The Son of His Father: Volume 2 by Mrs. Oliphant - HTML preview

CHAPTER XVIII.
 A PHILOSOPHER.

THE two men came in, the first with a somewhat downcast shamefaced air, the other with the impassiveness of the man who cannot be less thought of than he is, and who has neither pretensions nor hopes; yet it was Joe who was the first, and who encouraged his apparently uncongenial companion to enter.

‘Don’t you funk it,’ said Joe, ‘if any one’ll help you, he’ll do it. This gentleman,’ he added, addressing John, who was looking at them across the table covered by his papers, with a slightly impatient look, ‘is my mate, sir, as I told you on; him as you was so kind to, t’other night. He wanted for to thank you for all your kindness: and there’s—there’s another thing or two——’

‘I suppose he can tell me himself what he wants,’ said John.

The other man stood crushing his hat between his hands, looking at John with deprecating eyes, in which there lurked a smile, as though he was conscious how ludicrous it was that he should be thus introduced under the patronage of this strange companion. He said now,

‘That might be a little hard. But I can at least thank you, sir, for the kindness of the other night.’

‘It was nothing,’ said John, confusedly. ‘Won’t you sit down? It was very surprising to see a—a person like you——’

‘In such circumstances and such company, you would say? For the circumstances—yes; but, for the company, it’s the best this world can give any man, the company of a faithful friend. Joe’s not very polished, and if he’s clever it’s perhaps not in a laudable way: but he’s faithful. I believe he’ll never forsake me, sir. He’s as faithful as if I were a prince and he a knight. A poor pair of nobilities we’d make. You needn’t say so. I can see it in your eyes.’

‘I hope he is as faithful as you think,’ said John, ‘but——’

‘But me no buts,’ said the stranger, ‘if I give up Joe, I give up everything. I have nothing but Joe to trust to. Oh, yes, he’s faithful: for if he weren’t I should sink into ruin altogether. Don’t say anything against him—he’s all I have.’

The speaker gave John a look—which he thought more pathetic than anything he had ever seen, and which went at once to his heart—a look which betrayed a knowledge of Joe and of all that was in John’s mind concerning him, and of the unstable foundation on which his confidence reposed. The pathos and the wistfulness and the humour that were in it betrayed to John’s mind the existence of a sort of passionless self-conscious despairing, such as he had never glimpsed at before, or believed in the possibility of. Joe was this poor wretch’s only prop, but in his heart he knew Joe better than anyone else, and was half-amused in the depths of his desolation that he himself should still be capable of this human clinging to the only being who stood by him. This was what his eyes said to John’s. Joe’s faithfulness was a sort of woeful jest to him, yet his poor sheet-anchor, too.

‘Have you no relations?’ John said; he could not tell why, for what right had he to question this unfortunate man?

‘Relations,’ said the other, ‘are not fond of a man in my circumstances. You know where I’ve come from, I believe, sir, and what I am. May I ask you what made you so kind to me—the other night?’

John looked at Joe, who stood behind looking on, his eyes prowling round in a sort of hungry investigation. The other had drawn a chair to the table, and seated himself, but Joe stood looking about him, like a predatory animal examining if perhaps there might be something to devour.

‘Would your friend mind,’ said John, ‘if I were to ask him to step into the hall?’

The stranger gave a keen glance towards the door.

‘If there is nothing of value there,’ he said, quickly; then, with a change of his tone, ‘Joe, my good fellow, take a little walk outside. I seem to want to have a sentinel or I can’t rest. Just go and walk about a bit outside.’

Joe gave another predatory glance around, and then with a nod of his head withdrew.

‘I’ll come back,’ he said, ‘in ’alf an ’our. If I walks about, some bobby or other will be after me. They don’t never let a poor fellow alone.’

The stranger gave John one of his humorous looks.

‘Such is the effect of prejudice,’ he said.

