THE NEWCOMES

MEMOIRS OF A MOST RESPECTABLE FAMILY

Edited by Arthur Pendennis, Esq.

By William Makepeace Thackeray


Contents

 THE NEWCOMES
 CHAPTER I.  The Overture—After which the Curtain rises upon a Drinking Chorus
 CHAPTER II.  Colonel Newcome’s Wild Oats
 CHAPTER III.  Colonel Newcome’s Letter-box
 CHAPTER IV.  In which the Author and the Hero resume their Acquaintance
 CHAPTER V.  Clive’s Uncles
 CHAPTER VI.  Newcome Brothers
 CHAPTER VII.  In which Mr. Clive’s School-days are over
 CHAPTER VIII.  Mrs. Newcome at Home (a Small Early Party)
 CHAPTER IX.  Miss Honeyman’s
 CHAPTER X.  Ethel and her Relations
 CHAPTER XI.  At Mrs. Ridley’s
 CHAPTER XII.  In which everybody is asked to Dinner
 CHAPTER XIII.  In which Thomas Newcome sings his Last Song
 CHAPTER XIV.  Park Lane
 CHAPTER XV.  The Old Ladies
 CHAPTER XVI.  In which Mr. Sherrick lets his House in Fitzroy Square
 CHAPTER XVII.  A School of Art
 CHAPTER XVIII.  New Companions
 CHAPTER XIX.  The Colonel at Home
 CHAPTER XX.  Contains more Particulars of the Colonel and his Brethren
 CHAPTER XXI.  Is Sentimental, but Short
 CHAPTER XXII.  Describes a Visit to Paris; with Accidents and Incidents in London
 CHAPTER XXIII.  In which we hear a Soprano and a Contralto
 CHAPTER XXIV.  In which the Newcome Brothers once more meet together in Unity
 CHAPTER XXV.  Is passed in a Public-house
 CHAPTER XXVI.  In which Colonel Newcome’s Horses are sold
 CHAPTER XXVII.  Youth and Sunshine
 CHAPTER XXVIII.  In which Clive begins to see the World
 CHAPTER XXIX.  In which Barnes comes a-wooing
 CHAPTER XXX.  A Retreat
 CHAPTER XXXI.  Madame la Duchesse
 CHAPTER XXXII.  Barnes’s Courtship
 CHAPTER XXXIII.  Lady Kew at the Congress
 CHAPTER XXXIV.  The End of the Congress of Baden
 CHAPTER XXXV.  Across the Alps
 CHAPTER XXXVI.  In which M. de Florac is promoted
 CHAPTER XXXVII.  Returns to Lord Kew
 CHAPTER XXXVIII.  In which Lady Kew leaves his Lordship quite convalescent
 CHAPTER XXXIX.  Amongst the Painters
 CHAPTER XL.  Returns from Rome to Pall Mall
 CHAPTER XLI.  An Old Story
 CHAPTER XLII.  Injured Innocence
 CHAPTER XLIII.  Returns to some Old Friends
 CHAPTER XLIV.  In which Mr. Charles Honeyman appears in an Amiable Light
 CHAPTER XLV.  A Stag of Ten
 CHAPTER XLVI.  The Hotel de Florac
 CHAPTER XLVII.  Contains two or three Acts of a Little Comedy
 CHAPTER XLVIII.  In which Benedick is a Married Man
 CHAPTER XLIX.  Contains at least six more Courses and two Desserts
 CHAPTER L.  Clive in New Quarters
 CHAPTER LI.  An Old Friend
 CHAPTER LII.  Family Secrets
 CHAPTER LIII.  In which Kinsmen fall out
 CHAPTER LIV.  Has a Tragical Ending
 CHAPTER LV.  Barnes’s Skeleton Closet
 CHAPTER LVI.  Rosa quo locorum sera moratur
 CHAPTER LVII.  Rosebury and Newcome
 CHAPTER LVIII.  “One more Unfortunate”
 CHAPTER LIX.  In which Achilles loses Briseis
 CHAPTER LX.  In which we write to the Colonel
 CHAPTER LXI.  In which we are introduced to a New Newcome
 CHAPTER LXII.  Mr. and Mrs. Clive Newcome
 CHAPTER LXIII.  Mrs. Clive at Home
 CHAPTER LXIV.  Absit Omen
 CHAPTER LXV.  In which Mrs. Clive comes into her Fortune
 CHAPTER LXVI.  In which the Colonel and the Newcome Athenæum are both lectured
 CHAPTER LXVII.  Newcome and Liberty
 CHAPTER LXVIII.  A Letter and a Reconciliation
 CHAPTER LXIX.  The Election
 CHAPTER LXX.  Chiltern Hundreds
 CHAPTER LXXI.  In which Mrs. Clive Newcome’s Carriage is ordered
 CHAPTER LXXII.  Belisarius
 CHAPTER LXXIII.  In which Belisarius returns from Exile
 CHAPTER LXXIV.  In which Clive begins the World
 CHAPTER LXXV.  Founder’s Day at the Grey Friars
 CHAPTER LXXVI.  Christmas at Rosebury
 CHAPTER LXXVII.  The Shortest and Happiest in the Whole History
 CHAPTER LXXVIII.  In which the Author goes on a Pleasant Errand
 CHAPTER LXXIX.  In which Old Friends come together
 CHAPTER LXXX.  In which the Colonel says “Adsum” when his Name is called




THE NEWCOMES




CHAPTER I.
The Overture—After which the Curtain rises upon a Drinking Chorus


A crow, who had flown away with a cheese from a dairy-window, sate
perched on a tree looking down at a great big frog in a pool underneath
him. The frog’s hideous large eyes were goggling out of his head in a
manner which appeared quite ridiculous to the old blackamoor, who
watched the splay-footed slimy wretch with that peculiar grim humour
belonging to crows. Not far from the frog a fat ox was browsing; whilst
a few lambs frisked about the meadow, or nibbled the grass and
buttercups there.

Who should come in to the farther end of the field but a wolf? He was
so cunningly dressed up in sheep’s clothing, that the very lambs did
not know Master Wolf; nay, one of them, whose dam the wolf had just
eaten, after which he had thrown her skin over his shoulders, ran up
innocently towards the devouring monster, mistaking him for her mamma.

“He, he!” says a fox, sneaking round the hedge-paling, over which the
tree grew, whereupon the crow was perched looking down on the frog, who
was staring with his goggle eyes fit to burst with envy, and croaking
abuse at the ox. “How absurd those lambs are! Yonder silly little
knock-kneed baah-ling does not know the old wolf dressed in the sheep’s
fleece. He is the same old rogue who gobbled up little Red Riding
Hood’s grandmother for lunch, and swallowed little Red Riding Hood for
supper. _Tirez la bobinette et la chevillette cherra_. He, he!”

An owl that was hidden in the hollow of the tree woke up. “Oho, Master
Fox,” says she, “I cannot see you, but I smell you! If some folks like
lambs, other folks like geese,” says the owl.

“And your ladyship is fond of mice,” says the fox.

“The Chinese eat them,” says the owl, “and I have read that they are
very fond of dogs,” continued the old lady.

“I wish they would exterminate every cur of them off the face of the
earth,” said the fox.

“And I have also read, in works of travel, that the French eat frogs,”
continued the owl. “Aha, my friend Crapaud! are you there? That was a
very pretty concert we sang together last night!”

“If the French devour my brethren, the English eat beef,” croaked out
the frog,—“great, big, brutal, bellowing oxen.”

“Ho, whoo!” says the owl, “I have heard that the English are
toad-eaters too!”

“But who ever heard of them eating an owl or a fox, madam?” says
Reynard, “or their sitting down and taking a crow to pick?” adds the
polite rogue, with a bow to the old crow who was perched above them
with the cheese in his mouth. “We are privileged animals, all of us; at
least, we never furnish dishes for the odious orgies of man.”

“I am the bird of wisdom,” says the owl; “I was the companion of Pallas
Minerva: I am frequently represented in the Egyptian monuments.”

“I have seen you over the British barn-doors,” said the fox, with a
grin. “You have a deal of scholarship, Mrs. Owl. I know a thing or two
myself; but am, I confess it, no scholar—a mere man of the world—a
fellow that lives by his wits—a mere country gentleman.”

“You sneer at scholarship,” continues the owl, with a sneer on her
venerable face. “I read a good deal of a night.”

“When I am engaged deciphering the cocks and hens at roost,” says the
fox.

“It’s a pity for all that you can’t read; that board nailed over my
head would give you some information.”

“What does it say?” says the fox.

“I can’t spell in the daylight,” answered the owl; and, giving a yawn,
went back to sleep till evening in the hollow of her tree.

“A fig for her hieroglyphics!” said the fox, looking up at the crow in
the tree. “What airs our slow neighbour gives herself! She pretends to
all the wisdom; whereas, your reverences, the crows, are endowed with
gifts far superior to these benighted old big-wigs of owls, who blink
in the darkness, and call their hooting singing. How noble it is to
hear a chorus of crows! There are twenty-four brethren of the Order of
St. Corvinus, who have builded themselves a convent near a wood which I
frequent; what a droning and a chanting they keep up! I protest their
reverences’ singing is nothing to yours! You sing so deliciously in
parts, do for the love of harmony favour me with a solo!”

While this conversation was going on, the ox was thumping the grass;
the frog was eyeing him in such a rage at his superior proportions,
that he would have spurted venom at him if he could, and that he would
have burst, only that is impossible, from sheer envy; the little
lambkin was lying unsuspiciously at the side of the wolf in fleecy
hosiery, who did not as yet molest her, being replenished with the
mutton her mamma. But now the wolf’s eyes began to glare, and his sharp
white teeth to show, and he rose up with a growl, and began to think he
should like lamb for supper.

“What large eyes you have got!” bleated out the lamb, with rather a
timid look.

“The better to see you with, my dear.”

“What large teeth you have got!”

“The better to——”

At this moment such a terrific yell filled the field, that all its
inhabitants started with terror. It was from a donkey, who had somehow
got a lion’s skin, and now came in at the hedge, pursued by some men
and boys with sticks and guns.

When the wolf in sheep’s clothing heard the bellow of the ass in the
lion’s skin, fancying that the monarch of the forest was near, he ran
away as fast as his disguise would let him. When the ox heard the noise
he dashed round the meadow-ditch, and with one trample of his hoof
squashed the frog who had been abusing him. When the crow saw the
people with guns coming, he instantly dropped the cheese out of his
mouth, and took to wing. When the fox saw the cheese drop, he
immediately made a jump at it (for he knew the donkey’s voice, and that
his asinine bray was not a bit like his royal master’s roar), and
making for the cheese, fell into a steel trap, which snapped off his
tail; without which he was obliged to go into the world, pretending,
forsooth, that it was the fashion not to wear tails any more; and that
the fox-party were better without ’em.

Meanwhile, a boy with a stick came up, and belaboured Master Donkey
until he roared louder than ever. The wolf, with the sheep’s clothing
draggling about his legs, could not run fast, and was detected and shot
by one of the men. The blind old owl, whirring out of the hollow tree,
quite amazed at the disturbance, flounced into the face of a ploughboy,
who knocked her down with a pitchfork. The butcher came and quietly led
off the ox and the lamb; and the farmer, finding the fox’s brush in the
trap, hung it up over his mantelpiece, and always bragged that he had
been in at his death.

“What a farrago of old fables is this! What a dressing up in old
clothes!” says the critic. (I think I see such a one—a Solomon that
sits in judgment over us authors and chops up our children.) “As sure
as I am just and wise, modest, learned, and religious, so surely I have
read something very like this stuff and nonsense about jackasses and
foxes before. That wolf in sheep’s clothing?—do I not know him? That
fox discoursing with the crow?—have I not previously heard of him? Yes,
in Lafontaine’s fables: let us get the Dictionary and the Fable and the
Biographie Universelle, article Lafontaine, and confound the impostor.”

“Then in what a contemptuous way,” may Solomon go on to remark, “does
this author speak of human nature! There is scarce one of these
characters he represents but is a villain. The fox is a flatterer; the
frog is an emblem of impotence and envy; the wolf in sheep’s clothing a
bloodthirsty hypocrite, wearing the garb of innocence; the ass in the
lion’s skin a quack trying to terrify, by assuming the appearance of a
forest monarch (does the writer, writhing under merited castigation,
mean to sneer at critics in this character? We laugh at the impertinent
comparison); the ox, a stupid commonplace; the only innocent being in
the writer’s (stolen) apologue is a fool—the idiotic lamb, who does not
know his own mother!” And then the critic, if in a virtuous mood, may
indulge in some fine writing regarding the holy beauteousness of
maternal affection.

Why not? If authors sneer, it is the critic’s business to sneer at them
for sneering. He must pretend to be their superior, or who would care
about his opinion? And his livelihood is to find fault. Besides, he is
right sometimes; and the stories he reads, and the characters drawn in
them, are old, sure enough. What stories are new? All types of all
characters march through all fables: tremblers and boasters; victims
and bullies; dupes and knaves; long-eared Neddies, giving themselves
leonine airs; Tartuffes wearing virtuous clothing; lovers and their
trials, their blindness, their folly and constancy. With the very first
page of the human story do not love and lies too begin? So the tales
were told ages before Aesop; and asses under lions’ manes roared in
Hebrew; and sly foxes flattered in Etruscan; and wolves in sheep’s
clothing gnashed their teeth in Sanskrit, no doubt. The sun shines
to-day as he did when he first began shining; and the birds in the tree
overhead, while I am writing, sing very much the same note they have
sung ever since there were finches. Nay, since last he besought
good-natured friends to listen once a month to his talking, a friend of
the writer has seen the New World, and found the (featherless) birds
there exceedingly like their brethren of Europe. There may be nothing
new under and including the sun; but it looks fresh every morning, and
we rise with it to toil, hope, scheme, laugh, struggle, love, suffer,
until the night comes and quiet. And then will wake Morrow and the eyes
that look on it; and so _da capo_.

This, then, is to be a story, may it please you, in which jackdaws will
wear peacocks’ feathers, and awaken the just ridicule of the peacocks;
in which, while every justice is done to the peacocks themselves, the
splendour of their plumage, the gorgeousness of their dazzling necks,
and the magnificence of their tails, exception will yet be taken to the
absurdity of their rickety strut, and the foolish discord of their pert
squeaking; in which lions in love will have their claws pared by sly
virgins; in which rogues will sometimes triumph, and honest folks, let
us hope, come by their own; in which there will be black crape and
white favours; in which there will be tears under orange-flower
wreaths, and jokes in mourning-coaches; in which there will be dinners
of herbs with contentment and without, and banquets of stalled oxen
where there is care and hatred—ay, and kindness and friendship too,
along with the feast. It does not follow that all men are honest
because they are poor; and I have known some who were friendly and
generous, although they had plenty of money. There are some great
landlords who do not grind down their tenants; there are actually
bishops who are not hypocrites; there are liberal men even among the
Whigs, and the Radicals themselves are not all aristocrats at heart.
But who ever heard of giving the Moral before the Fable? Children are
only led to accept the one after their delectation over the other: let
us take care lest our readers skip both; and so let us bring them on
quickly—our wolves and lambs, our foxes and lions, our roaring donkeys,
our billing ringdoves, our motherly partlets, and crowing chanticleers.

There was once a time when the sun used to shine brighter than it
appears to do in this latter half of the nineteenth century; when the
zest of life was certainly keener; when tavern wines seemed to be
delicious, and tavern dinners the perfection of cookery; when the
perusal of novels was productive of immense delight, and the monthly
advent of magazine-day was hailed as an exciting holiday; when to know
Thompson, who had written a magazine-article, was an honour and a
privilege; and to see Brown, the author of the last romance, in the
flesh, and actually walking in the Park with his umbrella and Mrs.
Brown, was an event remarkable, and to the end of life to be perfectly
well remembered; when the women of this world were a thousand times
more beautiful than those of the present time; and the houris of the
theatres especially so ravishing and angelic, that to see them was to
set the heart in motion, and to see them again was to struggle for half
an hour previously at the door of the pit; when tailors called at a
man’s lodgings to dazzle him with cards of fancy waistcoats; when it
seemed necessary to purchase a grand silver dressing-case, so as to be
ready for the beard which was not yet born (as yearling brides provide
lace caps, and work rich clothes, for the expected darling); when to
ride in the Park on a ten-shilling hack seemed to be the height of
fashionable enjoyment, and to splash your college tutor as you were
driving down Regent Street in a hired cab the triumph of satire; when
the acme of pleasure seemed to be to meet Jones of Trinity at the
Bedford, and to make an arrangement with him, and with King of Corpus
(who was staying at the Colonnade), and Martin of Trinity Hall (who was
with his family in Bloomsbury Square), to dine at the Piazza, go to the
play and see Braham in Fra Diavolo, and end the frolic evening by
partaking of supper and a song at the “Cave of Harmony.”—It was in the
days of my own youth, then, that I met one or two of the characters who
are to figure in this history, and whom I must ask leave to accompany
for a short while, and until, familiarised with the public, they can
make their own way. As I recall them the roses bloom again, and the
nightingales sing by the calm Bendemeer.

Going to the play, then, and to the pit, as was the fashion in those
honest days, with some young fellows of my own age, having listened
delighted to the most cheerful and brilliant of operas, and laughed
enthusiastically at the farce, we became naturally hungry at twelve
o’clock at night, and a desire for welsh-rabbits and good old
glee-singing led us to the “Cave of Harmony,” then kept by the
celebrated Hoskins, among whose friends we were proud to count.

We enjoyed such intimacy with Mr. Hoskins that he never failed to greet
us with a kind nod; and John the waiter made room for us near the
President of the convivial meeting. We knew the three admirable
glee-singers, and many a time they partook of brandy-and-water at our
expense. One of us gave his call dinner at Hoskins’s, and a merry time
we had of it. Where are you, O Hoskins, bird of the night? Do you
warble your songs by Acheron, or troll your choruses by the banks of
black Avernus?

The goes of stout, the “Chough and Crow,” the welsh-rabbit, the
“Red-Cross Knight,” the hot brandy-and-water (the brown, the strong!),
the “Bloom is on the Rye” (the bloom isn’t on the rye any more!)—the
song and the cup, in a word, passed round merrily; and, I daresay, the
songs and bumpers were encored. It happened that there was a very small
attendance at the “Cave” that night, and we were all more sociable and
friendly because the company was select. The songs were chiefly of the
sentimental class; such ditties were much in vogue at the time of which
I speak.

There came into the “Cave” a gentleman with a lean brown face and long
black mustachios, dressed in very loose clothes, and evidently a
stranger to the place. At least he had not visited it for a long time.
He was pointing out changes to a lad who was in his company; and,
calling for sherry-and-water, he listened to the music, and twirled his
mustachios with great enthusiasm.

At the very first glimpse of me the boy jumped up from the table,
bounded across the room, ran to me with his hands out, and, blushing,
said, “Don’t you know me?”

It was little Newcome, my school-fellow, whom I had not seen for six
years, grown a fine tall young stripling now, with the same bright blue
eyes which I remembered when he was quite a little boy.

“What the deuce brings you here?” said I.

He laughed and looked roguish. “My father—that’s my father—would come.
He’s just come back from India. He says all the wits used to come
here,—Mr. Sheridan, Captain Morris, Colonel Hanger, Professor Porson. I
told him your name, and that you used to be very kind to me when I
first went to Smithfield. I’ve left now; I’m to have a private tutor. I
say, I’ve got such a jolly pony. It’s better fun than old Smile.”

Here the whiskered gentleman, Newcome’s father, pointing to a waiter to
follow him with his glass of sherry-and-water, strode across the room
twirling his mustachios, and came up to the table where we sate, making
a salutation with his hat in a very stately and polite manner, so that
Hoskins himself was, as it were, obliged to bow; the glee-singers
murmured among themselves (their eyes rolling over their glasses
towards one another as they sucked brandy-and water), and that
mischievous little wag, little Nadab the Improvisatore (who had just
come in), began to mimic him, feeling his imaginary whiskers, after the
manner of the stranger, and flapping about his pocket-handkerchief in
the most ludicrous manner. Hoskins checked this ribaldry by sternly
looking towards Nadab, and at the same time called upon the gents to
give their orders, the waiter being in the room, and Mr. Bellew about
to sing a song.

Newcome’s father came up and held out his hand to me. I dare say I
blushed, for I had been comparing him to the admirable Harley in the
Critic, and had christened him Don Ferolo Whiskerandos.

He spoke in a voice exceedingly soft and pleasant, and with a
cordiality so simple and sincere, that my laughter shrank away ashamed,
and gave place to a feeling much more respectful and friendly. In
youth, you see, one is touched by kindness. A man of the world may, of
course, be grateful or not as he chooses.

“I have heard of your kindness, sir,” says he, “to my boy. And whoever
is kind to him is kind to me. Will you allow me to sit down by you? and
may I beg you to try my cheroots?” We were friends in a minute—young
Newcome snuggling by my side, his father opposite, to whom, after a
minute or two of conversation, I presented my three college friends.

“You have come here, gentlemen, to see the wits,” says the Colonel.
“Are there any celebrated persons in the room? I have been
five-and-thirty years from home, and want to see all that is to be
seen.”

King of Corpus (who was an incorrigible wag) was on the point of
pulling some dreadful long-bow, and pointing out a halfdozen of people
in the room, as R. and H. and L., etc., the most celebrated wits of
that day; but I cut King’s shins under the table, and got the fellow to
hold his tongue.

“_Maxima debetur pueris_,” says Jones (a fellow of very kind feeling,
who has gone into the Church since), and, writing on his card to
Hoskins, hinted to him that a boy was in the room, and a gentleman, who
was quite a greenhorn: hence that the songs had better be carefully
selected.

And so they were. A ladies’ school might have come in, and, but for the
smell of the cigars and brandy-and-water, have taken no harm by what
happened. Why should it not always be so? If there are any “Caves of
Harmony” now, I warrant Messieurs the landlords, their interests would
be better consulted by keeping their singers within bounds. The very
greatest scamps like pretty songs, and are melted by them; so are
honest people. It was worth a guinea to see the simple Colonel, and his
delight at the music. He forgot all about the distinguished wits whom
he had expected to see in his ravishment over the glees.

“I say, Clive, this is delightful. This is better than your aunt’s
concert with all the Squallinis, hey? I shall come here often.
Landlord, may I venture to ask those gentlemen if they will take any
refreshment? What are their names?” (to one of his neighbours). “I was
scarcely allowed to hear any singing before I went out, except an
oratorio, where I fell asleep; but this, by George, is as fine as
Incledon!” He became quite excited over his sherry-and-water-(“I’m
sorry to see you, gentlemen, drinking brandy-pawnee,” says he; “it
plays the deuce with our young men in India.”) He joined in all the
choruses with an exceedingly sweet voice. He laughed at “The Derby Ram”
so that it did you good to hear him; and when Hoskins sang (as he did
admirably) “The Old English Gentleman,” and described, in measured
cadence, the death of that venerable aristocrat, tears trickled down
the honest warrior’s cheek, while he held out his hand to Hoskins and
said, “Thank you, sir, for that song; it is an honour to human nature.”
On which Hoskins began to cry too.

And now young Nadab, having been cautioned, commenced one of those
surprising feats of improvisation with which he used to charm
audiences. He took us all off, and had rhymes pat about all the
principal persons in the room: King’s pins (which he wore very
splendid), Martin’s red waistcoat, etc. The Colonel was charmed with
each feat, and joined delighted with the chorus—“Ritolderol ritolderol
ritolderolderay” (_bis_). And when, coming to the Colonel himself, he
burst out—

“A military gent I see—And while his face I scan,
I think you’ll all agree with me—He came from Hindostan.
And by his side sits laughing free—A youth with curly head,
I think you’ll all agree with me—That he was best in bed.
Ritolderol,” etc.


—the Colonel laughed immensely at this sally, and clapped his son,
young Clive, on the shoulder. “Hear what he says of you, sir? Clive,
best be off to bed, my boy—ho, ho! No, no. We know a trick worth two of
that. ‘We won’t go home till morning, till daylight does appear.’ Why
should we? Why shouldn’t my boy have innocent pleasure? I was allowed
none when I was a young chap, and the severity was nearly the ruin of
me. I must go and speak with that young man—the most astonishing thing
I ever heard in my life. What’s his name? Mr. Nadab? Mr. Nadab, sir,
you have delighted me. May I make so free as to ask you to come and
dine with me to-morrow at six? Colonel Newcome, if you please, Nerot’s
Hotel, Clifford Street. I am always proud to make the acquaintance of
men of genius, and you are one, or my name is not Newcome!”

“Sir, you do me hhonour,” says Mr. Nadab, pulling up his shirt-collar,
“and perhaps the day will come when the world will do me justice,—may I
put down your hhonoured name for my book of poems?”

“Of course, my dear sir,” says the enthusiastic Colonel; “I’ll send
them all over India. Put me down for six copies, and do me the favour
to bring them to-morrow when you come to dinner.”

And now Mr. Hoskins asking if any gentleman would volunteer a song,
what was our amazement when the simple Colonel offered to sing himself,
at which the room applauded vociferously; whilst methought poor Clive
Newcome hung down his head, and blushed as red as a peony. I felt for
the young lad, and thought what my own sensations would have been if,
in that place, my own uncle, Major Pendennis, had suddenly proposed to
exert his lyrical powers.

The Colonel selected the ditty of “Wapping Old Stairs” (a ballad so
sweet and touching that surely any English poet might be proud to be
the father of it), and he sang this quaint and charming old song in an
exceedingly pleasant voice, with flourishes and roulades in the old
Incledon manner, which has pretty nearly passed away. The singer gave
his heart and soul to the simple ballad, and delivered Molly’s gentle
appeal so pathetically that even the professional gentlemen hummed and
buzzed—a sincere applause; and some wags who were inclined to jeer at
the beginning of the performance, clinked their glasses and rapped
their sticks with quite a respectful enthusiasm. When the song was
over, Clive held up his head too; after the shock of the first verse,
looked round with surprise and pleasure in his eyes; and we, I need not
say, backed our friend, delighted to see him come out of his queer
scrape so triumphantly. The Colonel bowed and smiled with very pleasant
good-nature at our plaudits. It was like Dr. Primrose preaching his
sermon in the prison. There was something touching in the naivete and
kindness of the placid and simple gentleman.

Great Hoskins, placed on high, amidst the tuneful choir, was pleased to
signify his approbation, and gave his guest’s health in his usual
dignified manner. “I am much obliged to you, sir,” says Mr. Hoskins;
“the room ought to be much obliged to you: I drink your ’ealth and
song, sir;” and he bowed to the Colonel politely over his glass of
brandy-and-water, of which he absorbed a little in his customer’s
honour. “I have not heard that song,” he was kind enough to say,
“better performed since Mr. Incledon sung it. He was a great singer,
sir, and I may say, in the words of our immortal Shakspeare, that, take
him for all in all, we shall not look upon his like again.”

The Colonel blushed in his turn, and turning round to his boy with an
arch smile, said, “I learnt it from Incledon. I used to slip out from
Grey Friars to hear him, Heaven bless me, forty years ago; and I used
to be flogged afterwards, and serve me right too. Lord! Lord! how the
time passes!” He drank off his sherry-and-water, and fell back in his
chair; we could see he was thinking about his youth—the golden time—the
happy, the bright, the unforgotten. I was myself nearly two-and-twenty
years of age at that period, and felt as old as, ay, older than the
Colonel.

Whilst he was singing his ballad, there had walked, or rather reeled,
into the room, a gentleman in a military frock-coat and duck trousers
of dubious hue, with whose name and person some of my readers are
perhaps already acquainted. In fact it was my friend Captain Costigan,
in his usual condition at this hour of the night.

Holding on by various tables, the Captain had sidled up, without
accident to himself or any of the jugs and glasses round about him, to
the table where we sat, and had taken his place near the writer, his
old acquaintance. He warbled the refrain of the Colonel’s song, not
inharmoniously; and saluted its pathetic conclusion with a subdued
hiccup and a plentiful effusion of tears. “Bedad, it is a beautiful
song,” says he, “and many a time I heard poor Harry Incledon sing it.”

“He’s a great character,” whispered that unlucky King of Corpus to his
neighbour the Colonel; “was a Captain in the army. We call him the
General. Captain Costigan, will you take something to drink?”

“Bedad, I will,” says the Captain, “and I’ll sing ye a song tu.”

And, having procured a glass of whisky-and-water from the passing
waiter, the poor old man, settling his face into a horrid grin, and
leering, as he was wont when he gave what he called one of his prime
songs, began his music.

The unlucky wretch, who scarcely knew what he was doing or saying,
selected one of the most outrageous performances of his _répertoire_,
fired off a tipsy howl by way of overture, and away he went. At the end
of the second verse the Colonel started up, clapping on his hat,
seizing his stick, and looking as ferocious as though he had been going
to do battle with a Pindaree.

“Silence!” he roared out.

“Hear, hear!” cried certain wags at a farther table. “Go on, Costigan!”
said others.

“Go on!” cries the Colonel, in his high voice trembling with anger.
“Does any gentleman say ‘Go On?’ Does any man who has a wife and
sisters, or children at home, say ‘Go on’ to such disgusting ribaldry
as this? Do you dare, sir, to call yourself a gentleman, and to say
that you hold the King’s commission, and to sit down amongst Christians
and men of honour, and defile the ears of young boys with this wicked
balderdash?”

“Why do you bring young boys here, old boy?” cries a voice of the
malcontents.

“Why? Because I thought I was coming to a society of gentlemen,” cried
out the indignant Colonel. “Because I never could have believed that
Englishmen could meet together and allow a man, and an old man, so to
disgrace himself. For shame, you old wretch! Go home to your bed, you
hoary old sinner! And for my part, I’m not sorry that my son should
see, for once in his life, to what shame and degradation and dishonour,
drunkenness and whisky may bring a man. Never mind the change,
sir!—Curse the change!” says the Colonel, facing the amazed waiter.
“Keep it till you see me in this place again; which will be never—by
George, never!” And shouldering his stick, and scowling round at the
company of scared bacchanalians, the indignant gentleman stalked away,
his boy after him.

Clive seemed rather shamefaced; but I fear the rest of the company
looked still more foolish.

“Aussi que diable venait—il faire dans cette galere?” says King of
Corpus to Jones of Trinity; and Jones gave a shrug of his shoulders,
which were smarting, perhaps; for that uplifted cane of the Colonel’s
had somehow fallen on the back of every man in the room.




CHAPTER II.
Colonel Newcome’s Wild Oats


As the young gentleman who has just gone to bed is to be the hero of
the following pages, we had best begin our account of him with his
family history, which luckily is not very long.

When pigtails still grew on the backs of the British gentry, and their
wives wore cushions on their heads, over which they tied their own
hair, and disguised it with powder and pomatum: when Ministers went in
their stars and orders to the House of Commons, and the orators of the
Opposition attacked nightly the noble lord in the blue ribbon: when Mr.
Washington was heading the American rebels with a courage, it must be
confessed, worthy of a better cause: there came up to London, out of a
northern county, Mr. Thomas Newcome, afterwards Thomas Newcome, Esq.,
and sheriff of London, afterwards Mr. Alderman Newcome, the founder of
the family whose name has given the title to this history. It was but
in the reign of George III. that Mr. Newcome first made his appearance
in Cheapside; having made his entry into London on a waggon, which
landed him and some bales of cloth, all his fortune, in Bishopsgate
Street; though if it could be proved that the Normans wore pigtails
under William the Conqueror, and Mr. Washington fought against the
English under King Richard in Palestine, I am sure some of the present
Newcomes would pay the Heralds’ Office handsomely, living, as they do,
amongst the noblest of the land, and giving entertainments to none but
the very highest nobility and _élite_ of the fashionable and diplomatic
world, as you may read any day in the newspapers. For though these
Newcomes have got a pedigree from the College, which is printed in
Budge’s Landed Aristocracy of Great Britain, and which proves that the
Newcome of Cromwell’s army, the Newcome who was among the last six who
were hanged by Queen Mary for Protestantism, were ancestors of this
house; of which a member distinguished himself at Bosworth Field; and
the founder, slain by King Harold’s side at Hastings, had been
surgeon-barber to King Edward the Confessor; yet, between ourselves, I
think that Sir Brian Newcome, of Newcome, does not believe a word of
the story, any more than the rest of the world does, although a number
of his children bear names out of the Saxon Calendar.

Was Thomas Newcome a foundling—a workhouse child out of that village
which has now become a great manufacturing town, and which bears his
name? Such was the report set about at the last election, when Sir
Brian, in the Conservative interest contested the borough; and Mr.
Yapp, the out-and-out Liberal candidate, had a picture of the old
workhouse placarded over the town as the birthplace of the Newcomes;
with placards ironically exciting freemen to vote for Newcome and
_union_—Newcome and the _parish_ interests, etc. Who cares for these
local scandals? It matters very little to those who have the good
fortune to be invited to Lady Ann Newcome’s parties whether her
beautiful daughters can trace their pedigrees no higher than to the
alderman their grandfather; or whether, through the mythic ancestral
barber-surgeon, they hang on to the chin of Edward, Confessor and King.

Thomas Newcome, who had been a weaver in his native village, brought
the very best character for honesty, thrift, and ingenuity with him to
London, where he was taken into the house of Hobson Brothers,
cloth-factors; afterwards Hobson and Newcome. This fact may suffice to
indicate Thomas Newcome’s story. Like Whittington and many other London
apprentices, he began poor and ended by marrying his master’s daughter,
and becoming sheriff and alderman of the City of London.

But it was only _en secondes noces_ that he espoused the wealthy, and
religious, and eminent (such was the word applied to certain professing
Christians in those days) Sophia Alethea Hobson—a woman who,
considerably older than Mr. Newcome, had the advantage of surviving him
many years. Her mansion at Clapham was long the resort of the most
favoured amongst the religious world. The most eloquent expounders; the
most gifted missionaries, the most interesting converts from foreign
islands, were to be found at her sumptuous table, spread with the
produce of her magnificent gardens. Heaven indeed blessed those gardens
with plenty, as many reverend gentlemen remarked; there were no finer
grapes, peaches, or pineapples in all England. Mr. Whitfield himself
christened her; and it was said generally in the City, and by her
friends, that Miss Hobson’s two Christian names, Sophia and Alethea,
were two Greek words, which, being interpreted, meant wisdom and truth.
She, her villa and gardens, are now no more; but Sophia Terrace, Upper
and Lower Alethea Road, and Hobson’s Buildings, Square, etc., show
every quarter-day that the ground sacred to her (and freehold) still
bears plenteous fruit for the descendants of this eminent woman.

We are, however, advancing matters. When Thomas Newcome had been some
time in London, he quitted the house of Hobson, finding an opening,
though in a much smaller way, for himself. And no sooner did his
business prosper, than he went down into the north, like a man, to a
pretty girl whom he had left there, and whom he had promised to marry.
What seemed an imprudent match (for his wife had nothing but a pale
face, that had grown older and paler with long waiting) turned out a
very lucky one for Newcome. The whole countryside was pleased to think
of the prosperous London tradesman returning to keep his promise to the
penniless girl whom he had loved in the days of his own poverty; the
great country clothiers, who knew his prudence and honesty, gave him
much of their business when he went back to London. Susan Newcome would
have lived to be a rich woman had not fate ended her career within a
year after her marriage, when she died giving birth to a son.

Newcome had a nurse for the child, and a cottage at Clapham, hard by
Mr. Hobson’s house, where he had often walked in the garden of a
Sunday, and been invited to sit down to take a glass of wine. Since he
had left their service, the house had added a banking business, which
was greatly helped by the Quakers and their religious connection; and
Newcome, keeping his account there, and gradually increasing his
business, was held in very good esteem by his former employers, and
invited sometimes to tea at the Hermitage; for which entertainments he
did not, in truth, much care at first, being a City man, a good deal
tired with his business during the day, and apt to go to sleep over the
sermons, expoundings, and hymns, with which the gifted preachers,
missionaries, etc., who were always at the Hermitage, used to wind up
the evening, before supper. Nor was he a supping man (in which case he
would have found the parties pleasanter, for in Egypt itself there were
not more savoury fleshpots than at Clapham); he was very moderate in
his meals, of a bilious temperament, and, besides, obliged to be in
town early in the morning, always setting off to walk an hour before
the first coach.

But when his poor Susan died, Miss Hobson, by her father’s demise,
having now become a partner in the house, as well as heiress to the
pious and childless Zachariah Hobson, her uncle Mr. Newcome, with his
little boy in his hand, met Miss Hobson as she was coming out of
meeting one Sunday; and the child looked so pretty (Mr. N. was a very
personable, fresh-coloured man himself; he wore powder to the end, and
top-boots and brass buttons, in his later days, after he had been
sheriff indeed, one of the finest specimens of the old London
merchant); Miss Hobson, I say, invited him and little Tommy into the
grounds of the Hermitage; did not quarrel with the innocent child for
frisking about in the hay on the lawn, which lay basking in the Sabbath
sunshine, and at the end of the visit gave him a large piece of
pound-cake, a quantity of the finest hothouse grapes, and a tract in
one syllable. Tommy was ill the next day; but on the next Sunday his
father was at meeting.

He became very soon after this an awakened man; and the tittling and
tattling, and the sneering and gossiping, all over Clapham, and the
talk on ’Change, and the pokes in the waistcoat administered by the
wags to Newcome,—“Newcome, give you joy, my boy;” “Newcome, new partner
in Hobson’s;” “Newcome, just take in this paper to Hobson’s, they’ll do
it, I warrant,” etc. etc.; and the groans of the Rev. Gideon Bawls, of
the Rev. Athanasius O’Grady, that eminent convert from Popery, who,
quarrelling with each other, yea, striving one against another, had yet
two sentiments in common, their love for Miss Hobson, their dread,
their hatred of the worldly Newcome; all these squabbles and jokes, and
pribbles and prabbles, look you, may be omitted. As gallantly as he had
married a woman without a penny, as gallantly as he had conquered his
poverty and achieved his own independence, so bravely he went in and
won the great City prize with a fortune of a quarter of a million. And
every one of his old friends, and every honest-hearted fellow who likes
to see shrewdness, and honesty, and courage succeed, was glad of his
good fortune, and said, “Newcome, my boy” (or “Newcome, my buck,” if
they were old City cronies, and very familiar), “I give you joy.”

Of course Mr. Newcome might have gone into Parliament: of course before
the close of his life he might have been made a baronet: but he
eschewed honours senatorial or blood-red hands. “It wouldn’t do,” with
his good sense he said; “the Quaker connection wouldn’t like it.” His
wife never cared about being called Lady Newcome. To manage the great
house of Hobson Brothers and Newcome; to attend to the interests of the
enslaved negro; to awaken the benighted Hottentot to a sense of the
truth; to convert Jews, Turks, Infidels, and Papists; to arouse the
indifferent and often blasphemous mariner; to guide the washerwoman in
the right way; to head all the public charities of her sect, and do a
thousand secret kindnesses that none knew of; to answer myriads of
letters, pension endless ministers, and supply their teeming wives with
continuous baby-linen; to hear preachers daily bawling for hours, and
listen untired on her knees after a long day’s labour, while florid
rhapsodists belaboured cushions above her with wearisome benedictions;
all these things had this woman to do, and for near fourscore years she
fought her fight womanfully: imperious but deserving to rule, hard but
doing her duty, severe but charitable, and untiring in generosity as in
labour; unforgiving in one instance—in that of her husband’s eldest
son, Thomas Newcome; the little boy who had played on the hay, and whom
at first she had loved very sternly and fondly.

Mr. Thomas Newcome, the father of his wife’s twin boys, the junior
partner of the house of Hobson Brothers and Co., lived several years
after winning the great prize about which all his friends so
congratulated him. But he was, after all, only the junior partner of
the house. His wife was manager in Threadneedle Street and at home—when
the clerical gentlemen prayed they importuned Heaven for that sainted
woman a long time before they thought of asking any favour for her
husband. The gardeners touched their hats, the clerks at the bank
brought him the books, but they took their orders from her, not from
him. I think he grew weary of the prayer-meetings, he yawned over the
sufferings of the negroes, and wished the converted Jews at Jericho.
About the time the French Emperor was meeting with his Russian reverses
Mr. Newcome died: his mausoleum is in Clapham Churchyard, near the
modest grave where his first wife reposes.

When his father married, Mr. Thomas Newcome, jun., and Sarah his nurse
were transported from the cottage where they had lived in great comfort
to the palace hard by, surrounded by lawns and gardens, pineries,
graperies, aviaries, luxuries of all kinds. This paradise, five miles
from the Standard at Cornhill, was separated from the outer world by a
thick hedge of tall trees, and an ivy-covered porter’s-gate, through
which they who travelled to London on the top of the Clapham coach
could only get a glimpse of the bliss within. It was a serious
paradise. As you entered at the gate, gravity fell on you; and decorum
wrapped you in a garment of starch. The butcher-boy who galloped his
horse and cart madly about the adjoining lanes and common, whistled
wild melodies (caught up in abominable playhouse galleries), and joked
with a hundred cook-maids, on passing that lodge fell into an
undertaker’s pace, and delivered his joints and sweetbreads silently at
the servants’ entrance. The rooks in the elms cawed sermons at morning
and evening; the peacocks walked demurely on the terraces; the
guinea-fowls looked more Quaker-like than those savoury birds usually
do. The lodge-keeper was serious, and a clerk at a neighbouring chapel.
The pastors who entered at the gate, and greeted his comely wife and
children, fed the little lambkins with tracts. The head-gardener was a
Scotch Calvinist, after the strictest order, only occupying himself
with the melons and pines provisionally, and until the end of the
world, which event, he could prove by infallible calculations, was to
come off in two or three years at farthest. Wherefore, he asked, should
the butler brew strong ale to be drunken three years hence; or the
housekeeper (a follower of Joanna Southcote) make provisions of fine
linen and lay up stores of jams? On a Sunday (which good old Saxon word
was scarcely known at the Hermitage) the household marched away in
separate couples or groups to at least half a dozen of religious
edifices, each to sit under his or her favourite minister, the only man
who went to church being Thomas Newcome, accompanied by Tommy his
little son, and Sarah his nurse, who was, I believe, also his aunt, or
at least his mother’s first cousin. Tommy was taught hymns, very soon
after he could speak, appropriate to his tender age, pointing out to
him the inevitable fate of wicked children, and giving him the earliest
possible warning and description of the punishment of little sinners.
He repeated these poems to his stepmother after dinner, before a great
shining mahogany table, covered with grapes, pineapples, plum-cake,
port wine, and Madeira, and surrounded by stout men in black, with
baggy white neckcloths, who took the little man between their knees,
and questioned him as to his right understanding of the place whither
naughty boys were bound. They patted his head with their fat hands if
he said well, or rebuked him if he was bold, as he often was.

Nurse Sarah or Aunt Sarah would have died had she remained many years
in that stifling garden of Eden. She could not bear to part from the
child whom her mistress and kinswoman had confided to her (the women
had worked in the same room at Newcome’s, and loved each other always,
when Susan became a merchant’s lady, and Sarah her servant). She was
nobody in the pompous new household but Master Tommy’s nurse. The
honest soul never mentioned her relationship to the boy’s mother, nor
indeed did Mr. Newcome acquaint his new family with that circumstance.
The housekeeper called her an Erastian: Mrs. Newcome’s own serious maid
informed against her for telling Tommy stories of Lancashire witches,
and believing in the same. The black footman (madam’s maid and the
butler were of course privately united) persecuted her with his
addresses, and was even encouraged by his mistress, who thought of
sending him as a missionary to the Niger. No little love, and fidelity,
and constancy did honest Sarah show and use during the years she passed
at the Hermitage, and until Tommy went to school. Her master, with many
private prayers and entreaties, in which he passionately recalled his
former wife’s memory and affection, implored his friend to stay with
him; and Tommy’s fondness for her and artless caresses, and the scrapes
he got into, and the howls he uttered over the hymns and catechisms
which he was bidden to learn (by Rev. T. Clack,, of Highbury College,
his daily tutor, who was commissioned to spare not the rod, neither to
spoil the child), all these causes induced Sarah to remain with her
young master until such time as he was sent to school.

Meanwhile an event of prodigious importance, a wonderment, a blessing
and a delight, had happened at the Hermitage. About two years after
Mrs. Newcome’s marriage, the lady being then forty-three years of age,
no less than two little cherubs appeared in the Clapham Paradise—the
twins, Hobson Newcome and Brian Newcome, called after their uncle and
late grandfather, whose name and rank they were destined to perpetuate.
And now there was no reason why young Newcome should not go to school.
Old Mr. Hobson and his brother had been educated at that school of Grey
Friars, of which mention has been made in former works and to Grey
Friars Thomas Newcome was accordingly sent, exchanging—O ye Gods! with
what delight!—the splendour of Clapham for the rough, plentiful fare of
the place, blacking his master’s shoes with perfect readiness, till he
rose in the school, and the time came when he should have a fag of his
own: tibbing out and receiving the penalty therefore: bartering a black
eye, per bearer, against a bloody nose drawn at sight, with a
schoolfellow, and shaking hands the next day; playing at cricket,
hockey, prisoners’ base, and football, according to the season; and
gorging himself and friends with tarts when he had money (and of this
he had plenty) to spend. I have seen his name carved upon the Gown
Boys’ arch: but he was at school long before my time; his son showed me
the name when we were boys together, in some year when George the
Fourth was king.

The pleasures of this school-life were such to Tommy Newcome, that he
did not care to go home for a holiday: and indeed, by insubordination
and boisterousness; by playing tricks and breaking windows; by
marauding upon the gardener’s peaches and the housekeeper’s jam; by
upsetting his two little brothers in a go-cart (of which wanton and
careless injury the present Baronet’s nose bears marks to this very
day); by going to sleep during the sermons, and treating reverend
gentlemen with levity, he drew down on himself the merited wrath of his
stepmother; and many punishments in this present life, besides those of
a future and much more durable kind, which the good lady did not fail
to point out that he must undoubtedly inherit. His father, at Mrs.
Newcome’s instigation, certainly whipped Tommy for upsetting his little
brothers in the go-cart; but upon being pressed to repeat the whipping
for some other peccadillo performed soon after, Mr. Newcome refused at
once, using a wicked, worldly expression, which well might shock any
serious lady; saying, in fact, that he would be deed if he beat the boy
any more, and that he got flogging enough at school, in which opinion
Master Tommy fully coincided.

The undaunted woman, his stepmother, was not to be made to forgo her
plans for the boy’s reform by any such vulgar ribaldries; and Mr.
Newcome being absent in the City on his business, and Tommy refractory
as usual, she summoned the serious butler and the black footman (for
the lashings of whose brethren she felt an unaffected pity) to operate
together in the chastisement of this young criminal. But he dashed so
furiously against the butler’s shins as to draw blood from his comely
limbs, and to cause that serious and overfed menial to limp and suffer
for many days after; and, seizing the decanter, he swore he would
demolish blacky’s ugly face with it: nay, he threatened to discharge it
at Mrs. Newcome’s own head before he would submit to the coercion which
she desired her agents to administer.

High words took place between Mr. and Mrs. Newcome that night on the
gentleman’s return home from the City, and on his learning the events
of the morning. It is to be feared he made use of further oaths, which
hasty ejaculations need not be set down in this place; at any rate, he
behaved with spirit and manliness as master of the house, vowed that if
any servant laid a hand on the child, he would thrash him first and
then discharge him; and I dare say expressed himself with bitterness
and regret that he had married a wife who would not be obedient to her
husband, and had entered a house of which he was not suffered to be the
master. Friends were called in—the interference, the supplications, of
the Clapham clergy, some of whom dined constantly at the Hermitage,
prevailed to allay this domestic quarrel; and no doubt the good sense
of Mrs. Newcome—who, though imperious, was yet not unkind; and who,
excellent as she was, yet could be brought to own that she was
sometimes in fault—induced her to make at least a temporary submission
to the man whom she had placed at the head of her house, and whom it
must be confessed she had vowed to love and honour. When Tommy fell ill
of the scarlet fever, which afflicting event occurred presently after
the above dispute, his own nurse, Sarah, could not have been more
tender, watchful, and affectionate than his stepmother showed herself
to be. She nursed him through his illness; allowed his food and
medicine to be administered by no other hand; sat up with the boy
through a night of his fever, and uttered not one single reproach to
her husband (who watched with her) when the twins took the disease
(from which we need not say they happily recovered); and though young
Tommy, in his temporary delirium, mistaking her for Nurse Sarah,
addressed her as his dear Fat Sally—whereas no whipping-post to which
she ever would have tied him could have been leaner than Mrs.
Newcome—and, under this feverish delusion, actually abused her to her
face; calling her an old cat, an old Methodist, and, jumping up in his
little bed, forgetful of his previous fancy, vowing that he would put
on his clothes and run away to Sally. Sally was at her northern home by
this time, with a liberal pension which Mr. Newcome gave her, and which
his son and his son’s son after him, through all their difficulties and
distresses, always found means to pay.

What the boy threatened in his delirium he had thought of, no doubt,
more than once in his solitary and unhappy holidays. A year after he
actually ran away, not from school, but from home; and appeared one
morning, gaunt and hungry, at Sarah’s cottage two hundred miles away
from Clapham, who housed the poor prodigal, and killed her calf for
him—washed him, with many tears and kisses, and put him to bed and to
sleep; from which slumber he was aroused by the appearance of his
father, whose sure instinct, backed by Mrs. Newcome’s own quick
intelligence, had made him at once aware whither the young runaway had
fled. The poor father came horsewhip in hand—he knew of no other law or
means to maintain his authority; many and many a time had his own
father, the old weaver, whose memory he loved and honoured, strapped
and beaten him. Seeing this instrument in the parent’s hand, as Mr.
Newcome thrust out the weeping trembling Sarah and closed the door upon
her, Tommy, scared out of a sweet sleep and a delightful dream of
cricket, knew his fate; and, getting up out of bed, received his
punishment without a word. Very likely the father suffered more than
the child; for when the punishment was over, the little man, yet
trembling and quivering with the pain, held out his little bleeding
hand and said, “I can—I can take it from you, sir;” saying which his
face flushed, and his eyes filled, for the first time; whereupon the
father burst into a passion of tears, and embraced the boy and kissed
him, besought and prayed him to be rebellious no more—flung the whip
away from him and swore, come what would, he would never strike him
again. The quarrel was the means of a great and happy reconciliation.
The three dined together in Sarah’s cottage. Perhaps the father would
have liked to walk that evening in the lanes and fields where he had
wandered as a young fellow: where he had first courted and first kissed
the young girl he loved—poor child—who had waited for him so faithfully
and fondly, who had passed so many a day of patient want and meek
expectance, to be repaid by such a scant holiday and brief fruition.

Mrs. Newcome never made the slightest allusion to Tom’s absence after
his return, but was quite gentle and affectionate with him, and that
night read the parable of the Prodigal in a very low and quiet voice.

This, however, was only a temporary truce. War very soon broke out
again between the impetuous lad and his rigid domineering
mother-in-law. It was not that he was very bad, or she perhaps more
stern than other ladies, but the two could not agree. The boy sulked
and was miserable at home. He fell to drinking with the grooms in the
stables. I think he went to Epsom races, and was discovered after that
act of rebellion. Driving from a most interesting breakfast at
Roehampton (where a delightful Hebrew convert had spoken, oh! so
graciously!), Mrs. Newcome—in her state-carriage, with her bay
horses—met Tom, her son-in-law, in a tax-cart, excited by drink, and
accompanied by all sorts of friends, male and female. John the black
man was bidden to descend from the carriage and bring him to Mrs.
Newcome. He came; his voice was thick with drink. He laughed wildly: he
described a fight at which he had been present. It was not possible
that such a castaway as this should continue in a house where her two
little cherubs were growing up in innocence and grace.

The boy had a great fancy for India; and Orme’s History, containing the
exploits of Clive and Lawrence, was his favourite book of all in his
father’s library. Being offered a writership, he scouted the idea of a
civil appointment, and would be contented with nothing but a uniform. A
cavalry cadetship was procured for Thomas Newcome; and the young man’s
future career being thus determined, and his stepmother’s unwilling
consent procured, Mr. Newcome thought fit to send his son to a tutor
for military instruction, and removed him from the London school, where
in truth he had made but very little progress in the humaner letters.
The lad was placed with a professor who prepared young men for the
army, and received rather a better professional education than fell to
the lot of most young soldiers of his day. He cultivated the
mathematics and fortification with more assiduity than he had ever
bestowed on Greek and Latin, and especially made such a progress in the
French tongue as was very uncommon among the British youth his
contemporaries.

In the study of this agreeable language, over which young Newcome spent
a great deal of his time, he unluckily had some instructors who were
destined to bring the poor lad into yet further trouble at home. His
tutor, an easy gentleman, lived at Blackheath, and, not far from
thence, on the road to Woolwich, dwelt the little Chevalier de Blois,
at whose house the young man much preferred to take his French lessons
rather than to receive them under his tutor’s own roof.

For the fact was that the little Chevalier de Blois had two pretty
young daughters, with whom he had fled from his country along with
thousands of French gentlemen at the period of revolution and
emigration. He was a cadet of a very ancient family, and his brother,
the Marquis de Blois, was a fugitive like himself, but with the army of
the princes on the Rhine, or with his exiled sovereign at Mittau. The
Chevalier had seen the wars of the great Frederick: what man could be
found better to teach young Newcome the French language and the art
military? It was surprising with what assiduity he pursued his studies.
Mademoiselle Léonore, the Chevalier’s daughter, would carry on her
little industry very undisturbedly in the same parlour with her father
and his pupil. She painted card-racks: laboured at embroidery; was
ready to employ her quick little brain or fingers in any way by which
she could find means to add a few shillings to the scanty store on
which this exiled family supported themselves in their day of
misfortune. I suppose the Chevalier was not in the least unquiet about
her, because she was promised in marriage to the Comte de Florac, also
of the emigration—a distinguished officer like the Chevalier, than whom
he was a year older—and, at the time of which we speak, engaged in
London in giving private lessons on the fiddle. Sometimes on a Sunday
he would walk to Blackheath with that instrument in his hand, and pay
his court to his young _fiancée_, and talk over happier days with his
old companion-in-arms. Tom Newcome took no French lessons on a Sunday.
He passed that day at Clapham generally, where, strange to say, he
never said a word about Mademoiselle de Blois.

What happens when two young folks of eighteen, handsome and ardent,
generous and impetuous, alone in the world, or without strong
affections to bind them elsewhere,—what happens when they meet daily
over French dictionaries, embroidery frames, or indeed upon any
business whatever? No doubt Mademoiselle Léonore was a young lady
perfectly _bien élevée_, and ready, as every well-elevated young
Frenchwoman should be, to accept a husband of her parents’ choosing;
but while the elderly M. de Florac was fiddling in London, there was
that handsome young Tom Newcome ever present at Blackheath. To make a
long matter short, Tom declared his passion, and was for marrying
Léonore off hand, if she would but come with him to the little Catholic
chapel at Woolwich. Why should they not go out to India together and be
happy ever after?

The innocent little amour may have been several months in transaction,
and was discovered by Mrs. Newcome, whose keen spectacles nothing could
escape. It chanced that she drove to Blackheath to Tom’s tutor’s. Tom
was absent taking his French and drawing lesson of M. de Blois. Thither
Tom’s stepmother followed him, and found the young man sure enough with
his instructor over his books and plans of fortification. Mademoiselle
and her card-screens were in the room, but behind those screens she
could not hide her blushes and confusion from Mrs. Newcome’s sharp
glances. In one moment the banker’s wife saw the whole affair—the whole
mystery which had been passing for months under poor M. de Blois’ nose,
without his having the least notion of the truth.

Mrs. Newcome said she wanted her son to return home with her upon
private affairs; and before they had reached the Hermitage a fine
battle had ensued between them. His mother had charged him with being a
wretch and a monster, and he had replied fiercely, denying the
accusation with scorn, and announcing his wish instantly to marry the
most virtuous, the most beautiful of her sex. To marry a Papist! This
was all that was wanted to make poor Tom’s cup of bitterness run over.
Mr. Newcome was called in, and the two elders passed a great part of
the night in an assault upon the lad. He was grown too tall for the
cane; but Mrs. Newcome thonged him with the lash of her indignation for
many an hour that evening.

He was forbidden to enter, M. de Blois’ house, a prohibition at which
the spirited young fellow snapped his fingers, and laughed in scorn.
Nothing, he swore, but death should part him from the young lady. On
the next day his father came to him alone and plied him with
entreaties, but he was as obdurate as before. He would have her;
nothing should prevent him. He cocked his hat and walked out of the
lodge-gate, as his father, quite beaten by the young man’s obstinacy,
with haggard face and tearful eyes, went his own way into town. He was
not very angry himself: in the course of their talk overnight the boy
had spoken bravely and honestly, and Newcome could remember how, in his
own early life, he too had courted and loved a young lass. It was Mrs.
Newcome the father was afraid of. Who shall depict her wrath at the
idea that a child of her house was about to marry a Popish girl?

So young Newcome went his way to Blackheath, bent upon falling
straightway down upon his knees before Léonore, and having the
Chevalier’s blessing. That old fiddler in London scarcely seemed to him
to be an obstacle: it seemed monstrous that a young creature should be
given away to a man older than her own father. He did not know the law
of honour, as it obtained amongst French gentlemen of those days, or
how religiously their daughters were bound by it.

But Mrs. Newcome had been beforehand with him, and had visited the
Chevalier de Blois almost at cockcrow. She charged him insolently with
being privy to the attachment between the young people; pursued him
with vulgar rebukes about beggary, Popery, and French adventurers. Her
husband had to make a very contrite apology afterwards for the language
which his wife had thought fit to employ. “You forbid me,” said the
Chevalier, “you forbid Mademoiselle de Blois to marry your son, Mr.
Thomas! No, madam, she comes of a race which is not accustomed to ally
itself with persons of your class; and is promised to a gentleman whose
ancestors were dukes and peers when Mr. Newcome’s were blacking shoes!”
Instead of finding his pretty blushing girl on arriving at Woolwich,
poor Tom only found his French master, livid with rage and quivering
under his _ailes de pigeon_. We pass over the scenes that followed; the
young man’s passionate entreaties, and fury and despair. In his own
defence, and to prove his honour to the world, M. de Blois determined
that his daughter should instantly marry the Count. The poor girl
yielded without a word, as became her; and it was with this marriage
effected almost before his eyes, and frantic with wrath and despair,
that young Newcome embarked for India, and quitted the parents whom he
was never more to see.

Tom’s name was no more mentioned at Clapham. His letters to his father
were written to the City; very pleasant they were, and comforting to
the father’s heart. He sent Tom liberal private remittances to India,
until the boy wrote to say that he wanted no more. Mr. Newcome would
have liked to leave Tom all his private fortune, for the twins were
only too well cared for; but he dared not on account of his terror of
Sophia Alethea, his wife; and he died, and poor Tom was only secretly
forgiven.




CHAPTER III.
Colonel Newcome’s Letter-box

I.

“With the most heartfelt joy, my dear Major, I take up my pen to
announce to you the happy arrival of the Ramchunder, and the _dearest
and handsomest_ little boy who, I am sure, ever came from India. Little
Clive is in _perfect health_. He speaks English _wonderfully_ well. He
cried when he parted from Mr. Sneid, the supercargo, who most kindly
brought him from Southampton in a postchaise, but these tears in
childhood are _of very brief duration!_ The voyage, Mr. Sneid states,
was most favourable, occupying only four months and eleven days. How
different from that more lengthened and dangerous passage of eight
months, and almost perpetual sea-sickness, in which my poor dear sister
Emma went to Bengal, to become the wife of the best of husbands and the
mother of the dearest of little boys, and to enjoy these inestimable
blessings for so brief an interval! She has quitted this wicked and
wretched world for one where all is peace. The misery and ill-treatment
which she endured from Captain Case her first odious husband, were, I
am sure, amply repaid, my dear Colonel, by your subsequent affection.
If the most sumptuous dresses which London, even Paris, could supply,
jewellery the most costly, and elegant lace, and _everything lovely and
fashionable_, could content a woman, these, I am sure, during the last
four years of her life, the poor girl had. Of what avail are they when
this scene of vanity is closed?

“Mr. Sneid announces that the passage was most favourable. They stayed
a week at the Cape, and three days at St. Helena, where they visited
Bonaparte’s tomb (another instance of the vanity of all things!), and
their voyage was enlivened off Ascension by the taking of some
delicious turtle!

“You may be sure that _the most liberal sum_ which you have placed to
my credit with the Messrs. Hobson and Co. shall be faithfully expended
on my dear little charge. Mrs. Newcome can scarcely be called his
grandmamma, I suppose; and I daresay her Methodistical ladyship will
not care to see the daughter and grandson of a clergyman of the Church
of England! My brother Charles took leave to wait upon her when he
presented your last _most generous_ bill at the bank. She received him
_most rudely_, and said a fool and his money are soon parted; and when
Charles said, ‘Madam, I am the brother of the late Mrs. Major Newcome,’
‘Sir,’ says she, ‘I judge nobody; but from all accounts, you are the
brother of a very vain, idle, thoughtless, extravagant woman; and
Thomas Newcome was as foolish about his wife as about his money.’ Of
course, unless Mrs. N. writes to invite dear Clive, I shall not think
of sending him to Clapham.

“It is such hot weather that I cannot wear the _beautiful shawl_ you
have sent me, and shall keep it _in lavender_ till next winter! My
brother, who thanks you for your continuous bounty, will write next
month, and report progress as to his dear pupil. Clive will add a
postscript of his own, and I am, my dear Major, with a thousand thanks
for your kindness to me,—Your grateful and affectionate Martha
Honeyman.”

In a round hand and on lines ruled with pencil:—

“Dearest Papa i am very well i hope you are Very Well. M Sneed brought
me in a postchaise i like Mr. Sneed very much. i like Aunt Martha i
like Hannah. There are no ships here i am your affectionate son Clive
Newcome.”

II.

Rue St. Dominique, St. Germain, Paris,

Nov. 15, 1820,

“Long separated from the country which was the home of my youth, I
carried from her tender recollections, and bear her always a lively
gratitude. The Heaven has placed me in a position very different from
that in which I knew you. I have been the mother of many children. My
husband has recovered a portion of the property which the Revolution
tore from us; and France, in returning to its legitimate sovereign,
received once more the nobility which accompanied his august house into
exile. We, however, preceded His Majesty, more happy than many of our
companions. Believing further resistance to be useless; dazzled,
perhaps, by the brilliancy of that genius which restored order,
submitted Europe, and governed France; M. de Florac, in the first days,
was reconciled to the Conqueror of Marengo and Austerlitz, and held a
position in his Imperial Court. This submission, at first attributed to
infidelity, has subsequently been pardoned to my husband. His
sufferings during the Hundred Days made to pardon his adhesion to him
who was Emperor. My husband is now an old man. He was of the disastrous
campaign of Moscow, as one of the chamberlains of Napoleon. Withdrawn
from the world, he gives his time to his feeble health—to his family—to
Heaven.

“I have not forgotten a time before those days, when, according to
promises given by my father, I became the wife of M. de Florac.
Sometimes I have heard of your career. One of my parents, M. de F., who
took service in the English India, has entertained me of you; he
informed me how yet a young man you won laurels at Argom and Bhartpour;
how you escaped to death at Laswari. I have followed them, sir, on the
map. I have taken part in your victories and your glory. Ah! I am not
so cold, but my heart has trembled for your dangers; not so aged, but I
remember the young man who learned from the pupil of Frederick the
first rudiments of war. Your great heart, your love of truth, your
courage were your own. None had to teach you those qualities, of which
a good God had endowed you, My good father is dead since many years.
He, too, was permitted to see France before to die.

“I have read in the English journals not only that you are married, but
that you have a son. Permit me to send to your wife, to your child,
these accompanying tokens of an old friendship. I have seen that
Mistress Newcome was widow, and am not sorry of it. My friend, I hope
there was not that difference of age between your wife and you that I
have known in other unions. I pray the good God to bless yours. I hold
you always in my memory. As I write, the past comes back to me. I see a
noble young man, who has a soft voice, and brown eyes. I see the
Thames, and the smiling plains of Blackheath. I listen and pray at my
chamber-door as my father talks to you in our little cabinet of
studies. I look from my window, and see you depart.

“My son’s are men: one follows the profession of arms, one has embraced
the ecclesiastical state; my daughter is herself a mother. I remember
this was your birthday; I have made myself a little _fête_ in
celebrating it, after how many years of absence, of silence! Comtesse
De Florac. (_Née L. de Blois._)”

III.

“My Dear Thomas,—Mr. Sneid, supercargo of the Ramchunder, East
Indiaman, handed over to us yesterday your letter, and, to-day, I have
purchased three thousand three hundred and twenty-three pounds 6 and
8d. three per cent Consols, in our joint names (H. and B. Newcome),
held for your little boy. Mr. S. gives a very favourable account of the
little man, and left him in perfect health two days since, at the house
of his aunt, Miss Honeyman. We have placed 200 pounds to that lady’s
credit, at your desire.

“Lady Anne is charmed with the present which she received yesterday,
and says the white shawl is a great deal too handsome. My mother is
also greatly pleased with hers, and has forwarded, by the coach to
Brighton, to-day, a packet of books, tracts, etc., suited for his
tender age, for your little boy. She heard of you lately from the Rev.
T. Sweatenham on his return from India. He spoke of your kindness,—and
of the hospitable manner in which you had received him at your house,
and alluded to you in a very handsome way in the course of the
thanksgiving that evening. I dare say my mother will ask your little
boy to the Hermitage; and when we have a house of our own, I am sure
Anne and I will be very happy to see him. Yours affectionately, B.
Newcome. _Major Newcome_.”

IV.

“My Dear Colonel,—Did I not know the generosity of your heart, and the
bountiful means which Heaven has put at your disposal in order to
gratify that noble disposition; were I not certain that the small sum I
required will permanently place me beyond the reach of the difficulties
of life, and will infallibly be repaid before six months are over,
believe me I never would have ventured upon that bold step which our
friendship (carried on epistolarily as it has been), our relationship,
and your admirable disposition, have induced me to venture to take.

“That elegant and commodious chapel, known as Lady Whittlesea’s,
Denmark Street, Mayfair, being for sale, I have determined on venturing
my all in its acquisition, and in laying, as I hope, the foundation of
a competence for myself and excellent sister. What is a lodging-house
at Brighton but an uncertain maintenance? The mariner on the sea before
those cliffs is no more sure of wind and wave, or of fish to his
laborious net, than the Brighton house-owner (bred in affluence she may
have been, and used to unremitting plenty) to the support of the casual
travellers who visit the city. On one day they come in shoals, it is
true, but where are they on the next? For many months my poor sister’s
first floor was a desert, until occupied by your noble little boy, my
nephew and pupil. Clive is everything that a father’s, an uncle’s (who
loves him as a father), a pastor’s, a teacher’s affections could
desire. He is not one of those premature geniuses whose much-vaunted
infantine talents disappear along with adolescence; he is not, I
frankly own, more advanced in his classical and mathematical studies
than some children even younger than himself; but he has acquired the
rudiments of health; he has laid in a store of honesty and good-humour,
which are not less likely to advance him in life than mere science and
language, than the _as in præsenti_, or the _pons asinorum_.

“But I forget, in thinking of my dear little friend and pupil, the
subject of this letter—namely, the acquisition of the proprietary
chapel to which I have alluded, and the hopes, nay, certainty of a
fortune, if aught below is certain, which that acquisition holds out.
What is a curacy, but a synonym for starvation? If we accuse the
Eremites of old of wasting their lives in unprofitable wildernesses,
what shall we say to many a hermit of Protestant, and so-called
civilised times, who hides his head in a solitude in Yorkshire, and
buries his probably fine talents in a Lincolnshire fen? Have I genius?
Am I blessed with gifts of eloquence to thrill and soothe, to arouse
the sluggish, to terrify the sinful, to cheer and convince the timid,
to lead the blind groping in darkness, and to trample the audacious
sceptic in the dust? My own conscience, besides a hundred testimonials
from places of popular, most popular worship, from reverend prelates,
from distinguished clergy, tells me I have these gifts. A voice within
me cries, ‘Go forth, Charles Honeyman, fight the good fight; wipe the
tears of the repentant sinner; sing of hope to the agonised criminal;
whisper courage, brother, courage, at the ghastly deathbed, and strike
down the infidel with the lance of evidence and the shield of reason!’
In a pecuniary point of view I am confident, nay, the calculations may
be established as irresistibly as an algebraic equation, that I can
realise, as incumbent of Lady Whittlesea’s chapel, the sum of _not
less_ than one thousand pounds per annum. Such a sum, with economy (and
without it what sum were sufficient?), will enable me to provide amply
for my wants, to discharge my obligations to you, to my sister, and
some other creditors, very, very unlike you, and to place Miss Honeyman
in a home more worthy of her than that which she now occupies, only to
vacate it at the beck of every passing stranger!

“My sister does not disapprove of my plan, into which enter some
modifications which I have not, as yet, submitted to her, being anxious
at first that they should be sanctioned by you. From the income of the
Whittlesea chapel I propose to allow Miss Honeyman the sum of two
hundred pounds per annum, _paid quarterly_. This, with her private
property, which she has kept more thriftily than her unfortunate and
confiding brother guarded his (for whenever I had a guinea a tale of
distress would melt it into half a sovereign), will enable Miss
Honeyman to live in a way becoming my father’s daughter.

“Comforted with this provision as my sister will be, I would suggest
that our dearest young Clive should be transferred from her petticoat
government, and given up to the care of his affectionate uncle and
tutor. His present allowance will most liberally suffice for his
expenses, board, lodging, and education while under my roof, and I
shall be able to exert a paternal, a pastoral influence over his
studies, his conduct, and his _highest welfare_, which I cannot so
conveniently exercise at Brighton, where I am but Miss Honeyman’s
stipendiary, and where I often have to submit in cases where I know,
for dearest Clive’s own welfare, it is I, and not my sister, should be
paramount.

“I have given then to a friend, the Rev. Marcus Flather a draft for two
hundred and fifty pounds sterling, drawn upon you at your agent’s in
Calcutta, which sum will go in liquidation of dear Clive’s first year’s
board with me, or, upon my word of honour as a gentleman and clergyman,
shall be paid back at three months after sight, if you will draw upon
me. As I never—no, were it my last penny in the world—would dishonour
your draft, I implore you, my dear Colonel, not to refuse mine. My
credit in this city, where credit is _everything_, and the awful future
so little thought of, my engagements to Mr. Flather, my own prospects
in life, and the comfort of my dear sister’s declining years, all—all
depend upon this bold, this _eventful_ measure. My ruin or my earthly
happiness lies entirely in your hands. Can I doubt which way your kind
heart will lead you, and that you will come to the aid of your
affectionate brother-in-law? Charles Honeyman.”

“_P.S._—Our little Clive has been to London on a visit to his uncles
and to the Hermitage, Clapham, to pay his duty to his step-grandmother,
the wealthy Mrs. Newcome. I pass over words disparaging of myself which
the child in his artless prattles subsequently narrated. She was very
gracious to _him_, and presented him with a five-pound note, a copy of
Kirk White’s Poems, and a work called ‘Little Henry and his Bearer,’
relating to India, and the excellent Catechism of our Church. Clive is
full of humour, and I enclose you a rude scrap representing the
bishopess of Clapham, as she is called,—the other figure is a rude
though entertaining sketch of some other droll personage.

“_Lieutenant-Colonel Newcome, &c._”

V.

“My Dear Colonel;—The Rev. Marcus Flather has just written me a letter
at which I am greatly shocked and perplexed, informing me that my
brother Charles has given him a draft upon you for two hundred and
fifty pounds, when goodness knows it is not you but we who are many,
many hundred pounds debtors to you. Charles has explained that he drew
the bill at your desire, that you wrote to say you would be glad to
serve him in any way, and that the money is wanted to make his fortune.
Yet I don’t know—poor Charles is always going to make his fortune and
has never done it. That school which he bought, and for which you and
me between us paid the purchase-money, turned out no good, and the only
pupils left at the end of the first half-year were two woolly-headed
poor little mulattos, whose father was in gaol at St. Kitt’s, and whom
I kept actually in my own second-floor back room whilst the lawyers
were settling things, and Charles was away in France, and until my
dearest little Clive came to live with me.

“Then, as he was too small for a great school, I thought Clive could
not do better than stay with his old aunt and have his Uncle Charles
for a tutor, who is one of the finest scholars in the world. I wish you
could hear him in the pulpit. His delivery is grander and more
impressive than any divine now in England. His sermons you have
subscribed for, and likewise his book of elegant poems, which are
pronounced to be _very fine_.

“When he returned from Calais, and those horrid lawyers had left off
worriting him, I thought as his frame was much shattered and he was too
weak to take a curacy, that he could not do better than become Clive’s
tutor, and agreed to pay him out of your handsome donation of £250 for
Clive, a sum of one hundred pounds per year, so that, when the board of
the two and Clive’s clothing are taken into consideration, I think you
will see that no great profit is left to Miss Martha Honeyman.

“Charles talks to me of his new church in London, and of making me some
grand allowance. The poor boy is very affectionate, and always building
castles in the air, and of having Clive to live with him in London.
_Now this mustn’t be, and I won’t hear of it._ Charles is too kind to
be a schoolmaster, and Master Clive laughs at him. It was only the
other day, after his return from his grandmamma’s, regarding which I
wrote you, per Burrampooter, the 23rd ult., that I found a picture of
Mrs. Newcome and Charles too, and of both their spectacles, quite like.
I put it away, but some rogue, I suppose, has stolen it. He has done me
and Hannah too. Mr. Speck, the artist, laughed and took it home, and
says he is a wonder at drawing.

“Instead, then, of allowing Clive to go with Charles to London next
month, where my brother is bent on going, I shall send Clivey to Dr.
Timpany’s school, Marine Parade, of which I hear the best account, but
I hope you will think of soon sending him to a great school. My father
always said it was the best place for boys, and I have a brother to
whom my poor mother spared the rod, and who, I fear, has turned out but
a spoilt child.

“I am, dear Colonel, your most faithful servant, Martha Honeyman.”

“_Lieutenant-Colonel Newcome, C. B._”

VI.

“My Dear Brother,—I hasten to inform you of a calamity which, though it
might be looked for in the course of nature, has occasioned deep grief
not only in our family but in this city. This morning, at half-past
four o’clock, our beloved and respected mother, Sophia Alethea Newcome,
expired, at the advanced age of eighty-three years. On the night of
Tuesday-Wednesday, the 12-13th, having been engaged reading and writing
in her library until a late hour, and having dismissed the servants,
whom she never would allow to sit up for her, as well as my brother and
his wife, who always are in the habit of retiring early, Mrs. Newcome
extinguished the lamps, took a bedchamber candle to return to her room,
and must have fallen on the landing, where she was discovered by the
maids, sitting with her head reclining against the balustrades, and
endeavouring to staunch a wound in her forehead, which was bleeding
profusely, having struck in a fall against the stone step of the stair.

“When Mrs. Newcome was found she was speechless, but still sensible,
and medical aid being sent for, she was carried to bed. Mr. Newcome and
Lady Anne both hurried to her apartment, and she knew them, and took
the hands of each, but paralysis had probably ensued in consequence of
the shock of the fall; nor was her voice ever heard, except in
inarticulate moanings, since the hour on the previous evening when she
gave them her blessing and bade them good-night. Thus perished this
good and excellent woman, the truest Christian, the most charitable
friend to the poor and needful, the head of this great house of
business, the best and most affectionate of mothers.

“The contents of her will have long been known to us, and that document
was dated one month after our lamented father’s death. Mr. Thomas
Newcome’s property being divided equally amongst his three sons, the
property of his second wife naturally devolves upon her own issue, my
brother Brian and myself. There are very heavy legacies to servants and
to charitable and religious institutions, of which, in life, she was
the munificent patroness; and I regret, my dear brother, that no
memorial to you should have been left by my mother, because she often
spoke of you latterly in terms of affection, and on the very day on
which she died, commenced a letter to your little boy, which was left
unfinished on the library table. My brother said that on that same day,
at breakfast, she pointed to a volume of Orme’s Hindostan, the book,
she said, which set poor dear Tom wild to go to India, I know you will
be pleased to hear of these proofs of returning goodwill and affection
in one who often spoke latterly of her early regard for you. I have no
more time, under the weight of business which this present affliction
entails, than to say that I am yours, dear brother, very sincerely, H.
Newcome.”

“_Lieutenant-Colonel Newcome, etc._”




CHAPTER IV.
In which the Author and the Hero resume their Acquaintance


If we are to narrate the youthful history not only of the hero of this
tale, but of the hero’s father, we shall never have done with nursery
biography. A gentleman’s grandmother may delight in fond recapitulation
of her darling’s boyish frolics and early genius; but shall we weary
our kind readers by this infantile prattle, and set down the revered
British public for an old woman? Only to two or three persons in all
the world are the reminiscences of a man’s early youth interesting: to
the parent who nursed him; to the fond wife or child mayhap afterwards
who loves him; to himself always and supremely—whatever may be his
actual prosperity or ill-fortune, his present age, illness,
difficulties, renown, or disappointments, the dawn of his life still
shines brightly for him, the early griefs and delights and attachments
remain with him ever faithful and dear. I shall ask leave to say,
regarding the juvenile biography of Mr. Clive Newcome, of whose history
I am the chronicler, only so much as is sufficient to account for some
peculiarities of his character, and for his subsequent career in the
world.

Although we were schoolfellows, my acquaintance with young Newcome at
the seat of learning where we first met was very brief and casual. He
had the advantage of being six years the junior of his present
biographer, and such a difference of age between lads at a public
school puts intimacy out of the question—a junior ensign being no more
familiar with the Commander-in-Chief at the Horse Guards, or a
barrister on his first circuit with my Lord Chief Justice on the bench,
than the newly breeched infant in the Petties with a senior boy in a
tailed coat. As we “knew each other at home,” as our school phrase was,
and our families being somewhat acquainted, Newcome’s maternal uncle,
the Rev. Charles Honeyman (the highly gifted preacher, and incumbent of
Lady Whittlesea’s Chapel, Denmark Street, Mayfair), when he brought the
child, after the Christmas vacation of 182-, to the Grey Friars’
school, recommended him in a neat complimentary speech to my
superintendence and protection. My uncle, Major Pendennis, had for a
while a seat in the chapel of this sweet and popular preacher, and
professed, as a great number of persons of fashion did, a great
admiration for him—an admiration which I shared in my early youth, but
which has been modified by maturer judgment.

Mr. Honeyman told me, with an air of deep respect, that his young
nephew’s father, Colonel Thomas Newcome, C.B., was a most gallant and
distinguished officer in the Bengal establishment of the Honourable
East India Company;—and that his uncles, the Colonel’s half-brothers,
were the eminent bankers, heads of the firm of Hobson Brothers and
Newcome, Hobson Newcome, Esquire, Bryanstone Square, and Marblehead,
Sussex, and Sir Brian Newcome, of Newcome and Park Lane, “whom to
name,” says Mr. Honeyman, with the fluent eloquence with which he
decorated the commonest circumstances of life, “is to designate two of
the merchant princes of the wealthiest city the world has ever known;
and one, if not two, of the leaders of that aristocracy which rallies
round the throne of the most elegant and refined of European
sovereigns.” I promised Mr. Honeyman to do what I could for the boy;
and he proceeded to take leave of his little nephew in my presence in
terms equally eloquent, pulling out a long and very slender green
purse, from which he extracted the sum of two-and-sixpence, which he
presented to the child, who received the money with rather a queer
twinkle in his blue eyes.

After that day’s school, I met my little _protégé_ in the neighbourhood
of the pastrycook’s, regaling himself with raspberry-tarts. “You must
not spend all that money, sir, which your uncle gave you,” said I
(having perhaps even at that early age a slightly satirical turn), “in
tarts and ginger-beer.”

The urchin rubbed the raspberry-jam off his mouth, and said, “It don’t
matter, sir, for I’ve got lots more.”

“How much?” says the Grand Inquisitor: for the formula of interrogation
used to be, when a new boy came to the school, “What’s your name? Who’s
your father? and how much money have you got?”

The little fellow pulled such a handful of sovereigns out of his pocket
as might have made the tallest scholar feel a pang of envy. “Uncle
Hobson,” says he, “gave me two; Aunt Hobson gave me one—no, Aunt Hobson
gave me thirty shillings; Uncle Newcome gave me three pound; and Aunt
Anne gave me one pound five; and Aunt Honeyman sent me ten shillings in
a letter. And Ethel wanted to give me a pound, only I wouldn’t have it,
you know; because Ethel’s younger than me, and I have plenty.”

“And who is Ethel?” asks the senior boy, smiling at the artless youth’s
confessions.

“Ethel is my cousin,” replies little Newcome; “Aunt Anne’s daughter.
There’s Ethel and Alice, and Aunt Anne wanted the baby to be called
Boadicea, only uncle wouldn’t; and there’s Barnes and Egbert and little
Alfred; only he don’t count, he’s quite a baby you know. Egbert and me
was at school at Timpany’s; he’s going to Eton next half. He’s older
than me, but I can lick him.”

“And how old is Egbert?” asks the smiling senior.

“Egbert’s ten, and I’m nine, and Ethel’s seven,” replies the little
chubby-faced hero, digging his hands deep into his trousers’ pockets,
and jingling all the sovereigns there. I advised him to let me be his
banker; and, keeping one out of his many gold pieces, he handed over
the others, on which he drew with great liberality till his whole stock
was expended. The school hours of the upper and under boys were
different at that time; the little fellows coming out of their hall
half an hour before the Fifth and Sixth Forms; and many a time I used
to find my little blue jacket in waiting, with his honest square face,
and white hair, and bright blue eyes, and I knew that he was come to
draw on his bank. Ere long one of the pretty blue eyes was shut up, and
a fine black one substituted in its place. He had been engaged, it
appeared, in a pugilistic encounter with a giant of his own Form, whom
he had worsted in the combat. “Didn’t I pitch into him, that’s all?”
says he in the elation of victory; and when I asked whence the quarrel
arose, he stoutly informed me that “Wolf minor, his opponent, had been
bullying a little boy, and that he (the gigantic Newcome) wouldn’t
stand it.”

So, being called away from the school, I said farewell and God bless
you to the brave little man, who remained a while at the Grey Friars,
where his career and troubles had only just begun.

Nor did we meet again until I was myself a young man occupying chambers
in the Temple, when our rencontre took place in the manner already
described.

Poor Costigan’s outrageous behaviour had caused my meeting with my
schoolfellow of early days to terminate so abruptly and unpleasantly,
that I scarce expected to see Clive again, or at any rate to renew my
acquaintance with the indignant East Indian warrior who had quitted our
company in such a huff. Breakfast, however, was scarcely over in my
chambers the next morning, when there came a knock at the outer door,
and my clerk introduced “Colonel Newcome and Mr. Newcome.”

Perhaps the (joint) occupant of the chambers in Lamb Court, Temple,
felt a little pang of shame at hearing the name of the visitors; for,
if the truth must be told, I was engaged pretty much as I had been
occupied on the night previous, and was smoking a cigar over the
_Times_ newspaper. How many young men in the Temple smoke a cigar after
breakfast as they read the _Times?_ My friend and companion of those
days, and all days, Mr. George Warrington, was employed with his short
pipe, and was not in the least disconcerted at the appearance of the
visitors, as he would not have been had the Archbishop of Canterbury
stepped in.

Little Clive looked curiously about our queer premises, while the
Colonel shook me cordially by the hand. No traces of yesterday’s wrath
were visible on his face, but a friendly smile lighted his bronzed
countenance, as he too looked round the old room with its dingy
curtains and prints and bookcases, its litter of proof-sheets, blotted
manuscripts, and books for review, empty soda-water bottles,
cigar-boxes, and what not.

“I went off in a flame of fire last night,” says the Colonel, “and
being cooled this morning, thought it but my duty to call on Mr.
Pendennis and apologise for my abrupt behaviour. The conduct of that
tipsy old Captain—what is his name?—was so abominable, that I could not
bear that Clive should be any longer in the same room with him, and I
went off without saying a word of thanks or good-night to my son’s old
friend. I owe you a shake of the hand for last night, Mr. Pendennis.”
And, so saying, he was kind enough to give me his hand a second time.

“And this is the abode of the Muses, is it, sir?” our guest went on. “I
know your writings very well. Clive here used to send me the _Pall Mall
Gazette_ every month.”

“We took it at Smiffle, regular,” says Clive. “Always patronise Grey
Friars men.” “Smiffle,” it must be explained, is a fond abbreviation
for Smithfield, near to which great mart of mutton and oxen our school
is situated, and old Cistercians often playfully designate their place
of education by the name of the neighbouring market.

“Clive sent me the _Gazette_ every month; and I read your romance of
‘Walter Lorraine’ in my boat as I was coming down the river to
Calcutta.”

“Have Pen’s immortal productions made their appearance on board
Bengalee budgerows; and are their leaves floating on the yellow banks
of Jumna?” asks Warrington, that sceptic, who respects no work of
modern genius.

“I gave your book to Mrs. Timmins, at Calcutta,” says the Colonel
simply. “I daresay you have heard of _her_. She is one of the most
dashing women in all India. She was delighted with your work; and I can
tell you it is not with every man’s writing that Mrs. Timmins is
pleased,” he added, with a knowing air.

“It’s capital,” broke in Clive. “I say, that part, you know, where
Walter runs away with Neæra, and the General can’t pursue them, though
he has got the postchaise at the door, because Tim O’Toole has hidden
his wooden leg! By Jove, it’s capital!—All the funny part—I don’t like
the sentimental stuff, and suicide, and that; and as for poetry, I hate
poetry.”

“Pen’s is not first chop,” says Warrington. “I am obliged to take the
young man down from time to time, Colonel Newcome. Otherwise he would
grow so conceited there would be no bearing him.”

“I say,” says Clive.

“What were you about to remark?” asks Mr. Warrington, with an air of
great interest.

“I say, Pendennis,” continued the artless youth, “I thought you were a
great swell. When we used to read about the grand parties in the _Pall
Mall Gazette_, the fellows used to say you were at every one of them,
and you see, I thought you must have chambers in the Albany, and lots
of horses to ride, and a valet and a groom, and a cab at the very
least.”

“Sir,” says the Colonel, “I hope it is not your practice to measure and
estimate gentlemen by such paltry standards as those. A man of letters
follows the noblest calling which any man can pursue. I would rather be
the author of a work of genius, than be Governor-General of India. I
admire genius. I salute it wherever I meet it. I like my own profession
better than any in the world, but then it is because I am suited to it.
I couldn’t write four lines in verse, no, not to save me from being
shot. A man cannot have all the advantages of life. Who would not be
poor if he could be sure of possessing genius, and winning fame and
immortality, sir? Think of Dr. Johnson, what a genius he had, and where
did he live? In apartments that, I daresay, were no better than these,
which, I am sure, gentlemen, are most cheerful and pleasant,” says the
Colonel, thinking he had offended us. “One of the great pleasures and
delights which I had proposed to myself on coming home was to be
allowed to have the honour of meeting with men of learning and genius,
with wits, poets, and historians, if I may be so fortunate; and of
benefiting by their conversation. I left England too young to have that
privilege. In my father’s house money was thought of, I fear, rather
than intellect; neither he nor I had the opportunities which I wish you
to have; and I am surprised you should think of reflecting upon Mr.
Pendennis’s poverty, or of feeling any sentiment but respect and
admiration when you enter the apartments of the poet and the literary
man. I have never been in the rooms of a literary man before,” the
Colonel said, turning away from his son to us: “excuse me, is that—that
paper really a proof-sheet?” We handed over to him that curiosity,
smiling at the enthusiasm of the honest gentleman who could admire what
to us was as unpalatable as a tart to a pastrycook.

Being with men of letters, he thought proper to make his conversation
entirely literary; and in the course of my subsequent more intimate
acquaintance with him, though I knew he had distinguished himself in
twenty actions, he never could be brought to talk of his military feats
or experience, but passed them by, as if they were subjects utterly
unworthy of notice.

I found he believed Dr. Johnson to be the greatest of men: the Doctor’s
words were constantly in his mouth; and he never travelled without
Boswell’s Life. Besides these, he read Cæsar and Tacitus, “with
translations, sir, with translations—I’m thankful that I kept some of
my Latin from Grey Friars;” and he quoted sentences from the Latin
Grammar, _à propos_ of a hundred events of common life, and with
perfect simplicity and satisfaction to himself. Besides the above-named
books, the Spectator, Don Quixote, and Sir Charles Grandison formed a
part of his travelling library. “I read these, sir,” he used to say,
“because I like to be in the company of gentlemen; and Sir Roger de
Coverley, and Sir Charles Grandison, and Don Quixote are the finest
gentlemen in the world.” And when we asked him his opinion of
Fielding,—

“Tom Jones, sir; Joseph Andrews, sir!” he cried, twirling his
mustachios. “I read them when I was a boy, when I kept other bad
company, and did other low and disgraceful things, of which I’m ashamed
now. Sir, in my father’s library I happened to fall in with those
books; and I read them in secret, just as I used to go in private and
drink beer, and fight cocks, and smoke pipes with Jack and Tom, the
grooms in the stables. Mrs. Newcome found me, I recollect, with one of
those books; and thinking it might be by Mrs. Hannah More, or some of
that sort, for it was a grave-looking volume: and though I wouldn’t lie
about that or anything else—never did, sir; never, before heaven, have
I told more than three lies in my life—I kept my own counsel; I say,
she took it herself to read one evening; and read on gravely—for she
had no more idea of a joke than I have of Hebrew—until she came to the
part about Lady B—— and Joseph Andrews; and then she shut the book,
sir; and you should have seen the look she gave me! I own I burst out
a-laughing, for I was a wild young rebel, sir. But she was in the
right, sir, and I was in the wrong. A book, sir, that tells the story
of a parcel of servants, of a pack of footmen and ladies’-maids
fuddling in alehouses! Do you suppose I want to know what my kitmutgars
and cousomahs are doing? I am as little proud as any man in the world:
but there must be distinction, sir; and as it is my lot and Clive’s lot
to be a gentleman, I won’t sit in the kitchen and boose in the
servants’-hall. As for that Tom Jones—that fellow that sells himself,
sir—by heavens, my blood boils when I think of him! I wouldn’t sit down
in the same room with such a fellow, sir. If he came in at that door, I
would say, ‘How dare you, you hireling ruffian, to sully with your
presence an apartment where my young friend and I are conversing
together? where two gentlemen, I say, are taking their wine after
dinner? How dare you, you degraded villain?’ I don’t mean you, sir.
I—I—I beg your pardon.”

The Colonel was striding about the room in his loose garments, puffing
his cigar fiercely anon, and then waving his yellow bandana; and it was
by the arrival of Larkins, my clerk, that his apostrophe to Tom Jones
was interrupted; he, Larkins, taking care not to show his amazement,
having been schooled not to show or feel surprise at anything he might
see or hear in our chambers.

“What is it, Larkins?” said I. Larkins’ other master had taken his
leave some time before, having business which called him away, and
leaving me with the honest Colonel, quite happy with his talk and
cigar.

“It’s Brett’s man,” says Larkins.

I confounded Brett’s man, and told the boy to bid him call again. Young
Larkins came grinning back in a moment, and said:

“Please, sir, he says his orders is not to go away without the money.”

“Confound him again,” I cried. “Tell him I have no money in the house.
He must come to-morrow.”

As I spoke, Clive was looking in wonder, and the Colonel’s countenance
assumed an appearance of the most dolorous sympathy. Nevertheless, as
with a great effort, he fell to talking about Tom Jones again, and
continued:

“No, sir, I have no words to express my indignation against such a
fellow as Tom Jones. But I forgot that I need not speak. The great and
good Dr. Johnson has settled that question. You remember what he said
to Mr. Boswell about Fielding?”

“And yet Gibbon praises him, Colonel,” said the Colonel’s interlocutor,
“and that is no small praise. He says that Mr. Fielding was of the
family that drew its origin from the Counts of Hapsburg; but——”

“Gibbon! Gibbon was an infidel, and I would not give the end of this
cigar for such a man’s opinion. If Mr. Fielding was a gentleman by
birth, he ought to have known better; and so much the worse for him
that he did not. But what am I talking of, wasting your valuable time?
No more smoke, thank you. I must away into the City, but would not pass
the Temple without calling on you, and thanking my boy’s old protector.
You will have the kindness to come and dine with us—to-morrow, the next
day, your own day? Your friend is going out of town? I hope, on his
return, to have the pleasure of making his further acquaintance. Come,
Clive.”

Clive, who had been deep in a volume of Hogarth’s engravings during the
above discussion, or rather oration of his father’s, started up and
took leave, beseeching me, at the same time, to come soon and see his
pony; and so, with renewed greetings, we parted.

I was scarcely returned to my newspaper again, when the knocker of our
door was again agitated, and the Colonel ran back, looking very much
agitated and confused.

“I beg pardon,” says he; “I think I left my—my——” Larkins had quitted
the room by this time, and then he began more unreservedly. “My dear
young friend,” says he, “a thousand pardons for what I am going to say,
but, as Clive’s friend, I know I may take that liberty. I have left the
boy in the court. I know the fate of men of letters and genius: when we
were here just now, there came a single knock—a demand—that, that you
did not seem to be momentarily able to meet. Now do, do pardon the
liberty, and let me be your banker. You said you were engaged in a new
work: it will be a masterpiece, I am sure, if it’s like the last. Put
me down for twenty copies, and allow me to settle with you in advance.
I may be off, you know. I’m a bird of passage—a restless old soldier.”

“My dear Colonel,” said I, quite touched and pleased by this extreme
kindness, “my dun was but the washerwoman’s boy, and Mrs. Brett is in
my debt, if I am not mistaken. Besides, I already have a banker in your
family.”

“In my family, my dear Sir?”

“Messrs. Newcome, in Threadneedle Street, are good enough to keep my
money for me when I have any, and I am happy to say they have some of
mine in hand now. I am almost sorry that I am not in want, in order
that I might have the pleasure of receiving a kindness from you.” And
we shook hands for the fourth time that morning, and the kind gentleman
left me to rejoin his son.




CHAPTER V.
Clive’s Uncles


The dinner so hospitably offered by the Colonel was gladly accepted,
and followed by many more entertainments at the cost of that
good-natured friend. He and an Indian chum of his lived at this time at
Nerot’s Hotel, in Clifford Street, where Mr. Clive, too, found the good
cheer a great deal more to his taste than the homely, though plentiful,
fare at Grey Friars, at which, of course, when boys, we all turned up
our noses, though many a poor fellow, in the struggles of after-life,
has looked back with regret very likely to that well-spread youthful
table. Thus my intimacy with the father and the son grew to be
considerable, and a great deal more to my liking than my relations with
Clive’s City uncles, which have been mentioned in the last chapter, and
which were, in truth, exceedingly distant and awful.

If all the private accounts kept by those worthy bankers were like
mine, where would have been Newcome Hall and Park Lane, Marblehead and
Bryanstone Square? I used, by strong efforts of self-denial, to
maintain a balance of two or three guineas untouched at the bank, so
that my account might still remain open; and fancied the clerks and
cashiers grinned when I went to draw for money. Rather than face that
awful counter, I would send Larkins, the clerk, or Mrs. Flanagan, the
laundress. As for entering the private parlour at the back, wherein
behind the glazed partition I could see the bald heads of Newcome
Brothers engaged with other capitalists or peering over the newspaper,
I would as soon have thought of walking into the Doctor’s own library
at Grey Friars, or of volunteering to take an armchair in a dentist’s
studio, and have a tooth out, as of entering into that awful precinct.
My good uncle, on the other hand, the late Major Pendennis, who kept
naturally but a very small account with Hobsons’, would walk into the
parlour and salute the two magnates who governed there with the ease
and gravity of a Rothschild. “My good fellow,” the kind old gentleman
would say to his nephew and pupil, “_il faut se faire valoir_. I tell
you, sir, your bankers like to keep every gentleman’s account. And it’s
a mistake to suppose they are only civil to their great moneyed
clients. Look at me. I go in to them and talk to them whenever I am in
the City. I hear the news of ’Change, and carry it to our end of the
town. It looks well, sir, to be well with your banker; and at our end
of London, perhaps, I can do a good turn for the Newcomes.”

It is certain that in his own kingdom of Mayfair and St. James’s my
revered uncle was at least the bankers’ equal. On my coming to London,
he was kind enough to procure me invitations to some of Lady Anne
Newcome’s evening parties in Park Lane, as likewise to Mrs. Newcome’s
entertainments in Bryanstone Square; though, I confess, of these
latter, after a while, I was a lax and negligent attendant. “Between
ourselves, my good fellow,” the shrewd old Mentor of those days would
say, “Mrs. Newcome’s parties are not altogether select; nor is she a
lady of the very highest breeding; but it gives a man a good air to be
seen at his banker’s house. I recommend you to go for a few minutes
whenever you are asked.” And go I accordingly did sometimes, though I
always fancied, rightly or wrongly, from Mrs. Newcome’s manner to me,
that she knew I had but thirty shillings left at the bank. Once and
again, in two or three years, Mr. Hobson Newcome would meet me, and ask
me to fill a vacant place that day or the next evening at his table;
which invitation I might accept or otherwise. But one does not eat a
man’s salt, as it were, at these dinners. There is nothing sacred in
this kind of London hospitality. Your white waistcoat fills a gap in a
man’s table, and retires filled for its service of the evening. “Gad,”
the dear old Major used to say, “if we were not to talk freely of those
we dine with, how mum London would be! Some of the pleasantest evenings
I have ever spent have been when we have sate after a great dinner, _en
petit comité_, and abused the people who are gone. You have your turn,
_mon cher;_ but why not? Do you suppose I fancy my friends haven’t
found out _my_ little faults and peculiarities? And as I can’t help it,
I let myself be executed, and offer up my oddities _de bonne grâce.
Entre nous_, Brother Hobson Newcome is a good fellow, but a vulgar
fellow; and his wife—his wife exactly suits him.”

Once a year Lady Anne Newcome (about whom my Mentor was much more
circumspect; for I somehow used to remark that as the rank of persons
grew higher, Major Pendennis spoke of them with more caution and
respect)—once or twice in a year Lady Anne Newcome opened her saloons
for a concert and a ball, at both of which the whole street was crowded
with carriages, and all the great world, and some of the small, were
present. Mrs. Newcome had her ball too, and her concert of English
music, in opposition to the Italian singers of her sister-in-law. The
music of her country, Mrs. N. said, was good enough for _her_.

The truth must be told, that there was no love lost between the two
ladies. Bryanstone Square could not forget the superiority of Park
Lane’s rank; and the catalogue of grandees at dear Anne’s parties
filled dear Maria’s heart with envy. There are people upon whom rank
and worldly goods make such an impression, that they naturally fall
down on their knees and worship the owners; there are others to whom
the sight of Prosperity is offensive, and who never see Dives’ chariot
but to growl and hoot at it. Mrs. Newcome, as far as my humble
experience would lead me to suppose, is not only envious, but proud of
her envy. She mistakes it for honesty and public spirit. _She_ will not
bow down to kiss the hand of a haughty aristocracy. She is a merchant’s
wife and an attorney’s daughter. There is no pride about her. Her
brother-in-law, poor dear Brian—considering everybody knows everything
in London, was there ever such a delusion as his?—was welcome, after
banking-hours, to forsake his own friends for his wife’s fine
relations, and to dangle after lords and ladies in Mayfair. She had no
such absurd vanity—not she. She imparted these opinions pretty
liberally to all her acquaintances in almost all her conversations. It
was clear that the two ladies were best apart. There are some folks who
will see insolence in persons of rank, as there are others who will
insist; that all clergymen are hypocrites, all reformers villains, all
placemen plunderers, and so forth; and Mrs. Newcome never, I am sure,
imagined that she had a prejudice, or that she was other than an
honest, independent, high-spirited woman. Both of the ladies had
command over their husbands, who were of soft natures easily led by
woman, as, in truth, are all the males of this family. Accordingly,
when Sir Brian Newcome voted for the Tory candidate in the City, Mr.
Hobson Newcome plumped for the Reformer. While Brian, in the House of
Commons, sat among the mild Conservatives, Hobson unmasked traitors and
thundered at aristocratic corruption, so as to make the Marylebone
Vestry thrill with enthusiasm. When Lady Anne, her husband, and her
flock of children fasted in Lent, and declared for the High Church
doctrines, Mrs. Hobson had paroxysms of alarm regarding the progress of
Popery, and shuddered out of the chapel where she had a pew, because
the clergyman there, for a very brief season, appeared to preach in a
surplice.

Poor bewildered Honeyman! it was a sad day for you, when you appeared
in your neat pulpit with your fragrant pocket-handkerchief (and your
sermon likewise all millefleurs), in a trim, prim, freshly mangled
surplice, which you thought became you! How did you look aghast, and
pass your jewelled hand through your curls, as you saw Mrs. Newcome,
who had been as good as five-and-twenty pounds a year to you, look up
from her pew, seize hold of Mr. Newcome, fling open the pew-door, drive
out with her parasol her little flock of children, bewildered but not
ill-pleased to get away from the sermon, and summon John from the back
seats to bring away the bag of prayer-books! Many a good dinner did
Charles Honeyman lose by assuming that unlucky ephod. Why did the
high-priest of his diocese order him to put it on? It was delightful to
view him afterwards, and the airs of martyrdom which he assumed. Had
they been going to tear him to pieces with wild beasts next day, he
could scarcely have looked more meek, or resigned himself more
pathetically to the persecutors. But I am advancing matters. At this
early time of which I write, a period not twenty years since, surplices
were not even thought of in conjunction with sermons: clerical
gentlemen have appeared in them, and under the heavy hand of
persecution have sunk down in their pulpits again, as Jack pops back
into his box. Charles Honeyman’s elegant discourses were at this time
preached in a rich silk Master of Arts’ gown, presented to him, along
with a teapot full of sovereigns, by his affectionate congregation at
Leatherhead.

But that I may not be accused of prejudice in describing Mrs. Newcome
and her family, and lest the reader should suppose that some slight
offered to the writer by this wealthy and virtuous banker’s lady was
the secret reason for this unfavourable sketch of her character, let me
be allowed to report, as accurately as I can remember them, the words
of a kinsman of her own, —— Giles, Esquire, whom I had the honour of
meeting at her table, and who, as we walked away from Bryanstone
Square, was kind enough to discourse very freely about the relatives
whom he had just left.

“That was a good dinner, sir,” said Mr. Giles, puffing the cigar which
I offered to him, and disposed to be very social and communicative.
“Hobson Newcome’s table is about as good a one as any I ever put my
legs under. You didn’t have twice of turtle, sir, I remarked that—I
always do, at that house especially, for I know where Newcome gets it.
We belong to the same livery in the City, Hobson and I, the
Oystermongers’ Company, sir, and we like our turtle good, I can tell
you—good, and a great deal of it, you say. Hay, hay, not so bad!

“I suppose you’re a young barrister, sucking lawyer, or that sort of
thing. Because you was put at the end of the table and nobody took
notice of you. That’s my place too; I’m a relative and Newcome asks me
if he has got a place to spare. He met me in the City to-day, and says,
‘Tom,’ says he, ‘there’s some dinner in the Square at half-past seven:
I wish you would go and fetch Louisa, whom we haven’t seen this ever so
long.’ Louisa is my wife, sir—Maria’s sister—Newcome married that gal
from my house. ‘No, no,’ says I, ‘Hobson; Louisa’s engaged nursing
number eight’—that’s our number, sir. The truth is, between you and me,
sir, my missis won’t come any more at no price. She can’t stand it;
Mrs. Newcome’s dam patronising airs is enough to choke off anybody.
‘Well, Hobson, my boy,’ says I, ‘a good dinner’s a good dinner; and
I’ll come though Louisa won’t, that is, can’t.’”

While Mr. Giles, who was considerably enlivened by claret, was
discoursing thus candidly, his companion was thinking how he, Mr.
Arthur Pendennis, had been met that very afternoon on the steps of the
Megatherium Club by Mr. Newcome, and had accepted that dinner which
Mrs. Giles, with more spirit, had declined. Giles continued
talking—“I’m an old stager, I am. I don’t mind the rows between the
women. I believe Mrs. Newcome and Lady Newcome’s just as bad too; I
know Maria is always driving at her one way or the other, and calling
her proud and aristocratic, and that; and yet my wife says Maria, who
pretends to be such a Radical, never asks us to meet the Baronet and
his lady. ‘And why should she, Loo, my dear?’ says I. ‘I don’t want to
meet Lady Newcome, nor Lord Kew, nor any of ’em.’ Lord Kew, ain’t it an
odd name? Tearing young swell, that Lord Kew: tremendous wild fellow.”

“I was a clerk in that house, sir, as a young man; I was there in the
old woman’s time, and Mr. Newcome’s—the father of these young men—as
good a man as ever stood on ’Change.” And then Mr. Giles, warming with
his subject, enters at large into the history of the house. “You see,
sir,” says he, “the banking-house of Hobson Brothers, or Newcome
Brothers, as the partners of the firm really are, is not one of the
leading banking firms of the City of London, but a most respectable
house of many years’ standing, and doing a most respectable business,
especially in the Dissenting connection.” After the business came into
the hands of the Newcome Brothers, Hobson Newcome, Esq., and Sir Brian
Newcome, Bart., M.P., Mr. Giles shows how a considerable West End
connection was likewise established, chiefly through the aristocratic
friends and connections of the above-named Bart.

But the best man of business, according to Mr. Giles, whom the firm of
Hobson Brothers ever knew, better than her father and uncle, better
than her husband Sir T. Newcome, better than her sons and successors
above mentioned, was the famous Sophia Alethea Hobson, afterwards
Newcome—of whom might be said what Frederick the Great said of his
sister, that she was _sexu fœmina, vir ingenio_—in sex a woman, and in
mind a man. Nor was she, my informant told me, without even manly
personal characteristics: she had a very deep and gruff voice, and in
her old age a beard which many a young man might envy; and as she came
into the bank out of her carriage from Clapham, in her dark green
pelisse with fur trimmings, in her grey beaver hat, beaver gloves, and
great gold spectacles, not a clerk in that house did not tremble before
her, and it was said she only wanted a pipe in her mouth considerably
to resemble the late Field-Marshal Prince Blucher.

Her funeral was one of the most imposing sights ever witnessed in
Clapham. There was such a crowd you might have thought it was a
Derby-day. The carriages of some of the greatest City firms, and the
wealthiest Dissenting houses; several coaches full of ministers of all
denominations, including the Established Church; the carriage of the
Right Honourable the Earl of Kew, and that of his daughter, Lady Anne
Newcome, attended that revered lady’s remains to their final
resting-place. No less than nine sermons were preached at various
places of public worship regarding her end. She fell upstairs at a very
advanced age, going from the library to the bedroom, after all the
household was gone to rest, and was found by the maids in the morning,
inarticulate, but still alive, her head being cut frightfully with the
bedroom candle with which she was retiring to her apartment. “And,”
said Mr. Giles with great energy, “besides the empty carriages at that
funeral, and the parson in black, and the mutes and feathers and that,
there were hundreds and hundreds of people who wore no black, and who
weren’t present; and who wept for their benefactress, I can tell you.
She had her faults, and many of ’em; but the amount of that woman’s
charities are unheard of, sir—unheard of,—and they are put to the
credit side of her account up yonder.

“The old lady had a will of her own,” my companion continued. “She
would try and know about everybody’s business out of business hours:
got to know from the young clerks what chapels they went to, and from
the clergymen whether they attended regular; kept her sons, years after
they were grown men, as if they were boys at school—and what was the
consequence? They had a quarrel with Sir Thomas Newcome’s own son, a
harum-scarum lad, who ran away, and then was sent to India; and,
between ourselves, Mr. Hobson and Mr. Brian both, the present Baronet,
though at home they were as mum as Quakers at a meeting, used to go out
on the sly, sir, and be off to the play, sir, and sowed their wild oats
like any other young men, sir, like any other young men. Law bless me,
once, as I was going away from the Haymarket, if I didn’t see Mr.
Hobson coming out of the Opera, in tights and an opera-hat, sir, like
‘Froggy would wooing go,’ of a Saturday-night, too, when his ma thought
him safe in bed in the City! I warrant he hadn’t _his opera-hat_ on
when he went to chapel with her ladyship the next morning—that very
morning, as sure as my name’s John Giles.

“When the old lady was gone, Mr. Hobson had no need of any more
humbugging, but took his pleasure freely. Fighting, tandems,
four-in-hand, anything. He and his brother—his elder brother by a
quarter of an hour—were always very good friends; but after Mr. Brian
married, and there was only court-cards at his table, Mr. Hobson
couldn’t stand it. They weren’t of his suit, he said; and for some time
he said he wasn’t a marrying man—quite the contrary; but we all come to
our fate, you know, and his time came as mine did. You know we married
sisters? It was thought a fine match for Polly Smith, when she married
the great Mr. Newcome; but I doubt whether my old woman at home hasn’t
had the best of it, after all; and if ever you come Bernard Street way
on a Sunday, about six o’clock, and would like a slice of beef and a
glass of port, I hope you’ll come and see us.”

Do not let us be too angry with Colonel Newcome’s two most respectable
brothers, if for some years they neglected their Indian relative, or
held him in slight esteem. Their mother never pardoned him, or at least
by any actual words admitted his restoration to favour. For many years,
as far as they knew, poor Tom was an unrepentant prodigal, wallowing in
bad company, and cut off from all respectable sympathy. Their father
had never had the courage to acquaint them with his more true, and
kind, and charitable version of Tom’s story. So he passed at home for
no better than a black sheep; his marriage with a penniless young lady
did not tend to raise him in the esteem of his relatives at Clapham; it
was not until he was a widower, until he had been mentioned several
times in the _Gazette_ for distinguished military service, until they
began to speak very well of him in Leadenhall Street, where the
representatives of Hobson Brothers were of course East India
proprietors, and until he remitted considerable sums of money to
England, that the bankers his brethren began to be reconciled to him.

I say, do not let us be hard upon them. No people are so ready to give
a man a bad name as his own kinsfolk; and having made him that present,
they are ever most unwilling to take it back again. If they give him
nothing else in the days of his difficulty, he may be sure of their
pity, and that he is held up as an example to his young cousins to
avoid. If he loses his money they call him poor fellow, and point
morals out of him. If he falls among thieves, the respectable Pharisees
of his race turn their heads aside and leave him penniless and
bleeding. They clap him on the back kindly enough when he returns,
after shipwreck, with money in his pocket. How naturally Joseph’s
brothers made salaams to him, and admired him, and did him honour, when
they found the poor outcast a prime minister, and worth ever so much
money! Surely human nature is not much altered since the days of those
primeval Jews. We would not thrust brother Joseph down a well and sell
him bodily, but—but if he has scrambled out of a well of his own
digging, and got out of his early bondage into renown and credit, at
least we applaud him and respect him, and are proud of Joseph as a
member of the family.

Little Clive was the innocent and lucky object upon whom the increasing
affection of the Newcomes for their Indian brother was exhibited. When
he was first brought home a sickly child, consigned to his maternal
aunt, the kind old maiden lady at Brighton, Hobson Brothers scarce took
any notice of the little man, but left him to the entire
superintendence of his own family. Then there came a large remittance
from his father, and the child was asked by Uncle Newcome at Christmas.
Then his father’s name was mentioned in general orders, and Uncle
Hobson asked little Clive at Midsummer. Then Lord H., a late
Governor-General, coming home, and meeting the brothers at a grand
dinner at the Albion, given by the Court of Directors to his late
Excellency, spoke to the bankers about that most distinguished officer
their relative; and Mrs. Hobson drove over to see his aunt, where the
boy was; gave him a sovereign out of her purse, and advised strongly
that he should be sent to Timpany’s along wit her own boy. Then Clive
went from one uncle’s house to another; and was liked at both; and much
preferred ponies to ride, going out after rabbits with the keeper,
money in his pocket (charge to the debit of Lieut.-Col. T. Newcome),
and clothes from the London tailor, to the homely quarters and
conversation of poor kind old Aunt Honeyman at Brighton. Clive’s uncles
were not unkind; they liked each other; their wives, who hated each
other, united in liking Clive when they knew him, and petting the
wayward handsome boy: they were only pursuing the way of the world,
which huzzas all prosperity, and turns away from misfortune as from
some contagious disease. Indeed, how can we see a man’s brilliant
qualities if he is what we call in the shade?

The gentlemen, Clive’s uncles, who had their affairs to mind during the
day, society and the family to occupy them of evenings and holidays,
treated their young kinsman, the Indian Colonel’s son, as other wealthy
British uncles treat other young kinsmen. They received him in his
vacations kindly enough. They tipped him when he went to school; when
he had the hooping-cough, a confidential young clerk went round by way
of Grey Friars Square to ask after him; the sea being recommended to
him, Mrs. Newcome gave him change of air in Sussex, and transferred him
to his maternal aunt at Brighton. Then it was _bon jour_. As the
lodge-gates closed upon him, Mrs. Newcome’s heart shut up too and
confined itself within the firs, laurels, and palings which bound the
home precincts. Had not she her own children and affairs? her brood of
fowls, her Sunday-school, her melon-beds, her rose-garden, her quarrel
with the parson, etc., to attend to? Mr. Newcome, arriving on a
Saturday night; hears he is gone, says “Oh!” and begins to ask about
the new gravel-walk along the cliff, and whether it is completed, and
if the China pig fattens kindly upon the new feed.

Clive, in the avuncular gig, is driven over the downs to Brighton to
his maternal aunt there; and there he is a king. He has the best
bedroom, Uncle Honeyman turning out for him sweetbreads for dinner; no
end of jam for breakfast; excuses from church on the plea of delicate
health; his aunt’s maid to see him to bed; his aunt to come smiling in
when he rings his bell of a morning. He is made much of, and coaxed,
and dandled and fondled, as if he were a young duke. So he is to Miss
Honeyman. He is the son of Colonel Newcome, C.B., who sends her shawls,
ivory chessmen, scented sandalwood workboxes and kincob scarfs; who, as
she tells Martha the maid, has fifty servants in India; at which Martha
constantly exclaims, “Lor’, mum, what can he do with ’em, mum?” who,
when in consequence of her misfortunes she resolved on taking a house
at Brighton, and letting part of the same furnished, sent her an order
for a hundred pounds towards the expenses thereof; who gave Mr.
Honeyman, her brother, a much larger sum of money at the period of his
calamity. Is it gratitude for past favours? is it desire for more? is
it vanity of relationship? is it love for the dead sister—or tender
regard for her offspring which makes Mrs. Martha Honeyman so fond of
her nephew? I never could count how many causes went to produce any
given effect or action in a person’s life, and have been for my own
part many a time quite misled in my own case, fancying some grand, some
magnanimous, some virtuous reason, for an act of which I was proud,
when lo! some pert little satirical monitor springs up inwardly,
upsetting the fond humbug which I was cherishing—the peacock’s tail
wherein my absurd vanity had clad itself—and says, “Away with this
boasting! _I_ am the cause of your virtue, my lad. You are pleased that
yesterday at dinner you refrained from the dry champagne? My name is
Worldly Prudence, not Self-denial, and _I_ caused you to refrain. You
are pleased because you gave a guinea to Diddler? I am Laziness, not
Generosity, which inspired you. You hug yourself because you resisted
other temptation? Coward! it was because you dared not run the risk of
the wrong. Out with your peacock’s plumage! walk off in the feathers
which Nature gave you, and thank Heaven they are not altogether black.”
In a word, Aunt Honeyman was a kind soul, and such was the splendour of
Clive’s father, of his gifts, his generosity, his military services,
and companionship of the battles, that the lad did really appear a
young duke to her. And Mrs. Newcome was not unkind: and if Clive had
been really a young duke, I am sure he would have had the best bedroom
at Marble Hill, and not one of the far-off little rooms in the boys’
wing; I am sure he would have had jellies and Charlottes Russes,
instead of mere broth, chicken, and batter-pudding, as fell to his lot;
and when he was gone (in the carriage, mind you, not in the gig driven
by a groom), I am sure Mrs. Newcome would have written a letter that
night to Her Grace the Duchess Dowager his mamma, full of praise of the
dear child, his graciousness, his beauty, and his wit, and declaring
that she must love him henceforth and for ever after as _a son of her
own_. You toss down the page with scorn, and say, “It is not true.
Human nature is not so bad as this cynic would have it to be. You would
make no difference between the rich and the poor.” Be it so. You would
not. But own that your next-door neighbour would. Nor is this, dear
madam, addressed to you; no, no, we are not so rude as to talk about
you to your face; but if we may not speak of the lady who has just left
the room, what is to become of conversation and society?

We forbear to describe the meeting between the Colonel and his son—the
pretty boy from whom he had parted more than seven years before with
such pangs of heart; and of whom he had thought ever since with such a
constant longing affection. Half an hour after the father left the boy,
and in his grief and loneliness was rowing back to shore, Clive was at
play with a dozen of other children on the sunny deck of the ship. When
two bells rang for their dinner, they were all hurrying to the cuddy
table, and busy over their meal. What a sad repast their parents had
that day! How their hearts followed the careless young ones home across
the great ocean! Mothers’ prayers go with them. Strong men, alone on
their knees, with streaming eyes and broken accents, implore Heaven for
those little ones, who were prattling at their sides but a few hours
since. Long after they are gone, careless and happy, recollections of
the sweet past rise up and smite those who remain: the flowers they had
planted in their little gardens, the toys they played with, the little
vacant cribs they slept in as fathers’ eyes looked blessings down on
them. Most of us who have passed a couple of score of years in the
world, have had such sights as these to move us. And those who have
will think none the worse of my worthy Colonel for his tender and
faithful heart.

With that fidelity which was an instinct of his nature, this brave man
thought ever of his absent child, and longed after him. He never
forsook the native servants and nurses who had had charge of the child,
but endowed them with money sufficient (and indeed little was wanted by
people of that frugal race) to make all their future lives comfortable.
No friends went to Europe, nor ship departed, but Newcome sent presents
and remembrances to the boy, and costly tokens of his love and thanks
to all who were kind to his son. What a strange pathos seems to me to
accompany all our Indian story! Besides that official history which
fills _Gazettes_, and embroiders banners with names of victory; which
gives moralists and enemies cause to cry out at English rapine; and
enables patriots to boast of invincible British valour—besides the
splendour and conquest, the wealth and glory, the crowned ambition, the
conquered danger, the vast prize, and the blood freely shed in winning
it—should not one remember the tears, too? Besides the lives of myriads
of British men, conquering on a hundred fields, from Plassey to Meanee,
and bathing them cruore nostro: think of the women, and the tribute
which they perforce must pay to those victorious achievements. Scarce a
soldier goes to yonder shores but leaves a home and grief in it behind
him. The lords of the subject province find wives there; but their
children cannot live on the soil. The parents bring their children to
the shore, and part from them. The family must be broken up—keep the
flowers of your home beyond a certain time, and the sickening buds
wither and die. In America it is from the breast of a poor slave that a
child is taken. In India it is from the wife, and from under the
palace, of a splendid proconsul.

The experience of this grief made Newcome’s naturally kind heart only
the more tender, and hence he had a weakness for children which made
him the laughing-stock of old maids, old bachelors, and sensible
persons; but the darling of all nurseries, to whose little inhabitants
he was uniformly kind: were they the collectors’ progeny in their
palanquins, or the sergeants’ children tumbling about the cantonment,
or the dusky little heathens in the huts of his servants round his
gate.

It is known that there is no part of the world where ladies are more
fascinating than in British India. Perhaps the warmth of the sun
kindles flames in the hearts of both sexes, which would probably beat
quite coolly in their native air: else why should Miss Brown be engaged
ten days after her landing at Calcutta? or why should Miss Smith have
half a dozen proposals before she has been a week at the station? And
it is not only bachelors on whom the young ladies confer their
affections; they will take widowers without any difficulty; and a man
so generally liked as Major Newcome, with such a good character, with a
private fortune of his own, so chivalrous, generous, good-looking,
eligible in a word, you may be sure would have found a wife easily
enough, had he any mind for replacing the late Mrs. Casey.

The Colonel, as has been stated, had an Indian chum or companion, with
whom he shared his lodgings; and from many jocular remarks of this
latter gentleman (who loved good jokes, and uttered not a few) I could
gather that the honest widower Colonel Newcome had been often tempted
to alter his condition, and that the Indian ladies had tried numberless
attacks upon his bereaved heart, and devised endless schemes of
carrying it by assault, treason, or other mode of capture. Mrs. Casey
(his defunct wife) had overcome it by sheer pity and helplessness. He
had found her so friendless, that he took her into the vacant place,
and installed her there as he would have received a traveller into his
bungalow. He divided his meal with her, and made her welcome to his
best. “I believe Tom Newcome married her,” sly Mr. Binnie used to say,
“in order that he might have permission to pay her milliner’s bills;”
and in this way he was amply gratified until the day of her death. A
feeble miniature of the lady, with yellow ringlets and a guitar, hung
over the mantelpiece of the Colonel’s bedchamber, where I have often
seen that work of art; and subsequently, when he and Mr. Binnie took a
house, there was hung up in the spare bedroom a companion portrait to
the miniature—that of the Colonel’s predecessor, Jack Casey, who in
life used to fling plates at his Emma’s head, and who perished from a
fatal attachment to the bottle. I am inclined to think that Colonel
Newcome was not much cast down by the loss of his wife, and that they
lived but indifferently together. Clive used to say in his artless way
that his father scarcely ever mentioned his mother’s name; and no doubt
the union was not happy, although Newcome continued piously to
acknowledge it, long after death had brought it to a termination, by
constant benefactions and remembrances to the departed lady’s kindred.

Those widows or virgins who endeavoured to fill Emma’s place found the
door of Newcombe’s heart fast and barred, and assailed it in vain. Miss
Billing sat down before it with her piano, and, as the Colonel was a
practitioner on the flute, hoped to make all life one harmonious duet
with him; but she played her most brilliant sonatas and variations in
vain; and, as everybody knows, subsequently carried her grand piano to
Lieutenant and Adjutant Hodgkin’s house, whose name she now bears. The
lovely widow Wilkins, with two darling little children, stopped at
Newcome’s hospitable house, on her way to Calcutta; and it was thought
she might never leave it; but her kind host, as was his wont, crammed
her children with presents and good things, consoled and entertained
the fair widow, and one morning, after she had remained three months at
the station, the Colonel’s palanquins and bearers made their
appearance, and Elvira Wilkins went away weeping as a widow should. Why
did she abuse Newcome ever after at Calcutta, Bath, Cheltenham, and
wherever she went, calling him selfish, pompous, Quixotic, and a
Bahawder? I could mention half a dozen other names of ladies of most
respectable families connected with Leadenhall Street, who, according
to Colonel Newcome’s chum—that wicked Mr. Binnie—had all conspired more
or less to give Clive Newcome a stepmother.

But he had had an unlucky experience in his own case; and thought
within himself, “No, I won’t give Clive a stepmother. As Heaven has
taken his own mother from him, why, I must try to be father and mother
too to the lad.” He kept the child as long as ever the climate would
allow of his remaining, and then sent him home. Then his aim was to
save money for the youngster. He was of a nature so uncontrollably
generous, that to be sure he spent five rupees where another would save
them, and make a fine show besides; but it is not a man’s gifts or
hospitalities that generally injure his fortune. It is on themselves
that prodigals spend most. And as Newcome had no personal
extravagances, and the smallest selfish wants; could live almost as
frugally as a Hindoo; kept his horses not to race but to ride; wore his
old clothes and uniforms until they were the laughter of his regiment;
did not care for show, and had no longer an extravagant wife; he
managed to lay by considerably out of his liberal allowances, and to
find himself and Clive growing richer every year.

“When Clive has had five or six years at school”—that was his
scheme—“he will be a fine scholar, and have at least as much classical
learning as a gentleman in the world need possess. Then I will go to
England, and we will pass three or four years together, in which he
will learn to be intimate with me, and, I hope, to like me. I shall be
his pupil for Latin and Greek, and try and make up for lost time. I
know there is nothing like a knowledge of the classics to give a man
good breeding—_Ingenuas didicisse fideliter artes emollunt mores, nec
sinuisse feros_. I shall be able to help him with my knowledge of the
world, and to keep him out of the way of sharpers and a pack of rogues
who commonly infest young men. I will make myself his companion, and
pretend to no superiority; for, indeed, isn’t he my superior? Of course
he is, with his advantages. _He_ hasn’t been an idle young scamp as I
was. And we will travel together, first through England, Scotland, and
Ireland, for every man should know his own country, and then we will
make the grand tour. Then, by the time he is eighteen, he will be able
to choose his profession. He can go into the army, and emulate the
glorious man after whom I named him; or if he prefers the church, or
the law, they are open to him; and when he goes to the university, by
which time I shall be in all probability a major-general, I can come
back to India for a few years, and return by the time he has a wife and
a home for his old father; or if I die I shall have done the best for
him, and my boy will be left with the best education, a tolerable small
fortune, and the blessing of his old father.”

Such were the plans of our kind schemer. How fondly he dwelt on them,
how affectionately he wrote of them to his boy! How he read books of
travels and looked over the maps of Europe! and said, “Rome, sir,
glorious Rome; it won’t be very long, Major, before my boy and I see
the Colosseum, and kiss the Pope’s toe. We shall go up the Rhine to
Switzerland, and over the Simplon, the work of the great Napoleon. By
Jove, sir, think of the Turks before Vienna, and Sobieski clearing
eighty thousand of ’em off the face of the earth! How my boy will
rejoice in the picture-galleries there, and in Prince Eugene’s prints!
You know, I suppose, that Prince Eugene, one of the greatest generals
in the world, was also one of the greatest lovers of the fine arts.
_Ingenuas didicisse_, hey, Doctor! you know the rest,—_emollunt mores
nec_——”

“_Emollunt mores!_ Colonel,” says Doctor McTaggart, who perhaps was too
canny to correct the commanding officer’s Latin. “Don’t ye noo that
Prence Eugene was about as savage a Turrk as iver was? Have ye niver
rad the mimores of the Prants de Leen?”

“Well, he was a great cavalry officer,” answers the Colonel, “and he
left a great collection of prints—_that_ you know. How Clive will
delight in them! The boy’s talent for drawing is wonderful, sir,
wonderful. He sent me a picture of our old school—the very actual
thing, sir; the cloisters, the school, the head gown-boy going in with
the rods, and the Doctor himself. It would make you die of laughing!”

He regaled the ladies of the regiment with Clive’s letters, and those
of Miss Honeyman, which contained an account of the boy. He even bored
some of his bearers with this prattle; and sporting young men would
give or take odds that the Colonel would mention Clive’s name, once
before five minutes, three times in ten minutes, twenty-five times in
the course of dinner, and so on. But they who laughed at the Colonel
laughed very kindly; and everybody who knew him, loved him; everybody,
that is, who loved modesty, and generosity, and honour.

At last the happy time came for which the kind father had been longing
more passionately than any prisoner for liberty, or schoolboy for
holiday. Colonel Newcome has taken leave of his regiment, leaving Major
Tomkinson, nothing loth, in command. He has travelled to Calcutta; and
the Commander-in-Chief, in general orders, has announced that in giving
to Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Newcome, C.B., of the Bengal Cavalry,
leave for the first time, after no less than thirty-four years’ absence
from home, “he (Sir George Hustler) cannot refrain from expressing his
sense of the great and meritorious services of this most distinguished
officer, who has left his regiment in a state of the highest discipline
and efficiency.” And now the ship has sailed, the voyage is over, and
once more, after so many long years, the honest soldier’s foot is on
his native shore.




CHAPTER VI.
Newcome Brothers


Besides his own boy, whom he worshipped, this kind Colonel had a score,
at least, of adopted children, to whom he chose to stand in the light
of a father. He was for ever whirling away in postchaises to this
school and that, to see Jack Brown’s boys, of the Cavalry; or Mrs.
Smith’s girls, of the Civil Service; or poor Tom Hicks’s orphan, who
had nobody to look after him now that the cholera had carried off Tom,
and his wife too. On board the ship in which he returned from Calcutta
were a dozen of little children, of both sexes, some of whom he
actually escorted to their friends before he visited his own; and
though his heart was longing for his boy at Grey Friars. The children
at the schools seen, and largely rewarded out of his bounty (his loose
white trousers had great pockets, always heavy with gold and silver,
which he jingled when he was not pulling his mustachios—to see the way
in which he tipped children made one almost long to be a boy again);
and when he had visited Miss Pinkerton’s establishment, or Doctor
Ramshorn’s adjoining academy at Chiswick, and seen little Tom Davis or
little Fanny Holmes the honest fellow would come home and write off
straightway a long letter to Tom’s or Fanny’s parents, far away in the
Indian country, whose hearts he made happy by his accounts of their
children, as he had delighted the children themselves by his affection
and bounty. All the apple- and orange-women (especially such as had
babies as well as lollipops at their stalls), all the street-sweepers
on the road between Nerot’s and the Oriental, knew him, and were his
pensioners. His brothers in Threadneedle Street cast up their eyes at
the cheques which he drew.

One of the little people of whom the kind Newcome had taken charge
luckily dwelt near Portsmouth; and when the faithful Colonel consigned
Miss Fipps to her grandmother, Mrs. Admiral Fipps, at Southampton, Miss
Fipps clung to her guardian, and with tears and howls was torn away
from him. Not until her maiden aunts had consoled her with
strawberries, which she never before had tasted, was the little Indian
comforted for the departure of her dear Colonel. Master Cox, Tom Cox’s
boy, of the Native Infantry, had to be carried asleep from the “George”
to the mail that night. Master Cox woke up at the dawn wondering, as
the coach passed through the pleasant green roads of Bromley. The good
gentleman consigned the little chap to his uncle, Dr. Cox, Bloomsbury
Square, before he went to his own quarters, and then on the errand on
which his fond heart was bent.

He had written to his brothers from Portsmouth, announcing his arrival,
and three words to Clive, conveying the same intelligence. The letter
was served to the boy along with one bowl of tea and one buttered roll,
of eighty such which were distributed to fourscore other boys, boarders
of the same house with our young friend. How the lad’s face must have
flushed, and his eyes brightened, when he read the news! When the
master of the house, the Rev. Mr. Popkinson, came into the long-room,
with a good-natured face, and said, “Newcome, you’re wanted,” he knows
who is come. He does not heed that notorious bruiser, Old Hodge, who
roars out, “Confound you, Newcome: I’ll give it you for upsetting your
tea over my new trousers.” He runs to the room where the stranger is
waiting for him. We will shut the door, if you please, upon that scene.

If Clive had not been as fine and handsome a young lad as any in that
school or country, no doubt his fond father would have been just as
well pleased, and endowed him with a hundred fanciful graces; but in
truth, in looks and manners he was every thing which his parent could
desire; and I hope the artist who illustrates this work will take care
to do justice to his portrait. Mr. Clive himself, let that painter be
assured, will not be too well pleased if his countenance and figure do
not receive proper attention. He is not yet endowed with those splendid
mustachios and whiskers which he has himself subsequently depicted, but
he is the picture of health, strength, activity, and good-humour. He
has a good forehead, shaded with a quantity of waving light hair; a
complexion which ladies might envy; a mouth which seems accustomed to
laughing; and a pair of blue eyes that sparkle with intelligence and
frank kindness. No wonder the pleased father cannot refrain from
looking at him. He is, in a word, just such a youth as has a right to
be the hero of a novel.

The bell rings for second school, and Mr. Popkinson, arrayed in cap and
gown, comes in to shake Colonel Newcome by the hand, and to say he
supposes it’s to be a holiday for Newcome that day. He does not say a
word about Clive’s scrape of the day before, and that awful row in the
bedrooms, where the lad and three others were discovered making a
supper off a pork-pie and two bottles of prime old port from the Red
Cow public-house in Grey Friars Lane. When the bell has done ringing,
and all these busy little bees have swarmed into their hive, there is a
solitude in the place. The Colonel and his son walked the playground
together, that gravelly flat, as destitute of herbage as the Arabian
desert, but, nevertheless, in the language of the place called the
green. They walk the green, and they pace the cloisters, and Clive
shows his father his own name of Thomas Newcome carved upon one of the
arches forty years ago. As they talk, the boy gives sidelong glances at
his new friend, and wonders at the Colonel’s loose trousers, long
mustachios, and yellow face. He looks very odd, Clive thinks, very odd
and very kind, and he looks like a gentleman, every inch of him:—not
like Martin’s father, who came to see his son lately in high-lows, and
a shocking bad hat, and actually flung coppers amongst the boys for a
scramble. He bursts out a-laughing at the exquisitely ludicrous idea of
a gentleman of his fashion scrambling for coppers.

And now, enjoining the boy to be ready against his return (and you may
be sure Mr. Clive was on the look-out long before his sire appeared),
the Colonel whirled away in his cab to the City to shake hands with his
brothers, whom he had not seen since they were demure little men in
blue jackets, under charge of a serious tutor.

He rushed through the clerks and the banking-house, he broke into the
parlour where the lords of the establishment were seated. He astonished
those trim quiet gentlemen by the warmth of his greeting, by the vigour
of his hand-shake, and the loud high tones of his voice, which
penetrated the glass walls of the parlour, and might actually be heard
by the busy clerks in the hall without. He knew Brian from Hobson at
once—that unlucky little accident in the go-cart having left its mark
for ever on the nose of Sir Brian Newcome, the elder of the twins. Sir
Brian had a bald head and light hair, a short whisker cut to his cheek,
a buff waistcoat, very neat boots and hands. He looked like the
“Portrait of a Gentleman” at the Exhibition, as the worthy is
represented: dignified in attitude, bland, smiling, and statesmanlike,
sitting at a table unsealing letters, with a despatch-box and a silver
inkstand before him, a column and a scarlet curtain behind, and a park
in the distance, with a great thunderstorm lowering in the sky. Such a
portrait, in fact, hangs over the great sideboard at Newcome to this
day, and above the three great silver waiters, which the gratitude of
as many Companies has presented to their respected director and
chairman.

In face, Hobson Newcome, Esq., was like his elder brother, but was more
portly in person. He allowed his red whiskers to grow wherever nature
had planted them, on his cheeks and under his chin. He wore thick shoes
with nails in them, or natty round-toed boots, with tight trousers and
a single strap. He affected the country gentleman in his appearance.
His hat had a broad brim, and the ample pockets of his cut-away coat
were never destitute of agricultural produce, samples of beans or corn,
which he used to bite and chew even on ’Change, or a whip-lash, or
balls for horses: in fine, he was a good old country gentleman. If it
was fine in Threadneedle Street, he would say it was good weather for
the hay; if it rained, the country wanted rain; if it was frosty, “No
hunting to-day, Tomkins, my boy,” and so forth. As he rode from
Bryanstone Square to the City you would take him—and he was pleased to
be so taken—for a jolly country squire. He was a better man of business
than his more solemn and stately brother, at whom he laughed in his
jocular way; and he said rightly, that a gentleman must get up very
early in the morning who wanted to take him in.

The Colonel breaks into the sanctum of these worthy gentlemen; and each
receives him in a manner consonant with his peculiar nature. Sir Brian
regretted that Lady Anne was away from London, being at Brighton with
the children, who were all ill of the measles. Hobson said, “Maria
can’t treat you to such good company as my lady could give you, but
when will you take a day and come and dine with us? Let’s see, to-day’s
Wednesday; to-morrow we’ve a party. No, we’re engaged.” He meant that
his table was full, and that he did not care to crowd it; but there was
no use in imparting this circumstance to the Colonel. “Friday, we dine
at Judge Budge’s—queer name, Judge Budge, ain’t it? Saturday, I’m going
down to Marblehead, to look after the hay. Come on Monday, Tom, and
I’ll introduce you to the missus and the young ’uns.”

“I will bring Clive,” says Colonel Newcome, rather disturbed at this
reception. “After his illness my sister-in-law was very kind to him.”

“No, hang it, don’t bring boys; there’s no good in boys; they stop the
talk downstairs, and the ladies don’t want ’em in the drawing-room.
Send him to dine with the children on Sunday, if you like, and come
along down with me to Marblehead, and I’ll show you such a crop of hay
as will make your eyes open. Are you fond of farming?”

“I have not seen my boy for years,” says the Colonel; “I had rather
pass Saturday and Sunday with him, if you please, and some day we will
go to Marblehead together.”

“Well, an offer’s an offer. I don’t know any pleasanter thing than
getting out of this confounded City and smelling the hedges, and
looking at the crops coming up, and passing the Sunday in quiet.” And
his own tastes being thus agricultural, the honest gentleman thought
that everybody else must delight in the same recreation.

“In the winter, I hope we shall see you at Newcome,” says the elder
brother, blandly smiling. “I can’t give you any tiger-shooting, but
I’ll promise you that you shall find plenty of pheasants in our
jungle,” and he laughed very gently at this mild sally.

The Colonel gave him a queer look. “I shall be at Newcome before the
winter. I shall be there, please God, before many days are over.”

“Indeed!” says the Baronet, with an air of great surprise. “You are
going down to look at the cradle of our race. I believe the Newcomes
were there before the Conqueror. It was but a village in our
grandfather’s time, and it is an immense flourishing town now, for
which I hope to get—I expect to get—a charter.”

“Do you?” says the Colonel. “I am going down there to see a relation.”

“A relation! What relatives have we there?” cries the Baronet. “My
children, with the exception of Barnes. Barnes, this is your uncle
Colonel Thomas Newcome. I have great pleasure, brother, in introducing
you to my eldest son.”

A fair-haired young gentleman, languid and pale, and arrayed in the
very height of fashion, made his appearance at this juncture in the
parlour, and returned Colonel Newcome’s greeting with a smiling
acknowledgment of his own. “Very happy to see you, I’m sure,” said the
young man. “You find London very much changed since you were here? Very
good time to come—the very full of the season.”

Poor Thomas Newcome was quite abashed by this strange reception. Here
was a man, hungry for affection, and one relation asked him to dinner
next Monday, and another invited him to shoot pheasants at Christmas.
Here was a beardless young sprig, who patronised him, and vouchsafed to
ask him whether he found London was changed.

“I don’t know whether it’s changed,” says the Colonel, biting his
nails; “I know it’s not what I expected to find it.”

“To-day it’s really as hot as I should thing it must be in India,” says
young Mr. Barnes Newcome.

“Hot!” says the Colonel, with a grin. “It seems to me you are all cool
enough here.”

“Just what Sir Thomas de Boots said, sir,” says Barnes, turning round
to his father. “Don’t you remember when he came home from Bombay? I
recollect his saying, at Lady Featherstone’s, one dooced hot night, as
it seemed to us; I recklect his saying that he felt quite cold. Did you
know him in India, Colonel Newcome? He’s liked at the Horse Guards, but
he’s hated in his regiment.”

Colonel Newcome here growled a wish regarding the ultimate fate of Sir
Thomas de Boots, which we trust may never be realised by that
distinguished cavalry officer.

“My brother says he’s going to Newcome, Barnes, next week,” said the
Baronet, wishing to make the conversation more interesting to the newly
arrived Colonel. “He was saying so just when you came in, and I was
asking him what took him there?”

“Did you ever hear of Sarah Mason?” says the Colonel.

“Really, I never did,” the Baronet answered.

“Sarah Mason? No, upon my word, I don’t think I ever did, said the
young man.

“Well, that’s a pity too,” the Colonel said, with a sneer. “Mrs. Mason
is a relation of yours—at least by marriage. She is my aunt or cousin—I
used to call her aunt, and she and my father and mother all worked in
the same mill at Newcome together.”

“I remember—God bless my soul—I remember now!” cried the Baronet. “We
pay her forty pound a year on your account—don’t you know, brother?
Look to Colonel Newcome’s account—I recollect the name quite well. But
I thought she had been your nurse, and—and an old servant of my
father’s.”

“So she was my nurse, and an old servant of my father’s,” answered the
Colonel. “But she was my mother’s cousin too and very lucky was my
mother to have such a servant, or to have a servant at all. There is
not in the whole world a more faithful creature or a better woman.”

Mr. Hobson rather enjoyed his brother’s perplexity, and to see when the
Baronet rode the high horse, how he came down sometimes, “I am sure it
does you very great credit,” gasped the courtly head of the firm, “to
remember a—a humble friend and connexion of our father’s so well.”

“I think, brother, you might have recollected her too,” the Colonel
growled out. His face was blushing; he was quite angry and hurt at what
seemed to him Sir Brian’s hardness of heart.

“Pardon me if I don’t see the necessity,” said Sir Brian. “_I_ have no
relationship with Mrs. Mason, and do not remember ever having seen her.
Can I do anything for you, brother? Can I be useful to you in any way?
Pray command me and Barnes here, who after City hours will be delighted
if he can be serviceable to you—_I_ am nailed to this counter all the
morning, and to the House of Commons all night;—I will be with you in
one moment, Mr. Quilter. Good-bye, my dear Colonel. How well India has
agreed with you! how young you look! the hot winds are nothing to what
we endure in Parliament.—Hobson,” in a low voice, “you saw about that
h’m, that power of attorney—and h’m and h’m will call here at twelve
about that h’m.—I am sorry I must say good-bye—it seems so hard after
not meeting for so many years.”

“Very,” says the Colonel.

“Mind and send for me whenever you want me, now.”

“Oh, of course,” said the elder brother, and thought when will that
ever be!

“Lady Anne will be too delighted at hearing of your arrival. Give my
love to Clive—a remarkable fine boy, Clive—good morning:” and the
Baronet was gone, and his bald head might presently be seen alongside
of Mr. Quilter’s confidential grey poll, both of their faces turned
into an immense ledger.

Mr. Hobson accompanied the Colonel to the door, and shook him cordially
by the hand as he got into his cab. The man asked whither he should
drive? and poor Newcome hardly knew where he was or whither he should
go. “Drive! a—oh—ah—damme, drive me anywhere away from this place!” was
all he could say; and very likely the cabman thought he was a
disappointed debtor who had asked in vain to renew a bill. In fact,
Thomas Newcome had overdrawn his little account. There was no such
balance of affection in that bank of his brothers, as the simple
creature had expected to find there.

When he was gone, Sir Brian went back to his parlour, where sate young
Barnes perusing the paper. “My revered uncle seems to have brought back
a quantity of cayenne pepper from India, sir,” he said to his father.

“He seems a very kind-hearted simple man,” the Baronet said “eccentric,
but he has been more than thirty years away from home. Of course you
will call upon him to-morrow morning. Do everything you can to make him
comfortable. Whom would he like to meet at dinner? I will ask some of
the Direction. Ask him, Barnes, for next Wednesday or Saturday—no;
Saturday I dine with the Speaker. But see that every attention is paid
him.”

“Does he intend to have our relation up to town, sir? I should like to
meet Mrs. Mason of all things. A venerable washerwoman, I daresay, or
perhaps keeps a public-house,” simpered out young Barnes.

“Silence, Barnes; you jest at everything, you young men do—you do.
Colonel Newcome’s affection for his old nurse does him the greatest
honour,” said the Baronet, who really meant what he said.

“And I hope my mother will have her to stay a good deal at Newcome. I’m
sure she must have been a washerwoman, and mangled my uncle in early
life. His costume struck me with respectful astonishment. He disdains
the use of straps to his trousers, and is seemingly unacquainted with
gloves. If he had died in India, would my late aunt have had to perish
on a funeral pile?” Here Mr. Quilter, entering with a heap of bills,
put an end to these sarcastic remarks, and young Newcome, applying
himself to his business (of which he was a perfect master), forgot
about his uncle till after City hours, when he entertained some young
gentlemen of Bays’s Club with an account of his newly arrived relative.

Towards the City, whither he wended his way whatever had been the ball
or the dissipation of the night before, young Barnes Newcome might be
seen walking every morning, resolutely and swiftly, with his neat
umbrella. As he passed Charing Cross on his way westwards, his little
boots trailed slowly over the pavement, his head hung languid (bending
lower still, and smiling with faded sweetness as he doffed his hat and
saluted a passing carriage), his umbrella trailed after him. Not a
dandy on all the Pall Mall pavement seemed to have less to do than he.

Heavyside, a large young officer of the household troops—old Sir Thomas
de Boots—and Horace Fogey, whom every one knows—are in the window of
Bays’s, yawning as widely as that window itself. Horses under the
charge of men in red jackets are pacing up and down St. James’s Street.
Cabmen on the stand are regaling with beer. Gentlemen with grooms
behind them pass towards the Park. Great dowager barouches roll along
emblazoned with coronets, and driven by coachmen in silvery wigs.
Wistful provincials gaze in at the clubs. Foreigners chatter and show
their teeth, and look at the ladies in the carriages, and smoke and
spit refreshingly round about. Policeman X slouches along the pavement.
It is five o’clock, the noon in Pall Mall.

“Here’s little Newcome coming,” says Mr. Horace Fogey. “He and the
muffin-man generally make their appearance in public together.”

“Dashed little prig,” says Sir Thomas de Boots, “why the dash did they
ever let him in here? If I hadn’t been in India, by dash—he should have
been blackballed twenty times over, by dash.” Only Sir Thomas used
words far more terrific than dash, for this distinguished cavalry
officer swore very freely.

“He amuses me; he’s such a mischievous little devil,” says good-natured
Charley Heavyside.

“It takes very little to amuse you,” remarks Fogey.

“_You_ don’t, Fogey,” answers Charley. “I know every one of your demd
old stories, that are as old as my grandmother. How-dy-do, Barney?”
(Enter Barnes Newcome.) “How are the Three per Cents, you little
beggar? I wish you’d do me a bit of stiff; and just tell your father,
if I may overdraw my account I’ll vote with him—hanged if I don’t.”

Barnes orders absinthe-and-water, and drinks: Heavyside resuming his
elegant raillery. “I say, Barney, your name’s Barney, and you’re a
banker. You must be a little Jew, hey? Vell, how mosh vill you to my
little pill for?”

“Do hee-haw in the House of Commons, Heavyside,” says the young man
with a languid air. “That’s your place: you’re returned for it.”
(Captain the Honourable Charles Heavyside is a member of the
legislature, and eminent in the House for asinine imitations which
delight his own, and confuse the other party.) “Don’t bray here. I hate
the shop out of shop hours.”

“Dash the little puppy,” growls Sir de Boots, swelling in his
waistband.

“What do they say about the Russians in the City?” says Horace Fogey,
who has been in the diplomatic service. “Has the fleet left Cronstadt,
or has it not?”

“How should I know?” asks Barney. “Ain’t it all in the evening paper?”

“That is very uncomfortable news from India, General,” resumes
Fogey—“there’s Lady Doddington’s carriage, how well she looks—that
movement of Runjeet-Singh on Peshawur: that fleet on the Irrawaddy. It
looks doocid queer, let me tell you, and Penguin is not the man to be
Governor-General of India in a time of difficulty.”

“And Hustler’s not the man to be Commander-in-Chief: dashder old fool
never lived: a dashed old psalm-singing, blundering old woman,” says
Sir Thomas, who wanted the command himself.

“_You_ ain’t in the psalm-singing line, Sir Thomas,” says Mr. Barnes;
“quite the contrary.” In fact, Sir de Boots in his youth used to sing
with the Duke of York, and even against Captain Costigan, but was
beaten by that superior bacchanalian artist.

Sir Thomas looks as if to ask what the dash is that to you? but wanting
still to go to India again, and knowing how strong the Newcomes are in
Leadenhall Street, he thinks it necessary to be civil to the young cub,
and swallows his wrath once more into his waistband.

“I’ve got an uncle come home from India—upon my word I have,” says
Barnes Newcome. “That is why I am so exhausted. I am going to buy him a
pair of gloves, number fourteen—and I want a tailor for him—not a young
man’s tailor. Fogey’s tailor rather. I’d take my father’s; but he has
all his things made in the country—all—in the borough, you know—he’s a
public man.”

“Is Colonel Newcome, of the Bengal Cavalry, your uncle?” asks Sir
Thomas de Boots.

“Yes; will you come and meet him at dinner next Wednesday week, Sir
Thomas? and, Fogey, you come; you know you like a good dinner. You
don’t know anything against my uncle, do you, Sir Thomas? Have I any
Brahminical cousins? Need we be ashamed of him?”

“I tell you what, young man, if you were more like him it wouldn’t hurt
you. He’s an odd man; they call him Don Quixote in India; I suppose
you’ve read Don Quixote?”

“Never heard of it, upon my word; and why do you wish I should be more
like him? I don’t wish to be like him at all, thank you.”

“Why, because he is one of the bravest officers that ever lived,”
roared out the old soldier. “Because he’s one of the kindest fellows;
because he gives himself no dashed airs, although he has reason to be
proud if he chose. That’s why, Mr. Newcome.”

“A topper for you, Barney, my boy,” remarks Charles Heavyside, as the
indignant General walks away gobbling and red. Barney calmly drinks the
remains of his absinthe.

“I don’t know what that old muff means,” he says innocently, when he
has finished his bitter draught. “He’s always flying out at me, the old
turkey-cock. He quarrels with my play at whist, the old idiot, and can
no more play than an old baby. He pretends to teach me billiards, and
I’ll give him fifteen in twenty and beat his old head off. Why do they
let such fellows into clubs? Let’s have a game at piquet till dinner,
Heavyside. Hallo! That’s my uncle, that tall man with the mustachios
and the short trousers, walking with that boy of his. I dare say they
are going to dine in Covent Garden, and going to the play. How-dy-do,
Nunky?”—and so the worthy pair went up to the card-room, where they
sate at piquet until the hour of sunset and dinner arrived.




CHAPTER VII.
In which Mr. Clive’s School-days are over


Our good Colonel had luckily to look forward to a more pleasant meeting
with his son, than that unfortunate interview with his other near
relatives. He dismissed his cab at Ludgate Hill, and walked thence by
the dismal precincts of Newgate, and across the muddy pavement of
Smithfield, on his way back to the old school where his son was, a way
which he had trodden many a time in his own early days. There was
Cistercian Street, and the Red Cow of his youth: there was the quaint
old Grey Friars Square, with its blackened trees and garden, surrounded
by ancient houses of the build of the last century, now slumbering like
pensioners in the sunshine.

Under the great archway of the hospital he could look at the old Gothic
building: and a black-gowned pensioner or two crawling over the quiet
square, or passing from one dark arch to another. The boarding-houses
of the school were situated in the square, hard by the more ancient
buildings of the hospital. A great noise of shouting, crying, clapping
forms and cupboards, treble voices, bass voices, poured out of the
schoolboys’ windows: their life, bustle, and gaiety contrasted
strangely with the quiet of those old men creeping along in their black
gowns under the ancient arches yonder, whose struggle of life was over,
whose hope and noise and bustle had sunk into that grey calm. There was
Thomas Newcome arrived at the middle of life, standing between the
shouting boys and the tottering seniors, and in a situation to moralise
upon both, had not his son Clive, who has espied him from within Mr.
Hopkinson’s, or let us say at once Hopkey’s house, come jumping down
the steps to greet his sire. Clive was dressed in his very best; not
one of those four hundred young gentlemen had a better figure, a better
tailor, or a neater boot. Schoolfellows, grinning through the bars,
envied him as he walked away; senior boys made remarks on Colonel
Newcome’s loose clothes and long mustachios, his brown hands and
unbrushed hat. The Colonel was smoking a cheroot as he walked; and the
gigantic Smith, the cock of the school, who happened to be looking
majestically out of window, was pleased to say that he thought
Newcome’s governor was a fine manly-looking fellow.

“Tell me about your uncles, Clive,” said the Colonel, as they walked on
arm in arm.

“What about them, sir?” asks the boy. “I don’t think I know much.”

“You have been to stay with them. You wrote about them. Were they kind
to you?”

“Oh, yes, I suppose they are very kind. They always tipped me: only you
know when I go there I scarcely ever see them. Mr. Newcome asks me the
oftenest—two or three times a quarter when he’s in town, and gives me a
sovereign regular.”

“Well, he must see you to give you the sovereign,” says Clive’s father,
laughing.

The boy blushed rather.

“Yes. When it’s time to go back to Smithfield on a Sunday night, I go
into the dining-room to shake hands, and he gives it me; but he don’t
speak to me much, you know, and I don’t care about going to Bryanstone
Square, except for the tip, of course that’s important, because I am
made to dine with the children, and they are quite little ones; and a
great cross French governess, who is always crying and shrieking after
them, and finding fault with them. My uncle generally has his
dinner-parties on Saturday, or goes out; and aunt gives me ten
shillings and sends me to the play; that’s better fun than a
dinner-party.” Here the lad blushed again. “I used,” says he, “when I
was younger, to stand on the stairs and prig things out of the dishes
when they came out from dinner, but I’m past that now. Maria (that’s my
cousin) used to take the sweet things and give ’em to the governess.
Fancy! she used to put lumps of sugar into her pocket and eat them in
the schoolroom! Uncle Hobson don’t live in such good society as Uncle
Newcome. You see, Aunt Hobson, she’s very kind, you know, and all that,
but I don’t think she’s what you call _comme il faut_.”

“Why, how are you to judge?” asks the father, amused at the lad’s
candid prattle, “and where does the difference lie?”

“I can’t tell you what it is, or how it is,” the boy answered, “only
one can’t help seeing the difference. It isn’t rank and that; only
somehow there are some men gentlemen and some not, and some women
ladies and some not. There’s Jones now, the fifth form master, every
man sees _he’s_ a gentleman, though he wears ever so old clothes; and
there’s Mr. Brown, who oils his hair, and wears rings, and white
chokers—my eyes! such white chokers!—and yet we call him the handsome
snob! And so about Aunt Maria, she’s very handsome and she’s very
finely dressed, only somehow she’s not—she’s not the ticket, you see.”

“Oh, she’s not the ticket,” says the Colonel, much amused.

“Well, what I mean is—but never mind,” says the boy. “I can’t tell you
what I mean. I don’t like to make fun of her, you know, for after all,
she is very kind to me; but Aunt Anne is different, and it seems as if
what she says is more natural; and though she has funny ways of her own
too, yet somehow she looks grander,”—and here the lad laughed again.
“And do you know, I often think that as good a lady as Aunt Anne
herself, is old Aunt Honeyman at Brighton—that is, in all essentials,
you know. For she is not proud, and she is not vain, and she never says
an unkind word behind anybody’s back, and she does a deal of kindness
to the poor without appearing to crow over them, you know; and she is
not a bit ashamed of letting lodgings, or being poor herself, as
sometimes I think some of our family——”

“I thought we were going to speak no ill of them?” says the Colonel,
smiling.

“Well, it only slipped out unawares,” says Clive, laughing; “but at
Newcome when they go on about the Newcomes, and that great ass, Barnes
Newcome, gives himself his airs, it makes me die of laughing. That time
I went down to Newcome, I went to see old Aunt Sarah, and she told me
everything, and showed me the room where my grandfather—you know; and
do you know I was a little hurt at first, for I thought we were swells
till then. And when I came back to school, where perhaps I had been
giving myself airs, and bragging about Newcome, why, you know, I
thought it was right to tell the fellows.”

“That’s a man,” said the Colonel, with delight; though had he said,
“That’s a boy,” he had spoken more correctly. Indeed, how many men do
we know in the world without caring to know who their fathers were? and
how many more who wisely do not care to tell us? “That’s a man,” cries
the Colonel; “never be ashamed of your father, Clive.”

“Ashamed of my father!” says Clive, looking up to him, and walking on
as proud as a peacock. “I say,” the lad resumed, after a pause—

“Say what you say,” said the father.

“Is that all true what’s in the Peerage—in the Baronetage, about Uncle
Newcome and Newcome; about the Newcome who was burned at Smithfield;
about the one that was at the battle of Bosworth; and the old old
Newcome who was bar—that is, who was surgeon to Edward the Confessor,
and was killed at Hastings? I am afraid it isn’t; and yet I should like
it to be true.”

“I think every man would like to come of an ancient and honourable
race,” said the Colonel, in his honest way. “As you like your father to
be an honourable man, why not your grandfather, and his ancestors
before him? But if we can’t inherit a good name, at least we can do our
best to leave one, my boy; and that is an ambition which, please God,
you and I will both hold by.”

With this simple talk the old and young gentleman beguiled their way,
until they came into the western quarter of the town, where the junior
member of the firm of Newcome Brothers had his house—a handsome and
roomy mansion in Bryanstone Square. Colonel Newcome was bent on paying
a visit to his sister-in-law, and as he knocked at the door, where the
pair were kept waiting some little time, he could remark through the
opened windows of the dining-room, that a great table was laid and
every preparation made for a feast.

“My brother said he was engaged to dinner to-day,” said the Colonel.
“Does Mrs. Newcome give parties when he is away?”

“She invites all the company,” answered Clive. “My uncle never asks any
one without aunt’s leave.”

The Colonel’s countenance fell. He has a great dinner, and does not ask
his own brother! Newcome thought. Why, if he had come to me in India
with all his family, he might have stayed for a year, and I should have
been offended if he had gone elsewhere.

A hot menial, in a red waistcoat, came and opened the door; and without
waiting for preparatory queries, said, “Not at home.”

“It’s my father, John,” said Clive; “my aunt will see Colonel Newcome.”

“Missis not at home,” said the man. “Missis is gone in carriage—Not at
this door!-Take them things down the area steps, young man!” bawls out
the domestic. This latter speech was addressed to a pastrycook’s boy,
with a large sugar temple and many conical papers containing delicacies
for dessert. “Mind the hice is here in time; or there’ll be a blow-up
with your governor,”—and John struggled back, closing the door on the
astonished Colonel.

“Upon my life, they actually shut the door in our faces,” said the poor
gentleman.

“The man is very busy, sir. There’s a great dinner. I’m sure my aunt
would not refuse you,” Clive interposed. “She is very kind. I suppose
it’s different here to what it is in India, here are the children in
the square,—those are the girls in blue,—that’s the French governess,
the one with the mustachios and the yellow parasol. How d’ye do, Mary?
How d’ye do, Fanny? This is my father,—this is your uncle.”

“Mesdemoiselles! Je vous défends de parler à qui que ce soit hors du
Squar!” screams out the lady of the mustachios; and she strode forward
to call back her young charges.

The Colonel addressed her in very good French. “I hope you will permit
me to make acquaintance with my nieces,” he said, “and with their
instructress, of whom my son has given me such a favourable account.”

“Hem!” said Mademoiselle Lebrun, remembering the last fight she and
Clive had had together, and a portrait of herself (with enormous
whiskers) which the young scapegrace had drawn. “Monsieur is very good.
But one cannot too early inculcate _retenue_ and decorum to young
ladies in a country where demoiselles seem for ever to forget that they
are young ladies of condition. I am forced to keep the eyes of lynx
upon these young persons, otherwise heaven knows what would come to
them. Only yesterday, my back is turned for a moment, I cast my eyes on
a book, having but little time for literature, monsieur—for literature,
which I adore—when a cry makes itself to hear. I turn myself, and what
do I see? Mesdemoiselles, your nieces, playing at criquette, with the
Messieurs Smees—sons of Doctor Smees—young galopins, monsieur!” All
this was shrieked with immense volubility and many actions of the hand
and parasol across the square-railings to the amused Colonel, at whom
the little girls peered through the bars.

“Well, my dears, I should like to have a game at cricket with you,
too,” says the kind gentleman, reaching them each a brown hand.

“You, monsieur, c’est different—a man of your age! Salute monsieur,
your uncle, mesdemoiselles. You conceive, monsieur, that I also must be
cautious when I speak to a man so distinguished in a public squar.” And
she cast down her great eyes and hid those radiant orbs from the
Colonel.

Meanwhile, Colonel Newcome, indifferent to the direction which Miss
Lebrun’s eyes took, whether towards his hat or his boots, was surveying
his little nieces with that kind expression which his face always wore
when it was turned towards children. “Have you heard of your uncle in
India?” he asked them.

“No,” says Maria.

“Yes,” says Fanny. “You know mademoiselle said” (mademoiselle at this
moment was twittering her fingers, and, as it were, kissing them in the
direction of a grand barouche that was advancing along the Square)—“you
know mademoiselle said that if we were _méchantes_ we should be sent to
our uncle in India. I think I should like to go with you.”

“O you silly child!” cries Maria.

“Yes I should, if Clive went too,” says little Fanny.

“Behold madam, who arrives from her promenade!” Miss Lebrun exclaimed;
and, turning round, Colonel Newcome had the satisfaction of beholding,
for the first time, his sister-in-law.

A stout lady, with fair hair and a fine bonnet and pelisse (who knows
what were the fine bonnets and pelisses of the year 183-?), was
reclining in the barouche, the scarlet-plush integuments of her
domestics blazing before and behind her. A pretty little foot was on
the cushion opposite to her; feathers waved in her bonnet; a book was
in her lap; an oval portrait of a gentleman reposed on her voluminous
bosom. She wore another picture of two darling heads, with pink cheeks
and golden hair, on one of her wrists, with many more chains,
bracelets, bangles, and knick-knacks. A pair of dirty gloves marred the
splendour of this appearance; a heap of books from the library strewed
the back seat of the carriage, and showed that her habits were
literary. Springing down from his station behind his mistress, the
youth clad in the nether garments of red sammit discharged thunderclaps
on the door of Mrs. Newcome’s house, announcing to the whole Square
that his mistress had returned to her abode. Since the fort saluted the
Governor-General at ———, Colonel Newcome had never heard such a
cannonading.

Clive, with a queer twinkle of his eyes, ran towards his aunt.

She bent over the carriage languidly towards him. She liked him. “What,
you, Clive?” she said. “How come you away from school of a Thursday,
sir?”

“It is a holiday,” says he. “My father is come; and he is come to see
you.”

She bowed her head with an expression of affable surprise and majestic
satisfaction. “Indeed, Clive!” she was good enough to exclaim and with
an air which seemed to say, “Let him come up and be presented to me.”
The honest gentleman stepped forward and took off his hat and bowed,
and stood bareheaded. She surveyed him blandly, and with infinite grace
put forward one of the pudgy little hands in one of the dirty gloves.
Can you fancy a twopenny-halfpenny baroness of King Francis’s time
patronising Bayard? Can you imagine Queen Guinever’s lady’s-maid’s
lady’s maid being affable to Sir Lancelot? I protest there is nothing
like the virtue of English women.

“You have only arrived to-day, and you came to see me? That was very
kind. N’est-ce pas que c’était bong de Mouseer le Collonel,
mademoiselle? Madamaselle Lebrun, le Collonel Newcome, mong frère.” (In
a whisper, “My children’s governess and my friend, a most superior
woman.”) “Was it not kind of Colonel Newcome to come to see me? Have
you had a pleasant voyage? Did you come by St. Helena? Oh, how I envy
you seeing the tomb of that great man! Nous parlong de Napolleong,
mademoiselle, dong voter père a été le Général favvory.”

“O Dieu! que n’ai je pu le voir,” interjaculates mademoiselle. “Lui
dont parle l’univers, dont mon père m’a si souvent parlé!” but this
remark passes quite unnoticed by mademoiselle’s friend, who continues:

“Clive, donnez-moi voter bras. These are two of my girls. My boys are
at school. I shall be so glad to introduce them to their uncle. _This_
naughty boy might never have seen you, but that we took him home to
Marblehead, after the scarlet fever, and made him well, didn’t we,
Clive? And we are all very fond of him, and you must not be jealous of
his love for his aunt. We feel that we quite know you through him, and
we know that you know us, and we hope you will _like_ us. Do you think
your pa will like us, Clive? Or perhaps you will like Lady Anne best?
Yes; you have been to her first, of course? Not been? Oh! because she
is not in town.” Leaning fondly on the arm of Clive, mademoiselle
standing grouped with the children hard by while John, with his hat
off, stood at the opened door, Mr Newcome slowly uttered the above
remarkable remarks to the Colonel, on the threshold of her house, which
she never asked him to pass.

“If you will come in to us at about ten this evening,” she then said,
“you will find some men, not undistinguished, who honour me of an
evening. Perhaps they will be interesting to you, Colonel Newcome, as
you are newly arrived in Europe. Not men of worldly rank, necessarily,
although some of them are amongst the noblest of Europe. But my maxim
is, that genius is an illustration, and merit is better than any
pedigree. You have heard of Professor Bodgers? Count Poski? Doctor
McGuffog, who is called in his native country the Ezekiel of
Clackmannan? Mr. Shaloony, the great Irish patriot? our papers have
told you of _him_. These and some more I have been good enough to
promise me a visit to-night. A stranger coming to London could scarcely
have a better opportunity of seeing some of our great illustrations of
science and literature. And you will meet our own family—not Sir
Brian’s, who—who have other society and amusements—but mine. I hope Mr.
Newcome and myself will never forget _them_. We have a few friends at
dinner, and now I must go in and consult with Mrs. Hubbard, my
housekeeper. Good-bye for the present. Mind, not later than ten, as Mr.
Newcome must be up betimes in the morning, and our parties break up
early. When Clive is a little older, I dare say we shall see him, too.
_Good_-bye!” And again the Colonel was favoured with a shake of the
glove, and the lady and her suite sailed up the stair, and passed in at
the door.

She had not the faintest idea but that the hospitality which she was
offering to her kinsman was of the most cordial and pleasant kind. She
fancied everything she did was perfectly right and graceful. She
invited her husband’s clerks to come through the rain at ten o’clock
from Kentish Town; she asked artists to bring their sketch-books from
Kensington, or luckless pianists to trudge with their music from
Brompton. She rewarded them with a smile and a cup of tea, and thought
they were made happy by her condescension. If, after two or three of
these delightful evenings, they ceased to attend her receptions, she
shook her little flaxen head, and sadly intimated that Mr. A. was
getting into bad courses, or feared that Mr. B. found merely
_intellectual_ parties too quiet for him. Else, what young man in his
senses could refuse such entertainment and instruction?




CHAPTER VIII.
Mrs. Newcome at Home (a Small Early Party)


To push on in the crowd, every male or female struggler must use his
shoulders. If a better place than yours presents itself just beyond
your neighbour, elbow him and take it. Look how a steadily purposed man
or woman at court, at a ball, or exhibition, wherever there is a
competition and a squeeze, gets the best place; the nearest the
sovereign, if bent on kissing the royal hand; the closest to the grand
stand, if minded to go to Ascot; the best view and hearing of the Rev.
Mr. Thumpington, when all the town is rushing to hear that exciting
divine; the largest quantity of ice, champagne, and seltzer, cold pâté,
or other his or her favourite flesh-pot, if gluttonously minded, at a
supper whence hundreds of people come empty away. A woman of the world
will marry her daughter and have done with her; get her carriage and be
at home and asleep in bed; whilst a timid mamma has still her girl in
the nursery, or is beseeching the servants in the cloakroom to look for
her shawls, with which some one else has whisked away an hour ago. What
a man has to do in society is to assert himself. Is there a good place
at table? Take it. At the Treasury or the Home Office? Ask for it. Do
you want to go to a party to which you are not invited? Ask to be
asked. Ask A., ask B., ask Mrs. C., ask everybody you know: you will be
thought a bore; but you will have your way. What matters if you are
considered obtrusive, provided that you obtrude? By pushing steadily,
nine hundred and ninety-nine people in a thousand will yield to you.
Only command persons, and you may be pretty sure that a good number
will obey. How well your money will have been laid out, O gentle
reader, who purchase this; and, taking the maxim to heart, follow it
through life! You may be sure of success. If your neighbour’s foot
obstructs you, stamp on it; and do you suppose he won’t take it away?

The proofs of the correctness of the above remarks I show in various
members of the Newcome family. Here was a vulgar little woman, not
clever nor pretty, especially; meeting Mr. Newcome casually, she
ordered him to marry her, and he obeyed; as he obeyed her in everything
else which she chose to order through life. Meeting Colonel Newcome on
the steps of her house, she orders him to come to her evening party;
and though he has not been to an evening party for five-and-thirty
years—though he has not been to bed the night before—though he has no
mufti-coat except one sent him out by Messrs. Stultz to India in the
year 1821—he never once thinks of disobeying Mrs. Newcome’s order, but
is actually at her door at five minutes past ten, having arrayed
himself to the wonderment of Clive, and left the boy to talk with his
friend and fellow-passenger, Mr. Binnie, who has just arrived from
Portsmouth, who has dined with him, and who, by previous arrangement,
has taken up his quarters at the same hotel.

This Stultz coat, a blue swallow-tail, with yellow buttons, now wearing
a tinge of their native copper, a very high velvet collar on a level
with the tips of the Captain’s ears, with a high waist, indicated by
two lapelles, and a pair of buttons high up in the wearer’s back, a
white waistcoat and scarlet under-waistcoat, and a pair of the
never-failing duck trousers, complete Thomas Newcome’s costume, along
with the white hat in which we have seen him in the morning, and which
was one of two dozen purchased by him some years since at public
outcry, Burrumtollah. We have called him Captain purposely, while
speaking of his coat, for he held that rank when the garment came out
to him; and having been in the habit of considering it a splendid coat
for twelve years past, he has not the least idea of changing his
opinion.

The Doctor McGuffog, Professor Bodgers, Count Poski, and all the lions
present at Mrs. Newcome’s _réunion_ that evening, were completely
eclipsed by Colonel Newcome. The worthy soul, who cared not the least
about adorning himself, had a handsome diamond brooch of the year
1801—given him by poor Jack Cutler, who was knocked over by his side at
Argaum—and wore this ornament in his desk for a thousand days and
nights at a time; in his shirt-frill, on such parade evenings as he
considered Mrs. Newcome’s to be. The splendour of this jewel, and of
his flashing buttons, caused all eyes to turn to him. There were many
pairs of mustachios present, those of Professor Schnurr, a very
corpulent martyr, just escaped from Spandau, and of Maximilien
Tranchard, French exile and apostle of liberty, were the only whiskers
in the room capable of vying in interest with Colonel Newcome’s. Polish
chieftains were at this time so common in London, that nobody (except
one noble Member for Marylebone, once a year, the Lord Mayor) took any
interest in them. The general opinion was, that the stranger was the
Wallachian Boyar, whose arrival at Mivart’s the _Morning Post_ had just
announced. Mrs. Miles, whose delicious every other Wednesdays in
Montague Square are supposed by some to be rival entertainments to Mrs.
Newcome’s alternate Thursdays in Bryanstone Square, pinched her
daughter Mira, engaged in a polyglot conversation with Herr Schnurr,
nor Carabossi, the guitarist, and Monsieur Pivier, the celebrated
French chess-player, to point out the Boyar. Mira Miles wished she knew
a little Moldavian, not so much that she might speak it, but that she
might be heard to speak it. Mrs. Miles, who had not had the educational
advantages of her daughter, simpered up with “Madame Newcome pas
ici—votre excellence nouvellement arrivé—avez vous fait ung bong
voyage? Je reçois chez moi Mercredi prochaing; lonnure de vous
voir—Madamasel Miles ma fille;” and, Mira, now reinforcing her mamma,
poured in a glib little oration in French, somewhat to the astonishment
of the Colonel, who began to think, however, that perhaps French was
the language of the polite world, into which he was now making his very
first _entrée_.

Mrs. Newcome had left her place at the door of her drawing-room, to
walk through her rooms with Rummun Loll, the celebrated Indian
merchant, otherwise His Excellency Rummun Loll, otherwise his Highness
Rummun Loll, the chief proprietor of the diamond-mines in Golconda,
with a claim of three millions and a-half upon the East India
Company—who smoked his hookah after dinner when the ladies were gone,
and in whose honour (for his servants always brought a couple or more
of hookahs with them) many English gentlemen made themselves sick,
while trying to emulate the same practice. Mr. Newcome had been obliged
to go to bed himself in consequence of the uncontrollable nausea
produced by the chillum; and Doctor McGuffog, in hopes of converting
His Highness, had puffed his till he was as black in the face as the
interesting Indian—and now, having hung on his arm—always in the dirty
gloves—flirting a fan whilst His Excellency consumed betel out of a
silver box; and having promenaded him and his turban, and his shawls,
and his kincab pelisse, and his lacquered moustache, and keen brown
face; and opal eyeballs, through her rooms, the hostess came back to
her station at the drawing-room door.

As soon as His Excellency saw the Colonel, whom he perfectly well knew,
His Highness’s princely air was exchanged for one of the deepest
humility. He bowed his head and put his two hands before his eyes, and
came creeping towards him submissively, to the wonderment of Mrs.
Miles; who was yet more astonished when the Moldavian magnate exclaimed
in perfectly good English, “What, Rummun, you here?”

The Rummun, still bending and holding his hands before him, uttered a
number of rapid sentences in the Hindustani language, which Colonel
Newcome received twirling his mustachios with much hauteur. He turned
on his heel rather abruptly and began to speak to Mrs. Newcome, who
smiled and thanked him for coming on his first night after his return.

The Colonel said, “To whose house should he first come but to his
brother’s?” How Mrs. Newcome wished she could have had room for him at
dinner! And there was room after all, for Mr. Shaloony was detained at
the House. The most interesting conversation. The Indian Prince was so
intelligent!

“The Indian what?” asks Colonel Newcome. The heathen gentleman had gone
off, and was seated by one of the handsomest young women in the room,
whose fair face was turned towards him, whose blond ringlets touched
his shoulder, and who was listening to him as eagerly as Desdemona
listened to Othello.

The Colonel’s rage was excited as he saw the Indian’s behaviour. He
curled his mustachios up to his eyes in his wrath. “You don’t mean that
that man calls himself a Prince? That a fellow who wouldn’t sit down in
an officer’s presence is——”

“How do you do, Mr. Honeyman?—Eh, bong soir, Monsieur—You are very
late, Mr. Pressly.—What, Barnes! is it possible that you do me the
honour to come all the way from Mayfair to Marylebone? I thought you
young men of fashion never crossed Oxford Street. Colonel Newcome, this
is your nephew.”

“How do you do, sir?” says Barnes, surveying the Colonel’s costume with
inward wonder, but without the least outward manifestation of surprise.
“I suppose you dined here to meet the black Prince. I came to ask him
and my uncle to meet you at dinner on Wednesday. Where’s my uncle,
ma’am?”

“Your uncle is gone to bed ill. He smoked one of those hookahs which
the Prince brings, and it has made him very unwell indeed, Barnes. How
is Lady Anne? Is Lord Kew in London? Is your sister better for Brighton
air? I see your cousin is appointed Secretary of Legation. Have you
good accounts of your aunt Lady Fanny?”

“Lady Fanny is as well as can be expected, and the baby is going on
perfectly well, thank you,” Barnes said drily; and his aunt,
obstinately gracious with him, turned away to some other new comet.

“It’s interesting, isn’t it, sir,” says Barnes, turning to the Colonel,
“to see such union in families? Whenever I come here, my aunt trots out
all my relations; and I send a man round in the mornin to ask how they
all are. So Uncle Hobson is gone to bed sick with a hookah? I know
there was a deuce of a row made when I smoked at Marblehead. You are
promised to us for Wednesday, please. Is there anybody you would like
to meet? Not our friend the Rummun? How the girls crowd round him! By
Gad, a fellow who’s rich in London may have the pick of any gal—not
here—not in this sort of thing; I mean in society, you know,” says
Barnes confidentially, “I’ve seen the old dowagers crowdin round that
fellow, and the girls snugglin up to his india-rubber face. He’s known
to have two wives already in India; but, by Gad, for a settlement, I
believe some of ’em here would marry—I mean of the girls in society.”

“But isn’t this society?” asked the Colonel.

“Oh, of course. It’s very good society and that sort of thing—but it’s
not, you know—you understand. I give you my honour there are not three
people in the room one meets anywhere, except the Rummun. What is he at
home, sir? I know he ain’t a Prince, you know, any more than I am.”

“I believe he is a rich man now,” said the Colonel. “He began from very
low beginnings, and odd stories are told about the origin of his
fortune.”

“That may be,” says the young man; “of course, as businessmen, that’s
not our affair. But has he got the fortune? He keeps a large account
with us; and, I think, wants to have larger dealings with us still. As
one of the family we may ask you to stand by us, and tell us anything
you know. My father has asked him down to Newcome, and we’ve taken him
up; wisely or not I can’t say. I think otherwise; but I’m quite young
in the house, and of course the elders have the chief superintendence.”
The young man of business had dropped his drawl or his languor, and was
speaking quite unaffectedly; good-naturedly, and selfishly. Had you
talked to him for a week, you could not have made him understand the
scorn and loathing with which the Colonel regarded him. Here was a
young fellow as keen as the oldest curmudgeon; a lad with scarce a
beard to his chin, that would pursue his bond as rigidly as Shylock.
“If he is like this at twenty, what will he be at fifty?” groaned the
Colonel. “I’d rather Clive were dead than have him such a heartless
woriding as this.” And yet the young man was not ungenerous, not
untruth-telling, not unserviceable. He thought his life was good
enough. It was as good as that of other folks he lived with. You don’t
suppose he had any misgivings, provided he was in the City early enough
in the morning; or slept badly, unless he indulged too freely
over-night; or twinges of conscience that his life was misspent? He
thought his life a most lucky and reputable one. He had a share in a
good business, and felt that he could increase it. Some day he would
marry a good match, with a good fortune; meanwhile he could take his
pleasure decorously, and sow his wild oats as some of the young
Londoners sow them, not broadcast after the fashion of careless
scatter-brained youth, but trimly and neatly, in quiet places, where
the crop can come up unobserved, and be taken in without bustle or
scandal. Barnes Newcome never missed going to church, or dressing for
dinner. He never kept a tradesman waiting for his money. He never drank
too much, except when other fellows did, and in good company. He never
was late for business, or huddled over his toilet, however brief had
been his sleep, or severe his headache. In a word, he was as
scrupulously whited as any sepulchre in the whole bills of mortality.

Whilst young Barnes and his uncle were thus holding parley, a slim
gentleman of bland aspect, with a roomy forehead, or what his female
admirers called “a noble brow,” and a neat white neckcloth tied with
clerical skill, was surveying Colonel Newcome through his shining
spectacles, and waiting for an opportunity to address him. The Colonel
remarked the eagerness with which the gentleman in black regarded him,
and asked Mr. Barnes who was the padre? Mr. Barnes turned his eyeglass
towards the spectacles, and said “he didn’t know any more than the
dead; he didn’t know two people in the room.” The spectacles
nevertheless made the eyeglass a bow, of which the latter took no sort
of cognisance. The spectacles advanced; Mr. Newcome fell back with a
peevish exclamation of “Confound the fellow, what is he coming to speak
to me for?” He did not choose to be addressed by all sorts of persons
in all houses.

But he of the spectacles, with an expression of delight in his pale
blue eyes, and smiles dimpling his countenance, pressed onwards with
outstretched hands, and it was towards the Colonel he turned these
smiles and friendly salutations. “Did I hear aright, sir, from Mrs.
Miles,” he said, “and have I the honour of speaking to Colonel
Newcome?”

“The same, sir,” says the Colonel; at which the other, tearing off a
glove of lavender-coloured kid, uttered the words, “Charles Honeyman,”
and seized the hand of his brother-in-law. “My poor sister’s husband,”
he continued; “my own benefactor; Clive’s father. How strange are these
meetings in the mighty world! How I rejoice to see you, and know you!”

“You are Charles, are you?” cries the other. “I am very glad, indeed,
to shake you by the hand, Honeyman. Clive and I should have beat up
your quarters to-day, but we were busy until dinnertime. You put me in
mind of poor Emma, Charles,” he added, sadly. Emma had not been a good
wife to him; a flighty silly little woman, who had caused him when
alive many a night of pain and day of anxiety.

“Poor, poor Emma!” exclaimed the ecclesiastic, casting his eyes towards
the chandelier, and passing a white cambric pocket-handkerchief
gracefully before them. No man in London understood the ring business
or the pocket-handkerchief business better, or smothered his emotion
more beautifully. “In the gayest moments, in the giddiest throng of
fashion, the thoughts of the past will rise; the departed will be among
us still. But this is not the strain wherewith to greet the friend
newly arrived on our shores. How it rejoices me to behold you in old
England! How you must have joyed to see Clive!”

“D—— the humbug,” muttered Barnes, who knew him perfectly well. “The
fellow is always in the pulpit.”

The incumbent of Lady Whittlesea’s chapel smiled and bowed to him. “You
do not recognise me, sir; I have had the honour of seeing you in your
public capacity in the City, when I have called at the bank, the bearer
of my brother-in-law’s generous——”

“Never mind that, Honeyman!” cried the Colonel.

“But I _do_ mind, my dear Colonel,” answers Mr. Honeyman. “I should be
a very bad man, and a very ungrateful brother, if I _ever_ forgot your
kindness.”

“For God’s sake leave my kindness alone.”

“He’ll never leave it alone as long as he can use it,” muttered Mr.
Barnes in his teeth; and turning to his uncle, “May I take you home,
sir? my cab is at the door, and I shall be glad to drive you.” But the
Colonel said he must talk to his brother-in-law for a while, and Mr.
Barnes, bowing very respectfully to him, slipped under a dowager’s arm
in the doorway, and retreated silently downstairs.

Newcome was now thrown entirely upon the clergyman, and the latter
described the personages present to the stranger, who was curious to
know how the party was composed. Mrs. Newcome herself would have been
pleased had she heard Honeyman’s discourse regarding her guests and
herself. Charles Honeyman so spoke of most persons that you might fancy
they were listening over his shoulder. Such an assemblage of learning,
genius, and virtue, might well delight and astonish a stranger. “That
lady in the red turban, with the handsome daughters, is Lady Budge,
wife of the eminent judge of that name—everybody was astonished that he
was not made Chief Justice, and elevated to the Peerage—the only
objection (as I have heard confidentially) was on the part of a late
sovereign, who said he never could consent to have a peer of the name
of Budge. Her ladyship was of humble, I have heard even menial, station
originally, but becomes her present rank, dispenses the most elegant
hospitality at her mansion in Connaught Terrace, and is a pattern as a
wife and a mother. The young man talking to her daughter is a young
barrister, already becoming celebrated as a contributor to some of our
principal reviews.”

“Who is that cavalry officer in a white waistcoat talking to the Jew
with the beard?” asks the Colonel.

“He, he! That cavalry officer is another literary man of celebrity, and
by profession an attorney. But he has quitted the law for the Muses,
and it would appear that the Nine are never wooed except by gentlemen
with mustachios.”

“Never wrote a verse in my life,” says the Colonel, laughing, and
stroking his own.

“For I remark so many literary gentlemen with that decoration. The Jew
with the beard, as you call him, is Herr von Lungen, the eminent
hautboy-player. The three next gentlemen are Mr. Smee, of the Royal
Academy (who is shaved as you perceive), and Mr. Moyes and Mr. Cropper,
who are both very hairy about the chin. At the piano, singing,
accompanied by Mademoiselle Lebrun, is Signor Mezzocaldo, the great
barytone from Rome. Professor Quartz and Baron Hammerstein, celebrated
geologists from Germany, are talking with their illustrious _confrère_,
Sir Robert Craxton, in the door. Do you see yonder that stout gentleman
with stuff on his shirt? the eloquent Dr. McGuffog, of Edinburgh,
talking to Dr. Ettore, who lately escaped from the Inquisition at Rome
in the disguise of a washerwoman, after undergoing the question several
times, the rack and the thumbscrew. They say that he was to have been
burned in the Grand Square the next morning; but between ourselves, my
dear Colonel, I mistrust these stories of converts and martyrs. Did you
ever see a more jolly-looking man than Professor Schnurr, who was
locked up in Spielberg, and got out up a chimney, and through a window?
Had he waited a few months there are very few windows he could have
passed through. That splendid man in the red fez is Kurbash
Pasha—another renegade, I deeply lament to say—a hairdresser from
Marseilles, by name Monsieur Ferehaud, who passed into Egypt, and laid
aside the _tongs_ for a turban. He is talking with Mr. Palmer, one of
our most delightful young poets, and with Desmond O’Tara, son of the
late revered Bishop of Ballinafad, who has lately quitted ours for the
errors of the Church of Rome. Let me whisper to you that your kinswoman
is rather a searcher after what we call here _notabilities_. I heard
talk of one I knew in better days—of one who was the comrade of my
youth, and the delight of Oxford—poor Pidge of Brasenose, who got the
Newdigate in my third year, and who, under his present name of Father
Bartolo, was to have been here in his capuchin dress, with a beard and
bare feet; but I presume he could not get permission from his Superior.
That is Mr. Huff, the political economist, talking with Mr. Macduff,
the Member for Glenlivat. That is the coroner for Middlesex conversing
with the great surgeon Sir Cutler Sharp, and that pretty laughing girl
talking with them is no other than the celebrated Miss Pinnnifer, whose
novel of Ralph the Resurrectionist created such a sensation after it
was abused in the _Trimestrial Review_. It was a little bold
certainly—I just looked at it at my club—after hours devoted to parish
duty a clergyman is sometimes allowed, you know, _desipere in
loco_—there are descriptions in it certainly startling—ideas about
marriage not exactly orthodox; but the poor child wrote the book
actually in the nursery, and all England was ringing with it before Dr.
Pinnifer, her father, knew who was the author. That is the Doctor
asleep in the corner by Miss Rudge, the American authoress, who I dare
say is explaining to him the difference between the two Governments. My
dear Mrs. Newcome, I am giving my brother-in-law a little sketch of
some of the celebrities who are crowding your salon to-night. What a
delightful evening you have given us!”

“I try to do my best, Colonel Newcome,” said the lady of the house. “I
hope many a night we may see you here; and, as I said this morning,
Clive, when he is of an age to appreciate this kind of entertainment.
Fashion I do not worship. You may meet that amongst other branches of
our family; but genius and talent I do reverence. And if I can be the
means—the _humble_ means—to bring men of genius together—mind to
associate with mind—men of all nations to mingle in _friendly unison_—I
shall not have lived _altogether_ in vain. They call us women of the
world frivolous, Colonel Newcome. So some may be; I do not say there
are not in our own family persons who worship mere worldly rank, and
think but of fashion and gaiety; but such, I trust, will never be the
objects in life of me and my children. We are but merchants; we seek to
be _no more_. If I can look around me and see as I do”—(she waves her
fan round, and points to the illustrations scintillating round the
room)—“and see as I do now—a Poski, whose name is ever connected with
Polish history—an Ettore, who has exchanged a tonsure and a rack for
our own free country—a Hammerstein, and a Quartz, a Miss Rudge, our
Transatlantic sister (who I trust will not mention _this_ modest salon
in her forthcoming work on Europe), and Miss Pinnifer, whose genius I
acknowledge, though I deplore her opinions; if I can gather together
travellers, poets, and painters, princes and distinguished soldiers
from the East, and clergymen remarkable for their eloquence, my humble
aim is attained, and Maria Newcome is not altogether useless in her
generation. Will you take a little refreshment? Allow _your sister_ to
go down to the dining-room supported by your _gallant_ arm.” She looked
round to the admiring congregation, whereof Honeyman, as it were acted
as clerk, and flirting her fan, and flinging up her little head.
Consummate Virtue walked down on the arm of the Colonel.

The refreshment was rather meagre. The foreign artists generally dashed
downstairs, and absorbed all the ices, creams, etc. To those coming
late there were chicken-bones, table-cloths puddled with melted ice,
glasses hazy with sherry, and broken bits of bread. The Colonel said he
never supped; and he and Honeyman walked away together, the former to
bed, the latter, I am sorry to say, to his club; for he was a dainty
feeder, and loved lobster, and talk late at night, and a comfortable
little glass of something wherewith to conclude the day.

He agreed to come to breakfast with the Colonel, who named eight or
nine for the meal. Nine Mr. Honeyman agreed to with a sigh. The
incumbent of Lady Whittlesea’s chapel seldom rose before eleven. For,
to tell the truth, no French abbot of Louis XV. was more lazy and
luxurious, and effeminate, than our polite bachelor preacher.

One of Colonel Newcome’s fellow-passengers from India was Mr. James
Binnie of the Civil Service, a jolly young bachelor of two- or
three-and-forty, who, having spent half of his past life in Bengal, was
bent upon enjoying the remainder in Britain or in Europe, if a
residence at home should prove agreeable to him. The Nabob of books and
tradition is a personage no longer to be found among us. He is neither
as wealthy nor as wicked as the jaundiced monster of romances and
comedies, who purchases the estates of broken-down English gentlemen,
with rupees tortured out of bleeding rajahs, who smokes a hookah in
public, and in private carries about a guilty conscience, diamonds of
untold value, and a diseased liver; who has a vulgar wife, with a
retinue of black servants whom she maltreats, and a gentle son and
daughter with good impulses and an imperfect education, desirous to
amend their own and their parents’ lives, and thoroughly ashamed of the
follies of the old people. If you go to the house of an Indian
gentleman now, he does not say, “Bring more curricles,” like the famous
Nabob of Stanstead Park. He goes to Leadenhall Street in an omnibus,
and walks back from the City for exercise. I have known some who have
had maid-servants to wait on them at dinner. I have met scores who look
as florid and rosy as any British squire who has never left his
paternal beef and acres. They do not wear nankeen jackets in summer.
Their livers are not out of order any more; and as for hookahs, I dare
swear there are not two now kept alight within the bills of mortality;
and that retired Indians would as soon think of smoking them, as their
wives would of burning themselves on their husbands’ bodies at the
cemetery, Kensal Green, near to the Tyburnian quarter of the city which
the Indian world at present inhabits. It used to be Baker Street and
Harley Street; it used to be Portland Place, and in more early days
Bedford Square, where the Indian magnates flourished; districts which
have fallen from their pristine state of splendour now, even as Agra,
and Benares, and Lucknow, and Tippoo Sultan’s city are fallen.

After two-and-twenty years’ absence from London, Mr. Binnie returned to
it on the top of the Gosport coach with a hatbox and a little
portmanteau, a pink fresh-shaven face, a perfect appetite, a suit of
clothes like everybody else’s, and not the shadow of a black servant.
He called a cab at the White Horse Cellar, and drove to Nerot’s Hotel,
Clifford Street; and he gave the cabman eightpence, making the fellow,
who grumbled, understand that Clifford Street was not two hundred yards
from Bond Street, and that he was paid at the rate of five shillings
and fourpence per mile—calculating the mile at only sixteen hundred
yards. He asked the waiter at what time Colonel Newcome had ordered
dinner, and finding there was an hour on his hands before the meal,
walked out to examine the neighbourhood for a lodging where he could
live more quietly than in a hotel. He called it a hotel. Mr. Binnie was
a North Briton, his father having been a Writer to the Signet, in
Edinburgh, who had procured his son a writership in return for
electioneering services done to an East Indian Director. Binnie had his
retiring pension, and, besides, had saved half his allowances ever
since he had been in India. He was a man of great reading, no small
ability, considerable accomplishment, excellent good sense and good
humour. The ostentatious said he was a screw; but he gave away more
money than far more extravagant people: he was a disciple of David Hume
(whom he admired more than any other mortal), and the serious denounced
him as a man of dangerous principles, though there were, among the
serious, men much more dangerous than James Binnie.

On returning to his hotel, Colonel Newcome found this worthy gentleman
installed in his room in the best arm-chair sleeping cosily; the
evening paper laid decently over his plump waistcoat, and his little
legs placed on an opposite chair. Mr. Binnie woke up briskly when the
Colonel entered. “It is you, you gad-about, is it?” cried the civilian.
“How has the beau monde of London treated the Indian Adonis? Have you
made a sensation, Newcome? Gad, Tom, I remember you a buck of bucks
when that coat first came out to Calcutta—just a Barrackpore
Brummell—in Lord Minto’s reign, was it, or when Lord Hastings was
satrap over us?”

“A man must have one good coat,” says the Colonel; “I don’t profess to
be a dandy; but get a coat from a good tailor, and then have done with
it.” He still thought his garment was as handsome as need be.

“Done with it—ye’re never done with it!” cries the civilian.

“An old coat is an old friend, old Binnie. I don’t want to be rid of
one or the other. How long did you and my boy sit up together—isn’t he
a fine lad, Binnie? I expect you are going to put him down for
something handsome in your will.”

“See what it is to have a real friend now, Colonel! I sate up for ye,
or let us say more correctly, I waited for you—because I knew you would
want to talk about that scapegrace of yours. And if I had gone to bed,
I should have had you walking up to No. 28, and waking me out of my
first rosy slumber. Well, now confess; avoid not. Haven’t ye fallen in
love with some young beauty on the very first night of your arrival in
your sister’s salong, and selected a mother-in-law for young
Scapegrace?”

“Isn’t he a fine fellow, James?” says the Colonel, lighting a cheroot
as he sits on the table. Was it joy, or the bedroom candle with which
he lighted his cigar, which illuminated his honest features so, and
made them so to shine?

“I have been occupied, sir, in taking the lad’s moral measurement: and
have pumped him as successfully as ever I cross-examined a rogue in my
court. I place his qualities thus:—Love of approbation sixteen.
Benevolence fourteen. Combativeness fourteen. Adhesiveness two.
Amativeness is not yet of course fully developed, but I expect will be
prodeegiously strong. The imaginative and reflective organs are very
large—those, of calculation weak. He may make a poet or a painter, or
you may make a sojer of him, though worse men than him’s good enough
for that—but a bad merchant, a lazy lawyer, and a miserable
mathematician. He has wit and conscientiousness, so ye mustn’t think of
making a clergyman of him.”

“Binnie!” says the Colonel gravely, “you are always sneering at the
cloth.”

“When I think that, but for my appointment to India, I should have been
a luminary of the faith and a pillar of the church! grappling with the
ghostly enemy in the pulpit, and giving out the psawm. Eh, sir, what a
loss Scottish Divinity has had in James Binnie!” cries the little
civilian with his most comical face. “But that is not the question. My
opinion, Colonel, is, that young Scapegrace will give you a deal of
trouble; or would, only you are so absurdly proud of him that you think
everything he does is perfaction. He’ll spend your money for you: he’ll
do as little work as need be. He’ll get into scrapes with the sax. He’s
almost as simple as his father, and that is to say that any rogue will
cheat him; and he seems to me to have got your obstinate habit of
telling the truth, Colonel, which may prevet his getting on in the
world, but on the other hand will keep him from going very wrong. So
that, though there is every fear for him, there’s some hope and some
consolation.”

“What do you think of his Latin and Greek?” asks the Colonel. Before
going out to his party, Newcome had laid a deep scheme with Binnie, and
it had been agreed that the latter should examine the young fellow in
his humanities.

“Wall,” cries the Scot, “I find that the lad knows as much about Greek
and Latin as I knew myself when I was eighteen years of age.”

“My dear Binnie, is it possible? You, the best scholar in all India!”

“And which amounted to exactly nothing. He has acquired in five years,
and by the admirable seestem purshood at your public schools, just
about as much knowledge of the ancient languages as he could get by
three months’ application at home. Mind ye, I don’t say he would apply;
it is most probable he would do no such thing. But at the cost of—how
much? two hundred pounds annually—for five years—he has acquired about
five-and-twenty guineas’ worth of classical leeterature—enough, I dare
say, to enable him to quote Horace respectably through life, and what
more do ye want from a young man of his expectations? I think I should
send him into the army, that’s the best place for him—there’s the least
to do, and the handsomest clothes to wear. _Acce segnum!_” says the
little wag, daintily taking up the tail of his friend’s coat.

“There’s never any knowing whether you are in jest or in earnest,
Binnie,” the puzzled Colonel said.

“How should you know, when I don’t know myself?” answered the
Scotchman. “In earnest now, Tom Newcome, I think your boy is as fine a
lad as I ever set eyes on. He seems to have intelligence and good
temper. He carries his letter of recommendation in his countenance; and
with the honesty—and the rupees, mind ye—which he inherits from his
father, the deuce is in it if he can’t make his way. What time’s the
breakfast? Eh, but it was a comfort this morning not to hear the
holystoning on the deck. We ought to go into lodgings, and not fling
our money out of the window of this hotel. We must make the young chap
take us about and show us the town in the morning, Tom. I had but three
days of it five-and-twenty years ago, and I propose to reshoome my
observations to-morrow after breakfast. We’ll just go on deck and see
how’s her head before we turn in, eh, Colonel?” and with this the jolly
gentleman nodded over his candle to his friend, and trotted off to bed.

The Colonel and his friend were light sleepers and early risers, like
most men that come from the country where they had both been so long
sojourning, and were awake and dressed long before the London waiters
had thought of quitting their beds. The housemaid was the only being
stirring in the morning when little Mr. Binnie blundered over her pail
as she was washing the deck. Early as he was, his fellow-traveller had
preceded him. Binnie found the Colonel in his sitting-room arrayed in
what are called in Scotland his stocking-feet, already puffing the
cigar, which in truth was seldom out of his mouth at any hour of the
day.

He had a couple of bedrooms adjacent to this sitting-room, and when
Binnie, as brisk and rosy about the gills as chanticleer, broke out in
a morning salutation, “Hush,” says the Colonel, putting a long finger
up to his mouth, and advancing towards him as noiselessly as a ghost.

“What’s in the wind now?” asks the little Scot; “and what for have ye
not got your shoes on?”

“Clive’s asleep,” says the Colonel, with a countenance full of extreme
anxiety.

“The darling boy slumbers, does he?” said the wag; “mayn’t I just step
in and look at his beautiful countenance whilst he’s asleep, Colonel?”

“You may if you take off those confounded creaking shoes,” the other
answered, quite gravely; and Binnie turned away to hide his jolly round
face, which was screwed up with laughter.

“Have ye been breathing a prayer over your rosy infant’s slumbers,
Tom?” asks Mr. Binnie.

“And if I have, James Binnie,” the Colonel said gravely, and his sallow
face blushing somewhat, “if I have, I hope I’ve done no harm. The last
time I saw him asleep was nine years ago, a sickly little pale-faced
boy in his little cot, and now, sir, that I see him again, strong and
handsome, and all that a fond father can wish to see a boy, I should be
an ungrateful villain, James, if I didn’t—if I didn’t do what you said
just now, and thank God Almighty for restoring him to me.”

Binnie did not laugh any more. “By George, Tom Newcome,” said he,
“you’re just one of the saints of the earth. If all men were like you
there’d be an end of both our trades; there would be no fighting and no
soldiering, no rogues and no magistrates to catch them.” The Colonel
wondered at his friend’s enthusiasm, who was not used to be
complimentary; indeed what so usual with him as that simple act of
gratitude and devotion about which his comrade spoke to him? To ask a
blessing for his boy was as natural to him as to wake with the sunrise,
or to go to rest when the day was over. His first and his last thought
was always the child.

The two gentlemen were home in time enough to find Clive dressed, and
his uncle arrived for breakfast. The Colonel said a grace over that
meal: the life was begun which he had longed and prayed for, and the
son smiling before his eyes who had been in his thoughts for so many
fond years.




CHAPTER IX.
Miss Honeyman’s


In Steyne Gardens, Brighton, the lodging-houses are among the most
frequented in that city of lodging-houses. These mansions have
bow-windows in front, bulging out with gentle prominences, and
ornamented with neat verandahs, from which you can behold the tide of
humankind as it flows up and down the Steyne, and that blue ocean over
which Britannia is said to rule, stretching brightly away eastward and
westward. The chain-pier, as every body knows, runs intrepidly into the
sea, which sometimes, in fine weather, bathes its feet with laughing
wavelets, and anon, on stormy days, dashes over its sides with roaring
foam. Here, for the sum of twopence, you can go out to sea and pace
this vast deck without need of a steward with a basin. You can watch
the sun setting in splendour over Worthing, or illuminating with its
rising glories the ups and downs of Rottingdean. You see the citizen
with his family inveigled into the shallops of the mercenary native
mariner, and fancy that the motion cannot be pleasant; and how the
hirer of the boat, _otium et oppidi laudat rura sui_, haply sighs for
ease, and prefers Richmond or Hampstead. You behold a hundred
bathing-machines put to sea; and your naughty fancy depicts the
beauties splashing under their white awnings. Along the rippled sands
(stay, are they rippled sands or shingly beach?) the prawn-boy seeks
the delicious material of your breakfast. Breakfast-meal in London
almost unknown, greedily devoured in Brighton! In yon vessels now
nearing the shore the sleepless mariner has ventured forth to seize the
delicate whiting, the greedy and foolish mackerel, and the homely sole.
Hark to the twanging horn! it is the early coach going out to London.
Your eye follows it, and rests on the pinnacles built by the beloved
GEORGE. See the worn-out London roué pacing the pier, inhaling the sea
air, and casting furtive glances under the bonnets of the pretty girls
who trot here before lessons! Mark the bilious lawyer, escaped for a
day from Pump Court, and sniffing the fresh breezes before he goes back
to breakfast and a bag full of briefs at the Albion! See that pretty
string of prattling schoolgirls, from the chubby-cheeked, flaxen-headed
little maiden just toddling by the side of the second teacher, to the
arch damsel of fifteen, giggling and conscious of her beauty, whom Miss
Griffin, the stern head-governess, awfully reproves! See Tomkins with a
telescope and marine jacket; young Nathan and young Abrams, already
bedizened in jewellery, and rivalling the sun in oriental splendour;
yonder poor invalid crawling along in her chair; yonder jolly fat lady
examining the Brighton pebbles (I actually once saw a lady buy one),
and her children wondering at the sticking-plaister portraits with gold
hair, and gold stocks, and prodigious high-heeled boots, miracles of
art, and cheap at seven-and-sixpence! It is the fashion to run down
George IV., but what myriads of Londoners ought to thank him for
inventing Brighton! One of the best of physicians our city has ever
known, is kind, cheerful, merry Doctor Brighton. Hail, thou purveyor of
shrimps and honest prescriber of Southdown mutton! There is no mutton
so good as Brighton mutton; no flys so pleasant as Brighton flys; nor
any cliff so pleasant to ride on; no shops so beautiful to look at as
the Brighton gimcrack shops, and the fruit shops, and the market. I
fancy myself in Mrs. Honeyman’s lodgings in Steyne Gardens, and in
enjoyment of all these things.

If the gracious reader has had losses in life, losses not so bad as to
cause absolute want, or inflict upon him or her the bodily injury of
starvation, let him confess that the evils of this poverty are by no
means so great as his timorous fancy depicted. Say your money has been
invested in West Diddlesex bonds, or other luckless speculations—the
news of the smash comes; you pay your outlying bills with the balance
at the banker’s; you assemble your family and make them a fine speech;
the wife of your bosom goes round and embraces the sons and daughters
_seriatim;_ nestling in your own waistcoat finally, in possession of
which, she says (with tender tears and fond quotations from Holy Writ,
God bless her!), and of the darlings round about, lies all _her_
worldly treasure: the weeping servants are dismissed, their wages paid
in full, and with a present of prayer- and hymn-books from their
mistress; your elegant house in Harley Street is to let, and you
subside into lodgings in Pentonville, or Kensington, or Brompton. How
unlike the mansion where you paid taxes and distributed elegant
hospitality for so many years!

You subside into lodgings, I say, and you find yourself very tolerably
comfortable. I am not sure that in her heart your wife is not happier
than in what she calls her happy days. She will be somebody hereafter:
she was nobody in Harley Street: that is, everybody else in her
visiting-book, take the names all round, was as good as she. They had
the very same entrees, plated ware, men to wait, etc., at all the
houses where you visited in the street. Your candlesticks might be
handsomer (and indeed they had a very fine effect upon the
dinner-table), but then Mr. Jones’s silver (or electro-plated) dishes
were much finer. You had more carriages at your door on the evening of
your delightful soirées than Mrs. Brown (there is no phrase more
elegant, and to my taste, than that in which people are described as
“seeing a great deal of carriage company”); but yet Mrs. Brown, from
the circumstance of her being a baronet’s niece, took precedence of
your dear wife at most tables. Hence the latter charming woman’s scorn
at the British baronetcy, and her many jokes at the order. In a word,
and in the height of your social prosperity, there was always a lurking
dissatisfaction, and a something bitter, in the midst of the fountain
of delights at which you were permitted to drink.

There is no good (unless your taste is that way) in living in a society
where you are merely the equal of everybody else. Many people give
themselves extreme pains to frequent company where all around them are
their superiors, and where, do what you will, you must be subject to
continual mortification—(as, for instance, when Marchioness X. forgets
you, and you can’t help thinking that she cuts you on purpose; when
Duchess Z. passes by in her diamonds, etc.). The true pleasure of life
is to live with your inferiors. Be the cock of your village; the queen
of your coterie; and, besides very great persons, the people whom Fate
has specially endowed with this kindly consolation are those who have
seen what are called better days—those who have had losses. I am like
Cæsar, and of a noble mind: if I cannot be first in Piccadilly, let me
try Hatton Garden, and see whether I cannot lead the ton there. If I
cannot take the lead at White’s or the Travellers’, let me be president
of the Jolly Bandboys at the Bag of Nails, and blackball everybody who
does not pay me honour. If my darling Bessy cannot go out of a
drawing-room until a baronet’s niece (ha! ha! a baronet’s niece,
forsooth!) has walked before her, let us frequent company where we
shall be the first; and how can we be the first unless we select our
inferiors for our associates? This kind of pleasure is to be had by
almost everybody, and at scarce any cost. With a shilling’s-worth of
tea and muffins you can get as much adulation and respect as many
people cannot purchase with a thousand pounds’ worth of plate and
profusion, hired footmen, turning their houses topsy-turvy, and suppers
from Gunter’s. Adulation!—why, the people who come to you give as good
parties as you do. Respect!—the very menials, who wait behind your
supper-table, waited at a duke’s yesterday, and actually patronise you!
O you silly spendthrift! you can buy flattery for twopence, and you
spend ever so much money in entertaining your equals and betters, and
nobody admires you!

Now Aunt Honeyman was a woman of a thousand virtues; cheerful, frugal,
honest, laborious, charitable, good-humoured, truth-telling, devoted to
her family, capable of any sacrifice for those she loved; and when she
came to have losses of money, Fortune straightway compensated her by
many kindnesses which no income can supply. The good old lady admired
the word gentlewoman of all others in the English vocabulary, and made
all around her feel that such was her rank. Her mother’s father was a
naval captain; her father had taken pupils, got a living, sent his son
to college, dined with the squire, published his volume of sermons, was
liked in his parish, where Miss Honeyman kept house for him, was
respected for his kindness and famous for his port wine; and so died,
leaving about two hundred pounds a year to his two children, nothing to
Clive Newcome’s mother who had displeased him by her first marriage (an
elopement with Ensign Casey) and subsequent light courses. Charles
Honeyman spent his money elegantly in wine-parties at Oxford, and
afterwards in foreign travel;—spent his money and as much of Miss
Honeyman’s as that worthy soul would give him. She was a woman of
spirit and resolution. She brought her furniture to Brighton (believing
that the whole place still fondly remembered her grandfather, Captain
Nokes, who had resided there and his gallantry in Lord Rodney’s action
with the Count de Grasse), took a house, and let the upper floors to
lodgers.

The little brisk old lady brought a maid-servant out of the country
with her, who was daughter to her father’s clerk, and had learned her
letters and worked her first sampler under Miss Honeyman’s own eye,
whom she adored all through her life. No Indian begum rolling in
wealth, no countess mistress of castles and townhouses, ever had such a
faithful toady as Hannah Hicks was to her mistress. Under Hannah was a
young lady from the workhouse, who called Hannah “Mrs. Hicks, mum,” and
who bowed in awe as much before that domestic as Hannah did before Miss
Honeyman. At five o’clock in summer, at seven in winter (for Miss
Honeyman, a good economist, was chary of candlelight), Hannah woke up
little Sally, and these three women rose. I leave you to imagine what a
row there was in the establishment if Sally appeared with flowers under
her bonnet, gave signs of levity or insubordination, prolonged her
absence when sent forth for the beer, or was discovered in flirtation
with the baker’s boy or the grocer’s young man. Sally was frequently
renewed. Miss Honeyman called all her young persons Sally; and a great
number of Sallies were consumed in her house. The qualities of the
Sally for the time-being formed a constant and delightful subject of
conversation between Hannah and her mistress. The few friends who
visited Miss Honeyman in her back-parlour had _their_ Sallies, in
discussing whose peculiarities of disposition these good ladies passed
the hours agreeably over their tea.

Many persons who let lodgings in Brighton have been servants
themselves—are retired housekeepers, tradesfolk, and the like. With
these surrounding individuals Hannah treated on a footing of equality,
bringing to her mistress accounts of their various goings on; “how No.
6 was let; how No. 9 had not paid his rent again; how the first floor
at 27 had game almost every day, and made-dishes from Mutton’s; how the
family who had taken Mrs. Bugsby’s had left as usual after the very
first night, the poor little infant blistered all over with bites on
its little dear face; how the Miss Learys was going on shameful with
the two young men, actially in their setting-room, mum, where one of
them offered Miss Laura Leary a cigar; how Mrs. Cribb _still_ went
cuttin’ pounds and pounds of meat off the lodgers’ jints, emptying
their tea-caddies, actially reading their letters. Sally had been told
so by Polly the Cribb’s maid, who was kep, how that poor child was kep,
hearing language perfectly hawful!” These tales and anecdotes, not
altogether redounding to their neighbours’ credit, Hannah copiously
collected and brought to her mistress’s tea-table, or served at her
frugal little supper when Miss Honeyman, the labours of the day over,
partook of that cheerful meal. I need not say that such horrors as
occurred at Mrs. Bugsby’s never befell in Mrs. Honeyman’s
establishment. Every room was fiercely swept and sprinkled, and watched
by cunning eyes which nothing could escape; curtains were taken down,
mattresses explored, every bone in bed dislocated and washed as soon as
a lodger took his departure. And as for cribbing meat or sugar, Sally
might occasionally abstract a lump or two, or pop a veal-cutlet into
her mouth while bringing the dishes downstairs:—Sallies would—giddy
creatures bred in workhouses; but Hannah might be entrusted with untold
gold and uncorked brandy; and Miss Honeyman would as soon think of
cutting a slice off Hannah’s nose and devouring it, as of poaching on
her lodgers’ mutton. The best mutton-broth, the best veal-cutlets, the
best necks of mutton and French beans, the best fried fish and plumpest
partridges, in all Brighton, were to be had at Miss Honeyman’s—and for
her favourites the best Indian curry and rice, coming from a
distinguished relative, at present an officer in Bengal. But very few
were admitted to this mark of Miss Honeyman’s confidence. If a family
did not go to church they were not in favour: if they went to a
Dissenting meeting she had no opinion of them at all. Once there came
to her house a quiet Staffordshire family who ate no meat on Fridays,
and whom Miss Honeyman pitied as belonging to the Romish superstition;
but when they were visited by two corpulent gentlemen in black, one of
whom wore a purple underwaistcoat, before whom the Staffordshire lady
absolutely sank down on her knees as he went into the
drawing-room,—Miss Honeyman sternly gave warning to these idolaters.
She would have no Jesuits in her premises. She showed Hannah the
picture in Howell’s Medulla of the martyrs burning at Smithfield: who
said, “Lord bless you, mum,” and hoped it was a long time ago. She
called on the curate: and many and many a time, for years after,
pointed out to her friends, and sometimes to her lodgers, the spot on
the carpet where the poor benighted creature had knelt down. So she
went on, respected by all her friends, by all her tradesmen, by herself
not a little, talking of her previous “misfortunes” with amusing
equanimity; as if her father’s parsonage-house had been a palace of
splendour, and the one-horse chaise (with the lamps for evenings) from
which she had descended, a noble equipage. “But I know it is for the
best, Clive,” she would say to her nephew in describing those
grandeurs, “and, thank heaven, can be resigned in that station in life
to which it has pleased God to call me.”

The good lady was called the Duchess by her fellow-tradesfolk in the
square in which she lived. (I don’t know what would have come to her
had she been told she was a tradeswoman!) Her butchers, bakers, and
market-people paid her as much respect as though she had been a
grandee’s housekeeper out of Kemp Town. Knowing her station, she yet
was kind to those inferior beings. She held affable conversations with
them, she patronised Mr. Rogers, who was said to be worth a hundred
thousand—two-hundred-thousand pounds (or lbs. was it?), and who said,
“Law bless the old Duchess, she do make as much of a pound of veal
cutlet as some would of a score of bullocks, but you see she’s a lady
born and a lady bred: she’d die before she’d owe a farden, and she’s
seen better days, you know.” She went to see the grocer’s wife on an
interesting occasion, and won the heart of the family by tasting their
candle. Her fishmonger (it was fine to hear her talk of “my
fishmonger”) would sell her a whiting as respectfully as if she had
called for a dozen turbots and lobsters. It was believed by those good
folks that her father had been a Bishop at the very least; and the
better days which she had known were supposed to signify some almost
unearthly prosperity. “I have always found, Hannah,” the simple soul
would say, “that people know their place, or can be very very easily
made to find it if they lose it; and if a gentlewoman does not forget
herself, her inferiors will not forget that she is a gentlewoman.” “No
indeed, mum, and I’m sure they would do no such thing, mum,” says
Hannah, who carries away the teapot for her own breakfast (to be
transmitted to Sally for her subsequent refection), whilst her mistress
washes her cup and saucer, as her mother had washed her own china many
scores of years ago.

If some of the surrounding lodging-house keepers, as I have no doubt
they did, disliked the little Duchess for the airs which she gave
herself, as they averred; they must have envied her too her superior
prosperity, for there was scarcely ever a card in her window, whilst
those ensigns in her neighbours’ houses would remain exposed to the
flies and the weather, and disregarded by passers-by for months
together. She had many regular customers, or what should be rather
called constant friends. Deaf old Mr. Cricklade came every winter for
fourteen years, and stopped until the hunting was over; an invaluable
man, giving little trouble, passing all day on horseback, and all night
over his rubber at the club. The Misses Barkham, Barkhambury, Tunbridge
Wells, whose father had been at college with Mr. Honeyman, came
regularly in June for sea air, letting Barkhambury for the summer
season. Then, for many years, she had her nephew, as we have seen; and
kind recommendations from the clergymen of Brighton, and a constant
friend in the celebrated Dr. Goodenough of London, who had been her
father’s private pupil, and of his college afterwards, who sent his
patients from time to time down to her, and his fellow-physician, Dr.
H——, who on his part would never take any fee from Miss Honeyman,
except a packet of India curry-powder, a ham cured as she only knew how
to cure them, and once a year, or so, a dish of her tea.

“Was there ever such luck as that confounded old Duchess’s?” says Mr.
Gawler, coal-merchant and lodging-house keeper, next door but two,
whose apartments were more odious in some respects than Mrs. Bugsby’s
own. “Was there ever such devil’s own luck, Mrs. G.? It’s only a
fortnight ago as I read in the _Sussex Advertiser_ the death of Miss
Barkham, of Barkhambury, Tunbridge Wells, and thinks I, there’s a spoke
in your wheel, you stuck-up little old Duchess, with your cussed airs
and impudence. And she ain’t put her card up three days; and look yere,
yere’s two carriages, two maids, three children, one of them wrapped up
in a Hinjar shawl—man hout a livery,—looks like a foring cove I
think—lady in satin pelisse, and of course they go to the Duchess, be
hanged to her! Of course it’s our luck, nothing ever was like our luck.
I’m blowed if I don’t put a pistol to my ’ead, and end it, Mrs. G.
There they go in—three, four, six, seven on ’em, and the man. That’s
the precious child’s physic I suppose he’s a-carryin’ in the basket.
Just look at the luggage. I say! There’s a bloody hand on the first
carriage. It’s a baronet, is it? I ’ope your ladyship’s very well; and
I ’ope Sir John will soon be down yere to join his family.” Mr. Gawler
makes sarcastic bows over the card in his bow-window whilst making this
speech. The little Gawlers rush on to the drawing-room verandah
themselves to examine the new arrivals.

“This is Mrs. Honeyman’s?” asks the gentleman designated by Mr. Gawler
as “the foring cove,” and hands in a card on which the words, “Miss
Honeyman, 110, Steyne Gardens. J. Goodenough,” are written in that
celebrated physician’s handwriting. “We want five bet-rooms, six bets,
two or dree sitting-rooms. Have you got dese?”

“Will you speak to my mistress?” says Hannah. And if it is a fact that
Miss Honeyman does happen to be in the front parlour looking at the
carriages, what harm is there in the circumstance, pray? Is not Gawler
looking, and the people next door? Are not half a dozen little boys
already gathered in the street (as if they started up out of the
trap-doors for the coals), and the nursery maids in the stunted little
garden, are not they looking through the bars of the square? “Please to
speak to mistress,” says Hannah, opening the parlour-door, and with a
curtsey, “A gentleman about the apartments, mum.”

“Five bet-rooms,” says the man, entering. “Six bets, two or dree
sitting-rooms? We gome from Dr. Goodenough.”

“Are the apartments for you, sir?” says the little Duchess, looking up
at the large gentleman.

“For my lady,” answers the man.

“Had you not better take off your hat?” asks the Duchess, pointing out
of one of her little mittens to “the foring cove’s” beaver, which he
has neglected to remove.

The man grins, and takes off the hat. “I beck your bardon, ma’am,” says
he. “Have you fife bet-rooms?” etc. The doctor has cured the German of
an illness, as well as his employers, and especially recommended Miss
Honeyman to Mr. Kuhn.

“I have such a number of apartments. My servant will show them to you.”
And she walks back with great state to her chair by the window, and
resumes her station and work there.

Mr. Kuhn reports to his mistress, who descends to inspect the
apartments, accompanied through them by Hannah. The rooms are
pronounced to be exceedingly neat and pleasant, and exactly what are
wanted for the family. The baggage is forthwith ordered to be brought
from the carriages. The little invalid wrapped in his shawl is brought
upstairs by the affectionate Mr. Kuhn, who carries him as gently as if
he had been bred all his life to nurse babies. The smiling Sally (the
Sally for the time-being happens to be a very fresh pink-cheeked pretty
little Sally) emerges from the kitchen and introduces the young ladies,
the governess, the maids, to their apartments. The eldest, a slim
black-haired young lass of thirteen, frisks about the rooms, looks at
all the pictures, runs in and out of the verandah, tries the piano, and
bursts out laughing at its wheezy jingle (it had been poor Emma’s
piano, bought for her on her seventeenth birthday, three weeks before
she ran away with the ensign; her music is still in the stand by it:
the Rev. Charles Honeyman has warbled sacred melodies over it, and Miss
Honeyman considers it a delightful instrument), kisses her languid
little brother laid on the sofa, and performs a hundred gay and agile
motions suited to her age.

“Oh, what a piano! Why, it is as cracked as Miss Quigley’s voice!”

“My dear!” says mamma. The little languid boy bursts out into a jolly
laugh.

“What funny pictures, mamma! Action with Count de Grasse; the death of
General Wolfe; a portrait of an officer, an old officer in blue, like
grandpapa; Brazen Nose College, Oxford: what a funny name!”

At the idea of Brazen Nose College, another laugh comes from the
invalid. “I suppose they’ve all got _brass noses_ there,” he says; and
explodes at this joke. The poor little laugh ends in a cough, and
mamma’s travelling-basket, which contains everything, produces a bottle
of syrup, labelled “Master A. Newcome. A teaspoonful to be taken when
the cough is troublesome.”

“‘Oh, the delightful sea! the blue, the fresh, the ever free,’” sings
the young lady, with a shake. (I suppose the maritime song from which
she quoted was just written at this time.) “How much better this is
than going home and seeing those horrid factories and chimneys! I love
Doctor Goodenough for sending us here. What a sweet house it is!
Everybody is happy in it, even Miss Quigley is happy, mamma. What nice
rooms! What pretty chintz! What a—oh, what a—comfortable sofa!” and she
falls down on the sofa, which, truth to say, was the Rev. Charles
Honeyman’s luxurious sofa from Oxford, presented to him by young Cibber
Wright of Christchurch, when that gentleman-commoner was eliminated
from the University.

“The person of the house,” mamma says, “hardly comes up to Dr.
Goodenough’s description of her. He says he remembers her a pretty
little woman when her father was his private tutor.”

