Books: Robert Falconer

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Falconer took her hand and kissed it.

'Thank God,' he said. 'That spire was indeed the haunt of angels as
I fancied while I played upon those bells.'

'I knew it was you--that is, I was sure of it when I came to think
about it; but at the time I took it for a direct message from
heaven, which nobody heard but myself.'

'It was such none the less that I was sent to deliver it,' said
Falconer. 'I little thought during my imprisonment because of it,
that the end of my journey was already accomplished.'

Mysie put her hand in his.

'You have saved me, Mr. Falconer.'

'For Ericson's sake, who was dying and could not,' returned
Falconer.

'Ah!' said Mysie, her large eyes opening with wonder. It was
evident she had had no suspicion of his attachment to her.

'But,' said Falconer, 'there was another in it, without whom I could
have done nothing.'

'Who was that?'

'George Moray.'

'Did he know me then?'

'No. Fortunately not. You would not have looked at him then. It
was all done for love of me. He is the truest fellow in the world,
and altogether worthy of you, Miss Hamilton. I will tell you the
whole story some day, lest he should not do himself justice.'

'Ah, that reminds me. Hamilton sounds strange in your voice. You
suspected me of having changed my name to hide my history?'

It was so, and Falconer's silence acknowledged the fact.

'Lady Janet brought me home, and told my father all. When he died a
few years after, she took me to live with her, and never rested till
she had brought me acquainted with Sir John Hamilton, in favour of
whom my father had renounced his claim to some disputed estates.
Sir John had lost his only son, and he had no daughter. He was a
kind-hearted old man, rather like my own father. He took to me, as
they say, and made me change my name to his, leaving me the property
that might have been my father's, on condition that whoever I
married should take the same name. I don't think your friend will
mind making the exchange,' said Mysie in conclusion, as the door
opened and Shargar came in.

'Robert, ye're a' gait (everywhere)!' he exclaimed as he entered.
Then, stopping to ask no questions, 'Ye see I'm to hae a name o' my
ain efter a',' he said, with a face which looked even handsome in
the light of his gladness.

Robert shook hands with him, and wished him joy heartily.

'Wha wad hae thocht it, Shargar,' he added, 'that day 'at ye pat
bonnets for hose upo' Black Geordie's huves?'

The butler announced the Marquis of Boarshead. Mysie's eyes
flashed. She rose from her seat, and advanced to meet the marquis,
who entered behind the servant. He bowed and held out his hand.
Mysie retreated one step, and stood.

'Your lordship has no right to force yourself upon me. You must
have seen that I had no wish to renew the acquaintance I was unhappy
enough to form--now, thank God, many years ago.'

'Forgive me, Miss Hamilton. One word in private,' said the marquis.

'Not a word,' returned Mysie.

'Before these gentlemen, then, whom I have not the honour of
knowing, I offer you my hand.'

'To accept that offer would be to wrong myself even more than your
lordship has done.'

She went back to where Moray was standing, and stood beside him.
The evil spirit in the marquis looked out at its windows.

'You are aware, madam,' he said, 'that your reputation is in the
hand I offer you?'

'The worse for it, my lord,' returned Mysie, with a scornful smile.
'But your lordship's brother will protect it.'

'My brother!' said the marquis. 'What do you mean? I have no
brother!'

'Ye hae mair brithers than ye ken o', Lord Sandy, and I'm ane o'
them,' said Shargar.

'You are either a liar or a bastard, then,' said the marquis, who
had not been brought up in a school of which either self-restraint
or respect for women were prominent characteristics.

Falconer forgot himself for a moment, and made a stride forward.

'Dinna hit him, Robert,' cried Shargar. 'He ance gae me a shillin',
an' it helpit, as ye ken, to haud me alive to face him this day.--No
liar, my lord, but a bastard, thank heaven.' Then, with a laugh, he
instantly added, 'Gin I had been ain brither to you, my lord, God
only knows what a rascal I micht hae been.'

'By God, you shall answer for your damned insolence,' said the
marquis, and, lifting his riding-whip from the table where he had
laid it, he approached his brother.

Mysie rang the bell.

'Haud yer han', Sandy,' cried Shargar. 'I hae faced mair fearsome
foes than you. But I hae some faimily-feelin', though ye hae nane:
I wadna willin'ly strike my brither.'

As he spoke, he retreated a little. The marquis came on with raised
whip. But Falconer stepped between, laid one of his great hands on
the marquis's chest, and flung him to the other end of the room,
where he fell over an ottoman. The same moment the servant entered.

