He had been living amongst men whose master is the spirit that always denies. He had steeped himself in that pessimism of small minds which pervades society, and which is the chosen gospel of the men who profess to be in advance of their fellow-men. A dull, dead hopelessness came down upon him, like a dark cloud, in the midst of this palace of art which he had built for his soul, and the palace seemed no better than a prison-house.
He and Mrs. Champion had met less frequently during the last month, for Edith, who was warm-hearted and kindly natured, despite her essentially modern estimate of life, had deemed it her duty to withdraw in some measure from society, now that her husband was the inmate of a private lunatic asylum. She drove to Finchley three times a week, and spent an hour or two with the invalid, sometimes driving with him in the doctor’s capacious landau, while her own horses rested, sometimes walking beside his wheel-chair in the garden, and listening patiently while he rambled confusedly through the Stock Exchange list, from Berthas and Buenos Ayres First Preference to Electric Lighting Companies and Papafuego Loans; the shattered mind retracing trodden paths, and finding pleasure in familiar sounds, though memory was almost a blank. Mr. Champion was placable, satisfied with his surroundings, and expressed no impatience of restraint, nor desire to be taken back to his own house. Indeed, it seemed to his wife that he had forgotten every detail of his past existence, except the shibboleth of the Money Market.
In this dismal state it would have been less than charity to pray for the prolongation of his life. Edith did all in her power, by frequent supervision and by undeviating interest, to secure the patient’s well-being. He had his old and trusted servant with him, as a check upon the service of the doctor’s attendants. A wife who had loved him passionately could have done no more than Edith was doing.
CHAPTER XI. “EARTH BEING SO GOOD, WOULD HEAVEN SEEM BEST?”
PERHAPS in every life there is one perfect interlude — one long sweet interval set somewhere in the midst of the cares and tribulations of commonplace existence, a period in which trouble and sorrow are unknown, and all the colours of earth and sky are deepened into supernatural beauty. The period of a young girl’s engagement to the man of her choice — if she be only single-minded and free from jealous fears — is one of these halcyon days — a time of peace and happiness, the winds and waves of trouble all lying at rest, while the sea-birds, joy and hope, are hatching.
Lilian Hillersdon was steeped in the sunlight and the music of that enchanting time. The man to whom she had plighted her life seemed to realise her highest ideal of manly excellence. He satisfied every need of her nature.
She was deeply religious, and she found in her future husband a faith that could apprehend and discuss every theory and doubt of the age, and yet stand strong as a tower. She was tender-hearted, benevolent, sympathetic, taking the sufferings of humanity as a portion of her own life, an ever-present sorrow in the midst of her own joy, and she found in John Cumberland a pity as tender as her own, and a benevolence of a far wider grasp. She could look up to him with meek reverence, as the women of old looked up to their mailed warriors, the men who went out to the unknown laud to fight for the sepulchre of their Lord. She could revere him, and yet be utterly happy and light-hearted in his companionship, for his religion was, like Kingsley’s, the gospel of cheerfulness, and his most ardent desire was to get the greatest sum of happiness out of this world for himself and others.
The one shadow on her life was the fact that her brother had wantonly shut himself outside that fold where she would have gathered him, with all the precious things of her life; but when 6he told Jack Cumberland her fears and regrets, he smiled them away, and comforted her with his broad view of a young man’s foolishness.
“He is only going through that phase of unbelief which most men have to suffer at some period of their lives,” he said. “He will not be prayed or preached into happier ideas. The best thing you and I can do is to leave him alone with his opinions till he finds out how barren and joyless this world is while it means the whole, and how much more comprehensible when we accept it for what it is — a single round upon the ladder of everlasting life. In the meantime, if we can interest him in philanthropic schemes, and the making of Christian England, we shall do a good deal.”
“He has promised to make the round of our parish with mother next week,” said Lilian.
