Mortomley's Estate: A Novel. Vol. 1 (of 3)
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Title: Mortomley's Estate: A Novel. Vol. 1 (of 3)
Author: Mrs. J. H. Riddell
Release date: May 4, 2012 [eBook #39611]
Language: English
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Credits: E-text prepared by Robert Cicconetti, Sue Fleming, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive (http://archive.org)
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MORTOMLEY'S ESTATE.
A Novel.
BY
MRS. RIDDELL,
AUTHOR OF
"GEORGE GEITH," "TOO MUCH ALONE," "HOME, SWEET HOME,"
"THE EARL'S PROMISE," ETC. ETC.
_IN THREE VOLUMES._
VOL. I.
LONDON:
TINSLEY BROTHERS. 8, CATHERINE STREET, STRAND.
1874.
_All rights of Translation and Reproduction are Reserved._
PRINTED BY TAYLOR AND CO.,
LITTLE QUEEN STREET, LINCOLN'S INN FIELDS.
TO
Emma Martin,
OF
WADESMILL, HERTS,
THIS STORY IS DEDICATED,
AS A TOKEN OF THE AUTHOR'S RESPECT AND AFFECTION.
CONTENTS.
CHAP. PAGE
I. INTRODUCES MR. ASHERILL TO THE READER 1
II. A VERY WET SATURDAY 20
III. FOR MERCIES VOUCHSAFED 43
IV. SUMMER DAYS 63
V. ABOUT MRS. MORTOMLEY AND OTHERS 99
VI. MRS. MORTOMLEY IS ADVISED FOR HER GOOD 119
VII. LENORE 134
VIII. A DEAD FAINT 147
IX. THE FIRST MUTTERINGS OF THE STORM 167
X. MR. FORDE TAKES HIS HAT 200
XI. RUPERT SPEAKS VERY PLAINLY 225
XII. THE SAME DAY AT HOMEWOOD 242
XIII. MORTOMLEY'S FRIENDS 256
XIV. KLEINWORT IS SYMPATHETIC 271
MORTOMLEY'S ESTATE.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCES MR. ASHERILL TO THE READER.
During the course of the last ten or at most fifteen years, a new class
of building has, mushroom like, sprung up in the Metropolis, which
cannot perhaps better be described in a sentence than as
"The City of London Offices" (Limited).
True, none of the "Houses," "Chambers," "Halls," "Buildings" that swell
the ranks of this new army of offices, are so far as I know called by
the above name, but they are all situated within the precincts of the
City; they have been promoted by City men, they all belong to Limited
Companies or to the liquidators of those Companies, and they all
resemble each other more or less--more indeed rather than less.
They are to be met with in various lanes, alleys, streets, and courts.
So far as a casual observer can see, they are principally remarkable for
an utter absence of comfort. They possess longer corridors, smaller
rooms, steeper and more unpromising stone staircases than any other
class of building, Newgate not excepted, east of Temple Bar.
So far as the mind can grasp, they are tenanted by a more wonderful race
of men than Captain Cook discovered in the South Sea Islands, or Darwin
conceived could ever have been eliminated from monkeys.
The windows are noticeable for having no front light, the edifices
themselves are curious for the simple reason that they have been
apparently built without the usual preliminaries of either architect or
plan, while the men who during business hours inhabit the offices afford
subject for the wildest speculation.
They have as a rule come from no one knows where; they live no one, save
their victims, knows how; their business, though stated with sufficient
distinctness on the walls of the halls and corridors, and the glass and
panels of the doors, is a sealed mystery to every one but themselves and
the poor wretches who in those dreary offices are stripped of every
valuable they possess, every rag of social consideration, every vestige
of self-respect, and turned out naked as they came into the world to
meet the world's opprobrium and that which is tenfold harder to
bear--the world's pity, and to try to make their way once again through
a world it is unhappily necessary for them to pass through. And yet the
men who are able to set up in business in the trade or profession
(which?) that I have indicated, like the wicked, flourish as green bay
trees; they gather riches, they purchase houses and inhabit them, they
build barns and fill them, they lay by much treasure, they hug
themselves on their balances, their position, the deference shown
fearfully and servilely by those who are poorer than themselves, the
familiarity of those who are richer,--never recking of that possible
hour when poverty shall come upon them like an armed man, and when a
hand more terrible than that of death itself shall be laid upon their
shoulders and a voice whisper in their ear, "Thou fool, this night thy
substance is required of thee."
As for their souls, they never think of them either. Money is palpable,
spirit impalpable.
If in their blindness they ignore the probability of money making unto
itself wings--even money coined as theirs has been out of the blood
drawn from men's hearts, the anguished tears of women, the broken hopes
of youth, and the disgrace heaped upon old age--it is not in the
slightest degree likely they trouble themselves concerning the possible
vagaries of their spirits.
Death, if the idea of dying present itself, is looked at either as an
end of happiness or a cessation from anxiety.
It is bankruptcy in both cases. It ends a successful career; it smooths
all difficulties in the path of those whose experiments have proved
abortive, whose attempts have resulted in failure; and, as the
earth-worm is no respecter of persons, it cuts short the career of
worldly consideration, it renders men's good opinion valueless, it
places the best-esteemed City magnate in a position where even a plum of
money will not enable him to pass muster in a more creditable manner
than the Bethnal Green pauper who has nothing to leave his family except
his bones.
Death is bankruptcy. Can I say more in its disfavour when writing of a
class who hold personal bankruptcy--their own, I mean--a calamity too
great to contemplate; who estimate a man's standing, for here and
hereafter, by the amount he has managed to rake and scrape together; and
who live by swooping down upon his possessions, and selling the house
which shelters him, the bed he lies on, the toys his children have
played with, the dog he has fondled, the horses he has ridden, the harp
his dead mother's fingers have touched?
Much more might be said of the race, but as one man of the genus waits,
claiming particular attention, you and I reader will, leaving
generalities, walk up to the first floor of Salisbury Buildings,
Leadenhall Street, City, and enter the private office of Mr. Asherill,
senior partner in the firm of Asherill and Swanland, Public Accountants.
Well known was Mr. Asherill in the City; his large frame, his high
well-developed forehead, his massive head, his broad shoulders, his
perfectly white hair, were as familiar to the _habitués_ of Basinghall
Street, and the thorough-fares conducting to that heaven for rogues and
hell for honest people, as the faces of the ticket-porters in Lombard
Street, or the livery of those stately gentlemen who lounge about the
entrance to the Bank of England.
And indeed it must have been accounted a shame had it proved otherwise,
for Mr. Asherill was living, moving, and having his being in the City
for five-and-twenty years at all events, before the new Bankruptcy Act
developed that particular class of industry in which Mr. Asherill is at
this present moment employing the great and varied talents with which,
to quote his own modest phrase,--"The Lord has seen fit to bless him."
How he employed the thirty-five years preceding the above-mentioned
twenty-five of his sojourn in this wicked world, it would be tedious to
specify.
His enemies--for even such is the depravity of human nature, Mr.
Asherill had enemies--said a considerable portion of the period must
have been spent in obtaining a practical knowledge of the roguery, vice,
falsehood, and trickery, which he denounced so unctuously; and it is
quite certain that in whatever school he may have graduated, his
information on the subject of all the sins to which flesh is prone, his
thorough acquaintance with all the forms of lying and cheating, to which
what he habitually styled "poor human nature" is addicted, were as
complete as marvellous.
There must have been a black night at some period or other in his life;
but no man in the City, at all events, could fix a date and locality
when and where that event happened which caused Mr. Asherill to conceive
a dread of, and dislike for, gentlemen and ladies, which was the one
weak spot in an otherwise almost perfect Christian character.
Mr. Asherill's account of his own early life was that he worked in a
cotton mill at Manchester; that through the kindness of a poor scholar
who lodged in the house of his, Asherill's, sole surviving relative, his
grandmother, he learned to read, write and cipher; that, being steady
and hardworking, he attracted the attention and secured the interest of
a Christian blessed with worldly means and influence, who took him first
into his own warehouse, and subsequently procured for him an appointment
in India, where he remained for a long time, and might have remained
till the end of his life, had not the delicate health of his wife
compelled him, ten years after his marriage, to choose the alternative
of parting from her or leaving India.
"Guided by Providence," said Mr. Asherill, "I decided on returning to
England."
Which was all likely enough and plausible enough, only it happened to be
untrue in one particular at least.
An unregenerate wag who met Mr. Asherill at the Crystal Palace in the
days when the mysteries of cotton spinning were expounded in the
machinery department for the benefit of the masses, who were then
supposed to be hungering and thirsting after solid information,
persuaded that gentleman to inspect the process, and under pretence of
ignorance beguiled the former factory lad into making various statements
which proved conclusively he never could have been in a mill, save as a
mere visitor, in his life.
One swallow, however, does not make a summer; and even though a man be
convicted of having uttered one untruth, it does not follow that all his
other statements are necessarily false.
That Mr. Asherill had been in India there could be no question. He had
been there long enough to place a very effectual gulf between his
present and his past, and to render all attempts to fathom whatever
mystery may have attached to his early life utterly futile.
It might be the case, as some people declared, that he had not risen
from the ranks--that his real name was not Asherill--that he and his
father, a respectable tradesman, having had some difference concerning
the contents of the till, he was shipped out of the country and
requested to stay out of it--all this might be so, but who was to prove
it? and supposing it all capable of proof, who would be interested in
the matter?
All the king's horses and all the king's men could not undo the fact,
that for twenty-five years Mr. Asherill had held up his head in the
City--that he was a man of weight whom aldermen and common-councilmen
delighted to honour--who had been connected with every form of
speculation which the fashion of the day and the opportunities of each
commercial year brought into repute. He had made money by railways and
lost it, and come up again fresh and smiling as the director of various
banks and insurance companies, the very names of which are now almost
forgotten, so rapidly is the memory of one swindle wiped out by the
collapse of another more recent. He had something to do, directly or
indirectly, with nearly every "big thing" which was floated in the City.
To a nicety he knew the price of a lord, and was once clever enough to
bait a hook which enabled him to land a bishop. He was acquainted with
baronets and knights, whose names looked remarkably well on the list of
directors, whilst he had an army of generals, colonels, and majors ready
at any moment to take the financial field.
A ready man and an able--a man, a Yankee speculator, a canny Scot, a
German adventurer, or a religious philanthropist might have sat up all
night to catch napping, and eventually found the intended victim wider
awake than themselves.
If there were one thing more than another, always excepting
sanctimoniousness, which distinguished Mr. Asherill from other people,
it was his intense respectability. From the crown of his head to the
sole of his foot he looked the incarnation of that god which is the
Englishman's Fetish.
The folds of his immaculate white cravat were in themselves letters of
recommendation. Whenever any especially profitable and delicate piece of
business had to be manipulated in the Bankruptcy Court, Mr. Asherill
always made it a point to be present in person; and, with the exception
of one Commissioner, no Judge had ever yet been known to urge an
objection to any course Mr. Asherill suggested, and throw cold water on
any scheme that emanated from the brain which found no mean habitation
in the massive head covered with thick but perfectly snowy hair.
And whatever Mr. Asherill engaged in, he carried on and through
respectably. Had his lot been cast in a different sphere, he would have
made a splendid butler, a model parish clerk, or a magnificent hall
porter.
As it was he associated himself with company after company, and then
almost wept for those who lost their little savings, their policies of
insurance, their deposits, and their incomes.
Whoever else might be to blame in the affair, he never was. He was
always deceived; if there were one especial enterprise in which Mr.
Asherill had invested his largest stock of faith, it always proved to be
that which came to the most utter grief, which collapsed with the
mightiest shock.
Not only this, but the amount of money Mr. Asherill, according to his
own showing, lost on each of these occasions was positively appalling.
He would shake his head and beg that the subject might not be mentioned
to him, it was all so terrible; and then he would contrive to drop a
hint as to how far he was "in," and the majority of people believed him,
and the minority who did not believe was too small to count.
After that especial Friday, in eighteen hundred and sixty-six, when, had
any former citizen liked to get out of his coffin in the vaults of St.
Edmund the King and Martyr, adjacent to the notorious Corner House, he
might have fancied a second South Sea Bubble had just burst, after that
Black Afternoon which brought ruin to thousands, Mr. Asherill quietly
packed up a few clothes and left town.
Perhaps he had been waiting for some such opportunity; perhaps some
stray brick of that mighty pile touched him. Be this as it may, he went
quietly down to Lewes, got himself decorously arrested and lodged in
gaol, and then without the slightest fuss or useless publicity passed
his examination, received his certificate, joined his wife at Brighton,
and spent the summer at the sea-side. It was then he became a Christian
and began to wear white neckcloths.
As he said it himself, there can be no harm in my remarking that up to
the period of Overend and Gurney's collapse, he had not been a
Christian. He was not one when he visited Lewes--he was not one when he
reached Brighton, where, after more than a quarter of a century's bad
health, his wife was at length dying with a commendable if late
rapidity.
Whilst engaged in this occupation, she made the acquaintance of a widow
lady, who was serious and possessed of an ample competency, and who
being, moreover, amiably and charitably disposed, took the invalid
drives, and furnished her with many luxuries and comforts to which she
had always latterly been accustomed, but which, in the then state of the
Asherill finances, she might otherwise have sighed for in vain.
When Mr. Asherill once more returned to business--the City, his old
haunts, and companions--he was a changed man. If he had been respectable
before, he was ten times more respectable now.
He was a widower, and he mourned for his deceased wife in a hat-band a
foot deep, in black clothes of the best quality and of regular City
make; in jet studs, a ring containing her hair, and a white cravat which
would have made the fortune of an undertaker.
Nor was this all. Short as had been his absence, it proved long enough
to enable him to acquire the language and manners of the people amongst
whom he meant for the future to cast his lot; and he went about the City
lanes and streets, informing all with whom he stopped to speak, of the
irreparable loss he had sustained, of the great change which had been
wrought in himself. If he heard naughty words uttered in railway
carriages, he was wont to say, "Hush," and then read his dear young
friends a homily on their thoughtlessness and profanity.
He did not hesitate to tell them he had once been sinful, even as they,
and he always finished by expressing a hope they might be converted
earlier in life than had been the case with him.
He was always sowing good seed; and though some of it was necessarily
wasted, upon the whole, I am bound to say, Mr. Asherill found the
harvest pay him remarkably well.
His bankruptcy, his wife's death, the religious convictions which he was
able to receive, proved the making of his fortune.
Never had Mr. Asherill done better than when other men were doing as
badly as they knew how. Everything he touched turned out well for him,
at least; and nothing turned out a better speculation than the widow.
Naturally, after Mrs. Asherill's death, she imparted to the widower a
vast amount of religious consolation, and likewise naturally Mr.
Asherill found her conversation comfort and uphold him exceedingly.
Indeed, he found it so comforting that at the expiration of two years
from the period of his failure, that is, in the summer of eighteen
hundred and sixty-eight, he ventured to offer himself and his prospects
to the widow.
He was a man and a convert, what could a lone woman desire or ask more?
Nothing perhaps, and yet the widow had her doubts.
She had been so often angled for, that she looked rather closely at the
bait before she rose to it, and hinted that whilst friendship urged her
to say "Yes," prudence advised her to say "No."
She knew so little of Mr. Asherill's antecedents, she was so ignorant
even of the names of any of his friends, that--
"The name of Samuel Witney is familiar to you, doubtless," interrupted
Mr. Asherill.
Yes, the widow knew it well. He was a shining light in his own
particular denomination, and she had read his speeches, and listened to
his lectures with delight and instruction.
"I suppose then," suggested Mr. Asherill, "that if he writes to you
saying he has known me for twenty years, believes me incapable of a mean
action, and can vouch for my perfect respectability, I may hope--"
What he hoped was not exactly conveyed in words, but it resulted in the
widow saying,
"Oh! Mr. Asherill," and setting her cap, which had suddenly become
disarranged, straight.
I do not wish to enlarge upon this theme, however; the loves of elderly
couples cannot be made attractive by any sort of writing yet discovered,
and the billing and cooing of a pair of old doves is music which no art
can render sweet in the ear of the listener.
Immediately on Mr. Asherill's return to town, he informed Mr. Witney of
his wishes, as well as of the great change he had experienced, thus
killing, as was his wont, two birds with one stone.
He secured a second wife with a handsome income, every penny of which he
insisted should be settled on herself; and he cemented the friendship,
so called, which had after City fashion subsisted between himself and
Mr. Witney.
"It is so pleasant to think you are at last one of _us_," said that
gentleman, and undoubtedly Mr. Asherill thought so too.
CHAPTER II.
A VERY WET SATURDAY.
To this man, prosperous in spite of the reverses he had
experienced--contented notwithstanding the recollections his memory must
have held--hypocritical to Heaven and his fellows as he had once been to
his fellows alone--to this man who, having turned over a new leaf on
which nothing was traced save piety and respectability, found money,
and, as a natural consequence, a certain amount of consideration also,
there came on an especially wet Saturday, in a very recent year of
grace, one of his clerks, who handed to him a slip of paper on which two
names were written, and waited to hear his pleasure as to admitting the
owners of them to a private audience.
"Ask them to walk in," said Mr. Asherill; and accordingly two men did
walk in, with foreigner stamped upon them from head to foot.
"Pray be seated," suggested Mr. Asherill, acknowledging, from his side
of the table, their greetings, but either not seeing or not wishing to
see that one at least of the two was prepared to shake hands.
There had been a time--but that was in his unregenerate and impecunious
state--when friends were as scarce as florins, so it seems almost
ungenerous to state the fact of Mr. Asherill having once been glad to
hear himself familiarly accosted by the shorter, fairer, and apparently
franker of his visitors.
For many reasons Mr. Asherill disliked gentlemen who had not been
privileged to be born Britons. In his capacity as a Christian and a
Dissenter he disapproved of people whom he classed roughly all round as
"Papists," "Jesuits," and "Infidels." In his capacity as a citizen of
the City of London, he regarded foreigners as interlopers, and had once
actually written a letter to the then Chancellor of the Exchequer
suggesting a tax upon Germans, Greeks, Frenchmen, and others, as a means
at once of raising the revenue and of relieving Englishmen from an
irritating and disastrous competition.
Further, Mr. Asherill not merely believed that foreign men and women
were unbelievers, and that they crossed the Channel for no other object
except to pick the pocket of John Bull, but he also fancied--not
entirely without reason perhaps--that, polite manners and politer words
nevertheless, all foreigners with whom he came in contact had taken his
measure pretty accurately, and were laughing at him in their sleeve.
In a word, the very idea of such falseness and frivolity, when conjoined
with the art of making money, was odious to Mr. Asherill; and he had
made much good play amongst staid heads of families, and in the company
of elders of churches, by giving utterance to opinions that had at least
the merit of sincerity, on the subject of peaceful foreign invasion.
For these reasons, and for others which will explain themselves ere
long, Mr. Asherill did not think it necessary to exhibit any effusion of
feeling at sight of his visitors.
"Disagreeable day," he remarked in a deprecating sort of manner, as
though he were mentally apologizing to a higher authority for even
commenting on the state of the weather.
"Beastly," answered the taller man in a tone which clearly implied he at
least entertained no fear of Providence being offended by any strictures
on the English climate.
"Vairy bad," agreed his companion in an accent which indicated he was
more of a foreigner than the previous speaker.
And this was the case.
Bertrand Kleinwort was a German pure as imported, whilst Henry Werner
laboured under the (personal) disadvantages of having been born in
England and of having been brought up under somewhat different social
circumstances to those which usually tend to the triumph of the Teutonic
over the Saxon race.
One accustomed to notice such matters might also have observed another
distinction between the two men. While both were Germans, subject to the
difference above mentioned, both had also Jewish blood in their veins,
with the important difference that they certainly owed their origin to
separate descendants of the lost tribes.
I should be sorry to insult the memory of any one of the ten sons of
Jacob who failed to send down clear title-deeds with his posterity, by
suggesting to which of the number Mr. Kleinwort might directly trace his
existence, but it certainly was to another brother than he from whose
loins sprang the progenitor of Henry Werner.
Most people would have preferred Kleinwort to Werner; preferred his soft
pleading voice, his tone of ready sympathy, his pleasant, cheerful,
plausible, confidential manners, till they felt his deathly grip, and
understood, too late, the cold snake-like cruelty which underlay his
smooth kindly exterior; the devilish deliberation with which he lay in
ambush for his prey till the moment came, and with it, for ever,
farewell to hope--aye, and it had been to things dearer than hope, or
wealth, or life itself.