It was impossible that any position could be more strange. This unknown criminal, this discharged convict, of whom all that John knew was that he was a convict, and had no friend but Joe, seated himself opposite to the young man familiarly at John’s own table, with a twinkle in his eye and a grotesque sense of all that was ludicrous in his own circumstances which was entirely bewildering to a young man not used to mental phenomena of any kind. The man was dressed in clothes of an old-fashioned cut (most likely such as had been quite fashionable and appropriate, John thought, in the days when he was shut up in prison), but still perfectly correct and respectable, and there was in his aspect nothing of that unfamiliarity with comfort and decency which was evident in his companion. This person drew in his chair to John’s table with the ease and freedom of one to whom a tidy bourgeois parlour was usual and natural. Perhaps he might have been accustomed to better places—certainly not to worse. How the episode of the prison had affected him, John wondered vaguely, but at all events there was nothing visible of that association. He was able to make a good-humoured joke of it—a joke which concealed, was it philosophy, was it despair? He settled into seriousness, however, as the door closed upon Joe, though the smile was never far from his eyes—and repeated, with a slight curiosity,

‘You were very kind—that night. To find myself in a decent house, in a soft bed, was wonderful. I couldn’t help wondering why you should take such an interest in me.’

The eyes which were so expressive gave a wistful, almost imploring look in John’s face, as if the man had some suspicion, or rather hope, that John’s motive was other than that of mere charity. The young man was bewildered by this look, and by a something, he could not tell what, that was sympathetic and familiar in the air of the stranger. Sympathetic! and he was one of the criminal class, a returned convict! John’s mind was full of confusion, perplexed beyond measure by the influence which he felt to affect him in spite of himself. But, though he was angry with himself for yielding to it, he could not resist his strange companion’s eyes.

‘It does not seem becoming in me, at my age, to speak so to a man of yours,’ he said. ‘But when I saw you, helpless, with no one but that—ruffian——’

The twinkle lit up again in the eyes of the other; he put up his hand in deprecation.

‘Be gentle,’ he said, ‘with poor Joe.’

How was it possible to maintain the air of a virtuous superior with this smiling criminal? John was more and more abashed and embarrassed.

‘I thought,’ he said, ‘that if you had time to look out—for your real friends——’

‘It was simple charity, then?’ said the man, with a faint sigh: and then he smiled again. ‘At least it was a kind thought. You wanted to deliver me from the evil connections into which you thought I had fallen, in coming out, for lack of better. It was a very kind thought.’

John felt himself draw a long breath, almost a gasp of astonishment and relief and utter confusion of mind. He had felt himself the benefactor, doing indeed a very kind action, something that perhaps not many men would have done: and he was altogether taken aback by this generous appreciation of his good motive.

‘You were right enough,’ said the other, ‘quite right if I had been a more hopeful subject. But you’re too young to know all the ins and the outs of it. I have no real friends. Joe may, or may not, be faithful, poor fellow, but he’s the only human creature who sticks to me, and I am used to him. It was a kind thought on your part, but one that couldn’t come to anything. I partially divined it, so I left the place. I could not enjoy the clean sheets and the tidy room under false pretences; no less thanks to you, my young friend.’

‘But——’ said John, ‘you are not surely going to let yourself sink? you, a man evidently of education, of sense, of understanding——’

‘Sink—to what? Can one sink any deeper? I had all these things when I went—wrong, as people say. If they did not prevent me then, how do you think they are going to stop me now?’

John could do nothing but gasp and draw his breath, and stare at this calm statement. The speaker, after a moment’s pause, looked at him closely, and said,

‘You knew nothing at all about me then, what I had done or where I had been?’

‘How should I?’ said John.

The other laughed a little.

‘How should you indeed? but I had a kind of a hope you might. You don’t even know what I did to get myself into such a scrape? It was nothing brutal like poor Joe’s.’

‘I wish,’ said John, ‘you would not tell me any more: if I can help you to work to keep out of the mire, I will do it; but if it is only how you fell in to it, why should I know? I don’t want to know.’

‘Why, indeed?’ echoed the stranger, ‘and yet one has a sort of desire to tell. After all, you know, after thinking it over in every possible light for fourteen years, I cannot see the absolute sin there is in writing another man’s name. On the face of it, it’s no great thing—not so much as telling a lie, which anybody does without thinking. It’s only a more formal sort of a lie. Offences against the person are evident crimes; to injure another man, to put him in danger of his life, to give him pain, that I can understand; or to rob him of what is perhaps his children’s bread. But to write his name instead of your own! I have had a great deal of time to think of it. I cannot see, after all, the criminality of that.’

