Books: Our Friend the Charlatan
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George Gissing >> Our Friend the Charlatan
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Introductions were carelessly made; he seated himself on a
camp-stool by one of the young ladies, and dropped a few
insignificant remarks. No one paid much attention to him.
"Seventy-five runs!" exclaimed Mrs. Woolstan, addressing herself as
though with keen interest to the son of the family, a high-coloured,
large-limbed young man of about Lashmar's age. "That was splendid!
But you did better still against East Croydon, didn't you?"
"Made my century, there," answered Mr. Barker, jerking out a leg in
self-satisfaction.
"How conceited you're making him, Mrs. Woolstan!" cried one of his
sisters, with a shrill laugh. "It's a rule in this house to put the
stopper on Jim when he begins to talk about cricket. If we didn't,
there'd be no living with him."
"Are you a cricketer, Mr.--Mr. Lasher?" asked materfamilias,
eyeing the visitor curiously.
"It's a long time since I played," was the reply, uttered with
scarcely veiled contempt.
Mrs. Woolstan talked on in the highest spirits, exhibiting her
intimacy with the Barker household, and her sympathy with their
concerns. Lashmar waited for her to question him about Hollingford,
to give him an opportunity of revealing his importance; but her
thoughts seemed never to turn in that direction. As soon as a
movement in the company enabled him to rise, he stepped up to her,
and said in a voice audible to those standing by:
"I want to speak to you about Leonard. Shall you be at home this
evening?"
Iris gave him a startled look.
"You haven't bad news of Len?"
"Oh no; nothing of the kind."
"Can you call at six o'clock?"
He looked into her eyes, and nodded.
"What do you say to a boat, Mrs. Woolstan?" shouted Barker the son.
This suggestion was acclaimed, and Lashmar was urged to join the
party, but he gladly seized this chance of escape. Wandering along
the grassy edge of the cliffs, he presently descried the Barkers and
their friend putting forth in two little boats. The sight
exasperated him. He strode gloomily on, ever and again turning his
head to watch the boats, and struggling against the fears that once
more assailed him.
In a hollow of dry sand, where the cliffs broke, he flung himself
down, and lay still for an hour or two. Below him, on the edge of
the tide, children were playing; he watched them sullenly. Lashmar
disliked children; the sound of their voices was disagreeable to
him. He wondered whether he would ever have children of his own, and
heartily hoped not.
Six o'clock seemed very long in coming. But at length he found
himself at Sunrise Terrace again, and was admitted to an ordinary
lodging-house parlour, where, with tea on the table, Mrs. Woolstan
awaited him. The sea air had evidently done her good; she looked
younger and prettier than when Dyce last saw her, and the tea-gown
she wore became her well.
"How did you know where I was?" she began by asking, rather
distantly.
Lashmar told her in detail.
"But why were you so anxious to se me?--Sugar, I think?"
"It's a long story," he replied, looking t her from under his
eyebrows, "and I don't much care or telling it in a place like'
this, where all we say can be heard by anyone on the other side of
the door."
Iris was watching his countenance. The cold politeness with which
she had received him had become a very transparent mask; beneath it
showed eager curiosity and trembling hope.
"We can go out, if you like," she said.
"And most likely meet those singular friends of yours. Who on earth
are they?"
"Very nice people," replied Mrs. Woolstan, holding up her head.
"They are intolerably vulgar, and you must be aware of it. I felt
ashamed to see you among them. What are you doing at a place like
this? Why have you shut up your house?"
"Really," exclaimed Iris, with a flutter, "that is my business."
Lashmar's nervous irritation was at once subdued. He looked timidly
at the indignant face, let his eyes fall, and murmured an apology.
"I've been going through strange things, and I'm not quite master of
myself. The night before last"--his voice sunk to a hollow note--
"I very nearly took poison."
"What do you mean? Poison?"
Mrs. Woolstan's eyes widened in horror. Lashmar regarded her with a
smile of intense melancholy.
"One thing only kept me from it. I remembered that I was in your
debt, and I felt it would be too cowardly."
"What has happened?--Come and sit near the window; no one could
hear us talking here. I have been expecting to read of your
election. Is it something to do with Lady Ogram's death? I have
wanted so much to know about that, and how it affected you."
A few questions gave Dyce the comfortable assurance that Iris had
not seen Mrs. Toplady for a long time. Trouble with servants, she
said, coming after a slight illness, had decided her to quit her
house for the rest of the summer, and the Barkers persuaded her to
come to Gorleston. When Leonard left school for his holidays, she
meant to go with him to some nice place.
