A Struggle for Fame. A novel

Front matter

\ STRUGGLE FOR FAME. 3 Hobd. BY MRS. J. H. RIDDELL, AUTHOR OF Tllh MYSTERY IN PALACE GARDENS,' 'GEORGE CEIIH Of FEN COURT,' ETC. IN THREE VOLUMES. VOL. MI. LONDON : RICHARD BENTLEY AND SON iTitblislurs in ftirbinnri) to %)tt JHa.jcsti) the flOnrxn, 1SS3. [All Kig/its fcserverf.} CONTENTS OF VOL. III. CHAPTER PAGE I. ONE ROAD TO SUCCESS ... 1 II. THE NEW STORY - - - 40 in. barney's luck - - 73 IV. THE NEW' FIRM - - - - - -98 V. MR. LOGAN-LACERE IS AMAZED - - - 143 VI. MR. kelly's advice - - 194 VII. MR FELTON CRITICIZES - - - 228 VIIL A GREAT WINDFALL - - 245 IX. BOUND TO COME ------ 270 X. WHAT HAPPENED - - 292 XI. EVIL DAYS - - - - 314 XII. CONCLUSION - - " A STRUGGLE FOE FAME.

Chapter I. One Road To Success

S^^WOAV'S Maria?' had long been played ft Bvi] out ; ' less/ observed Mr. Dawton, &^>^M> ' from any want of life or animation in tbe fair Maria herself, than in consequence of a curious and to him (Air. Dawton) inexplicable lack of enthusiasm on the part of the principal performer.' ' If I may be allowed the expression,' pro ceeded Air. Daw*ton, 'he always acted the part under protest. Give you my honour, sir, he seemed as if he took it only out of compliment to me, and during the whole time he had his full share of tbe profits. Full share, ay, and more. vol. in. ■ From the first I told you he was a " cad," father/ said Ted, which opinion, indeed, the elder son of the house had freely expressed soon after forming the acquaintance of Mr. Bernard Kelly. ' He only went into the matter with you because he was short of cash.

He was deadly ashamed of the whole business, and took the earliest possible opportunity of getting out of it.' Incredible as this statement sounded to Mr. Dawton, it happened to be perfectly true. For anyone to be ' ashamed ' of the stage, and despise the * noblest profession man ever en tered,' seemed to the poor old actor a theory too wild for acceptance. But Ted had read his man accurately. If he had descended into the pit of Mr. Kelly's mind, and gone with a light through all the workings of that intricate mine, he could not have arrived at a more correct conclusion than was the case. Mr. Kelly had loathed ' How's Alaria ?' and felt each time the name of that mythical female was placarded about tbe towns in the Home Counties, beyond which distance Air. Dawton did not think it prudent to travel, as if a date were fixed for his own execution. ' You see, he never forgets Bernard Kelly,' explained Ted to his brother ; ' and for this reason, if for no other, he will never, let my father say what he likes, do a bit of good as an actor.' ' And I'm very sure he won't as an author/ capped Will. 'From the minute I stopped touching up his stories, not an editor would take one of them.' But Mr. William Dawton proved to be wrong in his idea that the Irishman would fail to make his way as a writer.

He lacked genius, it is true ; but he made up for the want of a gift w*hich does not always enable its possessor to compass worldly success, by in domitable perseverance and a determination to try all the gates of fortune till he found one that yielded to his hand. Nothing except that shortness of cash mentioned — a not uncommon want among all sorts and conditions of men — could ever have induced Mr. Kelly to appear in the little play Mr. AVilliam Dawton had 'knocked up' out of the omnibus incident which introduced Bernard to his uncle ; but he was so poor at the time, he agreed to what ever Mr. Daw-ton proposed ; and, as a natural 43—2 consequence, found himself carried, much against his own goodwill, to Croydon, King ston, Hertford, and such-like towns, as well as to places more properly to be regarded as out lying suburbs of London.

