Читать книгу The Last Call: A Romance (Vol. 1 of 3) - Dowling Richard - Страница 2

There was around Dominique Lavirotte an air of mystery which kept the good simple folk of Glengowra at bay. Although, theoretically, Frenchmen have always been popular in Ireland, this applies rather to the mass than to the individual. There was nothing repulsive about Dominique Lavirotte. On the contrary, he had attractive manners, and although he spoke English with a broken accent, he spoke it fluently and faultlessly. He was agreeable in company, well-read, and possessed a shallow encyclop[ae]dic knowledge, by means of which he was enabled to give great brilliancy and point to his conversation. Yet at certain moments he was taciturn, and if one attempted to break in upon his reserve he turned swiftly and snarled even at his best friend. According to his own account, he was descended from Louis Anne Lavirotte, medical doctor, born at Nolay, in the diocese of Autun, somewhere about a hundred years ago, who was a most skilful physician, and one well versed in the English language. This dead doctor of a hundred years ago had devoted much of his attention while on earth to more or less obscure forms of mental disease, and had written a treatise on hydrophobia. Dominique was very proud of this learned ancestor, and paid his relative of the last century the compliment of devoting some of his own time to the consideration of abnormal mental developments. Indeed, some of those who knew him best said that there was a twist in his own mind, and that under extreme provocation, mental or physical, the brain would give way. Lavirotte and O'Donnell were as close friends as it is possible for men to be; and, notwithstanding the ten miles which separated their homes, they saw much of one another. Each was young and enthusiastic, each sang tenor, and sang uncommonly well. In the town of Rathclare, no young man was more popular than Eugene O'Donnell, and the people there thought it a thousand pities that he should select as his favourite friend a man who was not only not a resident of Rathclare, but a foreigner, with mysterious ways and an uncertain temper. O'Donnell laughed off all their expostulations and warnings, and said that in so far as his friend was a stranger and afflicted with a bad temper, there was all the more reason why someone should do him any little kindness he could. But the people of Rathclare shook their heads gravely at the young man's temerity, and prophesied that no good would come to O'Donnell of this connection. They did not like this foreigner, with his strange ways and mysterious retirements into himself. They were free and open-hearted themselves, and they liked free and open-hearted souls like O'Donnell. They did not like swarthy skins; and now and then in the newspapers they read that men with swarthy skins drew knives and struck their dearest friends; that foreigners were treacherous, and not to be trusted with the lives, into the homes, or with the honour of law-abiding folk. They knew, it being a seaport, that foreigners spoke a gibberish which they affected to understand, and which was in reality no better than the language of Satan. Once a Greek, an infamous Greek, had been hanged in their town for an intolerable crime of cruelty committed on board ship; and somehow, ever since then, all foreigners, particularly swarthy foreigners, seemed in their eyes peculiarly prone to atrocious cruelties. What a luxury it must have been for this swarthy man of uncertain temper to meet and speak with Ellen Creagh, who was the very embodiment of all that is fair in the rich, warm sense of fairness in the North; and free in the sense of all that is open and joyous, and full of abounding confidence, in the North! During the fortnight in which he had been admitted to what he considered the infinite privilege of her society, he had fallen helplessly, hopelessly, madly in love. He had drunk in the subtle poison of her beauty with an avidity almost intolerable to himself. All the poetry and passion of his nature had gone forth ceaselessly towards that girl, as only the poetry and passion of southern blood can go forth. The violence of his feelings had astonished even himself. These feelings had grown all the more intense by the fierce repression in which he had kept them. For until that day in the boat he had never seemed to take more than a passing, polite interest in Ellen. Even then, in his dark and self-restrained nature, he had given no indication of the struggle within. The frenzy of his worship found no expression, and he took his dismissal with as much apparent indifference as though he had put the question to her merely out of regard to the wishes of others. Yet when he said the words, "I am a ruined man," he meant the words, or rather he meant that he was determined to take an active part in his own destruction. "If I die," he thought, "what is death to me? The sun is dead, the moon is dead, the stars are dead, earth is dead, and perdition will be a release from this valley of phantoms. When life is not worth living, why should one live? I will not live. I have no cause against her, but I have cause against myself, for I am a failure." He had determined to make away with himself; he had made up his mind that he would not survive this terrible disappointment; he would go home that night and take some painless and swift poison, and so pass out of this vain world to the unknown beyond; he would not declare his intention to anyone, least of all to O'Donnell, whose voice he recognised in the second stanza of the song; he knew where he could get the poison-from a friendly apothecary. They would hold an inquest on him, no doubt, and discover that he had done himself to death. Her name might even get mixed up in the affair, but he could not help that. He meant to do her no harm; he simply could not and would not endure. When that meeting took place on the beach, whereat he introduced