COSMO.
It is time to let the reader of this story know who Cosmo Douglas was,
whose appearance had made so great a commotion at Mount. He was--nobody.
This was a fact that Mr. Mountford had very soon elicited by his
inquiries. He did not belong to any known house of Douglasses under the
sun. It may be said that there was something fair in Cosmo’s frank
confession on this point, put perhaps it would be more true to say that
it showed the good sense which was certainly one of his characteristics;
for any delusion that he might have encouraged or consented to in this
respect must have been found out very shortly, and it would only have
been to his discredit to claim good connections which did not belong to
him. ‘Honesty is the best policy’ he had said to himself, and therefore
he had been honest. Nevertheless it was a standing mystery to Cosmo that
he was nobody. He could not understand it. It had been a trouble to him
all his life. How was he inferior to the other people who had good
connections? He had received the same kind of education, he had the same
kind of habits, he was as much a ‘gentleman,’ that curious English
distinction which means everything and nothing, as any of them. He did
not even feel within himself the healthy thrill of opposition with which
the lowly born sometimes scorn the supposed superiority of blue blood.
He for his part had something in his heart which entirely coincided with
that superstition. Instinctively he preferred for himself that his
friends should be well born. He had as natural a predilection that way
as if his shield held ever so many quarterings; and it was terrible to
know that he had no right to any shield at all. In his boyhood he had
accepted the crest which his father wore at his watchchain, and had
stamped upon his spoons and forks, with undoubting faith, as if it had
descended straight from the Crusaders; and when he had read of the ‘dark
grey man’ in early Scotch history, and of that Lord James who carried
Bruce’s heart to the Holy Land, there was a swell of pride within him,
and he had no doubt that they were his ancestors. But as he grew older
it dawned upon Cosmo that his father had assumed the bleeding heart
because he found it represented in the old book of heraldry as the
cognisance of the Douglasses, and not because he had any hereditary
right to it--and, indeed, the fact was that good Mr. Douglas knew no
better. He thought in all simplicity that his name entitled him to the
symbol which was connected with the name, and that all those great
people so far off from the present day were ‘no doubt’ his ancestors,
though it was too far back to be able to tell.
Mr. Douglas himself was a man of the highest respectability. He was the
managing clerk in a solicitor’s office, with a good salary, and the
entire confidence of his employers. Perhaps he might even have been a
partner had he been of a bolder temper; but he was afraid of
responsibility, and had no desire, he said, to assume a different
position, or rise in the social scale. That would be for Cosmo, he
added, within himself. He had lost his wife at a very early period, when
Cosmo was still a child, and upon the boy all his father’s hopes were
built. He gave him ‘every advantage.’ For himself he lived very quietly
in a house with a garden out Hampstead way, a small house capable of
being managed by one respectable woman-servant, who had been with him
for years, and a young girl under her, or sometimes a boy, when she
could be persuaded to put up with one of these more objectionable
creatures. But Cosmo had everything that was supposed to be best for an
English young man. He was at Westminster School, and so received into
the fraternity of ‘public school men,’ which is a distinct class in
England; and then he went to the University. When he took his degree he
studied for the bar. Both at Oxford and Lincoln’s Inn he was ‘in for’
all his examinations in company with the son of his father’s employer;
but it was Cosmo who was the most promising student always, and the most
popular man. He had the air and the bearing, the ‘je ne sçais quoi’
which is supposed to indicate ‘family,’ though he was of no family.
Nothing ever was more perplexing. He could not understand it himself.
What was it that made this wonderful difference? When he looked at
Charley Ashley a smile would sometimes steal over his countenance. In
that point of view the prejudice certainly showed its full absurdity.
Charley was his retainer, his faithful follower--his dog, in a way. But
Mr. Mountford, though he would probably have thought Charley not a
suitable match for his daughter, would not have looked upon him with the
same puzzled air as on a creature of a different species, with which he
regarded the suitor who was nobody. When this contrast struck him, no
doubt Cosmo smiled with a little bitterness. Charley had connections
among all the little squires of the district. He had an uncle here and
there whose name was in some undistinguished list or other--the ‘Gentry
of Great Britain’ or some other such beadroll. But Cosmo had no link at
all to the classes who consider themselves the natural masters of the
world.
