The Redemption of Edward Strahan. A social story

Front matter

WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR. THETHRESHOLDOFMANHOOD: Sermons to Young Men, preached in St. John's, Glasgow. Price t,s. 6d. " It is a splendid book, full of a warm, sympathetic appreciation of a young man's trials. Every page of it is worth reading. It never descends to mere commonplace platitude, and often rises to a glowing eloquence that can hardly be read without producing some practical effect on the life of the reader." — Church Bells. THE MAKERS OF MODERN ENGLISH: A Popular Guide to the Poets. Price 5s. The London Morning Post says that Mr. Dawson shows "a soundness of judgment and a subtle and clear insight into the essential characteristics of modern English poetry, which leaves little to be desired. The personality of the poet here helps us to interpret his poetry, and his poetry helps us to interpret his personality. . . .

The most delightful and masterly criticisms are those on Wordsworth, Browning, and Tennyson. In their case, especially, we feel that much is due to Mr. Dawson for the intelligence with which he interprets, and for the sympathy with which he appreciates these great singers of modern times." A VISION OF SOULS; with other Ballads and Poems. Price 6s. " This is a book of remarkable quality. It is dramatic, eminently human, and full of thought. Forty years ago work so good as this would have gone far to establish its author's name : and if it fails even yet to lift Mr. Dawson above the crowd of lesser poets, the failure of justice will be, perhaps, as humiliating as in any recent case of neglected talent." — The Academy. QUEST AND VISION : Essays in Life and Literature. 5s. (Out of print. ,) % Social Siorjj.

Chapter I. Middleham

A T the date when this story commences Middle ■*- *- ham was not the thriving place it now is. The rising tide of manufacture had only touched its outskirts ; the heart of the town remained much as it had been for the last hundred years. It possessed an old church, remarkable for no par ticular grace or dignity of architecture, a broad street which degenerated towards the north into a labyrinth of smaller streets, an old market-house, and a somewhat dilapidated Town Hall, which was never used for any public meetings, unless at the period of a general election. All the shops which did any considerable trade were situated in this one street, which was called High Street, and even there trade never showed any signs of external briskness. There were one or two tolerably-sized shops, but it was rarely that more than two persons were ever seen in them at the same time.

Their owners passed a good part of their time in standing at the doors, and on lazy sunny afternoons often retired for a comfortable nap, leaving the shop in charge of their apprentices. The smaller shops in the High Street were a sort of compromise between private dwelling-houses and places of business. They had two solid bow-windows, with a door between, and it answered all the purposes of trade to stock one of these windows with saleable commodities, and put a very modest notice over the door, conveying the intelligence that such and such articles were sold within. Some of them did not even display any notice. Their owners argued rightly that in Middleham every one knew every one, and it was a useless expense to advertise facts of which the whole town was already aware. If any one wanted Mr. Potts, the watchmaker, or Miss Shrimpton, the milliner, they knew where to find them.

There was no fear of any mistake being made, because there was only one watchmaker and one milliner in the place, and such wants as Middleham had in the way of watches and bonnets were sure to make themselves known by inevitable processes of natural law. Thus an admirably simple code of business prevailed. Advertising was ludicrously superfluous ; the Middleham tradesman had only to sit still, in the MIDDLEHAM. 3 certain knowledge that whatever trade there was in his line of business must ultimately drift his way, because there was no other direction in which it could travel. Social morals in Middleham proceeded upon as easy a basis as trade. Few people went to church, except on ceremonial occasions of marriage, christening, or burial, for the Rector was practically non-resident, and his curate was a shabby, woebegone, elderly man, whose time was wholly taken up in contending with the wants of a young family, which increased with perplexing rapidity, and at a normal rate as regular as the seasons.

Few persons went to the two small chapels, which belonged to rival sects of Methodists, for the sufficient reason that respectability forbade it. The ministers of these chapels came and went in rapid progression, and their presence in the town was scarcely known before their departure was announced. Respectability was the only god who was truly worshipped in Middleham. The great law of conduct which every one obeyed was that the blunder was worse than the crime, and in this respect Middleham might have laid claim to an advanced stage of civilisation. For there is nothing falser than our common assumption that cities, and cities alone, are the centres of shame and vice. The unrestrained primeval passions, which flow out into vicious acts, are as strong in small communities as in great, and the very indolence of life gives them opportunity for growth.