Amongst others to Stratford, where, although he saw them not, Miss Bridgetta and her niece saw him. ' I don't know what you'll think about Bar ney going the round of the country w*ith a parcel of strolling players,' wrote Miss Cavan to Mrs. Kelly. ' It seems a great come-down for a man reared in decency — and I am truly sorry for you — respected and respectable as you always were and kept yourself. Me and Hetty paid our shilling apiece, and went into the back seats to get a look at him ; and we felt it was money wasted. It was a pity you could not keep him at home, or get him off to America. Maybe your brother in Derry could give a helping hand to get him out there yet. He's in the middle of a gang of actors, Alat says ; and, indeed, I think it's only my duty and a kindness to write and let you know how he's going on.' AVhich was a very weak, foolish letter for poor Miss Cavan to indite, though she sent it to Callinacoan only with the laudable idea of taking the sting out of whatever Barney might have said about Mat.

Now, Barney had hitherto said nothing to the good people at home on the subject, and might possibly have held his peace for ever, if Miss Bridgetta had refrained her pen. As matters stood, however, he returned a short but incisive epistle to the letter of maternal lamentation which arrived in due course at Bermondsey. He told his mother not to be fretting about him — that he was doing very well, and meant to do better ; that Miss Cavan was an old idiot ; that Mat was only a common tout for advertisements; and that if he made five hun dred a year, he was drinking six ; that it was a pure waste of Irish produce to send hampers to West Ham ; and that, if she found she had at any time more than she knew what to do with, she had better send it to him than to a house w*here there were two slanderous old maids, and a man who had grudged him even the poor shelter their contemptible cottage afforded.

Bernard was very angry indeed, and when he was angry, he knew, as his mother said, ' where to lay on the whip.' Nevertheless, this little incident confirmed his previous resolution of severing his slight connection with the stage. 'It does not matter,' he considered, 'what a man does or leaves undone, so long as he can keep it quiet ; but you can't keep things quiet if you give any fool able to pay twelve pence leave to learn to know all you are about.' So Mr. Kelly, looking around, saw there was a great field in London open for any man who liked to push his way steadily and unpreten tiously. ' It's the horse that steals along wdns the race/ he thought ; ' that makes no great show, but just creeps on, and on, and was never thought of perhaps at all in the betting. So far as I have seen, it's the talk and the drink spoils a man's chances here.' And he vowed to himself that neither drink nor talk should destroy the chance of Mr. Bernard Kelly.

Brought up as he had been, the amount of money which sifted through the fingers of the people he came in contact with literally appalled him. Snow in June could not have disap peared quicker than sovereigns did out of the possession of Will and Jim Dawton. No one ever seemed to him to put by a halfpenny. AVhat his friends got they spent, and then they were short till they got more. It was either ' a feast or a famine ' — either debt or profu sion. ' It is a sort of life that would not suit me,' Air. Kelly said in after-years, referring to Life in Bohemia — but what perhaps he really meant was, it would not have suited him to pay for it. So long as somebody else found what the young Dawtons called ' the shot/ he said no thing in dispraise of Bohemian practices. Nay, most undoubtedly he liked them, always at another person's expense bien entendu — the snug supper-parties — the Blackwall dinners — the trips up the river — the picnics — the dances — the play-goings — the luncheons — he took them all just as he took good wine, when he could get that good thing ; but they did not turn his head any more than wine.

After the pleasantest party he could go home and in stantly buckle to his work. So far from un fitting him for his daily labour, society only seemed to supply some stimulus his nature needed. ' He never forgot Bernard Kelly/ to quote Ted Dawton's words ; and for that very reason, the life which micdit have over-excited and undermined a more sensitive and sympathetic nature really only proved a favouring wind which blew him onward to success. Ere he had been eighteen months in London the Dawtons felt that though he was among, he was not of them. He had got a literary connection quite outside their own, and a visiting acquaintance into w*hich his literary position never entered. How he had managed this was a question frequently mooted amongst the first friends whose kindness helped him over the difficulties of his earlier metropolitan experience.

