EDGAR did not well know where to go on his arrival in London. He knew nothing about London except in its most expensive regions, and the only place to which he could direct the driver of the cab into which he jumped, was the chambers in Piccadilly which he had occupied in his earlier days. He said to himself “For a day or two it cannot matter where I live;” and, besides, the season was over and everything cheap, or so, at least, Edgar thought.
The first thing he had to do was to see that his lawyers had carried out his directions and paid his debts—the number of which appalled him—out of his capital. Decidedly it was time that he should do something, and should shake himself out of those habits of a rich man, which had, in these three years, though he had no idea of it, compromised him to the extent of half his little fortune. This debt he felt he could not trifle with. The more indifferent he was about money, and the better able he was to do without it, the more necessity was there for the clearing off to begin with, of everything in the shape of debt. After all was paid, and the residue settled on the old lady at Loch Arroch, there remained to him about a hundred pounds in the bank, besides the two ten-pound notes which he had in his pocket-book. “I must not touch the money in the bank,” he said to himself, with a prudence which contrasted beautifully with his other extravagances, “that must remain as something to fall back upon. Suppose, for instance, I should be ill,” Edgar reasoned with himself, always with a delicious suppressed consciousness of the joke involved under the utter gravity and extreme reasonableness of his own self-communings, “how necessary it would be to have something to fall back upon!” When he had made this little speech to himself, he subsided into silence, and it was not until half-an-hour later that he permitted himself to laugh.
Both of his own suggestions seemed so oddly impossible to him. To be ill—he, in whose veins the blood ran so lightly, so tunefully, his pulse beating with the calm and continued strength of perfect harmony; or to want a pound or two—he who had possessed unlimited credit and means which he had never exhausted all his life. The change was so great that it affected him almost childishly—as a poor man might be affected by coming into a sudden fortune, or as a very young wife is sometimes affected by the bewildering and laughable, yet certain fact, that she, the other day only a little girl in pinafores, is now at the head of a house, free to give as many orders as she pleases, and sure to be obeyed. The extreme humour of the situation is the first thing that strikes a lively girl, under these circumstances, and it was the humour of it which struck Edgar: a fact, perhaps, which may lower his character in the reader’s eyes. But that, alas, I cannot help, for such as he was, such I must show him, and his character had many defects. Often had he been upbraided that he did not feel vicissitudes which looked like ruin and destruction to minds differently constituted. He did not—he was the most insouciant, the most care-hating of men. Up to this period of his life he had found the means, somehow, of getting a smile, or some gleam of fun, out of everything that happened. When he could not manage this the circumstances were very strange indeed, and I suppose he felt it; but at all events, in such cases, he kept his failure to himself.
As soon as he had refreshed himself and breakfasted, he went out to see his lawyer, who received him with that air of melancholy disappointment which distinguishes all agents who are compelled to carry out what they think the foolish will of their principals: but who submitted the accounts to him, which showed that his directions had been obeyed, explaining everything in a depressed and despondent voice, full of the sense of injury.
“I am compelled to say, Mr. Earnshaw,” said this good man, “that, as you have paid so little attention to our wishes, I and my firm would hence-forward have declined to take charge of your business transactions, if it had been the least likely that you would have had any more business to do; but as this is not possible, or at least probable—”
“You will continue to do it,” said Edgar, laughing. “I hope so; it would be kind of you. No, I don’t suppose I shall have much more business to do.”
“And may I ask without offence,” said Mr. Parchemin, who was an old friend of Edgar’s old friend, Mr. Farqakerley, and had taken up the foolish young fellow on the recommendation of that excellent and long-established family solicitor. “May I ask how, now you have given away all your money, you mean to live?”
“I must work,” said Edgar, cheerfully.
“Clearly; but what can you work at?”
“You have hit the difficulty exactly,” said Edgar, laughing. “To tell the truth, I don’t know. What do you suppose I could do best? There must be many men in my position, left in the lurch by circumstances—and they must have some way of providing for themselves. What do they generally do?”
“Go to the dogs,” said Mr. Parchemin, succinctly, for he was still offended, and had not yet forgiven his impracticable client.
“I sha’n’t do that,” said Edgar as briefly—and with, for the first time, and for one of the first times in his life, a shade of offence on his face.
“There are a good many other things they try to do,” said Mr. Parchemin; “for instance they take pupils—most men feel themselves capable of that when they are driven to it; or they get into a public office, if they have interest and can pass the examination; or they read for the bar if they have friends who can support them for a dozen years; or they write for the papers—”
“Stop a little,” said Edgar; “I have no friends to support me—I can’t write—I don’t think I could pass an examination—”
“After twenty, and unless you’ve been crammed for the purpose, I don’t know anyone who could,” said Mr. Parchemin, solemnly.
“And I doubt whether I could teach anything that any man in his senses would wish to know.”
“I doubt it also,” said the lawyer, “judging, if you will pardon me for saying so, by your guidance of your own affairs.”
