When Lancelot reached the banker"s a letter was put into his hand; it bore the Whitford postmark, and Mrs. Lavington"s handwriting. He tore it open; it contained a letter from Argemone, which, it is needless to say, he read before her mother"s:--
"My beloved! my husband!--Yes--though you may fancy me fickle and proud--I will call you so to the last; for were I fickle, I could have saved myself the agony of writing this; and as for pride, oh!
how that darling vice has been crushed out of me! I have rolled at my mother"s feet with bitter tears, and vain entreaties--and been refused; and yet I have obeyed her after all. We must write to each other no more. This one last letter must explain the forced silence which has been driving me mad with fears that you would suspect me.
And now you may call me weak; but it is your love which has made me strong to do this--which has taught me to see with new intensity my duty, not only to you, but to every human being--to my parents. By this self-sacrifice alone can I atone to them for all my past undutifulness. Let me, then, thus be worthy of you. Hope that by this submission we may win even her to change. How calmly I write!
but it is only my hand that is calm. As for my heart, read Tennyson"s Fatima, and then know how I feel towards you! Yes, I love you--madly, the world would say. I seem to understand now how women have died of love. Ay, that indeed would be blessed; for then my spirit would seek out yours, and hover over it for ever!
Farewell, beloved! and let me hear of you through your deeds. A feeling at my heart, which should not be, although it is, a sad one, tells me that we shall meet soon--soon."
Stupefied and sickened, Lancelot turned carelessly to Mrs.
Lavington"s cover, whose blameless respectability thus uttered itself:--
"I cannot deceive you or myself by saying I regret that providential circ.u.mstances should have been permitted to break off a connection which I always felt to be most unsuitable; and I rejoice that the intercourse my dear child has had with you has not so far undermined her principles as to prevent her yielding the most filial obedience to my wishes on the point of her future correspondence with you.
Hoping that all that has occurred will be truly blessed to you, and lead your thoughts to another world, and to a true concern for the safety of your immortal soul,
"I remain, yours truly,
"C. LAVINGTON."
"Another world!" said Lancelot to himself. "It is most merciful of you, certainly, my dear madame, to put one in mind of the existence of another world, while such as you have their own way in this one!"
and thrusting the latter epistle into the fire, he tried to collect his thoughts.
What had he lost? The oftener he asked himself, the less he found to unman him. Argemone"s letters were so new a want, that the craving for them was not yet established. His intense imagination, resting on the delicious certainty of her faith, seemed ready to fill the silence with bright hopes and n.o.ble purposes. She herself had said that he would see her soon. But yet--but yet--why did that allusion to death strike chilly through him? They were but words,-- a melancholy fancy, such as women love at times to play with. He would toss it from him. At least here was another reason for bestirring himself at once to win fame in the n.o.ble profession he had chosen.
And yet his brain reeled as he went upstairs to his uncle"s private room.
There, however, he found a person closeted with the banker, whose remarkable appearance drove everything else out of his mind. He was a huge, s.h.a.ggy, toil-worn man, the deep melancholy earnestness of whose rugged features reminded him almost ludicrously of one of Land-seer"s bloodhounds. But withal there was a tenderness--a genial, though covert humour playing about his ma.s.sive features, which awakened in Lancelot at first sight a fantastic longing to open his whole heart to him. He was dressed like a foreigner, but spoke English with perfect fluency. The banker sat listening, quite crestfallen, beneath his intense and melancholy gaze, in which, nevertheless, there twinkled some rays of kindly sympathy.
"It was all those foreign railways," said Mr. Smith pensively.
"And it serves you quite right," answered the stranger. "Did I not warn you of the folly and sin of sinking capital in foreign countries while English land was crying out for tillage, and English poor for employment?"
"My dear friend" (in a deprecatory tone), "it was the best possible investment I could make."
"And pray, who told you that you were sent into the world to make investments?"
"But--"
"But me no buts, or I won"t stir a finger towards helping you. What are you going to do with this money if I procure it for you?"
"Work till I can pay back that poor fellow"s fortune," said the banker, earnestly pointing to Lancelot. "And if I could clear my conscience of that, I would not care if I starved myself, hardly if my own children did."
"Spoken like a man!" answered the stranger; "work for that and I"ll help you. Be a new man, once and for all, my friend. Don"t even make this younker your first object. Say to yourself, not "I will invest this money where it shall pay me most, but I will invest it where it shall give most employment to English hands, and produce most manufactures for English bodies." In short, seek first the kingdom of G.o.d and His justice with this money of yours, and see if all other things, profits and suchlike included, are not added unto you."
"And you are certain you can obtain the money?"
"My good friend the Begum of the Cannibal Islands has more than she knows what to do with; and she owes me a good turn, you know."
"What are you jesting about now?"
"Did I never tell you? The new king of the Cannibal Islands, just like your European ones, ran away, and would neither govern himself nor let any one else govern; so one morning his ministers, getting impatient, ate him, and then asked my advice. I recommended them to put his mother on the throne, who, being old and tough, would run less danger; and since then everything has gone on smoothly as anywhere else."
