Читать книгу The Bramleighs of Bishop's Folly - Charles James Lever - Страница 13

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In a large room, comfortably furnished, but in which there was a certain blending of the articles of the drawing-room with those of the dining-room, showing unmistakably the bachelor character of the owner, sat two young men at opposite sides of an ample fireplace. One sat, or rather reclined, on a small leather sofa, his bandaged leg resting on a pillow, and his pale and somewhat shrunken face evidencing the results of pain and confinement to the house. His close-cropt head and square-cut beard, and a certain mingled drollery and fierceness in the eyes, proclaimed him French, and so M. Anatole Pracontal was; though it would have been difficult to declare as much from his English, which he spoke with singular purity and the very faintest peculiarity of accent.

Opposite him sat a tall well-built man of about thirty-four or five, with regular and almost handsome features, marred, indeed, in expression by the extreme closeness of the eyes, and a somewhat long upper lip, which latter defect an incipient moustache was already concealing. The color of his hair was, however, that shade of auburn which verges on red, and is so commonly accompanied by a much freckled skin. This same hair, and hands and feet almost enormous in size, were the afflictions which imparted bitterness to a lot which many regarded as very enviable in life; for Mr. Philip Longworth was his own master, free to go where he pleased, and the owner of a very sufficient fortune. He had been brought up at Oscot, and imbibed, with a very fair share of knowledge, a large stock of that general mistrust and suspicion which is the fortune of those entrusted to priestly teaching, and which, though he had travelled largely and mixed freely with the world, still continued to cling to his manner, which might be characterized by the one word—furtive.

Longworth had only arrived that day for dinner, and the two friends were now exchanging their experience since they had parted some eight months before at the second cataract of the Nile.

“And so, Pracontal, you never got one of my letters?”

“Not one,—on my honor. Indeed, if it were not that I learned by a chance meeting with a party of English tourists at Cannes that they had met you at Cairo, I 'd have begun to suspect you had taken a plunge into the Nile, or into Mohammedom, for which latter you were showing some disposition, you remember, when we parted.”

“True enough; and if one was sure never to turn westward again, there are many things in favor of the turban. It is the most sublime conception of egotism possible to imagine.”

“Egotism is a mistake, mon cher,” said the other; “a man's own heart, make it as comfortable as he may, is too small an apartment to live in. I do not say this in any grand benevolent spirit. There 's no humbug of philanthropy in the opinion.”

“Of that I 'm fully assured,” said Longworth, with a gravity which made the other laugh.

“No,” continued he, still laughing. “I want a larger field, a wider hunting-ground for my diversion than my own nature.”

“A disciple, in fact, of your great model, Louis Napoleon. You incline to annexations. By the way, how fares it with your new projects? Have you seen the lawyer I gave you the letter to?”

“Yes. I stayed eight days in town to confer with him. I heard from him this very day.”

“Well, what says he?”

“His letter is a very savage one. He is angry with me for having come here at all; and particularly angry because I have broken my leg, and can't come away.”

“What does he think of your case, however?”

“He thinks it manageable. He says—as of course I knew he would say—that it demands most cautious treatment and great acuteness. There are blanks, historical blanks, to be filled up; links to connect, and such like, which will demand some time and some money. I have told him I have an inexhaustible supply of the one, but for the other I am occasionally slightly pinched.”

“It promises well, however?”

“Most hopefully. And when once I have proved myself—not always so easy as it seems—the son of my father, I am to go over and see him again in consultation.”

“Kelson is a man of station and character, and if he undertakes your cause it is in itself a strong guarantee of its goodness.”

“Why, these men take all that is offered them. They no more refuse a bad suit than a doctor rejects a hopeless patient.”

“And so will a doctor, if he happen to be an honest man,” said Longworth, half peevishly. “Just as he would also refuse to treat one who would persist in following his own caprices in defiance of all advice.”

