Roland Oliver: a novel

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Chapter I. The House In Agar Street

OLAND OLIVER had come back to Loudon to settle there. He had made up his mind that it was time for him to do something ; and he had a feeling that it was about time for him to begin to enjoy life. He had had a good deal of trouble so far.

Perhaps it may be as well to explain how he came by such an odd conjunction of names as Roland Oliver. His father's name was Oliver ; so there is no explanation needed about that. But his mother was a generous and highly-romantic woman, and when her boy was born she resolved that he should be called Roland, and thus sent forth into the world, published in advance as a hero and one of Nature's nobility, by the fact that h© bore the names of the two great Paladins —

Roland and Oliver — who are set off in common proverb one against the other. She was always impressing him with the not unfamiliar truth that life is a battle, and that it behoves all true men to quit themselves like heroes. Perhaps it need hardly be said that she was a devotee of Longfellow. Her son, she declared, would never prove unworthy of the heroic names he bore ; and she held to it that there could be Rolands and Olivers in the most commonplace ways of life. The boy used to smile sometimes at her enthusiasm, but he liked it all the same ; and his mind often went back to those dear talks with his mother — went back in tenderness and sorrow, for she died when he was only twelve years old.

Many years had passed since that first grief of his life. He was now in his thirtieth year ; he was not particularly handsome, but he had an expressive face and was well set up ; the sort of young man whose clothes naturally fit him. He was apparently making himself very comfortable in London. He had taken a very charming set of rooms in one of the streets out of Park Lane, and had been at some expense to have them furnished and decorated to please himself. He had reconciled the landlady of the house, a good-natured, active body, who had been a lady’s-maid in her time, to his theories of domestic art and the implied disparagement of her theories, and her chimneyornaments, and her table-covers, by the promise that whenever he left the lodgings the property should be hers free of all charge.

He let himself in with his latch-key one evening in the spring-time and found his lamp lighted, his fire burning cheerily, and the whole place seeming, as it were, to be giving him a cordial welcome and inviting him to sit down and make himself quite at home. A letter on a salver was lying conspicuously on the table ; he took it up and looked at it with hardly half-awakened interest. Perhaps the interest began to get a little more than half-awakened when he saw that the address was in a woman’s handwriting. Of late he had had very few acquaintances among women in London. He had been away so long ; he had not been home long enough to have renewed many of his former acquaintanceships. He opened the letter and read :

" You don't know me — perhaps never heard of me; but I am the wife of an old school-fellow of yours, whom since that time you always called your friend — I am told. I am the wife of Laurence

Caledon. He is very sick, and we are miserably poor — only because be is siok and can do nothiug. Will you come and see him? He does not know that I am writing this ; he would be too proud to let me do so if he knew it. Besides, he has said often that when people are rich, like you, they hate to be appealed to by old friends who are poor. Is this true of you? I don’t know. At all events, I give you the chance of proving yourself better than others in your position.”

The letter was signed, “ Mary Caledon.” Then there was a not unimportant postscript :

“ I was near forgetting to tell you that we live in a couple of little rooms at the top of No. 27, Agar Street, Strand; a trying ascent even for friendship ; another excuse for you not to come.”

Laurence Caledon ! His old friend ! Yes, indeed ; they had been friends for years. Their fathers had been friends. It was only a love trouble of Roland’s which had separated them. When Roland came back to his father, he learned that Laurence had got married and gone to live at Constantinople, where he was practising as a barrister, and doing well, it seemed, at the International Court. Roland remembered feeling at the time a pang of something like envy because of the married happiness of his friend. He had heard that Laurence’s wife was young, beautiful, and clever ; but that she had very little money. After his father’s death, he had tried to find Laurence in Constantinople; but Laurence and his wife were away somewhere, and so the matter dropped through. Roland wa3 always hoping to meet his old friend again, although he could not help thinking, with a little dash of bitterness of his own, that his old friend, now that he was happily married and settled down, would perhaps not care much about him.

And this was what had come of it all ! Laurence was in London, poor, broken down, perhaps in actual want. The letter from his wife — how bitter it was and distrustful ! He could well excuse that ; one of the many curses of poverty to those who have not been always poor is that it makes them so cruelly suspicious. Yet, while the tone of the letter rather repelled him, or at all events called for some mental excusings and explainings on his part, he could not but see that it did show some trust in him too, and that it did, as the writer said, give him a chance of proving that he was not the sort of man to turn from a friend who is down.

