Charlotte's Inheritance by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (best beach reads .txt) 📖

when the fate of Philip was discussed by Valentine and himself. "He's doing well enough, somewhere or other, you may depend; but I don't think he'll ever be able to show his nose in London after those bill transactions. There's a very strong feeling against him on Change. He's looked upon as a discredit to the order, and that sort of thing, you see. It isn't often a member of the House goes to the bad like that. No, I don't think Phil will ever show himself in London again; but such a man as that can always find a platform somewhere--"

"And go on to the end of his days unpunished, I suppose," remarked Mr. Hawkehurst, with some bitterness.

"Well, yes; I don't see what's to touch him in the future. Of course he could be dropped upon for those bills, if he came in the way of being dropped upon; but, as I said before, he's too deep a card for that."

Thus did George Sheldon dismiss the subject. That his brother was an exile for life from his native land he did not doubt; but he took it for granted that in whatever distant spot of earth Philip had found a refuge, he would there contrive to prosper and to show a bold front in the city of his adoption.

This belief Mr. Sheldon of Gray's Inn cherished until one snowy Christmas Eve, a year and a half after that event, or series of events, which the lawyer briefly designated "the burst-up at Bayswater."

Bleak and bitter was that December, a December not long gone by. The heart of the prosperous British nation melted as the heart of one man. The columns of the _Zeus_ and the _Diurnal Hermes_, the _Flag_ and the _Hesper_, overflowed with the record of subscriptions to charity funds; and the leaders of the morning journals all preached the same kindly sermon on the same Christian text. Thick lay the snow upon the housetops; "thick and slab" the greasy slush upon the pavements of crowded thoroughfares; merry the rogues and ragamuffins of the great city. The ideal Christmas of our dreams seemed to have come at last, and the heart of every true Briton rejoiced; while skaters in the parks made merry, and cabmen demanded fabulous sums of helpless wayfarers; and luckless, overworked, under-fed horses stumbled and fell at every turn, and the familiar steep of Holborn was dangerous as Alpine mountain.

To George Sheldon neither the weather nor the Christmas season made much difference. The even current of his life was little disturbed by festive pleasures or dissipations. An extra glass at his tavern, an invitation to dinner from some friend in the bill-discounting line, were the most exciting events the season was likely to bring him. He saw the shops brighten suddenly with semi-supernal glories of crystallized fruits and gorgeous bonbon-boxes, and he was aware of a kind of movement in the streets that was brisker and gayer than the plodding hurry of everyday life. He stood aside and let the mummeries go by him, and was glad when these Christmas follies were done with, and the law-courts in full swing once more. In the happiest and most innocent days of his youth, Christmas had brought him no more than extraordinary indulgences in the way of eating and drinking, swiftly followed by that dread avenger, the demon of the bilious.

Upon this particular occasion Mr. Sheldon had pledged himself to dine with a horsey publican lately retired from business, and big with all the pride and glory of a "place" at Hornsey.

"Come down and see my place, Sheldon," this gentleman had said. "I don't pretend to do the swell thing; but I force my own pines and grow my own grapes, and can put as good a dessert on my table as you could buy in Covent Garden for a five-pun' note. That's my missus's fad, that is, and I can afford it; so why shouldn't I do it? You come and eat your Christmas dinner with us, Sheldon. I've got a friend coming that can sing as good a song as Reeves hisself, and might make a fortune, if he wasn't above coming out at one of them music-halls. And I'll give you a bottle of Madeira that you won't match at any nobleman's table, if noblemen's tables was in your line of business, which you and I know they ain't, old fellow."

And then the jolly good fellow dug his fat fingers into George Sheldon's ribs, and George accepted the invitation; not with any elation of spirits, but sufficiently pleased to secure a good dinner with a man who promised to be a profitable client, and whose house was within a reasonable cab-fare from the west-central district.

"The cabmen are trying it on, anyhow, just now," thought Mr. Sheldon; "but I don't think they'll try it on with me. And if they do, there's the Marylebone stage. I'm not afraid of a five-mile walk."

Having accepted this invitation, and thus disposed of his Christmas-day, George Sheldon refrained from the delights of social converse at his tavern on Christmas-eve, and occupied himself with business. His clerk left him at the usual hour; but the master sat, long after dark, writing letters and reading law-papers, while the snow drifted against his windows and whitened the quiet quadrangle below.