If you will think of it, it was as troublesome and unpleasant a position
as could be conceived--to have all that makes a gentleman and to be a
gentleman, fully considered and received as such, yet upon close
investigation to be found to be nobody, and have all your other
qualities ignored in consequence. It was hard--it was a complicating,
perplexing grievance, such as could only occur in the most artificial
state of society. In the middle ages, if a man ‘rose,’ it was by dint of
hard blows, and people were afraid of him. But ‘rising in the world’ had
a very different meaning in Cosmo’s case. He had always known what it
was to be carefully tended, daintily fed, clothed with the best of
clothes--as well as a duke’s son need have been. He had all the books to
read which any duke’s son could have set his face to; and though the
Hampstead rooms were small, and might have looked poky had there been a
family cooped up in them, Cosmo and his father had felt no want of space
nor of comfort. Even that little Hampstead house was now a thing of the
past. Mr. Douglas had died, though still not much beyond middle age,
and Cosmo had his chambers, like any other young barrister, and several
clubs, and all the ‘advantages’ which his father had sworn he should
have. He had a little money, and a little practice, and was ‘getting
on.’ If he was not in fashionable society, he was yet in an excellent
‘set’--rising barristers, literary people, all rising too, people of
reputation, people who suppose themselves to sway the world, and who
certainly direct a great deal of its public talk, and carry a large
silent background of its population with them. He was very well thought
of among this class, went out a great deal into society, knew a great
many people whom it is supposed something to know--and yet he was
nobody. The merest clown could have confused him at any time by asking,
‘Which is your county, Douglas?’ Poor Cosmo had no county. He took the
deficiency admirably, it is needless to say, and never shirked the truth
when there was any need to tell it. In the majority of cases it was not
at all necessary to tell it; but yet his friends knew well enough that
he had no relations to give him shooting, or ask him during the hunting
season; no district had any claim upon him, nor he upon it. A man may
love his home when it has never been anywhere but in Hampstead. But it
makes a great difference--even when his friends make up the deficiencies
of family to him, and invite him, as he had this year been invited, to
share the delights of a Scotch moor--still it makes a great difference.
And when it is a matter of matrimony, and of producing his proofs of
gentility, and of being a fit person to marry Anne Mountford, then the
difference shows most of all.
When Cosmo attained that perfect freedom from all ties, and power of
roaming wherever he pleased, without any clog to draw him back, which
was involved in his father’s death (though it may be said for him that
this was an event which he deeply regretted) he made up his mind that he
would not marry, at least until he had reached sufficient distinction in
his profession to make him somebody, quite independent of connections.
But then he had not seen Anne Mountford. With her, without any secondary
motives, he had fallen honestly and heartily in love, a love which he
would, however, have managed to quench and get the better of, had it not
turned out upon inquiry that Anne was one whom it was entirely
permissible to love, and who could help him, not hold him back in the
career of success. He had, however, many discussions with himself before
he permitted himself to indulge his inclinations. He had felt that with
people like the Mountfords the fact that he was nobody would tell with
double power; and, indeed, if he had ever been tempted to invent a
family of Douglasses of Somewhere-or-other, it was now. He had almost
been led into doing this. He had even half-prepared a little romance,
which no doubt Mr. Mountford, he thought, would have swallowed, of a
ruined house dwindled away to its last representative, which had lost
lands and even name in one of the rebellions. He had not chosen which
rebellion, but he had made up the story otherwise with great enjoyment
and a fine sense of its fitness: when that modern quality which for want
of a better name we call a sense of humour stopped him. For a man of his
time, a man of his enlightened opinions, a member of a liberal
profession, a high-bred (if not high-born) Englishman to seek importance
from a silly little school-girl romance was too absurd. He could not do
it. He laughed aloud at himself with a little flush of shame on his
countenance, and tossed away the fiction. But what a thing it would have
been for Cosmo if the tumbledown old house which he had invented and
the bit of school-girl fiction had been true! They became almost such to
him, so strongly did he feel that they would exactly fit his case. ‘They
would have been as stupid probably as--Mr. Mountford,’ Cosmo said to
himself, ‘and pig-headed into the bargain, or they never would have
thrown away everything for a gingerbread adventurer like Prince
Charley--rude Lowland rustics talking broad Scotch, not even endowed
with the mystery of Gaelic. But to be sure I might have made them Celts,
and the Lord of Mount would not have been a whit the wiser. I think I
can see a snuffy old laird in a blue bonnet, and a lumbering young lout
scratching his red head. And these be your gods, oh Israel! I don’t
think I should have been much the better of such ancestors.’ But
nevertheless he felt in his heart that he would have been much the
better for them. Other men might despise them, but Cosmo would have
liked to believe in those Douglasses who had never existed. However,
though he had invented them, he could not make use of them. It would
have been too absurd. He laughed and reddened a little, and let them
drop; and with a perfectly open and composed countenance informed Mr.
