Véra

Front matter

LONDON: SMITH, ELDER, % CO.

VERA.

VERA.

Part I. In Which The Wheel Begins To Turn

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Beginning at the Beginning 3

H. Of Family Matters 12

III. The Departure 22

IV. Or our Mother Moscow, and Family Matters

There 26

V. " Go where Glory waits Thee ! " 37

VI. Inkermann 47

VII. The Fifth of November 56

VIII. Between the Dead and the Dying 62

IX. Scutari 73

Part II. In Which The Wheel Continues To Turjs

X. Reaction 79

XI. Rome 92

XII. The Villa 103

XIII. In which History repeats itself 110

Till CONTENTS.

Part III. In Which The Wheel Is Seen Still Turning

CHAPTER PAGE

XIV. A London Season 119

XV. The Day after the Fair 134

XVI. An Old and a New Earl of Kendal 141

Part IV. In Which The Wheel Comes Full Circle

XVII. Sisterly Counsels 151

XVIII. Countess Prascovia at Home and Abroad 163

XIX. Tastes Differ 170

XX. A March that comes in like a Lion, and goes

out like a Lamb 182

XXI. April Days 192

XXn. Zenith 201

XXin. Nadir 2 1 7

XXIV. Breaking the News 230

XXV. The Lying in State 242

XXVI. "Pont des Pas Perdus" 255

XXVII. The Journey Northward 273

XXVIII. At Last 280

PAHT I.

IN WHICH THE WHEEL BEGINS TO TURN.

View mortal man, none over will you find, If the Gods force him, that can shun his fate.

Chapter I. Beginning At The Beginning

Two young men had been standing together in the morning-room of a house in Cadogan Place. The men were half-brothers, the day was the 7th of February, 1854, and the hour was 4 p.m. ; and there, when the dialogue ceased, which it did rather abruptly, and when the door had closed on the last and younger of the speakers, the elder, Colonel Henry St. John, was left alone, smoking in front of the fire.

The time and the place of this conversation having been given, it only remains for me to add that the subject of it had been debt — debts to the amount of 7801., incurred by Philip St. John, and which he was

4 VERA.

incapable of paying on this or any future day : moreover (and this complicated the affair not a little), he was at this moment, as an ensign in the Grenadier Guards, under immediate orders to leave England for the seat of war in the East.

I might enlarge in this place on his extravagance, and on the curious items which had, in a few months, swelled to such a total ; but I remember that when I used to tell stories to a bright-eyed audience in the nursery, that audience always cried out, " begin at the very beginning; " and thus it may be as well in telling a story for children of larger growth to bear this hint in mind, and so perhaps interest the reader more genuinely in the fortunes of my hero.

To begin then " at the beginning."

His father, the late Colonel the Honourable John St. John, was twice married. His first wife brought him a son within a year of their marriage, and then, after some years of bad health, died, leaving her boy Henry, the hero of this book, to the tender mercies of servants, and of a widower of whom the world prophesied that he would not be long in consoling himself. But if, by this expression, a second marriage was intended, the world for once was wrong. The Honourable John St. John enjoyed his liberty for seven years, and he might perhaps have continued to do so for seven years more, had not ruin overtaken him, and rendered it incumbent on him to look out for a wife with money. He found one — a Miss Heathcoto, a very rich, foolish, and ill-advised heiress, who at twenty- one years of age bestowed herself and her fortune on the ex-M.P. for North shire.

Not only was the Honourable John at that moment a bankrupt, but there had been some unfortunate circumstances connected with the fact, and with his career, which had made his own county what is vulgarly called " too hot " for him, and which had also had the effect of making his eldest brother's house as much too cold for him. In fact, Lord Kendal had simply refused to see his brother John again.

The story had been a bad one, albeit a common enough, or a likely enough one. It was that of a rich young widow to whom he had paid great attentions. Mrs. Lindley was his junior, and still very attractive ; yet though her jointure was large she was not the less ruled by the two passions which finally brought about her undoing, she wished to increase her worldly goods by speculation, and she wished to obtain, and if needs be buy, a connection with the peerage. What sort of a stepfather the Honourable John St. John might make to her two boys was a minor consideration, I fear, with her ; but at all events she paid dearly for any hopes she had been led to entertain by him. Pier money melted away

6 VERA.

in his larger speculations, her son's fortune was damaged, the big oaks and elmo of his park had to be cut down, and eight months later, when she had gone to Bath to retrench, she had the pleasure of reading in The Times John St. John's marriage to the Miss Heathcote aforesaid. How that Miss Heathcote came to be so much left to herself as to marry a man who had lost a fortune, a character, a seat in Parliament, and the colonelcy of a yeomanry regiment, all within a year of making her acquaintance, I know not, only Miss Heathcote was young, and silly, and as obstinate as only a very silly woman can be, and so in Paris, at the chapel of the British Embassy, in May, 1835, she embarked in matrimony with this hero. With the details of their wedded life, not always edifying, I will not weary the reader : suffice it to say that they were not such as to induce Lord Kendal to alter his opinion of his brother's conduct, and that two children were born to this couple — a daughter, born at Tours, Rue de la Scellerie, and christened Anne, and a son, also born at Tours, who received the name of Philip Heathcote.

