“I don’t know him,” said the baronet. “However, let him enter.”
The Marquise Desmoines, going out, met Mr. John Grant in the passage, which was narrow. He ceremoniously made room for her to pass; glanced after her for a moment, and then went into the baronet’s room.
CHAPTER IX.
WE may assume, for the present, that Mr. Grant’s object in calling upon Sir Francis Bendibow was to make arrangements whereby the bank might charge itself with the investment and care of his property. Meanwhile we shall have time to review what had been happening during the previous week at Mrs. Lockhart’s. Philip Lancaster and Mr. Grant, having passed their first night at the “Plough and Harrow,” returned to the widow’s with their luggage the next morning. Their reception on this occasion was much more cordial and confident than it had been the day before. The chance which had brought Lancaster into relations with the family of the gallant old soldier, whose body he had rescued from an unmarked grave, gave him a lien upon the interest and gratitude of the two women such as he might not otherwise have acquired at all. The whole history of his acquaintance with Major Lockhart had to be told many times over to listeners who could never hear it often enough; and the narrator ransacked his memory to reproduce each trifling word and event that had belonged to their intercourse. The hearers, for their part, commented on and discussed the story with a minuteness so loving and unweariable as to move Lancaster to say privately to Mr. Grant, “Damme, sir, if it doesn’t make me wish that I had been the Major, and the Major me. I shall never have a widow and daughter to mourn me so!”
“It is one of the ills of this life,” Mr. Grant returned with a smile, “that while your mourners are your only honest flatterers, their flattery always comes a day too late. If you had been the Major you would have missed hearing his praises. Being yourself, you miss the praises themselves; but upon the whole I think you have the best of it. The love of these good women for their departed father and husband is like yonder ray of sunshine which falls upon his portrait. It falls only there, but see how it brightens and warms the whole room—and your own countenance, I fancy, especially. In some measure, sir, you are heir of that wealth of affection which was the Major’s while he lived. Your news of him has partly made you his substitute in the eyes of those who loved him. Non omnis moriatur.”
“I wish you would take my poem in hand and put some poetry into it. ’Tis true the wreath of fame, as well as the brand of infamy, is laid only on dead brows. If a man could but return to life long enough to admire his own statue, or read his damnation in the Quarterly!”
“The damnation is swifter of foot than the statue, and sometimes overtakes us on this side of the grave,” said Mr. Grant. “But your aspiration may be realized. I have known the dead to come to life.”
“To find, probably, that the reality of dead features is less comely than the remembrance?”
“As for that, the dead man, if he be wise, will so disguise himself as to avoid recognition. He will renew his life only so far as to be a spectator, not a participant. So that, after all, he is not himself again, nor any other man either, and that is the same as to say that he is nobody, which is as much as a dead body has any right to be.”
“I’m not sure of that,” said Lancaster, folding his arms and leaning back his head. “There is a fellow in Weimar by the name of Goethe—you may have heard of him—who has written a poem called ‘Faust.’ Faust comes back to life, or to youth, which amounts to the same thing, and proves to be anything but a mere spectator. He gets caught in a love-scrape, and there is the devil to pay. There is something attractive in this human life which grapples us whether we will or no, and makes us dance to one tune or another. On second thoughts I withdraw my aspiration; one life is enough for me, and may be too much. To live again would be to wear the same old cap and bells, only jingling them to another measure. No man with any self-respect or sense of the ridiculous would do it.”