“Nothing to do with it! Oh, Sherry, how can you say such things!”
“Nothing whatever. I would have liked lots of other young fellows just as well. What especial reason had you for selecting this particular young fellow? That is what I want to get at.”
“Oh, is that all? Mamie loved him, my dear. I knew it long ago, and as I knew that you would not disapprove, I brought him here. It is not a question of money. We have more than we can ever need. It is not as if we had two or three sons to start in the world, Sherry.”
She lent an intonation of sadness to the last words, which, as she was aware, always produced the same effect upon her husband. He had bitterly regretted having no son to bear his honourable name.
“That is just it,” he answered sadly. “Mamie is everything, and everything is for her. That is the reason why we should be careful. She is not like a great many girls. She has a heart and she will break it, if she is not happy.”
“That is the very reason. You do not seem to realise that she is madly in love.”
“No doubt, but was she madly in love, as you call it, when you brought them here?”
“Long before that — —”
“Then why did you never tell me — we might have had him to the house all the time — —”
“Because I supposed, as every one else did, that he meant to marry Constance Fearing. I did not want to spoil his life, and I thought that Mamie would get over it. But the thing came to nothing. In fact, I begin to believe that there never was anything in it, and that the story was all idle gossip from beginning to end. He is on as good terms as ever with her and goes over there from time to time to console poor Grace.”
“Oh!” ejaculated Sherry in a thoughtful tone.
“You need not say ‘oh,’ like that. There is nothing to be afraid of. It is perfectly natural that the poor woman should like to see him, when he nearly died in trying to save her husband. They say she is in a dreadful state, half mad, and ill, and so changed!”
“Poor John!” exclaimed Sherry sadly. “I shall never see his like again.” He sighed, for he had been very fond of the man, besides looking upon him as a most promising partner in his law business.
“It was dreadful!” Mrs. Trimm shuddered as she thought of the accident. “I cannot bear to talk about it,” she added.
A short pause followed, during which Totty wore a very sad expression, and Sherry examined attentively a ring he wore upon his finger, in which a dark sapphire was set between two very white diamonds.
“There is one thing,” he said suddenly. “The sooner we pull up stakes the better. I do not propose to spend the best part of my life in the cars. The weather is cool and we will go back to town. So pack up your traps, Totty, and let us be off. Have you written to Tom?”
“No,” said Totty. “I would not announce the engagement till we were settled in town.”
Sherrington Trimm departed on the following morning, alleging with truth that the business could not be allowed to go to pieces. Totty and the two young people were to return two or three days later, and active preparations were at once made for moving. Totty, indeed, could not bear the idea of allowing her husband to remain alone in New York. It was possible that at any moment he might discover that the will was missing from her brother’s box. She might indeed have been spared much anxiety in this matter had she known that although Sherry had sealed and marked the document himself, it was not he who had placed it in the receptacle where it had been found by his wife. Sherry had handed it across the table to John Bond, telling him to put it in Craik’s deed-box, and had seen John leave the room with it, but had never seen it since. It was not, indeed, until much later that he had communicated to his partner the contents of the paper. If it could not now be found, Sherry would suppose that John had accidentally put it into the wrong box and a general search would be made. Then it would be thought that John had mislaid it. In any case poor John was dead and could not defend himself. Sherry would go directly to Tom Craik and get him to sign a duplicate, but he would never, under any conceivable combination of circumstances, connect his wife with the disappearance of the will, nor mention the fact in her presence. Totty, however, was ignorant of these facts, and lived in the constant fear of being obliged to explain matters to her husband. Though she had thought much of the matter she had not hit upon any expedient for restoring the document to its place. She kept it in a small Indian cabinet which her brother had once given her, in which there was a hidden drawer of which no one knew the secret but herself. This cabinet she had brought with her and had kept all through the summer in a prominent place in the drawing-room, justly deeming that things are generally most safely hidden when placed in the most exposed position, where no one would ever think of looking for them. On returning to New York the cabinet was again packed in one of Totty’s own boxes, but the will was temporarily concealed about her person, to be restored to its hiding-place as soon as she reached the town house.
Before leaving the neighbourhood George felt that it was his duty to apprise Constance and her sister of his departure, but he avoided the necessity of making a visit by writing a letter to Grace. It seemed to him more fitting that he should address his note to her rather than to her sister, considering all that had happened. He urged that both should return to New York before the winter began, and he inserted a civil message for Constance before he concluded.
Mamie took an affectionate leave of the place in which she had been so happy. During the last hours of the day preceding their return to town, George never left her side, while she wandered through the walks of the garden and beneath the beautiful trees, back to the house, in and out of the rooms, then lingered again upon the verandah and gazed at the distant river. He watched the movements of her faultless figure as she sat down for the last time in the places where they had so often sat together, then rose quickly, and, linking her arm in his, led him away to some other well-remembered spot.
