Three real actual positive gold and silver guineas! It was almost too much for either of them to believe, and all for a single morning’s light labour! What a perfect Eldorado of wealth and happiness seemed now to be opening out unexpectedly before them!
So much Arthur Berkeley, his own eyes glistening too with a sympathetic moisture, saw and heard before he went away in a happier mood and left them to their own domestic congratulations. But he did not see or know the reaction that came in the dead of night, after all that day’s unwonted excitement, to poor, sickening, weary, over-burdened Ernest. Even Edie never knew it all, for Ernest was careful to hide it as much as possible from her knowledge. But he knew himself, though he would not even light the candle to see it, that he had got those three glorious guineas–the guineas they had so delighted in–with something more than a morning’s labour. He had had to pay for them, not figuratively but literally, with some of his very life-blood.
CHAPTER XXV.
HARD PRESSED.
A week or two later, while ‘The Primate of Fiji’ was still running vigorously at the Ambiguities Theatre, Arthur Berkeley’s second opera, ‘The Duke of Bermondsey; or, the Bold Buccaneers of the Isle of Dogs,’ was brought out with vast success and immense exultation at the Marlborough. There is always a strong tendency to criticise a little severely the second work of a successful beginner: people like to assume a knowing air, and to murmur self-complacently that they felt sure from the beginning he couldn’t keep up permanently to his first level. But in spite of that natural tendency of the unregenerate human mind, and in spite, too, of a marked political bias on the author’s part, ‘The Duke of Bermondsey’ took the town by storm almost as completely as ‘The Primate of Fiji’ had done before it. Everybody said that though the principles of the piece were really quite atrocious, when one came to think of them seriously, yet the music and the dialogue were crisp and brisk enough to float any amount of social or economical heresy that that clever young man, Mr. Arthur Berkeley, might choose to put into one of his amusing and original operas.
The social and economical heresies, of course, were partly due to Ernest Le Breton’s insidious influence. At the same time that Berkeley was engaged in partially converting Ernest, Ernest was engaged in the counter process of partially converting Berkeley. To say the truth, the conversion was not a very difficult matter to effect; the neophyte had in him implicitly already the chief saving doctrines of the socialistic faith, or, if one must put it conversely, the germs of the disease were constitutionally implanted in his system, and only needed a little external encouragement to cring the poison out fully in the most virulent form of the complaint. The great point of ‘The Duke of Bermondsey’ consisted in the ridiculous contrast it exhibited between the wealth, dignity, and self-importance of the duke himself, and the squalid, miserable, shrinking poverty of the East-end purlieus from which he drew his enormous revenues. Ernest knew a little about the East-end from practical experience; he had gone there often with Ronald, on his rounds of mercy, and had seen with his own eyes those dens of misery which most people have only heard or read about. It was Ernest who had suggested this light satirical treatment of the great social problem, whose more serious side he himself had learnt to look at in Max Schurz’s revolutionary salon; and it was to Ernest that Arthur Berkeley owed the first hint of that famous scene where the young Countess of Coalbrookdale converses familiarly on the natural beauties of healthful labour with the chorus of intelligent colliery hands, in the most realistic of grimy costumes, from her father’s estates in Staffordshire. The stalls hardly knew whether to laugh or frown when the intelligent colliers respectfully invited the countess, in her best Ascot flounces and furbelows, to enjoy the lauded delights of healthful mine labour in propriâ personâ: but they quite recovered their good humour when the band of theatrical buccaneers, got up by the duke in Spanish costumes, with intent to deceive his lawless tenants in the East-end, came unexpectedly face to face with the genuine buccaneers of the Isle of Dogs, clothed in real costermonger caps and second-hand pilot-jackets of the marine-storedealers’ fashionable pattern. It was all only the ridiculous incongruity of our actual society represented in the very faintest shades of caricature upon the stage; but it made the incongruities more incongruous still to see them crowded together so closely in a single concentrated tableau. Unthinking people laughed uproariously at the fun and nonsense of the piece; thinking people laughed too, but not without an uncomfortable side twinge of conscientious remorse at the pity of it all. Some wise heads even observed with a shrug that when this sort of thing was applauded upon the stage, the fine old institutions of England were getting into dangerous contact with these pernicious continental socialistic theories. And no doubt those good people were really wise in their generation. ‘When Figaro came,’ Arthur Berkeley said himself to Ernest, ‘the French revolution wasn’t many paces behind on the track of the ages.’
‘Better even than the Primate, Mr. Berkeley,’ said Hilda Tregellis, as she met him in a London drawing-room a few days later. ‘What a delightful scene, that of the Countess of Coalbrookdale! You’re doing real good, I do believe, by making people think about these things more seriously, you know. As poor dear Mr. Le Breton would have said, you’ve got an ethical purpose–isn’t that the word?–underlying even your comic operas. By the way, do you ever see the Le Bretons now? Poor souls, I hear they’re doing very badly. The elder brother, Herbert Le Breton–horrid wretch!–he’s here to-night; going to marry that pretty Miss Faucit, they say; daughter of old Mr. Faucit, the candle-maker–no, not candles, soap I think it is–but it doesn’t matter twopence nowadays, does it? Well, as I was saying, you’re doing a great deal of good with characters like this Countess of Coalbrookdale. We want more mixture of classes, don’t we? more free intercourse between them; more familiarity of every sort. For my part, now, I should really very much like to know more of the inner life of the working classes.’ ‘If only he’d ask me to go to lunch,’ she thought, ‘with his dear old father, the superannuated shoemaker! so very romantic, really!’
But Arthur only smiled a sphinx-like smile, and answered lightly, ‘You would probably object to their treatment of you as much as the countess objected to the uupleasant griminess of the too-realistic coal galleries. Suppose you were to fall into the hands of a logical old radical workman, for example, who tore you to pieces, mentally speaking, with a shake or two of his big teeth, and calmly informed you that in his opinion you were nothing more than a very empty-headed, pretentious, ignorant young woman–perhaps even, after the plain-spoken vocabulary of hie kind, a regular downright minx and hussey?’
‘Charming,’ Lady Hilda answered, with perfect candour; ‘so very different from the senseless adulation of all the Hughs, and Guys, and Berties! What I do love in talking to clever men, Mr. Berkeley, is their delicious frankness and transparency. If they think one a fool, they tell one so plainly, or at least they let one see it without any reserve. Now that, you know, is really such a very delightful trait in clever people’s characters!’
‘I don’t know how you can have had the opportunity of judging, Lady Hilda,’ Arthur answered, looking at her handsome open face with a momentary glance of passing admiration–Hilda Tregellis was improving visibly as she matured–‘for no one can possibly ever have thought anything of the sort with you, I’m certain: and that I can say quite candidly, without the slightest tinge of flattery or adulation.’
‘What! YOU don’t think me a fool, Mr. Berkeley,’ cried Lady Hilda, delighted even with that very negative bit of favourable appreciation. ‘Now, that I call a real compliment, I assure you, because I know you clever people pitch your standard of intelligence so very, very high! You consider everybody fools, I’m sure, except the few people who are almost as clever as you yourselves are. However, to return to the countess: I do think there ought to be more mixture of classes in England, and somebody told me’–this was a violent effort to be literary on Hilda’s part, by way of rising to the height of the occasion–‘somebody told me that Mr. Matthew Arnold, who’s so dreadfully satirical, and cultivated, and so forth, thinks exactly the same thing, you know. Why shouldn’t the Countess of Coalbrookdale have really married the foreman of the colliers? I daresay she’d have been a great deal happier with a kind-hearted sensible man like him than with that lumbering, hunting, pheasant-shooting, horse-racing lout of a Lord Coalbrookdale, who would go to Norway on a fishing tour without her–now wouldn’t she?’
‘Very probably,’ Berkeley answered: ‘but in these matters we don’t regard happiness only,–that, you see, would be mere base, vulgar, commonplace utilitarianism:–we regard much more that grand impersonal overruling entity, that unseen code of social morals, which we commonly call the CONVENANCES. Proper people don’t take happiness into consideration at all, comparatively: they act religiously after the fashion that the CONVENANCES impose upon them.’
‘Ah, but why, Mr. Berkeley,’ Lady Hilda said, vehemently, ‘why should the whole world always take it for granted that because a girl happens to be born the daughter of people whose name’s in the peerage, she must necessarily be the slave of the proprieties, devoid of all higher or better instincts? Why should they take it for granted that she’s destitute of any appreciation for any kind of greatness except the kind that’s represented by a million and a quarter in the three per cents., or a great-great-grandfather who fought at the battle of Naseby? Why mayn’t she have a spark of originality? Why mayn’t she be as much attracted by literature, by science, by art, by… by… by beautiful music, as, say, the daughter of a lawyer, a doctor, or, or, or a country shopkeeper? What I want to know is just this, Mr. Berkeley: if people don’t believe in distinctions of birth, why on earth should they suppose that Lady Mary, or Lady Betty, or Lady Winifred, must necessarily be more banale and vulgar-minded, and common-place than plain Miss Jones, or Miss Brown, or Miss Robinson? You admit that these other girls may possibly care for higher subjects: then why on earth shouldn’t we, can you tell me?’
‘Certainly,’ Arthur Berkeley answered, looking down into Lady Hilda’s beautiful eyes after a dreamy fashion, ‘certainly there’s no inherent reason why one person shouldn’t have just as high tastes by nature as another. Everything depends, I suppose, upon inherited qualities, variously mixed, and afterwards modified by society and education.–It’s very hot here, to-night, Lady Hilda, isn’t it?’
‘Very,’ Lady Hilda echoed, taking his arm as she spoke. ‘Shall we go into the conservatory?’
‘I was just going to propose it myself,’ Berkeley said, with a faint tremor thrilling in his voice. She was a very beautiful woman, certainly, and her unfeigned appreciation of his plays and his music was undeniably very flattering to him.
‘Unless I bring him fairly to book this evening,’ Hilda thought to herself as she swept with him gracefully into the conservatory, ‘I shall have to fall back upon the red-haired hurlyburlying Scotch professor, after all–if I don’t want to end by getting into the clutches of one of those horrid Monties or Algies!’
CHAPTER XXVI.
IRRECLAIMABLE.
The occasional social articles for the ‘Morning Intelligence’ supplied Ernest with work enough for the time being to occupy part of his leisure, and income enough to keep the ship floating somehow, if not securely, at least in decent fair-weather fashion. His frequent trips with Ronald into the East-end gave him something comparatively fresh to write about, and though he was compelled to conceal his own sentiments upon many points, in order to conform to that impersonal conscience, ‘the policy of the paper,’ he was still able to deal with subjects that really interested him, and in which he fancied he might actually be doing a little good. A few days after he had taken seriously to the new occupation, good Mrs. Halliss made her appearance in the tiny sitting-room one morning, and with many apologies and much humming and hawing ventured to make a slight personal representation to wondering little Edie.
‘If you please, mum,’ she said nervously, fumbling all the while with the corner of the table cloth she was folding on the breakfast-table, ‘if I might make so bold, mum, without offence, I should like to say as me an’ John ‘as been talkin’ it hover, an’ we think now as your good gentleman ‘as so much writin’ to do, at ‘is littery work, mum, as I may make bold to call it, perhaps you wouldn’t mind, so as not to disturb ‘im with the blessed baby–not as that dear child couldn’t never disturb nobody, bless ‘er dear ‘eart, the darling, not even when she’s cryin’, she’s that sweet and gentle,–but we thought, mum, as littery gentlemen likes to ‘ave the coast clear, in the manner of speakin’, and perhaps you wouldn’t mind bein’ so good as to use the little front room upstairs, mum, for a sort o’ nursery, as I may call it, for the dear baby. It was our bedroom, that was, where John an’ me used to sleep; but we’ve been an’ putt our things into the front hattic, mum, as is very nice and comfortable in every way, so as to make room for the dear baby. An’ if you won’t take it as a liberty, mum, me an’ John ‘ud be more’n glad if you’d kindly make use of that there room for a sort of occasional nursery for the dear baby.’
