Darrell released the dread arm he had arrested, and Losely stared at him, amazed, bewildered.
Darrell resumed: “And now I tell you plainly that I can accede to no terms put to me thus. I can sign my hand to no order that you may dictate, because that would be to sign myself a coward—and my name is Darrell!”
“Down on your knees, proud man—sign you shall, and on your knees! I care not now for gold—I care not now a rush for my life. I came here to humble the man who from first to last has so scornfully humbled me.—And I will, I will! On your knees—on your knees!”
The robber flung himself forward; but Darrell, whose eye had never quitted the foe, was prepared for and eluded the rush. Losely, missing his object, lost his balance, struck against the edge of the table which partially interposed between himself and his prey, and was only saved from falling by the close neighbourhood of the wall, on which he came with a shock that for the moment well-nigh stunned him. Meanwhile Darrell had gained the hearth, and snatched from it a large log half-burning. Jasper, recovering himself, dashed the long matted hair from his eyes, and, seeing undismayed the formidable weapon with which he was menaced, cowered for a second and deadlier spring.
“Stay, stay, stay, parricide and madman!” cried Darrell, his eye flashing brighter than the brand. “It is not my life I plead for—it is yours. Remember, if I fall by your hand, no hope and no refuge are left to you! In the name of my dead child, and under the eye of avenging Heaven, I strike down the fury that blinds you, and I scare back your soul from the abyss!”
So ineffably grand were the man’s look and gesture—so full of sonorous terror the swell of his matchless all-conquering voice, that Losely, in his midmost rage, stood awed and spellbound. His breast heaved, his eye fell, his frame collapsed, even his very tongue seemed to cleave to the parched roof of his mouth. Whether the effect so suddenly produced might have continued, or whether the startled miscreant might not have lashed himself into renewed wrath and inexpiable crime, passes out of conjecture. At that instant simultaneously were heard hurried footsteps in the corridor without, violent blows on the door, and voices exclaiming, “Open, open!—Darrell, Darrell!”—while the bell at the portals of the old house rang fast and shrill.
“Ho—is it so?” growled Losely, recovering himself at those unwelcome sounds. “But do not think that I will be caught thus, like a rat in a trap. No—I will—”
“Hist!” interrupted Darrell, dropping the brand, and advancing quickly on the ruffian—“Hist!—let no one know that my daughter’s husband came here with a felon’s purpose. Sit down—down I say; it is for my house’s honour that you should be safe.” And suddenly placing both hands on Losely’s broad shoulder, he forced him into a seat. During these few hurried words, the strokes at the door and the shouts without had been continued, and the door shook on its yielding hinges.
“The key—the key!” whispered Darrell.
But the bravo was stupefied by the suddenness with which his rage had been cowed, his design baffled, his position changed from the man dictating laws and threatening life, to the man protected by his intended victim. And he was so slow in even comprehending the meaning of Darrell’s order, that Darrell had scarcely snatched the keys less from his hand than from the pouch to which he at last mechanically pointed, when the door was burst open, and Lionel Haughton, Alban Morley, and the Colonel’s servant were in the room. Not one of them, at the first glance, perceived the inmates of the chamber, who were at the right of their entrance, by the angle of the wall and in shadow. But out came Darrell’s calm voice:
“Alban! Lionel!—welcome always; but what brings you hither at such an hour, with such clamour? Armed too!”
The three men stood petrified. There sate, peaceably enough, a large dark form, its hands on its knees, its head bent down, so that the features were not, distinguishable; and over the chair in which this bending figure was thus confusedly gathered up leant Guy Darrell, with quiet ease—no trace of fear nor of past danger in his face, which, though very pale, was serene, with a slight smile on the firm lips.
“Well,” muttered Alban Morley, slowly lowering his pistol—“well, I am surprised!—yes, for the first time in twenty years, I and surprised!”
“Surprised perhaps to find me at this hour still up, and with a person upon business—the door locked. However, mutual explanations later. Of course you stay here to night. My business with this—this visitor, is now over. Lionel, open that door—here is the key.—Sir”—(he touched Losely by the shoulder, and whispered in his ear, “Rise and speak not,”)—(aloud) “Sir, I need not detain you longer. Allow me to show you the way out of this rambling old house.”
Jasper rose like one half asleep, and, still bending his form and hiding his face, followed Darrell down the private stair, through the study, the library, into the hall, the Colonel’s servant lighting the way; and Lionel and Morley, still too amazed for words, bringing up the rear. The servant drew the heavy bolts from the front door; and now the household had caught alarm. Mills first appeared with the blunderbuss, then the footman, then Fairthorn.
