Paston Carew, millionaire and miser

Front matter

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Chapter I

MR. CLINTOK^'S HOUSEKEEPER.

Fifty years ago a grave scandal had troubled society at Beaton Brows, and Maurice . Clinton, of Clinton Hall, had been both the subject and the cause. The Clintons, who had held their lands since the time of Edward the Sixth, W^re the most notable family on the whole east side of Fellshire; and their example was looked up to as one it was righteousness for meaner folk to follow. When, therefore, young Maurice, the then holder of the estate and setter of the lines of public conduct, outraged morality and offended society by his domestic arrangements at the Hall, the smaller gentry were sore put to it to know how to order themselves between those two opposing forces — respect for virtue in the abstract and their inherited allegiance to their local lord.

What made the matter worse was the traditional honor of the family name. To be sure, there had been a black sheep here and there — a Covenanter to shame his Royalist kinsmen; a ruffian in the dislocated times of the second James, who had flouted the law, defied God and the devil alike, devoured of his flock such ewe lambs as pleased his passing fancy, taken by force such pastures as suited the lay of his land, and knocked on the head those inconvenient rebels who had opposed him; a drunkard in the Prince Regent ^s time — and so forth. B ' "

had been wise-and- well- walking made this lapse of the present head as eccentric as it was grievous.

The whole thing was inexplicable. If he loved her, why did he not marry her? If he did not love her, why did he keep her?

The men said among themselves: “ All these things are simply questions of pounds^ shillings, and pence. Let him pay so much down and wash his hands clear of the whole disreputable affair. The jade will then have another chance, and may make an honest woman of herself.

The ladies took a higher tone, and waxed wroth over the shameless immorality of the transaction. So far from so much down, buying off with a pension, and giving the jade another chance in life, they held the Penitentiary to be the only -solution of the matter. It touched them nearh^ as Christian mothers, to see Clinton Hall shut against their daughters by reason of this unhallowed connection. As the conservators of the purity of society and the virtue of their own sex, as well as the guardians of their daughters^ interests, they were indignant that the finest estate in the county should be in a manner mortgaged to a Creature who ruled as mistress under the name of housekeeper, and who, as the unmarried mother of her u^ast^^ acknowledged child insulted the collective womanhood of Beaton Brows and put its maidens to the blush.

Meanwhile, Maurice Clinton and his housekeeper, Patty Carew — the Creature in question — lived with their boy tranquilly enough under the shadow of the ancestral oaks and elms; and neither was the position legalized nor the association discontinued, nor yet was any sign of wavering nor of remorse given by those concerned. Patty Carew was just Mr. Clinton ^s housekeeper as she had been from the beginning; and if she drove about the country with her master like his wife, dressed gorgeously in velvet and furs, and had a child to whom she had to give her own name, what was that to others? Is not a man master of his own affairs? and is not hi*s house his castle?

Patty, as mistress at the Hall, made a pretty good thing by her position, financially speaking. Maurice was as easy-going in expenditure as he was loose in morals; and, provided he kept within his income and was saved all trouble, he did not fret about apportionment. He paid the bills when they were laid before him, and did not look too curiously to details. Isor did he ask how Patty was able to make so grand a show on her stipulated wages of eightyfour pounds a year — seven pounds a month, at the top of the page, with the rest of the domestics in due order, according to amount, below. Hor yet did he ask if the abnormally high salaries set against the names of these others

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— salaries higher than her own, some of them running into three figures — were duly paid over to them. Nor would he listen to the various complaints of insufliciency, in more departments than one, which some of the bolder spirits sought to make. It was Mrs. Carew^s business, he would say, not his. If they had any fault to find, let them go to her, which was not even appealing from Philip drunk to Philip sober, but rather from the lioness in the jungle to the lioness in the cave — with such consequences to follow as might be expected.

For his own amusement Maurice devoted himself to various forms of playing at art. Now he took up photography, and photographed Patty and the boy, the dogs, the horses, the Hall, the garden, the trees, and the ferneries, in every conceivable attitude and aspect. Then he set up a lathe, and turned legs for chairs and pedestals for tables till the house was filled with supernumerary supports. Then he etched on glass and marble, and then went olf to wood-carving and fretwork. He covered the walls with brackets, and stuck finials on every available point; put up engraved tablets, and let in pictured windows wherever he could; and finally, as his last resource, took to modeling in clay, which was what the Scotch call a grand ploy,"’*' and kept him occupied to the end. As few people called on him to see for themselves what he had really done, his fame grew in obscurity, as fame always does, like mushrooms in the dark; and he was credited with mastership where he had barely attained facility.