As for Werner, with dark impassive face and impenetrable, almost sullen
manners, he had performed some feats of sailing remarkably close to the
wind, which had drawn upon him animadversions from masters, and
judges, and juries, and a few honest men in the City--a few of the
typical ten who may yet save it, if indeed there are--almsgiving
notwithstanding--ten left. He had kept up impending bankrupts till he
was clear, and it seemed expedient to let them go; he had allowed
people, to "refer to him," who saw him safe out and let other people in;
he had, it was whispered, once or twice accepted for payment paper, some
of the names on which were more than suspicious, taken in conjunction
with other names appended to the document, and no harm had come to him
in consequence; in a word, once upon a time, Henry Werner could not have
been considered particular, and now, when he had become very particular,
those matters were, by persons of a retentive turn of mind, remembered
against him.
Mr. Asherill remembered them, which was bad, seeing he had travelled an
even worse road himself; but then it must be taken into account that a
ticket-of-leave man who sincerely repents the error of his ways cannot
afford exactly to be seen in company even with a very young pickpocket.
"Well, gentlemen, what can I do for you?" asked Mr. Asherill, looking
across the table at his visitors, and digging the point of a steel pen
into his blotting-paper as he spoke.
"We have brought you one very good thing," said Mr. Kleinwort, speaking
slowly, and painfully, English bad as the weather.
"Much obliged, I am sure. What is it?"
"Oh! one small thing; not big, but good. Must be done this very day; no
fear of costs; lots of what you call peekings; no large bones but
meaty;" and Mr. Kleinwort, who was all head and stomach, like a modern
representation of Christmas, as popularly depicted, with a plum-pudding
for paunch, laughed at his own wit.
Mr. Werner did not laugh; he scowled at his companion. Mr. Asherill did
not laugh either. He looked from one to the other, and then asked, in a
tone an undertaker might have envied--
"Who has gone now?"
"Archibald Mortomley," said Mr. Werner, glancing at him with dark eyes,
from under darker brows.
"You don't mean that?" exclaimed Mr. Asherill, with a briskness
suggestive of the old Adam.
"I mean that," answered Mr. Werner; and then ensued a pause.
Mr. Asherill broke it.
"If not an impertinent question, gentlemen, what have you to do with
this?"
"I am his friend," said Mr. Werner, with a hesitation natural, perhaps,
to a man who looked so incapable of being a friend to any one.
"And I a creditor," said Mr. Kleinwort, with a fluency which seemed to
strike Mr. Asherill, who surveyed them both, and stared at them over and
through.
"What does he owe you?" he asked at last, addressing himself to Mr.
Kleinwort.
"Fifteen hundred pounds."
"For what?"
"Money advanced."
"Through whom?"
"Through nobody, except me, myself."
"Nonsense; it is of no use talking in this way to me. You never had
fifteen hundred pence, let alone fifteen hundred pounds to advance to
any one."
"Upon mine sacred word of honour," Mr. Kleinwort was beginning, when Mr.
Werner stopped him.
"It is all right, Mr. Asherill," he said, "Kleinwort has advanced
fifteen hundred pounds; I know how and I know why."
"Is Mr. Kleinwort the petitioning creditor?" inquired Mr. Asherill of
Mr. Werner.
"I," interposed Mr. Kleinwort; "I, mein Gott! No! It is a pity, ach,
such a pity. Such a place, such a plant, such a business! Did not I
myself go down with Forde to see what was possible? Did I not say to the
little lady, Mortomley's wife, 'It is a pity, such a pity to let all
everything go; think what you and your friends can do, and then come to
me; you shall have what you want if Bertrand Kleinwort can procure it
for you.'"
Mr. Asherill looked at the devoted foreigner curiously.
"And what said the little lady?" he inquired.
"She turned up her nose at me--what small amount of nose there was to
turn--she looked at me. Soh!" And Mr. Kleinwort glanced out of the
corner of his eyes, and puckered his face into a grotesque sneer. "She
flounced her dress about in a pet, and said, 'Thank you very much, but
we are all tired of pouring water into a sieve; and, for myself, I think
bankruptcy must be heaven in comparison to the life we have been leading
lately.'"
"And you?" suggested Mr. Asherill.
"I then made answer, 'Madame, you will not find bankruptcy so pleasant
as you think.' She folded her hands and said, 'We will take our
chance.'"
"And what was Mortomley doing all this time?" asked Mr. Asherill.
With an expressive shrug Mr. Kleinwort answered, "Ill or making believe
to be ill; it all comes to the same for us."
"Is the man really ill?" said Mr. Asherill, turning to Mortomley's
'friend.'
"I do not know; the doctor and his wife say he is; but then doctors and
wives will say anything," Mr. Werner replied impatiently.
"You both, however, believe that if he had been in the way this
misfortune need not have come to pass?"
"Most assuredly," said Mr. Kleinwort, eagerly.
"It might have been deferred, at all events," acquiesced Mr. Werner.
"Mrs. Mortomley is a relation of yours by marriage, I think," suggested
Mr. Asherill, addressing Mr. Werner.
"By no means. My wife is a niece of Lord Darsham; Mrs. Mortomley, the
daughter of a poor country clergyman. My wife knew Mrs. Mortomley when
they were both young girls, and a sort of acquaintance has been kept up
since."
Mr. Werner spoke the preceding sentence very rapidly, and grew very red
in spite of his dark complexion, as if the question and answer had
embarrassed him; but Mr. Asherill seemed to take little heed of his
agitation, for he turned at once to Mr. Kleinwort, remarking,
"Is Forde in this, too?"
"Ach, yes," returned the other; "in what is it poor Forde is not? He is
so good, so kind, so easy, or what you English call in your droll
way--soft."
"Perhaps," remarked Mr. Asherill dubiously, "he has had a good deal to
do with you, Kleinwort?"
"A little; yes, a little; not with me exact, but correspondents of
mine."
"And I expect he will have more to do with you before all transactions
are finally closed," continued Mr. Asherill.
"It may be; who can tell? business grows."
"True," agreed Mr. Asherill, "and falls off, which brings us back to
Mortomley. Why, as you two are so much interested in the affair, do you
not act as friendly trustees and help to pull him through?"
"Oh! it is deucedly unpleasant being mixed up in such affairs," said Mr.
Werner hastily.
"He means nothing by that," remarked Mr. Kleinwort, in reference to his
companion's adverb, at which Mr. Asherill had shaken his head in grave
remonstrance. "As to Mortomley, poor fellow, Forde asked me to see to
the property, but I made answer--
"No, no; I have mine own business to attend to; anything in reason it is
possible to do for the poor fellow and that mistaken little lady, yes;
but I cannot neglect my own family and my own interests, even for the
sake of that most beautiful child her mother refused to let kiss old,
ugly Kleinwort."
"Oh! Mrs. Mortomley would not then allow her child to kiss you?"
commented Mr. Asherill.
"Mein Gott, no!" exclaimed the German, warming with his subject; "ten
million pardons, Asherill. Mein Gott in my affluent language means not
the same, by hundreds of degrees, as the same phrase rendered into
English. The small miss is a company child, wearing her hair soh;"--and
Mr. Kleinwort made a feint of arranging a Gainsborough fringe over his
ample forehead,--"who is neither shy nor forward, but has a knowledge of
_les convenances_ customary with young ladies and gentlemen even of the
smallest age, who have mixed in society since able to walk alone, and
she, in answer to my petition, would have come to me. All who know
Kleinwort know his weakness for children,--lovely innocents,--everything
we men are not. But madam said, 'Lenore, I want you;' and, taking the
tiny creature's hand, looked at me as a tigress with a cub might have
regarded a hunter with a cocked gun. And Gott in Himmel knows," finished
Mr. Kleinwort plaintively--, "I wanted to do no harm to child, mother, or
father; only, as bad fortune would have it, poor dear Forde was rough.
Like all timid, nervous people he always is rough with tender women and
weak men, and so caused that mistaken little Mrs. Mortomley to put up
her mane."
"What sort of person is this Mrs. Mortomley, who seems to have disturbed
your friend's equanimity?" inquired Mr. Asherill, turning to Mr. Werner.
"Much like other women; there is not a great deal of difference among
them," was the reply.
"Ah! is not that Werner?" remarked Mr. Kleinwort; but Mr. Asherill
silenced him with an impatient movement.
"Gentlemen," he said in his best manner, "I am sorry to seem ungrateful
for your kindness, but I may tell you, in a word, this is a business
which will not suit me. It had better, far better, be arranged
privately. Your safest policy would be to find amongst yourselves money
to carry on the business. It and Mortomley must be right enough."
"The man is ill and has no stuff left in him," exclaimed Mr. Werner
energetically and colloquially, forgetting in his haste what he had said
previously concerning wives and doctors. Mr. Asherill, however, quietly
marked a point, while he observed, "Yes."
"And there is no one left--no, not one," added Mr. Kleinwort eagerly,
"but a nephew in a velvet suit, who paints poor pictures and swaggers,
and in effect, if not in deed, snaps his fingers at us all; and his
sister, who is going to marry a rich man, and wants to be rid of the
connection, and little madam with the big temper, who thinks to fight
the world single-handed, but who does not know, oh! she knows not all
that means."
"And Mortomley?" suggested Mr. Asherill.
"For him we will just now, if you please, carry what you call nought,"
answered Mr. Kleinwort quickly.
Mr. Asherill smiled again, and mentally scored another trick; but he
only said aloud,
"Nevertheless, with many thanks for your offer, this is a business I
would much rather decline."
"Forde wants you to undertake it as a particular favour," remarked Mr.
Werner.
"Oh! indeed."
"Yes," agreed Mr. Kleinwort; "his words were, 'Tell Asherill there can
be no loss; that there must be profit, and that he will be doing me and
other people, Mortomley included, a good turn besides.'"
Mr. Asherill leaned back in his arm-chair and closed his eyes; he
touched the fingers of his right hand with his left, and might have
looked, to those who knew no better, engaged in prayer.
Messrs. Kleinwort and Werner did know better; nevertheless, they
regarded him impatiently, not knowing what turn his meditations might
take, and meantime matters were pressing.
At length. Mr. Asherill unclosed his eyes and resumed an upright
position.
"I cannot," he began, addressing the two men, who, for reasons best
known to themselves, anxiously awaited his fiat, "do what you desire
myself,--I wish I could; but there are reasons which render it
impossible. Perhaps, however, my young partner, who is a perfect
gentleman, may be able to help you."
He touched his bell as he spoke, and a solemn silence ensued till a
clerk appeared in answer to the summons.
"Request Mr. Swanland to have the kindness to step this way," said Mr.
Asherill, and remained mute once more till his partner entered.
A man not young, certainly, though in comparison to Mr. Asherill,
relatively;--a man, not a gentleman, though cast in a different and more
modern mould from that which had turned out his senior; a man who had
taken much pains with his manners, his speech, and his deportment; and
who, though he had striven to graduate for a high place in the world's
university, and failed, would never cease to give himself the airs of
one who had, or ought to have, won distinguished honours.
Mr. Swanland entered. He came into the room with a quiet, almost
stealthy step, and, seeing strangers with his partner, bowed to them
stiffly and ceremoniously.
Bertrand Kleinwort looked him over. "No liver, no digestion, no brains,
no heart--he will do," was the German's mental comment, showing that,
although right in his premises, even a German may sometimes be wrong in
his inferences.
With eyes not unlike those of an Albino, the object of this flattering
private criticism surveyed Mr. Kleinwort and Werner for a moment; then
his gaze sought the carpet whilst Mr. Asherill spoke.
"These gentlemen, Mr. Swanland," he began, "Mr. Kleinwort, Mr. Werner,"
indicating each with a wave of his hand, "have come here about a matter
in which Forde is interested."
"Indeed," said Mr. Swanland, in a tone which implied Mr. Forde was no
more to him than any other inhabitant of London.
"I have told them," went on Mr. Asherill, "it is not a matter with which
I should personally care to be connected, but that, perhaps, you may
feel yourself able to oblige them; my opinion is that the affair ought
to be, and could be arranged differently. Pray remember, Mr. Werner, I
advised a private settlement--the introduction of fresh blood--a
friendly meeting of the principal creditors, if necessary--but nothing
of a public nature. No--no--no. Tell Forde this. Tell him I refused to
be mixed up with it. Tell him that whilst I do not presume to dictate to
Mr. Swanland, I should prefer his refusing to be mixed up with the
liquidation of Mortomley's estate, profitable though it may prove."
Having with great gravity delivered himself of which sentence, Mr.
Asherill rose and, saying he would leave his visitors to discuss affairs
with his young partner, bade them good morning, took his hat, and
departed.
Not merely out of the office, but out of the building. As has already
been said, it was Saturday; business in the City was over for the day,
and if it had not been, Mr. Asherill had no especial business to attend
to. He wanted, moreover, to place himself beyond the possibility of
being asked for any further opinion on the, to him, odious subject of
Mortomley's downfall, and he therefore went through the sopping streets
in quest of quietness, and what he called a "mouthful of lunch."
Not to any new-fangled restaurant, or bar, or dining-room, was he in the
habit of repairing to recruit exhausted nature, but to an old-fashioned
City tavern, where the head waiter was gracious and familiar, and the
landlord obsequious to him; where the steaks were tender and juicy, the
chops done to a turn, the potatoes piping hot and dry and mealy, perfect
balls of flour, the ale old and mellow, and the wine, when circumstances
required his indulgence in that luxury, of a vintage which Mr. Asherill,
who was no mean judge of such matters, approved.
As he retraced his steps towards Salisbury Buildings, he met rushing
across the road two of his own clerks.
"Going home, Bailey?" he said to the taller and older of the pair, in a
tone which seemed at once to hold a benediction in it, and a
recommendation to turn the morrow to profitable account.
"No, sir; we want to catch the 2.43 train to Leytonstone. Mr. Swanland
wishes us to get to this place early, as the work must be finished
to-day very particularly."
Thus Mr. Bailey, while he held a piece of paper to his employer, who,
after putting on his gold eye-glasses, took it, and, umbrella in one
hand and paper in the other, stood on the crowded side-path in the
pelting rain whilst he read twice over the address presented to him:--
"_A. Mortomley, Esqre._,
"_Homewood_,
"_Whip's Cross_."
"Homewood," said Mr. Asherill, as if he were reciting one of the
Penitential Psalms.
"Homewood--poor Mortomley! These things are really very sad."
And with a shake of his head, he handed the paper back to his clerk;
and, after bidding him not lose the 2.43 train, proceeded on his way.
Mr. Asherill's knowledge of the depravity of human nature was
unfortunately so great that it certainly could not have surprised him to
see Bailey wink at his younger companion as they parted company with
their principal. In reply to which, the junior, with the irrepressible
frivolity of boyhood, thrust his tongue in his cheek.
All immensely vulgar, no doubt; yet, to a disinterested observer,
immensely suggestive.
CHAPTER III.
FOR MERCIES VOUCHSAFED.
For once, however, Mr. Asherill was in earnest. Knowing what liquidation
meant to the debtor and the creditors (he had grasped its meaning
thoroughly before deciding to make his living out of it) he did think it
a sad thing Mortomley should liquidate. He did not wish to disoblige Mr.
Forde; and yet having gauged that gentleman and the people with whom he
was most intimately connected, he felt no wild desire to mell or meddle
in any affair of theirs.
For no bait Mr. Kleinwort could hold out would this man have mixed
himself up with an affair he, for some reason, considered so doubtful as
Mortomley's,--with a business in which he saw there lay, to quote his
own mental phrase, something so "fishy" as the conjunction of Kleinwort,
Werner, and Forde.
Mr. Asherill did not believe in the stars; but he was sufficiently
superstitious to feel satisfied so astounding a terrestrial phenomenon
as that mentioned must portend approaching calamity to more than one
person.
"It will end badly, I fear," he said mentally. "I hope, I do hope,
Swanland will be careful. After all, the estate can prove only a poor
thing, not worth the risk."
Perhaps the weather had some share in producing these misgivings,--a
steady downfall of rain, a dull yellow sky, the water pouring into the
gutters, and the streets and side-paths thick and slippery with mud, are
not stimulants to cheerful reflection; but possibly the fact that Mr.
Asherill had not grown younger with the years may be considered as
having more to do with his depression than even the wet misery of that
especial Saturday.
The old head we are taught to consider so desirable, Mr. Asherill
possessed, but, alas! it no longer surmounted young shoulders.
Mr. Swanland was waiting the return of his partner. The clerks had all
gone, the books were put away, the safes locked up, the offices
throughout the whole of the building closed, save alone that in the
gallery, occupied by Messrs. Asherill and Swanland, which was the
private temple of the senior partner.
There Mr. Swanland stood by the window, looking over a cheerful view of
wet slates and tiles and grotesque chimney-pots; but he turned his eyes
away from this prospect as Mr. Asherill entered.
"I waited to tell you I have agreed to act in that matter," he said,
thrusting his right hand far down in his trousers' pocket, as was his
habit when not quite at ease.
"So Bailey informed me. I met him," was the reply.
"There will be something to the good I fancy," remarked Mr. Swanland,
feeling his way with his accustomed caution. Although he meant, at some
not remote period, to be sole master in the firm, still as yet he was
only a junior, and unlike some juniors, who ruin their prospects for
want of thought, Mr. Swanland remembered this fact.
"To the good for whom?" inquired Mr. Asherill sharply; "for us, for the
creditors, or for Mortomley?"
"I have been accustomed to regard the good of one as the good of all,"
said Mr. Swanland, with a touching appearance of sincerity Mr. Asherill
himself might have envied.
"I am sorry you undertook the business," observed the senior, shifting
his ground from theory to fact.
"Why, you left me to undertake it," expostulated Mr. Swanland.
"I left you to _refuse_ it," said Mr. Asherill emphatically. "I did not,
for I could not, send back a message to Forde telling him to do his
dirty work for himself, or get some one else to do it. I wanted to be
rid, civilly, of the business, and I thought you would understand that."
"I certainly did not understand it," Mr. Swanland replied. "I thought
you wished that estate to be wound up in our office, though you did not
care, for some reason or other, to be brought forward prominently in it
yourself. If I have done wrong, I am sorry for it. All I can say is, I
did wrong with the best intentions."
And after this ample apology and vindication, Mr. Swanland thrust both
hands deep in his pockets, and turned once more to the dripping roofs
and twisted chimneys.
"Well, well, it cannot be helped now," said Mr. Asherill, in a
conciliatory tone; "another time I will be more explicit; only you know,
you must know, how resolutely I have always refused to have anything to
do with a transaction upon which it seems a blessing cannot rest."
"Why cannot a blessing rest on this affair," interrupted Mr. Swanland
impatiently.
"Because it is not straightforward. What have these men to do with the
matter. They are not petitioning creditors; they are not, according to
their own showing, pressing creditors. They want the man to go on, and
he or his family want to stop. What is the English of it all? Why does
not his solicitor appear?"
"I have a letter from him," said Mr. Swanland, lifting a sheet of note
paper off the table and handing it to his partner.
Mr. Asherill looked first at the signature. "Michael Benning," he read,
and looked at Mr. Swanland in blank consternation.
"Why, he is solicitor to the General Chemical Company."
"No; surely not?"
"Surely yes. I told you there was something underneath all this."
"I do not see that exactly. Why should he not be Mr. Mortomley's
solicitor too?"
"Because I happen to know his solicitor. As honest a man as ever
breathed; and that is more than Michael Benning could be accused of."
"Perhaps Mr. Mortomley has quarrelled with his honest solicitor,"
suggested Mr. Swanland; a sneer lurking in his tone. "Travellers on the
road to ruin are very apt to quarrel with their best friends. However,
let that be as it may, I have nothing to do with creditor or debtor,
save to hold the scales even between them. If we do our work
conscientiously and impartially, I cannot see what it matters to us how
much finessing there may be on the part of others."
"Unless we are placed in a false position in consequence," observed Mr.
Asherill.
"I will take care of that," said the junior, rash and over-confident as
even middle-aged youth is sometimes prone to be.
"Another thing," commenced Mr. Asherill. "You know how resolutely I
always set my face against having to do anything with the affairs of
gentlemen."
"I am aware of your prejudices," was the reply; "we have lost a
considerable amount of valuable business in consequence."
"We need not argue that point now," said Mr. Asherill.
"Certainly not, seeing this Mr. Mortomley is a colour maker."
"And what else?" asked Mr. Asherill.
"I have not an idea," replied Mr. Swanland, looking at his partner with
some curiosity.
