A DESPERATE EXPEDIENT.
It was something of a comfort to Phoebe to find that the "tea" to which
Ursula asked her was a family meal, such as Mr. and Mrs. Tozer indulged
in, in Grange Lane, with no idea of dinner to follow, as in more refined
circles. This, she said to herself benignly, must be "country fashion,"
and she was naturally as bland and gracious at the Parsonage tea-table
as anybody from town, knowing better, but desiring to make herself
thoroughly agreeable, could be. She amused Mr. May very much, who felt
the serene young princess, accepting her vulgar relations with gentle
resignation, and supported by a feeling of her own innate dignity, to be
something quite new to him. Phoebe had no objection to talk upon the
subject, for, clever as she was, she was not so clever as to see through
Mr. May's amused show of interest in her trials, but believed
ingenuously that he understood and felt for her, and was, perhaps, at
last, the one noble, impartial, and generous Churchman who could see
the difficulties of cultivated Dissenters, and enter into them
sympathetically. Why Mr. May took the trouble to draw her out on this
point it is more difficult to explain. Poor man, he was in a state of
semi-distraction over Cotsdean's bill. The ten days had shortened into
three, and he was no nearer finding that hundred pounds than ever. Even
while he smiled and talked to Phoebe, he was repeating over and over to
himself the terrible fact which could not now be ignored. "17th, 18th,
19th, and Friday will be the 20th," he was saying to himself. If that
20th came without any help, Cotsdean would be virtually made a bankrupt;
for of course all his creditors would make a rush upon him, and all his
affairs would be thrown open to the remorseless public gaze, if the
bill, which had been so often renewed, had to be dishonoured at last.
Mr. May had a conscience, though he was not careful of his money, and
the fear of ruin to Cotsdean was a very terrible and real oppression to
him. The recollection was upon him like a vulture in classic story,
tearing and gnawing, as he sat there and smiled over the cup of tea
Ursula gave him, feeling amused all the same at Phoebe's talk. He could
scarcely have told why he had permitted his daughter to pursue her
acquaintance with Tozer's granddaughter. Partly it was because of
Clarence Copperhead; out of curiosity, as, being about to be brought in
contact with some South Sea Islander or Fijian, one would naturally wish
to see another who was thrown in one's way by accident, and thus prepare
one's self for the permanent acquaintance. And she amused him. Her
cleverness, her ease, her conversational powers, her woman of the world
aspect, did not so much impress him, perhaps, as they did others; but
the complacency and innocent confidence of youth that were in her, and
her own enjoyment of the situation, notwithstanding the mortifications
incurred--all this amused Mr. May. He listened to her talk, sometimes
feeling himself almost unable to bear it, for the misery of those words,
which kept themselves ringing in a dismal chorus in his own mind, and
yet deriving a kind of amusement and distraction from it all the same.
"One of your friends was very hard upon my son--and myself--at your
Meeting the other night, Miss Beecham."
"He was very injudicious," said Phoebe, shaking her head. "Indeed I did
not approve. Personalities never advance any cause. I said so to him.
Don't you think the Church has herself to blame for those political
Dissenters, Mr. May? You sneer at us, and look down upon us--"
"I? I don't sneer at anybody."
"I don't mean you individually; but Churchmen do. They treat us as if
we were some strange kind of creatures, from the heart of Africa
perhaps. They don't think we are just like themselves: as well educated;
meaning as well; with as much right to our own ideas."
Mr. May could scarcely restrain a laugh. "Just like themselves." The
idea of a Dissenter setting up to be as well educated, and as capable of
forming an opinion, as a cultivated Anglican, an Oxford man, and a
beneficed clergyman, was too novel and too foolish not to be somewhat
startling as well. Mr. May was aware that human nature is strangely
blind to its own deficiencies, but was it possible that any delusion
could go so far as this? He did laugh a little--just the ghost of a
laugh--at the idea. But what is the use of making any serious opposition
to such a statement? The very fact of contesting the assumption seemed
to give it a certain weight.
"Whenever this is done," said Phoebe, with serene philosophy, "I think
you may expect a revulsion of feeling. The class to which papa belongs
is very friendly to the Established Church, and wishes to do her every
honour."
"Is it indeed? We ought to be much gratified," said Mr. May.
Phoebe gave him a quick glance, but he composed his face and met her look
meekly. It actually diverted him from his pre-occupation, and that is a
great deal to say.