The cause of all this wasted drift-weed, where should have been good tillage and rich harvests, was the old, old story by which so many good lives have been wrecked. After Martha French had refused him, the wealthy proprietor, and married instead his cousin Humphrey, the penniless lieutenant, with only his handsome face, exiguous pay, and magnificent voice as her settlements, nothing seemed , of much worth to poor Maurice. He had made his one cast and had failed, and he had not heart enough left in him to try another. His fiber was too soft for either that tenacity of sorrow which turns a man into a pessimist, or for that resolution to overcome despair which makes him a hero. His grief soon burned itself away; but at the same time it burned away the small amount of energy he had started with from the beginning. Yet though the world had lost its attractions for him when Martha French' said him nay, he made a luxurious kind of moral nest for himself, where his soul slumbered, and conscience, intellect, ambition, and family pride went to sleep with the rest.

He had fallen in with Patty Oarew when on the fishing expedition he had made immediately after his disappointment. She was a handsome, clever, shrewd kind of girl, with larger ideas of maintenance than her father — closefisted old Joe Oarew,. the village shoe-maker — either indorsed or gratified. When the fair-haired young gentleman with the fine name and full purse made love to her in the moonlight — in chief part because she had the same name, white skin, brown hair, and rich red coloring as Martha French — she was not scared as a rnore timid, nor revolted as a more virtuous, girl would have been. She took the proposal as a matter of business, and added up the sum with mathematical precision. She thought it all out, squarely and coolly, and struck the balance — so much gain and so much loss — as if it had been the yield of a potatopatch or the eggs of the poultry-yard. She hated* her present life and its surroundings, and rebelled against the meagerness of material things. She frankly disked that miserly old father of hers, who grudged her so much as a good dress for Sundays or a pudding on week-days, and who rated her in his vigorous vernacular if she took but an hour from her work for the play natural to her years. Neither had she any fancy for perpetuating her condition by marrying one of the louts of her native village. Hence she deliberately accepted the position offered to her, trusting to the infiuence sure to be got by a shrewd, strongminded, good-tempered woman over a man of loose fiber and generous impulses not to make shipwreck in her enterprise.

Her trust was justified. Maurice Clinton was too indo- • lent, too good-natured, and in some sense too indifferent, to break the association after it was once made. He got used to Patty, would have been horribly bored had he had to replace her, was fond of the beautiful little boy he knew to be his own, and did not care the traditional two straws for the world ^s opinion. He gave up hunting as well as the kennels, and threw the M.F.H. to his neighbor the rich stockbroker, who had been made a baronet by the outgoing Ministry last year. Hence he suffered no mortification on

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the field. He declined all public offices, so was not snubbed by his brother magistrates on the Bench nor by his coguardians at the Board. He never went to the county balls, nor took part in any public receptions of Illustrious Visitors, nor came to the front anywhere. But he subscribed freely to all charities, parochial and provincial, and he did not strain the rector’s conscience by presenting himself at functions and celebrations where Christian charity invited and ecclesiastical polity forbade him. In a word, he lived the life of a luxurious recluse; grew bald, stout, silent, lethargic, drank quite as much wine as was good for him, eat a great deal more than replaced the normal waste of tissue, and frittered away his time in his various attempts at artistic expression, and in pottering about his garden and houses, where he grew roses and cultivated orchids. So things went on as they had begun, and matters were as far from marriage as they were from repudiation, when Paston hach reached his twenty-first year, and his future career had yet to be decided on.

But Maurice would have been better content had not his cousin Humphrey, with his wife and family, taken Mock- Beggar, about six miles from Clinton Hall,' and the next best place in the neighborhood. By this time old French had died and left his daughter all his handsome fortune; and Humphrey had retired from the army with the rank of colonel, debts heavy enough to swamp a three-decker, and that kind of fluent expenditure which would have emptied Pactolus itself. It gave poor Maurice a certain dull sense of pain when he first heard the news, and he rather wondered that Martha should have consented, if Humphrey liad not had more delicac3^ But beyond a still more restricted ordering of his days, a closer confinement to his own grounds, and a rarer exit into the country beyond the park, - no change was made in his life; and Patty Care w never knew the real cause of her master’s increased taciturnity and indolence.

