Never had he been heard of since he left, hard heart; though he might have guessed a mother’s sorrow, and was not far away, and often lingered near the house in strange disguises.  It would have been easy for him, in some clever way or other, latch-key and all, to have gained access to her, and comforted her, and given her some real proof, that all the love she had shed on him had not been utterly thrown away; but he didn’t—­he didn’t; and I know not of a darker trait in Julian’s whole career; he was insensible to love—­a mother’s love.

For love is the weapon which Omnipotence reserved to conquer rebel man; when all the rest had failed.  Reason he parries; Fear he answers blow to blow; future interest he meets with present pleasure; but Love, that sun against whose melting beams the Winter cannot stand, that soft-subduing slumber which wrestles down the giant, there is not one human creature in a million—­not a thousand men in all earth’s huge quintillion, whose clay-heart is hardened against love.

Yet was Julian one of those select ones; an awful instance of that possible, that actual, though happily that scarcest of all characters, a man,

        “Black, with no virtue, and a thousand crimes.”

The amiable villain—­one whose generosity redeems his guilt, whose kindliness outweighs his folly, or whose beauty charms the eye to overlook his baseness—­this too common hero is an object, an example fraught with perilous interest.  Charles Duval, the polite; Paul Clifford, the handsome; Richard Turpin, brave and true; Jack Sheppard, no ignoble mind and loving still his mother; these, and such as these, with Schiller’s ‘Robbers’ and the like, are dangerous to gaze on, as Germany, if not England too, remembers well.  But, not more true to life, though far less common to be met with, is Julian’s incorrigible mind:  one, in whose life are no white days; one, on whose heart are no bright spots; when Heaven’s pity spoke to him, he ridiculed; as, when His threatenings thundered, he defied.  Of this world only, and tending to a worse appetite was all he lived for:  and the core of appetite is iron selfishness.

The filched cash-box proved to be too well-filled for him to trouble himself with thinking of his mother yet awhile:  and his smuggling acquaintances, a rough-featured, blasphemous crew, set him as their chief, so long as he swore loudest, drank deepest, and had money at command.  He hid the money, that they should not secretly steal from him that to which he owed his bad supremacy; and his double-barrels, shotted to the muzzle, were far too formidable for any hope of getting at it by open brute force.  Nevertheless, they were “fine high-spirited” fellows those, bold, dark men, of Julian’s own kidney; who toasted in their cups each other’s crimes, and the ghost or two that ought to have been haunting them.

CHAPTER XXIII.