Annals of an eventful life ... Third edition

Chapter I. How

I WAS BORN, AND WHAT HAPPENED AFTERWARDS. I was born in the year 181-. I am not going to tell you the exact year ; and am not likely to bore any of my readers with recollections of the Peace of Amiens or the Campaigns of the Duke of Wellington. Yes, I was born, but before I was born my existence was blighted. Not that I came into the world a rickety thing, for I was a most healthy child ; morally blighted, I mean. Every one had made up their minds that I was to be one thing, and I came out another. In a word, it had been settled that I was to be a girl, and I was born a boy. < ' ' Amphora cœpit Institui ; currciite rota, cur urceus exit?" We were a boy family, aud we had been a boy family time out of mind. Every now and then, after a run of fifteen boys or so, Nature, or whatever it is that settles these things, threw us a girl by way of a sop ; but I am bound to say, they had far better have been boys ; they were merely boys in girls' clothing, but inwardly they were thorough males.

One such sop had been my fathers sister. At first the terror, and afterwards the delight, of my existence, I fancy I see her now, and hear her say, " Oh, child, that you had been a girl !" Well ! this strong miuded woman had settled it with my parents that I was to be a girl, that I was to be called after her, to be adopted by her, and though last, not least, to have her money and her land. I have heard it whispered that my father had doubts on the matter, and that he was seen to wring his hands when baby's sex was talked of as a foregone conclusion. But my father was a wise man, and kept his doubts to himself, thinking, perhaps, that time would show ; and accordingly, when time did show, and our old nurse ran downstairs to tell him that baby was B born ; and born a boy, my father was almost the only one in tho house who was not surprised.

My mother fortunately, under the circumstances, could say very little ; but as for my Aunt, who was about as old as my father, and rather bullied him, I have heard nurse say, " She was neither to haud nor to bind, but went about the house just like a rampaging cow." What " a rampaging cow '' may be I can scarce say, even out-of-dooi s ; but indoors, and " about the house," it must be a most unpleasant phenomenon. If tossing was any part of the performance, my Aunt could have done it beautifully. No one ever tossed up her head higher, and no one ever kept her head so long at tossing pitch. To see her do it was as good a sight as a mountebank balancing a donkey on a ladder — a spectacle now, alas ! very rare in London streets. But even a rampaging cow, if left to herself, must wear herself out ; and so it was on the day of my birth.

The other children were sent over to a neighbour ; my father drove over his estate, there was no governess to rampage over or with, and the doctor, when he took his leave of my Aunt, insisted that the house must be kept as still as death ; not so much as a mouse should be heard to stir, she could not be too cautious, and so on, with a bundle of commonplaces which meant, " Dear Mrs. Mandeville, if I had power to turn you out of this house I would ; but as I haven't, I expect you to be quiet so long as you stay here." No wonder, then, that after Dr. Mindererus had departed Mrs. Mandeville took some sal volatile, sat down and had a good cry, and went to sleep. Now I daresay you will say, Then let her sleep for ever, for what we care ; why do you raise her up thirty years dead, to make the beginning of your story hideous ?

Yes ! that is just the reason why I raise her up. She did all she could to make my life hideous, and she very nearly succeeded. First of all, she was always snubbing me, and I have heard nurse say, " If Mrs. Man-Devil had had her way, Master Teddy would have had a humpback." Once or twice she was caught trying to drop " the little innocent " — yes ! me, the little innocent — on the floor, and several times she cut my nails to the quick ; once, in cutting my hair, she snipped off a bit of my ear ; in fact, she was always brandishing steel about, and scaring me out of my wits. Then she persuaded my parents that pastry and fruit were bad — not for all the children, but for me in particular. Oh ! the agonies I have endured at seeing the whole family circle devouring flaming mince-pies like so many devout fire worshippers, while I was condemned to eat tapioca or sago pud ding.

