One Of Them

There was a deep tone of melancholy in the way the last words were uttered that made Layton feel his companion was speaking from the heart.

“But it’s all our own fault,” broke in Quackinboss, quickly; “it all comes of the way we treat ‘em.”

“How do you mean?” asked Layton, eagerly.

“I mean,” said the other, resolutely, “we treat ‘em as reasonable beings, and they ain’t. No, sir, women is like Red-men; they ain’t to be persuaded, or argued with; they ‘re to be told what is right for ‘em, and good for ‘em, and that’s all. What does all your courting and coaxing a gal, but make her think herself something better than all creation? Why, you keep a-tellin’ her so all day, and she begins to believe it at last. Now, how much better and fairer to say to her, ‘Here’s how it is, miss, you ‘ve got to marry me, that’s how it’s fixed.’ She ‘ll understand that.”

“But if she says, ‘No, I won’t’?”

“No, no,” said Quackinboss, with a half-bitter smile, “she ‘ll never say that to the man as knows how to tell her his mind. And as for that courtship, it’s all a mistake. Why, women won’t confess they like a man, just to keep the game a-movin’. I’m blest if they don’t like it better than marriage.”

Layton gave a faint smile, but, faint as it was, Quackinboss perceived it, and said, —

“Now, don’t you go a-persuadin’ yourself these are all Yankee notions and such-like. I’m a-talkin’ of human natur’, and there ain’t many as knows more of that article than Leonidas Shaver Quackinboss. All you Old-World folk make one great mistake, and nothing shows so clearly as how you ‘re a worn-out race, used up and done for. You live too much with your emotions and your feelin’s. Have you never remarked that when the tap-root of a tree strikes down too far, it gets into a cold soil? And from that day for’ard you ‘ll never see fruit or blossom more. That’s just the very thing you ‘re a-doin’. You ain’t satisfied to be active and thrivin’ and healthful, but you must go a-specu-latin’ about why you are this, and why you ain’t t’ other. Get work to do, sir, and do it.”

“It is what I intend,” said Layton, in a low voice.

“There ain’t nothing like labor,” said Quackinboss, with energy; “work keeps the devil out of a man’s mind, for somehow there’s nothing that black fellow loves like loafing. And whenever I see a great, tall, well-whiskered chap leaning over a balcony in a grand silk dressing-gown, with a gold stitched cap on his head, and he a-yawning, I say to myself, ‘Maybe I don’t know who ‘s at your elbow now;’ and when I see one of our strapping Western fellows, as he has given the last stroke of his hatchet to a pine-tree, and stands back to let it fall, wiping the honest sweat from his brow, as his eyes turn upward over the tree-tops to something higher than them, I say to my heart, ‘All right, there; he knows who it was gave him the strength to lay that sixty-foot stem so low.’”

“You say truly,” muttered Layton.

“I know it, sir; I ‘ve been a-loafing myself these last three years, and I ‘ve run more to seed in that time than in all my previous life; but I mean to give it up.”

“What are your plans?” asked Layton, not sorry to let the conversation turn away from himself and his own affairs.

“My plans! They are ours, I hope,” said Quackinboss. “You’re a-coming out with me to the States, sir. We fixed it all t’ other night, I reckon! I ‘m a-goin’ to make your fortune; or, better still, to show you how to make it for yourself.”

Layton walked on in moody silence, while Quackinboss, with all the zealous warmth of conviction, described the triumphs and success he was to achieve in the New World.

A very few words will suffice to inform our reader of all that he need know on this subject. During Layton’s long convalescence poor Quackinboss felt his companionable qualities sorely taxed. At first, indeed, his task was that of consoler, for he had to communicate the death of Alfred’s mother, which occurred in the early days of her son’s illness. The Rector’s letter, in conveying the sad tidings, was everything that kindness and delicacy could dictate, and, with scarcely a reference to his own share in the benevolence, showed that all care and attention had waited upon her last hours. The blow, however, was almost fatal to Layton; and the thought of that forlorn, deserted death-bed clung to him by day, and filled his dreams by night.

