CHAPTER VIII.
DANIEL MAYFIELD’S COUNSEL.
THE great book and his own studies afforded Mr. Thorburn ample occupation for all his days and nights. If his days had been twice as long as they were, the young man would have found work for every hour. He was very ambitious, and he had that passionate love of learning for its own sake which marks the predestined scholar. But with all a Bentley or a Porson’s delight in the niceties of a Greek verb or the use of a preposition, he was as free from pedantry as from every other affectation. In the garden, on the river, by the piano, or on the croquet lawn, he was a match for the most empty-headed bachelor in Berkshire; and if he played croquet on mathematical principles, he was careful to keep that fact to himself. He had a knack of doing everything well, and even Mr. Jerningham was fain to admit that he was in tone and manner irreproachable. Never was the boyish candour of light-hearted youth more pleasantly blended with the self-possession of accomplished manhood. Grave and earnest, when good taste required that he should be serious; in his moments of expansion, full of enthusiasm and vivacity; always deferential to superior age and attainments, yet entirely without sycophancy; profoundly respectful in his intercourse with women--Eustace Thorburn was a man who made friends for himself unconsciously.
“I am very proud of my daughter,” M. de Bergerac said to Harold Jerningham one day, when they had been talking of the secretary; “but I should have been prouder still of such a son as that young man.”
“I have no passion for pattern young men,” replied Mr. Jerningham. “I dare say your model secretary is very amiable. You pay him a salary for being amiable, you see, and he occupies a very pleasant position in your house. But I cannot quite understand how you could bring yourself to admit a stranger into the bosom of your family. The arrangement reminds me a little of those curious advertisements one sees in the _Times_. A family who occupy a house too large for their requirements invite a gentleman engaged in the City during the day to share the delights of their too spacious mansion; and they promise him cheerful society--imagine the horror implied in pledging yourself to be cheerful all the year round for a gentleman engaged in the City!--and the gentleman comes to be welcomed to the arms of the family who know about as much of his antecedents, or his qualities of head and heart, as if he were an inhabitant of the planet Mars. Now it seems to me that you receive Mr. Thorburn very much on the same principle.”
“Not at all. I had Mr. Desmond’s credentials for my secretary’s character.”
“And how much does Mr. Desmond know of your secretary?”
“I can scarcely tell you that. I know that Desmond’s letter of recommendation was very satisfactory, and that the result has justified the letter.”
“And you do not even know who and what the young man’s father was?”
“I do not; but I would pledge my life upon the young man’s honesty of purpose, and I am not inclined to trouble, myself about his father.”
This conversation was eminently provoking to Mr. Jerningham. He had of late found himself tormented by an irritating curiosity upon the subject of Eustace Thorburn. He wanted to know who and what this man was whom he envied with so iniquitous an envy, whom he hated with a hatred so utterly unprovoked. Had he good blood in his veins, this young adventurer, who carried himself with an easy grace that could scarcely have been given to a plebeian? Mr. Jerningham was a Conservative in the narrowest sense of the word, and did not believe in nature’s nobility. He watched Eustace Thorburn with cold, critical eyes, and was fain to admit that in this young man there were no traces of vulgar origin.
“And they say he is like me,” Mr. Jerningham said to himself. “Was I ever as handsome as that, as bright, as candid in tone and frank in manner? I think not. Life was too smooth for me when I was a young man, and prosperity spoiled me.”
Mr. Jerningham looked back at the days of his youth, and remembered how prosperous they had been, and was fain to confess to himself that it might have been better for him if Fortune had been less lavish of her gifts. Absolute power is a crucial test that few men can stand. Absolute power makes a Caligula or a Heliogabalus, a Sixtus the Fourth or an Alexander the Sixth; and do not wealth, and good looks, and youth, and a decent amount of talent, constitute a power as absolute as the dominion of imperial papal Rome?
While Mr. Jerningham lingered--idle, discontented, ill at ease--amidst that Berkshire landscape which made Eustace Thorburn’s paradise, the young man’s life crept on, sweet as a summer-day’s dream. It had dawned upon him of late that he was not liked by the master of Greenlands, and he endured that affliction with becoming patience. He would have wished to be liked and trusted by all mankind, since his own heart knew only kindly feelings, except always against that one man who had to answer for his mother’s broken life. He wished to be on good terms with everybody; but if a cynical, middle-aged gentleman chose to dislike him, he was the last of men to court the cynical gentleman’s liking.
