“Of course,” said Newmarch, benignantly, “if you are in the country, don’t come to town on purpose. Any time in spring would probably do; but if you don’t hear from me in a few months, come and see me. When so much important business is passing through one’s hands, a little thing—and especially a personal matter—is apt to slip out of one’s head.”
“To be sure,” said Edgar, rising hastily, “and I am taking up, about a mere personal matter, your valuable time, which belongs to the nation.”
“Oh, don’t apologise. I am delighted to see you. And you can’t think of how much use you might be to me,” said the great man, earnestly, shaking hands with the small one, impressing upon him, almost with tears in his eyes, the importance he might come to, “if this man will only be so good as to resign.”
Edgar went away with a singing in his ears, which he could scarcely understand at first. In all his kindly careless life there had been so little occasion for that thrilling of the blood to the brain, in defence of the Self assailed, which now at once stimulated, and made him dizzy. He scarcely knew what it meant, neither could he realize the bitterness that came into his heart against his will, a most unusual guest. He went out from Lord Newmarch’s office, and walked long and far before he quite came to himself. Walking has often a similar effect to that which the poet tells us rhyme has, “the sad mechanic exercise, like dull narcotics numbing pain.” When he gradually emerged from the haze and heat of this first disagreeable encounter, Edgar took characteristic refuge in the serio-comic transformation which the whole matter underwent in Lord Newmarch’s hands. Instead of a simple question of employment for Edgar Earnshaw, it became the great man’s own business, a way of informing him as to the points in which his education was defective. Finding employment for Edgar interested him moderately; but finding information for himself, fired his soul;—the comical part of the whole being that he expected the other, whose personal interests were so closely concerned, to feel this superior view of the question as deeply as he himself did, and to put it quite above the vulgar preliminary of something to live by. To serve Lord Newmarch, and through him the Government, and through the Government the country, was not that, Edgar asked himself at last, feeling finally able to laugh again, a much more important matter than securing bread and butter for our thriftless man? As soon as he had laughed he was himself again, and the after processes of thought were more easy.
By-and-by he persuaded himself that on the whole Newmarch had behaved quite naturally, and not unkindly. “As a matter of course,” he said to himself, “every man’s own affairs are more interesting to him than any other man’s.” It was quite natural that Newmarch should think of his own business as most important. It was the most important, Edgar continued, in his ingenious and peculiar style of reasoning, since it was the business of the country—whereas Edgar’s business was only his own, and of importance to nobody but himself. Equally, of course, it was more important to secure a good public servant, even in the humble capacity of a Queen’s Messenger, than to secure bread and butter for Edgar Earnshaw; and, on the whole, there was a great deal to be said for Newmarch, who was a good fellow, and had been generally friendly, and not too patronizing. The only wormwood that remained in his thoughts by the time evening approached, and he turned his steps towards his club in search of dinner, concerned the long delay which apparently must occur before this promised advancement could reach him. Before Christmas; Edgar had very little idea how much a man could live upon in London; but he did not think it very likely that he could get through two months upon twenty pounds. And even if that should be possible, with his little knowledge and careless habits, what should he do in the meantime? Should he linger about town, doing nothing, waiting for this possible appointment, which might, perhaps, never come to anything? This was a course of procedure which prudence and inclination, and so much experience as he possessed, alike condemned. Hanging on, waiting till something should turn up! Was this all he was good for? he asked himself, with a flush on his face. If only the other man would be so obliging as to resign, or to be killed in a railway accident, or swamped in a steamboat, or to take some foreign fever or other, of the well-known kinds, which haunt those places to which Queen’s Messengers are habitually sent! This was a lugubrious prayer, and I don’t think the actual Queen’s Messenger against whom the anathema was addressed would have been much the worse for Edgar’s ill-wishes.
These virulent and malignant sentiments helped him to another laugh, and this was one of the cases in which for a man of his temperament to laugh was salvation. What a good thing it is in all circumstances! and from how many troubles, angers and ridiculousnesses this blessed power of laughter saves us! Man, I suppose, among the fast narrowing list of his specialities, still preserves that of being the only animal who laughs. Dogs sometimes sneer; but the genial power of this humorous expression of one’s sense of all life’s oddities and puzzles belongs only to man.