‘It’s one of the worst of crimes,’ said John, ‘it strikes at the root of everything. Why, forgery——’

‘Yes, give a dog an ill name,’ said the other dispassionate thinker, ‘call it forgery, and it becomes a bogey and frightens everybody. And yet, after all, apart from the motive, it’s the simplest action. Then there’s the other thing, drink—which is so often the first step (I hope you have no leanings that way, though I seem to excuse it—for, right or wrong, it’s ruin)—well, there’s no sin, you know, in that. Wine’s not vice, nor even whisky. No one will tell me that to take two, three, or indeed any number of glasses of anything is vice.’

‘Excess is vice,’ cried John. He felt himself redden with indignant fervour. The idea that any man could sit by him calmly and look him in the face and defend the indefensible—take up the cause of vice and criminality: he could not believe his ears. The criminal generally (so far as he was aware, especially the drunkard, of which kind the young man had seen in the way of his work some fine examples) is too apt to be unctuous in his repentance and quite uncompromising in his denunciation of his vice. To hear a man in this calm and apparently reasonable way discuss it as an open question was entirely new to him.

‘Excess is—excess,’ said this philosopher, ‘very bad for you, in whatever way you consider it; for the stomach and the constitution, also for your prospects in life, to which it is destruction;—that’s indisputable. But how far you can be said to break the moral law— To be sure you may take higher ground or lower ground. You may say that whatever obscures your brain and makes you incapable of reflection and thought, which is the spiritual side of the question; or, on the other hand, whatever visibly interferes with your comfort and destroys your career— But that last is mercenary,’ he added, with a wave of his hand, ‘and things that are mercenary and based on self-interest belong to a lower class of motives altogether; not what we were discussing at all.’

‘There is nothing to discuss that I can see,’ cried John. ‘All that you say is a mere confusion of plain right and wrong. To forge another man’s name is to sin against your neighbour; and drink is a sin against—yourself, and everything that’s sane and rational. You own yourself it’s ruin; and it’s degradation and misery and everything that’s dreadful. I have seen it among the men——’

‘I never said anything about the penalties,’ said the other, waving his hand again. ‘They’re innumerable: but they’re irrelevant. The penalties are enormous. Drinking is not in the decalogue at all, you’ll acknowledge that. But if you consider consequences (which, however, I protest are irrelevant), there’s nothing, not even murder, that is punished so. It makes a wreck of everything—a young fellow’s looks, and his health, and all he stands upon. He pays for his glass with everything he has in the world. You may even steal without being caught for years: but if you drink you lose everything: there’s no escape for you and no hope. All that is true. Still it isn’t the sin that lying is, or cheating, or bearing false witness. These things are all in the commandments, but not drinking. So far as I can see, and I have had a great deal of time to think, we’re paid out for that in the present world. It’s not left over like the rest for—the other place, sir, the other place.’

‘If you’d seen what I’ve seen,’ cried John, with honest, youthful fervour; ‘the harm it has done—oh, not to the brute himself, I don’t care a farthing for that! but to the helpless wife and children,—you would know better than to hesitate for a moment as to whether drinking is a sin.’

‘If I’d seen what he’s seen!’ cried his strange companion, with that wonderful twinkle in his eye. The humour in it was tinged with the profoundest tragedy, though John, in his indignation, failed to see it. He began to laugh low to himself with a curious quiver of sound in his throat. ‘I’ve done more than see it. I’ve done it,’ he said: ‘broken the hearts of everybody I cared for in the world. You don’t know what I am. I am a man that have had a wife and children, and perhaps have still, for aught I know. I made them pay for my whisky, God knows I did: and myself, too—but that’s neither here nor there. As for the brute himself, as you say, who cares a farthing for him? I took it out of them and made them pay for it. But now they’ve shaken me off, glad perhaps to get shut of me. And if they’re living or dead I don’t know, and where they are I don’t know. That’s one of the penalties. I should know all about that, if any one does: I’m no neophyte— I’m a man well instructed. But all these are consequences,’ he added, slowly. ‘They’re irrelevant. They don’t touch the principle. What you say I’ve gone over a thousand times. It’s juvenile, it’s elementary: it doesn’t touch the question at all: on which he thinks, bless us all—though he’s scarcely out of swaddling clothes—that he knows more than I!’