The only difference is that they are more secret and more stealthy in their operation because there is no crowd to conceal them, and detection is therefore easier. A stranger walking through the sleepy streets of Middleham might have supposed that vice had never reared its head in so still an air, just as strangers often look upon some idyllic village, with its ivied church, its jasmined cottages, its air of profound peace, and say, " Here at last is the Earthly Paradise ! " But fever lurks in the jasmined cottage, and hearts break under the shadow of the ivied church, and, unseen by us, the trail of the serpent lingers in the paradise we covet. So, even in so still a spot as Middleham, men found ample room for the cul tivation of vice, the only difference being that they acquired a preternatural slyness in concealing it.

At the time when my story commences there was in the shop of Mr. Joseph Bannerman, the chief grocer of Middleham, a youth named Edward Strahan, who was just out of his apprenticeship. Bannerman was an elder in the old Meeting-house where the fact that he was in comfortable circum- MIDDLEHAM. 5 stances gave him considerable social pre-eminence. He was a gross, heavy man, with carnality written unmistakably upon his features. More than once ominous whispers had been heard concerning his private life ; but, whatever wrongs he had com mitted, he had the dexterity to conceal them. He was a man of whom much evil was believed, and on pretty good evidence, but against whom nothing was proved. He had a niece living with him, Mary Messenger, who was a girl of fine spirit and noble disposition. She had an unusual love of reading, and found in books a perpetual retreat from the grossness of the Bannerman household.

Strahan shared her love of books, and in the course of time the bond between them became more sympathetic and tender. Thrown together as they constantly were, it was natural that they should love each other, and there was everything in their circumstances to foster the attachment. Strahan was one of those youths who are keenly impressionable, and are led in all things rather by impulse than reason. He had exalted moods, in which everything that was good and right seemed easy to him ; and from such moods he often passed, by the quickest transitions, to their very opposites. Few people are capable of estimating aright the temptations of quick and eager temperaments like his. They cannot understand their intense sus ceptibility, their shifting passions, their liability to evil, and their real thirst for good even when the stain of recent evil is deep upon them.

" The dyer's hand subdued to what it works in," of which Shakespeare so pathetically speaks in one of his sonnets, is the perpetual type of the force of environment on such men. When such men sin, they sin deeply ; and when they repent they know all the horrible bitterness of remorse. The one thing that is certain about them is that they are incapable of callousness, and have none of that sordid caution which is able to steer a middle course, tasting the apple of Sodom alternately with the fruit of life. They are creatures of strong passions and imperfect will power, and stand in perpetual need of the help which those steadier natures afford, in which life burns with more equal flame. Strahan, in a word, was capable of being a very good man or a very bad man ; but the one thing that was certain about him was that he could never be a Laodicean.

All his feelings and passions were intense, and it required little to fan either the good or bad impulses of his nature into white heat. At the present moment he stood at the turning of the ways, and it was impossible to forecast his suture. MIDDLEHAM. 7 Strahan's position at this time can be put into a few sentences. Bannerman's shop was next door to a small hotel called the Red Lion, and it had become a habit with Strahan to fly to the Red Lion as soon as business was over. Every one in Middleham, even the most respect able folk, considered it a perfectly natural and in evitable thing that a man's evening hours should be spent in a bar-room, and no one thought the worse of Strahan because he followed the pre vailing custom. But business-youths have little money, and an evening at the Red Lion was not exactly a cheap enjoyment.

Strahan met there other people who had more money than he had, and he felt it necessary to keep pace with them. And of late a still more shameful need had been laid upon him. He had established secret relations with a coarse, full-blown young woman who served behind the bar of the Red Lion, and he found that they could neither be kept up nor concealed without money. Money, indeed, was all that this flashy young person cared for. She cared nothing for Strahan, and took care to keep him well at arm's length, but she expected constant presents and gifts of money from him. It was a sordid, wretched, contemptible business, and Strahan felt it all the more because in his heart he did love Mary Messenger with an intense passion. It was in the mesh of these vulgar temptations Strahan now stood. A thousand times he cursed his folly, but his curses brought him no deliverance.

He saw that he had sold himself into bondage, and he could devise no means of escape. Some day all must be known, and then Mary would turn from him with honest scorn, and Bannerman would kick him out of doors. It was the very thing that Bannerman would delight in doing. For it is not to our fellow-sinner that we can look for sympathy in the hour of retribution ; he is only too ready to lay on the lash, and he does so with all the more energy because he knows that we deserve it less than he. It is the old criminal who makes the most merciless judge, the slave who is the hardest taskmaster, the felon who takes most kindly to the loathsome office of executioner. Under the easy sensuality of Bannerman there lay a profound capacity for cruelty, as Strahan well knew, and he dreaded it. It was ten o'clock on Saturday night, and the week's business at Mr. Bannerman's was over.

