Chapter XXVI

THE PRICE AT WHICH HARRY STANHOPE WAS RESCUED.

The first thing to be done for Harry Stanhope was to get him out of the situation for which he was utterly unfit, into which he had thrust himself—to extricate him from the network of idleness, false activity, unsuitable companionship, debt, and dissipation in which he was entangled. In some respects the feat was not only practicable, it was comparatively easy. Harry had proved himself so thoroughly incapable a farmer, that it was not likely any sane landlord would be urgent to keep this tenant, particularly as his slender funds and a part of his wife’s portion were already flung to the winds, or rather sunk in the soil, and he had no more left to deposit in the land even if that had been his sole mode of spending money.

Old Peter Constable had believed in women’s power of standing alone, and had left Fan absolutely mistress of her portion. Oliver had braved her indignation by asking her to have it settled on herself before her marriage. And certainly Harry Stanhope had not opposed the arrangement, for Harry was truly convinced of the treasure Fan was in herself, as well as habitually careless of pounds, shillings, and pence. Therefore, though he talked the jargon of his set—to Horace and others, and professed, as a claim to being a man of the world, not to be indifferent to tin—to the degree of counting on a woman’s goods to eke out his resources, he did not really put much weight on Fan’s bank-book and coupons, or mind whether she kept them in her own hands or put them into his.

In the end, Fan, more as a means of vindicating Harry’s disinterestedness than as a precaution for her own independence in days to come, allowed half of her portion to be tied up for her personal use if she should so ordain it. She would gladly have given up to Harry every shilling of this reserve, after he had disposed of the rest, had it not been that her foresight for him was not to say infinitely greater than his for himself or for her, but for any she could have exercised on her own account. Harry had become to his wife, in all worldly respects, like one of those minors or infants in the eyes of the law, with regard to whom it is his protector’s duty to defend him from the dangers of his own helplessness and to hedge him round with artificial barriers. Still Fan was eminently an upright woman, and she would have fought against her despair and nerved herself to strip—not herself alone but Harry, of her remaining possessions, in order to discharge the debts which he had contrived to incur in spite of her, rather than let them fall upon her brother, if she had not known that even supposing she could get Oliver to forego what all concerned in it called his ‘loans,’ it would only be a form. It could not prevent him from being impoverished in the long run, because it must be on Oliver the little family at Copley Grange Farm would have to depend, till its mistress was strong enough, if she ever were strong again, to struggle to secure independence—not merely for herself and Harry, but for Horace whose oars were shipped in Harry’s boat.

There was no difficulty on Harry’s side; he had never been overburdened with scruples, and he hardly suffered from any in accepting Oliver Constable’s interposition to free him—Harry, from his mess at Oliver’s cost. For indubitably there were money penalties, the extent of which even Fan did not guess, to pay all round, before the volunteer yeoman-farmer could be withdrawn from the ranks of the yeomen, released from the obligations of his lease, and granted a discharge by his creditors, while it was Oliver who, in each instance, paid the defalcation.

Oliver did not grudge it so much when he found that Harry, sick of the whole concern, readily consented to go abroad at once with his wife, brother, and brother-in-law—who appreciated the concession and was conscious of a lurking sweetness and graciousness in his unstable prodigal’s freedom from resentment at the old sap and grinder Constable’s interference and assumption, however carefully masked, or however dearly bought, of the reins of government.

Yet, after all, paradoxical as it may sound, dogged resistance would most assuredly have promised better than unconditional submission for Harry’s ultimate attainment of moral manhood.

‘Charity begins at home,’ Oliver told himself, using the proverb in a sense which satisfied him, when he reckoned up the damage to his own prospects, of leaving the mill and bakehouse in the charge of a dolt like Ned Green, and a foreman thirty years younger and a whole century less acute and discreet than Jim Hull. ‘I have always desired to be kept from developing into a monster, made up of theories like Maximilian Robespierre,’ he assured himself farther, with a faint smile; ‘and no doubt it is the finest thing which can happen to me—myself, to be forced to skedaddle across the Channel, and potter about foreign towns with Fan and her small family. It will knock the starch out of me in no time, and take me down ever so many pegs in my priggishness.’

