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Basil

W >> Wilkie Collins >> Basil




"Still, in spite of the temptations of youth, wealth, and birth which
your proposals held out to her, she accepted them at first (I made her
confess it herself) with a secret terror and misgiving, produced by
the remembrance of me. These sensations, however, she soon quelled, or
fancied she quelled; and these, it was now my last, best chance to
revive. I had a whole year for the work before me; and I felt certain
of success.

"On your side, you had immense advantages. You had social superiority;
you had her father's full approbation; and you were married to her. If
she had loved you for yourself, loved you for anything besides her own
sensual interests, her vulgar ambition, her reckless vanity, every
effort I could have made against you would have been defeated from the
first. But, setting this out of the question, in spite of the utter
heartlessness of her attachment to you, if you had not consented to
that condition of waiting a year for her after marriage; or,
consenting to it, if you had broken it long before the year was
out--knowing, as you should have known, that in most women's eyes a
man is not dishonoured by breaking his promise, so long as he breaks
it for a woman's sake--if, I say, you had taken either of these
courses, I should still have been powerless against you. But you
remained faithful to your promise, faithful to the condition, faithful
to the ill-directed modesty of your love; and that very fidelity put
you in my power. A pure-minded girl would have loved you a thousand
times better for acting as you did--but Margaret Sherwin was not a
pure-minded girl, not a maidenly girl: I have looked into her
thoughts, and I know it.

"Such were your chances against me; and such was the manner in which
you misused them. On _my_ side, I had indefatigable patience; personal
advantages equal, with the exception of birth and age, to yours:
long-established influence; freedom to be familiar; and more than all,
that stealthy, unflagging strength of purpose which only springs from
the desire of revenge. I first thoroughly tested your character, and
discovered on what points it was necessary for me to be on my guard
against you, when you took shelter under my roof from the storm. If
your father had been with you on that night, there were moments, while
the tempest was wrought to its full fury, when, if my voice could have
called the thunder down on the house to crush it and every one in it
to atoms, I would have spoken the word, and ended the strife for all
of us. The wind, the hail, and the lightning maddened my thoughts of
your father and you--I was nearly letting you see it, when that flash
came between us as we parted at my door.

"How I gained your confidence, you know; and you know also, how I
contrived to make you use me, afterwards, as the secret friend who
procured you privileges with Margaret which her father would not grant
at your own request. This, at the outset, secured me from suspicion on
your part; and I had only to leave it to your infatuation to do the
rest. With you my course was easy--with her it was beset by
difficulties; but I overcame them. Your fatal consent to wait through
a year of probation, furnished me with weapons against you, which I
employed to the most unscrupulous purpose. I can picture to myself
what would be your indignation and your horror, if I fully described
the use which I made of the position in which your compliance with her
father's conditions placed you towards Margaret. I spare you this
avowal--it would be useless now. Consider me what you please; denounce
my conduct in any terms you like: my justification will always be the
same. I was the injured man, you were the aggressor; I was righting
myself by getting back a possession of which you had robbed me, and
any means were sanctified by such an end as that.

"But my success, so far, was of little avail, in itself; against the
all-powerful counter-attraction which you possessed. Contemptible, or
not, you still had this superiority over me--you could make a fine
lady of her. From that fact sprang the ambition which all my
influence, dating as it did from her childhood, could not destroy.
There, was fastened the main-spring which regulated her selfish
devotion to you, and which it was next to impossible to snap asunder.
I never made the attempt.

"The scheme which I proposed to her, when she was fully prepared to
hear it, and to conceal that she had heard it, left her free to enjoy
all the social advantages which your alliance could bestow--free to
ride in her carriage, and go into her father's shop (that was one of
her ambitions!) as a new customer added to his aristocratic
connection--free even to become one of your family, unsuspected, in
case your rash marriage was forgiven. Your credulity rendered the
execution of this scheme easy. In what manner it was to be carried
out, and what object I proposed to myself in framing it, I abstain
from avowing; for the simple reason that the discovery at which you
arrived by following us on the night of the party, made my plan
abortive, and has obliged me since to renounce it. I need only say, in
this place, that it threatened your father as well as you, and that
Margaret recoiled from it at first--not from any horror of the
proposal, but through fear of discovery. Gradually, I overcame her
apprehensions: very gradually, for I was not thoroughly secure of her
devotion to my purpose, until your year of probation was nearly out.

