Chapter XVII · MEPHISTOPHELES AGAIN.

A prisoner, and without a crime!

Mary Lennox felt that fate was indeed dealing hardly with her. When the first wild paroxysms of grief and mortification were past, she learned to understand that she should be released and free the moment the robber's trial was over; but whither was she to turn then? Could she seek for any employment, however humble, and say that her last abode had been a public prison? Her purse would be restored to her she had been told; but how long might its contents avail her, especially when all the wardrobe she possessed was the fast fading suit of black she now wore.

All these reflections, and others, coursed through her mind, causing such pangs of pain in her heart, that each was like a probe of hot steel?

There was a valuable diamond in Cyril's ring, but the idea of parting with it never occurred to her, or that it possessed other value than accrued to it in her own estimation, from being his gift to her in a time of vanished happiness.

Three weeks after the scene we have narrated, saw Mary still in a cell of the prison, gazing in listless abstraction, and with eyes that were becoming dull and stony in aspect, from a grated window at the high brick boundary-wall of the place, a barrier to liberty and the external world, defended by two rows of crooked spikes.

The chaplain had been kind, and gave her a few dreary books and pious publications; while the matron, whose occupation rendered her naturally suspicious, and who could not be convinced that Mary was not an evil girl in some way, otherwise she should certainly have friends of some kind, supplied her with work, and urged her to "do a little white seam," that she might have more money by her when set at liberty.

But she had ever one thought which rankled bitterly in her heart, that she was a prisoner, though guiltless of a crime!

Should she ever smile—ever sing again—she who had so often sung with an aching heart? Deadened by the massive walls, the roar of mighty London came to her ears like a drowsy hum, and dreamily she listened to it.

Within every shadow there is a deeper shade. To Mary it seemed strange that she should have been able to undergo so many shocks to her nervous system, so many humiliations to her proper pride, so many bitter mortifications, so many sorrows and affronts, and not have died! Yet she was still living, with all the impulses of life strong within her, save its best and brightest one—hope, for that was fading now.

Her lover! He was a feature of the past; yet she could not look on his betrothal ring without a strange thrill running through her bosom, while fond memory flew back to many an hour of quiet joy beside the lonely stile and by the old pine wood. Anon she dismissed these regrets as unworthy of her; but she longed and yearned amid the solitude of her cell, for one caress, one kind word from the poor old man who had so loved and petted her!

"Never more—never more!" she would moan and mutter. Could she but join him! The attempt would be a crime against her Maker—yea, even the thought thereof, was a sin; but the dark idea would come to her again and again.

Memories grew strong and keen out of the monotony of her existence. And the most vivid, were of her father, so fond and doting, so passionate and querulous, and yet, withal, ever so gentle and affectionate to her. So, then, would come before her with morbid and painful distinctness the scene of his death-bed, his passing away, and the wistful look, which when once seen is never forgotten—the glance we must all give one day, when the world is receding from us, and its smallness appears more small than ever. His was a smile of unutterable fondness and sadness, and there came the great change that chilled her heart then, and chilled it now—the pallor of death—the forerunner of eternity and peace.

On whose face would her last smile rest? And who would close her eyes when the hour came?

Times there were when a terror filled her soul lest she might come forth only to fall lower than poverty could make her; for she remembered painfully one or two poor girls whom she had seen brought up before Alderman Figsley. But—no, no, she could only die, and be at rest for ever!

She knew that while she was gazing at the smoke-blackened brick wall or into the paved yard, where not a blade of grass was visible, the leaves would be thick and green in the rustling woods of the Merse; the blossoms of the white and pink hawthorn and of the golden laburnum, must have passed away; but the honey bees would be humming drowsily in the sunshine among the flowers she had planted, and over the beautiful heath-clad hills that looked down on what was once her home. There still, in the breezy and sunny morning, the mavis and merle were singing, and the voice of the cushat-dove would sound in the old coppice, the lone wood; but never more for her!

A pile of odious work for the matron was lying untouched before her, when she was roused from these dull thoughts by a warder announcing that "a gentleman, with an order from Alderman Figsley, had come to visit her."

She started from her seat with heightening colour; a foreboding of the heart told her who this visitor would too probably be—and Chesters, bowing and smiling, was ushered in. He presented his hand; but Mary drew back, and covered her eyes with her hand and arm, as if to shut out the sight of him.

"That man—that man again! You here, sir?"

"As you see, Miss Lennox; or will you permit me, as an old friend, to call you Mary?"

"Friend!" she exclaimed, with loathing in her half averted face.

He was now attired in a blue undress uniform, elaborately frogged and braided about the breast. He wore a gilded waistbelt, and a sabre with a white ivory hilt, and carried in one hand a scarlet fez with a long blue silk tassel; for he was in the undress of an officer of the Turkish Contingent. His appearance was always that of a gentleman, but there was in his eyes the jaded and dissipated expression habitual to them: and there were certain hard lines about the mouth, at least the angles thereof, that indicated him to be a roué or worse, and a gambler who played at high stakes with honour, fortune, and destiny.