Nor did their son Paston tell either one or the other how he had met a young fellow of his own age one day on the road — a young fellow whom he knew to be French Clinton, Cousin Humphrey’s eldest son— and how he had flung at him a vile epithet as he passed, and jeered him for the fault which was not his, but theirs. He did not tell, but he never forgot. The word stuck and rankled like a poisoned arrow, and in reality both influenced his character and modified his career — as a word can do when it falls on the sensitive soil of the forming-time of youth.

The boy had been well and carefully educated, but always at home. Partly out of kindness, to save him from the inevitable humiliations of his position, partly out of self-indulgence, because he liked to have him about the place, Maurice had refused to send the lad to school, as Patty, wiser and more mentally robust, had wished. But a childhood passed without' companionship — a boyhood destitute of comradeship, of emulation, of strife, of example — is not the best preparation for the active work of the world, nor is it the training which turns out the most capable men. Add to the moodiness and self -suppression inseparable from such a training the galling consciousness of his position when things became clear for what they were, and Prench Clinton '’s insult had its full significance; the warring in his heart between love for his mother and respect for his father; shame for her in that she should submit to such a state of things, anger against him in that he did not end that state and marry her, as he should have dofie more than twenty years ago; add the bitterness natural to a youth who has been brought up as a gentleman without the status of one, whose father does not give him his name, who can not inherit the estate which has been his home, whose mother is one no honest woman wlil associate with, and whom the very servants secretly despise; add the humiliation of knowing that he is unrecognized by the law, that he has neither name nor legal existence, that he may marry any one he will within the Table of Prohibited Degrees, so entirely is he ignored and beyond the pale; add up all these facts and thoughts into one lump sum of mental influence, and we can well understand how Paston Carew should be the most miserable youth in the world, eating out his heart in vain regrets, and fighting blindly against the fate which had struck at him so cruelly. And being miserable, he was by logical consequence disagreeable in temper and a most unpleasant companion in the house.

Evidently something ' must be done. Maurice Clinton, peace-loving and self-indulgent, was intolerant of unpleasant tempers. Patty had kept the box-seat because she had driven with a loose rein, and tickled with a flower instead of flicking the whip. Never since the first moment

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of their association had she demanded, objected, reproached. Never once had she sulked, nor wept, nor encroached, nor resented. She had taken her own wa^^ largely, but she had been careful not to cross his, nor to make her will too evident. She was only a shoe-maker’s daughter, but her intellect was as sharp and bright as a polished steel blade, and by mere force of that intellect she had herself in complete subjection. And here was her son spoiling his fortune and ruining his chances by a display of childish temper which would advance his interests no more than to kick over the board gives the victory at chess!

In vain she remonstrated and reasoned with him, preaching ever on the one same text — to make the best of things as they were, seeing that they could not now be changed. In vain his father showed certain signs which should have warned him. Paston had his mother’s tenacity, but not her philosophy, which extracted the best possible result out of evil conditions. Moody, perplexed, ill at ease, and sore-hearted, the yoiiug fellow lost his only hold on his father when he ceased to amuse and began to annoy him; and kind-hearted and indolent though he was, Maurice was too self-indulgent to bear ^ith contradiction. He liked peace, his ease, and that 4hose about him should be compliant rather than submissive. He did. not want to be either the master or the subjugator. He wished every one to be happy, but to be happy according to Ms way. He disliked having to coerce a rebellious will or to chastise an offending spirit. He equally disliked responsibility and argument. He wanted his men. and women to be as much like fat, sleek, cherished dogs as was possible; and when they refused to come to heel, he preferred to have them shot or sent away rather than to beat or even rate them.

Hence, when this youngest member of his human kennel left off the winsome ways of boyhood and put on the aggressive airs of an uncomfortable youth, his doom w^as sealed, and Maurice suddenly decided, once for all, that Clinton Hall should know the lad no more.

“You must send your son away, Patty,” he said one day to his housekeeper, after Paston had been specially aggravating:. “ He does not know his place here. He must learn it elsewhere.”

“ Yes,” said Patty, quietly; “ it is time he left home.”

This was all that was said. There were no tears and no

'remonstrances. Patty knew the exact measure of her tether, and did not strain it by so much as the pull of a liumming-bird; did not notice the coldness embodied in the pronoun “ your son — not mine/'’ nor ours/^ did not seek to justify the lad, whose discomfort had, however, somewhat of a solid groundwork laid down by themselves; did nothing whatever but acquiesce with quietness and seeming content — and then waited patiently for such arrangements as her master should think fit to make. She knew him, and could trust to his generosity, this costing him less trouble than would have done the calculations of meanness.

