SOMETHING TO COME
If you have the rare power of being able to work at any time, and after
any event to concentrate your thoughts on work, this is certainly a good
way of receiving disappointments and averting chagrin. Two hours passed.
Leonard continued at his table absorbed in his train of argument, and
for the moment wholly forgetful of what had passed. Presently his pen
began to move more slowly; he threw it down: he had advanced his
position by another earthwork. He sat up; he numbered his pages; he put
them together. And he found himself, after the change of mind necessary
for his work, able to consider the late conversation without passion,
though with a certain surprise. Some men--the weaker brethren--are
indignant, humiliated, by such a rejection. That is because their vanity
is built upon the sands. Leonard was not the kind of man to be
humiliated by any answer to any proposal, even that which concerns the
wedding-ring. He had too many excellent and solid foundations for the
good opinion which he entertained of himself. It was impossible for any
woman to refuse him, considering the standards by which women consider
and estimate men. Constance had indeed acknowledged that in all things
fortune had favoured him, yet owing to some feminine caprice or
unexpected perversity he had not been able to touch her heart. Such a
man as Leonard cannot be humiliated by anything that may be said or done
to him: he is humiliated by his own acts, perhaps, and his own blunders
and mistakes, of which most men’s lives are so full.
He was able to put aside, as an incident which would perhaps be
disavowed in the immediate future, the refusal of that thrice fortunate
hand of his. Besides, the refusal was conveyed in words so gracious and
so kindly.
But there was this strange attack upon him. He found himself repeating
in his own mind her words. Nature, Constance said, makes no man
perfectly happy. He himself, she went on, presented the appearance of
the one exception to the rule. He was well born, wealthy enough, strong
and tall, sound of wind and limb, sufficiently well favoured, with
proved abilities, already successful, and without any discoverable
drawback. Was there any other man in the whole world like unto him? It
would be better for him, this disturbing girl--this oracle--had gone on
to prophesy, if something of the common lot--the dash of bitterness--had
been thrown in with all these great and glorious gifts of fortune;
something would certainly happen: something was coming; there would be
disaster: then he would be more human; he would understand the world. As
soon as he had shared the sorrows and sufferings, the shames and the
humiliations, of the world, he would become more in harmony with men and
women. For the note of the common life is suffering.
At this point there came back to him again out of the misty glades of
childhood the memory of those two women who sat together, widows both,
in the garb of mourning, and wept together.
“My dear,” said the elder lady--the words came back to him, and the
scene, as plainly as on that day when he watched the old man sleeping in
his chair--“my dear, we are a family of misfortune.”
“But why--why--why?” asked the other. “What have we done?”
“Things,” said the elder lady, “are done which are never suspected.
Nobody knows; nobody finds out: the arm of the Lord is stretched out,
and vengeance falls, if not upon the guilty, then upon his children
and----”
Leonard drove the memory back--the lawn and the garden: the two women
sitting in the veranda: the child playing on the grass: the words--all
vanished. Leonard returned to the present. “Ghosts!” he said. “Ghosts!
Were these superstitious fears ever anything but ghosts?” He refused to
think of these things: he put aside the oracle of the wise woman, the
admonition that he was too fortunate a youth.
You have seen how he opened the first of a small heap of letters. His
eye fell upon the others: he took up the first and opened it: the
address was that of a fashionable West-End hotel: the writing was not
familiar. Yet it began “My dear nephew.”
“My dear nephew?” he asked; “who calls me his dear nephew?” He turned
over the letter, and read the name at the end, “Your affectionate uncle,
Fred Campaigne.”
Fred Campaigne! Then his memory flew back to another day of childhood,
and he saw his mother--that gentle creature--flushing with anger as she
repeated that name. There were tears in her eyes--not tears of sorrow,
but of wrath--and her cheek was aflame. And that was all he remembered.
The name of Frederick Campaigne was never more mentioned.
“I wonder,” said Leonard. Then he went on reading the letter:
“MY DEAR NEPHEW,
“I arrived here a day or two ago, after many years’ wandering. I
lose no time, after the transaction of certain necessary business,
in communicating with you. At this point, pray turn to my
signature.”
“I have done so already,” said Leonard. He put the letter down, and
tried to remember more. He could not. There arose before his memory once
more the figure of his mother angry for the first and only time that he
could remember. “Why was she angry?” he asked himself. Then he
remembered that his uncle Christopher, the distinguished lawyer, had
never mentioned Frederick’s name. “Seems as if there was a family
scandal, after all,” he thought. He turned to the letter again.
“I am the long-lost wanderer. I do not suppose that you can
possibly remember me, seeing that when I went away you were no more
than four or five years of age. One does not confide family matters
to a child of those tender years. When I left my country I was
under a cloud--a light cloud, it is true--a sort of nebulous haze,
mysteriously glowing in the sunshine. It was no more than the not
uncommon mystery of debt, my nephew. I went off. I was shoved off,
in fact, by the united cold shoulders of all the relations. Not
only were there money debts, but even my modest patrimony was gone.
