Lucius Davoren 13Book the Last · ‘’tis with Us Perpetual Night’
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Literature · Romance
Lucius Davoren 13
Book the Last · ‘’tis with Us Perpetual Night’
BraddonEnglish
They dug Ferdinand Sivewright out from under that pile of shattered brickwork and fallen timber, after labours that lasted late into the night. Help had not been far to seek amongst the good-natured Shadrackites. Stout navigators and stalwart stevedores had arisen as if by magic, spade and pickaxe had been brought, and the work of rescue had begun, as it seemed, almost before the echo of that thunderous sound of falling beam and brickwork had died out of the air.
When Lucius rushed down-stairs he found the forecourt full of wind-driven lime-dust and crumbled plaster and worm-eaten wood that drifted into his face like powder, and a clamorous crowd at the iron gate eager to know if any one was under the ruins.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘there’s a man yonder. Who’ll help me to dig him out?’
A chorus of eager voices rent the air.
‘Come, half a dozen of the strongest of you,’ said Lucius, unlocking the gate, ‘and bring picks and spades.’
The men filed in from among the miscellaneous crowd, women and babies in the foreground. Stray boys, frantic to do something, were sent right and left to fetch spades and picks. The miscellaneous crowd was forced back from the gate, unwilling to the last; the gate opened and the men entered, at once calm and eager, men who had seen peril and faced death in their time.
‘I knowed that end of the house would come down some day,’ said one brawny navvy, looking up at the dilapidated wing. ‘I told the old gent as much when he employed me to fasten some loose slates on one of the outhouses, but he didn’t thank me for my warning. “It’ll last my time,” says he. Is it the old gent that’s under the rubbidge, sir?’
‘Thank God, no. But there is a man there. Lose no time. There’s little hope of getting him out alive, but you can try your best.’
‘That we will,’ cried several voices unanimously.
The stray boys reappeared breathless, and handed in spades and picks through the half-open gate, which Lucius guarded. He didn’t want a useless crowd in the forecourt.
‘Now, lads, heave ahead!’ cried a stentorian voice, and the work began; a tedious labour, for the wreck of the old chimney made a mighty pile of ruin.
The labour thus fairly started, Lucius went back to the old man’s room. He found Homer Sivewright sitting half-dressed upon his bed, staring at that gap in the opposite wall, shaken terribly, but calmer than he had hoped to find him.
‘Save him, Lucius,’ cried the old man, clasping Lucius’s hand. ‘He has been an ingrate—a villain. There was bad blood in him, a taint that poisoned his nature—hereditary falsehood. But save him from such a hideous fate. Is there any hope?’
Lucius shook his head.
‘None, I fear. The fall alone was enough to kill any man, and that crossbeam may have fallen upon him. There are half a dozen men clearing away the rubbish, but all we can hope to find is the dead body of your son. Better that he should perish thus than by the gallows.’
‘Which must have been his inevitable doom, had he been permitted to finish his course,’ said the old man bitterly.
Lucius helped to remove his patient to Lucille’s vacant chamber, and tried to calm his agitation—a vain effort; for though quiet enough outwardly, Mr. Sivewright suffered intensely during this interval of uncertainty.
‘Go down and see how they are getting on,’ he said eagerly. ‘They must have cleared all away by this time surely.’
‘I’m going to look for a lantern or two,’ replied Lucius; ‘the night is as black as Erebus, and that strong wind makes the work slower.’
Mr. Sivewright told him where to find a couple of lanterns.
‘Go,’ he cried; ‘don’t waste time here with me. Rescue my son, if you can.’
His son still—by the mere force of habit, perhaps, although ten minutes ago his baffled murderer.
Lucius went out to the end of the house with a couple of lighted lanterns, and remained there moving about among the men as the work slowly progressed—remained giving them such help as he could—sustaining them with counsel—supplying them with beer, which one of the stray boys, retained for the purpose, fetched from a neighbouring publichouse by special license of the policeman, who acknowledged the necessity of the case—remained faithful to his post, until, in the dullest coldest hour of the dark windy night, Ferdinand Sivewright was discovered under a heap of rafters, which had fallen crosswise and made a kind of penthouse above him.
This accident had just saved him from being smothered by the fallen rubbish. The massive crossbeam of the chimney had fallen under him, and not above him—the long-loosened supports perhaps finally destroyed by that fierce shock which his own mad rush at the sliding panel had given to the fabric, weakened long ago by the injudicious cutting of the timbers when the old banquet-hall was pulled down.