"The son of a gentleman--of as true a gentleman as ever made trade an
honourable calling, when trade was a very different thing to what it is
now. Many and many a poor wretch he saved from ruin. Many and many a man
owes all he has, all he is, to the princely munificence, to the wide,
silent charity of Mortomley's father."
"Well, perhaps some of the number will come forward to help the son,"
suggested Mr. Swanland.
"No," said Mr. Asherill, "it is not in our rank any one who knows the
world looks for gratitude or friendship. Mortomley's help will not come
from those his father assisted; it will come from the only men who ever
really stick to each other--the gentry. His business is gone I see
plainly, but he will not go; and there will come a day of reckoning and
explanation yet, which may prove unpleasant for some people if they live
to see it."
Mr. Swanland shrugged his shoulders. His knowledge of the world was
confined to a very small section of the world; and though it would have
very much astonished him to hear any one thought so, he really had still
much to learn.
"Meanwhile," he remarked, "I fear we must liquidate Mortomley. There
seems, indeed, no help for it, with half-a-dozen executions in or about
to go in."
"You are not serious?"
"Never was more serious in my life. Here is a list of them,--two at
Whip's Cross, one in Thames Street, judgment summons returnable to-day,
two executions in the hands of the sheriff, one in the district county
court expected to seize daily."
Mr. Asherill lifted his hands.
"Why did he ever let it come to this?"
"Forde would not allow him to stop."
"How could he prevent him?"
"I do not know. He would prevent it now if he could only see the man.
Forde, so far as I can understand, is a person who, being mentally
short-sighted, can only see to twelve o'clock the next day. If twelve
o'clock can by hook or crook be reached, he thinks twelve o'clock the
following day is possible likewise. This is the sort of life he seems to
have been forcing on Mortomley--helping him at the last gasp to pay out
the sheriff, and suggesting all sorts of ridiculous plans to enable him
to float a little longer. Even according to the showing of his friend
Kleinwort Forde must be a perfect fool."
"His friend Kleinwort did not happen to show you anything else he was?"
asked Mr. Asherill. "No. Well, you will find out for yourself in time.
Meanwhile I should advise you to order your steps discreetly in this
matter, or you may repent it to the last day of your life. I will not
detain you any longer. I have said my final word about Mortomley and his
affairs. Good afternoon, God bless you," and the senior wrung his young
partner's hand and once again descended the staircase; while Mr.
Swanland, putting on his top-coat and taking his hat and umbrella,
remarked half audibly,
"The old hypocrite grows childish, but there is always a grain of truth
amongst his maunderings. Yes, Mr. Forde, you think to use me for a tool,
but I will not cut an inch unless I find it to my own advantage to do
so."
Not for many a day had Mr. Asherill carried so--what he would have
called--dubious a heart home with him as he did on that especial
Saturday afternoon while he travelled from Broad Street to Kew.
There were people in the same compartment with him whom he knew, and who
in the intervals of reading the evening papers exchanged remarks with
him of that recondite and abstruse nature which railway travellers have
made their own; but for once Mr. Asherill felt out of tune with
politics, religion, commerce, and the stock exchange.
Something once very real had risen like a ghost before him, and he was
not perhaps altogether sorry when, the last of his companions bidding
him good evening, he was left to pursue the remainder of his journey in
solitude, except for the presence of that phantom shadow which he faced
resolutely, retracing step by step the road they two--the trouble and
himself--had frantically hurried over together.
Out of the shadows of the past, the events of one day--one wet Saturday,
one awful Saturday--showed themselves clear and distinct as a light
tracing, against a dark background:--
He beheld day breaking upon him; a man out at elbows as regarded
fortune--not for the first time in his life. A great dread had kept him
wakeful. He had loathed the blackness of night, and yet when light
dawned he had hidden his face from it.
What more?--a mean, poorly-furnished room; a sick woman to whom he
carried the best cup of tea and a slice of bread toasted with his own
hands, and then sat down to read a letter which took all appetite from
him.
Out in the drenching rain, with only an old torn disreputable-looking
cotton umbrella between him and the weather--out, with the wet soaking
through his poor patched boots--out, his fingers numb with cold, and his
heart less numb than paralysed with the same dread a hare feels when,
her strength spent, she hears the hounds gaining on her.
From office to office--from one friend--Heaven save the mark!--to
another; out again in the weather, with "No" ringing in every possible
accent in which the word could be uttered or disguised; out hour after
hour--for it was before the Saturday early-closing movement had been
thought of--too wretched to feel hunger, too miserable to be exactly
conscious of the length and depth of his almost frantic despair; out in
the sloppy streets, under the sweeping pelting rain, with every resource
exhausted, with ruin and worse than ruin staring him in the face.
For one desperate moment he thought of the river, sullen and turbid,
flowing away to the sea, that would end the agony, frustrate the
disgrace. He would do it--he would; and he went hurrying towards the
Thames. There did not intervene five minutes between him and eternity
when his eye happened quite by chance to fall on a great warehouse over
the gates of which was written--
"Archibald Mortomley, White Lead and Colour Manufacturer."
"It would be nothing to him," said the poor wretch to himself. "I will
ask; I can but be refused."
And so with the consciousness of that flowing river still upon him, only
fainter, he closed his umbrella and, stepping within the
formidable-looking gates, asked if he could see Mr. Mortomley on private
business.
"He is engaged just now," answered a clerk, who knew Mr. Asherill by
sight. "If you step up into his office and wait a minute, he will be
with you."
Up into Mr. Mortomley's office went the man wet and miserable, who had
scarcely had a civil word spoken to him during the whole of his weary
pilgrimage,--up into the warmth, and what seemed to him the luxury of
that comfortably furnished apartment.
Into the Turkey carpet his chilled feet sank gratefully. He was so wet
he did not like to sit down and tarnish with his dripping garments the
morocco leather of the easy chair. A sense of peace, and leisure, and
quietness, and trust fell upon him.
The rush of the river grew less audible.
"I will do it. I will tell him all, by----."
And never in his later years had Mr. Asherill uttered the sacred name
with such agonized earnestness as then.
A man entered, old, white-haired, affluent; a man who did not merely
look like a gentleman, but who was one; a man who talked little about
religion, but whose life had been a long worship, a perpetual
thanksgiving, a continual striving to do good.
He looked at the saturated clothes, at the white anxious face, at the
mute glance towards the still open door; then he walked to the door, and
having closed and bolted it, came close up to his visitor and asked,
"What is it? what is the matter?"....
It was a common enough story, and it did not take long to tell. When it
was ended, Mr. Mortomley went to his safe, unlocked it, took out his
cheque-book, filled in a cheque, signed and blotted off the writing.
"You cannot get this cashed to-day," he said; "it is too late, but first
thing on Monday will be time enough for what you want. There, there;
don't thank me. Thank the Almighty for sending you here and saving you
from a worse crime still. Now go. Yet stay a moment. You look as if you
wanted food and drink and firing. Here are a couple of sovereigns; and
now do, do pray let this be a warning to you for the remainder of your
life."
That was the phantom memory conjured up. Instead of the river or a
prison, relief and a fresh chance given him.
It all happened just as the waves of time brought it back to his
recollection.
A similar Saturday--the rain pouring down--only now it was to the old
man's son, ruin had come, and there was no one to hold out a helping
hand to him.
Never had Mrs. Asherill beheld her husband in a more gracious or softer
mood than when, after dinner, he sat before a blazing fire and helped
her to grapes and filled a wine glass with some choice port, and
insisted on her drinking it.
"I have some sad news for you," she said. "I have kept it till now lest
it should spoil your appetite for dinner. My poor friend Rosa Gilbert is
dead, and she has left me five hundred pounds."
"Dear, dear, dear; dead is she, poor thing!" remarked Mr. Asherill.
"What frail creatures we are! Grass before the mower. Here to-day;
to-morrow, where?" And he folded his hands and stretched out his feet
towards the fire, whilst Mrs. Asherill considered the question of
mourning, and thought it seemed but a few days since Rosa and she were
girls together.
"My dear," said Mr. Asherill, "if you have no objection I should like to
devote fifty pounds of this legacy in charity. I have heard to-day of a
sad case, a most sad case; a family opulent, highly esteemed, of
considerable social standing, reduced to beggary. With your permission I
should wish to send fifty pounds to the family as a thanks offering for
great mercies vouchsafed to ourselves."
Mrs. Asherill instantly agreed to this. Though a woman, she was not
mean; though a Christian, she had not her husband's faculty for looking
after loaves and fishes.
She only bargained she should see the kind letter which accompanied the
gift, and then and there, accordingly, Mr. Asherill wrote a draft of it.
With morning, however, came reflection. Fifty pounds was a large sum Mr.
Asherill considered, and the Mortomleys might stand in no need of it.
He decided not to send so much, but to say nothing of the reduced gift
to his wife.
She had seen the letter. That letter could go all the same with a
smaller enclosure. The acknowledgment of a friendly gift from J. J.
could be inserted in the 'Daily News' as he had requested. There was no
necessity to change the form of that.
Monday came, and with it more prudent reflections.
Tuesday, even the later impulses of his generosity had been absurd.
Wednesday, and with it questions from Mrs. Asherill.
Thursday, and a greater access of prudence. Nevertheless, something must
be done, he felt, and so he did something. He wrote out the letter in a
fair hand, signed it,--"Your well wisher, John Jones," and enclosed a
post-office order for £2. 10_s_.
Saturday came, no advertisement in the 'Daily News,' and more questions
from Mrs. Asherill.
Monday, and this paragraph met Mr. Asherill's eyes,--
"Mrs. M. begs to acknowledge the receipt of two pounds ten shillings
from J. J., which she has forwarded to the Secretary of the London
Hospital."
Mr. Asherill shook all over with indignation. He had seen Mrs. Mortomley
on the previous Saturday and was not surprised when he read the
foregoing paragraph. He had fervently prayed privately that she might
never associate him and the so-signed John Jones together, but he felt
indignant nevertheless.
Particularly as it compelled him to practise a deception on the wife of
his bosom.
He had to draw out an advertisement himself and take the Thursday's
paper containing it home to Kew for Mrs. Asherill's delectation.
"Mrs. M. acknowledges the receipt of £50 from J. J. to whom she begs
to tender her most grateful thanks."
On the whole, occupied though Mrs. M.'s mind chanced at the time to be
with other matters, it was quite as well for J. J. that the 'Daily News'
was not a paper which the local vendor generally left at Homewood.
CHAPTER IV.
SUMMER DAYS.
Pedigree is one of those intangible and incontrovertible commodities
which never commands a premium in the busy, bustling, practical city of
London.
A long course of successful trade, big warehouses, troops of clerks,
fleets of vessels,--by these things and such as these shall a man work
out his temporal salvation; and, therefore, to those persons who, in the
ordinary course of business, had come in contact with Mortomley, it did
not signify in the slightest degree whether he had raised himself from
the gutter, or was the last male of a family which had been of some
reputation in days when England and Englishmen cared for something
beyond sale and barter; when they laid down their lives for the sake of
King, Country, Religion; and entertained grand ideas on the subject of
Loyalty, Patriotism, and Courage, which pounds shillings and pence, the
yard measure, and the modern god Commerce have long since elbowed out of
court.
And yet the fact remained that the Mortomleys had once been country
squires of some reputation, and that, notwithstanding their long
connection with trade, and their inter-marriages with the daughters of
a lower social scale, some gentle blood flowed in the veins of Archibald
Mortomley, who was about to be delivered bound hand and foot to the
tormentors.
There is an inevitable decay in some great business houses as there is
in some great families.
Properties change hands, titles become extinct; the trade made so
hardly, the money garnered so carefully, pass into other hands. It has
always been thus; it will be thus till the end, and the reasons are not
perhaps far to seek.
If time brings with it ripeness, it brings with it rottenness also; it
brings the mature fruit, but it brings likewise the dead leaf and the
bare brown branches. If it brings the strength of manhood, it brings
sooner or later the weakness of age.
That weakness had fallen on Archibald Mortomley, not because he was old
or because he was by constitution delicate, but merely because he had
carried the traditions of a bygone and romantic age down into one
eminently utilitarian,--because with every condition of existence
changed, he had tried to do as his fathers had done before him,--because
with rogues multiplying on every side as, like caterpillars, they are
certain to do where the land is well planted and fertile, he refused to
believe in the possibility of being brought personally into contact with
them.
Like his progenitors, without a doubt of failure, he, full of generous
impulses and philanthropic feeling, started on his business journey, and
behold, he fell among thieves.
The stage at which he had therefore arrived when we make his
acquaintance was something a hundred times worse than bankruptcy--a
thousand times worse than friendly liquidation by arrangement. Coolly
those about him, with his most innocent concurrence, handed the cards
which dropped from his feeble fingers to his worst enemies, who, under
the guise of friendship, undertook to play out the game for him, and
played it as we shall see.
About a century ago there came up to London the younger son of a
Leicestershire squire, who, having quarrelled with his father, thought
he would see whether the great metropolis might not prove a more genial
parent.
He came up with some money, good looks, the manners of a gentleman, and
that certain quantity of brains which Heaven, since the time of Jacob,
usually inclines, no doubt for good and equitable reasons, to bestow on
the junior members of a family.
In London he was fortunate enough to make the acquaintance of a certain
Philip Gyson, whose ancestors had long and honourably been connected
with the city, and who was about to start a colour works in the then
rural village of Hackney.
Into this works Hildebrand Mortomley--his family had not then lost
either the names or the traditions of those who, having fought on the
losing side for King and Crown, were loyal spite of royal ingratitude,
when the King came to his own again--threw himself, his money, his
energy, and his genius.
For he had genius. First of all he set himself to master his trade. When
he had mastered it, he at once began to reject its crude old-fashioned
formulæ, and invent, and simplify, and improve for himself.
A story of a successful man's life might have been written about this
first Mortomley, who, forsaking the paths hitherto trodden by his
progenitors, struck out one for himself which led to fortune and
domestic happiness.
He married a daughter of Philip Gyson, a maiden fair, discreet, young
and well-dowered. When evil days came to the old man, his father, he
succoured him as Joseph succoured Jacob. When famine, sore and sudden,
fell upon the Mortomleys, in Leicestershire, he bade his brothers and
his sisters welcome to sit at his board, and share of the plenty which
had fallen to his lot in the strange land of Cockaigne. He helped the
males of his family to wend their way to foreign lands as the humour
seized them; the females married or died. He buried his father in a
vault he built for the purpose in Hackney old church-yard,--and when his
own time came, he was laid beside him, and his son succeeded him.
This son was not the Archibald mentioned in the preceding chapter as
connected with an unpleasant occurrence in Mr. Asherill's experience,
but a Mortomley christened Hill--the name to which his father's somewhat
lengthy cognomen had been judiciously abbreviated--who worked even
harder at the colour trade than his father had done, and who, when he
died, left behind him not merely the original little factory enlarged,
but a new and extensive works, situate on the north bank of the Thames,
between what is now called the Regent's Canal and the then unbuilt West
India Docks. Further, during his reign the old city warehouse in Thames
Street,--where Philip Gyson carried on his business and lived when in
town, and not at his country seat in the delightful village of Hackney,
famous in his day for the salubrity of its air, and a favourite resort
of city merchants and their families,--was enlarged and altered so as to
suit the requirements of his extending business. Much more he might have
done, but that in his prime he caught a cold which turned to a fever
that ended in his being carried likewise to the family vault at Hackney.
Out of many children only one son remained, Archibald, and with him
began, not the downfall of the business edifice, but the commencement of
that dead level of successful trading which indicates surely that the
table land is reached, and the next incline will have to be trodden
down, not up.
A man who found and maintained a most lucrative business, who was
content to leave things as he found them, to do all the good he could in
life, whose delight it was to make other people happy, who, excepting
theoretically, had no faith whatever in original sin, and who, thanks to
those who had gone before, never found himself in a serious
embarrassment or difficulty from the time he entered man's estate till
his turn came to take possession of that other property which Adam with
strict impartiality left a share of to all his descendants for ever.
Before Archibald Mortomley's death he had, however, lived a sufficient
number of years to leave some difficult problems for the solution of his
next heir, if that next heir had, in addition to being a clever, chanced
likewise to be a wise man. The two phrases are not inter-changeable.
Archibald the second was not a wise man, and therefore he did not try to
solve the problems; he accepted them.
What his father had done seemed right in his eyes; and as his father had
permitted himself to be governed by his wife, so he allowed himself to
be ruled by his mother.
Early in life the first Archibald Mortomley had a disappointment in love
sufficient to wean his thoughts from matrimony till he was surely old
enough never to have thought of it at all.
Perhaps he did not think of it till the idea was suggested by a widow
lady already the happy mother of one son.
For this son and herself she was anxious to find a suitable home, and as
no more eligible victim offered, she secured that home by marrying
Mortomley.
From the hour she did so she devoted herself to sounding his praises;
and poor Mr. Mortomley, who in his modesty really believed she had
thrown herself away upon him, would cheerfully have laid down his life
to please her.
Unhappily for him and those who were to come after she did not want him
to do anything of the kind. She wanted him to live, she wanted him to
push on her first-born; she wished him to see Archibald their son grow
to manhood; she nursed, coddled, petted, flattered him to such good
purpose that, although his will did not prove to have been made exactly
in accordance with her secret desires, still he had lived long enough to
indoctrinate his son with his own opinions, so that in effect the
document which left the business and properties to Archibald junior and
to herself only a life annuity proved a mere form.
To all intents and purposes she and Richard, her eldest son, long
married to a most disagreeable woman, had the ball at their feet.
Archibald worshipped his mother with a worship worthy of a better
object, and in his eldest brother he believed with that touching faith
which would be pathetic were it not irritating, which single-minded,
honest men will persist occasionally on lavishing on rogues and
vagabonds.
Not that Richard Halling came precisely under either category. He was a
man who, while he wilfully deceived himself, was too selfish to
understand his deceit might chance to prove the ruin of other people.
He ran into debt meaning to repay; he borrowed money intending to
return; he took the roads which pleased him best, and let others settle
for the cost of conveyance and maintenance, with the full determination
of making all their fortunes when he reached his goal. But, like other
men of his temperament, he never reached that goal; he lay down by the
way weary, and died, confessing himself a "gigantic failure," which,
indeed, he was not, since he had never even striven to rise to any
height; blessing his brother for his generous kindness; and lest that
kindness should be in danger of rusting for want of exercise, leaving
him in trust a son and daughter,--that son and daughter, in fact, of
which Mr. Kleinwort had spoken in anything rather than flattering terms
to Mr. Asherill.
Some time, however, before Mr. Halling--long a widower--went to rejoin
his wife, Mortomley, motherless too late, had met the one woman of his
life.
She would not have been every one's fancy, but she was his, and the way
in which he chanced to meet with her was in this wise.
He had been working hard and fretting, in his own silent fashion,
concerning the death of his mother, and these two causes combined found
him, towards the beginning of a summer which was ever after stamped on
his memory,--ill, languid, in poor health, and worse spirits.
Hitherto he had been wont to take his holidays at the sea-side, in
Scotland, Ireland, or on the Continent; but on this occasion, when the
doctors told him he required change and must have it, he elected to seek
that change in Leicestershire, and look at the old acres and trees and
houses which had formerly made the name of Mortomley a household one in
the county.
The Mortomleys who had preceded this man, being nearer to the root of
the family tree, felt only a vague gratification in being the son,
grandson, and great-grandson of the last squire, but to the Archibald
Mortomley of whom I am writing, the glories of his race, fast merging in
the mists of distance, had been his thought and pride since earliest
boyhood. If they were vanishing it was the more reason he should try to
grasp them; if they were in danger of becoming mere memories of the
past, there was all the more reason why he should strive to make them
once again realities of the present.
From his mother he had inherited a pride of family which would have been
at once ludicrous and intolerable, but that such pride, unlike that of
wealth, rarely finds voice sufficient to proclaim itself. Herself, the
daughter of one parvenu, and the widow of another, it was perhaps
natural that after Mrs. Halling married Mortomley the elder, she should,
when reckoning up his claims to social and personal consideration, have
placed rather an undue value on the monuments, tablets, brasses, lists
of doles, and other such like matters, which were still to be seen in
Great Dassell Church, where the Mortomleys had once their great family
pew, that now, with the lands and woods and manors, was merged in larger
properties owned by mightier men than they had ever been.
