Читать книгу Aaron the Jew: A Novel - Farjeon Benjamin Leopold - Страница 2

His landlady, Mrs. Radcliffe, met him on the doorstep, and informed him that the gentleman who had called to see him in the afternoon had called again, and was in his room.

"A word, Mrs. Radcliffe," he said, hurriedly. "I am going to ask a great favour of you. I owe you two weeks' rent."

"Yes, sir."

His heart sank within him; he divined immediately from her tone that she was in need of the money.

"Would it inconvenience you to wait a little while for it?"

"I must, sir, if you haven't got it," she replied, "but I am dreadfully hard pressed, and I reckoned on it. I'm behindhand myself, sir, and my landlord's been threatening me-"

"Say no more, Mrs. Radcliffe. Justice must be first served. I have the money; take it-for Heaven's sake take it quickly! I must not rob the poor to help the poor."

He muttered the last words to himself as he thrust the sixteen shillings into her hand.

"I am so sorry, sir," said the distressed woman.

He interrupted her with, "There, there, I am ashamed that I asked you. I am sure no one has a kinder heart than you, and I am greatly obliged to you for all the attention you have shown me while I have been in your house. The gentleman is in my room, you say?"

It was a proof of Mrs. Radcliffe's kindness of heart that there was a bright fire blazing in the room, made with her own coals, and that the lamp had been replenished with her own oil. Dr. Spenlove was grateful to her, and he inwardly acknowledged that he could not have otherwise disposed of the few shillings which he had no right to call his own. His visitor rose as he entered, a well-dressed man some forty years of age, sturdily built, with touches of grey already in his hair and beard, and with signs in his face and on his forehead indicative of a strong will.

"Dr. Spenlove?" he asked, as they stood facing each other.

"That is my name."

"Mine is Gordon. I have come to see you on a matter of great importance."

Dr. Spenlove motioned to the chair from which his visitor had risen, and he resumed his seat; but although he had said that he had come upon a matter of great importance, he seemed to be either in no hurry to open it, or to be uncertain in which way to do so, for he sat for some moments in silence, smoothing his bearded chin and studying Dr. Spenlove's face with a stern and studious intentness.

"Can you spare me half an hour of your time?" he said at length.

"Longer, if you wish," said Dr. Spenlove.

"It may be longer, if you offer no opposition to the service I wish you to render me; and perhaps it is as well to say that I am willing and can afford to pay for the service."

Dr. Spenlove bent his head.

"It is seldom," continued Mr. Gordon, "that I make mistakes, and the reason is not far to seek. I make inquiries, I clear the ground, I resolve upon a course of action, and I pursue it to its end without deviation. I will be quite frank with you, Dr. Spenlove; I am a hard, inflexible man. Thrown upon the world when I was a lad, I pushed my way to fortune. I am self-made; I can speak fair English. I have received little education, none at all in a classical way; but I possess common sense, and I make it apply to my affairs. That is better than education if a man is resolved to get along in life-as I was resolved to do. When I was a young man I said, 'I will grow rich, or I will know the reason why.' I have grown rich. I do not say it as a boast-it is only fools who boast-but I am worth to-day a solid twenty thousand pounds a year. I make this statement merely as a proof that I am in a position to carry out a plan in which I desire your assistance and co-operation."

"My dear sir," said Dr. Spenlove, who could not but perceive that his visitor was very much in earnest, "the qualities you mention are admirable in their way, but I fear you have come to the wrong man. I am a doctor, and if you do not need my professional advice-"

"Stop a moment," interrupted Mr. Gordon, "I have come to the right man, and I do not need professional advice. I am as sound as a bell, and I have never had occasion to pay a doctor's fee. I know what I am about in the mission which brings me here. I have made inquiries concerning you, and have heard something of your career and its results; I have heard of your kindnesses and of the esteem in which you are held. You have influence with your patients; any counsel you might give them, apart from your prescriptions, would be received with respect and attention; and I believe I am not wrong when I say that you are to some extent a man of the world."

"To some slight extent only," corrected Dr. Spenlove, with a faint smile.

"Sufficient," proceeded Mr. Gordon, "for my purpose. You are not blind to the perils which lie before weak and helpless women-before, we will say, a woman who has no friends, who is living where she is not known, who is in a position of grave danger, who is entirely without means, who is young and good-looking, and who, at the best, is unable by the work of her hands to support herself."

Dr. Spenlove looked sharply at his visitor. "You have such a woman in your mind, Mr. Gordon."

"I have such a woman in my mind, Dr. Spenlove."

"A patient of mine?"

"A patient of yours."

There was but one who answered to this description, and whose future was so dark and hopeless. For the first time during the interview he began to be interested in his visitor. He motioned him to proceed.

"We are speaking in confidence, Dr. Spenlove?"

"In perfect confidence, Mr. Gordon."

"Whether my errand here is successful or not, I ask that nothing that passes between us shall ever be divulged to a third person."

"I promise it."

"I will mention the name of the woman to whom I have referred, or, it will be more correct to say, the name by which she is known to you. Mrs. Turner."

"You mean her no harm, sir?"

"None. I am prepared to befriend her, to save her, if my conditions are accepted."

Dr. Spenlove drew a deep breath of relief. He would go to his new field of labours with a light heart if this unhappy woman were saved.

