SIR ROBERT LINNE, as he left the club, had no thought but to sever the tangle of things by cutting his own throat. He intended to do this agreeably and decently, and to step off the world into chaos with as little inconvenience to himself and to others as was compatible with the severity of the deed.
After considerable reflection, the plan that suggested itself to him was to proceed to some riverside station, hire a wherry, work his way down stream an indefinite distance; and then, sitting on the thwarts, neatly and philosophically put a weight in his pocket and a bullet in his head, and so overboard.
Ordinarily, he permitted himself some nausea and ill-temper after a night’s debauch. This morning he would have none of them.
“It would be churlish,” he thought, “to hand in my credentials with an ill-grace. If I have represented his sable majesty faithfully, he has his own good reasons, no doubt, for recalling me.”
Therefore, to prove how the will can overcrow the nerve, he whistled on his way, and was very affable and kindly to all his fellows with whom he came in contact. They were not many at that early hour. An amazed roysterer waking on a step; a kennel-scraper driving his broom before him at a shambling trot; Giles the apprentice, yawning over the shutters, and a pretty mop-squeezer or so who affected a demure propriety as he waved a kiss to them in passing, and blushed and giggled when he had gone by.
He turned into St. James’s Park, where Moll and Meg were tethering their cows at the sweet-stuff stalls; and bought and drank a glassful of white innocence with a sort of pleasant bravado of geniality. It made him feel good for the moment—pastoral and boyish once more.
“What’s your wish in life, Molly?” he said, turning with a smile to the girl who had supplied him.
“Sure your honour’s quizzing!”
“No, I’m not. In truth now?”
“Tea at Bagnigge Wells, then, with china and a gilt spoon.”
He burst out laughing and then looked grave.
“Your ambition hath a goose-flight. What would you give for the treat?”
“Anything but my good name.”
“I stand corrected, sweetling. Here, take your golden egg, and never part with your goose.”
He took her chin in his hand.
“Bite,” he said, and clipped a guinea between her white teeth.
“That shall go to my credit,” he said to himself as he walked off; and made his way slowly to his rooms in Whitehall.
Therein he did not remain long, but came out very shortly, a pocket of his riding-coat bulged in a sinister manner.
He went down the Strand and Fleet Street, at a faster pace now, passed Temple Bar, with its three gaunt spikes yet shooting from the topmost arch, like dry stalks from which the ugly blossom had long withered and fallen, and turning into the cloisteral recesses of the Temple, fell loitering again, moved by the silence and antiquity of the place.
It was a fresh-blown morning, sweet with virginal sunshine, and the old haunted walls and windows of the courts seemed elbowing one another in eagerness to obtain largesse of light.
Glancing upward, he read on a dial set in the stained red brick wall of a house in the Inner Temple—“Begone about your business.”
“A sexton’s motto,” he murmured. “Must leisure be always a stolen happiness, and every clock a treadmill for Time to toil on? But I accept the churlish reminder,” and he made his way, with a melancholy smile, to a rearward gate in the river wall, and came out upon a flight of stone steps, that went down through ooze and slime to the water level.
The muddy stream, as far as the view could reach, was all patched with sunshine, like a beggar’s fustian with cloth of gold. Life was awake on the flood, but in such enchanted guise that for the moment his eyes filled with tears. Wherries shot the ripples, like bobbins traversing a loom of silver tissue; hay barges, soft apple-green along the thwarts and stacked high with yellow trusses, slid placidly past until the blue distance covered them with a haze like glass. From the happy shoreward mists, voices and anvils chimed in intricate harmony, but so subdued by distance as to seem the veritable bells of elf-land.
Sir Robert gazed in that entrancement of the spirit that is impersonal and momentarily divine—that comes of a complete surrender to influences outside the bourne of Nature. A voice hailing him, brought him back to the ugly prose of being.
“Boat, sir, boat!”
“Hi! my lad. Pull in here!”
The wherry came alongside the steps, and the man touched his hat.
“Waterman, what’s the value of your boat?”
“She’s not to sell, sir.”
“Perhaps she’s to buy. I’ll give you ten guineas for her.”
