Chapter XVII: The Wanderer’s Return

The great city lies seething like some unholy caldron under the blazing August sun, when a lonely wayfarer returns to it after two years’ exile on the other side of the world. Rank and fashion, middle-class wealth, professional respectability, have deserted the airy western squares and streets for English watering-places, Welsh mountains, Scottish moors, Irish lakes, or broiling Continental esplanades, spas, conversation-houses, Rhine steamers, and so on; but from this eastern end of the city there is no such exodus; here life holds on patiently through the dog days, here labour knows no respite, and the grinding of the universal mill slackens not.

Alexis Secretan, just disembarked from the famous clipper ship _Oronoko_, surveys the dingy street, the driving crowd, with wonder, not unmingled with loathing. What a weary city it seems to this man, who walked its stony ways two years ago a seeker for bread, and for the most part found only the natural product of the soil--a stone! He has found fortune kinder at the antipodes, man more friendly, Nature more liberal of her smiles, less shut out and constrained by brick and mortar. He has achieved no sudden prosperity, he has worked hard and honestly, and has done well; so well as to be able to come back to this sophisticated, unfriendly city, whither fate draws him as a magnet.

It is not possible for a man to feel more lonely than this returning wayfarer. In all the vast city which spreads itself about and around him there lives only one person from whom he can hope for a friendly smile of welcome. His humble friend Dick Plowden is the only being to whom he can go with any certainty of not being considered a bore and an intruder. His old brother officers--the companions of his brief day of prosperity,--alas! he wore out the friendship of those when he sank to that lowest grade in the animal creation--the borrowing animal.

Dear old Dick! honest, friendly Dick, to whom he has long since repaid that ten-pound note borrowed for the false wife who deserted him--it is to Dick he goes naturally to-day, as brother goes to brother. It is to Dick’s recommendation to Messrs. Keel and Skrew he owes the honourable independence of the last two years. But for Dick’s influence he would never have got that fair start in a new world which has enabled him to keep his head above water, and do Messrs. Keel and Skrew honourable service on the other side of the globe.

He can afford to take a hansom, and drive down to the Brompton Road as fast as a broken-down thoroughbred can take him. Dear old Dick is in the little back parlour hard at work, as on that snowy day when desperation guided Alexis to that last resource of the desperate--the humble friend of better days. But Dick is not occupied to-day in the mechanical drudgery of map-painting; he is writing a book, a little book on astronomy, for the use of schools,--that elementary geography of his having been a success.

He starts up at sight of Alexis, who has pushed by the maid of all work and entered unannounced. The two men greet each other heartily.

‘Captain Secretan! What a delightful surprise! and looking so well too, so handsome, just like my original captain, who took mother’s first floor.’

‘Dear old Dick!’

‘But I did not expect you home for ever so long. I thought you were going to stop at Sidney, working for the firm until you had made your fortune.’

‘Fortune is all very well, Dick--and the firm is all very well. They have been liberal employers, and I have worked honestly for them, and been lucky in my dealings for them. But the soul of man needs something more than fifteen per cent. commission upon all his dealings. There was an emptiness in my heart, Dick, out yonder--a cavity that needed filling somehow,--so I took the first opportunity to slip across to the old world, though God knows there’s little chance of filling the vacuum here. However, I shall only stop a month or so, and then go back again. The firm has been very kind about the matter. I told them my health was failing, and that the voyage home was my only hope of getting strong again, so they gave me a free passage both ways, and I’m to hold counsel with them about the opening of a new branch of the business out yonder.’

‘And were you really ill?’ asks Richard Plowden, sympathetically.

‘What I told the firm was not much more than the truth, old fellow. When heart-sickness sets in, bodily sickness is pretty sure to follow. My nights were growing sleepless, full of bad thoughts. Well, Dick, you can guess my first question. Any news--of her?’

Richard Plowden shakes his head despondingly.

‘I am the last to hear of her,’ he says,--‘I who live as much out of the world as if I were a hermit in a cave.’

