WHEN Philip Lancaster and Mr. Grant reached the landing at the head of the stairs, they faced each other for a moment; and then, by mutual impulse as it were, Grant tacitly extended, and Philip as tacitly accepted, an invitation to enter the former’s room. The mind resembles the heart in this, that it sometimes feels an instinctive and unexplained desire for the society of another mind. Cold and self-sufficient though the intellect is, it cannot always endure solitude and the corrosion of its unimparted thoughts. Therefore some of the most permanent, though not the most ardent friendships have been between men whose ground of meeting was exclusively intellectual. But men, for some reason, are not willing to admit this, and generally disguise the fact by a plausible obtrusion of other motives. So Mr. Grant, as he opened the door (after the tacit transaction abovementioned), said, “Step in, Lancaster, and help me through with a glass of that French cognac and water.”
“Thank you, I will,” Lancaster replied.
But when the tumblers were filled and tasted, and the liquor pronounced good, nothing more was said for some minutes. At last Lancaster got up from his chair and began to pace about the room.
“It could be worked up into a good story, that character of the Marquise Desmoines,” he said; “at least as I conceive it. If I were a story writer instead of a poet, I would attempt it. You would need the right sort of a man to bring into collision with her. While I was abroad, I knew a fellow who, I think, would do. Came of good English stock, and had talent—perhaps genius. His father was a poor man, though of noble descent. Gave his son a good early training, followed up by the university curriculum, and then sent him abroad, with two or three hundred a year income. We’ll call him Yorke. The fellow’s idea at that time was to enter the Church; he had eloquence when he was moved, a good presence, and a sort of natural benevolence or humanity, the result of a healthy constitution and digestion, and radical ignorance of the wickedness of this world. The truth probably was that his benevolence was condescension, and his humanity, good nature. As for religion, he looked at it from the poetical side, saw that it was susceptible of a pleasant symbolism, that the theory of right and wrong gave plenty of scope for the philosophical subtlety and profundity in which he imagined himself proficient, and that all he would have to do, as the professional representative of religious ideas, would be to preach poetical sermons, be the expectancy and rose of his parishioners, the glass of goodness and the mould of self-complacency. He thought everybody would be led by him and glorify him, that his chief difficulty would be to keep their piety within practical bounds; and that the devil himself would go near to break his sinful old heart because he could not be numbered among the disciples of so inspired a young prig. It was a lovely conception, wasn’t it? but he never got so far with it as even to experience its idiocy. His first bout with theological and ecclesiastical lore was enough for him. He found himself the captive of a prison house of dogmas, superstitions, and traditions, instead of the lord of a palace of freedom, beauty and blank verse. If this was religion, he was made for something better; and he began to look about him in search of it. There were plenty of ideas masquerading about just then in the guise of freedom, and flaring the penny-dip of nationality in people’s faces; and this fellow—what’s his name?—Yorke, gave courteous entertainment to several of them. A German university is as good a place as another to indulge in that sort of dissipation. Freedom—that was the word; the right of a man to exploit his nature from the top to the bottom—and having arrived at the bottom, to sit down there and talk about the top. He had two or three years of this, and arrived at such proficiency that he could give a reason for everything, especially for those things that suited his inclination of the moment; and could prove to demonstration that the proper moral attitude of man was heels in the air and head downward. But unluckily human nature is not inexhaustible, at all events in the case of my single individual. The prospect may be large enough, but he only walks in such few paths as are comfortably accessible to him; and as time goes on, his round of exercise gets more and more contracted, until at last he does little more than turn round on one heel, in the muddiest corner of the whole estate. As Yorke, owing perhaps to the superior intellect and moral organization on which he prided himself, arrived at this corner rather more speedily than the majority of his associates, he was better able than they to recognize its muddiness: and since mud, qu mud, was not irresistibly delightful to him, and he was not as yet inextricably embedded in it, he thought it worth while to try and get out of it; and made shift tolerably well to do so, though no doubt carrying plenty of stains along with him. All this time he had been secretly giving way to attacks of poetry, more or less modeled upon the Byron and Shelley plan. One day he took these scraps out of the portfolio in which he had hidden them, read them over, thought there was genius in them here and there, and made up his mind to be a great poet. There are always poetasters enough; but of great poets, you know, there are never so many as not to leave room for one or two more.”
“Here, then,” observed Mr. Grant, who had followed this history with complete attention—indeed he was an excellent listener—“here, then, you and Mr. Yorke were on sympathetic ground. It was probably at this epoch that you formed his acquaintance.”