Then she said she was sure that plays and pantomimes were too exciting for me, that I should have water on the brain if I went ; and the result was that I was packed off to bed while all the rest went in a merry party to the theatre. You will ask, of course, why this tyranny was borne ; but I can give you a very good answer. Though I had not proved a girl— for which, on the bended knib of my pen, I most devoutly thank Heaven— I was considered to be in some sort Mrs. Mandeville's property ; and as it was supposed that she would add to that property all she had, or, in other words, make me her heir, my father and mother agreed that Auntie must be humoured, and that she should have her way with the boy. Now, I may as well confess that Aunt Mandeville's property, — that is I, Edward Halfacre, — was very undutiful to her.

Whether it was that my digestion rose against her interference with its sacred right to ruin itself with mince-pies — whether it loathed tapioca aud sago as much as that dear old man of Tobago — who can tell 1 Certain it is that if, according to nurse, Aunt Mandeville plotted against my baby life, I, in my turn, put her in some peril of hers. As a little boy I was of a very lively, sprightly turn, much given to what a horse-dealer told me one of his horses was also given to — "badinage." "Well!" I said, "that 's a queer quality in a horse ; is it a virtue or a vice 1 " " I can't 'xacly say; sir, but that 'oss of mine as is given to badinage 'ud pitch Fordham over his 'ead in five minutes." By which I mean that I was a very wicked little boy to Auntie. Sometimes I would roll myself up like a ball, and lie in her way, that I might trip her up ; every day, as soon as I could reach up to her collar, I put pigtails on her.

Once — I confess it with bitter shame — I heated the handle of the poker, and put it close to her, that she might bum her fingers ; aud, though last, not least, I remember, when she was standing up to carve a leg of •mutton at luncheon, slipping gently off my chair, and suddenly drawing away hers just as she was in the act of sitting down. I fancy I see my father and mother both lifting up their hands aloft, and hear their shrieks, as down went Aunt Mandeville, knife and fork in air, flat on her back ; the result being that I was sent off dinnerless to bed, while Auntie was picked up, feeling herself all over to see if she had any bones broken. But where all this time, you will ask, was Mr. Mandeville ? That is soon answered. Dead and gone. Stretched comfortably out among the rude forefathers of the hamlet ; and if conscious, dreading lest the sound of the last trumpet should recall him to the side of Mrs. Mandeville.

" Poor old fellow ! He had a good heart, and a good constitution," nurse used to say ; " but law ! child, what was that if one had to live alone with Auntie ? No ! b No ! he couldn't abide it. Ho made a good fight, though ! Lived with her better than three years, and then, all at once, he died. Dr. Mindererus do say it were apoplexy, or sunstroke, or compression on the brain ; but I tell you it was Auntie on the brain. She was fond of him, but for all that she killed him. Women often do kill them as they love, and then they cry for them, and build their tombs. Did you ever see Squire Mande ville's tomb at Mandeville Hall i . . . Well, well ! child ! you '11 see it some day ; for if you're a good boy, they do say Auntie means to leave it all to you, and then you'll remember your old nurse, — won't you? there's a dear."

So much for old Mandeville, whose time could not have been a jolly one. He left his wife Mandeville Hall ; and so, what with his property and hers, Auntie was a person of consequence in the neighbourhood. Before I go any further, let me say that all these terrible accounts of Aunt Mandeville were mere nursery gossip. Nursie hated Aunt Mandeville, and painted her in hideous colours. It is perfectly true that she was bitterly disappointed that I was not a girl ; that she took care of my digestion, and that I was very ungrateful to her for her pains. She was a woman of strong will, and as such much the better horse when she was Squire Mandeville's yoke-fellow. My father and mother, too, for the same reason, were terribly afraid of her. But in after-years, when I really became her property, I found her as good as gold — when she had her own way.