"Are you mad?" thought Lancelot to himself, as he stared at the speaker"s matter-of-fact face.
"No, I am not mad, my young friend," quoth he, facing right round upon him, as if he had divined his thoughts.
"I--I beg your pardon, I did not speak," stammered Lancelot, abashed at a pair of eyes which could have looked down the boldest mesmerist in three seconds.
"I am perfectly well aware that you did not. I must have some talk with you: I"ve heard a good deal about you. You wrote those articles in the --- Review about George Sand, did you not?"
"I did."
"Well, there was a great deal of n.o.ble feeling in them, and a great deal of abominable nonsense. You seem to be very anxious to reform society?"
"I am."
"Don"t you think you had better begin by reforming yourself?"
"Really, sir," answered Lancelot, "I am too old for that worn-out quibble. The root of all my sins has been selfishness and sloth.
Am I to cure them by becoming still more selfish and slothful? What part of myself can I reform except my actions? and the very sin of my actions has been, as I take it, that I"ve been doing nothing to reform others; never fighting against the world, the flesh, and the devil, as your Prayer-book has it."
"MY Prayer-book?" answered the stranger, with a quaint smile.
"Upon my word, Lancelot," interposed the banker, with a frightened look, "you must not get into an argument: you must be more respectful: you don"t know to whom you are speaking."
"And I don"t much care," answered he. "Life is really too grim earnest in these days to stand on ceremony. I am sick of blind leaders of the blind, of respectable preachers to the respectable, who drawl out second-hand trivialities, which they neither practise nor wish to see practised. I"ve had enough all my life of Scribes and Pharisees in white cravats, laying on man heavy burdens, and grievous to be borne, and then not touching them themselves with one of their fingers."
"Silence, sir!" roared the banker, while the stranger threw himself into a chair, and burst into a storm of laughter.
"Upon my word, friend Mammon, here"s another of Hans Andersen"s ugly ducks!"
"I really do not mean to be rude," said Lancelot, recollecting himself, "but I am nearly desperate. If your heart is in the right place, you will understand me! if not, the less we talk to each other the better."
"Most true," answered the stranger; "and I do understand you; and if, as I hope, we see more of each other henceforth, we will see if we cannot solve one or two of these problems between us."
At this moment Lancelot was summoned downstairs, and found, to his great pleasure, Tregarva waiting for him. That worthy personage bowed to Lancelot reverently and distantly.
"I am quite ashamed to intrude myself upon you, sir, but I could not rest without coming to ask whether you have had any news."--He broke down at this point in the sentence, but Lancelot understood him.
"I have no news," he said. "But what do you mean by standing off in that way, as if we were not old and fast friends? Remember, I am as poor as you are now; you may look me in the face and call me your equal, if you will, or your inferior; I shall not deny it."
"Pardon me, sir," answered Tregarva; "but I never felt what a real substantial thing rank is, as I have since this sad misfortune of yours."
"And I have never till now found out its worthlessness."
"You"re wrong, sir, you are wrong; look at the difference between yourself and me. When you"ve lost all you have, and seven times more, you"re still a gentleman. No man can take that from you. You may look the proudest d.u.c.h.ess in the land in the face, and claim her as your equal; while I, sir,--I don"t mean, though, to talk of myself--but suppose that you had loved a pious and a beautiful lady, and among all your worship of her, and your awe of her, had felt that you were worthy of her, that you could become her comforter, and her pride, and her joy, if it wasn"t for that accursed gulf that men had put between you, that you were no gentleman; that you didn"t know how to walk, and how to p.r.o.nounce, and when to speak, and when to be silent, not even how to handle your own knife and fork without disgusting her, or how to keep your own body clean and sweet--Ah, sir, I see it now as I never did before, what a wall all these little defects build up round a poor man; how he longs and struggles to show himself as he is at heart, and cannot, till he feels sometimes as if he was enchanted, pent up, like folks in fairy tales, in the body of some dumb beast. But, sir," he went on, with a concentrated bitterness which Lancelot had never seen in him before, "just because this gulf which rank makes is such a deep one, therefore it looks to me all the more devilish; not that I want to pull down any man to my level; I despise my own level too much; I want to rise; I want those like me to rise with me. Let the rich be as rich as they will.--I, and those like me, covet not money, but manners. Why should not the workman be a gentleman, and a workman still? Why are they to be shut out from all that is beautiful, and delicate, and winning, and stately?"
"Now perhaps," said Lancelot, "you begin to understand what I was driving at on that night of the revel?"
"It has come home to me lately, sir, bitterly enough. If you knew what had gone on in me this last fortnight, you would know that I had cause to curse the state of things which brings a man up a savage against his will, and cuts him off, as if he were an ape or a monster, from those for whom the same Lord died, and on whom the same Spirit rests. Is that G.o.d"s will, sir? No, it is the devil"s will. "Those whom G.o.d hath joined, let no man put asunder.""