Mr. Bernard Kelly knew, but he did not mean to enlighten them, parrying all inquisitive inquiries with, to quote Jim Daw ton, ' a wisdom beyond his years.' The Dawtons could not make the matter out. Mr. Donagh had darkly hinted to them that ' Kelly was a low fellow,' ' born in the ranks / that ' Mr. Balmoy himself came from the dregs of the people.' ' Fellows/ proceeded Mat loftily, ' my grandfather would not have spoken to, except from the back of his thoroughbred, while they were running bare foot through the bogs ;' and, indeed, when he first arrived in London, there was nothing so particularly refined or aristocratic about Mr. Kelly's appearance, manners, and modes of thought as to induce a belief that he had been what Mr. Donagh called ' cradled amid the purple.' They knew that when Mr. Dawton, senior, first beheld him gazing darkly down into the water in St. James's Park, he was as destitute of friends as of money ; and now, behold, he had the entree to good houses ; ' and by Jove, sir,' added Will, ' he can plant a book with a publisher almost when and w*here he Likes.' All of which was true, but the apparent miracle of Bernard Kelly's success had its origin in twro extremely simple causes.

First, he started in the race unweighted. He had no wife, father, or child to consider ; it was not necessary for him to keep up appearances beyond dressing fairly w*ell ; he could lodge where he pleased, five as cheaply as he liked ; put the width of London betw*een himself and those who might have intruded upon his time and distracted him from his work ; what he made he could keep, he might save or spend, whichever pleased him best. In the second place, circumstances before he came to London so placed his lot, that he had splendid opportunity for reading books not generally resorted to for purposes of study. As a pigeon wheels round in the air, uncertain apparently at first in what direction to bend its flight — as a dog often first scents three roads out of four where that number meet, ere certainly electing to choose the last — so Mr. Kelly tried his hand at many things before he finally found out what he was best fitted for, and stuck to it.

Almost by accident — at least, if a conversation with Mr. Vassett could be deemed accident — he found he could utilize his almost exhaus tive acquaintance with the w'orks of those dramatists the present age has decided to shelve. Bernard Kelly knew them by heart. He read them at a time when he had no thought of coming to London and only the vaguest idea of ever publishing anything had entered his mind, and therefore started with the enormous advantage of not having to go to the British Museum to ' read up ' his sub ject. AVhen he did enter that building, it was merely to verify a quotation or refer to some work the gist of which w*as already known to him. At that time he chanced to be earning enough by those London sketches — to which allusion has already been made — to keep his modest pot boiling, and he could therefore write the book he had in his mind at leisure, and afford to spend time in giving it an amount of local colour which delighted Air.

Vassett, himself an antiquarian and a lover of the study of that long-ago time, when gallants ruffled it in doublets and plumed hats, when 'prentice boys fought, when grave citizens had to keep strict watch over fair wives and pretty daughters, when the Fleet afforded splendid opportunities for romance and scoundrelism and comedy and tragedy, when jolly young watermen pulled gay cavaliers to London Bridge, and down the stairs at York Gate — then lapped at high tide by the water, and not lying stranded back in a garden as it does now — ladies with hoops, and fans, and patches, and powdered hair, and looped-up dresses, and high-heeled shoes, were handed by lords wearing swords at their sides in order to take an airing on the river. It was concerning the dramatists of this time Mr. Kelly wrote what Air.

