Doctor Claudius, A True Story Part 29

Bellingham's rooms was good; much of it was unique, and the whole was harmonious. Rare editions were bound by famous binders, and if the twopenny-halfpenny productions of some little would-be modern poet, resplendent with vellum and aesthetic greenliness of paper, occasionally found their way to the table, they never travelled as far as the shelves. Mr. Bellingham had fools enough about him to absorb his spare trash.

On this particular occasion the old gentleman was seated in an arm-chair at his table, and Claudius, as aforesaid, had established himself upon the sofa. He looked very grave and smoked thoughtfully.

"I wish I knew what to do," he said. "Mr. Bellingham, do you think I could be of any use?"

"If I had not thought so, I would not have told you--I could have let you find it out for yourself from the papers. You can be of a great deal of use."

"Do you advise me to go to St. Petersburg and see about it then?"

"Of course I do. Start at once. You can get the necessary steps taken in no time, if you go now."

"I am ready. But how in the world can I get the thing done?"

"Letters. Your English friend over there will give you letters to the English Amba.s.sador; he is Lord Fitzd.o.g.g.i.n--cousin of the Duke's. And I will give you some papers that will be of use. I know lots of people in Petersburg. Why, it's as plain as a pikestaff. Besides, you know the proverb, _mitte sapientem et nihil dicas._ That means then when you send a wise man you must not dictate to him."

"You flatter me. But I would rather have your advice, if that is what you call 'dictating.' I am not exactly a fool, but then, I am not very wise either."

"No one is very wise, and we are all fools compared to some people,"

said Mr. Bellingham. "If anybody wanted a figurehead for a new Ship of Fools, I sometimes think a portrait of myself would be singularly appropriate. There are times when I should fix upon a friend for the purpose. Mermaid--half fish--figurehead, half man, half fool. That's a very good idea."

"Very good--for the friend. Meanwhile, you know, it is I who am going on the errand. If you do not make it clear to me it will be a fool's errand."

"It is perfectly clear, my dear sir," insisted Mr. Bellingham. "You go to St. Petersburg; you get an audience--you can do that by means of the letters; you lay the matter before the Czar, and request justice. Either you get it or you do not. That is the beauty of an autocratic country."

"How about a free country?" asked Claudius.

"You don't get it," replied his host grimly. Claudius laughed a cloud of smoke into the air.

"Why is that?" he asked idly, hoping to launch Mr. Bellingham into further aphorisms and paradoxes.

"Men are everywhere born free, but they--"

"Oh," said Claudius, "I want to know your own opinion about it."

"I have no opinion; I only have experience," answered the other. "At any rate in an autocratic country there is a visible, tangible repository of power to whom you can apply. If the repository is in the humour you will get whatever you want done, in the way of justice or injustice. Now in a free country justice is absorbed into the great cosmic forces, and it is apt to be an expensive incantation that wakes the lost elementary spirit. In Russia justice shines by contrast with the surrounding corruption, but there is no mistake about it when you get it. In America it is taken for granted everywhere, and the consequence is that, like most things that are taken for granted, it is a myth. Rousseau thought that in a republic like ours there would be no more of the 'chains' he was so fond of talking about. He did not antic.i.p.ate a stagnation of the national moral sense. An Englishman who has made a study of these things said lately that the Americans had retained the forms of freedom, but that the substance had suffered considerably."

"Who said that?" asked Claudius.

"Mr. Herbert Spencer. He said it to a newspaper reporter in New York, and so it was put into the papers. It is the truest thing he ever said, but no one took any more notice of it than if he had told the reporter it was a very fine day. They don't care. Tell the first man you meet down town that he is a liar; he will tell you he knows it. He will probably tell you you are another. We are all alike here. I'm a liar myself in a small way--there's a club of us, two Americans and one Englishman."

"You are the frankest person I ever met, Mr. Bellingham," said Claudius, laughing.

"Some day I will write a book," said Mr. Bellingham, rising and beginning to tramp round the room. "I will call it--by the way, we were talking about Petersburg. You had better be off."

"I am going, but tell me the name of the book before I go."

"No, I won't; you would go and write it yourself, and steal my thunder."

