IT is time to let the reader of this story know who Cosmo Douglas was, whose appearance had made so great a commotion at Mount. He was—nobody. This was a fact that Mr. Mountford had very soon elicited by his inquiries. He did not belong to any known house of Douglasses under the sun. It may be said that there was something fair in Cosmo’s frank confession on this point, put perhaps it would be more true to say that it showed the good sense which was certainly one of his characteristics; for any delusion that he might have encouraged or consented to in this respect must have been found out very shortly, and it would only have been to his discredit to claim good connections which did not belong to him. ‘Honesty is the best policy’ he had said to himself, and therefore he had been honest. Nevertheless it was a standing mystery to Cosmo that he was nobody. He could not understand it. It had been a trouble to him all his life. How was he inferior to the other people who had good connections? He had received the same kind of education, he had the same kind of habits, he was as much a ‘gentleman,’ that curious English distinction which means everything and nothing, as any of them. He did not even feel within himself the healthy thrill of opposition with which the lowly born sometimes scorn the supposed superiority of blue blood. He for his part had something in his heart which entirely coincided with that superstition. Instinctively he preferred for himself that his friends should be well born. He had as natural a predilection that way as if his shield held ever so many quarterings; and it was terrible to know that he had no right to any shield at all. In his boyhood he had accepted the crest which his father wore at his watchchain, and had stamped upon his spoons and forks, with undoubting faith, as if it had descended straight from the Crusaders; and when he had read of the ‘dark grey man’ in early Scotch history, and of that Lord James who carried Bruce’s heart to the Holy Land, there was a swell of pride within him, and he had no doubt that they were his ancestors. But as he grew older it dawned upon Cosmo that his father had assumed the bleeding heart because he found it represented in the old book of heraldry as the cognisance of the Douglasses, and not because he had any hereditary right to it—and, indeed, the fact was that good Mr. Douglas knew no better. He thought in all simplicity that his name entitled him to the symbol which was connected with the name, and that all those great people so far off from the present day were ‘no doubt’ his ancestors, though it was too far back to be able to tell.
Mr. Douglas himself was a man of the highest respectability. He was the managing clerk in a solicitor’s office, with a good salary, and the entire confidence of his employers. Perhaps he might even have been a partner had he been of a bolder temper; but he was afraid of responsibility, and had no desire, he said, to assume a different position, or rise in the social scale. That would be for Cosmo, he added, within himself. He had lost his wife at a very early period, when Cosmo was still a child, and upon the boy all his father’s hopes were built. He gave him ‘every advantage.’ For himself he lived very quietly in a house with a garden out Hampstead way, a small house capable of being managed by one respectable woman-servant, who had been with him for years, and a young girl under her, or sometimes a boy, when she could be persuaded to put up with one of these more objectionable creatures. But Cosmo had everything that was supposed to be best for an English young man. He was at Westminster School, and so received into the fraternity of ‘public school men,’ which is a distinct class in England; and then he went to the University. When he took his degree he studied for the bar. Both at Oxford and Lincoln’s Inn he was ‘in for’ all his examinations in company with the son of his father’s employer; but it was Cosmo who was the most promising student always, and the most popular man. He had the air and the bearing, the ‘je ne sçais quoi’ which is supposed to indicate ‘family,’ though he was of no family. Nothing ever was more perplexing. He could not understand it himself. What was it that made this wonderful difference? When he looked at Charley Ashley a smile would sometimes steal over his countenance. In that point of view the prejudice certainly showed its full absurdity. Charley was his retainer, his faithful follower—his dog, in a way. But Mr. Mountford, though he would probably have thought Charley not a suitable match for his daughter, would not have looked upon him with the same puzzled air as on a creature of a different species, with which he regarded the suitor who was nobody. When this contrast struck him, no doubt Cosmo smiled with a little bitterness. Charley had connections among all the little squires of the district. He had an uncle here and there whose name was in some undistinguished list or other—the ‘Gentry of Great Britain’ or some other such beadroll. But Cosmo had no link at all to the classes who consider themselves the natural masters of the world.