Vassett termed 'an important work.' He went into it with love, and he finished it with honour. He knew what he was about ; knew the plays the authors he spoke of had written, not merely by name, but line by line and sentence by sentence ; he understood their spirit ; he saw the ten dency of their times reflected in the loose morality of their plots and characters ; but beneath the grossness and the levity and the scoffs at decency and dulness and reli gion, he found a wealth of genius which surprised and delighted the Craven Street publisher. More than this, he haunted the localities described, the places where these men had lived, made his way into wretched tenements where genius and wit and beauty had once held high court, and weaving into his narrative the very stones of the street, and the aspect of the rooms, and the carving of the mantelpieces, and the paintings on the ceilings, and the pattern of the balustrades, produced a series of pictures, so said the reviewers, as well as a brilliant and accurate history of the period he described.

The book stamped Air. Kelly as a man worth cultivating ; but even before it appeared, he had made his way into houses where people are not usually asked merely because they have written a book or flashed some artistic fire works in the face of the multitude. He achieved this social feat by the kindness of a friend at whose hands he scarcely deserved such con sideration. Not then, but years after, he stated, in what reviewers termed a singularly graceful dedication, that to this lady — for his friend was of the better sex — he owed every good thing he possessed in life. And yet before he left Ireland he served her what a less forgiving and confiding nature might have regarded as a scurvy trick.

He had professed to be deeply in love with her ; he had given her to understand that Life destitute of her presence would be valueless ; he had been on the very eve of marrying her — indeed, without doubt he would have married her, but that at the eleventh hour her brother, getting wind of the matter, sent for Barney, as he was cabled in the easy vernacular of the neighbourhood, and said : ' Now, look here ! you think my sister has three hundred a year ?' ' And hasn't she V asked Barney, ' simple as a baby,' to quote his mother's somewhat incor rect statement. 'As long as she remains single!' answered Mr. Fortescue, for the gentleman's name was Fortescue, and the lady was Miss Fortescue — generally referred to among the Kelly connection as the ' old woman.' ' How's that ?' inquired Barney, naturally anxious to obtain all the information he could on so important a question. ' Well,' said Mr. Fortescue in a friendly con fidential sort of manner, for at this stage he felt affairs were in his own hand, ' you see — pray take a glass of wine, Mr. Kelly' — Barney had been ushered into the dining-room after the departure of youth and beauty as personi fied by Aliss Fortescue, and Air.

Fortescue now pushed the decanter over to him. ' You see, my father made his will when my sister was a young girl. He never altered it ; there were reasons, as you will allow, why it was wise he never did.' Mr. Kelly sipped his wine and remained silent ; there were reasons why he did not wish to answer ' Yes,' and he felt he certainly could not answer ' No ' till he knew more. ' So,' proceeded Air. Fortescue, ' to cut a long story short, when my father died and his will was read, we found that everything was left to me except three hundred a year to my sister so long as she remained single — the amount to cease totally on her marriage unless she wedded with my consent.' Air. Kelly finished his w*ine. He felt matters had reached a cbmax. ' And, Air. Kelly,' proceeded Air. Fortescue — ' pray take some more wine/ which Barney did, fearing he might never get anything else out of the Fortescue connection — 'to be quite plain, I have no intention of giving my consent to her marrying you ; still, as I have no desire to act unhandsomely towards a person who I think may have been led very much astray in his ideas — ' He paused, but strong in the virtue of silence, Barney declined to compromise himself with any statement as to whether he had been the deceiver or the deceived. ' I am willing,' said Air.

Fortescue, after an almost imperceptible pause, ' to — to — do some thing for you. If you like to leave the neighbourhood and — go— anywhere — you can have fifty pounds.' Fifty pounds and no Miss Fortescue ! At that moment, if possessed of fifty pounds in hard cash, all things seemed possible to Mr. Bernard Kelly ; so he closed with the offer on the spot. ' Ye didn't know your own worth, Barney dear,' commented his mother, when she heard of the transaction. 'AVith your wonderful brown eyes and that soft melting voice of yours, ye might wile a bird off her nest. Ye'd have doubled that fifty if you'd only stuck out a bit. And now w*here at all d'ye think ye'll go V Mr. Kelly did not know — he thought of America, and of Australia, and of Africa and New Zealand ; and then, feebng he lacked the spirit either of a pioneer or adventurer, said, ' I'll go to London.' London was not so far off as Air.

