Wilfrid Cumbermede

It was months before I could resume my work. Not until Charley’s absence was, as it were, so far established and accepted that hope had begun to assert itself against memory; that is, not until the form of Charley ceased to wander with despairful visage behind me and began to rise amongst the silvery mists before me, was I able to invent once more, or even to guide the pen with certainty over the paper. The moment, however, that I took the pen in my hand another necessity seized me.

Although Mary had hardly been out of my thoughts, I had heard no word of her since her brother’s death. I dared not write to her father or mother after the way the former had behaved to me, and I shrunk from approaching Mary with a word that might suggest a desire to intrude the thoughts of myself upon the sacredness of her grief. Why should she think of me? Sorrow has ever something of a divine majesty, before which one must draw nigh with bowed head and bated breath:

Here I and sorrows sit;
Here is my throne: bid kings come bow to it.

But the moment I took the pen in my hand to write, an almost agonizing desire to speak to her laid hold of me. I dared not yet write to her, but, after reflection, resolved to send her some verses which should make her think of both Charley and myself, through the pages of a magazine which I knew she read.

Oh, look not on the heart I bring—
It is too low and poor;
I would not have thee love a thing
Which I can ill endure.

Nor love me for the sake of what
I would be if I could;
O’er peaks as o’er the marshy flat,
Still soars the sky of good.

See, love, afar, the heavenly man
The will of God would make;
The thing I must be when I can,
Love now, for faith’s dear sake.

But when I had finished the lines, I found the expression had fallen so far short of what I had in my feeling, that I could not rest satisfied with such an attempt at communication. I walked up and down the room, thinking of the awful theories regarding the state of mind at death in which Mary had been trained. As to the mere suicide, love ever finds refuge in presumed madness; but all of her school believed that at the moment of dissolution the fate is eternally fixed either for bliss or woe, determined by the one or the other of two vaguely defined attitudes of the mental being towards certain propositions; concerning which attitudes they were at least right in asserting that no man could of himself assume the safe one. The thought became unendurable that Mary should believe that Charley was damned—and that for ever and ever. I must and would write to her, come of it what might. That my Charley, whose suicide came of misery that the painful flutterings of his half-born wings would not bear him aloft into the empyrean, should appear to my Athanasia lost in an abyss of irrecoverable woe; that she should think of God as sending forth his spirit to sustain endless wickedness for endless torture;—it was too frightful. As I wrote, the fire burned and burned, and I ended only from despair of utterance. Not a word can I now recall of what I wrote:—the strength of my feelings must have paralyzed the grasp of my memory. All I can recollect is that I closed with the expression of a passionate hope that the God who had made me and my Charley to love each other, would somewhere, some day, somehow, when each was grown stronger and purer, give us once more to each other. In that hope alone, I said, was it possible for me to live. By return of post I received the following:—

SIR,

After having everlastingly ruined one of my children, body and soul, for your sophisms will hardly alter the decrees of divine justice, once more you lay your snares—now to drag my sole remaining child into the same abyss of perdition. Such wickedness—wickedness even to the pitch of blasphemy against the Holy Ghost—I have never in the course of a large experience of impenitence found paralleled. It almost drives me to the belief that the enemy of souls is still occasionally permitted to take up his personal abode in the heart of him who wilfully turns aside from revealed truth. I forgive you for the ruin you have brought upon our fondest hopes, and the agony with which you have torn the hearts of those who more than life loved him of whom you falsely called yourself the friend. But I fear you have already gone too far ever to feel your need of that forgiveness which alone can avail you. Yet I say—Repent, for the mercy of the Lord is infinite. Though my boy is lost to me for ever, I should yet rejoice to see the instrument of his ruin plucked as a brand from the burning.

Your obedient well-wisher,

    CHARLES OSBORNE.

‘P.S.—I retain your letter for the sake of my less experienced brethren, that I may be able to afford an instance of how far the unregenerate mind can go in its antagonism to the God of Revelation.’