Chapter II. How Mt Father Became

A WEST INDIA PROPRIETOR. Where did we live ? Why, reader, you are like a child at a watering-place, so curious and inquisitive. Next you will ask what we were 1 what my father did 1 had we a carriage 1 how many horses ? how many servants ? I had better answer at once. We had all these ; and my father was nothing. He was well off, but that was no concern of mine, for did I not belono* to Aunt Mandeville ? As for our house, it was in the Midland Counties. I will even go so far as to tell you it was in War wickshire, but further as to my father's abode in England I do not mean to go. Besides his English estate, he had land beyond the sea. An old uucle had been a planter in the West Indies in the good old time, and when he died he made my father his heir. Now to what shall we liken a West Indian estate in this bad new time ?

A millstone round your neck is not a pleasant thing even on land, nor is it nice to walk up a mountain when the snow reaches mid-thigh. Water-lilies are lovely to look at from the bank, or out of a boat, but they are death to the strongest swimmer ; and so it is with a West Indian estate. Sweet is sugar to those who eat it. Sweet to old women in their tea, and to little boys in tarts ; but gall and wormwood to those who have to make it dear, aud sell it cheap. Well ! I belong to Aunt Mandeville, and so I am not going to moralise on sugar candy, clayed muscovadoes, jaggery, date-sugar, beet-root, maple, diabetes, or any other of the sugar-stuffs or processes. All I say is, woe to the man now-a-days who has a West Indian estate ! But it was not so bad then, fifteen years before the emancipation ; and my father was thought to be a lucky man when it was noised through the Forest of Arden that old Colonel Ratoon had died in the West Indies, and made Squire Halfacre his heir.

Then in due course Messrs. Steel, Penn, and Quill, old Ratoon's solicitors, wrote from Lincoln's-Inn-Fields to inform my father that they were ready to prove the will ; and Messrs. Short, Ready, and Stump, his bankers, advised him of the balance standing at their bank in the late Colonel Ratoon's name ; and though last, not least, Messrs. Claw, Tooth, and Nail, of Vulture Yard, Great St. Helen's, the late Colonel Ratoon's merchants, who sold his sugar and rum and molasses for him at ten per cent, commission, and sent him out vacuum pans and mill-wheels, and condensers and boilers, and cane crushers, also at ten per cent, commission, which ten per cent. became twenty, if in their jargon "they came under advances," — this most respectable firm, I say, " notified " my father that they were ready to transact the business relating to the Two Rivers Estates, in the Island of St. Saccharissa, on the same terms as those which had been agreed on between the late lamented Colonel Ratoon and their firm.

Strange to say, all these letters reached my father on the same day. He was a good, easy man, who lived happily on his estates, and thought all months endurable except June and July, when there was nothing to shoot. Norway was not then discovered, or he would have rushed off to fish there ; but as it was, he managed to exist through May with a little rook and rabbit shooting ; and on the 12th of August he went as regu larly to Scotland to destroy grouse, as the puffins depart on the same day from their island off Anglesea. As for business, he had an agent, who used to come over once a-month or so, and have a dreary morning of accounts with him at Halfacre Hall ; not that his estates were at all encumbered, but my father hated accounts, and, to tell the truth, he would much sooner have gone to the dentist once a-month than see his agent for half-an-hour.

You may fancy then how he felt when he had three business letters, each signed by a trine of partners. "Steel, Penn, and Quill," "Short, Ready, and Stump," " Claw, Tooth, and Nail," he murmured, " nine men of busi ness ; why, I shall have to go up to town." And to town he went, and in town he stayed, to my mother's amazement, a month before he returned. This was long before railways, and people used not to rush backwards and forwards by express. It was also before the penny post ; in the good old times of which I spoke, when no general post-letter cost less than eightpence, and when people, even men, were wicked enough to cross their letters. In those days, too, when you had written a letter you had to fold it — no such easy thing, let me tell you, to do neatly ; and if I wished to show, in one sentence, how much better off we of this generation are than our fore fathers, I would simply say — " Then there were no envelopes."