“She has grown very much since,” says the girl. And an explosion takes
place from the sofa, where the little man is always ready to laugh at
any joke, or anything like a joke, uttered by himself or by any of his
family or friends. As for Doctor Goodenough, he says laughing has saved
that boy’s life.

“She looks quite like a maid,” continues the lady. “She has hard hands,
and she called me mum always. I was quite disappointed in her.” And she
subsides into a novel, with many of which kind of works, and with other
volumes, and with workboxes, and with wonderful inkstands, portfolios,
portable days of the month, scent-bottles, scissor-cases, gilt
miniature easels displaying portraits, and countless gimcracks of
travel, the rapid Kuhn has covered the tables in the twinkling of an
eye.

The person supposed to be the landlady enters the room at this
juncture, and the lady rises to receive her. The little wag on the sofa
puts his arm round his sister’s neck, and whispers, “I say, Eth, isn’t
she a pretty girl? I shall write to Doctor Goodenough and tell him how
much she’s grown.” Convulsions follow this sally, to the surprise of
Hannah, who says, “Pooty little dear!—what time will he have his
dinner, mum?”

“Thank you, Mrs. Honeyman, at two o’clock,” says the lady with a bow of
her head. “There is a clergyman of your name in London; is he a
relation?” The lady in her turn is astonished, for the tall person
breaks out into a grin, and says, “Law, mum, you’re speakin’ of Master
Charles. He’s in London.”

“Indeed!—of Master Charles?”

“And you take me for missis, mum. I beg your pardon, mum,” cries
Hannah. The invalid hits his sister in the side with a weak little
fist. If laughter can cure, _Salva est res_. Doctor Goodenough’s
patient is safe. “Master Charles is missis’s brother, mum. I’ve got no
brother, mum—never had no brother. Only one son, who’s in the police,
mum, thank you. And law bless me, I was going to forget! If you please,
mum, missis says, if you are quite rested, she will pay her duty to
you, mum.”

“Oh, indeed,” says the lady, rather stiffly; and, taking this for an
acceptance of her mistress’s visit, Hannah retires.

“This Miss Honeyman seems to be a great personage,” says the lady. “If
people let lodgings, why do they give themselves such airs?”

“We never saw Monsieur de Boigne at Boulogne, mamma,” interposes the
girl.

“Monsieur de Boigne, my dear Ethel! Monsieur de Boigne is very well.
But—” here the door opens, and in a large cap bristling with ribbons,
with her best chestnut front, and her best black silk gown, on which
her gold watch shines very splendidly, little Miss Honeyman makes her
appearance, and a dignified curtsey to her lodger.

That lady vouchsafes a very slight inclination of the head indeed,
which she repeats when Miss Honeyman says, “I am glad to hear your
ladyship is pleased with the apartments.”

“Yes, they will do very well, thank you,” answers the latter person,
gravely.

“And they have such a beautiful view of the sea!” cries Ethel.

“As if all the houses hadn’t a view of the sea, Ethel! The price has
been arranged, I think? My servants will require a comfortable room to
dine in—by themselves, ma’am, if you please. My governess and the
younger children will dine together. My daughter dines with me—and my
little boy’s dinner will be ready at two o’clock precisely, if you
please. It is now near one.”

“Am I to understand——” interposed Miss Honeyman.

“Oh! I have no doubt we shall understand each other, ma’am,” cried Lady
Anne Newcome (whose noble presence the acute reader has no doubt ere
this divined and saluted). “Doctor Goodenough has given me a most
satisfactory account of you—more satisfactory perhaps than—than you are
aware of.” Perhaps Lady Anne’s sentence was not going to end in a very
satisfactory way for Miss Honeyman; but, awed by a peculiar look of
resolution in the little lady, her lodger of an hour paused in whatever
offensive remark she might have been about to make. “It is as well that
I at last have the pleasure of seeing you, that I may state what I
want, and that we may, as you say, understand each other. Breakfast and
tea, if you please, will be served in the same manner as dinner. And
you will have the kindness to order fresh milk every morning for my
little boy—ass’s milk—Doctor Goodenough has ordered ass’s milk.
Anything further I want I will communicate through the person who spoke
to you—Kuhn, Mr. Kuhn; and that will do.”

A heavy shower of rain was descending at this moment, and little Mrs.
Honeyman looking at her lodger, who had sate down and taken up her
book, said, “Have your ladyship’s servants unpacked your trunks?”

“What on earth, madam, have you—has that to do with the question?”

“They will be put to the trouble of packing again, I fear. I cannot
provide—three times five are fifteen—fifteen separate meals for seven
persons—besides those of my own family. If your servants cannot eat
with mine, or in my kitchen, they and their mistress must go elsewhere.
And the sooner the better, madam, the sooner the better!” says Mrs.
Honeyman, trembling with indignation, and sitting down in a chair
spreading her silks.

“Do you know who I am?” asks Lady Anne, rising.

“Perfectly well, madam,” says the other. “And had I known, you should
never have come into my house, that’s more.”

“Madam!” cries the lady, on which the poor little invalid, scared and
nervous, and hungry for his dinner, began to cry from his sofa.

“It will be a pity that the dear little boy should be disturbed. Dear
little child, I have often heard of him, and of you, miss,” says the
little householder, rising. “I will get you some dinner, my dear, for
Clive’s sake. And meanwhile your ladyship will have the kindness to
seek for some other apartments—for not a bit shall my fire cook for any
one else of your company.” And with this the indignant little landlady
sailed out of the room.

“Gracious goodness! Who is the woman?” cries Lady Anne. “I never was so
insulted in my life.”

“Oh, mamma, it was you began!” says downright Ethel. “That is—Hush,
Alfred dear!—Hush, my darling!”

“Oh, it was mamma began! I’m so hungry! I’m so hungry!” howled the
little man on the sofa—or off it rather—for he was now down on the
ground, kicking away the shawls which enveloped him.

“What is it, my boy? What is it, my blessed darling? You _shall_ have
your dinner! Give her all, Ethel. There are the keys of my desk—there’s
my watch—there are my rings. Let her take my all. The monster! the
child must live! It can’t go away in such a storm as this. Give me a
cloak, a parasol, anything—I’ll go forth and get a lodging. I’ll beg my
bread from house to house—if this fiend refuses me. Eat the biscuits,
dear! A little of the syrup, Alfred darling; it’s very nice, love! and
come to your old mother—your poor old mother.”

Alfred roared out, “No—it’s not n-ice: it’s n-a-a-asty! I won’t have
syrup. I _will_ have dinner.” The mother, whose embraces the child
repelled with infantine kicks, plunged madly at the bells, rang them
all four vehemently, and ran downstairs towards the parlour, whence
Miss Honeyman was issuing.

The good lady had not at first known the names of her lodgers, but had
taken them in willingly enough on Dr. Goodenough’s recommendation. And
it was not until one of the nurses entrusted with the care of Master
Alfred’s dinner informed Miss Honeyman of the name of her guest, that
she knew she was entertaining Lady Anne Newcome; and that the pretty
girl was the fair Miss Ethel; the little sick boy, the little Alfred of
whom his cousin spoke, and of whom Clive had made a hundred little
drawings in his rude way, as he drew everybody. Then bidding Sally run
off to St. James’s Street for a chicken—she saw it put on the spit, and
prepared a bread sauce, and composed a batter-pudding as she only knew
how to make batter-puddings. Then she went to array herself in her best
clothes, as we have seen,—as we have heard rather (Goodness forbid that
we should see Miss Honeyman arraying herself, or penetrate that chaste
mystery, her toilette!)—then she came to wait upon Lady Anne, not a
little flurried as to the result of that queer interview; then she
whisked out of the drawing-room as before has been shown; and, finding
the chicken roasted to a turn, the napkin and tray ready spread by
Hannah the neat-handed, she was bearing them up to the little patient
when the frantic parent met her on the stair.

“Is it—is it for my child?” cried Lady Anne, reeling against the
bannister.

“Yes, it’s for the child,” says Miss Honeyman, tossing up her head.
“But nobody else has anything in the house.”

“God bless you—God bless you! A mother’s bl-l-essings go with you,”
gurgled the lady, who was not, it must be confessed, a woman of strong
moral character.

It was good to see the little man eating the fowl. Ethel, who had never
cut anything in her young existence, except her fingers now and then
with her brother’s and her governess’s penknives, bethought her of
asking Miss Honeyman to carve the chicken. Lady Anne, with clasped
hands and streaming eyes, sate looking on at the ravishing scene.

“Why did you not let us know you were Clive’s aunt?” Ethel asked,
putting out her hand. The old lady took hers very kindly, and said,
“Because you didn’t give me time. And do you love Clive, my dear?”

The reconciliation between Miss Honeyman and her lodger was perfect.
Lady Anne wrote a quire of notepaper off to Sir Brian for that day’s
post—only she was too late, as she always was. Mr. Kuhn perfectly
delighted Miss Honeyman that evening by his droll sayings, jokes, and
pronunciation, and by his praises of Master Glife, as he called him. He
lived out of the house, did everything for everybody, was never out of
the way when wanted, and never in the way when not wanted. Ere long
Miss Honeyman got out a bottle of the famous Madeira which her Colonel
sent her, and treated him to a glass in her own room. Kuhn smacked his
lips and held out the glass again. The honest rogue knew good wine.




CHAPTER X.
Ethel and her Relations


For four-and-twenty successive hours Lady Anne Newcome was perfectly in
raptures with her new lodgings, and every person and thing which they
contained. The drawing-rooms were fitted with the greatest taste; the
dinner was exquisite. Were there ever such delicious veal-cutlets, such
verdant French beans? “Why do we have those odious French cooks, my
dear, with their shocking principles—the principles of all Frenchmen
are shocking—and the dreadful bills they bring us in; and their
consequential airs and graces? I am determined to part with Brignol. I
have written to your father this evening to give Brignol warning. When
did he ever give us veal-cutlets? What can be nicer?”

“Indeed they were very good,” said Miss Ethel, who had mutton five
times a week at one o’clock. “I am so glad you like the house, and
Clive, and Mrs. Honeyman.”

“Like her! the dear little old woman. I feel as if she had been my
friend all my life! I feel quite drawn towards her. What a wonderful
coincidence that Dr. Goodenough should direct us to this very house! I
have written to your father about it. And to think that I should have
written to Clive at this very house, and quite forgotten Mrs.
Honeyman’s name—and such an odd name too. I forget everything,
everything! You know I forgot your Aunt Louisa’s husband’s name; and
when I was godmother to her baby, and the clergyman said, ‘What is the
infant’s name?’ I said, ‘Really I forget.’ And so I did. He was a
London clergyman, but I forget at what church. Suppose it should be
this very Mr. Honeyman! It may have been, you know, and then the
coincidence would be still more droll. That tall, old, nice-looking,
respectable person, with a mark on her nose, the housekeeper—what is
her name?—seems a most invaluable person. I think I shall ask her to
come to us. I am sure she would save me I don’t know how much money
every week; and I am certain Mrs. Trotter is making a fortune by us. I
shall write to your papa, and ask him permission to ask this person.”
Ethel’s mother was constantly falling in love with her new
acquaintances; their man-servants and their maid-servants, their horses
and ponies, and the visitor within their gates. She would ask strangers
to Newcome, hug and embrace them on Sunday; not speak to them on
Monday; and on Tuesday behave so rudely to them, that they were gone
before Wednesday. Her daughter had had so many governesses—all darlings
during the first week, and monsters afterwards—that the poor child
possessed none of the accomplishments of her age. She could not play on
the piano; she could not speak French well; she could not tell you when
gunpowder was invented: she had not the faintest idea of the date of
the Norman Conquest, or whether the earth went round the sun, or vice
versa. She did not know the number of counties in England, Scotland,
and Wales, let alone Ireland; she did not know the difference between
latitude and longitude. She had had so many governesses: their accounts
differed: poor Ethel was bewildered by a multiplicity of teachers, and
thought herself a monster of ignorance. They gave her a book at a
Sunday School, and little girls of eight years old answered questions
of which she knew nothing. The place swam before her. She could not see
the sun shining on their fair flaxen heads and pretty faces. The rosy
little children holding up their eager hands, and crying the answer to
this question and that, seemed mocking her. She seemed to read in the
book, “O Ethel, you dunce, dunce, dunce!” She went home silent in the
carriage, and burst into bitter tears on her bed. Naturally a haughty
girl of the highest spirit, resolute and imperious, this little visit
to the parish school taught Ethel lessons more valuable than ever so
much arithmetic and geography. Clive has told me a story of her in her
youth, which, perhaps, may apply to some others of the youthful female
aristocracy. She used to walk, with other select young ladies and
gentlemen, their nurses and governesses, in a certain reserved plot of
ground railed off from Hyde Park, whereof some of the lucky dwellers in
the neighbourhood of Apsley House have a key. In this garden, at the
age of nine or thereabout, she had contracted an intimate friendship
with the Lord Hercules O’Ryan.—as every one of my gentle readers knows,
one of the sons of the Marquis of Ballyshannon. The Lord Hercules was a
year younger than Miss Ethel Newcome, which may account for the passion
which grew up between these young persons; it being a provision in
nature that a boy always falls in love with a girl older than himself,
or rather, perhaps, that a girl bestows her affections on a little boy,
who submits to receive them.

One day Sir Brian Newcome announced his intention to go to Newcome that
very morning, taking his family, and of course Ethel, with him. She was
inconsolable. “What will Lord Hercules do when he finds I am gone?” she
asked of her nurse.

The nurse endeavouring to soothe her, said, “Perhaps his lordship would
know nothing about the circumstance.” “He will,” said Miss
Ethel—“_he’ll read it in the newspaper_.” My Lord Hercules, it is to be
hoped, strangled this infant passion in the cradle; having long since
married Isabella, only daughter of ——— Grains, Esq., of Drayton
Windsor, a partner in the great brewery of Foker and Co.

When Ethel was thirteen years old, she had grown to be such a tall
girl, that she overtopped her companions by a head or more, and morally
perhaps, also, felt herself too tall for their society. “Fancy myself,”
she thought, “dressing a doll like Lily Putland or wearing a pinafore
like Lucy Tucker!” She did not care for their sports. She could not
walk with them: it seemed as if every one stared; nor dance with them
at the academy, nor attend the Cours de Littérature Universelle et de
Science Compréhensive of the professor then the mode—the smallest girls
took her up in the class. She was bewildered by the multitude of things
they bade her learn. At the youthful little assemblies of her sex,
when, under the guide of their respected governesses, the girls came to
tea at six o’clock, dancing, charades, and so forth, Ethel herded not
with the children of her own age, nor yet with the teachers who sit
apart at these assemblies, imparting to each other their little wrongs;
but Ethel romped with the little children—the rosy little trots—and
took them on her knees, and told them a thousand stories. By these she
was adored, and loved like a mother almost, for as such the hearty
kindly girl showed herself to them; but at home she was alone,
_farouche_ and intractable, and did battle with the governesses, and
overcame them one after another. I break the promise of a former page,
and am obliged to describe the youthful days of more than one person
who is to take a share in this story. Not always doth the writer know
whither the divine Muse leadeth him. But of this be sure—she is as
inexorable as Truth. We must tell our tale as she imparts it to us, and
go on or turn aside at her bidding.

Here she ordains that we should speak of other members of the family,
whose history we chronicle, and it behoves us to say a word regarding
the Earl of Kew, the head of the noble house into which Sir Brian
Newcome had married.

When we read in the fairy stories that the King and Queen, who lived
once upon a time, build a castle of steel, defended by moats and
sentinels innumerable, in which they place their darling only child,
the Prince or Princess, whose birth has blessed them after so many
years of marriage, and whose christening feast has been interrupted by
the cantankerous humour of that notorious old fairy who always persists
in coming, although she has not received any invitation to the
baptismal ceremony: when Prince Prettyman is locked up in the steel
tower, provided only with the most wholesome food, the most edifying
educational works, and the most venerable old tutor to instruct and to
bore him, we know, as a matter of course, that the steel bolts and
brazen bars one day will be of no avail, the old tutor will go off in a
doze, and the moats and drawbridges will either be passed by His Royal
Highness’s implacable enemies, or crossed by the young scapegrace
himself, who is determined to outwit his guardians, and see the wicked
world. The old King and Queen always come in and find the chambers
empty, the saucy heir-apparent flown, the porter and sentinels drunk,
the ancient tutor asleep; they tear their venerable wigs in anguish,
they kick the major-domo downstairs, they turn the duenna out of
doors—the toothless old dragon! There is no resisting fate. The
Princess will slip out of window by the rope-ladder; the Prince will be
off to pursue his pleasures, and sow his wild oats at the appointed
season. How many of our English princes have been coddled at home by
their fond papas and mammas, walled up in inaccessible castles, with a
tutor and a library, guarded by cordons of sentinels, sermoners, old
aunts, old women from the world without, and have nevertheless escaped
from all these guardians, and astonished the world by their
extravagance and their frolics? What a wild rogue was that Prince
Harry, son of the austere sovereign who robbed Richard the Second of
his crown,—the youth who took purses on Gadshill, frequented Eastcheap
taverns with Colonel Falstaff and worse company, and boxed Chief
Justice Gascoigne’s ears! What must have been the venerable Queen
Charlotte’s state of mind when she heard of the courses of _her_
beautiful young Prince; of his punting at gambling-tables; of his
dealings with horse-jockeys; of his awful doings with Perdita? Besides
instances taken from our Royal Family, could we not draw examples from
our respected nobility? There was that young Lord Warwick, Mr.
Addison’s stepson. We know that his mother was severe, and his
stepfather a most eloquent moralist, yet the young gentleman’s career
was shocking, positively shocking. He boxed the watch; he fuddled
himself at taverns; he was no better than a Mohock. The chronicles of
that day contain accounts of many a mad prank which he played, as we
have legends of a still earlier date of the lawless freaks of the wild
Prince and Poins. Our people has never looked very unkindly on these
frolics. A young nobleman, full of life and spirits, generous of his
money, jovial in his humour, ready with his sword, frank, handsome,
prodigal, courageous, always finds favour. Young Scapegrace rides a
steeplechase or beats a bargeman, and the crowd applauds him. Sages and
seniors shake their heads, and look at him not unkindly; even stern old
female moralists are disarmed at the sight of youth and gallantry, and
beauty. I know very well that Charles Surface is a sad dog, and Tom
Jones no better than he should be; but, in spite of such critics as Dr.
Johnson and Colonel Newcome, most of us have a sneaking regard for
honest Tom, and hope Sophia will be happy, and Tom will end well at
last.

Five-and-twenty years ago the young Earl of Kew came upon the town,
which speedily rang with the feats of his lordship. He began life time
enough to enjoy certain pleasures from which our young aristocracy of
the present day seem, alas! to be cut off. So much more peaceable and
polished do we grow, so much does the spirit of the age appear to
equalise all ranks; so strongly has the good sense of society, to which
in the end gentlemen of the very highest fashion must bow, put its veto
upon practices and amusements with which our fathers were familiar. At
that time the Sunday newspapers contained many and many exciting
reports of boxing-matches. Bruising was considered a fine manly old
English custom. Boys at public schools fondly perused histories of the
noble science, from the redoubtable days of Broughton and Slack, to the
heroic times of Dutch Sam and the Game Chicken. Young gentlemen went
eagerly to Moulsey to see the Slasher punch the Pet’s head, or the
Negro beat the Jew’s nose to a jelly. The island rang as yet with the
tooting horns and rattling teams of mail-coaches; a gay sight was the
road in merry England in those days, before steam-engines arose and
flung its hostelry and chivalry over. To travel in coaches, to drive
coaches, to know coachmen and guards, to be familiar with inns along
the road, to laugh with the jolly hostess in the bar, to chuck the
pretty chambermaid under the chin, were the delight of men who were
young not very long ago. Who ever thought of writing to the Times then?
“Biffin,” I warrant, did not grudge his money, and “A Thirsty Soul”
paid cheerfully for his drink. The road was an institution, the ring
was an institution. Men rallied round them; and, not without a kind
conservatism, expatiated upon the benefits with which they endowed the
country, and the evils which would occur when they should be no
more:—decay of English spirit, decay of manly pluck, ruin of the breed
of horses, and so forth, and so forth. To give and take a black eye was
not unusual nor derogatory in a gentleman; to drive a stage-coach the
enjoyment, the emulation of generous youth. Is there any young fellow
of the present time who aspires to take the place of a stoker? You see
occasionally in Hyde Park one dismal old drag with a lonely driver.
Where are you, charioteers? Where are you, O rattling Quicksilver, O
swift Defiance? You are passed by racers stronger and swifter than you.
Your lamps are out, and the music of your horns has died away.

Just at the ending of that old time, Lord Kew’s life began. That kindly
middle-aged gentleman whom his county knows that good landlord, and
friend of all his tenantry round about; that builder of churches, and
indefatigable visitor of schools; that writer of letters to the farmers
of his shire, so full of sense and benevolence; who wins prizes at
agricultural shows, and even lectures at county town institutes in his
modest, pleasant way, was the wild young Lord Kew of a quarter of a
century back; who kept racehorses, patronised boxers, fought a duel,
thrashed a Life Guardsman, gambled furiously at Crockford’s, and did
who knows what besides?

His mother, a devout lady, nursed her son and his property carefully
during the young gentleman’s minority: keeping him and his younger
brother away from all mischief, under the eyes of the most careful
pastors and masters. She learnt Latin with the boys, she taught them to
play on the piano: she enraged old Lady Kew, the children’s
grandmother, who prophesied that her daughter-in-law would make
milksops of her sons, to whom the old lady was never reconciled until
after my lord’s entry at Christchurch, where he began to distinguish
himself very soon after his first term. He drove tandems, kept hunters,
gave dinners, scandalised the Dean, screwed up the tutor’s door, and
agonised his mother at home by his lawless proceedings. He quitted the
University after a very brief sojourn at that seat of learning. It may
be the Oxford authorities requested his lordship to retire; let bygones
be bygones. His youthful son, the present Lord Walham, is now at
Christchurch, reading with the greatest assiduity. Let us not be too
particular in narrating his father’s unedifying frolics of a quarter of
a century ago.

Old Lady Kew, who, in conjunction with Mrs. Newcome, had made the
marriage between Mr. Brian Newcome and her daughter, always despised
her son-in-law; and being a frank, open person, uttering her mind
always, took little pains to conceal her opinion regarding him or any
other individual. “Sir Brian Newcome,” she would say, “is one of the
most stupid and respectable of men; Anne is clever, but has not a grain
of common sense. They make a very well assorted couple. Her flightiness
would have driven any man crazy who had an opinion of his own. She
would have ruined any poor man of her own rank; as it is, I have given
her a husband exactly suited for her. He pays the bills, does not see
how absurd she is, keeps order in the establishment, and checks her
follies. She wanted to marry her cousin, Tom Poyntz, when they were
both very young, and proposed to die of a broken heart when I arranged
her match with Mr. Newcome. A broken fiddlestick! she would have ruined
Tom Poyntz in a year; and has no more idea of the cost of a leg of
mutton, than I have of algebra.”

The Countess of Kew loved Brighton, and preferred living there even at
the season when Londoners find such especial charms in their own city.
“London after Easter,” the old lady said, “was intolerable. Pleasure
becomes a business, then so oppressive, that all good company is
destroyed by it. Half the men are sick with the feasts which they eat
day after day. The women are thinking of the half-dozen parties they
have to go to in the course of the night. The young girls are thinking
of their partners and their toilettes. Intimacy becomes impossible, and
quiet enjoyment of life. On the other hand, the crowd of _bourgeois_
has not invaded Brighton. The drive is not blocked up by flys full of
stockbrokers’ wives and children; and you can take the air in your
chair upon the chain-pier, without being stifled by the cigars of the
odious shop-boys from London.” So Lady Kew’s name was usually amongst
the earliest which the Brighton newspapers recorded amongst the
arrivals.

Her only unmarried daughter, Lady Julia, lived with her ladyship. Poor
Lady Julia had suffered early from a spine disease, which had kept her
for many years to her couch. Being always at home, and under her
mother’s eyes, she was the old lady’s victim, her pincushion, into
which Lady Kew plunged a hundred little points of sarcasm daily. As
children are sometimes brought before magistrates, and their poor
little backs and shoulders laid bare, covered with bruises and lashes
which brutal parents have inflicted, so, I dare say, if there had been
any tribunal or judge, before whom this poor patient lady’s heart could
have been exposed, it would have been found scarred all over with
numberless ancient wounds, and bleeding from yesterday’s castigation.
Old Lady Kew’s tongue was a dreadful thong which made numbers of people
wince. She was not altogether cruel, but she knew the dexterity with
which she wielded her lash, and liked to exercise it. Poor Lady Julia
was always at hand, when her mother was minded to try her powers.

Lady Kew had just made herself comfortable at Brighton, when her little
grandson’s illness brought Lady Anne Newcome and her family down to the
sea. Lady Kew was almost scared back to London again, or blown over the
water to Dieppe. She had never had the measles. “Why did not Anne carry
the child to some other place? Julia, you will on no account go and see
that little pestiferous swarm of Newcomes, unless you want to send me
out of the world—which I dare say you do, for I am a dreadful plague to
you, I know, and my death would be a release to you.”

“You see Doctor H., who visits the child every day,” cries poor
Pincushion; “you are not afraid when he comes.”

“Doctor H.? Doctor H. comes to cure me, or to tell me the news, or to
flatter me, or to feel my pulse and to pretend to prescribe, or to take
his guinea; of course Dr. H. must go to see all sorts of people in all
sorts of diseases. You would not have me be such a brute as to order
him not to attend my own grandson? I forbid you to go to Anne’s house.
You will send one of the men every day to inquire. Let the groom
go—yes, Charles—he will not go into the house. He will ring the bell
and wait outside. He had better ring the bell at the area—I suppose
there is an area—and speak to the servants through the bars, and bring
us word how Alfred is.” Poor Pincushion felt fresh compunctions; she
had met the children, and kissed the baby, and held kind Ethel’s hand
in hers, that day, as she was out in her chair. There was no use,
however, to make this confession. Is she the only good woman or man of
whom domestic tyranny has made a hypocrite?

Charles, the groom, brings back perfectly favourable reports of Master
Alfred’s health that day, which Doctor H., in the course of his visit,
confirms. The child is getting well rapidly; eating like a little ogre.
His cousin Lord Kew has been to see him. He is the kindest of men, Lord
Kew; he brought the little man Tom and Jerry with the pictures. The boy
is delighted with the pictures.

“Why has not Kew come to see me? When did he come? Write him a note,
and send for him instantly, Julia. Did you know he was here?”

Julia says, that she had but that moment read in the Brighton papers
the arrival of the Earl of Kew and the Honourable J. Belsize at the
Albion.

“I am sure they are here for some mischief,” cries the old lady,
delighted. “Whenever George and John Belsize are together, I know there
is some wickedness planning. What do you know, Doctor? I see by your
face you know something. Do tell it me, that I may write it to his
odious psalm-singing mother.”

Doctor H.’s face does indeed wear a knowing look. He simpers and says,
“I did see Lord Kew driving this morning, first with the Honourable Mr.
Belsize, and afterwards”—here he glances towards Lady Julia, as if to
say, “Before an unmarried lady, I do not like to tell your ladyship
with whom I saw Lord Kew driving, after he had left the Honourable Mr.
Belsize, who went to play a match with Captain Huxtable at tennis.”

“Are you afraid to speak before Julia?” cries the elder lady. “Why,
bless my soul, she is forty years old, and has heard everything that
can be heard. Tell me about Kew this instant, Doctor H.”

The Doctor blandly acknowledges that Lord Kew had been driving Madame
Pozzoprofondo, the famous contralto of the Italian Opera, in his
phaeton, for two hours, in the face of all Brighton.

“Yes, Doctor,” interposes Lady Julia, blushing; “but Signor
Pozzoprofondo was in the carriage too—a-a-sitting behind with the
groom. He was indeed, mamma.”

“Julia, _vous n’êtes qu’une bête_,” says Lady Kew, shrugging her
shoulders, and looking at her daughter from under her bushy black
eyebrows. Her ladyship, a sister of the late lamented Marquis of
Steyne, possessed no small share of the wit and intelligence, and a
considerable resemblance to the features, of that distinguished
nobleman.

Lady Kew bids her daughter take a pen and write:—

“_Monsieur le Mauvais Sujet_,—Gentlemen who wish to take the sea air in
private, or to avoid their relations, had best go to other places than
Brighton, where their names are printed in the newspapers. If you are
not drowned in a pozzo—”

“Mamma!” interposes the secretary.

“—in a pozzo-profondo, you will please come to dine with two old women,
at half-past seven. You may bring Mr. Belsize, and must tell us a
hundred stories.—Yours, etc., L. Kew.”

Julia wrote all the letter as her mother dictated it, save only one
sentence, and the note was sealed and despatched to my Lord Kew, who
came to dinner with Jack Belsize. Jack Belsize liked to dine with Lady
Kew. He said, “she was an old dear, and the wickedest old woman in all
England;” and he liked to dine with Lady Julia, who was “a poor
suffering dear, and the best woman in all England.” Jack Belsize liked
every one, and every one liked him.

Two evenings afterwards the young men repeated their visit to Lady Kew,
and this time Lord Kew was loud in praises of his cousins of the house
of Newcome.

“Not of the eldest, Barnes, surely, my dear?” cries Lady Kew.

“No, confound him! not Barnes.”

“No, d—— it, not Barnes. I beg your pardon, Lady Julia,” broke in Jack
Belsize. “I can get on with most men; but that little Barney is too
odious a little snob.”

“A little what—Mr. Belsize?”

“A little snob, ma’am. I have no other word, though he is your
grandson. I never heard him say a good word of any mortal soul, or do a
kind action.”

“Thank you, Mr. Belsize,” says the lady.

“But the others are capital. There is that little chap who has just had
the measles—he’s a clear little brick. And as for Miss Ethel——”

“Ethel is a trump, ma’am,” says Lord Kew, slapping his hand on his
knee.

“Ethel is a brick, and Alfred is a trump, I think you say,” remarks
Lady Kew, nodding approval; “and Barnes is a snob. This is very
satisfactory to know.”

“We met the children out to-day,” cries the enthusiastic Kew, “as I was
driving Jack in the drag, and I got out and talked to ’em.”

“Governess an uncommonly nice woman—oldish, but—I beg your pardon, Lady
Julia,” cries the inopportune Jack Belsize—“I’m always putting my foot
in it.”

“Putting your foot into what? Go on, Kew.”

“Well, we met the whole posse of children; and the little fellow wanted
a drive, and I said I would drive him and Ethel too, if she would come.
Upon my word she is as pretty a girl as you can see on a summer’s day.
And the governess said ‘No,’ of course. Governesses always do. But I
said I was her uncle, and Jack paid her such a fine compliment, that
the young woman was mollified, and the children took their seats beside
me, and Jack went behind.”

“Where Monsieur Pozzoprofondo sits, _bon_.”

“We drove on to the Downs, and we were nearly coming to grief. My
horses are young, and when they get on the grass they are as if they
were mad. It was very wrong; I know it was.”

“D——d rash,” interposes Jack. “He had nearly broken all our necks.”

“And my brother Frank would have been Lord Kew,” continued the young
Earl, with a quiet smile. “What an escape for him! The horses ran
away—ever so far—and I thought the carriage must upset. The poor little
boy, who has lost his pluck in the fever, began to cry; but that young
girl, though she was as white as a sheet, never gave up for a moment,
and sate in her place like a man. We met nothing, luckily; and I pulled
the horses in after a mile or two, and I drove ’em into Brighton as
quiet as if I had been driving a hearse. And that little trump of an
Ethel, what do you think she said? She said, ‘I was not frightened, but
you must not tell mamma.’ My aunt, it appears, was in a dreadful
commotion—I ought to have thought of that.”

“Lady Anne is a ridiculous old dear. I beg your pardon, Lady Kew,” here
breaks in Jack the apologiser.

“There is a brother of Sir Brian Newcome’s staying with them,” Lord Kew
proceeds; “an East India Colonel—a very fine-looking old boy.”

“Smokes awfully, row about it in the hotel. Go on, Kew; beg your——”

“This gentleman was on the look-out for us, it appears, for when we
came in sight he despatched a boy who was with him, running like a
lamplighter back to my aunt, to say all was well. And he took little
Alfred out of the carriage, and then helped out Ethel, and said, ‘My
dear, you are too pretty to scold; but you have given us all a _belle
peur_.’ And then he made me and Jack a low bow, and stalked into the
lodgings.”

“I think you do deserve to be whipped, both of you,” cries Lady Kew.

“We went up and made our peace with my aunt, and were presented in form
to the Colonel and his youthful cub.”

“As fine a fellow as ever I saw: and as fine a boy as ever I saw,”
cries Jack Belsize. “The young chap is a great hand at drawing—upon my
life the best drawings I ever saw. And he was making a picture for
little What-d’you-call-’em. And Miss Newcome was looking over them. And
Lady Anne pointed out the group to me, and said how pretty it was. She
is uncommonly sentimental, you know, Lady Anne.”

“My daughter Anne is the greatest fool in the three kingdoms,” cried
Lady Kew, looking fiercely over her spectacles. And Julia was
instructed to write that night to her sister, and desire that Ethel
should be sent to see her grandmother:—Ethel, who rebelled against her
grandmother, and always fought on her Aunt Julia’s side, when the
weaker was oppressed by the older and stronger lady.




CHAPTER XI.
At Mrs. Ridley’s


Saint Peter of Alcantara, as I have read in a life of St. Theresa,
informed that devout lady that he had passed forty years of his life
sleeping only an hour and a half each day; his cell was but four feet
and a half long, so that he never lay down: his pillow was a wooden log
in the stone wall: he ate but once in three days: he was for three
years in a convent of his order without knowing any one of his brethren
except by the sound of their voices, for he never during this period
took his eyes off the ground: he always walked barefoot, and was but
skin and bone when he died. The eating only once in three days, so he
told his sister Saint, was by no means impossible, if you began the
regimen in your youth. To conquer sleep was the hardest of all
austerities which he practised:—I fancy the pious individual so
employed, day after day, night after night, on his knees, or standing
up in devout meditation in the cupboard—his dwelling-place; bareheaded
and barefooted, walking over rocks, briars, mud, sharp stones (picking
out the very worst places, let us trust, with his downcast eyes), under
the bitter snow, or the drifting rain, or the scorching sunshine—I
fancy Saint Peter of Alcantara, and contrast him with such a personage
as the Incumbent of Lady Whittlesea’s Chapel, Mayfair.

His hermitage is situated in Walpole Street, let us say, on the second
floor of a quiet mansion, let out to hermits by a nobleman’s butler,
whose wife takes care of the lodgings. His cells consist of a
refectory, a dormitory, and an adjacent oratory where he keeps his
shower-bath and boots—the pretty boots trimly stretched on boot-trees
and blacked to a nicety (not varnished) by the boy who waits on him.
The barefooted business may suit superstitious ages and gentlemen of
Alcantara, but does not become Mayfair and the nineteenth century. If
St. Pedro walked the earth now with his eyes to the ground he would
know fashionable divines by the way in which they were shod. Charles
Honeyman’s is a sweet foot. I have no doubt as delicate and plump and
rosy as the white hand with its two rings, which he passes in
impassioned moments through his slender flaxen hair.

A sweet odour pervades his sleeping apartment—not that peculiar and
delicious fragrance with which the Saints of the Roman Church are said
to gratify the neighbourhood where they repose—but oils, redolent of
the richest perfumes of Macassar, essences (from Truefitt’s or
Delcroix’s) into which a thousand flowers have expressed their sweetest
breath, await his meek head on rising; and infuse the
pocket-handkerchief with which he dries and draws so many tears. For he
cries a good deal in his sermons, to which the ladies about him
contribute showers of sympathy.

By his bedside are slippers lined with blue silk and worked of an
ecclesiastical pattern, by some of the faithful who sit at his feet.
They come to him in anonymous parcels: they come to him in silver
paper: boys in buttons (pages who minister to female grace!) leave them
at the door for the Rev. C. Honeyman, and slip away without a word.
Purses are sent to him—penwipers—a portfolio with the Honeyman arms;
yea, braces have been known to reach him by the post (in his days of
popularity); and flowers, and grapes, and jelly when he was ill, and
throat comforters, and lozenges for his dear bronchitis. In one of his
drawers is the rich silk cassock presented to him by his congregation
at Leatherhead (when the young curate quitted that parish for London
duty), and on his breakfast-table the silver teapot, once filled with
sovereigns and presented by the same devotees. The devo-teapot he has,
but the sovereigns, where are they?

What a different life this is from our honest friend of Alcantara, who
eats once in three days! At one time if Honeyman could have drunk tea
three times in an evening, he might have had it. The glass on his
chimneypiece is crowded with invitations, not merely cards of ceremony
(of which there are plenty), but dear little confidential notes from
sweet friends of his congregation. “Ob, dear Mr. Honeyman,” writes
Blanche, “what a sermon that was! I cannot go to bed to-night without
thanking you for it.” “Do, _do_, dear Mr. Honeyman,” writes Beatrice,
“lend me that delightful sermon. And can you come and drink tea with me
and Selina, and my aunt? Papa and mamma dine out, but you know I am
always your faithful Chesterfield Street.” And so on. He has all the
domestic accomplishments; he plays on the violoncello: he sings a
delicious second, not only in sacred but in secular music. He has a
thousand anecdotes, laughable riddles, droll stories (of the utmost
correctness, you understand) with which he entertains females of all
ages; suiting his conversation to stately matrons, deaf old dowagers
(who can hear his clear voice better than the loudest roar of their
stupid sons-in-law), mature spinsters, young beauties dancing through
the season, even rosy little slips out of the nursery, who cluster
round his beloved feet. Societies fight for him to preach their charity
sermon. You read in the papers, “The Wapping Hospital for Wooden-legged
Seamen.—On Sunday the 23rd, Sermons will be preached in behalf of this
charity, by the Lord Bishop of Tobago in the morning, in the afternoon
by the Rev. C. Honeyman, A.M., Incumbent of,” etc. “Clergymen’s
Grandmothers’ Fund.—Sermons in aid of this admirable institution will
be preached on Sunday, 4th May, by the Very Rev. the Dean of Pimlico,
and the Rev. C. Honeyman, A.M.” When the Dean of Pimlico has his
illness, many people think Honeyman will have the Deanery; that he
ought to have it, a hundred female voices vow and declare: though it is
said that a right reverend head at headquarters shakes dubiously when
his name is mentioned for preferment. His name is spread wide, and not
only women but men come to hear him. Members of Parliament, even
Cabinet Ministers, sit under him. Lord Dozeley of course is seen in a
front pew: where was a public meeting without Lord Dozeley? The men
come away from his sermons and say, “It’s very pleasant, but I don’t
know what the deuce makes all you women crowd so to hear the man.” “Oh,
Charles! if you would but go oftener!” sighs Lady Anna Maria. “Can’t
you speak to the Home Secretary? Can’t you do something for him?” “We
can ask him to dinner next Wednesday if you like,” Says Charles. “They
say he’s a pleasant fellow out of the wood. Besides there is no use in
doing anything for him,” Charles goes on. “He can’t make less than a
thousand a year out of his chapel, and that is better than anything any
one can give him. A thousand a year, besides the rent of the
wine-vaults below the chapel.”

“Don’t, Charles!” says his wife, with a solemn look. “Don’t ridicule
things in that way.

“Confound it! there are wine-vaults under the chapel!” answers
downright Charles. “I saw the name, Sherrick and Co.; offices, a green
door, and a brass plate. It’s better to sit over vaults with wine in
them than coffins. I wonder whether it’s the Sherrick with whom Kew and
Jack Belsize had that ugly row?”

“What ugly row?—don’t say ugly row. It is not a nice word to hear the
children use. Go on, my darlings. What was the dispute of Lord Kew and
Mr. Belsize, and this Mr. Sherrick?”

“It was all about pictures, and about horses, and about money, and
about one other subject which enters into every row that I ever heard
of.”

“And what is that, dear?” asks the innocent lady, hanging on her
husband’s arm, and quite pleased to have led him to church and brought
him thence. “And what is it, that enters into every row, as you call
it, Charles?”

“A woman, my love,” answers the gentleman, behind whom we have been in
imagination walking out from Charles Honeyman’s church on a Sunday in
June: as the whole pavement blooms with artificial flowers and fresh
bonnets; as there is a buzz and cackle all around regarding the sermon;
as carriages drive off; as lady-dowagers walk home; as prayer-books and
footmen’s sticks gleam in the sun; as little boys with baked mutton and
potatoes pass from the courts; as children issue from the public-houses
with pots of beer; as the Reverend Charles Honeyman, who has been
drawing tears in the sermon, and has seen, not without complacent
throbs, a Secretary of State in the pew beneath him, divests himself of
his rich silk cassock in the vestry, before he walks away to his
neighbouring hermitage—where have we placed it?—in Walpole Street. I
wish St. Pedro of Alcantara could have some of that shoulder of mutton
with the baked potatoes, and a drink of that frothing beer. See, yonder
trots little Lord Dozeley, who has been asleep for an hour with his
head against the wood, like St. Pedro of Alcantara.

An East Indian gentleman and his son wait until the whole chapel is
clear, and survey Lady Whittlesea’s monument at their leisure, and
other hideous slabs erected in memory of defunct frequenters of the
chapel. Whose was that face which Colonel Newcome thought he
recognised—that of a stout man who came down from the organ-gallery?
Could it be Broff the bass singer, who delivered the “Red Cross Knight”
with such applause at the Cave of Melody, and who has been singing in
this place? There are some chapels in London, where, the function over,
one almost expects to see the sextons put brown hollands over the pews
and galleries, as they do at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden.

The writer of these veracious pages was once walking through a splendid
English palace, standing amidst parks and gardens, than which none more
magnificent has been seen since the days of Aladdin, in company with a
melancholy friend, who viewed all things darkly through his gloomy
eyes. The housekeeper, pattering on before us from chamber to chamber,
was expatiating upon the magnificence of this picture; the beauty of
that statue; the marvellous richness of these hangings and carpets; the
admirable likeness of the late Marquis by Sir Thomas; of his father,
the fifth Earl, by Sir Joshua, and so on; when, in the very richest
room of the whole castle, Hicks—such was my melancholy companion’s
name—stopped the cicerone in her prattle, saying in a hollow voice,
“And now, madam, will you show us the closet _where the skeleton is?_”
The seared functionary paused in the midst of her harangue; that
article was not inserted in the catalogue which she daily utters to
visitors for their half-crown. Hicks’s question brought a darkness down
upon the hall where we were standing. We did not see the room: and yet
I have no doubt there is such an one; and ever after, when I have
thought of the splendid castle towering in the midst of shady trees,
under which the dappled deer are browsing; of the terraces gleaming
with statues, and bright with a hundred thousand flowers; of the
bridges and shining fountains and rivers wherein the castle windows
reflect their festive gleams, when the halls are filled with happy
feasters, and over the darkling woods comes the sound of music;—always,
I say, when I think of Castle Bluebeard:—it is to think of that dark
little closet, which I know is there, and which the lordly owner opens
shuddering—after midnight—when he is sleepless and _must_ go unlock it,
when the palace is hushed, when beauties are sleeping around him
unconscious, and revellers are at rest. O Mrs. Housekeeper: all the
other keys hast thou: but that key thou hast not!

Have we not all such closets, my jolly friend, as well as the noble
Marquis of Carabas? At night, when all the house is asleep but you,
don’t you get up and peep into yours? When you in your turn are
slumbering, up gets Mrs. Brown from your side, steals downstairs like
Amina to her ghoul, clicks open the secret door, and looks into her
dark depository. Did she tell you of that little affair with Smith long
before she knew you? Psha! who knows any one save himself alone? Who,
in showing his house to the closest and dearest, doesn’t keep back the
key of a closet or two? I think of a lovely reader laying down the page
and looking over at her unconscious husband, asleep, perhaps, after
dinner. Yes, madam, a closet he hath: and you, who pry into everything,
shall never have the key of it. I think of some honest Othello pausing
over this very sentence in a railroad carriage, and stealthily gazing
at Desdemona opposite to him, innocently administering sandwiches to
their little boy—I am trying to turn off the sentence with a joke, you
see—I feel it is growing too dreadful, too serious.

And to what, pray, do these serious, these disagreeable, these almost
personal observations tend? To this simply, that Charles Honeyman, the
beloved and popular preacher, the elegant divine to whom Miss Blanche
writes sonnets, and whom Miss Beatrice invites to tea; who comes with
smiles on his lip, gentle sympathy in his tones, innocent gaiety in his
accent; who melts, rouses, terrifies in the pulpit; who charms over the
tea-urn and the bland bread-and-butter: Charles Honeyman has one or two
skeleton closets in his lodgings, Walpole Street, Mayfair; and many a
wakeful night, whilst Mrs. Ridley, his landlady, and her tired husband,
the nobleman’s major-domo, whilst the lodger on the first floor, whilst
the cook and housemaid and weary little bootboy are at rest (mind you,
they have all got _their_ closets, which they open with their
skeleton-keys); he wakes up, and looks at the ghastly occupant of that
receptacle. One of the Reverend Charles Honeyman’s grisly
night-haunters is—but stop; let us give a little account of the
lodgings, and of some of the people frequenting the same.

First floor, Mr. Bagshot, Member for a Norfolk borough. Stout jolly
gentleman;—dines at the Carlton Club; greatly addicted to Greenwich and
Richmond, in the season: bets in a moderate way: does not go into
society, except now and again to the chiefs of his party, when they
give great entertainments; and once or twice to the houses of great
country dons who dwell near him in the country. Is not of very good
family; was, in fact, an apothecary: married a woman with money, much
older than himself, who does not like London, and stops at home at
Hummingham, not much to the displeasure of Bagshot; gives every now and
then nice little quiet dinners, which Mrs. Ridley cooks admirably, to
exceedingly stupid jolly old Parliamentary fogies, who absorb, with
much silence and cheerfulness, a vast quantity of wine. They have just
begun to drink ’24 claret now, that of ’15 being scarce, and almost
drunk up. Writes daily, and hears every morning from Mrs. Bagshot; does
not read her letters always: does not rise till long past eleven
o’clock of a Sunday, and has _John Bull_ and _Bell’s Life_, in bed:
frequents the Blue Posts sometimes; rides a stout cob out of his
county, and pays like the Bank of England.

The house is a Norfolk house. Mrs. Ridley was housekeeper to the great
Squire Bayham, who had the estate before the Conqueror, and who came to
such a dreadful crash in the year 1825, the year of the panic. Bayhams
still belongs to the family, but in what a state, as those can say who
recollect it in its palmy days! Fifteen hundred acres of the best land
in England were sold off: all the timber cut down as level as a
billiard-board. Mr. Bayham now lives up in one corner of the house,
which used to be filled with the finest company in Europe. Law bless
you! the Bayhams have seen almost all the nobility of England come in
and go out, and were gentlefolks when many a fine lord’s father of the
present day was sweeping a counting-house.

The house will hold genteelly no more than these two inmates; but in
the season it manages to accommodate Miss Cann, who too was from
Bayhams, having been a governess there to the young lady who is dead,
and who now makes such a livelihood as she can best raise, by going out
as a daily teacher. Miss Cann dines with Mrs. Ridley in the adjoining
little back-parlour. Ridley but seldom can be spared to partake of the
family dinner, his duties in the house and about the person of my Lord
Todmorden keeping him constantly near that nobleman. How little Miss
Cann can go on and keep alive on the crumb she eats for breakfast, and
the scrap she picks at dinner, du astonish Mrs. Ridley, that it _du!_
She declares that the two canary-birds encaged in her window (whence is
a cheerful prospect of the back of Lady Whittlesea’s Chapel) eat more
than Miss Cann. The two birds set up a tremendous singing and
chorussing when Miss Cann, spying the occasion of the first-floor
lodger’s absence, begins practising her music-pieces. Such trills,
roulades, and flourishes go on from the birds and the lodger! it is a
wonder how any fingers can move over the jingling ivory so quickly as
Miss Cann’s. Excellent a woman as she is, admirably virtuous, frugal,
brisk, honest, and cheerful, I would not like to live in lodgings where
there was a lady so addicted to playing variations. No more does
Honeyman. On a Saturday, when he is composing his valuable sermons (the
rogue, you may be sure, leaves his work to the last day, and there are,
I am given to understand, among the clergy many better men than
Honeyman, who are as dilatory as he), he begs, he entreats with tears
in his eyes, that Miss Cann’s music may cease. I would back little Cann
to write a sermon against him, for all his reputation as a popular
preacher.

Old and weazened as that piano is, feeble and cracked her voice, it is
wonderful what a pleasant concert she can give in that parlour of a
Saturday evening, to Mrs. Ridley, who generally dozes a good deal, and
to a lad, who listens with all his soul, with tears sometimes in his
great eyes, with crowding fancies filling his brain and throbbing at
his heart, as the artist plies her humble instrument. She plays old
music of Handel and Haydn, and the little chamber anon swells into a
cathedral, and he who listens beholds altars lighted, priests
ministering, fair children swinging censers, great oriel windows
gleaming in sunset, and seen through arched columns and avenues of
twilight marble. The young fellow who hears her has been often and
often to the opera and the theatres. As she plays Don Juan, Zerlina
comes tripping over the meadows, and Masetto after her, with a crowd of
peasants and maidens: and they sing the sweetest of all music, and the
heart beats with happiness, and kindness, and pleasure. Piano,
pianissimo! the city is hushed. The towers of the great cathedral rise
in the distance, its spires lighted by the broad moon. The statues in
the moonlit place cast long shadows athwart the pavement: but the
fountain in the midst is dressed out like Cinderella for the night, and
sings and wears a crest of diamonds. That great sombre street all in
shade, can it be the famous Toledo?—or is it the Corso?—or is it the
great street in Madrid, the one which leads to the Escurial where the
Rubens and Velasquez are? It is Fancy Street—Poetry Street—Imagination
Street—the street where lovely ladies look from balconies, where
cavaliers strike mandolins and draw swords and engage, where long
processions pass, and venerable hermits, with long beards, bless the
kneeling people: where the rude soldiery, swaggering through the place
with flags and halberts, and fife and dance, seize the slim waists of
the daughters of the people, and bid the pifferari play to their
dancing. Blow, bagpipes, a storm of harmony! become trumpets,
trombones, ophicleides, fiddles, and bassoons! Fire, guns sound,
tocsins! Shout, people! Louder, shriller and sweeter than all, sing
thou, ravishing heroine! And see, on his cream-coloured charger
Massaniello prances in, and Fra Diavolo leaps down the balcony,
carabine in hand; and Sir Huon of Bordeaux sails up to the quay with
the Sultan’s daughter of Babylon. All these delights and sights, and
joys and glories, these thrills of sympathy, movements of unknown
longing, and visions of beauty, a young sickly lad of eighteen enjoys
in a little dark room where there is a bed disguised in the shape of a
wardrobe, and a little old woman is playing under a gas-lamp on the
jingling keys of an old piano.

For a long time Mr. Samuel Ridley, butler and confidential valet to the
Right Honourable John James Baron Todmorden, was in a state of the
greatest despair and gloom about his only son, the little John James,—a
sickly and almost deformed child “of whom there was no making nothink,”
as Mr. Ridley said. His figure precluded him from following his
father’s profession, and waiting upon the British nobility, who
naturally require large and handsome men to skip up behind their
rolling carriages, and hand their plates at dinner. When John James was
six years old his father remarked, with tears in his eyes, he wasn’t
higher than a plate-basket. The boys jeered at him in the streets—some
whopped him, spite of his diminutive size. At school he made but little
progress. He was always sickly and dirty, and timid and crying,
whimpering in the kitchen away from his mother; who, though she loved
him, took Mr. Ridley’s view of his character, and thought him little
better than an idiot until such time as little Miss Cann took him in
hand, when at length there was some hope of him.

“Half-witted, you great stupid big man,” says Miss Cann, who had a fine
spirit of her own. “That boy half-witted! He has got more wit in his
little finger than you have in all your great person! You are a very
good man, Ridley, very good-natured I’m sure, and bear with the teasing
of a waspish old woman: but you are not the wisest of mankind. Tut,
tut, don’t tell me. You know you spell out the words when you read the
newspaper still, and what would your bills look like if I did not write
them in my nice little hand? I tell you that boy is a genius. I tell
you that one day the world will hear of him. His heart is made of pure
gold. You think that all the wit belongs to the big people. Look at me,
you great tall man! Am I not a hundred times cleverer than you are?
Yes, and John James is worth a thousand such insignificant little chits
as I am; and he is as tall as me too, sir. Do you hear that! One day I
am determined he shall dine at Lord Todmorden’s table, and he shall get
the prize at the Royal Academy, and be famous, sir—famous!”

“Well, Miss C., I wish he may get it; that’s all I say,” answers Mr.
Ridley. “The poor fellow does no harm, that I acknowledge; but _I_
never see the good he was up to yet. I wish he’d begin it; I _du_ wish
he would now.” And the honest gentleman relapses into the study of his
paper.

All those beautiful sounds and thoughts which Miss Cann conveys to him
out of her charmed piano, the young artist straightway translates into
forms; and knights in armour, with plume, and shield, and battle-axe;
and splendid young noblemen with flowing ringlets, and bounteous plumes
of feathers, and rapiers, and russet boots; and fierce banditti with
crimson tights, doublets profusely illustrated with large brass
buttons, and the dumpy basket-hilted claymores known to be the
favourite weapon with which these whiskered ruffians do battle;
wasp-waisted peasant girls, and young countesses with oh, such large
eyes and the lips!—all these splendid forms of war and beauty crowd to
the young draughtsman’s pencil, and cover letter-backs, copybooks,
without end. If his hand strikes off some face peculiarly lovely, and
to his taste, some fair vision that has shone on his imagination, some
houri of a dancer, some bright young lady of fashion in an opera-box,
whom he has seen, or fancied he has seen (for the youth is
short-sighted, though he hardly as yet knows his misfortune)—if he has
made some effort extraordinarily successful, our young Pygmalion hides
away the masterpiece, and he paints the beauty with all his skill; the
lips a bright carmine, the eyes a deep, deep cobalt, the cheeks a
dazzling vermilion, the ringlets of a golden hue; and he worships this
sweet creature of his in secret, fancies a history for her; a castle to
storm, a tyrant usurper who keeps her imprisoned, and a prince in black
ringlets and a spangled cloak, who scales the tower, who slays the
tyrant, and then kneels gracefully at the princess’s feet, and says,
“Lady, wilt thou be mine?”

There is a kind lady in the neighbourhood, who takes in dressmaking for
the neighbouring maid-servants, and has a small establishment of
lollipops, theatrical characters, and ginger-beer for the boys in
Little Craggs Buildings, hard by the Running Footman public-house,
where father and other gentlemen’s gentlemen have their club: this good
soul also sells Sunday newspapers to the footmen of the neighbouring
gentry; and besides, has a stock of novels for the ladies of the upper
servants’ table. Next to Miss Cann, Miss Flinders is John James’s
greatest friend and benefactor. She has remarked him when he was quite
a little man, and used to bring his father’s beer of a Sunday. Out of
her novels he has taught himself to read, dull boy at the day-school
though he was, and always the last in his class, there. Hours, happy
hours, has he spent cowering behind her counter, or hugging her books
under his pinafore when he had leave to carry them home. The whole
library has passed through his hands, his long, lean, tremulous hands,
and under his eager eyes. He has made illustrations to every one of
those books, and been frightened at his own pictures of Manfroni or the
One-handed Monk, Abellino the Terrific Bravo of Venice, and Rinaldo
Rinaldini Captain of Robbers. How he has blistered Thaddeus of Warsaw
with his tears, and drawn him in his Polish cap, and tights, and
Hessians! William Wallace, the Hero of Scotland, how nobly he has
depicted him! With what whiskers and bushy ostrich plumes!—in a tight
kilt, and with what magnificent calves to his legs, laying about him
with his battle-axe, and bestriding the bodies of King Edward’s
prostrate cavaliers! At this time Mr. Honeyman comes to lodge in
Walpole Street, and brings a set of Scott’s novels, for which he
subscribed when at Oxford; and young John James, who at first waits
upon him and does little odd jobs for the reverend gentleman, lights
upon the volumes, and reads them with such a delight and passion of
pleasure as all the delights of future days will scarce equal. A fool,
is he?—an idle feller, out of whom no good will ever come, as his
father says. There was a time when, in despair of any better chance for
him, his parents thought of apprenticing him to a tailor, and John
James was waked up from a dream of Rebecca and informed of the cruelty
meditated against him. I forbear to describe the tears and terror, and
frantic desperation in which the poor boy was plunged. Little Miss Cann
rescued him from that awful board, and Honeyman likewise interceded for
him, and Mr. Bagshot promised that, as soon as his party came in, he
would ask the Minister for a tide-waitership for him; for everybody
liked the solemn, soft-hearted, willing little lad, and no one knew him
less than his pompous and stupid and respectable father.

Miss Cann painted flowers and card-screens elegantly, and “finished”
pencil-drawings most elaborately for her pupils. She could copy prints,
so that at a little distance you would scarcely know that the copy in
stumped chalk was not a bad mezzotinto engraving. She even had a little
old paint-box, and showed you one or two ivory miniatures out of the
drawer. She gave John James what little knowledge of drawing she had,
and handed him over her invaluable recipes for mixing
water-colours—“for trees in foregrounds, burnt sienna and indigo”—“for
very dark foliage, ivory black and gamboge”—“for flesh-colour,” etc.
etc. John James went through her poor little course, but not so
brilliantly as she expected. She was forced to own that several of her
pupils’ “pieces” were executed much more dexterously than Johnny
Ridley’s. Honeyman looked at the boy’s drawings from time to time, and
said, “Hm, ha!—very clever—a great deal of fancy, really.” But Honeyman
knew no more of the subject than a deaf and dumb man knows of music. He
could talk the art cant very glibly, and had a set of Morghens and
Madonnas as became a clergyman and a man of taste; but he saw not with
eyes such as those wherewith Heaven had endowed the humble little
butler’s boy, to whom splendours of Nature were revealed to vulgar
sights invisible, and beauties manifest in forms, colours, shadows of
common objects, where most of the world saw only what was dull, and
gross, and familiar. One reads in the magic story-books of a charm or a
flower which the wizard gives, and which enables the bearer to see the
fairies. O enchanting boon of Nature, which reveals to the possessor
the hidden spirits of beauty round about him! spirits which the
strongest and most gifted masters compel into painting or song. To
others it is granted but to have fleeting glimpses of that fair
Art-world; and tempted by ambition, or barred by faint-heartedness, or
driven by necessity, to turn away thence to the vulgar life-track, and
the light of common day.

The reader who has passed through Walpole Street scores of times, knows
the discomfortable architecture of all, save the great houses built in
Queen Anne’s and George the First’s time; and while some of the
neighbouring streets, to wit, Great Craggs Street, Bolingbroke Street,
and others, contain mansions fairly coped with stone, with little
obelisks before the doors, and great extinguishers wherein the torches
of the nobility’s running footmen were put out a hundred and thirty or
forty years ago:—houses which still remain abodes of the quality, and
where you shall see a hundred carriages gather of a public night;
Walpole Street has quite faded away into lodgings, private hotels,
doctors’ houses, and the like; nor is No. 23 (Ridley’s) by any means
the best house in the street. The parlour, furnished and tenanted by
Miss Cann as has been described; the first floor, Bagshot, Esq., M.P.;
the second floor, Honeyman; what remains but the garrets, and the ample
staircase and the kitchens? and the family being all put to bed, how
can you imagine there is room for any more inhabitants?

And yet there is one lodger more, and one who, like almost all the
other personages mentioned up to the present time (and some of whom you
have no idea yet), will play a definite part in the ensuing history. At
night, when Honeyman comes in, he finds on the hall-table three wax
bedroom candles—his own, Bagshot’s, and another. As for Miss Cann, she
is locked into the parlour in bed long ago, her stout little
walking-shoes being on the mat at the door. At 12 o’clock at noon,
sometimes at 1, nay at 2 and 3—long after Bagshot is gone to his
committees, and little Cann to her pupils—a voice issues from the very
topmost floor, from a room where there is no bell; a voice of thunder
calling out “Slavey! Julia! Julia, my love! Mrs. Ridley!” And this
summons not being obeyed, it will not unfrequently happen that a pair
of trousers enclosing a pair of boots with iron heels, and known by the
name of the celebrated Prussian General who came up to help the other
christener of boots at Waterloo, will be flung down from the topmost
story, even to the marble floor of the resounding hall. Then the boy
Thomas, otherwise called Slavey, may say, “There he goes again;” or
Mrs. Ridley’s own back-parlour bell rings vehemently, and Julia the
cook will exclaim, “Lor, it’s Mr. Frederick.”

If the breeches and boots are not understood, the owner himself appears
in great wrath dancing on the upper story; dancing down to the lower
floor; and loosely enveloped in a ragged and flowing _robe de chambre_.
In this costume and condition he will dance into Honeyman’s apartment,
where that meek divine may be sitting with a headache or over a novel
or a newspaper; dance up to the fire flapping his robe-tails, poke it,
and warm himself there; dance up to the cupboard where his reverence
keeps his sherry, and help himself to a glass.

“_Salve, spes fidei, lumen ecclesiæ_,” he will say; “here’s towards
you, my buck. I knows the tap. Sherrick’s Marsala bottled three months
after date, at two hundred and forty-six shillings the dozen.”

“Indeed, indeed it’s not” (and now we are coming to an idea of the
skeleton in poor Honeyman’s closet—not that this huge handsome jolly
Fred Bayham is the skeleton, far from it. Mr. Frederick weighs fourteen
stone). “Indeed, indeed it isn’t, Fred, I’m sure,” sighs the other.
“You exaggerate, indeed you do. The wine is not dear, not by any means
so expensive as you say.”

“How much a glass, think you?” says Fred, filling another bumper. “A
half-crown, think ye?—a half-crown, Honeyman? By cock and pye, it is
not worth a bender.” He says this in the manner of the most celebrated
tragedian of the day. He can imitate any actor, tragic or comic; any
known Parliamentary orator or clergyman; any saw, cock, cloop of a cork
wrenched from a bottle and guggling of wine into the decanter
afterwards, bee buzzing, little boy up a chimney, etc. He imitates
people being ill on board a steam-packet so well that he makes you die
of laughing: his uncle the Bishop could not resist this comic
exhibition, and gave Fred a cheque for a comfortable sum of money; and
Fred, getting cash for the cheque at the Cave of Harmony, imitated his
uncle the Bishop and his Chaplain, winding up with his Lordship and
Chaplain being unwell at sea—the Chaplain and Bishop quite natural and
distinct.

“How much does a glass of this sack cost thee, Charley?” resumes Fred,
after this parenthesis. “You say it is not dear. Charles Honeyman, you
had, even from your youth up, a villainous habit. And I perfectly well
remember, sir, in boyhood’s breezy hour, when I was the delight of his
school, that you used to tell lies to your venerable father. You did,
Charles. Excuse the frankness of an early friend, it’s my belief you’d
rather lie than not. Hm”—he looks at the cards in the chimney-glass
“Invitations to dinner, proffers of muffins. Do lend me your sermon.
Oh, you old impostor! you hoary old Ananias! I say, Charley, why
haven’t you picked out some nice girl for yours truly? One with lauds
and beeves, with rents and consols, mark you? I have no money, ’tis
true, but then I don’t owe as much as you. I am a handsomer man than
you are. Look at this chest” (he slaps it), “these limbs; they are
manly, sir, manly.”

“For Heaven’s sake, Bayham,” cries Mr. Honeyman, white with terror; “if
anybody were to come——”

“What did I say anon, sir? that I was manly, ay, manly. Let any
ruffian, save a bailiff, come and meet the doughty arm of Frederick
Bayham.”

“Oh, Lord, Lord, here’s somebody coming into the room!” cries Charles,
sinking back on the sofa, as the door opens.

“Ha! dost thou come with murderous intent?” and he now advances in an
approved offensive attitude. “Caitiff, come on, come on!” and he walks
off with a tragic laugh, crying, “Ha, ha, ha, ’tis but the slavey!”

The slavey has Mr. Frederick’s hot water, and a bottle of sodawater on
the same tray. He has been instructed to bring soda whenever he hears
the word slavey pronounced from above. The bottle explodes, and
Frederick drinks, and hisses after his drink as though he had been all
hot within.

“What’s o’clock now, slavey—half-past three? Let me see, I breakfasted
exactly ten hours ago, in the rosy morning, off a modest cup of coffee
in Covent Garden Market. Coffee, a penny; bread, a simple halfpenny.
What has Mrs. Ridley for dinner?”

“Please, sir, roast pork.”

“Get me some. Bring it into my room, unless, Honeyman, you insist upon
my having it here, kind fellow!”

At the moment a smart knock comes to the door, and Fred says, “Well,
Charles, it may be a friend or a lady come to confess, and I’m off; I
knew you’d be sorry I was going. Tom, bring up my things; brush ’em
gently, you scoundrel, and don’t take the nap off. Bring up the roast
pork, and plenty of apple-sauce, tell Mrs. Ridley, with my love; and
one of Mr. Honeyman’s shirts, and one of his razors. Adieu, Charles!
Amend! Remember me.” And he vanishes into the upper chambers.




CHAPTER XII.
In which everybody is asked to Dinner


John James had opened the door hastening to welcome a friend and
patron, the sight of whom always gladdened the youth’s eyes; no other
than Clive Newcome—in young Ridley’s opinion, the most splendid,
fortunate, beautiful, high-born, and gifted youth this island
contained. What generous boy in his time has not worshipped somebody?
Before the female enslaver makes her appearance, every lad has a friend
of friends, a crony of cronies, to whom he writes immense letters in
vacation, whom he cherishes in his heart of hearts; whose sister he
proposes to marry in after life; whose purse he shares; for whom he
will take a thrashing if need be: who is his hero. Clive was John
James’s youthful divinity: when he wanted to draw Thaddeus of Warsaw, a
Prince, Ivanhoe, or some one splendid and egregious, it was Clive he
took for a model. His heart leapt when he saw the young fellow. He
would walk cheerfully to Grey Friars, with a letter or message for
Clive, on the chance of seeing him, and getting a kind word from him,
or a shake of the hand. An ex-butler of Lord Todmorden was a pensioner
in the Grey Friars Hospital (it has been said that at that ancient
establishment is a college for old men as well as for boys), and this
old man would come sometimes to his successor’s Sunday dinner, and
grumble from the hour of that meal until nine o’clock, when he was
forced to depart, so as to be within Grey Friars’ gates before ten;
grumble about his dinner—grumble about his beer—grumble about the
number of chapels he had to attend, about the gown he wore, about the
master’s treatment of him, about the want of plums in the pudding, as
old men and schoolboys grumble. It was wonderful what a liking John
James took to this odious, querulous, graceless, stupid, and snuffy old
man, and how he would find pretexts for visiting him at his lodging in
the old hospital. He actually took that journey that he might have a
chance of seeing Clive. He sent Clive notes and packets of drawings;
thanked him for books lent, asked advice about future reading—anything,
so that he might have a sight of his pride, his patron, his paragon.

I am afraid Clive Newcome employed him to smuggle rum-shrub and cigars
into the premises; giving him appointments in the school precincts,
where young Clive would come and stealthily receive the forbidden
goods. The poor lad was known by the boys, and called Newcome’s Punch.
He was all but hunchbacked; long and lean in the arm; sallow, with a
great forehead, and waving black hair, and large melancholy eyes.

“What, is it you, J. J.?” cries Clive gaily, when his humble friend
appears at the door. “Father, this is my friend Ridley. This is the
fellow what can draw.”

“I know whom I will back against any young man of his size at _that_,”
says the Colonel, looking at Clive fondly. He considered there was not
such a genius in the world; and had already thought of having some of
Clive’s drawings published by M’Lean of the Haymarket.

“This is my father just come from India—and Mr. Pendennis, an old Grey
Friars’ man. Is my uncle at home?” Both these gentlemen bestow rather
patronising nods of the head on the lad introduced to them as J. J. His
exterior is but mean-looking. Colonel Newcome, one of the
humblest-minded men alive, has yet his old-fashioned military notions;
and speaks to a butler’s son as to a private soldier, kindly, but not
familiarly.

“Mr Honeyman is at home, gentlemen,” the young lad says, humbly. “Shall
I show you up to his room?” And we walk up the stairs after our guide.
We find Mr. Honeyman deep in study on his sofa, with Pearson on the
Creed before him. The novel has been whipped under the pillow. Clive
found it there some short time afterwards, during his uncle’s temporary
absence in his dressing-room. He has agreed to suspend his theological
studies, and go out with his brother-in-law to dine.

As Clive and his friends were at Honeyman’s door, and just as we were
entering to see the divine seated in state before his folio, Clive
whispers, “J. J., come along, old fellow, and show us some drawings.
What are you doing?”

“I was doing some Arabian Nights,” says J. J., “up in my room; and
hearing a knock which I thought was yours, I came down.”

“Show us the pictures. Let’s go up into your room,” cries Clive.
“What—will you?” says the other. “It is but a very small place.”

“Never mind, come along,” says Clive; and the two lads disappear
together, leaving the three grown gentlemen to discourse together, or
rather two of us to listen to Honeyman, who expatiates upon the beauty
of the weather, the difficulties of the clerical calling, the honour
Colonel Newcome does him by a visit, etc., with his usual eloquence.

After a while Clive comes down without J. J., from the upper regions.
He is greatly excited. “Oh, sir,” he says to his father, “you talk
about my drawings—you should see J. J.’s! By Jove, that fellow is a
genius. They are beautiful, sir. You seem actually to read the Arabian
Nights, you know, only in pictures. There is Scheherazade telling the
stories, and—what do you call her?—Dinarzade and the Sultan sitting in
bed and listening. Such a grim old cove! You see he has cut off ever so
many of his wives’ heads. I can’t think where that chap gets his ideas
from. I can beat him in drawing horses, I know, and dogs; but I can
only draw what I see. Somehow he seems to see things we don’t, don’t
you know? Oh, father, I’m determined I’d rather be a painter than
anything.” And he falls to drawing horses and dogs at his uncle’s
table, round which the elders are seated.

“I’ve settled it upstairs with J. J.,” says Clive, working away with
his pen. “We shall take a studio together; perhaps we will go abroad
together. Won’t that be fun, father?”

“My dear Clive,” remarks Mr. Honeyman, with bland dignity, “there are
degrees in society which we must respect. You surely cannot think of
being a professional artist. Such a profession is very well for your
young _protégé;_ but for you——”

“What for me?” cries Clive. “We are no such great folks that I know of;
and if we were, I say a painter is as good as a lawyer, or a doctor, or
even a soldier. In Dr. Johnston’s Life—which my father is always
reading—I like to read about Sir Joshua Reynolds best: I think he is
the best gentleman of all in the book. My! wouldn’t I like to paint a
picture like Lord Heathfield in the National Gallery! _Wouldn’t_ I
just! I think I would sooner have done that, than have fought at
Gibraltar. And those Three Graces—oh, aren’t they graceful! And that
Cardinal Beaufort at Dulwich!—it frightens me so, I daren’t look at it.
Wasn’t Reynolds a clipper, that’s all! and wasn’t Rubens a brick! He
was an ambassador, and Knight of the Bath; so was Vandyck. And Titian,
and Raphael, and Velasquez?—I’ll just trouble you to show me better
gentlemen than them, Uncle Charles.”

“Far be it from me to say that the pictorial calling is not
honourable,” says Uncle Charles; “but as the world goes there are other
professions in greater repute; and I should have thought Colonel
Newcome’s son——”

“He shall follow his own bent,” said the Colonel; “as long as his
calling is honest it becomes a gentleman; and if he were to take a
fancy to play on the fiddle—actually on the fiddle—I shouldn’t object.”

“Such a rum chap there was upstairs!” Clive resumes, looking up from
his scribbling. “He was walking up and down on the landing in a
dressing-gown, with scarcely any other clothes on, holding a plate in
one hand, and a pork-chop he was munching with the other. Like this”
(and Clive draws a figure). “What do you think, sir? He was in the Cave
of Harmony, he says, that night you flared up about Captain Costigan.
He knew me at once; and he says, ‘Sir, your father acted like a
gentleman, a Christian, and a man of honour. _Maxima debetur puero
reverentia_. Give him my compliments. I don’t know his highly
respectable name.’ His highly respectable name,” says Clive, cracking
with laughter—“those were his very words. ‘And inform him that I am an
orphan myself—in needy circumstances’—he said he was in needy
circumstances; ‘and I heartily wish he’d adopt me.’”

The lad puffed out his face, made his voice as loud and as deep as he
could; and from his imitation and the picture he had drawn, I knew at
once that Fred Bayham was the man he mimicked.

“And does the Red Rover live here,” cried Mr. Pendennis, “and have we
earthed him at last?”

“He sometimes comes here,” Mr. Honeyman said with a careless manner.
“My landlord and landlady were butler and housekeeper to his father,
Bayham of Bayham, one of the oldest families in Europe. And Mr.
Frederick Bayham, the exceedingly eccentric person of whom you speak,
was a private pupil of my own dear father in our happy days at
Borehambury.”

He had scarcely spoken when a knock was heard at the door, and before
the occupant of the lodgings could say “Come in!” Mr. Frederick Bayham
made his appearance, arrayed in that peculiar costume which he
affected. In those days we wore very tall stocks, only a very few
poetic and eccentric persons venturing on the Byron collar; but Fred
Bayham confined his neck by a simple ribbon, which allowed his great
red whiskers to curl freely round his capacious jowl. He wore a black
frock and a large broad-brimmed hat, and looked somewhat like a
Dissenting preacher. At other periods you would see him in a green coat
and a blue neckcloth, as if the turf or the driving of coaches was his
occupation.

“I have heard from the young man of the house who you were, Colonel
Newcome,” he said with the greatest gravity, “and happened to be
present, sir, the other night; for I was aweary, having been toiling
all the day in literary labour, and needed some refreshment. I happened
to be present, sir, at a scene which did you the greatest honour, and
of which I spoke, not knowing you, with something like levity to your
son. He is an _ingenui vultus puer ingenuique pudoris_—Pendennis, how
are you? And I thought, sir, I would come down and tender an apology if
I had said any words that might savour of offence to a gentleman who
was in the right, as I told the room when you quitted it, as Mr.
Pendennis, I am sure, will remember.”

Mr. Pendennis looked surprise and perhaps negation.

“You forget, Pendennis? Those who quit that room, sir, often forget on
the morrow what occurred during the revelry of the night. You did right
in refusing to return to that scene. We public men are obliged often to
seek our refreshment at hours when luckier individuals are lapt in
slumber.”

“And what may be your occupation, Mr. Bayham?” asks the Colonel, rather
gloomily, for he had an idea that Bayham was adopting a strain of
_persiflage_ which the Indian gentleman by no means relished. Never
saying aught but a kind word to any one, he was on fire at the notion
that any should take a liberty with him.

“A barrister, sir, but without business—a literary man, who can but
seldom find an opportunity to sell the works of his brains—a gentleman,
sir, who has met with neglect, perhaps merited, perhaps undeserved,
from his family. I get my bread as best I may. On that evening I had
been lecturing on the genius of some of our comic writers, at the
Parthenopæon, Hackney. My audience was scanty, perhaps equal to my
deserts. I came home on foot to an egg and a glass of beer after
midnight, and witnessed the scene which did you so much honour. What is
this? I fancy a ludicrous picture of myself”—he had taken up the sketch
which Clive had been drawing—“I like fun, even at my own expense; and
can afford to laugh at a joke which is meant in good-humour.” This
speech quite reconciled the honest Colonel. “I am sure the author of
that, Mr. Bayham, means you or any man no harm. Why! the rascal, sir,
has drawn me, his own father; and I have sent the drawing to Major
Hobbs, who is in command of my regiment. Chinnery himself, sir,
couldn’t hit off a likeness better; he has drawn me on horseback, and
he has drawn me on foot, and he has drawn my friend, Mr. Binnie, who
lives with me. We have scores of his drawings at my lodgings; and if
you will favour us by dining with us to-day, and these gentlemen, you
shall see that you are not the only person caricatured by Clive here.”

“I just took some little dinner upstairs, sir. I am a moderate man, and
can live, if need be, like a Spartan; but to join such good company I
will gladly use the knife and fork again. You will excuse the
traveller’s dress? I keep a room here, which I use only occasionally,
and am at present lodging—in the country.”

When Honeyman was ready, the Colonel, who had the greatest respect for
the Church, would not hear of going out of the room before the
clergyman, and took his arm to walk. Bayham then fell to Mr.
Pendennis’s lot, and they went together. Through Hill Street and
Berkeley Square their course was straight enough; but at Hay Hill, Mr.
Bayham made an abrupt tack larboard, engaging in a labyrinth of
stables, and walking a long way round from Clifford Street, whither we
were bound. He hinted at a cab, but Pendennis refused to ride, being,
in truth, anxious to see which way his eccentric companion would steer.
“There are reasons,” growled Bayham, “which need not be explained to
one of your experience, why Bond Street must be avoided by some men
peculiarly situated. The smell of Truefitt’s pomatum makes me ill. Tell
me, Pendennis, is this Indian warrior a rajah of large wealth? Could
he, do you think, recommend me to a situation in the East India
Company? I would gladly take any honest post in which fidelity might be
useful, genius might be appreciated, and courage rewarded. Here we are.
The hotel seems comfortable. I never was in it before.”

When we entered the Colonel’s sitting-room at Nerot’s, we found the
waiter engaged in extending the table. “We are a larger party than I
expected,” our host said. “I met my brother Brian on horseback leaving
cards at that great house in ——— Street.”

“The Russian Embassy,” says Mr. Honeyman, who knew the town quite well.

“And he said he was disengaged, and would dine with us,” continues the
Colonel.

“Am I to understand, Colonel Newcome,” says Mr. Frederick Bayham, “that
you are related to the eminent banker, Sir Brian Newcome, who gives
such uncommonly swell parties in Park Lane?”

“What is a swell party?” asks the Colonel, laughing. “I dined with my
brother last Wednesday; and it was a very grand dinner certainly. The
Governor-General himself could not give a more splendid entertainment.
But, do you know, I scarcely had enough to eat? I don’t eat side
dishes; and as for the roast beef of Old England, why, the meat was put
on the table and whisked away like Sancho’s inauguration feast at
Barataria. We did not dine till nine o’clock. I like a few glasses of
claret and a cosy talk after dinner; but—well, well”—(no doubt the
worthy gentleman was accusing himself of telling tales out of school
and had come to a timely repentance). “Our dinner, I hope, will be
different. Jack Binnie will take care of that. That fellow is full of
anecdote and fun. You will meet one or two more of our service; Sir
Thomas de Boots, who is not a bad chap over a glass of wine; Mr.
Pendennis’s chum, Mr. Warrington, and my nephew, Barnes Newcome—a dry
fellow at first, but I dare say he has good about him when you know
him; almost every man has,” said the good-natured philosopher. “Clive,
you rogue, mind and be moderate with the champagne, sir!”

“Champagne’s for women,” says Clive. “I stick to claret.”

“I say, Pendennis,” here Bayham remarked, “it is my deliberate opinion
that F. B. has got into a good thing.”

Mr. Pendennis seeing there was a great party was for going home to his
chambers to dress. “Hm!” says Mr. Bayham, “don’t see the necessity.
What right-minded man looks at the exterior of his neighbour? He looks
_here_, sir, and examines _there_,” and Bayham tapped his forehead,
which was expansive, and then his heart, which he considered to be in
the right place.

“What is this I hear about dressing?” asks our host. “Dine in your
frock, my good friend, and welcome, if your dress-coat is in the
country.”

“It is at present at an uncle’s,” Mr. Bayham said, with great gravity,
“and I take your hospitality as you offer it, Colonel Newcome,
cordially and frankly.”

Honest Mr. Binnie made his appearance a short time before the appointed
hour for receiving the guests, arrayed in a tight little pair of
trousers, and white silk stockings and pumps, his bald head shining
like a billiard-ball, his jolly gills rosy with good-humour. He was
bent on pleasure. “Hey, lads!” says he; “but we’ll make a night of it.
We haven’t had a night since the farewell dinner off Plymouth.”

“And a jolly night it was, James,” ejaculates the Colonel.

“Egad, what a song that Tom Norris sings!”

“And your ‘Jock o’ Hazeldean’ is as good as a play, Jack.”

“And I think you beat iny one I iver hard in ‘Tom Bowling,’ yourself,
Tom!” cries the Colonel’s delighted chum. Mr. Pendennis opened the eyes
of astonishment at the idea of the possibility of renewing these
festivities, but he kept the lips of prudence closed. And now the
carriages began to drive up, and the guests of Colonel Newcome to
arrive.




CHAPTER XIII.
In which Thomas Newcome sings his Last Song


The earliest comers were the first mate and the medical officer of the
ship in which the two gentlemen had come to England. The mate was a
Scotchman: the doctor was a Scotchman; of the gentlemen from the
Oriental Club, three were Scotchmen.

The Southrons, with one exception, were the last to arrive, and for a
while we stood looking out of the windows awaiting their coming. The
first mate pulled out a penknife and arranged his nails. The doctor and
Mr. Binnie talked of the progress of medicine. Binnie had walked the
hospitals of Edinburgh before getting his civil appointment to India.
The three gentlemen from Hanover Square and the Colonel had plenty to
say about Tom Smith of the Cavalry, and Harry Hall of the Engineers:
how Topham was going to marry poor little Bob Wallis’s widow; how many
lakhs Barber had brought home, and the like. The tall grey-headed
Englishman, who had been in the East too, in the King’s service, joined
for a while in this conversation, but presently left it, and came and
talked with Clive; “I knew your father in India,” said the gentleman to
the lad; “there is not a more gallant or respected officer in that
service. I have a boy too, a stepson, who has just gone into the army;
he is older than you, he was born at the end of the Waterloo year, and
so was a great friend of his and mine, who was at your school, Sir
Rawdon Crawley.”

“He was in Gown Boys, I know,” says the boy; “succeeded his uncle Pitt,
fourth Baronet. I don’t know how his mother—her who wrote the hymns,
you know, and goes to Mr. Honeyman’s chapel—comes to be Rebecca, Lady
Crawley. His father, Colonel Rawdon Crawley, died at Coventry Island,
in August, 182-, and his uncle, Sir Pitt, not till September here. I
remember, we used to talk about it at Grey Friars, when I was quite a
little chap; and there were bets whether Crawley, I mean the young one,
was a Baronet or not.”

“When I sailed to Rigy, Cornel,” the first mate was speaking—nor can
any spelling nor combination of letters of which I am master, reproduce
this gentleman’s accent when he was talking his best—“I racklackt they
used always to sairve us a drem before denner. And as your frinds are
kipping the denner, and as I’ve no watch to-night, I’ll jist do as we
used to do at Rigy. James, my fine fellow, jist look alive and breng me
a small glass of brandy, will ye? Did ye iver try a brandy cocktail,
Cornel? Whin I sailed on the New York line, we used jest to make bits
before denner and—thank ye, James:” and he tossed off a glass of
brandy.

Here a waiter announces, in a loud voice, “Sir Thomas de Boots,” and
the General enters, scowling round the room according to his fashion,
very red in the face, very tight in the girth, splendidly attired with
a choking white neckcloth, a voluminous waistcoat, and his orders on.

“Stars and garters, by jingo!” cries Mr. Frederick Bayham; “I say,
Pendennis, have you any idea, is the Duke coming? I wouldn’t have come
in these Bluchers if I had known it. Confound it, no—Hoby himself, my
own bootmaker, wouldn’t have allowed poor F. B. to appear in Bluchers,
if he had known that I was going to meet the Duke. My linen’s all
right, anyhow.”

F. B. breathed a thankful prayer for that. Indeed, who but the very
curious could tell that not F. B.’s, but C. H.’s—Charles Honeyman’s—was
the mark upon that decorous linen?

Colonel Newcome introduced Sir Thomas to every one in the room, as he
had introduced us all to each other previously, and as Sir Thomas
looked at one after another, his face was kind enough to assume an
expression which seemed to ask, “And who the devil are you, sir?” as
clearly as though the General himself had given utterance to the words.
With the gentleman in the window talking to Clive he seemed to have
some acquaintance, and said not unkindly, “How d’you do, Dobbin?”

The carriage of Sir Brian Newcome now drove up, from which the Baronet
descended in state, leaning upon the arm of the Apollo in plush and
powder, who closed the shutters of the great coach, and mounted by the
side of the coachman, laced and periwigged. The Bench of Bishops has
given up its wigs; cannot the box, too, be made to resign that insane
decoration? Is it necessary for our comfort, that the men who do our
work in stable or household should be dressed like Merry-Andrews? Enter
Sir Brian Newcome, smiling blandly: he greets his brother
affectionately, Sir Thomas gaily; he nods and smiles to Clive, and
graciously permits Mr. Pendennis to take hold of two fingers of his
extended right hand. That gentleman is charmed, of course, with the
condescension. What man could be otherwise than happy to be allowed a
momentary embrace of two such precious fingers? When a gentleman so
favours me, I always ask, mentally, why he has taken the trouble at
all, and regret that I have not had the presence of mind to poke one
finger against his two. If I were worth ten thousand a year, I cannot
help inwardly reflecting, and kept a large account in Threadneedle
Street, I cannot help thinking he would have favoured me with the whole
palm.

The arrival of these two grandees has somehow cast a solemnity over the
company. The weather is talked about: brilliant in itself, it does not
occasion very brilliant remarks among Colonel Newcome’s guests. Sir
Brian really thinks it must be as hot as it is in India. Sir Thomas de
Boots, swelling in his white waistcoat, in the armholes of which his
thumbs are engaged, smiles scornfully, and wishes Sir Brian had ever
felt a good sweltering day in the hot winds in India. Sir Brian
withdraws the untenable proposition that London is as hot as Calcutta.
Mr. Binnie looks at his watch, and at the Colonel. “We have only your
nephew, Tom, to wait for,” he says; “I think we may make so bold as to
order the dinner,”—a proposal heartily seconded by Mr. Frederick
Bayham.

The dinner appears steaming, borne by steaming waiters. The grandees
take their places, one on each side of the Colonel. He begs Mr.
Honeyman to say grace, and stands reverentially during that brief
ceremony, while de Boots looks queerly at him from over his napkin. All
the young men take their places at the farther end of the table, round
about Mr. Binnie; and at the end of the second course Mr. Barnes
Newcome makes his appearance.

Mr. Barnes does not show the slightest degree of disturbance, although
he disturbs all the company. Soup and fish are brought for him, and
meat, which he leisurely eats, while twelve other gentlemen are kept
waiting. We mark Mr. Binnie’s twinkling eyes, as they watch the young
man. “Eh,” he seems to say, “but that’s just about as free-and-easy a
young chap as ever I set eyes on.” And so Mr. Barnes was a cool young
chap. That dish is so good, he must really have some more. He discusses
the second supply leisurely; and turning round simpering to his
neighbour, says, “I really hope I’m not keeping everybody waiting.”

“Hem!” grunts the neighbour, Mr. Bayham; “it doesn’t much matter, for
we had all pretty well done dinner.” Barnes takes a note of Mr.
Bayham’s dress—his long frock-coat, the ribbon round his neck; and
surveys him with an admirable impudence. “Who are these people,” thinks
he, “my uncle has got together?” He bows graciously to the honest
Colonel, who asks him to take wine. He is so insufferably affable, that
every man near him would like to give him a beating.

All the time of the dinner the host was challenging everybody to drink
wine, in his honest old-fashioned way, and Mr. Binnie seconding the
chief entertainer. Such was the way in England and Scotland when they
were young men. And when Binnie, asking Sir Brian, receives for reply
from the Baronet—“Thank you, no, my dear sir. I have exceeded already,
positively exceeded,” the poor discomfited gentleman hardly knows
whither to apply: but, luckily, Tom Norris, the first mate, comes to
his rescue, and cries out, “Mr. Binnie, _I’ve_ not had enough, and I’ll
drink a glass of anything ye like with ye.” The fact is, that Mr.
Norris has had enough. He has drunk bumpers to the health of every
member of the company; his glass has been filled scores of times by
watchful waiters. So has Mr. Bayham absorbed great quantities of drink;
but without any visible effect on that veteran toper. So has young
Clive taken more than is good for him. His cheeks are flushed and
burning; he is chattering and laughing loudly at his end of the table.
Mr. Warrington eyes the lad with some curiosity; and then regards Mr.
Barnes with a look of scorn, which does not scorch that affable young
person.

I am obliged to confess that the mate of the Indiaman, at an early
period of the dessert, and when nobody had asked him for any such
public expression of his opinion, insisted on rising and proposing the
health of Colonel Newcome, whose virtues he lauded outrageously, and
whom he pronounced to be one of the best of mortal men. Sir Brian
looked very much alarmed at the commencement of this speech, which the
mate delivered with immense shrieks and gesticulation: but the Baronet
recovered during the course of the rambling oration, and at its
conclusion gracefully tapped the table with one of those patronising
fingers; and lifting up a glass containing at least a thimbleful of
claret, said, “My dear brother, I drink your health with all my heart,
I’m su-ah.” The youthful Barnes had uttered many “Hear, hears!” during
the discourse, with an irony which, with every fresh glass of wine he
drank, he cared less to conceal. And though Barnes had come late he had
drunk largely, making up for lost time.

Those ironical cheers, and all his cousin’s behaviour during dinner,
had struck young Clive, who was growing very angry. He growled out
remarks uncomplimentary to Barnes. His eyes, as he looked towards his
kinsman, flashed out challenges, of which we who were watching him
could see the warlike purport. Warrington looked at Bayham and
Pendennis with glances of apprehension. We saw that danger was
brooding, unless the one young man could be restrained from his
impertinence, and the other from his wine.

Colonel Newcome said a very few words in reply to his honest friend the
chief mate, and there the matter might have ended: but I am sorry to
say Mr. Binnie now thought it necessary to rise and deliver himself of
some remarks regarding the King’s service, coupled with the name of
Major-General Sir Thomas de Boots, K.C.B., etc.—the receipt of which
that gallant officer was obliged to acknowledge in a confusion
amounting almost to apoplexy. The glasses went whack whack upon the
hospitable board; the evening set in for public speaking. Encouraged by
his last effort, Mr. Binnie now proposed Sir Brian Newcome’s health;
and that Baronet rose and uttered an exceedingly lengthy speech,
delivered with his wine-glass on his bosom.

Then that sad rogue Bayham must get up, and call earnestly and
respectfully for silence and the chairman’s hearty sympathy, for the
few observations which he had to propose. “Our armies had been drunk
with proper enthusiasm—such men as he beheld around him deserved the
applause of all honest hearts, and merited the cheers with which their
names had been received. (‘Hear, hear!’ from Barnes Newcome
sarcastically. ‘Hear, hear, HEAR!’ fiercely from Clive.) But whilst we
applauded our army, should we forget a profession still more exalted?
Yes, still more exalted, I say in the face of the gallant General
opposite; and that profession, I need not say, is the Church.
(Applause.) Gentlemen, we have among us one who, while partaking
largely of the dainties on this festive board, drinking freely of the
sparkling wine-cup which our gallant hospitality administers to us,
sanctifies by his presence the feast of which he partakes, inaugurates
with appropriate benedictions, and graces it, I may say, both before
and after meat. Gentlemen, Charles Honeyman was the friend of my
childhood, his father the instructor of my early days. If Frederick
Bayham’s latter life has been chequered by misfortune, it may be that I
have forgotten the precepts which the venerable parent of Charles
Honeyman poured into an inattentive ear. He too, as a child, was not
exempt from faults; as a young man, I am told, not quite free from
youthful indiscretions. But in this present Anno Domini, we hail
Charles Honeyman as a precept and an example, as a _decus fidei_ and a
_lumen ecclesiæ_ (as I told him in the confidence of the private circle
this morning, and ere I ever thought to publish my opinion in this
distinguished company). Colonel Newcome and Mr. Binnie! I drink to the
health of the Reverend Charles Honeyman, A.M. May we listen to many
more of his sermons, as well as to that admirable discourse with which
I am sure he is about to electrify us now. May we profit by his
eloquence; and cherish in our memories the truths which come mended
from his tongue!” He ceased; poor Honeyman had to rise on his legs, and
gasp out a few incoherent remarks in reply. Without a book before him,
the Incumbent of Lady Whittlesea’s Chapel was no prophet, and the truth
is he made poor work of his oration.

At the end of it, he, Sir Brian, Colonel Dobbin, and one of the Indian
gentlemen quitted the room, in spite of the loud outcries of our
generous host, who insisted that the party should not break up. “Close
up, gentlemen,” called out honest Newcome, “we are not going to part
just yet. Let me fill your glass, General. You used to have no
objection to a glass of wine.” And he poured out a bumper for his
friend, which the old campaigner sucked in with fitting gusto. “Who
will give us a song? Binnie, give us the ‘Laird of Cockpen.’ It’s
capital, my dear General. Capital,” the Colonel whispered to his
neighbour.

Mr. Binnie struck up the “Laird of Cockpen,” without, I am bound to
say, the least reluctance. He bobbed to one man, and he winked to
another, and he tossed his glass, and gave all the points of his song
in a manner which did credit to his simplicity and his humour. You
haughty Southerners little know how a jolly Scotch gentleman can
_desipere in loco_, and how he chirrups over his honest cups. I do not
say whether it was with the song or with Mr. Binnie that we were most
amused. It was a good commonty, as Christopher Sly says; nor were we
sorry when it was done.

Him the first mate succeeded; after which came a song from the
redoubted F. Bayham, which he sang with a bass voice which Lablache
might envy, and of which the chorus was frantically sung by the whole
company. The cry was then for the Colonel; on which Barnes Newcome, who
had been drinking much, started up with something like an oath, crying,
“Oh, I can’t stand this.”

“Then leave it, confound you!” said young Clive, with fury in his face.
“If our company is not good for you, why do you come into it?”

“What’s that?” asks Barnes, who was evidently affected by wine. Bayham
roared “Silence!” and Barnes Newcome, looking round with a tipsy toss
of the head, finally sate down.

The Colonel sang, as we have said, with a very high voice, using freely
the falsetto, after the manner of the tenor singers of his day. He
chose one of his maritime songs, and got through the first verse very
well, Barnes wagging his head at the chorus, with a “Bravo!” so
offensive that Fred Bayham, his neighbour, gripped the young man’s arm,
and told him to hold his confounded tongue.

The Colonel began his second verse: and here, as will often happen to
amateur singers, his falsetto broke down. He was not in the least
annoyed, for I saw him smile very good-naturedly; and he was going to
try the verse again, when that unlucky Barnes first gave a sort of
crowing imitation of the song, and then burst into a yell of laughter.
Clive dashed a glass of wine in his face at the next minute, glass and
all; and no one who had watched the young man’s behaviour was sorry for
the insult.

I never saw a kind face express more terror than Colonel Newcome’s. He
started back as if he had himself received the blow from his son.
“Gracious God!” he cried out. “My boy insult a gentleman at my table!”

“I’d like to do it again,” says Clive, whose whole body was trembling
with anger.

“Are you drunk, sir?” shouted his father.

“The boy served the young fellow right, sir,” growled Fred Bayham in
his deepest voice. “Come along, young man. Stand up straight, and keep
a civil tongue in your head next time, mind you, when you dine with
gentlemen. It’s easy to see,” says Fred, looking round with a knowing
air, “that this young man hasn’t got the usages of society—he’s not
been accustomed to it:” and he led the dandy out.

Others had meanwhile explained the state of the case to the
Colonel—including Sir Thomas de Boots, who was highly energetic and
delighted with Clive’s spirit; and some were for having the song to
continue; but the Colonel, puffing his cigar, said, “No. My pipe is
out. I will never sing again.” So this history will record no more of
Thomas Newcome’s musical performances.




CHAPTER XIV.
Park Lane


Clive woke up the next morning to be aware of a racking headache, and,
by the dim light of his throbbing eyes, to behold his father with
solemn face at his bed-foot—a reproving conscience to greet his waking.

“You drank too much wine last night, and disgraced yourself, sir,” the
old soldier said. “You must get up and eat humble pie this morning, my
boy.”

“Humble what, father?” asked the lad, hardly aware of his words, or the
scene before him. “Oh, I’ve got such a headache!”

“Serve you right, sir. Many a young fellow has had to go on parade in
the morning, with a headache earned overnight. Drink this water. Now,
jump up. Now, dash the water well over your head. There you come! Make
your toilette quickly; and let us be off, and find cousin Barnes before
he has left home.”

Clive obeyed the paternal orders; dressed himself quickly; and
descending, found his father smoking his morning cigar in the apartment
where they had dined the night before, and where the tables still were
covered with the relics of yesterday’s feast—the emptied bottles, the
blank lamps, the scattered ashes and fruits, the wretched heel-taps
that have been lying exposed all night to the air. Who does not know
the aspect of an expired feast?

“The field of action strewed with the dead, my boy,” says Clive’s
father. “See, here’s the glass on the floor yet, and a great stain of
claret on the carpet.”

“Oh, father!” says Clive, hanging his head down, “I know I shouldn’t
have done it. But Barnes Newcome would provoke the patience of Job; and
I couldn’t bear to have my father insulted.”

“I am big enough to fight my own battles, my boy,” the Colonel said
good-naturedly, putting his hand on the lad’s damp head. “How your head
throbs! If Barnes laughed at my singing, depend upon it, sir, there was
something ridiculous in it, and he laughed because he could not help
it. If he behaved ill, we should not; and to a man who is eating our
salt too, and is of our blood.”

“He is ashamed of our blood, father,” cries Clive, still indignant.

“We ought to be ashamed of doing wrong. We must go and ask his pardon.
Once when I was a young man in India,” the father continued very
gravely, “some hot words passed at mess—not such an insult as that of
last night; I don’t think I could have quite borne that—and people
found fault with me for forgiving the youngster who had uttered the
offensive expressions over his wine. Some of my acquaintance sneered at
my courage, and that is a hard imputation for a young fellow of spirit
to bear. But providentially, you see, it was war-time, and very soon
after I had the good luck to show that I was not a _poule mouillée_, as
the French call it; and the man who insulted me, and whom I forgave,
became my fastest friend, and died by my side—it was poor Jack
Cutler—at Argaum. We must go and ask Barnes Newcome’s pardon, sir, and
forgive other people’s trespasses, my boy, if we hope forgiveness of
our own.” His voice sank down as he spoke, and he bowed his honest head
reverently. I have heard his son tell the simple story years
afterwards, with tears in his eyes.

Piccadilly was hardly yet awake the next morning, and the sparkling
dews and the poor homeless vagabonds still had possession of the grass
of Hyde Park, as the pair walked up to Sir Brian Newcome’s house, where
the shutters were just opening to let in the day. The housemaid, who
was scrubbing the steps of the house, and washing its trim feet in a
manner which became such a polite mansion’s morning toilet, knew Master
Clive, and smiled at him from under her blousy curl-papers, admitting
the two gentlemen into Sir Brian’s dining-room, where they proposed to
wait until Mr. Barnes should appear. There they sate for an hour
looking at Lawrence’s picture of Lady Anne, leaning over a harp,
attired in white muslin; at Harlowe’s portrait of Mrs. Newcome, with
her two sons simpering at her knees, painted at a time when the Newcome
Brothers were not the bald-headed, red-whiskered British merchants with
whom the reader has made acquaintance, but chubby children with hair
flowing down their backs, and quaint little swallow-tailed jackets and
nankeen trousers. A splendid portrait of the late Earl of Kew in his
peer’s robes hangs opposite his daughter and her harp. We are writing
of George the Fourth’s reign; I dare say there hung in the room a fine
framed print of that great sovereign. The chandelier is in a canvas
bag; the vast sideboard, whereon are erected open frames for the
support of Sir Brian Newcome’s grand silver trays, which on dinner days
gleam on that festive board, now groans under the weight of Sir Brian’s
bluebooks. An immense receptacle for wine, shaped like a Roman
sarcophagus, lurks under the sideboard. Two people sitting at that
large dining-table must talk very loud so as to make themselves heard
across those great slabs of mahogany covered with damask. The butler
and servants who attend at the table take a long time walking round it.
I picture to myself two persons of ordinary size sitting in that great
room at that great table, far apart, in neat evening costume, sipping a
little sherry, silent, genteel, and glum; and think the great and
wealthy are not always to be envied, and that there may be more comfort
and happiness in a snug parlour, where you are served by a brisk little
maid, than in a great dark, dreary dining-hall, where a funereal
major-domo and a couple of stealthy footmen minister to you your
mutton-chops. They come and lay the cloth presently, wide as the
main-sheet of some tall ammiral. A pile of newspapers and letters for
the master of the house; the _Newcome Sentinel_, old county paper,
moderate conservative, in which our worthy townsman and member is
praised, his benefactions are recorded, and his speeches given at full
length; the _Newcome Independent_, in which our precious member is
weekly described as a ninny, and informed almost every Thursday morning
that he is a bloated aristocrat, as he munches his dry toast. Heaps of
letters, county papers, _Times_ and _Morning Herald_ for Sir Brian
Newcome; little heaps of letters (dinner and soirée cards most of
these) and _Morning Post_ for Mr. Barnes. Punctually as eight o’clock
strikes, that young gentleman comes to breakfast; his father will lie
yet for another hour; the Baronet’s prodigious labours in the House of
Commons keeping him frequently out of bed till sunrise.

As his cousin entered the room, Clive turned very red, and perhaps a
faint blush might appear on Barnes’s pallid countenance. He came in, a
handkerchief in one hand, a pamphlet in the other, and both hands being
thus engaged, he could offer neither to his kinsmen.

“You are come to breakfast, I hope,” he said—calling it “weakfast,” and
pronouncing the words with a most languid drawl—“or, perhaps, you want
to see my father? He is never out of his room till half-past nine.
Harper, did Sir Brian come in last night before or after me?” Harper,
the butler, thinks Sir Brian came in after Mr. Barnes.

When that functionary had quitted the room, Barnes turned round to his
uncle in a candid, smiling way, and said, “The fact is, sir, I don’t
know when I came home myself very distinctly, and can’t, of course,
tell about my father. Generally, you know, there are two candles left
in the hall, you know; and if there are two, you know, I know of course
that my father is still at the House. But last night, after that
capital song you sang, hang me if I know what happened to me. I beg
your pardon, sir, I’m shocked at having been so overtaken. Such a
confounded thing doesn’t happen to me once in ten years. I do trust I
didn’t do anything rude to anybody, for I thought some of your friends
the pleasantest fellows I ever met in my life; and as for the claret,
’gad, as if I hadn’t had enough after dinner, I brought a quantity of
it away with me on my shirt-front and waistcoat!”

“I beg your pardon, Barnes,” Clive said, blushing deeply, “and I’m very
sorry indeed for what passed; I threw it.”

The Colonel, who had been listening with a queer expression of wonder
and doubt on his face, here interrupted Mr. Barnes. “It was Clive
that—that spilled the wine over you last night,” Thomas Newcome said;
“the young rascal had drunk a great deal too much wine, and had neither
the use of his head nor his hands, and this morning I have given him a
lecture, and he has come to ask your pardon for his clumsiness; and if
you have forgotten your share in the night’s transaction, I hope you
have forgotten his, and will accept his hand and his apology.”

“Apology: There’s no apology,” cries Barnes, holding out a couple of
fingers of his hand, but looking towards the Colonel. “I don’t know
what happened any more than the dead. Did we have a row? Were there any
glasses broken? The best way in such cases is to sweep ’em up. We can’t
mend them.”

The Colonel said gravely—“that he was thankful to find that the
disturbance of the night before had no worse result.” He pulled the
tail of Clive’s coat, when that unlucky young blunderer was about to
trouble his cousin with indiscreet questions or explanations, and
checked his talk. “The other night you saw an old man in drink, my
boy,” he said, “and to what shame and degradation the old wretch had
brought himself. Wine has given you a warning too, which I hope you
will remember all your life; no one has seen me the worse for drink
these forty years, and I hope both you young gentlemen will take
counsel by an old soldier, who fully preaches what he practises, and
beseeches you to beware of the bottle.”

After quitting their kinsman, the kind Colonel further improved the
occasion with his son; and told him out of his own experience many
stories of quarrels, and duels, and wine;—how the wine had occasioned
the brawls, and the foolish speech overnight the bloody meeting at
morning; how he had known widows and orphans made by hot words uttered
in idle orgies: how the truest honour was the manly confession of
wrong; and the best courage the courage to avoid temptation. The
humble-minded speaker, whose advice contained the best of all wisdom,
that which comes from a gentle and reverent spirit, and a pure and
generous heart, never for once thought of the effect which he might be
producing, but uttered his simple say according to the truth within
him. Indeed, he spoke out his mind pretty resolutely on all subjects
which moved or interested him; and Clive, his son, and his honest chum,
Mr. Binnie, who had a great deal more reading and much keener
intelligence than the Colonel, were amused often at his naive opinion
about men, or books, or morals. Mr. Clive had a very fine natural sense
of humour, which played perpetually round his father’s simple
philosophy with kind and smiling comments. Between this pair of friends
the superiority of wit lay, almost from the very first, on the younger
man’s side; but, on the other hand, Clive felt a tender admiration for
his father’s goodness, a loving delight in contemplating his elder’s
character, which he has never lost, and which in the trials of their
future life inexpressibly cheered and consoled both of them! _Beati
illi!_ O man of the world, whose wearied eyes may glance over this
page, may those who come after you so regard you! O generous boy, who
read in it, may you have such a friend to trust and cherish in youth,
and in future days fondly and proudly to remember!

Some four or five weeks after the quasi-reconciliation between Clive
and his kinsman, the chief part of Sir Brian Newcome’s family were
assembled at the breakfast-table together, where the meal was taken in
common, and at the early hour of eight (unless the senator was kept too
late in the House of Commons overnight); and Lady Anne and her nursery
were now returned to London again, little Alfred being perfectly set up
by a month of Brighton air. It was a Thursday morning; on which day of
the week, it has been said, the _Newcome Independent_ and the _Newcome
Sentinel_ both made their appearance upon the Baronet’s table. The
household from above and from below; the maids and footmen from the
basement; the nurses, children, and governesses from the attics; all
poured into the room at the sound of a certain bell.

I do not sneer at the purpose for which, at that chiming eight-o’clock
bell, the household is called together. The urns are hissing, the plate
is shining; the father of the house, standing up, reads from a gilt
book for three or four minutes in a measured cadence. The members of
the family are around the table in an attitude of decent reverence; the
younger children whisper responses at their mother’s knees; the
governess worships a little apart; the maids and the large footmen are
in a cluster before their chairs, the upper servants performing their
devotion on the other side of the sideboard; the nurse whisks about the
unconscious last-born, and tosses it up and down during the ceremony. I
do not sneer at that—at the act at which all these people are
assembled—it is at the rest of the day I marvel; at the rest of the
day, and what it brings. At the very instant when the voice has ceased
speaking and the gilded book is shut, the world begins again, and for
the next twenty-three hours and fifty-seven minutes all that household
is given up to it. The servile squad rises up and marches away to its
basement, whence, should it happen to be a gala-day, those tall
gentlemen at present attired in Oxford mixture will issue forth with
flour plastered on their heads, yellow coats, pink breeches, sky-blue
waistcoats, silver lace, buckles in their shoes, black silk bags on
their backs, and I don’t know what insane emblems of servility and
absurd bedizenments of folly. Their very manner of speaking to what we
call their masters and mistresses will be a like monstrous masquerade.
You know no more of that race which inhabits the basement floor, than
of the men and brethren of Timbuctoo, to whom some among us send
missionaries. If you met some of your servants in the streets (I
respectfully suppose for a moment that the reader is a person of high
fashion and a great establishment), you would not know their faces. You
might sleep under the same roof for half a century and know nothing
about them. If they were ill, you would not visit them, though you
would send them an apothecary and of course order that they lacked for
nothing. You are not unkind, you are not worse than your neighbours.
Nay, perhaps, if you did go into the kitchen, or to take the tea in the
servants’-hall, you would do little good, and only bore the folks
assembled there. But so it is. With those fellow-Christians who have
been just saying Amen to your prayers, you have scarcely the community
of Charity. They come, you don’t know whence; they think and talk, you
don’t know what; they die, and you don’t care, or _vice versâ_. They
answer the bell for prayers as they answer the bell for coals: for
exactly three minutes in the day you all kneel together on one
carpet—and, the desires and petitions of the servants and masters over,
the rite called family worship is ended.

Exeunt servants, save those two who warm the newspaper, administer the
muffins, and serve out the tea. Sir Brian reads his letters, and chumps
his dry toast. Ethel whispers to her mother, she thinks Eliza is
looking very ill. Lady Anne asks, which is Eliza? Is it the woman that
was ill before they left town? If she is ill, Mrs. Trotter had better
send her away. Mrs. Trotter is only a great deal too good-natured. She
is always keeping people who are ill. Then her ladyship begins to read
the _Morning Post_, and glances over the names of the persons who were
present at Baroness Bosco’s ball, and Mrs. Toddle Tompkyns’s _soirée
dansante_ in Belgrave Square.

“Everybody was there,” says Barnes, looking over from his paper.

“But who is Mrs. Toddle Tompkyns?” asks mamma. “Who ever heard of a
Mrs. Toddle Tompkyns? What do people mean by going to such a person?”

“Lady Popinjoy asked the people,” Barnes says gravely. “The thing was
really doosed well done. The woman looked frightened; but she’s pretty,
and I am told the daughter will have a great lot of money.”

“Is she pretty, and did you dance with her?” asks Ethel.

“Me dance!” says Mr. Barnes. We are speaking of a time before casinos
were, and when the British youth were by no means so active in dancing
practice as at this present period. Barnes resumed the reading of his
county paper, but presently laid it down, with an execration so brisk
and loud, that his mother gave a little outcry, and even his father
looked up from his letters to ask the meaning of an oath so unexpected
and ungenteel.

“My uncle, the Colonel of sepoys, and his amiable son have been paying
a visit to Newcome—that’s the news which I have the pleasure to
announce to you,” says Mr. Barnes.

“You are always sneering about our uncle,” breaks in Ethel, with
impetuous voice, “and saying unkind things about Clive. Our uncle is a
dear, good, kind man, and I love him. He came to Brighton to see us,
and went out every day for hours and hours with Alfred; and Clive, too,
drew pictures for him. And he is good, and kind, and generous, and
honest as his father. And Barnes is always speaking ill of him behind
his back.”

“And his aunt lets very nice lodgings, and is altogether a most
desirable acquaintance,” says Mr. Barnes. “What a shame it is that we
have not cultivated that branch of the family!”

“My dear fellow,” cries Sir Brian, “I have no doubt Miss Honeyman is a
most respectable person. Nothing is so ungenerous as to rebuke a
gentleman or a lady on account of their poverty, and I coincide with
Ethel in thinking that you speak of your uncle and his son in terms
which, to say the least, are disrespectful.”

“Miss Honeyman is a dear little old woman,” breaks in Ethel. “Was not
she kind to Alfred, mamma, and did not she make him nice jelly? And a
Doctor of Divinity—you know Clive’s grandfather was a Doctor of
Divinity, mamma, there’s a picture of him in a wig—is just as good as a
banker, you know he is.”

“Did you bring some of Miss Honeyman’s lodging-house cards with you,
Ethel?” says her brother, “and had we not better hang up one or two in
Lombard Street; hers and our other relation’s, Mrs. Mason?”

“My darling love, who is Mrs. Mason?” asks Lady Anne.

“Another member of the family, ma’am. She was cousin——”

“She was no such thing, sir,” roars Sir Brian.

“She was relative and housemaid of my grandfather during his first
marriage. She acted, I believe, as dry nurse to the distinguished
Colonel of sepoys, my uncle. She has retired into private life in her
native town of Newcome, and occupies her latter days by the management
of a mangle. The Colonel and young pothouse have gone down to spend a
few days with their elderly relative. It’s all here in the paper, by
Jove!” Mr. Barnes clenched his fist, and stamped upon the newspaper
with much energy.

“And so they should go down and see her, and so the Colonel should love
his nurse, and not forget his relations if they are old and poor,”
cries Ethel, with a flush on her face, and tears starting into her
eyes.

“Hear what the Newcome papers say about it,” shrieks out Mr. Barnes,
his voice quivering, his little eyes flashing out scorn. “It’s in both
the papers, I dare say. It will be in the _Times_ to-morrow. By —— it’s
delightful. Our paper only mentions the gratifying circumstance; here
is the paragraph. ‘Lieutenant-Colonel Newcome, C.B., a distinguished
Indian officer, and younger brother of our respected townsman and
representative Sir Brian Newcome, Bart., has been staying for the last
week at the King’s Arms, in our city. He has been visited by the
principal inhabitants and leading gentlemen of Newcome, and has come
among us, as we understand, in order to pass a few days with an elderly
relative, who has been living for many years past in great retirement
in this place.’”

“Well, I see no great harm in that paragraph,” says Sir Brian. “I wish
my brother had gone to the Roebuck, and not to the King’s Arms, as the
Roebuck is our house: but he could not be expected to know much about
the Newcome inns, as he is a _new-comer_ himself. And I think it was
very right of the people to call on him.”

“Now hear what the _Independent_ says, and see if you like that, sir,”
cries Barnes, grinning fiercely; and he began to read as follows:—

“‘Mr. _Independent_—I was born and bred a Screwcomite, and am naturally
proud of _everybody_ and _everything_ which bears the revered name of
Screwcome. I am a Briton and a man, though I have not the honour of a
vote for my native borough; if I had, you may be sure I would give it
to our _admired_ and _talented_ representative, Don Pomposo Lickspittle
Grindpauper, Poor House Agincourt, Screwcome, whose ancestors fought
with Julius Cæsar against William the Conqueror, and whose father
certainly wielded a _cloth yard shaft_ in London not fifty years ago.

“‘Don Pomposo, as you know, seldom favours the town o Screwcome with a
visit.—Our gentry are not of _ancient birth_ enough to be welcome to a
Lady Screwcome. Our manufacturers make their money by trade. Oh, fie I
how can it be supposed that such _vulgarians_ should be received among
the _aristocratic society_ of Screwcome House? Two balls in the
season, and ten dozen o gooseberry, are enough for _them_.’”

“It’s that scoundrel Parrot,” burst out Sir Brian; “because I wouldn’t
have any more wine of him—No, it’s Vidler, the apothecary. By heavens!
Lady Anne, I told you it would be so. Why didn’t you ask the Miss
Vidlers to your ball?”

“They were on the list,” cries Lady Anne, “three of them; I did
everything I could; I consulted Mr. Vidler for poor Alfred, and he
actually stopped and saw the dear child take the physic. Why were they
not asked to the ball?” cries her ladyship bewildered; “I declare to
gracious goodness I don’t know.”

“Barnes scratched their names,” cries Ethel, “out of the list, mamma.
You know you did, Barnes; you said you had gallipots enough.”

“I don’t think it is like Vidler’s writing,” said Mr. Barnes, perhaps
willing to turn the conversation. “I think it must be that villain Duff
the baker, who made the song about us at the last election;—but hear
the rest of the paragraph,” and he continued to read:—

“‘The Screwcomites are at this moment favoured with a visit from a
gentleman of the Screwcome family, who, having passed all his life
abroad, is somewhat different from his relatives, whom we all so _love
and honour!_ This distinguished gentleman, this gallant soldier, has
come among us, not merely to see our manufactures—in which Screwcome
can vie with any city in the North—but an old servant and relation of
his family, whom he is not above recognising; who nursed him in his
early days; who has been living in her native place for many years,
supported by the generous bounty of Colonel N———. The gallant officer,
accompanied by his son, a fine youth, has taken repeated drives round
our beautiful environs in one of friend Taplow’s (of the King’s Arms)
open drags, and accompanied by Mrs. ———, now an aged lady, who speaks,
with tears in her eyes, of the goodness and gratitude of her gallant
soldier!

“‘One day last week they drove to Screwcome House. Will it be believed
that, though the house is only four miles distant from our city—though
Don Pomposo’s family have inhabited it these twelve years for four or
five months every year—Mrs. M——— saw her cousin’s house for the first
time; has never set eyes upon those grandees, except in public places,
since the day when they _honoured_ the county by purchasing the estate
which they own?

“‘I have, as I repeat, no vote for the borough; but if I had, oh,
wouldn’t I show my respectful gratitude at the next election, and plump
for Pomposo! I shall keep my eye upon him, and am, Mr.
_Independent_,—Your Constant Reader, Peeping Tom.’”

“The spirit of radicalism abroad in this country,” said Sir Brian
Newcome, crushing his egg-shell desperately, “is dreadful, really
dreadful. We are on the edge of a positive volcano.” Down went the
egg-spoon into its crater. “The worst sentiments are everywhere
publicly advocated; the licentiousness of the press has reached a
pinnacle which menaces us with ruin; there is no law which these
shameless newspapers respect; no rank which is safe from their attacks;
no ancient landmark which the lava-flood of democracy does not threaten
to overwhelm and destroy.”

“When I was at Spielburg,” Barnes Newcome remarked kindly, “I saw three
long-bearded, putty-faced blaguards pacin up and down a little
courtyard, and Count Keppenheimer told me they were three damned
editors of Milanese newspapers, who had had seven years of imprisonment
already; and last year when Keppenheimer came to shoot at Newcome, I
showed him that old thief, old Batters, the proprietor of the
_Independent_, and Potts, his infernal ally, driving in a dogcart; and
I said to him, Keppenheimer, I wish we had a place where we could lock
up some of our infernal radicals of the press, or that you could take
off those two villains to Spielburg; and as we were passin, that
infernal Potts burst out laughin in my face, and cut one of my pointers
over the head with his whip. We must do something with that
_Independent_, sir.”

“We must,” says the father, solemnly, “we must put it down, Barnes, we
must put it down.”

“I think,” says Barnes, “we had best give the railway advertisements to
Batters.”

“But that makes the man of the _Sentinel_ so angry,” says the elder
persecutor of the press.

“Then let us give Tom Potts some shootin at any rate; the ruffian is
always poachin about our covers as it is. Speers should be written to,
sir, to keep a look-out upon Batters and that villain his accomplice,
and to be civil to them, and that sort of thing; and, damn it, to be
down upon them whenever he sees the opportunity.”

During the above conspiracy for bribing or crushing the independence of
a great organ of British opinion, Miss Ethel Newcome held her tongue;
but when her papa closed the conversation by announcing solemnly that
he would communicate with Speers, Ethel turning to her mother said,
“Mamma, is it true that grandpapa has a relation living at Newcome who
is old and poor?”

“My darling child, how on earth should I know?” says Lady Anne. “I
daresay Mr. Newcome had plenty of poor relations.”

“I am sure some on your side, Anne, have been good enough to visit me
at the bank,” said Sir Brian, who thought his wife’s ejaculation was a
reflection upon his family, whereas it was the statement of a simple
fact in natural history. “This person was no relation of my father’s at
all. She was remotely connected with his first wife, I believe. She
acted as servant to him, and has been most handsomely pensioned by the
Colonel.”

“Who went to her, like a kind, dear, good, brave uncle as he is,” cried
Ethel; “the very day I go to Newcome I’ll go to see her.” She caught a
look of negation in her father’s eye—“I will go—that is, if papa will
give me leave,” says Miss Ethel.

“By Gad, sir,” says Barnes, “I think it is the very best thing she
could do; and the best way of doing it, Ethel can go with one of the
boys and take Mrs. What-do-you-call’em a gown, or a tract, or that sort
of thing, and stop that infernal _Independent’s_ mouth.”

“If we had gone sooner,” said Miss Ethel, simply, “there would not have
been all this abuse of us in the paper.” To which statement her worldly
father and brother perforce agreeing, we may congratulate good old Mrs.
Mason upon the new and polite acquaintances she is about to make.




CHAPTER XV.
The Old Ladies


The above letter and conversation will show what our active Colonel’s
movements and history had been since the last chapter in which they
were recorded. He and Clive took the Liverpool mail, and travelled from
Liverpool to Newcome with a post-chaise and a pair of horses, which
landed them at the King’s Arms. The Colonel delighted in
post-chaising—the rapid transit through the country amused him and
cheered his spirits. Besides, had he not Dr. Johnson’s word for it,
that a swift journey in a post-chaise was one of the greatest
enjoyments in life, and a sojourn in a comfortable inn one of its chief
pleasures? In travelling he was as happy and noisy as a boy. He talked
to the waiters, and made friends with the landlord; got all the
information which he could gather regarding the towns into which he
came; and drove about from one sight or curiosity to another with
indefatigable good-humour and interest. It was good for Clive to see
men and cities; to visit mills, manufactories, country seats,
cathedrals. He asked a hundred questions regarding all things round
about him; and any one caring to know who Thomas Newcome was, and what
his rank and business, found no difficulty in having his questions
answered by the simple and kindly traveller.

Mine host of the King’s Arms, Mr. Taplow aforesaid, knew in five
minutes who his guest was, and the errand on which he came. Was not
Colonel Newcome’s name painted on all his trunks and boxes? Was not his
servant ready to answer all questions regarding the Colonel and his
son? Newcome pretty generally introduced Clive to my landlord, when the
latter brought his guest his bottle of wine. With old-fashioned
cordiality, the Colonel would bid the landlord drink a glass of his own
liquor, and seldom failed to say to him, “This is my son, sir. We are
travelling together to see the country. Every English gentleman should
see his own country first, before he goes abroad, as we intend to do
afterwards—to make the Grand Tour. And I will thank you to tell me what
there is remarkable in your town, and what we ought to see—antiquities,
manufactures, and seats in the neighbourhood. We wish to see
everything, sir—everything. Elaborate diaries of these home tours are
still extant, in Clive’s boyish manuscript and the Colonel’s dashing
handwriting—quaint records of places visited, and alarming accounts of
inn bills paid.”

So Mr. Taplow knew in five minutes that his guest was a brother of Sir
Brian, their member; and saw the note despatched by an ostler to “Mrs.
Sarah Mason, Jubilee Row,” announcing that the Colonel had arrived, and
would be with her after his dinner. Mr. Taplow did not think fit to
tell his guest that the house Sir Brian used—the Blue house—was the
Roebuck, not the King’s Arms. Might not the gentlemen be of different
politics? Mr. Taplow’s wine knew none.

Some of the jolliest fellows in all Newcome use the Boscawen Room at
the King’s Arms as their club, and pass numberless merry evenings and
crack countless jokes there.

Duff, the baker; old Mr. Vidler, when he can get away from his medical
labours (and his hand shakes, it must be owned, very much now, and his
nose is very red); Parrot, the auctioneer; and that amusing dog, Tom
Potts, the talented reporter of the _Independent_—were pretty constant
attendants at the King’s Arms; and Colonel Newcome’s dinner was not
over before some of these gentlemen knew what dishes he had had; how he
had called for a bottle of sherry and a bottle of claret, like a
gentleman; how he had paid the postboys, and travelled with a servant
like a top-sawyer; that he was come to shake hands with an old nurse
and relative of his family. Every one of those jolly Britons thought
well of the Colonel for his affectionateness and liberality, and
contrasted it with the behaviour of the Tory Baronet—their
representative.

His arrival made a sensation in the place. The Blue Club at the Roebuck
discussed it, as well as the uncompromising Liberals at the King’s
Arms. Mr. Speers, Sir Brian’s agent, did not know how to act, and
advised Sir Brian by the next night’s mail, The Reverend Dr. Bulders,
the rector, left his card.

Meanwhile it was not gain or business, but only love and gratitude,
which brought Thomas Newcome to his father’s native town. Their dinner
over, away went the Colonel and Clive, guided by the ostler, their
previous messenger, to the humble little tenement which Thomas
Newcome’s earliest friend inhabited. The good old woman put her
spectacles into her Bible, and flung herself into her boy’s arms—her
boy who was more than fifty years old. She embraced Clive still more
eagerly and frequently than she kissed his father. She did not know her
Colonel with them whiskers. Clive was the very picture of the dear boy
as he had left her almost twoscore years ago. And as fondly as she hung
on the boy, her memory had ever clung round that early time when they
were together. The good soul told endless tales of her darling’s
childhood, his frolics and beauty. To-day was uncertain to her, but the
past was still bright and clear. As they sat prattling together over
the bright tea-table, attended by the trim little maid, whose services
the Colonel’s bounty secured for his old nurse, the kind old creature
insisted on having Clive by her side. Again and again she would think
he was actually her own boy, forgetting, in that sweet and pious
hallucination, that the bronzed face, and thinned hair, and melancholy
eyes of the veteran before her, were those of her nursling of old days.
So for near half the space of man’s allotted life he had been absent
from her, and day and night wherever he was, in sickness or health, in
sorrow or danger, her innocent love and prayers had attended the absent
darling. Not in vain, not in vain, does he live whose course is so
befriended. Let us be thankful for our race, as we think of the love
that blesses some of us. Surely it has something of Heaven in it, and
angels celestial may rejoice in it, and admire it.

Having nothing whatever to do, our Colonel’s movements are of course
exceedingly rapid, and he has the very shortest time to spend in any
single place. That evening, Saturday, and the next day, Sunday, when he
will faithfully accompany his dear old nurse to church. And what a
festival is that day for her, when she has her Colonel and that
beautiful brilliant boy of his by her side, and Mr. Hicks, the curate,
looking at him, and the venerable Dr. Bulders himself eyeing him from
the pulpit, and all the neighbours fluttering and whispering, to be
sure, who can be that fine military gentleman, and that splendid young
man sitting by old Mrs. Mason, and leading her so affectionately out of
church? That Saturday and Sunday the Colonel will pass with good old
Mason, but on Monday he must be off; on Tuesday he must be in London,
he has important business in London,—in fact, Tom Hamilton, of his
regiment, comes up for election at the Oriental on that day, and on
such an occasion could Thomas Newcome be absent? He drives away from
the King’s Arms through a row of smirking chambermaids, smiling
waiters, and thankful ostlers, accompanied to the post-chaise, of which
the obsequious Taplow shuts the door; and the Boscawen Room pronounces
him that night to be a trump; and the whole of the busy town, ere the
next day is over, has heard of his coming and departure, praised his
kindliness and generosity, and no doubt contrasted it with the
different behaviour of the Baronet, his brother, who has gone for some
time by the ignominious sobriquet of Screwcome, in the neighbourhood of
his ancestral hall.

Dear old nurse Mason will have a score of visits to make and to
receive, at all of which you may be sure that triumphal advent of the
Colonel’s will be discussed and admired. Mrs. Mason will show her
beautiful new India shawl, and her splendid Bible with the large print,
and the affectionate inscription, from Thomas Newcome to his dearest
old friend; her little maid will exhibit her new gown; the curate will
see the Bible, and Mrs. Bulders will admire the shawl; and the old
friends and humble companions of the good old lady, as they take their
Sunday walks by the pompous lodge-gates of Newcome Park, which stand
with the Baronet’s new-fangled arms over them, gilded, and filagreed,
and barred, will tell their stories, too, about the kind Colonel and
his hard brother. When did Sir Brian ever visit a poor old woman’s
cottage, or his bailiff exempt from the rent? What good action, except
a few thin blankets and beggarly coal and soup tickets, did Newcome
Park ever do for the poor? And as for the Colonel’s wealth, Lord bless
you, he’s been in India these five-and-thirty years; the Baronet’s
money is a drop in the sea to his. The Colonel is the kindest, the
best, the richest of men. These facts and opinions, doubtless, inspired
the eloquent pen of “Peeping Tom,” when he indited the sarcastic
epistle to the _Newcome Independent_, which we perused over Sir Brian
Newcome’s shoulder in the last chapter.

And you may be sure Thomas Newcome had not been many weeks in England
before good little Miss Honeyman, at Brighton, was favoured with a
visit from her dear Colonel. The envious Gawler scowling out of his
bow-window, where the fly-blown card still proclaimed that his lodgings
were unoccupied, had the mortification to behold a yellow post-chaise
drive up to Miss Honeyman’s door, and having discharged two gentlemen
from within, trot away with servant and baggage to some house of
entertainment other than Gawler’s. Whilst this wretch was cursing his
own ill fate, and execrating yet more deeply Miss Honeyman’s better
fortune, the worthy little lady was treating her Colonel to a sisterly
embrace and a solemn reception. Hannah, the faithful housekeeper, was
presented, and had a shake of the hand. The Colonel knew all about
Hannah: ere he had been in England a week, a basket containing pots of
jam of her confection, and a tongue of Hannah’s curing, had arrived for
the Colonel. That very night when his servant had lodged Colonel
Newcome’s effects at the neighbouring hotel, Hannah was in possession
of one of the Colonel’s shirts, she and her mistress having previously
conspired to make a dozen of those garments for the family benefactor.

All the presents which Newcome had ever transmitted to his
sister-in-law from India had been taken out of the cotton and lavender
in which the faithful creature kept them. It was a fine hot day in
June, but I promise you Miss Honeyman wore her blazing scarlet Cashmere
shawl; her great brooch, representing the Taj of Agra, was in her
collar; and her bracelets (she used to say, I am given to understand
they are called bangles, my dear, by the natives) decorated the sleeves
round her lean old hands, which trembled with pleasure as they received
the kind grasp of the Colonel of colonels. How busy those hands had
been that morning! What custards they had whipped!—what a triumph of
pie-crusts they had achieved! Before Colonel Newcome had been ten
minutes in the house, the celebrated veal-cutlets made their
appearance. Was not the whole house adorned in expectation of his
coming? Had not Mr. Kuhn, the affable foreign gentleman of the
first-floor lodgers, prepared a French dish? Was not Betty on the
look-out, and instructed to put the cutlets on the fire at the very
moment when the Colonel’s carriage drove up to her mistress’s door? The
good woman’s eyes twinkled, the kind old hand and voice shook, as,
holding up a bright glass of Madeira, Miss Honeyman drank the Colonel’s
health. “I promise you, my dear Colonel,” says she, nodding her head,
adorned with a bristling superstructure of lace and ribbons, “I promise
you, that I can drink your health in good _wine!_” The wine was of his
own sending, and so were the China fire-screens, and the sandalwood
workbox, and the ivory cardcase, and those magnificent pink and white
chessmen, carved like little sepoys and mandarins, with the castles on
elephants’ backs, George the Third and his queen in pink ivory, against
the Emperor of China and lady in white—the delight of Clive’s
childhood, the chief ornament of the old spinster’s sitting-room.

Miss Honeyman’s little feast was pronounced to be the perfection of
cookery; and when the meal was over, came a noise of little feet at the
parlour door, which being opened, there appeared, first, a tall nurse
with a dancing baby; second and third, two little girls with little
frocks, little trousers, long ringlets, blue eyes, and blue ribbons to
match; fourth, Master Alfred, now quite recovered from his illness, and
holding by the hand, fifth, Miss Ethel Newcome, blushing like a rose.

Hannah, grinning, acted as mistress of the ceremonies, calling out the
names of “Miss Newcomes, Master Newcomes, to see the Colonel, if you
please, ma’am,” bobbing a curtsey, and giving a knowing nod to Master
Clive, as she smoothed her new silk apron. Hannah, too, was in new
attire, all crisp and rustling, in the Colonel’s honour. Miss Ethel did
not cease blushing as she advanced towards her uncle; and the honest
campaigner started up, blushing too. Mr. Clive rose also, as little
Alfred, of whom he was a great friend, ran towards him. Clive rose,
laughed, nodded at Ethel, and ate gingerbread nuts all at the same
time. As for Colonel Thomas Newcome and his niece, they fell in love
with each other instantaneously, like Prince Camaralzaman and the
Princess of China.

I have turned away one artist: the poor creature was utterly
incompetent to depict the sublime, graceful, and pathetic personages
and events with which this history will most assuredly abound, and I
doubt whether even the designer engaged in his place can make such a
portrait of Miss Ethel Newcome as shall satisfy her friends and her own
sense of justice. That blush which we have indicated, he cannot render.
How are you to copy it with a steel point and a ball of printer’s ink?
That kindness which lights up the Colonel’s eyes; gives an expression
to the very wrinkles round about them; shines as a halo round his
face;—what artist can paint it? The painters of old, when they
portrayed sainted personages, were fain to have recourse to compasses
and gold leaf—as if celestial splendour could be represented by Dutch
metal! As our artist cannot come up to this task, the reader will be
pleased to let his fancy paint for itself the look of courtesy for a
woman, admiration for a young beauty, protection for an innocent child,
all of which are expressed upon the Colonel’s kind face, as his eyes
are set upon Ethel Newcome.

“Mamma has sent us to bid you welcome to England, uncle,” says Miss
Ethel, advancing, and never thinking for a moment of laying aside that
fine blush which she brought into the room, and which is _her_ pretty
symbol of youth, and modesty, and beauty.

He took a little slim white hand and laid it down on his brown palm,
where it looked all the whiter: he cleared the grizzled mustachio from
his mouth, and stooping down he kissed the little white hand with a
great deal of grace and dignity. There was no point of resemblance, and
yet a something in the girl’s look, voice, and movements, which caused
his heart to thrill, and an image out of the past to rise up and salute
him. The eyes which had brightened his youth (and which he saw in his
dreams and thoughts for faithful years afterwards, as though they
looked at him out of heaven) seemed to shine upon him after
five-and-thirty years. He remembered such a fair bending neck and
clustering hair, such a light foot and airy figure, such a slim hand
lying in his own—and now parted from it with a gap of ten thousand long
days between. It is an old saying, that we forget nothing; as people in
fever begin suddenly to talk the language of their infancy we are
stricken by memory sometimes, and old affections rush back on us as
vivid as in the time when they were our daily talk, when their presence
gladdened our eyes, when their accents thrilled in our ears, when with
passionate tears and grief we flung ourselves upon their hopeless
corpses. Parting is death, at least as far as life is concerned. A
passion comes to an end; it is carried off in a coffin, or weeping in a
post-chaise; it drops out of life one way or other, and the earthclods
close over it, and we see it no more. But it has been part of our
souls, and it is eternal. Does a mother not love her dead infant? a man
his lost mistress? with the fond wife nestling at his side,—yes, with
twenty children smiling round her knee. No doubt, as the old soldier
held the girl’s hand in his, the little talisman led him back to Hades,
and he saw Leonora.——

“How do you do, uncle?” say girls Nos. 2 and 3 in a pretty little
infantile chorus. He drops the talisman, he is back in common life
again—the dancing baby in the arms of the bobbing nurse babbles a
welcome. Alfred looks up for a while at his uncle in the white
trousers, and then instantly proposes that Clive should make him some
drawings; and is on his knees at the next moment. He is always climbing
on somebody or something, or winding over chairs, curling through
banisters, standing on somebody’s head, or his own head,—as his
convalescence advances, his breakages are fearful. Miss Honeyman and
Hannah will talk about his dilapidations for years after the little
chap has left them. When he is a jolly young officer in the Guards, and
comes to see them at Brighton, they will show him the blue-dragon
Chayny jar, on which he would sit, and which he cried so fearfully upon
breaking.

When this little party has gone out smiling to take its walk on the
sea-shore, the Colonel sits down and resumes the interrupted dessert.
Miss Honeyman talks of the children and their mother, and the merits of
Mr. Kuhn, and the beauty of Miss Ethel, glancing significantly towards
Clive, who has had enough of gingerbread nuts and dessert and wine, and
whose youthful nose is by this time at the window. What kind-hearted
woman, young or old, does not love match-making?

The Colonel, without lifting his eyes from the table, says “she reminds
him of—of somebody he knew once.”

“Indeed?” cries Miss Honeyman, and thinks Emma must have altered very
much after going to India, for she had fair hair, and white eyelashes,
and not a pretty foot certainly—but, my dear good lady, the Colonel is
not thinking of the late Mrs. Casey.

He has taken a fitting quantity of the Madeira, the artless greeting of
the people here, young and old, has warmed his heart, and he goes
upstairs to pay a visit to his sister-in-law, to whom he makes his most
courteous bow as becomes a lady of her rank. Ethel takes her place
quite naturally beside him during his visit. Where did he learn those
fine manners which all of us who knew him admired in him? He had a
natural simplicity, an habitual practice of kind and generous thoughts;
a pure mind, and therefore above hypocrisy and affectation—perhaps
those French people with whom he had been intimate in early life had
imparted to him some of the traditional graces of their _vieille
tour_—certainly his half-brothers had inherited none such. “What is
this that Barnes has written about his uncle, that the Colonel is
ridiculous?” Lady Anne said to her daughter that night. “Your uncle is
adorable. I have never seen a more perfect grand Seigneur. He puts me
in mind of my grandfather, though grandpapa’s grand manner was more
artificial, and his voice spoiled by snuff. See the Colonel. He smokes
round the garden, but with what perfect grace! This is the man Uncle
Hobson, and your poor dear papa, have represented to us as a species of
bear! Mr. Newcome, who has himself the ton of a waiter! The Colonel is
perfect. What can Barnes mean by ridiculing him? I wish Barnes had such
a distinguished air; but he is like his poor dear papa. _Que
voulez-vous_, my love? The Newcomes are honourable: the Newcomes are
wealthy: but distinguished—no. I never deluded myself with that notion
when I married your poor dear papa. At once I pronounce Colonel Newcome
a person to be in every way distinguished by us. On our return to
London I shall present him to all our family: poor good man! let him
see that his family have some presentable relations besides those whom
he will meet at Mrs. Newcome’s, in Bryanstone Square. You must go to
Bryanstone Square immediately we return to London. You must ask your
cousins and their governess, and we will give them a little party. Mrs.
Newcome is insupportable, but we must never forsake our relatives,
Ethel. When you come out you will have to dine there, and to go to her
ball. Every young lady in your position in the world has sacrifices to
make, and duties to her family to perform. Look at me. Why did I marry
your poor dear papa? From duty. Has your Aunt Fanny, who ran away with
Captain Canonbury, been happy? They have eleven children, and are
starving at Boulogne. Think of three of Fanny’s boys in yellow
stockings at the Bluecoat School. Your papa got them appointed. I am
sure my papa would have gone mad if he had seen that day! She came with
one of the poor wretches to Park Lane: but I could not see them. My
feelings would not allow me. When my maid,—I had a French maid then,
Louise, you remember; her conduct was _abominable:_ so was
Préville’s—when she came and said that my Lady Fanny was below with a
young gentleman, _qui portait des bas jaunes_, I could not see the
child. I begged her to come up in my room: and, absolutely that I might
not offend her, I went to bed. That wretch Louise met her at Boulogne
and told her afterwards. Good night, we must not stand chattering here
any more. Heaven bless you, my darling! Those are the Colonel’s
windows! Look, he is smoking on his balcony—that must be Clive’s room.
Clive is a good kind boy. It was very kind of him to draw so many
pictures for Alfred. Put the drawings away, Ethel. Mr. Smee saw some in
Park Lane, and said they showed remarkable genius. What a genius your
Aunt Emily had for drawing; but it was flowers! I had no genius in
particular, so mamma used to say—and Doctor Belper said, ‘My dear Lady
Walham’ (it was before my grandpapa’s death), ‘has Miss Anne a genius
for sewing buttons and making puddens?’—puddens he pronounced it.
Goodnight, my own love. Blessings, blessings, on my Ethel!”

The Colonel from his balcony saw the slim figure of the retreating
girl, and looked fondly after her: and as the smoke of his cigar
floated in the air, he formed a fine castle in it, whereof Clive was
lord, and that pretty Ethel, lady. “What a frank, generous, bright
young creature is yonder!” thought he. “How cheery and gay she is; how
good to Miss Honeyman, to whom she behaved with just the respect that
was the old lady’s due—how affectionate with her brothers and sisters!
What a sweet voice she has! What a pretty little white hand it is! When
she gave it me, it looked like a little white bird lying in mine. I
must wear gloves, by Jove I must, and my coat is old-fashioned, as
Binnie says; what a fine match might be made between that child and
Clive! She reminds me of a pair of eyes I haven’t seen these forty
years. I would like to have Clive married to her; to see him out of the
scrapes and dangers that young fellows encounter, and safe with such a
sweet girl as that. If God had so willed it, I might have been happy
myself, and could have made a woman happy. But the Fates were against
me. I should like to see Clive happy, and then say _Nunc dimittis_. I
shan’t want anything more to-night, Kean, and you can go to bed.”

“Thank you, Colonel,” says Kean, who enters, having prepared his
master’s bedchamber, and is retiring when the Colonel calls after him:

“I say, Kean, is that blue coat of mine very old?”

“Uncommon white about the seams, Colonel,” says the man.

“Is it older than other people’s coats?”—Kean is obliged gravely to
confess that the Colonel’s coat is very queer.

“Get me another coat, then—see that I don’t do anything or wear
anything unusual. I have been so long out of Europe, that I don’t know
the customs here, and am not above learning.”

Kean retires, vowing that his master is an old trump; which opinion he
had already expressed to Mr. Kuhn, Lady Hanne’s man, over a long
potation which those two gentlemen had taken together. And, as all of
us, in one way or another, are subject to this domestic criticism, from
which not the most exalted can escape, I say, lucky is the man whose
servants speak well of him.




CHAPTER XVI.
In which Mr. Sherrick lets his House in Fitzroy Square


In spite of the sneers of the _Newcome Independent_, and the Colonel’s
unlucky visit to his nurse’s native place, he still remained in high
favour in Park Lane; where the worthy gentleman paid almost daily
visits, and was received with welcome and almost affection, at least by
the ladies and the children of the house. Who was it that took the
children to Astley’s but Uncle Newcome? I saw him there in the midst of
a cluster of these little people, all children together. He laughed
delighted at Mr. Merryman’s jokes in the ring. He beheld the Battle of
Waterloo with breathless interest, and was amazed—amazed, by Jove,
sir—at the prodigious likeness of the principal actor to the Emperor
Napoleon; whose tomb he had visited on his return from India, as it
pleased him to tell his little audience who sat clustering round him:
the little girls, Sir Brian’s daughters, holding each by a finger of
his honest hands; young Masters Alfred and Edward clapping and
hurrahing by his side; while Mr. Clive and Miss Ethel sat in the back
of the box enjoying the scene, but with that decorum which belonged to
their superior age and gravity. As for Clive, he was in these matters
much older than the grizzled old warrior his father. It did one good to
hear the Colonel’s honest laughs at clown’s jokes, and to see the
tenderness and simplicity with which he watched over this happy brood
of young ones. How lavishly did he supply them with sweetmeats between
the acts! There he sat in the midst of them, and ate an orange himself
with perfect satisfaction. I wonder what sum of money Mr. Barnes
Newcome would have taken to sit for five hours with his young brothers
and sisters in a public box at the theatre and eat an orange in the
face of the audience? When little Alfred went to Harrow, you may be
sure Colonel Newcome and Clive galloped over to see the little man, and
tipped him royally. What money is better bestowed than that of a
schoolboy’s tip? How the kindness is recalled by the recipient in after
days! It blesses him that gives and him that takes. Remember how happy
such benefactions made you in your own early time, and go off on the
very first fine day and tip your nephew at school!

The Colonel’s organ of benevolence was so large, that he would have
liked to administer bounties to the young folks his nephews and nieces
in Bryanstone Square, as well as to their cousins in Park Lane; but
Mrs. Newcome was a great deal too virtuous to admit of such spoiling of
children. She took the poor gentleman to task for an attempt upon her
boys when those lads came home for their holidays, and caused them
ruefully to give back the shining gold sovereign with which their uncle
had thought to give them a treat.

“I do not quarrel with _other_ families,” says she; “I do not _allude_
to other families;” meaning, of course, that she did not allude to Park
Lane. “There may be children who are allowed to receive money from
their father’s grown-up friends. There may be children who hold out
their hands for presents, and thus become mercenary in early life. I
make no reflections with regard to _other_ households. _I_ only look,
and think, and pray for the welfare of my own beloved ones. They want
for nothing. Heaven has bounteously furnished us with every comfort,
with every elegance, with every luxury. Why need we be bounden to
others, who have been ourselves so amply provided? I should consider it
ingratitude, Colonel Newcome, want of proper spirit, to allow my boys
to accept money. Mind, I make _no allusions_. When they go to school
they receive a sovereign a-piece from their father, and a shilling a
week, which is ample pocket-money. When they are at home, I desire that
they may have rational amusements: I send them to the Polytechnic with
Professor Hickson, who kindly explains to them some of the marvels of
science and the wonders of machinery. I send them to the
picture-galleries and the British Museum. I go with them myself to the
delightful lectures at the institution in Albemarle Street. I do not
desire that they should attend theatrical exhibitions. I do not quarrel
with those who go to plays; far from it! Who am I that I should venture
to judge the conduct of others? When you wrote from India, expressing a
wish that your boy should be made acquainted with the works of
Shakspeare, I gave up my own opinion at once. Should I interpose
between a child and his father? I encouraged the boy to go to the play,
and sent him to the pit with one of our footmen.”

“And you tipped him very handsomely, my dear Maria, too,” said the
good-natured Colonel, breaking in upon her sermon; but Virtue was not
to be put off in that way.

“And why, Colonel Newcome,” Virtue exclaimed, laying a pudgy little
hand on its heart; “why did I treat Clive so? Because I stood towards
him _in loco parentis;_ because he was as a child to me, and I to him
as a mother. I indulged him more than my own. I loved him with a true
maternal tenderness. _Then_ he was happy to come to our house: _then_
perhaps Park Lane was not so often open to him as Bryanstone Square:
but I make n_o allusions. Then_ he did not go six times to another
house for once that he came to mine. He was a simple, confiding,
generous boy, was not dazzled by worldly rank or titles of splendour.
He could not find _these_ in Bryanstone Square. A merchant’s wife, a
country lawyer’s daughter—I could not be expected to have my humble
board surrounded by titled aristocracy; I would not if I could. I love
my own family too well; I am too honest, too simple,—let me own it at
once, Colonel Newcome, too _proud!_ And now, now his father has come to
England, and I have resigned him, and he meets with no titled
aristocrats at my house, and he does not come here any more.”

Tears rolled out of her little eyes as she spoke, and she covered her
round face with her pocket-handkerchief.

Had Colonel Newcome read the paper that morning, he might have seen
amongst what are called the fashionable announcements, the cause,
perhaps, why his sister-in-law had exhibited so much anger and virtue.
The _Morning Post_ stated, that yesterday Sir Brian and Lady Newcome
entertained at dinner His Excellency the Persian Ambassador and
Bucksheesh Bey; the Right Honourable Cannon Rowe, President of the
Board of Control, and Lady Louisa Rowe; the Earl of H———, the Countess
of Kew, the Earl of Kew, Sir Currey Baughton, Major-General and Mrs.
Hooker, Colonel Newcome, and Mr. Horace Fogey. Afterwards her ladyship
had an assembly, which was attended by, etc. etc.

This catalogue of illustrious names had been read by Mr. Newcome to her
spouse at breakfast, with such comments as she was in the habit of
making.

“The President of the Board of Control, the Chairman of the Court of
Directors, and Ex-Governor-General of India, and a whole regiment of
Kews. By Jove, Maria, the Colonel is in good company,” cries Mr.
Newcome, with a laugh. “That’s the sort of dinner you should have given
him. Some people to talk about India. When he dined with us he was put
between old Lady Wormely and Professor Roots. I don’t wonder at his
going to sleep after dinner. I was off myself once or twice during that
confounded long argument between Professor Roots and Dr. Windus. That
Windus is the deuce to talk.”

“Dr. Windus is a man of science, and his name is of European
celebrity!” says Maria solemnly. “Any intellectual person would prefer
such company to the titled nobodies into whose family your brother has
married.”

“There you go, Polly; you are always having a shy at Lady Anne and her
relations,” says Mr. Newcome, good-naturedly.

“A shy! How can you use such vulgar words, Mr. Newcome? What have I to
do with Sir Brian’s titled relations? I do not value nobility. I prefer
people of science—people of intellect—to all the rank in the world.”

“So you do,” says Hobson her spouse. “You have your party—Lady Anne has
her party. You take your line—Lady Anne takes her line. You are a
superior woman, my dear Polly; every one knows that. I’m a plain
country farmer, I am. As long as you are happy, I am happy too. The
people you get to dine here may talk Greek or algebra for what I care.
By Jove, my dear, I think you can hold your own with the best of them.”

“I have endeavoured by assiduity to make up for time lost, and an early
imperfect education,” says Mrs. Newcome. “You married a poor country
lawyer’s daughter. You did not seek a partner in the Peerage, Mr.
Newcome.”

“No, no. Not such a confounded flat as that,” cries Mr. Newcome,
surveying his plump partner behind her silver teapot, with eyes of
admiration.

“I had an imperfect education, but I knew its blessings, and have, I
trust, endeavoured to cultivate the humble talents which Heaven has
given me, Mr. Newcome.”

“Humble, by Jove!” exclaims the husband. “No gammon of that sort,
Polly. You know well enough that you are a superior woman. I ain’t a
superior man. I know that: one is enough in a family. I leave the
reading to you, my dear. Here comes my horses. I say, I wish you’d call
on Lady Anne to-day. Do go and see her, now that’s a good girl. I know
she is flighty, and that; and Brian’s back is up a little. But he ain’t
a bad fellow; and I wish I could see you and his wife better friends.”

On his way to the City, Mr. Newcome rode to look at the new house, No.
120 Fitzroy Square, which his brother, the Colonel, had taken in
conjunction with that Indian friend of his, Mr. Binnie. Shrewd old
cock, Mr. Binnie. Has brought home a good bit of money from India. Is
looking out for safe investments. Has been introduced to Newcome
Brothers. Mr. Newcome thinks very well of the Colonel’s friend.

The house is vast, but, it must be owned, melancholy. Not long since it
was a ladies’ school, in an unprosperous condition. The scar left by
Madame Latour’s brass plate may still be seen on the tall black door,
cheerfully ornamented in the style of the end of the last century, with
a funereal urn in the centre of the entry, and garlands, and the skulls
of rams at each corner. Madame Latour, who at one time actually kept a
large yellow coach, and drove her parlour young ladies in the Regent’s
Park, was an exile from her native country (Islington was her
birthplace, and Grigson her paternal name), and an outlaw at the suit
of Samuel Sherrick: that Mr. Sherrick whose wine-vaults undermine Lady
Whittlesea’s Chapel where the eloquent Honeyman preaches.

The house is Mr. Sherrick’s house. Some say his name is Shadrach, and
pretend to have known him as an orange-boy, afterwards as a
chorus-singer in the theatres, afterwards as secretary to a great
tragedian. I know nothing of these stories. He may or he may not be a
partner of Mr. Campion, of Shepherd’s Inn: he has a handsome villa,
Abbey Road, St. John’s Wood, entertains good company, rather loud, of
the sporting sort, rides and drives very showy horses, has boxes at the
Opera whenever he likes, and free access behind the scenes: is
handsome, dark, bright-eyed, with a quantity of jewellery, and a tuft
to his chin; sings sweetly sentimental songs after dinner. Who cares a
fig what was the religion of Mr. Sherrick’s ancestry, or what the
occupation of his youth? Mr. Honeyman, a most respectable man surely,
introduced Sherrick to the Colonel and Binnie.

Mr. Sherrick stocked their cellar with some of the wine over which
Honeyman preached such lovely sermons. It was not dear; it was not bad
when you dealt with Mr. Sherrick for wine alone. Going into his market
with ready money in your hand, as our simple friends did, you were
pretty fairly treated by Mr. Sherrick.

The house being taken, we may be certain there was fine amusement for
Clive, Mr. Binnie, and the Colonel, in frequenting the sales, in the
inspection of upholsterers’ shops, and the purchase of furniture for
the new mansion. It was like nobody else’s house. There were three
masters with four or five servants over them. Kean for the Colonel and
his son; a smart boy with boots for Mr. Binnie; Mrs. Kean to cook and
keep house, with a couple of maids under her. The Colonel, himself, was
great at making hash mutton, hot-pot, curry, and pillau. What cosy
pipes did we not smoke in the dining-room, in the drawing-room, or
where we would! What pleasant evenings did we not have with Mr Binnie’s
books and Schiedam! Then there were the solemn state dinners, at most
of which the writer of this biography had a corner.

Clive had a tutor—Cirindey of Corpus—whom we recommended to him, and
with whom the young gentleman did not fatigue his brains very much; but
his great forte decidedly lay in drawing. He sketched the horses, he
sketched the dogs; all the servants from the blear-eyed boot-boy to the
rosy-cheeked lass, Mrs. Kean’s niece, whom that virtuous housekeeper
was always calling to come downstairs. He drew his father in all
postures—asleep, on foot, on horseback; and jolly little Mr. Binnie,
with his plump legs on a chair, or jumping briskly on the back of the
cob which he rode. He should have drawn the pictures for this book, but
that he no longer condescends to make sketches. Young Ridley was his
daily friend now; and Grindley, his classics and mathematics over in
the morning, and the ride with father over, this pair of young men
would constantly attend Gandish’s Drawing Academy, where, to be sure,
Ridley passed many hours at work on his art, before his young friend
and patron could be spared from his books to his pencil.

“Oh,” says Clive, “if you talk to him now about those early days, it
was a jolly time! I do not believe there was any young fellow in London
so happy.” And there hangs up in his painting-room now, a head, painted
at one sitting, of a man rather bald, with hair touched with grey, with
a large moustache, and a sweet mouth half smiling beneath it, and
melancholy eyes; and Clive shows that portrait of their grandfather to
his children, and tells them that the whole world never saw a nobler
gentleman.




CHAPTER XVII.
A School of Art


British art either finds her peculiar nourishment in melancholy, and
loves to fix her abode in desert places; or it may be her purse is but
slenderly furnished, and she is forced to put up with accommodations
rejected by more prosperous callings. Some of the most dismal quarters
of the town are colonised by her disciples and professors. In walking
through streets which may have been gay and polite when ladies’
chairmen jostled each other on the pavement, and linkboys with their
torches lighted the beaux over the mud, who has not remarked the
artist’s invasion of those regions once devoted to fashion and gaiety?
Centre windows of drawing-rooms are enlarged so as to reach up into
bedrooms—bedrooms where Lady Betty has had her hair powdered, and where
the painter’s north-light now takes possession of the place which her
toilet-table occupied a hundred years ago. There are degrees in
decadence: after the Fashion chooses to emigrate, and retreats from
Soho or Bloomsbury, let us say, to Cavendish Square, physicians come
and occupy the vacant houses, which still have a respectable look, the
windows being cleaned, and the knockers and plates kept bright, and the
doctor’s carriage rolling round the square, almost as fine as the
countess’s, which has whisked away her ladyship to other regions. A
boarding-house mayhap succeeds the physician, who has followed after
his sick folks into the new country; and then Dick Tinto comes with his
dingy brass plate, and breaks in his north window, and sets up his
sitters’ throne. I love his honest moustache, and jaunty velvet jacket;
his queer figure, his queer vanities, and his kind heart. Why should he
not suffer his ruddy ringlets to fall over his shirt-collar? Why should
he deny himself his velvet? it is but a kind of fustian which costs him
eighteenpence a yard. He is naturally what he is, and breaks out into
costume as spontaneously as a bird sings, or a bulb bears a tulip. And
as Dick, under yonder terrific appearance of waving cloak, bristling
beard, and shadowy sombrero, is a good kindly simple creature, got up
at a very cheap rate, his life is so consistent with his dress; he
gives his genius a darkling swagger, and a romantic envelope, which,
being removed, you find, not a bravo, but a kind chirping soul; not a
moody poet avoiding mankind for the better company of his own great
thoughts, but a jolly little chap who has an aptitude for painting
brocade gowns, a bit of armour (with figures inside them), or trees and
cattle, or gondolas and buildings, or what not; an instinct for the
picturesque, which exhibits itself in his works, and outwardly on his
person; beyond this, a gentle creature loving his friends, his cups,
feasts, merrymakings, and all good things. The kindest folks alive I
have found among those scowling whiskeradoes. They open oysters with
their yataghans, toast muffins on their rapiers, and fill their Venice
glasses with half-and-half. If they have money in their lean purses, be
sure they have a friend to share it. What innocent gaiety, what jovial
suppers on threadbare cloths, and wonderful songs after; what pathos,
merriment, humour does not a man enjoy who frequents their company! Mr.
Clive Newcome, who has long since shaved his beard, who has become a
family man, and has seen the world in a thousand different phases,
avers that his life as an art-student at home and abroad was the
pleasantest part of his whole existence. It may not be more amusing in
the telling than the chronicle of a feast, or the accurate report of
two lovers’ conversation; but the biographer, having brought his hero
to the period of his life, is bound to relate it, before passing to
other occurrences which are to be narrated in their turn.

We may be sure the boy had many conversations with his affectionate
guardian as to the profession which he should follow. As regarded
mathematical and classical learning, the elder Newcome was forced to
admit, that out of every hundred boys, there were fifty as clever as
his own, and at least fifty more industrious; the army in time of peace
Colonel Newcome thought a bad trade for a young fellow so fond of ease
and pleasure as his son: his delight in the pencil was manifest to all.
Were not his school-books full of caricatures of the masters? Whilst
his tutor, Grindley, was lecturing him, did he not draw Grindley
instinctively under his very nose? A painter Clive was determined to
be, and nothing else; and Clive, being then some sixteen years of age,
began to study the art, _en règle_, under the eminent Mr. Gandish, of
Soho.

It was that well-known portrait-painter, Alfred Smee, Esq., R.A., who
recommended Gandish to Colonel Newcome, one day when the two gentlemen
met at dinner at Lady Anne Newcome’s table. Mr. Smee happened to
examine some of Clive’s drawings, which the young fellow had executed
for his cousins. Clive found no better amusement than in making
pictures for them, and would cheerfully pass evening after evening in
that diversion. He had made a thousand sketches of Ethel before a year
was over; a year, every day of which seemed to increase the attractions
of the fair young creature, develop her nymph-like form, and give her
figure fresh graces. He also of course drew Alfred and the nursery in
general, Aunt Anne and the Blenheim spaniels, and Mr. Kuhn and his
earrings, the majestic John bringing in the coal-scuttle, and all
persons or objects in that establishment with which he was familiar.
“What a genius the lad has,” the complimentary Mr. Smee averred; “what
a force and individuality there is in all his drawings! Look at his
horses! capital, by Jove, capital! and Alfred on his pony, and Miss
Ethel in her Spanish hat, with her hair flowing in the wind! I must
take this sketch, I positively must now, and show it to Landseer.” And
the courtly artist daintily enveloped the drawing in a sheet of paper,
put it away in his hat, and vowed subsequently that the great painter
had been delighted with the young man’s performance. Smee was not only
charmed with Clive’s skill as an artist, but thought his head would be
an admirable one to paint. Such a rich complexion, such fine turns in
his hair! such eyes! to see real blue eyes was so rare nowadays! And
the Colonel too, if the Colonel would but give him a few sittings, the
grey uniform of the Bengal Cavalry, the silver lace, the little bit of
red ribbon just to warm up the picture! it was seldom, Mr. Smee
declared, that an artist could get such an opportunity for colour. With
our hideous vermilion uniforms there was no chance of doing anything;
Rubens himself could scarcely manage scarlet. Look at the horseman in
Cuyp’s famous picture at the Louvre: the red was a positive blot upon
the whole picture. There was nothing like French grey and silver! All
which did not prevent Mr. Smee from painting Sir Brian in a flaring
deputy-lieutenant’s uniform, and entreating all military men whom he
met to sit to him in scarlet. Clive Newcome the Academician succeeded
in painting, of course for mere friendship’s sake, and because he liked
the subject, though he could not refuse the cheque which Colonel
Newcome sent him for the frame and picture; but no cajoleries could
induce the old campaigner to sit to any artist save one. He said he
should be ashamed to pay fifty guineas for the likeness of his homely
face; he jocularly proposed to James Binnie to have his head put on the
canvas, and Mr. Smee enthusiastically caught at the idea; but honest
James winked his droll eyes, saying his was a beauty that did not want
any paint; and when Mr. Smee took his leave after dinner in Fitzroy
Square, where this conversation was held, James Binnie hinted that the
Academician was no better than an old humbug, in which surmise he was
probably not altogether incorrect. Certain young men who frequented the
kind Colonel’s house were also somewhat of this opinion; and made
endless jokes at the painter’s expense. Smee plastered his sitters with
adulation as methodically as he covered his canvas. He waylaid
gentlemen at dinner; he inveigled unsuspecting folks into his studio,
and had their heads off their shoulders before they were aware. One
day, on our way from the Temple, through Howland Street, to the
Colonel’s house, we beheld Major-General Sir Thomas de Boots, in full
uniform, rushing from Smee’s door to his brougham. The coachman was
absent refreshing himself at a neighbouring tap: the little street-boys
cheered and hurrayed Sir Thomas, as, arrayed in gold and scarlet, he
sate in his chariot. He blushed purple when he beheld us. No artist
would have dared to imitate those purple tones: he was one of the
numerous victims of Mr. Smee.

One day, then, day to be noted with a white stone, Colonel Newcome,
with his son and Mr. Smee, R.A., walked from the Colonel’s house to
Gandish’s, which was not far removed thence; and young Clive, who was a
perfect mimic, described to his friends, and illustrated, as was his
wont, by diagrams, the interview which he had with that professor. “By
Jove, you must see Gandish, pa!” cries Clive: “Gandish is worth the
whole world. Come and be an art-student. You’ll find such jolly fellows
there! Gandish calls it hart-student, and says, ‘Hars est celare
Hartem’—by Jove he does! He treated us to a little Latin, as he brought
out a cake and a bottle of wine, you know.”

“The governor was splendid, sir. He wore gloves: you know he only puts
them on on parade days; and turned out for the occasion spick and span.
He ought to be a general officer. He looks like a field-marshal—don’t
he? You should have seen him bowing to Mrs. Gandish and the Miss
Gandishes, dressed all in their best, round the cake-tray! He takes his
glass of wine, and sweeps them all round with a bow. ‘I hope, young
ladies,’ says he, ‘you don’t often go to the students’ room. I’m afraid
the young gentlemen would leave off looking at the statues if you came
in.’ And so they would: for you never saw such guys; but the dear old
boy fancies every woman is a beauty.

“‘Mr. Smee, you are looking at my picture of “Boadishia?”’ says
Gandish. Wouldn’t he have caught it for his quantities at Grey Friars,
that’s all.

“‘Yes—ah—yes,’ says Mr. Smee, putting his hand over his eyes, and
standing before it, looking steady, you know, as if he was going to see
whereabouts he should _hit_ Boadishia.

“‘It was painted when you were a young man, four years before you were
an associate, Smee. Had some success in its time, and there’s good
pints about that picture,’ Gandish goes on. ‘But I never could get my
price for it; and here it hangs in my own room. Igh art won’t do in
this country, Colonel—it’s a melancholy fact.’

“‘High art! I should think it _is_ high art!’ whispers old Smee;
‘fourteen feet high, at least!’ And then out loud he says ‘The picture
has very fine points in it, Gandish, as you say. Foreshortening of that
arm, capital! That red drapery carried off into the right of the
picture very skilfully managed!’

“‘It’s not like portrait-painting, Smee—Igh art,’ says Gandish. ‘The
models of the hancient Britons in that pictur alone cost me thirty
pound—when I was a struggling man, and had just married my Betsey here.
You reckonise Boadishia, Colonel, with the Roman elmet, cuirass, and
javeling of the period—all studied from the hantique, sir, the glorious
hantique.’

“‘All but Boadicea,’ says father. ‘She remains always young.’ And he
began to speak the lines out of Cowper, he did—waving his stick like an
old trump—and famous they are,” cries the lad:

“When the British warrior queen,
Bleeding from the Roman rods”—


“Jolly verses! Haven’t I translated them into alcaics?” says Clive,
with a merry laugh, and resumes his history.

“‘Oh, I must have those verses in my album,’ cries one of the young
ladies. ‘Did you compose them, Colonel Newcome?’ But Gandish, you see,
is never thinking about any works but his own, and goes on, ‘Study of
my eldest daughter, exhibited 1816.’

“‘No, pa, not ’16,’ cries Miss Gandish. She don’t look like a chicken,
I can tell you.

“‘Admired,’ Gandish goes on, never heeding her,—‘I can show you what
the papers said of it at the time—_Morning Chronicle_ and
_Examiner_—spoke most ighly of it. My son as an infant ’Ercules,
stranglin the serpent over the piano. Fust conception of my picture of
“Non Hangli said Hangeli.”’

“‘For which I can guess who were the angels that sat,’ says father.
Upon my word, that old governor! He is a little too strong. But Mr.
Gandish listened no more to him than to Mr. Smee, and went on,
buttering himself all over, as I have read the Hottentots do. ‘Myself
at thirty-three years of age!’ says he, pointing to a portrait of a
gentleman in leather breeches and mahogany boots; ‘I could have been a
portrait-painter, Mr. Smee.’

“‘Indeed it was lucky for some of us you devoted yourself to high art,
Gandish,’ Mr. Smee says, and sips the wine and puts it down again,
making a face. It was not first-rate tipple, you see.

“‘Two girls,’ continues that indomitable Mr. Gandish. ‘Hidea for “Babes
in the Wood.” “View of Pæstum,” taken on the spot by myself, when
travelling with the late lamented Earl of Kew. ‘Beauty, Valour,
Commerce, and Liberty, condoling with Britannia on the death of Admiral
Viscount Nelson,’—allegorical piece drawn at a very early age after
Trafalgar. Mr. Fuseli saw that piece, sir, when I was a student of the
Academy, and said to me, ‘Young man, stick to the antique. There’s
nothing like it.’ Those were ’is very words. If you do me the favour to
walk into the Hatrium, you’ll remark my great pictures also from
English ’istry. An English historical painter, sir, should be employed
chiefly in English ’istry. That’s what I would have done. Why ain’t
there temples for us, where the people might read their history at a
glance, and without knowing how to read? Why is my ‘Alfred’ ’anging up
in this ’all? Because there is no patronage for a man who devotes
himself to Igh art. You know the anecdote, Colonel? King Alfred flying
from the Danes, took refuge in a neaterd’s ’ut. The rustic’s wife told
him to bake a cake, and the fugitive sovering set down to his ignoble
task, and forgetting it in the cares of state, let the cake burn, on
which the woman struck him. The moment chose is when she is lifting her
’and to deliver the blow. The king receives it with majesty mingled
with meekness. In the background the door of the ’ut is open, letting
in the royal officers to announce the Danes are defeated. The daylight
breaks in at the aperture, signifying the dawning of ’Ope. That story,
sir, which I found in my researches in ’istry, has since become so
popular, sir, that hundreds of artists have painted it, hundreds! I who
discovered the legend, have my picture—here!’

“‘Now, Colonel,’ says the showman, ‘let me—let me lead you through the
statue gallery. ‘Apollo,’ you see. The ‘Venus Hanadyomene,’ the
glorious Venus of the Louvre, which I saw in 1814, Colonel, in its
glory—the ‘Laocoon’—my friend Gibson’s ‘Nymth,’ you see, is the only
figure I admit among the antiques. Now up this stair to the students’
room, where I trust my young friend, Mr. Newcome, will labour
assiduously. _Ars longa est_, Mr. Newcome. _Vita_——’”

“I trembled,” Clive said, “lest my father should introduce a certain
favourite quotation, beginning ‘_ingenuas didicisse_’—but he refrained,
and we went into the room, where a score of students were assembled,
who all looked away from their drawing-boards as we entered.

“‘Here will be your place, Mr. Newcome,’ says the Professor, ‘and here
that of your young friend—what did you say was his name?’ I told him
Rigby, for my dear old governor has promised to pay for J. J. too, you
know. ‘Mr. Chivers is the senior pupil and custos of the room in the
absence of my son. Mr. Chivers, Mr. Newcome; gentlemen, Mr. Newcome, a
new pupil. My son, Charles Gandish, Mr. Newcome. Assiduity, gentlemen,
assiduity. _Ars longa. Vita brevis, et linea recta brevissima est_.
This way, Colonel, down these steps, across the courtyard, to my own
studio. There, gentlemen,’—and pulling aside a curtain, Gandish says
‘There!’”

“And what was the masterpiece behind it?” we ask of Clive, after we
have done laughing at his imitation.

“Hand round the hat, J. J.!” cries Clive. “Now, ladies and gentlemen,
pay your money. Now walk in, for the performance is ‘just a-going to
begin.’” Nor would the rogue ever tell us what Gandish’s curtained
picture was.

Not a successful painter, Mr. Gandish was an excellent master, and
regarding all artists save one perhaps a good critic. Clive and his
friend J. J. came soon after and commenced their studies under him. The
one took his humble seat at the drawing-board, a poor mean-looking lad,
with worn clothes, downcast features, and a figure almost deformed; the
other adorned by good health, good looks, and the best of tailors;
ushered into the studio with his father and Mr. Smee as his
aides-de-camp on his entry; and previously announced there with all the
eloquence of honest Gandish. “I bet he’s ’ad cake and wine,” says one
youthful student, of an epicurean and satirical turn. “I bet he might
have it every day if he liked.” In fact Gandish was always handing him
sweetmeats of compliments and cordials of approbation. He had
coat-sleeves with silk linings—he had studs in his shirt. How different
was the texture and colour of that garment, to the sleeves Bob Grimes
displayed when he took his coat off to put on his working jacket!
Horses used actually to come for him to Gandish’s door (which was
situated in a certain lofty street in Soho). The Miss G.’s would smile
at him from the parlour window as he mounted and rode splendidly off;
and those opposition beauties, the Miss Levisons, daughters of the
professor of dancing over the way, seldom failed to greet the young
gentleman with an admiring ogle from their great black eyes. Master
Clive was pronounced an ‘out-and-outer,’ a ‘swell and no mistake,’ and
complimented with scarce one dissentient voice by the simple academy at
Gandish’s. Besides, he drew very well. There could be no doubt about
that. Caricatures of the students of course were passing constantly
among them, and in revenge for one which a huge red-haired Scotch
student, Mr. Sandy M’Collop, had made of John James, Clive perpetrated
a picture of Sandy which set the whole room in a roar; and when the
Caledonian giant uttered satirical remarks against the assembled
company, averring that they were a parcel of sneaks, a set of
lick-spittles, and using epithets still more vulgar, Clive slipped off
his fine silk-sleeved coat in an instant, invited Mr. M’Collop into the
back-yard, instructed him in a science which the lad himself had
acquired at Grey Friars, and administered two black eyes to Sandy,
which prevented the young artist from seeing for some days after the
head of the ‘Laocoon’ which he was copying. The Scotchman’s superior
weight and age might have given the combat a different conclusion, had
it endured long after Clive’s brilliant opening attack with his right
and left; but Professor Gandish came out of his painting-room at the
sound of battle, and could scarcely credit his own eyes when he saw
those of poor M’Collop so darkened. To do the Scotchman justice, he
bore Clive no rancour. They became friends there, and afterwards at
Rome, whither they subsequently went to pursue their studies. The fame
of Mr. M’Collop as an artist has long since been established. His
pictures of ‘Lord Lovat in Prison,’ and ‘Hogarth painting him,’ of the
‘Blowing up of the Kirk of Field’ (painted for M’Collop of M’Collop),
of the ‘Torture of the Covenanters,’ the ‘Murder of the Regent,’ the
‘Murder of Rizzio,’ and other historical pieces, all of course from
Scotch history, have established his reputation in South as well as in
North Britain. No one would suppose from the gloomy character of his
works that Sandy M’Collop is one of the most jovial souls alive. Within
six months after their little difference, Clive and he were the
greatest of friends, and it was by the former’s suggestion that Mr.
James Binnie gave Sandy his first commission, who selected the cheerful
subject of ‘The Young Duke of Rothsay starving in Prison.’

During this period, Mr. Clive assumed the _toga virilis_, and beheld
with inexpressible satisfaction the first growth of those mustachios
which have since given him such a marked appearance. Being at
Gandish’s, and so near the dancing academy, what must he do but take
lessons in the terpsichorean art too?—making himself as popular with
the dancing folks as with the drawing folks, and the jolly king of his
company everywhere. He gave entertainments to his fellow-students in
the upper chambers in Fitzroy Square, which were devoted to his use,
inviting his father and Mr. Binnie to those parties now and then. And
songs were sung, and pipes were smoked, and many a pleasant supper
eaten. There was no stint: but no excess. No young man was ever seen to
quit those apartments the worse, as it is called, for liquor. Fred
Bayham’s uncle the Bishop could not be more decorous than F. B. as he
left the Colonel’s house, for the Colonel made that one of the
conditions of his son’s hospitality, that nothing like intoxication
should ensue from it. The good gentleman did not frequent the parties
of the juniors. He saw that his presence rather silenced the young men;
and left them to themselves, confiding in Clive’s parole, and went away
to play his honest rubber of whist at the Club. And many a time he
heard the young fellows’ steps tramping by his bedchamber door, as he
lay wakeful within, happy to think his son was happy.




CHAPTER XVIII.
New Companions


Clive used to give droll accounts of the young disciples at Gandish’s,
who were of various ages and conditions, and in whose company the young
fellow took his place with that good temper and gaiety which have
seldom deserted him in life, and have put him at ease wherever his fate
has led him. He is, in truth, as much at home in a fine drawing-room as
in a public-house parlour; and can talk as pleasantly to the polite
mistress of the mansion, as to the jolly landlady dispensing her drinks
from her bar. Not one of the Gandishites but was after a while well
inclined to the young fellow; from Mr. Chivers, the senior pupil, down
to the little imp Harry Hooker, who knew as much mischief at twelve
years old, and could draw as cleverly as many a student of
five-and-twenty; and Bob Trotter, the diminutive fag of the studio, who
ran on all the young men’s errands, and fetched them in apples,
oranges, and walnuts. Clive opened his eyes with wonder when he first
beheld these simple feasts, and the pleasure with which some of the
young men partook of them. They were addicted to polonies; they did not
disguise their love for Banbury cakes; they made bets in ginger-beer,
and gave and took the odds in that frothing liquor. There was a young
Hebrew amongst the pupils, upon whom his brother-students used
playfully to press ham sandwiches, pork sausages, and the like. This
young man (who has risen to great wealth subsequently, and was bankrupt
only three months since) actually bought cocoa-nuts, and sold them at a
profit amongst the lads. His pockets were never without pencil-cases,
French chalk, garnet brooches, for which he was willing to bargain. He
behaved very rudely to Gandish, who seemed to be afraid before him. It
was whispered that the Professor was not altogether easy in his
circumstances, and that the elder Moss had some mysterious hold over
him. Honeyman and Bayham, who once came to see Clive at the studio,
seemed each disturbed at beholding young Moss seated there (making a
copy of the Marsyas). “Pa knows both those gents,” he informed Clive
afterwards, with a wicked twinkle of his Oriental eyes. “Step in, Mr.
Newcome, any day you are passing down Wardour Street, and see if you
don’t want anything in our way.” (He pronounced the words in his own
way, saying: “Step id, _Bister_ Doocob, ady day idto Vordor Street,”
etc.) This young gentleman could get tickets for almost all the
theatres, which he gave or sold, and gave splendid accounts at
Cavendish’s of the brilliant masquerades. Clive was greatly diverted at
beholding Mr. Moss at one of these entertainments, dressed in a scarlet
coat and top-boots, and calling out, “Yoicks! Hark forward!” fitfully
to another Orientalist, his younger brother, attired like a midshipman.
Once Clive bought a half-dozen of theatre tickets from Mr. Moss, which
he distributed to the young fellows of the studio. But, when this nice
young man tried further to tempt him on the next day, “Mr. Moss,” Clive
said to him with much dignity, “I am very much obliged to you for your
offer, but when I go to the play, I prefer paying at the doors.”

Mr. Chivers used to sit in one corner of the room, occupied over a
lithographic stone. He was an uncouth and peevish young man; for ever
finding fault with the younger pupils, whose butt he was. Next in rank
and age was M’Collop, before named: and these two were at first more
than usually harsh and captious with Clive, whose prosperity offended
them, and whose dandified manners, free-and-easy ways, and evident
influence over the younger scholars, gave umbrage to these elderly
apprentices. Clive at first returned Mr. Chivers war for war,
controlment for controlment; but when he found Chivers was the son of a
helpless widow; that he maintained her by his lithographic vignettes
for the music-sellers, and by the scanty remuneration of some lessons
which he gave at a school at Highgate;—when Clive saw, or fancied he
saw, the lonely senior eyeing with hungry eyes the luncheons of cheese
and bread, and sweetstuff, which the young lads of the studio enjoyed,
I promise you Mr. Clive’s wrath against Chivers was speedily turned
into compassion and kindness, and he sought, and no doubt found, means
of feeding Chivers without offending his testy independence.

Nigh to Gandish’s was, and perhaps is, another establishment for
teaching the art of design—Barker’s, which had the additional dignity
of a life academy and costume; frequented by a class of students more
advanced than those of Gandish’s. Between these and the Barkerites
there was a constant rivalry and emulation, in and out of doors.
Gandish sent more pupils to the Royal Academy; Gandish had brought up
three medallists; and the last R.A. student sent to Rome was a
Gandishite. Barker, on the contrary, scorned and loathed Trafalgar
Square, and laughed at its art. Barker exhibited in Pall Mall and
Suffolk Street: he laughed at old Gandish and his pictures, made
mincemeat of his “Angli and Angeli,” and tore “King Alfred” and his
muffins to pieces. The young men of the respective schools used to meet
at Lundy’s coffee-house and billiard-room, and smoke there, and do
battle. Before Clive and his friend J. J. came to Gandish’s, the
Barkerites were having the best of that constant match which the two
academies were playing. Fred Bayham, who knew every coffee-house in
town, and whose initials were scored on a thousand tavern doors, was
for a while a constant visitor at Lundy’s, played pool with the young
men, and did not disdain to dip his beard into their porter-pots, when
invited to partake of their drink; treated them handsomely when he was
in cash himself; and was an honorary member of Barker’s academy. Nay,
when the guardsman was not forthcoming, who was standing for one of
Barker’s heroic pictures, Bayham bared his immense arms and brawny
shoulders, and stood as Prince Edward, with Philippa sucking the
poisoned wound. He would take his friends up to the picture in the
Exhibition, and proudly point to it. “Look at that biceps, sir, and now
look at this—that’s Barker’s masterpiece, sir, and that’s the muscle of
F. B., sir.” In no company was F. B. greater than in the society of the
artists, in whose smoky haunts and airy parlours he might often be
found. It was from F. B. that Clive heard of Mr. Chivers’ struggles and
honest industry. A great deal of shrewd advice could F. B. give on
occasion, and many a kind action and gentle office of charity was this
jolly outlaw known to do and cause to be done. His advice to Clive was
most edifying at this time of our young gentleman’s life, and he owns
that he was kept from much mischief by this queer counsellor.

A few months after Clive and J. J. had entered at Gandish’s, that
academy began to hold its own against its rival. The silent young
disciple was pronounced to be a genius. His copies were beautiful in
delicacy and finish. His designs were for exquisite grace and richness
of fancy. Mr. Gandish took to himself the credit for J. J.’s genius;
Clive ever and fondly acknowledged the benefit he got from his friend’s
taste and bright enthusiasm and sure skill. As for Clive, if he was
successful in the academy he was doubly victorious out of it. His
person was handsome, his courage high, his gaiety and frankness
delightful and winning. His money was plenty and he spent it like a
young king. He could speedily beat all the club at Lundy’s at
billiards, and give points to the redoubted F. B. himself. He sang a
famous song at their jolly supper-parties: and J. J. had no greater
delight than to listen to his fresh voice, and watch the young
conqueror at the billiard-table, where the balls seemed to obey him.

Clive was not the most docile of Mr. Gandish’s pupils. If he had not
come to the studio on horseback, several of the young students averred,
Gandish would not always have been praising him and quoting him as that
professor certainly did. It must be confessed that the young ladies
read the history of Clive’s uncle in the Book of Baronets, and that
Gandish jun., probably with an eye to business, made a design of a
picture, in which, according to that veracious volume, one of the
Newcomes was represented as going cheerfully to the stake at
Smithfield, surrounded by some very ill-favoured Dominicans, whose
arguments did not appear to make the least impression upon the martyr
of the Newcome family. Sandy M’Collop devised a counter picture,
wherein the barber-surgeon of King Edward the Confessor was drawn,
operating upon the beard of that monarch. To which piece of satire
Clive gallantly replied by a design, representing Sawney Bean M’Collop,
chief of the clan of that name, descending from his mountains into
Edinburgh, and his astonishment at beholding a pair of breeches for the
first time. These playful jokes passed constantly amongst the young men
of Gandish’s studio. There was no one there who was not caricatured in
one way or another. He whose eyes looked not very straight was depicted
with a most awful squint. The youth whom nature had endowed with
somewhat lengthy nose was drawn by the caricaturists with a prodigious
proboscis. Little Bobby Moss, the young Hebrew artist from Wardour
Street, was delineated with three hats and an old-clothes bag. Nor were
poor J. J.’s round shoulders spared, until Clive indignantly
remonstrated at the hideous hunchback pictures which the boys made of
his friend, and vowed it was a shame to make jokes at such a deformity.

Our friend, if the truth must be told regarding him, though one of the
most frank, generous, and kind-hearted persons, is of a nature somewhat
haughty and imperious, and very likely the course of life which he now
led and the society which he was compelled to keep, served to increase
some original defects in his character, and to fortify a certain
disposition to think well of himself, with which his enemies not
unjustly reproach him. He has been known very pathetically to lament
that he was withdrawn from school too early, where a couple of years’
further course of thrashings from his tyrant, old Hodge, he avers,
would have done him good. He laments that he was not sent to college,
where if a young man receives no other discipline, at least he acquires
that of meeting with his equals in society and of assuredly finding his
betters: whereas in poor Mr. Gandish’s studio of art, our young
gentleman scarcely found a comrade that was not in one way or other his
flatterer, his inferior, his honest or dishonest admirer. The influence
of his family’s rank and wealth acted more or less on all those simple
folks, who would run on his errands and vied with each other in winning
the young nabob’s favour. His very goodness of heart rendered him a
more easy prey to their flattery, and his kind and jovial disposition
led him into company from which he had been much better away. I am
afraid that artful young Moss, whose parents dealt in pictures,
furniture, gimcracks, and jewellery, victimised Clive sadly with rings
and chains, shirt-studs and flaming shirt-pins, and such vanities,
which the poor young rogue locked up in his desk generally, only
venturing to wear them when he was out of his father’s sight or of Mr.
Binnie’s, whose shrewd eyes watched him very keenly.

Mr. Clive used to leave home every day shortly after noon, when he was
supposed to betake himself to Gandish’s studio. But was the young
gentleman always at the drawing-board copying from the antique when his
father supposed him to be so devotedly engaged? I fear his place was
sometimes vacant. His friend J. J. worked every day and all day. Many a
time the steady little student remarked his patron’s absence, and no
doubt gently remonstrated with him, but when Clive did come to his work
he executed it with remarkable skill and rapidity; and Ridley was too
fond of him to say a word at home regarding the shortcomings of the
youthful scapegrace. Candid readers may sometimes have heard their
friend Jones’s mother lament that her darling was working too hard at
college: or Harry’s sisters express their anxiety lest his too rigorous
attendance in chambers (after which he will persist in sitting up all
night reading those dreary law books which cost such an immense sum of
money) should undermine dear Henry’s health; and to such acute persons
a word is sufficient to indicate young Mr. Clive Newcome’s proceedings.
Meanwhile his father, who knew no more of the world than Harry’s simple
sisters or Jones’s fond mother, never doubted that all Clive’s doings
were right, and that his boy was the best of boys.

“If that young man goes on as charmingly as he has begun,” Clive’s
cousin, Barnes Newcome, said of his kinsman, “he will be a paragon. I
saw him last night at Vauxhall in company with young Moss, whose father
does bills and keeps the bric-a-brac shop in Wardour Street. Two or
three other gentlemen, probably young old-clothes-men, who had
concluded for the day the labours of the bag, joined Mr. Newcome and
his friend, and they partook of rack-punch in an arbour. He is a
delightful youth, cousin Clive, and I feel sure he is about to be an
honour to our family.”




CHAPTER XIX.
The Colonel at Home


Our good Colonel’s house had received a coat of paint, which, like
Madame Latour’s rouge in her latter days, only served to make her
careworn face look more ghastly. The kitchens were gloomy. The stables
were gloomy. Great black passages; cracked conservatory; dilapidated
bathroom, with melancholy waters moaning and fizzing from the cistern;
the great large blank stone staircase—were all so many melancholy
features in the general countenance of the house; but the Colonel
thought it perfectly, cheerful and pleasant, and furnished it in his
rough-and-ready way. One day a cartload of chairs; the next a waggonful
of fenders, fire-irons, and glass and crockery—a quantity of supplies,
in a word, he poured into the place. There were a yellow curtain in the
back drawing-room, and green curtains in the front. The carpet was an
immense bargain, bought dirt cheap, sir, at a sale in Euston Square. He
was against the purchase of a carpet for the stairs. What was the good
of it? What did men want with stair-carpets? His own apartment
contained a wonderful assortment of lumber. Shelves which he nailed
himself, old Indian garments, camphor trunks. What did he want with
gewgaws? anything was good enough for an old soldier. But the spare
bedroom was endowed with all sorts of splendour: a bed as big as a
general’s tent, a cheval glass—whereas the Colonel shaved in a little
cracked mirror, which cost him no more than King Stephen’s breeches—and
a handsome new carpet; while the boards of the Colonel’s bedchamber
were as bare—as bare as old Miss Scragg’s shoulders, which would be so
much more comfortable were they covered up. Mr. Binnie’s bedchamber was
neat, snug, and appropriate. And Clive had a study and bedroom at the
top of the house, which he was allowed to furnish entirely according to
his own taste. How he and Ridley revelled in Wardour Street! What
delightful coloured prints of hunting, racing, and beautiful ladies,
did they not purchase, mount with their own hands, cut out for screens,
frame and glaze, and hang up on the walls. When the rooms were ready
they gave a party, inviting the Colonel and Mr. Binnie by note of hand,
two gentlemen from Lamb Court, Temple, Mr. Honeyman, and Fred Bayham.
We must have Fred Bayham. Fred Bayham frankly asked, “Is Mr. Sherrick,
with whom you have become rather intimate lately—and mind you I say
nothing, but I recommend strangers in London to be cautious about their
friends—is Mr. Sherrick coming to you, young ’un? because if he is, F.
B. must respectfully decline.”

Mr. Sherrick was not invited, and accordingly F. B. came. But Sherrick
was invited on other days, and a very queer society did our honest
Colonel gather together in that queer house, so dreary, so dingy, so
comfortless, so pleasant. He, who was one of the most hospitable men
alive, loved to have his friends around him; and it must be confessed
that the evening parties now occasionally given in Fitzroy Square were
of the oddest assemblage of people. The correct East India gentlemen
from Hanover Square: the artists, Clive’s friends, gentlemen of all
ages with all sorts of beards, in every variety of costume. Now and
again a stray schoolfellow from Grey Friars, who stared, as well he
might, at the company in which he found himself. Sometimes a few ladies
were brought to these entertainments. The immense politeness of the
good host compensated some of them for the strangeness of his company.
They had never seen such odd-looking hairy men as those young artists,
nor such wonderful women as Colonel Newcome assembled together. He was
good to all old maids and poor widows. Retired captains with large
families of daughters found in him their best friend. He sent carriages
to fetch them and bring them back from the suburbs where they dwelt.
Gandish, Mrs. Gandish, and the four Miss Gandishes in scarlet robes,
were constant attendants at the Colonel’s soirées.

“I delight, sir, in the ’ospitality of my distinguished military
friend,” Mr. Gandish would say. “The harmy has always been my
passion.—I served in the Soho Volunteers three years myself, till the
conclusion of the war, sir, till the conclusion of the war.”

It was a great sight to see Mr. Frederick Bayham engaged in the waltz
or the quadrille with some of the elderly houris at the Colonel’s
parties. F. B., like a good-natured F. B. as he was, always chose the
plainest women as partners, and entertained them with profound
compliments and sumptuous conversation. The Colonel likewise danced
quadrilles with the utmost gravity. Waltzing had been invented long
since his time: but he practised quadrilles when they first came in,
about 1817, in Calcutta. To see him leading up a little old maid, and
bowing to her when the dance was ended, and performing cavalier seul
with stately simplicity, was a sight indeed to remember. If Clive
Newcome had not such a fine sense of humour, he would have blushed for
his father’s simplicity.—As it was, the elder’s guileless goodness and
childlike trustfulness endeared him immensely to his son. “Look at the
old boy, Pendennis,” he would say, “look at him leading up that old
Miss Tidswell to the piano. Doesn’t he do it like an old duke? I lay a
wager she thinks she is going to be my mother-in-law; all the women are
in love with him, young and old. ‘Should he upbraid?’ There she goes.
‘I’ll own that he’ll prevail, and sing as sweetly as a nigh-tin-gale!’
Oh, you old warbler! Look at father’s old head bobbing up and down!
Wouldn’t he do for Sir Roger de Coverley? How do you do, Uncle
Charles?—I say, M’Collop, how gets on the Duke of What-d’ye-call-’em
starving in the castle?—Gandish says it’s very good.” The lad retires
to a group of artists. Mr. Honeyman comes up with a faint smile playing
on his features, like moonlight on the facade of Lady Whittlesea’s
Chapel.

“These parties are the most singular I have ever seen,” whispers
Honeyman. “In entering one of these assemblies, one is struck with the
immensity of London: and with the sense of one’s own insignificance.
Without, I trust, departing from my clerical character, nay, from my
very avocation as incumbent of a London chapel,—I have seen a good deal
of the world, and here is an assemblage no doubt of most respectable
persons, on scarce one of whom I ever set eyes till this evening. Where
does my good brother find such characters?”

“That,” says Mr. Honeyman’s interlocutor, “is the celebrated, though
neglected artist, Professor Gandish, whom nothing but jealousy has kept
out of the Royal Academy. Surely you have heard of the great Gandish?”

“Indeed I am ashamed to confess my ignorance, but a clergyman busy with
his duties knows little, perhaps too little, of the fine arts.”

“Gandish, sir, is one of the greatest geniuses on whom our ungrateful
country ever trampled; he exhibited his first celebrated picture of
‘Alfred in the Neatherd’s Hut’ (he says he is the first who ever
touched that subject) in 180-; but Lord Nelson’s death, and victory of
Trafalgar, occupied the public attention at that time, and Gandish’s
work went unnoticed. In the year 1816, he painted his great work of
‘Boadicea.’ You see her before you. That lady in yellow, with a light
front and a turban. Boadicea became Mrs. Gandish in that year. So late
as ’27, he brought before the world his ‘Non Angli sed Angeli.’ Two of
the angels are yonder in sea-green dresses—the Misses Gandish. The
youth in Berlin gloves was the little male angelus of that piece.”

“How came you to know all this, you strange man?” says Mr. Honeyman.

“Simply because Gandish has told me twenty times. He tells the story to
everybody, every time he sees them. He told it to-day at dinner.
Boadicea and the angels came afterwards.”

“Satire! satire! Mr. Pendennis,” says the divine, holding up a
reproving finger of lavender kid, “beware of a wicked wit!—But when a
man has that tendency, I know how difficult it is to restrain. My dear
Colonel, good evening! You have a great reception to-night. That
gentleman’s bass voice is very fine; Mr. Pendennis and I were admiring
it. ‘The Wolf’ is a song admirably adapted to show its capabilities.”

Mr. Gandish’s autobiography had occupied the whole time of the
retirement of the ladies from Colonel Newcome’s dinner-table. Mr.
Hobson Newcome had been asleep during the performance; Sir Curry
Baughton and one or two of the Colonel’s professional and military
guests, silent and puzzled. Honest Mr. Binnie, with his shrewd
good-humoured face, sipping his claret as usual, and delivering a sly
joke now and again to the gentlemen at his end of the table. Mrs.
Newcome had sat by him in sulky dignity; was it that Lady Baughton’s
diamonds offended her?—her ladyship and her daughters being attired in
great splendour for a Court ball, which they were to attend that
evening. Was she hurt because SHE was not invited to that Royal
Entertainment? As the festivities were to take place at an early hour,
the ladies bidden were obliged to quit the Colonel’s house before the
evening part commenced, from which Lady Anne declared she was quite
vexed to be obliged to run away.

Lady Anne Newcome had been as gracious on this occasion as her
sister-in-law had been out of humour. Everything pleased her in the
house. She had no idea that there were such fine houses in that quarter
of the town. She thought the dinner so very nice,—that Mr Binnie such a
good-humoured-looking gentleman. That stout gentleman with his collars
turned down like Lord Byron, so exceedingly clever and full of
information. A celebrated artist was he? (courtly Mr. Smee had his own
opinion upon that point, but did not utter it). All those artists are
so eccentric and amusing and clever. Before dinner she insisted upon
seeing Clive’s den with its pictures and casts and pipes. “You horrid
young wicked creature, have you begun to smoke already?” she asks, as
she admires his room. She admired everything. Nothing could exceed her
satisfaction.

The sisters-in-law kissed on meeting, with that cordiality so
delightful to witness in sisters who dwell together in unity. It was,
“My dear Maria, what an age since I have seen you!” “My dear Anne, our
occupations are so engrossing, our circles are so different,” in a
languid response from the other. “Sir Brian is not coming, I suppose?
Now, Colonel,” she turns in a frisky manner towards him, and taps her
fan, “did I not tell you Sir Brian would not come?”

“He is kept at the House of Commons, my dear. Those dreadful
committees. He was quite vexed at not being able to come.”

“I know, I know, dear Anne, there are always excuses to gentlemen in
Parliament; I have received many such. Mr. Shaloo and Mr. M’Sheny, the
leaders of our party, often and often disappoint me. I _knew_ Brian
would not come. _My_ husband came down from Marble Head on purpose this
morning. Nothing would have induced us to give up our brother’s party.”

“I believe you. I did come down from Marble Head this morning, and I
was four hours in the hay-field before I came away, and in the City
till five, and I’ve been to look at a horse afterwards at Tattersall’s,
and I’m as hungry as a hunter, and as tired as a hodman,” says Mr.
Newcome, with his hands in his pockets. “How do you do, Mr. Pendennis?
Maria, you remember Mr. Pendennis—don’t you?”

“Perfectly,” replies the languid Maria. Mrs. Gandish, Colonel Topham,
Major M’Cracken, are announced, and then, in diamonds, feathers, and
splendour, Lady Baughton and Miss Baughton, who are going to the
Queen’s ball, and Sir Curry Baughton, not quite in his
deputy-lieutenant’s uniform as yet, looking very shy in a pair of blue
trousers, with a glittering stripe of silver down the seams. Clive
looks with wonder and delight at these ravishing ladies, rustling in
fresh brocades, with feathers, diamonds, and every magnificence. Aunt
Anne has not her Court dress on as yet; and Aunt Maria blushes as she
beholds the new comers, having thought fit to attire herself in a high
dress, with a Quaker-like simplicity, and a pair of gloves more than
ordinarily dingy. The pretty little foot she has, it is true, and
sticks it out from habit; but what is Mrs. Newcome’s foot compared with
that sweet little chaussure which Miss Baughton exhibits and withdraws?
The shiny white satin slipper, the pink stocking which ever and anon
peeps from the rustling folds of her robe, and timidly retires into its
covert—that foot, light as it is, crushes Mrs. Newcome.

No wonder she winces, and is angry; there are some mischievous persons
who rather like to witness that discomfiture. All Mr. Smee’s flatteries
that day failed to soothe her. She was in the state in which his
canvasses sometimes are, when he cannot paint on them.

What happened to her alone in the drawing-room, when the ladies invited
to the dinner had departed, and those convoked to the soirée began to
arrive,—what happened to her or to them I do not like to think. The
Gandishes arrived first. Boadicea and the angels. We judged from the
fact that young Mr. Gandish came blushing in to the dessert. Name after
name was announced of persons of whom Mrs. Newcome knew nothing. The
young and the old, the pretty and homely, they were all in their best
dresses, and no doubt stared at Mrs. Newcome, so obstinately plain in
her attire. When we came upstairs from dinner, we found her seated
entirely by herself, tapping her fan at the fireplace. Timid groups of
persons were round about, waiting for the irruption of the gentlemen,
until the pleasure should begin. Mr. Newcome, who came upstairs
yawning, was heard to say to his wife, “Oh, dam, let’s cut!” And they
went downstairs, and waited until their carriage had arrived, when they
quitted Fitzroy Square.

Mr. Barnes Newcome presently arrived, looking particularly smart and
lively, with a large flower in his button-hole, and leaning on the arm
of a friend. “How do you do, Pendennis?” he says, with a peculiarly
dandified air. “Did you dine here? You look as if you dined here” (and
Barnes, certainly, as if he had dined elsewhere). “I was only asked to
the cold soirée. Who did you have for dinner? You had my mamma and the
Baughtons, and my uncle and aunt, I know, for they are down below in
the library, waiting for the carriage: he is asleep, and she is as
sulky as a bear.”

“Why did Mrs. Newcome say I should find nobody I knew up here?” asks
Barnes’s companion. “On the contrary, there are lots of fellows I know.
There’s Fred Bayham, dancing like a harlequin. There’s old Gandish, who
used to be my drawing-master; and my Brighton friends, your uncle and
cousin, Barnes. What relations are they to me? must be some relations.
Fine fellow your cousin.”

“Hm,” growls Barnes. “Very fine boy,—not spirited at all,—not fond of
flattery,—not surrounded by toadies,—not fond of drink,—delightful boy!
See yonder, the young fellow is in conversation with his most intimate
friend, a little crooked fellow, with long hair. Do you know who he is?
he is the son of old Todmoreton’s butler. Upon my life it’s true.”

“And suppose it is; what the deuce do I care!” cries Lord Kew. “Who can
be more respectable than a butler? A man must be somebody’s son. When I
am a middle-aged man, I hope humbly I shall look like a butler myself.
Suppose you were to put ten of Gunter’s men into the House of Lords, do
you mean to say that they would not look as well as any average ten
peers in the house? Look at Lord Westcot; he is exactly like a butler
that’s why the country has such confidence in him. I never dine with
him but I fancy he ought to be at the sideboard. Here comes that
insufferable little old Smee. How do you do, Mr. Smee?”

Mr. Smee smiles his sweetest smile. With his rings, diamond
shirt-studs, and red velvet waistcoat, there are few more elaborate
middle-aged bucks than Alfred Smee. “How do you do, my dear lord?”
cries the bland one. “Who would ever have thought of seeing your
lordship here?”

“Why the deuce not, Mr. Smee?” asks Lord Kew, abruptly. “Is it wrong to
come here? I have been in the house only five minutes, and three people
have said the same thing to me—Mrs. Newcome, who is sitting downstairs
in a rage waiting for her carriage, the condescending Barnes, and
yourself. Why do you come here, Since? How are you, Mr. Gandish? How do
the fine arts go?”

“Your lordship’s kindness in asking for them will cheer them if
anything will,” says Mr. Gandish. “Your noble family has always
patronised them. I am proud to be reckonised by your lordship in this
house, where the distinguished father of one of my pupils entertains us
this evening. A most promising young man is young Mr. Clive—talents for
a hamateur really most remarkable.”

“Excellent, upon my word—excellent,” cries Mr. Smee. “I’m not an animal
painter myself, and perhaps don’t think much of that branch of the
profession; but it seems to me the young fellow draws horses with the
most wonderful spirit. I hope Lady Walham is very well, and that she
was satisfied with her son’s portrait. Stockholm, I think, your brother
is appointed to? I wish I might be allowed to paint the elder as well
as the younger brother, my lord.”

“I am an historical painter; but whenever Lord Kew is painted I hope
his lordship will think of the old servant of his lordship’s family,
Charles Gandish,” cries the Professor.

“I am like Susannah between the two Elders,” says Lord Kew. “Let my
innocence alone, Smee. Mr. Gandish, don’t persecute my modesty with
your addresses. I won’t be painted. I am not a fit subject for a
historical painter, Mr. Gandish.”

“Halcibiades sat to Praxiteles, and Pericles to Phridjas,” remarks
Gandish.

“The cases are not quite similar,” says Lord Kew, languidly. “You are
no doubt fully equal to Praxiteles; but I don’t see my resemblance to
the other party. I should not look well as a hero, and Smee could not
paint me handsome enough.”

“I would try, my dear lord,” cries Mr. Smee.

“I know you would, my dear fellow,” Lord Kew answered, looking at the
painter with a lazy scorn in his eyes. “Where is Colonel Newcome, Mr.
Gandish?” Mr. Gandish replied that our gallant host was dancing a
quadrille in the next room; and the young gentleman walked on towards
that apartment to pay his respects to the giver of the evening’s
entertainment.

Newcome’s behaviour to the young peer was ceremonious, but not in the
least servile. He saluted the other’s superior rank, not his person, as
he turned the guard out for a general officer. He never could be
brought to be otherwise than cold and grave in his behaviour to John
James; nor was it without difficulty, when young Ridley and his son
became pupils at Gandish’s, he could be induced to invite the former to
his parties. “An artist is any man’s equal,” he said. “I have no
prejudice of that sort; and think that Sir Joshua Reynolds and Doctor
Johnson were fit company for any person, of whatever rank. But a young
man whose father may have had to wait behind me at dinner, should not
be brought into my company.” Clive compromises the dispute with a
laugh. “First,” says he, “I will wait till I am asked; and then I
promise I will not go to dine with Lord Todmoreton.”




CHAPTER XX.
Contains more Particulars of the Colonel and his Brethren


Clive’s amusements, studies, or occupations, such as they were, filled
his day pretty completely, and caused the young gentleman’s time to
pass rapidly and pleasantly, his father, it must be owned, had no such
resources, and the good Colonel’s idleness hung heavily upon him. He
submitted very kindly to this infliction, however, as he would have
done to any other for Clive’s sake; and though he may have wished
himself back with his regiment again, and engaged in the pursuits in
which his life had been spent, he chose to consider these desires as
very selfish and blameable on his part, and sacrificed them resolutely
for his son’s welfare. The young fellow, I dare say, gave his parent no
more credit for his long self-denial, than many other children award to
theirs. We take such life-offerings as our due commonly. The old French
satirist avers that, in a love affair, there is usually one person who
loves, and the other, _qui se laisse aimer;_ it is only in later days,
perhaps, when the treasures of love are spent, and the kind hand cold
which ministered them, that we remember how tender it was; how soft to
soothe; how eager to shield; how ready to support and caress. The ears
may no longer hear, which would have received our words of thanks so
delightedly. Let us hope those fruits of love, though tardy, are yet
not all too late; and though we bring our tribute of reverence and
gratitude, it may be to a gravestone, there is an acceptance even there
for the stricken heart’s oblation of fond remorse, contrite memories,
and pious tears. I am thinking of the love of Clive Newcome’s father
for him (and, perhaps, young reader, that of yours and mine for
ourselves); how the old man lay awake, and devised kindnesses, and gave
his all for the love of his son; and the young man took, and spent, and
slept, and made merry. Did we not say at our tale’s commencement that
all stories were old? Careless prodigals and anxious elders have been
from the beginning:—and so may love, and repentance, and forgiveness
endure even till the end.

The stifling fogs, the slippery mud, the dun dreary November mornings,
when the Regent’s Park, where the Colonel took his early walk, was
wrapped in yellow mist, must have been a melancholy exchange for the
splendour of Eastern sunrise, and the invigorating gallop at dawn, to
which, for so many years of his life, Thomas Newcome had accustomed
himself. His obstinate habit of early waking accompanied him to
England, and occasioned the despair of his London domestics, who, if
master wasn’t so awful early, would have found no fault with him; for a
gentleman as gives less trouble to his servants; as scarcely ever rings
the bell for his self; as will brush his own clothes; as will even boil
his own shaving-water in the little hetna which he keeps up in his
dressing-room; as pays so regular, and never looks twice at the
accounts; such a man deserved to be loved by his household, and I dare
say comparisons were made between him and his son, who do ring the
bells, and scold if his boots ain’t nice, and horder about like a young
lord. But Clive, though imperious, was very liberal and good-humoured,
and not the worse served because he insisted upon exerting his youthful
authority. As for friend Binnie, he had a hundred pursuits of his own,
which made his time pass very comfortably. He had all the Lectures at
the British Institution; he had the Geographical Society, the Asiatic
Society, and the Political Economy Club; and though he talked year
after year of going to visit his relations in Scotland, the months and
seasons passed away, and his feet still beat the London pavement.

In spite of the cold reception his brothers gave him, duty was duty,
and Colonel Newcome still proposed, or hoped to be well with the female
members of the Newcome family; and having, as we have said, plenty of
time on his hands, and living at no very great distance from either of
his brothers’ town houses, when their wives were in London, the elder
Newcome was for paying them pretty constant visits. But after the good
gentleman had called twice or thrice upon his sister-in-law in
Bryanstone Square—bringing, as was his wont, a present for this little
niece, or a book for that—Mrs. Newcome, with her usual virtue, gave him
to understand that the occupation of an English matron, who, besides
her multifarious family duties, had her own intellectual culture to
mind, would not allow her to pass the mornings in idle gossips: and of
course took great credit to herself for having so rebuked him. “I am
not above instruction of any age,” says she, thanking Heaven (or
complimenting it, rather, for having created a being so virtuous and
humble-minded). “When Professor Schroff comes, I sit with my children,
and take lessons in German,—and I say my verbs with Maria and Tommy in
the same class!” Yes, with curtsies and fine speeches she actually
bowed her brother out of doors; and the honest gentleman meekly left
her, though with bewilderment, as he thought of the different
hospitality to which he had been accustomed in the East, where no
friend’s house was ever closed to him, where no neighbour was so busy
but he had time to make Thomas Newcome welcome.

When Hobson Newcome’s boys came home for the holidays, their kind uncle
was for treating them to the sights of the town, but here Virtue again
interposed and laid its interdict upon pleasure. “Thank you, very much,
my dear Colonel,” says Virtue, “there never was surely such a kind,
affectionate, unselfish creature as you are, and so indulgent for
children, but my boys and yours are brought up on a _very different_
plan. Excuse me for saying that I do not think it is advisable that
they should even see too much of each other. Clive’s company is not
good for them.”

“Great heavens, Maria!” cries the Colonel, starting up, “do you mean
that my boy’s society is not good enough for any boy alive?”

Maria turned very red: she had said not more than she meant, but more
than she meant to say. “My dear Colonel, how hot we are! how angry you
Indian gentlemen become with us poor women! Your boy is much older than
mine. He lives with artists, with all sorts of eccentric people. Our
children are bred on _quite a different plan_. Hobson will succeed his
father in the bank, and dear Samuel I trust will go into the Church. I
told you, before, the views I had regarding the boys: but it was most
kind of you to think of them—most generous and kind.”

“That nabob of ours is a queer fish,” Hobson Newcome remarked to his
nephew Barnes. “He is as proud as Lucifer, he is always taking huff
about one thing or the other. He went off in a fume the other night
because your aunt objected to his taking the boys to the play. She
don’t like their going to the play. My mother didn’t either. Your aunt
is a woman who is uncommon wideawake, I can tell you.”

“I always knew, sir, that my aunt was perfectly aware of the time of
the day,” says Barnes, with a bow.

“And then the Colonel flies out about his boy, and says that my wife
insulted him! I used to like that boy. Before his father came he was a
good lad enough—a jolly brave little fellow.”

“I confess I did not know Mr. Clive at that interesting period of his
existence,” remarks Barnes.

“But since he has taken this madcap freak of turning painter,” the
uncle continues, “there is no understanding the chap. Did you ever see
such a set of fellows as the Colonel had got together at his party the
other night? Dirty chaps in velvet coats and beards? They looked like a
set of mountebanks. And this young Clive is going to turn painter!”

“Very advantageous thing for the family. He’ll do our pictures for
nothing. I always said he was a darling boy,” simpered Barnes.

“Darling jackass!” growled out the senior. “Confound it, why doesn’t my
brother set him up in some respectable business? I ain’t proud. I have
not married an earl’s daughter. No offence to you, Barnes.”

“Not at all, sir. I can’t help it if my grandfather is a gentleman,”
says Barnes, with a fascinating smile.

The uncle laughs. “I mean I don’t care what a fellow is if he is a good
fellow. But a painter! hang it—a painter’s no trade at all—I don’t
fancy seeing one of our family sticking up pictures for sale. I don’t
like it, Barnes.”

“Hush! here comes his distinguished friend, Mr. Pendennis,” whispers
Barnes; and the uncle growling out, “Damn all literary fellows—all
artists—the whole lot of them!” turns away. Barnes waves three languid
fingers of recognition towards Pendennis: and when the uncle and nephew
have moved out of the club newspaper room, little Tom Eaves comes up
and tells the present reporter every word of their conversation.

Very soon Mrs. Newcome announced that their Indian brother found the
society of Bryanstone Square very little to his taste, as indeed how
should he? being a man of a good harmless disposition certainly, but of
small intellectual culture. It could not be helped. She had done her
utmost to make him welcome, and grieved that their pursuits were not
more congenial. She heard that he was much more intimate in Park Lane.
Possibly the superior rank of Lady Anne’s family might present charms
to Colonel Newcome, who fell asleep at her assemblies. His boy, she was
afraid, was leading the most _irregular life_. He was growing a pair of
mustachios, and going about with all sorts of wild associates. She
found no fault; who was she, to find fault with any one? But she had
been compelled to hint that her children must not be too intimate with
him. And so, between one brother who meant no unkindness, and another
who was all affection and goodwill, this undoubting woman created
difference, distrust, dislike, which might one day possibly lead to
open rupture. The wicked are wicked, no doubt, and they go astray and
they fall, and they come by their deserts: but who can tell the
mischief which the very virtuous do?

To her sister-in-law, Lady Anne, the Colonel’s society was more
welcome. The affectionate gentleman never tired of doing kindnesses to
his brother’s many children; and as Mr. Clive’s pursuits now separated
him a good deal from his father, the Colonel, not perhaps without a
sigh that fate should so separate him from the society which he loved
best in the world, consoled himself as best he might with his nephews
and nieces, especially with Ethel, for whom his _belle passion_
conceived at first sight never diminished. If Uncle Newcome had a
hundred children, Ethel said, who was rather jealous of disposition, he
would spoil them all. He found a fine occupation in breaking a pretty
little horse for her, of which he made her a present, and there was no
horse in the Park that was so handsome, and surely no girl who looked
more beautiful than Ethel Newcome with her broad hat and red ribbon,
with her thick black locks waving round her bright face, galloping
along the ride on Bhurtpore. Occasionally Clive was at their
riding-parties, when the Colonel would fall back and fondly survey the
young people cantering side by side over the grass: but by a tacit
convention it was arranged that the cousins should be but seldom
together; the Colonel might be his niece’s companion and no one could
receive him with a more joyous welcome, but when Mr. Clive made his
appearance with his father at the Park Lane door, a certain _gêne_ was
visible in Miss Ethel, who would never mount except with Colonel
Newcome’s assistance, and who, especially after Mr. Clive’s famous
mustachios made their appearance, rallied him, and remonstrated with
him regarding those ornaments, and treated him with much distance and
dignity. She asked him if he was going into the army? she could not
understand how any but military men could wear mustachios; and then she
looked fondly and archly at her uncle, and said she liked none that
were not grey.

Clive set her down as a very haughty, spoiled, aristocratic young
creature. If he had been in love with her, no doubt he would have
sacrificed even those beloved new-born whiskers for the charmer. Had he
not already bought on credit the necessary implements in a fine
dressing-case, from young Moss? But he was not in love with her;
otherwise he would have found a thousand opportunities of riding with
her, walking with her, meeting her, in spite of all prohibitions tacit
or expressed, all governesses, guardians, mamma’s punctilios, and kind
hints from friends. For a while, Mr. Clive thought himself in love with
his cousin; than whom no more beautiful young girl could be seen in any
park, ball, or drawing-room; and he drew a hundred pictures of her, and
discoursed about her beauties to J. J., who fell in love with her on
hearsay. But at this time Mademoiselle Saltarelli was dancing at Drury
Lane Theatre, and it certainly may be said that Clive’s first love was
bestowed upon that beauty: whose picture of course he drew in most of
her favourite characters; and for whom his passion lasted until the end
of the season, when her night was announced, tickets to be had at the
theatre, or of Mademoiselle Saltarelli, Buckingham Street, Strand. Then
it was that with a throbbing heart and a five-pound note, to engage
places for the houri’s benefit, Clive beheld Madame Rogomme,
Mademoiselle Saltarelli’s mother, who entertained him in the French
language in a dark parlour smelling of onions. And oh! issuing from the
adjoining dining-room (where was a dingy vision of a feast and pewter
pots upon a darkling tablecloth), could that lean, scraggy, old,
beetle-browed yellow face, who cried, “Ou es tu donc, maman?” with such
a shrill nasal voice—could that elderly vixen be that blooming and
divine Saltarelli? Clive drew her picture as she was, and a likeness of
Madame Rogomme, her mamma; a Mosaic youth, profusely jewelled, and
scented at once with tobacco and eau-de-cologne, occupied Clive’s stall
on Mademoiselle Saltarelli’s night. It was young Mr. Moss, of Gandish’s
to whom Newcome ceded his place, and who laughed (as he always did at
Clive’s jokes) when the latter told the story of his interview with the
dancer. “Paid five pound to see that woman! I could have took you
behind the scenes” (or “beide the seeds,” Mr. Moss said) “and showed
her to you for nothing.” Did he take Clive behind the scenes? Over this
part of the young gentleman’s life, without implying the least harm to
him—for have not others been behind the scenes; and can there be any
more dreary object than those whitened and raddled old women who
shudder at the slips?—over this stage of Clive Newcome’s life we may
surely drop the curtain.

It is pleasanter to contemplate that kind old face of Clive’s father,
that sweet young blushing lady by his side, as the two ride homewards
at sunset. The grooms behind in quiet conversation about horses, as men
never tire of talking about horses. Ethel wants to know about battles;
about lovers’ lamps, which she has read of in Lalla Rookh. “Have you
ever seen them, uncle, floating down the Ganges of a night?” About
Indian widows. “Did you actually see one burning, and hear her scream
as you rode up?” She wonders whether he will tell her anything about
Clive’s mother: how she must have loved Uncle Newcome! Ethel can’t
bear, somehow, to think that her name was Mrs. Casey, perhaps he was
very fond of her; though he scarcely ever mentions her name. She was
nothing like that good old funny Miss Honeyman at Brighton. Who could
the person be?—a person that her uncle knew ever so long ago—a French
lady, whom her uncle says Ethel often resembles? That is why he speaks
French so well. He can recite whole pages out of Racine. Perhaps it was
the French lady who taught him. And he was not very happy at the
Hermitage (though grandpapa was a very kind good man), and he upset
papa in a little carriage, and was wild, and got into disgrace, and was
sent to India? He could not have been very bad, Ethel thinks, looking
at him with her honest eyes. Last week he went to the Drawing-room, and
papa presented him. His uniform of grey and silver was quite old, yet
he looked much grander than Sir Brian in his new deputy-lieutenant’s
dress. “Next year, when I am presented, you must come too, sir,” says
Ethel. “I insist upon it, you must come too!”

“I will order a new uniform, Ethel,” says her uncle.

The girl laughs. “When little Egbert took hold of your sword, uncle,
and asked you how many people you had killed, do you know I had the
same question in my mind; and I thought when you went to the
Drawing-room, perhaps the King will knight him. But instead he knighted
mamma’s apothecary, Sir Danby Jilks: that horrid little man, and I
won’t have you knighted any more.”

“I hope Egbert won’t ask Sir Danby Jilks how many people HE has
killed,” says the Colonel, laughing; but thinking the joke too severe
upon Sir Danby and the profession, he forthwith apologises by narrating
many anecdotes he knows to the credit of surgeons. How, when the fever
broke out on board the ship going to India, their surgeon devoted
himself to the safety of the crew, and died himself, leaving directions
for the treatment of the patients when he was gone! What heroism the
doctors showed during the cholera in India; and what courage he had
seen some of them exhibit in action: attending the wounded men under
the hottest fire, and exposing themselves as readily as the bravest
troops. Ethel declares that her uncle always will talk of other
people’s courage, and never say a word about his own; “and the only
reason,” she says, “which made me like that odious Sir Thomas de Boots,
who laughs so, and looks so red, and pays such horrid compliments to
all ladies, was, that he praised you, uncle, at Newcome, last year,
when Barnes and he came to us at Christmas. Why did you not come? Mamma
and I went to see your old nurse; and we found her such a nice old
lady.” So the pair talk kindly on, riding homewards through the
pleasant summer twilight. Mamma had gone out to dinner; and there were
cards for three parties afterwards. “Oh, how I wish it was next year!”
says Miss Ethel.

Many a splendid assembly, and many a brilliant next year, will the
ardent and hopeful young creature enjoy; but in the midst of her
splendour and triumphs, buzzing flatterers, conquered rivals, prostrate
admirers, no doubt she will think sometimes of that quiet season before
the world began for her, and that dear old friend, on whose arm she
leaned while she was yet a young girl.

The Colonel comes to Park Street early in the forenoon, when the
mistress of the house, surrounded by her little ones, is administering
dinner to them. He behaves with splendid courtesy to Miss Quigley, the
governess, and makes a point of taking wine with her, and of making a
most profound bow during that ceremony. Miss Quigley cannot help
thinking Colonel Newcome’s bow very fine. She has an idea that his late
Majesty must have bowed in that way: she flutteringly imparts this
opinion to Lady Anne’s maid; who tells her mistress, who tells Miss
Ethel, who watches the Colonel the next time he takes wine with Miss
Quigley, and they laugh, and then Ethel tells him; so that the
gentleman and the governess have to blush ever after when they drink
wine together. When she is walking with her little charges in the Park,
or in that before-mentioned paradise nigh to Apsley House, faint
signals of welcome appear on her wan cheeks. She knows the dear Colonel
amongst a thousand horsemen. If Ethel makes for her uncle purses,
guard-chains, antimacassars, and the like beautiful and useful
articles, I believe it is in reality Miss Quigley who does four-fifths
of the work, as she sits alone in the schoolroom, high, high up in that
lone house, when the little ones are long since asleep, before her
dismal little tea-tray, and her little desk containing her mother’s
letters and her mementos of home.

There are, of course, numberless fine parties in Park Lane, where the
Colonel knows he would be very welcome. But if there be grand
assemblies, he does not care to come. “I like to go to the club best,”
he says to Lady Anne. “We talk there as you do here about persons, and
about Jack marrying, and Tom dying, and so forth. But we have known
Jack and Tom all our lives, and so are interested in talking about
them. Just as you are in speaking of your own friends and habitual
society. They are people whose names I have sometimes read in the
newspaper, but whom I never thought of meeting until I came to your
house. What has an old fellow like me to say to your young dandies or
old dowagers?”

“Mamma is very odd and sometimes very captious, my dear Colonel,” said
Lady Anne, with a blush; “she suffers so frightfully from tic that we
are all bound to pardon her.”

Truth to tell, old Lady Kew had been particularly rude to Colonel
Newcome and Clive. Ethel’s birthday befell in the spring, on which
occasion she was wont to have a juvenile assembly, chiefly of girls of
her own age and condition; who came, accompanied by a few governesses,
and they played and sang their little duets and choruses together, and
enjoyed a gentle refection of sponge-cakes, jellies, tea, and the
like.—The Colonel, who was invited to this little party, sent a fine
present to his favourite Ethel; and Clive and his friend J. J. made a
funny series of drawings, representing the life of a young lady as they
imagined it, and drawing her progress from her cradle upwards: now
engaged with her doll, then with her dancing-master; now marching in
her back-board; now crying over her German lessons: and dressed for her
first ball finally, and bestowing her hand upon a dandy, of
preternatural ugliness, who was kneeling at her feet as the happy man.
This picture was the delight of the laughing happy girls; except,
perhaps, the little cousins from Bryanstone Square, who were invited to
Ethel’s party, but were so overpowered by the prodigious new dresses in
which their mamma had attired them, that they could admire nothing but
their rustling pink frocks, their enormous sashes, their lovely new
silk stockings.