She was so far justified. Maurice proposed to give his son a sufficient sum of money with which he was to go out into the world, to sink or swim as chance and his personal abilities might determine. If he should sink, however, it would not be because the pecuniary life-belts with which he started were too small and weak for their ofiice. It would be merely because he had not the requisite abilUy. So the thing was arranged. Without the smallest display of emotion from any one concerned, the young fellow packed his portmanteau, pocketed his check, paid his last visit to the stables, the garden, the kennels, and the fields, shook hands with his father, kissed the cheek of his mother, bade the servants farewell, and started off in the dog-cart to the station — his back turned on Clinton Hall and, as he thought then, on Beaton Brows forever.

Chapter II

For all his dissatisfaction with things as they were, it was a hard trial to Paston when he had really-left the old home. Friendless and isolated as he was, how large and empty the world looked! He was not, as other young men, backed by a father^’s name and influence, and attached to society by the multitudinous threads of family associations and inherited friendships. He was No one — emphatically No one! What he would be in the future depended entirely on himself. Well, perhaps it were better so. Between maintaining the dignity and redeeming the shame of a

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name, the former might be the easier, but the latter was tlie more honorable. This was what he had to do; and what he set himself to do.

After the first stunning feeling of isolation and helplessness had passed. Fasten drew out the programme of his life aiid works. He would be his own creator; he would make his mark and amass a fortune. He, the son of the ancient house of Clinton, who might not bear his father's name, would make that of his dishonored mother famous. He would show them of what a man in his own right is capable; and he would go far past the “ curled darlings " who owed everything to fortune and nothing to themselves. And some day he would return to Beaton Brows, wealthy, influential, prepotent, where now he was a nameless and unplaced bastard. The stakes were worth playing for, and Paston Carew had inherited the close grip of his grandfather, old Joe, the village shoe-maker at Monkthwaite. If he had inhej’ited the velvet glove of his mother, Patty the housekeeper, his history would have been different.

Strengthened by this resolve, and always gloomy, selfcentered and unpleasant, after the young man left his father's house, where he was the son but not the heir, he virtually disappeared. He never returned — that, indeed, was in the arranged order of things; and he seldom wrote even to his mother, who did what she could to keep track of him without humiliating herself too much to her son or endangering her position with her master. When he did write he gave no detailed or satisfactory account of his doings. He always seemed to be resentful and distrustful; and he let his mother see that he hedged himself round against even her, assuredly his best friend, and the one 2)repared to do all for him that was possible without trenching on the unsecured margins of her own position.

Paston was but a short time in London, where, however, he learned more than the mere routine of business. He learned to divide the world into the two categories of the conquerors and the conquered — those who preyed and those who were preyed on; and he resolved that he would not come into the second division. He would be the first, let who might fall victim to his beak and claws, and he would have no mercy and show no ruth. When he had thoroughly learned this lesson he was offered a j)osition in India, in the service of John Company, under whose flag, as we know.

tlie j)agoda-tree was worth shaking. Here he remained for many years, and, to all appearance, shook that tree to some purp'ose; for he never applied for money, as his father had more than half expected he would, and he was known to regard ten per cent, as a mere hiding of your talents in a napkin and burying them in the ground.

At thirty years of age Paston married a charming girl — worlds too good for him, as she would have found to her sorrow had she lived long enough. She died just in time to save her happiness and preserve her illusions intact, leaving a little daughter, who now shared the heart which else would have been wholly given up to bitterness and avarice. The child became the one bright spot in her fatherms dusky life — the one human element in his arid nature — and he loved her as he had never yet loved living thing. He loved her even more than he had loved her mother, and almost as much as his schemes of social vengeance at Beaton Brows, by the way of his personal aggrandizement and overwhelming riches. For her benefit he disbursed oven willingly, though never lavishly, the money he worshiped as other men worship God — guarded as carefully as other men guard their lives.