“Stand back, there!” cried Darrell, and he opened the door himself to Losely. “Sir,” said he then, as they stood in the moonlight, “mark that I told you truly—you were in my power; and if the events of this night can lead you to acknowledge a watchful Providence, and recall with a shudder the crime from which you have been saved, why, then, I too, out of gratitude to Heaven, may think of means by which to free others from the peril of your despair.”
Losely made no answer, but slunk off with a fast, furtive stride, hastening out of the moonlit sward into the gloom of the leafless trees.
CHAPTER II
IF THE LION EVER WEAR THE FOX’S HIDE, STILL HE WEARS IT AS THE LION.
When Darrell was alone with Lionel and Alban Morley, the calm with which he had before startled them vanished. He poured out his thanks with deep emotion. “Forgive me; not in the presence of a servant could I say, ‘You have saved me from an unnatural strife, and my daughter’s husband from a murderer’s end.’ But by what wondrous mercy did you learn my danger? Were you sent to my aid?”
Alban briefly explained. “You may judge,” he said in conclusion, “how great was our anxiety, when, following the instructions of our guide, while our driver rang his alarum at the front portals, we made our entrance into yon ribs of stone, found the doors already opened, and feared we might be too late. But, meanwhile, the poor woman waits without in the carriage that brought us from the station. I must go and relieve her mind.”
“And bring her hither,” cried Darrell, “to receive my gratitude. Stay, Alban; while you leave me with her, you will speak aside to Mills; tell him that you heard there was an attempt to be made on the house, and came to frustrate it, but that your fears were exaggerated; the man was more a half-insane mendicant than a robber. Be sure, at least, that his identity with Losely be not surmised, and bid Mills treat the affair lightly. Public men are exposed, you know, to assaults from crackbrained enthusiasts; or stay—I once was a lawyer, and” (continued Darrell, whose irony had become so integral an attribute of his mind as to be proof against all trial) “there are men so out of their wits as to fancy a lawyer has ruined them! Lionel, tell poor Dick Fairthorn to come to me.” When the musician entered, Darrell whispered to him: “Go back to your room—open your casement—step out on to the parapet—you will see something white; it is a scrap of paper wrapped round my old armorial seal. Bring it to me just as it is, Dick. That poor young Lionel, we must keep him here a day or two; mind, no prickles for him, Dick.”
CHAPTER III
ARABELLA CRANE VERSUS GUY DARRELL; OR, WOMAN VERSUS LAWYER. IN THE COURTS, LAWYER WOULD WIN; BUT IN A PRIVATE PARLOUR, FOOT TO FOOT, AND TONGUE TO TONGUE, LAWYER HAS NOT A CHANCE.
Arabella Crane entered the room: Darrell hesitated—the remembrances attached to her were so painful and repugnant. But did he not now owe to her perhaps his very life? He passed his hand rapidly over his brow, as if to sweep away all earlier recollections, and, advancing quickly, extended that hand to her. The stern woman shook her head, and rejected the proffered greeting.
“You owe me no thanks,” she said, in her harsh, ungracious accents; “I sought to save not you, but him.”
“How!” said Darrell, startled; “you feel no resentment against the man who injured and betrayed you?”
“What my feelings may be towards him are not for you to conjecture; man could not conjecture them; I am woman. What they once were I might blush for; what they are now, I could own without shame. But you, Mr. Darrell,—you, in the hour of my uttermost anguish, when all my future was laid desolate, and the world lay crushed at my feet—you—man, chivalrous man!—you had for me no human compassion—you thrust me in scorn from your doors—you saw in my woe nothing but my error—you sent me forth, stripped of reputation, branded by your contempt, to famine or to suicide. And you wonder that I feel less resentment against him who wronged me than against you, who, knowing me wronged, only disdained my grief. The answer is plain—the scorn of the man she only reverenced leaves to a woman no memory to mitigate its bitterness and gall. The wrongs inflicted by the man she loved may leave, what they have left to me, an undying sense of a past existence—radiant, joyous, hopeful; of a time when the earth seemed covered with blossoms, just ready to burst into bloom; when the skies through their haze took the rose-hues as the sun seemed about to rise. The memory that I once was happy, at least then, I owe to him who injured and betrayed me. To you, when happiness was lost to me forever, what do I owe? Tell me.”