Strahan had just put up the last shutter, and stood in the shop taking off his apron. Bannerman was at his desk, busy with his ledger. In the little MIDDLEHAM. 9 room behind the shop the fire burned clearly, and beside it sat Mary Messenger, busy with some needlework. A glass door divided this room from the shop, and this stood slightly ajar, so that any thing said in the shop could very easily be over heard in the living-room. " Well, Strahan," said Bannerman, " too late for the Red Lion to-night, eh ? " " Yes, sir," said Strahan. " Seems to me you're there pretty often, young man," said Bannerman, with what was meant to be a cunning grin. " The Red Lion isn't cheap, either," he continued. " Blest if I know where you get the money ! " Bannerman only meant to be jocular, but no words could in reality have been more distasteful to Strahan than these.

Strahan knew very well that his master had been drinking pretty freely during the evening, and drink usually made him jocular. He knew also that it was impossible to silence him. Strahan made no reply. He hastily put his coat on, and walked away. " Stop a bit, young man," cried Bannerman, " You're in a mighty hurry all at once. I want to talk to you. You can't see Kate to-night, you know, so you needn't distress yourself." Strahan was dumb — partly with fear, partly with ineffectual resentment. Kate was the name of the barmaid at the Red Lion. What did Bannerman mean by linking her name with his ? Was he making a shrewd guess, or did he know anything ? " Fine girl, that Kate, you know, Strahan," said Bannerman, patronisingly ; " but not the sort for you, you know. Oh no ! not the sort for you.

Decidedly not. What do you think, young man ? " " I don't know what you mean," stammered Strahan. " Oh yes you do," said Bannerman. " And I'm talking to you for your good, you know. I like to act like a father to my young men. You can consider me your father. And I say she isn't the sort for you. I don't say she isn't what she ought to be, but — well, I need say no more. No," he continued, wheezily, with an indescribable grin of satisfaction, " she isn't the sort for you." Strahan could bear no more. He rushed out of the shop. His heart seemed too full to beat ; he felt as though it were bursting. It was impossible to be sure how far Bannerman was merely hilarious, how far malicious. His jokes often had a sting in them, and were a coarse way of saying cruel things. Strahan knew also that Mary Messenger had heard MIDDLEHAM. 11 every word her uncle had said, and it was that which smote him with the most poignant shame.

In some women there is a sort of relentless purity which makes them terrible to us in our ignoble moods. They stand aloof from us, and are as cold as statuary to our touch. Warm they are> and loving, till we offend that delicate female sense of theirs, but at that touch they become frozen, and seem to tower above us in disdainful majesty, as a goddess might. Mary Messenger was such a woman. Many times Strahan had been puzzled by something in her which repelled him. She could be tender and even gay, but there was an unconscious dignity about her, which shielded her like an invisible armour. Strahan called it stiff ness and reserve, but he was not acute enough to know from what it sprang. It really meant that Mary's nature, in its deepest elements, was severely pure and severely proud. Her pride was a noble, virginal pride, at once passionate and restrained, her purity an eager and disdainful force, to which mere sensuous love had no existence.

What made Mary often seem stiff with Strahan was that she instinctively felt that there was something in him that was hostile to her, a part of his nature in which her thoughts were not at home. When Strahan left the shop he rushed into the HE REDEMPTION OF EDWARD STRAHAN. 12 open air. He felt stifled in the atmosphere of suspicion which Bannerman's words had created, and his physical longing for fresh air was the reflex of his moral mood. It was an exquisite night in late November. The sky was a blue-black polished vault, and the stars glittered with an icy sparkle. The air was perfectly still, a profound calm filled heaven and earth. The very stillness struck him like a reproach. He knew little of astronomy, but he knew enough to understand the surpassing majesty of the spectacle which the heavens pre sented, and to feel awed and soothed by it.

He felt the meanness of his own position all the more acutely because the scene was so vast and splendid. Here were these uncounted worlds moving on their steadfast paths — calm, unresting, unhasting, unconscious of him and his misery, careless of him and all his petty embarrassments. What did it all matter ? What did anything matter ? In a few years all that would be left of him would be a pinch of dust, mixed with the myriad atoms of the earth, carried onward in its punctual movements, and the stars would shine just as serenely, the heavens sparkle with as keen a fire. For a moment he felt as though his personality were absorbed in the great life of nature, and told himself that he had disquieted himself in vain. MIDDLEHAM. 13 But it is, after all, impossible to free ourselves from the consequences of our own follies by any such traffic with nature.