"We would willingly do her any honour; we would willingly be friends,
even look up to her, if that would please her," added Phoebe, very
gravely, conscious of the importance of what she was saying; "but when
we see clergymen, and common persons also, who have never had one
rational thought on the subject, always setting us down as ignorant and
uncultured, because we are Dissenters----"
"But no one does that," said Ursula, soothingly, eager to save her new
friend's feelings. She paused in the act of pouring out the children's
second cup of tea, and looked up at her with eyes full of caressing and
flattering meaning. "No one, at least, I am sure," she added, faltering,
remembering suddenly things she had heard said of Dissenters, "who knows
_you_."
"It is not I that ought to be thought of, it is the general question.
Then can you wonder that a young man like the gentleman we were talking
of, clever and energetic, and an excellent scholar (and very good in
philosophy, too--he was at Jena for two or three years), should be made
bitter when he feels himself thrust back upon a community of small
shopkeepers?"
Mr. May could not restrain another short laugh.
"We must not join in the vulgar abuse of shopkeepers," he said.
Phoebe's colour rose. She raised her head a little, then perceiving the
superiority of her former position, smiled.
"I have no right to do so. My people, I suppose, were all shopkeepers to
begin with; but this gives me ways of knowing. Grandpapa is very kind
and nice--really nice, Mr. May; but he has not at all a wide way of
looking at things. I feel it, though they are so kind to me. I have been
brought up to think in such a different way; and if I feel it, who am
fond of them, think how that young minister must feel it, who was
brought up in a totally different class?"
"What kind of class was this one brought up in?" said Mr. May, with a
laugh. "He need not have assaulted Reginald, if he had been born a
prince. We had done him no harm."
"That is making it entirely a private question," said Phoebe, suavely,
"which I did not mean to do. When such a man finds out abuses--what he
takes to be abuses--in the Church, which treats him like a roadside
ranter, may not he feel a right to be indignant? Oh, I am not so. I
think such an office as that chaplaincy is very good, one here and there
for the reward of merit; and I think he was very right to take it; but
still it would not do, would it, to have many of them? It would not
answer any good purpose," she said, administering a little sting
scientifically, "if all clergymen held sinecures."
These words were overheard by Reginald, who just then came in, and to
whom it was startling to find Phoebe serenely seated at tea with his
family. The hated word sinecure did not seem to affect him from her lips
as it would have done from any one else's. He came in quite
good-humouredly, and said with a smile--
"You are discussing me. What about me? Miss Beecham, I hope you take my
side."
"I take everybody's side," said Phoebe; "for I try to trace people's
motives. I can sympathise both with you and those who assailed you."
"Oh, that Dissenting fellow. I beg your pardon, Miss Beecham, if you are
a Dissenter; but I cannot help it. We never go out of our way to attack
them and their chapels and coteries, and why should they spring at our
throats on every occasion? I think it is hard, and I can't say I have
any charity to spare for this individual. What had we done to him?
Ursula, give me some tea."
"Miss Beecham, I leave the cause of the Church in younger and, I hope,
abler hands," said Mr. May, getting up.
Partly it was that Reginald's onslaught made him see for the first time
certain weak points in the situation; partly it was that his private
care became too clamorous, and he could not keep on further. He went
away quite abruptly, and went downstairs to his study, and shut himself
in there; and the moment he had closed the door, all this amusement
floated away, and the vulture gripped at him, beak and talons digging
into his very soul. Good God! what was he to do? He covered his face
with his hands, and turned round and round mentally in that darkness to
see if anywhere there might be a gleam of light; but none was visible
east or west. A hundred pounds, only a hundred pounds; a bagatelle, a
thing that to many men was as small an affair as a stray sixpence; and
here was this man, as good, so to speak, as any--well educated, full of
gifts and accomplishments, well born, well connected, not a prodigal nor
open sinner, losing himself in the very blackness of darkness, feeling
that a kind of moral extinction was the only prospect before him, for
want of this little sum. It seemed incredible even to himself, as he sat
and brooded over it. Somehow, surely, there must be a way of
deliverance. He looked piteously about him in his solitude, appealing to
the very blank walls to save him. What could they do? His few books, his
faded old furniture, would scarcely realize a hundred pounds if they
were sold to-morrow. All his friends had been wearied out, all natural
resources had failed. James might any day have sent the money, but he
had not done so--just this special time, when it was so hard to get it,
James, too, had failed; and the hours of this night were stealing away
like thieves, so swift and so noiseless, to be followed by the others;
and Cotsdean, poor soul, his faithful retainer, would be broken and
ruined. To do Mr. May justice, if it had been only himself who could be
ruined, he would have felt it less; but it went to his very heart to
think of poor Cotsdean, who had trusted in him so entirely, and to whom,
indeed, he had been very kind in his day. Strife and discord had been in
the poor man's house, and perpetual wretchedness, and Mr. May had
managed, he himself could scarcely tell how, to set it right. He had
frightened and subdued the passionate wife, and quenched the growing
tendencies to evil, which made her temper worse than it was by nature,
and had won her back to soberness and some kind of peace, changing the
unhappy house into one of comparative comfort and cheerfulness. Most