Struck by her words, more by her impressive manner, though not recognising the plea by which the defendant thus raised herself into the accuser, Darrell answered gently “Pardon me; this is no moment to revive recollections of anger on my part; but reflect, I entreat you, and you will feel that I was not too harsh. In the same position any other man would not have been less severe.”
“Any other man!” she exclaimed; “ay, possibly! but would the scorn of any other man so have crushed self-esteem? The injuries of the wicked do not sour us against the good; but the scoff of the good leaves us malignant against virtue itself. Any other man! Tut! Genius is bound to be indulgent. It should know human errors so well—has, with its large luminous forces, such errors itself when it deigns to be human, that, where others may scorn, genius should only pity.” She paused a moment, and then slowly resumed. “And pity was my due. Had you, or had any one lofty as yourself in reputed honour, but said to me, ‘Thou hast sinned, thou must suffer; but sin itself needs compassion, and compassion forbids thee to despair,’ why, then, I might have been gentler to the things of earth, and less steeled against the influences of Heaven than I have been. That is all no matter now. Mr. Darrell, I would not part from you with angry and bitter sentiments. Colonel Morley tells me that you have not only let the man, whom we need not name, go free, but that you have guarded the secret of his designs. For this I thank you. I thank you, because what is left of that blasted and deformed existence I have taken into mine. And I would save that man from his own devices as I would save my soul from its own temptations. Are you large-hearted enough to comprehend me? Look in my face—you have seen his; all earthly love is erased and blotted out of both.”
Guy Darrell bowed his head in respect that partook of awe.
“You, too,” said the grim woman, after a pause, and approaching him nearer—“you, too, have loved, I am told, and you, too, were forsaken.”
He recoiled and—shuddered.
“What is left to your heart of its ancient folly? I should like to know! I am curious to learn if there be a man who can feel as woman! Have you only resentment? have you only disdain? have you only vengeance? have you pity? or have you the jealous absorbing desire, surviving the affection from which it sprang, that still the life wrenched from you shall owe, despite itself, a melancholy allegiance to your own?”
Darrell impatiently waved his hand to forbid further questions; and it needed all his sense of the service this woman had just rendered him to repress his haughty displeasure at so close an approach to his torturing secrets.
Arabella’s dark bright eyes rested on his knitted brow, for a moment, wistfully, musingly. Then she said: “I see! man’s inflexible pride—no pardon there! But own, at least, that you have suffered.”
“Suffered!” groaned Darrell involuntarily, and pressing his hand to his heart.
“You have!—and you own it! Fellow-sufferer, I have no more anger against you. Neither should pity, but let each respect the other. A few words more,—this child!”
“Ay—ay—this child! you will be truthful. You will not seek to deceive me—you know that she—she—claimed by that assassin, reared by his convict father—she is no daughter of my line!”
“What! would it then be no joy to know that your line did not close with yourself—that your child might—”
“Cease, madam, cease—it matters not to a man nor to a race when it perish, so that it perish at last with honour. Who would have either himself or his lineage live on into a day when the escutcheon is blotted and the name disgraced? No; if that be Matilda’s child, tell me, and I will bear, as man may do, the last calamity which the will of Heaven may inflict. If, as I have all reason to think, the tale be an imposture, speak and give me the sole comfort to which I would cling amidst the ruin of all other hopes.”
“Verily,” said Arabella, with a kind of musing wonder in the tone of her softened voice; “verily, has a man’s heart the same throb and fibre as a woman’s? Had I a child like that blue-eyed wanderer with the frail form needing protection, and the brave spirit that ennobles softness, what would be my pride! my bliss! Talk of shame—disgrace! Fie—fie—the more the evil of others darkened one so innocent, the more cause to love and shelter her. But—I—am childless! Shall I tell you that the offence which lies heaviest on my conscience has been my cruelty to that girl? She was given an infant to my care. I saw in her the daughter of that false, false, mean, deceiving friend, who had taken my confidence, and bought, with her supposed heritage, the man sworn by all oaths to me. I saw in her, too, your descendant, your rightful heiress. I rejoiced in a revenge on your daughter and yourself. Think not I would have foisted her on your notice! No. I would have kept her without culture, without consciousness of a higher lot; and when I gave her up to her grandsire, the convict, it was a triumph to think that Matilda’s child would be an outcast. Terrible thought! but I was mad then. But that poor convict whom you, in your worldly arrogance, so loftily despise—he took to his breast what was flung away as a worthless weed. And if the flower keep the promise of the bud, never flower so fair bloomed from your vaunted stem! And yet you would bless me if I said, ‘Pass on, childless man; she is nothing to you!’”
