The monarch of Mincing-Lane : a novel

Front matter

THE

MONARCH OF MINCING-LANE.

THE

Chapter I. A Lover’s Quarrel

Towarps the lower end of Park-lane there are a number of small, narrow, roundfronted houses—hiyou residences they are called by the auctioneers—which look as if their balconies had been squeezed out. of

them by sudden pressure. At a window overlooking one of those miniature balconies stood, on the forenoon of a certain day in February, two young people, who did not seem to be in an amiable frame of mind. They looked out, in a silent and absent way, on the strange glare of wintry sunshine that lay over the familiar scene

VOI B uy THE MONARCH OF MINCING-LANE.

before them; but they did not seem to notice the peculiar effect it produced. At this moment, indeed, Hyde-park was transfigured ; and any one less intent upon personal affairs could not fail to have been struck by its appearance. Above the tall houses of Knightsbridge and Kensington Gore, that lay in a faintly blue shadow, there was, instead of the sun, a confused mass of: shifting golden mist; and this strong centre of light shone over the broad slopes of the Park, which were intensely ereen with melted hoar-frost, and sent a pale radiance to gleam whitely on the ranges of buildings lying west of the Marble Arch. Down in front of Park-lane the leafless trees stood dark and clear in this bewildering light; and you could see through them the arm and shield of the Achilles statue; while around the Serpentine the masses of elms were of a pale blue; and that again became a dusky purple among the close trees of Kensington-gardens. The strong, shifting, yellow glare seemed to be the light of the coming Spring fighting with the retreating fog of the Winter; the atmosphere had grown warm and moist, and the grass was glittering with the gleaming drops of the melted rime; while down by Apsley House a man was wheeling along a barrow full of primroses and violets imbedded in moss, and you could buy a pennyworth of the sweet new life that was beginning to throb and swell in the clear country air, far out beyond the town.

The elder of these two persons was a young man of about twenty-four, whom you would at first sight have taken for a Spaniard. But with his dark complexion, black moustache, and somewhat haughty bearing, he showed an English height of stature and breadth of shoulder, and exhibited an unmistakably English bluntness and directness of manner. He was handsome rather than good-looking — well-formed, strong, with a clear dark eye, a square intellectual forehead, and a profusion of dark and wavy hair. There was strength in his appearance rather than grace; and there was at times perceptible in the reticence of his

A THE MONARCH OF MINCING-LANE.

manhood a trace of wilfulness in speech or gesture that was clearly juvenile, and spoke of a somewhat uncurbed youth. He was dressed fashionably, but rather neghgently; and had a riding-switch in his hand.

When two young people stare persistently at nothing, look morose and keep near each other without uttering a word, they are lovers and have fallen out.

His companion, who had now sat down at the opposite side of the window, had apparently, like himself, been out riding. She still wore her habit ; and her hat lay beside his on the table behind them. In fact, they had just returned from a canter in the Row, where, it is presumable, the quarrel had arisen.

She was certainly not much his junior ; and there was a mature womanly grace and ease about her figure and manner. She was not lovely. Men might have said of her, ‘Handsome sort of woman; women would have said of her, ‘ Plain—decidedly plain. But strong men, and intellectual men, have fallen in love with plain women;