Edie bit her lip hard in her momentary confusion. ‘Oh, dear, Mrs. Halliss,’ she said, almost crying at the kindly meant offer, ‘I’m afraid we can’t afford to have THREE rooms all for ourselves as things go at present. How much do you propose to charge us for the additional nursery?’
‘Charge you for it, mum,’ Mrs. Halliss echoed, almost indignantly; ‘charge our lodgers for any little hextry accommodation like the small front room upstairs, mum–now, don’t you go and say that to John, mum, I beg of you; for ‘is temper’s rather short at times, mum, thro’ boin’ asmatic and the rheumatiz, though you wouldn’t think it to look at ‘im, that you wouldn’t; an’ I’m reely afraid, mum, he might get angry if anybody was to holler ‘im anythink for a little bit of hextry accommodation like that there. Lord bless your dear ‘eart, mum, don’t you say nothink more about that, I beg of you; for if John was to ‘ear of it, he’d go off in a downright tearin’ tantrum at the bare notion. An’ about dinner, mum, you’ll ‘ave the cold mutton an’ potatoes, and a bit of biled beetroot; and I’ll just run round to the greengrocer’s this moment to order it for early dinner.’ And before Edie had time to thank her, the good woman was out of tha room again, and down in the kitchen at her daily preparations, with tears trickling slowly down both her hard red cheeks in her own motherly fashion.
So from that time forth, Ernest had the small sitting-room entirely to himself, whenever he was engaged in his literary labours, while Edie and Dot turned the front bedroom on the first floor into a neat and commodious nursery. As other work did not turn up so rapidly as might have been expected, and as Ernest grew tired after a while of writing magazine articles on ‘The Great Social Problem,’ which were invariably ‘declined with thanks’ so promptly as to lead to a well-founded suspicion that they had never even been opened by the editor, he determined to employ his spare time in the production of an important economical volume, a treatise on the ultimate ethics of a labouring community, to be entitled ‘The Final Rule of Social Right Living.’ This valuable economical work he continued to toil at for many months in the intervals of his other occupations; and when at last it was duly completed, he read it over at full length to dear little Edie, who considered it one of the most profoundly logical and convincing political treatises ever written. The various leading firms, however, to whom it was afterwards submitted with a view to publication, would appear, oddly enough, to have doubted its complete suitability to the tastes and demands of the reading public in the present century; for they invariably replied to Ernest’s inquiries that they would be happy to undertake its production for the trilling sum of one hundred guineas, payable in advance; but that they did not see their way to accepting the risk and responsibility of floating so speculative a volume on their own account. In the end, the unhappy manuscript, after many refusals, was converted into cock-boats, hats, and paper dollies for little Dot; and its various intermediate reverses need enter no further into the main thread of this history. It kept Ernest busy in the spare hours of several months, and prevented him from thinking too much of his own immediate prospects, in his dreams for the golden future of humanity; and insomuch it did actually subserve some indirectly useful function; but on the other hand it wasted a considerable quantity of valuable tenpenny foolscap, and provided him after all with one more severe disappointment, to put on top of all the others to which he was just then being subjected. Clearly, the reading public took no paying interest in political economy; or if they did, then the article practically affected by the eternal laws of supply and demand was at least not the one meted out to them from the enthusiastic Schurzian pen of Ernest Le Breton.
One afternoon, not long after Ernest and Edie had taken rooms at Mrs. Halliss’s, they were somewhat surprised at receiving the honour of a casual visit from a very unexpected and unusual quarter. Ronald was with them, talking earnestly over the prospects of the situation, when a knock came at the door, and to their great astonishment the knock was quickly followed by the entrance of Herbert. He had never been there before, and Ernest felt sure he had come now for some very definite and sufficient purpose. And so he had indeed: it was a strange one for him; but Herbert Le Breton was actually bound upon a mission of charity. We have all of us our feelings, no doubt, and Herbert Le Breton, too, in his own fashion, had his. Ernest was after all a good fellow enough at bottom, and his own brother: (a man can’t for very rospectability’s sake let his own brother go utterly to the dogs if he can possibly help it); and so Herbert had made up his mind, much against his natural inclination, to warn Ernest of the danger he incurred in having anything more to do or say with this insane, disreputable old Schurz fellow. For his own part, he hated giving advice; people never took it; and that was a deadly offence against his amour propre and a gross insult to his personal dignity; but still, in this case, for Ernest’s sake, he determined after an inward struggle to swallow his own private scruples, and make an effort to check his brother on the edge of the abyss. Not that he would come to the point at once; Herbert was a careful diplomatic agent, and he didn’t spoil his hand by displaying all his cards too openly at the outset; he would begin upon comparatively indifferent subjects, and lead round the conversation gradually to the perils and errors of pure Schurzianism. So he set out by admiring his niece’s fat arms–a remarkable stretch of kindliness on Herbert’s part, for of course other people’s babies are well known to be really the most uninteresting objects in the whole animate universe–and then he passed on by natural transitions to Ernest’s housekeeping arrangements, and to the prospects of journalism as a trade, and finally to the necessity for a journalist to consult the tastes of his reading public. ‘And by the way, Ernest,’ he said quietly at last, ‘of course after this row at Pilbury, you’ll drop the acquaintance of your very problematical German socialist.’
Edie started in surprise. ‘What? Herr Schurz?’ she said eagerly. ‘Dear simple, kindly old Herr Schurz! Oh no, Herbert, that I’m sure he won’t; Ernest will never drop HIS acquaintance, whatever happens.’
Herbert coughed drily. ‘Then there are two of them for me to contend against,’ he said to himself with an inward smile. ‘I should really hardly have expected that, now. One would have said a priori that the sound common-sense and practical regard for the dominant feelings of society, which is so justly strong in most women, would have kept HER at any rate–with her own social disabilities, too–from aiding and abetting her husband in such a piece of egregious folly’–‘I’m sorry to hear it, Mrs. Le Breton,’ he went on aloud,–he never called her by her Christian name, and Edie was somehow rather pleased that he didn’t: ‘for you know Herr Schurz is far from being a desirable acquaintance. Quite apart from his own personal worth, of course–which is a question that I for my part am not called upon to decide–he’s a snare and a stumbling-block in the eyes of society, and very likely indeed to injure Ernest’s future prospects, as he has certainly injured his career in the past. You know he’s going to be tried in a few weeks for a seditious libel and for inciting to murder the Emperor of Russia. Now, you will yourself admit, Mrs. Le Breton, that it’s an awkward thing to be mixed up with people who are tried on a criminal charge for inciting to murder. Of course, we all allow that the Czar’s a very despotic and autocratic sovereign, that his existence is an anomaly, and that the desire to blow him up is a very natural desire for every intelligent Russian to harbour privately in the solitude of his own bosom. If we were Russians ourselves, no doubt we’d try to blow him up too, if we could conveniently do so without detection. So much, every rational Englishman, who isn’t blinded by prejudice or frightened by the mere sound of words, must at once frankly acknowledge. But unfortunately, you see, the mass of Englishmen ARE blinded by prejudice, and ARE frightened by the mere sound of words. To them, blowing up a Czar is murder (though of course blowing up any number of our own black people isn’t); and inciting to blow up the Czar, or doing what seems to most Englishmen equivalent to such incitement, as for example, saying in print that the Czar’s government isn’t quite ideally perfect and ought gradually and tentatively to be abolished–why, that, I say, is a criminal offence, and is naturally punishable by a term of imprisonment. Now, is it worth while to mix oneself up with people like that, Ernest, when you can just as easily do without having anything on earth to say to them?’
Edie’s face burnt scarlet as she listened, but Ernest only answered more quietly–he never allowed anything that Herbert said to disturb his equanimity–‘We don’t think alike upon this subject, you know, Herbert; and I’m afraid the disagreement is fundamental. It doesn’t matter so much to us what the world thinks as what is abstractly right; and Edie would prefer to cling to Herr Schurz, through good report and evil report, rather than to be applauded by your mass of Englishmen for having nothing to do with inciting to murder. We know that Herr Max never did anything of the kind; that he is the gentlest and best of men; and that in Russian affairs he has always been on the side of the more merciful methods, as against those who would have meted out to the Czar the harsher measure of pure justice.’
‘Well,’ Herbert answered bravely, with a virtuous determination not to be angry at this open insult to his own opinion, but to persevere in his friendly efforts for his brother’s sake, ‘we won’t take Herr Max into consideration at all, but will look merely at the general question. The fact is, Ernest, you’ve chosen the wrong side. The environment is too strong for you; and if you set yourself up against it, it’ll crush you between the upper and the nether mill-stone. It isn’t your business to reform the world; it’s your business to live in it; and if you go on as you’re doing now, it strikes me that you’ll fail at the outset in that very necessary first particular.’
‘If I fail,’ Ernest answered with a heavy heart, ‘I can only die once; and after all every man can do no more than till to the best of his ability the niche in nature that he finds already cut out for him by circumstances.’
‘My dear Ernest,’ Herbert continued quietly, twisting himself a cigarette with placid deliberateness, as a preliminary to his departure; ‘your great mistake in life is that you WILL persist in considering the universe as a cosmos. Now the fact is, it isn’t a cosmos; it’s a chaos, and a very poor one at that.’
‘Ah, yes,’ Ernest answered gravely; ‘nobody recognises that fact more absolutely than I do; but surely it’s the duty of man to try as far as in him lies to cosmise his own particular little corner of it.’
‘In the abstract, certainly: as a race, most distinctly so; but as individuals, why, the thing’s clearly impossible. There was one man who once tried to do it, and his name was Don Quixote.’
‘There was another, I always thought,’ Ernest replied more solemnly, ‘and after his name we’ve all been taught as children to call ourselves Christians. At bottom, my ideal is only the Christian ideal.’
‘But, my dear fellow, don’t you see that the survival of the fittest must succeed in elbowing your ideal, for the present at least, out of existence? Look here, Ernest, you’re going the wrong way to work altogether for your own happiness and comfort. It doesn’t matter to me, of course; you can do as you like with yourself, and I oughtn’t to interfere with you; but I do it because I’m your brother, and because I take a certain amount of interest in you accordingly. Now, I quite grant with you that the world’s in a very unjust social condition at present. I’m not a fool, and I can’t help seeing that wealth is very badly distributed, and that happiness is very unequally meted. But I don’t feel called upon to make myself the martyr of the cause of readjustment for all that. If I were a working man, I should take up the side that you’re taking up now; I should have everything to gain, and nothing to lose by it. But your mistake is just this, that when you might identify your own interests with the side of the “haves,” as I do, you go out of your way to identify them with the side of the “have-nots,” out of pure idealistic Utopian philanthropy. You belong by birth to the small and intrinsically weak minority of persons specially gifted by nature and by fortune; and why do you lay yourself out with all your might to hound on the mass of your inferiors till they trample down and destroy whatever gives any special importance, interest, or value to intellectual superiority, vigour of character, political knowledge, or even wealth? I can understand that the others should wish to do this; I can understand that they will inevitably do it in the long run; but why on earth do you, of all men, want to help them in pulling down a platform on which you yourself might, if you chose, stand well above their heads and shoulders?’
‘Because I feel the platform’s an unjust one,’ Ernest answered, warmly.
‘An excellent answer for them,’ Herbert chimed in, in his coldest and calmest tone, ‘but a very insufficient one for you. The injustice, if any, tells all in your own favour. As long as the mob doesn’t rise up and tear the platform down (as it will one day), why on earth should you be more anxious about it than they are?’