“Madam, let us not argue. As you yourself justly imply, man’s heart and woman’s must each know throbs that never are, and never should be, familiar to the other. I repeat my question, and again I implore your answer.”
“I cannot answer for certain; and I am fearful of answering at all, lest on a point so important I should mislead you. Matilda’s child? Jasper affirmed it to me. His father believed him—I believed him. I never had the shadow of a doubt till—”
“Till what? For Heaven’s sake speak.”
“Till about five years ago, or somewhat more, I saw a letter from Gabrielle Desmarets, and—”
“Ah! which made you suspect, as I do, that the child is Gabrielle Desmaret’s daughter.”
Arabella reared her crest as a serpent before it strikes. “Gabrielle’s daughter! You think so. Her child that I sheltered! Her child for whom I have just pleaded to you! Hers!” She suddenly became silent. Evidently that idea had never before struck her; evidently it now shocked her; evidently something was passing through her mind which did not allow that idea to be dismissed. As Darrell was about to address her, she exclaimed abruptly: “No! say no more now. You may hear from me again should I learn what may decide at least this doubt one way or the other. Farewell, sir.”
“Not yet. Permit me to remind you that you have saved the life of a man whose wealth is immense.”
“Mr. Darrell, my wealth in relation to my wants is perhaps immense as yours, for I do not spend what I possess.”
“But this unhappy outlaw, whom you would save from himself, can henceforth be to you but a burthen and a charge. After what has passed to-night, I do tremble to think that penury may whisper other houses to rob, other lives to menace. Let me, then, place at your disposal, to be employed in such mode as you deem the best, a sum that may suffice to secure an object which we have in common.”
“No, Mr. Darrell,” said Arabella, fiercely; “whatever he be, never with my consent shall Jasper Losely be beholden to you for alms. If money can save him from shame and a dreadful death, that money shall be mine. I have said it. And, hark you, Mr. Darrell, what is repentance without atonement? I say not that I repent; but I do know that I seek to atone.”
The iron-grey robe fluttered an instant, and then vanished from the room.
When Alban Morley returned to the library, he saw Darrell at the farther corner of the room, on his knees. Well might Guy Darrell thank Heaven for the mercies vouchsafed to him that night. Life preserved? Is that all? Might life yet be bettered and gladdened? Was there aught in the grim woman’s words that might bequeath thoughts which reflection would ripen into influences over action?—aught that might suggest the cases in which, not ignobly, Pity might subjugate Scorn? In the royal abode of that Soul, does Pride only fortify Honour?—is it but the mild king, not the imperial despot? Would it blind, as its rival, the Reason? Would it chain, as a rebel, the Heart? Would it man the dominions, that might be serene, by the treasures it wastes-by the wars it provokes? Self-knowledge! self-knowledge! From Heaven, indeed, descends the precept, “KNOW THYSELF.” That truth was told to us by the old heathen oracle. But what old heathen oracle has told us how to know?
CHAPTER IV
THE MAN-EATER HUMILIATED. HE ENCOUNTERS AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE IN A TRAVELLER, WHO, LIKE SHAKESPEARE’S JAQUES, IS “A MELANCHOLY FELLOW”;
WHO ALSO, LIKE JAQUES, HATH “GREAT REASON TO BE BAD”; AND WHO, STILL LIKE JAQUES, IS “FULL OF MATTER.”
Jasper Losely rode slowly on through the clear frosty night; not back to the country town which he had left on his hateful errand, nor into the broad road to London. With a strange desire to avoid the haunts of men, he selected—at each choice of way in the many paths branching right and left, between waste and woodland—the lane that seemed the narrowest and the dimmest. It was not remorse that gnawed him, neither was it mere mercenary disappointment, nor even the pang of baffled vengeance—it was the profound humiliation of diseased self-love—the conviction that, with all his brute power, he had been powerless in the very time and scene in which he had pictured to himself so complete a triumph. Even the quiet with which he had escaped was a mortifying recollection. Capture itself would have been preferable, if capture had been preceded by brawl and strife—the exhibition of his hardihood and prowess. Gloomily bending over his horse’s neck, he cursed himself as fool and coward. What would he have had!—a new crime on his soul? Perhaps he would have answered, “Anything rather than this humiliating failure.” He did not rack his brains with conjecturing if Cutts had betrayed him, or by what other mode assistance had been sent in such time of need to Darrell. Nor did he feel that hunger for vengeance, whether on Darrell or on his accomplice (should that accomplice have played the traitor), which might have been expected from his characteristic ferocity. On the contrary, the thought of violence and its excitements had in it a sickness as of shame. Darrell at that hour might have ridden by him scathless. Cutts might have jeered and said, “I blabbed your secret, and sent the aid that foiled it”; and Losely would have continued to hang his head, nor lifted the herculean hand that lay nerveless on the horse’s mane. Is it not commonly so in all reaction from excitements in which self-love has been keenly galled? Does not vanity enter into the lust of crime as into the desire of fame?