Lady Kew coming to London attended on the party, and presented her
granddaughter with a sixpenny pincushion. The Colonel had sent Ethel a
beautiful little gold watch and chain. Her aunt had complimented her
with that refreshing work, Alison’s History of Europe, richly
bound.—Lady Kew’s pincushion made rather a poor figure among the gifts,
whence probably arose her ladyship’s ill-humour.

Ethel’s grandmother became exceedingly testy when, the Colonel
arriving, Ethel ran up to him and thanked him for the beautiful watch,
in return for which she gave him a kiss, which, I dare say, amply
repaid Colonel Newcome; and shortly after him Mr. Clive arrived,
looking uncommonly handsome, with that smart little beard and mustachio
with which nature had recently gifted him. As he entered, all the
girls, who had been admiring his pictures, began to clap their hands.
Mr. Clive Newcome blushed, and looked none the worse for that
indication of modesty.

Lady Kew had met Colonel Newcome a half-dozen times at her daughter’s
house: but on this occasion she had quite forgotten him, for when the
Colonel made her a bow, her ladyship regarded him steadily, and
beckoning her daughter to her, asked who the gentleman was who has just
kissed Ethel? Trembling as she always did before her mother, Lady Anne
explained. Lady Kew said “Oh!” and left Colonel Newcome blushing and
rather _embarrassé de sa personne_—before her.

With the clapping of hands that greeted Clive’s arrival, the Countess
was by no means more good-humoured. Not aware of her wrath, the young
fellow, who had also previously been presented to her, came forward
presently to make her his compliments. “Pray, who are you?” she said,
looking at him very earnestly in the face. He told her his name.

“Hm,” said Lady Kew, “I have heard of you, and I have heard very little
good of you.”

“Will your ladyship please to give me your informant?” cried out
Colonel Newcome.

Barnes Newcome, who had condescended to attend his sister’s little
fête, and had been languidly watching the frolics of the young people,
looked very much alarmed.




CHAPTER XXI.
Is Sentimental, but Short


Without wishing to disparage the youth of other nations, I think a
well-bred English lad has this advantage over them, that his bearing is
commonly more modest than theirs. He does not assume the tail-coat and
the manners of manhood too early: he holds his tongue, and listens to
his elders: his mind blushes as well as his cheeks: he does not know
how to make bows and pay compliments like the young Frenchman: nor to
contradict his seniors as I am informed American striplings do. Boys,
who learn nothing else at our public schools, learn at least good
manners, or what we consider to be such; and with regard to the person
at present under consideration, it is certain that all his
acquaintances, excepting perhaps his dear cousin Barnes Newcome, agreed
in considering him as a very frank, manly, modest, and agreeable young
fellow.—My friend Warrington found a grim pleasure in his company; and
his bright face, droll humour, and kindly laughter were always welcome
in our chambers. Honest Fred Bayham was charmed to be in his society;
and used pathetically to aver that he himself might have been such a
youth, had he been blest with a kind father to watch, and good friends
to guide, his early career. In fact, Fred was by far the most didactic
of Clive’s bachelor acquaintances, pursued the young man with endless
advice and sermons, and held himself up as a warning to Clive, and a
touching example of the evil consequences of early idleness and
dissipation. Gentlemen of much higher rank in the world took a fancy to
the lad. Captain Jack Belsize introduced him to his own mess, as also
to the Guard dinner at St. James’s; and my Lord Kew invited him to
Kewbury, his lordship’s house in Oxfordshire, where Clive enjoyed
hunting, shooting, and plenty of good company. Mrs. Newcome groaned in
spirit when she heard of these proceedings; and feared, feared very
much that that unfortunate young man was going to ruin; and Barnes
Newcome amiably disseminated reports amongst his family that the lad
was plunged in all sorts of debaucheries: that he was tipsy every
night: that he was engaged, in his sober moments, with dice, the turf,
or worse amusements: and that his head was so turned by living with Kew
and Belsize, that the little rascal’s pride and arrogance were
perfectly insufferable. Ethel would indignantly deny these charges;
then perhaps credit a few of them; and she looked at Clive with
melancholy eyes when he came to visit his aunt; and I hope prayed that
Heaven might mend his wicked ways. The truth is, the young fellow
enjoyed life, as one of his age and spirit might be expected to do; but
he did very little harm, and meant less; and was quite unconscious of
the reputation which his kind friends were making for him.

There had been a long-standing promise that Clive and his father were
to go to Newcome at Christmas: and I dare say Ethel proposed to reform
the young prodigal, if prodigal he was, for she busied herself
delightedly in preparing the apartments which they were to inhabit
during their stay—speculated upon it in a hundred pleasant ways,
putting off her visit to this pleasant neighbour, or that pretty scene
in the vicinage, until her uncle should come and they should be enabled
to enjoy the excursion together. And before the arrival of her
relatives, Ethel, with one of her young brothers, went to see Mrs.
Mason; and introduced herself as Colonel Newcome’s niece; and came back
charmed with the old lady, and eager once more in defence of Clive
(when that young gentleman’s character happened to be called in
question by her brother Barnes), for had she not seen the kindest
letter, which Clive had written to old Mrs. Mason, and the beautiful
drawing of his father on horseback and in regimentals, waving his sword
in front of the gallant the Bengal Cavalry, which the lad had sent down
to the good old woman? He could not be very bad, Ethel thought, who was
so kind and thoughtful for the poor. His father’s son could not be
altogether a reprobate. When Mrs. Mason, seeing how good and beautiful
Ethel was, and thinking in her heart nothing could be too good or
beautiful for Clive, nodded her kind old head at Miss Ethel, and said
she should like to find a husband for her, Miss Ethel blushed, and
looked handsomer than ever; and at home, when she was describing the
interview, never mentioned this part of her talk with Mrs. Mason.

But the _enfant terrible_, young Alfred, did: announcing to all the
company at dessert, that Ethel was in love with Clive—that Clive was
coming to marry her—that Mrs. Mason, the old woman at Newcome, had told
him so.

“I dare say she has told the tale all over Newcome!” shrieked out Mr.
Barnes. “I dare say it will be in the Independent next week. By Jove,
it’s a pretty connexion—and nice acquaintances this uncle of ours
brings us!” A fine battle ensued upon the receipt and discussion of
this intelligence: Barnes was more than usually bitter and sarcastic:
Ethel haughtily recriminated, losing her temper, and then her firmness,
until, fairly bursting into tears, she taxed Barnes with meanness and
malignity in for ever uttering stories to his cousin’s disadvantage,
and pursuing with constant slander and cruelty one of the very best of
men. She rose and left the table in great tribulation—she went to her
room and wrote a letter to her uncle, blistered with tears, in which
she besought him not to come to Newcome.—Perhaps she went and looked at
the apartments which she had adorned and prepared for his reception. It
was for him and for his company that she was eager. She had met no one
so generous and gentle, so honest and unselfish, until she had seen
him.

Lady Anne knew the ways of women very well; and when Ethel that night,
still in great indignation and scorn against Barnes, announced that she
had written a letter to her uncle, begging the Colonel not to come at
Christmas, Ethel’s mother soothed the wounded girl, and treated her
with peculiar gentleness and affection; and she wisely gave Mr. Barnes
to understand, that if he wished to bring about that very attachment,
the idea of which made him so angry, he could use no better means than
those which he chose to employ at present, of constantly abusing and
insulting poor Clive, and awakening Ethel’s sympathies by mere
opposition. And Ethel’s sad little letter was extracted from the
post-bag: and her mother brought it to her, sealed, in her own room,
where the young lady burned it: being easily brought by Lady Anne’s
quiet remonstrances to perceive that it was best no allusion should
take place to the silly dispute which had occurred that evening; and
that Clive and his father should come for the Christmas holidays, if
they were so minded. But when they came, there was no Ethel at Newcome.
She was gone on a visit to her sick aunt, Lady Julia. Colonel Newcome
passed the holidays sadly without his young favourite, and Clive
consoled himself by knocking down pheasants with Sir Brian’s keepers:
and increased his cousin’s attachment for him by breaking the knees of
Barnes’s favourite mare out hunting. It was a dreary entertainment;
father and son were glad enough to get away from it, and to return to
their own humbler quarters in London.

Thomas Newcome had now been for three years in the possession of that
felicity which his soul longed after; and had any friend of his asked
him if he was happy, he would have answered in the affirmative no
doubt, and protested that he was in the enjoyment of everything a
reasonable man could desire. And yet, in spite of his happiness, his
honest face grew more melancholy: his loose clothes hung only the
looser on his lean limbs: he ate his meals without appetite: his nights
were restless: and he would sit for hours silent in the midst of his
family, so that Mr. Binnie first began jocularly to surmise that Tom
was crossed in love; then seriously to think that his health was
suffering and that a doctor should be called to see him; and at last to
agree that idleness was not good for the Colonel, and that he missed
the military occupation to which he had been for so many years
accustomed.

The Colonel insisted that he was perfectly happy and contented. What
could he want more than he had—the society of his son, for the present;
and a prospect of quiet for his declining days? Binnie vowed that his
friend’s days had no business to decline as yet; that a sober man of
fifty ought to be at his best; and that Newcome had grown older in
three years in Europe, than in a quarter of a century in the East—all
which statements were true, though the Colonel persisted in denying
them.

He was very restless. He was always finding business in distant
quarters of England. He must go visit Tom Barker who was settled in
Devonshire, or Harry Johnson who had retired and was living in Wales.
He surprised Mrs. Honeyman by the frequency of his visits to Brighton,
and always came away much improved in health by the sea air, and by
constant riding with the harriers there. He appeared at Bath and at
Cheltenham, where, as we know, there are many old Indians. Mr. Binnie
was not indisposed to accompany him on some of these jaunts—“provided,”
the civilian said, “you don’t take young Hopeful, who is much better
without us; and let us two old fogies enjoy ourselves together.”

Clive was not sorry to be left alone. The father knew that only too
well. The young man had occupations, ideas, associates, in whom the
elder could take no interest. Sitting below in his blank, cheerless
bedroom, Newcome could hear the lad and his friends talking, singing,
and making merry overhead. Something would be said in Clive’s
well-known tones, and a roar of laughter would proceed from the
youthful company. They had all sorts of tricks, bywords, waggeries, of
which the father could not understand the jest nor the secret. He
longed to share in it, but the party would be hushed if he went in to
join it—and he would come away sad at heart, to think that his presence
should be a signal for silence among them; and that his son could not
be merry in his company.

We must not quarrel with Clive and Clive’s friends, because they could
not joke and be free in the presence of the worthy gentleman. If they
hushed when he came in, Thomas Newcome’s sad face would seem to look
round—appealing to one after another of them, and asking, “Why don’t
you go on laughing?” A company of old comrades shall be merry and
laughing together, and the entrance of a single youngster will stop the
conversation—and if men of middle age feel this restraint with our
juniors, the young ones surely have a right to be silent before their
elders. The boys are always mum under the eyes of the usher. There is
scarce any parent, however friendly or tender with his children, but
must feel sometimes that they have thoughts which are not his or hers;
and wishes and secrets quite beyond the parental control: and, as
people are vain, long after they are fathers, ay; or grandfathers, and
not seldom fancy that mere personal desire of domination is overweening
anxiety and love for their family, no doubt that common outcry against
thankless children might often be shown to prove, not that the son is
disobedient, but the father too exacting. When a mother (as fond
mothers often will) vows that she knows every thought in her daughter’s
heart, I think she pretends to know a great deal too much; nor can
there be a wholesomer task for the elders, as our young subjects grow
up, naturally demanding liberty and citizen’s rights, than for us
gracefully to abdicate our sovereign pretensions and claims of absolute
control. There’s many a family chief who governs wisely and gently, who
is loth to give the power up when he should. Ah, be sure, it is not
youth alone that has need to learn humility! By their very virtues, and
the purity of their lives, many good parents create flatterers for
themselves, and so live in the midst of a filial court of parasites—and
seldom without a pang of unwillingness, and often not at all, will they
consent to forgo their autocracy, and exchange the tribute they have
been wont to exact of love and obedience for the willing offering of
love and freedom.

Our good Colonel was not of the tyrannous, but of the loving order of
fathers: and having fixed his whole heart upon this darling youth, his
son, was punished, as I suppose such worldly and selfish love ought to
be punished (so Mr. Honeyman says, at least, in his pulpit), by a
hundred little mortifications, disappointments, and secret wounds,
which stung not the less severely though never mentioned by their
victim.

Sometimes he would have a company of such gentlemen as Messrs.
Warrington, Honeyman, and Pendennis, when haply a literary conversation
would ensue after dinner; and the merits of our present poets and
writers would be discussed with the claret. Honeyman was well enough
read in profane literature, especially of the lighter sort; and, I dare
say, could have passed a satisfactory examination in Balzac, Dumas, and
Paul de Kock himself, of all whose works our good host was entirely
ignorant,—as indeed he was of graver books, and of earlier books, and
of books in general—except those few which we have said formed his
travelling library. He heard opinions that amazed and bewildered him.
He heard that Byron was no great poet, though a very clever man. He
heard that there had been a wicked persecution against Mr. Pope’s
memory and fame, and that it was time to reinstate him that his
favourite, Dr. Johnson, talked admirably, but did not write English:
that young Keats was a genius to be estimated in future days with young
Raphael: and that a young gentleman of Cambridge who had lately
published two volumes of verses, might take rank with the greatest
poets of all. Doctor Johnson not write English! Lord Byron not one of
the greatest poets of the world! Sir Walter a poet of the second order!
Mr. Pope attacked for inferiority and want of imagination; Mr. Keats
and this young Mr. Tennyson of Cambridge, the chief of modern poetic
literature! What were these new dicta, which Mr. Warrington delivered
with a puff of tobacco-smoke: to which Mr. Honeyman blandly assented
and Clive listened with pleasure? Such opinions were not of the
Colonel’s time. He tried in vain to construe Oenone, and to make sense
of Lamia. Ulysses he could understand; but what were these prodigious
laudations bestowed on it? And that reverence for Mr. Wordsworth, what
did it mean? Had he not written Peter Bell, and been turned into
deserved ridicule by all the reviews? Was that dreary Excursion to be
compared to Goldsmith’s Traveller, or Doctor Johnson’s Imitation of the
Tenth Satire of Juvenal? If the young men told the truth, where had
been the truth in his own young days, and in what ignorance had our
forefathers been brought up?—Mr. Addison was only an elegant essayist,
and shallow trifler! All these opinions were openly uttered over the
Colonel’s claret, as he and Mr. Binnie sate wondering at the speakers,
who were knocking the gods of their youth about their ears. To Binnie
the shock was not so great; the hard-headed Scotchman had read Hume in
his college days, and sneered at some of the gods even at that early
time. But with Newcome the admiration for the literature of the last
century was an article of belief: and the incredulity of the young men
seemed rank blasphemy. “You will be sneering at Shakspeare next,” he
said: and was silenced, though not better pleased, when his youthful
guests told him, that Doctor Goldsmith sneered at him too; that Dr.
Johnson did not understand him, and that Congreve, in his own day and
afterwards, was considered to be, in some points, Shakspeare’s
superior. “What do you think a man’s criticism is worth, sir,” cries
Mr. Warrington, “who says those lines of Mr. Congreve, about a church—

‘How reverend is the face of yon tall pile,
Whose ancient pillars rear their marble heads,
To bear aloft its vast and ponderous roof,
By its own weight made steadfast and immovable;
Looking tranquillity. It strikes an awe
And terror on my aching sight’—et cætera


what do you think of a critic who says those lines are finer than
anything Shakspeare ever wrote?” A dim consciousness of danger for
Clive, a terror that his son had got into the society of heretics and
unbelievers, came over the Colonel,—and then presently, as was the wont
with his modest soul, a gentle sense of humility. He was in the wrong,
perhaps, and these younger men were right. Who was he, to set up his
judgment against men of letters, educated at college? It was better
that Clive should follow them than him, who had had but a brief
schooling, and that neglected, and who had not the original genius of
his son’s brilliant companions. We particularise these talks, and the
little incidental mortifications which one of the best of men endured,
not because the conversations are worth the remembering or recording,
but because they presently very materially influenced his own and his
son’s future history.

In the midst of the artists and their talk the poor Colonel was equally
in the dark. They assaulted this Academician and that; laughed at Mr.
Haydon, or sneered at Mr. Eastlake, or the contrary; deified Mr. Turner
on one side of the table, and on the other scorned him as a madman—nor
could Newcome comprehend a word of their jargon. Some sense there must
be in their conversation: Clive joined eagerly in it and took one side
or another. But what was all this rapture about a snuffy brown picture
called Titian, this delight in three flabby nymphs by Rubens, and so
forth? As for the vaunted Antique, and the Elgin Marbles—it might be
that that battered torso was a miracle, and that broken-nosed bust a
perfect beauty. He tried and tried to see that they were. He went away
privily and worked at the National Gallery with a catalogue: and passed
hours in the Museum before the ancient statues, desperately praying to
comprehend them, and puzzled before them as he remembered he was
puzzled before the Greek rudiments as a child when he cried over ὁ, και
ἡ ἀληθής, και τὸ ἀληθὲς. Whereas when Clive came to look at these same
things his eyes would lighten up with pleasure, and his cheeks flush
with enthusiasm. He seemed to drink in colour as he would a feast of
wine. Before the statues he would wave his finger, following the line
of grace, and burst into ejaculations of delight and admiration. “Why
can’t I love the things which he loves?” thought Newcome; “why am I
blind to the beauties which he admires so much—and am I unable to
comprehend what he evidently understands at his young age?”

So, as he thought what vain egotistical hopes he used to form about the
boy when he was away in India—how in his plans for the happy future,
Clive was to be always at his side; how they were to read, work, play,
think, be merry together—a sickening and humiliating sense of the
reality came over him: and he sadly contrasted it with the former fond
anticipations. Together they were, yet he was alone still. His thoughts
were not the boy’s: and his affections rewarded but with a part of the
young man’s heart. Very likely other lovers have suffered equally. Many
a man and woman has been incensed and worshipped, and has shown no more
feeling than is to be expected from idols. There is yonder statue in
St. Peter’s, of which the toe is worn away with kisses, and which sits,
and will sit eternally, prim and cold. As the young man grew, it seemed
to the father as if each day separated them more and more. He himself
became more melancholy and silent. His friend the civilian marked the
ennui, and commented on it in his laughing way. Sometimes he announced
to the club that Tom Newcome was in love: then he thought it was not
Tom’s heart but his liver that was affected, and recommended blue pill.
O thou fond fool! who art thou, to know any man’s heart save thine
alone? Wherefore were wings made, and do feathers grow, but that birds
should fly? The instinct that bids you love your nest, leads the young
ones to seek a tree and a mate of their own. As if Thomas Newcome by
poring over poems or pictures ever so much could read them with Clive’s
eyes!—as if by sitting mum over his wine, but watching till the lad
came home with his latchkey (when the Colonel crept back to his own
room in his stockings), by prodigal bounties, by stealthy affection, by
any schemes or prayers, he could hope to remain first in his son’s
heart!

One day going into Clive’s study, where the lad was so deeply engaged
that he did not hear the father’s steps advancing, Thomas Newcome found
his son, pencil in hand, poring over a paper, which, blushing, he
thrust hastily into his breast-pocket, as soon as he saw his visitor.
The father was deeply smitten and mortified. “I—I am sorry you have any
secrets from me, Clive,” he gasped out at length.

The boy’s face lighted up with humour. “Here it is, father, if you
would like to see:”—and he pulled out a paper which contained neither
more nor less than a copy of very flowery verses, about a certain young
lady, who had succeeded (after I know not how many predecessors) to the
place of _prima donna assoluta_ in Clive’s heart. And be pleased,
madam, not to be too eager with your censure, and fancy that Mr. Clive
or his chronicler would insinuate anything wrong. I dare say you felt a
flame or two before you were married yourself: and that the Captain or
the Curate, and the interesting young foreigner with whom you danced,
caused your heart to beat, before you bestowed that treasure on Mr.
Candour. Clive was doing no more than your own son will do when he is
eighteen or nineteen years old himself—if he is a lad of any spirit and
a worthy son of so charming a lady as yourself.




CHAPTER XXII.
Describes a Visit to Paris; with Accidents and Incidents in London


Mr. Clive, as we have said, had now begun to make acquaintances of his
own; and the chimney-glass in his study was decorated with such a
number of cards of invitation, as made his ex-fellow-student of
Gandish’s, young Moss, when admitted into that sanctum, stare with
respectful astonishment. “Lady Bary Rowe at obe,” the young Hebrew read
out; “Lady Baughton at obe, dadsig! By eyes! what a tip-top swell
you’re a gettid to be, Newcome! I guess this is a different sort of
business to the hops at old Levison’s, where you first learned the
polka; and where we had to pay a shilling a glass for negus!”

“_We_ had to pay! _You_ never paid anything, Moss,” cries Clive,
laughing; and indeed the negus imbibed by Mr. Moss did not cost that
prudent young fellow a penny.

“Well, well; I suppose at these swell parties you ’ave as bush champade
as ever you like,” continues Moss. “Lady Kicklebury at obe—small early
party. Why, I declare you know the whole peerage! I say, if any of
these swells want a little tip-top lace, a real bargain, or diamonds,
you know, you might put in a word for us, and do us a good turn.”

“Give me some of your cards,” says Clive; “I can distribute them about
at the balls I go to. But you must treat my friends better than you
serve me. Those cigars which you sent me were abominable, Moss; the
groom in the stable won’t smoke them.”

“What a regular swell that Newcome has become!” says Mr. Moss to an old
companion, another of Clive’s fellow-students: “I saw him riding in the
Park with the Earl of Kew, and Captain Belsize, and a whole lot of
’em—_I_ know ’em all—and he’d hardly nod to me. I’ll have a horse next
Sunday, and _then_ I’ll see whether he’ll cut me or not. Confound his
airs! For all he’s such a count, I know he’s got an aunt who lets
lodgings at Brighton, and an uncle who’ll be preaching in the Bench if
he don’t keep a precious good look-out.”

“Newcome is not a bit of a count,” answers Moss’s companion,
indignantly. “He don’t care a straw whether a fellow’s poor or rich;
and he comes up to my room just as willingly as he would go to a
duke’s. He is always trying to do a friend a good turn. He draws the
figure capitally: he _looks_ proud, but he isn’t, and is the
best-natured fellow I ever saw.”

“He ain’t been in our place this eighteen months,” says Mr. Moss: “I
know that.”

“Because when he came you were always screwing him with some bargain or
other,” cried the intrepid Hicks, Mr. Moss’s companion for the moment.
“He said he couldn’t afford to know you: you never let him out of your
house without a pin, or a box of eau-de-cologne, or a bundle of cigars.
And when you cut the arts for the shop, how were you and Newcome to go
on together, I should like to know?”

“I know a relative of his who comes to our ’ouse every three months, to
renew a little bill,” says Mr. Moss, with a grin: “and I know this, if
I go to the Earl of Kew in the Albany, or the Honourable Captain
Belsize, Knightsbridge Barracks, _they_ let me in soon enough. I’m told
his father ain’t got much money.”

“How the deuce should I know? or what do I care?” cries the young
artist, stamping the heel of his blucher on the pavement. “When I was
sick in that confounded Clipstone Street, I know the Colonel came to
see me, and Newcome too, day after day, and night after night. And when
I was getting well, they sent me wine and jelly, and all sorts of jolly
things. I should like to know how often you came to see me, Moss, and
what you did for a fellow?”

“Well, I kep away because I thought you wouldn’t like to be reminded of
that two pound three you owe me, Hicks: that’s why I kep away,” says
Mr. Moss, who, I dare say, was good-natured too. And when young Moss
appeared at the billiard-room that night, it was evident that Hicks had
told the story; for the Wardour Street youth was saluted with a roar of
queries, “How about that two pound three that Hicks owes you?”

The artless conversation of the two youths will enable us to understand
how our hero’s life was speeding. Connected in one way or another with
persons in all ranks, it never entered his head to be ashamed of the
profession which he had chosen. People in the great world did not in
the least trouble themselves regarding him, or care to know whether Mr.
Clive Newcome followed painting or any other pursuit: and though Clive
saw many of his schoolfellows in the world, these entering into the
army, others talking with delight of college, and its pleasures or
studies; yet, having made up his mind that art was his calling, he
refused to quit her for any other mistress, and plied his easel very
stoutly. He passed through the course of study prescribed by Mr.
Gandish, and drew every cast and statue in that gentleman’s studio.
Grindley, his tutor, getting a curacy, Clive did not replace him; but
he took a course of modern languages, which he learned with
considerable aptitude and rapidity. And now, being strong enough to
paint without a master, it was found that there was no good light in
the house in Fitzroy Square; and Mr. Clive must needs have an atelier
hard by, where he could pursue his own devices independently.

If his kind father felt any pang even at this temporary parting, he was
greatly soothed and pleased by a little mark of attention on the young
man’s part, of which his present biographer happened to be a witness;
for having walked over with Colonel Newcome to see the new studio, with
its tall centre window, and its curtains, and carved wardrobes, china
jars, pieces of armour, and other artistical properties, the lad, with
a very sweet smile of kindness and affection lighting up his honest
face, took one of two Bramah’s house-keys with which he was provided,
and gave it to his father: “That’s your key, sir,” he said to the
Colonel; “and you must be my first sitter, please, father; for though
I’m a historical painter, I shall condescend to do a few portraits, you
know.” The Colonel took his son’s hand, and grasped it; as Clive fondly
put the other hand on his father’s shoulder. Then Colonel Newcome
walked away into the next room for a minute or two, and came back
wiping his moustache with his handkerchief, and still holding the key
in the other hand. He spoke about some trivial subject when he
returned; but his voice quite trembled; and I thought his face seemed
to glow with love and pleasure. Clive has never painted anything better
than that head, which he executed in a couple of sittings; and wisely
left without subjecting it to the chances of further labour.

It is certain the young man worked much better after he had been
inducted into this apartment of his own. And the meals at home were
gayer; and the rides with his father more frequent and agreeable. The
Colonel used his key once or twice, and found Clive and his friend
Ridley engaged in depicting a life-guardsman,—or a muscular negro,—or a
Malay from a neighbouring crossing, who would appear as Othello,
conversing with a Clipstone Street nymph, who was ready to represent
Desdemona, Diana, Queen Ellinor (sucking poison from the arm of the
Plantagenet of the Blues), or any other model of virgin or maiden
excellence.

Of course our young man commenced as a historical painter, deeming that
the highest branch of art; and declining (except for preparatory
studies) to operate on any but the largest canvasses. He painted a
prodigious battle-piece of Assaye, with General Wellesley at the head
of the 19th Dragoons charging the Mahratta Artillery, and sabring them
at their guns. A piece of ordnance was dragged into the back-yard, and
the Colonel’s stud put into requisition to supply studies for this
enormous picture. Fred Bayham (a stunning likeness) appeared as the
principal figure in the foreground, terrifically wounded, but still of
undaunted courage, slashing about amidst a group of writhing Malays,
and bestriding the body of a dead cab-horse, which Clive painted, until
the landlady and rest of the lodgers cried out, and for sanitary
reasons the knackers removed the slaughtered charger. So large was this
picture that it could only be got out of the great window by means of
artifice and coaxing; and its transport caused a shout of triumph among
the little boys in Charlotte Street. Will it be believed that the Royal
Academicians rejected the “Battle of Assaye”? The masterpiece was so
big that Fitzroy Square could not hold it; and the Colonel had thoughts
of presenting it to the Oriental Club; but Clive (who had taken a trip
to Paris with his father, as a _délassement_ after the fatigues
incident on this great work), when he saw it, after a month’s interval,
declared the thing was rubbish, and massacred Britons, Malays,
Dragoons, Artillery and all.

“Hôtel de la Terrasse, Rue de Rivoli,

“April 27—May 1, 183-.

“My Dear Pendennis—You said I might write you a line from Paris; and if
you find in my correspondence any valuable hints for the _Pall Mall
Gazette_, you are welcome to use them gratis. Now I am here, I wonder I
have never been here before, and that I have seen the Dieppe packet a
thousand times at Brighton pier without thinking of going on board her.
We had a rough little passage to Boulogne. We went into action as we
cleared Dover pier—when the _first gun_ was fired, and a stout old lady
was carried off by a steward to the cabin; half a dozen more dropped
immediately, and the crew bustled about, bringing basins for the
wounded. The Colonel smiled as he saw them fall. ‘I’m an old sailor,’
says he to a gentleman on board. ‘I was coming home, sir, and we had
plenty of rough weather on the voyage, I never thought of being unwell.
My boy here, who made the voyage twelve years ago last May, may have
lost his sea-legs; but for me, sir—’ Here a great wave dashed over the
three of us; and would you believe it? in five minutes after, the dear
old governor was as ill as all the rest of the passengers. When we
arrived, we went through a line of ropes to the custom-house, with a
crowd of snobs jeering at us on each side; and then were carried off by
a bawling commissioner to an hotel, where the Colonel, who speaks
French beautifully, you know, told the waiter to get us a _petit
déjeuner soigné;_ on which the fellow, grinning, said, a ‘nice fried
sole, sir,—nice mutton-chop, sir,’ in regular Temple Bar English; and
brought us Harvey sauce with the chops, and the last _Bell’s Life_ to
amuse us after our luncheon. I wondered if all the Frenchmen read
_Bell’s Life_, and if all the inns smell so of brandy-and-water!

“We walked out to see the town, which I dare say you know, and
therefore shan’t describe. We saw some good studies of fishwomen with
bare legs, and remarked that the soldiers were very dumpy and small. We
were glad when the time came to set off by the diligence; and having
the coupe to ourselves, made a very comfortable journey to Paris. It
was jolly to hear the postillions crying to their horses, and the bells
of the team, and to feel ourselves really in France. We took in
provender at Abbeville and Amiens, and were comfortably landed here
after about six-and-twenty hours of coaching. Didn’t I get up the next
morning and have a good walk in the Tuileries! The chestnuts were out,
and the statues all shining, and all the windows of the palace in a
blaze. It looks big enough for the king of the giants to live in. How
grand it is! I like the barbarous splendour of the architecture, and
the ornaments profuse and enormous with which it is overladen. Think of
Louis XVI. with a thousand gentlemen at his back, and a mob of yelling
ruffians in front of him, giving up his crown without a fight for it;
leaving his friends to be butchered, and himself sneaking into prison!
No end of little children were skipping and playing in the sunshiny
walks, with dresses as bright and cheeks as red as the flowers and
roses in the parterres. I couldn’t help thinking of Barbaroux and his
bloody pikemen swarming in the gardens, and fancied the Swiss in the
windows yonder; where they were to be slaughtered when the King had
turned his back. What a great man that Carlyle is! I have read the
battle in his History so often, that I knew it before I had seen it.
Our windows look out on the obelisk where the guillotine stood. The
Colonel doesn’t admire Carlyle. He says Mrs. Graham’s Letters from
Paris are excellent, and we bought Scott’s Visit to Paris, and Paris
Re-visited, and read them in the diligence. They are famous good
reading; but the Palais Royal is very much altered since Scott’s time:
no end of handsome shops; I went there directly,—the same night we
arrived, when the Colonel went to bed. But there is none of the fun
going on which Scott describes. The _laquais-de-place_ says Charles X.
put an end to it all.

“Next morning the governor had letters to deliver after breakfast, and
left me at the Louvre door. I shall come and live here, I think. I feel
as if I never want to go away. I had not been ten minutes in the place
before I fell in love with the most beautiful creature the world has
ever seen. She was standing silent and majestic in the centre of one of
the rooms of the statue-gallery; and the very first glimpse of her
struck one breathless with the sense of her beauty. I could not see the
colour of her eyes and hair exactly, but the latter is light, and the
eyes I should think are grey. Her complexion is of a beautiful warm
marble tinge. She is not a clever woman, evidently; I do not think she
laughs or talks much—she seems too lazy to do more than smile. She is
only beautiful. This divine creature has lost an arm, which has been
cut off at the shoulder, but she looks none the less lovely for the
accident. She maybe some two-and-thirty years old; and she was born
about two thousand years ago. Her name is the Venus of Milo. O Victrix!
O lucky Paris! (I don’t mean this present Lutetia, but Priam’s son.)
How could he give the apple to any else but this enslaver—this joy of
gods and men? at whose benign presence the flowers spring up, and the
smiling ocean sparkles, and the soft skies beam with serene light! I
wish we might sacrifice. I would bring a spotless kid, snowy-coated,
and a pair of doves and a jar of honey—yea, honey from Morel’s in
Piccadilly, thyme-flavoured, narbonian, and we would acknowledge the
Sovereign Loveliness, and adjure the Divine Aphrodite. Did you ever see
my pretty young cousin, Miss Newcome, Sir Brian’s daughter? She has a
great look of the huntress Diana. It is sometimes too proud and too
cold for me. The blare of those horns is too shrill and the rapid
pursuit through bush and bramble too daring. O thou generous Venus! O
thou beautiful bountiful calm! At thy soft feet let me kneel—on
cushions of Tyrian purple. Don’t show this to Warrington, please: I
never thought when I began that Pegasus was going to run away with me.

“I wish I had read Greek a little more at school: it’s too late at my
age; I shall be nineteen soon, and have got my own business; but when
we return I think I shall try and read it with Cribs. What have I been
doing, spending six months over a picture of sepoys and dragoons
cutting each other’s throats? Art ought not to be a fever. It ought to
be a calm; not a screaming bull-fight or a battle of gladiators, but a
temple for placid contemplation, rapt worship, stately rhythmic
ceremony, and music solemn and tender. I shall take down my Snyders and
Rubens when I get home; and turn quietist. To think I have spent weeks
in depicting bony life-guardsmen delivering cut one, or Saint George,
and painting black beggars off a crossing!

“What a grand thing it is to think of half a mile of pictures at the
Louvre! Not but that there are a score under the old pepper-boxes in
Trafalgar Square as fine as the best here. I don’t care for any Raphael
here, as much as our own St. Catharine. There is nothing more grand.
Could the Pyramids of Egypt or the Colossus of Rhodes be greater than
our Sebastian? and for our Bacchus and Ariadne, you cannot beat the
best you know. But if we have fine jewels, here there are whole sets of
them: there are kings and all their splendid courts round about them.
J. J. and I must come and live here. Oh, such portraits of Titian! Oh,
such swells by Vandyke! I’m sure he must have been as fine a gentleman
as any he painted! It’s a shame they haven’t got a Sir Joshua or two.
At a feast of painters he has a right to a place, and at the high table
too. Do you remember Tom Rogers, of Gandish’s? He used to come to my
rooms—my other rooms in the Square. Tom is here with a fine carrotty
beard, and a velvet jacket, cut open at the sleeves, to show that Tom
has a shirt. I dare say it was clean last Sunday. He has not learned
French yet, but pretends to have forgotten English; and promises to
introduce me to a set of the French artists his _camarades_. There
seems to be a scarcity of soap among these young fellows; and I think I
shall cut off my mustachios; only Warrington will have nothing to laugh
at when I come home.

“The Colonel and I went to dine at the Café de Paris, and afterwards to
the opera. Ask for _huitres de Marenne_ when you dine here. We dined
with a tremendous French swell, the Vicomte de Florac, _officier
d’ordonnance_ to one of the princes, and son of some old friends of my
father’s. They are of very high birth, but very poor. He will be a duke
when his cousin, the Duc d’Ivry, dies. His father is quite old. The
vicomte was born in England. He pointed out to us no end of famous
people at the opera—a few of the Fauxbourg St. Germain, and ever so
many of the present people:—M. Thiers, and Count Molé, and Georges
Sand, and Victor Hugo, and Jules Janin—I forget half their names. And
yesterday we went to see his mother, Madame de Florac. I suppose she
was an old flame of the Colonel’s, for their meeting was uncommonly
ceremonious and tender. It was like an elderly Sir Charles Grandison
saluting a middle-aged Miss Byron. And only fancy! the Colonel has been
here once before since his return to England! It must have been last
year, when he was away for ten days, whilst I was painting that
rubbishing picture of the Black Prince waiting on King John. Madame de
F. is a very grand lady, and must have been a great beauty in her time.
There are two pictures by Gerard in her salon—of her and M. de Florac.
M. de Florac, old swell, powder, thick eyebrows, hooked nose; no end of
stars, ribbons, and embroidery. Madame also in the dress of the
Empire—pensive, beautiful, black velvet, and a look something like my
cousin’s. She wore a little old-fashioned brooch yesterday, and said,
‘_Voilà, la reconnoissez-vous?_ Last year when you were here, it was in
the country;’ and she smiled at him: and the dear old boy gave a sort
of groan and dropped his head in his hand. I know what it is. I’ve gone
through it myself. I kept for six months an absurd ribbon of that
infernal little flirt Fanny Freeman. Don’t you remember how angry I was
when you abused her?

“‘Your father and I knew each other when we were children, my friend,’
the Countess said to me (in the sweetest French accent). He was looking
into the garden of the house where they live, in the Rue Saint
Dominique. ‘You must come and see me often, always. You remind me of
him,’ and she added, with a very sweet kind smile, ‘Do you like best to
think that he was better-looking than you, or that you excel him?’ I
said I should like to be like him. But who is? There are cleverer
fellows, I dare say; but where is there such a good one? I wonder
whether he was very fond of Madame de Florac? The old Count does not
show. He is quite old, and wears a pigtail. We saw it bobbing over his
garden chair. He lets the upper part of his house; Major-General the
Honourable Zeno F. Pokey, of Cincinnati, U.S., lives in it. We saw Mrs.
Pokey’s carriage in the court, and her footmen smoking cigars there; a
tottering old man with feeble legs, as old as old Count de Florac,
seemed to be the only domestic who waited on the family below.

“Madame de Florac and my father talked about my profession. The
Countess said it was a _belle carrière_. The Colonel said it was better
than the army. ‘_Ah oui, monsieur_,’ says she very sadly. And then he
said, ‘that presently I should very likely come to study at Paris, when
he knew there would be a kind friend to watch over _son garçon_.’

“‘But you will be here to watch over him yourself, _mon ami?_’ says the
French lady.

“Father shook his head. ‘I shall very probably have to go back to
India,’ he said. ‘My furlough is expired. I am now taking my extra
leave. If I can get my promotion, I need not return. Without that I
cannot afford to live in Europe. But my absence in all probability will
be but very short,’ he said. ‘And Clive is old enough now to go on
without me.’

“Is this the reason why father has been so gloomy for some months past?
I thought it might have been some of my follies which made him
uncomfortable; and you know I have been trying my best to amend—I have
not half such a tailor’s bill this year as last. I owe scarcely
anything. I have paid off Moss every halfpenny for his confounded rings
and gimcracks. I asked father about this melancholy news as we walked
away from Madame de Florac.

“He is not near so rich as we thought. Since he has been at home he
says he has spent greatly more than his income, and is quite angry at
his own extravagance. At first he thought he might have retired from
the army altogether; but after three years at home, he finds he cannot
live upon his income. When he gets his promotion as full Colonel, he
will be entitled to a thousand a year; that, and what he has invested
in India, and a little in this country, will be plenty for both of us.
He never seems to think of my making money by my profession. Why,
suppose I sell the ‘Battle of Assaye’ for 500 pounds? that will be
enough to carry me on ever so long, without dipping into the purse of
the dear old father.

“The Viscount de Florac called to dine with us. The Colonel said he did
not care about going out: and so the Viscount and I went together.
_Trois Frères Provençaux_—he ordered the dinner and of course I paid.
Then we went to a little theatre, and he took me behind the scenes—such
a queer place! We went to the _loge_ of Mademoiselle Fine who acted the
part of ‘Le petit Tambour,’ in which she sings a famous song with a
drum. He asked her and several literary fellows to supper at the Café
Anglais. And I came home ever so late, and lost twenty napoleons at a
game called bouillotte. It was all the change out of a twenty-pound
note which dear old Binnie gave me before we set out, with a quotation
out of Horace, you know, about _Neque tu choreas sperne puer_. O me!
how guilty I felt as I walked home at ever so much o’clock to the Hotel
de la Terrasse, and sneaked into our apartment! But the Colonel was
sound asleep. His dear old boots stood sentries at his bedroom door,
and I slunk into mine as silently as I could.

“P.S.—Wednesday.—There’s just one scrap of paper left. I have got J.
J.’s letter. He has been to the private view of the Academy (so that
his own picture is in), and the ‘Battle of Assaye’ is refused. Smee
told him it was too big. I dare say it’s very bad. I’m glad I’m away,
and the fellows are not condoling with me.

“Please go and see Mr. Binnie. He has come to grief. He rode the
Colonel’s horse; came down on the pavement and wrenched his leg, and
I’m afraid the grey’s. Please look at his legs; we can’t understand
John’s report of them. He, I mean Mr. B., was going to Scotland to see
his relations when the accident happened. You know he has always been
going to Scotland to see his relations. He makes light of the business,
and says the Colonel is not to think of coming to him: and _I_ don’t
want to go back just yet, to see all the fellows from Gandish’s and the
Life Academy, and have them grinning at my misfortune.

“The governor would send his regards, I dare say, but he is out, and I
am always yours affectionately, Clive Newcome.”

“P.S.—He tipped me himself this morning; isn’t he a kind, dear old
fellow?”

Arthur Pendennis, Esq., to Clive Newcome, Esq.

“‘Pall Mall Gazette,’ Journal of Politics, Literature and Fashion, 225
Catherine Street, Strand,

“Dear Clive—I regret very much for Fred Bayham’s sake (who has lately
taken the responsible office of Fine Arts Critic for the _P. G._) that
your extensive picture of the ‘Battle of Assaye’ has not found a place
in the Royal Academy Exhibition. F. B. is at least fifteen shillings
out of pocket by its rejection, as he had prepared a flaming eulogium
of your work, which of course is so much waste paper in consequence of
this calamity. Never mind. Courage, my son. The Duke of Wellington you
know was best back at Seringapatam before he succeeded at Assaye. I
hope you will fight other battles, and that fortune in future years
will be more favourable to you. The town does not talk very much of
your discomfiture. You see the parliamentary debates are very
interesting just now, and somehow the ‘Battle of Assaye’ did not seem
to excite the public mind.

“I have been to Fitzroy Square; both to the stables and the house. The
Houyhnhnm’s legs are very well; the horse slipped on his side and not
on his knees, and has received no sort of injury. Not so Mr. Binnie;
his ankle is much wrenched and inflamed. He must keep his sofa for many
days, perhaps weeks. But you know he is a very cheerful philosopher,
and endures the evils of life with much equanimity. His sister has come
to him. I don’t know whether that may be considered as a consolation of
his evil or an aggravation of it. You know he uses the sarcastic method
in his talk, and it was difficult to understand from him whether he was
pleased or bored by the embraces of his relative. She was an infant
when he last beheld her, on his departure to India. She is now (to
speak with respect) a very brisk, plump, pretty little widow; having,
seemingly, recovered from her grief at the death of her husband,
Captain Mackenzie in the West Indies. Mr. Binnie was just on the point
of visiting his relatives, who reside at Musselburgh, near Edinburgh,
when he met with the fatal accident which prevented his visit to his
native shores. His account of his misfortune and his lonely condition
was so pathetic that Mrs. Mackenzie and her daughter put themselves
into the Edinburgh steamer, and rushed to console his sofa. They occupy
your bedroom and sitting-room, which latter Mrs. Mackenzie says no
longer smells of tobacco smoke, as it did when she took possession of
your den. If you have left any papers about, any bills, any
billets-doux, I make no doubt the ladies have read every single one of
them, according to the amiable habits of their sex. The daughter is a
bright little blue-eyed fair-haired lass, with a very sweet voice, in
which she sings (unaided by instrumental music, and seated on a chair
in the middle of the room) the artless ballads of her native country. I
had the pleasure of hearing the ‘Bonnets of Bonny Dundee’ and ‘Jack of
Hazeldean’ from her ruby lips two evenings since; not indeed for the
first time in my life, but never from such a pretty little singer.
Though both ladies speak our language with something of the tone
usually employed by the inhabitants of the northern part of Britain,
their accent is exceedingly pleasant, and indeed by no means so strong
as Mr. Binnie’s own; for Captain Mackenzie was an Englishman, for whose
sake his lady modified her native Musselburgh pronunciation. She tells
many interesting anecdotes of him, of the West Indies, and of the
distinguished regiment of infantry to which the captain belonged. Miss
Rosa is a great favourite with her uncle, and I have had the good
fortune to make their stay in the metropolis more pleasant, by sending
them orders, from the _Pall Mall Gazette_, for the theatres, panoramas,
and the principal sights in town. For pictures they do not seem to care
much; they thought the National Gallery a dreary exhibition, and in the
Royal Academy could be got to admire nothing but the picture of
M’Collop of M’Collop, by our friend of the like name; but they think
Madame Tussaud’s interesting exhibition of waxwork the most delightful
in London; and there I had the happiness of introducing them to our
friend Mr. Frederick Bayham; who, subsequently, on coming to this
office with his valuable contributions on the Fine Arts, made
particular inquiries as to their pecuniary means, and expressed himself
instantly ready to bestow his hand upon the mother or daughter,
provided old Mr. Binnie would make a satisfactory settlement. I got the
ladies a box at the opera, whither they were attended by Captain Goby
of their regiment, godfather to Miss, and where I had the honour of
paying them a visit. I saw your fair young cousin Miss Newcome in the
lobby with her grandmamma Lady Kew. Mr. Bayham with great eloquence
pointed out to the Scotch ladies the various distinguished characters
in the house. The opera delighted them, but they were astounded at the
ballet, from which mother and daughter retreated in the midst of a fire
of pleasantries of Captain Goby. I can fancy that officer at mess, and
how brilliant his anecdotes must be when the company of ladies does not
restrain his genial flow of humour.

“Here comes Mr. Baker with the proofs. In case you don’t see the _P.
G._ at Galignani’s, I send you an extract from Bayham’s article on the
Royal Academy, where you will have the benefit of his opinion on the
works of some of your friends:—

“‘617. “Moses Bringing Home the Gross of Green Spectacles,” Smith,
R.A.—Perhaps poor Goldsmith’s exquisite little work has never been so
great a favourite as in the present age. We have here, in a work by one
of our most eminent artists, an homage to the genius of him “who
touched nothing which he did not adorn:” and the charming subject is
handled in the most delicious manner by Mr. Smith. The chiaroscuro is
admirable: the impasto is perfect. Perhaps a very captious critic might
object to the foreshortening of Moses’s left leg; but where there is so
much to praise justly, the _Pall Mall Gazette_ does not care to
condemn.

“‘420. Our (and the public’s) favourite, Brown, R.A., treats us to a
subject from the best of all stories, the tale “which laughed Spain’s
chivalry away,” the ever new Don Quixote. The incident which Brown has
selected is the “Don’s Attack on the Flock of Sheep;” the sheep are in
his best manner, painted with all his well-known facility and _brio_.
Mr. Brown’s friendly rival, Hopkins, has selected “Gil Blas” for an
illustration this year; and the “Robber’s Cavern” is one of the most
masterly of Hopkins’ productions.

“‘Great Rooms. 33. “Portrait of Cardinal Cospetto,” O’Gogstay, A.R.A.;
and “Neighbourhood of Corpodibacco—Evening—a Contadina and a
Trasteverino dancing at the door of a Locanda to the music of a
Pifferaro.”—Since his visit to Italy Mr. O’Gogstay seems to have given
up the scenes of Irish humour with which he used to delight us; and the
romance, the poetry, the religion of “Italia la bella” form the
subjects of his pencil. The scene near Corpodibacco (we know the spot
well, and have spent many a happy month in its romantic mountains) is
most characteristic. Cardinal Cospetto, we must say, is a most
truculent prelate, and not certainly an ornament to his church.

“‘49, 210, 311. Smee, R.A.—Portraits which a Reynolds might be proud
of,—a Vandyke or Claude might not disown. “Sir Brian Newcome, in the
costume of a Deputy-Lieutenant,” “Major-General Sir Thomas de Boots,
K.C.B.,” painted for the 50th Dragoons, are triumphs, indeed, of this
noble painter. Why have we no picture of the Sovereign and her august
consort from Smee’s brush? When Charles II. picked up Titian’s
mahl-stick, he observed to a courtier, “A king you can always have; a
genius comes but rarely.” While we have a Smee among us, and a monarch
whom we admire,—may the one be employed to transmit to posterity the
beloved features of the other! We know our lucubrations are read in
_high places_, and respectfully insinuate _verbum sapienti_.

“‘1906. “The M’Collop of M’Collop,”—A. M’Collop,—is a noble work of a
young artist, who, in depicting the gallant chief of a hardy Scottish
clan, has also represented a romantic Highland landscape, in the midst
of which, “his foot upon his native heath,” stands a man of splendid
symmetrical figure and great facial advantages. We shall keep our eye
on Mr. M’Collop.

“‘1367. “Oberon and Titania.” Ridley.—This sweet and fanciful little
picture draws crowds round about it, and is one of the most charming
and delightful works of the present exhibition. We echo the universal
opinion in declaring that it shows not only the greatest promise, but
the most delicate and beautiful performance. The Earl of Kew, we
understand, bought the picture at the private view; and we congratulate
the young painter heartily upon his successful _début_. He is, we
understand, a pupil of Mr. Gandish. Where is that admirable painter? We
miss his bold canvasses and grand historic outline.’

“I shall alter a few inaccuracies in the composition of our friend F.
B., who has, as he says, ‘drawn it uncommonly mild in the above
criticism.’ In fact, two days since, he brought in an article of quite
a different tendency, of which he retains only the two last paragraphs;
but he has, with great magnanimity, recalled his previous observations;
and, indeed, he knows as much about pictures as some critics I could
name.

“Good-bye, my dear Clive! I send my kindest regards to your father; and
think you had best see as little as possible of your bouillotte-playing
French friend and his friends. This advice I know you will follow, as
young men always follow the advice of their seniors and well-wishers. I
dine in Fitzroy Square to-day with the pretty widow and her daughter,
and am yours always, dear Clive, A. P.”




CHAPTER XXIII.
In which we hear a Soprano and a Contralto


The most hospitable and polite of Colonels would not hear of Mrs.
Mackenzie and her daughter quitting his house when he returned to it,
after six weeks’ pleasant sojourn in Paris; nor, indeed, did his fair
guest show the least anxiety or intention to go away. Mrs. Mackenzie
had a fine merry humour of her own. She was an old soldier’s wife, she
said and knew when her quarters were good; and I suppose, since her
honeymoon, when the captain took her to Harrogate and Cheltenham,
stopping at the first hotels, and travelling in a chaise-and-pair the
whole way, she had never been so well off as in that roomy mansion near
Tottenham Court Road. Of her mother’s house at Musselburgh she gave a
ludicrous but dismal account. “Eh, James,” she said, “I think if you
had come to mamma, as you threatened, you would not have staid very
long. It’s a wearisome place. Dr. M’Craw boards with her; and it’s
sermon and psalm-singing from morning till night. My little Josey takes
kindly to the life there, and I left her behind, poor little darling!
It was not fair to bring three of us to take possession of your house,
dear James; but my poor little Rosey was just withering away there.
It’s good for the dear child to see the world a little, and a kind
uncle, who is not afraid of us now he sees us, is he?” Kind Uncle James
was not at all afraid of little Rosey; whose pretty face and modest
manners, and sweet songs, and blue eyes, cheered and soothed the old
bachelor. Nor was Rosey’s mother less agreeable and pleasant. She had
married the captain (it was a love-match, against the will of her
parents, who had destined her to be the third wife of old Dr. M’Mull)
when very young. Many sorrows she had had, including poverty, the
captain’s imprisonment for debt, and his demise; but she was of a gay
and lightsome spirit. She was but three-and-thirty years old, and
looked five-and-twenty. She was active, brisk, jovial, and alert; and
so good-looking, that it was a wonder she had not taken a successor to
Captain Mackenzie. James Binnie cautioned his friend the Colonel
against the attractions of the buxom siren; and laughingly would ask
Clive how he would like Mrs. Mackenzie for a mamaw?

Colonel Newcome felt himself very much at ease regarding his future
prospects. He was very glad that his friend James was reconciled to his
family, and hinted to Clive that the late Captain Mackenzie’s
extravagance had been the cause of the rupture between him and his
brother-in-law, who had helped that prodigal captain repeatedly during
his life; and, in spite of family quarrels, had never ceased to act
generously to his widowed sister and her family. “But I think, Mr.
Clive,” said he, “that as Miss Rosa is very pretty, and you have a
spare room at your studio, you had best take up your quarters in
Charlotte Street as long as the ladies are living with us.” Clive was
nothing loth to be independent; but he showed himself to be a very good
home-loving youth. He walked home to breakfast every morning, dined
often, and spent the evenings with the family. Indeed, the house was a
great deal more cheerful for the presence of the two pleasant ladies.
Nothing could be prettier than to see the two ladies tripping
downstairs together, mamma’s pretty arm round Rosey’s pretty waist.
Mamma’s talk was perpetually of Rosey. That child was always gay,
always good, always happy! That darling girl woke with a smile on her
face, it was sweet to see her! Uncle James, in his dry way, said, he
dared to say it was very pretty. “Go away, you droll, dear old kind
Uncle James!” Rosey’s mamma would cry out. “You old bachelors are
wicked old things!” Uncle James used to kiss Rosey very kindly and
pleasantly. She was as modest, as gentle, as eager to please Colonel
Newcome as any little girl could be. It was pretty to see her tripping
across the room with his coffee-cup, or peeling walnuts for him after
dinner with her white plump little fingers.

Mrs. Irons, the housekeeper, naturally detested Mrs. Mackenzie, and was
jealous of her: though the latter did everything to soothe and coax the
governess of the two gentlemen’s establishment. She praised her
dinners, delighted in her puddings, must beg Mrs. Irons to allow her to
see one of those delicious puddings made, and to write the receipt for
her, that Mrs. Mackenzie might use it when she was away. It was Mrs.
Irons’ belief that Mrs. Mackenzie never intended to go away. She had no
ideer of ladies, as were ladies, coming into her kitchen. The maids
vowed that they heard Miss Rosa crying, and mamma scolding in her
bedroom for all she was so soft-spoken. How was that jug broke, and
that chair smashed in the bedroom, that day there was such a awful row
up there?

Mrs. Mackenzie played admirably, in the old-fashioned way, dances,
reels, and Scotch and Irish tunes, the former, of which filled James
Binnie’s soul with delectation. The good mother naturally desired that
her darling should have a few good lessons of the piano while she was
in London. Rosey was eternally strumming upon an instrument which had
been taken upstairs for her special practice; and the Colonel, who was
always seeking to do harmless jobs of kindness for his friends,
bethought him of little Miss Cann, the governess at Ridley’s, whom he
recommended as an instructress. “Anybody whom you recommend I’m sure,
dear Colonel, we shall like,” said Mrs. Mackenzie, who looked as black
as thunder, and had probably intended to have Monsieur Quatremains or
Signor Twankeydillo; and the little governess came to her pupil. Mrs.
Mackenzie treated her very gruffly and haughtily at first; but as soon
as she heard Miss Cann play, the widow was pacified—nay, charmed.
Monsieur Quatremains charged a guinea for three-quarters of an hour;
while Miss Cann thankfully took five shillings for an hour and a half;
and the difference of twenty lessons, for which dear Uncle James paid,
went into Mrs. Mackenzie’s pocket, and thence probably on to her pretty
shoulders and head in the shape of a fine silk dress and a beautiful
French bonnet, in which Captain Goby said, upon his life, she didn’t
look twenty.

The little governess trotting home after her lesson would often look in
to Clive’s studio in Charlotte Street, where her two boys, as she
called Clive and J. J., were at work each at his easel. Clive used to
laugh, and tell us, who joked him about the widow and her daughter,
what Miss Cann said about them. Mrs. Mack was not all honey, it
appeared. If Rosey played incorrectly, mamma flew at her with
prodigious vehemence of language, and sometimes with a slap on poor
Rosey’s back. She must make Rosey wear tight boots, and stamp on her
little feet if they refused to enter into the slipper. I blush for the
indiscretion of Miss Cann; but she actually told J. J., that mamma
insisted upon lacing her so tight, as nearly to choke the poor little
lass. Rosey did not fight: Rosey always yielded; and the scolding over
and the tears dried, would come simpering downstairs with mamma’s arm
round her waist, and her pretty artless happy smile for the gentlemen
below. Besides the Scottish songs without music, she sang ballads at
the piano very sweetly. Mamma used to cry at these ditties. “That
child’s voice brings tears into my eyes, Mr. Newcome,” she would say.
“She has never known a moment’s sorrow yet! Heaven grant, heaven grant,
she may be happy! But what shall I be when I lose her?”

“Why, my dear, when ye lose Rosey, ye’ll console yourself with Josey,”
says droll Mr. Binnie from the sofa, who perhaps saw the manœuvre of
the widow.

The widow laughs heartily and really. She places a handkerchief over
her mouth. She glances at her brother with a pair of eyes full of
knowing mischief. “Ah, dear James,” she says, “you don’t know what it
is to have a mother’s feelings.”

“I can partly understand them,” says James. “Rosey, sing me that pretty
little French song.” Mrs. Mackenzie’s attention to Clive was really
quite affecting. If any of his friends came to the house, she took them
aside and praised Clive to them. The Colonel she adored. She had never
met with such a man or seen such a manner. The manners of the Bishop of
Tobago were beautiful, and he certainly had one of the softest and
finest hands in the world; but not finer than Colonel Newcome’s. “Look
at his foot!” (and she put out her own, which was uncommonly pretty,
and suddenly withdrew it, with an arch glance meant to represent a
blush)—“my shoe would fit it! When we were at Coventry Island, Sir
Peregrine Blandy, who succeeded poor dear Sir Rawdon Crawley—I saw his
dear boy was gazetted to a lieutenant-colonelcy in the Guards last
week—Sir Peregrine, who was one of the Prince of Wales’s most intimate
friends, was always said to have the finest manner and presence of any
man of his day; and very grand and noble he was, but I don’t think he
was equal to Colonel Newcome—I don’t really think so. Do you think so,
Mr. Honeyman? What a charming discourse that was last Sunday! I know
there were two pair of eyes not dry in the church. I could not see the
other people just for crying myself. Oh, but I wish we could have you
at Musselburgh! I was bred a Presbyterian, of course; but in much
travelling through the world with my dear husband, I came to love his
church. At home we sit under Dr M’Craw, of course; but he is so awfully
long! Four hours every Sunday at least, morning and afternoon! It
nearly kills poor Rosey. Did you hear her voice at your church? The
dear girl is delighted with the chants. Rosey, were you not delighted
with the chants?”

If she is delighted with the chants, Honeyman is delighted with the
chantress and her mamma. He dashes the fair hair from his brow: he sits
down to the piano, and plays one or two of them, warbling a faint vocal
accompaniment, and looking as if he would be lifted off the screw
music-stool, and flutter up to the ceiling.

“Oh, it’s just seraphic!” says the widow. “It’s just the breath of
incense and the pealing of the organ at the Cathedral at Montreal.
Rosey doesn’t remember Montreal. She was a wee wee child. She was born
on the voyage out, and christened at sea. You remember, Goby.”

“Gad, I promised and vowed to teach her her catechism; ’gad, but I
haven’t,” says Captain Goby. “We were between Montreal and Quebec for
three years with the Hundredth, and the Hundred Twentieth Highlanders,
and the Thirty-third Dragoon Guards a part of the time; Fipley
commanded them, and a very jolly time we had. Much better than the West
Indies, where a fellow’s liver goes to the deuce with hot pickles and
sangaree. Mackenzie was a dev’lish wild fellow,” whispers Captain Goby
to his neighbour (the present biographer, indeed), “and Mrs. Mack was
as pretty a little woman as ever you set eyes on.” (Captain Goby winks,
and looks peculiarly sly as he makes this statement.) “Our regiment
wasn’t on your side of India, Colonel.”

And in the interchange of such delightful remarks, and with music and
song, the evening passes away. “Since the house had been adorned by the
fair presence of Mrs. Mackenzie and her daughter,” Honeyman said,
always gallant in behaviour and flowery in expression, “it seemed as if
spring had visited it. Its hospitality was invested with a new grace;
its ever welcome little _réunions_ were doubly charming. But why did
these ladies come, if they were to go away again? How—how would Mr.
Binnie console himself (not to mention others) if they left him in
solitude?”

“We have no wish to leave my brother James in solitude,” cries Mrs.
Mackenzie, frankly laughing. “We like London a great deal better than
Musselburgh.”

“Oh, that we do!” ejaculates the blushing Rosey.

“And we will stay as long as ever my brother will keep us,” continues
the widow.

“Uncle James is so kind and dear,” says Rosey. “I hope he won’t send me
and mamma away.”

“He were a brute—a savage, if he did!” cries Binnie, with glances of
rapture towards the two pretty faces. Everybody liked them. Binnie
received their caresses very good-humouredly. The Colonel liked every
woman under the sun. Clive laughed and joked and waltzed alternately
with Rosey and her mamma. The latter was the briskest partner of the
two. The unsuspicious widow, poor dear innocent, would leave her girl
at the painting-room, and go shopping herself; but little J. J. also
worked there, being occupied with his second picture: and he was almost
the only one of Clive’s friends whom the widow did not like. She
pronounced the quiet little painter a pert, little, obtrusive,
underbred creature.

In a word, Mrs. Mackenzie was, as the phrase is, “setting her cap” so
openly at Clive, that none of us could avoid seeing her play: and Clive
laughed at her simple manœuvres as merrily as the rest. She was a merry
little woman. We gave her and her pretty daughter a luncheon in Lamb
Court, Temple; in Sibwright’s chambers—luncheon from Dick’s Coffee
House—ices and dessert from Partington’s in the Strand. Miss Rosey, Mr.
Sibwright, our neighbour in Lamb Court, and the Reverend Charles
Honeyman sang very delightfully after lunch; there was quite a crowd of
porters, laundresses, and boys to listen in the court; Mr. Paley was
disgusted with the noise we made—in fact, the party was perfectly
successful. We all liked the widow, and if she did set her pretty
ribbons at Clive, why should not she? We all liked the pretty, fresh,
modest Rosey. Why, even the grave old benchers in the Temple church,
when the ladies visited it on Sunday, winked their reverend eyes with
pleasure, as they looked at those two uncommonly smart, pretty,
well-dressed, fashionable women. Ladies, go to the Temple church. You
will see more young men, and receive more respectful attention there
than in any place, except perhaps at Oxford or Cambridge. Go to the
Temple church—not, of course, for the admiration which you will excite
and which you cannot help; but because the sermon is excellent, the
choral services beautifully performed, and the church so interesting as
a monument of the thirteenth century, and as it contains the tombs of
those dear Knights Templars!

Mrs. Mackenzie could be grave or gay, according to her company: nor
could any woman be of more edifying behaviour when an occasional
Scottish friend bringing a letter from darling Josey, or a
recommendatory letter from Josey’s grandmother, paid a visit in Fitzroy
Square. Little Miss Cann used to laugh and wink knowingly, saying, “You
will never get back your bedroom, Mr. Clive. You may be sure that Miss
Josey will come in a few months; and perhaps old Mrs. Binnie, only no
doubt she and her daughter do not agree. But the widow has taken
possession of Uncle James; and she will carry off somebody else if I am
not mistaken. Should you like a stepmother, Mr. Clive, or should you
prefer a wife?”

Whether the fair lady tried her wiles upon Colonel Newcome the present
writer has no certain means of ascertaining: but I think another image
occupied his heart: and this Circe tempted him no more than a score of
other enchantresses who had tried their spells upon him. If she tried
she failed. She was a very shrewd woman, quite frank in her talk when
such frankness suited her. She said to me, “Colonel Newcome has had
some great passion, once upon a time, I am sure of that, and has no
more heart to give away. The woman who had his must have been a very
lucky woman: though I daresay she did not value what she had; or did
not live to enjoy it—or—or something or other. You see tragedies in
some people’s faces. I recollect when we were in Coventry Island—there
was a chaplain there—a very good man—a Mr. Bell, and married to a
pretty little woman who died. The first day I saw him I said, ‘I know
that man has had a great grief in life. I am sure that he left his
heart in England.’ You gentlemen who write books, Mr. Pendennis, and
stop at the third volume, know very well that the real story often
begins afterwards. My third volume ended when I was sixteen, and was
married to my poor husband. Do you think all our adventures ended then,
and that we lived happy ever after? I live for my darling girls now.
All I want is to see them comfortable in life. Nothing can be more
generous than my dear brother James has been. I am only his
half-sister, you know, and was an infant in arms when he went away. He
had differences with Captain Mackenzie, who was headstrong and
imprudent, and I own my poor dear husband was in the wrong. James could
not live with my poor mother. Neither could by possibility suit the
other. I have often, I own, longed to come and keep house for him. His
home, the society he sees, of men of talents like Mr. Warrington
and—and I won’t mention names, or pay compliments to a man who knows
human nature so well as the author of Walter Lorraine: this house is
pleasanter a thousand times than Musselburgh—pleasanter for me and my
dearest Rosey, whose delicate nature shrunk and withered up in poor
mamma’s society. She was never happy except in my room, the dear child!
She’s all gentleness and affection. She doesn’t seem to show it: but
she has the most wonderful appreciation of wit, of genius, and talent
of all kinds. She always hides her feelings, except from her fond old
mother. I went up into our room yesterday, and found her in tears. I
can’t bear to see her eyes red or to think of her suffering. I asked
her what ailed her, and kissed her. She is a tender plant, Mr.
Pendennis! Heaven knows with what care I have nurtured her! She looked
up smiling on my shoulder. She looked so pretty! ‘Oh, mamma,’ the
darling child said, ‘I couldn’t help it. I have been crying over Walter
Lorraine.’ (Enter Rosey.) Rosey, darling! I have been telling Mr.
Pendennis what a naughty, naughty child you were yesterday, and how you
read a book which I told you you shouldn’t read; for it is a very
wicked book; and though it contains some sad sad truths, it is a great
deal too misanthropic (is that the right word? I’m a poor soldier’s
wife, and no scholar, you know), and a great deal too _bitter;_ and
though the reviews praise it, and the clever people—we are poor simple
country people—we won’t praise it. Sing, dearest, that little song”
(profuse kisses to Rosey), “that pretty thing that Mr. Pendennis
likes.”

“I am sure that I will sing anything that Mr. Pendennis likes,” says
Rosey, with her candid bright eyes—and she goes to the piano and
warbles “Batti, Batti,” with her sweet fresh artless voice.

More caresses follow. Mamma is in a rapture. How pretty they look—the
mother and daughter—two lilies twining together! The necessity of an
entertainment at the Temple-lunch from Dick’s (as before mentioned),
dessert from Partington’s, Sibwright’s spoons, his boy to aid ours,
nay, Sib himself, and his rooms, which are so much more elegant than
ours, and where there is a piano and guitar: all these thoughts pass in
rapid and brilliant combination in the pleasant Mr. Pendennis’s mind.
How delighted the ladies are with the proposal! Mrs. Mackenzie claps
her pretty hands, and kisses Rosey again. If osculation is a mark of
love, surely Mrs. Mack is the best of mothers. I may say, without false
modesty, that our little entertainment was most successful. The
champagne was iced to a nicety. The ladies did not perceive that our
laundress, Mrs. Flanagan, was intoxicated very early in the afternoon.
Percy Sibwright sang admirably, and with the greatest spirit, ditties
in many languages. I am sure Miss Rosey thought him (as indeed he is)
one of the most fascinating young fellows about town. To her mother’s
excellent accompaniment Rosey sang her favourite songs (by the way, her
stock was very small—five, I think, was the number). Then the table was
moved into a corner, where the quivering moulds of jelly seemed to keep
time to the music; and whilst Percy played, two couple of waltzers
actually whirled round the little room. No wonder that the court below
was thronged with admirers, that Paley the reading man was in a rage,
and Mrs. Flanagan in a state of excitement. Ah! pleasant days, happy
gold dingy chambers illuminated by youthful sunshine! merry songs and
kind faces—it is pleasant to recall you. Some of those bright eyes
shine no more: some of those smiling lips do not speak. Some are not
less kind, but sadder than in those days: of which the memories revisit
us for a moment, and sink back into the grey past. The dear old Colonel
beat time with great delight to the songs; the widow lit his cigar with
her own fair fingers. That was the only smoke permitted during the
entertainment—George Warrington himself not being allowed to use his
cutty-pipe—though the gay little widow said that she had been used to
smoking in the West Indies and I dare say spoke the truth. Our
entertainment lasted actually until after dark: and a particularly neat
cab being called from St. Clement’s by Mr. Binnie’s boy, you may be
sure we all conducted the ladies to their vehicle: and many a fellow
returning from his lonely club that evening into chambers must have
envied us the pleasure of having received two such beauties.

The clerical bachelor was not to be outdone by the gentlemen of the
bar; and the entertainment at the Temple was followed by one at
Honeyman’s lodgings, which, I must own, greatly exceeded ours in
splendour, for Honeyman had his luncheon from Gunter’s; and if he had
been Miss Rosey’s mother, giving a breakfast to the dear girl on her
marriage, the affair could not have been more elegant and handsome. We
had but two bouquets at our entertainment; at Honeyman’s there were
four upon the breakfast-table, besides a great pineapple, which must
have cost the rogue three or four guineas, and which Percy Sibwright
delicately cut up. Rosey thought the pineapple delicious. “The dear
thing does not remember the pineapples in the West Indies!” cries Mrs.
Mackenzie; and she gave us many exciting narratives of entertainments
at which she had been present at various colonial governors’ tables.
After luncheon, our host hoped we should have a little music. Dancing,
of course, could not be allowed. “That,” said Honeyman with his
soft-bleating sigh, “were scarcely clerical. You know, besides, you are
in a _hermitage;_ and” (with a glance round the table) “must put up
with Cenobite’s fare.” The fare was, as I have said, excellent. The
wine was bad, as George, and I, and Sib agreed; and in so far we
flattered ourselves that _our_ feast altogether excelled the parson’s.
The champagne especially was such stuff, that Warrington remarked on it
to his neighbour, a dark gentleman, with a tuft to his chin, and
splendid rings and chains.

The dark gentleman’s wife and daughter were the other two ladies
invited by our host. The elder was splendidly dressed. Poor Mrs.
Mackenzie’s simple gimcracks, though she displayed them to the most
advantage, and could make an ormolu bracelet go as far as another
woman’s emerald clasps, were as nothing compared to the other lady’s
gorgeous jewellery. Her fingers glittered with rings innumerable. The
head of her smelling-bottle was as big as her husband’s gold snuff box,
and of the same splendid material. Our ladies, it must be confessed,
came in a modest cab from Fitzroy Square; these arrived in a splendid
little open carriage with white ponies, and harness all over brass,
which the lady of the rings drove with a whip that was a parasol. Mrs.
Mackenzie, standing at Honeyman’s window, with her arm round Rosey’s
waist, viewed this arrival perhaps with envy. “My dear Mr. Honeyman,
whose are those beautiful horses?” cries Rosey, with enthusiasm.

The divine says with a faint blush—“It is—ah—it is Mrs. Sherrick and
Miss Sherrick who have done me the favour to come to luncheon.”

“Wine-merchant. Oh!” thinks Mrs. Mackenzie, who has seen Sherrick’s
brass plate on the cellar door of Lady Whittlesea’s Chapel; and hence,
perhaps, she was a trifle more magniloquent than usual, and entertained
us with stories of colonial governors and their ladies, mentioning no
persons but those who “had handles to their names,” as the phrase is.

Although Sherrick had actually supplied the champagne which Warrington
abused to him in confidence, the wine-merchant was not wounded; on the
contrary, he roared with laughter at the remark, and some of us smiled
who understood the humour of the joke. As for George Warrington, he
scarce knew more about the town than the ladies opposite to him; who,
yet more innocent than George, thought the champagne very good. Mrs.
Sherrick was silent during the meal, looking constantly up at her
husband, as if alarmed and always in the habit of appealing to that
gentleman, who gave her, as I thought, knowing glances and savage
winks, which made me augur that he bullied her at home. Miss Sherrick
was exceedingly handsome: she kept the fringed curtains of her eyes
constantly down; but when she lifted them up towards Clive, who was
very attentive to her (the rogue never sees a handsome woman but to
this day he continues the same practice)—when she looked up and smiled,
she was indeed a beautiful young creature to behold—with her pale
forehead, her thick arched eyebrows, her rounded cheeks, and her full
lips slightly shaded,—how shall I mention the word?—slightly pencilled,
after the manner of the lips of the French governess, Mademoiselle
Lenoir.

Percy Sibwright engaged Miss Mackenzie with his usual grace and
affability. Mrs. Mackenzie did her very utmost to be gracious, but it
was evident the party was not altogether to her liking. Poor Percy,
about whose means and expectations she had in the most natural way in
the world asked information from me, was not perhaps a very eligible
admirer for darling Rosey. She knew not that Percy can no more help
gallantry than the sun can help shining. As soon as Rosey had done
eating up her pineapple, artlessly confessing (to Percy Sibwright’s
inquiries) that she preferred it to the rasps and hinnyblobs in her
grandmamma’s garden, “Now, dearest Rosey,” cries Mrs. Mack, “now, a
little song. You promised Mr. Pendennis a little song.” Honeyman whisks
open the piano in a moment. The widow takes off her cleaned gloves
(Mrs. Sherrick’s were new, and of the best Paris make), and little
Rosey sings No. 1, followed by No. 2, with very great applause. Mother
and daughter entwine as they quit the piano. “Brava! brava!” says Percy
Sibwright. Does Mr. Clive Newcome say nothing? His back is turned to
the piano, and he is looking with all his might into the eyes of Miss
Sherrick.

Percy sings a Spanish seguidilla, or a German lied, or a French
romance, or a Neapolitan canzonet, which, I am bound to say, excites
very little attention. Mrs. Ridley is sending in coffee at this
juncture, of which Mrs. Sherrick partakes, with lots of sugar, as she
has partaken of numberless things before. Chicken, plovers’ eggs,
prawns, aspics, jellies, creams, grapes, and what-not. Mr. Honeyman
advances, and with deep respect asks if Mrs. Sherrick and Miss Sherrick
will not be persuaded to sing? She rises and bows, and again takes off
the French gloves, and shows the large white hands glittering with
rings, and, summoning Emily her daughter, they go to the piano.

“Can she sing,” whispers Mrs. Mackenzie, “can she sing after eating so
much?” Can she sing, indeed! Oh, you poor ignorant Mrs. Mackenzie! Why,
when you were in the West Indies, if you ever read the English
newspapers, you must have read of the fame of Miss Folthorpe. Mrs.
Sherrick is no other than the famous artist, who, after three years of
brilliant triumphs at the Scala, the Pergola, the San Carlo, the opera
in England, forsook her profession, rejected a hundred suitors, and
married Sherrick, who was Mr. Cox’s lawyer, who failed, as everybody
knows, as manager of Drury Lane. Sherrick, like a man of spirit, would
not allow his wife to sing in public after his marriage; but in private
society, of course, she is welcome to perform: and now with her
daughter, who possesses a noble contralto voice, she takes her place
royally at the piano, and the two sing so magnificently that everybody
in the room, with one single exception, is charmed and delighted; and
that little Miss Cann herself creeps up the stairs, and stands with
Mrs. Ridley at the door to listen to the music.

Miss Sherrick looks doubly handsome as she sings. Clive Newcome is in a
rapture; so is good-natured Miss Rosey, whose little heart beats with
pleasure, and who says quite unaffectedly to Miss Sherrick, with
delight and gratitude beaming from her blue eyes, “Why did you ask me
to sing, when you sing so wonderfully, so beautifully, yourself? Do not
leave the piano, please—do sing again!” And she puts out a kind little
hand towards the superior artist, and, blushing, leads her back to the
instrument. “I’m sure me and Emily will sing for you as much as you
like, dear,” says Mrs. Sherrick, nodding to Rosey good-naturedly. Mrs.
Mackenzie, who has been biting her lips and drumming the time on a
side-table, forgets at last the pain of being vanquished in admiration
of the conquerors. “It was cruel of you not to tell us, Mr. Honeyman,”
she says, “of the—of the treat you had in store for us. I had no idea
we were going to meet professional people; Mrs. Sherrick’s singing is
indeed beautiful.”

“If you come up to our place in the Regent’s Park, Mr. Newcome,” Mr.
Sherrick says, “Mrs. S. and Emily will give you as many songs as you
like. How do you like the house in Fitzroy Square? Anything wanting
doing there? I’m a good landlord to a good tenant. Don’t care what I
spend on my houses. Lose by ’em sometimes. Name a day when you’ll come
to us; and I’ll ask some good fellows to meet you. Your father and Mr.
Binnie came once. That was when you were a young chap. They didn’t have
a bad evening, I believe. You just come and try us—I can give you as
good a glass of wine as most, I think,” and he smiles, perhaps thinking
of the champagne which Mr. Warrington had slighted. “I’ve ad the close
carriage for my wife this evening,” he continues, looking out of window
at a very handsome brougham which has just drawn up there. “That little
pair of horses steps prettily together, don’t they? Fond of horses? I
know you are. See you in the Park; and going by our house sometimes.
The Colonel sits a horse uncommonly well: so do you, Mr. Newcome. I’ve
often said, ‘Why don’t they get off their horses and say, Sherrick,
we’re come for a bit of lunch and a glass of Sherry?’ Name a day, sir.
Mr. P., will you be in it?”

Clive Newcome named a day, and told his father of the circumstance in
the evening. The Colonel looked grave. “There was something which I did
not quite like about Mr. Sherrick,” said that acute observer of human
nature. “It was easy to see that the man is not quite a gentleman. I
don’t care what a man’s trade is, Clive. Indeed, who are we, to give
ourselves airs upon that subject? But when I am gone, my boy, and there
is nobody near you who knows the world as I do, you may fall into
designing hands, and rogues may lead you into mischief: keep a sharp
look-out, Clive. Mr. Pendennis, here, knows that there are designing
fellows abroad” (and the dear old gentleman gives a very knowing nod as
he speaks). “When I am gone, keep the lad from harm’s way, Pendennis.
Meanwhile Mr. Sherrick has been a very good and obliging landlord; and
a man who sells wine may certainly give a friend a bottle. I am glad
you had a pleasant evening, boys. Ladies, I hope you have had a
pleasant afternoon. Miss Rosey, you are come back to make tea for the
old gentlemen? James begins to get about briskly now. He walked to
Hanover Square, Mrs. Mackenzie, without hurting his ankle in the
least.”

“I am almost sorry that he is getting well,” says Mrs. Mackenzie
sincerely. “He won’t want us when he is quite cured.”

“Indeed, my dear creature!” cries the Colonel, taking her pretty hand
and kissing it; “he will want you, and he shall want you. James no more
knows the world than Miss Rosey here; and if I had not been with him,
would have been perfectly unable to take care of himself. When I am
gone to India, somebody must stay with him; and—and my boy must have a
home to go to,” says the kind soldier, his voice dropping. “I had been
in hopes that his own relatives would have received him more, but never
mind about that,” he cried more cheerfully. “Why, I may not be absent a
year! I perhaps need not go at all—I am second for promotion. A couple
of our old generals may drop any day; and when I get my regiment I come
back to stay, to live at home. Meantime, whilst I am gone, my dear
lady, you will take care of James; and you will be kind to my boy.”

“That I will!” said the widow, radiant with pleasure, and she took one
of Clive’s hands and pressed it for an instant; and from Clive’s
father’s kind face there beamed out that benediction which always made
his countenance appear to me among the most beautiful of human faces.




CHAPTER XXIV.
In which the Newcome Brothers once more meet together in Unity


His narrative, as the judicious reader no doubt is aware, is written
maturely and at ease, long after the voyage is over, whereof it
recounts the adventures and perils; the winds adverse and favourable;
the storms, shoals, shipwrecks, islands, and so forth, which Clive
Newcome met in his early journey in life. In such a history events
follow each other without necessarily having a connection with one
another. One ship crosses another ship, and after a visit from one
captain to his comrade, they sail away each on his course. The Clive
Newcome meets a vessel which makes signals that she is short of bread
and water; and after supplying her, our captain leaves her to see her
no more. One or two of the vessels with which we commenced the voyage
together, part company in a gale, and founder miserably; others, after
being wofully battered in the tempest, make port, or are cast upon
surprising islands where all sorts of unlooked-for prosperity awaits
the lucky crew. Also, no doubt, the writer of the book, into whose
hands Clive Newcome’s logs have been put, and who is charged with the
duty of making two octavo volumes out of his friend’s story, dresses up
the narrative in his own way; utters his own remarks in place of
Newcome’s; makes fanciful descriptions of individuals and incidents
with which he never could have been personally acquainted; and commits
blunders, which the critics will discover. A great number of the
descriptions in Cook’s Voyages, for instance, were notoriously invented
by Dr. Hawkesworth, who “did” the book: so in the present volumes,
where dialogues are written down, which the reporter could by no
possibility have heard, and where motives are detected which the
persons actuated by them certainly never confided to the writer, the
public must once for all be warned that the author’s individual fancy
very likely supplies much of the narrative; and that he forms it as
best he may, out of stray papers, conversations reported to him, and
his knowledge, right or wrong, of the characters of the persons
engaged. And, as is the case with the most orthodox histories, the
writer’s own guesses or conjectures are printed in exactly the same
type as the most ascertained patent facts. I fancy, for my part, that
the speeches attributed to Clive, the Colonel, and the rest, are as
authentic as the orations in Sallust or Livy, and only implore the
truth-loving public to believe that incidents here told, and which
passed very probably without witnesses, were either confided to me
subsequently as compiler of this biography, or are of such a nature
that they must have happened from what we know happened after. For
example, when you read such words as QVE ROMANVS on a battered Roman
stone, your profound antiquarian knowledge enables you to assert that
SENATVS POPVLVS was also inscribed there at some time or other. You
take a mutilated statue of Mars, Bacchus, Apollo, or Virorum, and you
pop him on a wanting hand, an absent foot, or a nose which time or
barbarians have defaced. You tell your tales as you can, and state the
facts as you think they must have been. In this manner, Mr. James
(historiographer to Her Majesty), Titus Livius, Professor Alison,
Robinson Crusoe, and all historians proceeded. Blunders there must be
in the best of these narratives, and more asserted than they can
possibly know or vouch for.

To recur to our own affairs, and the subject at present in hand, I am
obliged here to supply from conjecture a few points of the history,
which I could not know from actual experience or hearsay. Clive, let us
say, is Romanus, and we must add Senatus Populusque to his inscription.
After Mrs. Mackenzie and her pretty daughter had been for a few months
in London, which they did not think of quitting, although Mr. Binnie’s
wounded little leg was now as well and as brisk as ever it had been, a
redintegration of love began to take place between the Colonel and his
relatives in Park Lane. How should we know that there had ever been a
quarrel, or at any rate a coolness? Thomas Newcome was not a man to
talk at length of any such matter; though a word or two occasionally
dropped in conversation by the simple gentleman might lead persons who
chose to interest themselves about his family affairs to form their own
opinions concerning them. After that visit of the Colonel and his son
to Newcome, Ethel was constantly away with her grandmother. The Colonel
went to see his pretty little favourite at Brighton, and once, twice,
thrice, Lady Kew’s door was denied to him. The knocker of that door
could not be more fierce than the old lady’s countenance, when Newcome
met her in her chariot driving on the cliff. Once, forming the
loveliest of a charming Amazonian squadron, led by Mr. Whiskin, the
riding-master, when the Colonel encountered his pretty Ethel, she
greeted him affectionately, it is true; there was still the sweet look
of candour and love in her eyes; but when he rode up to her she looked
so constrained, when he talked about Clive, so reserved, when he left
her, so sad, that he could not but feel pain and commiseration. Back he
went to London, having in a week only caught this single glance of his
darling.

This event occurred while Clive was painting his picture of the “Battle
of Assaye” before mentioned, during the struggles incident on which
composition he was not thinking much about Miss Ethel, or his papa, or
any other subject but his great work. Whilst Assaye was still in
progress, Thomas Newcome must have had an explanation with his
sister-in-law, Lady Anne, to whom he frankly owned the hopes which he
had entertained for Clive, and who must as frankly have told the
Colonel that Ethel’s family had very different views for that young
lady to those which the simple Colonel had formed. A generous early
attachment, the Colonel thought, is the safeguard of a young man. To
love a noble girl; to wait a while and struggle, and haply do some
little achievement in order to win her; the best task to which his boy
could set himself. If two young people so loving each other were to
marry on rather narrow means, what then? A happy home was better than
the finest house in Mayfair; a generous young fellow, such as, please
God, his son was—loyal, upright, and a gentleman—might pretend surely
to his kinswoman’s hand without derogation; and the affection he bore
Ethel himself was so great, and the sweet regard with which she
returned it, that the simple father thought his kindly project was
favoured by Heaven, and prayed for its fulfilment, and pleased himself
to think, when his campaigns were over, and his sword hung on the wall,
what a beloved daughter he might have to soothe and cheer his old age.
With such a wife for his son, and child for himself, he thought the
happiness of his last years might repay him for friendless boyhood,
lonely manhood, and cheerless exile; and he imparted his simple scheme
to Ethel’s mother, who no doubt was touched as he told his story; for
she always professed regard and respect for him, and in the differences
which afterwards occurred in the family, and the quarrels which divided
the brothers, still remained faithful to the good Colonel.

But Barnes Newcome, Esquire, was the head of the house, and the
governor of his father and all Sir Brian’s affairs; and Barnes Newcome,
Esquire, hated his cousin Clive, and spoke of him as a beggarly
painter, an impudent snob, an infernal young puppy, and so forth; and
Barnes with his usual freedom of language imparted his opinions to his
Uncle Hobson at the bank, and Uncle Hobson carried them home to Mrs.
Newcome in Bryanstone Square; and Mrs. Newcome took an early
opportunity of telling the Colonel her opinion on the subject, and of
bewailing that love for aristocracy which she saw actuated some folks;
and the Colonel was brought to see that Barnes was his boy’s enemy, and
words very likely passed between them, for Thomas Newcome took a new
banker at this time, and, as Clive informed me, was in very great
dudgeon because Hobson Brothers wrote to him to say that he had
overdrawn his account. “I am sure there is some screw loose,” the
sagacious youth remarked to me; “and the Colonel and the people in Park
Lane are at variance, because he goes there very little now; and he
promised to go to Court when Ethel was presented, and he didn’t go.”

Some months after the arrival of Mr. Binnie’s niece and sister in
Fitzroy Square, the fraternal quarrel between the Newcomes must have
come to an end—for that time at least—and was followed by a rather
ostentatious reconciliation. And pretty little Rosey Mackenzie was the
innocent and unconscious cause of this amiable change in the minds of
the three brethren, as I gathered from a little conversation with Mrs.
Newcome, who did me the honour to invite me to her table. As she had
not vouchsafed this hospitality to me for a couple of years previously,
and perfectly stifled me with affability when we met,—as her invitation
came quite at the end of the season, when almost everybody was out of
town, and a dinner to a man is no compliment,—I was at first for
declining this invitation, and spoke of it with great scorn when Mr.
Newcome orally delivered it to me at Bays’s Club.

“What,” said I, turning round to an old man of the world, who happened
to be in the room at the time, “what do these people mean by asking a
fellow to dinner in August, and taking me up after dropping me for two
years?”

“My good fellow,” says my friend—it was my kind old Uncle Major
Pendennis, indeed—“I have lived long enough about town never to ask
myself questions of that sort. In the world people drop you and take
you up every day. You know Lady Cheddar by sight? I have known her
husband for forty years: I have stayed with them in the country, for
weeks at a time. She knows me as well as she knows King Charles at
Charing Cross, and a doosid deal better, and yet for a whole season she
will drop me—pass me by, as if there was no such person in the world.
Well, sir, what do I do? I never see her. I give you my word I am never
conscious of her existence; and if I meet her at dinner, I’m no more
aware of her than the fellows in the play are of Banquo. What’s the end
of it? She comes round—only last Toosday she came round—and said Lord
Cheddar wanted me to go down to Wiltshire. I asked after the family
(you know Henry Churningham is engaged to Miss Rennet?—a doosid good
match for the Cheddars). We shook hands and are as good friends as
ever. I don’t suppose she’ll cry when I die, you know,” said the worthy
old gentleman with a grin. “Nor shall I go into very deep mourning if
anything happens to her. You were quite right to say to Newcome that
you did not know whether you were free or not, and would look at your
engagements when you got home, and give him an answer. A fellow of that
rank _has_ no right to give himself airs. But they will, sir. Some of
those bankers are as high and mighty as the oldest families. They marry
noblemen’s daughters, by Jove, and think nothing is too good for ’em.
But I should go, if I were you, Arthur. I dined there a couple of
months ago; and the bankeress said something about you: that you and
her nephew were much together, that you were sad wild dogs, I
think—something of that sort. ‘Gad, ma’am,’ says I, ‘boys will be
boys.’ ‘And they grow to be men!’ says she, nodding her head. Queer
little woman, devilish pompous. Dinner confoundedly long, stoopid,
scientific.”

The old gentleman was on this day inclined to be talkative and
confidential, and I set down some more remarks which he made concerning
my friends. “Your Indian Colonel,” says he, “seems a worthy man.” The
Major quite forgot having been in India himself, unless he was in
company with some very great personage. “He don’t seem to know much of
the world, and we are not very intimate. Fitzroy Square is a dev’lish
long way off for a fellow to go for a dinner, and _entre nous_, the
dinner is rather queer and the company still more so. It’s right for
you who are a literary man to see all sorts of people; but I’m
different, you know, so Newcome and I are not very thick together. They
say he wanted to marry your friend to Lady Anne’s daughter, an
exceedingly fine girl; one of the prettiest girls come out this season.
I hear the young men say so. And that shows how monstrous ignorant of
the world Colonel Newcome is. His son could no more get that girl than
he could marry one of the royal princesses. Mark my words, they intend
Miss Newcome for Lord Kew. Those banker fellows are wild after grand
marriages. Kew will sow his wild oats, and they’ll marry her to him; or
if not to him, to some man of high rank. His father Walham was a weak
young man; but his grandmother, old Lady Kew, is a monstrous clever old
woman, too severe with her children, one of whom ran away and married a
poor devil without a shilling. Nothing could show a more deplorable
ignorance of the world than poor Newcome supposing his son could make
such a match as that with his cousin. Is it true that he is going to
make his son an artist? I don’t know what the dooce the world is coming
to. An artist! By gad, in my time a fellow would as soon have thought
of making his son a hairdresser, or a pastrycook, by gad.” And the
worthy Major gives his nephew two fingers, and trots off to the next
club in St. James’s Street, of which he is a member.

The virtuous hostess of Bryanstone Square was quite civil and
good-humoured when Mr. Pendennis appeared at her house; and my surprise
was not inconsiderable when I found the whole party from Saint Pancras
there assembled—Mr. Binnie; the Colonel and his son; Mrs. Mackenzie,
looking uncommonly handsome and perfectly well-dressed; and Miss Rosey,
in pink crape, with pearly shoulders and blushing cheeks, and beautiful
fair ringlets—as fresh and comely a sight as it was possible to
witness. Scarcely had we made our bows, and shaken our hands, and
imparted our observations about the fineness of the weather, when,
behold! as we look from the drawing-room windows into the cheerful
square of Bryanstone, a great family coach arrives, driven by a family
coachman in a family wig, and we recognise Lady Anne Newcome’s
carriage, and see her ladyship, her mother, her daughter, and her
husband, Sir Brian, descend from the vehicle. “It is quite a family
party,” whispers the happy Mrs. Newcome to the happy writer conversing
with her in the niche of the window. “Knowing your intimacy with our
brother, Colonel Newcome, we thought it would please him to meet you
here. Will you be so kind as to take Miss Newcome to dinner?”

Everybody was bent upon being happy and gracious. It was “My dear
brother, how do you do?” from Sir Brian. “My dear Colonel, how glad we
are to see you! how well you look!” from Lady Anne. Miss Newcome ran up
to him with both hands out, and put her beautiful face so close to his
that I thought, upon my conscience, she was going to kiss him. And Lady
Kew, advancing in the frankest manner, with a smile, I must own, rather
awful, playing round her many wrinkles, round her ladyship’s hooked
nose, and displaying her ladyship’s teeth (a new and exceedingly
handsome set), held out her hand to Colonel Newcome, and said briskly,
“Colonel, it is an age since we met.” She turns to Clive with equal
graciousness and good-humour, and says, “Mr. Clive, let me shake hands
with you; I have heard all sorts of good of you, that you have been
painting the most beautiful things, that you are going to be quite
famous.” Nothing can exceed the grace and kindness of Lady Anne Newcome
towards Mrs. Mackenzie: the pretty widow blushes with pleasure at this
greeting; and now Lady Anne must be introduced to Mrs. Mackenzie’s
charming daughter, and whispers in the delighted mother’s ear, “She is
lovely!” Rosey comes up looking rosy indeed, and executes a pretty
curtsey with a great deal of blushing grace.

Ethel has been so happy to see her dear uncle, that as yet she has had
no eyes for any one else, until Clive advancing, those bright eyes
become brighter still with surprise and pleasure as she beholds him.
For being absent with his family in Italy now, and not likely to see
this biography for many many months, I may say that he is a much
handsomer fellow than our designer has represented; and if that wayward
artist should take this very scene for the purpose of illustration, he
is requested to bear in mind that the hero of this story will wish to
have justice done to his person. There exists in Mr. Newcome’s
possession a charming little pencil-drawing of Clive at this age, and
which Colonel Newcome took with him when he went—whither he is about to
go in a very few pages—and brought back with him to this country. A
florid apparel becomes some men, as simple raiment suits others, and
Clive in his youth was of the ornamental class of mankind—a customer to
tailors, a wearer of handsome rings, shirt-studs, mustachios, long
hair, and the like; nor could he help, in his costume or his nature,
being picturesque and generous and splendid. He was always greatly
delighted with that Scotch man-at-arms in Quentin Durward, who twists
off an inch or two of his gold chain to treat a friend and pay for a
bottle. He would give a comrade a ring or a fine jewelled pin, if he
had no money. Silver dressing-cases and brocade morning-gowns were in
him a sort of propriety at this season of his youth. It was a pleasure
to persons of colder temperament to sun themselves in the warmth of his
bright looks and generous humour. His laughter cheered one like wine. I
do not know that he was very witty; but he was pleasant. He was prone
to blush: the history of a generous trait moistened his eyes instantly.
He was instinctively fond of children, and of the other sex from one
year old to eighty. Coming from the Derby once—a merry party—and
stopped on the road from Epsom in a lock of carriages, during which the
people in the carriage ahead saluted us with many vituperative
epithets, and seized the heads of our leaders,—Clive in a twinkling
jumped off the box, and the next minute we saw him engaged with a
half-dozen of the enemy: his hat gone, his fair hair flying off his
face, his blue eyes flashing with fire, his lips and nostrils quivering
wrath, his right and left hand hitting out, _que c’étoit un plaisir à
voir_. His father sat back in the carriage, looking with delight and
wonder—indeed it was a great sight. Policeman X separated the warriors.
Clive ascended the box again with a dreadful wound in the coat, which
was gashed from the waist to the shoulder. I hardly ever saw the elder
Newcome in such a state of triumph. The postboys quite stared at the
gratuity he gave them, and wished they might drive his lordship to the
Oaks.

All the time we have been making this sketch Ethel is standing, looking
at Clive; and the blushing youth casts down his eyes before hers. Her
face assumes a look of arch humour. She passes a slim hand over the
prettiest lips and a chin with the most lovely of dimples, thereby
indicating her admiration of Mr. Clive’s mustachios and imperial. They
are of a warm yellowish chestnut colour, and have not yet known the
razor. He wears a low cravat; a shirt-front of the finest lawn, with
ruby buttons. His hair, of a lighter colour, waves almost to his “manly
shoulders broad.” “Upon my word; my dear Colonel,” says Lady Kew, after
looking at him, and nodding her head shrewdly, “I think we were right.”

“No doubt right in everything your ladyship does, but in what
particularly?” asks the Colonel.

“Right to keep him out of the way. Ethel has been disposed of these ten
years. Did not Anne tell you? How foolish of her! But all mothers like
to have young men dying for their daughters. Your son is really the
handsomest boy in London. Who is that conceited-looking young man in
the window? Mr. Pen—what? has your son really been very wicked? I was
told he was a sad scapegrace.”

“I never knew him do, and I don’t believe he ever thought, anything
that was untrue, or unkind, or ungenerous,” says the Colonel. “If any
one has belied my boy to you, and I think I know who his enemy has
been——”

“The young lady is very pretty,” remarks Lady Kew, stopping the
Colonel’s further outbreak. “How very young her mother looks! Ethel, my
dear! Colonel Newcome must present us to Mrs. Mackenzie and Miss
Mackenzie;” and Ethel, giving a nod to Clive, with whom she has talked
for a minute or two, again puts her hand in her uncle’s, and walks
towards Mrs. Mackenzie and her daughter.

And now let the artist, if he has succeeded in drawing Clive to his
liking, cut a fresh pencil, and give us a likeness of Ethel. She is
seventeen years old; rather taller than the majority of women; of a
countenance somewhat grave and haughty, but on occasion brightening
with humour or beaming with kindliness and affection. Too quick to
detect affectation or insincerity in others, too impatient of dulness
or pomposity, she is more sarcastic now than she became when after
years of suffering had softened her nature. Truth looks out of her
bright eyes, and rises up armed, and flashes scorn or denial, perhaps
too readily, when she encounters flattery, or meanness, or imposture.
After her first appearance in the world, if the truth must be told,
this young lady was popular neither with many men, nor with most women.
The innocent dancing youth who pressed round her, attracted by her
beauty, were rather afraid, after a while, of engaging her. This one
felt dimly that she despised him; another, that his simpering
commonplaces (delights of how many well-bred maidens!) only occasioned
Miss Newcome’s laughter. Young Lord Croesus, whom all maidens and
matrons were eager to secure, was astounded to find that he was utterly
indifferent to her, and that she would refuse him twice or thrice in an
evening, and dance as many times with poor Tom Spring, who was his
father’s ninth son, and only at home till he could get a ship and go to
sea again. The young women were frightened at her sarcasm. She seemed
to know what _fadaises_ they whispered to their partners as they paused
in the waltzes; and Fanny, who was luring Lord Croesus towards her with
her blue eyes, dropped them guiltily to the floor when Ethel’s turned
towards her; and Cecilia sang more out of time than usual; and Clara,
who was holding Freddy, and Charley, and Tommy round her enchanted by
her bright conversation and witty mischief, became dumb and disturbed
when Ethel passed her with her cold face; and old Lady Hookham, who was
playing off her little Minnie now at young Jack Gorget of the Guards,
now at the eager and simple Bob Bateson of the Coldstreams, would slink
off when Ethel made her appearance on the ground, whose presence seemed
to frighten away the fish and the angler. No wonder that the other
Mayfair nymphs were afraid of this severe Diana, whose looks were so
cold and whose arrows were so keen.

But those who had no cause to heed Diana’s shot or coldness might
admire her beauty; nor could the famous Parisian marble, which Clive
said she resembled, be more perfect in form than this young lady. Her
hair and eyebrows were jet black (these latter may have been too thick
according to some physiognomists, giving rather a stern expression to
the eyes, and hence causing those guilty ones to tremble who came under
her lash), but her complexion was as dazzlingly fair and her cheeks as
red as Miss Rosey’s own, who had a right to those beauties, being a
blonde by nature. In Miss Ethel’s black hair there was a slight natural
ripple, as when a fresh breeze blows over the _melan hudor_—a ripple
such as Roman ladies nineteen hundred years ago, and our own beauties a
short time since, endeavoured to imitate by art, paper, and I believe
crumpling-irons. Her eyes were grey; her mouth rather large; her teeth
as regular and bright as Lady Kew’s own; her voice low and sweet; and
her smile, when it lighted up her face and eyes, as beautiful as spring
sunshine; also they could lighten and flash often, and sometimes,
though rarely, rain. As for her figure—but as this tall slender form is
concealed in a simple white muslin robe (of the sort which I believe is
called _demie toilette_), in which her fair arms are enveloped, and
which is confined at her slim waist by an azure ribbon, and descends to
her feet—let us make a respectful bow to that fair image of Youth,
Health, and Modesty, and fancy it as pretty as we will. Miss Ethel made
a very stately curtsey to Mrs. Mackenzie, surveying that widow calmly,
so that the elder lady looked up and fluttered; but towards Rosey she
held out her hand, and smiled with the utmost kindness, and the smile
was returned by the other; and the blushes with which Miss Mackenzie
was always ready at this time, became her very much. As for Mrs.
Mackenzie—the very largest curve that shall not be a caricature, and
actually disfigure the widow’s countenance—a smile so wide and steady,
so exceedingly rident, indeed, as almost to be ridiculous, may be drawn
upon her buxom face, if the artist chooses to attempt it as it appeared
during the whole of this summer evening, before dinner came (when
people ordinarily look very grave), when she was introduced to the
company: when she was made known to our friends Julia and Maria,—the
darling child, lovely little dears! how like their papa and mamma!—when
Sir Brian Newcome gave her his arm downstairs to the dining-room when
anybody spoke to her: when John offered her meat, or the gentleman in
the white waistcoat, wine; when she accepted or when she refused these
refreshments; when Mr. Newcome told her a dreadfully stupid story; when
the Colonel called cheerily from his end of the table, “My dear Mrs.
Mackenzie, you don’t take any wine to-day; may I not have the honour of
drinking a glass of champagne with you?” when the new boy from the
country upset some sauce upon her shoulder: when Mrs. Newcome made the
sign for departure; and I have no doubt in the drawing-room, when the
ladies retired thither. “Mrs. Mack is perfectly awful,” Clive told me
afterwards, “since that dinner in Bryanstone Square. Lady Kew and Lady
Anne are never out of her mouth; she has had white muslin dresses made
just like Ethel’s for herself and her daughter. She has bought a
Peerage, and knows the pedigree of the whole Kew family. She won’t go
out in a cab now without the boy on the box; and in the plate for the
cards which she has established in the drawing-room, you know, Lady
Kew’s pasteboard always _will_ come up to the top, though I poke it
down whenever I go into the room. As for poor Lady Trotter, the
governess of St. Kitt’s, you know, and the Bishop of Tobago, they are
quite bowled out: Mrs. Mack has not mentioned them for a week.”

During the dinner it seemed to me that the lovely young lady by whom I
sate cast many glances towards Mrs. Mackenzie, which did not betoken
particular pleasure. Miss Ethel asked me several questions regarding
Clive, and also respecting Miss Mackenzie: perhaps her questions were
rather downright and imperious, and she patronised me in a manner that
would not have given all gentlemen pleasure. I was Clive’s friend, his
schoolfellow? had I seen him a great deal? know him very well—very well
indeed? Was it true that he had been very thoughtless? very wild? Who
told her so? That was not her question (with a blush). It was not true,
and I ought to know? He was not spoiled? He was very good-natured,
generous, told the truth? He loved his profession very much, and had
great talent? Indeed she was very glad. Why do they sneer at his
profession? It seemed to her quite as good as her father’s and
brother’s. Were artists not very dissipated? Not more so, nor often so
much as other young men? Was Mr. Binnie rich, and was he going to leave
all his money to his niece? How long have you known them? Is Miss
Mackenzie as good-natured as she looks? Not very clever, I suppose.
Mrs. Mackenzie looks very—No, thank you, no more. Grandmamma (she is
very deaf, and cannot hear) scolded me for reading the book you wrote,
and took the book away. I afterwards got it, and read it all. I don’t
think there was any harm in it. Why do you give such bad characters of
women? Don’t you know any good ones? Yes, two as good as any in the
world. They are unselfish: they are pious; they are always doing good;
they live in the country? Why don’t you put them into a book? Why don’t
you put my uncle into a book? He is so good, that nobody could make him
good enough. Before I came out, I heard a young lady—(Lady Clavering’s
daughter, Miss Amory) sing a song of yours. I have never spoken to an
author before. I saw Mr. Lyon at Lady Popinjoy’s, and heard him speak.
He said it was very hot, and he looked so, I am sure. Who is the
greatest author now alive? You will tell me when you come upstairs
after dinner;—and the young lady sails away, following the matrons, who
rise and ascend to the drawing-room. Miss Newcome has been watching the
behaviour of the author by whom she sate; curious to know what such a
person’s habits are; whether he speaks and acts like other people; and
in what respect authors are different from persons “in society.”

When we had sufficiently enjoyed claret and politics below-stairs, the
gentlemen went to the drawing-room to partake of coffee and the ladies’
delightful conversation. We had heard previously the tinkling of the
piano above, and the well-known sound of a couple of Miss Rosey’s five
songs. The two young ladies were engaged over an album at a side-table,
when the males of the party arrived. The book contained a number of
Clive’s drawings made in the time of his very early youth for the
amusement of his little cousins. Miss Ethel seemed to be very much
pleased with these performances, which Miss Mackenzie likewise examined
with great good-nature and satisfaction. So she did the views of Rome,
Naples, Marble Hill in the county of Sussex, etc., in the same
collection: so she did the Berlin cockatoo and spaniel which Mrs.
Newcome was working in idle moments: so she did the “Books of Beauty,”
“Flowers of Loveliness,” and so forth. She thought the prints very
sweet and pretty: she thought the poetry very pretty and sweet. Which
did she like best, Mr. Niminy’s “Lines to a bunch of violets,” or Miss
Piminy’s “Stanzas to a wreath of roses”? Miss Mackenzie was quite
puzzled to say which of these masterpieces she preferred; she found
them alike so pretty. She appealed, as in most cases, to mamma. “How,
my darling love, can I pretend to know?” mamma says. “I have been a
soldier’s wife, battling about the world. I have not had your
advantages. I had no drawing-masters, nor music-masters as you have.
You, dearest child, must instruct me in these things.” This poses
Rosey: who prefers to have her opinions dealt out to her like her
frocks, bonnets, handkerchiefs, her shoes and gloves, and the order
thereof; the lumps of sugar for her tea, the proper quantity of
raspberry jam for breakfast; who trusts for all supplies corporeal and
spiritual to her mother. For her own part, Rosey is pleased with
everything in nature. Does she love music? Oh, yes. Bellini and
Donizetti? Oh, yes. Dancing? They had no dancing at grandmamma’s, but
she adores dancing, and Mr. Clive dances very well indeed. (A smile
from Miss Ethel at this admission.) Does she like the country? Oh, she
is so happy in the country! London? London is delightful, and so is the
seaside. She does not really know which she likes best, London or the
country, for mamma is not near her to decide, being engaged listening
to Sir Brian, who is laying down the law to her, and smiling, smiling
with all her might. In fact, Mr. Newcome says to Mr. Pendennis in his
droll, humorous way, “That woman grins like a Cheshire cat.” Who was
the naturalist who first discovered that peculiarity of the cats in
Cheshire?

In regard to Miss Mackenzie’s opinions, then, it is not easy to
discover that they are decided, or profound, or original; but it seems
pretty clear that she has a good temper, and a happy contented
disposition. And the smile which her pretty countenance wears shows off
to great advantage the two dimples on her pink cheeks. Her teeth are
even and white, her hair of a beautiful colour, and no snow can be
whiter than her fair round neck and polished shoulders. She talks very
kindly and good-naturedly with Julia and Maria (Mrs. Hobson’s precious
ones) until she is bewildered by the statements which those young
ladies make regarding astronomy, botany, and chemistry, all of which
they are studying. “My dears, I don’t know a single word about any of
these abstruse subjects: I wish I did,” she says. And Ethel Newcome
laughs. She too is ignorant upon all these subjects. “I am glad there
is some one else,” says Rosey, with naivete, “who is as ignorant as I
am.” And the younger children, with a solemn air, say they will ask
mamma leave to teach her. So everybody, somehow, great or small, seems
to protect her; and the humble, simple, gentle little thing wins a
certain degree of goodwill from the world, which is touched by her
humility and her pretty sweet looks. The servants in Fitzroy Square
waited upon her much more kindly than upon her smiling bustling mother.
Uncle James is especially fond of his little Rosey. Her presence in his
study never discomposes him; whereas his sister fatigues him with the
exceeding activity of her gratitude, and her energy in pleasing. As I
was going away, I thought I heard Sir Brian Newcome say, “It” (but what
“it” was, of course I cannot conjecture)—“it will do very well. The
mother seems a superior woman.”




CHAPTER XXV.
Is passed in a Public-house


I had no more conversation with Miss Newcome that night, who had
forgotten her curiosity about the habits of authors. When she had ended
her talk with Miss Mackenzie, she devoted the rest of the evening to
her uncle, Colonel Newcome; and concluded by saying, “And now you will
come and ride with me to-morrow, uncle, won’t you?” which the Colonel
faithfully promised to do. And she shook hands with Clive very kindly:
and with Rosey very frankly, but as I thought with rather a patronising
air: and she made a very stately bow to Mrs. Mackenzie, and so departed
with her father and mother. Lady Kew had gone away earlier. Mrs.
Mackenzie informed us afterwards that the Countess had gone to sleep
after her dinner. If it was at Mrs. Mack’s story about the Governor’s
ball at Tobago, and the quarrel for precedence between the Lord
Bishop’s lady, Mrs. Rotchet, and the Chief Justice’s wife, Lady
Barwise, I should not be at all surprised.

A handsome fly carried off the ladies to Fitzroy Square, and the two
worthy Indian gentlemen in their company; Clive and I walking, with the
usual Havannah to light us home. And Clive remarked that he supposed
there had been some difference between his father and the bankers: for
they had not met for ever so many months before, and the Colonel always
had looked very gloomy when his brothers were mentioned. “And I can’t
help thinking,” says the astute youth, “that they fancied I was in love
with Ethel (I know the Colonel would have liked me to make up to her),
and that may have occasioned the row. Now, I suppose, they think I am
engaged to Rosey. What the deuce are they in such a hurry to marry me
for?”

Clive’s companion remarked, “that marriage was a laudable institution:
and an honest attachment an excellent conservator of youthful morals.”
On which Clive replied, “Why don’t you marry yourself?”

This it was justly suggested was no argument, but a merely personal
allusion foreign to the question, which was, that marriage was
laudable, etc.

Mr. Clive laughed. “Rosey is as good a little creature as can be,” he
said. “She is never out of temper, though I fancy Mrs. Mackenzie tries
her. I don’t think she is very wise: but she is uncommonly pretty, and
her beauty grows on you. As for Ethel, anything so high and mighty I
have never seen since I saw the French giantess. Going to Court, and
about to parties every night where a parcel of young fools flatter her,
has perfectly spoiled her. By Jove, how handsome she is! How she turns
with her long neck, and looks at you from under those black eyebrows!
If I painted her hair, I think I should paint it almost blue, and then
glaze over with lake. It _is_ blue. And how finely her head is joined
on to her shoulders!”—And he waves in the air an imaginary line with
his cigar. “She would do for Judith, wouldn’t she? Or how grand she
would look as Herodias’s daughter sweeping down a stair—in a great
dress of cloth-of-gold like Paul Veronese—holding a charger before her
with white arms, you know—with the muscles accented like that glorious
Diana at Paris—a savage smile on her face and a ghastly solemn gory
head on the dish. I see the picture, sir, I see the picture!” and he
fell to curling his mustachios just like his brave old father.

I could not help laughing at the resemblance, and mentioning it to my
friend. He broke, as was his wont, into a fond eulogium of his sire,
wished he could be like him—worked himself up into another state of
excitement, in which he averred “that if his father wanted him to
marry, he would marry that instant. And why not Rosey? She is a dear
little thing. Or why not that splendid Miss Sherrick? What ahead!—a
regular Titian! I was looking at the difference of their colour at
Uncle Honeyman’s that day of the _déjeuner_. The shadows in Rosey’s
face, sir, are all pearly-tinted. You ought to paint her in milk, sir!”
cries the enthusiast. “Have you ever remarked the grey round her eyes,
and the sort of purple bloom of her cheek? Rubens could have done the
colour: but I don’t somehow like to think of a young lady and that
sensuous old Peter Paul in company. I look at her like a little
wild-flower in a field—like a little child at play, sir. Pretty little
tender nursling! If I see her passing in the street, I feel as if I
would like some fellow to be rude to her, that I might have the
pleasure of knocking him down. She is like a little songbird, sir,—a
tremulous, fluttering little linnet that you would take into your hand,
_pavidam quaerentem matrem_, and smooth its little plumes, and let it
perch on your finger and sing. The Sherrick creates quite a different
sentiment—the Sherrick is splendid, stately, sleepy——”

“Stupid,” hints Clive’s companion.

“Stupid! Why not? Some women ought to be stupid. What you call dulness
I call repose. Give me a calm woman, a slow woman,—a lazy, majestic
woman. Show me a gracious virgin bearing a lily: not a leering giggler
frisking a rattle. A lively woman would be the death of me. Look at
Mrs. Mack, perpetually nodding, winking, grinning, throwing out signals
which you are to be at the trouble to answer! I thought her delightful
for three days; I declare I was in love with her—that is, as much as I
can be after—but never mind that, I feel I shall never be really in
love again. Why shouldn’t the Sherrick be stupid, I say? About great
beauty there should always reign a silence. As you look at the great
stars, the great ocean, any great scene of nature: you hush, sir. You
laugh at a pantomime, but you are still in a temple. When I saw the
great Venus of the Louvre, I thought—Wert thou alive, O goddess, thou
shouldst never open those lovely lips but to speak lowly, slowly: thou
shouldst never descend from that pedestal but to walk stately to some
near couch, and assume another attitude of beautiful calm. To be
beautiful is enough. If a woman can do that well: who shall demand more
from her? You don’t want a rose to sing. And I think wit is out of
place where there’s great beauty; as I wouldn’t have a Queen to cut
jokes on her throne. I say, Pendennis,”—here broke off the enthusiastic
youth,—“have you got another cigar? Shall we go into Finch’s, and have
a game at billiards? Just one—it’s quite early yet. Or shall we go in
the Haunt? It’s Wednesday night, you know, when all the boys go.” We
tap at a door in an old, old street in Soho: an old maid with a kind,
comical face opens the door, and nods friendly, and says, “How do, sir?
ain’t seen you this ever so long. How do, Mr. Noocom?” “Who’s here?”
“Most everybody’s here.” We pass by a little snug bar, in which a trim
elderly lady is seated by a great fire, on which boils an enormous
kettle; while two gentlemen are attacking a cold saddle of mutton and
West India pickles: hard by Mrs. Nokes the landlady’s elbow—with mutual
bows—we recognise Hickson, the sculptor, and Morgan, the intrepid Irish
chieftain, chief of the reporters of the _Morning Press_ newspaper. We
pass through a passage into a back room, and are received with a roar
of welcome from a crowd of men, almost invisible in the smoke.

“I am right glad to see thee, boy!” cries a cheery voice (that will
never troll a chorus more). “We spake anon of thy misfortune, gentle
youth! and that thy warriors of Assaye have charged the Academy in
vain. Mayhap thou frightenedst the courtly school with barbarous
visages of grisly war.—Pendennis, thou dost wear a thirsty look!
Resplendent swell! untwine thy choker white, and I will either stand a
glass of grog, or thou shalt pay the like for me, my lad, and tell us
of the fashionable world.” Thus spake the brave old Tom Sarjent,—also
one of the Press, one of the old boys: a good old scholar with a good
old library of books, who had taken his seat any time these forty years
by the chimney-fire in this old Haunt: where painters, sculptors, men
of letters, actors, used to congregate, passing pleasant hours in rough
kindly communion, and many a day seeing the sunrise lighting the rosy
street ere they parted, and Betsy put the useless lamp out and closed
the hospitable gates of the Haunt.

The time is not very long since, though to-day is so changed. As we
think of it, the kind familiar faces rise up, and we hear the pleasant
voices and singing. There are they met, the honest hearty companions.
In the days when the Haunt was a haunt, stage-coaches were not yet
quite over. Casinos were not invented: clubs were rather rare luxuries:
there were sanded floors, triangular sawdust-boxes, pipes, and tavern
parlours. Young Smith and Brown, from the Temple, did not go from
chambers to dine at the Polyanthus, or the Megatherium, off potage à la
Bisque, turbot au gratin, cotelettes a la What-do-you-call-’em, and a
pint of St. Emilion; but ordered their beefsteak and pint of port from
the “plump head-waiter at the Cock;” did not disdain the pit of the
theatre; and for a supper a homely refection at the tavern. How
delightful are the suppers in Charles Lamb to read of even now!—the
cards—the punch—the candles to be snuffed—the social oysters—the modest
cheer! Whoever snuffs a candle now? What man has a domestic supper
whose dinner-hour is eight o’clock? Those little meetings, in the
memory of many of us yet, are gone quite away into the past.
Five-and-twenty years ago is a hundred years off—so much has our social
life changed in those five lustres. James Boswell himself, were he to
revisit London, would scarce venture to enter a tavern. He would find
scarce a respectable companion to enter its doors with him. It is an
institution as extinct as a hackney-coach. Many a grown man who peruses
this historic page has never seen such a vehicle, and only heard of
rum-punch as a drink which his ancestors used to tipple.

Cheery old Tom Sarjent is surrounded at the Haunt by a dozen of kind
boon companions. They toil all day at their avocations of art, or
letters, or law, and here meet for a harmless night’s recreation and
converse. They talk of literature, or politics, or pictures, or plays;
socially banter one another over their cheap cups: sing brave old songs
sometimes when they are especially jolly kindly ballads in praise of
love and wine; famous maritime ditties in honour of Old England. I
fancy I hear Jack Brent’s noble voice rolling out the sad, generous
_refrain_ of “The Deserter,” “Then for that reason and for a season we
will be merry before we go,” or Michael Percy’s clear tenor carolling
the Irish chorus of “What’s that to any one, whether or no!” or Mark
Wilder shouting his bottle-song of “Garryowen na gloria.” These songs
were regarded with affection by the brave old frequenters of the Haunt.
A gentleman’s property in a song was considered sacred. It was
respectfully asked for: it was heard with the more pleasure for being
old. Honest Tom Sarjent! how the times have changed since we saw thee!
I believe the present chief of the reporters of the newspaper (which
responsible office Tom filled) goes to Parliament in his brougham, and
dines with the Ministers of the Crown.

Around Tom are seated grave Royal Academicians, rising gay Associates;
writers of other journals besides the _Pall Mall Gazette;_ a barrister
maybe, whose name will be famous some day: a hewer of marble perhaps: a
surgeon whose patients have not come yet; and one or two men about town
who like this queer assembly better than haunts much more splendid.
Captain Shandon has been here, and his jokes are preserved in the
tradition of the place. Owlet, the philosopher, came once and tried, as
his wont is, to lecture; but his metaphysics were beaten down by a
storm of banter. Slatter, who gave himself such airs because he wrote
in the —— _Review_, tried to air himself at the Haunt, but was choked
by the smoke, and silenced by the unanimous pooh-poohing of the
assembly. Dick Walker, who rebelled secretly at Sarjent’s authority,
once thought to give himself consequence by bringing a young lord from
the Blue Posts, but he was so unmercifully “chaffed” by Tom, that even
the young lord laughed at him. His lordship has been heard to say he
had been taken to a monsus queeah place, queeah set of folks, in a tap
somewhere, though he went away quite delighted with Tom’s affability,
but he never came again. He could not find the place, probably. You
might pass the Haunt in the daytime, and not know it in the least. “I
believe,” said Charley Ormond (A.R.A. he was then)—“I believe in the
day there’s no such place at all: and when Betsy turns the gas off at
the door-lamp as we go away, the whole thing vanishes: the door, the
house, the bar, the Haunt, Betsy, the beer-boy, Mrs. Nokes and all.” It
has vanished: it is to be found no more: neither by night nor by
day—unless the ghosts of good fellows still haunt it.

As the genial talk and glass go round, and after Clive and his friend
have modestly answered the various queries put to them by good old Tom
Sarjent, the acknowledged Praeses of the assembly and Sachem of this
venerable wigwam, the door opens and another well-known figure is
recognised with shouts as it emerges through the smoke. “Bayham, all
hail!” says Tom. “Frederick, I am right glad to see thee!”

Bayham says he is disturbed in spirit, and calls for a pint of beer to
console him.

“Hast thou flown far, thou restless bird of night?” asks Father Tom,
who loves speaking in blank verses.

“I have come from Cursitor Street,” says Bayham, in a low groan. “I
have just been to see a poor devil in quod there. Is that you,
Pendennis? You know the man—Charles Honeyman.”

“What!” cries Clive, starting up.

“O my prophetic soul, my uncle!” growls Bayham. “I did not see the
young one; but ’tis true.”

The reader is aware that more than the three years have elapsed, of
which time the preceding pages contain the harmless chronicle; and
while Thomas Newcome’s leave has been running out and Clive’s
mustachios growing, the fate of other persons connected with our story
has also had its development, and their fortune has experienced its
natural progress, its increase or decay. Our tale, such as it has
hitherto been arranged, has passed leisurely in scenes wherein the
present tense is perforce adopted; the writer acting as chorus to the
drama, and occasionally explaining, by hints or more open statements,
what has occurred during the intervals of the acts; and how it happens
that the performers are in such or such a posture. In the modern
theatre, as the play-going critic knows, the explanatory personage is
usually of quite a third-rate order. He is the two walking-gentlemen
friends of Sir Harry Courtly, who welcome the young baronet to London,
and discourse about the niggardliness of Harry’s old uncle, the Nabob;
and the depth of Courtly’s passion for Lady Annabel the _première
amoureuse_. He is the confidant in white linen to the heroine in white
satin. He is “Tom, you rascal,” the valet or tiger, more or less
impudent and acute—that well-known menial in top-boots and a livery
frock with red cuffs and collar, whom Sir Harry always retains in his
service, addresses with scurrilous familiarity, and pays so
irregularly: or he is Lucetta, Lady Annabel’s waiting-maid, who carries
the _billets-doux_ and peeps into them; knows all about the family
affairs; pops the lover under the sofa; and sings a comic song between
the scenes. Our business now is to enter into Charles Honeyman’s
privacy, to peer into the secrets of that reverend gentleman, and to
tell what has happened to him during the past months, in which he has
made fitful though graceful appearances on our scene.

While his nephew’s whiskers have been budding, and his brother-in-law
has been spending his money and leave, Mr. Honeyman’s hopes have been
withering, his sermons growing stale, his once blooming popularity
drooping and running to seed. Many causes have contributed to bring him
to his present melancholy strait. When you go to Lady Whittlesea’s
Chapel now, it is by no means crowded. Gaps are in the pews: there is
not the least difficulty in getting a snug place near the pulpit,
whence the preacher can look over his pocket-handkerchief and see Lord
Dozeley no more: his lordship has long gone to sleep elsewhere and a
host of the fashionable faithful have migrated too. The incumbent can
no more cast his fine eyes upon the French bonnets of the female
aristocracy and see some of the loveliest faces in Mayfair regarding
his with expressions of admiration. Actual dowdy tradesmen of the
neighbourhood are seated with their families in the aisles: Ridley and
his wife and son have one of the very best seats. To be sure Ridley
looks like a nobleman, with his large waistcoat, bald head, and gilt
book: J. J. has a fine head; but Mrs. Ridley! cook and housekeeper is
written on her round face. The music is by no means of its former good
quality. That rebellious and ill-conditioned basso Bellew has seceded,
and seduced the four best singing boys, who now perform glees at the
Cave of Harmony. Honeyman has a right to speak of persecution, and to
compare himself to a hermit in so far that he preaches in a desert.
Once, like another hermit, St. Hierome, he used to be visited by lions.
None such come to him now. Such lions as frequent the clergy are gone
off to lick the feet of other ecclesiastics. They are weary of poor
Honeyman’s old sermons.

Rivals have sprung up in the course of these three years—have sprung up
round about Honeyman and carried his flock into their folds. We know
how such simple animals will leap one after another, and that it is the
sheepish way. Perhaps a new pastor has come to the church of St.
Jacob’s hard by—bold, resolute, bright, clear, a scholar and no pedant:
his manly voice is thrilling in their ears, he speaks of life and
conduct, of practice as well as faith; and crowds of the most polite
and most intelligent, and best informed, and best dressed, and most
selfish people in the world come and hear him twice at least. There are
so many well-informed and well-dressed etc. etc. people in the world
that the succession of them keeps St. Jacob’s full for a year or more.
Then, it may be, a bawling quack, who has neither knowledge, nor
scholarship, nor charity, but who frightens the public with
denunciations and rouses them with the energy of his wrath, succeeds in
bringing them together for a while till they tire of his din and
curses. Meanwhile the good quiet old churches round about ring their
accustomed bell: open their Sabbath gates: receive their tranquil
congregations and sober priest, who has been busy all the week, at
schools and sick-beds, with watchful teaching, gentle counsel, and
silent alms.

Though we saw Honeyman but seldom, for his company was not altogether
amusing, and his affectation, when one became acquainted with it, very
tiresome to witness, Fred Bayham, from his garret at Mrs. Ridley’s,
kept constant watch over the curate, and told us of his proceedings
from time to time. When we heard the melancholy news first announced,
of course the intelligence damped the gaiety of Clive and his
companion; and F. B., conducted all the affairs of life with great
gravity, telling Tom Sarjent that he had news of importance for our
private ear, Tom with still more gravity than F. B.’s, said, “Go, my
children, you had best discuss this topic in a separate room, apart
from the din and fun of a convivial assembly;” and ringing the bell he
bade Betsy bring him another glass of rum-and-water, and one for Mr.
Desborough, to be charged to him.

We adjourned to another parlour then, where gas was lighted up: and F.
B. over a pint of beer narrated poor Honeyman’s mishap. “Saving your
presence, Clive,” said Bayham, “and with every regard for the youthful
bloom of your young heart’s affections, your uncle Charles Honeyman,
sir, is a bad lot. I have known him these twenty years, when I was at
his father’s as a private tutor. Old Miss Honeyman is one of those
cards which we call trumps—so was old Honeyman a trump; but Charles and
his sister——”

I stamped on F. B.’s foot under the table. He seemed to have forgotten
that he was about to speak of Clive’s mother.

“Hem! of your poor mother, I—hem—I may say _vidi tantum_. I scarcely
knew her. She married very young: as I was when she left Borhambury.
But Charles exhibited his character at a very early age—and it was not
a charming one—no, by no means a model of virtue. He always had a
genius for running into debt. He borrowed from every one of the
pupils—I don’t know how he spent it except in hardbake and
alycompaine—and even from old Nosey’s groom,—pardon me, we used to call
your grandfather by that playful epithet (boys will be boys, you
know),—even from the doctor’s groom he took money, and I recollect
thrashing Charles Honeyman for that disgraceful action.

“At college, without any particular show, he was always in debt and
difficulties. Take warning by him, dear youth! By him and by me, if you
like. See me—me, F. Bayham, descended from the ancient kings that long
the Tuscan sceptre swayed, dodge down a street to get out of sight of a
boot-shop, and my colossal frame tremble if a chap puts his hand on my
shoulder, as you did, Pendennis, the other day in the Strand, when I
thought a straw might have knocked me down! I have had my errors,
Clive. I know ’em. I’ll take another pint of beer, if you please.
Betsy, has Mrs. Nokes any cold meat in the bar? and an accustomed
pickle? Ha! Give her my compliments, and say F. B. is hungry. I resume
my tale. Faults F. B. has, and knows it. Humbug he may have been
sometimes; but I’m not such a complete humbug as Honeyman.”

Clive did not know how to look at this character of his relative, but
Clive’s companion burst into a fit of laughter, at which F. B. nodded
gravely, and resumed his narrative. “I don’t know how much money he has
had from your governor, but this I can say, the half of it would make
F. B. a happy man. I don’t know out of how much the reverend party has
nobbled his poor old sister at Brighton. He has mortgaged his chapel to
Sherrick, I suppose you know, who is master of it, and could turn him
out any day. I don’t think Sherrick is a bad fellow. I think he’s a
good fellow; I have known him do many a good turn to a chap in
misfortune. He wants to get into society: what more natural? That was
why you were asked to meet him the other day, and why he asked you to
dinner. I hope you had a good one. I wish he’d ask me.

“Then Moss has got his bills, and Moss’s brother-in-law in Cursitor
Street has taken possession of his revered person. He’s very welcome.
One Jew has the chapel, another Hebrew has the clergyman. It’s
singular, ain’t it? Sherrick might turn Lady Whittlesea into a
synagogue and have the Chief Rabbi into the pulpit, where my uncle the
Bishop has given out the text.

“The shares of that concern ain’t at a premium. I have had immense fun
with Sherrick about it. I like the Hebrew, sir. He maddens with rage
when F. B. goes and asks him whether any more pews are let overhead.
Honeyman begged and borrowed in order to buy out the last man. I
remember when the speculation was famous, when all the boxes (I mean
the pews) were taken for the season, and you couldn’t get a place, come
ever so early. Then Honeyman was spoilt, and gave his sermons over and
over again. People got sick of seeing the old humbug cry, the old
crocodile! Then we tried the musical dodge. F. B. came forward, sir,
there. That _was_ a coup: I did it, sir. Bellew wouldn’t have sung for
any man but me—and for two-and-twenty months I kept him as sober as
Father Mathew. Then Honeyman didn’t pay him: there was a row in the
sacred building, and Bellew retired. Then Sherrick must meddle in it.
And having heard a chap out Hampstead way who Sherrick thought would
do, Honeyman was forced to engage him, regardless of expense. You
recollect the fellow, sir? The Reverend Simeon Rawkins, the lowest of
the Low Church, sir—a red-haired dumpy man, who gasped at his _h’s_ and
spoke with a Lancashire twang—he’d no more do for Mayfair than Grimaldi
for Macbeth. He and Honeyman used to fight like cat and dog in the
vestry: and he drove away a third part of the congregation. He was an
honest man and an able man too, though not a sound Churchman” (F. B.
said this with a very edifying gravity): “I told Sherrick this the very
day I heard him. And if he had spoken to me on the subject I might have
saved him a pretty penny—a precious deal more than the paltry sum which
he and I had a quarrel about at that time—a matter of business, sir—a
pecuniary difference about a small three months’ thing which caused a
temporary estrangement between us. As for Honeyman, he used to cry
about it. Your uncle is great in the lachrymatory line, Clive Newcome.
He used to go with tears in his eyes to Sherrick, and implore him not
to have Rawkins, but he would. And I must say for poor Charles that the
failure of Lady Whittlesea’s has not been altogether Charles’s fault;
and that Sherrick has kicked down that property.

“Well, then, sir, poor Charles thought to make it all right by marrying
Mrs. Brumby;—and she was very fond of him and the thing was all but
done, in spite of her sons, who were in a rage as you may fancy. But
Charley, sir, has such a propensity for humbug that he will tell lies
when there is no earthly good in lying. He represented his chapel at
twelve hundred a year, his private means as so-and-so; and when he came
to book up with Briggs the lawyer, Mrs. Brumby’s brother, it was found
that he lied and prevaricated so, that the widow in actual disgust
would have nothing more to do with him. She was a good woman of
business, and managed the hat-shop for nine years, whilst poor Brumby
was at Dr. Tokelys. A first-rate shop it was, too. I introduced Charles
to it. My uncle the Bishop had his shovels there: and they used for a
considerable period to cover _this_ humble roof with tiles,” said F.
B., tapping his capacious forehead; “I am sure he might have had
Brumby,” he added, in his melancholy tones, “but for those unlucky
lies. She didn’t want money. She had plenty. She longed to get into
society, and was bent on marrying a gentleman.

“But what I can’t pardon in Honeyman is the way in which he has done
poor old Ridley and his wife. I took him there, you know, thinking they
would send their bills in once a month: that he was doing a good
business: in fact, that I had put ’em into a good thing. And the fellow
has told me a score of times that he and the Ridleys were all right.
But he has not only not paid his lodgings, but he has had money of
them: he has given dinners: he has made Ridley pay for wine. He has
kept paying lodgers out of the house, and he tells me all this with a
burst of tears, when he sent for me to Lazarus’s to-night, and I went
to him, sir, because he was in distress—went into the lion’s den, sir!”
says F. B., looking round nobly. “I don’t know how much he owes them:
because of course you know the sum he mentions ain’t the right one. He
never does tell the truth—does Charles. But think of the pluck of those
good Ridleys never saying a single word to F. B. about the debt! ‘We
are poor, but we have saved some money and can lie out of it. And we
think Mr. Honeyman will pay us,’ says Mrs. Ridley to me this very
evening. And she thrilled my heart-strings, sir; and I took her in my
arms, and kissed the old woman,” says Bayham; “and I rather astonished
little Miss Cann, and young J. J., who came in with a picture under his
arm. But she said she had kissed Master Frederick long before J. J. was
born—and so she had: that good and faithful servant—and my emotion in
embracing her was manly, sir, manly.”

Here old Betsy came in to say that the supper was a-waitin’ for Mr.
Bayham and it was a-getting’ very late; and we left F. B. to his meal;
and bidding adieu to Mrs. Nokes, Clive and I went each to our
habitation.




CHAPTER XXVI.
In which Colonel Newcome’s Horses are sold


At an hour early the next morning I was not surprised to see Colonel
Newcome at my chambers, to whom Clive had communicated Bayham’s
important news of the night before. The Colonel’s object, as any one
who knew him need scarcely be told, was to rescue his brother-in-law;
and being ignorant of lawyers, sheriffs’-officers, and their
proceedings, he bethought him that he would apply to Lamb Court for
information, and in so far showed some prudence, for at least I knew
more of the world and its ways than my simple client, and was enabled
to make better terms for the unfortunate prisoner, or rather for
Colonel Newcome, who was the real sufferer, than Honeyman’s creditors
might otherwise have been disposed to give.

I thought it would be more prudent that our good Samaritan should not
see the victim of rogues whom he was about to succour; and left him to
entertain himself with Mr. Warrington in Lamb Court, while I sped to
the lock-up house, where the Mayfair pet was confined. A sickly smile
played over his countenance as he beheld me when I was ushered to his
private room. The reverent gentleman was not shaved; he had partaken of
breakfast. I saw a glass which had once contained brandy on the dirty
tray whereon his meal was placed: a greasy novel from a Chancery Lane
library lay on the table: but he was at present occupied in writing one
or more of those great long letters, those laborious, ornate, eloquent
statements, those documents so profusely underlined, in which the
_machinations of villains_ are laid bare with italic fervour; the
coldness, to use no _harsher_ phrase, of friends on whom reliance
_might have been placed;_ the outrageous conduct of Solomons; the
astonishing failure of Smith to pay a sum of money on which he had
counted as _on the Bank of England;_ finally, the _infallible
certainty_ of repaying (with what heartfelt thanks need not be said)
the loan of so many pounds _next Saturday week at farthest_. All this,
which some readers in the course of their experience have read no doubt
in many handwritings, was duly set forth by poor Honeyman. There was a
wafer in a wine-glass on the table, and the bearer no doubt below to
carry the missive. They always sent these letters by a messenger, who
is introduced in the postscript; he is always sitting in the hall when
you get the letter, and is “a young man waiting for an answer, please.”

No one can suppose that Honeyman laid a complete statement of his
affairs before the negotiator who was charged to look into them. No
debtor does confess all his debts, but breaks them gradually to his man
of business, factor or benefactor, leading him on from surprise to
surprise; and when he is in possession of the tailor’s little account,
introducing him to the bootmaker. Honeyman’s schedule I felt perfectly
certain was not correct. The detainees against him were trifling. “Moss
of Wardour Street, one hundred and twenty—I believe I have paid him
thousands in this very transaction,” ejaculates Honeyman. “A heartless
West End tradesman hearing of my misfortune—all these people a linked
together, my dear Pendennis, and rush like vultures upon their
prey!—Waddilove, the tailor, has another writ out for ninety-eight
pounds; a man whom I have made by my recommendations! Tobbins, the
bootmaker, his neighbour in Jermyn Street, forty-one pounds more, and
that is all—I give you my word, all. In a few months, when my pew-rents
will be coming in, I should have settled with those cormorants;
otherwise, my total and irretrievable ruin, and the disgrace and
humiliation of a prison attends me. I know it; I can bear it; I have
been wretchedly weak, Pendennis: I can say mea culpa, mea maxima culpa,
and I can—bear—my—penalty.” In his finest moments he was never more
pathetic. He turned his head away, and concealed it in a handkerchief
not so white as those which veiled his emotions at Lady Whittlesea’s.

How by degrees this slippery penitent was induced to make other
confessions; how we got an idea of Mrs. Ridley’s account from him, of
his dealings with Mr. Sherrick, need not be mentioned here. The
conclusion to which Colonel Newcome’s ambassador came was, that to help
such a man would be quite useless; and that the Fleet Prison would be a
most wholesome retreat for this most reckless divine. Ere the day was
out, Messrs. Waddilove and Tobbins had conferred with their neighbour
in St. James’s, Mr. Brace; and there came a detainer from that
haberdasher for gloves, cravats, and pocket-handkerchiefs, that might
have done credit to the most dandified young Guardsman. Mr. Warrington
was on Mr. Pendennis’s side, and urged that the law should take its
course. “Why help a man,” said he, “who will not help himself? Let the
law sponge out the fellow’s debts; set him going again with twenty
pounds when he quits the prison, and get him a chaplaincy in the Isle
of Man.”

I saw by the Colonel’s grave kind face that these hard opinions did not
suit him. “At all events, sir, promise us,” we said, “that you will pay
nothing yourself—that you won’t see Honeyman’s creditors, and let
people, who know the world better, deal with him.” “Know the world,
young man!” cries Newcome; “I should think if I don’t know the world at
my age, I never shall.” And if he had lived to be as old as Jahaleel, a
boy could still have cheated him.

“I do not scruple to tell you,” he said, after a pause during which a
plenty of smoke was delivered from the council of three, “that I have—a
fund—which I had set aside for mere purposes of pleasure, I give you my
word, and a part of which I shall think it my duty to devote to poor
Honeyman’s distresses. The fund is not large. The money was intended,
in fact:—however, there it is. If Pendennis will go round to these
tradesmen, and make some composition with them, as their prices have
been no doubt enormously exaggerated, I see no harm. Besides the
tradesfolk, there is good Mrs. Ridley and Mr. Sherrick—we must see
them; and, if we can, set this luckless Charles again on his legs. We
have read of other prodigals who were kindly treated; and we may have
debts of our own to forgive, boys.”

Into Mr. Sherrick’s account we had no need to enter. That gentleman had
acted with perfect fairness by Honeyman. He laughingly said to us, “You
don’t imagine I would lend that chap a shilling without security? I
will give him fifty or a hundred. Here’s one of his notes, with
What-do-you-call-’ems—that rum fellow Bayham’s name as drawer. A nice
pair, ain’t they? Pooh! _I_ shall never touch ’em. I lent some money on
the shop overhead,” says Sherrick, pointing to the ceiling (we were in
his counting-house in the cellar of Lady Whittlesea’s Chapel), “because
I thought it was a good speculation. And so it was at first. The people
liked Honeyman. All the nobs came to hear him. Now the speculation
ain’t so good. He’s used up. A chap can’t be expected to last for ever.
When I first engaged Mademoiselle Bravura at my theatre, you couldn’t
get a place for three weeks together. The next year she didn’t draw
twenty pounds a week. So it was with Pottle and the regular drama
humbug. At first it was all very well. Good business, good houses, our
immortal bard, and that sort of game. They engaged the tigers and the
French riding people over the way; and there was Pottle bellowing away
in my place to the orchestra and the orders. It’s all a speculation.
I’ve speculated in about pretty much everything that’s going: in
theatres, in joint-stock jobs, in building-ground, in bills, in gas and
insurance companies, and in this chapel. Poor old Honeyman! I won’t
hurt him. About that other chap I put in to do the first business—that
red-haired chap, Rawkins—I think I was wrong. I think he injured the
property. But I don’t know everything, you know. I wasn’t bred to know
about parsons—quite the reverse. I thought, when I heard Rawkins at
Hampstead, he was just the thing. I used to go about, sir, just as I
did to the provinces, when I had the theatre—Camberwell, Islington,
Kennington, Clapton, all about, and hear the young chaps. Have a glass
of sherry; and here’s better luck to Honeyman. As for that Colonel,
he’s a trump, sir! I never see such a man. I have to deal with such a
precious lot of rogues, in the City and out of it, among the swells and
all, you know, that to see such a fellow refreshes me; and I’d do
anything for him. You’ve made a good thing of that _Pall Mall Gazette!_
I tried papers too; but mine didn’t do. I don’t know why. I tried a
Tory one, moderate Liberal, and out-and-out uncompromising Radical. I
say, what d’ye think of a religious paper, the _Catechism_, or some
such name? Would Honeyman do as editor? I’m afraid it’s all up with the
poor cove at the chapel.” And I parted with Mr. Sherrick, not a little
edified by his talk, and greatly relieved as to Honeyman’s fate. The
tradesmen of Honeyman’s body were appeased; and as for Mr. Moss, when
he found that the curate had no effects, and must go before the
Insolvent Court, unless Moss chose to take the composition which we
were empowered to offer him, he too was brought to hear reason, and
parted with the stamped paper on which was poor Honeyman’s signature.
Our negotiation had like to have come to an end by Clive’s untimely
indignation, who offered at one stage of the proceedings to pitch young
Moss out of window; but nothing came of this most ungentlemanlike
behaviour on Noocob’s part, further than remonstrance and delay in the
proceedings; and Honeyman preached a lovely sermon at Lady Whittlesea’s
the very next Sunday. He had made himself much liked in the
sponging-house, and Mr. Lazarus said, “if he hadn’t a got out time
enough, I’d a let him out for Sunday, and sent one of my men with him
to show him the way ome, you know; for when a gentleman behaves as a
gentleman to me, I behave as a gentleman to him.”

Mrs. Ridley’s account, and it was a long one, was paid without a single
question, or the deduction of a farthing; but the Colonel rather
sickened of Honeyman’s expressions of rapturous gratitude, and received
his professions of mingled contrition and delight very coolly. “My
boy,” says the father to Clive, “you see to what straits debt brings a
man, to tamper with truth to have to cheat the poor. Think of flying
before a washerwoman, or humbling yourself to a tailor, or eating a
poor man’s children’s bread!” Clive blushed, I thought, and looked
rather confused.

“Oh, father,” says he, “I—I’m afraid I owe some money too—not much; but
about forty pound, five-and-twenty for cigars, and fifteen I borrowed
of Pendennis, and—and I’ve been devilish annoyed about it all this
time.”

“You stupid boy,” says the father “I knew about the cigars bill, and
paid it last week. Anything I have is yours, you know. As long as there
is a guinea, there is half for you. See that every shilling we owe is
paid before—before a week is over. And go down and ask Binnie if I can
see him in his study. I want to have some conversation with him.” When
Clive was gone away, he said to me in a very sweet voice, “In God’s
name, keep my boy out of debt when I am gone, Arthur. I shall return to
India very soon.”

“Very soon, sir! You have another year’s leave,” said I.

“Yes, but no allowances, you know; and this affair of Honeyman’s has
pretty nearly emptied the little purse I had set aside for European
expenses. They have been very much heavier than I expected. As it is, I
overdrew my account at my brother’s, and have been obliged to draw
money from my agents in Calcutta. A year sooner or later (unless two of
our senior officers had died, when I should have got my promotion and
full colonel’s pay with it, and proposed to remain in this country)—a
year sooner or later, what does it matter? Clive will go away and work
at his art, and see the great schools of painting while I am absent. I
thought at one time how pleasant it would be to accompany him. But
_l’homme propose_, Pendennis. I fancy now a lad is not the better for
being always tied to his parent’s apron-string. You young fellows are
too clever for me. I haven’t learned your ideas or read your books. I
feel myself very often an old damper in your company. I will go back,
sir, where I have some friends, where I am somebody still. I know an
honest face or two, white and brown, that will lighten up in the old
regiment when they see Tom Newcome again. God bless you, Arthur. You
young fellows in this country have such cold ways that we old ones
hardly know how to like you at first. James Binnie and I, when we first
came home, used to talk you over, and think you laughed at us. But you
didn’t, I know. God Almighty bless you, and send you a good wife, and
make a good man of you. I have bought a watch, which I would like you
to wear in remembrance of me and my boy, to whom you were so kind when
you were boys together in the old Grey Friars.” I took his hand, and
uttered some incoherent words of affection and respect. Did not Thomas
Newcome merit both from all who knew him?

His resolution being taken, our good Colonel began to make silent but
effectual preparations for his coming departure. He was pleased during
these last days of his stay to give me even more of his confidence than
I had previously enjoyed, and was kind enough to say that he regarded
me almost as a son of his own, and hoped I would act as elder brother
and guardian to Clive. Ah! who is to guard the guardian? The younger
brother had many nobler qualities than belonged to the elder. The world
had not hardened Clive, nor even succeeded in spoiling him. I perceive
I am diverging from his history into that of another person, and will
return to the subject proper of the book.

Colonel Newcome expressed himself as being particularly touched and
pleased with his friend Binnie’s conduct, now that the Colonel’s
departure was determined. “James is one of the most generous of men,
Pendennis, and I am proud to be put under an obligation to him, and to
tell it too. I hired this house, as you are aware, of our speculative
friend Mr. Sherrick, and am answerable for the payment of the rent till
the expiry of the lease. James has taken the matter off my hands
entirely. The place is greatly too large for him, but he says that he
likes it, and intends to stay, and that his sister and niece shall be
his housekeepers. Clive” (here, perhaps, the speaker’s voice drops a
little)—“Clive will be the son of the house still, honest James says,
and God bless him. James is richer than I thought by near a lakh of
rupees—and here is a hint for you, Master Arthur. Mr. Binnie has
declared to me in confidence that if his niece, Miss Rosey, shall marry
a person of whom he approves, he will leave her a considerable part of
his fortune.”

The Colonel’s confidant here said that his own arrangements were made
in another quarter, to which statement the Colonel replied knowingly,
“I thought so. A little bird has whispered to me the name of a certain
Miss A. I knew her grandfather, an accommodating old gentleman, and I
borrowed some money from him when I was a subaltern at Calcutta. I tell
you in strict confidence, my dear young friend, that I hope and trust a
certain young gentleman of your acquaintance may be induced to think
how good and pretty and sweet-tempered a girl Miss Mackenzie is, and
that she may be brought to like him. If you young men would marry in
good time good and virtuous women—as I am sure—ahem!—Miss Amory is—half
the temptations of your youth would be avoided. You would neither be
dissolute, has many of you seem to me, or cold and selfish, which are
worse vices still. And my prayer is, that my Clive may cast anchor
early out of the reach of temptation, and mate with some such kind girl
as Binnie’s niece. When I first came home I formed other plans for him
which could not be brought to a successful issue; and knowing his
ardent disposition, and having kept an eye on the young rogue’s
conduct, I tremble lest some mischance with a woman should befall him,
and long to have him out of danger.”

So the kind scheme of the two elders was, that their young ones should
marry and be happy ever after, like the Prince and Princess of the
Fairy Tale: and dear Mrs. Mackenzie (have I said that at the
commencement of her visit to her brother she made almost open love to
the Colonel?), dear Mrs. Mack was content to forgo her own chances so
that her darling Rosey might be happy. We used to laugh and say, that
as soon as Clive’s father was gone, Josey would be sent for to join
Rosey. But little Josey being under her grandmother’s sole influence
took most gratifying and serious turn; wrote letters, in which she
questioned the morality of operas, Towers of London, and waxworks; and,
before a year was out, married Elder Bogie, of Mr. M’Craw’s church.

Presently was to be read in the _Morning Post_ an advertisement of the
sale of three horses (the description and pedigree following), “the
property of an officer returning to India. Apply to the groom, at the
stables, 150 Fitzroy Square.”

The Court of Directors invited Lieutenant-Colonel Newcome to an
entertainment given to Major-General Sir Ralph Spurrier, K.C.B.,
appointed Commander-in-Chief at Madras. Clive was asked to this dinner
too, “and the governor’s health was drunk, sir,” Clive said, “after
dinner, and the dear old fellow made such a good speech, in returning
thanks!”

He, Clive, and I made a pilgrimage to Grey Friars, and had the Green to
ourselves, it being the Bartlemytide vacation, and the boys all away.
One of the good old Poor Brothers whom we both recollected accompanied
us round the place; and we sate for a while in Captain Scarsdale’s
little room (he had been a Peninsular officer, who had sold out, and
was fain in his old age to retire into this calm retreat). And we
talked, as old schoolmates and lovers talk, about subjects interesting
to schoolmates and lovers only.

One by one the Colonel took leave of his friends, young and old; ran
down to Newcome, and gave Mrs. Mason a parting benediction; slept a
night at Tom Smith’s, and passed a day with Jack Brown; went to all the
boys’ and girls’ schools where his little _protégés_ were, so as to be
able to take the very last and most authentic account of the young
folks to their parents in India; spent a week at Marble Hill, and shot
partridges there, but for which entertainment, Clive said, the place
would have been intolerable; and thence proceeded to Brighton to pass a
little time with good Miss Honeyman. As for Sir Brian’s family, when
Parliament broke up, of course, they did not stay in town. Barnes, of
course, had part of a moor in Scotland, whither his uncle and cousin
did not follow him. The rest went abroad. Sir Brian wanted the waters
of Aix-la-Chapelle. The brothers parted very good friends; Lady Anne,
and all the young people, heartily wished him farewell. I believe Sir
Brian even accompanied the Colonel downstairs from the drawing-room, in
Park Lane, and actually came out and saw his brother into his cab (just
as he would accompany old Lady Bagges when she came to look at her
account at the bank, from the parlour to her carriage). But as for
Ethel, she was not going to be put off with this sort of parting and
the next morning a cab dashed up to Fitzroy Square, and a veiled lady
came out thence, and was closeted with Colonel Newcome for five
minutes, and when he led her back to the carriage there were tears in
his eyes.

Mrs. Mackenzie joked about the transaction (having watched it from the
dining-room windows), and asked the Colonel who his sweetheart was?
Newcome replied very sternly, that he hoped no one would ever speak
lightly of that young lady, whom he loved as his own daughter; and I
thought Rosey looked vexed at the praises thus bestowed. This was the
day before we all went down to Brighton. Miss Honeyman’s lodgings were
taken for Mr. Binnie and his ladies. Clive and her dearest Colonel had
apartments next door. Charles Honeyman came dawn and preached one of
his very best sermons. Fred Bayham was there, and looked particularly
grand and noble on the pier and the cliff. I am inclined to think he
had had some explanation with Thomas Newcome, which had placed F. B. in
a state of at least temporary prosperity. Whom did he not benefit whom
he knew, and what eye that saw him did not bless him? F. B. was greatly
affected at Charles’s sermon, of which our party of course could see
the allusions. Tears actually rolled down his brown cheeks; for Fred
was a man very easily moved, and, as it were, a softened sinner. Little
Rosey and her mother sobbed audibly, greatly to the surprise of stout
old Miss Honeyman, who had no idea of such watery exhibitions, and to
the discomfiture of poor Newcome, who was annoyed to have his praises
even hinted in that sacred edifice. Good Mr. James Binnie came for once
to church; and, however variously their feelings might be exhibited or,
repressed, I think there was not one of the little circle there
assembled who did not bring to the place a humble prayer and a gentle
heart. It was the last Sabbath-bell our dear friend was to hear for
many a day on his native shore. The great sea washed the beach as we
came out, blue with the reflection of the skies, and its innumerable
waves crested with sunshine. I see the good man and his boy yet
clinging to him, as they pace together by the shore.

The Colonel was very much pleased by a visit from Mr. Ridley and the
communication which he made (my Lord Todmorden has a mansion and park
in Sussex, whence Mr. Ridley came to pay his duty to Colonel Newcome).
He said he “never could forget the kindness with which the Colonel have
a treated him. His lordship have taken a young man, which Mr. Ridley
had brought him up under his own eye, and can answer for him, Mr. R.
says, with impunity; and which he is to be his lordship’s own man for
the future. And his lordship have appointed me his steward, and having,
as he always hev been, been most liberal in point of sellary. And me
and Mrs. Ridley was thinking, sir, most respectfully, with regard to
our son, Mr. John James Ridley—as good and honest a young man, which I
am proud to say it, that if Mr. Clive goes abroad we should be most
proud and happy if John James went with him. And the money which you
have paid us so handsome, Colonel, he shall have it; which it was the
excellent ideer of Miss Cann; and my lord have ordered a pictur of John
James in the most libral manner, and have asked my son to dinner, sir,
at his lordship’s own table, which I have faithfully served him
five-and-thirty years.” Ridley’s voice fairly broke down at this part
of his speech, which evidently was a studied composition, and he
uttered no more of it, for the Colonel cordially shook him by the hand,
and Clive jumped up clapping his, and saying that it was the greatest
wish of his heart that J. J. and he should be companions in France and
Italy. “But I did not like to ask my dear old father,” he said, “who
has had so many calls on his purse, and besides, I knew that J. J. was
too independent to come as my follower.”

The Colonel’s berth has been duly secured ere now. This time he makes
the overland journey; and his passage is to Alexandria, taken in one of
the noble ships of the Peninsular and Oriental Company. His kit is as
simple as a subaltern’s; I believe, but for Clive’s friendly
compulsion, he would have carried back no other than the old uniform
which has served him for so many years. Clive and his father travelled
to Southampton together by themselves. F. B. and I took the Southampton
coach: we had asked leave to see the last of him, and say a “God bless
you” to our dear old friend. So the day came when the vessel was to
sail. We saw his cabin, and witnessed all the bustle and stir on board
the good ship on a day of departure. Our thoughts, however, were fixed
but on one person—the case, no doubt, with hundreds more on such a day.
There was many a group of friends closing wistfully together on the
sunny deck, and saying the last words of blessing and farewell. The
bustle of the ship passes dimly round about them; the hurrying noise of
crew and officers running on their duty; the tramp and song of the men
at the capstan-bars; the bells ringing, as the hour for departure comes
nearer and nearer, as mother and son, father and daughter, husband and
wife, hold hands yet for a little while. We saw Clive and his father
talking together by the wheel. Then they went below; and a passenger,
her husband, asked me to give my arm to an almost fainting lady, and to
lead her off the ship. Bayham followed us, carrying their two children
in his arms, as the husband turned away and walked aft. The last bell
was ringing, and they were crying, “Now for the shore.” The whole ship
had begun to throb ere this, and its great wheels to beat the water,
and the chimneys had flung out their black signals for sailing. We were
as yet close on the dock, and we saw Clive coming up from below,
looking very pale; the plank was drawn after him as he stepped on land.

Then, with three great cheers from the dock, and from the crew in the
bows, and from the passengers on the quarter-deck, the noble ship
strikes the first stroke of her destined race, and swims away towards
the ocean. “There he is, there he is,” shouts Fred Bayham, waving his
hat. “God bless him, God bless him!” I scarce perceived at the ship’s
side, beckoning an adieu, our dear old friend, when the lady, whose
husband had bidden me to lead her away from the ship, fainted in my
arms. Poor soul! Her, too, has fate stricken. Ah, pangs of hearts torn
asunder, passionate regrets, cruel, cruel partings! Shall you not end
one day, ere many years; when the tears shall be wiped from all eyes,
and there shall be neither sorrow nor pain?




CHAPTER XXVII.
Youth and Sunshine


Although Thomas Newcome was gone back to India in search of more money,
finding that he could not live upon his income at home, he was
nevertheless rather a wealthy man; and at the moment of his departure
from Europe had two lakhs of rupees invested in various Indian
securities. “A thousand a year,” he thought, “more, added to the
interest accruing from my two lakhs, will enable us to live very
comfortably at home. I can give Clive ten thousand pounds when he
marries, and five hundred a year out of my allowances. If he gets a
wife with some money, they may have every enjoyment of life; and as for
his pictures, he can paint just as few or as many of those as he
pleases.” Newcome did not seem seriously to believe that his son would
live by painting pictures, but considered Clive as a young prince who
chose to amuse himself with painting. The Muse of Painting is a lady
whose social station is not altogether recognised with us as yet. The
polite world permits a gentleman to amuse himself with her; but to take
her for better or for worse! forsake all other chances and cleave unto
her! to assume her name! Many a respectable person would be as much
shocked at the notion, as if his son had married an opera-dancer.

Newcome left a hundred a year in England, of which the principal sum
was to be transferred to his boy as soon as he came of age. He endowed
Clive further with a considerable annual sum, which his London bankers
would pay: “And if these are not enough,” says he kindly, “you must
draw upon my agents, Messrs. Frank and Merryweather at Calcutta, who
will receive your signature just as if it was mine.” Before going away,
he introduced Clive to F. and M.’s corresponding London house, Jolly
and Baines, Fog Court—leading out of Leadenhall—Mr. Jolly, a myth as
regarded the firm, now married to Lady Julia Jolly—a Park in
Kent—evangelical interest—great at Exeter Hall meetings—knew Clive’s
grandmother—that is, Mrs. Newcome, a most admirable woman. Baines
represents a house in the Regent’s Park, with an emigrative tendency
towards Belgravia—musical daughters—Herr Moscheles, Benedick,
Ella,—Osborne, constantly at dinner-sonatas in P flat (op. 936),
composed and dedicated to Miss Euphemia Baines, by her most obliged,
most obedient servant, Ferdinando Blitz. Baines hopes that his young
friend will come constantly to York Terrace, where the most girls will
be happy to see him; and mentions at home a singular whim of Colonel
Newcome’s, who can give his son twelve or fifteen hundred a year, and
makes an artist of him. Euphemia and Flora adore artists; they feel
quite interested about this young man. “He was scribbling caricatures
all the time I was talking with his father in my parlour,” says Mr.
Baines, and produces a sketch of an orange-woman near the Bank, who had
struck Clive’s eyes, and been transferred to the blotting-paper in Fog
Court. “_He_ needn’t do anything,” said good-natured Mr. Baines. “I
guess all the pictures he’ll paint won’t sell for much.”

“Is he fond of music, papa?” asks Miss. “What a pity he had not come to
our last evening; and now the season is over!”

“And Mr. Newcome is going out of town. He came to me, to-day for
circular notes—says he’s going through Switzerland and into Italy—lives
in Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square. Queer place, ain’t it? Put his
name down in your book, and ask him to dinner next season.”

Before Clive went away, he had an apparatus of easels,
sketching-stools, umbrellas, and painting-boxes, the most elaborate and
beautiful that Messrs. Soap and Isaac could supply. It made J. J.’s
eyes glisten to see those lovely gimcracks of art; those smooth
mill-boards, those slab-tinted sketching-blocks, and glistening rows of
colour-tubes lying in their boxes, which seemed to cry, “Come, squeeze
me.” If painting-boxes made painters, if sketching-stools would but
enable one to sketch, surely I would hasten this very instant to
Messrs. Soap and Isaac! but, alas! these pretty toys no more make
artists than cowls make monks.

As a proof that Clive did intend to practise his profession, and to
live by it too, at this time he took four sporting sketches to a
printseller in the Haymarket, and disposed of them at the rate of seven
shillings and sixpence per sketch. His exultation at receiving a
sovereign and half a sovereign from Mr. Jones was boundless. “I can do
half a dozen of these things easily in a morning,” he says. “Two
guineas a day is twelve guineas—say ten guineas a week, for I won’t
work on Sundays, and may take a holiday in the week besides. Ten
guineas a week is five hundred a year. That is pretty nearly as much
money as I shall want, and I need not draw the dear old governor’s
allowance at all.” He wrote an ardent letter, full of happiness and
affection, to the kind father, which he shall find a month after he has
arrived in India, and read to his friends in Calcutta and Barrackpore.
Clive invited many of his artist friends to a grand feast in honour of
the thirty shillings. The King’s Arms, Kensington, was the hotel
selected (tavern beloved of artists for many score years!). Gandish was
there, and the Gandishites, and some chosen spirits from the Life
Academy, Clipstone Street, and J. J. was vice-president, with Fred
Bayham by his side, to make the speeches and carve the mutton; and I
promise you many a merry song was sung, and many a health drunk in
flowing bumpers; and as jolly a party was assembled as any London
contained that day. The _beau monde_ had quitted it; the Park was empty
as we crossed it; and the leaves of Kensington Gardens had begun to
fall, dying after the fatigues of a London season. We sang all the way
home through Knightsbridge and by the Park railings, and the Covent
Garden carters halting at the Half-way House were astonished at our
choruses. There is no half-way house now; no merry chorus at midnight.

Then Clive and J. J. took the steamboat to Antwerp; and those who love
pictures may imagine how the two young men rejoiced in one of the most
picturesque cities of the world; where they went back straightway into
the sixteenth century; where the inn at which they stayed (delightful
old Grand Laboureur, thine ancient walls are levelled! thy comfortable
hospitalities exist no more!) seemed such a hostelry as that where
Quentin Durward first saw his sweetheart; where knights of Velasquez or
burgomasters of Rubens seemed to look from the windows of the
tall-gabled houses and the quaint porches; where the Bourse still
stood, the Bourse of three hundred years ago, and you had but to supply
figures with beards and ruffs, and rapiers and trunk-hose, to make the
picture complete; where to be awakened by the carillon of the bells was
to waken to the most delightful sense of life and happiness; where
nuns, actual nuns, walked the streets, and every figure in the Place de
Meir, and every devotee at church, kneeling and draped in black, or
entering the confessional (actually the confessional!), was a
delightful subject for the new sketchbook. Had Clive drawn as much
everywhere as at Antwerp, Messrs. Soap and Isaac might have made a
little income by supplying him with materials.

After Antwerp, Clive’s correspondent gets a letter dated from the Hotel
de Suede at Brussels, which contains an elaborate eulogy of the cookery
and comfort of that hotel, where the wines, according to the writer’s
opinion, are unmatched almost in Europe. And this is followed by a
description of Waterloo, and a sketch of Hougoumont, in which J. J. is
represented running away in the character of a French grenadier, Clive
pursuing him in the lifeguard’s habit, and mounted on a thundering
charger.

Next follows a letter from Bonn. Verses about Drachenfels of a not very
superior style of versification; an account of Crichton, an old Grey
Friars man, who has become a student at the university; of a commerz, a
drunken bout, and a students’ duel at Bonn. “And whom should I find
here,” says Mr. Clive, “but Aunt Anne, Ethel, Miss Quigley, and the
little ones, the whole detachment under the command of Kuhn? Uncle
Brian is staying at Aix. He is recovered from his attack. And, upon my
conscience, I think my pretty cousin looks prettier every day.

“When they are not in London,” Clive goes on to write, “or I sometimes
think when Barnes or old Lady Kew are not looking over them, they are
quite different. You know how cold they have latterly seemed to us, and
how their conduct annoyed my dear old father. Nothing can be kinder
than their behaviour since we have met. It was on the little hill at
Godesberg: J. J. and I were mounting to the ruin, followed by the
beggars who waylay you, and have taken the place of the other robbers
who used to live there, when there came a procession of donkeys down
the steep, and I heard a little voice cry, ‘Hullo! it’s Clive! hooray,
Clive!’ and an ass came pattering down the declivity, with a little
pair of white trousers at an immensely wide angle over the donkey’s
back, and behold there was little Alfred grinning with all his might.

“He turned his beast and was for galloping up the hill again, I suppose
to inform his relations; but the donkey refused with many kicks, one of
which sent Alfred plunging amongst the stones, and we were rubbing him
down just as the rest of the party came upon us. Miss Quigley looked
very grim on an old white pony; my aunt was on a black horse that might
have turned grey, he is so old. Then come two donkeysful of children,
with Kuhn as supercargo; then Ethel on donkey-back, too, with a bunch
of wildflowers in her hand, a great straw hat with a crimson ribbon, a
white muslin jacket, you know, bound at the waist with a ribbon of the
first, and a dark skirt, with a shawl round her feet which Kuhn had
arranged. As she stopped, the donkey fell to cropping greens in the
hedge; the trees there chequered her white dress and face with shadow.
Her eyes, hair, and forehead were in shadow too—but the light was all
upon her right cheek: upon her shoulder down to her arm, which was of a
warmer white, and on the bunch of flowers which she held, blue, yellow,
and red poppies, and so forth.

“J. J. says, ‘I think the birds began to sing louder when she came.’ We
have both agreed that she is the handsomest woman in England. It’s not
her form merely, which is certainly as yet too thin and a little
angular—it is her colour. I do not care for woman or picture without
colour. O, ye carnations! O, ye _lilia mista rosis!_ O such black hair
and solemn eyebrows! It seems to me the roses and carnations have
bloomed again since we saw them last in London, when they were drooping
from the exposure to night air, candle-light, and heated ballrooms.

“Here I was in the midst of a regiment of donkeys, bearing a crowd of
relations; J. J. standing modestly in the background—beggars completing
the group, and Kuhn ruling over them with voice and gesture, oaths and
whip. Throw in the Rhine in the distance flashing by the Seven
Mountains—but mind and make Ethel the principal figure: if you make her
like, she certainly _will_ be—and other lights will be only minor
fires. You may paint her form, but you can’t paint her colour; that is
what beats us in nature. A line must come right; you can force that
into its place, but you can’t compel the circumambient air. There is no
yellow I know of will make sunshine, and no blue that is a bit like
sky. And so with pictures: I think you only get signs of colour, and
formulas to stand for it. That brick-dust which we agree to receive as
representing a blush, look at it—can you say it is in the least like
the blush which flickers and varies as it sweeps over the down of the
cheek—as you see sunshine playing over a meadow? Look into it and see
what a variety of delicate blooms there are! a multitude of flowerets
twining into one tint! We may break our colour-pots and strive after
the line alone: that is palpable and we can grasp it—the other is
impossible and beyond us.” Which sentiment I here set down, not on
account of its worth (and I think it is contradicted—as well as
asserted—in more than one of the letters I subsequently had from Mr.
Clive, but it may serve to show the ardent and impulsive disposition of
this youth), by whom all beauties of art and nature, animate or
inanimate (the former especially), were welcomed with a gusto and
delight whereof colder temperaments are incapable. The view of a fine
landscape, a fine picture, a handsome woman, would make this harmless
young sensualist tipsy with pleasure. He seemed to derive an actual
hilarity and intoxication as his eye drank in these sights; and, though
it was his maxim that all dinners were good, and he could eat bread and
cheese and drink small beer with perfect good-humour, I believe that he
found a certain pleasure in a bottle of claret, which most men’s
systems were incapable of feeling.

This springtime of youth is the season of letter-writing. A lad in high
health and spirits, the blood running briskly in his young veins, and
the world, and life, and nature bright and welcome to him, looks out,
perforce, for some companion to whom he may impart his sense of the
pleasure which he enjoys, and which were not complete unless a friend
were by to share it. I was the person most convenient for the young
fellow’s purpose; he was pleased to confer upon me the title of friend
_en titre_, and confidant in particular; to endow the confidant in
question with a number of virtues and excellences which existed very
likely only in the lad’s imagination; to lament that the confidant had
no sister whom he, Clive, might marry out of hand; and to make me a
thousand simple protests of affection and admiration, which are noted
here as signs of the young man’s character, by no means as proofs of
the goodness of mine. The books given to the present biographer by “his
affectionate friend, Clive Newcome,” still bear on the titlepages the
marks of that boyish hand and youthful fervour. He had a copy of Walter
Lorraine bound and gilt with such splendour as made the author blush
for his performance, which has since been seen at the bookstalls at a
price suited to the very humblest purses. He fired up and fought a
newspaper critic (whom Clive met at the Haunt one night) who had dared
to write an article in which that work was slighted; and if, in the
course of nature, his friendship has outlived that rapturous period,
the kindness of the two old friends, I hope, is not the less because it
is no longer romantic, and the days of white vellum and gilt edges have
passed away. From the abundance of the letters which the affectionate
young fellow now wrote, the ensuing portion of his youthful history is
compiled. It may serve to recall passages of their early days to such
of his seniors as occasionally turn over the leaves of a novel; and in
the story of his faults, indiscretions, passions, and actions, young
readers may be reminded of their own.

Now that the old Countess, and perhaps Barnes, were away, the barrier
between Clive and this family seemed to be withdrawn. The young folks
who loved him were free to see him as often as he would come. They were
going to Baden: would he come too? Baden was on the road to
Switzerland, he might journey to Strasbourg, Basle, and so on. Clive
was glad enough to go with his cousins, and travel in the orbit of such
a lovely girl as Ethel Newcome. J. J. performed the second part always
when Clive was present: and so they all travelled to Coblentz, Mayence,
and Frankfort together, making the journey which everybody knows, and
sketching the mountains and castles we all of us have sketched. Ethel’s
beauty made all the passengers on all the steamers look round and
admire. Clive was proud of being in the suite of such a lovely person.
The family travelled with a pair of those carriages which used to
thunder along the Continental roads a dozen years since, and from
interior, box, and rumble discharge a dozen English people at hotel
gates.

The journey is all sunshine and pleasure and novelty: the circular
notes with which Mr. Baines of Fog Court has supplied Clive Newcome,
Esquire, enabled that young gentleman to travel with great ease and
comfort. He has not yet ventured upon engaging a _valet de chambre_, it
being agreed between him and J. J. that two travelling artists have no
right to such an aristocratic appendage; but he has bought a snug
little britzska at Frankfort (the youth has very polite tastes, is
already a connoisseur in wine, and has no scruple in ordering the best
at the hotels), and the britzska travels in company with Lady Anne’s
caravan, either in its wake so as to be out of reach of the dust, or
more frequently ahead of that enormous vehicle and its tender, in which
come the children and the governess of Lady Anne Newcome, guarded by a
huge and melancholy London footman, who beholds Rhine and Neckar,
valley and mountain, village and ruin, with a like dismal composure.
Little Alfred and little Egbert are by no means sorry to escape from
Miss Quigley and the tender, and for a stage ride or two in Clive’s
britzska. The little girls cry sometimes to be admitted to that
privilege. I dare say Ethel would like very well to quit her place in
the caravan, where she sits, circumvented by mamma’s dogs, and books,
bags, dressing-boxes, and gimcrack cases, without which apparatus some
English ladies of condition cannot travel; but Miss Ethel is grown up,
she is out, and has been presented at Court, and is a person of too
great dignity now to sit anywhere but in the place of state in the
chariot corner. I like to think, for my part, of the gallant young
fellow taking his pleasure and enjoying his holiday, and few sights are
more pleasant than to watch a happy, manly English youth, free-handed
and generous-hearted, content and good-humour shining in his honest
face, pleased and pleasing, eager, active, and thankful for services,
and exercising bravely his noble youthful privilege to be happy and to
enjoy. Sing, cheery spirit, whilst the spring lasts; bloom whilst the
sun shines, kindly flowers of youth! You shall be none the worse
to-morrow for having been happy to-day, if the day brings no action to
shame it. As for J. J., he too had his share of enjoyment; the charming
scenes around him did not escape his bright eye, he absorbed pleasure
in his silent way, he was up with the sunrise always, and at work with
his eyes and his heart if not with his hands. A beautiful object too is
such a one to contemplate, a pure virgin soul, a creature gentle,
pious, and full of love, endowed with sweet gifts, humble and timid;
but for truth’s and justice’s sake inflexible, thankful to God and man,
fond, patient, and faithful. Clive was still his hero as ever, his
patron, his splendid young prince and chieftain. Who was so brave, who
was so handsome, generous, witty as Clive? To hear Clive sing, as the
lad would whilst they were seated at their work, or driving along on
this happy journey, through fair landscapes in the sunshine, gave J. J.
the keenest pleasure; his wit was a little slow, but he would laugh
with his eyes at Clive’s sallies, or ponder over them and explode with
laughter presently, giving a new source of amusement to these merry
travellers, and little Alfred would laugh at J. J.’s laughing; and so,
with a hundred harmless jokes to enliven, and the ever-changing,
ever-charming smiles of nature to cheer and accompany it, the happy
day’s journey would come to an end.

So they travelled by the accustomed route to the prettiest town of all
places where Pleasure has set up her tents; and where the gay, the
melancholy, the idle or occupied, grave or haughty, come for amusement,
or business, or relaxation; where London beauties, having danced and
flirted all the season, may dance and flirt a little more; where
well-dressed rogues from all quarters of the world assemble; where I
have seen severe London lawyers, forgetting their wigs and the Temple,
trying their luck against fortune and M. Bénazet; where wistful
schemers conspire and prick cards down, and deeply meditate the
infallible coup; and try it, and lose it, and borrow a hundred francs
to go home; where even virtuous British ladies venture their little
stakes, and draw up their winnings with trembling rakes, by the side of
ladies who are not virtuous at all, no, not even by name; where young
prodigals break the bank sometimes, and carry plunder out of a place
which Hercules himself could scarcely compel; where you meet wonderful
countesses and princesses, whose husbands are almost always absent on
their vast estates—in Italy, Spain, Piedmont—who knows where their
lordships’ possessions are?—while trains of suitors surround those
wandering Penelopes their noble wives; Russian Boyars, Spanish Grandees
of the Order of the Fleece, Counts of France, and Princes Polish and
Italian innumerable, who perfume the gilded halls with their
tobacco-smoke, and swear in all languages against the black and the
red. The famous English monosyllable by which things, persons, luck,
even eyes, are devoted to the infernal gods, we may be sure is not
wanting in that Babel. Where does one not hear it? “D—— the luck,” says
Lord Kew, as the croupier sweeps off his lordship’s rouleaux. “D—— the
luck,” says Brown the bagman, who has been backing his lordship with
five-franc pieces. “Ah, body of Bacchus!” says Count Felice, whom we
all remember a courier. “Ah, sacré coup,” cries M. le Vicomte de
Florac, as his last louis parts company from him—each cursing in his
native tongue. Oh, sweet chorus!

That Lord Kew should be at Baden is no wonder. If you heard of him at
the Finish, or at Buckingham Palace ball, or in a watch-house, or at
the Third Cataract, or at a Newmarket meeting, you would not be
surprised. He goes everywhere; does everything with all his might;
knows everybody. Last week he won who knows how many thousand louis
from the bank (it appears Brown has chosen one of the unlucky days to
back his lordship). He will eat his supper as gaily after a great
victory as after a signal defeat; and we know that to win with
magnanimity requires much more constancy than to lose. His sleep will
not be disturbed by one event or the other. He will play skittles all
the morning with perfect contentment, romp with children in the
forenoon (he is the friend of half the children in the place), or he
will cheerfully leave the green table and all the risk and excitement
there, to take a hand at sixpenny whist with General Fogey, or to give
the six Miss Fogeys a turn each in the ballroom. From H.R.H. the Prince
Royal of ——, who is the greatest guest at Baden, down to Brown the
bagman, who does not consider himself the smallest, Lord Kew is hail
fellow with everybody, and has a kind word from and for all.




CHAPTER XXVIII.
In which Clive begins to see the World


In the company assembled at Baden, Clive found one or two old
acquaintances; among them his friend of Paris, M. de Florac, not in
quite so brilliant a condition as when Newcome had last met him on the
Boulevard. Florac owned that Fortune had been very unkind to him at
Baden; and, indeed, she had not only emptied his purse, but his
portmanteaus, jewel-box, and linen-closet—the contents of all of which
had ranged themselves on the red and black against Monsieur Bénazet’s
crown-pieces: whatever side they took was, however, the unlucky one.
“This campaign has been my Moscow, _mon cher_,” Florac owned to Clive.
“I am conquered by Bénazet; I have lost in almost every combat. I have
lost my treasure, my baggage, my ammunition of war, everything but my
honour, which, _au reste_, Mons. Bénazet will not accept as a stake; if
he would, there are plenty here, believe me, who would set it on the
trente-et-quarante. Sometimes I have had a mind to go home; my mother,
who is an angel all forgiveness, would receive her prodigal, and kill
the fatted veal for me. But what will you? He annoys me—the domestic
veal. Besides, my brother the Abbé, though the best of Christians, is a
Jew upon certain matters; a Bénazet who will not _troquer_ absolution
except against repentance; and I have not for a sou of repentance in my
pocket! I have been sorry, yes—but it was because odd came up in place
of even, or the reverse. The accursed _après_ has chased me like a
remorse, and when black has come up I have wished myself converted to
red. Otherwise I have no repentance—I am _joueur_—nature has made me
so, as she made my brother _dévot_. The Archbishop of Strasbourg is of
our parents; I saw his grandeur when I went lately to Strasbourg, on my
last pilgrimage to the Mont de Piété. I owned to him that I would pawn
his cross and ring to go play: the good prelate laughed, and said his
chaplain should keep an eye on them. Will you dine with me? The
landlord of my hotel was the intendant of our cousin, the Duc d’Ivry,
and will give me credit to the day of judgment. I do not abuse his
noble confidence. My dear! there are covers of silver put upon my table
every day with which I could retrieve my fortune, did I listen to the
suggestions of Satanas; but I say to him, _Vade retro_. Come and dine
with me—Duluc’s kitchen is very good.”

These easy confessions were uttered by a gentleman who was nearly forty
years of age, and who had indeed played the part of a young man in
Paris and the great European world so long, that he knew or chose to
perform no other. He did not want for abilities; had the best temper in
the world; was well bred and gentlemanlike always; and was gay even
after Moscow. His courage was known, and his character for bravery and
another kind of gallantry probably exaggerated by his bad reputation.
Had his mother not been alive, perhaps he would have believed in the
virtue of no woman. But this one he worshipped, and spoke with
tenderness and enthusiasm of her constant love and patience and
goodness. “See her miniature!” he said, “I never separate myself from
it—oh, never! It saved my life in an affair about—about a woman who was
not worth the powder which poor Jules and I burned for her. His ball
struck me here, upon the waistcoat, bruising my rib and sending me to
my bed, which I never should have left alive but for this picture. Oh,
she is an angel, my mother! I am sure that Heaven has nothing to deny
that saint, and that her tears wash out my sins.”

Clive smiled. “I think Madame de Florac must weep a good deal,” he
said.

“_Enormément_, my friend! My faith! I do not deny it! I give her cause,
night and evening. I am possessed by demons! This little Affenthaler
wine of this country has a little smack which is most agreeable. The
passions tear me, my young friend! Play is fatal, but play is not so
fatal as woman. Pass me the écrévisses, they are most succulent. Take
warning by me, and avoid both. I saw you _rôder_ round the green
tables, and marked your eyes as they glistened over the heaps of gold,
and looked at some of our beauties of Baden. Beware of such sirens,
young man! and take me for your Mentor; avoiding what I have done—that
understands itself. You have not played as yet? Do not do so; above all
avoid a martingale, if you do. Play ought not to be an affair of
calculation, but of inspiration. I have calculated infallibly, and what
has been the effect? Gousset empty, tiroirs empty, nécessaire parted
for Strasbourg! Where is my fur pelisse, Frédéric?”

“Parbleu, vous le savez bien, Monsieur le Vicomte,” says Frédéric, the
domestic, who was waiting on Clive and his friend.

“A pelisse lined with true sable, and, worth three thousand francs,
that I won of a little Russian at billiards. That pelisse at Strasbourg
(where the infamous worms of the Mount of Piety are actually gnawing
her). Two hundred francs and this _reconnaissance_, which Frédéric
receive, are all that now represent the pelisse. How many chemises have
I, Frédéric?”

“Eh, parbleu, Monsieur le Vicomte sait bien que nous avons toujours
vingt-quatre chemises,” says Frédéric, grumbling.

Monsieur le Vicomte springs up shrieking from the dinner-table.
“Twenty-four shirts,” says he, “and I have been a week without a louis
in my pocket! _Bélître! Nigaud!_” He flings open one drawer after
another, but there are no signs of that—superfluity of linen of which
the domestic spoke, whose countenance now changes from a grim frown to
a grim smile.

“Ah, my faithful Frédéric, I pardon thee! Mr. Newcome will understand
my harmless _supercherie_. Frédéric was in my company of the Guard, and
remains with me since. He is Caleb Balderstone and I am Ravenswood.
Yes, I am Edgard. Let us have coffee and a cigar, Balderstone.”

“Plait-il, Monsieur le Vicomte?” says the French Caleb.

“Thou comprehendest not English. Thou readest not Valtare Scott, thou!”
cries the master. “I was recounting to Monsieur Newcome thy history and
my misfortunes. Go seek coffee for us, _Nigaud_.” And as the two
gentlemen partake of that exhilarating liquor, the elder confides gaily
to his guest the reason why he prefers taking coffee at the hotel to
the coffee at the great Café of the Redoute, with a _duris urgéns in
rebus égestāss!_ pronounced in the true French manner.

Clive was greatly amused by the gaiety of the Viscount after his
misfortunes and his Moscow; and thought that one of Mr. Baines’s
circular notes might not be ill laid out in succouring this hero. It
may have been to this end that Florac’s confessions tended; though, to
do him justice, the incorrigible young fellow would confide his
adventures to any one who would listen; and the exact state of his
wardrobe, and the story of his pawned pelisse, dressing-case, rings and
watches, were known to all Baden.

“You tell me to marry and range myself,” said Clive (to whom the
Viscount was expatiating upon the charms of the _superbe_ young
_Anglaise_ with whom he had seen Clive walking on the promenade). “Why
do you not marry and range yourself too?”

“Eh, my dear! I am married already. You do not know it? I am married
since the Revolution of July. Yes. We were poor in those days, as poor
we remain. My cousins the Duc d’Ivry’s sons and his grandson were still
alive. Seeing no other resource and pursued by the Arabs, I espoused
the Vicomtesse de Florac. I gave her my name, you comprehend, in
exchange for her own odious one. She was Miss Higg. Do you know the
family Higg of Manchesterre in the comte of Lancastre? She was then a
person of a ripe age. The Vicomtesse is now—ah! it is fifteen years
since, and she dies not. Our union was not happy, my friend—Madame Paul
de Florac is of the reformed religion—not of the Anglican Church, you
understand—but a dissident I know not of what sort. We inhabited the
Hôtel de Florac for a while after our union, which was all of
convenience, you understand. She filled her salon with ministers to
make you die. She assaulted my poor father in his garden-chair, whence
he could not escape her. She told my sainted mother that she was an
idolatress—she who only idolatrises her children! She called us other
poor Catholics who follow the rites of our fathers, _des Romishes;_ and
Rome, Babylon; and the Holy Father—a scarlet—eh! a scarlet abomination.
She outraged my mother, that angel; essayed to convert the antechamber
and the office; put little books in the Abbé’s bedroom. Eh, my friend!
what a good king was Charles IX., and his mother what a wise sovereign!
I lament that Madame de Florac should have escaped the St. Barthelemi,
when no doubt she was spared on account of her tender age. We have been
separated for many years; her income was greatly exaggerated. Beyond
the payment of my debts I owe her nothing. I wish I could say as much
of all the rest of the world. Shall we take a turn of promenade?
_Mauvais sujet!_ I see you are longing to be at the green table.”

Clive was not longing to be at the green table: but his companion was
never easy at it or away from it. Next to winning, losing, M. de Florac
said, was the best sport—next to losing, looking on. So he and Clive
went down to the Redoute, where Lord Kew was playing with a crowd of
awestruck amateurs and breathless punters admiring his valour and
fortune; and Clive, saying that he knew nothing about the game, took
out five Napoleons from his purse, and besought Florac to invest them
in the most profitable manner at roulette. The other made some faint
attempts at a scruple: but the money was speedily laid on the table,
where it increased and multiplied amazingly too; so that in a quarter
of an hour Florac brought quite a handful of gold pieces to his
principal. Then Clive, I dare say blushing as he made the proposal,
offered half the handful of Napoleons to M. de Florac, to be repaid
when he thought fit. And fortune must have been very favourable to the
husband of Miss Higg that night; for in the course of an hour he
insisted on paying back Clive’s loan; and two days afterwards appeared
with his shirt-studs (of course with his shirts also), released from
captivity, his watch, rings, and chains, on the parade; and was
observed to wear his celebrated fur pelisse as he drove back in a
britzska from Strasbourg. “As for myself,” wrote Clive, “I put back
into my purse the five Napoleons with which I had begun; and laid down
the whole mass of winnings on the table, where it was doubled and then
quadrupled, and then swept up by the croupiers, greatly to my ease of
mind. And then Lord Kew asked me to supper and we had a merry night.”

This was Mr. Clive’s first and last appearance as a gambler. J. J.
looked very grave when he heard of these transactions. Clive’s French
friend did not please his English companion at all, nor the friends of
Clive’s French friend, the Russians, the Spaniards, the Italians, of
sounding titles and glittering decorations, and the ladies who belonged
to their society. He saw by chance Ethel, escorted by her cousin Lord
Kew, passing through a crowd of this company one day. There was not one
woman there who was not the heroine of some discreditable story. It was
the Comtesse Calypso who had been jilted by the Duc Ulysse. It was the
Marquise Ariane to whom the Prince Thésée had behaved so shamefully,
and who had taken to Bacchus as a consolation. It was Madame Médée, who
had absolutely killed her old father by her conduct regarding Jason:
she had done everything for Jason: she had got him the _toison d’or_
from the Queen Mother, and now had to meet him every day with his
little blonde bride on his arm! J. J. compared Ethel, moving in the
midst of these folks, to the Lady amidst the rout of Comus. There they
were the Fauns and Satyrs: there they were, the merry Pagans: drinking
and dancing, dicing and sporting; laughing out jests that never should
be spoken; whispering rendezvous to be written in midnight calendars;
jeering at honest people who passed under their palace windows—jolly
rebels and repealers of the law. Ah, if Mrs. Brown, whose children are
gone to bed at the hotel, knew but the history of that calm
dignified-looking gentleman who sits under her, and over whose patient
back she frantically advances and withdraws her two-franc piece, whilst
his own columns of louis d’or are offering battle to fortune—how she
would shrink away from the shoulder which she pushes! That man so calm
and well bred, with a string of orders on his breast, so well dressed,
with such white hands, has stabbed trusting hearts; severed family
ties; written lying vows; signed false oaths; torn up pitilessly tender
appeals for redress, and tossed away into the fire supplications
blistered with tears; packed cards and cogged dice; or used pistol or
sword as calmly and dexterously as he now ranges his battalions of gold
pieces.

Ridley shrank away from such lawless people with the delicacy belonging
to his timid and retiring nature, but it must be owned that Mr. Clive
was by no means so squeamish. He did not know, in the first place, the
mystery of their iniquities; and his sunny kindly spirit, undimmed by
any of the cares which clouded it subsequently, was disposed to shine
upon all people alike. The world was welcome to him: the day a
pleasure: all nature a gay feast: scarce any dispositions discordant
with his own (for pretension only made him laugh, and hypocrisy he will
never be able to understand if he lives to be a hundred years old): the
night brought him a long sleep, and the morning a glad waking. To those
privileges of youth what enjoyments of age are comparable? what
achievements of ambition? what rewards of money and fame? Clive’s happy
friendly nature shone out of his face; and almost all who beheld it
felt kindly towards him. As those guileless virgins of romance and
ballad, who walk smiling through dark forests charming off dragons and
confronting lions, the young man as yet went through the world
harmless; no giant waylaid him as yet; no robbing ogre fed on him: and
(greatest danger of all for one of his ardent nature) no winning
enchantress or artful siren coaxed him to her cave, or lured him into
her waters—haunts into which we know so many young simpletons are
drawn, where their silly bones are picked and their tender flesh
devoured.

The time was short which Clive spent at Baden, for it has been said the
winter was approaching, and the destination of our young artists was
Rome; but he may have passed some score of days here, to which he and
another person in that pretty watering-place possibly looked back
afterwards, as not the unhappiest period of their lives. Among Colonel
Newcome’s papers to which the family biographer has had subsequent
access, there are a couple of letters from Clive, dated Baden, at this
time, and full of happiness, gaiety, and affection. Letter No. 1 says,
“Ethel is the prettiest girl here. At the assemblies all the princes,
counts, dukes, Parthians, Medes, and Elamites, are dying to dance with
her. She sends her dearest love to her uncle.” By the side of the words
“prettiest girl,” was written in a frank female hand the monosyllable
“_Stuff;_” and as a note to the expression “dearest love,” with a star
to mark the text and the note, are squeezed, in the same feminine
characters, at the bottom of Clive’s page, the words, “_That I do. E.
N._”

In letter No. 2, the first two pages are closely written in Clive’s
handwriting, describing his pursuits and studies, and giving amusing
details of the life at Baden, and the company whom he met
there—narrating his _rencontre_ with their Paris friend, M. de Florac,
and the arrival of the Duchesse d’Ivry, Florac’s cousin, whose titles
the Vicomte will probably inherit. Not a word about Florac’s gambling
propensities are mentioned in the letter; but Clive honestly confesses
that he has staked five Napoleons, doubled them, quadrupled them, won
ever so much, lost it all back again, and come away from the table with
his original five pounds in his pocket—proposing never to play any
more. “Ethel,” he concluded, “is looking over my shoulder. She thinks
me such a delightful creature that she is never easy without me. She
bids me to say that I am the best of sons and cousins, and am, in a
word, a darling du—” The rest of this important word is not given, but
_goose_ is added in the female hand. In the faded ink, on the yellow
paper that may have crossed and recrossed oceans, that has lain locked
in chests for years, and buried under piles of family archives, while
your friends have been dying and your head has grown white—who has not
disinterred mementos like these—from which the past smiles at you so
sadly, shimmering out of Hades an instant but to sink back again into
the cold shades, perhaps with a faint, faint sound as of a remembered
tone—a ghostly echo of a once familiar laughter? I was looking of late
at a wall in the Naples Museum, whereon a boy of Herculaneum eighteen
hundred years ago had scratched with a nail the figure of a soldier. I
could fancy the child turning round and smiling on me after having done
his etching. Which of us that is thirty years old has not had his
Pompeii? Deep under ashes lies the Life of Youth,—the careless Sport,
the Pleasure and Passion, the darling Joy. You open an old letter-box
and look at your own childish scrawls, or your mother’s letters to you
when you were at school; and excavate your heart. Oh me, for the day
when the whole city shall be bare and the chambers unroofed—and every
cranny visible to the Light above, from the Forum to the Lupanar!

Ethel takes up the pen. “My dear uncle,” she says, “while Clive is
sketching out of window, let me write you a line or two on his paper,
though _I know you like to hear no one speak_ but him. I wish I could
draw him for you as he stands yonder, looking the picture of good
health, good spirits, and good humour. Everybody likes him. He is quite
unaffected; always gay; always pleased. He draws more and more
beautifully every day; and his affection for young Mr. Ridley, who is
really a most excellent and astonishing young man, and actually a
better artist than Clive himself, is most romantic, and does your son
the greatest credit. You will order Clive not to sell his pictures,
won’t you? I know it is not wrong, but your son might look higher than
to be an artist. It is a rise for Mr. Ridley, but a fall for him. An
artist, an organist, a pianist, all these are very good people, but you
know not _de notre monde_, and Clive ought to belong to it.

“We met him at Bonn on our way to a great family gathering here; where,
I must tell you, we are assembled for what I call the Congress of
Baden! The chief of the house of Kew is here, and what time he does not
devote to skittles, to smoking cigars, to the _jeu_ in the evenings, to
Madame d’Ivry, to Madame de Cruchecassée, and the foreign people (of
whom there are a host here of the worst kind, as usual), he graciously
bestows on me. Lord and Lady Dorking are here, with their meek little
daughter, Clara Pulleyn; and Barnes is coming. Uncle Hobson has
returned to Lombard Street to relieve guard. I think you will hear
before very long of Lady Clara Newcome. Grandmamma, who was to have
presided at the Congress of Baden, and still, you know, reigns over the
house of Kew, has been stopped at Kissingen with an attack of
rheumatism; I pity poor Aunt Julia, who can never leave her. Here are
all our news. I declare I have filled the whole page; men write closer
than we do. I wear the dear brooch you gave me, often and often; I
think of you always, dear, kind uncle, as your affectionate Ethel.”

Besides roulette and trente-et-quarante, a number of amusing games are
played at Baden, which are not performed, so to speak, _sur table_.
These little diversions and _jeux de société_ can go on anywhere; in an
alley in the park; in a picnic to this old schloss, or that pretty
hunting-lodge; at a tea-table in a lodging-house or hotel; in a ball at
the Redoute; in the play-rooms behind the backs of the gamblers, whose
eyes are only cast upon rakes and rouleaux, and red and black; or on
the broad walk in front of the conversation rooms, where thousands of
people are drinking and chattering, lounging and smoking, whilst the
Austrian brass band, in the little music pavilion, plays the most
delightful mazurkas and waltzes. Here the widow plays her black suit
and sets her bright eyes against the rich bachelor, elderly or young as
may be. Here the artful practitioner, who has dealt in a thousand such
games, engages the young simpleton with more money than wit; and
knowing his weakness and her skill, we may safely take the odds, and
back rouge et couleur to win. Here mamma, not having money, perhaps,
but metal more attractive, stakes her virgin daughter against Count
Fettacker’s forests and meadows; or Lord Lackland plays his coronet, of
which the jewels have long since been in pawn, against Miss Bags’
three-per-cents. And so two or three funny little games were going on
at Baden amongst our immediate acquaintance; besides that vulgar sport
round the green table, at which the mob, with whom we have little to
do, was elbowing each other. A hint of these domestic prolusions has
been given to the reader in the foregoing extract from Miss Ethel
Newcome’s letter: likewise some passions have been in play, of which a
modest young English maiden could not be aware. Do not, however, let us
be too prematurely proud of our virtue. That tariff of British virtue
is wonderfully organised. Heaven help the society which made its laws!
Gnats are shut out of its ports, or not admitted without scrutiny and
repugnance, whilst herds of camels are let in. The law professes to
exclude some goods (or bads shall we call them?)—well, some articles of
baggage, which are yet smuggled openly under the eyes of winking
officers, and worn every day without shame. Shame! What is shame?
Virtue is very often shameful according to the English social
constitution, and shame honourable. Truth, if yours happens to differ
from your neighbour’s, provokes your friend’s coldness, your mother’s
tears, the world’s persecution. Love is not to be dealt in, save under
restrictions which kill its sweet, healthy, free commerce. Sin in man
is so light, that scarce the fine of a penny is imposed; while for
woman it is so heavy that no repentance can wash it out. Ah! yes; all
stories are old. You proud matrons in your Mayfair markets, have you
never seen a virgin sold, or sold one? Have you never heard of a poor
wayfarer fallen among robbers, and not a Pharisee to help him? of a
poor woman fallen more sadly yet, abject in repentance and tears, and a
crowd to stone her? I pace this broad Baden walk as the sunset is
gilding the hills round about, as the orchestra blows its merry tunes,
as the happy children laugh and sport in the alleys, as the lamps of
the gambling-palace are lighted up, as the throngs of pleasure-hunters
stroll, and smoke, and flirt, and hum: and wonder sometimes, is it the
sinners who are the most sinful? Is it poor Prodigal yonder amongst the
bad company, calling black and red and tossing the champagne; or
brother Straitlace that grudges his repentance? Is it downcast Hagar
that slinks away with poor little Ishmael in her hand; or bitter old
virtuous Sarah, who scowls at her from my demure Lord Abraham’s arm?

One day of the previous May, when of course everybody went to visit the
Water-colour Exhibitions, Ethel Newcome was taken to see the pictures
by her grandmother, that rigorous old Lady Kew, who still proposed to
reign over all her family. The girl had high spirit, and very likely
hot words had passed between the elder and the younger lady; such as I
am given to understand will be uttered in the most polite families.
They came to a piece by Mr. Hunt, representing one of those figures
which he knows how to paint with such consummate truth and pathos—a
friendless young girl cowering in a doorway, evidently without home or
shelter. The exquisite fidelity of the details, and the plaintive
beauty of the expression of the child, attracted old Lady Kew’s
admiration, who was an excellent judge of works of art; and she stood
for some time looking at the drawing, with Ethel by her side. Nothing,
in truth, could be more simple or pathetic; Ethel laughed, and her
grandmother looking up from her stick on which she hobbled about, saw a
very sarcastic expression in the girl’s eyes.

“You have no taste for pictures, only for painters, I suppose,” said
Lady Kew.

“I was not looking at the picture,” said Ethel, still with a smile,
“but at the little green ticket in the corner.”

“Sold,” said Lady Kew. “Of course it is sold; all Mr. Hunt’s pictures
are sold. There is not one of them here on which you won’t see the
green ticket. He is a most admirable artist. I don’t know whether his
comedy or tragedy are the most excellent.”

“I think, grandmamma,” Ethel said, “we young ladies in the world, when
we are exhibiting, ought to have little green tickets pinned on our
backs, with ‘Sold’ written on them; it would prevent trouble and any
future haggling, you know. Then at the end of the season the owner
would come to carry us home.”

Grandmamma only said, “Ethel, you are a fool,” and hobbled on to Mr.
Cattermole’s picture hard by. “What splendid colour; what a romantic
gloom; what a flowing pencil and dexterous hand!” Lady Kew could
delight in pictures, applaud good poetry, and squeeze out a tear over a
good novel too. That afternoon, young Dawkins, the rising water-colour
artist, who used to come daily to the gallery and stand delighted
before his own piece, was aghast to perceive that there was no green
ticket in the corner of his frame, and he pointed out the deficiency to
the keeper of the pictures. His landscape, however, was sold and paid
for, so no great mischief occurred. On that same evening, when the
Newcome family assembled at dinner in Park Lane, Ethel appeared with a
bright green ticket pinned in the front of her white muslin frock, and
when asked what this queer fancy meant, she made Lady Kew a curtsey,
looking her full in the face, and turning round to her father, said, “I
am a _tableau-vivant_, papa. I am Number 46 in the Exhibition of the
Gallery of Painters in Water-colours.”

“My love, what do you mean?” says mamma; and Lady Kew, jumping up on
her crooked stick with immense agility, tore the card out of Ethel’s
bosom, and very likely would have boxed her ears, but that her parents
were present and Lord Kew announced.

Ethel talked about pictures the whole evening, and would talk of
nothing else. Grandmamma went away furious. “She told Barnes, and when
everybody was gone there was a pretty row in the building,” said Madam
Ethel, with an arch look, when she narrated the story. “Barnes was
ready to kill me and eat me; but I never was afraid of Barnes.” And the
biographer gathers from this little anecdote, narrated to him, never
mind by whom, at a long subsequent period, that there had been great
disputes in Sir Brian Newcome’s establishment, fierce drawing-room
battles, whereof certain pictures of a certain painter might have
furnished the cause, and in which Miss Newcome had the whole of the
family forces against her. That such battles take place in other
domestic establishments, who shall say or shall not say? Who, when he
goes out to dinner, and is received by a bland host with a gay shake of
the hand, and a pretty hostess with a gracious smile of welcome, dares
to think that Mr. Johnson upstairs, half an hour before, was swearing
out of his dressing-room at Mrs. Johnson, for having ordered a turbot
instead of a salmon, or that Mrs. Johnson now talking to Lady Jones so
nicely about their mutual darling children, was crying her eyes out as
her maid was fastening her gown, as the carriages were actually driving
up? The servants know these things, but not we in the dining-room. Hark
with what a respectful tone Johnson begs the clergyman present to say
grace!

Whatever these family quarrels may have been, let bygones be bygones,
and let us be perfectly sure, that to whatever purpose Miss Ethel
Newcome, for good or for evil, might make her mind up, she had quite
spirit enough to hold her own. She chose to be Countess of Kew because
she chose to be Countess of Kew; had she set her heart on marrying Mr.
Kuhn, she would have had her way, and made the family adopt it, and
called him dear Fritz, as by his godfathers and godmothers, in his
baptism, Mr. Kuhn was called. Clive was but a fancy, if he had even
been so much as that, not a passion, and she fancied a pretty
four-pronged coronet still more.

So that the diatribe wherein we lately indulged, about the selling of
virgins, by no means applies to Lady Anne Newcome, who signed the
address to Mrs Stowe, the other day, along with thousands more virtuous
British matrons; but should the reader haply say, “Is thy fable, O
Poet, narrated concerning Tancred Pulleyn, Earl of Dorking, and
Sigismunda, his wife?” the reluctant moralist is obliged to own that
the cap _does_ fit those noble personages, of whose lofty society you
will, however, see but little.

For though I would like to go into an Indian Brahmin’s house, and see
the punkahs, and the purdahs and tattys, and the pretty brown maidens
with great eyes, and great nose-rings, and painted foreheads, and slim
waists cased in Cashmir shawls, Kincob scarfs, curly slippers, gilt
trousers, precious anklets and bangles; and have the mystery of Eastern
existence revealed to me (as who would not who has read the Arabian
Nights in his youth?), yet I would not choose the moment when the
Brahmin of the house was dead, his women howling, his priests doctoring
his child of a widow, now frightening her with sermons, now drugging
her with bang, so as to push her on his funeral pile at last, and into
the arms of that carcase, stupefied, but obedient and decorous. And
though I like to walk, even in fancy, in an earl’s house, splendid,
well ordered, where there are feasts and fine pictures and fair ladies
and endless books and good company; yet there are times when the visit
is not pleasant; and when the parents in that fine house are getting
ready their daughter for sale, and frightening away her tears with
threats, and stupefying her grief with narcotics, praying her and
imploring her, and dramming her and coaxing her, and blessing her, and
cursing her perhaps, till they have brought her into such a state as
shall fit the poor young thing for that deadly couch upon which they
are about to thrust her. When my lord and lady are so engaged I prefer
not to call at their mansion, Number 1000 in Grosvenor Square, but to
partake of a dinner of herbs rather than of that stalled ox which their
cook is roasting whole. There are some people who are not so squeamish.
The family comes, of course; the Most Reverend the Lord Arch-Brahmin of
Benares will attend the ceremony; there will be flowers and lights and
white favours; and quite a string of carriages up to the pagoda; and
such a breakfast afterwards; and music in the street and little parish
boys hurrahing; and no end of speeches within and tears shed (no
doubt), and His Grace the Arch-Brahmin will make a highly appropriate
speech, just with a faint scent of incense about it as such a speech
ought to have; and the young person will slip away unperceived, and
take off her veils, wreaths, orange-flowers, bangles and finery, and
will put on a plain dress more suited for the occasion, and the
house-door will open—and there comes the SUTTEE in company of the body:
yonder the pile is waiting on four wheels with four horses, the crowd
hurrahs and the deed is done.

This ceremony amongst us is so stale and common that to be sure there
is no need to describe its rites, and as women sell themselves for what
you call an establishment every day; to the applause of themselves,
their parents, and the world, why on earth should a man ape at
originality and pretend to pity them? Never mind about the lies at the
altar, the blasphemy against the godlike name of love, the sordid
surrender, the smiling dishonour. What the deuce does a _mariage de
convenance_ mean but all this, and are not such sober Hymeneal torches
more satisfactory often than the most brilliant love matches that ever
flamed and burnt out? Of course. Let us not weep when everybody else is
laughing: let us pity the agonised duchess when her daughter, Lady
Atalanta, runs away with the doctor—of course, that’s respectable; let
us pity Lady Iphigenia’s father when that venerable chief is obliged to
offer up his darling child; but it is over _her_ part of the business
that a decorous painter would throw the veil now. Her ladyship’s
sacrifice is performed, and the less said about it the better.

Such was the case regarding an affair which appeared in due subsequence
in the newspapers not long afterwards under the fascinating title of
“Marriage in High Life,” and which was in truth the occasion of the
little family Congress of Baden which we are now chronicling. We all
know—everybody at least who has the slightest acquaintance with the
army list—that, at the commencement of their life, my Lord Kew, my Lord
Viscount Rooster, the Earl of Dorking’s eldest son, and the Honourable
Charles Belsize, familiarly called Jack Belsize, were subaltern
officers in one of His Majesty’s regiments of cuirassier guards. They
heard the chimes at midnight like other young men, they enjoyed their
fun and frolics as gentlemen of spirit will do; sowing their wild oats
plentifully, and scattering them with boyish profusion. Lady Kew’s luck
had blessed him with more sacks of oats than fell to the lot of his
noble young companions. Lord Dorking’s house is known to have been long
impoverished; an excellent informant, Major Pendennis, has entertained
me with many edifying accounts of the exploits of Lord Rooster’s
grandfather “with the wild Prince and Poins,” of his feats in the
hunting-field, over the bottle, over the dice-box. He played two nights
and two days at a sitting with Charles Fox, when they both lost sums
awful to reckon. He played often with Lord Steyne, and came away, as
all men did, dreadful sufferers from those midnight encounters. His
descendants incurred the penalties of the progenitor’s imprudence, and
Chanticlere, though one of the finest castles in England, is splendid
but for a month in the year. The estate is mortgaged up to the very
castle windows. “Dorking cannot cut a stick or kill a buck in his own
park,” the good old Major used to tell with tragic accents, “he lives
by his cabbages, grapes, and pineapples, and the fees which people give
for seeing the place and gardens, which are still the show of the
county, and among the most splendid in the island. When Dorking is at
Chanticlere, Ballard, who married his sister, lends him the plate and
sends three men with it. Four cooks inside, and four maids and six
footmen on the roof, with a butler driving, come down from London in a
trap, and wait the month. And as the last carriage of the company
drives away, the servants’ coach is packed, and they all bowl back to
town again. It’s pitiable, sir, pitiable.”

In Lord Kew’s youth, the names of himself and his two noble friends
appeared on innumerable slips of stamped paper, conveying pecuniary
assurances of a promissory nature; all of which promises, my Lord Kew
singly and most honourably discharged. Neither of his two
companions-in-arms had the means of meeting these engagements. Ballard,
Rooster’s uncle, was said to make his lordship some allowance. As for
Jack Belsize: how he lived; how he laughed; how he dressed himself so
well, and looked so fat and handsome; how he got a shilling to pay for
a cab or a cigar; what ravens fed him; was a wonder to all. The young
men claimed kinsmanship with one another, which those who are learned
in the peerage may unravel.

When Lord Dorking’s eldest daughter married the Honourable and
Venerable Dennis Gallowglass, Archdeacon of Bullintubber (and at
present Viscount Gallowglass and Killbrogue, and Lord Bishop of
Ballyshannon), great festivities took place at Chanticlere, whither the
relatives of the high contracting parties were invited. Among them came
poor Jack Belsize, and hence the tears which are dropping at Baden at
this present period of our history. Clara Pulleyn was then a pretty
little maiden of sixteen, and Jack a handsome guardsman of six or seven
and twenty. As she had been especially warned against Jack as a wicked
young rogue, whose _antécédents_ were wofully against him; as she was
never allowed to sit near him at dinner, or to walk with him, or to
play at billiards with him, or to waltz with him; as she was scolded if
he spoke a word to her, or if he picked up her glove, or touched her
hand in a round game, or caught him when they were playing at
blindman’s-buff; as they neither of them had a penny in the world, and
were both very good-looking, of course Clara was always catching Jack
at blindman’s-buff; constantly lighting upon him in the shrubberies or
corridors, etc. etc. etc. She fell in love (she was not the first) with
Jack’s broad chest and thin waist; she thought his whiskers as indeed
they were, the handsomest pair in all His Majesty’s Brigade of
Cuirassiers.

We know not what tears were shed in the vast and silent halls of
Chanticlere, when the company were gone, and the four cooks, and four
maids, six footmen, and temporary butler had driven back in their
private trap to the metropolis, which is not forty miles distant from
that splendid castle. How can we tell? The guests departed, the
lodge-gates shut; all is mystery:—darkness with one pair of wax candles
blinking dismally in a solitary chamber; all the rest dreary vistas of
brown hollands, rolled Turkey carpets, gaunt ancestors on the walls
scowling out of the twilight blank. The imagination is at liberty to
depict his lordship, with one candle, over his dreadful endless tapes
and papers; her ladyship with the other, and an old, old novel, wherein
perhaps, Mrs. Radcliffe describes a castle as dreary as her own; and
poor little Clara sighing and crying in the midst of these funereal
splendours, as lonely and heart-sick as Oriana in her moated
grange:—poor little Clara!

Lord Kew’s drag took the young men to London; his lordship driving, and
the servants sitting inside. Jack sat behind with the two grooms, and
tooted on a cornet-a-piston in the most melancholy manner. He partook
of no refreshment on the road. His silence at his clubs was remarked:
smoking, billiards, military duties, and this and that, roused him a
little, and presently Jack was alive again. But then came the season,
Lady Clara Pulleyn’s first season in London, and Jack was more alive
than ever. There was no ball he did not go to; no opera (that is to
say, no opera of _certain_ operas) which he did not frequent. It was
easy to see by his face, two minutes after entering a room, whether the
person he sought was there or absent; not difficult for those who were
in the secret to watch in another pair of eyes the bright kindling
signals which answered Jack’s fiery glances. Ah! how beautiful he
looked on his charger on the birthday, all in a blaze of scarlet, and
bullion, and steel. O Jack! tear her out of yon carriage, from the side
of yonder livid, feathered, painted, bony dowager! place her behind you
on the black charger; cut down the policeman, and away with you! The
carriage rolls in through St. James’s Park; Jack sits alone with his
sword dropped to the ground, or only _atra cura_ on the crupper behind
him; and Snip, the tailor, in the crowd, thinks it is for fear of him
Jack’s head droops. Lady Clara Pulleyn is presented by her mother, the
Countess of Dorking; and Jack is arrested that night as he is going out
of White’s to meet her at the Opera.

Jack’s little exploits are known in the Insolvent Court, where he made
his appearances as Charles Belsize, commonly called the Honourable
Charles Belsize, whose dealings were smartly chronicled by the
indignant moralists of the press of those days. The _Scourge_ flogged
him heartily. The _Whip_ (of which the accomplished editor was himself
in Whitecross Street prison) was especially virtuous regarding him; and
the _Penny Voice of Freedom_ gave him an awful dressing. I am not here
to scourge sinners; I am true to my party; it is the other side this
humble pen attacks; let us keep to the virtuous and respectable, for as
for poor sinners they get the whipping-post every day. One person was
faithful to poor Jack through all his blunders and follies and
extravagance and misfortunes, and that was the pretty young girl of
Chanticlere, round whose young affections his luxuriant whiskers had
curled. And the world may cry out at Lord Kew for sending his brougham
to the Queen’s Bench prison, and giving a great feast at Grignon’s to
Jack on the day of his liberation, but I for one will not quarrel with
his lordship. He and many other sinners had a jolly night. They said
Kew made a fine speech, in hearing and acknowledging which Jack Belsize
wept copiously. Barnes Newcome was in a rage at Jack’s manumission, and
sincerely hoped Mr. Commissioner would give him a couple of years
longer; and cursed and swore with a great liberality on hearing of his
liberty.

That this poor prodigal should marry Clara Pulleyn, and by way of a
dowry lay his schedule at her feet, was out of the question. His noble
father, Lord Highgate, was furious against him; his eldest brother
would not see him; he had given up all hopes of winning his darling
prize long ago, and one day there came to him a great packet bearing
the seal of Chanticlere, containing a wretched little letter signed C.
P., and a dozen sheets of Jack’s own clumsy writing, delivered who
knows how, in what crush-rooms, quadrilles, bouquets, balls, and in
which were scrawled Jack’s love and passion and ardour. How many a time
had he looked into the dictionary at White’s, to see whether eternal
was spelt with an e, and adore with one a or two! There they were, the
incoherent utterances of his brave longing heart; and those two
wretched, wretched lines signed C., begging that C.’s little letters
might too be returned or destroyed. To do him justice, he burnt them
loyally every one along with his own waste paper. He kept not one
single little token which she had given him or let him take. The rose,
the glove, the little handkerchief which she had dropped to him, how he
cried over them! The ringlet of golden hair—he burnt them all, all in
his own fire in the prison, save a little, little bit of the hair,
which might be any one’s, which was the colour of his sister’s. Kew saw
the deed done; perhaps he hurried away when Jack came to the very last
part of the sacrifice, and flung the hair into the fire, where he would
have liked to fling his heart and his life too.

So Clara was free, and the year when Jack came out of prison and went
abroad, she passed the season in London dancing about night after
night, and everybody said she was well out of that silly affair with
Jack Belsize. It was then that Barnes Newcome, Esq., a partner of the
wealthy banking firm of Hobson Brothers and Newcome, son and heir of
Sir Brian Newcome, of Newcome, Bart., and M. P., descended in right
line from Bryan de Newcomyn, slain at Hastings, and barber-surgeon to
Edward the Confessor, etc. etc., cast the eyes of regard on the Lady
Clara Pulleyn, who was a little pale and languid certainly, but had
blue eyes, a delicate skin, and a pretty person, and knowing her
previous history as well as you who have just perused it, deigned to
entertain matrimonial intentions towards her ladyship.

Not one of the members of these most respectable families, excepting
poor little Clara perhaps, poor little fish (as if she had any call but
to do her duty, or to ask _à quelle sauce elle serait mangée_),
protested against this little affair of traffic; Lady Dorking had a
brood of little chickens to succeed Clara. There was little Hennie, who
was sixteen, and Biddy, who was fourteen, and Adelaide, and who knows
how many more? How could she refuse a young man, not very agreeable it
is true, nor particularly amiable, nor of good birth, at least on his
father’s side, but otherwise eligible, and heir to so many thousands a
year? The Newcomes, on their side, think it a desirable match. Barnes,
it must be confessed, is growing rather selfish, and has some bachelor
ways which a wife will reform. Lady Kew is strongly for the match. With
her own family interest, Lord Steyne and Lord Kew, her nephews, and
Barnes’s own father-in-law, Lord Dorking, in the Peers, why shall not
the Newcomes sit there too, and resume the old seat which all the world
knows they had in the time of Richard III.? Barnes and his father had
got up quite a belief about a Newcome killed at Bosworth, along with
King Richard, and hated Henry VII. as an enemy of their noble race. So
all the parties were pretty well agreed. Lady Anne wrote rather a
pretty little poem about welcoming the white Fawn to the Newcome
bowers, and “Clara” was made to rhyme with “fairer,” and “timid does
and antlered deer to dot the glades of Chanticlere,” quite in a
picturesque way. Lady Kew pronounced that the poem was very pretty
indeed.

The year after Jack Belsize made his foreign tour he returned to London
for the season. Lady Clara did not happen to be there; her health was a
little delicate, and her kind parents took her abroad; so all things
went on very smoothly and comfortably indeed.

Yes, but when things were so quiet and comfortable, when the ladies of
the two families had met at the Congress of Baden, and liked each other
so much, when Barnes and his papa the Baronet, recovered from his
illness, were actually on their journey from Aix-la-Chapelle, and Lady
Kew in motion from Kissingen to the Congress of Baden, why on earth
should Jack Belsize, haggard, wild, having been winning great sums, it
was said, at Hombourg, forsake his luck there, and run over frantically
to Baden? He wore a great thick beard, a great slouched hat—he looked
like nothing more or less than a painter or an Italian brigand.
Unsuspecting Clive, remembering the jolly dinner which Jack had
procured for him at the Guards’ mess in St. James’s, whither Jack
himself came from the Horse Guards—simple Clive, seeing Jack enter the
town, hailed him cordially, and invited him to dinner, and Jack
accepted, and Clive told him all the news he had of the place; how Kew
was there, and Lady Anne Newcome, and Ethel; and Barnes was coming. “I
am not very fond of him either,” says Clive, smiling, when Belsize
mentioned his name. So Barnes was coming to marry that pretty little
Lady Clara Pulleyn. The knowing youth! I dare say he was rather pleased
with his knowledge of the fashionable world, and the idea that Jack
Belsize would think he, too, was somebody.

Jack drank an immense quantity of champagne, and the dinner over, as
they could hear the band playing from Clive’s open windows in the snug
clean little Hôtel de France, Jack proposed they should go on the
promenade. M. de Florac was of the party; he had been exceedingly
jocular when Lord Kew’s name was mentioned, and said, “Ce petit Kiou!
M. le Duc d’Ivry, mon oncle, l’honore d’une amitié toute particulière.”
These three gentlemen walked out; the promenade was crowded, the was
band playing “Home, sweet Home” very sweetly, and the very first
persons they met on the walk were the Lords of Kew and Dorking, on the
arm of which latter venerable peer his daughter Lady Clara was hanging.

Jack Belsize, in a velvet coat, with a sombrero slouched over his face,
with a beard reaching to his waist, was, no doubt, not recognised at
first by the noble lord of Dorking, for he was greeting the other two
gentlemen with his usual politeness and affability; when, of a sudden,
Lady Clara looking up, gave a little shriek and fell down lifeless on
the gravel walk. Then the old earl recognised Mr. Belsize, and Clive
heard him say, “You villain, how dare you come here?”

Belsize had flung himself down to lift up Clara, calling her
frantically by her name, when old Dorking sprang to seize him.

“Hands off, my lord,” said the other, shaking the old man from his
back. “Confound you, Jack, hold your tongue,” roars out Kew. Clive runs
for a chair, and a dozen were forthcoming. Florac skips back with a
glass of water. Belsize runs towards the awakening girl: and the
father, for an instant losing all patience and self-command, trembling
in every limb, lifts his stick, and says again, “Leave her, you
ruffian.” “Lady Clara has fainted again, sir,” says Captain Belsize. “I
am staying at the Hôtel de France. If you touch me, old man” (this in a
very low voice), “by Heaven I shall kill you. I wish you good morning;”
and taking a last long look at the lifeless girl, he lifts his hat and
walks away. Lord Dorking mechanically takes his hat off, and stands
stupidly gazing after him. He beckoned Clive to follow him, and a crowd
of the frequenters of the place are by this time closed round the
fainting young lady.

Here was a pretty incident in the Congress of Baden!




CHAPTER XXIX.
In which Barnes comes a-wooing


Ethel had all along known that her holiday was to be a short one, and
that, her papa and Barnes arrived, there was to be no more laughing and
fun and sketching and walking with Clive; so she took the sunshine
while it lasted, determined to bear with a stout heart the bad weather.

Sir Brian Newcome and his eldest born arrived at Baden on the very
night of Jack Belsize’s performance upon the promenade; of course it
was necessary to inform the young bridegroom of the facts. His
acquaintances of the public, who by this time know his temper, and are
acquainted with his language, can imagine the explosions of the one and
the vehemence of the other; it was a perfect _feu d’artifice_ of oaths
which he sent up. Mr. Newcome only fired off these volleys of curses
when he was in a passion, but then he was in a passion very frequently.

As for Lady Clara’s little accident, he was disposed to treat that very
lightly. “Poor dear Clara, of course, of course,” he said, “she’s been
accustomed to fainting fits; no wonder she was agitated on the sight of
that villain, after his infernal treatment of her. If I had been there”
(a volley of oaths comes here along the whole line) “I should have
strangled the scoundrel; I should have murdered him.”

“Mercy, Barnes!” cries Lady Anne.

“It was a mercy Barnes was not there,” says Ethel, gravely; “a fight
between him and Captain Belsize would have been awful indeed.”

“I am afraid of no man, Ethel,” says Barnes fiercely, with another
oath.

“Hit one of your own size, Barnes,” says Miss Ethel (who had a number
of school-phrases from her little brothers, and used them on occasions
skilfully). “Hit Captain Belsize, he has no friends.”

As Jack Belsize from his height and strength was fitted to be not only
an officer but actually a private in his former gallant regiment, and
brother Barnes was but a puny young gentleman, the idea of a personal
conflict between them was rather ridiculous. Some notion of this sort
may have passed through Sir Brian’s mind, for the Baronet said with his
usual solemnity, “It is the cause, Ethel, it is the cause, my dear,
which gives strength; in such a cause as Barnes’s, with a beautiful
young creature to protect from a villain, any man would be strong, any
man would be strong.” “Since his last attack,” Barnes used to say, “my
poor old governor is exceedingly shaky, very groggy about the head;”
which was the fact. Barnes was already master at Newcome and the bank,
and awaiting with perfect composure the event which was to place the
blood-red hand of the Newcome baronetcy on his own brougham.

