MR. JERNINGHAM’S GUEST.
THEODORE DE BERGERAC and Harold Jerningham were friends of thirty
years’ standing. There was some distant relationship between them--some
remote cousinship arising from the marriage of an exiled Jerningham
of Jacobite principles with a De Bergerac, in the reign of George
the Second. But this inscrutable cousinship had nothing to do with
the friendship between the two men. _That_ was a sincere and
spontaneous affection, such as exists now and then between two people
as different from each other as it is possible for creatures of the
same species to be. Harold was ten years younger than his friend in
actual years, and his senior by a century in all qualities of heart and
mind. The elder man retained the freshness and simplicity of a child
at sixty years of age; the younger had parted with every attribute
of youth before the advent of his twenty-fifth birthday. Both were
highly gifted: but one had scattered the treasures of intellect on
every road, and wasted the powers of his brain in a hundred ignoble
pursuits; while the other had enriched his mind unconsciously in the
calm seclusion of a scholar’s retreat. An angel might have read the
innermost secrets of Theodore de Bergerac’s heart, and would have
found therein no taint of earthly grossness; but there had been times
when devils might have rejoiced in the thoughts of Harold Jerningham.
And yet the two men were friends, and had preserved an unbroken
friendship for nearly thirty years. A Philip of Orleans, steeped to
the very lips in the poisonous teaching of a Dubois, will in the hour
of his deepest degradation respect the purity of childhood. Before
the stainless robes of perfect innocence the most hardened profligate
bows his head and covers his face, ashamed of the vices he is wont to
be proud of--softened, melted, vanquished by that invincible purity.
Thus it had been with Harold Jerningham. For this world-weary, hardened
sinner the simple-minded scholar was sacred as a child. De Bergerac
knew nothing of that Jerningham of the bachelor’s house in Park Lane:
Jerningham the irresistible, the man who was an exile from the houses
of careful fathers and devoted husbands; the man whose life would have
furnished subject-matter for half a dozen romances and more than one
tragedy. When Harold Jerningham entered his friend’s house he put away
the baser half of himself. A little cynical, a little bitter, a little
hard and worldly he must needs be, even in that innocent society; but
Jerningham the free-thinker and the profligate melted into thin air on
the threshold of Theodore de Bergerac’s dwelling.
The two friends did not meet very often, though the house which
Theodore de Bergerac had occupied ever since his first coming to
England stood on the border of Mr. Jerningham’s park in Berkshire,--a
grand old park, in the midst of which there was a great house that
had once been splendid, but about which there was now a certain air
of shabbiness and decay. How should a mansion preserve its warmth
and grandeur when the master crossed its threshold so rarely, and
during his brief visits preferred a couple of dingy chambers on the
ground-floor to that spacious suite of apartments, with panelled walls
and painted ceilings, in which his forefathers had held their state?
M. de Bergerac was a warm partizan of the Orleans family, and in the
revolution of ’48 had turned his back upon his father’s country. He had
come straight to England, where he had found a fair young English wife
in the person of a Berkshire curate’s eldest daughter, and had accepted
the hospitality of his friend, Mr. Jerningham, so far as to occupy an
old-fashioned farm-house on the borders of the park--a house which had
been built for a bailiff in the days of some departed Jerningham, but
which had long fallen into disuse. Harold would fain have persuaded the
exile to take up his quarters in the big house, with all the lazy,
over-fed retainers at his disposal; but De Bergerac ridiculed his
friend’s offer.
“What should I do with your thirty bedchambers,” he wrote in answer to
Harold’s letter of invitation, “and your great corridors, along which
one could drive a coach-and-pair, and your housekeeper in a stiff silk
gown, and all your grooms and hangers-on? I would as soon live in
the palace of Versailles. Even kings and queens grow tired of their
palaces, you will perceive; and the man who has sunk millions in the
creation of a Versailles must needs seek domestic comfort at Marly.
You cannot endure your howling wilderness yourself,--you, who have
been accustomed to splendid habitations,--and yet ask me to take up my
abode in your thirty bedchambers, and abandon myself to the tyranny
of your awful housekeeper. No, my dear Jerningham; give me the little
Trianon--that tumble-down old farm-house you showed me last year, in
the midst of a quaint Dutch flower-garden--and I shall be happy. All I
want is a room big enough and dry enough to hold my books, and I will
not envy your gracious Queen her pompous château of Windsor.”
