CHAPTER III.
THE MAN WITH A GRIEVANCE.
Late that same night a young man stepped from a window in one of the rooms on the third floor in the Hôtel du Louvre in Paris, and stood in the balcony. It was a balcony in that side of the hotel which looks on the Rue de Rivoli. The young man smoked a cigar and leaned over the balcony.
It was a soft moonlight night. The hour was late and the streets were nearly silent. The latest omnibus had gone its way, and only now and then a rare and lingering voiture clicked and clattered along, to disappear round the corner of the place in front of the Palais Royal. The long line of gas lamps, looking a faint yellow beneath the hotel and the Louvre Palace across the way, seemed to deepen and deepen into redder sparks the further the eye followed them to the right as they stretched on to the Place de la Concorde and the Champs Elysées. To the left the young man, leaning from the balcony, could see the tower of St. Jacques standing darkly out against the faint, pale blue of the moonlighted sky. The street was a line of silver or snow in the moonlight.
The young man was tall, thin, dark, and handsome. He was unmistakably English, although he had an excitable and nervous way about him which did not savor of British coolness and composure. He seemed a person not to take anything easily. Even the moonlight, and the solitude, and the indescribably soothing and philosophic influence of the contemplation of a silent city from the serene heights of a balcony, did not prevail to take him out of himself into the upper ether of mental repose. He pulled his long moustaches now and then, until they met like a kind of strap beneath his chin, and again he twisted their ends up as if he desired to appear fierce as a champion duellist of the Bonapartist group. He sometimes took his cigar from his lips and held it between his fingers until it went out, and when he put it into his mouth again he took several long puffs before he quite realized the fact that he was puffing at what one might term dry stubble. Then he pulled out a box of fusees and lighted his cigar in an irritated way, as if he were protesting that really the fates were bearing down upon him rather too heavily, and that he was entitled to complain at last.
"Good evening, sir," said a strong, full British voice that sounded just at his elbow.
The young man, looking round, saw that his next-door neighbor in the hotel had likewise opened his window and stepped out on his balcony. The two had met before, or at least seen each other before, once or twice. The young man had seen the elder with some ladies at breakfast in the hotel, and that evening he and his neighbor had taken coffee side by side on the boulevards and smoked and exchanged a few words.
The elder man's strong, rather under-sized figure showed very clearly in the moonlight. He had thick, almost shaggy hair, of an indefinable dark brownish color—hair that was not curly, that was not straight, that did not stand up, and yet could evidently never be kept down. He had a rough complexioned face, with heavy eyebrows and stubby British whiskers. His hands were large and reddish-brown and coarse. He was dressed carelessly—that is, his clothes were evidently garments that had cost money, but he did not seem to care how he wore them. Any garment must fall readily into shapelessness and give up trying to fit well on that unheeding figure. The Briton did not seem exactly what one would at once assume to be a gentleman. Yet he was not vulgar, and he was evidently quite at his ease with himself. He looked somehow like a man who had money or power of some kind, and who did not care whether people knew it or did not know it. Our younger Briton had at the first glance taken him for the ordinary English father of a family, travelling with his womankind. But he had not seen him for two minutes at the breakfast table before he observed that the supposed heavy father was never in a fuss, had a way of having all his orders obeyed without trouble or misunderstanding, and for all his strong British accent talked French with entire ease and a sort of resolute grammatical accuracy.
"Staying in Paris?" the elder man said—he too was smoking—when the younger had replied to his salutation.
"No; I am going home—I mean I am going to England—to-morrow."
"Ay, ay? I almost wish I were too. I'm taking my wife and daughters for a holiday. I don't much care for holidays myself. I hadn't time for enjoyment of such things when I could enjoy them, and of course when you get out of the way of enjoying yourself you never get into it again; it's a sort of groove, I suppose. Anyhow, we don't ever enjoy much, our people. You are English, I suppose?"
"Yes, I am English."
"Wish you weren't? I see."
Indeed, the tone in which the young man answered the question seemed to warrant this interpretation.
"Excuse me; I didn't say that," the young man said, a little sharply.
"No, no; I only thought you meant it. We are not bound, you know, to keep rattling up the Rule Britannia always among ourselves."
"I can assure you I am not at all inclined to rattle the Rule Britannia too loudly," the young man said, tossing the end of his cigar away and looking determinedly into the street with his hands dug deeply into his pockets.
The elder man smoked for a few seconds in silence, and looked up and down the long straight line of street.