The craft was old and cranky. The man scratched his head, grinned and spat into the water.
“I’m at your service, sir.”
“And damn your company, say I. I don’t want it. If you’re for selling, there’s my offer. If you’re not, I’ll go elsewhere.”
“Short and sweet. What d’ye want of her?”
“That’s my business. Mind you your own, and——”
He thought he caught a glimpse of a figure moving the other side of the gateway in the wall.
“Come!” he cried hurriedly. “Take or reject. I’ve no time for barter.”
He brought a handful of gold out of his pocket as he spoke. There was the sum he had named and a little over.
The man hesitated—not from any doubt as to his own advantage in the bargain, but from a dread that he might be lending himself to some compromising transaction. The glitter of the pieces decided him. He stepped forward, hollowed his two hands together, and looked up greedily.
“Take it a bargain,” he said. “I’m for your honour.”
A moment later he was holding the wherry while the baronet climbed in, sat down and unshipped the sculls.
The stern swung out into the stream. At that instant a figure came softly and hastily through the doorway, with a finger on its lips. It slipped a crown into the waterman’s ready palm. The prow of the wherry, held by the latter, jerked and bobbed and settled steady. He in the boat was at wrestle with the sculls.
“Let her go!” he cried, without looking round.
The waterman gave the craft a vigorous shove, and stepped back.
“What’s in the wind with you, my dandy galloot?” he murmured watching, hand on hip; and—“Your honour makes better time with tongue-pad than with sculls,” he added with a grin. And, indeed, it must be confessed that Sir Robert was no accomplished oarsman.
However, he shuffled his craft out into mid-stream somehow, being indifferent to the manner; and then he poised his sculls, letting the boat drift down with the tide which was running to sea.
Even now he could hardly take himself with that seriousness that the nature of his intention would seem to demand.
“Did ever man,” he said aloud, “meet the devil half-way with such a sense of humour?”
“You have none,” said a creaking voice in the bows.
He twisted his head about—scarcely marvelling at the response.
“So you have taken me at my word?” he said.
“You think I am the devil—eh?”
“You flatter yourself. A monarch to condescend to the practical executive! I take you for one of his imps.”
“Well, sir—I don’t despair of you. I gave the waterman a douceur, and slipped in as you pushed off.”
“So, you are not the devil?”
“No; only one of his imps—an attorney.”
“Then I am lost indeed.”
“H’m!—May I have a little bout at reasoning with you—before you—eh?”
“Before I—eh?—just so, my friend. Now, balance the pros and cons, I pray. Here am I, going to damnation, and thinking myself equipped with all decent loneliness for the journey. I turn my head, and find——”
“Counsel, waiting to argue the case for you. Congratulate yourself. Heaven is——”
“No, no. State your case, without blasphemy.”
“Very well (take care of that barge).—I revert to my original postulate. You said—‘Did ever man meet the devil half-way with such a sense of humour?’—and I answered: ‘You have none.’”
“You did—and I throw the word in your teeth. No man, I make bold to say, has more than I.”
“Yet you propose killing yourself?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“My mission in life was to be foil to the virtuous. ’Tis a costly business, and not to be maintained save with luck. Luck has cold-shouldered me. I have staked and lost my last penny, and so my mission ends; and I jump off the cliff of the world with a light heart.”
“And with a poor sense of humour. I repeat it.”
“Pardon me. You said with no sense of humour.”
“Well—I qualify that.”
“That is a concession from a lawyer. Now, has it occurred to you that you have obtruded yourself upon a reckless and desperate man?—that, to a lost soul standing on the brink of Cocytus, it may seem a small matter, and the humouring of a very trifling aggravation, to push a fellow-traveller over into the gulf before he leaps himself?—At this moment it suggests itself to me that no ghostly letter of credit would serve me half so well down there as an attorney in esse. The devil needs lawyers to argue his case. Generally they evade him at the last by some technicality. Shall I take you, to prove at least that suicides come not, without exception, of the humourless class?”
“I made no such statement. But this I say—that any man who contemplates self-destruction has, for the time being, lost his sense of humour.”
“I am in no hurry. Why?”
“Because he is taking himself with that exaggerated seriousness which is the trade-mark of the bore.”
