THE ROGUE'S MARCH
Part I
THE OLD COUNTRY
CHAPTER I
"SUDDEN DEATH"
In the year 1837, and on a warm, moist April morning, there knocked at a modest lodging-house in Rolls Buildings, Fetter Lane, a recent lodger who could no longer afford even the attic’s trifling rent. So now he made his bed in the parks of the metropolis, or in the damp green fields outside. And for all he professed to care, the damp was welcome to kill him, if only it would kill outright.
The man was very fair and spare, but of a medium height. His hands and feet were notably small, the wrists and arms a little deceptive. These looked lean, but were made of muscle, and quickened with hot, keen blood.
He was very young; but though, as a fact, not five-and-twenty, the thin, sardonic, reckless face looked half as old again. An abiding bitterness had curled the full nostrils, deepening the lines thence to the sensitive red lips, and drawing the latter too habitually apart upon set teeth or a sneer. Nor was the bitterness of the kind sown in proud hearts by capricious circumstance and crushing but not dishonourable defeat. It was rather the Dead Sea fruit of wilful riot and a contemptible, impenitent remorse. And yet in the full brown eye and lifted chin, as in the ill-clad, well-carried figure, there was a lingering something that was gallant and fine and debonair; as if the makings of angel or of devil still lurked beneath that crumpled kerseymere waistcoat and those faded blue swallow-tails.
To this lost youth the door in Rolls Buildings was opened by a grey-haired woman who nodded knowingly in response to an inquiry for letters, and handed one over with an invitation to enter and read it within. But the kindly words fell on inattentive ears. Looking fondly and yet fearfully at the superscription—to Thomas Erichsen, Esquire, and the rest—the needy owner of that name suddenly pocketed his letter with unbroken seals. He was turning as abruptly away when the blank face of his former landlady led him to pause a moment.
"No; bless you, no! it's not from him," said Erichsen, grimly. "This is from a friend I met yesterday, who would insist on having my address. What was I to do? I thought you wouldn't mind, so I gave my last.”
"Mind! It is your address, and might be your 'ome if you wasn’t that 'igh and 'aughty. Dear, dear, dear! so you’ve not heard from that villain yet?"
"Not a line."
"Nor of him?"
"Not a word. Give me time. If I don't root him out by this day month—well, then he's fled the country—like a sensible man."
“But what if you do?” demanded the landlady, who was herself directly interested in the event.
“What if I do, Mrs. Adcock? Well, I shall probably half murder him, to begin with; he has wholly ruined me. Yes, it will be my money—and your money—or his life! He knows it, too, if he’s got my letters. Feel the weight of that!”
And he put in her hands a heavy ash stick, green and sinewy, with the knob still creamy from the knife.
“Lord save us!” cried the woman. “Is this the rod in pickle for him?”
“That’s the rod in pickle. Nice and heavy, isn’t it?”
“Too ’eavy, Mr. Erichsen! Too ’eavy by ’alf. I’d show no mercy to thieves and swindlers, but I should be very careful what I did with that. I wouldn’t take the law into my own hands, if I were you!”
“You wouldn’t?” cried he. “Not if you’d been cleaned out as I have, by as blackguardly a dodge? By the Lord that made him, I’d break every bone in his infernal body; and will, too, if I find him and he won’t pay up. I’ll pay him! I grant you it was my own cursed fault in the beginning; but what about that last thirty pounds? Who got that? Why am I rotting and starving here? Who threw me on the mercy of kind good folks like you—yes, and made a sponge of me in my turn? Whose doing is it that I’ve got to pawn the clothes off my back, or beg my meals; to tramp the streets all day, to lie all night in the fields—”
“Your own!” exclaimed the woman, coming hastily down from the step upon which she had been standing all this time. “It’s your own fault, is that, however! You know well it isn’t mine. Our attic has been empty ever since you went; you’re welcome to it until it’s wanted again, if only you’ll come back. Nay, sir, I do assure you I’d rather have you for nothing than most of them that pays. Come back to-night, or I’m sure I sha’n’t sleep a wink for thinking of you; come in now, and I’ll get you some nice ’ot breakfast. You look as if you hadn’t ’ad any yet, I’m sure you do. So in you come!”