and, indeed, those women who figure in history as having enchained and fascinated, beyond power of protest or resistance, the greatest men of their time, have almost invariably been plain. Nor has it always happened that they have possessed compensations for their want of personal beauty in the way of wit, ability, or special accomplishments. But since ever history began to be minute, we know that the mistresses of great statesmen and the loves of great poets have been, as a rule, the reverse of beautiful; and in our own times, in our own small circles, there are few of us who have not met some plain commonplace sort of woman who somehow exercises a nameless fascination over all the men around her, drawing-room, wins easy victories over the and, in the poor competition of the heads of far more beautiful women. Perhaps Miss Thormanby, who now sat twisting a corner of her glove, did not possess this power of general fascination; but she had certainly taken captive the man who stood beside her, and who so frequently rebelled, in a bitter way, against his slavery. Yet he did not wish to break the chains that bound him. Had he so resolved, he had a resolute will that would have sent him into Lopez’s army or into the Australian bush for half-a-dozen years, and so completed his freedom. But to a young man, however dissatisfied he may be with the woman with whom ill-luck has made him fall in love, there is something very sad in relinquishing all the future he had constructed for them both. He has a vague idea that he will never again love a woman as he loves this one. If he destroys the beautiful world that love bas painted for him in the distance, it will never, he thinks, be possible to build it up again. Thus he would rather struggle on with those weaknesses of character which he perceives in his companion, and strive to improve her and raise her to that higher standard of womanhood which is his ideal. That he should ever undertake such a task, shows what a peculiar film love may cast over the eyes of the clearest-headed men.

A LOVER'S QUARREL. ri

Mary Thormanby had a handsome figure and a good presence. Her features were rather irregular; her complexion pale and a trifle dull; her eyes large, gray, and fine; her hair flaxen. Her face generally was cold, and seemed to want flexibility; while her aquiline nose, her thin lips, and a certain gait she had gave one a notion that she was unimpressionable, resolute, and proud. Ifsuch was the expression of her general appearance, her manner speedily contradicted it; for nothing could exceed the facile complaisance of her bearing, especially to strangers. She had a trick of making friends with one in a few seconds; and she seemed to bring herself, by the exercise of a swift, keen, intellectual sympathy, immediately en rapport with the person addressed. It was then that her eyes grew full of light and intelligence, and banished the apparent coldness of her face. Her teeth, too, it should be mentioned, were beautifully white and regular; and when, with this access of sympathy brightening the big gray eyes, she chose to smile and disclose the nut-white teeth, the transformation of her face was perfect, and you would regard her henceforth as quite a different creature from the impassive reserved woman who had entered the room with the cold dignity of an empress.

‘You are romantic, and I am not: that is all,’ she said at last, to her companion, Philip Drem.

There was a touch of indifference or resignation in her voice, as though she had ceased to care any longer about the matter in dispute.

‘Yes, he answered, ‘I suppose I am romantic: I fancied that women were instinctively truthful and sincere.’

‘You carry your sincerity to the verge of rudeness,’ she said calmly.

‘ Perhaps.’

There was an interval of dead silence, only broken by the rumbling of the carriages down below, as they rolled past towards Piccadilly or, conversely, up to Oxford-street. The glare of yellow sunlight still hung over Kensington and fell on the wet green slopes of the Park and on the white fronts of the houses in the north. At length she was provoked into speaking, and said sharply,

‘The fact is, you have been a spoiled boy all your life, and you not only expect to have everything you want, but you expect that every one will be to you just what you want them to be.’

‘That is asking no sacrifice from you,’ he said, with what was remarkably like a sneer; ‘you can be anything to anybody. You can persuade the greatest stranger that you have been of his or her way of thinking all your life. You are too clever to be sincere. You persuade yourself that all this pretence is kindness to the people whom you meet; but it is only an intellectual feat that you are proud of, and you forget that it is deception as well. Why, the way in which you flattered and cajoled that hideous old woman O’Mallory—’

‘Lady O’Mallory was a friend of my parents in Ireland,’ said Miss Thormanby, not caring to take any notice of what he had said about herself, ‘and I ought to do my best to please her for their sakes. If you have no respect for me, at least respect those who are older than yourself—’

‘Respect the O’Mallory !’ he cried, with a laugh.