“I came to know him very well then, at all events,” replied Lancaster, taking a sip from his tumbler, and then resuming his walk up and down the room. “He had a curiously mixed character. It was difficult to help liking him at first sight. He was handsome, cheerful, many-sided, easy-natured; but though he loved his ease, both of mind and body, he was capable on occasion of great physical or mental exertion. He was more comprehensive than commanding; but perhaps he seemed less strong than he really was, because he doubted the essential expediency or virtue of any particular line of conduct; and would rather observe the leadership of others than lead himself. He had great intuitive insight into the moral constitution of other people, but was not so keen-eyed toward his own structure; in considering an event, he had the habit of taking it upon its artistic or symbolical side—it was a device to parry the touch of realities. But often he allowed his imagination to get him into real scrapes—imagine himself to be this or that person, for instance, and act the character into actual consequences. He had a quaint way with him, and shunned giving direct pain, or coming into hostile collision with anybody; but the reason of that was, not the generous humanity of a powerful spirit, but the knowledge of a secret weakness that was in him, and a fear of revealing it. His weakness was a passionate, violent temper, which, once he had given way to it, would strip him of dignity and self-restraint, and uncover all manner of hatreds, revenges, jealousies, burning envies, and remorseless cruelties. There was nothing noble in his rage: it was underhand, savage, and malignant. In fact, subtlety was at the very base of his nature: so that he would constantly be secret and stealthy when there was no reason for it: he would conceal a hundred things which he might more conveniently to himself have left open; he would give a false impression when he might more advantageously to himself have told the truth; though I never met a man who could upon occasion speak the naked truth more boldly and recklessly than he. I should say he was by instinct and organization a coward, but a brave man by determination. Back to a certain point he would yield and yield; but then he would leap out and fight like a mad tiger. He was liable to wicked conceptions: although, whether from constitution or caution, he commonly did what was right, and did not like to be suspected of acts of which he secretly knew himself either guilty or capable. In short, there was an ignoble, treacherous region, underlying his visible and better character, which he made use of that better character to disguise. The peril he stood in was, lest the baser nature should get the upper hand; and if he was saved from that, it was, I should say, by virtue of what may be called his genius. It was his good genius in more senses than one. It filled his imagination with lofty images: when his pen was in his hand no man was more pure-minded, well-balanced and upright than he. In those moods he was even reverential, which in practical affairs he never was. The custom of those moods influenced him like association with good men and women: or like some beneficent spell, which should suspend the action of a poison until either it lost its virulence, or he had recovered strength enough to disregard it. Have you heard enough about my friend Yorke?”
In putting this abrupt question, Lancaster stopped as abruptly in his walk, and fixed his eyes upon Mr. Grant, who lifted his face and met the look thoughtfully.
“’Tis a portrait not devoid of life and substance, and does credit to your discernment more than to your charity,” he replied. “But the features are so true as to be in a measure typical; I have met men who resembled him, and therefore I may modify your interpretation by my own. With all his sensitiveness to rebuke and his fair-seeming, was he not a man given to self-depreciation?”
“Sometimes—yes.”
“The issue of that kind of vanity which would simulate what is dark and terrible, to make the hearers stare. He would not do the evil that he uttered. Besides, he was aware of a certain softness or womanishness in his nature, which his masculine taste condemned, and which he sought to rectify at least in words.”
“But that would show a fear to let the truth about himself be known.”
“Aye; and a moral indifference to ill repute. On the other hand, I doubt not he often sinned in thought, when a physical or mental fastidiousness withheld him from fixing his thought in action. As to his genius, I grant you it was purgative to him; but less because it put him in noble company than because it gave vent through the imagination, and with artistic balance, to the wickedness which might else have forced a less harmless outlet. You say his general bearing was genial?”
“Yes; but his bearing was often much pleasanter than his feelings. He disliked to say or hear ugly words; though he could write savage letters, and could imagine himself being very stern in intercourse; but when he came to the point, he was apt to sweeten off—more, I think, from dread of being tempted to lose his temper than from natural kindliness.”
“You judge him too harshly, because too minutely. Every human motive has its shady side. He was a man—if I may hazard an opinion—who was never so gay and good-humored as under specially trying or perilous circumstances: upon slighter occasions he might be less agreeable.”
“You have chanced upon a truth there,” said Lancaster, apparently somewhat impressed by his interlocutor’s sagacity. “We were once in a boat together on the Lake of Geneva, and a storm put us in imminent danger of our lives for a couple of hours. He was laughing and jesting all the time—not cynically or mockingly, but from genuine light-heartedness. Perhaps you can explain that?”