Erichsen held out his hand.
“No, no,” said he. “I owe you quite enough already, Mrs. Adcock; besides, I’m as strong as a horse, and doing much better than you think. But the world is full of kindness, after all! and God bless you for yours!”
And his dark eyes, that but now had flashed and burnt with bitter fires—that were the more striking always for a shock of almost flaxen hair—stood full of tears. He could say no more, but only wring the dry, chapped hand in his. Then he was gone; and might have been seen, a little later, hurrying with bent head towards Temple Bar; or, later yet, spread at full length in that green asylum of his homeless days, the southwest corner of St. James’s Park.—
And here he read the letter from his friend. It began on one side of the large white paper, and ended on the next. The girlish handwriting was pitifully tremulous, but yet instinct with a self-reliance then uncommon in young English ladies. The letter ran:—
“Avenue Lodge,
“Regent's Park.
“April 26th.
“Darling,—What does it mean? I was picturing you in Calcutta when I saw you this afternoon in Piccadilly! I had been thinking about you just then—I always am—and there you were! Oh, my darling, what can it mean? Tell me quickly, or I shall go mad with anxiety, as I nearly did on the spot this afternoon. Come here, as you love me, and tell me all!
“Darling, what can it be that has kept you here, and so silent all this time; or did you go out and come straight back? No, there has not been time. The Jumna sailed on the last day of September, and I have prayed for her safety all these months. I was so sure my love was on board!
“Oh, if only I dare have stopped to speak to you a few more seconds. The groom was so close behind. But, Tom, you seemed not to want to give me your address? I would not have left you without it; and now I shall come to you there unless you come to me. You looked so sad and ill, my sweetheart! I can see his poor face still!
“Come and tell me all, and let me help you, or my heart will break. You are in trouble. I know it, and must help you—it is my right. We are in the new Avenue Road; you will easily find it. The house is far the largest on the right-hand side as you come from town. There are fields behind, and our garden goes the farthest back; that is, we have a field of our own walled in with it, and there is a green gate in the wall. It is kept locked, but I will be there at nine o’clock tomorrow (Thursday) night; and so must you. Be there for my sake, and tell me all.
“I have written the moment I got in. I will post it myself. Dear Tom, do not be hard on this girl if you think her over-bold; for she loves you! she loves you! and would give her life to make yours happy.
“Your own true
“Claire.
“Twenty-eight mortal hours to wait. I shall hear my heart beating—as I hear it now—as I have heard it ever since I saw that sad, sad face—until I see it again!”
When Thomas Erichsen came to the end of this passionate, pure love-letter, he buried his face in the sweet spring grass, and lay immovable with a grief too great for tears. The sounds of London (louder then than now) boomed and rattled in his ears; the racket of unmuffled wheels upon street beyond street of cobbles; a coachman’s horn in Whitehall; a roll of drums from the barracks across Birdcage Walk; elsewhere a hurdy-gurdy; near at hand an altercation between two other hiveless drones; and in the middle-distance an errand-boy whistling “All Round My Hat.” Such were the sounds heard that April morning by Tom Erichsen’s outward ears; to those of his soul, a brave soft voice was whispering the last God-speed, while his own, the more broken of the two, was vowing not only eternal constancy, but eternal goodness and an honest life for her sake.
He could see the steady grey eyes filled with tears that never fell, and shining into his with the love that knew no shame; he must never look in them again, nor ever more defile with his the brave lips that had trembled, truly, but yet spoken comfortable words up to the end.
And here he lay, in culpable poverty and dishonourable rags; fallen already to an ultimate deep. So now, too late, as through the gates of hell, must come this message of angelic love!
He read it again, tore off the clean half-sheet, and, sitting cross-legged, wrote as follows in pencil upon his knee:—
“It means that I am a blackguard, and no longer worthy to be even your friend.
