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What Will He Do With It, a novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton |
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Book 4 - Chapter 19 |
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_ BOOK IV CHAPTER XIX Joy, nevertheless, does return to Mr. Rugge: and hope now inflicts herself on Mrs. Crane; a very fine-looking hope too,--six feet one, --strong as Achilles, and as fleet of foot! Buy we have left Mr. Rugge at Mrs. Crane's door; admit him. He bursts into her drawing-room wiping his brows. "Ma'am, they're off to America!" "So I have heard. You are fairly entitled to the return of your money--" "Entitled, of course, but--" "There it is; restore to me the contract for the child's services." Rugge gazed on a roll of bank-notes, and could scarcely believe his eyes. He darted forth his hand,--the notes receded like the dagger in Macbeth. "First the contract," said Mrs. Crane. Rugge drew out his greasy pocket-book, and extracted the worthless engagement. "Henceforth, then," said Mrs. Crane, "you have no right to complain; and whether or not the girl ever again fall in your way, your claim over her ceases." "The gods be praised! it does, ma'am, I have had quite enough of her. But you are every inch a lady, and allow me to add that I put you on my free list for life." Rugge gone, Arabella Crane summoned Bridget to her presence. "Lor', miss," cried Bridget, impulsively, "who'd think you'd been up all night raking! I have not seen you look so well this many a year." "Ah," said Arabella Crane, "I will tell you why. I have done what for many a year I never thought I should do again,--a good action. That child,--that Sophy,--do you remember how cruelly I used her?" "Oh, miss, don't go for to blame yourself; you fed her, you clothed her, when her own father, the villing, sent her away from hisself to you,--you of all people, you. How could you be caressing and fawning on his child,--their child?" Mrs. Crane hung her head gloomily. "What is past is past. I have lived to save that child, and a curse seems lifted from my soul. Now listen. I shall leave London--England--probably this evening. You will keep this house; it will be ready for me any moment I return. The agent who collects my house-rents will give you money as you want it. Stint not yourself, Bridget. I have been saving and saving and saving for dreary years,--nothing else to interest me, and I am richer than I seem." "But where are you going, miss?" said Bridget, slowly recovering from the stupefaction occasioned by her mistress's announcement. "I don't know; I don't care." "Oh, gracious stars! is it with that dreadful Jasper Losely?--it is, it is. You are crazed, you are bewitched, miss!" "Possibly I am crazed,--possibly bewitched; but I take that man's life to mine as a penance for all the evil mine has ever known; and a day or two since I should have said, with rage and shame, 'I cannot help it; I loathe myself that I can care what becomes of him.' Now, without rage, without shame, I say, 'The man whom I once so loved shall not die on a gibbet if I can help it' and, please Heaven, help it I will." The grim woman folded her arms on her breast, and raising her head to its full height, there was in her face and air a stern gloomy grandeur, which could not have been seen without a mixed sensation of compassion and awe. "Go now, Bridget; I have said all. He will be here soon: he will come; he must come; he has no choice; and then--and then--" she closed her eyes, bowed her head, and shivered. Arabella Crane was, as usual, right in her predictions. Before noon Jasper came,--came, not with his jocund swagger, but with that sidelong sinister look--of the man whom the world cuts--triumphantly restored to its former place in his visage. Madame Caumartin had been arrested; Poole had gone into the country with Uncle Sam; Jasper had seen a police-officer at the door of his own lodgings. He slunk away from the fashionable thoroughfares, slunk to the recesses of Podden Place, slunk into Arabella Crane's prim drawing-room, and said sullenly, "All is up; here I am!" Three days afterwards, in a quiet street in a quiet town of Belgium,--wherein a sharper, striving to live by his profession, would soon become a skeleton,--in a commodious airy apartment, looking upon a magnificent street, the reverse of noisy, Jasper Losely sat secure, innocuous, and profoundly miserable. In another house, the windows of which--facing those of Jasper's sitting-room, from an upper story-commanded so good a view therein that it placed him under a surveillance akin to that designed by Mr. Bentham's reformatory Panopticon, sat Arabella Crane. Whatever her real feelings towards Jasper Losely (and what those feelings were no virile pen can presume authoritatively to define; for lived there ever a man who thoroughly understood a woman?), or whatever in earlier life might have been their reciprocated vows of eternal love,--not only from the day that Jasper, on his return to his native shores, presented himself in Podden Place, had their intimacy been restricted to the austerest bonds of friendship, but after Jasper had so rudely declined the hand which now fed him, Arabella Crane had probably perceived that her sole chance of retaining intellectual power over his lawless being necessitated the utter relinquishment of every hope or project that could expose her again to his contempt. Suiting appearances to reality, the decorum of a separate house was essential to the maintenance of that authority with which the rigid nature of their intercourse invested her. The additional cost strained her pecuniary resources, but she saved in her own accommodation in order to leave Jasper no cause to complain of any stinting in his. There, then, she sat by her window, herself unseen, eying him in his opposite solitude, accepting for her own life a barren sacrifice, but a jealous sentinel on his. Meditating as she sat and as she eyed him,--meditating what employment she could invent, with the bribe of emoluments to be paid furtively by her, for those strong hands that could have felled an ox, but were nerveless in turning an honest penny, and for that restless mind hungering for occupation, and with the digestion of an ostrich for dice and debauch, riot and fraud, but queasy as an exhausted dyspeptic at the reception of one innocent amusement, one honourable toil. But while that woman still schemes how to rescue from hulks or halter that execrable man, who shall say that he is without a chance? A chance he has: WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT? _ |
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