Paul Clifford

by Edward Bulwer-Lytton

  When the day arrived for Sir William Brandon to set out on the circuit, he called Barlow, and enjoined that acute and intelligent servant the strictest caution with respect to Lucy. He bade him deny her to everyone, of whatever rank, and carefully to look into every newspaper that was brought to her, as well as to withhold every letter, save such as were addressed to her in the judge’s own hand-writing. Lucy’s maid Brandon had already won over to silence; and the uncle now pleased himself with thinking that he had put an effectual guard to every chance of discovery. The identity of Lovett with Clifford had not yet even been rumoured, and Mauleverer had rightly judged of Clifford, when he believed the prisoner would himself take every precaution against the detection of that fact. Clifford answered the earl’s note and promise, in a letter couched in so affecting yet so manly a tone of gratitude, that even Brandon was touched when he read it. And since his confinement and partial recovery of health, the prisoner had kept himself closely secluded, and refused all visitors. Encouraged by this reflection, and the belief in the safety of his precautions, Brandon took leave of Lucy. ‘Farewell!’ said he, as he embraced her affectionately. ‘Be sure that you write to me, and forgive me if I do not answer you punctually. Take care of yourself, my sweet niece, and let me see a fresher colour on that soft cheek when I return!’

  ‘Take care of yourself rather, my dear, dear uncle,’ said Lucy, clinging to him and weeping, as of late her weakened nerves caused her to do at the least agitation. ‘Why may I not go with you? You have seemed to me paler than usual the last three or four days, and you complained yesterday. Do let me go with you; I will be no trouble, none at all; but I am sure you require a nurse.’

  ‘You want to frighten me, my pretty Lucy,’ said Brandon, shaking his head with a smile. ‘I am well, very well: I felt a strange rush of blood towards the head yesterday, it is true; but I feel today stronger and lighter than I have done for years. Once more, God bless you, my child!’

  And Brandon tore himself away, and commenced his journey.

  The wandering and dramatic course of our story now conducts us to an obscure lane in the metropolis, leading to the Thames, and makes us spectators of an affecting farewell between two persons, whom the injustice of fate, and the persecutions of men, were about perhaps for ever to divide.

  ‘Adieu, my friend!’ said Augustus Tomlinson, as he stood looking full on that segment of the face of Edward Pepper which was left unconcealed by a huge hat and a red belcher handkerchief. Tomlinson himself was attired in the full costume of a dignified clergyman. ‘Adieu, my friend, since you will remain in England, – adieu! I am, I exult to say, no less sincere a patriot than you. Heaven be my witness, how long I looked repugnantly on poor Lovett’s proposal to quit my beloved country. But all hope of life here is now over: and really, during the last ten days, I have been so hunted from corner to corner, so plagued with polite invitations, similar to those given by a farmer’s wife to her ducks – “Dilly, dilly, dilly, come and be killed!” – that my patriotism has been prodigiously cooled, and I no longer recoil from thoughts of self-banishment. “The earth,” my dear Ned – as a Greek sage has very well observed – “the earth is the same everywhere!” And if I am asked for my home, I can point, like Anaxagoras, to heaven!’

  ‘’Pon my soul, you affect me!’ said Ned, speaking thick, either from grief or the pressure of the belcher handkerchief on his mouth. ‘It is quite beautiful to hear you talk!’

  ‘Bear up, my dear friend,’ continued Tomlinson, ‘bear up against your present afflictions. What, to a man who fortifies himself by reason and by reflection on the shortness of life, are the little calamities of the body! What is imprisonment, or persecution, or cold, or hunger? – By-the-by, you did not forget to put the sandwiches into my coat-pocket!’

  ‘Hush!’ whispered Ned, and he moved on involuntarily. ‘I see a man at the other end of the street.’

  ‘Let us quicken our pace,’ said Tomlinson; and the pair proceeded towards the river.

  ‘And now,’ began Ned, who thought he might as well say something about himself, for hitherto Augustus, in the ardour of his friendship, had been only discussing his own plans; – ‘and now, – that is to say, when I leave you, – I shall hasten to dive for shelter, until the storm blows over. I don’t much like living in a cellar, and wearing a smock-frock, – but those concealments have something interesting in them, after all! The safest and snuggest place I know of is the Pays Bas, about Thames Court; so I think of hiring an apartment under ground, and taking my meals at poor Lovett’s old quarters, the Mug, – the police will never dream of looking in those vulgar haunts for a man of my fashion.’

  ‘You cannot then tear yourself from England?’ said Tomlinson.

  ‘No, hang it! The fellows are so cursed unmanly on the other side of the water. I hate their wine and their parley voo. Besides, there is no fun there.’

  Tomlinson, who was absorbed in his own thoughts, made no comment on his friend’s excellent reasons against travel, and the pair now approached the brink of the river. A boat was in waiting to receive and conduct to the vessel in which he had taken his place for Calais, the illustrious emigrant. But as Tomlinson’s eye fell suddenly on the rude boatman and the little boat which were to bear him away from his native land; as he glanced too, across the blue waters, which a brisk wind wildly agitated, and thought how much rougher it would be at sea, where ‘his soul’ invariably ‘sickened at the heaving wave,’ a whole tide of deep and sorrowful emotions rushed upon him.