They lifted him out of the wreck, and, to the marvel of all of them, alive, although unconscious. Lucius examined him carefully as he lay upon a heap of the men’s coats and jackets, pallid, and bloodstained. Two of the men held the lanterns as Lucius knelt down beside that awful figure to make his investigation. Both legs were broken, the ribs crushed inwards; in short, the case was fatal, though the man still lived.
‘Come indoors with me,’ cried Lucius, ‘two of you good fellows, and we’ll pull down a door and put a mattress upon it; we must take him to the London Hospital.’
Two men followed him to the house; they selected one of the doors in the back premises, an old washhouse door that hung loosely enough on its rusty hinges, and proceeded to unscrew this, while Lucius went up-stairs for a mattress. A few minutes afterwards they had laid Ferdinand Sivewright on this extemporary litter, and were carrying him, loosely covered with a couple of coats, to the London Hospital.
There was a surgical examination by two of the best men in London early next morning; but as nothing that surgery could do could have prolonged that wicked life, the consultation ended only in the simple sentence, ‘A fatal case.’
‘Do what you can to make the poor fellow comfortable,’ said the chief surgeon; ‘it would be useless to put him to any pain by trying to set the broken bones; amputation might have answered, but for those injuries to the ribs and chest—those alone would be fatal. I give him about twenty-four hours. The brain is uninjured, and there may be a return of consciousness before the end.’
For this Lucius waited, never leaving his post by the narrow hospital bed. It was important that he should be at hand, to hear whatever this man might have to say—most important that he should receive from these lips the secret of Lucille’s parentage. All that care or skill could do to alleviate Ferdinand Sivewright’s sufferings Lucius did, patiently, kindly, and waited for the end, strong in his trust in Providence.
‘Better that he should perish thus by the visitation of God than by my hand,’ he said to himself, with deepest thankfulness.
He telegraphed to his sister, asking her to come to London immediately, and to bring Lucille with her. They were to travel by a particular train, and to go straight to his house, where he would meet them.
Painful as the scene would be to both, he deemed it best that both should hear this man’s last words; that Lucille should be told by his own lips that he was not her father; that Janet should hear the truth about her unhappy marriage, from him who alone had power to enlighten her. It was to give to both a bitter memory; but it was to relieve the minds of both from doubt and misconception.
A little before the hour at which Lucius expected the arrival of Janet and Lucille, the dying man awoke to consciousness. Lucius at once resolved not to leave him. He wrote a few lines to Janet, begging her to come on with Lucille to the hospital, and dispatched the note by a messenger.
Ferdinand Sivewright looked about him for a little while with a dull half-conscious wonder. Then with that bitter smile which Lucius remembered years ago in the log-hut, he said slowly.
‘Another hospital! I thought I’d had enough of them. I’ve been laid by the heels often enough. Once in Mexico; another time in British Columbia, when those Canadian trappers picked me up, half dead with frost-bites and with a bullet through my shoulder, a mile or so from that villanous log-hut, and carried me on to the nearest settlement. Yes, I thought I’d had enough of sick beds and strange faces.’
Presently his eyes turned slowly towards Lucius. He looked at him for a little while with a lazy stare; then with a sudden fierceness in the dark fever-bright eyes.
‘You!’ he cried; ‘you, that sent that bullet into my shoulder! It must be a bad dream that brings you to my bedside.’
‘I am here to help and not to hurt you,’ answered Lucius quietly. ‘The end of your life is so near that there is no time for enmity. I saved you last night from becoming a parricide; and afterwards helped to rescue you from a horrible death under the ruins of the house you had invaded. If it is possible for such a nature as yours to feel remorse for the past or apprehension for the future, give the few remaining hours of your life to penitence and prayer.’
‘What, am I doomed?’
‘Yes, your hours are numbered. Medical skill can do nothing, except to make your end a little easier.’
‘That’s bitter,’ muttered Ferdinand. ‘Just as I saw my grip upon the old man’s hoard. I had schemes enough in this busy brain to occupy twenty years more. Dying! How did I come here? What happened to me? I remember nothing, except that I got into my father’s house last night to have a little peaceable conversation with him. Did I see him? I can’t remember.’