My father hated letter-writing, but he was good, and wrote often to my mother ; but his letters were so full of " Short, Ready, and Stump," "Claw, Tooth, and Nail," and "Steel, Penn, and Quill," and entered so much into probates, and balances, and consignments, and brokers, that my mother could make neither head nor tail of them ; and even my Aunt Man deville, whose knowledge of business was supposed in the family to be profound, confessed herself puzzled. " Brother Halfacre has got into a new world," she said. " I hope we shall have him back safe, and that he will not be torn to pieces by Messrs. Claw, Tooth, and Nail." " I do wish though," added my mother, " that he would tell us whether he has seen the king ; and what's the truth of this story about poor Lord Castlereagh, ancl whether ladies' waists are longer, and their bonnets smaller, this season than last."

At last he came back, but it was only to talk incessantly of the mystic nine who made up the three firms. It was plain though that the three that had the firmest hold on him were, as might be expected, Messrs. Claw, Tooth, and Nail. As for bankers, they are very obliging, but it is rather in deeds than in words. I once spent a day in Switzerland with three bankers, all of one house, and it was by far the dullest day I ever passed in my life. No one can spend a day with a banker ; it is a contradiction in terms. As for conversation, they have none — " How will you take it 1 " is their longest sentence. No ! you may shoot, fish, and hunt with a banker, and you may dine with him, and do all well ; but with bankers it is as with your destiny in a future state, you must bring your happiness with you, and trust to no one else.

A lively banker is a dan gerous banker ; he ought to be gazetted out of the firm as soon as possible. Nor are solicitors, as a rule, lively. Besides, the more respectable a firm is, the more likely are you to sneeze when visiting them, and I hate sneezing. Inwardly, like old port, they may be cheering and cheerful, but outwardly they are sawdust and cobwebs. But a merchant may be very lively and pleasant. In them there is more of that speculative nature so attractive to generous minds. There is something spirited and genial even in their ventures ; and as the finest bird often lives in the dingiest nest, many a merchant, when he wings his way west from the sunless prison of Vulture Court, may shine in society at night as brilliant as a firefly of the south. So it was with my father's merchants.

Claw, the senior partner, lived in a street which opened on Park Lane. He had a few fine pictures ; statues by Thorwaldsen and Canova ; a choice library, and gave good dinners at which all the wits of the town were welcome. Tooth was not so grand. He lived in Bryanstone Square, a spot then, as now, of infinite respectability. The Bryansto nians in their inner hearts, I believe, think it fashionable, and mean next season to have chairs and a Row of their own, even more rotten and more frequented than that on the south side of Hyde Park ; but let that pass. In the year 182- Tooth lived there ; he was the oldest of the partners, and was one of those mysterious persons who are said to have come to London with half-a-crown in their pockets, and to have realised a splendid for tune all by their own exertions.

The truth, I believe, was that Tooth had been warehouseman to old Claw, the father of Claw the Second. He was industrious, and more, he was handsome. Old Claw and his son and daughter lived in Vulture Yard, that was the cradle of their race, their Stammhaus, like the Roths childs' in the Frankfort Judengasse. Miss Claw never saw any one but the warehouseman, fell in love with him, and had the sense to tell her father. Old Claw, if this were a mere common novel instead of a most truthful story, would have flown into a fury, set his face against the match, wedded his daughter to an attorney who had red hair, black teeth, limped like Vulcan and squinted like John Wilkes ■ the warehouseman would have become a highwayman, waylaid the attorney, who just then had his pockets full of thousand-pound notes, robbed him, blown his brains out, married his widow, who would never have discovered that he was her long-lost lover till she was on her death-bed of consumption, brought on by pining for her first love.