Mountford that he was nobody and sprang from no known Douglasses at all.
It was a kind of heroism in its way, the heroism of good sense, the
influence of that wholesome horror of the ridiculous which is one of the
strongest agencies of modern life.
After the interview with Mr. Mountford, and after the still greater
shock of Anne’s intimation that her father would not yield, Cosmo’s mind
had been much exercised, and there had been a moment, in which he had
not known what to do or say. Marriage without pecuniary advantage was
impossible to him--he could not, he dared not think of it. It meant
downfall of every kind, and a narrowing of all the possibilities of
life. It would be ruin to him and also to the girl who should be his
wife. It would be impossible for him to keep her in the position she
belonged to, and he would have to relinquish the position which belonged
to him--two things not for a moment to be thought of. The only thing
possible, evidently, was to wait. He was in love, but he was not anxious
to marry at once. In any case it would be expedient to defer that event;
and the old man might die--nay, most likely would die--and would not
certainly change his will if all things were kept quiet and no
demonstration made. He left Mount full of suppressed excitement, yet
glad to be able to withdraw; to go away without compromising Anne,
without being called upon to confront or defy the harsh parent, or do
anything to commit himself. If Anne but held her tongue, there was no
reason why Mr. Mountford might not suppose that she had given Cosmo up,
and Cosmo was rather pleased than otherwise with the idea that she might
do so. He wanted no sentimental passion; no sacrifice of everything for
his sake. All for love and the world well lost, was not in the least a
sentiment which commended itself to him. He would have much preferred
that she had dissembled altogether, and put on an appearance of obeying
her father; but this was a thing that he could not recommend her to do,
any more than he could put forth his invented story of the ruined
Douglasses. The fashion of his age and his kind and his education was so
against lying, that it could be practised only individually, so to
speak, and as it were accidentally. You might be betrayed into it by the
emergency of a moment, but you could not, unless you were very sure
indeed of your ground and your coadjutor, venture to suggest falsehood.
The thing could not be done. This, however, was what he would have
thought the safest thing--that all should fall back into its usual
state; that Anne should go on as if she were still simply Anne, without
any difference in her life; and that, except for the fine but concealed
bond between them, which should be avowed on the first possible
occasion, but never made any display of while things were not ripe,
everything should be exactly as before. This was perfectly fair in love,
according to all known examples and rules. Something like it had
happened in the majority of similar cases, and indeed, Cosmo said to
himself with a half smile, a lover might feel himself little flattered
for whom such a sacrifice would not be made. But all the same he could
not suggest it. He could not say to Anne, ‘Tell a lie for me--persuade
your father that all is over between us, though it is not all over
between us and never shall be till death parts us.’ A young man of the
nineteenth century, brought up at a public school and university, a
member of the bar, and in very good society, could not say that. It
would have been an anachronism. He might wish it, and did do so
fervently; but to put it in words was impossible.