Thus does fond youth foolishly throw good money after bad. I should
have kept my patrimony to go abroad with, and spent nothing but my
debts. I am now, however, home again. I should have called, but I
have important appointments in the City, where, you may be pleased
to learn, my name and my voice carry weight. Meantime, I hear that
you will be asked to meet me at my brother Christopher’s on
Wednesday. I shall, therefore, hope to see you then. My City
friends claim all my time between this and Wednesday. The magnitude
of certain operations renders it necessary to devote myself, for a
day or two, entirely to matters of _haute finance_. It was, I
believe, customary in former times for the prodigal son to return
in rags. We have changed all that. Nowadays the prodigal son
returns in broadcloth, with a cheque-book in his pocket and credit
at his bank. The family will be glad, I am sure, to hear that I am
prosperous exceedingly.”
Leonard read this letter with a little uneasiness. He remembered those
tears, to begin with. And then there was a certain false ring in the
words, an affectation of light-heartedness which did not sound true.
There was an ostentation of success which seemed designed to cover the
past. “I had forgotten,” he said, “that we had a prodigal son in the
family. Indeed, I never knew the fact. ‘Prosperous exceedingly,’ is he?
‘Important appointments in the City.’ Well, we shall see. I can wait
very well until Wednesday.”
He read the letter once more. Something jarred in it; the image of the
gentle woman for once in her life in wrath real and undisguised did not
agree with the nebulous haze spoken of by the writer. Besides, the touch
of romance, the Nabob who returns with a pocket full of money having
prospered exceedingly, does not begin by making excuses for the manner
of leaving home. Not at all: he comes home exultant, certain to be well
received on account of his money-bags. “After all,” said Leonard,
putting down the letter, “it is an old affair, and my poor mother will
shed no more tears over that or anything else, and it may be forgotten.”
He put down the letter and took up the next. “Humph!” he growled.
“Algernon again! I suppose he wants to borrow again. And Constance said
that I wanted poor relations.”
It is true that his cousin Algernon did occasionally borrow money of
him: but he was hardly a poor relation, being the only son of Mr.
Christopher Campaigne, of Lincoln’s Inn, Barrister-at-law, and in the
enjoyment of a large and lucrative practice. It is the blessed privilege
of the Bar that every large practice is lucrative; now, in the lower
branch of the legal profession there are large practices which are not
lucrative, just as in the lower branches of the medical profession there
are sixpenny practitioners with a very large connection, and in the
Church there are vicars with very large parishes.
Algernon, for his part, was studying with a great and ambitious object.
He proposed to become the dramatist of the future. He had not yet
written any dramas; he haunted the theatres, attended all the first
nights, knew a good many actors and a few actresses, belonged to the
Playgoers’ Club, spoke and posed as one who is on the stage, or at least
as one to whom the theatre is his chosen home. Algernon was frequently
stone-broke, was generally unable to obtain more than a certain
allowance from his father, and was accustomed to make appeals to his
cousin, the head of the family.
The letter was, as Leonard expected, an invitation to lend him money:
“DEAR LEONARD,
“I am sorry to worry you, but things have become tight, and the
pater refuses any advances. Why, with his fine practice, he should
grudge my small expenses I cannot understand. He complains that I
am doing no work. This is most unreasonable, as there is no man who
works harder at his art than I myself. I go to a theatre nearly
every evening; is it my fault that the stalls cost half a guinea?
All this means that I want you to lend me a tenner until the
paternal pride breaks or bends.
“Yours,
“ALGERNON.”
Leonard read and snorted.
“The fellow will never do anything,” he said. Nevertheless, he sat down,
opened his cheque-book, and drew the cheque. “Take it, confound you!” he
said.
And yet Constance had told him that for want of poor relations he was
out of harmony with the rest of the world.
There was a third letter--from his aunt:
“DEAR LEONARD,
“Will you look in, if you possibly can, on Wednesday to meet your
uncle Fred? He has come home again. Of course, you cannot remember
him. He was wild, I believe, in the old days, but he says that is
over now. Indeed, it is high time. He seems to be doing well, and
is most cheerful. As the acting head of the family, you will, I am
sure, give him a welcome, and forget and forgive, if there is
anything to forgive. Algernon is, I fear, working too hard. I could
not have believed that the art of play-writing required such close
attention to the theatres. He is making many acquaintances among
actors and actresses, who will be able, he says, to help him
tremendously. I tell his father, who sometimes grumbles, that when
the boy makes up his mind to begin there will be no living
dramatist who has more conscientiously studied his art.
“Affectionately yours,
“DOROTHY CAMPAIGNE.”
Leonard wrote a note accepting this invitation, and then endeavoured,
but without success, to dismiss the subject of the returned prodigal
from his mind. It was a relief to feel that he was at least prosperous
and cheerful. Now, had Leonard been a person of wider experience, he
would have remembered that cheerfulness in a prodigal is a most
suspicious attribute, because cheerfulness is the dominant note of the
prodigal under all circumstances, even the most unpromising. His
cheerfulness is his principal, sometimes his only, virtue. He is
cheerful because it is always more pleasant to be cheerful than to be
miserable; it is more comfortable to laugh than to cry. Only when the
prodigal becomes successful--which is very, very seldom--does he lose
his cheerfulness and assume a responsible and anxious countenance like
the steady and plodding elder brother.