“Which touches me. Is not it so?” said the other, laughing. “Well, I think I ought to have stayed quietly here, and not shown myself in public. All the more, since it has cost me this,” and he pointed to his leg as he spoke. “But I can't help confessing it, Philip, the sight of those fellows in their gay scarlet, caracoling over the sward, and popping over the walls and hedges, provoked me. It was exactly like a challenge; so I felt it, at least. It was as though they said, 'What if you come here to pit your claims against ours, and you are still not gentleman enough to meet us in a fair field and face the same perils that we do.' And this, be it remembered, to one who had served in a cavalry regiment, and made campaigns with the Chasseurs d'Afrique. I could n't stand it, and after the second day I mounted, and—” a motion of his hand finished the sentence.

“All that sort of reasoning is so totally different from an Englishman's that I am unable even to discuss it. I do not pretend to understand the refined sensibility that resents provocations which were never offered.”

“I know you don't, and I know your countrymen do not either. You are such a practical people that your very policemen never interfere with a criminal till he has fully committed himself.”

“In plain words, we do not content ourselves with inferences. But tell me, did any of these people call to see you, or ask after you?”

“Yes, they sent the day after my disaster, and they also told the doctor to say how happy they should be if they could be of service to me. And a young naval commander,—his card is yonder,—came, I think, three times, and would have come up if I had wished to receive him; but Kelson's letter, so angry about my great indiscretion, as he called it, made me decline the visit, and confine my acknowledgment to thanks.”

“I wonder what my old gatekeeper thought when he saw them, or their liveries in this avenue?” said Longworth, with a peculiar bitterness in his tone.

“Why, what should he think,—was there any feud between the families?”

“How could there be? These people have not been many months in Ireland. What I meant was with reference to the feud that is six centuries old, the old open ulcer, that makes all rule in this country a struggle, and all resistance to it a patriotism. Don't you know,” asked he, almost sternly, “that I am a Papist?” “Yes, you told me so.”

“And don't you know that my religion is not a mere barrier to my advancement in many careers of life, but is a social disqualification—that it is, like the trace of black blood in a créole, a ban excluding him from intercourse with his better-born neighbors—that I belong to a class just as much shut out from all the relations of society as were the Jews in the fifteenth century?”

“I remember that you told me so once, but I own I never fully comprehended it, nor understood how the question of a man's faith was to decide his standing in this world, and that, being the equal of those about you in birth and condition, your religion should stamp you with inferiority.”

“But I did not tell you I was their equal,” said Longworth, with a slow and painful distinctness. “We are novi homines here; a couple of generations back we were peasants—as poor as anything you could see out of that window. By hard work and some good luck—of course there was luck in it—we emerged, and got enough together to live upon, and I was sent to a costly school, and then to college, that I might start in life the equal of my fellows. But what avails it all? To hold a station in life, to mix with the world, to associate with men educated and brought up like myself, I must quit my own country and live abroad. I know, I see, you can make nothing of this. It is out and out incomprehensible. You made a clean sweep of these things with your great Revolution of '93. Ours is yet to come.”

“Per Dio! I 'd not stand it,” cried the other, passionately.

“You could n't help it. You must stand it; at least, till such time as a good many others, equally aggrieved as yourself, resolve to risk something to change it; and this is remote enough, for there is nothing that men—I mean educated and cultivated men—are more averse to, than any open confession of feeling a social disqualification. I may tell it to you here, as we sit over the fire, but I 'll not go out and proclaim it, I promise you. These are confessions one keeps for the fireside.”

“And will not these people visit you?”

“Nothing less likely.”

“Nor you call upon them?”

“Certainly not.”

“And will you continue to live within an hour's drive of each other without acquaintance or recognition?”

“Probably—at least we may salute when we meet.”

“Then I say the guillotine has done more for civilization than the schoolmaster,” cried the other. “And all this because you are a Papist?”

“Just so. I belong to a faith so deeply associated with a bygone inferiority that I am not to be permitted to emerge from it—there's the secret of it all.”

“I 'd rebel. I 'd descend into the streets!”

“And you'd get hanged for your pains.”

