← catalogue

The Newcomes: Memoirs of a Most Respectable Family

by William Makepeace Thackeray · English · Gutenberg #7467 · 2,055,153 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Newcomes: Memoirs of a Most Respectable Family
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: The Newcomes: Memoirs of a Most Respectable Family

Author: William Makepeace Thackeray


        
Release date: February 1, 2005 [eBook #7467]
                Most recently updated: May 24, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7467

Credits: Credits: Tapio Riikonen and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NEWCOMES: MEMOIRS OF A MOST RESPECTABLE FAMILY ***




THE NEWCOMES

MEMOIRS OF A MOST RESPECTABLE FAMILY


Edited by Arthur Pendennis, Esq.

By William Makepeace Thackeray


Contents

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




THE NEWCOMES




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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What does it say?” says the fox.

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

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

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

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

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

“What large teeth you have got!”

“The better to——”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Silence!” he roared out.

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER II.
Colonel Newcome’s Wild Oats


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER III.
Colonel Newcome’s Letter-box

I.

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

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

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

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

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

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

II.

Rue St. Dominique, St. Germain, Paris,

Nov. 15, 1820,

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

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

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

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

III.

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

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

IV.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“_Lieutenant-Colonel Newcome, &c._”

V.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“_Lieutenant-Colonel Newcome, C. B._”

VI.

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

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

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

“_Lieutenant-Colonel Newcome, etc._”




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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I say,” says Clive.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s Brett’s man,” says Larkins.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“In my family, my dear Sir?”

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




CHAPTER V.
Clive’s Uncles


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER VI.
Newcome Brothers


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Very,” says the Colonel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The boy blushed rather.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Say what you say,” said the father.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No,” says Maria.

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

“O you silly child!” cries Maria.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/7467