But how had it fared in the meantime through childhood, boyhood, and youth, with Henry St. John, the son, by the first marriage ? It had fared rather hardly as a child, and after that much less ill than might have been expected, thanks to the kindness of

Lord Kendal, who, taking a fancy to the boy, had sent him to school as soon as was possible after his mother's death. That school answered well, and Lord Kendal, of course, paid for it, but when Master St. John had outgrown the care of the very excellent lady in whose house he lived for three years, a painful interregnum then occurred in his education. It was mainly spent in France, and there it was that the young gentleman acquired that proficiency in foreign tongues, which distinguished him in later life ; but there he might also have learned many other, and less desirable things, both from his father and from his father's companions, had not Lord Kendal again interfered, and again bought the right to superintend the training of the lad. Miss Heathcote's appearance on the scene about that time had given the signal, it is true, for at least a temporary reformation in his home, but Lord Kendal still forbade his brother the house, and the father and the stepmother, in spite of that condition, were quite ready to hand over to the peer the son, who was at least the presumptive heir to his title, and to the estates.

Lord Kendal was a bachelor, a bookworm, and a recluse of so inveterate a kind, that he had built up the ground-uoor windows of one side of the house lest he should be overlooked by the gardener's or the baker's boys and his life was as solitary as it was frugal. He

8 VERA.

kept a secretary, a stout cob, and a breed of mastiffs, for which Hurst Royal had long been famous : he wore a velvet cap, and smoked incessantly, and ho lived in the county, not because he knew the pig from the cow, or a mangold-wurzel from a hyacinth, but because he liked pure air, large rooms, quiet by night, and learned leisure by day. In politics he defined himself a Tory, and he was a Churchman in theory, albeit not one in practice, as he did not attend the services of the Church, having taken umbrage in early life at the bad logic of the parson, the coughing of the children, and the southernwood nosegays of the old women. Many years ago, and when his brother John had been first returned for the county, he had taken some interest in politics, but that had been only ephemeral, the conduct of John St. John had been too discreditable, the electors had been found to be venal, and the agents to have faults more serious than were those of the curates and of the charity children. He gave largely to local charities, but his temper was not the less of the kind euphuistically called difficult, namely, too difficult for its owner to manage, and very difficult for his neighbours always to steer clear of.

The secret of Lord Kendal's celibacy was a quarrel with the only woman he had ever loved. He had been wrong in it, but he had (and perhaps for that very reason) kept it up with a firmness worthy of a better cause ; and thus, when he had shut the door some years later in his brother's face, his interests and sympathies, but for the existence of Master Henry, would have begun and ended in his library.

The recluse's heart was thus sleeping, when at the age of fourteen tho boy came to stir it, and to make the old house, the stables, the park, the mere, and tho preserves ring to young voices and young steps. Lord Kendal was very indulgent to him. He would lay aside his great opus, " The Lives of Great Men," a sort of modern Plutarch, which he was preparing, to look at the contents of Henry's game-bag, and he even began to take an intelligent interest in ferrets, kingfishers, and stag-beetles, all parts of the animal creation which had never before been properly brought under his notice. He grew thus to experience some of the cares and pleasures cf fatherhood, and more of its pleasures than of its cares, for the boy was handsome, docile, truthful, and clever. There is a theory that gout and madness often skip over one generation to reappear in the next, and in that same way, while passing over the Honourable John, of impecunious memory, there really did seem to have descended to his son, the honour, the industry, and the self-control of the first, the lawyer Earl of Kendal.

