Delphi Collected Works of Marie Corelli (Illustrated) (Delphi Series Eight Book 22)

by Marie Corelli

  “David Helmsley.”

  “Cryptic, positively cryptic!” murmured Sir Francis, as he folded up the letter and put it by. “There’s no clue to anything anywhere. What does he mean by a bad speculation? — a loss ‘on the whole gamble’? I know — or at least I thought I knew — every number on which he had put his money. It won’t affect his financial position, he says. I should think not! It would take a bigger Colossus than that of Rhodes to overshadow Helmsley in the market! But he’s got some queer notion in his mind, — some scheme for finding an heir to his millions, — I’m sure he has! A fit of romance has seized him late in life, — he wants to be loved for himself alone, — which, of course, at his age, is absurd! No one loves old people, except, perhaps (in very rare cases), their children, — if the children are not hopelessly given over to self and the hour, which they generally are.” He sighed, and his brows contracted. He had a spendthrift son and a “rapid” daughter, and he knew well enough how little he could depend upon them for either affection or respect.

  “Old age is regarded as a sort of crime nowadays,” he continued, apostrophising the dingy walls of his office, as he took his walking-stick and prepared to leave the premises— “thanks to the donkey-journalism of the period which brays down everything that is not like itself — mere froth and scum. And unlike our great classic teachers who held that old age was honourable and deserved the highest place in the senate, the present generation affects to consider a man well on the way to dotage after forty. God bless me! — what fools there are in this twentieth century! — what blatant idiots! Imagine national affairs carried on in the country by its young men! The Empire would soon became a mere football for general kicking! However, there’s one thing in this Helmsley business that I’m glad of” — and his eyes twinkled— “I believe the Sorrels have lost their game! Positively, I think Miss Lucy has broken her line, and that the fish has gone without her hook in its mouth! Old as he is, David is not too old to outwit a woman! I gave him a hint, just the slightest hint in the world, — and I think he’s taken it. Anyhow, he’s gone, — booked for Southampton. And from Southampton a man can ‘ship himself all aboard of a ship,’ like Lord Bateman in the ballad, and go anywhere. Anywhere, yes! — but in this case I wonder where he will go? Possibly to America — yet no! — I think not!” And Sir Francis, descending his office stairs, went out into the broad sunshine which flooded the city streets, continuing his inward reverie as he walked,— “I think not. From what he said the other night, I fancy not even the haunting memory of ‘ole Virginny’ will draw him back there. ‘Consider me as lost,’ he says. An odd notion! David Helmsley, one of the richest men in the whole of two continents, wishes to lose himself! Impossible! He’s a marked multi-millionaire, — branded with the golden sign of unlimited wealth, and as well known as a London terminus! If he were ‘lost’ to-day, he’d be found to-morrow. As matters stand I daresay he’ll turn up all fight in a month’s time and I need not worry my head any more about him!”

  With this determination Sir Francis went home to luncheon, and after luncheon duly appeared driving in the Park with Lady Vesey, like the attentive and obliging husband he ever was, despite the boredom which the “Row” and the “Ladies’ Mile” invariably inflicted upon him, — yet every now and then before him there rose a mental image of his old friend “King David,” — grey, sad-eyed, and lonely — flitting past like some phantom in a dream, and wandering far away from the crowded vortex of London life, where his name was as honey to a swarm of bees, into some dim unreachable region of shadow and silence, with the brief farewell:

  “Consider me as lost!”