"Odd," he said abruptly. "I always think of Balzac when I look into the streets of Paris, and when I give myself time to think. Balzac sums up Paris to me."
"Yes," said the younger man, talking for the first time with an appearance of genuine interest in the conversation; "but things must be greatly changed since that time even in Paris, you know."
"Changed? Not a bit of it. The outsides of course. The Louvre was half a ruin the other day, and now it's getting all right again. That's change, if you like to call it so. But the heart of things is just the same. Balzac stands for Paris, believe you me."
"I don't believe a word of it—not a word! I mean—excuse me—that I don't agree with you."
"Yes, yes: I understand what you mean. I'm not offended. Well?"
"Well—I don't believe a bit that men and women ever were like that. You mean to tell me that people were made without hearts in Paris or anywhere else? Do you believe in a place peopled by cads and sneaks and curs—and the women half again as bad as the men?"
The young man grew warm, and the elder drew him out, and they discussed Balzac as they stood in the balcony and looked down on silent moonlighted Paris. The elder man smoked and smiled and shrugged his shoulders good-humoredly. The younger was as full of gesture and animation as if his life depended on the controversy.
"All right," the elder said at last. "I like to hear you talk, but Paris is Balzac to me still. Going to be in London some time?"
"I suppose so: yes," in a tone of sudden depression and discontent.
"I wish we might meet. I live in London, and I wish you would come and see me when we get back from our—holiday we'll call it."
The young man turned half away and leaned on the balcony as if he were looking very earnestly for something in the direction of the Champs Elysées. Then he faced his companion suddenly and said,
"I think you had much better not have anything to do with me: I should only prove a bore to you, or to anybody."
"How is that?"
"Well—in short, I'm a man with a grievance."
"Ay, ay? What's your grievance? Whom has it to do with?"
The young man looked up quickly, as if he did not quite understand the brusque ways of his new acquaintance, who put his questions so directly. But the new acquaintance seemed good-humored and quite at his ease, and evidently had not the least idea of being rude or over-inquisitive. He had only the way of one apparently used to ordering people about.
"My grievance is against the Government," the young man said with a grave politeness, almost like self-assertion.
"Government here: in France?"
"Ay, ay? What have they been doing? You haven't invented anything—new cannon—flying machine—that sort of thing?"
"No: nothing of the kind—I wish I had—but how did you know?"
"How did I know what?"
"That I hadn't invented anything?"
"Why, I knew it by looking at you. Do you think I shouldn't know an inventor? You might as well ask me how I know a man has been in the army. Well, about this grievance of yours?"
"I dare say you will know my name," the young man said with a sort of reluctant modesty, which contrasted a little oddly with the quick movements and rapid talk which usually belonged to him. Then his manner suddenly changed, and he spoke in a tone of something like irritation, as if he had better have the whole thing out at once and be done with it—"My name is Heron—Victor Heron."
"Heron—Heron?" said the other, turning over the name in his memory. "Well, I don't know I'm sure—I may have heard it—one hears all sorts of names. But I don't remember just at the moment."
Mr. Heron seemed a little surprised that his revelation had produced no effect. He had made up his mind somehow that his new friend was mixed up with politics and public affairs.
"You'll remember Victor Heron of the St. Xavier's Settlements?" he said decisively.
"Heron of the St. Xavier's Settlements? Ah, yes, yes. To be sure. Yes, I begin to remember now. Of course, of course. You're the fellow who got us into the row with the Portuguese or the Dutch, or who was it? About the slave trade, or something? I remember it in the House."
"I am the fool," Mr. Heron went on volubly—"the blockhead, the idiot, that thought England had principles, and honor, and a policy, and all the rest of it! I haven't lived in England very much. I'm the son of a colonist—the Herons are an old colonial family—and you can't think, you people always in England, how romantic and enthusiastic we get about England, we silly colonists, with our old-fashioned ways. When I got that confounded appointment—it was given in return for some old services of my father's—I believe I thought I was going to be another sort of Raleigh, or something of the kind."
"Just so; and of course you were ready to tumble into any sort of scrape. You are hauled over the coals—snubbed for your pains?"
"Yes—I was snubbed."
"Of course: they'll soon work the enthusiasm out of you. But that's a couple of years ago—and you weren't recalled?"
"No. I wasn't recalled."
"Well, what's your grievance then?"
"Why—don't you see?—my time is out—and they've dropped me down. My whole career is closed—I'm quietly thrown over—and I'm only twenty-nine!" The young man caught at his moustache with nervous hands and kicked with one foot against the rails of the balcony. He gazed into the street, and his eyes sparkled and twinkled as if there were tears in them. Perhaps there were, for Mr. Heron was evidently a young man of quicker emotions than young men generally show in our days. He made haste to say something, apparently as if to escape from himself.