Casting his eyes about the room, a heap of drawings, the work of a
well-known hand which he hated, met his eye. There were a half-dozen
sketches of Baden; Ethel on horseback again; the children and the dogs
just in the old way. “D—— him, is he here?” screams out Barnes. “Is
that young pothouse villain here? and hasn’t Kew knocked his head off?
Is Clive Newcome here, sir,” he cries out to his father. “The Colonel’s
son. I have no doubt they met by——”

“By what, Barnes?” says Ethel.

“Clive is here, is he?” says the Baronet; “making caricatures, hey? You
did not mention him in your letters, Lady Anne.”

Sir Brian was evidently very much touched by his last attack.

Ethel blushed; it was a curious fact, but there had been no mention of
Clive in the ladies’ letters to Sir Brian.

“My dear, we met him by the merest chance, at Bonn, travelling with a
friend of his; and he speaks a little German, and was very useful to
us, and took one of the boys in his britzska the whole way.”

“Boys always crowd in a carriage,” says Sir Brian. “Kick your shins;
always in the way. I remember, when we used to come in the carriage
from Clapham, when we were boys, I used to kick my brother Tom’s shins.
Poor Tom, he was a devilish wild fellow in those days. You don’t
recollect Tom, my Lady Anne?”

Further anecdotes from Sir Brian are interrupted by Lord Kew’s arrival.
“How dydo, Kew!” cries Barnes. “How’s Clara?” and Lord Kew walking up
with great respect to shake hands with Sir Brian, says, “I am glad to
see you looking so well, sir,” and scarcely takes any notice of Barnes.
That Mr. Barnes Newcome was an individual not universally beloved, is a
point of history of which there can be no doubt.

“You have not told me how Clara is, my good fellow,” continues Barnes.
“I have heard all about her meeting with that villain, Jack Belsize.”

“Don’t call names, my good fellow,” says Lord Kew. “It strikes me you
don’t know Belsize well enough to call him by nicknames or by other
names. Lady Clara Pulleyn, I believe, is very unwell indeed.”

“Confound the fellow! How dared he to come here?” cries Barnes, backing
from this little rebuff.

“Dare is another ugly word. I would advise you not to use it to the
fellow himself.”

“What do you mean?” says Barnes, looking very serious in an instant.

“Easy, my good friend. Not so very loud. It appears, Ethel, that poor
Jack—_I_ know him pretty well, you see, Barnes, and may call him by
what names I like—had been dining to-day with cousin Clive; he and M.
de Florac; and that they went with Jack to the promenade, not in the
least aware of Mr. Jack Belsize’s private affairs, or of the shindy
that was going to happen.”

“By Jove, he shall answer for it,” cries out Barnes in a loud voice.

“I dare say he will, if you ask him,” says the other drily; “but not
before ladies. He’d be afraid of frightening them. Poor Jack was always
as gentle as a lamb before women. I had some talk with the Frenchman
just now,” continued Lord Kew gaily, as if wishing to pass over this
side of the subject. “Mi Lord Kiou,” says he, “we have made your friend
Jac to hear reason. He is a little _fou_, your friend Jack. He drank
champagne at dinner like an ogre. How is the _charmante_ Miss Clara?
Florac, you see, calls her Miss Clara, Barnes; the world calls her Lady
Clara. You call her Clara. You happy dog, you.”

“I don’t see why that infernal young cub of a Clive is always meddling
in our affairs,” cries out Barnes, whose rage was perpetually being
whipped into new outcries. “Why has he been about this house? Why is he
here?”

“It is very well for you that he was, Barnes,” Lord Kew said. “The
young fellow showed great temper and spirit. There has been a famous
row, but don’t be alarmed, it is all over. It is all over, everybody
may go to bed and sleep comfortably. Barnes need not get up in the
morning to punch Jack Belsize’s head. I’m sorry for your
disappointment, you Fenchurch Street fire-eater. Come away. It will be
but proper, you know, for a bridegroom elect to go and ask news of _la
charmante_ Miss Clara.”

“As we went out of the house,” Lord Kew told Clive, “I said to Barnes
that every word I had uttered upstairs with regard to the
reconciliation was a lie. That Jack Belsize was determined to have his
blood, and was walking under the lime-trees by which we had to pass
with a thundering big stick. You should have seen the state the fellow
was in, sir. The sweet youth started back, and turned as yellow as a
cream cheese. Then he made a pretext to go into his room, and said it
was for his pocket-handkerchief, but I know it was for a pistol; for he
dropped his hand from my arm into his pocket, every time I said ‘Here’s
Jack,’ as we walked down the avenue to Lord Dorking’s apartment.”

A great deal of animated business had been transacted during the two
hours subsequent to poor Lady Clara’s mishap. Clive and Belsize had
returned to the former’s quarters, while gentle J. J. was utilising the
last rays of the sun to tint a sketch which he had made during the
morning. He fled to his own apartment on the arrival of the
fierce-looking stranger, whose glaring eyes, pallid looks, shaggy
beard, clutched hands, and incessant gasps and mutterings as he strode
up and down, might well scare a peaceable person. Very terrible must
Jack have looked as he trampled those boards in the growing twilight,
anon stopping to drink another tumbler of champagne, then groaning
expressions of inarticulate wrath, and again sinking down on Clive’s
bed with a dropping head and breaking voice, crying, “Poor little
thing, poor little devil.”

“If the old man sends me a message, you will stand by me, won’t you,
Newcome? He was a fierce old fellow in his time, and I have seen him
shoot straight enough at Chanticlere. I suppose you know what the
affair is about?”

“I never heard of it before, but I think I understand,” says Clive,
gravely.

“I can’t ask Kew, he is one of the family; he is going to marry Miss
Newcome. It is no use asking him.”

All Clive’s blood tingled at the idea that any man was going to marry
Miss Newcome. He knew it before—a fortnight since, and it was nothing
to him to hear it. He was glad that the growing darkness prevented his
face from being seen. “I am of the family, too,” said Clive, “and
Barnes Newcome and I had the same grandfather.”

“Oh, yes, old boy—old banker, the weaver, what was he? I forgot,” says
poor Jack, kicking on Clive’s bed, “in that family the Newcomes don’t
count. I beg your pardon,” groans poor Jack.

They lapse into silence, during which Jack’s cigar glimmers from the
twilight corner where Clive’s bed is; whilst Clive wafts his fragrance
out of the window where he sits, and whence he has a view of Lady Anne
Newcome’s windows to the right, over the bridge across the little
rushing river, at the Hotel de Hollande hard by. The lights twinkle in
the booths under the pretty lime avenues. The hum of distant voices is
heard; the gambling-palace is all in a blaze; it is an assembly night,
and from the doors of the conversation rooms, as they open and close,
escape gusts of harmony. Behind on the little hill the darkling woods
lie calm, the edges of the fir-trees cut sharp against the sky, which
is clear with a crescent moon and the lambent lights of the starry
hosts of heaven. Clive does not see pine-robed hills and shining stars,
nor think of pleasure in its palace yonder, nor of pain writhing on his
own bed within a few feet of him, where poor Belsize was groaning. His
eyes are fixed upon a window whence comes the red light of a lamp,
across which shadows float now and again. So every light in every booth
yonder has a scheme of its own: every star above shines by itself; and
each individual heart of ours goes on brightening with its own hopes,
burning with its own desires, and quivering with its own pain.

The reverie is interrupted by the waiter, who announces M. le Vicomte
de Florac, and a third cigar is added to the other two smoky lights.
Belsize is glad to see Florac, whom he has known in a thousand haunts.
“He will do my business for me. He has been out half a dozen times,”
thinks Jack. It would relieve the poor fellow’s boiling blood that some
one would let a little out. He lays his affair before Florac; he
expects a message from Lord Dorking.

“Comment donc?” cries Florac; “il y avait donc quelque chose! Cette
pauvre petite Miss! Vous voulez tuer le père, après avoir délaissé la
fille? Cherchez d’autres témoins, Monsieur. Le Vicomte de Florac ne se
fait pas complice de telles lâchetés.”

“By Heaven,” says Jack, sitting up on the bed, with his eyes glaring,
“I have a great mind, Florac, to wring your infernal little neck, and
to fling you out of the window. Is all the world going to turn against
me? I am half mad as it is. If any man dares to think anything wrong
regarding that little angel, or to fancy that she is not as pure, and
as good, and as gentle, and as innocent, by Heaven, as any angel
there,—if any man thinks I’d be the villain to hurt her, I should just
like to see him,” says Jack. “By the Lord, sir, just bring him to me.
Just tell the waiter to send him upstairs. Hurt her! I hurt her! Oh!
I’m a fool! a fool! a d——d fool! Who’s that?”

“It’s Kew,” says a voice out of the darkness from behind cigar No. 4,
and Clive now, having a party assembled, scrapes a match and lights his
candles.

“I heard your last words, Jack,” Lord Kew says bluntly, “and you never
spoke more truth in your life. Why did you come here? What right had
you to stab that poor little heart over again, and frighten Lady Clara
with your confounded hairy face? You promised me you would never see
her. You gave your word of honour you wouldn’t, when I gave you the
money to go abroad. Hang the money, I don’t mind that; it was on your
promise that you would prowl about her no more. The Dorkings left
London before you came there; they gave you your innings. They have
behaved kindly and fairly enough to that poor girl. How was she to
marry such a bankrupt beggar as you are? What you have done is a shame,
Charley Belsize. I tell you it is unmanly and cowardly.”

“Pst,” says Florac, “numero deux, voilà le mot lâche.”

“Don’t bite your thumb at me,” Kew went on. “I know you could thrash
me, if that’s what you mean by shaking your fists; so could most men. I
tell you again—you have done a bad deed; you have broken your word of
honour, and you knocked down Clara Pulleyn to-day as cruelly as if you
had done it with your hand.”

With this rush upon him, and fiery assault of Kew, Belsize was quite
bewildered. The huge man flung up his great arms, and let them drop at
his side as a gladiator that surrenders, and asks for pity. He sank
down once more on the iron bed.

“I don’t know,” says he, rolling and rolling round, in one of his great
hands, one of the brass knobs of the bed by which he was seated. “I
don’t know, Frank,” says he, “what the world is coming to, or me
either; here is twice in one night I have been called a coward by you,
and by that little what-d’-you-call-’m. I beg your pardon, Florac. I
don’t know whether it is very brave in you to hit a chap when he is
down: hit again, I have no friends. I have acted like a blackguard, I
own that; I did break my promise; you had that safe enough, Frank, my
boy; but I did not think it would hurt her to see me,” says he, with a
dreadful sob in his voice. “By—I would have given ten years of my life
to look at her. I was going mad without her. I tried every place,
everything; went to Ems, to Wiesbaden, to Hombourg, and played like
hell. It used to excite me once, and now I don’t care for it. I won no
end of money,—no end for a poor beggar like me, that is; but I couldn’t
keep away. I couldn’t, and if she had been at the North Pole, by
Heavens I would have followed her.”

“And so just to look at her, just to give your confounded stupid eyes
two minutes’ pleasure, you must bring about all this pain, you great
baby,” cries Kew, who was very soft-hearted, and in truth quite torn
himself by the sight of poor Jack’s agony.

“Get me to see her for five minutes, Kew,” cries the other, griping his
comrade’s hand in his; “but for five minutes.”

“For shame,” cries Lord Kew, shaking away his hand, “be a man, Jack,
and have no more of this puling. It’s not a baby, that must have its
toy, and cries because it can’t get it. Spare the poor girl this pain,
for her own sake, and balk yourself of the pleasure of bullying and
making her unhappy.”

Belsize started up with looks that were by no means pleasant. “There’s
enough of this chaff I have been called names, and blackguarded quite
sufficiently for one sitting. I shall act as I please. I choose to take
my own way, and if any gentleman stops me he has full warning.” And he
fell to tugging his mustachios, which were of a dark tawny hue, and
looked as warlike as he had ever done on any field-day.

“I take the warning!” said Lord Kew. “And if I know the way you are
going, as I think I do, I will do my best to stop you, madman as you
are! You can hardly propose to follow her to her own doorway and pose
yourself before your mistress as the murderer of her father, like
Rodrigue in the French play. If Rooster were here it would be his
business to defend his sister; In his absence I will take the duty on
myself, and I say to you, Charles Belsize, in the presence of these
gentlemen, that any man who iusults this young lady, who persecutes her
with his presence, knowing it can but pain her, who persists in
following her when he has given his word of honour to avoid her, that
such a man is——”

“What, my Lord Kew?” cries Belsize, whose chest began to heave.

“You know what,” answers the other. “You know what a man is who insults
a poor woman, and breaks his word of honour. Consider the word said,
and act upon it as you think fit.”

“I owe you four thousand pounds, Kew,” says Belsize, “and I have got
four thousand on the bills, besides four hundred when I came out of
that place.”

“You insult me the more,” cries Kew, flashing out, “by alluding to the
money. If you will leave this place to-morrow, well and good; if not,
you will please to give me a meeting. Mr. Newcome will you be so kind
as to act as my friend? We are connexions, you know, and this gentleman
chooses to insult a lady who is about to become one of our family.”

“C’est bien, milord. Ma foi! c’est d’agir en vrai gentilhomme,” says
Florac, delighted. “Touchez-là, mon petit Kiou. Tu as du cœur. Godam!
you are a brave! A brave fellow!” and the Viscount reached out his hand
cordially to Lord Kew.

His purpose was evidently pacific. From Kew he turned to the great
guardsman, and taking him by the coat began to apostrophise him. “And
you, mon gros,” says he, “is there no way of calming this hot blood
without a saignée? Have you a penny to the world? Can you hope to carry
off your Chiméne, O Rodrigue, and live by robbing afterwards on the
great way? Suppose you kill ze Fazér, you kill Kiou, you kill Roostere,
your Chiméne will have a pretty moon of honey.”

“What the devil do you mean about your Chiméne and your Rodrigue? Do
you mean, Viscount——?” says Belsize, “Jack Belsize once more, and he
dashed his hand across his eyes. Kew has riled me, and he drove me half
wild. I ain’t much of a Frenchman, but I know enough of what you said,
to say it’s true, by Jove, and that Frank Kew’s a trump. That’s what
you mean. Give us your hand, Frank. God bless you, old boy; don’t be
too hard upon me, you know I’m d——d miserable, that I am. Hullo! What’s
this?” Jack’s pathetic speech was interrupted at this instant, for the
Vicomte de Florac in his enthusiasm rushed into his arms, and jumped up
towards his face and proceeded to kiss Jack. A roar of immense
laughter, as he shook the little Viscount off, cleared the air and
ended this quarrel.

Everybody joined in this chorus, the Frenchman with the rest, who said,
“he loved to laugh meme when he did not know why.” And now came the
moment of the evening, when Clive, according to Lord Kew’s saying,
behaved so well and prevented Barnes from incurring a great danger. In
truth, what Mr. Clive did or said amounted exactly to nothing. What
moments can we not all remember in our lives when it would have been so
much wittier and wiser to say and do nothing?

Florac, a very sober drinker like most of his nation, was blessed with
a very fine appetite, which, as he said, renewed itself thrice a day at
least. He now proposed supper, and poor Jack was for supper too, and
especially more drink, champagne and seltzer-water; “bring champagne
and seltzer-water, there is nothing like it.” Clive could not object to
this entertainment, which was ordered forthwith, and the four young men
sat down to share it.

Whilst Florac was partaking of his favourite écrévisses, giving not
only his palate but his hands, his beard, his mustachios and cheeks a
full enjoyment of the sauce which he found so delicious, he chose to
revert now and again to the occurrences which had just passed, and
which had better perhaps have been forgotten, and gaily rallied Belsize
upon his warlike humour. “If ze petit pretendu was here, what would you
have done wiz him, Jac? You would croquer im, like zis ecrevisse, hein?
You would mache his bones, hein?”

Jack, who had forgotten to put the seltzer-water into his champagne,
writhed at the idea of having Barnes Newcome before him, and swore,
could he but see Barnes, he would take the little villain’s life.

And but for Clive, Jack might actually have beheld his enemy. Young
Clive after the meal went to the window with his eternal cigar, and of
course began to look at That Other window. Here, as he looked, a
carriage had at the moment driven up. He saw two servants descend, then
two gentlemen, and then he heard a well-known voice swearing at the
couriers. To his credit be it said, he checked the exclamation which
was on his lips, and when he came back to the table did not announce to
Kew or his right-hand neighbour Belsize, that his uncle and Barnes had
arrived. Belsize, by this time, had had quite too much wine: when the
viscount went away, poor Jack’s head was nodding; he had been awake all
the night before; sleepless for how many nights previous. He scarce
took any notice of the Frenchman’s departure.

Lord Kew remained. He was for taking Jack to walk, and for reasoning
with him further, and for entering more at large than perhaps he chose
to do before the two others upon this family dispute. Clive took a
moment to whisper to Lord Kew, “My uncle and Barnes are arrived, don’t
let Belsize go out; for goodness’ sake let us get him to bed.”

And lest the poor fellow should take a fancy to visit his mistress by
moonlight, when he was safe in his room Lord Kew softly turned the key
in Mr. Jack’s door.




CHAPTER XXX.
A Retreat


As Clive lay awake revolving the strange incidents of the day, and
speculating upon the tragedy in which he had been suddenly called to
take a certain part, a sure presentiment told him that his own happy
holiday was come to an end, and that the clouds and storm which he had
always somehow foreboded, were about to break and obscure this brief
pleasant period of sunshine. He rose at a very early hour, flung his
windows open, looked out no doubt towards those other windows in the
neighbouring hotel, where he may have fancied he saw a curtain
stirring, drawn by a hand that every hour now he longed more to press.
He turned back into his chamber with a sort of groan, and surveyed some
of the relics of the last night’s little feast, which still remained on
the table. There were the champagne-flasks which poor Jack Belsize had
emptied, the tall seltzer-water bottle, from which the gases had issued
and mingled with the hot air of the previous night’s talk; glasses with
dregs of liquor, ashes of cigars, or their black stumps, strewing the
cloth; the dead men, the burst guns of yesterday’s battle. Early as it
was, his neighbour J. J had been up before him. Clive could hear him
singing as was his wont when the pencil went well, and the colours
arranged themselves to his satisfaction over his peaceful and happy
work.

He pulled his own drawing-table to the window, set out his board and
colour-box, filled a great glass from the seltzer-water bottle, drank
some of the vapid liquor, and plunged his brushes in the rest, with
which he began to paint. The work all went wrong. There was no song for
him over his labour; he dashed brush and board aside after a while,
opened his drawers, pulled out his portmanteaus from under the bed, and
fell to packing mechanically. J. J. heard the noise from the next room,
and came in smiling, with a great painting-brush in his mouth.

“Have the bills in, J. J.,” says Clive. “Leave your cards on your
friends, old boy; say good-bye to that pretty little strawberry-girl
whose picture you have been doing; polish it off to-day, and dry the
little thing’s tears. I read P.P.C. in the stars last night, and my
familiar spirit came to me in a vision, and said, ‘Clive, son of
Thomas, put thy travelling-boots on.’”

Lest any premature moralist should prepare to cry fie against the good,
pure-minded little J. J., I hereby state that his strawberry-girl was a
little village maiden of seven years old, whose sweet little picture a
bishop purchased at the next year’s Exhibition.

“Are you going already?” cries J. J., removing the bit out of his
mouth. “I thought you had arranged parties for a week to come, and that
the princesses and the duchesses had positively forbidden the departure
of your lordship!”

“We have dallied at Capua long enough,” says Clive; “and the legions
have the route for Rome. So wills Hannibal, the son of Hasdrubal.”

“The son of Hasdrubal is quite right,” his companion answered; “the
sooner we march the better. I have always said it; I will get all the
accounts in. Hannibal has been living like a voluptuous Carthaginian
prince. One, two, three champagne-bottles! There will be a deuce of a
bill to pay.”

“Ah! there _will_ be a deuce of a bill to pay,” says Clive, with a
groan whereof J. J. knew the portent; for the young men had the
confidence of youth one in another. Clive was accustomed to pour out
his full heart to any crony who was near him; and indeed had he spoken
never a word, his growing attachment to his cousin was not hard to see.
A hundred times, and with the glowing language and feelings of youth,
with the fire of his twenty years, with the ardour of a painter, he had
spoken of her and described her. Her magnanimous simplicity, her
courage and lofty scorn, her kindness towards her little family, her
form, her glorious colour of rich carnation and dazzling white, her
queenly grace when quiescent and in motion, had constantly formed the
subjects of this young gentleman’s ardent eulogies. As he looked at a
great picture or statue, as the Venus of Milo, calm and deep,
unfathomably beautiful as the sea from which she sprung; as he looked
at the rushing Aurora of the Rospigliosi, or the Assumption of Titian,
more bright and glorious than sunshine, or that divine Madonna and
divine Infant, of Dresden, whose sweet faces must have shone upon
Raphael out of heaven; his heart sang hymns, as it were, before these
gracious altars; and, somewhat as he worshipped these masterpieces of
his art, he admired the beauty of Ethel.

J. J. felt these things exquisitely after his manner, and enjoyed
honest Clive’s mode of celebration and rapturous fioriture of song; but
Ridley’s natural note was much gentler, and he sang his hymns in
plaintive minors. Ethel was all that was bright and beautiful but—but
she was engaged to Lord Kew. The shrewd kind confidant used gently to
hint the sad fact to the impetuous hero of this piece. The impetuous
hero knew this quite well. As he was sitting over his painting-board he
would break forth frequently, after his manner, in which laughter and
sentiment were mingled, and roar out with all the force of his healthy
young lungs—

“But her heart it is another’s, she never—can—be—mine;”


and then hero and confidant would laugh each at his drawing-table. Miss
Ethel went between the two gentlemen by the name of Alice Grey.

Very likely, Night, the Grey Mentor, had given Clive Newcome the
benefit of his sad counsel. Poor Belsize’s agony, and the wretchedness
of the young lady who shared in the desperate passion, may have set our
young man a-thinking; and Lord Kew’s frankness and courage, and honour,
whereof Clive had been a witness during the night, touched his heart
with a generous admiration, and manned him for a trial which he felt
was indeed severe. He thought of the dear old father ploughing the seas
on the way to his duty, and was determined, by Heaven’s help, to do his
own. Only three weeks since, when strolling careless about Bonn he had
lighted upon Ethel and the laughing group of little cousins, he was a
boy as they were, thinking but of the enjoyment of the day and the
sunshine, as careless as those children. And now the thoughts and
passions which had sprung up in a week or two, had given him an
experience such as years do not always furnish; and our friend was to
show, not only that he could feel love in his heart, but that he could
give proof of courage, and self-denial, and honour.

“Do you remember, J. J.,” says he, as boots and breeches went plunging
into the portmanteau, and with immense energy, he pummels down one upon
the other, “do you remember” (a dig into the snowy bosom of a dress
cambric shirt) “my dear old father’s only campaign story of his running
away” (a frightful blow into the ribs of a waistcoat), “running away at
Asseer-Ghur?”

“Asseer-What?” says J. J. wondering.

“The siege of Asseer-Ghur!” says Clive, “fought in the eventful year
1803: Lieutenant Newcome, who has very neat legs, let me tell you,
which also he has imparted to his descendants, had put on a new pair of
leather breeches, for he likes to go handsomely dressed into action.
His horse was shot, the enemy were upon him, and the governor had to
choose between death and retreat. I have heard his brother-officers say
that my dear old father was the bravest man they ever knew, the coolest
hand, sir. What do you think it was Lieutenant Newcome’s duty to do
under these circumstances? To remain alone as he was, his troop having
turned about, and to be cut down by the Mahratta horsemen—to perish or
to run, sir?”

“I know which I should have done,” says Ridley.

“Exactly. Lieutenant Newcome adopted that course. His bran-new leather
breeches were exceedingly tight, and greatly incommoded the rapidity of
his retreating movement, but he ran away, sir, and afterwards begot
your obedient servant. That is the history of the battle of
Asseer-Ghur.”

“And now for the moral,” says J. J., not a little amused.

“J. J., old boy, this is my battle of Asseer-Ghur. I am off. Dip into
the money-bag: pay the people: be generous, J. J., but not too
prodigal. The chambermaid is ugly, yet let her not want for a crown to
console her at our departure. The waiters have been brisk and servile;
reward the slaves for their labours. Forget not the humble boots, so
shall he bless us when we depart. For artists are gentlemen, though
Ethel does not think so. De—No—God bless her, God bless her,” groans
out Clive, cramming his two fists into his eyes. If Ridley admired him
before, he thought none the worse of him now. And if any generous young
fellow in life reads the Fable, which may possibly concern him, let him
take a senior’s counsel and remember that there are perils in our
battle, God help us, from which the bravest had best run away.

Early as the morning yet was, Clive had a visitor, and the door opened
to let in Lord Kew’s honest face. Ridley retreated before it into his
own den; the appearance of earls scared the modest painter, though he
was proud and pleased that his Clive should have their company. Lord
Kew indeed lived in more splendid apartments on the first floor of the
hotel, Clive and his friend occupying a couple of spacious chambers on
the second story. “You are an early bird,” says Kew. “I got up myself
in a panic before daylight almost; Jack was making a deuce of a row in
his room, and fit to blow the door out. I have been coaxing him for
this hour; I wish we had thought of giving him a dose of laudanum last
night; if it finished him, poor old boy, it would do him no harm.” And
then, laughing, he gave Clive an account of his interview with Barnes
on the previous night. “You seem to be packing up to go, too,” says
Lord Kew, with a momentary glance of humour darting from his keen eyes.
“The weather is breaking up here, and if you are going to cross the St.
Gothard, as the Newcomes told me, the sooner the better. It’s bitter
cold over the mountains in October.”

“Very cold,” says Clive, biting his nails.

“Post or Vett.?” asks my lord.

“I bought a carriage at Frankfort,” says Clive, in an offhand manner.

“Hulloh!” cries the other, who was perfectly kind, and entirely frank
and pleasant, and showed no difference in his conversation with men of
any degree, except perhaps that to his inferiors in station he was a
little more polite than to his equals; but who would as soon have
thought of a young artist leaving Baden in a carriage of his own as of
his riding away on a dragon.

“I only gave twenty pounds for the carriage; it’s a little light thing,
we are two, a couple of horses carry us and our traps, you know, and we
can stop where we like. I don’t depend upon my profession,” Clive
added, with a blush. “I made three guineas once, and that is the only
money I ever gained in my life.”

“Of course, my dear fellow, have not I been to your father’s house? At
that pretty ball, and seen no end of fine people there? We are young
swells. I know that very well. We only paint for pleasure.”

“We are artists, and we intend to paint for money, my lord,” says
Clive. “Will your lordship give me an order?”

“My lordship serves me right,” the other said. “I think, Newcome, as
you are going, I think you might do some folks here a good turn, though
the service is rather a disagreeable one. Jack Belsize is not fit to be
left alone. I can’t go away from here just now for reasons of state. Do
be a good fellow and take him with you. Put the Alps between him and
this confounded business, and if I can serve you in any way I shall be
delighted, if you will furnish me with the occasion. Jack does not know
yet that our amiable Barnes is here. I know how fond you are of him. I
have heard the story—glass of claret and all. We all love Barnes. How
that poor Lady Clara can have accepted him the Lord knows. We are
fearfully and wonderfully made, especially women.”

“Good heavens,” Clive broke out, “can it be possible that a young
creature can have been brought to like such a selfish, insolent coxcomb
as that, such a cocktail as Barnes Newcome? You know very well, Lord
Kew, what his life is. There was a poor girl whom he brought out of a
Newcome factory when he was a boy himself, and might have had a heart
one would have thought, whom he ill-treated, whom he deserted, and
flung out of doors without a penny, upon some pretence of her
infidelity towards him; who came and actually sat down on the steps of
Park Lane with a child on each side of her, and not their cries and
their hunger, but the fear of his own shame and a dread of a
police-court, forced him to give her a maintenance. I never see the
fellow but I loathe him, and long to kick him out of window and this
man is to marry a noble young lady because forsooth he is a partner in
a bank, and heir to seven or eight thousand a year. Oh, it is a shame,
it is a shame! It makes me sick when I think of the lot which the poor
thing is to endure.”

“It is not a nice story,” said Lord Kew, rolling a cigarette; “Barnes
is not a nice man. I give you that in. You have not heard it talked
about in the family, have you?”

“Good heavens! you don’t suppose that I would speak to Ethel, to Miss
Newcome, about such a foul subject as that?” cries Clive. “I never
mentioned it to my own father. He would have turned Barnes out of his
doors if he had known it.”

“It was the talk about town, I know,” Kew said dryly. “Everything is
told in those confounded clubs. I told you I give up Barnes. I like him
no more than you do. He may have treated the woman ill, I suspect he
has not an angelical temper: but in this matter he has not been so bad,
so very bad as it would seem. The first step is wrong, of course—those
factory towns—that sort of thing, you know—well, well, the commencement
of the business is a sad one. But he is not the only sinner in London.
He has declared on his honour to me when the matter was talked about,
and he was coming on for election at Bays’s, and was as nearly as any
man I ever knew in my life,—he declared on his word that he only parted
from poor Mrs. Delacy, (Mrs. Delacy, the devil used to call herself)
because he found that she had served him—as such women will serve men.
He offered to send his children to school in Yorkshire—rather a cheap
school—but she would not part with them. She made a scandal in order to
get good terms, and she succeeded. He was anxious to break the
connexion: he owned it had hung like a millstone round his neck and
caused him a great deal of remorse—annoyance you may call it. He was
immensely cut up about it. I remember, when that fellow was hanged for
murdering a woman, Barnes said he did not wonder at his having done it.
Young men make those connexions in their early lives and rue them all
their days after. He was heartily sorry, that we may take for granted.
He wished to lead a proper life. My grandmother managed this business
with the Dorkings. Lady Kew still pulls stroke oar in our boat, you
know, and the old woman will not give up her place. They know
everything, the elders do. He is a clever fellow. He is witty in his
way. When he likes he can make himself quite agreeable to some people.
There has been no sort of force. You don’t suppose young ladies are
confined in dungeons and subject to tortures, do you? But there is a
brood of Pulleyns at Chanticlere, and old Dorking has nothing to give
them. His daughter accepted Barnes of her own free will, he knowing
perfectly well of that previous affair with Jack. The poor devil bursts
into the place yesterday and the girl drops down in a faint. She will
see Belsize this very day if he likes. I took a note from Lady Dorking
to him at five o’clock this morning. If he fancies that there is any
constraint put upon Lady Clara’s actions she will tell him with her own
lips that she has acted of her own free will. She will marry the
husband she has chosen and do her duty by him. You are quite a young un
who boil and froth up with indignation at the idea that a girl hardly
off with an old love should take on with a new——”

“I am not indignant with her,” says Clive, “for breaking with Belsize,
but for marrying Barnes.”

“You hate him, and you know he is your enemy; and, indeed, young
fellow, he does not compliment you in talking about you. A pretty young
scapegrace he has made you out to be, and very likely thinks you to be.
It depends on the colours in which a fellow is painted. Our friends and
our enemies draw us,—and I often think both pictures are like,”
continued the easy world-philosopher. “You hate Barnes, and cannot see
any good in him. He sees none in you. There have been tremendous
shindies in Park Lane _à propos_ of your worship, and of a subject
which I don’t care to mention,” said Lord Kew, with some dignity; “and
what is the upshot of all this malevolence? I like you; I like your
father, I think he is a noble old boy; there are those who represented
him as a sordid schemer. Give Mr. Barnes the benefit of common charity
at any rate; and let others like him, if you do not.

“And as for this romance of love,” the young nobleman went on, kindling
as he spoke, and forgetting the slang and colloquialisms with which we
garnish all our conversation—“this fine picture of Jenny and Jessamy
falling in love at first sight, billing and cooing in an arbour, and
retiring to a cottage afterwards to go on cooing and billing—Psha! what
folly is this! It is good for romances, and for misses to sigh about;
but any man who walks through the world with his eyes open, knows how
senseless is all this rubbish. I don’t say that a young man and woman
are not to meet, and to fall in love that instant, and to marry that
day year, and love each other till they are a hundred; that is the
supreme lot—but that is the lot which the gods only grant to Baucis and
Philemon, and a very, very few besides. As for the rest, they must
compromise; make themselves as comfortable as they can, and take the
good and the bad together. And as for Jenny and Jessamy, by Jove! look
round among your friends, count up the love matches, and see what has
been the end of most of them! Love in a cottage! Who is to pay the
landlord for the cottage? Who is to pay for Jenny’s tea and cream, and
Jessamy’s mutton-chops? If he has cold mutton, he will quarrel with
her. If there is nothing in the cupboard, a pretty meal they make. No,
you cry out against people in our world making money marriages. Why,
kings and queens marry on the same understanding. My butcher has saved
a stockingful of money, and marries his daughter to a young salesman;
Mr. and Mrs. Salesman prosper in life, and get an alderman’s daughter
for their son. My attorney looks out amongst his clients for an
eligible husband for Miss Deeds; sends his son to the bar, into
Parliament, where he cuts a figure and becomes attorney-general, makes
a fortune, has a house in Belgrave Square, and marries Miss Deeds of
the second generation to a peer. Do not accuse us of being more sordid
than our neighbours. We do but as the world does; and a girl in our
society accepts the best _parti_ which offers itself, just as Miss
Chummey, when entreated by two young gentlemen of the order of
costermongers, inclines to the one who rides from market on a moke,
rather than to the gentleman who sells his greens from a handbasket.”

This tirade, which his lordship delivered with considerable spirit, was
intended no doubt to carry a moral for Clive’s private hearing; and
which, to do him justice, the youth was not slow to comprehend. The
point was, “Young man, if certain persons of rank choose to receive you
very kindly, who have but a comely face, good manners, and three or
four hundred pounds a year, do not presume upon their good-nature, or
indulge in certain ambitious hopes which your vanity may induce you to
form. Sail down the stream with the brass-pots, Master Earthen-pot, but
beware of coming too near! You are a nice young man, but there are
prizes which are some too good for you, and are meant for your betters.
And you might as well ask the prime minister for the next vacant garter
as expect to wear on your breast such a star as Ethel Newcome.”

Before Clive made his accustomed visit to his friends at the hotel
opposite, the last great potentiary had arrived who was to take part in
the family Congress of Baden. In place of Ethel’s flushing cheeks and
bright eyes, Clive found, on entering Lady Anne Newcome’s sitting-room,
the parchment-covered features and the well-known hooked beak of the
old Countess of Kew. To support the glances from beneath the bushy
black eyebrows on each side of that promontory was no pleasant matter.
The whole family cowered under Lady Kew’s eyes and nose, and she ruled
by force of them. It was only Ethel whom these awful features did not
utterly subdue and dismay.

Besides Lady Kew, Clive had the pleasure of finding his lordship, her
grandson, Lady Anne and children of various sizes, and Mr. Barnes; not
one of whom was the person whom Clive desired to behold.

The queer glance in Kew’s eye directed towards Clive, who was himself
not by any means deficient in perception, informed him that there had
just been a conversation in which his own name had figured. Having been
abusing Clive extravagantly as he did whenever he mentioned his
cousin’s name, Barnes must needs hang his head when the young fellow
came in. His hand was yet on the chamber-door, and Barnes was calling
his miscreant and scoundrel within; so no wonder Barnes had a hangdog
look. But as for Lady Kew, that veteran diplomatist allowed no signs of
discomfiture, or any other emotion, to display themselves on her
ancient countenance. Her bushy eyebrows were groves of mystery, her
unfathomable eyes were wells of gloom.

She gratified Clive by a momentary loan of two knuckly old fingers,
which he was at liberty to hold or to drop; and then he went on to
enjoy the felicity of shaking hands with Mr. Barnes, who, observing and
enjoying his confusion over Lady Kew’s reception, determined to try
Clive in the same way, and he gave Clive at the same time a
supercilious “How de dah,” which the other would have liked to drive
down his throat. A constant desire to throttle Mr. Barnes—to beat him
on the nose—to send him flying out of window, was a sentiment with
which this singular young man inspired many persons whom he accosted. A
biographer ought to be impartial, yet I own, in a modified degree, to
have partaken of this sentiment. He looked very much younger than his
actual time of life, and was not of commanding stature; but patronised
his equals, nay, let us say, his betters, so insufferably, that a
common wish for his suppression existed amongst many persons in
society.

Clive told me of this little circumstance, and I am sorry to say of his
own subsequent ill behaviour. “We were standing apart from the ladies,”
so Clive narrated, “when Barnes and I had our little passage-of-arms.
He had tried the finger business upon me before, and I had before told
him, either to shake hands or to leave it alone. You know the way in
which the impudent little beggar stands astride, and sticks his little
feet out. I brought my heel well down on his confounded little
varnished toe, and gave it a scrunch which made Mr. Barnes shriek out
one of his loudest oaths.”

“D—— clumsy ——!” screamed out Barnes.

Clive said, in a low voice, “I thought you only swore at women,
Barnes.”

“It is you that say things before women, Clive,” cries his cousin,
looking very furious.

Mr. Clive lost all patience. “In what company, Barnes, would you like
me to say, that I think you are a snob? Will you have it on the Parade?
Come out and I will speak to you.”

“Barnes can’t go out on the Parade,” cries Lord Kew, bursting out
laughing: “there’s another gentleman there wanting him.” And two of the
three young men enjoyed this joke exceedingly. I doubt whether Barnes
Newcome Newcome, Esq., of Newcome, was one of the persons amused.

“What wickedness are you three boys laughing at?” cries Lady Anne,
perfectly innocent and good-natured; “no good, I will be bound. Come
here, Clive.” Our young friend, it must be premised, had no sooner
received the thrust of Lady Kew’s two fingers on entering, than it had
been intimated to him that his interview with that gracious lady was at
an end. For she had instantly called her daughter to her, with whom her
ladyship fell a-whispering; and then it was that Clive retreated from
Lady Kew’s hand, to fall into Barnes’s.

“Clive trod on Barnes’s toe,” cries out cheery Lord Kew, “and has hurt
Barnes’s favourite corn, so that he cannot go out, and is actually
obliged to keep the room. That’s what we were laughing at.”

“Hem!” growled Lady Kew. She knew to what her grandson alluded. Lord
Kew had represented Jack Belsize, and his thundering big stick, in the
most terrific colours to the family council. The joke was too good a
one not to serve twice.

Lady Anne, in her whispered conversation with the old Countess, had
possibly deprecated her mother’s anger towards poor Clive, for when he
came up to the two ladies, the younger took his hand with great
kindness, and said, “My dear Clive, we are very sorry you are going.
You were of the greatest use to us on the journey. I am sure you have
been uncommonly good-natured and obliging, and we shall all miss you
very much.” Her gentleness smote the generous young fellow, and an
emotion of gratitude towards her for being so compassionate to him in
his misery, caused his cheeks to blush and his eyes perhaps to moisten.
“Thank you, dear aunt,” says he, “you have been very good and kind to
me. It is I that shall feel lonely; but—but it is quite time that I
should go to my work.”

“Quite time!” said the severe possessor of the eagle beak. “Baden is a
bad place for young men. They make acquaintances here of which very
little good can come. They frequent the gambling-tables, and live with
the most disreputable French Viscounts. We have heard of your
goings-on, sir. It is a great pity that Colonel Newcome did not take
you with him to India.”

“My dear mamma,” cries Lady Anne, “I am sure Clive has been a very good
boy indeed.” The old lady’s morality put a stop to Clive’s pathetic
mood, and he replied with a great deal of spirit, “Dear Lady Anne, you
have been always very good, and kindness is nothing surprising from
you; but Lady Kew’s advice, which I should not have ventured to ask, is
an unexpected favour; my father knows the extent of the gambling
transactions to which your ladyship was pleased to allude, and
introduced me to the gentleman whose acquaintance you don’t seem to
think eligible.”

“My good young man, I think it is time you were off,” Lady Kew said,
this time with great good-humour; she liked Clive’s spirit, and as long
as he interfered with none of her plans, was quite disposed to be
friendly with him. “Go to Rome, go to Florence, go wherever you like,
and study very hard, and make very good pictures, and come back again,
and we shall all be very glad to see you. You have very great
talents—these sketches are really capital.”

“Is not he very clever, mamma?” said kind Lady Anne, eagerly. Clive
felt the pathetic mood coming on again, and an immense desire to hug
Lady Anne in his arms, and to kiss her. How grateful are we—how touched
a frank and generous heart is for a kind word extended to us in our
pain! The pressure of a tender hand nerves a man for an operation, and
cheers him for the dreadful interview with the surgeon.

That cool old operator, who had taken Mr. Clive’s case in hand, now
produced her shining knife, and executed the first cut with perfect
neatness and precision. “We are come here, as I suppose you know, Mr.
Newcome, upon family matters, and I frankly tell you that I think, for
your own sake, you would be much better away. I wrote my daughter a
great scolding when I heard that you were in this place.”

“But it was by the merest chance, mamma, indeed it was,” cries Lady
Anne.

“Of course, by the merest chance, and by the merest chance I heard of
it too. A little bird came and told me at Kissingen. You have no more
sense, Anne, than a goose. I have told you so a hundred times. Lady
Anne requested you to stay, and I, my good young friend, request you to
go away.”

“I needed no request,” said Clive. “My going, Lady Kew, is my own act.
I was going without requiring any guide to show me to the door.”

“No doubt you were, and my arrival is the signal for Mr. Newcome’s _bon
jour_. I am Bogey, and I frighten everybody away. By the scene which
you witnessed yesterday, my good young friend, and all that painful
_esclandre_ on the promenade, you must see how absurd, and dangerous,
and wicked—yes, wicked it is for parents to allow intimacies to spring
up between young people, which can only lead to disgrace and
unhappiness. Lady Dorking was another good-natured goose. I had not
arrived yesterday ten minutes, when my maid came running in to tell me
of what had occurred on the promenade; and, tired as I was, I went that
instant to Jane Dorking and passed the evening with her, and that poor
little creature to whom Captain Belsize behaved so cruelly. She does
not care a fig for him—not one fig. Her childish inclination is passed
away these two years, whilst Mr. Jack was performing his feats in
prison; and if the wretch flatters himself that it was on his account
she was agitated yesterday, he is perfectly mistaken, and you may tell
him Lady Kew said so. She is subject to fainting fits. Dr. Finck has
been attending her ever since she has been here. She fainted only last
Tuesday at the sight of a rat walking about their lodgings (they have
dreadful lodgings, the Dorkings), and no wonder she was frightened at
the sight of that great coarse tipsy wretch! She is engaged, as you
know, to your connexion, my grandson, Barnes:—in all respects a most
eligible union. The rank of life of the parties suits them to one
another. She is a good young woman, and Barnes has experienced from
persons of another sort such horrors, that he will know the blessing of
domestic virtue. It was high time he should. I say all this in perfect
frankness to you.

“Go back again and play in the garden, little brats” (this to the
innocents who came frisking in from the lawn in front of the windows).
“You have been? And Barnes sent you in here? Go up to Miss Quigley. No,
stop. Go and tell Ethel to come down; bring her down with you. Do you
understand?”

The unconscious infants toddle upstairs to their sister; and Lady Kew
blandly says, “Ethel’s engagement to my grandson, Lord Kew, has long
been settled in our family, though these things are best not talked
about until they are quite determined, you know, my dear Mr. Newcome.
When we saw you and your father in London, we heard that you too-that
you too were engaged to a young lady in your own rank of life, a
Miss—what was her name?—Miss MacPherson, Miss Mackenzie. Your aunt,
Mrs. Hobson Newcome, who I must say is a most blundering silly person,
had set about this story. It appears there is no truth in it. Do not
look surprised that I know about your affairs. I am an old witch, and
know numbers of things.”

And, indeed, how Lady Kew came to know this fact, whether her maid
corresponded with Lady Anne’s maid, what her ladyship’s means of
information were, avowed or occult, this biographer has never been able
to ascertain. Very likely Ethel, who in these last three weeks had been
made aware of that interesting circumstance, had announced it to Lady
Kew in the course of a cross-examination, and there may have been a
battle between the granddaughter and the grandmother, of which the
family chronicler of the Newcomes has had no precise knowledge. That
there were many such I know—skirmishes, sieges, and general
engagements. When we hear the guns, and see the wounded, we know there
has been a fight. Who knows had there been a battle-royal, and was Miss
Newcome having her wounds dressed upstairs?

“You will like to say good-bye to your cousin, I know,” Lady Kew
continued, with imperturbable placidity. “Ethel, my dear, here is Mr.
Clive Newcome, who has come to bid us all good-bye.” The little girls
came trotting down at this moment, each holding a skirt of their elder
sister. She looked rather pale, but her expression was haughty—almost
fierce.

Clive rose up as she entered, from the sofa by the old Countess’s side,
which place she had pointed him to take during the amputation. He rose
up and put his hair back off his face, and said very calmly, “Yes, I’m
come to say good-bye. My holidays are over, and Ridley and I are off
for Rome; good-bye, and God bless you, Ethel.”

She gave him her hand and said, “Good-bye, Clive,” but her hand did not
return his pressure, and dropped to her side, when he let it go.

Hearing the words good-bye, little Alice burst into a howl, and little
Maude, who was an impetuous little thing, stamped her little red shoes
and said, “It san’t be good-bye. Tlive san’t go.” Alice, roaring, clung
hold of Clive’s trousers. He took them up gaily, each on an arm, as he
had done a hundred times, and tossed the children on to his shoulders,
where they used to like to pull his yellow mustachios. He kissed the
little hands and faces, and a moment after was gone.

“Qu’as-tu?” says M. de Florac, meeting him going over the bridge to his
own hotel. “Qu’as-tu, mon petit Claive? Est-ce qu’on vient de
t’arracher une dent?”

“C’est ça,” says Clive, and walked into the Hôtel de France. “Hulloh!
J. J.! Ridley!” he sang out. “Order the trap out and let’s be off.” “I
thought we were not to march till to-morrow,” says J. J., divining
perhaps that some catastrophe had occurred. Indeed, Mr. Clive was going
a day sooner than he had intended. He woke at Fribourg the next
morning. It was the grand old cathedral he looked at, not Baden of the
pine-clad hills, of the pretty walks and the lime-tree avenues. Not
Baden, the prettiest booth of all Vanity Fair. The crowds and the
music, the gambling-tables and the cadaverous croupiers and chinking
gold, were far out of sight and hearing. There was one window in the
Hôtel de Hollande that he thought of, how a fair arm used to open it in
the early morning, how the muslin curtain in the morning air swayed to
and fro. He would have given how much to see it once more! Walking
about at Fribourg in the night, away from his companions, he had
thought of ordering horses, galloping back to Baden, and once again
under that window, calling Ethel, Ethel. But he came back to his room
and the quiet J. J., and to poor Jack Belsize, who had had his tooth
taken out too.

We had almost forgotten Jack, who took a back seat in Clive’s carriage,
as befits a secondary personage in this history, and Clive in truth had
almost forgotten him too. But Jack having his own cares and business,
and having rammed his own carpet-bag, brought it down without a word,
and Clive found him environed in smoke when he came down to take his
place in the little britzska. I wonder whether the window at the Hôtel
de Hollande saw him go? There are some curtains behind which no
historian, however prying, is allowed to peep.

“Tiens, le petit part,” says Florac of the cigar, who was always
sauntering. “Yes, we go,” says Clive. “There is a fourth place,
Viscount; will you come too?”

“I would love it well,” replies Florac, “but I am here in faction. My
cousin and seigneur M. le Duc d’Ivry is coming all the way from
Bagneres de Bigorre. He says he counts on me:—affaires mon cher,
affaires d’etat.”

“How pleased the duchess will be! Easy with that bag!” shouts Clive.
“How pleased the princess will be!” In truth he hardly knew what he was
saying.

“Vous croyez; vous croyez,” says M. de Florac. “As you have a fourth
place, I know who had best take it.”

“And who is that?” asked the young traveller.

Lord Kew and Barnes, Esq., of Newcome, came out of the Hotel de
Hollande at this moment. Barnes slunk back, seeing Jack Belsize’s hairy
face. Kew ran over the bridge. “Good-bye, Clive. Good-bye, Jack.”
“Good-bye, Kew.” It was a great handshake. Away goes the postillion
blowing his horn, and young Hannibal has left Capua behind him.




CHAPTER XXXI.
Madame la Duchesse


In one of Clive Newcome’s letters from Baden, the young man described
to me, with considerable humour and numerous illustrations as his wont
was, a great lady to whom he was presented at that watering-place by
his friend Lord Kew. Lord Kew had travelled in the East with Monsieur
le Duc and Madame la Duchesse d’Ivry—the prince being an old friend of
his lordship’s family. He is the “Q” of Madame d’Ivry’s book of
travels, Footprints of the Gazelles, by a daughter of the Crusaders, in
which she prays so fervently for Lord Kew’s conversion. He is the “Q”
who rescued the princess from the Arabs, and performed many a feat
which lives in her glowing pages. He persists in saying that he never
rescued Madame la Princesse from any Arabs at all, except from one
beggar who was bawling out for bucksheesh, and whom Kew drove away with
a stick. They made pilgrimages to all the holy places, and a piteous
sight it was, said Lord Kew, to see the old prince in the Jerusalem
processions at Easter pacing with bare feet and a candle. Here Lord Kew
separated from the prince’s party. His name does not occur in the last
part of the Footprints; which, in truth, are filled full of strange
rhapsodies, adventures which nobody was but the princess, and mystic
disquisitions. She hesitates at nothing, like other poets of her
nation: not profoundly learned, she invents where she has not acquired:
mingles together religion and the opera; and performs Parisian
_pas-de-ballet_ before the gates of monasteries and the cells of
anchorites. She describes, as if she had herself witnessed the
catastrophe, the passage of the Red Sea: and, as if there were no doubt
of the transaction, an unhappy love-affair between Pharaoh’s eldest son
and Moses’s daughter. At Cairo, _à propos_ of Joseph’s granaries, she
enters into a furious tirade against Putiphar, whom she paints as an
old savage, suspicious and a tyrant. They generally have a copy of the
Footprints of the Gazelles at the Circulating Library at Baden, as
Madame d’Ivry constantly visits that watering-place. M. le Duc was not
pleased with the book, which was published entirely without his
concurrence, and which he described as one of the ten thousand follies
of Madame la Duchesse.

This nobleman was five-and-forty years older than his duchess. France
is the country where that sweet Christian institution of _mariages de
convenance_ (which so many folks of the family about which this story
treats are engaged in arranging) is most in vogue. There the newspapers
daily announce that M. de Foy has a bureau de confiance, where families
may arrange marriages for their sons and daughters in perfect comfort
and security. It is but a question of money on one side and the other.
Mademoiselle has so many francs of dot; Monsieur has such and such
_rentes_ or lands in possession or reversion, an _étude d’avoué_, a
shop with a certain _clientèle_ bringing him such and such an income,
which may be doubled by the judicious addition of so much capital, and
the pretty little matrimonial arrangement is concluded (the agent
touching his percentage), or broken off, and nobody unhappy, and the
world none the wiser. The consequences of the system I do not pretend
personally to know; but if the light literature of a country is a
reflex of its manners, and French novels are a picture of French life,
a pretty society must that be into the midst of which the London reader
may walk in twelve hours from this time of perusal, and from which only
twenty miles of sea separate us.

When the old Duke d’Ivry, of the ancient ancient nobility of France, an
emigrant with Artois, a warrior with Conde, an exile during the reign
of the Corsican usurper, a grand prince, a great nobleman afterwards,
though shorn of nineteen-twentieths of his wealth by the
Revolution,—when the Duke d’Ivry lost his two sons, and his son’s son
likewise died, as if fate had determined to end the direct line of that
noble house, which had furnished queens to Europe, and renowned chiefs
to the Crusaders—being of an intrepid spirit, the Duke was ill disposed
to yield to his redoubtable energy, in spite of the cruel blows which
the latter had inflicted upon him, and when he was more than sixty
years of age, three months before the July Revolution broke out, a
young lady of a sufficient nobility, a virgin of sixteen, was brought
out of the convent of the Sacré Cœur at Paris, and married with immense
splendour and ceremony to this princely widower. The most august names
signed the book of the civil marriage. Madame la Dauphine and Madame la
Duchesse de Berri complimented the young bride with royal favours. Her
portrait by Dubufe was in the Exhibition next year, a charming young
duchess indeed, with black eyes, and black ringlets, pearls on her
neck, and diamonds in her hair, as beautiful as a princess of a fairy
tale. M. d’Ivry, whose early life may have been rather oragious, was
yet a gentleman perfectly well conserved. Resolute against fate his
enemy (one would fancy fate was of an aristocratic turn, and took
especial delight in combats with princely houses; the Atridae, the
Borbonidae, the Ivrys,—the Browns and Joneses being of no account), the
prince seemed to be determined not only to secure a progeny, but to
defy age. At sixty he was still young, or seemed to be so. His hair was
as black as the princess’s own, his teeth as white. If you saw him on
the Boulevard de Gand, sunning among the youthful exquisites there, or
riding _au Bois_, with a grace worthy of old Franconi himself, you
would take him for one of the young men, of whom indeed up to his
marriage he retained a number of the graceful follies and amusements,
though his manners had a dignity acquired in old days of Versailles and
the Trianon, which the moderns cannot hope to imitate. He was as
assiduous behind the scenes of the opera as any journalist, or any
young dandy of twenty years. He “ranged himself,” as the French phrase
is, shortly before his marriage, just like any other young bachelor:
took leave of Phryne and Aspasie in the coulisses, and proposed to
devote himself henceforth to his charming young wife.

The affreux catastrophe of July arrived. The ancient Bourbons were once
more on the road to exile (save one wily old remnant of the race, who
rode grinning over the barricades, and distributing poignees de main to
the stout fists that had pummelled his family out of France). M. le Duc
d’Ivry, who lost his place at court, his appointments which helped his
income very much, and his peerage would no more acknowledge the usurper
of Neuilly, than him of Elba. The ex-peer retired to his _terres_. He
barricaded his house in Paris against all supporters of the citizen
king; his nearest kinsman, M. de Florac, among the rest, who for his
part cheerfully took his oath of fidelity, and his seat in Louis
Philippe’s house of peers, having indeed been accustomed to swear to
all dynasties for some years past.

In due time Madame la Duchesse d’Ivry gave birth to a child, a
daughter, whom her noble father received with but small pleasure. What
the Duke desired, was an heir to his name, a Prince of Moncontour, to
fill the place of the sons and grandsons gone before him, to join their
ancestors in the tomb. No more children, however, blessed the old
Duke’s union. Madame d’Ivry went the round of all the watering-places:
pilgrimages were tried: vows and gifts to all saints supposed to be
favourable to the d’Ivry family, or to families in general:—but the
saints turned a deaf ear; they were inexorable since the true religion
and the elder Bourbons were banished from France.

Living by themselves in their ancient castles, or their dreary mansion
of the Faubourg St. Germain, I suppose the Duke and Duchess grew tried
of one another, as persons who enter into a _mariage de convenance_
sometimes, nay, as those who light a flaming love-match, and run away
with one another, will be found to do. A lady of one-and-twenty, and a
gentleman of sixty-six, alone in a great castle, have not unfrequently
a third guest at their table, who comes without a card, and whom they
cannot shut out, though they keep their doors closed ever so. His name
is Ennui, and many a long hour and weary night must such folks pass in
the unbidden society of this Old Man of the Sea; this daily guest at
the board; this watchful attendant at the fireside; this assiduous
companion who _will_ walk out with you; this sleepless restless
bedfellow.

At first, M. d’Ivry, that well-conserved nobleman who never would allow
that he was not young, exhibited no sign of doubt regarding his own
youth except an extreme jealousy and avoidance of all other young
fellows. Very likely Madame la Duchesse may have thought men in general
dyed their hair, wore stays, and had the rheumatism. Coming out of the
convent of the Sacré Cœur, how was the innocent young lady to know
better? You see, in these _mariages de convenance_, though a coronet
may be convenient to a beautiful young creature, and a beautiful young
creature may be convenient to an old gentleman, there are articles
which the marriage-monger cannot make to convene at all: tempers over
which M. de Foy and his like have no control; and tastes which cannot
be put into the marriage settlements. So this couple were unhappy, and
the Duke and Duchess quarrelled with one another like the most vulgar
pair who ever fought across a table.

In this unhappy state of home affairs, madame took to literature,
monsieur to politics. She discovered that she was a great unappreciated
soul, and when a woman finds that treasure in her bosom of course she
sets her own price on the article. Did you ever see the first poems of
Madame la Duchesse d’Ivry, Les Cris de l’Ame? She used to read them to
her very intimate friends, in white, with her hair a good deal down her
back. They had some success. Dubufe having painted her as a Duchess,
Scheffer depicted her as a Muse. That was in the third year of her
marriage, when she rebelled against the Duke her husband, insisted on
opening her saloons to art and literature, and, a fervent devotee
still, proposed to unite genius and religion. Poets had interviews with
her. Musicians came and twanged guitars to her.

Her husband, entering her room, would fall over the sabre and spurs of
Count Almaviva from the boulevard, or Don Basilio with his great
sombrero and shoe-buckles. The old gentleman was breathless and
bewildered in following her through all her vagaries. He was of old
France, she of new. What did he know of the Ecole Romantique, and these
_jeunes gens_ with their Marie Tudors and Tours de Nesle, and
sanguineous histories of queens who sewed their lovers into sacks,
emperors who had interviews with robber captains in Charlemagne’s tomb,
Buridans and Hernanis, and stuff? Monsieur le Vicomte de Chateaubriand
was a man of genius as a writer, certainly immortal; and M. de
Lamartine was a young man extremely _bien pensant_, but, _ma foi_, give
him _Crébillon fils_, or a bonne farce of M. Vade to make laugh; for
the great sentiments, for the beautiful style, give him M. de Lormian
(although Bonapartist) or the Abbé de Lille. And for the new school!
bah! these little Dumass, and Hugos, and Mussets, what is all that? “M.
de Lormian shall be immortal, monsieur,” he would say, “when all these
_freluquets_ are forgotten.” After his marriage he frequented the
coulisses of the opera no more; but he was a pretty constant attendant
at the Théatre Français, where you might hear him snoring over the
_chefs-d’œuvres_ of French tragedy.

For some little time after 1830, the Duchesse was as great a Carlist as
her husband could wish; and they conspired together very comfortably at
first. Of an adventurous turn, eager for excitement of all kinds,
nothing would have better pleased the Duchesse than to follow MADAME in
her adventurous courses in La Vendee, disguised as a boy above all. She
was persuaded to stay at home, however, and aid the good cause at
Paris; while Monsieur le Duc went off to Brittany to offer his old
sword to the mother of his king. But MADAME was discovered up the
chimney at Rennes, and all sorts of things were discovered afterwards.
The world said that our silly little Duchess of Paris was partly the
cause of the discovery. Spies were put upon her, and to some people she
would tell anything. M. le Duc, on paying his annual visit to august
exiles at Goritz, was very badly received: Madame la Dauphine gave him
a sermon. He had an awful quarrel with Madame la Duchesse on returning
to Paris. He provoked Monsieur le Comte Tiercelin, le beau Tiercelin,
an officer of ordonnance of the Duke of Orleans, into a duel, _à
propos_ of a cup of coffee in a salon; he actually wounded the beau
Tiercelin—he sixty-five years of age! his nephew, M. de Florac, was
loud in praise of his kinsman’s bravery.

That pretty figure and complexion which still appear so captivating in
M. Dubufe’s portrait of Madame la Duchesse d’Ivry, have long existed—it
must be owned only in paint. “_Je la préfère à l’huile_,” the Vicomte
de Florac said of his cousin. “She should get her blushes from Monsieur
Dubufe—those of her present furnishers are not near so natural.”
Sometimes the Duchess appeared with these postiches roses, sometimes of
a mortal paleness. Sometimes she looked plump, on other occasions
wofully thin. “When she goes into the world,” said the same chronicler,
“ma cousine surrounds herself with _jupons_—c’est pour défendre sa
vertu: when she is in a devotional mood, she gives up rouge, roast
meat, and crinoline, and _fait maigre absolument_.” To spite the Duke
her husband, she took up with the Vicomte de Florac, and to please
herself she cast him away. She took his brother, the Abbé de Florac,
for a director, and presently parted from him. “Mon frère, ce saint
homme ne parle jamais de Madame la Duchesse, maintenant,” said the
Vicomte. “She must have confessed to him des choses affreuses—oh,
oui!—affreuses ma parole d’honneur!”

The Duke d’Ivry being archiroyaliste, Madame la Duchesse must make
herself ultra-Philippiste. “Oh, oui! tout ce qu’il y a de plus Madame
Adélaide au monde!” cried Florac. “She raffoles of M. le Régent. She
used to keep a fast of the day of the supplice of Philippe Egalité,
Saint and Martyr. I say used, for to make to enrage her husband, and to
recall the Abbé my brother, did she not advise herself to consult M. le
Pasteur Grigou, and to attend the preach at his Temple? When this sheep
had brought her shepherd back, she dismissed the Pasteur Grigou. Then
she tired of M. l’Abbé again, and my brother is come out from her,
shaking his good head. Ah! she must have put things into it which
astonished the good Abbé! You know he has since taken the Dominican
robe? My word of honour! I believe it was terror of her that drove him
into a convent. You shall see him at Rome, Clive. Give him news of his
elder, and tell him this gross prodigal is repenting amongst the swine.
My word of honour! I desire but the death of Madame la Vicomtesse de
Florac, to marry and range myself!

“After being Royalist, Philippist, Catholic, Huguenot, Madame d’Ivry
must take to Pantheism, to bearded philosophers who believe in nothing,
not even in clean linen, eclecticism, republicanism, what know I? All
her changes have been chronicled by books of her composition. Les
Démons, poem Catholic; Charles IX. is the hero and the demons are shot
for the most part at the catastrophe of St. Bartholomew. My good
mother, all good Catholic as she is, was startled by the boldness of
this doctrine. Then there came Une Dragonnade, par Mme. la Duchesse
d’Ivry, which is all on your side. That was of the time of the Pastor
Grigou, that one. The last was Les Dieux déchus, poème en 20 chants,
par Mme. la D—— d’I. Guard yourself well from this Muse! If she takes a
fancy to you she will never leave you alone. If you see her often, she
will fancy you are in love with her, and tell her husband. She always
tells my uncle—afterwards—after she has quarrelled with you and grown
tired of you! Eh, being in London once, she had the idea to make
herself a _Quakre;_ wore the costume, consulted a minister of that
culte, and quarrelled with him as of rule. It appears the Quakers do
not beat themselves, otherwise my poor uncle must have paid of his
person.

“The turn of the philosophers then came, the chemists, the natural
historians, what know I? She made a laboratory in her hotel, and
rehearsed poisons like Madame de Brinvilliers—she spent hours in the
Jardin des Plantes. Since she has grown _affreusement maigre_ and wears
mounting robes, she has taken more than ever to the idea that she
resembles Mary Queen of Scots. She wears a little frill and a little
cap. Every man she loves, she says, has come to misfortune. She calls
her lodgings Lochleven. Eh! I pity the landlord of Lochleven! She calls
ce gros Blackball, vous savez, that pillar of estaminets, that prince
of mauvais-ton, her Bothwell; little Mijaud, the poor little pianist,
she named her Rizzio; young Lord Greenhorn who was here with governor,
a Monsieur of Oxfort, she christened her Darnley, and the Minister
Anglican, her John Knox! The poor man was quite enchanted! Beware of
this haggard siren, my little Clive!—mistrust her dangerous song! Her
cave is _jonchée_ with the bones of her victims. Be you not one!”

Far from causing Clive to avoid Madame la Duchesse, these cautions very
likely would have made him only the more eager to make her
acquaintance, but that a much nobler attraction drew him elsewhere. At
first, being introduced to Madame d’Ivry’s salon, he was pleased and
flattered, and behaved himself there merrily and agreeably enough. He
had not studied Horace Vernet for nothing; he drew a fine picture of
Kew rescuing her from the Arabs, with a plenty of sabres, pistols,
burnouses, and dromedaries. He made a pretty sketch of her little girl
Antoinette, and a wonderful likeness of Miss O’Grady, the little girl’s
governess, the mother’s dame de compagnie;—Miss O’Grady, with the
richest Milesian brogue, who had been engaged to give Antoinette the
pure English accent. But the French lady’s great eyes and painted
smiles would not bear comparison with Ethel’s natural brightness and
beauty. Clive, who had been appointed painter in ordinary to the Queen
of Scots, neglected his business, and went over to the English faction;
so did one or two more of the Princess’s followers, leaving her Majesty
by no means well pleased at their desertion.

There had been many quarrels between M. d’Ivry and his next-of-kin.
Political differences, private differences—a long story. The Duke, who
had been wild himself, could not pardon the Vicomte de Florac for being
wild. Efforts at reconciliation had been made which ended
unsuccessfully. The Vicomte de Florac had been allowed for a brief
space to be intimate with the chief of his family, and then had been
dismissed for being too intimate. Right or wrong, the Duke was jealous
of all young men who approached the Duchesse. “He is suspicious,”
Madame de Florac indignantly said, “because he remembers: and he thinks
other men are like himself.” The Vicomte discreetly said, “My cousin
has paid me the compliment to be jealous of me,” and acquiesced in his
banishment with a shrug.

During the emigration the old Lord Kew had been very kind to exiles, M.
d’Ivry amongst the number; and that nobleman was anxious to return to
all Lord Kew’s family when they came to France the hospitality which he
had received himself in England. He still remembered or professed to
remember Lady Kew’s beauty. How many women are there, awful of aspect,
at present, of whom the same pleasing legend is not narrated! It must
be true, for do not they themselves confess it? I know of few things
more remarkable or suggestive of philosophic contemplation than those
physical changes.

When the old Duke and the old Countess met together and talked
confidentially, their conversation bloomed into a jargon wonderful to
hear. Old scandals woke up, old naughtinesses rose out of their graves,
and danced, and smirked, and gibbered again, like those wicked nuns
whom Bertram and Robert le Diable evoke from their sepulchres whilst
the bassoon performs a diabolical incantation. The Brighton Pavilion
was tenanted; Ranelagh and the Pantheon swarmed with dancers and masks;
Perdita was found again, and walked a minuet with the Prince of Wales.
Mrs. Clarke and the Duke of York danced together—a pretty dance. The
old Duke wore a _jabot_ and _ailes-de-pigeon_, the old Countess a hoop,
and a cushion on her head. If haply the young folks came in, the elders
modified their recollections, and Lady Kew brought honest old King
George and good old ugly Queen Charlotte to the rescue. Her ladyship
was sister of the Marquis of Steyne: and in some respects resembled
that lamented nobleman. Their family had relations in France (Lady Kew
had always a pied-a-terre at Paris, a bitter little scandal-shop, where
_les bien-pensants_ assembled and retailed the most awful stories
against the reigning dynasty). It was she who handed over le petit
Kiou, when quite a boy, to Monsieur and Madame d’Ivry, to be _lancé_
into Parisian society. He was treated as a son of the family by the
Duke, one of whose many Christian names, his lordship, Francis George
Xavier, Earl of Kew and Viscount Walham, bears. If Lady Kew hated any
one (and she could hate very considerably) she hated her
daughter-in-law, Walham’s widow, and the Methodists who surrounded her.
Kew remain among a pack of psalm-singing old women and parsons with his
mother! Fi donc! Frank was Lady Kew’s boy; she would form him, marry
him, leave him her money if he married to her liking, and show him
life. And so she showed it to him.

Have you taken your children to the National Gallery in London, and
shown them the “Marriage a la Mode?” Was the artist exceeding the
privilege of his calling in painting the catastrophe in which those
guilty people all suffer? If this fable were not true, if many and many
of your young men of pleasure had not acted it, and rued the moral, I
would tear the page. You know that in our Nursery Tales there is
commonly a good fairy to counsel, and a bad one to mislead the young
prince. You perhaps feel that in your own life there is a Good
Principle imploring you to come into its kind bosom, and a Bad Passion
which tempts you into its arms. Be of easy minds good-natured people!
Let us disdain surprises and _coups-de-théâtre_ for once; and tell
those good souls who are interested about him, that there is a Good
Spirit coming to the rescue of our young Lord Kew.

Surrounded by her court and royal attendants, La Reine Marie used
graciously to attend the play-table, where luck occasionally declared
itself for and against her Majesty. Her appearance used to create not a
little excitement in the Saloon of Roulette, the game which she
patronised, it being more “fertile of emotions” than the slower
trente-et-quarante. She dreamed of numbers, had favourite incantations
by which to conjure them: noted the figures made by peels of peaches
and so forth, the numbers of houses, on hackney-coaches—was
superstitious _comme toutes les rimes poétiques_. She commonly brought
a beautiful agate bonbonniere full of gold pieces, when she played. It
was wonderful to see her grimaces: to watch her behaviour: her appeals
to heaven, her delight and despair. Madame la Baronne de la
Cruchecassée played on one side of her, Madame la Comtesse de
Schlangenbad on the other. When she had lost all her money her Majesty
would condescend to borrow—not from those ladies:—knowing the royal
peculiarity, they never had any money; they always lost; they swiftly
pocketed their winnings and never left a mass on the table, or quitted
it, as courtiers will, when they saw luck was going against their
sovereign. The officers of her household were Count Punter, a
Hanoverian, the Cavaliere Spada, Captain Blackball of a mysterious
English regiment, which might be any one of the hundred and twenty in
the Army List, and other noblemen and gentlemen, Greeks, Russians, and
Spaniards. Mr. and Mrs. Jones (of England), who had made the princess’s
acquaintance at Bagneres (where her lord still remained in the gout)
and perseveringly followed her all the way to Baden, were dazzled by
the splendour of the company in which they found themselves. Miss Jones
wrote such letters to her dearest friend Miss Thompson, Cambridge
Square, London, as caused that young person to crever with envy. Bob
Jones, who had grown a pair of mustachios since he left home, began to
think slightingly of poor little Fanny Thompson, now he had got into
“the best Continental society.” Might not he quarter a countess’s coat
on his brougham along with the Jones arms, or, more slap-up still, have
the two shields painted on the panels with the coronet over? “Do you
know the princess calls herself the Queen of Scots, and she calls me
Julian Avenel?” says Jones delighted, to Clive, who wrote me about the
transmogrification of our schoolfellow, an attorney’s son, whom I
recollected a snivelling little boy at Grey Friars. “I say, Newcome,
the princess is going to establish an order,” cried Bob in ecstasy.
Every one of her aides-de-camp had a bunch of orders at his button,
excepting, of course, poor Jones.

Like all persons who beheld her, when Miss Newcome and her party made
their appearance at Baden, Monsieur de Florac was enraptured with her
beauty. “I speak of it constantly before the Duchesse. I know it
pleases her,” so the Vicomte said. “You should have seen her looks when
your friend M. Jones praised Miss Newcome! She ground her teeth with
fury. Tiens ce petit sournois de Kiou! He always spoke of her as a mere
sac d’argent that he was about to marry—an ingot of the cité—une fille
de Lord Maire. Have all English bankers such pearls of daughters? If
the Vicomtesse de Florac had but quitted the earth, dont elle fait
l’ornement—I would present myself to the charmante meess and ride a
steeple-chase with Kiou!” That he should win it the Viscount never
doubted.

When Lady Anne Newcome first appeared in the ballroom at Baden, Madame
la Duchesse d’Ivry begged the Earl of Kew (_notre filleul_, she called
him) to present her to his aunt miladi and her charming daughter. “My
_filleul_ had not prepared me for so much grace,” she said, turning a
look towards Lord Kew, which caused his lordship some embarrassment.
Her kindness and graciousness were extreme. Her caresses and
compliments never ceased all the evening. She told the mother and the
daughter too that she had never seen any one so lovely as Ethel.
Whenever she saw Lady Anne’s children in the walks she ran to them (so
that Captain Blackball and Count Punter, A.D.C., were amazed at her
tenderness), she _étouffé’d_ them with kisses. What lilies and roses!
What lovely little creatures! What companions for her own Antoinette.
“This is your governess, Miss Quigli; mademoiselle, you must let me
present you to Miss O’Gredi, your compatriot, and I hope your children
will be always together.” The Irish Protestant governess scowled at the
Irish Catholic—there was a Boyne Water between them.

Little Antoinette; a lonely little girl, was glad to find any
companions. “Mamma kisses me on the promenade,” she told them in her
artless way. “She never kisses me at home!” One day when Lord Kew with
Florac and Clive were playing with the children, Antoinette said,
“Pourquoi ne venez-vous plus chez nous, M. de Kew? And why does mamma
say you are a _lâche?_ She said so yesterday to ces messieurs. And why
does mamma say thou art only a vaurien, mon cousin? Thou art always
very good for me. I love thee better than all those messieurs. Ma tante
Florac a été bonne pour moi à Paris aussi—Ah! qu’elle a été bonne!”

“C’est que les anges aiment bien les petits chérubins, and my mother is
an angel, seest thou,” cries Florac, kissing her.

“Thy mother is not dead,” said little Antoinette, “then why dost thou
cry, my cousin?” And the three spectators were touched by this little
scene and speech.

Lady Anne Newcome received the caresses and compliments of Madame la
Duchesse with marked coldness on the part of one commonly so very
good-natured. Ethel’s instinct told her that there was something wrong
in this woman, and she shrank from her with haughty reserve. The girl’s
conduct was not likely to please the French lady, but she never relaxed
in her smiles and her compliments, her caresses, and her professions of
admiration. She was present when Clara Pulleyn fell; and, prodigal of
_câlineries_ and consolation, and shawls and scent-bottles, to the
unhappy young lady, she would accompany her home. She inquired
perpetually after the health of _cette pauvre petite Miss Clara_. Oh,
how she railed against _ces Anglaises_ and their prudery! Can you fancy
her and her circle, the tea-table set in the twilight that evening, the
court assembled, Madame de la Cruchecassée and Madame de Schlangenbad;
and their whiskered humble servants, Baron Punter and Count Spada, and
Marquis Iago, and Prince Iachimo, and worthy Captain Blackball? Can you
fancy a moonlight conclave, and ghouls feasting on the fresh corpse of
a reputation:—the gibes and sarcasms, the laughing and the gnashing of
teeth? How they tear the dainty limbs, and relish the tender morsels!

“The air of this place is not good for you, believe me, my little Kew;
it is dangerous. Have pressing affairs in England; let your château
burn down; or your intendant run away, and pursue him. Partez, mon
petit Kiou; partez, or evil will come of it.” Such was the advice which
a friend of Lord Kew gave the young nobleman.




CHAPTER XXXII.
Barnes’s Courtship


Ethel had made various attempts to become intimate with her future
sister-in-law; had walked, and ridden, and talked with Lady Clara
before Barnes’s arrival. She had come away not very much impressed with
respect for Lady Clara’s mental powers; indeed, we have said that Miss
Ethel was rather more prone to attack women than to admire them, and
was a little hard upon the fashionable young persons of her
acquaintance and sex. In after life, care and thought subdued her
pride, and she learned to look at society more good-naturedly; but at
this time, and for some years after, she was impatient of commonplace
people, and did not choose to conceal her scorn. Lady Clara was very
much afraid of her. Those timid little thoughts, which would come out,
and frisk and gambol with pretty graceful antics, and advance
confidingly at the sound of Jack Belsize’s jolly voice, and nibble
crumbs out of his hand, shrank away before Ethel, severe nymph with the
bright eyes, and hid themselves under the thickets and in the shade.
Who has not overheard a simple couple of girls, or of lovers possibly,
pouring out their little hearts, laughing at their own little jokes,
prattling and prattling away unceasingly, until mamma appears with her
awful didactic countenance, or the governess with her dry moralities,
and the colloquy straightway ceases, the laughter stops, the chirp of
the harmless little birds is hushed. Lady Clara being of a timid
nature, stood in as much awe of Ethel as of her father and mother;
whereas her next sister, a brisk young creature of seventeen, who was
of the order of romps or tomboys, was by no means afraid of Miss
Newcome, and indeed a much greater favourite with her than her placid
elder sister.

Young ladies may have been crossed in love, and have had their
sufferings, their frantic moments of grief and tears, their wakeful
nights, and so forth; but it is only in very sentimental novels that
people occupy themselves perpetually with that passion: and, I believe,
what are called broken hearts are very rare articles indeed. Tom is
jilted—is for a while in a dreadful state—bores all his male
acquaintance with his groans and his frenzy—rallies from the
complaint—eats his dinner very kindly—takes an interest in the next
turf event, and is found at Newmarket, as usual, bawling out the odds
which he will give or take. Miss has her paroxysm and recovery—Madame
Crinoline’s new importations from Paris interest the young creature—she
deigns to consider whether pink or blue will become her most—she
conspires with her maid to make the spring morning dresses answer for
the autumn—she resumes her books, piano, and music (giving up certain
songs perhaps that she used to sing)—she waltzes with the Captain—gets
a colour—waltzes longer, better, and ten times quicker than Lucy, who
is dancing with the Major—replies in an animated manner to the
Captain’s delightful remarks—takes a little supper—and looks quite
kindly at him before she pulls up the carriage windows.

Clive may not like his cousin Barnes Newcome, and many other men share
in that antipathy, but all ladies do not. It is a fact that Barnes,
when he likes, can make himself a very pleasant fellow. He is
dreadfully satirical, that is certain; but many persons are amused by
those dreadful satirical young men: and to hear fun made of our
neighbours, even of some of our friends, does not make us very angry.
Barnes is one of the very best waltzers in all society, that is the
truth; whereas it must be confessed Some One Else was very heavy and
slow, his great foot always crushing you, and he always begging your
pardon. Barnes whirls a partner round a room ages after she is ready to
faint. What wicked fun he makes of other people when he stops! He is
not handsome, but in his face there is something odd-looking and
distinguished. It is certain he has beautiful small feet and hands.

He comes every day from the City, drops in, in his quiet unobtrusive
way, and drinks tea at five o’clock; always brings a budget of the
funniest stories with him, makes mamma laugh, Clara laugh, Henrietta,
who is in the schoolroom still, die of laughing. Papa has the highest
opinion of Mr. Newcome as a man of business: if he had had such a
friend in early life his affairs would not be where they now are, poor
dear kind papa! Do they want to go anywhere, is not Mr. Newcome always
ready? Did he not procure that delightful room for them to witness the
Lord Mayor’s show; and make Clara die of laughing at those odd City
people at the Mansion House ball? He is at every party, and never tired
though he gets up so early: he waltzes with nobody else: he is always
there to put Lady Clara in the carriage: at the drawing-room he looked
quite handsome in his uniform of the Newcome Hussars, bottle-green and
silver lace: he speaks Politics so _exceedingly_ well with papa and
gentlemen after dinner: he is a sound conservative, full of practical
good sense and information, with no dangerous new-fangled ideas, such
as young men have. When poor dear Sir Brian Newcome’s health gives way
quite, Mr. Newcome will go into Parliament, and then he will resume the
old barony which has been in abeyance in the family since the reign of
Richard the Third. They had fallen quite, quite low. Mr. Newcome’s
grandfather came to London with a satchel on his back, like
Whittington. Isn’t it romantic?

This process has been going on for months. It is not in one day that
poor Lady Clara has been made to forget the past, and to lay aside her
mourning. Day after day, very likely, the undeniable faults and many
peccadilloes of—of that other person, have been exposed to her. People
around the young lady may desire to spare her feelings, but can have no
interest in screening Poor Jack from condign reprobation. A wild
prodigal—a disgrace to his order—a son of old Highgate’s leading such a
life, and making such a scandal! Lord Dorking believes Mr. Belsize to
be an abandoned monster and fiend in human shape; gathers and relates
all the stories that ever have been told to the young man’s
disadvantage, and of these be sure there are enough, and speaks of him
with transports of indignation. At the end of months of unwearied
courtship, Mr. Barnes Newcome is honestly accepted, and Lady Clara is
waiting for him at Baden, not unhappy to receive him; when walking on
the promenade with her father, the ghost of her dead love suddenly
rises before her, and the young lady faints to the ground.

When Barnes Newcome thinks fit he can be perfectly placable in his
demeanour and delicate in his conduct. What he said upon this painful
subject was delivered with the greatest propriety. He did not for one
moment consider that Lady Clara’s agitation arose from any present
feeling in Mr. Belsize’s favour, but that she was naturally moved by
the remembrance of the past, and the sudden appearance which recalled
it. “And but that a lady’s name should never be made the subject of
dispute between men,” Newcome said to Lord Dorking, with great dignity,
“and that Captain Belsize has opportunely quitted the place, I should
certainly have chastised him. He and another adventurer, against whom I
have had to warn my own family, have quitted Baden this afternoon. I am
glad that both are gone, Captain Belsize especially; for my temper, my
lord, is hot, and I do not think I should have commanded it.”

Lord Kew, when the elder lord informed him of this admirable speech of
Barnes Newcome’s, upon whose character, prudence, and dignity the Earl
of Dorking pronounced a fervent eulogium, shook his head gravely, and
said, “Yes, Barnes was a dead shot, and a most determined fellow:” and
did not burst out laughing until he and Lord Dorking had parted. Then
to be sure he took his fill of laughter, he told the story to Ethel, he
complimented Barnes on his heroic self-denial; the joke of the
thundering big stick was nothing to it. Barnes Newcome laughed too; he
had plenty of humour, Barnes. “I think you might have whopped Jack when
he came out from his interview with the Dorkings,” Kew said: “the poor
devil was so bewildered and weak, that Alfred might have thrashed him.
At other times you would find it more difficult, Barnes my man.” Mr. B.
Newcome resumed his dignity; said a joke was a joke, and there was
quite enough of this one; which assertion we may be sure he
conscientiously made.

That meeting and parting between the old lovers passed with a great
deal of calm and propriety on both sides. Miss’s parents of course were
present when Jack at their summons waited upon them and their daughter,
and made his hang-dog bow. My Lord Dorking said (poor Jack in the
anguish of his heart had poured out the story to Clive Newcome
afterwards), “Mr. Belsize, I have to apologise for words which I used
in my heat yesterday, and which I recall and regret, as I am sure you
do that there should have been any occasion for them.”

Mr. Belsize looking at the carpet said he was very sorry.

Lady Dorking here remarked, that as Captain Belsize was now at Baden,
he might wish to hear from Lady Clara Pulleyn’s own lips that the
engagement into which she had entered was formed by herself, certainly
with the consent and advice of her family. “Is it not so, my dear?”

Lady Clara said, “Yes, mamma,” with a low curtsey.

“We have now to wish you good-bye, Charles Belsize,” said my lord, with
some feeling. “As your relative, and your father’s old friend, I wish
you well. I hope your future course in life may not be so unfortunate
as the past year. I request that we may part friends. Good-bye,
Charles. Clara, shake hands with Captain Belsize. My Lady Dorking, you
will please to give Charles your hand. You have known him since he was
a child; and—and—we are sorry to be obliged to part in this way.” In
this wise Mr. Jack Belsize’s tooth was finally extracted; and for the
moment we wish him and his brother-patient a good journey.

Little lynx-eyed Dr. Von Finck, who attends most of the polite company
at Baden, drove ceaselessly about the place that day, with the _real_
version of the fainting-fit story, about which we may be sure the
wicked and malicious, and the uninitiated, had a hundred absurd
details. Lady Clara ever engaged to Captain Belsize? Fiddle-de-dee!
Everybody knew the Captain’s affairs, and that he could no more think
of marrying than flying. Lady Clara faint at seeing him! she fainted
before he came up; she was always fainting, and had done so thrice in
the last week to his knowledge. Lord Dorking had a nervous affection of
his right arm, and was always shaking his stick. He did not say
Villain, he said William; Captain Belsize’s name is William. It is not
so in the Peerage? Is he called Jack in the Peerage? Those Peerages are
always wrong. These candid explanations of course had their effect.
Wicked tongues were of course instantaneously silent. People were
entirely satisfied; they always are. The next night being Assembly
night, Lady Clara appeared at the rooms and danced with Lord Kew and
Mr. Barnes Newcome. All the society was as gracious and good-humoured
as possible, and there was no more question of fainting than of burning
down the Conversation-house. But Madame de Cruchecassée, and Madame de
Schlangenbad, and those horrid people whom the men speak to, but whom
the women salute with silent curtseys, persisted in declaring that
there was no prude like an English prude; and to Dr. Finck’s oaths,
assertions, explanations, only replied, with a shrug of their bold
shoulders, “Taisez-vous, Docteur, vous n’êtes qu’une vieille bête.”

Lady Kew was at the rooms, uncommonly gracious. Miss Ethel took a few
turns of the waltz with Lord Kew, but this nymph looked more _farouche_
than upon ordinary days. Bob Jones, who admired her hugely, asked leave
to waltz with her, and entertained her with recollections of Clive
Newcome at school. He remembered a fight in which Clive had been
engaged, and recounted that action to Miss Newcome, who seemed to be
interested. He was pleased to deplore Clive’s fancy for turning artist,
and that Miss Newcome recommended him to have his likeness taken, for
she said his appearance was exceedingly picturesque. He was going on
with further prattle, but she suddenly cut Mr. Jones short, making him
a bow, and going to sit down by Lady Kew. “And the next day, sir,” said
Bob, with whom the present writer had the happiness of dining at a mess
dinner at the Upper Temple, “when I met her on the walk, sir, she cut
me as dead as a stone. The airs those swells give themselves is enough
to make any man turn republican.”

Miss Ethel indeed was haughty, very haughty, and of a difficult temper.
She spared none of her party except her kind mother, to whom Ethel
always was kind, and her father, whom, since his illnesses, she tended
with much benevolence and care. But she did battle with Lady Kew
repeatedly, coming to her Aunt Julia’s rescue, on whom her mother as
usual exercised her powers of torturing. She made Barnes quail before
her by the shafts of contempt which she flashed at him; and she did not
spare Lord Kew, whose good-nature was no shield against her scorn. The
old queen-mother was fairly afraid of her; she even left off beating
Lady Julia when Ethel came in, of course taking her revenge in the
young girl’s absence, but trying in her presence to soothe and please
her. Against Lord Kew the young girl’s anger was most unjust, and the
more cruel because the kindly young nobleman never spoke a hard word of
any one mortal soul, and, carrying no arms, should have been assaulted
by none. But his very good-nature seemed to make his young opponent
only the more wrathful; she shot because his honest breast was bare; it
bled at the wounds which she inflicted. Her relatives looked at her
surprised at her cruelty, and the young man himself was shocked in his
dignity and best feelings by his cousin’s wanton ill-humour.

Lady Kew fancied she understood the cause of this peevishness, and
remonstrated with Miss Ethel. “Shall we write a letter to Lucerne, and
order Dick Tinto back again?” said her ladyship. “Are you such a fool,
Ethel, as to be hankering after that young scapegrace, and his yellow
beard? His drawings are very pretty. Why, I think he might earn a
couple of hundred a year as a teacher, and nothing would be easier than
to break your engagement with Kew, and whistle the drawing-master back
again.”

Ethel took up the whole heap of Clive’s drawings, lighted a taper,
carried the drawings to the fireplace, and set them in a blaze. “A very
pretty piece of work,” says Lady Kew, “and which proves satisfactorily
that you don’t care for the young Clive at all. Have we arranged a
correspondence? We are cousins, you know; we may write pretty cousinly
letters to one another.” A month before the old lady would have
attacked her with other arms than sarcasm, but she was scared now, and
dared to use no coarser weapons. “Oh!” cried Ethel in a transport,
“what a life ours is, and how you buy and sell, and haggle over your
children! It is not Clive I care about, poor boy. Our ways of life are
separate. I cannot break from my own family, and I know very well how
yon would receive him in it. Had he money, it would be different. You
would receive him, and welcome him, and hold out your hands to him; but
he is only a poor painter, and we forsooth are bankers in the City; and
he comes among us on sufferance, like those concert-singers whom mamma
treats with so much politeness, and who go down and have supper by
themselves. Why should they not be as good as we are?”

“M. de C——, my dear, is of a noble family,” interposed Lady Kew; “when
he has given up singing and made his fortune, no doubt he can go back
into the world again.”

“Made his fortune, yes,” Ethel continued, “that is the cry. There never
were, since the world began, people so unblushingly sordid! We own it,
and are proud of it. We barter rank against money, and money against
rank, day after day. Why did you marry my father to my mother? Was it
for his wit? You know he might have been an angel and you would have
scorned him. Your daughter was bought with papa’s money as surely as
ever Newcome was. Will there be no day when this mammon-worship will
cease among us?”

“Not in my time or yours, Ethel,” the elder said, not unkindly; perhaps
she thought of a day long ago before she was old herself.

“We are sold,” the young girl went on, “we are as much sold as Turkish
women; the only difference being that our masters may have but one
Circassian at a time. No, there is no freedom for us. I wear my green
ticket, and wait till my master comes. But every day as I think of our
slavery, I revolt against it more. That poor wretch, that poor girl
whom my brother is to marry, why did she not revolt and fly? I would,
if I loved a man sufficiently, loved him better than the world, than
wealth, than rank, than fine houses and titles,—and I feel I love these
best,—I would give up all to follow him. But what can I be with my name
and my parents? I belong to the world like all the rest of my family.
It is you who have bred us up; you who are answerable for us. Why are
there no convents to which we can fly? You make a fine marriage for me;
you provide me with a good husband, a kind soul, not very wise, but
very kind; you make me what you call happy, and I would rather be at
the plough like the women here.”

“No, you wouldn’t, Ethel,” replies the grandmother, drily. “These are
the fine speeches of schoolgirls. The showers of rain would spoil your
complexion—you would be perfectly tired in an hour, and come back to
luncheon—you belong to your belongings, my dear, and are not better
than the rest of the world:—very good-looking, as you know perfectly
well, and not very good-tempered. It is lucky that Kew is. Calm your
temper, at least before marriage; such a prize does not fall to a
pretty girl’s lot every day. Why, you sent him away quite seared by
your cruelty; and if he is not playing at roulette, or at billiards, I
dare say he is thinking what a little termagant you are, and that he
had beat pause while it is yet time. Before I was married, your poor
grandfather never knew I had a temper; of after-days I say nothing; but
trials are good for all of us, and he bore his like an angel.”

Lady Kew, too, on this occasion at least, was admirably good-humoured.
She also when it was necessary could put a restraint on her temper,
and, having this match very much at heart, chose to coax and to soothe
her granddaughter rather than to endeavour to scold and frighten her.

“Why do you desire this marriage so much, grandmamma,” the girl asked.
“My cousin is not very much in love,—at least I should fancy not,” she
added, blushing. “I am bound to own Lord Kew is not in the least eager,
and I think if you were to tell him to wait for five years he would be
quite willing. Why should you be so very anxious?”

“Why, my dear? Because I think young ladies who want to go and work in
the fields, should make hay while the sun shines; because I think it is
high time that Kew should ranger himself; because I am sure he will
make the best husband, and Ethel the prettiest Countess in England.”
And the old lady, seldom exhibiting any signs of affection, looked at
her granddaughter very fondly. From her Ethel looked up into the glass,
which very likely repeated on its shining face the truth her elder had
just uttered. Shall we quarrel with the girl for that dazzling
reflection; for owning that charming truth, and submitting to the
conscious triumph? Give her her part of vanity, of youth, of desire to
rule and be admired. Meanwhile Mr. Clive’s drawings have been crackling
in the fireplace at her feet, and the last spark of that combustion is
twinkling out unheeded.




CHAPTER XXXIII.
Lady Kew at the Congress


When Lady Kew heard that Madame d’Ivry was at Baden, and was informed
at once of the French lady’s graciousness towards the Newcome family,
and of her fury against Lord Kew, the old Countess gave a loose to that
energetic temper with which nature had gifted her; a temper which she
tied up sometimes and kept from barking and biting; but which when
unmuzzled was an animal of whom all her ladyship’s family had a just
apprehension. Not one of them but in his or her time had been wounded,
lacerated, tumbled over, otherwise frightened or injured by this unruly
brute. The cowards brought it sops and patted it; the prudent gave it a
clear berth, and walked round so as not to meet it; but woe be to those
of the family who had to bring the meal, and prepare the litter, and
(to speak respectfully) share the kennel with Lady Kew’s “Black Dog!”
Surely a fine furious temper, if accompanied with a certain magnanimity
and bravery which often go together with it, is one of the most
precious and fortunate gifts with which a gentleman or lady can be
endowed. A person always ready to fight is certain of the greatest
consideration amongst his or her family circle. The lazy grow tired of
contending with him; the timid coax and flatter him; and as almost
every one is timid or lazy, a bad-tempered man is sure to have his own
way. It is he who commands, and all the others obey. If he is a
gourmand, he has’ what he likes for dinner; and the tastes of all the
rest are subservient to him. She (we playfully transfer the gender, as
a bad temper is of both sexes) has the place which she likes best in
the drawing-room; nor do her parents, nor her brothers and sisters,
venture to take her favourite chair. If she wants to go to a party,
mamma will dress herself in spite of her headache; and papa, who hates
those dreadful soirées, will go upstairs after dinner and put on his
poor old white neckcloth, though he has been toiling at chambers all
day, and must be there early in the morning—he will go out with her, we
say, and stay for the cotillon. If the family are taking their tour in
the summer, it is she who ordains whither they shall go, and when they
shall stop. If he comes home late, the dinner is kept for him, and not
one dares to say a word though ever so hungry. If he is in a good
humour, how every one frisks about and is happy! How the servants jump
up at his bell and run to wait upon him! How they sit up patiently, and
how eagerly they rush out to fetch cabs in the rain! Whereas for you
and me, who have the tempers of angels, and never were known to be
angry or to complain, nobody cares whether we are pleased or not. Our
wives go to the milliners and send us the bill, and we pay it; our John
finishes reading the newspaper before he answers our bell, and brings
it to us; our sons loll in the arm-chair which we should like; fill the
house with their young men, and smoke in the dining-room; our tailors
fit us badly; our butchers give us the youngest mutton; our tradesmen
dun us much more quickly than other people’s, because they know we are
good-natured; and our servants go out whenever they like, and openly
have their friends to supper in the kitchen. When Lady Kew said _Sic
volo, sic jubeo_, I promise you few persons of her ladyship’s
belongings stopped, before they did her biddings, to ask her reasons.

If, which very seldom happens, there are two such imperious and
domineering spirits in a family, unpleasantries of course will arise
from their contentions; or, if out of doors the family Bajazet meets
with some other violent Turk, dreadful battles ensue, all the allies on
either side are brought in, and the surrounding neighbours perforce
engaged in the quarrel. This was unluckily the case in the present
instance. Lady Kew, unaccustomed to have her will questioned at home,
liked to impose it abroad. She judged the persons around her with great
freedom of speech. Her opinions were quoted, as people’s sayings will
be; and if she made bitter speeches, depend on it they lost nothing in
the carrying. She was furious against Madame la Duchesse d’Ivry, and
exploded in various companies whenever that lady’s name was mentioned.
“Why was she not with her husband? Why was the poor old Duke left to
his gout, and this woman trailing through the country with her vagabond
court of billiard-markers at her heels? She to call herself Mary Queen
of Scots, forsooth!—well, she merited the title in some respects,
though she had not murdered her husband as yet. Ah! I should like to be
Queen Elizabeth if the Duchess is Queen of Scots!” said the old lady,
shaking her old fist. And these sentiments being uttered in public,
upon the promenade, to mutual friends, of course the Duchess had the
benefit of Lady Kew’s remarks a few minutes after they were uttered;
and her grace, and the distinguished princes, counts, and noblemen in
her court, designated as billiard-markers by the old Countess, returned
the latter’s compliments with pretty speeches of their own. Scandals
were dug up respecting her ladyship, so old that one would have thought
them forgotten these forty years,—so old that they happened before most
of the Newcomes now extant were born, and surely therefore are out of
the province of this contemporary biography. Lady Kew was indignant
with her daughter (there were some moments when any conduct of her
friends did not meet her ladyship’s approbation) even for the scant
civility with which Lady Anne had received the Duchess’s advances.
“Leave a card upon her!—yes, send a card by one of your footmen; but go
in to see her—because she was at the window and saw you drive up.—Are
you mad, Anne? That was the very reason you should not have come out of
your carriage. But you are so weak and good-natured, that if a
highwayman stopped you, you would say, ‘Thank you, sir,’ as you gave
him your purse: yes, and if Mrs. Macheath called on you afterwards you
would return the visit!”

Even had these speeches been made _about_ the Duchess, and some of them
not addressed to her, things might have gone on pretty well. If we
quarrelled with all the people who abuse us behind our backs, and began
to tear their eyes out as soon as we set ours on them, what a life it
would be, and when should we have any quiet? Backbiting is all fair in
society. Abuse me, and I will abuse you; but let us be friends when we
meet. Have not we all entered a dozen rooms, and been sure, from the
countenances of the amiable persons present, that they had been
discussing our little peculiarities, perhaps as we were on the stairs?
Was our visit, therefore, the less agreeable? Did we quarrel and say
hard words to one another’s faces? No—we wait until some of our dear
friends take their leave, and then comes our turn. My back is at my
neighbour’s service; as soon as that is turned let him make what faces
he thinks proper: but when we meet we grin and shake hands like
well-bred folk, to whom clean linen is not more necessary than a clean
sweet-looking countenance, and a nicely got-up smile, for company.

Here was Lady Kew’s mistake. She wanted, for some reason, to drive
Madame d’Ivry out of Baden; and thought there were no better means of
effecting this object than by using the high hand, and practising those
frowns upon the Duchess which had scared away so many other persons.
But the Queen of Scots was resolute, too, and her band of courtiers
fought stoutly round about her. Some of them could not pay their bills,
and could not retreat: others had courage, and did not choose to fly.
Instead of coaxing and soothing Madame d’Ivry, Madame de Kew thought by
a brisk attack to rout and dislodge her. She began on almost the very
first occasion when the ladies met. “I was so sorry to hear that
Monsieur le Duc was ill at Bagneres, Madame la Duchesse,” the old lady
began on their very first meeting, after the usual salutations had
taken place.

“Madame la Comtesse is very kind to interest herself in Monsieur
d’Ivry’s health. Monsieur le Duc at his age is not disposed to travel.
You, dear miladi, are more happy in being always able to retain the
_goût des voyages!_”

“I come to my family! my dear Duchess.”

“How charmed they must be to possess you! Miladi Anne, you must be
inexpressibly consoled by the presence of a mother so tender! Permit me
to present Madame la Comtesse de la Cruchecassée to Madame la Comtesse
de Kew. Miladi is sister to that amiable Marquis of Steyne, whom you
have known, Ambrosine! Madame la Baronne de Schlangenbad, Miladi Kew.
Do you not see the resemblance to milor? These ladies have enjoyed the
hospitalities—the splendours of Gaunt House. They were of those famous
routs of which the charming Mistress Crawley, _la semillante Becki_,
made part! How sad the Hôtel de Gaunt must be under the present
circumstances! Have you heard, miladi, of the charming Mistress Becki?
Monsieur le Duc describes her as the most _spirituelle_ Englishwoman he
ever met.” The Queen of Scots turns and whispers her lady of honour,
and shrugs and taps her forehead. Lady Kew knows that Madame d’Ivry
speaks of her nephew, the present Lord Steyne, who is not in his right
mind. The Duchess looks round, and sees a friend in the distance whom
she beckons. “Comtesse, you know already monsieur the Captain
Blackball? He makes the delight of our society!” A dreadful man with a
large cigar, a florid waistcoat, and billiards written on his
countenance, swaggers forward at the Duchess’s summons. The Countess of
Kew has not gained much by her attack. She has been presented to
Cruchecassée and Schlangenbad. She sees herself on the eve of becoming
the acquaintance of Captain Blackball.

“Permit me, Duchess, to choose my _English_ friends at least for
myself,” says Lady Kew, drumming her foot.

“But, madam, assuredly! You do not love this good Monsieur de
Blackball? Eh! the English manners are droll, pardon me for saying so.
It is wonderful how proud you are as a nation, and how ashamed you are
of your compatriots!”

“There are some persons who are ashamed of nothing, Madame la
Duchesse,” cries Lady Kew; losing her temper.

“Is that _gracieuseté_ for me? How much goodness! This good Monsieur de
Blackball is not very well bred; but, for an Englishman, he is not too
bad. I have met with people who are more ill-bred than Englishmen in my
travels.”

“And they are?” said Lady Anne, who had been in vain endeavouring to
put an end to this colloquy.

“Englishwomen, madam! I speak not for you. You are kind; you—you are
too soft, dear Lady Anne, for a persecutor.”

The counsels of the worldly woman who governed and directed that branch
of the Newcome family of whom it is our business to speak now for a
little while, bore other results than those which the elderly lady
desired and foresaw. Who can foresee everything and always? Not the
wisest among us. When his Majesty Louis XIV., jockeyed his grandson on
to the throne of Spain (founding thereby the present revered dynasty of
that country), did he expect to peril his own, and bring all Europe
about his royal ears? Could a late King of France, eager for the
advantageous establishment of one of his darling sons, and anxious to
procure a beautiful Spanish princess, with a crown and kingdom in
reversion, for the simple and obedient youth, ever suppose that the
welfare of his whole august race and reign would be upset by that smart
speculation? We take only the most noble examples to illustrate the
conduct of such a noble old personage as her ladyship of Kew, who
brought a prodigious deal of trouble upon some of the innocent members
of her family, whom no doubt she thought to better in life by her
experienced guidance and undoubted worldly wisdom. We may be as deep as
Jesuits, know the world ever so well, lay the best-ordered plans, and
the profoundest combinations, and by a certain not unnatural turn of
fate, we, and our plans and combinations, are sent flying before the
wind. We may be as wise as Louis Philippe, that many-counselled Ulysses
whom the respectable world admired so; and after years of patient
scheming, and prodigies of skill, after coaxing, wheedling, doubling,
bullying, wisdom, behold yet stronger powers interpose: and schemes,
and skill and violence, are nought.

Frank and Ethel, Lady Kew’s grandchildren, were both the obedient
subjects of this ancient despot: this imperious old Louis XIV. in a
black front and a cap and ribbon, this scheming old Louis Philippe in
tabinet; but their blood was good and their tempers high; and for all
her bitting and driving, and the training of her _manége_, the generous
young colts were hard to break. Ethel, at this time, was especially
stubborn in training, rebellious to the whip, and wild under harness;
and the way in which Lady Kew managed her won the admiration of her
family: for it was a maxim among these folks that no one could manage
Ethel but Lady Kew. Barnes said no one could manage his sister but his
grandmother. He couldn’t, that was certain. Mamma never tried, and
indeed was so good-natured, that rather than ride the filly, she would
put the saddle on her own back and let the filly ride her; no, there
was no one but her ladyship capable of managing that girl, Barnes
owned, who held Lady Kew in much respect and awe. “If the tightest hand
were not kept on her, there’s no knowing what she mightn’t do,” said
her brother. “Ethel Newcome, by Jove, is capable of running away with
the writing-master.”

After poor Jack Belsize’s mishap and departure, Barnes’s own bride
showed no spirit at all, save one of placid contentment. She came at
call and instantly, and went through whatever paces her owner demanded
of her. She laughed whenever need was, simpered and smiled when spoken
to, danced whenever she was asked; drove out at Barnes’s side in Kew’s
phaeton, and received him certainly not with warmth, but with
politeness and welcome. It is difficult to describe the scorn with
which her sister-in-law regarded her. The sight of the patient timid
little thing chafed Ethel, who was always more haughty and flighty and
bold when in Clara’s presence than at any other time. Her ladyship’s
brother, Captain Lord Viscount Rooster, before mentioned, joined the
family party at this interesting juncture. My Lord Rooster found
himself surprised, delighted, subjugated by Miss Newcome, her wit and
spirit. “By Jove, she is a plucky one,” his lordship exclaimed. “To
dance with her is the best fun in life. How she pulls all the other
girls to pieces, by Jove, and how splendidly she chaffs everybody!
But,” he added with the shrewdness and sense of humour which
distinguished the young officer, “I’d rather dance with her than marry
her—by a doosid long score—I don’t envy you that part of the business,
Kew, my boy.” Lord Kew did not set himself up as a person to be envied.
He thought his cousin beautiful: and with his grandmother, that she
would make a very handsome Countess; and he thought the money which
Lady Kew would give or leave to the young couple a very welcome
addition to his means.

On the next night, when there was a ball at the room, Miss Ethel chose
to appear in a toilette the very grandest and finest which she had ever
assumed, who was ordinarily exceedingly simple in her attire, and
dressed below the mark of the rest of the world. Her clustering
ringlets, her shining white shoulders, her splendid raiment (I believe
indeed it was her court-dress which the young lady assumed) astonished
all beholders. She _écrasé’d_ all other beauties by her appearance; so
much so that Madame d’Ivry’s court could not but look, the men in
admiration, the women in dislike, at this dazzling young creature. None
of the countesses, duchesses, princesses, Russ, Spanish, Italian, were
so fine or so handsome. There were some New York ladies at Baden as
there are everywhere else in Europe now. Not even these were more
magnificent than Miss Ethel. General Jeremiah J. Bung’s lady owned that
Miss Newcome was fit to appear in any party in Fourth Avenue. She was
the only well-dressed English girl Mrs. Bung had seen in Europe. A
young German Durchlaucht deigned to explain to his aide-de-camp how
very handsome he thought Miss Newcome. All our acquaintances were of
one mind. Mr. Jones of England pronounced her stunning; the admirable
Captain Blackball examined her points with the skill of an amateur, and
described them with agreeable frankness. Lord Rooster was charmed as he
surveyed her, and complimented his late companion-in-arms on the
possession of such a paragon. Only Lord Kew was not delighted—nor did
Miss Ethel mean that he should be. She looked as splendid as Cinderella
in the prince’s palace. But what need for all this splendour? this
wonderful toilette? this dazzling neck and shoulders, whereof the
brightness and beauty blinded the eyes of lookers-on? She was dressed
as gaudily as an actress of the Varietes going to a supper at Trois
Frères. “It was Mademoiselle Mabille en habit de cœur,” Madame d’Ivry
remarked to Madame Schlangenbad. Barnes, who with his bride-elect for a
partner made a vis-a-vis for his sister and the admiring Lord Rooster,
was puzzled likewise by Ethel’s countenance and appearance. Little Lady
Clara looked like a little schoolgirl dancing before her.

One, two, three, of the attendants of her Majesty the Queen of Scots
were carried off in the course of the evening by the victorious young
beauty, whose triumph had the effect, which the headstrong girl perhaps
herself anticipated, of mortifying the Duchesse d’Ivry, of exasperating
old Lady Kew, and of annoying the young nobleman to whom Miss Ethel was
engaged. The girl seemed to take a pleasure in defying all three, a
something embittered her, alike against her friends and her enemies.
The old dowager chaffed and vented her wrath upon Lady Anne and Barnes.
Ethel kept the ball alive by herself almost. She refused to go home,
declining hints and commands alike. She was engaged for ever so many
dances more. Not dance with Count Punter? it would be rude to leave him
after promising him. Not waltz with Captain Blackball? He was not a
proper partner for her? Why then did Kew know him? Lord Kew walked and
talked with Captain Blackball every day. Was she to be so proud as not
to know Lord Kew’s friends? She greeted the Captain with a most
fascinating smile as he came up whilst the controversy was pending, and
ended it by whirling round the room in his arms.

Madame d’Ivry viewed with such pleasure as might be expected the
defection of her adherents, and the triumph of her youthful rival, who
seemed to grow more beautiful with each waltz, so that the other
dancers paused to look at her, the men breaking out in enthusiasm, the
reluctant women being forced to join in the applause. Angry as she was,
and knowing how Ethel’s conduct angered her grandson, old Lady Kew
could not help admiring the rebellious beauty, whose girlish spirit was
more than a match for the imperious dowager’s tough old resolution. As
for Mr. Barnes’s displeasure, the girl tossed her saucy head, shrugged
her fair shoulders, and passed on with a scornful laugh. In a word,
Miss Ethel conducted herself as a most reckless and intrepid young
flirt, using her eyes with the most consummate effect, chattering with
astounding gaiety, prodigal of smiles, gracious thanks and killing
glances. What wicked spirit moved her? Perhaps had she known the
mischief she was doing, she would have continued it still.

The sight of this wilfulness and levity smote poor Lord Kew’s honest
heart with cruel pangs of mortification. The easy young nobleman had
passed many a year of his life in all sorts of wild company. The
_chaumière_ knew him, and the balls of Parisian actresses, the
coulisses of the opera at home and abroad. Those pretty heads of ladies
whom nobody knows, used to nod their shining ringlets at Kew, from
private boxes at theatres, or dubious Park broughams. He had run the
career of young men of pleasure, and laughed and feasted with jolly
prodigals and their company. He was tired of it: perhaps he remembered
an earlier and purer life, and was sighing to return to it. Living as
he had done amongst the outcasts, his ideal of domestic virtue was high
and pure. He chose to believe that good women were entirely good.
Duplicity he could not understand; ill-temper shocked him: wilfulness
he seemed to fancy belonged only to the profane and wicked; not to good
girls, with good mothers, in honest homes. Their nature was to love
their families; to obey their parents; to tend their poor; to honour
their husbands; to cherish their children. Ethel’s laugh woke him up
from one of these simple reveries very likely, and then she swept round
the ballroom rapidly, to the brazen notes of the orchestra. He never
offered to dance with her more than once in the evening; went away to
play, and returned to find her still whirling to the music. Madame
d’Ivry remarked his tribulation and gloomy face, though she took no
pleasure at his discomfiture, knowing that Ethel’s behaviour caused it.

In plays and novels, and I dare say in real life too sometimes, when
the wanton heroine chooses to exert her powers of fascination, and to
flirt with Sir Harry or the Captain, the hero, in a pique, goes off and
makes love to somebody else: both acknowledge their folly after a
while, shake hands, and are reconciled, and the curtain drops, or the
volume ends. But there are some people too noble and simple for these
amorous scenes and smirking artifices. When Kew was pleased he laughed,
when he was grieved he was silent. He did not deign to hide his grief
or pleasure under disguises. His error, perhaps, was in forgetting that
Ethel was very young; that her conduct was not design so much as
girlish mischief and high spirits; and that if young men have their
frolics, sow their wild oats, and enjoy their pleasure, young women may
be permitted sometimes their more harmless vagaries of gaiety, and
sportive outbreaks of wilful humour.

When she consented to go home at length, Lord Kew brought Miss
Newcome’s little white cloak for her (under the hood of which her
glossy curls, her blushing cheeks, and bright eyes looked provokingly
handsome), and encased her in this pretty garment without uttering one
single word. She made him a saucy curtsey in return for this act of
politeness, which salutation he received with a grave bow; and then he
proceeded to cover up old Lady Kew, and to conduct her ladyship to her
chariot. Miss Ethel chose to be displeased at her cousin’s displeasure.
What were balls made for but that people should dance? She a flirt? She
displease Lord Kew? If she chose to dance, she would dance; she had no
idea of his giving himself airs; besides it was such fun taking away
the gentlemen of Mary Queen of Scots’ court from her; such capital fun!
So she went to bed, singing and performing wonderful roulades as she
lighted her candle and retired to her room. She had had such a jolly
evening!! such famous fun, and, I dare say (but how shall a novelist
penetrate these mysteries?), when her chamber door was closed, she
scolded her maid and was as cross as two sticks. You see there come
moments of sorrow after the most brilliant victories; and you conquer
and rout the enemy utterly, and then regret that you fought.




CHAPTER XXXIV.
The End of the Congress of Baden


Mention has been made of an elderly young person from Ireland, engaged
by Madame la Duchesse d’Ivry, as companion and teacher of English for
her little daughter. When Miss O’Grady, as she did some time
afterwards, quitted Madame d’Ivry’s family, she spoke with great
freedom regarding the behaviour of that duchess, and recounted horrors
which she, the latter, had committed. A number of the most terrific
anecdotes issued from the lips of the indignant Miss, whose volubility
Lord Kew was obliged to check, not choosing that his countess, with
whom he was paying a bridal visit to Paris, should hear such dreadful
legends. It was there that Miss O’Grady, finding herself in misfortune,
and reading of Lord Kew’s arrival at the Hôtel Bristol, waited upon his
lordship and the Countess of Kew, begging them to take tickets in a
raffle for an invaluable ivory writing-desk, sole relic of her former
prosperity, which she proposed to give her friends the chance of
acquiring: in fact, Miss O’Grady lived for some years on the produce of
repeated raffles for this beautiful desk: many religious ladies of the
Faubourg St. Germain taking an interest in her misfortunes, and
alleviating them by the simple lottery system. Protestants as well as
Catholics were permitted to take shares in Miss O’Grady’s raffles; and
Lord Kew, good-natured then as always, purchased so many tickets, that
the contrite O’Grady informed him of a transaction which had nearly
affected his happiness, and in which she took a not very creditable
share. “Had I known your lordship’s real character,” Miss O’G was
pleased to say, “no tortures would have induced me to do an act for
which I have undergone penance. It was that black-hearted woman, my
lord, who maligned your lordship to me: that woman whom I called friend
once, but who is the most false, depraved, and dangerous of her sex.”
In this way do ladies’ companions sometimes speak of ladies when
quarrels separate them, when confidential attendants are dismissed,
bearing away family secrets in their minds, and revenge in their
hearts.

The day after Miss Ethel’s feats at the assembly, old Lady Kew went
over to advise her granddaughter, and to give her a little timely
warning about the impropriety of flirtations; above all, with such men
as are to be found at watering-places, persons who are never seen
elsewhere in society. “Remark the peculiarities of Kew’s temper, who
never flies into a passion like you and me, my dear,” said the old lady
(being determined to be particularly gracious and cautious); “when once
angry he remains so, and is so obstinate that it is almost impossible
to coax him into good-humour. It is much better, my love, to be like
us,” continued the old lady, “to fly out in a rage and have it over;
but que voulez-vous? such is Frank’s temper, and we must manage him.”
So she went on, backing her advice by a crowd of examples drawn from
the family history; showing how Kew was like his grandfather, her own
poor husband; still more like his late father, Lord Walham; between
whom and his mother there had been differences, chiefly brought on by
my Lady Walham, of course, which had ended in the almost total
estrangement of mother and son. Lady Kew then administered her advice,
and told her stories with Ethel alone for a listener; and in a most
edifying manner, she besought Miss Newcome to _ménager_ Lord Kew’s
susceptibilities, as she valued her own future comfort in life, as well
as the happiness of a most amiable man, of whom, if properly managed,
Ethel might make what she pleased. We have said Lady Kew managed
everybody, and that most of the members of her family allowed
themselves to be managed by her ladyship.

Ethel, who had permitted her grandmother to continue her sententious
advice, while she herself sat tapping her feet on the floor, and
performing the most rapid variations of that air which is called the
Devil’s Tattoo, burst out, at length, to the elder lady’s surprise,
with an outbreak of indignation, a flushing face, and a voice quivering
with anger.

“This most amiable man,” she cried out, “that you design for me, I know
everything about this most amiable man, and thank you and my family for
the present you make me! For the past year, what have you been doing?
Every one of you! my father, my brother, and you yourself, have been
filling my ears wit cruel reports against a poor boy, whom you chose to
depict as everything that was dissolute and wicked, when there was
nothing against him; nothing, but that he was poor. Yes, you yourself,
grandmamma, have told me many and many a time, that Clive Newcome was
not a fit companion for us; warned me against his bad courses, and
painted him as extravagant, unprincipled, I don’t know how bad. How
bad! I know how good he is; how upright, generous, and truth-telling:
though there was not a day until lately, that Barnes did not make some
wicked story against him,—Barnes, who, I believe, is bad himself,
like—like other young men. Yes, I am sure there was something about
Barnes in that newspaper which my father took away from me. And you
come, and you lift up your hands, and shake your head, because I dance
with one gentleman or another. You tell me I am wrong; mamma has told
me so this morning. Barnes, of course, has told me so, and you bring me
Frank as a pattern, and tell me to love and honour and obey _him!_ Look
here,” and she drew out a paper and put it into Lady Kew’s hands. “Here
is Kew’s history, and I believe it is true; yes, I am sure it is true.”

The old dowager lifted her eyeglass to her black eyebrow, and read a
paper written in English, and bearing no signature, in which many
circumstances of Lord Kew’s life were narrated for poor Ethel’s
benefit. It was not a worse life than that of a thousand young men of
pleasure, but there were Kew’s many misdeeds set down in order: such a
catalogue as we laugh at when Leporello trolls it, and sings his
master’s victories in France, Italy, and Spain. Madame d’Ivry’s name
was not mentioned in this list, and Lady Kew felt sure that the outrage
came from her.

With real ardour Lady Kew sought to defend her grandson from some of
the attacks here made against him; and showed Ethel that the person who
could use such means of calumniating him, would not scruple to resort
to falsehood in order to effect her purpose.

“Her purpose!” cries Ethel. “How do you know it is a woman?” Lady Kew
lapsed into generalities. She thought the handwriting was a woman’s—at
least it was not likely that a man should think of addressing an
anonymous letter to a young lady, and so wreaking his hatred upon Lord
Kew. “Besides, Frank has had no rivals—except—except one young
gentleman who has carried his paint-boxes to Italy,” says Lady Kew.
“You don’t think your dear Colonel’s son would leave such a piece of
mischief behind him? You must act, my dear,” continued her ladyship,
“as if this letter had never been written at all; the person who wrote
it no doubt will watch you. Of course we are too proud to allow him to
see that we are wounded; and pray, pray do not think of letting poor
Frank know a word about this horrid transaction.”

“Then the letter is true?” burst out Ethel. “You know it is true,
grandmamma, and that is why you would have me keep it a secret from my
cousin; besides,” she added, with a little hesitation, “your caution
comes too late, Lord Kew has seen the letter.”

“You fool!” screamed the old lady, “you were not so mad as to show it
to him?”

“I am sure the letter is true,” Ethel said, rising up very haughtily.
“It is not by calling me bad names that your ladyship will disprove it.
Keep them, if you please, for my Aunt Julia; she is sick and weak, and
can’t defend herself. I do not choose to bear abuse from you, or
lectures from Lord Kew. He happened to be here a short while since,
when the letter arrived. He had been good enough to come to preach me a
sermon on his own account. He to find fault with my actions!” cried
Miss Ethel, quivering with wrath and clenching the luckless paper in
her hand. “He to accuse me of levity, and to warn me against making
improper acquaintances! He began his lectures too soon. I am not a
lawful slave yet, and prefer to remain unmolested, at least as long as
I am free.”

“And you told Frank all this, Miss Newcome, and you showed him that
letter?” said the old lady.

“The letter was actually brought to me whilst his lordship was in the
midst of his sermon,” Ethel replied. “I read it as he was making his
speech,” she continued, gathering anger and scorn as she recalled the
circumstances of the interview. “He was perfectly polite in his
language. He did not call me a fool or use a single other bad name. He
was good enough to advise me and to make such virtuous pretty speeches,
that if he had been a bishop he could not have spoken better; and as I
thought the letter was a nice commentary on his lordship’s sermon, I
gave it to him. I gave it to him,” cried the young woman, “and much
good may it do him. I don’t think my Lord Kew will preach to me again
for some time.”

“I don’t think he will indeed,” said Lady Kew, in a hard dry voice.
“You don’t know what you may have done. Will you be pleased to ring the
bell and order my carriage? I congratulate you on having performed a
most charming morning’s work.”

Ethel made her grandmother a very stately curtsey. I pity Lady Julia’s
condition when her mother reached home.

All who know Lord Kew may be pretty sure that in that unlucky interview
with Ethel, to which the young lady has alluded, he just said no single
word to her that was not kind, and just, and gentle. Considering the
relation between them, he thought himself justified in remonstrating
with her as to the conduct which she chose to pursue, and in warning
her against acquaintances of whom his own experience had taught him the
dangerous character. He knew Madame d’Ivry and her friends so well that
he would not have his wife-elect a member of their circle. He could not
tell Ethel what he knew of those women and their history. She chose not
to understand his hints—did not, very likely, comprehend them. She was
quite young, and the stories of such lives as theirs had never been
told before her. She was indignant at the surveillance which Lord Kew
exerted over her, and the authority which he began to assume. At
another moment and in a better frame of mind she would have been
thankful for his care, and very soon and ever after she did justice to
his many admirable qualities—his frankness, honesty, and sweet temper.
Only her high spirit was in perpetual revolt at this time against the
bondage in which her family strove to keep her. The very worldly
advantages of the position which they offered her served but to chafe
her the more. Had her proposed husband been a young prince with a crown
to lay at her feet, she had been yet more indignant very likely, and
more rebellious. Had Kew’s younger brother been her suitor, or Kew in
his place, she had been not unwilling to follow her parents’ wishes.
Hence the revolt in which she was engaged—the wayward freaks and
outbreaks her haughty temper indulged in. No doubt she saw the justice
of Lord Kew’s reproofs. That self-consciousness was not likely to add
to her good-humour. No doubt she was sorry for having shown Lord Kew
the letter the moment after she had done that act, of which the poor
young lady could not calculate the consequences that were now to ensue.

Lord Kew, on glancing over the letter, at once divined the quarter
whence it came. The portrait drawn of him was not unlike, as our
characters described by those who hate us are not unlike. He had passed
a reckless youth; indeed he was sad and ashamed of that past life,
longed like the poor prodigal to return to better courses, and had
embraced eagerly the chance afforded him of a union with a woman young,
virtuous, and beautiful, against whom and against heaven he hoped to
sin no more. If we have told or hinted at more of his story than will
please the ear of modern conventionalism, I beseech the reader to
believe that the writer’s purpose at least is not dishonest, nor
unkindly. The young gentleman hung his head with sorrow over that sad
detail of his life and its follies. What would he have given to be able
to say to Ethel, “This is not true.”

His reproaches to Miss Newcome of course were at once stopped by this
terrible assault on himself. The letter had been put in the Baden
post-box, and so had come to its destination. It was in a disguised
handwriting. Lord Kew could form no idea even of the sex of the scribe.
He put the envelope in his pocket, when Ethel’s back was turned. He
examined the paper when he left her. He could make little of the
superscription or of the wafer which had served to close the note. He
did not choose to caution Ethel as to whether she should burn the
letter or divulge it to her friends. He took his share of the pain, as
a boy at school takes his flogging, stoutly and in silence.

When he saw Ethel again, which he did in an hour’s time, the generous
young gentleman held his hand out to her. “My dear,” he said, “if you
had loved me you never would have shown me that letter.” It was his
only reproof. After that he never again reproved or advised her.

Ethel blushed. “You are very brave and generous, Frank,” said, bending
her head, “and I am captious and wicked.” He felt the hot tear blotting
on his hand from his cousin’s downcast eyes.

He kissed her little hand. Lady Anne, who was in the room with her
children when these few words passed between the two in a very low
tone, thought it was a reconciliation. Ethel knew it was a renunciation
on Kew’s part—she never liked him so much as at that moment. The young
man was too modest and simple to guess himself what the girl’s feelings
were. Could he have told them, his fate and hers might have been
changed.

“You must not allow our kind letter-writing friend,” Lord Kew
continued, “to fancy we are hurt. We must walk out this afternoon, and
we must appear very good friends.”

“Yes, always, Kew,” said Ethel, holding out her hand again. The next
minute her cousin was at the table carving roast-fowls, and
distributing the portions to the hungry children.

The assembly of the previous evening had been one of those which the
_fermier des jeux_ at Baden beneficently provides for the frequenters
of the place, and now was to come off a much more brilliant
entertainment, in which poor Clive, who is far into Switzerland by this
time, was to have taken a share. The Bachelors had agreed to give a
ball, one of the last entertainments of the season: a dozen or more of
them had subscribed the funds, and we may be sure Lord Kew’s name was
at the head of the list, as it was of any list, of any scheme, whether
of charity or fun. The English were invited, and the Russians were
invited; the Spaniards and Italians, Poles, Prussians, and Hebrews; all
the motley frequenters of the place, and the warriors in the Duke of
Baden’s army. Unlimited supper was set in the restaurant. The
dancing-room glittered with extra lights, and a profusion of cut-paper
flowers decorated the festive scene. Everybody was present, those
crowds with whom our story has nothing to do, and those two or three
groups of persons who enact minor or greater parts in it. Madame d’Ivry
came in a dress of stupendous splendour, even more brilliant than that
in which Miss Ethel had figured at the last assembly. If the Duchess
intended to _écraser_ Miss Newcome by the superior magnificence of her
toilet, she was disappointed. Miss Newcome wore a plain white frock on
the occasion, and resumed, Madame d’Ivry said, her _rôle_ of _ingenue_
for that night.

During the brief season in which gentlemen enjoyed the favour of Mary
Queen of Scots, that wandering sovereign led them through all the paces
and vagaries of a regular passion. As in a fair, where time is short
and pleasures numerous, the master of the theatrical booth shows you a
tragedy, a farce, and a pantomime, all in a quarter of an hour, having
a dozen new audiences to witness his entertainments in the course of
the forenoon; so this lady with her platonic lovers went through the
complete dramatic course,—tragedies of jealousy, pantomimes of rapture,
and farces of parting. There were billets on one side and the other;
hints of a fatal destiny, and a ruthless, lynx-eyed tyrant, who held a
demoniac grasp over the Duchess by means of certain secrets which he
knew: there were regrets that we had not known each other sooner: why
were we brought out of our convent and sacrificed to Monsieur le Duc?
There were frolic interchanges of fancy and poesy: pretty _bouderies;_
sweet reconciliations; yawns finally—and separation. Adolphe went out
and Alphonse came in. It was the new audience; for which the bell rang,
the band played, and the curtain rose; and the tragedy, comedy, and
farce were repeated.

Those Greenwich performers who appear in the theatrical pieces
above-mentioned, make a great deal more noise than your stationary
tragedians; and if they have to denounce a villain, to declare a
passion, or to threaten an enemy, they roar, stamp, shake their fists,
and brandish their sabres, so that every man who sees the play has
surely a full pennyworth for his penny. Thus Madame la Duchesse d’Ivry
perhaps a little exaggerated her heroines’ parts liking to strike her
audiences quickly, and also to change them often. Like good performers,
she flung herself heart and soul into the business of the stage, and
was what she acted. She was Phedre, and if in the first part of the
play she was uncommonly tender to Hippolyte, in the second she hated
him furiously. She was Medea, and if Jason was _volage_, woe to Creusa!
Perhaps our poor Lord Kew had taken the first character in a
performance with Madame d’Ivry; for his behaviour in which part it was
difficult enough to forgive him; but when he appeared at Baden the
affianced husband of one of the most beautiful young creatures in
Europe,—when his relatives scorned Madame d’Ivry,—no wonder she was
maddened and enraged, and would have recourse to revenge, steel,
poison.

There was in the Duchess’s court a young fellow from the South of
France, whose friends had sent him to _faire son droit_ at Paris, where
he had gone through the usual course of pleasure and studies of the
young inhabitants of the Latin Quarter. He had at one time exalted
republican opinions, and had fired his shot with distinction at St.
Méri. He was a poet of some little note—a book of his lyrics, Les Râles
d’un Asphyxié, having made a sensation at the time of their appearance.
He drank great quantities of absinthe of a morning; smoked incessantly;
played roulette whenever he could get a few pieces; contributed to a
small journal, and was especially great in his hatred of _l’infame
Angleterre. Delenda est Carthago_ was tattooed beneath his
shirt-sleeves. Fifine and Clarisse, young milliners of the students’
district, had punctured this terrible motto on his manly right arm. _Le
léopard_, emblem of England, was his aversion; he shook his fist at the
caged monster in the Garden of Plants. He desired to have “Here lies an
enemy of England” engraved upon his early tomb. He was skilled at
billiards and dominoes, adroit in the use of arms, of unquestionable
courage and fierceness. Mr. Jones of England was afraid of M. de
Castillonnes, and cowered before his scowls and sarcasms. Captain
Blackball, the other English aide-de-camp of the Duchesse d’Ivry, a
warrior of undoubted courage, who had been “on the ground” more than
once, gave him a wide berth, and wondered what the little beggar meant
when he used to say, “Since the days of the Prince Noir, monsieur, my
family has been at feud with l’Angleterre!” His family were grocers at
Bordeaux, and his father’s name was M. Cabasse. He had married a noble
in the revolutionary times; and the son at Paris called himself Victor
Cabasse de Castillonnes; then Victor C. de Castillonnes; then M. de
Castillonnes. One of the followers of the Black Prince had insulted a
lady of the house of Castillonnes, when the English were lords of
Guienne; hence our friend’s wrath against the Leopard. He had written,
and afterwards dramatised a terrific legend describing the
circumstances, and the punishment of the Briton by a knight of the
Castillonnes family. A more awful coward never existed in a melodrama
than that felon English knight. His _blanche-fille_, of course, died of
hopeless love for the conquering Frenchman, her father’s murderer. The
paper in which the feuilleton appeared died at the sixth number of the
story. The theatre of the Boulevard refused the drama; so the author’s
rage against _l’infame Albion_ was yet unappeased. On beholding Miss
Newcome, Victor had fancied a resemblance between her and Agnes de
Calverley, the blanche Miss of his novel and drama, and cast an eye of
favour upon the young creature. He even composed verses in her honour
(for I presume that the “Miss Betti” and the Princess Crimhilde of the
poems which he subsequently published, were no other than Miss Newcome,
and the Duchess, her rival). He had been one of the lucky gentlemen who
had danced with Ethel on the previous evening. On the occasion of the
ball, he came to her with a highflown compliment, and a request to be
once more allowed to waltz with her—a request to which he expected a
favourable answer, thinking, no doubt, that his wit, his powers of
conversation, and the _amour qui flambait dans son regard_, had had
their effect upon the charming Meess. Perhaps he had a copy of the very
verses in his breast-pocket, with which he intended to complete his
work of fascination. For her sake alone, he had been heard to say that
he would enter into a truce with England, and forget the hereditary
wrongs of his race.

But the blanche Miss on this evening declined to waltz with him. His
compliments were not of the least avail. He retired with them and his
unuttered verses in his crumpled bosom. Miss Newcome only danced in one
quadrille with Lord Kew, and left the party quite early, to the despair
of many of the bachelors, who lost the fairest ornament of their ball.

Lord Kew, however, had been seen walking with her in public, and
particularly attentive to her during her brief appearance in the
ballroom; and the old Dowager, who regularly attended all places of
amusement, and was at twenty parties and six dinners the week before
she died, thought fit to be particularly gracious to Madame d’Ivry upon
this evening, and, far from shunning the Duchesse’s presence or being
rude to her, as on former occasions, was entirely smiling and
good-humoured. Lady Kew, too, thought there had been a reconciliation
between Ethel and her cousin. Lady Anne had given her mother some
account of the handshaking. Kew’s walk with Ethel, the quadrille which
she had danced with him alone, induced the elder lady to believe that
matters had been made up between the young people.

So, by way of showing the Duchesse that her little shot of the morning
had failed in its effect, as Frank left the room with his cousin, Lady
Kew gaily hinted, “that the young earl was aux petits soins with Miss
Ethel; that she was sure her old friend, the Duc d’Ivry, would be glad
to hear that his godson was about to range himself. He would settle
down on his estates. He would attend to his duties as an English peer
and a country gentleman. We shall go home,” says the benevolent
Countess, “and kill the veau gras, and you shall see our dear prodigal
will become a very quiet gentleman.”

The Duchesse said, “my Lady Kew’s plan was most edifying. She was
charmed to hear that Lady Kew loved veal; there were some who thought
that meat rather insipid.” A waltzer came to claim her hand at this
moment; and as she twirled round the room upon that gentleman’s arm,
wafting odours as she moved, her pink silks, pink feathers, pink
ribands, making a mighty rustling, the Countess of Kew had the
satisfaction of thinking that she had planted an arrow in that
shrivelled little waist, which Count Punter’s arms embraced, and had
returned the stab which Madame d’Ivry had delivered in the morning.

Mr. Barnes, and his elect bride, had also appeared, danced, and
disappeared. Lady Kew soon followed her young ones; and the ball went
on very gaily, in spite of the absence of these respectable personages.

Being one of the managers of the entertainment, Lord Kew returned to it
after conducting Lady Anne and her daughter to their carriage, and now
danced with great vigour, and with his usual kindness, selecting those
ladies whom other waltzers rejected because they were too old, or too
plain, or too stout, or what not. But he did not ask Madame d’Ivry to
dance. He could condescend to dissemble so far as to hide the pain
which he felt; but did not care to engage in that more advanced
hypocrisy of friendship, which for her part, his old grandmother had
not shown the least scruple in assuming.

Amongst other partners, my lord selected that intrepid waltzer, the
Gräfinn von Gumpelheim, who, in spite of her age, size, and large
family, never lost a chance of enjoying her favourite recreation. “Look
with what a camel my lord waltzes,” said M. Victor to Madame d’Ivry,
whose slim waist he had the honour of embracing to the same music.
“What man but an Englishman would ever select such a dromedary?”

“Avant de se marier,” said Madame d’Ivry, “il faut avouer que my lord
se permet d’enormes distractions.”

“My lord marries himself! And when and whom?” cried the Duchesse’s
partner.

“Miss Newcome. Do not you approve of his choice? I thought the eyes of
Stenio” (the Duchess called M. Victor, Stenio) “looked with some favour
upon that little person. She is handsome, even very handsome. Is it not
so often in life, Stenio? Are not youth and innocence (I give Miss
Ethel the compliment of her innocence, now surtout that the little
painter is dismissed)—are we not cast into the arms of jaded roues?
Tender young flowers, are we not torn from our convent gardens, and
flung into a world of which the air poisons our pure life, and withers
the sainted buds of hope and love and faith? Faith! The mocking world
tramples on it, n’est-ce pas? Love! The brutal world strangles the
heaven-born infant at its birth. Hope! It smiled at me in my little
convent chamber, played among the flowers which I cherished, warbled
with the birds that I loved. But it quitted me at the door of the
world, Stenio. It folded its white wings and veiled its radiant face!
In return for my young love, they gave me—sixty years, the dregs of a
selfish heart, egotism cowering over its fire, and cold for all its
mantle of ermine! In place of the sweet flowers of my young years, they
gave me these, Stenio!” and she pointed to her feathers and her
artificial roses. “Oh, I should like to crush them under my feet!” and
she put out the neatest little slipper. The Duchesse was great upon her
wrongs, and paraded her blighted innocence to every one who would feel
interested by that piteous spectacle. The music here burst out more
swiftly and melodiously than before; the pretty little feet forgot
their desire to trample upon the world. She shrugged the lean little
shoulders—“Eh!” said the Queen of Scots, “dansons et oublions;” and
Stenio’s arm once more surrounded her fairy waist (she called herself a
fairy; other ladies called her a skeleton); and they whirled away in
the waltz again and presently she and Stenio came bumping up against
the stalwart Lord Kew and the ponderous Madame de Gumpelheim, as a
wherry dashes against the oaken ribs of a steamer.

The little couple did not fall; they were struck on to a neighbouring
bench, luckily: but there was a laugh at the expense of Stenio and the
Queen of Scots—and Lord Kew, settling his panting partner on to a seat,
came up to make excuses for his awkwardness to the lady who had been
its victim. At the laugh produced by the catastrophe, the Duchesse’s
eyes gleamed with anger.

“M. de Castillonnes,” she said to her partner, “have you had any
quarrel with that Englishman?”

“With ce milor? But no,” said Stenio.

“He did it on purpose. There has been no day but his family has
insulted me!” hissed out the Duchesse, and at this moment Lord Kew came
up to make his apologies. He asked a thousand pardons of Madame la
Duchesse for being so maladroit.

“Maladroit! et tres maladroit, monsieur,” says Stenio, curling his
moustache; “c’est bien le mot, monsieur!

“Also, I make my excuses to Madame la Duchesse, which I hope she will
receive,” said Lord Kew. The Duchesse shrugged her shoulders and sunk
her head.

“When one does not know how to dance, one ought not to dance,”
continued the Duchesse’s knight.

“Monsieur is very good to give me lessons in dancing,” said Lord Kew.

“Any lessons which you please, milor!” cries Stenio; “and everywhere
where you will them.”

Lord Kew looked at the little man with surprise. He could not
understand so much anger for so trifling an accident, which happens a
dozen times in every crowded ball. He again bowed to the Duchesse, and
walked away.

“This is your Englishman—your Kew, whom you vaunt everywhere,” said
Stenio to M. de Florac, who was standing by and witnessed the scene.
“Is he simply bête, or is he poltroon as well? I believe him to be
both.”

“Silence, Victor!” cried Florac, seizing his arm, and drawing him away.
“You know me, and that I am neither one or the other. Believe my word,
that my Lord Kew wants neither courage nor wit!”

“Will you be my witness, Florac?” continues the other.

“To take him your excuses? yes. It is you who have insulted—”

“Yes, parbleu, I have insulted!” says the Gascon.

“—A man who never willingly offended soul alive. A man full of heart:
the most frank: the most loyal. I have seen him put to the proof, and
believe me he is all I say.”

“Eh! so much the better for me!” cried the Southron. “I shall have the
honour of meeting a gallant man: and there will be two on the field.”

“They are making a tool of you, my poor Gascon,” said M. de Florac, who
saw Madame d’Ivry’s eyes watching the couple. She presently took the
arm of the noble Count de Punter, and went for fresh air into the
adjoining apartment, where play was going on as usual; and Lord Kew and
his friend Lord Rooster were pacing the room apart from the gamblers.

My Lord Rooster, at something which Kew said, looked puzzled, and said,
“Pooh, stuff, damned little Frenchman! Confounded nonsense!”

“I was searching you, milor!” said Madame d’Ivry, in a most winning
tone, tripping behind him with her noiseless little feet. “Allow me a
little word. Your arm! You used to give it me once, mon filleul! I hope
you think nothing of the rudeness of M. de Castillonnes; he is a
foolish Gascon: he must have been too often to the buffet this
evening.”

Lord Kew said, No, indeed, he thought nothing of de Castillonnes’
rudeness.

“I am so glad! These heroes of the salle-d’armes have not the commonest
manners. These Gascons are always flamberge au vent. What would the
charming Miss Ethel say, if she heard of the dispute?”

“Indeed there is no reason why she should hear of it,” said Lord Kew,
“unless some obliging friend should communicate it to her.”

“Communicate it to her—the poor dear! who would be so cruel as to give
her pain?” asked the innocent Duchesse. “Why do you look at me so,
Frank?”

“Because I admire you,” said her interlocutor, with a bow. “I have
never seen Madame la Duchesse to such advantage as to-day.”

“You speak in enigmas! Come back with me to the ballroom. Come and
dance with me once more. You used to dance with me. Let us have one
waltz more, Kew. And then, and then, in a day or two I shall go back to
Monsieur le Duc, and tell him that his filleul is going to marry the
fairest of all Englishwomen and to turn hermit in the country, and
orator in the Chamber of Peers. You have wit! ah si—you have wit!” And
she led back Lord Kew, rather amazed himself at what he was doing, into
the ballroom; so that the good-natured people who were there, and who
beheld them dancing, could not refrain from clapping their hands at the
sight of this couple.

The Duchess danced as if she was bitten by that Neapolitan spider
which, according to the legend, is such a wonderful dance-incentor. She
would have the music quicker and quicker. She sank on Kew’s arm, and
clung on his support. She poured out all the light of her languishing
eyes into his face. Their glances rather confused than charmed him. But
the bystanders were pleased; they thought it so good-hearted of the
Duchesse, after the little quarrel, to make a public avowal of
reconciliation!

Lord Rooster looking on, at the entrance of the dancing-room, over
Monsieur de Florac’s shoulder, said, “It’s all right! She’s a clipper
to dance, the little Duchess.”

“The viper!” said Florac, “how she writhes!”

“I suppose that business with the Frenchman is all over,” says Lord
Rooster. “Confounded piece of nonsense.”

“You believe it finished? We shall see!” said Florac, who perhaps knew
his fair cousin better. When the waltz was over, Kew led his partner to
a seat, and bowed to her; but though she made room for him at her side,
pointing to it, and gathering up her rustling robes so that he might
sit down, he moved away, his face full of gloom. He never wished to be
near her again. There was something more odious to him in her
friendship than her hatred. He knew hers was the hand that had dealt
that stab at him and Ethel in the morning. He went back and talked with
his two friends in the doorway. “Couch yourself, my little Kiou,” said
Florac. “You are all pale. You were best in bed, mon garçon!”

“She has made me promise to take her in to supper,” Kew said, with a
sigh.

“She will poison you,” said the other. “Why have they abolished the
roue chez nous? My word of honour they should retabliche it for this
woman.”

“There is one in the next room,” said Kew, with a laugh, “Come,
Vicomte, let us try our fortune,” and he walked back into the
play-room.

That was the last night on which Lord Kew ever played a gambling game.
He won constantly. The double zero seemed to obey him; so that the
croupiers wondered at his fortune. Florac backed it; saying with the
superstition of a gambler, “I am sure something goes to arrive to this
boy.” From time to time M. de Florac went back to the dancing-room,
leaving his mise under Kew’s charge. He always found his heaps
increased; indeed the worthy Vicomte wanted a turn of luck in his
favour. On one occasion he returned with a grave face, saying to Lord
Rooster, “She has the other one in hand. We are going to see.”
“Trente-six encor! et rouge gagne,” cried the croupier with his nasal
tone, Monsieur de Florac’s pockets overflowed with double Napoleons,
and he stopped his play, luckily, for Kew putting down his winnings,
once, twice, thrice, lost them all.

When Lord Kew had left the dancing-room, Madame d’Ivry saw Stenio
following him with fierce looks, and called back that bearded bard.
“You were going to pursue M. de Kew,” she said: “I knew you were. Sit
down here, sir,” and she patted him down on her seat with her fan.

“Do you wish that I should call him back, madame?” said the poet, with
the deepest tragic accents.

“I can bring him when I want him, Victor,” said the lady.

“Let us hope others will be equally fortunate,” the Gascon said, with
one hand in his breast, the other stroking his moustache.

“Fi, monsieur, que vous sentez le tabac! je vous le défends,
entendez-vous, monsieur?”

“Pourtant, I have seen the day when Madame la Duchesse did not disdain
a cigar,” said Victor. “If the odour incommodes, permit that I retire.”

“And you also would quit me, Stenio? Do you think I did not mark your
eyes towards Miss Newcome? your anger when she refused you to dance?
Ah! we see all. A woman does not deceive herself, do you see? You send
me beautiful verses, Poet. You can write as well of a statue or a
picture, of a rose or a sunset, as of the heart of a woman. You were
angry just now because I danced with M. de Kew. Do you think in a
woman’s eyes jealousy is unpardonable?”

“You know how to provoke it, madame,” continued the tragedian.

“Monsieur,” replied the lady, with dignity, “am I to render you an
account of all my actions, and ask your permission for a walk?”

“In fact, I am but the slave, madame,” groaned the Gascon, “I am not
the master.”

“You are a very rebellious slave, monsieur,” continues the lady, with a
pretty moue, and a glance of the large eyes artfully brightened by her
rouge. “Suppose—suppose I danced with M. de Kew, not for his
sake—Heaven knows to dance with him is not a pleasure—but for yours.
Suppose I do not want a foolish quarrel to proceed. Suppose I know that
he is ni sot ni poltron as you pretend. I overheard you, sir, talking
with one of the basest of men, my good cousin, M. de Florac: but it is
not of him I speak. Suppose I know the Comte de Kew to be a man, cold
and insolent, ill-bred, and grossier, as the men of his nation are—but
one who lacks no courage—one who is terrible when roused; might I have
no occasion to fear, not for him, but——”

“But for me! Ah, Marie! Ah, madame! Believe you that a man of my blood
will yield a foot to any Englishman? Do you know the story of my race?
do you know that since my childhood I have vowed hatred to that nation?
Tenez, madame, this M. Jones who frequents your salon, it was but
respect for you that has enabled me to keep my patience with this
stupid islander. This Captain Blackball, whom you distinguish, who
certainly shoots well, who mounts well to horse, I have always thought
his manners were those of the marker of a billiard. But I respect him
because he has made war with Don Carlos against the English. But this
young M. de Kew, his laugh crisps me the nerves; his insolent air makes
me bound; in beholding him I said to myself, I hate you; think whether
I love him better after having seen him as I did but now, madame!”
Also, but this Victor did not say, he thought Kew had laughed at him at
the beginning of the evening, when the blanche Miss had refused to
dance with him.

“Ah, Victor, it is not him, but you that I would save,” said the
Duchess. And the people round about, and the Duchess herself,
afterwards said, yes, certainly, she had a good heart. She entreated
Lord Kew; she implored M. Victor; she did everything in her power to
appease the quarrel between him and the Frenchman.

After the ball came the supper, which was laid at separate little
tables, where parties of half a dozen enjoyed themselves. Lord Kew was
of the Duchess’s party, where our Gascon friend had not a seat. But
being one of the managers of the entertainment, his lordship went about
from table to table, seeing that the guests at each lacked nothing. He
supposed too that the dispute with the Gascon had possibly come to an
end; at any rate, disagreeable as the other’s speech had been, he had
resolved to put up with it, not having the least inclination to drink
the Frenchman’s blood, or to part with his own on so absurd a quarrel.
He asked people in his good-natured way to drink wine with him; and
catching M. Victor’s eye scowling at him from a distant table, he sent
a waiter with a champagne-bottle to his late opponent, and lifted his
glass as a friendly challenge. The waiter carried the message to M.
Victor, who, when he heard it, turned up his glass, and folded his arms
in a stately manner. “M. de Castillonnes dit qu’il refuse, milor,” said
the waiter, rather scared. “He charged me to bring that message to
milor.” Florac ran across to the angry Gascon. It was not while at
Madame d’Ivry’s table that Lord Kew sent his challenge and received his
reply; his duties as steward had carried him away from that pretty
early.

Meanwhile the glimmering dawn peered into the windows of the
refreshment-room, and behold, the sun broke in and scared all the
revellers. The ladies scurried away like so many ghosts at cock-crow,
some of them not caring to face that detective luminary. Cigars had
been lighted ere this; the men remained smoking them with those
sleepless German waiters still bringing fresh supplies of drink. Lord
Kew gave the Duchesse d’Ivry his arm, and was leading her out; M. de
Castillonnes stood scowling directly in their way, upon which, with
rather an abrupt turn of the shoulder, and a “Pardon, monsieur,” Lord
Kew pushed by, and conducted the Duchesse to her carriage. She did not
in the least see what had happened between the two gentlemen in the
passage; she ogled, and nodded, and kissed her hands quite
affectionately to Kew as the fly drove away.

Florac in the meanwhile had seized his compatriot, who had drunk
champagne copiously with others, if not with Kew, and was in vain
endeavouring to make him hear reason. The Gascon was furious; he vowed
that Lord Kew had struck him. “By the tomb of my mother,” he bellowed,
“I swear I will have his blood!” Lord Rooster was bawling out, “D——
him, carry him to bed, and shut him up;” which remarks Victor did not
understand, or two victims would doubtless have been sacrificed on his
mamma’s mausoleum.

When Kew came back (as he was only too sure to do), the little Gascon
rushed forward with a glove in his hand, and having an audience of
smokers round about him, made a furious speech about England, leopards,
cowardice, insolent islanders, and Napoleon at St. Helena; and demanded
reason for Kew’s conduct during the night. As he spoke, he advanced
towards Lord Kew, glove in hand, and lifted it as if he was actually
going to strike.

“There is no need for further words,” said Lord Kew, taking his cigar
out of his mouth. “If you don’t drop that glove, upon my word I will
pitch you out of the window. Ha!—Pick the man up, somebody. You’ll bear
witness, gentlemen, I couldn’t help myself. If he wants me in the
morning, he knows where to find me.”

“I declare that my Lord Kew has acted with great forbearance, and under
the most brutal provocation—the most brutal provocation, entendez-vows,
M. Cabasse?” cried out M. de Florac, rushing forward to the Gascon, who
had now risen; “monsieur’s conduct has been unworthy of a Frenchman and
a gallant homme.”

“D—— it, he has had it on his nob, though,” said Lord Viscount Rooster,
laconically.

“Ah, Roosterre! ceci n’est pas pour rire,” Florac cried sadly, as they
both walked away with Lord Kew; “I wish that first blood was all that
was to be shed in this quarrel”

“Gaw! how he did go down!” cried Rooster, convulsed with laughter.

“I am very sorry for it,” said Kew, quite seriously; “I couldn’t help
it. God forgive me.” And he hung down his head. He thought of the past,
and its levities, and punishment coming after him _pede claudo_. It was
with all his heart the contrite young man said “God forgive me.” He
would take what was to follow as the penalty of what had gone before.

“Pallas te hoc vulnere, Pallas immolat, mon pauvre Kiou,” said his
French friend. And Lord Rooster, whose classical education had been
much neglected, turned round and said, “Hullo, mate, what ship’s that?”

Viscount Rooster had not been two hours in bed, when the Count de
Punter (formerly of the Black Jägers) waited upon him upon the part of
M. de Castillonnes and the Earl of Kew, who had referred him to the
Viscount to arrange matters for a meeting between them. As the meeting
must take place out of the Baden territory, and they ought to move
before the police prevented them, the Count proposed that they should
at once make for France; where, as it was an affair of honneur, they
would assuredly be let to enter without passports.

Lady Anne and Lady Kew heard that the gentlemen after the ball had all
gone out on a hunting-party, and were not alarmed for four-and-twenty
hours at least. On the next day none of them returned; and on the day
after, the family heard that Lord Kew had met with rather a dangerous
accident; but all the town knew he had been shot by M. de Castillonnes
on one of the islands on the Rhine, opposite Kehl, where he was now
lying.




CHAPTER XXXV.
Across the Alps


Our discursive muse must now take her place in the little britzska in
which Clive Newcome and his companions are travelling, and cross the
Alps in that vehicle, beholding the snows on St. Gothard, and the
beautiful region through which the Ticino rushes on its way to the
Lombard lakes, and the corn-covered great plains of the Milanese; and
that royal city, with the cathedral for its glittering crown, only less
magnificent than the imperial dome of Rome. I have some long letters
from Mr. Clive, written during this youthful tour, every step of which,
from the departure at Baden, to the gate of Milan, he describes as
beautiful; and doubtless, the delightful scenes through which the young
man went, had their effect in soothing any private annoyances with
which his journey commenced. The aspect of nature, in that fortunate
route which he took, is so noble and cheering, that our private affairs
and troubles shrink away abashed before that serene splendour. O sweet
peaceful scene of azure lake, and snow-crowned mountain, so wonderfully
lovely is your aspect, that it seems like heaven almost, and as if
grief and care could not enter it! What young Clive’s private cares
were I knew not as yet in those days; and he kept them out of his
letters; it was only in the intimacy of future life that some of these
pains were revealed to me.

Some three months after taking leave of Miss Ethel, our young gentleman
found himself at Rome, with his friend Ridley still for a companion.
Many of us, young or middle-aged, have felt that delightful shock which
the first sight of the great city inspires. There is one other place of
which the view strikes one with an emotion even greater than that with
which we look at Rome, where Augustus was reigning when He saw the day,
whose birthplace is separated but by a hill or two from the awful gates
of Jerusalem. Who that has beheld both can forget that first aspect of
either? At the end of years the emotion occasioned by the sight still
thrills in your memory, and it smites you as at the moment when you
first viewed it.

The business of the present novel, however, lies neither with priest
nor pagan, but with Mr. Clive Newcome, and his affairs and his
companions at this period of his life. Nor, if the gracious reader
expects to hear of cardinals in scarlet, and noble Roman princes and
princesses, will he find such in this history. The only noble Roman
into whose mansion our friend got admission was the Prince Polonia,
whose footmen wear the liveries of the English royal family, who gives
gentlemen and even painters cash upon good letters of credit; and, once
or twice in a season, opens his transtiberine palace and treats his
customers to a ball. Our friend Clive used jocularly to say, he
believed there were no Romans. There were priests in portentous hats;
there were friars with shaven crowns; there were the sham peasantry,
who dressed themselves out in masquerade costumes, with bagpipe and
goatskin, with crossed leggings and scarlet petticoats, who let
themselves out to artists at so many pauls per sitting; but he never
passed a Roman’s door except to buy a cigar or to purchase a
handkerchief. Thither, as elsewhere, we carry our insular habits with
us. We have a little England at Paris, a little England at Munich,
Dresden, everywhere. Our friend is an Englishman, and did at Rome as
the English do.

There was the polite English society, the society that flocks to see
the Colosseum lighted up with blue fire, that flocks to the Vatican to
behold the statues by torchlight, that hustles into the churches on
public festivals in black veils and deputy-lieutenants’ uniforms, and
stares, and talks, and uses opera-glasses while the pontiffs of the
Roman Church are performing its ancient rites, and the crowds of
faithful are kneeling round the altars; the society which gives its
balls and dinners, has its scandal and bickerings, its aristocrats,
parvenus, toadies imported from Belgravia; has its club, its hunt, and
its Hyde Park on the Pincio: and there is the other little English
world, the broad-hatted, long-bearded, velvet-jacketed, jovial colony
of the artists, who have their own feasts, haunts, and amusements by
the side of their aristocratic compatriots, with whom but few of them
have the honour to mingle.

J. J. and Clive engaged pleasant lofty apartments in the Via
Gregoriana. Generations of painters had occupied these chambers and
gone their way. The windows of their painting-room looked into a quaint
old garden, where there were ancient statues of the Imperial time, a
babbling fountain and noble orange-trees with broad clustering leaves
and golden balls of fruit, glorious to look upon. Their walks abroad
were endlessly pleasant and delightful. In every street there were
scores of pictures of the graceful characteristic Italian life, which
our painters seem one and all to reject, preferring to depict their
quack brigands, contadini, pifferari, and the like, because Thompson
painted them before Jones, and Jones before Thompson, and so on,
backwards into time. There were the children at play, the women huddled
round the steps of the open doorways, in the kindly Roman winter; grim,
portentous old hags, such as Michael Angelo painted, draped in majestic
raggery; mothers and swarming bambins; slouching countrymen, dark of
beard and noble of countenance, posed in superb attitudes, lazy,
tattered, and majestic. There came the red troops, the black troops,
the blue troops of the army of priests; the snuffy regiments of
Capuchins, grave and grotesque; the trim French abbés; my lord the
bishop, with his footman (those wonderful footmen); my lord the
cardinal, in his ramshackle coach and his two, nay three, footmen
behind him;—flunkeys, that look as if they had been dressed by the
costumier of a British pantomime; coach with prodigious emblazonments
of hats and coats-of-arms, that seems as if it came out of the
pantomime too, and was about to turn into something else. So it is,
that what is grand to some persons’ eyes appears grotesque to others;
and for certain sceptical persons, that step, which we have heard of,
between the sublime and the ridiculous, is not visible.

“I wish it were not so,” writes Clive, in one of the letters wherein he
used to pour his full heart out in those days. “I see these people at
their devotions, and envy them their rapture. A friend, who belongs to
the old religion, took me, last week, into a church where the Virgin
lately appeared in person to a Jewish gentleman, flashed down upon him
from heaven in light and splendour celestial, and, of course,
straightway converted him. My friend bade me look at the picture, and,
kneeling down beside me, I know prayed with all his honest heart that
the truth might shine down upon me too; but I saw no glimpse of heaven
at all. I saw but a poor picture, an altar with blinking candles, a
church hung with tawdry strips of red and white calico. The good, kind
W—— went away, humbly saying ‘that such might have happened again if
heaven so willed it.’ I could not but feel a kindness and admiration
for the good man. I know his works are made to square with his faith,
that he dines on a crust, lives as chaste as a hermit, and gives his
all to the poor.

“Our friend J. J., very different to myself in so many respects, so
superior in all, is immensely touched by these ceremonies. They seem to
answer to some spiritual want of his nature, and he comes away
satisfied as from a feast, where I have only found vacancy. Of course
our first pilgrimage was to St. Peter’s. What a walk! Under what noble
shadows does one pass; how great and liberal the houses are, with
generous casements and courts, and great grey portals which giants
might get through and keep their turbans on. Why, the houses are twice
as tall as Lamb Court itself; and over them hangs a noble dinge, a
venerable mouldy splendour. Over the solemn portals are ancient mystic
escutcheons—vast shields of princes and cardinals, such as Ariosto’s
knights might take down; and every figure about them is a picture by
himself. At every turn there is a temple: in every court a brawling
fountain. Besides the people of the streets and houses, and the army of
priests black and brown, there’s a great silent population of marble.
There are battered gods tumbled out of Olympus and broken in the fall,
and set up under niches and over fountains; there are senators
namelessly, noselessly, noiselessly seated under archways, or lurking
in courts and gardens. And then, besides these defunct ones, of whom
these old figures may be said to be the corpses, there is the reigning
family, a countless carved hierarchy of angels, saints, confessors of
the latter dynasty which has conquered the court of Jove. I say, Pen, I
wish Warrington would write the history of the Last of the Pagans. Did
you never have a sympathy for them as the monks came rushing into their
temples, kicking down their poor altars, smashing the fair calm faces
of their gods, and sending their vestals a-flying? They are always
preaching here about the persecution of the Christians. Are not the
churches full of martyrs with choppers in their meek heads; virgins on
gridirons; riddled St. Sebastians, and the like? But have they never
persecuted in their turn? O me! You and I know better, who were bred up
near to the pens of Smithfield, where Protestants and Catholics have
taken their turn to be roasted.

“You pass through an avenue of angels and saints on the bridge across
Tiber, all in action; their great wings seem clanking, their marble
garments clapping; St. Michael, descending upon the Fiend, has been
caught and bronzified just as he lighted on the Castle of St. Angelo:
his enemy doubtless fell crushing through the roof and so downwards. He
is as natural as blank verse—that bronze angel-set, rhythmic,
grandiose. You’ll see, some day or other, he’s a great sonnet, sir, I’m
sure of that. Milton wrote in bronze; I am sure Virgil polished off his
Georgics in marble—sweet calm shapes! exquisite harmonies of line! As
for the Aeneid; that, sir, I consider to be so many bas-reliefs, mural
ornaments which affect me not much.

“I think I have lost sight of St. Peter’s, haven’t I? Yet it is big
enough. How it makes your heart beat when you first see it! Ours did as
we came in at night from Civita Vecchia, and saw a great ghostly
darkling dome rising solemnly up into the grey night, and keeping us
company ever so long as we drove, as if it had been an orb fallen out
of heaven with its light put out. As you look at it from the Pincio,
and the sun sets behind it, surely that aspect of earth and sky is one
of the grandest in the world. I don’t like to say that the facade of
the church is ugly and obtrusive. As long as the dome overawes, that
facade is supportable. You advance towards it—through, oh, such a noble
court! with fountains flashing up to meet the sunbeams; and right and
left of you two sweeping half-crescents of great columns; but you pass
by the courtiers and up to the steps of the throne, and the dome seems
to disappear behind it. It is as if the throne was upset, and the king
had toppled over.

“There must be moments, in Rome especially, when every man of friendly
heart, who writes himself English and Protestant, must feel a pang at
thinking that he and his countrymen are insulated from European
Christendom. An ocean separates us. From one shore or the other one can
see the neighbour cliffs on clear days: one must wish sometimes that
there were no stormy gulf between us; and from Canterbury to Rome a
pilgrim could pass, and not drown beyond Dover. Of the beautiful parts
of the great Mother Church I believe among us many people have no idea;
we think of lazy friars, of pining cloistered virgins, of ignorant
peasants worshipping wood and stones, bought and sold indulgences,
absolutions, and the like commonplaces of Protestant satire. Lo! yonder
inscription, which blazes round the dome of the temple, so great and
glorious it looks like heaven almost, and as if the words were written
in stars, it proclaims to all the world, this is that Peter, and on
this rock the Church shall be built, against which Hell shall not
prevail. Under the bronze canopy his throne is lit with lights that
have been burning before it for ages. Round this stupendous chamber are
ranged the grandees of his court. Faith seems to be realised in their
marble figures. Some of them were alive but yesterday; others, to be as
blessed as they, walk the world even now doubtless; and the
commissioners of heaven, here holding their court a hundred years
hence, shall authoritatively announce their beatification. The signs of
their power shall not be wanting. They heal the sick, open the eyes of
the blind, cause the lame to walk to-day as they did eighteen centuries
ago. Are there not crowds ready to bear witness to their wonders? Isn’t
there a tribunal appointed to try their claims; advocates to plead for
and against; prelates and clergy and multitudes of faithful to back and
believe them? Thus you shall kiss the hand of a priest to-day, who has
given his to a friar whose bones are already beginning to work
miracles, who has been the disciple of another whom the Church has just
proclaimed a saint,—hand in hand they hold by one another till the line
is lost up in heaven. Come, friend, let us acknowledge this, and go and
kiss the toe of St. Peter. Alas! there’s the Channel always between us;
and we no more believe in the miracles of St. Thomas of Canterbury,
than that the bones of His Grace John Bird, who sits in St. Thomas’s
chair presently, will work wondrous cures in the year 2000: that his
statue will speak, or his portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence will wink.

“So, you see, at those grand ceremonies which the Roman Church exhibits
at Christmas, I looked on as a Protestant. Holy Father on his throne or
in his palanquin, cardinals with their tails and their train-bearers,
mitred bishops and abbots, regiments of friars and clergy, relics
exposed for adoration, columns draped, altars illuminated, incense
smoking, organs pealing, and boxes of piping soprani, Swiss guards with
slashed breeches and fringed halberts;—between us and all this
splendour of old-world ceremony, there’s an ocean flowing: and yonder
old statue of Peter might have been Jupiter again, surrounded by a
procession of flamens and augurs, and Augustus as Pontifex Maximus, to
inspect the sacrifices,—and my feelings at the spectacle had been,
doubtless, pretty much the same.

“Shall I utter any more heresies? I am an unbeliever in Raphael’s
‘Transfiguration’—the scream of that devil-possessed boy, in the lower
part of the figure of eight (a stolen boy too), jars the whole music of
the composition. On Michael Angelo’s great wall, the grotesque and
terrible are not out of place. What an awful achievement! Fancy the
state of mind of the man who worked it—as alone, day after day, he
devised and drew those dreadful figures! Suppose in the days of the
Olympian dynasty, the subdued Titan rebels had been set to ornament a
palace for Jove, they would have brought in some such tremendous work:
or suppose that Michael descended to the Shades, and brought up this
picture out of the halls of Limbo. I like a thousand and a thousand
times better to think of Raphael’s loving spirit. As he looked at women
and children, his beautiful face must have shone like sunshine: his
kind hand must have caressed the sweet figures as he formed them. If I
protest against the ‘Transfiguration,’ and refuse to worship at that
altar before which so many generations have knelt, there are hundreds
of others which I salute thankfully. It is not so much in the set
harangues (to take another metaphor), as in the daily tones and talk
that his voice is so delicious. Sweet poetry, and music, and tender
hymns drop from him: he lifts his pencil, and something gracious falls
from it on the paper. How noble his mind must have been! it seems but
to receive, and his eye seems only to rest on, what is great, and
generous, and lovely. You walk through crowded galleries, where are
pictures ever so large and pretentious; and come upon a grey paper, or
a little fresco, bearing his mark-and over all the brawl and the throng
recognise his sweet presence. ‘I would like to have you been Giulio
Romano,’ J. J. says (who does not care for Giulio’s pictures), ‘because
then I would have been Raphael’s favourite pupil.’ We agreed that we
would rather have seen him and William Shakspeare, than all the men we
ever read of. Fancy poisoning a fellow out of envy—as Spagnoletto did!
There are some men whose admiration takes that bilious shape. There’s a
fellow in our mess at the Lepre, a clever enough fellow too—and not a
bad fellow to the poor. He was a Gandishite. He is a genre and portrait
painter, by the name of Haggard. He hates J. J. because Lord Fareham,
who is here, has given J. J. an order; and he hates me, because I wear
a clean shirt, and ride a cock-horse.

“I wish you could come to our mess at the Lepre. It’s such a dinner:
such a tablecloth: such a waiter: such a company! Every man has a beard
and a sombrero: and you would fancy we were a band of brigands. We are
regaled with woodcocks, snipes, wild swans, ducks, robins, and owls and
οἰωνοῖσι τε πᾶσι for dinner; and with three pauls’ worth of wines and
victuals the hungriest has enough, even Claypole the sculptor. Did you
ever know him? He used to come to the Haunt. He looks like the
Saracen’s head with his beard now. There is a French table still more
hairy than ours, a German table, an American table. After dinner we go
and have coffee and mezzo-caldo at the Café Greco over the way.
Mezzo-caldo is not a bad drink—a little rum—a slice of fresh
citron—lots of pounded sugar, and boiling water for the rest. Here in
various parts of the cavern (it is a vaulted low place) the various
nations have their assigned quarters, and we drink our coffee and
strong waters, and abuse Guido, or Rubens, or Bernini _selon les
goûts_, and blow such a cloud of smoke as would make Warrington’s lungs
dilate with pleasure. We get very good cigars for a bajoccho and
half—that is very good for us, cheap tobaccanalians; and capital when
you have got no others. M’Collop is here: he made a great figure at a
cardinal’s reception in the tartan of the M’Collop. He is splendid at
the tomb of the Stuarts, and wanted to cleave Haggard down to the chine
with his claymore for saying that Charles Edward was often drunk.

“Some of us have our breakfasts at the Café Greco at dawn. The birds
are very early birds here; and you’ll see the great sculptors—the old
Dons, you know, who look down on us young fellows—at their coffee here
when it is yet twilight. As I am a swell, and have a servant, J. J. and
I breakfast at our lodgings. I wish you could see Terribile our
attendant, and Ottavia our old woman! You will see both of them on the
canvas one day. When he _hasn’t_ blacked our boots and has got our
breakfast, Terribile the valet-de-chambre becomes Terribile the model.
He has figured on a hundred canvases ere this, and almost ever since he
was born. All his family were models. His mother having been a Venus,
is now a Witch of Endor. His father is in the patriarchal line: he has
himself done the cherubs, the shepherd-boys, and now is a grown man,
and ready as a warrior, a pifferaro, a capuchin, or what you will.

“After the coffee and the Café Greco we all go to the Life Academy.
After the Life Academy, those who belong to the world dress and go out
to tea-parties just as if we were in London. Those who are not in
society have plenty of fun of their own—and better fun than the
tea-party fun too. Jack Screwby has a night once a week, sardines and
ham for supper, and a cask of Marsala in the corner. Your humble
servant entertains on Thursdays: which is Lady Fitch’s night too; and I
flatter myself some of the London dandies who are passing the winter
here, prefer the cigars and humble liquors which we dispense, to tea
and Miss Fitch’s performance on the pianoforte.

“What is that I read in _Galignani_ about Lord K— and an affair of
honour at Baden? Is it my dear kind jolly Kew with whom some one has
quarrelled? I know those who will be even more grieved than I am,
should anything happen to the best of good fellows. A great friend of
Lord Kew’s, Jack Belsize commonly called, came with us from Baden
through Switzerland, and we left him at Milan. I see by the paper that
his elder brother is dead and so poor Jack will be a great man some
day. I wish the chance had happened sooner if it was to befall at all.
So my amiable cousin, Barnes Newcome Newcome, Esq., has married my Lady
Clara Pulleyn; I wish her joy of her bridegroom. All I have heard of
that family is from the newspaper. If you meet them, tell me anything
about them.—We had a very pleasant time altogether at Baden. I suppose
the accident to Kew will put off his marriage with Miss Newcome. They
have been engaged, you know, ever so long.—And—do, do write to me and
tell me something about London. It’s best I should—should stay here and
work this winter and the next. J. J. has done a famous picture, and if
I send a couple home, you’ll give them a notice in the _Pall Mall
Gazette_—won’t you?—for the sake of old times and yours affectionately,
Clive Newcome.”




CHAPTER XXXVI.
In which M. de Florac is promoted


However much Madame la Duchesse d’Ivry was disposed to admire and
praise her own conduct in the affair which ended so unfortunately for
poor Lord Kew, between whom and the Gascon her grace vowed that she had
done everything in her power to prevent a battle, the old Duke, her
lord, was, it appeared, by no means delighted with his wife’s
behaviour, nay, visited her with his very sternest displeasure. Miss
O’Grady, the Duchesse’s companion, and her little girl’s instructress,
at this time resigned her functions in the Ivry family; it is possible
that in the recriminations consequent upon the governess’s dismissal,
the Miss Irlandaise, in whom the family had put so much confidence,
divulged stories unfavourable to her patroness, and caused the
indignation of the Duke, her husband. Between Florac and the Duchesse
there was also open war and rupture. He had been one of Kew’s seconds
in the latter’s affair with the Vicomte’s countryman. He had even cried
out for fresh pistols, and proposed to engage Castillonnes, when his
gallant principal fell; and though a second duel was luckily averted as
murderous and needless, M. de Florac never hesitated afterwards, and in
all companies, to denounce with the utmost virulence the instigator and
the champion of the odious original quarrel. He vowed that the Duchesse
had shot _le petit Kiou_ as effectually as if she had herself fired the
pistol at his breast. Murderer, poisoner, Brinvilliers, a hundred more
such epithets he used against his kinswoman, regretting that the good
old times were past—that there was no Chambre Ardente to try her, and
no rack and wheel to give her her due.

The biographer of the Newcomes has no need (although he possesses the
fullest information) to touch upon the Duchesse’s doings, further than
as they relate to that most respectable English family. When the Duke
took his wife into the country, Florac never hesitated to say that to
live with her was dangerous for the old man, and to cry out to his
friends of the Boulevards or the Jockey Club, “Ma parole d’honneur,
cette femme le tuera!”

Do you know, O gentle and unsuspicious readers, or have you ever
reckoned as you have made your calculation of society, how many most
respectable husbands help to kill their wives—how many respectable
wives aid in sending their husbands to Hades? The wife of a
chimney-sweep or a journeyman butcher comes shuddering before a police
magistrate—her head bound up—her body scarred and bleeding with wounds,
which the drunken ruffian, her lord, has administered: a poor
shopkeeper or mechanic is driven out of his home by the furious
ill-temper of the shrill virago his wife—takes to the public-house—to
evil courses—to neglecting his business—to the gin-bottle—to _delirium
tremens_—to perdition. Bow Street, and policemen, and the newspaper
reporters, have cognisance and a certain jurisdiction over these vulgar
matrimonial crimes; but in politer company how many murderous assaults
are there by husband or wife—where the woman is not felled by the
actual fist, though she staggers and sinks under blows quite as cruel
and effectual; where, with old wounds yet unhealed, which she strives
to hide under a smiling face from the world, she has to bear up and to
be stricken down and to rise to her feet again, under fresh daily
strokes of torture; where the husband, fond and faithful, has to suffer
slights, coldness, insult, desertion, his children sneered away from
their love for him, his friends driven from his door by jealousy, his
happiness strangled, his whole life embittered, poisoned, destroyed! If
you were acquainted with the history of every family in your street,
don’t you know that in two or three of the houses there such tragedies
have been playing? Is not the young mistress of Number 20 already
pining at her husband’s desertion? The kind master of Number 30 racking
his fevered brains and toiling through sleepless nights to pay for the
jewels on his wife’s neck, and the carriage out of which she ogles
Lothario in the Park? The fate under which man or woman falls, blow of
brutal tyranny, heartless desertion, weight of domestic care too heavy
to bear—are not blows such as these constantly striking people down? In
this long parenthesis we are wandering ever so far away from M. le Duc
and Madame la Duchesse d’Ivry, and from the vivacious Florac’s
statement regarding his kinsman, that that woman will kill him.

There is this at least to be said, that if the Duc d’Ivry did die he
was a very old gentleman, and had been a great viveur for at least
threescore years of his life. As Prince de Moncontour in his father’s
time before the Revolution, during the Emigration, even after the
Restoration, M. le Duc had vecu with an extraordinary vitality. He had
gone through good and bad fortune: extreme poverty, display and
splendour, affairs of love—affairs of honour,—and of one disease or
another a man must die at the end. After the Baden business—and he had
dragged off his wife to Champagne—the Duke became greatly broken; he
brought his little daughter to a convent at Paris, putting the child
under the special guardianship of Madame de Florac, with whom and with
whose family in these latter days the old chief of the house effected a
complete reconciliation. The Duke was now for ever coming to Madame de
Florac; he poured all his wrongs and griefs into her ear with garrulous
senile eagerness. “That little Duchesse is a monstre, a femme d’Eugene
Sue,” the Vicomte used to say; “the poor old Duke he cry—ma parole
d’honneur, he cry and I cry too when he comes to recount to my poor
mother, whose sainted heart is the _asile_ of all griefs, a real Hotel
Dieu, my word the most sacred, with beds for all the afflicted, with
sweet words, like Sisters of Charity, to minister to them:—I cry, mon
bon Pendennis, when this _vieillard_ tells his stories about his wife
and tears his white hairs to the feet of my mother.”

When the little Antoinette was separated by her father from her mother,
the Duchesse d’Ivry, it might have been expected that that poetess
would have dashed off a few more _cris de l’âme_, shrieking according
to her wont, and baring and beating that shrivelled maternal bosom of
hers, from which her child had been just torn. The child skipped and
laughed to go away to the convent. It was only when she left Madame de
Florac that she used to cry; and when urged by that good lady to
exhibit a little decorous sentiment in writing to her mamma, Antoinette
would ask, in her artless way, “Pourquoi? Mamma used never to speak to
me except sometimes before the world, before ladies, that understands
itself. When her gentleman came, she put me to the door; then she gave
me tapes, _oh oui_, she gave me tapes! I cry no more; she has so much
made to cry M. le Duc, that it is quite enough of one in a family.” So
Madame la Duchesse d’Ivry did not weep, even in print, for the loss of
her pretty little Antoinette; besides, she was engaged, at that time,
by other sentimental occupations. A young grazier of their neighbouring
town, of an aspiring mind and remarkable poetic talents, engrossed the
Duchesse’s platonic affections at this juncture. When he had sold his
beasts at market, he would ride over and read Rousseau and Schiller
with Madame la Duchesse, who formed him. His pretty young wife was
rendered miserable by all these readings, but what could the poor
little ignorant countrywoman know of Platonism? Faugh! there is more
than one woman we see in society smiling about from house to house,
pleasant and sentimental and formosa superne enough; but I fancy a
fish’s tail is flapping under her fine flounces, and a forked fin at
the end of it!

Finer flounces, finer bonnets, more lovely wreaths, more beautiful
lace, smarter carriages, bigger white bows, larger footmen, were not
seen, during all the season of 18—, than appeared round about St.
George’s, Hanover Square, in the beautiful month of June succeeding
that September when so many of our friends the Newcomes were assembled
at Baden. Those flaunting carriages, powdered and favoured footmen,
were in attendance upon members of the Newcome family and their
connexions, who were celebrating what is called a marriage in high life
in the temple within. Shall we set down a catalogue of the dukes,
marquises, earls, who were present; cousins of the lovely bride? Are
they not already in the _Morning Herald_ and _Court Journal_, as well
as in the _Newcome Sentinel_ and _Independent_, and the _Dorking
Intelligence_ and _Chanticlere Weekly Gazette?_ There they are, all
printed at full length sure enough; the name of the bride, Lady Clara
Pulleyn, the lovely and accomplished daughter of the Earl and Countess
of Dorking; of the beautiful bridesmaids, the Ladies Henrietta,
Belinda, Adelaide Pulleyn, Miss Newcome, Miss Alice Newcome, Miss Maude
Newcome, Miss Anna Maria (Hobson) Newcome; and all the other persons
engaged in the ceremony. It was performed by the Right Honourable
Viscount Gallowglass, Bishop of Ballyshannon, brother-in-law to the
bride, assisted by the Honourable and Reverend Hercules O’Grady, his
lordship’s chaplain, and the Reverend John Bulders, Rector of St.
Mary’s, Newcome. Then follow the names of all the nobility who were
present, and of the noble and distinguished personages who signed the
book. Then comes an account of the principal dresses, chefs-d’œuvre of
Madame Crinoline; of the bride’s coronal of brilliants, supplied by
Messrs. Morr and Stortimer;—of the veil of priceless Chantilly lace,
the gift of the Dowager Countess of Kew. Then there is a description of
the wedding-breakfast at the house of the bride’s noble parents, and of
the cake, decorated by Messrs. Gunter with the most delicious taste and
the sweetest hymeneal allusions.

No mention was made by the fashionable chronicler of a slight
disturbance which occurred at St. George’s, and which was indeed out of
the province of such a genteel purveyor of news. Before the marriage
service began, a woman of vulgar appearance and disorderly aspect,
accompanied by two scared children who took no part in the disorder
occasioned by their mother’s proceeding, except by their tears and
outcries to augment the disquiet, made her appearance in one of the
pews of the church, was noted there by persons in the vestry, was
requested to retire by a beadle, and was finally induced to quit the
sacred precincts of the building by the very strongest persuasion of a
couple of policemen; X and Y laughed at one another, and nodded their
heads knowingly as the poor wretch with her whimpering boys was led
away. They understood very well who the personage was who had come to
disturb the matrimonial ceremony; it did not commence until Mrs. De
Lacy (as this lady chose to be called) had quitted this temple of
Hymen. She slunk through the throng of emblazoned carriages, and the
press of footmen arrayed as splendidly as Solomon in his glory. John
jeered at Thomas, William turned his powdered head, and signalled
Jeames, who answered with a corresponding grin, as the woman with sobs,
and wild imprecations, and frantic appeals, made her way through the
splendid crowd escorted by her aides-de-camp in blue. I dare say her
little history was discussed at many a dinner-table that day in the
basement story of several fashionable houses. I know that at clubs in
St. James’s the facetious little anecdote was narrated. A young fellow
came to Bays’s after the marriage breakfast and mentioned the
circumstance with funny comments; although the _Morning Post_, in
describing this affair in high life, naturally omitted all mention of
such low people as Mrs. De Lacy and her children.

Those people who knew the noble families whose union had been
celebrated by such a profusion of grandees, fine equipages, and
footmen, brass bands, brilliant toilets, and wedding favours, asked how
it was that Lord Kew did not assist at Barnes Newcome’s marriage; other
persons in society inquired waggishly why Jack Belsize was not present
to give Lady Clara away.

As for Jack Belsize, his clubs had not been ornamented by his presence
for a year past. It was said he had broken the bank at Hombourg last
autumn; had been heard of during the winter at Milan, Venice, and
Vienna; and when, a few months after the marriage of Barnes Newcome and
Lady Clara, Jack’s elder brother died, and he himself became the next
in succession to the title and estates of Highgate, many folks said it
was a pity little Barney’s marriage had taken place so soon. Lord Kew
was not present, because Kew was still abroad; he had had a gambling
duel with a Frenchman, and a narrow squeak for his life. He had turned
Roman Catholic, some men said; others vowed that he had joined the
Methodist persuasion. At all events Kew had given up his wild courses,
broken with the turf, and sold his stud off; he was delicate yet, and
his mother was taking care of him; between whom and the old dowager of
Kew, who had made up Barney’s marriage, as everybody knew, there was no
love lost.

Then who was the Prince de Moncontour, who, with his princess, figured
at this noble marriage? There was a Moncontour, the Duc d’Ivry’s son,
but he died at Paris before the revolution of ’30: one or two of the
oldsters at Bays’s, Major Pendennis, General Tufto, old Cackleby—the
old fogies, in a word—remembered the Duke of Ivry when he was here
during the Emigration, and when he was called Prince de Moncontour, the
title of the eldest son of the family. Ivry was dead, having buried his
son before him, and having left only a daughter by that young woman
whom he married, and who led him such a life. Who was this present
Moncontour?

He was a gentleman to whom the reader has already been presented,
though when we lately saw him at Baden he did not enjoy so magnificent
a title. Early in the year of Barnes Newcome’s marriage, there came to
England, and to our modest apartment in the Temple, a gentleman
bringing a letter of recommendation from our dear young Clive, who said
that the bearer, the Vicomte de Florac, was a great friend of his, and
of the Colonel’s, who had known his family from boyhood. A friend of
our Clive and our Colonel was sure of a welcome in Lamb Court; we gave
him the hand of hospitality, the best cigar in the box, the easy-chair
with only one broken leg; the dinner in chambers and at the club, the
banquet at Greenwich (where, _ma foi_, the little _whites baites_
elicited his profound satisfaction); in a word, did our best to honour
that bill which our young Clive had drawn upon us. We considered the
young one in the light of a nephew of our own; we took a pride in him,
and were fond of him; and as for the Colonel, did we not love and
honour him; would we not do our utmost in behalf of any stranger who
came recommended to us by Thomas Newcome’s good word? So Florac was
straightway admitted to our companionship. We showed him the town, and
some of the modest pleasures thereof; we introduced him to the Haunt,
and astonished him by the company which he met there. Between Brent’s
“Deserter” and Mark Wilder’s “Garryowen,” Florac sang—

Tiens voici ma pipe, voilà mon bri—quet;
Et quand la Tulipe fait le noir tra—jet
Que tu sois la seule dans le régi—ment
Avec la brûle-gueule de ton cher z’a—mant;


to the delight of Tom Sarjent, who, though he only partially
comprehended the words of the song, pronounced the singer to be a rare
gentleman, full of most excellent differences. We took our Florac to
the Derby; we presented him in Fitzroy Square, whither we still
occasionally went, for Clive’s and our dear Colonel’s sake.

The Vicomte pronounced himself strongly in favour of the blanche misse
little Rosey Mackenzie, of whom we have lost sight for some few
chapters. Mrs. Mac he considered, my faith, to be a woman superb. He
used to kiss the tips of his own fingers, in token of his admiration
for the lovely widow; he pronounced her again more pretty than her
daughter; and paid her a thousand compliments, which she received with
exceeding good-humour. If the Vicomte gave us to understand presently
that Rosey and her mother were both in love with him, but that for all
the world he would not meddle with the happiness of his dear little
Clive, nothing unfavourable to the character or constancy of the
before-mentioned ladies must be inferred from M. de Florac’s speech;
his firm conviction being, that no woman could pass many hours in his
society without danger to her subsequent peace of mind.

For some little time we had no reason to suspect that our French friend
was not particularly well furnished with the current coin of the realm.
Without making any show of wealth, he would, at first, cheerfully
engage in our little parties: his lodgings in the neighbourhood of
Leicester Square, though dingy, were such as many noble foreign exiles
have inhabited. It was not until he refused to join some pleasure-trip
which we of Lamb Court proposed, honestly confessing his poverty, that
we were made aware of the Vicomte’s little temporary calamity; and, as
we became more intimate with him, he acquainted us, with great
openness, with the history of all his fortunes. He described
energetically that splendid run of luck which had set in at Baden with
Clive’s loan: his winnings, at that fortunate period, had carried him
through the winter with considerable brilliancy, but bouillotte and
Mademoiselle Atala, of the Variétés (_une ogresse, mon cher!_ who
devours thirty of our young men every year in her cavern, in the Rue de
Bréda), had declared against him, and the poor Vicomte’s pockets were
almost empty when he came to London.

He was amiably communicative regarding himself, and told us his virtues
and his faults (if indeed a passion for play and for women could be
considered as faults in a gay young fellow of two or three and forty),
with a like engaging frankness. He would weep in describing his angel
mother: he would fly off again into tirades respecting the wickedness,
the wit, the extravagance, the charms of the young lady of the
Variétés. He would then (in conversation) introduce us to Madame de
Florac, _née_ Higg, of Manchesterre. His prattle was incessant, and to
my friend Mr. Warrington especially he was an object of endless delight
and amusement and wonder. He would roll and smoke countless paper
cigars, talking unrestrainedly when we were not busy, silent when we
were engaged; he would only rarely partake of our meals, and altogether
refused all offers of pecuniary aid. He disappeared at dinner-time into
the mysterious purlieus of Leicester Square, and dark ordinaries only
frequented by Frenchmen. As we walked with him in the Regent Street
precincts, he would exchange marks of recognition with many dusky
personages, smoking bravos; and whiskered refugees of his nation.

“That gentleman,” he would say, “who has done me the honour to salute
me, is a coiffeur of the most celebrated; he forms the _delices_ of our
table-d’hôte. ‘Bon jour, mon cher monsieur!’ We are friends, though not
of the same opinion. Monsieur is a republican of the most
distinguished; conspirator of profession, and at this time engaged in
constructing an infernal machine to the address of His Majesty, Louis
Philippe, King of the French.” “Who is my friend with the scarlet beard
and the white paletot? My good Warrington! you do not move in the
world; you make yourself a hermit, my dear! Not know monsieur!—monsieur
is secretary to Mademoiselle Caracoline, the lovely rider at the circus
of Astley; I shall be charmed to introduce you to this amiable society
some day at our table-d’hôte.”

Warrington vowed that the company of Florac’s friends would be
infinitely more amusing than the noblest society ever chronicled in the
_Morning Post;_ but we were neither sufficiently familiar with the
French language to make conversation in that tongue as pleasant to us
as talking in our own; and so were content with Florac’s description of
his compatriots, which the Vicomte delivered in that charming
French-English of which he was a master.

However threadbare in his garments, poor in purse, and eccentric in
morals our friend was, his manners were always perfectly gentlemanlike,
and he draped himself in his poverty with the grace of a Spanish
grandee. It must be confessed, that the grandee loved the estaminet
where he could play billiards with the first comer; that he had a
passion for the gambling-house; that he was a loose and disorderly
nobleman: but, in whatever company he found himself, a certain
kindness, simplicity, and politeness distinguished him always. He bowed
to the damsel who sold him a penny cigar, as graciously as to a
duchess; he crushed a _manant’s_ impertinence or familiarity as
haughtily as his noble ancestors ever did at the Louvre, at Marli, or
Versailles. He declined to _obtempérer_ to his landlady’s request to
pay his rent, but he refused with a dignity which struck the woman with
awe; and King Alfred, over the celebrated muffin (on which Gandish and
other painters have exercised their genius), could not have looked more
noble than Florac in a robe-de-chambre, once gorgeous, but shady now as
became its owner’s clouded fortunes; toasting his bit of bacon at his
lodgings, when the fare even of his table-d’hôte had grown too dear for
him.

As we know from Gandish’s work, that better times were in store for the
wandering monarch, and that the officers came acquainting him that his
people demanded his presence _à grands cris_, when of course King
Alfred laid down the toast and resumed the sceptre; so in the case of
Florac, two humble gentlemen, inhabitants of Lamb Court, and members of
the Upper temple, had the good luck to be the heralds as it were, nay
indeed, the occasion, of the rising fortunes of the Prince de
Moncontour. Florac had informed us of the death of his cousin the Duc
d’Ivry, by whose demise the Vicomte’s father, the old Count de Florac,
became the representative of the house of Ivry, and possessor, through
his relative’s bequest, of an old château still more gloomy and
spacious than the count’s own house in the Faubourg St. Germain—a
château, of which the woods, domains, and appurtenances had been lopped
off by the Revolution. “Monsieur le Comte,” Florac says, “has not
wished to change his name at his age; he has shrugged his old shoulder,
and said it was not the trouble to make to engrave a new card; and for
me,” the philosophical Vicomte added, “of what good shall be a title of
prince in the position where I find myself?” It is wonderful for us who
inhabit a country where rank is worshipped with so admirable a
reverence, to think that there are many gentlemen in France who
actually have authentic titles and do not choose to bear them.

Mr. George Warrington was hugely amused with this notion of Florac’s
ranks and dignities. The idea of the Prince purchasing penny cigars; of
the Prince mildly expostulating with his landlady regarding the rent;
of his punting for half-crowns at a neighbouring hall in Air Street,
whither the poor gentleman desperately ran when he had money in his
pocket, tickled George’s sense of humour. It was Warrington who gravely
saluted the Vicomte, and compared him to King Alfred, on that afternoon
when we happened to call upon him and found him engaged in cooking his
modest dinner.

We were bent upon an excursion to Greenwich, and on having our friend’s
company on that voyage, and we induced the Vicomte to forgo his bacon,
and be our guest for once. George Warrington chose to indulge in a
great deal of ironical pleasantry in the course of the afternoon’s
excursion. As we went down the river, he pointed out to Florac the very
window in the Tower where the captive Duke of Orleans used to sit when
he was an inhabitant of that fortress. At Greenwich, which palace
Florac informed us was built by Queen Elizabeth, George showed the very
spot where Raleigh laid his cloak down to enable Her Majesty to step
over a puddle. In a word, he mystified M. de Florac; such was Mr.
Warrington’s reprehensible spirit.

It happened that Mr. Barnes Newcome came to dine at Greenwich on the
same day when our little party took place. He had come down to meet
Rooster and one or two other noble friends whose names he took care to
give us, cursing them at the same time for having thrown him over.
Having missed his own company, Mr. Barnes condescended to join ours,
Warrington gravely thanking him for the great honour which he conferred
upon us by volunteering to take a place at our table. Barnes drank
freely, and was good enough to resume his acquaintance with Monsieur de
Florac, whom he perfectly well recollected at Baden, but had thought
proper to forget on the one or two occasions when they had met in
public since the Vicomte’s arrival in this country. There are few men
who can drop and resume an acquaintance with such admirable
self-possession as Barnes Newcome. When, over our dessert, by which
time all tongues were unloosed and each man talked gaily, George
Warrington feelingly thanked Barnes in a little mock speech, for his
great kindness in noticing us, presenting him at the same time to
Florac as the ornament of the City, the greatest banker of his age, the
beloved kinsman of their friend Clive, who was always writing about
him; Barnes said, with one of his accustomed curses, he did not know
whether Mr. Warrington was “chaffing” him or not, and indeed could
never make him out. Warrington replied that he never could make himself
out: and if ever Mr. Barnes could, George would thank him for
information on that subject.

Florac, like most Frenchmen very sober in his potations, left us for a
while over ours, which were conducted after the more liberal English
manner, and retired to smoke his cigar on the terrace. Barnes then
freely uttered his sentiments regarding him, which were not more
favourable than those which the young gentleman generally emitted
respecting gentlemen whose backs were turned. He had known a little of
Florac the year before at Baden: he had been mixed up with Kew in that
confounded row in which Kew was hit; he was an adventurer, a pauper, a
blackleg, a regular Greek; he had heard Florac was of old family, that
was true; but what of that? He was only one of those d—— French counts;
everybody was a count in France confound ’em! The claret was
beastly—not fit for a gentleman to drink!—He swigged off a great bumper
as he was making the remark: for Barnes Newcome abuses the men and
things which he uses, and perhaps is better served than more grateful
persons.

“Count!” cries Warrington, “what do you mean by talking about beggarly
counts? Florac’s family is one of the noblest and most ancient in
Europe. It is more ancient than your illustrious friend, the
barber-surgeon; it was illustrious before the house, ay, or the pagoda
of Kew was in existence.” And he went on to describe how Florac by the
demise of his kinsman, was now actually Prince de Moncontour, though he
did not choose to assume that title. Very likely the noble Gascon drink
in which George had been indulging, imparted a certain warmth and
eloquence to his descriptions of Florac’s good qualities, high birth,
and considerable patrimony; Barnes looked quite amazed and scared at
these announcements, then laughed and declared once more that
Warrington was chaffing him.

“As sure as the Black Prince was lord of Acquitaine—as sure as the
English were masters of Bordeaux—and why did we ever lose the country?”
cries George, filling himself a bumper,—“every word I have said about
Florac is true;” and Florac coming in at this juncture havin just
finished his cigar, George turned round and made him a fine speech in
the French language, in which he lauded his constancy and good-humour
under evil fortune, paid him two or three more cordial compliments, and
finished by drinking another great bumper to his good health.

Florac took a little wine, replied “with effusion” to the toast which
his excellent, his noble friend had just carried. We rapped our glasses
at the end of the speech. The landlord himself seemed deeply touched by
it as he stood by with a fresh bottle. “It is good wine—it is honest
wine—it is capital wine” says George, “and honni soit qui mal y pence!
What business have you, you little beggar, to abuse it? My ancestor
drank the wine and wore the motto round his leg long before a Newcome
ever showed his pale face in Lombard Street.” George Warrington never
bragged about his pedigree except under certain influences. I am
inclined to think that on this occasion he really did find the claret
very good.

“You don’t mean to say,” says Barnes, addressing Florac in French, on
which he piqued himself, “que vous avez un tel manche à votre nom, et
que vous ne l’usez pas?”

Florac shrugged his shoulders; he at first did not understand that
familiar figure of English speech, or what was meant by “having a
handle to your name.” “Moncontour cannot dine better than Florac,” he
said. “Florac has two louis in his pocket, and Moncontour exactly forty
shillings. Florac’s proprietor will ask Moncontour to-morrow for five
weeks’ rent; and as for Florac’s friends, my dear, they will burst out
laughing to Moncontour’s nose!” “How droll you English are!” this acute
French observer afterwards said, laughing, and recalling the incident.
Did you not see how that little Barnes, as soon as he knew my title of
Prince, changed his manner and became all respect towards me? This,
indeed, Monsieur de Florac’s two friends remarked with no little
amusement. Barnes began quite well to remember their pleasant days at
Baden, and talked of their acquaintance there: Barnes offered the
Prince the vacant seat in his brougham, and was ready to set him down
anywhere that he wished in town.

“Bah!” says Florac; “we came by the steamer, and I prefer the
_péniboat_.” But the hospitable Barnes, nevertheless, called upon
Florac the next day. And now having partially explained how the Prince
de Moncontour was present at Mr. Barnes Newcome’s wedding, let us show
how it was that Barnes’s first-cousin, the Earl of Kew, did not attend
that ceremony.




CHAPTER XXXVII.
Returns to Lord Kew


We do not propose to describe at length or with precision the
circumstances of the duel which ended so unfortunately for young Lord
Kew. The meeting was inevitable: after the public acts and insult of
the morning, the maddened Frenchman went to it convinced that his
antagonist had wilfully outraged him, eager to show his bravery upon
the body of an Englishman, and as proud as if he had been going into
actual war. That commandment, the sixth in our decalogue, which forbids
the doing of murder, and the injunction which directly follows on the
same table, have been repealed by a very great number of Frenchmen for
many years past; and to take the neighbour’s wife, and his life
subsequently, has not been an uncommon practice with the politest
people in the world. Castillonnes had no idea but that he was going to
the field of honour; stood with an undaunted scowl before his enemy’s
pistol; and discharged his own and brought down his opponent with a
grim satisfaction, and a comfortable conviction afterwards that he had
acted _en galant homme_. “It was well for this milor that he fell at
the first shot, my dear,” the exemplary young Frenchman remarked; “a
second might have been yet more fatal to him; ordinarily I am sure of
my _coup_, and you conceive that in an affair so grave it was
absolutely necessary that one or other should remain on the ground.”
Nay, should M. de Kew recover from his wound, it was M. de
Castillonnes’ intention to propose a second encounter between himself
and that nobleman. It had been Lord Kew’s determination never to fire
upon his opponent, a confession which he made not to his second, poor
scared Lord Rooster, who bore the young Earl to Kehl, but to some of
his nearest relatives, who happened fortunately to be not far from him
when he received his wound, and who came with all the eagerness of love
to watch by his bedside.

We have said that Lord Kew’s mother, Lady Walham, and her second son
were staying at Hombourg, when the Earl’s disaster occurred. They had
proposed to come to Baden to see Kew’s new bride, and to welcome her;
but the presence of her mother-in-law deterred Lady Walham, who gave up
her heart’s wish in bitterness of spirit, knowing very well that a
meeting between the old Countess and herself could only produce the
wrath, pain, and humiliation which their coming together always
occasioned. It was Lord Kew who bade Rooster send for his mother, and
not for Lady Kew; and as soon as she received those sad tidings, you
may be sure the poor lady hastened to the bed where her wounded boy
lay.

The fever had declared itself, and the young man had been delirious
more than once. His wan face lighted up with joy when he saw his
mother; he put his little feverish hand out of the bed to her—“I knew
you would come, dear,” he said, “and you know I never would have fired
upon the poor Frenchman.” The fond mother allowed no sign of terror or
grief to appear upon her face, so as to disturb her first-born and
darling; but no doubt she prayed by his side as such loving hearts know
how to pray, for the forgiveness of his trespass, who had forgiven
those who sinned against him. “I knew I should be hit, George,” said
Kew to his brother when they were alone; “I always expected some such
end as this. My life has been very wild and reckless; and you, George,
have always been faithful to our mother. You will make a better Lord
Kew than I have been, George. God bless you.” George flung himself down
with sobs by his brother’s bedside, and swore Frank had always been the
best fellow, the best brother, the kindest heart, the warmest friend in
the world. Love—prayer—repentance, thus met over the young man’s bed.
Anxious and humble hearts, his own the least anxious and the most
humble, awaited the dread award of life or death; and the world, and
its ambition and vanities, were shut out from the darkened chamber
where the awful issue was being tried.

Our history has had little to do with characters resembling this lady.
It is of the world, and things pertaining to it. Things beyond it, as
the writer imagines, scarcely belong to the novelist’s province. Who is
he, that he should assume the divine’s office; or turn his desk into a
preacher’s pulpit? In that career of pleasure, of idleness, of crime we
might call it (but that the chronicler of worldly matters had best be
chary of applying hard names to acts which young men are doing in the
world every day), the gentle widowed lady, mother of Lord Kew, could
but keep aloof, deploring the course upon which her dear young prodigal
had entered; and praying with that saintly love, those pure
supplications, with which good mothers follow their children, for her
boy’s repentance and return. Very likely her mind was narrow; very
likely the precautions which she had used in the lad’s early days, the
tutors and directors she had set about him, the religious studies and
practices to which she would have subjected him, had served only to vex
and weary the young pupil, and to drive his high spirit into revolt. It
is hard to convince a woman perfectly pure in her life and intentions,
ready to die if need were for her own faith, having absolute confidence
in the instruction of her teachers, that she and they (with all their
sermons) may be doing harm. When the young catechist yawns over his
reverence’s discourse, who knows but it is the doctor’s vanity which is
enraged, and not Heaven which is offended? It may have been, in the
differences which took place between her son and her, the good Lady
Walham never could comprehend the lad’s side of the argument; or how
his Protestantism against her doctrines should exhibit itself on the
turf, the gaming-table, or the stage of the opera-house; and thus but
for the misfortune under which poor Kew now lay bleeding, these two
loving hearts might have remained through life asunder. But by the
boy’s bedside; in the paroxysms of his fever; in the wild talk of his
delirium; in the sweet patience and kindness with which he received his
dear nurse’s attentions; the gratefulness with which he thanked the
servants who waited on him; the fortitude with which he suffered the
surgeon’s dealings with his wounds;—the widowed woman had an
opportunity to admire with an exquisite thankfulness the generous
goodness of her son; and in those hours, those sacred hours passed in
her own chamber, of prayers, fears, hopes, recollections, and
passionate maternal love, wrestling with fate for her darling’s
life;—no doubt the humbled creature came to acknowledge that her own
course regarding him had been wrong; and, even more for herself than
for him, implored forgiveness.

For some time George Barnes had to send but doubtful and melancholy
bulletins to Lady Kew and the Newcome family at Baden, who were all
greatly moved and affected by the accident which had befallen poor Kew.
Lady Kew broke out in wrath, and indignation. We may be sure the
Duchesse d’Ivry offered to condole with her upon Kew’s mishap the day
after the news arrived at Baden; and, indeed, came to visit her. The
old lady had just received other disquieting intelligence. She was just
going out, but she bade her servant to inform the Duchess that she was
never more at home to the Duchesse d’Ivry. The message was not
delivered properly, or the person for whom it was intended did not
choose to understand it, for presently, as the Countess was hobbling
across the walk on her way to her daughter’s residence, she met the
Duchesse d’Ivry, who saluted her with a demure curtsey and a
commonplace expression of condolence. The Queen of Scots was surrounded
by the chief part of her court, saving of course MM. Castillonnes and
Punter absent on service. “We were speaking of this deplorable affair,”
said Madame d’Ivry (which indeed was the truth, although she said it).
“How we pity you, madame!” Blackball and Loder, Cruchecassée and
Schlangenbad, assumed sympathetic countenances.

Trembling on her cane, the old Countess glared out upon Madame d’Ivry.
“I pray you, madame,” she said in French, “never again to address me
the word. If I had, like you, assassins in my pay, I would have you
killed; do you hear me?” and she hobbled on her way. The household to
which she went was in terrible agitation; the kind Lady Anne frightened
beyond measure, poor Ethel full of dread, and feeling guilty almost as
if she had been the cause, as indeed she was the occasion, of Kew’s
misfortune. And the family had further cause of alarm from the shock
which the news had given to Sir Brian. It has been said that he had had
illnesses of late which caused his friends much anxiety. He had passed
two months at Aix-la-Chapelle, his physicians dreading a paralytic
attack; and Madame d’Ivry’s party still sauntering on the walk, the men
smoking their cigars, the women breathing their scandal, now beheld Dr.
Finck issuing from Lady Anne’s apartments, and wearing such a face of
anxiety, that the Duchesse asked with some emotion, “Had there been a
fresh bulletin from Kehl?”

“No, there had been no fresh bulletin from Kehl; but two hours since
Sir Brian Newcome had had a paralytic seizure.”

“Is he very bad?”

“No,” says Dr. Finck, “he is not very bad.”

“How inconsolable M. Barnes will be!” said the Duchesse, shrugging her
haggard shoulders. Whereas the fact was that Mr. Barnes retained
perfect presence of mind under both of the misfortunes which had
befallen his family. Two days afterwards the Duchesse’s husband arrived
himself, when we may presume that exemplary woman was too much engaged
with her own affairs to be able to be interested about the doings of
other people. With the Duke’s arrival the court of Mary Queen of Scots
was broken up. Her Majesty was conducted to Lochleven, where her tyrant
soon dismissed her very last lady-in-waiting, the confidential Irish
secretary, whose performance had produced such a fine effect amongst
the Newcomes.

Had poor Sir Brian Newcome’s seizure occurred at an earlier period of
the autumn, his illness no doubt would have kept him for some months
confined at Baden; but as he was pretty nearly the last of Dr. Von
Finck’s bath patients, and that eminent physician longed to be off to
the Residenz, he was pronounced in a fit condition for easy travelling
in rather a brief period after his attack, and it was determined to
transport him to Mannheim, and thence by water to London and Newcome.

During all this period of their father’s misfortune no sister of
charity could have been more tender, active, cheerful, and watchful
than Miss Ethel. She had to wear a kind face, and exhibit no anxiety
when occasionally the feeble invalid made inquiries regarding poor Kew
at Baden; to catch the phrases as they came from him; to acquiesce, or
not to deny, when Sir Brian talked of the marriages—both
marriages—taking place at Christmas. Sir Brian was especially eager for
his daughter’s, and repeatedly, with his broken words, and smiles, and
caresses, which were now quite senile, declared that his Ethel would
make the prettiest countess in England. There came a letter or two from
Clive, no doubt, to the young nurse in her sick-room. Manly and
generous, full of tenderness and affection, as those letters surely
were, they could give but little pleasure to the young lady—indeed,
only add to her doubts and pain.

She had told none of her friends as yet of those last words of Kew’s,
which she interpreted as a farewell on the young nobleman’s part. Had
she told them they were likely would not have understood Kew’s meaning
as she did, and persisted in thinking that the two were reconciled. At
any rate, whilst he and her father were still lying stricken by the
blows which had prostrated them both, all questions of love and
marriage had been put aside. Did she love him? She felt such a kind
pity for his misfortune, such an admiration for his generous gallantry,
such a remorse for her own wayward conduct and cruel behaviour towards
this most honest, and kindly, and affectionate gentleman, that the sum
of regard which she could bestow upon him might surely be said to
amount to love. For such a union as that contemplated between them,
perhaps for any marriage, no greater degree of attachment was necessary
as the common cement. Warm friendship and thorough esteem and
confidence (I do not say that our young lady calculated in this
matter-of-fact way) are safe properties invested in the prudent
marriage stock, multiplying and bearing an increasing value with every
year. Many a young couple of spendthrifts get through their capital of
passion in the first twelve months, and have no love left for the daily
demands of after life. O me! for the day when the bank account is
closed, and the cupboard is empty, and the firm of Damon and Phyllis
insolvent!

Miss Newcome, we say, without doubt, did not make her calculations in
this debtor and creditor fashion; it was only the gentlemen of that
family who went to Lombard Street. But suppose she thought that regard,
and esteem, and, affection being sufficient, she could joyfully, and
with almost all her heart bring such a portion to Lord Kew; that her
harshness towards him as contrasted with his own generosity, and above
all with his present pain, infinitely touched her; and suppose she
fancied that there was another person in the world to whom, did fates
permit, she could offer not esteem, affection, pity only, but something
ten thousand times more precious? We are not in the young lady’s
secrets, but if she has some as she sits by her father’s chair and bed,
who day or night will have no other attendant; and, as she busies
herself to interpret his wants, silently moves on his errands,
administers his potions, and watches his sleep, thinks of Clive absent
and unhappy, of Kew wounded and in danger, she must have subject enough
of thought and pain. Little wonder that her cheeks are pale and her
eyes look red; she has her cares to endure now in the world, and her
burden to bear in it, and somehow she feels she is alone, since that
day when poor Clive’s carriage drove away.

In a mood of more than ordinary depression and weakness Lady Kew must
have found her granddaughter, upon one of the few occasions after the
double mishap when Ethel and her elder were together. Sir Brian’s
illness, as it may be imagined, affected a lady very slightly, who was
of an age when these calamities occasion but small disquiet, and who,
having survived her own father, her husband, her son, and witnessed
their lordships’ respective demises with perfect composure, could not
reasonably be called upon to feel any particular dismay at the probable
departure from this life of a Lombard Street banker, who happened to be
her daughter’s husband. In fact, not Barnes Newcome himself could await
that event more philosophically. So, finding Ethel in this melancholy
mood, Lady Kew thought a drive in the fresh air would be of service to
her, and Sir Brian happening to be asleep, carried the young girl away
in her barouche.

They talked about Lord Kew, of whom the accounts were encouraging, and
who is mending in spite of his silly mother and her medicines, “and as
soon as he is able to move we must go and fetch him, my dear,” Lady Kew
graciously said, “before that foolish woman has made a methodist of
him. He is always led by the woman who is nearest him, and I know one
who will make of him just the best little husband in England.” Before
they had come to this delicate point the lady and her grandchild had
talked Kew’s character over, the girl, you may be sure, having spoken
feelingly and eloquently about his kindness and courage, and many
admirable qualities. She kindled when she heard the report of his
behaviour at the commencement of the fracas with M. de Castillonnes,
his great forbearance and good-nature, and his resolution and
magnanimity when the moment of collision came.

But when Lady Kew arrived at that period of her discourse in which she
stated that Kew would make the best little husband in England, poor
Ethel’s eyes filled with tears; we must remember that her high spirit
was worn down by watching and much varied anxiety, and then she
confessed that there had been no reconciliation, as all the family
fancied, between Frank and herself—on the contrary, a parting, which
she understood to be final; and she owned that her conduct towards her
cousin had been most captious and cruel, and that she could not expect
they should ever again come together. Lady Kew, who hated sick-beds and
surgeons except for herself, who hated her daughter-in-law above all,
was greatly annoyed at the news which Ethel gave her; made light of if,
however, and was quite confident that a very few words from her would
place matters on their old footing, and determined on forthwith setting
out for Kehl. She would have carried Ethel with her, but that the poor
Baronet with cries and moans insisted on retaining his nurse, and
Ethel’s grandmother was left to undertake this mission by herself, the
girl remaining behind acquiescent, not unwilling, owning openly a great
regard and esteem for Kew, and the wrong which she had done him,
feeling secretly a sentiment which she had best smother. She had
received a letter from that other person, and answered it with her
mother’s cognisance, but about this little affair neither Lady Anne nor
her daughter happened to say a word to the manager of the whole family.




CHAPTER XXXVIII.
In which Lady Kew leaves his Lordship quite convalescent


Immediately after Lord Kew’s wound, and as it was necessary to apprise
the Newcome family of the accident which had occurred, the good-natured
young Kew had himself written a brief note to acquaint his relatives
with his mishap, and had even taken the precaution to antedate a couple
of billets to be despatched on future days; kindly forgeries, which
told the Newcome family and the Countess of Kew, that Lord Kew was
progressing very favourably, and that his hurt was trifling. The fever
had set in, and the young patient was lying in great danger, as most of
the laggards at Baden knew, when his friends there were set at ease by
this fallacious bulletin. On the third day after the accident, Lady
Walham arrived with her younger son, to find Lord Kew in the fever
which ensued after the wound. As the terrible anxiety during the
illness had been Lady Walham’s, so was hers the delight of the
recovery. The commander-in-chief of the family, the old lady at Baden,
showed her sympathy by sending couriers, and repeatedly issuing orders
to have news of Kew. Sick-beds scared her away invariably. When illness
befell a member of her family she hastily retreated from before the
sufferer, showing her agitation of mind, however, by excessive
ill-humour to all the others within her reach.

A fortnight passed, a ball had been found and extracted, the fever was
over, the wound was progressing favourably, the patient advancing
towards convalescence, and the mother, with her child once more under
her wing, happier than she had been for seven years past, during which
her young prodigal had been running the thoughtless career of which he
himself was weary, and which had occasioned the fond lady such anguish.
Those doubts which perplex many a thinking man, and, when formed and
uttered, give many a fond and faithful woman pain so exquisite, had
most fortunately never crossed Kew’s mind. His early impressions were
such as his mother had left them, and he came back to her, as she would
have him, as a little child; owning his faults with a hearty humble
repentance, and with a thousand simple confessions, lamenting the
errors of his past days. We have seen him tired and ashamed of the
pleasures which he was pursuing, of the companions who surrounded him,
of the brawls and dissipations which amused him no more; in those hours
of danger and doubt, when he had lain, with death perhaps before him,
making up his account of the vain life which probably he would be
called upon to surrender, no wonder this simple, kindly, modest, and
courageous soul thought seriously of the past and of the future; and
prayed, and resolved, if a future were awarded to him, it should make
amends for the days gone by; and surely as the mother and son read
together the beloved assurance of the divine forgiveness, and of that
joy which angels feel in heaven for a sinner repentant, we may fancy in
the happy mother’s breast a feeling somewhat akin to that angelic
felicity, a gratitude and joy of all others the loftiest, the purest,
the keenest. Lady Walham might shrink with terror at the Frenchman’s
name, but her son could forgive him, with all his heart, and kiss his
mother’s hand, and thank him as the best friend of his life.

During all the days of his illness, Kew had never once mentioned
Ethel’s name, and once or twice as his recovery progressed, when with
doubt and tremor his mother alluded to it, he turned from the subject
as one that was disagreeable and painful. Had she thought seriously on
certain things? Lady Walham asked. Kew thought not, “but those who are
bred up as you would have them, mother, are often none the better,” the
humble young fellow said. “I believe she is a very good girl. She is
very clever, she is exceedingly handsome, she is very good to her
parents and her brothers and sisters; but—” he did not finish the
sentence. Perhaps he thought, as he told Ethel afterwards, that she
would have agreed with Lady Walham even worse than with her imperious
old grandmother.

Lady Walham then fell to deplore Sir Brian’s condition, accounts of
whose seizure of course had been despatched to the Kehl party, and to
lament that a worldly man as he was should have such an affliction, so
near the grave and so little prepared for it. Here honest Kew, however,
held out. “Every man for himself, mother,” says he. “Sir Brian was bred
up very strictly, perhaps too strictly as a young man. Don’t you know
that that good Colonel, his elder brother, who seems to me about the
most honest and good old gentleman I ever met in my life, was driven
into rebellion and all sorts of wild courses by old Mrs. Newcome’s
tyranny over him? As for Sir Brian, he goes to church every Sunday: has
prayers in the family every day: I’m sure has led a hundred times
better life than I have, poor old Sir Brian. I often have thought,
mother, that though our side was wrong, you could not be altogether
right, because I remember how my tutor, and Mr. Bonner, and Dr. Laud,
when they used to come down to us at Kewbury, used to make themselves
so unhappy about other people.” So the widow withdrew her unhappiness
about Sir Brian; she was quite glad to hope for the best regarding that
invalid.

With some fears yet regarding her son,—for many of the books with which
the good lady travelled could not be got to interest him; at some he
would laugh outright,—with fear mixed with the maternal joy that he was
returned to her, and had quitted his old ways; with keen feminine
triumph, perhaps, that she had won him back, and happiness at his daily
mending health, all Lady Walham’s hours were passed in thankful and
delighted occupation. George Barnes kept the Newcomes acquainted with
the state of his brother’s health. The skilful surgeon from Strasbourg
reported daily better and better of him, and the little family were
living in great peace and contentment, with one subject of dread,
however, hanging over the mother of the two young men, the arrival of
Lady Kew, as she was foreboding, the fierce old mother-in-law who had
worsted Lady Walham in many a previous battle.

It was what they call the summer of St. Martin, and the weather was
luckily very fine; Kew could presently be wheeled into the garden of
the hotel, whence he could see the broad turbid current of the swollen
Rhine: the French bank fringed with alders, the vast yellow fields
behind them, the great avenue of poplars stretching away to the
Alsatian city, and its purple minster yonder. Good Lady Walham was for
improving the shining hour by reading amusing extracts from her
favourite volumes, gentle anecdotes of Chinese and Hottentot converts,
and incidents from missionary travel. George Barnes, a wily young
diplomatist, insinuated _Galignani_, and hinted that Kew might like a
novel; and a profane work called Oliver Twist having appeared about
this time, which George read out to his family with admirable emphasis,
it is a fact that Lady Walham became so interested in the parish boy’s
progress, that she took his history into her bedroom (where it was
discovered, under Blatherwick’s Voice from Mesopotamia, by her
ladyship’s maid), and that Kew laughed so immensely at Mr. Bumble, the
Beadle, as to endanger the reopening of his wound.

While, one day, they were so harmlessly and pleasantly occupied, a
great whacking of whips, blowing of horns, and whirring of wheels was
heard in the street without. The wheels stopped at their hotel gate;
Lady Walham started up; ran through the garden door, closing it behind
her; and divined justly who had arrived. The landlord was bowing; the
courier pushing about; waiters in attendance; one of them, coming up to
pale-faced Lady Walham; said, “Her Excellency the Frau Gräfinn von Kew
is even now absteiging.”

“Will you be good enough to walk into our salon, Lady Kew?” said the
daughter-in-law, stepping forward and opening the door of that
apartment. The Countess, leaning on her staff, entered that darkened
chamber. She ran up towards an easy-chair, where she supposed Lord Kew
was. “My dear Frank!” cries the old lady; “my dear boy, what a pretty
fright you have given us all! They don’t keep you in this horrid noisy
room facing that——Ho—what is this?” cries the Countess, closing her
sentence abruptly.

“It is not Frank. It is only a bolster, Lady Kew, and I don’t keep him
in a noisy room towards the street,” said Lady Walham.

“Ho! how do you do? This is the way to him, I suppose;” and she went to
another door—it was a cupboard full of the relics of Frank’s illness,
from which Lady Walham’s mother-in-law shrunk back aghast. “Will you
please to see that I have a comfortable room, Maria; and one for my
maid, next me? I will thank you to see yourself,” the Empress of Kew
said, pointing with her stick, before which many a time the younger
lady had trembled.

This time Lady Walham only rang the bell. “I don’t speak German; and
have never been on any floor of the house but this. Your servant had
better see to your room, Lady Kew. That next is mine; and I keep the
door, which you are trying, locked on other side.”

“And I suppose Frank is locked up there!” cried the old lady, “with a
basin of gruel and a book of Watts’s hymns.” A servant entered at this
moment, answering Lady Walham’s summons. “Peacock, the Countess of Kew
says that she proposes to stay here this evening. Please to ask the
landlord to show her ladyship rooms,” said Lady Walham; and by this
time she had thought of a reply to Lady Kew’s last kind speech.

“If my son were locked up in my room, madam, his mother is surely the
best nurse for him. Why did you not come to him three weeks sooner,
when there was nobody with him?”

Lady Kew said nothing, but glared and showed her teeth—those pearls set
in gold.

“And my company may not amuse Lord Kew—”

“He-e-e!” grinned the elder, savagely.

“—But at least it is better than some to which you introduced my son,”
continued Lady Kew’s daughter-in-law, gathering force and wrath as she
spoke. “Your ladyship may think lightly of me, but you can hardly think
so ill of me as of the Duchesse d’Ivry, I should suppose, to whom you
sent my boy, to form him, you said; about whom, when I remonstrated—for
though I live out of the world I hear of it sometimes—you were pleased
to tell me that I was a prude and a fool. It is you I thank for
separating my child from me—yes, you—for so many years of my life; and
for bringing me to him when he was bleeding and almost a corpse, but
that God preserved him to the widow’s prayers;—and you, you were by,
and never came near him.”

“I—I did not come to see you—or—or—for this kind of scene, Lady
Walham,” muttered the other. Lady Kew was accustomed to triumph, by
attacking in masses, like Napoleon. Those who faced her routed her.

“No; you did not come for me, I know very well,” the daughter went on.
“You loved me no better than you loved your son, whose life, as long as
you meddled with it, you made wretched. You came here for my boy.
Haven’t you done him evil enough? And now God has mercifully preserved
him, you want to lead him back again into ruin and crime. It shall not
be so, wicked woman! bad mother! cruel, heartless parent!—George!”
(Here her younger son entered the room, and she ran towards him with
fluttering robes and seized his hands.) “Here is your grandmother; here
is the Countess of Kew, come from Baden at last; and she wants—she
wants to take Frank from us, my dear, and to—give—him—back to
the—Frenchwoman again. No, no! Oh, my God! Never! never!” And she flung
herself into George Barnes’s arms, fainting with an hysteric burst of
tears.

“You had best get a strait-waistcoat for your mother, George Barnes,”
Lady Kew said, scorn and hatred in her face. (If she had been Iago’s
daughter, with a strong likeness to her sire, Lord Steyne’s sister
could not have looked more diabolical.) “Have you had advice for her?
Has nursing poor Kew turned her head? I came to see _him_. Why have I
been left alone for half an hour with this madwoman? You ought not to
trust her to give Frank medicine. It is positively——”

“Excuse me,” said George, with a bow; “I don’t think the complaint has
as yet exhibited itself in my mother’s branch of the family. (She
always hated me,” thought George; “but if she had by chance left me a
legacy, there it goes.) You would like, ma’am, to see the rooms
upstairs? Here is the landlord to conduct your ladyship. Frank will be
quite ready to receive you when you come down. I am sure I need not beg
of your kindness that nothing may be said to agitate him. It is barely
three weeks since M. de Castillonnes’s ball was extracted; and the
doctors wish he should be kept as quiet as possible.”

Be sure that the landlord, the courier, and the persons engaged in
showing the Countess of Kew the apartments above spent an agreeable
time with Her Excellency the Frau Gräfinn von Kew. She must have had
better luck in her encounter with these than in her previous passages
with her grandson and his mother; for when she issued from her
apartment in a new dress and fresh cap, Lady Kew’s face wore an
expression of perfect serenity. Her attendant may have shook her fist
behind her, and her man’s eyes and face looked Blitz and Donnerwetter;
but their mistress’s features wore that pleased look which they assumed
when she had been satisfactorily punishing somebody. Lord Kew had by
this time got back from the garden to his own room, where he awaited
grandmamma. If the mother and her two sons had in the interval of Lady
Kew’s toilette tried to resume the history of Bumble the Beadle, I fear
they could not have found it very comical.

“Bless me, my dear child! How well you look! Many a girl would give the
world to have such a complexion. There is nothing like a mother for a
nurse! Ah, no! Maria, you deserve to be the Mother Superior of a House
of Sisters of Charity, you do. The landlord has given me a delightful
apartment, thank you. He is an extortionate wretch; but I have no doubt
I shall be very comfortable. The Dodsburys stopped here, I see by the
travellers’ book-quite right, instead of sleeping at that odious buggy
Strasbourg. We have had a sad, sad time, my dears, at Baden. Between
anxiety about poor Sir Brian, and about you, you naughty boy, I am sure
I wonder how I have got through it all. Doctor Finck would not let me
come away to-day; would I would come.”