Uncle Horace's eyes twinkled, and a corruscation of laugh-wrinkles shot like sheet-lightning over his face. He disappeared into a neighbouring room, leaving a trail of white smoke in his wake, like a locomotive.

Presently he returned with a _Bullinger Guide_ in his hand.

"You can sail on Wednesday at two o'clock by the Cunarder," he said.

"You can go to Newport to-day, and come back by the boat on Tuesday night, and be ready to start in the morning." Mr. Bellingham prided himself greatly on his faculty for making combinations of times and places.

"How about those letters, Mr. Bellingham?" inquired Claudius, who had no idea of going upon his expedition without proper preparations.

"I will write them," said Uncle Horace, "I will write them at once," and he dived into an address-book and set to work. His pen was that of the traditional ready-writer, for he wrote endless letters, and his correspondence was typical of himself--the scholar, the wanderer, and the Priest of Buddha by turns, and sometimes all at once. For Mr.

Bellingham was a professed Buddhist and a profound student of Eastern moralities, and he was a thorough scholar in certain branches of the cla.s.sics. The combination of these qualities, with the tact and versatile fluency of a man of the world, was a rare one, and was a source of unceasing surprise to his intimates. At the present moment he was a diplomatist, since he could not be a diplomat, and to his energetic suggestion and furtherance of the plan he had devised the results which this tale will set forth are mainly due.

Claudius sat upon the sofa watching the old gentleman, and wondering how it was that a stranger should so soon have a.s.sumed the position of an adviser, and with an energy and good sense, too, which not only disarmed resistance, but a.s.subjugated the consent of the advised. Life is full of such things. Man lives quietly like a fattening carp in some old pond for years, until some idle disturber comes and pokes up the mud with a stick, and the poor fish is in the dark. Presently comes another destroyer of peace, less idle and more enterprising, and drains away the water, carp and all, and makes a potato-garden of his old haunts. So the carp makes a new study of life under altered circ.u.mstances in other waters; and to pa.s.s the time he wonders about it all. It happens even to men of masterful character, accustomed to directing events. An illness takes such a man out of his sphere for a few months. He comes back and finds his pond turned into a vegetable-garden and his ploughed field into a swamp; and then for a time he is fain to ask advice and take it, like any other mortal. So Claudius, who felt himself in an atmosphere new to him, and had tumbled into a very burning bush of complications, had fallen in with Mr. Horace Bellingham, a kind of professional bone-setter, whose province was the reduction of society fractures, speaking medically. And Mr. Bellingham, scenting a patient, and moreover being strongly attracted to him on his own merits, had immediately broached the subject of the Nihilist Nicholas, drawing the conclusion that the man of the emergency was Claudius, and Claudius only. And the bold Doctor weighed the old gentleman's words, and by the light of what he felt he knew that Uncle Horace was right. That if he loved Margaret his first duty was to her, and that first duty was her welfare. No messenger could or would be so active in her interests as himself; and in his anxiety to serve her he had not thought it strange that Mr.

Bellingham should take it for granted he was ready to embark on the expedition. He thought of that later, and wondered at the boldness of the stranger's a.s.sumption, no less than at the keenness of his wit. Poor Claudius! anybody might see he was in love.

"There; I think that will draw sparks," said Mr. Bellingham, as he folded the last of his letters and put them all in a great square envelope. "Put those in your pocket and keep your powder dry."

"I am really very grateful to you," said Claudius. Uncle Horace began to tramp round the room again, emitting smoky e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns of satisfaction.

Presently he stopped in front of his guest and turned his eyes up to Claudius's face without raising his head. It gave him a peculiar expression.

"It is a very strange thing," he said, "but I knew at once that you had a destiny, the first time I saw you. I am very superst.i.tious; I believe in destiny."

"So would I if I thought one could know anything about it. I mean in a general way," answered Claudius, smiling.

"Is generalisation everything?" asked Mr. Bellingham sharply, still looking at the young man. "Is experience to be dismissed as empiricism, with a sneer, because the wider rule is lacking?"

"No. But so long as only a few occupy themselves in reducing empiric knowledge to a scientific shape they will not succeed, at least in this department. To begin with, they have not enough experience among them to make rules from."