In which supreme hour the ex-highwayman would have confessed that he had gone over to the Church of Rome when he took to the road, and that his spiritual director had laid this penance on him to purge him of his sin in murdering the attorney. He was to marry the widow, and never to tell her his history. This confession would have been too much for the consumptive widow, she would have died in the arms of her husband and lover now happily united. The bereaved husband, then left to his own reflections, would have founded a monastery, subsisted on herring-bones and potatoparings, of which he partook on all fours out of a trough, and died at last in the odour of sanctity, a thoroughly holy man. But this is not a sensational novel, but plain matter-of-fact, and as plain truth is often much more astonishing than fiction, old Claw simply gave his consent, let his daughter marry the warehouseman, and made him his partner.

And old Claw was quite right. One of the clerks who had served the firm for fifty years, and was allowed to be facetious, said, " Our Mr. Tooth is the eye-tooth of the firm," and so it was. Old Claw's business increased twenty-fold after the partnership ; and when he died and left it to his son and Tooth, and the name of the firm, which had been first Claw, then Claw and Son, then Claw, Claw, and Tooth, became Claw and Tooth, the two surviv ing partners were wealthy enough to take another partner into the firm, on condition that he brought a hundred thousand pounds into the concern. This partner they found in Mr. Nail, whose father was, like Alexander in the Acts, a coppersmith, and had dealt largely with Claw and Tooth in manufacturing sugar boilers and such gear for the West Indian estates on which they had mortgages.

Mr. Nail was the youngest of the firm, which now became Claw, Tooth, and Nail. He was a bachelor, and lived in lodgings in St. James's Street. He often went to the theatre ; not like Tooth, who was devoted to the Kembles, and took a prominent part in the O.P. riots, if any one remembers what they were. If Mr. Tooth had a pain in the face he called it an ache, not an uke, because that was how Mr. John Kemble pronounced the passage in the ' Tempest.' — " For this thou shalt have aches." If he ever took a holiday it was to hurry away to the third row of the pit at Drury Lane, where he took his seat comfortably before the overture began. But Nail was not so " legitimate." He was not like Tooth, he cared little for the Kembles. Farce and comedy were his delight. He adored Liston, and still more Vestris.

Another of the clerks, one of those people who hear and see everything either with their own eyes and ears, or those of their friends, had heard Mr. Tooth's greengrocer say that he knew an oilman, who knew a scene shifter, who said that once " Our Mr. Nail " had been seen to slip a nosegay — now-a-days we call it bouquet — into the hand of Madame Vestris as she retired from the stage. But this is not a history of Claw, Tooth, and Nail, they are only of interest as being my father's merchants, though I cannot help speaking a little of them. When he came back, as I said before, he was full of the firm. On such a day he had dined with Claw-, and met Mr. Canning, Conversation Sharpe, and a very pleasant and agreeable young man, though quite a revolu tionist, Mr. Thomas Duncombe. He had quite meant to write down all the clever things he heard, but somehow he put it off from day to day till it was too late.

Then he told of Claw's pictures, and statues, and books ; and how he patronised a Scotchman, David Wilkie, whose works were really of great promise. Another day, too, Claw took him to dine with the Goldsmiths' Company, of which Claw was that year Master, or Warden, or whatever it is. Such a dinner, and such plate ! There, too, he tasted turtle for the first time, and confessed that Claw had made him have two helps. Then Tooth asked him to dine at five o'clock at the Bedford Hotel in Covent Garden Market; and they had marrow-bones, a delicacy undreamt of before ; and after that they went to see John Kemble play Hamlet, and Mrs. Siddons the Queen ; and another day they went to see Mrs. Siddons as Lady Macbeth ; and all through both tragedies my father confessed he still thought of the marrow-bones of the Bedford Hotel, and wondered how it was that the Warwickshire marrow-bones, on which his own Devon bullocks so often said their prayers to the Power who sends sweet grass, never had any marrow in them, and how it always seemed to run up to the innermost end of the bone out of the reach of the marrow-spoon, like the quicksilver in a barometer, when it sinks below zero.