It was now seven o’clock. Roland had proposed to dress, to dine at his club, and to look into a theatre. He thought no more of the dinner or the theatre, but got into a hansom and started in quest of his old friend. Night was darkening down when he reached Agar Street in the Strand.

Agar Street is not a lively or a picturesque or an interesting thoroughfare. It gives one at first the notion that it is a street presenting only blind sides to the eye of the wayfarer. It seems out of the question to think of anybody living in such a place; to associate it with the thought of household fires, and cosy hearths, and the prattle of children’s voices. The yellow walls and pillars of a hospital stretch along one whole side of the street; and although no institution devoted to man’s benefit can be more useful than a hospital, yet the sight of one of these structures does not, as a rule, tend to brighten a neighbourhood. The other side of the little street was composed of tall, gaunt houses, the lower floors of which were given up to organisations of various kinds — a district School Board office, a private inquiry office, various offices of limited liability companies, an agricultural newspaper office, one or two dismal shops and forlorn coffee-houses.

Boland wandered up and down the street for a while, trying in the semi-darkness to find out the

TEE HOUSE IN AO AH STREET particular number of which he was in quest. He thought he had never seen a more dreary region. A man in robust health might be excused if his spirits were to give way under the mere pressure of having to inhabit such a thoroughfare. But only fancy being a poverty-stricken invalid there ! In truth Roland could not see any signs of life in any of the houses, except the two or three small shops and the windows of the hospital. The other tenements seemed to be places where business of some kind was transacted in the day, and which, after business hours, were left to the darkness, the rats, the black beetles, and the ghosts.

At last Roland found the house. Its lower floor was occupied by a society for the diffusion of something; and there were bell-handles rising one above another, corresponding with and symbolical of the several flights and floors. Some of the bell-handles had names inscribed beneath ; the uppermost one bore no name. About to touch this uppermost bell, he stopped for a moment and let the past come back upon him.

Roland Oliver was

Lord of himself — that heritage of woe,

as Byron says. He had no isolations — at -all events no near relations — living. His father had been in trade ; had owned a large West End establishment, with the privilege, blazoned on the outside, of proclaiming himself a servant of the Royal Family. The father, who had but the one child, especially desired him to turn out a gentleman, and was strong and severe on the subject of rank and respectability. A Spanish grandee of Old Castile could not have been more entirely filled with contempt for his humble fellow-creatures. His theories had been dinned into the young man’s head with the natural effect of making him a theoretical leveller of all class distinctions. The elder generation never seems quite to know how to manage the younger. The natural inclination of the younger set — of all of us when we were younger — is to get into antagonism with the accepted principles and theories which are preached at us by our too wise and self-asserting parents. The elder man in this story ought to have preached to the younger nothing but the brotherhood of man and the baseness of earthly dignities and class distinctions ; then he might have quietly carried his point. He did not adopt such a plan, however, and he failed ; and his son fell in love with the- daughter of a music - master who lived in Clapham. Roland told his father of his love, and the father stormed at him ; the lover would not give way, and so the angry parent turned him out of doors.

The young man’s pride and love sustained him. He told all to his love, and told her he was determined to go out and conquer the world for her ; in other words, make a fortune for her. They could not marry while he had nothing and she had nothing ; but give up each other they would not. So Roland turned into money some of the few valuables left him by his mother, and started out for the diamond mines of South Africa. Miss Lydia Palmer, his sweetheart, gave him as they were parting, not merely a lock of her dark brown hair, but an interwoven armlet or bangle of it, which he was always to wear for her sake, and which was to be a sort of amulet for his constancy and his personal safety.

He did not begin to make much of a fortune. If the luck was not dead against him yet it did not do much for him. He went on striving and straining. He had a certain capacity for inventing, and he turned out various inventions meant to be useful in mining work. But the inventions only returned, as Macbeth says, to plague the inventor.