The sum of Oliver’s project for the Stanhopes, in the meantime, was to cut off Harry from his moorings and their tendencies, to furnish him with the substitutes of movement and variety, to afford Fan the change, rest, and recruiting of which she was sorely in need, till something more effectual should be devised to rebuild the ruined home, and replace the lost opportunities. It was a humble enough programme, not very interesting and exciting, save for the main thread of the drama, on which all the rest hung, and on which the performers were shamefacedly silent.

Most people have experienced the peculiar fascination and absorption which is caused by dangerous illness in a family, when the whole interests of life centre in the sick-room and its bulletins. All outside matters, though they might formerly have been regarded as of vital moment, dwindle into insignificance, until the wide world with its empires and peoples, tottering republics and falling thrones, and nations wresting their liberties at the expense of bloody battles in which men by thousands perish uncounted, scarcely noticed—are blotted out for the time by a few feet of flooring and ceiling, a single bed, one figure lying still with half-closed eyes and half-parted lips, faintly beating heart and fluttering breath.

Harry Stanhope had acquired, as his companions knew, the taint of a grievous disease, half physical, half spiritual, which may rank with the plague and cholera among moral maladies. So to watch stealthily his symptoms, note the changes in his state, chronicle with trembling hope his progress in throwing off the deeply injected poison, or to recognise with sinking heart its fresh outbreak and farther spread through the system, laid hold upon and monopolised the thoughts of the little party of which Harry was the half-unconscious sick man, till he engrossed them more and more, as the combat thickened, and final victory or defeat drew nearer and nearer.

Sometimes Harry would rise so far above his ailment as to lose the worst of the disfiguring traces which it was stamping on his outer man. He would be for days and weeks together the easily entertained, contented, manly lad of the past. He would be as simple and pleasant as an unspoilt schoolboy, as charmed to go or stay with Fan as in the days of their courtship, as united to Horry as when the brothers were loving children, as satisfied with chaffing Constable, and proving the life of his own circle, where animal spirits were in request, as if there did not exist for him more highly-flavoured attractions, more enthralling society—a coarse and powerful supplementary source of excitement.

In these moods, when Harry was restored to his right mind, he was—without a grain of hypocrisy, so frank and free, so irresistibly helpful to children and old people, so easily served by servants, that he won, without fail, the heart of every stranger with whom he came in contact. He was the charming fellow-traveller, at each _table-d’hôte_ and in every steamboat and railway carriage, of hosts of unknown travellers, native and foreign. Harry was the great social conductor and bond of union between the whirling world around him and the rest of his party, who smiled cheerfully, and accepted with gay grumbling their share of the plague of his popularity.

Then such a transformation came over the patient that clear brow and eyes, broad shoulders, active hands and feet and tongue grew as if they belonged to an entirely different person. Here was a man in the toils of raging fever, and possessed by its delusions, with the load of a nameless unbearable oppression on his lowering forehead, the gleam of a strange fire in his burning eyes, having his head bent, and his back slouched with the gait of an incorrigible vagabond, who must escape from the most sacred bonds and solemn obligations, and carry a distracted spirit ill at ease, and which cannot rest, into kindred storm and darkness. Why, the very muscular hands were straining and quivering to clutch the deadly foe, bound to overthrow the victim in the hateful encounter; the swift feet were stumbling in their frenzied haste to reach the goal from which there is seldom a return; the tongue spoke winning words no more, but stammered with the language of unreasoning fury and aimless invective.

When the demon of his craving for strong drink leaped upon Harry and held him, he broke from every other detaining grasp. It was to no purpose that Fan, Horace, and Oliver put force on their inclinations in order to go with desperate perseverance on the endless round of theatres, public gardens, and concerts, as if the travellers had been so many schoolboys abroad for their holidays, or as if individual tastes and domestic habits were unknown to the party. Harry would not suffer Fan by his side; he shook off his brother and Oliver. He quitted them, and defied them to follow him, or he fled from them and outsped them by the terrible strength and subtlety of his madness. They lost him for intervals of hours, increasing to days and even weeks. The journeyings of the party came to an abrupt stop; all their previous arrangements were upset.

Fan and Horry, with Oliver added as a third to the group, looked at each other, on the first sign of the repetition of the miserable scenes, as the two had looked in the familiar farmhouse at home.

