MISSING, A HOUSEHOLDER

BY FRANCIS JACOX

THE great Speke mystery, which for some time exercised so intently the speculative powers of the public and the press, was but an acute development, so to speak, of what seems to be a chronic tendency in human nature—on the side of its morbid pathology at least-towards hiding from one's fellows for some scarcely assignable reason, and for some provokingly indefinite time. The late Nathaniel Hawthorne once wrote a narrative essay on the subject, taking for his text the story of a man he calls Wakefield, who lived with his wife in London, and there signalised himself by "as remarkable a freak as may be found in the whole list of human oddities." Under pretence of going a journey, this man is said to have taken lodgings in the next street to his own house, and to have dwelt there upwards of twenty years, unheard of by his wife or friends, and without one shadow of a reason for such selfbanishment. During that period, it seems, he beheld his home every day, and his forlorn wife at least "once a week" "all the year round." After so great a gap in his wedded happiness-after his decease had been long ago accepted as indubitable, his estate settled, and his name forgotten-he "entered the door quietly, as from a day's absence, and became a loving spouse till death." And the author of Transformation claims for this story an interest which appeals to the general sympathies of mankind. "We know, each one of us," he remarks, "that we could not perpetrate such a folly, yet feel as if some other might." To Mr. Hawthorne this Wakefield becomes a thoroughly real personage, into the secrets of whose individuality he, with characteristic subtlety of analysis, and with all those refinements of psychology in which he revelled, strives to enter. In imagination he dogs Wakefield step by step along the street ere he lose his personality and melt into the great mass of London life; follows him until, after several superfluous turns and doublings, he comfortably establishes himself by the fireside of a small room, previously bespoken, where he is at once in the next street to his own and at his journey's end. Wakefield is imagined almost repentant of his frolic the same night, and half resolved to return next day. In the morning he is figured as rising earlier than usual, and considering what he really means to do; for such are his loose and rambling modes of thought, that he has taken this very singular step (on our author's showing) with the consciousness of a purpose indeed,

but without being able to define it sufficiently for his own contemplation. "The vagueness of the project, and the convulsive effort with which he plunges into the execution of it, are equally characteristic of a feeble-minded man." A morbid vanity is assigned as lying nearest the bottom of the affair, denoted by his curiosity to know how the little sphere of creatures and circumstances in which he was a central object will be affected by his removal. He is even pictured as going, almost by habit, to his own door, but hurrying away breathless with agitation hitherto unfelt, little dreaming of the doom to which his first backward step devotes him. Anon, the whole process of estrangement evolves in a natural train; and a new system once established, a retrograde movement to the old world, it is argued, would to such a man be almost as difficult as the step that placed him in his unparalleled position. He had contrived-or rather, as Mr. Hawthorne reads him-he had happened to dissever himself from the world, to vanish, to give up his place and privileges with living men, without being admitted into the privileges of the dead. "It was Wakefield's unparalleled fate to retain his original share of human sympathies, and to be still involved in human interests, while he had lost his reciprocal influence on them." And the moral drawn from this strange story, so far as it admits of one, is, that amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place for ever. "Like Wakefield, he may become as it were the outcast of the universe." The author of the Blithedale Romance was an adept, sui generis, in the art to point a moral and adorn a tale; and among tales Wakefield is one of his twice-told ones. Hardly applicable to him and to them is the accepted adage of nothing being so tedious as a twice-told tale. All depends on the telling; and in that, taken in his own way, he is almost unique.

Ben Jonson hinges the plot of one of his better, if not best, comedies, on the fact of a wife playing the trick that in Hawthorne's sketch a husband plays. Sylly's daughter of the South, wedded to the Lord Frampul, a noble gentleman, virtuous, and a scholar, quits her house, impelled by a crotchet or whim; and the result is her husband's disappearance too :

"A fond weak woman went away in a melancholy;
Because she brought him none but girls, she thought
Her husband loved her not: and he, as foolish,
Too late resenting the cause given, went afar
In quest of her, and was not heard of since."

The story is a curious one that Robert Baillie tells, in his Letters and Journals (1637-1662), of my Lord Belhaven, who, "without any example I ever heard of in Scotland, with his ladie, a very witie woman's advice, did fayne death, and for seven yeares was taken by all for dead, yet now appears againe safe and sound in his own house. He was

much ingadged for Duke Hamilton: fearing the creditors might fall on his person and estate, and knowing if he were reputed dead, his wife, by conjunct-fye and otherwayes, would keep his estate, he went, with his brother and two servants, towards England. These returned, affirming, that in Solway Sands my lord was carried down by the river, and they could not rescue him. His ladie and friends made great doole for him, and none controverts his death. In the meantime he goes beyond London and farms a piece of ground, and lives very privatelie there."