“No further than to remind you that great or dangerous crises burn the pretense out of a man and leave him sincere: and then it will be known, to others as well as to himself, whether he be brave or craven. In the case of your friend Yorke, with his dread of being accused of fine feelings, imminent peril would annul that dread, because he would perceive that no one about him was likely to be in a state of mind serene enough to be critical: therefore his self-consciousness would leave him, and he would become his spontaneous self. The chief vice of your friend seems to me, indeed, to be that same self-consciousness. He would be for ever watching and speculating about himself. Pray, did you consider him of a fickle disposition?”
“He has given many instances of it, both in mind and heart.”
“Nevertheless,” rejoined Mr. Grant, taking a pinch of snuff between his fingers, and regarding Lancaster with a smile of quiet penetration, “nevertheless I will wager that he was, at bottom, no more fickle than you or I. His fickleness was of the surface merely; within, he was perhaps more constant than most men.”
“You speak confidently, sir.”
“Nay, I am no conjuror, nor no dogmatist either. Your friend’s character is, in reality, not quite so complex as it appears. What are its main elements? Powerful imagination, independence, affability, love of approbation, evidenced by the pride that veils it; a skeptical habit of conversation, to conceal a perhaps too credulous faith, unweariable spiritual curiosity, noble ideals; modesty, unless depreciated, sensitiveness to beauty, and docility unless opposed. That enumeration might be condensed, but let it pass. Here, then, we have a man open to an unusual variety of impressions, and fond of experimenting on himself; in the habit, therefore, of regarding himself as a third person. What more probable than that such a man should imagine changes in his beliefs or affections, and should amuse himself by acting as if those changes were actual? Yet, when it came to some vital matter, his deeper-rooted sense of right and justice would take the reins again, and curb the vagaries of his fancy.”
“But it might happen,” said Lancaster, “that some person became involved in this amusing experiment of his, who should mistake the experiment for earnest. What would my friend’s sense of right and justice have to say to that?”
“Nay, that lies between him and his conscience,” quoth Mr. Grant, applying the pinch of snuff to his nostrils, “and you and I have no concern with it.”
Lancaster took a couple of turns up and down the room, and then seated himself in a chair at the opposite side of the table. “Enough about my friend Yorke,” he said; “between your analysis and mine, he has grown too big for his share in the story. What I intended was to bring him into relations with a woman who should be a match for him: and this Marquise Desmoines, as I conceive her, will answer the purpose as well as another. Even while yet a girl at school, she had, as Marion’s anecdote showed, the instinct of woman’s power and conquest. She had already divided the human race into male and female, and had appraised the weapons available on her side. She had perceived that the weak point of woman is the heart, and was resolved to fence her own with triple steel. To marry a rich foreign nobleman of more than thrice her age was precisely her affair. She would have the world before her, as well as at her feet. She was—I imagine her to have been—beautiful, dimpled, luxurious, skeptical, and witty. She was energetic by nature, selfish by philosophy, clever and worldly-wise by training. She could appreciate you like a friend, rally you like a critic, flatter and wheedle you like a mistress. She would caress you one moment, scoff at you the next, and put you in the wrong be your argument what it might. She could speak in double meaning, startle you, deceive you, and forgive you. She was fond of intrigue for its own sake, fertile in resources and expedients; she was willful and wayward from calculation, and dangerous at all times. She was indolently despotic, fond of playing with her sensations, and amusing herself with her passions. She was the heroine of a hundred perilous anecdotes, which showed rather the audacity of genius than commonplace impropriety. She could say with grace and charm things that no other woman could say at all. She could assume a fatal innocence and simplicity; and to have seen her blush was an unforgettable experience in a man’s life. Physical exercise, especially dancing and riding, were indispensable to her; her toilets, baths, clothes, and equipment were ideals of luxury. She was superstitious, because she believed in no religion; indifferent to inflicting suffering, because never suffering herself; but she loved the pleasure of pleasing, was kindly in disposition, mindful of benefits as well as of injuries; and in her loftier moods she could be royally or savagely generous, as well as fiercely implacable. She had a lawyer’s head for business; was a better companion for men than for women; was even capable of genuine friendship, and could give sound and honest advice: and it was at such times that the real power and maturity of her understanding were revealed. That is the sort of woman that the plot of my story requires her to have been. When Yorke met her, she was the Circe of a distinguished company of noblemen, authors, actors, artists, abbÉs, soldiers, wits, and humorists; all of whom, by her magic, she could cause to assume the forms of turkey-cocks, magpies, poodles, monkeys, hogs, puppies, parrots, boa-constrictors, and other animals, according to their several dispositions. But Yorke was the Ulysses upon whom her spells had only so much effect as to incline him to spend most of his time in her company.”