There were few people about at the club where he dined alone, and the few acquaintances who recognised him were very shy about his name, not knowing how to address him, and asking each other in corners, as he divined, what the deuce was his real name, now it had been found out that he was not Arden? for it must be remembered that he had gone abroad immediately after his downfall, and had never been known in society under his new name, which by this time had become sufficiently familiar to himself. His dinner, poor fellow, was rather a doleful one, and accompanied by many thoughts. He went to one of the theatres afterwards, where the interregnum between one season and another still lasted, and foolishness more foolish even than that which is permitted at other periods, reigned riotous. Edgar came away wearied and disgusted before the performance was over, and had walked about aimlessly for some time before he recollected that he had travelled all night, and had a right to be tired—upon which recollection his aimless steps changed their character, and he went off briskly and thankfully through the bustling streets under the stars, which were sharp with night frost as they had been at Loch Arroch. Looking up at them as they glowed and sparkled over the dark house-tops in London, it was natural to think what was going on at Loch Arroch now. The kye would be “suppered,” and Bell would have fastened the ever open door, and little Jeanie upstairs would be reading her “chapter” to her grandmother before the old lady went to bed. He had seen that little, tender, pious scene more than once, when Granny was feeble, and he had gone to her room to say good-night. How sweet the low Scotch voice, with its soft broad vowels, had sounded, reading reverently those sacred verses, better than invocation of angels to keep the house from harm! What a peaceful, homely little house! all in it resting tranquil and untroubled beneath the twinkling stars. He went home to his rooms, through streets where very different scenes were going on, hushed by the thought of the rural calm and stillness, and half thinking the dark shadows he felt around him must be the dew-breathing shadows of the hills. And when Edgar got up to his bachelor refuge in Piccadilly, which he called home for the nonce for lack of a better, he did the very wisest thing a tired man could do, he went to bed; where he slept the moment his head touched the pillow, that sleep which does not always attend the innocent. The morn, as says our homely proverb in Scotland, would bring a new day.
CHAPTER XI.
Waiting for a Situation.
Edgar’s calculations, which he began next morning, and carried on for a great many days after, were of a kind which many men have made before him, that it would be foolish to call them original. He made elaborate calculations upon various pieces of paper, by which he made out that with economy, he could perfectly well live upon his twenty pounds for two months. To be sure his rent in these rooms in Piccadilly was preposterously high, and could not by any means be brought within that calculation. But then he reflected to himself that moving is always expensive—(he possessed two portmanteaus, a box of books, and a dressing-case, all of which could have gone in a cab)—and that very probably he might fall among thieves, and get into the hands of one of those proverbial landladies who steal the tea, and drink the brandy, in which case it would be no economy at all to save a few shillings on rent. In short, Edgar said to himself, loftily, these petty little savings never tell. You are much less comfortable, and it is just as expensive. For the same reason, he felt it was much the best way to continue dining at the club. “It may be sixpence dearer, but it is so infinitely more comfortable,” he said to himself; and, after all, comfort was worth an additional sixpence. By striking off the rent of his rooms altogether from the calculation, it seemed to him that he could afford his dinners at the club; and if he got his appointment by Christmas, as he certainly must, it would be so easy to pay the lodgings in a lump. He jotted down these calculations so often, and upon so many bits of paper, that he grew to believe in them as if they had been a revelation. By this it will appear that his doubts about hanging on, and waiting for the possible Queen’s Messengership which he had at first set down as out of the question, did not continue to appear so impracticable as time went on. He said to himself every morning that it was absurd, but still he did nothing else, and gradually the Queen’s Messengership grew to be a certain thing to him, upon which he was to enter at Christmas, or a little later. After all, what did it matter how he spent a week or two of his time? At eight-and-twenty, life does not appear so short as some people have found it. A week or two, a month or two, were neither here nor there.
I can scarcely tell how Edgar occupied himself during these wintry days. For one thing, he had not been accustomed to regular occupation, and the desultory life was familiar to him. The days glided past he scarcely knew how. He did a great many perfectly virtuous and laudable actions. He went to the British Museum, and to all the collections of pictures; he even, in sheer absence of anything else to do, went to the Charity House, which was a little way out of London, and was taken over it by Sister Susan, his travelling companion, and for an hour or so was seized upon by the charity fever, which is very contagious, and for some days kept thinking, as he went about the streets, of all the miserable souls—not to say bodies—consuming there, in dirt, and disease, and ignorance. I do not mean to give any account of the Charity-House—at least, not here and at this moment. But Sister Susan undeniably exercised a powerful attraction over the young man, as she discoursed in her cheery voice of her orphans, and her patients, and her penitents, all of which classes were collected round and in “the House.” She was not “the Mother,” who was rather a great personage, but she was one of the elders in the Sisterhood, and her conventual talk was very amusing to Edgar, who was not used to it. He did all he could to make her talk of the journey in which they had been fellow-travellers, and of her young companion; and Sister Susan was cunningly open in certain particulars: