A Mere Cypher. A novel, etc

Chapter I

From a street of houses the uniform white paint of which has taken on varying shades of grime, from white paving-stones and a narrow road, it is not possible, granted any quantity of sunshine, to produce colour; but it is possible to produce glare. In an atmosphere so laden with smoke and dust that even the sky looks pale and dirty it is not possible to produce exhilaration ; but it is possible to produce almost unlimited oppression. Foiled on the one side the full power of the sun may be concentrated on the other, and nature's great magician become a tyrant. VOL. II. B In a small crescent in Bloomsbury cause and effect of this description were equally rife one August morning, five years after the spring which Norman Strange had spent at Thornsdyke. It was not yet ten o'clock, but the sun had been beating piti lessly down for the last five hours ; and there was something cruel and relentless in the steady brilliance with which it scorched the ugly houses and the dusty road, making the ugliness uglier and the dust more all pervading, until it seemed that no November fog or February downpour could be so unendurably dreary as that glaring summer sunshine.

The houses were not provided with sun blinds ; in most of them the choice lay between the semi-darkness and total airless ness of tightly-closed Venetian blinds, and the full glare of the sun. In the first-floor room of one of those in which the former alternative had been chosen, somewhat late for the meal though it was, Mrs. Custance and her husband were at breakfast. It was a small, furnished house, and the room was the description of dining - room inevitable under the circumstances, rather shabby, rather dingy, essentially wanting in any sort of charm. One of the closely-drawn Venetian blinds wanted mending, there was a great gap between two of the laths, and the ray of hot, vivid sunshine which came through and fell across the room in a great glaring bar, bringing with it a suggestion of what lay outside that seemed to add to the oppression of the atmosphere within, seemed to touch nothing in which it did not bring into strong relief the ugliness and dreariness which the surrounding dimness hardly seemed to soften.

It would have B been difficult to say exactly what was wrong. The room was scrupulously clean and neat ; the ugly sideboard was in no need of polish ; dust, except in that relentless ray of light, was nowhere to be seen ; nor was there any painfully apparent air of poverty; but there was a curiously forlorn and unhomelike appearance which was not merely the ordinary characteristic of the furnished house, but which suggested a total want of hope or interest in the care bestowed upon it. Silence had been quite unbroken since breakfast began. Once Dr. Custance had looked up from his plate as though to make a remark, and the nervous start with which his wife received the movement was a proof that such an occurrence was an exception. Something in the paper propped before him, however, had apparently caught his eye at the moment ; he had not spoken, and after a moment or two of nervous attention, she had relapsed into the attitude in which she had sat since finishing her own breakfast some minutes earlier, her hands loosely clasped in her lap, her head a little droop ing ; an attitude expressive of nothing but a patient sense of oppression which might have been either physical or mental.

Five years had gone by since Norman Strange had said good-bye to Mrs. Custance in the dining-room at the White House ; five more uneventful years in her uneventful life. Dr. Custance had given up his practice at Thornsdyke shortly after Norman's de parture, and they had lived for some time in a fashionable seaside town, whence they had moved, first into the country again, and then to London. Nothing more stirring than these removals had occurred, and Mrs. Custance had accepted these in a manner to deprive them of any exciting or striking character istics which they might have possessed. " Mrs. Custance was so indifferent," was the opinion that was gaining ground in Thornsdyke when she left it. This being the case, time had naturally changed her very little. Five years before, at six-and twenty, she had looked like a woman of six-and-thirty ; now at one-and-thirty she looked little older.

Change, striking change of any kind, was rather inconceivable in connection with that little, worn, faded personality. Change involves the presence of force of some kind, even if the change consists simply in the withdrawal of that force ; and she apparently had so little. And yet if there had been any one at once sympathetic and keen - sighted to compare the Mrs. Custance of Thornsdyke with the Mrs. Custance who sat opposite her husband at the breakfast-table on this August morning, it would have been obvious that she was altered, though the alteration consisted solely in an accentuation of characteristics that had been hers before. The dull blue eyes were duller than they had been, and there was a patient weariness in their apathetic glance ; a weariness which had changed, as she lifted them to her husband, to a nervousness so painful and excessive that it was almost fear.

There were lines about the mouth which had not been there five years ago, and which told of hopeless, unresenting depression. Such expression as her face had once possessed seemed to have subdued itself into some thing that had not the power of endurance, nor the dignity of resignation, nor the pathos of suffering, but which faintly and strangely enough suggested all the three; numbed, and impotent to struggle into active life. Her figure looked a little thinner and more awkward than it had been, and her face also was, perhaps, a trifle thinner and more colourless for the passing of those five un eventful years. " I thought I told you yesterday to mend that blind." The ray of sunlight on its way through the room was falling now exactly across Dr. Custance's newspaper, and its dazzling presence caused him to shift his position as he addressed himself to his wife without looking up at her.