Here Lancaster paused, and drank off the remains of his tumbler of brandy and water.
“Well?” said Mr. Grant, moving the bottle toward him.
“No more, thank you,” said Lancaster.
“You are not going to leave your drama just as the curtain is ready to go up?”
“I have come to the end of my invention.”
“Ah! I should scarce have thought you had begun upon it, as yet,” returned the other dryly.
Lancaster made no reply. At last Mr. Grant said, “Unless my genealogical inferences are at fault, you and Sir Francis Bendibow should be of kin.”
“It is one of the impertinences of human society,” said Lancaster, with a twitching of his eyebrows, “that whatever filibuster happens to marry the sister of your father has a right to call you nephew. It might as reasonably be decreed that because I happen to cut the throat of some hook-nosed old money-lender, his women and children would have the right to style themselves my cousins and aunts. That law might, to be sure, prove a beneficial one, for it would do more than hanging to put a stop to murder. But the other law makes marriage a nuisance, and one of these days the nephews will arise and compel its repeal at the sword’s point. Meanwhile I remain the baronet’s nephew and your humble servant.”
“You would abolish all but blood-relatives then?” said Mr. Grant, resting his elbows on the arms of his chair and interlacing his fingers.
“I would have no buts; abolish the whole of them!” exclaimed Lancaster—“even the rich uncles and the pretty cousins. Take a leaf from the book of animals, and let each human creature stand on his own basis and do the best he can with it. When I found a republic there shall be no genealogies and no families. So long as they exist we shall never know what we are really made of.”
“The Bendibow Bank is, however, a highly prosperous and trustworthy concern?”
“You must get my uncle to sing its eulogies for you; I know nothing. But I am of opinion that Miss Marion Lockhart has an intuition for detecting humbugs. That Charles Grantley affair ... is none of mine. But Sir Francis had two sides to him in his youth, and there may be some passages in his account book that he would deprecate publishing.”
“Ah! I had contemplated calling at the bank to-morrow—”
“Oh, don’t interpret my prejudices and antipathies as counsel!” interrupted the young man, throwing back his hair from his forehead and smiling. “The bank is as sound as the Great Pyramid, I doubt not. Bless your heart, everybody banks there! If they ruin you, you will have all the best folks in London for your fellow-bankrupts. I’m afraid I’ve bored you shamefully, but a little brandy goes a long way with me.”
“You have said nothing that has failed to interest me,” returned the old gentleman courteously. “As you may conceive, I find myself somewhat lonely. In twenty years such friends as may have been mine in England have disappeared, and the circumstances in which those years have been passed—in India—have precluded my finding others. At your age one can afford to wish to abolish kindred, but by the time you have lived thirty years longer you may understand how I would rather wish to create new kindred in the place of those whom fate has abolished for me. Human beings need one another, Mr. Lancaster. God has no other way of ministering to us than through our fellow-creatures. I esteem myself fortunate, therefore, in having met with yourself and with these kind ladies. You cannot know me as the vanished friends I spoke of would know me—my origin, my early life, my ambitions, my failures; but you can know me as an inoffensive old gentleman whose ambition for the rest of his life is to make himself agreeable to somebody. If you and I had been young men together in London thirty years ago, doubtless we might have found ourselves in accord on many points of speculation and philosophy wherein now I should be disposed to challenge some of your conclusions. But intellectual agreement is not the highest basis of friendship between man and man. I, at all events, have been led by experience to value men for what I think they are, more than for what they think they are. I will make no other comment than that on the brilliant and ingenious ... confidence, shall I call it?—with which you have honored me to-night. If it should ever occur to you to present me to your friend Yorke, under his true name, I am sure that I should enjoy his acquaintance, and that I should recognize him from your description. Perhaps he might be able to reinforce your invention as to the Marquise Perdita. Well, well, I am detaining you. Good-night!”
Lancaster colored a little at the latter sentence and a cloud passed over his face, but in another moment his eyebrows lifted with a smile. “God knows what induces me to masquerade so,” he said. “I care to conceal myself only from those who can see nothing on any terms—which is certainly not your category. Let Yorke and Lancaster be one in future. As for Perdita ... there goes twelve o’clock! I was startled at hearing her name to-night; she has just returned to London in the capacity of widow. It only needed that ... however, what is that to you? Good-night.”
“Perdita, a pretty name, is it not?” said Mr. Grant musingly, as he followed the other to the door. “It makes one hope there may be some leaven of Shakspeare’s Perdita in her, after all.”
“’Tis an ominous name, though—too ominous in this case for even Shakspeare to save it, I’m afraid,” returned Lancaster. With that he went out and left Mr. Grant to his meditations.