A shrug of the shoulders was all the reply, and Longworth went on:—

“Some one once said, 'It was better economy in a state to teach people not to steal than to build jails for the thieves;' and so I would say to our rulers it would be cheaper to give us some of the things we ask for than to enact all the expensive measures that are taken to repress us.”

“What chance have I, then, of justice in such a country?” cried the foreigner, passionately.

“Better than in any land of Europe. Indeed I will go further, and say it is the one land in Europe where corruption is impossible on the seat of judgment. If you make out your claim, as fully as you detailed it to me, if evidence will sustain your allegations, your flag will as certainly wave over that high tower yonder as that decanter stands there.”

“Here's to la bonne chance,” said the other, filling a bumper and drinking it off.

“You will need to be very prudent, very circumspect: two things which I suspect will cost you some trouble,” said Longworth. “The very name you will have to go by will be a difficulty. To call yourself Bramleigh will be an open declaration of war; to write yourself Pracontal is an admission that you have no claim to the other appellation.”

“It was my mother's name. She was of a Provençal family, and the Pracontals were people of good blood.”

“But your father was always called Bramleigh?”

“My father, mon cher, had fifty aliases; he was Louis Lagrange under the Empire, Victor Cassagnac at the Restoration, Carlo Salvi when sentenced to the galleys at Naples, Niccolo Baldassare when he shot the Austrian colonel at Capua, and I believe when he was last heard of, the captain of a slaver, he was called, for shortness' sake, 'Brutto,' for he was not personally attractive.”

“Then when and where was he known as Bramieigh?”

“Whenever he wrote to England. Whenever he asked for money, which, on the whole, was pretty often, he was Montagu Bramieigh.”

“To whom were these letters addressed?”

“To his father, Montagu Bramieigh, Portland Place, London. I have it all in my note-book.”

“And these appeals were responded to?”

“Not so satisfactorily as one might wish. The replies were flat refusals to give money, and rather unpleasant menaces as to police measures if the insistence were continued.

“You have some of these letters?”

“The lawyer has, I think, four of them. The last contained a bank order for five hundred francs, payable to Giacomo Lami, or order.”

“Who was Lami?”

“Lami was the name of my grandmother; her father was Giacomo. He was the old fresco-painter who came over from Rome to paint the walls of that great house yonder, and it was his daughter that Bramleigh married.”

“Which Bramleigh was the father of the present possessor of Castello?”

“Precisely. Montagu Bramleigh married my grandmother here in Ireland, and when the troubles broke out, either to save her father from the laws or to get rid of him, managed to smuggle him out of the country over to Holland—the last supposition, and the more likely, is that he sent his wife off with her father.”

“What evidence is there of this marriage?”

“It was registered in some parish authority; at least so old Giacomo's journal records, for we have the journal, and without it we might never have known of our claim; but besides that, there are two letters of Montagu Bramleigh's to my grandmother, written when he had occasion to leave her about ten days after their marriage, and they begin, 'My dearest wife.' and are signed, 'Your affectionate husband, M. Bramleigh.' The lawyer has all these.”

“How did it come about that a rich London banker, as Bramleigh was, should ally himself with the daughter of a working Italian tradesman?”

“Here's the story as conveyed by old Giacomo's notes. Bramleigh came over here to look after the progress of the works for a great man, a bishop and a lord marquis too, who was the owner of the place; he made the acquaintance of Lami and his daughters: there were two; the younger only a child, however. The eldest, Enrichetta, was very beautiful, so beautiful indeed, that Giacomo was eternally introducing her head into all his frescos; she was a blonde Italian, and made a most lovely Madonna. Old Giacomo's journal mentions no less than eight altar-pieces where she figures, not to say that she takes her place pretty frequently in heathen society also, and if I be rightly informed, she is the centre figure of a 'fresco' in this very house of Castello, in a small octagon tower, the whole of which Lami painted with his own hand. Bramleigh fell in love with this girl and married her.”

“But she was a Catholic.”

“No. Lami was originally a Waldensian, and held some sort of faith, I don't exactly know what, that claimed affinity with the English Church; at all events, the vicar here, a certain Robert Mathews—his name is in the precious journal—married them, and man and wife they were.”