‘She might have come to you to inquire about my fate, knowing you were the only friend adversity had left me.’

‘She has never come.’

‘Nor written?’

‘Not a line. Forgive me if I wound you, Captain Secretan----.’

‘Call me Alex, Dick, or we shall quarrel.’

‘Forgive me if I seem to speak hardly of her, but upon my honour, Alex, it seems to me that you have nothing to do but to forget her. She deserted you when you had the most need of her love, when, if she had been a true woman, she would have clung to you most fondly.’

‘Granted, Dick. She was selfish, base, cowardly. We had sunk together into the slough of despond, and she contrived to scramble out of it and leave me in the mire. She was clever enough to make use of me to accomplish her escape, sent me out among hard-hearted humanity to borrow, beg, or steal the means by which she meant to separate herself from my fallen fortunes. Do you think I came across the world to seek for her? No, Dick, I am not such a fool. I have been cheated once. I shall never be her dupe again. Do you think I could ever trust her any more?--that if fortune smiled upon us, and she pretended to love me, I could feel any confidence in her truth, any security in her affection? The void in my heart is to be filled, but not by her. I came back to the old world to look for my child,--the child that was to be born to me when my cruel wife left me.’

‘You do not even know that the child survived its birth?’

‘What a Job’s comforter you are, Dick! I know nothing except that I am going to hunt for the mother in order that I may find the child.’

‘The law would give the custody of so young a child to the mother.’

‘I snap my fingers at the law. Truth is great and shall prevail. So base a wife must be an unworthy mother. I will find her price for the child. She will sell that as she sold me--for a mess of pottage. When I left England I was desperate--mad, perhaps, or I should not have left the land that held my child. My loneliness in that strange world yonder awakened a father’s feelings, I found out how dreary a prospect life is to a man who stands alone--a blank and barren desert, with no green oasis--no distant city to which he may direct his steps--a lonely pilgrimage leading nowhere.’

‘How shall you commence your search?’

‘I have thought of that question many a time on board the _Oronoko_. There is little choice of plan left open to me. You remember that before Messrs. Keel and Skrew took me into their employment, I went to Redcastle, the place my wife came from when she came to London as Mrs. Hazleton’s governess. I saw Sibyl’s younger sister, made my inquiries, and found that Sibyl had not been heard of at Redcastle. She had not gone straight home to her uncle, the parish doctor, as I had supposed it probable she would, and flung herself and her troubles upon his shoulders. No, she was too artful for that. She had some deeper game in view--some rich relative from whom she had expectations, as I gathered dimly from her letter. I could find out nothing more from the girl than that Sibyl was supposed still to be in Mrs. Hazleton’s employment--that her marriage was not known to her family, that she had not reappeared at Redcastle, or received any help from her uncle the doctor. Where could she be, and how could she be living? She must have found the wealthy friend whose existence I inferred from her letter, and this wealthy friend or relative was evidently not an inhabitant of Redcastle. She must have found a safe haven somewhere. I made no further attempt to trace her. I was too deeply stung by her abandonment. “Let her go,” I said to myself, as I crawled wearily away from that dismal country town, through the January weather, “she and I have done with each other.” I did not foresee that the hour would come in which the thought of my child would be more precious to me than my false wife’s love had ever been. But in my lonely days in a strange land--lonely in spite of what the world calls friendship--I have suffered my hopes to build themselves round that one image--the child whose face I have never seen. Now, Dick, there seem to be only two sources of information open to me. I can go down to Redcastle again, and renew my inquiries at Dr. Faunthorpe’s; or, before doing that, I can hunt up an honest creature who used to be housemaid at Mrs. Hazleton’s, and who made herself useful to my wife in sending her letters, and so helping her to sustain the falsehood which she chose to practise upon her uncle, for quite inadequate reasons, as they always seemed to me. But there are minds to which double-dealing is an absolute pleasure, and hers may be of that order,’ adds Alexis, bitterly.

