The pocket-cannibal baits his woman’s trap with love-letters, and a widow allured steals timidly towards it from under the weeds.
Jasper Losely is beginning to be hard up! The infallible calculation at rouge-et-noir has carried off all that capital which had accumulated from the savings of the young gentlemen whom Dolly Poole had contributed to his exchequer. Poole himself is beset by duns, and pathetically observes “that he has lost three stone in weight, and that he believes the calves to his legs are gone to enlarge his liver.”
Jasper is compelled to put down his cabriolet, to discharge his groom, to retire from his fashionable lodgings; and just when the prospect even of a dinner becomes dim, he bethinks himself of Arabella Crane, and remembers that she promised him L5, nay L10, which are still due from her. He calls; he is received like the prodigal son. Nay, to his own surprise, he finds Mrs. Crane has made her house much more inviting: the drawing-rooms are cleaned up; the addition of a few easy articles of furniture gives them quite a comfortable air. She herself has improved in costume, though her favourite colour still remains iron gray. She informs Jasper that she fully expected him; that these preparations are in his honour; that she has engaged a very good cook; that she hopes he will dine with her when not better engaged; in short, lets him feel himself at home in Podden Place.
Jasper at first suspected a sinister design, under civilities that his conscience told him were unmerited,—a design to entrap him into that matrimonial alliance which he had so ungallantly scouted, and from which he still recoiled with an abhorrence which man is not justified in feeling for any connubial partner less preternaturally terrific than the Witch of Endor or the Bleeding Nun!
But Mrs. Crane quickly and candidly hastened to dispel his ungenerous apprehensions. She had given up, she said, all ideas so preposterous; love and wedlock were equally out of her mind. But ill as he had behaved to her, she could not but feel a sincere regard for him,—a deep interest in his fate. He ought still to make a brilliant marriage: did that idea not occur to him? She might help him there with her woman’s wit. “In short,” said Mrs. Crane, pinching her lips, “In short, Jasper, I feel for you as a mother. Look on me as such!”
The pure and affectionate notion wonderfully tickled and egregiously delighted Jasper Losely. “Look on you as a mother! I will,” said he, with emphasis. “Best of creatures!” And though in his own mind he had not a doubt that she still adored him (not as a mother), he believed it was a disinterested, devoted adoration, such as the beautiful brute really had inspired more than once in his abominable life. Accordingly, he moved into the neighbourhood of Podden Place, contenting himself with a second-floor bedroom in a house recommended to him by Mrs. Crane, and taking his meals at his adopted mother’s with filial familiarity. She expressed a desire to make Mr. Poole’s acquaintance; Jasper hastened to present that worthy. Mrs. Crane invited Samuel Dolly to dine one day, to sup the next; she lent him L3 to redeem his dress-coat from pawn, and she gave him medicaments for the relief of his headache.
Samuel Dolly venerated her as a most superior woman; envied Jasper such a “mother.” Thus easily did Arabella Crane possess herself of the existence of Jasper Losely. Lightly her fingers closed over it,—lightly as the fisherman’s over the captivated trout. And whatever her generosity, it was not carried to imprudence. She just gave to Jasper enough to bring him within her power; she had no idea of ruining herself by larger supplies: she concealed from him the extent of her income (which was in chief part derived from house-rents), the amount of her savings, even the name of her banker. And if he carried off to the rouge-et-noir table the coins he obtained from her, and came for more, Mrs. Crane put on the look of a mother incensed,—mild but awful,—and scolded as mothers sometimes can scold. Jasper Losely began to be frightened at Mrs. Crane’s scoldings. And he had not that power over her which, though arrogated by a lover, is denied to an adopted son. His mind, relieved from the habitual distraction of the gaming-table for which the resource was wanting, settled with redoubled ardour on the image of Mrs. Haughton. He had called at her house several times since the fatal day on which he had met there Colonel Morley, but Mrs. Haughton was never at home. And as when the answer was given to him by the footman, he had more than once, on crossing the street, seen herself through the window, it was clear that his acquaintance was not courted. Jasper Losely, by habit, was the reverse of a pertinacious and troublesome suitor; not, Heaven knows, from want of audacity, but from excess of self-love. Where a Lovelace so superb condescended to make overtures, a Clarissa so tasteless as to decline them deserved and experienced his contempt. Besides, steadfast and prolonged pursuit of any object, however important and attractive, was alien to the levity and fickleness of his temper. But in this instance he had other motives than those on the surface for unusual perseverance.
A man like Jasper Losely never reposes implicit confidence in any one. He is garrulous, indiscreet; lets out much that Machiavel would have advised him not to disclose: but he invariably has nooks and corners in his mind which he keeps to himself. Jasper did not confide to his adopted mother his designs upon his intended bride. But she knew them through Poole, to whom he was more frank; and when she saw him looking over her select and severe library, taking therefrom the “Polite Letter-Writer” and the “Elegant Extracts,” Mrs. Crane divined at once that Jasper Losely was meditating the effect of epistolary seduction upon the widow of Gloucester Place.
Jasper did not write a bad love-letter in the florid style. He had at his command, in especial, certain poetical quotations, the effect of which repeated experience had assured him to be as potent upon the female breast as the incantations or carmina of the ancient sorcery. The following in particular,
“Had I a heart for falsehood framed,
I neer could injure you.”