He had just laid aside his papers and lighted a cigar, when he was startled by a stealthy knocking at his door. He was not unaccustomed to late visitors, as he was known to live at his chambers, and to work after office-hours; but the knocking of to-night was not the loud rollicking rat-a-tat of his jolly-good-fellow friends or clients. If he had been a student of light literature, and imbued with the ghostly associations of the season, he would have gone to his door expecting to behold a weird figure clothed in the vestments of the last century; or an old woman in ruff and martingale, whose figure in the flesh had once haunted those legal precincts; or the ghostly semblance of the Baron of Verulam himself, revisiting the glimpses of the moon and the avenue of elms that were planted by his order.

In George Sheldon's nature there was, however, no lurking dread of fiend or phantom. His ideas in connection with ghosts were limited to a white sheet, a broomstick, and a hollow turnip with a lighted candle inside it; and he would have set down the most awful apparition that ever was revealed to German ghost-seer, with a scornful grin, as a member of the sheet and-hollow-turnip confraternity.

"I know how it's done," he would have said, if the spectral form had glowered upon him in midnight churchyard or ruined abbey. "You'd better go and try it on somewhere else, my friend."

* * * * *


To a superstitious mind the THING which crept across the dark lobby and dragged itself into the glare of the gas-lighted office might have seemed, indeed, some, creature too loathsome for humanity. A plague-stricken corpse galvanized into a spasmodic life could scarcely have lifted to the light a more awful countenance than that on which George Sheldon looked with mingled anger and disgust.

"What do you want here" he asked. "Do you take this for the workhouse?"

"No," the creature answered, in a faint hoarse voice; "but I take you for my brother."

"WHAT!" cried George Sheldon, aghast.

He bent down and looked at the awful face. Yes, from the cavernous hollows of those sunken cheeks, beneath the shaggy penthouse of those bony brows, the fierce black eyes of Philip Sheldon looked out at him with a savage glare that he had never seen in them before--even when the savage nature of the man had revealed itself most nakedly--the fierce glare of fever and starvation.

This walking horror, this mass of loathsome rags endued with motion, this living disease, was the sometime prosperous stockbroker, the man whom it had been impossible to think of except furnished with linen of spotless whiteness, and the glossy broad-cloth, and well-made boots, and keyless chronometer, and silk umbrella of commercial success.

"Good God!" exclaimed George, horror-stricken, "is it you?"

"Yes, it's I," answered the creature in his strange husky accents; and the change--nay, indeed, the degradation, of the voice was as complete as the degradation of the man. "Yes, George, it's I; your brother Phil. You're surprised to see me fallen so low in the world, I suppose; but you can't be more surprised than I am myself. I've tried hard enough to hold my head above water. There's scarcely any trade that mortal man ever tried to earn his bread by, that I haven't tried--and failed in. It has been the experience of Fitzgeorge-street over and over again, in every trade and every profession. I started as doctor in Philadelphia, and was doing well;--till--till a patient died--and things went against me. I've been clerk in more offices than you can count on your ten fingers; but there was always something--my employer levanted, or was bankrupt, or died, or dismissed me. I've been travelling-dentist, auctioneer, commission-agent, tout, pedlar, out yonder; but it all came to the same thing--ruin, starvation, the hospital, or the pauper's ward. I have swept crossings in the city, and camped out in the wilderness among the bears and opossums. One day I thought I'd come home. 'There's George,' I said to myself; 'if I can get money enough to take me across the Atlantic, I shall be all right. George will give me a lift.' I don't stand alone in the world. A man's own flesh and blood won't let him starve--can't let him starve. Blood's thicker than water, you know, George. So I came home. I got the money; never you mind how. I needn't tell you what it cost me to scrape half-a-dozen pounds together. When a man's as low down in the world as I am, there's not a shilling he earns that doesn't cost him a drop of his heart's blood; there's not a pound he gets together that isn't bought by the discount of so much of his life. I found money enough for my passage in an emigrant vessel; and here I am, ready for anything. I'll work like your bought nigger. I'll do the work your clerk does for a quarter of his wages. I'll sweep out your office, and run errands for you. You'll give me something to keep body and soul together, won't you, George?"

Nothing could be more utterly abject than the tone of this most abject wretch.

This man, who in prosperity had been the very personification of hardness and insolence, was transformed into a grovelling, cringing supplicant, ready to lie face downward in the dust beneath the feet of that brother whose patronage, or charity, he besought.

Mr. Sheldon the younger contemplated the supplicant with looks of undisguised gratification. He walked a few paces backward from the spot where his brother had fallen, in a half-sitting, half-crouching attitude, and where he remained, hugging himself in his rags, too abject to be acutely conscious of his degradation. A year ago and he would have held himself obstinately aloof from all old associations, and would have declared himself ready to face starvation, rather than accept, still less supplicate, relief from his younger brother. The events of that one year had involved alternations and convulsions that change a year into a cycle. He had faced starvation; he had walked with hunger for his travelling companion; he had lain down night after night in such