“I am sure it was uncommonly kind, ma’am,” says poor Kew, with a rueful
face.

“That horrible woman against whom I always warned but you—but young men
will not take the advice of old grandmammas—has gone away these ten
days. Monsieur le Duc fetched her; and if he locked her up at
Moncontour, and kept her on bread-and-water; for the rest of her life,
I am sure he would serve her right. When a woman once forgets religious
principles, Kew, she is sure to go wrong. The Conversation-room is shut
up. The Dorkings go on Tuesday. Clara is really a dear little artless
creature; one that you will like, Maria—and as for Ethel, I really
think she is an angel. To see her nursing her poor father is the most
beautiful sight; night after night she has sate up with him. I know
where she would like to be, the dear child. And if Frank falls ill
again, Maria, he won’t need a mother or useless old grandmother to
nurse him. I have got some pretty messages to deliver from her; but
they are for your private ears, my lord; not even mammas and brothers
may hear them.”

“Do not go, mother! Pray stay, George!” cried the sick man (and again
Lord Steyne’s sister looked uncommonly like that lamented marquis). “My
cousin is a noble young creature,” he went on. “She has admirable good
qualities, which I appreciate with all my heart; and her beauty, you
know how I admire it. I have thought of her a great deal as I was lying
on the bed yonder” (the family look was not so visible in Lady Kew’s
face), “and—and—I wrote to her this very morning; she will have the
letter by this time, probably.”

“Bien! Frank!” Lady Kew smiled (in her supernatural way) almost as much
as her portrait, by Harlowe, as you may see it at Kewbury to this very
day. She is represented seated before an easel, painting a miniature of
her son, Lord Walham.

“I wrote to her on the subject of the last conversation we had
together,” Frank resumed, in rather a timid voice, “the day before my
accident. Perhaps she did not tell you, ma’am, of what passed between
us. We had had a quarrel; one of many. Some cowardly hand, which we
both of us can guess at, had written to her an account of my past life,
and she showed me the letter. Then I told her, that if she loved me she
never would have showed it me: without any other words of reproof. I
bade her farewell. It was not much, the showing that letter; but it was
enough. In twenty differences we have had together, she had been unjust
and captious, cruel towards me, and too eager, as I thought, for other
people’s admiration. Had she loved me, it seemed to me Ethel would have
shown less vanity and better temper. What was I to expect in life
afterwards from a girl who before her marriage used me so? Neither she
nor I could be happy. She could be gentle enough, and kind, and anxious
to please any man whom she loves, God bless her! As for me, I suppose,
I’m not worthy of so much talent and beauty, so we both understood that
that was a friendly farewell; and as I have been lying on my bed
yonder, thinking, perhaps, I never might leave it, or if I did, that I
should like to lead a different sort of life to that which ended in
sending me there, my resolve of last month was only confirmed. God
forbid that she and I should lead the lives of some folks we know; that
Ethel should marry without love, perhaps to fall into it afterwards;
and that I, after this awful warning I have had, should be tempted to
back into that dreary life I was leading. It was wicked, ma’am, I knew
it was; many and many a day I used to say so to myself, and longed to
get rid of it. I am a poor weak devil, I know, I am only too easily led
into temptation, and I should only make matters worse if I married a
woman who cares for the world more than for me, and would not make me
happy at home.”

“Ethel care for the world!” gasped out Lady Kew; “a most artless,
simple, affectionate creature; my dear Frank, she——”

He interrupted her, as a blush came rushing over his pale face. “Ah!”
said he, “if I had been the painter, and young Clive had been Lord Kew,
which of us do you think she would have chosen? And she was right. He
is a brave, handsome, honest young fellow, and is a thousand times
cleverer and better than I am.”

“Not better, dear, thank God,” cried his mother, coming round to the
other side of his sofa, and seizing her son’s hand.

“No, I don’t think he is better, Frank,” said the diplomatist, walking
away to the window. And as for grandmamma at the end of this little
speech and scene, her ladyship’s likeness to her brother, the late
revered Lord Steyne, was more frightful than ever.

After a minute’s pause, she rose up on her crooked stick, and said, “I
really feel I am unworthy to keep company with so much exquisite
virtue. It will be enhanced, my lord, by the thought of the pecuniary
sacrifice which you are making, for I suppose you know that I have been
hoarding—yes, and saving, and pinching,—denying myself the necessities
of life, in order that my grandson might one day have enough to support
his rank. Go and live and starve in your dreary old house, and marry a
parson’s daughter, and sing psalms with your precious mother; and I
have no doubt you and she—she who has thwarted me all through life, and
whom I hated,—yes, I hated from the moment she took my son from me, and
brought misery into my family, will be all the happier when she thinks
that she has made a poor, fond, lonely old woman more lonely and
miserable. If you please, George Barnes, be good enough to tell my
people that I shall go back to Baden,” and waving her children away
from her, the old woman tottered out of the room on her crutch.

So the wicked fairy drove away disappointed in the chariot with the
very dragons which had brought her away in the morning, and just had
time to get their feed of black bread. I wonder whether they were the
horses Clive and J. J. and Jack Belsize had used when they passed on
their road to Switzerland? Black Care sits behind all sorts of horses,
and gives a trinkgelt to postillions all over the map. A thrill of
triumph may be permitted to Lady Walham after her victory over her
mother-in-law. What Christian woman does not like to conquer another?
and if that other were a mother-in-law, would the victory be less
sweet? Husbands and wives both will be pleased that Lady Walham has had
the better of this bout: and you, young boys and virgins, when your
turn comes to be married, you will understand the hidden meaning of
this passage. George Barnes got Oliver Twist out, and began to read
therein. Miss Nancy and Fanny again were summoned before this little
company to frighten and delight them. I dare say even Fagin and Miss
Nancy failed with the widow, so absorbed was she with the thoughts of
the victory which she had just won. For the evening service, in which
her sons rejoiced her fond heart by joining, she lighted on a psalm
which was as a _Te Deum_ after the battle—the battle of Kehl by Rhine,
where Kew’s soul, as his mother thought, was the object of contention
between the enemies. I have said, this book is all about the world and
a respectable family dwelling in it. It is not a sermon, except where
it cannot help itself, and the speaker pursuing the destiny of his
narrative finds such a homily before him. O friend, in your life and
mine, don’t we light upon such sermons daily?—don’t we see at home as
well as amongst our neighbours that battle betwixt Evil and Good? Here
on one side is Self and Ambition and Advancement; and Right and Love on
the other. Which shall we let to triumph for ourselves—which for our
children?

The young men were sitting smoking the vesper cigar. (Frank would do
it, and his mother actually lighted his cigar for him now, enjoining
him straightway after to go to bed.) Kew smoked and looked at a
star—shining above in the heaven. “Which is that star?” he asked: and
the accomplished young diplomatist answered it was Jupiter.

“What a lot of things you know, George!” cries the senior, delighted;
“you ought to have been the elder, you ought, by Jupiter! But you have
lost your chance this time.”

“Yes, thank God!” says George.

“And I am going to be all right—and to turn over a new leaf, old
boy—and paste down the old ones, eh? I wrote to Martins this morning to
have all my horses sold; and I’ll never beg—so help me—so help me,
Jupiter. I made a vow—a promise to myself, you see, that I wouldn’t if
I recovered. And I wrote to Cousin Ethel this morning.—As I thought
over the matter yonder, I felt quite certain I was right, and that we
could never, never pull together. Now the Countess is gone, I wonder
whether I was right—to give up sixty thousand pounds, and the prettiest
girl in London?”

“Shall I take horses and go after her? My mother’s gone to bed, she
won’t know,” asked George. “Sixty thousand is a lot of money to lose.”

Kew laughed. “If you were to go and tell our grandmother that I could
not live the night through, and that you would be Lord Kew in the
morning, and your son Viscount Walham, I think the Countess would make
up a match between you and the sixty thousand pounds, and the prettiest
girl in England: she would, by—by Jupiter. I intend only to swear by
the heathen gods now, Georgy.—No, I am not sorry I wrote to Ethel. What
a fine girl she is!—I don’t mean her beauty merely, but such a
noble-bred one! And to think that there she is in the market to be
knocked down to—I say, I was going to call that three-year-old,
Ethelinda.—We must christen her over again for Tattersall’s, Georgy.”

A knock is heard through an adjoining door, and a maternal voice cries,
“It is time to go to bed.” So the brothers part, and, let us hope,
sleep soundly.

The Countess of Kew, meanwhile, has returned to Baden; where, though it
is midnight when she arrives, and the old lady has had two long
bootless journeys, you will be grieved to hear, that she does not sleep
a single wink. In the morning she hobbles over to the Newcome quarters;
and Ethel comes down to her pale and calm. How is her father? He has
had a good night: he is a little better, speaks more clearly, has a
little more the use of his limbs.

“I wish _I_ had had a good night!” groans out the Countess.

“I thought you were going to Lord Kew, at Kehl,” remarked her
granddaughter.

“I did go, and returned with wretches who would not bring me more than
five miles an hour! I dismissed that brutal grinning courier; and I
have given warning to that fiend of a maid.”

“And Frank is pretty well, grandmamma?”

“Well! He looks as pink as a girl in her first season! I found him, and
his brother George, and their mamma. I think Maria was hearing them
their catechism,” cries the old lady.

“N. and M. together! Very pretty,” says Ethel, gravely. “George has
always been a good boy, and it is quite time for my Lord Kew to begin.”

The elder lady looked at her descendant, but Miss Ethel’s glance was
impenetrable. “I suppose you can fancy, my dear, why I came back?” said
Lady Kew.

“Because you quarrelled with Lady Walham, grandmamma. I think I have
heard that there used to be differences between you.” Miss Newcome was
armed for defence and attack; in which cases we have said Lady Kew did
not care to assault her. “My grandson told me that he had written to
you,” the Countess said.

“Yes: and had you waited but half an hour yesterday, you might have
spared me the humiliation of that journey.”

“_You_—the humiliation—Ethel!”

“Yes, _me_,” Ethel flashed out. “Do you suppose it is none to have me
bandied about from bidder to bidder, and offered for sale to a
gentleman who will not buy me? Why have you and all my family been so
eager to get rid of me? Why should you suppose or desire that Lord Kew
should like me? Hasn’t he the Opera; and such friends as Madame la
Duchesse d’Ivry, to whom your ladyship introduced him in early life? He
told me so: and she was good enough to inform me of the rest. What
attractions have I in comparison with such women? And to this man from
whom I am parted by good fortune; to this man who writes to remind me
that we are separated—your ladyship must absolutely go and entreat him
to give me another trial! It is too much, grandmamma. Do please to let
me stay where I am; and worry me with no more schemes for my
establishment in life. Be contented with the happiness which you have
secured for Clara Pulleyn and Barnes; and leave me to take care of my
poor father. Here I know I am doing right. Here, at least, there is no
such sorrow, and doubt, and shame, for me, as my friends have tried to
make me endure. There is my father’s bell. He likes me to be with him
at breakfast and to read his paper to him.”

“Stay a little, Ethel,” cried the Countess, with a trembling voice. “I
am older than your father, and you owe me a little obedience—that is,
if children do owe any obedience to their parents nowadays. I don’t
know. I am an old woman—the world perhaps has changed since my time;
and it is you who ought to command, I dare say, and we to follow.
Perhaps I have been wrong all through life, and in trying to teach my
children to do as I was made to do. God knows I have had very little
comfort from them: whether they did or whether they didn’t. You and
Frank I had set my heart on; I loved you out of all my
grandchildren—was it very unnatural that I should wish to see you
together? For that boy I have been saving money these years past. He
flies back to the arms of his mother, who has been pleased to hate me
as only such virtuous people can; who took away my own son from me; and
now his son—towards whom the only fault I ever committed was to spoil
him and be too fond of him. Don’t leave me too, my child. Let me have
something that I can like at my years. And I like your pride, Ethel,
and your beauty, my dear; and I am not angry with your hard words; and
if I wish to see you in the place in life which becomes you—do I do
wrong? No. Silly girl! There—give me the little hand. How hot it is!
Mine is as cold as a stone—and shakes, doesn’t it?—Eh! it was a pretty
hand once! What did Anne—what did your mother say to Frank’s letter.

“I did not show it to her,” Ethel answered.

“Let me see it, my dear,” whispered Lady Kew, in a coaxing way.

“There it is,” said Ethel pointing to the fireplace, where there lay
some torn fragments and ashes of paper. It was the same fireplace at
which Clive’s sketches had been burned.




CHAPTER XXXIX.
Amongst the Painters


When Clive Newcome comes to be old, no doubt he will remember his Roman
days as amongst the happiest which fate ever awarded him. The
simplicity of the student’s life there, the greatness and friendly
splendour of the scenes surrounding him, the delightful nature of the
occupation in which he is engaged, the pleasant company of comrades,
inspired by a like pleasure over a similar calling, the labour, the
meditation, the holiday and the kindly feast afterwards, should make
the Art-students the happiest of youth, did they but know their good
fortune. Their work is for the most part delightfully easy. It does not
exercise the brain too much, but gently occupies it, and with a subject
most agreeable to the scholar. The mere poetic flame, or jet of
invention, needs to be lighted up but very seldom, namely, when the
young painter is devising his subject, or settling the composition
thereof. The posing of figures and drapery; the dexterous copying of
the line; the artful processes of cross-hatching, of stumping, of
laying on lights, and what not; the arrangement of colour, and the
pleasing operations of glazing and the like, are labours for the most
part merely manual. These, with the smoking of a proper number of
pipes, carry the student through his day’s work. If you pass his door
you will very probably hear him singing at his easel. I should like to
know what young lawyer, mathematician, or divinity scholar can sing
over his volumes, and at the same time advance with his labour? In
every city where Art is practised there are old gentlemen who never
touched a pencil in their lives, but find the occupation and company of
artists so agreeable that they are never out of the studios; follow one
generation of painters after another; sit by with perfect contentment
while Jack is drawing his pifferaro, or Tom designing his cartoon, and
years afterwards when Jack is established in Newman Street, and Tom a
Royal Academician, shall still be found in their rooms, occupied now by
fresh painters and pictures, telling the youngsters, their successors,
what glorious fellows Jack and Tom were. A poet must retire to privy
places and meditate his rhymes in secret; a painter can practise his
trade in the company of friends. Your splendid _chef d’école_, a Rubens
or a Horace Vernet, may sit with a secretary reading to him; a troop of
admiring scholars watching the master’s hand; or a company of court
ladies and gentlemen (to whom he addresses a few kind words now and
again) looking on admiringly; whilst the humblest painter, be he ever
so poor, may have a friend watching at his easel, or a gentle wife
sitting by with her work in her lap, and with fond smiles or talk or
silence cheering his labour.

Amongst all ranks and degrees of painters assembled at Rome, Mr. Clive
found companions and friends. The cleverest man was not the best artist
very often: the ablest artist not the best critic nor the best
companion. Many a man could give no account of the faculty within him,
but achieved success because he could not help it; and did, in an hour
and without effort, that which another could not effect with half a
life’s labour. There were young sculptors who had never read a line of
Homer, who took on themselves nevertheless to interpret and continue
the heroic Greek art. There were young painters with the strongest
natural taste for low humour, comic singing, and Cyder-Cellar
jollifications, who would imitate nothing under Michael Angelo, and
whose canvases teemed with tremendous allegories of fates, furies,
genii of death and battle. There were long-haired lads who fancied the
sublime lay in the Peruginesque manner, and depicted saintly personages
with crisp draperies, crude colours, and haloes of gold-leaf. Our
friend marked all these practitioners of Art with their various
oddities and tastes, and was welcomed in the ateliers of all of them,
from the grave dons and seniors, the senators of the French and English
Academy, down to the jovial students who railed at the elders over
their cheap cups at the Lepre. What a gallant, starving, generous,
kindly life, many of them led! What fun in their grotesque airs, what
friendship and gentleness in their poverty! How splendidly Carlo talked
of the marquis his cousin, and the duke his intimate friend! How great
Federigo was on the subject of his wrongs, from the Academy at home, a
pack of tradesmen who could not understand high art, and who had never
seen a good picture! With what haughtiness Augusto swaggered about at
Sir John’s soirées, though he was known to have borrowed Fernando’s
coat, and Luigi’s dress-boots! If one or the other was ill, how nobly
and generously his companions flocked to comfort him, took turns to
nurse the sick man through nights of fever, contributed out of their
slender means to help him through his difficulty. Max, who loves fine
dresses and the carnival so, gave up a costume and a carriage so as to
help Paul, when he sold his picture (through the agency of Pietro, with
whom he had quarrelled, and who recommended him to a patron), gave a
third of the money back to Max, and took another third portion to
Lazaro, with his poor wife and children, who had not got a single order
all that winter—and so the story went on. I have heard Clive tell of
two noble young Americans who came to Europe to study their art; of
whom the one fell sick, whilst the other supported his penniless
comrade, and out of sixpence a day absolutely kept but a penny for
himself, giving the rest to his sick companion. “I should like to have
known that good Samaritan, Sir,” our Colonel said, twirling his
mustachios, when we saw him again, and his son told him that story.

J. J., in his steady silent way, worked on every day, and for many
hours every day. When Clive entered their studio of a morning, he found
J. J. there, and there he left him. When the Life Academy was over, at
night, and Clive went out to his soirées, J. J. lighted his lamp and
continued his happy labour. He did not care for the brawling
supper-parties of his comrades; liked better to stay at home than to go
into the world, and was seldom abroad of a night except during the
illness of Luigi before mentioned, when J. J. spent constant evenings
at the other’s bedside. J. J. was fortunate as well as skilful: people
in the world took a liking to the modest young man, and he had more
than one order for pictures. The Artists’ Club, at the Lepre, set him
down as close with his money; but a year after he left Rome, Lazaro and
his wife, who still remained there, told a different tale. Clive
Newcome, when he heard of their distress, gave them something—as much
as he could spare; but J. J. gave more, and Clive was as eager in
acknowledging and admiring his friend’s generosity as he was in
speaking of his genius. His was a fortunate organisation indeed. Study
was his chief amusement. Self-denial came easily to him. Pleasure, or
what is generally called so, had little charm for him. His ordinary
companions were pure and sweet thoughts; his out-door enjoyment the
contemplation of natural beauty; for recreation, the hundred pleasant
dexterities and manipulations of his craft were ceaselessly interesting
to him: he would draw every knot in an oak panel, or every leaf in an
orange-tree, smiling, and taking a gay delight over the simple feats of
skill: whenever you found him he seemed watchful and serene, his modest
virgin-lamp always lighted and trim. No gusts of passion extinguished
it; no hopeless wandering in the darkness afterwards led him astray.
Wayfarers through the world, we meet now and again with such purity;
and salute it, and hush whilst it passes on.

We have it under Clive Newcome’s own signature, that he intended to
pass a couple of years in Italy, devoting himself exclusively to the
study of his profession. Other besides professional reasons were
working secretly in the young man’s mind, causing him to think that
absence from England was the best cure for a malady under which he
secretly laboured. But change of air may cure some sick people more
speedily than the sufferers ever hoped; and also it is on record, that
young men with the very best intentions respecting study, do not fulfil
them, and are led away from their scheme by accident, or pleasure, or
necessity, or some good cause. Young Clive worked sedulously two or
three months at his vocation at Rome, secretly devouring, no doubt, the
pangs of sentimental disappointment under which he laboured; and he
drew from his models, and he sketched round about everything that
suited his pencil on both sides of Tiber; and he laboured at the Life
Academy of nights—a model himself to other young students. The symptoms
of his sentimental malady began to abate. He took an interest in the
affairs of Jack, and Tom, and Harry round about him: Art exercised its
great healing influence on his wounded spirit, which to be sure had
never given in. The meeting of the painters at the Café Greco, and at
their private houses, was very jovial, pleasant, and lively. Clive
smoked his pipe, drank his glass of Marsala, sang his song, and took
part in the general chorus as gaily as the jolliest of the boys. He was
the cock of the whole painting school, the favourite of all; and to be
liked by the people, you may be pretty sure that we for our parts must
like them.

Then, besides the painters, he had, as he has informed us, the other
society of Rome. Every winter there is a gay and pleasant English
colony in that capital, of course more or less remarkable for rank,
fashion, and agreeability with every varying year. In Clive’s year some
very pleasant folks set up their winter quarters in the usual
foreigners’ resort round about the Piazza di Spagna. I was amused to
find, lately, looking over the travels of the respectable M. de
Poellnitz, that, a hundred and twenty years ago, the same quarter, the
same streets and palaces, scarce changed from those days, were even
then polite foreigners’ resort. Of one or two of the gentlemen Clive
had made the acquaintance in the hunting-field; others he had met
during his brief appearance in the London world. Being a youth of great
personal agility, fitted thereby to the graceful performance of polkas,
etc.; having good manners, and good looks, and good credit with Prince
Poloni, or some other banker, Mr. Newcome was thus made very welcome to
the Anglo-Roman society; and as kindly received in genteel houses,
where they drank tea and danced the galop, as in those dusky taverns
and retired lodgings where his bearded comrades, the painters held
their meetings.

Thrown together every day, and night after night; flocking to the same
picture-galleries, statue-galleries, Pincian drives, and church
functions, the English colonists at Rome perforce became intimate, and
in many cases friendly. They have an English library where the various
meets for the week are placarded: on such a day the Vatican galleries
are open: the next is the feast of Saint So-and-so: on Wednesday there
will be music and vespers at the Sistine Chapel—on Thursday, the Pope
will bless the animals—sheep, horses, and what-not: and flocks of
English accordingly rush to witness the benediction of droves of
donkeys. In a word, the ancient city of the Cæsars, the august fanes of
the Popes, with their splendour and ceremony, are all mapped out and
arranged for English diversion; and we run in a crowd to high mass at
St. Peter’s, or to the illumination on Easter Day, as we run when the
bell rings to the Bosjesmen at Cremorne, or the fireworks at Vauxhall.

Running to see fireworks alone, rushing off to examine Bosjesmen by
one’s self, is a dreary work: I should think very few men would have
the courage to do it unattended, and personally would not prefer a pipe
in their own rooms. Hence if Clive went to see all these sights, as he
did, it is to be concluded that he went in company; and if he went in
company and sought it, we may suppose that little affair which annoyed
him at Baden no longer tended to hurt his peace of mind very seriously.
The truth is, our countrymen are pleasanter abroad than at home; most
hospitable, kindly, and eager to be pleased and to please. You see a
family half a dozen times in a week in the little Roman circle, whom
you shall not meet twice in a season afterwards in the enormous London
round. When Easter is over and everybody is going away at Rome, you and
your neighbour shake hands, sincerely sorry to part: in London we are
obliged to dilute our kindness so that there is hardly any smack of the
original milk. As one by one the pleasant families dropped off with
whom Clive had spent his happy winter; as Admiral Freeman’s carriage
drove away, whose pretty girls he had caught at St. Peter’s kissing St.
Peter’s toe; as Dick Denby’s family ark appeared with all Denby’s sweet
young children kissing farewells to him out of the window; as those
three charming Miss Baliols with whom he had that glorious day in the
Catacombs; as friend after friend quitted the great city with kind
greetings, warm pressures of the hand, and hopes of meeting in a yet
greater city on the banks of the Thames, young Clive felt a depression
of spirit. Rome was Rome, but it was pleasanter to see it in company;
our painters are smoking still at the Oafs Greco, but a society all
smoke and all painters did not suit him. If Mr. Clive is not a Michael
Angelo or a Beethoven, if his genius is not gloomy, solitary, gigantic,
shining alone, like a lighthouse, a storm round about him, and breakers
dashing at his feet, I cannot help myself: he is as Heaven made him,
brave, honest, gay, and friendly, and persons of a gloomy turn must not
look to him as a hero.

So Clive and his companion worked away with all their hearts from
November until far into April when Easter came, and the glorious gala
with which the Roman Church celebrates that holy season. By this time
Clive’s books were full of sketches. Ruins, imperial and mediæval;
peasants and bagpipemen; Passionists with shaven polls; Capuchins and
the equally hairy frequenters of the Café Greco; painters of all
nations who resort there; Cardinals and their queer equipages and
attendants; the Holy Father himself (it was Gregory sixteenth of the
name); the dandified English on the Pincio and the wonderful Roman
members of the hunt—were not all these designed by the young man and
admired by his friends in after-days? J. J.’s sketches were few, but he
had painted two beautiful little pictures, and sold them for so good a
price that Prince Polonia’s people were quite civil to him. He had
orders for yet more pictures, and having worked very hard, thought
himself authorised to accompany Mr. Clive upon a pleasure-trip to
Naples, which the latter deemed necessary after his own tremendous
labours. He for his part had painted no pictures, though he had
commenced a dozen and turned them to the wall; but he had sketched, and
dined, and smoked, and danced, as we have seen. So the little britzska
was put behind horses again, and our two friends set out on their tour,
having quite a crowd of brother-artists to cheer them, who had
assembled and had a breakfast for the purpose at that comfortable
osteria near the Lateran Gate. How the fellows flung their hats up, and
shouted, “Lebe wohl,” and “Adieu,” and “God bless you, old boy,” in
many languages! Clive was the young swell of the artists of that year,
and adored by the whole of the jolly company. His sketches were
pronounced on all hands to be admirable: it was agreed that if he chose
he might do anything.

So with promises of a speedy return they left behind them the noble
city, which all love who once have seen it, and of which we think
afterwards ever with the kindness and the regard of home. They dashed
across the Campagna and over the beautiful hills of Albano, and sped
through the solemn Pontine Marshes, and stopped to roost at Terracing
(which was not at all like Fra Diavolo’s Terracing at Covent Garden, as
J. J. was distressed to remark), and so, galloping onwards through a
hundred ancient cities that crumble on the shores of the beautiful
Mediterranean, behold, on the second day as they ascended a hill about
noon. Vesuvius came in view, its great shape shimmering blue in the
distant haze, its banner of smoke in the cloudless sky. And about five
o’clock in the evening (as everybody will who starts from Terracing
early and pays the postboy well), the travellers came to an ancient
city walled and fortified, with drawbridges over the shining moats.

“Here is CAPUA,” says J. J., and Clive burst out laughing: thinking of
_his_ Capua which he had left—how many months—years it seemed ago! From
Capua to Naples is a fine straight road, and our travellers were landed
at the latter place at suppertime; where, if they had quarters at the
Vittoria Hotel, they were as comfortable as any gentlemen painters need
wish to be in this world.

The aspect of the place was so charming and delightful to Clive:—the
beautiful sea stretched before his eyes when waking, Capri a fairy
island in the distance, in the amethyst rocks of which Sirens might be
playing—that fair line of cities skirting the shore glittering white
along the purple water—over the whole brilliant scene Vesuvius rising
with cloudlets playing round its summit, and the country bursting out
into that glorious vegetation with which sumptuous nature decorates
every spring—this city and scene of Naples were so much to Clive’s
liking that I have a letter from him dated a couple of days after the
young man’s arrival, in which he announces his intention of staying
there for ever, and gives me an invitation to some fine lodgings in a
certain palazzo, on which he has cast his eye. He is so enraptured with
the place, that he says to die and be buried there even would be quite
a treat, so charming is the cemetery where the Neapolitan dead repose.

The Fates did not, however, ordain that Clive Newcome should pass all
his life at Naples. His Roman banker presently forwarded a few letters
to his address; some which had arrived after his departure, others
which had been lying at the Poste Restante, with his name written in
perfectly legible characters, but which the authorities of the post,
according to their custom, would not see when Clive sent for them.

It was one of these letters which Clive clutched the most eagerly. It
had been lying since October, actually, at the Roman post, though Clive
had asked for letters there a hundred times. It was that little letter
from Ethel, in reply to his own, whereof we have made mention in a
previous chapter. There was not much in the little letter. Nothing, of
course, that Virtue or Grandmamma might not read over the young
writer’s shoulder. It was affectionate, simple, rather melancholy;
described in a few words Sir Brian’s seizure and present condition;
spoke of Lord Kew, who was mending rapidly, as if Clive, of course, was
aware of his accident; of the children, of Clive’s father, and ended
with a hearty “God bless you,” to Clive, from his sincere Ethel.

“You boast of its being over. You see it is not over,” says Clive’s
monitor and companion. “Else, why should you have dashed at that letter
before all the others, Clive?” J. J. had been watching, not without
interest, Clive’s blank face as he read the young lady’s note.

“How do you know who wrote the letter?” asks Clive.

“I can read the signature in your face,” says the other; “and I could
almost tell the contents of the note. Why have you such a tell-tale
face, Clive?”

“It is over; but when a man has once, you know, gone through an affair
like that,” says Clive, looking very grave, “he—he’s anxious to hear of
Alice Grey, and how she’s getting on, you see, my good friend.” And he
began to shout out as of old—

“Her heart it is another’s, she—never—can—be—mine;”


and to laugh at the end of the song. “Well, well,” says he; “it is a
very kind note, a very proper little note; the expression elegant, J.
J., the sentiment is most correct. All the little t’s most properly
crossed, and all the little i’s have dots over their little heads. It’s
a sort of a prize note, don’t you see; and one such, as in the old
spelling-book story, the good boy received a plum-cake for writing.
Perhaps you weren’t educated on the old spelling-book, J. J.? My good
old father taught me to read out of his—I say, I think it was a shame
to keep the old boy waiting whilst I have been giving an audience to
this young lady. Dear old father!” and he apostrophised the letter. “I
beg your pardon, sir; Miss Newcome requested five minutes’
conversation, and I was obliged, from politeness, you know, to receive.
There’s nothing between us; nothing but what’s most correct, upon my
honour and conscience.” And he kissed his father’s letter, and calling
out again, “Dear old father!” proceeded to read as follows:—

“‘Your letters, my dearest Clive, have been the greatest comfort to me.
I seem to hear you as I read them. I can’t but think that this, the
_modern and natural style_, is a great progress upon the
_old-fashioned_ manner of my day, when we used to begin to our fathers,
‘Honoured Father,’ or even ‘Honoured Sir’ some _precisians_ used to
write still from Mr. Lord’s Academy, at Tooting, where I went before
Grey Friars—though I suspect parents were no more _honoured_ in those
days than nowadays. I know one who had rather be trusted than honoured;
and you may call me what you please, so as you do that.

“‘It is not only to me your letters give pleasure. Last week I took
yours from Baden Baden, No. 3, September 15, into Calcutta, and could
not help showing it at Government House, where I dined. Your sketch of
the old Russian Princess and her little boy, gambling, was _capital_.
Colonel Buckmaster, Lord Bagwig’s private secretary, knew her, and says
it is to a _T_. And I read out to some of my young fellows what you
said about play, and how you had given it over. I very much fear some
of the young rogues are at dice and brandy-pawnee before tiffin. What
you say of young Ridley, I take _cum grano_. His sketches I thought
very agreeable; but to compare them to _a certain gentleman’s_——Never
mind, I shall not try to make him think too well of himself. I kissed
dear Ethel’s hand in your letter. I write her a long letter by this
mail.

“‘If Paul de Florac in any way resembles his mother, between you and
him there ought to be a very warm regard. I knew her when I was a boy,
long before you were born or thought of; and in wandering forty years
through the world since, I have seen no woman in my eyes so good or so
beautiful. Your cousin Ethel reminded me of her; as handsome, but not
so _lovely_. Yes, it was that pale lady you saw at Paris, with eyes
full of care, and hair streaked with grey. So it will be the turn of
you young folks, come eight more _lustres_, and your heads will be bald
like mine, or grey like Madame de Florac’s, and bending over the ground
where we are lying in quiet. I understand from you that young Paul is
not in very flourishing circumstances. If he still is in need, mind and
be his banker, and _I will be yours_. Any child of hers must never want
when I have a spare guinea. I do not mind telling you, sir, that I
cared for her more than millions of guineas once; and half broke my
heart about her when I went to India, as a young chap. So, if any such
misfortunes happen to _you_, consider, my boy, you are not the _only_
one.

“‘Binnie writes me word that he has been ailing. I hope you are a good
correspondent with him. What made me turn to him just after speaking of
unlucky love affairs? Could I be thinking about little Rosie Mackenzie?
She is a sweet little lass, and James will leave her a pretty piece of
money. _Verbum sap_. I should like you to marry; but God forbid you
should marry for a million of gold mohurs.

“‘And gold mohurs bring me to another subject. Do you know I narrowly
missed losing half a lakh of rupees which I had at an agent’s here? And
who do you think warned me about him? Our friend Rummun Loll, who has
lately been in England, and with whom I made the voyage from
Southampton. He is a man of wonderful tact and observation. I used to
think meanly of the honesty of natives and treat them haughtily, as I
recollect doing this very gentleman at your Uncle Newcome’s in
Bryanstone Square. He heaped coals of fire on my head by saving my
money for me; and I have placed it with interest in his house. If I
would but listen to him, my capital might be trebled in a year, he
says, and the interest immensely increased. He enjoys the greatest
esteem among the moneyed men here; keeps a splendid establishment and
house here in Barrackpore; is princely in his benefactions. He talks to
me about the establishment of a bank, of which the profits are so
enormous and the scheme so (seemingly) clear, that I don’t know whether
I mayn’t be tempted to take a few shares. _Nous verrons_. Several of my
friends are longing to have a finger in it; but be sure this, I shall
do nothing rashly and without the very _best advice_.

“‘I have not been frightened yet by your draughts upon me. Draw as many
of these as you please. You know I don’t half like the other kind of
drawing, except as a _délassement:_ but if you chose to be a weaver,
like my grandfather, I should not say you nay. Don’t stint yourself of
money or of honest pleasure. Of what good is money, unless we can make
those we love happy with it? There would be no need for me to save, if
you were to save too. So, and as you know as well as I what our means
are, in every honest way use them. I should like you not to pass the
whole of next year in Italy, but to come home and pay a visit to honest
James Binnie. I wonder how the old barrack in Fitzroy Square looks
without me? Try and go round by Paris on your way home, and pay your
visit, and carry your father’s fond remembrances to Madame la Comtesse
de Florac. I don’t say remember me to my brother, as I write Brian by
this mail. Adieu, mon fils! je t’embrasse!—and am always my Clive’s
affectionate father, T. N.’”

“Isn’t he a noble old trump?” That point had been settled by the young
men any time these three years. And now Mr. J. J. remarked that when
Clive had read his father’s letter once, then he read Ethel’s over
again, and put it in his breast-pocket, and was very disturbed in mind
that day, pishing and pshawing at the statue-gallery which they went to
see at the Museo.

“After all,” says Clive, “what rubbish these second-rate statues are!
what a great hulking abortion is this brute of a Farnese Hercules!
There’s only one bit in the whole gallery that is worth a
twopenny-piece.”

It was the beautiful fragment called Psyche. J. J. smiled as his
comrade spoke in admiration of this statue—in the slim shape, in the
delicate formation of the neck, in the haughty virginal expression, the
Psyche is not unlike the Diana of the Louvre—and the Diana of the
Louvre we have said was like a certain young lady.

“After all,” continues Clive, looking up at the great knotted legs of
that clumsy caricatured porter which Glykon the Athenian sculptured in
bad times of art surely,—“she could not write otherwise than she
did—don’t you see? Her letter is quite kind and affectionate. You see
she says she shall always hear of me with pleasure: hopes I’ll come
back soon, and bring some good pictures with me, since pictures I will
do. She thinks small beer of painters, J. J.—well, we don’t think small
beer of ourselves, my noble friend. I—I suppose it must be over by this
time, and I may write to her as the Countess of Kew.” The custode of
the apartment had seen admiration and wonder expressed by hundreds of
visitors to his marble Giant: but he had never known Hercules occasion
emotion before, as in the case of the young stranger; who, after
staring a while at the statue, dashed his hand across his forehead with
a groan, and walked away from before the graven image of the huge
Strongman, who had himself been made such a fool by women.

“My father wants me to go and see James and Madame de Florac,” says
Clive, as they stride down the street to the Toledo.

J. J. puts his arm through his companion’s, which is deep the pocket of
his velvet paletot. “You must not go home till you hear it is over,
Clive,” whispers J. J.

“Of course not, old boy,” says the other, blowing tobacco out of his
shaking head.

Not very long after their arrival, we may be sure they went to Pompeii,
of which place, as this is not an Italian tour, but a history of Clive
Newcome, Esquire, and his most respectable family, we shall offer to
give no description. The young man had read Sir Bulwer Lytton’s
delightful story, which has become the history of Pompeii, before they
came thither, and Pliny’s description, _apud_ the Guide-Book. Admiring
the wonderful ingenuity with which the English writer had illustrated
the place by his text, as if the houses were so many pictures to which
he had appended a story, Clive, the wag, who was always indulging his
vein for caricature, was proposing that that they should take the same
place, names, people, and make a burlesque story: “What would be a
better figure,” says he, “than Pliny’s mother, whom the historian
describes as exceedingly corpulent, and walking away from the
catastrophe with slaves holding cushions behind her, to shield her
plump person from the cinders! Yes, old Mrs Pliny shall be my heroine!”
says Clive. A picture of her on a dark grey paper and touched up with
red at the extremities, exists in Clive’s album to the present day.

As they were laughing, rattling, wondering, mimicking, the cicerone
attending them with his nasal twaddle, anon pausing and silent,
yielding to the melancholy pity and wonder which the aspect of that
strange and smiling place inspires,—behold they come upon another party
of English, two young men accompanying a lady.

“What, Clive!” cries one.

“My dear, dear Lord Kew!” shouts the other; and as the young man rushes
up and grasps the two hands of the other, they begin to blush——

Lord Kew and his family resided in a neighbouring hotel on the Chiafa
at Naples; and that very evening on returning from the Pompeian
excursion, the two painters were invited to take tea by those friendly
persons. J. J. excused himself, and sate at home drawing all night.
Clive went, and passed a pleasant evening; in which all sorts of future
tours and pleasure-parties were projected by the young men. They were
to visit Pæstum, Capri, Sicily; why not Malta and the East? asked Lord
Kew.

Lady Walham was alarmed. Had not Kew been in the East already? Clive
was surprised and agitated too. Could Kew think of going to the East,
and making long journeys when he had—he had other engagements that
would necessitate his return home? No, he must not go to the East, Lord
Kew’s mother avowed; Kew had promised to stay with her during the
summer at Castellammare, and Mr. Newcome must come and paint their
portraits there—all their portraits. She would like to have an entire
picture-gallery of Kews, if her son would remain at home during the
sittings.

At an early hour Lady Walham retired to rest, exacting Clive’s promise
to come to Castellammare; and George Barnes disappeared to array
himself in an evening costume, and to pay his round of visits as became
a young diplomatist. This part of diplomatic duty does not commence
until after the opera at Naples; and society begins when the rest of
the world has gone to bed.

Kew and Clive sate till one o’clock in the morning, when the latter
returned to his hotel. Not one of those fine parties at Pæstum, Sicily,
etc. was carried out. Clive did not go to the East at all, and it was
J. J, who painted Lord Kew’s portrait that summer at Castellammare. The
next day Clive went for his passport to the embassy; and a steamer
departing direct for Marseilles on that very afternoon, behold Mr.
Newcome was on board of her; Lord Kew and his brother and J. J. waving
their hats to him as the vessel left the shore.

Away went the ship cleaving swiftly through the azure waters; but not
swiftly enough for Clive. J. J. went back with a sigh to his sketchbook
and easels. I suppose the other young disciple of Art had heard
something which caused him to forsake his sublime mistress for one who
was much more capricious and earthly.




CHAPTER XL.
Returns from Rome to Pall Mall


One morning in the month of July, when there was actually sunshine in
Lamb Court, and the two gentlemen who occupied the third-floor chambers
there in partnership, were engaged, as their custom was, over their
pipes, and their manuscripts, and their _Times_ newspaper, behold a
fresh sunshine burst into their room in the person of a young Clive,
with a bronzed face, and a yellow beard and mustachios, and those
bright cheerful eyes, the sight of which was always so welcome to both
of us. “What, Clive! What, the young one! What, Benjamin!” shout
Pendennis and Warrington. Clive had obtained a very high place indeed
in the latter’s affections, so much so, that if I could have found it
in my heart to be jealous of such a generous brave fellow, I might have
grudged him his share of Warrington’s regard. He blushed up with
pleasure to see us again. Pidgeon, our boy, introduced him with a
jubilant countenance; and Flanagan, the laundress, came smirking out of
the bedroom, eager to get a nod of recognition from him, and bestow a
smile of welcome upon everybody’s favourite, Clive.

In two minutes an arm-chair full of magazines, slips of copy, and books
for review, was emptied over the neighbouring coal-scuttle, and Clive
was in the seat, a cigar in his mouth, as comfortable as if he had
never been away. When did he come? Last night. He was back in Charlotte
Street, at his old lodgings: he had been to breakfast in Fitzroy Square
that morning; James Binnie chirped for joy at seeing him. His father
had written to him desiring him to come back and see James Binnie;
pretty Miss Rosey was very well, thank you: and Mrs. Mack? Wasn’t Mrs.
Mackenzie delighted to behold him? “Come, sir, on your honour and
conscience, didn’t the widow give you a kiss on your return?” Clive
sends an uncut number of the _Pall Mall Gazette_ flying across the room
at the head of the inquirer; but blushes as sweetly, that I have very
little doubt some such pretty meeting had taken place.

What a pity it is he had not been here a short while since for a
marriage in high life, to give away his dear Barnes, and sign the book,
along with the other dignitaries! We described that ceremony to him,
and announced the promotion of his friend, Florac, now our friend also,
Director of the Great Anglo-Gallic Railway, the Prince de Moncontour.
Then Clive told us of his deeds during the winter; of the good fun he
had had at Rome, and the jolly fellows he had met there. Was he going
to astonish the world by some grand pictures? He was not. The more he
worked, the more discontented he was with his performances somehow: but
J. J. was coming out very strong, J. J. was going to be a stunner. We
turned with pride and satisfaction to that very number of the _Pall
Mall Gazette_ which the youth had flung at us, and showed him a fine
article by F. Bayham, Esq., in which the picture sent home by J. J. was
enthusiastically lauded by the great critic.

So he was back amongst us, and it seemed but yesterday he had quitted
us. To Londoners everything seems to have happened but yesterday;
nobody has time to miss his neighbour who goes away. People go to the
Cape, or on a campaign, or on a tour round the world, or to India, and
return with a wife and two or three children, and we fancy it was only
the other day they left us, so engaged is every man in his individual
speculations, studies, struggles; so selfish does our life make
us:—selfish but not ill-natured. We are glad to see an old friend,
though we do not weep when he leaves us. We humbly acknowledge, if fate
calls us away likewise, that we are no more missed than any other atom.

After talking for a while, Mr. Clive must needs go into the City,
whither I accompanied him. His interview with Messrs. Jolly and Baines,
at the house in Fog Court, must have been very satisfactory; Clive came
out of the parlour with a radiant countenance. “Do you want any money,
old boy?” says he; “the dear old governor has placed a jolly sum to my
account, and Mr. Baines has told me how delighted Mrs. Baines and the
girls will be to see me at dinner. He says my father has made a lucky
escape out of one house in India, and a famous investment in another.
Nothing could be more civil; how uncommonly kind and friendly everybody
is in London! Everybody!” Then bestowing ourselves in a hansom cab,
which had probably just deposited some other capitalist in the City, we
made for the West End of the town, where Mr. Clive had some important
business to transact with his tailors. He discharged his outstanding
little account with easy liberality, blushing as he pulled out of his
pocket a new chequebook, page 1 of which he bestowed on the delighted
artist. From Mr. B.’s shop to Mr. Truefitt’s, is but a step. Our young
friend was induced to enter the hairdresser’s, and leave behind him a
great portion of the flowing locks and the yellow beard, which he had
brought with him from Rome. With his mustachios he could not be induced
to part; painters and cavalry officers having a right to those
decorations. And why should not this young fellow wear smart clothes,
and a smart moustache, and look handsome, and take his pleasure, and
bask in his sun when it shone? Time enough for flannel and a fire when
the winter comes; and for grey hair and cork-soled boots in the natural
decline of years.

Then we went to pay a visit at a hotel in Jermyn Street to our friend
Florac who was now magnificently lodged there. A powdered giant lolling
in the hall, his buttons emblazoned with prodigious coronets, took our
cards up to the Prince. As the door of an apartment on the first floor
opened, we heard a cry as of joy; and that nobleman in a magnificent
Persian dressing-gown, rushing from the room, plunged down the stairs,
and began kissing Clive, to the respectful astonishment of the Titan in
livery.

“Come that I present you, my friends,” our good little Frenchman
exclaimed “to Madame la—to my wife!” We entered the drawing-room; a
demure little little lady, of near sixty years of age, was seated
there, and we were presented in form to Madame Princesse de Moncontour,
nee Higg, of Manchester. She made us a stiff little curtsey, but looked
not ill-natured; indeed, few women could look at Clive Newcome’s
gallant figure and brave smiling countenance and keep a frown on their
own very long.

“I have ’eard of you from somebodys else besides the Prince,” said the
lady, with rather a blush “Your uncle has spoke to me hoften about you,
Mr. Clive, and about your good father.”

“C’est son Directeur,” whispers Florac to me. I wondered which of the
firm of Newcome had taken that office upon him.

“Now you are come to England,” the lady continued (whose Lancashire
pronunciation being once indicated, we shall henceforth, out of respect
to the Princess’s rank generally pretermit),—“now you are come to
England we hope to see you often. Not here in this noisy hotel, which I
can’t bear, but in the country. Our house is only three miles from
Newcome—not such a grand place as your uncle’s; but I hope we shall see
you there a great deal, and your friend Mr Pendennis, if he is passing
that way.” The invitation to Mr. Pendennis, I am bound to say, was
given in terms by no means so warm as those in which the Princess’s
hospitality to Clive were professed.

“Shall we meet you at your Huncle ’Obson’s?” the lady continued to
Clive; “his wife is a most charming, well-informed woman, has been most
kind and civil and we dine there to-day. Barnes and his wife is gone to
spend the honeymoon at Newcome. Lady Clara is a sweet dear thing, and
her pa and ma most affable, I am sure. What a pity Sir Brian couldn’t
attend the marriage! There was everybody there in London, a’most. Sir
Harvey Diggs says he is mending very slowly. In life we are in death,
Mr. Newcome! Isn’t it sad to think of him, in the midst of all his
splendour and prosperity, and he so infirm and unable to enjoy them!
But let us hope for the best, and that his health will soon come
round!”

With these and similar remarks, in which poor Florac took but a very
small share (for he seemed dumb and melancholy in the company of the
Princess, his elderly spouse), the visit sped on. Mr. Pendennis, to
whom very little was said, having leisure to make his silent
observations upon the person to whom he had been just presented.

As there lay on the table two neat little packages, addressed “The
Princess de Moncontour”—an envelope to the same address, with “The
Prescription, No. 9396,” further inscribed on the paper, and a sheet of
notepaper, bearing cabalistic characters, and the signature of that
most fashionable physician, Sir Harvey Diggs, I was led to believe that
the lady of Moncontour was, or fancied herself, in a delicate state of
health. By the side of the physic for the body was medicine for the
soul—a number of pretty little books in middle-age bindings, in antique
type many of theist, adorned with pictures of the German school,
representing demure ecclesiastics, with their heads on one side,
children in long starched nightgowns, virgins bearing lilies, and so
forth, from which it was to be concluded that the owner of the volumes
was not so hostile to Rome as she had been at an earlier period of her
religious life; and that she had migrated (in spirit) from Clapham to
Knightsbridge—so many wealthy mercantile families have likewise done in
the body. A long strip of embroidery, of the Gothic pattern,
furthermore betrayed her present inclinations; and the person observing
these things, whilst nobody was taking any notice of him, was amused
when the accuracy of his conjectures was confirmed by the reappearance
of the gigantic footman, calling out “’Oneyman,” in a loud voice, and
preceding that divine into the room.

“C’est le Directeur. Venez fumer dans ma chambre, Pen,” growled Florac
as Honeyman came sliding over the carpet, his elegant smile changing to
a blush when he beheld Clive, his nephew, seated by the Princess’s
side. This, then, was the uncle who had spoken about Clive and his
father to Madame de Florac. Charles seemed in the best condition. He
held out two bran-new lavender-coloured kid gloves to shake hands with
his dear Clive; Florac and Mr. Pendennis vanished out of the room as he
appeared, so that no precise account can be given of this affecting
interview.

When I quitted the hotel, a brown brougham, with a pair of beautiful
horses, the harness and panels emblazoned with the neatest little ducal
coronets you ever saw, and a cypher under each crown as easy to read as
the arrow-headed inscriptions on one of Mr. Layard’s Assyrian chariots,
was in waiting, and I presumed that Madame la Princesse was about to
take an airing.

Clive had passed the avuncular banking-house in the City, without
caring to face his relatives there. Mr. Newcome was now in sole
command, Mr. Barnes being absent at Newcome, the Baronet little likely
ever to enter bank-parlour again. But his bounden duty was to wait on
the ladies; and of course, only from duty’s sake, he went the very
first day and called in Park Lane.

“The family was habsent ever since the marriage simminery last week,”
the footman, who had accompanied the party to Baden, informed Clive
when he opened the door, and recognised that gentleman. “Sir Brian
pretty well, thank you, sir. The family was at Brighting. That is Miss
Newcome is in London staying with her grandmamma in Queen Street,
Mayfear, sir.” The varnished doors closed upon Jeames within; the
brazen knockers grinned their familiar grin at Clive, and he went down
the blank steps discomfited. Must it be owned that he went to a Club,
and looked in the Directory for the number of Lady Kew’s house in Queen
Street? Her ladyship had a furnished house for the season. No such
noble name to be found among the inhabitants of Queen Street.

Mr. Hobson was from home; that is, Thomas had orders not to admit
strangers on certain days, or before certain hours; so that Aunt Hobson
saw Clive without being seen by the young man. I cannot say how much he
regretted that mischance. His visits of propriety were thus all paid;
and he went off to dine dutifully with James Binnie, after which meal
he came to a certain rendezvous given to him by some bachelors friends
for the evening.

James Binnie’s eyes lightened up with pleasure on beholding his young
Clive; the youth, obedient to his father’s injunction, had hastened to
Fitzroy Square immediately after taking possession of his old
lodgings—his, during the time of his absence. The old properties and
carved cabinets, the picture of his father looking melancholy out of
the canvas, greeted Clive strangely on the afternoon of his arrival. No
wonder he was glad to get away from a solitude peopled with a number of
dismal recollections, to the near hospitality of Fitzroy Square and his
guardian and friend there.

James had not improved in health during Clive’s ten months’ absence. He
had never been able to walk well, or take his accustomed exercise,
after his fall. He was no more used to riding than the late Mr. Gibbon,
whose person James’s somewhat resembled, and of whose philosophy our
Scottish friend was an admiring scholar. The Colonel gone, James would
have arguments with Mr. Honeyman over their claret, bring down the
famous XVth and XVIth chapters of the Decline and Fall upon him, and
quite get the better of the clergyman. James, like many other sceptics,
was very obstinate, and for his part believed that almost all parsons
had as much belief as the Roman augurs in their ceremonies. Certainly,
poor Honeyman, in their controversies, gave up one article after
another, flying from James’s assault; but the battle over, Charles
Honeyman would pick up these accoutrements which he had flung away in
his retreat, wipe them dry, and put them on again.

Lamed by his fall, and obliged to remain much within doors, where
certain society did not always amuse him, James Binnie sought
excitement in the pleasures of the table, partaking of them the more
freely now that his health could afford them the less. Clive, the sly
rogue, observed a great improvement in the commissariat since his good
father’s time, ate his dinner with thankfulness, and made no remarks.
Nor did he confide to us for a while his opinion that Mrs. Mack bored
the good gentleman most severely; that he pined away under her
kindnesses; sneaked off to his study-chair and his nap; was only too
glad when some of the widow’s friends came, or she went out; seeming to
breathe more freely when she was gone, and drink his wine more cheerily
when rid of the intolerable weight of her presence.

I protest the great ills of life are nothing—the loss of your fortune
is a mere flea-bite; the loss of your wife—how many men have supported
it and married comfortably afterwards? It is not what you lose, but
what you have daily to bear that is hard. I can fancy nothing more
cruel, after a long easy life of bachelorhood, than to have to sit day
after day with a dull, handsome woman opposite; to have to answer her
speeches about the weather, housekeeping and what not; to smile
appropriately when she is disposed to be lively (that laughing at the
jokes is the hardest part), and to model your conversation so as to
suit her intelligence, knowing that a word used out of its downright
signification will not be understood by your fair breakfast-maker.
Women go through this simpering and smiling life, and bear it quite
easily. Theirs is a life of hypocrisy. What good woman does not laugh
at her husband’s or father’s jokes and stories time after time, and
would not laugh at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, if he told them?
Flattery is their nature—to coax, flatter and sweetly befool some one
is every woman’s business. She is none if she declines this office. But
men are not provided with such powers of humbug or endurance—they
perish and pine away miserably when bored—or they shrink off to the
club or public-house for comfort. I want to say as delicately as I can,
and never liking to use rough terms regarding a handsome woman, that
Mrs. Mackenzie, herself being in the highest spirits and the best
humour, extinguished her half-brother, James Binnie, Esq.; that she was
as a malaria to him, poisoning his atmosphere, numbing his limbs,
destroying his sleep—that day after day as he sate down at breakfast,
and she levelled commonplaces at her dearest James, her dearest James
became more wretched under her. And no one could see what his complaint
was. He called in the old physicians at the Club. He dosed himself with
poppy, and mandragora and blue pill—lower and lower went poor James’s
mercury. If he wanted to move to Brighton or Cheltenham, well and good.
Whatever were her engagements, or whatever pleasures darling Rosey
might have in store, dear thing!—at her age, my dear Mrs. Newcome,
would not one do all to make a young creature happy?—under no
circumstances could I _think_ of leaving my poor brother.

Mrs. Mackenzie thought herself a most highly principled woman, Mrs.
Newcome had also a great opinion of her. These two ladies had formed a
considerable friendship in the past months, the captain’s widow having
an unaffected reverence for the banker’s lady and thinking her one of
the best informed and most superior women in the world. When she had a
high opinion of a person Mrs. Mack always wisely told it. Mrs. Newcome
in her turn thought Mrs. Mackenzie a very clever, agreeable, ladylike
woman,—not accomplished, but one could not have everything. “No, no, my
dear,” says simple Hobson, “never would do to have every woman as
clever as you are, Maria. Women would have it all their own way then.”

Maria, as her custom was, thanked God for being so virtuous and clever,
and graciously admitted Mrs. and Miss Mackenzie into the circle of
adorers of that supreme virtue and talent. Mr. Newcome took little
Rosey and her mother to some parties. When any took place in Bryanstone
Square, they were generally allowed to come to tea.

When on the second day of his arrival the dutiful Clive went to dine
with Mr. James, the ladies, in spite of their raptures at his return
and delight at seeing him, were going in the evening to his aunt. Their
talk was about the Princess all dinner-time. The Prince and Princess
were to dine in Bryanstone Square. The Princess had ordered such and
such things at the jeweller’s—the Princess would take rank over an
English Earl’s daughter—over Lady Anne Newcome, for instance. “Oh,
dear! I wish the Prince and Princess were smothered in the Tower,”
growled James Binnie; “since you have got acquainted with ’em I have
never heard of anything else.”

Clive, like a wise man, kept his counsel about the Prince and Princess,
with whom we have seen that he had had the honour of an interview that
very day. But after dinner Rosey came round and whispered to her mamma,
and after Rosey’s whisper mamma flung her arms round Rosey’s neck and
kissed her, and called her a thoughtful darling. “What do you think
this creature says, Clive?” says Mrs. Mack, still holding her darling’s
little hand. “I wonder I had not thought of it myself.”

“What is it, Mrs. Mackenzie?” asks Clive, laughing.

“She says why should not you come to your aunt’s with us? We are sure
Mrs. Newcome would be most happy to see you.”

Rosey, with a little hand put to mamma’s mouth, said, “Why did you
tell?—you naughty mamma! Isn’t she a naughty mamma, Uncle James?” More
kisses follow after this sally, of which Uncle James receives one with
perfect complacency: mamma crying out as Rosey retires to dress, “That
darling child is always thinking of others—always!”

Clive says, “he will sit and smoke a cheroot with Mr. Binnie, if they
please.” James’s countenance falls. “We have left off _that_ sort of
thing here, my dear Clive, a long time,” cries Mrs. Mackenzie,
departing from the dining-room.

“But we have improved the claret, Clive, my boy!” whispers Uncle James.
“Let us have another bottle, and we will drink to the dear Colonel’s
good health and speedy return—God bless him! I say, Clive, Tom seems to
have had a most fortunate escape out of Winter’s house—thanks to our
friend Rummun Loll, and to have got into a capital good thing with this
Bundelcund bank. They speak famously of it at Hanover Square, and I see
the _Hurkara_ quotes the shares at a premium already.”

Clive did not know anything about the Bundelcund bank, except a few
words found in a letter from his father, which he had in the City this
morning, “and an uncommonly liberal remittance the governor has sent me
home, sir.” Upon which they fill another bumper to the Colonel’s
health.

Mamma and Rosey come and show their pretty pink dresses before going to
Mrs. Newcome’s, and Clive lights a cigar in the hall—and isn’t there a
jubilation at the Haunt when the young fellow’s face appears above the
smoke-clouds there?




CHAPTER XLI.
An Old Story


Many of Clive’s Roman friends were by this time come to London, and the
young man renewed his acquaintance with them, and had speedily a
considerable circle of his own. He thought fit to allow himself a good
horse or two, and appeared in the Park among other young dandies. He
and Monsieur de Moncontour were sworn allies. Lord Fareham, who had
purchased J. J.’s picture, was Clive’s very good friend: Major
Pendennis himself pronounced him to be a young fellow of agreeable
manners, and very favourably vu (as the Major happened to know) in some
very good quarters.

Ere many days Clive had been to Brighton to see Lady Anne and Sir
Brian, and good Aunt Honeyman, in whose house the Baronet was lodged:
and I suppose he found out, by some means or other, where Lady Kew
lived in Mayfair.

But her ladyship was not at home, nor was she at home on the second
day, nor did there come any note from Ethel to her cousin. She did not
ride in the Park as of old. Clive, _bien vu_ as he was, did not belong
to that great world as yet, in which he would be pretty sure to meet
her every night at one of those parties where everybody goes. He read
her name in the paper morning after morning, as having been present at
Lady This’s entertainment and Lady That’s ministerial _réunion_. At
first he was too shy to tell what the state of the case was, and took
nobody into his confidence regarding his little _tendre_.

There he was riding through Queen Street, Mayfair, attired in splendid
raiment: never missing the Park; actually going to places of worship in
the neighbourhood; and frequenting the opera—a waste of time which one
would never have expected in a youth of his nurture. At length a
certain observer of human nature remarking his state, rightly
conjectured that he must be in love, and taxed him with the soft
impeachment—on which the young man, no doubt anxious to open his heart
to some one, poured out all that story which has before been narrated;
and told how he thought his passion cured, and how it was cured; but
when he heard from Kew at Naples that the engagement was over between
him and Miss Newcome, Clive found his own flame kindle again with new
ardour. He was wild to see her. He dashed off from Naples instantly on
receiving the news that she was free. He had been ten days in London
without getting a glimpse of her. “That Mrs. Mackenzie bothers me so I
hardly know where to turn,” said poor Clive, “and poor little Rosey is
made to write me a note about something twice a day. She’s a good dear
little thing—little Rosey—and I really had thought once of—of—oh, never
mind that! Oh, Pen! I’m up another tree now! and a poor miserable young
beggar I am!” In fact, Mr. Pendennis was installed as confidant, _vice_
J. J.—absent on leave.

This is a part, which, especially for a few days, the present
biographer has always liked well enough. For a while, at least, I think
almost every man or woman is interesting when in love. If you know of
two or three such affairs going on in any soirée to which you may be
invited—is not the party straightway amusing? Yonder goes Augustus
Tomkins, working his way through the rooms to that far corner where
demure Miss Hopkins is seated, to whom the stupid grinning Bumpkins
thinks he is making himself agreeable. Yonder sits Miss Fanny
_distraite_, and yet trying to smile as the captain is talking his
folly the parson his glib compliments. And see, her face lights up all
of a sudden: her eyes beam with delight at the captain’s stories, and
at that delightful young clergyman likewise. It is because Augustus has
appeared; their eyes only meet for one semi-second, but that is enough
for Miss Fanny. Go on, captain, with your twaddle!—Proceed, my reverend
friend, with your smirking commonplaces! In the last two minutes the
world has changed for Miss Fanny. That moment has come for which she
has been fidgeting and longing and scheming all day! How different an
interest, I say, has a meeting of people for a philosopher who knows of
a few such little secrets, to that which your vulgar looker-on feels
who comes but to eat the ices, and stare at the ladies’ dresses and
beauty! There are two frames of mind under which London society is
bearable to a man—to be an actor in one of those sentimental
performances above hinted at; or to be a spectator and watch it. But as
for the mere _dessus de cartes_—would not an arm-chair and the dullest
of books be better than that dull game?

So I not only became Clive’s confidant in this affair, but took a
pleasure in extracting the young fellow’s secrets from him, or rather
in encouraging him to pour them forth. Thus was the great part of the
previous tale revealed to me: thus Jack Belsize’s misadventures, of the
first part of which we had only heard in London (and whither he
returned presently to be reconciled to his father, after his elder
brother’s death). Thus my Lord Kew’s secret history came into my
possession; let us hope for the public’s future delectation, and the
chronicler’s private advantage. And many a night until daylight did
appear has poor Clive stamped his chamber or my own, pouring his story
out to me, his griefs and raptures; recalling, in his wild young way,
recollections of Ethel’s sayings and doings; uttering descriptions of
her beauty, and raging against the cruelty which she exhibited towards
him.

As soon as the new confidant heard the name of the young lover’s
charmer, to do Mr. Pendennis justice, he endeavoured to fling as much
cold water upon Clive’s flame as a small private engine could be
brought to pour on such a conflagration. “Miss Newcome! my dear Clive,”
says the confidant, “do you know what you are aspiring to? For the last
three months Miss Newcome has been the greatest lioness in London: the
reigning beauty winning the horse: the first favourite out of the whole
Belgravian harem. No young woman of this year has come near her: those
of past seasons she has distanced and utterly put to shame. Miss
Blackcap, Lady Blanch Blackcap’s daughter, was (as perhaps you are not
aware) considered by her mamma the great beauty of last season; and it
was considered rather shabby of the young Marquis of Farintosh to leave
town without offering to change Miss Blackcap’s name. Heaven bless you!
this year Farintosh will not look at Miss Blackcap! _He_ finds people
at home when (ha! I see you wince, my suffering innocent!)—when he
calls in Queen Street; yes, and Lady Kew, who is one of the cleverest
women in England, will listen for hours to Lord Farintosh’s
conversation; than whom the Rotten Row of Hyde Park cannot show a
greater booby. Miss Blackcap may retire, like Jephthah’s daughter, for
all Farintosh will relieve her. Then, my dear fellow, there were, as
possibly you do not know, Lady Hermengilde and Lady Yseult, Lady
Rackstraw’s lovely twins, whose appearance created such a sensation at
Lady Hautbois’ first—was it her first or was it her second?—yes, it was
her second—breakfast. Whom weren’t they going to marry? Crackthorpe as
mad, they said, about both.—Bustington, Sir John Fobsby, the young
Baronet with the immense Northern property—the Bishop of Windsor was
actually said to be smitten with one of them, but did not like to
offer, as her present M—y, like Qu—n El-z-b-th of gracious memory, is
said to object to bishops, as bishops, marrying. Where is Bustington?
Where is Crackthorpe? Where is Fobsby, the young Baronet of the North?
My dear fellow, when those two girls come into a room now, they make no
more sensation than you or I. Miss Newcome has carried their admirers
away from them: Fobsby has actually, it is said, proposed for her: and
the real reason of that affair between Lord Bustington and Captain
Crackthorpe of the Royal Horse Guards Green, was a speech of
Bustington’s, hinting that Miss Newcome had not behaved well in
throwing Lord Kew over. Don’t you know what old Lady Kew will do with
this girl, Clive? She will marry Miss Newcome to the best man. If a
richer and better _parti_ than Lord Farintosh presents himself—then it
will be Farintosh’s turn to find that Lady Kew is not at home. Is there
any young man in the Peerage unmarried and richer than Farintosh? I
forget. Why does not some one publish a list of the young male nobility
and baronetage, their names, weights, and probable fortunes? I don’t
mean for the matrons of Mayfair—they have the list by heart and study
it in secret—but for young men in the world; so that they may know what
their chances are, and who naturally has the pull over them. Let me
see—there is young Lord Gaunt, who will have a great fortune, and is
desirable because you know his father is locked up—but he is only ten
years old—no—they can scarcely bring him forward as Farintosh’s rival.

“You look astonished, my poor boy? You think it is wicked in me to talk
in this brutal way about bargain and sale; and say that your heart’s
darling is, at this minute, being paced up and down the Mayfair market
to be taken away by the best bidder. Can you count purses with Sultan
Farintosh? Can you compete even with Sir John Fobsby of the North? What
I say is wicked and worldly, is it? So it is; but it is true, as true
as Tattersall’s—as true as Circassia or Virginia. Don’t you know that
the Circassian girls are proud of their bringing up, and take rank
according to the prices which they fetch? And you go and buy yourself
some new clothes, and a fifty-pound horse, and put a penny rose in your
button-hole, and ride past her window, and think to win this prize? Oh,
you idiot! A penny rosebud! Put money in your purse. A fifty-pound hack
when a butcher rides as good a one!—Put money in your purse. A brave
young heart, all courage and love and honour! Put money in thy
purse—t’other coin don’t pass in the market—at least, where old Lady
Kew has the stall.”

By these remonstrances, playful though serious, Clive’s adviser sought
to teach him wisdom about his love affair; and the advice was received
as advice upon those occasions usually is.

After calling thrice and writing to Miss Newcome, there came a little
note from that young lady, saying, “Dear Clive,—We were so sorry we
were out when you called. We shall be at home to-morrow at lunch, when
Lady Kew hopes you will come, and see yours ever, E. N.”

Clive went—poor Clive! He had the satisfaction of shaking Ethel’s hand
and a finger of Lady Kew; of eating a mutton-chop in Ethel’s presence;
of conversing about the state of art at Rome with Lady Kew, and
describing the last works of Gibson and Macdonald. The visit lasted but
for half an hour. Not for one minute was Clive allowed to see Ethel
alone. At three o’clock Lady Kew’s carriage was announced, and our
young gentleman rose to take his leave, and had the pleasure of seeing
the most noble Peer, Marquis of Farintosh and Earl of Rossmont, descend
from his lordship’s brougham and enter at Lady Kew’s door, followed by
a domestic bearing a small stack of flowers from Covent Garden.

It befell that the good-natured Lady Fareham had a ball in these days;
and meeting Clive in the Park, her lord invited him to the
entertainment. Mr. Pendennis had also the honour of a card. Accordingly
Clive took me up at Bays’s, and we proceeded to the ball together.

The lady of the house, smiling upon all her guests, welcomed with
particular kindness her young friend from Rome. “Are you related to
_the_ Miss Newcome, Lady Anne Newcome’s daughter? Her cousin? She will
be here to-night.” Very likely Lady Fareham did not see Clive wince and
blush at this announcement, her ladyship having to occupy herself with
a thousand other people. Clive found a dozen of his Roman friends in
the room, ladies young and middle-aged, plain and handsome, all glad to
see his kind face. The house was splendid; the ladies magnificently
dressed; the ball beautiful, though it appeared a little dull until
that event took place whereof we treated two pages back (in the
allegory of Mr. Tomkins and Miss Hopkins), and Lady Kew and her
granddaughter made their appearance.

That old woman, who began to look more and more like the wicked fairy
of the stories, who is not invited to the Princess’s Christening Feast,
had this advantage over her likeness, that she was invited everywhere;
though how she, at her age, could fly about to so many parties, unless
she was a fairy, no one could say. Behind the fairy, up the marble
stairs, came the most noble Farintosh, with that vacuous leer which
distinguishes his lordship. Ethel seemed to be carrying the stack of
flowers which the Marquis had sent to her. The noble Bustington
(Viscount Bustington, I need scarcely tell the reader, is the heir of
the house of Podbury), the Baronet of the North, the gallant
Crackthorpe, the first men in town, in a word, gathered round the young
beauty, forming her court; and little Dick Hitchin, who goes
everywhere, you may be sure was near her with a compliment and a smile.
Ere this arrival, the twins had been giving themselves great airs in
the room—the poor twins! when Ethel appeared they sank into shuddering
insignificance, and had to put up with the conversation and attentions
of second-rate men, belonging to second-rate clubs in heavy dragoon
regiments. One of them actually walked with a dancing barrister; but he
was related to a duke, and it was expected the Lord Chancellor would
give him something very good.

Before he saw Ethel, Clive vowed he was aware of her. Indeed, had not
Lady Fareham told him Miss Newcome was coming? Ethel, on the contrary,
not expecting him, or not having the prescience of love, exhibited
signs of surprise when she beheld him, her eyebrows arching, her eyes
darting looks of pleasure. When grandmamma happened to be in another
room, she beckoned Clive to her, dismissing Crackthorpe and Fobsby,
Farintosh and Bustington, the amorous youth who around her bowed, and
summoning Mr. Clive to an audience with the air of a young princess.

And so she was a princess; and this the region of her special dominion.
The wittiest and handsomest, she deserved to reign in such a place, by
right of merit and by general election. Clive felt her superiority, and
his own shortcomings: he came up to her as to a superior person.
Perhaps she was not sorry to let him see how she ordered away grandees
and splendid Bustingtons, informing them, with a superb manner, that
she wished to speak to her cousin—that handsome young man with the
light moustache yonder.

“Do you know many people? This is your first appearance in society?
Shall I introduce you to some nice girls to dance with?” What very
pretty buttons!”

“Is that what you wanted to say?” asked Clive, rather bewildered.

“What does one say at a ball? One talks conversation suited to the
place. If I were to say to Captain Crackthorpe, ‘What pretty buttons!’
he would be delighted. But you—you have a soul above buttons, I
suppose.”

“Being, as you say, a stranger in this sort of society, you see I am
not accustomed to—to the exceeding brilliancy of its conversation,”
said Clive.

“What! you want to go away, and we haven’t seen each other for near a
year!” cries Ethel, in quite a natural voice. “Sir John Fobsby, I’m
very sorry—but do let me off this dance. I have just met my cousin,
whom I have not seen for a whole year, and I want to talk to him.”

“It was not my fault that you did not see me sooner. I wrote to you
that I only got your letter a month ago. You never answered the second
I wrote you from Rome. Your letter lay there at the post ever so long,
and was forwarded to me at Naples.”

“_Where?_” asked Ethel.

“I saw Lord Kew there.” Ethel was smiling with all her might, and
kissing her hand to the twins, who passed at that moment with their
mamma. “Oh, indeed, you saw—how do you do?—Lord Kew.”

“And, having seen him, I came over to England,” said Clive.

Ethel looked at him, gravely. “What am I to understand by that,
Clive?—You came over because it was very hot at Naples, and because you
wanted to see your friends here, n’est-ce pas? How glad mamma was to
see you! You know she loves you as if you were her own son.”

“What, as much as that angel, Barnes!” cries Clive, bitterly;
“impossible.”

Ethel looked once more. Her present mood and desire was to treat Clive
as a chit, as a young fellow without consequence—a thirteenth younger
brother. But in his looks and behaviour there was that which seemed to
say not too many liberties were to be taken with him.

“Why weren’t you here a month sooner, and you might have seen the
marriage? It was a very pretty thing. Everybody was there. Clara, and
so did Barnes really, looked quite handsome.”

“It must have been beautiful,” continued Clive; “quite a touching
sight, I am sure. Poor Charles Belsize could not be present because his
brother was dead; and——”

“And what else, pray, Mr. Newcome!” cries Miss, in great wrath, her
pink nostrils beginning to quiver. “I did not think, really, that when
we met after so many months, I was to be insulted; yes, insulted, by
the mention of that name.”

“I most humbly ask pardon,” said Clive, with a grave bow. “Heaven
forbid that I should wound your sensibility, Ethel! It is, as you say,
my first appearance in society. I talk about things or persons that I
should not mention. I should talk about buttons, should I? which you
were good enough to tell me was the proper subject of conversation.
Mayn’t I even speak of connexions of the family? Mr. Belsize, through
this marriage, has the honour of being connected with you; and even I,
in a remote degree, may boast of a sort of an ever—so—distant
cousinship with him. What an honour for me!”

“Pray, what is the meaning of all this?” cries Miss Ethel, surprised,
and perhaps alarmed. Indeed, Clive scarcely knew. He had been chafing
all the while he talked with her; smothering anger as he saw the young
men round about her; revolting against himself for the very humility of
his obedience, and angry at the eagerness and delight with which he had
come at her call.

“The meaning is, Ethel”—he broke out, seizing the opportunity—“that
when a man comes a thousand miles to see you, and shake your hand, you
should give it him a little more cordially than you choose to do to me;
that when a kinsman knocks at your door, time after time, you should
try and admit him; and that when you meet him you should treat him like
an old friend not as you treated me when my Lady Kew vouchsafed to give
me admittance; not as you treat these fools that are fribbling round
about you,” cries Mr. Clive, in a great rage, folding his arms, and
glaring round on a number of the most innocent young swells; and he
continued looking as if he would like to knock a dozen of their heads
together. “Am I keeping Miss Newcome’s admirers from her?”

“That is not for me to say,” she said, quite gently. He was; but to see
him angry did not displease Miss Newcome.

“That young man who came for you just now,” Clive went on—“that Sir
John——”

“Are you angry with me because I sent him away?” said Ethel, putting
out a hand. “Hark! there is the music. Take me in and waltz with me.
Don’t you know it is not _my_ door at which you knocked?” she said,
looking up into his face as simply and kindly as of old. She whirled
round the dancing-room with him in triumph, the other beauties
dwindling before her: she looked more and more beautiful with each
rapid move of the waltz, her colour heightening and her eyes seeming to
brighten. Not till the music stopped did she sink down on a seat,
panting, and smiling radiant—as many many hundred years ago I remember
to have seen Taglioni after a conquering _pas seul_. She nodded a
“thank you” to Clive. It seemed that there was a perfect
reconciliation. Lady Kew came in just at the end of the dance, scowling
when she beheld Ethel’s partner; but in reply to her remonstrances,
Ethel shrugged her fair shoulders, with a look which seemed to say _je
le veux_, gave an arm to her grandmother, an walked off, saucily
protecting her.

Clive’s friend had been looking on observingly and curiously as the
scene between them had taken place, and at the dance with which the
reconciliation had been celebrated. I must tell you that this arch
young creature had formed the object of my observation for some months
past, and that I watched her as I have watched a beautiful panther at
the Zoological Gardens, so bright of eye, so sleek of coat, so slim in
form, so sweet and agile in her spring.

A more brilliant young coquette than Miss Newcome, in her second
season, these eyes never looked upon, that is the truth. In her first
year, being engaged to Lord Kew, she was perhaps a little more reserved
and quiet. Besides, her mother went out with her that first season, to
whom Miss Newcome except for a little occasional flightiness, was
invariably obedient and ready to come to call. But when Lady Kew
appeared as her duenna, the girl’s delight seemed to be to plague the
old lady, and she would dance with the very youngest sons merey to put
grandmamma in a passion. In this way poor young Cubley (who has two
hundred a year of allowance, besides eighty, and an annual rise of five
in the Treasury) actually thought that Ethel was in love with him, and
consulted with the young men in his room in Downing Street, whether two
hundred and eighty a year, with five pound more next year, would be
enough for them to keep house on? Young Tandy of the Temple, Lord
Skibbereen’s younger son, who sate in the House for some time on the
Irish Catholic side, was also deeply smitten, and many a night in our
walks home from the parties at the other end of the town, would
entertain me with his admiration and passion for her.

“If you have such a passion for her, why not propose?” it was asked of
Mr. Tandy.

“Propose! propose to a Russian Archduchess,” cries young Tandy. “She’s
beautiful, she’s delightful, she’s witty. I have never seen anything
like her eyes; they send me wild—wild,” says Tandy—(slapping his
waistcoat under Temple Bar)—“but a more audacious little flirt never
existed since the days of Cleopatra.”

With this opinion likewise in my mind, I had been looking on during
Clive’s proceedings with Miss Ethel—not, I say, without admiration of
the young lady who was leading him such a dance. The waltz over, I
congratulated him on his own performance. His Continental practice had
greatly improved him. “And as for your partner, it is delightful to see
her,” I went on. “I always like to be by when Miss Newcome dances. I
had sooner see her than anybody since Taglioni. Look at her now, with
her neck up, and her little foot out, just as she is preparing to
start! Happy Lord Bustington!”

“You are angry with her because she cut you,” growls Clive. “You know
you said she cut you, or forgot you; and your vanity’s wounded, that is
why you are so satirical.”

“How can Miss Newcome remember all the men who are presented to her?”
says the other. “Last year she talked to me because she wanted to know
about you. This year she doesn’t talk: because I suppose she doesn’t
want to know about you any more.”

“Hang it. Do—on’t, Pen,” cries Clive, as a schoolboy cries out to
another not to hit him.

“She does not pretend to observe: and is in full conversation with the
amiable Bustington. Delicious interchange of noble thoughts! But she is
observing us talking, and knows that we are talking about her. If ever
you marry her, Clive, which is absurd, I shall lose you for a friend.
You will infallibly tell her what I think of her: and she will order
you to give me up.” Clive had gone off in a brown study, as his
interlocutor continued. “Yes, she is a flirt. She can’t help her
nature. She tries to vanquish every one who comes near her. She is a
little out of breath from waltzing, and so she pretends to be listening
to poor Bustington, who is out of breath too, but puffs out his best in
order to make himself agreeable, with what a pretty air she appears to
listen! Her eyes actually seem to brighten.”

“_What?_” says Clive, with a start.

I could not comprehend the meaning of the start: nor did I care much to
know: supposing that the young man was waking up from some lover’s
reverie: and the evening sped away, Clive not quitting the ball until
Miss Newcome and the Countess of Kew had departed. No further
communication appeared to take place between the cousins that evening.
I think it was Captain Crackthorpe who gave the young lady an arm into
her carriage; Sir John Fobsby having the happiness to conduct the old
Countess, and carrying the pink bag for the shawls, wrappers, etc., on
which her ladyship’s coronet and initials are emblazoned. Clive may
have made a movement as if to step forward, but a single finger from
Miss Newcome warned him back.

Clive and his two friends in Lamb Court had made an engagement for the
next Saturday to dine at Greenwich; but on the morning of that day
there came a note from him to say that he thought of going down to see
his aunt, Miss Honeyman, and begged to recall his promise to us.
Saturday is a holiday with gentlemen of our profession. We had invited
F. Bayham, Esquire, and promised ourselves a merry evening, and were
unwilling to baulk ourselves of the pleasure on account of the absence
of our young Roman. So we three went to London Bridge Station at an
early hour, proposing to breathe the fresh air of Greenwich Park before
dinner. And, at London Bridge, by the most singular coincidence, Lady
Kew’s carriage drove up to the Brighton entrance, and Miss Ethel and
her maid stepped out of the brougham.

When Miss Newcome and her maid entered the Brighton station, did Mr.
Clive, by another singular coincidence, happen also to be there? What
more natural and dutiful than that he should go and see his aunt, Miss
Honeyman? What more proper than that Miss Ethel should pass the
Saturday and Sunday with her sick father; and take a couple of
wholesome nights’ rest after those five weary past evenings, for each
of which we may reckon a couple of soirées and a ball? And that
relations should travel together, the young lady being protected by her
_femme-de-chambre;_ that surely, as every one must allow, was perfectly
right and proper.

That a biographer should profess to know everything which passes, even
in a confidential talk in a first-class carriage between two lovers,
seems perfectly absurd; not that grave historians do not pretend to the
same wonderful degree of knowledge—reporting meetings of the most
occult of conspirators; private interviews between monarchs and their
ministers, even the secret thoughts and motives of those personages,
which possibly the persons themselves did not know;—all for which the
present writer will pledge his known character for veracity is, that on
a certain day certain parties had a conversation, of which the upshot
was so-and-so. He guesses, of course, at a great deal of what took
place; knowing the characters, and being informed at some time of their
meeting. You do not suppose that I bribed the _femme-de-chambre_, or
that those two City gents, who sate in the same carriage with our young
friends, and could not hear a word they said, reported their talk to
me? If Clive and Ethel had had a coupe to themselves, I would yet
boldly tell what took place, but the coupe was taken by other three
young City gents who smoked the whole way.

“Well, then,” the bonnet begins close up to the hat, “tell me, sir, is
it true that you were so very much _épris_ of the Miss Freemans at
Rome; and that afterwards you were so wonderfully attentive to the
third Miss Baliol? Did you draw her portrait? You know you drew her
portrait. You painters always pretend to admire girls with auburn hair,
because Titian and Raphael painted it. Has the Fornarina red hair? Why,
we are at Croydon, I declare!”

“The Fornarina”—the hat replies to the bonnet, “if that picture at the
Borghese Palace be an original, or a likeness of her—is not a handsome
woman, with vulgar eyes and mouth, and altogether a most
mahogany-coloured person. She is so plain, in fact, I think that very
likely it is the real woman; for it is with their own fancies that men
fall in love,—or rather every woman is handsome to the lover. You know
how old Helen must have been.”

“I don’t know any such thing, or anything about her. Who was Helen?”
asks the bonnet; and indeed she did not know.

“It’s a long story, and such an old scandal now, that there is no use
in repeating it,” says Clive.

“You only talk about Helen because you wish to turn away the
conversation from Miss Freeman,” cries the young lady—“from Miss
Baliol, I mean.”

“We will talk about whichever you please. Which shall we begin to pull
to pieces?” says Clive. You see, to be in this carriage—to be actually
with _her_—to be looking into those wonderful lucid eyes—to see her
sweet mouth dimpling, and hear her sweet voice ringing with its
delicious laughter—to have that hour and a half his own, in spite of
all the world-dragons, grandmothers, _convenances_, the future—made the
young fellow so happy, filled his whole frame and spirit with a delight
so keen, that no wonder he was gay, and brisk, and lively.

“And so you knew of my goings-on?” he asked. O me! they were at Reigate
by this time; there was Gatton Park flying before them on the wings of
the wind.

“I know of a number of things,” says the bonnet, nodding with ambrosial
curls.

“And you would not answer the second letter I wrote to you?

“We were in great perplexity. One cannot be always answering young
gentlemen’s letters. I had considerable doubt about answering a note I
got from Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square,” says the lady’s chapeau.
“No, Clive, we must not write to one another,” she continued more
gravely, “or only very, very seldom. Nay, my meeting you here to-day is
by the merest chance, I am sure; for when I mentioned at Lady Fareham’s
the other evening that I was going to see papa at Brighton to-day, I
never for one moment thought of seeing you in the train. But as you are
here, it can’t be helped; and I may as well tell you that there are
obstacles.”

“What, _other_ obstacles?” Clive gasped out.

“Nonsense—you silly boy! No other obstacles but those which always have
existed, and must. When we parted—that is, when you left us at Baden,
you knew it was for the best. You had your profession to follow, and
could not go on idling about—about a family of sick people and
children. Every man has his profession, and you yours, as you would
have it. We are so nearly allied that we may—we may like each other
like brother and sister almost. I don’t know what Barnes would say if
he heard me! Wherever you and your father are, how can I ever think of
you but—but you know how? I always shall, always. There are certain
feelings we have which I hope never can change; though, if you please,
about them I intend never to speak any more. Neither you nor I can
alter our conditions, but must make the best of them. You shall be a
fine clever painter; and I,—who knows what will happen to me? I know
what is going to happen to-day; I am going to see papa and mamma, and
be as happy as I can till Monday morning.”

“I know what I wish would happen now,” said Clive,—they were going
screaming through a tunnel.

“What?” said the bonnet in the darkness: and the engine was roaring so
loudly, that he was obliged to put his head quite close to say—

“I wish the tunnel would fall in and close upon us, or that we might
travel on for ever and ever.”

Here there was a great jar of the carriage, and the lady’s-maid, and I
think Miss Ethel, gave a shriek. The lamp above was so dim that the
carriage was almost totally dark. No wonder the lady’s-maid was
frightened! but the daylight came streaming in, and all poor Clive’s
wishes of rolling and rolling on for ever were put an end to by the
implacable sun in a minute.

Ah, why was it the quick train? Suppose it had been the parliamentary
train?—even that too would have come to an end. They came and said,
“Tickets, please,” and Clive held out the three of their party—his, and
Ethel’s, and her maid’s. I think for such a ride as that he was right
to give up Greenwich. Mr. Kuhn was in waiting with a carriage for Miss
Ethel. She shook hands with Clive, returning his pressure.

“I may come and see you?” he said.

“You may come and see mamma—yes.”

“And where are you staying?”

“Bless my soul—they were staying at Miss Honeyman’s!” Clive burst into
a laugh. Why, he was going there too! Of course Aunt Honeyman had no
room for him, her house being quite full with the other Newcomes.

It was a most curious coincidence their meeting; but altogether Lady
Anne thought it was best to say nothing about the circumstance to
grandmamma. I myself am puzzled to say which would have been the better
course to pursue under the circumstances; there were so many courses
open. As they had gone so far, should they go on farther together?
Suppose they were going to the same house at Brighton, oughtn’t they to
have gone in the same carriage, with Kuhn and the maid of course?
Suppose they met by chance at the station, ought they to have travelled
in separate carriages? I ask any gentleman and father of a family, when
he was immensely smitten with his present wife, Mrs. Brown, if he had
met her travelling with her maid, in the mail, when there was a vacant
place, what would he himself have done?




CHAPTER XLII.
Injured Innocence


From Clive Newcome, Esq., to Lieut.-Col. Newcome, C.B.

“Brighton, June 12, 18—.

“My Dearest Father,—As the weather was growing very hot at Naples, and
you wished I should come to England to see Mr. Binnie, I came
accordingly, and have been here three weeks, and write to you from Aunt
Honeyman’s parlour at Brighton, where you ate your last dinner before
embarking for India. I found your splendid remittance calling in Fog
Court, and have invested a part of the sum in a good horse to ride,
upon which I take my diversion with other young dandies in the Park.
Florac is in England, but he has no need of your kindness. Only think!
he is Prince de Moncontour now, the second title of the Duc d’Ivry’s
family; and M. le Comte de Florac is Duc d’Ivry in consequence of the
demise of t’other old gentleman. I believe the late duke’s wife
shortened his life. Oh, what a woman! She caused a duel between Lord
Kew and a Frenchman, which has in its turn occasioned all sorts of evil
and division in families, as you shall hear.

“In the first place, in consequence of the duel and of incompatibility
of temper, the match between Kew and E. N. has been broken off. I met
Lord Kew at Naples with his mother and brother, nice quiet people as
you would like them. Kew’s wound and subsequent illness have altered
him a good deal. He has become much _more serious_ than he used to be;
not ludicrously so at all, but he says he thinks his past life has been
useless and even criminal, and he wishes to change it. He has sold his
horses, and sown his wild oats. He has turned quite a sober quiet
gentleman.

“At our meeting he told me of what had happened between him and Ethel,
of whom he spoke _most kindly and generously_, but avowing his opinion
that they never could have been happy in married life. And now I think
my dear old father will see that there may be another reason besides my
desire to see Mr. Binnie, which has brought me tumbling back to England
again. If need be to speak, I never shall have, I hope, any secrets
from you. I have not said much about one which has given me the deuce’s
disquiet for ten months past, because there was no good in talking
about it, or vexing you needlessly with reports of my griefs and woes.

“Well, when we were at Baden in September last, and E. and I wrote
those letters in common to you, I dare say you can fancy what my
feelings might have been towards such a beautiful young creature, who
has a hundred faults, for which I love her just as much as for the good
that is in her. I became dreadfully smitten indeed, and knowing that
she was engaged to Lord Kew, I did as you told me you did once when the
enemy was too strong for you—_I ran away_. I had a bad time of it for
two or three months. At Rome, however, I began to take matters more
easily, my naturally fine appetite returned, and at the end of the
season I found myself uncommonly happy in the society of the Miss
Baliols and the Miss Freemans; but when Kew told me at Naples of what
had happened, there was straightway a _fresh eruption_ in my heart, and
I was fool enough to come almost without sleep to London in order to
catch a glimpse of the bright eyes of E. N.

“She is now in this very house upstairs with one aunt, whilst the other
lets lodgings to her. I have seen her but very seldom indeed since I
came to London, where Sir Brian and Lady Anne do not pass the season,
and Ethel goes about to a dozen parties every week with old Lady Kew,
who neither loves you nor me. Hearing E. say she was coming down to her
parents at Brighton, I made so bold as to waylay her at the train
(though I didn’t tell her that I passed three hours in the
waiting-room); and we made the journey together, and she was very kind
and beautiful; and though I suppose I might just as well ask the Royal
Princess to have me, I can’t help hoping and longing and hankering
after her. And Aunt Honeyman must have found out that I am fond of her,
for the old lady has received me with a scolding. Uncle Charles seems
to be in very good condition again. I saw him in full clerical
feather—at Madame de Moncontour’s, a good-natured body who drops her
_h_’s, though Florac is not aware of their absence. Pendennis and
Warrington, I know, would send you their regards. Pen is conceited, but
much kinder in reality than he has the air of being. Fred Bayham is
doing well, and prospering in his mysterious way.

“Mr. Binnie is not looking at all well: and Mrs. Mack—well, as I know
you never attack a lady behind her lovely back, I won’t say a word of
Mrs. Mack—but she has taken possession of Uncle James, and seems to me
to weigh upon him somehow. Rosey is as pretty and good-natured as ever,
and has learned two new songs; but you see, with my sentiments in
another quarter, I feel as it were guilty and awkward in company of
Rosey and her mamma. They have become the very greatest friends with
Bryanstone Square, and Mrs. Mack is always citing Aunt Hobson as the
most superior of women, in which opinion, I daresay, Aunt Hobson
concurs.

“Good-bye, my dearest father; my sheet is full; I wish I could put my
arm in yours and pace up and down the pier with you, and tell you more
and more. But you know enough now, and that I am your affectionate son
always, C. N.”

In fact, when Mr. Clive appeared at Steyne Gardens stepping out of the
fly, and handing Miss Ethel thence, Miss Honeyman of course was very
glad to see her nephew, and saluted him with a little embrace to show
her sense of pleasure at his visit. But the next day, being Sunday,
when Clive, with a most engaging smile on his countenance, walked over
to breakfast from his hotel, Miss Honeyman would scarcely speak to him
during the meal, looked out at him very haughtily from under her Sunday
cap, and received his stories about Italy with “Oh! ah! indeed!” in a
very unkind manner. And when breakfast was over, and she had done
washing her age chins, she fluttered up to Clive with such an agitation
of plumage, redness of craw, and anger of manner, as a maternal hen
shows if she has reason to think you menace her chickens. She fluttered
up to Clive, I say, and cried out, “Not in _this_ house, Clive,—not in
this house, I beg you to understand _that!_”

Clive, looking amazed, said, “Certainly not, ma’am; I never did do it
in the house, as I know you don’t like it. I was going into the
Square.” The young man meaning that he was about to smoke, and
conjecturing that his aunt’s anger applied to that practice.

“_You_ know very well what I mean, sir! Don’t try to turn _me_ off in
that highty-tighty way. My dinner to-day is at half-past one. You can
dine or not as you like,” and the old lady flounced out of the room.

Poor Clive stood rolling his cigar in sad perplexity of spirit, until
Mrs. Honeyman’s servant Hannah entered, who, for her part, grinned and
looked particularly sly. “In the name of goodness, Hannah, what is the
row about?” cries Mr. Clive. “What is my aunt scolding at? What are you
grinning at, you old Cheshire cat?”

“Git long, Master Clive,” says Hannah, patting the cloth.

“Get along! why get along, and where am I to get along to?”

“Did ’ee do ut really now, Master Clive?” cries Mrs. Honeyman’s
attendant, grinning with the utmost good-humour. “Well, she be as
pretty a young lady as ever I saw; and as I told my missis, ‘Miss
Martha,’ says I, ‘there’s a pair on ’em.’ Though missis was mortal
angry to be sure. She never could bear it.”

“Bear _what?_ you old goose!” cries Clive, who by these playful names
had been wont to designate Hannah these twenty years past.

“A young gentleman and a young lady a kissing of each other in the
railway coach,” says Hannah, jerking up with her finger to the ceiling,
as much as to say, “There she is! Lar, she be a pretty young creature,
that she be! and so I told Miss Martha.” Thus differently had the news
which had come to them on the previous night affected the old lady and
her maid.

The news was, that Miss Newcome’s maid (a giddy thing from the county,
who had not even learned as yet to hold her tongue) had announced with
giggling delight to Lady Anne’s maid, who was taking tea with Mrs.
Hicks, that Mr. Clive had given Miss Ethel a kiss in the tunnel, and
she supposed it was a match. This intelligence Hannah Hicks took to her
mistress, of whose angry behaviour to Clive the next morning you may
now understand the cause.

Clive did not know whether to laugh or to be in a rage. He swore that
he was as innocent of all intention of kissing Miss Ethel as of
embracing Queen Elizabeth. He was shocked to think of his cousin,
walking above, fancy-free in maiden meditation, whilst this
conversation regarding her was carried on below. How could he face her,
or her mother, or even her maid, now he had cognisance of this naughty
calumny? “Of course Hannah had contradicted it?” “Of course I have a
done no such indeed,” replied Master Clive’s old friend; “of course I
have set ’em down a bit; for when little Trimmer said it, and she
supposed it was all settled between you, seeing how it had been a going
on in foreign parts last year, Mrs. Pincott says, ‘Hold your silly
tongue, Trimmer,’ she says; ‘Miss Ethel marry a painter, indeed,
Trimmer!’ says she, ‘while she has refused to be a Countess,’ she says;
‘and can be a Marchioness any day, and will be a Marchioness. Marry a
painter, indeed!’ Mrs. Pincott says; ‘Trimmer, I’m surprised at your
impidence.’ So, my dear, I got angry at that,” Clive’s champion
continued, “and says I, if my young master ain’t good enough for any
young lady in this world, says I, I’d like you to show her to me: and
if his dear father, the Colonel, says I, ain’t as good as your old
gentleman upstairs, says I, who has gruel and dines upon doctor’s
stuff, the Mrs. Pincott, says I, my name isn’t what it is, says I.
Those were my very words, Master Clive, my dear; and then Mrs. Pincott
says, Mrs. Hicks, she says, you don’t understand society, she says; you
don’t understand society, he! he!” and the country lady, with
considerable humour, gave an imitation of the town lady’s manner.

At this juncture Miss Honeyman re-entered the parlour, arrayed in her
Sunday bonnet, her stiff and spotless collar, her Cashmere shawl, and
Agra brooch, and carrying her Bible and Prayer-Book each stitched in
its neat cover of brown silk. “Don’t stay chattering here, you idle
woman,” she cried to her attendant with extreme asperity. “And you,
sir, if you wish to smoke your cigar, you had best walk down to the
cliff where the Cockneys are!” she added, glowering at Clive.

“Now I understand it all,” Clive said, trying to deprecate her anger.
“My dear good aunt, it’s a most absurd mistake; upon my honour, Miss
Ethel is as innocent as you are.”

“Innocent or not, this house is not intended for assignations, Clive!
As long as Sir Brian Newcome lodges here, you will be pleased to keep
away from it, sir; and though I don’t approve of Sunday travelling, I
think the very best thing you can do is to put yourself in the train
and go back to London.”

And now, young people, who read my moral pages, you will see how highly
imprudent it is to sit with your cousins in railway carriages; and how,
though you may not mean the slightest harm in the world, a great deal
may be attributed to you; and how, when you think you are managing your
little absurd love-affairs ever so quietly, Jeames and Betsy in the
servants’-hall are very likely talking about them, and you are putting
yourself in the power of those menials. If the perusal of these lines
has rendered one single young couple uncomfortable, surely my amiable
end is answered, and I have written not altogether in vain.

Clive was going away, innocent though he was, yet quivering under his
aunt’s reproof, and so put out of countenance that he had not even
thought of lighting the great cigar which he stuck into his foolish
mouth; when a shout of “Clive! Clive!” from half a dozen little voices
roused him, and presently as many little Newcomes came toddling down
the stairs, and this one clung round his knees, and that at the skirts
of his coat, and another took his hand and said, he must come and walk
with them on the beach.

So away went Clive to walk with his cousins, and then to see his old
friend Miss Cann, with whom and the elder children he walked to church,
and issuing thence greeted Lady Anne and Ethel (who had also attended
the service) in the most natural way in the world.

While engaged in talking with these, Miss Honeyman came out of the
sacred edifice, crisp and stately in the famous Agra brooch and
Cashmere shawls. The good-natured Lady Anne had a smile and a kind word
for her as for everybody. Clive went up to his maternal aunt to offer
his arm. “You must give him up to us for dinner, Miss Honeyman, if you
please to be so very kind. He was so good-natured in escorting Ethel
down,” Lady Anne said.

“Hm! my lady,” says Miss Honeyman, perking her head up in her collar.
Clive did not know whether to laugh or not, but a fine blush
illuminated his countenance. As for Ethel, she was and looked perfectly
unconscious. So, rustling in her stiff black silk, Martha Honeyman
walked with her nephew silent by the shore of the much-sounding sea.
The idea of courtship, of osculatory processes, of marrying and giving
in marriage, made this elderly virgin chafe and fume, she never having,
at any period of her life, indulged in any such ideas or practices, and
being angry against them, as childless wives will sometimes be angry
and testy against matrons with their prattle about their nurseries.
Now, Miss Cann was a different sort of spinster, and loved a bit of
sentiment with all her heart from which I am led to conclude—but, pray,
is this the history of Miss Cann or of the Newcomes?

All these Newcomes then entered into Miss Honeyman’s house, where a
number of little knives and forks were laid for them. Ethel was cold
and thoughtful; Lady Anne was perfectly good-natured as her wont was.
Sir Brian came in on the arm of his valet presently, wearing that look
of extra neatness which invalids have, who have just been shaved and
combed, and made ready by their attendants to receive company. He was
voluble: though there was a perceptible change in his voice: he talked
chiefly of matters which had occurred forty years ago, and especially
of Clive’s own father, when he was a boy, in a manner which interested
the young man and Ethel. “He threw me down in a chaise—sad chap—always
reading Orme’s History of India—wanted marry Frenchwoman. He wondered
Mrs. Newcome didn’t leave Tom anything—’pon my word, quite s’prise.”
The events of to-day, the House of Commons, the City, had little
interest for him. All the children went up and shook him by the hand,
with awe in their looks, and he patted their yellow heads vacantly and
kindly. He asked Clive (several times) where he had been? and said he
himself had had a slight ’tack—vay slight—was getting well ev’y
day—strong as a horse—go back to Parliament d’rectly. And then he
became a little peevish with Parker, his man, about his broth. The man
retired, and came back presently, with profound bows and gravity, to
tell Sir Brian dinner was ready, and he went away quite briskly at this
news, giving a couple of fingers to Clive before he disappeared into
the upper apartments. Good-natured Lady Anne was as easy about this as
about the other events of this world. In later days, with what a
strange feeling we remember that last sight we have of the old friend;
that nod of farewell, and shake of the hand, that last look of the face
and figure as the door closes on him, or the coach drives away! So the
roast mutton was ready, and all the children dined very heartily.

The infantile meal had not been long concluded, when servants announced
“the Marquis of Farintosh;” and that nobleman made his appearance to
pay his respects to Miss Newcome and Lady Anne. He brought the very
last news of the very last party in London, where “Really, upon my
honour, now, it was quite a stupid party, because Miss Newcome wasn’t
there. It was now, really.”

Miss Newcome remarked, “If he said so upon his honour, of course she
was satisfied.”

“As you weren’t there,” the young nobleman continued, “the Miss
Rackstraws came out quite strong; really they did now, upon my honour.
It was quite a quiet thing. Lady Merriborough hadn’t even got a new
gown on. Lady Anne, you shirk London society this year, and we miss
you: we expected you to give us two or three things this season; we did
now, really. I said to Tufthunt, only yesterday, Why has not Lady Anne
Newcome given anything? You know Tufthunt? They say he’s a clever
fellow, and that—but he’s a low little beast, and I hate him.”

Lady Anne said, “Sir Brian’s bad state of health prevented her from
going out this season, or receiving at home.”

“It don’t prevent your mother from going out, though,” continued my
lord. “Upon my honour, I think unless she got two or three things every
night, I think she’d die. Lady Kew’s like one of those horses, you
know, that unless they go they drop.”

“Thank you for my mother,” said Lady Anne.

“She is, upon my honour. Last night I know she was at ever so many
places. She dined at the Bloxams’, for I was there. Then she said she
was going to sit with old Mrs. Crackthorpe, who has broke her
collar-bone (that Crackthorpe in the Life Guards, her grandson, is a
brute, and I hope she won’t leave him a shillin’); and then she came on
to Lady Hawkstone’s, where I heard her say she had been at the—at the
Flowerdales’, too. People begin to go to those Flowerdales’. Hanged—if
I know where they won’t go next. Cotton-spinner, wasn’t he?”

“So were we, my lord,” says Miss Newcome.

“Oh, yes, I forgot! But you’re of an old family—very old family.”

“We can’t help it,” said Miss Ethel, archly. Indeed, she thought she
was.

“Do you believe in the barber-surgeon?” asked Clive. And my lord looked
at him with a noble curiosity, as much as to say, “Who the deuce was
the barber-surgeon? and who the devil are you?”

“Why should we disown our family?” Miss Ethel said, simply. “In those
early days I suppose people did—did all sorts of things, and it was not
considered at all out of the way to be surgeon to William the
Conqueror.”

“Edward the Confessor,” interposed Clive. “And it must be true, because
I have seen a picture of the barber-surgeon, a friend of mine,
M’Collop, did the picture, and I dare say it is for sale still”

Lady Anne said “she should be delighted to see it.” Lord Farintosh
remembered that the M’Collop had the moor next to his in Argyleshire,
but did not choose to commit himself with the stranger, and preferred
looking at his own handsome face and admiring it in the glass until the
last speaker had concluded his remarks.

As Clive did not offer any further conversation, but went back to a
table, where he began to draw the barber-surgeon, Lord Farintosh
resumed the delightful talk. “What infernal bad glasses these are in
these Brighton lodging-houses! They make a man look quite green, really
they do—and there’s nothing green in me, is there, Lady Anne?”

“But you look very unwell, Lord Farintosh; indeed you do,” Miss Newcome
said, gravely. “I think late hours, and smoking, and going to that
horrid Platt’s, where I dare say you go——”

“Go? Don’t I? But don’t call it horrid; really, now, don’t call it
horrid!” cried the noble Marquis.

“Well—something has made you look far from well. You know how very well
Lord Farintosh used to look, mamma—and to see him now, in only his
second season—oh, it is melancholy!”

“God bless my soul, Miss Newcome! what do you mean? I think I look
pretty well,” and the noble youth passed his hand through his hair. “It
is a hard life, I know; that tearin’ about night after night, and
sittin’ up till ever so much o’clock; and then all these races, you
know, comin’ one after another—it’s enough to knock up any fellow. I’ll
tell you what I’ll do, Miss Newcome. I’ll go down to Codlington, to my
mother; I will, upon my honour, and lie quiet all July, and then I’ll
go to Scotland—and you shall see whether I don’t look better next
season.”

“Do, Lord Farintosh!” said Ethel, greatly amused, as much, perhaps, at
the young Marquis as at her cousin Clive, who sat whilst the other was
speaking, fuming with rage, at his table.

“What are you doing, Clive?” she asks.

“I was trying to draw; Lord knows who—Lord Newcome, who was killed at
the battle of Bosworth,” said the artist, and the girl ran to look at
the picture.

“Why, you have made him like Punch!” cries the young lady.

“It’s a shame caricaturing one’s own flesh and blood, isn’t it?” asked
Clive, gravely.

“What a droll, funny picture!” exclaims Lady Anne. “Isn’t it capital,
Lord Farintosh?”

“I dare say—I confess I don’t understand that sort of thing,” says his
lordship. “Don’t, upon my honour. There’s Odo Carton, always making
those caricatures—_I_ don’t understand ’em. You’ll come up to town
to-morrow, won’t you? And you’re goin’ to Lady Hm’s, and to Hm and
Hm’s, ain’t you?” (The names of these aristocratic places of resort
were quite inaudible.) “You mustn’t let Miss Blackcap have it all her
own way, you know, that you mustn’t.”

“She won’t have it all her own way,” says Miss Ethel. “Lord Farintosh,
will you do me a favour? Lady Innishowan is your aunt?”

“Of course she is my aunt.”

“Will you be so very good as to get a card for her party on Tuesday,
for my cousin, Mr. Clive Newcome? Clive, please be introduced to the
Marquis of Farintosh.”

The young Marquis perfectly well recollected those mustachios and their
wearer on a former night, though he had not thought fit to make any
sign of recognition. “Anything you wish, Miss Newcome,” he said;
“delighted, I’m sure;” and turning to Clive—In the army, I suppose?”

“I am an artist,” says Clive, turning very red.

“Oh, really, I didn’t know!” cries the nobleman; and my lord bursting
out laughing presently as he was engaged in conversation with Miss
Ethel on the balcony, Clive thought, very likely with justice, “He is
making fun of my mustachios. Confound him! I should like to pitch him
over into the street.” But this was only a kind wish on Mr. Newcome’s
part; not followed out by any immediate fulfilment.

As the Marquis of Farintosh seemed inclined to prolong his visit, and
his company was exceedingly disagreeable to Clive, the latter took his
departure for an afternoon walk, consoled to think that he should have
Ethel to himself at the evening’s dinner, when Lady Anne would be
occupied about Sir Brian, and would be sure to be putting the children
to bed, and, in a word, would give him a quarter of an hour of
delightful _tête-à-tête_ with the beautiful Ethel.

Clive’s disgust was considerable when he came to dinner at length, and
found Lord Farintosh, likewise invited, and sprawling in the
drawing-room. His hopes of a _tête-à-tête_ were over. Ethel and Lady
Anne and my lord talked, as all people will, about their mutual
acquaintance: what parties were coming off, who was going to marry
whom, and so forth. And as the persons about whom they conversed were
in their own station of life, and belonged to the fashionable world, of
which Clive had but a slight knowledge, he chose to fancy that his
cousin was giving herself airs, and to feel sulky and uneasy during
their dialogue.

Miss Newcome had faults of her own, and was worldly enough as perhaps
the reader has begun to perceive; but in this instance no harm, sure,
was to be attributed to her. If two gossips in Aunt Honeyman’s parlour
had talked over the affairs of Mr. Jones and Mr. Brown, Clive would not
have been angry; but a young man of spirit not unfrequently mistakes
his vanity for independence: and it is certain that nothing is more
offensive to us of the middle class than to hear the names of great
folks constantly introduced into conversation.

So Clive was silent and ate no dinner, to the alarm of Martha, who had
put him to bed many a time, and always had a maternal eye over him.
When he actually refused currant and raspberry tart, and custard, the
_chef d’œuvre_ of Miss Honeyman, for which she had seen him absolutely
cry in his childhood, the good Martha was alarmed.

“Law, Master Clive!” she said, “do ’ee eat some. Missis made it, you
know she did;” and she insisted on bringing back the tart to him.

Lady Anne and Ethel laughed at this eagerness on the worthy old woman’s
part. “Do ’ee eat some, Clive,” says Ethel, imitating honest Mrs.
Hicks, who had left the room.

“It’s doosid good,” remarked Lord Farintosh.

“Then do ’ee eat some more,” said Miss Newcome: on which the young
nobleman, holding out his plate, observed with much affability, that
the cook of the lodgings was really a stunner for tarts.

“The cook! dear me, it’s not the _cook!_” cries Miss Ethel. “Don’t you
remember the princess in the Arabian Nights, who was such a stunner for
tarts, Lord Farintosh?”

Lord Farintosh couldn’t say that he did.

“Well, I thought not; but there was a princess in Arabia or China, or
somewhere, who made such delicious tarts and custards that nobody’s
could compare with them; and there is an old lady in Brighton who has
the same wonderful talent. She is the mistress of this house.”

“And she is my aunt, at your lordship’s service,” said Mr. Clive, with
great dignity.

“Upon my honour! _did_ you make ’em, Lady Anne?” asked my lord.

“The Queen of Hearts made tarts!” cried out Miss Newcome, rather
eagerly, and blushing somewhat.

“My good old aunt, Miss Honeyman, made this one,” Clive would go on to
say.

“Mr. Honeyman’s sister, the preacher, you know, where we go on Sunday,”
Miss Ethel interposed.

“The Honeyman pedigree is not a matter of very great importance,” Lady
Anne remarked gently. “Kuhn, will you have the goodness to take away
these things? When did you hear of Colonel Newcome, Clive?”

An air of deep bewilderment and perplexity had spread over Lord
Farintosh’s fine countenance whilst this talk about pastry had been
going on. The Arabian Princess, the Queen of Hearts making tarts, Miss
Honeyman? Who the deuce were all these? Such may have been his
lordship’s doubts and queries. Whatever his cogitations were he did not
give utterance to them, but remained in silence for some time, as did
the rest of the little party. Clive tried to think he had asserted his
independence by showing that he was not ashamed of his old aunt; but
the doubt may be whether there was any necessity for presenting her in
this company, and whether Mr. Clive had not much better have left the
tart question alone.

Ethel evidently thought so: for she talked and rattled in the most
lively manner with Lord Farintosh for the rest of the evening, and
scarcely chose to say a word to her cousin. Lady Anne was absent with
Sir Brian and her children for the most part of the time: and thus
Clive had the pleasure of listening to Miss Newcome uttering all sorts
of odd little paradoxes, firing the while sly shots at Mr. Clive, and,
indeed, making fun of his friends, exhibiting herself in not the most
agreeable light. Her talk only served the more to bewilder Lord
Farintosh, who did not understand a tithe of her allusions: for Heaven,
which had endowed the young Marquis with personal charms, a large
estate, an ancient title and the pride belonging to it, had not
supplied his lordship with a great quantity of brains, or a very
feeling heart.

Lady Anne came back from the upper regions presently, with rather a
grave face, and saying that Sir Brian was not so well this evening,
upon which the young men rose to depart. My lord said he had “a most
delightful dinner and a most delightful tart, ’pon his honour,” and was
the only one of the little company who laughed at his own remark. Miss
Ethel’s eyes flashed scorn at Mr. Clive when that unfortunate subject
was introduced again.

My lord was going back to London to-morrow. Was Miss Newcome going
back? Wouldn’t he like to go back in the train with her!—another
unlucky observation. Lady Anne said, “it would depend on the state of
Sir Brian’s health the next morning whether Ethel would return; and
both of you gentlemen are too young to be her escort,” added the kind
lady. Then she shook hands with Clive, as thinking she had said
something too for him.

Farintosh in the meantime was taking leave of Miss Newcome. “Pray,
pray,” said his lordship, “don’t throw me over at Lady Innishowan’s.
You know I hate balls and never go to ’em, except when you go. I hate
dancing, I do, ’pon my honour.”

“Thank you,” said Miss Newcome, with a curtsey.

“Except with one person—only one person, upon my honour. I’ll remember
and get the invitation for your friend. And if you would but try that
mare, I give you my honour I bred her at Codlington. She’s a beauty to
look at, and as quiet as a lamb.”

“I don’t want a horse like a lamb,” replied the young lady.

“Well—she’ll go like blazes now: and over timber she’s splendid now.
She is, upon my honour.”

“When I come to London perhaps you may trot her out,” said Miss Ethel,
giving him her hand and a fine smile.

Clive came up biting his lips. “I suppose you don’t condescend to ride
Bhurtpore any more now?” he said.

“Poor old Bhurtpore! The children ride him now,” said Miss Ethel—giving
Clive at the same time a dangerous look of her eyes, as though to see
if her shot had hit. Then she added, “No—he has not been brought up to
town this year: he is at Newcome, and I like him very much.” Perhaps
she thought the shot had struck too deep.

But if Clive was hurt he did not show his wound. “You have had him
these four years—yes, it’s four years since my father broke him for
you. And you still continue to like him? What a miracle of constancy!
You use him sometimes in the country—when you have no better horse—what
a compliment to Bhurtpore!”

“Nonsense!” Miss Ethel here made Clive a sign in her most imperious
manner to stay a moment when Lord Farintosh had departed.

But he did not choose to obey this order. “Good night,” he said.
“Before I go I must shake hands with my aunt downstairs.” And he was
gone, following close upon Lord Farintosh, who I dare say thought, “Why
the deuce can’t he shake hands with his aunt up here?” and when Clive
entered Miss Honeyman’s back-parlour, making a bow to the young
nobleman, my lord went away more perplexed than ever: and the next day
told friends at White’s what uncommonly queer people those Newcomes
were. “I give you my honour there was a fellow at Lady Anne’s whom they
call Clive, who is a painter by trade—his uncle is a preacher—his
father is a horse-dealer, and his aunt lets lodgings and cooks the
dinner.”




CHAPTER XLIII.
Returns to some Old Friends


The haggard youth burst into my chambers, in the Temple, on the very
next morning, and confided to me the story which has been just here
narrated. When he had concluded it, with many ejaculations regarding
the heroine of the tale, “I saw her, sir,” he added, “walking with the
children and Miss Cann as I drove round in the fly to the station—and
didn’t even bow to her.”

“Why did you go round by the cliff?” asked Clive’s friend.

“That is not the way from the Steyne Arms to the railroad.”

“Hang it,” says Clive, turning very red, “I wanted to pass just under
her windows, and if I saw her, not to see her: and that’s what I did.”

“Why did she walk on the cliff?” mused Clive’s friend, “at that early
hour? Not to meet Lord Farintosh, I should think, he never gets up
before twelve. It must have been to see you. Didn’t you tell her you
were going away in the morning?”

“I tell you what she does with me,” continues Mr. Clive. “Sometimes she
seems to like me, and then she leaves me. Sometimes she is quite
kind—kind she always is—I mean, you know, Pen—_you_ know what I mean;
and then up comes the old Countess, or a young Marquis, or some fellow
with a handle to his name, and she whistles me off till the next
convenient opportunity.”

“Women are like that, my ingenuous youth,” says Clive’s counsellor.

“_I_ won’t stand it. _I_ won’t be made a fool of!” he continues. “She
seems to expect everybody to bow to her, and moves through the world
with her imperious airs. Oh, how confoundedly handsome she is with
them! I tell you what. I feel inclined to tumble down and feel one of
her pretty little feet on my neck and say, There! Trample my life out.
Make a slave of me. Let me get a silver collar and mark ‘Ethel’ on it,
and go through the world with my badge.”

“And a blue ribbon for a footman to hold you by; and a muzzle to wear
in the dog-days. Bow! wow!” says Mr. Pendennis.

(At this noise Mr. Warrington puts his head in from the neighbouring
bedchamber, and shows a beard just lathered for shaving. “We are
talking sentiment! Go back till you are wanted!” says Mr. Pendennis.
Exit he of the soap-suds.)

“Don’t make fun of a fellow,” Clive continues, laughing ruefully. “You
see I must talk about it to somebody. I shall die if I don’t.
Sometimes, sir, I rise up in my might and I defy her lightning. The
sarcastic dodge is the best: I have borrowed that from you Pen, old
boy. That puzzles her: that would beat her if I could but go on with
it. But there comes a tone of her sweet voice, a look out of those
killing grey eyes, and all my frame is in a thrill and a tremble. When
she was engaged to Lord Kew I did battle with the confounded
passion—and I ran away from it like an honest man, and the gods
rewarded me with ease of mind after a while. But now the thing rages
worse than ever. Last night, I give you my honour, I heard every one of
the confounded hurs toll, except the last, when I was dreaming of my
father, and the chambermaid woke me with a hot water jug.”

“Did she scald you? What a cruel chambermaid! I see you have shaven the
mustachios off.”

“Farintosh asked me whether I was going in the army,” said Clive, “and
she laughed. I thought I had best dock them. Oh, I would like to cut my
head off as well as my hair!”

“Have you ever asked her to marry you?” asked Clive’s friend.

“I have seen her but five times since my return from abroad,” the lad
went on; “there has been always somebody by. Who am I? a painter with
five hundred a year for an allowance. Isn’t she used to walk up on
velvet and dine upon silver; and hasn’t she got marquises and barons,
and all sorts of swells, in her train? I daren’t ask her——”

Here his friend hummed Montrose’s lines—“He either fears his fate too
much, or his desert is small, who dares not put it to the touch, and
win or lose it all.”

“I own I dare not ask her. If she were to refuse me, I know I should
never ask again. This isn’t the moment, when all Swelldom is at her
feet, for me to come forward and say, ‘Maiden, I have watched thee
daily, and I think thou lovest me well.’ I read that ballad to her at
Baden, sir. I drew a picture of the Lord of Burleigh wooing the maiden,
and asked what she would have done?”

“Oh, you _did?_ I thought, when we were at Baden, we were so modest
that we did not even whisper our condition?”

“A fellow can’t help letting it be seen and hinting it,” says Clive,
with another blush. “They can read it in our looks fast enough; and
what is going on in our minds, hang them! I recollect she said, in her
grave, cool way, that after all the Lord and Lady of Burleigh did not
seem to have made a very good marriage, and that the lady would have
been much happier in marrying one of her own degree.”

“That was a very prudent saying for a young lady of eighteen,” remarks
Clive’s friend.

“Yes; but it was not an unkind one. Say Ethel thought—thought what was
the case; and being engaged herself, and knowing how friends of mine
had provided a very pretty little partner for me—she is a dear, good
little girl, little Rosey; and twice as good, Pen, when her mother is
away—knowing this and that, I say, suppose Ethel wanted to give me a
hint to keep quiet, was she not right in the counsel she gave me? She
is not fit to be a poor man’s wife. Fancy Ethel Newcome going into the
kitchen and making pies like Aunt Honeyman!”

“The Circassian beauties don’t sell under so many thousand purses,”
remarked Mr. Pendennis. “If there’s a beauty in a well-regulated
Georgian family, they fatten her; they feed her with the best _Racahout
des Arabes_. They give her silk robes, and perfumed baths; have her
taught to play on the dulcimer and dance and sing; and when she is
quite perfect, send her down to Constantinople for the Sultan’s
inspection. The rest of the family think never of grumbling, but eat
coarse meat, bathe in the river, wear old clothes, and praise Allah for
their sister’s elevation. Bah! Do you suppose the Turkish system
doesn’t obtain all over the world? My poor Clive, this article in the
Mayfair Market is beyond your worship’s price. Some things in this
world are made for our betters, young man. Let Dives say grace for his
dinner, and the dogs and Lazarus be thankful for the crumbs. Here comes
Warrington, shaven and smart as if he was going out a-courting.”

Thus it will be seen, that in his communication with certain friends
who approached nearer to his own time of life, Clive was much more
eloquent and rhapsodical than in the letter which he wrote to his
father, regarding his passion for Miss Ethel. He celebrated her with
pencil and pen. He was for ever drawing the outline of her head, the
solemn eyebrow, the nose (that wondrous little nose), descending from
the straight forehead, the short upper lip, and chin sweeping in a full
curve to the neck, etc. etc. A frequenter of his studio might see a
whole gallery of Ethels there represented: when Mrs. Mackenzie visited
that place, and remarked one face and figure repeated on a hundred
canvases and papers, grey, white, and brown, I believe she was told
that the original was a famous Roman model, from whom Clive had studied
a great deal during his residence in Italy; on which Mrs. Mack gave it
as her opinion that Clive was a sad wicked young fellow. The widow
thought rather the better of him for being a sad wicked young fellow;
and as for Miss Rosey, she, was of course of mamma’s way of thinking.
Rosey went through the world constantly smiling at whatever occurred.
She was good-humoured through the dreariest long evenings at the most
stupid parties; sate good-humouredly for hours at Shoolbred’s whilst
mamma was making purchases; heard good-humouredly those old old stories
of her mother’s day after day; bore an hour’s joking or an hour’s
scolding with equal good-humour; and whatever had been the occurrences
of her simple day, whether there was sunshine or cloudy weather, or
flashes of lightning and bursts of rain, I fancy Miss Mackenzie slept
after them quite undisturbedly, and was sure to greet the morrow’s dawn
with a smile.

Had Clive become more knowing in his travels, had Love or Experience
opened his eyes, that they looked so differently now upon objects which
before used well enough to please them? It is a fact that, until he
went abroad, he thought widow Mackenzie a dashing, lively, agreeable
woman: he used to receive her stories about Cheltenham, the colonies,
the balls at Government House, the observations which the bishop made,
and the peculiar attention of the Chief Justice to Mrs. Major M’Shane,
with the Major’s uneasy behaviour—all these to hear at one time did
Clive not ungraciously incline. “Our friend, Mrs. Mack,” the good old
Colonel used to say, “is a clever woman of the world, and has seen a
great deal of company.” That story of Sir Thomas Sadman dropping a
pocket-handkerchief in his court at Colombo, which the Queen’s Advocate
O’Goggarty picked up, and on which Laura MacS. was embroidered, whilst
the Major was absolutely in the witness-box giving evidence against a
native servant who had stolen one of his cocked-hats—that story always
made good Thomas Newcome laugh, and Clive used to enjoy it too, and the
widow’s mischievous fun in narrating it; and now, behold, one day when
Mrs. Mackenzie recounted the anecdote in her best manner to Messrs.
Pendennis and Warrington, and Frederick Bayham, who had been invited to
meet Mr. Clive in Fitzroy Square—when Mr. Binnie chuckled, when Rosey,
as in duty bound, looked discomposed and said, “Law, mamma!”—not one
sign of good-humour, not one ghost of a smile, made its apparition on
Clive’s dreary face. He painted imaginary portraits with a strawberry
stalk; he looked into his water-glass as though he would plunge and
drown there; and Bayham had to remind him that the claret jug was
anxious to have another embrace from its constant friend, F. B. When
Mrs. Mack went away distributing smiles, Clive groaned out, “Good
heavens! how that story does bore me!” and lapsed into his former
moodiness, not giving so much as a glance to Rosey, whose sweet face
looked at him kindly for a moment, as she followed in the wake of her
mamma.

“The mother’s the woman for my money,” I heard F. B. whisper to
Warrington. “Splendid figure-head, sir—magnificent build, sir, from
bows to stern—I like ’em of that sort. Thank you, Mr. Binnie, I _will_
take a back-hander, as Clive don’t seem to drink. The youth, sir, has
grown melancholy with his travels; I’m inclined to think some noble
Roman has stolen the young man’s heart. Why did you not send us over a
picture of the charmer, Clive? Young Ridley, Mr. Binnie, you will be
happy to hear, is bidding fair to take a distinguished place in the
world of arts. His picture has been greatly admired; and my good friend
Mrs. Ridley tells me that Lord Todmorden has sent him over an order to
paint him a couple of pictures at a hundred guineas apiece.”

“I should think so. J. J.’s pictures will be worth five times a hundred
guineas ere five years are over,” says Clive.

“In that case it wouldn’t be a bad speculation for our friend
Sherrick,” remarked F. B., “to purchase a few of the young man’s works.
I would, only I haven’t the capital to spare. Mine has been vested in
an Odessa venture, sir, in a large amount of wild oats, which up to the
present moment make me no return. But it will always be a consolation
to me to think that I have been the means—the humble means—of
furthering that deserving young man’s prospects in life.”

“You, F. B.! and how?” we asked.

“By certain humble contributions of mine to the press,” answered
Bayham, majestically. “Mr. Warrington, the claret happens to stand with
you; and exercise does it good, sir. Yes, the articles, trifling as
they may appear, have attracted notice,” continued F. B., sipping his
wine with great gusto. “They are noticed, Pendennis, give me leave to
say, by parties who don’t value so much the literary or even the
political part of the _Pall Mall Gazette_, though both, I am told by
those who read them, are conducted with considerable—consummate
ability. John Ridley sent a hundred pounds over to his father, the
other day, who funded it in his son’s name. And Ridley told the story
to Lord Todmorden, when the venerable nobleman congratulated him on
having such a child. I wish F. B. had one of the same sort, sir.” In
which sweet prayer we all of us joined with a laugh.

One of us had told Mrs. Mackenzie (let the criminal blush to own that
quizzing his fellow-creatures used at one time to form part of his
youthful amusement) that F. B. was the son of a gentleman of most
ancient family and vast landed possessions, and as Bayham was
particularly attentive to the widow, and grandiloquent in his remarks,
she was greatly pleased by his politeness, and pronounced him a most
_distingué_ man—reminding her, indeed, of General Hopkirk, who
commanded in Canada. And she bade Rosey sing for Mr. Bayham, who was in
a rapture at the young lady’s performances, and said no wonder such an
accomplished daughter came from such a mother, though how such a mother
could have a daughter of such an age he, F. B., was at a loss to
understand. Oh, sir! Mrs. Mackenzie was charmed and overcome at this
novel compliment. Meanwhile the little artless Rosey warbled on her
pretty ditties.

“It _is_ a wonder,” growled out Mr. Warrington, “that that sweet girl
can belong to such a woman. I don’t understand much about women, but
that one appears to me to be—hum!”

“What, George?” asked Warrington’s friend.

“Well, an ogling, leering, scheming, artful old campaigner,” grumbled
the misogynist. “As for the little girl, I should like to have her to
sing to me all night long. Depend upon it she would make a much better
wife for Clive than that fashionable cousin of his he is hankering
after. I heard him bellowing about her the other day in chambers, as I
was dressing. What the deuce does the boy want with a wife at all?” And
Rosey’s song being by this time finished, Warrington went up with a
blushing face and absolutely paid a compliment to Miss Mackenzie—an
almost unheard-of effort on George’s part.

“I wonder whether it is every young fellow’s lot,” quoth George, as we
trudged home together, “to pawn his heart away to some girl that’s not
worth the winning? Psha! it’s all mad rubbish this sentiment. The women
ought not to be allowed to interfere with us: married if a man must be,
a suitable wife should be portioned out to him, and there an end of it.
Why doesn’t the young man marry this girl, and get back to his business
and paint his pictures? Because his father wishes it—and the old Nabob
yonder, who seems a kindly-disposed, easy-going, old heathen
philosopher. Here’s a pretty little girl: money I suppose in
sufficiency—everything satisfactory, except, I grant you, the
campaigner. The lad might daub his canvases, christen a child a year,
and be as happy as any young donkey that browses on this common of
ours—but he must go and heehaw after a zebra forsooth! a _lusus naturæ_
is she! I never spoke to a woman of fashion, thank my stars—I don’t
know the nature of the beast; and since I went to our race-balls, as a
boy, scarcely ever saw one; as I don’t frequent operas and parties in
London like you young flunkeys of the aristocracy. I heard you talking
about this one; I couldn’t help it, as my door was open and the young
one was shouting like a madman. What! does he choose to hang on on
sufferance and hope to be taken, provided Miss can get no better? Do
you mean to say that is the genteel custom, and that women in your
confounded society do such things every day? Rather than have such a
creature I would take a savage woman, who should nurse my dusky brood;
and rather than have a daughter brought up to the trade I would bring
her down from the woods and sell her in Virginia.” With which burst of
indignation our friend’s anger ended for that night.

Though Mr. Clive had the felicity to meet his cousin Ethel at a party
or two in the ensuing weeks of the season, every time he perused the
features of Lady Kew’s brass knocker in Queen Street, no result came of
the visit. At one of their meetings in the world Ethel fairly told him
that her grandmother would not receive him. “You know, Clive, I can’t
help myself: nor would it be proper to make you signs out of the
window. But you must call for all that: grandmamma may become more
good-humoured: or if you don’t come she may suspect I told you not to
come: and to battle with her day after day is no pleasure, sir, I
assure you. Here is Lord Farintosh coming to take me to dance. You must
not speak to me all the evening, mind that, sir,” and away goes the
young lady in a waltz with the Marquis.

On the same evening—as he was biting his nails, or cursing his fate, or
wishing to invite Lord Farintosh into the neighbouring garden of
Berkeley Square, whence the policeman might carry to the station-house
the corpse of the survivor,—Lady Kew would bow to him with perfect
graciousness; on other nights her ladyship would pass and no more
recognise him than the servant who opened the door.

If she was not to see him at her grandmother’s house, and was not
particularly unhappy at his exclusion, why did Miss Newcome encourage
Mr. Clive so that he should try and see _her?_ If Clive could not get
into the little house in Queen Street, why was Lord Farintosh’s
enormous cab-horse looking daily into the first-floor windows of that
street? Why were little quiet dinners made for him, before the opera,
before going to the play, upon a half-dozen occasions, when some of the
old old Kew port was brought out of the cellar, where cobwebs had
gathered round it ere Farintosh was born? The dining-room was so tiny
that not more than five people could sit at the little round table:
that is, not more than Lady Kew and her granddaughter, Miss Crochet,
the late vicar’s daughter, at Kewbury, one of the Miss Toadins, and
Captain Walleye, or Tommy Henchman, Farintosh’s kinsman, and admirer,
who were of no consequence, or old Fred Tiddler, whose wife was an
invalid, and who was always ready at a moment’s notice? Crackthorpe
once went to one of these dinners, but that young soldier being a frank
and high-spirited youth, abused the entertainment and declined more of
them. “I tell you what I was wanted for,” the Captain told his mess and
Clive at the Regent’s Park barracks afterwards, “I was expected to go
as Farintosh’s Groom of the Stole, don’t you know, to stand, or if I
could sit, in the back seat of the box, whilst his Royal Highness made
talk with the Beauty; to go out and fetch the carriage, and walk
downstairs with that d—— crooked old dowager, that looks as if she
usually rode on a broomstick, by Jove, or else with that bony old
painted sheep-faced companion, who’s raddled like an old bell-wether. I
think, Newcome, you seem rather hit by the Belle Cousine—so was I last
season; so were ever so many of the fellows. By Jove, sir! there’s
nothing I know more comfortable or inspiritin’ than a younger son’s
position, when a marquis cuts in with fifteen thousand a year! We fancy
we’ve been making running, and suddenly we find ourselves nowhere. Miss
Mary, or Miss Lucy, or Miss Ethel, saving your presence, will no more
look at us, than my dog will look at a bit of bread, when I offer her
this cutlet. Will you—old woman! no, you old slut, that you won’t!” (to
Mag, an Isle of Skye terrier, who, in fact, prefers the cutlet, having
snuffed disdainfully at the bread)—“that you won’t, no more than any of
your sex. Why, do you suppose, if Jack’s eldest brother had been
dead—Barebones Belsize they used to call him (I don’t believe he was a
bad fellow, though he was fond of psalm-singing)—do you suppose that
Lady Clara would have looked at that cock-tail Barney Newcome? Beg your
pardon, if he’s your cousin—but a more odious little snob I never saw.”

“I give you up Barnes,” said Clive, laughing; “anybody may shy at him
and I shan’t interfere.”

“I understand, but at nobody else of the family. Well, what I mean is,
that that old woman is enough to spoil any young girl she takes in
hand. She dries ’em up, and poisons ’em, sir; and I was never more glad
than when I heard that Kew had got out of her old clutches. Frank is a
fellow that will always be led by some woman or another; and I’m only
glad it should be a good one. They say his mother’s serious, and that;
but why shouldn’t she bet?” continues honest Crackthorpe, puffing his
cigar with great energy. “They say the old dowager doesn’t believe in
God nor devil: but that she’s in such a funk to be left in the dark
that she howls, and raises the doose’s own delight if her candle goes
out. Toppleton slept next room to her at Groningham, and heard her;
didn’t you, Top?”

“Heard her howling like an old cat on the tiles,” says
Toppleton,—“thought she was at first. My man told me that she used to
fling all sorts of things—boot-jacks and things, give you my honour—at
her maid, and that the woman was all over black and blue.”

“Capital head that is Newcome has done of Jack Belsize!” says
Crackthorpe, from out of his cigar.

“And Kew’s too—famous likeness! I say, Newcome, if you have ’em printed
the whole brigade’ll subscribe. Make your fortune, see if you won’t,”
cries Toppleton.

“He’s such a heavy swell, he don’t want to make his fortune,”
ejaculates Butts.

“Butts, old boy, he’ll paint you for nothing, and send you to the
Exhibition, where some widow will fall in love with you, and you shall
be put as frontispiece for the ‘Book of Beauty,’ by Jove,” cries
another military satirist—to whom Butts:

“You hold your tongue, you old Saracen’s Head; they’re going to have
you done on the bear’s-grease pots. I say, I suppose Jack’s all right
now. When did he write to you last, Cracky?”

“He wrote from Palermo—a most jolly letter from him and Kew. He hasn’t
touched a card for nine months; is going to give up play. So is Frank,
too, grown quite a good boy. So will you, too, Butts, you old
miscreant, repent of your sins, pay your debts, and do something
handsome for that poor deluded milliner in Albany Street. Jack says
Kew’s mother has written over to Lord Highgate a beautiful letter—and
the old boy’s relenting, and they’ll come together again—Jack’s eldest
son now, you know. Bore for Lady Susan only having girls.”

“Not a bore for Jack, though,” cries another. And what a good fellow
Jack was; and what a trump Kew is; how famously he stuck by him: went
to see him in prison and paid him out! and what good fellows we all
are, in general, became the subject of the conversation, the latter
part of which took place in the smoking-room of the Regent’s Park
Barracks, then occupied by that regiment of Life Guards of which Lord
Kew and Mr. Belsize had been members. Both were still fondly remembered
by their companions; and it was because Belsize had spoken very warmly
of Clive’s friendliness to him that Jack’s friend the gallant
Crackthorpe had been interested in our hero, and found an opportunity
of making his acquaintance.

With these frank and pleasant young men Clive soon formed a
considerable intimacy: and if any of his older and peaceful friends
chanced to take their afternoon airing in the Park, and survey the
horsemen there, we might have the pleasure of beholding Mr. Newcome in
Rotten Row, riding side by side with other dandies who had mustachios
blonde or jet, who wore flowers in their buttons (themselves being
flowers of spring), who rode magnificent thoroughbred horses, scarcely
touching their stirrups with the tips of their varnished boots, and who
kissed the most beautiful primrose-coloured kid gloves to lovely ladies
passing them in the Ride. Clive drew portraits of half the officers of
the Life Guards Green; and was appointed painter in ordinary to that
distinguished corps. His likeness of the Colonel would make you die
with laughing: his picture of the Surgeon was voted a masterpiece. He
drew the men in the saddle, in the stable, in their flannel dresses,
sweeping their flashing swords about, receiving lancers, repelling
infantry,—nay, cutting—a sheep in two, as some of the warriors are
known to be able to do at one stroke. Detachments of Life Guardsmen
made their appearance in Charlotte Street, which was not very distant
from their barracks; the most splendid cabs were seen prancing before
his door; and curly-whiskered youths, of aristocratic appearance,
smoking cigars out of his painting-room window. How many times did
Clive’s next-door neighbour, little Mr Finch, the miniature-painter,
run to peep through his parlour blinds, hoping that a sitter was
coming, and “a carriage-party” driving up! What wrath Mr. Scowler,
A.R.A., was in, because a young hop-o’-my-thumb dandy, who wore gold
chains and his collars turned down, should spoil the trade and draw
portraits for nothing! Why did none of the young men come to Scowler?
Scowler was obliged to own that Mr. Newcome had considerable talent,
and a good knack at catching a likeness. He could not paint a bit, to
be sure, but his heads in black-and-white were really tolerable; his
sketches of horses very vigorous and lifelike. Mr. Gandish said if
Clive would come for three or four years into his academy he could make
something of him. Mr. Smee shook his head, and said he was afraid, that
kind of loose, desultory study, that keeping of aristocratic company,
was anything but favourable to a young artist—Smee, who would walk five
miles to attend an evening party of ever so little a great man!




CHAPTER XLIV.
In which Mr. Charles Honeyman appears in an Amiable Light


Mr. Frederick Bayham waited at Fitzroy Square while Clive was yet
talking with his friends there, and favoured that gentleman with his
company home to the usual smoky refreshment. Clive always rejoiced in
F. B.’s society, whether he was in a sportive mood, or, as now, in a
solemn and didactic vein. F. B. had been more than ordinarily majestic
all the evening. “I dare say you find me a good deal altered, Clive,”
he remarked; “I am a good deal altered. Since that good Samaritan, your
kind father, had compassion on a poor fellow fallen among thieves
(though I don’t say, mind you, he was much better than his company), F.
B. has mended some of his ways. I am trying a course of industry, sir.
Powers, perhaps naturally great, have been neglected over the wine-cup
and the die. I am beginning to feel my way; and my chiefs yonder, who
have just walked home with their cigars in their mouths, and without as
much as saying, F. B., my boy, shall we go to the Haunt and have a cool
lobster and a glass of table-beer,—which they certainly do not consider
themselves to be,—I say, sir, the Politician and the Literary Critic”
(there was a most sarcastic emphasis laid on these phrases,
characterising Messrs. Warrington and Pendennis) “may find that there
is a humble contributor to the _Pall Mall Gazette_, whose name, may be,
the amateur shall one day reckon even higher than their own. Mr.
Warrington I do not say so much—he is an able man, sir, an able
man;—but there is that about your exceedin self-satisfied friend, Mr.
Arthur Pendennis, which—well, well—let time show. You did not—get
the—hem—paper at Rome and Naples, I suppose?”

“Forbidden by the Inquisition,” says Clive, delighted; “and at Naples
the king furious against it.”

“I _don’t wonder_ they don’t like it at Rome, sir. There’s serious
matter in it which may set the prelates of a certain Church rather in a
tremor. You haven’t read—the—ahem—the Pulpit Pencillings in the _P. M.
G.?_ Slight sketches, mental and corporeal, of our chief divines now in
London—and signed Latimer?”

“I don’t do much in that way,” said Clive.

“So much the worse for you, my young friend. Not that I mean to judge
any other fellow harshly—I mean any other fellow sinner harshly—or that
I mean that those Pulpit Pencillings would be likely to do you any
great good. But, such as they are, they have been productive of
benefit.—Thank you, Mary, and my dear, the tap is uncommonly good, and
I drink to your future husband’s good health.—A glass of good sound
beer refreshes after all that claret. Well, sir, to return to the
Pencillings, pardon my vanity in saying, that though Mr. Pendennis
laughs at them, they have been of essential service to the paper. They
give it a character, they rally round it the respectable classes. They
create correspondence. I have received many interesting letters,
chiefly from females, about the Pencillings. Some complain that their
favourite preachers are slighted; others applaud because the clergymen
they sit under are supported by F. B. _I_ am Laud Latimer, sir,—though
I have heard the letters attributed to the Rev. Mr. Bunker, and to a
Member of Parliament eminent in the religious world.”

“So you are the famous Laud Latimer?” cries Clive, who had, in fact,
seen letters signed by those right reverend names in our paper.

“Famous is hardly the word. One who scoffs at everything—I need not say
I allude to Mr. Arthur Pendennis—would have had the letters signed—the
Beadle, of the Parish. He calls me the Venerable Beadle sometimes—it
being, I grieve to say, his way to deride grave subjects. You wouldn’t
suppose now, my young Clive, that the same hand which pens the Art
criticisms, occasionally, when His Highness Pendennis is lazy, takes a
minor theatre, or turns the sportive epigram, or the ephemeral
paragraph, should adopt a grave theme on a Sunday, and chronicle the
sermons of British divines? For eighteen consecutive Sunday evenings,
Clive, in Mrs. Ridley’s front parlour, which I now occupy, vice Miss
Cann promoted, I have written the Pencillings—scarcely allowing a drop
of refreshment, except under extreme exhaustion, to pass my lips.
Pendennis laughs at the Pencillings. He wants to stop them; and says
they bore the public.—I don’t want to _think_ a man is jealous, who was
himself the cause of my engagement at the _P. M. G._,—perhaps my powers
were not developed then.”

“Pen thinks he writes better now than when he began,” remarked Clive;
“I have heard him say so.”

“His opinion of his own writings is high, whatever their date. Mine,
sir, are only just coming into notice. They begin to know F. B., sir,
in the sacred edifices of his metropolitan city. I saw the Bishop of
London looking at me last Sunday week, and am sure his chaplain
whispered him, ‘It’s Mr. Bayham, my lord, nephew of your lordship’s
right reverend brother, the Lord Bishop of Bullocksmithy.’ And last
Sunday being at church—at Saint Mungo the Martyr’s, Rev. Sawders—by
Wednesday I got in a female hand—Mrs. Sawders’s, no doubt—the biography
of the Incumbent of St. Mungo; an account of his early virtues; a copy
of his poems; and a hint that he was the gentleman destined for the
vacant Deanery.

“Ridley is not the only man I have helped in this world,” F. B.
continued. “Perhaps I should blush to own it—I _do_ blush: but I feel
the ties of early acquaintance, and I own that I have puffed your
uncle, Charles Honeyman, most tremendously. It was partly for the sake
of the Ridleys and the tick he owes ’em: partly for old times’ sake.
Sir, are you aware that things are greatly changed with Charles
Honeyman, and that the poor F. B. has very likely made his fortune?”

“I am delighted to hear it,” cried Clive; “and how, F. B., have you
wrought this miracle?”

“By common sense and enterprise, lad—by a knowledge of the world and a
benevolent disposition. You’ll see Lady Whittlesea’s Chapel bears a
very different aspect now. That miscreant Sherrick owns that he owes me
a turn, and has sent me a few dozen of wine—without any stamped paper
on my part in return—as an acknowledgment of my service. It chanced,
sir, soon after your departure for Italy, that going to his private
residence respecting a little bill to which a heedless friend had put
his hand, Sherrick invited me to partake of tea in the bosom of his
family. I was thirsty—having walked in from Jack Straw’s Castle at
Hampstead, where poor Kitely and I had been taking a chop—and accepted
the proffered entertainment. The ladies of the family gave us music
after the domestic muffin—and then, sir, a great idea occurred to me.
You know how magnificently Miss Sherrick and the mother sing? Thy sang
Mozart, sir. Why, I asked of Sherrick, should those ladies who sing
Mozart to a piano, not sing Handel to an organ?

“‘Dash it, you don’t mean a hurdy-gurdy?’”

“‘Sherrick,’ says I, ‘you are no better than a heathen ignoramus. I
mean why shouldn’t they sing Handes Church Music, and Church Music in
general in Lady Whittlesea’s Chapel? Behind the screen up in the
organ-loft what’s to prevent ’em? By Jingo! Your singing-boys have gone
to the Cave of Harmody; you and your choir have split—why should not
these ladies lead it?’ He caught at the idea. You never heard the
chants more finely given—and they would be better still if the
congregation would but hold their confounded tongues. It was an
excellent though a harmless dodge, sir: and drew immensely, to speak
profanely. They dress the part, sir, to admiration—a sort of nunlike
costume they come in: Mrs. Sherrick has the soul of an artist still—by
Jove, sir, when they have once smelt the lamps, the love of the trade
never leaves ’em. The ladies actually practised by moonlight in the
Chapel, and came over to Honeyman’s to an oyster afterwards. The thing
took, sir. People began to take box-seats, I mean, again:—and Charles
Honeyman, easy in his mind through your noble father’s generosity,
perhaps inspirited by returning good fortune, has been preaching more
eloquently than ever. He took some lessons of Husler, of the Haymarket,
sir. His sermons are old, I believe; but so to speak, he has got them
up with new scenery, dresses, and effects, sir. They have flowers, sir,
about the buildin’—pious ladies are supposed to provide ’em, but,
_entre nous_, Sherrick contracts for them with Nathan, or some one in
Covent Garden. And—don’t tell this now, upon your honour!”

“Tell what, F. B.?” asks Clive.

“I got up a persecution against your uncle for Popish practices
summoned a meetin’ at the Running Footman, in Bolingbroke Street.
Billings the butterman; Sharwood, the turner and blacking-maker; and
the Honourable Phelin O’Curragh, Lord Scullabogue’s son, made speeches.
Two or three respectable families (your aunt, Mrs. What-d’-you-call-’em
Newcome, amongst the number) quitted the Chapel in disgust—I wrote an
article of controversial biography in the _P. M. G.;_ set the business
going in the daily press; and the thing was done, sir. That property is
a paying one to the Incumbent, and to Sherrick over him. Charles’s
affairs are getting all right, sir. He never had the pluck to owe much,
and if it be a sin to have wiped his slate clean, satisfied his
creditors, and made Charles easy—upon my conscience, I must confess
that F. B. has done it. I hope I may never do anything worse in this
life, Clive. It ain’t bad to see him doing the martyr, sir: Sebastian
riddled with paper pellets; Bartholomew on a cold gridiron. Here comes
the lobster. Upon my word, Mary, a finer fish I’ve seldom seen.”

Now surely this account of his uncle’s affairs and prosperity was
enough to send Clive to Lady Whittlesea’s Chapel, and it was not
because Miss Ethel had said that she and Lady Kew went there that Clive
was induced to go there too? He attended punctually on the next Sunday,
and in the incumbent’s pew, whither the pew-woman conducted him, sate
Mr. Sherrick in great gravity, with large gold pins, who handed him, at
the anthem, a large, new, gilt hymn-book.

An odour of millefleurs rustled by them as Charles Honeyman accompanied
by his ecclesiastical valet, passed the pew from the vestry, and took
his place at the desk. Formerly he used to wear a flaunting scarf over
his surplice, which was very wide and full; and Clive remembered when
as a boy he entered the sacred robing-room, how his uncle used to pat
and puff out the scarf and the sleeves of his vestment, and to arrange
the natty curl on his forehead and take his place, a fine example of
florid church decoration. Now the scarf was trimmed down to be as
narrow as your neckcloth, and hung loose and straight over the back;
the ephod was cut straight and as close and short as might be,—I
believe there was a little trimming of lace to the narrow sleeves, and
a slight arabesque of tape, or other substance, round the edge of the
surplice. As for the curl on the forehead, it was no more visible than
the Maypole in the Strand, or the Cross at Charing. Honeyman’s hair was
parted down the middle, short in front, and curling delicately round
his ears and the back of his head. He read the service in a swift
manner, and with a gentle twang. When the music began, he stood with
head on one side, and two slim fingers on the book, as composed as a
statue in a mediæval niche. It was fine to hear Sherrick, who had an
uncommonly good voice, join in the musical parts of the service. The
produce of the market-gardener decorated the church here and there; and
the impresario of the establishment, having picked up a Flemish painted
window from old Moss in Wardour Street, had placed it in his chapel.
Labels of faint green and gold, with long Gothic letters painted
thereon, meandered over the organ-loft and galleries, and strove to
give as mediæval a look to Lady Whittlesea’s as the place was capable
of assuming.

In the sermon Charles dropped the twang with the surplice, and the
priest gave way to the preacher. He preached short stirring discourses
on the subjects of the day. It happened that a noble young prince, the
hope of a nation, and heir of a royal house, had just then died by a
sudden accident. Absalom, the son of David, furnished Honeyman with a
parallel. He drew a picture of the two deaths, of the grief of kings,
of the fate that is superior to them. It was, indeed, a stirring
discourse, and caused thrills through the crowd to whom Charles
imparted it. “Famous, ain’t it?” says Sherrick, giving Clive a hand
when the rite was over. “How he’s come out, hasn’t he? Didn’t think he
had it in him.” Sherrick seemed to have become of late impressed with
the splendour of Charles’s talents, and spoke of him—was it not
disrespectful?—as a manager would of a successful tragedian. Let us
pardon Sherrick: he had been in the theatrical way. “That Irishman was
no go at all,” he whispered to Mr. Newcome, “got rid of him,—let’s see,
at Michaelmas.”

On account of Clive’s tender years, and natural levity, a little
inattention may be allowed to the youth, who certainly looked about him
very eagerly during the service. The house was filled by the ornamental
classes, the bonnets of the newest Parisian fashion. Away in a darkling
corner, under the organ, sate a squad of footmen. Surely that powdered
one in livery wore Lady Kew’s colours? So Clive looked under all the
bonnets, and presently spied old Lady Kew’s face, as grim and yellow as
her brass knocker, and by it Ethel’s beauteous countenance. He dashed
out of church when the congregation rose to depart. “Stop and see
Honeyman, won’t you?” asked Sherrick, surprised.

“Yes, yes; come back again,” said Clive, and was gone.

He kept his word, and returned presently. The young Marquis and an
elderly lady were in Lady Kew’s company. Clive had passed close under
Lady Kew’s venerable Roman nose without causing that organ to bow in
ever so slight a degree towards the ground. Ethel had recognised him
with a smile and a nod. My lord was whispering one of his noble
pleasantries in her ear. She laughed at the speech or the speaker. The
steps of a fine belozenged carriage were let down with a bang. The
Yellow One had jumped up behind it, by the side of his brother Giant
Canary. Lady Kew’s equipage had disappeared, and Mrs. Canterton’s was
stopping the way.

Clive returned to the chapel by the little door near to the Vestiarium.
All the congregation had poured out by this time. Only two ladies were
standing near the pulpit; and Sherrick, with his hands rattling his
money in his pockets, was pacing up and down the aisle.

“Capital house, Mr. Newcome, wasn’t it? I counted no less than fourteen
nobs. The Princess of Moncontour and her husband, I suppose, that chap
with the beard, who yawns so during the sermon. I’m blessed, if I
didn’t think he’d have yawned his head off. Countess of Kew, and her
daughter; Countess of Canterton, and the Honourable Miss Fetlock—no,
Lady Fetlock. A Countess’s daughter is a lady, I’m dashed if she ain’t.
Lady Glenlivat and her sons; the most noble the Marquis of Farintosh,
and Lord Enry Roy; that makes seven—no, nine—with the Prince and
Princess.—Julia, my dear, you came out like a good un to-day. Never
heard you in finer voice. Remember Mr. Clive Newcome?”

Mr. Clive made bows to the ladies, who acknowledged him by graceful
curtsies. Miss Sherrick was always looking to the vestry-door.

“How’s the old Colonel? The best feller—excuse my calling him a
feller—but he is, and a good one too. I went to see Mr. Binnie, my
other tenant. He looks a little yellow about the gills, Mr. Binnie.
Very proud woman that is who lives with him—uncommon haughty. When will
you come down and take your mutton in the Regent’s Park, Mr. Clive?
There’s some tolerable good wine down there. Our reverend gent drops in
and takes a glass, don’t he, missis?”

“We shall be most ’appy to see Mr. Newcome, I’m sure,” says the
handsome and good-natured Mrs. Sherrick. “Won’t we, Julia?”

“Oh, certainly,” says Julia, who seems rather absent. And behold, at
this moment the reverend gent enters from the vestry. Both the ladies
run towards him, holding forth their hands.

“Oh, Mr. Honeyman! What a sermon! Me and Julia cried so up in the
organ-loft; we thought you would have heard us. Didn’t we, Julia?”

“Oh, yes,” says Julia, whose hand the pastor is now pressing.

“When you described the young man, I thought of my poor boy, didn’t I,
Julia?” cries the mother, with tears streaming down her face.

“We had a loss more than ten years ago,” whispers Sherrick to Clive
gravely. “And she’s always thinking of it. Women are so.”

Clive was touched and pleased by this exhibition of kind feeling.

“You know his mother was an Absalom,” the good wife continues, pointing
to her husband. “Most respectable diamond merchants in——”

“Hold your tongue, Betsy, and leave my poor old mother alone; do now,”
says Mr. Sherrick darkly. Clive is in his uncle’s fond embrace by this
time, who rebukes him for not having called in Walpole Street.

“Now, when will you two gents come up to my shop to ’ave a family
dinner?” asks Sherrick.

“Ah, Mr. Newcome, do come,” says Julia in her deep rich voice, looking
up to him with her great black eyes. And if Clive had been a vain
fellow like some folks, who knows but he might have thought he had made
an impression on the handsome Julia?

“Thursday, now make it Thursday, if Mr. H. is disengaged. Come along,
girls, for the flies bites the ponies when they’re a-standing still and
makes ’em mad this weather. Anything you like for dinner? Cut of salmon
and cucumber? No, pickled salmon’s best this weather.”

“Whatever you give me, you know I’m thankful!” says Honeyman, in a
sweet sad voice, to the two ladies, who were standing looking at him,
the mother’s hand clasped in the daughter’s.

“Should you like that Mendelssohn for the Sunday after next? Julia
sings it splendid!”

“No, I don’t, ma.”

“You do, dear! She’s a good, good _dear_, Mr. H., that’s what she is.”

“You must not call—a—him, in that way. _Don’t_ say Mr. H., ma,” says
Julia.

“Call me what you please!” says Charles, with the most heart-rending
simplicity; and Mrs. Sherrick straightway kisses her daughter. Sherrick
meanwhile has been pointing out the improvement of the chapel to Clive
(which now has indeed a look of the Gothic Hall at Rosherville), and
has confided to him the sum for which he screwed the painted window out
of old Moss. “When he come to see it up in this place, sir, the old man
was mad, I give you my word! His son ain’t no good: says he knows you.
He’s such a screw, that chap, that he’ll overreach himself, mark my
words. At least, he’ll never die rich. Did you ever hear of _me_
screwing? No, I spend my money like a man. How those girls are a-goin’
on about their music with Honeyman! I don’t let ’em sing in the
evening, or him do duty more than once a day; and you can calc’late how
the music draws, because in the evenin’ there ain’t half the number of
people here. Rev. Mr. Journyman does the duty now—quiet Hogford
man—ill, I suppose, this morning. H. sits in his pew, where we was; and
coughs; that’s to say, I told him to cough. The women like a
consumptive parson, sir. Come, gals!”

Clive went to his uncle’s lodgings, and was received by Mr. and Mrs.
Ridley with great glee and kindness. Both of those good people had made
it a point to pay their duty to Mr. Clive immediately on his return to
England, and thank him over and over again for his kindness to John
James. Never, never would they forget his goodness, and the Colonel’s,
they were sure. A cake, a heap of biscuits, a pyramid of jams, six
frizzling mutton-chops, and four kinds of hot wine, came bustling up to
Mr. Honeyman’s room twenty minutes after Clive had entered it,—as a
token of the Ridleys’ affection for him.

Clive remarked, with a smile, the _Pall Mall Gazette_ upon a
side-table, and in the chimney-glass almost as many cards as in the
time of Honeyman’s early prosperity. That he and his uncle should be
very intimate together, was impossible, from the nature of the two men;
Clive being frank, clear-sighted, and imperious; Charles, timid, vain,
and double-faced, conscious that he was a humbug, and that most people
found him out, so that he would quiver and turn away, and be more
afraid of young Clive and his direct straightforward way, than of many
older men. Then there was the sense of the money transactions between
him and the Colonel, which made Charles Honeyman doubly uneasy. In
fine, they did not like each other; but, as he is a connection of the
most respectable Newcome family, surely he is entitled to a page or two
in these their memoirs.

Thursday came, and with it Mr. Sherrick’s entertainment, to which also
Mr. Binnie and his party had been invited to meet Colonel Newcome’s
son. Uncle James and Rosey brought Clive in their carriage; Mrs.
Mackenzie sent a headache as an apology. She chose to treat Uncle
James’s landlord with a great deal of hauteur, and to be angry with her
brother for visiting such a person. “In fact, you see how fond I must
be of dear little Rosey, Clive, that I put up with all mamma’s tantrums
for her sake,” remarks Mr. Binnie.

“Oh, uncle!” says little Rosey, and the old gentleman stopped her
remonstrances with a kiss.

“Yes,” says he, “your mother _does_ have tantrums, miss; and though you
never complain, there’s no reason why I shouldn’t. You will not tell on
me” (it was “Oh, uncle!” again); “and Clive won’t, I am sure.—This
little thing, sir,” James went on, holding Rosey’s pretty little hand
and looking fondly in her pretty little face, “is her old uncle’s only
comfort in life. I wish I had had her out to India to me, and never
come back to this great dreary town of yours. But I was tempted home by
Tom Newcome; and I’m too old to go back, sir. Where the stick falls let
it lie. Rosey would have been whisked out of my house, in India, in a
month after I had her there. Some young fellow would have taken her
away from me; and now she has promised never to leave her old Uncle
James, hasn’t she?”

“No, never, uncle,” said Rosey.

“_We_ don’t want to fall in love, do we, child? We don’t want to be
breaking our hearts like some young folks, and dancing attendance at
balls night after night, and capering about in the Park to see if we
can get a glimpse of the beloved object, eh, Rosey?”

Rosey blushed. It was evident that she and Uncle James both knew of
Clive’s love affair. In fact, the front seat and back seat of the
carriage both blushed. And as for the secret, why Mrs. Mackenzie and
Mrs. Hobson had talked it a hundred times over.

“This little Rosey, sir, has promised to take care of me on this side
of Styx,” continued Uncle James; “and if she could but be left alone
and to do it without mamma—there, I won’t say a word more against
her—we should get on none the worse.”

“Uncle James, I must make a picture of you, for Rosey,” said Clive,
good-humouredly. And Rosey said, “Oh, thank you, Clive,” and held out
that pretty little hand, and looked so sweet and kind and happy, that
Clive could not but be charmed at the sight of so much innocence and
candour.

“Quasty peecoly Rosiny,” says James, in a fine Scotch Italian, “e la
piu bella, la piu cara, ragazza ma la mawdry e il diav——”

“Don’t, uncle!” cried Rosey, again; and Clive laughed at Uncle James’s
wonderful outbreak in a foreign tongue.

“Eh! I thought ye didn’t know a word of the sweet language, Rosey! It’s
just the Lenguy Toscawny in Bocky Romawny that I thought to try in
compliment to this young monkey who has seen the world.” And by this
time Saint John’s Wood was reached, and Mr. Sherrick’s handsome villa,
at the door of which the three beheld the Rev. Charles Honeyman
stepping out of a neat brougham.

The drawing-room contained several pictures of Mrs. Sherrick when she
was in the theatrical line; Smee’s portrait of her, which was never
half handsome enough—for my Betsy, Sherrick said indignantly; the print
of her in Artaxerxes, with her signature as Elizabeth Folthorpe (not in
truth a fine specimen of calligraphy) the testimonial presented to her
on the conclusion of the triumphal season of 18—, at Drury Lane, by her
ever grateful friend Adolphus Smacker, Lessee, who, of course, went to
law with her next year; and other Thespian emblems. But Clive remarked,
with not a little amusement, that the drawing-room tables were now
covered with a number of those books which he had seen at Madame de
Moncontour’s, and many French and German ecclesiastical gimcracks, such
as are familiar to numberless readers of mine. These were the Lives of
St. Botibol of Islington and St. Willibald of Bareacres, with pictures
of those confessors. Then there was the Legend of Margery Dawe, Virgin
and Martyr, with a sweet double frontispiece, representing (1) the
sainted woman selling her feather-bed for the benefit of the poor; and
(2) reclining upon straw, the leanest of invalids. There was Old Daddy
Longlegs, and how he was brought to say his Prayers; a Tale for
Children, by a Lady, with a preface dated St. Chad’s Eve, and signed
“C. H.” The Rev. Charles Honeyman’s Sermons, delivered at Lady
Whittlesea’s Chapel. Poems of Early Days, by Charles Honeyman, A.M. The
Life of good Dame Whittlesea, by do, do. Yes, Charles had come out in
the literary line; and there in a basket was a strip of Berlin work, of
the very same Gothic pattern which Madame de Moncontour was weaving;
and which you afterwards saw round the pulpit of Charles’s chapel.
Rosey was welcomed most kindly by the kind ladies; and as the gentlemen
sat over their wine after dinner in the summer evening, Clive beheld
Rosey and Julia pacing up and down the lawn, Miss Julia’s arm around
her little friend’s waist: he thought they would make a pretty little
picture.

“My girl ain’t a bad one to look at, is she?” said the pleased father.
“A fellow might look far enough, and see not prettier than them two.”

Charles sighed out that there was a German print, the “Two Leonoras,”
which put him in mind of their various styles of beauty.

“I wish I could paint them,” said Clive.

“And why not, sir?” asks his host. “Let me give you your first
commission now, Mr Clive; I wouldn’t mind paying a good bit for a
picture of my Julia. I forget how much old Smee got for Betsy’s, the
old humbug!”

Clive said it was not the will, but the power that was deficient. He
succeeded with men, but the ladies were too much for him as yet.

“Those you’ve done up at Albany Street Barracks are famous: I’ve seen
’em,” said Mr. Sherrick; and remarking that his guest looked rather
surprised at the idea of his being in such company, Sherrick said,
“What, you think they are too great swells for me? Law bless you, I
often go there. I’ve business with several of ’em; had with Captain
Belsize, with the Earl of Kew, who’s every inch the gentleman—one of
nature’s aristocracy, and paid up like a man. The Earl and me has had
many dealings together:”

Honeyman smiled faintly, and nobody complying with Mr. Sherrick’s
boisterous entreaties to drink more, the gentlemen quitted the
dinner-table, which had been served in a style of prodigious splendour,
and went to the drawing-room for a little music.

This was all of the gravest and best kind; so grave indeed, that James
Binnie might be heard in a corner giving an accompaniment of little
snores to the singers and the piano. But Rosey was delighted with the
performance, and Sherrick remarked to Clive, “That’s a good gal, that
is; I like that gal; she ain’t jealous of Julia cutting her out in the
music, but listens as pleased as any one. She’s a sweet little pipe of
her own, too. Miss Mackenzie, if ever you like to go to the opera, send
a word either to my West End or my City office. I’ve boxes every week,
and you’re welcome to anything I can give you.”

So all agreed that the evening had been a very pleasant one; and they
of Fitzroy Square returned home talking in a most comfortable friendly
way—that is, two of them, for Uncle James fell asleep again, taking
possession of the back seat; and Clive and Rosey prattled together. He
had offered to try and take all the young ladies’ likenesses. “You know
what a failure the last was, Rosey?”—he had very nearly said “dear
Rosey.”

“Yes, but Miss Sherrick is so handsome, that you will succeed better
with her than with my round face, Mr. Newcome.”

“Mr. _What?_” cries Clive.

“Well, Clive, then,” says Rosey, in a little voice.

He sought for a little hand which was not very far away. “You know we
are like brother and sister, dear Rosey?” he said this time.

“Yes,” said she, and gave a little pressure of the hand. And then Uncle
James woke up; and it seemed as if the whole drive didn’t occupy a
minute, and they shook hands very very kindly at the door of Fitzroy
Square.

Clive made a famous likeness of Miss Sherrick, with which Mr. Sherrick
was delighted, and so was Mr. Honeyman, who happened to call upon his
nephew once or twice when the ladies happened to be sitting. Then Clive
proposed to the Rev. Charles Honeyman to take _his_ head off; and made
an excellent likeness in chalk of his uncle—that one, in fact, from
which the print was taken which you may see any day at Hogarth’s, in
the Haymarket, along with a whole regiment of British divines. Charles
became so friendly, that he was constantly coming to Charlotte Street,
once or twice a week.

Mr. and Mrs. Sherrick came to look at the drawing, were charmed with
it; and when Rosey was sitting, they came to see her portrait, which
again was not quite so successful. One Monday, the Sherricks and
Honeyman too happened to call to see the picture of Rosey, who trotted
over with her uncle to Clive’s studio, and they all had a great laugh
at a paragraph in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, evidently from F. B.’s hand,
to the following effect:—

“Conversion In High Life.—A foreign nobleman of princely rank, who has
married an English lady, and has resided among us for some time, is
likely, we hear and trust, to join the English Church. The Prince de
M-nc-nt-r has been a constant attendant at Lady Whittlesea’s Chapel, of
which the Rev. C. Honeyman is the eloquent incumbent; and it is said
this sound and talented divine has been the means of awakening the
prince to a sense of the erroneous doctrines in which he has been bred.
His ancestors were Protestant, and fought by the side of Henry IV. at
_Ivry_. In Louis XIV.’s time, they adopted the religion of that
persecuting monarch. We sincerely trust that the present heir of the
house of Ivry will see fit to return to the creed which his forefathers
so unfortunately abjured.”

The ladies received this news with perfect gravity; and Charles uttered
a meek wish that it might prove true. As they went away, they offered
more hospitalities to Clive and Mr. Binnie and his niece. They liked
the music: would they not come and hear it again?

When they had departed with Mr. Honeyman, Clive could not help saying
to Uncle James, “Why are those people always coming here; praising me;
and asking me to dinner? Do you know, I can’t help thinking that they
rather want me as a pretender for Miss Sherrick?”

Binnie burst into a loud guffaw, and cried out, “O vanitas vanitawtum!”
Rosa laughed too.

“I don’t think it any joke at all,” said Clive.

“Why, you stupid lad, don’t you see it is Charles Honeyman the girl’s
in love with?” cried Uncle James. “Rosey saw it in the very first
instant we entered their drawing-room three weeks ago.”

“Indeed, and how?” asked Clive.

“By—by the way she looked at him,” said little Rosey.




CHAPTER XLV.
A Stag of Ten


The London season was very nearly come to an end, and Lord Farintosh
had danced I don’t know how many times with Miss Newcome, had drunk
several bottles of the old Kew port, had been seen at numerous
breakfasts, operas, races, and public places by the young lady’s side,
and had not as yet made any such proposal as Lady Kew expected for her
granddaughter. Clive going to see his military friends in the Regent’s
Park once, and finish Captain Butts’s portrait in barracks, heard two
or three young men talking, and one say to another, “I bet you three to
two Farintosh don’t marry her, and I bet you even that he don’t ask
her.” Then as he entered Mr. Butts’s room, where these gentlemen were
conversing, there was a silence and an awkwardness. The young fellows
were making an “event” out of Ethel’s marriage, and sporting their
money freely on it.

To have an old countess hunting a young marquis so resolutely that all
the world should be able to look on and speculate whether her game
would be run down by that staunch toothless old pursuer—that is an
amusing sport, isn’t it? and affords plenty of fun and satisfaction to
those who follow the hunt. But for a heroine of a story, be she ever so
clever, handsome, and sarcastic, I don’t think for my part, at this
present stage of the tale, Miss Ethel Newcome occupies a very dignified
position. To break her heart in silence for Tomkins who is in love with
another; to suffer no end of poverty, starvation, capture by ruffians,
ill-treatment by a bullying husband, loss of beauty by the small-pox,
death even at the end of the volume; all these mishaps a young heroine
must endure (and has endured in romances over and over again), without
losing the least dignity, or suffering any diminution of the
sentimental reader’s esteem. But a girl of great beauty, high temper,
and strong natural intellect, who submits to be dragged hither and
thither in an old grandmother’s leash, and in pursuit of a husband who
will run away from the couple, such a person, I say, is in a very
awkward position as a heroine; and I declare if I had another ready to
my hand (and unless there were extenuating circumstances) Ethel should
be deposed at this very sentence.

But a novelist must go on with his heroine, as a man with his wife, for
better or worse, and to the end. For how many years have the Spaniards
borne with their gracious queen, not because she was faultless, but
because she was there? So Chambers and grandees cried, God save her.
Alabarderos turned out: drums beat, cannons fired, and people saluted
Isabella Segunda, who was no better than the humblest washerwoman of
her subjects. Are we much better than our neighbours? Do we never yield
to our peculiar temptation, our pride, or our avarice or our vanity, or
what not? Ethel is very wrong certainly. But recollect, she is very
young. She is in other people’s hands. She has been bred up and
governed by a very worldly family, and taught their traditions. We
would hardly, for instance, the staunchest Protestant in England would
hardly be angry with poor Isabella Segunda for being a Catholic. So if
Ethel worships at a certain image which a great number of good folks in
England bow to, let us not be too angry with her idolatry, and bear
with our queen a little before we make our pronunciamiento.

No, Miss Newcome, yours is not a dignified position in life, however
you may argue that hundreds of people in the world are doing like you.
O me! what a confession it is, in the very outset of life and blushing
brightness of youth’s morning, to own that the aim with which a young
girl sets out, and the object of her existence, is to marry a rich man;
that she was endowed with beauty so that she might buy wealth, and a
title with it; that as sure as she has a soul to be saved, her business
here on earth is to try and get a rich husband. That is the career for
which many a woman is bred and trained. A young man begins the world
with some aspirations at least; he will try to be good and follow the
truth; he will strive to win honours for himself, and never do a base
action; he will pass nights over his books, and forgo ease and pleasure
so that he may achieve a name. Many a poor wretch who is worn-out now
and old, and bankrupt of fame and money too, has commenced life at any
rate with noble views and generous schemes, from which weakness,
idleness, passion, or overpowering hostile fortune have turned him
away. But a girl of the world, _bon Dieu!_ the doctrine with which she
begins is that she is to have a wealthy husband: the article of faith
in her catechism is, “I believe in elder sons, and a house in town, and
a house in the country!” They are mercenary as they step fresh and
blooming into the world out of the nursery. They have been schooled
there to keep their bright eyes to look only on the prince and the
duke, Croesus and Dives. By long cramping and careful process, their
little natural hearts have been squeezed up, like the feet of their
fashionable little sisters in China. As you see a pauper’s child, with
an awful premature knowledge of the pawnshop, able to haggle at market
with her wretched halfpence, and battle bargains at hucksters’ stalls,
you shall find a young beauty, who was a child in the schoolroom a year
since, as wise and knowing as the old practitioners on that exchange;
as economical of her smiles, as dexterous in keeping back or producing
her beautiful wares; as skilful in setting one bidder against another;
as keen as the smartest merchant in Vanity Fair.

If the young gentlemen of the Life Guards Green who were talking about
Miss Newcome and her suitors, were silent when Clive appeared amongst
them, it was because they were aware not only of his relationship to
the young lady, but his unhappy condition regarding her. Certain men
there are who never tell their love, but let concealment, like a worm
in the bud, feed on their damask cheeks; others again must be not
always thinking, but talking, about the darling object. So it was not
very long before Captain Crackthorpe was taken into Clive’s confidence,
and through Crackthorpe very likely the whole mess became acquainted
with his passion. These young fellows, who had been early introduced
into the world, gave Clive small hopes of success, putting to him, in
their downright phraseology, the point of which he was already aware,
that Miss Newcome was intended for his superiors, and that he had best
not make his mind uneasy by sighing for those beautiful grapes which
were beyond his reach.

But the good-natured Crackthorpe, who had a pity for the young
painter’s condition, helped him so far (and gained Clive’s warmest
thanks for his good offices), by asking admission for Clive to
entertain evening parties of the _beau-monde_, where he had the
gratification of meeting his charmer. Ethel was surprised and pleased,
and Lady Kew surprised and angry, at meeting Clive Newcome at these
fashionable houses; the girl herself was touched very likely at his
pertinacity in following her. As there was no actual feud between them,
she could not refuse now and again to dance with her cousin; and thus
he picked up such small crumbs of consolation as a youth in his state
can get; lived upon six words vouchsafed to him in a quadrille, or
brought home a glance of the eyes which she had presented to him in a
waltz, or the remembrance of a squeeze of the hand on parting or
meeting. How eager he was to get a card to this party or that! how
attentive to the givers of such entertainments! Some friends of his
accused him of being a tuft-hunter and flatterer of the aristocracy, on
account of his politeness to certain people; the truth was, he wanted
to go wherever Miss Ethel was; and the ball was blank to him which she
did not attend.

This business occupied not only one season, but two. By the time of the
second season, Mr. Newcome had made so many acquaintances that he
needed few more introductions into society. He was very well known as a
good-natured handsome young man, and a very good waltzer, the only son
of an Indian officer of large wealth, who chose to devote himself to
painting, and who was supposed to entertain an unhappy fondness for his
cousin the beautiful Miss Newcome. Kind folks who heard of this little
_tendre_, and were sufficiently interested in Mr. Clive, asked him to
their houses in consequence. I dare say those people who were good to
him may have been themselves at one time unlucky in their own
love-affairs.

When the first season ended without a declaration from my lord, Lady
Kew carried off her young lady to Scotland, where it also so happened
that Lord Farintosh was going to shoot, and people made what surmises
they chose upon this coincidence. Surmises, why not? You who know the
world, know very well that if you see Mrs. So-and-so’s name in the list
of people at an entertainment, on looking down the list you will
presently be sure to come on Mr. What-d’-you-call-’em’s. If Lord and
Lady of Suchandsuch Castle, received a distinguished circle (including
Lady Dash), for Christmas or Easter, without reading farther the names
of the guests, you may venture on any wager that Captain Asterisk is
one of the company. These coincidences happen every day; and some
people are so anxious to meet other people, and so irresistible is the
magnetic sympathy, I suppose, that they will travel hundreds of miles
in the worst of weather to see their friends, and break your door open
almost, provided the friend is inside it.

I am obliged to own the fact, that for many months Lady Kew hunted
after Lord Farintosh. This rheumatic old woman went to Scotland, where,
as he was pursuing the deer, she stalked his lordship: from Scotland
she went to Paris, where he was taking lessons in dancing at the
Chaumière; from Paris to an English country-house, for Christmas, where
he was expected, but didn’t come—not being, his professor said, quite
complete in the polka, and so on. If Ethel were privy to these
manœuvres, or anything more than an unwittingly consenting party, I say
we would depose her from her place of heroine at once. But she was
acting under her grandmother’s orders, a most imperious, irresistible,
managing old woman, who exacted everybody’s obedience, and managed
everybody’s business in her family. Lady Anne Newcome being in
attendance on her sick husband, Ethel was consigned to the Countess of
Kew, her grandmother, who hinted that she should leave Ethel her
property when dead, and whilst alive expected the girl should go about
with her. She had and wrote as many letters as a Secretary of State
almost. She was accustomed to set off without taking anybody’s advice,
or announcing her departure until within an hour or two of the event.
In her train moved Ethel, against her own will, which would have led
her to stay at home with her father, but at the special wish and order
of her parents. Was such a sum as that of which Lady Kew had the
disposal (Hobson Brothers knew the amount of it quite well) to be left
out of the family? Forbid it, all ye powers! Barnes—who would have
liked the money himself, and said truly that he would live with his
grandmother anywhere she liked if he could get it,—Barnes joined most
energetically with Sir Brian and Lady Anne in ordering Ethel’s
obedience to Lady Kew. You know how difficult it is for one young woman
not to acquiesce when the family council strongly orders. In fine, I
hope there was a good excuse for the queen of this history, and that it
was her wicked domineering old prime minister who led her wrong.
Otherwise I say, we would have another dynasty. Oh, to think of a
generous nature, and the world, and nothing but the world, to occupy
it!—of a brave intellect, and the milliner’s bandboxes, and the scandal
of the coteries, and the fiddle-faddle etiquette of the Court for its
sole exercise! of the rush and hurry from entertainment to
entertainment; of the constant smiles and cares of representation; of
the prayerless rest at night, and the awaking to a godless morrow! This
was the course of life to which Fate, and not her own fault altogether,
had for awhile handed over Ethel Newcome. Let those pity her who can
feel their own weakness and misgoing; let those punish her who are
without fault themselves.

Clive did not offer to follow her to Scotland, he knew quite well that
the encouragement he had had was only of the smallest; that as a
relation she received him frankly and kindly enough; but checked him
when he would have adopted another character. But it chanced that they
met in Paris, whither he went in the Easter of the ensuing year, having
worked to some good purpose through the winter, and despatched as on a
former occasion his three or four pictures, to take their chance at the
Exhibition.

Of these it is our pleasing duty to be able to corroborate to some
extent, Mr. F. Bayham’s favourable report. Fancy sketches and
historical pieces our young man had eschewed; having convinced himself
either that he had not an epic genius, or that to draw portraits of his
friends, was a much easier task than that which he had set himself
formerly. Whilst all the world was crowding round a pair of J. J,.’s
little pictures, a couple of chalk heads were admitted into the
Exhibition (his great picture of Captain Crackthorpe on horseback, in
full uniform, I must admit was ignominiously rejected), and the friends
of the parties had the pleasure of recognising in the miniature room,
No. 1246, “Picture of an Officer,”—viz., Augustus Butts, Esq., of the
Life Guards Green; and “Portrait of the Rev. Charles Honeyman,” No.
1272. Miss Sherrick the hangers refused; Mr. Binnie, Clive had spoiled,
as usual, in the painting; the heads, however, before-named, were voted
to be faithful likenesses, and executed in a very agreeable and
spirited manner. F. Bayham’s criticism on these performances, it need
not be said, was tremendous. “Since the days of Michael Angelo you
would have thought there never had been such drawings.” In fact, F. B.,
as some other critics do, clapped his friends so boisterously on the
back, and trumpeted their merits with such prodigious energy, as to
make his friends themselves sometimes uneasy.

Mr. Clive, whose good father was writing home more and more wonderful
accounts of the Bundelcund Bank, in which he had engaged, and who was
always pressing his son to draw for more money, treated himself to
comfortable rooms at Paris, in the very same hotel where the young
Marquis of Farintosh occupied lodgings much more splendid, and where he
lived, no doubt, so as to be near the professor, who was still teaching
his lordship the polka. Indeed, it must be said that Lord Farintosh
made great progress under this artist, and that he danced very much
better in his third season than in the first and second years after he
had come upon the town. From the same instructor the Marquis learned
the latest novelties in French conversation, the choicest oaths and
phrases (for which he was famous), so that although his French grammar
was naturally defective, he was enabled to order a dinner at
Philippe’s, and to bully a waiter, or curse a hackney-coachman with
extreme volubility. A young nobleman of his rank was received with the
distinction which was his due, by the French sovereign of that period;
and at the Tuileries, and the houses of the French nobility, which he
visited, Monsieur le Marquis de Farintosh excited considerable remark,
by the use of some of the phrases which his young professor had taught
to him. People even went so far as to say that the Marquis was an
awkward and dull young man, of the very worst manners.

Whereas the young Clive Newcome—and it comforted the poor fellow’s
heart somewhat, and be sure pleased Ethel, who was looking on at his
triumphs—was voted the most charming young Englishman who had been seen
for a long time in our salons. Madame de Florac, who loved him as a son
of her own, actually went once or twice into the world in order to see
his _début_. Madame de Moncontour inhabited a part of the Hotel de
Florac, and received society there. The French people did not
understand what bad English she talked, though they comprehended Lord
Farintosh’s French blunders. “Monsieur Newcome is an artist! What a
noble career!” cries a great French lady, the wife of a Marshal to the
astonished Miss Newcome. “This young man is the cousin, of the charming
mees? You must be proud to possess such a nephew, madame!” says another
French lady to the Countess of Kew (who, you may be sure, is delighted
to have such a relative). And the French lady invites Clive to her
receptions expressly in order to make herself agreeable to the old
Comtesse. Before the cousins have been three minutes together in Madame
de Florac’s salon, she sees that Clive is in love with Ethel Newcome.
She takes the boy’s hand and says, “_J’ai votre secret, mon ami;_” and
her eyes regard him for a moment as fondly, as tenderly, as ever they
looked at his father. Oh, what tears have they shed, gentle eyes! Oh,
what faith has it kept, tender heart! If love lives through all life;
and survives through all sorrow; and remains steadfast with us through
all changes; and in all darkness of spirit burns brightly; and, if we
die, deplores us for ever, and loves still equally; and exists with the
very last gasp and throb of the faithful bosom—whence it passes with
the pure soul, beyond death; surely it shall be immortal? Though we who
remain are separated from it, is it not ours in Heaven? If we love
still those we lose, can we altogether lose those we love? Forty years
have passed away. Youth and dearest memories revisit her, and Hope
almost wakes up again out of its grave, as the constant lady holds the
young man’s hand, and looks at the son of Thomas Newcome.




CHAPTER XLVI.
The Hotel de Florac


Since the death of the Duc d’Ivry, the husband of Mary Queen of Scots,
the Comte de Florac, who is now the legitimate owner of the ducal
title, does not choose to bear it, but continues to be known in the
world by his old name. The old Count’s world is very small. His doctor,
and his director, who comes daily to play his game of piquet; his
daughter’s children, who amuse him by their laughter, and play round
his chair in the garden of his hotel; his faithful wife, and one or two
friends as old as himself, form his society. His son the Abbé is with
them but seldom. The austerity of his manners frightens his old father,
who can little comprehend the religionism of the new school. After
going to hear his son preach through Lent at Notre-Dame, where the Abbé
de Florac gathered a great congregation, the old Count came away quite
puzzled at his son’s declamations. “I do not understand your new
priests,” he says; “I knew my son had become a Cordélier; I went to
hear him, and found he was a Jacobin. Let me make my salut in quiet, my
good Léonore. My director answers for me, and plays a game at trictrac
into the bargain with me.” Our history has but little to do with this
venerable nobleman. He has his chamber looking out into the garden of
his hotel; his faithful old domestic to wait upon him; his House of
Peers to attend when he is well enough, his few acquaintances to help
him to pass the evening. The rest of the hotel he gives up to his son,
the Vicomte de Florac, and Madame la Princesse de Moncontour, his
daughter-in-law.

When Florac has told his friends of the Club why it is he has assumed a
new title—as a means of reconciliation (a reconciliation all
philosophical, my friends) with his wife nee Higg of Manchester, who
adores titles like all Anglaises, and has recently made a great
succession, everybody allows that the measure was dictated by prudence,
and there is no more laughter at his change of name. The Princess takes
the first floor of the hotel at the price paid for it by the American
General, who has returned to his original pigs at Cincinnati. Had not
Cincinnatus himself pigs on his farm, and was he not a general and
member of Congress too? The honest Princess has a bedchamber, which, to
her terror, she is obliged to open of reception-evenings, when
gentlemen and ladies play cards there. It is fitted up in the style of
Louis XVI. In her bed is an immense looking-glass, surmounted by stucco
cupids: it is an alcove which some powdered Venus, before the
Revolution, might have reposed in. Opposite that looking-glass, between
the tall windows, at some forty feet distance, is another huge mirror,
so that when the poor Princess is in bed, in her prim old curl-papers,
she sees a vista of elderly princesses twinkling away into the dark
perspective; and is so frightened that she and Betsy, her Lancashire
maid, pin up the jonquil silk curtains over the bed-mirror after the
first night; though the Princess never can get it out of her head that
her image is still there, behind the jonquil hangings, turning as she
turns, waking as she wakes, etc. The chamber is so vast and lonely that
she has a bed made for Betsy in the room. It is, of course, whisked
away into a closet on reception-evenings. A boudoir, rose-tendre, with
more cupids and nymphs by Boucher, sporting over door-panels—nymphs who
may well shock old Betsy and her old mistress—is the Pricess’s
morning-room. “Ah, mum, what would Mr. Humper at Manchester, Mr. Jowls
of Newcome” (the minister whom, in early days, Miss Higg used to sit
under) “say if they was browt into this room?” But there is no question
of Jowls and Mr. Humper, excellent dissenting divines, who preached to
Miss Higg, being brought into the Princesse de Moncontour’s boudoir.

That paragraph, respecting a conversion in high life, which F. B. in
his enthusiasm inserted in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, caused no small
excitement in the Florac family. The Florac family read the _Pall Mall
Gazette_, knowing that Clive’s friends were engaged in that periodical.
When Madame de Florac, who did not often read newspapers, happened to
cast her eye upon that poetic paragraph of F. B.’s, you may fancy, with
what a panic it filled the good and pious lady. Her son become a
Protestant! After all the grief and trouble his wildness had occasioned
to her, Paul forsake his religion! But that her husband was so ill and
aged as not to be able to bear her absence, she would have hastened to
London to rescue her son out of that perdition. She sent for her
younger son, who undertook the embassy; and the Prince and Princesse de
Moncontour, in their hotel at London, were one day surprised by the
visit of the Abbé de Florac.

As Paul was quite innocent of any intention of abandoning his religion,
the mother’s kind heart was very speedily set at rest by her envoy. Far
from Paul’s conversion to Protestantism, the Abbé wrote home the most
encouraging accounts of his sister-in-law’s precious dispositions. He
had communications with Madame de Moncontour’s Anglican director, a man
of not powerful mind, wrote M. l’Abbé, though of considerable repute
for eloquence in his Sect. The good dispositions of his sister-in-law
were improved by the French clergyman, who could be most captivating
and agreeable when a work of conversion was in hand. The visit
reconciled the family to their English relative, in whom good-nature
and many other good qualities were to be seen now that there were hopes
of reclaiming her. It was agreed that Madame de Moncontour should come
and inhabit the Hôtel de Florac at Paris: perhaps the Abbé tempted the
worthy lady by pictures of the many pleasures and advantages she would
enjoy in that capital. She was presented at her own court by the French
ambassadress of that day: and was received at the Tuileries with a
cordiality which flattered and pleased her.

Having been presented herself, Madame la Princesse in turn presented to
her august sovereign Mrs. T. Higg and Miss Higg, of Manchester, Mrs.
Samuel Higg, of Newcome; the husbands of those ladies (the Princess’s
brothers) also sporting a court-dress for the first time. Sam Higg’s
neighbour, the member for Newcome; Sir Brian Newcome, Bart., was too
ill to act as Higg’s sponsor before majesty; but Barnes Newcome was
uncommonly civil to the two Lancashire gentlemen; though their politics
were different to his, and Sam had voted against Sir Brian at his last
election. Barnes took them to dine at a club—recommended his tailor—and
sent Lady Clara Pulleyn to call on Mrs. Higg—who pronounced her to be a
pretty young woman and most haffable. The Countess of Dorking would
have been delighted to present these ladies had the Princess not
luckily been in London to do that office. The Hobson Newcomes were very
civil to the Lancashire party, and entertained them splendidly at
dinner. I believe Mrs. and Mr. Hobson themselves went to court this
year, the latter in a deputy-lieutenant’s uniform.

If Barnes Newcome was so very civil to the Higg family we may suppose
he had good reason. The Higgs were very strong in Newcome, and it was
advisable to conciliate them. They were very rich, and their account
would not be disagreeable at the bank. Madame de Moncontour’s—a large
easy private account—would be more pleasant still. And, Hobson Brothers
having entered largely into the Anglo-Continental Railway, whereof
mention has been made, it was a bright thought of Barnes to place the
Prince of Moncontour, etc. etc., on the French Direction of the
Railway; and to take the princely prodigal down to Newcome with his new
title, and reconcile him to his wife and the Higg family. Barnes we may
say invented the principality: rescued the Vicomte de Florac out of his
dirty lodgings in Leicester Square, and sent the Prince of Moncontour
back to his worthy middle-aged wife again. The disagreeable dissenting
days were over. A brilliant young curate of Doctor Bulders, who also
wore long hair, straight waistcoats, and no shirt-collars, had already
reconciled the Vicomtesse de Florac to the persuasion, whereof the
ministers are clad in that queer uniform. The landlord of their hotel
at St. James’s got his wine from Sherrick, and sent his families to
Lady Whittlesea’s Chapel. The Rev. Charles Honeyman’s eloquence and
amiability were appreciated by his new disciple—thus the historian has
traced here step by step how all these people became acquainted.

Sam Higg, whose name was very good on ’Change in Manchester and London,
joined the direction of the Anglo-Continental. A brother had died
lately, leaving his money amongst them, and his wealth had added
considerably to Madame de Florac’s means; his sister invested a portion
of her capital in the railway in her husband’s name. The shares were at
a premium, and gave a good dividend. The Prince de Moncontour took his
place with great gravity at the Paris board, whither Barnes made
frequent flying visits. The sense of capitalism sobered and dignified
Paul de Florac: at the age of five-and-forty he was actually giving up
being a young man, and was not ill pleased at having to enlarge his
waistcoats, and to show a little grey in his moustache. His errors were
forgotten: he was bien vu by the Government. He might have had the
Embassy Extraordinary to Queen Pomaré; but the health of Madame la
Princesse was delicate. He paid his wife visits every morning: appeared
at her parties and her opera box, and was seen constantly with her in
public. He gave quiet little dinners still, at which Clive was present
sometimes: and had a private door and key to his apartments, which were
separated by all the dreary length of the reception-rooms from the
mirrored chamber and jonquil couch where the Princess and Betsy
reposed. When some of his London friends visited Paris he showed us
these rooms and introduced us duly to Madame la Princesse. He was as
simple and as much at home in the midst of these splendours, as in the
dirty little lodgings in Leicester Square, where he painted his own
boots, and cooked his herring over the tongs. As for Clive, he was the
infant of the house: Madame la Princesse could not resist his kind
face; and Paul was as fond of him in his way as Paul’s mother in hers.
Would he live at the Hôtel de Florac? There was an excellent atélier in
the pavilion, with a chamber for his servant. “No! you will be most at
ease in apartments of your own. You will have here but the society of
women. I do not rise till late: and my affairs, my board, call me away
for the greater part of the day. Thou wilt but be annuyé to play
trictrac with my old father. My mother waits on him. My sister au
second is given up entirely to her children, who always have the
_pituite_. Madame la Princesse is not amusing for a young man. Come and
go when thou wilt, Clive, my garçon, my son: thy cover is laid. Wilt
thou take the portraits of all the family? Hast thou want of money? I
had at thy age and almost ever since, _mon ami;_ but now we swim in
gold, and when there is a louis in my purse, there are ten francs for
thee.” To show his mother that he did not think of the Reformed
Religion, Paul did not miss going to mass with her on Sunday. Sometimes
Madame Paul went too, between whom and her mother-in-law there could
not be any liking, but there was now great civility. They saw each
other once a day: Madame Paul always paid her visit to the Comte de
Florac: and Betsy, her maid, made the old gentleman laugh by her
briskness and talk. She brought back to her mistress the most wonderful
stories which the old man told her about his doings during the
emigration—before he married Madame la Comtesse—when he gave lessons in
dancing, parbleu! There was his fiddle still, a trophy of those old
times. He chirped, and coughed, and sang, in his cracked old voice, as
he talked about them. “Lor! bless you, mum,” says Betsy, “he must have
been a terrible old man!” He remembered the times well enough, but the
stories he sometimes told over twice or thrice in an hour. I am afraid
he had not repented sufficiently of those wicked old times: else why
did he laugh and giggle so when he recalled them? He would laugh and
giggle till he was choked with his old cough: and old S. Jean, his man,
came and beat M. le Comte on the back, and made M. le Comte take a
spoonful of his syrup.

Between two such women as Madame de Florac and Lady Kew, of course
there could be little liking or sympathy. Religion, love, duty, the
family, were the French lady’s constant occupation,—duty and the
family, perhaps, Lady Kew’s aim too,—only the notions of duty were
different in either person. Lady Kew’s idea of duty to her relatives
being to push them on in the world: Madame de Florac’s to soothe, to
pray, to attend them with constant watchfulness, to strive to mend them
with pious counsel. I don’t know that one lady was happier than the
other. Madame de Florac’s eldest son was a kindly prodigal: her second
had given his whole heart to the Church: her daughter had centred hers
on her own children, and was jealous if their grandmother laid a finger
on them. So Léonore de Florac was quite alone. It seemed as if Heaven
had turned away all her children’s hearts from her. Her daily business
in life was to nurse a selfish old man, into whose service she had been
forced in early youth, by a paternal decree which she never questioned;
giving him obedience, striving to give him respect,—everything but her
heart, which had gone out of her keeping. Many a good woman’s life is
no more cheerful; a spring of beauty, a little warmth and sunshine of
love, a bitter disappointment, followed by pangs and frantic tears,
then a long monotonous story of submission. “Not here, my daughter, is
to be your happiness,” says the priest; “whom Heaven loves it
afflicts.” And he points out to her the agonies of suffering saints of
her sex; assures her of their present beatitudes and glories; exhorts
her to bear her pains with a faith like theirs; and is empowered to
promise her a like reward.

The other matron is not less alone. Her husband and son are dead,
without a tear for either,—to weep was not in Lady Kew’s nature. Her
grandson, whom she had loved perhaps more than any human being, is
rebellious and estranged from her; her children, separated from her,
save one whose sickness and bodily infirmity the mother resents as
disgraces to herself. Her darling schemes fail somehow. She moves from
town to town, and ball to ball, and hall to castle, for ever uneasy and
always alone. She sees people scared at her coming; is received by
sufferance and fear rather than by welcome; likes perhaps the terror
which she inspires, and to enter over the breach rather than through
the hospitable gate. She will try and command wherever she goes; and
trample over dependants and society, with a grim consciousness that it
dislikes her, a rage at its cowardice, and an unbending will to
domineer. To be old, proud, lonely, and not have a friend in the
world—that is her lot in it. As the French lady may be said to resemble
the bird which the fables say feeds her young with her blood; this one,
if she has a little natural liking for her brood, goes hunting hither
and thither and robs meat for them; And so, I suppose, to make the
simile good, we must compare the Marquis of Farintosh to a lamb for the
nonce, and Miss Ethel Newcome to a young eaglet. Is it not a rare
provision of nature (or fiction of poets, who have their own natural
history) that the strong-winged bird can soar to the sun and gaze at
it, and then come down from heaven and pounce on a piece of carrion?

After she became acquainted with certain circumstances, Madame de
Florac was very interested about Ethel Newcome, and strove in her
modest way to become intimate with her. Miss Newcome and Lady Kew
attended Madame de Moncontour’s Wednesday evenings. “It is as well, my
dear, for the interests of the family that we should be particularly
civil to these people,” Lady Kew said; and accordingly she came to the
Hôtel de Florac, and was perfectly insolent to Madame la Princesse
every Thursday evening. Towards Madame de Florac, even Lady Kew could
not be rude. She was so gentle as to give no excuse for assault: Lady
Kew vouchsafed you to pronounce that Madame de Florac was “très grande
dame;”—“of the sort which is almost impossible to find nowadays,” Lady
Kew said, who thought she possessed this dignity in her own person.
When Madame de Florac, blushing, asked Ethel to come and see her,
Ethel’s grandmother consented with the utmost willingness. “She is very
_dévote_, I have heard, and will try and convert you. Of course you
will hold your own about that sort of thing; and have the good sense to
keep off theology. There is no Roman Catholic _parti_ in England or
Scotland that is to be thought for a moment. You will see they will
marry young Lord Derwenwater to an Italian princess; but he is only
seventeen, and his directors never lose sight of him. Sir Bartholomew
Bawkes will have a fine property when Lord Campion dies, unless Lord
Campion leaves the money to the convent where his daughter is—and, of
the other families, who is there? I made every inquiry purposely—that
is, of course, one is anxious to know about the Catholics as about
one’s own people: and little Mr. Rood, who was one of my poor brother
Steyne’s lawyers, told me there is not one young man of that party at
this moment who can be called a desirable person. Be very civil to
Madame de Florac; she sees some of the old legitimists, and you know I
am _brouillée_ with that party of late years.”

“There is the Marquis de Montluc, who has a large fortune for France,”
said Ethel, gravely; “he has a humpback, but he is very spiritual.
Monsieur de Cadillan paid me some compliments the other night, and even
asked George Barnes what my dot was, He is a widower, and has a wig and
two daughters. Which do you think would be the greatest encumbrance,
grandmamma,—a humpback, or a wig and two daughters? I like Madame de
Florac; for the sake of the borough, I must try and like poor Madame de
Moncontour, and I will go and see them whenever you please.”

So Ethel went to see Madame de Florac. She was very kind to Madame de
Préville’s children, Madame de Florac’s grandchildren; she was gay and
gracious with Madame de Moncontour. She went again and again to the
Hotel de Florac, not caring for Lady Kew’s own circle of statesmen and
diplomatists, Russian, and Spanish, and French, whose talk about the
courts of Europe,—who was in favour at St. Petersburg, and who was in
disgrace at Schoenbrunn,—naturally did not amuse the lively young
person. The goodness of Madame de Florac’s life, the tranquil grace and
melancholy kindness with which the French lady received her, soothed
and pleased Miss Ethel. She came and reposed in Madame de Florac’s
quiet chamber, or sate in the shade in the sober old garden of her
hotel; away from all the trouble and chatter of the salons, the gossip
of the embassies, the fluttering ceremonial of the Parisian ladies’
visits in their fine toilettes, the _fadaises_ of the dancing dandies,
and the pompous mysteries of the old statesmen who frequented her
grandmother’s apartment. The world began for her at night; when she
went in the train of the old Countess from hotel to hotel, and danced
waltz after waltz with Prussian and Neapolitan secretaries, with
princes’ officers of ordonnance,—with personages even more lofty very
likely,—for the court of the Citizen King was then in its splendour;
and there must surely have been a number of nimble young royal
highnesses who would like to dance with such a beauty as Miss Newcome.
The Marquis of Farintosh had a share in these polite amusements. His
English conversation was not brilliant as yet, although his French was
eccentric; but at the court balls, whether he appeared in his uniform
of the Scotch Archers, or in his native Glenlivat tartar there
certainly was not in his own or the public estimation a handsomer young
nobleman in Paris that season. It has been said that he was greatly
improved in dancing; and, for a young man of his age, his whiskers were
really extraordinarily large and curly.

Miss Newcome, out of consideration for her grandmother’s strange
antipathy to him, did not inform Lady Kew that a young gentleman by the
name of Clive occasionally came to visit the Hôtel de Florac. At first,
with her French education, Madame de Florac never would have thought of
allowing the cousins to meet in her house; but with the English it was
different. Paul assured her that in the English châteaux, _les Meess_
walked for entire hours with the young men, made parties of the fish,
mounted to horse with them, the whole with the permission of the
mothers. “When I was at Newcome, Miss Ethel rode with me several
times,” Paul said; “_à preuve_ that we went to visit an old relation of
the family, who adores Clive and his father.” When Madame de Florac
questioned her son about the young Marquis to whom it was said Ethel
was engaged, Florac flouted the idea. “Engaged! This young Marquis is
engaged to the Théâtre des Variétés, my mother. He laughs at the notion
of an engagement.” When one charged him with it of late at the club;
and asked how Mademoiselle Louqsor—she is so tall, that they call her
the Louqsor—she is an _Odalisque Obélisque_, ma mère; when one asked
how the Louqsor would pardon his pursuit of Miss Newcome, my Ecossois
permitted himself to say in full club, that it was Miss Newcome pursued
him,—that nymph, that Diane, that charming and peerless young creature!
On which, as the others laughed, and his friend Monsieur Walleye
applauded, I dared to say in my turn, “Monsieur le Marquis, as a young
man, not familiar with our language, you have said what is not true,
milor, and therefore luckily not mischievous. I have the honour to
count of my friends the parents of the young lady of whom you have
spoken. You never could have intended to say that a young miss who
lives under the guardianship of her parents, and is obedient to them,
whom you meet in society all the nights, and at whose door your
carriage is to be seen every day, is capable of that with which you
charge her so gaily. These things say themselves, monsieur, in the
_coulisses_ of the theatre, of women from whom you learn our language;
not of young persons pure and chaste, Monsieur de Farintosh! Learn to
respect your compatriots; to honour youth and innocence everywhere,
monsieur! and when you forget yourself, permit one who might be your
father to point where you are wrong.”

“And what did he answer?” asked the Countess.

“I attended myself to a _soufflet_,” replied Florac; “but his reply was
much more agreeable. The young insulary, with many blushes and a _gros
juron_, as his polite way is, said he had not wished to say a word
against that person. ‘Of whom the name,’ cried I, ‘ought never to be
spoken in these places.’ Herewith our little dispute ended.”

So, occasionally, Mr. Clive had the good luck to meet with his cousin
at the Hôtel de Florac, where, I dare say, all the inhabitants wished
he should have his desire regarding this young lady. The Colonel had
talked early to Madame de Florac about this wish of his life,
impossible then to gratify, because Ethel was engaged to Lord Kew.
Clive, in the fulness of his heart, imparted his passion to Florac, and
in answer to Paul’s offer to himself, had shown the Frenchman that kind
letter in which his father bade him carry aid to “Léonore de Florac’s
son,” in case he should need it. The case was all clear to the lively
Paul. “Between my mother and your good Colonel there must have been an
affair of the heart in the early days during the emigration.” Clive
owned his father had told him as much, at least that he himself had
been attached to Mademoiselle de Blois. “It is for that that her heart
yearns towards thee, that I have felt myself _entrained_ toward thee
since I saw thee”—Clive momentarily expected to be kissed again. “Tell
thy father that I feel—am touched by his goodness with an eternal
gratitude, and love every one that loves my mother.” As far as wishes
went, these two were eager promoters of Clive’s little love-affair; and
Madame la Princesse became equally not less willing. Clive’s good looks
and good-nature had had their effects upon that good-natured woman, and
he was as great a favourite with her as with her husband. And thus it
happened that when Miss Ethel came to pay her visit, and sate with
Madame de Florac and her grandchildren in the garden, Mr. Newcome would
sometimes walk up the avenue there, and salute the ladies.

If Ethel had not wanted to see him, would she have come? Yes; she used
to say she was going to Madame de Préville’s, not Madame de Florac’s,
and would insist, I have no doubt, that it was Madame de Préville whom
she went to see (whose husband was a member of the Chamber of Deputies,
a Conseiller d’etat; or other French bigwig), and that she had no idea
of going to meet Clive, or that he was more than a casual acquaintance
at the Hôtel de Florac. There was no part of her conduct in all her
life, which this lady, when it was impugned, would defend more strongly
than this intimacy at the Hôtel de Florac. It is not with this I
quarrel especially. My fair young readers, who have seen a half-dozen
of seasons, can you call to mind the time when you had such a
friendship for Emma Tomkins, that you were always at the Tomkins’s, and
notes were constantly passing between your house and hers? When her
brother, Paget Tomkins, returned to India, did not your intimacy with
Emma fall off? If your younger sister is not in the room, I know you
will own as much to me. I think you are always deceiving yourselves and
other people. I think the motive you put forward is very often not the
real one; though you will confess, neither to yourself, nor to any
human being, what the real motive is. I think that what you desire you
pursue, and are as selfish in your way as your bearded fellow-creatures
are. And as for the truth being in you, of all the women in a great
acquaintance, I protest there are but—never mind. A perfectly honest
woman, a woman who never flatters, who never manages, who never
cajoles, who never conceals, who never uses her eyes, who never
speculates on the effect which she produces, who never is conscious of
unspoken admiration, what a monster, I say, would such a female be!
Miss Hopkins, you have been a coquette since you were a year old; you
worked on your papa’s friends in the nurse’s arms by the fascination of
your lace frock and pretty new sash and shoes; when you could just
toddle, you practised your arts upon other children in the square, poor
little lambkins sporting among the daisies; and _nunc in ovilia, mox in
reluctantes dracones_, proceeding from the lambs to reluctant dragoons,
you tried your arts upon Captain Paget Tomkins, who behaved so ill, and
went to India without—without making those proposals which of course
you never expected. Your intimacy was with Emma. It has cooled. Your
sets are different. The Tomkins’s are not _quite_ etc. etc. You believe
Captain Tomkins married a Miss O’Grady, etc. etc. Ah, my pretty, my
sprightly Miss Hopkins, be gentle in your judgment of your neighbours!




CHAPTER XLVII.
Contains two or three Acts of a Little Comedy


All this story is told by one, who, if he was not actually present at
the circumstances here narrated, yet had information concerning them,
and could supply such a narrative of facts and conversations as is,
indeed, not less authentic than the details we have of other histories.
How can I tell the feelings in a young lady’s mind; the thoughts in a
young gentleman’s bosom?—As Professor Owen or Professor Agassiz takes a
fragment of a bone, and builds an enormous forgotten monster out of it,
wallowing in primeval quagmires, tearing down leaves and branches of
plants that flourished thousands of years ago, and perhaps may be coal
by this time—so the novelist puts this and that together: from the
footprint finds the foot; from the foot, the brute who trod on it; from
the brute, the plant he browsed on, the marsh in which he swam—and thus
in his humble way a physiologist too, depicts the habits, size,
appearance of the beings whereof he has to treat;—traces this slimy
reptile through the mud, and describes his habits filthy and rapacious;
prods down this butterfly with a pin, and depicts his beautiful coat
and embroidered waistcoat; points out the singular structure of yonder
more important animal, the megatherium of his history.

Suppose then, in the quaint old garden of the Hôtel de Florac, two
young people are walking up and down in an avenue of lime-trees, which
are still permitted to grow in that ancient place. In the centre of
that avenue is a fountain, surmounted by a Triton so grey and
moss-eaten, that though he holds his conch to his swelling lips,
curling his tail in the arid basin, his instrument has had a sinecure
for at least fifty years; and did not think fit even to play when the
Bourbons, in whose time he was erected, came back from their exile. At
the end of the lime-tree avenue is a broken-nosed damp Faun, with a
marble panpipe, who pipes to the spirit ditties which I believe never
had any tune. The _perron_ of the hotel is at the other end of the
avenue; a couple of Cæsars on either side of the door-window, from
which the inhabitants of the hotel issue into the garden—Caracalla
frowning over his mouldy shoulder at Nerva, on to whose clipped hair
the roofs of the grey château have been dribbling for ever so many long
years. There are more statues gracing this noble place. There is Cupid,
who has been at the point of kissing Psyche this half-century at least,
though the delicious event has never come off, through all those
blazing summers and dreary winters: there is Venus and her Boy under
the damp little dome of a cracked old temple. Through the alley of this
old garden, in which their ancestors have disported in hoops and
powder, Monsieur de Florac’s chair is wheeled by St. Jean, his
attendant; Madame de Préville’s children trot about, and skip, and play
at cache-cache. The R. P. de Florac (when at home) paces up and down
and meditates his sermons; Madame de Florac sadly walks sometimes to
look at her roses; and Clive and Ethel Newcome are marching up and
down; the children, and their bonne of course being there, jumping to
and fro; and Madame de Florac, having just been called away to Monsieur
le Comte, whose physician has come to see him.

Ethel says, “How charming and odd this solitude is: and how pleasant to
hear the voices of the children playing in the neighbouring Convent
garden,” of which they can see the new chapel rising over the trees.

Clive remarks that “the neighbouring hotel has curiously changed its
destination. One of the members of the Directory had it; and, no doubt,
in the groves of its garden, Madame Tallien, and Madame Recamier, and
Madame Beauharnais have danced under the lamps. Then a Marshal of the
Empire inhabited it. Then it was restored to its legitimate owner,
Monsieur le Marquis de Bricquabracque, whose descendants, having a
lawsuit about the Bricquabracque succession, sold the hotel to the
Convent.”

After some talk about nuns, Ethel says, “There were convents in
England. She often thinks she would like to retire to one;” and she
sighs as if her heart were in that scheme.

Clive, with a laugh, says, “Yes. If you could retire after the season,
when you were very weary of the balls, a convent would be very nice. At
Rome he had seen San Pietro in Montorio and Sant Onofrio, that
delightful old place where Tasso died: people go and make a retreat
there. In the ladies’ convents, the ladies do the same thing—and he
doubts whether they are much more or less wicked after their retreat,
than gentlemen and ladies in England or France.”

_Ethel_. Why do you sneer at all faith? Why should not a retreat do
people good? Do you suppose the world is so satisfactory, that those
who are in it never wish for a while to leave it’d (_She heaves a sigh
and looks down towards a beautiful new dress of many flounces, which
Madame de Flouncival, the great milliner, has sent her home that very
day._)

_Clive_. I do not know what the world is, except from afar off. I am
like the Peri who looks into Paradise and sees angels within it. I live
in Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square: which is not within the gates of
Paradise. I take the gate to be somewhere in Davies Street, leading out
of Oxford Street into Grosvenor Square. There’s another gate in Hay
Hill: and another in Bruton Street, Bond——

_Ethel_. Don’t be a goose.

_Clive_. Why not? It is as good to be a goose, as to be a lady—no, a
gentleman of fashion. Suppose I were a Viscount, an Earl, a Marquis, a
Duke, would you say Goose? No, you would say Swan.

_Ethel_. Unkind and unjust!—ungenerous to make taunts which common
people make: and to repeat to me those silly sarcasms which your low
_Radical literary_ friends are always putting in their books! Have I
ever made any difference to you? Would I not sooner see you than the
fine people? Would I talk with you, or with the young dandies most
willingly? Are we not of the same blood, Clive; and of all the grandees
I see about, can there be a grander gentleman than your dear old
father? You need not squeeze my hand so.—Those little imps are
look—that has nothing to do with the question. Viens, Léonore! Tu
connois bien, monsieur, n’est-ce pas? qui te fait de si jolis dessins?

_Léonore_. Ah, oui! Vous m’en ferez toujours, n’est-ce pas Monsieur
Clive? des chevaux, et puis des petites filles avec leurs gouvernantes,
et puis des maisons—et puis—et puis des maisons encore—où est bonne
maman?

[_Exit little_ LÉONORE _down an alley._


_Ethel_. Do you remember when we were children, and you used to make
drawings for us? I have some now that you did—in my geography book,
which I used to read and read with Miss Quigley.

_Clive_. I remember all about our youth, Ethel.

_Ethel_. Tell me what you remember?

_Clive_. I remember one of the days, when I first saw you, I had been
reading the Arabian Nights at school—and you came in in a bright dress
of shot silk, amber, and blue—and I thought you were like that
fairy-princess who came out of the crystal box—because——

_Ethel_. Because why?

_Clive_. Because I always thought that fairy somehow must be the most
beautiful creature in all the world—that is “why and because.” Do not
make me Mayfair curtsies. You know whether you are good-looking or not:
and how long I have thought you so. I remember when I thought I would
like to be Ethel’s knight, and that if there was anything she would
have me do, I would try and achieve it in order to please her. I
remember when I was so ignorant I did not know there was any difference
in rank between us.

_Ethel_. Ah, Clive!

_Clive_. Now it is altered. Now I know the difference between a poor
painter and a young lady of the world. Why haven’t I a title and a
great fortune? Why did I ever see you, Ethel; or, knowing the distance
which it seems fate has placed between us, why have I seen you again?

_Ethel_ (_innocently_). Have I ever made any difference between us?
Whenever I may see you, am I not too glad? Don’t I see you sometimes
when I should not—no—I do not say when I should not; but when others,
whom I am bound to obey, forbid me? What harm is there in my
remembering old days? Why should I be ashamed of our relationship?—no,
not ashamed—shy should I forget it? Don’t do that, sir; we have shaken
hands twice already. Léonore! Xavier!

_Clive_. At one moment you like me: and at the next you seem to repent
it. One day you seem happy when I come; and another day you are ashamed
of me. Last Tuesday, when you came with those fine ladies to the
Louvre, you seemed to blush when you saw me copying at my picture; and
that stupid young lord looked quite alarmed because you spoke to me. My
lot in life is not very brilliant; but I would not change it against
that young man’s—no, not with all his chances.

_Ethel_. What do you mean with all his chances?

_Clive_. You know very well. I mean I would not be as selfish or as
dull, or as ill educated—I won’t say worse of him—not to be as
handsome, or as wealthy, or as noble as he is. I swear I would not now
change my place against his, or give up being Clive Newcome to be my
Lord Marquis of Farintosh, with all his acres and titles of nobility.

_Ethel_. Why are you for ever harping about Lord Farintosh and his
titles? I thought it was only women who were jealous—you gentlemen say
so.—(_Hurriedly_.) I am going to-night with grandmamma to the Minister
of the Interior, and then to the Russian ball; and to-morrow to the
Tuileries. We dine at the Embassy first; and on Sunday, I suppose, we
shall go to the Rue d’Aguesseau. I can hardly come here before Mon—.
Madam de Florac! Little Léonore is very like you—resembles you very
much. My cousin says he longs to make a drawing of her.

_Madame de Florac_. My husband always likes that I should be present at
his dinner. Pardon me, young people, that I have been away from you for
a moment.

[_Exeunt_ CLIVE, ETHEL, _and_ Madame DE F. _into the house_.


CONVERSATION II.—_Scene_ I.


_Miss Newcome arrives in Lady Kew’s carriage, which enters the court of
the Hôtel de Florac._


_Saint Jean_. Mademoiselle—Madame la Comtesse is gone out but madame
has charged me to say, that she will be at home to the dinner of M. le
Comte, as to the ordinary.

_Miss Newcome_. Madame de Préville is at home?

_Saint Jean_. Pardon me, madame is gone out with M. le Baron, and M.
Xavier, and Mademoiselle de Préville. They are gone, miss, I believe,
to visit the parents of Monsieur le Baron; of whom it is probably
to-day the fête: for Mademoiselle Léonore carried a bouquet—no doubt
for her grandpapa. Will it please mademoiselle to enter? I think
Monsieur the Count sounds me. (_Bell rings_.)

_Miss Newcome_. Madame la Prince—Madame la Vicomtesse is at home,
Monsieur St. Jean?

_Saint Jean_. I go to call the people of Madame la Vicomtesse.

[_Exit Old_ SAINT JEAN _to the carriage: a Lackey comes presently in a
gorgeous livery, with buttons like little cheese plates_.


_The Lackey_. The Princess is at home, miss, and will be most appy to
see you, miss. (_Miss trips up the great stair: a gentleman out of
livery has come forth to the landing, and introduces her to the
apartments of_ Madame la Princesse.)

_The Lackey to the Servants on the box_. Good morning, Thomas. How dy’
do, old Backystopper?

_Backystopper_. How de do, Jim? I say, you couldn’t give a feller a
drink of beer, could yer, Muncontour? It was precious wet last night, I
can tell you. ’Ad to stop for three hours at the Napolitum Embassy,
when we was a dancing. Me and some chaps went into Bob Parsom’s and had
a drain. Old Cat came out and couldn’t find her carriage, not by no
means, could she, Tommy? Blest if I didn’t nearly drive her into a
wegetable-cart. I was so uncommon scruey! Who’s this a-hentering at
your pot-coshare? Billy, my fine feller!

_Clive Newcome_ (_by the most singular coincidence_). Madame la
Princesse?

_Lackey_. We, Munseer. (_He rings a bell: the gentleman in black
appears as before on the landing-place up the stair_.)

[_Exit_ CLIVE.


_Backystopper_. I say, Bill: is that young chap often a-coming about
here? They’d run pretty in a curricle, wouldn’t they? Miss N. and
Master N. Quiet, old woman! Jest look to that mare’s ead, will you,
Billy? He’s a fine young feller, that is. He gave me a covering the
other night. Whenever I sor him in the Park, he was always riding an
ansum hanimal. What is he? They said in our ’all he was a hartis. I can
’ardly think that. Why, there used to be a hartis come to our club, and
painted two or three of my ’osses, and my old woman too.

_Lackey_. There’s hartises and hartises, Backystopper. Why, there’s
some on ’em comes here with more stars on their coats than Dukes has
got. Have you never ’eard of Mossyer Verny, or Mossyer Gudang?

_Backystopper_. They say this young gent is sweet on Miss N.; which, I
guess, I wish he may git it.

_Tommy_. He! he! he!

_Backystopper_. Brayvo, Tommy. Tom ain’t much of a man for
conversation, but he’s a precious one to drink. _Do_ you think the
young gent is sweet on her, Tommy? I sor him often prowling about our
’ouse in Queen Street, when we was in London.

_Tommy_. I guess he wasn’t let in in Queen Street. I guess hour little
Buttons was very near turned away for saying we was at home to him—I
guess a footman’s place is to keep his mouth hopen—no, his heyes
hopen—and his mouth shut. (_He lapses into silence_.)

_Lackey_. I think Thomis is in love, Thomis is. Who was that young
woman I saw you a-dancing of at the Showmier, Thomis? How the young
Marquis was a-cuttin’ of it about there! The pleace was obliged to come
up and stop him dancing. His man told old Buzfuz upstairs, that the
Marquis’s goings on is hawful. Up till four or five every morning;
blind hookey, shampaign, the dooce’s own delight. That party have had I
don’t know how much in diamonds—and they quarrel and swear at each
other, and fling plates: it’s tremendous.

_Tommy_. Why doesn’t the Marquis man mind his own affairs? He’s a
supersellious beast: and will no more speak to a man, except he’s
out-a-livery, than he would to a chimbly-swip. He! Cuss him, I’d fight
’im for ’alf-a-crown.

_Lackey_. And we’d back you, Tommy. Buzfuz upstairs ain’t
supersellious; nor is the Prince’s walet nether. That old Sangjang’s a
rum old guvnor. He was in England with the Count, fifty years ago—in
the hemigration—in Queen Hann’s time, you know. He used to support the
old Count. He says he remembers a young Musseer Newcome then, that used
to take lessons from the Shevallier, the Countess’ father—there’s my
bell.

[_Exit Lackey_.


_Backystopper_. Not a bad chap that. Sports his money very free—sings
an uncommon good song.

_Thomas_. Pretty voice, but no cultiwation.

_Lackey_ (_who re-enters_). Be here at two o’clock for Miss N. Take
anything? Come round the corner.—There’s a capital shop round the
corner.

[_Exeunt Servants_.


SCENE II.


_Ethel_. I can’t think where Madame de Moncontour has gone. How very
odd it was that you should come here—that we should both come here
to-day! How surprised I was to see you at the Minister’s! Grandmamma
was so angry! “That boy pursues us wherever we go,” she said. I am sure
I don’t know why we shouldn’t meet, Clive. It seems to be wrong even my
seeing you by chance here. Do you know, sir, what a scolding I had
about—about going to Brighton with you? My grandmother did not hear of
it till we were in Scotland, when that foolish maid of mine talked of
it to her maid; and, there was oh, such a tempest! If there were a
Bastile here, she would like to lock you into it. She says that you are
always upon our way—I don’t know how, I am sure. She says, but for you
I should have been—you know what I should have been: but I am thankful
that I wasn’t, and Kew has got a much nicer wife in Henrietta Pulleyn,
than I could ever have been to him. She will be happier than Clara,
Clive. Kew is one of the kindest creatures in the world—not very wise;
not very strong: but he is just such a kind, easy, generous little man,
as will make a girl like Henrietta quite happy.

_Clive_. But not you, Ethel?

_Ethel_. No, nor I him. My temper is difficult, Clive, and I fear few
men would bear with me. I feel, somehow, always very lonely. How old am
I? Twenty—I feel sometimes as if I was a hundred; and in the midst of
all these admirations and fêtes and flatteries, so tired, oh, so tired!
And yet if I don’t have them, I miss them. How I wish I was religious
like Madame de Florac: there is no day that she does not go to church.
She is for ever busy with charities, clergymen, conversions; I think
the Princess will be brought over ere long—that dear old Madame de
Florac! and yet she is no happier than the rest of us. Hortense is an
empty little thing, who thinks of her prosy fat Camille with
spectacles, and of her two children, and of nothing else in the world
besides. Who is happy? Clive!

_Clive_. You say Barnes’s wife is not.

_Ethel_. We are like brother and sister, so I may talk to you. Barnes
is very cruel to her. At Newcome, last winter, poor Clara used to come
into my room with tears in her eyes morning after morning. He calls her
a fool; and seems to take a pride in humiliating her before company. My
poor father has luckily taken a great liking to her: and before him,
for he has grown very very hot-tempered since his illness, Barnes
leaves poor Clara alone. We were in hopes that the baby might make
matters better, but as it is a little girl, Barnes chooses to be very
much disappointed. He wants papa to give up his seat in Parliament, but
he clings to that more than anything. Oh, dear me! who is happy in the
world? What a pity Lord Highgate’s father had not died sooner! He and
Barnes have been reconciled. I wonder my brother’s spirit did not
revolt against it. The old lord used to keep a great sum of money at
the bank, I believe: and the present one does so still: he has paid all
his debts off: and Barnes is actually friends with him. He is always
abusing the Dorkings, who want to borrow money from the bank, he says.
This eagerness for money is horrible. If I had been Barnes I would
never have been reconciled with Mr. Belsize, never, never! And yet they
say he was quite right: and grandmamma is even pleased that Lord
Highgate should be asked to dine in Park Lane. Poor papa is there: come
to attend his parliamentary duties as he thinks. He went to a division
the other night; and was actually lifted out of his carriage and
wheeled into the lobby in a chair. The ministers thanked him for
coming. I believe he thinks he will have his peerage yet. Oh, what a
life of vanity ours is!