  CHAPTER V

  Among the many wild and lovely tangles of foliage and flower which Nature and her subject man succeed in working out together after considerable conflict and argument, one of the most beautiful and luxuriant is a Somersetshire lane. Narrow and tortuous, fortified on either side with high banks of rough turf, topped by garlands of climbing wild-rose, bunches of corn-cockles and tufts of meadow-sweet, such a lane in midsummer is one of beauty’s ways through the world, — a path, which if it lead to no more important goal than a tiny village or solitary farm, is, to the dreamer and poet, sufficiently entrancing in itself to seem a fairy road to fairyland. Here and there some grand elm or beech tree, whose roots have hugged the soil for more than a century, spreads out broad protecting branches all a-shimmer with green leaves, — between the uneven tufts of grass, the dainty “ragged robin” sprays its rose-pink blossoms contrastingly against masses of snowy star-wort and wild strawberry, — the hedges lean close together, as though accustomed to conceal the shy confidences of young lovers, — and from the fields beyond, the glad singing of countless skylarks, soaring one after the other into the clear pure air, strikes a wave of repeated melody from point to point of the visible sky. All among the delicate or deep indentures of the coast, where the ocean creeps softly inland with a caressing murmur, or scoops out caverns for itself among the rocks with perpetual roar and dash of foam, the glamour of the green extends, — the “lane runs down to meet the sea, carrying with it its garlands of blossoms, its branches of verdure, and all the odour and freshness of the woodlands and meadows, and when at last it drops to a conclusion in some little sandy bay or sparkling weir, it leaves an impression of melody on the soul like the echo of a sweet song just sweetly sung. High up the lanes run; — low down on the shoreline they come to an end, — and the wayfarer, pacing along at the summit of their devious windings, can hear the plash of the sea below him as he walks, — the little tender laughing plash if the winds are calm and the day is fair, — the angry thud and boom of the billows if a storm is rising. These bye-roads, of which there are so many along the Somersetshire coast, are often very lonely, — they are dangerous to traffic, as no two ordinary sized vehicles can pass each other conveniently within so narrow a compass, — and in summer especially they are haunted by gypsies, “pea-pickers,” and ill-favoured men and women of the “tramp” species, slouching along across country from Bristol to Minehead, and so over Countisbury Hill into Devon. One such questionable-looking individual there was, who, — in a golden afternoon of July, when the sun was beginning to decline towards the west, — paused in his slow march through the dust, which even in the greenest of hill and woodland ways is bound to accumulate thickly after a fortnight’s lack of rain, — and with a sigh of fatigue, sat down at the foot of a tree to rest. He was an old man, with a thin weary face which was rendered more gaunt and haggard-looking by a ragged grey moustache and ugly stubble beard of some ten days’ growth, and his attire suggested that he might possibly be a labourer dismissed from farm work for the heinous crime of old age, and therefore “on the tramp” looking out for a job. He wore a soft slouched felt hat, very much out of shape and weather-stained, — and when he had been seated for a few minutes in a kind of apathy of lassitude, he lifted the hat off, passing his hand through his abundant rough white hair in a slow tired way, as though by this movement he sought to soothe some teasing pain.

  “I think,” he murmured, addressing himself to a tiny brown bird which had alighted on a branch of briar-rose hard by, and was looking at him with bold and lively inquisitiveness,— “I think I have managed the whole thing very well! I have left no clue anywhere. My portmanteau will tell no tales, locked up in the cloak-room at Bristol. If it is ever sold with its contents ‘to defray expenses,’ nothing will be found in it but some unmarked clothes. And so far as all those who know me are concerned, every trace of me ends at Southampton. Beyond Southampton there is a blank, into which David Helmsley, the millionaire, has vanished. And David Helmsley, the tramp, sits here in his place!”

  The little brown bird preened its wing, and glanced at him sideways intelligently, as much as to say: “I quite understand! You have become one of us, — a wanderer, taking no thought for the morrow, but letting to-morrow take thought for the things of itself. There is a bond of sympathy between me, the bird, and you, the man — we are brother
s!”

