The Fourth Generation. Walter Besant
will end it.”
Then he sank back. The distortion went out of him. He laid his head upon the chair; calm and peace, as of a child, returned to his face; he was again asleep – if he had been awake.
“A dream,” said the looker on. But he remembered the words, which came back to him, and remained with him – why, he could not tell.
He looked about the room. He thought of the strange, solitary, meaningless life, the monotonous life, the useless life, that this patriarch had lived for so many years. Seventy long years! This recluse during the whole of that time – for seventy long years – had never got outside the walls of his garden; he had seen none of his old friends; only his great-grandson might from time to time visit the place to ascertain if he were still living. He had done no kind of work during that long time; he had not even put a spade into the ground; he had never opened a book or seen a newspaper; he knew nothing that had happened. Why, for him the world was still the world before the Reform Act. There were no railways, there were no telegraph-wires; none of the inventions and improvements and new ideas and new customs were known to him, or suspected by him; he asked for nothing, he cared for nothing, he took interest in nothing: he never spoke. Oh, the wretchedness of it! The folly of it! What excuse could there be – what reason – sufficient for this throwing away of a life in which so much might have been done? What defence could a man have for thus deserting from the Army of Humanity?
As long as this young man remembered anything, he had heard of this old man: it was always the same story; there was a kind of family bogie, who wore always the same clothes, and took the same walk every morning and slept every afternoon. Sometimes his mother would tell him, when he was a boy, scraps of history about the Recluse. Long ago, in the reign of George the Fourth, the gloomy solitary was a handsome, spirited, popular young man; fond of hunting, fond of shooting and fishing and all out-door sports, yet not a boor or a barbarian; one who had passed through the University with credit, and had learning and cultivation. He had a fine library which he used, he enjoyed conversations with scholars, he had travelled on the Continent, a thing which then was rare; he was thinking of entering the House. He had a fine, though not a large, estate, and a lovely house and stately gardens. No one in the county had greater reason to be satisfied with his lot, no one had a clearer right to look forward to the future with confidence, than Mr. Algernon Campaigne. The boy remembered all this talk.
He now contemplated the sleeping figure with a curious blend or mixture of emotions. There was pity in the blend, there was contempt in it, there was something of the respect or reverence due to an ancestor. One does not often get the chance of paying respect to so remote an ancestor as a great-grandfather. The ancestor lay back in his chair, his head turned a little on one side; his face, perfectly calm, had something of the transparent waxen look that belongs to the newly dead.
The young man went on thinking of what he had heard of this old man, who was at once the pride and the shame of the family. No one can help being proud of having a recluse, an anchorite, in the family – it is uncommon, like an early Shakespeare; moreover, the recluse was the head of the family, and lived in the place where the family had always lived from time beyond the memory of man.
He remembered his mother, a sad-faced widow, and his grandmother, another sad-faced widow. A certain day came back to him – it was a few weeks after his father’s early death, when he was a child of seven – when the two women sat together in sorrow, and wept together, and conversed, in his presence – but the child could not understand – and said things which he recalled at this moment for the first time.
“My dear,” said the elder lady, “we are a family of misfortune.”
“But why – why – why?” asked the other. “What have we done?”
The elder lady shook her head. “Things are done,” she said, “that are never suspected. Nobody knows, nobody finds out, but the arm of the Lord is stretched out and vengeance falls, if not upon the guilty, then upon his children and his grandchildren unto the third and fourth generation. It has fallen heavily upon that old man – for the sins of his father, perhaps – and upon us – and upon the children – ”
“The helpless, innocent children? Oh! It is cruel.”
“We have Scripture for it.”
These words – this conversation – came back suddenly and unexpectedly to the young man. He had never remembered them before.
“Who did what?” he asked. “The guilty person cannot be this venerable patriarch, because this affliction has fallen upon him and still abides with him after seventy years. But they spoke of something else. Why do these old words come back to me? Ancestor, sleep on.”
In the hall he saw the old housekeeper, and stopped to ask her after the master.
“He spoke just now,” he said.
“Spoke, sir? Spoke? The master spoke?”
“He sat up in his sleep and spoke.”
“What in the name o’ mercy did he say?”
“He said, quite clearly, ‘That will end it.’ ”
“Say it again.”
He said it again.
“Sir,” she said, “I don’t know what he means. It’s most time to end it. Master Leonard, something dreadful will happen. It is the first time for seventy years that he have spoken one single word.”
“It was in his sleep.”
“The first time for seventy years! Something dreadful, for sure, is going to happen.”
CHAPTER II
WHAT HE WANTED
IN the lightest and sunniest rooms of an unpretending flat forming part of the Bendor Mansions, Westminster, sat a young man of six-and-twenty. You have already seen him when he called upon his irresponsive ancestor at the family seat in the shire of Buckingham. He was now in his study and seated at what used to be called his desk. This simple piece of the scholar’s furniture has long since given way to a table as big as the dimensions of the room permit – in this case one of eight feet long and five broad. It did not seem to be any too large for the object of its construction, because it was completely covered with books, papers, Blue-books, French and German journals, as well as Transactions of English learned and scientific societies. There was no confusion. The papers were lying in orderly arrangement; the books stood upright along the back of the table facing the writer. They were all books of political history, political economy, or of reference. A revolving bookcase stood ready at hand filled with other books of reference. These, it might have been observed, were principally concerned with statistics of trade – histories of trade, books on subjects connected with trade, Free Trade, Protection, the expansion of trade, and points connected with manufactures, industries, exports, and imports.
Mr. Leonard Campaigne was already in the House. It would be too much to say that he had already arrived at a position of authority, but he was so far advanced that on certain subjects of the more abstruse kind, which he endeavoured to make his own and to speak upon them with the manner of a specialist, he was heard with some deference and reported at some length. More than this is not permitted to six-and-twenty.
These subjects were such as demand a clear head, untiring industry, the grasp of figures, and the power of making them attractive. They also required a prodigious memory. All these valuable qualities this young man possessed. At Cambridge, where he went out in mathematics, he tore himself reluctantly away from examiners who gave him all they could, with tears that it could be no more than “Part II., Division I., Class I.,” and wept that they could not, as all good examiners hope to do before long, carry their examinations on to Part III., divided into three parts and each part into three classes, and then to Part IV., also divided into three divisions and each division into three classes, and so to go on examining their candidates, always decreasing in number, once a year for the rest of their natural lives, ending with a disgraceful pluck at eighty.
“Part II., Division I., Class I.” No one can do better than that. I believe that only one man in Leonard’s year did as well. Therefore he went down having a very