‘Because, Herbert, if there must be injustice, I would rather suffer it than do it.’
‘Well, go your own way,’ Herbert answered, with a calm smile of superior wisdom; ‘go your own way and let it land you where it will. For my part, I back the environment. But it’s no business of mine; I have done my best to warn you. Liberavi animam meam. You won’t take my advice, and I must leave you to your own devices.’ And with just a touch of the hand to Edie, and a careless nod to his two brothers, he sauntered out of the room without another word. ‘As usual,’ he thought to himself as he walked down the stairs, ‘I go out of my way to give good advice to a fellow-creature, and I get only the black ingratitude of a snubbing in return. This is really almost enough to make even me turn utterly and completely selfish!’
‘I wonder, Ernest,’ said Ronald, looking up as Herbert shut the door gently behind him, ‘how you and I ever came to have such a brother as Herbert!’
‘I think it’s easy enough to understand, Ronald, on plain hereditary principles.’
Ronald sighed. ‘I see what you mean,’ he said; ‘it’s poor mother’s strain–the Whitaker strain–coming out in him.’
‘I often fancy, Ronald, I can see the same two strains in varying intensity, running through all three of us alike. In Herbert the Whitaker strain is uppermost, and the Le Breton comparatively in abeyance; in me, they’re both more or less blended; in you, the Le Breton strain comes out almost unadulterated. Yet even Herbert has more of a Le Breton in him than one might imagine, for he’s with us intellectually; it’s the emotional side only that’s wanting to him. Even when members of a family are externally very much unlike one another in the mere surface features of their characters, I believe you can generally see the family likeness underlying it for all that.’
‘Only you must know how to analyse the character to see it,’ said Edie. ‘I don’t think it ever struck me before that there was anything in common between you and Herbert, Ernest, and yet now you point it out I believe there really is something after all. I’m sorry you told me, for I can’t bear to think that you’re like Herbert.’
‘Oh, no,’ Ronald put in hastily; ‘it isn’t Ernest who has something in him like Herbert; it’s Herbert who has something in him like Ernest. There’s a great deal of difference between the one thing and the other. Besides, he hasn’t got enough of it, Edie, and Ernest has.’
CHAPTER XXVII.
RONALD COMES OF AGE.
‘Strange,’ Ronald Le Breton thought to himself, as he walked along the Embankment between Westminster and Waterloo, some weeks later–the day of Herr Max’s trial,–‘I had a sort of impulse to come down here alone this afternoon: I felt as if there was an unseen Hand somehow impelling me. Depend upon it, one doesn’t have instincts of that sort utterly for nothing. The Finger that guides us guides us always aright for its own wise and unfathomable purposes. What a blessing and a comfort it is to feel that one’s steps are continually directed from above, and that even an afternoon stroll through the great dreary town is appointed to us for some fit and sufficient reason! Look at that poor girl over there now, at the edge of the Embankment! I wonder what on earth she can have come here for. Why…how pale and excited she looks. What’s she going so near the edge for? Gracious heavens! it can’t be…yes…it is… no, no, but still it must be…that’s what the Finger was guiding me here for this afternoon. There’s no denying it. The poor creature’s tempted to destroy herself. My instinct tells me so at once, and it never tells me wrong. Oh, Inscrutable Wisdom, help me, help me: give me light to act rightly! I must go up this very moment and speak to her!’
The girl was walking moodily along the edge of the bank, and looking in a dreamy fashion over the parapet into the sullen fast-flowing brown water below. An eye less keen than Ronald’s might have seen in a moment, from her harassed weary face and her quick glance to right and left after the disappearing policeman, that she was turning over in her own mind something more desperate than any common everyday venture. Ronald stepped up to her hastily, and, firm in his conviction that the Finger was guiding him aright, spoke out at once with boldness on the mere strength of his rapid instinctive conjecture.
‘Stop, stop,’ he said, laying his hand gently on her shoulder: ‘not for a moment, I beg of you, not for a moment. Not till you’ve at least told me what is your trouble.’
Selah turned round sharply and looked up in his face with a vague feeling of indefinable wonder. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked, in a husky voice. ‘Don’t do what? How do you know I was going to do anything?’
‘You were going to throw yourself into the river,’Ronald answered confidently; ‘or at least you were debating about it in your own soul. I know you were, because a sure Guide tells me so.’
Selah’s lip curled a little at the sound of that familiar language. ‘And suppose I was,’ she replied, defiantly, in her reckless fashion; ‘suppose I was: what’s that to you or anybody, I should like to know? Are you your brother’s keeper, as your own Bible puts it? Well, yes, then, perhaps I WAS going to drown myself: and if I choose, as soon as your back’s turned, I shall go and do it still; so there; and that’s all I have to say about it.’
Ronald turned his face towards her with an expression of the intensest interest, but before he could put in a single word, Selah interrupted him.
‘I know what you’re going to say,’ she went on, looking up at him rebelliously. ‘I know what you’re going to say every bit as well as if you’d said it. You’re one of these city missionary sort of people, you are; and you’re going to tell me it’s awfully wicked of me to try and destroy myself, and ain’t I afraid of a terrible hereafter! Ugh! I hate and detest all that mummery.’
Ronald looked down upon her in return with a sort of silent wondering pity. ‘Awfully wicked,’ he said slowly, ‘awfully wicked! How meaningless! How incomprehensible! Awfully wicked to be friendless, or poor, or wretched, or unhappy! Awfully wicked to be driven by despair, or by heartlessness, to such a pitch of misery or frenzy that you want to fling yourself wildly into the river, only to be out of it all, anywhere, in a minute! Why you poor, unhappy girl, how on earth can you possibly help it?’
There was something in the tone of his earnest voice that melted for a moment even Selah Briggs’s pride and vehemence. It was very impertinent of him to try and interfere with her purely personal business, no doubt, but he seemed to do so in a genuinely kindly rather than in a fussy interfering spirit. At any rate he didn’t begin by talking to her that horrid cant about the attempt to commit suicide being so extremely wicked! If he had done that, Selah would have felt it was not only an unwarrantable intrusion upon her liberty of action, but a grotesque insult to her natural intelligence as well.
‘I’ve a right to drown myself if I choose,’ she faltered out, leaning faintly as she spoke against the parapet, ‘and nobody else has any possible right to hinder or prevent me. If you people make laws against my rights in that matter, I shall set your laws aside whenever and wherever it happens to suit my personal convenience.’
‘Exactly so,’ Ronald answered, in the same tone of gentle and acquiescent persuasion. ‘I quite agree with you. It’s as clear as daylight that every individual human being has a perfect right to put an end to his own life whenever it becomes irksome or unpleasant to him; and nobody else has any right whatever to interfere with him. The prohibitions that law puts upon our freedom in that respect are only of a piece with the other absurd restrictions of our existing unchristian legislation–as opposed to the spirit of the Word as the old rule that made us bury a suicide at four cross roads with a hideously barbarous and brutal ceremonial. They’re all mere temporary survivals from a primitive paganism: the truth shall make us free. But though we mayn’t rightly interfere, we may surely inquire in a brotherly spirit of interest, whether it isn’t possible for us to make life less irksome for those who, unhappily, want to get rid of it. After all, the causes of our discontent are often quite removable. Tell me, at least, what yours are, and let me see whether I’m able to do anything towards removing them.’
Selah hung back a little sullenly. This was a wonderful mixture of tongues that the strange young man was talking in! When he spoke about the right and wrong of suicide, ethically considered, it might have been Herbert Walters himself who was addressing her: when he glided off sideways to the truth and the Word, it might have been her Primitive Methodist friends at Hastings, in full meeting assembled. And, by the way, he reminded her strangely, somehow, of Herbert Walters! What manner of man could he be, she wondered, and what strange sort of new Gospel was this that he was preaching to her?
‘How do I know who you are?’ she asked him, carelessly. ‘How do I know what you want to know my story for? Perhaps you’re only trying to get something out of me.’
‘Trust me,’ Ronald said simply. ‘By faith we live, you know. Only trust me.’
Selah answered nothing.
‘Come over here to the bench by the garden,’ Ronald went on earnestly. ‘We can talk there more at our leisure. I don’t like to see you leaning so close to the parapet. It’s a temptation; I know it’s a temptation.’
Seiah looked at him again inquiringly. She had never before met anybody so curious, she fancied. ‘Aren’t you afraid of being seen sitting with me like this,’ she said, ‘on the Embankment benches? Some of your fine friends might come by and wonder who on earth you had got here with you.’ And, indeed, Selah’s dress had grown vory shabby and poor-looking during a long and often fruitless search for casual work or employment in London.
But Ronald only surveyed her gently from head to foot with a quiet smile, and answered softly, ‘Oh, no; there’s no reason on earth why we shouldn’t sit down and talk together; and even if there were, my friends all know me far too well by this time to be surprised at anything I may do, when the Hand guides me. If you will only sit down and tell me your story, I should like to see whether I could possibly do anything to help you.’
Selah let him lead her in his gentle half-womanly fashion to the bench, and sat down beside him mechanically. Still, she made no attempt to begin her pitiful story. Ronald suspected for a second some special cause for her embarrassment, and ventured to suggest a possible way out of it. ‘Perhaps,’ he said timidly, ‘you would rather speak to some older and more fatherly man about it, or to some kind lady. If so, I have many good friends in London who would listen to you with as much interest and attention as I should.’
The old spirit flared up in Selah for a second, as she answered quickly, ‘No, no, sir, it’s nothing of that sort. I can tell YOU as well as I can tell anybody. If I’ve been unfortunate, it’s been through no fault of my own, thank goodness, but only through the hard-heartedness and unkindness of other people. I’d rather speak to you than to anyone else, because I feel somehow–why, I don’t know–as if you had something or other really good in you.’
‘I beg your pardon,’ Ronald said hastily, ‘for even suggesting it but you see, I often have to meet a great many people who’ve been unhappy through a great many different causes, and that leads one occasionally for a time into mistaken inferences. Let me hear all your history, please, and I firmly believe, through the aid that never forsakes us, I shall be able to do something or other to help you in your difficulties.’
Thus adjured, Selah began and told her whole unhappy history through, without pause or break, into Ronald’s quietly sympathetic ear. She told him quite frankly and fully how she had picked up the acquaintance of a young Mr. Walters from Oxford at Hastings: how this Mr. Walters had led her to believe he would marry her: how she had left her home hurriedly, under the belief that he would be induced to keep his promise: how he had thrown her over to her own devices: and how she had ever since been trying to pick up a precarious livelihood for herself in stray ways as a sempstress, work for which she wag naturally very ill-fitted, and for which she had no introductions. She slurred over nothing on either side of the story; and especially she did not forget to describe the full measure of her troubles and trials from her Methodist friends at Hastings. Ronald shook his head sympathetically at this stage of the story. ‘Ah, I know, I know,’ he muttered, half under his breath; ‘nasty pious people! Very well meaning, very devout, very earnest, one may be sure of it–but oh! what terrible soul-killing people to live among! I can understand all about it, for I’ve met them often–Sabbath-keeping folks; preaching and praying folks; worrying, bothering, fussy-religious folks: formalists, Pharisees, mint-anise and-cummin Christians: awfully anxious about your soul, and so forth, and doing their very best to make you as miserable all the time as a slave at the torture! I don’t wonder you ran away from them.’
‘And I wasn’t really going to drown myself, you know, when you spoke to me.’ Selah said, quite apologetically. ‘I was only just looking over into the beautiful brown water, and thinking how delicious it would be to fling oneself in there, and be carried off down to the sea, and rolled about for ever into pebbles on the shingle, and there would be an end of one altogether–oh, how lovely!’