‘You have not dined,’ says Richard Plowden, by way of changing the conversation. ‘I’ll order a steak and potatoes. You’ll enjoy an English rump-steak after ship fare, and you know mother’s a first-rate cook. You’ll take up your quarters with us, of course, while you are in London?’

‘I shall go to Redcastle to-morrow, Dick, if I can find Jane Dimond, the housemaid, this evening. But if you can give me a bed for to-night, I will accept it with all gratitude. Don’t trouble about dinner. I had a substantial lunch on board the _Oronoko_. I’ll go to Lowther Street at once, and we can smoke our pipes together when I come back, and talk over old times, when I was a careless, thriftless bachelor. How selfish I am, talking of my own affairs all this time, and never so much as congratulating you on your success as an author!’

‘Don’t call me an author,’ protests Dick, blushing. ‘That’s putting me too much upon a level with Scott and Bulwer, and geniuses of that kind. I was lucky enough to hit upon an easy, simple way of stating hard facts--making information a little more attractive than it has been made for young minds, and the style took with the schools and teachers. My little handbook of geography has gone through fifteen editions, and has been quite a fortune to me, and I’m now doing the sixth in a series of handbooks, all more or less geographical, up to the present one, in which I venture upon astronomy. So you see map-painting led to something, after all.’

‘Intelligence and industry always lead to something, Dick. There would be a screw loose in the scheme of the universe if they could ever lead to nothing.’

‘Those little books have done wonders for us,’ exclaims Dick, with harmless pride. ‘Mother doesn’t work half so hard as she used, though she will stick to the cooking; and she has a silk gown to wear on Sundays,--doesn’t it rustle, too! you can hear it at the very top of the staircase,--none of your soft silks for mother, but a silk that stands alone and lets you know that it’s there. And I’ve got a garden. See!’

The Duke of Devonshire could feel no loftier pride in the possession of Chatsworth than swells Richard Plowden’s breast to-day, as he draws up the Venetian blind and allows his cherished garden to burst upon Alexis Secretan’s admiring gaze.

It is a quadrangle of fifteen feet square, shut in by whitewashed walls, overshadowed by leaden cisterns, bounded by the slated roofs of a mews, but Dick has built rockeries in the corners, rockeries where ferns flourish greenly. He has trained ivy over one wall--that blessed parasite which is so fair and quick-growing a screen for brick and mortar abominations--Virginia creeper over another. The grass is soft and green, and in the middle of the little plot there is a stone basin--a timeworn old basin which Dick has picked up for half a sovereign in a builder’s yard, but a basin in which a slender jet of water actually plays. Scarlet geraniums in green tubs give colour to the picture; an old stone bench, also a bargain of Dick’s, offers repose to the idler in this narrow pleasaunce. Shut in as it is by mews and back kitchens,--overshadowed as it is by cisterns,--Richard Plowden’s garden is absolutely pretty. Alexis accords it his unmeasured approbation.

‘It’s the first English garden I’ve seen for the last two years, Dick, and it smiles at me like a welcome home. Yes, I’ll come back in time to smoke a cigar on that stone bench of yours under the summer stars.’

‘We drink tea out there on fine Sunday afternoons in the warm weather,’ says Dick, smiling at the ferns and rockwork, ‘and you can’t imagine how proud mother is. I’ve got the real _Osmunda regalis_, or flowering fern, in that corner, though you’d hardly believe it; and there’s a _Polypodium_ over there that a friendly lodger of ours brought me from Ilfracombe.’

‘Well, Dick, I must go and look for Jane Dimond, but I’ll be back in a couple of hours at latest.’

Dick limps to the door with his friend, and follows his figure with admiring eyes till it vanishes in the current of wayfarers.

‘What a fine fellow he is! and to think that a wife could desert him! I’ll ask mother to get a bit of something nice for supper, a veal cutlet and a few peas, or a chicken and a slice of broiled ham.’