Hide and Seek

by Wilkie Collins

  "My son requires the most unremitting parental discipline and control," Mr. Thorpe remarked, in explanation of his motives for forcing Zack to adopt a commercial career. "When he is not under my own eye at home, he must be under the eyes of devout friends, in whom I can place unlimited confidence. One of these devout friends is ready to receive him into his counting-house; to keep him industriously occupied from nine in the morning till six in the evening; to surround him with estimable examples; and, in short, to share with me the solemn responsibility of managing his moral and religious training. Persons who ask me to allow motives of this awfully important nature to be modified in the smallest degree by any considerations connected with the lad's natural disposition (which has been a source of grief to me from his childhood) with his bodily gifts of the flesh (which have hitherto only served to keep him from the cultivation of the gifts of the spirit); or with his own desires (which I know by bitter experience to be all of the world, worldly);—persons, I say, who ask me to do any of these things, ask me also to act from a godless principle of expediency, and to violate moral rectitude by impiously compounding with vice."

  Acting on such principles of parental discipline as these, Mr. Thorpe conscientiously believed that he had done his duty, when he had at last forced his son into the merchant's office. He had, in truth, perpetrated one of the most serious mistakes which it is possible for a wrong-headed father to commit. For once, Zack had not exaggerated in saying that his aversion to employment in a counting-house amounted to absolute horror. His physical peculiarities, and the habits which they had entailed on him from boyhood, made life in the open air, and the constant use of his hardy thews and sinews a constitutional necessity. He felt—and there was no self-delusion in the feeling—that he should mope and pine, like a wild animal in a cage, under confinement in an office, only varied from morning to evening by commercial walking expeditions of a miserable mile or two in close and crowded streets. These forebodings—to say nothing of his natural yearning towards adventure, change of scene, and exhilarating bodily exertion—would have been sufficient of themselves to have decided him to leave his home, and battle his way through the world (he cared not where or how, so long as he battled it freely), but for one consideration. Reckless as he was, that consideration stayed his feet on the brink of a sacred threshold which he dared not pass, perhaps to leave it behind him for ever—the threshold of his mother's door.

  Strangely as it expressed itself, and irregularly as it influenced his conduct, Zack's love for his mother was yet, in its own nature, a beautiful and admirable element in his character; full of promise for the future, if his father had been able to discover it, and had been wise enough to be guided by the discovery. As to outward expression, the lad's fondness for Mrs. Thorpe was a wild, boisterous, inconsiderate, unsentimental fondness, noisily in harmony with his thoughtless, rattle-pated disposition. It swayed him by fits and starts; influencing him nobly to patience and forbearance at one time; abandoning him, to all appearance, at another. But it was genuine, ineradicable fondness, nevertheless—however often heedlessness and temptation might overpower the still small voice in which its impulses spoke to his conscience, and pleaded with his heart.

  Among other unlucky results of Mr. Thorpe's conscientious imprisonment of his son in a merchant's office, was the vast increase which Zack's commercial penance produced in his natural appetite for the amusements and dissipations of the town. After nine hours of the most ungrateful daily labor that could well have been inflicted on him, the sight of play-bills and other wayside advertisements of places of public recreation appealed to him on his way home, with irresistible fascination.

  Mr. Thorpe drew the line of demarcation between permissible and forbidden evening amusements at the lecture-rooms of the Royal and Polytechnic Institutions, and the oratorio performances in Exeter Hall. All gates opening on the outer side of the boundary thus laid down, were gates of Vice—gates that no son of his should ever be allowed to pass. The domestic laws which obliged Zack to be home every night at eleven o'clock, and forbade the possession of a door-key, were directed especially to the purpose of closing up against him the forbidden entrances to theaters and public gardens—places of resort which Mr. Thorpe characterized, in a strain of devout allegory, as "Labyrinths of National Infamy." It was perfectly useless to suggest to the father (as some of Zack's maternal relatives did suggest to him), that the son was originally descended from Eve, and was consequently possessed of an hereditary tendency to pluck at forbidden fruit; and that his disposition and age made it next to a certainty, that if he were restrained from enjoying openly the amusements most attractive to him, he would probably end in enjoying them by stealth. Mr. Thorpe met all arguments of this kind by registering his usual protest against "compounding with vice;" and then drew the reins of discipline tighter than ever, by way of warning off all intrusive hands from attempting to relax them for the future.

