O for the pen of that ready writer who is always in the humour for work, who can always write, sir, who is never at a loss, who sits down before a ream of foolscap paper, and tosses off sheet after sheet, sir, until he is surrounded by piles of manuscript! I have seen him do it, continues the friend at our elbow—seen him do it. And then there’s Miss ——, who is so awfully popular, you know, and stands to her work like an artist at his easel; she can write two novels a year like fun, and clever books too. George So-and-so, he goes down on his knees to write, and turns off slip after slip like a gusset and band coming out of a sewing machine. Mrs. —— plods away all day long, whether she likes it or not—pegs away, sir, and produces a certain amount of copy before she dines; and she can write two books at once, sir, like winking. That’s the woman for my money.
O for the pen of one of these ready writers, that we might throw off in a few rapid pages the conclusion of all that romantic story which Paul Somerton told the barrister a few evenings after that day at Brighton. If we sat before that ream of foolscap, and filled every sheet, we could not do full justice to the extraordinary narrative, nor to the imagination of Mrs. Jefferson Crawley, the young lady whom you met in the early part of our history as the showman’s daughter. You remember how she gobbled up the tripe on that first evening, when Mr. Dibble joined the company of the Temple of Magic to do the outside business. You would hardly give her credit for imaginative power. She handled the cards well, and was great in the basket trick, but you would not expect her to possess what phrenologists call Ideality, in a large degree.
Perhaps the education which she had received in a few months as the wife of our old acquaintance Mr. Gibbs, alias Jefferson Crawley, had been beneficial to her in this respect. Mr. Crawley nevertheless had been disappointed in the young woman. He did not find that her abilities as a shuffler at cards were of any great benefit to him; but she was useful in some respects. There was an air of respectability that was beneficial sometimes in speaking of “my wife,” and introducing Mrs. Crawley, though the class of persons to whom introductions usually took place cast knowing glances at each other, and commenced desperate flirtations with the young lady immediately. This was useful too, and Mr. Gibbs sometimes traded upon it in a way that was by no means pleasant to the showman’s daughter. She was not a refined young woman as you have seen, not over-particular as you know; but she was vain of her good looks, and had just sufficient of woman’s amour propre, speedily to contract a contempt for a husband who was base enough and mean enough to be utterly indifferent to his wife’s honour.
These two soon understood each other, almost indeed from the moment when Mr. Jefferson Crawley, having run away with the young woman, wished to set aside the ceremony of marriage which Christabel, the mysterious lady, had punctiliously insisted upon. What a wedding it was! What a honeymoon! Yet not stranger than ten thousand other weddings and honeymoons. Truth stranger than fiction! If that strange little fellow on two sticks who appeared so mysteriously to Don Cleofas, would come and take you for an evening’s ramble, you would see in half an hour how far fiction falls short of the realities of life; how far the darkest pictures which those ready writers have limned in pen and ink are less appalling than the realities of sin, and wickedness, and woe, which exist in the dark places of our modern Babylon! Ask that detective officer who used to visit the late Mr. Christopher Tallant at Barton Hall; he could tell you some rare tales of the class of people to whom Mr. and Mrs. Crawley belong. But even that gentleman would be surprised if Asmodeus sat him down upon St. Paul’s, and unroofed a few hundred yards of that mass of brick, behind which the great game of life is being played out in ten thousand different ways.
Before Mr. Gibbs had been married three months, he gave his wife permission to find a better home if she could. He vowed he had no desire to limit anybody’s freedom. As far as the work of the household went, he said, looking round the miserable den, he thought he should lose nothing by the departure of the lady of the house. He could easily get somebody else to come and clean his boots, and cut bread and butter for him. If the young lady thought it would advance her prospects to leave his humble roof, she might go; he should put no advertisement in the papers for her, he should employ no private detective to hunt her up: he was exceedingly obliged to her for becoming his wife, highly honoured in fact, if not more so, but he should not break his heart if she returned to the sawdust and naphtha lamps of the Temple of Magic.
And so the young lady disappeared accordingly; but that wonderful account which she gave of her early life, and which Lieutenant Somerton repeated to the barrister, left out altogether those incidents to which her husband had alluded. She certainly did justice to the gambler’s tuition. Old Martin could never have taught her to be such a clever dissembler; and that melancholy clown who had on his deathbed presented her father with Momus, had certainly not wit enough to instruct her in such delicate cunning.