His mind had followed the logical course. Ambition became avarice, and determination developed into unscrupulousness. “Paston Carew, the miser — that was the name by which he went in the district, where he oppressed the natives and piled up his rupees like grains of rice in a granaiy. His desire for money was as a thirst unappeasable; and his dread of spending increased with his means of getting. He was as if drunk with the lust for gold. Dominated by this one passion, he lived only to indulge it; and nothing but his Httle dauglater stood between him and the ultimate degradation of his vice. All might go bare, but she must be well provided, and while he himself sometimes suffered hunger to save a few annas, and his servants were kept just above the limits of starvation, he would send to the bazaar for toys and sweetmeats for the little maid, w^hose laughter was his sole delight and whose eyes were his only suns.

As time passed, and the babe grew to be a child whose awakening intellect needed direction, he sent her to England under the care of a lady whose terms were moderate, side by side with her programme. And when she was gone^ naught then remained but increased cruelties, and more and more amassing of the wealth which was to give him his revenge, and make her a pearl of price among men. No creature between earth and sky was so rapacious as he. No fabled dragon enveloping in its scaly folds the young and fair, the wealthy and beloved, cared less for the lives that went to make him fat than did Paston Carew for those which went to make him rich. No mythic tyrant, pleasing himself with the groans and shrieks of tortured men, was ever soothed to such sweet humors by this litany of agony as was Paston Carew, thinking of the day^’s good business when he had wrung the last piece from a helpless victim or . squeezed the gorged money-bags of an oppressor only one degree less cruel than himself. It was the passion of a hunter, the feverish madness of a torturer, something wdiich neither reason nor humanity had power to check or to nontrol.

At the old home time worked its accustomed changes. Indolent, self-indulgent Maurice Clinton died, as every one expected, of an apoplectic fit, due to the cook and winemerchant conjointly. It was the certain consequence of his manner of life, and what had been foretold half a dozen times at the least. He died suddenly; and he died intestate. He had always intended to make a will, leaving a handsome income to Patty for her life, and a good round sum to the boy, who, though unsatisfactory enough, was always his son. That was plainly his duty, and he would do it, as a gentleman should. He would be just and generous, but not lavish. He did not care to scrape the estate bare, to the prejudice of his cousin Humphrey — whom yet he had no cause specially to love — and of the boys whom Margaret French called her sons. He knew that the eldest bore her name — was French Clinton — in her honor; and he often thought within himself that he would like to see him just once, to kiss him as Jacob might have kissed the Benjamin who was RachePs but not his.

He had not a trace of jealousy, revenge, nor of spite in his character. Indeed, he was too indolent, as well as too soft, for the darker passions; and it troubled him that his successful rival had been the life-long husband of Martha French, and the father of her son^ who would eventually be his own heir — no more than to know that he was* to profit by his death. Still, he wished that he had not come to Mock-Beggar; bufc the thing was done now, and there was no help for it. And, after all, it was but natural that Humphrey should wish to be near the land he was to inherit: the land is so much to a man! Only those who inherit from a long line, direct or collateral, understand what magic lies in the idea of possession!

All the same he, Maurice, ought to take care of Patty and the boy. And he would some day. She had been a good and debonair kind of odalisque to him; and he must not leave her, like a second Nell G Wynne, to starve after he had gone.

But he simply contributed so many cart-loads of good intentions to the infernal pavement below; for year by year passed, and the day and hour of consolidation never came. If Patty had not been wise in her generation — if she had not made her hay while the sun shone, and lined her nest wdiile feathers were flying abroad — on the death of her master she would have come to cruel ends. She would havebeen turned adrift without a penny to call her own ; for outraged respectability has a heavy hand when it has fairly seized the whip, and those who have trodden on Mrs. Grundy^s toes must look out for kicks on their heels when the ranks '’bout face. But Patty Carew had calculated,^ and foreseen from the first day to the last, and when the end came, and she had to leave in unhonored haste and bitter scorn the house where for thirty fruitful years she had been supreme and all-powerful, she left with so many secret thousands well invested as secured her a luxurious maintenance for the remainder of her days.

When she left she vanished into space, and Beaton Brows neither knew her retreat nor speculated on her fate. Certainly odd rumors every now and then floated up like fantastic shapes of miasmatic clouds, now of her abounding prosperity, now of her abject degradation. She had been met driving a luxurious equipage in the Park, and she had been seen by the door of a gin-shop. And each witness was as positive as the other, and as exact. No one discovered her in the middle-aged but still well-preserved wife of that young teacher of foreign tongues — that M. Richard whohad found her such a sympathetic companion in the lodgings where he starved in the garret and she lived knee-deep in clover in the drawing-room — that smart young advent-

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urer whose wits were his bank, whereof the dividends were neither regular nor bountiful.