'Ask your mistress to oblige me by coming to the drawing-room,' said
Mysie.

The marquis had risen, but had not recovered his presence of mind
when Lady Janet entered. She looked inquiringly from one to the
other.

'Please, Lady Janet, will you ask the Marquis of Boarshead to leave
the house,' said Mysie.

'With all my hert,' answered Lady Janet; 'and the mair that he's a
kin' o' a cousin o' my ain. Gang yer wa's, Sandy. Ye're no fit
company for decent fowk; an' that ye wad ken yersel', gin ye had ony
idea left o' what decency means.'

Without heeding her, the marquis went up to Falconer.

'Your card, sir.'

Lady Janet followed him.

''Deed ye s' get nae cairds here,' she said, pushing him aside. 'So
you allow your friends to insult me in your own house as they
please, cousin Janet?' said the marquis, who probably felt her
opposition the most formidable of all.

''Deed they canna say waur o' ye nor I think. Gang awa', an'
repent. Consider yer gray hairs, man.'

This was the severest blow he had yet received. He left the room,
'swearing at large.'

Falconer followed him; but what came of it nobody ever heard.

Major and Miss Hamilton were married within three months, and went
out to India together, taking Nancy Kennedy with them.

CHAPTER X.

A NEOPHYTE.

Before many months had passed, without the slightest approach to any
formal recognition, I found myself one of the church of labour of
which Falconer was clearly the bishop. As he is the subject, or
rather object of my book, I will now record a fact which may serve
to set forth his views more clearly. I gained a knowledge of some
of the circumstances, not merely from the friendly confidences of
Miss St. John and Falconer, but from being a kind of a Scotch cousin
of Lady Janet Gordon, whom I had taken an opportunity of acquainting
with the relation. She was old-fashioned enough to acknowledge it
even with some eagerness. The ancient clan-feeling is good in this,
that it opens a channel whose very existence is a justification for
the flow of simply human feelings along all possible levels of
social position. And I would there were more of it. Only something
better is coming instead of it--a recognition of the infinite
brotherhood in Christ. All other relations, all attempts by
churches, by associations, by secret societies--of Freemasons and
others, are good merely as they tend to destroy themselves in the
wider truth; as they teach men to be dissatisfied with their
limitations. But I wander; for I mentioned Lady Janet now, merely
to account for some of the information I possess concerning Lady
Georgina Betterton.

I met her once at my so-called cousin's, whom she patronized as a
dear old thing. To my mind, she was worth twenty of her, though she
was wrinkled and Scottishly sententious. 'A sweet old bat,' was
another epithet of Lady Georgina's. But she came to see her,
notwithstanding, and did not refuse to share in her nice little
dinners, and least of all, when Falconer was of the party, who had
been so much taken with Lady Janet's behaviour to the Marquis of
Boarshead, just recorded, that he positively cultivated her
acquaintance thereafter.

Lady Georgina was of an old family--an aged family, indeed; so old,
in fact, that some envious people professed to think it decrepit
with age. This, however, may well be questioned if any argument
bearing on the point may be drawn from the person of Lady Georgina.
She was at least as tall as Mary St. John, and very handsome--only
with somewhat masculine features and expression. She had very
sloping shoulders and a long neck, which took its finest curves when
she was talking to inferiors: condescension was her forte. Of the
admiration of the men, she had had more than enough, although either
they were afraid to go farther, or she was hard to please.

She had never contemplated anything admirable long enough to
comprehend it; she had never looked up to man or woman with anything
like reverence; she saw too quickly and too keenly into the foibles
of all who came near her to care to look farther for their virtues.
If she had ever been humbled, and thence taught to look up, she
might by this time have been a grand woman, worthy of a great man's
worship. She patronized Miss St. John, considerably to her
amusement, and nothing to her indignation. Of course she could not
understand her. She had a vague notion of how she spent her time;
and believing a certain amount of fanaticism essential to religion,
wondered how so sensible and ladylike a person as Miss St. John
could go in for it.

Meeting Falconer at Lady Janet's, she was taken with him. Possibly
she recognized in him a strength that would have made him her
master, if he had cared for such a distinction; but nothing she
could say attracted more than a passing attention on his part.
Falconer was out of her sphere, and her influences were powerless
to reach him.

At length she began to have a glimmering of the relation of labour
between Miss St. John and him, and applied to the former for some
enlightenment. But Miss St. John was far from explicit, for she had
no desire for such assistance as Lady Georgina's. What motives next
led her to seek the interview I am now about to record, I cannot
satisfactorily explain, but I will hazard a conjecture or two,
although I doubt if she understood them thoroughly herself.