It was with this view, however, that Cosmo had omitted all mention of
correspondence in his last interviews with Anne. They were full of so
much that was novel and exciting to her that she did not notice the
omission, nor in the hurry and rush of new sensations in her mind had
she that eager longing for a letter which most girls would have felt on
parting with their lovers. She had no habit of letters. She had never
been at school or made any friendships of the kind that need to be
solaced by continual outpourings upon paper. Almost all her intimates
were about her, seeing her often, not standing in need of
correspondence. She had not even said in the hurry of parting, ‘You will
write.’ Perhaps she saw it like himself, but like himself was unwilling
to propose the absolute concealment which was desirable. Cosmo’s mind
had been full of nothing else on his way to Scotland to his friend’s
moor. He had thought of her half the time, and the other half of the
time he had thought how to manage, how to secure her without injuring
her (which was how he put it); the long night’s journey was made short
to him by these thoughts. He did not sleep, and he did not want to
sleep; the darkness of the world through which he was rushing, the
jumble of perpetual sound, which made a sort of atmosphere about him,
was as a hermitage to Cosmo, as it has been to many before him. Railway
trains, indeed, are hermitages in life for the much-pondering and
careworn sons of the present age. There they can shut themselves up and
think at will. He turned it all over and over in his mind. No wild
notion--such as had moved the inexperienced mind of Anne with a thrill
of delightful impulse--of rushing back to work and instantly beginning
the toil which was to win her, occurred to Anne’s lover. To be sure it
was the Long Vacation, which is a thing girls do not take into account,
and Cosmo would have smiled at the notion of giving up his shooting and
going back to his chambers out of the mere sentiment of losing no time,
which probably would have appeared to Anne a heroic and delightful idea;
but he did what Anne could not have done; he went into the whole
question, all the _pros_ and _cons_, and weighed them carefully. He had
a long journey, far up into the wilds, by the Highland railway. Morning
brought him into the land of hills and rivers, and noon to the bleaker
mountains and glens, wealthy only in grouse and deer. He did nothing but
think it over in the night and through the day. Nevertheless, Cosmo,
when he reached Glentuan, was as little worn out as it becomes an
experienced young Englishman to be after a long journey. He was quite
fresh for dinner after he had performed the customary rites--ready to
take his part in all the conversation and help in the general amusement.
‘Douglas--which of the Douglasses does he belong to?’ one of the guests
asked after he had withdrawn.
‘I’ve always known him as Douglas of Trinity,’ said the host.
‘Trinity, Trinity,’ answered the other, who was a local personage,
thinking of nothing but territorial designation, ‘I never heard of any
Douglasses of Trinity. Do you mean the place near Edinburgh where all
the seaside villas are?’
‘He means Cambridge,’ said another, laughing.
‘Douglas is the best fellow in the world, but he is--nobody: at least so
I’ve always heard.’
Cosmo did not overhear this conversation, but he knew that it had taken
place as well as if he had heard it; not that it did him the least harm
with his comrades of the moment, to whom he was a very nice fellow, a
capital companion, thoroughly acquainted with all the habits and customs
of their kind, and though no great shot, yet good enough for all that
was necessary, good enough to enjoy the sport, which nobody who is
awkward and really ignorant can do. But he knew that one time or other
this little conversation would take place, and though he felt that he
might do himself the credit to say that he had no false shame, nor
attached any exaggerated importance to the subject, still it was no
doubt of more importance to him than it was to those with whom it was
only one out of many subjects of a casual conversation. All the same,
however, even these casual talkers did not forget it. Strange
superstition, strangest folly, he might well say to himself with such a
smile as was possible in the circumstances. Douglas of Trinity--Douglas
of Lincoln’s Inn meant something--but to be one of the Douglasses of
some dilapidated old house, what did that mean? This question, however,
had nothing to do with the matter, and the smile had not much
pleasantness in it, as may easily be perceived.
The fruit of Cosmo’s cogitations, however, was that he wrote to Anne, as
has been seen, and sent his letter to Charley Ashley to be delivered.
This was partly policy and partly uncertainty, a sort of half measure to
feel his way; but, on the whole, was most of all the necessity he felt
to say something to her, to seize upon her, not to let this beautiful
dream escape from him.