Another, generally to be applied when confessing that his career had been interestingly wild, and would, if pity were denied him, be pathetically short,
“When he who adores thee has left but the name
Of his faults and his follies behind.”
Armed with these quotations, many a sentence from the “Polite Letter-Writer” or the “Elegant Extracts,” and a quire of rose-edged paper, Losely sat down to Ovidian composition.
But as he approached the close of epistle the first, it occurred to him that a signature and address were necessary. The address was not difficult. He could give Poole’s (hence his confidence to that gentleman): Poole had a lodging in Bury Street, St. James’s, a fashionable locality for single men. But the name required more consideration. There were insuperable objections against signing his own to any person who might be in communication with Mr. Darrell; a pity, for there was a good old family of the name of Losely. A name of aristocratic sound might indeed be readily borrowed from any lordly proprietor thereof without asking a formal consent. But this loan was exposed to danger. Mrs. Haughton might very naturally mention such name, as borne by her husband’s friend, to Colonel Morley; and Colonel Morley would most probably know enough of the connections and relations of any peer so honoured to say, “There is no such Greville, Cavendish, or Talbot.” But Jasper Losely was not without fertility of invention and readiness of resource. A grand idea, worthy of a master, and proving that, if the man had not been a rogue in grain, he could have been reared into a very clever politician, flashed across him. He would sign himself “SMITH.” Nobody could say there is no such Smith; nobody could say that a Smith might not be a most respectable, fashionable, highly-connected man. There are Smiths who are millionaires; Smiths who are large-acred squires; substantial baronets; peers of England, and pillars of the State. You can no more question a man’s right to be a Smith than his right to be a Briton; and wide as the diversity of rank, lineage, virtue, and genius in Britons is the diversity in Smiths. But still a name so generic often affects a definitive precursor. Jasper signed himself “J. COURTENAY SMITH.” He called, and left epistle the first with his own kid-gloved hand, inquiring first if Mrs. Haughton were at home, and, responded to in the negative this time, he asked for her son. “Her son was gone abroad with Colonel Morley.” Jasper, though sorry to lose present hold over the boy, was consoled at learning that the Colonel was off the ground. Afore sanguine of success, he glanced up at the window, and, sure that Mrs. Haughton was there, though he saw her not, lifted his hat with as melancholy an expression of reproach as he could throw into his face.
The villain could not have found a moment in Mrs. Haughton’s widowed life so propitious to his chance of success. In her lodging-house at Pimlico, the good lady had been too incessantly occupied for that idle train of revery, in which the poets assure us that Cupid finds leisure to whet his arrows and take his aim. Had Lionel still been by her side, had even Colonel Morley been in town, her affection for the one, her awe of the other, would have been her safeguards. But alone in that fine new house, no friends, no acquaintances as yet, no dear visiting circle on which to expend the desire of talk and the zest for innocent excitement that are natural to ladies of an active mind and a nervous temperament, the sudden obtrusion of a suitor so respectfully ardent,—oh, it is not to be denied that the temptation was IMMENSE.
And when that note, so neatly folded, so elegantly sealed, lay in her irresolute hand, the widow could not but feel that she was still young, still pretty; and her heart flew back to the day when the linendraper’s fair daughter had been the cynosure of the provincial High Street; when young officers had lounged to and fro the pavement, looking in at her window; when ogles and notes had alike beset her, and the dark eyes of the irresistible Charlie Haughton had first taught her pulse to tremble. And in her hand lies the letter of Charlie Haughton’s particular friend. She breaks the seal. She reads—a declaration!
Five letters in five days did Jasper write. In the course of those letters, he explains away the causes for suspicion which Colonel Morley had so ungenerously suggested. He is no longer anonymous; he is J. Courtenay Smith. He alludes incidentally to the precocious age in which he had become “lord of himself, that heritage of woe.” This accounts for his friendship with a man so much his senior as the late Charlie. He confesses that in the vortex of dissipation his hereditary estates have disappeared; but he has still a genteel independence; and with the woman of his heart, etc. He had never before known what real love was, etc. “Pleasure had fired his maddening soul;” “but the heart,—the heart been lonely still.” He entreated only a personal interview, even though to be rejected,—scorned. Still, when “he who adored her had left but the name,” etc. Alas! alas! as Mrs. Haughton put down epistle the fifth, she hesitated; and the woman who hesitates in such a case, is sure, at least—to write a civil answer.
Mrs. Haughton wrote but three lines,—still they were civil; and conceded an interview for the next day, though implying that it was but for the purpose of assuring Mr. J. Courtenay Smith, in person, of her unalterable fidelity to the shade of his lamented friend.
In high glee Jasper showed Mrs. Haughton’s answer to Dolly Poole, and began seriously to speculate on the probable amount of the widow’s income, and the value of her movables in Gloucester Place. Thence he repaired to Mrs. Crane; and, emboldened by the hope forever to escape from her maternal tutelage, braved her scoldings and asked for a couple of sovereigns. He was sure that he should be in luck that night. She gave to him the sum, and spared the scoldings. But, as soon as he was gone, conjecturing from the bravado of his manner what had really occurred, Mrs. Crane put on her bonnet and went out.
All books are sourced from Project Gutenberg