And the reader may be quite sure that she instructed her son in all
these matters. Not merely had he grown up to think his father the
cleverest man in the world, his mother the wisest woman, his
step-brother a model of what a brother and a son should be, but the
Mortomley family as one of the first consideration; and, therefore, it
is not, perhaps, a matter for astonishment, that when ill and out of
spirits, he should try to recruit his health and improve his mental tone
by visiting a place where those of his ancestors, who would have turned
up their patrician noses at colour works and colour-makers, had, from
cradle to grave, travelled that pleasant road which leads to ruin.
To Great Dassell he accordingly made his way, companionless; for one of
the many evils of a youth having been brought up under the eye of a
woman is, that when manhood surprises him with its presence, he finds
the capacity for making male friends has somehow been lost in the
process of his one-sided education.
He rented farmhouse apartments, from the windows of which he could see
the turrets and chimneys of the old mansion, now owned by Lord Darsham,
and called Dassell Court, that had been formerly known as Mortomley
Place, or most commonly, "The Place;" and before a week was over, it was
rumoured through all the country round and about Great Dassell, that a
great-great-grandson of the last Mortomley, of The Place, was lodging at
Braffin's Farm, and hand-and-glove with the vicar, a nephew of the late
Lord Darsham.
More than that, Sir Thomas Laman left his card at Braffin's, and
supplemented that delicate attention by asking Mr. Mortomley to dinner;
and it was well known Sir Thomas was twice as rich as Lord Darsham, for
he could afford to reside on his property, whilst his lordship was
obliged to shut up the Court and live upon as little as might be in
"foreign parts."
In one wing of Dassell Court Miss Trebasson resided with her mother, the
Honourable Mrs. Trebasson, sister-in-law to his lordship; and in that
part of the shire mother and daughter made genteel poverty not merely
respectable, but almost fashionable. They dressed like nuns and lived
like anchorites; but being ladies born, of a stately carriage and wont
to dispense alms out of a most insufficient income, people of all
classes bowed down before and did them homage.
Even Sir Thomas and his wife and daughters they received with a distant
courtesy, which taught the worthy baronet and his family they were too
rich and too new to be received quite on an exact equality by their
poorer neighbours.
To Miss Trebasson, whom he chanced to meet at the Vicarage, Mr.
Mortomley was indebted for that private view of Dassell Court, which
showed him at once how little and how much the Mortomleys had formerly
been; how little, that is, without the glamour and how much with it.
Mrs. Trebasson, who was slightly paralysed, received him with great
kindness, and, so far as her infirmity would permit, waxed eloquent on
the subject of family histories in general, and the history of the
Mortomley family in particular.
Drinking tea out of very fine china in company with these ladies,
listening to Mrs. Trebasson's slow talk and old-world ideas, his eyes
wandering over woods and park, and the great silence which necessarily
surrounds a secluded country mansion, causing a tension on his nerves of
hearing which the rattle of East-cheap had never done,--Mortomley felt
for the time a convert to the doctrine that, as compared with birth,
riches were but dross; that the lives of these two must be happy and
peaceful beyond that of dwellers in towns; that it would be delightful
to dream existence away in just such an old mansion as this, which had
once belonged to his ancestors, reading, thinking, experimenting,
without a thought of profit or dread of failure to break in even for a
moment upon the illusions of his life.
Mortomley was an experimenter. When ruin has marked a family for her
own, she usually endows the last of the race with some such form of
genius, which clings about and lends a certain picturesque grace to his
decay, as ivy climbing around an almost lifeless tree clothes it with a
freshness and a beauty it lacked in the days of its strength.
And the form of genius of the first Mortomley who engaged in trade had,
with every condition of existence altered, reappeared in this later,
weaker, and more sensitive descendant.
Even in his father's time he had introduced processes and combinations
into their laboratory hitherto unthought of; and since he had been sole
master of the business, strange and unwonted colours had appeared in the
market which caused astonishment, not unmixed with dread, to fill the
hearts of those who had hitherto been content to travel in the footsteps
of their predecessors, but who now confessed they must move quicker or
they would be left far in the rear.
Of all these things Mrs. Trebasson encouraged Mr. Mortomley to speak as
she would have encouraged any former Mortomley to talk of his hunters,
his hounds, his library, or anything else in which he took delight; and
Mortomley, flattered and pleased, talked of his plans and hopes with the
simplicity of a boy, and further, as the intimacy grew closer, told the
old lady about his lonely home, his lack of all near relatives, the love
he had borne for his mother, and the tender respect, the unquestioning
admiration, the devoted affection he had felt for his father--a
Mortomley every inch--though a Mortomley of The Place no more.
And Miss Trebasson, in her plain nun-like dress, her beauty unheightened
by decking or jewel, sat by and listened; and Mortomley never knew he
had spoken to such purpose of himself and his surroundings, that the
daughter had given him her heart and the mother was willing to give him
her daughter before his holiday came to an end. But it was not to be.
Had that ever been, this story must have remained unwritten. With
Leonora Trebasson for his wife, it is quite certain Mortomley never
would, whether ill or well, successful or defeated, have been permitted
to make the awful _fiasco_ of delivering himself, hair-shorn, strength
gone, into the hands of the Philistines. There are wives and wives; and
Mortomley, people said, was not fortunate in the choice of his. Spite of
her almost judicial wisdom, other people thought Miss Trebasson had not
been fortunate in the choice of her dearest friend. Perhaps for a time
she thought so herself, when she found that friend had bound Mortomley
to her chariot wheels. Perhaps for one night her heart did feel very
bitter towards her inseparable companion; but if this were so, she was
too essentially just to allow her disappointment to overpower her
reason. If her eyes had been unclouded by prejudice, she would have
understood long before, that although Dolly Gerace was not apparently
possessed of a single quality likely to win a man like Mortomley, yet in
reality she was precisely the sort of girl a keen observer would have
prophesied certain to attract him.
And yet so little observant had she been that the truth came upon her
like the stab of a sharp knife, and so little observant had Mrs.
Trebasson been that she actually encouraged Dolly to visit the Court
more frequently than ever during Mr. Mortomley's stay in the
neighbourhood to act as a foil--so the would-be worldly old lady
thought--to her own stately and beautiful daughter.
From which remarks it will readily be concluded that Dolly Gerace was no
beauty; further, that she was not merely destitute of good looks, but
that she had several undesirable points about her.
These things were the case. Dolly had not a good feature in her face. In
person she was small, slight, insignificant; mentally, she was an utter
anomaly to those who came in contact with her; while in more serious
matters, though born in a Christian land of Christian parents--having
been duly baptized and confirmed--being the daughter of a clergyman, and
the only living child of a most truly good woman, Dolly was as thorough
a little heathen as if she had called a squaw mother--and a brave
father.
More so indeed, for then she would have had some settled idea of a
certain code of morals and religion.
As matters stood, Dolly, for all she seemed to reverence or respect
anything, might have been her own Creator--her own all in all.
Not that any one could accuse her of flippancy, irreverence, undue
selfishness, or habitual ill-humour.
She had a want of something, rather than an excess of any evil quality;
indeed she had no evil quality, unless an occasional tendency to flame
up could be so considered. But then she never flamed up except when her
equanimity had been long and sorely tried, and the usual happy
brightness of her temper was pleasant as sunshine--as music--as the
songs of birds--as the perfume of flowers.
Long before Mortomley came upon the scene, Miss Trebasson had exercised
her mind upon the subject of Dolly Gerace.
After much consideration, which ended in leaving her as wise as she was
before, it suddenly dawned upon Miss Trebasson that her friend either
had been born without a soul or that it had never developed.
From that hour Miss Trebasson treated Dolly with the same sort of
tenderness as she might an eminently interesting and attractive infant;
and when it was proved to demonstration that Mortomley had fallen in
love with the girl, Miss Trebasson, after the first bitterness was over,
felt no surprise at his choice.
Beside Dolly, spite of her beauty, her intellect, her ancestors, her
titled relations, Leonora Trebasson knew she must look but as a bird of
very dull plumage.
Weather, means, the state of the domestic atmosphere, the depression of
the home funds, never made any difference to Dolly. Given that you
expected her, and she was quite certain to appear crisp, smiling, happy,
bright, with nothing to say perhaps particularly worth recording, and
yet able to say that nothing in a way which made the time speed by
quickly and pleasantly.
Miss Trebasson had no more thought of Dolly as a rival than she might
have taken of a kitten or a puppy; and yet when Mortomley lost his
heart, being a woman rarely wise and with somewhat of a man's instincts,
she understood he had done so for the same reason in great measure as
she loved Dolly herself, because the creature was gay, sun-shiny,
brimful of life and spirits,--because, in a word, she was Dolly Gerace.
Miss Trebasson had seen Dolly in the dumps,--she had seen Dolly
rueful--Dolly in sorrow--Dolly crying fit to break her heart--Dolly
living with a father who, though loving, never interfered with
her--Dolly living with an aunt who never ceased to interfere; and yet,
through all these changes, Dolly left the impression that in the country
where she lived a fine climate was the rule, not the exception.
When Mortomley fell in love with Dolly, Miss Trebasson waited curiously,
and--she was only human and a woman--anxiously, to see if her friend
would at length develope any of those qualities which are supposed, more
or less erroneously, to attach to a person destined to exist throughout
eternity as well as time, but she watched in vain.
Dolly went through her engagement and her marriage with her customary
sun-shiny cheerfulness.
"She _has_ no soul," decided Miss Trebasson, "she does not care for him
one bit;" and the tears Miss Trebasson shed that night were very bitter,
for she herself had cared for Archibald Mortomley very much, and she
doubted greatly whether Dolly Gerace was the wife he ought to have
chosen. However, he had chosen her, and there was an end of the matter.
Mr. Trebasson gave her away; Miss Trebasson, Miss Halling, and a couple
more young ladies were bridesmaids. Mortomley had been sorely exercised
to find a best man, but at length he hit on Henry Werner.
The wedding breakfast was by desire of Lord Darsham held at the Court.
Thus Mortomley came by his wife. A few sentences will explain how she
came by her being:--
A certain Mr. Gerace having been presented by his pupil, Lord Darsham,
with the family living of Great Dassell, which was not a very great
thing after all, being only about three hundred and fifty pounds a year,
beside the Vicarage-house and glebe lands, the Reverend Mr. Gerace
immediately married an eminently discreet, Christian-minded, and
unendowed young governess, for which act he had no excuse to offer
except that he loved her.
This justification might have been all very well if, in addition to a
tender heart, the clergyman had not possessed a weary list of college
debts.
He had been foolish once,--he had to pay for that folly to the last day
of his life.
He thought he could do much with his income as vicar of Great Dassell,
and yet he was only able to live and go on paying those weary, weary
bills till it was impossible for him to do anything more on earth.
Before hope had died out in him a female child was born, and after a
serious consultation he and his wife decided to name her Dollabella
after a distant relative who had no sons or daughters, but, better than
either, a considerable amount of money.
She stood for one of the godmothers, together with Miss Celia Gerace, an
aunt of the vicar's, Lord Darsham volunteering the part of godfather.
Dolly had not so much as a spoon from the whole of the trio,--she was
wont to state this fact with a certain malicious point in her sentence;
but they had all, with the exception of Miss Dollabella, been kind to
her,--so kind--better than any number of services of plate, Dolly added
with her wonderful rippling laugh.
And she meant it. They had been kind,--every one was kind sooner or
later to Dolly.
This was another peculiarity about her friend which puzzled Miss
Trebasson; other people professed much gratitude for favours received,
even though they spoke with occasional bitterness of those who conferred
them; but that was not Dolly's way, she accepted kindness as she
accepted unkindness, with an equanimity of feeling which seemed simply
incomprehensible.
As she grew older this equanimity increased. She laughed and jested with
those about her when they were in pleasant moods; when the reverse was
the case, when her aunt Celia took her grand-niece to task for the
general sins of the human race, Dolly either left the house as soon as
she decently could, or if that were impossible, busied herself about
domestic matters or worked with rare industry at whatever article of
apparel she was making, till the storm blew over, and the domestic
atmosphere was clear once more.
There were those who, knowing Miss Celia's temper, wondered Dolly could
live with it and its owner; but if people do not object to rain, bad
weather cannot seriously affect their spirits, and accordingly, in spite
of the usual inclemency of the climate at Eglantine Cottage, Dolly spent
some not unhappy years under its roof.
All the great, passionate, unruly love her untrained nature had yet
given to any one, she had laid, the first year she was in her teens, in
her father's grave.
The world,--her poor little narrow world, did what it could for the
orphan, but, as was natural, failed to sympathize fully in her grief.
That was enough for Dolly. She did not trouble the world with much
outward evidence of sorrow after that. The wound closed externally, bled
internally. Her bed-room in the roof of Eglantine Cottage, selected by
herself because there she was out of the way, the lonely woods around
Dassell Court, the alder-trees growing by the trout streams, quiet
lanes bordered by wild roses, holly and blackberries, and even quieter
fields where the half-horned cattle browsed peacefully,--could have told
tales of long weary fits of crying, of broken-hearted inquiries as to
why such things should be, of an insensate struggle against the
inevitable,--of very, very bad half-hours indeed when Dolly wished she
was lying beside her father in Dassell's quiet church-yard.
Time went by; and if the wound was not healed it ceased to bleed at any
rate. Life had to be gone through, and Dolly was not one to lengthen the
distance between the miles with useless repinings. Though she probably
had never read "A Winter's Tale" with sufficient attention to know that
"A merry heart goes all the day,
Your sad tires in a mile-a!"
she seemed to have adopted that couplet for her ensampler.
She might, as Miss Trebasson suspected, have no soul, but she was
possessed of a wonderful temper--of a marvellous elasticity.
She took life after the fashion of an amiable cat or dog. If people
stroked and patted her, she purred and gambolled for joy; if they were
out of sorts she crept away from sight till that mood was past.
She was a lazy little sinner--lazy, that is, in points where other young
ladies of her acquaintance were most industrious. She would not
practice, she would not sketch, she resolutely refused to read German
with any one, and she openly scoffed at two London misses who visiting
at the Rectory talked French to each other on the strength of having
spent a winter at Paris, imagining the Dassell natives could not
understand their satirical sentences.
She commented on their remarks in English, and so put them to the rout.
"I thought you told me you could not speak French?" said the youngest to
her.
"Neither I can any better than you," retorted Dolly; "and I do not call
_that_ speaking French."
Altogether an unpleasant young person, and yet Miss Trebasson loved her
tenderly, and Mortomley as well as he knew how.
"What is the matter with you to-night, Dolly?" asked Miss Celia one
evening when her niece had sat longer than usual looking out into the
twilight while the spinster indulged in that nap which "saved candles."
"Are not you well? I told you how it would be going out for that long
walk in the heat of the day."
"We walked through the woods, aunt, and it was not too hot,--and I am
quite well," answered Dolly in her concise manner, still looking out
into the gathering night. If she could have seen painted upon that blank
background all that was to come, would she have gone forward?
Yes, I think so; I am sure she would. For although Dolly had not been
born in the purple, there was not a drop of cowardly blood in her veins.
"Then what is the matter with you?" persisted Miss Celia, who always
resented having been permitted to finish her nap in peace.
"I was only thinking, aunt."
"That is a very bad habit, particularly for a young girl like you."
"I do not quite see how young girls can help thinking sometimes any more
than old ones," answered Dolly, but there was no flippancy in her tone,
if there were in her words. "Aunty, Mr. Mortomley--that gentleman I have
told you of, who is so much at the Vicarage and Dassell Court--has asked
me to marry him."
"Asked _you_ to marry him, child?"
"Yes."
"And what did you say?"
"What could I say, aunt? He is coming to see you about it to-morrow."
Miss Celia arose from her easy-chair. Perhaps out of the midst of the
cloud of years that had gathered behind her there arose the ghost of an
old love-dream, never laid--never likely to be laid. At all events her
usually shrill voice was modulated to an almost tender key, as, drawing
Dolly towards her, she asked,
"Do you love him, Dolly?"
"What should I know about love, aunty?" inquired Dolly; and at that
answer the elder woman's embrace relaxed. Here was no sentimental Miss
such as she herself had been in her teens, but a girl lacking something
as every one felt--who in some way or other was not as other human
beings--who even in those remote wilds was able to behold a personable
man and not go crazy about him on the instant.
Clearly there was a want in Dolly. Miss Gerace could not imagine what
that want might be, but that it existed she entertained not the smallest
manner of doubt.
After that answer about love, Dolly slipped out of her aunt's arms, out
of the room, out of the house. It was a quiet country place, and so she
merely wrapped a shawl about her head and shoulders, and walked a few
paces up the road to a field path across which she struck--a field path
leading to the church-yard.
There were no gates and bolts and locks there--cutting off the dead from
the living. Dolly swung back the turnstile gate--it had often yielded to
her touch before--and entered the enclosure.
Leaning over the spot where her father lay, she--this girl who had never
known a mother--whispered her story.
Dolly's best friend was right, I fear, and the girl was a heathen; but
this visit to the dead had been a fancy of hers for years. Whenever she
was troubled, whenever she was glad, whenever she was in perplexity,
whenever a difficult problem had been solved--she carried the trouble,
the gladness, the perplexity, the solution to a mound where the grass
grew, which the daisies covered, and went away relieved.
A strange creature--destitute of beauty, not in the least like other
young ladies, with occasionally a biting tongue--for Mortomley to
choose.
Yet he chose her; that was the last act wanting to complete his ruin.
Had he married Leonora Trebasson, she would have made him successful.
Her grand nature, her imperial beauty, her strength of character, would
have impelled him to deeds of daring; she would have armed him for the
battle and insisted on his coming back victorious.
As matters stood, he wooed and won Dolly; he married her in the spring
succeeding his first visit to Dassell. When the woods were putting on
their earliest robings of delicate green he made her his wife, and Miss
Trebasson was principal bridesmaid, and Mr. Henry Werner best man.
So the play I have to recount commenced; how it ended, if you have
patience, you shall know.
CHAPTER V.
ABOUT MRS. MORTOMLEY AND OTHERS.
As has been already stated, Mr. Henry Werner assisted at the wedding in
the character of best man, and it was to this circumstance that he owed
the good fortune of subsequently marrying Miss Trebasson himself.
Had he met that young lady--as he did afterwards meet her, as a mere
guest at Homewood--in the unexalted position of Mrs. Mortomley's
friend, he would never have thought of asking her to be his wife; but
seeing her for the first time with the glamour of Dassell Court upon
her, and the glory of her relatives surrounding her, he thought it would
be a fine thing for him to win and wed such a woman even if she had not,
as he soon found out was the case, a penny of fortune.
More of these matches are made than people generally imagine. It is
astonishing to look around and behold the number of well-born women who
have married men, that at first sight one might imagine to have been as
far distant from the upper ten thousand as earth is from heaven; and it
is more astonishing still to find that these women have, one and
all--despite their prejudices, their pedigree, their pride, and their
delicate sensitiveness--married for money.
It would be useless to deny that Leonora Trebasson did this. She was not
a girl of whom such a step could have been predicated, and yet, looking
at the affair from a common-sense point of view, it was quite
certain--after the event--that if no one for whom she could feel
affection possessed of money came to woo, she would marry some person
for whom she did not care in the least.
It was necessary for her to marry; she knew it, she had always known it.
Her mother's small jointure died with her. Whenever her cousin, the heir
of Dassell Court, took a wife--and there was just as great a necessity
for him to find an heiress as for her to meet a man possessed of a
competence, at all events--she understood she and her mother would have
to leave the Court, and settle down in perhaps such another cottage as
that tenanted by Miss Gerace.
There had been a tenderness once between herself and Charley--the
Honourable Charles Trebasson--but the elders on both sides comprehending
how disastrous such a pauper union must prove, speedily nipped that
attachment in the bud, and the future Lord went out into the world to
look for his heiress, whilst Miss Trebasson stayed at Dassell to await
the husband fate might send her.
Of these and such like matters the mother and daughter never spoke
openly; but it was clearly understood between them, that curates without
private fortune, officers with no income beyond their pay, the younger
sons of neighbouring squires, were to be considered as utterly
ineligible for husbands.
Mrs. Trebasson herself having made a love-match and suffered for the
imprudence every day of her married life, she had educated Leonora to
keep her feelings well in hand and on no account to let affection run
away with her judgment.
When Archibald Mortomley went down that summer to fish, and recruit his
health, Mrs. Trebasson's hopes grew high that love and prudence might,
for once, be able to walk hand in hand together.
She liked Mortomley--he was the kind of man to whom women, especially
elderly women, take naturally with as true and keen an instinct as
children--and the thought passed through her mind that here, at last,
was a possible son-in-law, who would not merely make a good husband to
her daughter, but prove a friend to herself.