‘I say you are merely a spoiled boy. It is the same now as when we first began to know you down in Surrey. Then there was nobody in the house—nobody in the world — but Master Philip. No one was thought of but Master Philip; and even when your papa came down from town, he had no authority in his own house. Master Philip strolled about with his gun, and amused himself; and luncheon, and dinner, and visitors were alike expected to wait on Master Philip. A foolish step-mother was the worst of the lot; and looked upon herself as only too happy if her darling boy would accept the daintiest bit of everything at table. She was delighted to wait upon him herself; and would have gone out shooting with him, to load his gun, I daresay, if she only knew how. Then Master Philip goes to Cambridge, and is nearly expelled for throwing a man into the river, and kicking his hat in after him. But all at once Master Philip gets into some political clique, begins to study diligently, takes his degree, and comes up to London a fierce Radical. Nothing will do for him but that every man and woman he meets must be honest— that is to say, rude and vulgar—and you are contemptible if you do not nourish great schemes for the future of streetscavengers, and costermongers, and such people. To tell you the truth, Philip, I begin to feel your latest hobby a little tiresome. If politics only mean that you are to become suspicious of your friends, and disagreeable in your manner, I prefer letting them alone. When I have been privileged to meet representatives of the classes about whom you are so anxious, I have generally found them eager to get half-a-crown by begging rather than by work —others very ready to pocket a spoon or a ey THE MONARCH OF MINCING-LANE.

brooch when they have been mending the water-pipes or painting the house—others systematically cheating you in the addition of their bills; and I really don’t see why one should so trouble oneself about their political privileges and position. They won't thank you for your disinterested efforts-— which seem to me to consist chiefly in insulting your friends; and so I wish you would assume some other character.’

‘You have the nimblest wit of any woman I know,’ he said, provoked into a erim smile by her rather vehement speech. ‘You are quite aware that you are fencing with the question; and that politics have remarkably little to do with your habit of making-believe. Why do I protest against your constant hypocrisy—if I must speak plainly? I want to show you the absurdity of all this pretence, that answers no end whatever. J want you to be honest. And you indignantly deny that you are guilty of anything but common courtesy; and then the next minute you meet some hideous old fool of a woman—’

‘That is Lady O’Mallory, I presume,’ she interjected.

‘Or some man to whom you have been scarcely introduced; and you talk to the one as if she were your only friend, and to the other as if you were engaged to him. You ought to have more self-respect than to play the hypocrite in order to amuse these people—’

‘Really, Philip, your Radical politics are teaching you charming language. However, plain-speaking, as you suggest, must be such a novelty to me, that I ought to welcome it. I wish, though, you would be a little more consistent im your censures. You say | ought to be more honest; I should appear to be what I am; I should show everybody what I thmk. Yet you yourself are constantly charging me with having degraded views of life—with caring for nothing beyond amusement, dress, and the talk of society. I have no grand aspirations; I only live for my own gratification; I am selfish—and so on, and so on, and so on. If my true nature is so very bad, and mean, and petty, and contemptible, is it not better that I should conceal it? IfI am so selfish, ought I not to pretend to take an interest in other people and their affairs? Being so poor, and commonplace, and unsympathetic a creature, surely my hypocrisy becomes a virtue; and I wish that you, too, would become so much of a hypocrite as to lessen your rudeness, and treat me with a little of the respect which you would show to any stranger.’

With that she drew herself up to her full height and walked across the room to the table on which her hat and ridingwhip lay.

Philip shrugged his shoulders.

‘T wish you would treat me with a little of the profuse affection you show to every stranger!’ he muttered. But she did not hear him.

Then she took her hat and whip into her hand, gathered up her dress with the other, and, with her pale clear-cut English face looking pitiless and proud, said coldly,

‘T must change my dress for luncheon ; uncle and aunt will be home presently. Will you stay ?’

‘No, thank you.’

‘Do you dine with us this evening, then ?’

‘IT scarcely remember whether I promised or not. But since you are in so amiable a mood, perhaps I had better dine at the club. I hope you won't refuse to shake hands with me.’

In this way they bade each other good-bye; he went downstairs, and out into the street.

‘Why can’t I leave her alone,’ he said to himself, as he walked down to Piccadilly, ‘and let her be as God made her? If I could get her to assume sincerity, it would still be an assumption. As it is, she has many good qualities; and sometimes exhibits a flash of sincerity that blinds one like lightning, so sudden and startling it is. Perhaps it is startling because it is unexpected.’

