Chapter Twenty Five.
His Last Friend.
Midwinter in the metropolis!
If you are blessed with a sufficient income, a snug club, a cheerful abode and a good digestion, there is nothing very terrible in the above. But, if your shillings are scanty in number, and each one disbursed with infinite reluctance, if you have been so long in a far country as to be unknown to, or forgotten by, every living soul, if you are condemned to pig it in a miserable slum, because needs must when the devil drives—then, O friend and reader—Heaven help you!
Midwinter in the metropolis!
Streets knee-deep in black, slushy, half-melted snow; a pelting, ceaseless rain falling from the opaque, lowering vapour above, which makes one doubt the existence of Heaven’s blue firmament otherwise than in dreams; foot passengers with streaming umbrellas and muffled in vast wraps, jostling each other angrily, as, red-nosed and watery-eyed, they hurry through the rain and mire; then, as the short afternoon fades into night, the yellow light of gas lamps and the glare of shop windows reflects itself slimily on the sloppy pavements, and the breath of the cab and omnibus horses mingles in a steamy cloud with the prevailing dank and fog-laden atmosphere.
On just such a day as this Roland Dorrien sits moodily in his dreary, comfortless room, looking out into the darkling vista of rain and fog. A tiny handful of fire flickers in the grate, hardly enough to make itself felt twelve inches off, and though he is wrapped in a warm, thick overcoat he shivers from time to time. He is looking very altered from when we saw him last, three or four months ago, very pale, and haggard, and hollow-eyed, and a frown is seldom altogether away from his brow; but his clothes are not shabby, nor does his countenance wear the neglected and unkempt aspect of a man who had come down so irretrievably in the world as to be careless of appearances. His dark curling hair is as neat, but his face is no longer clean-shaven, for he has allowed a thickly-growing beard to hide it, in addition to the heavy, drooping moustache. From a vestiary point of view he would seem as prosperous as in the days when he was known to, and envied by, Wandsborough and its neighbourhood as the future Squire of Cranston. But as a set-off against this, he seldom indulges in more than one full meal a day, sometimes not that. Prevention is better than cure, he thinks, and if the pangs of hunger assail him, why, a crust of bread will stave it off for the time being. As a consequence, his system is rapidly falling to zero, and now he lives in a kind of lethargy which is half a waking slumber. He goes out and comes in, taking not the slightest notice of what transpires around him, and of society or acquaintances he has none. In the intervals between his brooding fits, his pen affords him a solace, and at times he will sit down and by the hour confide his reflections to sympathising paper, strange, weird fancies and reasonings, so startling and bizarre in their wildness, that, but for the strong, logical sequence running through them, they might be taken for the ravings of delirium.
As with food, so with other bodily comforts. Firing costs money, of which he has but the scantiest store, wherefore he sits and shivers. Tobacco he has hardly touched since his ruin, for the same reason, and as for anything alcoholic he has almost forgotten what it was like. There is method in his madness, and against this temptation he has set a resolute face. It may be that he will soon find an unknown and nameless grave, probably he will—indeed, this is a contingency he has quite brought himself to contemplate with equanimity, but never will he sink to the level of a raving, drink-sodden beast. Yet another danger, more imminent still, he somehow overlooks. A little more of this morbid, brooding life in its frightful loneliness, and the man will go mad.
But if he himself overlooks the possibility, others do not. He has changed his lodgings no less than three times in as many months, in reality, obliged to do so by the fears of his respective landladies, who didn’t like to “’ave a gentleman in the ’ouse as was that queer—no, not if you was to give them the whole Bank of England. Why, they might be murdered any night in their beds.” So one after another politely hinted that they would rather have his room than his occupation, and to each and all poor Roy afforded a ready pretext.