‘We said nothing about writing, and I don’t know, my dearest, what you
wish in this respect. Silence seems impossible, but if you wish it, if
you ask this sacrifice, I will be content with my perfect trust in my
Anne, and do whatever she would have me do. I know that it would be
against your pride and your delicacy, my darling, to keep up any
correspondence which the severest parent could call clandestine, and if
I take advantage of a good fellow who is devoted to us both, for once,
it is not with the least idea that you will like it, or will allow me to
continue it. But what can I do? I must know what is your will in this
matter, and I must allow myself the luxury once, if only once, of
telling you on paper what I have tried to tell you so often in
words--how I love you, my love, and what it is to me to love you--a new
creation, an opening up both of earth and heaven.’ (We need not continue
what Cosmo said on this point because, to be sure, it has all been said
over and over again, sometimes no doubt worse, and sometimes
unquestionably a great deal better, than he said it: and there is no
advantage that we know of to be got from making young persons
prematurely acquainted with every possible manner in which this
sentiment can be expressed.) At the end he resumed, with generous
sentiment, which was perfectly genuine, and yet not any more free of
calculation and the idea of personal advantage than all the rest was:--
‘Charley Ashley is the truest friend that ever man had; he has loved you
all his life (_that_ is nothing wonderful), and yet, though, at such a
cost as I do not like to try to estimate, he still loves me, though he
knows that I have come between him and any possibility there was that he
should ever win any return from you. To do him full justice, I do not
think he ever looked for any return, but was content to love you as in
itself a happiness and an elevation for which a man might well be
grateful; but still it is hard upon him to see a man no better than
himself, nay, less worthy in a hundred ways, winning the unimaginable
reward for which he, poor Charley, had not so much as ventured to hope.
Yet with a generosity--how can I express it, how could I ever have
emulated it?--which is beyond words, he has neither withdrawn his
brotherly kindness from me, nor refused to stand by me in my struggle
towards you and happiness. What can we say to a friend like this? Trust
him, my dearest, as I do. I do not mean that he should be the medium of
communication between us, but there are ways in which he may be of help
and comfort to us both; and, in the meantime, you will at your dear
pleasure tell me yourself what you wish to do, or let me know by him: if
I may write, if I must be silent, if you will make me a happy man now
and then by a word from your hand, or if I am to wait for that hand till
I dare claim it as mine. Nay, but my Anne, my darling, for once, if for
once only, you must send two or three words, a line or two, to give me
patience and hope.’
As he folded this up his whole heart longed for the ‘word or two’ he
had asked for. Without that it almost seemed to him that all that had
passed before might mean nothing, might roll away like the mists, like
the fabric of a vision. But at the same time Cosmo felt in his heart
that if Anne would send him the consolation of this one letter through
Charley Ashley, and after that bid him be silent and wait for chance
opportunities or modes of communication, that she would do well. It was
what he would have advised her to do had he been free to tell her
exactly what he thought. But he was not free to advise such a
proceeding. It was not in his _rôle_; nor could he have proposed any
clandestine correspondence, though he would have liked it. It was
impossible. Anne would most probably have thrown him off as altogether
unworthy had he proposed anything of the kind to her, or at least would
have regarded him with very different eyes from those with which she
looked upon him now. And even independent of this he could not have done
it: the words would have failed him to make such a proposal. It was
contrary to all tradition, and to the spirit of his class and time.
When he had despatched this letter Cosmo’s bosom’s lord sat more lightly
upon his throne. He went out next morning very early and made a
respectable, a very respectable, bag. Nobody could say that he was a
cockney sportsman not knowing how to aim or hold a gun. In this as in
everything else he had succeeded in mastering the rules of every
fashion, and lived as a man who was to the manner born. He was indeed to
the manner born, with nothing in him, so far as he was aware, that went
against the traditions of a gentleman: and yet similar conversations to
that one which occurred in the smoking-room, occurred occasionally on
the hills among the heather. ‘Of what Douglasses is your friend?’ ‘Oh, I
don’t know that he is of any Douglasses,’ the master of the moor would
say with impatience. ‘He is a capital fellow, and a rising man in the
law--that’s all I know about him;’ or else, ‘He is a college friend, a
man who took a very good degree, as clever a fellow as you will meet
with, and getting on like a house on fire.’ But all these
recommendations, as they all knew, were quite beside the question. He
was of nowhere in particular--he was nobody. It was a mysterious
dispensation, altogether unexplainable, that such a man should have come
into the world without suitable ancestors who could have responded for
him. But he had done so. And he could not even produce that fabulous
house which, as he had invented it, was a far prettier and more truly
gentle and creditable family than half the families who would have
satisfied every question. Thus the very best quality of his age was
against him as well as its superstitions. Had he been an enriched grocer
to whom it could have done no possible good, he might easily have
invented a pedigree; but being himself he could not do it. And thus the
injury he had sustained at the hands of Providence was beyond all remedy
or hope of amendment.