XVIII. New Companions
Clive used to give droll accounts of the young disciples at Gandish’s, who were of various ages and conditions, and in whose company the young fellow took his place with that good temper and gaiety which have seldom deserted him in life, and have put him at ease wherever his fate has led him. He is, in truth, as much at home in a fine drawing-room as in a public-house parlour; and can talk as pleasantly to the polite mistress of the mansion, as to the jolly landlady dispensing her drinks from her bar. Not one of the Gandishites but was after a while well inclined to the young fellow; from Mr. Chivers, the senior pupil, down to the little imp Harry Hooker, who knew as much mischief at twelve years old, and could draw as cleverly as many a student of five-and-twenty; and Bob Trotter, the diminutive fag of the studio, who ran on all the young men’s errands, and fetched them in apples, oranges, and walnuts. Clive opened his eyes with wonder when he first beheld these simple feasts, and the pleasure with which some of the young men partook of them. They were addicted to polonies; they did not disguise their love for Banbury cakes; they made bets in ginger-beer, and gave and took the odds in that frothing liquor. There was a young Hebrew amongst the pupils, upon whom his brother-students used playfully to press ham sandwiches, pork sausages, and the like. This young man (who has risen to great wealth subsequently, and was bankrupt only three months since) actually bought cocoa-nuts, and sold them at a profit amongst the lads. His pockets were never without pencil-cases, French chalk, garnet brooches, for which he was willing to bargain. He behaved very rudely to Gandish, who seemed to be afraid before him. It was whispered that the Professor was not altogether easy in his circumstances, and that the elder Moss had some mysterious hold over him. Honeyman and Bayham, who once came to see Clive at the studio, seemed each disturbed at beholding young Moss seated there (making a copy of the Marsyas). “Pa knows both those gents,” he informed Clive afterwards, with a wicked twinkle of his Oriental eyes. “Step in, Mr. Newcome, any day you are passing down Wardour Street, and see if you don’t want anything in our way.” (He pronounced the words in his own way, saying: “Step id, Bister Doocob, ady day idto Vordor Street,” etc.) This young gentleman could get tickets for almost all the theatres, which he gave or sold, and gave splendid accounts at Cavendish’s of the brilliant masquerades. Clive was greatly diverted at beholding Mr. Moss at one of these entertainments, dressed in a scarlet coat and top-boots, and calling out, “Yoicks! Hark forward!” fitfully to another Orientalist, his younger brother, attired like a midshipman. Once Clive bought a half-dozen of theatre tickets from Mr. Moss, which he distributed to the young fellows of the studio. But, when this nice young man tried further to tempt him on the next day, “Mr. Moss,” Clive said to him with much dignity, “I am very much obliged to you for your offer, but when I go to the play, I prefer paying at the doors.”
Mr. Chivers used to sit in one corner of the room, occupied over a lithographic stone. He was an uncouth and peevish young man; for ever finding fault with the younger pupils, whose butt he was. Next in rank and age was M’Collop, before named: and these two were at first more than usually harsh and captious with Clive, whose prosperity offended them, and whose dandified manners, free-and-easy ways, and evident influence over the younger scholars, gave umbrage to these elderly apprentices. Clive at first returned Mr. Chivers war for war, controlment for controlment; but when he found Chivers was the son of a helpless widow; that he maintained her by his lithographic vignettes for the music-sellers, and by the scanty remuneration of some lessons which he gave at a school at Highgate;—when Clive saw, or fancied he saw, the lonely senior eyeing with hungry eyes the luncheons of cheese and bread, and sweetstuff, which the young lads of the studio enjoyed, I promise you Mr. Clive’s wrath against Chivers was speedily turned into compassion and kindness, and he sought, and no doubt found, means of feeding Chivers without offending his testy independence.
Nigh to Gandish’s was, and perhaps is, another establishment for teaching the art of design—Barker’s, which had the additional dignity of a life academy and costume; frequented by a class of students more advanced than those of Gandish’s. Between these and the Barkerites there was a constant rivalry and emulation, in and out of doors. Gandish sent more pupils to the Royal Academy; Gandish had brought up three medallists; and the last R.A. student sent to Rome was a Gandishite. Barker, on the contrary, scorned and loathed Trafalgar Square, and laughed at its art. Barker exhibited in Pall Mall and Suffolk Street: he laughed at old Gandish and his pictures, made mincemeat of his “Angli and Angeli,” and tore “King Alfred” and his muffins to pieces. The young men of the respective schools used to meet at Lundy’s coffee-house and billiard-room, and smoke there, and do battle. Before Clive and his friend J. J. came to Gandish’s, the Barkerites were having the best of that constant match which the two academies were playing. Fred Bayham, who knew every coffee-house in town, and whose initials were scored on a thousand tavern doors, was for a while a constant visitor at Lundy’s, played pool with the young men, and did not disdain to dip his beard into their porter-pots, when invited to partake of their drink; treated them handsomely when he was in cash himself; and was an honorary member of Barker’s academy. Nay, when the guardsman was not forthcoming, who was standing for one of Barker’s heroic pictures, Bayham bared his immense arms and brawny shoulders, and stood as Prince Edward, with Philippa sucking the poisoned wound. He would take his friends up to the picture in the Exhibition, and proudly point to it. “Look at that biceps, sir, and now look at this—that’s Barker’s masterpiece, sir, and that’s the muscle of F. B., sir.” In no company was F. B. greater than in the society of the artists, in whose smoky haunts and airy parlours he might often be found. It was from F. B. that Clive heard of Mr. Chivers’ struggles and honest industry. A great deal of shrewd advice could F. B. give on occasion, and many a kind action and gentle office of charity was this jolly outlaw known to do and cause to be done. His advice to Clive was most edifying at this time of our young gentleman’s life, and he owns that he was kept from much mischief by this queer counsellor.
A few months after Clive and J. J. had entered at Gandish’s, that academy began to hold its own against its rival. The silent young disciple was pronounced to be a genius. His copies were beautiful in delicacy and finish. His designs were for exquisite grace and richness of fancy. Mr. Gandish took to himself the credit for J. J.’s genius; Clive ever and fondly acknowledged the benefit he got from his friend’s taste and bright enthusiasm and sure skill. As for Clive, if he was successful in the academy he was doubly victorious out of it. His person was handsome, his courage high, his gaiety and frankness delightful and winning. His money was plenty and he spent it like a young king. He could speedily beat all the club at Lundy’s at billiards, and give points to the redoubted F. B. himself. He sang a famous song at their jolly supper-parties: and J. J. had no greater delight than to listen to his fresh voice, and watch the young conqueror at the billiard-table, where the balls seemed to obey him.
Clive was not the most docile of Mr. Gandish’s pupils. If he had not come to the studio on horseback, several of the young students averred, Gandish would not always have been praising him and quoting him as that professor certainly did. It must be confessed that the young ladies read the history of Clive’s uncle in the Book of Baronets, and that Gandish jun., probably with an eye to business, made a design of a picture, in which, according to that veracious volume, one of the Newcomes was represented as going cheerfully to the stake at Smithfield, surrounded by some very ill-favoured Dominicans, whose arguments did not appear to make the least impression upon the martyr of the Newcome family. Sandy M’Collop devised a counter picture, wherein the barber-surgeon of King Edward the Confessor was drawn, operating upon the beard of that monarch. To which piece of satire Clive gallantly replied by a design, representing Sawney Bean M’Collop, chief of the clan of that name, descending from his mountains into Edinburgh, and his astonishment at beholding a pair of breeches for the first time. These playful jokes passed constantly amongst the young men of Gandish’s studio. There was no one there who was not caricatured in one way or another. He whose eyes looked not very straight was depicted with a most awful squint. The youth whom nature had endowed with somewhat lengthy nose was drawn by the caricaturists with a prodigious proboscis. Little Bobby Moss, the young Hebrew artist from Wardour Street, was delineated with three hats and an old-clothes bag. Nor were poor J. J.’s round shoulders spared, until Clive indignantly remonstrated at the hideous hunchback pictures which the boys made of his friend, and vowed it was a shame to make jokes at such a deformity.
Our friend, if the truth must be told regarding him, though one of the most frank, generous, and kind-hearted persons, is of a nature somewhat haughty and imperious, and very likely the course of life which he now led and the society which he was compelled to keep, served to increase some original defects in his character, and to fortify a certain disposition to think well of himself, with which his enemies not unjustly reproach him. He has been known very pathetically to lament that he was withdrawn from school too early, where a couple of years’ further course of thrashings from his tyrant, old Hodge, he avers, would have done him good. He laments that he was not sent to college, where if a young man receives no other discipline, at least he acquires that of meeting with his equals in society and of assuredly finding his betters: whereas in poor Mr. Gandish’s studio of art, our young gentleman scarcely found a comrade that was not in one way or other his flatterer, his inferior, his honest or dishonest admirer. The influence of his family’s rank and wealth acted more or less on all those simple folks, who would run on his errands and vied with each other in winning the young nabob’s favour. His very goodness of heart rendered him a more easy prey to their flattery, and his kind and jovial disposition led him into company from which he had been much better away. I am afraid that artful young Moss, whose parents dealt in pictures, furniture, gimcracks, and jewellery, victimised Clive sadly with rings and chains, shirt-studs and flaming shirt-pins, and such vanities, which the poor young rogue locked up in his desk generally, only venturing to wear them when he was out of his father’s sight or of Mr. Binnie’s, whose shrewd eyes watched him very keenly.
Mr. Clive used to leave home every day shortly after noon, when he was supposed to betake himself to Gandish’s studio. But was the young gentleman always at the drawing-board copying from the antique when his father supposed him to be so devotedly engaged? I fear his place was sometimes vacant. His friend J. J. worked every day and all day. Many a time the steady little student remarked his patron’s absence, and no doubt gently remonstrated with him, but when Clive did come to his work he executed it with remarkable skill and rapidity; and Ridley was too fond of him to say a word at home regarding the shortcomings of the youthful scapegrace. Candid readers may sometimes have heard their friend Jones’s mother lament that her darling was working too hard at college: or Harry’s sisters express their anxiety lest his too rigorous attendance in chambers (after which he will persist in sitting up all night reading those dreary law books which cost such an immense sum of money) should undermine dear Henry’s health; and to such acute persons a word is sufficient to indicate young Mr. Clive Newcome’s proceedings. Meanwhile his father, who knew no more of the world than Harry’s simple sisters or Jones’s fond mother, never doubted that all Clive’s doings were right, and that his boy was the best of boys.
“If that young man goes on as charmingly as he has begun,” Clive’s cousin, Barnes Newcome, said of his kinsman, “he will be a paragon. I saw him last night at Vauxhall in company with young Moss, whose father does bills and keeps the bric-a-brac shop in Wardour Street. Two or three other gentlemen, probably young old-clothes-men, who had concluded for the day the labours of the bag, joined Mr. Newcome and his friend, and they partook of rack-punch in an arbour. He is a delightful youth, cousin Clive, and I feel sure he is about to be an honour to our family.”
XIX. The Colonel at Home
Our good Colonel’s house had received a coat of paint, which, like Madame Latour’s rouge in her latter days, only served to make her careworn face look more ghastly. The kitchens were gloomy. The stables were gloomy. Great black passages; cracked conservatory; dilapidated bathroom, with melancholy waters moaning and fizzing from the cistern; the great large blank stone staircase—were all so many melancholy features in the general countenance of the house; but the Colonel thought it perfectly, cheerful and pleasant, and furnished it in his rough-and-ready way. One day a cartload of chairs; the next a waggonful of fenders, fire-irons, and glass and crockery—a quantity of supplies, in a word, he poured into the place. There were a yellow curtain in the back drawing-room, and green curtains in the front. The carpet was an immense bargain, bought dirt cheap, sir, at a sale in Euston Square. He was against the purchase of a carpet for the stairs. What was the good of it? What did men want with stair-carpets? His own apartment contained a wonderful assortment of lumber. Shelves which he nailed himself, old Indian garments, camphor trunks. What did he want with gewgaws? anything was good enough for an old soldier. But the spare bedroom was endowed with all sorts of splendour: a bed as big as a general’s tent, a cheval glass—whereas the Colonel shaved in a little cracked mirror, which cost him no more than King Stephen’s breeches—and a handsome new carpet; while the boards of the Colonel’s bedchamber were as bare—as bare as old Miss Scragg’s shoulders, which would be so much more comfortable were they covered up. Mr. Binnie’s bedchamber was neat, snug, and appropriate. And Clive had a study and bedroom at the top of the house, which he was allowed to furnish entirely according to his own taste. How he and Ridley revelled in Wardour Street! What delightful coloured prints of hunting, racing, and beautiful ladies, did they not purchase, mount with their own hands, cut out for screens, frame and glaze, and hang up on the walls. When the rooms were ready they gave a party, inviting the Colonel and Mr. Binnie by note of hand, two gentlemen from Lamb Court, Temple, Mr. Honeyman, and Fred Bayham. We must have Fred Bayham. Fred Bayham frankly asked, “Is Mr. Sherrick, with whom you have become rather intimate lately—and mind you I say nothing, but I recommend strangers in London to be cautious about their friends—is Mr. Sherrick coming to you, young ’un? because if he is, F. B. must respectfully decline.”
Mr. Sherrick was not invited, and accordingly F. B. came. But Sherrick was invited on other days, and a very queer society did our honest Colonel gather together in that queer house, so dreary, so dingy, so comfortless, so pleasant. He, who was one of the most hospitable men alive, loved to have his friends around him; and it must be confessed that the evening parties now occasionally given in Fitzroy Square were of the oddest assemblage of people. The correct East India gentlemen from Hanover Square: the artists, Clive’s friends, gentlemen of all ages with all sorts of beards, in every variety of costume. Now and again a stray schoolfellow from Grey Friars, who stared, as well he might, at the company in which he found himself. Sometimes a few ladies were brought to these entertainments. The immense politeness of the good host compensated some of them for the strangeness of his company. They had never seen such odd-looking hairy men as those young artists, nor such wonderful women as Colonel Newcome assembled together. He was good to all old maids and poor widows. Retired captains with large families of daughters found in him their best friend. He sent carriages to fetch them and bring them back from the suburbs where they dwelt. Gandish, Mrs. Gandish, and the four Miss Gandishes in scarlet robes, were constant attendants at the Colonel’s soirées.
“I delight, sir, in the ’ospitality of my distinguished military friend,” Mr. Gandish would say. “The harmy has always been my passion.—I served in the Soho Volunteers three years myself, till the conclusion of the war, sir, till the conclusion of the war.”
It was a great sight to see Mr. Frederick Bayham engaged in the waltz or the quadrille with some of the elderly houris at the Colonel’s parties. F. B., like a good-natured F. B. as he was, always chose the plainest women as partners, and entertained them with profound compliments and sumptuous conversation. The Colonel likewise danced quadrilles with the utmost gravity. Waltzing had been invented long since his time: but he practised quadrilles when they first came in, about 1817, in Calcutta. To see him leading up a little old maid, and bowing to her when the dance was ended, and performing cavalier seul with stately simplicity, was a sight indeed to remember. If Clive Newcome had not such a fine sense of humour, he would have blushed for his father’s simplicity.—As it was, the elder’s guileless goodness and childlike trustfulness endeared him immensely to his son. “Look at the old boy, Pendennis,” he would say, “look at him leading up that old Miss Tidswell to the piano. Doesn’t he do it like an old duke? I lay a wager she thinks she is going to be my mother-in-law; all the women are in love with him, young and old. ‘Should he upbraid?’ There she goes. ‘I’ll own that he’ll prevail, and sing as sweetly as a nigh-tin-gale!’ Oh, you old warbler! Look at father’s old head bobbing up and down! Wouldn’t he do for Sir Roger de Coverley? How do you do, Uncle Charles?—I say, M’Collop, how gets on the Duke of What-d’ye-call-’em starving in the castle?—Gandish says it’s very good.” The lad retires to a group of artists. Mr. Honeyman comes up with a faint smile playing on his features, like moonlight on the facade of Lady Whittlesea’s Chapel.