‘Very natural,’ Ronald answered calmly. ‘Very natural. Of course it would. I’ve often thought the same thing myself. Still, one oughtn’t, if possible, to give way to these impulses: one ought to do all that’s in one’s power to prevent such a miserable termination to one’s divinely allotted existence. After all, it is His will, you see, that we should be happy.’
When Selah had quite finished all her story, Ronald began drawing circles in the road with the end of his stick, and perpending within himself what had better be done about it, now that all was told him. ‘No work,’ he said, half to himself; ‘no money; no food. Why, why, I suppose you must be hungry.’
Selah nodded assent.
‘Will you allow me to offer you a little lunch?’ he asked, hesitatingly, with something of Herbert’s stately politeness. Even in this last extremity, Ronald felt instinctively what was due to Selah Briggs’s natural sentiments of pride and delicacy. He must speak to her deferentially as if she were a lady, not give her alms as if she were a beggar.
Then for the first time that day Selah burst suddenly into tears. ‘Oh, sir,’ she said, sobbing, ‘you are very kind to me.’
Ronald waited a moment or two till her eyes were dry, and then took her across the gardens and into Gatti’s. Any other man might have chosen some other place of entertainment under the circumstances, but Ronald, in his perfect simplicity of heart, looked only for the first shop where he could get Selah the food she needed. He ordered something hot hastily, and, when it came, though he had had his own lunch already, he played a little with a knife and fork himself for show’s sake, in order not to seem as if he were merely looking on while Selah was eating. These little touches of feeling were not lost upon Selah: she noticed them at once, and recognised in what Ernest would have called her aboriginal unregenerate vocabulary that she was dealing with a true gentleman.
‘Walters,’ Ronald said, pausing a second with a bit of chop poised lightly on the end of his fork; ‘let me see–Walters. I don’t know any man of that name, myself, but I’ve had two brothers at Oxford, and perhaps one of them could tell me who he is. Walters–Walters. You said your own name was Miss Briggs, I think, didn’t you? My name’s Ronald Le Breton.’
‘How curious,’ Selah said, colouring up. ‘I’m sure I remember Mr. Walters talking more than once to me about his brother Ronald.’
‘Indeed,’ Ronald answered, without even a passing tinge of suspicion. That any man should give a false name to other people with intent to deceive was a thing that would never have entered into his simple head–far less that his own brother Herbert should be guilty of such a piece of disgraceful meanness.
‘I think,’ Ronald went on, as soon as Selah had finished her lunch, ‘you’d better come with me back to my mother’s house for the present. I suppose, now you’ve talked it over a little, you won’t think of throwing yourself into the river any more for to-day. You’ll postpone your intention for the present, won’t you? Adjourn it sine die till we can see what can be done for you.’
Selah smiled faintly. Even with the slight fresh spring of hope that this chance rencontre had roused anew within her, it seemed rather absurd and childish of her to have meditated suicide only an hour ago. Besides, she had eaten and drunk since then, and the profoundest philosophers have always frankly admitted that the pessimistic side of human nature is greatly mitigated after a good dinner.
Ronald called a hansom, and drove up rapidly to Epsilon Terrace. When he got there, he took Selah into the little back breakfast room, regardless of the proprieties, and began once more to consider the prospects of the future.
‘Is Lady Le Breton in?’ he asked the servant: and Selah noticed with surprise and wonder that this strange young man’s mother was actually ‘a lady of title,’ as she called it to herself in her curious ordinary language.
‘No, sir,’ the girl answered; ‘she have been gone out about an hour.’
‘Then I must leave you here while I go out and get you lodgings for the present,’ Ronald said, quietly; ‘you won’t object to my doing that, of course: you can easily pay me back from your salary as soon as we succeed in finding you some suitable occupation. Let me see, where can I put you for the next fortnight? Naturally you wouldn’t like to live with religious people, would you?’
‘I hate them,’ Selah answered vigorously.
‘Of course, of course,’ Ronald went on, as if to himself. ‘Perfectly natural. She hates them! So should I if I’d been bothered and worried out of my life by them in the way she has. I hate them myself–that kind: or, rather, it’s wrong to say that of them, poor creatures, for they mean well, they really mean well at bottom, in their blundering, formal, pettifogging way. They think they can take the kingdom of Heaven, not by storm, but by petty compliances, like servile servants who have to deal with a capricious, exacting master. Poor souls, they know no better. They measure the universe by the reflection in their muddy mill-pond. Nasty pious people is what I always call them; nasty pious people: little narrow souls, trying hard to be Christians after their lights, and only attaining, after all, to a sort of second-hand diluted Judaism, a religion of cup-washing, and phylacteries, and new moons, and sabbaths, and daily sacrifices. However, that’s neither here nor there. I won’t hand you over, Miss Briggs, to any of those poor benighted people. No, nor to any religious people at all. It wouldn’t suit you: you want to be well out of it. I know the very place for you. There are the Baumanns: they’d be glad to let a room: Baumann’s a German refugee, and a friend of Ernest’s: a good man, but a secularist. THEY wouldn’t bother you with any religion: poor things, they haven’t got any. Mrs. Baumann’s an excellent woman–educated, too; no objection at all in any way to the Baumanns. They’re people I like and respect immensely–every good quality they have; and I’m often grieved to think such excellent people should be deprived of the comfort and pleasure of believing. But, then, so’s my dear brother Ernest; and you know, they’re none the worse for it, apparently, any of them: indeed, I don’t know that there’s anybody with whom I can talk more sympathetically on spiritual matters than dear Ernest. Depend upon it, most of the most spiritually-minded people nowadays are outside all the churches altogether.’
Selah listened in blank amazement to this singular avowal of heterodox opinion from an obviously religious person. What Ronald Le Breton could be she couldn’t imagine; and she thought with an inward smile of the very different way in which her friends at Hastings would have discussed the spiritual character of a wicked secularist.
Just at that moment a latch-key turned lightly in the street door, and two sets of footsteps came down the passage to Lady Le Breton’s little back breakfast-room. One set turned up the staircase, the other halted for a second at the breakfast-room doorway. Then the door opened gently, and Herbert Le Breton and Selah Briggs stood face to face again in blank astonishment.
There was a moment’s pause, as Selah rose with burning cheeks from the chair where she was sitting; and neither spoke a word as they looked with eyes of mutual suspicion and dislike into each other’s faces. At last Herbert Le Breton turned with some acerbity to his brother Ronald, and asked in a voice of affected contempt, ‘Who is this woman?’
‘This LADY’S name is Miss Briggs,’ Ronald answered, pointedly, but, of course, quite innocently.
‘I needn’t ask you who this man is,’ Selah said, with bitter emphasis. ‘It’s Herbert Walters.’
A horrible light burst in upon Ronald instantaneously as she uttered the name; but he could not believe it; he would not believe it: it was too terrible, too incredible. ‘No, no,’ he said falteringly, turning to Selah; ‘you must be mistaken. This is not Mr. Walters. This is my brother, Herbert Le Breton.’
Selah gazed into Herbert’s slinking eyes with a concentrated expression of scorn and disgust. ‘Then he gave me a false name,’ she said, slowly, fronting him like a tigress. ‘He gave me a false name, it seems, from the very beginning. All through, the false wretch, all through, he actually meant to deceive me. He laid his vile scheme for it beforehand. I never wish to see you again, you miserable cur, Herbert Le Breton, if that’s your real name at last. I never wish to see you again: but I’m glad I’ve done it now by accident, if it were only to inflict upon you the humiliation of knowing that I have measured the utmost depth of your infamy! You mean, common, false scoundrel, I have measured to the bottom the depth of your infamy!’
‘Oh, don’t,’ Ronald said imploringly, laying his hand upon her arm. ‘He deserves it, no doubt; but don’t glory over his humiliation.’ He had no need to ask whether she spoke the truth; his brother’s livid and scarlet face was evidence enough against him.
Herbert, however, answered nothing. He merely turned angrily to Ronald. ‘I won’t bandy words,’ he said constrainedly in his coldest tone, ‘with this infamous woman whom you have brought here on purpose to insult me; but I must request you to ask her to leave the house immediately. Your mother’s home is no place to which to bring people of such a character.’
As he spoke, the door opened again, and Lady Le Breton, attracted by the sound of angry voices, entered unexpectedly. ‘What does all this riot mean, Herbert?’ she asked, imperiously. ‘Who on earth is this young woman that Ronald has brought into my own house, actually without my permission?’
Herbert whispered a few words quietly into her ear, and then left the room hurriedly with a stiff and formal bow to his brother Ronald. Lady Le Breton turned round to the culprit severely.
‘Disgraceful, Ronald!’ she cried in her sternest and most angry voice; ‘perfectly disgraceful! You aid and abet this wretched creature–whose object is only to extort money by false pretences out of your brother Herbert–you aid and abet her in her abominable stratagems, and you even venture to introduce her clandestinely into my own breakfast-room. I wonder you’re not ashamed of yourself. What on earth can you mean by such extraordinary, such unChristian conduct? Go to your own room this moment, sir, and ask this young woman to leave the house immediately.’
‘I shall go without being asked,’ Selah said, proudly, her big eyes flashing defiance haughtily into Lady Le Breton’s. ‘I don’t know who you all may be, or what this gentleman who brought me here may have to do with you: but if you are in any way connected with that wretch Herbert Le Breton, who called himself Herbert Walters for the sake of deceiving me, I don’t want to have anything further to say to any of the whole pack of you. Please stand out of my way,’ she went on to Ronald, ‘and I shall have done with you all together this very instant. I wish to God I had never seen a single one of you.’
‘No, no, not just yet, please,’ Ronald put in hastily. ‘You mustn’t go just yet, I implore you, I beg of you, till I have explained to my mother, before you, how this all happened; and then, when you go, I shall go with you. Though I have the misfortune to be the brother of the man who gave you a false name in order to deceive you, I trust you will still allow me to help you as far as I am able, and to take you to my German friends of whom I spoke to you.’
‘Ronald,’ Lady Le Breton cried, in her most commanding tone, ‘you must have taken leave of your senses. How dare you keep this person a moment longer in my house against my wish, when even she herself is anxious to quit it? Let her go at once, let her go at once, sir.’
‘No, mother,’ Ronald answered firmly. ‘We are commanded in the Word to obey our parents in all things, “in the Lord.” I think you’ve forgotten that proviso, mother, “in the Lord.” Now, mother, I will tell you all about it.’ And then, in a rapid sketch, Ronald, with his back planted solidly against the door, told his mother briefly all he knew about Selah Briggs, how he had found her, how he had brought her home not knowing who she was, and how she had recognised Herbert as her unfaithful lover. Lady Le Breton, when she saw that escape was practically impossible, flung herself back in an easy-chair, where she swayed herself backward and forward gently all the while, without once lifting her eyes towards Ronald, and sighed impatiently from time to time audibly, as if the story merely bored her. As for poor Selah, she stood upright in front of Ronald without a word, looking neither to the right nor to the left, and waiting eagerly for the story to be finished.
When Ronald had said his say, Lady Le Breton looked up at last and said simply, with a pretended yawn, ‘Now, Ronald, will you go to your own room?’
‘I will not,’ Ronald answered, in a soft whisper. ‘I will go with this lady to the rooms of which I have spoken to her.’
‘Then,’ Lady Le Breton said coldly, ‘you shall not return here. It seems I’m to lose all my children, one after another, by their extraordinary rebelliousness!’
‘By your own act–yes,’ Ronald answered, very calmly. ‘You forgot that last Thursday was my birthday, I daresay, mother; but I didn’t forget it; it was; and I came of age then. I’m my own master now. I’ve stopped here as long as I could, mother, because of the commandment: but I can’t stop here any longer. I shall go to Ernest’s for to-night as soon as I’ve got rooms for this lady.’
‘Good evening,’ Lady Le Breton said, bowing frigidly, without another word.