  He turned away: – the spot on which he stood was a piece of ground to be let (as a board proclaimed) upon a building lease; below, descended the steps which were to conduct him to the boat; around, the desolate space allowed him to see in far and broad extent the spires and domes, and chimneys of the great city whose inhabitants he might never plunder more. As he looked and looked, the tears started to his eyes, and with a gust of enthusiasm little consonant with his temperate and philosophical character, he lifted his right hand from his black breeches-pocket, and burst into the following farewell to the metropolis of his native shores: –

  ‘Farewell, my beloved London, farewell! Where shall I ever find a city like you? Never, till now, did I feel how inexpressibly dear you were to me. You have been my father, and my brother, and my mistress, and my tailor, and my shoemaker, and my hatter, and my cook, and my wine-merchant! You and I never misunderstood each other. I did not grumble when I saw what fine houses and good strong boxes you gave to other men. No! I rejoiced at their prosperity. I delighted to see a rich man – my only disappointment was in stumbling on a poor one. You gave riches to my neighbours; but, O generous London, you gave those neighbours to me! Magnificent streets, all Christian virtues abide within you! Charity is as common as smoke! Where, in what corner of the habitable world, shall I find human beings with so many superfluities? Where shall I so easily decoy, from benevolent credulity, those superfluities to myself? Heaven only knows, my dear, dear, darling London, what I lose in you! O public charities! – O public institutions! – O banks that belie mathematical axioms and make lots out of nothing! – O ancient constitution always to be questioned! – O modern improvements that never answer! – O speculations! – O companies! – O usury laws which guard against usurers, by making as many as possible! – O churches in which no one profits, save the parson, and the old women that let pews of an evening! – O superb theatres, too small for parks, too enormous for houses, which exclude comedy and comfort, and have a monopoly for performing nonsense gigantically! – O houses of plaster built in a day! – O palaces four yards high, with a dome in the middle, meant to be invisible! – O shops worth thousands, and O shopkeepers not worth a shilling! – O system of credit by which beggars are princes, and princes are beggars! – O imprisonment for debt, which lets the mare be stolen, and then locks up the bridle! – O sharpers, bubbles, senators, beaux, taverns, brothels, clubs, houses private and public! – O LONDON, in a word, receive my last adieu! Long may you flourish in
peace and plenteousness! May your knaves be witty, and your fools be rich! May you alter only two things – your damnable tricks of transportation and hanging! Those are your sole faults; but for those I would never desert you. – Adieu!’

  Here Tomlinson averted his head, and then hastily shaking the hand of Long Ned with a tremulous and warm grasp, he hurried down the stairs and entered the boat. Ned remained motionless for some moments, following him with his eyes as he sat at the end of the boat, waving a white pocket handkerchief. At length, a line of barges snatched him from the sight of the lingerer, and Ned slowly turning away, muttered, – ‘Yes, I have always heard that Dame Lobkins’s was the safest asylum for misfortune like mine. I will go forthwith in search of a lodging, and tomorrow I will make my breakfast at the Mug!’

  Be it our pleasing task, dear reader, to forestall the good robber, and return, at the hour of sunrise on the day following Tomlinson’s departure, to the scene at which our story commenced. We are now once more at the house of Mrs Margery Lobkins.

  The room which served so many purposes was still the same as when Paul turned it into the arena of his mischievous pranks. The dresser, with its shelves of mingled delf and pewter, occupied its ancient and important station. Only it might be noticed that the pewter was more dull than of yore, and that sundry cracks made their erratic wanderings over the yellow surface of the delf. The eye of the mistress had become less keen than heretofore, and the care of the hand-maid had, of necessity, relaxed. The tall clock still ticked in monotonous warning; the blanket-screen, haply innocent of soap since last we described it, many-storied, and poly-balladed, still unfolded its ample leaves ‘rich with the spoils of time.’ The spit and the musket yet hung from the wall in amicable proximation. And the long smooth form, ‘with many a holy text thereon bestrewn,’ still afforded rest to the weary traveller, and an object to the vacant stare of Mrs Margery Lobkins, as she lolled in her opposite seat and forgot the world. But poor Piggy Lobb! There was the alteration! The soul of the woman was gone! The spirit had evaporated from the human bottle! She sat with open mouth and glassy eye in her chair, sidling herself to and fro, with the low, peevish sound of fretful age and bodily pain; sometimes this querulous murmur sharpened into a shrill but unmeaning scold. ‘There now, you gallows bird! You has taken the swipes without chalking; you wants to cheat the poor widow: but I sees you, I does! Providence protects the aged and the innocent – oh, oh! These twinges will be the death o’ me. Where’s Martha? You jade, you! You wiperous hussey, bring the tape here: doesn’t you see how I suffers? Has you no bowels, to let a poor Christin cretur perish for want o’ help! That’s the way with ’em, that’s the way! No one cares for I now – no one has respect for the grey ’airs of the old!’ And then the voice dwindled into the whimpering ‘tenor of its way.’ Martha, a strapping wench with red hair streaming over her ‘hills of snow,’ was not, however, inattentive to the wants of her mistress. ‘Who knows,’ said she to a man who sat by the hearth, drinking tea out of a blue mug, and toasting with great care two or three huge rounds of bread, for his own private and especial nutriment – ‘who knows,’ said she, ‘what we may come to ourselves?’ And, so saying, she placed a glowing tumbler by her mistress’s elbow. But in the sunken prostration of her intellect, the old woman was insensible even to her consolation: she sipped and drank, it is true; but as if the stream warmed not the benumbed region through which it passed, she continued muttering in a crazed and groaning key, ‘Is this your gratitude, you sarpent! Why does not you bring the tape, I tells you? Am I of a age to drink water like a oss, you nasty thing! Oh, to think as ever I should live to be desarted!’