"You have come at a critical moment," he said, "and you have accurately described the position in which she is placed. But how can my mediation, or the mediation of any man, be necessary in such a case? She will hail you as her saviour and the saviour of her babe. Hasten to her immediately, dear sir; or perhaps you do not know where she lives, and wish me to take you to her? I am ready. Do not let us lose a moment, for every moment deepens her misery."

He did not observe the frown which passed into Mr. Gordon's face at his mention of the child; he was so eager that his hat was already on his head and his hand on the handle of the door.

Mr. Gordon did not rise from his chair.

"You are in too great a hurry, Dr. Spenlove. Be seated, and listen to what I have to say. You ask how your mediation can avail. I answer, in the event of her refusal to accept the conditions upon which I am ready to marry her."

"To marry her!" exclaimed Dr. Spenlove.

"To marry her," repeated Mr. Gordon. "She is not a married woman, and her real name need not be divulged. When you hear the story I am about to relate, when you hear the conditions, the only conditions, upon which I will consent to lift her from the degraded depths into which she has fallen, you will understand why I desire your assistance. You will be able to make clear to her the effect of her consent or refusal upon her destiny and the destiny of her child; you will be able to use arguments which are in my mind, but to which I shall not give utterance. And remember, through all, that her child is a child of shame, and that I hold out to her the only prospect of that child being brought up in a reputable way and of herself being raised to a position of respectability."

He paused a moment or two before he opened fresh matter.

"I was a poor lad, Dr. Spenlove, without parents, without a home; and when I was fourteen years of age I was working as an errand-boy in London, and keeping myself upon a wage of four shillings a week. I lost this situation through the bankruptcy of my employer, and I was not successful in obtaining another. One day, I saw on the walls a bill of a vessel going to Australia, and I applied at the agent's office with a vague idea that I might obtain a passage by working aboard ship in some capacity or other. I was a strong boy-starvation agrees with some lads-and a willing boy, and it happened that one of my stamp was wanted in the cook's galley. I was engaged at a shilling a month, and I landed in Melbourne with four shillings in my pocket.

"How I lived till I became a man is neither here nor there; but when gold was discovered I lived well, for I got enough to buy a share in a cattle station, which now belongs entirely to me. In 1860, being then on the high road to fortune, I made the acquaintance of a man whom I will call Mr. Charles, and of his only child, a girl of fourteen, whom I will call Mary. I was taken with Mr. Charles, and I was taken in by him as well, for he disappeared from the colony a couple of years afterwards, in my debt to the tune of a thousand pounds. He had the grace to write to me from London, saying he would pay me some day; and there the matter rested for seven years more, which brings me to two years ago.

"At that time I had occasion to visit England on business; and in London I hunted up my debtor, and we renewed our acquaintance. Mary was then a young woman of twenty-one; and had it not been for her, it is more than likely I might have made things unpleasant for her father, who was leading the disreputable life of a gambler on racecourses, and in clubs of a low character.

"Dr. Spenlove, you must have gathered from the insight I have given you into my character that I am not a man of sentiment, and you will probably consider it all the more strange that I should have entertained feelings towards Mary which caused me to consider whether she would not make me a creditable wife. Of these feelings I prefer not to speak in a warmer strain, but shall leave you to place your own construction upon them. While I was debating with myself as to the course I should pursue, the matter was decided for me by the death of Mr. Charles. He died in disgrace and poverty, and Mary was left friendless and homeless.

"I stepped in to her rescue, and I made a proposal of marriage to her. At the same time, I told her that I thought it advisable, for her sake and mine, that a little time should elapse before this proposal was carried into effect. I suggested that our marriage should take place in two years; meanwhile, I would return to Australia, to build a suitable house and to prepare a home for her, and she would remain in England to fit herself for her new sphere of duties. She accepted me, and I arranged with a lady of refinement to receive her. To this lady both she and I were utter strangers, and it was settled between Mary and myself that she should enter her temporary home under an assumed name. It was my proposal that this pardonable deceit should be practised; no person was wronged by it, and it would assist towards Mary's complete severance from old associations. Our future was in our own hands, and concerned nobody but ourselves.

"I returned to Australia, and made my preparations. We corresponded once a month, and some few months ago I informed her of the date of my intended arrival in England. To that letter I received no reply; and when I landed and called at the lady's house, I learned that she had fled. I set to work to discover the truth, and I have discovered it; I set to work to track her, and I have succeeded. Her story is a common story of betrayal and desertion, and I am not inclined to trouble you with it. She has not the remotest hope of assistance from the man who betrayed her; she has not the remotest hope of assistance from a person in the world with the exception of myself.

"Dr. Spenlove, notwithstanding what has occurred I am here in Portsmouth this night with the intention of carrying out the engagement into which I entered with her; I am here, prepared to marry her, on express conditions. The adoption of assumed names, the obscurity she has courted, the absolute silence which is certain to be observed by her, by me, by you, by the man who betrayed her, render me safe. It is known that I have come to England to be married, and she will be accepted as I present her when I return with her as my wife. I will have no discussion as to my motives for taking what the world would consider an unwise step; but you will understand that my feelings for the woman who has played me false must be of a deep and sincere nature, or I should not dream of taking it.

"It now only remains for me to state the conditions under which I am prepared to save her from even a more shameful degradation than that into which she has already fallen. I speak plainly. You know as well as I the fate that is in store for her if my offer is rejected."