Quackinboss did his utmost, not very skilfully nor very adroitly, perhaps, but with a hearty sincerity, to combat this depression. He tried to picture a future of activity and exertion, – a life of sterling labor. He placed before his companion’s eyes the objects and ambitions men usually deem the worthiest, and endeavored to give them an interest to him. Met in all his attempts by a dreary, hopeless indifference, the kind-hearted fellow reflected long and deeply over his next resource; and so one day, when Layton’s recovered strength suggested a hope for the project, he gave an account of his own neglected youth, how, thrown when a mere boy upon the world, he had never been able to acquire more than a smattering of what others learn at school. “I had three books in the world, sir, – a Bible, Robinson Crusoe, and an old volume of Wheatson’s Algebra. And from a-readin’ and readin’ of ‘em over and over, I grew to blend ‘em all up in my head together. And there was Friday, just as much a reality to me as Father Abraham; and I thought men kept all their trade reckoning by simple equations. I felt, in fact, as if there was no more than these three books in all creation, and out of them a man had to pick all the wisdom he could. Now, what I ‘m a-thinkin’ is that though I ‘m too old to go to school, maybe as how you ‘d not refuse to give me a helpin’ hand, by readin’ occasionally out of those languages I only know by name? Teachin’ an old fellow like me is well-nigh out of the question; but when a man has got a long, hard-earned experience of human natur’, it’s a main pleasant thing to know that oftentimes the thoughts that he is struggling with have occurred to great minds who know how to utter them; and so many an impression comes to be corrected, or mayhap confirmed, by those clever fellows, with their thoughtful heads.”

There was one feature in the project which could not but gratify Layton; it enabled him to show his gratitude for the brotherly affection he had met with, and he accepted the suggestion at once. The first gleam of animation that had lighted his eyes for many a day was when planning out the line of reading he intended them to follow. Taking less eras of history than some of the great men who had illustrated them, he thought how such characters would be sure to interest one whose views of life were eminently practical, and so a great law-giver, a legislator, a great general, or orator, was each evening selected for their reading. If it were not out of our track, we might tell here how much Layton was amused by the strange, shrewd commentaries of his companion on the characters of a classic age; or how he enjoyed the curious resemblances Quackinboss would discover between the celebrities of Athens and Rome and the great men of his own country. And many a time was the reader interrupted by such exclamations as, “Ay, sir, just what J. Q. Adams would have said!” or, “That ‘s the way our John Randolph would have fixed it!”

But Quackinboss was not satisfied with the pleasure thus afforded to himself, for, with native instinct, he began to think how all such stores of knowledge and amusement might be utilized for the benefit of the possessor.

“You must come to the States, Layton,” he would say. “You must let our people hear these things. They ‘re a main sharp, wide-awake folk, but they ain’t posted up about Greeks and Romans. Just mind me, now, and you’ll do a fine stroke of work, sir. Give them one of these pleasant stories out of that fellow there, Herod – Herod – what d’ye call him?”

“Herodotus?”

“Ay, that’s he; and then a slice out of one of those slapping speeches you read to me t’ other night. I’m blessed if the fellow did n’t lay it on like Point Dexter himself; and wind up all with what we can’t match, a comic scene from Aristophanes. You see I have his name all correct. I ain’t christened Shaver if you don’t fill your hat with Yankee dollars in every second town of the Union.”

Layton burst out into a hearty laugh at what seemed to him a project so absurd and impossible; but Quackinboss, with increased gravity, continued, —

“Your British pride, mayhap, is offended by the thought of lecturin’ to us Western folk; but I am here to tell you, sir, that our own first men – ay, and you ‘ll not disparage them– are a-doin’ it every day. It’s not play-actin’ I ‘m speaking of. They don’t go before a crowded theatre to play mimic with face or look or voice or gesture. They ‘ve got a something to tell folk that’s either ennobling or instructive. They’ve got a story of some man, who, without one jot more of natural advantages than any of those listening there, made himself a name to be blessed and remembered for ages. They’ve to show what a thing a strong will is when united with an honest heart; and how no man, no matter how humble he be, need despair of being useful to his fellows. They ‘ve got many a lesson out of history to give a people who are just as ambitious, just as encroaching, and twice as warlike as the Athenians, about not neglecting private morality in the search after national greatness. What is the lecturer but the pioneer to the preacher? In clearing away ignorance and superstition, ain’t he making way for the army of truth that’s coming up? Now I tell you, sir, that ain’t a thing to be ashamed of!”