“I dare say Mr. Jerningham thinks there is a kind of impertinence in my likeness to him,” Eustace thought, when Harold’s eyes had watched him with a more than usually disdainful gaze. “He is angry with nature herself for having made a nameless adventurer somewhat after his image. Am I like him, I wonder? Yes, I see a look of his face in my own when I look in my glass. And that woman, Mrs. Willows, told me that I reminded her of my father; so Mr. Jerningham must be like my father. I can almost fancy my father that kind of man--cold, and proud, and selfish; for I know that Mr. Jerningham is selfish, in spite of M. de Bergerac’s praise of him.”
The idea that Harold Jerningham must needs bear some faint resemblance to the father whom Eustace had never seen, quickened the young man’s interest in him. The two men watched each other, and thought of each other, and wondered about each other, with ever-increasing interest, each seeking to fathom the hidden depths of the other’s nature, each baffled by that conventional external life which raises a kind of screen between the real and the artificial man.
Mr. Jerningham was a master of the art of concealing his sentiments, and Eustace, frank, true, and young as he was, kept his gravest thoughts locked in his own breast; so, after meeting nearly every day for some months, the two men knew very little more of each other than they had known after the first week of their intercourse.
Early in June, when the garden and park, river and wood-crowned hills beyond, were looking unspeakably beautiful in the early summer, Eustace left that arcadian paradise for a week’s hard labour in the manuscript-room of the British Museum, where there were certain documents bearing upon the subject of M. de Bergerac’s _magnum opus_--records of trials for witchcraft; ghastly confessions, wrung from the white lips of writhing wretches in the torture-chambers of mediæval England; hideous details of trial and _auto da fé_ in the days when the great stone scaffold stood at the gates of Seville, and the smoke and the stench of burning heretics darkened the skies of Spain.
Eustace shared his Uncle Dan’s lodgings on this occasion as on the last, to the delight of both. To Daniel Mayfield his nephew’s presence was like a glimpse of green fields and cooling waters seen athwart the arid sands of a desert.
“You are like a summer wind, blowing the hopes and joys of my youth back to me,” said Daniel, as the two men dined together on the first evening. “You are not like your mother, dear boy; but you have a look of hers in your eyes when you are at your best.”
“I have been told that I am like my father,” said Eustace, thoughtfully.
“Told by whom?”
“By Mrs. Willows--Sarah Kimber--my mother’s friend.”
“Indeed! Yes; Sarah Kimber must have seen that man.”
“And you never saw him?”
“Never. I was in London at the time. If I had been at Bayham, things might have been----Ah, well, we always think we could have saved our darlings from ruin or death if we had been at hand. God would not save her. But who knows if it was not better for her to have sinned, and suffered, and repented, and lived her pure, unselfish life for twenty years, to die humble and trusting, as she did, than to have married some vulgar, prosperous tradesman, and to have grown hard, and bitter, and worldly? Better for her to be the Publican than the Pharisee. You know what I am in the matter of religious opinion, Eustace; or, at any rate, you know as well as I know myself how I take Rabelais’ Great Perhaps; but since your mother’s death the hope of something better to come, after all this wear and tear, and drudgery and turmoil, has seemed nearer to me. The Great Perhaps has grown almost into a certainty; and sometimes at sunset, when I am walking in the busiest street in this great clamorous city, I see the sun going down in crimson glory behind the house-tops, and in the midst of all that roar and bustle, with the omnibuses rattling past, and the crowd jostling and pushing me as I tramp along, I think of the golden-paved city, that has no need of either sun or moon to shine in it, but is lighted with the glory of God; and I wish that the farce were over and the curtain dropped.”
Much more was said about the mild and inoffensive creature whom these two men had loved so dearly. To Eustace there was supreme comfort in this quiet talk about the unforgotten dead. After this there came more cheerful talk. Daniel Mayfield was anxious to ascertain what his nephew’s life was like at Greenlands.