She looked up, however, at the first sound of the cold, hard voice in which he spoke ; the loose clasp of her thin hands became a nervous grip, and her voice, as she answered, was hurried and faltering. It had evidently been no part of the work of the past five years to lessen her timidity with her husband. "I — I forgot ; I am very sorry ! " was all she said. " I'm glad of that, at any rate ! " The words themselves were simple enough, but the tone in which they were spoken, dry and sarcastic, made them cut like a knife, and the blue eyes which watched him so anxiously dilated a little. Their owner made no attempt to defend herself, however, and Dr. Custance, who had turned his head towards her as he finished speaking, looked at her for a moment and then went on, speaking slowly and deliberately in the same tone : " I don't know, Leila, of course, whether you are pleased to consider yourself either amusing or ornamental — possibly you find yourself both.

I merely wish to mention that I make no demands on you in those lines, and that the only expectation I have is some slight attention to trifling domestic details." He paused, tacitly inviting a response, and her lips moved, but no words were audible. " What did you say, Leila ? It was some time now since Dr. Custance had discovered a means by which practically unlimited distress might be inflicted on his wife with no trouble and a considerable amount of contemptuous amusement to himself, and he used his weapon with lazy satisfaction. Having indulged his temper as far as he ever took the trouble to indulge it, he had only to insist on audible answers when nervousness had rendered speech almost impossible to her. Five years had not improved Dr. Custance. They had been five years of such lazy self-indulgence as his circum stances allowed ; five years of which the only effort had been the effort to obtain money without giving money's equivalent — labour ; five years during which he had used the large share of brains with which nature had endowed him only in shirking work wherever it was possible, and in scamping it where it was not.

The result was visible in his face as he sat now looking at his wife. It had grown coarser and harder; the eyes were more indolent than ever, but there was a look in them that suggested a capacity for unscrupulous calculation ; and the half-smile that curled his lips as he met the bewildered blue eyes was a cruel one. His lips were parted to repeat his question when his attention was diverted by the opening of the door and the entrance of the servant. " If you please, sir," she said, " the Reverend Chisholm would like to speak to 7) you. " Chisholm ! " exclaimed Dr. Custance. " Confound the fellow ! What can he want at this time in the morning?" Then he rose from his chair with a movement of indolent annoyance, and as he did so the strained expression of distress which had faintly shadowed itself forth on Mrs. Custance's face gradually subsided, as though with the sense that her bad moment was passed for the time being.

A certain anxious, mute observance of her husband remained, how ever ; it was apparently habitual to her in his presence. There was a moment's pause, and then Dr. Custance turned to the servant — a fresh looking country girl. " Have you shown him into the drawing room ? " he said. " And how lonois it, Susan, since I told you to say Mr. Chis holm ? " " I beg your pardon, sir, I'm sure," was the answer. " No, sir, I was turning out the drawing-room, and the Reverend — leastways, Mr. Chisholm, he's in the hall, sir." " You must show him in here then, I suppose," returned Dr. Custance, with a glance at the breakfast-table, and a muttered reiteration of, " Confound the fellow ! " as the girl withdrew. His wife had risen and was standing hesitating by the table, and Dr. Custance had only time to say to her quickly, and in a tone which made the words an order, " You needn't go, Leila !

" before the " Reverend Chisholm " appeared in person. He was a very young man, short and rather round. He had a round, innocent face in which the features made no particular effort to assert themselves ; eyes of which neither the colour nor the size was calculated to impress, though they were honest and simple ; and sandy hair. What his personality might have been under other circumstances it was not possible to say, for any individuality that he might have possessed was completely swamped by the strong professional aroma which was his most striking characteristic. He had evidently very recently become a pillar of the Church ; his youth, the ultra-correctness of his dress — that of the orthodox High Churchman — testified to this fact, and his bearing and expression testified to his constant sense of the dignities and responsi bilities of his new position.

And the pallor of the chubby, boyish face that should naturally have been rather rosy than other wise, and a tired, fagged appearance about the greenish eyes, testified further to the fact that those responsibilities were no mere name to him, that his embryo priestliness consisted not merely in being, but that a very considerable amount of earnest doing accompanied it. He came quickly into the room and advanced to Mrs. Custance with a mixture of priestly confidence and individual embarrass ment that mingled somewhat oddly, and he shook the hand she held out to him almost as nervously as it was offered. " I'm afraid I'm disturbing you, Mrs. Custance ! " he said, and the diffident de ference in his tone and manner was by no means affected by the ill-assured uncertainty of the woman to whom he spoke.