  A sudden smile illumined his face. The situation was novel, and to him enjoyable. He was greatly fatigued, — he had over-exerted himself during the past three or four days, walking much further than he had ever been accustomed to, and his limbs ached sorely — nevertheless, with the sense of rest and relief from strain, came a certain exhilaration of spirit, like the vivacious delight of a boy who has run away from school, and is defiantly ready to take all the consequences of his disobedience to the rules of discipline and order. For years he had wanted a “new” experience of life. No one would give him what he sought. To him the “social” round was ever the same dreary, heartless and witless thing, as empty under the sway of one king or queen as another, and as utterly profitless to peace or happiness as it has always been. The world of finance was equally uninteresting so far as he was concerned; he had exhausted it, and found it no more than a monotonous grind of gain which ended in a loathing of the thing gained. Others might and would consume themselves in fevers of avarice, and surfeits of luxury, — but for him such temporary pleasures were past. He desired a complete change, — a change of surroundings, a change of associations — and for this, what could be more excellent or more wholesome than a taste of poverty? In his time he had met men who, worn out with the constant fight of the body’s materialism against the soul’s idealism, had turned their backs for ever on the world and its glittering shows, and had shut themselves up as monks of “enclosed” or “silent” orders, — others he had known, who, rushing away from what we call civilisation, had encamped in the backwoods of America, or high up among the Rocky Mountains, and had lived the lives of primeval savages in their strong craving to assert a greater manliness than the streets of cities would allow them to enjoy, — and all were moved by the same mainspring of action, — the overpowering spiritual demand within themselves which urged them to break loose from cowardly conventions and escape from Sham. He could not compete with younger men in taking up wild sport and “big game” hunting in far lands, in order to give free play to the natural savage temperament which lies untamed at the root of every man’s individual being, — and he had no liking for “monastic” immurements. But he longed for liberty, — liberty to go where he liked without his movements being watched and commented upon by a degraded “personal” press, — liberty to speak as he felt and do as he wished, without being compelled to weigh his words, or to consider his actions. Hence — he had decided on his present course, though how that course was likely to shape itself in its progress he had no very distinct idea. His actual plan was to walk to Cornwall, and there find out the native home of his parents, not so much for sentiment’s sake as for the necessity of having a definite object or goal in view. And the reason of his determination to go “on the road,” as it were, was simply that he wished to test for himself the actual happiness or misery experienced by the very poor as contrasted with the supposed joys of the very wealthy. This scheme had been working in his brain for the past year or more, — all his business arrangements had been made in such a way as to enable him to carry it out satisfactorily to himself without taking any one else into his confidence. The only thing that might possibly have deterred him from his quixotic undertaking would have been the moral triumph of Lucy Sorrel over the temptation he had held out to her. Had she been honest to her better womanhood, — had she still possessed the “child’s heart,” with which his remembrance and imagination had endowed her, he would have resigned every other thought save that of so smoothing the path of life for her that she might tread it easily to the end. But now that she had disappointed him, he had, so he told himself, done with fine illusions and fair beliefs for ever. And he had started on a lonely quest, — a search for something vague and intangible, the very nature of which he himself could not tell. Some glimmering ghost of a notion lurked in his mind that perhaps, during his self-imposed solitary ramblings, he might find some new and unexplored channel wherein his vast wealth might flow to good purpose after his death, without the trammels of Committee-ism and Red-Tape-ism. But he expected and formulated nothing, — he was more or less in a state of quiescence, awaiting adventures without either hope or fear. In the meantime, here he sat in the shady Somersetshire lane, resting, — the multi-millionaire whose very name shook the money-markets of the world, but who to all present appearances seemed no more than a tramp, footing it wearily along one of the many winding “short cuts” through the country between Somerset and Devon, and as unlike the actual self of him as known to Lombard Street and the Stock Exchange as a beggar is unlike a king.

  “After all, it’s quite as interesting as ‘big game’ shooting!” he said, the smile still lingering in his eyes. “I am after ‘sport,’ — in a novel fashion! I am on the lookout for new specimens of men and women, — real honest ones! I may find them, — I may not, — but the search will surely prove at least as instructive and profitable as if one went out to the Arctic regions for the purpose of killing innocent polar bears! Change and excitement are what every one craves for nowadays — I’m getting as much as I want — in my own way!”

  He thought over the whole situation, and reviewed with a certain sense of interest and amusement his method of action since he left London. Benson, his valet, had packed his portmanteau, according to orders, with everything that was necessary for a short sea trip, and then had seen him off at the station for Southampton, — and to Southampton he had gone. Arrived there, he had proceeded to a hotel, where, under an assumed name, he had stayed the night. The next day he had left Southampton for Salisbury by train, and there staying another night, had left again for Bath and Bristol. On the latter journey he had “tipped” the guard heavily to keep his first-class compartment reserved to himself. This had been done; and the train being an express, stopping at very few stations, he had found leisure and opportunity to unpack his portmanteau and cut away every mark on his linen and other garments which could give the slightest clue to their possessor. When he had removed all possible trace of his identity on or in this one piece of luggage, he packed it up again, and on reaching Bristol, took it to the station’s cloak-room, and there deposited it with the stated intention of calling back for it at the hour of the next train to London. This done, he stepped forth untrammelled, a free man. He had with him five hundred pounds in banknotes, and for a day or so was content to remain in Bristol at one of the best hotels, under an assumed name as before, while privately making such other preparations for his intended long “tramp” as he thought necessary. In one of the poorest quarters of the town he purchased a few second-hand garments such as might be worn by an ordinary day-labourer, saying to the dealer that he wanted to “rig out” a man who had just left hospital and who was going in for “field” work. The dealer saw nothing either remarkable or suspicious in this seemingly benevolent act of a kindly-looking well-dressed old gentleman, and sent him the articles he had purchased done up in a neat package and addressed to him at his hotel, by the name he had for the time assumed. When he left the hotel for good, he did so with nothing more than this neat package, which he carried easily in one hand by a loop of string. And so he began his journey, walking steadily for two or three hours, — then pausing to rest awhile, — and after rest, going on again. Once out of Bristol he was glad, and at certain lonely places, when the shadows of night fell, he changed all his garments one by one till he stood transformed as now he was. The clothes he was compelled to discard he got rid of by leaving them in unlikely holes and corners on the road, — as for example, at one place he filled the pockets of his good broadcloth coat with stones and dropped it into the bottom of an old disused well. The curious sense of guilt he felt when he performed this innocent act surprised as well as amused him.