“It is not an unprofitable life, at any rate,” he said, with a proud smile; “for those little poems you send me now and then for the magazines show a marked growth of mind. It ripens the mind; and the heart is not absorbed by the brain. That is the point. It is so difficult to keep heart and brain alive together. Do you remember what Vasari says of Giotto, ‘_Il renouvela l’art, parce qu’il mit plus de bonté dans les têtes_’? There is _bonté_ in your verses, my lad; and if Dan Mayfield is anything of a judge of literary yearlings, you may safely enter yourself for some of the great events. Of course, you will not depend upon verse-making for your daily bread. Verse-making is the Sabbath of a hard-working literary life. You will find good work to do without descending to such cab-horse labour as mine has been. And take to heart this one precept throughout your literary career: you have only one master, and that master is the British public. For your critics, if they are honest, respect and honour them with all your heart and mind; accept their blame in all humility, and be diligent to learn whatever they can teach. But when the false prophets assail you,--they who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravening wolves,--the critics who are no critics, but unsuccessful writers or trade rivals in disguise,--be on your guard, and take care of your cheese. You know the fable: the fox flattered the raven until the weak-minded bird dropped her cheese. The fox goes on another principle now-a-days, and reviles the raven; but for the same purpose. Remember my warning, Eustace, and don’t drop your cheese. The public, your master, has a very plain way of expressing its opinion. If the public like your book, the public will read it; if not, the public will assuredly let it alone; and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, in the way of criticism, cannot set you up or knock you down, unless the reading public is with them. Accept this brief sermon, Eustace, from a man who has lived and suffered.”
Those were pleasant hours which the two men spent together, sitting late into the night, talking of books and men, of worlds seen and unseen; metaphysical, practical, poetical, theological, by turns, as the stream of talk flowed onward in its wandering way--erratic as the most wayward brook that ever strayed by hill-side and meadow.
Eustace believed in his Uncle Dan as the greatest of men; and, indeed, in close companionship, the most stolid of companions could scarcely refrain from some expression of wonder and delight on beholding so much unconscious power, such depth of thought, such wealth of fancy, such grand imaginings,--all scattered as recklessly as Daniel Mayfield scattered his more substantial possessions in the shape of sovereigns and half-crowns. A dangerous enemy, a warm friend, a pitiless assailant, a staunch champion, large of heart and large of brain, more like Ben Jonson than Shakspeare, nearer to Dryden than to Pope, to Steele than to Addison,--such was Daniel Mayfield, essayist, reviewer, historian--what you will; always excellent, and sometimes great; but never so admirable a creature as when he sat smoking his meerschaum, dreamily, and looking across the blue mists of tobacco at the nephew he loved.
“And you are really and truly happy at Greenlands?” he said, after the young man had told him a good deal about his life in Berkshire.
“Happier than I ever was before in a stranger’s house,” answered Eustace; “though Mr. Jerningham evidently considers me an intruder.”
“Never mind Mr. Jerningham; you do not exist to please him. M. de Bergerac likes you; and Mademoiselle--she tolerates you, I suppose?”
A vivid blush betrayed that secret which Eustace Thorburn was so incapable of concealing.
“Ho, ho!” cried Daniel; “that is where we are, is it? We are in love with our employer’s daughter! Take care, Eustace; that way madness lies.”
“I know that,” the young man answered, gravely. “I have kept that in my mind ever since I first went to Greenlands.”
“Ever since? Ah, then it is an old story!”
“I know the chances are against me, and I mean to cure myself, sooner or later; unless----Well, Uncle Dan, I can’t teach myself to look at this business as altogether desperate. M. de Bergerac is all goodness, generosity, simplicity; and as for Helen----Don’t think me a cox-comb or a fool if I say I believe she loves me. We have been together for nearly a year, you see, like brother and sister; I teaching her Greek, she teaching me music. I play the basses of her duets--you remember how my poor mother taught me, when I was a child--and we have all kinds of tastes, and predilections, and enthusiasms in common. I cannot believe we could be so completely happy together if--if there were not something more than common sympathy between us. Don’t laugh at me, Uncle Dan.”
