CHAPTER III.
It was some time before I could shake off the impression made on me by
the words and the look of that dying man.
It was not that my conscience upbraided me. What had I done?
Denounced that which I held, in common with most men of sense in or out
of my profession, to be one of those illusions by which quackery draws
profit from the wonder of ignorance. Was I to blame if I refused to
treat with the grave respect due to asserted discovery in legitimate
science pretensions to powers akin to the fables of wizards? Was I to
descend from the Academe of decorous science to examine whether a
slumbering sibyl could read from a book placed at her back, or tell me at
L---- what at that moment was being done by my friend at the Antipodes?
And what though Dr. Lloyd himself might be a worthy and honest man,
and a sincere believer in the extravagances for which he demanded an
equal credulity in others, do not honest men every day incur the penalty
of ridicule if, from a defect of good sense, they make themselves
ridiculous? Could I have foreseen that a satire so justly provoked would
inflict so deadly a wound? Was I inhumanly barbarous because the
antagonist destroyed was morbidly sensitive? My conscience, therefore,
made me no reproach, and the public was as little severe as my conscience.
The public had been with me in our contest; the public knew nothing of my
opponent's deathbed accusations; the public knew only that I had attended
him in his last moments; it saw me walk beside the bier that bore him to
his grave; it admired the respect to his memory which I evinced in the
simple tomb that I placed over his remains, inscribed with an epitaph that
did justice to his unquestionable benevolence and integrity; above all, it
praised the energy with which I set on foot a subscription for his orphan
children, and the generosity with which I headed that subscription by a
sum that was large in proportion to my means.
To that sum I did not, indeed, limit my contribution. The sobs of the
poor female child rang still on my heart. As her grief had been keener
than that of her brothers, so she might be subjected to sharper trials
than they, when the time came for her to fight her own way through the
world; therefore I secured to her, but with such precautions that the
gift could not be traced to my hand, a sum to accumulate till she was
of marriageable age, and which then might suffice for a small wedding
portion; or if she remained single, for an income that would place her
beyond the temptation of want, or the bitterness of a servile dependence.
That Dr. Lloyd should have died in poverty was a matter of
surprise at first, for his profits during the last few years had been
considerable, and his mode of life far from extravagant. But just before
the date of our controversy he had been induced to assist the brother of
his lost wife, who was a junior partner in a London bank, with the loan
of his accumulated savings. This man proved dishonest; he embezzled that
and other sums intrusted to him, and fled the country. The same sentiment
of conjugal affection which had cost Dr. Lloyd his fortune kept him
silent as to the cause of the loss. It was reserved for his executors to
discover the treachery of the brother-in-law whom he, poor man, would
have generously screened from additional disgrace.
The Mayor of L----, a wealthy and public-spirited merchant, purchased the
museum, which Dr. Lloyd's passion for natural history had induced him to
form; and the sum thus obtained, together with that raised by subscription,
sufficed not only to discharge all debts due by the deceased, but to
insure to the orphans the benefits of an education that might fit at
least the boys to enter fairly armed into that game, more of skill than
of chance, in which Fortune is really so little blinded that we see, in
each turn of her wheel, wealth and its honours pass away from the lax
fingers of ignorance and sloth, to the resolute grasp of labour and
knowledge.
Meanwhile a relation in a distant county undertook the charge of the
orphans; they disappeared from the scene, and the tides of life in a
commercial community soon flowed over the place which the dead man had
occupied in the thoughts of his bustling townsfolk.
One person at L----, and only one, appeared to share and inherit the
rancour with which the poor physician had denounced me on his death-bed.
It was a gentleman named Vigors, distantly related to the deceased, and who
had been, in point of station, the most eminent of Dr. Lloyd's partisans
in the controversy with myself, a man of no great scholastic
acquirements, but of respectable abilities. He had that kind of power
which the world concedes to respectable abilities when accompanied
with a temper more than usually stern, and a moral character more than
usually austere. His ruling passion was to sit in judgment upon others;
and being a magistrate, he was the most active and the most rigid of all
the magistrates L---- had ever known.
Mr. Vigors at first spoke of me with great bitterness, as having
ruined, and in fact killed, his friend, by the uncharitable and unfair
acerbity which he declared I had brought into what ought to have been an
unprejudiced examination of simple matter of fact. But finding no
sympathy in these charges, he had the discretion to cease from making them,
contenting himself with a solemn shake of his head if he heard my
name mentioned in terms of praise, and an oracular sentence or two, such
as "Time will show," "All's well that ends well," etc. Mr. Vigors,
however, mixed very little in the more convivial intercourse of the
townspeople. He called himself domestic; but, in truth, he was
ungenial,--a stiff man, starched with self-esteem. He thought that his
dignity of station was not sufficiently acknowledged by the merchants of
Low Town, and his superiority of intellect not sufficiently recognized by
the exclusives of the Hill. His visits were, therefore, chiefly confined
to the houses of neighbouring squires, to whom his reputation as a
magistrate, conjoined with his solemn exterior, made him one of
those oracles by which men consent to be awed on condition that the awe is
not often inflicted. And though he opened his house three times a week,
it was only to a select few, whom he first fed and then biologized.
Electro-biology was very naturally the special entertainment of a man whom
no intercourse ever pleased in which his will was not imposed upon others.
Therefore he only invited to his table persons whom he could stare into
the abnegation of their senses, willing to say that beef was lamb, or
brandy was coffee, according as he willed them to say. And, no doubt, the
persons asked would have said anything he willed, so long as they had, in
substance, as well as in idea, the beef and the brandy, the lamb and the
coffee. I did not, then, often meet Mr. Vigors at the houses in which I
occasionally spent my evenings. I heard of his enmity as a man safe in
his home hears the sough of a wind on a common without. If now and then
we chanced to pass in the streets, he looked up at me (he was a small man
walking on tiptoe) with a sullen scowl of dislike; and from the height of
my stature, I dropped upon the small man and sullen scowl the affable
smile of supreme indifference.