“When and how did all these facts come to your knowledge?”

“As to the when and the how, the same answer will suffice. I was serving as sous-lieutenant of cavalry in Africa when news reached me that the 'Astradella,' the ship in which my father sailed, was lost off the Cape Verde islands, with all on board. I hastened off to Naples, where a Mr. Bolton lived, who was chief owner of the vessel, to hear what tidings had reached him of the disaster, and to learn something of my father's affairs, for he had been, if I might employ so fine a word for so small a function, his banker for years. Indeed, but for Bolton's friendship and protection—how earned I never knew—my father would have come to grief years before, for he was a thorough Italian, and always up to the neck in conspiracies; he had been in that Bonapartist affair at Home; was a Carbonaro and a Camorrist, and Heaven knows what besides. And though Bolton was a man very unlikely to sympathize with these opinions, I take it my respected parent must have been a bon diable that men who knew him would not willingly see wrecked and ruined. Bolton was most kind to myself personally. He received me with many signs of friendship, and without troubling me with any more details of law than were positively unavoidable, put me in possession of the little my father had left behind him, which consisted of a few hundred francs of savings and an old chest, with some older clothes and a mass of papers and letters—dangerous enough, as I discovered, to have compromised scores of people—and a strange old manuscript book, clasped and locked, called the 'Diary of Giacomo Lami,' with matter in it for half a dozen romances; for Giacomo, too, had the conspirator's taste, had known Danton intimately, and was deep in the confidence of all the Irish republicans who were affiliated with the French revolutionary party. But besides this the book contained a quantity of original letters; and when mention was made in the text of this or that event, the letter which related to it, or replied to some communication about it, was appended in the original. I made this curious volume my study for weeks, till, in fact, I came to know far more about old Giacomo and his times than I ever knew about my father and his epoch. There was not a country in Europe in which he had not lived, nor, I believe, one in which he had not involved himself in some trouble. He loved his art, but he loved political plotting and conspiracy even more, and was ever ready to resign his most profitable engagement for a scheme that promised to overturn a government or unthrone a sovereign. My first thought on reading his curious reminiscences was to make them the basis of a memoir for publication. Of course they were fearfully indiscreet, and involved reputations that no one had ever thought of assailing; but they were chiefly of persons dead and gone, and it was only their memory that could suffer. I spoke to Bolton about this. He approved of the notion, principally as a means of helping me to a little money, which I stood much in need of, and gave me a letter to a friend in Paris, the well-known publisher, Lecoq, of the Rue St. Honoré.

“As I was dealing with a man of honor and high character, I had no scruple in leaving the volume of old Giacomo's memoirs in Lecoq's hands; and after about a week I returned to learn what he thought of it. He was frank enough to say that no such diary had ever come before him—that it cleared up a vast number of points hitherto doubtful and obscure, and showed an amount of knowledge of the private life of the period absolutely marvellous; 'but,' said he, 'it would never do to make it public. Most of these men are now forgotten, it is true, but their descendants remain, and live in honor amongst us. What a terrible scandal it would be to proclaim to the world that of these people many were illegitimate, many in the enjoyment of large fortunes to which they had not a shadow of a title; in fact,' said he, 'it would be to hurl a live shell in the very midst of society, leaving the havoc and destruction it might cause to blind chance. But,' added he, 'it strikes me there is a more profitable use the volume might be put to. Have you read the narrative of your grandmother's marriage in Ireland with that rich Englishman?' I owned I had read it carelessly, and without bestowing much interest on the theme. 'Go back and reread it,' said he, 'and come and talk it over with me to-morrow evening.' As I entered his room the next night he arose ceremoniously from his chair, and said, in a tone of well-assumed obsequiousness, 'Si je ne me trompe pas, j'ai l'honneur de voir Monsieur Bramleigh, n'est-ce pas?' I laughed, and replied, 'Je ne m'y oppose pas, monsieur;' and we at once launched out into the details of the story, of which each of us had formed precisely the same opinion.