“Shall I laugh at youth, and hope, and love?” cried Daniel Mayfield. “The next thing would be to laugh at the angels in heaven.--And so she loves you, this Demoiselle de Bergerac? I wonder how she could help loving you, forsooth! Has her father any inkling of this pretty little pastoral comedy that is being enacted under his very nose?”
“I doubt it. He is simplicity itself.”
“And don’t you think, Eustace, that, in consideration for that sweet, childlike simplicity which so often goes with scholarship, you are bound to tell him the truth? You see, your position in the house is a privilege which you can scarcely enjoy with the consciousness of this treasonable secret. Tell M. de Bergerac the whole truth,--your plans, your chances of future distinction,--and ascertain from his own lips whether there is any hope for you.”
“And if he tells me there is no hope?”
“Well, that will seem a death-blow, of course. But if the girl really loves you, her heart will be always on your side. In that case, I should say wait, and put your trust in Time--Time, the father of Truth, as Mary Stuart called him when she wanted to obtain belief for a bouncer,--and oh, what an incredible number of royal bouncers were carried to and fro in the despatches of that period! Wait, Eustace, and when you have made a hit in the literary world, you can carry your laurel-crown to M. de Bergerac, and make an appeal against his stern decision.”
“And in the meantime, while the laurels are growing for my crown, some one else will marry Helen.”
“That is probable, if her love for you is only the caprice of a boarding-school miss, in which case you will be better off without her. Don’t look at me so despairingly, dear boy. You cannot get five-and-forty to regard these things with the eyes of five-and-twenty. I have had my own dream and my own disappointment, and have gone my ways, and cannot tell whether I am worse or better for my loss. Do you remember that tender little essay of Charles Lamb’s, in which he tells us about the children that might have been--the dear, loving, pretty creatures, who never lived except in Elia’s dreams? I have my little family too, Eustace; and of a night, when I sit alone and the candles burn dim on yonder table, they come out of the dusky corners and stand at my knee, and I talk to them, and tell them of the things that might have been if they had ever been born. And yet, how do I know that they wouldn’t have turned out the veriest little rascals and scoundrels in Christendom, and the torment of my existence? I have missed the home that I once dreamt of; but I have my pipe and my rare old books, and my faithful friends who come sometimes of an evening to play a rubber with me--as Elia’s friends used to come to him--and I take things quietly, and say Kismet. Be honest and true, Eustace, and leave the rest to the destiny that ‘shapes our ends.’
“I have thought that it might be my duty to tell M. de Bergerac the truth,” said Eustace, thoughtfully; “but then, you see, I have set a watch upon every look and word. I have preserved my own proper position as a paid secretary with punctilious care. What harm is there in my presence in that house, where I am so happy, so long as I keep my secret?”
“But can you tell how long you may keep it?” asked the incredulous Daniel, “or how many times you betray it in a single day to every one except that dreaming student, who has evidently no eyes to see anything that lies beyond his own desk? Your girlish blush betrayed you to me--blushes, and looks, and tones, and sighs will betray you to the demoiselle, and then some day the great discovery will be made all at once, and you will find yourself in a false position.”
“Yes, Uncle Dan; I begin to think you are right. I should be a scoundrel to profit by that dear old man’s simplicity. I will tell him the truth, and leave Greenlands. Ah, you cannot imagine how happy I have been there. And then, I am so useful to M. de Bergerac. The great book will come to a standstill again, or at any rate go on very slowly. And I am so interested in my work. It seems very hard, Uncle Dan; but I suppose it must be done.”
“It had better be done, my dear boy. Besides, you may not lose by your candour. M. de Bergerac may tell you to remain.”
“I cannot hope that. But I will take your advice; the truth is always best.”
“Always best and wisest.”
It was thus decided. Eustace wrung his uncle’s hand in silence, and retired, pale and sorrowful. The elder man felt this keenly; but he had something of the Spartan’s feelings in his relations with his beloved nephew.
“I have kept him away from me because I love him, and now I take him from this girl because I love him,” he thought, as he smoked his last pipe in cheerless solitude. “I am more watchful of his honour than ever I was of my own.”
There was very little more said about Greenlands during the few remaining days of Eustace Thorburn’s visit. His face told Daniel that the die was cast. The young Spartan had determined to do his duty.