Fortescue could have desired ; still, in those days it was a long way. A man who wished to return might, were he so inclined, get back almost as easily from America as from London; and besides, he web1 knew that after the first cold plunge into the swift stream of metropolitan life had been taken, men did not often desire to return to the turf and the pigs, and the dead-alive existence of a place like Callinacoan. Mr. Balmoy was communicated with, and expressed his willingness to assist a relative represented as so extremely clever as far as lay in his power ; the outfit was procured, and Barney left what Mr. Donagh would have called his ' natal bogs.' The letter in which he bade farewell to Miss Fortescue was a masterpiece of falsehood and diplomacy ; but what he said, knowing the writer, may be safely left to the imagina tion of the reader.

The lady, who, though not young, was tender, wept bitterly over the desertion of her devoted swain : he wanted ' faith,' she said sadly — took, indeed, to her bed when her brother told her how he and Kelly had talked the matter over, and decided it was better for vol. in. 44 W Barney to go to London ; but after a time she tired of tears and solitude — got up, went down stairs, and in pursuance of her domestic avocations discovered the new pad-groom was an extremely handsome young man, and decided that he must be a hero in disguise. The end of that romance is written in the chronicles of the house of Fortescue. AViser than his predecessor, the handsome young man wasted no time over his wooing or his wedding either ; and on this occasion the first hint Mr. Fortescue received of what had been going on, arrived in the form of an intimation that Mr. Robert Underwood bad that day wedded Dorothea, only daughter of the late Thomas Fortescue, of Alanchester Square, London.

If a shell had exploded at Sulby Park it would have caused less con fusion. ' Married — and to a groom !' gasped Air. Fortescue. ' AVhy, Kelly was nothing to this !' ' Serve him right,' thought Mrs. Kelly, ' turning up his impudent English nose at my Barney.' ' Something might have been made of Kelly/ considered Air. Fortescue, which judg ment Barney, as soon as he heard the news, immediately justified by despatching a letter to the bride full of earnest hopes for her happiness, touching expressions of gratitude for her kindness to himself in the days gone by, and assurances that almost every hour he found occasion to recall some of her excellent advice and necessity to use the information she had given him. It was a sprat thrown to catch a very vague herring, but still Air. Kelly decided the chance must be worth the postage-stamp and the time which it cost.

By return of mail came an answer from Mrs. Underwood. She did not say much about her husband, but she said a great deal concerning Barney — remarked how thankful she felt to know her poor advice had proved of the sbghtest service; begged him to tell her if she could not be of some real use to him in London ; entreated that he would confide all his hopes and fears to her as of old. She had always prophesied he would rise, and rise high, and as a true, though humble friend, she desired from the remote 44—2 s spot where her lot was cast to be able to follow the course of his upward progress. It is almost unnecessary to say Air. Bernard Kelly was not at all backward in availing him self of the chance thus offered. He told her he was writing — getting on in the world wonderfully, all things considered ; that merely to provide the ' sinews of war ' he had tem porarily joined fortunes with a family named Dawton, well known in the theatrical world, and acted in their company a little play called ' How's Maria ?' — founded on the inci dent which had destroyed his hopes of assist ance from Mr. Balmoy — at various country towns.

Having thus drawn the venom from Aliss Donagh's sting, he went on to say that he had met with many curious persons and passed through many strange vicissitudes since they parted, and that he often wished he was near enough to resume the charming com panionship he had been privileged to enjoy at Callinacoan. ' Then,' he added, ' it was you who were wont to amuse and instruct me with stories of a world of which I knew nothing. If we met now, I am vain enough to think, short as has been my London experience, I could relate many things which would interest you.' The correspondence prospered ; Air. Under wood, holding out, got his five hundred pounds and went to America, where popular rumour stated he immediately took to himself another and younger wife. He was quite firm in the matter of not subjecting Airs.

Underwood to the inconveniences of a sea voyage and uncer tain prospects when she got on the other side, so the lady returned to her brother's roof — where, as it was clearly impossible she could marry again, a great peace began to reign. The correspondence with Barney suppbed all the elements of romance, lacking which, as Miss Fortescue used to say, life lacked everything. ' Existence,' she wrote plaintively, ' is ended for me, but in your success I sometimes feel like one raised again from tbe dead.' She gave him letters of introduction ; she ' worked her friends,' to use a phrase of the Dawtons', for his benefit ; she opened doors for him he never could have opened for himself ; in a word, Air. Kelly was doing very well indeed, yet he did not feel quite satisfied. He knew now he could make a certain sum per annum for several years — perhaps for life — but he could only do this by continuous work on the literary treadmill.

A thousand miles in a thousand hours seems a vast pedestrian feat to those who are little given to such exercise ; but the life of an author without private fortune, or the fortune of getting into some good thing, just means what is equivalent to walking a mile every working hour of his bfe. The task is never done — even w*hen he is lying on his death-bed the hack leaves some ' copy ' unfinished. The simile of the crutch and the walking-stick is almost too trite to be repeated here — yet it is so true, use can scarcely render it stale — and Mr. Kelly, who, for all his common-sense and industry and patience and perseverance, was thoroughly Irish in his love of pleasure and hatred of routine, felt sometimes he hated authorship, and wished he could get into another groove where at least some little variety might compensate for inade. quate remuneration.

Leader-writing had not at that time got to be the money-making business it has since become, and at all events Air. Kelly was not on any newspaper. Literary men would have looked round their fourth-floor chambers in incredulous astonishment had they then been told they need only borrow enough money for the railway fare to some remote borough, in order to write Al. P. after their names. The honours conferred by a seat in the House of Commons were not in those days as easy to be obtained as foreign titles and diplomas ; there were fewer prizes in author ship than there are now, but as a balance there were not quite so many blanks. The monotony and the drudgery, however, even of an assured success, appalled Mr. Kelly. He felt thankful for what he bad been able to do ; but he wanted something more — something that would, as he phrased the matter to him self, be going on like rent or interest while a fellow was sleeping.

He desired, in brief, a salary — an editorship — anything which would not necessitate the eternal turning out of ' copy.' He even fixed the amount of that salary, if be could get it, at precisely the same annual sum as that maiden lady, whose rela tions were not as kind as she thought they might have been, prayed for. ' And lest, 0 Lord I Thou shouldest not know what I mean, I mean three hundred a year, paid quarterly.' Three hundred a year would have suited Mr. Kelly to a nicety ; but though he was a great deal about London, editorships were things he did not seem to hear about, in time at any rate ; and the Dawtons, who did hear, were not in any hurry to tell him. Perhaps they thought, and with good reason, that once this ' chief butler ' got comfortably placed himself, he would forget all about the struggling Josephs of his former prison house.

At all events, he wras wishing very much for what he did not seem bkely soon to get, and was pondering how other people appeared to fall into ' excellent berths,' when one day — the very same day, in fact, when Glen and Ned Beattie sat on the heights above Leigh looking down upon the Thames — he took boat to go to Lambeth. It had dawned upon him it might not have been quite wise on his part to cut the Dawton connection even so far as he had done. True, the Daw*tons and the rank to which he wished to belong, and with which he was in fact privileged to associate, were social ingredients so different as to be well-nigh incompatible. But bankers and clergymen, and old dowagers with assured positions, and prim maiden ladies distantly related to the nobility, put nothing tangible in his pocket ; while the pleasant Bohemians, whose ways and doings and conversation seemed to him so pleasant, but whom latterly he had grown somewhat to look down upon, could tell when and where every new venture on which for a time money would be spent freely was to be started.