The Fourth Generation. Walter Besant
to make you like other people, vulnerable, you would learn that Love might mean—and then, in that impossible case—I don’t know—perhaps——” She left the sentence unfinished and ran out of the room.
Leonard looked after her, his face expressing some pain. “What does she mean? Humiliation? Degraded relations? Ridiculous!”
Then, for the second time after many years, he heard the voices of his mother and his grandmother. They spoke of misfortunes falling upon one and another of their family, beginning with the old man of the country house and the terrace. Oh! oh! It was absurd. He sprang to his feet. It was absurd. Humiliations! Disgrace! Family misfortunes! Absurd! Well, Constance had refused him. Perhaps she would come round. Meanwhile his eyes fell upon the table and his papers. He sat down: he took up the pen. Love, who had been looking on sorrowfully from a lofty perch on a bookshelf, vanished with a sigh of despair. The lover heard neither the sigh nor the fluttering of Love’s wings. He bent over his papers. A moment, and he was again absorbed—entirely absorbed in the work before him.
In her own room the girl sat before her table and took up her pen. But she threw it down again. “No,” she said, “I could not. He is altogether absorbed in himself. He knows nothing and understands nothing—and the world is so full of miseries; and he is all happiness, and men and women suffer—how they suffer!—for their sins and for other people’s sins. And he knows nothing. He understands nothing. Oh, if he could be made human by something—by humiliation, by defeat! If he could be made human, like the rest, why, then—then——” She threw away her pen, pushed back the chair, put on her hat and jacket, and went out into the streets among the men and women.
CHAPTER III
SOMETHING TO COME
IF you have the rare power of being able to work at any time, and after any event to concentrate your thoughts on work, this is certainly a good way of receiving disappointments and averting chagrin. Two hours passed. Leonard continued at his table absorbed in his train of argument, and for the moment wholly forgetful of what had passed. Presently his pen began to move more slowly; he threw it down: he had advanced his position by another earthwork. He sat up; he numbered his pages; he put them together. And he found himself, after the change of mind necessary for his work, able to consider the late conversation without passion, though with a certain surprise. Some men—the weaker brethren—are indignant, humiliated, by such a rejection. That is because their vanity is built upon the sands. Leonard was not the kind of man to be humiliated by any answer to any proposal, even that which concerns the wedding-ring. He had too many excellent and solid foundations for the good opinion which he entertained of himself. It was impossible for any woman to refuse him, considering the standards by which women consider and estimate men. Constance had indeed acknowledged that in all things fortune had favoured him, yet owing to some feminine caprice or unexpected perversity he had not been able to touch her heart. Such a man as Leonard cannot be humiliated by anything that may be said or done to him: he is humiliated by his own acts, perhaps, and his own blunders and mistakes, of which most men’s lives are so full.
He was able to put aside, as an incident which would perhaps be disavowed in the immediate future, the refusal of that thrice fortunate hand of his. Besides, the refusal was conveyed in words so gracious and so kindly.
But there was this strange attack upon him. He found himself repeating in his own mind her words. Nature, Constance said, makes no man perfectly happy. He himself, she went on, presented the appearance of the one exception to the rule. He was well born, wealthy enough, strong and tall, sound of wind and limb, sufficiently well favoured, with proved abilities, already successful, and without any discoverable drawback. Was there any other man in the whole world like unto him? It would be better for him, this disturbing girl—this oracle—had gone on to prophesy, if something of the common lot—the dash of bitterness—had been thrown in with all these great and glorious gifts of fortune; something would certainly happen: something was coming; there would be disaster: then he would be more human; he would understand the world. As soon as he had shared the sorrows and sufferings, the shames and the humiliations, of the world, he would become more in harmony with men and women. For the note of the common life is suffering.
At this point there came back to him again out of the misty glades of childhood the memory of those two women who sat together, widows both, in the garb of mourning, and wept together.
“My dear,” said the elder lady—the words came back to him, and the scene, as plainly as on that day when he watched the old man sleeping in his chair—“my dear, we are a family of misfortune.”
“But why—why—why?” asked the other. “What have we done?”
“Things,” said the elder lady, “are done which are never suspected. Nobody knows; nobody finds out: the arm of the Lord is stretched out, and vengeance falls, if not upon the guilty, then upon his children and——”
Leonard drove the memory back—the lawn and the garden: the two women sitting in the veranda: the child playing on the grass: the words—all vanished. Leonard returned to the present. “Ghosts!” he said. “Ghosts! Were these superstitious fears ever anything but ghosts?” He refused to think of these things: he put aside the oracle of the wise woman, the admonition that he was too fortunate a youth.
You have seen how he opened the first of a small heap of letters. His eye fell upon the others: he took up the first and opened it: the address was that of a fashionable West-End hotel: the writing was not familiar. Yet it began “My dear nephew.”
“My dear nephew?” he asked; “who calls me his dear nephew?” He turned over the letter, and read the name at the end, “Your affectionate uncle, Fred Campaigne.”
Fred Campaigne! Then his memory flew back to another day of childhood, and he saw his mother—that gentle creature—flushing with anger as she repeated that name. There were tears in her eyes—not tears of sorrow, but of wrath—and her cheek was aflame. And that was all he remembered. The name of Frederick Campaigne was never more mentioned.
“I wonder,” said Leonard. Then he went on reading the letter:
“My dear Nephew,
“I arrived here a day or two ago, after many years’ wandering. I lose no time, after the transaction of certain necessary business, in communicating with you. At this point, pray turn to my signature.”
“I have done so already,” said Leonard. He put the letter down, and tried to remember more. He could not. There arose before his memory once more the figure of his mother angry for the first and only time that he could remember. “Why was she angry?” he asked himself. Then he remembered that his uncle Christopher, the distinguished lawyer, had never mentioned Frederick’s name. “Seems as if there was a family scandal, after all,” he thought. He turned to the letter again.
“I am the long-lost wanderer. I do not suppose that you can possibly remember me, seeing that when I went away you were no more than four or five years of age. One does not confide family matters to a child of those tender years. When I left my country I was under a cloud—a light cloud, it is true—a sort of nebulous haze, mysteriously glowing in the sunshine. It was no more than the not uncommon mystery of debt, my nephew. I went off. I was shoved off, in fact, by the united cold shoulders of all the relations. Not only were there money debts, but even my modest patrimony was gone. Thus does fond youth foolishly throw good money after bad. I should have kept my patrimony to go abroad with, and spent nothing but my debts. I am now, however, home again. I should have called, but I have important appointments in the City, where, you may be pleased to learn, my name and my voice carry weight. Meantime, I hear that you will be asked to meet me at my brother Christopher’s on Wednesday. I shall, therefore, hope to see you then. My City friends claim all my time between this and Wednesday. The magnitude of certain operations renders it necessary to devote myself, for a day or two, entirely to matters of haute finance. It was, I believe,