Chapter X: The Secret of Dalton's Life

'I cannot understand the terms on which you say you and Mrs. Trelawney have parted,' said Goring, to whom his most valued friend Dalton had been, as a sort of relief to his own mind, apparently making what he called 'a clean breast of it,' and detailing his relations with the fair widow of Chilcote Grange. 'You seem to have made love enough to her--that I saw for myself often. You seemed to have expressed admiration enough for her, to all of which she appears to have listened with patience and pleasure in some instances; with impatience and petulance in others; and yet you seem to have wound up with a kind of quarrel at last!'

'She acknowledged that she had only been amusing herself and befooling me.'

'It would also seem by your own account that amid all the curious love-making you never made her a direct proposal of marriage.'

'No.'

'Why?'

'I dared not,' said Dalton, sadly.

'You dared not--and why?'

'Because--because I am a married man--there now, the murder is out!'

'A married man--you, Tony Dalton!' exclaimed Goring, in utter bewilderment.

'I, Tony Dalton--the biggest fool in Her Majesty's service,' replied that personage, with a groan.

'Does Mrs. Trelawney know of this state of affairs?' asked Goring, after a long pause.

'I have more than once feared as much.'

'She hinted to me once that there was a secret in your life that precluded her reception of your addresses. Then it is so?'

'Yes, that I am a married man,' replied Dalton, as he threw open his dark green and silk-braided patrol jacket (which he had resumed after the march) as if its collar choked him, tossed his half-finished cigar into the blazing fire, and drained his glass only to replenish it again.

It was in a hotel at Southampton, not far from where the transport lay, when they were having a 'farewell drink' after a cutlet or so, that Dalton made this astounding revelation to his friend--one that seemed fully to account for many peculiarities which the latter had remarked in Dalton's intercourse with Mrs. Trelawney.

'Why, in the name of all that is wonderful, have you concealed this so long?'

'An emotion of shame perhaps--shame at my own egregious folly tied my tongue.'

'But when, where, how did it all come about?'

'The most miserable stories are often told in a few words, and thus told best; and, Goring, I shall tell you mine,' replied Dalton.

'When I was being educated for the service--my parents being dead--I was boarded by my uncle Sir John Dalton--on whose hands and generosity I was utterly cast--with a tutor at Hastings.

'My uncle was most generous. I had quarterly as much pocket-money--too much indeed--as a young fellow in his early teens could desire to have; I had a horse at my command, a pleasure-boat whenever I liked it, and was a frequent attender at the theatre; for my tutor was a careless fellow, fond of amusement too, and did not look sufficiently after me.

'All this was some ten or twelve years ago. At the theatre there was a young girl who figured in the bills as Miss Laura Dorillion, and who was deemed quite a star.

'One story went that she was a lady of high family, who, in a rage for histrionic fame, had fled from home, changed her name, and adopted the stage as a profession; another story was that she was the only daughter of a man of rank, whom dissipation or bad speculations on the turf had ruined; and rumour added that, when only twelve years of age, she had played Juliet to perfection in amateur theatricals at a fashionable West End School; at fifteen she was a genius; at seventeen she was cast as Miss Hardcastle in the "School for Scandal;" and more than once when I saw her as Juliet I longed, with all my soul, to be her Romeo.

'Boylike I fell madly in love with her--in love as dreamy boys at my then years are wont to do--and nightly I haunted the theatre, often in defiance of my tutor, and my studies became a farce; in fact they were utterly neglected, and I had but one thought--Laura Dorillion!

'How pretty--how sweetly pretty--the name sounded to me, and I was never weary of repeating it to myself.

'_Was_ she pretty, you will ask? When made-up for the stage and surrounded by all its accessories, she looked downright lovely; but, when watching her going from her lodgings to morning rehearsal, I was obliged to confess to myself that my goddess had rather a large mouth, but fine eyes with a sleepy or dreamy expression, long lashes and drooping lids of which she could make a most seductive use; that in figure she was tall but not ungraceful, and was neither fully grown nor developed; but there seemed a great want of finish about her for one who was alleged to be the daughter of a noble family. This might proceed, I thought, from the style of her toilette, which certainly did not come from Swan & Edgar's.