"I am leaving Paris in the morning."
"Then why don't you go to bed and have a sleep?"
"Well, I don't feel like sleeping just yet."
"You young fellows never know the blessing of sleep. I can sleep whenever I want to—it's a great thing. I make it a rule though to do all my sleeping at night, whenever I can. You leave Paris in the morning? Now that's a thing I don't like to do. Paris should never be seen early in the morning. London shows to the best advantage early; but Paris—no!"
"Why not?" Mr. Heron asked, stimulated to a little curiosity.
"Paris is a beauty, you know, a little on the wane, and wanting to be elaborately made up and curled and powdered and painted, and all that. She's a little of a slattern underneath the surface, you know, and doesn't bear to be taken unawares—mustn't be seen for at least an hour or two after she has got out of bed. All the more like Balzac's women."
Perhaps the elder man had observed Mr. Heron's sensitiveness more closely and clearly than Heron fancied, and was talking on only to give him time to recover his composure. Certainly he talked much more volubly and continuously than appeared at first to be his way. After a while he said, in his usual style of blunt but not unkind inquiry—
"Any of your people living in London?"
"No—in fact, I haven't any people in England—few relations now left anywhere."
"Like Melchisedek, eh? Well, I don't know that he was the most to be pitied of men. You have friends enough, I suppose?"
"Not friends exactly—acquaintances enough, I dare say—people to call on, people who remember one's name and who ask one to dinner. But I don't know that I shall have much time for cultivating acquaintanceships in the way of society."
"Why so? What are you going to London to do?"
"To get a hearing, of course. To make the whole thing known. To show that I was in the right, and that I only did what the honor of England demanded. I trust to England."
"What's England got to do with it? England is only so many men and women and children all concerned in their own affairs, and not caring twopence about you and me and our wrongs. Besides, who has accused you? Who has found fault with you? Your time is out, and there's an end."
"But they have dropped me down—they think to crush me."
"If they do, it will be by severely letting you alone; and what can you do against that? You can't quarrel with a man merely because he ceases to invite you to dinner, and that's about the way of it."
"I'll fight this out for all that."
"You'll soon get tired of it. It's beating the air, you know. Of course, if you want to annoy the Government, you could easily get some of us to take up your case—no difficulty about that—and make you the hero of a grievance and a debate, and so on."
"I want nothing of the kind! I don't want any one to trouble himself about me, and I don't care to be taken in hand by any one. If Englishmen will not listen to a plain statement of right, why then——But I know they will."
The conviction itself was expressed in the tone of one who by its very assertion protests against a rising doubt and tries to stifle it.
"Very good," said the other. "Try it on. We shall soon see. I have a sort of interest in the matter, for I had a grievance myself, and I have still, only I went about things in a different way—looking for redress, I mean."
"What did you do?"
"It's a longish story, and quite a different line from yours, and it would bore you to hear, even if you understood it. I got into the House and made myself a nuisance. I put money in my purse; it came in somehow. I watch the department that I once belonged to with the eye of a lynx. Well, I shall look out for you and give you a hand if I can, always supposing it would annoy the Government—any Government—I don't care what."
Mr. Heron looked at him with wonder and incredulity.
"Terrible lack of principle, you think? Not a bit of it; I'm a strong politician; I stick to my side through thick and thin. But in their management of departments, you know—contracts, and all that—governments are all the same; the natural enemies of man. Well, I hope to see you. I am going to have a sleep. Let me give you my address—though in any case I think we are certain to meet."
They parted with blunt expression of friendly inclination on the one side and a doubtful, half-reluctant acknowledgment on the other. Heron remained standing in his balcony looking at the changes of the moonlight on the silent streets and thinking of his career and his grievance.
The nearer he came to England the colder his hopes seemed to grow. Now upon the threshold of the country he had so longed to reach, he was inclined to linger and loiter and to put off his entrance. Everything that was so easy and clear a few thousand miles off began to show itself perplexed and difficult. "When shall I be there?" he used to ask himself on his homeward journey. "What have I come for?" he began to ask himself now.