There was a hard smile on his face, begotten of this thought, as he walked into his club in St. James’s - street, went into the reading-room, and looked at the second edition of the Times. He did not see anything of the type before him; or, at least, he had no sort of notion what the words meant. He was regarding mechanically a telegram which told of another despairing effort of Austria to pacify her incorrigible Czechs, but he was thinking of Mary Thormanby and her uncle and aunt.

‘She knows well why the old Major and his vulgar wife are so delighted to see me at dinner. She knows well what the proposal about a quiet little rubber after dinner means; and she knows that though the Major and I pay in threepenny points, it is guinea points that have to be paid afterwards. She understands the Major’s little joke which always puts her and me as partners, while he and mother Delaney settle down to the plucking of their conscious victim. What an amiable young man they must consider me, thus to sit and lose sovereigns for the sake of playing

A LOVER’S QUARREL. lige with their niece! And Mary knows that I see their coarse and obvious game; and I have caught her clear gray eyes glancing furtively at me at times, and I have seen a quick blush of shame covering her cheeks, as that awful old woman loudly claimed two by honours when Mary herself had played ace and queen. Yet they are content to play the open trick night after night; and it is only Mary who is sometimes driven by shame to protest against it. “Bless me!” says the fat old woman, with a gigele of wonder, “what a bad mimory Ihave! Sure I thought I played fea ?

the queen He became aware at this moment that some one else wanted to look down the column of latest intelligence; so he moved an inch or two to one side, and recalled himself so far as to glance at the news. One of the paragraphs was as follows :

Sr. Nazairu, Feb. 8.—The brig Georgette, from Martinique to St. Nazaire, reports the total loss, in longitude 18° 10’, of the ship

VOL. I. Cc

18 TIE MONARCH OF MINCING-LANE.

Westmoreland, Captain Seaford, from Jamaica to London. The Westmoreland was caught in a heavy gale, and foundered, with all hands on beard.

‘So that is the end of poor Tom Seaford,’ said Philip Drem, as he slowly left the room, ‘the kindly fellow, with the dark-blue eyes and the curly brown hair, who used to take me on his knee, and empty his pockets of all sorts of wonderful toys, and sing those famous old ballads. I must go along to my father and ask what he is going to do for Tom’s widow and child. He must do something for them; for I fancy he treated poor old Seaford very hardly when he was alive.’

The club-porter called a hansom; the young man stepped inside, and bade the cabman drive to Mincing-lane.

Chapter II. In Mincing-lane

WHEN Shanghai first became the El Dorado of English commerce, and boys at school were taught to long for ten years’ penal servitude in China, as a sort of purgatory whence they should reach the modern heaven of unlimited wealth, Richard Drem went out to this land of promise, and found it amazingly fruitful. His constitution could stand any amount of heat—a fact which his fellow-clerks used to say promised well for his comfort in the next world. He was never guilty of any extravagance or folly; he was found to be an adept in bargaining with natives who are the greatest liars in the world, for he encountered them with their own weapons; and so pertinaciously did he stick to business, that his becoming a partner, his setting up a firm for himself, and his gradually extending his commercial relations and forming agencies in all parts of the world, were steps of a career which followed each other with amazing swiftness. But while Richard Drem was yet making his way, there arrived in Shanghai a Spaniard named Esturiz, with his only daughter. What had tempted this old man, who was apparently poor and friendless, to seek his living in this remote climate, no one knows; nor can one well understand how Richard Drem first conceived the notion of marrying a girl who was penniless. There is reason to believe that the Sefiorita Anna was led to sacrifice herself, in order to gain for her unsuspecting father a situation in the house of which Richard Drem was now a junior partner. At all events they were married; and the young and handsome Spanish girl died in giving birth to a son. When Richard Drem, having founded the ereat firm of Drem & Co. in Yokohama, Canton, Melbourne, and Calcutta, returned

IN MINCING-LANE. yal to London, Philip was a small boy of six or seven years of age.