‘Good evening, mother,’ Ronald replied, in his natural voice. ‘Miss Briggs, will you come with me? I’m very sorry that this unhappy scene should have been inflicted upon you against my will; but I hope and pray that you won’t have lost all confidence in my wish to help you, in spite of these unfortunate accidents.’
Selah followed him blindly, in a dazzled fashion, out on to the flagstones of Epsilon Terrace.
‘Dear me, dear me,’ moaned Lady Le Breton, sinking back vacantly once more, with an air of resignation after her efforts, into the easy-chair: ‘was there ever a mother so plagued and burdened with unnatural and undutiful sons as I am? If it weren’t for dear Herbert, I’m sure I don’t know what I should ever do between them. Ronald, too, who always pretended to be so very, very religious! To think that he should go and uphold the word of a miserable, abandoned, improper adventuress against his own brother Herbert! Atrocious, perfectly atrocious! Where on earth he can have picked up such a woman I’m positively at a loss to imagine. But it’s exactly like his poor dear father: I remember once when we were stationed at Moozuffernugger, in the North-West Provinces, with the 14th Bengal, poor Owen absolutely insisted on taking up the case of some Eurasian waman, who pretended she’d been badly treated by young Walker of our regiment! I call it quite improper–almost unseemly–to meddle in the affairs of such people. I daresay Herbert has had something or other to say to this horrid girl; young men will be young men, and in the army we know how to make allowances for that sort of thing: but that Ronald should positively think of bringing such a person into my breakfast-room is not to be heard of. Ronald’s a pure Le Breton–that’s undeniable, thank goodness; not a single one of the good Whitaker points to be found in all his nature. However, poor dear Sir Owen, in spite of all his nonsense, was at least an officer and a gentleman; whereas the nonsense these boys have picked up at Oxford and among their German refugee people is both irreligious, and, I may even say, indecent, or, to put it in the mildest way, indecorous. I wish with all my heart I’d never sent them to Oxford. I’ve always thought that if only Ernest had gone in for a direct commission, he’d soon have got all that absurd revolutionary rubbish knocked out of him in a mess-room! But it’s a great comfort to me to think I have one real blessing in dear Herbert, who’s just such a son as any mother might well be thoroughly proud of in every way!’
While Lady Le Breton was thus communing with herself in the breakfast-room, and while Herbert was trying to patch up a hollow truce with his own much-bruised self-respect in his own bedroom, Ronald was taking poor dazed and wearied Selah round to the refuge of the Baumanns’ hospitable roof. As soon as that matter was temporarily arranged to the mutual satisfaction of all the parties concerned, Ronald walked over alone to Ernest’s little lodgings at Holloway. He would sleep there that night, and send round a letter to Amelia, the housemaid, in the morning, asking her to pack up his things and forward them at once to Mrs. Halliss’s. For himself, he did not propose, unless circumstances compelled it, again to enter his mother’s rooms, except by her own express invitation. After all, he thought, even his little income, if clubbed with Edie and Ernest’s, would probably help them all to live now in tolerable comfort.
So he told Edie all his story, and Edie listened to it with an approving smile. ‘I think, dear Ronald,’ she said, taking his hand in hers, ‘you did quite right–quite as Ernest himself would have done under the circumstances.’
‘Where’s Ernest?’ asked Ronald, half smiling at that naive wifely standard of right conduct.
‘Gone with Mr. Berkeley to the trial,’ Edie answered.
‘The trial! What trial?’
‘Oh, don’t you know? Herr Max’s. They’re trying him to-day for littering a seditious libel and inciting to murder the chief of the Third Section at St. Petersburg.’
‘But he said nothing at all,’ Ronald cried in astonishment. ‘I read the article myself. He said nothing that any Englishman mightn’t have said under the same circumstances. Why, I could have written the libel, as they call it, myself, even, and I’m not much of a politician either! They can’t ever be trying him in a country like England for anything so ridiculously little as that!’
‘But they are,’ Edie answered quietly; ‘and dear Ernest’s dreadfully afraid the verdict will go against him.’
‘Nonsense,’ Ronald answered with natural confidence. ‘No English jury would ever convict a man for speaking up like that against an odious and abominable tyranny.’
Very late in the afternoon, Ernest and Berkeley returned to the lodgings. Ernest’s face was white with excitement, and his lips were trembling violently with suppressed emotion. His eyes were red and swollen. Edie hardly needed to ask in a breathless whisper of Arthur Berkeley, ‘What verdict?’
‘Guilty,’ Arthur Berkeley answered with a look of unfeigned horror and indignation. He had learnt by this time quite to take the communistic view of such questions.
‘Guilty,’ Ronald cried, jumping up from his chair in astonishment. ‘Impossible! And what sentence?’
‘Twelve months’ hard labour,’ Berkeley answered, slowly and remorsefully.
‘An atrocious sentence!’ Ronald exclaimed, turning red with excitement. ‘An abominable sentence! A most malignant and vindictive sentence! Who was the judge, Arthur?’
‘Bassenthwaite,’ Berkeley replied half under his breath.
‘And may the Lord have mercy upon his soul!’ said Ronald solemnly,
But Ernest never said a single word. He only sat down and ate his supper in silence, like one stunned and dazzled. He didn’t even notice Ronald’s coming. And Edie knew by his quick breath and his face alternately flushed and pallid that there would be another crisis in his gathering complaint before the next morning.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
TELL IT NOT IN OATH.
As they sat silent in that little sitting-room after supper, a double knock at the door suddenly announced the arrival of a telegram for Ernest. He opened it with trembling lingers. It was from Lancaster:–‘Come down to the office at once. Schurz has been sentenced to a year’s imprisonment, and we want a leader about him for to-morrow.’ The telegram roused Ernest at once from his stupefied lethargy. Here was a chance at last of doing something for Max Schurz and for the cause of freedom! Here was a chance of waking up all England to a sense of the horrible crime it had just committed through the voice of its duly accredited judicial mouthpiece! The country was trembling on the brink of an abyss, and he, Ernest Le Breton, might just be in time to save it. The Home Secretary must be compelled by the unanimous clamour of thirty millions of free working people to redress the gross injustice of the law in sending Max Sohurz, the greatest, noblest, and purest-minded of mankind, to a common felon’s prison! Nothing else on earth could have moved Ernest, jaded and dispirited as he was at that moment, to the painful exertion of writing a newspaper leader after the day’s fatigues and excitements, except the thought that by doing so he might not only blot out this national disgrace, as he considered it, but might also help to release the martyr of the people’s rights from his incredible, unspeakable punishment. Flushed and feverish though he was, he rose straight up from the table, handed the telegram to Edie without a word, and started off alone to hail a hansom cab and drive down immediately to the office. Arthur Berkeley, fearful of what might happen to him in his present excited state, stole out after him quietly, and followed him unperceived in another hansom at a little distance.
When Ernest got to the ‘Morning Intelligence’ buildings, he was shown up at once into the editorial room. He expected to find Mr. Lancaster at the same white heat of indignation as himself; but to his immense surprise he actually found him in the usual sleepy languid condition of apathetic impartiality. ‘I wired for you, Le Breton,’ the impassive editor said calmly, ‘because I understand you know all about this man Schurz, who has just got his twelve months’ imprisonment this evening. I suppose, of course, you’ve heard already all about it.’
‘I’ve been at the trial all day,’ Ernest answered, ‘and myself heard the verdict and sentence.’
‘Good,’ Mr. Lancaster said, with a dreamy touch of approval in his tone. ‘That’s good journalism, certainly, and very smart of you. Helps you to give local colour and realistic touches to the matter. But you ought to have called in here to see me immediately. We shall have a regular reporter’s report of the trial, of course; but reporters’ reports are fearfully and wonderfully lifeless. If you like, besides the leader, you might work up a striking headed article on the Scene in Court. This is an important case, and we want something more about it than mere writing, you know; a little about the man himself and his personal history, which Berkeley tells me you’re well acquainted with. He’s written something called “Gold and the Proletariate,” or whatever it is; just tell our readers all about it. As to the leader, say what you like in it–of course I shall look over the proof, and tone it down a bit to suit the taste of our public–we appeal mainly to the mercantile middle class, I need hardly say; but you know the general policy of the paper, and you can just write what you think best, subject to subsequent editorial revision. Get to work at once, please, as the articles are wanted immediately, and send down slips as fast as they’re written to the printers.’
Ernest could hardly contain his surprise at Mr. Lancaster’s calmness under such unheard-of circumstances, when the whole laborious fabric of British liberties was tottering visibly to its base–but he wisely concluded to himself that the editor had to see articles written about every possible subject every evening–from a European convulsion to a fire at a theatre,–and that use must have made it in him a property of easiness. When a man’s obliged to work himself up perpetually into a state of artificial excitement about every railway accident, explosion, shipwreck, earthquake, or volcanic eruption, in Europe, Asia, Africa, America, and the islands of the Pacific Ocean, why then, Ernest charitably said to himself, his sympathies must naturally end by getting a trifle callous, especially when he’s such a very apathetic person to start with as this laconic editorial Lancaster. So he turned into the little bare box devoted to his temporary use, and began writing with perfectly unexampled and extraordinary rapidity at his leader and his article about the injured and martyred apostle of the slighted communistic religion.
It was only a few months since Ernest had, with vast toil and forethought, spun slowly out his maiden newspaper article on the Italian organ-boy, and now he found himself, to his own immense surprise, covering sheet after sheet of paper in feverish haste with a long account of Max Schurz’s splendid life and labours, and with a really fervid and eloquent appeal to the English people not to suffer such a man as he to go helplessly and hopelessly to an English prison, at the bare bidding of a foreign despot. He never stopped for one moment to take thought, or to correct what he had written; in the excitement of the moment his pen travelled along over the paper as if inspired, and he found the words and thoughts thronging his brain almost faster than his lagging hand could suffice to give them visible embodiment. As each page was thrown off hurriedly, he sent it down, still pale and wet, to the printers in the office; and before two o’clock in the morning, he had full proofs of all he had written sent up to him for final correction. It was a stirring and vigorous leader, he felt quite certain himself as he read it over; and he thought with a swelling breast that it would appear next day, with all the impersonal authority of the ‘Morning Intelligence’ stamped upon its face, at ten thousand English breakfast tables, where it might rouse the people in their millions to protest sternly before it was too late against this horrid violation of our cherished and boasted national hospitality.
Meanwhile, Arthur Berkeley had stopped at the office, and run in hastily for five minutes’ talk with the terrible editor. ‘Don’t say anything to shock Le Breton, I beg of you, Lancaster,’ he said, ‘about this poor man Schurz who has just been sent for a year to prison. It’s a very hard case, and I’m awfully sorry for the man myself, though that’s neither here nor there. I can see from your face that you, for your part, don’t sympathise with him; but at any rate, don’t say anything about it to hurt Le Breton’s feelings. He’s in a dreadfully feverish and excited condition this evening; Max Schurz has always been to him almost like a father, and he naturally takes his sentence very bitterly to heart. To tell you the truth, I regret it a great deal myself, I know a little of Schurz, through Le Breton, and I know what a well-meaning, ardent, enthusiastic person he really is, and how much good actually underlies all his chaotic socialistic notions. But at any rate, I do beg of you, don’t say anything to further excite and hurt poor Le Breton.’
‘Certainly not,’ the editor answered, smoothing his large hands softly one over the other. ‘Certainly not; though I confess, as a practical man, I don’t sympathise in the least with this preposterous German refugee fellow. So far as I can learn, he’s been at the bottom of half the revolutionary and insurrectionary movements of the last twenty years–a regular out-and-out professional socialistic incendiary.’
‘You wouldn’t say so,’ Berkeley replied quietly, ‘if you’d seen more of him, Lancaster.’ But being a man of the world, and having come mainly on Ernest’s account, he didn’t care to press the abstract question of Herr Max’s political sincerity any further.