Even in the famous soliloquy over poor Yorick's skull my father's fancy still wandered on, ancl he wondered whether there was any marrow in Yorick's shanks, and why a man shouldn't moralise over a marrow-bone as well as over a skull. Mr. Nail also belonged to a City Company. He was that year Renter Warden of the Fishmongers', and my father dined with him too, and he used to say that he could not tell whether the Goldsmiths' or the Fishmongers' gave the better dinner. Perhaps the turtle was better at the Goldsmiths', and the fish at the Fishmongers', but then it must never be forgotten that first turtle is, like first love, a thing altogether apart and exquisite, not to be compared with any love or turtle that may come upon us afterwards. Another thing in which the Goldsmiths excelled the Fishmongers was this.

After dinner they gave each guest a box of sweetmeats to carry away with him ; thus suffering him, unlike the little boy in the story, to fill his pockets as well as his stomach. Besides, this box gave a kind of reality to my father's trip to London, for it was brought down to Warwickshire, and shared amongst the children — all save me, for did I not belong to Aunt Mandeville, and did she not exercise her right of property on this occasion too, and for bid my father and mother to ruin the child's digestion with sweetmeats 1

Chapter III. How Mt Father Made Up His Mind To Go To

THE WEST INDIES. Nothing of any note happened with us in Warwickshire for some time. My father wrote to his merchants, aud his merchants to him, but no one knew whether anything was going on, till one morning he looked hard across the breakfast-table at my mother and said, — "I must go to the West Indies." I do not know, if he had said I must go to the moon, that my mother would have been more astonished. Certainly it would have been less trouble ; for if a man makes up his mind to go to the moon to the moon he must go. It is not far, only to the nearest lunatic asylum ; but the West Indies are a long way off, the voyage costs money and breaks up a family circle! Certainly it is worse to go to the West Indies than to the moon. I do not know if my mother was at first aware of the full extent of my father's perversity, but she saw perplexities of all kinds ahead, and speedily entrenching herself behind a whole array of woman's reasons, she resisted the enemy.

" Go to the West Indies, Halfacre ! Why should vou sro to the West Indies 1 " J b "Why, you see, my dear, Claw, Tooth, and Nail say it is usual for a new proprietor to show himself among his tenants I mean among his slaves,— they work more willingly when they see the man to whom they belong; the mauagers°and overseers need the master's eye ; there are numberless improvements to be made in the manufacture of sugar ; by the new vacuum-pan molasses will be annihilated, and the new centrifugal boiler crys tallizes the juice in half the time consumed under the old pro cess. I have just given Messrs. Claw and Nail, who always made Colonel Ratoon's machinery, a large order for new vacuum pans, boilers, condensers, pumps, and crystallizers. One of their patent cane-crushers, too, I must have. A Scotch engineer must go out, with two skilled mechanics, to fix all this machinery, and this, again, will be best done under the master's eye.

Added to this, they tell me the voyage is safe and pleasant. I will go out in the Encliantress, one of Claw, Tooth, and Nail's ships. She is a fast sailer, and I shall be there in six weeks." Here my father paused to take breath, as well he might, for it was by far the longest private speech he had ever been known to make. It was a good deal longer, in fact, than the famous speech which he made at Warwick, when proposing the judge's health at the assizes. As for my mother, she was utterly be wildered with his vacuum-pans, and condensers, and crystal lizers, ancl cane-crushers, so she wisely disregarded them, and clung to the fact of his voyage across the sea, and as soon as he paused she struck in, — " And, Halfacre, if it takes you six weeks to get there, how long will you stay, and when will you come back 1 " My father had been so full of going that he had not consi dered these points ; his fancy had landed him in the region of the molasses which he was prepared to annihilate ; but having, in his mind's eye, set his foot ou the shore, seen his slaves, aud set up his machinery, he thought he had gone far enough.