The daughter of respectable parents at Severntown, her father died early, and left her with a widowed mother. She had received but little education in consequence, and was obliged to go out to service. Her mother soon afterwards died, and then she was left alone in the wide, wide world. She had lived for some time with her aunt, who was then a wealthy lady, residing at Carter Street West, but had since lost all her money in the panic, and had gone to Paris. Her aunt was too poor to take her along with her, or she would have done so; but she recommended her to a lady in whose service she had endeavoured to study, and carry out the good advice which her dear aunt had given her. The lady had a son who came to see her at intervals, a very handsome young gentleman, and who seemed very good. He was very kind to her, and she often saw him watching her. One day when his mamma (who was a widow) had gone out, he made love to her, and soon after he asked her to be engaged to him: she wished to ask the permission of her mistress, but he would not hear of it; she would never consent he said, and one day he persuaded her to elope with him, and in the end, after a long struggle between duty and inclination, she gave way.
And here it appeared the young lady had broken down in tears, and Paul had soothed her, and vowed eternal love, like a weak, infatuated, silly fellow that he was. We almost question whether, had she told him the whole truth of her life, he would not have done just the same.
She soon discovered that her husband was a bad man, a gambler, and everything that was wicked, and she went to his mother to beg her forgiveness, and asked to be taken back as her servant. The old lady had ordered her to be turned out of the house, and her husband laughed and jeered at her when she related the incident to him. She had never really loved him, but had hoped to have a home, and to find peace, and she tried to love him, and was a faithful true wife to him; but oh, he led such a life! he was a cheat, a forger, everything that was bad, and not the old lady’s son after all, but the son of her first husband, who was a dissipated man, and had died of delirium tremens.
How Paul pitied her! O, if she had not been married! he had exclaimed in his ecstacy, as he looked into her deep eyes, and nursed her hand in his.
She sighed at this, and wept again, and said there was something yet which she had not told him. Some day he should know all. Meanwhile she was so good, so kind, so affectionate. Mrs. Dibble even went so far as to say that if she had not been brought up at a boarding-school, she ought to have been, for her manners were quite boarding-school, and her disposition was heavenly.
Paul sent her books of poems, and novels, and all sorts of works, to read, that she might be amused and improve her mind; and it was astonishing how rapidly the young lady mastered their contents, and how ably she used the sentiments of some of those poems that were full of love and tenderness. It was surely native inborn tact this. The cynic would say that all women have it; that nature has given them cunning instead of physical strength. What a woman this would have been with a good education! What a woman with the French language on her tongue! The judgment of Shuffleton Gibbs when he sat in the show and thought he could make a fortune by her cleverness at cards, was that of a shrewd observer, though he had been disappointed.
What happy days these were to the Lieutenant, what happy hours, these stolen intervals, as Chrissy got better. Chrissy she had always been called she said, and that was nearer the truth than any other word she had spoken; for that old clown who taught her to read and write, had called her Chris in those wild days of her childhood. With good treatment and comfort, she had soon recovered her strength, and the roses came back to her cheeks, the roundness to her arms, and the brightness to her eyes. There was a little vulgarity in her appearance, and in her manners. The red in her cheeks was not of a delicate rosy hue, and her voice could not be called musical. Her nose was anything but classical,—not that we care for classical noses; no, nor for classical foreheads either for that matter. To Paul Somerton Chrissy was beautiful, and that which you would call vulgar he looked upon as frankness and innocence, which charmed him all the more on that account.
Mr. Williamson soon had a surfeit of all this. The Lieutenant became quite a bore to him, and as obstinate as a mule. He would take no advice, and listen to no arguments that in any way interfered with his wild idea of living with this woman in some distant land. That special feature of interest in the woman’s history which had, as you will remember, brought up the name of Shuffleton Gibbs, soon disappeared; for Chrissy had described to Paul a young and dashing fellow as her husband, and they had both taken the description as true of course. The Lieutenant might have asked Macshawser what sort of a fellow Crawley was; but neither he nor the clever barrister thought of this, or if they had, perhaps the Lieutenant would have put his veto upon such a course, seeing that it might in some way have led to the detection of Paul as Chrissy’s protector.
Now, Mr. Arundel Williamson had been hit in some escapade of his youth in which a married woman was concerned; and it was this you know which excited his sympathy so much for Paul, or he would long since have shunned that young gentleman’s society, though the fellows at the club to which the barrister belonged liked the Lieutenant for his pleasant, outspoken, honest manners, his free and easy and unsophisticated ways, and the perfect absence of military snobbism which was characteristic of him. But a good deal of this was assumed as a sort of standing argument against the barrister’s advice to Paul to give up his schemes with regard to the lady whom he loved so much, and remember that his duty to his family, to himself, aye, and to the army, was to avoid a disgraceful liaison.
Paul had once or twice become quite eloquent on this point, reminded the barrister of his philosophy, quoted some of those very broad maxims which Mr. Williamson had repeated in that little room in the Temple, talked of equality, and raved against all aristocratic assumption on the score of birth and position. When the barrister replied, and endeavoured to show that the Lieutenant was making use of arguments which did not apply to the present case, Paul would hurl at him all kinds of absurd aphorisms about love equalising all ranks, and then rave about his own birth—a bailiff’s son, sir!