If you will think of it, it was as troublesome and unpleasant a position as could be conceived—to have all that makes a gentleman and to be a gentleman, fully considered and received as such, yet upon close investigation to be found to be nobody, and have all your other qualities ignored in consequence. It was hard—it was a complicating, perplexing grievance, such as could only occur in the most artificial state of society. In the middle ages, if a man ‘rose,’ it was by dint of hard blows, and people were afraid of him. But ‘rising in the world’ had a very different meaning in Cosmo’s case. He had always known what it was to be carefully tended, daintily fed, clothed with the best of clothes—as well as a duke’s son need have been. He had all the books to read which any duke’s son could have set his face to; and though the Hampstead rooms were small, and might have looked poky had there been a family cooped up in them, Cosmo and his father had felt no want of space nor of comfort. Even that little Hampstead house was now a thing of the past. Mr. Douglas had died, though still not much beyond middle age, and Cosmo had his chambers, like any other young barrister, and several clubs, and all the ‘advantages’ which his father had sworn he should have. He had a little money, and a little practice, and was ‘getting on.’ If he was not in fashionable society, he was yet in an excellent ‘set’—rising barristers, literary people, all rising too, people of reputation, people who suppose themselves to sway the world, and who certainly direct a great deal of its public talk, and carry a large silent background of its population with them. He was very well thought of among this class, went out a great deal into society, knew a great many people whom it is supposed something to know—and yet he was nobody. The merest clown could have confused him at any time by asking, ‘Which is your county, Douglas?’ Poor Cosmo had no county. He took the deficiency admirably, it is needless to say, and never shirked the truth when there was any need to tell it. In the majority of cases it was not at all necessary to tell it; but yet his friends knew well enough that he had no relations to give him shooting, or ask him during the hunting season; no district had any claim upon him, nor he upon it. A man may love his home when it has never been anywhere but in Hampstead. But it makes a great difference—even when his friends make up the deficiencies of family to him, and invite him, as he had this year been invited, to share the delights of a Scotch moor—still it makes a great difference. And when it is a matter of matrimony, and of producing his proofs of gentility, and of being a fit person to marry Anne Mountford, then the difference shows most of all.
When Cosmo attained that perfect freedom from all ties, and power of roaming wherever he pleased, without any clog to draw him back, which was involved in his father’s death (though it may be said for him that this was an event which he deeply regretted) he made up his mind that he would not marry, at least until he had reached sufficient distinction in his profession to make him somebody, quite independent of connections. But then he had not seen Anne Mountford. With her, without any secondary motives, he had fallen honestly and heartily in love, a love which he would, however, have managed to quench and get the better of, had it not turned out upon inquiry that Anne was one whom it was entirely permissible to love, and who could help him, not hold him back in the career of success. He had, however, many discussions with himself before he permitted himself to indulge his inclinations. He had felt that with people like the Mountfords the fact that he was nobody would tell with double power; and, indeed, if he had ever been tempted to invent a family of Douglasses of Somewhere-or-other, it was now. He had almost been led into doing this. He had even half-prepared a little romance, which no doubt Mr. Mountford, he thought, would have swallowed, of a ruined house dwindled away to its last representative, which had lost lands and even name in one of the rebellions. He had not chosen which rebellion, but he had made up the story otherwise with great enjoyment and a fine sense of its fitness: when that modern quality which for want of a better name we call a sense of humour stopped him. For a man of his time, a man of his enlightened opinions, a member of a liberal profession, a high-bred (if not high-born) Englishman to seek importance from a silly little school-girl romance was too absurd. He could not do it. He laughed aloud at himself with a little flush of shame on his countenance, and tossed away the fiction. But what a thing it would have been for Cosmo if the tumbledown old house which he had invented and the bit of school-girl fiction had been true! They became almost such to him, so strongly did he feel that they would exactly fit his case. ‘They would have been as stupid probably as—Mr. Mountford,’ Cosmo said to himself, ‘and pig-headed into the bargain, or they never would have thrown away everything for a gingerbread adventurer like Prince Charley—rude Lowland rustics talking broad Scotch, not even endowed with the mystery of Gaelic. But to be sure I might have made them Celts, and the Lord of Mount would not have been a whit the wiser. I think I can see a snuffy old laird in a blue bonnet, and a lumbering young lout scratching his red head. And these be your gods, oh Israel! I don’t think I should have been much the better of such ancestors.’ But nevertheless he felt in his heart that he would have been much the better for them. Other men might despise them, but Cosmo would have liked to believe in those Douglasses who had never existed. However, though he had invented them, he could not make use of them. It would have been too absurd. He laughed and reddened a little, and let them drop; and with a perfectly open and composed countenance informed Mr. Mountford that he was nobody and sprang from no known Douglasses at all. It was a kind of heroism in its way, the heroism of good sense, the influence of that wholesome horror of the ridiculous which is one of the strongest agencies of modern life.