Sometimes Fan sat alone in the strange hotel room listening to the careless coming and going of the other travellers; through the long hours from sunset to darkness and the white glimmering dawn, while Horace and Oliver, going different ways, hunted through all the _places_ and _markets_; the hotels and cafés—conspicuous or obscure—the houses of entertainment where questionable hosts received strangers more likely to prove thieves than angels taken in unawares—the hunters studiously keeping themselves, as far as they might, unseen, till they stalked their prey. Thrice happy for all if it had been the beast of the field, and not merely a creature made in the image of God, degraded into a condition lower than that of the brutes, over which he had been ordained lord and king. A horse or a dog would have been wiser than Harry Stanhope, and would have guided him with advantage, in the circumstances. Or it might be the man-stalkers returned, with reluctant feet, empty hands, and hanging heads, to the hapless woman condemned to sit and wait in vain.

In these altered times, Harry, who was so fond of his kind, constituted the great insurmountable obstacle to any genial fraternisation between his family and other travelling parties who were in the wholesome odour of unsullied respectability and the vigour and gladness of moral health and strength. He condemned his companions—not simply to a tedious and irritating quarantine, but to a sad and chilling isolation, as they drew away from their neighbours to hide their wound and its humiliating cause under a tightly grasped mantle, which must never be thrown open.

The isolation served only to draw the group more closely together, and to engage them, with still greater usurpation of their faculties, in their deeply human office, till Oliver became well-nigh as wrapped up as Fan and Horace were, in that vocation of nurse and brother’s keeper, which—whether it be of the body or the soul—passes with practice into the most enticing and devouring of pursuits. Witness how it lures its recruits from the brightest and most peaceful quarters, and holds its brave soldiers fast, resisting all remonstrance, till they drop at their posts in dens of squalor and misery.

Time and place ceased largely to exert their power over persons bound up in one man’s fortunes in a prolonged and terrible single combat.

What difference did the varying seasons make, when spring stole on to summer, and summer glided into autumn, and autumn stiffened and froze into winter, if yet there was no sure amendment or certain decline in Harry Stanhope’s condition? What did it matter whether the battle-ground were the heaths of Brittany, the stony vineyards of Burgundy, the fat pastures of Guelderland, the forests of Flanders, the olive and orange gardens wet with the spray of the Mediterranean in the Riviera; or whether the towns offered to the visitors the picturesque gables and roofs of Bruges or Nüremberg, the palaces of Genoa, or the churches of Venice, when the question still was Harry and Harry only? How long was it since there had been an outbreak of his mania? Was he steadier this month than last? Was there any hope left?

It is not merely religious, or what many would call fanatical, people who are brought to comprehend the sorrowful wonder of the demand, ‘What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?’ For the fate of a soul even here in the light of goodness and loyal obedience to God’s laws, or of turbulent rebellion against them, with all future honour and happiness, or all future disgrace and misery at stake—be it in the case of a not overwise lad like Harry Stanhope—is really of greater moment and of more intense interest to kindred humanity, than all the natural beauties and all the acted out history of the universe. Place a drowning man in juxtaposition with the finest, most suggestive landscape in the world, and what spectator—not to speak of the unhappy mortal’s familiar friends, would not—conscious of his fellow-creature’s strait—turn his back on senseless matter and the dead past? Unless, indeed, the looker-on were morally dwarfed, distorted, and hardened almost beyond recognition by his kind crying shame on him, with honest disgust for his unnatural conduct, he would watch, if he could do no more, with a sympathetic agony of eagerness, the hard fight for life of his perishing brother—how he clutched desperately each bough and every twig in his path,—how he struck out gallantly for a space till he was well-nigh beyond the engulphing wave,—how he faltered and gave way, and was sucked back into the insatiable jaws of the overmastering tide.

The Stanhopes, with Oliver in their company, went on like the wandering Jew, as if there were no end to their wandering, no rest for the soles of their feet. They lived their own throbbing, high-strung family life, till other lives beyond theirs looked distant, pale, and dim, like lives in dreams. Tidings from the old home came to the wayfarers, and did not move them, or only awoke in them dull or fitful responses. A bachelor uncle of Harry and Horace Stanhope’s died, and, with some dawning suspicion in his last days that he had left his brother’s orphan boys very much to sink or swim as they could, sought to anticipate the moment of reckoning by an act of atonement. He chose to bequeath the sum of eight thousand pounds—the bulk of his savings in a colonial office—to the poor relations whom he had shunned and ignored as much as he could, in the course of their previous existence, instead of to the well-to-do flesh and blood whom he had hitherto exclusively cultivated.