‘Well,’ the editor went on, a little testily, ‘be that as it may, I won’t discuss the subject with your friend Le Breton, who’s really a nice, enthusiastic young fellow, I think, as far as I’ve seen him. I’ll simply let him write to-night whatever he pleases, and make the necessary alterations in proof afterwards, without talking it over with him personally at all. That’ll avoid any needless discussion and ruffling of his supersensitive communistic feelings. Poor fellow, he looks very ill indeed to-night. I’m really extremely sorry for him.’
‘When will he be finished?’ asked Arthur.
‘At two,’ the editor answered.
‘I’ll send a cab for him,’ Arthur said; ‘there’ll be none about at that hour, probably. Will you kindly tell him it’s waiting for him?’
At two o’clock or a little after, Ernest drove home with his heart on fire, full of eagerness and swelling hope for to-morrow morning. He found Edie waiting for him, late as it was, with a little bottle of wine–an unknown luxury at Mrs. Halliss’s lodgings–and such light supper as she thought he could manage to swallow in his excitement. Ernest drank a glass of the wine, but left the supper untasted. Then he went to bed, and tossed about uneasily till morning. He couldn’t sleep through his anxiety to see his great leader appear in all the added dignity of printer’s ink and rouse the slumbering world of England up to a due sense of Max Schurz’s wrongs and the law’s incomprehensible iniquity.
Before seven, he rose very quietly, dressed himself without saying a word, and stole out to buy an early copy of the ‘Morning Intelligence.’ He got one at the small tobacconist’s shop round the corner, where he had taken his first hint for the Italian organ-boy leader. It was with difficulty that he could contain himself till he was back in Mrs. Halliss’s little front parlour; and there he tore open the paper eagerly, and turned to the well-remembered words at the beginning of his desperate appealing article. He could recollect the very run of every clause and word he had written: ‘No Englishman can read without a thrill of righteous indignation,’ it began,’the sentence passed last night upon Max Schurz, the author of that remarkable economical work, “Gold and the Proletariate.” Herr Schurz is one of those numerous refugees from German despotism who have taken advantage of the hospitable welcome usually afforded by England to the oppressed of all creeds or nations’–and so forth, and so forth. Where was it now? Yes, that was it, in the place of honour, of course–the first leader under the clock in the ‘Morning Intelligence.’ His eye caught at once the opening key-words, ‘No Englishman.’ Sinking down into the easy-chair by the flowers in the window he prepared to run it through at his leisure with breathless anxiety.
‘No Englishman can read without a feeling of the highest approval the sentence passed last night upon Max Schurz, the author of that misguided economical work, “Gold and the Proletariate.” Herr Schurz is one of those numerous refugees from German authority, who have taken advantage of the hospitable welcome usually afforded by England to the oppressed of all creeds or nations, in order to hatch plots in security against the peace of sovereigns or governments with which we desire always to maintain the most amicable and cordial relations.’ Ernest’s eyes seemed to fail him. The type on the paper swam wildly before his bewildered vision. What on earth could this mean? It was his own leader, indeed, with the very rhythm and cadence of the sentences accurately preserved, but with all the adjectives and epithets so ingeniously altered that it was turned into a crushing condemnation of Max Schurz, his principles, his conduct, and his ethical theories. From beginning to end, the article appealed to the common-sense of intelligent Englishmen to admire the dignity of the law in thus vindicating itself against the atrocious schemes of a dangerous and ungrateful political exile who had abused the hospitality of a great fres country to concoct vile plots against the persons of friendly sovereigns and innocent ministers on the European continent.
Ernest laid down the paper dreamily, and leant back for a moment in his chair, to let his brain recover a little from the reeling dizziness of that crushing disappointment. Then he turned in a giddy mechanical fashion to the headed article on the fourth page. There the self-same style of treatment met once more his astonished gaze. All the minute facts as to Max Schurz’s history and personality were carefully preserved; the description of his simple artisan life, his modest household, his Sunday evening receptions, his great following of earnest and enthusiastic refugees–every word of all this, which hardly anyone else could have equally well supplied, was retained intact in the published copy; yet the whole spirit of the thing had utterly evaporated, or rather had been perverted into the exact opposite unsympathetic channel. Where Ernest had written ‘enthusiasm,’ Lancaster had simply altered the word to ‘fanaticism;’ where Ernest had spoken of Herr Max’s ‘single-hearted devotion,’ Lancaster had merely changed the phrase into ‘undisguised revolutionary ardour.’ The whole paper was one long sermon against Max Schurz’s Utopian schemes, imputing to him not only folly but even positive criminality as well. We all know how we all in England look upon the foreign political refugee–a man to be hit again with impunity, because he has no friends; but to Ernest, who had lived so long in his own little socialistic set, the discovery that people could openly say such things against his chosen apostle at the very moment of his martyrdom, was a hideous and blinding disillusionment. He put the paper down upon the table once more, and buried his face helplessly between his burning hands.
The worst of it all was this: if Herr Max ever saw those articles he would naturally conclude that Ernest had been guilty of the basest treachery, and that too on the very day when he most needed the aid and sympathy of all his followers. With a thrill of horror he thought in his own soul that the great leader might suspect him for an hour of being the venal Judas of the little sect.
How Ernest ever got through that weary day he did not know himself; nothing kept him up through it except his burning indignation against Lancaster’s abominable conduct. About eleven o’clock, Arthur Berkeley called in to see him. ‘I’m afraid you’ve been a little disappointed,’ he said, ‘about the turn Lancaster has given to your two articles. He told me he meant to alter the tone so as to suit the policy of the paper, and I see he’s done so very thoroughly. You can’t look for much sympathy from commonplace, cold, calculating Englishmen for enthusiastic natures like Herr Max’s.’
Ernest turned to him in blank amazement. He had expected Berkeley to be as angry as himself at Lancaster’s shameful mutilation of his appealing leader; and he found now that even Berkeley accepted it as an ordinary incident in the course of journalistic business. His heart sank within him as he thought how little hope there could be of Herr Max’s liberation, when even his own familiar friend Berkeley looked upon the matter in such a casual careless fashion.
‘I shall never write another word for the “Morning Intelligence,”‘ he cried vehemently, after a moment’s pause. ‘If we starve for it, I shall never write another word in that wicked, abominable, dishonourable paper. I can die easily enough, heaven knows, without a murmur: but I can’t be disloyal to dear Herr Max, and to all my innate ingrained principles.’
‘Don’t say that, Ernest,’ Berkeley answered gently. ‘Think of Mrs. Le Breton and the baby. The luxury of starvation for the sake of a cause is one you might venture to allow yourself if you were alone in the world as I am, but not one which you ought to force unwillingly upon your wife and children. You’ve been getting a trifle more practical of late under the spur of necessity; don’t go and turn impossible again at the supreme moment. Whatever happens, it’s your plain duty to go on writing for the “Morning Intelligence.” You say with your own hand only what you think and believe yourself: the editor alone is responsible for the final policy of the paper.’
Ernest only muttered slowly to himself,–‘Never, never, never!’
Still, though the first attempt had failed, Ernest did not wholly give up his hopes of doing something towards the release of Herr Max from that unutterable imprisonment. He drew up a form of petition to the Home Secretary, in which he pointed out the reasons for setting aside the course of the law in the case of this particular political prisoner. With feverish anxiety he ran about London for the next two days, trying to get influential signatures to his petition, and to rouse the people in their millions to demand the release of the popular martyr. Alas for the stolid indifference of the British public! The people in their millions sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play, exactly as if nothing unusual in any way had happened. Most of them had never heard at all of Herr Max, or of ‘Gold and the Proletariate,’ and those who had heard understood for the most part that he was a bad lot who was imprisoned for trying nefariously to blow up the Emperor of Rooshia. Crowds of people nightly besieged the doors of the Ambiguities and the Marlborough, to hear the fate of ‘The Primate of Fiji’ and ‘The Duke of Bermondsey;’ but very few among the millions took the trouble to sign their names to Ernest Le Breton’s despairing petition. Even the advanced radicals of the market-place, the men who figured largely at Trafalgar Square meetings and Agricultural Labourers’ Unions, feared to damage their reputation for moderation and sobriety by getting themselves mixed up with a continental agitator like this man Schurz that people were talking about. The Irish members expressed a pious horror of the very word dynamite: the working-man leaders hemmed and hawed, and regretted their inability, in their very delicate position, to do anything which might seem like countenancing Russian nihilism. In the end, Ernest sent, in his petition with only half a dozen unknown signatures; and the Home Secretary’s private prompter threw it into the waste-paper basket entire, without even taking the trouble to mention its existence to his harassed and overburdened chief. Just a Marylebone communist refugee in prison! How could a statesman with half the bores and faddists of England on his troubled hands, find time to look at uninfluential petitions about an insignificant worthless nobody like that?
So gentle, noble-natured, learned Herr Max went to prison and served his year there uncomplainingly, like any other social malefactor; and Society talked about his case with languid interest for nearly a fortnight, and then straightway found a new sensation, and forgot all about him. But there are three hundred and sixty-five days of twenty-four hours each in every year; and for every one of those days Herr Max and Herr Max’s friends never forgot for an hour together that he was in prison.
And at the end of the week Ernest got a letter from Lancaster, enclosing a cheque for eight guineas. That is a vast sum of money, eight guineas: just think of all the bread, and meat, and tea, and clothing one can buy with it for a small family! ‘My dear Le Breton,’ the editor wrote–in his own hand, too; a rare honour; for he was a kindly man, and he had learned, much to his surprise, from Arthur Berkeley, that Ernest was angry at his treatment of the Schurzian leader: ‘My dear Le Breton, I enclose cheque for eight guineas, for your two articles. I hope you didn’t mind the way I was obliged to cut them up in some unessential details, so as to suit the policy of the paper. I kept whatever was really most distinctive as embodying special information in them. You know we are above all things strictly moderate. Please send us another social shortly.’
It was a kind letter, undoubtedly a kind and kindly-meant letter: but Ernest flung it from him as though he had been stung by a serpent or a scorpion. Then he handed the cheque to Edie in solemn silence, to see what she would do with it. He merely wanted to try her constancy. For himself, he would have felt like a Judas indeed if he had taken and used their thirty pieces of silver.
Edie looked at the cheque intently and sighed a deep sigh of regret. How could she do otherwise? They were so very poor, and it was such an immense sum of money! Then she rose quietly without saying a word, and lighted a match from the box on the mantelpiece. She held the cheque firmly between her finger and thumb till it was nearly burnt, end let it drop slowly at last into the empty fireplace. Ernest rose up and kissed her tenderly. The leaden weight of the thirty pieces of silver was fairly off their united conscience. They had made what reparation they could for the evil of that unhappy, undesigned leader. After all Ernest had wasted the last remnant of his energy on one eventful evening, all for nothing.
As Edie sat looking wistfully at the smouldering fragments of the burnt cheque, Ernest roused her again by saying quietly, ‘To-day’s Saturday. Have we got anything for to-morrow’s dinner, Edie?’
‘Nothing,’ Edie answered, simply. ‘How much money have you left, Ernest?’
‘Sixpence,’ Ernest said, without needing to consult his empty purse for confirmation–he had counted the pence, as they went, too carefully for that already. ‘Edie, I’m afraid we must go at last to the poor man’s banker till I can get some more money.’
‘Oh, Ernest–not–not–not the pawnbroker!’
‘Yes, Edie, the pawnbroker.’
The tears came quickly into Edie’s eyes, but she answered nothing. They must have food, and there was no other way open before them. They rose together and went quietly into the bedroom. There they gathered together the few little trinkets and other things that might be of use to them, and Ernest took down his hat from the stand to go out with them to the pawnbroker’s.