After the interview with Mr. Mountford, and after the still greater shock of Anne’s intimation that her father would not yield, Cosmo’s mind had been much exercised, and there had been a moment, in which he had not known what to do or say. Marriage without pecuniary advantage was impossible to him—he could not, he dared not think of it. It meant downfall of every kind, and a narrowing of all the possibilities of life. It would be ruin to him and also to the girl who should be his wife. It would be impossible for him to keep her in the position she belonged to, and he would have to relinquish the position which belonged to him—two things not for a moment to be thought of. The only thing possible, evidently, was to wait. He was in love, but he was not anxious to marry at once. In any case it would be expedient to defer that event; and the old man might die—nay, most likely would die—and would not certainly change his will if all things were kept quiet and no demonstration made. He left Mount full of suppressed excitement, yet glad to be able to withdraw; to go away without compromising Anne, without being called upon to confront or defy the harsh parent, or do anything to commit himself. If Anne but held her tongue, there was no reason why Mr. Mountford might not suppose that she had given Cosmo up, and Cosmo was rather pleased than otherwise with the idea that she might do so. He wanted no sentimental passion; no sacrifice of everything for his sake. All for love and the world well lost, was not in the least a sentiment which commended itself to him. He would have much preferred that she had dissembled altogether, and put on an appearance of obeying her father; but this was a thing that he could not recommend her to do, any more than he could put forth his invented story of the ruined Douglasses. The fashion of his age and his kind and his education was so against lying, that it could be practised only individually, so to speak, and as it were accidentally. You might be betrayed into it by the emergency of a moment, but you could not, unless you were very sure indeed of your ground and your coadjutor, venture to suggest falsehood. The thing could not be done. This, however, was what he would have thought the safest thing—that all should fall back into its usual state; that Anne should go on as if she were still simply Anne, without any difference in her life; and that, except for the fine but concealed bond between them, which should be avowed on the first possible occasion, but never made any display of while things were not ripe, everything should be exactly as before. This was perfectly fair in love, according to all known examples and rules. Something like it had happened in the majority of similar cases, and indeed, Cosmo said to himself with a half smile, a lover might feel himself little flattered for whom such a sacrifice would not be made. But all the same he could not suggest it. He could not say to Anne, ‘Tell a lie for me—persuade your father that all is over between us, though it is not all over between us and never shall be till death parts us.’ A young man of the nineteenth century, brought up at a public school and university, a member of the bar, and in very good society, could not say that. It would have been an anachronism. He might wish it, and did do so fervently; but to put it in words was impossible.