Layton was silent; not convinced, it is true, but restrained, from respect for the other’s ardor, from venturing on a reply too lightly. Quackinboss, after a brief pause, went on: —

“Well, it is possible what I said about the profit riled you. Well, then, don’t take the dollars; or take them, and give them, as some of our Western men do, to some object of public good, – if you ‘re rich enough.”

“Rich enough! I’m a beggar,” broke in Layton, bitterly, “I ‘m at this instant indebted to you for more than, perhaps, years of labor may enable me to repay.”

“I put it all down in a book, sir,” said Quackinboss, sternly, “and I threw it in the fire the first night you read out Homer to me. I said to myself, ‘You are well paid, Shaver, old fellow. You never knew how your heart could be shaken that way, and what brave feelings were lying there still, inside of it.’”

“Nay, dear friend, it is not thus I ‘m to acquit my debt Even the moneyed one – ”

“I tell you what, Layton,” said Quackinboss, rising, and striking the table with his clenched fist, “there’s only one earthly way to part us, and that is by speaking to me of this. Once, and forever, I say to you, there’s more benefit to a man like me to be your companion for a week, than for you to have toiled, and fevered, and sweated after gold, as I have done for thirty hard years.”

“Give me a day or two to think over it,” said Layton, “and I ‘ll tell you my resolve.”

“With all my heart! Only, I would ask you not to take my showing of its goodness, but to reason the thing well out of your own clear head. Many a just cause is lost by a bad lawyer; remember that” And thus the discussion ended for the time.

The following morning, when they met at breakfast, Layton took the other’s hand, and said, —

“I ‘ve thought all night of what you ‘ve said, and I accept, – not without many a misgiving as regards myself, but I accept.”

“I’d not take ten thousand dollars for the engagement, sir,” said Quackinboss, as he wrung Layton’s hand. “No, sir, I ‘d not take it, for even four cities of the Union.”

Although thus the project was ratified between them, scarcely a day passed that Layton did not experience some compunction for his pledge. Now, it was a repugnance to the sort of enterprise he was about to engage in, the criticisms to which he was to expose himself, and the publicity he was to confront; nor could all his companion’s sanguine assurances of success compensate him for his own heartfelt repugnance to try the ordeal.

“After all,” thought he, “failure, with all its pangs of wounded self-love, will only serve to show Quackinboss how deeply I feel myself his debtor when I am content to risk so much to repay him.”

Such was the bond he had signed, such his struggles to fulfil its obligations. One only condition he stipulated for, – he wished to go to Ireland before setting out for the States, to see the last resting-place of his poor mother ere he quitted his country, perhaps forever. Dr. Millar, too, had mentioned that a number of letters were amongst the few relics she had left, and he desired, for many reasons, that these should not fall into strangers’ hands. As for Qnackinboss, he agreed to everything. Indeed, he thought that as there was no use in reaching the States before “the fall,” they could not do better than ramble about Ireland, while making some sort of preparation for the coming campaign.

“How sad this place makes me!” said Layton, as they strolled along one of the leaf-strewn alleys. “I wish I had not come here.”

“That’s just what I was a-thinkin’ myself,” said the other. “I remember coming back all alone once over the Michigan prairie, which I had travelled about eight months before with a set of hearty companions, and whenever I ‘d come up to one of the spots where our tent used to be pitched, and could mark the place by the circle of greener grass, with a burned-up patch where the fire stood, it was all I could do not to burst out a-cryin’ like a child! It’s a main cruel thing to go back alone to where you ‘ve once been happy in, and there ‘s no forgettin’ the misery of it ever after.”

“That’s true,” said Layton; “the pleasant memories are erased forever. Let us go.”

CHAPTER XXV. BEHIND THE SCENES

It is amongst the prerogatives of an author to inform his reader of many things which go on “behind the scenes” of life. Let me, therefore, ask your company, for a brief space, in a small and not ill-furnished chamber, which, deep in the recesses of back scenes, dressing-rooms, scaffolding, and machinery, is significantly entitled, by a painted inscription, “Manager’s Room.” Though the theatre is a London one, the house is small. It is one of those West-End speculations which are occasionally graced by a company of French comedians, a monologist, or a conjurer. There is all the usual splendor before the curtain, and all the customary squalor behind. At the present moment – for it is growing duskish of a November day, and rehearsal is just over – the general aspect of the place is dreary enough. The box fronts and the lustre are cased in brown holland, and, though the curtain is up, the stage presents nothing but a chaotic mass of disjointed scenery and properties. Tables, chairs, musical instruments, the half of a boat, a throne, and a guillotine lie littered about, amidst which a ragged supernumerary wanders, broom in hand, but apparently hopeless of where or how to begin to reduce the confusion to order.