  Before long, the evil results predicted by the opponents of the father's plan for preventing the son from indulging in public amusements, actually occurred. At first, Zack gratified his taste for the drama, by going to the theater whenever he felt inclined; leaving the performances early enough to get home by eleven o'clock, and candidly acknowledging how he had occupied the evening, when the question was asked at breakfast the next morning. This frankness of confession was always rewarded by rebukes, threats, and reiterated prohibitions, administered by Mr. Thorpe with a crushing assumption of superiority to every mitigating argument, entreaty, or excuse that his son could urge, which often irritated Zack into answering defiantly, and recklessly repeating his offense. Finding that all menaces and reproofs only ended in making the lad ill-tempered and insubordinate for days together, Mr. Thorpe so far distrusted his own powers of correction as to call in the aid of his prime clerical adviser, the Reverend Aaron Yollop; under whose ministry he sat, and whose portrait, in lithograph, hung in the best light on the dining-room wall at Baregrove Square.

  Mr. Yollop's interference was at least weighty enough to produce a positive and immediate result: it drove Zack to the very last limits of human endurance. The reverend gentleman's imperturbable self possession defied the young rebel's utmost powers of irritating reply, no matter how vigorously he might exert them. Once vested with the paternal commission to rebuke, prohibit, and lecture, as the spiritual pastor and master of Mr. Thorpe's disobedient son, Mr. Yollop flourished in his new vocation in exact proportion to the resistance offered to the exercise of his authority. He derived a grim encouragement from the wildest explosions of Zack's fury at being interfered with by a man who had no claim of relationship over him, and who gloried, professionally, in experimenting on him, as a finely-complicated case of spiritual disease. Thrice did Mr. Yollop, in his capacity of a moral surgeon, operate on his patient, and triumph in the responsive yells which his curative exertions elicited. At the fourth visit of attendance, however, every angry symptom suddenly and marvelously disappeared before the first significant flourish of the clerical knife. Mr. Yollop had triumphed where Mr. Thorpe had failed! The case which had defied lay treatment had yielded to the parsonic process of cure; and Zack, the rebellious, was tamed at last into spending his evenings in decorous dullness at home!

  It never occurred to Mr. Yollop to doubt, or to Mr. Thorpe to ascertain, whether the young gentleman really went to bed, after he had retired obediently, at the proper hour, to his sleeping room. They saw him come home from business sullenly docile and speechlessly subdued, take his dinner and his book in the evening, and go up stairs quietly, after the house door had been bolted for the night. They saw him thus acknowledge, by every outward proof, that he was crushed into thorough submission; and the sight satisfied them to their heart's content. No men are so short-sighted as persecuting men. Both Mr. Thorpe and his coadjutor were persecutors on principle, wherever they encountered opposition; and both were consequently incapable of looking beyond immediate results. The sad truth was, however, that they had done something
more than discipline the lad. They had fairly worried his native virtues of frankness and fair-dealing out of his heart; they had beaten him back, inch by inch, into the miry refuge of sheer duplicity. Zack was deceiving them both.

  Eleven o'clock was the family hour for going to bed at Baregrove Square. Zack's first proceeding on entering his room was to open his window softly, put on an old traveling cap, and light a cigar. It was December weather at that time; but his hardy constitution rendered him as impervious to cold as a young Polar bear. Having smoked quietly for half an hour, he listened at his door till the silence in Mr. Thorpe's dressing-room below assured him that his father was safe in bed, and invited him to descend on tiptoe—with his boots under his arm—into the hall. Here he placed his candle, with a box of matches by it, on a chair, and proceeded to open the house door with the noiseless dexterity of a practiced burglar—being always careful to facilitate the safe performance of this dangerous operation by keeping lock, bolt, and hinges well oiled. Having secured the key, blown out the candle, and noiselessly closed the door behind him, he left the house, and started for the Haymarket, Covent Garden, or the Strand, a little before midnight—or, in other words, set forth on a nocturnal tour of amusement, just at the time when the doors of respectable places of public recreation (which his father prevented him from attending) were all closed, and the doors of disreputable places all thrown open.