The only point upon which the barrister got the better of his friend, was when he quietly rehearsed the penalties attendant upon the crime of abduction, and more particularly the severity of the punishment which the law awarded to bigamy. Paul certainly retaliated with the Divorce Court, but he found himself weak in the combat, very weak when the barrister talked of bigamy. The time came however when that difficulty was at an end.
Three months of this feverish and wicked dream of love had passed, and Paul had worshipped the idol which the fickle, cynical god, whom the classics supposed to reign supreme in affairs of the heart, had set up. How the rosy youth must have laughed (not in his sleeve, for he never had any sleeves according to the painters) at the simplicity of this young fellow who wore Her Majesty’s uniform! Perhaps Asmodeo was the true god after all; the lame monster with his goat legs, his long visage, his sharp chin, and his demoniacal eyes and mouth, is certainly a more fitting spirit to preside over some of Love’s entanglements than he of the gilded wings and the quiver full of arrows. But he boasted of assuming whatever shape he willed, and confessed that it was necessary to look well sometimes; Vice never pleased half so well unless it had a fair appearance.
Lieutenant Somerton did not dream of gods at all in the matter, and he would not have indulged his fancy upon such a cynical fellow as Asmodeo for a moment; he was in love, over head and ears, madly in love with this woman, who thrust that wooden spoon into the bowl at the roadside inn, and ate her share of the repast like—well, like a vagabond, as she was, you know, in the eyes of the law—like a rogue and vagabond; for the law combines the two in its harsh description of the poor stroller. The Lieutenant would surely have been disenchanted if Signor Asmodeo had taken the bandage from his eyes and shown him that incident in the past; or that little scene in the show when Mr. Shuffleton Gibbs, his dire enemy, had made love to her, and succeeded in his suit.
What a clever girl she was! The god “so gloriously celebrated by Agrippa and the Clavicula Salomonis,” and his friend Don Cleofas would have been delighted with her. His Spanish majesty would surely have painted her image on his cloak, and illustrated her curious and brilliant career!
One fine summer evening, when a gentle rain had washed the dust out of the two trees which lived out a shambling sort of existence at the back of the house where Mrs. Dibble consented to act the part of guardian to that poor persecuted orphan, whom she loved as if she were her own—on a bright summer evening when the sun was shining out after the rain, and a refreshing breeze came up the Thames and moved the leaves of the trees in question, Chrissy leaned upon Paul Somerton’s shoulder, and told him that she must leave him on the next day. She was now quite well, she said, and her gratitude to him for his great kindness compelled her to take this course. His honourable and respectful conduct towards her, and her love for him, too, all urged departure. She had deceived him, deceived him wickedly, and had never until now felt courage enough to tell him how much she had wronged him.
Paul grew terribly alarmed at her earnest words, and begged her not to tell him, not to talk of leaving him. Where could she go? He could not live without her. O, that cursed marriage! O cruel Fate that had not brought her to him in the days of her early life! It seemed to him, he said, that he had known her always. Her face was familiar to him when first he saw her. Paul had often said this, and poor Chrissy felt satisfied in her own mind that he must have seen that mysterious lady of the Temple of Magic; but, of course, she never assisted his memory one jot, and if memory had given him a quiet nudge in connection with his visit to Severntown with Mrs. Dibble, he would have repudiated the suggestion with scorn.
When he exclaimed, O that cursed marriage! Chrissy held down her head and sighed and wept and murmured out some pathetic words of Thomas Moore’s about forgiveness. She had rehearsed this point before Mrs. Dibble’s glass, and had committed the words to memory for the purpose a week previously. She knew that Paul could not marry her because she was Crawley’s wife; she knew that a divorce was a serious business, and that it might lead to the exposure of her real history. So she had resolved, the first week she was in Paul’s care, that when she was once firmly secure of his love, she would make a pathetic confession of being single, and then fall at his feet and implore his forgiveness.
How cleverly she did this it is unnecessary to say. It was a splendid success; the confession jumped so well with the Lieutenant’s wishes that he blotted out the past at once, forgave her, and in his blind mad fashion felt perfectly happy. He went to his quarters that night determined to exchange into a regiment that was abroad or going abroad, and marry this poor girl, who had been so wronged, and who had knelt at his feet until his heart ached for her, and whose future happiness he vowed should be his continual care.
Mrs. Dibble had told dear Chrissy that she expected her husband coming to spend a day with them in the course of a fortnight; and as the chatty, old woman had told dear Chrissy how she had found poor Thomas with a set of nasty, dirty show people, dear Chrissy thought it best to bring her grand scheme of a new start in life to an early conclusion. O, how she would love to go to India or anywhere beyond the seas, where she could begin her life anew, and prove to her dear, dear Paul, the depth of woman’s gratitude and love!