THE FEET OF CLAY.

It is a terrible thing to be left alone with one’s dead, and this might in some sort be said to have been Margaret’s case when Mrs. Jordan had departed. Her Willie had become as dead to her; all that was left of him was the shameful record that lay upon the table before her. Never more—save once—was she to see his face again in this life, nor did she desire to do so. She would have shrunk from his hand had he offered it to her, and the touch of his lips would have been contamination. He had obtained her kisses as it were under false pretences, and she flushed with shame when she thought of them. She did not conceal from herself that his behaviour up to the very last had been in keeping with his whole career. He should have come in person, whatever it had cost him, and confessed his guilt, and not have left her a prey to unfounded terrors. It was cowardly and base and selfish. Miserable as she had been on his account an hour ago, she was now infinitely more wretched. It was better to have thought him dead—and honest, than to know he was alive and a cheat. ‘He is only seventeen, remember,’ had been Mrs. Jordan’s words in appeal to her charity and pity, but they found no response in Margaret’s bosom. ‘One can forgive anything at seventeen,’ was her reflection, ‘save hypocrisy and deceit.’ She forgave him as a very charitable person might forgive a cardsharper; there was no malice nor hatred in her heart against him, but she could never take him to her heart again.

Was it possible, she wondered, that he could have been always base? When he had made that passionate protestation in Anne Hathaway’s garden, for example, and besought her only to keep her heart free for him for a little time, to give him a chance of proving himself worthy of her; had he had this hateful plan of fraud and falsehood in his mind even then? If he was not to be believed then, if what he said then was not the utterance of genuine love and honesty, what word of man was to be credited? And if he was honest then, when did he begin to lie?

It had been her intention not to read this hateful paper; to commit it to the flames; but a sort of terrible curiosity now urged her to peruse it. She had no expectation of finding in it any mitigation of her lost lover’s conduct; any plea for pardon or even for pity. She had no wish to hear what he had to say for himself; only a certain morbid interest in it.

Yet as she opened the manuscript and her eyes fell on the well-known handwriting, they filled with unbidden tears. Great heavens! how she had believed in him, how she had loved him! Nay, how she had sympathised unwittingly with his very frauds, and longed and prayed for their success. Prayed for it—the thought of this especially appalled her. She found herself, for the first time, face to face with the mystery of life; with the difficulties of spiritual things. It is strange enough (what happens often enough), that we should fall on our knees and implore the divine assistance to avert misfortunes from our dear ones that (if we did but know) have already happened; but that we should implore it (if we did but know) on behalf of falsehood, fraud—with the intent to prosper wickedness! This man, among his other villanies, almost made her doubt of the goodness of God!

The manuscript was voluminous. It was written in the form of a diary, but interspersed with reflections and protestations.

‘I protest,’ it began, ‘that I had no premeditated design or the idea of any continued course of duplicity when my first error—the production of the Hemynge note of hand—was committed.’

‘He calls it “an error,”’ thought Margaret with a moan, and indeed the opening remark was the keynote of the whole composition, significant of all that was to come. He had been weak, it avowed, but never wicked; the victim not so much of temptation, but of overwhelming circumstances. ‘You know, Margaret——’

This unexpected personal appeal came upon her like a thunderclap; it was as though in that solitary room and in that solemn hour when night and morning were about to meet, his very voice had addressed her. ‘You know, Margaret, what sort of relations existed at that time between Mr. Erin and myself: how, though he permitted me to pass as his son, he was far from having any paternal feelings towards me; that he had no sympathy with my tastes, no interest in my doings, and that he grudged me the cost of my very maintenance. Was it so very reprehensible that, having attempted in vain to gain his affection by the usual road to a father’s heart, by diligence and duty, that I looked about me for some other way? Knowing his passion for any reliques of Shakespeare, it struck me that I might conciliate him by affecting to discover that of which he was always in search. I do not seek to justify what I did, but there was surely some extenuation for it.