“These parties are the most singular I have ever seen,” whispers Honeyman. “In entering one of these assemblies, one is struck with the immensity of London: and with the sense of one’s own insignificance. Without, I trust, departing from my clerical character, nay, from my very avocation as incumbent of a London chapel,—I have seen a good deal of the world, and here is an assemblage no doubt of most respectable persons, on scarce one of whom I ever set eyes till this evening. Where does my good brother find such characters?”
“That,” says Mr. Honeyman’s interlocutor, “is the celebrated, though neglected artist, Professor Gandish, whom nothing but jealousy has kept out of the Royal Academy. Surely you have heard of the great Gandish?”
“Indeed I am ashamed to confess my ignorance, but a clergyman busy with his duties knows little, perhaps too little, of the fine arts.”
“Gandish, sir, is one of the greatest geniuses on whom our ungrateful country ever trampled; he exhibited his first celebrated picture of ‘Alfred in the Neatherd’s Hut’ (he says he is the first who ever touched that subject) in 180-; but Lord Nelson’s death, and victory of Trafalgar, occupied the public attention at that time, and Gandish’s work went unnoticed. In the year 1816, he painted his great work of ‘Boadicea.’ You see her before you. That lady in yellow, with a light front and a turban. Boadicea became Mrs. Gandish in that year. So late as ’27, he brought before the world his ‘Non Angli sed Angeli.’ Two of the angels are yonder in sea-green dresses—the Misses Gandish. The youth in Berlin gloves was the little male angelus of that piece.”
“How came you to know all this, you strange man?” says Mr. Honeyman.
“Simply because Gandish has told me twenty times. He tells the story to everybody, every time he sees them. He told it to-day at dinner. Boadicea and the angels came afterwards.”
“Satire! satire! Mr. Pendennis,” says the divine, holding up a reproving finger of lavender kid, “beware of a wicked wit!—But when a man has that tendency, I know how difficult it is to restrain. My dear Colonel, good evening! You have a great reception to-night. That gentleman’s bass voice is very fine; Mr. Pendennis and I were admiring it. ‘The Wolf’ is a song admirably adapted to show its capabilities.”
Mr. Gandish’s autobiography had occupied the whole time of the retirement of the ladies from Colonel Newcome’s dinner-table. Mr. Hobson Newcome had been asleep during the performance; Sir Curry Baughton and one or two of the Colonel’s professional and military guests, silent and puzzled. Honest Mr. Binnie, with his shrewd good-humoured face, sipping his claret as usual, and delivering a sly joke now and again to the gentlemen at his end of the table. Mrs. Newcome had sat by him in sulky dignity; was it that Lady Baughton’s diamonds offended her?—her ladyship and her daughters being attired in great splendour for a Court ball, which they were to attend that evening. Was she hurt because SHE was not invited to that Royal Entertainment? As the festivities were to take place at an early hour, the ladies bidden were obliged to quit the Colonel’s house before the evening part commenced, from which Lady Anne declared she was quite vexed to be obliged to run away.
Lady Anne Newcome had been as gracious on this occasion as her sister-in-law had been out of humour. Everything pleased her in the house. She had no idea that there were such fine houses in that quarter of the town. She thought the dinner so very nice,—that Mr. Binnie such a good-humoured-looking gentleman. That stout gentleman with his collars turned down like Lord Byron, so exceedingly clever and full of information. A celebrated artist was he? (courtly Mr. Smee had his own opinion upon that point, but did not utter it). All those artists are so eccentric and amusing and clever. Before dinner she insisted upon seeing Clive’s den with its pictures and casts and pipes. “You horrid young wicked creature, have you begun to smoke already?” she asks, as she admires his room. She admired everything. Nothing could exceed her satisfaction.
The sisters-in-law kissed on meeting, with that cordiality so delightful to witness in sisters who dwell together in unity. It was, “My dear Maria, what an age since I have seen you!” “My dear Anne, our occupations are so engrossing, our circles are so different,” in a languid response from the other. “Sir Brian is not coming, I suppose? Now, Colonel,” she turns in a frisky manner towards him, and taps her fan, “did I not tell you Sir Brian would not come?”
“He is kept at the House of Commons, my dear. Those dreadful committees. He was quite vexed at not being able to come.”
“I know, I know, dear Anne, there are always excuses to gentlemen in Parliament; I have received many such. Mr. Shaloo and Mr. M’Sheny, the leaders of our party, often and often disappoint me. I knew Brian would not come. My husband came down from Marble Head on purpose this morning. Nothing would have induced us to give up our brother’s party.”
“I believe you. I did come down from Marble Head this morning, and I was four hours in the hay-field before I came away, and in the City till five, and I’ve been to look at a horse afterwards at Tattersall’s, and I’m as hungry as a hunter, and as tired as a hodman,” says Mr. Newcome, with his hands in his pockets. “How do you do, Mr. Pendennis? Maria, you remember Mr. Pendennis—don’t you?”
“Perfectly,” replies the languid Maria. Mrs. Gandish, Colonel Topham, Major M’Cracken, are announced, and then, in diamonds, feathers, and splendour, Lady Baughton and Miss Baughton, who are going to the Queen’s ball, and Sir Curry Baughton, not quite in his deputy-lieutenant’s uniform as yet, looking very shy in a pair of blue trousers, with a glittering stripe of silver down the seams. Clive looks with wonder and delight at these ravishing ladies, rustling in fresh brocades, with feathers, diamonds, and every magnificence. Aunt Anne has not her Court dress on as yet; and Aunt Maria blushes as she beholds the new comers, having thought fit to attire herself in a high dress, with a Quaker-like simplicity, and a pair of gloves more than ordinarily dingy. The pretty little foot she has, it is true, and sticks it out from habit; but what is Mrs. Newcome’s foot compared with that sweet little chaussure which Miss Baughton exhibits and withdraws? The shiny white satin slipper, the pink stocking which ever and anon peeps from the rustling folds of her robe, and timidly retires into its covert—that foot, light as it is, crushes Mrs. Newcome.
No wonder she winces, and is angry; there are some mischievous persons who rather like to witness that discomfiture. All Mr. Smee’s flatteries that day failed to soothe her. She was in the state in which his canvasses sometimes are, when he cannot paint on them.
What happened to her alone in the drawing-room, when the ladies invited to the dinner had departed, and those convoked to the soirée began to arrive,—what happened to her or to them I do not like to think. The Gandishes arrived first. Boadicea and the angels. We judged from the fact that young Mr. Gandish came blushing in to the dessert. Name after name was announced of persons of whom Mrs. Newcome knew nothing. The young and the old, the pretty and homely, they were all in their best dresses, and no doubt stared at Mrs. Newcome, so obstinately plain in her attire. When we came upstairs from dinner, we found her seated entirely by herself, tapping her fan at the fireplace. Timid groups of persons were round about, waiting for the irruption of the gentlemen, until the pleasure should begin. Mr. Newcome, who came upstairs yawning, was heard to say to his wife, “Oh, dam, let’s cut!” And they went downstairs, and waited until their carriage had arrived, when they quitted Fitzroy Square.
Mr. Barnes Newcome presently arrived, looking particularly smart and lively, with a large flower in his button-hole, and leaning on the arm of a friend. “How do you do, Pendennis?” he says, with a peculiarly dandified air. “Did you dine here? You look as if you dined here” (and Barnes, certainly, as if he had dined elsewhere). “I was only asked to the cold soirée. Who did you have for dinner? You had my mamma and the Baughtons, and my uncle and aunt, I know, for they are down below in the library, waiting for the carriage: he is asleep, and she is as sulky as a bear.”
“Why did Mrs. Newcome say I should find nobody I knew up here?” asks Barnes’s companion. “On the contrary, there are lots of fellows I know. There’s Fred Bayham, dancing like a harlequin. There’s old Gandish, who used to be my drawing-master; and my Brighton friends, your uncle and cousin, Barnes. What relations are they to me? must be some relations. Fine fellow your cousin.”
“Hm,” growls Barnes. “Very fine boy,—not spirited at all,—not fond of flattery,—not surrounded by toadies,—not fond of drink,—delightful boy! See yonder, the young fellow is in conversation with his most intimate friend, a little crooked fellow, with long hair. Do you know who he is? he is the son of old Todmoreton’s butler. Upon my life it’s true.”
“And suppose it is; what the deuce do I care!” cries Lord Kew. “Who can be more respectable than a butler? A man must be somebody’s son. When I am a middle-aged man, I hope humbly I shall look like a butler myself. Suppose you were to put ten of Gunter’s men into the House of Lords, do you mean to say that they would not look as well as any average ten peers in the house? Look at Lord Westcot; he is exactly like a butler that’s why the country has such confidence in him. I never dine with him but I fancy he ought to be at the sideboard. Here comes that insufferable little old Smee. How do you do, Mr. Smee?”
Mr. Smee smiles his sweetest smile. With his rings, diamond shirt-studs, and red velvet waistcoat, there are few more elaborate middle-aged bucks than Alfred Smee. “How do you do, my dear lord?” cries the bland one. “Who would ever have thought of seeing your lordship here?”
“Why the deuce not, Mr. Smee?” asks Lord Kew, abruptly. “Is it wrong to come here? I have been in the house only five minutes, and three people have said the same thing to me—Mrs. Newcome, who is sitting downstairs in a rage waiting for her carriage, the condescending Barnes, and yourself. Why do you come here, Since? How are you, Mr. Gandish? How do the fine arts go?”
“Your lordship’s kindness in asking for them will cheer them if anything will,” says Mr. Gandish. “Your noble family has always patronised them. I am proud to be reckonised by your lordship in this house, where the distinguished father of one of my pupils entertains us this evening. A most promising young man is young Mr. Clive—talents for a hamateur really most remarkable.”
“Excellent, upon my word—excellent,” cries Mr. Smee. “I’m not an animal painter myself, and perhaps don’t think much of that branch of the profession; but it seems to me the young fellow draws horses with the most wonderful spirit. I hope Lady Walham is very well, and that she was satisfied with her son’s portrait. Stockholm, I think, your brother is appointed to? I wish I might be allowed to paint the elder as well as the younger brother, my lord.”
“I am an historical painter; but whenever Lord Kew is painted I hope his lordship will think of the old servant of his lordship’s family, Charles Gandish,” cries the Professor.
“I am like Susannah between the two Elders,” says Lord Kew. “Let my innocence alone, Smee. Mr. Gandish, don’t persecute my modesty with your addresses. I won’t be painted. I am not a fit subject for a historical painter, Mr. Gandish.”
“Halcibiades sat to Praxiteles, and Pericles to Phridjas,” remarks Gandish.
“The cases are not quite similar,” says Lord Kew, languidly. “You are no doubt fully equal to Praxiteles; but I don’t see my resemblance to the other party. I should not look well as a hero, and Smee could not paint me handsome enough.”
“I would try, my dear lord,” cries Mr. Smee.
“I know you would, my dear fellow,” Lord Kew answered, looking at the painter with a lazy scorn in his eyes. “Where is Colonel Newcome, Mr. Gandish?” Mr. Gandish replied that our gallant host was dancing a quadrille in the next room; and the young gentleman walked on towards that apartment to pay his respects to the giver of the evening’s entertainment.
Newcome’s behaviour to the young peer was ceremonious, but not in the least servile. He saluted the other’s superior rank, not his person, as he turned the guard out for a general officer. He never could be brought to be otherwise than cold and grave in his behaviour to John James; nor was it without difficulty, when young Ridley and his son became pupils at Gandish’s, he could be induced to invite the former to his parties. “An artist is any man’s equal,” he said. “I have no prejudice of that sort; and think that Sir Joshua Reynolds and Doctor Johnson were fit company for any person, of whatever rank. But a young man whose father may have had to wait behind me at dinner, should not be brought into my company.” Clive compromises the dispute with a laugh. “First,” says he, “I will wait till I am asked; and then I promise I will not go to dine with Lord Todmoreton.”
XX. Contains more Particulars of the Colonel and his Brethren
Clive’s amusements, studies, or occupations, such as they were, filled his day pretty completely, and caused the young gentleman’s time to pass rapidly and pleasantly, his father, it must be owned, had no such resources, and the good Colonel’s idleness hung heavily upon him. He submitted very kindly to this infliction, however, as he would have done to any other for Clive’s sake; and though he may have wished himself back with his regiment again, and engaged in the pursuits in which his life had been spent, he chose to consider these desires as very selfish and blameable on his part, and sacrificed them resolutely for his son’s welfare. The young fellow, I dare say, gave his parent no more credit for his long self-denial, than many other children award to theirs. We take such life-offerings as our due commonly. The old French satirist avers that, in a love affair, there is usually one person who loves, and the other, qui se laisse aimer; it is only in later days, perhaps, when the treasures of love are spent, and the kind hand cold which ministered them, that we remember how tender it was; how soft to soothe; how eager to shield; how ready to support and caress. The ears may no longer hear, which would have received our words of thanks so delightedly. Let us hope those fruits of love, though tardy, are yet not all too late; and though we bring our tribute of reverence and gratitude, it may be to a gravestone, there is an acceptance even there for the stricken heart’s oblation of fond remorse, contrite memories, and pious tears. I am thinking of the love of Clive Newcome’s father for him (and, perhaps, young reader, that of yours and mine for ourselves); how the old man lay awake, and devised kindnesses, and gave his all for the love of his son; and the young man took, and spent, and slept, and made merry. Did we not say at our tale’s commencement that all stories were old? Careless prodigals and anxious elders have been from the beginning:—and so may love, and repentance, and forgiveness endure even till the end.
The stifling fogs, the slippery mud, the dun dreary November mornings, when the Regent’s Park, where the Colonel took his early walk, was wrapped in yellow mist, must have been a melancholy exchange for the splendour of Eastern sunrise, and the invigorating gallop at dawn, to which, for so many years of his life, Thomas Newcome had accustomed himself. His obstinate habit of early waking accompanied him to England, and occasioned the despair of his London domestics, who, if master wasn’t so awful early, would have found no fault with him; for a gentleman as gives less trouble to his servants; as scarcely ever rings the bell for his self; as will brush his own clothes; as will even boil his own shaving-water in the little hetna which he keeps up in his dressing-room; as pays so regular, and never looks twice at the accounts; such a man deserved to be loved by his household, and I dare say comparisons were made between him and his son, who do ring the bells, and scold if his boots ain’t nice, and horder about like a young lord. But Clive, though imperious, was very liberal and good-humoured, and not the worse served because he insisted upon exerting his youthful authority. As for friend Binnie, he had a hundred pursuits of his own, which made his time pass very comfortably. He had all the Lectures at the British Institution; he had the Geographical Society, the Asiatic Society, and the Political Economy Club; and though he talked year after year of going to visit his relations in Scotland, the months and seasons passed away, and his feet still beat the London pavement.
In spite of the cold reception his brothers gave him, duty was duty, and Colonel Newcome still proposed, or hoped to be well with the female members of the Newcome family; and having, as we have said, plenty of time on his hands, and living at no very great distance from either of his brothers’ town houses, when their wives were in London, the elder Newcome was for paying them pretty constant visits. But after the good gentleman had called twice or thrice upon his sister-in-law in Bryanstone Square—bringing, as was his wont, a present for this little niece, or a book for that—Mrs. Newcome, with her usual virtue, gave him to understand that the occupation of an English matron, who, besides her multifarious family duties, had her own intellectual culture to mind, would not allow her to pass the mornings in idle gossips: and of course took great credit to herself for having so rebuked him. “I am not above instruction of any age,” says she, thanking Heaven (or complimenting it, rather, for having created a being so virtuous and humble-minded). “When Professor Schroff comes, I sit with my children, and take lessons in German,—and I say my verbs with Maria and Tommy in the same class!” Yes, with curtsies and fine speeches she actually bowed her brother out of doors; and the honest gentleman meekly left her, though with bewilderment, as he thought of the different hospitality to which he had been accustomed in the East, where no friend’s house was ever closed to him, where no neighbour was so busy but he had time to make Thomas Newcome welcome.