Mrs. Hillersdon’s much-talked-of visit to her son’s house had been deferred from one cause and another until April was nearly over; but when that pleasant month was at its best she appeared upon the scene, fresh and smiling as one of the glebe meadows on a sunny morning, and escorted by the Rector, who was to spend only three days in town, before returning westward to visit old friends, and to preach charity sermons at Stroud and at Bath on his way home.
The mother was full of admiration of her son’s surroundings, and of the pretty rooms allotted to Lilian, in whose future home she was even more keenly interested. While the Rector was in London, the time was devoted to picture-galleries, concerts, the Park, and society, with the exception of a somewhat hurried survey of Mr. Cumberland’s church, vicarage, and schools; but when Mr. Hillersdon had departed upon his round of visits, Lilian took complete possession of her mother, and most of their time was spent in the neighbourhood of Soho, both mother and daughter preferring the simple luncheon provided by Jack Cumberland’s plain cook and middle-aged house-maid, in the sober oak-panelled dining-room in Greek Street, to the elaborate inventions of the chef at Hillersdon House. The mother was never tired of inspecting her daughter’s future home, or of discussing that important question of household linen, with all its scope for variety of material and fine sewing. Most delightful was it also to join Lilian and her lover in their rambles after furniture, books, and curios, wherewith to make the new home more and more homelike — the long drives to queer old brokers’ shops to examine some gem of the Chippendale or Sheraton period, entangled in a dusty labyrinth of rubbish. It was curious how to these two women there was more real rapture in a couple of shield-backed chairs of the wheat-ear pattern, unearthed at a remote broker’s, than in all the chastened splendour and carefully thought out luxury of Hillersdon House; indeed, there was to Mrs. Hillersdon’s simple mind — chastened by long years of tranquil inactivity, sobered by the sorrows of a country parish — some latent feeling of distrust which saddened her in the midst of her son’s brilliant surroundings. The change in his fortunes was too sudden and too intense. Unconsciously she echoed the foreboding of Solon when Croesus exhibited his magnificence before the calm gaze of wisdom. She looked at her son, radiant, animated, leading the conversation at a table where all the guests were men of mark, and all the women beauties or wits, and the flush upon his cheek seemed the hectic of disease, the light in his eye too restless for health. She questioned him with keenest anxiety after one of these brilliant dinners.
“Are you not doing too much, Gerard?” she asked tenderly, “burning the candle of life at both ends?”
“My dear mother, candles were made to burn. If one must be either a flame or a lump of tallow I would rather be the flame — though, no doubt, the unlighted tallow would last a great deal longer. I dare say we seem to be taking life prestissimo after your gentle andante movement in Devonshire. But a man who has no financial cares can stand a little racketing. I used to take a great deal more out of myself in the days when the thought of my tailor’s bill, or the image of my landlord’s sullen face scowling at me from the half-open door of his back parlour, would come between me and the roses and raptures of a Belgravian ball-room.”
“But you have financial cares of another kind, Gerard,” answered his mother, in her grave, sweet voice. “You have the disposal of a great fortune — talents for which you must account by-and-by.”
“At least, admit that I have not buried them in a napkin — unless it is a dinner napkin,” laughed Gerard. “What did you think of that chaufroid of quails? commonplace, I fear; everybody gives quails at this season; the Lond
on menu becomes as monotonous as that of the Israelites in the wilderness; but the lobster soufflé was iced to perfection.”
“Well, I won’t try to talk seriously to you to-night; you will only laugh at my old-fashioned ideas. I was brought up to think of riches as something held in trust for one’s fellow-creatures.”
“You were brought up by the ideal squire and squiress. Yes, I remember my grandfather, who spent every sixpence he could spare from the mere bread and cheese of this life, upon building cottages for his farm labourers and improving the drainage of old-fashioned homesteads, and who was considered a tyrannical landlord by way of recompense — and my grandmother, who tramped up and down muddy lanes, and penetrated foul-smelling cabins, and dressed sore legs, and read to the sick and the blind, and was generally spoken of as an officious, domineering person. Is that the kind of life you want me to lead, mother?”