"So, you foolish little girl, it has come to this," said he, surveying the bare walls of the whitewashed cell. "Why would you not permit me to become your security—to speak for you, I mean?"

"Rather would I have died than have accepted from your hands the smallest favour on any terms, and least of all on such as you dared to offer me—the daughter of a gentleman, every way your superior! And how basely done—in French, too, lest the magistrate should overhear or understand you. Begone, sir! What seek you here?" she demanded, while surveying him with intense disgust and drawing herself up the while, with the air of a little tragedy queen, her eyes sparkling with resentment, and her hands clenched with energy. "Why intrude upon me, unasked, unwanted, and so abhorred as you are?"

"This is a cell in a prison," said he mockingly.

"True. But here my privacy is as sacred as if I occupied the saloon of a palace! And I am here—here—a prisoner, without crime!" And her voice died away as she spoke.

After a pause she asked,—

"Is it manly of you to come here and mock me in my misery?"

"I did not come to mock you, Mary."

"Leave me, sir. Whatever be my fate, I am stainless and guiltless."

"Notwithstanding all that, your character will be utterly gone, and a taint shall be upon you that will cause all to shrink from befriending you. If you seek for work, or aid of any kind, however menial, however humble, can you refer people only to the chaplain or the turnkey of a prison? I should think not! Oh, Mary Lennox, you will starve, or do worse, in the streets of this vast modern Babylon!"

Mary trembled in her soul, for he was speaking her own terrible thoughts; but he was minute in his wish to torture her, and pitiless in his desire to bend her to his wishes.

"There are, of course, houses of refuge for casuals, and the hospitals for those who are ailing; and when the unknown or the unclaimed die there, where do their remains go? To the surgical theatre, where your beauty, which is undeniable, and where the very perfections of your person, may be made a source of speculation, perhaps of banter, for a rabble of young sprigs of anatomy; and thence to a grave, God knows where or how! Avoid the contingencies of a fate so terrible; I entreat you, dearest Mary, to listen to me, and—and——"

"Go with you?"

"Yes." And he drew nearer, as he spoke, earnestly.

"Never," said she, through her clenched teeth, while shrinking back. "Better death—any death, however black and desperate! Oh, how have I the patience to degrade myself by talking with you on such a subject? But I am becoming familiar with humiliation now and misery too!"

"I could prove a strong friend, Mary."

"Hitherto you have been a dangerous enemy—a veritable fiend."

"As you please, as you please. In this epoch of ours, much as we boast of enlightenment and advancement, passion is as strong, hate as bitter, and Destiny quite as inexorable and pitiless, as ever they were in the dark and middle ages."

Mary cowered and shivered as he spoke; and in the depth of her misery—a misery rendered all the more keen by the girl's extreme sensibility, he surveyed her with exactly such a glance or smile, as one might fancy in the face of Mephistopheles, while watching Goethe's heroine, poor Margaret, when she lay prostrate on the straw in prison, with a piece of brown bread and a pitcher of cold water beside her.

Mary's unconcealed repugnance and aversion for him, kindled at last the rage of this would-be lover; and, in revenge, he adopted an undisguised insolence of tone.

"So you hate me?"

"Say rather that I—despise you!"

"So you won't come with me to the East on any terms? By Jove, I could give you such a pretty gilded kiosk on the shore of the Bosphorus, where you might see all the gardens of Pera on one side; Scutari, with its mosques on the other, and all that sort of thing. I daresay that, as senior officer, I could get you out with me in the transport somehow; and we should do the Mediterranean and the Levant at Her Majesty's expense, and without requiring even a 'John Murray.' Say you'll come, and I shall get you out of this den in a twinkling. I shall soon make it all square with yonder Alderman, who made such a fuss about you. I am in funds, my girl, I can tell you: cleared two thousand odd, by a few strokes at billiards last night, after getting the IOU's of two noble lords—swell friends—by whose aid my leave at home has been somewhat protracted, as I threatened monetary pressure. Say you'll come. I have plenty of gold to pave the way, and won't we be jolly while it lasts? 'See; the mountains kiss high heaven'—you know the rest. Ah, you will find it better fun steaming past the isles of the Levant, than moping here or mooning at Lonewoodlee!"

Even his brusque insolence failed to rouse anger in her heart.

"Lonewoodlee—oh, Lonewoodlee!" she repeated, pressing her slender white fingers interlaced upon her sunken eyes and speaking in a soft and agitated voice; "my father's home! It is gone, and I have but the memory of it now, and of all I have lost, to remind me of the words of David," and lifting up her hands and eyes with much of sublime resignation in the expression of her pallid face, she said, "Dominus dedit, Dominus abstulit, sed nomen Domini benedictum!"

After a pause,

"Are you mad that you begin jabbering Latin in a place like this?" he asked with an air of astonishment that was really genuine.

"I am not mad, sir, though I might well be; and now I have but once more to entreat—nay to command you, as you are a man, to leave me to my fate and trouble me no more."

"I shall do so—and be assured it will be a sad and degrading one."

"As God pleases."

She turned her back upon him, and with a glance in which rage and baffled desire triumphed over pity, he retired and left her in an almost fainting condition.