CHAPTER VAN ANYTHINGARIAN
Two hours later Gordon sat alone in the room, looking out on the softening sun-glare of St. James Street. In the chastened light the brilliant dark-auburn curls that clustered over his colorless face showed a richer brown and under their long black lashes his eyes had deepened their tint. Near-by, where Park Place opened, a fountain played, on whose bronze rim dusty sparrows preened and twittered. The clubs that faced the street were showing signs of life, and on the pave a newsboy, for the benefit of late-rising west-end dandies, was crying the papers.
Gordon was waiting for Hobhouse. They were to sup together this last night. To-morrow he was to leave for Newstead Abbey and the uncomfortable ministrations of his eccentric and capricious mother, whom he had not yet seen. He had come back to his land and place to find that enmity had been busy envenoming his absence, and the taste of home had turned unsweet to his palate.
As he sat now, however, Gordon had thrust bitterness from his mood. He was thinking with satisfaction of the copyhold he had transferred. He had always declaredthat for what he wrote he would take no money. If these verses—the first in which he felt he had expressed something of his real self—if these brought recompense, it was a fitting disposition he had made. He had paid an old debt to the man with the worn waistcoat and kindly, studious face—almost the only debt of its kind he owed in the world.
The words with which Dallas had left him recurred to him—“God bless you!”
“Poor old plodding Dallas!” he mused reflectively. “It’s curious how a man’s sense of gratitude drags up his religion—if hehasany to drag up. He thinks now the Creator put into my heart to do that—doesn’t give himself a bit of credit for it!”
He laughed reminiscently.
“I don’t suppose he has seen six hundred pounds to spend since he bought that pony! He has had a hard row to hoe all his life, and never did an ounce of harm to any living thing, yet at the first turn of good luck, he fairly oozes thankfulness to the Almighty. He is a churchman clear through. He believes in revealed religion—though no religion everisrevealed—and yet he doesn’t mistake theology for Christianity. He positively doesn’t know the meaning of the word cant. Ah—there goes another type!”
Gordon was looking at a square, mottle-faced man passing slowly on the opposite side of the street, carrying a bundle of leaflets from which now and then he drew to give to a passer-by. He was high-browed, with eyes that projected like an insect’s and were flattish in their orbits. He wore a ministerial cloak over his street costume.
“There’s Cassidy,” he said to himself. “Dr. James Cassidy, on shore leave, distributing his little doctrinal tracts. I remember him well. He is in the navy medical service, but it’s the grief of his life he can’t be a parson. He talked enough pedantry over the ship’s table of thePylades, while I was coming home from Greece, to last me till the resurrection. He is as ardent a predestinarian as any Calvinistic dean in gaiters, and knows all the hackneyed catch-phrases of eternal punishment. He has an itch forpropaganda, and distributes his tracts, printed at his own expense, on the street-corner for the glory of theology. He is the sort of Christian who always writes damned with a dash. And yet, I wonder how much real true Christianity he has—Christianity like Dallas’, I mean. I remember that scar on his cheek; it stands for a thrashing he got once at Bombay from a deserting ensign named Trevanion—a youth I met in Greece afterward, and had cause to remember, by the way!”
His eyes had darkened suddenly. His brows frowned, his firm white hand ran over his curls as though to brush away a disagreeable recollection.
“Cassidy would travel half around the globe to find the deserter that thrashed him and land him in quod. That man would deserve it richly enough, but would Cassidy’s act be for the good of the king’s service? No—for the satisfaction of James Cassidy. Is that Christianity? Dallas never treasured an enmity in his life. Yet both of them believe the same doctrine, worship the same God, read the same Bible. Does man make his beliefs? Or do his beliefs make him? If his beliefs make man, why are Dallas and Cassidy so different?If man makes his beliefs, why should I not make my own? I will be an Anythingarian, and leave dreams to Emanuel Swedenborg!”
His gaze, that had followed the clerical figure till it passed out of sight, returned meditatively to the slaty white buildings opposite.