When Hobson Newcome’s boys came home for the holidays, their kind uncle was for treating them to the sights of the town, but here Virtue again interposed and laid its interdict upon pleasure. “Thank you, very much, my dear Colonel,” says Virtue, “there never was surely such a kind, affectionate, unselfish creature as you are, and so indulgent for children, but my boys and yours are brought up on a very different plan. Excuse me for saying that I do not think it is advisable that they should even see too much of each other. Clive’s company is not good for them.”
“Great heavens, Maria!” cries the Colonel, starting up, “do you mean that my boy’s society is not good enough for any boy alive?”
Maria turned very red: she had said not more than she meant, but more than she meant to say. “My dear Colonel, how hot we are! how angry you Indian gentlemen become with us poor women! Your boy is much older than mine. He lives with artists, with all sorts of eccentric people. Our children are bred on quite a different plan. Hobson will succeed his father in the bank, and dear Samuel I trust will go into the Church. I told you, before, the views I had regarding the boys: but it was most kind of you to think of them—most generous and kind.”
“That nabob of ours is a queer fish,” Hobson Newcome remarked to his nephew Barnes. “He is as proud as Lucifer, he is always taking huff about one thing or the other. He went off in a fume the other night because your aunt objected to his taking the boys to the play. She don’t like their going to the play. My mother didn’t either. Your aunt is a woman who is uncommon wideawake, I can tell you.”
“I always knew, sir, that my aunt was perfectly aware of the time of the day,” says Barnes, with a bow.
“And then the Colonel flies out about his boy, and says that my wife insulted him! I used to like that boy. Before his father came he was a good lad enough—a jolly brave little fellow.”
“I confess I did not know Mr. Clive at that interesting period of his existence,” remarks Barnes.
“But since he has taken this madcap freak of turning painter,” the uncle continues, “there is no understanding the chap. Did you ever see such a set of fellows as the Colonel had got together at his party the other night? Dirty chaps in velvet coats and beards? They looked like a set of mountebanks. And this young Clive is going to turn painter!”
“Very advantageous thing for the family. He’ll do our pictures for nothing. I always said he was a darling boy,” simpered Barnes.
“Darling jackass!” growled out the senior. “Confound it, why doesn’t my brother set him up in some respectable business? I ain’t proud. I have not married an earl’s daughter. No offence to you, Barnes.”
“Not at all, sir. I can’t help it if my grandfather is a gentleman,” says Barnes, with a fascinating smile.
The uncle laughs. “I mean I don’t care what a fellow is if he is a good fellow. But a painter! hang it—a painter’s no trade at all—I don’t fancy seeing one of our family sticking up pictures for sale. I don’t like it, Barnes.”
“Hush! here comes his distinguished friend, Mr. Pendennis,” whispers Barnes; and the uncle growling out, “Damn all literary fellows—all artists—the whole lot of them!” turns away. Barnes waves three languid fingers of recognition towards Pendennis: and when the uncle and nephew have moved out of the club newspaper room, little Tom Eaves comes up and tells the present reporter every word of their conversation.
Very soon Mrs. Newcome announced that their Indian brother found the society of Bryanstone Square very little to his taste, as indeed how should he? being a man of a good harmless disposition certainly, but of small intellectual culture. It could not be helped. She had done her utmost to make him welcome, and grieved that their pursuits were not more congenial. She heard that he was much more intimate in Park Lane. Possibly the superior rank of Lady Anne’s family might present charms to Colonel Newcome, who fell asleep at her assemblies. His boy, she was afraid, was leading the most irregular life. He was growing a pair of mustachios, and going about with all sorts of wild associates. She found no fault; who was she, to find fault with any one? But she had been compelled to hint that her children must not be too intimate with him. And so, between one brother who meant no unkindness, and another who was all affection and goodwill, this undoubting woman created difference, distrust, dislike, which might one day possibly lead to open rupture. The wicked are wicked, no doubt, and they go astray and they fall, and they come by their deserts: but who can tell the mischief which the very virtuous do?
To her sister-in-law, Lady Anne, the Colonel’s society was more welcome. The affectionate gentleman never tired of doing kindnesses to his brother’s many children; and as Mr. Clive’s pursuits now separated him a good deal from his father, the Colonel, not perhaps without a sigh that fate should so separate him from the society which he loved best in the world, consoled himself as best he might with his nephews and nieces, especially with Ethel, for whom his belle passion conceived at first sight never diminished. If Uncle Newcome had a hundred children, Ethel said, who was rather jealous of disposition, he would spoil them all. He found a fine occupation in breaking a pretty little horse for her, of which he made her a present, and there was no horse in the Park that was so handsome, and surely no girl who looked more beautiful than Ethel Newcome with her broad hat and red ribbon, with her thick black locks waving round her bright face, galloping along the ride on Bhurtpore. Occasionally Clive was at their riding-parties, when the Colonel would fall back and fondly survey the young people cantering side by side over the grass: but by a tacit convention it was arranged that the cousins should be but seldom together; the Colonel might be his niece’s companion and no one could receive him with a more joyous welcome, but when Mr. Clive made his appearance with his father at the Park Lane door, a certain gêne was visible in Miss Ethel, who would never mount except with Colonel Newcome’s assistance, and who, especially after Mr. Clive’s famous mustachios made their appearance, rallied him, and remonstrated with him regarding those ornaments, and treated him with much distance and dignity. She asked him if he was going into the army? she could not understand how any but military men could wear mustachios; and then she looked fondly and archly at her uncle, and said she liked none that were not grey.
Clive set her down as a very haughty, spoiled, aristocratic young creature. If he had been in love with her, no doubt he would have sacrificed even those beloved new-born whiskers for the charmer. Had he not already bought on credit the necessary implements in a fine dressing-case, from young Moss? But he was not in love with her; otherwise he would have found a thousand opportunities of riding with her, walking with her, meeting her, in spite of all prohibitions tacit or expressed, all governesses, guardians, mamma’s punctilios, and kind hints from friends. For a while, Mr. Clive thought himself in love with his cousin; than whom no more beautiful young girl could be seen in any park, ball, or drawing-room; and he drew a hundred pictures of her, and discoursed about her beauties to J. J., who fell in love with her on hearsay. But at this time Mademoiselle Saltarelli was dancing at Drury Lane Theatre, and it certainly may be said that Clive’s first love was bestowed upon that beauty: whose picture of course he drew in most of her favourite characters; and for whom his passion lasted until the end of the season, when her night was announced, tickets to be had at the theatre, or of Mademoiselle Saltarelli, Buckingham Street, Strand. Then it was that with a throbbing heart and a five-pound note, to engage places for the houri’s benefit, Clive beheld Madame Rogomme, Mademoiselle Saltarelli’s mother, who entertained him in the French language in a dark parlour smelling of onions. And oh! issuing from the adjoining dining-room (where was a dingy vision of a feast and pewter pots upon a darkling tablecloth), could that lean, scraggy, old, beetle-browed yellow face, who cried, “Ou es tu donc, maman?” with such a shrill nasal voice—could that elderly vixen be that blooming and divine Saltarelli? Clive drew her picture as she was, and a likeness of Madame Rogomme, her mamma; a Mosaic youth, profusely jewelled, and scented at once with tobacco and eau-de-cologne, occupied Clive’s stall on Mademoiselle Saltarelli’s night. It was young Mr. Moss, of Gandish’s to whom Newcome ceded his place, and who laughed (as he always did at Clive’s jokes) when the latter told the story of his interview with the dancer. “Paid five pound to see that woman! I could have took you behind the scenes” (or “beide the seeds,” Mr. Moss said) “and showed her to you for nothing.” Did he take Clive behind the scenes? Over this part of the young gentleman’s life, without implying the least harm to him—for have not others been behind the scenes; and can there be any more dreary object than those whitened and raddled old women who shudder at the slips?—over this stage of Clive Newcome’s life we may surely drop the curtain.
It is pleasanter to contemplate that kind old face of Clive’s father, that sweet young blushing lady by his side, as the two ride homewards at sunset. The grooms behind in quiet conversation about horses, as men never tire of talking about horses. Ethel wants to know about battles; about lovers’ lamps, which she has read of in Lalla Rookh. “Have you ever seen them, uncle, floating down the Ganges of a night?” About Indian widows. “Did you actually see one burning, and hear her scream as you rode up?” She wonders whether he will tell her anything about Clive’s mother: how she must have loved Uncle Newcome! Ethel can’t bear, somehow, to think that her name was Mrs. Casey, perhaps he was very fond of her; though he scarcely ever mentions her name. She was nothing like that good old funny Miss Honeyman at Brighton. Who could the person be?—a person that her uncle knew ever so long ago—a French lady, whom her uncle says Ethel often resembles? That is why he speaks French so well. He can recite whole pages out of Racine. Perhaps it was the French lady who taught him. And he was not very happy at the Hermitage (though grandpapa was a very kind good man), and he upset papa in a little carriage, and was wild, and got into disgrace, and was sent to India? He could not have been very bad, Ethel thinks, looking at him with her honest eyes. Last week he went to the Drawing-room, and papa presented him. His uniform of grey and silver was quite old, yet he looked much grander than Sir Brian in his new deputy-lieutenant’s dress. “Next year, when I am presented, you must come too, sir,” says Ethel. “I insist upon it, you must come too!”
“I will order a new uniform, Ethel,” says her uncle.
The girl laughs. “When little Egbert took hold of your sword, uncle, and asked you how many people you had killed, do you know I had the same question in my mind; and I thought when you went to the Drawing-room, perhaps the King will knight him. But instead he knighted mamma’s apothecary, Sir Danby Jilks: that horrid little man, and I won’t have you knighted any more.”
“I hope Egbert won’t ask Sir Danby Jilks how many people HE has killed,” says the Colonel, laughing; but thinking the joke too severe upon Sir Danby and the profession, he forthwith apologises by narrating many anecdotes he knows to the credit of surgeons. How, when the fever broke out on board the ship going to India, their surgeon devoted himself to the safety of the crew, and died himself, leaving directions for the treatment of the patients when he was gone! What heroism the doctors showed during the cholera in India; and what courage he had seen some of them exhibit in action: attending the wounded men under the hottest fire, and exposing themselves as readily as the bravest troops. Ethel declares that her uncle always will talk of other people’s courage, and never say a word about his own; “and the only reason,” she says, “which made me like that odious Sir Thomas de Boots, who laughs so, and looks so red, and pays such horrid compliments to all ladies, was, that he praised you, uncle, at Newcome, last year, when Barnes and he came to us at Christmas. Why did you not come? Mamma and I went to see your old nurse; and we found her such a nice old lady.” So the pair talk kindly on, riding homewards through the pleasant summer twilight. Mamma had gone out to dinner; and there were cards for three parties afterwards. “Oh, how I wish it was next year!” says Miss Ethel.
Many a splendid assembly, and many a brilliant next year, will the ardent and hopeful young creature enjoy; but in the midst of her splendour and triumphs, buzzing flatterers, conquered rivals, prostrate admirers, no doubt she will think sometimes of that quiet season before the world began for her, and that dear old friend, on whose arm she leaned while she was yet a young girl.
The Colonel comes to Park Street early in the forenoon, when the mistress of the house, surrounded by her little ones, is administering dinner to them. He behaves with splendid courtesy to Miss Quigley, the governess, and makes a point of taking wine with her, and of making a most profound bow during that ceremony. Miss Quigley cannot help thinking Colonel Newcome’s bow very fine. She has an idea that his late Majesty must have bowed in that way: she flutteringly imparts this opinion to Lady Anne’s maid; who tells her mistress, who tells Miss Ethel, who watches the Colonel the next time he takes wine with Miss Quigley, and they laugh, and then Ethel tells him; so that the gentleman and the governess have to blush ever after when they drink wine together. When she is walking with her little charges in the Park, or in that before-mentioned paradise nigh to Apsley House, faint signals of welcome appear on her wan cheeks. She knows the dear Colonel amongst a thousand horsemen. If Ethel makes for her uncle purses, guard-chains, antimacassars, and the like beautiful and useful articles, I believe it is in reality Miss Quigley who does four-fifths of the work, as she sits alone in the schoolroom, high, high up in that lone house, when the little ones are long since asleep, before her dismal little tea-tray, and her little desk containing her mother’s letters and her mementos of home.
There are, of course, numberless fine parties in Park Lane, where the Colonel knows he would be very welcome. But if there be grand assemblies, he does not care to come. “I like to go to the club best,” he says to Lady Anne. “We talk there as you do here about persons, and about Jack marrying, and Tom dying, and so forth. But we have known Jack and Tom all our lives, and so are interested in talking about them. Just as you are in speaking of your own friends and habitual society. They are people whose names I have sometimes read in the newspaper, but whom I never thought of meeting until I came to your house. What has an old fellow like me to say to your young dandies or old dowagers?”
“Mamma is very odd and sometimes very captious, my dear Colonel,” said Lady Anne, with a blush; “she suffers so frightfully from tic that we are all bound to pardon her.”
Truth to tell, old Lady Kew had been particularly rude to Colonel Newcome and Clive. Ethel’s birthday befell in the spring, on which occasion she was wont to have a juvenile assembly, chiefly of girls of her own age and condition; who came, accompanied by a few governesses, and they played and sang their little duets and choruses together, and enjoyed a gentle refection of sponge-cakes, jellies, tea, and the like.—The Colonel, who was invited to this little party, sent a fine present to his favourite Ethel; and Clive and his friend J. J. made a funny series of drawings, representing the life of a young lady as they imagined it, and drawing her progress from her cradle upwards: now engaged with her doll, then with her dancing-master; now marching in her back-board; now crying over her German lessons: and dressed for her first ball finally, and bestowing her hand upon a dandy, of preternatural ugliness, who was kneeling at her feet as the happy man. This picture was the delight of the laughing happy girls; except, perhaps, the little cousins from Bryanstone Square, who were invited to Ethel’s party, but were so overpowered by the prodigious new dresses in which their mamma had attired them, that they could admire nothing but their rustling pink frocks, their enormous sashes, their lovely new silk stockings.
Lady Kew coming to London attended on the party, and presented her granddaughter with a sixpenny pincushion. The Colonel had sent Ethel a beautiful little gold watch and chain. Her aunt had complimented her with that refreshing work, Alison’s History of Europe, richly bound.—Lady Kew’s pincushion made rather a poor figure among the gifts, whence probably arose her ladyship’s ill-humour.
Ethel’s grandmother became exceedingly testy when, the Colonel arriving, Ethel ran up to him and thanked him for the beautiful watch, in return for which she gave him a kiss, which, I dare say, amply repaid Colonel Newcome; and shortly after him Mr. Clive arrived, looking uncommonly handsome, with that smart little beard and mustachio with which nature had recently gifted him. As he entered, all the girls, who had been admiring his pictures, began to clap their hands. Mr. Clive Newcome blushed, and looked none the worse for that indication of modesty.
Lady Kew had met Colonel Newcome a half-dozen times at her daughter’s house: but on this occasion she had quite forgotten him, for when the Colonel made her a bow, her ladyship regarded him steadily, and beckoning her daughter to her, asked who the gentleman was who has just kissed Ethel? Trembling as she always did before her mother, Lady Anne explained. Lady Kew said “Oh!” and left Colonel Newcome blushing and rather embarrassé de sa personne—before her.
With the clapping of hands that greeted Clive’s arrival, the Countess was by no means more good-humoured. Not aware of her wrath, the young fellow, who had also previously been presented to her, came forward presently to make her his compliments. “Pray, who are you?” she said, looking at him very earnestly in the face. He told her his name.
“Hm,” said Lady Kew, “I have heard of you, and I have heard very little good of you.”
“Will your ladyship please to give me your informant?” cried out Colonel Newcome.