The timely legacy—together with what was left of Fan’s means, would form a little competence for the Stanhopes, if they made up their minds to settle in some quiet way abroad.

The subject scarcely struck any of the pilgrims in this light. Would it not rather deal the death-stroke to Harry by supplying him with independent funds, other than his wife’s, for squandering and riot?

‘Poor old uncle Geof!’ said the man on his trial, with an impulse of his native kindliness; ‘to think he should be gone, and to cut up well for us, after all! For at least this legacy, though it ain’t much,’ continued Harry with a mixture of earnestness and candour, condescension and defiance peculiar to him, ‘ain’t too little for some enjoyment, without Fan and the rest of you looking glum. Come on, Horry; we’ll pay all respect to the old boy and his tin, by drinking to his memory to begin with, and then we’ll do whatever else enters our heads, to drive dull care away. Nobody can reasonably expect two fellows who have succeeded to a small fortune—and the smaller it is the less self-denial is to be looked for—to abstain from a glorification or two. But we’ll save enough to make you a handsome present, Fan, never fear. As for Constable, he’s like the man in history, beyond being bought.’

Agneta wrote—to her brothers this time, to tell them of her approaching marriage, with the full approbation of her guardians, to Mr. Amyott of Copley Grange—of all men, the widower approaching middle age, the father of two or three girls, the biggest already higher than the writer’s elbow.

‘Aggie a stepmother! Why doesn’t she go in for being a grandmother at once?’ cried Harry, as his single derisive comment on an incident which, since it barely touched him, did not deserve more serious consideration.

‘Ah! she was always fond of Copley Grange,’ said Fan, with quick, womanly extenuation, as if it had been the manor-house and the squire that Agneta had known and prized. ‘But she is taking a great many duties and cares upon her at once, which seems a pity, when one thinks how many more must come in the course of nature,’ ended Fan in assumed matter-of-factness, and in the languor which had replaced her old fire. But she began again a moment afterwards. ‘It is not fair to herself and to what ought to have been her natural obligations.’ Fan spoke now with something of her former suppressed ardour and inextinguishable passion for justice; but tears of weakness gathered in her eyes at the same time. She was not thinking of Agneta’s future alone, but of the future of others with claims on their sister, which Fan, in the days of her strength, would have been the last to urge, and which Agneta appeared deliberately disqualifying herself from ever fulfilling.

‘Heaven help us! I think we are not very cordial in our congratulations,’ exclaimed Oliver impatiently. He was pricked by the troubled consciousness that the cares as well as the pleasures of this life—the cares which are not of our seeking and which certainly do not contribute to our ease and satisfaction, are in danger of choking the good seed of generous thoughts and magnanimous judgments. ‘Can’t we wish Miss Stanhope and Mr. Amyott joy, without spotting all the real or imaginary disadvantages in their connection, and collaring the couple with the double chains of fulfilled and neglected requirements?’

A new idea was tickling Harry. ‘Look here, Horry; if we had stayed in the Farm we should have been Aggie’s tenants—bound to take off our hats to her. We might even have yoked ourselves into the carriage which brought her and her blooming bridegroom home from their marriage-tour. I wonder if she would have had an extra barrel of beer broached for my benefit? She has some small notion of the depth of my thirst. Wouldn’t it have been jolly? By Jove! we’ve spoilt an interesting episode for the county paper. “Charming tableau of attached relations forgetting the accidental diversities of rank and fortune and rushing into each other’s arms.” Don’t frown, Fan, my love; you would not have been called on to drag Aggie up the drive hooraying for our master and mistress. You would have sat at ease, over the way, and witnessed the gala from a respectful distance.’

‘If it is any gratification to you to talk nonsense, Harry, why then, do it,’ said Fan, with a lingering reflection of her old girlish dignity, in the middle of her womanly pain at his want of comprehension and feeling, and yet with the pathetic indulgence to every defect in the man she loved, which far transcended both dignity and pain.