It was with this view, however, that Cosmo had omitted all mention of correspondence in his last interviews with Anne. They were full of so much that was novel and exciting to her that she did not notice the omission, nor in the hurry and rush of new sensations in her mind had she that eager longing for a letter which most girls would have felt on parting with their lovers. She had no habit of letters. She had never been at school or made any friendships of the kind that need to be solaced by continual outpourings upon paper. Almost all her intimates were about her, seeing her often, not standing in need of correspondence. She had not even said in the hurry of parting, ‘You will write.’ Perhaps she saw it like himself, but like himself was unwilling to propose the absolute concealment which was desirable. Cosmo’s mind had been full of nothing else on his way to Scotland to his friend’s moor. He had thought of her half the time, and the other half of the time he had thought how to manage, how to secure her without injuring her (which was how he put it); the long night’s journey was made short to him by these thoughts. He did not sleep, and he did not want to sleep; the darkness of the world through which he was rushing, the jumble of perpetual sound, which made a sort of atmosphere about him, was as a hermitage to Cosmo, as it has been to many before him. Railway trains, indeed, are hermitages in life for the much-pondering and careworn sons of the present age. There they can shut themselves up and think at will. He turned it all over and over in his mind. No wild notion—such as had moved the inexperienced mind of Anne with a thrill of delightful impulse—of rushing back to work and instantly beginning the toil which was to win her, occurred to Anne’s lover. To be sure it was the Long Vacation, which is a thing girls do not take into account, and Cosmo would have smiled at the notion of giving up his shooting and going back to his chambers out of the mere sentiment of losing no time, which probably would have appeared to Anne a heroic and delightful idea; but he did what Anne could not have done; he went into the whole question, all the pros and cons, and weighed them carefully. He had a long journey, far up into the wilds, by the Highland railway. Morning brought him into the land of hills and rivers, and noon to the bleaker mountains and glens, wealthy only in grouse and deer. He did nothing but think it over in the night and through the day. Nevertheless, Cosmo, when he reached Glentuan, was as little worn out as it becomes an experienced young Englishman to be after a long journey. He was quite fresh for dinner after he had performed the customary rites—ready to take his part in all the conversation and help in the general amusement.
‘Douglas—which of the Douglasses does he belong to?’ one of the guests asked after he had withdrawn.
‘I’ve always known him as Douglas of Trinity,’ said the host.
‘Trinity, Trinity,’ answered the other, who was a local personage, thinking of nothing but territorial designation, ‘I never heard of any Douglasses of Trinity. Do you mean the place near Edinburgh where all the seaside villas are?’
‘He means Cambridge,’ said another, laughing.
‘Douglas is the best fellow in the world, but he is—nobody: at least so I’ve always heard.’
Cosmo did not overhear this conversation, but he knew that it had taken place as well as if he had heard it; not that it did him the least harm with his comrades of the moment, to whom he was a very nice fellow, a capital companion, thoroughly acquainted with all the habits and customs of their kind, and though no great shot, yet good enough for all that was necessary, good enough to enjoy the sport, which nobody who is awkward and really ignorant can do. But he knew that one time or other this little conversation would take place, and though he felt that he might do himself the credit to say that he had no false shame, nor attached any exaggerated importance to the subject, still it was no doubt of more importance to him than it was to those with whom it was only one out of many subjects of a casual conversation. All the same, however, even these casual talkers did not forget it. Strange superstition, strangest folly, he might well say to himself with such a smile as was possible in the circumstances. Douglas of Trinity—Douglas of Lincoln’s Inn meant something—but to be one of the Douglasses of some dilapidated old house, what did that mean? This question, however, had nothing to do with the matter, and the smile had not much pleasantness in it, as may easily be perceived.
The fruit of Cosmo’s cogitations, however, was that he wrote to Anne, as has been seen, and sent his letter to Charley Ashley to be delivered. This was partly policy and partly uncertainty, a sort of half measure to feel his way; but, on the whole, was most of all the necessity he felt to say something to her, to seize upon her, not to let this beautiful dream escape from him.
