THE SUICIDE.
Falconer lived on and laboured on in London.Wherever he found a man fitted for the work, he placed him in such office as De Fleuri already occupied.At the same time he went more into society, and gained the friendship of many influential people.Besides the use he made of this to carry out plans for individual rescue, it enabled him to bestir himself for the first and chief good which he believed it was in the power of the government to effect for the class amongst which he laboured.As I have shown, he did not believe in any positive good being effected save through individual contact--through faith, in a word--faith in the human helper--which might become a stepping-stone through the chaotic misery towards faith in the Lord and in his Father.All that association could do, as such, was only, in his judgment, to remove obstructions from the way of individual growth and education--to put better conditions within reach--first of all, to provide that the people should be able, if they would, to live decently.He had no notion of domestic inspection, or of offering prizes for cleanliness and order.He knew that misery and wretchedness are the right and best condition of those who live so that misery and wretchedness are the natural consequences of their life.But there ought always to be the possibility of emerging from these; and as things were, over the whole country, for many who would if they could, it was impossible to breathe fresh air, to be clean, to live like human beings.And he saw this difficulty ever on the increase, through the rapacity of the holders of small house-property, and the utter wickedness of railway companies, who pulled down every house that stood in their way, and did nothing to provide room for those who were thus ejected--most probably from a wretched place, but only, to be driven into a more wretched still.To provide suitable dwellings for the poor he considered the most pressing of all necessary reforms.His own fortune was not sufficient for doing much in this way, but he set about doing what he could by purchasing houses in which the poor lived, and putting them into the hands of persons whom he could trust, and who were immediately responsible to him for their proceedings: they had to make them fit for human abodes, and let them to those who desired better accommodation, giving the preference to those already tenants, so long as they paid their reasonable rent, which he considered far more necessary for them to do than for him to have done.
One day he met by appointment the owner of a small block, of which he contemplated the purchase.They were in a dreadfully dilapidated condition, a shame that belonged more to the owner than the inhabitants.The man wanted to sell the houses, or at least was willing to sell them, but put an exorbitant price upon them.
Falconer expostulated.
'I know the whole of the rent these houses could bring you in,' he said, 'without making any deduction for vacancies and defalcations:
what you ask is twice as much as they would fetch if the full rent were certain.'
The poor wretch looked up at him with the leer of a ghoul.He was dressed like a broken-down clergyman, in rusty black, with a neck-cloth of whitey-brown.
'I admit it,' he said in good English, and a rather educated tone.
'Your arguments are indisputable.I confess besides that so far short does the yield come of the amount on paper, that it would pay me to give them away.But it's the funerals, sir, that make it worth my while.I'm an undertaker, as you may judge from my costume.I count back-rent in the burying.People may cheat their landlord, but they can't cheat the undertaker.They must be buried.
That's the one indispensable--ain't it, sir?'
Falconer had let him run on that he might have the measure of him.
Now he was prepared with his reply.
'You've told me your profession,' he said: 'I'll tell you mine.Iam a lawyer.If you don't let me have those houses for five hundred, which is the full market value, I'll prosecute you.It'll take a good penny from the profits of your coffins to put those houses in a state to satisfy the inspector.'
The wretched creature was struck dumb.Falconer resumed.
'You're the sort of man that ought to be kept to your pound of filthy flesh.I know what I say; and I'll do it.The law costs me nothing.You won't find it so.'
The undertaker sold the houses, and no longer in that quarter killed the people he wanted to bury.
I give this as a specimen of the kind of thing Falconer did.But he took none of the business part in his own hands, on the same principle on which Paul the Apostle said it was unmeet for him to leave the preaching of the word in order to serve tables--not that the thing was beneath him, but that it was not his work so long as he could be doing more important service still.
De Fleuri was one of his chief supports.The whole nature of the man mellowed under the sun of Falconer, and over the work that Falconer gave him to do.His daughter recovered, and devoted herself to the same labour that had rescued her.Miss St.John was her superior.By degrees, without any laws or regulations, a little company was gathered, not of ladies and gentlemen, but of men and women, who aided each, other, and without once meeting as a whole, laboured not the less as one body in the work of the Lord, bound in one by bonds that had nothing to do with cobweb committee meetings or public dinners, chairmen or wine-flushed subscriptions.They worked like the leaven of which the Lord spoke.