"Through all that year, daily visitor as you were at North Villa, you
never suspected either of us! And yet, had you been one whit less
infatuated, how many warnings you might have discovered, which, in
spite of her duplicity and my caution, would then have shown
themselves plainly enough to put you on your guard! Those abrupt
changes in her manner, those alternate fits of peevish silence and
capricious gaiety, which sometimes displayed themselves even in your
presence, had every one of them their meaning--though you could not
discern it. Sometimes, they meant fear of discovery, sometimes fear of
me: now, they might be traced back to hidden contempt; now, to
passions swelling under fancied outrage; now, to secret remembrance of
disclosures I had just made, or eager anticipation of disclosures I
had yet to reveal. There were times at which every step of the way
along which I was advancing was marked, faintly yet significantly, in
her manner and her speech, could you only have interpreted them
aright. My first renewal of my old influence over her, my first words
that degraded you in her eyes, my first successful pleading of my own
cause against yours, my first appeal to those passions in her which I
knew how to move, my first proposal to her of the whole scheme which I
had matured in solitude, in the foreign country, by the banks of the
great river--all these separate and gradual advances on my part
towards the end which I was vowed to achieve, were outwardly shadowed
forth in her, consummate as were her capacities for deceit, and
consummately as she learnt to use them against you.

"Do you remember noticing, on your return from the country, how ill
Margaret looked, and how ill I looked? We had some interviews during
your absence, at which I spoke such words to her as would have left
their mark on the face of a Jezebel, or a Messalina. Have you
forgotten how often, during the latter days of your year of
expectation, I abruptly left the room after you had called me in to
bear you company in your evening readings? My pretext was sudden
illness; and illness it was, but not of the body. As the time
approached, I felt less and less secure of my own caution and
patience. With you, indeed, I might still have considered myself safe:
it was the presence of Mrs. Sherwin that drove me from the room. Under
that woman's fatal eye I shrank, when the last days drew near--I, who
had defied her detection, and stood firmly on my guard against her
sleepless, silent, deadly vigilance, for months and months--gave way
as the end approached! I knew that she had once or twice spoken
strangely to you, and I dreaded lest her wandering, incoherent words
might yet take in time a recognisable direction, a palpable shape.
They did not; the instinct of terror bound her tongue to the last.
Perhaps, even if she had spoken plainly, you would not have believed
her; you would have been still true to yourself and to your confidence
in Margaret. Enemy as I am to you, enemy as I will be to the day of
your death, I will do you justice for the past:--Your love for that
girl was a love which even the purest and best of women could never
have thoroughly deserved.

-----

"My letter is nearly done: my retrospect is finished. I have brought
it down to the date of events, about which you know as much as I do.
Accident conducted you to a discovery which, otherwise, you might not
have made, perhaps for months, perhaps not at all, until I had led you
to it of my own accord. I say accident, positively; knowing that from
first to last I trusted no third person. What you know, you knew by
accident alone.

"But for that chance discovery, you would have seen me bring her back
to North Villa at the appointed time, in my care, just as she went
out. I had no dread of her meeting you. But enough of her! I shall
dispose of her future, as I had resolved to dispose of it years ago;
careless how she may be affected when she first sees the hideous
alteration which your attack has wrought in me. Enough, I say, of the
Sherwins--father, mother, and daughter--your destiny lies not with
_them,_ but with _me._

"Do you still exult in having deformed me in every feature, in having
given me a face to revolt every human being who looks at me? Do you
triumph in the remembrance of this atrocity, as you triumphed in the
acting of it--believing that you had destroyed my future with
Margaret, in destroying my very identity as a man? I tell you, that
with the hour when I leave this hospital your day of triumph will be
over, and your day of expiation will begin--never to end till the
death of one of us. You shall live--refined educated gentleman as you
are--to wish, like a ruffian, that you had killed me; and your father
shall live to wish it too.