'The girl was quite a favourite in Hastings; she played for, sang for, and subscribed to many local charities, and had about her none of that fastness of dress or demeanour peculiar to so many young girls on the stage; and so I loved her, or thought I did. I was but a boy--it was what the French--so happy in their phrases--call _un grand caprice enflammé par des obstacles_--nothing more, perhaps; and the obstacles were my lack of independent means to take her off the stage; my having no profession; and my uncle's well known family pride, position, and general views regarding me, his brother's only son, and all that sort of thing. Otherwise, I might have continued "to sigh like a furnace," and eventually, when I went elsewhere, forget her; but it was not to be.

'I was not a bad-looking fellow, and always dressed scrupulously well; thus she was not long in discovering me as I sat night after night, bouquet in hand, in a certain pit stall; and she no doubt connected me with the beautiful bouquets that came to the stage door nightly, in more than one instance with little complimentary notes on pink and perfumed paper inserted therein.

'Once she appeared at the wings with one of these notes in her hand. She blew me a kiss from the tips of her fingers, and placed the missive in her bosom, two little actions which raised me to the seventh heaven of ecstacy. After that Laura Dorillion sang to me, acted to me, glanced and smiled at me in a way that completed her conquest, and, in short, I was a lost Tony Dalton!

'As a pledge of solemn engagement, I gave her a diamond and opal ring.

'In the end I achieved an introduction in the most matter-of-fact way in the world--just as Sir Walter Scott did to his first love--by the prosaic offer of my umbrella on a wet day, and then my dream began to take a more tangible form in little lunches and solid presents, in escorting her to and from the theatre, which became an established kind of expected duty; in walks on the Sunday mornings along the towering cliffs that overhang the sea; along the breezy Marina; by the Lover's Seat in lonely Fairlight Glen with its thickly wooded sides and tapestry of wild flowers; by the Dripping Well, that an enormous beech-tree overhangs; among the ruins of the old castle, when "the old, old tale" was told again--not of Hastin and his men, or of Saxons or Normans--but of our love for each other, and life became to me a species of feverish intoxication for some weeks at least.

'Some little points of manner, accent, pronunciation certainly did at times jar upon my better taste; and she seemed, for a girl educated at a West End seminary for young ladies, rather ignorant of the manners and customs of that "society" which she affected in genteel comedy to pourtray upon the stage; but the former I attributed to association with her inferiors--to wit, the members of the company to which she belonged.

'From what you know of my disposition and general character, you may guess the end of all this.'

'No--I do not,' said Goring.

'I married her.'

'Whew!' whistled Goring; 'in church?'

'In church! where she was given away by the manager. The "heavy old woman" acted as mother, two young ladies of the company were bridesmaids, and when, tremulously, she subscribed herself in the register Laura Dorillion, the clerk and the pew-opener gave their signatures as witnesses. The breakfast is but a confused memory. There was no rice--no old slippers; and we are told that no girl likes to be married without any of the gay things which make marriage such a joyous experience--no gay preparations--no pretty wedding in a flower-decked church--no presents--not even a new dress!'

'Well?'

'Then came a life of misery and jealousy. I trembled when other men went near her, and boiled with exasperation when love was openly made to her on the stage in the mere business of the play. I had seen enough of that done before with considerable placidity, but somehow I could not stand it now.

'With my last quarter's allowance in my pocket, and utterly vague ideas of the future in my mind, I left the house of my tutor and went to share her humble lodging in a rather obscure part of Hastings, and soon the sordid nature of our surroundings began to impress me most disagreeably, as the bubble began to burst.

'At last there came a night which I was fated not to forget for a time.

'I had brought her home from the theatre, where she had acquitted herself with singular skill and sweetness as blind Iolanthe in "King René's Daughter," and she was in the act of repeating a portion of her dialogue with Tristan as we ascended the stair--

"Another time,
When I had pined for many tedious days,
Because my father was detained from home,
I wept for very gladness when he came!
Through tears I gave my bursting heart relief,
And at mine eyes it found a rushing vent."

'In our little sitting-room I found an elderly man, wearing a battered grey hat girt by a black band, and clad in shabby-genteel--nay, quite threadbare garments--standing on the hearthrug, smoking a short clay pipe, with his coat-tails over his arms, his bleared and tipsy-looking eyes--one of which had a white plaister over it--regarding the furniture and details of the apartment critically, while he took a sip from a pewter mug of beer, and set it down with a clank.