“But a tutor does not teach boys how to guide their own affairs,” said Edgar, recovering his sense of the joke.
“That is true too. A man may be very wise in giving good advice, and admirable on paper, and yet be fool enough in other respects. There was Goldsmith, for instance. But why shouldn’t you write? Plenty of stupid fellows write in the papers. You are not stupid—”
“Thanks,” cried Edgar, laughing.
“Of course, you have read what Thackeray says on that subject—in ‘Pendennis,’ you know—how it is all a knack that anybody can learn; and it pays very well, I have always heard. There is no sort of nonsense that people will not read. I don’t see why you should not try the newspapers; if you know any one on the staff of the Times, for instance—that is a splendid opening—or even the News or the Telegraph.”
“But, alas, I don’t know anyone.”
“Do you mean to say you never met any of those press fellows? when you were a great man, you know, when you were fashionable? At your club, for instance? You must have met some of them. Think! Why, they go everywhere, it’s their trade; they must have news. And, by the way, they have made their own of you first and last; the Arden estate, and the law-suit that was to be, and the noble behaviour of the unfortunate gentleman, &c., &c. You have figured in many a paragraph. Some of them you must know.”
“Newmarch used to dabble in literature,” said Edgar, doubtfully.
“Newmarch—Lord Newmarch! Why, that is better still. He’s in the Ministry, a rising young fellow, with the Manchester interest, and a few hundred thousands a-year behind him. He’s your very man; he’ll get you something; a school-inspectorship, or something of that sort, at the very least. What is he, by-the-bye? Education and that sort of thing is his hobby, so, of course, he’s put somewhere, like Dogberry, where there shall be no occasion for such vanities. Ah! I thought so; Foreign Office. He knows about as much of foreign politics, my dear Sir, as my office boy. That’s why he’s put in; that’s the present people’s way.”
“I don’t think I should like to ask a favour of Newmarch,” said Edgar, with hesitation; and there suddenly rose in his mind a spiritual presence which he had never before recognised nor expected to see, a something which was Pride. He himself was so unaffectedly surprised by the apparition that he did not know how to encounter it; but sat silent, wondering, and unable to understand the new dilemma in which he found himself. No; Newmarch was the last person of whom he should like to ask a favour, he said to himself.
“Is there any one else whom you would like better?” said Mr. Parchemin, somewhat satirically. “So far as we have got, Lord Newmarch’s is much the most practicable aid you could get. Would you prefer to ask your favour from anyone else?”
“You are quite right,” said Edgar, rousing himself. “The fact is, I don’t like asking favours at all. I suppose I expected the world to come to me and offer me a living, hat in hand. Of course, it is absurd.”
“Lord Newmarch is probably too high and mighty to prefer a friend unless he is sure it will be for the public interest, etc.,” said Mr. Parchemin. “He will say as much, at least, you may be sure of that. And I advise you to be prepared for a great deal of this sort of lofty rubbish; but don’t pay any attention to it. Don’t take offence.”
Edgar laughed; but the laugh was unexplainable to anyone but himself. He had not been in the habit of taking offence; he had never borne anybody a grudge, so far as he knew, in his life; but along with the new-born pride which had arisen in him, was the faculty of offence coming too? These were the first fruits of poverty, spectres which had never crossed his sunny pathway before. And though he laughed, not with amusement, but in a kind of dazed acknowledgment of the incongruity of things, the sense of the joke began to fail in Edgar’s mind. The whimsical, pleasant fun of the whole proceeding disappeared before those apparitions of Anger and Pride. Alas, was it possible that such a vulgar material change as the loss of money could bring such evil things into being? His friendly, gentle soul was appalled. He laughed with pain, not with amusement, because of the strange unlikeness of this new state of mind to anything he had known before.
“Newmarch, I suppose, is not in town; he can’t be in town at this time of the year,” he said, with a momentary hope of postponing his sufferings at least.
“Ah, my dear Sir,” said the lawyer, “he is one of the new brooms that sweep clean. Besides, there is something going on between Russia and Prussia that wants watching, and it’s Lord Newmarch’s business to be on the spot. If you’ll take my advice, you’ll see him at once. Before the season begins he can’t have so many applicants. Go, if you’ll take my advice, at once.”
Edgar winced, as a man cannot but wince who is thrown into the class of “applicants” at a blow. Why shouldn’t he be an applicant? he said to himself as he went out. Better men than he had been obliged to kick their heels in great men’s anterooms; but fortunately the reign of patrons was so far over now. Was it over? While human nature continued could it ever be over? or would it not be necessary as long as the world lasted that there should be some men holding out the hand to ask, and others to give? Not so very long ago Lord Newmarch had come to him, Edgar, hat in hand, so to speak, wanting not place or living, but the good graces of a rich and fair young lady with whom her brother might advance him. Her brother! There gleamed up before Edgar, as he walked through the dusty October streets, the sudden glimpse he had seen at the roadside station of Margaret waiting for her brother. Alas, yes! Most people had sisters, if not something still dearer, to greet them, to hear the account of all they had done, and consult what remained to do. I do not know how it was that at this moment something brought into Edgar’s mind the two ladies who had travelled with him from Scotland. Probably the mere word Sister was enough; or perhaps it was because one of them, the elder, was just turning the corner of the street, and met him two minutes after. She smiled with a momentary hesitation (she was forty at the least), and then stopped to speak.