  One precaution, and one only, did Zack observe while enjoying the dangerous diversions into which paternal prohibitions, assisted by filial perversity, now thrust him headlong, He took care to keep sober enough to be sure of getting home before the servants had risen, and to be certain of preserving his steadiness of hand and stealthiness of foot, while bolting the door and stealing up stairs for an hour or two of bed. Knowledge of his own perilous weakness of brain, as a drinker, rendered him thus uncharacteristically temperate and self-restrained, so far as indulgence in strong liquor was concerned. His first glass of grog comforted him; his second agreeably excited him; his third (as he knew by former experience) reached his weak point on a sudden, and robbed him treacherously of his sobriety.

  Three or four times a week, for nearly a month, had he now enjoyed his unhallowed nocturnal rambles with perfect impunity—keeping them secret even from his friend Mr. Blyth, whose toleration, expansive as it was, he well knew would not extend to viewing leniently such offenses as haunting night-houses at two in the morning, while his father believed him to be safe in bed. But one mitigating circumstance can be urged in connection with the course of misconduct which he was now habitually following. He had still grace enough left to feel ashamed of his own successful duplicity, when he was in his mother's presence.

  But circumstances unhappily kept him too much apart from Mrs. Thorpe, and so prevented the natural growth of a good feeling, which flourished only under her influence: and which, had it been suffered to arrive at maturity, might have led to his reform. All day he was at the office, and his irksome life there only inclined him to look forward with malicious triumph to the secret frolic of the night. Then, in the evening, Mr. Thorpe often thought it advisable to harangue him seriously, by way of not letting the reformed rake relapse for want of a little encouraging admonition of the moral sort. Nor was Mr. Yollop at all behindhand in taking similar precautions to secure the new convert permanently, after having once caught him. Every word these two gentlemen spoke only served to harden the lad afresh, and to deaden the reproving and reclaiming influence of his mother's affectionate looks and confiding words. "I should get nothing by it, even if I could turn over a new leaf;" thought Zack, shrewdly and angrily, when his father or his father's friend favored him with a little improving advice: "Here they are, worrying away again already at their pattern good boy, to make him a better."

  Such was the point at which the Tribulations of Zack had arrived, at the period when Mr. Valentine Blyth resolved to set up a domestic Drawing Academy in his wife's room; with the double purpose of amusing his family circle in the evening, and reforming his wild young friend by teaching him to draw from the "glorious Antique."

  CHAPTER X. MR. BLYTH'S DRAWING ACADEMY.

  When the week of delay had elapsed, and when Mrs. Blyth felt strong enough to receive company in her room, Valentine sent the promised invitation to Zack which summoned him to his first drawing-lesson.

  The locality in which the family drawing academy was to be held deserves a word of preliminary notice. It formed the narrow world which bounded, by day and night alike, the existence of the painter's wife.