“Some people call me an atheist—I never could understand why, though I prefer Confucius to the Ten Commandments and Socrates to St. Paul,—the two latter happen to agree in their opinion of marriage,—and I don’t think eating bread or drinking wine from the hand of an earthly vicar will make me an inheritor of Heaven. Dallas would tell me not to reason, but to believe. You might as well tell a man not to wake but to sleep. Neither Cicero nor the Messiah could ever have altered the vote of a single lord of the bed-chamber! And then to bully with torments and all that! The menace of hell makes as many devils as the penal code makes villains. All cant—Methodistical cant—yet Dallas believes it. And both he and Cassidy belong to the same one of the seventy-two sects that are tearing each other to pieces for the love of the Lord and hatred of each other—the sects that call men atheists because the eternalwhywill creep into what they write. If it pleases the Church—I except Dallas—to damn me for asking questions, I shall be only one with some millions of scoundrels who, after all, seem as likely to be damned as ever. As for immortality, if people are to live, why die? And our carcases, are they worth raising? I hope, if mine is, I shall have a better pair of legs than I have moved on these three-and-twentyyears, or I shall be sadly behind in the squeeze into Paradise!”
There was a knock at the door. He rose and opened it. It was Hobhouse. Gordon caught up his hat and they left the hotel together.
As they crossed Park Place a woman, draggled and gin-besotted, strayed from some Thames-side stews, sat on the worn stone base of the fountain, leaning uncertainly against its bronze rim. Her swollen lids hid her eyes and one hand, palm up, was thrown out across her lap. Gordon drew a shilling from his pocket, and passing his arm in Hobhouse’s, laid it in the outstretched hand. At the touch of the coin, the drab started up, looked at him stupidly an instant, then with a ribald yell of laughter she flung the shilling into the water and shambled across the square, mimicking, in a hideous sort of buffoonery, the lameness of his gait.
Gordon’s face turned ashen. He walked on without a word, but his companion could feel his hand tremble against his sleeve. When he spoke, it was in a voice half-smothered, forbidding.
“The old jeer!” he said. “The very riffraff of the street fling it at me! Yet I don’t know why they should spare that taunt; even my mother did not. ‘Lame brat!’ she called me once when I was a child.” He laughed, jarringly, harshly. “Why, only a few days before I sailed from England, in one of her fits of passion, she flung it at me. ‘May you be as ill-formed in mind as you are in body!’ Could they wish me worse than she?”
“Gordon!” expostulated the other. “Don’t!—”
He had no time to finish. A grizzled man in the dress of an upper servant was approaching them, hisrubicund face bearing an unmistakable look of haste and concern.
“Well, Fletcher?” inquired Gordon.
“I thought your lordship had gone out earlier. I have been inquiring for you at the clubs. This message has just come from Newstead.”
His master took the letter and read it. A strange, slow, remorseful look overspread the passion on his face.
“No ill news, I hope,” ventured Hobhouse.
Gordon made no reply. He crushed the letter into his pocket, turned abruptly and strode up St. James Street.
“His lordship’s mother died yesterday, Mr. Hobhouse,” said the valet in a low voice.
“Good God!” exclaimed the other. “What acontretemps.”
A knot of loungers were seated under the chandeliers in the bow-window of White’s Club as Gordon passed on his way to the coach. Beau Brummell,élégant, spendthrift, in white great-coat and blue satin cravat exhaling an odor ofeau de jasmin, lifted a languid glass to his eye.
“I’ll go something handsome!” cried he; “I thought he was in Greece!”
“He’s the young whelp of a peer who made such a dust with that Satire he wrote,” Lord Petersham informed his neighbor. “Hero of the sack story I told you. Took the title from his great-uncle, the madman who killed old Chaworth in that tavern duel. House of Lords tried him for murder, you know. Used to train crickets and club them over the head with straws;all of them left the house in a body the day he died. Devilish queer story! Who’s the aged party with the portmanteaus? Valet?”
“Yes,” asserted some one. “The old man was here a while ago trying to find Gordon—with bad news. His lordship’s mother is dead.”
“Saw her once at Newstead Abbey,” yawned Brummell, wearily, dusting his cuffs. “Corpulent termagant and gave George no end of a row. He used to call her his ‘maternal war-whoop.’ My own parents—poor good people!—died long ago,” he added reflectively; “—cut their throats eating peas with a knife.”