people like those best to whom they have been kind, whom they have
served or benefited, and in this way Mr. May was fond of Cotsdean, who
in his turn had been a very good friend to his clergyman, serving him as
none of his own class could have done, going in the face of all his own
prejudices and the timorousness of nature, on his account. And the
result was to be ruin--ruin unmitigated to the small man who was in
business, and equally disastrous, though in a less creditable way, to
his employer. It was with a suppressed anguish which is indescribable
that he sat there, with his face covered, looking this approaching
misery in the face. How long he had been there, he could scarcely
himself tell, when he heard a little commotion in the hall, the sounds
of running up and down stairs, and opening of doors. He was in a
feverish and restless condition, and every stir roused him. Partly
because of that impatience in his mind, and partly because every new
thing seemed to have some possibility of hope in it, he got up and went
to the door. Before he returned to his seat, something might have
occurred to him, something might have happened--who could tell? It might
be the postman with a letter containing that remittance from James,
which still would set all right. It might be--he rose suddenly, and
opening the door, held it ajar and looked out; the front door was open,
and the night air blowing chilly into the house, and on the stairs,
coming down, he heard the voices of Ursula and Phoebe. Ursula was pinning
a shawl round her new friend, and consoling her.
"I hope you will find it is nothing. I am so sorry," she said.
"Oh, I am not very much afraid," said Phoebe. "She is ill, but not very
bad, I hope; and it is not dangerous. Thank you so much for letting me
come."
"You will come again?" said Ursula, kissing her; "promise that you will
come again."
Mr. May listened with a certain surface of amusement in his mind. How
easy and facile these girlish loves and fancies were! Ursula knew
nothing of this stranger, and yet so free were the girl's thoughts, so
open her heart to receive impressions, that on so short knowledge she
had received the other into it with undoubting confidence and trust. He
did not come forward himself to say good-bye, but he perceived that
Reginald followed downstairs, and took his hat from the table, to
accompany Phoebe home. As they closed the outer door behind them, the
last gust thus forcibly shut in made a rush through the narrow hall, and
carried a scrap of paper to Mr. May's feet. He picked it up almost
mechanically, and carried it with him to the light, and looked at it
without thought. There was not much in it to interest any one. It was
the little note which Tozer had sent to his granddaughter by the maid,
not prettily folded, to begin with, and soiled and crumpled by the
bearer.
"Your grandmother is took bad with one of her attacks. Come back
directly. She wants you badly.
"SAML. TOZER."
This was all that was in it. Mr. May opened it out on his table with a
half-smile of that same superficial amusement which the entire incident
had caused him--the contact, even momentary, of his own household with
that of Tozer, the old Dissenting butterman, was so droll an event. Then
he sank down on his chair again with a sigh, the amusement dying out all
at once, purely superficial as it was. Amusement! how strange that even
the idea of amusement should enter his head in the midst of his despair.
His mind renewed that horrible mechanical wandering through the dismal
circle of might-be's which still survived amid the chaos of his
thoughts. Once or twice there seemed to gleam upon him a stray glimmer
of light through a loophole, but only to throw him back again into the
darkness. Now and then he roused himself with a look of real terror in
his face, when there came a noise outside. What he was afraid of was
poor Cotsdean coming in with his hand to his forehead, and his
apologetic "Beg your pardon, sir." If he came, what could he say to him?
Two days--only two days more! If Mr. May had been less sensible and less
courageous, he would most likely have ended the matter by a pistol or a
dose of laudanum; but fortunately he was too rational to deliver himself
by this desperate expedient, which, of course, would only have made the
burden more terrible upon the survivors. If Cotsdean was to be ruined,
and there was no remedy, Mr. May was man enough to feel that it was his
business to stand by him, not to escape in any dastardly way; but in the
mean time to face Cotsdean, and tell him that he had done and could do
nothing, seemed more than the man who had caused his ruin could bear. He
moved about uneasily in his chair in the anguish of his mind. As he did
so, he pushed off some of his papers from the table with his elbow. It
was some sort of break in his feverish musings to pick them up again in
a bundle, without noticing what they were. He threw them down in a
little heap before him. On the top, as it chanced, came the little dirty
scrap of paper, which ought to have been tossed into the fire or the
waste-paper basket. Saml. Tozer! What was Saml. Tozer to him that his
name should stare him in the face in this obtrusive way? Tozer, the old
butterman! a mean and ignorant person, as far beneath Mr. May's level as
it is possible to imagine, whose handwriting it was very strange to see
on anything but a bill. He fixed his eyes upon it mechanically; he had
come, as it were, to the end of all things in those feverish musings; he
had searched through his whole known world for help, and found there
nothing and nobody to help him. Those whom he had once relied on were
exhausted long ago; his friends had all dropped off from him, as far, at
least, as money was concerned. Some of them might put out a hand to keep
him and his children from starvation even now, but to pay Cotsdean's
bill, never. There was no help anywhere, nor any hope. Natural ways and
means were all exhausted, and though he was a clergyman, he had no such
faith in the supernatural as to hope much for the succour of Heaven.