Times had indeed changed very suddenly with Victor Heron. He had come into the active world perhaps rather prematurely. When very young, under the guidance of an energetic and able father who had been an administrator of some distinction in England's service among her dependencies, he had made himself somewhat conspicuous in one of the colonies; and when an opportunity occurred, after his father's death, of offering him a considerable position, the Government appointed him to the administration of a new settlement. It is hardly necessary for us to go any deeper into the story of his grievance than he has already gone himself in a few words. Except as an illustration of his character, we have not much to do with the story of his career as an administrator. It was a very small business altogether; a quarrel in a far off, lately appropriated, and almost wholly insignificant scrap of England's domains. Probably Mr. Heron was in the wrong, for he had been stimulated wholly by a chivalrous enthusiasm for the honor of England's principles and a keen sense of what he considered justice. The Government had dealt very kindly with him in consideration of his youth and of his father's services, and had merely dropped him down.
This to a young man like Heron was simply killing with kindness. He could have stood up stoutly against impeachment, trial, punishment, any manner of exciting ordeal, and commanded his brave heart to bear it. But to be quietly allowed to go his way was intolerable, and, being accused of nothing, he was rushing back to England to insist on being accused of something. A chief of any kind in a small dependency is a person of overwhelming greatness and importance in his own sphere. Every eye there is literally on him. He diffuses even a sort of impression as if he were a good deal too large for his sphere, like the helmet of such portentous size in the courtyard of Otranto. To come down all at once to be an ordinary passenger to England, an ordinary "No. 257, au 3me" at the Hôtel du Louvre in Paris, an obscure personage getting out at the Charing Cross station and calling a hansom, nobody caring whence he has come, or capable, even after elaborate reminder, of calling to memory his story, his grievance, or his identity—this is something to try the soul of a patient man. Mr. Heron was not patient.
He was a young Quixote out of time and place. He never could let anything alone. He could not see a grievance without trying to set it right. The impression that anybody was being wronged or cheated affected and tormented him as keenly as a discordant note or an inharmonious arrangement of colors might disturb persons of loftier artistic soul. In the colonies queer old ideas survive long after they have died out of England, and the traveller from the parent country comes often on some ancient abstraction there as he might upon some old-fashioned garment. Heron started into life with a full faith in the living reality of divers abstractions which people in England have long since dissected, analyzed, and thrown away. He believed in and spoke of progress, and humanity, and brotherhood, and such like vaguenesses as if they were real things to work for and love. People who regard abstractions as realities are just the very persons who turn solid and commonplace realities into shining and splendid abstractions. Young Heron regarded England not as an island with a bad climate, where some millions of florid men made money or worked for it, but as a sort of divine influence inspiring youth to noble deeds and patriotic devotion. He was of course the very man to get into a muddle when he had anything to do with the administration of a new settlement. If the muddle had not lain in his way, he would assuredly have found it.
He had so much to do now on his further way home in helping elderly ladies on that side who could not speak French, and on this side who could not speak English; in seeing that persons whom he had never set eyes on before were not neglected at buffets, left behind by trains, or overcharged by waiters; in giving and asking information about everything, that he had not much time to think about the St. Xavier's settlements and his personal grievance. When the suburbs of London came in sight, with their trim rows of stucco-fronted villas and cottages, and their front gardens ornamented with the inevitable evergreens, a thrill of enthusiasm came up in Heron's breast, and he became feverish with anxiety to be in the heart of the great capital once again. Now he began to see familiar spires, and domes, and towers, and then again huge, unfamiliar roofs and buildings that were not there when he was in London last, and that puzzled him with their presence. Then the train crossed the river, and he had glimpses of the Thames, and Westminster Palace, and the embankment with its bright garden patches and its little trees, and he wondered at the ungenial creatures who see in London nothing but ugliness. To him everything looked smiling, beautiful, alive with hope and good omen.
Certainly a railway station, an arrival, a hurried transaction, however slight and formal, with a customs officer, are a damper on enthusiasm of any kind. Heron began to feel dispirited. London looked hard and prosaic. His grievance began to show signs of breaking out again amid the hustling, the crowd, the luggage, and the exertion, as an old wound might under similar circumstances, if one in his haste and eagerness were to strain its hardly closed edges.
It was when he was in a hansom driving to his hotel that Heron, putting his hand in his waistcoat pocket, drew out a crumpled card which he had thrust in there hastily and forgotten. The card bore the name of
"Mr. Crowder E. Money,
Victoria street,
Westminster."
Heron remembered his friend of Paris. "An odd name," he thought. "I have heard it before somewhere. I like him. He seems a manly sort of fellow."
Then he found himself wondering what Mr. Money's daughters were like, and wishing he had observed them more closely in Paris, and asking whether it was possible that girls could be pretty and interesting with such an odd name.