She was, if not blasée, at least ennuyée, and began to miss
excitement, and feel blindly about her for something to make life
interesting. She was gifted with far more capacity than had ever
been exercised, and was of a large enough nature to have grown
sooner weary of trifles than most women of her class. She might
have been an artist, but she drew like a young lady; she might have
been a prophetess, and Byron was her greatest poet. It is no wonder
that she wanted something she had not got.

Since she had been foiled in her attempt on Miss St. John, which she
attributed to jealousy, she had, in quite another circle, heard
strange, wonderful, even romantic stories about Falconer and his
doings among the poor. A new world seemed to open before her
longing gaze--a world, or a calenture, a mirage? for would she cross
the 'wandering fields of barren foam,' to reach the green grass that
did wave on the far shore? the dewless desert to reach the fair
water that did lie leagues beyond its pictured sweetness? But I
think, mingled with whatever motives she may have had, there must
have been some desire to be a nobler, that is a more useful woman
than she had been.

She had not any superabundance of feminine delicacy, though she had
plenty of good-breeding, and she trusted to her position in society
to cover the eccentricity of her present undertaking.

One morning after breakfast she called upon Falconer; and accustomed
to visits from all sorts of people, Mrs. Ashton showed her into his
sitting-room without even asking her name. She found him at his
piano, apologized, in her fashionable drawl, for interrupting his
music, and accepted his offer of a chair without a shade of
embarrassment. Falconer seated himself and sat waiting.

'I fear the step I have taken will appear strange to you, Mr.
Falconer. Indeed it appears strange to myself. I am afraid it may
appear stranger still.'

'It is easy for me to leave all judgment in the matter to yourself,
Miss--I beg your pardon; I know we have met; but for the moment I
cannot recall your name.'

'Lady Georgina Betterton,' drawled the visitor carelessly, hiding
whatever annoyance she may have felt.

Falconer bowed. Lady Georgina resumed.

'Of course it only affects myself; and I am willing to take the
risk, notwithstanding the natural desire to stand well in the
opinion of any one with whom even my boldness could venture such a
step.'

A smile, intended to be playful, covered the retreat of the
sentence. Falconer bowed again. Lady Georgina had yet again to
resume.

'From the little I have seen, and the much I have heard of
you--excuse me, Mr. Falconer--I cannot help thinking that you know
more of the secret of life than other people--if indeed it has any
secret.'

'Life certainly is no burden to me,' returned Falconer. 'If that
implies the possession of any secret which is not common property, I
fear it also involves a natural doubt whether such secret be
communicable.'

'Of course I mean only some secret everybody ought to know.'

'I do not misunderstand you.'

'I want to live. You know the world, Mr. Falconer. I need not tell
you what kind of life a girl like myself leads. I am not old, but
the gilding is worn off. Life looks bare, ugly, uninteresting. I
ask you to tell me whether there is any reality in it or not;
whether its past glow was only gilt; whether the best that can be
done is to get through with it as fast as possible?'

'Surely your ladyship must know some persons whose very countenances
prove that they have found a reality at the heart of life.'

'Yes. But none whose judgment I could trust. I cannot tell how soon
they may find reason to change their minds on the subject. Their
satisfaction may only be that they have not tried to rub the varnish
off the gilding so much as I, and therefore the gilding itself still
shines a little in their eyes.'

'If it be only gilding, it is better it should be rubbed off.'

'But I am unwilling to think it is. I am not willing to sign a bond
of farewell to hope. Life seemed good once. It is bad enough that
it seems such no longer, without consenting that it must and shall
be so. Allow me to add, for my own sake, that I speak from the
bitterness of no chagrin. I have had all I ever cared--or
condescended to wish for. I never had anything worth the name of a
disappointment in my life.'

'I cannot congratulate you upon that,' said Falconer, seriously.
'But if there be a truth or a heart in life, assurance of the fact
can only spring from harmony with that truth. It is not to be known
save by absolute contact with it; and the sole guide in the
direction of it must be duty: I can imagine no other possible
conductor. We must do before we can know.'

'Yes, yes,' replied Lady Georgina, hastily, in a tone that implied,
'Of course, of course: we know all about that.' But aware at once,
with the fine instinct belonging to her mental organization, that
she was thus shutting the door against all further communication,
she added instantly: 'But what is one's duty? There is the
question.'