Heaven! what could Heaven do for him? Bank-notes did not drop down out
of the skies. There had been a time when he had felt full faith in
"Providence;" but he seemed to have nothing to expect now from that
quarter more than from any other. Samuel Tozer! why did that name always
come uppermost, staring into his very eyes? It was a curious signature,
the handwriting very rude and unrefined, with odd, illiterate dashes,
and yet with a kind of rough character in it, easy to identify, not
difficult to copy--
What was it that brought beads of moisture all at once to Mr. May's
forehead? He started up suddenly, pushing his chair with a hoarse
exclamation, and walked up and down the room quickly, as if trying to
escape from something. His heart jumped up in his breast, like a thing
possessed of separate life, and thumped against his side, and beat with
loud pulsations in his ears. When he caught sight of himself in the
mirror over the mantelpiece, he started as if he had seen a ghost. Some
one else seemed to see him; seemed to pounce upon and seize him out of
that glass. He retreated from the reach of it, almost staggering; then
he returned to his table. What thought was it that had struck him so
wildly, like a sudden squall upon a boat? He sat down, and covered his
face with his hands; then putting out one finger, stealthily drew the
paper towards him, and studied it closely from under the shadow of the
unmoved hand, which half-supported, half-covered his face. Well! after
all, what would be the harm? A gain of three months' time, during which
every sort of arrangement could be made so nicely; supplies got
anywhere, everywhere; the whole machinery of being set easily in motion
again, and no harm done to any one: this was the real force of the
idea--no harm done to any one! Long before the three months were out,
that hundred pounds--a paltry business, a nothing, when a man had time
before him--could be got, one might make sure; and where was the harm?
_He_ would never know it. Poor Cotsdean need never have the slightest
burden upon his conscience. Here, in the stillness of his own room, it
could all be done as easily as possible, without a soul being taken into
confidence, except that bloodless wretch in the glass with his staring
face, Mr. May said to himself, only dimly sensible that this wretch was
himself. No, it would harm no one, that was clear; it never need be
known to any one. It was a mere act of borrowing, and borrowing was
never accounted a crime; borrowing not money even, only a name, and for
so short a time. No harm; it could do no one in the world any harm.
While these reasonings went on in his mind, his heart dropped down again
into its right place; his pulse ceased to beat like the pistons of a
steam-engine; he came gradually to himself. After all, what was it? Not
such a great matter; a loan of something which would neither enrich him
who took, nor impoverish him who, without being aware of it, should
give--a nothing! Why people should entertain the prejudices they did on
the subject, it was difficult to see, though, perhaps, he allowed
candidly to himself, it might be dangerous for any ignorant man to
follow the same strain of thinking; but in the hands of a man who was
not ignorant, who knew, as he himself did, exactly how far to go, and
what might be _innocently_ done; _innocently_ done--in his own mind he
put a great stress on this--why, what was it? A thing which might be of
use in an emergency, and which was absolutely no harm.
Mr. May was late in leaving his room that night. It was understood in
the family that he "was writing," and all was kept very quiet in the
house; yet not sufficiently quiet, for Janey, when she brought in the
coffee, placing it on the table close to the door, was startled by the
fierceness of the exclamation with which her father greeted her
entrance.
"What do you want prying here?" he said, dropping his hand over the
writing.
"Prying himself!" said Janey, furiously, when she was up again in the
cheerful light of the drawing-room; "a great deal there is to pry into
in that dreadful old study."
"Hush! he never likes to be disturbed in his writing," said Ursula,
soothingly.
And he sat at his "writing" to a much later hour than usual, and he
stumbled upstairs to his bed-room in the dead of the night, with the
same scared pale face which he had seen in the glass. Such a look as
that when it once comes upon a man's face takes a long time to glide
away; but his heart beat more tranquilly, and the blood flowed even in
his veins. After all, where was the harm?