A whole year went over in this way, until one day the European mail brought him out two letters, each of which had some effect upon his life. One was from his softened and repentant father, full of affection, beseeching him to come home and marry whom he pleased, and bring her to live in the paternal home, and adding that the health of the writer had been but poor of late. The other was from his sweetheart, quietly telling him that she was not his sweetheart any more; that she was sure their engagement was a sin, because it was opposed to the wishes of both their parents — which was news to Roland, so far as her parent was concerned — and that therefore it must be considered as broken off ; and that she would trouble him to return her the armlet of dark brown hair. The meaning of this, as he soon after learned, was that the inconstant Lydia had grown tired of waiting, had lost faith in his conquering the world for her, and had been asked by a clever young lawyer to honour him with her hand. Before Roland got back to England she was married ; and oh, what a pang of remorse went through her sensitive heart when she learned that her rejected lover was taken back to his fathers house, and was to be his father's heir, and that if she had only waited she would have shared the inheritance !

This was three years before the opening of the story we have to tell. The father died within a year. He had sold off his business and his establishment, and when dying left his son a considerable fortune. The young man found himself not indeed rich in the vast sense of present day fortunes, but with enough to give to a bachelor a life of luxury, if he cared about it, and to enable him, if he chose to marry, to offer to his wife a nice houso in the West End, a brougham, a victoria, and a horse to ride in the Row.

Roland was very sorry for his father ; his mind was filled with contrition, although he had really done nothing which called for contriteness. Ho and the elder man had lived a very happy season together before the father died ; and the young man’s heart was wounded sorely at the time, and kindness touched him. After his father’s death he went abroad, and wandered about a good deal, just going whither chance or caprice might take him. During his wanderings and his lonely thinkings he found a great change had come over him. He had turned from a boy into a man.

At last he made up his mind to go home — that

B is to say to go back to England, for it was not now muck of a homo to him. But ho began to think that it was time he should now turn to and do some work in the world. IIo was not quite clear what the work was to be, but he said to himself : “ I have a good deal of money ; I have had an education ; I have picked up a pretty fair share of experience in various ways ; I have read many books, and I know a lot of things that cannot bo learned from books; I have suffered not a little, and there ought to be some way in which I could be of service in the world.” His heart was much humbled and softened. He had quite recovered from the hurt that had been given him by his false true-love — whom he had only loved because at the time he had to love somebody ; but he was not in the least inclined to try another chance of love-making. He did not care much for the society of women ; as he chanced to find them they seemed either too young to be interesting or not quite young enough to be idolised. On the whole it must be owned that when he returned to London he was by no means an unhappy young man ; such sorrow as he had had was now a source of sweetness and not of bitterness to his heart. After the first few days in London he began to find life very interesting. The only acquaintances he had in the metropolis were people he had met when travelling; some of them were well worth knowing, and gave him a cordial welcome. It was the spring-time of the year, and spring-time was in the breast of the young man.

Chapter II. The Old Friend And The New

OLAND rang the uppermost bell and the door was presently opened by a pretty little servant-girl, who seemed almost amazed at the sight of any visitor. She told him that Mr. Caledon was at home, and volunteered the additional information that Mr. Caledon never went out. Then she took his card and showed him the way up flights and flights of narrow, creaking, crumbling stairs, and at last led him into a tiny passage, so small that there was some difficulty in managing to close the door behind him. Certainly the place had not been arranged, even in the original plan of its architect, for the reception of many visitors.

There would seem to be some other difficulty also about his admission. Roland was allowed to ’>nnain quite a long time in the narrow passage.

THE OLD FRIEND ASD THE NEW

“ Only one of the mysteries of poverty,” thought he to himself. “ My poor friend’s surroundings are such as he is unwilling to show to outer eyes ; he and his wife and the servant are no doubt making some hasty touches of improvement here and there. If he only knew how little need there was for ceremonial with me ! ”

Then a door opened and the little serving-maid invited him to come in.

When he entered he certainly was surprised ; he saw himself in a tiny sitting-room, most tastefully and even elegantly furnished and decorated. It was very small indeed, but nothing could have been prettier than its get-up and its general arrangements. The walls were done in delicate distemper ; the ceiling carried out the tone and idea of the walls ; the furniture was all white ; the mirror over the chimney-piece was draped in soft white; a carpet of delicate, noiseless felt was on the floor ; the portieres were in perfect harmony, both in colour and material, with the carpet and the furniture, just striking a middle and blending note between the pearl-white and the soft greenishgray ; a few etchings in frames were on the walls. It was altogether a sort of bijou room. This did not look very like utter poverty. Nor could he suppose that this was but the wreck of former elegance, the remains of better days ; for the whole get-up was evidently new. u Laurence’s wife is vain and silly," he at once charitably assumed, “and has either spent all they had left or run into debt to keep pretty things about her.”