'The thing that lies next you, of course. You are, and must remain,
the sole judge of that. Another cannot help you.'

'But that is just what I do not know.'

I interrupt Lady Georgina to remark--for I too have been a pupil of
Falconer--that I believe she must have suspected what her duty was,
and would not look firmly at her own suspicion. She added:

'I want direction.'

But the same moment she proceeded to indicate the direction in which
she wanted to be directed; for she went on:

'You know that now-a-days there are so many modes in which to employ
one's time and money that one does not know which to choose. The
lower strata of society, you know, Mr. Falconer--so many channels!
I want the advice of a man of experience, as to the best
investment, if I may use the expression: I do not mean of money
only, but of time as well.'

'I am not fitted to give advice in such a matter.'

'Mr. Falconer!'

'I assure you I am not. I subscribe to no society myself--not one.'

'Excuse me, but I can hardly believe the rumours I hear of
you--people will talk, you know--are all inventions. They say you
are for ever burrowing amongst the poor. Excuse the phrase.'

'I excuse or accept it, whichever you please. Whatever I do, I am
my own steward.'

'Then you are just the person to help me! I have a fortune, not
very limited, at my own disposal: a gentleman who is his own
steward, would find his labours merely facilitated by administering
for another as well--such labours, I mean.'

'I must beg to be excused, Lady Georgina. I am accountable only for
my own, and of that I have quite as much as I can properly manage.
It is far more difficult to use money for others than to spend it
for yourself.'

'Ah!' said Lady Georgina, thoughtfully, and cast an involuntary
glance round the untidy room, with its horse-hair furniture, its
ragged array of books on the wall, its side-table littered with
pamphlets he never read, with papers he never printed, with pipes he
smoked by chance turns. He saw the glance and understood it.

'I am accustomed,' he said, 'to be in such sad places for human
beings to live in, that I sometimes think even this dingy old room
an absolute palace of comfort.--But,' he added, checking himself, as
it were, 'I do not see in the least how your proposal would
facilitate an answer to your question.'

'You seem hardly inclined to do me justice,' said Lady Georgina,
with, for the first time, a perceptible, though slight shadow
crossing the disc of her resolution. 'I only meant it,' she went on,
'as a step towards a further proposal, which I think you will allow
looks at least in the direction you have been indicating.'

She paused.

'May I beg of you to state the proposal?' said Falconer.

But Lady Georgina was apparently in some little difficulty as to the
proper form in which to express her object. At last it appeared in
the cloak of a question.

'Do you require no assistance in your efforts for the elevation of
the lower classes?' she asked.

'I don't make any such efforts,' said Falconer.

Some of my lady-readers will probably be remarking to themselves,
'How disagreeable of him! I can't endure the man.' If they knew
how Falconer had to beware of the forwardness and annoyance of
well-meaning women, they would not dislike him so much. But
Falconer could be indifferent to much dislike, and therein I know
some men that envy him.

When he saw, however, that Lady Georgina was trying to swallow a
lump in her throat, he hastened to add,

'I have only relations with individuals--none with classes.'

Lady Georgina gathered her failing courage. 'Then there is the more
hope for me,' she said. 'Surely there are things a woman might be
useful in that a man cannot do so well--especially if she would do
as she was told, Mr. Falconer?'

He looked at her, inquiring of her whole person what numen abode in
the fane. She misunderstood the look.

'I could dress very differently, you know. I will be a sister of
charity, if you like.'

'And wear a uniform?--as if the god of another world wanted to make
proselytes or traitors in this! No, Lady Georgina, it was not of a
dress so easily altered that I was thinking; it was of the habit,
the dress of mind, of thought, of feeling. When you laid aside your
beautiful dress, could you avoid putting on the garment of
condescension, the most unchristian virtue attributed to Deity or
saint? Could you--I must be plain with you, Lady Georgina, for this
has nothing to do with the forms of so-called society--could your
temper endure the mortifications of low opposition and
misrepresentation of motive and end--which, avoid intrusion as you
might, would yet force themselves on your perception? Could you be
rudely, impudently thwarted by the very persons for whom you were
spending your strength and means, and show no resentment? Could you
make allowances for them as for your own brothers and sisters, your
own children?'

Lady Georgina was silent.