Barnes Newcome, who had condescended to attend his sister’s little fête, and had been languidly watching the frolics of the young people, looked very much alarmed.
XXI. Is Sentimental, but Short
Without wishing to disparage the youth of other nations, I think a well-bred English lad has this advantage over them, that his bearing is commonly more modest than theirs. He does not assume the tail-coat and the manners of manhood too early: he holds his tongue, and listens to his elders: his mind blushes as well as his cheeks: he does not know how to make bows and pay compliments like the young Frenchman: nor to contradict his seniors as I am informed American striplings do. Boys, who learn nothing else at our public schools, learn at least good manners, or what we consider to be such; and with regard to the person at present under consideration, it is certain that all his acquaintances, excepting perhaps his dear cousin Barnes Newcome, agreed in considering him as a very frank, manly, modest, and agreeable young fellow.—My friend Warrington found a grim pleasure in his company; and his bright face, droll humour, and kindly laughter were always welcome in our chambers. Honest Fred Bayham was charmed to be in his society; and used pathetically to aver that he himself might have been such a youth, had he been blest with a kind father to watch, and good friends to guide, his early career. In fact, Fred was by far the most didactic of Clive’s bachelor acquaintances, pursued the young man with endless advice and sermons, and held himself up as a warning to Clive, and a touching example of the evil consequences of early idleness and dissipation. Gentlemen of much higher rank in the world took a fancy to the lad. Captain Jack Belsize introduced him to his own mess, as also to the Guard dinner at St. James’s; and my Lord Kew invited him to Kewbury, his lordship’s house in Oxfordshire, where Clive enjoyed hunting, shooting, and plenty of good company. Mrs. Newcome groaned in spirit when she heard of these proceedings; and feared, feared very much that that unfortunate young man was going to ruin; and Barnes Newcome amiably disseminated reports amongst his family that the lad was plunged in all sorts of debaucheries: that he was tipsy every night: that he was engaged, in his sober moments, with dice, the turf, or worse amusements: and that his head was so turned by living with Kew and Belsize, that the little rascal’s pride and arrogance were perfectly insufferable. Ethel would indignantly deny these charges; then perhaps credit a few of them; and she looked at Clive with melancholy eyes when he came to visit his aunt; and I hope prayed that Heaven might mend his wicked ways. The truth is, the young fellow enjoyed life, as one of his age and spirit might be expected to do; but he did very little harm, and meant less; and was quite unconscious of the reputation which his kind friends were making for him.
There had been a long-standing promise that Clive and his father were to go to Newcome at Christmas: and I dare say Ethel proposed to reform the young prodigal, if prodigal he was, for she busied herself delightedly in preparing the apartments which they were to inhabit during their stay—speculated upon it in a hundred pleasant ways, putting off her visit to this pleasant neighbour, or that pretty scene in the vicinage, until her uncle should come and they should be enabled to enjoy the excursion together. And before the arrival of her relatives, Ethel, with one of her young brothers, went to see Mrs. Mason; and introduced herself as Colonel Newcome’s niece; and came back charmed with the old lady, and eager once more in defence of Clive (when that young gentleman’s character happened to be called in question by her brother Barnes), for had she not seen the kindest letter, which Clive had written to old Mrs. Mason, and the beautiful drawing of his father on horseback and in regimentals, waving his sword in front of the gallant --th Bengal Cavalry, which the lad had sent down to the good old woman? He could not be very bad, Ethel thought, who was so kind and thoughtful for the poor. His father’s son could not be altogether a reprobate. When Mrs. Mason, seeing how good and beautiful Ethel was, and thinking in her heart nothing could be too good or beautiful for Clive, nodded her kind old head at Miss Ethel, and said she should like to find a husband for her, Miss Ethel blushed, and looked handsomer than ever; and at home, when she was describing the interview, never mentioned this part of her talk with Mrs. Mason.
But the enfant terrible, young Alfred, did: announcing to all the company at dessert, that Ethel was in love with Clive—that Clive was coming to marry her—that Mrs. Mason, the old woman at Newcome, had told him so.
“I dare say she has told the tale all over Newcome!” shrieked out Mr. Barnes. “I dare say it will be in the Independent next week. By Jove, it’s a pretty connexion—and nice acquaintances this uncle of ours brings us!” A fine battle ensued upon the receipt and discussion of this intelligence: Barnes was more than usually bitter and sarcastic: Ethel haughtily recriminated, losing her temper, and then her firmness, until, fairly bursting into tears, she taxed Barnes with meanness and malignity in for ever uttering stories to his cousin’s disadvantage, and pursuing with constant slander and cruelty one of the very best of men. She rose and left the table in great tribulation—she went to her room and wrote a letter to her uncle, blistered with tears, in which she besought him not to come to Newcome.—Perhaps she went and looked at the apartments which she had adorned and prepared for his reception. It was for him and for his company that she was eager. She had met no one so generous and gentle, so honest and unselfish, until she had seen him.
Lady Anne knew the ways of women very well; and when Ethel that night, still in great indignation and scorn against Barnes, announced that she had written a letter to her uncle, begging the Colonel not to come at Christmas, Ethel’s mother soothed the wounded girl, and treated her with peculiar gentleness and affection; and she wisely gave Mr. Barnes to understand, that if he wished to bring about that very attachment, the idea of which made him so angry, he could use no better means than those which he chose to employ at present, of constantly abusing and insulting poor Clive, and awakening Ethel’s sympathies by mere opposition. And Ethel’s sad little letter was extracted from the post-bag: and her mother brought it to her, sealed, in her own room, where the young lady burned it: being easily brought by Lady Anne’s quiet remonstrances to perceive that it was best no allusion should take place to the silly dispute which had occurred that evening; and that Clive and his father should come for the Christmas holidays, if they were so minded. But when they came, there was no Ethel at Newcome. She was gone on a visit to her sick aunt, Lady Julia. Colonel Newcome passed the holidays sadly without his young favourite, and Clive consoled himself by knocking down pheasants with Sir Brian’s keepers: and increased his cousin’s attachment for him by breaking the knees of Barnes’s favourite mare out hunting. It was a dreary entertainment; father and son were glad enough to get away from it, and to return to their own humbler quarters in London.
Thomas Newcome had now been for three years in the possession of that felicity which his soul longed after; and had any friend of his asked him if he was happy, he would have answered in the affirmative no doubt, and protested that he was in the enjoyment of everything a reasonable man could desire. And yet, in spite of his happiness, his honest face grew more melancholy: his loose clothes hung only the looser on his lean limbs: he ate his meals without appetite: his nights were restless: and he would sit for hours silent in the midst of his family, so that Mr. Binnie first began jocularly to surmise that Tom was crossed in love; then seriously to think that his health was suffering and that a doctor should be called to see him; and at last to agree that idleness was not good for the Colonel, and that he missed the military occupation to which he had been for so many years accustomed.
The Colonel insisted that he was perfectly happy and contented. What could he want more than he had—the society of his son, for the present; and a prospect of quiet for his declining days? Binnie vowed that his friend’s days had no business to decline as yet; that a sober man of fifty ought to be at his best; and that Newcome had grown older in three years in Europe, than in a quarter of a century in the East—all which statements were true, though the Colonel persisted in denying them.
He was very restless. He was always finding business in distant quarters of England. He must go visit Tom Barker who was settled in Devonshire, or Harry Johnson who had retired and was living in Wales. He surprised Mrs. Honeyman by the frequency of his visits to Brighton, and always came away much improved in health by the sea air, and by constant riding with the harriers there. He appeared at Bath and at Cheltenham, where, as we know, there are many old Indians. Mr. Binnie was not indisposed to accompany him on some of these jaunts—“provided,” the civilian said, “you don’t take young Hopeful, who is much better without us; and let us two old fogies enjoy ourselves together.”
Clive was not sorry to be left alone. The father knew that only too well. The young man had occupations, ideas, associates, in whom the elder could take no interest. Sitting below in his blank, cheerless bedroom, Newcome could hear the lad and his friends talking, singing, and making merry overhead. Something would be said in Clive’s well-known tones, and a roar of laughter would proceed from the youthful company. They had all sorts of tricks, bywords, waggeries, of which the father could not understand the jest nor the secret. He longed to share in it, but the party would be hushed if he went in to join it—and he would come away sad at heart, to think that his presence should be a signal for silence among them; and that his son could not be merry in his company.
We must not quarrel with Clive and Clive’s friends, because they could not joke and be free in the presence of the worthy gentleman. If they hushed when he came in, Thomas Newcome’s sad face would seem to look round—appealing to one after another of them, and asking, “Why don’t you go on laughing?” A company of old comrades shall be merry and laughing together, and the entrance of a single youngster will stop the conversation—and if men of middle age feel this restraint with our juniors, the young ones surely have a right to be silent before their elders. The boys are always mum under the eyes of the usher. There is scarce any parent, however friendly or tender with his children, but must feel sometimes that they have thoughts which are not his or hers; and wishes and secrets quite beyond the parental control: and, as people are vain, long after they are fathers, ay; or grandfathers, and not seldom fancy that mere personal desire of domination is overweening anxiety and love for their family, no doubt that common outcry against thankless children might often be shown to prove, not that the son is disobedient, but the father too exacting. When a mother (as fond mothers often will) vows that she knows every thought in her daughter’s heart, I think she pretends to know a great deal too much; nor can there be a wholesomer task for the elders, as our young subjects grow up, naturally demanding liberty and citizen’s rights, than for us gracefully to abdicate our sovereign pretensions and claims of absolute control. There’s many a family chief who governs wisely and gently, who is loth to give the power up when he should. Ah, be sure, it is not youth alone that has need to learn humility! By their very virtues, and the purity of their lives, many good parents create flatterers for themselves, and so live in the midst of a filial court of parasites—and seldom without a pang of unwillingness, and often not at all, will they consent to forgo their autocracy, and exchange the tribute they have been wont to exact of love and obedience for the willing offering of love and freedom.
Our good Colonel was not of the tyrannous, but of the loving order of fathers: and having fixed his whole heart upon this darling youth, his son, was punished, as I suppose such worldly and selfish love ought to be punished (so Mr. Honeyman says, at least, in his pulpit), by a hundred little mortifications, disappointments, and secret wounds, which stung not the less severely though never mentioned by their victim.
Sometimes he would have a company of such gentlemen as Messrs. Warrington, Honeyman, and Pendennis, when haply a literary conversation would ensue after dinner; and the merits of our present poets and writers would be discussed with the claret. Honeyman was well enough read in profane literature, especially of the lighter sort; and, I dare say, could have passed a satisfactory examination in Balzac, Dumas, and Paul de Kock himself, of all whose works our good host was entirely ignorant,—as indeed he was of graver books, and of earlier books, and of books in general—except those few which we have said formed his travelling library. He heard opinions that amazed and bewildered him. He heard that Byron was no great poet, though a very clever man. He heard that there had been a wicked persecution against Mr. Pope’s memory and fame, and that it was time to reinstate him; that his favourite, Dr. Johnson, talked admirably, but did not write English: that young Keats was a genius to be estimated in future days with young Raphael: and that a young gentleman of Cambridge who had lately published two volumes of verses, might take rank with the greatest poets of all. Doctor Johnson not write English! Lord Byron not one of the greatest poets of the world! Sir Walter a poet of the second order! Mr. Pope attacked for inferiority and want of imagination; Mr. Keats and this young Mr. Tennyson of Cambridge, the chief of modern poetic literature! What were these new dicta, which Mr. Warrington delivered with a puff of tobacco-smoke: to which Mr. Honeyman blandly assented and Clive listened with pleasure? Such opinions were not of the Colonel’s time. He tried in vain to construe Oenone, and to make sense of Lamia. Ulysses he could understand; but what were these prodigious laudations bestowed on it? And that reverence for Mr. Wordsworth, what did it mean? Had he not written Peter Bell, and been turned into deserved ridicule by all the reviews? Was that dreary Excursion to be compared to Goldsmith’s Traveller, or Doctor Johnson’s Imitation of the Tenth Satire of Juvenal? If the young men told the truth, where had been the truth in his own young days, and in what ignorance had our forefathers been brought up?—Mr. Addison was only an elegant essayist, and shallow trifler! All these opinions were openly uttered over the Colonel’s claret, as he and Mr. Binnie sate wondering at the speakers, who were knocking the gods of their youth about their ears. To Binnie the shock was not so great; the hard-headed Scotchman had read Hume in his college days, and sneered at some of the gods even at that early time. But with Newcome the admiration for the literature of the last century was an article of belief: and the incredulity of the young men seemed rank blasphemy. “You will be sneering at Shakspeare next,” he said: and was silenced, though not better pleased, when his youthful guests told him, that Doctor Goldsmith sneered at him too; that Dr. Johnson did not understand him, and that Congreve, in his own day and afterwards, was considered to be, in some points, Shakspeare’s superior. “What do you think a man’s criticism is worth, sir,” cries Mr. Warrington, “who says those lines of Mr. Congreve, about a church—
‘How reverend is the face of yon tall pile, Whose ancient pillars rear their marble heads, To bear aloft its vast and ponderous roof, By its own weight made steadfast and immovable; Looking tranquillity. It strikes an awe And terror on my aching sight’—et cætera
what do you think of a critic who says those lines are finer than anything Shakspeare ever wrote?” A dim consciousness of danger for Clive, a terror that his son had got into the society of heretics and unbelievers, came over the Colonel,—and then presently, as was the wont with his modest soul, a gentle sense of humility. He was in the wrong, perhaps, and these younger men were right. Who was he, to set up his judgment against men of letters, educated at college? It was better that Clive should follow them than him, who had had but a brief schooling, and that neglected, and who had not the original genius of his son’s brilliant companions. We particularise these talks, and the little incidental mortifications which one of the best of men endured, not because the conversations are worth the remembering or recording, but because they presently very materially influenced his own and his son’s future history.
In the midst of the artists and their talk the poor Colonel was equally in the dark. They assaulted this Academician and that; laughed at Mr. Haydon, or sneered at Mr. Eastlake, or the contrary; deified Mr. Turner on one side of the table, and on the other scorned him as a madman—nor could Newcome comprehend a word of their jargon. Some sense there must be in their conversation: Clive joined eagerly in it and took one side or another. But what was all this rapture about a snuffy brown picture called Titian, this delight in three flabby nymphs by Rubens, and so forth? As for the vaunted Antique, and the Elgin Marbles—it might be that that battered torso was a miracle, and that broken-nosed bust a perfect beauty. He tried and tried to see that they were. He went away privily and worked at the National Gallery with a catalogue: and passed hours in the Museum before the ancient statues, desperately praying to comprehend them, and puzzled before them as he remembered he was puzzled before the Greek rudiments as a child when he cried over ὁ, και ἡ ἀληθής, και τὸ ἀληθὲς. Whereas when Clive came to look at these same things his eyes would lighten up with pleasure, and his cheeks flush with enthusiasm. He seemed to drink in colour as he would a feast of wine. Before the statues he would wave his finger, following the line of grace, and burst into ejaculations of delight and admiration. “Why can’t I love the things which he loves?” thought Newcome; “why am I blind to the beauties which he admires so much—and am I unable to comprehend what he evidently understands at his young age?”
So, as he thought what vain egotistical hopes he used to form about the boy when he was away in India—how in his plans for the happy future, Clive was to be always at his side; how they were to read, work, play, think, be merry together—a sickening and humiliating sense of the reality came over him: and he sadly contrasted it with the former fond anticipations. Together they were, yet he was alone still. His thoughts were not the boy’s: and his affections rewarded but with a part of the young man’s heart. Very likely other lovers have suffered equally. Many a man and woman has been incensed and worshipped, and has shown no more feeling than is to be expected from idols. There is yonder statue in St. Peter’s, of which the toe is worn away with kisses, and which sits, and will sit eternally, prim and cold. As the young man grew, it seemed to the father as if each day separated them more and more. He himself became more melancholy and silent. His friend the civilian marked the ennui, and commented on it in his laughing way. Sometimes he announced to the club that Tom Newcome was in love: then he thought it was not Tom’s heart but his liver that was affected, and recommended blue pill. O thou fond fool! who art thou, to know any man’s heart save thine alone? Wherefore were wings made, and do feathers grow, but that birds should fly? The instinct that bids you love your nest, leads the young ones to seek a tree and a mate of their own. As if Thomas Newcome by poring over poems or pictures ever so much could read them with Clive’s eyes!—as if by sitting mum over his wine, but watching till the lad came home with his latchkey (when the Colonel crept back to his own room in his stockings), by prodigal bounties, by stealthy affection, by any schemes or prayers, he could hope to remain first in his son’s heart!