  Inattentive to these murmurs, which she felt unreasonable, the bouncing Martha now quitted the room, to repair to her ‘upper household’ avocations. The man at the hearth was the only companion left to the widow. Gazing at her for a moment, as she sat whining, with a rude compassion in his eye, and slowly munching his toast which he had now buttered, and placed in a delf plate on the hob, this person thus soothingly began: –

  ‘Ah, Dame Lobkins, if so be as ow little Paul vas a vith you, it would be a gallows comfort to you in your latter hend!’

  The name of Paul made the good woman incline her head towards the speaker; a ray of consciousness shot through her bedulled brain.

  ‘Little Paul, eh, sirs! Where is Paul? Paul, I say, my ben-cull. Alack! he’s gone – left his poor old nurse to die like a cat in a cellar. Oh, Dummie, never live to be old, man! They leaves us to oursels, and then takes away all the lush with ’em! I has not a drop o’ comfort in the varsal world!’

  Dummie, who at this moment had his own reasons for soothing the dame, and was anxious to make the most of the opportunity of a conversation as unwitnessed as the present, replied tenderly; and with a cunning likely to promote his end, reproached Paul bitterly for never having informed the dame of his whereabout and his proceedings. ‘But come, dame,’ he wound up, ‘come, I guess as how he is better nor all that, and that you need not beat your hold brains to think where he lies, or vot he’s a doing. Blow me tight, Mother Lob, – I ax pardon, Mrs Margery, I should say, – if I vould not give five bob, ay, and five to the tail o’ that, to know what the poor lad is about; I takes a mortal hinterest in that ’ere chap!’

  ‘Oh! Oh!’ groaned the old woman, on whose palsied sense the astute inquiries of Dummie Dunnaker fell harmless. ‘My poor sinful carcass! What a way it be in!’

  Artfully again did Dummie Dunnaker, nothing defeated, renew his attack; but fortune does not always favour the wise, and it failed Dummie now, for a twofold reason: first, because it was not possible for the dame to comprehend him; secondly, because even if it had been, she had nothing to reveal. Some of Clifford’s pecuniary gifts had been conveyed anonymously, all without direction or date; and, for the most part they had been appropriated by the sage Martha, into whose hands they fell, to her own private uses. Nor did the dame require Clifford’s grateful charity; for she was a woman tolerably well off in this world, considering how near she was waxing to another. Longer, however, might Dummie have tried his unavailing way, had not the door of the inn creaked on its hinges, and the bulky form of a tall man in a smock-frock, but with a remarkably fine head of hair, darkened the threshold. He honoured the dame, who cast on him a lacklustre eye, with a sulky, yet ambrosial nod, seized a bottle of spirits and a tumbler, lighted a candle, drew a small German pipe and a tobacco-box from his pouch, placed these several luxuries on a small table, wheeled it to a far corner of the room, and throwing himself into one chair, and his legs into another, he enjoyed the result of his pains in a moody and supercilious silence. Long and earnestly did the meek Dummie gaze on the face of the gentleman before him. It had been some years since he had last beheld it; but it was one which did not easily escape the memory; and although its proprietor was a man who had risen in the world, and had gained the height of his profession (a station far beyond the diurnal sphere of Dummie Dunnaker), and the humble purloiner was, therefore, astonished to encounter him in these lower regions; yet Dummie’s recollection carried him back to a day when they had gone shares together without respect of persons, and been right jolly partners in the practical game of beggar my neighbour. While, however, Dummie Dunnaker, who was a little inclined to be shy, deliberated as to the propriety of claiming acquaintanceship, a dirty boy, with a face which betokened the frost, as Dummie himself said, like a plum dying of the scarlet fever, entered the room, with a newspaper in his dexter paw. ‘Great news! – Great news!’ cried the urchin, imitating his vociferous originals in the street. ‘All about the famous Captain Lovett, as large as life!’

  ‘Old your blarney, you blattergowl,’ said Dummie, rebukingly, and seizing the journal.