"But do tell me what you mean by those dreadful words? And why have
you come to see _me_?"
She was her old self, the Iris Woolstan on whom first of all Lashmar
had tried his "method," who had so devoutly believed in him and
given such substantial proof of her faith. The man felt his power,
and began to recover self-respect.
"Tell me one thing," he said, bending towards her. "May I remain
your debtor for a little longer? Will it put you to inconvenience?"
"Not at all!" was the impulsive reply. "I told you I didn't want the
money. I have more than six hundred pounds a year, and never spend
quite all of it."
Lashmar durst not raise his eyes lest a gleam of joy should betray
him. He knew now what he had so long desired to know. Six hundred a
year; it was enough.
"You are very kind. That relieves me. For two or three days I have
been in despair. Yes, you shall hear all about it. I owe you the
whole truth, for no one ever understood me as you did, and no one
ever gave me such help--of every kind. First of all, about my
engagement to Miss Bride. It's at an end. But more than that it
wasn't a real engagement at all. We tried to play a comedy, and the
end has been tragic."
Iris drew a deep breath of wonder. Her little lips were parted, her
little eyebrows made a high arch; she had the face of a child who
listens to a strange and half terrifying story.
"Don't you see how it was?" he exclaimed, in a subdued voice of
melodious sadness. "Lady Ogram discovered that her niece--you
remember May Tomalin? thought rather too well of me. This did not
suit her views; she had planned a marriage between May and Lord
Dymchurch. You know what her temper was. One day she gave me the
choice: either I married Constance Bride, or I never entered her
house again. Imagine my position. Think of me, with my ambitions, my
pride, and the debt I had incurred to you. Can you blame me much if,
seeing that Lady Ogram's life might end any day, I met her tyranny
by stratagem. How I longed to tell you the truth! But I felt bound
in honour to silence. Constance Bride, my friend and never anything
more, agreed to the pretence of an engagement. Wasn't it brave of
her? And so things went on, until the day when Dymchurch came down
to Rivenoak, and proposed to May. The silly girl refused him. There
was a terrible scene, such as I hope never to behold again. May was
driven forth from the house, and Lady Ogram, just as she was bidding
me take steps for my immediate marriage, fell to the ground
unconscious--dying."
He paused impressively. The listener was panting as if she had run a
race.
"And the will?" she asked.
"It dates from a year ago. May Tomalin is not mentioned in it. I, of
course, have nothing."
Iris gazed at the floor. A little sound as of consternation had
passed her lips, but she made no attempt to console the victim of
destiny who sat with bowed head before her. After a brief silence,
Lashmar told of the will as it concerned Constance Bride, insisting
on the fact that she was a mere trustee of the wealth bequeathed to
her. With a humorously doleful smile, he spoke of Lady Ogram's
promise to defray his election expenses, and added that Miss Bride,
in virtue of her trusteeship, would carry out this wish. Another
exclamation sounded from the listener, this time one of joy.
"Well, that's something! I suppose the expenses are heavy, aren't
they?"
"Oh, not very. But what's the use? Of course I withdraw."
He let his hand fall despondently. Again there was silence.
"And that is why you thought of taking poison?" asked Iris, with a
quick glance at his lowering visage.
"Isn't it a good reason? All is over with me. If Lady Ogram had
lived to make her new will, I should have been provided for. Now I
am penniless and hopeless."
"But, if she had lived, you would have had to marry Miss Bride."
Dyce made a sorrowful gesture.
"No. She would never have consented, even if I could have brought
myself to such a sacrifice. In any case, I was doomed."
"But--"
Iris paused, biting her lip.
"You were going to say?"
"Only--that I suppose you would have been willing to marry that
girl, the niece."
"I will answer you frankly." He spoke in the softest tone and his
look had a touching candour. "You, better than anyone, know the
nature of my ambition. You know it is not merely personal. One
doesn't like to talk grandiloquently, but, alone with you, there is
no harm in saying that I have a message for our time. We have
reached a point in social and political evolution where all the
advance of modern life seems to be imperilled by the growing
preponderance of the multitude. Our need is of men who are born to
guide and rule, and I feel myself one of these. But what can I do as
long as I am penniless? And so I answer you frankly: yes, if May
Tomalin had inherited Lady Ogram's wealth, I should have _felt it my
duly_ to marry her."
Iris listened without a smile. Lashmar had never spoken with a more
convincing show of earnestness.