“I have been so happy here!” she said for the hundredth time.
“You shall be as happy in other places, if I can make you so,” George answered.
“Shall we? Shall I?” she asked, looking up into his face. “Who can tell! One is never so sure of the future as one is of the past — and the present. Shall we take it all with us to our little house in New York? How funny it will seem to be living all alone with you in a little house! I shall not give you champagne every day, George. You need not expect it! It will be a very little house, and I shall do all the work.”
“If you will allow me to black the boots, I shall be most happy,” said George. “I know how.”
“Imagine! You, blacking boots!” exclaimed Mamie indignantly.
“Why not? But seriously, we can do a great deal more than you fancy — provided, as you say, that we do not go in for champagne every day, and keep horses and all that.”
“I think we shall have more champagne and horses than other things,” Mamie answered with a laugh. “Mamma is going to keep a carriage for me, as well as my dear old riding horse, and papa told me not to let you buy any wine, because there was some of that particular kind you like on the way out. Between you and me, I do not think they really expect us to be in the least economical, though mamma is always talking about it.”
She was very happy and it was impossible for her to cloud the future by the idea of being deprived of any of the luxury to which she had always been accustomed. She knew in her heart that she was both willing and able to undergo any privation for George’s sake, but it would have been unlike her to talk of what she would or could do when there was no immediate prospect of doing it. Her chief thought was to make her husband’s house comfortable, and if she knew something of the art from having watched her mother, she knew also that comfort, as she understood it, required a very free use of money. George knew it, too, since he had been brought up in luxury and had been deprived of it at the age when such things are most keenly felt. The terrible, noiseless, hourly expenditure that he had seen in
Totty’s house made the exiguity of his own resources particularly apparent to his judgment.
“Good-bye, dear old place!” cried the young girl, as they stood on the verandah at dusk, before going in to dress for dinner. She threw kisses with her fingers at the garden and at the trees.
George stood by her side in silence, gazing out at the dim outline of the distant hills beyond the river.
“Are you not sorry to leave it all?” Mamie asked.
“Very sorry,” he answered, as though not knowing what he said. Then he stooped, and kissed her small white face, and they both went in.
That night George sat up late in his room, looking over the manuscript that had grown under his hand during the summer months. It was all but finished and he intended to write the last chapter in New York, but it interested him to look through it before leaving the surroundings in which it had been written. What most struck him in the work was the care with which it was done. It was not a very imaginative book, but it was remarkable for its truth and clearness of style. He wondered at the coldness of certain scenes, which in his first conception of the story had promised to be the most dramatic. He wondered still more at the success with which he had handled points which in themselves seemed to be far from attractive to the novelist. His conversations were better than they had formerly been, but the love scenes were unsatisfactory, and he determined that he would re-write some of them. The whole book looked too truthful and too little enthusiastic to him, now, though he fancied that he had passed through moments of enthusiasm while he was writing it. On the whole, it was a disappointment to himself, and he believed that others would be disappointed likewise. He asked himself what Johnson would think of it, and made up his mind to abide by his opinion. Vaguely too, as one sometimes longs to see again a book once read, he wished that he might have Constance’s criticism and advice, though he was conscious at the same time that it was not the sort of story she would have liked.
Two days later, he found himself once more in his little room in his father’s house. The old gentleman received the news of the engagement in silence. He had guessed that matters would terminate as they had, and the prospect had given him little satisfaction. He thought that the alliance would probably cut him off from his son’s society, and he was inwardly hurt that George should seem indifferent to the fact. But he said nothing. From the worldly point of view the marriage was a brilliant one, and it meant that George must ultimately be a rich man. His future at least was provided for.
George found Johnson hard at work, as usual, and if possible paler and more in earnest than before. He had taken a week’s holiday during the hottest part of the summer, but with that exception had never relaxed in his astounding industry since they had last met.
“How particularly sleek you look,” he said, scrutinising George’s face as the latter sat down.
“I feel sleek,” George answered with a slight laugh. “I believe that is what is the matter with the book I have been writing since I saw you. I am not satisfied with it, and I want your opinion. I sat up all last night to write the last chapter in my old den. I think it is better than the rest.”
“That is a pity. It will look like a new silk hat on a beggar — or like a wig on a soup-tureen, as the Frenchmen say. But I daresay you are quite wrong about the rest of it. You generally are. For a man who can write a good story in good English when he tries, you have as little confidence as I ever saw in any one. The public does not write books and does not know how they are written. It will never find out that you wrote the beginning in clover and the end in nettles.”
“Oh — the public!” exclaimed George. “One never knows what it will do.”
“One may guess, sometimes. The public consists of a vast collection of individuals collected in a crowd around the feet of four great beasts. There is the ignorant beast and the learned beast, the virtuous beast and the vicious beast. They are all four beasts in their way, because they all represent an immense accumulation of prejudice, in four different directions and having four different followings, all pulling different ways. You cannot possibly please them all and it is quite useless to try.”