As he turned out he was met energetically on the landing by a stout barricade from good Mrs. Halliss. ‘No, sir, not you, sir,’ the landlady said firmly, trying to take the parcel from him as he went towards the door. ‘I beg your pardon, sir, for ‘avin’ over’eard what wasn’t meant for me to ‘ear, no doubt, but I couldn’t ‘elp it, sir, and John an’ me can’t allow nothink of this sort, we can’t. We’re used to this sort o’ things, sir, John and me is; but you and the dear lady isn’t used to ’em, sir, and didn’t nought to be neither, and John an’ me can’t allow it, not anyhow.’
Ernest turned scarlet with shame, but could say nothing. Edie only whispered softly, ‘Dear, dear Mrs. Halliss, we’re so sorry, but we can’t help it.’
”Elp it, ma’am,’ said Mrs. Halliss, herself almost crying, ‘nor there ain’t no reason why you should try to ‘elp it neither. As I says to John, “John,” says I, “there ain’t no ‘arm in it, noways,” says I, “but I can’t stand by,” says I, “and see them two poor dear young creechurs,” meanin’ no offence, ma’am, “a-pawning of their own jewelry and things to go and pay for their Sunday’s dinner.” And John, ‘e says, says ‘e, “Quite right, Martha,” says ‘e; “don’t let ’em, my dear,” says ‘e. “The Lord has prospered us a bit in our ‘umble way, Martha,” says ‘e, “and we ain’t got no cause to want, we ain’t; and if the dear lady and the good gentleman wouldn’t take it as a liberty,” says ‘e, “it ‘ud be better they should just borrer a pound or two for a week from us,” says ‘e, beggin’ your pardon, ma’am, for ‘intin’ of it, “than that there Mr. Le Breting, as ain’t accustomed to such places nohow, should go a-makin’ acquaintance, for the fust time of his life, as you may say, with the inside of a pawnbroker’s shop,” says ‘e. “John,” says I, “it’s my belief the lady and gentleman ‘ud be insulted,” says I, “though they ARE the sweetest unassoomin’est young gentlefolk I ever did see,” says I, “if we were to go as tin’ them to accept the loan of money from the likes of you and me, John, as is no better, by the side of them, nor old servants, in the manner o’ speakin’.” “Insulted,” says ‘e; “not a bit of it, they needn’t, Martha,” says ‘e, “for I knows the ways of the aristocracy,” says ‘e, “and I knows as there’s many a gentleman as owns ‘is own ‘osses and ‘is own ‘ounds as isn’t afraid to borrer a pound or so from ‘is own coachman, or even from ‘is own groom–not but what to borrer from a groom is lowerin’,” says ‘e, “in a tempory emergency. Mind you, Martha,” says ‘e, “a tempory emergency is a thing as may ‘appen to landed gentlefolks any day,” says ‘e. “It’s like a ‘ole in your coat made by a tear,” says ‘e; “a haccident as may ‘appen to-morrer to the Prince of Wales ‘isself upon the ‘untin’ field,” ‘e says. “Well, then, John,” says I, “I’ll just go an’ speak to ’em about it, this very minnit,” says I, and if I might make so bold, ma’am, without seemin’ too presumptious, I should be very glad if you’d kindly allow me, ma’am, to lend Mr. Le Breting a few suvverins till ‘e gets ‘is next remittances, ma’am.’
Edie looked at Ernest, and Ernest looked at Edie and the landlady; and then they all three burst out crying together without further apology. Perhaps it was the old Adam left in Ernest a little; but though he could stand kindness from Dr. Greatrex or from Mr. Lancaster stoically enough, he couldn’t watch the humble devotion of those two honest-hearted simple old servants without a mingled thrill of shame and tenderness. ‘Mrs. Halliss,’ he said, catching up the landlady’s hard red hand gratefully in his own, ‘you are too good and too kind, and too considerate for us altogether. I feel we have done nothing to deserve such great kindness from you. But I really don’t think it would be right of us to borrow from you when we don’t even know how long it may be before we’re able to return your money or whether we shall ever be able to return it at all. We’re so much obliged to you, so very very much obliged to you, dear Mrs. Halliss, but I think we ought as a matter of duty to pawn these few little things rather than run into debt which we’ve no fair prospect at present of ever redeeming.’
‘HAS you please, sir,’ Mrs. Halliss said gently, wiping her eyes with her snow-white apron, for she saw at once that Ernest really meant what he said. ‘Not that John an’ me would think of it for a minnit, sir, so long as you wouldn’t mind our takin’ the liberty; but any’ow, sir, we can’t allow you to go out yourself and go to the pawnbroker’s. It ain’t no fit place for the likes of you, sir, a pawnbroker’s ain’t, in all that low company; and I don’t suppose you’d rightly know ‘ow much to hask on the articles, neither. John, ‘e ain’t afeard of goin’; an’ ‘e says, ‘e insists upon it as ‘e’s to go, for ‘e don’t think, sir, for the honour of the ‘ouse, ‘e says, sir, as a lodger of ours ought to be seen a-goin’ to the pawnbroker’s. Just you give them things right over to John, sir, and ‘e’ll get you a better price on ’em by a long way nor they’d ever think of giving a gentleman like you, sir.’
Ernest fought off the question in a half-hearted fashion for a little while, but Mrs. Halliss insisted upon it, and after a short time Ernest gave way, for to say the truth he had very vague ideas himself as to how he ought to proceed in a pawnbroking expedition. Mrs. Halliss ran down the kitchen stairs quickly, for fear he should change his mind as soon as her back was turned, and called out gaily to her husband in the first delight of her unexpected triumph.
‘John,’ she cried, ‘–drat that man, where is ‘e? John, dear, you just putt your ‘at on, and purtend to run round the corner a bit to Aston’s the pawnbroker’s. The Lord have mercy upon me for the stories I’ve been a-tellin’ of ’em, but I couldn’t bear to see them two pore things a-pawnin’ their little bits of jewelry and sich, and Mr. Le Breting, too, ‘im as ain’t fit to go knockin’ together with underbred folks like pawnbrokers. So I told ‘im as you’d take ’em round and pawn ’em for ‘im yourself; not as I don’t suppose you’ve never pawned nothink in your ‘ole life, John, leastways not since ever you an’ me kep’ company, for afore that I suppose you was purty much like other young men is, John, for all you shakes your ‘ead at it now so innocent like. But you just run round, there’s a dear, and make as if you was goin’ to the pawnbroker’s, and then you come straight ‘ome again unbeknown to ’em. I ain’t a goin’ to let them two pore dears go pawnin’ their things for a dinner nohow. You take them two suvverins out of your box, John, and putt away these ‘ere little things for the present time till the pore souls is able to pay us, and if they never don’t, small matter neither. Now you go fast, John, there’s a dear, and come back, and mind you give them two suvverins to Mr. Le Breting as natural like as ever you’re able.’
‘Pawn ’em,’ John said in a pitying voice, ‘no indeed, it ain’t come to that yet, I should ‘ope, that they need go a-pawnin’ their effects while we’ve got a suvverin or two laid by in our box, Martha. Not as anybody need be ashamed of pawnin’ on occasions, for that matter,–I don’t say as a reg’lar thing, but now an’ then on occasions, as you may call it; for even in the best dookal families, I’ve ‘eard tell they DO sometimes ‘ave to pawn the dimonds, so that pawnin’ ain’t in the runnin’ noways, bless you, as respects gentility. Not as I’d like to go into a pawnshop myself, Martha, as I’ve always been brought up respectable; but when you send for Mr. Hattenborough to your own ressydence and say quite commandin’ like, “‘Er Grace ‘ud be obleeged if you’d wait upon ‘er in Belgrave Square to hinspeck ‘er dimonds as I want to raise the wind on ’em,” why, that’s quite another matter nat’rally.’
When honest John came back in a few minutes and handed the two sovereigns over to Ernest, he did it with such an unblushing face as might have won him applause on any stage for its perfect naturalness. ‘Lor’ bless your ‘eart, sir,’ he said in answer to Ernest’s shamefaced thanks, touching the place where his hat ought to be mechanically, ‘it ain’t nothing, sir, that ain’t. If it weren’t for the dookal families of England, sir, it’s my belief the pawnbrokin’ business wouldn’t be worth mentioning in the manner o’ speakin’.’
That evening, Ernest paced up and down the little parlour rather moodily for half an hour with three words ringing perpetually in his dizzy ears-the ‘Never, never, never,’ he had used so short a tune since about the ‘Morning Intelligence.’ He must get money somehow for Dot and Edie! he must get money somehow to pay good Mrs. Halliss for their board and lodging! There was only one way possible. Fight against it as he would, in the end he must come back to that inevitable conclusion. At last he sat down with a gloomy face at the centre table, and pulled out a sheet of blank foolscap.
‘What are you going to do, Ernest?’ Edie asked him.
Ernest groaned. ‘I’m writing a social for the “Morning Intelligence,” Edie,’ he answered bitterly.
‘Oh, Ernest!’ Edie said with a face of horror and surprise. ‘Not after the shameful way they’ve treated poor Max Schurz!’
Ernest groaned again. ‘There’s nothing else to be done, Edie,’ he said, looking up at her despondently. ‘I must earn money somehow to keep the house going.’
It is the business of the truthful historian to narrate facts, not to palliate or extenuate the conduct of the various actors. Whether Ernest did right or wrong, at least he did it; he wrote a playful social for Monday’s ‘Morning Intelligence,’ and carried it into the office on Sunday afternoon himself, beause there was no postal delivery in the London district.
That night, he lay awake once more for hours together, tossing and turning, and reflecting bitterly on his own baseness and his final moral downfall. Herbert was right, after all. The environment was beginning to conquer. He could hold out no longer. Herr Max was in prison; the world was profoundly indifferent; he himself had fallen away like Peter; and there was nothing left for him now but to look about and find himself a dishonourable grave.
And Dot? And Edie? What was to become of them after? Ah me, for the pity of it when a man cannot even crawl quietly into a corner and die in peace like a dog, without being tortured by fears and terrors beforehand as to what will come to those he loves far better than life when he himself is quietly dead and buried out of the turmoil!
CHAPTER XXIX.
A MAN AND A MAID.
IF Ernest and Edie had permitted it, Ronald Le Breton would have gone at once, after his coming of age, to club income and expenditure with his brother’s household. But, as Edie justly remarked, when he proposed it, such a course would pretty nearly have amounted to clubbing HIS income with THEIR expenditure; and even in their last extreme of poverty that was an injustice which neither she nor her husband could possibly permit. Ronald needed all his little fortune for his own simple wants, and though they themselves starved, they couldn’t bear to deprive him of the small luxuries which had grown into absolute necessaries for one so feeble and weak. Indeed, ill as Ernest himself now was, he had never outgrown the fixed habit of regarding Ronald as the invalid of the family; and to have taken anything, though in the direst straits, from him, would have seemed like robbing the helpless poor of their bare necessities. So Ronald was fain at last to take lodgings for himself with a neighbour of good Mrs. Halliss’s, and only to share in Ernest’s troubles to the small extent of an occasional loan, which Edie would have repaid to time if she had to go without their own poor little dinner for the sake of the repayment.