Godwin, in his Caleb Williams, makes it a characteristic of Mr. Falkland that he would sometimes, without any previous notice, absent himself from his home without cause shown. But the guilt of this absentee might give him a fellow-feeling with the yearning for evasion expressed in one of Wordsworth's poems:

"To wicked deeds I was inclined,

And wicked fancies crossed my mind;
And every man I chanced to see,

I thought he knew some ill of me :
No peace, no comfort could I find,

No ease within doors or without;
And crazily and wearily

I went my work about;

And oft was moved to flee from home,

And hide my head where wild beasts roam."

The latest of Lord Lytton's longer fictions has been charged with a predominant disregard of abiding restraints and responsibilities, so universal is the pursuit and bouleversement; nobody holding his own, but everybody flying off at a tangent; old Waife at hide-and-seek with his grandchild, then in magnanimous flight from her, and so with the other chief dramatis persona. The "inevitable, unmanageable stability of the middle classes," their subservience to certain stationary laws, and dull permanence of life and duty, is suggested as one possible reason for the author's alienation from, and want of sympathy with them; for whatever reverses his heart is exposed to, the merchant cannot at a moment's warning desert his counting-house, the attorney his clients, the doctor his patients; and "the wildest imagination shrinks from the assumption that a tradesman can desert his business and disappear for three years into Central Africa, and return to find things just as he left them." Nevertheless, the truth that is so strange as to be stranger than fiction, supplies at least isolated instances of Wakefields neither few nor far between; their cases differing from his rather in degree than in kind. Mrs. Gaskell appears to have been founding fiction upon fact when she cited the example of "a relation of mine," who, "charming as he is in many points, has the little peculiarity of liking to change his lodgings once every three months on an average, to the bewilderment of his friends;" which peculiarity she made the text or starting-point of an essay on "Disappearances."

One can easily understand a man with such a past as Prince Charles Edward's had been taking to periodical disappearances in his later and unhappier years. From Avignon, for example, after a residence of two months he abruptly withdrew himself, and for a long while his movements—if he was on the move-were a mystery. For more than a year he was lost sight of by his friends, and even by his nearest relations. Morbid feelings, suggests one of his biographers, acting upon a character naturally secretive, seem to have been the cause of this strange conduct. On another occasion we are told how "the secretiveness which he had shown in the Highlands, when passing from one retreat and one set of friends to another, now reappeared, and it marked much of his future career." And again at a later stage in the chequered progress of that "strange eventful history," "obscurity again settles upon him for a period. Where he travelled, or where he stayed, what name and character he assumed, and by whom he was attended," were questions, vexed and vexatious questions, which those even who were most in the prince's confidence entirely failed to solve.

Descartes at one time, without quitting Paris, kept himself so closely withdrawn from his acquaintance, that it was two years before the most intimate of them succeeded in finding him out. Swift at one time retired from Dublin to the south of Ireland, and there continued for the space of several months, without communicating, it is said, with even his dearest friends, or putting it into the power of the nearest of those dearest to prate of his whereabouts. Benjamin Constant had a restless spirit that impelled him to start suddenly on expeditions which should leave no trace of his transit. Von Buch, the distinguished geologist, would leave his house in Berlin without telling anyone of his intentions, remain away for weeks or months, and return with as little notice given,-if with as little notice taken, so much the better for him. The late Baron von Stockmar, a cherished guest from time to time at Windsor Castle, is said to have left that royal roof in the same abrupt manner as that of his exit from other households-without a hint of his intentions at the time, or a clue to trace his erratic course elsewhither. The author of the Caxtonian essays pictures a typically shy man, who, with the dissimulation peculiar to that form of shyness, suffers annoyances to accumulate without implying by a word that he ever feels them, until he can bear them no longer. Then suddenly he absconds, shuts himself up in some inaccessible fortress, and perhaps has recourse to his pen, with which, safe at a distance, his shyness corrupts into ferocity. "It was but the other day that a shy acquaintance of mine threw his family into consternation by going off none knew whither, and sending a deed of separation to the unsuspecting wife, who for ten years had tormented him without provoking a syllable of complaint." Aloïsius Bertrand, the French poet, known in this country, if not by his own writings, at least by Sainte-Beuve's charming sketch of him, used to disappear from the ken of his friends, evanish and give no sign, not even the sign-manual

of a bit of handwriting. To tell the why and wherefore of his flitting would be too much to ask; but neither was there any means of telling the whither and where. He was like one of the Lake poets, as depicted by another of them :

"Here on his hours he hung as on a book,

On his own time here would he float away,

As doth a fly upon a summer brook;

But go to-morrow, or belike to-day,

Seek for him, he is fled, and whither none can say.

What ill was on him, what he had to do,

A mighty wonder bred among our quiet crew.

Great wonder to our gentle tribe it was,
Whenever from our valley he withdrew;
For happier soul no living creature has
Than he had, being here the long day through.
Some thought he was a lover, and did woo:

Some thought far worse of him, and judged him wrong ;

But verse was what he had been wedded to;

And his own mind did, like a tempest strong,

Come to him thus, and drove the weary wight along."