One day going into Clive’s study, where the lad was so deeply engaged that he did not hear the father’s steps advancing, Thomas Newcome found his son, pencil in hand, poring over a paper, which, blushing, he thrust hastily into his breast-pocket, as soon as he saw his visitor. The father was deeply smitten and mortified. “I—I am sorry you have any secrets from me, Clive,” he gasped out at length.
The boy’s face lighted up with humour. “Here it is, father, if you would like to see:”—and he pulled out a paper which contained neither more nor less than a copy of very flowery verses, about a certain young lady, who had succeeded (after I know not how many predecessors) to the place of prima donna assoluta in Clive’s heart. And be pleased, madam, not to be too eager with your censure, and fancy that Mr. Clive or his chronicler would insinuate anything wrong. I dare say you felt a flame or two before you were married yourself: and that the Captain or the Curate, and the interesting young foreigner with whom you danced, caused your heart to beat, before you bestowed that treasure on Mr. Candour. Clive was doing no more than your own son will do when he is eighteen or nineteen years old himself—if he is a lad of any spirit and a worthy son of so charming a lady as yourself.
XXII. Describes a Visit to Paris; with Accidents and Incidents in London
Mr. Clive, as we have said, had now begun to make acquaintances of his own; and the chimney-glass in his study was decorated with such a number of cards of invitation, as made his ex-fellow-student of Gandish’s, young Moss, when admitted into that sanctum, stare with respectful astonishment. “Lady Bary Rowe at obe,” the young Hebrew read out; “Lady Baughton at obe, dadsig! By eyes! what a tip-top swell you’re a gettid to be, Newcome! I guess this is a different sort of business to the hops at old Levison’s, where you first learned the polka; and where we had to pay a shilling a glass for negus!”
“We had to pay! You never paid anything, Moss,” cries Clive, laughing; and indeed the negus imbibed by Mr. Moss did not cost that prudent young fellow a penny.
“Well, well; I suppose at these swell parties you ’ave as bush champade as ever you like,” continues Moss. “Lady Kicklebury at obe—small early party. Why, I declare you know the whole peerage! I say, if any of these swells want a little tip-top lace, a real bargain, or diamonds, you know, you might put in a word for us, and do us a good turn.”
“Give me some of your cards,” says Clive; “I can distribute them about at the balls I go to. But you must treat my friends better than you serve me. Those cigars which you sent me were abominable, Moss; the groom in the stable won’t smoke them.”
“What a regular swell that Newcome has become!” says Mr. Moss to an old companion, another of Clive’s fellow-students: “I saw him riding in the Park with the Earl of Kew, and Captain Belsize, and a whole lot of ’em—I know ’em all—and he’d hardly nod to me. I’ll have a horse next Sunday, and then I’ll see whether he’ll cut me or not. Confound his airs! For all he’s such a count, I know he’s got an aunt who lets lodgings at Brighton, and an uncle who’ll be preaching in the Bench if he don’t keep a precious good look-out.”
“Newcome is not a bit of a count,” answers Moss’s companion, indignantly. “He don’t care a straw whether a fellow’s poor or rich; and he comes up to my room just as willingly as he would go to a duke’s. He is always trying to do a friend a good turn. He draws the figure capitally: he looks proud, but he isn’t, and is the best-natured fellow I ever saw.”
“He ain’t been in our place this eighteen months,” says Mr. Moss: “I know that.”
“Because when he came you were always screwing him with some bargain or other,” cried the intrepid Hicks, Mr. Moss’s companion for the moment. “He said he couldn’t afford to know you: you never let him out of your house without a pin, or a box of eau-de-cologne, or a bundle of cigars. And when you cut the arts for the shop, how were you and Newcome to go on together, I should like to know?”
“I know a relative of his who comes to our ’ouse every three months, to renew a little bill,” says Mr. Moss, with a grin: “and I know this, if I go to the Earl of Kew in the Albany, or the Honourable Captain Belsize, Knightsbridge Barracks, they let me in soon enough. I’m told his father ain’t got much money.”
“How the deuce should I know? or what do I care?” cries the young artist, stamping the heel of his blucher on the pavement. “When I was sick in that confounded Clipstone Street, I know the Colonel came to see me, and Newcome too, day after day, and night after night. And when I was getting well, they sent me wine and jelly, and all sorts of jolly things. I should like to know how often you came to see me, Moss, and what you did for a fellow?”
“Well, I kep away because I thought you wouldn’t like to be reminded of that two pound three you owe me, Hicks: that’s why I kep away,” says Mr. Moss, who, I dare say, was good-natured too. And when young Moss appeared at the billiard-room that night, it was evident that Hicks had told the story; for the Wardour Street youth was saluted with a roar of queries, “How about that two pound three that Hicks owes you?”
The artless conversation of the two youths will enable us to understand how our hero’s life was speeding. Connected in one way or another with persons in all ranks, it never entered his head to be ashamed of the profession which he had chosen. People in the great world did not in the least trouble themselves regarding him, or care to know whether Mr. Clive Newcome followed painting or any other pursuit: and though Clive saw many of his schoolfellows in the world, these entering into the army, others talking with delight of college, and its pleasures or studies; yet, having made up his mind that art was his calling, he refused to quit her for any other mistress, and plied his easel very stoutly. He passed through the course of study prescribed by Mr. Gandish, and drew every cast and statue in that gentleman’s studio. Grindley, his tutor, getting a curacy, Clive did not replace him; but he took a course of modern languages, which he learned with considerable aptitude and rapidity. And now, being strong enough to paint without a master, it was found that there was no good light in the house in Fitzroy Square; and Mr. Clive must needs have an atelier hard by, where he could pursue his own devices independently.
If his kind father felt any pang even at this temporary parting, he was greatly soothed and pleased by a little mark of attention on the young man’s part, of which his present biographer happened to be a witness; for having walked over with Colonel Newcome to see the new studio, with its tall centre window, and its curtains, and carved wardrobes, china jars, pieces of armour, and other artistical properties, the lad, with a very sweet smile of kindness and affection lighting up his honest face, took one of two Bramah’s house-keys with which he was provided, and gave it to his father: “That’s your key, sir,” he said to the Colonel; “and you must be my first sitter, please, father; for though I’m a historical painter, I shall condescend to do a few portraits, you know.” The Colonel took his son’s hand, and grasped it; as Clive fondly put the other hand on his father’s shoulder. Then Colonel Newcome walked away into the next room for a minute or two, and came back wiping his moustache with his handkerchief, and still holding the key in the other hand. He spoke about some trivial subject when he returned; but his voice quite trembled; and I thought his face seemed to glow with love and pleasure. Clive has never painted anything better than that head, which he executed in a couple of sittings; and wisely left without subjecting it to the chances of further labour.
It is certain the young man worked much better after he had been inducted into this apartment of his own. And the meals at home were gayer; and the rides with his father more frequent and agreeable. The Colonel used his key once or twice, and found Clive and his friend Ridley engaged in depicting a life-guardsman,—or a muscular negro,—or a Malay from a neighbouring crossing, who would appear as Othello, conversing with a Clipstone Street nymph, who was ready to represent Desdemona, Diana, Queen Ellinor (sucking poison from the arm of the Plantagenet of the Blues), or any other model of virgin or maiden excellence.
Of course our young man commenced as a historical painter, deeming that the highest branch of art; and declining (except for preparatory studies) to operate on any but the largest canvasses. He painted a prodigious battle-piece of Assaye, with General Wellesley at the head of the 19th Dragoons charging the Mahratta Artillery, and sabring them at their guns. A piece of ordnance was dragged into the back-yard, and the Colonel’s stud put into requisition to supply studies for this enormous picture. Fred Bayham (a stunning likeness) appeared as the principal figure in the foreground, terrifically wounded, but still of undaunted courage, slashing about amidst a group of writhing Malays, and bestriding the body of a dead cab-horse, which Clive painted, until the landlady and rest of the lodgers cried out, and for sanitary reasons the knackers removed the slaughtered charger. So large was this picture that it could only be got out of the great window by means of artifice and coaxing; and its transport caused a shout of triumph among the little boys in Charlotte Street. Will it be believed that the Royal Academicians rejected the “Battle of Assaye”? The masterpiece was so big that Fitzroy Square could not hold it; and the Colonel had thoughts of presenting it to the Oriental Club; but Clive (who had taken a trip to Paris with his father, as a délassement after the fatigues incident on this great work), when he saw it, after a month’s interval, declared the thing was rubbish, and massacred Britons, Malays, Dragoons, Artillery and all.
“Hôtel de la Terrasse, Rue de Rivoli,
“April 27—May 1, 183-.
“My Dear Pendennis—You said I might write you a line from Paris; and if you find in my correspondence any valuable hints for the Pall Mall Gazette, you are welcome to use them gratis. Now I am here, I wonder I have never been here before, and that I have seen the Dieppe packet a thousand times at Brighton pier without thinking of going on board her. We had a rough little passage to Boulogne. We went into action as we cleared Dover pier—when the first gun was fired, and a stout old lady was carried off by a steward to the cabin; half a dozen more dropped immediately, and the crew bustled about, bringing basins for the wounded. The Colonel smiled as he saw them fall. ‘I’m an old sailor,’ says he to a gentleman on board. ‘I was coming home, sir, and we had plenty of rough weather on the voyage, I never thought of being unwell. My boy here, who made the voyage twelve years ago last May, may have lost his sea-legs; but for me, sir—’ Here a great wave dashed over the three of us; and would you believe it? in five minutes after, the dear old governor was as ill as all the rest of the passengers. When we arrived, we went through a line of ropes to the custom-house, with a crowd of snobs jeering at us on each side; and then were carried off by a bawling commissioner to an hotel, where the Colonel, who speaks French beautifully, you know, told the waiter to get us a petit déjeuner soigné; on which the fellow, grinning, said, a ‘nice fried sole, sir,—nice mutton-chop, sir,’ in regular Temple Bar English; and brought us Harvey sauce with the chops, and the last Bell’s Life to amuse us after our luncheon. I wondered if all the Frenchmen read Bell’s Life, and if all the inns smell so of brandy-and-water!
“We walked out to see the town, which I dare say you know, and therefore shan’t describe. We saw some good studies of fishwomen with bare legs, and remarked that the soldiers were very dumpy and small. We were glad when the time came to set off by the diligence; and having the coupe to ourselves, made a very comfortable journey to Paris. It was jolly to hear the postillions crying to their horses, and the bells of the team, and to feel ourselves really in France. We took in provender at Abbeville and Amiens, and were comfortably landed here after about six-and-twenty hours of coaching. Didn’t I get up the next morning and have a good walk in the Tuileries! The chestnuts were out, and the statues all shining, and all the windows of the palace in a blaze. It looks big enough for the king of the giants to live in. How grand it is! I like the barbarous splendour of the architecture, and the ornaments profuse and enormous with which it is overladen. Think of Louis XVI. with a thousand gentlemen at his back, and a mob of yelling ruffians in front of him, giving up his crown without a fight for it; leaving his friends to be butchered, and himself sneaking into prison! No end of little children were skipping and playing in the sunshiny walks, with dresses as bright and cheeks as red as the flowers and roses in the parterres. I couldn’t help thinking of Barbaroux and his bloody pikemen swarming in the gardens, and fancied the Swiss in the windows yonder; where they were to be slaughtered when the King had turned his back. What a great man that Carlyle is! I have read the battle in his History so often, that I knew it before I had seen it. Our windows look out on the obelisk where the guillotine stood. The Colonel doesn’t admire Carlyle. He says Mrs. Graham’s Letters from Paris are excellent, and we bought Scott’s Visit to Paris, and Paris Re-visited, and read them in the diligence. They are famous good reading; but the Palais Royal is very much altered since Scott’s time: no end of handsome shops; I went there directly,—the same night we arrived, when the Colonel went to bed. But there is none of the fun going on which Scott describes. The laquais-de-place says Charles X. put an end to it all.
“Next morning the governor had letters to deliver after breakfast, and left me at the Louvre door. I shall come and live here, I think. I feel as if I never want to go away. I had not been ten minutes in the place before I fell in love with the most beautiful creature the world has ever seen. She was standing silent and majestic in the centre of one of the rooms of the statue-gallery; and the very first glimpse of her struck one breathless with the sense of her beauty. I could not see the colour of her eyes and hair exactly, but the latter is light, and the eyes I should think are grey. Her complexion is of a beautiful warm marble tinge. She is not a clever woman, evidently; I do not think she laughs or talks much—she seems too lazy to do more than smile. She is only beautiful. This divine creature has lost an arm, which has been cut off at the shoulder, but she looks none the less lovely for the accident. She maybe some two-and-thirty years old; and she was born about two thousand years ago. Her name is the Venus of Milo. O Victrix! O lucky Paris! (I don’t mean this present Lutetia, but Priam’s son.) How could he give the apple to any else but this enslaver—this joy of gods and men? at whose benign presence the flowers spring up, and the smiling ocean sparkles, and the soft skies beam with serene light! I wish we might sacrifice. I would bring a spotless kid, snowy-coated, and a pair of doves and a jar of honey—yea, honey from Morel’s in Piccadilly, thyme-flavoured, narbonian, and we would acknowledge the Sovereign Loveliness, and adjure the Divine Aphrodite. Did you ever see my pretty young cousin, Miss Newcome, Sir Brian’s daughter? She has a great look of the huntress Diana. It is sometimes too proud and too cold for me. The blare of those horns is too shrill and the rapid pursuit through bush and bramble too daring. O thou generous Venus! O thou beautiful bountiful calm! At thy soft feet let me kneel—on cushions of Tyrian purple. Don’t show this to Warrington, please: I never thought when I began that Pegasus was going to run away with me.
“I wish I had read Greek a little more at school: it’s too late at my age; I shall be nineteen soon, and have got my own business; but when we return I think I shall try and read it with Cribs. What have I been doing, spending six months over a picture of sepoys and dragoons cutting each other’s throats? Art ought not to be a fever. It ought to be a calm; not a screaming bull-fight or a battle of gladiators, but a temple for placid contemplation, rapt worship, stately rhythmic ceremony, and music solemn and tender. I shall take down my Snyders and Rubens when I get home; and turn quietist. To think I have spent weeks in depicting bony life-guardsmen delivering cut one, or Saint George, and painting black beggars off a crossing!
“What a grand thing it is to think of half a mile of pictures at the Louvre! Not but that there are a score under the old pepper-boxes in Trafalgar Square as fine as the best here. I don’t care for any Raphael here, as much as our own St. Catharine. There is nothing more grand. Could the Pyramids of Egypt or the Colossus of Rhodes be greater than our Sebastian? and for our Bacchus and Ariadne, you cannot beat the best you know. But if we have fine jewels, here there are whole sets of them: there are kings and all their splendid courts round about them. J. J. and I must come and live here. Oh, such portraits of Titian! Oh, such swells by Vandyke! I’m sure he must have been as fine a gentleman as any he painted! It’s a shame they haven’t got a Sir Joshua or two. At a feast of painters he has a right to a place, and at the high table too. Do you remember Tom Rogers, of Gandish’s? He used to come to my rooms—my other rooms in the Square. Tom is here with a fine carrotty beard, and a velvet jacket, cut open at the sleeves, to show that Tom has a shirt. I dare say it was clean last Sunday. He has not learned French yet, but pretends to have forgotten English; and promises to introduce me to a set of the French artists his camarades. There seems to be a scarcity of soap among these young fellows; and I think I shall cut off my mustachios; only Warrington will have nothing to laugh at when I come home.