"Am I trying to awe you with the fierce words of a boaster and a
bully? Test me, by looking back a little, and discovering what I have
abstained from for the sake of my purpose, since I have been here. A
word or two from my lips, in answer to the questions with which I have
been baited, day after day, by those about me, would have called you
before a magistrate to answer for an assault--a shocking and a savage
assault, even in this country, where hand to hand brutality is a
marketable commodity between the Prisoner and the Law. Your father's
name might have been publicly coupled with your dishonour, if I had
but spoken; and I was silent. I kept the secret--kept it, because to
avenge myself on you by a paltry scandal, which you and your family
(opposing to it wealth, position, previous character, and general
sympathy) would live down in a few days, was not my revenge: because
to be righted before magistrates and judges by a beggarman's
exhibition of physical injury, and a coward's confession of physical
defeat, was not my way of righting myself. I have a lifelong
retaliation in view, which laws and lawgivers are powerless either to
aid or to oppose--the retaliation which set a mark upon Cain (as I
will set a mark on you); and then made his life his punishment (as I
will make your life yours).

"How? Remember what my career has been; and know that I will make your
career like it. As my father's death by the hangman affected _my_
existence, so the events of that night when you followed me shall
affect _yours._ Your father shall see you living the life to which his
evidence against _my_ father condemned _me_--shall see the foul stain
of your disaster clinging to you wherever you go. The infamy with
which I am determined to pursue you, shall be your own infamy that you
cannot get quit of--for you shall never get quit of me, never get quit
of the wife who has dishonoured you. You may leave your home, and
leave England; you may make new friends, and seek new employments;
years and years may pass away--and still, you shall not escape us:
still, you shall never know when we are near, or when we are distant;
when we are ready to appear before you, or when we are sure to keep
out of your sight. My deformed face and her fatal beauty shall hunt
you through the world. The terrible secret of your dishonour, and of
the atrocity by which you avenged it, shall ooze out through strange
channels, in vague shapes, by tortuous intangible processes; ever
changing in the manner of its exposure, never remediable by your own
resistance, and always directed to the same end--your isolation as a
marked man, in every fresh sphere, among every new community to which
you retreat.

"Do you call this a very madness of malignity and revenge? It is the
only occupation in life for which your mutilation of me has left me
fit; and I accept it, as work worthy of my deformity. In the prospect
of watching how you bear this hunting through life, that never quite
hunts you down; how long you resist the poison-influence, as slow as
it is sure, of a crafty tongue that cannot be silenced, of a
denouncing presence that cannot be fled, of a damning secret torn from
you and exposed afresh each time you have hidden it--there is the
promise of a nameless delight which it sometimes fevers, sometimes
chills my blood to think of. Lying in this place at night, in those
hours of darkness and stillness when the surrounding atmosphere of
human misery presses heavy on me in my heavy sleep, prophecies of
dread things to come between us, trouble my spirit in dreams. At those
times, I know, and shudder in knowing, that there is something besides
the motive of retaliation, something less earthly and apparent than
that, which urges me horribly and supernaturally to link myself to you
for life; which makes me feel as the bearer of a curse that shall
follow you; as the instrument of a fatality pronounced against you
long ere we met--a fatality beginning before our fathers were parted
by the hangman; perpetuating itself in you and me; ending who shall
say how, or when?

"Beware of comforting yourself with a false security, by despising my
words, as the wild words of a madman, dreaming of the perpetration of
impossible crimes. Throughout this letter I have warned you of what
you may expect; because I will not assail you at disadvantage, as you
assailed me; because it is my pleasure to ruin you, openly resisting
me at every step. I have given you fair play, as the huntsmen give
fair play at starting to the animal they are about to run down. Be
warned against seeking a false hope in the belief that my faculties
are shaken, and that my resolves are visionary--false, because such a
hope is only despair in disguise.

"I have done. The time is not far distant when my words will become
deeds. They cure fast in a public hospital: we shall meet soon!

"ROBERT MANNION."



"We shall meet soon!"

How? Where? I looked back at the last page of writing. But my
attention wandered strangely; I confused one paragraph with another;
the longer I read, the less I was able to grasp the meaning, not of
sentences merely, but even of the simplest words.