She pictured Homewood, and fancied she could end her days there happily.
In those days of uncertainty the future wore a fairer face for mother
and child than had ever been the case previously.
And then the vision departed--Dolly, whom Mrs. Trebasson had always
regarded as less than nobody, was preferred to Leonora. Without lifting
a finger to secure the prize--without the slightest effort or trouble on
her part--the stranger yielded himself captive. It was not Dolly's
fault, nevertheless Mrs. Trebasson regarded her with unchristian
feelings for the remainder of her life.
When, after a time, Henry Werner preferred his suit and was accepted,
Mrs. Trebasson never spoke of ending her days in his house; rather she
trusted she "should not have to leave Dassell Court until she was laid
in the family vault."
She had no fault to find with Mr. Werner. He was a much richer man than
Mortomley; he was possessed of more worldly sense than any Mortomley
ever boasted; he was ambitious and might rise to be a man of mark as
well as one of wealth; he spent money lavishly; he evidently intended to
maintain a handsome establishment; he was proud of the beauty and
stately grace of his _fiancée_; he bowed down before the Darshams and
worshipped them; he was of a suitable age and sufficiently
presentable--and yet--and yet--Mrs. Trebasson felt her daughter ought to
have married Archibald Mortomley, and then Dolly Gerace might have been
chosen by Henry Werner or some one like him.
Dolly had no love, however, for Henry Werner. So far as she was in the
habit of developing antipathies she felt one for him, and when she
learned he had proposed for Leonora and been accepted, she expressed her
opinions on the subject with a freedom which Mrs. Trebasson, at all
events, keenly resented.
"You must not be angry with poor Dolly, mamma," said her friend, tearing
Mrs. Mortomley's letter into very small fragments and then strewing them
on the fire. Mrs. Trebasson had desired the letter should be preserved
and deposited with other family treasures, to the end that Dolly might,
at some future day, be confronted with it and covered with confusion;
but her daughter would permit nothing of the kind.
"I do not know why you call her 'poor' Dolly," retorted Mrs. Trebasson,
"she has an excellent husband who gives her everything she wants and
never crosses her whims. She has plenty of money and a pretty house--she
who never had a sovereign in her pocket she could call her own; and now,
forsooth, she must give herself airs and presume to dictate to you."
"She does not dictate, mamma, she only expresses her opinions--she means
no harm."
"It would be harm in any one else. Why should you defend her when she is
so grossly impertinent?"
"I love Dolly," was the quiet answer. "She is often very foolish,
sometimes very trying, always disappointing and unsatisfying; but I
shall love her to the end."
When Miss Trebasson set her foot down upon such a sentence as the
foregoing, Mrs. Trebasson understood further expostulation was useless,
and so the offensive letter smouldered into ashes, and the bride elect
tried to forget its contents as she had too readily, perhaps, forgiven
them.
Fortunately for all concerned Dolly was unable to be present at her
friend's wedding, and Mortomley gladly enough made the state of his
wife's health a plea for excusing his own attendance.
Owing either to her own folly, or to some remoter cause with which this
story has no concern, Mrs. Mortomley was, at that period, having an
extremely hard fight for life. She had been happy with her child--that
Lenore of whom Mr. Kleinwort made mention--for a couple of days. Every
one was satisfied, husband, doctor, nurse; and then suddenly there came
a reaction, and Dolly hung between life and death, insensible to the
reality of either.
When Mrs. Werner, after her wedding tour, drove over and visited her
friend, she found outwardly a very different Dolly to that photographed
in her memory.
A pale weak woman, with hair cut short and softly curling round her
temples; a creature with transparent hands; dark eyes looking eagerly
and anxiously out of a white sunken face; the Dolly of old; but Dolly as
she might have looked had she gone to heaven and come back again to
earth; Dolly etherealised, and with a beauty of delicacy strange as it
was new--but Dolly unchanged mentally.
With a feeling of surprise and regret Mrs. Werner confessed to herself
that not even the fact of having set her feet in the valley of the
shadow, and being brought back into the sunshine, almost by a miracle,
had altered her friend.
The want there had been in Dolly before her marriage still remained
unsupplied.
"I wonder what would really change her," thought Mrs. Werner looking at
the poor wan cheeks, at the wasted figure, at the feeble woman too weak
to hold her child in her arms and coo soft tender nothings in its ear.
One day Mrs. Werner was to understand; but before that day arrived she
was destined to see many changes in Dolly.
When Mrs. Mortomley was sufficiently recovered to endure the fatigue of
travelling, the doctors recommended her to leave London and remain for
some time at a quiet watering-place on the East coast. Near that
particular town resided some relatives of the Trebassons, and to them
Mrs. Werner wrote, asking them to call on her friend.
That proved the turning point in Dolly's life, and she took, as
generally proves the case, the wrong road. With what anguish of spirit,
over what weary and stony paths, through what hedges set thick with
thorns, she retraced her steps, it is part of the purpose of this story
to show. As matters then stood, she simply went along winding lanes
bordered with flowers, festooned by roses, the sun shining over-head,
the birds singing all around; went on, unthinking of evil, happier than
she had ever been before; satisfied, because at last she had found her
vocation.
To enjoy herself--that was the object for which she was created. If she
did not say this in so many words, she felt it, felt it like a blessing
each night as she laid her head on her pillow--her poor foolish little
head which was not strong enough to bear the excitement of the new and
strange life suddenly opened before her.
She was young--she was recovering from dangerous illness; she was,
notwithstanding her feeble health, bright and gay and sun-shiny. She had
plenty of money, for her husband grudged her nothing his love could
supply; she was interesting and fresh, and new, and naïve, and she was
the dearest friend Leonora Trebasson ever had; what wonder therefore
that the people amongst whom she was thrown fussed over, and petted and
flattered, and humoured her, till they taught Dolly wherein her power
and her genius lay; so that when Mrs. Mortomley returned home she took
with her graces previously undeveloped, and left behind the virtue of
unconsciousness and the mantle of personal humility which had hitherto
clothed her.
Up to that time Dolly had not thought much of herself. Now she was as
one possessed of a beautiful face, who having seen her own reflection
for the first time can never forget the impression it produced upon her.
In her own country and amongst her own people, Dolly had been no
prophet. Rather she had been regarded as a nonentity, and the little
world of Dassell wondered at Mr. Mortomley's choice. Amongst strangers
Dolly had spread her wings and tried her strength. She felt in the
position of a usually silent man, considered by his friends rather
stupid than otherwise, who in a fresh place and under unwonted
circumstances opens his mouth and gives utterance to words he knew not
previously were his to command.
Yes, Dolly would never be humble again. She had lost that attraction,
and through all the years to follow, the years filled with happiness and
sorrow, exaltation and abasement, she never recovered it.
There are plants of a rare sweetness which die more surely from excess
of sunshine than from the severity of frost; common plants, yet that we
miss from the borders set round and about our homes with a heart-ache we
never feel when a more flaunting flower fails to make its appearance;
and just such a tender blossom, just such a healing herb, died that
summer in the garden of Dolly's nature.
And she only nineteen! Well-a-day, the plant had not perhaps had time to
strike its roots very deep, and the soil was certainly uncongenial. At
all events its place knew it no more, and something of sweetness and
softness departed with it.
But it was only a very keen and close observer who could have detected
all this; for other flowers sprang up and made a great show where that
had been--graces of manner, inflections of voice, thoughtfulness for
others, which if acquired seemed none the less charming on that account,
a desire to please and be pleased, which exercised itself on rich and
poor alike--these things and the sunshine of old which she still carried
with her, made Dolly seem a very exceptional woman in the bright years
which were still to come.
They made her so exceptional in fact, that her god-mother left her eight
thousand pounds. She would not have left her eight pence in the Dassell
days, but after spending a fortnight at Homewood she returned home,
altered her will which had provided for the establishment and
preservation of certain useless charities, and bequeathed eight thousand
pounds, her plate, and her jewellery, and her lace, to her beloved
god-daughter Dollabella, wife of Archibald Mortomley, Esquire, of
Homewood.
If people be travelling downhill the devil is always conveniently at
hand to give the vehicle they occupy a shove. That eight thousand pounds
proved a nice impetus to the Mortomleys, and a further legacy from a
distant relative which dropped in shortly after the previous bequest,
accelerated the descent.
When Dolly was married, no girl could have come to a husband with more
economical ideas than she possessed. Poverty and she had been friends
all her life; she had been accustomed to shortness of money, to frugal
fare, to the closest and strictest expenditure from her childhood
upwards, and had Mortomley been wise as he was amiable, she might have
regarded changing a five-pound note with a certain awe and hesitation to
the end of her days.
In money as in other matters, however, she speedily, in that different
atmosphere, lost her head. There can be no greater mistake than to
suppose, because a person has made both ends meet on, say a hundred and
fifty pounds a year, he will be able to manage comfortably on fifteen
hundred; on the contrary, he is nearly certain either to turn miser or
spendthrift. Dolly had not the faintest idea how to deal with a
comfortable income, and as her husband was as incompetent as herself, he
let her have pretty well her own way, which was a very bad way indeed.
Like his wife, perhaps, he thought those legacies represented a great
deal more money than was the case, since money only represents money
according to the way in which it chances to be expended.
It is not in the unclouded noontide, however, when fortune wears its
brightest smiles, that any one dreams of the wild night--the darkness of
despair to follow. It seems to me that the stories we hear of second
sight, of presentiments, of warnings, had a deeper origin than the usual
superstitious fantasies we associate with them. I think they were
originally intended as parables--as prophecies.
I believe the words of dark import were designed to convey to the
man--prosperous, victorious--safe in the security of his undiscovered
sins, the same lesson that Nathan's final sentence, "Thou art the Man,"
conveyed in _his_ hour of fancied safety to the heart of David. I
believe under the disguise of a thrice-told tale, those inscrutable
warnings of which we hear, arresting a man in the middle of a
questionable story or a peal of drunken laughter, were meant to be as
truly writings on the wall as ever silenced the merriment in
Belshazzar's halls--as certainly prophecies as that dream which
prefigured Nebuchadnezzar's madness.
And there was a time when portents, prophecies, and parables did
influence men for good, did turn them from the evil, did turn their
thoughts from earth to heaven, but that was in the days when people
having time to think--thought; when sometimes alone, separate from their
fellow-creatures, able to forget for a period the world and its
requirements, they were free to think of that which, spite of a learned
divine's dictum, is more wonderful and more bewildering than
eternity--the soul of man--the object of his creation, the use and
reason and purpose of his ever having been made in God's image to walk
erect upon the earth.
There were not wanting, in the very middle of their abundant prosperity,
signs and tokens sufficient to have assured the Mortomleys that to the
life, one at least of them was leading, there must come an end; but
neither husband nor wife had eyes to see presages which were patent to
the very ordinary minds of some of the business men with whom the owner
of Homewood had dealings. Notwithstanding his large connexion, his
monopoly of several lucrative branches of his trade, his own patrimony,
his wife's thousands, Mortomley was always short of money.
When once shortness of money becomes chronic, it is quite certain the
patient is suffering under a mortal disease. People who are clever in
commercial matters understand this fact thoroughly. Chronic shortness of
money has no more to do with unexpected reverses, with solvent poverty,
with any ailment curable by any means short of sharp and agonizing
treatment, than the heart throbs of a man destined some day to fall down
stone dead in the middle of a sentence, has a likeness to the pulsations
of fever, or the languid flow of life which betokens that the body is
temporarily exhausted.
Like all persons, however, who are sickening unto death, Mortomley was
the last to realize the fact.
He knew he was embarrassed, he knew why he was embarrassed, and he
thought he should have no difficulty in clearing himself of those
embarrassments.
And, in truth, had he been a wise man he might have done so. If, after
the death of his brother, which occurred about seven years subsequent to
his own marriage with Dolly, he had faced his position, there would have
been no story to tell about him or his estate either; but instead of
doing that, he drifted--there are hundreds and thousands in business, in
love, on sea or land, who when an emergency comes, always drift--and
always make ship-wreck of their fortunes and their lives in consequence.
For years he had helped his step-brother by going security for him, by
lending his name, by giving him money, by paying his debts. Somehow the
security had never involved pecuniary outlay. The loan of the name had
been renewed, passed into different channels, held over, manipulated in
fact by Mr. Richard Halling, until, in very truth, Mortomley, at best as
wretched a financier as he was an admirable inventor, knew no more than
his own daughter how accounts stood between him and the man who had been
his mother's favourite son.
One day, however, Mr. Richard Halling caught cold--a fortnight after, he
was dead. The debts he left behind him were considerable; his effects
small. To Mortomley he bequeathed the former, together with his son and
daughter. Of his effects the creditors took possession.
The event cut up Mr. Mortomley considerably. He was a man who, making no
fresh friends, felt the loss of relatives morbidly.
He returned from the funeral looking like one broken-hearted, and
brought back with him to Homewood his nephew and niece, who were to
remain there "until something definite could be settled about their
future."
To this arrangement Dolly made no objection. Dolly would not have
objected had her husband suggested inviting the noblemen composing the
House of Lords, or a regiment of soldiers, or a squad of workhouse boys.
People came and people went. It was all the same to Dolly.
CHAPTER VI.
MRS. MORTOMLEY IS ADVISED FOR HER GOOD.
"My dear, you never mean to tell me Richard Halling's son and daughter
are _here_ for an indefinite period." It was Mrs. Werner who,
dressed in a light summer muslin, which trailed behind her over
the grass, addressed this remark to Mrs. Mortomley attired in deep
mourning--barathea and crape trailing behind her likewise.
"Yes, they are," said Dolly indifferently. "For how long a time they are
to be here I have not the faintest idea. It makes no difference to me.
They go their way and I go mine. Antonia dresses herself to receive her
_fiancé_ and goes to stay with his sister. Rupert lounges about, plays
the piano, bribes Lenore to sit still like an angel. They do not
interfere with me and I do not interfere with them. There is nothing to
make a song about in the matter."
"Dolly," said her friend, "You will go your own way once too often."
Dolly opened her eyes as wide as she could, and asked, "Whose way would
you have me go."
"I would have you take a woman's place and assume a wife's
responsibilities."
"Good gracious!" and Dolly plumped down on the grass.
"Leonora, you utter dark sayings, be kind enough to explain your words
of wisdom in plain English."
There was a garden chair close at hand, and Mrs. Werner took advantage
of it to lessen the distance between herself and her friend. Being a
small, short, slight, lithe woman, Dolly could pose her person anywhere.
Being tall, stately, a lady "with a presence," Mrs. Werner would as soon
have thought of dropping on the grass as of climbing a tree.
"Do you remember Dassell?" she asked softly.
"Do I remember Dassell," repeated Dolly, and her brown eyes had a
far-away look in them as she answered, "You might have shaped your
singular question better, Nora; ask me if I shall ever forget it, and
then I shall answer you in the words of Moultrie's, 'Forget Thee,' which
really does go admirably to the air of Lucy Neal; I wish you would try
how well."
"Dolly do be serious for five minutes, if you can. Do you never long for
the old quiet life again."
"No I do not," answered Mrs. Mortomley promptly. "It was very well while
it lasted; good, nice, peaceful, what you will, but I could no more go
back to that than I could to a rattle and coral and bells. I have gone
forward--I have passed that stage. We must go forward, we must travel
from stage to stage till the end, whether we like the journey or not. My
journey has been very pleasant, so far."
"Has it been satisfactory?" asked Mrs. Werner.
"Has yours?" retorted Dolly; then, without waiting for a reply, went on:
"We have all our ideal life, and the real must differ from it. We have
our ideal husbands, as our husbands have had their ideal wives, and the
real are never like the ideal. Well, what does it matter? We would not
marry our ideals now if we could, so what is the use of thinking about
them. Has my life been satisfactory? you ask. Yes, I think so. I am not
very old now. I am five-and-twenty, Leonora, four years younger than
you, and yet I think if the whole thing were stopped this minute, if God
himself said to me now, you have had your share of happiness, you have
eaten all the feasts set out for you too fast, you must walk out of the
sunshine and make way for some one else, I could not grumble even
mentally; I have had my innings, Nora, let the future bring what it
will."
"You little heathen!"
"Perhaps you are right," said Dolly philosophically, "Perhaps it is
heathenish to love ease and pleasure and luxury, as I love them all;
but, Lenny, you know I never had high aims; I should detest working for
my living, or being a clergyman's wife and having to visit all sorts of
miserable people, or going about as a Sister of Charity, or setting-up
for a philanthropist, or a social reformer, '_Chacun à son goût_,' and
it certainly would not be my _goût_ to make myself less happy than I
am."
"But, Dolly, do not you think you owe a duty to your husband?"
"Of course I do, if you like to word your sentence in so disagreeable a
manner, but I am not aware that I fail in my duty towards him. You do
not think it necessary, I suppose, that I should make his shirts, or
darn his socks so long as there are people to be found glad to earn a
little money by drudging at such things. He has a comfortable home, and
everything in it that he wants so far as I know. I never nag him as I
hear many excellent wives nag their husbands. We never exchange an angry
word. If I want anything, he says 'Very well, get it.' If he wants
anything, I say 'Very well, do it.' Upon my word, Leonora, I cannot
imagine what it is you wish, unless that I should begin to make myself
disagreeable."
"That is exactly what I do wish," said Mrs. Werner. "Instead of treating
your husband like a spoiled child whose way is on no account to be
crossed, I would have you talk with him, reason, advise, consult."
"Good gracious!" interrupted Dolly "what is there to consult about; what
we shall have for dinner, or the shape of his next new hat? There, don't
be cross, Nora," she added, penitently as Mrs. Werner turned her head
away with an impatient gesture. "Tell me what it is you want me to do,
condescend to particulars, and don't generalize as is your habit, and I
will be as attentive as even you could desire."
"You ought never to have allowed those people to come here," said Mrs.
Werner emphatically.
"Archibald brought them home with him, and it would surely not have been
pretty manners for me to tell them to go back again."
"If you had ever been in any useful sense a helpmeet to Mr. Mortomley he
would not have thought of billeting them at Homewood. Any other woman
than you, Dolly, would have taught him prudence and carefulness and
wisdom. I wonder your long experience of the miseries of a small income
has resulted in nothing except perfect indifference to pecuniary
affairs."
"You mistake," answered Dolly; "it has taught me to feel unspeakably
thankful for a large income."
"Then why do you not take care of it?" asked her friend.
"I do not think I spend so much money as you," retorted Mrs. Mortomley.
"Perhaps not; but Mr. Werner's business is a much better one than your
husband's, and we spend the greater part of our income in trying to
increase his influence and extend his connexion."
"Oh!" said Dolly, and no form of words could do justice to the contempt
she managed to convey by her rendering of that simple ejaculation.
"It is quite true," persisted Mrs. Werner, answering her tone, not her
words.
"No doubt you think so," retorted Dolly, "but I do not. For instance,
how should you know whether Mr. Werner's business is a better one than
ours or not?"
It was not often Mrs. Mortomley claimed the colour manufactory for her
own, but when it was attacked she flung personal feeling into the
defence.
"Henry says so," was the convincing reply.
"Henry," with a momentary pause on the name intended to mark the word as
a quotation, "Henry may know what he makes himself, but I cannot
understand how he can tell what we make," and Dolly folded her hands
together in her lap and waited for the next aggressive move.
"I think, my dear, City men have ways and means of ascertaining these
things."
"Very likely," said Mrs. Mortomley, "for I think, my dear, City men are
usually a set of ill-natured gossiping old women."
"Do not be cross, Dolly," suggested her friend.
"I shall be cross if I choose, Leonora," said Mrs. Mortomley. "It is
enough to make any one cross. What right has Mr. Werner--for it is Mr.
Werner, I know, who has really spoken to me through your mouth--what
right has he, I repeat, to dictate to us how we shall spend our money.
If he likes to have horrid, tiresome, vulgar, prosy people at his
house--when he might get pleasant people--that is his affair. I do not
interfere with him--(only I will not go to your parties)--but he has no
sort of claim to dictate to us, and I will not bear it, Nora, I will
not."
"Dolly, dear, I was only speaking for your good--"
"I do not want good spoken to me," interrupted Mrs. Mortomley.
"And it is not for your good," went on Mrs. Werner calmly, "that you
should have Antonia and Rupert quartered here. If your husband had given
them say a couple of hundred pounds a year, they would have thought far
more of his generosity, and it would have cost you less than half what
it will do now, besides being wiser in every way."
"Had not you better lay that statement before him yourself?" asked
Dolly.