‘Don’t rack your brain to remember. There is no time to think of your life in detail. Repent, even at this last hour, and pray to an all-merciful God to pardon a life that has been all sin.’
‘Let Him answer for the work of His hands,’ cried the sinner. ‘He gave me the passions that ruled my life—the brain that plotted, the heart that knew not compunction. If He has His chosen vessels for good and evil, I suppose I have fulfilled the purpose of my creation.’
‘May God forgive your blasphemous thought! To all His creatures He gives the right of choice between two roads. You, of your own election, chose the evil path. It is not too late even now to cry to Him, “Lord, have mercy upon me a sinner!”’
The dying man closed his eyes, and made no answer.
‘I don’t suppose I should have been a bad fellow,’ he said by and by, ‘if destiny had provided me with a handsome income, say ten thousand a year. The tiger is a decent beast enough till he is hungry. I’ve had a strange life—a chequered fabric—some sunshine; a good deal of shadow. You never heard of me in the United States, I suppose, where I was best known as Señor Ferdinando, the violin improvisatore? I was the rage yonder in my time, I can tell you, and saw the dollars roll in like the golden waters of Pactolus, and had pretty women going mad about me by scores. Ferdinando—yes, I was a great man as Señor Ferdinando.’
He paused with a sigh, half regret, half satisfaction.
‘I had a run of luck at the tables at San Francisco, when I got the better of that accursed bulletwound—your bullet, remember—and I didn’t do badly at the diggings, though I gained more by a lucky partnership with some hard-working fools than by actual work. Then came a turn in the tide, and I landed in this used-up old country without a five-pound note, and nothing to hope for but the chance of getting on the blind side of my old father. But that was difficult.’
‘You contrived to rob him, however,’ said Lucius.
The dying eyes looked at him with the old keen gaze, as if taking the measure of his knowledge. But Ferdinand Sivewright did not trouble himself either to deny or admit the justice of this accusation.
‘In England things went badly with me always; though I have played the gentleman here in my time,’ he muttered, and closed his eyes wearily.
Lucius moistened the dry lips with brandy from a bottle that stood by the bedside.
The messenger returned to say that two ladies were below in the waiting-room.
Lucius went down-stairs, leaving a nurse in charge of Ferdinand. He found Janet and Lucille alike pale and anxious. Lucille was the first to speak.
‘Has anything happened to my grandfather?’ she exclaimed. ‘Is he here? O, Lucius, tell me quickly.’
‘No, my darling. Mr. Sivewright is safe, at Cedar House. I have sent for you to see one who has not very long to remain in this world—the man whom you once loved as a father.’
‘My father here?’
‘No, Lucille, not your father. Ferdinand Sivewright stole that name, and won your love by a falsehood.’
‘He was kind to me when I was a child,’ said Lucille. ‘But why is he here? What has happened?’
Lucius told her briefly that there had been an accident by which Ferdinand Sivewright had been fatally injured. Of the exact nature of that accident, and the events that immediately preceded it, he told her nothing.
To Janet he spoke more fully, when he had taken her to the other end of the room, out of Lucille’s hearing.
‘Your husband is found, Janet,’ he said.
‘What?’ she cried; ‘he is living then; and your friend Mr. Hossack assured me of his death.’
Her first thought was one of regret that Geoffrey should have pledged himself to a falsehood.
‘Geoffrey was deceived by a train of circumstances that also deceived me.’
‘He is living, and in this place!’ said Janet, with a sigh for the man she had once loved.
‘He is dying, Janet. If you want him to acknowledge any wrong done to you, it is a fitting time to obtain such a confession.’
‘I will not torture him with questions. I am too sorry for his mistaken life. Take me to him, Lucius.’
‘And Lucille, she must come with you.’
‘What need has Lucille to be there?’
‘Greater need than you could suppose. Lucille’s pretended father and your husband are one and the same person. Come, both of you. There is no time to lose.’
He led the way to the accident ward, and to the quiet corner where Ferdinand’s bed stood, shaded, and in a manner divided, from the rest of the room by a canvas screen. His was the worst case in that abode of pain.
Lucille drew near the bed, and at a sign from Lucius seated herself quietly in the chair by the dying man’s pillow. Lucius stopped Janet with a warning gesture, as she was advancing towards the screen.
‘Not yet,’ he whispered; ‘hear all, but don’t let him see you.’