Ladies had been something of an alarm to Aubrey Chisholm throughout the innocent schoolboy life that had lasted to all intents and purposes up to his ordination, and he had had as yet little professional intercourse with them. He was quite unconscious of any difference between Mrs. Custance and the most self possessed woman of his acquaintance, except inasmuch as additional respect was due to the former in his eyes, owing to the fact that she " worked in the parish " ; the parish in question being that particular cure of souls which was his centre of the universe. Mrs. Custance, however, was so little accustomed to respect that her nervousness was only increased by it, and they embarrassed one another mutually. *' Not at all," she murmured, now. " How do you do?" And Mr. Chisholm turned to shake hands with her husband.

" I'm rather early," he said apologetically, speaking in the natural, straightforward way which was evidently habitual to him when he was not embarrassed. A gentleman's instinct kept his eyes meanwhile from the late breakfast-table which his youthful asceticism was loudly condemning. " It's a busy day with us, and I was anxious to see you before I began my visiting." " Don't apologise," returned Dr. Custance languidly, but by no means uncourteously. " I am quite at your service. Won't you sit down ? " " I have come about the trust lands, as no doubt you take for granted," answered the young man with a faint smile, sitting down as he spoke on the nearest chair, apparently hardly conscious of his movement in his absorption in his subject. " I want to have another talk with you about their possibilities."

He glanced at Mrs. Custance as he finished, as though he would have preferred the freedom of her absence for the talk in question ; but she had seated herself on a chair by the window, and even if she had seen and understood the glance the vol. n. c thought of defying her husband's wish would never have occurred to her. " Their impossibilities, Mr. Chisholm, I'm afraid you mean," answered Dr. Custance pleasantly and imperturbably. " That's just the point," returned the young man, speaking with a plodding eager ness that belonged to his honest face. " If I could only get you to see that I do not contemplate the impossible, it would be half the battle." He paused, and then, Dr. Custance re sponding by a smile and a shake of the head, he began again, his manner quickened into the ardour of one whose interest in an always favourite topic has quite recently received a stimulus.

" Now, just let me put the case to you again as I see it," he said. " The land when the trust was originally willed was worth several hundred pounds a year. A suc cession of bad tenants and careless steward ship have reduced it until it brings in at this moment not more than a third of the original sum, and the trust is practically a dead letter." ;t That is unfortunately the case," corro borated Dr. Custance parenthetically. " But there is the land still ! " was the eager response. " Its resources are as great now as they were a hundred years ago. As great, do I say. Dr. Custance ? They are considerably greater. The modern improve ments in the science ot farming and drainage open out numberless possibilities of improve ment. They have only to be applied and the mistakes and carelessness of the last thirty years would be neutralised in three, and the people who are so sadly in need of assistance would have that which is theirs by right." c There was a ring of very real earnest ness in the last words, in spite of the strong access of priestliness that had suppressed the youthful, practical, persevering argumenta tiveness of the earlier part of his speech.

Dr. Custance smiled again and passed the last words over. He was leaning lazily back in his chair surveying the unconscious awkwardness of his visitor's attitude with in dolent, inscrutable eyes. " As you say," he observed placidly, " these methods have only to be applied. Unfortunately the said application constitutes the impossibility I spoke of. ' " That is exactly what brings me here this morning," returned the young man, promptly returning to his business-like tone with an obvious effort, and evidently flatter ing himself that he was speaking with the greatest perspicuity. " The first outlay has hitherto been — I won't say the impossibility — but the obstacle, and now I think the way through it has shown itself." " Indeed!" " I have heard of a man — or rather, I should say, that my sister has heard of a man — -who could, we believe, be induced to advance the necessary capital."

As Aubrey Chisholm made his statement in a tone which was perhaps not so free from elation and importance as he hoped, Dr. Custance darted one keen, quick look at him. Then he settled himself rather more com fortably in his chair, meditated the young man's statement apparently for a moment, and finally said, fixing his indolent eyes full on the simple, boyish face : " Miss Chisholm thinks he might be induced to advance the necessary capital ! Has she, or have you, may I ask, Mr. Chisholm, considered the detail of security ? Possibly you have arranged that with Mr. Essendine." " My uncle will do nothing, as you know, Dr. Custance," said the young man, "but my sister and I have considered the question and we think that the land itself — or that Mr. Rowe, the gentleman I speak of, who is deeply interested in the condition of the poor, might possibly consent to waive the question."