“The Colonel and I went to dine at the Café de Paris, and afterwards to the opera. Ask for huitres de Marenne when you dine here. We dined with a tremendous French swell, the Vicomte de Florac, officier d’ordonnance to one of the princes, and son of some old friends of my father’s. They are of very high birth, but very poor. He will be a duke when his cousin, the Duc d’Ivry, dies. His father is quite old. The vicomte was born in England. He pointed out to us no end of famous people at the opera—a few of the Fauxbourg St. Germain, and ever so many of the present people:—M. Thiers, and Count Molé, and Georges Sand, and Victor Hugo, and Jules Janin—I forget half their names. And yesterday we went to see his mother, Madame de Florac. I suppose she was an old flame of the Colonel’s, for their meeting was uncommonly ceremonious and tender. It was like an elderly Sir Charles Grandison saluting a middle-aged Miss Byron. And only fancy! the Colonel has been here once before since his return to England! It must have been last year, when he was away for ten days, whilst I was painting that rubbishing picture of the Black Prince waiting on King John. Madame de F. is a very grand lady, and must have been a great beauty in her time. There are two pictures by Gerard in her salon—of her and M. de Florac. M. de Florac, old swell, powder, thick eyebrows, hooked nose; no end of stars, ribbons, and embroidery. Madame also in the dress of the Empire—pensive, beautiful, black velvet, and a look something like my cousin’s. She wore a little old-fashioned brooch yesterday, and said, ‘Voilà, la reconnoissez-vous? Last year when you were here, it was in the country;’ and she smiled at him: and the dear old boy gave a sort of groan and dropped his head in his hand. I know what it is. I’ve gone through it myself. I kept for six months an absurd ribbon of that infernal little flirt Fanny Freeman. Don’t you remember how angry I was when you abused her?
“‘Your father and I knew each other when we were children, my friend,’ the Countess said to me (in the sweetest French accent). He was looking into the garden of the house where they live, in the Rue Saint Dominique. ‘You must come and see me often, always. You remind me of him,’ and she added, with a very sweet kind smile, ‘Do you like best to think that he was better-looking than you, or that you excel him?’ I said I should like to be like him. But who is? There are cleverer fellows, I dare say; but where is there such a good one? I wonder whether he was very fond of Madame de Florac? The old Count does not show. He is quite old, and wears a pigtail. We saw it bobbing over his garden chair. He lets the upper part of his house; Major-General the Honourable Zeno F. Pokey, of Cincinnati, U.S., lives in it. We saw Mrs. Pokey’s carriage in the court, and her footmen smoking cigars there; a tottering old man with feeble legs, as old as old Count de Florac, seemed to be the only domestic who waited on the family below.
“Madame de Florac and my father talked about my profession. The Countess said it was a belle carrière. The Colonel said it was better than the army. ‘Ah oui, monsieur,’ says she very sadly. And then he said, ‘that presently I should very likely come to study at Paris, when he knew there would be a kind friend to watch over son garçon.’
“‘But you will be here to watch over him yourself, mon ami?’ says the French lady.
“Father shook his head. ‘I shall very probably have to go back to India,’ he said. ‘My furlough is expired. I am now taking my extra leave. If I can get my promotion, I need not return. Without that I cannot afford to live in Europe. But my absence in all probability will be but very short,’ he said. ‘And Clive is old enough now to go on without me.’
“Is this the reason why father has been so gloomy for some months past? I thought it might have been some of my follies which made him uncomfortable; and you know I have been trying my best to amend—I have not half such a tailor’s bill this year as last. I owe scarcely anything. I have paid off Moss every halfpenny for his confounded rings and gimcracks. I asked father about this melancholy news as we walked away from Madame de Florac.
“He is not near so rich as we thought. Since he has been at home he says he has spent greatly more than his income, and is quite angry at his own extravagance. At first he thought he might have retired from the army altogether; but after three years at home, he finds he cannot live upon his income. When he gets his promotion as full Colonel, he will be entitled to a thousand a year; that, and what he has invested in India, and a little in this country, will be plenty for both of us. He never seems to think of my making money by my profession. Why, suppose I sell the ‘Battle of Assaye’ for 500 pounds? that will be enough to carry me on ever so long, without dipping into the purse of the dear old father.
“The Viscount de Florac called to dine with us. The Colonel said he did not care about going out: and so the Viscount and I went together. Trois Frères Provençaux—he ordered the dinner and of course I paid. Then we went to a little theatre, and he took me behind the scenes—such a queer place! We went to the loge of Mademoiselle Fine who acted the part of ‘Le petit Tambour,’ in which she sings a famous song with a drum. He asked her and several literary fellows to supper at the Café Anglais. And I came home ever so late, and lost twenty napoleons at a game called bouillotte. It was all the change out of a twenty-pound note which dear old Binnie gave me before we set out, with a quotation out of Horace, you know, about Neque tu choreas sperne puer. O me! how guilty I felt as I walked home at ever so much o’clock to the Hotel de la Terrasse, and sneaked into our apartment! But the Colonel was sound asleep. His dear old boots stood sentries at his bedroom door, and I slunk into mine as silently as I could.
“P.S.—Wednesday.—There’s just one scrap of paper left. I have got J. J.’s letter. He has been to the private view of the Academy (so that his own picture is in), and the ‘Battle of Assaye’ is refused. Smee told him it was too big. I dare say it’s very bad. I’m glad I’m away, and the fellows are not condoling with me.
“Please go and see Mr. Binnie. He has come to grief. He rode the Colonel’s horse; came down on the pavement and wrenched his leg, and I’m afraid the grey’s. Please look at his legs; we can’t understand John’s report of them. He, I mean Mr. B., was going to Scotland to see his relations when the accident happened. You know he has always been going to Scotland to see his relations. He makes light of the business, and says the Colonel is not to think of coming to him: and I don’t want to go back just yet, to see all the fellows from Gandish’s and the Life Academy, and have them grinning at my misfortune.
“The governor would send his regards, I dare say, but he is out, and I am always yours affectionately, Clive Newcome.”
“P.S.—He tipped me himself this morning; isn’t he a kind, dear old fellow?”
Arthur Pendennis, Esq., to Clive Newcome, Esq.
“‘Pall Mall Gazette,’ Journal of Politics, Literature and Fashion, 225 Catherine Street, Strand,
“Dear Clive—I regret very much for Fred Bayham’s sake (who has lately taken the responsible office of Fine Arts Critic for the P. G.) that your extensive picture of the ‘Battle of Assaye’ has not found a place in the Royal Academy Exhibition. F. B. is at least fifteen shillings out of pocket by its rejection, as he had prepared a flaming eulogium of your work, which of course is so much waste paper in consequence of this calamity. Never mind. Courage, my son. The Duke of Wellington you know was best back at Seringapatam before he succeeded at Assaye. I hope you will fight other battles, and that fortune in future years will be more favourable to you. The town does not talk very much of your discomfiture. You see the parliamentary debates are very interesting just now, and somehow the ‘Battle of Assaye’ did not seem to excite the public mind.
“I have been to Fitzroy Square; both to the stables and the house. The Houyhnhnm’s legs are very well; the horse slipped on his side and not on his knees, and has received no sort of injury. Not so Mr. Binnie; his ankle is much wrenched and inflamed. He must keep his sofa for many days, perhaps weeks. But you know he is a very cheerful philosopher, and endures the evils of life with much equanimity. His sister has come to him. I don’t know whether that may be considered as a consolation of his evil or an aggravation of it. You know he uses the sarcastic method in his talk, and it was difficult to understand from him whether he was pleased or bored by the embraces of his relative. She was an infant when he last beheld her, on his departure to India. She is now (to speak with respect) a very brisk, plump, pretty little widow; having, seemingly, recovered from her grief at the death of her husband, Captain Mackenzie in the West Indies. Mr. Binnie was just on the point of visiting his relatives, who reside at Musselburgh, near Edinburgh, when he met with the fatal accident which prevented his visit to his native shores. His account of his misfortune and his lonely condition was so pathetic that Mrs. Mackenzie and her daughter put themselves into the Edinburgh steamer, and rushed to console his sofa. They occupy your bedroom and sitting-room, which latter Mrs. Mackenzie says no longer smells of tobacco smoke, as it did when she took possession of your den. If you have left any papers about, any bills, any billets-doux, I make no doubt the ladies have read every single one of them, according to the amiable habits of their sex. The daughter is a bright little blue-eyed fair-haired lass, with a very sweet voice, in which she sings (unaided by instrumental music, and seated on a chair in the middle of the room) the artless ballads of her native country. I had the pleasure of hearing the ‘Bonnets of Bonny Dundee’ and ‘Jack of Hazeldean’ from her ruby lips two evenings since; not indeed for the first time in my life, but never from such a pretty little singer. Though both ladies speak our language with something of the tone usually employed by the inhabitants of the northern part of Britain, their accent is exceedingly pleasant, and indeed by no means so strong as Mr. Binnie’s own; for Captain Mackenzie was an Englishman, for whose sake his lady modified her native Musselburgh pronunciation. She tells many interesting anecdotes of him, of the West Indies, and of the distinguished regiment of infantry to which the captain belonged. Miss Rosa is a great favourite with her uncle, and I have had the good fortune to make their stay in the metropolis more pleasant, by sending them orders, from the Pall Mall Gazette, for the theatres, panoramas, and the principal sights in town. For pictures they do not seem to care much; they thought the National Gallery a dreary exhibition, and in the Royal Academy could be got to admire nothing but the picture of M’Collop of M’Collop, by our friend of the like name; but they think Madame Tussaud’s interesting exhibition of waxwork the most delightful in London; and there I had the happiness of introducing them to our friend Mr. Frederick Bayham; who, subsequently, on coming to this office with his valuable contributions on the Fine Arts, made particular inquiries as to their pecuniary means, and expressed himself instantly ready to bestow his hand upon the mother or daughter, provided old Mr. Binnie would make a satisfactory settlement. I got the ladies a box at the opera, whither they were attended by Captain Goby of their regiment, godfather to Miss, and where I had the honour of paying them a visit. I saw your fair young cousin Miss Newcome in the lobby with her grandmamma Lady Kew. Mr. Bayham with great eloquence pointed out to the Scotch ladies the various distinguished characters in the house. The opera delighted them, but they were astounded at the ballet, from which mother and daughter retreated in the midst of a fire of pleasantries of Captain Goby. I can fancy that officer at mess, and how brilliant his anecdotes must be when the company of ladies does not restrain his genial flow of humour.
“Here comes Mr. Baker with the proofs. In case you don’t see the P. G. at Galignani’s, I send you an extract from Bayham’s article on the Royal Academy, where you will have the benefit of his opinion on the works of some of your friends:—
“‘617. “Moses Bringing Home the Gross of Green Spectacles,” Smith, R.A.—Perhaps poor Goldsmith’s exquisite little work has never been so great a favourite as in the present age. We have here, in a work by one of our most eminent artists, an homage to the genius of him “who touched nothing which he did not adorn:” and the charming subject is handled in the most delicious manner by Mr. Smith. The chiaroscuro is admirable: the impasto is perfect. Perhaps a very captious critic might object to the foreshortening of Moses’s left leg; but where there is so much to praise justly, the Pall Mall Gazette does not care to condemn.
“‘420. Our (and the public’s) favourite, Brown, R.A., treats us to a subject from the best of all stories, the tale “which laughed Spain’s chivalry away,” the ever new Don Quixote. The incident which Brown has selected is the “Don’s Attack on the Flock of Sheep;” the sheep are in his best manner, painted with all his well-known facility and brio. Mr. Brown’s friendly rival, Hopkins, has selected “Gil Blas” for an illustration this year; and the “Robber’s Cavern” is one of the most masterly of Hopkins’ productions.
“‘Great Rooms. 33. “Portrait of Cardinal Cospetto,” O’Gogstay, A.R.A.; and “Neighbourhood of Corpodibacco—Evening—a Contadina and a Trasteverino dancing at the door of a Locanda to the music of a Pifferaro.”—Since his visit to Italy Mr. O’Gogstay seems to have given up the scenes of Irish humour with which he used to delight us; and the romance, the poetry, the religion of “Italia la bella” form the subjects of his pencil. The scene near Corpodibacco (we know the spot well, and have spent many a happy month in its romantic mountains) is most characteristic. Cardinal Cospetto, we must say, is a most truculent prelate, and not certainly an ornament to his church.
“‘49, 210, 311. Smee, R.A.—Portraits which a Reynolds might be proud of,—a Vandyke or Claude might not disown. “Sir Brian Newcome, in the costume of a Deputy-Lieutenant,” “Major-General Sir Thomas de Boots, K.C.B.,” painted for the 50th Dragoons, are triumphs, indeed, of this noble painter. Why have we no picture of the Sovereign and her august consort from Smee’s brush? When Charles II. picked up Titian’s mahl-stick, he observed to a courtier, “A king you can always have; a genius comes but rarely.” While we have a Smee among us, and a monarch whom we admire,—may the one be employed to transmit to posterity the beloved features of the other! We know our lucubrations are read in high places, and respectfully insinuate verbum sapienti.
“‘1906. “The M’Collop of M’Collop,”—A. M’Collop,—is a noble work of a young artist, who, in depicting the gallant chief of a hardy Scottish clan, has also represented a romantic Highland landscape, in the midst of which, “his foot upon his native heath,” stands a man of splendid symmetrical figure and great facial advantages. We shall keep our eye on Mr. M’Collop.
“‘1367. “Oberon and Titania.” Ridley.—This sweet and fanciful little picture draws crowds round about it, and is one of the most charming and delightful works of the present exhibition. We echo the universal opinion in declaring that it shows not only the greatest promise, but the most delicate and beautiful performance. The Earl of Kew, we understand, bought the picture at the private view; and we congratulate the young painter heartily upon his successful début. He is, we understand, a pupil of Mr. Gandish. Where is that admirable painter? We miss his bold canvasses and grand historic outline.’
“I shall alter a few inaccuracies in the composition of our friend F. B., who has, as he says, ‘drawn it uncommonly mild in the above criticism.’ In fact, two days since, he brought in an article of quite a different tendency, of which he retains only the two last paragraphs; but he has, with great magnanimity, recalled his previous observations; and, indeed, he knows as much about pictures as some critics I could name.
“Good-bye, my dear Clive! I send my kindest regards to your father; and think you had best see as little as possible of your bouillotte-playing French friend and his friends. This advice I know you will follow, as young men always follow the advice of their seniors and well-wishers. I dine in Fitzroy Square to-day with the pretty widow and her daughter, and am yours always, dear Clive, A. P.”
XXIII. In which we hear a Soprano and a Contralto
The most hospitable and polite of Colonels would not hear of Mrs. Mackenzie and her daughter quitting his house when he returned to it, after six weeks’ pleasant sojourn in Paris; nor, indeed, did his fair guest show the least anxiety or intention to go away. Mrs. Mackenzie had a fine merry humour of her own. She was an old soldier’s wife, she said and knew when her quarters were good; and I suppose, since her honeymoon, when the captain took her to Harrogate and Cheltenham, stopping at the first hotels, and travelling in a chaise-and-pair the whole way, she had never been so well off as in that roomy mansion near Tottenham Court Road. Of her mother’s house at Musselburgh she gave a ludicrous but dismal account. “Eh, James,” she said, “I think if you had come to mamma, as you threatened, you would not have staid very long. It’s a wearisome place. Dr. M’Craw boards with her; and it’s sermon and psalm-singing from morning till night. My little Josey takes kindly to the life there, and I left her behind, poor little darling! It was not fair to bring three of us to take possession of your house, dear James; but my poor little Rosey was just withering away there. It’s good for the dear child to see the world a little, and a kind uncle, who is not afraid of us now he sees us, is he?” Kind Uncle James was not at all afraid of little Rosey; whose pretty face and modest manners, and sweet songs, and blue eyes, cheered and soothed the old bachelor. Nor was Rosey’s mother less agreeable and pleasant. She had married the captain (it was a love-match, against the will of her parents, who had destined her to be the third wife of old Dr. M’Mull) when very young. Many sorrows she had had, including poverty, the captain’s imprisonment for debt, and his demise; but she was of a gay and lightsome spirit. She was but three-and-thirty years old, and looked five-and-twenty. She was active, brisk, jovial, and alert; and so good-looking, that it was a wonder she had not taken a successor to Captain Mackenzie. James Binnie cautioned his friend the Colonel against the attractions of the buxom siren; and laughingly would ask Clive how he would like Mrs. Mackenzie for a mamaw?
