Part 62

"Mon cher," said M. Renan, "ses défauts sont ses meilleures qualités."

So he spent a tranquil happy winter, and wrote of his happiness and his tranquillity to Lady Caroline and Daphne and Ida and me; and before he knew where he was, or we, the almond-trees blossomed again, and then the lilacs and limes and horse-chestnuts and syringas; and the fireflies flew in and out of his bedroom at night, and the many nightingales made such music in the Hof gardens that he could scarcely sleep for them; and other nightingales came to make music for him too--most memorable music! Stockhausen, Jenny Ney, Joachim, Madame Schumann; for the triennial Musik festival was held in Düsseldorf that year (a month later than usual); and musical festivals are things they manage uncommonly well in Germany. Barty, unseen and unheard, as becomes a chorus-singer, sang in the choruses of Gluck's Iphigenia, and heard and saw everything for nothing.

But, before this, Captain Reece came back to Riffrath, and, according to appointment, Admiral Royce and Lady Jane, and Julia, lovelier than ever; and all the sweetness she was so full of rose in her heart and gathered in her eyes as they once more looked on Barty Josselin.

He steeled and stiffened himself like a man who knew that the divine Julias of this world were for his betters--not for him! Nevertheless, as he went to bed, and thought of the melting gaze that had met his, he was deeply stirred; and actually, though the north was in him, he forgot, for the first time in all that twelvemonth, for the first time since that terrible night in Malines, to say his prayers to Martia--and next morning he found a letter by his bedside in pencil-written blaze of his own handwriting:

"Barty my Beloved,--A crisis has come in your affairs, which are mine; and, great as the cost is to me, I must write again, at the risk of betraying what amounts to a sacred trust; a secret that I have innocently surprised, the secret of a noble woman's heart.

"One of the richest girls in England, one of the healthiest and most beautiful women in the whole world, a bride fit for an emperor, is yours for the asking. It is my passionate wish, and a matter of life and death to me, that you and Julia Royce should become man and wife; when you are, you shall both know why.

"Mr. Nobody of Nowhere--as you are so fond of calling yourself--you shall be such, some day, that the best and highest in the land will be only too proud to be your humble friends and followers; no woman is too good for you--only one good enough! and she loves you: of that I feel sure--and it is impossible you should not love her back again.

"I have known her from a baby, and her father and mother also; I have inhabited her, as I have inhabited you, although I have never been able to give her the slightest intimation of the fact. You are both, physically, the most perfect human beings I was ever in; and in heart and mind the most simply made, the most richly gifted, and the most admirably balanced; and I have inhabited many thousands, and in all parts of the globe.

"You, Barty, are the only one I have ever been able to hold communication with, or make to feel my presence; it was a strange chance, that--a happy accident; it saved your life. I am the only one, among many thousands of homeless spirits, who has ever been able to influence an earthly human being, or even make him feel the magnetic current that flows through us all, and by which we are able to exist; all the rappings and table-turnings are mere hysterical imaginations, or worse--the cheapest form of either trickery or self-deception that can be. Barty, your unborn children are of a moment to me beyond anything you can realize or imagine, and Julia must be their mother; Julia Royce, and no other woman in the world.

"It is in you to become so great when you are ripe that she will worship the ground you walk upon; but you can only become as great as that through her and through me, who have a message to deliver to mankind here on earth, and none but you to give it a voice--not one. But I must have my reward, and that can only come through your marriage with Julia.

"When you have read this, Barty, go straight to Riffrath, and see Julia if you can, and be to her as you have so often been to any women you wished to please, and who were not worth pleasing. Her heart is her own to give, like her fortune; she can do what she likes with them both, and will--her mother notwithstanding, and in the teeth of the whole world.

"Poor as you are, maimed as you are, irregularly born as you are, it is better for her that she should be your wife than the wife of any man living, whoever he be.

"Look at yourself in the glass, and say at once,

"'Martia, I'm off to Riffrath as soon as I've swallowed my breakfast!'

"And then I'll go about my business with a light heart and an easy mind.

"Martia."

Much moved and excited, Barty looked in the glass and did as he was bid, and the north left him; and Johanna brought him his breakfast, and he started for Riffrath.

* * * * *

All through this winter that was so happily spent by Barty in Düsseldorf things did not go very happily in London for the Gibsons. Mr. Gibson was not meant for business; nature intended him as a rival to Keeley or Buckstone.

He was extravagant, and so was his wife; they were both given to frequent and most expensive hospitalities; and he to cards, and she to dressing herself and her daughter more beautifully than quite became their position in life. The handsome and prosperous shop in Cheapside--the "emporium," as he loved to call it--was not enough to provide for all these luxuries; so he took another in Conduit Street, and decorated it and stocked it at immense expense, and called it the "Universal Fur Company," and himself the "Head of a West End firm."

Then he speculated, and was not successful, and his affairs got into tangle.

And a day came when he found he could not keep up these two shops and his private house in Tavistock Square as well; the carriage was put down first--a great distress to Mrs. Gibson; and finally, to her intense grief, it became necessary to give up the pretty house itself.

It was decided that their home in future must be over the new emporium in Conduit Street; Mrs. Gibson had a properly constituted English shopkeeper's wife's horror of living over her husband's shop--the idea almost broke her heart; and as a little consolation, while the necessary changes were being wrought for their altered mode of life, Mr. Gibson treated her and Leah and my sister to a trip up the Rhine--and Mrs. Bletchley, the splendid old Jewess (Leah's grandmother), who suffered, or fancied she suffered, in her eyesight, took it into her head that she would like to see the famous Dr. Hasenclever in Riffrath, and elected to journey with them--at all events as far as Düsseldorf. I would have escorted them, but that my father was ill, and I had to replace him in Barge Yard; besides, I was not yet quite cured of my unhappy passion, though in an advanced stage of convalescence; and I did not wish to put myself under conditions that might retard my complete recovery, or even bring on a relapse. I wished to love Leah as a sister; in time I succeeded in doing so; she has been fortunate in her brother, though I say it who shouldn't--and, O heavens! haven't I been fortunate in my sister Leah?

My own sister Ida wrote to Barty to find rooms and meet them at the station, and fixed the day and hour of their arrival; and commissioned him to take seats for Gluck's Iphigenia.

She thought more of Iphigenia than of the Drachenfels or Ehrenbreitstein; and was overjoyed at the prospect of once more being with Barty, whom she loved as well as she loved me, if not even better. He was fortunate in his sister, too!

And the Rhine in May did very well as a background to all these delights.

So Mr. Babbage (the friend of the family) and I saw them safely on board the Baron Osy ("the Ank-works package," as Mrs. Gamp called it), which landed them safely in the Place Verte at Antwerp; and then they took train for Düsseldorf, changing at Malines and Verviers; and looked forward eagerly, especially Ida, to the meeting with Barty at the little station by the Rhine.

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