'"Hullo, my girl," he exclaimed; "here you are at last! This here is a rum go. So this is the young gent as you have gone and made such a fool of yourself by marrying?"

'Laura's heart was beating fast--so fast that even respiration seemed to suffocate her; her face was blanched; her eyes had a scared expression; and gave me a glance that seemed full of shame and agony.

'"Who is this impertinent scoundrel?" I demanded.

'"Scoundrel in your teeth again!" he exclaimed, turning up the cuffs of his coat, threateningly, and striking his battered hat firmly on his head; "is this your company manners, you young cub?" he added, with a frightful imprecation.

'"Who are you, and what do you want here?" I demanded, looking about for a stick.

'"Dabchick is my name! Jo Dabchick, clown, Banger's Circus, Surreyside o' the river, and no mistake; and I have come here to see my own daughter, Laura Dorillion, as she calls herself, or must it be Mrs. Antony Dalton now--Lady Dalton perhaps that's to be, when your uncle hops his blessed twig?"

'"Oh, father," said Laura, in a breathless voice, "why have you come, and how did you find me out?"

'"I come because I want money; and, as for finding you out, that was easy enough; the Hastings theatre ain't at the bottom of the sea."

"'And mother?"

'"Is there in your bed--has had a drop too much, and so I have tucked her in there; and now what have you got for supper--tripe, sausages, bloaters, or summat tasty, I hope? Speak--you look as lively as a couple of glow-worms in the sunshine!"

'My soul sickened within me! And with these additions to our little household--a slatternly, odious mother, a beery, broken-down actor, whose line had once been genteel comedy, a clown in a circus latterly, but whose incessant dissipation had deprived him of all employment--life became a burden now, and my stupendous folly stood in letters of fire before me.

'Existence became unendurable, and neither Laura nor I dared to look forward to the dark and vague future we might be doomed to drag out in the world.

'Their arrival filled my wife with shame and anger, and I do believe with generous sorrow for me. My quarter's pittance was soon expended; _her_ salary could not maintain us all. My tutor soon discovered the whole situation, and laid it mercilessly bare before my uncle, Sir John Dalton, who from that hour cast me off, ignored my letters and my existence, and disinherited me by his will.

'I had no money, or means of getting any, after the best of my jewellery and wardrobe had departed. Laura's father and mother soon proved abusive and most obnoxious to me; they insulted me hourly, and eventually drove me from the squalid lodgings we shared together. Laura one night took their part; it required but that to fill up the measure of my disgust, and I found myself wandering in the streets with all I possessed in the world--the clothes that I wore. I rooted the love of her out of my heart; but it was long before I could efface her image, which often a fancied resemblance in another brought before me.

'There are some men of whom it is said that they will not acknowledge their false steps even to their own hearts; but I am not one of them, and must acknowledge, dear Goring, that in sackcloth and ashes I have repented of mine.

'My haughty uncle proving obdurate to the last degree, there was no hope for me so far as he was concerned; so I took the Queen's shilling and sailed for India, and there I strove to forget my boyish folly, the contemptible position I had occupied with such a father and mother-in-law, the disgust and horror with which their advent and their surroundings inspired me--sick, too, of the slatternly girl I had married, for slatternly she too was in her home and when off the stage, reserving all her toilettes and her graces for the British public.

'You know the rest. I soon got a commission through the ranks--sooner than I could have got it through the medium of a crammer and exams. From the hour I turned at midnight along the Marina of Hastings, and heard the monotonous sound of the surge, as it rolled on the beach in the dark, I have never heard of my wife or been able to trace her. Her odious parents I discovered have been long since dead, and that she is no longer on the stage, or, if so, bears another name, or has gone I know not where.

'I have sometimes hoped that I had been freed from her by death--ungenerous though that hope may be, and that my uncle must have heard of her demise, when by a codicil to his will he left me all his fortune. And now you know why it was that I dared not make a proposal to Mrs. Trelawney--nor did I ever think of love or marriage till I met her lately; and how I love her, and have struggled to tear that hopeless passion from my heart, is known only to God and to myself!'