"What is she going to do?" asked the troubled little woman, her eyes
cast down.
Dyce told all that he knew of May's position. He was then questioned
as to the state of things political at Hollingford: his replies were
at once sanguine and disconsolate.
"Well," he said at length, "I have done my best, but fortune is
against me. In coming to see you, I discharged what I felt to be a
duty. Let me again thank you for your generous kindness. Now I must
work, work--"
He stood an image of noble sadness, of magnanimity at issue with
cruel fate. Iris glanced timidly at him; her panting showed that she
wished to speak, but could not. He offered his hand; Iris took it,
but only for an instant.
"I want you to tell me something else," broke from her lips.
"I will tell you anything."
"Are you in love with that girl--Miss Tomalin?"
With sorrowful dignity, he shook his head; with proud
self-consciousness, he smiled.
"Nor with Miss Bride?"
"I think of her exactly as if she were a man."
"If I told you that I very much wished you to do something, would
you care to do it?"
"Your wish is for me a command," Dyce answered gently. "If it were
not, I should be grossly ungrateful."
"Then promise to go through with the election. Your expenses are
provided for. If you win, I am _sure_ some way can be found of
providing you with an income--I am _sure_ it can!"
"It shall be as you wish," said Lashmar, seeming to speak with a
resolute cheerfulness. "I will return to Hollingford by the first
train to-morrow."
They talked for a few minutes more. Lashmar mentioned where he was
going to pass the night. He promised to resume their
long-interrupted correspondence, and to let his friend have frequent
reports from Hollingford. Then they shook hands, and parted
silently.
After dinner, Dyce strayed shorewards. He walked down to the little
harbour, and out on to the jetty. A clouded sky had brought night
fast upon sunset; green and red lamps shone from the lighthouse at
the jetty head, and the wash of the rising tide sounded in darkness
on either hand. Not many people had chosen this spot for their
evening walk, but, as he drew near to the lighthouse, he saw the
figure of a woman against the grey obscurity; she was watching a
steamboat slowly making its way through the harbour mouth. He
advanced, and at the sound of his nearing step the figure faced to
him. There was just light enough to enable him to recognise Iris.
"You oughtn't to be here alone," he said.
"Oh, why not?" she replied with a laugh. "I'm old enough to take
care of myself."
The wind had begun to moan; waves tide-borne against the jetty made
a hollow booming, and at moments scattered spray.
"How black it is to-night!" Iris added. "It will rain. There! I felt
a spot."
"Only a splash of sea-water, I think," replied Lashmar, standing
close beside her.
Both gazed at the dark vast of sea and sky. A pair of ramblers
approached them; a young man and a girl, talking loudly the tongue
of lower London.
"I know a young lady," sounded in the feminine voice, "as 'as a
keeper set with a di'mond and a hamethys--lovely!"
"Come away," said Dyce. "What a hateful place this is! How can you
bear to be among such brutes?"
Iris moved on by him, but said nothing.
"I felt ashamed," he added, "to find you with people like the
Barkers. Do you mean to say they don't disgust you?"
"They are not so bad as that," Iris weakly protested. "But you
mustn't think I regard them as intimate friends. It's only that--
I've been rather lonely lately. Len away at school--and several
things--"
"Yes, yes, I understand. But they're no company for you. Do get away
as soon as possible."
Another couple went by them talking loudly the same vernacular.
"If I put a book down for a day," said the young woman, "I forget
all I've read. I've a hawful bad memory for readin'."
"How I loathe that class!" Lashmar exclaimed. "I never came to this
part of the coast, because I knew it was defiled by them. For
heaven's sake, get away t Go to some place where your ears won't be
perpetually outraged. I can't bear to think of leaving you here."
"I'll go as soon as ever I can--I promise you," murmured Iris.
"There! It really is beginning to rain. We must walk quickly."
"Will you take my arm?"
She did so, and they hurried on.
"That's the democracy," said Lashmar. "Those are the people for whom
we are told that the world exists. They get money, and it gives them
power. Meanwhile, the true leaders of mankind, as often as not,
struggle through their lives in poverty and neglect."
Iris's voice sounded timidly.
"You would feel it of no use to have just enough for independence?"
"For the present," he replied, "it would be all I ask. But I might
just as well ask for ten thousand a year."
The rain was beating upon them. During the ascent to Sunrise
Terrace, neither spoke a word. At the door of her lodgings, Iris
looked into her companion's face, and said in a tremulous voice:
"I am sure you will be elected! I'm certain of it!"