_Enter Madame de Moncontour_. What are you young folks a-talkin’
about—balls and operas? When first I was took to the opera I did not
like it—and fell asleep. But now, oh, it’s ’eavenly to hear Grisi sing!

_The Clock_. Ting, ting!

_Ethel_. Two o’clock already! I must run back to grandmamma. Good-bye,
Madame de Moncontour; I am so sorry I have not been able to see dear
Madame de Florac. I will try and come to her on Thursday—please tell
her. Shall we meet you at the American minister’s to-night, or at
Madame de Brie’s to-morrow? Friday is your own night—I hope grandmamma
will bring me. How charming your last music was! Good-bye, mon cousin!
You shall not come downstairs with me, I insist upon it, sir: and had
much best remain here, and finish your drawing of Madame de Moncontour.

_Princess_. I’ve put on the velvet, you see, Clive—though it’s very ’ot
in May. Good-bye, my dear.

[_Exit_ ETHEL.


As far as we can judge from the above conversation, which we need not
prolong—as the talk between Madame de Moncontour and Monsieur Clive,
after a few complimentary remarks about Ethel, had nothing to do with
the history of the Newcomes—as far as we can judge, the above little
colloquy took place on Monday: and about Wednesday, Madame la Comtesse
de Florac received a little note from Clive, in which he said, that one
day when she came to the Louvre, where he was copying, she had admired
a picture of a Virgin and Child, by Sasso Ferrato, since when he had
been occupied in making a water-colour drawing after the picture, and
hoped she would be pleased to accept the copy from her affectionate and
grateful servant, Clive Newcome. The drawing would be done the next
day, when he would call with it in his hand. Of course Madame de Florac
received this announcement very kindly; and sent back by Clive’s
servant a note of thanks to that young gentleman.

Now on Thursday morning, about one o’clock, by one of those singular
coincidences which, etc. etc., who should come to the Hotel de Florac
but Miss Ethel Newcome? Madame la Comtesse was at home, waiting to
receive Clive and his picture: but Miss Ethel’s appearance frightened
the good lady, so much so that she felt quite guilty at seeing the
girl, whose parents might think—I don’t know what they might not
think—that Madame de Florac was trying to make a match between the
young people. Hence arose the words uttered by the Countess, after a
while, in—

CONVERSATION III.


_Madame de Florac_ (_at work_). And so you like to quit the world and
to come to our _triste_ old hotel. After to-day you will find it still
more melancholy, my poor child.

_Ethel_. And why?

_Madame de F_. Some one who has been here to _égayer_ our little
meetings will come no more.

_Ethel_. Is the Abbé de Florac going to quit Paris, madam?

_Madame de F_. It is not of him that I speak, thou knowest it very
well, my daughter. Thou hast seen my poor Clive twice here. He will
come once again, and then no more. My conscience reproaches me that I
have admitted him at all. But he is like a son to me, and was so
confided to me by his father. Five years ago, when we met, after an
absence—of how many years!—Colonel Newcome told me what hopes he had
cherished for his boy. You know well, my daughter, with whom those
hopes were connected. Then he wrote me that family arrangements
rendered his plans impossible—that the hand of Miss Newcome was
promised elsewhere. When I heard from my son Paul how these
negotiations were broken, my heart rejoiced, Ethel, for my friend’s
sake. I am an old woman now, who have seen the world, and all sorts of
men. Men more brilliant no doubt I have known, but such a heart as his,
such a faith as his, such a generosity and simplicity as Thomas
Newcome’s—never!

_Ethel_ (_smiling_). Indeed, dear lady, I think with you.

_Madame de F_. I understand thy smile, my daughter. I can say to thee,
that when we were children almost, I knew thy good uncle. My poor
father took the pride of his family into exile with him. Our poverty
only made his pride the greater. Even before the emigration a contract
had been passed between our family and the Count de Florac. I could not
be wanting to the word given by my father. For how many long years have
I kept it? But when I see a young girl who may be made the victim—the
subject of a marriage of convenience, as I was—my heart pities her. And
if I love her, as I love you, I tell her my thoughts. Better poverty,
Ethel: better a cell in a convent: than a union without love. Is it
written eternally that men are to make slaves of us? Here in France,
above all, our fathers sell us every day. And what a society ours is!
Thou wilt know this when thou art married. There are some laws so cruel
that nature revolts against theme, and breaks them—or we die in keeping
them. You smile. I have been nearly fifty years dying—_n’est-ce
pas?_—and am here an old woman, complaining to a young girl. It is
because our recollections of youth are always young: and because I have
suffered so, that I would spare those I love a like grief. Do you know
that the children of those who do not love in marriage seem to bear an
hereditary coldness, and do not love their parents as other children
do? They witness our differences and our indifferences, hear our
recriminations, take one side or the other in our disputes, and are
partisans for father or mother. We force ourselves to be hypocrites,
and hide our wrongs from them; we speak of a bad father with false
praises; we wear feint smiles over our tears, and deceive our
children—deceive them, do we? Even from the exercise of that pious
deceit there is no woman but suffers in the estimation of her sons.
They may shield her as champions against their father’s selfishness or
cruelty. In this case, what a war! What a home, where the son sees a
tyrant in the father, and in the mother but a trembling victim! I speak
not for myself—whatever may have been the course of our long wedded
life, I have not to complain of these ignoble storms. But when the
family chief neglects his wife, or prefers another to her, the children
too, courtiers as we are, will desert her. You look incredulous about
domestic love. Tenez, my child, if I may so surmise, I think you cannot
have seen it.

_Ethel_ (_blushing, and thinking, perhaps, how she esteems her father,
how her mother, and how much they esteem each other_). My father and
mother have been most kind to all their children, madame; and no one
can say that their marriage has been otherwise than happy. My mother is
the kindest and most affectionate mother, and—(_Here a vision of Sir
Brian alone in his room, and nobody really caring for him so much as
his valet, who loves him to the extent of fifty pounds a year and
perquisites; or, perhaps, Miss Cann, who reads to him, and plays a good
deal of evenings, much to Sir Brian’s liking—here this vision, we say,
comes, and stops Miss Ethel’s sentence_.)

_Madame de F_. Your father, in his infirmity—and yet he is five years
younger than Colonel Newcome—is happy to have such a wife and such
children. They comfort his age; they cheer his sickness; they confide
their griefs and pleasures to him—is it not so? His closing days are
soothed by their affection.

_Ethel_. Oh, no, no! And yet it is not his fault or ours that he is a
stranger to us. He used to be all day at the bank, or at night in the
House of Commons, or he and mamma went to parties, and we young ones
remained with the governess. Mamma is very kind. I have never, almost,
known her angry; never with us; about us, sometimes, with the servants.
As children, we used to see papa and mamma at breakfast; and then when
she was dressing to go out. Since he has been ill, she has given up all
parties. I wanted to do so too. I feel ashamed in the world, sometimes,
when I think of my poor father at home, alone. I wanted to stay, but my
mother and my grandmother forbade me. Grandmamma has a fortune, which
she says I am to have: since then they have insisted on my being with
her. She is very clever you know: she is kind too in her way; but she
cannot live out of society. And I, who pretend to revolt, I like it
too; and I, who rail and scorn flatterers—oh, I like admiration! I am
pleased when the women hate me, and the young men leave them for me.
Though I despise many of these, yet I can’t help drawing them towards
me. One or two of them I have seen unhappy about me, and I like it; and
if they are indifferent I am angry, and never tire till they come back.
I love beautiful dresses; I love jewels; I love a great name and a fine
house—oh, I despise myself, when I think of these things! When I lie in
bed and say I have been heartless and a coquette, I cry with
humiliation; and then rebel and say, Why not?—and to-night—yes,
to-night—after leaving you, I shall be wicked, I know I shall.

_Madame de F_. (_sadly_). One will pray for thee, my child.

_Ethel_ (_sadly_). I thought I might be good once. I used to say my own
prayers then. Now I speak them but by rote, and feel ashamed—yes,
ashamed to speak them. Is it not horrid to say them, and next morning
to be no better than you were last night? Often I revolt at these as at
other things, and am dumb. The Vicar comes to see us at Newcome, and
eats so much dinner, and pays us such court, and “Sir Brians” papa, and
“Your Ladyship’s” mamma. With grandmamma I go to hear a fashionable
preacher—Clive’s uncle, whose sister lets lodgings at Brighton; such a
queer, bustling, pompous, honest old lady. Do you know that Clive’s
aunt lets lodgings at Brighton?

_Madame de F_. My father was an usher in a school. Monsieur de Florac
gave lessons in the emigration. Do you know in what?

_Ethel_. Oh, the old nobility! that is different, you know. That Mr.
Honeyman is so affected that I have no patience with him!

_Madame de F_. (_with a sigh_). I wish you could attend the services of
a better church. And when was it you thought you might be good, Ethel?

_Ethel_. When I was a girl. Before I came out. When I used to take long
rides with my dear Uncle Newcome; and he used to talk to me in his
sweet simple way; and he said I reminded him of some one he once knew.

_Madame de F_. Who—who was that, Ethel?

_Ethel_ (_looking up at Gerard’s picture of the Countess de Florac_).
What odd dresses you wore in the time of the Empire, Madame de Florac!
How could you ever have such high waists, and such wonderful _fraises!_
(MADAME DE FLORAC _kisses_ ETHEL. _Tableau_.)

_Enter_ SAINT JEAN, _preceding a gentleman with a drawing-board under
his arm_.

_Saint Jean_. Monsieur Claive! [_Exit_ SAINT JEAN.

_Clive_. How do you do, Madame la Comtesse? Mademoiselle, j’ai
l’honneur de vous souhaiter le bon jour.

_Madame de F_. Do you come from the Louvre? Have you finished that
beautiful copy, mon ami?

_Clive_. I have brought it for you. It is not very good. There are
always so many _petites demoiselles_ copying that Sasso Ferrato; and
they chatter about it so, and hop from one easel to another; and the
young artists are always coming to give them advice—so that there is no
getting a good look at the picture. But I have brought you the sketch;
and am so pleased that you asked for it.

_Madame de F_. (_surveying the sketch_). It is charming—charming! What
shall we give to our painter for his chef-d’œuvre?

_Clive_ (_kisses her hand_). There is my pay! And you will be glad to
hear that two of my portraits have been received at the Exhibition. My
uncle, the clergyman, and Mr. Butts, of the Life Guards.

_Ethel_. Mr. Butts—quel nom! Je ne connois aucun M. Butts!

_Clive_. He has a famous head to draw. They refused Crackthorpe and—and
one or two other heads I sent in.

_Ethel_ (_tossing up hers_). Miss Mackenzie’s, I suppose!

_Clive_. Yes, Miss Mackenzie’s. It is a sweet little face; too delicate
for my hand, though.

_Ethel_. So is a wax-doll’s a pretty face. Pink cheeks; china-blue
eyes; and hair the colour of old Madame Hempenfeld’s—not her last
hair—her last but one. (_She goes to a window that looks into the
court_.)

_Clive_ (_to the Countess_). Miss Mackenzie speaks more respectfully of
other people’s eyes and hair. She thinks there is nobody in the world
to compare to Miss Newcome.

_Madame de F_. (_aside_). And you, mon ami? This is the last time,
entendez-vous? You must never come here again. If M. le Comte knew it
he never would pardon me. Encore? (_He kisses her ladyship’s hand
again_.)

_Clive_. A good action gains to be repeated. Miss Newcome, does the
view of the courtyard please you? The old trees and the garden are
better. That dear old Faun without a nose! I must have a sketch of him:
the creepers round the base are beautiful.

_Miss N_. I was looking to see if the carriage had come for me. It is
time that I return home.

_Clive_. That is my brougham. May I carry you anywhere? I hire him by
the hour: and I will carry you to the end of the world.

_Miss N_. Where are you going, Madame de Floras?—to show that sketch to
M. le Comte? Dear me! I don’t fancy that M. de Florac can care for such
things! I am sure I have seen many as pretty on the quays for
twenty-five sous. I wonder the carriage is not come for me.

_Clive_. You can take mine without my company, as that seems not to
please you.

_Miss N_. Your company is sometimes very pleasant—when you please.
Sometimes, as last night, for instance, when you particularly lively.

_Clive_. Last night, after moving heaven and earth to get an invitation
to Madame de Brie—I say, heaven and earth, that is a French phrase—I
arrive there; I find Miss Newcome engaged for almost every dance,
waltzing with M. de Klingenspohr, galloping with Count de Capri,
galloping and waltzing with the most noble the Marquis of Farintosh.
She will scarce speak to me during the evening; and when I wait till
midnight, her grandmamma whisks her home, and I am left alone for my
pains. Lady Kew is in one of her high moods, and the only words she
condescends to say to me are, “Oh, I thought you had returned to
London,” with which she turns her venerable back upon me.

_Miss N_. A fortnight ago you said you were going to London. You said
the copies you were about here would not take you another week, and
that was three weeks since.

_Clive_. It were best I had gone.

_Miss N_. If you think so, I cannot but think so.

_Clive_. Why do I stay and hover about you, and follow you know—I
follow you? Can I live on a smile vouchsafed twice a week, and no
brighter than you give to all the world? What I do I get, but to hear
your beauty praised, and to see you, night after night, happy and
smiling and triumphant, the partner of other men? Does it add zest to
your triumph, to think that I behold it? I believe you would like a
crowd of us to pursue you.

_Miss N_. To pursue me; and if they find me alone, by chance to
compliment me with such speeches as you make? That would be pleasure
indeed! Answer me here in return, Clive. Have I ever disguised from any
of my friends the regard I have for you? Why should I? Have not I taken
your part when you were maligned? In former days, when—when Lord Kew
asked me, as he had a right to do then—I said it was as a brother I
held you; and always would. If I have been wrong, it has been for two
or three times in seeing you at all—or seeing you thus; in letting you
speak to me as you do—injure me as you do. Do you think I have not hard
enough words said to me about you, but that you must attack me too in
turn? Last night only, because you were at the ball,—it was very, very
wrong of me to tell you I was going there,—as we went home, Lady
Kew—Go, sir. I never thought you would have seen in me this
humiliation.

_Clive_. Is it possible that I should have made Ethel Newcome shed
tears? Oh, dry them, dry them. Forgive me, Ethel, forgive me! I have no
right to jealousy, or to reproach you—I know that. If others admire
you, surely I ought to know that they—they do but as I do: I should be
proud, not angry, that they admire my Ethel—my sister, if you can be no
more.

_Ethel_. I will be that always, whatever harsh things you think or say
of me. There, sir, I am not going to be so foolish as to cry again.
Have you been studying very hard? Are your pictures good at the
Exhibition? I like you with your mustachios best, and order you not to
cut them off again. The young men here wear them. I hardly knew Charles
Beardmore when he arrived from Berlin the other day, like a sapper and
miner. His little sisters cried out, and were quite frightened by his
apparition. Why are you not in diplomacy? That day, at Brighton, when
Lord Farintosh asked whether you were in the army, I thought to myself,
why is he not?

_Clive_. A man in the army may pretend to anything, _n’est-ce pas?_ He
wears a lovely uniform. He may be a General, a K.C.B., a Viscount, an
Earl. He may be valiant in arms, and wanting a leg, like the lover in
the song. It is peace-time, you say? so much the worse career for a
soldier. My father would not have me, he said, for ever dangling in
barracks, or smoking in country billiard-rooms. I have no taste for
law: and as for diplomacy, I have no relations in the Cabinet, and no
uncles in the House of Peers. Could my uncle, who is in Parliament,
help me much, do you think? or would he, if he could?—or Barnes, his
noble son and heir, after him?

_Ethel_ (_musing_). Barnes would not, perhaps, but papa might even
still, and you have friends who are fond of you.

_Clive_. No—no one can help me: and my art, Ethel, is not only my
choice and my love, but my honour too. I shall never distinguish myself
in it: I may take smart likenesses, but that is all. I am not fit to
grind my friend Ridley’s colours for him. Nor would my father, who
loves his own profession so, make a good general probably. He always
says so. I thought better of myself when I began as a boy; and was a
conceited youngster, expecting to carry it all before me. But as I
walked the Vatican, and looked at Raphael, and at the great Michael—I
knew I was but a poor little creature; and in contemplating his genius,
shrunk up till I felt myself as small as a man looks under the dome of
St. Peter’s. Why should I wish to have a great genius?—Yes, there is
one reason why I should like to have it.

_Ethel_. And that is?

_Clive_. To give it you, if it pleased you, Ethel. But I might wish for
the roc’s egg: there is no way of robbing the bird. I must take a
humble place, and you want a brilliant one. A brilliant one! Oh, Ethel,
what a standard we folks measure fame by! To have your name in the
_Morning Post_, and to go to three balls every night. To have your
dress described at the Drawing-Room; and your arrival, from a round of
visits in the country, at your town-house; and the entertainment of the
Marchioness of Farin——

_Ethel_. Sir, if you please, no calling names.

_Clive_. I wonder at it. For you are in the world, and you love the
world, whatever you may say. And I wonder that one of your strength of
mind should so care for it. I think my simple old father is much finer
than all your grandees: his single-mindedness more lofty than all their
bowing, and haughtiness, and scheming. What are you thinking of, as
you stand in that pretty attitude—like Mnemosyne—with your finger on
your chin?

_Ethel_. Mnemosyne! who was she? I think I like you best when you are
quiet and gentle, and not when you are flaming out and sarcastic, sir.
And so you think you will never be a famous painter? They are quite in
society here. I was so pleased, because two of them dined at the
Tuileries when grandmamma was there; and she mistook one, who was
covered all over with crosses, for an ambassador, I believe, till the
Queen call him Monsieur Delaroche. She says there is no knowing people
in this country. And do you think you will never be able to paint as
well as M. Delaroche?

_Clive_. No—never.

_Ethel_. And—and—you will never give up painting?

_Clive_. No—never. That would be like leaving your friend who was poor;
or deserting your mistress because you were disappointed about her
money. They do those things in the great world, Ethel.

_Ethel_ (_with a sigh_). Yes.

_Clive_. If it is so false, and base, and hollow, this great world—if
its aims are so mean, its successes so paltry, the sacrifices it asks
of you so degrading, the pleasures it gives you so wearisome, shameful
even, why does Ethel Newcome cling to it? Will you be fairer, dear,
with any other name than your own? Will you be happier, after a month,
at bearing a great title, with a man whom you can’t esteem, tied for
ever to you, to be the father of Ethel’s children, and the lord and
master of her life and actions? The proudest woman in the world
consents to bend herself to this ignominy, and own that a coronet is a
bribe sufficient for her honour! What is the end of a Christian life,
Ethel; a girl’s pure nurture?—it can’t be this! Last week, as we walked
in the garden here, and heard the nuns singing in their chapel, you
said how hard it was that poor women should be imprisoned so, and were
thankful that in England we had abolished that slavery. Then you cast
your eyes to the ground, and mused as you paced the walk; and thought,
I know, that perhaps their lot was better than some others.

_Ethel_. Yes, I did. I was thinking that almost all women are made
slaves one way or other, and that these poor nuns perhaps were better
off than we are.

_Clive_. I never will quarrel with nun or matron for following her
vocation. But for our women, who are free, why should they rebel
against Nature, shut their hearts up, sell their lives for rank and
money, and forgo the most precious right of their liberty? Look, Ethel,
dear. I love you so, that if I thought another had your heart, an
honest man, a loyal gentleman, like—like him of last year even, I think
I could go back with a God bless you, and take to my pictures again,
and work on in my own humble way. You seem like a queen to me, somehow;
and I am but a poor, humble fellow, who might be happy, I think, if you
were. In those balls, where I have seen you surrounded by those
brilliant young men, noble and wealthy, admirers like me, I have often
thought, “How could I aspire to such a creature, and ask her to forgo a
palace to share the crust of a poor painter?”

_Ethel_. You spoke quite scornfully of palaces just now, Clive. I won’t
say a word about the—the regard which you express for me. I think you
have it. Indeed, I do. But it were best not said, Clive; best for me,
perhaps, not to own that I know it. In your speeches, my poor boy—and
you will please not to make any more, or I never can see you or speak
to you again, never—you forgot one part of a girl’s duty: obedience to
her parents. They would never agree to my marrying any one below—any
one whose union would not be advantageous in a worldly point of view. I
never would give such pain to the poor father, or to the kind soul who
never said a harsh word to me since I was born. My grandmamma is kind,
too, in her way. I came to her of my own free will. When she said she
would leave me her fortune, do you think it was for myself alone that I
was glad? My father’s passion was to make an estate, and all my
brothers and sisters will be but slenderly portioned. Lady Kew said she
would help them if I came to her—and—it is the welfare of those little
people that depends upon me, Clive. Now, do you see, _brother_, why you
must speak to me so no more? There is the carriage. God bless you, dear
Clive.

(Clive sees the carriage drive away after Miss Newcome has entered it
without once looking up to the window where he stands. When it is gone
he goes to the opposite windows of the salon, which are open, towards
the garden. The chapel music begins to play from the Convent, next
door. As he hears it he sinks down, his head in his hands.)

_Enter Madame de Florac_ (_She goes to him with anxious looks_.) What
hast thou, my child? Hast thou spoken?

_Clive_ (_very steadily_). Yes.

_Madame de F_. And she loves thee? I know she loves thee.

_Clive_. You hear the organ of the convent?

_Madame de F_. Qu’as tu?

_Clive_. I might as well hope to marry one of the sisters of yonder
convent, dear lady. (_He sinks down again, and she kisses him_.)

_Clive_. I never had a mother; but you seem like one.

_Madame de F_. Mon fils! Oh, mon fils!




CHAPTER XLVIII.
In which Benedick is a Married Man


We have all heard of the dying French Duchess, who viewed her coming
dissolution and subsequent fate so easily, because she said she was
sure that Heaven must deal politely with a person of her quality;—I
suppose Lady Kew had some such notions regarding people of rank: her
long-suffering towards them was extreme; in fact, there were vices
which the old lady thought pardonable, and even natural, in a young
nobleman of high station, which she never would have excused in persons
of vulgar condition.

Her ladyship’s little knot of associates and scandal-bearers—elderly
roues and ladies of the world, whose business it was to know all sorts
of noble intrigues and exalted tittle-tattle; what was happening among
the devotees of the exiled court at Frobsdorf; what among the citizen
princes of the Tuileries; who was the reigning favourite of the Queen
Mother at Aranjuez; who was smitten with whom at Vienna or Naples; and
the last particulars of the _chroniques scandaleuses_ of Paris and
London;—Lady Kew, I say, must have been perfectly aware of my Lord
Farintosh’s amusements, associates, and manner of life, and yet she
never, for one moment, exhibited any anger or dislike towards that
nobleman. Her amiable heart was so full of kindness and forgiveness
towards the young prodigal that, even without any repentance on his
part, she was ready to take him to her old arms, and give him her
venerable benediction. Pathetic sweetness of nature! Charming
tenderness of disposition! With all his faults and wickednesses, his
follies and his selfishness, there was no moment when Lady Kew would
not have received the young lord, and endowed him with the hand of her
darling Ethel.

But the hopes which this fond forgiving creature had nurtured for one
season, and carried on so resolutely to the next, were destined to be
disappointed yet a second time, by a most provoking event, which
occurred in the Newcome family. Ethel was called away suddenly from
Paris by her father’s third and last paralytic seizure. When she
reached her home, Sir Brian could not recognise her. A few hours after
her arrival, all the vanities of the world were over for him: and Sir
Barnes Newcome, Baronet, reigned in his stead. The day after Sir Brian
was laid in his vault at Newcome—a letter appeared in the local papers
addressed to the Independent Electors of that Borough, in which his
orphan son, feelingly alluding to the virtue, the services, and the
political principles of the deceased, offered himself as a candidate
for the seat in Parliament now vacant. Sir Barnes announced that he
should speedily pay his respects in person to the friends and
supporters of his lamented father. That he was a staunch friend of our
admirable constitution need not be said. That he was a firm, but
conscientious upholder of our Protestant religion, all who knew Barnes
Newcome must be aware. That he would do his utmost to advance the
interests of this great agricultural, this great manufacturing county
and borough, we may be sure he avowed; as that he would be (if returned
to represent Newcome in Parliament) the advocate of every rational
reform, the unhesitating opponent of every reckless innovation. In
fine, Barnes Newcome’s manifesto to the Electors of Newcome was as
authentic a document and gave him credit for as many public virtues, as
that slab over poor Sir Brian’s bones in the chancel of Newcome church,
which commemorated the good qualities of the defunct, and the grief of
his heir.

In spite of the virtues, personal and inherited, of Barnes, his seat
for Newcome was not got without a contest. The dissenting interest and
the respectable Liberals of the borough wished to set up Samuel Higg,
Esq.; against Sir Barnes Newcome: and now it was that Barnes’s
civilities of the previous year, aided by Madame de Moncontour’s
influence over her brother, bore their fruit. Mr. Higg declined to
stand against Sir Barnes Newcome, although Higg’s political principles
were by no means those of the honourable Baronet; and the candidate
from London, whom the Newcome extreme Radicals set up against Barnes,
was nowhere on the poll when the day of election came. So Barnes had
the desire of his heart; and, within two months after his father’s
demise, he sate in Parliament as Member for Newcome.

The bulk of the late Baronet’s property descended, of course, to his
eldest son: who grumbled, nevertheless, at the provision made for his
brothers and sisters, and that the town-house should have been left to
Lady Anne, who was too poor to inhabit it. But Park Lane is the best
situation in London, and Lady Anne’s means were greatly improved by the
annual produce of the house in Park Lane, which, as we all know, was
occupied by a foreign minister for several subsequent seasons. Strange
mutations of fortune: old places; new faces; what Londoner does not see
and speculate upon them every day? Cœlia’s boudoir, who is dead with
the daisies over her at Kensal Green, is now the chamber where Delia is
consulting Dr. Locock, or Julia’s children are romping: Florio’s
dining-tables have now Pollio’s wine upon them: Calista, being a widow,
and (to the surprise of everybody who knew Trimalchio, and enjoyed his
famous dinners) left but very poorly off, lets the house, and the rich,
chaste, and appropriate planned furniture, by Dowbiggin, and the
proceeds go to keep her little boys at Eton. The next year, as Mr.
Clive Newcome rode by the once familiar mansion (whence the hatchment
had been removed, announcing that there was _in Cœlo Quies_ for the
late Sir Brian Newcome, Bart.), alien faces looked from over the
flowers in the balconies. He got a card for an entertainment from the
occupant of the mansion, H.E. the Bulgarian minister; and there was the
same crowd in the reception-room and on the stairs, the same grave men
from Gunter’s distributing the refreshments in the dining-room, the
same old Smee, R. A. (always in the room where the edibles were),
cringing and flattering to the new occupants; and the same effigy of
poor Sir Brian, in his deputy-lieutenant’s uniform, looking blankly
down from over the sideboard, at the feast which his successors were
giving. A dreamy old ghost of a picture. Have you ever looked at those
round George IV.’s banqueting-hall at Windsor? Their frames still hold
them, but they smile ghostly smiles, and swagger in robes and velvets
which are quite faint and faded: their crimson coats have a twilight
tinge: the lustre of their stars has twinkled out: they look as if they
were about to flicker off the wall and retire to join their originals
in limbo.

Nearly three years had elapsed since the good Colonel’s departure for
India, and during this time certain changes had occurred in the lives
of the principal actors and the writer of this history. As regards the
latter, it must be stated that the dear old firm of Lamb Court had been
dissolved, the junior member having contracted another partnership. The
chronicler of these memoirs was a bachelor no longer. My wife and I had
spent the winter at Rome (favourite resort of young married couples);
and had heard from the artists there Clive’s name affectionately
repeated; and many accounts of his sayings and doings, his merry
supper-parties, and the talents of young Ridley, his friend. When we
came to London in the spring, almost our first visit was to Clive’s
apartments in Charlotte Street, whither my wife delightedly went to
give her hand to the young painter.

But Clive no longer inhabited that quiet region. On driving to the
house we found a bright brass plate, with the name of Mr. J. J. Ridley
on the door, and it was J. J.’s hand which I shook (his other being
engaged with a great palette, and a sheaf of painting-brushes) when we
entered the well-known quarters. Clive’s picture hung over the
mantelpiece, where his father’s head used to hang in our time—a careful
and beautifully executed portrait of the lad in a velvet coat and a
Roman hat, with that golden beard which was sacrificed to the
exigencies of London fashion. I showed Laura the likeness until she
could become acquainted with the original. On her expressing her
delight at the picture, the painter was pleased to say, in his modest
blushing way, that he would be glad to execute my wife’s portrait too,
nor, as I think, could any artist find a subject more pleasing.

After admiring others of Mr. Ridley’s works, our talk naturally
reverted to his predecessor. Clive had migrated to much more splendid
quarters. Had we not heard? he had become a rich man, a man of fashion.
“I fear he is very lazy about the arts,” said J. J., with regret on his
countenance; “though I begged and prayed him to be faithful to his
profession. He would have done very well in it, in portrait-painting
especially. Look here, and here, and here!” said Ridley, producing fine
vigorous sketches of Clive’s. “He had the art of seizing the likeness,
and of making all his people look like gentlemen, too. He was improving
every day, when this abominable bank came in the way, and stopped him.”

What bank? I did not know the new Indian bank of which the Colonel was
a director. Then, of course, I was aware that the mercantile affair in
question was the Bundelcund Bank, about which the Colonel had written
to me from India more than a year since, announcing that fortunes were
to be made by it, and that he had reserved shares for me in the
company. Laura admired all Clive’s sketches, which his affectionate
brother-artist showed to her with the exception of one representing the
reader’s humble servant; which, Mrs. Pendennis considered, by no means
did justice to the original.

Bidding adieu to the kind J. J., and leaving him to pursue his art, in
that silent serious way in which he daily laboured at it, we drove to
Fitzroy Square hard by, where I was not displeased to show the good old
hospitable James Binnie the young lady who bore my name. But here, too,
we were disappointed. Placards wafered in the windows announced that
the old house was to let. The woman who kept it brought a card in Mrs.
Mackenzie’s frank handwriting, announcing Mr. James Binnie’s address
was “Poste-restante, Pau, in the Pyrenees,” and that his London agents
were Messrs. So-and-so. The woman said she believed the gentleman had
been unwell. The house, too, looked very pale, dismal, and disordered.
We drove away from the door, grieving to think that ill-health, or any
other misfortunes, had befallen good old James.

Mrs. Pendennis drove back to our lodgings, Brixham’s, in Jermyn Street,
while I sped to the City, having business in that quarter. It has been
said that I kept a small account with Hobson Brothers, to whose bank I
went, and entered the parlour with that trepidation which most poor men
feel on presenting themselves before City magnates and capitalists. Mr.
Hobson Newcome shook hands most jovially and good-naturedly,
congratulated me on my marriage, and so forth, and presently Sir Barnes
Newcome made his appearance, still wearing his mourning for his
deceased father.

Nothing could be more kind, pleasant, and cordial than Sir Barnes’s
manner. He seemed to know well about my affairs; complimented me on
every kind of good fortune; had heard that I had canvassed the borough
in which I lived; hoped sincerely to see me in Parliament and on the
right side; was most anxious to become acquainted with Mrs. Pendennis,
of whom Lady Rockminster said all sorts of kind things; and asked for
our address, in order that Lady Clara Newcome might have the pleasure
of calling on my wife. This ceremony was performed soon afterwards; and
an invitation to dinner from Sir Barnes and Lady Clara Newcome speedily
followed it.

Sir Barnes Newcome, Bart., M.P., I need not say, no longer inhabited
the small house which he had occupied immediately after his marriage:
but dwelt in a much more spacious mansion in Belgravia, where he
entertained his friends. Now that he had come into his kingdom, I must
say that Barnes was by no means so insufferable as in the days of his
bachelorhood. He had sown his wild oats, and spoke with regret and
reserve of that season of his moral culture. He was grave, sarcastic,
statesmanlike; did not try to conceal his baldness (as he used before
his father’s death, by bringing lean wisps of hair over his forehead
from the back of his head); talked a great deal about the House; was
assiduous in his attendance there and in the City; and conciliating
with all the world. It seemed as if we were all his constituents, and
though his efforts to make himself agreeable were rather apparent, the
effect succeeded pretty well. We met Mr. and Mrs. Hobson Newcome, and
Clive, and Miss Ethel looking beautiful in her black robes. It was a
family party, Sir Barnes said, giving us to understand, with a decorous
solemnity in face and voice, that no _large_ parties as yet could be
received in that house of mourning.

To this party was added, rather to my surprise, my Lord Highgate, who
under the sobriquet of Jack Belsize has been presented to the reader of
this history. Lord Highgate gave Lady Clara his arm to dinner, but went
and took a place next Miss Newcome, on the other side of her; that
immediately by Lady Clara being reserved for a guest who had not as yet
made his appearance.

Lord Highgate’s attentions to his neighbour, his laughing and talking,
were incessant; so much so that Clive, from his end of the table,
scowled in wrath at Jack Belsize’s assiduities: it was evident that the
youth, though hopeless, was still jealous and in love with his charming
cousin.

Barnes Newcome was most kind to all his guests: from Aunt Hobson to
your humble servant, there was not one but the of master the house had
an agreeable word for him. Even for his cousin Samuel Newcome, a gawky
youth with an eruptive countenance, Barnes had appropriate words of
conversation, and talked about King’s College, of which the lad was an
ornament, with the utmost affability. He complimented that institution
and young Samuel, and by that shot knocked not only over Sam but his
mamma too. He talked to Uncle Hobson about his crops; to Clive about
his pictures; to me about the great effect which a certain article in
the _Pall Mall Gazette_ had produced in the House, where the Chancellor
of the Exchequer was perfectly livid with fury, and Lord John bursting
out laughing at the attack: in fact, nothing could be more amiable than
our host on this day. Lady Clara was very pretty—grown a little stouter
since her marriage; the change only became her. She was a little
silent, but then she had Uncle Hobson on her left-hand side, between
whom and her ladyship there could not be much in common, and the place
at the right hand was still vacant. The person with whom she talked
most freely was Clive, who had made a beautiful drawing of her and her
little girl, for which the mother and the father too, as it appeared,
were very grateful.

What had caused this change in Barnes’s behaviour? Our particular
merits or his own private reform? In the two years over which this
narrative has had to run in the course of as many chapters, the writer
had inherited a property so small that it could not occasion a banker’s
civility; and I put down Sir Barnes Newcome’s politeness to a sheer
desire to be well with me. But with Lord Highgate and Clive the case
was different, as you must now hear.

Lord Highgate, having succeeded to his father’s title and fortune, had
paid every shilling of his debts, and had sowed his wild oats to the
very last corn. His lordship’s account at Hobson Brothers was very
large. Painful events of three years’ date, let us hope, were
forgotten—gentlemen cannot go on being in love and despairing, and
quarrelling for ever. When he came into his funds, Highgate behaved
with uncommon kindness to Rooster, who was always straitened for money:
and when the late Lord Dorking died and Rooster succeeded to him, there
was a meeting at Chanticlere between Highgate and Barnes Newcome and
his wife, which went off very comfortably. At Chanticlere the Dowager
Lady Kew and Miss Newcome were also staying, when Lord Highgate
announced his prodigious admiration for the young lady; and, it was
said, corrected Farintosh, as a low-minded, foul-tongued young cub, for
daring to speak disrespectfully of her. Nevertheless, vous concevez,
when a man of the Marquis’s rank was supposed to look with the eyes of
admiration upon a young lady, Lord Highgate would not think of spoiling
sport, and he left Chanticlere declaring that he was always destined to
be unlucky in love. When old Lady Kew was obliged to go to Vichy for
her lumbago, Highgate said to Barnes, “Do ask your charming sister to
come to you in London; she will bore herself to death with the old
woman at Vichy, or with her mother at Rugby” (whither Lady Anne had
gone to get her boys educated), and accordingly Miss Newcome came on a
visit to her brother and sister, at whose house we have just had the
honour of seeing her.

When Rooster took his seat in the House of Lords, he was introduced by
Highgate and Kew, as Highgate had been introduced by Kew previously.
Thus these three gentlemen all rode in gold coaches; had all got
coronets on their heads; as you will, my respected young friend, if you
are the eldest son of a peer who dies before you. And now they were
rich, they were all going to be very good boys, let us hope. Kew, we
know, married one of the Dorking family, that second Lady Henrietta
Pulleyn, whom we described as frisking about at Baden, and not in the
least afraid of him. How little the reader knew, to whom we introduced
the girl in that chatty offhand way, that one day the young creature
would be a countess! But we knew it all the while—and, when she was
walking about with the governess, or romping with her sisters; and when
she had dinner at one o’clock; and when she wore a pinafore very
likely—we secretly respected her as the future Countess of Kew, and
mother of the Viscount Walham.

Lord Kew was very happy with his bride, and very good to her. He took
Lady Kew to Paris, for a marriage trip; but they lived almost
altogether at Kewbury afterwards, where his lordship sowed tame oats
now after his wild ones, and became one of the most active farmers of
his county. He and the Newcomes were not very intimate friends; for
Lord Kew was heard to say that he disliked Barnes more after his
marriage than before. And the two sisters, Lady Clara and Lady Kew, had
a quarrel on one occasion, when the latter visited London just before
the dinner at which we have just assisted—nay, at which we are just
assisting, took place,—a quarrel about Highgate’s attentions to Ethel,
very likely. Kew was dragged into it, and hot words passed between him
and Jack Belsize; and Jack did not go down to Kewbury afterwards,
though Kew’s little boy was christened after him. All these interesting
details about people of the very highest rank, we are supposed to
whisper in the reader’s ear as we are sitting at a Belgravian
dinner-table. My dear Barmecide friend, isn’t it pleasant to be in such
fine company?

And now we must tell how it is that Clive Newcome, Esq., whose eyes are
flashing fire across the flowers of the table at Lord Highgate, who is
making himself so agreeable to Miss Ethel—now we must tell how it is
that Clive and his cousin Barnes have grown to be friends again.

The Bundelcund Bank, which had been established for four years, had now
grown to be one of the most flourishing commercial institutions in
Bengal. Founded, as the prospectus announced, at a time when all
private credit was shaken by the failure of the great Agency Houses, of
which the downfall had carried dismay and ruin throughout the
Presidency, the B. B. had been established on the _only_ sound
principle of commercial prosperity—that is association. The native
capitalists, headed by the great firm of Rummun Loll and Co., of
Calcutta, had largely embarked in the B. B., and the officers of the
two services and the European mercantile body of Calcutta had been
invited to take shares in an institution which, to merchants, native
and English, civilian and military men, was alike advantageous and
indispensable. How many young men of the latter services had been
crippled for life by the ruinous cost of agencies, of which the profits
to the agents themselves were so enormous! The shareholders of the B.
B. were their own agents; and the greatest capitalist in India as well
as the youngest ensign in the service might invest at the largest and
safest premium, and borrow at the smallest interest, by becoming
according to his means, a shareholder in the B. B. Their correspondents
were established in each presidency and in every chief city of India,
as well as at Sydney, Singapore, Canton, and, of course. London. With
China they did, an immense opium-trade, of which the profits were so
great, that it was only in private sittings of the B. B. managing
committee that the details and accounts of these operations could be
brought forward. Otherwise the books of the bank were open to every
shareholder; and the ensign or the young civil servant was at liberty
at any time to inspect his own private account as well as the common
ledger. With New South Wales they carried on a vast trade in wool,
supplying that great colony with goods, which their London agents
enabled them to purchase in such a way as to give them the command of
the market. As if to add to their prosperity, coppermines were
discovered on lands in the occupation of the B. Banking Company, which
gave the most astonishing returns. And throughout the vast territories
of British India, through the great native firm of Rummun Loll and Co.,
the Bundelcund Banking Company had possession of the native markets.
The order from Birmingham for idols alone (made with their copper and
paid in their wool) was enough to make the Low Church party in England
cry out; and a debate upon this subject actually took place in the
House of Commons, of which the effect was to send up the shares of the
Bundelcund Banking Company very considerably upon the London Exchange.

The fifth half-yearly dividend was announced at twelve and a quarter
per cent of the paid-up capital: the accounts from the copper-mine sent
the dividend up to a still greater height, and carried the shares to an
extraordinary premium. In the third year of the concern, the house of
Hobson Brothers, of London, became the agents of the Bundelcund Banking
Company of India and amongst our friends, James Binnie, who had
prudently held out for some time and Clive Newcome, Esq., became
shareholders, Clive’s good father having paid the first instalments of
the lad’s shares up in Calcutta, and invested every rupee he could
himself command in this enterprise. When Hobson Brothers joined it, no
wonder James Binnie was convinced; Clive’s friend, the Frenchman, and
through that connexion the house of Higg, of Newcome and Manchester,
entered into the affair; and amongst the minor contributors in England
we may mention Miss Cann, who took a little fifty-pound-note share and
dear old Miss Honeyman; and J. J., and his father, Ridley, who brought
a small bag of saving—all knowing that their Colonel, who was eager
that his friends should participate in his good fortune, would never
lead them wrong. To Clive’s surprise Mrs. Mackenzie, between whom and
himself there was a considerable coolness, came to his chambers, and
with a solemn injunction that the matter between them should be quite
private, requested him to purchase 1500 pounds worth of Bundelcund
shares for her and her darling girls, which he did, astonished to find
the thrifty widow in possession of so much money. Had Mr. Pendennis’s
mind not been bent at this moment on quite other subjects, he might
have increased his own fortune by the Bundelcund Bank speculation; but
in these two years I was engaged in matrimonial affairs (having Clive
Newcome, Esq., as my groomsman on a certain interesting occasion). When
we returned from our tour abroad the India Bank shares were so very
high that I did not care to purchase, though I found an affectionate
letter from our good Colonel (enjoining me to make my fortune) awaiting
me at the agent’s, and my wife received a pair of beautiful Cashmere
shawls from the same kind friend.




CHAPTER XLIX.
Contains at least six more Courses and two Desserts


The banker’s dinner-party over, we returned to our apartments, having
dropped Major Pendennis at his lodgings, and there, as the custom is
amongst most friendly married couples, talked over the company and the
dinner. I thought my wife would naturally have liked Sir Barnes
Newcome, who was very attentive to her, took her to dinner as the
bride, and talked ceaselessly to her during the whole entertainment.

Laura said No—she did not know why—could there be any better reason?
There was a tone about Sir Barnes Newcome she did not like—especially
in his manner to women.

I remarked that he spoke sharply and in a sneering manner to his wife,
and treated one or two remarks which she made as if she was an idiot.

Mrs. Pendennis flung up her head as much as to say, “and so she is.”

_Mr. Pendennis_. What, the wife too, my dear Laura! I should have
thought such a pretty, simple, innocent young woman, with just enough
good looks to make her pass muster, who is very well bred and not
brilliant at all,—I should have thought such a one might have secured a
sister’s approbation.

_Mrs. Pendennis_. You fancy we are all jealous of one another. No
protests of ours can take that notion out of your heads. My dear Pen, I
do not intend to try. We are not jealous of mediocrity: we are not
patient of it. I dare say we are angry because we see men admire it so.
You gentlemen, who pretend to be our betters, give yourselves such airs
of protection, and profess such a lofty superiority over us, prove it
by quitting the cleverest woman in the room for the first pair of
bright eyes and dimpled cheeks that enter. It was those charms which
attracted you in Lady Clara, sir.

_Pendennis_. I think she is very pretty, and very innocent, and
artless.

_Mrs. P_. Not very pretty, and perhaps not so very artless.

_Pendennis_. How can you tell, you wicked woman? Are you such a
profound deceiver yourself, that you can instantly detect artifice in
others? O Laura!

_Mrs. P_. We can detect all sorts of things. The inferior animals have
instincts, you know. (I must say my wife is always very satirical upon
this point of the relative rank of the sexes.) One thing I am sure of
is, that she is not happy; and oh, Pen! that she does not care much for
her little girl.

_Pendennis_. How do you know that, my dear?

_Mrs. P_. We went upstairs to see the child after dinner. It was at my
wish. The mother did not offer to go. The child was awake and crying.
Lady Clara did not offer to take it. Ethel—Miss Newcome took it, rather
to my surprise, for she seems very haughty; and the nurse, who I
suppose was at supper, came running up at the noise, and then the poor
little thing was quiet.

_Pendennis_. I remember we heard the music as the dining-room door was
open; and Newcome said, “That is what you will have to expect,
Pendennis.”

_Mrs. P_. Hush, sir! If my baby cries, I think you must expect me to
run out of the room. I liked Miss Newcome after seeing her with the
poor little thing. She looked so handsome as she walked with it! I
longed to have it myself.

_Pendennis. Tout vient à fin, à qui sait_——

_Mrs. P_. Don’t be silly. What a dreadful dreadful place this great
world of yours is, Arthur; where husbands do not seem to care for their
wives; where mothers do not love their children; where children love
their nurses best; where men talk what they call gallantry!

_Pendennis_. What?

_Mrs. P_. Yes, such as that dreary, languid, pale, bald, cadaverous,
leering man whispered to me. Oh, how I dislike him! I am sure he is
unkind to his wife. I am sure he has a bad temper; and if there is any
excuse for——

_Pendennis_. For what?

_Mrs. P_. For nothing. But you heard yourself that he had a bad temper,
and spoke sneeringly to his wife. What could make her marry him?

_Pendennis_. Money, and the desire of papa and mamma. For the same
reason Clive’s flame, poor Miss Newcome, was brought out to-day; that
vacant seat at her side was for Lord Farintosh, who did not come. And
the Marquis not being present, the Baron took his innings. Did you not
see how tender he was to her, and how fierce poor Clive looked?

_Mrs. P_. Lord Highgate was very attentive to Miss Newcome, was he?

_Pendennis_. And some years ago, Lord Highgate was breaking his heart
about whom do you think? about Lady Clara Pulleyn, our hostess of last
night. He was Jack Belsize then, a younger son, plunged over head and
ears in debt; and of course there could be no marriage. Clive was
present at Baden when a terrible scene took place, and carried off poor
Jack to Switzerland and Italy, where he remained till his father died,
and he came into the title in which he rejoices. And now he is off with
the old love, Laura, and on with the new. Why do you look at me so? Are
you thinking that other people have been in love two or three times
too?

_Mrs. P_. I am thinking that I should not like to live in London,
Arthur.

And this was all that Mrs. Laura could be brought to say. When this
young woman chooses to be silent, there is no power that can extract a
word from her. It is true that she is generally in the right; but that
is only the more aggravating. Indeed, what can be more provoking, after
a dispute with your wife, than to find it is you, and not she, who has
been in the wrong?

Sir Barnes Newcome politely caused us to understand that the
entertainment of which we had just partaken was given in honour of the
bride. Clive must needs not be outdone in hospitality; and invited us
and others to a fine feast at the Star and Garter at Richmond, where
Mrs. Pendennis was placed at his right hand. I smile as I think how
much dining has been already commemorated in these veracious pages; but
the story is an everyday record; and does not dining form a certain
part of the pleasure and business of every day? It is at that pleasant
hour that our set has the privilege of meeting the other. The morning
man and woman alike devote to business; or pass mainly in the company
of their own kind. John has his office; Jane her household, her
nursery, her milliner, her daughters and their masters. In the country
he has his hunting, his fishing, his farming, his letters; she her
schools, her poor, her garden, or what not. Parted through the shining
hours, and improving them, let us trust, we come together towards
sunset only, we make merry and amuse ourselves. We chat with our pretty
neighbour, or survey the young ones sporting; we make love and are
jealous; we dance, or obsequiously turn over the leaves of Cecilia’s
music-book; we play whist, or go to sleep in the arm-chair, according
to our ages and conditions. Snooze gently in thy arm-chair, thou easy
bald-head! play your whist, or read your novel, or talk scandal over
your work, ye worthy dowagers and fogies! Meanwhile the young ones
frisk about, or dance, or sing, or laugh; or whisper behind curtains in
moonlit windows; or shirk away into the garden, and come back smelling
of cigars; nature having made them so to do.

Nature at this time irresistibly impelled Clive Newcome towards
love-making. It was pairing-season with him. Mr. Clive was now some
three-and-twenty years old: enough has been said about his good looks,
which were in truth sufficient to make him a match for the young lady
on whom he had set his heart, and from whom, during this entertainment
which he gave to my wife, he could never keep his eyes away for three
minutes. Laura’s did not need to be so keen as they were in order to
see what poor Clive’s condition was. She did not in the least grudge
the young fellow’s inattention to herself; or feel hurt that he did not
seem to listen when she spoke; she conversed with J. J., her neighbour,
who was very modest and agreeable; while her husband, not so well
pleased, had Mrs. Hobson Newcome for his partner during the chief part
of the entertainment. Mrs. Hobson and Lady Clara were the matrons who
gave the sanction of their presence to this bachelor-party. Neither of
their husbands could come to Clive’s little fête; had they not the City
and the House of Commons to attend? My uncle, Major Pendennis, was
another of the guests; who for his part found the party was what you
young fellows call very slow. Dreading Mrs. Hobson and her powers of
conversation, the old gentleman nimbly skipped out of her
neighbourhood, and fell by the side of Lord Highgate, to whom the Major
was inclined to make himself very pleasant. But Lord Highgate’s broad
back was turned upon his neighbour, who was forced to tell stories to
Captain Crackthorpe, which had amused dukes and marquises in former
days, and were surely quite good enough for any baron in this realm.
“Lord Highgate sweet upon _la belle_ Newcome, is he?” said the testy
Major afterwards. “He seemed to me to talk to Lady Clara the whole
time. When I awoke in the garden after dinner, as Mrs. Hobson was
telling one of her confounded long stories, I found her audience was
diminished to one. Crackthorpe, Lord Highgate, and Lady Clara, we had
all been sitting there when the bankeress cut in (in the mid of a very
good story I was telling them, which entertained them very much), and
never ceased talking till I fell off into a doze. When I roused myself,
begad, she was still going on. Crackthorpe was off, smoking a cigar on
the terrace: my Lord and Lady Clara were nowhere; and you four, with
the little painter, were chatting cosily in another arbour. Behaved
himself very well, the little painter. Doosid good dinner Ellis gave
us. But as for Highgate being _aux soins_ with _la belle Banquière_,
trust me, my boy, he is—upon my word, my dear, it seemed to me his
thoughts went quite another way. To be sure, Lady Clara is a _belle
Banquière_ too now. He, he, he! How could he say he had no carriage to
go home in? He came down in Crackthorpe’s cab, who passed us just now,
driving back young What-dye-call the painter.”

Thus did the Major discourse, as we returned towards the City. I could
see in the open carriage which followed us (Lady Clara Newcome’s) Lord
Highgate’s white hat, by Clive’s on the back seat.

Laura looked at her husband. The same thought may have crossed their
minds, though neither uttered it; but although Sir Barnes and Lady
Clara Newcome offered us other civilities during our stay in London, no
inducements could induce Laura to accept the proffered friendship of
that lady. When Lady Clara called, my wife was not at home; when she
invited us, Laura pleaded engagements. At first she bestowed on Miss
Newcome, too, a share of this haughty dislike, and rejected the
advances which that young lady, who professed to like my wife very
much, made towards an intimacy. When I appealed to her (for Newcome’s
house was after all a very pleasant one, and you met the best people
there), my wife looked at me with an expression of something like
scorn, and said: “Why don’t I like Miss Newcome? Of course because I am
jealous of her—all women, you know, Arthur, are jealous of such
beauties.” I could get for a long while no better explanation than
these sneers, for my wife’s antipathy towards this branch of the
Newcome family; but an event presently came which silenced my
remonstrances, and showed to me, that Laura had judged Barnes and his
wife only too well.

Poor Mrs. Hobson Newcome had reason to be sulky at the neglect which
all the Richmond party showed her, for nobody, not even Major
Pendennis, as we have seen, would listen to her intellectual
conversation; nobody, not even Lord Highgate, would drive back to town
in her carriage, though the vehicle was large and empty, and Lady
Clara’s barouche, in which his lordship chose to take a place, had
already three occupants within it:—but in spite of these rebuffs and
disappointments the virtuous lady of Bryanstone Square was bent upon
being good-natured and hospitable; and I have to record, in the present
chapter, yet one more feast of which Mr. and Mrs. Pendennis partook at
the expense of the most respectable Newcome family.

Although Mrs. Laura here also appeared, and had the place of honour in
her character of bride, I am bound to own my opinion that Mrs. Hobson
only made us the pretext of her party, and that in reality it was given
to persons of a much more exalted rank. We were the first to arrive,
our good old Major, the most punctual of men, bearing us company. Our
hostess was arrayed in unusual state and splendour; her fat neck was
ornamented with jewels, rich bracelets decorated her arms, and this
Bryanstone Square Cornelia had likewise her family jewels distributed
round her, priceless male and female Newcome gems, from the King’s
College youth, with whom we have made a brief acquaintance, and his
elder sister, now entering into the world, down to the last little
ornament of the nursery, in a prodigious new sash, with ringlets hot
and crisp from the tongs of a Marylebone hairdresser, We had seen the
cherub faces of some of these darlings pressed against the drawing-room
windows as our carriage drove up to the door; when, after a few
minutes’ conversation, another vehicle arrived, away they dashed to the
windows again, the innocent little dears crying out, “Here’s the
Marquis;” and in sadder tones, “No, it isn’t the Marquis,” by which
artless expressions they showed how eager they were to behold an
expected guest of a rank only inferior to Dukes in this great empire.

Putting two and two together, as the saying is, it was not difficult
for me to guess who the expected Marquis was—and, indeed, the King’s
College youth set that question at once to rest, by wagging his head at
me, and winking his eye, and saying, “We expect Farintosh.”

“Why, my dearest children,” Matronly Virtue exclaimed, “this anxiety to
behold the young Marquis of Farintosh, whom we expect at our modest
table, Mrs. Pendennis, to-day? Twice you have been at the window in
your eagerness to look for him. Louisa, you silly child, do you imagine
that his lordship will appear in his robes and coronet? Rodolf, you
absurd boy, do you think that a Marquis is other than a man? I have
never admired aught but intellect, Mrs. Pendennis; _that_, let us be
thankful, is the only true title to distinction in our country
nowadays.”

“Begad, sir,” whispers the old Major to me, “intellect may be a doosid
fine thing, but in my opinion, a Marquisate and eighteen or twenty
thousand a year—I should say the Farintosh property, with the Glenlivat
estate and the Roy property in England, must be worth nineteen thousand
a year at the very lowest figure and I remember when this young man’s
father was only Tom Roy, of the 42nd, with no hope of succeeding to the
title, and doosidly out at elbows too—I say what does the bankeress
mean by chattering about intellect? Hang me, a Marquis is a Marquis;
and Mrs. Newcome knows it as well as I do.” My good Major was growing
old, and was not unnaturally a little testy at the manner in which his
hostess received him. Truth to tell, she hardly took any notice of him
and cut down a couple of the old gentleman’s stories before he had been
five minutes in the room.

To our party presently comes the host in a flurried countenance, with a
white waistcoat, holding in his hand an open letter, towards which his
wife looks with some alarm. “How dy’ doo, Lady Clara, how dy’ doo,
Ethel?” he says, saluting those ladies, whom the second carriage had
brought to us. “Sir Barnes is not coming, that’s one place vacant;
that, Lady Clara, you won’t mind, you see him at home: but here’s a
disappointment for you, Miss Newcome, Lord Farintosh can’t come.”

At this, two of the children cry out “Oh! oh!” with such a melancholy
accent that Miss Newcome and Lady Clara burst out laughing.

“Got a dreadful toothache,” said Mr. Hobson; “here’s his letter.”

“Hang it, what a bore!” cries artless young King’s College.

“Why a bore, Samuel? A bore, as you call it, for Lord Farintosh, I
grant; but do you suppose that the high in station are exempt from the
ills of mortality? I know nothing more painful than a toothache,”
exclaims a virtuous matron, using the words of philosophy, but showing
the countenance of anger.

“Hang it, why didn’t he have it out?” says Samuel.

Miss Ethel laughed. “Lord Farintosh would not have that tooth out for
the world, Samuel,” she cried, gaily. “He keeps it in on purpose, and
it always aches when he does not want to go out to dinner.”

“I know _one_ humble family who will never ask him again,” Mrs. Hobson
exclaims, rustling in all her silks, and tapping her fan and her foot.
The eclipse, however, passes off her countenance and light is restored;
when at this moment, a cab having driven up during the period of
darkness, the door is flung open, and Lord Highgate is announced by a
loud-voiced butler.

My wife, being still the bride on this occasion, had the honour of
being led to the dinner-table by our banker and host. Lord Highgate was
reserved for Mrs. Hobson, who, in an engaging manner, requested poor
Clive to conduct his cousin Maria to dinner, handing over Miss Ethel to
another guest. Our Major gave his arm to Lady Clara, and I perceived
that my wife looked very grave as he passed the place where she sat,
and seated Lady Clara in the next chair to that which Lord Highgate
chanced to occupy. Feeling himself _en vein_, and the company being
otherwise rather mum and silent, my uncle told a number of delightful
anecdotes about the beau-monde of his time, about the Peninsular war,
the Regent, Brummell, Lord Steyne, Pea Green Payne, and so forth. He
said the evening was very pleasant, though some others of the party, as
it appeared to me, scarcely seemed to think so. Clive had not a word
for his cousin Maria, but looked across the table at Ethel all
dinner-time. What could Ethel have to say to her partner, old Colonel
Sir Donald M’Craw, who gobbled and drank, as his wont is, and if he had
a remark to make, imparted it to Mrs. Hobson, at whose right hand he
was sitting, and to whom, during the whole course, or courses, of the
dinner, my Lord Highgate scarcely uttered one single word?

His lordship was whispering all the while into the ringlets of Lady
Clara; they were talking a jargon which their hostess scarcely
understood, of people only known to her by her study of the Peerage.
When we joined the ladies after dinner, Lord Highgate again made way
towards Lady Clara, and at an order from her, as I thought, left her
ladyship, and strove hard to engage in a conversation with Mrs.
Newcome. I hope he succeeded in smoothing the frowns in that round
little face. Mrs. Laura, I own, was as grave as a judge all the
evening; very grave even and reserved with my uncle, when the hour for
parting came, and we took him home.

“He, he!” said the old man, coughing, and nodding his old head and
laughing in his senile manner, when I saw him on the next day; “that
was a pleasant evening we had yesterday; doosid pleasant, and I think
my two neighbours seemed to be uncommonly pleased with each other; not
an amusing fellow, that young painter of yours, though he is
good-looking enough, but there’s no conversation in him. Do you think
of giving a little dinner, Arthur, in return for these hospitalities?
Greenwich, hey, or something of that sort? I’ll go you halves, sir, and
we’ll ask the young banker and bankeress—not yesterday’s Amphitryon nor
his wife; no, no, hang it! but Barnes Newcome is a devilish clever,
rising man, and moves in about as good society as any in London. We’ll
ask him and Lady Clara and Highgate, and one or two more, and have a
pleasant party.”

But to this proposal, when the old man communicated it to her, in a
very quiet, simple, artful way, Laura, with a flushing face said No
quite abruptly, and quitted the room, rustling in her silks, and
showing at once dignity and indignation.

Not many more feasts was Arthur Pendennis, senior, to have in this
world. Not many more great men was he to flatter, nor schemes to wink
at, nor earthly pleasures to enjoy. His long days were well-nigh ended:
on his last couch, which Laura tended so affectionately, with his last
breath almost, he faltered out to me. “I had other views for you, my
boy, and once hoped to see you in a higher position in life; but I
begin to think now, Arthur, that I was wrong; and as for that girl,
sir, I am sure she is an angel.”

May I not inscribe the words with a grateful heart? Blessed he—blessed
though maybe undeserving—who has the love of a good woman.




CHAPTER L.
Clive in New Quarters


My wife was much better pleased with Clive than with some of his
relatives to whom I had presented her. His face carried a
recommendation with it that few honest people could resist. He was
always a welcome friend in our lodgings, and even our uncle the Major
signified his approval of the lad as a young fellow of very good
manners and feelings, who, if he chose to throw himself away and be a
painter, _ma foi_, was rich enough no doubt to follow his own caprices.
Clive executed a capital head of Major Pendennis, which now hangs in
our drawing-room at Fairoaks, and reminds me of that friend of my
youth. Clive occupied ancient lofty chambers in Hanover Square now. He
had furnished them in an antique manner, with hangings, cabinets,
carved work, Venice glasses, fine prints, and water-colour sketches of
good pictures by his own and other hands. He had horses to ride, and a
liberal purse full of paternal money. Many fine equipages drew up
opposite to his chambers: few artists had such luck as young Mr. Clive.
And above his own chambers were other three which the young gentleman
had hired, and where, says he, “I hope ere very long my dear old father
will be lodging with me. In another year he says he thinks he will be
able to come home; when the affairs of the Bank are quite settled. You
shake your head! why? The shares are worth four times what we gave for
them. We are men of fortune, Pen, I give you my word. You should see
how much they make of me at Baynes and Jolly’s, and how civil they are
to me at Hobson Brothers’! I go into the City now and then, and see our
manager, Mr. Blackmore. He tells me such stories about indigo, and
wool, and copper, and sicca rupees, and Company’s rupees. I don’t know
anything about the business, but my father likes me to go and see Mr.
Blackmore. Dear cousin Barnes is for ever asking me to dinner; I might
call Lady Clara Clara if I liked, as Sam Newcome does in Bryanstone
Square. You can’t think how kind they are to me there. My aunt
reproaches me tenderly for not going there oftener—it’s not very good
fun dining in Bryanstone Square, is it? And she praises my cousin Maria
to me—you should hear my aunt praise her! I have to take Maria down to
dinner; to sit by the piano and listen to her songs in all languages.
Do you know Maria can sing Hungarian and Polish, besides your common
German, Spanish, and Italian? Those I have at our _other_ agents’,
Baynes and Jolly’s—Baynes’s that is in the Regent’s Park, where the
girls are prettier and just as civil to me as at Aunt Hobson’s.” And
here Clive would amuse us by the accounts which he gave us of the
snares which the Misses Baynes, those young sirens of Regent’s Park,
set for him; of the songs which they sang to enchant him, the albums in
which they besought him to draw—the thousand winning ways which they
employed to bring him into their cave in York Terrace. But neither
Circe’s smiles nor Calypso’s blandishments had any effect on him; his
ears were stopped to their music, and his eyes rendered dull to their
charms by those of the flighty young enchantress with whom my wife had
of late made acquaintance.

Capitalist though he was, our young fellow was still very affable. He
forgot no old friends in his prosperity; and the lofty antique chambers
would not unfrequently be lighted up at nights to receive F. B. and
some of the old cronies of the Haunt, and some of the Gandishites, who,
if Clive had been of a nature that was to be spoiled by flattery, had
certainly done mischief to the young man. Gandish himself, when Clive
paid a visit to that illustrious artist’s Academy, received his former
pupil as if the young fellow had been a sovereign prince almost,
accompanied him to his horse; and would have held his stirrup as he
mounted; whilst the beautiful daughters of the house waved adieus to
him from the parlour-window. To the young men assembled in his Gandish
studio, was never tired of talking about Clive. The Professor would
take occasion to inform them that he had been to visit his
distinguished young friend, Mr. Newcome, son of Colonel Newcome; that
last evening he had been present at an elegant entertainment at Mr.
Newcome’s news apartments. Clive’s drawings were hung up in Gandish’s
gallery, and pointed out to visitors by the worthy Professor. On one or
two occasions, I was allowed to become a bachelor again, and
participate in these jovial meetings. How guilty my coat was on my
return home; how haughty the looks of the mistress of my house, as she
bade Martha carry away the obnoxious garment! How grand F. B. used to
be as president of Clive’s smoking-party, where he laid down the law,
talked the most talk, sang the jolliest song, and consumed the most
drink of all the jolly talkers and drinkers! Clive’s popularity rose
prodigiously; not only youngsters, but old practitioners of the fine
arts, lauded his talents. What a shame that his pictures were all
refused this year at the Academy! Alfred Smee, Esq., R.A., was
indignant at their rejection, but J. J. confessed with a sigh, and
Clive owned good-naturedly, that he had been neglecting his business,
and that his pictures were not so good as those of two years before. I
am afraid Mr. Clive went to too many balls and parties, to clubs and
jovial entertainments, besides losing yet more time in that other
pursuit we wot of. Meanwhile J. J. went steadily on with his work, no
day passed without a line: and Fame was not very far off, though this
he heeded but little; and Art, his sole mistress, rewarded him for his
steady and fond pursuit of her.

“Look at him,” Clive would say with a sigh. “Isn’t he the mortal of all
others the most to be envied! He is so fond of his art that in all the
world there is no attraction like it for him. He runs to his easel at
sunrise, and sits before it caressing his picture all day till
nightfall. He takes leave of it sadly when dark comes, spends the night
in a Life Academy, and begins next morning _da capo_. Of all the pieces
of good fortune which can befall a man, is not this the greatest: to
have your desire, and then never tire of it? I have been in such a rage
with my own shortcomings that I have dashed my foot through the
canvases, and vowed I would smash my palette and easel. Sometimes I
succeed a little better in my work, and then it will happen for half an
hour that I am pleased, but pleased at what? pleased at drawing Mr.
Muggins’s head rather like Mr. Muggins. Why, a thousand fellows can do
better, and when one day I reach my very best, yet thousands will be
able to do better still. Ours is a trade for which nowadays there is no
excuse unless one can be great in it: and I feel I have not the stuff
for that. No. 666. ‘Portrait of Joseph Muggins, Esq., Newcome, Great
George Street.’ No. 979. ‘Portrait of Mrs. Muggins, on her grey pony,
Newcome.’ No. 579. ‘Portrait of Joseph Muggins Esq.’s dog Toby,
Newcome’—this is—what I’m fit for. These are the victories I have set
myself on achieving. Oh, Mrs. Pendennis, isn’t it humiliating? Why
isn’t there a war? Why can’t I go and distinguish myself somewhere and
be a general? Why haven’t I a genius? I say, Pen, sir, why haven’t I a
genius? There is a painter who lives hard by, and who sends sometimes,
to beg me to come and look at his work. He is in the Muggins line too.
He gets his canvases with a good light upon them: excludes the
contemplation of all other objects, stands beside his pictures in an
attitude himself, and thinks that he and they are masterpieces.
Masterpieces! Oh me, what drivelling wretches we are! Fame!—except that
of just the one or two—what’s the use of it? I say, Pen, would you feel
particularly proud now if you had written Hayley’s poems? And as for a
second place in painting, who would care to be Caravaggio or Caracci? I
wouldn’t give a straw to be Caracci or Caravaggio. I would just as soon
be yonder artist who is painting up Foker’s Entire over the
public-house at the corner. He will have his payment afterwards, five
shillings a day, and a pot of beer. Your head a little more to the
light, Mrs. Pendennis, if you please. I am tiring you, I dare say, but
then, oh, I am doing it so badly!”

I, for my part, thought Clive was making a very pretty drawing of my
wife, and having affairs of my own to attend to, would often leave her
at his chambers as a sitter, or find him at our lodgings visiting her.
They became the very greatest friends. I knew the young fellow could
have no better friend than Laura; and not being ignorant of the malady
under which he was labouring, concluded naturally and justly that Clive
grew so fond of my wife, not for her sake entirely, but for his own,
because he could pour his heart out to her, and her sweet kindness and
compassion would soothe him in his unhappy condition.

Miss Ethel, I have said, also professed a great fondness for Mrs.
Pendennis; and there was that charm in the young lady’s manner which
speedily could overcome even female jealousy. Perhaps Laura determined
magnanimously to conquer it; perhaps she hid it so as to vex me and
prove the injustice of my suspicions: perhaps, honestly, she was
conquered by the young beauty, and gave her a regard and admiration
which the other knew she could inspire whenever she had the will. My
wife was fairly captivated by her at length. The untameable young
creature was docile and gentle in Laura’s presence; modest, natural,
amiable, full of laughter and spirits, delightful to see and to hear;
her presence cheered our quiet little household; her charm fascinated
my wife as it had subjugated poor Clive. Even the reluctant Farintosh
was compelled to own her power, and confidentially told his male
friends, that, hang it, she was so handsome, and so clever, and so
confoundedly pleasant and fascinating, and that—that he had been on the
point of popping the fatal question ever so many times, by Jove. “And
hang it, you know,” his lordship would say, “I don’t want to marry
until I have had my fling, you know.” As for Clive, Ethel treated him
like a boy, like a big brother. She was jocular, kind, pert, pleasant
with him, ordered him on her errands, accepted his bouquets and
compliments, admired his drawings, liked to hear him praised, and took
his part in all companies; laughed at his sighs, and frankly owned to
Laura her liking for him and her pleasure in seeing him. “Why,” said
she, “should not I be happy as long as the sunshine lasts? To-morrow, I
know, will be glum and dreary enough. When grandmamma comes back I
shall scarcely be able to come and see you. When I am settled in
life—eh! I shall be settled in life! Do not grudge me my holiday,
Laura. Oh, if you knew how stupid it is to be in the world, and how
much pleasanter to come and talk, and laugh, and sing, and be happy
with you, than to sit in that dreary Eaton Place with poor Clara!”

“Why do you stay in Eaton Place?” asks Laura.

“Why? because I must go out with somebody. What an unsophisticated
little country creature you are! Grandmamma is away, and I cannot go
about to parties by myself.”

“But why should you go to parties, and why not go back to your mother?”
says Mrs. Pendennis, gently.

“To the nursery, and my little sisters, and Miss Cann? I like being in
London best, thank you. You look grave? You think a girl should like to
be with her mother and sisters best? My dear mamma wishes me to be
here, and I stay with Barnes and Clara by grandmamma’s orders. Don’t
you know that I have been made over to Lady Kew, who has adopted me? Do
you think a young lady of my pretensions can stop at home in a damp
house in Warwickshire and cut bread-and-butter for little schoolboys?
Don’t look so very grave and shake your head so, Mrs. Pendennis! If you
had been bred as I have, you would be as I am. I know what you are
thinking, madam.”

“I am thinking,” said Laura, blushing and bowing her head—“I am
thinking, if it pleases God to give me children, I should like to live
at home at Fairoaks.” My wife’s thoughts, though she did not utter
them, and a certain modesty and habitual awe kept her silent upon
subjects so very sacred, went deeper yet. She had been bred to measure
her actions by a standard which the world may nominally admit, but
which it leaves for the most part unheeded. Worship, love, duty, as
taught her by the devout study of the Sacred Law which interprets and
defines it—if these formed the outward practice of her life, they were
also its constant and secret endeavours and occupation. She spoke but
very seldom of her religion, though it filled her heart and influenced
all her behaviour. Whenever she came to that sacred subject, her
demeanour appeared to her husband so awful that he scarcely dared to
approach it in her company, and stood without as this pure creature
entered into the Holy of Holies. What must the world appear to such a
person? Its ambitious rewards, disappointments, pleasures, worth how
much? Compared to the possession of that priceless treasure and
happiness unspeakable, a perfect faith, what has Life to offer? I see
before me now her sweet grave face, as she looks out from the balcony
of the little Richmond villa we occupied during the first happy year
after our marriage, following Ethel Newcome, who rides away, with a
staid groom behind her, to her brother’s summer residence, not far
distant. Clive had been with us in the morning, and had brought us
stirring news. The good Colonel was by this time on his way home. “If
Clive could tear himself away from London,” the good man wrote (and we
thus saw he was acquainted with the state of the young man’s mind),
“why should not Clive go and meet his father at Malta?” He was feverish
and eager to go; and his two friends strongly counselled him to take
the journey. In the midst of our talk Miss Ethel came among us. She
arrived flushed and in high spirits; she rallied Clive upon his gloomy
looks; she turned rather pale, as it seemed to us, when she heard the
news. Then she coldly told him she thought the voyage must be a
pleasant one, and would do him good: it was pleasanter than that
journey she was going to take herself with her dreary grandmother, to
those German springs which the old Countess frequented year after year.
Mr. Pendennis having business, retired to his study, whither presently
Mrs. Laura followed, having to look for her scissors, or a book she
wanted, or upon some pretext or other. She sate down in the conjugal
study; not one word did either of us say for a while about the young
people left alone in the drawing-room yonder. Laura talked about our
own home at Fairoaks, which our tenants were about to vacate. She vowed
and declared that we must live at Fairoaks; that Clavering, with all
its tittle-tattle and stupid inhabitants, was better than this wicked
London. Besides, there were some new and very pleasant families settled
in the neighbourhood. Clavering Park was taken by some delightful
people—“and you know, Pen, you were always very fond of fly-fishing,
and may fish the Brawl, as you used in old days, when—” The lips of the
pretty satirist who alluded to these unpleasant bygones were silenced
as they deserved to be by Mr. Pendennis. “Do you think, sir, I did not
know,” says the sweetest voice in the world, “when you went out on your
fishing excursions with Miss Amory?” Again the flow of words is checked
by the styptic previously applied.

“I wonder,” says Mr. Pendennis, archly, bending over his wife’s fair
hand—“I wonder whether this kind of thing is taking place in the
drawing-room?”

“Nonsense, Arthur. It is time to go back to them. Why, I declare, I
have been three-quarters of an hour away!”

“I don’t think they will much miss you, my dear,” says the gentleman.

“She is certainly very fond of him. She is always coming here. I am
sure it is not to hear you read Shakspeare, Arthur; or your new novel,
though it is very pretty. I wish Lady Kew and her sixty thousand pounds
were at the bottom of the sea.”

“But she says she is going to portion her younger brothers with a part
of it; she told Clive so,” remarks Mr. Pendennis.

“For shame! Why does not Barnes Newcome portion his younger brothers? I
have no patience with that——Why! Goodness! There is Clive going away,
actually! Clive! Mr. Newcome!” But though my wife ran to the
study-window and beckoned our friend, he only shook his head, jumped on
his horse, and rode away gloomily.

“Ethel had been crying when I went into the room,” Laura afterwards
told me. “I knew she had; but she looked up from some flowers over
which she was bending, began to laugh and rattle, would talk about
nothing but Lady Hautboi’s great breakfast the day before, and the most
insufferable Mayfair jargon; and then declared it was time to go home
and dress for Mrs. Booth’s _déjeûner_, which was to take place that
afternoon.”

And so Miss Newcome rode away—back amongst the roses and the
rouges—back amongst the fiddling, flirting, flattery, falseness—and
Laura’s sweet serene face looked after her departing. Mrs. Booth’s was
a very grand _déjeûner_. We read in the newspapers a list of the
greatest names there. A Royal Duke and Duchess; a German Highness, a
Hindoo Nabob, etc.; and, amongst the Marquises, Farintosh; and, amongst
the Lords, Highgate; and Lady Clara Newcome, and Miss Newcome, who
looked killing, our acquaintance Captain Crackthorpe informs us, and
who was in perfectly stunning spirits. “His Imperial Highness the Grand
Duke of Farintosh is wild about her,” the Captain said, “and our poor
young friend Clive may just go and hang himself. Dine with us at the
Gar and Starter? Jolly party. Oh! I forgot! married man now!” So
saying, the Captain entered the hostelry near which I met him, leaving
this present chronicler to return to his own home.




CHAPTER LI.
An Old Friend


I might open the present chapter as a contemporary writer of Romance is
occasionally in the habit of commencing his tales of Chivalry, by a
description of a November afternoon falling leaves, tawny forests,
gathering storms, and other autumnal phenomena; and two horsemen
winding up the romantic road which leads from—from Richmond Bridge to
the Star and Garter. The one rider is youthful, and has a blonde
moustache. The cheek of the other has been browned by foreign suns; it
is easy to see by the manner in which he bestrides his powerful charger
that he has followed the profession of arms. He looks as if he had
faced his country’s enemies on many a field of Eastern battle. The
cavaliers alight before the gate of a cottage on Richmond Hill, where a
gentleman receives them with eager welcome. Their steeds are
accommodated at a neighbouring hostelry,—I pause in the midst of the
description, for the reader has made the acquaintance of our two
horsemen long since. It is Clive returned from Malta, from Gibraltar,
from Seville, from Cadiz, and with him our dear old friend the Colonel.
His campaigns are over, his sword is hung up, he leaves Eastern suns
and battles to warm younger blood. Welcome back to England, dear
Colonel and kind friend! How quickly the years have passed since he has
been gone! There is a streak or two more silver in his hair. The
wrinkles about his honest eyes are somewhat deeper, but their look is
as steadfast and kind as in the early, almost boyish days when first we
knew them.

We talk a while about the Colonel’s voyage home, the pleasures of the
Spanish journey, the handsome new quarters in which Clive has installed
his father and himself, my own altered condition in life, and what not.
During the conversation a little querulous voice makes itself audible
above-stairs, at which noise Mr. Clive begins to laugh, and the Colonel
to smile. It is for the first time in his life Mr. Clive listens to the
little voice; indeed, it is only since about six weeks that that small
organ has been heard in the world at all. Laura Pendennis believes its
tunes to be the sweetest, the most interesting, the most
mirth-inspiring, the most pitiful and pathetic, that ever baby uttered;
which opinions, of course, are backed by Mrs. Hokey, the confidential
nurse. Laura’s husband is not so rapturous; but, let us trust, behaves
in a way becoming a man and a father. We forgo the description of his
feelings as not pertaining to the history at present under
consideration. A little while before the dinner is served, the lady of
the cottage comes down to greet her husband’s old friends.

And here I am sorely tempted to a third description, which has nothing
to do with the story, to be sure, but which, if properly his off might
fill half a page very prettily. For is not a young mother one of the
sweetest sights which life shows us? If she has been beautiful before,
does not her present pure joy give a character of refinement and
sacredness almost to her beauty, touch her sweet cheeks with fairer
blushes, and impart I know not what serene brightness to her eyes? I
give warning to the artist who designs the pictures for this veracious
story, to make no attempt at this subject. I never would be satisfied
with it were his drawing ever so good.

When Sir Charles Grandison stepped up and made his very beautifullest
bow to Miss Byron, I am sure his gracious dignity never exceeded that
of Colonel Newcome’s first greeting to Mrs. Pendennis. Of course from
the very moment they beheld one another they became friends. Are not
most of our likings thus instantaneous? Before she came down to see
him, Laura had put on one of the Colonel’s shawls—the crimson one, with
the red palm-leaves and the border of many colours. As for the white
one, the priceless, the gossamer, the fairy web, which might pass
through a ring, _that_, every lady must be aware, was already
appropriated to cover the cradle, or what I believe is called the
bassinet, of Master Pendennis.

So we all became the very best of friends; and during the winter months
whilst we still resided at Richmond, the Colonel was my wife’s constant
visitor. He often came without Clive. He did not care for the world
which the young gentleman frequented, and was more pleased and at home
by my wife’s fireside than at more noisy and splendid entertainments.
And, Laura being a sentimental person interested in pathetic novels and
all unhappy attachments, of course she and the Colonel talked a great
deal about Mr. Clive’s little affair, over which they would have such
deep confabulations that even when the master of the house appeared,
Pater Familias, the man whom, in the presence of the Rev. Dr. Portman,
Mrs. Laura had sworn to love and honour these two guilty ones would be
silent, or change the subject of conversation, not caring to admit such
an unsympathising person as myself into their conspiracy.

From many a talk which they have had together since the Colonel and his
son embraced at Malta, Clive’s father had been led to see how strongly
the passion which our friend had once fought and mastered, had now
taken possession of the young man. The unsatisfied longing left him
indifferent to all other objects of previous desire or ambition. The
misfortune darkened the sunshine of his spirit, and clouded the world
before his eyes. He passed hours in his painting-room, though he tore
up what he did there. He forsook his usual haunts, or appeared amongst
his old comrades moody and silent. From cigar-smoking, which I own to
be a reprehensible practice, he plunged into still deeper and darker
dissipation; for I am sorry to say, he took to pipes and the strongest
tobacco, for which there is _no_ excuse. Our young man was changed.
During the last fifteen or twenty months, the malady had been
increasing on him, of which we have not chosen to describe at length
the stages; knowing very well that the reader (the male reader at
least) does not care a fig about other people’s sentimental
perplexities, and is not wrapped up heart and soul in Clive’s affairs
like his father, whose rest was disturbed if the boy had a headache, or
who would have stripped the coat off his back to keep his darling’s
feet warm.

The object of this hopeless passion had, meantime, returned to the
custody of the dark old duenna, from which she had been liberated for a
while. Lady Kew had got her health again, by means of the prescriptions
of some doctors, or by the efficacy of some baths; and was again on
foot and in the world, tramping about in her grim pursuit of pleasure.
Lady Julia, we are led to believe, had retired upon half-pay, and into
an inglorious exile at Brussels, with her sister, the outlaw’s wife, by
whose bankrupt fireside she was perfectly happy. Miss Newcome was now
her grandmother’s companion, and they had been on a tour of visits in
Scotland, and were journeying from country-house to country-house about
the time when our good Colonel returned to his native shores.

The Colonel loved his nephew Barnes no better than before, perhaps,
though we must say that since his return from India the young Baronet’s
conduct had been particularly friendly. “No doubt marriage had improved
him; Lady Clara seemed a good-natured young woman enough; besides,”
says the Colonel, wagging his good old head knowingly, “Tom Newcome, of
the Bundelcund Bank, is a personage to be conciliated; whereas Tom
Newcome, of the Bengal Cavalry, was not worth Master Barnes’s
attention. He has been very good and kind on the whole; so have his
friends been uncommonly civil. There was Clive’s acquaintance, Mr.
Belsize that was, Lord Highgate who is now, entertained our whole
family sumptuously last week—wants us and Barnes and his wife to go to
his country-house at Christmas—is as hospitable, my dear Mrs.
Pendennis, as man can be. He met you at Barnes’s, and as soon as we are
alone,” says the Colonel, turning round to Laura’s husband, “I will
tell you in what terms Lady Clara speaks of your wife. Yes. She is a
good-natured, kind little woman, that Lady Clara.” Here Laura’s face
assumed that gravity and severeness, which it always wore when Lady
Clara’s name was mentioned, and the conversation took another turn.

Returning home from London one afternoon, I met the Colonel, who hailed
me on the omnibus, and rode on his way towards the City, I knew, of
course, that he had been colloquying with my wife; and taxed that young
woman with these continued flirtations. “Two or three times a week,
Mrs. Laura, you dare to receive a Colonel of Dragoons. You sit for
hours closeted with the young fellow of sixty; you change the
conversation when your own injured husband enters the room, and pretend
to talk about the weather, or the baby. You little arch hypocrite, you
know you do. Don’t try to humbug me, miss; what will Richmond, what
will society, what will Mrs. Grundy in general say to such atrocious
behaviour?”

“Oh! Pen,” says my wife, closing my mouth in a way which I do not
choose further to particularise; “that man is the best, the dearest,
the kindest creature. I never knew such a good man; you ought to put
him into a book. Do you know, sir, that I felt the very greatest desire
to give him a kiss when he went away; and that one which you had just
now, was intended for him.

“Take back thy gift, false girl!” says Mr Pendennis; and then, finally,
we come to the particular circumstance which had occasioned so much
enthusiasm on Mrs. Laura’s part.

Colonel Newcome had summoned heart of grace, and in Clive’s behalf had
regularly proposed him to Barnes, as a suitor to Ethel, taking an
artful advantage of his nephew Barnes Newcome, and inviting that Barnes
to a private meeting, where they were to talk about the affairs of the
Bundelcund Banking Company.

Now this Bundelcund Banking Company, in the Colonel’s eyes, was in
reality his son Clive. But for Clive there might have been a hundred
banking companies established, yielding a hundred per cent, in as many
districts of India, and Thomas Newcome, who had plenty of money for his
own wants, would never have thought of speculation. His desire was to
see his boy endowed with all the possible gifts of fortune. Had he
built a palace for Clive, and been informed that a roc’s egg was
required to complete the decoration of the edifice, Tom Newcome would
have travelled to the world’s end in search of the wanting article. To
see Prince Clive ride in a gold coach with a princess beside him, was
the kind old Colonel’s ambition; that done, he would be content to
retire to a garret in the prince’s castle, and smoke his cheroot there
in peace. So the world is made. The strong and eager covet honour and
enjoyment for themselves; the gentle and disappointed (once, they may
have been strong and eager, too) desire these gifts for their children.
I think Clive’s father never liked or understood the lad’s choice of a
profession. He acquiesced in it as he would in any of his son’s wishes.
But, not being a poet himself, he could not see the nobility of that
calling; and felt secretly that his son was demeaning himself by
pursuing the art of painting. “Had he been a soldier, now,” thought
Thomas Newcome, “(though I prevented that) had he been richer than he
is, he might have married Ethel, instead of being unhappy as he now is,
God help him! I remember my own time of grief well enough: and what
years it took before my wound was scarred over.”

So with these things occupying his brain Thomas Newcome artfully
invited Barnes, his nephew, to dinner under pretence of talking of the
affairs of the great B. B. C. With the first glass of wine at dessert,
and according to the Colonel’s good old-fashioned custom of proposing
toasts, they drank the health of the B. B. C. Barnes drank the toast
with all his generous heart. The B. B. C. sent to Hobson Brothers and
Newcome a great deal of business, was in a most prosperous condition,
kept a great balance at the bank, a balance that would not be
overdrawn, as Sir Barnes Newcome very well knew. Barnes was for having
more of these bills, provided there were remittances to meet the same.
Barnes was ready to do any amount of business with the Indian bank, or
with any bank, or with any individual, Christian or heathen, white or
black, who could do good to the firm of Hobson Brothers and Newcome. He
spoke upon this subject with great archness and candour: of course as a
City man he would be glad to do a profitable business anywhere, and the
B. B. C.’s business was profitable. But the interested motive which he
admitted frankly as a man of the world, did not prevent other
sentiments more agreeable. “My dear Colonel,” says Barnes, “I am happy,
most happy, to think that our house and our name should have been
useful, as I know they have been, in the establishment of a concern in
which one of our family is interested; one whom we all so sincerely
respect and regard.” And he touched his glass with his lips and blushed
a little, as he bowed towards his uncle. He found himself making a
little speech, indeed; and to do so before one single person seems
rather odd. Had there been a large company present Barnes would not
have blushed at all, but have tossed off his glass, struck his
waistcoat possibly, and looked straight in the face of his uncle as the
chairman; well, he _did_ very likely believe that he respected and
regarded the Colonel.

The Colonel said—“Thank you, Barnes, with all my heart. It is always
good for men to be friends, much more for blood relations, as we are.”

“A relationship which honours me, I’m sure!” says Barnes, with a tone
of infinite affability. You see, he believed that Heaven had made him
the Colonel’s superior.

“And I am very glad,” the elder went on, “that you and my boy are good
friends.”

“Friends! of course. It would be unnatural if such near relatives were
otherwise than good friends.”

“You have been hospitable to him, and Lady Clara very kind, and he
wrote to me telling me of your kindness. Ahem! this is tolerable
claret. I wonder where Clive gets it?”

“You were speaking about that indigo, Colonel!” here Barnes interposes.
“Our house has done very little in that way, to be sure but I suppose
that our credit is _about_ as good as Baines and Jolly’s, and if——” but
the Colonel is in a brown study.

“Clive will have a good bit of money when I die,” resumes Clive’s
father.

“Why, you are a hale man—upon my word, quite a young man, and may marry
again, Colonel,” replies the nephew fascinatingly.

“I shall never do that,” replies the other. “Ere many years are gone, I
shall be seventy years old, Barnes.”

“Nothing in this country, my dear sir! positively nothing. Why, there
was Titus, my neighbour in the country—when will you come down to
Newcome?—who married a devilish pretty girl, of very good family, too,
Miss Burgeon, one of the Devonshire Burgeons. He looks, I am sure,
twenty years older than you do. Why should not you do likewise?”

“Because I like to remain single, and want to leave Clive a rich man.
Look here, Barnes, you know the value of our bank shares, now?”

“Indeed I do; rather speculative; but of course I know what some sold
for last week,” says Barnes.

“Suppose I realise now. I think I am worth six lakhs. I had nearly two
from my poor father. I saved some before and since I invested in this
affair; and could sell out to-morrow with sixty thousand pounds.”

“A very pretty sum of money, Colonel,” says Barnes.

“I have a pension of a thousand a year.”

“My dear Colonel, you are a capitalist! we know it very well,” remarks
Sir Barnes.

“And two hundred a year is as much as I want for myself,” continues the
capitalist, looking into the fire, and jingling his money in his
pockets. “A hundred a year for a horse; a hundred a year for
pocket-money, for I calculate, you know, that Clive will give me a
bedroom and my dinner.”

“He! he! If your son won’t, your nephew will, my dear Colonel!” says
the affable Barnes, smiling sweetly.

“I can give the boy a handsome allowance, you see,” resumes Thomas
Newcome.

“You can make him a handsome allowance now, and leave him a good
fortune when you die!” says the nephew, in a noble and courageous
manner,—and as if he said Twelve times twelve are a hundred and
forty-four and you have Sir Barnes Newcome’s authority—Sir Barnes
Newcome’s, mind you—to say so.

“Not when I die, Barnes,” the uncle goes on. “I will give him every
shilling I am worth to-morrow morning, if he marries as I wish him.”

“Tant mieux pour lui!” cries the nephew; and thought to himself, “Lady
Clara must ask Clive to dinner instantly. Confound the fellow. I hate
him—always have; but what luck he has!”

“A man with that property may pretend to a good wife, as the French
say; hey Barnes?” asks the Colonel, rather eagerly looking up in his
nephew’s face.

That countenance was lighted up with a generous enthusiasm. “To any
woman, in any rank—to a nobleman’s daughter, my dear sir!” exclaims Sir
Barnes.

“I want your sister; I want dear Ethel for him, Barnes,” cries Thomas
Newcome, with a trembling voice, and a twinkle in his eyes. “That was
the hope I always had till my talk with your poor father stopped it.
Your sister was engaged to my Lord Kew then; and my wishes of course
were impossible. The poor boy is very much cut up, and his whole heart
is bent upon possessing her. She is not, she can’t be, indifferent to
him. I am sure she would not be, if her family in the least encouraged
him. Can either of these young folks have a better chance of happiness
again offered to them in life? There’s youth, there’s mutual liking,
there’s wealth for them almost—only saddled with the encumbrance of an
old dragoon, who won’t be much in their way. Give us your good word,
Barnes, and let them come together; and upon my word the rest of my
days will be made happy if I can eat my meal at their table.”

Whilst the poor Colonel was making his appeal, Barnes had time to
collect his answer; which, since in our character of historians we take
leave to explain gentlemen’s motives as well as record their speeches
and actions, we may thus interpret. “Confound the young beggar!” thinks
Barnes, then. “He will have three or four thousand a year, will he?
Hang him, but it’s a good sum of money. What a fool his father is to
give it away! Is he joking? No, he was always half crazy—the Colonel.
Highgate seemed uncommonly sweet on her, and was always hanging about
our house. Farintosh has not been brought to book yet; and perhaps
neither of them will propose for her. My grandmother, I should think,
won’t hear of her making a low marriage, as this certainly is: but it’s
a pity to throw away four thousand a year, ain’t it?” All these natural
calculations passed briskly through Barnes Newcome’s mind, as his
uncle, from the opposite side of the fireplace, implored him in the
above little speech.

“My dear Colonel,” said Barnes, “my dear, kind Colonel! I needn’t tell
you that your proposal flatters us, as much as your extraordinary
generosity surprises me. I never heard anything like it—never. Could I
consult my own wishes I would at once—I would, permit me to say, from
sheer admiration of your noble character, say yes, with all my heart,
to your proposal. But, alas, I haven’t that power.”

“Is—is she engaged?” asks the Colonel, looking as blank and sad as
Clive himself when Ethel had conversed with him.

“No—I cannot say engaged—though a person of the very highest rank has
paid her the most marked attention. But my sister has, in a way, gone
from our family, and from my influence as the head of it—an influence
which I, I am sure, had most gladly exercised in your favour. My
grandmother, Lady Kew, has adopted her; purposes, I believe, to leave
Ethel the greater part of her fortune, upon certain conditions; and, of
course, expects the—the obedience, and so forth, which is customary in
such cases. By the way, Colonel, is our young soupirant aware that papa
is pleading his cause for him?”

The Colonel said no; and Barnes lauded the caution which his uncle had
displayed. It was quite as well for the young man’s interests (which
Sir Barnes had most tenderly at heart) that Clive Newcome should not
himself move in the affair, or present himself to Lady Kew. Barnes
would take the matter in hand at the proper season; the Colonel might
be sure it would be most eagerly, most ardently pressed. Clive came
home at this juncture, whom Barnes saluted affectionately. He and the
Colonel had talked over their money business; their conversation had
been most satisfactory, thank you. “Has it not, Colonel?” The three
parted the very best of friends.

As Barnes Newcome professed that extreme interest for his cousin and
uncle, it is odd he did not tell them that Lady Kew and Miss Ethel
Newcome were at that moment within a mile of them, at her ladyship’s
house in Queen Street, Mayfair. In the hearing of Clive’s servant,
Barnes did not order his brougham to drive to Queen Street, but waited
until he was in Bond Street before he gave the order.

And, of course, when he entered Lady Kew’s house, he straightway asked
for his sister, and communicated to her the generous offer which the
good Colonel had made.

You see, Lady Kew was in town, and not in town. Her ladyship was but
passing through, on her way from a tour of visits in the North, to
another tour of visits somewhere else. The newspapers were not even off
the blinds. The proprietor of the house cowered over a bed-candle and a
furtive teapot in the back drawing-room. Lady Kew’s gens were not here.
The tall canary ones with white polls, only showed their plumage and
sang in spring. The solitary wretch who takes charge of London houses,
and the two servants specially affected to Lady Kew’s person, were the
only people in attendance. In fact, her ladyship was not in town. And
that is why, no doubt, Barnes Newcome said nothing about her being
there.




CHAPTER LII.
Family Secrets


The figure cowering over the furtive teapot glowered grimly at Barnes
as he entered; and an old voice said—“Ho, it’s you!”

“I have brought you the notes, ma’am,” says Barnes, taking a packet of
those documents from his pocket-book. “I could not come sooner, I have
been engaged upon bank business until now.”

“I dare say! You smell of smoke like a courier.”

“A foreign capitalist: he would smoke. They will, ma’am. _I_ didn’t
smoke, upon my word.”

“I don’t see why you shouldn’t, if you like it. You will never get
anything out of me whether you do or don’t. How is Clara? Is she gone
to the country with the children? Newcome is the best place for her.”

“Doctor Bambury thinks she can move in a fortnight. The boy has had a
little——”

“A little fiddlestick! I tell you it is she who likes to stay, and
makes that fool, Bambury, advise her not going away. I tell you to send
her to Newcome. The air is good for her.”

“By that confounded smoky town, my dear Lady Kew?”

“And invite your mother and little brothers and sisters to stay
Christmas there. The way in which you neglect them is shameful, it is,
Barnes.”

“Upon my word, ma’am, I propose to manage my own affairs without your
ladyship’s assistance,” cries Barnes, starting up, “and did not come at
this time of night to hear this kind of——”

“Of good advice. I sent for you to give it you. When I wrote to you to
bring me the money I wanted it was but a pretext; Barkins might have
fetched it from the City in the morning. I want you to send Clara and
the children to Newcome. They ought to go, sir. That is why I sent for
you; to tell you that. Have you been quarrelling as much as usual?”

“Pretty much as usual,” says Barnes, drumming on his hat.

“Don’t beat that devil’s tattoo; you agacez my poor old nerves. When
Clara was given to you she was as well broke a girl as any in London.”

Sir Barnes responded by a groan.

“She was as gentle and amenable to reason, as good-natured a girl as
could be; a little vacant and silly, but you men like dolls for your
wives; and now in three years you have utterly spoiled her. She is
restive, she is artful, she flies into rages, she fights you and beats
you. He! he! and that comes of your beating her!”

“I didn’t come to hear this, ma’am,” says Barnes, livid with rage

“You struck her, you know you did, Sir Barnes Newcome. She rushed over
to me last year on the night you did it, you know she did.”

“Great God, ma’am! You know the provocation,” screams Barnes.

“Provocation or not, I don’t say. But from that moment she has beat
you. You fool, to write her a letter and ask her pardon. If I had been
a man I would rather have strangled my wife, than have humiliated
myself so before her. She will never forgive that blow.”

“I was mad when I did it; and she drove me mad,” says Barnes. “She has
the temper of a fiend, and the ingenuity of the devil. In two years an
entire change has come over her. If I had used a knife to her I should
not have been surprised. But it is not with you to reproach me about
Clara. Your ladyship found her for me.”

“And you spoilt her after she was found, sir. She told me part of her
story that night she came to me. I know it is true, Barnes. You have
treated her dreadfully, sir.”

“I know that she makes my life miserable, and there is no help for it,”
says Barnes, grinding a curse between his teeth. “Well, well, no more
about this. How is Ethel? Gone to sleep after her journey? What do you
think, ma’am, I have brought for her? A proposal.”

“Bon Dieu! You don’t mean to say Charles Belsize was in earnest!” cries
the dowager. “I always thought it was a——”

“It is not from Lord Highgate, ma’am,” Sir Barnes said, gloomily. “It
is some time since I have known that he was not in earnest; and he
knows that I am now.”

“Gracious goodness! come to blows with him, too? You have not? That
would be the very thing to make the world talk,” says the dowager, with
some anxiety.

“No,” answers Barnes. “He knows well enough that there can be no open
rupture. We had some words the other day at a dinner he gave at his own
house; Colonel Newcome and that young beggar, Clive, and that fool, Mr.
Hobson, were there. Lord Highgate was confoundedly insolent. He told me
that I did not dare to quarrel with him because of the account he kept
at our house. I should like to have massacred him! She has told him
that I struck her,—the insolent brute—he says he will tell it at my
clubs; and threatens personal violence to me, there, if I do it again.
Lady Kew, I’m not safe from that man and that woman,” cries poor
Barnes, in an agony of terror.

“Fighting is Jack Belsize’s business, Barnes Newcome; banking is yours,
luckily,” said the dowager. “As old Lord Highgate was to die and his
eldest son, too, it is a pity certainly they had not died a year or two
earlier, and left poor Clara and Charles to come together. You should
have married some woman in the serious way; my daughter Walham could
have found you one. Frank, I am told, and his wife go on very sweetly
together; her mother-in-law governs the whole family. They have turned
the theatre back into a chapel again: they have six little ploughboys
dressed in surplices to sing the service; and Frank and the Vicar of
Kewbury play at cricket with them on holidays. Stay, why should not
Clara go to Kewbury?”

“She and her sister have quarrelled about this very affair with Lord
Highgate. Some time ago it appears they had words about it and when I
told Kew that bygones had best be bygones, that Highgate was very sweet
upon Ethel now, and that I did not choose to lose such a good account
as his, Kew was very insolent to me; his conduct was blackguardly,
ma’am, quite blackguardly, and you may be sure but for our relationship
I would have called him to——”

Here the talk between Barnes and his ancestress was interrupted by the
appearance of Miss Ethel Newcome, taper in hand, who descended from the
upper regions enveloped in a shawl.

“How do you do, Barnes? How is Clara? I long to see my little nephew.
Is he like his pretty papa?” cries the young lady, giving her fair
cheek to her brother.

“Scotland has agreed with our Newcome rose,” says Barnes, gallantly.
“My dear Ethel, I never saw you in greater beauty.”

“By the light of one bedroom candle! what should I be if the whole room
were lighted? You would see my face then was covered all over with
wrinkles, and quite pale and woebegone, with the dreariness of the
Scotch journey. Oh, what a time we have spent! haven’t we, grandmamma?
I never wish to go to a great castle again; above all, I never wish to
go to a little shooting-box. Scotland may be very well for men; but for
women—allow me to go to Paris when next there is talk of a Scotch
expedition. I had rather be in a boarding-school in the Champs Elysées
than in the finest castle in the Highlands. If it had not been for a
blessed quarrel with Fanny Follington, I think I should have died at
Glen Shorthorn. Have you seen my dear, dear uncle, the Colonel? When
did he arrive?”

“Is he come? Why is he come?” asks Lady Kew.

“Is he come? Look here, grandmamma! did you ever see such a darling
shawl! I found it in a packet in my room.”

“Well, it is beautiful,” cries the Dowager, bending her ancient nose
over the web. “Your Colonel is a galant homme. That must be said of
him; and in this does not quite take after the rest of the family. Hum!
hum! is he going away again soon?”

“He has made a fortune, a very considerable fortune for a man in that
rank in life,” says Sir Barnes. “He cannot have less than sixty
thousand pounds.”

“Is that much?” asks Ethel.

“Not in England, at our rate of interest; but his money is in India,
where he gets a great percentage. His income must be five or six
thousand pounds, ma’am,” says Barnes, turning to Lady Kew.

“A few of the Indians were in society in my time, my dear,” says Lady
Kew, musingly. “My father has often talked to me about Barbell of
Stanstead, and his house in St. James’s Square; the man who ordered
more curricles when there were not carriages enough for his guests. I
was taken to Mr. Hastings’s trial. It was very stupid and long. The
young man, the painter, I suppose will leave his paint-pots now, and
set up as a gentleman. I suppose they were very poor, or his father
would not have put him to such a profession. Barnes, why did you not
make him a clerk in the bank, and save him from the humiliation?”

“Humiliation! why, he is proud of it. My uncle is as proud as a
Plantagenet; though he is as humble as—as what! Give me a simile
Barnes. Do you know what my quarrel with Fanny Follington was about?
She said we were not descended from the barber-surgeon, and laughed at
the Battle of Bosworth. She says our great-grandfather was a weaver.
Was he a weaver?”

“How should I know? and what on earth does it matter, my child? Except
the Gaunts, the Howards, and one or two more, there is scarcely any
good blood in England. You are lucky in sharing some of mine. My poor
Lord Kew’s grandfather was an apothecary at Hampton Court, and founded
the family by giving a dose of rhubarb to Queen Caroline. As a rule,
nobody is of a good family. Didn’t that young man, that son of the
Colonel’s, go about last year? How did he get in society? Where did we
meet him? Oh! at Baden, yes; when Barnes was courting, and my
grandson—yes, my grandson, acted so wickedly.” Here she began to cough,
and to tremble so, that her old stick shook under her hand. “Ring the
bell for Ross. Ross, I will go to bed. Go you too, Ethel. You have been
travelling enough to-day.”

“Her memory seems to fail her a little,” Ethel whispered to her
brother; “or she will only remember what she wishes. Don’t you see that
she has grown very much older?”

“I will be with her in the morning. I have business with her,” said
Barnes.

“Good night. Give my love to Clara, and kiss the little ones for me.
Have you done what you promised me, Barnes?”

“What?”

“To be—to be kind to Clara. Don’t say cruel things to her. She has a
high spirit, and she feels them, though she says nothing.”

“_Doesn’t_ she?” said Barnes, grimly.

“Ah, Barnes, be gentle with her. Seldom as I saw you together, when I
lived with you in the spring, I could see that you were harsh, though
she affected to laugh when she spoke of your conduct to her. Be kind. I
am sure it is the best, Barnes; better than all the wit in the world.
Look at grandmamma, how witty she was and is; what a reputation she
had, how people were afraid of her; and see her now—quite alone.”

“I’ll see her in the morning quite alone, my dear,” says Barnes, waving
a little gloved hand. “Bye-bye!” and his brougham drove away. While
Ethel Newcome had been under her brother’s roof, where I and friend
Clive, and scores of others, had been smartly entertained, there had
been quarrels and recriminations, misery and heart-burning, cruel words
and shameful struggles, the wretched combatants in which appeared
before the world with smiling faces, resuming their battle when the
feast was concluded and the company gone.

On the next morning, when Barnes came to visit his grandmother, Miss
Newcome was gone away to see her sister-in-law, Lady Kew said, with
whom she was going to pass the morning; so Barnes and Lady Kew had an
uninterrupted _tête-à-tête_, in which the former acquainted the old
lady with the proposal which Colonel Newcome had made to him on the
previous night.

Lady Kew wondered what the impudence of the world’s would come to. An
artist propose for Ethel! One of her footmen might propose next, and
she supposed Barnes would bring the message. “The father came and
proposed for this young painter, and you didn’t order him out of the
room!”

Barnes laughed. “The Colonel is one of my constituents. I can’t afford
to order the Bundelcund Banking Company out of its own room.”

“You did not tell Ethel this pretty news, I suppose?”

“Of course I didn’t tell Ethel. Nor did I tell the Colonel that Ethel
was in London. He fancies her in Scotland with your ladyship at this
moment.”

“I wish the Colonel were at Calcutta, and his son with him. I wish he
was in the Ganges, I wish he was under Juggernaut’s car,” cried the old
lady. “How much money has the wretch really got? If he is of importance
to the bank, of course you must keep well with him. Five thousand a
year, and he says he will settle it all on his son? He must be crazy.
There is nothing some of these people will not do, no sacrifice they
will not make, to ally themselves with good families. Certainly you
must remain on good terms with him and his bank. And we must say
nothing of the business to Ethel, and trot out of town as quickly as we
can. Let me see? We go to Drummington on Saturday. This is Tuesday.
Barkins, you will keep the front drawing-room shutters shut, and
remember we are not in town, unless Lady Glenlivat or Lord Farintosh
should call.”

“Do you think Farintosh will—will call, ma’am?” asked Sir Barnes
demurely.

“He will be going through to Newmarket. He has been where we have been
at two or three places in Scotland,” replies the lady, with equal
gravity. “His poor mother wishes him to give up his bachelor’s life—as
well she may—for you young men are terribly dissipated. Rossmont is
quite a regal place. His Norfolk house is not inferior. A young man of
that station ought to marry, and live at his places, and be an example
to his people, instead of frittering away his time at Paris and Vienna
amongst the most odious company.”

“Is he going to Drummington?” asks the grandson.

“I believe he has been invited. We shall go to Paris for November: he
probably will be there,” answered the Dowager casually; “and tired of
the dissipated life he has been leading, let us hope he will mend his
ways, and find a virtuous, well-bred young woman to keep him right.”
With this her ladyship’s apothecary is announced, and her banker and
grandson takes his leave.

Sir Barnes walked into the City with his umbrella, read his letters,
conferred with his partners and confidential clerks; was for a while
not the exasperated husband, or the affectionate brother, or the
amiable grandson, but the shrewd, brisk banker, engaged entirely with
his business. Presently he had occasion to go on ’Change, or elsewhere,
to confer with brother-capitalists, and in Cornhill behold he meets his
uncle, Colonel Newcome, riding towards the India House, a groom behind
him.

The Colonel springs off his horse, and Barnes greets him in the
blandest manner. “Have you any news for me, Barnes?” cries the officer.

“The accounts from Calcutta are remarkably good. That cotton is of
admirable quality really. Mr. Briggs, of our house, who knows cotton as
well as any man in England, says——”

“It’s not the cotton, my dear Sir Barnes,” cries the other.

“The bills are perfectly good; there is no sort of difficulty about
them. Our house will take half a million of ’em, if——”

“You are talking of bills, and I am thinking of poor Clive,” the
Colonel interposes. “I wish you could give me good news for him,
Barnes.”

“I wish I could. I heartily trust that I may some day. My good wishes
you know are enlisted in your son’s behalf,” cries Barnes, gallantly.
“Droll place to talk sentiment in—Cornhill, isn’t it? But Ethel, as I
told you, is in the hands of higher powers, and we must conciliate Lady
Kew if we can. She has always spoken very highly of Clive; very.”

“Had I not best go to her?” asks the Colonel.

“Into the North, my good sir? She is—ah—she is travelling about. I
think you had best depend upon me, Good morning. In the City we have no
hearts, you know, Colonel. Be sure you shall hear from me as soon as
Lady Kew and Ethel come to town.”

And the banker hurried away, shaking his finger-tips to his uncle, and
leaving the good Colonel utterly surprised at his statements. For the
fact is, the Colonel knew that Lady Kew was in London, having been
apprised of the circumstance in the simplest manner in the world,
namely, by a note from Miss Ethel, which billet he had in his pocket,
whilst he was talking with the head of the house of Hobson Brothers:—

“My dear Uncle” (the note said), “how glad I shall be to see you! How
shall I thank you for the beautiful shawl, and the kind, kind
remembrance of me? I found your present yesterday evening, on our
arrival from the North. We are only here _en passant_, and see _nobody_
in Queen Street but Barnes, who has just been about business, and he
does not count, you know. I shall go and see Clara to-morrow, and make
her take me to see your pretty friend, Mrs. Pendennis. How glad I
should be if you _happened_ to pay Mrs. P. a visit _about two!_
Good-night. I thank you a thousand times, and am always your
affectionate E.”

“QUEEN STREET. Tuesday night. _Twelve o’clock_.”

This note came to Colonel Newcome’s breakfast-table, and he smothered
the exclamation of wonder which was rising to his lips, not choosing to
provoke the questions of Clive, who sate opposite to him. Clive’s
father was in a woeful perplexity all that forenoon. “Tuesday night,
twelve o’clock,” thought he. “Why, Barnes must have gone to his
grandmother from my dinner-table; and he told me she was out of town,
and said so again just now when we met in the City.” (The Colonel was
riding towards Richmond at this time.) “What cause had the young man to
tell me these lies? Lady Kew may not wish to be at home for me, but
need Barnes Newcome say what is untrue to mislead me? The fellow
actually went away simpering, and kissing his hand to me, with a
falsehood on his lips! What a pretty villain! A fellow would deserve,
and has got, a horse-whipping for less. And to think of a Newcome doing
this to his own flesh and blood; a young Judas!” Very sad and
bewildered, the Colonel rode towards Richmond, where he was to happen
to call on Mrs. Pendennis.

It was not much of a fib that Barnes had told. Lady Kew announcing that
she was out of town, her grandson, no doubt, thought himself justified
in saying so, as any other of her servants would have done. But if he
had recollected how Ethel came down with the Colonel’s shawl on her
shoulders, how it was possible she might have written to thank her
uncle, surely Barnes Newcome would not have pulled that unlucky
long-bow. The banker had other things to think of than Ethel and her
shawl.

When Thomas Newcome dismounted at the door of Honeymoon Cottage,
Richmond, the temporary residence of A. Pendennis, Esq., one of the
handsomest young women in England ran into the passage with
outstretched arms, called him her dear old uncle, and gave him two
kisses, that I dare say brought blushes on his lean sunburnt cheeks.
Ethel clung always to his affection. She wanted that man, rather than
any other in the whole world, to think well of her. When she was with
him, she was the amiable and simple, the loving impetuous creature of
old times. She chose to think of no other. Worldliness, heartlessness,
eager scheming, cold flirtations, marquis-hunting and the like,
disappeared for a while—and were not, as she sate at that honest man’s
side. O me! that we should have to record such charges against Ethel
Newcome!

“He was come home for good now? He would never leave that boy he
spoiled so, who was a good boy, too: she wished she could see him
oftener. At Paris, at Madame de Florac’s—I found out all about Madame
de Florac, sir,” says Miss Ethel, with a laugh—“we used often to meet
there; and here, sometimes, in London. But in London it was different.
You know what peculiar notions some people have; and as I live with
grandmamma, who is most kind to me and my brothers, of course I must
obey her, see her,” etc. etc. That the young lady went on talking,
defending herself, whom nobody attacked, protesting her dislike to
gaiety and dissipation—you would have fancied her an artless young
country lass, only longing to trip back to her village, milk her cows
at sunrise, and sit spinning of winter evenings by the fire.

“Why do you come and spoil my _tête-à-tête_ with my uncle, Mr.
Pendennis?” cries the young lady to the master of the house, who
happens to enter “Of all the men in the world the one I like best to
talk to! Does he not look younger than when he went to India? When
Clive marries that pretty little Miss Mackenzie, you will marry again,
uncle, and I will be jealous of your wife.”

“Did Barnes tell you that we had met last night, my dear?” asks the
Colonel.

“Not one word. Your shawl and your dear kind note told me you were
come. Why did not Barnes tell us? Why do you look so grave?”

“He has not told her that I was here, and would have me believe her
absent,” thought Newcome, as his countenance fell. “Shall I give her my
own message, and plead my poor boy’s cause with her?” I know not
whether he was about to lay his suit before her; he said himself
subsequently that his mind was not made up; but at this juncture, a
procession of nurses and babies made their appearance, followed by the
two mothers, who had been comparing their mutual prodigies (each lady
having her own private opinion)—Lady Clara and my wife—the latter for
once gracious to Lady Clara Newcome, in consideration of the infantine
company with which she came to visit Mrs. Pendennis.

Luncheon was served presently. The carriage of the Newcomes drove away,
my wife smilingly pardoning Ethel for the assignation which the young
person had made at our house. And when those ladies were gone, our good
Colonel held a council of war with us his two friends, and told us what
had happened between him and Barnes on that morning and the previous
night. His offer to sacrifice every shilling of his fortune to young
Clive seemed to him to be perfectly simple (though the recital of the
circumstance brought tears into my wife’s eyes)—he mentioned it by the
way, and as a matter that was scarcely to call for comment, much less
praise.

Barnes’s extraordinary statements respecting Lady Kew’s absence puzzled
the elder Newcome; and he spoke of his nephew’s conduct with much
indignation. In vain I urged that her ladyship desiring to be
considered absent from London, her grandson was bound to keep her
secret. “Keep her secret, yes! Tell me lies, no!” cries out the
Colonel. Sir Barnes’s conduct was in fact indefensible, though not
altogether unusual—the worst deduction to be drawn from it, in my
opinion, was, that Clive’s chance with the young lady was but a poor
one, and that Sir Barnes Newcome, inclined to keep his uncle in
good-humour, would therefore give him no disagreeable refusal.

Now this gentleman could no more pardon a lie than he could utter one.
He would believe all and everything a man told him until deceived once,
after which he never forgave. And wrath being once roused in his simple
mind and distrust firmly fixed there, his anger and prejudices gathered
daily. He could see no single good quality in his opponent; and hated
him with a daily increasing bitterness.

As ill luck would have it, that very same evening, at his return to
town, Thomas Newcome entered Bays’s club, of which, at our request, he
had become a member during his last visit to England, and there was Sir
Barnes, as usual, on his way homewards from the City. Barnes was
writing at a table, and sealing and closing a letter, as he saw the
Colonel enter; he thought he had been a little inattentive and curt
with his uncle in the morning; had remarked, perhaps, the expression of
disapproval on the Colonel’s countenance. He simpered up to his uncle
as the latter entered the clubroom, and apologised for his haste when
they met in the City in the morning—all City men were so busy! “And I
have been writing about that little affair, just as you came in,” he
said; “quite a moving letter to Lady Kew, I assure you, and I do hope
and trust we shall have a favourable answer in a day or two.”

“You said her ladyship was in the North, I think?” said the Colonel,
drily.

“Oh, yes—in the North, at—at Lord Wallsend’s—great coal-proprietor, you
know.”

“And your sister is with her?”

“Ethel is always with her.”

“I hope you will send her my very best remembrances,” said the Colonel.

“I’ll open the letter, and add ’em in a postscript,” said Barnes.

“Confounded liar?” cried the Colonel, mentioning the circumstance to me
afterwards, “why does not somebody pitch him out of the bow-window?”

If we were in the secret of Sir Barnes Newcome’s correspondence, and
could but peep into that particular letter to his grandmother, I dare
say we should read that he had seen the Colonel, who was very anxious
about his darling youth’s suit, but, pursuant to Lady Kew’s desire,
Barnes had stoutly maintained that her ladyship was still in the North,
enjoying the genial hospitality of Lord Wallsend. That of course he
should say nothing to Ethel, except with Lady Kew’s full permission:
that he wished her a pleasant trip to ——, and was, etc. etc.

Then if we could follow him, we might see him reach his Belgravian
mansion, and fling an angry word to his wife as she sits alone in the
darkling drawing-room, poring over the embers. He will ask her,
probably with an oath, why the —— she is not dressed? and if she always
intends to keep her company waiting? An hour hence, each with a smirk,
and the lady in smart raiment, with flowers in her hair, will be
greeting their guests as they arrive. Then will come dinner and such
conversation as it brings. Then at night Sir Barnes will issue forth,
cigar in mouth; to return to his own chamber at his own hour; to
breakfast by himself; to go Citywards, money-getting. He will see his
children once a fortnight, and exchange a dozen sharp words with his
wife twice in that time.

More and more sad does the Lady Clara become from day to day; liking
more to sit lonely over the fire; careless about the sarcasms of her
husband; the prattle of her children. She cries sometimes over the
cradle of the young heir. She is aweary, aweary. You understand, the
man to whom her parents sold her does not make her happy, though she
has been bought with diamonds, two carriages, several large footmen, a
fine country-house with delightful gardens, and conservatories, and
with all this she is miserable—is it possible?




CHAPTER LIII.
In which Kinsmen fall out


Not the least difficult part of Thomas Newcome’s present business was
to keep from his son all knowledge of the negotiation in which he was
engaged on Clive’s behalf. If my gentle reader has had sentimental
disappointments, he or she is aware that the friends who have given him
most sympathy under these calamities have been persons who have had
dismal histories of their own at some time of their lives, and I
conclude Colonel Newcome in his early days must have suffered very
cruelly in that affair of which we have a slight cognisance, or he
would not have felt so very much anxiety about Clive’s condition.

A few chapters back and we described the first attack, and Clive’s
manful cure: then we had to indicate the young gentleman’s relapse, and
the noisy exclamations of the youth under this second outbreak of
fever. Calling him back after she had dismissed him, and finding
pretext after pretext to see him,—why did the girl encourage him, as
she certainly did? I allow, with Mrs. Grundy and most moralists, that
Miss Newcome’s conduct in this matter was highly reprehensible; that if
she did not intend to marry Clive she should have broken with
him—altogether; that a virtuous young woman of high principle, etc.
etc., having once determined to reject a suitor, should separate from
him utterly then and there—never give him again the least chance of a
hope, or reillume the extinguished fire in the wretch’s bosom.

But coquetry, but kindness, but family affection, and a strong, very
strong partiality for the rejected lover—are these not to be taken in
account, and to plead as excuses for her behaviour to her cousin? The
least unworthy part of her conduct, some critics will say, was that
desire to see Clive and be well with him: as she felt the greatest
regard for him, the showing it was not blameable; and every flutter
which she made to escape out of the meshes which the world had cast
about her was but the natural effort at liberty. It was her prudence
which was wrong; and her submission wherein she was most culpable. In
the early church story, do we not read how young martyrs constantly had
to disobey worldly papas and mammas, who would have had them silent,
and not utter their dangerous opinions? how their parents locked them
up, kept them on bread-and-water, whipped and tortured them in order to
enforce obedience?—nevertheless they would declare the truth: they
would defy the gods by law established, and deliver themselves up to
the lions or the tormentors. Are not there Heathen Idols enshrined
among us still? Does not the world worship them, and persecute those
who refuse to kneel? Do not many timid souls sacrifice to them; and
other bolder spirits rebel and, with rage at their hearts, bend down
their stubborn knees at their altars? See! I began by siding with Mrs.
Grundy and the world, and at the next turn of the see-saw have lighted
down on Ethel’s side, and am disposed to think that the very best part
of her conduct has been those escapades which—which right-minded
persons most justly condemn. At least, that a young beauty should
torture a man with alternate liking and indifference; allure, dismiss,
and call him back out of banishment; practise arts to please upon him,
and ignore them when rebuked for her coquetry—these are surely
occurrences so common in young women’s history as to call for no
special censure; and if on these charges Miss Newcome is guilty, is
she, of all her sex, alone in her criminality?

So Ethel and her duenna went away upon their tour of visits to mansions
so splendid, and among hosts and guests so polite, that the present
modest historian does not dare to follow them. Suffice it to say that
Duke This and Earl That were, according to their hospitable custom,
entertaining a brilliant circle of friends at their respective castles,
all whose names the _Morning Post_ gave; and among them those of the
Dowager Countess of Kew and Miss Newcome.

During her absence, Thomas Newcome grimly awaited the result of his
application to Barnes. That Baronet showed his uncle a letter, or
rather a postscript, from Lady Kew, which probably had been dictated by
Barnes himself, in which the Dowager said she was greatly touched by
Colonel Newcome’s noble offer; that though she owned she had very
different views for her granddaughter, Miss Newcome’s choice of course
lay with herself. Meanwhile, Lady K. and Ethel were engaged in a round
of visits to the country, and there would be plenty of time to resume
this subject when they came to London for the season. And, lest dear
Ethel’s feelings should be needlessly agitated by a discussion of the
subject, and the Colonel should take a fancy to write to her privately,
Lady Kew gave orders that all letters from London should be despatched
under cover to her ladyship, and carefully examined the contents of the
packet before Ethel received her share of the correspondence.

To write to her personally on the subject of the marriage, Thomas
Newcome had determined was not a proper course for him to pursue. “They
consider themselves,” says he, “above us, forsooth, in their rank of
life (oh, mercy! what pigmies we are! and don’t angels weep at the
brief authority in which we dress ourselves up!) and of course the
approaches on our side must be made in regular form, and the parents of
the young people must act for them. Clive is too honourable a man to
wish to conduct the affair in any other way. He might try the influence
of his _beaux yeux_, and run off to Gretna with a girl who had nothing;
but the young lady being wealthy, and his relation, sir, we must be on
the point of honour; and all the Kews in Christendom shan’t have more
pride than we in this matter.”

All this time we are keeping Mr. Clive purposely in the background. His
face is so woebegone that we do not care to bring it forward in the
family picture. His case is so common that surely its lugubrious
symptoms need not be described at length. He works away fiercely at his
pictures, and in spite of himself improves in his art. He sent a
“Combat of Cavalry,” and a picture of “Sir Brian the Templar carrying
off Rebecca,” to the British Institution this year; both of which
pieces were praised in other journals besides the _Pall Mall Gazette_.
He did not care for the newspaper praises. He was rather surprised when
a dealer purchased his “Sir Brian the Templar.” He came and went from
our house a melancholy swain. He was thankful for Laura’s kindness and
pity. J. J.’s studio was his principal resort; and I dare say, as he
set up his own easel there, and worked by his friend’s side, he
bemoaned his lot to his sympathising friend.

Sir Barnes Newcome’s family was absent from London during the winter.
His mother, and his brothers and sisters, his wife and his two
children, were gone to Newcome for Christmas. Some six weeks after
seeing him, Ethel wrote her uncle a kind, merry letter. They had been
performing private theatricals at the country-house where she and Lady
Kew were staying. “Captain Crackthorpe made an admirable Jeremy Diddler
in ‘Raising the Wind.’ Lord Farintosh broke down lamentably as Fusbos
in ‘Bombastes Furioso.’” Miss Ethel had distinguished herself in both
of these facetious little comedies. “I should like Clive to paint me as
Miss Plainways,” she wrote. “I wore a powdered front, painted my face
all over wrinkles, imitated old Lady Griffin as well as I could, and
looked sixty at least.”

Thomas Newcome wrote an answer to his fair niece’s pleasant letter;
“Clive,” he said, “would be happy to bargain to paint her, and nobody
else but her, all the days of his life; and,” the Colonel was sure,
“would admire her at sixty as much as he did now, when she was forty
years younger.” But, determined on maintaining his appointed line of
conduct respecting Miss Newcome, he carried his letter to Sir Barnes,
and desired him to forward it to his sister. Sir Barnes took the note,
and promised to despatch it. The communications between him and his
uncle had been very brief and cold, since the telling of these little
fibs concerning old Lady Kew’s visits to London, which the Baronet
dismissed from his mind as soon as they were spoken, and which the good
Colonel never could forgive. Barnes asked his uncle to dinner once or
twice, but the Colonel was engaged. How was Barnes to know the reason
of the elder’s refusal? A London man, a banker, and a Member of
Parliament, has a thousand things to think of; and no time to wonder
that friends refuse his invitations to dinner. Barnes continued to grin
and smile most affectionately when he met the Colonel; to press his
hand, to congratulate him on the last accounts from India, unconscious
of the scorn and distrust with which his senior mentally regarded him.
“Old boy is doubtful about the young cub’s love-affair,” the Baronet
may have thought. “We’ll ease his old mind on that point some time
hence.” No doubt Barnes thought he was conducting the business very
smartly and diplomatically.

I heard myself news at this period from the gallant Crackthorpe, which,
being interested in my young friend’s happiness, filled me with some
dismay. “Our friend the painter and glazier has been hankering about
our barracks at Knightsbridge” (the noble Life Guards Green had now
pitched their tents in that suburb), “and pumping me about _la belle
cousine_. I don’t like to break it to him—I don’t really, now. But it’s
all up with his chance, I think. Those private theatricals at
Fallowfield have done Farintosh’s business. He used to rave about the
Newcomes to me, as we were riding home from hunting. He gave Bob
Henchman the lie, who told a story which Bob got from his man, who had
it from Miss Newcome’s lady’s-maid, about—about some journey to
Brighton, which the cousins took.” Here Mr. Crackthorpe grinned most
facetiously. “Farintosh swore he’d knock Henchman down; and vows he
will be the death of—will murder our friend Clive when he comes to
town. As for Henchman, he was in a desperate way. He lives on the
Marquis, you know, and Farintosh’s anger or his marriage will be the
loss of free quarters, and ever so many good dinners a year to him.” I
did not deem it necessary to impart Crackthorpe’s story to Clive, or
explain to him the reason why Lord Farintosh scowled most fiercely upon
the young painter, and passed him without any other sign of recognition
one day as Clive and I were walking together in Pall Mall. If my lord
wanted a quarrel, young Clive was not a man to balk him; and would have
been a very fierce customer to deal with, in his actual state of mind.

A pauper child in London at seven years old knows how to go to market,
to fetch the beer, to pawn father’s coat, to choose the largest fried
fish or the nicest ham-bone, to nurse Mary Jane of three,—to conduct a
hundred operations of trade or housekeeping, which a little Belgravian
does not perhaps acquire in all the days of her life. Poverty and
necessity force this precociousness on the poor little brat. There are
children who are accomplished shoplifters and liars almost as soon as
they can toddle and speak. I dare say little Princes know the laws of
etiquette as regards themselves, and the respect due to their rank, at
a very early period of their royal existence. Every one of us,
according to his degree, can point to the Princekins of private life
who are flattered and worshipped, and whose little shoes grown men kiss
as soon almost as they walk upon ground.

It is a wonder what human nature will support: and that, considering
the amount of flattery some people are crammed with from their cradles,
they do not grow worse and more selfish than they are. Our poor little
pauper just mentioned is dosed with Daffy’s Elixir, and somehow
survives the drug. Princekin or lordkin from his earliest days has
nurses, dependants, governesses, little friends, schoolfellows,
schoolmasters, fellow-collegians, college tutors, stewards and valets,
led captains of his suite, and women innumerable flattering him and
doing him honour. The tradesman’s manner, which to you and me is
decently respectful, becomes straightway frantically servile before
Princekin. Honest folks at railway stations whisper to their families,
“That’s the Marquis of Farintosh,” and look hard at him as he passes.
Landlords cry, “This way, my lord; this room for your lordship.” They
say at public schools Princekin is taught the beauties of equality, and
thrashed into some kind of subordination. Psha! Toad-eaters in
pinafores surround Princekin. Do not respectable people send their
children so as to be at the same school with him; don’t they follow him
to college, and eat his toads through life?

And as for women—oh, my dear friends and brethren in this vale of
tears—did you ever see anything so curious, monstrous, and amazing as
the way in which women court Princekin when he is marriageable, and
pursue him with their daughters? Who was the British nobleman in old
old days who brought his three daughters to the King of Mercia, that
His Majesty might choose one after inspection? Mercia was but a petty
province, and its king in fact a Princekin. Ever since those extremely
ancient and venerable times the custom exists not only in Mercia, but
in all the rest of the provinces inhabited by the Angles, and before
Princekins the daughters of our nobles are trotted out.

There was no day of his life which our young acquaintance, the Marquis
of Farintosh, could remember on which he had not been flattered; and no
society which did not pay him court. At a private school he could
recollect the master’s wife stroking his pretty curls and treating him
furtively to goodies; at college he had the tutor simpering and bowing
as he swaggered over the grass-plat; old men at clubs would make way
for him and fawn on him—not your mere pique-assiettes and penniless
parasites, but most respectable toad-eaters, fathers of honest
families, gentlemen themselves of good station, who respected this
young gentleman as one of the institutions of their country, and the
admired wisdom of the nation that set him to legislate over us. When
Lord Farintosh walked the streets at night, he felt himself like Haroun
Alraschid—(that is, he would have felt so had he ever heard of the
Arabian potentate)—a monarch in disguise affably observing and
promenading the city. And let us be sure there was a Mesrour in his
train to knock at the doors for him and run the errands of this young
caliph. Of course he met with scores of men in life who neither
flattered him nor would suffer his airs; but he did not like the
company of such, or for the sake of truth undergo the ordeal of being
laughed at; he preferred toadies, generally speaking. “I like,” says
he, “you know, those fellows who are always saying pleasant things, you
know, and who would run from here to Hammersmith if I asked ’em—much
better than those fellows who are always making fun of me, you know.” A
man of his station who likes flatterers need not shut himself up; he
can get plenty of society.

As for women, it was his lordship’s opinion that every daughter of Eve
was bent on marrying him. A Scotch marquis, an English earl, of the
best blood in the empire, with a handsome person, and a fortune of
fifteen thousand a year, how could the poor creatures do otherwise than
long for him? He blandly received their caresses; took their coaxing
and cajolery as matters of course; and surveyed the beauties of his
time as the Caliph the moonfaces of his harem. My lord intended to
marry certainly. He did not care for money, nor for rank; he expected
consummate beauty and talent, and some day would fling his handkerchief
to the possessor of these, and place her by his side upon the Farintosh
throne.

At this time there were but two or three young ladies in society
endowed with the necessary qualifications, or who found favour in his
eyes. His lordship hesitated in his selection from these beauties. He
was not in a hurry, he was not angry at the notion that Lady Kew (and
Miss Newcome with her) hunted him. What else should they do but pursue
an object so charming? Everybody hunted him. The other young ladies,
whom we need not mention, languished after him still more longingly. He
had little notes from these; presents of purses worked by them, and
cigar-cases embroidered with his coronet. They sang to him in cosy
boudoirs—mamma went out of the room, and sister Ann forgot something in
the drawing-room. They ogled him as they sang. Trembling they gave him
a little foot to mount them, that they might ride on horseback with
him. They tripped along by his side from the Hall to the pretty country
church on Sundays. They warbled hymns: sweetly looking at him the while
mamma whispered confidentially to him, “What an angel Cecilia is!” And
so forth, and so forth—with which chaff our noble bird was by no means
to be caught. When he had made up his great mind, that the time was
come and the woman, he was ready to give a Marchioness of Farintosh to
the English nation.

Miss Newcome has been compared ere this to the statue of “Huntress
Diana” at the Louvre, whose haughty figure and beauty the young lady
indeed somewhat resembled. I was not present when Diana and Diana’s
grandmother hunted the noble Scottish stag of whom we have just been
writing; nor care to know how many times Lord Farintosh escaped, and
how at last he was brought to bay and taken by his resolute pursuers.
Paris, it appears, was the scene of his fall and capture. The news was
no doubt well known amongst Lord Farintosh’s brother-dandies, among
exasperated matrons and virgins in Mayfair, and in polite society
generally, before it came to simple Tom Newcome and his son. Not a word
on the subject had Sir Barnes mentioned to the Colonel: perhaps not
choosing to speak till the intelligence was authenticated; perhaps not
wishing to be the bearer of tidings so painful.

Though the Colonel may have read in his _Pall Mall Gazette_ a paragraph
which announced an approaching MARRIAGE IN HIGH LIFE, “between a noble
young marquis and an accomplished and beautiful young lady, daughter
and sister of a Northern baronet,” he did not know who were the
fashionable persons about to be made happy, nor, until he received a
letter from an old friend who lived at Paris, was the fact conveyed to
him. Here is the letter preserved by him along with all that he ever
received from the same hand:—

“Rue St. Dominique, St. Germain, Paris, 10 Fev.

“So behold you of return, my friend! you quit for ever the sword and
those arid plains where you have passed so many years of your life,
separated from those to whom, at the commencement, you held very
nearly. Did it not seem once as if two hands never could unlock, so
closely were they enlaced together? Ah, mine are old and feeble now;
forty years have passed since the time when you used to say they were
young and fair. How well I remember me of every one of those days,
though there is a death between me and them, and it is as across a
grave I review them! Yet another parting, and tears and regrets are
finished. Tenez, I do not believe them when they say there is no
meeting for us afterwards, there above. To what good to have seen you,
friend, if we are to part here, and in Heaven too? I have not
altogether forgotten your language, is it not so? I remember it because
it was yours, and that of my happy days. I radote like an old woman as
I am. M. de Florac has known my history from the commencement. May I
not say that after so many of years I have been faithful to him and to
all my promises? When the end comes with its great absolution, I shall
not be sorry. One supports the combats of life, but they are long, and
one comes from them very wounded; ah, when shall they be over?

“You return and I salute you with wishes for parting. How much egotism!
I have another project which I please myself to arrange. You know how I
am arrived to love Clive as own my child. I very quick surprised his
secret, the poor boy, when he was here it is twenty months. He looked
so like you as I repeal me of you in the old time! He told me he had no
hope of his beautiful cousin. I have heard of the fine marriage that
one makes her. Paul, my son, has been at the English Ambassade last
night and has made his congratulations to M. de Farintosh. Paul says
him handsome, young, not too spiritual, rich, and haughty, like all,
all noble Montagnards.

“But it is not of M. de Farintosh I write, whose marriage, without
doubt, has been announced to you. I have a little project; very
foolish, perhaps. You know Mr. the Duke of Ivry has left me guardian of
his little daughter Antoinette, whose _affreuse_ mother no one sees
more. Antoinette is pretty and good, and soft, and with an affectionate
heart. I love her already as my infant. I wish to bring her up, and
that Clive should marry her. They say you are returned very rich. What
follies are these I write! In the long evenings of winter, the children
escaped it is a long time from the maternal nest, a silent old man my
only company,—I live but of the past; and play with its souvenirs as
the detained caress little birds, little flowers, in their prisons. I
was born for the happiness; my God! I have learned it in knowing you.
In losing you I have lost it. It is not against the will of Heaven I
oppose myself. It is man, who makes himself so much of this evil and
misery, this slavery, these tears, these crimes, perhaps.

“This marriage of the young Scotch Marquis and the fair Ethel (I love
her in spite of all, and shall see her soon and congratulate her, for,
do you see, I might have stopped this fine marriage, and did my best
and more than my duty for our poor Clive) shall make itself in London
next spring, I hear. You shall assist scarcely at the ceremony; he,
poor boy, shall not care to be there. Bring him to Paris to make the
court to my little Antoinette: bring him to Paris to his good friend,
Comtesse de Florac.”

“I read marvels of his works in an English journal, which one sends
me.”

Clive was not by when this letter reached his father. Clive was in his
painting-room, and lest he should meet his son, and in order to devise
the best means of breaking the news to the lad, Thomas Newcome
retreated out of doors; and from the Oriental he crossed Oxford Street,
and from Oxford Street he stalked over the roomy pavements of
Gloucester Place, and there he bethought him how he had neglected Mrs.
Hobson Newcome of late, and the interesting family of Bryanstone
Square. So he went to leave his card at Maria’s door: her daughters, as
we have said, are quite grown girls. If they have been lectured, and
learning, and back-boarded, and practising, and using the globes, and
laying in a store of ’ologies, ever since, what a deal they must know!
Colonel Newcome was admitted to see his nieces, and Consummate Virtue,
their parent. Maria was charmed to see her brother-in-law; she greeted
him with reproachful tenderness: “Why, why,” her fine eyes seemed to
say, “have you so long neglected us? Do you think because I am wise,
and gifted, and good, and you are, it must be confessed, a poor
creature with no education, I am not also affable? Come, let the
prodigal be welcomed by his virtuous relatives: come and lunch with us,
Colonel!” He sate down accordingly to the family tiffin.

When the meal was over, the mother, who had matter _of importance to
impart to him_, besought him to go to the drawing-room, and there
poured out such a eulogy upon her children’s qualities as fond mothers
know how to utter. They knew this and they knew that. They were
instructed by the most eminent professors; “that wretched Frenchwoman,
whom you may remember here, Mademoiselle Lenoir,” Maria remarked
parenthetically, “turned out, oh, frightfully! She taught the girls the
worst accent, it appears. Her father was not a colonel; he was—oh!
never mind! It is a mercy I got rid of that _fiendish woman_, and
before my precious ones knew _what_ she was!” And then followed details
of the perfections of the two girls, with occasional side-shots at Lady
Anne’s family, just as in the old time. “Why don’t you bring your boy,
whom I have always loved as a son, and who avoids me? Why does not
Clive know his cousins? They are very different from others of his
kinswomen, who think best of the _heartless world_.”

“I fear, Maria, there is too much truth in what you say,” sighs the
Colonel, drumming on a book on the drawing-room table, and looking down
sees it is a great, large, square, gilt Peerage, open at FARINTOSH,
MARQUIS OF.—Fergus Angus Malcolm Mungo Roy, Marquis of Farintosh, Earl
of Glenlivat, in the peerage of Scotland; also Earl of Rossmont, in
that of the United Kingdom. Son of Angus Fergus Malcolm, Earl of
Glenlivat, and grandson and heir of Malcolm Mungo Angus, first Marquis
of Farintosh, and twenty-fifth Earl, etc. etc.

“You have heard the news regarding Ethel?” remarks Hobson.

“I have just heard,” says the poor Colonel.

“I have a letter from Anne this morning,” Maria continues. “They are of
course delighted with the match. Lord Farintosh is wealthy, handsome;
has been a little wild, I hear; is not such a husband as I would choose
for my darlings, but poor Brian’s family have been educated to love the
world; and Ethel no doubt is flattered by the prospects before her. I
_have_ heard that some one else was a little _épris_ in that quarter.
How does Clive bear the news, my dear Colonel?”

“He has long expected it,” says the Colonel, rising: “and I left him
very cheerful at breakfast this morning.”

“Send him to see us, the naughty boy!” cries Maria. “_We_ don’t change;
we remember old times, to us he will ever be welcome!” And with this
confirmation of Madame de Florac’s news, Thomas Newcome walked sadly
homewards.

And now Thomas Newcome had to break the news to his son; who received
the shot in such a way as caused his friends and confidants to admire
his high spirit. He said he had long been expecting some such
announcement: it was many months since Ethel had prepared him for it.
Under her peculiar circumstances he did not see how she could act
otherwise than she had done. And he narrated to the Colonel the
substance of the conversation which the two young people had had
together several months before, in Madame de Florac’s garden.

Clive’s father did not tell his son of his own bootless negotiation
with Barnes Newcome. There was no need to recall that now; but the
Colonel’s wrath against his nephew exploded in conversation with me,
who was the confidant of father and son in this business. Ever since
that luckless day when Barnes thought proper to—to give a wrong address
for Lady Kew, Thomas Newcome’s anger had been growing. He smothered it
yet for a while, sent a letter to Lady Anne Newcome, briefly
congratulating her on the choice which he had heard Miss Newcome had
made; and in acknowledgment of Madame de Florac’s more sentimental
epistle he wrote a reply which has not been preserved, but in which he
bade her rebuke Miss Newcome for not having answered him when he wrote
to her, and not having acquainted her old uncle with her projected
union.

To this message, Ethel wrote back a brief, hurried reply; it said:—

“I saw Madame de Florac last night at her daughter’s reception, and she
gave me my dear uncle’s messages. _Yes, the news is true_ which you
have heard from Madame de Florac, and in Bryanstone Square. I did not
like to write it to you, because I know one whom I regard as a brother
(and a great, great deal better), and to whom I know it will give pain.
He knows that I have done _my duty_, and _why_ I have acted as I have
done. God bless him and his dear father!

“What is this about a letter which I never answered? Grandmamma knows
nothing about a letter. Mamma has enclosed to me that which you wrote
to her, but there has been _no letter_ from T. N. to his sincere and
affectionate E. N.

“Rue de Rivoli. Friday.”

This was too much, and the cup of Thomas Newcome’s wrath overflowed.
Barnes had lied about Ethel’s visit to London: Barnes had lied in
saying that he delivered the message with which his uncle charged him:
Barnes had lied about the letter which he had received, and never sent.
With these accusations firmly proven in his mind against his nephew,
the Colonel went down to confront that sinner.

Wherever he should find Barnes, Thomas Newcome was determined to tell
him his mind. Should they meet on the steps of a church, on the flags
of ’Change, or in the newspaper-room at Bays’s, at evening-paper time,
when men most do congregate, Thomas the Colonel was determined upon
exposing and chastising his father’s grandson. With Ethel’s letter in
his pocket, he took his way into the City, penetrated into the
unsuspecting back-parlour of Hobson’s bank, and was disappointed at
first at only finding his half-brother Hobson there engaged over his
newspaper. The Colonel signified his wish to see Sir Barnes Newcome.
“Sir Barnes was not come in yet. You’ve heard about the marriage,” says
Hobson. “Great news for the Barnes’s, ain’t it? The head of the house
is as proud as a peacock about it. Said he was going out to Samuels,
the diamond merchants; going to make his sister some uncommon fine
present. Jolly to be uncle to a marquis, ain’t it, Colonel? I’ll have
nothing under a duke for my girls. I say, I know whose nose is out of
joint. But young fellows get over these things, and Clive won’t die
this time, I dare say.”

While Hobson Newcome made these satiric and facetious remarks, his
half-brother paced up and down the glass parlour, scowling over the
panes into the bank where the busy young clerks sate before their
ledgers. At last he gave an “Ah!” as of satisfaction. Indeed, he had
seen Sir Barnes Newcome enter into the bank.

The Baronet stopped and spoke with a clerk, and presently entered,
followed by that young gentleman into his private parlour. Barnes tried
to grin when he saw his uncle, and held out his hand to greet the
Colonel; but the Colonel put both his behind his back—that which
carried his faithful bamboo cane shook nervously. Barnes was aware that
the Colonel had the news. “I was going to—to write to you this morning,
with—with some intelligence that I am—very—very sorry to give.”

“This young gentleman is one of your clerks?” asked Thomas Newcome,
blandly.

“Yes; Mr. Boltby, who has your private account. This is Colonel
Newcome, Mr. Boltby,” says Sir Barnes, in some wonder.

“Mr. Boltby, brother Hobson, you heard what Sir Barnes Newcome said
just now respecting certain intelligence which he grieved to give me?”

At this the three other gentlemen respectively wore looks of amazement.

“Allow me to say in your presence, that I don’t believe one single word
Sir Barnes Newcome says, when he tells me that he is very sorry for
some intelligence he has to communicate. He lies, Mr. Boltby; he is
very glad. I made up my mind that in whatsoever company I met him, and
on the very first day I found him—hold your tongue, sir; you shall
speak afterwards and tell more lies when I have done—I made up my mind,
I say, that on the very first occasion I would tell Sir Barnes Newcome
that he was a liar and a cheat. He takes charge of letters and keeps
them back. Did you break the seal, sir? There was nothing to steal in
my letter to Miss Newcome. He tells me people are out of town, when he
goes to see in the next street, after leaving my table, and whom I see
myself half an hour before he lies to me about their absence.”

“D—n you, go out, and don’t stand staring there, you booby!” screams
out Sir Barnes to the clerk. “Stop, Boltby. Colonel Newcome, unless you
leave this room I shall—I shall——”

“You shall call a policeman. Send for the gentleman, and I will tell
the Lord Mayor what I think of Sir Barnes Newcome, Baronet. Mr. Boltby,
shall we have the constable in?”

“Sir, you are an old man, and my father’s brother, or you know very
well I would——”

“You would what, Sir? Upon my word, Barnes Newcome” (here the Colonel’s
two hands and the bamboo cane came from the rear and formed in front),
“but that you are my father’s grandson, after a menace like that, I
would take you out and cane you in the presence of your clerks. I
repeat, sir, that I consider you guilty of treachery, falsehood, and
knavery. And if I ever see you at Bays’s Club, I will make the same
statement to your acquaintance at the west end of the town. A man of
your baseness ought to be known, sir; and it shall be my business to
make men of honour aware of your character. Mr. Boltby, will you have
the kindness to make out my account? Sir Barnes Newcome, for fear of
consequences that I should deplore, I recommend you to keep a wide
berth of me, sir.” And the Colonel twirled his mustachios, and waved
his cane in an ominous manner, and Barnes started back spontaneously
out of its dangerous circle.

What Mr. Boltby’s sentiments may have been regarding this extraordinary
scene in which his principal cut so sorry a figure;—whether he narrated
the conversation to other gentlemen connected with the establishment of
Hobson Brothers, or prudently kept it to himself, I cannot say, having
no means of pursuing Mr. B.’s subsequent career. He speedily quitted
his desk at Hobson Brothers; and let us presume that Barnes _thought_
Mr. B. had old all the other clerks of the avuncular quarrel. That
conviction will make us imagine Barnes still more comfortable. Hobson
Newcome no doubt was rejoiced at Barnes’s discomfiture; he had been
insolent and domineering beyond measure of late to his vulgar
good-natured uncle, whereas after the above interview with the Colonel
he became very humble and quiet in his demeanour, and for a long, long
time never said a rude word. Nay, I fear Hobson must have carried an
account of the transaction to Mrs. Hobson and the circle in Bryanstone
Square; for Sam Newcome, now entered at Cambridge, called the Baronet
“Barnes” quite familiarly; asked after Clara and Ethel; and requested a
small loan of Barnes.

Of course the story did not get wind at Bays’s; of course Tom Eaves did
not know all about it, and say that Sir Barnes had been beaten
black-and-blue. Having been treated very ill by the committee in a
complaint which he made about the Club cookery, Sir Barnes Newcome
never came to Bays’s, and at the end of the year took off his name from
the lists of the Club.

Sir Barnes, though a little taken aback in the morning, and not ready
with an impromptu reply to the Colonel and his cane, could not allow
the occurrence to pass without a protest; and indited a letter which
Thomas Newcome kept along with some others previously quoted by the
compiler of the present memoirs.

It is as follows:—

Belgrave St., Feb. 15, 18—.

“Colonel Newcome, C.B., _private_.

“SIR—The incredible insolence and violence of your behaviour to-day
(inspired by whatever causes or mistakes of your own), cannot be passed
without some comment, on my part. I laid before a friend of your own
profession, a statement of the words which you applied to me in the
presence of my partner and one of my clerks this morning; and my
adviser is of opinion, that considering the relationship unhappily
subsisting between us, I can take no notice of insults for which you
knew when you uttered them, I could not call you to account.”

“There is some truth in that,” said the Colonel. “He couldn’t fight,
you know; but then he was such a liar I could not help speaking my
mind.”

“I gathered from the brutal language which you thought fit to employ
towards a disarmed man, the ground of one of your monstrous accusations
against me, that I deceived you in stating that my relative, Lady Kew,
was in the country, when in fact she was at her house in London.

“To this absurd charge I at once plead guilty. The venerable lady in
question was passing through London, where she desired to be free from
intrusion. At her ladyship’s wish I stated that she was out of town;
and would, under the same circumstances, unhesitatingly make the same
statement. Your slight acquaintance with the person in question did not
warrant that you should force yourself on her privacy, as you would
doubtless know were you more familiar with the customs of the society
in which she moves.

“I declare upon my honour as a gentleman, that I gave her the message
which I promised to deliver from you, and also that I transmitted a
letter with which you entrusted me; and repel with scorn and
indignation the charges which you were pleased to bring against me, as
I treat with contempt the language and the threats which you thought
fit to employ.

“Our books show the amount of _x_£. _xs. xd_. to your credit, which you
will be good enough to withdraw at your earliest convenience; as of
course all intercourse must cease henceforth between you and—Yours,
etc.

“B. Newcome Newcome.”

“I think, sir, he doesn’t make out a bad case,” Mr. Pendennis remarked
to the Colonel, who showed him this majestic letter.

“It would be a good case if I believed a single word of it, Arthur,”
replied my friend, placidly twirling the old grey moustache. “If you
were to say so-and-so, and say that I had brought false charges against
you, I should cry _mea culpa_ and apologise with all my heart. But as I
have a perfect conviction that every word this fellow says is a lie,
what is the use of arguing any more about the matter? I would not
believe him if he brought twenty as witnesses, and if he lied till he
was black in the other liars’ face. Give me the walnuts. I wonder who
Sir Barnes’s military friend was.”

Barnes’s military friend was our gallant acquaintance General Sir
George Tufto, K.C.B., who a short while afterwards talked over the
quarrel with the Colonel, and manfully told him that (in Sir George’s
opinion) he was wrong. “The little beggar behaved very well, I thought,
in the first business. You bullied him so, and in the front of his
regiment, too, that it was almost past bearing; and when he deplored,
with tears in his eyes, almost, the little humbug! that his
relationship prevented him calling you out, ecod, I believed him! It
was in the second affair that poor little Barnes showed he was a
cocktail.”

“What second affair?” asked Thomas Newcome.

“Don’t you know? He! he! this is famous!” cries Sir George. “Why, sir,
two days after your business, he comes to me with another letter and a
face as long as my mare’s, by Jove. And that letter, Newcome, was from
your young ’un. Stop, here it is!” and from his padded bosom General
Sir George Tufto drew a pocket-book, and from the pocket-book a copy of
a letter, inscribed, “Clive Newcome, Esq., to Sir B. N. Newcome.”
“There’s no mistake about your fellow, Colonel. No,——him!” and the man
of war fired a volley of oaths as a salute to Clive.

And the Colonel, on horseback, riding by the other cavalry officer’s
side read as follows:—

“George Street, Hanover Square, February 16.

“SIR—Colonel Newcome this morning showed me a letter bearing your
signature, in which you state—1. That Colonel Newcome has uttered
calumnious and insolent charges against you. 2. That Colonel Newcome so
spoke, knowing that you could take no notice of his charges of
falsehood and treachery, on account of the relationship subsisting
between you.

“Your statements would evidently imply that Colonel Newcome has been
guilty of ungentlemanlike conduct, and of cowardice towards you.

“As there can be no reason why we should not meet in any manner that
you desire, I here beg leave to state, on my own part, that I fully
coincide with Colonel Newcome in his opinion that you have been guilty
of falsehood and treachery, and that the charge of cowardice which you
dare to make against a gentleman of his tried honour and courage, is
another wilful and cowardly falsehood on your part.

“And I hope you will refer the bearer of this note, my friend, Mr.
George Warrington, of the Upper Temple, to the military gentleman whom
you consulted in respect to the just charges of Colonel Newcome.
Waiting a prompt reply,

“Believe me, sir—Your obedient servant,
Clive Newcome.


“Sir Barnes Newcome Newcome, Bart., M. P., etc.”

“What a blunderhead I am!” cries the Colonel, with delight on his
countenance, spite of his professed repentance. “It never once entered
my head that the youngster would take any part in the affair. I showed
him his cousin’s letter casually, just to amuse him, I think, for he
has been deuced low lately, about—about a young man’s scrape that he
has got into. And he must have gone off and despatched his challenge
straightway. I recollect he appeared uncommonly brisk at breakfast the
next morning. And so you say, General, the Baronet did not like the
_poulet?_”

“By no means; never saw a fellow show such a confounded white feather.
At first I congratulated him, thinking your boy’s offer must please
him, as it would have pleased any fellow in our time to have a shot.
Dammy! but I was mistaken in my man. He entered into some confounded
long-winded story about a marriage you wanted to make with that
infernal pretty sister of his, who is going to marry young Farintosh,
and how you were in a rage because the scheme fell to the ground, and
how a family duel might occasion unpleasantries to Miss Newcome; though
I showed him how this could be most easily avoided, and that the lady’s
name need never appear in the transaction. ‘Confound it, Sir Barnes,’
says I, ‘I recollect this boy, when he was a youngster throwing a glass
of wine in your face! We’ll put it upon that, and say it’s an old feud
between you.’ He turned quite pale, and he said your fellow had
apologised for the glass of wine.”

“Yes,” said the Colonel, sadly, “my boy apologised for the glass of
wine. It is curious how we have disliked that Barnes ever since we set
eyes on him.”

“Well, Newcome,” Sir George resumed, as his mettled charger suddenly
jumped and curvetted, displaying the padded warrior’s cavalry-seat to
perfection. “Quiet, old lady!—easy, my dear! Well, when I found the
little beggar turning tail in this way I said to him, ‘Dash me, sir, if
you don’t want me, why the dash do you send for me, dash me? Yesterday
you talked as if you would bite the Colonel’s head off, and to-day,
when his son offers you every accommodation, by dash, sir, you’re
afraid to meet him. It’s my belief you had better send for a policeman.
A 22 is your man, Sir Barnes Newcome.’ And with that I turned on my
heel and left him. And the fellow went off to Newcome that very night.”

“A poor devil can’t command courage, General,” said the Colonel, quite
peaceably, “any more than he can make himself six feet high.”

“Then why the dash did the beggar send for me?” called out General Sir
George Tufto, in a loud and resolute voice; and presently the two
officers parted company.

When the Colonel reached home, Mr. Warrington and Mr. Pendennis
happened to be on a visit to Clive, and all three were in the young
fellow’s painting-room. We knew our lad was unhappy, and did our little
best to amuse and console him. The Colonel came in. It was in the dark
February days: we lighted the gas in the studio. Clive had made a
sketch from some favourite verses of mine and George’s: those charming
lines of Scott’s:—

“He turned his charger as he spake,
    Beside the river shore;
He gave his bridle-rein a shake,
    With adieu for evermore,
            My dear!
    Adieu for evermore!”


Thomas Newcome held up a finger at Warrington, and he came up to the
picture and looked at it; and George and I trolled out:

“Adieu for evermore,
            My dear!
Adieu for evermore!”


From the picture the brave old Colonel turned to the painter, regarding
his son with a look of beautiful inexpressible affection. And he laid
his hand on his son’s shoulder, and smiled, and stroked Clive’s yellow
moustache.

“And—and did Barnes send no answer to that letter you wrote him?” he
said, slowly.

Clive broke out into a laugh that was almost a sob. He took both his
father’s hands. “My dear, dear old father!” says he, “what a—what
an—old—trump you are!” My eyes were so dim I could hardly see the two
men as they embraced.




CHAPTER LIV.
Has a Tragical Ending


Clive presently answered the question which his father put to him in
the last chapter, by producing from the ledge of his easel a crumpled
paper, full of Cavendish now, but on which was written Sir Barnes
Newcome’s reply to his cousin’s polite invitation. Sir Barnes Newcome
wrote, “that he thought a reference to a friend was quite unnecessary,
in the most disagreeable and painful dispute in which Mr. Clive desired
to interfere as a principal; that the reasons which prevented Sir
Barnes from taking notice of Colonel Newcome’s shameful and
ungentlemanlike conduct applied equally, as Mr. Clive Newcome very well
knew, to himself; that if further insult was offered, or outrage
attempted, Sir Barnes should resort to the police for protection; that
he was about to quit London, and certainly should not delay his
departure on account of Mr. Clive Newcome’s monstrous proceedings; and
that he desired to take leave of an odious subject, as of an individual
whom he had striven to treat with kindness, but from whom, from youth
upwards, Sir Barnes Newcome had received nothing but insolence, enmity,
and ill-will.”

“He is an ill man to offend,” remarked Mr. Pendennis. “I don’t think he
has ever forgiven that claret, Clive.”

“Pooh! the feud dates from long before that,” said Clive; “Barnes
wanted to lick me when I was a boy, and I declined: in fact, I think he
had rather the worst of it; but then I operated freely on his shins,
and that wasn’t fair in war, you know.”

“Heaven forgive me,” cries the Colonel; “I have always felt the fellow
was my enemy: and my mind is relieved now war is declared. It has been
a kind of hypocrisy with me to shake his hand and eat his dinner. When
I trusted him it was against my better instinct; and I have been
struggling against it these ten years, thinking it was a wicked
prejudice, and ought to be overcome.”

“Why should we overcome such instincts?” asks Mr. Warrington. “Why
shouldn’t we hate what is hateful in people and scorn what is mean?
From what friend Pen has described to me, and from some other accounts
which have come to my ears, your respectable nephew is about as
loathsome a little villain as crawls on the earth. Good seems to be out
of his sphere, and away from his contemplation. He ill-treats every one
he comes near; or, if, gentle to them, it is that they may serve some
base purpose. Since my attention has been drawn to the creature, I have
been contemplating his ways with wonder and curiosity. How much
superior Nature’s rogues are, Pen, to the villains you novelists put
into your books! This man goes about his life business with a natural
propensity to darkness and evil—as a bug crawls, and stings, and
stinks. I don’t suppose the fellow feels any more remorse than a cat
that runs away with a mutton-chop. I recognise the Evil Spirit, sir,
and do honour to Ahrimanes, in taking off my hat to this young man. He
seduced a poor girl in his father’s country town—is it not natural?
Deserted her and her children—don’t you recognise the beast? married
for rank—could you expect otherwise from him? invites my Lord Highgate
to his house in consideration of his balance at the bank;—sir, unless
somebody’s heel shall crunch him on the way, there is no height to
which this aspiring vermin mayn’t crawl. I look to see Sir Barnes
Newcome prosper more and more. I make no doubt he will die an immense
capitalist, and an exalted Peer of this realm. He will have a marble
monument, and a pathetic funeral sermon. There is a divine in your
family, Clive, that shall preach it. I will weep respectful tears over
the grave of Baron Newcome, Viscount Newcome, Earl Newcome; and the
children whom he has deserted, and who, in the course of time, will be
sent by a grateful nation to New South Wales, will proudly say to their
brother convicts,—‘Yes, the Earl was our honoured father.’”

“I fear he is no better than he should be, Mr. Warrington,” says the
Colonel, shaking his head. “I never heard the story about the deserted
children.”

“How should you, O you guileless man!” cries Warrington.

“I am not in the ways of scandal-hearing myself much: but this tale I
had from Sir Barnes Newcome’s own country. Mr. Batters of the _Newcome
Independent_ is my esteemed client. I write leading articles for his
newspaper, and when he was in town last spring he favoured me with the
anecdote; and proposed to amuse the Member for Newcome by publishing it
in his journal. This kind of writing is not much in my line: and, out
of respect to you and your young one, I believe—I strove with Mr.
Batters, and—entreated him and prevailed with him, not to publish the
story. That is how I came to know it.”

I sate with the Colonel in the evening, when he commented on
Warrington’s story and Sir Barnes’s adventures in his simple way. He
said his brother Hobson had been with him the morning after the
dispute, reiterating Barnes’s defence of his conduct: and professing on
his own part nothing but goodwill towards his brother. “Between
ourselves the young Baronet carries matters with rather a high hand
sometimes, and I am not sorry that you gave him a little dressing. But
you were too hard upon him, Colonel—really you were.” “Had I known that
child-deserting story I would have given it harder still, sir,” says
Thomas Newcome, twirling his mustachios: “but my brother had nothing to
do with the quarrel, and very rightly did not wish to engage in it. He
has an eye to business, has Master Hobson too,” my friend continued:
“for he brought me a cheque for my private account, which of course, he
said, could not remain after my quarrel with Barnes. But the Indian
bank account, which is pretty large, he supposed need not be taken
away? and indeed why should it? So that, which is little business of
mine, remains where it was; and brother Hobson and I remain perfectly
good friends.

“I think Clive is much better since he has been quite put out of his
suspense. He speaks with a great deal more kindness and good-nature
about the marriage than I am disposed to feel regarding it: and depend
on it has too high a spirit to show that he is beaten. But I know he is
a good deal cut up, though he says nothing; and he agreed willingly
enough to take a little journey, Arthur, and be out of the way when
this business takes place. We shall go to Paris: I don’t know where
else besides. These misfortunes do good in one way, hard as they are to
bear: they unite people who love each other. It seems to me my boy has
been nearer to me, and likes his old father better than he has done of
late.” And very soon after this talk our friends departed.

The Bulgarian minister having been recalled, and Lady Anne Newcome’s
house in park Lane being vacant, her ladyship and her family came to
occupy the mansion for this eventful season, and sate once more in the
dismal dining-room under the picture of the defunct Sir Brian. A little
of the splendour and hospitality of old days was revived in the house:
entertainments were given by Lady Anne: and amongst other festivities a
fine ball took place, when pretty Miss Alice, Miss Ethel’s younger
sister, made her first appearance in the world, to which she was
afterwards to be presented by the Marchioness of Farintosh. All the
little sisters were charmed, no doubt, that the beautiful Ethel was to
become a beautiful Marchioness, who, as they came up to womanhood one
after another, would introduce them severally to amiable young earls,
dukes, and marquises, when they would be married off and wear coronets
and diamonds of their own right. At Lady Anne’s ball I saw my
acquaintance, young Mumford, who was going to Oxford next October, and
about to leave Rugby, where he was at the head of the school, looking
very dismal as Miss Alice whirled round the room dancing in Viscount
Bustington’s arms;—Miss Alice, with whose mamma he used to take tea at
Rugby, and for whose pretty sake Mumford did Alfred Newcome’s verses
for him and let him off his thrashings. Poor Mumford! he dismally went
about under the protection of young Alfred, a fourth-form boy—not one
soul did he know in that rattling London ballroom; his young face—as
white as the large white tie, donned two hours since at the Tavistock
with such nervousness and beating of heart!

With these lads, and decorated with a tie equally splendid, moved about
young Sam Newcome, who was shirking from his sister and his mamma. Mrs.
Hobson had actually assumed clean gloves for this festive occasion. Sam
stared at all the “Nobs:” and insisted upon being introduced to
“Farintosh,” and congratulated his lordship with much graceful ease:
and then pushed about the rooms perseveringly hanging on to Alfred’s
jacket. “I say, I wish you wouldn’t call me Al’,” I heard Mr. Alfred
say to his cousin. Seeing my face, Mr. Samuel ran up to claim
acquaintance. He was good enough to say he thought Farintosh seemed
devilish haughty. Even my wife could not help saying, that Mr. Sam was
an odious little creature.

So it was for young Alfred, and his brothers and sisters, who would
want help and protection in the world, that Ethel was about to give up
her independence, her inclination perhaps, and to bestow her life on
yonder young nobleman. Looking at her as a girl devoting herself to her
family, her sacrifice gave her a melancholy interest in our eyes. My
wife and I watched her, grave and beautiful, moving through the rooms,
receiving and returning a hundred greetings, bending to compliments,
talking with this friend and that, with my lord’s lordly relations,
with himself, to whom she listened deferentially; faintly smiling as he
spoke now and again; doing the honours of her mother’s house. Lady
after lady of his lordship’s clan and kinsfolk complimented the girl
and her pleased mother. Old Lady Kew was radiant (if one can call
radiance the glances of those darkling old eyes). She sate in a little
room apart, and thither people went to pay their court to her.
Unwillingly I came in on this levee with my wife on my arm: Lady Kew
scowled at me over her crutch, but without a sign of recognition. “What
an awful countenance that old woman has!” Laura whispered as we
retreated out of that gloomy presence.

And Doubt (as its wont is) whispered too a question in my ear, “Is it
for her brothers and sisters only that Miss Ethel is sacrificing
herself? Is it not for the coronet, and the triumph, and the fine
houses?” “When two motives may actuate a friend, we surely may try and
believe in the good one,” says Laura. “But, but I am glad Clive does
not marry her—poor fellow—he would not have been happy with her. She
belongs to this great world: she has spent all her life in it: Clive
would have entered into it very likely in her train; and you know, sir,
it is not good that we should be our husbands’ superiors,” adds Mrs.
Laura, with a curtsey.

She presently pronounced that the air was very hot in the rooms, and in
fact wanted to go home to see her child. As we passed out, we saw Sir
Barnes Newcome, eagerly smiling, smirking, bowing, and in the fondest
conversation with his sister and Lord Farintosh. By Sir Barnes
presently brushed Lieutenant-General Sir George Tufto, K.C.B., who,
when he saw on whose foot he had trodden, grunted out, “H’m, beg your
pardon!” and turning his back on Barnes, forthwith began complimenting
Ethel and the Marquis. “Served with your lordship’s father in Spain;
glad to make your lordship’s acquaintance,” says Sir George. Ethel bows
to us as we pass out of the rooms, and we hear no more of Sir George’s
conversation.

In the cloak-room sits Lady Clara Newcome, with a gentleman bending
over her, just in such an attitude as the bride is in Hogarth’s
“Marriage à la Mode” as the counsellor talks to her. Lady Clara starts
up as a crowd of blushes come into her wan face, and tries to smile,
and rises to greet my wife, and says something about its being so
dreadfully hot in the upper rooms, and so very tedious waiting for the
carriages. The gentleman advances towards me with a military stride,
and says, “How do you do, Mr. Pendennis? How’s our young friend, the
painter?” I answer Lord Highgate civilly enough, whereas my wife will
scarce speak a word in reply to Lady Clara Newcome.

Lady Clara asked us to her ball, which my wife declined altogether to
attend. Sir Barnes published a series of quite splendid entertainments
on the happy occasion of his sister’s betrothal. We read the names of
all the clan Farintosh in the _Morning Post_, as attending these
banquets. Mr. and Mrs. Hobson Newcome, in Bryanstone Square, gave also
signs of rejoicing at their niece’s marriage. They had a grand banquet
followed by a tea, to which latter amusement the present biographer was
invited. Lady Anne, and Lady Kew and her granddaughter, and the Baronet
and his wife, and my Lord Highgate and Sir George Tufto attended the
dinner; but it was rather a damp entertainment. “Farintosh,” whispers
Sam Newcome, “sent word just before dinner that he had a sore throat,
and Barnes was as sulky as possible. Sir George wouldn’t speak to him,
and the Dowager wouldn’t speak to Lord Highgate. Scarcely anything was
drank,” concluded Mr. Sam, with a slight hiccup. “I say, Pendennis, how
sold Clive will be!” And the amiable youth went off to commune with
others of his parents’ guests.

Thus the Newcomes entertained the Farintoshes, and the Farintoshes
entertained the Newcomes. And the Dowager Countess of Kew went from
assembly to assembly every evening, and to jewellers and upholsterers
and dressmakers every morning; and Lord Farintosh’s town-house was
splendidly re-decorated in the newest fashion; and he seemed to grow
more and more attentive as the happy day approached, and he gave away
all his cigars to his brother Rob; and his sisters were delighted with
Ethel, and constantly in her company, and his mother was pleased with
her, and thought a girl of her spirit and resolution would make a good
wife for her son: and select crowds flocked to see the service of plate
at Handyman’s, and the diamonds which were being set for the lady; and
Smee, R.A., painted her portrait, as a _souvenir_ for mamma when Miss
Newcome should be Miss Newcome no more; and Lady Kew made a will
leaving all she could leave to her beloved granddaughter, Ethel,
daughter of the late Sir Brian Newcome, Baronet; and Lord Kew wrote an
affectionate letter to his cousin, congratulating her, and wishing her
happiness with all his heart; and I was glancing over _The Times_
newspaper at breakfast one morning; when I laid it down with an
exclamation which caused my wife to start with surprise.

“What is it?” cries Laura, and I read as follows:—

“‘Death of the Countess Dowager of Kew.—We regret to have to announce
the awfully sudden death of this venerable lady. Her ladyship, who had
been at several parties of the nobility the night before last,
seemingly in perfect health, was seized with a fit as she was waiting
for her carriage, and about to quit Lady Pallgrave’s assembly.
Immediate medical assistance was procured, and her ladyship was carried
to her own house, in Queen Street, Mayfair. But she never rallied, or,
we believe, spoke, after the first fatal seizure, and sank at eleven
o’clock last evening, The deceased, Louisa Joanna Gaunt, widow of
Frédéric, first Earl of Kew, was daughter of Charles, Earl of Gaunt,
and sister of the late and aunt of the present Marquis of Steyne. The
present Earl of Kew is her ladyship’s grandson, his lordship’s father,
Lord Walham, having died before his own father, the first earl. Many
noble families are placed in mourning by this sad event. Society has to
deplore the death of a lady who has been its ornament for more than
half a century, and who was known, we may say, throughout Europe for
her remarkable sense, extraordinary memory, and brilliant wit.’”




CHAPTER LV.
Barnes’s Skeleton Closet


The demise of Lady Kew of course put a stop for a while to the
matrimonial projects so interesting to the house of Newcome. Hymen blew
his torch out, put it into the cupboard for use on a future day, and
exchanged his garish saffron-coloured robe for decent temporary
mourning. Charles Honeyman improved the occasion at Lady Whittlesea’s
Chapel hard by; and “Death at the Festival” was one of his most
thrilling sermons; reprinted at the request of some of the
congregation. There were those of his flock, especially a pair whose
quarter of the fold was the organ-loft, who were always charmed with
the piping of that melodious pastor.

Shall we too, while the coffin yet rests on the earth’s outer surface,
enter the chapel whither these void remains of our dear sister departed
are borne by the smug undertaker’s gentlemen, and pronounce an elegy
over that bedizened box of corruption? When the young are stricken
down, and their roses nipped in an hour by the destroying blight, even
the stranger can sympathise, who counts the scant years on the
gravestone, or reads the notice in the newspaper corner. The contrast
forces itself on you. A fair young creature, bright and blooming
yesterday, distributing smiles, levying homage, inspiring desire,
conscious of her power to charm, and gay with the natural enjoyment of
her conquests—who in his walk through the world has not looked on many
such a one; and, at the notion of her sudden call away from beauty,
triumph, pleasure; her helpless outcries during her short pain; her
vain pleas for a little respite; her sentence, and its execution; has
not felt a shock of pity? When the days of a long life come to its
close, and a white head sinks to rise no more, we bow our own with
respect as the mourning train passes, and salute the heraldry and
devices of yonder pomp, as symbols of age, wisdom, deserved respect and
merited honour; long experience of suffering and action. The wealth he
may have achieved is the harvest which he sowed; the titles on his
hearse, fruits of the field he bravely and laboriously wrought in. But
to live to fourscore years, and be found dancing among the idle
virgins! to have had near a century of allotted time, and then be
called away from the giddy notes of a Mayfair fiddle! To have to yield
your roses too, and then drop out of the bony clutch of your old
fingers a wreath that came from a Parisian bandbox! One fancies around
some graves unseen troops of mourners waiting; many and many a poor
pensioner trooping to the place; many weeping charities; many kind
actions; many dear friends beloved and deplored, rising up at the toll
of that bell to follow the honoured hearse; dead parents waiting above,
and calling, “Come, daughter!” lost children, heaven’s fondlings,
hovering round like cherubim, and whispering, “Welcome, mother!” Here
is one who reposes after a long feast where no love has been; after
girlhood without kindly maternal nurture; marriage without affection;
matronhood without its precious griefs and joys; after fourscore years
of lonely vanity. Let us take off our hats to that procession too as it
passes, admiring the different lots awarded to the children of men, and
the various usages to which Heaven puts its creatures.

Leave we yonder velvet-palled box, spangled with fantastic heraldry,
and containing within the aged slough and envelope of a soul gone to
render its account. Look rather at the living audience standing round
the shell;—the deep grief on Barnes Newcome’s fine countenance; the
sadness depicted in the face of the most noble the Marquis of
Farintosh; the sympathy of her ladyship’s medical man (who came in the
third mourning carriage); better than these, the awe, and reverence,
and emotion, exhibited in the kind face of one of the witnesses of this
scene, as he listens to those words which the priest rehearses over our
dead. What magnificent words! what a burning faith, what a glorious
triumph; what a heroic life, death, hope, they record! They are read
over all of us alike; as the sun shines on just and unjust. We have all
of us heard them; and I have fancied, for my part, that they fell and
smote like the sods on the coffin.

The ceremony over, the undertaker’s gentlemen clamber on the roof of
the vacant hearse, into which palls, tressels, trays of feathers, are
inserted, and the horses break out into a trot, and the empty
carriages, expressing the deep grief of the deceased lady’s friends,
depart homeward. It is remarked that Lord Kew hardly has any
communication with his cousin, Sir Barnes Newcome. His lordship jumps
into a cab, and goes to the railroad. Issuing from the cemetery, the
Marquis of Farintosh hastily orders that thing to be taken off his hat,
and returns to town in his brougham, smoking a cigar. Sir Barnes
Newcome rides in the brougham beside Lord Farintosh as far as Oxford
Street, where he gets a cab, and goes to the City. For business is
business, and must be attended to, though grief be ever so severe.

A very short time previous to her demise, Mr. Rood (that was Mr.
Rood—that other little gentleman in black, who shared the third
mourning coach along with her ladyship’s medical man) had executed a
will by which almost all the Countess’s property was devised to her
granddaughter, Ethel Newcome. Lady Kew’s decease of course delayed the
marriage projects for a while. The young heiress returned to her
mother’s house in Park Lane. I dare say the deep mourning habiliments
in which the domestics of that establishment appeared, were purchased
out of the funds left in his hands, which Ethel’s banker and brother
had at her disposal.

Sir Barnes Newcome, who was one of the trustees of his sister’s
property, grumbled no doubt because his grandmother had bequeathed to
him but a paltry recompense of five hundred pounds for his pains and
trouble of trusteeship; but his manner to Ethel was extremely bland and
respectful: an heiress now, and to be a marchioness in a few months,
Sir Barnes treated her with a very different regard to that which he
was accustomed to show to other members of his family. For while this
worthy Baronet would contradict his mother at every word she uttered,
and take no pains to disguise his opinion that Lady Anne’s intellect
was of the very poorest order, he would listen deferentially to Ethel’s
smallest observations, exert himself to amuse her under her grief,
which he chose to take for granted was very severe, visit her
constantly, and show the most charming solicitude for her general
comfort and welfare.

During this time my wife received constant notes from Ethel Newcome,
and the intimacy between the two ladies much increased. Laura was so
unlike the women of Ethel’s circle, the young lady was pleased to say,
that to be with her was Ethel’s greatest comfort. Miss Newcome was now
her own mistress, had her carriage, and would drive day after day to
our cottage at Richmond. The frigid society of Lord Farintosh’s
sisters, the conversation of his mother, did not amuse Ethel, and she
escaped from both with her usual impatience of control. She was at home
every day dutifully to receive my lord’s visits; but though she did not
open her mind to Laura as freely regarding the young gentleman as she
did when the character and disposition of her future mother and
sisters-in-law was the subject of their talk, I could see, from the
grave look of commiseration which my wife’s face bore after her young
friend’s visits, that Mrs. Pendennis augured rather ill of the future
happiness of this betrothed pair. Once, at Miss Newcome’s special
request, I took my wife to see her in Park Lane, where the Marquis of
Farintosh found us. His lordship and I had already a half-acquaintance,
which was not, however, improved after my regular presentation to him
by Miss Newcome: he scowled at me with a countenance indicative of
anything but welcome, and did not seem in the least more pleased when
Ethel entreated her friend Laura not to take her bonnet, not to think
of going away so soon. She came to see us the very next day, stayed
much longer with us than usual, and returned to town quite late in the
evening, in spite of the entreaties of the inhospitable Laura, who
would have had her leave us long before. “I am sure,” says
clear-sighted Mrs. Laura, “she is come out of bravado, and after we
went away yesterday that there were words between her and Lord
Farintosh on our account.”

“Confound the young man,” breaks out Mr. Pendennis in a fume; “what
does he mean by his insolent airs?”

“He may think we are partisans de l’autre,” says Mrs. Pendennis, with a
smile first, and a sigh afterwards, as she said “poor Clive!”

“Do you ever talk about Clive?” asks the husband.

“Never. Once, twice, perhaps, in the most natural manner in the world
we mentioned where he is; but nothing further passes. The subject is a
sealed one between us. She often looks at his drawings in my album
(Clive had drawn our baby there and its mother in a great variety of
attitudes), and gazes at his sketch of his dear old father: but of him
she never says a word.”

“So it is best,” says Mr. Pendennis.

“Yes—best,” echoes Laura, with a sigh.

“You think, Laura,” continues the husband, “you think she——”

“She what?” What did Mr. Pendennis mean? Laura his wife certainly
understood him, though upon my conscience the sentence went no
further—for she answered at once:

“Yes—I think she certainly did, poor boy! But that, of course, is over
now: and Ethel, though she cannot help being a worldly woman, has such
firmness and resolution of character, that if she has once determined
to conquer any inclination of that sort I am sure she will master it,
and make Lord Farintosh a very good wife.”

“Since the Colonel’s quarrel with Sir Barnes,” cries Mr. Pendennis,
adverting by a natural transition from Ethel to her amiable brother,
“our banking friend does not invite us any more: Lady Clara sends you
no cards. I have a great mind to withdraw my account.”

Laura, who understands nothing about accounts, did not perceive the
fine irony of this remark: but her face straightway put on the severe
expression which it chose to assume whenever Sir Barnes’s family was
mentioned, and she said, “My dear, I am very glad indeed that Lady
Clara sends us no more of her invitations. You know very well why I
disliked them.”

“Why?”

“I hear baby crying,” says Laura. Oh, Laura, Laura! how could you tell
your husband such a fib?—and she quits the room without deigning to
give any answer to that “Why?”

Let us pay a brief visit to Newcome in the north of England, and there
we may get some answer to the question of which Mr. Pendennis had just
in vain asked a reply from his wife. My design does not include a
description of that great and flourishing town of Newcome, and of the
manufactures which caused its prosperity; but only admits of the
introduction of those Newcomites who are concerned in the affairs of
the family which has given its respectable name to these volumes.

Thus in previous pages we have said nothing about the Mayor and
Corporation of Newcome the magnificent bankers and manufacturers who
had their places of business in the town, and their splendid villas
outside its smoky precincts; people who would give their thousand
guineas for a picture or a statue, and write you off a cheque for ten
times the amount any day; people who, if there was a talk of a statue
to the Queen or the Duke, would come down to the Town All and subscribe
their one, two, three undred apiece (especially if in the neighbouring
city of SLOWCOME they were putting up a statue to the Duke or the
Queen)—not of such men have I spoken, the magnates of the place; but of
the humble Sarah Mason in Jubilee Row—of the Reverend Dr. Bulders the
Vicar, Mr. Vidler the apothecary, Mr. Puff the baker—of Tom Potts, the
jolly reporter of the _Newcome Independent_, and —— Batters, Esq., the
proprietor of that journal—persons with whom our friends have had
already, or will be found presently to have, some connexion. And it is
from these that we shall arrive at some particulars regarding the
Newcome family, which will show us that they have a skeleton or two in
_their_ closets, as well as their neighbours.

Now, how will you have the story? Worthy mammas of families—if you do
not like to have your daughters told that bad husbands will make bad
wives; that marriages begun in indifference make homes unhappy; that
men whom girls are brought to swear to love and honour are sometimes
false, selfish, and cruel; and that women forget the oaths which they
have been made to swear—if you will not hear of this, ladies, close the
book, and send for some other. Banish the newspaper out of your houses,
and shut your eyes to the truth, the awful truth, of life and sin. Is
the world made of Jennies and Jessamies; and passion the play of
schoolboys and schoolgirls, scribbling valentines and interchanging
lollipops? Is life all over when Jenny and Jessamy are married; and are
there no subsequent trials, griefs, wars, bitter heart-pangs, dreadful
temptations, defeats, remorses, sufferings to bear, and dangers to
overcome? As you and I, friend, kneel with our children round about us,
prostrate before the Father of us all, and asking mercy for miserable
sinners, are the young ones to suppose the words are mere form, and
don’t apply to us?—to some outcasts in the free seats probably, or
those naughty boys playing in the churchyard? Are they not to know that
we err too, and pray with all our hearts to be rescued from temptation?
If such a knowledge is wrong for them, send them to church apart. Go
you and worship in private; or if not too proud, kneel humbly in the
midst of them, owning your wrong, and praying Heaven to be merciful to
you a sinner.

When Barnes Newcome became the reigning Prince of the Newcome family,
and after the first agonies of grief for his father’s death had
subsided, he made strong attempts to conciliate the principal persons
in the neighbourhood, and to render himself popular in the borough. He
gave handsome entertainments to the townsfolk and to the county gentry;
he tried even to bring those two warring classes together. He
endeavoured to be civil to the _Newcome Independent_, the Opposition
paper, as well as to the _Newcome Sentinel_ that true old
Uncompromising Blue. He asked the Dissenting clergyman to dinner, and
the Low Church clergyman, as well as the orthodox Doctor Bulders and
his curates. He gave a lecture at the Newcome Athenæum, which everybody
said was very amusing, and which _Sentinel_ and _Independent_ both
agreed in praising. Of course he subscribed to that statue which the
Newcomites were raising; to the philanthropic missions which Reverend
Low Church gentlemen were engaged in; to the (for the young Newcomite
manufacturers are as sporting as any gents in the North), to the
hospital, the People’s Library, the restoration of the rood-screen and
the great painted window in Newcome Old Church (Rev. J. Bulders), and
he had to pay in fine a most awful price for his privilege of sitting
in Parliament as representative of his native place—as he called it in
his speeches “the cradle of his forefathers, the home of his race,”
etc., though Barnes was in fact born at Clapham.

Lady Clara could not in the least help this young statesman in his
designs upon Newcome and the Newcomites. After she came into Barnes’s
hands, a dreadful weight fell upon her. She would smile and simper, and
talk kindly and gaily enough at first, during Sir Brian’s life; and
among women, when Barnes was not present. But as soon as he joined the
company, it was remarked that his wife became silent, and looked
eagerly towards him whenever he ventured to speak. She blundered, her
eyes filled with tears; the little wit she had left her in her
husband’s presence: he grew angry, and tried to hide his anger with a
sneer, or broke out with gibe and an oath, when he lost patience, and
Clara, whimpering, would leave the room. Everybody at Newcome knew that
Barnes bullied his wife.

People had worse charges against Barnes than wife-bullying. Do you
suppose that little interruption which occurred at Barnes’s marriage
was not known in Newcome? His victim had been a Newcome girl, the man
to whom she was betrothed was in a Newcome factory. When Barnes was a
young man, and in his occasional visits to Newcome, lived along with
those dashing young blades Sam Jollyman (Jollyman Brothers and
Bowcher), Bob Homer, Cross Country Bill, Al Rackner (for whom his
father had to pay eighteen thousand pounds after the Leger, the year
Toggery won it) and that wild lot, all sorts of stories were told of
them, and of Barnes especially. Most of them were settled, and steady
business men by this time. Al, it was known had become very serious,
besides making his fortune in cotton. Bob Homer managed the Bank; and
as for S. Jollyman, Mrs. S. J. took uncommon good care that he didn’t
break out of bounds any more; why, he was not even allowed to play a
game at billiards; or to dine out without her——I could go on giving you
interesting particulars of a hundred members of the Newcome
aristocracy, were not our attention especially directed to one
respectable family.

All Barnes’s endeavours at popularity were vain, partly from his own
fault, and partly from the nature of mankind, and of the Newcome folks
especially, whom no single person could possibly conciliate. Thus,
suppose he gave the advertisements to the _Independent;_ the old Blue
paper the _Sentinel_ was very angry: suppose he asked Mr. Hunch, the
Dissenting minister, to bless the tablecloth after dinner, as he had
begged Dr. Bulders to utter a benediction on the first course, Hunch
and Bulders were both angry. He subscribed to the races—what
heathenism! to the missionaries—what sanctimonious humbug! And the
worst was that Barnes being young at that time, and not able to keep
his tongue in order, could not help saying not to but of such and such
a man, that he was an infernal ass, or a confounded old idiot, and so
forth—peevish phrases, which undid in a moment the work of a dozen
dinners, countless compliments, and months of grinning good-humour.

Now he is wiser. He is very proud of being Newcome of Newcome, and
quite believes that the place is his hereditary principality. But
still, he says, his father was a fool for ever representing the
borough. “Dammy, sir,” cries Sir Barnes, “never sit for a place that
lies at your park-gates, and above all never try to conciliate ’em.
Curse ’em! Hate ’em well, sir! Take a line, and flog the fellows on the
other side. Since I have sate in Parliament for another place, I have
saved myself I don’t know how much a year. I never go to High Church or
Low; don’t give a shillin’ to the confounded races, or the infernal
souptickets, or to the miserable missionaries; and at last live in
quiet.”

So, in spite of all his subscriptions, and his coaxing of the various
orders of Newcomites, Sir Barnes Newcome was not popular among them;
and while he had enemies on all sides, had sturdy friends not even on
his own. Scarce a man but felt Barnes was laughing at him; Bulders in
his pulpit, Holder who seconded him in his election, the Newcome
society; and the ladies, even more than the men, were uneasy under his
ominous familiarity, and recovered their good-humour when he left them.
People felt as if it was a truce only, and not an alliance with him,
and always speculated on the possibility of war: when he turned his
back on them in the market, men felt relieved, and, as they passed his
gate, looked with no friendly glances over his park-wall.

What happened within was perfectly familiar to many persons. Our friend
was insolent to all his servants; and of course very well served, but
very much disliked, in consequence. The butler was familiar with
Taplow—the housekeeper had a friend at Newcome; Mrs Taplow, in fact, of
the King’s Arms—one of the grooms at Newcome Park kept company with
Mrs. Bulder’s maid: the incomings and outgoings, the quarrels and
tears, the company from London, and all the doings of the folks at
Newcome Park were thus known to the neighbourhood round about. The
apothecary brought an awful story back from Newcome. He had been called
to Lady Clara in strong hysterical fits. He found her ladyship with a
bruise on her face. When Sir Barnes approached her (he would not allow
the medical man to see her except in his presence) she screamed and
bade him not come near her. These things did Mr. Vidler weakly impart
to Mrs. Vidler: these, under solemn vows of secrecy, Mrs. Vidler told
to one or two friends. Sir Barnes and Lady Clara were seen shopping
together very graciously in Newcome a short time afterwards; persons
who dined at the Park said the Baronet and his wife seemed on very good
terms; but—but that story of the bruised cheek remained in the minds of
certain people, and lay by at compound interest as such stories will.

Now, say people quarrel and make it up; or don’t make it up, but wear a
smirking face to society, and call each other “my dear” and “my love,”
and smooth over their countenances before John, who enters with the
coals as they are barking and biting, or who announces the dinner as
they are tearing each other’s eyes out? Suppose a woman is ever so
miserable, and yet smiles, and doesn’t show her grief? “Quite right,”
say her prudent friends, and her husband’s relations above all. “My
dear, you have too much propriety to exhibit your grief before the
world, or above all, before the darling children.” So to lie is your
duty, to lie to your friends, to yourself if you can, to your children.

Does this discipline of hypocrisy improve any mortal woman? Say she
learns to smile after a blow, do you suppose in this matter alone she
will be a hypocrite? Poor Lady Clara! I fancy a better lot for you than
that to which fate handed you over. I fancy there need have been no
deceit in your fond simple little heart, could it but have been given
into other keeping. But you were consigned to a master, whose scorn and
cruelty terrified you; under whose sardonic glances your scared eyes
were afraid to look up, and before whose gloomy coldness you dared not
be happy. Suppose a little plant, very frail and delicate from the
first, but that might have bloomed sweetly and borne fair flowers, had
it received warm shelter and kindly nurture; suppose a young creature
taken out of her home, and given over to a hard master whose caresses
are as insulting as his neglect; consigned to cruel usage; to weary
loneliness; to bitter, bitter recollections of the past; suppose her
schooled into hypocrisy by tyranny—and then, quick, let us hire an
advocate to roar out to a British jury the wrongs of her injured
husband, to paint the agonies of his bleeding heart (if Mr. Advocate
gets plaintiff’s brief in time, and before defendant’s attorney has
retained him), and to show Society injured through him. Let us console
that martyr, I say, with thumping damages; and as for the woman—the
guilty wretch!—let us lead her out and stone her.




CHAPTER LVI.
Rosa quo locorum sera moratur


Clive Newcome bore his defeat with such a courage and resolution as
those who knew the young fellow’s character were sure he would display.
It was whilst he had a little lingering hope still that the poor lad
was in the worst condition; as a gambler is restless and unhappy whilst
his last few guineas remain with him, and he is venturing them against
the overpowering chances of the bank. His last piece, however, gone,
our friend rises up from that unlucky table beaten at the contest but
not broken in spirit. He goes back into the world again and withdraws
from that dangerous excitement; sometimes when he is alone or wakeful,
tossing in his bed at nights, he may recall the fatal game, and think
how he might have won it—think what a fool he was ever to have played
it at all—but these cogitations Clive kept for himself. He was
magnanimous enough not even to blame Ethel much, and to take her side
against his father, who it must be confessed now exhibited a violent
hostility against that young lady and her belongings. Slow to anger and
utterly beyond deceit himself, when Thomas Newcome was once roused, or
at length believed that he was cheated woe to the offender! From that
day forth, Thomas believed no good of him. Every thought or action of
his enemy’s life seemed treason to the worthy Colonel. If Barnes gave a
dinner-party, his uncle was ready to fancy that the banker wanted to
poison somebody; if he made a little speech in the House of Commons
(Barnes did make little speeches in the House of Commons), the Colonel
was sure some infernal conspiracy lay under the villain’s words. The
whole of that branch of the Newcomes fared little better at their
kinsman’s hands—they were all deceitful, sordid, heartless,
worldly;—Ethel herself no better now than the people who had bred her
up. People hate, as they love, unreasonably. Whether is it the more
mortifying to us, to feel that we are disliked or liked undeservedly?

Clive was not easy until he had the sea between him and his misfortune:
and now Thomas Newcome had the chance of making that tour with his son,
which in early days had been such a favourite project with the good
man. They travelled Rhineland and Switzerland together—they crossed
into Italy—went from Milan to Venice (where Clive saluted the greatest
painting in the world—the glorious ‘Assumption’ of Titian)—they went to
Trieste and over the beautiful Styrian Alps to Vienna—they beheld
Danube, and the plain where the Turk and Sobieski fought. They
travelled at a prodigious fast pace. They did not speak much to one
another. They were a pattern pair of English travellers: I dare say
many persons whom they met smiled to observe them; and shrugged their
shoulders at the aspect of _ces Anglais_. They did not know the care in
the young traveller’s mind; and the deep tenderness and solicitude of
the elder. Clive wrote to say it was a very pleasant tour, but I think
I should not have liked to join it. Let us dismiss it in this single
sentence. Other gentlemen have taken the same journey, and with sorrow
perhaps as their silent fellow-traveller. How you remember the places
afterwards, and the thoughts which pursued you! If in after days, when
your grief is dead and buried, you revisit the scenes in which it was
your companion, how its ghost rises and shows itself again! Suppose
this part of Mr. Clive’s life were to be described at length in several
chapters, and not in a single brief sentence, what dreary pages they
would be! In two or three months our friends saw a number of men,
cities, mountains, rivers, and what not. It was yet early autumn when
they were back in France again, and September found them at Brussels,
where James Binnie, Esq., and his family were established in
comfortable quarters, and where we may be sure Clive and his father
were very welcome.

Dragged abroad at first sorely against his will, James Binnie had found
the Continental life pretty much to his liking. He had passed a winter
at Pau, a summer at Vichy, where the waters had done him good. His
ladies had made several charming foreign acquaintances. Mrs. Mackenzie
had quite a list of counts and marchionesses among her friends. The
excellent Captain Goby, wandered about the country with them. Was it to
Rosey, was it to her mother, the Captain was most attached? Rosey
received him as a godpapa; Mrs. Mackenzie as a wicked, odious,
good-for-nothing, dangerous, delightful creature. Is it humiliating, is
it consolatory, to remark, with what small wit some of our friends are
amused? The jovial sallies of Goby appeared exquisite to Rosey’s
mother, and to the girl probably; though that young Bahawder of a Clive
Newcome chose to wear a grave face (confound his insolent airs!) at the
very best of the Goby jokes.

In Goby’s train was his fervent admirer and inseparable young friend,
Clarence Hoby. Captain Hoby and Captain Goby travelled the world
together, visited Hombourg and Baden, Cheltenham and Leamington, Paris
and Brussels, in company, belonged to the same club in London—the
centre of all pleasure, fashion, and joy, for the young officer and the
older campaigner. The jokes at the Flag, the dinners at the Flag, the
committee of the Flag, were the theme of their constant conversation.
Goby fifty years old, unattached, and with dyed moustaches, was the
affable comrade of the youngest member of his club: when absent, a
friend wrote him the last riddle from the smoking-room; when present,
his knowledge of horses, of cookery, wines, and cigars, and military
history, rendered him a most acceptable companion. He knew the history
and achievements of every regiment in the army; of every general and
commanding officer. He was known to have been ‘out’ more than once
himself, and had made up a hundred quarrels. He was certainly not a man
of an ascetic life or a profound intellectual culture: but though poor
he was known to be most honourable; though more than middle-aged he was
cheerful, busy, and kindly; and though the youngsters called him Old
Goby, he bore his years very gaily and handsomely, and I dare say
numbers of ladies besides Mrs. Mackenzie thought him delightful. Goby’s
talk and rattle perhaps somewhat bored James Binnie, but Thomas Newcome
found the Captain excellent company; and Goby did justice to the good
qualities of the Colonel.

Clive’s father liked Brussels very well. He and his son occupied very
handsome quarters, near the spacious apartments in the Park which James
Binnie’s family inhabited. Waterloo was not far off, to which the
Indian officer paid several visits with Captain Goby for a guide; and
many of Marlborough’s battlefields were near, in which Goby certainly
took but a minor interest; but on the other hand Clive beheld these
with the greatest pleasure, and painted more than one dashing piece, in
which Churchill and Eugene, Cutts and Cadogan, were the heroes; whose
flowing periwigs, huge boots, and thundering Flemish chargers were, he
thought, more novel and picturesque than the Duke’s surtout, and the
French Grenadiers’ hairy caps, which so many English and French artists
have portrayed.

Mr. and Mrs. Pendennis were invited by our kind Colonel to pass a
month—six months if they chose—at Brussels, and were most splendidly
entertained by our friends in that city. A suite of handsome rooms was
set apart for us. My study communicated with Clive’s atelier. Many an
hour did we pass, and many a ride and walk did we take together. I
observed that Clive never mentioned Miss Newcome’s name, and Laura and
I agreed that it was as well not to recall it. Only once, when we read
the death of Lady Glenlivat, Lord Farintosh’s mother, in the newspaper,
I remember to have said, “I suppose that marriage will be put off
again.”

“Qu’est ce que cela me fait?” says Mr. Clive gloomily, over his
picture—a cheerful piece representing Count Egmont going to execution;
in which I have the honour to figure as a halberdier, Captain Hoby as
the Count, and Captain Goby as the Duke of Alva, looking out of window.

Mrs. Mackenzie was in a state of great happiness and glory during this
winter. She had a carriage, and worked that vehicle most indefatigably.
She knew a great deal of good company at Brussels. She had an evening
for receiving. She herself went to countless evening-parties, and had
the joy of being invited to a couple of court balls, at which I am
bound to say her daughter and herself both looked very handsome. The
Colonel brushed up his old uniform and attended these entertainments.
M. Newcome fils, as I should judge, was not the worst-looking man in
the room; and, as these young people waltzed together (in which
accomplishment Clive was very much more skilful than Captain Goby) I
dare say many people thought he and Rosey made a pretty couple.

Most persons, my wife included, difficult as that lady is to please,
were pleased with the pretty little Rosey. She sang charmingly now, and
looked so while singing. If her mother would but have omitted that
chorus, which she cackled perseveringly behind her daughter’s pretty
back: about Rosey’s angelic temper; about the compliments Signor
Polonini paid her; about Sir Horace Dash, our minister, _insisting_
upon her singing “Batti Batti” over again, and the Archduke clapping
his hands and saying, “Oh, yes!” about Count Vanderslaapen’s attentions
to her, etc. etc.; but for these constant remarks of Mrs. Mack’s, I am
sure no one would have been better pleased with Miss Rosey’s singing
and behaviour than myself. As for Captain Hoby, it was easy to see how
_he was_ affected towards Miss Rosalind’s music and person.

And indeed few things could be pleasanter than to watch the behaviour
of this pretty little maid with her Uncle James and his old chum the
Colonel. The latter was soon as fond of her as James Binnie himself,
whose face used to lighten with pleasure whenever it turned towards
hers. She seemed to divine his wants, as she would trip across the room
to fulfil them. She skipped into the carriage and covered his feet with
a shawl. James was lazy and chilly now, when he took his drive. She
sate opposite to him and smiled on him; and, if he dozed, quick,
another handkerchief was round his neck. I do not know whether she
understood his jokes, but she saluted them always with a sweet kind
smile. How she kissed him, and how delighted she was if he bought her a
bouquet for her ball that night! One day, upon occasion of one of these
balls, James and Thomas, those two old boys, absolutely came into Mrs.
Mackenzie’s drawing-room with a bouquet apiece for Miss Rosey; and
there was a fine laughing.

“Oh, you little Susanna!” says James, after taking his usual payment;
“now go and pay t’other elder.” Rosey did not quite understand at
first, being, you see, more ready to laugh at jokes than to comprehend
them: but when she did, I promise you she looked uncommonly pretty as
she advanced to Colonel Newcome and put that pretty fresh cheek of hers
up to his grizzled moustache.

“I protest I don’t know which of you blushes the most,” chuckles James
Binnie—and the truth is, the old man and the young girl had both hung
out those signals of amiable distress.

On this day, and as Miss Rosey was to be overpowered by flowers, who
should come presently to dinner but Captain Hoby, with another bouquet?
on which Uncle James said Rosey should go to the ball like an American
Indian with her scalps at her belt.

“Scalps!” cries Mrs. Mackenzie.

“Scalps! Oh law, uncle!” exclaims Miss Rosey. “What can you mean by
anything so horrid?”

Goby recalls to Mrs. Mack, Hook-ee-ma-goosh the Indian chief, whom she
must have seen when the Hundred and Fiftieth were at Quebec, and who
had his lodge full of them; and who used to lie about the barracks so
drunk, and who used to beat his poor little European wife: and
presently Mr. Clive Newcome joins this company, when the chirping,
tittering, joking, laughing, cease somehow.

Has Clive brought a bouquet too? No. He has never thought about a
bouquet. He is dressed in black, with long hair, a long moustache, and
melancholy imperial. He looks very handsome, but as glum as an
undertaker. And James Binnie says, “Egad, Tom, they used to call you
the knight of the woeful countenance, and Clive has just inherited the
paternal mug.” Then James calls out in a cheery voice, “Dinner,
dinner!” and trots off with Mrs. Pendennis under his arm; Rosey nestles
up against the Colonel; Goby and Mrs. Mack walk away arm-in-arm very
contentedly; and I don’t know with which of her three nosegays pretty
Rosey appears at the ball.

Our stay with our friends at Brussels could not be prolonged beyond a
month, for at the end of that period we were under an engagement to
other friends in England, who were good enough to desire the presence
of Mrs. Pendennis and her suite of baby, nurse, and husband. So we
presently took leave of Rosey and the Campaigner, of the two stout
elders, and our melancholy young Clive, who bore us company to Antwerp,
and who won Laura’s heart by the neat way in which he took her child on
board ship. Poor fellow! how sad he looked as he bowed to us and took
off his hat! His eyes did not seem to be looking at us, though they and
his thoughts were turned another way. He moved off immediately, with
his head down, puffing his eternal cigar, and lost in his own
meditations; our going or our staying was of very little importance to
the lugubrious youth.

“I think it was a great pity they came to Brussels,” says Laura, as we
sate on the deck, while her unconscious infant was cheerful, and while
the water of the lazy Scheldt as yet was smooth.

“Who? The Colonel and Clive? They are very handsomely lodged. They have
a good maître-d’hôtel. Their dinners, I am sure, are excellent; and
your child, madam, is as healthy as it possibly can be.”

“Blessed darling! Yes!” (Blessed darling crows, moos, jumps in his
nurse’s arms, and holds out a little mottled hand for a biscuit of
Savoy, which mamma supplies.) “I can’t help thinking, Arthur, that
Rosey would have been much happier as Mrs. Hoby than she will be as
Mrs. Newcome.”

“Who thinks of her being Mrs. Newcome?”

“Her mother, her uncle, and Clive’s father, Since the Colonel has been
so rich, I think Mrs. Mackenzie sees a great deal of merit in Clive.
Rosey will do anything her mother bids her. If Clive can be brought to
the same obedience, Uncle James and the Colonel will be delighted.
Uncle James has set his heart on this marriage. (He and his sister
agree upon this point.) He told me, last night, that he would sing
‘Nunc dimittis,’ could he but see the two children happy; and that he
should lie easier in purgatory if that could be brought about.”

“And what did you say, Laura?”

“I laughed, and told Uncle James I was of the Hoby faction. He is very
good-natured, frank, honest, and gentlemanlike, Mr. Hoby. But Uncle
James said he thought Mr. Hoby was so—well, so stupid—that his Rosey
would be thrown away upon the poor Captain. So I did not tell Uncle
James that, before Clive’s arrival, Rosey had found Captain Hoby far
from stupid. He used to sing duets with her; he used to ride with her
before Clive came. Last winter, when they were at Pau, I feel certain
Miss Rosey thought Captain Hoby very pleasant indeed. She thinks she
was attached to Clive formerly, and now she admires him, and is
dreadfully afraid of him. He is taller and handsomer, and richer and
cleverer than Captain Hoby, certainly.”

“I should think so, indeed,” breaks out Mr. Pendennis. “Why, my dear,
Clive is as fine a fellow as one can see on a summer’s day. It does one
good to look at him. What a frank pair of bright blue eyes he has, or
used to have, till this mishap overclouded them! What a pleasant laugh
he has! What a well-built, agile figure it is—what pluck, and spirit,
and honour, there is about my young chap! I don’t say he is a genius of
the highest order, but he is the staunchest, the bravest, the
cheeriest, the most truth-telling, the kindest heart. Compare him and
Hoby! Why, Clive is an eagle, and yonder little creature a mousing
owl!”

“I like to hear you speak so,” cries Mrs. Laura, very tenderly. “People
say that you are always sneering, Arthur; but I know my husband better.
We know papa better, don’t we, baby?” (Here my wife kisses the infant
Pendennis with great effusion, who has come up dancing on his nurse’s
arms.) “But,” says she, coming back and snuggling by her husband’s side
again—“But suppose your favourite Clive is an eagle, Arthur, don’t you
think he had better have an eagle for a mate? If he were to marry
little Rosey, I dare say he would be very good to her; but I think
neither he nor she would be very happy. My dear, she does not care for
his pursuits; she does not understand him when he talks. The two
captains, and Rosey and I, and the campaigner, as you call her, laugh
and talk, and prattle, and have the merriest little jokes with one
another, and we all are as quiet as mice when you and Clive come in.”

“What, am I an eagle, too? I have no aquiline pretensions at all, Mrs.
Pendennis.”

“No. Well, we are not afraid of you. We are not afraid of papa, are we,
darling?” this young woman now calls out to the other member of her
family; who, if you will calculate, has just had time to be walked
twice up and down the deck of the steamer, whilst Laura has been making
her speech about eagles. And soon the mother, child, and attendant
descend into the lower cabins: and then dinner is announced: and
Captain Jackson treats us to champagne from his end of the table and
yet a short while, and we are at sea, and conversation becomes
impossible: and morning sees us under the grey London sky, and amid the
million of masts in the Thames.




CHAPTER LVII.
Rosebury and Newcome


The friends to whom we were engaged in England were Florac and his
wife, Madame la Princesse de Moncontour, who were determined to spend
the Christmas holidays at the Princess’s country seat. It was for the
first time since their reconciliation, that the Prince and Princess
dispensed their hospitalities at the latter’s château. It is situated,
as the reader has already been informed, at some five miles from the
town of Newcome; away from the chimneys and smoky atmosphere of that
place, in a sweet country of rural woodlands; over which quiet
villages, grey church spires, and ancient gabled farmhouses are
scattered: still wearing the peaceful aspect which belonged to them
when Newcome was as yet but an antiquated country town, before mills
were erected on its river-banks, and dyes and cinders blackened its
stream. Twenty years since Newcome Park was the only great house in
that district; now scores of fine villas have sprung up in the suburb
lying between the town and park. Newcome New Town, as everybody knows,
has grown round the park-gates, and the New Town Hotel (where the
railway station is) is a splendid structure in the Tudor style, more
ancient in appearance than the park itself; surrounded by little
antique villas with spiked gables, stacks of crooked chimneys, and
plate-glass windows looking upon trim lawns; with glistening hedges of
evergreens, spotless gravel walks, and Elizabethan gig-houses. Under
the great railway viaduct of the New Town, goes the old tranquil
winding London highroad, once busy with a score of gay coaches, and
ground by innumerable wheels: but at a few miles from the New Town
Station the road has become so mouldy that the grass actually grows on
it; and Rosebury, Madame de Moncontour’s house, stands at one end of a
village-green, which is even more quiet now than it was a hundred years
ago.

When first Madame de Florac bought the place, it scarcely ranked
amongst the country-houses; and she, the sister of manufacturers at
Newcome and Manchester, did not of course visit the county families. A
homely little body, married to a Frenchman from whom she was separated,
may or may not have done a great deal of good in her village, have had
pretty gardens, and won prizes at the Newcome flower and fruit shows;
but, of course, she was nobody in such an aristocratic county as we
know ———shire is. She had her friends and relatives from Newcome. Many
of them were Quakers—many were retail shopkeepers. She even frequented
the little branch Ebenezer, on Rosebury Green; and it was only by her
charities and kindness at Christmas-time, that the Rev. Dr. Potter, the
rector at Rosebury, knew her. The old clergy, you see, live with the
county families. Good little Madame de Florac was pitied and patronised
by the Doctor, treated with no little superciliousness by Mrs. Potter,
and the young ladies, who only kept the first society. Even when her
rich brother died, and she got her share of all that money Mrs. Potter
said poor Madame de Florac did well in not trying to move out of her
natural sphere (Mrs. P. was the daughter of a bankrupt hatter in
London, and had herself been governess in a noble family, out of which
she married Mr. P., who was private tutor). Madame de Florac did well,
she said, not to endeavour to leave her natural sphere, and that The
County never would receive her. Tom Potter, the rector’s son, with whom
I had the good fortune to be a fellow-student at Saint Boniface
College, Oxbridge—a rattling, forward, and it must be owned, vulgar
youth—asked me whether Florac was not a billiard-marker by profession?
and was even so kind as to caution his sisters not to speak of
billiards before the lady of Rosebury. Tom was surprised to learn that
Monsieur Paul de Florac was a gentleman of lineage incomparably better
than that of any, except two or three families in England (including
your own, my dear and respected reader, of course, if you hold to your
pedigree). But the truth is, heraldically speaking, that union with the
Higgs of Manchester was the first misalliance which the Florac family
had made for long long years. Not that I would wish for a moment to
insinuate that any nobleman is equal to an English nobleman; nay, that
an English snob, with a coat-of-arms bought yesterday, or stolen out of
Edmonton, or a pedigree purchased from a peerage-maker, has not a right
to look down upon any of your paltry foreign nobility.

One day the carriage-and-four came in state from Newcome Park, with the
well-known chaste liveries of the Newcomes, and drove up Rosebury
Green, towards the parsonage gate, when Mrs. and the Miss Potters
happened to be standing, cheapening fish from a donkey-man, with whom
they were in the habit of dealing. The ladies were in their pokiest old
head-gear and most dingy gowns, when they perceived the carriage
approaching; and considering, of course, that the visit of the Park
people was intended for them, dashed into the rectory to change their
clothes, leaving Rowkins, the costermonger, in the very midst of the
negotiation about the three mackerel. Mamma got that new bonnet out of
the bandbox; Lizzy and Liddy skipped up to their bedroom, and brought
out those dresses which they wore at the _déjeûner_ at the Newcome
Athenæum, when Lord Leveret came down to lecture; into which they no
sooner had hooked their lovely shoulders, than they reflected with
terror that mamma had been altering one of papa’s flannel waistcoats
and had left it in the drawing-room, when they were called out by the
song of Rowkins, and the appearance of his donkey’s ears over the green
gate of the rectory. To think of the Park people coming, and the
drawing-room in that dreadful state!

But when they came downstairs the Park people were not in the room—the
woollen garment was still on the table (how they plunged it into the
chiffonier!)—and the only visitor was Rowkins, the costermonger,
grinning at the open French windows, with the three mackerel, and
crying, “Make it sixpence, miss—don’t say fippens, maam, to a pore
fellow that has a wife and family.” So that the young ladies had to
cry—“Impudence!” “Get away, you vulgar insolent creature!—Go round,
sir, to the back door!” “How dare you?” and the like; fearing lest Lady
Anne Newcome, and Young Ethel, and Barnes should enter in the midst of
this ignoble controversy.

They never came at all—those Park people. How very odd! They passed the
rectory gate; they drove on to Madame de Florac’s lodge. They went in.
They stayed for half an hour; the horses driving round and round the
gravel road before the house; and Mrs. Potter and the girls speedily
going to the upper chambers, and looking out of the room where the
maids slept, saw Lady Anne, Ethel, and Barnes walking with Madame de
Florac, going into the conservatories, issuing thence with MacWhirter,
the gardener, bearing huge bunches of grapes and large fasces of
flowers; they saw Barnes talking in the most respectful manner to
Madame de Florac: and when they went downstairs and had their work
before them—Liddy her gilt music-book, Lizzy her embroidered
altar-cloth, mamma her scarlet cloak for one of the old women—they had
the agony of seeing the barouche over the railings whisk by, with the
Park people inside, and Barnes driving the four horses.

It was on that day when Barnes had determined to take up Madame de
Florac; when he was bent upon reconciling her to her husband. In spite
of all Mrs. Potter’s predictions, the county families did come and
visit the manufacturer’s daughter; and when Madame de Florac became
Madame la Princesse de Moncontour, when it was announced that she was
coming to stay at Rosebury for Christmas, I leave you to imagine
whether the circumstance was or was not mentioned in the _Newcome
Sentinel_ and the _Newcome Independent;_ and whether Rev. G. Potter,
D.D., and Mrs. Potter did or did not call on the Prince and Princess. I
leave you to imagine whether the lady did or did not inspect all the
alterations which Vineer’s people from Newcome were making at Rosebury
House—the chaste yellow satin and gold of the drawing-room—the carved
oak for the dining-room—the chintz for the bedrooms—the Princess’s
apartment—the Prince’s apartment—the guests’ apartments—the
smoking-room, gracious goodness!—the stables (these were under Tom
Potter’s superintendence), “and I’m finished,” says he one day, “if
here doesn’t come a billiard-table!”

The house was most comfortably and snugly appointed from top to bottom;
and thus it will be seen that Mr. and Mrs. Pendennis were likely to be
in very good quarters for Christmas of 184-.

Tom Potter was so kind as to call on me two days after our arrival; and
to greet me in the Princess’s pew at church on the previous day. Before
desiring to be introduced to my wife, he requested me to present him to
my friend the Prince. He called him your Highness. His Highness, who
had behaved with exemplary gravity, save once when he shrieked an “ah!”
as Miss Liddy led off the children in the organ-loft in a hymn, and the
whole pack went woefully out of tune, complimented Monsieur Tom on the
sermon of monsieur his father. Tom walked with us to Rosebury
lodge-gate. “Will you not come in, and make a party of billiard with
me?” says His Highness. “Ah Pardon! I forgot, you do not play the
billiard the Sunday!” “_Any other day_, Prince, I shall be delighted,”
says Tom; and squeezed His Highness’s hand tenderly at parting. “Your
comrade of college was he?” asks Florac. “My dear, what men are these
comrades of college! What men are you English! My word of honour, there
are some of them here—if I were to say to them wax my boots, they would
take them and wax them! Didst thou see how the Révérend eyed us during
the sermon? He regarded us over his book, my word of honour!”

Madame de Florac said simply, she wished the Prince would go and hear
Mr. Jacob at the Ebenezer. Mr. Potter was not a good preacher,
certainly.

“Savez-vous qu’elle est furieusement belle, la fille du Révérend?”
whispered His Highness to me. “I have made eyes at her during the
sermon. They will be of pretty neighbours these meess!” and Paul looked
unutterably roguish and victorious as he spoke. To my wife, I am bound
to say, Monsieur de Moncontour showed a courtesy, a respect and
kindness, that could not be exceeded. He admired her. He paid her
compliments innumerable, and gave me I am sure sincere congratulations
at possessing such a treasure. I do not think he doubted about his
power of conquering her, or any other of the daughters of women. But I
was the friend of his misfortunes—his guest; and he spared me.

I have seen nothing more amusing, odd, and pleasant than Florac at this
time of his prosperity. We arrived, as this veracious chronicle has
already asserted, on a Saturday evening. We were conducted to our most
comfortable apartments; with crackling fires blazing on the hearths,
and every warmth of welcome. Florac expanded and beamed with
good-nature. He shook me many times by the hand; he patted me; he
called me his good—his brave. He cried to his maître-d’hôtel,
“Frédéric, remember monsieur is master here! Run before his orders.
Prostrate thyself to him. He was good to me in the days of my
misfortune. Hearest thou, Frédéric? See that everything be done for
Monsieur Pendennis—for madame sa charmante lady—for her angelic infant,
and the bonne. None of thy garrison tricks with that young person,
Frédéric! vieux scélérat! Garde-toi de là, Frédéric; si non, je
t’envoie à Botani Bay; je te traduis devant le Lord-Maire!”

“En Angleterre je me fais Anglais, vois-tu, mon ami,” continued the
Prince. “Demain c’est Sunday, et tu vas voir! I hear the bell, dress
thyself for the dinner—my friend!”; Here there was another squeeze of
both hands from the good-natured fellow. “It do good to my art to ’ave
you in my ’ouse! Heuh!” He hugged his guest; he had tears in his eyes
as he performed this droll, this kind embrace. Not less kind in her
way, though less expensive and _embracive_, was Madame de Moncontour to
my wife, as I found on comparing notes with that young woman, when the
day’s hospitalities were ended. The little Princess trotted from
bedchamber to nursery to see that everything was made comfortable for
her guests. She sate and saw the child washed and put to bed. She had
never beheld such a little angel. She brought it a fine toy to play
with. She and her grim old maid frightened the little creature at
first, but it was very speedily reconciled to their countenances. She
was in the nursery almost as early as the child’s mother. “Ah!” sighed
the poor little woman, “how happy you must be to have one!” In fine, my
wife was quite overcome by her goodness and welcome.

Sunday morning arrived in the course of time, and then Florac appeared
as a most wonderful Briton indeed! He wore top-boots and buckskins; and
after breakfast, when we went to church, a white great-coat with a
little cape, in which garment he felt that his similarity to an English
gentleman was perfect. In conversation with his grooms and servants he
swore freely,—not that he was accustomed to employ oaths in his own
private talk, but he thought the employment of these expletives
necessary as an English country gentleman. He never dined without a
roast-beef, and insisted that the piece of meat should be bleeding, “as
you love it, you others.” He got up boxing-matches: and kept birds for
combats of cock. He assumed the sporting language with admirable
enthusiasm—drove over to cover with a steppère—rode across countri like
a good one—was splendid in the hunting-field in his velvet cap and
Napoleon boots, and made the Hunt welcome at Rosebury where his
good-natured little wife was as kind to the gentlemen in scarlet as she
used to be of old to the stout Dissenting gentlemen in black, who sang
hymns and spake sermons on her lawn. These folks, scared at the change
which had taken place in the little Princess’s habits of life, lamented
her falling away: but in the county she and her husband got a great
popularity, and in Newcome town itself they were not less liked, for
her benefactions were unceasing, and Paul’s affability the theme of all
praise. The _Newcome Independent_ and the _Newcome Sentinel_ both paid
him compliments; the former journal contrasting his behaviour with that
of Sir Barnes, their member. Florac’s pleasure was to drive his
Princess with four horses into Newcome. He called his carriage his
“trappe,” his “drague.” The street-boys cheered and hurrayed the Prince
as he passed through the town. One haberdasher had a yellow stock
called the “Moncontour” displayed in his windows; another had a pink
one marked “The Princely,” and as such recommended it to the young
Newcome gents.

The drague conveyed us once to the neighbouring house of Newcome,
whither my wife accompanied Madame de Moncontour at that lady’s own
request, to whom Laura very properly did not think fit to confide her
antipathy for Lady Clara Newcome. Coming away from a great house, how
often she and I, egotistical philosophers, thanked our fates that our
own home was a small one! How long will great houses last in this
world? Do not their owners now prefer a lodging at Brighton, or a
little entresol on the Boulevard, to the solitary ancestral palace in a
park barred round with snow? We were as glad to get out of Newcome as
out of a prison. My wife and our hostess skipped into the carriage, and
began to talk freely as the lodge-gates closed after us. Would we be
lords of such a place under the penalty of living in it? We agreed that
the little angle of earth called Fairoaks was dearer to us than the
clumsy Newcome-pile of Tudor masonry. The house had been fitted up in
the time of George IV. and the quasi-Gothic revival. We were made to
pass through Gothic dining-rooms, where there was now no
hospitality,—Gothic drawing-rooms shrouded in brown hollands, to one
little room at the end of the dusky suite, where Lady Clara sate alone,
or in the company of the nurses and children. The blank gloom of the
place had fallen upon the poor lady. Even when my wife talked about
children (good-natured Madame de Moncontour vaunting ours as a prodigy)
Lady Clara did not brighten up! Her pair of young ones was exhibited
and withdrawn. A something weighed upon the woman. We talked about
Ethel’s marriage. She said it was fixed for the new year, she believed.
She did not know whether Glenlivat had been very handsomely fitted up.
She had not seen Lord Farintosh’s house in London. Sir Barnes came down
once—twice—of a Saturday sometimes, for three or four days to hunt, to
amuse himself, as all men do she supposed. She did not know when he was
coming again. She rang languidly when we rose to take leave, and sank
back on her sofa, where lay a heap of French novels. “She has chosen
some pretty books,” says Paul, as we drove through the sombre avenues
through the grey park, mists lying about the melancholy ornamental
waters, dingy herds of huddled sheep speckling the grass here and
there; no smoke rising up from the great stacks of chimneys of the
building we were leaving behind us, save one little feeble thread of
white which we knew came from the fire by which the lonely mistress of
Newcome was seated. “Ouf!” cries Florac, playing his whip, as the
lodge-gates closed on us, and his team of horses rattled merrily along
the road, “what a blessing it is to be out of that vault of a place!
There is something fatal in this house—in this woman. One smells
misfortune there.”

The hotel which our friend Florac patronised on occasion of his visits
to Newcome was the King’s Arms, and it happened, one day, as we entered
that place of entertainment in company, that a visitor of the house was
issuing through the hall, to whom Florac seemed as if he would
administer one of his customary embraces, and to whom the Prince called
out “Jack,” with great warmth and kindness as he ran towards the
stranger.

Jack did not appear to be particularly well pleased on beholding us; he
rather retreated from before the Frenchman’s advances.

“My dear Jack, my good, my brave Ighgate! I am delighted to see you!”
Florac continues, regardless of the stranger’s reception, or of the
landlord’s looks towards us, who was bowing the Prince into his very
best room.

“How do you do, Monsieur de Florac?” growls the new comer, surlily; and
was for moving on after this brief salutation; but having a second
thought seemingly, turned back and followed Florac into the apartment
where our host conducted us. _A la bonne heure!_ Florac renewed his
cordial greetings to Lord Highgate. “I knew not, mon bon, what fly had
stung you,” says he to my lord. The landlord, rubbing his hands,
smirking and bowing, was anxious to know whether the Prince would take
anything after his drive. As the Prince’s attendant and friend, the
lustre of his reception partially illuminated me. When the chief was
not by, I was treated with great attention (mingled with a certain
degree of familiarity) by my landlord.

Lord Highgate waited until Mr. Taplow was out of the room; and then
said to Florac, “Don’t call me by my name here, please, Florac, I am
here incog.”

“Plait-il?” asks Florac. “Where is incog.?” He laughed when the word
was interpreted to him. Lord Highgate had turned to me. “There was no
rudeness, you understand, intended, Mr. Pendennis, but I am down here
on some business, and don’t care to wear the handle to my name. Fellows
work it so, don’t you understand? never leave you at rest in a country
town—that sort of thing. Heard of our friend Clive lately?”