‘To show you how little of settled purpose there was in the matter, I took that note of hand, before presentation to your uncle, to Mr. Lavine, the bookseller, in New Inn Passage, and showed him the document for his opinion. He said it seemed to him to have been written a good many years ago (taking for granted that it was an imitation), but that the ink was not what it should be. He told me that he could give me a mixture much more like old ink if it was my humour to produce the semblance of antiquity, and immediately mixed together in a bottle three different liquids used by book-binders in marbling covers, and this I always henceforth used. I have applied to him again and again for more ink: a circumstance I mention not only to show the simplicity of the means employed in these so-called forgeries of mine, but also the everyday risks I ran of discovery. Do you think I could have endured such a position, had I been merely actuated by the motive I have mentioned? Could human nature have borne it? No, Margaret, I was sustained by a far higher ambition, for a man may strive for a reward unworthily, and even though he is aware that he does not deserve it.’

The calmness of this reasoning appalled Margaret even more by its speciousness than by its falseness. Her instinct, though she knew nothing of these abstract matters, told her that such philosophy was rotten at the core.

‘The imitation of that note of hand was a false step I admit,’ continued the writer, ‘but it succeeded beyond my most sanguine expectations. It altered my relations with Mr. Erin entirely, which of itself encouraged me to new deceptions; but above all it became a basis on which to build my hopes of your becoming my wife. Hitherto I had loved you, Margaret, passionately, devotedly indeed, but with little hopes of ever winning you. When I obtained that promise from your dear lips in the garden at Shottery, it was not merely with the selfish intention of excluding for a few months from your heart the rival whom I feared; I believed, as I still believe, that my talents were of a high order, and I thought that at no distant date they would meet with public recognition; that some of that praise, in short, which I have gained under false pretences would have been accorded to my own legitimate efforts. The time during which you promised to keep yourself free for me, however, was now drawing to a close, and I felt that I had not advanced a single step on the road to either fame or fortune. I was madly in love with you. I felt that you were slipping out of the reach of my arms, and the terrible temptation suggested itself to secure you by the means that had already gained me so much in so unlooked-for a manner. If I could only make myself necessary to your uncle by ministering to his ruling passion, perhaps he would give his consent (which otherwise I well knew could never be obtained) to our immediate union. Not greed, I swear it, no, nor even the desire of recognition (though only as it were by proxy) for my genius, were my inducements to persevere in my course—

Love only was my call,
And if I lost thy love, I lost my all.’

It was terrible to Margaret to read such words; they almost made her feel as though she had been a confederate in the delinquencies of this unhappy boy. Terrible, too, was the appearance, under dates, of his particular acts of forgery, each set down in a matter-of-fact and methodical manner, and concerning which the total absence of penitence and self-reprobation was less painful to her than the fallacious self-justification in which he had indulged elsewhere.

‘Nov. 2nd.—Love-letter and verses to Anne Hathaway. Five stanzas and a braid of hair. Hair a gage d’amour from a young playmate; the silk that bound it had attached the seals to some old deed. It was thickly woven and twisted in some peculiar manner, which I judged would suggest antiquity.

‘Nov. 7th.—Playhouse receipts. String for them, some worsted thread taken out of some old tapestry in the waiting-room of the House of Lords, where I went to hear his Majesty’s speech with Mr. Erin.

‘Dec. 2nd.—The Profession of Faith. My most ambitious performance (except the play). I solemnly affirm that but for the praises bestowed upon my good fortune (as it was held) on the previous occasions, I should have hesitated to compose this document. On the other hand, you know, Margaret, how earnestly desirous Mr. Erin always was that Shakespeare should be proved to have been a Protestant; if I could please him in this I thought that my way to his heart would be made easy indeed. Moreover, I had myself the most rooted objection to anything like bigotry or superstition. In penning the Profession I formed the twelve letters contained in the Christian and surname of Shakespeare as much as possible to resemble those in his original autographs, but as for the rest I was only careful to produce as many doubleyous and esses as possible. It was a most simple performance, and executed with so little prudence that (as you remember) the word “leffee“ was introduced instead of “leafless.” Nor did I take much more trouble with the composition itself. When, therefore, I heard Dr. Warton pronounce such an eulogium upon it—”Sir, we have many fine things in our Church Service, and our Litany abounds with beauties; but here, sir, is a man who has distanced us all”—it is hardly to be wondered at that I was intoxicated with so unexpected a success. It corroborated very strongly the high estimation in which I had always held my talents, and I resolved, since the world would not recognise them in my proper person, to compel it to acknowledge them under another name. If I was not so great as Shakespeare—and indeed I have sometimes believed myself to be so—I had at all events a soul akin to him.’