Richard Drem was now a very important man. He was the luminous head of all the Drem family; and he was content to earn the pleasure of bestowing alms on his poor relations, if only they would keep at a distance, and not disgrace him before his London friends. Sometimes the unconscionable perversity of human nature made him rebel against the charity he gave, and the adulation that he reaped; and I believe that at such times he almost wished himself without a farthing, in order to spite these pests of claimants.

All his relations were not equally poor. There were the Seafords, for example, a Devonshire family, who were his cousins. It was shortly after his return to England that Richard Drem discovered that his cousin Tom Seaford, who had always been a roving and merry-hearted fellow, rather wild and given to all manner of mad pranks, had some years before completed the list of his offences by marrying a young yap THE MONARCH OF MINCING-LANE.

Devonshire girl, the daughter of a fisherman, or some other obscure person. Mr. Drem took it upon him to lecture Tom. His cousin, never very cautious in his language, not only spoke up for his wife, but added some phrases about Richard Drem which the latter never forgot or forgave. From that moment Tom Seaford became the object of Richard Drem’s bitterest enmity, which soon showed itself in stirring up disturbances between Tom and his father, a weak old man, who was at last induced to forbid his son to come near the house. The rest of the story we need not enter into at present.

On this February afternoon Mr. Drem was seated in his private room, on the firstfloor of the Mincing-lane offices. He was a short broad-built man, with a red irreeularly-shaped face, and a mass of short thick white hair, that seemed to stand on end as it rose straight from his forehead. He was dressed in black, and he wore a snow-white neck-cloth.

Downstairs, as the early twilight made

IN MINCING-LANE. 25 the long mahogany-desked apartment look dusky and gray, there was profound silence, broken only by a cough or the scratching ofa pen. The tea-, sugar-, coffec-, cotton-, jute-, and other brokers (who are the floats that tell the commercial angler when his bait has taken) had ceased to rush in frantically with bids; the business of the day was practically over; and a gentle state of coma had fallen over most of the clerks. The young gentleman nearest the door, whose papa had paid 500/ to have him placed on that tall stool, and whose business it was to answer inquiries, pay sugarduties, and carry cheques to the ship-brokers, was pretending to add up the figures of certain landing-accounts, but was in reality busy in trying to sketch the face of a popular actress on his blotting-paper. He was thus engaged when the door of the office was gently opened, and a small slight woman, dressed in black, with a young girl by her side, entered.

She inquired timidly whether Mr. Drem were within. The young gentleman was striving desperately to recall the likeness of the actress, which an unlucky touch at the end of the nose had somehow spoiled. The small woman with the gentle face, the singularly dark-blue eyes, and prematurely eray hair, again asked, in a timid way, if she could see Mr. Drem. The young gentleman threw down his pen, turned round, blushed violently when he saw, or fancied he saw, two ladies waiting on him, and then in a hasty manner said, ‘ Certainly,’ opened the small door, and showed them upstairs.

They had no sooner gone upstairs than it suddenly occurred to the young gentleman that he had been guilty of the serious crime of sending some one upstairs unannounced; and he returned to his desk with a qualm at his heart. Down came the head-clerk from the other end of the office.

‘Who are these people?’ he asked coldly.

‘I don’t know, sir, stammered the youth. ‘I forgot—’

‘Then don’t forget yourself so far again.’

As he was going away he caught sight

IN MINCING-LANE. 5)

of the actress’s profile on the blotting-paper. He said nothing; but he quietly took up the sheet, tore it into fragments, threw them in the fire, and then gravely walked back to his desk. The young gentleman began to think that commerce was a despicable thing, and that his father should have sent him into the army or the church.

Mr. Ewart, the head-clerk, had no sooner returned to his desk than there came into the office Mr. Arthur Drem, Mr. Richard Drem’s nephew, a small lean young man, with fair hair and gray eyes. His desk was opposite that of Mr. Ewart; and, as he hung up his hat, he said to the head-clerk :

‘Seen the second edition of the Times ?’

‘No; Mr. Drem is not done with it yet.’