From the first lines to the last, the letter had produced no distinct
impressions on my mind. So utterly was I worn out by the previous
events of the day, that even those earlier portions of Mannion's
confession, which revealed the connection between my father and his,
and the terrible manner of their separation, hardly roused me to more
than a momentary astonishment. I just called to remembrance that I had
never heard the subject mentioned at home, except once or twice in
vague hints dropped mysteriously by an old servant, and little
regarded by me at the time, as referring to matters which had happened
before I was born. I just reflected thus briefly and languidly on the
narrative at the commencement of the letter; and then mechanically
read on. Except the passages which contained the exposure of
Margaret's real character, and those which described the origin and
progress of Mannion's infamous plot, nothing in the letter impressed
me, as I was afterwards destined to be impressed by it, on a second
reading. The lethargy of all feeling into which I had now sunk, seemed
a very lethargy of death.

I tried to clear and concentrate my faculties by thinking of other
subjects; but without success. All that I had heard and seen since the
morning, now recurred to me more and more vaguely and confusedly. I
could form no plan either for the present or the future. I knew as
little how to meet Mr. Sherwin's last threat of forcing me to
acknowledge his guilty daughter, as how to defend myself against the
life-long hostility with which I was menaced by Mannion. A feeling of
awe and apprehension, which I could trace to no distinct cause, stole
irresistibly and mysteriously over me. A horror of the searching
brightness of daylight, a suspicion of the loneliness of the place to
which I had retreated, a yearning to be among my fellow-creatures
again, to live where there was life--the busy life of London--overcame
me. I turned hastily, and walked back from the suburbs to the city.

It was growing towards evening as I gained one of the great
thoroughfares. Seeing some of the inhabitants of the houses, as I
walked along, sitting at their open windows to enjoy the evening air,
the thought came to me for the first time that day:--where shall I lay
my head tonight? Home I had none. Friends who would have gladly
received me were not wanting; but to go to them would oblige me to
explain myself; to disclose something of the secret of my calamity;
and this I was determined to keep concealed, as I had told my father I
would keep it. My last-left consolation was my knowledge of still
preserving that resolution, of still honourably holding by it at all
hazards, cost what it might.

So I thought no more of succour or sympathy from any one of my
friends. As a stranger I had been driven from my home, and as a
stranger I was resigned to live, until I had learnt how to conquer my
misfortune by my own vigour and endurance. Firm in this determination,
though firm in nothing else, I now looked around me for the first
shelter I could purchase from strangers--the humbler the better.

I happened to be in the poorest part, and on the poorest side of the
great street along which I was walking--among the inferior shops, and
the houses of few stories. A room to let was not hard to find here. I
took the first I saw; escaped questions about names and references by
paying my week's rent in advance; and then found myself left in
possession of the one little room which I must be resigned to look on
for the future--perhaps for a long future!--as my home.

Home! A dear and a mournful remembrance was revived in the reflections
suggested by that simple word. Through the darkness that thickened
over my mind, there now passed one faint ray of light which gave
promise of the morning--the light of the calm face that I had last
looked on when it was resting on my father's breast.

Clara! My parting words to her, when I had unclasped from my neck
those kind arms which would fain have held me to home for ever, had
expressed a promise that was yet unfulfilled. I trembled as I now
thought on my sister's situation. Not knowing whither I had turned my
steps on leaving home; uncertain to what extremities my despair might
hurry me; absolutely ignorant even whether she might ever see me
again--it was terrible to reflect on the suspense under which she
might be suffering, at this very moment, on my account. My promise to
write to her, was of all promises the most vitally important, and the
first that should be fulfilled.

My letter was very short. I communicated to her the address of the
house in which I was living (well knowing that nothing but positive
information on this point would effectually relieve her anxiety)--I
asked her to write in reply, and let me hear some news of her, the
best that she could give--and I entreated her to believe implicitly in
my patience and courage under every disaster; and to feel assured
that, whatever happened, I should never lose the hope of soon meeting
her again. Of the perils that beset me, of the wrong and injury I
might yet be condemned to endure, I said nothing. Those were truths
which I was determined to conceal from her, to the last. She had
suffered for me more than I dared think of, already!