One of the curtains was withdrawn, and Laurence Caledon limped or dragged himself slowly, heavily, feebly into the room, leaning on the shoulder of the little serving-maiden. He stopped for a moment, and gazed into Roland's face.

Meanwhile Roland had a chance of surveying his old friend. The old friend had changed indeed. He had been handsome and shapely, and vain of his face and his form. His form was now bent and shrunken, the shoulders bowed, the chest sunken. His face was miserably thin and pale; his eyes had too much lustre in them. What was his age? About thirty He might have been fifty, and a very ill-preserved fifty. The shock of seeing him thus changed made Roland silent for a moment. Then he recovered himself, and seized Caledon's white emaciated hand.

“ Dear old chap," he exclaimed with a fervour which was all unfeigned, “ I am so glad to see you.”

Laurence smiled a rather constrained smile.

THE OLD FllIEND AND TnE NEW 23

“Glad to seo me like this ? " he asked.

“Oh, come, now, you know what I must feel about that ; only I am glad to be able to come and see you, and talk to you, and hear all about you, and see what can be done to make things cheerful. I am so much alone in London myself that I am beginning to hate solitude, and I don't know what I should have done if I had not heard that you were here."

“ I am glad to see you — really glad," the sick man said, his face brightening a little. “ Sit down, old friend." Laurence himself lounged feebly on to a sofa. “ That will do, Annie. Now, please, go and say to Mrs. Caledon that she may come in. You only know my wife as a correspondent, I think ? ”

(< Only as a correspondent. It was so kind of her."

“ I didn't know anything about it ; she only told me just this moment — when you came.”

“My dear fellow, you don’t really mean to say that you were going to remain in London all the time, and never let me know ? Don’t you know that I hunted you up in Constantinople for days and days ? "

“Constantinople! Oh, I dread to think those days; such a contrast to these! Ah, yes; everything looked bright and smiling then. I beg your pardon, Roland, but I almost wish you hadn’t mentioned Constantinople. ‘ A sorrow’s crown of sorrow/ don’t you know, Tennyson says,- ‘ is remembering happier things.’ ”

“Poor fellow!” Roland pityingly thought; “how morbid his illness has made him. One will have to be pretty careful what one is saying. There’s one subject choked off, to begin with ; and I was very anxious to know how they were getting on in Constantinople, and what made them leave it, and how he came to be so much of an invalid. Well, it is not a question of gratifying my curiosity, but a question of how to do some good for him.”

“ All right, Laurence,” he said ; “ I am sorry I said anything. I am awfully stupid about things ”

“No, no, my dear friend; but I am absurdly sensitive. You shall hear all about it ; you shall know my whole story. My wife will tell you ; it will please her to talk about it; she has none of my foolish sensibility. See, here she is. Mary, this is my old friend, your new correspondent, Mr. Oliver.”

Roland rose, of course, but he did not go forward and offer his hand; something made him leave to her the definition of the sort of terms on which they were to meet. He had a quick eye ; he studied her at a glance, and took in every point. The impression she gave him on entering the room was that the room was too small for her. Yet she was not much more than common tall ; no one would speak of her as a tall woman. Nor was she of Juno-like proportions; she was rather slender, but very finely formed; short in waist, with length of limb. She had the bust of a Greek statue. Her face was singularly delicate in its mould, with a complexion exquisitely pale ; fair is not the word to describe it. As she entered, a slight pink flush came up, as it seemed, behind the pale curtain of the skin, and gave something of the effect of a rosy light inside an alabaster lamp. In short, Mrs. Caledon was a very striking woman to look at; decidedly what one would call queenly, but with the melancholy dignity of a discrowned queen. It was this appearance that impressed our hero at first with the idea that she seemed out of proportion with the tiny sitting-room.