"But they contribute. One man will come who will find the rule. Was Tycho Brahe a nonent.i.ty because he was not Kepler? Was Van Helmont nothing because he was not Lavoisier? Yet Tycho Brahe was an empiric--he was the last of the observers of the concrete, if you will allow me the phrase. He was scientifically the father of Kepler."

"That is very well put," said Claudius. "But we were talking of destiny.

You are an observer."

"I have very fine senses," replied Mr. Bellingham. "I always know when anybody I meet is going to do something out of the common run. You are."

"I hope so," said Claudius, laughing. "Indeed I think I am beginning already."

"Well, good luck to you," said Mr. Bellingham, remembering that he had missed one engagement, and was on the point of missing another. He suddenly felt that he must send Claudius away, and he held out his hand.

There was nothing rough in his abruptness. He would have liked to talk with Claudius for an hour longer had his time permitted. Claudius understood perfectly. He put the letters in his pocket, and with a parting shake of the hand he bade Mr. Horace Bellingham good-morning, and good-bye; he would not trouble him again, he said, before sailing.

But Mr. Bellingham went to the door with him.

"Come and see me before you go--Wednesday morning; I am up at six, you know. I shall be very glad to see you. I am like the Mexican donkey that died of _congojas ajenas_--died of other people's troubles. People always come to me when they are in difficulties." The old gentleman stood looking after Claudius as he strode away. Then he screwed up his eyes at the sun, sneezed with evident satisfaction, and disappeared within, closing the street door behind him.

"Some day I will write my memoirs," he said to himself, as he sat down.

Claudius was in a frame of mind which he would have found it hard to describe. The long conversation with Mr. Bellingham had been the first intimation he had received of Margaret's disaster, and the same interview had decided him to act at once in her behalf--in other words, to return to Europe immediately, after a week's stay in New York, leaving behind all that was most dear to him. This resolution had formed itself instantaneously in his mind, and it never occurred to him, either then or later, that he could have done anything else in the world. It certainly did not occur to him that he was doing anything especially praiseworthy in sacrificing his love to its object, in leaving Margaret for a couple of months, and enduring all that such a separation meant, in order to serve her interests more effectually. He knew well enough what he was undertaking--the sleepless nights, the endless days, the soul-compelling heaviness of solitude, and the deadly sinking at the heart, all which he should endure daily for sixty days--he could not be back before that. He knew it all, for he had suffered it all, during those four and twenty hours on the yacht that followed his first wild speech of love. But Claudius's was a knightly soul, and when he served he served wholly, without reservation. Had the dark-browed Countess guessed half the n.o.bleness of purpose her tall lover carried in his breast, who knows but she might have been sooner moved herself. But how could she know? She suspected, indeed, that he was above his fellows, and she never attributed bad motives to his actions, as she would unhesitatingly have done with most men; for she had learned lessons of caution in her life. Who steals hearts steals souls, wherefore it behoves woman to look that the lock be strong and the key hung high. Claudius thought so too, and he showed it in every action, though unconsciously enough, for it was a knowledge natural and not acquired, an instinctive determination to honour where honour was due. Call it Quixotism if need be. There is nothing ridiculous in the word, for there breathes no truer knight or gentler soul than Cervantes's hero in all the pages of history or romance. Why cannot all men see it? Why must an infamous world be ever sneering at the sight, and smacking its filthy lips over some fresh gorge of martyrs? Society has non-suited h.e.l.l to-day, lest peradventure it should not sleep o'

nights.

Thomas Carlyle, late of Chelsea, knew that. How he hit and hammered and churned in his wrath, with his great cast-iron words. How the world shrieked when he wound his tenacious fingers in the glory of her golden hair and twisted and wrenched and twisted till she yelled for mercy, promising to be good, like a whipped child. There is a story told of him which might be true.

It was at a dinner-party, and Carlyle sat silent, listening to the talk of lesser men, the snow on his hair and the fire in his amber eyes. A young Liberal was talking theory to a beefy old Conservative, who despised youth and reason in an equal degree.

"The British people, sir," said he of the beef, "can afford to laugh at theories."