“I suppose you mean that the four beasts are the four kinds of critics. Is that it?”
“No,” Johnson answered. “That is not it at all. If we critics had more real influence with the public, the public would be all the better for it. As it is, the real critic is dying out, because the public will not pay enough to keep him alive. It is sad, but I suppose it is natural. This is the age of free thought, and the phrase, if you interpret it as most people do, means that all men are to consider themselves critics, whether they know anything or not. Have you brought your manuscript with you?”
“No. I wanted to ask first whether you would read it.”
“You need not be so humble, now that you are a celebrity,” said Johnson with a laugh. “You do not look the part, either. What has happened to you?”
“I am going to be married,” George answered. “I am to marry my cousin, Miss Trimm.”
“Not Sherrington Trimm’s daughter!”
“The same, if it please you.”
“I congratulate you on leaving the literary career,” said Johnson with a sardonic smile. “I suppose you will never do another stroke of work. Well — it is a pity.”
“I have to work for my living as I have done for years,” George answered. “Do you imagine that I would live upon other people’s money?”
“Do you really mean to go on working?”
“Of course I do, as long as I can hold a pen. I should if I were rich in my own right, for love of the thing.”
“Love of the thing is not enough. Are you ambitious?”
“I do not know. I never thought about it. To me, the question is whether a thing is well done or not, for its own sake. The success of it means money, which I need, but apart from that I do not think I care very much about it. I may be mistaken. I value your opinion, for instance, and if I knew other men like you, I should value theirs.”
“You will never succeed to any extent without ambition,” Johnson answered with great energy. “It is everything in literature. You must feel that you will go mad if you are not first, if you are not acknowledged to be better than any one else during your lifetime. You must make people understand that you are a dangerous rival, and you must have the daily satisfaction of knowing that they feel it. Literature is like the storming of a redoubt, you must climb upon the bodies of the slain and be the first to plant your flag on the top. You must lie awake all night, and torment yourself all day to find some means of doing a thing better than other people. To be first, always, all your life, without fear of competition, to be Cæsar or to be nothing! I wish I could make you feel what I feel!”
“I think I would rather not,” said George. “It must be very disturbing to the judgment to be always comparing oneself with others instead of trying to do the best one can in an independent way.”
“You will never succeed without ambition,” Johnson repeated confidently.
“Then I am afraid I shall never succeed at all, for I have not a spark of that sort of ambition. I do not care a straw for being thought better than any one else, nor for being a celebrity. I want to satisfy myself, my own idea of what is a good book, and I am afraid I never shall. I suppose that is a sort of ambition too.”
“It is not the right sort.”
George knew his friend very well and was familiar with most of his ideas. He respected his character, and he valued his opinion more than that of any man in his acquaintance, but he could never accept his theories as infallible. He felt that if he ever succeeded in writing a book that pleased him he would recognise its merits sooner than any one, and but for the necessity of earning a livelihood he would have systematically destroyed all his writings until he had attained a satisfactory result. That a certain amount of reputation might be gained by publishing what he regarded as incomplete or inartistic work was to him a matter of indifference, except for th
e material advantages which resulted from the transaction. Such, at least, was his belief about himself. That he was able to appreciate flattery when it was of a good and subtle quality, only showed him that he was human, but did not improve his own estimation of his productions.
A week later, Johnson returned the manuscript with a note in which he gave his opinion of it.
“It will sell,” he wrote. “You are quite mistaken about yourself, as usual. You told me the other day that you had no ambition. Your book proves that you have. You have taken the subject treated by Wiggins in his last great novel. It made a sensation, but in my opinion you have handled it better than he did, though he is called a great novelist. It was a very ambitious thing to do, and it is wonderful that, while taking a precisely similar situation, there should not be a word in your work that recalls his. After this, do not tell me that you have no ambition, for it is sheer nonsense. As for the last chapter, I should not have known that it was not written under the same circumstances as all the rest.”
George laughed aloud to himself. He knew the name of Wiggins well enough, but he had never read one of the celebrated author’s books, and if he had he would assuredly not have taken his plot.
“But Johnson could not know that,” he said to himself, “and I have written just such stuff about other people.”
The book went to the publisher and he thought no more of it. During the time that followed, his days were very fully occupied. Between making the necessary preparations for his approaching marriage, and the pleasant duty of spending a certain number of hours with Mamie every day, he had very little time to call his own, although nothing of any importance happened to vary the course of his life. At the beginning of November Constance Fearing and her sister returned to town, and at about the same time he was informed by Sherrington Trimm that it would be necessary for him to visit Mr. Thomas Craik, as he was about to become that gentleman’s nephew by marriage.
Complete Works of F Marion Crawford Page 524
