“The Hermit, or the Recluse, has long disappeared from the roadside, from the bridge-end, from the river bank. His Hermitage sometimes remains, as at Warkworth, but the ancient occupant is gone. He was succeeded by the Eccentric, who flourished mightily in the last century, and took many strange forms; some lived alone, each in a single room; some became misers and crept out at night, to pick up offal for food; some lived in hollow trees; some never washed, and allowed nothing in the house to be washed. There were no absurdities too ridiculous to be practised by the Eccentric of the last century.
“For reasons which the writer of social manners may discover, the Eccentric has mostly followed the Recluse; there are none left. Therefore, the life of the late Algernon Campaigne, of Campaigne Park, Bucks, an Eccentric of the eighteenth-century type, will afford a pleasing exception to the dull and monotonous chronicles of modern private life.
“This worthy, a country gentleman of good family and large estate, was married in quite early manhood, having succeeded to the property at twenty-one or so. His health was excellent; he was a model of humanity to look at, being much over six feet high and large of frame in proportion. He had gone through the usual course of public school and the University, not without distinction; he had been called to the Bar; he was a magistrate; and he was understood to have ambitions of a Parliamentary career. In a word, no young man ever started with fairer prospects or with a better chance of success in whatever line he proposed to take up.
“Unfortunately, a single tragic event blasted these prospects and ruined his life. His brother-in-law, a gentleman of his own rank and station, and his most intimate friend, while on a visit at Campaigne Park, was brutally murdered—by whom it was never discovered. The shock of this event brought the young wife of Mr. Campaigne to premature labour, and killed her as well on the same day.
“This misfortune so weighed upon the unhappy man that he fell into a despondent condition, from which he never rallied. He entered into a voluntary retirement from the world. He lived alone in his great house, with no one but an old woman for a housekeeper, for the whole remainder of his life—seventy years. During the whole of that time he has preserved absolute silence; he has not uttered a word. He has neglected his affairs; when his signature was absolutely necessary, his agent left the document on his table, and next day found it signed. He would have nothing done to the house; the fine furniture and the noble paintings are reported to be ruined with damp and cold; his garden and glass-houses are overgrown and destroyed. He spent his mornings, in all weathers, walking up and down the brick terrace overlooking his ruined lawns; he dined at one o’clock on a beefsteak and a bottle of port; he slept before the fire all the afternoon; he went to bed at nine. He never opened a book or a newspaper or a letter. He was careless what became of his children, and he refused to see his friends. A more melancholy, useless existence can hardly be imagined. And this life he followed without the least change for seventy years. When he died, the day before yesterday, it was on his ninety-fifth birthday.”
More followed, but these were the facts as presented to the readers, with a moral to follow.
They buried the old man with his forefathers “in sure and certain hope.” The words may pass, perhaps, for he had been punished, if punishment can atone for crime. Constance brought him a message of forgiveness, but could he forgive himself? All manner of sins can be forgiven. The murdered man, the dishonoured woman, the wronged orphan, the sweated workwoman, the ruined shareholder, the innocent man done to death or prison by perjury—all may lift up their hands in pity and cry aloud with tears their forgiveness, but will the guilty man forgive himself? Until he can the glorious streets of the New Jerusalem will be dark, the sound of the harp and the voices of praise will be but a confused noise, and the new life itself will be nothing better than an intolerable prolonging of the old burden.
“Dust to dust, ashes to ashes.”
Then they went away, and when they were all gone the old bird-scarer came hobbling to the grave, and looked into it, and murmured, but not aloud, for fear the man in the grave might arise and kill him too:
“You done it! You done it! You done it!”