And, good heavens what a loss to me! Edgar felt disposed to say. As much chance as there ever was! then what had the chance been at first, for which he had wasted so much time and all his little stock of money. God help him! he had to receive the news with a smile, the best he could muster, and to listen to Lord Newmarch’s assurance that a few months could make very little difference. “Oh, very little difference!” echoed poor Edgar, with that curious fictitious brassy (why he thought it was brassy I cannot tell, but that was the adjective he used to himself) brassy imitation of a smile; and Lord Newmarch went on talking somehow up in the air beside him, about a number of things, to which he said yes and no mechanically with some certain kind of appropriateness, I suppose, for nobody seemed to find out the semi-consciousness in which he was—until the great man suddenly recollected that he must speak a few words to Tottenham, and fell back upon the man with worn grey eyes and loose lips, who sprang up from behind his newspaper like a jack in a box. Edgar, for his part, dropped down in his chair something like the same toy when shut up in its hiding-place. There was a buzzing in his ears again as there had been when he had his first interview with the Minister—but this time the giddiness was more overpowering; a hundred thoughts passed through his mind in a moment, each crowding upon each, a noiseless, breathless crowd. What was he to do? Everything seemed to be shown to him in the space of a moment, as fable says, a whole lifetime is shown in a moment to those who die suddenly. Good God! a few months! what was he to do?
Some people can face the prospect of living for a few months on nothing quite pleasantly, and some people do it habitually (without being at all bad people), and get through somehow, and come to no tragical end. But Edgar was young and unaccustomed to poverty. He was even unaccustomed to live from hand to mouth, as so many of us do, light-hearted wretches, without taking thought for the morrow. It was some time, it was true, before he was roused to think of the morrow at all, but, when he did, it seized upon him like a vulture. He sank back into his chair, and sat there like a log, with vacant eyes, but mind preternaturally busy and occupied. What was he to do?
He was roused from this outward stupor, but inner ferment, by seeing Newmarch again come up accompanied by the stranger, whose very existence he had forgotten. “Mr. Tottenham, Mr. Edgar Earnshaw,” said the Under-Secretary, “one of my best friends. Come and see me, won’t you, in Eaton Place. I must go now; and come to the office soon, and let us talk your affair over. The moment old Runtherout will consent to take himself out of the way—As for you, Tottenham, I envy you. All your schemes in your own hands, no chief to thwart you, no office to keep on recommending this man and that, when they know you have a man of your own. You may thank heaven that you have only your own theories to serve, and not Her Majesty. Good night, good night.”
“Good night,” said Edgar, absently.
Mr. Tottenham said nothing, but he gave Lord Newmarch a finger to shake, and turned to his new companion, who sat with his head down, and paid little attention to his presence. He fixed his eyes very closely on Edgar, which is a thing that can scarcely be done without attracting finally the notice of the person looked at. When he had caught Edgar’s wondering but dazed and dreamy look, he smiled—the same smile by which Edgar had already been half pleased, half angered.
“Mr. Earnshaw,” he said, “you have a story, and I know it. I hope I should have tried to behave as well myself; but I don’t know. And I have a story too. Will you come into the smoking-room if you have nothing better to do, and I’ll tell it you? I call it the history of a very hard case. Newmarch left you to me as his substitute, for he knew I wanted to talk. I like the exchange. He’s a profound blockhead, though he’s Secretary of State. Come and smoke a cigar.”
Edgar rose mechanically, he scarcely knew why; he was pale; he felt his legs almost give way under him as he moved across the passage to the smoking-room. He did not want to smoke, nor to know Mr. Tottenham’s story; but he had not strength of mind to resist what was asked of him.
“A few months,” he kept saying to himself. It seemed to him that a sudden indifference to everything else, to all things greater and more distant, had come into his mind. For the first time in his life he was self-engrossed, self-absorbed, able to think of nothing but his own necessities, and what he was to do. So strange was this to Edgar, so miserable did he feel it, that even on the short journey from one room to another he made an effort to shake off the sudden chains with which this sudden necessity had bound him, and was appalled by his own weakness, almost by a sense of guilt, when he found that he could take no interest whatever in Mr. Tottenham, that he could think of nothing but himself. For the first time, there was nobody but himself involved; no justice to be done, no kindness to be shown to others. Wherever other people are concerned, a certain breadth, a certain freedom and largeness, come into the question, even though the other people may be poor and small enough; but how mean the generous man feels, how petty and miserable, when he, and he only, becomes by any twist of fortune the centre of all his thoughts!
CHAPTER XIII.
A new Friend.
“I hope I should have done exactly as you did in that Arden business,” said Mr. Tottenham; “but I can’t tell. The amount of meanness and falseness to all one’s own rules which one feels in one’s self in a great emergency is wonderful. I never put any dependence on myself. Now I will tell who, or rather what I am. The pronoun Who is inappropriate in my case. I am nobody; but when you know what I am—if, indeed, my name does not tell you—”