He spoke stoutly and rather stiffly, holding loyally by his introduction of his sister's name into the argument, but evidently a little shaken and disturbed by Dr. Custance's politely belittling reception of his words. "When you come to consider the whole case," he broke out suddenly, "when you look at all that is involved " But Dr. Custance interrupted him, politely but with an expression that seemed to imply that he had no intention of being bored to that extent, and that he was saving himself by the handiest means available. "Quite so! Quite so!" he said gravely and quickly. " Well, Mr. Chisholm, if you and Miss Chisholm have paved the way, as I imagine you have, on the philanthropic lines, perhaps the next step will be for me to approach this Mr. Rowe from the business point of view. Where is he to be found ?

" Aubrey Chisholm appeared to feel that the matter was thus cursorily disposed of. He had come to Dr. Custance that morning for the express purpose of inducing him to put himself into communication with the said Mr. Rowe, but he apparently experienced none of the elation incidental to the attain ment of an end as Dr. Custance gravely took down the address dictated to him. On the contrary he looked as though the colour had in some mysterious way departed from his scheme, whatever that scheme might be. He hesitated a moment as though he were trying, and trying in vain, to think of something more to say, and then he rose, saying : " I needn't detain you any longer then, thanks, Dr. Custance. I must be getting back. You will let me know the result." He took his leave of Mrs. Custance in a saddened, almost depressed manner, and went away, accompanied to the door by Dr. Custance, with the indolent cordiality which he had exhibited throughout the interview.

Chapter II

That manner of Dr. Custance's was very far from expressive of his real feeling towards Aubrey Chisholm, and was dictated solely by policy. Dr. Custance had come to London six months before on speculation merely. He had grown tired of country practices, and it had occurred to him that London was, after all, the obvious place in which to " pick up" something that should be a sinecure as far as work went. In the very first week of his arrival he had chanced to stumble across a City magnate whose acquaintance he had made some years earlier ; a pompous, stupid, and very rich old man, who had quarrelled with his doctor at the sea-side place at which he was staying, and had called in Dr. Cus tance out of pure and simple spite. In conversation with this Mr. Essendine Dr. Custance had cleverly, and apparently quite incidentally, alluded to his present unoccupied position, and the chance cast had been successful beyond his hopes ; it resulted in an offer made him by Mr. Essendine with much pomp and patronage, of a post which was exactly what he wanted, inasmuch as it entailed a yearly income and nothing to do for it.

It was an anomalous post, and it had originated as many anomalies do in a course of neglect and wrong. An ancestor of the Essendine family, some hundred years before — a rich old man of an eccentric and disagree able temperament — had begun the course by quarrelling with his family, and dyino-, had left his large property in a variety of curious trusts, apparently arranged with a view less to the benefit of mankind than to the annoyance of his relatives. Among these trusts was one which, at that stage of cos mopolitan developement obtaining at the time, had seemed more eccentric than all the rest At a date when the colonies were comparatively young, and emigrant and exile were synonymous terms, a clause in old Ralph Essendine's will devoted the yearly income of a certain piece of land in the Midlands to the furtherance of emigration from a certain specified parish in London ; " the testator believing." so ran the crabbed and very unpatriotic will, " that it is impossible for a man to be worse off in a wilderness than he must be in England, and that separation from his family would, in most cases, be an inestimable boon to him."

That the money thus willed misfht never be diverted from the purpose thus charitably indicated, it was further provided by the will that the trust should never be amalgamated with any other chari table society, but should be administered by salaried officers of its own, to be appointed by the trustees, and paid out of the income derived from the land. And it was further provided that the parish indicated by the will, and no other, should benefit. Like attracts like, and it was not strange that a trust so willed, originating, as it were, in spite and rancour, should from the first have been administered in no spirit of justice or honesty, and that little good to any one should have resulted from it. The funds were misappropriated, the land neglected, and a hundred years from old Ralph Essendine's death found the trust existing in name only, with only one trustee, the present Ralph Essendine, and only sufficient income to pay the one officer necessary under the terms of the will.

It was to this nominal secretaryship, treasurership, or managership, whichever it might most fitly be called since nothing was either managed or treasured, and where no correspondence was carried on, that Dr. Custance had been appointed by the sole trustee. Aubrey Chisholm was the present Ralph Essendine's nephew, and it was simply be cause he was his patron's near relation that the young man never received from Dr. Custance anything approaching discourtesy. For Aubrey Chisholm was the one shadow upon Dr. Custance's satisfaction with his present lot. He and his sister were the only children of a sister of Mr. Essendine's ; she had married a young soldier, a descendant of a Ions: line of soldiers, a scholar and a gentleman. She and her husband had both died before the little girl was two years old, leaving their children, each with a little money, to the care of their mother's sister, who was rich and childless.