“I had not a chance to thank you for getting our cab and looking after our luggage. It was very kind; but my young friend was in a great hurry.”
“She was, I suppose, of your sisterhood, too,” said Edgar, with a curiosity which was quite unjustifiable, and for which he could not account.
“Who? Miss ——. Oh! dear no,” said the good-humoured Sister. “She is what we call an associate, and does what she can for our charges, the poor people—in something like our dress; but it is far from being the dress of a professed sister,” the excellent woman added, adjusting her cross and collar. “I daresay you will meet her some day in society, and you need not tell her great friends that a Sister of the Charity House made her travel third class. We always do it; but fine people do not like to know.”
“I should have to betray myself,” said Edgar laughing, “if I betrayed you.”
“That is true,” said the Sister. “If you ever pass by the Charity House at Amerton ask for Sister Susan, and I shall be glad to show you over it. I assure you it is something to see.”
“I shall come some day or other,” said Edgar, not quite knowing what he said. Who was she then, the girl with the veil who kept herself shrouded from him? She had not seemed farouche or unfriendly. She had waited quietly while he did what he could for them at the railway station. She had even touched his hand lightly as he put her into the cab; but there had seemed to be three or four veils between him and her countenance. During all the long journey he had seen of her nothing but the little white hand stealing from under the cover of her cloak; but somehow his dream came back to him, and wove itself in with the semblance of this veiled stranger. Absurd! but sometimes an absurdity is pleasant and comforting, and so it was in this case. He could not have said what fancies came into his head, or if he had any fancies. No, he was past dreaming, past all that kind of boyish nonsense, he said to himself. But yet the recollection of the veiled maiden was pleasant to him, he could scarcely have told why.
Lord Newmarch was at his office, and he was ready after some time to see his visitor, whom he greeted with sufficient friendliness and good feeling. Lord Newmarch had been very democratic in his day; he had taken workmen in their working clothes to dine with him at his club in his hot youth, and had made them very uncomfortable, and acquired a delightful reputation himself for advanced ideas; which was a very great thing for a new lord, whose grandfather had been a small shopkeeper, to do. But somehow he was a great deal more at his ease with the working men than with his former friend and equal, now reduced to a perfectly incredible destitution of those ordinary circumstances which form the very clothing and skin of most men. Edgar was in soul and being, no doubt, exactly the same as ever; he had the same face, the same voice, the same thought and feelings. Had he lost only his money Lord Newmarch would not have felt the difficulty half so great, for indeed a great many people do (whatever the world may say) lose their money, without being dropped or discredited by society. But something a great deal more dreadful had happened in Edgar’s case. He had lost, so to speak, himself; and how to behave towards a man who a little while ago had been his equal, nay his superior, and now was not his equal, nor anybody’s, yet the same man, puzzled the young statesman beyond expression. This is a very different sort of thing from entertaining a couple of working men to the much astonishment (delightful homage to one’s peculiarities) of one’s club. The doctrine that all men are brothers comes in with charming piquancy in the one case, but is very much less easy to deal with in the other. Lord Newmarch got up with some perturbation from his seat when Edgar came in. He shook him warmly by the hand, and said,
“Oh, Arden—ah, Earnshaw,” looking at the card. “I beg your pardon. I am delighted to see you.”
And then they both sat down and looked at each other after the warmth of this accost, and found, as so often happens, that they had nothing more to say. I do not know a more embarrassing position in ordinary circumstances, even when there is no additional and complicating embarrassment. You meet your old friend, you shake hands, you commit yourself to an expression of delight—and then you are silent. He has sailed away from you and you from him since you last met, and there is nothing to be said between you, beyond that first unguarded and uncalled for warmth of salutation, the emblem of an intimacy past. This is how Lord Newmarch accosted Edgar; and Edgar accepted the salutation with a momentary glow at his breast. And then they sat down and looked at each other; they had given forth all the feeling they had toward each other, and how could they express sentiments which had no existence? They had to glide involuntarily into small talk about the empty state of town, and the new Minister’s devotion to business, and the question between Prussia and Russia which he had to keep at his post to watch. Lord Newmarch allowed, with dignified resignation, that it was hard upon him, and that an Under Secretary of State has much that is disagreeable to bear; and then he added politely, but thinking to himself—oh, how much easier were two, nay half-a-dozen working-men, than this!—an inquiry as to the nature of his old friend’s occupation. “What,” said the statesman, crossing and uncrossing his legs two or three times in succession to get the easiest position, and with a look at his shoes which expressed eloquently all the many events that had passed since their last meeting, “What are you doing yourself?”