So the scholar and lover of books came to the farm-house, which Harold
Jerningham had taken care to make weather-tight and snug before the
exile’s arrival. De Bergerac recognized the handiwork of his friend in
the arrangement of this comfortable English hermitage. There were a few
rare old Dutch pictures, a small head by Holbein, a highly-finished
little bit by Canaletti, hanging in the oak-panelled parlour, which
no farm-bailiff had been privileged to gaze upon. There were quaint
little inlaid cabinets between the windows, with that delightful
shabbiness of aspect and mellow depth of tint which distinguishes the
treasures of Christie and Manson’s saleroom from the glaring freshness
of modern marqueterie. And on the cabinets were fragile odds and ends
of Derby and Worcester, Chelsea and Battersea, intermingled with those
dingy-looking bronzes and intaglios which the soul of the collector
loveth. And the biggest room in the old farm-house, once a kitchen, had
been lined from floor to ceiling with carved oaken shelves, for the
reception of the newcomer’s library; while the great yawning fireplace,
in which hinds and shepherds had supped their evening ale, and roasted
their sturdy legs, in the days that were gone, was now lined with
encaustic tiles, and furnished with a modern-antique grate of black
iron-work and glittering steel. When Harold Jerningham was pleased to
be generous, he obeyed his impulses in a princely fashion. He was not
a good man; but his vices and virtues were alike of the _vieille
roche_, and were instinct with a kind of dignity. Let Lucifer fall
never so low, he is the prince of devils still, and will show himself
grander in his debasement than fiends of meaner rank.
The country-people in the neighbourhood of Greenlands were ready to
receive M. de Bergerac with open arms: but he did not often avail
himself of their friendly hospitality. He was serenely happy among his
books and manuscripts, in the chamber which his friend had beautified
for him, and had no thought of seeking any other kind of happiness. The
great scheme of his life, the very beginning and end of his existence,
was the completion of a book which was to supply an existing void in
the world of books. To this achievement he devoted his days and nights,
choosing all his reading with reference to his one great scheme. The
subject possessed unfailing fascination for the mind of the scholar.
It was an inexhaustible quarry, rich with gems of purest water; and
De Bergerac dug patiently for the precious jewels, content to let the
years slip past him unmarked, save by the slow growth of his mighty
treatise. When the work seemed ripening, and the hour of its completion
near at hand, the scholar trembled, for he remembered Gibbon’s walk in
the moonlit garden at Lausanne, and the desolation which came down upon
the worker when he felt that his task was finished. Happily, the hour
of completion, which De Bergerac dreaded, was very slow to come. There
was an end to the history of ancient Rome; but it appeared, at times,
as if there could be no end to the history of superstition.
The exile had passed his fortieth birthday, and had been but six
months in England, when he married a fair young English girl--in a
fit of absence of mind, said the ignorant, who tried to account for
this unexpected alliance. But Harold Jerningham fathomed the secret of
his friend’s marriage. The girl was the daughter of a curate, an old
Orientalist, of whose reading De Bergerac had gladly availed himself
for his beloved work, and in whose pleasant cottage he had therefore
been a constant visitor. The curate’s daughter had been charmed out of
the dullness of her life by the society of the courteous exile; and
from looking up to him with reverential tenderness as a mentor and
friend, she had unconsciously grown to regard him with a deeper and
more tender feeling than that gentle, womanly friendship. A tone, a
look, an imperceptible something not to be defined by words, revealed
this feeling to De Bergerac before the girl was fully aware of it
herself; and could he be less than grateful, this exile of forty? could
his own heart fail to yield to so insidious and innocent an attack?
Hence arose this marriage, which was so great a wonder to those who had
only a superficial knowledge of the Frenchman’s character.
It was a union of perfect happiness. M. de Bergerac’s modest income
was more than enough for the Arcadian existence which he and his
young wife led in the Berkshire farm-house. The curate’s daughter was
country-bred, and was a fitting mistress for such an establishment. She
brought the garden to the rarest perfection of floricultural beauty,
and she distinguished herself by the administration of a wonderful
poultry-yard. She was as happy as the summer day was long among her
simple duties; while he, who in her eyes appeared the greatest of human
scholars and the most adorable of men, sat alone in the sacred chamber,
which she entered always with subdued footsteps, as if it had been a
religious temple. It was her pride and delight to be useful to the man
she loved. She worked for him, and managed for him, and hoarded for
him; and he found himself all the richer, even in the matter of sordid
cash, for her sweet companionship. The student, looking up from his
books and manuscripts, beheld cows grazing in the rich meadow before
his window, and was told that the cows were his, and that the produce
of those stupid creatures could be transformed into money, with which
rare old black-letter volumes and manuscripts of unspeakable value
could be bought in London sale-rooms.