"If I were his wife I should unhesitatingly," was the reply.
"Well, I am his wife and I will not," declared Dolly. "If he likes to
have them in the house I cannot see why he should not, so long as they
do not make their proximity disagreeable to me; and I am not likely to
let them do that, am I, Nora?"
"So long as you have your house filled with company, and are out at
parties continually, perhaps not."
"Leonora," began Mrs. Mortomley, "you are the only friend I ever had in
my life. I am never likely to have another; but sooner than submit to
this eternal lecturing I would rather kiss and say good-bye now, than go
on to an open quarrel. Why can we not agree to differ; why cannot Mr.
Werner leave my husband to manage his own affairs, and you leave me to
order my way of life as seems most satisfactory to me? You think you are
doing great things for your husband because, at his desire, you invite
City notables and their wives to dinner, and perhaps you may be. All I
can say is, I should not be doing Archie any service by inviting them
here. I do not know whether rich City snobs and snobesses hate
_you_--perhaps not as there is a real live lord, not a Lord Mayor,
amongst your relatives--but they hate me. If I had never come in contact
with one of them it might have spared us some enemies; and I never mean
so long as I live to come in contact with another, except those who are
unavoidable, such as Antonia's elderly young man, for instance. There is
nothing I can do or wear or say right in their eyes. I feel this. I know
it. They detest me because I am different from them, and they do not
think, as I was not a lady of fortune or a lord's niece, I have any
right to be different. I do not know why oil should impute it as a sin
to water, that it is water and not oil, but these people who cannot mix
with me and with whom I cannot mix, do impute it to me as a sin that I
am myself and not them. There is the case in a nutshell, Mrs. Werner,
and I fail to see why you and I should quarrel over it."
"But, Dolly, do you think it prudent to have so many guests here in whom
it is impossible for your husband to take an interest?"
"If they do not interest they amuse him," was the reply. "And I think
anything which brings him out of his laboratory even for a few hours
must be advantageous to him mentally and physically. I do not believe,"
continued Dolly, warming with her subject, "in men living their lives in
the City, or else amongst colours and chemicals. When we come to compare
notes in our old age, Leonora, I wonder which faith, yours or mine, will
be found to have contained temporal salvation."
Mrs. Werner looked down on the slight figure, at the eager upturned
face, and then speaking her thoughts and that of many another person
aloud, said,
"I cannot fancy you old, Dolly. I think if you live to be elderly you
will be like the Countess of Desmond, who was killed by a fall from a
cherry-tree in her hundred and fortieth year."
Mrs. Mortomley's laugh rang out through the clear summer air.
"Do you know," she said, "the same thought has perplexed me; only it was
different. I can imagine myself old; a garrulous great-grandmother, good
to Lenore's grandchildren, a white-haired, lively, pleasant old lady,
fond of the society of young people; but, oh! Nora, I cannot picture
myself as middle-aged. I fail to imagine the ten years passage between
thirty-five and forty-five, between forty-five and fifty-five. If I
could go to sleep for twenty years like Rip van Winkle, and reappear
on the scene with grey hair and a nice lace cap, I should understand the
_rôle_ perfectly; but the middle passage, I tell you fairly, the
prospect of that fills me with dismay."
"And yet I also am only six years distant from the point which you
kindly mark as the entrance to middle age, and can contemplate the
prospect with equanimity."
"Queens never age," observed Dolly, "they only acquire dignity; ordinary
mortals get crooked and battered and wrinkled and--ugly. I am afraid I
shall get very ugly; grow fat, probably; fond of good living, and drink
porter for luncheon."
"How can you be so absurd?" exclaimed Mrs. Werner.
"Nora," said Dolly solemnly, "I have, little as you may think it, very
serious thoughts at times about my future. I would give really and truly
ten pounds--and you know if I had the income of a Rothschild I should
still be in want of that particular ten pounds--but I would, indeed,
give that amount if any one could tell me how I should spend the twenty
years stretching between thirty-five and fifty-five."
"I do not imagine the most daring gipsy could say the line of your life
would be cut short."
"Oh! no, I shall reach the white hair and the lace cap and the great
grandmother stage; but how? that is the question."
"My dear, leave these matters to God."
"I must, I suppose," said Dolly resignedly.
CHAPTER VII.
LENORE.
When Mrs. Mortomley stated that the rich men's wives--the
carriage-and-pair and moderate-single-brougham ladies, who had duly
called at Homewood and made acquaintance with the colour-maker's
bride--hated her, her statement was probably too sweeping.
Hatred is a big word, and conveys the idea of an overwhelming amount of
detestation, and I do not think really there was a woman amongst the
whole number included in Dolly's mental and verbal condemnation who was
not far too much occupied with the grandeur of her own surroundings--the
wish to eclipse her neighbours--the perfections of her children and the
shortcomings of her servants, to have time to cultivate any feeling
stronger than very sufficient dislike for the new mistress of Homewood.
So far as dislike went, Mrs. Mortomley was right. The ladies who called
upon her, and who, in their own way--which was not her way--were wiser,
better, happier women than Dolly, disliked her as nation dislikes
nation, as class dislikes class, as sect dislikes sect, as diverging
politicians dislike each other.
There was no blame attaching to any one in the matter. It could not be
said that anything Dolly did repulsed these worthy matrons. What God and
circumstances had made her was the cause of their antipathy.
A cat is a nice domestic animal in the eyes of many people, and a dog
has many qualities which endear him to an appreciative master; but we do
not blame either because they cannot agree--we say they are better
separate than together. Mrs. Mortomley and the worthy, kindly, prim,
straight-laced female pharisees who had been disposed to look amiably
upon her, were better apart.
Mrs. Werner, with her stately manner, with her--by them--unapproachable
heart, with her high-bred courtesy and innate knowledge of the world,
delighted them. Though in her presence they felt much the same sort of
restraint as a subject, no matter how well-born and delicately nurtured,
if unaccustomed to courts, might feel during an audience with her
Majesty, still they went away praising her gifts of person, her graces
of bearing, her suitable conversation.
She was all the mind of woman could desire, while Dolly was all that the
imagination of woman held undesirable.
But the precious gift of charity was amongst these ladies. They were
glad to smooth their ruffled feathers with a flattering platitude, "Poor
dear Mrs. Mortomley! Yes; so untiring a hostess! so hospitable! so
unselfish! but," this in a stage whisper, "odd, no doubt a little
flighty and uncertain, like all clever people!"
For these people, with a quicker intuition than obtained among the
residents of Great Dassell, had discovered Dolly was clever. Though her
light, hidden under a bushel, could have never been discovered save by
the eye of faith,--by them.
With men the case was different. With all the veins of their hearts, the
men whose good-will it seemed most desirable she should conciliate,
hated Dolly.
They began with liking her--there was the misfortune--that which their
wives, daughters, and sisters were sharp enough to detect at a glance,
they only found out by a slow and painful and degrading process of
disillusion.
Intuitively women understood that the moment after Mrs. Mortomley had in
her best manner bid the last of them "good night," coming herself to the
outer door to speak the words, she flung her arms over her head, thanked
Heaven they were gone, and delightedly mocked them for the benefit of
any appreciative guest belonging to the clique she affected; but men
could not be lectured, scolded, or inducted into a comprehension of Mrs.
Mortomley's hypocrisy till their vanity had been raised to a point from
whence the fall proved hurtful.
Men accustomed to society would have taken Dolly's little careful
attentions, her conventional flatteries, her recollection of special
likings, her remembrance of physical delicacy, and mental peculiarities
for just the trifle they were worth, the laudable desire of a woman to
make all her guests feel Homewood for the nonce their home, and the
natural and essentially feminine wish to induce each male of the
company--even if he were deaf, bald, prosy--to carry away a special and
particular remembrance of their hostess Mrs. Mortomley.
But this is a game which if all very well for a short period, palls
after frequent playing. Dolly grew sick of the liking she herself had
striven to excite.
She might have managed to continue to associate with the wives and
produce no stronger feeling of antipathy than she managed to excite
during the course of a first interview, but with husbands the case was
different. Let her try as she would, and at the suggestion of various
well meaning if short-sighted friends she did occasionally try, with all
her heart, to retain the good opinion that many worthy and wealthy
gentlemen had been kind enough in the early days of acquaintanceship to
express concerning her--her efforts proved utterly futile.
Mortomley had made a mistake, and he was the only person who failed to
understand the fact. His wife was quick enough to know she ought never
to have responded to the offers of intimacy and hospitality "people most
desirable for a man to stand well with" had been so unhappily prompt to
offer.
That which Lamb wrote of himself might, merely altering the pronoun,
have been said about Dolly:
"Those who did not like him hated him, and some who once liked him
afterwards became his bitterest haters."
I have said before that this was scarcely Mr. Mortomley's fault; but
most assuredly it was Mr. Mortomley's misfortune. The very dislike his
wife inspired gave a factitious importance to him and his affairs which
they certainly never possessed before.
The modest home his progenitors had, in the good old days when that
which belonged to everybody could be appropriated by any-body, made for
themselves on the outskirts of Epping Forest, became a centre of
interest to an extent the owner never could have conceived possible. He
did not trouble himself about the affairs of his neighbours. That they
should concern themselves about his, never entered his mind.
It may be safe enough, if not altogether pleasant, for a great
millionaire or a great lady to be subject to the curious gaze of the
multitude; but for a business man doing a moderate trade, or for a wife
in the middle rank of society, it proves a trying and often dangerous
ordeal.
All unconsciously Mortomley pursued his way, with many a scrutinizing
eye marking his progress. Not quite so unconsciously Mrs. Mortomley
pursued her way, making fresh enemies as she moved along.
Even her child grew to be a source of offence. "It's not her fault poor
little thing!" the mothers of pert, snub-nosed, inquisitive, precocious
snoblings would complacently remark, "properly brought up she might be
something very different."
Which, indeed, to say truth, was not desirable. Let the mother's
deficiencies be what they might, it would have been difficult, I think,
to suggest improvement in the child.
She had all the Mortomley regularity of features, light brown hair,
flecked with gold, that came likewise from her father's family; but her
eyes were the eyes of Dolly--only darker, larger, more liquid; and her
vivacity, her peals of delighted laughter, her happy ability to amuse
herself for hours together, came from some forgotten Gerace. There are
families in which few traditions are preserved, who have left no memory
behind them, but still lived long enough to bequeath the great gift of
contentment to some who were to come after.
Why then was Lenore accounted an offence? A sentence from "Imperfect
Sympathies," may, perhaps, explain this better than I can.
Elia says, "I have been trying all my life to like--" For the present
purpose it is not needful to extract more closely,--"And am obliged to
desist from the experiment in despair. They cannot like me, and in truth
I never knew one of that nation who attempted to do it."
In a foot note to the same essay, he puts his idea even more clearly:
"There may be individuals born and constellated so opposite to another
individual nature, that the same sphere cannot hold them. I have met
with my moral antipodes, and can believe the story of two persons
meeting (who never saw one another before), and instantly fighting."
Custom, association, family prejudices, the objects upon which the eye
has been in the habit of perpetually dwelling, these things go to make
the something, which in at once a wider and a narrower sense than that
artists and literati understand the word, is called taste.
I mean this: matters such as those indicated, educate for good or for
evil, the outward senses, and at the same time form an actual, if
unconscious, mental standard to which, as it may be high or low, the
estimate of those with whom we are thrown in contact is dwarfed or
raised.
If it were true, as is generally supposed, that maternity makes women
appreciative of, and tender-hearted to, the children of other women,
Lenore might have spanned the gulf which stretched between her mother
and the admirable matrons who contemned without understanding her; but
it is not true.
So long as infants are in arms, so long as their talk is unintelligible,
their limbs unavailable for active service, their idiosyncracies
undeveloped and their features unformed, they occupy a platform on which
mothers can meet on neutral ground and survey and discuss the beauties
of alien babies without a feeling of envy, or rivalry.
In that stage, even Lenore was viewed with kindly and appreciative eyes,
but not long subsequently to the period when she found the use of her
tongue which, of course, after the manner of her sex, she began to ply
in vague utterances before a boy would have thought of exercising it,
the little creature began to fall out of favour with those ladies who
looked upon Mrs. Mortomley as an error in creation.
And as Lenore passed as such as she do pass, rapidly from infancy to
childhood, she became more obnoxious to those who had a theory as to
what little girls and boys should be, founded it may be remarked on the
reality of what their own boys and girls had been, or were.
Dolly's child, though an only one, was no spoiled brat, always rubbing
up against its mother and asking for this, that and the other. Let Dolly
be as foolish in all else as she liked, she was wise as regarded Lenore.
When with lavish hand the father would have poured toys into her lap,
filled her little hands to overflowing, given her every pretty present
his eye lit upon, Dolly interfered. Her own childhood, bare of toys and
gifts, yet full of an exceeding happiness all self-made, was not, God
help her, hid so far away back in the mists of time, but she could
understand even in that land of plenty how to bring up the one child
given to her.
Lenore was a healthy little girl, healthily brought up. As a baby she
rolled on the grass or over the carpets, as a tiny little girl she could
make herself as happy stringing daisy chains and dandelion flowers, as
though each flower had been a pearl of price, and the threads with which
she linked them together spun out of gold; no lack of living companions
had she either; cats and dogs, kittens and puppies, composed part of the
retinue of that tiny queen.
But the queen and the retinue gave offence; as, being all natural, how
could they avoid doing?
Her name in the first instance stank in the nostrils of many worthy
women. "Named after some dreadful creature in Lord Byron's poems," they
remarked.
And if a person favourably inclined to Mrs. Mortomley explained he
believed the child was called after Mrs. Werner, and that secondly the
name was that of a heroine in one of Edgar Poe's poems, they answered,
"The name is suitable enough when given to a Lord's daughter, but Mr.
Mortomley is not a Lord, and I hope, Mr.----" this severely, "you do
not advocate having the heroines of French and German poets introduced
into English homes."
At which crass ignorance Mr.----bowed his head and confessed himself
conquered.
Whilst Lenore, unconscious of disapprobation and offence, grew and was
happy, a very impersonation of childish beauty and grace, and all the
time trouble was coming. A cloud no bigger than a man's hand hovered in
the horizon during the first happy years of her life, betokening a
hurricane which ultimately broke over Homewood, and swept it away from
her father's possession.
CHAPTER VIII.
A DEAD FAINT.
By reason of favourable winds and propitious currents Mrs. Mortomley had
almost sailed out of sight of those heavily-freighted merchant ships
which hold on one accustomed course too calmly to suit the vagaries of
such craft as she, when the death of Richard Halling and arrival of his
son and daughter at Homewood threw her once again amongst people who
were never likely to take kindly to or be desired by her.
Miss Halling was engaged to a middle-aged, or, indeed, elderly
gentleman, who stood high in the estimation of City folks, and who
himself had the highest opinion possible of individuals who, after
making fortunes on Change, in Mincing Lane, or any other typical London
Eldorado, did not turn their backs on the place where they gained their
money as if ashamed of it, but were content to associate with their
equals, and felt as much "honoured by an invitation to the Mansion House
as dukes and duchesses might to an invitation to the Court of St.
James's."
This was literally Mr. Dean's style of conversation, and the reader who
has been good enough to follow this story so far may comprehend the
favour it found with Mrs. Mortomley. He had a comfortable old-fashioned
house situated in the midst of good grounds. His gardens were well kept
up; but were a weariness, if not to him, at least to Dolly, by reason of
his being unable to find honest men to till the ground and his perpetual
lamentations concerning the shortcomings of those he did employ.
There was not a picture hanging on his walls, not a horse in his
stables, not a cow in his meadows, not a tree about his place that Dolly
did not hate with the detestation born of utter weariness and mental
exhaustion.
And in this case she had no choice but to suffer patiently. Antonia
Halling had not been at Homewood three months before Mrs. Mortomley
would have given her entire fortune to see her depart. Her friends
filled the house. She herself simply deposed Dolly; and Dolly, though no
saint, loved peace far too well to fight for the possession of a throne
she knew she must ultimately re-ascend.
When Mr. Dean married Antonia, but not before. Judge, therefore, how
anxious Dolly was to stand well with Mr. Dean; but she failed in her
endeavour.
Mr. Dean "could not see anything in her." "She was not his style." "Her
manners might please some people, apparently they did, but they did not
recommend themselves to him." "Of course the fortune she had left her
was one not be despised by a man in Mr. Mortomley's position, but he was
doubtful whether a managing, steady, careful, sensible woman might not
have proved a better-dowered wife than the one he had chosen."
For all of which remarks--that sooner or later reached her ears--Dolly
cared not a groat. Slowly, however, it dawned upon her by degrees she
never could recall--by a process as gradual as that which is effected
when night is changed to day--that Mr. Dean and men like him not merely
disapproved of her, which was nothing and to be expected, but looked
down upon her husband, which was much and astounding.
By imperceptible degrees she arrived at the knowledge of the fact. More
rapidly she grasped the reason, and came at the same time to a vague
comprehension of the cause why between her soul and the souls of Mr.
Dean and men and women like him, there lay an antagonism which should
for ever prevent their knitting into one.
All Christianity, all genius, all talent, all cleverness, all striving
after an ideal, all industry; all patience, all bearing and forbearing,
they held not as things in themselves intrinsically good, but as good
only so far as they were available for money getting.
Unless the sermon, or the book, or the invention, or the philanthropy or
the hard work, or the vague yet passionate yearnings after a higher life
which shy and self-contained natures possess and keep silence
concerning--produced money, and a large amount of it, too--they despised
those products of the human mind.
They had made their money or their fathers had done so before them, and
having made it they were to speak justly as they themselves could state
their case, willing to subscribe to charities and missions, and put down
their fifties, their hundreds, and their thousands at public meetings,
and even to send anonymous donations when they thought such a style of
giving might approve itself to God.
But of that swift untarrying generosity which gives and forgets itself
has given--of that Christian feeling which seeing a brother in need
relieves him and omits to debit the Almighty with a dole--Mr. Dean and
his fellows having no knowledge, they accounted Mortomley foolish
because he had not considered himself first and the man who had need
second.
The world had gone on and the Mortomleys had stood still; but though
they had not compassed their fair share of earthly prosperity, who shall
say they were not "nearer the Kingdom" for that very reason.
Those traits in Mortomley's character which had won for him golden
opinions from Mrs. Trebasson, and something more from her daughter, and
which unconsciously to herself knit Dolly's heart to her husband firmer
and closer as the years went by, would simply have been accounted
foolishness by those who had done so remarkably well for themselves and
their families. Their ideal of a good man was Henry Werner, who, upon a
small business inherited from his father, had built himself a great
commercial edifice; who was a "shrewd fellow" according to his admirers,
and who, if he ever lapsed into generosity, took care to be generous
wisely and profitably. No man would have caught that clever gentleman
dispensing alms with only his left hand for audience. If there was a
famine in the East, or a bad ship-wreck, or an hospital in want of
funds, or any other calamity on sufficiently large a scale to justify
the Lord Mayor in convening a public meeting on the subject, I warrant
that Mr. Werner would be present on the occasion and put down his name
for a sum calculated to prove that business with him was flourishing.
But all the private almsgiving which was done in his family was done by
Mrs. Werner, and to "remember the poor and forget not" she had to manage
her allowance with prudence. Unlike Dolly she had no private fortune;
unlike Dolly she could not go to her husband and say she wanted money to
give to that widow or this orphan, or some poor old man laid up with
cold and rheumatism and the burden of years superadded.
Mr. Werner was in the world's eyes a prosperous man, but although his
wife did her duty by, she did not grow to love, him. Mortomley, on the
contrary, was a man who did not prosper as he might have done; and Dolly
did not do her duty by him; but then she loved him, not perhaps as
Leonora Trebasson might have done, but still according to her different
nature wholly and increasingly.
Was there nothing to be put to the credit side of the last account, do
you suppose? nothing of which the world with its befrilled and
bejewelled wife failed to take notice.
Although, however, Mrs. Mortomley came to understand that in the opinion
of his acquaintances her husband had made nothing of the opportunities
offered him by fortune, she did not comprehend that what they thought
was literally true.
She did not know that in business as in everything else it is simply
impossible for a man to remain stationary. If he is not advancing he
must be retrograding, if he is not increasing his returns his profits
must be decreasing, if he is not extending his connexion he must be
losing it, if he is not keeping ahead of the times he must be lagging
behind the footsteps of progress.
Of all these matters Mrs. Mortomley was profoundly ignorant. From Mrs.