Mrs. Caledon bowed, and hardly smiled ; but ther® wa3 certainly a welcome on her face, which made his position easier for the visitor.

“ I knew you would come,” she said in a voice that was low and soft, but so sweet and clear that every word floated to the listener’s ear.

“Of course I would come; but how did you know it ? ”

“ I can’t tell ; but I felt certain. My husband has told me so often about you.”

“ Well, the great thing is that we have got him here,” Laurence said, with a resolute effort to be cheerful; “and it does not much matter, Mary, whether we knew he would come or not. We want to hear all about him, and what he has been doing, and what he is going to do. I don’t suppose he will much care to hear about our private meditations.”

“ But I want to hear all about you.”

“ She’ll tell you all, you may be sure. But now this is our first meeting for ever so long, let us talk of cheerful things. How do you like London again ? ”

“ Oh, I am in love with it ! I can’t get half enough of it.”

“ No ? ” Laurence asked, with a sigh. “ Well, I used to feel like that once, when we were out there.” He jerked his head as if to indicate that somewhere just behind him stood the Constantinople of which he did not care to name the name. “ I used to think it would be delightful to knock about London once again. But here I am in London, and what have I to do with London ? I might as well be a thousand miles away. I never go out; I never see anything of London but the walls of the houses' over the way, and not even these lively objects very often.”

“ But why don’t you get out ? It must be awfully bad for you, living for ever between these four walls.”

“ Of course, I know it’s bad for me ; of course, I know it is killing me. But what can I do? I can’t walk ; I am too weak and crippled ; and my means don't precisely allow me to keep a carriage."

“But, my dear boy, there are such things as hansom cabs.”

“ I detest hansom cabs ; I detest the rattle, and the trouble of getting in and out, and the trying to make the driver hear through a hole in the roof. Oh, no, no; I hate hansom cabs, and, of course, one couldn’t stand a growler; and so I find it better, after all, to stay indoors. Perhaps it won’t be for very long,” he added, significantly.

Roland glanced involuntarily at Mrs. Caledon when Laurence had said this. She got up as if to

LOLASV OLIVER look for something, and disappeared behind the curtain.

“ Come, now, Laurence, you said, I thought, we were not to talk of any but cheerful things to-day. One thing only I want to say, now that your wife isn’t here — you know, it must be very bad for her to be always within doors ; she does not seem to me to be in good health by any means.”

4< The great thing,” Roland said in his own mind, “is to withdraw poor Laurence’s attention from himself by giving him an alarm about his wife. I am sure his malady increases by his constantly dwelling upon it and upon his own general condition. It would be better even to startle him, by telling him frankly that his wife seems out of health and needs looking after as well as he.”

“ She not in good health ? Oh, yes ; she’s all right enough. She always looks a little pale — just like that — but she’s quite well. And she can go out as much as she likes — of course she can.”

“ But I dare say she doesn’t like to leave you here alone.’*

“Oh, I don’t mind being left alone, I rather like it sometimes. I wouldn’t for anything keep her in if she wanted to get about. I know how

THE OLD FRIEND AND TILE NEW egotistic invalids generally are, and I always do my best not to think of myself.”

“ Does not the doctor tell you that you ought to go out ? ”

“Doctor? Oh, I haven’t any doctor.”

“No doctor? Good gracious! why don’t you. have one ? ”

“ Well, any sort of a doctor worth sending for* has to be paid so much. Two guineas for the first visit, and some of them expect two guineas for every following visit as well. No, my dear fellow, my finances don’t run to that.”

Mrs. Caledon here came back into the room.

“Why don’t you make your husband have a doctor, Mrs. Caledon ? ” he asked her, bluntly. Ho was beginning to get angry with her. He set down the fittings and furniture of the room to her account, and he could not understand why she did not insist on taking care of her husband. She knew how unwell he was, for she had written it in her letter.

“I have tried often,” she said; “but I can’t prevail on him. He will not think about himself ; I cannot get him to think about himself. That is why I wanted you, his old friend, to come and see

him ; at least that is one reason. If he were more of a selfish man he might have been well long ago”

“ Please never mind about my good qualities and virtues and all that,” Laurence said, with a softer and more pleasing tone in his voice than it had yet given out. “ My old friend here knows all about me, or if there is anything he doesn't know he will soon find it out.”