The boy had early developed an instinct for practical religion which had made the church his natural destination, and on his ordination, fate — a very perverse and irritating fate it seemed to Dr. Custance — had settled him in the very parish to which his great-great orandfather had made his remarkable be quest for the salvation of man from his relations, a parish in the south of London. At that time the young man had never heard of the Essendine trust, and when a chance discovery made by his sister in some old family papers opened out the track, and the state of things became clear, his excitement •the excitement of brother and sister alike was considerable. Time, which had stood still with the Essendine trust, had stood still with nothing else. The parish which a century before had been poor certainly, but not very poor, was now one of those terrible problems to be found in every great city; hopelessly poverty stricken, miserably degraded, and over crowded to a degree inconceivable by those who do not know.

The boon so cynically provided a hundred years before had changed its aspect in the interval, and was capable now of a reading that made it a boon indeed ; emigration with all its possibilities had become a fact such as old Ralph Essendine had never dreamed of. To Aubrey Chis holm, looking at the terrible, compression, the stifling contact with which he was brought daily face to face, the thought of an annual income, even a small annual income, to be devoted to the transport of a few of those miserable human beings to homes where they should have space and hope was the thought of an inestimable blessing. Aubrey was neither quick nor easily worked up, but stimulated by the enthusiasm of his sister he set to work to secure that blessing for his people ; to revive the dead letter of the past and make it a living reality of the present.

It needed all his sister's ardour and his own sense of duty to bring him up to his first step, which was obviously a call on the sole trustee of the fund. Interviews with his uncle had been eminently unpleasant to him all his life. And here at the very outset he met with a heavy rebuff. Family rancour is a curious thing, and never more curious than in its hereditary aspect. The Ralph Essendine of eighteen hundred and eighty hated the Ralph Essendine of seventeen hundred and eighty as his grandfather had done before him, and he would do nothing whatever towards the revival of the trust left by him. He was aware that the income of the trust was swallowed by the salary of its official ; he was grimly satisfied with the fact as pointing the futility of his ancestor's arrangements. Beyond this he neither knew nor cared anything about the business, and he left his nephew no doubt whatever as to his sentiments on the subject.

Aubrey Chisholm himself might have accepted the obstacles thus raised between him and his hopes as at any rate indefinitely postponing the realisation of the latter ; but his sister was not easily discouraged. At her instigation and with her help her brother went into all the details of the trust, investi- VOL. II. d gated the property, and interviewed Dr. Custance. The property consisted of a considerable acreage of farm land ; a series of bad tenants had reduced it to the lowest stage of exhaustion, and much of it was also practically undrained. Its present tenant held it at a merely nominal rent, and was too poor a man to improve it in any way. All sorts of schemes by which its value might be increased were concocted by the brother and sister, some of them somewhat youthful, but none wholly impracticable, and were unfolded by Aubrey to Dr. Cus tance, one after the other, with the same hopeful patience and perseverance.

But Dr. Custance had no intention of lending himself to any plan that involved work for himself in the present or in the future. He was lazily content with his small income, and he meant to retain it on the present terms, and with this end in view he quietly extinguished any and every scheme which was likely to lead to important de velopements. The chief and most potent extinguisher employed by him, was a simple representation of the lack of capital. He altogether negatived any proposal for bor rowing it, and uncountenanced either by him or by Mr. Essendine, any effort in this direction on the part of Aubrey Chisholm was of course impossible. And on the financial question Dr. Custance was in the habit of assuming a pleasant superiority as of a practical man of the world, before which the young man's theories, however carefully worked out, however sound they had seemed before they were propounded to Dr. Custance, suddenly seemed to lose all backbone for him.

It was the jubilant conviction of both brother and sister that the capital difficulty D was practically solved, that had brought Aubrey Chisholm to the house in Blooms bury so early on that August morning. It was some time now since their last attempt had failed, and their present move had been carefully and patiently planned. The Mr. Rowe of whom Aubrey had spoken, was a rich merchant of philanthropic tendencies ; he had listened with much apparent interest to the statements made by Aubrey, and with even more obvious interest to the statements made by Aubrey's sister, and he was regarded by both as the long looked-for lever. The doubt and depression in which Aubrey brought the interview to a close, were the result of that manner which Dr. Custance had found extremely useful on several somewhat similar occasions in the course of their intercourse.