Dyce laughed, pressed her hand, and, as the door opened, walked away
through the storm.
CHAPTER XXVIII
Lord Dymchurch went down into Somerset. His younger sister was in a
worse state of health than he had been led to suppose; there could
be no thought of removing her from home. A day or two later, her
malady took a hopeless turn, and by the end of the week she was
dead.
A month after this, the surviving daughter of the house, seeking
solace in the ancient faith to which she had long inclined, joined a
religious community. Dymchurch was left alone.
Since his abrupt departure from Rivenoak, he had lived a silent
life, spending the greater part of every day in solitude. Grief was
not sufficient to account for the heaviness and muteness which had
fallen upon him, or for the sudden change by which his
youthful-looking countenance had become that of a middle-aged man.
He seemed to shrink before eyes that regarded him, however kind
their expression; one might have thought that some secret shame was
harassing his mind. He himself, indeed, would have used no other
word to describe the ill under which he suffered. Looking back on
that strange episode of his life which began with his introduction
to Mrs. Toplady and ended in the park at Rivenoak, he was stung
almost beyond endurance by a sense of ignominious folly. On his
lonely walks, and in the silence of sleepless nights, he often
gesticulated and groaned like a man in pain. His nerves became so
shaken that at times he could hardly raise a glass or cup to his
lips without spilling the contents. Poverty and loneliness be had
known, and had learnt to bear them with equanimity; for the first
time he was tasting humiliation.
Incessantly be reviewed the stages of his foolishness and, as be
deemed it, of his dishonour. But he had lost the power to understand
that phantasm of himself which pranked so grotesquely in the
retrospect. Was it true that he had reasoned and taken deliberate
step after step in the wooing of Lady Ogram's niece? Might he not
urge in his excuse, to cloak him from his own and the world's
contempt, some unsuspected calenture, for which, had he known, he
ought to have taken medical advice? When, in self-chastisement, he
tried to summon before his mind's eye the image of May Tomalin, he
found it quite impossible; the face no longer existed for him; the
voice was as utterly forgotten as any he might have chanced to hear
for a few minutes on that fatal evening in Pont Street. And this was
what he had seen as an object of romantic tenderness--this
vaporous nothing, this glimmer in a dazed eye!
Calm moments brought a saner self-reproach. "I simply yielded to the
common man's common temptation. I am poor, and it was wealth that
dazzled and lured me. Pride would explain more subtly; that is but a
new ground of shame. I felt a prey to the vulgarest and basest
passion; better to burn that truth into my mind, and to make the
brand a lifelong warning. I shall the sooner lift up my head again."
He seemed to palliate his act by remembering that he wished to
benefit his sisters. Neither of them--the poor dead girl, and she
who lived only for self-forgetfulness--would have been happier at
the cost of his disgrace. How well it was, indeed, that he had been
saved from that debasement in their eyes.
He lived on in the silent house, quite alone and desiring no
companionship. Few letters came for him, and he rarely saw a
newspaper. After a while he was able to forget himself in the
reading of books which tranquillised his thought, and held him far
from the noises of the passing world. So sequestered was the grey
old house that he could go forth when he chose into lanes and
meadows without fear of encountering anyone who would disturb his
meditation and his enjoyment of nature's beauty. Through the mellow
days of the declining summer, he lived amid trees and flowers,
slowly recovering health and peace in places where a bird's note, or
the ripple of a stream, or the sighing of the wind, were the only
sounds under the ever-changing sky.
His thoughts were often of death, but not on that account gloomy.
Reading in his Marcus Aurelius, he said to himself that the Stoic
Emperor must, after all, have regarded death with some fear: else,
why speak of it so persistently, and with such marshalling of
arguments to prove it no matter for dread? Dymchurch never wished to
shorten his life, yet, without other logic than that of a quiet
heart, came to think more than resignedly of the end towards which
he moved. He was the last of his family, and no child would ever
bear his name. Without bitterness, he approved this extinction of a
line which seemed to have outlived its natural energies. He, at all
events, would bear no responsibility for suffering or wrongdoing in
the days to come.
The things which had so much occupied him during the last year or
two, the state of the time, its perils and its needs, were now but
seldom in his mind: he felt himself ripening to that "wise
passiveness," which, through all his intellectual disquiet, he had
regarded as the unattainable ideal. When, as a very young man, he
exercised himself in versifying, the model he more or less
consciously kept in view was Matthew Arnold; it amused him now to
recall certain of the compositions he had once been rather proud of,
and to recognise how closely he had trodden in Arnold's footprints;
at the same time, he felt glad that the aspiration of his youth
seemed likely to become the settled principle of his maturity.