John was daunted, and he was impressed by the terrible story thus lightly glanced at. He did not know what to say. What he faltered forth at last was the question of a child in the midst of an exciting story.

‘And don’t you know where they are? and can’t you seek them out?’

If the stranger’s feelings had been affected before, he seemed to have got the better of his emotion now.

‘Do you remember,’ he said, ‘in the Sermon on the Mount, how the unkind children say it is Corban, a gift, and so get rid of the old people? That’s how they’ve done with me. It is Corban, a gift. I’m not penniless, though I’m friendless. There was a sum of money waiting for me when I came out: and that was all.’

‘But you could inquire; you could search for them: you could——’

John felt his sense of right and wrong confused by this narrative. Suspicion, offence, indignation, righteous anger at all these sophistries had succeeded each other in his mind. Now there came over him a great wave of pity. In every such story he had ever heard of (he did not realise that he had never heard such a story at first hand) there had always been some devoted wife or sister or child waiting to receive the miserable offender, some sorrowful home ready to take him in. That was always the most pathetic situation, the saddest picture. But the dead blank of this—a sum of money waiting for the unhappy man and no more, no one to take him by the hand or give him hope, was tragedy indeed. It made his heart sick, and filled him with a confused relenting and compunction and eagerness to do something—to help, where no help was.

‘Why should I?’ said the man, with his strange smile. ‘I daresay she has brought them up very creditably, poor children. I should like to know something about my little boy: but it would be no advantage to him, would it, to find his long-lost father in me? No, I’ve got below that, or above it, if you please. I content myself with Joe—poor Joe,’ here he broke into a tremulous laugh, ‘whose truth you don’t believe in, but who’s always been faithful, after his sort, to me.’

John was greatly moved, more moved than he could have thought was possible out of mere sympathy and pity.

‘Oh,’ he cried, ‘don’t content yourself with Joe. I’ve no right to give you my advice, but since you’ve come to me and told me all this— When I took you to those lodgings that night, it was because I wanted to try to get you to think—to get free of such company. Don’t be content with Joe; you will only fall into—you will only be led into——’

‘Drink,’ said the other. ‘Very likely: and that’s all right. I should have been dead long ago if I hadn’t been kept from it by force for years. Now I’m old, comparatively, as the newspapers say. And it will make short work. All the better. That’s the only thing I’m good for now.’

‘Don’t say that,’ said John, with moisture in the corners of his eyes. ‘You are not an old man yet. Do something better than that. Work at something. I’ll help you if I can—I’ll——’ He paused, for this was a tremendous thing to say, and such a risk to run as took away the breath of a young man so absorbed in his own pursuits and determined on succeeding. He paused, and the flush of a sudden struggle came all over him, a rush of blood to his brain, a conflict of thoughts which filled his head and his ears with a clamour as of armies meeting, and then he continued, with a vehemence which was not in his ordinary nature, a burst of generous youthful impulse unlike the ordinary wisdom and self-restraint of his sober youth, ‘I’ll be a friend to you instead of Joe!’

The convict—for he was a convict, however he might explain his offences away—gave John a smile which was like sunshine, and lit up all his face. But then he shook his head.

‘I am not going to accept that,’ he said. ‘No, no—I am no friend for you. But it’s true the money will not last for ever—and I ought to do something if I am to go on living. I don’t know what, though. They taught me a trade down yonder, but——’ he broke off with a smile. ‘I don’t know what I am good for otherwise.’

‘I’ll tell you,’ said John, in his fervour. ‘You shall come and copy these papers for me. I am out all day, and you can do it here. I can show you what I want in half-an-hour. They are plans I have been making out: I’ve done them on all sorts of scraps, and they must be clearly copied. I hope they’ll make my fortune,’ he said, after a moment, with a touch of boyish simplicity, ‘and then perhaps I’ll be able to do something more, something better for you.’

He did not observe in the warmth of his interest that Joe had come in while he was speaking, after a faint knock at the door. Joe entered softly, still with that hungry look in his eyes. He had been more than half-an-hour gone, and he was very anxious to know what those two had been talking about all this time. The words he caught as he came in raised this curiosity to the fever point.

‘They’ll make his fortune,’ he repeated to himself, looking at the table and all the papers with his wolfish, predatory eyes.

END OF THE SECOND VOLUME.