Strahan was speedily made conscious of this by the sound of a voice he had already begun to hate. The Red Lion was closed, but Kate stood at the door, and as Strahan stepped into the street she saw him and called him. When he did not reply — and indeed in his agitation of mind he had not heard — she called louder. " I want to speak to you. Are you deaf ? " she said. Mechanically, Strahan turned to her. " I'm in a hurry," he said. " I can't stop." " Can't you ? " she said. " Well, you'll have to. I want to know where that brooch is you promised me. You promised it a month ago ; you said you had sent to London for it. Does it take a month for brooches to be sent from London ? " At that moment Strahan noticed that a light appeared in the topmost window of Bannerman's house. It was Mary's bedroom, and he suddenly became conscious that in that clear still air all that he said could easily be overheard.

For the second time that evening it seemed to him that Mary was fated to be an unconscious eavesdropper, and he was to be humiliated in her eyes. He was stung into sudden passion. HE REDEMPTION OF EDWARD STRAHAN. 14 " I tell you I can't stop," he said. " And," he added, in an angry whisper, " I wouldn't if I could. I won't see you any more. Do you understand that ? " The girl laughed scornfully. " Oh yes, you will," she cried. " You don't escape so easily as that. I shall come and see you if you don't come and see me. Besides, you know, there's that letter of yours, which Mr. Bannerman might like to see, and he shall see it too if you don't mind what you're at." What was Strahan to do ? The girl had no sense of caution even, and in her irritation was speaking loud enough for all the Bannerman household to hear if they had a mind to listen.

The letter of which she spoke had been a thorn in Strahan's side for months. In a foolish moment of joviality — alcoholic joviality, of course — he had once written her a mock love-letter. He did not know what was in it, for he was hardly conscious of what he wrote. But he knew that he had com promised himself, and he knew that Kate was quite unprincipled, and if it served her ends would be likely enough to show the letter to either Bannerman or Mary. That was the secret of her power over him. There was no help for it He went into the Red Lion with Kate. MIDDLEHAM. 15 In the meantime Mary Messenger sat alone in her bedroom, thinking she had recognised Strahan's voice in the street, but she was too disdainful to attempt the odious role of the eavesdropper. And indeed she had heard enough already from her uncle's lips.

I have said nothing of Mary's history, and what there is to be told can be put in a few sentences. She was an orphan, and had been received into the Bannerman household when about twelve years of age. Bannerman had caused it to be inferred among his friends that charity was the sole motive which had actuated him in his conduct towards her, but, as a matter of fact, charity had had nothing whatever to do with the transaction. There was a small sum of money settled upon Mary, and Bannerman thought the interest of this money might as well be administered by him as anybody else, and he was easily able to effect an arrangement with her trustees. Mrs. Bannerman, who was then alive, thought that Mary might save her a servant, and for that reason readily acquiesced in the arrangement. Thus, under the plea of charity, the Bannermans made a highly advantageous bargain for themselves.

They obtained the services of a bright, intelligent girl, who soon proved herself worth a couple of servants, but instead of paying her any wages they received fifty pounds a year for allowing her to serve them. This was what Mr. Bannerman called charity — a virtue which he often recommended to his neighbours as " the dooty of a Christian, however much it cost him." Mary had grown up in a house where the scale of life was gross and clumsy, but if her environment had thwarted the development, it had not otherwise injured the real refinement of her nature. On some natures environment has little power, because they are self-poised, and are not plastic under the hand of circumstance. Mary's nature resembled a lovely flower, which had grown white and strong out of a polluted soil. Her father had been a man of quick intelligence, and he had bequeathed his eagerness of mind to his daughter.

I have said that she loved books, and she often felt amid the unblessed drudgeries of her girlhood that they alone kept her really alive. She knew her Shakespeare as few girls know him, and the evil in him had not existed for her, while the good had been the strongest influence of her life. In this little room, where she now sat, the only happy hours of her life had been passed. There she had found a retreat from in solence and sordidness, from the nagging tongue of her aunt, and the coarse familiarity of her uncle, and especially from the dreariness of the Bannerman MIDDLEHAM. 17 Sabbath, which was devoted to indolence, cant, over-eating, and somnolence. Mrs. Bannerman was always curious about this room, because there was something in its air of refinement which baffled her. It was small, little better than an attic indeed ; it was plainly and parsimoniously furnished ; but there was an aspect of daintiness about it which its poverty could not conceal.

