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MR. REDMAIN.
A life of comparatively innocent gayety could not be attractive
to Mr. Redmain, but at first he accompanied his wife everywhere.
No one knew better than he that not an atom of love had mingled
with her motives in marrying him; but for a time he seemed bent
on showing her that she needed not have been so averse to him.
Whether this was indeed his design or not, I imagine he enjoyed
the admiration she roused: for why should not a man take pride in
the possession of a fine woman as well as in that of a fine
horse? To be sure, Mrs. Redmain was not quite in the same way,
nor quite so much his, as his horses were, and might one day be a
good deal less his than she was now; but in the mean time she
was, I fancy, a pleasant break in the gathering monotony of his
existence. As he got more accustomed to the sight of her in a
crowd, however, and at the same time to her not very interesting
company in private, when she took not the smallest pains to
please him, he gradually lapsed into his former ways, and soon
came to spend his evenings in company that made him forget his
wife. He had loved her in a sort of a way, better left undefined,
and had also, almost from the first, hated her a little; for,
following her cousin's advice, she had appealed to him to save
her, and, when he evaded her prayer, had addressed him in certain
terms too appropriate to be agreeable, and too forcible to be
forgotten. His hatred, however, if that be not much too strong a
name, was neither virulent nor hot, for it had no inverted love
to feed and embitter it. It was more a thing of his head than his
heart, revealing itself mainly in short, acrid speeches, meant to
be clever, and indubitably disagreeable. Nor did Hesper prove an
unworthy antagonist in their encounters of polite Billingsgate:
what she lacked in experience she made up in breeding. The common
remark, generally false, about no love being lost, was in their
case true enough, for there never had been any between them to
lose. The withered rose-leaves have their sweetness yet, but what
of the rotted peony? It was generally when Redmain had been
longer than usual without seeing his wife that he said the worst
things to her, as if spite had grown in absence; but that he
should then be capable of saying such things as he did say, could
be understood only by those who knew the man and his history.
Ferdinand Goldberg Redmain--parents with mean surroundings often
give grand names to their children--was the son of an
intellectually gifted laborer, who, rising first to be boss of a
gang, began to take portions of contracts, and arrived at last,
through one lucky venture after another, at having his estimate
accepted and the contract given him for a rather large affair.
The result was that, through his minute knowledge of details, his
faculty for getting work out of his laborers, a toughness of
heart and will that enabled him to screw wages to the lowest
mark, and the judicious employment of inferior material, the
contract paid him much too well for any good to come out of it.
From that time, what he called his life was a continuous course
of what he called success, and he died one of the richest dirt-
beetles of the age, bequeathing great wealth to his son, and
leaving a reputation for substantial worth behind him; hardly
leaving it, I fancy, for surely he found it waiting him where he
went. He had been guilty of a thousand meannesses, oppressions,
rapacities, and some quiet rogueries, but none of them worse than
those of many a man whose ultimate failure has been the sole
cause of his excommunication by the society which all the time
knew well enough what he was. Often had he been held up by
would-be teachers as a pattern to aspiring youth of what might
be achieved by unwavering attention to the main chance,
combined with unassailable honesty: from his experience they
would once more prove to a gaping world the truth of the maxim,
the highest intelligible to a base soul, that "honesty is the
best policy." With his money he left to his son the seeds of a
varied meanness, which bore weeds enough, but curiously, neither
avarice nor, within the bounds of a modest prudence, any
unwillingness to part with money--a fact which will probably
appear the stranger when I have told the following anecdote
concerning a brother of the father, of whom few indeed mentioned
in my narrative ever heard.
This man was a joiner, or working cabinet-maker, or something of
the sort. Having one day been set by his master to repair for an
old lady an escritoire which had been in her possession for a
long time, he came to her house in the evening with a five-pound
note of a country bank, which he had found in a secret drawer of
the same, handing it to her with the remark that he had always
found honesty the best policy. She gave him half a sovereign, and
he took his leave well satisfied. He had been first to make
inquiry, and had learned that the bank stopped payment many years
ago. I can not help wondering, curious in the statistics of
honesty, how many of my readers will be more amused than
disgusted with the story. It is a great thing to come of decent
people, and Ferdinand Goldberg Redmain must not be judged like
one who, of honorable parentage, whether noble or peasant, takes
himself across to the shady side of the road. Much had been
against Redmain. I do not know of what sort his mother was, but
from certain embryonic virtues in him, which could hardly have
been his father's, I should think she must have been better than
her husband. She died, however, while he was a mere child; and
his father married, some said did not marry again. The boy
was sent to a certain public school, which at that time, whatever
it may or may not be now, was simply a hot-bed of the lowest
vices, and in devil-matters Redmain was an apt pupil. There is
fresh help for the world every time a youth starts clean upon
manhood's race; his very being is a hope of cleansing: this one
started as foul as youth could well be, and had not yet begun to
repent. His character was well known to his associates, for he
was no hypocrite, and Hosper's father knew it perfectly, and was
therefore worse than he. Had Redmain had a daughter, he would
never have given her to a man like himself. But, then, Mortimer
was so poor, and Redmain was so very rich! Alas for the
man who degrades his poverty by worshiping wealth! there is no
abyss in hell too deep for him to find its bottom.
