VII
Gwynne found few letters awaiting him; he had not encouraged correspondence, and only his mother, Flora Thangue, and his solicitors knew his address. It had been announced and reiterated in London that he was making a tour of the world. During the first month of his absence Lady Victoria had sent him a large bundle of clippings from newspapers, some acid in comment upon his obvious intention of neglecting his duties as a peer of the realm, his fruitless exposure of a chagrin at an elevation in which he would find more and more consolation as time went on. A few were sympathetic. Others went so far as to indicate a program in which he might serve his country with modesty, if not with the scintillations of the free-lance; and reminded him that peers had risen to the post of prime-minister ere this, of viceroy, lord-lieutenant, governor-general, and ambassador. Then, apparently, they dismissed him. The fiscal question was acute. Dissolution threatened. There were bright particular stars still in both parties, and the press and public had enough to do with sitting in judgment upon their respective rays.
In the two letters from his mother, written at Homburg, there was no news beyond the letting of the properties and a bulletin of her health, which promised an imminent fitness for travel. His solicitors wrote that the income from the two estates was ample to keep the numerous women of the family in comfort, and leave a surplus which should be paid to his mother, according to his directions. This, with the southern ranch and the San Francisco property, should yield her an income of two thousand five hundred pounds a year. The confidential member of the firm hinted that if his lordship found means of increasing her ladyship's income in that land of gold and plenty it would be wise to do so, as her ladyship knew less than nothing of economy and was even more deeply in debt than usual.
He missed Flora's gay letter of gossip, and looked with narrowing lids at the pile of newspapers. None had been sent him before, and he had left not a subscription behind him; but it was evident that his mother and Flora were under the mistaken impression that he would welcome this greeting in his new home. They had accumulated for a month. He recognized the type of the leading dailies, and could guess the names of the numerous illustrated weeklies. Suddenly he took them in his arms and walked quickly over to the stove, his eye roving in search of a match-box. But even as he stooped he rose again, and, blushing for his weakness, carried them back to the table, tore them open with nervous haste. He skimmed the great pages of the dailies from start to finish, telling himself that he must have a breath from home, news from authoritative sources, stated in excellent English; sickened with the knowledge that he was but searching eagerly for a word of himself; sickening more when he found none. Then he fell upon the weeklies, his eye glancing indifferently from the paragraphs and presentments of the royal and the engaged, but scanning every personality. He had had one rival and there was much of him.
Before he had finished the third his struggling pride conquered. He gathered the heap and flung it into a corner, then caught up his hat and struck out for the loneliest part of the ranch. He writhed in the throes of disappointment, jealousy, disgust of self. He attempted consolation by picturing all the other ambitious men he knew exhibiting a similar weakness and vanity when there was no eye to see. His imagination did not rise to marvellous feats—and what if it did not? He had never aspired to be in the same class with other men.
The bitter tide receded only to give place to apprehension. His temperament was mercurial, balanced by a certain languor in the earlier stages of emotion, and there had been little to depress his spirit during those thirty years when all the fairies had danced attendance on him; even defeat had but intoxicated his fighting instinct and given another excuse for flattery and encouragement. During the eleven months since he had left England he had experienced neither encouragement nor flattery. He could not recall having made a profound impression upon any of his casual acquaintances; he certainly had created no sensation. It was true that his rôle had been that of the listener, the student, but he had so long accepted himself as a personality, as the most remarkable of England's younger productions, that he had been deeply mortified more than once at the cavalier treatment of middle-aged business men with no time to waste upon a young Britisher of no possible use to them.
To-day he boldly faced the haunting doubt if he were really a great man; if his success in England, as well as his phenomenal self-confidence, had not been merely the result of an inordinate ambition fed by fortuitous circumstances. He recalled that from childhood his grandfather and his mother had practically decreed that the bright, lovable, mischievous boy was to be a great man; that as he grew older the entire family connection joined the conspiracy. It is easy enough to believe in yourself when the world believes in you, and easy enough to make the world take you at your own valuation when you have a powerful backing, a reasonable amount of cleverness, a sublime audacity, the power of speech, and a happy series of accidents. Were all great men two-thirds accidental or manufactured? He felt inclined to believe it, but while it soothed his torn and throbbing pride, it by no means lessened his apprehension.
Was he not a great man, even so? He felt anything but a great man at the moment. He recalled that he had indulged in few lapses into complacency since his departure incognito from England, and that he had deliberately held self-analysis at bay by incessant travel and a compulsory interest in subjects that did not appeal to him in the least. It was this absence of interest after close upon a year in the country that appalled him as much as his inner visioning. He hated the country. He hated its politics, both parties impartially. He hated all the questions that absorbed the American mind, from graft to negroes. He had sat in the Congressional galleries in Washington, attended political meetings wherever he could obtain admittance, studied the press in even the smaller towns, travelled through the South and relieved himself of whatever abstract sympathy he may have cherished for the colored race, visited the sweat-shops of New York, the meat-packing establishments of Chicago, the factories of New England, every phase of the great civilization he knew of; and while he found much to admire and condemn, both left him evenly indifferent. With all his soul he longed for England. She might have her selfishness and her snobberies, lingering taints in her political system, but she stood at the apex of civilization, and her very faults were interesting; far removed from the brazen crudities of the New World's struggle for wealth and power. And although the blood of reformers was in his veins, and in his secret soul he was an idealist to the point of knight-errantry, the desire for reform had ebbed out of him during his American exile. And he knew the fate of a good many American reformers. There were several in high places at present, cheerfully trimmed down from the statesman to the political ideal. Julia Kaye—clever woman!—had put the matter into an epigram. The American statesman was the superior politician.
And how was he, out of tune with every phase of the country, to find the ghost of an opportunity to lead it? He was no actor. If he had a merit it was sincerity, a contempt for subterfuge as beneath both his powers and the lofty position to which he had been born. Moreover, he was honest; an equally aristocratic failing and drawback.