The manager’s room is somewhat more habitable, for there is a good carpet, warm curtains, and an excellent fire, at which two gentlemen are seated, whose jocund tones and pleasant faces are certainly, so far as outward signs go, fair guarantees that the world is not dealing very hardly with them, nor they themselves much disgusted with the same world. One of these – the elder, a middle-aged man somewhat inclined to corpulency, with a florid cheek, and clear, dark eye – is the celebrated Mr. Hyman Stocmar; celebrated, I say, for who can take up the morning papers without reading his name and knowing his whereabouts; as thus: “We are happy to be able to inform our readers that Mr. Stocmar is perfectly satisfied with his after season at the ‘Regent’s.’ Whatever other managers may say, Mr. Stocmar can make no complaint of courtly indifference. Her Majesty has four times within the last month graced his theatre with her presence. Mr. Stocmar is at Madrid, at Vienna, at Naples. Mr. Stocmar is in treaty with Signor Urlaccio of Turin, or Mademoiselle Voltarina of Venice. He has engaged the Lapland voyagers, sledge-dogs and all, the Choctaw chiefs, or the Californian lecturer, Boreham, for the coming winter. Let none complain of London in November so long as Mr. Hyman Stocmar caters for the public taste;” and so on. To look at Stocmar’s bright complexion, his ruddy glow, his well-filled waistcoat, and his glossy ringlets, – for, though verging on forty, he has them still “curly,” – you’d scarcely imagine it possible that his life was passed amongst more toil, confusion, difficulty, and distraction than would suffice to kill five out of any twenty, and render the other fifteen deranged. I do not mean alone the worries inseparable from a theatrical direction, – the fights, the squabbles, the insufferable pretensions he must bear, the rivalries he must reconcile, the hates he must conciliate; the terrible existence of coax and bully, bully and coax, fawn, flatter, trample on, and outrage, which goes on night and day behind the curtain, – but that his whole life in the world is exactly a mild counterpart of the same terrible performance; the great people, his patrons, being fifty times more difficult to deal with than the whole corps itself, – the dictating dowagers and exacting lords, the great man who insists upon Mademoiselle So-and-so being engaged, the great lady who will have no other box than that occupied by the Russian embassy, the friends of this tenor and the partisans of that, the classic admirers of grand music, and that larger section who will have nothing but comic opera, not to mention the very extreme parties who only care for the ballet, and those who vote the “Traviata” an unclean thing. What are a lover’s perjuries to the lies such a man tells all day long? – lies only to be reckoned by that machine that records the revolutions of a screw in a steamer. His whole existence is passed in promises, excuses, evasions, and explanations; always paying a small dividend to truth, he barely escapes utter bankruptcy, and by a plausibility most difficult to distrust, he obtains a kind of half-credit, – that of one who would keep his word if he could.