Harrow, and Christ Church followed each other for

10 VERA.

Henry, and then Lord Kendal bought a commission for his nephew, and sent into the Scots Fusilier Guards as fine a young fellow as ever wore her Majesty's uniform — a very good-looking one, I may also add. A good deal above the middle height, well-knit and well-proportioned he looked very handsome in his uniform, and from under the fringe of his bearskin you saw dark blue eyes, regular features, and a very pleasant mouth. His hair was so dark that it might almost have passed for black, but that on the cheek, and above the mouth it had rich warm tints of brown. His voice, in speaking, was low and modulated, and he was naturally rather silent, though, perhaps, the least shy man in London. He explained this by saying that he had had to conquer all shyness as a lad. Much of his intercourse with his uncle had cost him an effort at first; and no wonder, since till you had gained, and knew that you had gained, his regard, Lord Kendal was indeed a very aweinspiring man. Then much of Henry's intercourse, after he grew up, with both father and stepmother, had entailed efforts of another description, and to a youth so schooled in the family, society presented no great difficulties. But he had naturally a good deal of aplomb, and very little vanity. He meant to be a good soldier, and he meant to command his regiment some day, and on another, a very distant day, to be the third Earl of Kendal, and to take his seat in the House of Lords, the representation of his county being shut, as well he knew, to his father's son for ever. In the meantime, he would take his place in the world. Alas ! there was many a steep hill to be climbed ere that future of ease and honour was won, for which he fancied that he had only to work and wait.

12 VERA.

Chapter II. Of Family Matters

Nine times out of ten it is over the Bridge of Sighs that wc pass tho narrow gulf from youth to manhood. — Lord Lytton.

Death, which solves all riddles for the man whom it overtakes, is very often apt to leave, however, a new set of them for the solution of the survivors, and when death at last cut short the career of the Honourable John St. John, it was found that he had left his brother and his eldest son joint-executors and joint-guardians to his two younger children. A family council was held at Hurst Eoyal upon this matter, and the deliberations there were both perplexing and perplexed.

John St. John's home had been fixed for the last two years at Brighton. His daughter Annie was twelve years of age, his son Philip was eleven, and their mother, who was in indifferent health, had found at Brighton a society eminently to her mind. Perhaps

OP FAMILY MATTERS. 13

inind is a strong word to apply to the mental or psychical processes of Albinia St. John, so I will rather substitute for it that of tastes, and say that her tastes lay in preachers, milliners, doctors, and toadies. The toadies she preferred to everything else, and she valued the clergymen, doctors, and milliners exactly in the ratio in which they might add toadyism to their other virtues and qualifications. In London, an Honourable, more or less, before one's name counts for nothing, but in Brighton it matters a great deal, and so when Mrs. St. John was left a widow, she proposed to herself to make her home by those shallow waters, and on that glaring promenade.

After the funeral, Lord Kendal brought himself to see his sister-in-law for the first time. It was about seven weeks after the solemnity that he took his courage in his two hands, and, in company with his nephew, he went down to Brighton, where Mrs. St. John was inexpressibly comic in her preparations for his advent.

She had an instinctive awe of the peer who was the head of the house, and who had kept her worthy husband at a distance ever since she had the benefit of his acquaintance, but she had also an instinctive preference for male society, so she armed herself for this meeting with a battery of charms, and then played them off on her deceased husband's brother with the greatest

14 veka.

vivacity. The best of it was that Lord Kendal, being a man of a very dry humour, entered immensely into the joke. He saw through all the smiles and tears, but he admired her blue eyes, her almond-shaped nails, her long cap-strings, and her still very pretty figure, with all the alacrity that was expected of him. Henry St. John winced the while under the spectacle, and congratulated himself that the peer did not see much of his stepmother, since the first evening had been passed in a mingled parade of sorrow and elegance that was very trying. On the second, Mrs. St. John's conversation became more confidential and secular, though she selected as a topic, less the many and varied experiences of her married life, than her triumphs as a young lady. Lord Kendal again listened with an air of conviction, and wore a face of amused commiseration over the early and violent deaths of several of her victims, smiling at times with the most grimly assenting smiles. From .these subjects she passed on to that of climate. " No one could believe how much one climate affected her spirits, or how much another tried her nerves." Of the climate of Brighton she had nothing but good to say, " though it was true that her poor dear husband had " (as the French express it) " permitted himself to die of it." " You ought to be very grateful to it, madam," observed Lord Kendal, making her a grave bow, and she, not perceiving the satire in the speech, said that she really was so, and that she hoped to remain where she was. His lordship then, with a dry preliminary hem ! plunged into the subject of house-rent, and then disclosed to her, rather abruptly, the results of his meditations, and of a committee of ways and means held that morning with Henry St. John and their lawyer. He began by offering a very handsome subsidy for her own wants, and by promising a still better allowance for the education of his brother's children, irrespective of the allowance which he habitually made to Captain St. John. Then came the question of establishments. It seemed that two could hardly be kept up, even on the means he was inclined to place at their disposal, so the house in Brighton must be let — perhaps, ultimately sold — and the whole party must agree to keep house together in London, and Philip must be sent to school.