Nowadays he gave much of his thought to Wordsworth, content to study
without the desire of imitating. Whether he could _do_ anything,
whether he could bear witness in any open way to what he held the
truth, must still remain uncertain; sure it was that a profound
distrust of himself in every practical direction, a very humble
sense of follies committed and dangers barely escaped, would for a
long time make him a silent and solitary man. He hoped that some way
might be shown him, some modest yet clear way, by following which he
would live not wholly to himself; but he had done for ever with
schemes of social regeneration, with political theories, with all
high-sounding words and phrases. It might well prove that the work
appointed him was simply to live as an honest man. Was that so easy,
or such a little thing?
Walking one day a mile or two from home, in one of those
high-bowered Somerset lanes which are unsurpassed for rural
loveliness, he came within sight of a little cottage, which stood
apart from a hamlet hidden beyond a near turning of the road. Before
it moved a man, white-headed, back-bent, so crippled by some ailment
that he tottered slowly and painfully with the aid of two sticks.
Just as Dymchurch drew near, the old fellow accidentally let fall
his pipe, which he had been smoking as he hobbled along. For him
this incident was a disaster; he stared down helplessly at the pipe
and the little curl of smoke which rose from it, utterly unable to
stoop for its recovery. Dymchurch, seeing the state of things, at
once stepped to his assistance.
"I thank you, sir, I thank you," said the hobbler, with pleasant
frankness. "A man isn't much use when he can't even keep his pipe in
his mouth, to say nothing of picking it up when it drops; what do
_you_ think, sir?"
Dymchurch talked with him. The man had spent his life as a gardener,
and now for a couple of years, invalided by age and rheumatism, had
lived in this cottage on a pension. His daughter, a widow, dwelt
with him, but was away working nearly the whole of the day. He got
along very well, but one thing there was that grieved him, the state
of his little garden. Through the early summer he had been able to
look after it as usual, pottering among the flowers and the
vegetables for an hour or two each day; but there came rainy
weather, and with it one of his attacks, and the garden was now so
overgrown with weeds that it "hurt his eyes," it really did, to look
that way. The daughter dug potatoes and gathered beans as they were
wanted, but she had neither time nor strength to do more.
Interested in a difficulty such as he had never imagined, Dymchurch
went up to the garden-wall, and viewed the state of things. Indeed,
it was deplorable. Thistles, docks, nettles, wild growths
innumerable, were choking the flowers in which the old man so
delighted. But the garden was such a small one that little trouble
and time would be needed to put it in order.
"Will you let me do it for you?" he asked, good-naturedly. "It's
just the kind of job I should like."
"You, sir!" cried the old fellow, all but again losing his pipe in
astonishment. "Ho, ho! That's a joke indeed!"
Without another word, Dymchurch opened the wicket, flung off his
coat, and got to work. He laboured for more than an hour, the old
man leaning on the wall and regarding him with half-ashamed,
half-amused countenance. They did not talk much, but, when he had
begun to perspire freely, Dymchurch looked at his companion, and
said:
"Now here's a thing I never thought of. Neglect your garden for a
few weeks, and it becomes a wilderness; nature conquers it back
again. Think what that means; how all the cultivated places of the
earth are kept for men only by ceaseless fighting with nature, year
in, year out."
"And that's true, sir, that's true. I've thought of it sometimes,
but then I'm a gardener, you see, and it's my business, as you may
say, to have such thoughts."
"It's every man's business," returned Dymchurch, supporting himself
on his hoe, and viewing the uprooted weeds. "I never realised as in
this half-hour at the cost of what incessant labour the earth is
kept at man's service. If I have done you a good turn, you have done
me a better."
And he hoed vigorously at a root of dandelion.
Not for years had he felt so well in body and mind as during his
walk home. There, there was the thought for which he had been
obscurely groping! What were volumes of metaphysics and of sociology
to the man who had heard this one little truth whispered from the
upturned mould? Henceforth he knew _why_ he was living, and _how_ it
behooved him to live. Let theories and poesies follow if they would:
for him, the prime duty was that nearest to him, to strive his best
that the little corner of earth which he called his own should yield
food for man. At this moment there lay upon his table letters
informing him of the unsatisfactory state of his Kentish farm; the
tenant was doing badly in every sense of the word, and would
willingly escape from his lease if opportunity were given. Very
well; the man should go.
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