Its only ornaments were a tiny shelf full of books, and an old miniature of Mary's mother, but they were sufficient to give a touch of distinction to the room, a hint that a mind and heart dwelt there as well as a body. All was white, clean, orderly ; a maiden's bower has often been a more sumptuous retreat, but none could be more maidenly. To-night, as Mary entered the room, her thoughts were painful and perplexed. She was only eighteen, and was still lingering on the threshold of womanhood. She was vaguely conscious of the impending change in the sense of stronger thoughts and more serious purposes. There had been a time when she had clothed Strahan with every conceivable garment that romance can weave ; he had been the Romeo, the Lothario, the Hamlet of her dreams. It had been his bright intelligence which had done much to rouse hers, and he had more than once lent her books which had been to her as new windows opening on an unknown and fascinating world.

Latterly she had been keenly conscious that these garments of romance had worn very threadbare. She^ loved Strahan with more passion than she knew, but hers was not the nature that could remain in prolonged blindness to his faults. There was a touch of hardness in her too, an innate abhorrence of weakness, which showed itself in the calmness of her brow and the deep fire of her eyes. She placed her candle on the little table, and drew down the blind. Then she unfastened the thick coils of her hair, with a sort of unrealised sense that there was more than physical liberation in the act. For a long time she sat perfectly silent, her head leaning on her hand, her thoughts busy with the events of the evening. It would be difficult to describe those thoughts. A thousand times her heart said, " I love him," and her mind replied, " Thou shalt not love him."

Mechanically she unlocked her little writing-desk, and took out a letter. It was the only letter she had ever received from Strahan. It was dated from a distant town, where he had been spending a few days, and there was little in it that was not commonplace. Still she had kept it, and she MIDDLEHAM. 19 remembered with what keen delight she had received it. It struck her now, for the first time, that perhaps Strahan had written letters to others beside herself, others to whom he might have felt attachment. It was a new thought to her, a thought that would have been inconceivable an hour ago. With a quick gesture of anger she thrust the note into the flame, and then, repenting of her act, drew it out again half-burnt, and smoothed the charred edges. Then she burst into tears. Happy are those who can weep, for whom is unknown that dry-eyed anguish which is perpetually alert and unslaked, and which burrows silently into the heart's core, like an undying worm.

There is in tears a physical absolution and remission of sorrow. Mary wept softly, silently, and her pain was soothed. Presently she rose, extinguished the light, and drew up the blind. There was that same midnight pomp that Strahan had looked upon, ' a majestical roof fretted with golden fire.' A slight breeze was now blowing, and in the west ward a pile of snowy clouds was slowly advancing, like an invading army. One solitary star trembled on the summit of these alps of air, and as Mary looked it was silently submerged. It seemed to her as if in like manner the one light that had brightened her narrow life was going out, sinking under the impending bulk of some unrealised calamity. But even with such thoughts there mingled others, similar to those which had been Strahan's, as he looked into that profound vault of starlit air an hour ago.

She also felt the grandeur of the spectacle as a sort of reproach on the egotism of so small a creature as man. And surely, she said to herself, life can have other aims and purposes even if love be lost ; it is like the firmament, too vast a thing to miss a single star. And yet, if that star be the one star that is shining in the sky, its loss is not so easily measured ; and this was Mary's last thought as she sunk into the abyss of troubled dreams.

Chapter II

A FIRST VIEW OF LONDON. \\ 7 HEN Strahan woke next morning it was " with a confused sense that something un happy had happened to him. He was conscious of a gnawing pain about the heart, as of some uneasy sorrow which sleep could not dull. His head ached, his brain was weary. He seemed to have been arguing, protesting, declaiming all night upon some subject of supreme importance, but which for the life of him he could not recall. In those drowsy moments immediately before waking, when the curtain of sleep is being slowly lifted from the mind like a withdrawing mist, the sense of this trouble grew keener, although the cause of it was still concealed. Then, all at once, the sharp light of consciousness poured across the brain, and he knew what had happened to him. With a shock of shame and surprise he sat up in bed, and perceived that it was a strange room which he occupied.

And then the memory recovered its functions, and he recollected Bannerman's words and looks, Kate's vulgar importunity, his own fear and folly. It was a room in the Red Lion he had slept in. The first feeling in Strahan's heart was of salutary shame ; the next of despair. He could have torn his own flesh in the fierce anger that he felt agains himself. He felt that he had been betrayed by the baser part of himself, and he was full of self-con tempt. So intense was the imaginative and moral passion that possessed him that it almost seemed as if this baser self took a distinct and separate form, and stood beside him like a mocking fiend. It seemed to nod at him, and jibe him, and say, " You are my slave ! I am your master, and you must needs be obedient to me." As the fancy fastened on him and grew stronger, he seemed to see this horrible presence : a hateful, unclean, mean, malevolent thing — a foul Frankenstein monster of his own creation.