Mrs. St. John's dismay when she heard of this plan was not less genuine than had been that of her stepson when it was first disclosed to him. And yet twelve hours of reflection, while they showed him that its details in practice would be even more unpleasant than was its aspect in theory, had also shown him that it was the only just and feasible arrangement. Mrs. St. John had not been left any share in the guardianship of her two children, one of the two guardians must, therefore,

16 VERA.

undertake that duty, and turn to some profitable account the money allowed by Lord Kendal for their educa +; on. They must all keep house together — there was no help for it. Annie was a nice child, and Philip might not have been less so, had not his mother done her best to spoil what she now called " the last pledge of her dear husband's affection." He was now to go to school, Lord Kendal said, and though Mrs. St. John consented, she was not very likely, if left to herself, to carry the terrible threat into execution. To London they were to go, Lord Kendal also said, and to London, accordingly, they went ; and then Philip really was sent to Marlborough, and a daily governess and masters were got for his sister.

Their home was a house in the upper end of Cadogan Place. There Henry St. John had hi 3 two rooms, and there, at the age of seven-and-twenty, he established himself, father of a fine family, as he said, besides being adviser, tutor, and major-domo to Mrs. St. John.

I know that she disliked the change, and I do not think that she liked her stepson. For some weeks she had held forth to all her acquaintances in Brighton about these plans ; how Lord Kendal had proposed this, and Lord Kendal had arranged that, and so on ; with " Lord Kendal " at every second word, and ad nauseam. That had heen very fine in its way, but the reality had by no means proved as delectable, and Henry St. John, on close acquaintance, turned out to be most aggravatingly like his uncle ; not like the Lord Kendal whom she was apt to harangue about, but like the one who did his duty, and expected other people to do theirs ; who gave pounds unasked for, and demanded a strict account of pence, who preferred deeds to words, who had a dry way of instantly clearing the argument of all sophisms, paradoxes, and cobwebs, and of expecting the plainest of " becauscs " to follow on the shortest of " whys ? "

Annie St. John loved her half-brother, and she was, perhaps, the only person in the house who did. She was not afraid of him, she perched on the arm of his chair, played tidy little tunes to him of an evening, made his breakfast, smoothed out his newspapers, and reduced the rooms to something like order, for his comfort. Annie was not pretty, but she was lively and truthful, and Mrs. St. John felt her to be rather on the enemy's side whenever, by some gross unpunctuality in appointments or payments, she was made uneasy under her stepson's eyes. Keally she tried his patience. Her obstinate coldness when they were alone, her smoothspokenness when strangers were present, her foolish flutters in men's society, her equally foolish terrors in the

18 VEEA.

streets, her untidiness and extravagance, her perpetual wrangles with her servants, her whims about her health and victuals, her palpable neglect of her daughter— all these were features which might well have worn out the patience of an older or wiser man. But Henry St. John was, as he briefly expressed it, " in for the thing," aud he would stick to it, keeping his temper in the best way he could, and removing his little sister as far as he could from the effects of her mother's folly. He walked with her often, and read for her ; and then Lord Kendal gave her horses, and they rode together, and as Annie gradually shot up into a tall, graceful girl, her love and gratitude made the home life less trying. At thirty-two years of age Captain, now Colonel, St. John, was quite a family man. People admired him, and the London mammas who had long wondered why he did not marry, settled that he would not do so now until he had seen his sister established.

Seven or eight years ago Henry St. John had, as it happened, wished to marry, and his choice had then fallen on a girl in his own county. But there the legends of his father's misconduct had pursued him. Lord Kendal had disapproved of the match, the younglady's family had been less than cordial, and finally the fair one had been false, so that the affair had ended in disappointment and pain. He did not easily get over it. lie was incapable of replacing tlie fickle idol, or of beginning again at London routs and balls all the preludes and proems of the tender passion, and before long the death of his father had thrown on his shoulders a new burden of cares. And it is the way of this wicked world that as one trouble vanishes another comes.

Henry St. John going into society in 1853-4, with his sister, was a quite heart-whole man, and Annie's social prospects were good, but then here was Philip grown up, and already on his " way through the world," if one might judge by the way that he made through his allowance.