Werner she knew that Richard Halling's death had embarrassed her
husband; but she attached little importance to this information, first
because it came from a source she had always distrusted, and second
because she had only the vaguest idea of what embarrassment meant in
trade. Her notion, if she had any, was that her husband would have to
put off some payment--as she sometimes deferred paying her
milliner--that was all.
The first hint of things being at all "difficult" came to her in this
wise.
She had not been very well. Perhaps, Miss Halling's friends, or Mr.
Dean's instructive remarks on the subject of his business had proved
exhausting. Let that be as it may, one evening when a few guests were
present she had just walked into the drawing-room after dinner when,
without the slightest premonitory warning, she fell back in a dead
faint.
She soon recovered, however, and not without a certain spice of malice
laid her illness at the door of a scent which Miss Dean thought an
appropriate odour to carry about with her everywhere--musk.
"I never can remain in a room with musk," said Dolly defiantly, "without
feeling faint. Out of politeness to Miss Dean, I have latterly ceased
speaking of a weakness she considers mere affectation, but now I suppose
I may feel myself at liberty to do so."
And without further apology Dolly, still looking very white and
terrified, for that inexplicable transition from consciousness to
insensibility was a new sensation to her, walked through into the
conservatory followed by Mrs. Werner and another lady who chanced to be
present.
"I never could forgive the first Napoleon for divorcing Josephine until
I read that she liked--musk," said Dolly leaning against the open door
and looking out over the lawns, from which already came the sad perfume
of the fallen Autumn leaves. "Fancy a man whose family traditions were
interwoven with violets having that horrible odour greet him every time
he entered her apartments."
"But it never made you faint before," remarked Mrs. Werner, ignoring
Josephine's peculiarities, and reverting to her friend's sudden illness.
"I never had so large a dose at one time before," retorted Mrs.
Mortomley; "Miss Dean must have taken a bath of it I should think, this
afternoon."
"Hush! dear," expostulated Mrs. Werner, and she put her arm round
Dolly's waist and kissed her. Not even in the pages of old romance was
there ever anything truer, purer, more perfect, than the love Lord
Dassell's niece bore for Archibald Mortomley's wife.
Meantime, within the drawing-room, Miss Dean remarked to Antonia
penitently,
"I really did think it was--not affectation exactly you know, but her
way; I am so sorry."
Miss Halling raised her white shoulders with a significant gesture.
"She attributes it to the musk, but it was not really that, though I do
think, remember, many perfumes are disagreeable to her. For instance, I
have often known her order hyacinths, lily of the valley, lilac and
syringa to be taken out of a room where she wished to sit, and I
remember once when we were going to London together by train, her
getting into another compartment at Stratford, merely because a fat old
lady who was our fellow-traveller had thought fit to deluge her
handkerchief with patchouli. But it was not the musk which made her
faint. She takes too much out of herself. She is never still, she visits
and talks enough for a dozen people. She was at a wedding yesterday
morning, at a kettledrum in the afternoon, and then she came home and we
all dined with the Morrisons. No constitution could endure such
treatment," finished Miss Halling.
"The constitutions of fashionable ladies endure more than that," replied
Miss Dean, who might perhaps have liked Antonia better than was the case
had that young person not assumed the shape of a future sister-in-law.
"Yes," agreed the other, "but then they do nothing else, and
Dolly--excuse me for calling her by that ridiculous name, but we have
got into the habit of it--is never at rest from morning till night, she
rises early and she goes to bed late, and she is here there and
everywhere at all hours of the day."
This was true at any rate. It was precisely what a solemn old doctor
told her when by Mr. Mortomley's request she sent next day for "some one
to give her something."
He said she had better go out of town to some quiet place, and
accordingly Dolly accompanied by Lenore and her maid left Homewood
before the week was over.
It was when Mortomley was saying his last words of farewell that the
first drop of rain indicating foul weather to come, fell on her upturned
face.
"Dolly dear, you won't spend more money than you can help," said her
husband in the tone of a man who would just have liked about as well to
cut his throat as utter the words.
Dolly opened her eyes. It had been a childish habit of hers, and time
failed to cure her of it.
"Do I spend too much?" she asked.
"Not half enough, if we had it to spend," was the answer; then he added
hurriedly, "you are not vexed, you do not mind my speaking." At that
moment, 'Take your seats. Now, sir, if you please,' was shouted out, and
Dolly could only reply from her corner in the carriage,
"I will tell you when you come down," but there was not a shade on her
face. Her look was bright as ever, while she put her hand in his.
A whole chapter of assurances could not have lightened her husband's
heart one half so effectually.
Even if the words he had uttered bore no immediate fruit, what did it
matter? The ice was broken. Hereafter he could talk to her again and
explain his meaning more fully. All the way to the station he had felt
miserable. He had treated her always like a child, and now when he was
forced to tell her she must do without any fresh toy to which she took a
fancy, he imagined himself little better than a brute.
But Dolly had been told and was not vexed. Why, oh! why, had he not
spoken to her before!
By the sad sea waves Mrs. Mortomley thought those last words over and
over and over. She put two and two together. She estimated the amount
the interest her own modest fortune brought back to the common fund, and
then she reckoned as well as a woman who never professed to keep any
accounts could reckon, the total of their annual expenditure.
The result was that when her husband did come down and ask her in his
usual fashion, if she wanted money, (for indeed he was as much gratified
as surprised at having heard no mention of that one thing needful in her
short notes), she opened her purse and turned out its contents
gleefully.
"Haven't I been good?" she asked; and then went on to ask,
"Archie, have you really and truly been troubled about these things?"
"A little," he answered.
"Then why did you not tell me sooner?"
"Why should I trouble you about such matters, love?"
"Because till I married you, the want of money and I were close
acquaintances; perhaps that is the reason why I have always hated
considering money since, but I can consider for all that, and I intend
to make what you hold in your hand last until I get home again."
He put the notes and gold back into her purse slowly and thoughtfully,
folding each note by itself, with nervous absent carefulness, dropping
each sovereign singly into the little netted bag she kept, with her
childish love for pretty things, for them.
"My poor Dolly," he said at last. Was it a prevision? Knowledge _could
not_ have come to him then, and it must have been a prevision that made
the souls of both husband and wife grow for some reason, inexplicable to
themselves, sad and sorrowful for a moment.
As for Dolly, his three words had sent her eyes out seaward with tears
welling in them; but she was the first to recover herself.
"We will spoil our pleasure by talking of horrid money matters at the
sea side," she remarked, "but when I go home again you must give me a
full, true, and particular account of all that is troubling you. Do you
hear, sir."
"Yes; I hear," he answered, "and I can give you an account of what is
troubling me, at once. I have been foolish and I am suffering for my
folly. I did not consider the crop I was planting and I am among
stinging nettles in consequence; but we shall 'win through it yet,' to
quote an old saying, dear, 'we shall win through it yet,' please God."
"I wish I was at home again," she said.
"So do I love, but you must not think of returning till you are quite
strong and well again."
"No," she answered; "I think a sick wife is as bad in a house as a
scolding wife, or worse, because at least the latter cannot excite
anxiety, although it _was_ only Miss Dean made me ill."
Mortomley shook his head, "Never mind what made you ill, dear, so as you
only get well," he answered, and then, for the twilight had closed upon
them and the place was empty of visitors, they paced slowly back along
that walk by the sea hand clasped in hand.
If--nine years husband though he was--he had known more of Dolly,
possessed much insight into the windings and subtleties of any woman's
nature, it would have struck him as curious that after the confidence
given, his wife did not at once pack up her dresses and return to
Homewood. Happily for him he did not understand her, did not comprehend
the light words she had spoken apparently in jest were uttered in real
earnest.
"A sick wife,"--Dolly's imagination could present even to itself few
more terrible pictures than that, and she knew and some one else knew it
was needful for her to take practical measures to avert so fearful a
misfortune.
With the solemn old doctor Dolly had jested about her illness, had
laughed at advice, had grudgingly consented to take his medicine. It was
all very pleasant, very easy, very non-alarming. Even Mortomley was
satisfied when the old simpleton with a wise face assured him all his
wife wanted was a month at the sea-side and entire repose.
Dolly knew better. With no flourish of trumpets, saying nothing to
any-body, she went off quietly by herself to a celebrated physician and
told him about that little swoon.
He did not say much, indeed he did not say anything at first; then he
asked carelessly, almost indifferently, as was his fashion,
"And what do you suppose made you faint." Mrs. Mortomley did not answer,
she looked him straight in the face, as women sometimes can look, evil
and danger.
There ensued a dead silence, then she said,
"I came here expecting you to tell me the cause."
"I will answer your question hereafter, and write you a prescription
meantime," he answered confusedly.
"Neither is necessary at present," she replied, and laying down her
guinea left the room before he could recover from his astonishment.
"Now I should like to know the future of that woman," he said, "She
understands all about it as well as I do."
Perhaps she did, but then she possessed a marvellous buoyancy of temper,
and disbelief in the infallibility of doctors.
Fortunately for her, and somebody else.
CHAPTER IX.
THE FIRST MUTTERINGS OF THE STORM.
"DEAR AUNT,--(thus Mrs. Mortomley to Miss Gerace)--I have been a
little ill, and I am here by the doctor's advice for change of air
and scene; but I find that the moaning of the sea and the howling of
the wind depress me at night, and I think I should get well quicker
if I were at Dassell in my own old room.
"May I go to you--will you have me? Lenore is with me at present,
but I will not trouble you with her. She shall go back to her papa
at Homewood, if you say you have a corner still in your house for
your affectionate niece,
"DOLLY."
It is no exaggeration to say Mrs. Mortomley waited with a sickening
impatience for the answer which should justify her in starting forthwith
for Dassell. She believed she should get well there at once. She longed
to hear the solemn silence of the woods; to behold once more the
familiar landscape; to run over to the Court, and talk to Mrs.
Trebasson; in her matronhood, to stop for a moment and rehabilitate the
beauty of her girlish life--where it had once been a breathing presence.
Perhaps in the new notion of economy which possessed her, she desired to
be strengthened in her purpose by a glimpse of the land where she had
been content with so little of the world's wealth. Anyhow, let the
reason be what it might, Dolly wanted to go back home--as she mentally
phrased it--and waited anxiously for Miss Gerace's letter. It came: it
ran as follows:--
"MY DEAR NIECE,--I grieve to hear of your ill-health, although I
cannot marvel you have broken down at last; you know my opinions.
They may be old fashioned; but, at all events, they carry with them
the weight of an experience longer and wiser than my own.
"Health and undue excitement are incompatible. You left me blessed
with a strong constitution; you have ruined it. You were a robust
girl; you are a delicate woman. But I refrain, aware that my remarks
now must be as distasteful as my previous advice has proved.
"When you were married I told you my home, so long as I had one,
should always be yours. Though you have changed, I have not--and
therefore, if you really think this air and place likely to benefit
so _fashionable a lady as yourself_--pray come to me at once.
"Do not send your little girl back to Homewood, because you fear her
giving trouble to a fidgety old maid. If you remember, I was not in
my first youth when I took sole charge of you; and if I failed to
train you into a perfect character, I do not think the blame could
be laid altogether at my door. _But_ I will have none of your
fly-away, fine-lady servants, remember that. You and the child are
welcome; but there is no place in my small house for London maids or
nurses.
"I hope you will take what I have written in the spirit in which it
is meant, and
"Believe me,
"Your affectionate Aunt,
"M. GERACE."
To which epistle, Dolly, in an ecstasy of indignation, replied:--
"MY DEAR AUNT,--(from which commencement Miss Gerace anticipated
stormy weather to follow; 'my' as a prefix to 'dear,' having always
with Dolly been a declaration of hostility)--Of course I cannot tell
in what spirit your letter was written, but I should say in a very
bad one. At all events, I cannot go to Dassell now, and I regret
asking you to have me. I will not visit any one who gives me a
grudging welcome.
"I am not a fashionable lady. I am not a delicate woman. If being
'perfect' includes the power of saying disagreeable things to
unoffending people, I am very thankful to admit I am, spite of your
judicious training, an imperfect character. I suppose you have been
waiting your opportunity to say something unpleasant to me, because
Mrs. Edward Gerace spent a week with us in the Summer. I do not like
her or her husband; but when they offered to visit us, we could not
very well say there were plenty of Hotels within their means in
London.
"And when they did come, I admit we tried to make them comfortable,
which, no doubt assumes in your eyes the proportions of a sin. I
daresay Edward Gerace's father did not treat my father well; but
Edward is not responsible for that. For my part, I think in family
feuds there ought to be a statute of limitations, as I believe there
is for debt; nothing more fatiguing can be imagined, than to go on
acting the Montague and Capulet business through all the days of
one's life. If you had written to propose visiting me, I should have
returned a very different answer; but I suppose people cannot help
their dispositions. More is the pity!
"Your affectionate Niece,
"DOLLABELLA MORTOMLEY."
Which signature was adding insult to injury. 'Dollabella' had always
been an offence in the nostrils of Miss Gerace. 'Dolly' was absurd;
still, between the name and the owner, there was a certain fitness and
unity.
With 'Dollabella' there was none. The "Minerva Press" twang about it had
ever seemed intolerable to the practical spinster, nor did the fact of
Mrs. Mortomley having been left the best part of her Godmother's money,
tend to reconcile Miss Gerace to the polysyllabic appellation, all of
which Mrs. Mortomley knew, and for that very reason she signed it in
full.
"There," she thought to herself as she directed, sealed, and stamped the
letter. "I hope Miss Gerace will like that."
For after the manner of her sex, she was petulant and little in
unimportant matters.
It is the most purely womanly women who are given to similar outbursts.
Mrs. Werner could never so far have forgotten her own dignity as to
indite such an epistle; but then, on the other hand, neither could she
have repented for having done so, as Dolly did.
Barely was the letter posted before that repentance began. First, Mrs.
Mortomley, her anger not yet assuaged, mentally pictured her aunt's
horror and astonishment when she read. She saw the postman come up to
the door. She saw the prim servant receive the letter. She saw her carry
it into the breakfast-parlour. She saw Miss Gerace put on her
spectacles. And at that point Dolly's anger began to ebb, and her regret
to flow; after all, her aunt's innings out of life had been few and her
own many; and she had her opinions just as Dolly had hers; and she had
taken her nephew's child home when he died, and shared her small income
with her, and done her duty faithfully, if not always pleasantly, and by
way of return, Mrs. Mortomley had penned that letter, which by this time
she herself styled nasty and detestable.
She could not send the antidote with the bane, for the early post had
already gone out, taking her letter with it. But she could write by the
night mail, and Miss Gerace would then receive her apology on the
afternoon of the same day, which witnessed her offence.
One of the servants from the Court always went over for the letter bag
twice a day, and it was understood Miss Gerace's correspondence went and
came at the same time.
She need not therefore sleep upon the first letter; Dolly decided she
would not sleep either till the second was written.
"DEAR AUNT,--(so began number two of the same date)--I am so sorry
for the ill-tempered things I said this morning. I did not really
mean one of them. Your letter made me angry for the minute, and I
wrote without stopping to think, indeed I did.
"Dear auntie, forgive me. When I remember all the years during which
you stinted yourself to provide for me, I feel a monster of
ingratitude. I will go to you now if you will have me, and take
Lenore; but _no servant_; and Archie shall fetch me back when I have
made my peace, and you are quite tired of me. I love you better than
a thousand Edward Geraces, and their wives into the bargain, and
their is not a stone in your house, or a plant in your garden that
is not dear to me.
"Your ever affectionate,
"DOLLY."
After which came a postscript.
"A message from home has just arrived. My husband is ill, so I
cannot go to Dassell. Direct to Homewood."
Which Miss Gerace did.
With a good grace she said she was sorry to hear of Mr. Mortomley's
illness and trusted he would soon be restored to health. With a bad
grace she sent Mrs. Mortomley her forgiveness, and regretted Dolly's
tendency to ill-temper was the besetting sin even her course of
education had been unable to rectify. The one thing--she added with her
own peculiar grace--she lamented to find was so strong a taint of
vulgarity in her brother's child. The letter for which she so properly
apologized would not have disgraced a Billingsgate fishwife. For that
trait in her character she must have gone back to some alien blood.
"Poor aunt!" remarked Dolly, putting the letter aside, "she will never
be good friends with me again. If she knew how ill Archie is, I do not
think she would be so hard upon me."
Certainly Mr. Mortomley was very ill. For no light cause would Antonia
Halling have summoned Mrs. Mortomley back as she did, but when she sent
her telegram she really was afraid of the owner of Homewood dying in her
hands.
To Dolly sickness was nothing new. As a clergyman's daughter she had
been with it more or less all her life; less certainly since her
marriage than before that event.
But one strong experience is perhaps enough. She had helped nurse her
father; nay, she had tended him more unweariedly than any one else, and
by reason of those vigils knew how to watch by the sick.
Beside her husband she took her post, and through the valley of the
shadow brought him back to health, or at least what the doctors were
pleased to call health.
They did not understand, though perhaps Dolly might instinctively, that
the man who has once sickened through mental distress will never really
even begin to recover until the mental pressure be removed.
Hot and fast Richard Halling's bills were pouring in. Mr. Mortomley was
beginning fully to understand what "lending a name" means. Unfortunately
he believed he could, as he said to Dolly, "win through"; and in that
belief he was encouraged by the holders of every bill which had his name
on the back of it.
"We will renew, of course," they said, and Mortomley instead of facing
the question put it off; just as you would do, reader, were you
similarly situated and had a great deal to lose.
So Mr. Mortomley, according to the doctors, was once again strong and
able to attend to business. Nevertheless, his wife noticed he stayed a
good deal in his laboratory after his attack, whilst his nephew went to
town to look after affairs there. Indeed, the man's nerves were so
shaken, his organization being delicate, that Dolly felt very glad to
see any one, even Rupert, take his place in the City.
The doctors had their own way at last, and Homewood was quiet. In the
face of her husband's illness, Dolly could not prove a gadabout. With
unusual embarrassments surrounding him, Mortomley could not entertain as
his fathers had done before he was thought of.
Nevertheless, there were occasional dinner-parties, and at one of these
Dolly first saw Mr. Forde.
In deference to a suggestion of Mr. Werner's, who now interested and
busied himself not a little with the concerns of his old friend, he had
been asked to the house.
When he came no one knew exactly what to do with him. A stranger amongst
strange people is rarely to be envied his lot; but perhaps the position
of strange people when a stranger ventures amongst them is more
unenviable still.
Mrs. Mortomley felt their modest establishment must seem poor in the
eyes of a man who talked so glibly of the fine seats possessed by this
alderman and that retired tallow-chandler. Although affably anxious to
descend to the position, Mr. Forde lost no opportunity of letting the
Mortomleys know Homewood seemed a mere doll's-house in comparison with
the mansions to which he was daily invited. He and Mr. Werner had the
bulk of the talk to themselves, and it related principally to City
incidents and City men, to the fortune left by this merchant and the
_fiasco_ made by his neighbour, with other pleasing incidents of a like
nature interspersed with political observations that made Dolly yawn
frightfully behind her handkerchief.
Notwithstanding which pretences of under-rating Homewood and its
occupiers, Mr. Forde was impressed by both. The unities of decent
society always do impress men who have lived during the whole of their
earlier years on the edge of society or below it.
After that first visit Mr. Forde came frequently to Homewood, but of
this Mrs. Mortomley took little notice until one day when having, for
reasons of her own, suggested putting off his proposed visit, Rupert
remarked,
"I am afraid that would scarcely be a safe move. At any inconvenience to
ourselves, we must be civil to him."
"Why?" asked Dolly.
"Well; for various reasons. If a man gets into Queer Street, he can
scarcely afford to quarrel with the people who live there."
"Do you mean that Archie is in Queer Street?" Mrs. Mortomley inquired.
"In something very like it, at any rate," was the reply.
"How does it happen?"
"I cannot tell," he answered in all sincerity.
"When will he be out of it?"
"That is what puzzles me. We ought to have been out of it long ago."
Misfortune, like age, comes differently upon different people. There are
those whose hair turns white in a single night, and those again to whom
grey hairs come almost one by one, and in similar fashion ruin
overwhelms some in an hour, whilst others are reduced to beggary by a
slow and almost imperceptible process, the beginning and progress of
which it seems impossible to trace.
The end every one understands, the commencement is usually
unintelligible to those who ought to know most about it.
In the February of that year in which this story opens, came the first
thunderclap heralding very bad weather to come.
