No. XI.—TO PLAUSIBILITY.
MY DEAR PLAU,
I SHOULD be the most ungrateful dog if I failed to acknowledge the pleasure I have received during my life from the society of your friends and protégés. I don't speak of mere material, meat-and-money advantages. Probably, if a strict account could be stated, it might be found that in these paltry matters a balance, large or small, was still due to me. Who knows? Strict accounts are hateful; and even if I did lose here and there I did it, I fancy, with my eyes open, and was not sorry to indulge these gentlemen with the idea that their fascinations had conquered me. No. What I speak of is rather the genuine pleasure I have derived from some of the finest acting (in ordinary life, not on the boards) that the world ever saw, acting in which I protest that the tears, the sighs, the misery, the gallantry, the courage, the loyal sentiments and the honourable promises all rang with so sincere a sound that the very actor himself was subdued like the dyer's hand to the colours he worked in, until he believed himself to be the most unjustly persecuted of mankind, the most upright of gentlemen, or whatever the special emotion he simulated required that he should seem to be for the moment. That he might possibly be what, as a matter of fact, he often was, a rogue and a knave, mattered little to me at the time. He was evidently himself ignorant of his potentialities, and in any case they could not spoil my æsthetic enjoyment of a notable performance. And after all who is to undertake to draw the line between the good man and the bad? I have known men with regard to whom I was convinced that they were admirably equipped by nature for a career of roguery; somewhere in the backs of their heads I know they carried a complete set of intellectual implements for the task, but no temptation, as it happened, ever came to open the door of that secret chamber, and the unconscious owners of it passed through life honoured by their fellow-citizens, and their actions still smell sweet and blossom in their dust. Others, of course, were not so fortunate. Their crisis pursued and captured them, revealed them to themselves and others, and in many cases only left them, alas, after cropping both their hair and their reputations. But I leave these divagations, which can have but little interest for you. What I rather wish to do is to recall to your memory the curious personality and the chequered adventures of our common friend, WILFRID COBBYN.
I met him some six years ago when I was on a visit to my father's old friend, General TEMPEST, at Dansington. Most people, I take it, have heard of Dansington, that home of educational establishments, amusement, and retired Indian Generals. Old General TEMPEST—LEONIDAS MARLBOROUGH TEMPEST he had been christened by a warlike father, whose military aspirations had been crushed by the necessity for a commercial career, and who had taken it out of fate by devoting his son to heroism at the baptismal font, and by subsequently buying him a commission in a crack regiment—General TEMPEST was, in the days of which I speak, a hospitable veteran whose amiability and good-nature had survived many severe campaigns in which he had taken and given hard knocks wherever hard knocks were to be found. His benevolence and hospitality were proverbial far beyond the limits of Dansington, and his daughter CLARA was one of the prettiest girls in the United Kingdom.
On the occasion of this visit I found a fellow guest, the identical WILFRID COBBYN whom I have already mentioned. He had been there for a fortnight, I learnt from ALEXANDER, the eldest hope of the TEMPESTS, and had made himself a favourite with every member of the family. How they got to know him I never quite discovered—indeed, I doubt if any of them could have told me—and as to his previous history all they seemed to know was that his father had property "somewhere in the West of England," that he himself had travelled a great deal, and was now close upon thirty years old. I am free to admit that after my first dinner in his company I had very little inclination to worry myself about the details of his past, so cheerful and fascinating did I find his gay companionship. I cannot quite explain the charm of the man. He had a roving blue eye, a ruddy and glowing complexion, and a laugh that seemed to kick all gloomy fancies into flinders, and to carry those who heard it in a helter-skelter gallop of mirth. And then what stories the fellow could tell! He had the General and me in perpetual convulsions, and even ALEXANDER, a somewhat awkward and taciturn youth, much weighed down by the responsibilities of his freshmanhood at Oxford, was pleased to unbend and smile approvingly at the amazing sallies of the wizard COBBYN.
One story I remember in particular, though I dare not attempt to repeat it as COBBYN told it. It was about the wretched adventures of a certain travelling companion of his on a shooting expedition in Albania. It was a story that never seemed to cease,—a bad recommendation for most stories, I admit; but in this case so artfully and with such surprising humour and force was it told, so vividly did it depict a long series of ludicrous sufferings culminating in the total loss of the sufferer's clothes and his involuntary appearance in the full uniform of a Turkish Zaptieh, with other surprising and endless episodes, that at the last we had in the midst of our gasps of helpless laughter to implore the narrator to stop for the sake of our sides and the resounding rafters of the General's house.
At other times the irresistible WILFRID would pose reminiscently as the gallant protector of outraged virtue, or as the hero of some deathless story of courage and coolness by which empires had been saved from disaster. And he was so persuasive, so convincing, that our imaginations, which would have refused to follow a smaller man on lower flights, soared obediently after him through an empyrean of impossible romance. Nor did he stop at this. General TEMPEST was the pattern of old-world punctilio, but before a week was out he had introduced COBBYN, of whom he knew nothing except what COBBYN told him, to all the best people in Dansington; nor shall I ever forget the air with which this glorious rascal took the portly old Countess of CARDAMUMS down to her second supper at the County Ball. He rode ALEXANDER'S chestnut, and ALEXANDER never murmured. The General's ancient retainer went on his many errands, and neither the General nor his man saw anything out of the way in the proceeding. Even CLARA looked, I thought, with some favour—but as CLARA always breaks into indignant denials whenever this is hinted, I will proceed no further. As for the members of the Dansington Club they were enthusiastic in COBBYN'S praises. The young sparks imitated his fashions in ties and collars, the old bucks repeated to one another his stories, and one and all vowed he was "an uncommon good fellow, by Gad."
To me COBBYN was always profusely polite, with that flattering politeness which induces the flattered to think himself just a shade cleverer and sharper and better than his fellow-creatures, and on the day before my departure he honoured me by borrowing a ten-pound note of me and writing my London address with much ceremony on the back of an envelope, which I afterwards found lying about in a passage of the General's house.
Three months afterwards there was a tempest in Dansington. COBBYN had gone away for two days and had stayed away for good. His intimates and the Dansington tradesmen became uneasy, rumours began to spread, and the result was a crash which made some very knowing fellows look extremely foolish, and filled the Club with honest British imprecations. Little TOM SPINDLE, who commanded a troop of the Fallowshire Yeomanry (the Duke of DASHBOROUGH'S Hussars) and had the reputation of spending a royal income with beggarly meanness, had backed one of COBBYN'S bills for £1,000. Sir PAUL PACKTHREAD, one of the greatest of the local magnates, had lent him £500 without a scrap of security, and Colonel CHUTNEY had put £300 into the Ephemeral Soapsuds Company, Limited, of which COBBYN was to have been the managing director. I cannot go through the whole long list. He had fleeced all that was fleeceable in Dansington, and had vanished into the clouds. How he managed to do it, by what artful proposals he conquered the avarice of SPINDLE, prevailed over the mercantile sagacity of PACKTHREAD, and subdued the fiery temper of CHUTNEY, will never be known. Partly, no doubt, he succeeded by being here and there perfectly truthful and candid. He was the son of a well-to-do country Squire, but the father had long since ejected his offspring from the paternal mansion; he had really travelled and had often displayed pluck. But his chief gifts were his good-humour, his ardent imagination, and a persuasive tongue that gained for him the trusting confidence of his victims almost before he himself knew that he meant to victimise them.