  “It is exactly as if I had murdered somebody and had sunk a body into the well instead of a coat!” he said— “and — perhaps I have! Perhaps I am killing my Self, — getting rid of my Self, — which would be a good thing, if I could only find Some one or Some thing better than my Self in my
Self’s place!”

  When he had finally disposed of every article that could suggest any possibility of his ever having been clothed as a gentleman, he unripped the lining of his rough “workman’s” vest, and made a layer of the banknotes he had with him between it and the cloth, stitching it securely over and over with coarse needle and thread, being satisfied by this arrangement to carry all his immediate cash hidden upon his person, while for the daily needs of hunger and thirst he had a few loose shillings and coppers in his pocket. He had made up his mind not to touch a single one of the banknotes, unless suddenly overtaken by accident or illness. When his bit of silver and copper came to an end, he meant to beg alms along the road and prove for himself how far it was true that human beings were in the main kind and compassionate, and ready to assist one another in the battle of life. With these ideas and many others in his mind, he started on his “tramp” — and during the first two or three days of it suffered acutely. Many years had passed since he had been accustomed to long sustained bodily exercise, and he was therefore easily fatigued. But by the time he reached the open country between the Quantocks and the Brendon Hills, he had got somewhat into training, and had begun to feel a greater lightness and ease as well as pleasure in walking. He had found it quite easy to live on very simple food, — in fact one of the principal charms of the strange “holiday” he had planned for his own entertainment was to prove for himself beyond all dispute that no very large amount of money is required to sustain a man’s life and health. New milk and brown bread had kept him going bravely every day, — fruit was cheap and so was cheese, and all these articles of diet are highly nourishing, so that he had wanted for nothing. At night, the weather keeping steadily fine and warm, he had slept in the open, choosing some quiet nook in the woodland under a tree, or else near a haystack in the fields, and he had benefited greatly by thus breathing the pure air during slumber, and getting for nothing the “cure” prescribed by certain Artful Dodgers of the medical profession who take handfuls of guineas from credulous patients for what Mother Nature willingly gives gratis. And he was beginning to understand the joys of “loafing,” — so much so indeed that he felt a certain sympathy with the lazy varlet who prefers to stroll aimlessly about the country begging his bread rather than do a stroke of honest work. The freedom of such a life is self-evident, — and freedom is the broadest and best way of breathing on earth. To “tramp the road” seems to the well-dressed, conventional human being a sorry life; but it may be questioned whether, after all, he with his social trammels and household cares, is not leading a sorrier one. Never in all his brilliant, successful career till now had David Helmsley, that king of modern finance, realised so intensely the beauty and peace of being alone with Nature, — the joy of feeling the steady pulse of the Spirit of the Universe throbbing through one’s own veins and arteries, — the quiet yet exultant sense of knowing instinctively beyond all formulated theory or dogma, that one is a vital part of the immortal Entity, as indestructible as Itself. And a great calm was gradually taking possession of his soul, — a smoothing of all the waves of his emotional and nervous temperament. Under this mystic touch of unseen and uncomprehended heavenly tenderness, all sorrows, all disappointments, all disillusions sank out of sight as though they had never been. It seemed to him that he had put away his former life for ever, and that another life had just begun, — and his brain was ready and eager to rid itself of old impressions in order to prepare for new. Nothing of much moment had occurred to him as yet. A few persons had said “good-day “ or “good-night” to him in passing, — a farmer had asked him to hold his horse for a quarter of an hour, which he had done, and had thereby earned threepence, — but he had met with no interesting or exciting incidents which could come under the head of “adventures.” Nevertheless he was gathering fresh experiences, — experiences which all tended to show him how the best and brightest part of life is foolishly wasted and squandered by the modern world in a mad rush for gain.