Oliver knew he was still capable of quite another form of selfishness, when a letter from Mrs. Hilliard reached Fan. Mrs. Hilliard would not consent to lose sight of her kindred in exile, any more than when settled in a mill and bakehouse at her door. She had no further occasion, indeed, to acknowledge Fan’s triumph and pay it homage, but the eventual defeat of Mrs. Hilliard’s enemy was disarming in another way. Mrs. Hilliard was interested to learn what farther reversal of parts might occur among her cousins; and whether poor dear Harry Stanhope was to prove the reprobate out and out, as she rather feared would be the end. But nobody could help it save himself, he was the sole person to blame. It was Philistinish of the Constables to throw themselves into the breach, and make such a fuss about what was so likely to happen. It would have been far better for everybody to have hushed it up, to have put poor Harry and his drag of a brother quietly out of the way—not by murder, which might have had unpleasant consequences, but by banishment for life, while Fan came home to her brother. But these cousins of Mrs. Hilliard’s were not like anybody else, and would not behave like rational people in the common lot of having a prodigal among them.

Mrs. Hilliard’s letter was not purely inquisitive; she was really softened by the news she had to tell, though she told it in her own manner. Her cousin Catherine was better. She had surmounted the crisis of her illness, and she was not only to live and be well again, she was about to turn over a new leaf—in short, to go a-head and look alive for the rest of her days. Mrs. Hilliard flattered herself _that_ would astonish her readers. The miracle had been worked by the new order of nurse whom the London physician had brought down just in time to their assistance. It had been during the very dismallest part of Catherine’s illness, when Mrs. Hilliard’s sole refuge from the blues on her own account, had been in the anticipation of the inconsistencies and incongruities she was to encounter in the latest specimen of nurse—who is no longer a Sairey Gamp but a beneficent princess in disguise. Now beneficent princesses are charming to think of, but naturally one would suppose they are not the easiest persons to accommodate and entertain. Mrs. Hilliard had, therefore, proposed to lay all the house under contribution for the Sister’s benefit. She had told off her own maid in the stranger’s service. The maid’s mistress had even had some idea of converting herself into an abigail, that she might more fittingly hold pins for her social superior, who was condescending to attend on Catherine. Mrs. Hilliard had arranged levees of all the ladies in Friarton to be held in the Meadows’ drawing-room in honour of the Sister when she was off duty and open to recreation; and sure enough the Sister had turned out to be a daughter of the old lord-lieutenant’s, the county belle of ten years ago; but she had laughed to scorn the words ‘accommodation,’ ‘entertainment,’ and ‘homage.’

She had perversely chosen and doggedly stuck to a housemaid’s bedroom, because it was nearest to Catherine’s room. She had insisted on putting in for herself the few pins which her holland gown required. She was so enlivened by her work in the sick-room that she came out of it looking as fresh as a daisy and as gay as a lark. When she had an hour to spare, or wanted a little variety, she took it in running about the town to rout out sickness among the miserable wretches who could not afford a nurse of any kind, and then in seeking to trace the mischief to its origin and destroy its sheet anchors of poverty and dirt. She had caused the two doctors’ hair to stand on end, forced the vicar to tear what hair was left on his head, and all but driven the youngest and most enthusiastic of the curates to hang himself. In fine, the Sister had imparted to Mrs. Hilliard the remarkable information that she looked on this apparently lowest department of her profession as in fact the highest, and had been guilty of selecting it for herself. She had only consented to come down and nurse so swell a patient as Catherine because she was in extremity, and because the Sister had some special acquaintance with nervous disorders and skill in treating them.

Catherine had opened her eyes at the princess in disguise, of course penetrating the disguise, from the first moment she saw her. The sick woman had come under the spell of the nurse’s vitality until everybody who could make a diagnosis said the one craze would cast out the other, the craze of work would expel the craze of lethargy, the craze of social regeneration would break the back of individual despondency and despair. Thus Mrs. Hilliard wrote, and Oliver was free to think over the news.

Catherine alive, in health, awakened from her long unhealthy sleep with its haunting nightmares! Catherine loosed from her grave-clothes! Catherine informed of the riches of life, stretching out her hands to take them for herself and share them with others! If he could but see and speak with Catherine now, would she not understand him, and feel with him at last, whatever came of it?

But to see Catherine, with whom all was well, Oliver must abandon Fan in her tribulation, when, in the light of a fresh trial hanging over her, she had more need of his help than ever.

Oliver could not find it in his heart to quit his post under such conditions, though it was also in his heart to writhe and fret at what might have been, and the possible forfeiture of his own chance of human happiness. But he was also capable of feeling thankful that it was—as he had every reason to believe—only his own happiness, not Catherine’s—above all, not her well-being, which might be at stake. He was not put to the torture of having to choose between Fan and Catherine in this supreme sense.