“Is a suicide a bore?”
“Certainly. He is a man with a grievance, who, professing to accept life as a game of chances, cries out if the cards are against him. His tone may be clamorous or subdued; but it always carries the same refrain. At a certain point he would almost resent good fortune, for he hath persuaded himself that he is born the butt of Providence; and his vanity is such that he would not have even a diseased judgment of his refuted. Vanity, vanity—he is the very maggot of it.”
“Continue, continue, my friend. This is not Coke or Lyttleton.”
“Sir, I will continue. You decry my profession; but what doth it teach a man, if not to look below the surface? The suicide is he who will not take his own destinies in hand; for at heart he is a sensuous fellow, who hath subordinated his instinct for combativeness to a poor sentiment of fatality. In a world of noble struggle he would lie down and ignobly sleep. Thus, like a distempered cur, he turns and gnaws his own flesh; or, weakly despairing, stings himself to death like the fire-ringed scorpion.”
The baronet sat amazed.
“This is no lawyer,” he cried; “but a Wesley come to judgment!”
The dried-stick of a man in the bows drew in his breath, and leaned forward, with moist eyes, the lids whereof were like dead sea-weed.
“Oh, sir!” he cried, in a full voice, “let me entreat you—see the game out. If I lose and am disqualified, there is no whit the less interest in the play that goes on. There are plenty to continue it—plenty to profit by the lesson of my downfall. From being pupil I have become teacher; and shall I by self-destruction diminish the number of that blest company?”
“My good sir,” said the baronet, with some emotion (and, “Pull your right scull,” said the lawyer anxiously), “you have a great advantage of me; but I respect and honour your sentiments. Why I should find you here, or why you should take an interest in my fate, passes my comprehension.”
“No doubt,” said the other.
“I know you, I think, by sight,” said Sir Robert. “You are a member of ‘Whitelaw’s,’ if I am not greatly mistaken.”
“I was elected five years ago. Recently, I have presumed to take a watchful interest in your fortunes, as they were presented to me by report and by actual observation. I have sorely marked you—I crave your indulgence—in your race to the devil.”
“I have a good mount. I shall win.”
“Sir! sir!”
“Why, what a to-do is this! Do you disparage your master? I am no attorney; yet I could prove black the very moral of innocence.”
“As how?”
“As thus. To desire—conscious of unworthiness—one’s own salvation, is to aim at self-aggrandisement. To be careless of one’s own salvation, is to be unselfish. To be opposed to one’s own salvation, is to be actually virtuous. The devil may be considered the Apostle of this creed—ergo, the devil teaches virtue.”
“Well, and well. I take you on clause two of your reasoning. If, in being careless of your own salvation, you are careless of that of others (and surely it so follows, having regard to precept and influence), you are selfish. But, if you think of others, you are not careless of your own; for no man would of his true generosity help his neighbour to that which he himself scorns. Now, the manner of your purposed exit; the unexampled sweetness, sir, with which you have met my most impertinent intrusion, convince me that you are far from feeling a careless indifference to your fellows.”
“I have a measure of good-humour. I would not kick the stool from under my neighbour because I sit upon a stone. But the first test of humour is to know itself bested; to succumb to the finer wit—and that the devil hath shown.”
“Disprove him. He hath stood so long in his own shadow that he fancies himself a giant. He tiptoes against the setting sun, and his dead image seems to embrace the world. Upset him, and he lies but a pigmy.”
“My friend, he is not to be felled but by the stone of godliness. That I never possessed, for it is not purchasable. And if it were, my pouch is empty.”
“Yet you gave, in hard cash, ten guineas for this crank vessel that is worth——”
“It was my all—I swear it. And now I have bought Charon’s ferry-boat, and future souls must swim. Not much consideration for my neighbour in that.”
“So I have said nought to move you from your purpose?”
“I greatly regret—nothing.”
The spare stranger groaned.
“It shall be a lesson to my self-sufficiency. Well, sir, I must play a better card.”
“If you please.”
“Run the boat into the hard there, and accompany me to my office. I will hand you the title-deeds of an estate that shall give you a new lease of life.”