‘The Westmoreland has gone down.’

‘The Westmoreland!’

‘Yes; every nail in her has gone to the bottom.’

‘Thank God! said Mr. Ewart piously.

‘And every man too.’

‘Ah, I am sorry for that. But the wreck is a great relief to me in the present. state of the market.—Mr. Smith, be good enough to see what invoices you have by the Westmoreland, and give me a note of the quantities.’

Meanwhile the two strangers had gone upstairs, and paused irresolutely on the landing. One of them was a small middleaged woman, whose soft brown hair, visible underneath her black bonnet, was streaked with gray. She had a pretty, rather sad face, with deep-blue eyes, a smooth forehead, and a fair complexion, somewhat tanned and freckled by the sun, even now in winter. She was dressed plainly and neatly in black. The other was evidently her daughter, and showed her mother’s prettiness transferred to the spring-time of youth and health. She was too young to be admired as a handsome woman; for there was an evidently girlish timidity in her manner and in the soft lght of her eyes. Dark-blue eyes they were—of that intense, almost violet, blue which is at once so rare and so beautiful. She had over her

IN MINCING-LANE. nad white forehead masses of wavy brown hair that had a gleam of gold in it; and the tender oval girlish face had a healthy pink glow, as bright, and yet as delicate, as the blush on a white sea-shell. It was a pretty face even in its soft immaturity—a pure trustworthy face, that only wanted time to give it repose and calm. It was in the eyes that the girlishness of Lilian Seaford’s a halffrightened bird-like look that gave to the daughter chiefly showed itself whole face an expression of innocence and youth, that spoke of the time when the soul is not yet familiar with the carth, and finds in all new things a wonder and a delight.

Mrs. Seaford tapped gently at the glassdoor in front of her.

‘Come in,’ said a harsh and reedy voice.

She opened the door. Mr. Drem looked up from his desk with astonishment in his small eyes. When in that decorous office had two women unannounced ever presented themselves before him? He did not rise ; he merely continued his stare, apparently waiting for them to state the object of such an unprecedented intrusion.

‘I called, sir, to ask if you had heard anything yet of the Westmoreland,’ said the small woman with the timid voice and the eray hair.

‘You've come to the wrong place,’ he said curtly; ‘you must go to the ship-brokers.’ With that he turned to his desk, as much as to say: ‘Go to the ship-brokers, or the devil, only don’t bother me.’

‘I have been to the ship-brokers, sir,’ she said meekly.

‘And if they can’t tell you anything about the ship, how do you think I can?” he asked with another stare.

‘T thought it possible you might have received some news,’ she said. ‘I came up from Devon six weeks ago to meet my husband; and I have waited to hear something about the ship, and I cannot hear anything.’

Richard Drem now turned himself round in his chair.

‘Are you then—’

‘Captain Seaford is my husband, sir.’

IN MINCING-LANE. 29

She spoke in a low tone, as if fearing to offend the great merchant, whom she had been taught to fear.

He, in turn, regarded her from head to foot, glanced at her daughter, and then said coldly,

‘Q, indeed. Pray sit down; and I will ask about the Westmoreland.’

He whistled down a tube for Mr. Ewart, who forthwith presented himself.

‘How is it that these — ladies — have been sent up in this way ?’

‘Mistake, sir, of Mr. Mowbray.’

‘Kick the young fool out of the place if he does it agaim—do you hear? What about this ship—this Westmoreland? Have you heard anything of her? She is from Jamaica—eh, ch? From Jamaica, isn’t she ?”

‘The Westmoreland is—

Somehow the man, happening to glance at the woman whose eyes were fixed upon him, paused. There flashed upon him a suspicion as to the object of her visit.

‘Well, well ? said Richard Drem impatiently, apparently wishing the whole of them were where the Westmoreland lay at that moment. ‘What is it?—what is it ? Have you heard of the Westmoreland ?’

The woman’s frightened eyes had noticed his hesitation.

‘You have heard,’ she said, advancing a step towards him. ‘Where is—the ship ?”