'I shall seem to glorify myself, but at that risk I must put the
reality before you.--Could you endure the ugliness both moral and
physical which you must meet at every turn? Could you look upon
loathsomeness, not merely without turning away in disgust, and thus
wounding the very heart you would heal, but without losing your
belief in the Fatherhood of God, by losing your faith in the actual
blood-relationship to yourself of these wretched beings? Could you
believe in the immortal essence hidden under all this garbage--God
at the root of it all? How would the delicate senses you probably
inherit receive the intrusions from which they could not protect
themselves? Would you be in no danger of finding personal refuge in
the horrid fancy, that these are but the slimy borders of humanity
where it slides into, and is one with bestiality? I could show you
one fearful baboon-like woman, whose very face makes my nerves
shudder: could you believe that woman might one day become a lady,
beautiful as yourself, and therefore minister to her? Would you not
be tempted, for the sake of your own comfort, if not for the pride
of your own humanity, to believe that, like untimely blossoms, these
must fall from off the boughs of the tree of life, and come to
nothing at all--a theory that may do for the preacher, but will not
do for the worker: him it would paralyze?--or, still worse,
infinitely worse, that they were doomed, from their birth, to
endless ages of a damnation, filthy as that in which you now found
them, and must probably leave them? If you could come to this, you
had better withhold your hand; for no desire for the betterment of
the masses, as they are stupidly called, can make up for a lack of
faith in the individual. If you cannot hope for them in your heart,
your hands cannot reach them to do them good. They will only hurt
them.'

Lady Georgina was still silent. Falconer's eloquence had perhaps
made her ashamed.

'I want you to sit down and count the cost, before you do any
mischief by beginning what you are unfit for. Last week I was
compelled more than once to leave the house where my duty led me,
and to sit down upon a stone in the street, so ill that I was in
danger of being led away as intoxicated, only the policeman happened
to know me. Twice I went back to the room I had left, crowded with
human animals, and one of them at least dying. It was all I could
do, and I have tolerable nerve and tolerable experience.'

A mist was gathering over Lady Georgina's eyes. She confessed it
afterwards to Miss St. John. And through the mist he looked larger
than human.

'And then the time you must spend before you can lay hold upon them
at all, that is with the personal relation which alone is of any
real influence! Our Saviour himself had to be thirty years in the
world before he had footing enough in it to justify him in beginning
to teach publicly: he had been laying the needful foundations all
the time. Not under any circumstances could I consent to make use
of you before you had brought yourself into genuine relations with
some of them first.'

'Do you count societies, then, of no use whatever?' Lady Georgina
asked, more to break the awkwardness of her prolonged silence than
for any other reason.

'In as far as any of the persons they employ fulfil the conditions
of which I have spoken, they are useful--that is, just in as far as
they come into genuine human relations with those whom they would
help. In as far as their servants are incapable of this, the
societies are hurtful. The chief good which societies might effect
would be the procuring of simple justice for the poor. That is what
they need at the hands of the nation, and what they do not receive.
But though few can have the knowledge of the poor I have, many
could do something, if they would only set about it simply, and not
be too anxious to convert them; if they would only be their friends
after a common-sense fashion. I know, say, a hundred wretched men
and women far better than a man in general knows him with whom he
claims an ordinary intimacy. I know many more by sight whose names
in the natural course of events I shall probably know soon. I know
many of their relations to each other, and they talk about each
other to me as if I were one of themselves, which I hope in God I
am. I have been amongst them a good many years now, and shall
probably spend my life amongst them. When I went first, I was
repeatedly robbed; now I should hardly fear to carry another man's
property. Two years ago I had my purse taken, but next morning it
was returned, I do not know by whom: in fact it was put into my
pocket again--every coin, as far as I could judge, as it left me. I
seldom pretend to teach them--only now and then drop a word of
advice. But possibly, before I die, I may speak to them in public.
At present I avoid all attempt at organization of any sort, and as
far as I see, am likely of all things to avoid it. What I want is
first to be their friend, and then to be at length recognized as
such. It is only in rare cases that I seek the acquaintance of any
of them: I let it come naturally. I bide my time. Almost never do
I offer assistance. I wait till they ask it, and then often refuse
the sort they want. The worst thing you can do for them is to
attempt to save them from the natural consequences of wrong: you may
sometimes help them out of them. But it is right to do many things
for them when you know them, which it would not be right to do for
them until you know them. I am amongst them; they know me; their
children know me; and something is always occurring that makes this
or that one come to me. Once I have a footing, I seldom lose it.
So you see, in this my labour I am content to do the thing that
lies next me. I wait events. You have had no training, no
blundering to fit you for such work. There are many other modes of
being useful; but none in which I could undertake to direct you. I
am not in the habit of talking so much about my ways--but that is of
no consequence. I think I am right in doing so in this instance.'