For seven years Theodore de Bergerac tasted the perfection of calm
domestic happiness, and then the cup was snatched away from him. The
bright face faded; the indefatigable housewife was fain to rest from
her beloved labours. Little by little the bitter truth--which at first
seemed almost an impossibility--came home to the stricken heart of the
husband, and he knew that he was doomed to survive his young wife.
The dreaded hour came, and she left him--very lonely without her,
but, happily, not quite alone. She left one little girl--a fairer and
brighter likeness of herself; and upon this young life the widower set
his hopes of earthly happiness.
It was only natural that his unfinished book should become so much the
dearer to him by reason of this great human sorrow. The stricken heart
refused all comfort, but the agonized mind sought to beguile itself
into forgetfulness of pain. The student went back to his books, and
buried himself more deeply than of old amidst the ruins and ashes of
the past. His days were spent at his desk. His soul, sorely stricken
in this lower world of hard realities, wandered away and lost itself
in the infinite regions of mythic poetry. As the years crept past him
unawares, and his daughter blossomed into early womanhood, and the same
bright face peeped in again at his window which had shone upon him in
the brief happiness of his married life, it almost seemed to him as if
that terrible anguish, that desolating loss, had been no more than a
dreadful dream.
To this man’s quiet home Harold Jerningham came sometimes as to a haven
of shelter. He was wont to drop in upon the modest Berkshire household
unexpectedly, with the bronze of an Oriental sun still upon his face,
or a fur coat, in which he had travelled from St. Petersburgh, hanging
loosely on his arm. He came hither for rest, for a brief interval of
repose from “the fever called living;” and it was here, in the house
that had been built for his great-grandfather’s bailiff, that the owner
of three country-seats and an almost inexhaustible revenue found the
nearest approach to happiness which he had experienced during the last
twenty years.
Eustace Thorburn’s arrangements for beginning his new life were of the
simplest order. He found a letter from M. de Bergerac waiting for him
on his return to London--such a letter as only a gentleman can write--a
letter which placed the secretary at once on the footing of a friend,
and gave him promise of friendly welcome.
The young man spent the last night of his stay in London with Daniel
Mayfield. The uncle and nephew dined together at one of those snug
little haunts which the literary Bohemian affected, and Daniel’s soul
expanded under the influence of Chambertin at nine shillings a bottle.
He had received a cheque in payment of his latest Massacre of the
Innocents in the way of reviewing, and it was in vain that Eustace
tried to arrest his extravagant orders.
“The best you can do for us in the shape of dinner, Tom,” he
said to the waiter, with whom he was on the familiar terms of an
_habitué_; “and--let me see the wine-card: yes, Dancer sticks to
his old prices, I perceive. What nethermost circle can that man expect
to inhabit in the under world, I wonder? Johannisberg with the oysters,
Tom: if you were well up in your Charles de Bernard, you would be aware
that Chablis is the mistake of the half-educated diner. After the
soup you may give us a bottle of the old Madeira--_the_ Madeira,
remember--no modern French concoction, flavoured with burnt-sugar.
We will not go into sparkling, Tom--sparkling is the luxury of the
vulgar; wines that leap and bubble are the pet delusion of the _oi
polloi_; we will therefore confine ourselves to the borders of the
Rhine. If your still Moselle is worthy of a gentleman’s attention, you
may bring us a bottle. The Chambertin I know to be tolerable; so after
dinner we will stick to _that_.”
Never before had Daniel Mayfield introduced his sister’s son to any of
the haunts in which the best hours of his own careless life had been
wasted. The young man was as temperate as a girl, and the dinner-giver
had his carefully chosen wines to himself. But as Mayfield grew gay and
eloquent with the warming influence of the Burgundian hillside, Eustace
Thorburn’s spirits rose in sympathy with his companion. For there is a
subtle influence in wine which communicates itself to the man who does
not drink as well as to the man who does; and he must be slow and dull
of soul who can sit amongst the worshippers of Bacchus and not feel the
fiery presence of the god, let his own beverage be no stronger than
water.