“The Jumna was ten days behind her advertised time of sailing, and I was miserable. You might have pitied me then; I neither ask nor deserve any pity now. I had vile thoughts. Even if I made my fortune your father would hate my father’s son for ever—and I him—so it could never be. You would marry in due course. How could you help yourself? Those were my thoughts. And then I made a friend!
“He showed me the town. He helped me to forget. He won most of my money, and took the rest by fraud. I never even booked my passage. And now I only live to spill the fellow’s blood.
“But that’s all he did. He didn’t disgrace me. I disgraced myself, and broke all my promises to the noble girl of whom I never was worthy; and must therefore see her no more. It would be no good. Why should I insult you too? I have done so enough in coming to this. Simply forget me, for I am not worth your scorn. Forget me utterly. I am too ashamed to sign my name.”
This he folded up, addressed with his pencil, and sealed (in a fashion) with the wafers which had been used already: her lips had touched them before his! Then he sat where he was, and noted the other moral corpses stretched upon that daily battle-field, and wondered if any of them had wrecked their lives as wilfully as he his. And then he thought of his father’s white hairs, and thanked God they had won to the grave without this to bring them there.
Then he lay down again, and wrestled with hunger and anguish alternately and both together. It was evening when he left the park, heavy-laden with a fact remembered on the way. He lacked the price of a two-penny stamp! Not a farthing had he left, nor a thing to pawn, save his long silk purse so ignobly emptied, and that had been his father’s before him. It should not go, even for this; yet the letter must; then how?
He sat down again on a bench; for he was weak for want of food; and in his weakness came a temptation, that was indeed more like an inspiration, so luminous was its flash. He might take his letter and leave it himself in the key-hole of the garden-gate. Why not? Then she would get it at once—that evening.
Why not? He had already given the reasons in the letter itself. And see her he would—he must—if once he got as far as that garden-gate. So the reasons in the letter held very good indeed; and how weak to be himself the first to fly in their face! But then weakness was his present portion, whereas the temptation grew stronger and stronger: only to see her face once more; only to hear her voice, although it lashed him with the reproaches he so richly deserved! Yet he did not give in without a kind of struggle. He had become a gambler, and a gambler’s compromise occurred to him now.
This was when the yellow London sun was setting, a little after seven o’clock; about twenty minutes past, several of the better-favoured pedestrians in Pall Mall were accosted by a timid ragamuffin with a ghastly face, who begged the loan of a penny, and was rightly treated to deaf ears. But at length a dapper young man, in a long bottle-green coat, wheeled round with an oath and a twinkling eye.
“Lend you one!” cried he. “I like that! What d’ye mean by it, eh?”
“What I say. I ask the loan of the smallest coin you’ve got—and your pardon for the liberty.”
“Pray when shall I see it again?”
“In half a minute.”
“Half a what? Well, you’re a rum ’un, you are; here’s your brown.”
“Thank you,” said Erichsen, and balanced it on his right thumbnail. “Now you stand by and see fair play. Heads I go and tails I don’t; sudden death; let it fall clear!”
His beggar’s manners (such as these were) had been forgotten on the instant. The coin rang upon the paving-stone with his words.
“Heads it is!” cried the owner, on his haunches, with his fine long coat in the dust.
“Then I’m unspeakably obliged to you,” replied the fervent beggar, returning the penny. “I wish you goodnight, sir, with a thousand thanks!”
“No, no; hang it all! I’m a sportsman myself; you’re a man of my kidney, and you hadn’t even a brown to toss with! Oblige me by taking this yellow-boy; no, curse it, I beg your pardon—I might have seen! At least, sir, you will join me at the tavern, to show there’s no ill-feeling? A cut off the joint, I think, and a tankard of stout; what say you? I feel peckish myself. Come, come, or you’ll offend me!”
But the eyes which his miseries had left dry were dim again at the kindness of the world; and Tom Erichsen had not spoken because he could not. “May I live to repay this!” he muttered now. “It will be my first bite since yesterday.”
And in another hour it was a new man who was pushing forward, with such brisk steps, upon the high road to Avenue Lodge and his appointed fate.
Moreover, the currents of other lives than his had been deflected, for good or evil, by the spin of that borrowed coin.