Mr. Redmain had no profession, and knew nothing of business
beyond what was necessary for understanding whether his factor or
steward, or whatever he called him, was doing well with his
money--to that he gave heed. Also, wiser than many, he took some
little care not to spend at full speed what life he had. With
this view he laid down and observed certain rules in the ordering
of his pleasures, which enabled him to keep ahead of the vice-
constable for some time longer than would otherwise have been the
case. But he is one who can never finally be outrun, and now, as
Mr. Redmain was approaching the end of middle age, he heard
plainly enough the approach of the wool-footed avenger behind
him. Horrible was the inevitable to him, as horrible as to any;
but it had not yet looked frightful enough to arrest his downward
rush. In his better conditions--physical, I mean--whether he had
any better moral conditions, I can not tell--he would laugh and
say, "_Gather the roses while you may_"--heaven and earth!
what roses!--but, in his worse, he maledicted everything, and was
horribly afraid of hell. When in tolerable health, he laughed at
the notion of such an out-of-the-way place, repudiating its very
existence, and, calling in all the arguments urged by good men
against the idea of an eternity of aimless suffering, used them
against the idea of any punishment after death. Himself a bad
man, he reasoned that God was too good to punish sin; himself a
proud man, he reasoned that God was too high to take heed of him.
He forgot the best argument he could have adduced--namely, that
the punishment he had had in this life had done him no good; from
which he might have been glad to argue that none would, and
therefore none would be tried. But I suppose his mother believed
there was a hell, for at such times, when from weariness he was
less of an evil beast than usual, the old-fashioned horror would
inevitably raise its dinosaurian head afresh above the slime of
his consciousness; and then even his wife, could she have seen
how the soul of the man shuddered and recoiled, would have let
his brutality pass unheeded, though it was then at its worst, his
temper at such times being altogether furious. There was no grace
in him when he was ill, nor at any time, beyond a certain cold
grace of manner, which he kept for ceremony, or where he wanted
to please.
Happily, Mr. Redmain had one intellectual passion, which, poor
thing as it was, and in its motive, most of its aspects, and
almost all its tendencies, evil exceedingly, yet did something to
delay that corruption of his being which, at the same time, it
powerfully aided to complete: it was for the understanding and
analysis of human evil--not in the abstract, but alive and
operative. For the appeasement of this passion, he must render
intelligible to himself, and that on his own exclusive theory of
human vileness, the aims and workings of every fresh specimen of
what he called human nature that seemed bad enough, or was
peculiar enough to interest him. In this region of darkness he
ranged like a discoverer--prowled rather, like an unclean beast
of prey--ever and always on the outlook for the false and foul;
acknowledging, it is true, that he was no better himself, but
arrogating on that ground a correctness of judgment beyond the
reach of such as, desiring to be better, were unwilling to
believe in the utter badness of anything human. Like a lover, he
would watch for the appearance of the vile motive, the self-
interest, that "must be," he knew, at the heart of this or
that deed or proceeding of apparent benevolence or generosity.
Often, alas! the thing was provable; and, where he did not find,
he was quick to invent; and, where he failed in finding or
inventing, he not the less believed the bad motive was there, and
followed the slightest seeming trail of the cunning demon only
the more eagerly. What a smile was his when he heard, which truly
he was not in the way to hear often, the praise of some good
deed, or an ascription of high end to some endeavor of one of the
vile race to which he belonged! Do those who abuse their kind
actually believe they are of it? Do they hold themselves
exceptions? Do they never reflect that it must be because such is
their own nature, whether their accusation be true or false, that
they know how to attribute such motives to their fellows? Or is
it that, actually and immediately rejoicing in iniquity, they
delight in believing it universal?
Quiet as a panther, Redmain was, I say, always in pursuit, if not
of something sensual for himself, then of something evil in
another. He would sit at his club, silent and watching, day after
day, night after night, waiting for the chance that should cast
light on some idea of detection, on some doubt, bewilderment, or
conjecture. He would ask the farthest-off questions: who could
tell what might send him into the track of discovery? He would
give to the talk the strangest turns, laying trap after trap to
ensnare the most miserable of facts, elevated into a desirable
secret only by his hope to learn through it something equally
valueless beyond it. Especially he delighted in discovering, or
flattering himself he had discovered, the hollow full of dead
men's bones under the flowery lawn of seeming goodness. Nor as
yet had he, so far as he knew, or at least was prepared to allow,
ever failed. And this he called the study of human nature, and
quoted Pope. Truly, next to God, the proper study of mankind is
man; but how shall a man that knows only the evil in himself, nor
sees it hateful, read the thousandfold-compounded heart of his
neighbor? To rake over the contents of an ash-pit, is not to
study geology. There were motives in Redmain's own being, which
he was not merely incapable of understanding, but incapable of
seeing, incapable of suspecting.
The game had for him all the pleasure of keenest speculation; nor
that alone, for, in the supposed discovery of the evil of
another, he felt himself vaguely righteous.
One more point in his character I may not in fairness omit: he
had naturally a strong sense of justice; and, if he exercised it
but little in some of the relations of his life, he was none the
less keenly alive to his own claims on its score; for chiefly he
cried out for fair play on behalf of those who were wicked in
similar fashion to himself. But, in truth, no one dealt so hardly
with Redmain as his own conscience at such times when suffering
and fear had awaked it.
So much for a portrait-sketch of the man to whom Mortimer had
sold his daughter--such was the man whom Hesper, entirely aware
that none could compel her to marry against her will, had, partly
from fear of her father, partly from moral laziness, partly from
reverence for the Moloch of society, whose priestess was her
mother, vowed to love, honor, and obey! In justice to her, it
must be remembered, however, that she did not and could not know
of him what her father knew.
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