Meanwhile, Ronald had another interest on hand which to his enthusiastic nature seemed directly imposed upon him by the finger of Providence–to provide a home and occupation for poor Selah, whom Herbert had cast aside as a legacy to him. As soon as he had got settled down to his own new mode of life in the Holloway lodgings, he began to look about for a fit place for the homeless girl–a place, he thought to himself, which must combine several special advantages; plenty of work–she wanted that to take her mind off brooding; good, honest, upright people; and above all, no religion. Ronald recognised that last undoubted requirement as of absolutely paramount importance. ‘She’ll stand any amount of talk or anything else from me,’ he said to himself often, ‘because she knows I’m really in earnest; but she wouldn’t stand it for a moment from those well-meaning, undiscriminating, religious busy-bodies, who are so awfully anxious about other people’s souls, though they never seem for a single minute to consider in any way other people’s feelings.’ After a little careful hunting among his various acquaintances, however, he found at last a place that would exactly suit Selah at a stationer’s in Netting Hill; and there he put her–with full confidence that Selah would do the work entrusted to her well and ably, if not from conscientiousness, at least from personal pride, ‘which, after all,’ Roland soliloquised dreamily, ‘is as good a substitute for the genuine article as one can reasonably expect to find in poor fallen human nature.’
‘I wish, Mr. Le Breton,’ Selah said, quite timidly for her (maidenly reserve, it must be admitted, was not one of Selah Briggs’s strong points), ‘that I wasn’t going to be quite so far from you as Notting Hill. If I could see you sometimes, you know, I should feel that it might keep me more straight–keep me away from the river in future, I mean. I can’t stand most people’s preaching, but somehow, your preaching seems to do me more good than harm, really, which is just the exact opposite way, it seems to me, from everybody else’s.’
Ronald smiled sedately. ‘I’m glad you want to see me sometimes,’ he said, with a touch of something very like gallantry in his tone that was wholly unusual with him. ‘I shall walk over every now and then, and look you up at your lodgings over yonder; and besides, you can come on Sundays to dear Edie’s, and I shall be able to meet you there once a fortnight or thereabouts. But I’m not going to let you call me Mr. Le Breton any longer; it isn’t friendly: and, what’s more, it isn’t Christian. Why should there be these artificial barriers between soul and soul, eh, Selah? I shall call you Selah in future: it seems more genuine and heartfelt, and unencumbered with needless conventions, than your misters and misses. After all, why should we keep up such idle formalities between brethren and fellow-workers?’
Selah started a little–she knew better than Ronald himself did what such first advances really led to. ‘Oh, Mr. Le Breton,’ she said quickly, ‘I really can’t call you Ronald. I can never call any other man by his Christian name as long as I live, after–your brother.’
‘You mistake me, Selah,’ Ronald put in hastily, with his quaint gravity. ‘I mean it merely as a sign of confidence and a mark of Christian friendship. Sisters call their brothers by their Christian names, don’t they? So there can be no harm in that, surely. It seems to me that if you call me Mr. Le Breton, you’re putting me on the footing of a man merely; if you call me Ronald, you’re putting me on the footing of a brother, which is really a much more harmless and unequivocal position for me to stand in. Do, please, Selah, call me Ronald.’
‘I’m afraid I can’t,’ Selah answered. ‘I daren’t. I mustn’t.’ But she faltered a little for a moment, notwithstanding.
‘You must, Selah,’ Ronald said, with all the force of his enthusiastic nature, fixing his piercing eyes full upon her. ‘You must, I tell you. Call me Ronald.’
‘Very well–Ronald,’ Selah said at last, after a long pause. ‘Good-bye, now. I must be going. Good-bye, and thank you. Thank you. Thank you.’ There was a tear quivering even in Selah Briggs’s eye, as she held his hand lingeringly a moment in hers before releasing it. He was a very good fellow, really, and he had been so very kind, too, in interesting himself about her future.
‘What a marvellous thread of sameness,’ Ronald thought to himself, as he walked back rapidly to his solitary lodgings, ‘runs through the warp and woof of a single family, after all! What an underlying unity of texture there must be throughout, in all its members, however outwardly dissimilar they may seem to be from one another! One would say at first sight there was very little, if anything, in common between me and Herbert. And yet this girl interests me wonderfully. Of course I’m not in love with her–the notion of MY falling in love with anybody is clearly too ridiculous. But I’m attracted by her, drawn towards her, fascinated as it were; I feel a sort of curious spell upon me whenever I look into her deep big eyes, flashing out upon one with their strange luminousness. It isn’t merely that the Hand has thrown her in my way: that counts for something, no doubt, but not for everything. Besides, the Hand doesn’t act blindly–nay, rather, acts with supreme wisdom, surpassing the powers or the comprehension of man. When it threw Selah Briggs in my way, depend upon it, it was because the Infinite saw in me something that was specially adapted to her, and in her something that was specially adapted to me. The instrument is duly shaped by inscrutable Wisdom for its own proper work. Now, whatever interests ME in her, must have also interested Herbert in her equally and for the same reason. We’re drawn towards her, clearly; she exercises over both of us some curious electric power that she doesn’t exercise, presumably, over other people. For Herbert must have been really in love with her–not that I’m in love with her, of course; but still, the phenomena are analogous, even if on a slightly different plane–Herbert must have been really in love with her, I’m sure, or such a prudent man as he is would never have let himself get into what he would consider such a dangerous and difficult entanglement. Yes, clearly, there’s something in Selah Briggs that seems to possess a singular polarity, as Ernest would call it, for the Le Breton character and individuality!
‘And then, it cuts both ways, too, for Selah was once desperately in love with Herbert: of that I’m certain. She must have been, to judge from the mere strength of the final revulsion. She’s a girl of intensely deep passions–I like people to have some depth to their character, even if it’s only in the way of passion–and she’d never have loved him at all without loving him fervently and almost wildly: hers is a fervent, wild, indomitable nature. Yes, she was certainly in love with Herbert; and now, though of course I don’t mean to say she’s in love with me (I hope it isn’t wrong to think in this way about an unmarried girl), still I can’t help seeing that I have a certain influence over her in return–that she pays much attention to what I say and think, considers me a person worth considering, which she doesn’t do, I’m sure, with most other people. Ah, well, there’s a vast deal of truth, no doubt, in these new hereditary doctrines of Darwin’s and Galton’s that Herbert and Ernest talk about so much; a family’s a family, that’s certain, not a mere stray collection of casual acquaintances. How the likeness runs through the very inmost structure of our hearts and natures! I see in Selah very much what Herbert saw in Selah: Selah sees in me very much what she saw in Herbert. Extraordinary insight into human nature men like Darwin and Galton have, to be sure? And David, too, what a marvellous thinker he was, really! What unfathomed depths of meaning lie unexpected in that simple sentence of his, “I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” Fearfully and wonderfully, indeed, when one remembers that from one father and mother Herbert and I have both been compounded, so unlike in some things that we scarcely seem to be comparable with one another (look at Herbert’s splendid intellect beside mine!), so like in others that Selah Briggs–goodness gracious, what am I thinking of? I was just going to say that Selah Briggs falls in love first with one of us and then with the other. I do hope and trust it isn’t wrong of me to fill my poor distracted head so much with these odd thoughts about that unfortunate girl, Selah!’
CHAPTER XXX.
THE ENVIRONMENT FINALLY TRIUMPHS.
Winter had come, and on a bitter cold winter’s night, Ernest Le Breton once more received an unexpected telegram asking him to hurry down without a moment’s delay on important business to the ‘Morning Intelligence’ office. The telegram didn’t state at all what the business was; it merely said it was urgent and immediate without in any way specifying its nature. Ernest sallied forth in some perturbation, for his memories of the last occasion when the ‘Morning Intelligence’ required his aid on important business were far from pleasant ones; but for Edie’s sake he felt he must go, and so he went without a murmur.
‘Sit down, Le Breton,’ Mr. Lancaster said slowly when Ernest entered. ‘The matter I want to see you about’s a very peculiar one. I understand from some of my friends that you’re a son of Sir Owen Le Breton, the Indian general.’
‘Yes, I am,’ Ernest answered, wondering within himself to what end this curious preamble could possibly be leading up. If there’s any one profession, he thought, which is absolutely free from the slightest genealogical interest in the persons of its professors, surely that particular calling ought to be the profession of journalism.
‘Well, so I hear, Le Breton. Now, I believe I’m right in saying, am I not, that it was your father who first subdued and organised a certain refractory hill-tribe on the Tibetan frontier, known as the Bodahls, wasn’t it?’
‘Quite right,’ Ernest replied, with a glimmering idea slowly rising in his mind as to what Mr. Lancaster was now driving at.
‘Ah, that’s good, very good indeed, certainly. Well, tell me, Le Breton, do you yourself happen to know anything on earth about these precious insignificant people?’
‘I know all about them,’ Ernest answered quickly. ‘I’ve read all my father’s papers and despatches, and seen his maps and plans and reports in our house at home from my boyhood upward. I know as much about the Bodahls, in fact, as I know about Bayswater, or Holborn, or Fleet Street.’
‘Capital, capital,’ the editor said, fondling his big hands softly; ‘that’ll exactly suit us. And could you get at these plans and papers now, this very evening, just to refresh the gaps in your memory?’
‘I could have them all down here,’ Ernest answered, ‘at an hour’s notice.’
‘Good,’ the editor said again. ‘I’ll send a boy for them with a cab. Meanwhile, you’d better be perpending this telegram from our Simla correspondent, just received. It’s going to be the question of the moment, and we should very much like you to give us a leader of a full column about the matter.’
Ernest took the telegram and read it over carefully. It ran in the usual very abbreviated newspaper fashion: ‘Russian agents revolted Bodahls Tibetan frontier. Advices Peshawur state Russian army marching on Merv. Bodahls attacked Commissioner, declared independence British raj.’
‘Will you write us a leader?’ the editor asked, simply.
Ernest drew a long breath. Three guineas! Edie, Dot, an empty exchequer! If he could only have five minutes to make his mind up! But he couldn’t. After all, what did it matter what he said about these poor unknown Bodahls? If HE didn’t write the leader, somebody else who knew far less about the subject than he did would be sure to do it. He wasn’t responsible for that impalpable entity ‘the policy of the paper.’ Beside the great social power of the ‘Morning Intelligence,’ of the united English people, what was he, Ernest Le Breton, but a miserable solitary misplaced unit? One way or the other, he could do very little indeed, for good or for evil. After half a minute’s internal struggle, he answered back the editor faintly, ‘Yes, I will.’ ‘For Edie,’ he muttered half audibly to himself; ‘I must do it for dear Edie.’
‘And you’ll allow me to make whatever alterations I think necessary in the article to suit the policy of the paper?’ the editor asked once more, looking through him with his sleepy keen grey eyes. ‘You see, Le Breton, I don’t want to annoy you, and I know your own principles are rather peculiar; but of course all we want you for is just to give us the correct statement of facts about these outlandish people. All that concerns our own attitude towards them as a nation falls naturally under the head of editorial matter. You must see yourself that it’s quite impossible for us to let any one single contributor dictate from his own standpoint the policy of the paper.’
Ernest bent his head slowly. ‘You’re very kind to argue out the matter with me so, Mr. Lancaster,’ he said, trembling with excitement. ‘Yes, I suppose I must bury my scruples. I’ll write a leader about these Bodahls, and let you deal with it afterwards as you think proper.’
They showed him into the bare little back room, and sent a boy up with a hastily written note to Ronald for the maps and papers. There Ernest sat for an hour or two, writing away for very life, and putting on paper everything that he knew about the poor Bodahls. By two o’clock, the proofs had all come up to him, and he took his hat in a shamefaced manner to sally out into the cold street, where he hoped to hide his rising remorse and agony under cover of the solitary night. He knew too well what ‘the policy of the paper’ would be, to venture upon asking any questions about it. As he left the office, a boy brought him down a sealed envelope from Mr. Lancaster. With his usual kindly thoughtfulness the editor had sent him at once the customary cheque for three guineas. Ernest folded it up with quivering fingers, and felt the blood burn in his cheeks as he put it away in his waistcoat pocket. That accursed money! For it he had that night sold his dearest principles! And yet, not for it, not for it, not for it–oh, no, not for it, but for Dot and Edie!
The boy had a duplicate proof in his other hand, and Ernest saw at