For reasons best known to himself, Rupert had neglected to meet a
somewhat important acceptance and had failed to take sufficient notice
of a writ of which he, in Mr. Mortomley's absence, accepted service. The
option had lain with the holder of proceeding against his debtor in
Essex, or The City, and he selected the former as being likely to give
the greatest annoyance.
To do him justice, Rupert was only vaguely acquainted with the nature of
writs, and the spectacle of a sheriff's officer appearing at Homewood,
proved as great a shock to him as it did to Miss Halling and Mortomley
and Dolly and the servants.
They were all so perfectly new to business of the kind that they did not
even try to keep the matter secret. From the cook to the page boy, from
the lady's-maid to the groom, from the foreman manager in the works to
the youngest lad employed about the place, every creature knew that a
"man in possession" had taken up his residence in Homewood.
It was then the principal of Dolly's fortune proved of service. Within
twenty-four hours the money was raised, the debt paid, and the man
despatched to herald ruin to some other family, but the evil was
wrought. Mortomley's credit had gone; and not all the sops thrown to
fate out of Mrs. Mortomley's _dot_ could pacify the wolves which now
came howling round that doomed estate.
For a time, however, Mrs. Mortomley entertained no fear that their ship
was sinking.
So far as she saw, beyond a certain gravity in her husband's face, a
certain discontent in that of Miss Halling, and a retrenchment which she
accepted as just and necessary in her own expenditure, there was no
cause to anticipate danger. Things went on much as usual, the waters
over which they floated seemed calm enough, and the winds fair and
favourable.
She did not know, neither did her husband, neither did Rupert, that
there was a leak in their vessel which it would have required very
different hands from theirs to stop.
Had Mr. Werner stood in Mr. Mortomley's shoes, he could have done it,
and would have made matters remarkably unpleasant for any one who tried
to prevent his doing so.
When the evil day came, Mr. Werner said Mortomley was a fool, with an
extremely strong adjective prefixed to this flattering appellation; but
he did not call him a rogue.
Neither did any-body else for the matter of that, except Mr. Forde.
Which was of the less consequence, because as a wag remarked, speaking
of his violent vituperations against the colour-maker,
"Poor Forde's experience has as yet been too one-sided to enable him to
distinguish good from evil."
Indeed, after all, when a man is down it makes very little difference
what the world thinks of him, unless in this way: the world always helps
a rogue, because it has a justifiable faith in his helping himself,
whereas a fool or a fool's equivalent in the opinion of society--an
honest man--though weak may, if once thrown, lie for ever like a sheep
on the broad of his back, unless some Samaritan help him to his feet
again.
And Samaritans are scarce now-a-days; and when they do appear are
generally as scarce of pennies as rich people are of inclination to give
them.
One evening in the early summer time, Dolly, putting aside the muslin
curtains which draped one of the French windows leading on the lawn,
entered that cool and pleasant drawing-room of which, under her
_régime_, many a man and woman had carried away happy memories.
As she stood with the light muslin parted above her head, she saw that
her husband and Rupert sat with chairs close together, the latter
talking earnestly; and she would have retreated by the way she came, for
Dolly never cared to intrude on the _tête-à-tête_ of any two persons,
but Mortomley said, "You had better stay, dear. It is only right you
should hear what we are saying."
"What is the matter?" asked Dolly, stepping up to the pair and looking
from one to the other with a quick apprehension of something being
wrong.
Her husband rose, and walking to the hearth, stood leaning with his back
against the mantel-piece. Rupert rose likewise and looked out of the
window nearest to where he stood; his hands plunged deep in his pockets,
his dress dusty as when he returned from town, his hair, worn long as
was the artist fashion he affected; looking rough and unkempt, and an
expression on his face no one probably had ever seen there before, not
even when Mr. Gideon told him he must make a slight inventory of a few
articles and leave behind him the first creature, gentle or simple, to
whom the owners of Homewood grudged extending hospitality.
How the room, the flowers, the soft evening light, the figures of the
two men were photographed into her mind at that moment Mrs. Mortomley
never knew until the months had come and the months had gone, and
Homewood, its shady walks, its smooth lawns, its banks of flowers, its
wealth of foliage, its modest luxury of appointment, its utter comfort
and sweet simplicity, were all part and parcel of a past which could
return--ah! nevermore.
"What is the matter?" she repeated. "What has gone wrong?"
"I do not know that anything has gone wrong," Rupert answered. "It may
be, for aught I can tell, the beginning of greater peace than we have
had for some time past. I have been telling Archie I think he ought to
stop."
"I have thought so often lately," said Mortomley with quiet resignation.
"Stop what--stop when!" his wife interrogated; then she suddenly paused,
adding the instant after, "Do you mean fail?"
"Certainly not," replied the younger man. "I merely mean that he should
go into liquidation."
"What on earth is liquidation?"
"It is nothing very dreadful," said Mr. Halling reassuringly. "Nothing,
of course, will be changed here--the works will go on as usual--you can
live just as we have been doing lately; we could not expect to
entertain, of course, until every one to whom anything is owing is paid
off, and then we can do what we like. That is about the English of it,
is it not?" he said turning to Mr. Mortomley, who replied with a set
face,
"I do not know. I have never been in liquidation."
"But you know plenty of fellows who have."
"I cannot say that I do," was the answer; and he turned a little aside
and began toying absently with the articles on the chimney-piece.
"At all events, you see quite clearly we cannot go on as we have been
doing," persisted Rupert.
"I wonder we have been able to go on so long--"
"It would not be such a hopeless fight if we were not daily and hourly
getting involved more deeply with the General Chemical Company."
"Yes; that is the worst feature of the position; and I confess I cannot
understand how it happens."
"But I have explained the whole thing to you fully," said Rupert,
looking angry and excited.
"Yes, according to your idea; but I tell you such a system is impossible
in any respectable business."
"Do you consider the General Chemical Company a respectable concern?"
"I have always supposed so; but whether respectable or not, the errors,
to use a mild term, you speak of are simply impossible in an
establishment where there are clerks employed, and checks kept, and
experienced book-keepers always engaged on the accounts."
Having made which observation, in a much more decided manner than it was
his custom usually to employ, Mr. Mortomley walked out of the room,
leaving his wife and Rupert alone together.
Rupert, looking after him, shrugged his shoulders, and thrusting his
hands deeper into his pockets and planting one shoulder well up against
the window shutter, remarked to Dolly,
"He won't believe those people have been cheating him right and left,
and I don't know that any good purpose would be served if I could make
him believe it. Because, owing to my stupidity, we never can prove the
fact. If you and Lenore are beggared," he added, with a poor attempt at
mirth, "I give you full leave to blame me for the whole of it."
"Do not be absurd," answered Mrs. Mortomley uneasily. "Archie is quite
right, of course. People could not cheat, and if they could they would
not be so wicked."
Rupert laughed outright. "Would they not, Mrs. Mortomley? Much you know
of the world and its ways--I say and shall say to the end of my life,
that the General Chemical Company has, by a system of splendid
book-keeping, been robbing us of I should be afraid to say how much; and
I say further, no system of book-keeping we could devise would be of the
slightest use in preventing it. But it might have been stopped ere this
by our stoppage. Nothing else will do it now. Remember what I say to
you, Dolly; and they are not my words alone--they are the words of men
who know far more about business and City matters than I ever want to
do. If Archie is to do any good for himself and you and Lenore" (Rupert
kept his own name and that of his sister discreetly out of sight) "he
must stop now. If he speaks to you about it, don't dissuade him, Dolly;
for God's sake don't try to induce him to put off the evil day any
longer."
Vehemence of manner or expression was unusual at Homewood, and, for a
moment, Rupert's words and looks startled Mrs. Mortomley. After that
moment she answered,
"I shall not dissuade or persuade him, for I know nothing really about
the matter."
"Do you mind coming with me into the works?" asked Rupert in reply.
"No." Dolly said she would go with him if he wished; and accordingly the
pair went out together on to the lawn and across the flower-garden and
so to the laurel-walk which people averred was the crowning beauty of
Homewood. Who had first planted it no one knew, but tradition ascribed
that virtuous deed to a far-away dignitary of the Church of Rome, who
had considered Homewood, then a mere cottage and lands on the borders of
the forest, a sort of hermitage to which, from the din of party and the
clamour of men's tongues, he might retire to pray and meditate in peace.
And this view is confirmed by the fact, that in another country I
remember well seeing in grounds belonging to an old monastic institution
similar arcades of greenery, thick hedges to right and left, and
overarching branches inter-twining and overlapping, till the light of
day was shut out and the paths made dark as night.
At Homewood this inconvenience had been obviated by cutting at intervals
openings in one of the hedges in the form of pointed arches; and the
effect produced was consequently somewhat akin to that left on the mind
by walking along some cloister in an ancient cathedral.
Quiet as any monastic pavement was the laurel-path at Homewood; and the
frequent glimpses of emerald green and bright-hued flowers afforded by
the openings mentioned, in no way detracted from the solemn feeling
produced by the stillness of that remarkable passage.
Of late many a bitter thought and wearying anxiety had kept Mortomley
company as he paced along it to the postern gate giving admission to his
works; and this, Dolly's quick instinct enabled her to realise as she
tried with her short uneven steps to keep up with Rupert's long careless
stride.
"Oh! I wish I had known sooner," she said mentally; "I wish--I wish--I
wish I had."
"It is a sweet place, Dolly," remarked Rupert, who possessed a keen
sense of the beautiful in nature, women, and children, though his
artistic power of reproducing beauty on canvas was meagre.
"Ay," she answered with a little gasp, "that it is."
"We must not risk losing it."
She did not answer, but she touched his arm with her hand entreatingly.
Looking down at the face upraised to his, he saw her eyes were full of
tears. Lose Homewood! why it had never looked fairer than it did at that
moment, with the evening sun shining athwart its lawns. Lose Homewood!
where she had been so happy; it would be worse than death.
"Oh! Rupert," she cried at last, and she clung to him entreatingly, "you
did not mean it--say you did not."
"I declare Dolly, you are prettier than Lenore," he answered
irrelevantly, as it may seem; but the fact was, all at once, in that
moment of mental anguish, of pathetic helplessness, he saw something in
the woman's face he had never beheld there before--something grief had
developed already, a grace and a beauty hitherto concealed.
"Dolly," he went on vehemently, "if I can keep Homewood for you I will;
but you must help, you must not let Archie turn back from the battle. It
is true, dear, I do not go on my own judgment; if he is not firm now, we
shall all be lost!"
As he spoke he was unlocking the postern door, which admitted them to a
small court which, in its turn, gave ingress to the foreman's office as
well as to the more private offices of the establishment, Mr.
Mortomley's own room and laboratory included.
When they entered the court, Hankins, the foreman, was fastening his
door and came to meet them, swinging a great bunch of keys on his
fingers in a _debonnaire_ manner the while.
Out of respect or, shall we say, gallantry he raised his hat to Mrs.
Mortomley. Rupert's "Good evening," he answered with a nod. Mr. Hankins
was a working-man of the very advanced type, who thought much of
himself, and but little consequently of any one else. He was a clever
fellow, as all Mortomley's picked men were, and fairly faithful and
honest as the world goes now-a-days, which is not perhaps far.
But he understood his business and he did his work, and he saw that
others did it also. Now that the day's labour was over, he had been, as
he informed his visitors, "just taking as usual a look round to see
everything was right."
"Mr. Lang gone?" asked Rupert.
"Yes, sir, not five minutes ago;" and Mr. Hankins swung his bunch of
keys again as a polite intimation to Mr. Halling that it was not part of
his contract to stand talking to him all night.
"You got some more barytes in to-day," remarked Rupert, wilfully
disregarding the hint.
"You can call it barytes, of course, sir, if you like," was the reply,
"I call it stuff."
"It is not good then?"
"Good! Now I should just wish you to see it. Naturally, not having been
brought up to the business, you cannot be supposed to know all the ins
and outs of our trade, but a child might tell the inferiority of this.
If not detaining you, sir, I really should feel obliged by your stepping
this way," and with an air he flung open the door of his office, and
pointing to a powder of a whity-brown colour lying on the desk, asked
ironically,
"That is a first-rate article, ain't it, sir?"
Rupert shook his head; and Mr. Hankins thus encouraged, pressed his
point.
"Here, ma'am," he said, taking up an other parcel and opening it, "is
something like. Look at the difference. I declare, upon my conscience,"
continued Mr. Hankins, turning to Rupert and forgetting in his energy
the presence of his employer's wife, "it is enough to drive a man out of
his mind to be obliged to sign a receipt-note for such rubbish. I often
think things here might make people believe that old story the parsons
tell about the Israelites being ordered to make bricks without straw.
After what I have seen this last eighteen months I fancy I could almost
swallow anything," finished Mr. Hankins with that advanced and almost
unconscious scepticism which is so curious an adjunct to skilled labour
at this period of the world's history.
Rupert looked uneasily at his companion. At any other time she might
have felt inclined to enter into a controversy with Mr. Hankins on the
religious question, but at that moment her heart was so full of her
husband's position that the orthodoxy or non-orthodoxy of any person's
opinions seemed quite a secondary matter in her eyes.
"Surely," she began, "Mr. Mortomley is the only person to say here what
is good or bad. If he approves of this," and she pointed to the barytes,
"it is not fitting any one else should disapprove."
"_Mr. Mortomley won't look at it, ma'am_," was the ominous answer. "If I
go to him, he says, 'I am busy now,' or, 'you must do the best you can
with it,' or, 'I will write and complain;' and all the while as fine a
business as there is in the Home counties is going to the devil. I beg
your pardon, ma'am, but I can't help saying it. You heard, sir, I
suppose, that Traceys had sent back all the ten tons of Brunswick
green," (Rupert nodded) "and if things go on much longer as they have
been going, we shall have everything sent back. If it wasn't for the
respect I have to Mr. Mortomley, I would not stay here an hour; and as
it is, I do not know as how I can bear it much longer."
Which last was intended as a side blow to be carried by Mrs. Mortomley
to her husband. Mr. Hankins folded up his samples, took his keys, said,
"Evening, sir," "Good evening, ma'am," touched the brim of his hat, and
sauntered leisurely across the yard leaving his visitors alone.
"I wanted you to hear, Dolly," said Rupert, "but I fear in my wisdom I
have been a brute."
She did not answer, but she walked back steadily to the house. She
dressed for dinner; and when that meal was served, they all sat down as
people might the evening before an execution.
So far this narrative has been preliminary and introductory. In the next
chapter the real story of Mortomley's Estate begins.
CHAPTER X.
MR. FORDE TAKES HIS HAT.
The stores, warehouses, and offices of the General Chemical Company
(Limited), are situated, as all City folks know, on St. Vedast Wharf,
Vedast Lane, Upper Thames Street.
Landing stages and railway bridges, which have altered the aspect of so
many other places of business, have left St. Vedast Wharf untouched. And
the curious inquirer will find it still presenting precisely the same
appearance as it did in those early summer days of a few years back when
it was still optional with Mortomley to do what he liked under certain
conditions with his own estate.
Excepting Lower Thames Street, there is not probably in the city a
thoroughfare so utterly given over to business and business doing, as
Thames Street above bridge.
What Hyde Park is for carriages, it is for vans and carts. If timid
people elect to walk along it, they must do so crossing from side to
side, under the heads of great cart-horses to avoid the bales of goods,
the reams of paper, the huge barrels, the heavy castings that come
swinging down from the loop-holes of third and fourth stories,
indifferent as to whether any-body or nobody is passing beneath.
All the lanes leading from it to the river are narrow and dingy and
sunless, and Vedast Lane seems probably narrower and dirtier than most
of its fellows, because many carts and waggons pass down it on their way
to various huge warehouses, occupied by persons following different
trades.
During all the working hours of the day, shouting and swearing and the
lumbering of vans, and the trampling and slipping about of horses, cease
not for one single instant; and it is notorious that the traffic of the
whole lane was once stopped for four hours by a jibbing horse, who would
probably have remained there until now, had a passer-by not suggested
throwing a truss of straw under him and then setting fire to it, which
produced such celerity of movement that the driver found himself in
Bridge Street, having threaded the vehicles crowded together by the way,
without let or hindrance, before he had sufficiently recovered his
presence of mind to search about for his whip.
Arrived, however, at St. Vedast Wharf, the scene changes as if by magic.
One moment the foot-passenger is in the gloom and dirt and riot of a
narrow City lane, the next all clamour and noise seem left behind.
Before him lies the Silent Highway, with its steam-boats, barges, and
tiny skiffs threading their way in and out amongst the heavier craft.
Facing the river the imposing-looking warehouses of the General Chemical
Company rear themselves story on the top of story. To the left lies
London Bridge, the masts of the larger vessels showing at uncertain
intervals between the stream of vehicles flowing perpetually over it,
while to his right the old bridges and the new confuse themselves before
him, so that he has to pause for a moment before answering the eager
inquiries of a country cousin.
To look at the wharf, to look at the warehouses, to enter the offices,
most people a few years back would have said,
"Here is a solvent Company. It must be paying large dividends to its
shareholders."
Whereas the true history and state of the General Chemical Company
chanced to be this:
When in the palmy days of "promoting," long before Black Friday was
thought of, while the Corner House was a power in the City, the old and
long established business (_vide_ prospectus of the period) of Henrison
Brothers was merged into the General Chemical Company, Limited, with a
tribe of directors, manager, sub-manager, secretary, and
shareholders,--probably no one, excepting Mr. Henrison and his brothers
and the gentlemen who successfully floated the venture, was aware that
the old and highly respectable house was as near bankruptcy as any house
could well be.
Such, however, was the case, but a considerable time elapsed before the
directors and the shareholders found that out.
Mr. Henrison "consented" to remain as manager for one year after he and
his brothers put the purchase-money in their pockets, (the shares they
sold at discreet intervals), and it is unnecessary to say _he_ did not
enlighten the Company he represented about that part of the business.
Neither did the sub-manager, who hoped to succeed Mr. Henrison, and who
did succeed him. Neither did the secretary, whose ideas of the duties
connected with his office were exceedingly simple.
To do as little work as possible, and to draw as much money as he could
get, was the easy programme he sketched out for his own guidance; and
that the programme pleased his audience may be gathered from the fact,
that whilst shareholders varied, and directors resigned, and managers
were supplanted, that fortunate official's name remained on the
prospectus of the Company.
He beheld Henrison fulfil his year. He was on friendly terms with the
sub who succeeded him. He still nodded to that ex-sub and manager when
he was discharged for malpractices. He preserved his equanimity when the
next manager, also discharged, brought his action against the Company
for wrongful dismissal, and the Company, their eyes beginning to open,
compromised the matter rather than let the public light of day in on the
swindle Henrison Brothers had practiced.
He was there when Delaroche making on his own responsibility a bad debt
which shook the concern to its rotten foundations, was turned off
penniless and characterless; he was there when various other managers
and subs obtained, who either in due course of time shifted themselves,
or were shifted by the powers then supreme; and, to cut short a long
list, he was there when the united wisdom of the directors appointed
Forde, General in command.
One of the directors had looked with exceeding favour upon Forde. Having
known him fill various subordinate positions in the trade creditably, he
concluded he was precisely the man wanted at that period at the General
Chemical Company.
Outwardly Mr. Forde made little of the honour conferred; inwardly he was
uplifted.
If men and women, who, having been to the manner born, are able to bear
worldly promotion without entirely losing whatever small amount of sense
God may have seen fit to give them, could only understand the mental
effect, the fact of being placed in a position of power produces upon
those who have hitherto served in the rank and file of life's army,--I
fancy managers and housekeepers and confidential employés of all
descriptions would be chosen from a far different rank than is the case
at present.
You, sir, who having had the use of a carriage all your life, would much
rather walk to your destination than be driven thither,--do you suppose
you can comprehend what driving even in another person's carriage means
to the man who has all his life looked upon an equipage of the kind with
mingled feelings of admiration and envy.
No, you cannot! But I, who have been practically taught the lesson, may
inform you that it is utter folly to open the door and let down the
steps, and permit the poor simpleton I have indicated to fancy himself a
great fellow, lounging on your cushions, or the cushions you have helped
to place for him.
If he is able, in God's name let him buy a carriage for himself if
nothing less will content him. By the time he has done so, he will have
conjugated all the moods and tenses connected with its possession, and
may, perhaps, go on safely to the end; otherwise he is very apt to loll
back with legs outstretched and arms crossed on his way to that place
the name of which on earth is, beggary.
Was it the fault of Forde that he was placed in a square hole, he being
essentially fitted to fill a round one; that he, being poor, should have
visions of opulence thrust upon him; that he, being in a very settled
and respectable and useful rank of socie
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