Colonel Newcome felt himself very much at ease regarding his future prospects. He was very glad that his friend James was reconciled to his family, and hinted to Clive that the late Captain Mackenzie’s extravagance had been the cause of the rupture between him and his brother-in-law, who had helped that prodigal captain repeatedly during his life; and, in spite of family quarrels, had never ceased to act generously to his widowed sister and her family. “But I think, Mr. Clive,” said he, “that as Miss Rosa is very pretty, and you have a spare room at your studio, you had best take up your quarters in Charlotte Street as long as the ladies are living with us.” Clive was nothing loth to be independent; but he showed himself to be a very good home-loving youth. He walked home to breakfast every morning, dined often, and spent the evenings with the family. Indeed, the house was a great deal more cheerful for the presence of the two pleasant ladies. Nothing could be prettier than to see the two ladies tripping downstairs together, mamma’s pretty arm round Rosey’s pretty waist. Mamma’s talk was perpetually of Rosey. That child was always gay, always good, always happy! That darling girl woke with a smile on her face, it was sweet to see her! Uncle James, in his dry way, said, he dared to say it was very pretty. “Go away, you droll, dear old kind Uncle James!” Rosey’s mamma would cry out. “You old bachelors are wicked old things!” Uncle James used to kiss Rosey very kindly and pleasantly. She was as modest, as gentle, as eager to please Colonel Newcome as any little girl could be. It was pretty to see her tripping across the room with his coffee-cup, or peeling walnuts for him after dinner with her white plump little fingers.
Mrs. Irons, the housekeeper, naturally detested Mrs. Mackenzie, and was jealous of her: though the latter did everything to soothe and coax the governess of the two gentlemen’s establishment. She praised her dinners, delighted in her puddings, must beg Mrs. Irons to allow her to see one of those delicious puddings made, and to write the receipt for her, that Mrs. Mackenzie might use it when she was away. It was Mrs. Irons’ belief that Mrs. Mackenzie never intended to go away. She had no ideer of ladies, as were ladies, coming into her kitchen. The maids vowed that they heard Miss Rosa crying, and mamma scolding in her bedroom for all she was so soft-spoken. How was that jug broke, and that chair smashed in the bedroom, that day there was such a awful row up there?
Mrs. Mackenzie played admirably, in the old-fashioned way, dances, reels, and Scotch and Irish tunes, the former, of which filled James Binnie’s soul with delectation. The good mother naturally desired that her darling should have a few good lessons of the piano while she was in London. Rosey was eternally strumming upon an instrument which had been taken upstairs for her special practice; and the Colonel, who was always seeking to do harmless jobs of kindness for his friends, bethought him of little Miss Cann, the governess at Ridley’s, whom he recommended as an instructress. “Anybody whom you recommend I’m sure, dear Colonel, we shall like,” said Mrs. Mackenzie, who looked as black as thunder, and had probably intended to have Monsieur Quatremains or Signor Twankeydillo; and the little governess came to her pupil. Mrs. Mackenzie treated her very gruffly and haughtily at first; but as soon as she heard Miss Cann play, the widow was pacified—nay, charmed. Monsieur Quatremains charged a guinea for three-quarters of an hour; while Miss Cann thankfully took five shillings for an hour and a half; and the difference of twenty lessons, for which dear Uncle James paid, went into Mrs. Mackenzie’s pocket, and thence probably on to her pretty shoulders and head in the shape of a fine silk dress and a beautiful French bonnet, in which Captain Goby said, upon his life, she didn’t look twenty.
The little governess trotting home after her lesson would often look in to Clive’s studio in Charlotte Street, where her two boys, as she called Clive and J. J., were at work each at his easel. Clive used to laugh, and tell us, who joked him about the widow and her daughter, what Miss Cann said about them. Mrs. Mack was not all honey, it appeared. If Rosey played incorrectly, mamma flew at her with prodigious vehemence of language, and sometimes with a slap on poor Rosey’s back. She must make Rosey wear tight boots, and stamp on her little feet if they refused to enter into the slipper. I blush for the indiscretion of Miss Cann; but she actually told J. J., that mamma insisted upon lacing her so tight, as nearly to choke the poor little lass. Rosey did not fight: Rosey always yielded; and the scolding over and the tears dried, would come simpering downstairs with mamma’s arm round her waist, and her pretty artless happy smile for the gentlemen below. Besides the Scottish songs without music, she sang ballads at the piano very sweetly. Mamma used to cry at these ditties. “That child’s voice brings tears into my eyes, Mr. Newcome,” she would say. “She has never known a moment’s sorrow yet! Heaven grant, heaven grant, she may be happy! But what shall I be when I lose her?”
“Why, my dear, when ye lose Rosey, ye’ll console yourself with Josey,” says droll Mr. Binnie from the sofa, who perhaps saw the manœuvre of the widow.
The widow laughs heartily and really. She places a handkerchief over her mouth. She glances at her brother with a pair of eyes full of knowing mischief. “Ah, dear James,” she says, “you don’t know what it is to have a mother’s feelings.”
“I can partly understand them,” says James. “Rosey, sing me that pretty little French song.” Mrs. Mackenzie’s attention to Clive was really quite affecting. If any of his friends came to the house, she took them aside and praised Clive to them. The Colonel she adored. She had never met with such a man or seen such a manner. The manners of the Bishop of Tobago were beautiful, and he certainly had one of the softest and finest hands in the world; but not finer than Colonel Newcome’s. “Look at his foot!” (and she put out her own, which was uncommonly pretty, and suddenly withdrew it, with an arch glance meant to represent a blush)—“my shoe would fit it! When we were at Coventry Island, Sir Peregrine Blandy, who succeeded poor dear Sir Rawdon Crawley—I saw his dear boy was gazetted to a lieutenant-colonelcy in the Guards last week—Sir Peregrine, who was one of the Prince of Wales’s most intimate friends, was always said to have the finest manner and presence of any man of his day; and very grand and noble he was, but I don’t think he was equal to Colonel Newcome—I don’t really think so. Do you think so, Mr. Honeyman? What a charming discourse that was last Sunday! I know there were two pair of eyes not dry in the church. I could not see the other people just for crying myself. Oh, but I wish we could have you at Musselburgh! I was bred a Presbyterian, of course; but in much travelling through the world with my dear husband, I came to love his church. At home we sit under Dr. M’Craw, of course; but he is so awfully long! Four hours every Sunday at least, morning and afternoon! It nearly kills poor Rosey. Did you hear her voice at your church? The dear girl is delighted with the chants. Rosey, were you not delighted with the chants?”
If she is delighted with the chants, Honeyman is delighted with the chantress and her mamma. He dashes the fair hair from his brow: he sits down to the piano, and plays one or two of them, warbling a faint vocal accompaniment, and looking as if he would be lifted off the screw music-stool, and flutter up to the ceiling.
“Oh, it’s just seraphic!” says the widow. “It’s just the breath of incense and the pealing of the organ at the Cathedral at Montreal. Rosey doesn’t remember Montreal. She was a wee wee child. She was born on the voyage out, and christened at sea. You remember, Goby.”
“Gad, I promised and vowed to teach her her catechism; ’gad, but I haven’t,” says Captain Goby. “We were between Montreal and Quebec for three years with the Hundredth, and the Hundred Twentieth Highlanders, and the Thirty-third Dragoon Guards a part of the time; Fipley commanded them, and a very jolly time we had. Much better than the West Indies, where a fellow’s liver goes to the deuce with hot pickles and sangaree. Mackenzie was a dev’lish wild fellow,” whispers Captain Goby to his neighbour (the present biographer, indeed), “and Mrs. Mack was as pretty a little woman as ever you set eyes on.” (Captain Goby winks, and looks peculiarly sly as he makes this statement.) “Our regiment wasn’t on your side of India, Colonel.”
And in the interchange of such delightful remarks, and with music and song, the evening passes away. “Since the house had been adorned by the fair presence of Mrs. Mackenzie and her daughter,” Honeyman said, always gallant in behaviour and flowery in expression, “it seemed as if spring had visited it. Its hospitality was invested with a new grace; its ever welcome little réunions were doubly charming. But why did these ladies come, if they were to go away again? How—how would Mr. Binnie console himself (not to mention others) if they left him in solitude?”
“We have no wish to leave my brother James in solitude,” cries Mrs. Mackenzie, frankly laughing. “We like London a great deal better than Musselburgh.”
“Oh, that we do!” ejaculates the blushing Rosey.
“And we will stay as long as ever my brother will keep us,” continues the widow.
“Uncle James is so kind and dear,” says Rosey. “I hope he won’t send me and mamma away.”
“He were a brute—a savage, if he did!” cries Binnie, with glances of rapture towards the two pretty faces. Everybody liked them. Binnie received their caresses very good-humouredly. The Colonel liked every woman under the sun. Clive laughed and joked and waltzed alternately with Rosey and her mamma. The latter was the briskest partner of the two. The unsuspicious widow, poor dear innocent, would leave her girl at the painting-room, and go shopping herself; but little J. J. also worked there, being occupied with his second picture: and he was almost the only one of Clive’s friends whom the widow did not like. She pronounced the quiet little painter a pert, little, obtrusive, underbred creature.
In a word, Mrs. Mackenzie was, as the phrase is, “setting her cap” so openly at Clive, that none of us could avoid seeing her play: and Clive laughed at her simple manœuvres as merrily as the rest. She was a merry little woman. We gave her and her pretty daughter a luncheon in Lamb Court, Temple; in Sibwright’s chambers—luncheon from Dick’s Coffee House—ices and dessert from Partington’s in the Strand. Miss Rosey, Mr. Sibwright, our neighbour in Lamb Court, and the Reverend Charles Honeyman sang very delightfully after lunch; there was quite a crowd of porters, laundresses, and boys to listen in the court; Mr. Paley was disgusted with the noise we made—in fact, the party was perfectly successful. We all liked the widow, and if she did set her pretty ribbons at Clive, why should not she? We all liked the pretty, fresh, modest Rosey. Why, even the grave old benchers in the Temple church, when the ladies visited it on Sunday, winked their reverend eyes with pleasure, as they looked at those two uncommonly smart, pretty, well-dressed, fashionable women. Ladies, go to the Temple church. You will see more young men, and receive more respectful attention there than in any place, except perhaps at Oxford or Cambridge. Go to the Temple church—not, of course, for the admiration which you will excite and which you cannot help; but because the sermon is excellent, the choral services beautifully performed, and the church so interesting as a monument of the thirteenth century, and as it contains the tombs of those dear Knights Templars!
Mrs. Mackenzie could be grave or gay, according to her company: nor could any woman be of more edifying behaviour when an occasional Scottish friend bringing a letter from darling Josey, or a recommendatory letter from Josey’s grandmother, paid a visit in Fitzroy Square. Little Miss Cann used to laugh and wink knowingly, saying, “You will never get back your bedroom, Mr. Clive. You may be sure that Miss Josey will come in a few months; and perhaps old Mrs. Binnie, only no doubt she and her daughter do not agree. But the widow has taken possession of Uncle James; and she will carry off somebody else if I am not mistaken. Should you like a stepmother, Mr. Clive, or should you prefer a wife?”
Whether the fair lady tried her wiles upon Colonel Newcome the present writer has no certain means of ascertaining: but I think another image occupied his heart: and this Circe tempted him no more than a score of other enchantresses who had tried their spells upon him. If she tried she failed. She was a very shrewd woman, quite frank in her talk when such frankness suited her. She said to me, “Colonel Newcome has had some great passion, once upon a time, I am sure of that, and has no more heart to give away. The woman who had his must have been a very lucky woman: though I daresay she did not value what she had; or did not live to enjoy it—or—or something or other. You see tragedies in some people’s faces. I recollect when we were in Coventry Island—there was a chaplain there—a very good man—a Mr. Bell, and married to a pretty little woman who died. The first day I saw him I said, ‘I know that man has had a great grief in life. I am sure that he left his heart in England.’ You gentlemen who write books, Mr. Pendennis, and stop at the third volume, know very well that the real story often begins afterwards. My third volume ended when I was sixteen, and was married to my poor husband. Do you think all our adventures ended then, and that we lived happy ever after? I live for my darling girls now. All I want is to see them comfortable in life. Nothing can be more generous than my dear brother James has been. I am only his half-sister, you know, and was an infant in arms when he went away. He had differences with Captain Mackenzie, who was headstrong and imprudent, and I own my poor dear husband was in the wrong. James could not live with my poor mother. Neither could by possibility suit the other. I have often, I own, longed to come and keep house for him. His home, the society he sees, of men of talents like Mr. Warrington and—and I won’t mention names, or pay compliments to a man who knows human nature so well as the author of Walter Lorraine: this house is pleasanter a thousand times than Musselburgh—pleasanter for me and my dearest Rosey, whose delicate nature shrunk and withered up in poor mamma’s society. She was never happy except in my room, the dear child! She’s all gentleness and affection. She doesn’t seem to show it: but she has the most wonderful appreciation of wit, of genius, and talent of all kinds. She always hides her feelings, except from her fond old mother. I went up into our room yesterday, and found her in tears. I can’t bear to see her eyes red or to think of her suffering. I asked her what ailed her, and kissed her. She is a tender plant, Mr. Pendennis! Heaven knows with what care I have nurtured her! She looked up smiling on my shoulder. She looked so pretty! ‘Oh, mamma,’ the darling child said, ‘I couldn’t help it. I have been crying over Walter Lorraine.’ (Enter Rosey.) Rosey, darling! I have been telling Mr. Pendennis what a naughty, naughty child you were yesterday, and how you read a book which I told you you shouldn’t read; for it is a very wicked book; and though it contains some sad sad truths, it is a great deal too misanthropic (is that the right word? I’m a poor soldier’s wife, and no scholar, you know), and a great deal too bitter; and though the reviews praise it, and the clever people—we are poor simple country people—we won’t praise it. Sing, dearest, that little song” (profuse kisses to Rosey), “that pretty thing that Mr. Pendennis likes.”
“I am sure that I will sing anything that Mr. Pendennis likes,” says Rosey, with her candid bright eyes—and she goes to the piano and warbles “Batti, Batti,” with her sweet fresh artless voice.