“Whether you ’ave ’andle or no ’andle, Jack, you are always the
bien-venu to me. What is thy affair? Old monster! I wager——”

“No, no, no such nonsense,” says Jack, rather eagerly. “I give you my
honour, I—I want to—to raise a sum of money—that is, to invest some in
a speculation down here—deuced good the speculations down here; and, by
the way, if the landlord asks you, I’m Mr. Harris—I’m a civil
engineer—I’m waiting for the arrival of the Canada at Liverpool from
America, and very uneasy about my brother who is on board.”

“What does he recount to us there? Keep these stories for the landlord,
Jack; to us ’tis not the pain to lie. My good Mr. Harris, why have we
not seen you at Rosebury? The Princess will scold me if you do not
come; and you must bring your dear brother when he arrive too. Do you
hear?” The last part of this sentence was uttered for Mr. Taplow’s
benefit, who had re-entered the George bearing a tray of wine and
biscuit.

The Master of Rosebury and Mr. Harris went out presently to look at a
horse which was waiting the former’s inspection in the stableyard of
the hotel. The landlord took advantage of his business, to hear a bell
which never was rung, and to ask me questions about the guest who had
been staying at his house for a week past. Did I know that party? Mr.
Pendennis said, “Yes, he knew that party.”

“Most respectable party, I have no doubt,” continues Boniface. “Do you
suppose the Prince of Moncontour knows any but respectable parties?”
asks Mr. Pendennis—a query of which the force was so great as to
discomfit and silence our landlord, who retreated to ask questions
concerning Mr. Harris of Florac’s grooms.

What was Highgate’s business here? Was it mine to know? I might have
suspicions, but should I entertain them or communicate them, and had I
not best keep them to myself? I exchanged not a word on the subject of
Highgate with Florac, as we drove home: though from the way in which we
looked at one another each saw that the other was acquainted with that
unhappy gentleman’s secret. We fell to talking about Madame la Duchesse
d’Ivry as we trotted on; and then of English manners by way of
contrast, of intrigues, elopements, Gretna Grin, etc., etc. “You are a
droll nation!” says Florac. “To make love well, you must absolutely
have a chaise-de-poste, and a scandal afterwards. If our affairs of
this kind made themselves on the grand route, what armies of
postillions we should need!”

I held my peace. In that vision of Jack Belsize I saw misery, guilt,
children dishonoured, homes deserted,—ruin for all the actors and
victims of the wretched conspiracy. Laura marked my disturbance when we
reached home. She even divined the cause of it, and charged me with it
at night, when we sate alone by our dressing-room fire, and had taken
leave of our kind entertainers. Then, under her cross-examination, I
own that I told what I had seen—Lord Highgate, under a feigned name
staying at Newcome. It might be nothing. “Nothing! Gracious heavens!
Could not this crime and misery be stopped?” “It might be too late,”
Laura’s husband said sadly, bending down his head into the fire.

She was silent too for a while. I could see she was engaged where pious
women ever will betake themselves in moments of doubt, of grief, of
pain, of separation, of joy even, or whatsoever other trial. They have
but to will, and as it were an invisible temple rises round them; their
hearts can kneel down there; and they have an audience of the great,
the merciful untiring Counsellor and Consoler. She would not have been
frightened at Death near at hand. I have known her to tend the poor
round about us, or to bear pain—not her own merely, but even her
children’s and mine, with a surprising outward constancy and calm. But
the idea of this crime being enacted close at hand, and no help for
it—quite overcame her. I believe she lay awake all that night; and rose
quite haggard and pale after the bitter thoughts which had deprived her
of rest.

She embraced her own child with extraordinary tenderness that morning,
and even wept over it, calling it by a thousand fond names of maternal
endearment “Would I leave you, my darling—could I ever, ever, ever quit
you, my blessing, and treasure!” The unconscious little thing, hugged
to his mother’s bosom, and scared at her tones and tragic face, clung
frightened and weeping round Laura’s neck. Would you ask what the
husband’s feelings were as he looked at that sweet love, that sublime
tenderness, that pure Saint blessing the life of him unworthy? Of all
the gifts of Heaven to us below, that felicity is the sum and the
chief. I tremble as I hold it lest I should lose it, and be left alone
in the blank world without it: again, I feel humiliated to think that I
possess it; as hastening home to a warm fireside and a plentiful table,
I feel ashamed sometimes before the poor outcast beggar shivering in
the street.

Breakfast was scarcely over when Laura asked for a pony carriage, and
said she was bent on a private visit. She took her baby and nurse with
her. She refused our company, and would not even say whither she was
bound until she had passed the lodge-gate. I may have suspected what
the object was of her journey. Florac and I did not talk of it. We rode
out to meet the hounds of a cheery winter morning: on another day I
might have been amused with my host—the splendour of his raiment, the
neatness of his velvet cap, the gloss of his hunting-boots; the cheers,
shouts, salutations, to dog and man; the oaths and outcries of this
Nimrod, who shouted louder than the whole field and the whole pack
too—but on this morning—I was thinking of the tragedy yonder enacting,
and came away early from the hunting-field, and found my wife already
returned to Rosebury.

Laura had been, as I suspected, to Lady Clara. She did not know why,
indeed. She scarce knew what she should say when she arrived—how she
could say what she had in her mind. “I hoped, Arthur, that I should
have something—something told me to say,” whispered Laura, with her
head on my shoulder; and as I lay awake last night thinking of her,
prayed—that is, hoped, I might find a word of consolation for that poor
lady. Do you know, I think she has hardly ever heard a kind word? She
said so; she was very much affected after we had talked together a
little.

“At first she was very indifferent; cold and haughty in her manner;
asked what had caused the pleasure of this visit, for I would go in,
though at the lodge they told me her ladyship was unwell, and they
thought received no company. I said I wanted to show our boy to
her—that the children ought to be acquainted—I don’t know what I said.
She seemed more and more surprised—then all of a sudden—I don’t know
how—I said, ‘Lady Clara, I have had a dream about you and your
children, and I was so frightened that I came over to you to speak
about it.’ And I _had_ the dream, Pen; it came to me absolutely as I
was speaking to her.

“She looked a little scared, and I went on telling her the dream. ‘My
dear’ I said, ‘I dreamed that I saw you happy with those children.’

“‘Happy!’ says she—the three were playing in the conservatory into
which her sitting-room opens.

“‘And that a bad spirit came and tore them from you, and drove you out
into the darkness; and I saw you wandering about quite lonely and
wretched, and looking back into the garden where the children were
playing. And you asked and implored to see them; and the Keeper at the
gate said ‘No, never.’ And then—then I thought they passed by you, and
they did not know you.’

“‘Ah!’ said Lady Clara.

“‘And then I thought, as we do in dreams, you know, that it was my
child who was separated from me, and who would not know me: and oh,
what a pang that was! Fancy that! Let us pray God it was only a dream.
And worse than that, when you, when I implored to come to the child,
and the man said, ‘No, never,’ I thought there came a spirit—an angel
that fetched the child to heaven, and you said, ‘Let me come too; oh,
let me come too, I am so miserable.’ And the angel said, ‘No, never,
never.’

“By this time Lady Clara was looking very pale. ‘What do you mean?’ she
asked of me,” Laura continued.

“‘Oh, dear lady, for the sake of the little ones, and Him who calls
them to Him, go you with them. Never, never part from them! Cling to
His knees, and take shelter there.’ I took her hands, and I said more
to her in this way, Arthur, that I need not, that I ought not to speak
again. But she was touched at length when I kissed her; and she said I
was very kind to her, and no one had ever been so, and that she was
quite alone in the world and had no friend to fly to; and would I go
and stay with her? and I said ‘yes;’ and we must go, my dear. I think
you should see that person at Newcome—see him, and warn him,” cried
Laura, warming as she spoke, “and pray God to enlighten and strengthen
him, and to keep him from this temptation, and implore him to leave
this poor, weak, frightened, trembling creature; if he has the heart of
a gentleman and the courage of a man, he will, I know he will.”

“I think he would, my dearest,” I said, “if he but heard the
petitioner.” Laura’s cheeks were blushing, her eyes brightened, her
voice rang with a sweet pathos of love that vibrates through my whole
being sometimes. It seems to me as if evil must give way, and bad
thoughts retire before that purest creature.

“Why has she not some of her family with her, poor thing!” my wife
continued. “She perishes in that solitude. Her husband prevents her, I
think—and—oh—I know enough of _him_ to know what his life is. I
shudder, Arthur, to see you take the hand of that wicked, selfish man.
You must break with him, do you hear, sir?”

“Before or after going to stay at his house, my love?” asks Mr.
Pendennis.

“Poor thing! she lighted up at the idea of any one coming. She ran and
showed me the rooms we were to have. It will be very stupid; and you
don’t like that. But you can write your book, and still hunt and shoot
with our friends here. And Lady Anne Newcome must be made to come back
again. Sir Barnes quarrelled with his mother and drove her out of the
house on her last visit—think of that! The servants here know it.
Martha brought me the whole story from the housekeeper’s room. This Sir
Barnes Newcome is a dreadful creature, Arthur. I am so glad I loathed
him from the very first moment I saw him.”

“And into this ogre’s den you propose to put me and my family, madam!”
says the husband. “Indeed, where won’t I go if you order me? Oh, who
will pack my portmanteau?”

Florac and the Princess were both in desolation when, at dinner, we
announced our resolution to go away—and to our neighbours at Newcome!
that was more extraordinary. “Que diable goest thou to do in this
galley?” asks our host as we sat alone over our wine.

But Laura’s intended visit to Lady Clara was never to have a
fulfilment, for on this same evening, as we sate at our dessert, comes
a messenger from Newcome, with a note for my wife from the lady there:—

“_Dearest, kindest_ Mrs. Pendennis,” Lady Clara wrote, with many
italics, and evidently in much distress of mind. “Your visit _is not to
be_. I spoke about it to Sir B., who _arrived this afternoon_, and who
has already begun to treat me _in his usual way_. Oh, I am so unhappy!
Pray, pray do not be angry at this rudeness—though indeed it is only a
kindness to keep you from this wretched place! I feel as _if I cannot
bear this much longer_. But, whatever happens, I shall always remember
your goodness, your beautiful goodness and kindness; and shall worship
you as _an angel_ deserves to be worshipped. Oh, why had I not such a
friend _earlier!_ But alas! I have none—only _his odious family_ thrust
upon me for companions to the _wretched, lonely_, C. N.

“P.S.—He does not know of my writing. Do not be surprised if you get
another note from me in the morning, written in a _ceremonious style_
and regretting that we _cannot have the pleasure_ of receiving Mr. and
Mrs. Pendennis for the present at Newcome.

“P.S.—The hypocrite!”

This letter was handed to my wife at dinner-time, and she gave it to me
as she passed out of the room with the other ladies.

I told Florac that the Newcomes could not receive us, and that we would
remain, if he willed it, his guests for a little longer. The kind
fellow was only too glad to keep us. “My wife would die without
_Bébi_,” he said. “She becomes quite dangerous about Bébi.” It was
gratifying that the good old lady was not to be parted as yet from the
innocent object of her love.

My host knew as well as I the terms upon which Sir Barnes and his wife
were living. Their quarrels were the talk of the whole county; one side
brought forward his treatment of her, and his conduct elsewhere, and
said that he was so bad that honest people should not know him. The
other party laid the blame upon her, and declared that Lady Clara was a
languid, silly, weak, frivolous creature; always crying out of season;
who had notoriously taken Sir Barnes for his money and who as certainly
had had an attachment elsewhere. Yes, the accusations were true on both
sides. A bad, selfish husband had married a woman for her rank: a weak,
thoughtless girl had been sold to a man for his money; and the union,
which might have ended in a complete indifference, had taken an ill
turn and resulted in misery, cruelty, fierce mutual recriminations,
bitter tears shed in private, husband’s curses and maledictions, and
open scenes of wrath and violence for servants to witness and the world
to sneer at. We arrange such matches every day; we sell or buy beauty,
or rank, or wealth; we inaugurate the bargain in churches with
sacramental services, in which the parties engaged call upon Heaven to
witness their vows—we know them to be lies, and we seal them with God’s
name. “I, Barnes, promise to take you, Clara, to love and honour till
death do us part” “I Clara, promise to take you, Barnes,” etc, etc. Who
has not heard the ancient words; and how many of us have uttered them,
knowing them to be untrue: and is there a bishop on the bench that has
not amen’d the humbug in his lawn sleeves and called a blessing over
the kneeling perjurers?

“Does Mr. Harris know of Newcome’s return?” Florac asked, when I
acquainted him with this intelligence. “Ce scelerat de Highgate—Va!”

“Does Newcome know that Lord Highgate is here?” I thought within
myself, admiring my wife’s faithfulness and simplicity, and trying to
believe with that pure and guileless creature that it was not yet too
late to save the unhappy Lady Clara.

“Mr. Harris had best be warned,” I said to Florac; “will you write him
a word, and let us send a messenger to Newcome?”

At first Florac said, “Parbleu! No;” the affair was none of his, he
attended himself always to this result of Lady Clara’s marriage. He had
even complimented Jack upon it years before at Baden, when scenes
enough tragic, enough comical, _ma foi_, had taken place _à propos_ of
this affair. Why should he meddle with it now?

“Children dishonoured,” said I, “honest families made miserable; for
Heaven’s sake, Florac, let us stay this catastrophe if we can.” I spoke
with much warmth, eagerly desirous to avert this calamity if possible,
and very strongly moved by the tale which I had heard only just before
dinner from that noble and innocent creature, whose pure heart had
already prompted her to plead the cause of right and truth, and to try
and rescue an unhappy desperate sister trembling on the verge of ruin.

“If you will not write to him,” said I, in some heat, “if your grooms
don’t like to go out of a night” (this was one of the objections which
Florac had raised), “I will walk.” We were talking over the affair
rather late in the evening, the ladies having retreated to their
sleeping apartments, and some guests having taken leave, whom our
hospitable host and hostess had entertained that night, and before whom
I naturally did not care to speak upon a subject so dangerous.

“Parbleu, what virtue, my friend! what a Joseph!” cries Florac, puffing
his cigar. “One sees well that your wife had made you the sermon. My
poor Pendennis! You are henpecked, my pauvre bon! You become the
husband model. It is true my mother writes that thy wife is an angel!”

“I do not object to obey such a woman when she bids me do right,” I
said; and would indeed at that woman’s request have gone out upon the
errand, but that we here found another messenger. On days when
dinner-parties were held at Rosebury, certain auxiliary waiters used to
attend from Newcome whom the landlord of the King’s Arms was accustomed
to supply; indeed, it was to secure these, and make other necessary
arrangements respecting fish, game, etc., that the Prince de Moncontour
had ridden over to Newcome on the day when we met Lord Highgate,
_alias_ Mr. Harris, before the bar of the hotel. Whilst we were engaged
in the above conversation a servant enters, and says, “My lord, Jenkins
and the other man is going back to Newcome in their cart, and is there
anything wanted?”

“It is the Heaven which sends him,” says Florac, turning round to me
with a laugh; “make Jenkins to wait five minutes, Robert; I have to
write to a gentleman at the King’s Arms.” And so saying, Florac wrote a
line which he showed me, and having sealed the note, directed it to Mr.
Harris at the King’s Arms. The cart, the note, and the assistant
waiters departed on their way to Newcome. Florac bade me go to rest
with a clear conscience. In truth, the warning was better given in that
way than any other, and a word from Florac was more likely to be
effectual than an expostulation from me. I had never thought of making
it, perhaps; except at the expressed desire of a lady whose counsel in
all the difficult circumstances of life I own I am disposed to take.

Mr. Jenkins’s horse no doubt trotted at a very brisk pace, as
gentlemen’s horses will of a frosty night, after their masters have
been regaled with plentiful supplies of wine and ale. I remember in my
bachelor days that my horses always trotted quicker after I had had a
good dinner; the champagne used to communicate itself to them somehow,
and the claret get into their heels. Before midnight the letter for Mr.
Harris was in Mr. Harris’s hands in the King’s Arms.

It has been said that in the Boscawen Room at the Arms, some of the
jolly fellows of Newcome had a club, of which Parrot the auctioneer,
Tom Potts the talented reporter, now editor of the _Independent_,
Vidler the apothecary, and other gentlemen, were members.

When we first had occasion to mention that society, it was at an early
stage of this history, long before Clive Newcome’s fine moustache had
grown. If Vidler the apothecary was old and infirm then, he is near ten
years older now; he has had various assistants, of course, and one of
them of late years had his become his partner, though the firm
continues to be known by Viller’s ancient and respectable name. A
jovial fellow was this partner—a capital convivial member of the Jolly
Britons, where he used to sit very late, so as to be in readiness for
any night-work that might come in.

So the Britons were all sitting, smoking, drinking, and making merry,
in the Boscawen Room, when Jenkins enters with a note, which he
straightway delivers to Mr. Vidler’s partner. “From Rosebury? The
Princess ill again, I suppose,” says the surgeon, not sorry to let the
company know that he attends her. “I wish the old girl would be ill in
the daytime. Confound it,” says he, “what’s this——” and he reads out,
“‘Sir Newcome est de retour. Bon voyage, mon ami.—F.’ What does this
mean?”

“I thought you knew French, Jack Harris,” says Tom Potts; “you’re
always bothering us with your French songs.”

“Of course I know French,” says the other; “but what’s the meaning of
this?”

“Screwcome came back by the five o’clock train. I was in it, and his
royal highness would scarcely speak to me. Took Brown’s fly from the
station. Brown won’t enrich his family much by the operation,” says Mr.
Potts.

“But what do _I_ care?” cries Jack Harris; “we don’t attend him, and we
don’t lose much by that. Howell attends him, ever since Vidler and he
had that row.”

“Hulloh! I say, it’s a mistake,” cries Mr. Taplow, smoking in his
chair. “This letter is for the party in the Benbow. The gent which the
Prince spoke to him, and called him Jack the other day when he was
here. Here’s a nice business, and the seal broke, and all. Is the
Benbow party gone to bed? John, you must carry him in this here note.”
John, quite innocent of the note and its contents, for he that moment
had entered the clubroom with Mr. Potts’s supper, took the note to the
Benbow, from which he presently returned to his master with a very
scared countenance. He said the gent in the Benbow was a most
harbitrary gent. He had almost choked John after reading the letter,
and John wouldn’t stand it; and when John said he supposed that Mr.
Harris in the Boscawen—that Mr. Jack Harris, had opened the letter, the
other gent cursed and swore awful.

“Potts,” said Taplow, who was only too communicative on some occasions
after he had imbibed too much of his own brandy-and-water, “it’s my
belief that that party’s name is no more Harris than mine is. I have
sent his linen to the wash, and there was two white
pocket-handkerchiefs with H. and a coronet.”

On the next day we drove over to Newcome, hoping perhaps to find that
Lord Highgate had taken the warning sent to him and quitted the place.
But we were disappointed. He was walking in front of the hotel, where a
thousand persons might see him as well as ourselves.

We entered into his private apartment with him, and there expostulated
upon his appearance in the public street, where Barnes Newcome or any
passer-by might recognise him. He then told us of the mishap which had
befallen Florac’s letter on the previous night.

“I can’t go away now, whatever might have happened previously: by this
time that villain knows that I am here. If I go, he will say I was
afraid of him, and ran away. Oh, how I wish he would come and find me!”
He broke out with a savage laugh.

“It is best to run away,” one of us interposed sadly.

“Pendennis,” he said with a tone of great softness, “your wife is a
good woman. God bless her! God bless her for all she has said and
done—would have done, if that villain had let her! Do you know the poor
thing hasn’t a single friend in the world, not one, one—except me, and
that girl they are selling to Farintosh, and who does not count for
much. He has driven away all her friends from her: one and all turn
upon her. Her relations, of course; when did _they_ ever fail to hit a
poor fellow or a poor girl when she was down? The poor angel! The
mother who sold her comes and preaches at her; Kew’s wife turns up her
little cursed nose and scorns her; Rooster, forsooth, must ride high
the horse, now he is married and lives at Chanticlere, and give her
warning to avoid my company or his! Do you know the only friend she
ever had was that old woman with the stick—old Kew; the old witch whom
they buried four months ago after nobbling her money for the beauty of
the family? She used to protect her—that old woman; heaven bless her
for it, wherever she is now, the old hag—a good word won’t do her any
harm. Ha! ha!” His laughter was cruel to hear.

“Why did I come down?” he continued in reply to our sad queries. “Why
did I come down, do you ask? Because she was wretched, and sent for me.
Because if I was at the end of the world, and she was to say, ‘Jack,
come!’ I’d come.”

“And if she bade you go?” asked his friends.

“I would go; and I have gone. If she told me to jump into the sea, do
you think I would not do it? But I go; and when she is alone with him,
do you know what he does? He strikes her. Strikes _that_ poor little
thing! He has owned to it. She fled from him and sheltered with the old
woman who’s dead. He may be doing it now. Why did I ever shake hands
with him? that’s humiliation sufficient, isn’t it? But she wished it;
and I’d black his boots, curse him, if she told me. And because he
wanted to keep my money in his confounded bank; and because he knew he
might rely upon my honour and hers, poor dear child, he chooses to
shake hands with me—me, whom he hates worse than a thousand devils—and
quite right too. Why isn’t there a place where we can go and meet, like
man to man, and have it over! If I had a ball through my brains I
shouldn’t mind, I tell you. I’ve a mind to do it for myself, Pendennis.
You don’t understand me, Viscount.”

“Il est vrai,” said Florac, with a shrug, “I comprehend neither the
suicide nor the chaise-de-poste. What will you? I am not yet enough
English, my friend. We make marriages of convenance in our country, que
diable, and what follows follows; but no scandal afterwards! Do not
adopt our institutions à demi, my friend. Vous ne me comprenez pas non
plus, men pauvre Jack!”

“There is one way still, I think,” said the third of the speakers in
this scene. “Let Lord Highgate come to Rosebury in his own name,
leaving that of Mr. Harris behind him. If Sir Barnes Newcome wants you,
he can seek you there. If you will go, as go you should, and God speed
you, you can go, and in your own name, too.”

“Parbleu, c’est ça,” cries Florac, “he speaks like a book—the
romancier!” I confess, for my part, I thought that a good woman might
plead with him, and touch that manly not disloyal heart now trembling
on the awful balance between evil and good.

“Allons! let us make to come the drague!” cries Florac. “Jack, thou
returnest with us, my friend! Madame Pendennis, an angel, my friend, a
_quakre_ the most charming, shall roucoule to thee the sweetest
sermons. My wife shall tend thee like a mother—a grandmother. Go make
thy packet!”

Lord Highgate was very much pleased and relieved seemingly. He shook
our hands, he said he should never forget our kindness, never! In
truth, the didactic part of our conversation was carried on at much
greater length than as here noted down: and he would come that evening,
but not with us, thank you; he had a particular engagement, some
letters he must write. Those done, he would not fail us, and would be
at Rosebury by dinner-time.




CHAPTER LVIII.
“One more Unfortunate”


The Fates did not ordain that the plan should succeed which Lord
Highgate’s friends had devised for Lady Clara’s rescue or respite. He
was bent upon one more interview with the unfortunate lady; and in that
meeting the future destiny of their luckless lives was decided. On the
morning of his return home, Barnes Newcome had information that Lord
Highgate, under a feigned name, had been staying in the neighbourhood
of his house, and had repeatedly been seen in the company of Lady
Clara. She may have gone out to meet him but for one hour more. She had
taken no leave of her children on the day when she left her home, and,
far from making preparations for her own departure, had been engaged in
getting the house ready for the reception of members of the family,
whose arrival her husband announced as speedily to follow his own.
Ethel and Lady Anne and some of the children were coming. Lord
Farintosh’s mother and sisters were to follow. It was to be a reunion
previous to the marriage which was closer to unite the two families.
Lady Clara said Yes to her husband’s orders; rose mechanically to obey
his wishes and arrange for the reception of the guests; and spoke
tremblingly to the housekeeper as her husband gibed at her. The little
ones had been consigned to bed early and before Sir Barnes’s arrival.
He did not think fit to see them in their sleep; nor did their mother.
She did not know, as the poor little creatures left her room in charge
of their nurses, that she looked on them for the last time. Perhaps,
had she gone to their bedsides that evening, had the wretched
panic-stricken soul been allowed leisure to pause, and to think, and to
pray, the fate of the morrow might have been otherwise, and the
trembling balance of the scale have inclined to right’s side. But the
pause was not allowed her. Her husband came and saluted her with his
accustomed greetings of scorn, and sarcasm, and brutal insult. On a
future day he never dared to call a servant of his household to testify
to his treatment of her; though many were ready to attend to prove his
cruelty and her terror. On that very last night, Lady Clara’s maid, a
country girl from her father’s house at Chanticlere, told Sir Barnes in
the midst of a conjugal dispute that her lady might bear his conduct
but she could not, and that she would no longer live under the roof of
such a brute. The girl’s interference was not likely to benefit her
mistress much: the wretched Lady Clara passed the last night under the
roof of her husband and children, unattended save by this poor domestic
who was about to leave her, in tears and hysterical outcries, and then
in moaning stupor. Lady Clara put to sleep with laudanum, her maid
carried down the story of her wrongs to the servants’ quarters; and
half a dozen of them took in their resignation to Sir Barnes as he sat
over his breakfast the next morning—in his ancestral hall—surrounded by
the portraits of his august forefathers—in his happy home.

Their mutiny of course did not add to their master’s good-humour; and
his letters brought him news which increased Barnes’s fury. A messenger
arrived with a letter from his man of business at Newcome, upon the
receipt of which he started up with such an execration as frightened
the servant waiting on him, and letter in hand he ran to Lady Clara’s
sitting-room. Her ladyship was up. Sir Barnes breakfasted rather late
on the first morning after an arrival at Newcome. He had to look over
the bailiff’s books, and to look about him round the park and grounds;
to curse the gardeners; to damn the stable and kennel grooms; to yell
at the woodman for clearing not enough or too much; to rail at the poor
old workpeople brooming away the fallen leaves, etc. So Lady Clara was
up and dressed when her husband went to her room, which lay at the end
of the house as we have said, the last of a suite of ancestral halls.

The mutinous servant heard high voices and curses within; then Lady
Clara’s screams; then Sir Barnes Newcome burst out of the room, locking
the door and taking the key with him, and saluting with more curses
James, the mutineer, over whom his master ran.

“Curse your wife, and don’t curse me, Sir Barnes Newcome!” said James,
the mutineer; and knocked down a hand which the infuriated Baronet
raised against him, with an arm that was twice as strong as Barnes’s
own. This man and maid followed their mistress in the sad journey upon
which she was bent. They treated her with unalterable respect. They
never could be got to see that her conduct was wrong. When Barnes’s
counsel subsequently tried to impugn their testimony, they dared him;
and hurt the plaintiff’s case very much. For the balance had weighed
over; and it was Barnes himself who caused what now ensued; and what we
learned in a very few hours afterwards from Newcome, where it was the
talk of the whole neighbourhood.

Florac and I, as yet ignorant of all that was occurring, met Barnes
near his own lodge-gate riding in the direction of Newcome, as we were
ourselves returning to Rosebury. The Prince de Moncontour, who was
driving, affably saluted the Baronet, who gave us a scowling
recognition, and rode on, his groom behind him. “The figure of the
garçon,” says Florac, as our acquaintance passed, “is not agreeable. Of
pale, he has become livid. I hope these two men will not meet, or evil
will come!” Evil to Barnes there might be, Florac’s companion thought,
who knew the previous little affairs between Barnes and his uncle and
cousin; and that Lord Highgate was quite able to take care of himself.

In half an hour after Florac spoke, that meeting between Barnes and
Highgate actually had taken place—in the open square of Newcome, within
four doors of the King’s Arms inn, close to which lives Sir Barnes
Newcome’s man of business; and before which, Mr. Harris, as he was
called, was walking, and waiting till a carriage which he had ordered
came round from the inn yard. As Sir Barnes Newcome rode into the place
many people touched their hats to him, however little they loved him.
He was bowing and smirking to one of these, when he suddenly saw
Belsize.

He started back, causing his horse to back with him on to the pavement,
and it may have been rage and fury, or accident and nervousness merely,
but at this instant Barnes Newcome, looking towards Lord Highgate,
shook his whip.

“You cowardly villain!” said the other, springing forward. “I was going
to your house.”

“How dare you, sir,” cries Sir Barnes, still holding up that unlucky
cane, “how dare you to—to——”

“Dare, you scoundrel!” said Belsize. “Is that the cane you strike your
wife with, you ruffian!” Belsize seized and tore him out of the saddle,
flinging him screaming down on the pavement. The horse, rearing and
making way for himself, galloped down the clattering street; a hundred
people were round Sir Barnes in a moment.

The carriage which Belsize had ordered came round at this very
juncture. Amidst the crowd, shrinking, bustling, expostulating,
threatening, who pressed about him, he shouldered his way. Mr. Taplow,
aghast, was one of the hundred spectators of the scene.

“I am Lord Highgate,” said Barnes’s adversary. “If Sir Barnes Newcome
wants me, tell him I will send him word where he may hear of me.” And
getting into the carriage, he told the driver to go “to the usual
place.”

Imagine the hubbub in the town, the conclaves at the inns, the talks in
the counting-houses, the commotion amongst the factory people, the
paragraphs in the Newcome papers, the bustle of surgeons and lawyers,
after this event. Crowds gathered at the King’s Arms, and waited round
Mr. Speers the lawyer’s house, into which Sir Barnes was carried. In
vain policemen told them to move on; fresh groups gathered after the
seceders. On the next day, when Barnes Newcome, who was not much hurt,
had a fly to go home, a factory man shook his fist in at the carriage
window, and, with a curse, said, “Serve you right, you villain.” It was
the man whose sweetheart this Don Juan had seduced and deserted years
before; whose wrongs were well known amongst his mates, a leader in the
chorus of hatred which growled round Barnes Newcome.

Barnes’s mother and sister Ethel had reached Newcome shortly before the
return of the master of the house. The people there were in
disturbance. Lady Anne and Miss Newcome came out with pallid looks to
greet him. He laughed and reassured them about his accident: indeed his
hurt had been trifling; he had been bled by the surgeon, a little
jarred by the fall from his horse; but there was no sort of danger.
Still their pale and doubtful looks continued. What caused them? In the
open day, with a servant attending her Lady Clara Newcome had left her
husband’s house; and a letter was forwarded to him that same evening
from my Lord Highgate, informing Sir Barnes Newcome that Lady Clara
Pulleyn could bear his tyranny no longer, and had left his roof; that
Lord Highgate proposed to leave England almost immediately, but would
remain long enough to afford Sir Barnes Newcome the opportunity for an
interview, in case he should be disposed to demand one: and a friend
(of Lord Highgate’s late regiment) was named who would receive letters
and act in any way necessary for his lordship.

The debates of the House of Lords must tell what followed afterwards in
the dreary history of Lady Clara Pulleyn. The proceedings in the
Newcome Divorce Bill filled the usual number of columns in the
papers,—especially the Sunday papers. The witnesses were examined by
learned peers whose business—nay, pleasure—it seems to be to enter into
such matters; and, for the ends of justice and morality, doubtless, the
whole story of Barnes Newcome’s household was told to the British
public. In the previous trial in the Court of Queen’s Bench, how
grandly Serjeant Rowland stood up for the rights of British husbands!
with what pathos he depicted the conjugal paradise, the innocent
children prattling round their happy parents, the serpent, the
destroyer, entering into that Belgravian Eden; the wretched and
deserted husband alone by his desecrated hearth, and calling for
redress on his country! Rowland wept freely during his noble harangue.
At not a shilling under twenty thousand pounds would he estimate the
cost of his client’s injuries. The jury was very much affected: the
evening papers gave Rowland’s address _in extenso_, with some pretty
sharp raps at the aristocracy in general. The _Day_, the principal
morning journal of that period, came out with a leading article the
next morning, in which every party concerned and every institution was
knocked about. The disgrace of the peerage, the ruin of the monarchy
(with a retrospective view of the well-known case of Gyges and
Candaules), the monstrosity of the crime, and the absurdity of the
tribunal and the punishment, were all set forth in the terrible leading
article of the _Day_.

But when, on the next day, Serjeant Rowland was requested to call
witnesses to prove that connubial happiness which he had depicted so
pathetically, he had none at hand.

Oliver, Q.C., now had his innings. A man, a husband, and a father, Mr.
Oliver could not attempt to defend the conduct of his unfortunate
client; but if there could be any excuse for such conduct, that excuse
he was free to confess the plaintiff had afforded, whose cruelty and
neglect twenty witnesses in court were ready to prove—neglect so
outrageous, cruelty so systematic, that he wondered the plaintiff had
not been better advised than to bring this trial, with all its
degrading particulars, to a public issue. On the very day when the
ill-omened marriage took place, another victim of cruelty had
interposed as vainly—as vainly as Serjeant Rowland himself interposed
in Court to prevent this case being made known—and with piteous
outcries, in the name of outraged neglected woman, of castaway children
pleading in vain for bread, had besought the bride to pause, and the
bridegroom to look upon the wretched beings who owed him life. Why had
not Lady Clara Pulleyn’s friends listened to that appeal? And so on,
and so on, between Rowland and Oliver the battle waged fiercely that
day. Many witnesses were mauled and slain. Out of that combat scarce
anybody came well, except the two principal champions, Rowland,
Serjeant, and Oliver, Q.C. The whole country looked on and heard the
wretched story, not only of Barnes’s fault and Highgate’s fault, but of
the private peccadilloes of their suborned footmen and conspiring
housemaids. Mr. Justice C. Sawyer charged the jury at great
length—those men were respectable men and fathers of families
themselves—of course they dealt full measure to Lord Highgate for his
delinquencies; consoled the injured husband with immense damages, and
left him free to pursue the further steps for releasing himself
altogether from the tie which had been bound with affecting episcopal
benediction at St. George’s, Hanover Square.

So Lady Clara flies from the custody of her tyrant, but to what a
rescue! The very man who loves her, and gives her asylum, pities and
deplores her. She scarce dares to look out of the windows of her new
home upon the world, lest it should know and reproach her. All the
sisterhood of friendship is cut off from her. If she dares to go abroad
she feels the sneer of the world as she goes through it; and knows that
malice and scorn whisper behind her. People, as criminal but
undiscovered, make room for her, as if her touch were pollution. She
knows she has darkened the lot and made wretched the home of the man
whom she loves best; that his friends who see her, treat her with but a
doubtful respect; and the domestics who attend her, with a suspicious
obedience. In the country lanes, or the streets of the county town,
neighbours look aside as the carriage passes in which she sits splendid
and lonely. Rough hunting companions of her husband’s come to her
table: he is driven perforce to the company of flatterers and men of
inferior sort; his equals, at least in his own home, will not live with
him. She would be kind, perhaps, and charitable to the cottagers round
about her, but she fears to visit them lest they too should scorn her.
The clergyman who distributes her charities, blushes and looks awkward
on passing her in the village, if he should be walking with his wife or
one of his children. Shall they go to the Continent, and set up a grand
house at Paris or at Florence? There they can get society, but of what
a sort! Our acquaintances of Baden,—Madame Schlangenbad, and Madame de
Cruchecassée, and Madame d’Ivry, and Messrs. Loder, and Punter, and
Blackball, and Deuceace, will come, and dance, and flirt, and quarrel,
and gamble, and feast round about her; but what in common with such
wild people has this poor, timid, shrinking soul? Even these scorn her.
The leers and laughter on those painted faces are quite unlike her own
sad countenance. She has no reply to their wit. Their infernal gaiety
scares her more than the solitude at home. No wonder that her husband
does not like home, except for a short while in the hunting season. No
wonder that he is away all day; how can he like a home which she has
made so wretched? In the midst of her sorrow, and doubt, and misery, a
child comes to her: how she clings to it! how her whole being, and
hope, and passion centres itself on this feeble infant!——but she no
more belongs to our story; with the new name she has taken, the poor
lady passes out of the history of the Newcomes.

If Barnes Newcome’s children meet yonder solitary lady, do they know
her? If her once-husband thinks upon the unhappy young creature whom
his cruelty drove from him, does his conscience affect his sleep at
night? Why should Sir Barnes Newcome’s conscience be more squeamish
than his country’s, which has put money in his pocket for having
trampled on the poor weak young thing, and scorned her, and driven her
to ruin? When the whole of the accounts of that wretched bankruptcy are
brought up for final Audit, which of the unhappy partners shall be
shown to be most guilty? Does the Right Reverend Prelate who did the
benedictory business for Barnes and Clara his wife repent in secret? Do
the parents who pressed the marriage, and the fine folks who signed the
book, and ate the breakfast, and applauded the bridegroom’s speech,
feel a little ashamed? O Hymen Hymenæe! The bishops, beadles, clergy,
pew-openers, and other officers of the temple dedicated to Heaven under
the invocation of St. George, will officiate in the same place at
scores and scores more of such marriages: and St. George of England may
behold virgin after virgin offered up to the devouring monster, Mammon
(with many most respectable female dragons looking on)—may see virgin
after virgin given away, just as in the Soldan of Babylon’s time, but
with never a champion to come to the rescue!




CHAPTER LIX.
In which Achilles loses Briseis


Although the years of the Marquis of Farintosh were few, he had spent
most of them in the habit of command; and, from his childhood upwards,
had been obeyed by all persons round about him. As an infant he had but
to roar, and his mother and nurses were as much frightened as though he
had been a Libyan lion. What he willed and ordered was law amongst his
clan and family. During the period of his London and Parisian
dissipations his poor mother did not venture to remonstrate with her
young prodigal, but shut her eyes, not daring to open them on his wild
courses. As for the friends of his person and house, many of whom were
portly elderly gentlemen, their affection for the young Marquis was so
extreme that there was no company into which their fidelity would not
lead them to follow him; and you might see him dancing at Mabille with
veteran aides-de-camp looking on, or disporting with opera-dancers at a
Trois Freres banquet, which some old gentleman of his father’s age had
taken the pains to order. If his lordship Count Almaviva wants a friend
to carry the lanthorn or to hold the ladder; do you suppose there are
not many most respectable men in society who will act Figaro? When
Farintosh thought fit, in the fulness of time and the blooming pride of
manhood, to select a spouse, and to elevate a marchioness to his
throne, no one dared gainsay him. When he called upon his mother and
sisters, and their ladyships’ hangers-on and attendants; upon his own
particular kinsmen, led captains, and toadies; to bow the knee and do
homage to the woman whom he delighted to honour, those duteous subjects
trembled and obeyed; in fact, he thought that the position of a
Marchioness of Farintosh was under heaven, and before men, so splendid,
that, had he elevated a beggar-maid to that sublime rank, the inferior
world was bound to worship her.

So my lord’s lady-mother, and my lord’s sisters, and his captains, and
his players of billiards, and the toadies of his august person, all
performed obeisance to his bride-elect, and never questioned the will
of the young chieftain. What were the private comments of the ladies of
the family we had no means of knowing; but it may naturally be supposed
that his lordship’s gentlemen-in-waiting, Captain Henchman, Jack
Todhunter, and the rest, had many misgivings of their own respecting
their patrons change in life, and could not view without anxiety the
advent of a mistress who might reign over him and them, who might
possibly not like their company, and might exert her influence over her
husband to oust these honest fellows from places in which they were
very comfortable. The jovial rogues had the run of my lord’s kitchen,
stables, cellars, and cigar-boxes. A new marchioness might hate
hunting, smoking, jolly parties, and toad-eaters in general, or might
bring into the house favourites of her own. I am sure any kind-hearted
man of the world must feel for the position of these faithful,
doubtful, disconsolate vassals, and have a sympathy for their rueful
looks and demeanour as they eye the splendid preparations for the
ensuing marriage, the grand furniture sent to my lord’s castles and
houses, the magnificent plate provided for his tables—tables at which
they may never have a knife and fork; castles and houses of which the
poor rogues may never be allowed to pass the doors.

When, then, “the elopement in High Life,” which has been described in
the previous pages, burst upon the town in the morning papers, I can
fancy the agitation which the news occasioned in the faithful bosoms of
the generous Todhunter, and the attached Henchman. My lord was not in
his own house as yet. He and his friends still lingered on in the
little house in Mayfair, the dear little bachelor’s quarters, where
they had enjoyed such good dinners, such good suppers, such rare
doings, such a jolly time. I fancy Hench coming down to breakfast, and
reading the _Morning Post_. I imagine Tod dropping in from his bedroom
over the way, and Hench handing the paper over to Tod, and the
conversation which ensued between those worthy men. Elopement in high
life—excitement in N—come, and flight of Lady Cl— N—come, daughter of
the late and sister of the present Earl of D-rking, with Lord H—-gate;
personal rencontre between Lord H—-gate and Sir B—nes N—come.
Extraordinary disclosures. I say, I can fancy Hench and Tod over this
awful piece of news.

“Pretty news, ain’t it, Toddy?” says Henchman, looking up from a
Perigord-pie, which the faithful creature is discussing.

“Always expected it,” remarks the other. “Anybody who saw them together
last season must have known it. The Chief himself spoke of it to me.”

“It’ll cut him up awfully when he reads it. Is it in the _Morning
Post?_ He has the _Post_ in his bedroom. I know he has rung his bell: I
heard it. Bowman, has his lordship read his paper yet?”

Bowman, the valet, said, “I believe you, he _have_ read his paper. When
he read it, he jumped out of bed and swore most awful. I cut as soon as
I could,” continued Mr. Bowman, who was on familiar—nay contemptuous
terms with the other two gentlemen.

“Enough to make any man swear,” says Toddy to Henchman; and both were
alarmed in their noble souls, reflecting that their chieftain was now
actually getting up and dressing himself; that he would speedily, and
in course of nature, come downstairs; and, then, most probably, would
begin swearing at _them_.

The most noble Mungo Malcolm Angus was in an awful state of mind when,
at length, he appeared in the breakfast-room. “Why the dash do you make
a taproom of this?” he cries. The trembling Henchman, who has begun to
smoke—as he has done a hundred times before in this bachelor’s
hall—flings his cigar into the fire.

“There you go—nothing like it! Why don’t you fling some more in? You
can get ’em at Hudson’s for five guineas a pound.” bursts out the
youthful peer.

“I understand why you are out of sorts, old boy,” says Henchman,
stretching out his manly hand. A tear of compassion twinkled in his
eyelid, and coursed down his mottled cheek. “Cut away at old Frank,
Farintosh,—a fellow who has been attached to you since before you could
speak. It’s not when a fellow’s down and cut up, and riled—naturally
riled—as you are—I know you are, Marquis; it’s not then that I’m going
to be angry with you. Pitch into old Frank Henchman—hit away, my young
one.” And Frank put himself into an attitude as of one prepared to
receive a pugilistic assault. He bared his breast, as it were, and
showed his scars, and said, “Strike!” Frank Henchman was a florid
toady. My uncle, Major Pendennis, has often laughed with me about the
fellow’s pompous flatteries and ebullient fidelity.

“You have read this confounded paragraph?” says the Marquis.

“We _have_ read it: and were deucedly cut up, too,” says Henchman, “for
your sake, my dear boy.”

“I remembered what you said, last year, Marquis,” cries Todhunter (not
unadroitly). “You, yourself, pointed out, in this very room, I
recollect, at this very table—that night Coralie and the little Spanish
dancer and her mother supped here, and there was a talk about
Highgate—you, yourself, pointed out what was likely to happen. I
doubted it; for I have dined at the Newcomes’, and seen Highgate and
her together in society often. But though you are a younger bird, you
have better eyes than I have—and you saw the thing at once—at once,
don’t you remember I and Coralie said how glad she was, because Sir
Barnes ill-treated her friend. What was the name of Coralie’s friend,
Hench?”

“How should _I_ know her confounded name?” Henchman briskly answers.
“What do I care for Sir Barnes Newcome and his private affairs? He is
no friend of mine. I never said he was a friend of mine. I never said I
liked him. Out of respect for the Chief here, I held my tongue about
him, and shall hold my tongue. Have some of this pate, Chief! No? Poor
old boy! I know you haven’t got an appetite. I know this news cuts you
up. I say nothing, and make no pretence of condolence; though I feel
for you—and you know you can count on old Frank Henchman—don’t you,
Malcolm?” And again he turns away to conceal his gallant sensibility
and generous emotion.

“What does it matter to me?” bursts out the Marquis, garnishing his
conversation with the usual expletives which adorned his eloquence when
he was strongly moved. “What do I care for Barnes Newcome, and his
confounded affairs and family? I never want to see him again, but in
the light of a banker, when I go to the City, where he keeps my
account. I say, I have nothing to do with him, or all the Newcomes
under the sun. Why, one of them is a painter, and will paint my dog,
Ratcatcher, by Jove! or my horse, or my groom, if I give him the order.
Do you think I care for any one of the pack? It’s not the fault of the
Marchioness of Farintosh that her family is not equal to mine. Besides
two others in England and Scotland, I should like to know what family
is? I tell you what, Hench. I bet you five to two, that before an hour
is over my mother will be here, and down on her knees to me, begging me
to break off this engagement.”

“And what will you do, Farintosh?” asks Henchman, slowly, “Will you
break it off?”

“No!” shouts the Marquis. “Why shall I break off with the finest girl
in England—and the best-plucked one, and the cleverest and wittiest,
and the most beautiful creature, by Jove, that ever stepped, for no
fault of hers, and because her sister-in-law leaves her brother, who I
know treated her infernally? We have talked this matter over at home
before. I wouldn’t dine with the fellow; though he was always asking
me; nor meet, except just out of civility, any of his confounded
family. Lady Anne is different. She is a lady, she is. She is a good
woman: and Kew is a most respectable man, though he is only a peer of
George III.’s creation, and you should hear how _he_ speaks of Miss
Newcome, though she refused him. I should like to know who is to
prevent me marrying Lady Anne Newcome’s daughter?”

“By Jove, you are a good-plucked fellow, Farintosh—give me your hand,
old boy,” says Henchman.

“Heh! am I? You would have said, give me your hand, old boy, whichever
way I determined, Hench! I tell you, I ain’t intellectual, and that
sort of thing. But I know my rank, and I know my place; and when a man
of my station gives his word, he sticks to it, sir; and my lady, and my
sisters, may go on their knees all round; and, by Jove, I won’t
flinch.”

The justice of Lord Farintosh’s views was speedily proved by the
appearance of his lordship’s mother, Lady Glenlivat, whose arrival put
a stop to a conversation which Captain Francis Henchman has often
subsequently narrated. She besought to see her son in terms so urgent,
that the young nobleman could not be denied to his parent; and, no
doubt, a long and interesting interview took place, in which Lord
Farintosh’s mother passionately implored him to break off a match upon
which he was as resolutely bent.

Was it a sense of honour, a longing desire to possess this young
beauty, and call her his own, or a fierce and profound dislike to being
balked in any object of his wishes, which actuated the young lord?
Certainly he had borne, very philosophically, delay after delay which
had taken place in the devised union; and being quite sure of his
mistress, had not cared to press on the marriage, but lingered over the
dregs of his bachelor cup complacently still. We all know in what an
affecting farewell he took leave of the associates of his _vie de
garçon:_ the speeches made (in both languages), the presents
distributed, the tears and hysterics of some of the guests assembled;
the cigar-boxes given over to this friend, the _écrin_ of diamonds to
that, et cætera, et cætera, et cætera. Don’t we know? If we don’t it is
not Henchman’s fault, who has told the story of Farintosh’s betrothals
a thousand and one times at his clubs, at the houses where he is asked
to dine, on account of his intimacy with the nobility, among the young
men of fashion, or no fashion, whom this two-bottle Mentor, and burly
admirer of youth, has since taken upon himself to form. The farewell at
Greenwich was so affecting that all “traversed the cart,” and took
another farewell at Richmond, where there was crying too, but it was
Eucharis cried because fair Calypso wanted to tear her eyes out; and
where not only Telemachus (as was natural to his age), but Mentor
likewise, quaffed the wine-cup too freely. You are virtuous, O reader!
but there are still cakes and ale, Ask Henchman if there be not. You
will find him in the Park any afternoon; he will dine with you if no
better man ask him in the interval. He will tell you story upon story
regarding young Lord Farintosh, and his marriage, and what happened
before his marriage, and afterwards; and he will sigh, weep almost at
some moments, as he narrates their subsequent quarrel, and Farintosh’s
unworthy conduct, and tells you how he formed that young man. My uncle
and Captain Henchman disliked each other very much, I am sorry to
say—sorry to add that it was very amusing to hear either one of them
speak of the other.

Lady Glenlivat, according to the Captain, then, had no success in the
interview with her son; who, unmoved by the maternal tears, commands,
and entreaties, swore he would marry Miss Newcome, and that no power on
earth should prevent him. “As if trying to thwart that man—_could_ ever
prevent his having his way!” ejaculated his quondam friend.

But on the next day, after ten thousand men in clubs and coteries had
talked the news over; after the evening had repeated and improved the
delightful theme of our “morning contemporaries;” after Calypso and
Eucharis driving together in the Park, and reconciled now, had kissed
their hands to Lord Farintosh, and made him their compliments—after a
night of natural doubt, disturbance, defiance, fury—as men whispered to
each other at the club where his lordship dined, and at the theatre
where he took his recreation—after an awful time at breakfast in which
Messrs. Bowman, valet, and Todhunter and Henchman, captains of the
Farintosh bodyguard, all got their share of kicks and growling—behold
Lady Glenlivat came back to the charge again; and this time with such
force that poor Lord Farintosh was shaken indeed.

Her ladyship’s ally was no other than Miss Newcome herself; from whom
Lord Farintosh’s mother received, by that day’s post, a letter, which
she was commissioned to read to her son:—

“Dear Madam” (wrote the young lady in her firmest handwriting)—“Mamma
is at this moment in a state of such _grief and dismay_ at the _cruel_
misfortune and _humiliation_ which has just befallen our family, that
she is really not able to write to you as she _ought_, and this task,
painful as it is, must be _mine_. Dear Lady Glenlivat, the kindness and
confidence which I have ever received from you and _yours_, merit
truth, and most grateful respect and regard from _me_. And I feel after
the late fatal occurrence, what I have often and often owned to myself
though I did not _dare_ to acknowledge it, that I ought to release Lord
F., _at once and for ever_, from an engagement _which he could never
think_ of maintaining with a family _so unfortunate as ours_. I thank
him with all my heart for his goodness in bearing with my humours so
long; if I have given him pain, as I _know_ I have sometimes, I beg his
pardon, and would do so _on my knees_. I hope and pray he may be happy,
as I feared he never could be with me. He has many good and noble
qualities; and, in bidding him farewell, I trust I may retain his
friendship, and that he will believe in the esteem and gratitude of
your most sincere,

Ethel Newcome.”


A copy of this farewell letter was seen by a lady who happened to be a
neighbour of Miss Newcome’s when the family misfortune occurred, and to
whom, in her natural dismay and grief, the young lady fled for comfort
and consolation. “Dearest Mrs. Pendennis,” wrote Miss Ethel to my wife,
“I hear you are at Rosebury; do, do come to your affectionate E. N.”
The next day, it was—“Dearest Laura—If you can, pray, pray come to
Newcome this morning. I want very much to speak to you about the poor
children, to consult you about something most important.” Madame de
Moncontour’s pony-carriage was constantly trotting between Rosebury and
Newcome in these days of calamity.

And my wife, as in duty bound, gave me full reports of all that
happened in that house of mourning. On the very day of the flight, Lady
Anne, her daughter, and some others of her family arrived at Newcome.
The deserted little girl, Barnes’s eldest child, ran, with tears and
cries of joy, to her Aunt Ethel, whom she had always loved better than
her mother; and clung to her and embraced her; and, in her artless
little words, told her that mamma had gone away, and that Ethel should
be her mamma now. Very strongly moved by the misfortune, as by the
caresses and affection of the poor orphaned creature, Ethel took the
little girl to her heart, and promised to be a mother to her, and that
she would not leave her; in which pious resolve I scarcely need say
Laura strengthened her, when, at her young friend’s urgent summons, my
wife came to her.

The household at Newcome was in a state of disorganisation after the
catastrophe. Two of Lady Clara’s servants; it has been stated already,
went away with her. The luckless master of the house was lying wounded
in the neighbouring town. Lady Anne Newcome, his mother, was terribly
agitated by the news, which was abruptly broken to her, of the flight
of her daughter-in-law and her son’s danger. Now she thought of flying
to Newcome to nurse him; and then feared lest she should be ill
received by the invalid—indeed, ordered by Sir Barnes to go home, and
not to bother him. So at home Lady Anne remained, where the thoughts of
the sufferings she had already undergone in that house, of Sir Barnes’s
cruel behaviour to her at her last visit, which he had abruptly
requested her to shorten, of the happy days which she had passed as
mistress of that house and wife of the defunct Sir Brian; the sight of
that departed angel’s picture in the dining-room and wheel-chair in the
gallery; the recollection of little Barnes as a cherub of a child in
that very gallery, and pulled out of the fire by a nurse in the second
year of his age, when he was all that a fond mother could wish—these
incidents and reminiscences so agitated Lady Anne Newcome, that she,
for her part, went off in a series of hysterical fits, and acted as one
distraught: her second daughter screamed in sympathy with her and Miss
Newcome had to take the command of the whole of this demented
household, hysterical mamma and sister, mutineering servants, and
shrieking abandoned nursery, and bring young people and old to peace
and quiet.

On the morrow after his little concussion Sir Barnes Newcome came home,
not much hurt in body, but woefully afflicted in temper, and venting
his wrath upon everybody round about him in that strong language which
he employed when displeased; and under which his valet, his
housekeeper, his butler, his farm-bailiff, his lawyer, his doctor, his
dishevelled mother herself—who rose from her couch and her sal-volatile
to fling herself round her dear boy’s knees—all had to suffer. Ethel
Newcome, the Baronet’s sister, was the only person in his house to whom
Sir Barnes did not utter oaths or proffer rude speeches. He was afraid
of offending her or encountering that resolute spirit, and lapsed into
a surly silence in her presence. Indistinct maledictions growled about
Sir Barnes’s chair when he beheld my wife’s pony-carriage drive up; and
he asked what brought _her_ here? But Ethel sternly told her brother
that Mrs. Pendennis came at her particular request, and asked him
whether he supposed anybody could come into that house for pleasure
now, or for any other motive but kindness? Upon which, Sir Barnes
fairly burst out into tears, intermingled with execrations against his
enemies and his own fate, and assertions that he was the most miserable
beggar alive. He would not see his children: but with more tears he
would implore Ethel never to leave them, and, anon, would ask what he
should do when she married, and he was left alone in that infernal
house?

T. Potts, Esq., of the _Newcome Independent_, used to say afterwards
that the Baronet was in the direst terror of another meeting with Lord
Highgate, and kept a policeman at the lodge-gate, and a second in the
kitchen, to interpose in event of a collision. But Mr. Potts made this
statement in after days, when the quarrel between his party and paper
and Sir Barnes Newcome was flagrant. Five or six days after the meeting
of the two rivals in Newcome market-place, Sir Barnes received a letter
from the friend of Lord Highgate, informing him that his lordship,
having waited for him according to promise, had now left England, and
presumed that the differences between them were to be settled by their
respective lawyers—infamous behaviour on a par with the rest of Lord
Highgate’s villainy, the Baronet said. “When the scoundrel knew I could
lift my pistol arm,” Barnes said, “Lord Highgate fled the
country;”—thus hinting that death, and not damages, were what he
intended to seek from his enemy.

After that interview in which Ethel communicated to Laura her farewell
letter to Lord Farintosh, my wife returned to Rosebury with an
extraordinary brightness and gaiety in her face and her demeanour. She
pressed Madame de Moncontour’s hands with such warmth, she blushed and
looked so handsome, she sang and talked so gaily, that our host was
struck by her behaviour, and paid her husband more compliments
regarding her beauty, amiability, and other good qualities, than need
be set down here. It may be that I like Paul de Florac so much, in
spite of certain undeniable faults of character, because of his
admiration for my wife. She was in such a hurry to talk to me, that
night, that Paul’s game and Nicotian amusements were cut short by her
visit to the billiard-room; and when we were alone by the cosy
dressing-room fire, she told me what had happened during the day. Why
should Ethel’s refusal of Lord Farintosh have so much elated my wife?

“Ah!” cries Mrs. Pendennis, “she has a generous nature, and the world
has not had time to spoil it. Do you know there are many points that
she never has thought of—I would say problems that she has to work out
for herself, only you, Pen, do not like us poor ignorant women to use
such a learned word as problems? Life and experience force things upon
her mind which others learn from their parents or those who educate
them, but, for which she has never had any teachers. Nobody has ever
told her, Arthur, that it was wrong to marry without love, or pronounce
lightly those awful vows which we utter before God at the altar. I
believe, if she knew that her life was futile, it is but of late she
has thought it could be otherwise, and that she might mend it. I have
read (besides that poem of Goethe of which you are so fond) in books of
Indian travels of Bayaderes, dancing-girls brought up by troops round
about the temples, whose calling is to dance, and wear jewels, and look
beautiful; I believe they are quite respected in—in Pagoda-land. They
perform before the priests in the pagodas; and the Brahmins and the
Indian princes marry them. Can we cry out against these poor creatures,
or against the custom of their country? It seems to me that young women
in our world are bred up in a way not very different. What they do they
scarcely know to be wrong. They are educated for the world, and taught
to display: their mothers will give them to the richest suitor, as they
themselves were given before. How can these think seriously, Arthur, of
souls to be saved, weak hearts to be kept out of temptation, prayers to
be uttered, and a better world to be held always in view, when the
vanities of this one are all their thought and scheme? Ethel’s simple
talk made me smile sometimes, do you know, and her _strenuous_ way of
imparting her discoveries. I thought of the shepherd boy who made a
watch, and found on taking it into the town how very many watches there
were, and how much better than his. But the poor child has had to make
hers for herself, such as it is; and, indeed, is employed now in
working on it. She told me very artlessly her little history, Arthur;
it affected me to hear her simple talk, and—and I blessed God for our
mother, my dear, and that my early days had had a better guide.

“You know that for a long time it was settled that she was to marry her
cousin, Lord Kew. She was bred to that notion from her earliest youth;
about which she spoke as we all can about our early days. They were
spent, she said, in the nursery and schoolroom for the most part. She
was allowed to come to her mother’s dressing-room, and sometimes to see
more of her during the winter at Newcome. She describes her mother as
always the kindest of the kind: but from very early times the daughter
must have felt her own superiority, I think, though she does not speak
of it. You should see her at home now in their dreadful calamity. She
seems the only person of the house who keeps her head.

“She told very nicely and modestly how it was Lord Kew who parted from
her, not she who had dismissed him, as you know the Newcomes used to
say. I have heard that—oh—that man Sir Barnes say so myself. She says
humbly that her cousin Kew was a great deal too good for her; and so is
every one almost, she adds, poor thing!”

“Poor every one! Did you ask about him, Laura?” said Mr. Pendennis.

“No; I did not venture. She looked at me out of her downright eyes, and
went on with her little tale. ‘I was scarcely more than a child then,’
she continued, ‘and though I liked Kew very much—who would not like
such a generous honest creature? I felt somehow that I was _taller_
than my cousin, and as if I ought not to marry him, or should make him
unhappy if I did. When poor papa used to talk, we children remarked
that mamma hardly listened to him; and so we did not respect him as we
should, and Barnes was especially scoffing and odious with him. Why,
when he was a boy, he used to sneer at papa openly before us younger
ones. Now Harriet admires everything that Kew says, and that makes her
a great deal happier at being with him.’ And then,” added Mrs.
Pendennis, “Ethel said, ‘I hope you respect your husband, Laura: depend
on it, you will be happier if you do.’ Was not that a fine discovery of
Ethel’s, Mr. Pen?

“‘Clara’s terror of Barnes frightened me when I stayed in the house,’
Ethel went on. ‘I am sure _I_ would not tremble before any man in the
world as she did. I saw early that she used to deceive him, and tell
him lies, Laura. I do not mean lies of words alone, but lies of looks
and actions. Oh! I do not wonder at her flying from him. He was
dreadful to be with: cruel, and selfish, and cold. He was made worse by
marrying a woman he did not love; as she was, by that unfortunate union
with him. Suppose he had found a clever woman who could have controlled
him, and amused him, and whom he and his friends could have admired,
instead of poor Clara, who made his home wearisome, and trembled when
he entered it? Suppose she could have married that unhappy man to whom
she was attached early? I was frightened, Laura, to think how ill this
worldly marriage had prospered.

“‘My poor grandmother, whenever I spoke upon such a subject, would
break out into a thousand gibes and sarcasms, and point to many of our
friends who had made love-matches, and were quarrelling now as fiercely
as though they had never loved each other. You remember that dreadful
case in France Duc de ——, who murdered his duchess? That was a
love-match, and I can remember the sort of screech with which Lady Kew
used to speak about it; and of the journal which the poor duchess kept,
and in which she noted down all her husband’s ill-behaviour.’”

“Hush, Laura! Do you remember where we are? If the Princess were to put
down all Florac’s culpabilities in an album, what a ledger it would
be—as big as Dr. Portman’s Chrysostom!” But this was parenthetical: and
after a smile, and a little respite, the young woman proceeded in her
narration of her friend’s history.

“‘I was willing enough to listen,’ Ethel said, ‘to grandmamma then: for
we are glad of an excuse to do what we like; and I liked admiration,
and rank, and great wealth, Laura; and Lord Farintosh offered me these.
I liked to surpass my companions, and I saw _them_ so eager in pursuing
him! You cannot think, Laura, what meannesses women in the world will
commit—mothers and daughters too, in the pursuit of a person of his
great rank. Those Miss Burrs, you should have seen them at the
country-houses where we visited together, and how they followed him;
how they would meet him in the parks and shrubberies; how they liked
smoking though I knew it made them ill; how they were always finding
pretexts for getting near him! Oh, it was odious!’”

I would not willingly interrupt the narrative, but let the reporter be
allowed here to state that at this point of Miss Newcome’s story (which
my wife gave with a very pretty imitation of the girl’s manner), we
both burst out laughing so loud that little Madame de Moncontour put
her head into the drawing-room and asked what we was a-laughing at? We
did not tell our hostess that poor Ethel and her grandmother had been
accused of doing the very same thing for which she found fault with the
Misses Burr. Miss Newcome thought _herself_ quite innocent, or how
should she have cried out at the naughty behaviour of other people?

“‘Wherever we went, however,’ resumed my wife’s young penitent, ‘it was
easy to see, I think I may say so without vanity, who was the object of
Lord Farintosh’s attention. He followed us everywhere; and we could not
go upon any visit in England or Scotland but he was in the same house.
Grandmamma’s whole heart was bent upon that marriage, and when he
proposed for me I do not disown that I was very pleased and vain.

“‘It is in these last months that I have heard about him more, and
learned to know him better—him and myself too, Laura. Some one—some one
you know, and whom I shall always love as a brother—reproached me in
former days for a worldliness about which you talk too sometimes. But
it is not worldly to give yourself up for your family, is it? One
cannot help the rank in which one is born, and surely it is but natural
and proper to marry in it. Not that Lord Farintosh thinks me or any one
of his rank.’ (Here Miss Ethel laughed.) ‘He is the Sultan, and we,
every unmarried girl in society, is his humblest slave. His Majesty’s
opinions upon this subject did not suit me, I can assure you: I have no
notion of such pride!

“‘But I do not disguise from you, dear Laura, that after accepting him,
as I came to know him better, and heard him, and heard of him, and
talked with him daily, and understood Lord Farintosh’s character, I
looked forward with more and more doubt to the day when I was to become
his wife. I have not learned to respect him in these months that I have
known him, and during which there has been mourning in our families. I
will not talk to you about him; I have no right, have I?—to hear him
speak out his heart, and tell it to any friend. He said he liked me
because I did not flatter him. Poor Malcolm! they all do. What was my
acceptance of him, Laura, but flattery? Yes, flattery, and servility to
rank, and a desire to possess it. Would I have accepted plain Malcolm
Roy? I sent away a better than him, Laura.

“‘These things have been brooding in my mind for some months past. I
must have been but an ill companion for him, and indeed he bore with my
waywardness much more kindly than I ever thought possible; and when
four days since we came to this sad house, where he was to have joined
us, and I found only dismay and wretchedness, and these poor children
deprived of a mother, whom I pity, God help her, for she has been made
so miserable—and is now and must be to the end of her days; as I lay
awake, thinking of my own future life, and that I was going to marry,
as poor Clara had married, but for an establishment and a position in
life; I, my own mistress, and not obedient by nature, or a slave to
others as that poor creature was—I thought to myself, why shall I do
this? Now Clara has left us, and is, as it were, dead to us who made
her so unhappy, let me be the mother to her orphans. I love the little
girl, and she has always loved me, and came crying to me that day when
we arrived, and put her dear little arms round my neck, and said,
‘_You_ won’t go away, will you, Aunt Ethel?’ in her sweet voice. And I
will stay with her; and will try and learn myself that I may teach her;
and learn to be good too—better than I have been. Will praying help me,
Laura? I did. I am sure I was right, and that it is my duty to stay
here.’”

Laura was greatly moved as she told her friend’s confession; and when
the next day at church the clergyman read the opening words of the
service I thought a peculiar radiance and happiness beamed from her
bright face.

Some subsequent occurrences in the history of this branch of the
Newcome family I am enabled to report from the testimony of the same
informant who has just given us an account of her own feelings and
life. Miss Ethel and my wife were now in daily communication, and
“my-dearesting” each other with that female fervour, which, cold men of
the world as we are—not only chary of warm expressions of friendship,
but averse to entertaining warm feelings at all—we surely must admire
in persons of the inferior sex, whose loves grow up and reach the skies
in a night; who kiss, embrace, console, call each other by Christian
names, in that sweet, kindly sisterhood of Misfortune and Compassion
who are always entering into partnership here in life. I say the world
is full of Miss Nightingales; and we, sick and wounded in our private
Scutaris, have countless nurse-tenders. I did not see my wife
ministering to the afflicted family at Newcome Park; but I can fancy
her there amongst the women and children, her prudent counsel, her
thousand gentle offices, her apt pity and cheerfulness, the love and
truth glowing in her face, and inspiring her words, movements,
demeanour.

Mrs. Pendennis’s husband for his part did not attempt to console Sir
Barnes Newcome Newcome, Baronet. I never professed to have a
halfpennyworth of pity at that gentleman’s command. Florac, who owed
Barnes his principality and his present comforts in life, did make some
futile efforts at condolence, but was received by the Baronet with such
fierceness, and evident ill-humour, that he did not care to repeat his
visits, and allowed him to vent his curses and peevishness on his own
immediate dependents. We used to ask Laura on her return to Rosebury
from her charity visits to Newcome about the poor suffering master of
the house. She faltered and stammered in describing him and what she
heard of him; she smiled, I grieve to say, for this unfortunate lady
cannot help having a sense of humour; and we could not help laughing
outright sometimes at the idea of that discomfited wretch, that
overbearing creature overborne in his turn—which laughter Mrs. Laura
used to chide as very naughty and unfeeling. When we went into Newcome
the landlord of the King’s Arms looked knowing and quizzical: Tom Potts
grinned at me and rubbed his hands. “This business serves the paper
better than Mr. Warrington’s articles,” says Mr. Potts. “We have sold
no end of _Independents;_ and if you polled the whole borough, I bet
that five to one would say Sir Screwcome Screwcome was served right. By
the way, what’s up about the Marquis of Farintosh, Mr. Pendennis? He
arrived at the Arms last night; went over to the Park this morning, and
is gone back to town by the afternoon train.”

What had happened between the Marquis of Farintosh and Miss Newcome I
am enabled to know from the report of Miss Newcome’s confidante. On the
receipt of that letter of _congé_ which has been mentioned in a former
chapter, his lordship must have been very much excited, for he left
town straightway by that evening’s mail, and on the next morning, after
a few hours of rest at his inn, was at Newcome lodge-gate demanding to
see the Baronet.

On that morning it chanced that Sir Barnes had left home with Mr Speer,
his legal adviser; and hereupon the Marquis asked to see Miss Newcome;
nor could the lodge-keeper venture to exclude so distinguished a person
from the Park. His lordship drove up to the house, and his name was
taken to Miss Ethel. She turned very pale when she heard it; and my
wife divined at once who was her visitor. Lady Anne had not left her
room as yet. Laura Pendennis remained in command of the little conclave
of children, with whom the two ladies were sitting when Lord Farintosh
arrived. Little Clara wanted to go with her aunt as she rose to leave
the room—the child could scarcely be got to part from her now.

At the end of an hour the carriage was seen driving away, and Ethel
returned looking as pale as before, and red about the eyes. Miss
Clara’s mutton-chop for dinner coming in at the same time, the child
was not so presently eager for her aunt’s company. Aunt Ethel cut up
the mutton-chop very neatly, and then, having seen the child
comfortably seated at her meal, went with her friend into a
neighbouring apartment (of course, with some pretext of showing Laura a
picture, or a piece of china, or a new child’s frock, or with some
other hypocritical pretence by which the ingenuous female attendants
pretended to be utterly blinded), and there, I have no doubt, before
beginning her story, dearest Laura embraced dearest Ethel, and vice
versa.

“He is gone!” at length gasps dearest Ethel.

“Pour toujours? poor young man!” sighs dearest Laura. “Was he very
unhappy, Ethel?”

“He was more angry,” Ethel answers. “He had a right to be hurt, but not
to speak as he did. He lost his temper quite at last, and broke out in
the most frantic reproaches. He forgot all respect and even
gentlemanlike behaviour. Do you know he used words—words such as Barnes
uses sometimes when he is angry! and dared this language to me! I was
sorry till then, very sorry, and very much moved; but I know more than
ever, now, that I was right in refusing Lord Farintosh.”

Dearest Laura now pressed for an account of all that had happened,
which may be briefly told as follows. Feeling very deeply upon the
subject which brought him to Miss Newcome, it was no wonder that Lord
Farintosh spoke at first in a way which moved her. He said he thought
her letter to his mother was very rightly written under the
circumstances, and thanked her for her generosity in offering to
release him from his engagement. But the affair—the painful
circumstance of Highgate, and that—which had happened in the Newcome
family, was no fault of Miss Newcome’s, and Lord Farintosh could not
think of holding her accountable. His friends had long urged him to
marry, and it was by his mother’s own wish that the engagement was
formed, which he was determined to maintain. In his course through the
world (of which he was getting very tired), he had never seen a woman,
a lady who was so—you understand, Ethel—whom he admired so much, who
was likely to make so good a wife for him as you are. “You allude,” he
continued, “to differences we have had—and we have had them—but many of
them, I own, have been from my fault. I have been bred up in a way
different to most young men. I cannot help it if I have had temptations
to which other men are not exposed; and have been placed by—by
Providence—in a high rank of life; I am sure if you share it with me
you will adorn it, and be in every way worthy of it, and make me much
better than I have been. If you knew what a night of agony I passed
after my mother read that letter to me—I know you’d pity me, Ethel,—I
know you would. The idea of losing you makes me wild. My mother was
dreadfully alarmed when she saw the state I was in; so was the doctor—I
assure you he was. And I had no rest at all, and no peace of mind,
until I determined to come down to you; and say that I adored you, and
you only; and that I would hold to my engagement in spite of
everything—and prove to you that—that no man in the world could love
you more sincerely than I do.” Here the young gentleman was so overcome
that he paused in his speech, and gave way to an emotion, for which,
surely no man who has been in the same condition with Lord Farintosh
will blame him.

Miss Newcome was also much touched by this exhibition of natural
feeling; and, I dare say, it was at this time that her eyes showed the
first symptoms of that malady of which the traces were visible an hour
after.

“You are very generous and kind to me, Lord Farintosh,” she said. “Your
constancy honours me very much, and proves how good and loyal you are;
but—but do not think hardly of me for saying that the more I have
thought of what has happened here,—of the wretched consequences of
interested marriages; the long union growing each day so miserable,
that at last it becomes intolerable and is burst asunder, as in poor
Clara’s case;—the more I am resolved not to commit that first fatal
step of entering into a marriage without—without the degree of
affection which people who take that vow ought to feel for one
another.”

“Affection! Can you doubt it? Gracious heavens, I adore you! Isn’t my
being here a proof that I do?” cries the young lady’s lover.

“But I?” answered the girl. “I have asked my own heart that question
before now. I have thought to myself,—If he comes after all,—if his
affection for me survives this disgrace of our family, as it has, and
every one of us should be thankful to you—ought I not to show at least
gratitude for so much kindness and honour, and devote myself to one who
makes such sacrifices for me? But, before all things I owe you the
truth, Lord Farintosh. I never could make you happy; I know I could
not: nor obey you as you are accustomed to be obeyed; nor give you such
a devotion as you have a right to expect from your wife. I thought I
might once. I can’t now! I know that I took you because you were rich,
and had a great name; not because you were honest, and attached to me
as you show yourself to be. I ask your pardon for the deceit I
practised on you.—Look at Clara, poor child, and her misery! My pride,
I know, would never have let me fall as far as she has done; but oh! I
am humiliated to think that I could have been made to say I would take
the first step in that awful career.”

“What career, in God’s name?” cries the astonished suitor. “Humiliated,
Ethel? Who’s going to humiliate you? I suppose there is no woman in
England who need be humiliated by becoming my wife. I should like to
see the one that I can’t pretend to—or to royal blood if I like: it’s
not better than mine. Humiliated, indeed! That _is_ news. Ha! ha! You
don’t suppose that your pedigree, which I know all about, and the
Newcome family, with your barber-surgeon to Edward the Confessor, are
equal to——”

“To yours? No. It is not very long that I have learned to disbelieve in
that story altogether. I fancy it was an odd whim of my poor father’s,
and that our family were quite poor people.

“I knew it,” said Lord Farintosh. “Do you suppose there was not plenty
of women to tell it me?”

“It was not because we were poor that I am ashamed,” Ethel went on.
“That cannot be our fault, though some of us seem think it is, as they
hide the truth so. One of my uncles used to tell me that my
grandfather’s father was a labourer in Newcome: but I was a child then,
and liked to believe the prettiest story best.”

“As if it matters!” cries Lord Farintosh.

“As if it matters in your wife? _n’est-ce pas?_ I never thought that it
would. I should have told you, as it was my duty to tell you all. It
was not my ancestors you cared for; and it is you yourself that your
wife must swear before heaven to love.”

“Of course it’s me,” answers the young man, not quite understanding the
train of ideas in his companion’s mind. “And I’ve given up
everything—everything—and have broken off with my old habits and—and
things, you know—and intend to lead a regular life—and will never go to
Tattersall’s again; nor bet a shilling; nor touch another cigar if you
like—that is, if you don’t like; for I love you so, Ethel—I do, with
all my heart I do!”

“You are very generous and kind, Lord Farintosh,” Ethel said. “It is
myself, not you, I doubt. Oh, I am humiliated to make such a
confession!”

“How humiliated?” Ethel withdrew the hand which the young nobleman
endeavoured to seize.

“If,” she continued, “if I found it was your birth, and your name, and
your wealth that I coveted, and had nearly taken, ought I not to feel
humiliated, and ask pardon of you and of God? Oh, what perjuries poor
Clara was made to speak,—and see what has befallen her! We stood by and
heard her without being shocked. We applauded even. And to what shame
and misery we brought her! Why did her parents and mine consign her to
such ruin! She might have lived pure and happy but for us. With her
example before me—not her flight, poor child—I am not afraid of _that_
happening to me—but her long solitude, the misery of her wasted
years,—my brother’s own wretchedness and faults aggravated a
hundredfold by his unhappy union with her—I must pause while it is yet
time, and recall a promise which I know I should make you unhappy if I
fulfilled. I ask your pardon that I deceived you, Lord Farintosh, and
feel ashamed for myself that I could have consented to do so.”

“Do you mean,” cried the young Marquis, “that after my conduct to
you—after my loving you, so that even this—this disgrace in your family
don’t prevent my going on—after my mother has been down on her knees to
me to break off, and I wouldn’t—no, I wouldn’t—after all White’s
sneering at me and laughing at me, and all my friends, friends of my
family, who would go to—go anywhere for me, advising me, and saying,
‘Farintosh, what a fool you are! break off this match,’—and I wouldn’t
back out, because I loved you so, by Heaven, and because, as a man and
a gentleman, when I give my word I keep it—do you mean that you throw
me over? It’s a shame—it’s a shame!” And again there were tears of rage
and anguish in Farintosh’s eyes.

“What I did was a shame, my lord,” Ethel said, humbly; “and again I ask
your pardon for it. What I do now is only to tell you the truth, and to
grieve with all my soul for the falsehood—yes the falsehood—which I
told you, and which has given your kind heart such cruel pain.”

“Yes, it was a falsehood!” the poor lad cried out. “You follow a
fellow, and you make a fool of him, and you make him frantic in love
with you, and then you fling him over! I wonder you can look me in the
face after such an infernal treason. You’ve done it to twenty fellows
before, I know you have. Everybody said so, and warned me. You draw
them on, and get them to be in love, and then you fling them away. Am I
to go back to London and be made the laughing-stock of the whole
town—I, who might marry any woman in Europe, and who am at the head of
the nobility of England?”

“Upon my word, if you will believe me after deceiving you once,” Ethel
interposed, still very humbly, “I will never say that it was I who
withdrew from you, and that it was not you who refused me. What has
happened here fully authorises you. Let the rupture of the engagement
come from you, my lord. Indeed, indeed, I would spare you all the pain
I can. I have done you wrong enough already, Lord Farintosh.”

And now the Marquis burst forth with tears and imprecations, wild cries
of anger, love, and disappointment, so fierce and incoherent that the
lady to whom they were addressed did not repeat them to her confidante.
Only she generously charged Laura to remember, if ever she heard the
matter talked of in the world, that it was Lord Farintosh’s family
which broke off the marriage; but that his lordship had acted most
kindly and generously throughout the whole affair.

He went back to London in such a state of fury, and raved so wildly
amongst his friends against the whole Newcome family, that many men
knew what the case really was. But all women averred that that
intriguing worldly Ethel Newcome, the apt pupil of her wicked old
grandmother, had met with a deserved rebuff; that, after doing
everything in her power to catch the great _parti_, Lord Farintosh, who
had long been tired of her, flung her over, not liking the connexion;
and that she was living out of the world now at Newcome, under the
pretence of taking care of that unfortunate Lady Clara’s children, but
really because she was pining away for Lord Farintosh, who, as we all
know, married six months afterwards.




CHAPTER LX.
In which we write to the Colonel


Deeming that her brother Barnes had cares enough of his own presently
at hand, Ethel did not think fit to confide to him the particulars of
her interview with Lord Farintosh; nor even was poor Lady Anne informed
that she had lost a noble son-in-law. The news would come to both of
them soon enough, Ethel thought; and indeed, before many hours were
over, it reached Sir Barnes Newcome in a very abrupt and unpleasant
way. He had dismal occasion now to see his lawyers every day; and on
the day after Lord Farintosh’s abrupt visit and departure, Sir Barnes,
going into Newcome upon his own unfortunate affairs, was told by his
attorney, Mr. Speers, how the Marquis of Farintosh had slept for a few
hours at the King’s Arms, and returned to town the same evening by the
train. We may add, that his lordship had occupied the very room in
which Lord Highgate had previously slept; and Mr. Taplow recommends the
bed accordingly, and shows pride it with to this very day.

Much disturbed by this intelligence, Sir Barnes was making his way to
his cheerless home in the evening, when near his own gate he overtook
another messenger. This was the railway porter, who daily brought
telegraphic messages from his uncle and the London bank. The message of
that day was,—“Consols, so-and-so. French Rentes, so much. _Highgate’s
and Farintosh’s accounts withdrawn_.” The wretched keeper of the lodge
owned, with trembling, in reply to the curses and queries of his
employer, that a gentleman, calling himself the Marquis of Farintosh,
had gone up to the house the day before, and come away an hour
afterwards,—did not like to speak to Sir Barnes when he came home, Sir
Barnes looked so bad like.

Now, of course, there could be no concealment from her brother, and
Ethel and Barnes had a conversation, in which the latter expressed
himself with that freedom of language which characterised the head of
the house of Newcome. Madame de Moncontour’s pony-chaise was in waiting
at the hall door, when the owner of the house entered it; and my wife
was just taking leave of Ethel and her little people when Sir Barnes
Newcome entered the lady’s sitting-room.

The livid scowl with which Barnes greeted my wife surprised that lady,
though it did not induce her to prolong her visit to her friend. As
Laura took leave, she heard Sir Barnes screaming to the nurses to “take
those little beggars away,” and she rightly conjectured that some more
unpleasantries had occurred to disturb this luckless gentleman’s
temper.

On the morrow, dearest Ethel’s usual courier, one of the boys from the
lodge, trotted over on his donkey to dearest Laura at Rosebury, with
one of those missives which were daily passing between the ladies. This
letter said:—

“Barnes m’a fait une scène terrible hier. I was obliged to tell him
everything about Lord F., and _to use the plainest language_. At first,
he forbade you the house. He thinks that you have been the cause of
F.’s dismissal, and charged me, _most unjustly_, with a desire to bring
back poor C. N. I replied _as became me_, and told him fairly I would
leave the house if _odious insulting charges_ were made against me, if
my friends were not received. He stormed, he cried, he employed_ his
usual language_,—he was in a dreadful state. He relented and asked
pardon. He goes to town to-night by the mail-train. _Of course_ you
come as usual, dear, dear Laura. I am miserable without you; and you
know I cannot leave poor mamma. Clarykin sends a _thousand kisses_ to
little Arty; and I am _his mother’s_ always affectionate—E. N.

“Will the gentlemen like to shoot our pheasants? Please ask the Prince
to let Warren know when. I sent a brace to poor dear old Mrs. Mason,
and had such a nice letter from her!”

“And who is poor dear Mrs. Mason” asks Mr. Pendennis, as yet but
imperfectly acquainted with the history of the Newcomes.

And Laura told me—perhaps I had heard before, and forgotten—that Mrs.
Mason was an old nurse and pensioner of the Colonel’s, and how he had
been to see her for the sake of old times; and how she was a great
favourite with Ethel; and Laura kissed her little son, and was
exceedingly bright, cheerful, and hilarious that evening, in spite of
the affliction under which her dear friends at Newcome were labouring.

People in country-houses should be exceedingly careful about their
blotting-paper. They should bring their own portfolios with them. If
any kind readers will bear this simple little hint in mind, how much
mischief may they save themselves,—nay, enjoy possibly, by looking at
the pages of the next portfolio in the next friend’s bedroom in which
they sleep. From such a book I once cut out, in Charles Slyboots’
well-known and perfectly clear handwriting, the words, “Miss Emily
Hartington, James Street, Backingham Gate, London,” and produced as
legibly on the blotting-paper as on the envelope which the postman
delivered. After showing the paper round to the company, I enclosed it
in a note and sent it to Mr. Slyboots, who married Miss Hartington
three months afterwards. In such a book at the club I read, as plainly
as you may read this page, a holograph page of the Right Honourable the
Earl of Bareacres, which informed the whole club of a painful and
private circumstance, and said, “My dear Green,—I am truly sorry that I
shall not be able to take up the bill for eight hundred and fifty-six
pounds, which becomes due next Tu——” and upon such a book, going to
write a note in Madame de Moncontour’s drawing-room at Rosebury, what
should I find but proofs that my own wife was engaged in a clandestine
correspondence with a gentleman residing abroad!

“Colonel Newcome, C.B., Montagne de la Cour, Brussels,” I read, in this
young woman’s handwriting; and asked, turning round upon Laura, who
entered the room just as I discovered her guilt: “What have you been
writing to Colonel Newcome about, miss?”

“I wanted him to get me some lace,” she said.

“To lace some nightcaps for me, didn’t you, my dear? He is such a fine
judge of lace! If I had known you had been writing, I would have asked
you to send him a message. I want something from Brussels. Is the
letter—ahem—gone?” (In this artful way, you see, I just hinted that I
should like to see letter.).

“The letter is—ahem—gone,” says Laura. “What do you want from Brussels,
Pen?”

“I want some Brussels sprouts, my love—they are so fine in their native
country.”

“Shall I write to him to send the letter back?” palpitates poor little
Laura; for she thought her husband was offended, by using the ironic
method.

“No, you dear little woman! You need not send for letter the back: and
you need not tell me what was in it: and I will bet you a hundred yards
of lace to a cotton nightcap—and you know whether _I_, madam, am a man
_à bonnet-de-coton_—I will let you that I know what you have been
writing about, under pretence of a message about lace, to our Colonel.”

“He promised to send it me. He really did. Lady Rockminster gave me
twenty pounds——” gasps Laura.

“Under pretence of lace, you have been sending over a love-message. You
want to see whether Clive is still of his old mind. You think the coast
is now clear, and that dearest Ethel may like him. You think Mrs. Mason
is growing very old and infirm, and the sight of her dear boy would——”

“Pen! Pen! _did you open my letter?_” cries Laura; and a laugh which
could afford to be good-humoured (followed by yet another expression of
the lips) ended this colloquy. No; Mr Pendennis did not see the
letter—but he knew the writer;—flattered himself that he knew women in
general.

“Where did you get your experience of them, sir?” asks Mrs. Laura.
Question answered in the same manner as the previous demand.

“Well, my dear; and why should not the poor boy be made happy?” Laura
continues, standing very close up to her husband. “It is evident to me
that Ethel is fond of him. I would rather see her married to a good
young man whom she loves, than the mistress of a thousand palaces and
coronets. Suppose—suppose you had married Miss Amory, sir, what a
wretched worldly creature you would have been by this time; whereas
now——”

“Now that I am the humble slave of a good woman there is some chance
for me,” cries this model of husbands. “And all good women are
match-makers, as we know very well; and you have had this match in your
heart ever since you saw the two young people together. Now; madam,
since I did not see your letter to the Colonel—though I have guessed
part of it—tell me, what have you said in it? Have you by any chance
told the Colonel that the Farintosh alliance was broken off?”

Laura owned that she had hinted as much.

“You have not ventured to say that Ethel is well inclined to Clive?”

“Oh, no—oh _dear_, no!” But after much cross-examining and a little
blushing on Laura’s part, she is brought to confess that she has asked
the Colonel whether he will not come and see Mrs. Mason, who is pining
to see him, and is growing very old. And I find out that she has been
to see this Mrs. Mason; that she and Miss Newcome visited the old lady
the day before yesterday; and Laura thought from the manner in which
Ethel looked at Clive’s picture, hanging up in the parlour of his
father’s old friend, that she really was very much, etc. etc. So, the
letter being gone, Mrs. Pendennis is most eager about the answer to it,
and day after day examines the bag, and is provoked that it brings no
letter bearing the Brussels post-mark.

Madame de Moncontour seems perfectly well to know what Mrs. Laura has
been doing and is hoping. “What, no letters again to-day? Ain’t it
provoking?” she cries. She is in the conspiracy too; and presently
Florac is one of the initiated. “These women wish to _bacler_ a
marriage between the belle miss and le petit Claive,” Florac announces
to me. He pays the highest compliments to Miss Newcome’s person, as he
speaks regarding the marriage. “I continue to adore your Anglaises,” he
is pleased to say. “What of freshness, what of beauty, what roses! And
then they are so adorably good! Go, Pendennis, thou art a happy
_coquin!_” Mr. Pendennis does not say No. He has won the
twenty-thousand-pound prize; and we know there are worse blanks in that
lottery.




CHAPTER LXI.
In which we are introduced to a New Newcome


No answer came to Mrs. Pendennis’s letter to Colonel Newcome at
Brussels, for the Colonel was absent from that city, and at the time
when Laura wrote was actually in London, whither affairs of his own had
called him. A note from George Warrington acquainted me with this
circumstance; he mentioned that he and the Colonel had dined together
at Bays’s on the day previous, and that the Colonel seemed to be in the
highest spirits. High spirits about what? This news put Laura in a sad
perplexity. Should she write and tell him to get his letters from
Brussels? She would in five minutes have found some other pretext for
writing to Colonel Newcome, had not her husband sternly cautioned the
young woman to leave the matter alone.

The more readily perhaps because he had quarrelled with his nephew Sir
Barnes, Thomas Newcome went to visit his brother Hobson and his
sister-in-law; bent on showing that there was no division between him
and this branch of his family. And you may suppose that the admirable
woman just named had a fine occasion for her virtuous conversational
powers in discoursing upon the painful event which had just happened to
Sir Barnes. When we fail, how our friends cry out for us! Mrs. Hobson’s
homilies must have been awful. How that outraged virtue must have
groaned and lamented, gathered its children about its knees, wept over
them and washed them; gone into sackcloth and ashes and tied up the
knocker; confabulated with its spiritual adviser; uttered commonplaces
to its husband; and bored the whole house! The punishment of
worldliness and vanity, the evil of marrying out of one’s station, how
these points must have been explained and enlarged on! Surely the
Peerage was taken off the drawing-room table and removed to papa’s
study, where it could not open, as it used naturally once, to Highgate,
Baron, or Farintosh, Marquis of, being shut behind wires and closely
jammed in on an upper shelf between Blackstone’s Commentaries and the
Farmer’s Magazine! The breaking of the engagement with the Marquis of
Farintosh was known in Bryanstone Square; and you may be sure
interpreted by Mrs. Hobson in the light the most disadvantageous to
Ethel Newcome. A young nobleman—with grief and pain Ethel’s aunt must
own the fact—a young man of notoriously dissipated habits but of great
wealth and rank, had been pursued by the unhappy Lady Kew—Mrs. Hobson
would not say by her _niece_, that were _too_ dreadful—had been
pursued, and followed, and hunted down in the most notorious manner,
and finally made to propose! Let Ethel’s _conduct_ and _punishment_ be
a warning to my dearest girls, and let them bless _Heaven_ they have
parents who are not worldly! After all the trouble and pains, Mrs.
Hobson did not say _disgrace_, the Marquis takes _the very first
pretext_ to break off the match, and leaves the unfortunate girl for
ever!

And now we have to tell of the hardest blow which fell upon poor Ethel,
and this was that her good uncle Thomas Newcome believed the charges
against her. He was willing enough to listen now to anything which was
said against that branch of the family. With such a traitor,
double-dealer, dastard as Barnes at its head, what could the rest of
the race be? When the Colonel offered to endow Ethel and Clive with
every shilling he had in the world, had not Barnes, the arch-traitor,
temporised and told him falsehoods, and hesitated about throwing him
off until the Marquis had declared himself? Yes. The girl he and poor
Clive loved so was ruined by her artful relatives, was unworthy of his
affection and his boy’s, was to be banished, like her worthless
brother, out of his regard for ever. And the man she had chosen in
preference to his Clive!—a roue, a libertine, whose extravagances and
dissipations were the talk of every club, who had no wit, nor talents,
not even constancy (for had he not taken the first opportunity to throw
her off?) to recommend him—only a great title and a fortune wherewith
to bribe her! For shame, for shame! Her engagement to this man was a
blot upon her—the rupture only a just punishment and humiliation. Poor
unhappy girl! let her take care of her wretched brother’s abandoned
children, give up the world, and amend her life.

This was the sentence Thomas Newcome delivered: a righteous and
tender-hearted man, as we know, but judging in this case wrongly, and
bearing much too hardly, as we who know her betters must think, upon
one who had her faults certainly, but whose errors were not all of her
own making. Who set her on the path she walked in? It was her parents’
hands which led her, and her parents’ voices which commanded her to
accept the temptation set before her. What did she know of the
character of the man selected to be her husband? Those who should have
known better brought him to her, and vouched for him. Noble, unhappy
young creature! are you the first of your sisterhood who has been
bidden to traffic your beauty, to crush and slay your honest natural
affections, to sell your truth and your life for rank and title? But
the Judge who sees not the outward acts merely, but their causes, and
views not the wrong alone, but the temptations, struggles, ignorance of
erring creatures, we know has a different code to ours—to ours, who
fall upon the fallen, who fawn upon the prosperous so, who administer
our praises and punishments so prematurely, who now strike so hard,
and, anon, spare so shamelessly.

Our stay with our hospitable friends at Rosebury was perforce coming to
a close, for indeed weeks after weeks had passed since we had been
under their pleasant roof; and in spite of dearest Ethel’s
remonstrances it was clear that dearest Laura must take her farewell.
In these last days, besides the visits which daily took place between
one and other, the young messenger was put in ceaseless requisition,
and his donkey must have been worn off his little legs with trotting to
and fro between the two houses, Laura was quite anxious and hurt at not
hearing from the Colonel; it was a shame that he did not have over his
letters from Belgium and answer that one which she had honoured him by
writing. By some information, received who knows how? our host was
aware of the intrigue which Mrs. Pendennis was carrying on; and his
little wife almost as much interested in it as my own. She whispered to
me in her kind way that she would give a guinea, that she would, to see
a certain couple made happy together; that they were born for one
another, that they were; she was for having me go off to fetch Clive:
but who was I to act as Hymen’s messenger, or to interpose in such
delicate family affairs?

All this while Sir Barnes Newcome, Bart., remained absent in London,
attending to his banking duties there, and pursuing the dismal
inquiries which ended, in the ensuing Michaelmas term, in the famous
suit of Newcome _v_. Lord Highgate. Ethel, pursuing the plan which she
had laid down for herself from the first, took entire charge of his
children and house: Lady Anne returned to her own family: never indeed
having been of much use in her son’s dismal household. My wife talked
to me of course about her pursuits and amusements at Newcome, in the
ancestral hall which we have mentioned. The children played and ate
their dinner (mine often partook of his infantine mutton, in company
with little Clara and the poor young heir of Newcome) in the room which
had been called my lady’s own, and in which her husband had locked her,
forgetting that the conservatories were open, through which the hapless
woman had fled. Next to this was the baronial library, a side of which
was fitted with the gloomy books from Clapham, which old Mrs. Newcome
had amassed; rows of tracts, and missionary magazines, and dingy quarto
volumes of worldly travel and history which that lady had admitted into
her collection.

Almost on the last day of our stay at Rosebury, the two young ladies
bethought them of paying a visit to the neighbouring town of Newcome,
to that old Mrs. Mason who has been mentioned in a foregoing page in
some yet earlier chapter of our history. She was very old now, very
faithful to the recollections of her own early time, and oblivious of
yesterday. Thanks to Colonel Newcome’s bounty, she had lived in comfort
for many a long year past; and he was as much her boy now as in those
early days of which we have given but an outline. There were Clive’s
pictures of himself and his father over her little mantelpiece, near
which she sat in comfort and warmth by the winter fire which his bounty
supplied.

Mrs. Mason remembered Miss Newcome, prompted thereto by the hints of
her little maid, who was much younger, and had a more faithful memory
than her mistress. Why, Sarah Mason would have forgotten the pheasants
whose very tails decorated the chimney-glass, had not Keziah, the maid,
reminded her that the young lady was the donor. Then she recollected
her benefactor, and asked after her father, the Baronet; and wondered,
for her part, why her boy, the Colonel, was not made baronet, and why
his brother had the property? Her father was a very good man; though
Mrs. Mason had heard he was not much liked in those parts. “Dead and
gone, was he, poor man?” (This came in reply to a hint from Keziah, the
attendant, bawled in the old lady’s ears, who was very deaf.) “Well,
well, we must all go; and if we were all good, like the Colonel, what
was the use of staying? I hope his wife will be good. I am sure such a
good man deserves one,” added Mrs. Mason.

The ladies thought the old woman doting, led thereto by the remark of
Keziah, the maid, that Mrs. Mason have a lost her memory. And she asked
who the other bonny lady was, and Ethel told her that Mrs. Pendennis
was a friend of the Colonel’s and Clive’s.

“Oh, Clive’s friend! Well, she was a pretty lady, and he was a dear
pretty boy. He drew those pictures; and he took off me in my cap, with
my old cat and all—my poor old cat that’s buried this ever so long
ago.”

“She has had a letter from the Colonel, miss,” cries out Keziah.
“Haven’t you had a letter from the Colonel, mum? It came only
yesterday.” And Keziah takes out the letter and shows it to the ladies.
They read as follows:—

“London, Feb. 12, 184-.

“My Dear Old Mason—I have just heard from a friend of mine who has been
staying in your neighbourhood, that you are well and happy, and that
you have been making inquiries after _your young scapegrace_, Tom
Newcome, who is well and happy too, and who proposes to be _happier
still_ before any very long time is over.

“The letter which was written to me about you was sent to me _in
Belgium_, at Brussels, where I have been living—a town near the place
where the famous _Battle of Waterloo_ was fought; and as I had run away
from Waterloo it _followed me to England_.

“I cannot come to Newcome just now to shake my dear old friend and
nurse _by the hand_. I have business in London; and there are those of
my name _living in Newcome_ who would not be very happy to see me and
mine.

“But I promise you a visit before very long, and Clive will come with
me; and when we come I shall introduce a new friend to you, a very
pretty little _daughter-in-law_, whom you must promise to love very
much. She is a _Scotch lassie_, niece of my oldest friend, James
Binnie, Esquire, of the Bengal Civil Service, who will give her a
_pretty bit of siller_, and her present name is Miss Rosa Mackenzie.

“We shall send you a _wedding cake_ soon, and a new gown for Keziah (to
whom remember me), and when I am gone, my grandchildren after me will
hear what a dear friend you were to your affectionate Thomas Newcome.”

Keziah must have thought that there was something between Clive and my
wife, for when Laura had read the letter she laid it down on the table,
and sitting down by it, and hiding her face in her hands, burst into
tears.

Ethel looked steadily at the two pictures of Clive and his father. Then
she put her hand on her friend’s shoulder. “Come, my dear,” she said,
“it is growing late, and I must go back to my children.” And she
saluted Mrs. Mason and her maid in a very stately manner, and left
them, leading my wife away, who was still exceedingly overcome.

We could not stay long at Rosebury after that. When Madame de
Moncontour heard the news, the good lady cried too. Mrs. Pendennis’s
emotion was renewed as we passed the gates of Newcome Park on our way
to the railroad.




CHAPTER LXII.
Mr. and Mrs. Clive Newcome


The friendship between Ethel and Laura, which the last narrated
sentimental occurrences had so much increased, subsists very little
impaired up to the present day. A lady with many domestic interests and
increasing family, etc. etc., cannot be supposed to cultivate female
intimacies out of doors with that ardour and eagerness which young
spinsters exhibit in their intercourse; but Laura, whose kind heart
first led her to sympathise with her young friend in the latter’s days
of distress and misfortune, has professed ever since a growing esteem
for Ethel Newcome, and says, that the trials and perhaps grief which
the young lady now had to undergo have brought out the noblest
qualities of her disposition. She is a very different person from the
giddy and worldly girl who compelled our admiration of late in the days
of her triumphant youthful beauty, of her wayward generous humour, of
her frivolities and her flirtations.

Did Ethel shed tears in secret over the marriage which had caused
Laura’s gentle eyes to overflow? We might divine the girl’s grief, but
we respected it. The subject was never mentioned by the ladies between
themselves, and even in her most intimate communications with her
husband that gentleman is bound to say his wife maintained a tender
reserve upon the point, nor cared to speculate upon a subject which her
friend held sacred. I could not for my part but acquiesce in this
reticence; and, if Ethel felt regret and remorse, admire the dignity of
her silence, and the sweet composure of her now changed and saddened
demeanour.

The interchange of letters between the two friends was constant, and in
these the younger lady described at length the duties, occupations, and
pleasures of her new life. She had quite broken with the world, and
devoted herself entirely to the nurture and education of her brother’s
orphan children. She educated herself in order to teach them. Her
letters contain droll yet touching confessions of her own ignorance and
her determination to overcome it. There was no lack of masters of all
kinds in Newcome. She set herself to work like a schoolgirl. The little
piano in the room near the conservatory was thumped by Aunt Ethel until
it became quite obedient to her, and yielded the sweetest music under
her fingers. When she came to pay us a visit at Fairoaks some two years
afterwards she played for our dancing children (our third is named
Ethel, our second Helen, after one still more dear), and we were in
admiration of her skill. There must have been the labour of many lonely
nights when her little charges were at rest, and she and her sad
thoughts sat up together, before she overcame the difficulties of the
instrument so as to be able to soothe herself and to charm and delight
her children.

When the divorce was pronounced, which came in due form, though we know
that Lady Highgate was not much happier than the luckless Lady Clara
Newcome had been, Ethel’s dread was lest Sir Barnes should marry again,
and by introducing a new mistress into his house should deprive her of
the care of her children.

Miss Newcome judged her brother rightly in that he would try to marry,
but a noble young lady to whom he offered himself rejected him, to his
surprise and indignation, for a beggarly clergyman with a small living,
on which she elected to starve; and the wealthy daughter of a
neighbouring manufacturer whom he next proposed to honour with his
gracious hand, fled from him with horror to the arms of her father,
wondering how such a man as that should ever dare to propose marriage
to an honest girl. Sir Barnes Newcome was much surprised at this
outbreak of anger; he thought himself a very ill-used and unfortunate
man, a victim of most cruel persecutions, which we may be sure did not
improve his temper or tend to the happiness of his circle at home.
Peevishness, and selfish rage, quarrels with servants and governesses,
and other domestic disquiet, Ethel had of course to bear from her
brother, but not actual personal ill-usage. The fiery temper of former
days was subdued in her, but the haughty resolution remained, which was
more than a match for her brother’s cowardly tyranny: besides, she was
the mistress of sixty thousand pounds, and by many wily hints and
piteous appeals to his sister Sir Barnes sought to secure this
desirable sum of money for his poor dear unfortunate children.

He professed to think that she was ruining herself for her younger
brothers, whose expenses the young lady was defraying, this one at
college, that in the army, and whose maintenance he thought might be
amply defrayed out of their own little fortunes and his mother’s
jointure: and, by ingeniously proving that a vast number of his
household expenses were personal to Miss Newcome and would never have
been incurred but for her residence in his house, he subtracted for his
own benefit no inconsiderable portion of her income. Thus the
carriage-horses were hers, for what need had he, a miserable bachelor,
of anything more than a riding-horse and a brougham? A certain number
of the domestics were hers, and as he could get no scoundrel of his own
to stay with him, he took Miss Newcome’s servants. He would have had
her pay the coals which burned in his grate, and the taxes due to our
sovereign lady the Queen; but in truth, at the end of the year, with
her domestic bounties and her charities round about Newcome, which
daily increased as she became acquainted with her indigent neighbours,
Miss Ethel, the heiress, was as poor as many poorer persons.

Her charities increased daily with her means of knowing the people
round about her. She gave much time to them and thought; visited from
house to house, without ostentation; was awestricken by that spectacle
of the poverty which we have with us always, of which the sight rebukes
our selfish griefs into silence, the thought compels us to charity,
humility, and devotion. The priests of our various creeds, who
elsewhere are doing battle together continually, lay down their arms in
its presence and kneel before it; subjugated by that overpowering
master. Death, never dying out; hunger always crying; and children born
to it day after day,—our young London lady, flying from the splendours
and follies in which her life had been past, found herself in the
presence of these; threading darkling alleys which swarmed with
wretched life; sitting by naked beds, whither by God’s blessing she was
sometimes enabled to carry a little comfort and consolation; or whence
she came heart-stricken by the overpowering misery, or touched by the
patient resignation of the new friends to whom fate had directed her.
And here she met the priest upon his shrift, the homely missionary
bearing his words of consolation, the quiet curate pacing his round;
and was known to all these, and enabled now and again to help their
people in trouble. “Oh! what good there is in this woman!” my wife
would say to me, as she laid one of Miss Ethel’s letters aside; “who
would have thought this was the girl of your glaring London ballroom?
If she has had grief to bear, how it has chastened and improved her!”

And now I have to confess that all this time, whilst Ethel Newcome has
been growing in grace with my wife, poor Clive has been lapsing sadly
out of favour. She has no patience with Clive. She drubs her little
foot when his name is mentioned and turns the subject. Whither are all
the tears and pities fled now? Mrs. Laura has transferred all her
regard to Ethel, and when that lady’s ex-suitor writes to his old
friend, or other news is had of him, Laura flies out in her usual
tirades against the world, the horrid wicked selfish world, which
spoils everybody who comes near it. What has Clive done, in vain his
apologist asks, that an old friend should be so angry with him?

She is not angry with him—not she. She only does not care about him.
She wishes him no manner of harm—not the least, only she has lost all
interest in him. And the Colonel too, the poor good old Colonel, was
actually in Mrs. Pendennis’ black books, and when he sent her the
Brussels veil which we have heard of, she did not think it was a
bargain at all—not particularly pretty, in fact, rather dear at the
money. When we met Mr. and Mrs. Clive Newcome in London, whither they
came a few months after their marriage, and where Rosey appeared as
pretty, happy, good-humoured a little blushing bride as eyes need
behold, Mrs. Pendennis’s reception of her was quite a curiosity of
decorum. “I, not receive her well?” cried Laura. “How on earth would
you have me receive her? I talked to her about everything, and she only
answered yes or no. I showed her the children, and she did not seem to
care. Her only conversation was about millinery and Brussels balls, and
about her dress at the drawing-room. The drawing-room! What business
has she with such follies?”

The fact is, that the drawing-room was Tom Newcome’s affair, not his
son’s, who was heartily ashamed of the figure he cut in that astounding
costume, which English private gentlemen are made to sport when they
bend the knee before their gracious Sovereign.

Warrington roasted poor Clive upon the occasion, and complimented him
with his usual gravity, until the young fellow blushed and his father
somewhat testily signified to our friend that his irony was not
agreeable. “I suppose,” says the Colonel, with great hauteur, “that
there is nothing ridiculous in an English gentleman entertaining
feelings of loyalty and testifying his respect to his Queen: and I
presume that Her Majesty knows best, and has a right to order in what
dress her subjects shall appear before her and I don’t think it’s kind
of you, George, I say, I don’t think it’s kind of you to quiz my boy
for doing his duty to his Queen and to his father too, sir,—for it was
at my request that Clive went, and we went together, sir—to the levee
and then to the drawing-room afterwards with Rosey, who was presented
by the lady of my old friend, Sir George Tufto, a lady of rank herself,
and the wife of as brave an officer as ever drew a sword.”

Warrington stammered an apology for his levity, but no explanations
were satisfactory, and it was clear George had wounded the feelings of
our dear simple old friend.

After Clive’s marriage, which was performed at Brussels, Uncle James
and the lady, his sister, whom we have sometimes flippantly ventured to
call the Campaigner, went off to perform that journey to Scotland which
James had meditated for ten years past; and, now little Rosey was made
happy for life, to renew acquaintance with little Josey. The Colonel
and his son and daughter-in-law came to London, not to the bachelor
quarters, where we have seen them, but to an hotel, which they occupied
until their new house could be provided for them, a sumptuous mansion
in the Tyburnian district, and one which became people of their
station.

We have been informed already what the Colonel’s income was, and have
the gratification of knowing that it was very considerable. The simple
gentleman who would dine off a crust, and wear a coat for ten years,
desired that his children should have the best of everything: ordered
about upholsterers, painters, carriage-makers, in his splendid Indian
way; presented pretty Rosey with brilliant jewels for her introduction
at Court, and was made happy by the sight of the blooming young
creature decked in these magnificences, and admired by all his little
circle. The old boys, the old generals, the old colonels, the old
qui-his from the club, came and paid her their homage; the directors’
ladies, and the generals’ ladies, called upon her, and feasted her at
vast banquets served on sumptuous plate. Newcome purchased plate and
gave banquets in return for these hospitalities. Mrs. Clive had a neat
close carriage for evenings, and a splendid barouche to drive in the
Park. It was pleasant to see this equipage at four o’clock of an
afternoon, driving up to Bays’s, with Rosey most gorgeously attired
reclining within; and to behold the stately grace of the old gentleman
as he stepped out to welcome his daughter-in-law, and the bow he made
before he entered her carriage. Then they would drive round the Park;
round and round and round; and the old generals, and the old colonels,
and old fogies, and their ladies and daughters, would nod and smile out
of _their_ carriages as they crossed each other upon this charming
career of pleasure.

I confess that a dinner at the Colonel’s, now he appeared in all his
magnificence, was awfully slow. No peaches could look fresher than
Rosey’s cheeks,—no damask was fairer than her pretty little shoulders.
No one, I am sure, could be happier than she, but she did not impart
her happiness to her friends; and replied chiefly by smiles to the
conversation of the gentlemen at her side. It is true that these were
for the most part elderly dignitaries, distinguished military officers
with blue-black whiskers, retired old Indian judges, and the like,
occupied with their victuals, and generally careless to please. But
that solemn happiness of the Colonel, who shall depict it:—that look of
affection with which he greeted his daughter as she entered, flounced
to the waist, twinkling with innumerable jewels, holding a dainty
pocket-handkerchief, with smiling eyes, dimpled cheeks, and golden
ringlets! He would take her hand, or follow her about from group to
group, exchanging precious observations about the weather, the Park,
the exhibition, nay, the opera, for the old man actually went to the
opera with his little girl, and solemnly snoozed by her side in a white
waistcoat.

Very likely this was the happiest period of Thomas Newcome’s life. No
woman (save one perhaps fifty years ago) had ever seemed so fond of him
as that little girl. What pride he had in her, and what care he took of
her! If she was a little ailing, what anxiety and hurrying for doctors!
What droll letters came from James Binnie, and how they laughed over
them: with what respectful attention he acquainted Mrs. Mack with
everything that took place: with what enthusiasm that Campaigner
replied! Josey’s husband called a special blessing upon his head in the
church at Musselburgh; and little Jo herself sent a tinful of Scotch
bun to her darling sister, with a request from her husband that he
might have a few shares in the famous Indian Company.

The Company was in a highly flourishing condition, as you may suppose,
when one of its directors, who at the same time was one of the
honestest men alive, thought it was his duty to live in the splendour
in which we now behold him. Many wealthy City men did homage to him.
His brother Hobson, though the Colonel had quarrelled with the chief of
the firm, yet remained on amiable terms with Thomas Newcome, and shared
and returned his banquets for a while. Charles Honeyman we may be sure
was present at many of them, and smirked a blessing over the plenteous
meal. The Colonel’s influence was such with Mr. Sherrick that he
pleaded Charles’s cause with that gentleman, and actually brought to a
successful termination that little love-affair in which we have seen
Miss Sherrick and Charles engaged. Mr. Sherrick was not disposed to
part with much money during his lifetime—indeed, he proved to Colonel
Newcome that he was not so rich as the world supposed him. But, by the
Colonel’s interest, the chaplaincy of Boggley Wollah was procured for
the Rev. C. Honeyman, who now forms the delight of that flourishing
station.

All this while we have said little about Clive, who in truth was
somehow in the background in this flourishing Newcome group. To please
the best father in the world; the kindest old friend who endowed his
niece with the best part of his savings; to settle that question about
marriage and have an end of it;—Clive Newcome had taken a pretty and
fond young girl, who respected and admired him beyond all men, and who
heartily desired to make him happy. To do as much would not his father
have stripped his coat from his back,—have put his head under
Juggernaut’s chariot-wheel, have sacrificed any ease, comfort, or
pleasure for the youngster’s benefit? One great passion he had had and
closed the account of it: a worldly ambitious girl—how foolishly
worshipped and passionately beloved no matter—had played with him for
years; had flung him away when a dissolute suitor with a great fortune
and title had offered himself. Was he to whine and despair because a
jilt had fooled him? He had too much pride and courage for any such
submission; he would accept the lot in life which was offered to him,
no undesirable one surely; he would fulfil the wish of his father’s
heart, and cheer his kind declining years. In this way the marriage was
brought about. It was but a whisper to Rosey in the drawing-room, a
start and a blush from the little girl as he took the little willing
hand, a kiss for her from her delighted old father-in-law, a twinkle in
good old James’s eyes, and double embrace from the Campaigner as she
stood over them in a benedictory attitude;—expressing her surprise at
an event for which she had been jockeying ever since she set eyes on
young Newcome; and calling upon Heaven to bless her children. So, as a
good thing when it is to be done had best be done quickly, these worthy
folks went off almost straightway to a clergyman, and were married out
of hand—to the astonishment of Captains Hoby and Goby when they came to
hear of the event. Well, my gallant young painter and friend of my
boyhood! if my wife chooses to be angry at your marriage, shall her
husband not wish you happy?

Suppose we had married our first loves, others of us, were we the
happier now? Ask Mr. Pendennis, who sulked in his tents when his
Costigan, his Briseis, was ravished from him. Ask poor George
Warrington, who had his own way, Heaven help him! There was no need why
Clive should turn monk because number one refused him; and, that
charmer removed, why he should not take to his heart number two. I am
bound to say, that when I expressed these opinions to Mrs. Laura, she
was more angry and provoked than ever.

It is in the nature of such a simple soul as Thomas Newcome, to see but
one side of a question, and having once fixed Ethel’s worldliness in
his mind, and her brother’s treason, to allow no argument of advocates
of the other side to shake his displeasure. Hence the one or two
appeals which Laura ventured to make on behalf of her friend, were
checked by the good Colonel with a stern negation. If Ethel was not
guiltless, she could not make him see at least that she was not guilty.
He dashed away all excuses and palliations. Exasperated as he was, he
persisted in regarding the poor girl’s conduct in its most unfavourable
light. “She was rejected, and deservedly rejected, by the Marquis of
Farintosh,” he broke out to me once, who was not indeed authorised to
tell all I knew regarding the story; “the whole town knows it; all the
clubs ring with it. I blush, sir, to think that my brother’s child
should have brought such a stain upon our name.” In vain, I told him
that my wife, who knew all the circumstances much better, judged Miss
Newcome far more favourably, and indeed greatly esteemed and loved her.
“Pshaw! sir,” breaks out the indignant Colonel, “your wife is an
innocent creature, who does not know the world as we men of experience
do,—as I do, sir;” and would have no more of the discussion. There is
no doubt about it, there was a coolness between my old friend’s father
and us.

As for Barnes Newcome, we gave up that worthy, and the Colonel showed
him no mercy. He recalled words used by Warrington, which I have
recorded in a former page, and vowed that he only watched for an
opportunity to crush the miserable reptile. He hated Barnes as a
loathsome traitor, coward, and criminal; he made no secret of his
opinion; and Clive, with the remembrance of former injuries, of
dreadful heart-pangs; the inheritor of his father’s blood, his honesty
of nature, and his impetuous enmity against wrong; shared to the full
his sire’s antipathy against his cousin, and publicly expressed his
scorn and contempt for him. About Ethel he would not speak. “Perhaps
what you say, Pen, is true,” he said. “I hope it is. Pray God it is.”
But his quivering lips and fierce countenance, when her name was
mentioned or her defence attempted, showed that he too had come to
think ill of her. “As for her brother, as for that scoundrel,” he would
say, clenching his fist, “if ever I can punish him I will. I shouldn’t
have the soul of a dog, if ever I forgot the wrongs that have been done
me by that vagabond. Forgiveness? Pshaw! Are you dangling to sermons,
Pen, at your wife’s leading-strings? Are you preaching that cant? There
are some injuries that no honest man should forgive, and I shall be a
rogue on the day I shake hands with that villain.”

“Clive has adopted the Iroquois ethics,” says George Warrington,
smoking his pipe sententiously, “rather than those which are at present
received among us. I am not sure that something is not to be said, as
against the Eastern, upon the Western, or Tomahawk, or Ojibbeway side
of the question. I should not like,” he added, “to be in a vendetta or
feud, and to have you, Clive, and the old Colonel engaged against me.”

“I would rather,” I said, “for my part, have half a dozen such enemies
as Clive and the Colonel, than one like Barnes. You never know where or
when that villain may hit you.” And before a very short period was
over, Sir Barnes Newcome, Bart., hit his two hostile kinsmen such a
blow, as one might expect from such a quarter.




CHAPTER LXIII.
Mrs. Clive at Home


Clive and his father did not think fit to conceal their opinions
regarding their kinsman, Barnes Newcome, and uttered them in many
public places when Sir Barnes’s conduct was brought into question, we
may be sure that their talk came to the Baronet’s ears, and did not
improve his already angry feeling towards those gentlemen. For a while
they had the best of the attack. The Colonel routed Barnes out of his
accustomed club at Bays’s; where also the gallant Sir George Tufto
expressed himself pretty openly with respect to the poor Baronet’s want
of courage: the Colonel had bullied and browbeaten Barnes in the
parlour of his own bank, and the story was naturally well known in the
City; where it certainly was not pleasant for Sir Barnes, as he walked
to ’Change, to meet sometimes the scowls of the angry man of war, his
uncle, striding down to the offices of the Bundelcund Bank, and armed
with that terrible bamboo cane.

But though his wife had undeniably run away after notorious
ill-treatment from her husband; though he had shown two white feathers
in those unpleasant little affairs with his uncle and cousin; though
Sir Barnes Newcome was certainly neither amiable nor popular in the
City of London, his reputation as a most intelligent man of business
still stood; the credit of his house was deservedly high, and people
banked with him, and traded with him, in spite of faithless wives and
hostile colonels.

When the outbreak between Colonel Newcome and his nephew took place, it
may be remembered that Mr. Hobson Newcome, the other partner of the
firm of Hobson Brothers, waited upon Colonel Newcome, as one of the
principal English directors of the B. B. C., and hoped that although
private differences would, of course, oblige Thomas Newcome to cease
all personal dealings with the bank of Hobson, the affairs of the
Company in which he was interested ought not to suffer on this account;
and that the Indian firm should continue dealing with Hobsons on the
same footing as before. Mr. Hobson Newcome represented to the Colonel,
in his jolly frank way, that whatever happened between the latter and
his nephew Barnes, Thomas Newcome had still one friend in the house;
that the transactions between it and the Indian Company were mutually
advantageous; finally, that the manager of the Indian bank might
continue to do business with Hobsons as before. So the B. B. C. sent
its consignments to Hobson Brothers, and drew its bills, which were
duly honoured by that firm.

More than one of Colonel Newcome’s City acquaintances, among them his
agent, Mr. Jolly, and his ingenuous friend, Mr. Sherrick, especially,
hinted to Thomas Newcome to be very cautious in his dealings with
Hobson Brothers, and keep a special care lest that house should play
him an evil turn. They both told him that Barnes Newcome had said more
than once, in answer to reports of the Colonel’s own speeches against
Barnes. “I know that hot-headed, blundering Indian uncle of mine is
furious against me, on account of an absurd private affair and
misunderstanding, which he is too obstinate to see in the proper light.
What is my return for the abuse and rant which he lavishes against me?
I cannot forget that he is my grandfather’s son, an old man, utterly
ignorant both of society and business here; and as he is interested in
this Indian Banking Company, which must be preciously conducted when it
appointed him as the guardian and overseer of its affairs in England, I
do my very best to serve the Company, and I can tell you, its
blundering, muddleheaded managers, black and white, owe no little to
the assistance which they have had from our house. If they don’t like
us, why do they go on dealing with us? We don’t want them and their
bills. We were a leading house fifty years before they were born, and
shall continue to be so long after they come to an end.” Such was
Barnes’s case, as stated by himself. It was not a very bad one, or very
unfairly stated, considering the advocate. I believe he has always
persisted in thinking that he never did his uncle any wrong.

Mr. Jolly and Mr. Sherrick, then, both entreated Thomas Newcome to use
his best endeavours, and bring the connexion of the B. B. C. and Hobson
Brothers to a speedy end. But Jolly was an interested party; he and his
friends would have had the agency of the B. B. C., and the profits
thereof, which Hobsons had taken from them. Mr. Sherrick was an outside
practitioner, a guerilla amongst regular merchants. The opinions of one
and the other, though submitted by Thomas Newcome duly to his
co-partners, the managers and London board of directors of the
Bundelcund Banking Company, were overruled by that assembly.

They had their establishment and apartments in the City; they had their
clerks and messengers, their managers’ room and board-room, their
meetings, where no doubt great quantities of letters were read, vast
ledgers produced; where Tom Newcome was voted into the chair, and voted
out with thanks; where speeches were made, and the affairs of the B. B.
C. properly discussed. These subjects are mysterious, terrifying,
unknown to me. I cannot pretend to describe them. Fred Bayham, I
remember, used to be great in his knowledge of the affairs of the
Bundelcund Banking Company. He talked of cotton, wool, copper, opium,
indigo, Singapore, Manilla, China, Calcutta, Australia, with prodigious
eloquence and fluency. His conversation was about millions. The most
astounding paragraphs used to appear in the _Pall Mall Gazette_,
regarding the annual dinner at Blackwall, which the directors gave, and
to which he, and George, and I, as friends of the court, were invited.
What orations were uttered, what flowing bumpers emptied in the praise
of this great Company; what quantities of turtle and punch did Fred
devour at its expense! Colonel Newcome was the kindly old chairman at
these banquets; the prince, his son, taking but a modest part in the
ceremonies, and sitting with us, his old cronies.

All the gentlemen connected with the board, all those with whom the B.
B. C. traded in London, paid Thomas Newcome extraordinary respect. His
character for wealth was deservedly great, and of course multiplied by
the tongue of Rumour. F. B. knew to a few millions of rupees, more or
less, what the Colonel possessed, and what Clive would inherit. Thomas
Newcome’s distinguished military services, his high bearing, lofty
courtesy, simple but touching garrulity;—for the honest man talked much
more now than he had been accustomed to do in former days, and was not
insensible to the flattery which his wealth brought him,—his reputation
as a keen man of business, who had made his own fortune by operations
equally prudent and spirited, and who might make the fortunes of
hundreds of other people, brought the worthy Colonel a number of
friends, and I promise you that the loudest huzzahs greeted his health
when it was proposed at the Blackwall dinners. At the second annual
dinner after Clive’s marriage some friends presented Mrs. Clive Newcome
with a fine testimonial. There was a superb silver cocoa-nut tree,
whereof the leaves were dexterously arranged for holding candle and
pickles; under the cocoa-nut was an Indian prince on a camel, giving
his hand to a cavalry officer on horseback—a howitzer, a plough, a
loom, a bale of cotton, on which were the East India Company’s arms, a
Brahmin, Britannia, and Commerce with a cornucopia were grouped round
the principal figures: and if you would see a noble account of this
chaste and elegant specimen of British art, you are referred to the
pages of the _Pall Mall Gazette_ of that year, as well as to Fred
Bayham’s noble speech in the course of the evening, when it was
exhibited. The East and its wars, and its heroes, Assaye and
Seringapatam (“and Lord Lake and Laswaree too,” calls out the Colonel
greatly elated), tiger-hunting, palanquins, Juggernaut, elephants, the
burning of widows—all passed before us in F. B.’s splendid oration. He
spoke of the product of the Indian forest, the palm-tree, the cocoa-nut
tree, the banyan-tree. Palms the Colonel had already brought back with
him, the palms of valour, won in the field of war (cheers). Cocoa-nut
trees he had never seen, though he had heard wonders related regarding
the milky contents of their fruit. Here at any rate was one tree of the
kind, under the branches of which he humbly trusted often to
repose—and, if he might be so bold as to carry on the Eastern metaphor,
he would say, knowing the excellence of the Colonel’s claret and the
splendour of his hospitality, that he would prefer a cocoa-nut day at
the Colonel’s to a banyan day anywhere else. Whilst F. B.’s speech went
on, I remember J. J. eyeing the trophy, and the queer expression of his
shrewd face. The health of British Artists was drunk a propos of this
splendid specimen of their skill, and poor J. J. Ridley, Esq., A.R.A.,
had scarce a word to say in return. He and Clive sat by one another,
the latter very silent and gloomy. When J. J. and I met in the world,
we talked about our friend, and it was easy for both of us to see that
neither was satisfied with Clive’s condition.

The fine house in Tyburnia was completed by this time, as gorgeous as
money could make it. How different it was from the old Fitzroy Square
mansion with its ramshackle furniture, and spoils of brokers’ shops,
and Tottenham Court Road odds and ends! An Oxford Street upholsterer
had been let loose in the yet virgin chambers; and that inventive
genius had decorated them with all the wonders his fancy could devise.
Roses and cupids quivered on the ceilings, up to which golden
arabesques crawled from the walls; your face (handsome or otherwise)
was reflected by countless looking-glasses, so multiplied and arranged
as, as it were, to carry you into the next street. You trod on velvet,
pausing with respect in the centre of the carpet, where Rosey’s cypher
was worked in the sweet flowers which bear her name. What delightful
crooked legs the chairs had! What corner cupboards there were filled
with Dresden gimcracks, which it was a part of this little woman’s
business in life to purchase! What etageres, and bonbonnieres, and
chiffonnieres! What awfully bad pastels there were on the walls! What
frightful Boucher and Lancret shepherds and shepherdesses leered over
the portieres! What velvet-bound volumes, mother-of-pearl albums,
inkstands representing beasts of the field, prie-dieu chairs, and
wonderful knick-knacks I can recollect! There was the most magnificent
piano, though Rosey seldom sang any of her six songs now; and when she
kept her couch at a certain most interesting period, the good Colonel,
ever anxious to procure amusement for his darling, asked whether she
would not like a barrel-organ grinding fifty or sixty favourite pieces,
which a bearer could turn? And he mentioned how Windus, of their
regiment, who loved music exceedingly, had a very fine instrument of
this kind out to Barrackpore in the year 1810, and relays of barrels by
each ship with all the new tunes from Europe. The Testimonial took its
place in the centre of Mrs. Clive’s table, surrounded by satellites of
plate. The delectable parties were constantly gathered together, the
grand barouche rolling in the Park, or stopping at the principal shops.
Little Rosey bloomed in millinery, and was still the smiling little pet
of her father-in-law, and poor Clive, in the midst of all these
splendours, was gaunt, and sad, and silent; listless at most times,
bitter and savage at others, pleased only when he was out of the
society which bored him, and in the company of George and J. J., the
simple friends of his youth.

His careworn look and altered appearance mollified my wife towards
him—who had almost taken him again into favour. But she did not care
for Mrs. Clive, and the Colonel, somehow, grew cool towards us, and to
look askance upon the little band of Clive’s friends. It seemed as if
there were two parties in the house. There was Clive’s set—J. J., the
shrewd, silent little painter; Warrington, the cynic; and the author of
the present biography, who was, I believe, supposed to give himself
contemptuous airs; and to have become very high and mighty since his
marriage. Then there was the great, numerous, and eminently respectable
set, whose names were all registered in little Rosey’s little
visiting-book, and to whose houses she drove round, duly delivering the
cards of Mr. and Mrs. Clive Newcome, and Colonel Newcome;—the generals
and colonels, the judges and the fogies. The only man who kept well
with both sides of the house was F. Bayham, Esq., who, having got into
clover, remained in the enjoyment of that welcome pasture; who really
loved Clive and the Colonel too, and had a hundred pleasant things and
funny stories (the droll old creature!) to tell to the little lady for
whom we others could scarcely find a word. The old friends of the
student-days were not forgotten, but they did not seem to get on in the
new house. The Miss Gandishes came to one of Mrs. Clive’s balls, still
in blue crape, still with ringlets on their wizened old foreheads,
accompanying papa, with his shirt-collars turned down—who gazed in mute
wonder on the splendid scene. Warrington actually asked Miss Gandish to
dance, making woeful blunders, however, in the quadrille, while Clive,
with something like one of his old smiles on his face, took out Miss
Zoe Gandish, her sister. We made Gandish overeat and overdrink himself
in the supper-room, and Clive cheered him by ordering a full length of
Mrs. Clive Newcome from his distinguished pencil. Never was seen a
grander exhibition of white satin and jewels. Smee, R.A., was furious
at the preference shown to his rival.

We had Sandy M’Collop, too, at the party, who had returned from Rome,
with his red beard, and his picture of the murder of the Red Comyn,
which made but a dim effect in the Octagon Room of the Royal Academy,
where the bleeding agonies of the dying warrior were veiled in an
unkind twilight. On Sandy and his brethren little Rosey looked rather
coldly. She tossed up her little head in conversation with me, and gave
me to understand that this party was only an _omnium gatherum_, not one
of the select parties, from which Heaven defend us. “We are Poins, and
Nym, and Pistol,” growled out George Warrington, as he strode away to
finish the evening in Clive’s painting- and smoking-room. “Now Prince
Hal is married, and shares the paternal throne, his Princess is ashamed
of his brigand associates of former days.” She came and looked at us
with a feeble little smile, as we sat smoking, and let the daylight in
on us from the open door, and hinted to Mr. Clive that it was time to
go to bed.

So Clive Newcome lay in a bed of down and tossed and tumbled there. He
went to fine dinners, and sat silent over them; rode fine horses, and
black Care jumped up behind the moody horseman. He was cut off in a
great measure from the friends of his youth, or saw them by a kind of
stealth and sufferance; was a very lonely, poor fellow, I am afraid,
now that people were testimonialising his wife, and many an old comrade
growling at his haughtiness and prosperity.

In former days, when his good father recognised the difference which
fate, and time, and temper, had set between him and his son, we have
seen with what a gentle acquiescence the old man submitted to his
inevitable fortune, and how humbly he bore that stroke of separation
which afflicted the boy lightly enough, but caused the loving sire so
much pain. Then there was no bitterness between them, in spite of the
fatal division; but now, it seemed as if there was anger on Thomas
Newcome’s part, because, though come together again, they were not
united, though with every outward appliance of happiness Clive was not
happy. What young man on earth could look for more? a sweet young wife,
a handsome home, of which the only encumbrance was an old father, who
would give his last drop of blood in his son’s behalf. And it was to
bring about this end that Thomas Newcome had toiled and had amassed a
fortune. Could not Clive, with his talents and education, go down once
or twice a week to the City and take a decent part in the business by
which his wealth was secured? He appeared at the various board-rooms
and City conclaves, yawned at the meetings, and drew figures on the
blotting-paper of the Company; had no interest in its transactions, no
heart in its affairs; went away and galloped his horse alone; or
returned to his painting-room, put on his old velvet jacket, and worked
with his palettes and brushes. Palettes and brushes! Could he not give
up these toys when he was called to a much higher station in the world?
Could he not go talk with Rosey;—drive with Rosey, kind little soul,
whose whole desire was to make him happy? Such thoughts as these, no
doubt, darkened the Colonel’s mind, and deepened the furrows round his
old eyes. So it is, we judge men by our own standards; judge our
nearest and dearest often wrong.

Many and many a time did Clive try and talk with the little Rosey, who
chirped and prattled so gaily to his father. Many a time would she come
and sit by his easel, and try her little powers to charm him, bring him
little tales about their acquaintances, stories about this ball and
that concert, practise artless smiles upon him, gentle little
bouderies, tears, perhaps, followed by caresses and reconciliation. At
the end of which he would return to his cigar; and she, with a sigh and
a heavy heart, to the good old man who had bidden her to go and talk
with him. He used to feel that his father had sent her; the thought
came across him in their conversations, and straightway his heart would
shut up and his face grew gloomy. They were not made to mate with one
another. This was the truth; the shoe was a very pretty little shoe,
but Clive’s foot was too big for it.

Just before the testimonial, Mr. Clive was in constant attendance at
home, and very careful and kind and happy with his wife, and the whole
family party went very agreeably. Doctors were in constant attendance
at Mrs. Clive Newcome’s door; prodigious care was taken by the good
Colonel in wrapping her and in putting her little feet on sofas, and in
leading her to her carriage. The Campaigner came over in immense flurry
from Edinburgh (where Uncle James was now very comfortably lodged in
Picardy Place with the most agreeable society round about him), and all
this circle was in a word very close and happy and intimate; but woe is
me, Thomas Newcome’s fondest hopes were disappointed this time: his
little grandson lived but to see the light and leave it: and sadly,
sadly, those preparations were put away, those poor little robes and
caps, those delicate muslins and cambrics over which many a care had
been forgotten, many a fond prayer thought, if not uttered. Poor little
Rosey! she felt the grief very keenly; but she rallied from it very
soon. In a very few months, her cheeks were blooming and dimpling with
smiles again, and she was telling us how her party was an _omnium
gatherum_.

The Campaigner had ere this returned to the scene of her northern
exploits; not, I believe, entirely of the worthy woman’s own free will.
Assuming the command of the household, whilst her daughter kept her
sofa, Mrs. Mackenzie had set that establishment into uproar and mutiny.
She had offended the butler, outraged the housekeeper, wounded the
sensibilities of the footmen, insulted the doctor, and trampled on the
inmost corns of the nurse. It was surprising what a change appeared in
the Campaigner’s conduct, and how little, in former days, Colonel
Newcome had known her. What the Emperor Napoleon the First said
respecting our Russian enemies, might be applied to this lady,
Grattez-la, and she appeared a Tartar. Clive and his father had a
little comfort and conversation in conspiring against her. The old man
never dared to try, but was pleased with the younger’s spirit and
gallantry in the series of final actions which, commencing over poor
little Rosey’s prostrate body in the dressing-room, were continued in
the drawing-room, resumed with terrible vigour on the enemy’s part in
the dining-room, and ended, to the triumph of the whole establishment,
at the outside of the hall-door.

When the routed Tartar force had fled back to its native north, Rosey
made a confession, which Clive told me afterwards, bursting with bitter
laughter. “You and papa seem to be very much agitated,” she said.
(Rosey called the Colonel papa in the absence of the Campaigner.) “I do
not mind it a bit, except just at first, when it made me a little
nervous. Mamma used always to be so; she used to scold and scold all
day, both me and Josey, in Scotland, till grandmamma sent her away; and
then in Fitzroy Square, and then in Brussels, she used to box my ears,
and go into such tantrums; and I think,” adds Rosey, with one of her
sweetest smiles, “she had quarrelled with Uncle James before she came
to us.”

“She used to box Rosey’s ears,” roars out poor Clive, “and go into such
tantrums, in Fitzroy Square and Brussels afterwards, and the pair would
come down with their arms round each other’s waists, smirking and
smiling as if they had done nothing but kiss each other all their
mortal lives! This is what we know about women—this is what we get, and
find years afterwards, when we think we have married a smiling, artless
young creature! Are you all such hypocrites, Mrs. Pendennis?” and he
pulled his mustachios in his wrath.

“Poor Clive!” says Laura, very kindly. “You would not have had her tell
tales of her mother, would you?”

“Oh, of course not,” breaks out Clive; “that is what you all say, and
so you are hypocrites out of sheer virtue.”

It was the first time Laura had called him Clive for many a day. She
was becoming reconciled to him. We had our own opinion about the young
fellow’s marriage.

And, to sum up all, upon a casual rencontre with the young gentleman in
question, whom we saw descending from a hansom at the steps of the
Flag, Pall Mall, I opined that dark thoughts of Hoby had entered into
Clive Newcome’s mind. Othello-like, he scowled after that unconscious
Cassio as the other passed into the club in his lacquered boots.




CHAPTER LXIV.
Absit Omen


At the first of the Blackwall festivals, Hobson Newcome was present, in
spite of the quarrel which had taken place between his elder brother
and the chief of the firm of Hobson Brothers and Newcome. But it was
the individual Barnes and the individual Thomas who had had a
difference together; the Bundelcund Bank was not at variance with its
chief house of commission in London; no man drank prosperity to the B.
B. C., upon occasion of this festival, with greater fervour than Hobson
Newcome, and the manner in which he just slightly alluded, in his own
little speech of thanks, to the notorious differences between Colonel
Newcome and his nephew, praying that these might cease some day, and,
meanwhile, that the confidence between the great Indian establishment
and its London agents might never diminish, was appreciated and admired
by six-and-thirty gentlemen, all brimful of claret and enthusiasm, and
in that happy state of mind in which men appreciate and admire
everything.

At the second dinner, when the testimonial was presented, Hobson was
not present. Nor did his name figure amongst those engraven on the
trunk of Mr. Newcome’s allegorical silver cocoa-nut tree. As we
travelled homewards in the omnibus, Fred Bayham noticed the
circumstance to me. “I have looked over the list of names,” says he,
“not merely that on the trunk, sir, but the printed list; it was rolled
up and placed in one of the nests on the top of the tree. Why is
Hobson’s name not there?—Ha! it mislikes me, Pendennis.”

F. B., who was now very great about City affairs, discoursed about
stocks and companies with immense learning, and gave me to understand
that he had transacted one or two little operations in Capel Court on
his own account, with great present, and still larger prospective,
advantages to himself. It is a fact that Mr. Ridley was paid, and that
F. B.’s costume, though still eccentric, was comfortable, cleanly, and
variegated. He occupied the apartments once tenanted by the amiable
Honeyman. He lived in ease and comfort there. “You don’t suppose,” says
he, “that the wretched stipend I draw from the _Pall Mall Gazette_
enables me to maintain this kind of thing? F. B., sir, has a station in
the world; F. B. moves among moneyers and City nobs, and eats cabobs
with wealthy nabobs. He may marry, sir, and settle in life.” We
cordially wished every worldly prosperity to the brave F. B.

Happening to descry him one day in the Park, I remarked that his
countenance wore an ominous and tragic appearance, which seemed to
deepen as he neared me. I thought he had been toying affably with a
nursery-maid the moment before, who stood with some of her little
charges watching the yachts upon the Serpentine. Howbeit, espying my
approach, F. B. strode away from the maiden and her innocent
companions, and advanced to greet his old acquaintance, enveloping his
face with shades of funereal gloom.

“Yon were the children of my good friend Colonel Huckaback of the
Bombay Marines! Alas! unconscious of their doom, the little infants
play. I was watching them at their sports. There is a pleasing young
woman in attendance upon the poor children. They were sailing their
little boats upon the Serpentine; racing and laughing, and making
merry; and as I looked on, Master Hastings Huckaback’s boat went down!
_Absit omen_, Pendennis! I was moved by the circumstance. F. B. hopes
that the child’s father’s argosy may not meet with shipwreck!”

“You mean the little yellow-faced man whom we met at Colonel
Newcome’s?” says Mr. Pendennis.

“I do, sir,” growled F. B. “You know that he is a brother director with
our Colonel in the Bundelcund Bank?”

“Gracious Heavens!” I cried, in sincere anxiety, “nothin has happened,
I hope, to the Bundelcund Bank?”

“No,” answers the other, “nothing has happened, the good ship is safe,
sir, as yet. But she has narrowly escaped a great danger, Pendennis,”
cries F. B., gripping my arm with great energy, “there was a traitor in
her crew—she has weathered the storm nobly—who would have sent her on
the rocks, sir, who would have scuttled her at midnight.”

“Pray drop your nautical metaphors, and tell me what you mean,” cries
F. B.’s companion, and Bayham continued his narration.

“Were you in the least conversant with City affairs,” he said, “or did
you deign to visit the spot where merchants mostly congregate, you
would have heard the story, which was over the whole City yesterday,
and spread dismay from Threadneedle Street to Leadenhall. The story is,
that the firm of Hobson Brothers and Newcome, yesterday refused
acceptance of thirty thousand pounds’ worth of bills of the Bundelcund
Banking Company of India.

“The news came like a thunderclap upon the London Board of Directors,
who had received no notice of the intentions of Hobson Brothers, and
caused a dreadful panic amongst the shareholders of the concern. The
board-room was besieged by colonels and captains, widows and orphans;
within an hour after protest of bills were taken up, and you will see,
in the City article of the _Globe_ this very evening, an announcement
that henceforward the house of Baines and Jolly, of Job Court, will
meet engagements of the Bundelcund Banking Company of India, being
provided with ample funds to do honour to every possible liability of
that Company. But the shares fell, sir, in consequence of the panic. I
hope they will rally. I trust and believe they will rally. For our good
Colonel’s sake and that of his friends, for the sake of the innocent
children sporting by the Serpentine yonder.

“I had my suspicions when they gave that testimonial,” said F. B. “In
my experience of life, sir, I always feel rather shy about
testimonials, and when a party gets one, somehow look out to hear of
his smashing the next month. _Absit omen!_ I will say again. I like not
the going down of yonder little yacht.”

The _Globe_ sure enough contained a paragraph that evening announcing
the occurrence which Mr. Bayham had described, and the temporary panic
which it had occasioned, and containing an advertisement stating that
Messrs. Baines and Jolly would henceforth act as agents of the Indian
Company. Legal proceedings were presently threatened by the solicitors
of the Company against the banking firm which had caused so much
mischief. Mr. Hobson Newcome was absent abroad when the circumstance
took place, and it was known that the protest of the bills was solely
attributable to his nephew and partner. But after the break between the
two firms, there was a rupture between Hobson’s family and Colonel
Newcome. The exasperated Colonel vowed that his brother and his nephew
were traitors alike, and would have no further dealings with one or the
other. Even poor innocent Sam Newcome, coming up to London from Oxford,
where he had been plucked, and offering a hand to Clive, was frowned
away by our Colonel, who spoke in terms of great displeasure to his son
for taking the least notice of the young traitor.

Our Colonel was changed, changed in his heart, changed in his whole
demeanour towards the world, and above all towards his son, for whom he
had made so many kind sacrifices in his old days. We have said how,
ever since Clive’s marriage, a tacit strife had been growing up between
father and son. The boy’s evident unhappiness was like a reproach to
his father. His very silence angered the old man. His want of
confidence daily chafed and annoyed him. At the head of a large
fortune, which he rightly persisted in spending, he felt angry with
himself because he could not enjoy it, angry with his son, who should
have helped him in the administration of his new estate, and who was
but a listless, useless member of the little confederacy, a living
protest against all the schemes of the good man’s past life. The
catastrophe in the City again brought father and son together somewhat,
and the vindictiveness of both was roused by Barnes’s treason. Time was
when the Colonel himself would have viewed his kinsman more charitably,
but fate and circumstance had angered that originally friendly and
gentle disposition; hate and suspicion had mastered him, and if it
cannot be said that his new life had changed him, at least it had
brought out faults for which there had hitherto been no occasion, and
qualities latent before. Do we know ourselves, or what good or evil
circumstance may bring from us? Did Cain know, as he and his younger
brother played round their mother’s knee, that the little hand which
caressed Abel should one day grow larger, and seize a brand to slay
him? Thrice fortunate he, to whom circumstance is made easy: whom fate
visits with gentle trial, and kindly Heaven keeps out of temptation.

In the stage which the family feud now reached, and which the
biographer of the Newcomes is bound to describe, there is one gentle
moralist who gives her sentence decidedly against Clive’s father;
whilst on the other hand a rough philosopher and friend of mine, whose
opinions used to have some weight with me, stoutly declares that they
were right. “War and justice are good things,” says George Warrington,
rattling his clenched fist on the table. “I maintain them, and the
common sense of the world maintains them, against the preaching of all
the Honeymans that ever puled from the pulpit. I have not the least
objection in life to a rogue being hung. When a scoundrel is whipped I
am pleased, and say, serve him right. If any gentleman will horsewhip
Sir Barnes Newcome, Baronet, I shall not be shocked, but, on the
contrary, go home and order an extra mutton-chop for dinner.”

“Ah! revenge is wrong, Pen,” pleads the other counsellor.

“Let alone that the wisest and best of all Judges has condemned it. It
blackens the hearts of men. It distorts their views of right. It sets
them to devise evil. It causes them to think unjustly of others. It is
not the noblest return for injury, not even the bravest way of meeting
it. The greatest courage is to bear persecution, not to answer when you
are reviled, and when wrong has been done you to forgive. I am sorry
for what you call the Colonel’s triumph and his enemy’s humiliation.
Let Barnes be as odious as you will, he ought never to have humiliated
Ethel’s brother; but he is weak. Other gentlemen as well are weak, Mr.
Pen, although you are so much cleverer than women. I have no patience
with the Colonel, and I beg you to tell him, whether he asks you or not
that he has lost my good graces, and that I for one will not huzzah at
what his friends and flatterers call his triumphs, and that I don’t
think in this instance he has acted like the dear Colonel, and the good
Colonel, and the good Christian that I once thought him.”

We must now tell what the Colonel and Clive had been doing, and what
caused two such different opinions respecting their conduct from the
two critics just named. The refusal of the London Banking House to
accept the bills of the Great Indian Company of course affected very
much the credit of that Company in this country. Sedative announcements
were issued by the Directors in London; brilliant accounts of the
Company’s affairs abroad were published; proof incontrovertible was
given that the B. B. C. was never in so flourishing a state as at that
time when Hobson Brothers had refused its drafts; there could be no
question that the Company had received a severe wound and was deeply if
not vitally injured by the conduct of the London firm.

The propensity to sell out became quite epidemic amongst the
shareholders. Everybody was anxious to realise. Why, out of the thirty
names inscribed on poor Mrs. Clive’s cocoa-nut tree no less than twenty
deserters might be mentioned, or at least who would desert could they
find an opportunity of doing so with arms and baggage. Wrathfully the
good Colonel scratched the names of those faithless ones out of his
daughter’s visiting-book: haughtily he met them in the street; to
desert the B. B. C. at the hour of peril was, in his idea, like
applying for leave of absence on the eve of an action. He would not see
that the question was not one of sentiment at all, but of chances and
arithmetic; he would not hear with patience of men quitting the ship,
as he called it. “They may go, sir,” says he, “but let them never more
be officers of mine.” With scorn and indignation he paid off one or two
timid friends, who were anxious to fly, and purchased their shares out
of his own pocket. But his purse was not long enough for this kind of
amusement. What money he had was invested in the Company already, and
his name further pledged for meeting the engagements from which their
late London bankers had withdrawn.

Those gentlemen, in the meanwhile, spoke of their differences with the
Indian Bank as quite natural, and laughed at the absurd charges of
personal hostility which poor Thomas Newcome publicly preferred. “Here
is a hot-headed old Indian dragoon,” says Sir Barnes, “who knows no
more about business than I do about cavalry tactics or Hindostanee; who
gets into a partnership along with other dragoons and Indian wiseacres,
with some uncommonly wily old native practitioners; and they pay great
dividends, and they set up a bank. Of course we will do these people’s
business as long as we are covered, but I have always told their
manager that we would run no risks whatever, and close the account the
very moment it did not suit us to keep it: and so we parted company six
weeks ago, since when there has been a panic in the Company, a panic
which has been increased by Colonel Newcome’s absurd swagger and folly.
He says I am his enemy; enemy indeed! So I am in private life, but what
has that to do with business? In business, begad, there are no friends
and no enemies at all. I leave all my sentiment on the other side of
Temple Bar.”

So Thomas Newcome, and Clive the son of Thomas, had wrath in their
hearts against Barnes, their kinsman, and desired to be revenged upon
him, and were eager after his undoing, and longed for an opportunity
when they might meet him and overcome him, and put him to shame.

When men are in this frame of mind, a certain personage is said always
to be at hand to help them and give them occasion for indulging in
their pretty little passion. What is sheer hate seems to the individual
entertaining the sentiment so like indignant virtue, that he often
indulges in the propensity to the full, nay, lauds himself for the
exercise of it. I am sure if Thomas Newcome in his present desire for
retaliation against Barnes, had known the real nature of his sentiments
towards that worthy, his conduct would have been different, and we
should have heard of no such active hostilities as ensued.




CHAPTER LXV.
In which Mrs. Clive comes into her Fortune


Speaking of the affairs of B. B. C., Sir Barnes Newcome always took
care to maintain his candid surprise relating to the proceedings of
that Company. He set about evil reports against it! He endeavour to do
it a wrong—absurd! If a friend were to ask him (and it was quite
curious what a number did manage to ask him) whether he thought the
Company was an advantageous investment, of course he would give an
answer. He could not say conscientiously he thought so—never once had
said so—in the time of their connexion, which had been formed solely
with a view of obliging his amiable uncle. It was a quarrelsome
Company; a dragoon Company; a Company of gentlemen accustomed to
gunpowder, and fed on mulligatawny. He, forsooth, be hostile to it!
There were some Companies that required no enemies at all, and would be
pretty sure to go to the deuce their own way.

Thus, and with this amiable candour, spake Barnes, about a commercial
speculation, the merits of which he had a right to canvass as well as
any other citizen. As for Uncle Hobson, his conduct was characterised
by a timidity which one would scarcely have expected from a gentleman
of his florid, jolly countenance, active habits, and generally manly
demeanour. He kept away from the cocoa-nut feast, as we have seen: he
protested privily to the Colonel that his private goodwill continued
undiminished but he was deeply grieved at the B. B. C. affair, which
took place while he was on the Continent—confound the Continent, my
wife would go—and which was entirely without his cognisance. The
Colonel received his brother’s excuses, first with awful bows and
ceremony, and finally with laughter. “My good Hobson,” said he, with
the most insufferable kindness, “of course you intended to be friendly;
of course the affair was done without your knowledge. We understand
that sort of thing. London bankers have no hearts—for these last fifty
years past that I have known you and your brother, and my amiable
nephew, the present commanding officer, has there been anything in your
conduct that has led me to suppose you had?” and herewith Colonel
Newcome burst out into a laugh. It was not a pleasant laugh to hear.
Worthy Hobson took his hat, and walked away, brushing it round and
round, and looking very confused. The Colonel strode after him
downstairs, and made him an awful bow at the hall door. Never again did
Hobson Newcome set foot in that Tyburnian mansion.

During the whole of that season of the testimonial the cocoa-nut
figured in an extraordinary number of banquets. The Colonel’s
hospitalities were more profuse than ever, and Mrs. Clive’s toilettes
more brilliant. Clive, in his confidential conversations with his
friends, was very dismal and gloomy. When I asked City news of our
well-informed friend F. B., I am sorry to say, his countenance became
funereal. The B. B. C. shares, which had been at an immense premium
twelve months since, were now slowly falling, falling.

“I wish,” said Mr. Sherrick to me, “the Colonel would realise, even
now, like that Mr. Ratray who has just come out of the ship, and
brought a hundred thousand pounds with him.”

“Come out of the ship! You little know the Colonel, Mr. Sherrick, if
you think he will ever do that.”

Mr. Ratray, though he had returned to Europe, gave the most cheering
accounts of the B. B. C. It was in the most flourishing state. Shares
sure to get up again. He had sold out entirely on account of his liver.
Must come home—the doctor said so.

Some months afterwards, another director, Mr. Hedges, came home. Both
of these gentlemen, as we know, entertained the fashionable world, got
seats in Parliament, purchased places in the country, and were greatly
respected. Mr. Hedges came out, but his wealthy partner, Mr. M’Gaspey,
entered into the B. B. C. The entry of Mr. M’Gaspey into the affairs of
the Company did not seem to produce very great excitement in England.
The shares slowly fell. However, there was a prodigious indigo crop.
The London manager was in perfect good-humour. In spite of this and
that, of defections, of unpleasantries, of unfavourable whispers, and
doubtful friends—Thomas Newcome kept his head high, and his face was
always kind and smiling, except when certain family enemies were
mentioned, and he frowned like Jove in anger.

We have seen how very fond little Rosey was of her mamma, of her uncle,
James Binnie, and now of her papa, as she affectionately styled Thomas
Newcome. This affection, I am sure, the two gentlemen returned with all
their hearts, and but that they were much too generous and
simple-minded to entertain such a feeling. It may be wondered that the
two good old boys were not a little jealous of one another. Howbeit it
does not appear that they entertained such a feeling; at least it never
interrupted the kindly friendship between them, and Clive was regarded
in the light of a son by both of them, and each contented himself with
his moiety of the smiling little girl’s affection.

As long as they were with her, the truth is, little Mrs. Clive was very
fond of people, very docile, obedient, easily pleased, brisk, kind, and
good-humoured. She charmed her two old friends with little songs,
little smiles,—little kind offices, little caresses; and having
administered Thomas Newcome’s cigar to him in the daintiest, prettiest
way, she would trip off to drive with James Binnie, or sit at his
dinner, if he was indisposed, and be as gay, neat-handed, watchful, and
attentive a child as any old gentleman could desire.

She did not seem to be very sorry to part with mamma, a want of feeling
which that lady bitterly deplored in her subsequent conversation with
her friends about Mrs. Clive Newcome. Possibly there were reasons why
Rosey should not be very much vexed at quitting mamma; but surely she
might have dropped a little tear as she took leave of kind, good old
James Binnie. Not she. The gentleman’s voice faltered, but hers did not
in the least. She kissed him on the face, all smiles, blushes, and
happiness, and tripped into the railway carriage with her husband and
father-in-law, leaving the poor old uncle very sad. Our women said, I
know not why, that little Rosey had no heart at all. Women are
accustomed to give such opinions respecting the wives of their newly
married friends. I am bound to add (and I do so during Mr. Clive
Newcome’s absence from England, otherwise I should not like to venture
upon the statement), that some men concur with the ladies’ opinion of
Mrs. Clive. For instance, Captains Goby and Hoby declare that her
treatment of the latter, her encouragement, and desertion of him when
Clive made his proposals, were shameful.

At this time Rosey was in a pupillary state. A good, obedient little
girl, her duty was to obey the wishes of her dear mamma. How show her
sense of virtue and obedience better than by promptly and cheerfully
obeying mamma, and at the orders of that experienced Campaigner, giving
up Bobby Hoby, and going to England to a fine house, to be presented at
Court, to have all sorts of pleasure with a handsome young husband and
a kind father-in-law by her side? No wonder Rosey was not in a very
active state of grief at parting from Uncle James. He strove to console
himself with these considerations when he had returned to the empty
house, where she had danced, and smiled, and warbled; and he looked at
the chair she sat in; and at the great mirror which had so often
reflected her fresh pretty face;—the great callous mirror, which now
only framed upon its shining sheet the turban, and the ringlets, and
the plump person, and the resolute smile of the old Campaigner.

After that parting with her uncle at the Brussels railway, Rosey never
again beheld him. He passed into the Campaigner’s keeping, from which
alone he was rescued by the summons of pallid death. He met that
summons like a philosopher; rejected rather testily all the mortuary
consolations which his nephew-in-law, Josey’s husband, thought proper
to bring to his bedside; and uttered opinions which scandalised that
divine. But as he left Mrs. M’Craw only 500 pounds, thrice that sum to
his sister, and the remainder of his property to his beloved niece,
Rosa Mackenzie, now Rosa Newcome, let us trust that Mr. M’Craw, hurt
and angry at the ill-favour shown to his wife, his third young wife,
his best-beloved Josey, at the impatience with which the deceased had
always received his, Mr. M’Craw’s, own sermons;—let us hope, I say,
that the reverend gentleman was mistaken in his views respecting the
present position of Mr. James Binnie’s soul; and that Heaven may have
some regions yet accessible to James, which Mr. M’Craw’s intellect has
not yet explored. Look, gentlemen! Does a week pass without the
announcement of the discovery of a new comet in the sky, a new star in
the heaven, twinkling dimly out of a yet farther distance, and only now
becoming visible to human ken though existent for ever and ever? So let
us hope divine truths may be shining, and regions of light and love
extant, which Geneva glasses cannot yet perceive, and are beyond the
focus of Roman telescopes.

I think Clive and the Colonel were more affected by the news of James’s
death than Rosey, concerning whose wonderful strength of mind good
Thomas Newcome discoursed to my Laura and me, when, fancying that my
friend’s wife needed comfort and consolation, Mrs. Pendennis went to
visit her. “Of course we shall have no more parties this year,” sighed
Rosey. She looked very pretty in her black dress. Clive, in his hearty
way, said a hundred kind feeling things about the departed friend.
Thomas Newcome’s recollections of him, and regret, were no less tender
and sincere. “See,” says he, “how that dear child’s sense of duty makes
her hide her feelings! Her grief is most deep, but she wears a calm
countenance. I see her looking sad in private, but I no sooner speak
than she smiles.” “I think,” said Laura, as we came away, “that Colonel
Newcome performs all the courtship part in the marriage, and Clive,
poor Clive, though he spoke very nobly and generously about Mr. Binnie,
I am sure it is not his old friend’s death merely, which makes him so
unhappy.”

Poor Clive, by right of his wife, was now rich Clive; the little lady
having inherited from her kind relative no inconsiderable sum of money.
In a very early part of this story, mention has been made of a small
sum producing one hundred pounds a year, which Clive’s father had made
over to the lad when he sent him from India. This little sum Mr. Clive
had settled upon his wife before his marriage, being indeed all he had
of his own; for the famous bank shares which his father presented to
him, were only made over formally when the young man came to London
after his marriage, and at the paternal request and order appeared as a
most inefficient director of the B. B. C. Now Mrs. Newcome, of her
inheritance, possessed not only B. B. C. shares, but moneys in bank,
and shares in East India Stock, so that Clive in the right of his wife
had a seat in the assembly of East India shareholders, and a voice in
the election of directors of that famous company. I promise you Mrs.
Clive was a personage of no little importance. She carried her little
head with an aplomb and gravity which amused some of us. F. B. bent his
most respectfully down before her; she sent him on messages, and
deigned to ask him to dinner. He once more wore a cheerful countenance;
the clouds which gathered o’er the sun of Newcome were in the bosom of
the ocean buried, Bayham said, by James Binnie’s brilliant behaviour to
his niece.

Clive was a proprietor of East India Stock, and had a vote in electing
the directors of that Company; and who so fit to be a director of his
affairs as Thomas Newcome, Esq., Companion of the Bath, and so long a
distinguished officer in its army? To hold this position of director,
used, up to very late days, to be the natural ambition of many East
Indian gentlemen. Colonel Newcome had often thought of offering himself
as a candidate, and now openly placed himself on the lists, and
publicly announced his intention. His interest was rather powerful
through the Indian bank, of which he was a director, and many of the
shareholders of which were proprietors of the East India Company. To
have a director of the B. B. C. also a member of the parliament in
Leadenhall Street, would naturally be beneficial to the former
institution. Thomas Newcome’s prospectuses were issued accordingly, and
his canvass received with tolerable favour.

Within a very short time another candidate appeared in the field—a
retired Bombay lawyer, of considerable repute and large means—and at
the head of this gentleman’s committee appeared the names of Hobson
Brothers and Newcome, very formidable personages at the East India
House, with which the bank of Hobson Brothers have had dealings for
half a century past, and where the old lady, who founded or
consolidated that family, had had three stars before her own venerable
name, which had descended upon her son Sir Brian, and her grandson, Sir
Barnes.

War was thus openly declared between Thomas Newcome and his nephew. The
canvass on both sides was very hot and eager. The number of promises
was pretty equal. The election was not to come off yet for a while; for
aspirants to the honourable office of director used to announce their
wishes years before they could be fulfilled, and returned again and
again to the contest before they finally won it. Howbeit, the Colonel’s
prospects were very fair, and a prodigious indigo crop came in to
favour the B. B. C., with the most brilliant report from the board at
Calcutta. The shares, still somewhat sluggish, rose again, the
Colonel’s hopes with them, and the courage of gentlemen at home who had
invested their money in the transaction.

We were sitting one day round the Colonel’s dinner-table; it was not
one of the cocoa-nut-tree days; that emblem was locked up in the
butler’s pantry, and only beheld the lamps on occasions of state. It
was a snug family party in the early part of the year, When scarcely
anybody was in town; only George Warrington, and F. B., and Mr. and
Mrs. Pendennis; and the ladies having retired, We were having such a
talk as we used to enjoy in quiet old days, before marriages and cares
and divisions had separated us.

F. B. led the conversation. The Colonel received his remarks with great
gravity, and thought him an instructive personage. Others considered
him rather as amusing than instructive, and so his eloquence was
generally welcome. The canvass for the directorship was talked over.
The improved affairs of a certain great Banking Company, which shall be
nameless, but one which F. B. would take the liberty to state, would,
in his opinion, for ever unite the mother country to our great Indian
possessions;—the prosperity of this great Company was enthusiastically
drunk by Mr. Bayham in some of the very best claret. The conduct of the
enemies of that Company was characterised in terms of bitter, but not
undeserved, satire. F. B. rather liked to air his oratory, and
neglected few opportunities for making speeches after dinners.

The Colonel admired his voice and sentiments not the less, perhaps,
because the latter were highly laudatory of the good man. And not from
interest, at least, as far as he himself knew—not from any mean or
selfish motives, did F. B. speak. He called Colonel Newcome his friend,
his benefactor: kissed the hem of his garment: he wished fervently that
he could have been the Colonel’s son: he expressed, repeatedly, a
desire that some one would speak ill of the Colonel, so that he, F. B.,
might have the opportunity of polishing that individual off in about
two seconds. He covered the Colonel with all his heart; nor is any
gentleman proof altogether against this constant regard and devotion
from another.

The Colonel used to wag his head wisely, and say Mr. Bayham’s
suggestions were often exceedingly valuable, as indeed the fact was,
though his conduct was no more of a piece with his opinions than those
of some other folks occasionally are.

“What the Colonel ought to do, sir, to help him in the direction,” says
F. B., “is to get into Parliament. The House of Commons would aid him
into the Court of Directors, and the Court of Directors would help him
in the House of Commons.”

“Most wisely said,” says Warrington.

The Colonel declined. “I have long had the House of Commons in my eye,”
he said; “but not for me. I wanted my boy to go there. It would be a
proud day for me if I could see him there.”

“I can’t speak,” says Clive, from his end of the table. “I don’t
understand about parties, like F. B. here.”

“I believe I do know a thing or two,” Mr. Bayham here interposes.

“And politics do not interest me in the least,” Clive sighs out,
drawing pictures with his fork on his napkin, and not heeding the
other’s interruption.

“I wish I knew what would interest him,” his father whispers to me, who
happened to be at his side. “He never cares to be out of his
painting-room; and he doesn’t seem to be very happy even in there. I
wish to God, Pen, I knew what had come over the boy.” I thought I knew;
but what was the use of telling, now there was no remedy?

“A dissolution is expected every day,” continued F. B. “The papers are
full of it. Ministers cannot go on with this majority—cannot possibly
go on, sir. I have it on the best authority; and men who are anxious
about their seats are writing to their constituents, or are subscribing
at missionary meetings, or are gone down to lecturing at Athenæums, and
that sort of thing.”

Here Warrington burst out into a laughter much louder than the occasion
of the speech of F. B. seemed to warrant; and the Colonel, turning
round with some dignity, asked the cause of George’s amusement.

“What do you think your darling, Sir Barnes Newcome Newcome, has been
doing during the recess?” cries Warrington. “I had a letter this
morning, from my liberal and punctual employer, Thomas Potts, Esquire,
of the _Newcome Independent_, who states, in language scarcely
respectful, that Sir Barnes Newcome Newcome is trying to come the
religious dodge, as Mr. Potts calls it. He professes to be stricken
down by grief on account of late family circumstances; wears black, and
puts on the most piteous aspect, and asks ministers of various
denominations to tea with him; and the last announcement is the most
stupendous of all. Stop, I have it in my greatcoat;” and, ringing the
bell, George orders a servant to bring him a newspaper from his
great-coat pocket. “Here it is, actually in print,” Warrington
continues, and reads to us:—“‘Newcome Athenæum. 1, for the benefit of
the Newcome Orphan Children’s Home, and 2, for the benefit of the
Newcome Soup Association, without distinction of denomination. Sir
Barnes Newcome Newcome, Bart., proposes to give two lectures, on Friday
the 23rd, and Friday the 30th, instant. No. 1, The Poetry of Childhood:
Doctor Watts, Mrs. Barbauld, Jane Taylor, No. 2, The Poetry of
Womanhood, and the Affections: Mrs. Hemans, L. E. L. Threepence will be
charged at the doors, which will go to the use of the above two
admirable Societies.’ Potts wants me to go down and hear him. He has an
eye to business. He has had a quarrel with Sir Barnes, and wants me to
go down and hear him, and smash him, he kindly says. Let us go down,
Clive. You shall draw your cousin as you have drawn his villainous
little mug a hundred times before; and I will do the smashing part, and
we will have some fun out of the transaction.”

“Besides, Florac will be in the country; going to Rosebury is a journey
worth the taking, I can tell you; and we have old Mrs. Mason to go and
see, who sighs after you, Colonel. My wife went to see her,” remarks
Mr. Pendennis, “and——”

“And Miss Newcome, I know,” says the Colonel.

“She is away at Brighton, with her little charges, for sea air. My wife
heard from her to-day.”

“Oh, indeed. Mrs. Pendennis corresponds with her?” says our host,
darkling under his eyebrows; and, at this moment, my neighbour, F. B.,
is kind enough to scrunch my foot under the table with the weight of
his heel, as much as to warn me, by an appeal to my own corns, to avoid
treading on so delicate a subject in that house. “Yes,” said I, in
spite, perhaps in consequence, of this interruption. “My wife does
correspond with Miss Ethel, who is a noble creature, and whom those who
know her know how to love and admire. She is very much changed since
you knew her, Colonel Newcome; since the misfortunes in Sir Barnes’s
family, and the differences between you and him. Very much changed and
very much improved. Ask my wife about her, who knows her most
intimately, and hears from her constantly.”

“Very likely, very likely,” cried the Colonel, hurriedly, “I hope she
is improved, with all my heart. I am sure there was room for it.
Gentlemen, shall we go up to the ladies and have some coffee?” And
herewith the colloquy ended, and the party ascended to the
drawing-room.

The party ascended to the drawing-room, where no doubt both the ladies
were pleased by the invasion which ended their talk. My wife and the
Colonel talked apart, and I saw the latter looking gloomy, and the
former pleading very eagerly, and using a great deal of action, as the
little hands are wont to do, when the mistress’s heart is very much
moved. I was sure she was pleading Ethel’s cause with her uncle.

So indeed she was. And Mr. George, too, knew what her thoughts were.
“Look at her!” he said to me. “Don’t you see what she is doing? She
believes in that girl whom you all said Clive took a fancy to before he
married his present little placid wife; a nice little simple creature,
who is worth a dozen Ethels.”

“Simple certainly,” says Mr. P., with a shrug of the shoulders.

“A simpleton of twenty is better than a roue of twenty. It is better
not to have thought at all, than to have thought such things as must go
through a girl’s mind whose life is passed in jilting and being jilted;
whose eyes, as soon as they are opened, are turned to the main chance,
and are taught to leer at earl, to languish at a marquis, and to grow
blind before a commoner. I don’t know much about fashionable life.
Heaven help us (you young Brummell! I see the reproach in your face!)
Why, sir, it absolutely appears to me as if this little hop-o’-my-thumb
of a creature has begun to give herself airs since her marriage and her
carriage. Do you know, I rather thought she patronised me? Are all
women spoiled by their contact with the world, and their bloom rubbed
off in the market? I know one who seems to me to remain pure! to be
sure, I only know her, and this little person, and Mrs. Flanagan our
laundress, and my sisters at home, who don’t count. But that Miss
Newcome to whom once you introduced me? Oh, the cockatrice! only that
poison don’t affect your wife, the other would kill her. I hope the
Colonel will not believe a word which Laura says.” And my wife’s
_tête-à-tête_ with our host coming to an end about this time, Mr.
Warrington in high spirits goes up to the ladies, recapitulates the
news of Barnes’s lecture, recites “How doth the little busy bee,” and
gives a quasi-satirical comment upon that well-known poem, which
bewilders Mrs. Clive, until, set on by the laughter of the rest of the
audience, she laughs very freely at that odd man, and calls him “you
droll satirical creature you!” and says “she never was so much amused
in her life. Were you, Mrs. Pendennis?”

Meanwhile Clive, who has been sitting apart moodily biting his nails,
not listening to F. B.’s remarks, has broken into a laugh once or
twice, and gone to a writing-book, on which, whilst George is still
disserting, Clive is drawing.

At the end of the other’s speech, F. B. goes up to the draughtsman,
looks over his shoulder, makes one or two violent efforts as of inward
convulsion, and finally explodes in an enormous guffaw. “It’s capital!
By Jove, it’s capital! Sir Barnes would never dare to face his
constituents with that picture of him hung up in Newcome!”

And F. B. holds up the drawing, at which we all laugh except Laura. As
for the Colonel, he paces up and down the room, holding the sketch
close to his eyes, holding it away from him, patting it, clapping his
son delightedly on the shoulder. “Capital! capital! We’ll have the
picture printed, by Jove, sir; show vice it’s own image; and shame the
viper in his own nest, sir. That’s what we will.”

Mrs. Pendennis came away with rather a heavy heart from this party. She
chose to interest herself about the right or wrong of her friends; and
her mind was disturbed by the Colonel’s vindictive spirit. On the
subsequent day we had occasion to visit our friend J. J. (who was
completing the sweetest little picture, No. 263 in the Exhibition,
“Portrait of a Lady and Child”), and we found that Clive had been with
the painter that morning likewise; and that J. J. was acquainted with
his scheme. That he did not approve of it we could read in the artist’s
grave countenance. “Nor does Clive approve of it either!” cried Ridley,
with greater eagerness than he usually displayed, and more openness
than he was accustomed to exhibit in judging unfavourably of his
friends.

“Among them they have taken him away from his art,” Ridley said. “They
don’t understand him when he talks about it; they despise him for
pursuing it. Why should I wonder at that? my parents despised it too,
and my father was not a grand gentleman like the Colonel, Mrs.
Pendennis. Ah! why did the Colonel ever grow rich? Why had not Clive to
work for his bread as have? He would have done something that was
worthy of him then; now his time must be spent in dancing attendance at
balls land operas, and yawning at City board-rooms. They call that
business: they think he is idling when he comes here, poor fellow! As
if life was long enough for our art; and the best labour we can give,
good enough for it! He went away groaning this morning, and quite
saddened in spirits. The Colonel wants to set up himself for
Parliament, or to set Clive up; but he says he won’t. I hope he won’t;
do not you, Mrs. Pendennis?”

The painter turned as he spoke; and the bright northern light which
fell upon the sitter’s head was intercepted, and lighted up his own as
he addressed us. Out of that bright light looked his pale thoughtful
face, and long locks and eager brown eyes. The palette on his arm was a
great shield painted of many colours: he carried his mall-stick and a
sheaf of brushes along with the weapons of his glorious but harmless
war. With these he achieves conquests, wherein none are wounded save
the envious: with that he shelters him against how much idleness,
ambition, temptations! Occupied over that consoling work, idle thoughts
cannot gain mastery over him: selfish wishes or desires are kept at
bay. Art is truth: and truth is religion: and its study and practice a
daily work of pious duty. What are the world’s struggles, brawls,
successes, to that calm recluse pursuing his calling? See, twinkling in
the darkness round his chamber, numberless beautiful trophies of the
graceful victories which he has won:—sweet flowers of fancy reared by
him:—kind shapes of beauty which he has devised and moulded. The world
enters into the artist’s studio, and scornfully bids him a price for
his genius, or makes dull pretence to admire it. What know you of his
art? You cannot read the alphabet of that sacred book, good old Thomas
Newcome! What can you tell of its glories, joys, secrets, consolations?
Between his two best-beloved mistresses, poor Clive’s luckless father
somehow interposes; and with sorrowful, even angry protests. In place
of Art the Colonel brings him a ledger; and in lieu of first love,
shows him Rosey.

No wonder that Clive hangs his head; rebels sometimes, desponds always:
he has positively determined to refuse to stand for Newcome, Ridley
says. Laura is glad of his refusal, and begins to think of him once
more as of the Clive of old days.




CHAPTER LXVI.
In which the Colonel and the Newcome Athenæum are both lectured


At breakfast with his family, on the morning after the little
entertainment to which we were bidden, in the last chapter, Colonel
Newcome was full of the projected invasion of Barnes’s territories, and
delighted to think that there was an opportunity of at last humiliating
that rascal.

“Clive does not think he is a rascal at all, papa,” cries Rosey, from
behind her tea-urn; “that is, you said you thought papa judged him too
harshly; you know you did, this morning!” And from her husband’s angry
glances, she flies to his father’s for protection. Those were even
fiercer than Clive’s. Revenge flashed from beneath Thomas Newcome’s
grizzled eyebrows, and glanced in the direction where Clive sat. Then
the Colonel’s face flushed up, and he cast his eyes down towards his
tea-cup, which he lifted with a trembling hand. The father and son
loved each other so, that each was afraid of the other. A war between
two such men is dreadful; pretty little pink-faced Rosey, in a sweet
little morning cap and ribbons, her pretty little fingers twinkling
with a score of rings, sat simpering before her silver tea-urn, which
reflected her pretty little pink baby face. Little artless creature!
what did she know of the dreadful wounds which her little words
inflicted in the one generous breast and the other?

“My boy’s heart is gone from me,” thinks poor Thomas Newcome; “our
family is insulted, our enterprises ruined, by that traitor, and my son
is not even angry! he does not care for the success of our plans—for
the honour of our name even; I make him a position of which any young
man in England might be proud, and Clive scarcely deigns to accept it.”

“My wife appeals to my father,” thinks poor Clive; “it is from him she
asks counsel, and not from me. Be it about the ribbon in her cap, or
any other transaction in our lives, she takes her colour from his
opinion, and goes to him for advice, and I have to wait till it is
given, and conform myself to it. If I differ from the dear old father,
I wound him; if I yield up my opinion, as I do always, it is with a bad
grace, and I wound him still. With the best intentions in the world,
what a slave’s life it is that he has made for me!”

“How interested you are in your papers!” resumes the sprightly nosey.
“What can you find in those horrid politics?” Both gentlemen are
looking at their papers with all their might, and no doubt cannot see
one single word which those brilliant and witty leading articles
contain.

“Clive is like you, Rosey,” says the Colonel, laying his paper down,
“and does not care for politics.”

“He only cares for pictures, papa,” says Mrs. Clive. “He would not
drive with me yesterday in the Park, but spent hours in his room, while
you were toiling in the City, poor papa!—spent hours painting a horrid
beggar-man dressed up as a monk. And this morning, he got up quite
early, quite early, and has been out ever so long, and only came in for
breakfast just now! just before the bell rung.”

“I like a ride before breakfast,” says Clive.

“A ride! I know where you have been, sir! He goes away morning after
morning, to that little Mr. Ridley’s—his chums, papa, and he comes back
with his hands all over horrid paint. He did this morning; you know you
did, Clive.”

“I did not keep any one waiting, Rosa,” says Clive. “I like to have two
or three hours at my painting when I can spare time.” Indeed, the poor
fellow used so to run away of summer meetings for Ridley’s
instructions, and gallop home again, so as to be in time for the family
meal.

“Yes,” cries Rosey, tossing up the cap and ribbons, “he gets up so
early in the morning, that at night he falls asleep after dinner; very
pleasant and polite, isn’t he, papa?”

“I am up betimes too, my dear,” says the Colonel (many and many a time
he must have heard Clive as he left the house); “I have a great many
letters to write, affairs of the greatest importance to examine and
conduct. Mr. Betts from the City is often with me for hours before I
come down to your breakfast-table. A man who has the affairs of such a
great bank as ours to look to, must be up with the lark. We are all
early risers in India.”

“You dear kind papa!” says little Rosey, with unfeigned admiration; and
she puts out one of the plump white little jewelled hands, and pats the
lean brown paw of the Colonel which is nearest to her.

“Is Ridley’s picture getting on well, Clive?” asks the Colonel, trying
to interest himself about Ridley and his picture.

“Very well; it is beautiful; he has sold it for a great price; they
must make him an Academician next year,” replies Clive.

“A most industrious and meritorious young man; he deserves every honour
that may happen to him,” says the old soldier. “Rosa, my dear, it is
time that you should ask Mr. Ridley to dinner, and Mr. Smee, and some
of those gentlemen. We will drive this afternoon and see your
portrait.”

“Clive does not go to sleep after dinner when Mr. Ridley comes here,”
cries Rosa.

“No; I think it is my turn then,” says the Colonel, with a glance of
kindness. The anger has disappeared from under his brows; at that
moment the menaced battle is postponed.

“And yet I know that it must come,” says poor Clive, telling me the
story as he hangs on my arm, and we pace through the Park. “The Colonel
and I are walking on a mine, and that poor little wife of mine is
perpetually flinging little shells to fire it. I sometimes wish it were
blown up, and I were done for, Pen. I don’t think my widow would break
her heart about me. No; I have no right to say that; it’s a shame to
say that; she tries her very best to please me, poor little dear. It’s
the fault of my temper, perhaps, that she can’t. But they neither
understand me, don’t you see? the Colonel can’t help thinking I am a
degraded being, because I am fond of painting. Still, dear old boy, he
patronises Ridley; a man of genius, whom those sentries ought to
salute, by Jove, sir, when he passes. Ridley patronised by an old
officer of Indian dragoons, a little bit of a Rosey, and a fellow who
is not fit to lay his palette for him! I want sometimes to ask J. J.’s
pardon, after the Colonel has been talking to him in his confounded
condescending way, uttering some awful bosh about the fine arts. Rosey
follows him, and trips round J. J.’s studio, and pretends to admire,
and says, ‘How soft; how sweet!’ recalling some of mamma-in-law’s
dreadful expressions, which make me shudder when I hear them. If my
poor old father had a confidant into whose arm he could hook his own,
and whom he could pester with his family griefs as I do you, the dear
old boy would have his dreary story to tell too. I hate banks, bankers,
Bundelcund, indigo, cotton, and the whole business. I go to that
confounded board, and never hear one syllable that the fellows are
talking about. I sit there because he wishes me to sit there; don’t you
think he sees that my heart is out of the business; that I would rather
be at home in my painting-room? We don’t understand each other, but we
feel each other, as it were by instinct. Each thinks in his own way,
but knows what the other is thinking. We fight mute battles, don’t you
see, and, our thoughts, though we don’t express them, are perceptible
to one another, and come out from our eyes, or pass out from us
somehow, and meet, and fight, and strike, and wound.”

Of course Clive’s confidant saw how sore and unhappy the poor fellow
was, and commiserated his fatal but natural condition. The little ills
of life are the hardest to bear, as we all very well know. What would
the possession of a hundred thousand a year, or fame, and the applause
of one’s countrymen, or the loveliest and best-beloved woman,—of any
glory, and happiness, or good-fortune avail to a gentleman, for
instance, who was allowed to enjoy them only with the condition of
wearing a shoe with a couple of nails or sharp pebbles inside it? All
fame and happiness would disappear, and plunge down that shoe. All life
would rankle round those little nails. I strove, by such philosophic
sedatives as confidants are wont to apply on these occasions, to soothe
my poor friend’s anger and pain; and I dare say the little nails hurt
the patient just as much as before.

Clive pursued his lugubrious talk through the Park, and continued it as
far as the modest-furnished house which we then occupied in the Pimlico
region. It so happened that the Colonel and Mrs. Clive also called upon
us that day, and found this culprit in Laura’s drawing-room, when they
entered it, descending out of that splendid barouche in which we have
already shown Mrs. Clive to the public.

“He has not been here for months before; nor have you Rosa; nor have
you, Colonel; though we have smothered our indignation, and been to
dine with you, and to call, ever so many times!” cries Laura.

The Colonel pleaded his business engagements; Rosa, that little woman
of the world, had a thousand calls to make, and who knows how much to
do? since she came out. She had been to fetch papa, at Bays’s, and the
porter had told the Colonel that Mr. Clive and Mr. Pendennis had just
left the club together.

“Clive scarcely ever drives with me,” says Rosa; “papa almost always
does.”

“Rosey’s is such a swell carriage, that I feel ashamed,” says Clive.

“I don’t understand you young men. I don’t see why you need be ashamed
to go on the Course with your wife in her carriage, Clive,” remarks the
Colonel.

“The Course! the Course is at Calcutta, papa!” cries Rosey. “_We_ drive
in the Park.”

“We have a park at Barrackpore too, my dear,” says papa.

“And he calls his grooms saices! He said he was going to send away a
saice for being tipsy, and I did not know in the least what he could
mean, Laura!”

“Mr. Newcome! you must go and drive on the Course with Rosa now; and
the Colonel must sit and talk with me, whom he has not been to see for
such a long time.” Clive presently went off in state by Rosey’s side,
and then Laura showed Colonel Newcome his beautiful white Cashmere
shawl round a successor of that little person who had first been
wrapped in that web, now a stout young gentleman whose noise could be
clearly heard in the upper regions.

“I wish you could come down with us, Arthur, upon our electioneering
visit.”

“That of which you were talking last night? Are you bent upon it?”

“Yes, I am determined on it.”

Laura heard a child’s cry at this moment, and left the room with a
parting glance at her husband, who in fact had talked over the matter
with Mrs. Pendennis, and agreed with her in opinion.

As the Colonel had opened the question, I ventured to make a respectful
remonstrance against the scheme. Vindictiveness on the part of a man so
simple and generous, so fair and noble in all his dealings as Thomas
Newcome, appeared in my mind unworthy of him. Surely his kinsman had
sorrow and humiliation enough already at home. Barnes’s further
punishment, we thought, might be left to time, to remorse, to the Judge
of right and wrong; Who better understands than we can do, our causes
and temptations towards evil actions, Who reserves the sentence for His
own tribunal. But when angered, the best of us mistake our own motives,
as we do those of the enemy who inflames us. What may be private
revenge, we take to be indignant virtue and just revolt against wrong.
The Colonel would not hear of counsels of moderation, such as I bore
him from a sweet Christian pleader. “Remorse!” he cried out with a
laugh, “that villain will never feel it until he is tied up and whipped
at the cart’s tail! Time change that rogue! Unless he is wholesomely
punished, he will grow a greater scoundrel every year. I am inclined to
think, sir,” says he, his honest brows darkling as he looked towards
me, “that you too are spoiled by this wicked world, and these
heartless, fashionable, fine people. You wish to live well with the
enemy, and with us too, Pendennis. It can’t be. He who is not with us
is against us. I very much fear, sir, that the women, the women, you
understand, have been talking you over. Do not let us speak any more
about this subject, for I don’t wish that my son, and my son’s old
friend, should have a quarrel.” His face became red, his voice quivered
with agitation, and he looked with glances which I was pained to behold
in those kind old eyes: not because his wrath and suspicion visited
myself, but because an impartial witness, nay, a friend to Thomas
Newcome in that family quarrel, I grieved to think that a generous
heart was led astray, and to see a good man do wrong. So with no more
thanks for his interference than a man usually gets who meddles in
domestic strifes, the present luckless advocate ceased pleading.

To be sure, the Colonel and Clive had other advisers, who did not take
the peaceful side. George Warrington was one of these; he was for war
_à l’outrance_ with Barnes Newcome; for keeping no terms with such a
villain. He found a pleasure in hunting him, and whipping him. “Barnes
ought to be punished,” George said, “for his poor wife’s misfortune; it
was Barnes’s infernal cruelty, wickedness, selfishness, which had
driven her into misery and wrong.” Mr. Warrington went down to Newcome,
and was present at that lecture whereof mention has been made in a
previous chapter. I am afraid his behaviour was very indecorous; he
laughed at the pathetic allusions of the respected Member for Newcome;
he sneered at the sublime passages; he wrote an awful critique in the
_Newcome Independent_ two days after, whereof the irony was so subtle,
that half the readers of the paper mistook his grave scorn for respect,
and his gibes for praise.

Clive, his father, and Frederick Bayham, their faithful aide-de-camp,
were at Newcome likewise when Sir Barnes’s oration was delivered. At
first it was given out at Newcome that the Colonel visited the place
for the purpose of seeing his dear old friend and pensioner, Mrs.
Mason, who was now not long to enjoy his bounty, and so old, as
scarcely to know her benefactor. Only after her sleep, or when the sun
warmed her and the old wine with which he supplied her, was the good
old woman able to recognise her Colonel. She mingled father and son
together in her mind. A lady who now often came in to her, thought she
was wandering in her talk, when the poor old woman spoke of a visit she
had had from her boy; and then the attendant told Miss Newcome that
such a visit had actually taken place, and that but yesterday Clive and
his father had been in that room, and occupied the chair where she sat.
“The young lady was taken quite ill, and seemed ready to faint almost,”
Mrs. Mason’s servant and spokeswoman told Colonel Newcome when that
gentleman arrived shortly after Ethel’s departure, to see his old
nurse. “Indeed! he was very sorry.” The maid told many stories about
Miss Newcome’s goodness and charity; how she was constantly visiting
the poor now; how she was for ever engaged in good works for the young,
the sick, and the aged. She had had a dreadful misfortune in love; she
was going to be married to a young marquis; richer even than Prince de
Moncontour down at Rosebury; but it was all broke off on account of
that dreadful affair at the Hall.

Was she very good to the poor? did she come often to see her
grandfather’s old friend? it was no more than she ought “to do,”
Colonel Newcome said; without, however, thinking fit to tell his
informant that he had himself met his niece Ethel, five minutes before
he had entered Mrs. Mason’s door.

The poor thing was in discourse with Mr. Harris, the surgeon, and
talking (as best she might, for no doubt the news which she had just
heard had agitated her), talking about blankets, and arrowroot, wine,
and medicaments for her poor, when she saw her uncle coming towards
her. She tottered a step or two forwards to meet him; held both her
hands out, and called his name; but he looked her sternly in the face,
took off his hat and bowed, and passed on. He did not think fit to
mention the meeting even to his son, Clive; but we may be sure Mr.
Harris, the surgeon, spoke of the circumstance that night after the
lecture, at the club, where a crowd of gentlemen were gathered
together, smoking their cigars, and enjoying themselves according to
their custom, and discussing Sir Barnes Newcome’s performance.

According to established usage in such cases, our esteemed
representative was received by the committee of the Newcome Athenæum,
assembled in their committee-room, and thence marshalled by the
chairman and vice-chairman to his rostrum in the lecture-hall, round
about which the magnates of the institution and the notabilities of the
town were rallied on this public occasion. The Baronet came in some
state from his own house, arriving at Newcome in his carriage with four
horses, accompanied by my lady his mother, and Miss Ethel his beautiful
sister, who now was mistress at the Hall. His little girl was
brought—five years old now; she sate on her aunt’s knee, and slept
during a greater part of the performance. A fine bustle, we may be
sure, was made on the introduction of these personages to their
reserved seats on the platform, where they sate encompassed by others
of the great ladies of Newcome, to whom they and the lecturer were
especially gracious at this season. Was not Parliament about to be
dissolved, and were not the folks at Newcome Park particularly civil at
that interesting period? So Barnes Newcome mounts his pulpit, bows
round to the crowded assembly in acknowledgment of their buzz of
applause or recognition, passes his lily-white pocket-handkerchief
across his thin lips, and dashes off into his lecture about Mrs. Hemans
and the poetry of the affections. A public man, a commercial man as we
well know, yet his heart is in his home, and his joy in his affections;
the presence of this immense assembly here this evening; of the
industrious capitalists; of the intelligent middle class; of the pride
and mainstay of England, the operatives of Newcome; these, surrounded
by their wives and their children (a graceful bow to the bonnets to the
right of the platform), show that they too have hearts to feel, and
homes to cherish; that they, too, feel the love of women, the innocence
of children, the love of song! Our lecturer then makes a distinction
between man’s poetry and woman’s poetry, charging considerably in
favour of the latter. We show that to appeal to the affections is after
all the true office of the bard; to decorate the homely threshold, to
wreathe flowers round the domestic hearth, the delightful duty of the
Christian singer. We glance at Mrs. Hemans’s biography, and state where
she was born, and under what circumstances she must have at first, etc.
etc. Is this a correct account of Sir Barnes Newcome’s lecture? I was
not present, and did not read the report. Very likely the above may be
a reminiscence of that mock lecture which Warrington delivered in
anticipation of the Baronet’s oration.

After he had read for about five minutes, it was remarked the Baronet
suddenly stopped and became exceedingly confused over his manuscript:
betaking himself to his auxiliary glass of water before he resumed his
discourse, which for a long time was languid, low, and disturbed in
tone. This period of disturbance, no doubt, must have occurred when Sir
Barnes saw before him F. Bayham and Warrington seated in the
amphitheatre; and, by the side of those fierce scornful countenances,
Clive Newcome’s pale face.

Clive Newcome was not looking at Barnes. His eyes were fixed upon the
lady seated not far from the lecturer—upon Ethel, with her arm round
her little niece’s shoulder, and her thick black ringlets drooping down
over a face paler than Clive’s own.

Of course she knew that Clive was present. She was aware of him as she
entered the hall; saw him at the very first moment; saw nothing but
him, I dare say, though her eyes were shut and her head was turned now
towards her mother, and now bent down on the little niece’s golden
curls. And the past and its dear histories, and youth and its hopes and
passions, and tones and looks for ever echoing in the heart, and
present in the memory—these, no doubt, poor Clive saw and heard as he
looked across the great gulf of time, and parting, and grief, and
beheld the woman he had loved for many years. There she sits; the same,
but changed: as gone from him as if she were dead; departed indeed into
another sphere, and entered into a kind of death. If there is no love
more in yonder heart, it is but a corpse unburied. Strew round it the
flowers of youth. Wash it with tears of passion. Wrap it and envelop it
with fond devotion. Break heart, and fling yourself on the bier, and
kiss her cold lips and press her hand! It falls back dead on the cold
breast again. The beautiful lips have never a blush or a smile. Cover
them and lay them in the ground, and so take thy hatband off, good
friend, and go to thy business. Do you suppose you are the only man who
has had to attend such a funeral? You will find some men smiling and at
work the day after. Some come to the grave now and again out of the
world, and say a brief prayer, and a “God bless her!” With some men,
she gone, and her viduous mansion your heart to let, her successor, the
new occupant, poking in all the drawers and corners, and cupboards of
the tenement, finds her miniature and some of her dusty old letters
hidden away somewhere, and says—Was this the face he admired so? Why,
allowing even for the painter’s flattery, it is quite ordinary, and the
eyes certainly do not look straight. Are these the letters you thought
so charming? Well, upon my word, I never read anything more commonplace
in my life! See, here’s a line half blotted out. Oh, I suppose she was
crying then—some of her tears, idle tears—Hark, there is Barnes
Newcome’s eloquence still plapping on like water from a cistern—and our
thoughts, where have they wandered? far away from the lecture—as far
away as Clive’s almost. And now the fountain ceases to trickle; the
mouth from which issued that cool and limpid flux ceases to smile; the
figure is seen to bow and retire; a buzz, a hum, a whisper, a scuffle,
a meeting of bonnets and wagging of feathers and rustling of silks
ensues. “Thank you! delightful, I am sure!” “I really was quite
overcome;” “Excellent;” “So much obliged,” are rapid phrases heard
amongst the polite on the platform. While down below, “Yaw! quite
enough of _that;_” “Mary Jane, cover your throat up, and don’t kitch
cold, and don’t push me, please, sir;” “’Arry! coom along and ’av’ a
pint a ale,” etc., are the remarks heard, or perhaps not heard, by
Clive Newcome, as he watches at the private entrance of the Athenæum,
where Sir Barnes’s carriage is waiting with its flaming lamps, and
domestics in state liveries. One of them comes out of the building
bearing the little girl in his arms, and lays her in the carriage. Then
Sir Barnes, and Lady Anne, and the Mayor; then Ethel issues forth, and
as she passes under the lamps, beholds Clive’s face as pale and sad as
her own.

Shall we go visit the lodge-gates of Newcome Park the moon shining on
their carving? Is there any pleasure in walking by miles of grey
paling, and endless palisades of firs? Oh, you fool, what do you hope
to see behind that curtain? Absurd fugitive, whither would you run? Can
you burst the tether of fate: and is not poor dear little Rosey
Mackenzie sitting yonder waiting for you by the stake? Go home, sir;
and don’t catch cold. So Mr. Clive returns to the King’s Arms, and goes
up to his bedroom, and he hears Mr. F. Bayham’s deep voice as he passes
by the Boscawen Room, where the Jolly Britons are as usual assembled.




CHAPTER LXVII.
Newcome and Liberty


We have said that the Baronet’s lecture was discussed in the midnight
senate assembled at the King’s Arms, where Mr. Tom Potts showed the
orator no mercy. The senate of the King’s Arms was hostile to Sir
Barnes Newcome. Many other Newcomites besides were savage and inclined
to revolt against the representative of their borough. As these
patriots met over their cups, and over the bumper of friendship uttered
the sentiments of freedom, they had often asked of one another, where
should a man be found to rid Newcome of its dictator? Generous hearts
writhed under the oppression: patriotic eyes scowled when Barnes
Newcome went by: with fine satire, Tom Potts at Brown the hatter’s
shop, who made the hats for Sir Barnes Newcome’s domestics, proposed to
take one of the beavers—a gold-laced one with a cockade and a cord—and
set it up in the market-place and bid all Newcome come bow to it, as to
the hat of Gessler. “Don’t you think, Potts,” says F. Bayham, who of
course was admitted into the King’s Arms club, and ornamented that
assembly by his presence and discourse, “Don’t you think the Colonel
would make a good William Tell to combat against that Gessler?” Ha!
Proposal received with acclamation—eagerly adopted by Charles Tucker,
Esq., Attorney-at-Law, who would not have the slightest objection to
conduct Colonel Newcome’s, or any other gentleman’s electioneering
business in Newcome or elsewhere.

Like those three gentlemen in the plays and pictures of William Tell,
who conspire under the moon, calling upon liberty and resolving to
elect Tell as their especial champion—like Arnold, Melchthal, and
Werner—Tom Potts, Fred Bayham, and Charles Tucker, Esqs., conspired
round a punch-bowl, and determined that Thomas Newcome should be
requested to free his country. A deputation from the electors of
Newcome, that is to say, these very gentlemen waited on the Colonel in
his apartment the very next morning, and set before him the state of
the borough; Barnes Newcome’s tyranny, under which it groaned; and the
yearning of all honest men to be free from that usurpation. Thomas
Newcome received the deputation with great solemnity and politeness,
crossed his legs, folded his arms, smoked his cheroot, and listened
moat decorously, as now Potts, now Tucker, expounded to him; Bayham
giving the benefit of his emphatic “hear, hear,” to their statements,
and explaining dubious phrases to the Colonel in the most affable
manner.

Whatever the conspirators had to say against Barnes, Colonel Newcome
was only too ready to believe. He had made up his mind that that
criminal ought to be punished and exposed. The lawyer’s covert
innuendoes, who was ready to insinuate any amount of evil against
Barnes which could safely be uttered, were by no means strong enough
for Thomas Newcome. “‘Sharp practice! exceedingly alive to his own
interests—reported violence of temper and tenacity of money’—say
swindling at once, sir—say falsehood and rapacity—say cruelty and
avarice,” cries the Colonel. “I believe, upon my honour and conscience,
that unfortunate young man to be guilty of every one of those crimes.”

Mr. Bayham remarks to Mr. Potts that our friend the Colonel, when he
does utter an opinion, takes care that there shall be no mistake about
it.

“And I took care there should be no mistake before I uttered it at all,
Bayham!” cries F. B.’s patron. “As long as I was in any doubt about
this young man, I gave the criminal the benefit of it, as a man who
admires our glorious constitution should do, and kept my own counsel,
sir.”

“At least,” remarks Mr. Tucker, “enough is proven to show that Sir
Barnes Newcome Newcome, Baronet, is scarce a fit person to represent
this great borough in Parliament.”

“Represent Newcome in Parliament! It is a disgrace to that noble
institution the English House of Commons, that Barnes Newcome should
sit in it. A man whose word you cannot trust; a man stained with every
private crime. What right has he to sit in the assembly of the
legislators of the land, sir?” cries the Colonel, waving his hand as if
addressing a chamber of deputies.

“You are for upholding the House of Commons?” inquires the lawyer.

“Of course, sir, of course.”

“And for increasing the franchise, Colonel Newcome, I should hope?”
continues Mr. Tucker.

“Every man who can read and write ought to have a vote, sir; that is my
opinion!” cries the Colonel.

“He’s a Liberal to the backbone,” says Potts to Tucker.

“To the backbone!” responds Tucker to Potts. “The Colonel will do for
us, Potts.”

“We want such a man, Tucker; the _Independent_ has been crying out for
such a man for years past. We ought to have a Liberal as second
representative of this great town—not a sneaking half-and-half
Ministerialist like Sir Barnes, a fellow with one leg in the Carlton
and the other in Brookes’s. Old Mr. Bunce we can’t touch. His place is
safe; he is a good man of business: we can’t meddle with Mr. Bunce—I
know that, who know the feeling of the country pretty well.”

“Pretty well! Better than any man in Newcome, Potts!” cries Mr. Tucker.

“But a good man like the Colonel,—a good Liberal like the Colonel,—a
man who goes in for household suffrage——”

“Certainly, gentlemen.”

“And the general great Liberal principles—we know, of course—such a man
would assuredly have a chance against Sir Barnes Newcome at the coming
election! could we find such a man! a real friend of the people!”

“I know a friend of the people if ever there was one,” F. Bayham
interposes.

“A man of wealth, station, experience; a man who has fought for his
country; a man who is beloved in this place as you are, Colonel
Newcome: for your goodness is known, sir—_You_ are not ashamed of your
origin, and there is not a Newcomite old or young, but knows how
admirably good you have been to your old friend, Mrs.—Mrs.
What-d’-you-call’-em.”

“Mrs. Mason,” from F. B.

“Mrs. Mason. If such a man as you, sir, would consent to put himself in
nomination at the next election, every true Liberal in this place would
rush to support you; and crush the oligarchy who rides over the
liberties of this borough!”

“Something of this sort, gentlemen, I own to you had crossed my mind,”
Thomas Newcome remarked. “When I saw that disgrace to my name, and the
name of my father’s birthplace, representing the borough in Parliament,
I thought for the credit of the town and the family, the Member for
Newcome at least might be an honest man. I am an old soldier; have
passed all my life in India; and am little conversant with affairs at
home” (cries of “You are, you are”). “I hoped that my son, Mr. Clive
Newcome, might have been found qualified to contest this borough
against his unworthy cousin, and possibly to sit as your representative
in Parliament. The wealth I have had the good fortune to amass will
descend to him naturally, and at no very distant period of time, for I
am nearly seventy years of age, gentlemen.”

The gentlemen are astonished at this statement.

“But,” resumed the Colonel; “my son Clive, as my friend Bayham knows,
and to my own regret and mortification, as I don’t care to confess to
you, declares he has no interest or desire in politics, or for public
distinction—prefers his own pursuits—and even these I fear do not
absorb him—declines the offer which I made him, to present himself in
opposition to Sir Barnes Newcome. It becomes men in a certain station,
as I think, to assert that station; and though a few years back I never
should have thought of public life at all, and proposed to end my days
in quiet as a retired dragoon officer, since—since it has pleased
Heaven to increase very greatly my pecuniary means, to place me, as a
director and manager of an important banking company, in a station of
great public responsibility, I and my brother-directors have thought it
but right that one of us should sit in Parliament, if possible, and I
am not a man to shirk from that or from any other duty.”

“Colonel, will you attend a meeting of electors which we will call, and
say as much to them and as well?” cries Mr. Potts. “Shall I put an
announcement in my paper to the effect that you are ready to come
forward?”

“I am prepared to do so, my good sir.”

And presently this solemn palaver ended.

Besides the critical article upon the Baronet’s lecture, of which Mr.
Warrington was the author, there appeared in the leading columns of the
ensuing number of Mr. Potts’ _Independent_, some remarks of a very
smashing or hostile nature, against the Member for Newcome. “This
gentleman has shown such talent in the lecturing business,” the
_Independent_ said, “that it is a great pity he should not withdraw
himself from politics, and cultivate what all Newcome knows are the
arts which he understands best; namely, poetry and the domestic
affections. The performance of our talented representative last night
was so pathetic as to bring tears into the eyes of several of our fair
friends. We have heard, but never believed until now, that Sir Barnes
Newcome possessed such a genius _for making women cry_. Last week we
had the talented Miss Noakes, from Slowcome, reading Milton to us; how
far superior was the eloquence of Sir Barnes Newcome Newcome, Bart.,
even to that of the celebrated jestress! Bets were freely offered in
the room last night that Sir Barnes would _beat any woman_,—bets which
were not taken, as we scarcely need say, so well do our citizens
appreciate the character of our excellent, our admirable
representative.—Let the Baronet stick to his lectures, and let Newcome
relieve him of his political occupations. He is not fit for them, he is
too sentimental a man for us; the men of Newcome want a sound practical
person; the Liberals of Newcome have a desire to be represented. When
we elected Sir Barnes, he talked liberally enough, and we thought he
would do, but you see the honourable Baronet is so poetical! we ought
to have known that, and not to have believed him. Let us have a
straightforward gentleman. If not a man of words, at least let us have
a practical man. If not a man of eloquence, one at any rate whose word
we can trust, and we can’t trust Sir Barnes Newcome’s; we have tried
him, and we can’t really. Last night when the ladies were crying, we
could not for the souls of us help laughing. We hope we know how to
conduct ourselves as gentlemen. We trust we did not interrupt the
harmony of the evening; but Sir Barnes Newcome, prating about children
and virtue, and affection and poetry, this is really too strong.

“The _Independent_, faithful to its name, and ever actuated by
principles of honour, has been, as our thousands of readers know,
disposed to give Sir Barnes Newcome Newcome, Bart., a fair trial. When
he came forward after his father’s death, we believed in his pledges
and promises, as a retrencher and reformer, and we stuck by him. Is
there any man in Newcome, except, perhaps, our twaddling old
contemporary the _Sentinel_, who believes in Sir B. N. any more? We say
no, and we now give the readers of the _Independent_, and the electors
of this borough, fair notice, that when the dissolution of Parliament
takes place, a good man, a true man, a man of experience, no dangerous
Radical, or brawling tap orator—Mr. Hicks’s friends well understand
whom we mean—but a gentleman of Liberal principles, well-won wealth,
and deserved station and honour, will ask the electors of Newcome
whether they are, or are not discontented with their present unworthy
Member. The _Independent_ for one, says, we know good men of your
family, we know in it men who would do honour to any name; but you, Sir
Barnes Newcome Newcome, Bart., we trust no more.”

In the electioneering matter, which had occasioned my unlucky
interference, and that subsequent little coolness upon the good
Colonel’s part, Clive Newcome had himself shown that the scheme was not
to his liking; had then submitted as his custom was: and doing so with
a bad grace, as also was to be expected, had got little thanks for his
obedience. Thomas Newcome was hurt at his son’s faint-heartedness, and
of course little Rosey was displeased at his hanging back. He set off
in his father’s train, a silent, unwilling partisan. Thomas Newcome had
the leisure to survey Clive’s glum face opposite to him during the
whole of their journey, and to chew his mustachios, and brood upon his
wrath and wrongs. His life had been a sacrifice for that boy! What
darling schemes had he not formed in his behalf, and how superciliously
did Clive meet his projects! The Colonel could not see the harm of
which he had himself been the author. Had he not done everything in
mortal’s power for his son’s happiness, and how many young men in
England were there with such advantages as this moody, discontented,
spoiled boy? As Clive backed out of the contest, of course his father
urged it only the more vehemently. Clive slunk away from committees and
canvassing, and lounged about the Newcome manufactories, whilst his
father, with anger and bitterness in his heart, remained at the post of
honour, as he called it, bent upon overcoming his enemy and carrying
his point against Barnes Newcome. “If Paris will not fight, sir,” the
Colonel said, with a sad look following his son, “Priam must.” Good old
Priam believed his cause to be a perfectly just one, and that duty and
his honour called upon him to draw the sword. So there was difference
between Thomas Newcome and Clive his son. I protest it is with pain and
reluctance I have to write that the good old man was in error—that
there was a wrong-doer, and that Atticus was he.

Atticus, be it remembered, thought himself compelled by the very best
motives. Thomas Newcome, the Indian banker, was at war with Barnes, the
English banker. The latter had commenced the hostilities by a sudden
and cowardly act of treason. There were private wrongs to envenom the
contest, but it was the mercantile quarrel on which the Colonel chose
to set his declaration of war. Barnes’s first dastardly blow had
occasioned it, and his uncle was determined to carry it through. This I
have said was also George Warrington’s judgment, who, in the ensuing
struggle between Sir Barnes and his uncle, acted as a very warm and
efficient partisan of the latter. “Kinsmanship!” says George, “what has
old Tom Newcome ever had from his kinsman but cowardice and treachery?
If Barnes had held up his finger, the young one might have been happy;
if he could have effected it, the Colonel and his bank would have been
ruined. I am for war, and for seeing the old boy in Parliament. He
knows no more about politics than I do about dancing the polka; but
there are five hundred wiseacres in that assembly who know no more than
he does, and an honest man taking his seat there, in place of a
confounded little rogue, at least makes a change for the better.”

I dare say Thomas Newcome, Esq. would by no means have concurred in the
above estimate of his political knowledge, and thought himself as well
informed as another. He used to speak with the greatest gravity about
our constitution as the pride and envy of the world, though he
surprised you as much by the latitudinarian reforms, which he was eager
to press forward, as by the most singular old Tory opinions which he
advocated on other occasions. He was for having every man to vote;
every poor man to labour short time and get high wages; every poor
curate to be paid double or treble; every bishop to be docked of his
salary, and dismissed from the House of Lords. But he was a staunch
admirer of that assembly, and a supporter of the rights of the Crown.
He was for sweeping off taxes from the poor, and as money must be
raised to carry on government, he opined that the rich should pay. He
uttered all these opinions with the greatest gravity and emphasis,
before a large assembly of electors, and others convened in the Newcome
Town Hall, amid the roars of applause of the non-electors, and the
bewilderment and consternation of Mr. Potts, of the _Independent_, who
had represented the Colonel in his paper as a safe and steady reformer.
Of course the _Sentinel_ showed him up as a most dangerous radical, a
sepoy republican, and so forth, to the wrath and indignation of Colonel
Newcome. He a republican! he scorned the name! He would die as he had
bled many a time for his sovereign. He an enemy of our beloved Church!
He esteemed and honoured it, as he hated and abhorred the superstitions
of Rome. (Yells, from the Irish in the crowd.) He an enemy of the House
of Lords! He held it to be the safeguard of the constitution and the
legitimate prize of our most illustrious, naval, military,
and—and—legal heroes (ironical cheers). He repelled with scorn the
dastard attacks of the journal which had assailed him; he asked, laying
his hands on his heart, if as a gentleman, an officer bearing Her
Majesty’s commission, he could be guilty of a desire to subvert her
empire and to insult the dignity of her crown?

After this second speech at the Town Hall, it was asserted by a
considerable party in Newcome, that Old Tom (as the mob familiarly
called him) was a Tory, while an equal number averred that he was a
Radical. Mr. Potts tried to reconcile his statements, a work in which I
should think the talented editor of the _Independent_ had no little
difficulty. “He knows nothing about it,” poor Clive said with a sigh;
“his politics are all sentiment and kindness; he will have the poor man
paid double wages, and does not remember that the employer would be
ruined: you have heard him, Pen, talking in this way at his own table,
but when he comes out armed _cap-à-pied_, and careers against windmills
in public, don’t you see that as Don Quixote’s son I had rather the
dear brave old gentleman was at home?”

So this _fainéant_ took but little part in the electioneering doings,
holding moodily aloof from the meetings, and councils, and
public-houses, where his father’s partisans were assembled.




CHAPTER LXVIII.
A Letter and a Reconciliation


Miss Ethel Newcome to Mrs. Pendennis:

“Dearest Laura,—I have not written to you for many weeks past. There
have been some things too trivial, and some too sad, to write about;
some things I know I shall write of if I begin, and yet that I know I
had best leave; for of what good is looking to the past now? Why vex
you or myself by reverting to it? Does not every day bring its own duty
and task, and are these not enough to occupy one? What a fright you
must have had with my little goddaughter! Thank heaven she is well now,
and restored to you. You and your husband I know do not think it
essential, but I do, _most essential_, and am very grateful that she
was taken to church before her illness.

“Is Mr. Pendennis proceeding with his canvass? I try and avoid a
certain subject, but it _will_ come. You know who is canvassing against
us here. My poor uncle has met with very considerable success amongst
the lower classes. He makes them rambling speeches at which my brother
and his friends laugh, but which the people applaud. I saw him only
yesterday, on the balcony of the King’s Arms, speaking to a great mob,
who were cheering vociferously below. I had met him before. He would
not even stop and give his Ethel of old days his hand. I would have
given him I don’t know what, for one kiss, for one kind word; but he
passed on and would not answer me. He thinks me—what the world thinks
me, worldly and heartless; what I _was_. But at least, dear Laura, you
know that I always truly loved _him_, and do now, although he is our
enemy, though he believes and utters the most cruel things against
Barnes, though he says that Barnes Newcome, my father’s son, my
brother, Laura, is not an honest man. Hard, selfish, worldly, I own my
poor brother to be, and pray Heaven to amend him; but dishonest! and to
be so maligned by the person one loves best in the world! This is a
hard trial. I pray a proud heart may be bettered by it.

“And I have seen my cousin; once at a lecture which poor Barnes gave,
and who seemed very much disturbed on perceiving Clive; once afterwards
at good old Mrs. Mason’s, whom I have always continued to visit for
uncle’s sake. The poor old woman, whose wits are very nearly gone, held
both our hands, and asked when we were going to be married? and
laughed, poor old thing! I cried out to her that Mr. Clive had a wife
at home, a young dear wife, I said. He gave a dreadful sort of laugh,
and turned away into the window. He looks terribly ill, pale, and
oldened.

“I asked him a great deal about his wife, whom I remember a very
pretty, sweet-looking girl indeed, at my Aunt Hobson’s, but with a not
agreeable mother as I thought then. He answered me by monosyllables,
appeared as though he would speak, and then became silent. I am pained,
and yet glad that I saw him, I said, not very distinctly, I dare say,
that I hoped the difference between Barnes and uncle would not
extinguish his regard for mamma and me, who have always loved him; when
I said loved him, he give one of his bitter laughs again; and so he did
when I said I hoped his wife was well. You never would tell me much
about Mrs. Newcome; and I fear she does not make my cousin happy. And
yet this marriage was of my uncle’s making: another of the unfortunate
marriages in our family. I am glad that I paused in time, before the
commission of that sin; I strive my best, and to amend my temper, my
inexperience, my shortcomings, and try to be the mother of my poor
brother’s children. But Barnes has never forgiven me my refusal of Lord
Farintosh. He is of the world still, Laura. Nor must we deal too
harshly with people of his nature, who cannot perhaps comprehend a
world beyond. I remember in old days, when we were travelling on the
Rhine, in the happiest days of my whole life, I used to hear Clive and
his friend Mr. Ridley, talk of art and of nature in a way that I could
not understand at first, but came to comprehend better as my cousin
taught me; and since then, I see pictures, landscapes, and flowers,
with quite different eyes, and beautiful secrets as it were, of which I
had no idea before. The secret of all secrets, the secret of the other
life, and the better world beyond ours, may not this be unrevealed to
some? I pray for them all, dearest Laura, for those nearest and dearest
to me, that the truth may lighten their darkness, and Heaven’s great
mercy defend them in the perils and dangers of their night.

“My boy at Sandhurst has done very well indeed; and Egbert, I am happy
to say, thinks of taking orders; he has been very moderate at College.
Not so Alfred; but the Guards are a sadly dangerous school for a young
man; I have promised to pay his debts, and he is to exchange into the
line. Mamma is coming to us at Christmas with Alice; my sister is very
pretty indeed, I think, and I am rejoiced she is to marry young Mr.
Mumford, who has a tolerable living, and who has been attached to her
ever since he was a boy at Rugby School.

“Little Barnes comes on bravely with his Latin; and Mr. Whitestock, _a
most excellent and valuable_ person in this place, where there is so
much Romanism and Dissent, speaks highly of him. Little Clara is so
like her unhappy mother in a thousand ways and actions, that I am
shocked often; and see my brother starting back and turning his head
away, as if suddenly wounded. I have heard the most deplorable accounts
of Lord and Lady Highgate. Oh, dearest friend and sister!-save you, I
think I scarce know any one that is happy in the world: I trust you may
continue so-you who impart your goodness and kindness to all who come
near you-you in whose sweet serene happiness I am thankful to be
allowed to repose sometimes. You are the island in the desert, Laura!
and the birds sing there, and the fountain flows; and we come and
repose by you for a little while, and to-morrow the march begins again,
and the toil, and the struggle, and the desert. Good-bye, fountain!
Whisper kisses to my dearest little ones from their affectionate Aunt
Ethel.

“A friend of his, a Mr. Warrington, has spoken against us several times
with extraordinary ability, as Barnes owns. Do you know Mr. W.? He
wrote a dreadful article in the _Independent_, about the last poor
lecture, which was indeed sad, sentimental, commonplace: and the
critique is terribly comical. I could not help laughing, remembering
some passages in it, when Barnes mentioned it: and my brother became so
angry! They have put up a dreadful caricature of B. in Newcome: and my
brother says he did it, but I hope not. It is very droll, though: he
used to make them very funnily. I am glad he has spirits for it.
Good-bye again.—E. N.”

“He says he did it!” cries Mr. Pendennis, laying the letter down.
“Barnes Newcome would scarcely caricature himself, my dear?”

“‘He’ often means—means Clive—I think,” says Mrs. Pendennis, in an
offhand manner.

“Oh! he means Clive, does he, Laura?”

“Yes—and you mean goose, Mr. Pendennis!” that saucy lady replies.

It must have been about the very time when this letter was written,
that a critical conversation occurred between Clive and his father, of
which the lad did not inform me until much later days; as was the
case—the reader has been more than once begged to believe—with many
other portions of this biography.

One night the Colonel, having come home from a round of electioneering
visits, not half satisfied with himself; exceedingly annoyed (much more
than he cared to own) with the impudence of some rude fellows at the
public-houses, who had interrupted his fine speeches with odious
hiccups and familiar jeers, was seated brooding over his cheroot by the
chimney-fire; friend F. B. (of whose companionship his patron was
occasionally tired) finding much better amusement with the Jolly
Britons in the Boscawen Room below. The Colonel, as an electioneering
business, had made his appearance in the club. But that ancient Roman
warrior had frightened those simple Britons. His manners were too awful
for them: so were Clive’s, who visited them also under Mr. Pott’s
introduction; but the two gentlemen, each being full of care and
personal annoyance at the time, acted like wet blankets upon the
Britons—whereas F. B. warmed them and cheered them, affably partook of
their meals with them, and graciously shared their cups. So the Colonel
was alone, listening to the far-off roar of the Britons’ choruses by an
expiring fire, as he sate by a glass of cold negus and the ashes of his
cigar.

I dare say he may have been thinking that his fire was well-nigh
out,—his cup of the dregs, his pipe little more now than dust and
ashes—when Clive, candle in hand, came into their sitting-room.

As each saw the other’s face, it was so very sad and worn and pale,
that the young man started back; and the elder, with quite the
tenderness of old days, cried, “God bless me, my boy, how ill you look!
Come and warm yourself—look, the fire’s out. Have something, Clivy!”

For months past they had not had a really kind word. The tender old
voice smote upon Clive, and he burst into sudden tears. They rained
upon his father’s trembling old brown hand, and stooped down and kissed
it.

“You look very ill too, father,” says Clive.

“Ill? not I!” cries the father, still keeping the boy’s hand under both
his own on the mantelpiece. “Such a battered old fellow as I am has a
right to look the worse for wear; but you, boy; why do you look so
pale?”

“I have seen a ghost, father,” Clive answered. Thomas, however, looked
alarmed and inquisitive as though the boy was wandering in his mind.

“The ghost of my youth, father, the ghost of my happiness, and the best
days of my life,” groaned out the young man. “I saw Ethel to-day. I
went to see Sarah Mason, and she was there.”

“I had seen her, but I did not speak of her,” said the father. “I
thought it was best not to mention her to you, my poor boy. And are—are
you fond of her still, Clive?”

“Still! once means always in these things, father, doesn’t it? Once
means to-day, and yesterday, and forever and ever.”

“Nay, my boy, you mustn’t talk to me so, or even to yourself so. You
have the dearest little wife at home, a dear little wife and child.”

“You had a son, and have been kind enough to him, God knows. _You_ had
a wife: but that doesn’t prevent other—other thoughts. Do you know you
never spoke twice in your life about my mother? You didn’t care for
her.”

“I—I did my duty by her; I denied her nothing. I scarcely ever had a
word with her, and I did my best to make her happy,” interposed the
Colonel.

“I know, but your heart was with the other. So is mine. It’s fatal; it
runs in the family, father.”

The boy looked so ineffably wretched that the father’s heart melted
still more. “I did my best, Clive,” the Colonel gasped out. “I went to
that villain Barnes and offered him to settle every shilling I was
worth on you—I did—you didn’t know that—I’d kill myself for your sake,
Clivy. What’s an old fellow worth living for? I can live upon a crust
and a cigar. I don’t care about a carriage, and only go in it to please
Rosey. I wanted to give up all for you, but he played me false, that
scoundrel cheated us both; he did, and so did Ethel.”

“No, sir; I may have thought so in my rage once, but I know better now.
She was the victim and not the agent. Did Madame de Florac play _you_
false when she married her husband? It was her fate, and she underwent
it. We all bow to it, we are in the track and the car passes over us.
You know it does, father.” The Colonel was a fatalist: he had often
advanced this Oriental creed in his simple discourses with his son and
Clive’s friends.

“Besides,” Clive went on, “Ethel does not care for me. She received me
to-day quite coldly, and held her hand out as if we had only parted
last year. I suppose she likes that marquis who jilted her—God bless
her! How shall we know what wins the hearts of women? She has mine.
There was my Fate. Praise be to Allah! It is over.”

“But there’s that villain who injured you. His isn’t over yet,” cried
the Colonel, clenching his trembling hand.

“Ah, father! Let us leave him to Allah too! Suppose Madame de Florac
had a brother who insulted you. You know you wouldn’t have revenged
yourself. You would have wounded her in striking him.”

“You called out Barnes yourself, boy,” cried the father.

“That was for another cause, and not for my quarrel. And how do you
know I intended to fire? By Jove, I was so miserable then that an ounce
of lead would have done me little harm!”

The father saw the son’s mind more clearly than he had ever done
hitherto. They had scarcely ever talked upon that subject which the
Colonel found was so deeply fixed in Clive’s heart. He thought of his
own early days, and how he had suffered, and beheld his son before him
racked with the same cruel pangs of enduring grief. And he began to own
that he had pressed him too hastily in his marriage; and to make an
allowance for an unhappiness of which he had in part been the cause.

“Mashallah! Clive, my boy,” said the old man, “what is done is done.”

“Let us break up our camp before this place, and not go to war with
Barnes, father,” said Clive. “Let us have peace—and forgive him if we
can.”

“And retreat before this scoundrel, Clive?”

“What is a victory over such a fellow? One gives a chimney-sweep the
wall, father.”

“I say again—What is done is done. I have promised to meet him at the
hustings, and I will. I think it is best: and you are right: and you
act like a high-minded gentleman—and my dear old boy—not to meddle in
the quarrel—though I didn’t think so—and the difference gave me a great
deal of pain—and so did what Pendennis said—and I’m wrong—and thank God
I am wrong—and God bless you, my own boy!” the Colonel cried out in a
burst of emotion; and the two went to their bedrooms together, and were
happier as they shook hands at the doors of their adjoining chambers
than they had been for many a long day and year.




CHAPTER LXIX.
The Election


Having thus given his challenge, reconnoitred the enemy, and pledged
himself to do battle at the ensuing election, our Colonel took leave of
the town of Newcome, and returned to his banking affairs in London. His
departure was as that of a great public personage; the gentlemen of the
Committee followed him obsequiously down to the train. “Quick,” bawls
out Mr. Potts to Mr. Brown, the station-master, “Quick, Mr. Brown, a
carriage for Colonel Newcome!” Half a dozen hats are taken off as he
enters into the carriage, F. Bayham and his servant after him, with
portfolios, umbrellas, shawls, despatch-boxes. Clive was not there to
act as his father’s aide-de-camp. After their conversation together the
young man had returned to Mrs. Clive and his other duties in life.

It has been said that Mr. Pendennis was in the country, engaged in a
pursuit exactly similar to that which occupied Colonel Newcome. The
menaced dissolution of Parliament did not take place so soon as we
expected. The Ministry still hung together, and by consequence, Sir
Barnes Newcome kept the seat in the House of Commons, from which his
elder kinsman was eager to oust him. Away from London, and having but
few correspondents, save on affairs of business, I heard little of
Clive and the Colonel, save an occasional puff of one of Colonel
Newcome’s entertainments in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, to which journal
F. Bayham still condescended to contribute; and a satisfactory
announcement in a certain part of that paper, that on such a day, in
Hyde Park Gardens, Mrs. Clive Newcome had presented her husband with a
son. Clive wrote to me presently, to inform me of the circumstance,
stating at the same time, with but moderate gratification on his own
part, that the Campaigner, Mrs. Newcome’s mamma, had upon this second
occasion made a second lodgment in her daughter’s house and bedchamber,
and showed herself affably disposed to forget the little unpleasantries
which had clouded over the sunshine of her former visit.