I breathed a deep breath, and laid the letter down, mainly concerned as to whether Mary had had the chance of reading mine. I could believe any amount of tyranny in her father—even to perusing and withholding her letters; but in this I may do him injustice, for there is no common ground known to me from which to start in speculating upon his probable actions. I wrote in answer something nearly as follows:—

SIR,

That you should do me injustice can by this time be no matter of surprise to me. Had I the slightest hope of convincing you of the fact, I should strain every mental nerve to that end. But no one can labour without hope, and as in respect of your justice I have none, I will be silent. May the God in whom I trust convince you of the cruelty of which you have been guilty: the God in whom you profess to believe, must be too like yourself to give any ground of such hope from him.

Your obedient servant,

    ‘WILFRID CUMBERMEDE.’

If Mary had read my letter, I felt assured her reading had been very different from her father’s. Anyhow she could not judge me as he did, for she knew me better. She knew that for Charley’s sake I had tried the harder to believe myself.

But the reproaches of one who had been so unjust to his own son could not weigh very heavily on me, and I now resumed my work with a tolerable degree of calmness. But I wrote badly. I should have done better to go down to the Moat, and be silent. If my reader has ever seen what I wrote at that time, I should like her to know that I now wish it all unwritten—not for any utterance contained in it, but simply for its general inferiority.

Certainly work is not always required of a man. There is such a thing as a sacred idleness, the cultivation of which is now fearfully neglected. Abraham, seated in his tent door in the heat of the day, would be to the philosophers of the nineteenth century an object for uplifted hands and pointed fingers. They would see in him only the indolent Arab, whom nothing but the foolish fancy that he saw his Maker in the distance, could rouse to run.

It was clearly better to attempt no further communication with Mary at present; and I could think but of one person from whom, without giving pain, I might hope for some information concerning her.

Here I had written a detailed account of how I contrived to meet Miss Pease, but it is not of consequence enough to my story to be allowed to remain. Suffice it to mention that one morning at length I caught sight of her in a street in Mayfair, where the family was then staying for the season, and overtaking addressed her.

She started, stared at me for a moment, and held out her hand.

‘I didn’t know you, Mr Cumbermede. How much older you look! I beg your pardon. Have you been ill?’

She spoke hurriedly, and kept looking over her shoulder now and then, as if afraid of being seen talking to me.

‘I have had a good deal to make me older since we met last, Miss Pease,’ I said. ‘I have hardly a friend left in the world but you—that is, if you will allow me to call you one.’

‘Certainly, certainly,’ she answered, but hurriedly, and with one of those uneasy glances. ‘Only you must allow, Mr Cumbermede, that—that—that—’

The poor lady was evidently unprepared to meet me on the old footing, and, at the same time, equally unwilling to hurt my feelings.

‘I should be sorry to make you run a risk for my sake,’ I said. ‘Please just answer me one question. Do you know what it is to be misunderstood—to be despised without deserving it?’

She smiled sadly, and nodded her head gently two or three times.

‘Then have pity on me, and let me have a little talk with you.’

Again she glanced apprehensively over her shoulder.

‘You are afraid of being seen with me, and I don’t wonder,’ I said.

‘Mr Geoffrey came up with us,’ she answered. ‘I left him at breakfast. He will be going across the park to his club directly.’

‘Then come with me the other way—into Hyde Park,’ I said.

With evident reluctance, she yielded and accompanied me.

As soon as we got within Stanhope Gate, I spoke.

‘A certain sad event, of which you have no doubt heard, Miss Pease, has shut me out from all communication with the family of my friend Charley Osborne. I am very anxious for some news of his sister. She is all that is left of him to me now. Can you tell me anything about her?’

‘She has been very ill,’ she replied.

‘I hope that means that she is better,’ I said.

‘She is better, and, I hear, going on the Continent, as soon as the season will permit. But, Mr Cumbermede, you must be aware that I am under considerable restraint in talking to you. The position I hold in Sir Giles’s family, although neither a comfortable nor a dignified one—’

‘I understand you perfectly, Miss Pease,’ I returned, ‘and fully appreciate the sense of propriety which causes your embarrassment. But the request I am about to make has nothing to do with them or their affairs whatever. I only want your promise to let me know if you hear anything of Miss Osborne.’

‘I cannot tell—what—’

‘What use I may be going to make of the information you give me. In a word, you do not trust me.’