‘We said nothing about writing, and I don’t know, my dearest, what you wish in this respect. Silence seems impossible, but if you wish it, if you ask this sacrifice, I will be content with my perfect trust in my Anne, and do whatever she would have me do. I know that it would be against your pride and your delicacy, my darling, to keep up any correspondence which the severest parent could call clandestine, and if I take advantage of a good fellow who is devoted to us both, for once, it is not with the least idea that you will like it, or will allow me to continue it. But what can I do? I must know what is your will in this matter, and I must allow myself the luxury once, if only once, of telling you on paper what I have tried to tell you so often in words—how I love you, my love, and what it is to me to love you—a new creation, an opening up both of earth and heaven.’ (We need not continue what Cosmo said on this point because, to be sure, it has all been said over and over again, sometimes no doubt worse, and sometimes unquestionably a great deal better, than he said it: and there is no advantage that we know of to be got from making young persons prematurely acquainted with every possible manner in which this sentiment can be expressed.) At the end he resumed, with generous sentiment, which was perfectly genuine, and yet not any more free of calculation and the idea of personal advantage than all the rest was:—
‘Charley Ashley is the truest friend that ever man had; he has loved you all his life (that is nothing wonderful), and yet, though, at such a cost as I do not like to try to estimate, he still loves me, though he knows that I have come between him and any possibility there was that he should ever win any return from you. To do him full justice, I do not think he ever looked for any return, but was content to love you as in itself a happiness and an elevation for which a man might well be grateful; but still it is hard upon him to see a man no better than himself, nay, less worthy in a hundred ways, winning the unimaginable reward for which he, poor Charley, had not so much as ventured to hope. Yet with a generosity—how can I express it, how could I ever have emulated it?—which is beyond words, he has neither withdrawn his brotherly kindness from me, nor refused to stand by me in my struggle towards you and happiness. What can we say to a friend like this? Trust him, my dearest, as I do. I do not mean that he should be the medium of communication between us, but there are ways in which he may be of help and comfort to us both; and, in the meantime, you will at your dear pleasure tell me yourself what you wish to do, or let me know by him: if I may write, if I must be silent, if you will make me a happy man now and then by a word from your hand, or if I am to wait for that hand till I dare claim it as mine. Nay, but my Anne, my darling, for once, if for once only, you must send two or three words, a line or two, to give me patience and hope.’
As he folded this up his whole heart longed for the ‘word or two’ he had asked for. Without that it almost seemed to him that all that had passed before might mean nothing, might roll away like the mists, like the fabric of a vision. But at the same time Cosmo felt in his heart that if Anne would send him the consolation of this one letter through Charley Ashley, and after that bid him be silent and wait for chance opportunities or modes of communication, that she would do well. It was what he would have advised her to do had he been free to tell her exactly what he thought. But he was not free to advise such a proceeding. It was not in his rôle; nor could he have proposed any clandestine correspondence, though he would have liked it. It was impossible. Anne would most probably have thrown him off as altogether unworthy had he proposed anything of the kind to her, or at least would have regarded him with very different eyes from those with which she looked upon him now. And even independent of this he could not have done it: the words would have failed him to make such a proposal. It was contrary to all tradition, and to the spirit of his class and time.
When he had despatched this letter Cosmo’s bosom’s lord sat more lightly upon his throne. He went out next morning very early and made a respectable, a very respectable, bag. Nobody could say that he was a cockney sportsman not knowing how to aim or hold a gun. In this as in everything else he had succeeded in mastering the rules of every fashion, and lived as a man who was to the manner born. He was indeed to the manner born, with nothing in him, so far as he was aware, that went against the traditions of a gentleman: and yet similar conversations to that one which occurred in the smoking-room, occurred occasionally on the hills among the heather. ‘Of what Douglasses is your friend?’ ‘Oh, I don’t know that he is of any Douglasses,’ the master of the moor would say with impatience. ‘He is a capital fellow, and a rising man in the law—that’s all I know about him;’ or else, ‘He is a college friend, a man who took a very good degree, as clever a fellow as you will meet with, and getting on like a house on fire.’ But all these recommendations, as they all knew, were quite beside the question. He was of nowhere in particular—he was nobody. It was a mysterious dispensation, altogether unexplainable, that such a man should have come into the world without suitable ancestors who could have responded for him. But he had done so. And he could not even produce that fabulous house which, as he had invented it, was a far prettier and more truly gentle and creditable family than half the families who would have satisfied every question. Thus the very best quality of his age was against him as well as its superstitions. Had he been an enriched grocer to whom it could have done no possible good, he might easily have invented a pedigree; but being himself he could not do it. And thus the injury he had sustained at the hands of Providence was beyond all remedy or hope of amendment.