Janet obeyed, and remained hidden by the screen. Ferdinand Sivewright’s eyes wandered to the gentle face bent tearfully over his pillow.
‘Lucille,’ he gasped, ‘I thought you had abandoned me.’
‘Not in the hour of your remorse, father,’ she said; ‘my heart tells me you are sorry for your sins; for that last worst sin of all I know you must be sorry. It is not in nature that you should be remorseless.’
‘There are anomalies in nature,’ answered Sivewright. ‘I believe I was born without a conscience, or wore it out before I was ten years old. After all I have only sinned against my fellow man when I was desperate; it has been my ultimate expedient. I have not injured anybody upon fanciful grounds, for revenge or jealousy, or any of those incendiary passions which have urged some men to destroy their kind. I have obeyed the stern law of necessity.’
‘Father, repent; life is ebbing. Have you no words but those of mockery?’
She took his death-cold hands, trying to fold them in prayer. He looked at her, and the cynic’s smile faded. There was even some touch of tenderness in his look.
‘Do you think the God against whom I have shut my mind is very likely to take pity upon me now, at my last gasp, when further sin is impossible?’
‘There is no state too desperate for the hope of His mercy. Christ died for sinners. The penitent thief had briefest time for repentance, none for atonement.’
‘I wonder whether he had been doing evil all his life; had never done a good action, never truly served a friend,’ murmured Sivewright in a musing tone.
‘We only know that he had sinned, and was forgiven.’
‘Ah, that’s a slight ground for belief in illimitable mercy. Can you forgive me, Lucille—you whom I wronged and deluded, whom I cheated of a birthright?’
‘I do not know what wrong you have done me; but whatever that wrong may be, Heaven knows how freely I forgive it. I loved you dearly once.’
‘Ay, once. Poor parasite, why should you love me, except that it was in your nature to twine your tendrils about something? And I loved you, little one, as much as it was in my nature to love anything. Whatever love I had, I divided between you and the fiddle I used to play to you in that dusky old parlour, when we two sat alone by the fire.’
‘Father, by the memory of that time, when I knew not what sin was—when I thought you good and true, as you were kind—tell me that you repent your sins, that you are sorry for having tried to injure that poor old man.’
‘Repent my sins—sorry,’ he muttered. ‘Well, I’ll say this much, that if I could begin life afresh, with a clean conscience and a fair start, I’d try to be an honest man. Outlaws have their pleasures; but I think respectability has the best of it in the longrun.’
‘The strongest proof of repentance is the endeavour to atone,’ said Lucius, who dreaded lest the end should come ere he had learned all he wanted to know about Henry Glenlyne. ‘The wrong you did Lucille Glenlyne was a bitter one, for you robbed her of a father.’
‘Lucille Glenlyne!’ cried Ferdinand. ‘How came you by the name of Glenlyne?’
‘Never mind how I learned the name. Your time is short. Remember that, and if you can be the means of restoring Lucille to her father, lose not a moment ere you do that one good act.’
‘An affectionate father,’ said Ferdinand, with the old mocking tone. ‘He was very glad to be comfortably rid of his pretty little daughter. He came to Bond-street a week after his wife’s death, with the merest apology for a hatband, lest people should ask him why he was in mourning, and took the little one on his knee and kissed her, and smoothed her dark curls, but never told her to call him father; and then, finding that she was so fond of me, proposed that I should adopt her altogether, and bring her up as my own.’
‘For a consideration, I suppose?’ said Lucius.
‘Yes, he paid me something of course—a sum of money down—very little—but he was always whining about his difficulties, and pretended that he could do no more. After that I lost sight of him altogether. I had left England before he came into his uncle’s fortune, and when I wrote to him from South America, asking him to remember old promises, he did not answer my letters. When I came back to England, with some idea of hunting him up and making him pay me for my discretion, I heard that he was dead. He was a mean cur at the best of times, and was never worthy of his wife.’
‘Tell me at least where I can get most information about him?’ asked Lucius earnestly.
‘From the family lawyers—Pullman and Everill, Lincoln’s-inn.’
This was something. Lucius had set his heart upon restoring Lucille’s rightful name before she changed it for his own. A somewhat useless labour, it might seem in the abstract; but to an Englishman that question of name is a strong point.
‘Is that all you can tell me—the only help you can give me towards reinstating Lucille in any rights she may have been deprived of through her father’s desertion of her?’ asked Lucius.