By some strange law of compensation, this man, who sees a very dark side of human nature, – sees it in its low intrigues, unworthy pursuits, falsehoods, and depravities, – who sees even the “great” in their moods of meanness, – this man, I say, has the very keenest relish for life, and especially the life of London. He knows every capital of Europe: Paris, from the Chaussée d’Antin to the Boulevard Mont-Parnasse; Vienna, from the Hof to the Volksgarten; Rome, from the Piazza di Spagna to the Ghetto; and yet he would tell you they are nothing, all of them, to that area between Pall Mall and the upper gate of Hyde Park. He loves his clubs, his dinners, his junketings to Richmond or Greenwich, his short Sunday excursions to the country, generally to some great artiste’s villa near Fulham or Chiswick, and declares to you that it is England alone offers all these in perfection. Is it any explanation, does it give any clew to this gentleman’s nature, if I say that a certain aquiline character in his nose, and a peculiar dull lustre in the eye, recall that race who, with all the odds of a great majority against them, enjoy a marvellous share of this world’s prosperity? Opposite to him sits one not unworthy – even from externals – of his companionship. He is a very good-looking fellow, with light brown hair, his beard and moustaches being matchless in tint and arrangement: he has got large, full blue eyes, a wide capacious forehead, and that style of head, both in shape and the way in which it is set on, which indicate a frank, open, and courageous nature. Were it not for a little over-attention to dress, there is no “snobbery” about him; but there is a little too much velvet on his paletot, and his watch trinkets are somewhat in excess, not to say that the gold head of his cane is ostentatiously large and striking. This is Captain Ludlow Paten, a man about town, known to and by everybody, very much asked about in men’s circles, but never by any accident met in ladies’ society. By very young men he is eagerly sought after. It is one of the best things coming of age has in its gift is to know Paten and be able to ask him to dine. Older ones relish him full as much; but his great popularity is with a generation beyond that again: the mediaevals, who walk massively and ride not at all; the florid, full-cheeked, slightly bald generation, who grace club windows of a morning and the coulisses at night. These are his “set,” par excellence, and he knows them thoroughly. As for himself or his family, no one knows, nor, indeed, wants to know anything. The men he associates with chiefly in life are all “cognate numbers,” and these are the very people who never trouble their heads about a chance intruder amongst them; and although some rumor ran that his father was a porter at the Home Office, or a tailor at Blackwall, none care a jot on the matter: they want him; and he could n’t be a whit more useful if his veins ran with all the blood of all the Howards.

There is a story of him, however, which, though I reveal to you, is not generally known. He was once tried for a murder. It was a case of poisoning in Jersey, where the victim was a well-known man of the Turf, and who was murdered by the party he had invited to spend a Christmas with him. Paten was one of the company, and included in the accusation. Two were banged; Paten and another, named Collier, acquitted. Paten’s name was Hunt, but he changed it at once, and, going abroad, entered the Austrian service, where, in eight years, he became a lieutenant. This was enough for probation and rank, and so he returned to England as Captain Ludlow Paten. Stocmar, of course, knew the story: there were half a dozen more, also, who did, but they each and all knew that poor Paul was innocent; that there was n’t a fragment of evidence against him; that he lost – actually lost – by Hawke’s death; that he was carried tipsy to bed that night two hours before the murder; that he was so overcome the next morning by his debauch that he was with difficulty awakened; that the coroner thought him a downright fool, he was so stunned by the event; in a word, though he changed his name to Paten, and now wore a tremendous beard, and affected a slightly foreign accent, these were disguises offered up to the mean prejudices of the world rather than precautions of common safety and security.

Though thus Paten’s friends had passed this bill of indemnity in his favor, the affair of Jersey was never alluded to, by even his most intimate amongst them. It was a page of history to be carefully wafered up till that reckoning when all volumes are ransacked, and no blottings nor erasures avail! As for himself, who, to look at him, with his bright countenance, to hear the jocund ring of his merry laugh – who could ever imagine such a figure in a terrible scene of tragedy? What could such a man have to do with any of the dark machinations of crime, the death-struggle, the sack, the silent party that stole across the grass at midnight, and the fish-pond? Oh, no! rather picture him as one who, meeting such details in his daily paper, would hastily turn the sheet to seek for pleasanter matter; and so it was he eschewed these themes in conversation, and even when some celebrated trial would for the moment absorb all interest, giving but one topic in almost every circle, Paten would drop such commonplaces on the subject as showed he cared little or nothing for the event.

Let us now hear what these two men are talking about, as they sat thus confidentially over the fire. Stocmar is the chief speaker. He does not smoke of a morning, because many of his grand acquaintances are averse to tobacco; as for Paten, the cigar never leaves his lips.

“Well, now for his story!” cried Paten. “I ‘m anxious to hear about him.”

“I ‘m sorry I can’t gratify the curiosity. All I can tell you is where I found him. It was in Dublin. They had a sort of humble Cremorne there, – a place little resorted to by the better classes; indeed, rarely visited save by young subs from the garrison, milliners, and such other lost sheep; not very wonderful, after all, seeing that the rain usually contrived to extinguish the fireworks. Having a spare evening on my hands, I went there, and, to my astonishment, witnessed some of the most extraordinary displays in fireworks I had ever seen. Whether for beauty of design, color, and precision, I might declare them unequalled. ‘Who’s your pyrotechnist?’ said I to Barry, the proprietor.