At sunrise Losely found himself on the high-road into which a labyrinth of lanes had led him, and opposite to a milestone, by which he learned that he had been long turning his back on the metropolis, and that he was about ten miles distant from the provincial city of Ouzelford. By this time his horse was knocked up, and his own chronic pains began to make themselves acutely felt; so that, when, a little farther on, he came to a wayside inn, he was glad to halt; and after a strong drain, which had the effect of an opiate, he betook himself to bed, and slept till the noon was far advanced.
When Losely came down-stairs, the common room of the inn was occupied by a meeting of the trustees of the highroads; and, on demanding breakfast, he was shown into a small sanded parlour adjoining the kitchen. Two other occupants—a man and a woman—were there already, seated at a table by the fireside, over a pint of half-and-half. Losely, warming himself at the hearth, scarcely noticed these humble revellers by a glance. And they, after a displeased stare at the stalwart frame which obscured the cheering glow they had hitherto monopolised, resumed a muttered conversation; of which, as well as of the vile modicum that refreshed their lips, the man took the lion’s share. Shabbily forlorn were that man’s habiliments—turned and re-turned, patched, darned, weather-stained, grease-stained—but still retaining that kind of mouldy, grandiose, bastard gentility, which implies that the wearer has known better days; and, in the downward progress of fortunes when they once fall, may probably know still worse.
The woman was some years older than her companion, and still more forlornly shabby. Her garments seemed literally composed of particles of dust glued together, while her face might have insured her condemnation as a witch before any honest jury in the reign of King James the First. His breakfast, and the brandy-bottle that flanked the loaf, were now placed before Losely; and, as distastefully he forced himself to eat, his eye once more glanced towards, and this time rested on, the shabby man, in the sort of interest with which one knave out of elbows regards another. As Jasper thus looked, gradually there stole on him a reminiscence of those coarse large features—that rusty disreputable wig. The recognition, however, was not mutual; and presently, after a whisper interchanged between the man and the woman, the latter rose, and approaching Losely, dropped a curtsey, and said, in a weird, under voice: “Stranger! luck’s in store for you. Tell your fortune!” As she spoke, from some dust-hole in her garments she produced a pack of cards, on whose half-obliterated faces seemed incrusted the dirt of ages. Thrusting these antiquities under Jasper’s nose, she added, “Wish and cut.”
“Yshaw,” said Jasper, who, though sufficiently superstitious in some matters and in regard to some persons, was not so completely under the influence of that imaginative infirmity as to take the creature before him for a sibyl. “Get away; you turn my stomach. Your cards smell; so do you!”
“Forgive her, worthy sir,” said the man, leaning forward. “The hag may be unsavoury, but she is wise. The Three Sisters who accosted the Scottish Thane, sir (Macbeth—you have seen it on the stage?) were not savoury. Withered, and wild in their attire, sir, but they knew a thing or two! She sees luck in your face. Cross her hand and give it vent!”
“Fiddledee,” said the irreverent Losely. “Take her off, or I shall scald her,” and he seized the kettle.
The hag retreated grumbling; and Losely, soon despatching his meal, placed his feet ‘on the hobs, and began to meditate what course to adopt for a temporary subsistence. He had broken into the last pound left of the money which he had extracted from Mrs. Crane’s purse some days before. He recoiled with terror from the thought of returning to town and placing himself at her mercy. Yet what option had he? While thus musing, he turned impatiently round, and saw that the shabby man and the dusty hag were engaged in an amicable game of ecarte, with those very cards which had so offended his olfactory organs. At that sight the old instinct of the gambler struggled back; and, raising himself up, he looked over the cards of the players. The miserable wretches were, of course, playing for nothing; and Losely saw at a glance that the man was, nevertheless, trying to cheat the woman! Positively he took that man into more respect; and that man, noticing the interest with which Losely surveyed the game, looked up, and said:
“While the time, sir? What say you? A game or two? I can stake my pistoles—that is, sir, so far as a fourpenny bit goes. If ignorant of this French game, sir, cribbage or all fours?”
