Still trying to figure out what's going on in The Confidence Man

Herman Melville's The Confidence Man continues to trouble and disturb, which is of course his intent - as, 50+ pages in, the con-man scheme takes a bit of a twist; Melville reels off two chapters (most of the chapters are short, just an encounter between two or three characters aboard the steamship) in which the confidence man - now described generally as a man dressed in gray (I think he uses the British spelling though) - we never really do have a clear image of what he looks like as his guise changes and that is part of the point - meets with two "good" characters on board and in both cases wheedles out of them a large donation to his supposed charity for Seminole women and orphans. So what is Melville's ever-darker point? Benevolence and charity are often misguided, there's evil everywhere, the world is a great con game? Somehow I think he's not that monolithically cynical, that there's an element of the story that suggest benevolence is misguided when toward abstractions - a donation to a charity for a cause far and remote - and the truly good person rises to the defense of fellow man or woman; in other words, a good man does not allow a disabled beggar to be humiliated while assuaging his soul by writing a check. Perhaps. Who knows? TCM remains extremely complex and elusive and I'm not sure if I've figured out anything about it beyond the banal up to this point.