“No, dear; that was charity upon a small scale, and under difficulties. You can do some great work.”
“Only show me what there is for me to do, mother, and I will do it. There is Jack Cumberland yonder, who knows that my surplus income is at his service, but who is too proud to be helped, except in the most insignificant way. Shall I build him a church, or shall I endow an almshouse vast enough to hold all the elderly paupers in his parish? I am ready to give anything or to do anything. If I had any treasure specially dear to my heart, I would surrender it, as Polycrates threw his ring into the sea.”
“Ah, dearest, I know your heart is in the right place,” said the mother, drawing nearer to the low chair in which her son was reclining, his head lying back upon the amber cushions, his cheek pale with the exhaustion of an animated evening, “but I am grieved to think that in a life which might be so happy — and so useful — there is one sad want.”
“What is that, mother?”
“The want of religious convictions. Your sister tells me that yon never go to church now, that Christ is no longer your master and your guide, but that you and your friends talk of our blessed Lord as a village philosopher in advance of his age, who unconsciously reproduced the aspirations of Plato and the morals of Buddha. You used to be such a firm believer, Gerard, in the days when you came home from Marlborough, so fresh, and frank, and joyous, and when you and I used to have long Sunday talks together in the woods between luncheon and evening service.”
“Ah, mother, those were the days when life was a picture and not a problem; the days before I began to think. I dare say I shall be just as good a believer again by-and-by, when I am old enough to leave off thinking.”
CHAPTER XII. “FOR SUCH THINGS MUST BEGIN SOME DAY.”
MR. CUMBERLAND’S most energetic coadjutor in the improvement of his new parish was Lady Jane Blenheim, who had worked in that parish for many years, and who was the head and front of a club and home for working-women, that stood almost within the shadow of the old church of St. Lawrence. Lady Jane had seen vicars and curates come and go. She had seen good and faithful shepherds; she had seen those who scarce knew how to hold a sheep-hook; and she was quick to recognise the right stamp of man in the new incumbent. She entered heartily into all his projected improvements, and gave the hand of friendship to his intended wife; while the Vicar on his side ardently espoused all the enthusiasms of the lady, and lent his musical gifts to those social evenings at the club which it was Lady Jane’s delight to inaugurate and superintend. To have as head of the parish a man with a strong brain and a fine baritone voice, supported by an extensive repertoire from both oratorio and opera, was more than she had ever hoped, and she gave the new Vicar her friendship and her counsel in unstinted measure. She was a familiar visitor in the dreariest ground-floor dens, and in the most miserable garrets within the district, and she could tell him a great deal about his neediest parishioners, who, although they frequently shifted from one wretched lodging to another, did not often wander far afield, indeed for the most part revolved within a narrow circle, keeping the old burial-ground of St. Lawrence as their centre, and the church tower as their landmark, a landmark which sometimes served to guide the feet of the Saturday night reveller, too far gone in liquor to read the names of the streets, or recognise minor indications.
To please his sister and her betrothed, Gerard interested himself in Lady Jane’s club, and excused himself from an engagement at one of the most distinguished houses in London, where hospitality was a fine art, and where Cabinet Ministers were as common as strawberries in July, in order to eat boiled salmon and roast lamb in Jack Cumberland’s dining-room, where Lady Jane and his sister made up the party of four. His mother had gone back to Devonshire, satiated with the sights of London, and loaded with gifts from her millionaire son, costly trifles and new inventions for the comfort or decoration of drawing-room and morning-room, as yet unknown and undreamed of by the shopkeepers of Exeter.