Ellen to O'Donnell, he had noticed the latter's start of amazed admiration. "What," thought Lavirotte, "is he hit too; he, the invincible! he, the adamantine man, who has hitherto withstood all the charms of her lovely sex? It would be curious to watch this. Will he too make love, and fail-succeed? Ah." When this thought first occurred to Lavirotte he paused in a dim, dazed way. Of all men living he wished best to O'Donnell, now that he might regard himself as dead. "If I am to die and she is to love, would it not be best that she should love him?" And while he was thinking thus, and as he was mentioning his friend's name to her, he saw her, too, start and seem for a moment confused. He could easily understand why it was O'Donnell had started. Such beauty as hers appeared potent enough to infuse the Belvidere Apollo with action. But why should she start? Woman is not overwhelmed by the beauty of man, as man is by the beauty of woman. Here it was that the demon of jealousy first entered the soul of Dominique Lavirotte; here it was he first inhaled the mephitic breath of jealousy, destined to poison all his life and to embitter the last moment of his existence. As the three turned away and left the blue shingle for the yellow road, the sun fell behind them, and almost imperceptibly the gray dusk of twilight gathered in the east. Overhead the blue of day was becoming fainter and fainter, making way for the intenser blue of night. Neither of the men seemed disposed to speak. The heart of each was full of new emotion-one of love, the other of jealousy; one of the first rapturous buoyancy of dearest hope, the other of degrading cark. Nothing but the most ordinary commonplaces were uttered that night; and after the leave-taking each went a different way-she to the modest lodging where she spent her brief holiday with her mother; Lavirotte to his quiet room, and O'Donnell back to Rathclare by the latest train leaving the village that night. When the last-mentioned got home, he astonished his father and mother by walking into the room where they were sitting, and saying abruptly: "Sir, you have often advised me to marry, and I have put the matter off. Are you still of your former mind?" "God bless my soul!" cried the father in astonishment. "God bless my soul, Eugene, what's the matter?" He could get no further than this with surprise, and the question he asked was put merely as a matter of form, and not from any desire to ascertain the condition of his son's mind. But the mother was quicker-took in the whole situation at once, plunged at the heart of things, and asked breathlessly: "Eugene, who is she?" He coloured slightly and drew back. His father was too slow, and his mother too quick for him. He preferred his mother's mode of treating the matter. The word "she" brought back to his enchanted eyes the vision he had seen on the beach. He said to himself: "My mother has no right to be so quick. For all I know to the contrary, she may be engaged to Lavirotte." Then aloud he said: "Mother, I assure you, there is no 'she.' I never said two civil words to any girl in all my life." "Eugene," she said, dropping into her lap the woollen stocking she was knitting for him, "no young man ever yet thought of marriage until thinking of some girl had put the thought into his head." He felt in a way flattered and fluttered. It was pleasant even for a moment to fancy that his mother, although she knew nothing of Miss Creagh, had suggested the notion he might marry her. He laughed and shook his head, and laughing and shaking his head became him. His mother looked at him half sadly, and thought: "No girl in all the world could refuse my boy-my handsome boy, my noble boy. And now one of them is going to take him away from me, who reared him, and have known him every hour since he was born." "Eugene," said the father deliberately, "do I understand that you wish me to give you my opinions on marriage?" The young man burst into a loud laugh. He had got far beyond the theoretic aspect of the affair now, and his father's opinion would have made very little impression indeed when compared with the impression Ellen Creagh had left upon his heart. After this the three talked upon the subject of Eugene's possible marriage, he telling them no more about the adventure on the beach than that the notion of marriage had been put into his mind by the sight of a most estimable young lady, in every way suited to him, but of whom he had only the slightest knowledge up to this. That night, when Ellen Creagh found herself in her own room, no thoughts of love were in her head. A feeling of pity for the fair young man she had met was uppermost in her head. It was not sentimental pity, but pity of a much more substantial and worldly kind. She had a letter to write, and sat down to write it. It began, "My dear Ruth," and continued to narrate certain trivial matters connected with seaweed and shells. Then it went on to say: "I have seen young Mr. O'Donnell, son of your father's great friend, here. I was quite startled when I heard the name. I was introduced to him by a friend who had told me of him before." When she had finished her letter, she addressed it to Miss Vernon, Fitzwilliam Square, Dublin. She added a postscript, saying: "I hope you will soon get out of Dublin. You must be weary of it this lovely weather. I shall write again in a few days." Then she stood awhile at the table, musing over the events in the boat. "He could not have been serious," she thought. "I daresay if I had looked at his face I should have seen him smiling. Anyway, he took it very quietly." That night Dominique Lavirotte slept little. "Though he were my friend over and over again," he cried passionately, "he shall not. No! Not if I were to-" Here he covered his face with his hands. "What a horrible thought! I can see his white face now in the moonlight. Why is it white? Why is it moonlight? Oh, God! was beauty ever such as hers?"