  By throwing down a partition-wall, Mrs. Blyth's room had been so enlarged, as to extend along the whole breadth of one side of the house, measuring from the front to the back garden windows. Considerable as the space was which had been thus obtained, every part of it from floor to ceiling was occupied by objects of beauty proper to the sphere in which they were placed: some, solid and serviceable, where usefulness was demanded; others light and elegant, where ornament alone was necessary—and all won gloriously by Valentine's brush; by the long, loving, unselfish industry of many years. Mrs. Blyth's bed, like everything else that she used in her room, was so arranged as to offer her the most perfect comfort and luxury attainable in her suffering condition. The framework was broad enough to include within its dimensions a couch for day and a bed for night. Her reading easel and work-table could be moved within reach, in whatever position she lay. Immediately above her hung an extraordinary complication of loose cords, which ran through ornamental pulleys of the quaintest kind, fixed at different places in the ceiling, and communicating with the bell, the door, and a pane of glass in the window which opened easily on hinges. These were Valentine's own contrivances to enable his wife to summon attendance, admit visitors, and regulate the temperature of her room at will, by merely pulling at any one of the loops hanging within reach of her hand, and neatly labeled with ivory tablets, inscribed "Bell," "Door," "Window." The cords comprising this rigging for invalid use were at least five times more numerous than was necessary for the purpose they were designed to serve; but Mrs. Blyth would never allow them to be simplified by dexterous hands. Clumsy as their arrangement might appear to others, in her eyes it was without a fault: every useless cord was sacred from the reforming knife, for Valentine's sake.

  Imprisoned to one room, as she had now been for years, she had not lost her natural womanly interest in the little occupations and events of household life. From the studio to the kitchen, she managed every day, through channels of communication invented by herself, to find out the latest domestic news; to be present in spirit at least if not in body, at family consultations which could not take place in her room; to know exactly how her husband was getting on downstairs with his pictures; to rectify in time any omission of which Mr. Blyth or Madonna might be guilty in making the dinner arrangements, or in sending orders to tradespeople; to keep the servants attentive to their work, and to indulge or control them, as the occasion might require. Neither by look nor manner did she betray any of the sullen listlessness or fretful impatience sometimes attendant on long, incurable illness. Her voice, low as its tones were, was always cheerful, and varied musically and pleasantly with her varying thoughts. On her days of weakness, when she suffered much under her malady, she was accustomed to be quite still and quiet, and to keep her room darkened—these being the only signs by which any increase in her disorder could be detected by those about her. She never complained when the bad symptoms came on; and never voluntarily admitted, even on being questioned, that the spine was more painful to her than usual.

  She was dressed very prettily for the opening night of the Drawing Academy, wearing a delicate lace cap, and a new silk gown of Valentine's choosing, made full enough to hide the emaciation of her figure. Her husband's love, faithful through all affliction and change to the girlish image of its first worship, still affectionately exacted from her as much attention to the graces and luxuries of dress as she might have bestowed on them of her own accord, in the best and gaye
st days of youth and health. She had never looked happier and better in any new gown than in that, which Mr. Blyth had insisted on giving her, to commemorate the establishment of the domestic drawing school in her own room.

  Seven o'clock had been fixed as the hour at which the business of the academy was to begin. Always punctual, wherever his professional engagements were concerned, Valentine put the finishing touch to his preparations as the clock struck; and perching himself gaily on a corner of Mrs. Blyth's couch, surveyed his drawing-boards, his lamps, and the plaster cast set up for his pupils to draw from, with bland artistic triumph.

  "Now, Lavvie," he said, "before Zack comes and confuses me, I'll just check off all the drawing things one after another, to make sure that nothing's left down stairs in the studio, which ought to be up here."

  As her husband said these words, Mrs. Blyth touched Madonna gently on the shoulder. For some little time the girl had been sitting thoughtfully, with her head bent down, her cheek resting on her hand, and a bright smile just parting her lips very prettily. The affliction which separated her from the worlds of hearing and speech—which set her apart among her fellow-creatures, a solitary living being in a sphere of death-silence that others might approach, but might never enter—gave a touching significance to the deep, meditative stillness that often passed over her suddenly, even in the society of her adopted parents, and of friends who were all talking around her. Sometimes, the thoughts by which she was thus absorbed—thoughts only indicated to others by the shadow of their mysterious presence, moving in the expression that passed over her face—held her long under their influence: sometimes, they seemed to die away in her mind almost as suddenly as they had arisen to life in it. It was one of Valentine's many eccentric fancies that she was not meditating only, at such times as these, but that, deaf and dumb as she was with the creatures of this world, she could talk with the angels, and could hear what the heavenly voices said to her in return.