“I have never brought you here before, and I should not have brought
you here to-night, Eustace,” said Daniel, and he passed his newly
filled glass of Burgundy beneath his nostrils, with the gesture of a
connoisseur; “I should not have brought you here to-night, my lad,
pleasant though it is to me to see your bright face across the rosy
vapour of the South, if you and I were not going to part company.
This is Bohemia, Eustace--the land in which jolly good fellows go to
the dogs in their own jolly way--and I’m not quite certain that it’s
the worst way a man can travel to his ruin. We spend our money, and
we live in fear of sheriff’s officers, and we die in sponging-houses;
but, after all, we escape many of the heartburnings which your very
respectable people suffer. We are no shams--we live our own lives;
and are ourselves alone--no phantasmal simulacra of other men. We
take existence lightly--share our own good fortune with our needy
brothers--and envy no man his luck. But if you have poetic aspirations
and noble ambitions, if you want to be a great and a good man, keep
clear of us--no great man ever issued from our ranks. We have talent,
we have sometimes even genius; but we never achieve. Jones is of the
stuff that makes a noble historian; but Jones must have his night in
his pet tavern, and a five-pound note at the service of the Pythias of
the hour; so he writes showy essays for the magazines. Smith turns his
unfinished picture to the wall, in the hour when he was budding into
a Rubens, to paint pot-boilers for the fashionable dealers--a young
man and woman in a boat off Twickenham, with spinachy foliage and a
flimsy blue sky, spotted with little ragged dabs of the palette-knife;
or a girl in a striped petticoat playing croquet against a background
in which you may count the threads of the canvas. Browne might write
a comedy which would remind the critics of Sheridan; but he cannot
afford to polish the graceful turns of his dialogue or study the unity
of his design, so he does a bad adaptation of a bad French vaudeville,
and gets twenty pounds down on the nail for his labour. We possess
the elements of greatness; but we can’t wait--we want ready money.
The man with a wife and seven children may struggle out of poverty
into greatness; but for the jolly good-fellow, with half a dozen
boon-companions, enduring success is an impossibility.”
Eustace had never before heard his uncle speak so seriously of himself
and his own set.
“You may do great things yet, Uncle Dan,” he said, earnestly; “let me
give up this Berkshire engagement, and stop in town to work with you.
Cut all the boon-companions, and let us go in earnestly for honest hard
work. I want to see your name allied to some perfect book; your talent
gets frittered away upon anonymous reviews and essays. Oliver Goldsmith
wrote the _Vicar of Wakefield_, and you know he was something of
a Bohemian.”
“He was a Bohemian, who lived among such men as Johnson and Burke and
Reynolds,” answered Daniel; “Bohemia has degenerated since those days.
And how many more stories, as perfect as the _Vicar of Wakefield_,
might _not_ simple-hearted Noll have written if he had not been
something of a Bohemian! Your great workers are jog-trot stay-at-home
creatures. William Shakespeare was a respectable citizen, who saved
money, and settled himself comfortably in his native town before he was
my age, and sued his friend for a trifling debt, and made a will in
which his domestic carefulness reveals itself by allusions to bedsteads
and such-like household furniture; whereby you may perceive the
legendary character of all popular records of the poet’s youth, for the
man who began life by stealing deer and holding horses would never have
developed into the bequeather of bedsteads. So no more, lad; I shall
hide my light in anonymous essays and reviews as long as I live, for I
shall always be in want of ready money.”
“Unless I can make a fortune big enough for us both, Uncle Dan,” said
the young man, hopefully. At three-and-twenty one fancies it such an
easy thing to make a fortune. All the high-roads to the temple of fame
radiate before the feet of youth, and it seems a mere matter of choice
whether one is to be Shakespeare or Bacon.
“If you made the fortune of a Rothschild or a Pereira, you would never
make me a rich man,” cried Daniel. “Turn the waters of the Pactolus
into my pocket to-day, and before a month is out there will not be left
one vestige of the golden river. If I were a second Midas, endowed with
the power of changing vulgar wooden chairs and tables into so much
solid gold, my friends and companions and the tavern-keepers would take
the chairs and tables, and leave me a pauper. I must go my own way,
dear boy; and the further my road lies from yours the better for you.
Let me hear from you sometimes; and even if your letters are left
unanswered, think that they are carried in the pocket nearest your
Daniel’s heart, and that they are his consolation when the world goes
ill with him.”