The inordinate and monstrous vanity of this remark did not escape Margaret’s notice, but it did not give her the pain that his other reflections had done; it even afforded some palliation of his deplorable conduct. The approbation of so many learned men, deceived by a great name, had been evidently taken by him as an involuntary recognition of his own genius, and in a manner turned his head. She tried to persuade herself that he henceforth at least became in some degree irresponsible for his own actions.

‘It was about this time,’ the confession continued, ‘that I was almost ruined by the treachery and malignity of Reginald Talbot, for it was he, you remember, who induced Mr. Albany Wallis to confront me with a genuine signature of John Hemynge. I look upon that as the most dangerous peril I had yet encountered, and, at the same time, the cause of my greatest triumph. It seemed incredible, and no wonder, that I should have produced within the space of one hour and a quarter (including the time spent in going and coming, as was supposed, to the Temple, but in reality to my own rooms at the New Inn), a facsimile of the other John Hemynge’s handwriting, unless it had been a genuine document. By that time I had become an adept in imitation, and could also retain in my recollection the form of letters in any autograph which I had once beheld. I brought back a deed sufficiently similar to the original to set all Mr. Wallis’s doubts at rest. It did not, however, satisfy my own mind, and that very evening I executed another deed more carefully, which I substituted for the former one, and which stood the test of all future examinations. From that moment indeed, save those who had been my enemies from the first, and who probably never would have believed in the Shakespeare manuscripts, even though they had been really genuine, I had no serious opponent, with one exception, and for some reason or another of his own, he has never shown himself antagonistic to me.’

There was much more of it; the whole composition of the ‘Vortigern’ was described, with Talbot’s connection with it, just as it had been narrated by Mrs. Jordan. But what chiefly engaged Margaret’s thoughts, and caused her to refer to it again and again, was that allusion of William Henry’s to that one person who, not belonging to the Malone faction, had all along discredited his statements, though, ‘for some reason or another of his own, he had not shown himself antagonistic.’ This was certainly not Talbot, who had shown himself antagonistic enough, nor was it evidently any confidant of the unhappy boy’s. It could, therefore, only have been Frank Dennis; he had, she well remembered, always kept silence when the question of the manuscripts was mentioned, and had even incurred Mr. Erin’s indignation by doing so. But his nature was so frank and open that she could not understand how he could have tacitly countenanced such a fraud had he been really convinced that it was being enacted. It was curious, considering the great distress and perturbation of her mind, that a matter so comparatively small should have thus intruded itself; but it did so.

Otherwise, as may well be imagined, her thoughts had bitter food enough provided for them. That whole night long Margaret never sought her couch. The revelation of the worthlessness of her lover, made by his own hand, and, what was worse, made in no spirit of penitence or remorse, put sleep far from her eyes, and filled her soul with wretchedness. If the thought that things might have been worse can afford consolation, that indeed she had, for William Henry might have married her. If the play had been successful, and if Reginald Talbot had held his tongue, and indeed if he had not held it—for she would never have disbelieved in her Willie had he not torn the mask from his face with his own hand—she might have become William Henry’s wife! The very idea of it chilled her blood. Bound to a liar, a cheat, a forger, by an indissoluble bond for life! Vowed to love, revere, and honour a man the baseness of whose nature she would have been certain to have discovered sooner or later, but in any case too late! She had been saved from that at least; and yet how terrible was the blow that had been inflicted upon her!

Sad it is to be left alone with our dead, how much sadder to be left alone, after they have died, with the revelation of their baseness, to find our love has been wasted on an unworthy object, our reverence paid to a false god. In Margaret’s case matters were still worse, for she could not even keep the revelation to herself; she had not the miserable satisfaction that some bereaved ones have when they chance upon the proof of a once loved one’s shame, of concealing it. It was necessary that she should tell Mr. Erin, and in revealing the fraud of which he had been the victim, what misery was she about to inflict upon him! How the whole fabric of the old man’s pride would be shattered to the dust, and how triumphantly would his enemies trample upon it.