“No,” said Losely, mournfully; “there is nothing to be got out of you; otherwise”—he stopped and sighed. “But I have seen you under other circumstances. What has become of your Theatrical Exhibition? Gambled it away? Yet, from what I see of your play, I think you ought not to have lost, Mr. Rugge.”
The ex-manager started.
“What! You knew me before the Storm?—before the lightning struck me, as I may say, sir—and falling into difficulties, I became-a wreck? You knew me?—not of the Company?—a spectator?”
“As you say—a spectator. You had once in your employ an actor—clever old fellow. Waife, I think, he was called.”
“Ah! hold! At that name, sir, my wounds bleed afresh. From that execrable name, sir, there hangs a tale!”
“Indeed! Then it will be a relief to you to tell it,” said Losely, resettling his feet on the hob, and snatching at any diversion from his own reflections.
“Sir, when a gentleman, who is a gentleman, asks as a favour a specimen of my powers of recital, not professionally, and has before him the sparkling goblet, which he does not invite me to share, he insults my fallen fortunes. Sir, I am poor—I own it; I have fallen into the sere and yellow leaf, sir; but I have still in this withered bosom the heart of a Briton!”
“Warm it, Mr. Rugge. Help yourself to the brandy—and the lady too.”
“Sir, you are a gentleman; sir, your health. Hag, drink better days to us both. That woman, sir, is a hag, but she is an honour to her sex-faithful!”
“It is astonishing how faithful ladies are when not what is called beautiful. I speak from painful experience,” said Losely, growing debonnair as the liquor relaxed his gloom, and regaining that levity of tongue which sometimes strayed into wit, and which-springing originally from animal spirits and redundant health—still came to him mechanically whenever roused by companionship from alternate intervals of lethargy and pain. “But, now, Mr. Rugge, I am all ears; perhaps you will be kind enough to be all tale.”
With tragic aspect, unrelaxed by that jeu de mots, and still wholly unrecognising in the massive form and discoloured swollen countenance of the rough-clad stranger, the elegant proportions, the healthful, blooming, showy face, and elaborate fopperies of the Jasper Losely who had sold to him a Phenomenon which proved so evanishing, Rugge entered into a prolix history of his wrongs at the hands of Waife, of Losely, of Sophy. Only of Mrs. Crane did he speak with respect; and Jasper then for the first time learned—and rather with anger for the interference than gratitude for the generosity—that she had repaid the L100, and thereby cancelled Rugge’s claim upon the child. The ex-manager then proceeded to the narrative of his subsequent misfortunes—all of which he laid to the charge of Waife and the Phenomenon. “Sir,” said he, “I was ambitious. From my childhood’s hour I dreamed of the great York Theatre—dreamed of it literally thrice. Fatal Vision! But like other dreams, that dream would have faded—been forgotten in the workday world—and I should not have fallen into the sere and yellow, but have had, as formerly, troops of friends, and not been reduced to the horrors of poverty and a faithful Hag. But, sir, when I first took to my bosom that fiend William Waife, he exhibited a genius, sir, that Dowton (you have seen Dowton?—grand) was a stick as compared with. Then my ambition, sir, blazed and flared up-obstreperous, and my childhood’s dream haunted me; and I went about musing [Hag, you recollect!]—and muttering ‘The Royal Theatre at York.’ But, incredible though it seem, the ungrateful scorpion left me with a treacherous design to exhibit the parts I had fostered on the London boards; and even-handed Justice, sir, returned the poisoned chalice to his lips, causing him to lose an eye and to hobble—besides splitting up his voice—which served him right. And again I took the scorpion for the sake of the Phenomenon. I had a babe myself once, sir, though you may not think it. Gormerick (that is this faithful Hag) gave the babe Daffy’s Elixir, in teething; but it died—convulsions. I comforted myself when that Phenomenon came out on my stage—in pink satin and pearls. ‘Ha,’ I said, ‘the great York Theatre shall yet be mine!’ The haunting idea became a Mania, sir. The learned say that there is a Mania called Money Mania—[Monomania??]—when one can think but of the one thing needful—as the guilty Thane saw the dagger, sir—you understand. And when the Phenomenon had vanished and gone, as I was told, to America, where I now wish I was myself, acting Rolla at New York or elsewhere, to a free and enlightened people—then, sir, the Mania grew on me still stronger and stronger. There was a pride in it, sir, a British pride.