Lord Kendal had again been paymaster in this case, and had bought a commission for the youngster in the Grenadier Guards, when, wonderful to relate, he had got through his examination. He was now launched in London life, beautiful in his own eyes, and in those of Mrs. St. John. He resembled his mother. He had her fair hair, and good blue eyes, and withal such a pretty pink and white complexion, that he would have made in that respect a prettier young lady than did poor Annie, who had inherited the olive cheek of the late honourable John. The good looks were spoilt, however, by a rather peevish expression, and by an extreme of self-consciousness that would have been fatal to Nar-

20 VERA.

cissus. And a more extravagant boy never lived. The grief of his life — its secret grief surely, for one cannot fancy even Mrs. St. John silly enough to have been its confidante — was that he was number two in the family, and that no amount of wishing would make him heir to an earldom, or make sure that through life "the pigeons would fly " (as the Germans say) "ready roast into his mouth." That was certain ; but he seemed less convinced of the truth of what might be called its minor proposition, viz. that he ought not to buy what he could not pay for, or bet sovereigns when he had but sixpences to spend. Philip had already made many attempts to solve the problem of cutting the coat wider than the cloth, and one of the most remarkable of these experiments had been made at Marlborough College when a boy of fourteen. He bought a pony. Where he got it, or what he paid for it, is not known to history; but an approximation can be made as to what it " stood him in," from the fact that he had an allowance of two shillings a week of pocket-money. Part of this sum he devoted to the pony's keep, and to the hire of the shed in which the animal was hidden. Whether a prolonged diet of squibs and toffy disagreed with it there, or whether, as is but too probable, its master forgot to feed it, I cannot say, but one day the poor starved brute, with ribs protruding, with knees tottering, and with a coat two inches long, was produced before the angry eyes of Dr. Colenso, who ordered the pony to bo shot, and the boy to be flogged.

This had unfortunately not been Philip's last adventure in horseflesh, and so it happened that on the eve of his departure for the Crimea, the sum of 780Z. was wanted to pay his lawful debts.

The debts had formed the subject of that conversation between the two brothers which is mentioned on the first page of this book. The money was to be forthcoming, the elder brother said, the people who advanced it being Colonel St. John, and Colonel Alfred Newbold, a brother officer of his own, who knew something of the family affairs, and who had just claimed for himself a right to know them.

He had just engaged himself to Annie St. John, and had given her the assurance of his love before taking a long and enforced leave of her, and of his country.

Chapter III. The Departure

Who could guess If evermore should meet those mutual eyes.

Childe Harold.

The first week of February was already gone, and by its last days Miss St. John's two brothers and her betrothed would all have sailed. Their very hours seemed numbered.

Now as I recall those February clays, all their farewells, all the steps that then left thresholds they were never again to cross, all the ashy faces, and all the unspeakable pangs of parting suffered that month through the length and breadth of Britain, my eyes, even at this distance of years, grow dim ; the pain of it all seems too fresh : so that I can hardly dwell on it.

At 4 a.m. on the morning of "Wednesday the 22nd

THE DEPARTURE. 23

of February, when, by lamplight and to the sound of their band, the Grenadier Guards poured out of St. George's barracks, Philip St. John carried one of their colours. His mother, prostrate on her face in her chamber, and praying to God through all that grey and cheerless dawning, was not the less to be pitied, or the less a mother, because she happened to bo also an unutterably foolish woman. Her darling was gone from her : when and how would he return ?

For Annie the worst was yet to come, for in that embarkation of the household troops the Grenadiers had had the pas. At 6 a.m. their train had moved out of the Waterloo Bridge station, and before the brief February day had closed, the three great steamers had received their precious freights, and then in order (first the Manilla, then the Ripon, and, two hours later, the Orinoco) they stood out into the Southampton "Water, and with the next morning's tide they were gone.

But the Scots Fusilier Guards were still in London, and to remain till the following Tuesday. Their last week was full of business and bustle. An inspection at the Wellington Barracks, where a princely mother and sister came to see a princely soldier under arms, and a dinner given to the same Prince by the members of White's, where the chairman also was a prince in lineage, and in personal beauty, if not absolutely one by title —

24 vfiM.

these, and many other engagements, filled up Colonel St. John and Colonel Newbold's last days in London.

" Apply to Lord Kendal in your first difficulty, and do not wait for a second. God bless you, dearest, take care of yourself and write to me, like a good girl," were her brother's last words to Annie St. John. What her lover's were she might not choose that I should repeat, or that you should hear ; but they were said on the stairs, and after those words the two men were gone. It was 11 p.m., and when the girl ran up to her room, she saw by the lamplight that a shower of snow was falling, and had already covered with a white sheet the steps and the threshold where their feet had last stood.