Laura, with a smile of some humour, said she thought now would be the
time when, if Clive could be spared from his bank, he might pay us that
visit at Fairoaks which had been due so long, and hinted that change of
air and a temporary absence from Mrs. Mackenzie might be agreeable to
my old friend.

It was, on the contrary, Mr. Pendennis’s opinion that his wife artfully
chose that period of time when little Rosey was, perforce, kept at home
and occupied with her delightful maternal duties, to invite Clive to
see us. Mrs. Laura frankly owned that she liked our Clive better
without his wife than with her, and never ceased to regret that pretty
Rosey had not bestowed her little hand upon Captain Hoby, as she had
been very well disposed at one time to do. Against all marriages of
interest this sentimental Laura never failed to utter indignant
protests; and Clive’s had been a marriage of interest, a marriage made
up by the old people, a marriage which the young man had only yielded
out of good-nature and obedience. She would apostrophise her
unconscious young ones, and inform those innocent babies that _they_
should never be made to marry except for love, never—an announcement
which was received with perfect indifference by little Arthur on his
rocking-horse, and little Helen smiling and crowing in her mother’s
lap.

So Clive came down to us, careworn in appearance, but very pleased and
happy, he said, to stay for a while with the friends of his youth. We
showed him our modest rural lions; we got him such sport and company as
our quiet neighbourhood afforded, we gave him fishing in the Brawl, and
Laura in her pony-chaise drove him to Baymouth, and to Clavering Park
and town, and visit the famous cathedral at Chatteris, where she was
pleased to recount certain incidents of her husband’s youth.

Clive laughed at my wife’s stories; he pleased himself in our home; he
played with our children, with whom he had became a great favourite; he
was happier, he told me with a sigh, than he had been for many a day.
His gentle hostess echoed the sigh of the poor young fellow. She was
sure that his pleasure was only transitory, and was convinced that many
deep cares weighed upon his mind.

Ere long my old schoolfellow made me sundry confessions, which showed
that Laura’s surmises were correct. About his domestic affairs he did
not treat much; the little boy was said to be a very fine little boy;
the ladies had taken entire possession of him. “I can’t stand Mrs.
Mackenzie any longer, I own,” says Clive; “but how resist a wife at
such a moment? Rosa was sure she would die, unless her mother came to
her, and of course we invited Mrs. Mack. This time she is all smiles
and politeness with the Colonel: the last quarrel is laid upon me, and
in so far I am easy, as the old folks get on pretty well together.” To
me, considering these things, it was clear that Mr. Clive Newcome was
but a very secondary personage indeed in his father’s new fine house
which he inhabited, and in which the poor Colonel had hoped they were
to live such a happy family.

But it was about Clive Newcome’s pecuniary affairs that I felt the most
disquiet when he came to explain these to me. The Colonel’s capital and
that considerable sum which Mrs. Clive had inherited from her good old
uncle, were all involved in a common stock, of which Colonel Newcome
took the management. “The governor understands business so well, you
see,” says Clive; “is a most remarkable head for accounts: he must have
inherited that from my grandfather, you know, who made his own fortune:
all the Newcomes are good at accounts, except me, a poor useless devil
who knows nothing but to paint a picture, and who can’t even do that.”
He cuts off the head of a thistle as he speaks, bites his tawny
mustachios, plunges his hands into his pockets and his soul into
reverie.

“You don’t mean to say,” asks Mr. Pendennis, “that your wife’s fortune
has not been settled upon herself?”

“Of course it has been settled upon herself; that is, it is entirely
her own—you know the Colonel has managed all the business, he
understands it better than we do.”

“Do you say that your wife’s money is not vested in the hands of
trustees, and for her benefit?”

“My father is one of the trustees. I tell you he manages the whole
thing. What is his property is mine and ever has been; and I might draw
upon him as much as I liked: and you know it’s five times as great as
my wife’s. What is his is ours, and what is ours is his, of course; for
instance, the India Stock, which poor Uncle James left, that now stands
in the Colonel’s name. He wants to be a Director: he will be at the
next election—he must have a certain quantity of India Stock, don’t you
see?”

“My dear fellow, is there then no settlement made upon your wife at
all?”

“You needn’t look so frightened,” says Clive. “I made a settlement on
her: with all my worldly goods I did her endow three thousand three
hundred and thirty-three pounds six and eightpence, which my father
sent over from India to my uncle, years ago, when I came home.”

I might well indeed be aghast at this news, and had yet further
intelligence from Clive, which by no means contributed to lessen my
anxiety. This worthy old Colonel, who fancied himself to be so clever a
man of business, chose to conduct it in utter ignorance and defiance of
law. If anything happened to the Bundelcund Bank, it was clear that not
only every shilling of his own property, but every farthing bequeathed
to Rosa Mackenzie would be lost; only his retiring pension, which was
luckily considerable, and the hundred pounds a year which Clive had
settled on his wife, would be saved out of the ruin.

And now Clive confided to me his own serious doubts and misgivings
regarding the prosperity of the Bank itself. He did not know why, but
he could not help fancying that things were going wrong. Those partners
who had come home, having sold out of the Bank, and living in England
so splendidly, why had they quitted it? The Colonel said it was a proof
of the prosperity of the company, that so many gentlemen were enriched
who had taken shares in it. “But when I asked my father,” Clive
continued, “why he did not himself withdraw, the dear old Colonel’s
countenance fell: he told me such things were not to be done every day;
and ended, as usual, by saying that I do not understand anything about
business. No more I do: that is the truth. I hate the whole concern,
Pen! I hate that great tawdry house in which we live; and those
fearfully stupid parties:—Oh, how I wish we were back in Fitzroy
Square! But who can recall bygones, Arthur; or wrong steps in life? We
must make the best of to-day, and to-morrow must take care of itself.
‘Poor little child!’ I could not help thinking, as I took it crying in
my arms the other day, ‘what has life in store for you, my poor weeping
baby?’ My mother-in-law cried out that I should drop the baby, and that
only the Colonel knew how to hold it. My wife called from her bed; the
nurse dashed up and scolded me; and they drove me out of the room
amongst them. By Jove, Pen, I laugh when some of my friends
congratulate me on my good fortune! I am not quite the father of my own
child, nor the husband of my own wife, nor even the master of my own
easel. I am managed for, don’t you see? boarded, lodged, and done for.
And here is the man they call happy. Happy! Oh!!! Why had I not your
strength of mind; and why did I ever leave my art, my mistress?”

And herewith the poor lad fell to chopping thistles again; and quitted
Fairoaks shortly, leaving his friends there very much disquieted about
his prospects, actual and future.

The expected dissolution of Parliament came at length. All the country
papers in England teemed with electioneering addresses; and the country
was in a flutter with particoloured ribbons. Colonel Thomas Newcome,
pursuant to his promise, offered himself to the independent electors of
Newcome in the Liberal journal of the family town, whilst Sir Barnes
Newcome, Bart., addressed himself to his old and tried friends, and
called upon the friends of the constitution to rally round him, in the
Conservative print. The addresses of our friend were sent to us at
Fairoaks by the Colonel’s indefatigable aide-de-camp, Mr. Frederick
Bayham. During the period which had elapsed since the Colonel’s last
canvassing visit and the issuing of the writs now daily expected for
the new Parliament, many things of great importance had occurred in
Thomas Newcome’s family—events which were kept secret from his
biographer, who was, at this period also, pretty entirely occupied with
his own affairs. These, however, are not the present subject of this
history, which has Newcome for its business, and the parties engaged in
the family quarrel there.

There were four candidates in the field for the representation of that
borough. That old and tried member of Parliament, Mr. Bunce, was
considered to be secure; and the Baronet’s seat was thought to be
pretty safe on account of his influence in the place. Nevertheless,
Thomas Newcome’s supporters were confident for their champion, and that
when the parties came to the poll, the extreme Liberals of the borough
would divide their votes between him and the fourth candidate, the
uncompromising Radical, Mr. Barker.

In due time the Colonel and his staff arrived at Newcome, and resumed
the active canvass which they had commenced some months previously.
Clive was not in his father’s suite this time, nor Mr. Warrington,
whose engagements took him elsewhere. The lawyer, the editor of the
_Independent_, and F. B., were the Colonel’s chief men. His
headquarters (which F. B. liked very well) were at the hotel where we
last saw him, and whence issuing with his aide-de-camp at his heels,
the Colonel went round to canvass personally, according to his promise,
every free and independent elector of the borough. Barnes too was
canvassing eagerly on his side, and was most affable and active; the
two parties would often meet nose to nose in the same street, and their
retainers exchange looks of defiance. With Mr. Potts of the
_Independent_, a big man, on his left; with Mr. Frederick, a still
bigger man, on his right; his own trusty bamboo cane in his hand,
before which poor Barnes had shrunk abashed ere now, Colonel Newcome
had commonly the best of these street encounters, and frowned his
nephew Barnes, and Barnes’s staff, off the pavement. With the
non-electors the Colonel was a decided favourite; the boys invariably
hurrayed him; whereas they jeered and uttered ironical cries after poor
Barnes, asking, “Who beat his wife? Who drove his children to the
workhouse?” and other unkind personal questions. The man upon whom the
libertine Barnes had inflicted so cruel an injury in his early days,
was now the Baronet’s bitterest enemy. He assailed him with curses and
threats when they met, and leagued his brother-workmen against him. The
wretched Sir Barnes owned with contrition that the sins of his youth
pursued him; his enemy scoffed at the idea of Barnes’s repentance; he
was not moved at the grief, the punishment in his own family, the
humiliation and remorse which the repentant prodigal piteously pleaded.
No man was louder in his cries of _mea culpa_ than Barnes: no man
professed a more edifying repentance. He was hat in hand to every
black-coat, established or dissenting. Repentance was to his interest,
to be sure, but yet let us hope it was sincere. There is some
hypocrisy, of which one does not like even to entertain the thought;
especially that awful falsehood which trades with divine truth, and
takes the name of Heaven in vain.

The Roebuck Inn at Newcome stands in the market-place, directly facing
the King’s Arms, where, as we know, Colonel Newcome and uncompromising
toleration held their headquarters. Immense banners of blue and yellow
floated from every window of the King’s Arms, and decorated the balcony
from which the Colonel and the assistants were in the habit of
addressing the multitude. Fiddlers and trumpeters, arrayed in his
colours, paraded the town and enlivened it with their melodious
strains. Other trumpeters and fiddlers, bearing the true-blue cockades
and colours of Sir Barnes Newcome, Bart., would encounter the Colonel’s
musicians, on which occasions of meeting, it is to be feared, small
harmony was produced. They banged each other with their brazen
instruments. The warlike drummers thumped each other’s heads in lieu of
the professional sheepskin. The townboys and street-blackguards
rejoiced in these combats, and exhibited their valour on one side or
the other. The Colonel had to pay a long bill for broken brass when he
settled the little accounts of the election.

In after times, F. B. was pleased to describe the circumstances of a
contest in which he bore a most distinguished part. It was F. B.’s
opinion that his private eloquence brought over many waverers to the
Colonel’s side, and converted numbers of the benighted followers of Sir
Barnes Newcome. Bayham’s voice was indeed magnificent, and could be
heard from the King’s Arm’s balcony above the shout and roar of the
multitude, the gongs and bugles of the opposition bands. He was
untiring in his oratory—undaunted in the presence of the crowds below.
He was immensely popular, F. B. Whether he laid his hand upon his broad
chest, took off his hat and waved it, or pressed his blue and yellow
ribbons to his bosom, the crowd shouted, “Hurra: silence! bravo! Bayham
for ever!” “They would have carried me in triumph,” said F. B.; “if I
had but the necessary qualification I might be member for Newcome this
day or any other I chose.”

I am afraid in this conduct of the Colonel’s election Mr. Bayham
resorted to acts of which his principal certainly would disapprove, and
engaged auxiliaries whose alliance was scarcely creditable. Whose was
the hand which flung the potato which struck Sir Barnes Newcome, Bart.,
on the nose as he was haranguing the people from the Roebuck? How came
it that whenever Sir Barnes and his friends essayed to speak, such an
awful yelling and groaning took place in the crowd below, that the
words of those feeble orators were inaudible? Who smashed all the front
windows of the Roebuck? Colonel Newcome had not words to express his
indignation at proceedings so unfair. When Sir Barnes and staff were
hustled in the market-place and most outrageously shoved, jeered, and
jolted, the Colonel from the King’s Arms organised a rapid sally, which
he himself headed with his bamboo cane; cut out Sir Barnes and his
followers from the hands of the mob, and addressed those ruffians in a
noble speech, of which bamboo-cane—Englishman—shame—fair-play, were the
most emphatic expressions. The mob cheered Old Tom as they called
him—they made way for Sir Barnes, who shrunk pale and shuddering back
into his hotel again—who always persisted in saying that that old
villain of a dragoon had planned both the assault and the rescue.

“When the dregs of the people—the scum of the rabble, sir, banded
together by the myrmidons of Sir Barnes Newcome, attacked us at the
King’s Arms, and smashed ninety-six pounds’ worth of glass at one
volley, besides knocking off the gold unicorn head and the tail of the
British lion; it was fine, sir,” F. B. said, “to see how the Colonel
came forward, and the coolness of the old boy in the midst of the
action. He stood there in front, sir, with his old hat off, never so
much as once bobbing his old head, and I think he spoke rather better
under fire than he did when there was no danger. Between ourselves, he
ain’t much of a speaker, the old Colonel; he hems and haws, and repeats
himself a good deal. He hasn’t the gift of natural eloquence which some
men have, Pendennis. You should have heard my speech, sir, on the
Thursday in the Town Hall—that was something like a speech. Potts was
jealous of it, and always reported me most shamefully.”

In spite of his respectful behaviour to the gentlemen in black coats,
his soup-tickets and his flannel-tickets, his own pathetic lectures and
his sedulous attendance at other folk’s sermons, poor Barnes could not
keep up his credit with the serious interest at Newcome, and the
meeting-houses and their respective pastors and frequenters turned
their backs upon him. The case against him was too flagrant: his enemy,
the factory-man, worked it with an extraordinary skill, malice, and
pertinacity. Not a single man, woman, or child in Newcome but was made
acquainted with Sir Barnes’s early peccadillo. Ribald ballads were
howled through the streets describing his sin, and his deserved
punishment. For very shame, the reverend dissenting gentlemen were
obliged to refrain from voting for him; such as ventured, believing in
the sincerity of his repentance, to give him their voices, were yelled
away from the polling-places. A very great number who would have been
his friends, were compelled to bow to decency and public opinion, and
supported the Colonel.

Hooted away from the hustings, and the public places whence the rival
candidates addressed the free and independent electors, this wretched
and persecuted Sir Barnes invited his friends and supporters to meet
him at the Athenæum Room—scene of his previous eloquent performances.
But, though this apartment was defended by tickets, the people burst
into it; and Nemesis, in the shape of the persevering factory-man,
appeared before the scared Sir Barnes and his puzzled committee. The
man stood up and bearded the pale Baronet. He had a good cause, and was
in truth a far better master of debate than our banking friend, being a
great speaker amongst his brother-operatives, by whom political
questions are discussed, and the conduct of political men examined,
with a ceaseless interest and with an ardour and eloquence which are
often unknown in what is called superior society. This man and his
friends round about him fiercely silenced the clamour of “Turn him
out,” with which his first appearance was assailed by Sir Barnes’s
hangers-on. He said, in the name of justice he would speak up; if they
were fathers of families and loved their wives and daughters he dared
them to refuse him a hearing. Did they love their wives and their
children? it was a shame that they should take such a man as that
yonder for their representative in Parliament. But the greatest
sensation he made was when, in the middle of his speech, after
inveighing against Barnes’s cruelty and parental ingratitude, he asked,
“Where were Barnes’s children?” and actually thrust forward two, to the
amazement of the committee and the ghastly astonishment of the guilty
Baronet himself.

“Look at them,” says the man: “they are almost in rags, they have to
put up with scanty and hard food; contrast them with his other
children, whom you see lording in gilt carriages, robed in purple and
fine linen, and scattering mud from their wheels over us humble people
as we walk the streets; ignorance and starvation is good enough for
these, for those others nothing can be too fine or too dear. What can a
factory-girl expect from such a fine, high-bred, white-handed,
aristocratic gentleman as Sir Barnes Newcome, Baronet, but to be
cajoled, and seduced, and deserted, and left to starve! When she has
served my lord’s pleasure, her natural fate is to be turned into the
street; let her go and rot there and her children beg in the gutter.

“This is the most shameful imposture,” gasps out Sir Barnes, “these
children are not—are not——”

The man interrupted him with a bitter laugh. “No,” he says; “they are
not his; that’s true enough, friends. Its Tom Martin’s girl and boy, a
precious pair of lazy little scamps. But, at least he _thought_ they
were his children. See how much he knows about them! He hasn’t seen his
children for years; he would have left them and their mother to starve,
and did, but for shame and fear. The old man, his father, pensioned
them, and he hasn’t the heart to stop their wages now. Men of Newcome,
will you have this man to represent you in Parliament?” And the crowd
roared “No;” and Barnes and his shamefaced committee slunk out of the
place, and no wonder the dissenting clerical gentlemen were shy of
voting for him.

A brilliant and picturesque diversion in Colonel Newcome’s favour was
due to the inventive genius of his faithful aide-de-camp, F. B. On the
polling-day, as the carriages full of voters came up to the
market-place, there appeared nigh to the booths an open barouche,
covered all over with ribbon, and containing Frederick Bayham, Esq.,
profusely decorated with the Colonel’s colours, and a very old woman
and her female attendant, who were similarly ornamented. It was good
old Mrs. Mason, who was pleased with the drive and the sunshine, though
she scarcely understood the meaning of the turmoil, with her maid by
her side, delighted to wear such ribbons, and sit in such a post of
honour. Rising up in the carriage, F. B. took off his hat, bade his men
of brass be silent, who were accustomed to bray “See the Conquering
Hero come,” whenever the Colonel, or Mr. Bayham, his brilliant
aide-de-camp, made their appearance;—bidding, we say, the musicians and
the universe to be silent, F. B. rose, and made the citizens of Newcome
a splendid speech. Good old unconscious Mrs. Mason was the theme of it,
and the Colonel’s virtues and faithful gratitude in tending her. “She
was his father’s old friend. She was Sir Barnes Newcome’s grandfather’s
old friend. She had lived for more than forty years at Sir Barnes
Newcome’s door, and how often had he been to see her? Did he go every
week? No. Every month? No. Every year? No. Never in the whole course of
his life had he set his foot into her doors!” (Loud yells, and cries of
‘Shame!’) “Never had he done her one single act of kindness. Whereas
for years and years past, when he was away in India, heroically
fighting the battles of his country, when he was distinguishing himself
at Assaye, and—and—Mulligatawny, and Seringapatam, in the hottest of
the fight and the fiercest of the danger, in the most terrible moment
of the conflict, and the crowning glory of the victory, the good, the
brave, the kind old Colonel,—why should he say Colonel? why should he
not say Old Tom at once?” (immense roars of applause) “always
remembered his dear old nurse and friend. Look at that shawl, boys,
which she has got on! My belief is that Colonel Newcome took that shawl
in single combat, and on horseback, from the prime minister of Tippoo
Sahib.” (Immense cheers and cries of ‘Bravo, Bayham!’) “Look at that
brooch the dear old thing wears!” (he kissed her hand whilst so
apostrophising her). “Tom Newcome never brags about his military
achievements, he is the most modest as well as the bravest man in the
world. What if I were to tell you that he cut that brooch from the
throat of an Indian rajah? He’s man enough to do it.” (‘He is! he is!’
from all parts of the crowd.) “What, you want to take the horses out,
do you?” (to the crowd, who were removing those quadrupeds). “I ain’t
agoing to prevent you; I expected as much of you. Men of Newcome, I
expected as much of you, for I know you! Sit still, old lady; don’t be
frightened, ma’am: they are only going to pull you to the King’s Arms,
and show you to the Colonel.”

This, indeed, was the direction in which the mob (whether inflamed by
spontaneous enthusiasm, or excited by cunning agents placed amongst the
populace by F. B., I cannot say), now took the barouche and its three
occupants. With a myriad roar and shout the carriage was dragged up in
front of the King’s Arms, from the balconies of which a most
satisfactory account of the polling was already placarded. The extra
noise and shouting brought out the Colonel, who looked at first with
curiosity at the advancing procession, and then, as he caught sight of
Sarah Mason, with a blush and a bow of his kind old head.

“Look at him, boys!” cried the enraptured F. B., pointing up to the old
man. “Look at him; the dear old boy! Isn’t he an old trump? which will
you have for your Member, Barnes Newcome or Old Tom?”

And as might be supposed, an immense shout of “Old Tom!” arose from the
multitude; in the midst of which, blushing and bowing still, the
Colonel went back to his committee-room: and the bands played “See the
Conquering Hero” louder than ever; and poor Barnes in the course of his
duty having to come out upon his balcony at the Roebuck opposite, was
saluted with a yell as vociferous as the cheer for the Colonel had
been; and old Mrs. Mason asked what the noise was about; and after
making several vain efforts, in dumb show, to the crowd, Barnes slunk
back into his hole again as pale as the turnip which was flung at his
head: and the horses were brought, and Mrs. Mason driven home; and the
day of election came to an end.

Reasons of personal gratitude, as we have stated already, prevented His
Highness the Prince de Moncontour from taking a part in this family
contest. His brethren of the House of Higg, however, very much to
Florac’s gratification, gave their second votes to Colonel Newcome,
carrying with them a very great number of electors: we know that in the
present Parliament, Mr. Higg and Mr. Bunce sit for the borough of
Newcome. Having had monetary transactions with Sir Barnes Newcome, and
entered largely into railway speculations with him, the Messrs. Higg
had found reason to quarrel with the Baronet; accuse him of sharp
practices to the present day, and have long stories to tell which do
not concern us about Sir Barnes’s stratagems, grasping, and extortion.
They their following, deserting Sir Barnes, whom they had supported in
previous elections, voted for the Colonel, although some of the
opinions of that gentleman were rather too extreme for such sober
persons.

Not exactly knowing what his politics were when he commenced the
canvass, I can’t say to what opinions the poor Colonel did not find
himself committed by the time when the election was over. The worthy
gentleman felt himself not a little humiliated by what he had to say
and to unsay, by having to answer questions, and submit to
familiarities, to shake hands which, to say truth, he did not care for
grasping at all. His habits were aristocratic; his education had been
military; the kindest and simplest soul alive, he yet disliked all
familiarity, and expected from common people the sort of deference
which he had received from his men in the regiment. The contest
saddened and mortified him; he felt that he was using wrong means to
obtain an end that perhaps was not right (for so his secret conscience
must have told him); he was derogating from his own honour in tampering
with political opinions, submitting to familiarities, condescending to
stand by whilst his agents solicited vulgar suffrages or uttered
claptraps about retrenchment and reform. “I felt I was wrong,” he said
to me, in after days, “though _I_ was too proud to own my error in
those times, and you and your good wife and my boy were right in
protesting against that mad election.” Indeed, though we little knew
what events were speedily to happen, Laura and I felt very little
satisfaction when the result of the Newcome election was made known to
us, and we found Sir Barnes Newcome third, and Col. Thomas Newcome
second upon the poll.

Ethel was absent with her children at Brighton. She was glad, she
wrote, not to have been at home during the election. Mr. and Mrs. C.
were at Brighton, too. Ethel had seen Mrs. C. and her child once or
twice. It was a very fine child. “My brother came down to us,” she
wrote, “after all was over. He is furious against M. de Moncontour,
who, he says, persuaded the Whigs to vote against him, and turned the
election.”




CHAPTER LXX.
Chiltern Hundreds


We shall say no more regarding Thomas Newcome’s political doings; his
speeches against Barnes, and the Baronet’s replies. The nephew was
beaten by his stout old uncle.

In due time the _Gazette_ announced that Thomas Newcome, Esq., was
returned as one of the Members of Parliament for the borough of
Newcome; and after triumphant dinners, speeches, and rejoicings, the
Member came back to his family in London, and to his affairs in that
city.

The good Colonel appeared to be by no means elated by his victory. He
would not allow that he was wrong in engaging in that family war, of
which we have just seen the issue; though it may be that his secret
remorse on this account in part occasioned his disquiet. But there were
other reasons, which his family not long afterwards came to understand,
for the gloom and low spirits which now oppressed the head of their
home.

It was observed (that is, if simple little Rosey took the trouble to
observe) that the entertainments at the Colonel’s mansion were more
frequent and splendid even than before; the silver cocoa-nut tree was
constantly in requisition, and around it were assembled many new
guests, who had not formerly been used to sit under those branches. Mr.
Sherrick and his wife appeared at those parties, at which the
proprietor of Lady Whittlesea’s Chapel made himself perfectly familiar.
Sherrick cut jokes with the master of the house, which the latter
received with a very grave acquiescence; he ordered the servants about,
addressing the butler as “Old Corkscrew,” and bidding the footman, whom
he loved to call by his Christian name, to “look alive.” He called the
Colonel “Newcome” sometimes, and facetiously speculated upon the degree
of relationship subsisting between them now that his daughter was
married to Clive’s uncle, the Colonel’s brother-in-law. Though I dare
say Clive did not much relish receiving news of his aunt, Sherrick was
sure to bring such intelligence when it reached him; and announced, in
due time, the birth of a little cousin at Boggley Wollah, whom the fond
parents designed to name “Thomas Newcome Honeyman.”

A dreadful panic and ghastly terror seized poor Clive on occasion which
he described to me afterwards. Going out from home one day with his
father, he beheld a wine-merchant’s cart, from which hampers were
carried down the area gate into the lower regions of Colonel Newcome’s
house. “Sherrick and Co., Wine Merchants, Walpole Street,” was painted
upon the vehicle.

“Good heavens! sir, do you get your wine from _him?_” Clive cried out
to his father, remembering Honeyman’s provisions in early times. The
Colonel, looking very gloomy and turning red, said, “Yes, he bought
wine from Sherrick, who had been very good-natured and serviceable; and
who—and who, you know, is our connexion now.” When informed of the
circumstance by Clive, I too, as I confess, thought the incident
alarming.

Then Clive, with a laugh, told me of a grand battle which had taken
place in consequence of Mrs. Mackenzie’s behaviour to the
wine-merchant’s wife. The Campaigner had treated this very kind and
harmless, but vulgar woman, with extreme _hauteur_—had talked loud
during her singing—the beauty of which, to say truth, time had
considerably impaired—had made contemptuous observations regarding her
upon more than one occasion. At length the Colonel broke out in great
wrath against Mrs. Mackenzie—bade her to respect that lady as one of
his guests—and, if she did not like the company which assembled at his
house, hinted to her that there were many thousand other houses in
London where she could find a lodging. For the sake of her grandchild,
and her adored child, the Campaigner took no notice of this hint; and
declined to remove from the quarter which she had occupied ever since
she had become a grandmamma.

I myself dined once or twice with my old friends, under the shadow of
the pickle-bearing cocoa-nut tree; and could not but remark a change of
personages in the society assembled. The manager of the City branch of
the B. B. C. was always present—an ominous-looking man, whose whispers
and compliments seemed to make poor Clive, at his end of the table,
very melancholy. With the City manager came the City manager’s friends,
whose jokes passed gaily round, and who kept the conversation to
themselves. Once I had the happiness to meet Mr. Ratray, who had
returned, filled with rupees from the Indian Bank; who told us many
anecdotes of the splendour of Rummun Loll at Calcutta, who complimented
the Colonel on his fine house and grand dinners with sinister
good-humour. Those compliments did not seem to please our poor friend;
that familiarity choked him. A brisk little chattering attorney, very
intimate with Sherrick, with a wife of dubious gentility, was another
constant guest. He enlivened the table by his jokes, and recounted
choice stories about the aristocracy, with certain members of whom the
little man seemed very familiar. He knew to a shilling how much this
lord owed—and how much the creditors allowed to that marquis. He had
been concerned with such and such a nobleman, who was now in the
Queen’s Bench. He spoke of their lordships affably and without their
titles—calling upon “Louisa, my dear,” his wife, to testify to the day
when Viscount Tagrag dined with them, and Earl Bareacres sent them the
pheasants. F. B., as sombre and downcast as his hosts now seemed to be,
informed me demurely that the attorney was a member of one of the most
eminent firms in the City—that he had been engaged in procuring the
Colonel’s parliamentary title for him—and in various important matters
appertaining to the B. B. C.; but my knowledge of the world and the law
was sufficient to make me aware that this gentleman belonged to a
well-known firm of money-lending solicitors, and I trembled to see such
a person in the home of our good Colonel. Where were the generals and
the judges? Where were the fogies and their respectable ladies? Stupid
they were, and dull their company; but better a stalled ox in their
society, than Mr. Campion’s jokes over Mr. Sherrick’s wines.

After the little rebuke administered by Colonel Newcome, Mrs. Mackenzie
abstained from overt hostilities against any guests of her daughter’s
father-in-law; and contented herself by assuming grand and
princess-like airs in the company of the new ladies. They flattered her
and poor little Rosa intensely. The latter liked their company, no
doubt. To a man of the world looking on, who has seen the men and
morals of many cities, it was curious, almost pathetic, to watch that
poor little innocent creature fresh and smiling, attired in bright
colours and a thousand gewgaws, simpering in the midst of these
darkling people—practising her little arts and coquetries, with such a
court round about her. An unconscious little maid, with rich and rare
gems sparkling on all her fingers, and bright gold rings as many as
belonged to the late Old Woman of Banbury Cross—still she smiled and
prattled innocently before these banditti—I thought of Zerlina and the
Brigands, in Fra Diavolo.

Walking away with F. B. from one of these parties of the Colonel’s, and
seriously alarmed at what I had observed there, I demanded of Bayham
whether my conjectures were not correct, that some misfortune overhung
our old friend’s house? At first Bayham denied stoutly or pretended
ignorance; but at length, having reached the Haunt together, which I
had not visited since I was a married man, we entered that place of
entertainment, and were greeted by its old landlady and waitress, and
accommodated with a quiet parlour. And here F. B., after groaning and
sighing—after solacing himself with a prodigious quantity of bitter
beer—fairly burst out, and, with tears in his eyes, made a full and sad
confession respecting this unlucky Bundelcund Banking Company. The
shares had been going lower and lower, so that there was no sale now
for them at all. To meet the liabilities, the directors must have
undergone the greatest sacrifices. He did know—he did not like to think
what the Colonel’s personal losses were. The respectable solicitors of
the Company had retired, long since, after having secured payment of a
most respectable bill; and had given place to the firm of dubious
law-agents of whom I had that evening seen a partner. How the retiring
partners from India had been allowed to withdraw, and to bring fortunes
along with them, was a mystery to Mr. Frederick Bayham. The great
Indian millionnaire was in his, F. B.’s eyes, “a confounded
mahogany-coloured heathen humbug.” These fine parties which the Colonel
was giving, and that fine carriage which was always flaunting about the
Park with poor Mrs. Clive and the Campaigner, and the nurse and the
baby, were, in F. B.’s opinion, all decoys and shams. He did not mean
to say that the meals were not paid, and that the Colonel had to
plunder for his horses’ corn; but he knew that Sherrick, and the
attorney, and the manager, insisted upon the necessity of giving these
parties, and keeping up this state and grandeur, and opined that it was
at the special instance of these advisers that the Colonel had
contested the borough for which he was now returned. “Do you know how
much that contest cost?” asks F. B. “The sum, sir, was awful! and we
have ever so much of it to pay. I came up twice myself from Newcome to
Campion and Sherrick about it. I betray no secrets—F. B., sir, would
die a thousand deaths before he would tell the secrets of his
benefactor!—But, Pendennis, you understand a thing or two. You know
what o’clock it is, and so does yours truly, F. B., who drinks your
health. _I_ know the taste of Sherrick’s wine well enough. F. B., sir,
fears the Greeks and all the gifts they bring. Confound his
Amontillado! I had rather drink this honest malt and hops all my life
than ever see a drop of his abominable sherry. Golden? F. B. believes
it _is_ golden—and a precious deal dearer than gold too”—and herewith,
ringing the bell, my friend asked for a second pint of the just-named
and cheaper fluid.

I have of late had to recount portions of my dear old friend’s history
which must needs be told, and over which the writer does not like to
dwell. If Thomas Newcome’s opulence was unpleasant to describe, and to
contrast with the bright goodness and simplicity I remembered in former
days, how much more painful is that part of his story to which we are
now come perforce, and which the acute reader of novels has, no doubt,
long foreseen? Yes, sir or madam, you are quite right in the opinion
which you have held all along regarding that Bundelcund Banking
Company, in which our Colonel has invested every rupee he possesses,
_Solvuntur rupees_, etc. I disdain, for the most part, the tricks and
surprises of the novelist’s art. Knowing, from the very beginning of
our story, what was the issue of this Bundelcund Banking concern, I
have scarce had patience to keep my counsel about it; and whenever I
have had occasion to mention the Company, have scarcely been able to
refrain from breaking out into fierce diatribes against that
complicated, enormous, outrageous swindle. It was one of many similar
cheats which have been successfully practised upon the simple folks,
civilian and military, who toil and struggle—who fight with sun and
enemy—who pass years of long exile and gallant endurance in the service
of our empire in India. Agency houses after agency houses have been
established, and have flourished in splendour and magnificence, and
have paid fabulous dividends—and have enormously enriched two or three
wary speculators—and then have burst in bankruptcy, involving widows,
orphans, and countless simple people who trusted their all to the
keeping of these unworthy treasurers.

The failure of the Bundelcund Bank which we now have to record, was one
only of many similar schemes ending in ruin. About the time when Thomas
Newcome was chaired as Member of Parliament for the borough of which he
bore the name, the great Indian merchant who was at the head of the
Bundelcund Banking Company’s affairs at Calcutta, suddenly died of
cholera at his palace at Barackpore. He had been giving of late a
series of the most splendid banquets with which Indian prince ever
entertained a Calcutta society. The greatest and proudest personages of
that aristocratic city had attended his feasts. The fairest Calcutta
beauties had danced in his halls. Did not poor F. B. transfer from the
columns of the _Bengal Hurkaru_ to the _Pall Mall Gazette_ the most
astounding descriptions of those Asiatic Nights Entertainments, of
which the very grandest was to come off on the night when cholera
seized Rummun Loll in its grip? There was to have been a masquerade
outvying all European masquerades in splendour. The two rival queens of
the Calcutta society were to have appeared each with her court around
her. Young civilians at the College, and young ensigns fresh landed,
had gone into awful expenses and borrowed money at interest from the B.
B. C. and other banking companies, in order to appear with befitting
splendour as knights and noblemen of Henrietta Maria’s Court (Henrietta
Maria, wife of Hastings Hicks, Esq., Sudder Dewanee Adawlut), or as
princes and warriors surrounding the palanquin of Lalla Rookh (the
lovely wife of Hon. Cornwallis Bobus, Member of Council): all these
splendours were there. As carriage after carriage drove up from
Calcutta, they were met at Rummun Loll’s gate by ghastly weeping
servants, who announced their master’s demise.

On the next day the Bank at Calcutta was closed, and the day after,
when heavy bills were presented which must be paid, although by this
time Rummun Loll was not only dead but buried, and his widows howling
over his grave, it was announced throughout Calcutta that but 800
rupees were left in the treasury of the B. B. C. to meet engagements to
the amount of four lakhs then immediately due, and sixty days
afterwards the shutters were closed at No. 175 Lothbury, the London
offices of the B. B. C. of India, and 35,000 pounds worth of their
bills refused by their agents, Messrs. Baines, Jolly and Co., of Fog
Court.

When the accounts of that ghastly bankruptcy arrived from Calcutta, it
was found, of course, that the merchant-prince Rummun Loll owed the B.
B. C. twenty-five lakhs of rupees, the value of which was scarcely even
represented by his respectable signature. It was found that one of the
auditors of the bank, the generally esteemed Charley Conder (a capital
fellow, famous for his good dinners, and for playing low-comedy
characters at the Chowringhee Theatre), was indebted to the bank in
90,000 pounds; and also it was discovered that the revered Baptist
Bellman, Chief Registrar of the Calcutta Tape and Sealing-Wax Office (a
most valuable and powerful amateur preacher who had converted two
natives, and whose serious soirées were thronged at Calcutta), had
helped himself to 73,000 pounds more, for which he settled in the
Bankruptcy Court before he resumed his duties in his own. In justice to
Mr. Bellman, it must be said that he could have had no idea of the
catastrophe impending over the B. B. C. For, only three weeks before
that great bank closed its doors, Mr. Bellman, as guardian of the
children of his widowed sister Mrs. Green, had sold the whole of the
late Colonel’s property out of Company’s paper and invested it in the
bank, which gave a high interest, and with bills of which, drawn upon
their London correspondents, he had accommodated Mrs. Colonel Green
when she took her departure for Europe with her numerous little family
on board the Burrumpooter.

And now you have the explanation of the title of this chapter, and know
wherefore Thomas Newcome never sat in Parliament. Where are our dear
old friends now? Where are Rosey’s chariots and horses? Where her
jewels and gewgaws? Bills are up in the fine new house. Swarms of
Hebrew gentlemen with their hats on are walking about the
drawing-rooms, peering into the bedrooms, weighing and poising the poor
old silver cocoa-nut tree, eyeing the plate and crystal, thumbing the
damask of the curtains, and inspecting ottomans, mirrors, and a hundred
articles of splendid trumpery. There is Rosey’s boudoir which her
father-in-law loved to ornament—there is Clive’s studio with a hundred
sketches—there is the Colonel’s bare room at the top of the house, with
his little iron bedstead and ship’s drawers, and a camel trunk or two
which have accompanied him on many an Indian march, and his old
regulation sword, and that one which the native officers of his
regiment gave him when he bade them farewell. I can fancy the brokers’
faces as they look over this camp wardrobe, and that the uniforms will
not fetch much in Holywell Street. There is the old one still, and that
new one which he ordered and wore when poor little Rosey was presented
at court. I had not the heart to examine their plunder, and go amongst
those wreckers. F. B. used to attend the sale regularly, and report its
proceedings to us with eyes full of tears. “A fellow laughed at me,”
says F. B., “because when I came into the dear old drawing-room I took
my hat off. I told him that if he dared say another word I would knock
him down.” I think F. B. may be pardoned in this instance for emulating
the office of auctioneer. Where are you, pretty Rosey and poor little
helpless baby? Where are you, dear Clive—gallant young friend of my
youth? Ah! it is a sad story—a melancholy page to pen! Let us pass it
over quickly—I love not to think of my friend in pain.




CHAPTER LXXI.
In which Mrs. Clive Newcome’s Carriage is ordered


All the friends of the Newcome family, of course, knew the disaster
which had befallen the good Colonel, and I was aware, for my own part,
that not only his own, but almost the whole of Rosa Newcome’s property
was involved in the common ruin. Some proposals of temporary relief
were made to our friends from more quarters than one, but were
thankfully rejected—and we were led to hope that the Colonel, having
still his pension secured to him, which the law could not touch, might
live comfortably enough the retirement to which, of course, he would
betake himself, when the melancholy proceedings consequent on the
bankruptcy were brought to an end. It was shown that he had been
egregiously duped in the transaction—that his credulity had cost him
and his family a large fortune—that he had given up every penny which
belonged to him—that there could not be any sort of stain upon his
honest reputation. The judge before whom he appeared spoke with feeling
and regard of the unhappy gentleman—the lawyer who examined him
respected the grief and fall of that simple old man. Thomas Newcome
took a little room near the court where his affairs and the affairs of
the company were adjudged—lived with a frugality which never was
difficult to him—And once when perchance I met him in the City, avoided
me, with a bow and courtesy that was quite humble, though proud and
somehow inexpressibly touching to me. Fred Bayham was the only person
whom he admitted. Fred always faithfully insisted upon attending him in
and out of court. J. J. came to me immediately after he heard of the
disaster, eager to place all his savings at the service of his friends.
Laura and I came to London, and were urgent with similar offers. Our
good friend declined to see any of us. F. B., again, with tears
trickling on his rough cheeks, and a break in his voice, told me he
feared that affairs must be very bad indeed, for the Colonel absolutely
denied himself a cheroot to smoke. Laura drove to his lodgings and took
him a box, which was held up to him as he came to open the door to my
wife’s knock by our smiling little boy, He patted the child on his
golden head and kissed him. My wife wished he would have done as much
for her—but he would not—though she owned she kissed his hand. He drew
it across his eyes and thanked her in a very calm and stately
manner—but he did not invite her within the threshold of his door,
saying simply, that such a room was not a fit place to receive a lady,
“as you ought to know very well, Mrs. Smith,” he said to the landlady,
who had accompanied my wife up the stairs. “He will eat scarcely
anything,” the woman told us, “his meals come down untouched; his
candles are burning all night, almost, as he sits poring over his
papers.”

“He was bent—he who used to walk so uprightly,” Laura said. He seemed
to have grown many years older, and was, indeed, quite a decrepit old
man.

“I am glad they have left Clive out of the bankruptcy,” the Colonel
said to Bayham; it was almost the only time when his voice exhibited
any emotion. “It was very kind of them to leave out Clive, poor boy,
and I have thanked the lawyers in court.” Those gentlemen, and the
judge himself, were very much moved at this act of gratitude. The judge
made a very feeling speech to the Colonel when he came up for his
certificate. He passed very different comments on the conduct of the
Manager of the Bank, when that person appeared for examination. He
wished that the law had power to deal with those gentlemen who had come
home with large fortunes from India, realised but a few years before
the bankruptcy. Those gentlemen had known how to take care of
themselves very well; and as for the Manager, is not his wife giving
elegant balls at her elegant house at Cheltenham at this very day?

What weighed most upon the Colonel’s mind, F. B. imagined, was the
thought that he had been the means of inducing many poor friends to
embark their money in this luckless speculation. Take J. J.’s money
after he had persuaded old Ridley to place 200 pounds in Indian shares!
Good God, he and his family should rather perish than he would touch a
farthing of it! Many fierce words were uttered to him by Mrs.
Mackenzie, for instance—by her angry daughter at Musselburgh—Josey’s
husband, by Mr. Smee, R.A., and two or three Indian officers, friends
of his own, who had entered into the speculation on his recommendation.
These rebukes Thomas Newcome bore with an affecting meekness, as his
faithful F. B. described to me, striving with many oaths and much
loudness to carry off his own emotion. But what moved the Colonel most
of all, was a letter which came at this time from Honeyman in India,
saying that he was doing well—that of course he knew of his
benefactor’s misfortune, and that he sent a remittance which, _D. V._,
should be annual, in payment of his debt to the Colonel, and his good
sister at Brighton. “On receipt of this letter,” said F. B., “the old
man was fairly beaten—the letter, with the bill in it, dropped out of
his hands. He clasped them together, shaking in every limb, and his
head dropped down on his breast as he said, ‘I thank my God Almighty
for this!’ and he sent the cheque off to Mrs. Honeyman by the post that
night, sir, every shilling of it; and he passed his old arm under
mine—and we went out to Tom’s Coffee-House, and he ate some dinner the
first time for ever so long, and drank a couple of glasses of port
wine, and F. B. stood it, sir, and would stand his heart’s blood that
dear old boy.”

It was on a Monday morning that those melancholy shutters were seen
over the offices of the Bundelcund Bank in Lothbury, which were not to
come down until the rooms were handed over to some other, and, let us
trust, more fortunate speculators. The Indian bills had arrived, and
been protested in the City on the previous Saturday. The Campaigner and
Mrs. Rosey had arranged a little party to the theatre that evening, and
the gallant Captain Goby had agreed to quit the delights of the Flag
Club, in order to accompany the ladies. Neither of them knew what was
happening in the City, or could account otherwise than by the common
domestic causes, for Clive’s gloomy despondency and his father’s sad
reserve. Clive had not been in the City on this day. He had spent it,
as usual, in his studio, _boudé_ by his wife, and not disturbed by the
messroom raillery of the Campaigner. They had dined early, in order to
be in time for the theatre. Goby entertained them with the latest jokes
from the smoking-room at the Flag, and was in his turn amused by the
brilliant plans for the season which Rosey and her mamma sketched out
the entertainments which Mrs. Clive proposed to give, the ball—she was
dying for a masked ball just such a one as that was described in the
_Pall Mall Gazette_ of last week, out of that paper with the droll
title, the _Bengal Hurkaru_, which the merchant-prince, the head of the
bank, you know, in India, had given at Calcutta. “We must have a ball,
too,” says Mrs. Mackenzie; “society demands it of you.” “Of course it
does,” echoes Captain Goby, and he bethought him of a brilliant circle
of young fellows from the Flag, whom he would bring in splendid uniform
to dance with the pretty Mrs. Clive Newcome.

After the dinner—they little knew it was to be their last in that fine
house—the ladies retired to give their parting kiss to baby—a parting
look to the toilettes, with which they proposed to fascinate the
inhabitants of the pit and the public boxes at the Olympic. Goby made
vigorous play with the claret-bottle during the brief interval of
potation allowed to him; he, too, little deeming that he should never
drink bumper there again; Clive looking on with the melancholy and
silent acquiescence which had, of late, been his part in the household.
The carriage was announced—the ladies came down—pretty capotes on the
lovely Campaigner, Goby vowed, looking as young and as handsome as her
daughter, by Jove, and the ball door was opened to admit the two
gentlemen and ladies to their carriage, when, as they were about to
step in, a hansom cab drove up rapidly, in which was perceived Thomas
Newcome’s anxious face. He got out of the vehicle—his own carriage
making way for him—the ladies still on the steps. “Oh, the play! I
forgot,” said the Colonel.

“Of course we are going to the play, papa,” cries little Rosey, with a
gay little tap of her hand.

“I think you had better not,” Colonel Newcome said gravely.

“Indeed my darling child has set her heart upon it, and I would not
have her disappointed for the world in her situation,” cries the
Campaigner, tossing up her head.

The Colonel for reply bade his coachman drive to the stables, and come
for further orders; and, turning to his daughter’s guest, expressed to
Captain Goby his regret that the proposed party could not take place on
that evening, as he had matter of very great importance to communicate
to his family. On hearing these news, and understanding that his
further company was not desirable, the Captain, a man of great presence
of mind, arrested the hansom cabman, who was about to take his
departure, and who blithely, knowing the Club and its inmates full
well, carried off the jolly Captain to finish his evening at the Flag.

“Has it come, father?” said Clive with a sure prescience, looking in
his father’s face.

The father took and grasped the hand which his son held out. “Let us go
back into the dining-room,” he said. They entered it, and he filled
himself a glass of wine out of the bottle still standing amidst the
dessert. He bade the butler retire, who was lingering about the room
and sideboard, and only wanted to know whether his master would have
dinner, that was all. And, this gentleman having withdrawn, Colonel
Newcome finished his glass of sherry and broke a biscuit; the
Campaigner assuming an attitude of surprise and indignation, whilst
Rosey had leisure to remark that papa looked very ill, and that
something must have happened.

The Colonel took both her hands and drew her towards him and kissed
her, whilst Rosey’s mamma, flouncing down on a chair, beat a tattoo
upon the tablecloth with her fan. “Something has happened, my love,”
the Colonel said very sadly; “you must show all your strength of mind,
for a great misfortune has befallen us.”

“Good heavens, Colonel, what is it? don’t frighten my beloved child,”
cries the Campaigner, rushing towards her darling, and enveloping her
in her robust arms. “What can have happened, don’t agitate this darling
child, sir,” and she looked indignantly towards the poor Colonel.

“We have received the very worst news from Calcutta, a confirmation of
the news by the last mail, Clivey, my boy.”

“It is no news to me. I have always been expecting it, father,” says
Clive, holding down his head.

“Expecting what? What have you been keeping back from us? In what have
you been deceiving us, Colonel Newcome?” shrieks the Campaigner; and
Rosa, crying out, “Oh, mamma, mamma!” begins to whimper.

“The chief of the bank in India is dead,” the Colonel went on. “He has
left its affairs in worse than disorder. We are, I fear, ruined, Mrs.
Mackenzie.” And the Colonel went on to tell how the bank could not open
on Monday morning, and its bills to a great amount had already been
protested in the City that day.

Rosey did not understand half these news, or comprehend the calamity
which was to follow; but Mrs. Mackenzie, rustling in great wrath, made
a speech, of which the anger gathered as he proceeded; in which she
vowed and protested that her money, which the Colonel, she did not know
from _what motives_, had induced her to subscribe, should not be
sacrificed, and that have it she would, the bank shut or not, the next
Monday morning—that her daughter had a fortune of her own which her
poor dear brother James should have divided and would have divided much
more fairly, had he not been wrongly influenced—she would not say by
whom, and she commanded Colonel Newcome upon that _instant_, if he was,
as he always pretended to be, an _honourable_ man, to give an account
of her blessed darling’s property, and to pay back her own, every
sixpence of it. She would not lend it for an hour longer, and to see
that that dear blessed child now sleeping unconsciously upstairs, and
his dear brothers and sisters who might follow, for Rosey was a young
woman, a poor innocent creature, too young to be married, and never
would have been married had she listened to her mamma’s advice. She
demanded that the baby, and all succeeding babies, should have their
_rights_, and should be looked to by their grandmother, if their
father’s father was so _unkind_, and so _wicked_, and so _unnatural_,
as to give their money to rogues, and deprive them of their just bread.

Rosey began to cry more loudly than ever during the utterance of
mamma’s sermon, so loudly that Clive peevishly cried out, “Hold your
tongue,” on which the Campaigner, clutching her daughter to her breast
again, turned on her son-in-law, and abused him as she had abused his
father before him, calling out that they were both in a conspiracy to
defraud her child, and the little darling upstairs of its bread, and
she would speak, yes, she would, and no power should prevent her, and
her money she would have on Monday, as sure as her poor dear husband,
Captain Mackenzie, was dead, and she never would have been _cheated_
so, yes, _cheated_, if he had been alive.

At the word “cheated” Clive broke out with an execration—the poor
Colonel with a groan of despair—the widow’s storm continued, and above
that howling tempest of words rose Mrs. Clive’s piping scream, who went
off into downright hysterics at last, in which she was encouraged by
her mother, and in which she gasped out frantic ejaculations regarding
baby; dear, darling, ruined baby, and so forth.

The sorrow-stricken Colonel had to quell the women’s tongues and shrill
anger, and his son’s wrathful replies, who could not bear the weight of
Mrs. Mackenzie upon him; and it was not until these three were allayed,
that Thomas Newcome was able to continue his sad story, to explain what
had happened, and what the actual state of the case was, and to oblige
the terror-stricken women at length to hear something like reason.

He then had to tell them, to their dismay, that he would inevitably be
declared a bankrupt in the ensuing week; that the whole of his property
in that house, as elsewhere, would be seized and sold for the
creditors’ benefit; and that his daughter had best immediately leave a
home where she would be certainly subject to humiliation and annoyance.
“I would have Clive, my boy, take you out of the country, and—and
return to me when I have need of him, and shall send for him,” the
father said fondly in reply to a rebellious look on his son’s face. “I
would have you quit this house as soon as possible. Why not to-night?
The law blood-hound may be upon us ere an hour is over—at this moment
for what I know.”

At that moment the door-bell was heard to ring, and the women gave a
scream apiece, as if the bailiffs were actually coming to take
possession. Rosey went off in quite a series of screams, peevishly
repressed by her husband, and always encouraged by mamma, who called
her son-in-law an unfeeling wretch. It must be confessed that Mrs.
Clive Newcome did not exhibit much strength of mind, or comfort her
husband much at a moment when he needed consolation.

From angry rebellion and fierce remonstrance, this pair of women now
passed to an extreme terror and desire for instantaneous flight. They
would go that moment—they would wrap the blessed child up in its
shawls—and nurse should take it anywhere—anywhere, poor neglected
thing. “My trunks,” cries Mrs. Mackenzie, “you know are ready packed—I
am sure it is not the treatment which I have received—it is nothing but
my _duty_ and my _religion_—and the protection which I owe to this
blessed unprotected—yes, _unprotected_, and _robbed_, and _cheated_,
darling child—which have made me stay a _single day_ in this house. I
never thought I should have been _robbed_ in it, or my darlings with
their fine fortunes flung naked on the world. If my Mac was here, you
never had dared to have done this, Colonel Newcome—no, never. He had
his faults—Mackenzie had—but he would never have robbed his own
children! Come away, Rosey, my blessed love, come let us pack your
things, and let us go and _hide_ our _heads_ in sorrow somewhere. Ah!
didn’t I tell you to beware of all _painters_, and that Clarence was a
true gentleman, and loved you with all his heart, and would never have
cheated you out of your money, for which I will have justice as sure as
there is justice in England.”

During this outburst the Colonel sat utterly scared and silent,
supporting his poor head between his hands. When the harem had departed
he turned sadly to his son. Clive did not believe that his father was a
cheat and a rogue. No, thank God! The two men embraced with tender
cordiality and almost happy emotion on the one side and the other.
Never for one moment could Clive think his dear old father meant
wrong—though the speculations were unfortunate in which he had
engaged—though Clive had not liked them; it was a relief to his mind
that they were now come to an end; they should all be happier now,
thank God! those clouds of distrust being removed. Clive felt not one
moment’s doubt but that they should be able to meet fortune with a
brave face; and that happier, much happier days were in store for him
than ever they had known since the period of this confounded
prosperity.

“Here’s a good end to it,” says Clive, with flashing eyes and a flushed
face, “and here’s a good health till to-morrow, father!” and he filled
into two glasses the wine still remaining in the flask. “Good-bye to
our fortune, and bad luck go with her—I puff the prostitute away—_Si
celeres quatit pennas_, you remember what we used to say at Grey
Friars—_resigno quæ dedit, et mea virtute me involvo, probamque
pauperiem sine dote quæro_.” And he pledged his father, who drank his
wine, his hand shaking as he raised the glass to his lips, and his kind
voice trembling as he uttered the well-known old school words, with an
emotion that was as sacred as a prayer. Once more, and with hearts full
of love, the two men embraced. Clive’s voice would tremble now if he
told the story, as it did when he spoke it to me in happier times, one
calm summer evening when we sat together and talked of dear old days.

Thomas Newcome explained to his son the plan, which, to his mind, as he
came away from the City after the day’s misfortunes, he thought it was
best to pursue. The women and the child were clearly best out of the
way. “And you too, my boy, must be on duty with them until I send for
you, which I will do if your presence can be of the least service to
me, or is called for by—by—our honour,” said the old man with a drop in
his voice. “You must obey me in this, dear Clive, as you have done in
everything, and been a good and dear, and obedient son to me. God
pardon me for having trusted to my own simple old brains too much, and
not to you who know so much better. You will obey me this once more, my
boy—you will promise me this?” and the old man as he spoke took Clive’s
hand in both his, and fondly caressed it.

Then with a shaking hand he took out of his pocket his old purse with
the steel rings, which he had worn for many and many a long year. Clive
remembered it, and his father’s face how it would beam with delight,
when he used to take that very purse out in Clive’s boyish days and tip
him just after he left school. “Here are some notes and some gold,” he
said. “It is Rosey’s, honestly, Clive dear, her half-year’s dividend,
for which you will give an order, please, to Sherrick. He has been very
kind and good, Sherrick. All the servants were providentially paid last
week—there are only the outstanding week’s bills out—we shall manage to
meet those, I dare say. And you will see that Rosey only takes away
such clothes for herself and her baby as are actually necessary, won’t
you, dear? the plain things, you know—none of the fineries—they may be
packed in a petara or two, and you will take them with you—but the
pomps and vanities, you know, we will leave behind—the pearls and
bracelets, and the plate, and all that rubbish—and I will make an
inventory of them to-morrow when you are gone, and give them up, every
rupee’s worth, sir, every anna, by Jove, to the creditors.”

The darkness had fallen by this time, and the obsequious butler entered
to light the dining-room lamps. “You have been a very good and kind
servant to us, Martin,” says the Colonel, making him a low bow. “I
should like to shake you by the hand. We must part company now, and I
have no doubt you and your fellow servants will find good places, all
of you, as you merit, Martin—as you merit. Great losses have fallen
upon our family—we are ruined, sir—we are ruined! The great Bundelcund
Banking Company has stopped payment in India, and our branch here must
stop on Monday. Thank my friends downstairs for their kindness to me
and my family.” Martin bowed in silence with great respect. He and his
comrades in the servants’-hall had been expecting this catastrophe,
quite as long as the Colonel himself who thought he had kept his
affairs so profoundly secret.

Clive went up into his women’s apartments, looking with but little
regret, I dare say, round those cheerless nuptial chambers with all
their gaudy fittings; the fine looking-glasses, in which poor Rosey’s
little person had been reflected; the silken curtains under which he
had lain by the poor child’s side, wakeful and lonely. Here he found
his child’s nurse, and his wife, and wife’s mother, busily engaged with
a multiplicity of boxes; with flounces, feathers, fal-lals, and finery,
which they were stowing away in this trunk and that; while the baby lay
on its little pink pillow breathing softly, a little pearly fist placed
close to its mouth. The aspect of the tawdry vanities scattered here
and there chafed and annoyed the young man. He kicked the robes over
with his foot. When Mrs. Mackenzie interposed with loud ejaculations,
he sternly bade her to be silent, and not wake the child. His words
were not to be questioned when he spoke in that manner. “You will take
nothing with you, Rosey, but what is strictly necessary—only two or
three of your plainest dresses, and what is required for the boy. What
is in this trunk?” Mrs. Mackenzie stepped forward and declared, and the
nurse vowed upon her honour, and the lady’s-maid asserted really now
upon honour too, that there was nothing but what was most strictly
necessary in that trunk, to which affidavits, when Clive applied to his
wife, she gave a rather timid assent.

“Where are the keys of that trunk?” Upon Mrs. Mackenzie’s exclamation
of “What nonsense!” Clive, putting his foot upon the flimsy oil-covered
box, vowed he would kick the lid off unless it was instantly opened.
Obeying this grim summons, the fluttering women produced the keys, and
the black box was opened before him.

The box was found to contain a number of objects which Clive pronounced
to be by no means necessary to his wife’s and child’s existence.
Trinket-boxes and favourite little gimcracks, chains, rings and pearl
necklaces, the tiara poor Rosey had worn at court—the feathers and the
gorgeous train which had decorated the little person—all these were
found packed away in this one receptacle; and in another box, I am
sorry to say, were the silver forks and spoons (the butler wisely
judging that the rich and splendid electrotype ware might as well be
left behind)—all the silver forks, spoons, and ladles, and our poor old
friend the cocoa-nut tree, which these female robbers would have
carried out of the premises.

Mr. Clive Newcome burst out into fierce laughter when he saw the
cocoa-nut tree; he laughed so loud that baby woke, and his
mother-in-law called him a brute, and the nurse ran to give its
accustomed quietus to the little screaming infant. Rosey’s eyes poured
forth a torrent of little protests, and she would have cried yet more
loudly than the other baby, had not her husband, again fiercely
checking her, sworn with a dreadful oath, that unless she told him the
whole truth, “By heavens she should leave the house with nothing but
what covered her.” Even the Campaigner could not make head against
Clive’s stern resolution; and the incipient insurrection of the maids
and the mistresses was quelled by his spirit. The lady’s-maid, a
flighty creature, received her wages and took her leave: but the nurse
could not find it in her heart to quit her little nursling so suddenly,
and accompanied Clive’s household in the journey upon which those poor
folks were bound. What stolen goods were finally discovered when the
family reached foreign parts were found in Mrs. Mackenzie’s trunks, not
in her daughter’s: a silver filigree basket, a few teaspoons, baby’s
gold coral, and a costly crimson velvet-bound copy of the Hon. Miss
Grimstone’s Church Service, to which articles, having thus appropriated
them, Mrs. Mackenzie henceforward laid claim as her own.

So when the packing was done a cab was called to receive the modest
trunks of this fugitive family—the coachman was bidden to put his
horses to again, and for the last time poor Rosey Newcome sate in her
own carriage, to which the Colonel conducted her with his courtly old
bow, kissing the baby as it slept once more unconscious in its nurse’s
embrace, and bestowing a very grave and polite parting salute upon the
Campaigner.

Then Clive and his father entered a cab on which the trunks were borne,
and they drove to the Tower Stairs, where the ship lay which was to
convey them out of England; and, during that journey, no doubt, they
talked over their altered prospects, and I am sure Clive’s father
blessed his son fondly, and committed him and his family to a good
God’s gracious keeping, and thought of him with sacred love when they
had parted, and Thomas Newcome had returned to his lonely house to
watch and to think of his ruined fortunes, and to pray that he might
have courage under them; that he might bear his own fate honourably;
and that a gentle one might be dealt to those beloved beings for whom
his life had been sacrificed in vain.




CHAPTER LXXII.
Belisarius


When the sale of Colonel Newcome’s effects took place, a friend of the
family bought in for a few shillings those two swords which had hung,
as we have said, in the good man’s chamber, and for which no single
broker present had the heart to bid. The head of Clive’s father,
painted by himself, which had always kept its place in the young man’s
studio, together with a lot of his oil-sketchings, easels, and painting
apparatus, were purchased by the faithful J. J., who kept them until
his friend should return to London and reclaim them, and who showed the
most generous solicitude in Clive’s behalf. J. J. was elected of the
Royal Academy this year, and Clive, it was evident, was working hard at
the profession which he had always loved; for he sent over three
pictures to the Academy, and I never knew man more mortified than the
affectionate J. J., when two of these unlucky pieces were rejected by
the committee for the year. One pretty little piece, called “The
Stranded Boat,” got a fair place on the Exhibition walls, and, you may
be sure, was loudly praised by a certain critic in the _Pall Mall
Gazette_. The picture was sold on the first day of the exhibition at
the price of twenty-five pounds, which the artist demanded; and when
the kind J. J. wrote to inform his friend of this satisfactory
circumstance, and to say that he held the money at Clive’s disposal,
the latter replied with many expressions of sincere gratitude, at the
same time begging him directly to forward the money, with our old
friend Thomas Newcome’s love, to Mrs. Sarah Mason, at Newcome. But J.
J. never informed his friend that he himself was the purchaser of the
picture; nor was Clive made acquainted with the fact until some time
afterwards, when he found it hanging in Ridley’s studio.

I have said that we none of us were aware at this time what was the
real state of Colonel Newcome’s finances, and hoped that, after giving
up every shilling of his property which was confiscated to the
creditors of the Bank, he had still, from his retiring pension and
military allowances, at least enough reputably to maintain him. On one
occasion, having business in the City, I there met Mr. Sherrick.
Affairs had been going ill with that gentleman—he had been let in
terribly, he informed me, by Lord Levant’s insolvency—having had large
money transactions with his lordship. “There’s none of them so good as
old Newcome,” Mr. Sherrick said with a sigh; “that was a good one—that
was an honest man if ever I saw one—with no more guile, and no more
idea of business than a baby. Why didn’t he take my advice, poor old
cove?—he might be comfortable now. Why did he sell away that annuity,
Pendennis? I got it done for him when nobody else perhaps could have
got it done for him—for the security ain’t worth twopence if Newcome
wasn’t an honest man;—but I know he is, and would rather starve and eat
the nails off his fingers than not keep his word, the old trump. And
when he came to me, a good two months before the smash of the Bank,
which I knew it, sir, and saw that it must come—when he came and raised
three thousand pounds to meet them d—d electioneering bills, having to
pay lawyers, commission, premium, life-insurance—you know the whole
game, Mr. P.—I as good as went down on my knees to him—I did—at the
North and South American Coffee-house, where he was to meet the party
about the money, and said, ‘Colonel, don’t raise it—I tell you, let it
stand over—let it go in along with the bankruptcy that’s a-coming,’—but
he wouldn’t—he went on like an old Bengal tiger, roaring about his
honour; he paid the bills every shilling—infernal long bills they were,
and it’s my belief that, at this minute, he ain’t got fifty pounds a
year of his own to spend. I would send him back my commission—I would
by Jove—only times is so bad, and that rascal Levant let me in. It went
to my heart to take the old cock’s money—but it’s gone—that and ever so
much more—and Lady Whittlesea’s Chapel too, Mr. P. Hang that young
Levant.”

Squeezing my hand after this speech, Sherrick ran across the street
after some other capitalist who was entering the Diddlesex Insurance
Office, and left me very much grieved and dismayed at finding that my
worst fears in regard to Thomas Newcome were confirmed. Should we
confer with his wealthy family respecting the Colonel’s impoverished
condition? Was his brother Hobson Newcome aware of it? As for Sir
Barnes, the quarrel between him and his uncle had been too fierce to
admit of hopes of relief from that quarter. Barnes had been put to very
heavy expenses in the first contested election; had come forward again
immediately on his uncle’s resignation, but again had been beaten by a
more liberal candidate, his quondam former friend, Mr. Higg—who
formally declared against Sir Barnes, and who drove him finally out of
the representation of Newcome. From this gentleman it was vain of
course for Colonel Newcome’s friends to expect relief.

How to aid him? He was proud—past work—nearly seventy years old. “Oh,
why did those cruel Academicians refuse Clive’s pictures?” cries Laura.
“I have no patience with them—had the pictures been exhibited I know
who might have bought them—but that is vain now. He would suspect at
once, and send her money away. Oh, Pen! why, why didn’t he come when I
wrote that letter to Brussels?”

From persons so poorly endowed with money as ourselves, any help, but
of the merest temporary nature, was out of the question. We knew our
friends too well not to know that they would disdain to receive it. It
was agreed between me and Laura that at any rate I should go and see
Clive. Our friends indeed were at a very short distance from us, and,
having exiled themselves from England, could yet see its coasts from
their windows upon any clear day. Boulogne was their present
abiding-place—refuge of how many thousands of other unfortunate
Britons—and to this friendly port I betook myself speedily, having the
address of Colonel Newcome. His quarters were in a quiet grass-grown
old street of the Old Town. None of the family were at home when I
called. There was indeed no servant to answer the bell, but the
good-natured French domestic of a neighbouring lodger told me that the
young monsieur went out every day to make his designs, and that I
should probably find the elder gentleman upon the rampart, where he was
in the custom of going every day. I strolled along by those pretty old
walks and bastions, under the pleasant trees which shadow them, and the
grey old gabled houses from which you look down upon the gay new city,
and the busy port, and the piers stretching into the shining sea,
dotted with a hundred white sails or black smoking steamers, and
bounded by the friendly lines of the bright English shore. There are
few prospects more charming than the familiar view from those old
French walls—few places where young children may play, and ruminating
old age repose more pleasantly than on those peaceful rampart gardens.

I found our dear old friend seated on one of the benches, a newspaper
on his knees, and by his side a red-cheeked little French lass, upon
whose lap Thomas Newcome the younger lay sleeping. The Colonel’s face
flushed up when he saw me. As he advanced a step or two towards me I
could see that he trembled in his walk. His hair had grown almost quite
white. He looked now to be more than his age—he whose carriage last
year had been so erect, whose figure had been so straight and manly. I
was very much moved at meeting him, and at seeing the sad traces which
pain and grief had left in the countenance of the dear old man.

“So you are come to see me, my good young friend,” cried the Colonel,
with a trembling voice. “It is very, very kind of you. Is not this a
pretty drawing-room to receive our friends in? We have not many of them
now; Boy and I come and sit here for hours every day. Hasn’t he grown a
fine boy? He can say several words now, sir, and can walk surprisingly
well. Soon he will be able to walk with his grandfather, and then Marie
will not have the trouble to wait upon either of us.” He repeated this
sentiment in his pretty old French, and turning with a bow to Marie.
The girl said monsieur knew very well that she did not desire better
than to come out with baby; that it was better than staying at home,
pardieu; and, the clock striking at this moment, she rose up with her
child, crying out that it was time to return or madame would scold.

“Mrs. Mackenzie has rather a short temper,” the Colonel said with a
gentle smile. “Poor thing, she has had a great deal to bear in
consequence, Pen, of my imprudence. I am glad you never took shares in
our bank. I should not be so glad to see you as I am now, if I had
brought losses upon you as I have upon so many of my friends.” I, for
my part, trembled to hear the good old man was under the domination of
the Campaigner.

“Bayham sends me the paper regularly; he is a very kind faithful
creature. How glad I am that he has got a snug berth in the City! His
company really prospers, I am happy to think, unlike some companies you
know of, Pen. I have read your two speeches, sir, and Clive and I liked
them very much. The poor boy works all day at his pictures. You know he
has sold one at the exhibition, which has given us a great deal of
heart—and he has completed two or three more—and I am sitting to him
now for—what do you think, sir? for Belisarius. Will you give
Belisarius and the Obolus kind word?”

“My dear, dear old friend,” I said in great emotion, “if you will do me
the kindness to take my Obolus or to use my services in any way, you
will give me more pleasure than ever I had from your generous bounties
in old days. Look, sir, I wear the watch which you gave me when you
went to India. Did you not tell me then to look over Clive and serve
him if I could? Can’t I serve him now?” and I went on further in this
strain, asseverating with great warmth and truth that my wife’s
affection and my own were most sincere for both of them, and that our
pride would be to be able to help such dear friends.

The Colonel said I had a good heart, and my wife had, though—though—he
did not finish this sentence, but I could interpret it without need of
its completion. My wife and the two ladies of Colonel Newcome’s family
never could be friends, however much my poor Laura tried to be intimate
with these women. Her very efforts at intimacy caused a frigidity and
hauteur which Laura could not overcome. Little Rosey and her mother set
us down as two aristocratic personages; nor for our parts were we very
much disturbed at this opinion of the Campaigner and little Rosa.

I talked with the Colonel for half an hour or more about his affairs,
which indeed were very gloomy, and Clive’s prospects, of which he
strove to present as cheering a view as possible. He was obliged to
confirm the news which Sherrick had given me, and to own, in fact, that
all his pension was swallowed up by a payment of interest and life
insurance for sums which he had been compelled to borrow. How could he
do otherwise than meet his engagements? Thank God, he had Clive’s full
approval for what he had done—had communicated the circumstance to his
son almost immediately after it took place, and that was a comfort to
him—an immense comfort. “For the women are very angry,” said the poor
Colonel; “you see they do not understand the laws of honour, at least
as we understand them: and perhaps I was wrong in hiding the truth as I
certainly did from Mrs. Mackenzie, but I acted for the best—I hoped
against hope that some chance might turn in our favour. God knows, I
had a hard task enough in wearing a cheerful face for months, and in
following my little Rosa about to her parties and balls; but poor Mrs.
Mackenzie has a right to be angry, only I wish my little girl did not
side with her mother so entirely, for the loss of her affection gives
me great pain.”

So it was as I suspected. The Campaigner ruled over this family, and
added to all their distresses by her intolerable presence and tyranny.
“Why, sir,” I ventured to ask, “if, as I gather from you—and I
remember,” I added with a laugh, “certain battles-royal which Clive
described to me in old days—if you and the Campai—Mrs. Mackenzie do not
agree, why should she continue to live with you, when you would all be
so much happier apart?”

“She has a right to live in the house,” says the Colonel; “It is I who
have no right in it. I am a poor old pensioner, don’t you see,
subsisting on Rosey’s bounty? We live on the hundred a year, secured to
her at her marriage, and Mrs. Mackenzie has her forty pounds of pension
which she adds to the common stock. It is I who have made away with
every shilling of Rosey’s 17,000 pounds, God help me, and with 1500
pounds of her mother’s. They put their little means together, and they
keep us—me and Clive. What can we do for a living? Great God! What can
we do? Why, I am so useless that even when my poor boy earned 25 pounds
for his picture, I felt we were bound to send it to Sarah Mason, and
you may fancy when this came to Mrs. Mackenzie’s ears, what a life my
boy and I led. I have never spoken of these things to any mortal soul—I
even don’t speak of them with Clive—but seeing your kind and honest
face has made me talk—you must pardon my garrulity—I am growing old,
Arthur. This poverty and these quarrels have beaten my spirit
down—there, I shall talk on this subject no more. I wish, sir, I could
ask you to dine with us, but”—and here he smiled—“we must get the leave
of the higher powers.”

I was determined, in spite of prohibitions and Campaigners, to see my
old friend Clive, and insisted on walking back with the Colonel to his
lodgings, at the door of which we met Mrs. Mackenzie and her daughter.
Rosa blushed up a little—looked at her mamma—and then greeted me with a
hand and a curtsey. The Campaigner also saluted me in a majestic but
amicable manner, made no objection even to my entering her apartments
and seeing _the condition to which they were reduced:_ this phrase was
uttered with particular emphasis and a significant look towards the
Colonel, who bowed his meek head and preceded me into the lodgings,
which were in truth very homely, pretty, and comfortable. The
Campaigner was an excellent manager—restless, bothering, brushing
perpetually. Such fugitive gimcracks as they had brought away with them
decorated the little salon. Mrs. Mackenzie, who took the entire
command, even pressed me to dine and partake, if so fashionable a
gentleman would _condescend_ to partake, of a humble exile’s fare. No
fare was perhaps very pleasant to me in company with that woman, but I
wanted to see my dear old Clive, and gladly accepted his voluble
mother-in-law’s not disinterested hospitality. She beckoned the Colonel
aside; whispered to him, putting something into his hand; on which he
took his hat and went away. Then Rosey was dismissed upon some other
pretext, and I had the felicity to be left alone with Mrs. Captain
Mackenzie.

She instantly improved the occasion; and with great eagerness and
volubility entered into her statement of the present affairs and
position of this unfortunate family. She described darling Rosey’s
delicate state, poor thing—nursed with tenderness and in the lap of
luxury—brought up with every delicacy and the fondest mother—never
knowing in the least how to take care of herself, and likely to fall
down and perish unless the kind Campaigner were by to prop and protect
her. She was in delicate health—very delicate—ordered cod-liver oil by
the doctor. Heaven knows how he could be paid for those expensive
medicines out of the pittance to which the _imprudence_—the most
culpable and designing _imprudence_, and _extravagance_, and _folly_ of
Colonel Newcome had reduced them! Looking out from the window as she
spoke I saw—we both saw—the dear old gentleman sadly advancing towards
the house, a parcel in his hand. Seeing his near approach, and that our
interview was likely to come to an end, Mrs. Mackenzie rapidly
whispered to me that she knew I had a good heart—that I had been
blessed by Providence with a fine fortune, which I knew how to keep
better than _some_ folks—and that if, as no doubt was my intention—for
with what other but a charitable view could I have come to see
them?—and most generous and noble was it of you to come, and I always
thought it of you, Mr. Pendennis, whatever _other_ people said to the
contrary. If I proposed to give them relief, which was most needful—and
for which a _mother’s blessings_ would follow me—let it be to her, the
Campaigner, that my loan should be confided—for as for the Colonel, he
is not fit to be trusted with a shilling, and has already flung away
_immense sums_ upon some old woman he keeps in the country, leaving his
darling Rosey without the actual necessaries of life.

The woman’s greed and rapacity—the flattery with which she chose to
belabour me at dinner, so choked and disgusted me, that I could hardly
swallow the meal, though my poor old friend had been sent out to
purchase a pâté from the pastrycook’s for my especial refection. Clive
was not at the dinner. He seldom returned till late at night on
sketching days. Neither his wife nor his mother-in-law seemed much to
miss him; and seeing that the Campaigner engrossed the entire share of
the conversation, and proposed not to leave me for five minutes alone
with the Colonel, I took leave rather speedily of my entertainers,
leaving a message for Clive, and a prayer that he would come and see me
at my hotel.




CHAPTER LXXIII.
In which Belisarius returns from Exile


I was sitting in the dusk in my room at Hotel des Bains, when the
visitor for whom I hoped made his appearance in the person of Clive,
with his broad shoulders, and broad hat, and a shaggy beard, which he
had thought fit in his quality of painter to assume. Our greeting it
need not be said was warm; and our talk, which extended far into the
night, very friendly and confidential. If I make my readers confidants
in Mr. Clive’s private affairs, I ask my friend’s pardon for narrating
his history in their behoof. The world had gone very ill with my poor
Clive, and I do not think that the pecuniary losses which had visited
him and his father afflicted him near so sorely as the state of his
home. In a pique with the woman he loved, and from that generous
weakness which formed part of his character, and which led him to
acquiesce in most wishes of his good father, the young man had
gratified the darling desire of the Colonel’s heart, and taken the wife
whom his two old friends brought to him. Rosey, who was also, as we
have shown, of a very obedient and ductile nature, had acquiesced
gladly enough in her mamma’s opinion, that she was in love with the
rich and handsome young Clive, and accepted him for better or worse. So
undoubtedly would this good child have accepted Captain Hoby, her
previous adorer, have smilingly promised fidelity to the Captain at
church, and have made a very good, happy, and sufficient little wife
for that officer,—had not mamma commanded her to jilt him. What wonder
that these elders should wish to see their two dear young ones united?
They began with suitable age, money, good temper, and parents’
blessings. It is not the first time that, with all these excellent
helps to prosperity and happiness, a marriage has turned out
unfortunately—a pretty, tight ship gone to wreck that set forth on its
voyage with cheers from the shore, and every prospect of fair wind and
fine weather.

We have before quoted poor Clive’s simile of the shoes with which his
good old father provided him—as pretty a little pair of shoes as need
be—only they did not fit the wearer. If they pinched him at first, how
they blistered and tortured him now! If Clive was gloomy and
discontented even when the honeymoon had scarce waned, and he and his
family sat at home in state and splendour under the boughs of the
famous silver cocoa-nut tree, what was the young man’s condition now in
poverty, when they had no love along with a scant dinner of herbs; when
his mother-in-law grudged each morsel which his poor old father
ate—when a vulgar, coarse-minded woman pursued with brutal sarcasm and
deadly rancour one of the tenderest and noblest gentlemen in the
world—when an ailing wife, always under some one’s domination, received
him with helpless hysterical cries and reproaches—when a coarse female
tyrant, stupid, obstinate, utterly unable to comprehend the son’s
kindly genius, or the father’s gentle spirit, bullied over both, using
the intolerable undeniable advantage which her actual wrongs gave her
to tyrannise over these two wretched men! He had never heard the last
of that money which they had sent to Mrs. Mason, Clive said. When the
knowledge of the fact came to the Campaigner’s ears, she raised such a
storm as almost killed the poor Colonel, and drove his son half mad.
She seized the howling infant, vowing that its unnatural father and
grandfather were bent upon starving it—she consoled and sent Rosey into
hysterics—she took the outlawed parson to whose church they went, and
the choice society of bankrupt captains, captains’ ladies, fugitive
stockbrokers’ wives, and dingy frequenters of billiard-rooms, and
refugees from the Bench, into her councils; and in her daily visits
amongst these personages, and her walks on the pier, whither she
trudged with poor Rosey in her train, Mrs. Mackenzie made known her own
wrongs and her daughter’s—showed how the Colonel, having robbed and
cheated them previously, was now living upon them; insomuch that Mrs.
Bolter, the levanting auctioneer’s wife, would not make the poor old
man a bow when she met him—that Mrs. Captain Kitely, whose husband had
lain for seven years past in Boulogne gaol ordered her son to cut
Clive; and when, the child being sick, the poor old Colonel went for
arrowroot to the chemist’s, young Snooks, the apothecary’s assistant,
refused to allow him to take the powder away without previously
depositing the money.

He had no money, Thomas Newcome. He gave up every farthing. After
having impoverished all around him, he had no right, he said, to touch
a sixpence of the wretched pittance remaining to them—he had even given
up his cigar, the poor old man, the companion and comforter of forty
years. He was “not fit to be trusted with money,” Mrs. Mackenzie said,
and the good man owned as he ate his scanty crust, and bowed his noble
old head in silence under that cowardly persecution.

And this, at the end of threescore and seven or eight years, was to be
the close of a life which had been spent in freedom and splendour, and
kindness and honour; this the reward of the noblest heart that ever
beat—the tomb and prison of a gallant warrior who had ridden in twenty
battles—whose course through life had been a bounty wherever it had
passed—whose name had been followed by blessings, and whose career was
to end here—here—in a mean room, in a mean alley of a foreign town—a
low furious woman standing over him and stabbing the kind defenceless
heart with killing insult and daily outrage!

As we sat together in the dark, Clive told me this wretched story,
which was wrung from him with a passionate emotion that I could not but
keenly share. He wondered the old man lived, Clive said. Some of the
women’s taunts and gibes, as he could see, struck his father so that he
gasped and started back as if some one had lashed him with a whip. “He
would make away with himself,” said poor Clive, “but he deems this is
his punishment, and that he must bear it as long as it pleases God. He
does not care for his own losses, as far as they concern himself: but
these reproaches of Mrs. Mackenzie, and some things which were said to
him in the Bankruptcy Court, by one or two widows of old friends, who
were induced through his representations, to take shares in that
infernal bank, have affected him dreadfully. I hear him lying awake and
groaning at night, God bless him. Great God! what can I do—what can I
do?” burst out the young man in a dreadful paroxysm of grief. “I have
tried to get lessons—I went to London on the deck of a steamer, and
took a lot of drawings with me—tried
picture-dealers—pawnbrokers—Jews—Moss, whom you may remember at
Gandish’s, and who gave me for forty-two drawings, eighteen pounds. I
brought the money back to Boulogne. It was enough to pay the doctor,
and bury our last poor little dead baby. _Tenez_, Pen, you must give me
some supper: I have had nothing all day but a _pain de deux sous;_ I
can’t stand it at home. My heart’s almost broken—you must give me some
money, Pen, old boy. I know you will. I thought of writing to you, but
I wanted to support myself, you see. When I went to London with the
drawings I tried George’s chambers, but he was in the country, I saw
Crackthorpe on the street in Oxford Street, but I could not face him,
and bolted down Hanway Yard. I tried, and I could not ask him, and I
got the 18 pounds from Moss that day, and came home with it.”

Give him money? of course I would give him money—my dear old friend!
And, as an alternative and a wholesome shock to check that burst of
passion and grief in which the poor fellow indulged, I thought fit to
break into a very fierce and angry invective on my own part, which
served to disguise the extreme feeling of pain and pity that I did not
somehow choose to exhibit. I rated Clive soundly, and taxed him with
unfriendliness and ingratitude for not having sooner applied to friends
who would think shame of themselves whilst he was in need. Whatever he
wanted was his as much as mine. I could not understand how the
necessity of the family should, in truth, be so extreme as he described
it, for after all many a poor family lived upon very much less; but I
uttered none of these objections, checking them with the thought that
Clive, on his first arrival at Boulogne, entirely ignorant of the
practice of economy, might have imprudently engaged in expenses which
had reduced him to this present destitution.*

* I did not know at the time that Mrs. Mackenzie had taken entire
superintendence of the family treasury—and that this exemplary woman
was putting away, as she had done previously, sundry little sums to
meet rainy days.


I took the liberty of asking about debts, and of these Clive gave me to
understand there were none—at least none of his or his father’s
contracting. “If we were too proud to borrow, and I think we were
wrong, Pen, my dear old boy—I think we were wrong now—at least, we were
too proud to owe. My colourman takes his bill out in drawings, and I
think owes me a trifle. He got me some lessons at fifty sous a ticket—a
pound the ten—from an economical swell who has taken a château here,
and has two flunkeys in livery. He has four daughters, who take
advantage of the lessons, and screws ten per cent upon the poor
colourman’s pencils and drawing-paper. It’s pleasant work to give the
lessons to the children; and to be patronised by the swell; and not
expensive to him, is it, Pen? But I don’t mind that, if I could but get
lessons enough: for, you see, besides our expenses here, we must have
some more money, and the dear old governor would die outright if poor
old Sarah Mason did not get her 50 pounds a year.”

And now there arrived a plentiful supper, and a bottle of good wine, of
which the giver was not sorry to partake after the meagre dinner at
three o’clock, to which I had been invited by the Campaigner; and it
was midnight when I walked back with my friend to his house in the
upper town; and all the stars of heaven were shining cheerily; and my
dear Clive’s face wore an expression of happiness, such as I remembered
in old days, as we shook hands and parted with a “God bless you.”

To Clive’s friend, revolving these things in his mind, as he lay in one
of those most snug and comfortable beds at the excellent Hotel des
Bains, it appeared that this town of Boulogne was a very bad market for
the artist’s talents; and that he had to bring them to London, where a
score of old friends would assuredly be ready to help him. And if the
Colonel, too, could be got away from the domination of the Campaigner,
I felt certain that the dear old gentleman could but profit by his
leave of absence. My wife and I at this time inhabited a spacious old
house in Queens Square, Westminster, where there was plenty of room for
father and son. I knew that Laura would be delighted to welcome these
guests—may the wife of every worthy gentleman who reads these pages be
as ready to receive her husband’s friends. It was the state of Rosa’s
health, and the Campaigner’s authority and permission, about which I
was in doubt, and whether this lady’s two slaves would be allowed to go
away.

These cogitations kept the present biographer long awake, and he did
not breakfast next day until an hour before noon. I had the coffee-room
to myself by chance, and my meal was not yet ended when the waiter
announced a lady to visit Mr. Pendennis, and Mrs. Mackenzie made her
appearance. No signs of care or poverty were visible in the attire or
countenance of the buxom widow. A handsome bonnet, decorated within
with a profusion of poppies, bluebells; and ears of corn; a jewel on
her forehead, not costly, but splendid in appearance, and glittering
artfully over that central spot from which her wavy chestnut hair
parted to cluster in ringlets round her ample cheeks; a handsome India
shawl, smart gloves, a rich silk dress, a neat parasol of blue with
pale yellow lining, a multiplicity of glittering rinks, and a very
splendid gold watch and chain, which I remembered in former days as
hanging round poor Rosey’s white neck;—all these adornments set off the
widow’s person, so that you might have thought her a wealthy
capitalist’s lady, and never could have supposed that she was a poor,
cheated, ruined, robbed, unfortunate Campaigner.

Nothing could be more gracious than the _accueil_ of this lady. She
paid me many handsome compliments about my literary work—asked most
affectionately for dear Mrs. Pendennis and the dear children—and then,
as I expected, coming to business, contrasted the happiness and genteel
position of my wife and family with the misery and wrongs of her own
blessed child and grandson. She never could call that child by the
odious name which he received at his baptism. _I_ knew what bitter
reasons she had to dislike the name of Thomas Newcome.

She again rapidly enumerated the wrongs she had received at the hands
of that gentleman; mentioned the vast sums of money out of which she
and her soul’s darling had been tricked by that poor muddle-headed
creature, to say no worse of him; and described finally their present
pressing need. The doctors, the burial, Rosey’s delicate condition, the
cost of sweetbreads, calf’s-foot jelly, and cod-liver oil, were again
passed in a rapid calculation before me; and she ended her speech by
expressing her gratification that I had attended to her advice of the
previous day, and not given Clive Newcome a direct loan; that the
family wanted it, the Campaigner called upon Heaven to witness; that
Clive and his absurd poor father would fling guineas out of the window
was a fact equally certain; the rest of the argument was obvious,
namely, that Mr. Pendennis should administer a donation to herself.

I had brought but a small sum of money in my pocket-book, though Mrs.
Mackenzie, intimate with bankers, and having, thank Heaven, in spite of
all her misfortunes, the utmost confidence of _all_ her tradesmen,
hinted a perfect willingness on her part to accept an order upon her
friends, Hobson Brothers of London.

This direct thrust I gently and smilingly parried by asking Mrs.
Mackenzie whether she supposed a gentleman who had just paid an
electioneering bill, and had, at the best of times, but a very small
income, might sometimes not be in a condition to draw satisfactorily
upon Messrs. Hobson or any other bankers? Her countenance fell at this
remark, nor was her cheerfulness much improved by the tender of one of
the two bank-notes which then happened to be in my possession. I said
that I had a use for the remaining note, and that it would not be more
than sufficient to pay my hotel bill, and the expenses of my party back
to London.

My party? I had here to divulge, with some little trepidation, the plan
which I had been making overnight; to explain how I thought that
Clive’s great talents were wasted at Boulogne, and could only find a
proper market in London; how I was pretty certain, through my
connection with booksellers, to find some advantageous employment for
him, and would have done so months ago had I known the state of the
case; but I had believed, until within a very few days since, that the
Colonel, in spite of his bankruptcy, was still in the enjoyment of
considerable military pensions.

This statement, of course, elicited from the widow a number of remarks
not complimentary to my dear old Colonel. He might have kept his
pensions had he not been a fool—he was a baby about money
matters—misled himself and everybody—was a log in the house, etc. etc.
etc.

I suggested that his annuities might possibly be put into some more
satisfactory shape—that I had trustworthy lawyers with whom I would put
him in communication—that he had best come to London to see to these
matters—and that my wife had a large house where she would most gladly
entertain the two gentlemen.

This I said with some reasonable dread—fearing, in the first place, her
refusal; in the second, her acceptance of the invitation, with a
proposal, as our house was large, to come herself and inhabit it for a
while. Had I not seen that Campaigner arrive for a month at poor James
Binnie’s house in Fitzroy Square, and stay there for many years? Was I
not aware that when she once set her foot in a gentleman’s
establishment, terrific battles must ensue before she could be
dislodged? Had she not once been routed by Clive? and was she not now
in command and possession? Do I not, finally, know something of the
world; and have I not a weak, easy temper? I protest it was with terror
that I awaited the widow’s possible answer to my proposal.

To my great relief, she expressed the utmost approval of both my plans.
I was uncommonly kind, she was sure, to interest myself about the two
gentlemen, and for her blessed Rosa’s sake, a fond mother thanked me.
It was most advisable that he should earn some money by that horrid
profession which he had chosen to adopt—_trade, she_ called it. She was
clearly anxious get rid both of father and son, and agreed that the
sooner they went the better.

We walked back arm-in-arm to the Colonel’s quarters in the Old Town,
Mrs. Mackenzie, in the course of our walk, doing me the honour to
introduce me by name to several dingy acquaintances, whom we met
sauntering up the street, and imparting to me, as each moved away, the
pecuniary cause of his temporary residence in Boulogne. Spite of
Rosey’s delicate state of health, Mrs. Mackenzie did not hesitate to
break the news to her of the gentlemen’s probable departure, abruptly
and eagerly, as if the intelligence was likely to please her:—and it
did, rather than otherwise. The young woman, being in the habit of
letting mamma judge for her, continued it in this instance; and whether
her husband stayed or went, seemed to be equally content or apathetic.
“And is it not most kind and generous of dear Mr. and Mrs. Pendennis to
propose to receive Mr. Newcome and the Colonel?” This opportunity for
gratitude being pointed out to Rosey, she acquiesced in it
straightway—it was very kind of me, Rosey was sure. “And don’t you ask
after dear Mrs. Pendennis and the dear children—you poor dear suffering
darling child?” Rosey, who had neglected this inquiry, immediately
hoped Mrs. Pendennis and the children were well. The overpowering
mother had taken utter possession of this poor little thing. Rosey’s
eyes followed the Campaigner about, and appealed to her at all moments.
She sat under Mrs. Mackenzie as a bird before a boa-constrictor,
doomed—fluttering—fascinated—scared and fawning as a whipt spaniel
before a keeper.

The Colonel was on his accustomed bench on the rampart at this sunny
hour. I repaired thither, and found the old gentleman seated by his
grandson, who lay, as yesterday, on the little bonne’s lap, one of his
little purple hands closed round the grandfather’s finger. “Hush!” says
the good man, lifting up his other finger to his moustache, as I
approached, “Boy’s asleep. Il est bien joli quand il dort—le Boy,
n’est-ce pas, Marie?” The maid believed monsieur well—the boy was a
little angel. “This maid is a most trustworthy, valuable person,
Pendennis,” the Colonel said, with much gravity.

The boa-constrictor had fascinated him, too—the lash of that woman at
home had cowed that helpless, gentle, noble spirit. As I looked at the
head so upright and manly, now so beautiful and resigned—the year of
his past life seemed to pass before me somehow in a flash of thought. I
could fancy the accursed tyranny—the dumb acquiescence—the brutal
jeer—the helpless remorse—the sleepless nights of pain and
recollection—the gentle heart lacerated with deadly stabs—and the
impotent hope. I own I burst into a sob at the sight, and thought of
the noble suffering creature, and hid my face, and turned away.

He sprang up, releasing his hand from the child’s, and placing it, the
kind shaking hand, on my shoulder. “What is it, Arthur—my dear boy?” he
said, looking wistfully in my face. “No bad news from home, my dear?
Laura and the children well?”

The emotion was mastered in a moment, I put his arm under mine, and as
we slowly sauntered up and down the sunny walk of the old rampart, I
told him how I had come with special commands from Laura to bring him
for a while to stay with us, and to settle his business, which I was
sure had been wofully mismanaged, and to see whether we could not find
the means of getting some little out of the wreck of the property for
the boy yonder.

At first Colonel Newcome would not hear of quitting Boulogne, where
Rosey would miss him—he was sure she would want him—but before the
ladies of his family, to whom we presently returned, Thomas Newcome’s
resolution was quickly recalled. He agreed to go, and Clive coming in
at this time was put in possession of our plan and gladly acquiesced in
it. On that very evening I came with a carriage to conduct my two
friends to the steamboat. Their little packets were made and ready.
There was no pretence of grief at parting on the women’s side, but
Marie, the little maid, with Boy in her arms, cried sadly; and Clive
heartily embraced the child; and the Colonel, going back to give it one
more kiss, drew out of his neckcloth a little gold brooch which he
wore, and which, trembling, he put into Marie’s hand, bidding her take
good care of Boy till his return.

“She is a good girl—a most faithful, attached girl, Arthur, do you
see,” the kind old gentleman said; “and I had no money to give her—no,
not one single rupee.”




CHAPTER LXXIV.
In which Clive begins the World


We are ending our history, and yet poor Clive is but beginning the
world. He has to earn the bread which he eats henceforth; and, as I saw
his labours, his trials, and his disappointments, I could not but
compare his calling with my own.

The drawbacks and penalties attendant upon our profession are taken
into full account, as we well know, by literary men, and their friends.
Our poverty, hardships, and disappointments are set forth with great
emphasis, and often with too great truth by those who speak of us; but
there are advantages belonging to our trade which are passed over, I
think, by some of those who exercise it and describe it, and for which,
in striking the balance of our accounts, we are not always duly
thankful. We have no patron, so to speak—we sit in ante-chambers no
more, waiting the present of a few guineas from my lord, in return for
a fulsome dedication. We sell our wares to the book-purveyor, between
whom and us there is no greater obligation than between him and his
paper-maker or printer. In the great towns in our country immense
stores of books are provided for us, with librarians to class them,
kind attendants to wait upon us, and comfortable appliances for study.
We require scarce any capital wherewith to exercise our trade. What
other so-called learned profession is equally fortunate? A doctor, for
example, after carefully and expensively educating himself, must invest
in house and furniture, horses, carriage, and menservants, before the
public patient will think of calling him in. I am told that such
gentlemen have to coax and wheedle dowagers, to humour hypochondriacs,
to practise a score of little subsidiary arts in order to make that of
healing profitable. How many many hundreds of pounds has a barrister to
sink upon his stock-in-trade before his returns are available? There
are the costly charges of university education—the costly chambers in
the Inn of Court—the clerk and his maintenance—the inevitable travels
on circuit—certain expenses all to be defrayed before the possible
client makes his appearance, and the chance of fame or competency
arrives. The prizes are great, to be sure, in the law, but what a
prodigious sum the lottery-ticket costs! If a man of letters cannot
win, neither does he risk so much. Let us speak of our trade as we find
it, and not be too eager in calling out for public compassion.

The artists, for the most part, do not cry out their woes as loudly as
some gentlemen of the literary fraternity, and yet I think the life of
many of them is harder; their chances even more precarious, and the
conditions of their profession less independent and agreeable than
ours. I have watched Smee, Esq., R.A., flattering and fawning, and at
the same time boasting and swaggering, poor fellow, in order to secure
a sitter. I have listened to a Manchester magnate talking about fine
arts before one of J. J.’s pictures, assuming the airs of a painter,
and laying down the most absurd laws respecting the art. I have seen
poor Tomkins bowing a rich amateur through a private view, and noted
the eager smiles on Tomkins’ face at the amateur’s slightest joke, the
sickly twinkle of hope in his eyes as Amateur stopped before his own
picture. I have been ushered by Chipstone’s black servant through hall
after hall peopled with plaster gods and heroes, into Chipstone’s own
magnificent studio, where he sat longing vainly for an order, and
justly dreading his landlord’s call for the rent. And, seeing how
severely these gentlemen were taxed in their profession, I have been
grateful for my own more fortunate one, which necessitates cringing to
no patron; which calls for no keeping up of appearances; and which
requires no stock-in-trade save the workman’s industry, his best
ability, and a dozen sheets of paper.

Having to turn with all his might to his new profession, Clive Newcome,
one of the proudest men alive, chose to revolt and to be restive at
almost every stage of his training. He had a natural genius for his
art, and had acquired in his desultory way a very considerable skill.
His drawing was better than his painting (an opinion which, were my
friend present, he of course would utterly contradict); his designs and
sketches were far superior to his finished compositions. His friends,
presuming to judge of this artist’s qualifications, ventured to counsel
him accordingly, and were thanked for their pains in the usual manner.
We had in the first place to bully and browbeat Clive most fiercely,
before he would take fitting lodgings for the execution of those
designs which we had in view for him. “Why should I take expensive
lodgings?” says Clive, slapping his fist on the table. “I am a pauper,
and can scarcely afford to live in a garret. Why should you pay me for
drawing your portrait and Laura’s and the children? What the deuce does
Warrington want with the effigy of his old mug? You don’t want them a
bit—you only want to give me money.—It would be much more honest of me
to take the money at once and own that I am a beggar; and I tell you
what, Pen, the only money which I feel I come honestly by, is that
which is paid me by a little printseller in Long Acre who buys my
drawings, one with another, at fourteen shillings apiece, and out of
whom I can earn pretty nearly two hundred a year. I am doing Coaches
for him, sir, and Charges of Cavalry; the public like the Mail Coaches
best—on a dark paper—the horses and miles picked out white—yellow
dust—cobalt distance, and the guard and coachman of course in
vermilion. That’s what a gentleman can get his bread by—portraits,
pooh! it’s disguised beggary, Crackthorpe, and a half-dozen men of his
regiment came, like good fellows as they are, and sent me five pounds
apiece for their heads, but I tell you I am ashamed to take the money.”
Such used to be the tenor of Clive Newcome’s conversation as he strode
up and down our room after dinner, pulling his moustache, and dashing
his long yellow hair off his gaunt face.

When Clive was inducted into the new lodgings at which his friends
counselled him to hang up his ensign, the dear old Colonel accompanied
his son, parting with a sincere regret from our little ones at home, to
whom he became greatly endeared during his visit to us, and who always
hailed him when he came to see us with smiles and caresses and sweet
infantile welcome. On that day when he went away, Laura went up and
kissed him with tears in her eyes. “You know how long I have been
wanting to do it,” this lady said to her husband. Indeed I cannot
describe the behaviour of the old man during his stay with us, his
gentle gratitude, his sweet simplicity and kindness, his thoughtful
courtesy. There was not a servant in our little household but was eager
to wait upon him. Laura’s maid was as tender-hearted at his departure
as her mistress. He was ailing for a short time, when our cook
performed prodigies of puddings and jellies to suit his palate. The
youth who held the offices of butler and valet in our establishment—a
lazy and greedy youth whom Martha scolded in vain—would jump up and
leave his supper to carry a message to our Colonel. My heart is full as
I remember the kind words which he said to me at parting, and as I
think that we were the means of giving a little comfort to that
stricken and gentle soul.

Whilst the Colonel and his son stayed with us, letters of course passed
between Clive and his family at Boulogne, but my wife remarked that the
receipt of those letters appeared to give our friend but little
pleasure. They were read in a minute, and he would toss them over to
his father, or thrust them into his pocket with a gloomy face. “Don’t
you see,” groans out Clive to me one evening, “that Rosa scarcely
writes the letters, or if she does, that her mother is standing over
her? That woman is the Nemesis of our life, Pen. How can I pay her off?
Great God! how can I pay her off?” And so having spoken, his head fell
between his hands, and as I watched him I saw a ghastly domestic
picture before me of helpless pain, humiliating discord, stupid
tyranny.

What, I say again, are the so-called great ills of life compared to
these small ones?

The Colonel accompanied Clive to the lodgings which we had found for
the young artist, in a quarter not far removed from the old house in
Fitzroy Square, where some happy years of his youth had been spent.
When sitters came to Clive—as at first they did in some numbers, many
of his early friends being anxious to do him a service—the old
gentleman was extraordinarily cheered and comforted. We could see by
his face that affairs were going on well at the studio. He showed us
the rooms which Rosey and the boy were to occupy. He prattled to our
children and their mother, who was never tired of hearing him, about
his grandson. He filled up the future nursery with a hundred little
knick-knacks of his own contriving; and with wonderful cheap bargains,
which he bought in his walks about Tottenham Court Road. He pasted a
most elaborate book of prints and sketches for Boy. It was astonishing
what notice Boy already took of pictures. He would have all the genius
of his father. Would he had had a better grandfather than the foolish
old man who had ruined all belonging to him!

However much they like each other, men in the London world see their
friends but seldom. The place is so vast that even next door is
distant; the calls of business, society, pleasure, so multifarious that
mere friendship can get or give but an occasional shake of the hand in
the hurried moments of passage. Men must live their lives; and are
perforce selfish, but not unfriendly. At a great need you know where to
look for your friend, and he that he is secure of you. So I went very
little to Howland Street, where Clive now lived; very seldom to Lamb
Court, where my dear old friend Warrington still sate in his old
chambers, though our meetings were none the less cordial when they
occurred, and our trust in one another always the same. Some folks say
the world is heartless: he who says so either prates commonplaces (the
most likely and charitable suggestion), or is heartless himself, or is
most singular and unfortunate in having made no friends. Many such a
reasonable mortal cannot have: our nature, I think, not sufficing for
that sort of polygamy. How many persons would you have to deplore your
death; or whose death would you wish to deplore? Could our hearts let
in such a harem of dear friendships, the mere changes and recurrences
of grief and mourning would be intolerable, and tax our lives beyond
their value. In a word, we carry our own burthen in the world; push and
struggle along on our own affairs; are pinched by our own shoes—though
Heaven forbid we should not stop and forget ourselves sometimes, when a
friend cries out in his distress, or we can help a poor stricken
wanderer in his way. As for good women—these, my worthy reader, are
different from us—the nature of these is to love, and to do kind
offices, and devise untiring charities:—so I would have you to know,
that, though Mr. Pendennis was _parcus suorum cultor et infrequens_,
Mrs. Laura found plenty of time to go from Westminster to Bloomsbury;
and to pay visits to her Colonel and her Clive, both of whom she had
got to love with all her heart again, now misfortune was on them; and
both of whom returned her kindness with an affection blessing the
bestower and the receiver; and making the husband proud and thankful
whose wife had earned such a noble regard. What is the dearest praise
of all to a man? his own—or that you should love those whom he loves? I
see Laura Pendennis ever constant and tender and pure, ever ministering
in her sacred office of kindness—bestowing love and followed by
blessings. Which would I have, think you; that priceless crown
hymeneal, or the glory of a Tenth Edition?

Clive and his father had found not only a model friend in the lady
above mentioned, but a perfect prize landlady in their happy lodgings.
In her house, besides those apartments which Mr. Newcome had originally
engaged, were rooms just sufficient to accommodate his wife, child, and
servant, when they should come to him, with a very snug little upper
chamber for the Colonel, close by Boy’s nursery, where he liked best to
be. “And if there is not room for the Campaigner, as you call her,”
says Mrs. Laura, with a shrug of her shoulders, “why, I am very sorry,
but Clive must try and bear her absence as well as possible. After all,
my dear Pen, you know he is married to Rosa and not to her mamma; and
so, and so I think it will be quite best that they shall have their
_ménage_ as before.”

The cheapness of the lodgings which the prize landlady let, the
quantity of neat new furniture which she put in, the consultations
which she had with my wife regarding these supplies, were quite
singular to me. “Have you pawned your diamonds, you reckless little
person, in order to supply all this upholstery?” “No, sir, I have not
pawned my diamonds,” Mrs. Laura answers; and I was left to think (if I
thought on the matter at all) that the landlady’s own benevolence had
provided these good things for Clive. For the wife of Laura’s husband
was perforce poor; and she asked me for no more money at this time than
at any other.

At first, in spite of his grumbling, Clive’s affairs looked so
prosperous, and so many sitters came to him from amongst his old
friends, that I was half inclined to believe with the Colonel and my
wife, that he was a prodigious genius, and that his good fortune would
go on increasing. Laura was for having Rosey return to her husband.
Every wife ought to be with her husband. J. J. shook his head about the
prosperity. “Let us see whether the Academy will have his pictures this
year, and what a place they will give him,” said Ridley. To do him
justice, Clive thought far more humbly of his compositions than Ridley
did. Not a little touching was it to us, who had known the young men in
former days, to see them in their changed positions. It was Ridley,
whose genius and industry had put him in the rank of a patron—Ridley,
the good industrious apprentice, who had won the prize of his art—and
not one of his many admirers saluted his talent and success with such a
hearty recognition as Clive, whose generous soul knew no envy, and who
always fired and kindled at the success of his friends.

When Mr. Clive used to go over to Boulogne from time to time to pay his
dutiful visits to his wife, the Colonel did not accompany his son, but,
during the latter’s absence, would dine with Mrs. Pendennis.

Though the preparations were complete in Howland Street, and Clive
dutifully went over to Boulogne, Mrs. Pendennis remarked that he seemed
still to hesitate about bringing his wife to London.

Upon this Mr. Pendennis observed that some gentlemen were not
particularly anxious about the society of their wives, and that this
pair were perhaps better apart. Upon which Mrs. Pendennis, drubbing on
the ground with a little foot, said, “Nonsense, for shame, Arthur! How
can you speak so flippantly? Did he not swear before Heaven to love and
cherish her, never to leave her, sir? Is not his _duty_ his _duty_,
sir?” (a most emphatic stamp of the foot). “Is she not his for better,
or for worse?”

“Including the Campaigner, my dear?” says Mr. P.

“Don’t laugh, sir! She _must_ come to him. There is no room in Howland
Street for Mrs. Mackenzie.”

“You artful scheming creature! We have some spare rooms. Suppose we ask
Mrs. Mackenzie to come and live with us, my dear? and we could then
have the benefit of the garrison anecdotes, and mess jocularities of
your favourite, Captain Goby.”

“I could never bear the horrid man!” cried Mrs. Pendennis. And how can
I tell why she disliked him?

Everything being now ready for the reception of Clive’s little family,
we counselled our friend to go over to Boulogne, and bring back his
wife and child, and then to make some final stipulation with the
Campaigner. He saw, as well as we, that the presence and tyranny of
that fatal woman destroyed his father’s health and spirits—that the old
man knew no peace or comfort in her neighbourhood, and was actually
hastening to his grave under that dreadful and unremitting persecution.
Mrs. Mackenzie made Clive scarcely less wretched than his father—she
governed his household—took away his weak wife’s allegiance and
affection from him—and caused the wretchedness of every single person
round about her. They ought to live apart. If she was too poor to
subsist upon her widow’s pension, which, in truth, was but a very small
pittance, let Clive give up to her, say, the half of his wife’s income
of one hundred pounds a year. His prospects and present means of
earning money were such that he might afford to do without that portion
of his income; at any rate, he and his father would be cheaply ransomed
at that price from their imprisonment to this intolerable person. “Go,
Clive,” said his counsellors, “and bring back your wife and child, and
let us all be happy together.” For, you see, those advisers opined that
if we had written over to Mrs. Newcome—“Come”—she would have come with
the Campaigner in her suite.

Vowing that he would behave like a man of courage—and we knew that
Clive had shown himself to be such in two or three previous
battles—Clive crossed the water to bring back his little Rosey. Our
good Colonel agreed to dine at our house during the days of his son’s
absence. I have said how beloved he was by young and old there—and he
was kind enough to say afterwards, that no woman had made him so happy
as Laura. We did not tell him—I know not from what reticence—that we
had advised Clive to offer a bribe of fifty pounds a year to Mrs.
Mackenzie; until about a fortnight after Clive’s absence, and a week
after his return, when news came that poor old Mrs. Mason was dead at
Newcome, whereupon we informed the Colonel that he had another
pensioner now in the Campaigner.

Colonel Newcome was thankful that his dear old friend had gone out of
the world in comfort and without pain. She had made a will long since,
leaving all her goods and chattels to Thomas Newcome—but having no
money to give, the Colonel handed over these to the old lady’s faithful
attendant, Keziah.

Although many of the Colonel’s old friends had parted from him or
quarrelled with him in consequence of the ill success of the B. B. C.,
there were two old ladies who yet remained faithful to him—Miss Cann,
namely, and honest little Miss Honeyman of Brighton, who, when she
heard of the return to London of her nephew and brother-in-law, made a
railway journey to the metropolis (being the first time she ever
engaged in that kind of travelling), rustled into Clive’s apartments in
Howland Street in her neatest silks, and looking not a day older than
on that when we last beheld her; and after briskly scolding the young
man for permitting his father to enter into money affairs—of which the
poor dear Colonel was as ignorant as a baby—she gave them both to
understand that she had a little sum at her banker’s at their
disposal—and besought the Colonel to remember that her house was his,
and that she should be proud and happy to receive him as soon and as
often and for as long a time as he would honour her with his company.
“Is not my house full of your presents”—cried the stout little old
lady—“have I not reason to be grateful to all the Newcomes—yes, to all
the Newcomes;—for Miss Ethel and her family have come to me every year
for months, and I don’t quarrel with them, and I won’t, although you
do, sir? Is not this shawl—are not these jewels that I wear,” she
continued, pointing to those well-known ornaments, “my dear Colonel’s
gift? Did you not relieve my brother Charles in this country and
procure for him his place in India? Yes, my dear friend—and though you
have been imprudent in money matters, my obligations towards you, and
my gratitude, and my affection are always the same.” Thus Miss Honeyman
spoke, with somewhat of a quivering voice at the end of her little
oration, but with exceeding state and dignity—for she believed that her
investment of two hundred pounds in that unlucky B. B. C., which failed
for half a million, was a sum of considerable importance, and gave her
a right to express her opinion to the Managers.

Clive came back from Boulogne in a week, as we have said—but he came
back without his wife, much to our alarm, and looked so exceedingly
fierce and glum when we demanded the reason of his return without his
family, that we saw wars and battles had taken place, and thought that
in this last continental campaign the Campaigner had been too much for
her friend.

The Colonel, to whom Clive communicated, though with us the poor lad
held his tongue, told my wife what had happened:—not all the battles;
which no doubt raged at breakfast, dinner, supper, during the week of
Clive’s visit to Boulogne,—but the upshot of these engagements. Rosey,
not unwilling in her first private talk with her husband to come to
England with him and the boy, showed herself irresolute on the second
day at breakfast, when the fire was opened on both sides; cried at
dinner when fierce assaults took place, in which Clive had the
advantage; slept soundly, but besought him to be very firm, and met the
enemy at breakfast with a quaking heart; cried all that day during
which, pretty well without cease, the engagement lasted; and when Clive
might have conquered and brought her off, but the weather was windy and
the sea was rough, and he was pronounced a brute to venture on it with
a wife in Rosey’s situation.

Behind that “situation” the widow shielded herself. She clung to her
adored child, and from that bulwark discharged abuse and satire at
Clive and his father. He could not rout her out of her position. Having
had the advantage on the first two or three days, on the four last he
was beaten, and lost ground in each action. Rosey found that in her
situation she could not part from her darling mamma. The Campaigner for
her part averred that she might be reduced to beggary; that she might
be robbed of her last farthing and swindled and cheated; that she might
see her daughter’s fortune flung away by unprincipled adventurers, and
her blessed child left without even the comforts of life; but desert
her in such a situation, she never would—no, never! Was not dear Rosa’s
health already impaired by the various shocks which she had undergone?
Did she not require every comfort, every attendance? Monster! ask the
doctor! She would stay with her darling child in spite of insult and
rudeness and vulgarity. (Rosey’s father was a King’s officer, not a
Company’s officer, thank God!) She would stay as long at least as
Rosey’s situation continued, at Boulogne, if not in London, but with
her child. They might refuse to send her money, having robbed her of
all her own, but she would pawn her gown off her back for her child.
Whimpers from Rosey—cries of “Mamma, mamma, compose
yourself,”—convulsive sobs—clenched knuckles—flashing eyes—embraces
rapidly clutched—laughs—stamps—snorts—from the dishevelled Campaigner;
grinding teeth—livid fury and repeated breakages of the third
commandment by Clive—I can fancy the whole scene. He returned to London
without his wife, and when she came she brought Mrs. Mackenzie with
her.




CHAPTER LXXV.
Founder’s Day at the Grey Friars


Rosey came, bringing discord and wretchedness with her to her husband,
and the sentence of death or exile to his dear old father, all of which
we foresaw—all of which Clive’s friends would have longed to
prevent—all of which were inevitable under the circumstances. Clive’s
domestic affairs were often talked over by our little set. Warrington
and F. B. knew of his unhappiness. We three had strongly opined that
the women being together at Boulogne, should stay there and live there,
Clive sending them over pecuniary aid as his means permitted. “They
must hate each other pretty well by this time,” growls George
Warrington. “Why on earth should they not part?” “What a woman that
Mrs. Mackenzie is!” cries F. B. “What an infernal tartar and catamaran!
She who was so uncommonly smiling and soft-spoken, and such a fine
woman, by jingo! What puzzles all women are!” F. B. sighed, and drowned
further reflection in beer.

On the other side, and most strongly advocating Rosey’s return to
Clive, was Mrs. Laura Pendennis; with certain arguments for which she
had chapter and verse, and against which we of the separatist party had
no appeal. “Did he marry her only for the days of her prosperity?”
asked Laura. “Is it right, is it manly, that he should leave her now
she is unhappy—poor little creature—no woman had ever more need of
protection; and who should be her natural guardian save her husband?
Surely, Arthur, you forget—have you forgotten them yourself, sir?—the
solemn vows which Clive made at the altar. Is he not bound to his wife
to keep only unto her so long as they both shall live, to love and
comfort her, honour her, and keep her in sickness and health?”

“To keep her, yes—but not to keep the Campaigner,” cries Mr. Pendennis.
“It is a moral bigamy, Laura, which you advocate, you wicked, immoral
young woman!”

But Laura, though she smiled at this notion, would not be put off from
her first proposition. Turning to Clive, who was with us, talking over
his doleful family circumstances, she took his hand, and pleaded the
cause of right and religion with sweet artless fervour. She agreed with
us that it was a hard lot for Clive to bear. So much the nobler the
task, and the fulfilment of duty in enduring it. A few months too would
put an end to his trials. When his child was born Mrs. Mackenzie would
take her departure. It would even be Clive’s duty to separate from her
then, as it now was to humour his wife in her delicate condition, and
to soothe the poor soul who had had a great deal of ill-health, of
misfortune, of domestic calamity to wear and shatter her. Clive
acquiesced with a groan, but—with a touching and generous resignation
as we both thought. “She is right, Pen,” he said, “I think your wife is
always right. I will try, Laura, and bear my part, God help me! I will
do my duty and strive my best to soothe and gratify my poor dear little
woman. They will be making caps and things, and will not interrupt me
in my studio. Of nights I can go to Clipstone Street and work at the
Life. There’s nothing like the Life, Pen. So you see I shan’t be much
at home except at meal-times, when by nature I shall have my mouth
full, and no opportunity of quarrelling with poor Mrs. Mac.” So he went
home, followed and cheered by the love and pity of my dear wife, and
determined stoutly to bear this heavy yoke which fate had put on him.

To do Mrs. Mackenzie justice, that lady backed up with all her might
the statement which my wife had put forward, with a view of soothing
poor Clive, viz., that the residence of his mother-in-law in his house
was only to be temporary. “Temporary!” cries Mrs. Mac (who was kind
enough to make a call on Mrs. Pendennis, and treat that lady to a piece
of her mind). “Do you suppose, madam, that it could be otherwise? Do
you suppose that worlds would induce me to stay in a house where I have
received such _treatment;_ where, after I and my daughter had been
robbed of every shilling of our fortune, where we are daily insulted by
Colonel Newcome and his son? Do you suppose, ma’am, that I do not know
that Clive’s friends hate me, and give themselves airs and look down
upon my darling child, and try and make differences between my sweet
Rosa and me—Rosa who might have been dead, or might have been starving,
but that her dear mother came to her rescue? No, I would never stay. I
loathe every day that I remain in the house—I would rather beg my
bread—I would rather sweep the streets and starve—though, thank God, I
have my pension as the widow of an officer in Her Majesty’s Service,
and I can live upon that—and of _that_ Colonel Newcome _cannot_ rob me;
and when my darling love needs a mother’s care no longer, I will leave
her. I will shake the dust off my feet and leave that house. I will—And
Mr. Newcome’s friends may then sneer at me and abuse me, and blacken my
darling child’s heart towards me if they choose. And I thank you, Mrs.
Pendennis, for all your _kindness_ towards my daughter’s family, and
for the furniture which you have sent into the house, and for the
_trouble_ you have taken about our family arrangements. It was for this
I took the liberty of calling upon you, and I wish you a very good
morning.” So speaking, the Campaigner left my wife; and Mrs. Pendennis
enacted the pleasing scene with great spirit to her husband afterwards,
concluding the whole with a splendid curtsey and toss of the head, such
as Mrs. Mackenzie performed as her parting salute.

Our dear Colonel had fled before. He had acquiesced humbly with the
decree of fate; and, lonely, old and beaten, marched honestly on the
path of duty. It was a great blessing, he wrote to us, to him to think
that in happier days and during many years he had been enabled to
benefit his kind and excellent relative, Miss Honeyman. He could
thankfully receive her hospitality now, and claim the kindness and
shelter which this old friend gave him. No one could be more anxious to
make him comfortable. The air of Brighton did him the greatest good; he
had found some old friends, some old Bengalees there, with whom he
enjoyed himself greatly, etc. How much did we, who knew his noble
spirit, believe of this story? To us Heaven had awarded health,
happiness, competence, loving children, united hearts, and modest
prosperity. To yonder good man, whose long life shone with
benefactions, and whose career was but kindness and honour, fate
decreed poverty, disappointment, separation, a lonely old age. We bowed
our heads, humiliated at the contrast of his lot and ours; and prayed
Heaven to enable us to bear our present good fortune meekly, and our
evil days, if they should come, with such a resignation as this good
Christian showed.

I forgot to say that our attempts to better Thomas Newcome’s money
affairs were quite in vain, the Colonel insisting upon paying over
every shilling of his military allowances and retiring pension to the
parties from whom he had borrowed money previous to his bankruptcy.
“Ah! what a good man that is,” says Mr. Sherrick with tears in his
eyes, “what a noble fellow, sir! He would die rather than not pay every
farthing over. He’d starve, sir, that he would. The money ain’t mine,
sir, or if it was do you think I’d take it from the poor old boy? No,
sir; by Jove! I honour and reverence him more now he ain’t got a
shilling in his pocket, than ever I did when we thought he was
a-rolling in money.”

My wife made one or two efforts at Samaritan visits in Howland Street,
but was received by Mrs. Clive with such a faint welcome, and by the
Campaigner with so grim a countenance, so many sneers, innuendoes,
insults almost, that Laura’s charity was beaten back, and she ceased to
press good offices thus thanklessly received. If Clive came to visit
us, as he very rarely did, after an official question or two regarding
the health of his wife and child, no further mention was made of his
family affairs. His painting, he said, was getting on tolerably well;
he had work, scantily paid it is true, but work sufficient. He was
reserved, uncommunicative, unlike the frank Clive of former times, and
oppressed by his circumstances, as it was easy to see. I did not press
the confidence which he was unwilling to offer, and thought best to
respect his silence. I had a thousand affairs of my own; who has not in
London? If you die to-morrow, your dearest friend will feel for you a
hearty pang of sorrow, and go to his business as usual. I could divine,
but would not care to describe, the life which my poor Clive was now
leading; the vulgar misery, the sordid home, the cheerless toil, and
lack of friendly companionship which darkened his kind soul. I was glad
Clive’s father was away. The Colonel wrote to us twice or thrice; could
it be three months ago?—bless me, how time flies! He was happy, he
wrote, with Miss Honeyman, who took the best care of him.

Mention has been made once or twice in the course of this history of
the Grey Friars school,—where the Colonel and Clive and I had been
brought up,—an ancient foundation of the time of James I., still
subsisting in the heart of London city. The death-day of the founder of
the place is still kept solemnly by Cistercians. In their chapel, where
assemble the boys of the school, and the fourscore old men of the
Hospital, the founder’s tomb stands, a huge edifice: emblazoned with
heraldic decorations and clumsy carved allegories. There is an old
Hall, a beautiful specimen of the architecture of James’s time; an old
Hall? many old halls; old staircases, passages, old chambers decorated
with old portraits, walking in the midst of which we walk as it were in
the early seventeenth century. To others than Cistercians, Grey Friars
is a dreary place possibly. Nevertheless, the pupils educated there
love to revisit it; and the oldest of us grow young again for an hour
or two as we come back into those scenes of childhood.

The custom of the school is, that on the 12th of December, the
Founder’s Day, the head gown-boy shall recite a Latin oration, in
praise of _Fundatoris Nostri_, and upon other subjects; and a goodly
company of old Cistercians is generally brought together to attend this
oration: after which we go to chapel and hear a sermon; after which we
adjourn to a great dinner, where old condisciples meet, old toasts are
given, and speeches are made. Before marching from the oration-hall to
chapel, the stewards of the day’s dinner, according to old-fashioned
rite, have wands put into their hands, walk to church at the head of
the procession, and sit there in places of honour. The boys are already
in their seats, with smug fresh faces, and shining white collars; the
old black-gowned pensioners are on their benches; the chapel is
lighted, and Founder’s Tomb, with its grotesque carvings, monsters,
heraldries, darkles and shines with the most wonderful shadows and
lights. There he lies, Fundator Noster, in his ruff and gown, awaiting
the great Examination Day. We oldsters, be we ever so old, become boys
again as we look at that familiar old tomb, and think how the seats are
altered since we were here, and how the doctor—not the present doctor,
the doctor of our time—used to sit yonder, and his awful eye used to
frighten us shuddering boys, on whom it lighted; and how the boy next
us _would_ kick our shins during service time, and how the monitor
would cane us afterwards because our shins were kicked. Yonder sit
forty cherry-cheeked boys, thinking about home and holidays to-morrow.
Yonder sit some threescore old gentlemen pensioners of the hospital,
listening to the prayers and the psalms. You hear them coughing feebly
in the twilight,—the old reverend blackgowns. Is Codd Ajax alive, you
wonder?—the Cistercian lads called these old gentlemen Codds, I know
not wherefore—I know not wherefore—but is old Codd Ajax alive, I
wonder? or Codd Soldier? or kind old Codd Gentleman, or has the grave
closed over them? A plenty of candles lights up this chapel, and this
scene of age and youth, and early memories, and pompous death. How
solemn the well-remembered prayers are, here uttered again in the place
wherein childhood we used to hear them! How beautiful and decorous the
rite; how noble the ancient words of the supplications which the priest
utters, and to which generations of fresh children and troops of bygone
seniors have cried Amen! under those arches! The service for Founder’s
Day is a special one; one of the psalms selected being the
thirty-seventh, and we hear—

23. The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord: and he delighteth
in his way.
24. Though he fall, he shall not be utterly cast down: for the Lord
upholdeth him with his hand.
25. I have been young, and now am old: yet have I not seen the
righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging their bread.


As we came to this verse, I chanced to look up from my book towards the
swarm of black-coated pensioners: and amongst them—amongst them—sate
Thomas Newcome.

His dear old head was bent down over his prayer-book—there was no
mistaking him. He wore the black gown of the pensioners of the Hospital
of Grey Friars. His order of the Bath was on his breast. He stood there
amongst the poor brethren, uttering the responses to the psalm. The
steps of this good man had been ordered him hither by Heaven’s decree:
to this almshouse! Here it was ordained that a life all love, and
kindness, and honour, should end! I heard no more of prayers, and
psalms, and sermon, after that. How dared I to be in a place of mark,
and he, he yonder among the poor? Oh, pardon, you noble soul! I ask
forgiveness of you for being of a world that has so treated you—you my
better, you the honest, and gentle, and good! I thought the service
would never end, or the organist’s voluntaries, or the preacher’s
homily.

The organ played us out of chapel at length, and I waited in the
ante-chapel until the pensioners took their turn to quit it. My dear,
dear old friend! I ran to him with a warmth and eagerness of
recognition which no doubt showed themselves in my face and accents, as
my heart was moved at the sight of him. His own face flushed up when he
saw me, and his hand shook in mine. “I have found a home, Arthur,” said
he. “Don’t you remember before I went to India, when we came to see the
old Grey Friars, and visited Captain Scarsdale in his room?—a poor
brother like me—an old Peninsular man. Scarsdale is gone now, sir, and
is where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest; and
I thought then, when we saw him,—here would be a place for an old
fellow when his career was over, to hang his sword up; to humble his
soul, and to wait thankfully for the end. Arthur. My good friend, Lord
H., who is a Cistercian like ourselves, and has just been appointed a
governor, gave me his first nomination. Don’t be agitated, Arthur my
boy, I am very happy. I have good quarters, good food, good light and
fire, and good friends; blessed be God! my dear kind young friend—my
boy’s friend; you have always been so, sir; and I take it uncommonly
kind of you, and I thank God for you, sir. Why, sir, I am as happy as
the day is long.” He uttered words to this effect as he walked through
the courts of the building towards his room, which in truth I found
neat and comfortable, with a brisk fire crackling on the hearth; a
little tea-table laid out, a Bible and spectacles by the side of it,
and over the mantelpiece a drawing of his grandson by Clive.

“You may come and see me here, sir, whenever you like, and so may your
dear wife and little ones, tell Laura, with my love;—but you must not
stay now. You must go back to your dinner.” In vain I pleaded that I
had no stomach for it. He gave me a look, which seemed to say he
desired to be alone, and I had to respect that order and leave him.

Of course I came to him on the very next day; though not with my wife
and children, who were in truth absent in the country at Rosebury,
where they were to pass the Christmas holidays; and where, this
school-dinner over, I was to join them. On my second visit to Grey
Friars my good friend entered more at length into the reasons why he
had assumed the Poor Brother’s gown; and I cannot say but that I
acquiesced in his reasons, and admired that noble humility and
contentedness of which he gave me an example.

“That which had caused him most grief and pain,” he said, “in the issue
of that unfortunate bank, was the thought that poor friends of his had
been induced by his representations to invest their little capital in
that speculation. Good Miss Honeyman, for instance, meaning no harm,
and in all respects a most honest and kindly-disposed old lady, had
nevertheless alluded more than once to the fact that her money had been
thrown away; and these allusions, sir, made her hospitality somewhat
hard to bear,” said the Colonel. “At home—at poor Clivey’s, I mean—it
was even worse,” he continued; “Mrs. Mackenzie for months past, by her
complaints, and—and her conduct, has made my son and me so
miserable—that flight before her, and into any refuge, was the best
course. She too does not mean ill, Pen. Do not waste any of your oaths
upon that poor woman,” he added, holding up his finger, and smiling
sadly. “She thinks I deceived her, though Heaven knows it was myself I
deceived. She has great influence over Rosa. Very few persons can
resist that violent and headstrong woman, sir. I could not bear her
reproaches, or my poor sick daughter, whom her mother leads almost
entirely now, and it was with all this grief on my mind, that, as I was
walking one day upon Brighton cliff, I met my schoolfellow, my Lord
H——, who has ever been a good friend of mine—and who told me how he had
just been appointed a governor of Grey Friars. He asked me to dine with
him on the next day, and would take no refusal. He knew of my pecuniary
misfortunes, of course—and showed himself most noble and liberal in his
offers of help. I was very much touched by his goodness, Pen,—and made
a clean breast of it to his lordship; who at first would not hear of my
coming to this place—and offered me out of the purse of an old
brother-schoolfellow and an old brother soldier as much—as much as
should last me my time. Wasn’t it noble of him, Arthur? God bless him!
There are good men in the world, sir, there are true friends, as I have
found in these later days. Do you know, sir”—here the old man’s eyes
twinkled,—“that Fred Bayham fixed up that bookcase yonder—and brought
me my little boy’s picture to hang up? Boy and Clive will come and see
me soon.”

“Do you mean they do not come?” I cried.

“They don’t know I am here, sir,” said the Colonel, with a sweet, kind
smile. “They think I am visiting his lordship in Scotland. Ah! they are
good people! When we had had a talk downstairs over our bottle of
claret—where my old commander-in-chief would not hear of my plan—we
went upstairs to her ladyship, who saw that her husband was disturbed,
and asked the reason. I dare say it was the good claret that made me
speak, sir; for I told her that I and her husband had had a dispute and
that I would take her ladyship for umpire. And then I told her the
story over, that I had paid away every rupee to the creditors, and
mortgaged my pensions and retiring allowances for the same end, that I
was a burden upon Clivey, who had enough, poor boy, to keep his own
family, and his wife’s mother, whom my imprudence had
impoverished,—that here was an honourable asylum which my friend could
procure for me, and was not that better than to drain his purse? She
was very much moved, sir—she is a very kind lady, though she passed for
being very proud and haughty in India—so wrongly are people judged. And
Lord H. said, in his rough way, ‘that, by Jove, if Tom Newcome took a
thing into his obstinate old head no one could drive it out.’ And so,”
said the Colonel, with his sad smile, “I _had_ my own way. Lady H. was
good enough to come and see me the very next day—and do you know, Pen,
she invited me to go and live with them for the rest of my life—made me
the most generous, the most delicate offers. But I knew I was right,
and held my own. I am too old to work, Arthur: and better here whilst I
am to stay, than elsewhere. Look! all this furniture came from H.
House—and that wardrobe is full of linen, which she sent me. She has
been twice to see me, and every officer in this hospital is as
courteous to me as if I had my fine house.”

I thought of the psalm we had heard on the previous evening, and turned
to it in the opened Bible, and pointed to the verse, “Though he fall,
he shall not be utterly cast down: for the Lord upholdeth him.” Thomas
Newcome seeing my occupation, laid a kind, trembling hand on my
shoulder; and then, putting on his glasses, with a smile bent over the
volume. And who that saw him then, and knew him and loved him as I
did—who would not have humbled his own heart, and breathed his inward
prayer, confessing and adoring the Divine Will, which ordains these
trials, these triumphs, these humiliations, these blest griefs, this
crowning Love?

I had the happiness of bringing Clive and his little boy to Thomas
Newcome that evening; and heard the child’s cry of recognition and
surprise, and the old man calling the boy’s name, as I closed the door
upon that meeting; and by the night’s mail I went down to Newcome, to
the friends with whom my own family was already staying.

Of course, my conscience-keeper at Rosebury was anxious to know about
the school-dinner, and all the speeches made, and the guests assembled
there; but she soot ceased to inquire about these when I came to give
her the news of the discovery of our dear old friend in the habit of a
Poor Brother of Grey Friars. She was very glad to hear that Clive and
his little son had been reunited to the Colonel; and appeared to
imagine at first, that there was some wonderful merit upon my part in
bringing the three together.

“Well—no great merit, Pen, as you _will_ put it,” says the Confessor;
“but it was kindly thought, sir—and I like my husband when he is kind
best; and don’t wonder at your having made a stupid speech at the
dinner, as you say you did, when you had this other subject to think
of. That is a beautiful psalm, Pen, and those verses which you were
reading when you saw him, especially beautiful.”

“But in the presence of eighty old gentlemen, who have all come to
decay, and have all had to beg their bread in a manner, don’t you think
the clergyman might choose some other psalm?” asks Mr. Pendennis.

“They were not forsaken _utterly_, Arthur,” says Mrs. Laura, gravely:
but rather declines to argue the point raised by me; namely, that the
selection of that especial thirty-seventh psalm was not complimentary
to those decayed old gentlemen.

“_All_ the psalms are good, sir,” she says, “and this one, of course,
is included,” and thus the discussion closed.

I then fell to a description of Howland Street, and poor Clive, whom I
had found there over his work. A dubious maid scanned my appearance
rather eagerly when I asked to see him. I found a picture-dealer
chaffering with him over a bundle of sketches, and his little boy,
already pencil in hand, lying in one corner of the room, the sun
playing about his yellow hair. The child looked languid and pale, the
father worn and ill. When the dealer at length took his bargains away,
I gradually broke my errand to Clive, and told him from whence I had
just come.

He had thought his father in Scotland with Lord H.: and was immensely
moved with the news which I brought.

“I haven’t written to him for a month. It’s not pleasant the letters I
have to write, Pen, and I can’t make them pleasant. Up, Tommykin, and
put on your cap.” Tommykin jumps up. “Put on your cap, and tell them to
take off your pinafore, tell grandmamma——”

At that name Tommykin begins to cry.

“Look at that!” says Clive, commencing to speak in the French language,
which the child interrupts by calling out in that tongue. “I speak also
French, papa.”

“Well, my child! You will like to come out with papa, and Betsy can
dress you.” He flings off his own paint-stained shooting-jacket as he
talks, takes a frock-coat out of a carved wardrobe, and a hat from a
helmet on the shelf. He is no longer the handsome splendid boy of old
times. Can that be Clive, with that haggard face and slouched
handkerchief? “I am not the dandy I was, Pen,” he says bitterly.

A little voice is heard crying overhead—and giving a kind of gasp the
wretched father stops in some indifferent speech he was trying to make.
“I can’t help myself,” he groans out; “my wife is so ill, she can’t
attend to the child. Mrs. Mackenzie manages the house for me—and—here!
Tommy, Tommy! papa is coming!” Tommy has been crying again; and
flinging open the studio door, Clive calls out, and dashes upstairs.

I hear scuffling, stamping, loud voices, poor Tommy’s scared little
pipe—Clive’s fierce objurgations, and the Campaigner’s voice barking
out—“Do, sir, do! with my child suffering in the next room. Behave like
a brute to me, do. He shall not go! He shall not have the hat”—“He
shall”—“Ah—ah!” A scream is heard. It is Clive tearing a child’s hat
out of the Campaigner’s hands, with which, and a flushed face, he
presently rushes downstairs, bearing little Tommy on his shoulder.

“You see what I am come to, Pen,” he says with a heartbroken voice,
trying, with hands all of a tremble, to tie the hat on the boy’s head.
He laughs bitterly at the ill success of his endeavours. “Oh, you silly
papa!” laughs Tommy, too.

The door is flung open, and the red-faced Campaigner appears. Her face
is mottled with wrath, her bandeaux of hair are disarranged upon her
forehead, the ornaments of her cap, cheap, and dirty, and numerous,
only give her a wilder appearance. She is in a large and dingy wrapper,
very different from the lady who had presented herself a few months
back to my wife—how different from the smiling Mrs. Mackenzie of old
days!

“He shall not go out of a winter day, sir,” she breaks out. “I have his
mother’s orders, whom you are _killing_. Mr. Pendennis!” She starts,
perceiving me for the first time, and her breast heaves, and she
prepares for combat, and looks at me over her shoulder.

“You and his father are the best judges upon this point, ma’am,” said
Mr. Pendennis, with a bow.

“The child is delicate, sir,” cries Mrs. Mackenzie; “and this winter——”

“Enough of this,” says Clive with a stamp, and passes through her guard
with Tommy, and we descend the stairs, and at length are in the free
street. Was it not best not to describe at full length this portion of
poor Clive’s history?




CHAPTER LXXVI.
Christmas at Rosebury


We have known our friend Florac under two aristocratic names, and might
now salute him by a third, to which he was entitled, although neither
he nor his wife ever chose to assume it. His father was lately dead,
and M. Paul de Florac might sign himself Duc d’Ivry if he chose, but he
was indifferent as to the matter, and his wife’s friends indignant at
the idea that their kinswoman, after having been a Princess, should
descend to the rank of a mere Duchess. So Prince and Princess these
good folks remained, being exceptions to that order, inasmuch as their
friends could certainly put their trust in them.

On his father’s death Florac went to Paris, to settle the affairs of
the paternal succession; and, having been for some time absent in his
native country, returned to Rosebury for the winter, to resume that
sport of which he was a distinguished amateur. He hunted in black
during the ensuing season; and, indeed, henceforth laid aside his
splendid attire and his _allures_ as a young man. His waist expanded,
or was no longer confined by the cestus which had given it a shape.
When he laid aside his black, his whiskers, too, went into a sort of
half-mourning, and appeared in grey. “I make myself old, my friend,” he
said, pathetically; “I have no more neither twenty years nor forty.” He
went to Rosebury Church no more; but, with great order and sobriety,
drove every Sunday to the neighbouring Catholic chapel at C—— Castle.
We had an ecclesiastic or two to dine with us at Rosebury, one of whom
I inclined to think was Florac’s director.

A reason, perhaps, for Paul’s altered demeanour, was the presence of
his mother at Rosebury. No politeness or respect could be greater than
Paul’s towards the Countess. Had she been a sovereign princess, Madame
de Florac could not have been treated with more profound courtesy than
she now received from her son. I think the humble-minded lady could
have dispensed with some of his attentions; but Paul was a personage
who demonstrated all his sentiments, and performed his various parts in
life with the greatest vigour. As a man of pleasure, for instance, what
more active roué than he? As a _jeune homme_, who could be younger, and
for a longer time? As a country gentleman, or an _homme d’affaires_, he
insisted upon dressing each character with the most rigid accuracy, and
an exactitude that reminded one somewhat of Bouffé, or Ferville, at the
play. I wonder whether, when is he quite old, he will think proper to
wear a pigtail, like his old father? At any rate, that was a good part
which the kind fellow was now acting, of reverence towards his widowed
mother, and affectionate respect for her declining days. He not only
felt these amiable sentiments, but he imparted them to his friends most
freely, as his wont was. He used to weep freely,—quite unrestrained by
the presence of the domestics, as English sentiment would be:—and when
Madame de Florac quitted the room after dinner, would squeeze my hand
and tell me with streaming eyes, that his mother was an angel. “Her
life has been but a long trial, my friend,” he would say. “Shall not I,
who have caused her to shed so many tears, endeavour to dry some?” Of
course the friends who liked him best encouraged him in an intention so
pious.

The reader has already been made acquainted with this lady by the
letters of hers, which came into my possession some time after the
events which I am at present narrating: my wife, through our kind
friend, Colonel Newcome, had also had the honour of an introduction to
Madame de Florac at Paris; and, on coming to Rosebury for the Christmas
holidays, I found Laura and the children greatly in favour with the
good Countess. She treated her son’s wife with a perfect though distant
courtesy. She was thankful to Madame de Moncontour for the latter’s
great goodness to her son. Familiar with but very few persons, she
could scarcely be intimate with her homely daughter-in-law. Madame de
Moncontour stood in the greatest awe of her; and, to do that good lady
justice, admired and reverenced Paul’s mother with all her simple
heart. In truth, I think almost every one had a certain awe of Madame
de Florac, except children, who came to her trustingly, and, as it
were, by instinct. The habitual melancholy of her eyes vanished as they
lighted upon young faces and infantile smiles. A sweet love beamed out
of her countenance: an angelic smile shone over her face, as she bent
towards them and caressed them. Her demeanour then, nay, her looks and
ways at other times;—a certain gracious sadness, a sympathy with all
grief, and pity for all pain; a gentle heart, yearning towards all
children; and, for her own especially, feeling a love that was almost
an anguish: in the affairs of the common world only a dignified
acquiescence, as if her place was not in it, and her thoughts were in
her Home elsewhere;—these qualities, which we had seen exemplified in
another life, Laura and her husband watched in Madame de Florac, and we
loved her because she was like our mother. I see in such women, the
good and pure, the patient and faithful, the tried and meek, the
followers of Him whose earthly life was divinely sad and tender.

But, good as she was to us and to all, Ethel Newcome was the French
lady’s greatest favourite. A bond of extreme tenderness and affection
united these two. The elder friend made constant visits to the younger
at Newcome; and when Miss Newcome, as she frequently did, came to
Rosebury, we used to see that they preferred to be alone; divining and
respecting the sympathy which brought those two faithful hearts
together. I can imagine now the two tall forms slowly pacing the garden
walks, or turning, as they lighted on the young ones in their play.
What was their talk! I never asked it. Perhaps Ethel never said what
was in her heart, though, be sure, the other knew it. Though the grief
of those they love is untold, women hear it; as they soothe it with
unspoken consolations. To see the elder lady embrace her friend as they
parted was something holy—a sort of saintlike salutation.

Consulting the person from whom I had no secrets, we had thought best
at first not to mention to our friends the place and position in which
we had found our dear Colonel; at least to wait for a fitting
opportunity on which we might break the news to those who held him in
such affection. I told how Clive was hard at work, and hoped the best
for him. Good-natured Madame de Moncontour was easily satisfied with my
replies to her questions concerning our friend. Ethel only asked if he
and her uncle were well, and once or twice made inquiries respecting
Rosa and her child. And now it was that my wife told me, what I need no
longer keep secret, of Ethel’s extreme anxiety to serve her distressed
relatives, and how she, Laura, had already acted as Miss Newcome’s
almoner in furnishing and hiring those apartments, which Ethel believed
were occupied by Clive and his father, and wife and child. And my wife
further informed me with what deep grief Ethel had heard of her uncle’s
misfortune, and how, but that she feared to offend his pride, she
longed to give him assistance. She had even ventured to offer to send
him pecuniary help; but the Colonel (who never mentioned the
circumstance to me any other of his friends), in a kind but very cold
letter, had declined to be beholden to his niece for help.

So I may have remained some days at Rosebury, and the real position of
the two Newcomes was unknown to our friends there. Christmas Eve was
come, and, according to a long-standing promise, Ethel Newcome and her
two children had arrived from the Park, which dreary mansion, since his
double defeat, Sir Barnes scarcely ever visited. Christmas was come,
and Rosebury hall was decorated with holly. Florac did his best to
welcome his friends, and strove to make the meeting gay, though in
truth it was rather melancholy. The children, however, were happy: and
they had pleasure enough, in the school festival, in the distribution
of cloaks and blankets to the poor, and in Madame de Moncontour’s
gardens, delightful and beautiful though the winter was there.

It was only a family meeting, Madame de Florac’s widowhood not
permitting her presence in large companies. Paul sate at his table
between his mother and Mrs. Pendennis; Mr. Pendennis opposite to him,
with Ethel and Madame de Moncontour on each side. The four children
were placed between these personages, on whom Madame de Florac looked
with her tender glances, and to whose little wants the kindest of hosts
ministered with uncommon good-nature and affection. He was very
soft-hearted about children. “Pourquoi n’en avons-nous pas, Jeanne? He!
quoi n’en avons-nous pas?” he said, addressing his wife by her
Christian name. The poor little lady looked kindly at her husband, and
then gave a sigh, and turned and heaped cake upon the plate of the
child next to her. No mamma or Aunt Ethel could interpose. It was a
very light wholesome cake. Brown made it on purpose for the children,
“the little darlings!” cries the Princess.

The children were very happy at being allowed to sit up so late to
dinner, at all the kindly amusements of the day, at the holly and
mistletoe clustering round the lamps—the mistletoe, under which the
gallant Florac, skilled in all British usages, vowed he would have his
privilege. But the mistletoe was clustered round the lamp, the lamp was
over the centre of the great round table—the innocent gratification
which he proposed to himself was denied to M. Paul.

In the greatest excitement and good-humour, our host at the dessert
made us _des speech_. He carried a toast to the charming Ethel, another
to the charming Mistriss Laura, another to his good fren’, his brave
frren’, his ’appy fren’, Pendennis—’appy as possessor of such a wife,
’appy as writer of works destined to the immortality, etc. etc. The
little children round about clapped their happy little hands, and
laughed and crowed in chorus. And now the nursery and its guardians
were about to retreat, when Florac said he had yet a speech, yet a
toast—and he bade the butler pour wine into every one’s glass—yet a
toast—and he carried it to the health of our dear friends, of Clive and
his father,—the good, the brave Colonel! “We who are happy,” says he,
“shall we not think of those who are good? We who love each other,
shall we not remember those whom we all love?” He spoke with very great
tenderness and feeling. “Ma bonne mere, thou too shalt drink this
toast!” he said, taking his mother’s hand, and kissing it. She returned
his caress gently, and tasted the wine with her pale lips. Ethel’s head
bent in silence over her glass; and, as for Laura, need I say what
happened to her! When the ladies went away my heart was opened to my
friend Florac, and I told him where and how I had left my dear Clive’s
father.

The Frenchman’s emotion on hearing this tale was such that I have loved
him ever since. Clive in want! Why had he not sent to his friend?
Grands Dieux! Clive who had helped him in his greatest distress!
Clive’s father, ce _preux chevalier, ce parfait gentilhomme!_ In a
hundred rapid exclamations Florac exhibited his sympathy, asking of
Fate, why such men as he and I were sitting surrounded by
splendours—before golden vases crowned with flowers—with valets to kiss
our feet—(those were merely figures of speech in which Paul expressed
his prosperity)—whilst our friend the Colonel, so much better than we,
spent his last days in poverty, and alone.

I liked Florac none the less, I own, because that one of the conditions
of the Colonel’s present life, which appeared the hardest to most
people, affected Florac but little. To be a Pensioner of an Ancient
Institution? Why not? Might not a man retire without shame to the
Invalides at the close of his campaigns, and, had not Fortune conquered
our old friend, and age and disaster overcome him? It never once
entered Thomas Newcome’s head; nor Clive’s, nor Florac’s, nor his
mother’s, that the Colonel demeaned himself at all by accepting that
bounty; and I recollect Warrington sharing our sentiment and trowling
out those noble lines of the old poet:—

“His golden locks time hath to silver turned;
    O time too swift, O swiftness never ceasing!
His youth ’gainst time and age hath ever spurned,
    But spurned in vain; youth waneth by encreasing.
Beauty, strength, youth, are flowers but fading seen.
Duty, faith, love, are roots, and ever green.

“His helmet now shall make a hive for bees,
    And lovers’ songs be turned to holy psalms;
A man at arms must now serve on his knees,
    And feed on prayers, which are old age’s alms.”


These, I say, respected our friend, whatever was the coat he wore;
whereas, among the Colonel’s own kinsfolk, dire was the dismay, and
indignation even, which they expressed when they came to hear of this,
what they were pleased to call degradation to their family. Clive’s
dear mother-in-law made outcries over the good old man as over a
pauper, and inquired of Heaven, what she had done that her blessed
child should have a mendicant for a father? And Mrs. Hobson, in
subsequent confidential communication with the writer of these memoirs,
improved the occasion religiously as her wont was; referred the matter
to Heaven too, and thought fit to assume that the celestial powers had
decreed this _humiliation_, this _dreadful trial_ for the Newcome
family, as a warning to them all that they should not be too much
puffed up with prosperity, nor set their affections too much upon
things of this earth. Had they not already received _one_ chastisement
in Barnes’s punishment, and Lady Clara’s awful falling away? They had
taught her a lesson, which the Colonel’s _lamentable errors_ had
_confirmed_,—the vanity of trusting in all earthly grandeurs! Thus it
was this worthy woman plumed herself, as it were, on her relative’s
misfortunes; and was pleased to think the latter were designed for the
special warning and advantage of her private family. But Mrs. Hobson’s
philosophy is only mentioned by the way. Our story, which is drawing to
its close, has to busy itself with other members of the house of The
Newcomes.

My talk with Florac lasted for some time: at its close, when we went to
join the ladies in the drawing-room, we found Ethel cloaked and
shawled, and prepared for her departure with her young ones, who were
already asleep. The little festival was over, and had ended in
melancholy—even in weeping. Our hostess sate in her accustomed seat by
her lamp and her worktable; but, neglecting her needle, she was having
perpetual recourse to her pocket-handkerchief, and uttering
ejaculations of pity between the intervals of her gushes of tears.
Madame de Florac was in her usual place, her head cast downwards, and
her hands folded. My wife was at her side, a grave commiseration
showing itself in Laura’s countenance, whilst I read a yet deeper
sadness in Ethel’s pale face. Miss Newcome’s carriage had been
announced; the attendants had already carried the young ones asleep to
the vehicle; and she was in the act of taking leave. We looked round at
this disturbed party, guessing very likely what the subject of their
talk had been, to which, however, Miss Ethel did not allude: but,
announcing that she had intended to depart without disturbing the two
gentlemen, she bade us farewell and good night. “I wish I could say a
merry Christmas,” she added gravely, “but none of us, I fear, can hope
for that.” It was evident that Laura had told the last chapter of the
Colonel’s story.

Madame de Floras rose up and embraced Miss Newcome, and, that farewell
over, she sank back on the sofa exhausted, and with such an expression
of affliction in her countenance, that my wife ran eagerly towards her.
“It is nothing, my dear,” she said, giving a cold hand to the younger
lady, and sate silent for a few moments, during which we heard Florac’s
voice without crying Adieu! and the wheels of Miss Newcome’s carriage
when it drove away.

Our host entered a moment afterwards; and remarking, as Laura had done,
his mother’s pallor and look of anguish, went up and spoke to her with
the utmost tenderness and anxiety.

She gave her hand to her son, and a faint blush rose up out of the past
as it were, and trembled upon her wan cheek. “He was the first friend I
ever had in the world, Paul,” she said “the first and the best. He
shall not want, shall he, my son?”

No signs of that emotion in which her daughter-in-law had been
indulging were as yet visible in Madame de Florac’s eyes, but, as she
spoke, holding her son’s hand in hers, the tears at length overflowed,
and with a sob, her head fell forwards. The impetuous Frenchman flung
himself on his knees before his mother, uttered a hundred words of love
and respect for her, and with tears and sobs of his own called God to
witness that their friend should never want. And so this mother and son
embraced each other, and clung together in a sacred union of love,
before which we who had been admitted as spectators of that scene,
stood hushed and respectful.

That night Laura told me, how, when the ladies left us, the talk had
been entirely about the Colonel and Clive. Madame de Florac had spoken
especially, and much more freely than was her wont. She had told many
reminiscences of Thomas Newcome, and his early days; how her father
taught him mathematics when they were quite poor, and living in their
dear little cottage at Blackheath; how handsome he was then, with
bright eyes, and long black hair flowing over his shoulders; how
military glory was his boyish passion, and he was for ever talking of
India, and the famous deeds of Clive and Lawrence. His favourite book
was a history of India—the history of Orme. “He read it, and I read it
also, my daughter,” the French lady said, turning to Ethel; “ah! I may
say so after so many years.”

Ethel remembered the book as belonging to her grandmother, and now in
the library at Newcome. Doubtless the same sympathy which caused me to
speak about Thomas Newcome that evening, impelled my wife likewise. She
told her friends, as I had told Florac, all the Colonel’s story; and it
was while these good women were under the impression of the melancholy
history, that Florac and his guest found them.

Retired to our rooms, Laura and I talked on the same subject until the
clock tolled Christmas, and the neighbouring church bells rang out a
jubilation. And, looking out into the quiet night, where the stars were
keenly shining, we committed ourselves to rest with humbled hearts;
praying, for all those we loved, a blessing of peace and goodwill.




CHAPTER LXXVII.
The Shortest and Happiest in the Whole History


In the ensuing Christmas morning I chanced to rise betimes, and
entering my dressing-room, opened the windows and looked out on the
soft landscape, over which mists were still lying; whilst the serene
sky above, and the lawns and leafless woods in the foreground near,
were still pink with sunrise. The grey had not even left the west yet,
and I could see a star or two twinkling there, to vanish with that
twilight.

As I looked out, I saw the not very distant lodge-gate open after a
brief parley, and a lady on horseback, followed by a servant, rode
rapidly up to the house. This early visitor was no other than Miss
Ethel Newcome. The young lady espied me immediately. “Come down; come
down to me this moment, Mr. Pendennis,” she cried out. I hastened down
to her, supposing rightly that news of importance had brought her to
Rosebury so early.

The news were of importance indeed. “Look here!” she said, “read this;”
and she took a paper from the pocket of her habit. “When I went home
last night, after Madame de Florac had been talking to us about Orme’s
India, I took the volumes from the bookcase and found this paper. It is
in my grandmother’s—Mrs. Newcome’s—handwriting; I know it quite well,
it is dated on the very day of her death. She had been writing and
reading in her study on that very night; I have often heard papa speak
of the circumstance. Look and read. You are a lawyer, Mr. Pendennis;
tell me about this paper.”

I seized it eagerly, and cast my eyes over it; but having read it, my
countenance fell.

“My dear Miss Newcome, it is not worth a penny,” I was obliged to own.

“Yes, it is, sir, to honest people!” she cried out. “My brother and
uncle will respect it as Mrs. Newcome’s dying wish. They _must_ respect
it.”

The paper in question was a letter in ink that had grown yellow from
time, and was addressed by the late Mrs. Newcome, to “my dear Mr.
Luce.”

“That was her solicitor, my solicitor still,” interposes Miss Ethel.

“THE HERMITAGE, March 14, 182-.


“My Dear Mr. Luce” (the defunct lady wrote)—“My late husband’s grandson
has been staying with me lately, and is a most pleasing, handsome, and
engaging little boy. He bears a strong likeness to his grandfather, I
think; and though he has no claims upon me, and I know is sufficiently
provided for by his father Lieutenant-Colonel Newcome, C.B., of the
East India Company’s Service, I am sure my late dear husband will be
pleased that I should leave his grandson, Clive Newcome, a token of
_peace and goodwill;_ and I can do so with the more readiness, as it
has pleased Heaven greatly to increase my means since my husband was
called away hence.

“I desire to bequeath a sum equal to that which Mr Newcome willed to my
eldest son, Brian Newcome, Esq., to Mr. Newcome’s grandson, Clive
Newcome; and furthermore, that a token of my esteem and affection, a
ring, or a piece of plate, of the value of one £100, be given to
Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Newcome, my stepson, whose excellent conduct
_for many years_, and whose repeated acts of gallantry in the _service
of his sovereign_, have long obliterated the just feelings of
displeasure with which I could not but view his early _disobedience and
misbehaviour_, before he quitted England against my will, and entered
the military service.

“I beg you to prepare immediately a codicil to my will providing for
the above bequests; and desire that the amount of these legacies should
be taken from the property bequeathed to my eldest son. You will be so
good as to prepare the necessary document, and bring it with you when
you come on Saturday, to

yours very truly,
“Sophia Alethea Newcome.


“Tuesday night.”

I gave back the paper with a sigh to the finder. “It is but a wish of
Mrs. Newcome, my dear Miss Ethel,” I said. “Pardon me, if I say, I
think I know your elder brother too well to supposes that he will
fulfil it.”

“He _will_ fulfil it, sir, I am sure he will,” Miss Newcome said, in a
haughty manner. “He would do as much without being asked, I am certain
he would, did he know the depth of my dear uncle’s misfortune. Barnes
is in London now, and——”

“And you will write to him? I know what the answer will be.”

“I will go to him this very day, Mr. Pendennis! I will go to my dear,
dear uncle. I cannot bear to think of him in that place,” cried the
young lady, the tears starting into her honest eyes. “It was the will
of Heaven. Oh, God be thanked for it! Had we found my grandmamma’s
letter earlier, Barnes would have paid the legacy immediately, and the
money would have gone in that dreadful bankruptcy. I will go to Barnes
to-day. Will you come with me? Won’t you come to your old friends? We
may be at his—at Clive’s house this evening; and oh, praise be to God!
there need be no more want in his family.”

“My dear friend, I will go with you round the world on such an errand,”
I said, kissing her hand. How beautiful she looked; the generous colour
rose in her face, her voice thrilled with happiness. The music of
Christmas church bells leaped up at this moment with joyful
gratulations; the face of the old house, before which we stood talking,
shone out in the morning sun.

“You will come I thank you! I must run and tell Madame de Florac,”
cried the happy young lady, and we entered the house together. “How
came you to be kissing Ethel’s hand, sir; and what is the meaning of
this early visit?” asks Mrs. Laura, as soon as I had returned to my own
apartments.

“Martha, get me a carpet-bag! I am going to London in an hour,” cries
Mr. Pendennis. If I had kissed Ethel’s hand jus now, delighted at the
news which she brought to me, was not one a thousand times dearer to
me, as happy as her friend? I know who prayed with a thankful heart
that day as we sped, in the almost solitary train, towards London.




CHAPTER LXXVIII.
In which the Author goes on a Pleasant Errand


Before I parted with Miss Newcome at the station, she made me promise
to see her on the morrow at an early hour at her brother’s house; and
having bidden her farewell and repaired to my own solitary residence,
which presented but a dreary aspect on that festive day, I thought I
would pay Howland Street a visit; and, if invited, eat my Christmas
dinner with Clive.

I found my friend at home, and at work still, in spite of the day. He
had promised a pair of pictures to a dealer for the morrow. “He pays me
pretty well, and I want all the money he will give me, Pen,” the
painter said, rubbing on at his canvas. “I am pretty easy in my mind
since I have become acquainted with a virtuous dealer. I sell myself to
him, body and soul, for some half-dozen pounds a week. I know I can get
my money, and he is regularly supplied with his pictures. But for
Rosey’s illness we might carry on well enough.”

Rosey’s illness? I was sorry to hear of that: and poor Clive, entering
into particulars, told me how he had spent upon doctors rather more
than a fourth of his year’s earnings. “There is a solemn fellow, to
whom the women have taken a fancy, who lives but a few doors off in
Gower Street; and who, for his last sixteen visits, has taken sixteen
pounds sixteen shillings out of my pocket, and as if guineas grew
there, with the most admirable gravity. He talks the fashions to my
mother-in-law. My poor wife hangs on every word he says. Look! There is
his carriage coming up now! and there is his fee, confound him!” says
Clive, casting a rueful look towards a little packet lying upon the
mantelpiece, by the side of that skinned figure in plaster of Paris
which we have seen in most studios.

I looked out of window and saw a certain Fashionable Doctor tripping
out of his chariot; that Ladies’ Delight, who has subsequently migrated
from Bloomsbury to Belgravia; and who has his polite foot now in a
thousand nurseries and boudoirs. What Confessors were in old times,
Quackenboss and his like are in our Protestant country. What secrets
they know! into what mystic chambers do they not enter! I suppose the
Campaigner made a special toilette to receive her fashionable friend,
for that lady attired in considerable splendour, and with the precious
jewel on her head, which I remembered at Boulogne, came into the studio
two minutes after the Doctor’s visit was announced, and made him a low
curtsey. I cannot describe the overpowering civilities of that woman.

Clive was very gracious and humble to her. He adopted a lively air in
addressing her—“Must work, you know, Christmas Day and all—for the
owner of the pictures will call for them in the morning. Bring me a
good report about Rosey, Mrs. Mackenzie, please—and if you will have
the kindness to look by the _écorché_ there, you will see that little
packet which I have left for you.” Mrs. Mack, advancing, took the
money. “I thought that plaster of Paris figure was not the only
_écorché_ in the room.”

“I want you to stay to dinner. You must stay, Pen, please,” cried
Clive; “and be civil to her, will you? My dear old father is coming to
dine here. They fancy that he has lodgings at the other end of the
town, and that his brothers do something for him. Not a word about Grey
Friars. It might agitate Rosa, you know. Ah! isn’t he noble, the dear
old boy! and isn’t it fine to see him in that place?” Clive worked on
as he talked, using up the last remnant of the light of Christmas Day,
and was cleaning his palette and brushes, when Mrs. Mackenzie returned
to us.

Darling Rosey was very delicate, but Doctor Quackenboss was going to
give her the very same medicine which had done the charming young
Duchess of Clackmannanshire so much good, and he was not in the least
disquiet.

On this I cut into the conversation with anecdotes concerning the
family of the Duchess of Clackmannanshire, remembering early days, when
it used to be my sport to entertain the Campaigner with anecdotes of
the aristocracy, about whose proceedings she still maintained a
laudable curiosity. Indeed, one of few the books escaped out of the
wreck of Tyburn Gardens was a Peerage, now a well-worn volume, much
read by Rosa and her mother.

The anecdotes were very politely received—perhaps it was the season
which made Mrs. Mack and her son-in-law on more than ordinarily good
terms. When, turning to the Campaigner, Clive said he wished that she
could persuade me to stay to dinner, she acquiesced graciously and at
once in that proposal, and vowed that her daughter would be delighted
if I could condescend to eat their _humble_ fare. “It is not such a
dinner as you _have_ seen at her house, with six side-dishes, two
flanks, that splendid epergne, and the silver dishes top and bottom;
but such as my Rosey _has_ she offers with a willing _heart_,” cries
the Campaigner.

“And Tom may sit to dinner, mayn’t he, grandmamma?” asks Clive, in a
humble voice.

“Oh, if you wish it, sir.”

“His grandfather will like to sit by him,” said Clive. “I will go out
and meet him; he comes through Guildford Street and Russell Square,”
says Clive. “Will you walk, Pen?”

“Oh, pray don’t let us detain you,” says Mrs. Mackenzie, with a toss of
her head: and when she retreated Clive whispered that she would not
want me; for she looked to the roasting of the beef and the making of
the pudding and the mince-pie.

“I thought she might have a finger in it,” I said; and we set forth to
meet the dear old father, who presently came, walking very slowly,
along the line by which we expected him. His stick trembled as it fell
on the pavement: so did his voice, as he called out Clive’s name: so
did his hand, as he stretched it to me. His body was bent, and feeble.
Twenty years had not weakened him so much as the last score of months.
I walked by the side of my two friends as they went onwards, linked
lovingly together. How I longed for the morrow, and hoped they might be
united once more! Thomas Newcome’s voice, once so grave, went up to a
treble, and became almost childish, as he asked after Boy. His white
hair hung over his collar. I could see it by the gas under which we
walked—and Clive’s great back and arm, as his father leaned on it, and
his brave face turned towards the old man. Oh, Barnes Newcome, Barnes
Newcome! Be an honest man for once, and help your kinsfolk! thought I.

The Christmas meal went off in a friendly manner enough. The
Campaigner’s eyes were everywhere: it was evident that the little maid
who served the dinner, and had cooked a portion of it under their keen
supervision, cowered under them, as well as other folks. Mrs. Mack did
not make more than ten allusions to former splendours during the
entertainment, or half as many apologies to me for sitting down to a
table very different from that to which I was _accustomed_. Good,
faithful F. Bayham was the only other guest. He complimented the
mince-pies, so that Mrs. Mackenzie owned she had made them. The Colonel
was very silent, but he tried to feed Boy, and was only once or twice
sternly corrected by the Campaigner. Boy, in the best little words he
could muster, asked why grandpapa wore a black cloak? Clive nudged my
foot under the table. The secret of the Poor Brothership was very
nearly out. The Colonel blushed, and with great presence of mind said
he wore a cloak to keep him warm in winter.

Rosey did not say much. She had grown lean and languid: the light of
her eyes had gone out: all her pretty freshness had faded. She ate
scarce anything, though her mother pressed her eagerly, and whispered
loudly that a woman in her situation ought to strengthen herself. Poor
Rosey was always in a situation.

When the cloth was withdrawn, the Colonel bending his head said, “Thank
God for what we have received,” so reverently, and with an accent so
touching, that Fred Bayham’s big eyes as he turned towards the old man
filled up with tears. When his mother and grandmother rose to go away,
poor little Boy cried to stay longer, and the Colonel would have meekly
interposed, but the domineering Campaigner cried, “Nonsense, let him go
to bed!” and flounced him out of the room: and nobody appealed against
that sentence. Then we three remained, and strove to talk as cheerfully
as we might, speaking now of old times, and presently of new. Without
the slightest affectation, Thomas Newcome told us that his life was
comfortable, and that he was happy in it. He wished that many others of
the old gentlemen, he said, were as contented as himself, but some of
them grumbled sadly, he owned and quarrelled with their
bread-and-butter. He, for his part, had everything he could desire: all
the officers of the Establishment were most kind to him; an excellent
physician came to him when wanted; a most attentive woman waited on
him. “And if I wear a black gown,” said he, “is not that uniform as
good as another, and if we have to go to church every day, at which
some of the Poor Brothers grumble, I think an old fellow can’t do
better; and I can say my prayers with a thankful heart, Clivey my boy,
and should be quite happy but for my—for my past imprudence, God
forgive me. Think of Bayham here coming to our chapel to-day!—he often
comes—that was very right, sir—very right.”

Clive, filling a glass of wine, looked at F. B. with eyes that said God
bless you. F. B. gulped down another bumper. “It is almost a merry
Christmas,” said I; “and oh, I hope it will be a happy New Year!”

Shortly after nine o’clock the Colonel rose to depart, saying he must
be “in barracks” by ten; and Clive and F. B. went a part of the way
with him. I would have followed them, but he whispered me to stay and
talk to Mrs. Mack, for Heaven’s sake, and that he would be back ere
long. So I went and took tea with the two ladies; and as we drank it,
Mrs. Mackenzie took occasion to tell me she did not know what amount of
income the Colonel had from his _wealthy brother_, but that _they_
never received any benefit from it; and again she computed to me all
the sums, principal and interest, which ought at that moment to belong
to her darling Rosey. Rosey now and again made a feeble remark. She did
not seem pleased or sorry when her husband came in; and presently,
dropping me a little curtsey, went to bed under charge of the
Campaigner. So Bayham and I and Clive retired to the studio, where
smoking was allowed, and where we brought that Christmas day to an end.

At the appointed time on the next forenoon I called upon Miss Newcome
at her brother’s house. Sir Barnes Newcome was quitting his own door as
I entered it, and he eyed me with such a severe countenance, as made me
augur but ill of the business upon which I came. The expression of
Ethel’s face was scarcely more cheering: she was standing at the
window, sternly looking at Sir Barnes, who yet lingered at his own
threshold, having some altercation with his cab-boy ere he mounted his
vehicle to drive into the City.

Miss Newcome was very pale when she advanced and gave me her hand. I
looked with some alarm into her face, and inquired what news?

“It is as you expected, Mr. Pendennis,” she said—“not as I did. My
brother is averse to making restitution. He just now parted from me in
some anger. But it does not matter; the restitution must be made, if
not by Barnes, by one of our family—must it not?”

“God bless you for a noble creature, my dear, dear Miss Newcome!” was
all I could say.

“For doing what is right? Ought I not to do it? I am the eldest of our
family after Barnes: I am the richest after him. Our father left all
his younger children the very sum of money which Mrs. Newcome here
devises to Clive; and you know, besides, I have all my grandmother’s,
Lady Kew’s, property. Why, I don’t think I could sleep if this act of
justice were not done. Will you come with me to my lawyer’s? He and my
brother Barnes are trustees of my property; and I have been thinking,
dear Mr. Pendennis—and you are very good to be so kind, and to express
so kind an opinion of me, and you and Laura have always, always been
the best friends to me”—(she says this, taking one of my hands and
placing her other hand over it)—“I have been thinking, you know, that
this transfer had better be made through Mr. Luce, you understand, and
as coming from the _family_, and then I need not appear in it at all,
you see; and—and my dear good uncle’s pride need not be wounded.” She
fairly gave way to tears as she spoke—and for me, I longed to kiss the
hem of her robe, or anything else she would let me embrace, I was so
happy, and so touched by the simple demeanour and affection of the
noble young lady.

“Dear Ethel,” I said, “did I not say I would go to the end of the world
with you—and won’t I go to Lincoln’s Inn?”

A cab was straightway sent for, and in another half-hour we were in the
presence of the courtly little old Mr. Luce in his chambers in
Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

He knew the late Mrs. Newcome’s handwriting at once. He remembered
having seen the little boy at the Hermitage, had talked with Mr.
Newcome regarding his son in India, and had even encouraged Mrs.
Newcome in her idea of leaving some token of goodwill to the latter. “I
was to have dined with your grandmamma on the Saturday, with my poor
wife. Why, bless my soul! I remember the circumstance perfectly well,
my dear young lady. There can’t be a doubt about the letter, but of
course the bequest is no bequest at all, and Colonel Newcome has
behaved so ill to your brother that I suppose Sir Barnes will not go
out of his way to benefit the Colonel.”

“What would you do, Mr. Luce?” asks the young lady.

“H’m! And pray why should I tell you what I should do under the
circumstances?” replied the little lawyer. “Upon my word, Miss Newcome,
I think I should leave matters as they stand. Sir Barnes and I, you are
aware, are not the very best of friends—as your father’s, your
grandmother’s old friend and adviser, your own too, my dear young lady,
I and Sir Barnes Newcome remain on civil terms. But neither is over
much pleased with the other, to say the truth; and, at any rate, I
cannot be accused—nor can any one else that I know of—of being a very
warm partisan of your brother’s. But candidly, were his case mine—had I
a relation who had called me unpleasant names, and threatened me I
don’t know with what, with sword and pistol—who had put me to five or
six thousand pounds’ expense in contesting an election which I had
lost,—I should give him, I think, no more than the law obliged me to
give him; and that, my dear Miss Newcome, is not one farthing.”

“I am very glad you say so,” said Miss Newcome, rather to my
astonishment.

“Of course, my dear young lady; and so you need not be alarmed at
showing your brother this document. Is not that the point about which
you came to consult me? You wished that I should prepare him for the
awful disclosure, did you not? You know, perhaps, that he does not like
to part with his money, and thought the appearance of this note might
agitate him? It has been a long time coming to its address, but nothing
can be done, don’t you see? and be sure Sir Barnes Newcome will not be
the least agitated when I tell him its contents.”

“I mean I am very glad you think my brother is not called upon to obey
Mrs. Newcome’s wishes, because I need not think so hardly of him as I
was disposed to do,” Miss Newcome said. “I showed him the paper this
morning, and he repelled it with scorn; and not kind words passed
between us, Mr. Luce, and unkind thoughts remained in my mind. But if
he, you think, is justified, it is I who have been in the wrong for
saying that he was self—for upbraiding him as I own I did.”

“You called him selfish!—You had words with him! Such things have
happened before, my dear Miss Newcome, in the best-regulated families.”

“But if he is not wrong, sir, holding his opinions, surely I should be
wrong, sir, with mine, not to do as my conscience tells me; and having
found this paper only yesterday at Newcome, in the library there, in
one of my grandmother’s books, I consulted with this gentleman, the
husband of my dearest friend, Mrs. Pendennis—the most intimate friend
of my uncle and cousin Clive; and I wish, and I desire and insist, that
my share of what my poor father left us girls should be given to my
cousin, Mr. Clive Newcome, in accordance with my grandmother’s dying
wishes.”

“My dear, you gave away your portion to your brothers and sisters ever
so long ago!” cried the lawyer.

“I desire, sir, that six thousand pounds may be given to my cousin,”
Miss Newcome said, blushing deeply. “My dear uncle, the best man in the
world, whom I love with all my heart, sir, is in the most dreadful
poverty. Do you know where he is, sir? My dear, kind, generous
uncle!”—and, kindling as she spoke, and with eyes beaming a bright
kindness, and flushing cheeks, and a voice that thrilled to the heart
of those two who heard her, Miss Newcome went on to tell of her uncle’s
and cousin’s misfortunes, and of her wish, under God, to relieve them.
I see before me now the figure of the noble girl as she speaks; the
pleased little old lawyer, bobbing his white head, looking up at her
with his twinkling eyes—patting his knees, patting his snuff-box—as he
sits before his tapes and his deeds, surrounded by a great background
of tin boxes.

“And I understand you want this money paid as coming from the family,
and not from Miss Newcome?” says Mr. Luce.

“Coming from the family—exactly,” answers Miss Newcome.

Mr. Luce rose up from his old chair—his worn-out old horsehair
chair—where he had sat for half a century and listened to many a
speaker, very different from this one. “Mr. Pendennis,” he said, “I
envy you your journey along with this young lady. I envy you the good
news you are going to carry to your friends—and, Miss Newcome, as I am
an old—old gentleman who have known your family these sixty years, and
saw your father in his long-clothes, may I tell you how heartily and
sincerely I—I love and respect you, my dear? When should you wish Mr.
Clive Newcome to have his legacy?”

“I think I should like Mr. Pendennis to have it this instant, Mr. Luce,
please,” said the young lady—and her veil dropped over her face as she
bent her head down, and clasped her hands together for a moment, as if
she was praying.

Mr. Luce laughed at her impetuosity; but said that if she was bent upon
having the money, it was at her instant service; and before we left the
room, Mr. Luce prepared a letter, addressed to Clive Newcome, Esquire,
in which he stated, that amongst the books of the late Mrs. Newcome a
paper had only just been found, of which a copy was enclosed, and that
the family of the late Sir Brian Newcome, desirous to do honour to the
wishes of the late Mrs. Newcome, had placed the sum of 6000 pounds at
the bank of Messrs. H. W——, at the disposal of Mr. Clive Newcome, of
whom Mr. Luce had the honour to sign himself the most obedient servant,
etc. And, the letter approved and copied, Mr. Luce said Mr. Pendennis
might be the postman thereof; if Miss Newcome so willed it; and, with
this document in my pocket, I quitted the lawyer’s chambers, with my
good and beautiful young companion.

Our cab had been waiting several hours in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and I
asked Miss Ethel whither I now should conduct her?

“Where is Grey Friars?” she said. “Mayn’t I go to see my uncle?”




CHAPTER LXXIX.
In which Old Friends come together


We made the descent of Snowhill, we passed by the miry pens of
Smithfield; we travel through the street of St. John, and presently
reach the ancient gateway, in Cistercian Square, where lies the old
Hospital of Grey Friars. I passed through the gate, my fair young
companion on my arm, and made my way to the rooms occupied by brother
Newcome.

As we traversed the court the Poor Brothers were coming from dinner. A
couple of score, or more, of old gentlemen in black gowns, issued from
the door of their refectory, and separated over the court, betaking
themselves to their chambers. Ethel’s arm trembled under mine as she
looked at one and another, expecting to behold her dear uncle’s
familiar features. But he was not among the brethren. We went to his
chamber, of which the door was open: a female attendant was arranging
the room; she told us Colonel Newcome was out for the day, and thus our
journey had been made in vain.

Ethel went round the apartment and surveyed its simple decorations; she
looked at the pictures of Clive and his boy; the two sabres crossed
over the mantelpiece, the Bible laid on the table, by the old latticed
window. She walked slowly up to the humble bed, and sat down on a chair
near it. No doubt her heart prayed for him who slept there; she turned
round where his black pensioner’s cloak was hanging on the wall, and
lifted up the homely garment, and kissed it. The servant looked on
admiring, I should think, her melancholy and her gracious beauty. I
whispered to the woman that the young lady was the Colonel’s niece. “He
has a son who comes here, and is very handsome, too,” said the
attendant.

The two women spoke together for a while. “Oh, miss!” cried the elder
and humbler, evidently astonished at some gratuity which Miss Newcome
bestowed upon her, “I didn’t want this to be good to him. Everybody
here loves him for himself; and I would sit up for him for weeks—that I
would.”

My companion took a pencil from her bag, and wrote “Ethel” on a piece
of paper, and laid the paper on the Bible. Darkness had again fallen by
this time, feeble lights were twinkling in the chamber windows of the
Poor Brethren as we issued into the courts;—feeble lights illumining a
dim, grey, melancholy old scene. Many a career, once bright, was
flickering out here in the darkness; many a night was closing in. We
went away silently from that quiet place; and in another minute were in
the flare and din and tumult of London.

“The Colonel is most likely gone to Clive’s,” I said. Would not Miss
Newcome follow him thither? We consulted whether she should go. She
took heart and said yes. “Drive, cabman, to Howland Street!” The horse
was, no doubt, tired, for the journey seemed extraordinarily long; I
think neither of us spoke a word on the way.

I ran upstairs to prepare our friends for the visit. Clive, his wife,
his father, and his mother-in-law were seated by a dim light in Mrs.
Clive’s sitting-room. Rosey on the sofa, as usual; the little boy on
his grandfather’s knees.

I hardly made a bow to the ladies, so eager was I to communicate with
Colonel Newcome. “I have just been to your quarters at Grey Friars,
sir,” said I. “That is——”

“You have been to the Hospital, sir! You need not be ashamed to mention
it, as Colonel Newcome is not ashamed _to go there_,” cried out the
Campaigner. “Pray speak in your own language, Clive, unless there is
something _not fit_ for ladies to hear.” Clive was growling out to me
in German that there had just been a terrible scene, his father having,
a quarter of an hour previously, let slip the secret about Grey Friars.

“Say at once, Clive!” the Campaigner cried, rising in her might, and
extending a great strong arm over her helpless child, “that Colonel
Newcome owns that he has gone to live as a pauper in a hospital! He who
has squandered his own money. He who has squandered my money. He who
has squandered the money of that darling helpless child—compose
yourself, Rosey my love!—has completed the disgrace of the family, by
his present mean and unworthy—yes, I say, mean and _unworthy_ and
_degraded_ conduct. Oh, my child, my blessed child! to think that your
husband’s father should have come to a _workhouse!_” Whilst this
maternal agony bursts over her, Rosa, on the sofa, bleats and whimpers
amongst the faded chintz cushions.

I took Clive’s hand, which was cast up to his head striking his
forehead with mad impotent rage, whilst this fiend of a woman lashed
his good father. The veins of his great fist were swollen, his whole
body was throbbing and trembling with the helpless pain under which he
writhed. “Colonel Newcome’s friends, ma’am,”, I said, “think very
differently from you; and that he is a better judge than you, or any
one else, of his own honour. We all, who loved him in his prosperity,
love and respect him more than ever for the manner in which he bears
his misfortune. Do you suppose that his noble friend, the Earl of H——,
would have counselled him to a step unworthy of a gentleman; that the
Prince de Moncontour would applaud his conduct as he does, if he did
not think it admirable?” I can hardly say with what scorn I used this
argument, or what depth of contempt I felt for the woman whom I knew it
would influence. “And at this minute,” I added, “I have come from
visiting the Gray Friars with one of the Colonel’s relatives, whose
love and respect for him is boundless; who longs to be reconciled to
him, and who is waiting below, eager to shake his hand, and embrace
Clive’s wife.”

“Who is that?” says the Colonel, looking gently up, as he pats Boy’s
head.

“Who is it, Pen?” says Clive. I said in a low voice, “Ethel;” and
starting up and crying “Ethel! Ethel!” he ran from the room.

Little Mrs. Rosa started up too on her sofa, clutching hold of the
table-cover with her lean hand, and the two red spots on her cheeks
burning more fiercely than ever. I could see what passion was beating
in that poor little heart. “Heaven help us! what a resting-place had
friends and parents prepared for it! for shame!”

“Miss Newcome, is it? My darling Rosa, get on your shawl!” cried the
Campaigner, a grim smile lighting her face.

“It is Ethel; Ethel is my niece. I used to love her when she was quite
a little girl,” says the Colonel, patting Boy on the head; “and she is
a very good, beautiful little child—a very good child.” The torture had
been too much for that kind old heart: there were times when Thomas
Newcome passed beyond it. What still maddened Clive, excited his father
no more; the pain yonder woman inflicted, only felled and stupefied
him.

As the door opened, the little white-headed child trotted forward
towards the visitor, and Ethel entered on Clive’s arm, who was as
haggard and pale as death. Little Boy, looking up at the stately lady,
still followed beside her, as she approached her uncle, who remained
sitting, his head bent to the ground. His thoughts were elsewhere.
Indeed he was following the child, and about to caress it again.

“Here is a friend, father!” says Clive, laying a hand on the old man’s
shoulder. “It is I, Ethel, uncle!” the young lady said, taking his
hand; and kneeling down between his knees, she flung her arms round
him, and kissed him, and wept on his shoulder.

His consciousness had quite returned ere an instant was over. He
embraced her with the warmth of his old affection, uttering many brief
words of love, kindness, and tenderness, such as men speak when
strongly moved.

The little boy had come wondering up to the chair whilst this embrace
took place, and Clive’s tall figure bent over the three. Rosa’s eyes
were not good to look at, as she stared at the group with a ghastly
smile. Mrs. Mackenzie surveyed the scene in haughty state, from behind
the sofa cushions. She tried to take one of Rosa’s lean hot hands. The
poor child tore it away, leaving her rings behind her; lifted her hands
to her face: and cried, cried as if her little heart would break. Ah
me! what a story was there! what an outburst of pent-up feeling! what a
passion of pain! The ring had fallen to the ground; the little boy
crept towards it, and picked it up, and came towards his mother, fixing
on her his large wondering eyes. “Mamma crying. Mamma’s ring!” he said,
holding up the circle of gold. With more feeling than I had ever seen
her exhibit, she clasped the boy in her wasted arms. Great Heaven! what
passion, jealousy, grief, despair, were tearing and trying all these
hearts, that but for fate might have been happy?

Clive went round, and with the utmost sweetness and tenderness hanging
round his child and wife, soothed her with words of consolation, that
in truth I scarce heard, being ashamed almost of being present at this
sudden scene. No one, however, took notice of the witnesses; and even
Mrs. Mackenzie’s voice was silent for the moment. I dare say Clive’s
words were incoherent; but women have more presence of mind; and now
Ethel, with a noble grace which I cannot attempt to describe, going up
to Rosa, seated herself by her, spoke of her long grief at the
differences between her dearest uncle and herself; of her early days,
when he had been as a father to her; of her wish, her hope that Rosa
should love her as a sister; and of her belief that better days and
happiness were in store for them all. And she spoke to the mother about
her boy so beautiful and intelligent, and told her how she had brought
up her brother’s children, and hoped that this one too would call her
Aunt Ethel. She would not stay now, might she come again? Would Rosa
come to her with her little boy? Would he kiss her? He did so with a
very good grace; but when Ethel at parting embraced the child’s mother,
Rosa’s face wore a smile ghastly to look at, and the lips that touched
Ethel’s cheeks, were quite white.

“I shall come and see you again to-morrow, uncle, may I not? I saw your
room to-day, sir, and your housekeeper; such a nice old lady, and your
black gown. And you shall put it on to-morrow, and walk with me, and
show me the beautiful old buildings of that old hospital. And I shall
come and make tea for you, the housekeeper says I may. Will you come
down with me to my carriage? No, Mr. Pendennis must come;” and she
quitted the room, beckoning me after her. “You will speak to Clive now,
won’t you?” she said, “and come to me this evening, and tell me all
before you go to bed?” I went back, anxious in truth to the messenger
of good tidings to my dear old friends.

Brief as my absence had been, Mrs. Mackenzie had taken advantage of
that moment again to outrage Clive and his father, and to announce that
Rosa might go to see this Miss Newcome, whom people respected because
she was rich, but whom _she_ would never visit; no, never! “An
insolent, proud, impertinent thing! Does she take me for a housemaid?”
Mrs. Mackenzie had inquired.

“Am I dust to be trampled beneath her feet? Am I a dog that she can’t
throw me a word?” Her arms were stretched out, and she was making this
inquiry as to her own canine qualities as I re-entered the room, and
remembered that Ethel had never once addressed a single word to Mrs.
Mackenzie in the course of her visit.

I affected not to perceive the incident, and presently said that I
wanted to speak to Clive in his studio. Knowing that I had brought my
friend one or two commissions for drawings, Mrs. Mackenzie was civil to
me, and did not object to our colloquies.

“Will you come too, and smoke a pipe, father?” says Clive.

“_Of course_ your father intends to stay to _dinner?_” says the
Campaigner, with a scornful toss of her head. Clive groaned out as we
were on the stair, “that he could not bear this much longer, by heavens
he could not.”

“Give the Colonel his pipe, Clive,” said I. “Now, sir, down with you in
the sitter’s chair, and smoke the sweetest cheroot you ever smoked in
your life! My dear, dear old Clive! you need not bear with the
Campaigner any longer; you may go to bed without this nightmare
to-night if you like; you may have your father back under your roof
again.”

“My dear Arthur! I must be back at ten, sir, back at ten, military
time; drum beats; no—bell tolls at ten, and gates close;” and he
laughed and shook his old head. “Besides, I am to see a young lady,
sir; and she is coming to make tea for me, and I must speak to Mrs.
Jones to have all things ready—all things ready;” and again the old man
laughed as he spoke.

His son looked at him and then at me with eyes full of sad meaning.
“How do you mean, Arthur,” Clive said, “that he can come and stay with
me, and that that woman can go?”

Then feeling in my pocket for Mr. Luce’s letter, I grasped my dear
Clive by the hand and bade him prepare for good news. I told him how
providentially, two days since, Ethel, in the library at Newcome,
looking into Orme’s History of India, a book which old Mrs. Newcome had
been reading on the night of her death, had discovered a paper, of
which the accompanying letter enclosed a copy, and I gave my friend the
letter.

He opened it, and read it through. I cannot say that I saw any
particular expression of wonder in his countenance, for somehow, all
the while Clive perused this document, I was looking at the Colonel’s
sweet kind face. “It—it is Ethel’s doing,” said Clive, in a hurried
voice. “There was no such letter.”

“Upon my honour,” I answered, “there was. We came up to London with it
last night, a few hours after she had found it. We showed it to Sir
Barnes Newcome, who—who could not disown it. We took it to Mr. Luce,
who recognised it at once, who was old Mrs. Newcome’s man of business,
and continues to be the family lawyer, and the family recognises the
legacy and has paid it, and you may draw for it to-morrow, as you see.
What a piece of good luck it is that it did not come before the B. B.
C. time! That confounded Bundelcund Bank would have swallowed up this
like all the rest.”

“Father! father! do you remember Orme’s History of India?” cries Clive.

“Orme’s History! of course I do, I could repeat whole pages of it when
I was a boy,” says the old man, and began forthwith. “‘The two
battalions advanced against each other cannonading, until the French,
coming to a hollow way, imagined that the English would not venture to
pass it. But Major Lawrence ordered the sepoys and artillery—the sepoys
and artillery to halt and defend the convoy against the
Morattoes’—Morattoes Orme calls ’em. Ho! ho! I could repeat whole
pages, sir.”

“It is the best book that ever was written,” calls out Clive. The
Colonel said he had not read it, but he was informed Mr. Mill’s was a
very learned history; he intended to read it. “Eh! there is plenty of
time now,” said the good Colonel. “I have all day long at Grey
Friars,—after chapel, you know. Do you know, sir, when I was a boy I
used what they call to tib out and run down to a public-house in
Cistercian Lane—the Red Cowl sir,—and buy rum there? I was a terrible
wild boy, Clivy. You weren’t so, sir, thank Heaven! A terrible wild
boy, and my poor father flogged me, though I think it was very hard on
me. It wasn’t the pain, you know: it wasn’t the pain, but——” Here tears
came into his eyes and he dropped his head on his hand, and the cigar
from it fell on to the floor, burnt almost out, and scattering white
ashes.

Clive looked sadly at me. “He was often so at Boulogne, Arthur,” he
whispered; “after a scene with that—that woman yonder, his head would
go: he never replied to her taunts; he bore her infernal cruelty
without an unkind word—Oh! I pay her back, thank God I can pay her! But
who shall pay her,” he said, trembling in every limb, “for what she has
made that good man suffer?”

He turned to his father, who still sate lost in his meditations. “You
need never go back to Grey Friars, father!” he cried out.

“Not go back, Clivy? Must go back, boy, to say Adsum, when my name is
called. Newcome! Adsum! Hey! that is what we used to say—we used to
say!”

“You need not go back, except to pack your things, and return and live
with me and Boy,” Clive continued, and he told Colonel Newcome rapidly
the story of the legacy. The old man seemed hardly to comprehend it.
When he did, the news scarcely elated him; when Clive said “they could
now pay Mrs. Mackenzie,” the Colonel replied, “Quite right, quite
right,” and added up the sum, principal and interest, in which they
were indebted to her—he knew it well enough, the good old man. “Of
course we shall pay her, Clivy, when we can!” But in spite of what
Clive had said he did not appear to understand the fact that the debt
to Mrs. Mackenzie was now actually to be paid.

As we were talking, a knock came to the studio door, and that summons
was followed by the entrance of the maid, who said to Clive, “If you
please, sir, Mrs. Mackenzie says, how long are you a-going to keep the
dinner waiting?”

“Come, father, come to dinner!” cries Clive; “and, Pen, you will come
too, won’t you?” he added; “it may be the last time you dine in such
pleasant company. Come along,” he whispered hurriedly. “I should like
you to be there, it will keep her tongue quiet.” As we proceeded to the
dining-room, I gave the Colonel my arm; and the good man prattled to me
something about Mrs. Mackenzie having taken shares in the Bundelcund
Banking Company, and about her not being a woman of business, and
fancying we had spent her money. “And I have always felt a wish that
Clivy should pay her, and he will pay her, I know he will,” says the
Colonel; “and then we shall lead a quiet life, Arthur; for, between
ourselves, some women are the deuce when they are angry, sir.” And
again he laughed, as he told me this sly news, and he bowed meekly his
gentle old head as we entered the dining-room.

That apartment was occupied by little Boy already seated in his high
chair, and by the Campaigner only, who stood at the mantelpiece in a
majestic attitude. On parting with her, before we adjourned to Clive’s
studio, I had made my bow and taken my leave in form, not supposing
that I was about to enjoy her hospitality yet once again. My return did
not seem to please her. “Does Mr. Pendennis favour us with his company
to dinner again, Clive?” she said, turning to her son-in-law. Clive
curtly said, Yes, he had asked Mr. Pendennis to stay.

“You might at least have been _so kind_ as to give me notice,” says the
Campaigner, still majestic, but ironical. “You will have but a poor
meal, Mr. Pendennis; and one such as I’m not accustomed to give my
guests.”

“Cold beef! what the deuce does it matter;” says Clive, beginning to
carve the joint, which, hot, had served our yesterday’s Christmas
table.

“It does matter, sir! I am not accustomed to treat my guests in this
way Maria! who had been cutting that beef? Three pounds of that beef
have been cut away since one o’clock to-day,” and with flashing eyes,
and a finger twinkling all over with rings, she pointed towards the
guilty joint.

Whether Maria had been dispensing secret charities, or kept company
with an occult policeman partial to roast-beef, I do not know; but she
looked very much alarmed, and said, Indeed, and indeed, mum, she had
not touched a morsel of it!—not she.

“Confound the beef!” says Clive, carving on.

“She _has_ been cutting it!” cries the Campaigner, bringing her fist
down with a thump upon the table. “Mr. Pendennis! you saw the beef
yesterday; eighteen pounds it weighed, and this is what comes up of it!
As if there was not already ruin enough in the house!”

“D—n the beef!” cries out Clive.

“No! no! Thank God for our good dinner! Benedicti benedicamus, Clivy my
boy,” says the Colonel, in a tremulous voice.

“Swear on, sir! let the child hear your oaths! Let my blessed child,
who is too ill to sit at table and picks her bite! sweetbread on her
sofa,—which her poor mother prepares for her, Mr. Pendennis,—which I
cooked it, and gave it to her with _these hands_,—let _her_ hear your
curses and blasphemies, Clive Newcome! They are loud enough.”

“Do let us have a quiet life,” groans out Clive; and for me, I must
confess, I kept my eyes steadily down upon my plate, nor dared to lift
them until my portion of cold beef had vanished.

No further outbreak took place until the appearance of the second
course, which consisted, as the ingenious reader may suppose, of the
plum-pudding, now in a grilled state, and the remanent of mince-pies
from yesterday’s meal. Maria, I thought, looked particularly guilty as
these delicacies were placed on the table: she set them down hastily,
and was for operating an instant retreat.

But the Campaigner shrieked after her, “Who has eaten that pudding? I
insist upon knowing who has eaten it. I saw it at two o’clock when I
went down to the kitchen and fried a bit for my darling child, and
there’s pounds of it gone since then! There were five mince-pies! Mr.
Pendennis! you saw yourself there were five that went away from table
yesterday—where’s the other two Maria? You leave the house this night,
you thieving, wicked wretch—and I’ll thank you to come back to me
afterwards for a character. Thirteen servants have we had in nine
months, Mr. Pendennis, and this girl is the worst of them all, and the
greatest liar and the greatest thief.”

At this charge the outraged Maria stood up in arms, and as the phrase
is, gave the Campaigner as good as she got. Go! wouldn’t she go? Pay
her her wages, and let her go out of that ell upon hearth, was Maria’s
prayer. “It isn’t you, sir,” she said, turning to Clive. “_You_ are
good enough, and works hard enough to git the guineas which you give
out to pay that doctor; and she don’t pay him—and I see five of them in
her purse wrapped up in paper, myself I did, and she abuses you to
him—and I heard her, and Jane Black, who was here before, told me she
heard her. Go! won’t I just go, I dispises your puddens and pies!” and
with a laugh of scorn this rude Maria snapped her black fingers in the
immediate vicinity of the Campaigner’s nose.

“I will pay her her wages, and she shall go this instant!” says Mrs.
Mackenzie, taking her purse out.

“Pay me with them suvverings that you have got in it, wrapped up in
paper. See if she haven’t, Mr. Newcome,” the refractory waiting-woman
cried out, and again she laughed a strident laugh.

Mrs. Mackenzie briskly shut her portemonnaie, and rose up from table,
quivering with indignant virtue. “Go!” she exclaimed, “go and pack your
trunks this instant! you quit the house this night, and a policeman
shall see to your boxes before you leave it!”

Whilst uttering this sentence against the guilty Maria, the Campaigner
had intended, no doubt, to replace her purse in her pocket,—a handsome
filagree gimcrack of poor Ross’s, one of the relics of former
splendours,—but, agitated by Maria’s insolence, the trembling hand
missed the mark, and the purse fell to the ground.

Maria dashed at the purse in a moment, with a scream of laughter shook
its contents upon the table, and sure enough, five little packets
wrapped in paper rolled out upon the cloth, besides bank-notes and
silver and golden coin. “I’m to go, am I? I’m a thief, am I?” screamed
the girl, clapping her hands. “_I_ sor ’em yesterday when I was
a-lacing of her; and thought of that pore young man working night and
day to get the money;—me a thief, indeed!—I despise you, and _I_ give
you warning.”

“Do you wish to see me any longer insulted by this woman, Clive? Mr.
Pendennis, I am shocked that you should witness such horrible
vulgarity,” cries the Campaigner, turning to her guest. “Does the
wretched creature suppose that I, I who have given _thousands_, I who
have denied myself _everything_, I who have spent my _all_ in support
of this house; and Colonel Newcome _knows_ whether I have given
thousands or not, and _who_ has spent them, and _who_ has been robbed,
I say, and——”

“Here! you! Maria! go about your business,” shouted out Clive Newcome,
starting up; “go and pack your trunks if you like, and pack this
woman’s trunks too. Mrs. Mackenzie, I can bear you no more; go in
peace, and if you wish to see your daughter she shall come to you; but
I will never, so help me God! sleep under the same roof with you; or
break the same crust with you; or bear your infernal cruelty; or sit to
hear my father insulted; or listen to your wicked pride and folly more.
There has not been a day since you thrust your cursed foot into our
wretched house, but you have tortured one and all of us. Look here, at
the best gentleman, and the kindest heart in all the world, you fiend!
and see to what a condition you have brought him! Dearest father! she
is going, do you hear? She leaves us, and you will come back to me,
won’t you? Great God, woman,” he gasped out, “do you know what you have
made me suffer—what you have done to this good man? Pardon, father,
pardon!”—and he sank down by his father’s side, sobbing with passionate
emotion. The old man even now did not seem to comprehend the scene.
When he heard that woman’s voice in anger, a sort of stupor came over
him.

“I am a _fiend_, am I?” cries the lady. “You hear, Mr. Pendennis, this
is the language to which I am accustomed; I am a widow, and I trusted
my child and my all to that old man; he robbed me and my darling of
almost every farthing we had; and what has been my return for such
baseness? I have lived in this house and toiled like a _slave;_ I have
acted as servant to my blessed child; night after night I have sat with
her; and month after month, when _her husband_ has been away, I have
nursed that poor innocent; and the father having robbed me, the son
turns me out of doors!”

A sad thing it was to witness, and a painful proof how frequent were
these battles, that, as this one raged, the poor little boy sat almost
careless, whilst his bewildered grandfather stroked his golden head.
“It is quite clear to me, madam,” I said, turning to Mrs. Mackenzie,
“that you and your son-in-law are better apart; and I came to tell him
to-day of a most fortunate legacy, which has been left to him, and
which will enable him to pay you to-morrow morning every shilling,
every shilling which he does NOT owe you?”

“I will not leave this house until I am paid every shilling of which I
have been robbed,” hissed out Mrs. Mackenzie; and she sat down, folding
her arms across her chest.

“I am sorry,” groaned out Clive, wiping the sweat off his brow, “I used
a harsh word; I will never sleep under the same roof with you.
To-morrow I will pay you what you claim; and the best chance I have of
forgiving you the evil which you have done me, is that we never should
meet again. Will you give me a bed at your house, Arthur? Father, will
you come out and walk? Good night, Mrs. Mackenzie; Pendennis will
settle with you in the morning. You will not be here, if you please,
when I return; and so God forgive you, and farewell.”

Mrs. Mackenzie in a tragic manner dashed aside the hand which poor
Clive held out to her, and disappeared from the scene of this dismal
dinner. Boy presently fell a-crying; in spite of all the battle and
fury, there was sleep in his eyes.

“Maria is too busy, I suppose, to put him to bed,” said Clive, with a
sad smile; “shall we do it, father? Come, Tommy, my son!” and he folded
his arms round the child, and walked with him to the upper regions. The
old man’s eyes lighted up; his seared thoughts returned to him; he
followed his two children up the stairs, and saw his grandson in his
little bed; and, as we walked home with him, he told me how sweetly Boy
said “Our Father,” and prayed God bless all those who loved him, as
they laid him to rest.

So these three generations had joined in that supplication: the strong
man, humbled by trial and grief, whose loyal heart was yet full of
love;—the child, of the sweet age of those little ones whom the Blessed
Speaker of the prayer first bade to come unto Him;—and the old man,
whose heart was well-nigh as tender and as innocent; and whose day was
approaching, when he should be drawn to the bosom of the Eternal Pity.




CHAPTER LXXX.
In which the Colonel says “Adsum” when his Name is called


The vow which Clive had uttered, never to share bread with his
mother-in-law, or sleep under the same roof with her, was broken on the
very next day. A stronger will than the young man’s intervened, and he
had to confess the impotence of his wrath before that superior power.
In the forenoon of the day following that unlucky dinner, I went with
my friend to the banking-house whither Mr. Luce’s letter directed us,
and carried away with me the principal sum, in which the Campaigner
said Colonel Newcome was indebted to her, with the interest accurately
computed and reimbursed. Clive went off with a pocketful of money to
the dear old Poor Brother of Grey Friars; and he promised to return
with his father, and dine with my wife in Queen Square. I had received
a letter from Laura by the morning’s post, announcing her return by the
express train from Newcome, and desiring that a spare bedroom should be
got ready for a friend who accompanied her.

On reaching Howland Street, Clive’s door was opened, rather to my
surprise, by the rebellious maid-servant who had received her dismissal
on the previous night; and the doctor’s carriage drove up as she was
still speaking to me. The polite practitioner sped upstairs to Mrs.
Newcome’s apartment. Mrs. Mackenzie, in a robe-de-chambre and cap very
different from yesterday’s, came out eagerly to meet the physician on
the landing. Ere they had been a quarter of an hour together, arrived a
cab, which discharged an elderly person with her bandbox and bundles; I
had no difficulty in recognising a professional nurse in the new-comer.
She too disappeared into the sick-room, and left me sitting in the
neighbouring chamber, the scene of the last night’s quarrel.

Hither presently came to me Maria, the maid. She said she had not the
heart to go away now she was wanted; that they had passed a sad night,
and that no one had been to bed. Master Tommy was below, and the
landlady taking care of him: the landlord had gone out for the nurse.
Mrs. Clive had been taken bad after Mr. Clive went away the night
before. Mrs. Mackenzie had gone to the poor young thing, and there she
went on, crying, and screaming, and stamping, as she used to do in her
tantrums, which was most cruel of her, and made Mrs. Clive so ill. And
presently the young lady began: my informant told me. She came
screaming into the sitting-room, her hair over her shoulders, calling
out she was deserted, deserted, and would like to die. She was like a
mad woman for some time. She had fit after fit of hysterics: and there
was her mother, kneeling, and crying, and calling out to her darling
child to calm herself;—which it was all her own doing, and she had much
better have held her own tongue, remarked the resolute Maria. I
understood only too well from the girl’s account what had happened, and
that Clive, if resolved to part with his mother-in-law, should not have
left her, even for twelve hours, in possession of his house. The
wretched woman, whose Self was always predominant, and who, though she
loved her daughter after her own fashion, never forgot her own vanity
or passion, had improved the occasion of Clive’s absence: worked upon
her child’s weakness, jealousy, ill-health, and driven her, no doubt,
into the fever which yonder physician was called to quell.

The doctor presently enters to write a prescription, followed by
Clive’s mother-in-law, who had cast Rosa’s fine Cashmere shawl over her
shoulders, to hide her disarray. “You here still, Mr. Pendennis!” she
exclaims. She knew I was there. Had not she changed her dress in order
to receive me?

“I have to speak to you for two minutes on important business, and then
I shall go,” I replied gravely.

“Oh, sir! to what a scene you have come! To what a state has Clive’s
conduct last night driven my darling child!”

As the odious woman spoke so, the doctor’s keen eyes, looking up from
the prescription, caught mine. “I declare before Heaven, madam,” I said
hotly, “I believe you yourself are the cause of your daughter’s present
illness, as you have been of the misery of my friends.”

“Is this, sir,” she was breaking out, “is this language to be used
to——?”

“Madam, will you be silent?” I said. “I am come to bid you farewell on
the part of those whom your temper has driven into infernal torture. I
am come to pay you every halfpenny of the sum which my friends do not
owe you, but which they restore. Here is the account, and here is the
money to settle it. And I take this gentleman to witness, to whom, no
doubt, you have imparted what you call your wrongs” (the doctor smiled,
and shrugged his shoulders) “that now you are paid.”

“A widow—a poor, lonely, insulted widow!” cries the Campaigner, with
trembling hands taking possession of the notes.

“And I wish to know,” I continued, “when my friend’s house will be free
to him, and he can return in peace.”

Here Rosa’s voice was heard from the inner apartment, screaming,
“Mamma, mamma!”

“I go to my child, sir,” she said. “If Captain Mackenzie had been
alive, you would not have _dared_ to insult me so.” And carrying off
her money, she left us.

“Cannot she be got out of the house?” I said to the doctor. “My friend
will never return until she leaves it. It is my belief she is the cause
of her daughter’s present illness.”

“Not altogether, my dear sir. Mrs. Newcome was in a very, very delicate
state of health. Her mother is a lady of impetuous temper, who
expresses herself very strongly—too strongly, I own. In consequence of
unpleasant family discussions, which no physician can prevent, Mrs.
Newcome has been wrought up to a state of—of agitation. Her fever is,
in fact, at present very high. You know her condition. I am
apprehensive of ulterior consequences. I have recommended an excellent
and experienced nurse to her. Mr. Smith, the medical man at the corner,
is a most able practitioner. I shall myself call again in a few hours,
and I trust that, after the event which I apprehend, everything will go
well.

“Cannot Mrs. Mackenzie leave the house, sir?” I asked.

“Her daughter cries out for her at every moment. Mrs. Mackenzie is
certainly not a judicious nurse, but in Mrs. Newcome’s present state I
cannot take upon myself to separate them. Mr. Newcome may return, and I
do think and believe that his presence may tend to impose silence and
restore tranquillity.”

I had to go back to Clive with these gloomy tidings. The poor fellow
must put up a bed in his studio, and there await the issue of his
wife’s illness. I saw Thomas Newcome could not sleep under his son’s
roof that night. That dear meeting, which both so desired, was delayed,
who could say for how long?

“The Colonel may come to us,” I thought; “our old house is big enough.”
I guessed who was the friend coming in my wife’s company; and pleased
myself by thinking that two friends so dear should meet in our home.
Bent upon these plans, I repaired to Grey Friars, and to Thomas
Newcome’s chamber there.

Bayham opened the door when I knocked, and came towards me with a
finger on his lip, and a sad, sad countenance. He closed the door
gently behind him, and led me into the court. “Clive is with him, and
Miss Newcome. He is very ill. He does not know them,” said Bayham with
a sob. “He calls out for both of them: they are sitting there and he
does not know them.”

In a brief narrative, broken by more honest tears, Fred Bayham, as we
paced up and down the court, told me what had happened. The old man
must have passed a sleepless night, for on going to his chamber in the
morning, his attendant found him dressed in his chair, and his bed
undisturbed. He must have sat all through the bitter night without a
fire: but his hands were burning hot, and he rambled in his talk. He
spoke of some one coming to drink tea with him, pointed to the fire,
and asked why it was not made; he would not go to bed, though the nurse
pressed him. The bell began to ring for morning chapel; he got up and
went towards his gown, groping towards it as though he could hardly
see, and put it over his shoulders, and would go out, but he would have
fallen in the court if the good nurse had not given him her arm; and
the physician of the hospital, passing fortunately at this moment, who
had always been a great friend of Colonel Newcome’s, insisted upon
leading him back to his room again, and got him to bed. “When the bell
stopped, he wanted to rise once more; he fancied he was a boy at school
again,” said the nurse, “and that he was going in to Dr. Raine, who was
schoolmaster here ever so many years ago.” So it was, that when happier
days seemed to be dawning for the good man, that reprieve came too
late. Grief, and years, and humiliation, and care, and cruelty had been
too strong for him, and Thomas Newcome was stricken down.

Bayham’s story told, I entered the room, over which the twilight was
falling, and saw the figures of Clive and Ethel seated at each end of
the bed. The poor old man within it was calling incoherent sentences. I
had to call Clive from the present grief before him, with intelligence
of further sickness awaiting him at home. Our poor patient did not heed
what I said to his son. “You must go home to Rosa,” Ethel said. “She
will be sure to ask for her husband, and forgiveness is best, dear
Clive. I will stay with uncle. I will never leave him. Please God, he
will be better in the morning when you come back.” So Clive’s duty
called him to his own sad home; and, the bearer of dismal tidings, I
returned to mine. The fires were lit there and the table spread; and
kind hearts were waiting to welcome the friend who never more was to
enter my door.

It may be imagined that the intelligence which I brought alarmed and
afflicted my wife and Madame de Florac, our guest. Laura immediately
went away to Rosa’s house to offer her services if needed. The accounts
which she brought thence were very bad: Clive came to her for a minute
or two, but Mr. Mackenzie could not see her. Should she not bring the
little boy home to her children? Laura asked; and Clive thankfully
accepted that offer. The little man slept in our nursery that night,
and was at play with our young ones on the morrow—happy and unconscious
of the fate impending over his home.

Yet two more days passed, and I had to take two advertisements to _The
Times_ newspaper on the part of poor Clive. Among the announcements of
Births was printed, “On the 28th, in Howland Street, Mrs. Clive Newcome
of a son, still-born.” And a little lower, in the third division of the
same column, appeared the words, “On the 29th, in Howland Street, aged
26, Rosa, wife of Clive Newcome, Esq.” So, one day, shall the names of
all of us be written there; to be deplored by how many?—to be
remembered how long?—to occasion what tears, praises, sympathy,
censure?—yet for a day or two, while the busy world has time to
recollect us who have passed beyond it. So this poor little flower had
bloomed for its little day, and pined, and withered, and perished.
There was only one friend by Clive’s side following the humble
procession which laid poor Rosa and her child out of sight of a world
that had been but unkind to her. Not many tears were there to water her
lonely little grave. A grief that was akin to shame and remorse humbled
him as he knelt over her. Poor little harmless lady! no more childish
triumphs and vanities, no more hidden griefs are you to enjoy or
suffer; and earth closes over your simple pleasures and tears! The snow
was falling and whitening the coffin as they lowered it into the
ground. It was at the same cemetery in which Lady Kew was buried. I
dare say the same clergyman read the same service over the two graves,
as he will read it for you or any of us to-morrow, and until his own
turn comes. Come away from the place, poor Clive! Come sit with your
orphan little boy; and bear him on your knee, and hug him to your
heart. He seems yours now, and all a father’s love may pour out upon
him. Until this hour, Fate uncontrollable and homely tyranny had
separated him from you.

It was touching to see the eagerness and tenderness with which the
great strong man now assumed the guardianship of the child, and endowed
him with his entire wealth of affection. The little boy now ran to
Clive whenever he came in, and sat for hours prattling to him. He would
take the boy out to walk, and from our windows we could see Clive’s
black figure striding over the snow in St. James’s Park, the little man
trotting beside him, or perched on his father’s shoulder. My wife and I
looked at them one morning as they were making their way towards the
City.

“He has inherited that loving heart from his father,” Laura said; “and
he is paying over the whole property to his son.”

Clive, and the boy sometimes with him, used to go daily to Grey Friars,
where the Colonel still lay ill. After some days the fever which had
attacked him left him, but left him so weak and enfeebled that he could
only go from his bed to the chair by his fireside. The season was
exceedingly bitter, the chamber which he inhabited was warm and
spacious; it was considered unadvisable to move him until he had
attained greater strength, and till warmer weather. The medical men of
the House hoped he might rally in spring. My friend, Dr. Goodenough,
came to him; he hoped too: but not with a hopeful face. A chamber,
luckily vacant, hard by the Colonel’s, was assigned to his friends,
where we sate when we were too many for him. Besides his customary
attendant, he had two dear and watchful nurses, who were almost always
with him—Ethel and Madame de Florac, who had passed many a faithful
year by an old man’s bedside; who would have come, as to a work of
religion, to any sick couch, much more to this one, where he lay for
whose life she would once gladly have given her own.

But our Colonel, we all were obliged to acknowledge, was no more our
friend of old days. He knew us again, and was good to every one round
him, as his wont was; especially when Boy came, his old eyes lighted up
with simple happiness, and, with eager trembling hands, he would seek
under his bedclothes, or the pockets of his dressing-gown, for toys or
cakes, which he had caused to be purchased for his grandson. There was
a little laughing, red-cheeked, white-headed gown-boy of the school, to
whom the old man had taken a great fancy. One of the symptoms of his
returning consciousness and recovery, as we hoped, was his calling for
this child, who pleased our friend by his archness and merry ways; and
who, to the old gentleman’s unfailing delight, used to call him, “Codd
Colonel.” “Tell little F——, that Codd Colonel wants to see him;” and
the little gown-boy was brought to him; and the Colonel would listen to
him for hours; and hear all about his lessons and his play; and prattle
almost as childishly about Dr. Raine, and his own early school-days.
The boys of the school, it must be said, had heard the noble old
gentleman’s touching history, and had all got to know and love him.
They came every day to hear news of him; sent him in books and papers
to amuse him; and some benevolent young souls,—God’s blessing on all
honest boys, say I,—painted theatrical characters, and sent them in to
Codd Colonel’s grandson. The little fellow was made free of gown-boys,
and once came thence to his grandfather in a little gown, which
delighted the old man hugely. Boy said he would like to be a little
gown-boy; and I make no doubt, when he is old enough, his father will
get him that post, and put him under the tuition of my friend Dr.
Senior.

So, weeks passed away, during which our dear old friend still remained
with us. His mind was gone at intervals, but would rally feebly; and
with his consciousness returned his love, his simplicity, his
sweetness. He would talk French with Madame de Florac, at which time,
his memory appeared to awaken with surprising vividness, his cheek
flushed, and he was a youth again,—a youth all love and hope,—a
stricken old man, with a beard as white as snow covering the noble
careworn face. At such times he called her by her Christian name of
Léonore; he addressed courtly old words of regard and kindness to the
aged lady; anon he wandered in his talk, and spoke to her as if they
still were young. Now, as in those early days, his heart was pure; no
anger remained in it; no guile tainted it; only peace and goodwill
dwelt in it.

Rosa’s death had seemed to shock him for a while when the unconscious
little boy spoke of it. Before that circumstance, Clive had even
forbore to wear mourning, lest the news should agitate his father. The
Colonel remained silent and was very much disturbed all that day, but
he never appeared to comprehend the fact quite; and, once or twice
afterwards, asked, why she did not come to see him? She was prevented,
he supposed—she was prevented, he said, with a look of terror: he never
once otherwise alluded to that unlucky tyrant of his household, who had
made his last years so unhappy.

The circumstance of Clive’s legacy he never understood: but more than
once spoke of Barnes to Ethel, and sent his compliments to him, and
said he should like to shake him by the hand. Barnes Newcome never once
offered to touch that honoured hand, though his sister bore her uncle’s
message to him. They came often from Bryanstone Square; Mrs. Hobson
even offered to sit with the Colonel, and read to him, and brought him
books for his improvement. But her presence disturbed him; he cared not
for her books; the two nurses whom he loved faithfully watched him; and
my wife and I were admitted to him sometimes, both of whom he honoured
with regard and recognition. As for F. B., in order to be near his
Colonel, did not that good fellow take up his lodging in Cistercian
Lane, at the Red Cow? He is one whose errors, let us hope, shall be
pardoned, _quia multum amavit_. I am sure he felt ten times more joy at
hearing of Clive’s legacy, than if thousands had been bequeathed to
himself. May good health and good fortune speed him!

The days went on, and our hopes, raised sometimes, began to flicker and
fail. One evening the Colonel left his chair for his bed in pretty good
spirits, but passed a disturbed night, and the next morning was too
weak to rise. Then he remained in his bed, and his friends visited him
there. One afternoon he asked for his little gown-boy, and the child
was brought to him, and sate by the bed with a very awestricken face;
and then gathered courage, and tried to amuse him by telling him how it
was a half-holiday, and they were having a cricket-match with the St.
Peter’s boys in the green, and Grey Friars was in and winning. The
Colonel quite understood about it; he would like to see the game; he
had played many a game on that green when he was a boy. He grew
excited; Clive dismissed his father’s little friend, and put a
sovereign into his hand; and away he ran to say that Codd Colonel had
come into a fortune, and to buy tarts, and to see the match out. _I,
curre_, little white-haired gown-boy! Heaven speed you, little friend!

After the child had gone, Thomas Newcome began to wander more and more.
He talked louder; he gave the word of command, spoke Hindustanee as if
to his men. Then he spoke words in French rapidly, seizing a hand that
was near him and crying, “Toujours, toujours!” But it was Ethel’s hand
which he took.

Ethel and Clive and the nurse were in the room with him; the latter
came to us, who were sitting in the adjoining apartment; Madame de
Florac was there, with my wife and Bayham.

At the look in the woman’s countenance Madame de Florac started up. “He
is very bad, he wanders a great deal,” the nurse whispered. The French
lady fell instantly on her knees, and remained rigid in prayer.

Some time afterwards Ethel came in with a scared face to our pale
group. “He is calling for you again, dear lady,” she said, going up to
Madame de Florac, who was still kneeling; “and just now he said he
wanted Pendennis to take care of his boy. He will not know you.” She
hid her tears as she spoke.

She went into the room, where Clive was at the bed’s foot; the old man
within it talked on rapidly for a while: then again he would sigh and
be still: once more I heard him say hurriedly, “Take care of him while
I’m in India;” and then with a heart-rending voice he called out,
“Léonore, Léonore!” She was kneeling by his side now. The patient’s
voice sank into faint murmurs; only a moan now and then announced that
he was not asleep.

At the usual evening hour the chapel bell began to toll, and Thomas
Newcome’s hands outside the bed feebly beat a time. And just as the
last bell struck, a peculiar sweet smile shone over his face, and he
lifted up his head a little, and quickly said, “Adsum!” and fell back.
It was the word we used at school, when names were called; and lo, he,
whose heart was as that of a little child, had answered to his name,
and stood in the presence of The Master.


Two years ago, walking with my children in some pleasant fields, near
to Berne in Switzerland, I strayed from them into a little wood; and,
coming out of it presently, told them how the story had been revealed
to me somehow, which for three-and-twenty months the reader has been
pleased to follow. As I write the last line with a rather sad heart,
Pendennis and Laura, and Ethel and Clive, fade away into Fable-land. I
hardly know whether they are not true: whether they do not live near us
somewhere. They were alive, and I heard their voices, but five minutes
since was touched by their grief. And have we parted with them here on
a sudden, and without so much as a shake of the hand? Is yonder line
(——), which I drew with my own pen, a barrier between me and Hades as
it were, across which I can see those figures retreating and only dimly
glimmering? Before taking leave of Mr. Arthur Pendennis, might he not
have told us whether Miss Ethel married anybody finally? It was
provoking that he should retire to the shades without answering that
sentimental question.

But though he has disappeared as irrevocably as Eurydice, these minor
questions may settle the major one above mentioned. How could Pendennis
have got all that information about Ethel’s goings-on at Baden, and
with Lord Kew, unless she had told somebody—her husband, for instance,
who, having made Pendennis an early confidant in his amour, gave him
the whole story? Clive, Pendennis writes expressly, is travelling
abroad with his wife. Who is that wife? By a most monstrous blunder,
Mr. Pendennis killed Lord Farintosh’s mother at one page and brought
her to life again at another; but Rosey, who is so lately consigned to
Kensal Green, it is not surely with _her_ that Clive is travelling, for
then Mrs. Mackenzie would probably be with them to a live certainty,
and the tour would be by no means pleasant. How could Pendennis have
got all those private letters, etc., but that the Colonel kept them in
a teak box, which Clive inherited and made over to his friend? My
belief then is, that in Fable-land somewhere Ethel and Clive are living
most comfortably together: that she is immensely fond of his little
boy, and a great deal happier now than they would have been had they
married at first, when they took a liking to each other as young
people. That picture of J. J.’s of Mrs. Clive Newcome (in the Crystal
Palace Exhibition in Fable-land), is certainly not in the least like
Rosey, who we read was fair; but it represents a tall, handsome, dark
lady, who must be Mrs. Ethel.

Again, why did Pendennis introduce J. J. with such a flourish, giving
us, as it were, an overture, and no piece to follow it? J. J.’s
history, let me confidentially state, has been revealed to me too, and
may be told some of these fine summer months, or Christmas evenings,
when the kind reader has leisure to hear.

What about Sir Barnes Newcome ultimately? My impression is that he is
married again, and it is my fervent hope that his present wife bullies
him. Mrs. Mackenzie cannot have the face to keep that money which Clive
paid over to her, beyond her lifetime; and will certainly leave it and
her savings to little Tommy. I should not be surprised if Madame de
Moncontour left a smart legacy to the Pendennis children; and Lord Kew
stood godfather in case—in case Mr. and Mrs. Clive wanted such an
article. But have they any children? I, for my part, should like her
best without, and entirely devoted to little Tommy. But for you, dear
friend, it is as you like. You may settle your Fable-land in your own
fashion. Anything you like happens in Fable-land. Wicked folks die
apropos (for instance, that death of Lady Kew was most artful, for if
she had not died, don’t you see that Ethel would have married Lord
Farintosh the next week?)—annoying folks are got out of the way; the
poor are rewarded—the upstarts are set down in Fable-land,—the frog
bursts with wicked rage, the fox is caught in his trap, the lamb is
rescued from the wolf, and so forth, just in the nick of time. And the
poet of Fable-land rewards and punishes absolutely. He splendidly deals
out bags of sovereigns, which won’t buy anything; belabours wicked
backs with awful blows, which do not hurt; endows heroines with
preternatural beauty, and creates heroes, who, if ugly sometimes, yet
possess a thousand good qualities, and usually end by being immensely
rich; makes the hero and heroine happy at last, and happy ever after.
Ah, happy, harmless Fable-land, where these things are! Friendly
reader! may you and the author meet there on some future day. He hopes
so; as he yet keeps a lingering hold of your hand, and bids you
farewell with a kind heart.

PARIS, 28th June 1855.