I sent my letter by hand, so as to ensure its immediate delivery. In
writing those few simple lines, I had no suspicion of the important
results which they were destined to produce. In thinking of to-morrow,
and of all the events which to-morrow might bring with it, I little
thought whose voice would be the first to greet me the next day, whose
hand would be held out to me as the helping hand of a friend.

VI.

It was still early in the morning, when a loud knock sounded at the
house-door, and I heard the landlady calling to the servant: "A
gentleman to see the gentleman who came in last night." The moment the
words reached me, my thoughts recurred to the letter of yesterday--Had
Mannion found me out in my retreat? As the suspicion crossed my mind,
the door opened, and the visitor entered.

I looked at him in speechless astonishment. It was my elder brother!
It was Ralph himself who now walked into the room!

"Well, Basil! how are you?" he said, with his old off-hand manner and
hearty voice.

"Ralph! You in England!--you here!"

"I came back from Italy last night. Basil, how awfully you're changed!
I hardly know you again."

His manner altered as he spoke the last words. The look of sorrow and
alarm which he fixed on me, went to my heart. I thought of
holiday-time, when we were boys; of Ralph's boisterous ways with me;
of his good-humoured school-frolics, at my expense; of the strong bond
of union between us, so strangely compounded of my weakness and his
strength; of my passive and of his active nature; I saw how little
_he_ had changed since that time, and knew, as I never knew before,
how miserably _I_ was altered. All the shame and grief of my
banishment from home came back on me, at sight of his friendly,
familiar face. I struggled hard to keep my self-possession, and tried
to bid him welcome cheerfully; but the effort was too much for me. I
turned away my head, as I took his hand; for the old school-boy
feeling of not letting Ralph see that I was in tears, influenced me
still.

"Basil! Basil! what are you about? This won't do. Look up, and listen
to me. I have promised Clara to pull you through this wretched mess;
and I'll do it. Get a chair, and give me a light. I'm going to sit on
your bed, smoke a cigar, and have a long talk with you."

While he was lighting his cigar, I looked more closely at him than
before. Though he was the same as ever in manner; though his
expression still preserved its reckless levity of former days, I now
detected that he had changed a little in some other respects. His
features had become coarser--dissipation had begun to mark them. His
spare, active, muscular figure had filled out; he was dressed rather
carelessly; and of all his trinkets and chains of early times, not one
appeared about him now. Ralph looked prematurely middle-aged, since I
had seen him last.

"Well," he began, "first of all, about my coming back. The fact is,
the morganatic Mrs. Ralph--" (he referred to his last mistress)
"wanted to see England, and I was tired of being abroad. So I brought
her back with me; and we're going to live quietly, somewhere in the
Brompton neighbourhood. That woman has been my salvation--you must
come and see her. She has broke me of gaming altogether; I was going
to the devil as fast as I could, when she stopped me--but you know all
about it, of course. Well: we got to London yesterday afternoon; and
in the evening I left her at the hotel, and went to report myself at
home. There, the first thing I heard, was that you had cut me out of
my old original distinction of being the family scamp. Don't look
distressed, Basil; I'm not laughing at you; I've come to do something
better than that. Never mind my talk: nothing in the world ever was
serious to _me,_ and nothing ever will be."

He stopped to knock the ash off his cigar, and settle himself more
comfortably on my bed; then proceeded.

"It has been my ill-luck to see my father pretty seriously offended on
more than one occasion; but I never saw him so very quiet and so very
dangerous as last night when he was telling me about you. I remember
well enough how he spoke and looked, when he caught me putting away my
trout-flies in the pages of that family history of his; but it was
nothing to see him or hear him then, to what it is now. I can tell you
this, Basil--if I believed in what the poetical people call a broken
heart (which I don't), I should be almost afraid that _he_ was
broken-hearted. I saw it was no use to say a word for you just yet, so
I sat quiet and listened to him till I got my dismissal for the
evening. My next proceeding was to go up-stairs, and see Clara.
Upstairs, I give you my word of honour, it was worse still. Clara was
walking about the room with your letter in her hand--just reach me the
matches: my cigar's out. Some men can talk and smoke in equal
proportions--I never could.

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