“Ill luck would have it, that as I went back to my lodgings on that night I should meet Bertani, and Varese, and Manini, and be persuaded to go and sup with them. They were all suspected by the police, from their connection with Fieschi; and on the morning after I received an order from the Minister of War to join my regiment at Oran, and an intimation that my character being fully known it behooved me to take care. I gave no grounds for more stringent measures towards me. I understood the 'caution,' and, not wishing to compromise Monsieur Lecoq, who had been so friendly in all his relations with me, I left France, without even an opportunity of getting back my precious volume, which I never saw again till I revisited Paris eight years after, having given in my démission from the service. Lecoq obtained for me that small appointment I held under Monsieur Lesseps in Egypt, and which I had given up a few weeks before I met you on the Nile. I ought to tell you that Lecoq, for what reason I can't tell, was not so fully pursuaded that my claim was as direct as he had at first thought it; and indeed his advice to me was rather to address myself seriously to some means of livelihood, or to try and make some compromise with the Bramleighs, with whom he deemed a mere penniless pretender would not have the smallest chance of success. I hesitated a good deal over his counsel. There was much in it that weighed with me, perhaps convinced me: but I was always more or less of a gambler, and more than once have I risked a stake, which, if I lost, would have left me penniless; and at last I resolved to say, Va Banque, here goes; all or nothing. There's my story, mon cher, without any digressions, even one of which, if I had permitted myself to be led into it, would have proved twice as long.”

“The strength of a chain is the strength of its weakest link, the engineers tell us,” said Longworth, “and it is the same with evidence. I 'd like to hear what Kelson says of the case.”

“That I can scarcely give you. His last letter to me is full of questions which I cannot answer; but you shall read it for yourself. Will you send upstairs for my writing-desk?”

“We 'll con that over to-morrow after breakfast, when our heads will be clearer and brighter. Have you old Lami's journal with you?”

“No. All my papers are with Kelson. The only thing I have here is a sketch in colored chalk of my grandmother, in her eighteenth year, as a Flora, and, from the date, it must have been done in Ireland, when Giacomo was working at the frescos.”

“That my father,” said Pracontal, after a pause, “counted with certainty on this succession, all his own papers show, as well as the care he bestowed on my early education, and the importance he attached to my knowing and speaking English perfectly. But my father cared far more for a conspiracy than a fortune. He was one of those men who only seem to live when they are confronted by a great danger, and I believe there has not been a great plot in Europe these last five-and-thirty years without his name being in it. He was twice handed over to the French authorities by the English Government, and there is some reason to believe that the Bramleighs were the secret instigators of the extradition. There was no easier way of getting rid of his claims.”

“These are disabilities which do not attach to you.”

“No, thank Heaven. I have gone no farther with these men than mere acquaintance. I know them all, and they know me well enough to know that I deem it the greatest disaster of my life that my father was one of them. It is not too much to say that a small part of the energy he bestowed on schemes of peril and ruin would have sufficed to have vindicated his claim to wealth and fortune.”

“You told me, I think, that Kelson hinted at the possibility of some compromise,—something which, sparing them the penalty of publicity, would still secure to you an ample fortune.”

“Yes. What he said was, 'Juries are, with all their honesty of intention, capricious things to trust to;' and that, not being rich enough to suffer repeated defeats, an adverse verdict might be fatal to me. I did n't like the reasoning altogether, but I was so completely in his hands that I forbore to make any objection, and so the matter remained.”

“I suspect he was right,” said Longworth, thoughtfully. “At the same time, the case must be strong enough to promise victory, to sustain the proposal of a compromise.”

“And if I can show the game in my hand why should I not claim the stakes?”

“Because the other party may delay the settlement. They may challenge the cards, accuse you of 'a rook,' put out the lights—anything, in short, that shall break up the game.”

“I see,” said Pracontal, gravely; “the lawyer's notion may be better than I thought it.”

A long silence ensued between them; then Longworth, looking at his watch, exclaimed, “Who'd believe it? It wants only a few minutes to two o'clock. Good-night.”