‘Ay, that’s a question that might be worth looking into. You’d better look at old Glenlyne’s will. Henry married a second time, I know, but I don’t know whether he had children by that second marriage. I don’t see how I can help you. Henry Glenlyne married Félicie Dumarques at the church in Piccadilly—St. James’s—just twenty years ago. I never had the certificate of the marriage. Hal Glenlyne kept that himself. But you’ll find the register. Lucille’s rights—if she has any under Reginald Glenlyne’s will—may be made out clearly enough; provided you can identify the child I brought home to Bond-street as the daughter of Henry and Félicie Glenlyne. There’s your greatest difficulty.’
The man’s keen intellect, even clouded by pain, dulled by the dark shadow of death, grasped every detail, and saw the weak point in the case.
‘I am no fortune-hunter,’ said Lucius, ‘and were Lucille mistress of a million she could be no dearer to me than she is now; nor her future life happier than, with God’s help, I hope to make it. I desire nothing but that she should have justice—justice to her dead mother—justice to herself.’
‘You cannot get it out of Henry Glenlyne,’ answered Ferdinand Sivewright. ‘He has slipped comfortably into his grave and escaped all reckoning. He was always a sneak.’
‘Enough. We must look for justice to God, if man withhold it. There is some one here who wishes to see you—some one you have wronged as deeply as you wronged Lucille. Can you bear to see your wife—my sister Janet?’
‘What, is she here too? You come like the ghosts that circled crook-back Richard’s bed at Bosworth.’
‘Will you see your wife?’ asked Lucius quietly.
‘Yes. She’ll not reproach me now. Let her come.’
‘Janet.’
Janet came softly to the bed, and knelt beside the man whose influence had once been all-powerful to lead her.
‘Can you forgive me?’ he asked, looking at her with those awful eyes, whose intensity was slowly lessening as the dull shade of death dimmed them. ‘Can you forgive? I wronged you worst of all, for I told you a lie on purpose to break your heart. You are my lawful wife—I had no other—never loved any other woman. I stole you secretly from your home because I knew my character couldn’t stand investigation, and if I had wooed you openly there’d have been all manner of inquiries. I knew the keen prying ways of your petty provincial gentry. It was easier to make the business a secret, and thus escape all danger.’
‘You gave me a bitter burden to bear in all these years,’ Janet answered gently; ‘but I am grateful even for this tardy justice. May God forgive you as I do!’
She covered her face with her hands, and her head sank on the coverlet of the bed, as she knelt in silent prayer. There could be little to be said between these two. Janet’s wrongs were too deep for many words.
Ferdinand stretched out his hand with a feeble wandering movement, and the tremulous fingers rested on his wife’s bent head—rested there with a light and tender touch, it might be in blessing.
‘Father, will you not say one prayer?’ asked Lucille piteously.
‘I will say anything to please you,’ he answered.
‘No, no, not for me, but for your own sake! God is all goodness; even to those who turn to Him at the eleventh hour. His mercies are infinite.’
‘They had need be if I am to have any part in them.’
Lucille repeated the Lord’s Prayer slowly, the dying man repeating it after her, in Latin—the words he had learned in his boyhood when he went to mass with his mother at the chapel in Spanish-place.
They stayed with him all that day, Lucille reading, at intervals, words of hope and comfort from the Gospel—words which may have pierced even those dull ears with some faint promise, may have kindled some vague yearning for divine forgiveness even in that hardened heart. The sinner seemed at intervals to listen; there was a grateful look now and then in the tired eyes.
They did not fatigue him, even with these pious ministrations. The soothing words were read to him after pauses of silence, and only when he seemed free from pain. Lucille’s gentle hand bathed the burning forehead. Janet held the reviving cordial to the pale parched lips. Had he lived nobly, and perished in the discharge of some sacred duty, his dying hours could not have been more gently tended. And thus the slow sad day wore on, and at dusk he started up out of a brief slumber, with a sharp cry of pain, and repeated, in a strange husky voice, the words Lucille had read to him a little while before:
‘Lord—be merciful—to me—a—’
He lacked strength to finish that brief sentence; but, conscious to the last, looked round upon them all, and then, stretching out his arms to Lucille, fell upon her neck, and died there.
He had loved the little girl who sat on his knee in the gloaming, while he played by his father’s fireside, better than the wife he wronged.