He was not sorry to give up a ducal dinner-party, albeit his card of invitation bristled with Royalties. He had been tolerably familiar with all that London can offer in the way of pleasure and dissipation before he came into his fortune. He stood now upon a higher grade of the steps that approach the throne, but the palace was the same palace, the lights, music, flowers, lovely women were the same that he had looked upon for half a dozen seasons, when he was a nobody. He would have liked to have had a new world — to have had a gate open for him into a land where all things were new. If he had been able to walk more than half a dozen miles without feeling tired, he would have started for Central Africa. He had serious thoughts of Japan, Ceylon, or even Burmah — but while an inner self yearned for untrodden lands, the commonplace, work-a-day self clung to Mayfair and its civilisation — to the great city in which for the man with any pretension to be “smart” there is only one hatter, one boot-maker, tailor, carriage-builder, one kind of letter-paper, one club, and one perfume possible; for be it observed that although the really smart man may be a member of twenty clubs, there is only one that he considers worthy of him — that one from which the black ball has excluded the majority of his particular friends.
This little dinner in Soho, served by the neat parlour-maid, in the sombre oak-panelled parlour, this talk with Lady Jane of the ways and works of girls who made jam, and girls who made tailors’ trimmings, was almost as good as a glimpse of a new country. All things here were new to the man who, since he left the University, had lived only amongst people who either were or pretended to be of the mode, modish.
The stories he heard to-night of sin and sorrow, good and bad, brutal crime, heroic effort, tender self-sacrifice, in a world given over to abject poverty, with all the lights and shadows of these lowly lives, touched and interested him more than he could have supposed possible. His heart and his fancy had not been brought so near the lives of the masses since he read, with choking throat and tear-dimmed eyes, Zola’s story of the lower deeps in that brilliant Paris of which he, Gerard Hillersdon, knew only the outward glitter and garish colouring. Behind the boulevards and the cafés, the theatres and the music halls, there is always this other world where everybody whose eyes open on the light of God’s day is foredoomed a “lifer,” sentenced to hard labour, and with but faintest hope of a ticket-of-leave after years of patient work. To Gerard, conscious of wealth in superabundance, these stories of sordid miseries, agonies which a five-pound note might cure, or fatal diseases, incurable for ever, which a little ease and a little comfort might have averted, seemed doubly dreadful — dreadful as a reproach to every rich man in the city of London. And yet to try and alter these things, he told himself, would be like trying to turn the tide of the St. Lawrence, above the falls of Niagara. Were he to cast all his fortune into this great gulf of poverty, there would be one millionaire the less, and for the masses an almost imperceptible gain. But he resolved, sitting in this sombre parlour, with the sunset of a fine May evening glowing on the polished oak panels, as on deep water — he resolved that these stories of hard lives should not have been told him in vain — that he would do some great thing, when
once he could decide upon the thing that was most needed — to lessen the measure of perpetual want. Whether lodging-house or hospital, club or refuge, reformatory or orphanage, something would he create; something which would soothe his own conscience and satisfy his mother’s piety.
The dinner was all over before eight o’clock, and the little party left the Vicarage on foot to go to a hall in the neighbourhood which had been lent for a meeting of the choirs formed by the various women’s clubs in London. The concert and competition had begun when the Vicar’s party entered the lighted hall, and the building was crowded in every part; but seats had been kept for Mr. Cumberland and his friends in a central position in front of the platform.
The choirs were ranged in a semicircle, like the spectators in a Greek theatre. There were eight choirs, numbering in all something over two hundred girls, and each choir wore a sash of a particular colour from shoulder to waist. These bright scarves across the sombre dresses, all following the same line, gave an appearance of uniformity to the whole costume. The eye hardly noted the dingy browns, or rusty blacks, the well-worn olives, or neutral greys of cheap, hard-wearing gowns. The bright faces, the neatly dressed hair — with its varied colouring, from raven black, through all the shades of brown and ruddy gold, to palest flaxen — the blue, and yellow, and green, and rose, and violet sashes filled the hall with life and colour.
Seen thus in a mass of smiling humanity the clubs of London seemed to have sent out a bevy of beauties. The general effect was excellent; and when all the voices burst forth in a great gush of melody, as the united choirs attacked Mendelssohn’s “Greeting,” Gerard felt the sudden thrill of sympathy which brings unbidden tears to the eyes.
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 905