More caresses follow. Mamma is in a rapture. How pretty they look—the mother and daughter—two lilies twining together! The necessity of an entertainment at the Temple-lunch from Dick’s (as before mentioned), dessert from Partington’s, Sibwright’s spoons, his boy to aid ours, nay, Sib himself, and his rooms, which are so much more elegant than ours, and where there is a piano and guitar: all these thoughts pass in rapid and brilliant combination in the pleasant Mr. Pendennis’s mind. How delighted the ladies are with the proposal! Mrs. Mackenzie claps her pretty hands, and kisses Rosey again. If osculation is a mark of love, surely Mrs. Mack is the best of mothers. I may say, without false modesty, that our little entertainment was most successful. The champagne was iced to a nicety. The ladies did not perceive that our laundress, Mrs. Flanagan, was intoxicated very early in the afternoon. Percy Sibwright sang admirably, and with the greatest spirit, ditties in many languages. I am sure Miss Rosey thought him (as indeed he is) one of the most fascinating young fellows about town. To her mother’s excellent accompaniment Rosey sang her favourite songs (by the way, her stock was very small—five, I think, was the number). Then the table was moved into a corner, where the quivering moulds of jelly seemed to keep time to the music; and whilst Percy played, two couple of waltzers actually whirled round the little room. No wonder that the court below was thronged with admirers, that Paley the reading man was in a rage, and Mrs. Flanagan in a state of excitement. Ah! pleasant days, happy gold dingy chambers illuminated by youthful sunshine! merry songs and kind faces—it is pleasant to recall you. Some of those bright eyes shine no more: some of those smiling lips do not speak. Some are not less kind, but sadder than in those days: of which the memories revisit us for a moment, and sink back into the grey past. The dear old Colonel beat time with great delight to the songs; the widow lit his cigar with her own fair fingers. That was the only smoke permitted during the entertainment—George Warrington himself not being allowed to use his cutty-pipe—though the gay little widow said that she had been used to smoking in the West Indies and I dare say spoke the truth. Our entertainment lasted actually until after dark: and a particularly neat cab being called from St. Clement’s by Mr. Binnie’s boy, you may be sure we all conducted the ladies to their vehicle: and many a fellow returning from his lonely club that evening into chambers must have envied us the pleasure of having received two such beauties.
The clerical bachelor was not to be outdone by the gentlemen of the bar; and the entertainment at the Temple was followed by one at Honeyman’s lodgings, which, I must own, greatly exceeded ours in splendour, for Honeyman had his luncheon from Gunter’s; and if he had been Miss Rosey’s mother, giving a breakfast to the dear girl on her marriage, the affair could not have been more elegant and handsome. We had but two bouquets at our entertainment; at Honeyman’s there were four upon the breakfast-table, besides a great pineapple, which must have cost the rogue three or four guineas, and which Percy Sibwright delicately cut up. Rosey thought the pineapple delicious. “The dear thing does not remember the pineapples in the West Indies!” cries Mrs. Mackenzie; and she gave us many exciting narratives of entertainments at which she had been present at various colonial governors’ tables. After luncheon, our host hoped we should have a little music. Dancing, of course, could not be allowed. “That,” said Honeyman with his soft-bleating sigh, “were scarcely clerical. You know, besides, you are in a hermitage; and” (with a glance round the table) “must put up with Cenobite’s fare.” The fare was, as I have said, excellent. The wine was bad, as George, and I, and Sib agreed; and in so far we flattered ourselves that our feast altogether excelled the parson’s. The champagne especially was such stuff, that Warrington remarked on it to his neighbour, a dark gentleman, with a tuft to his chin, and splendid rings and chains.
The dark gentleman’s wife and daughter were the other two ladies invited by our host. The elder was splendidly dressed. Poor Mrs. Mackenzie’s simple gimcracks, though she displayed them to the most advantage, and could make an ormolu bracelet go as far as another woman’s emerald clasps, were as nothing compared to the other lady’s gorgeous jewellery. Her fingers glittered with rings innumerable. The head of her smelling-bottle was as big as her husband’s gold snuff box, and of the same splendid material. Our ladies, it must be confessed, came in a modest cab from Fitzroy Square; these arrived in a splendid little open carriage with white ponies, and harness all over brass, which the lady of the rings drove with a whip that was a parasol. Mrs. Mackenzie, standing at Honeyman’s window, with her arm round Rosey’s waist, viewed this arrival perhaps with envy. “My dear Mr. Honeyman, whose are those beautiful horses?” cries Rosey, with enthusiasm.
The divine says with a faint blush—“It is—ah—it is Mrs. Sherrick and Miss Sherrick who have done me the favour to come to luncheon.”
“Wine-merchant. Oh!” thinks Mrs. Mackenzie, who has seen Sherrick’s brass plate on the cellar door of Lady Whittlesea’s Chapel; and hence, perhaps, she was a trifle more magniloquent than usual, and entertained us with stories of colonial governors and their ladies, mentioning no persons but those who “had handles to their names,” as the phrase is.
Although Sherrick had actually supplied the champagne which Warrington abused to him in confidence, the wine-merchant was not wounded; on the contrary, he roared with laughter at the remark, and some of us smiled who understood the humour of the joke. As for George Warrington, he scarce knew more about the town than the ladies opposite to him; who, yet more innocent than George, thought the champagne very good. Mrs. Sherrick was silent during the meal, looking constantly up at her husband, as if alarmed and always in the habit of appealing to that gentleman, who gave her, as I thought, knowing glances and savage winks, which made me augur that he bullied her at home. Miss Sherrick was exceedingly handsome: she kept the fringed curtains of her eyes constantly down; but when she lifted them up towards Clive, who was very attentive to her (the rogue never sees a handsome woman but to this day he continues the same practice)—when she looked up and smiled, she was indeed a beautiful young creature to behold—with her pale forehead, her thick arched eyebrows, her rounded cheeks, and her full lips slightly shaded,—how shall I mention the word?—slightly pencilled, after the manner of the lips of the French governess, Mademoiselle Lenoir.
Percy Sibwright engaged Miss Mackenzie with his usual grace and affability. Mrs. Mackenzie did her very utmost to be gracious, but it was evident the party was not altogether to her liking. Poor Percy, about whose means and expectations she had in the most natural way in the world asked information from me, was not perhaps a very eligible admirer for darling Rosey. She knew not that Percy can no more help gallantry than the sun can help shining. As soon as Rosey had done eating up her pineapple, artlessly confessing (to Percy Sibwright’s inquiries) that she preferred it to the rasps and hinnyblobs in her grandmamma’s garden, “Now, dearest Rosey,” cries Mrs. Mack, “now, a little song. You promised Mr. Pendennis a little song.” Honeyman whisks open the piano in a moment. The widow takes off her cleaned gloves (Mrs. Sherrick’s were new, and of the best Paris make), and little Rosey sings No. 1, followed by No. 2, with very great applause. Mother and daughter entwine as they quit the piano. “Brava! brava!” says Percy Sibwright. Does Mr. Clive Newcome say nothing? His back is turned to the piano, and he is looking with all his might into the eyes of Miss Sherrick.
Percy sings a Spanish seguidilla, or a German lied, or a French romance, or a Neapolitan canzonet, which, I am bound to say, excites very little attention. Mrs. Ridley is sending in coffee at this juncture, of which Mrs. Sherrick partakes, with lots of sugar, as she has partaken of numberless things before. Chicken, plovers’ eggs, prawns, aspics, jellies, creams, grapes, and what-not. Mr. Honeyman advances, and with deep respect asks if Mrs. Sherrick and Miss Sherrick will not be persuaded to sing? She rises and bows, and again takes off the French gloves, and shows the large white hands glittering with rings, and, summoning Emily her daughter, they go to the piano.
“Can she sing,” whispers Mrs. Mackenzie, “can she sing after eating so much?” Can she sing, indeed! Oh, you poor ignorant Mrs. Mackenzie! Why, when you were in the West Indies, if you ever read the English newspapers, you must have read of the fame of Miss Folthorpe. Mrs. Sherrick is no other than the famous artist, who, after three years of brilliant triumphs at the Scala, the Pergola, the San Carlo, the opera in England, forsook her profession, rejected a hundred suitors, and married Sherrick, who was Mr. Cox’s lawyer, who failed, as everybody knows, as manager of Drury Lane. Sherrick, like a man of spirit, would not allow his wife to sing in public after his marriage; but in private society, of course, she is welcome to perform: and now with her daughter, who possesses a noble contralto voice, she takes her place royally at the piano, and the two sing so magnificently that everybody in the room, with one single exception, is charmed and delighted; and that little Miss Cann herself creeps up the stairs, and stands with Mrs. Ridley at the door to listen to the music.
Miss Sherrick looks doubly handsome as she sings. Clive Newcome is in a rapture; so is good-natured Miss Rosey, whose little heart beats with pleasure, and who says quite unaffectedly to Miss Sherrick, with delight and gratitude beaming from her blue eyes, “Why did you ask me to sing, when you sing so wonderfully, so beautifully, yourself? Do not leave the piano, please—do sing again!” And she puts out a kind little hand towards the superior artist, and, blushing, leads her back to the instrument. “I’m sure me and Emily will sing for you as much as you like, dear,” says Mrs. Sherrick, nodding to Rosey good-naturedly. Mrs. Mackenzie, who has been biting her lips and drumming the time on a side-table, forgets at last the pain of being vanquished in admiration of the conquerors. “It was cruel of you not to tell us, Mr. Honeyman,” she says, “of the—of the treat you had in store for us. I had no idea we were going to meet professional people; Mrs. Sherrick’s singing is indeed beautiful.”
“If you come up to our place in the Regent’s Park, Mr. Newcome,” Mr. Sherrick says, “Mrs. S. and Emily will give you as many songs as you like. How do you like the house in Fitzroy Square? Anything wanting doing there? I’m a good landlord to a good tenant. Don’t care what I spend on my houses. Lose by ’em sometimes. Name a day when you’ll come to us; and I’ll ask some good fellows to meet you. Your father and Mr. Binnie came once. That was when you were a young chap. They didn’t have a bad evening, I believe. You just come and try us—I can give you as good a glass of wine as most, I think,” and he smiles, perhaps thinking of the champagne which Mr. Warrington had slighted. “I’ve ad the close carriage for my wife this evening,” he continues, looking out of window at a very handsome brougham which has just drawn up there. “That little pair of horses steps prettily together, don’t they? Fond of horses? I know you are. See you in the Park; and going by our house sometimes. The Colonel sits a horse uncommonly well: so do you, Mr. Newcome. I’ve often said, ‘Why don’t they get off their horses and say, Sherrick, we’re come for a bit of lunch and a glass of Sherry?’ Name a day, sir. Mr. P., will you be in it?”
Clive Newcome named a day, and told his father of the circumstance in the evening. The Colonel looked grave. “There was something which I did not quite like about Mr. Sherrick,” said that acute observer of human nature. “It was easy to see that the man is not quite a gentleman. I don’t care what a man’s trade is, Clive. Indeed, who are we, to give ourselves airs upon that subject? But when I am gone, my boy, and there is nobody near you who knows the world as I do, you may fall into designing hands, and rogues may lead you into mischief: keep a sharp look-out, Clive. Mr. Pendennis, here, knows that there are designing fellows abroad” (and the dear old gentleman gives a very knowing nod as he speaks). “When I am gone, keep the lad from harm’s way, Pendennis. Meanwhile Mr. Sherrick has been a very good and obliging landlord; and a man who sells wine may certainly give a friend a bottle. I am glad you had a pleasant evening, boys. Ladies, I hope you have had a pleasant afternoon. Miss Rosey, you are come back to make tea for the old gentlemen? James begins to get about briskly now. He walked to Hanover Square, Mrs. Mackenzie, without hurting his ankle in the least.”
“I am almost sorry that he is getting well,” says Mrs. Mackenzie sincerely. “He won’t want us when he is quite cured.”
“Indeed, my dear creature!” cries the Colonel, taking her pretty hand and kissing it; “he will want you, and he shall want you. James no more knows the world than Miss Rosey here; and if I had not been with him, would have been perfectly unable to take care of himself. When I am gone to India, somebody must stay with him; and—and my boy must have a home to go to,” says the kind soldier, his voice dropping. “I had been in hopes that his own relatives would have received him more, but never mind about that,” he cried more cheerfully. “Why, I may not be absent a year! I perhaps need not go at all—I am second for promotion. A couple of our old generals may drop any day; and when I get my regiment I come back to stay, to live at home. Meantime, whilst I am gone, my dear lady, you will take care of James; and you will be kind to my boy.”
“That I will!” said the widow, radiant with pleasure, and she took one of Clive’s hands and pressed it for an instant; and from Clive’s father’s kind face there beamed out that benediction which always made his countenance appear to me among the most beautiful of human faces.
XXIV. In which the Newcome Brothers once more meet together in Unity
His narrative, as the judicious reader no doubt is aware, is written maturely and at ease, long after the voyage is over, whereof it recounts the adventures and perils; the winds adverse and favourable; the storms, shoals, shipwrecks, islands, and so forth, which Clive Newcome met in his early journey in life. In such a history events follow each other without necessarily having a connection with one another. One ship crosses another ship, and after a visit from one captain to his comrade, they sail away each on his course. The Clive Newcome meets a vessel which makes signals that she is short of bread and water; and after supplying her, our captain leaves her to see her no more. One or two of the vessels with which we commenced the voyage together, part company in a gale, and founder miserably; others, after being wofully battered in the tempest, make port, or are cast upon surprising islands where all sorts of unlooked-for prosperity awaits the lucky crew. Also, no doubt, the writer of the book, into whose hands Clive Newcome’s logs have been put, and who is charged with the duty of making two octavo volumes out of his friend’s story, dresses up the narrative in his own way; utters his own remarks in place of Newcome’s; makes fanciful descriptions of individuals and incidents with which he never could have been personally acquainted; and commits blunders, which the critics will discover. A great number of the descriptions in Cook’s Voyages, for instance, were notoriously invented by Dr. Hawkesworth, who “did” the book: so in the present volumes, where dialogues are written down, which the reporter could by no possibility have heard, and where motives are detected which the persons actuated by them certainly never confided to the writer, the public must once for all be warned that the author’s individual fancy very likely supplies much of the narrative; and that he forms it as best he may, out of stray papers, conversations reported to him, and his knowledge, right or wrong, of the characters of the persons engaged. And, as is the case with the most orthodox histories, the writer’s own guesses or conjectures are printed in exactly the same type as the most ascertained patent facts. I fancy, for my part, that the speeches attributed to Clive, the Colonel, and the rest, are as authentic as the orations in Sallust or Livy, and only implore the truth-loving public to believe that incidents here told, and which passed very probably without witnesses, were either confided to me subsequently as compiler of this biography, or are of such a nature that they must have happened from what we know happened after. For example, when you read such words as QVE ROMANVS on a battered Roman stone, your profound antiquarian knowledge enables you to assert that SENATVS POPVLVS was also inscribed there at some time or other. You take a mutilated statue of Mars, Bacchus, Apollo, or Virorum, and you pop him on a wanting hand, an absent foot, or a nose which time or barbarians have defaced. You tell your tales as you can, and state the facts as you think they must have been. In this manner, Mr. James (historiographer to Her Majesty), Titus Livius, Professor Alison, Robinson Crusoe, and all historians proceeded. Blunders there must be in the best of these narratives, and more asserted than they can possibly know or vouch for.
To recur to our own affairs, and the subject at present in hand, I am obliged here to supply from conjecture a few points of the history, which I could not know from actual experience or hearsay. Clive, let us say, is Romanus, and we must add Senatus Populusque to his inscription. After Mrs. Mackenzie and her pretty daughter had been for a few months in London, which they did not think of quitting, although Mr. Binnie’s wounded little leg was now as well and as brisk as ever it had been, a redintegration of love began to take place between the Colonel and his relatives in Park Lane. How should we know that there had ever been a quarrel, or at any rate a coolness? Thomas Newcome was not a man to talk at length of any such matter; though a word or two occasionally dropped in conversation by the simple gentleman might lead persons who chose to interest themselves about his family affairs to form their own opinions concerning them. After that visit of the Colonel and his son to Newcome, Ethel was constantly away with her grandmother. The Colonel went to see his pretty little favourite at Brighton, and once, twice, thrice, Lady Kew’s door was denied to him. The knocker of that door could not be more fierce than the old lady’s countenance, when Newcome met her in her chariot driving on the cliff. Once, forming the loveliest of a charming Amazonian squadron, led by Mr. Whiskin, the riding-master, when the Colonel encountered his pretty Ethel, she greeted him affectionately, it is true; there was still the sweet look of candour and love in her eyes; but when he rode up to her she looked so constrained, when he talked about Clive, so reserved, when he left her, so sad, that he could not but feel pain and commiseration. Back he went to London, having in a week only caught this single glance of his darling.
This event occurred while Clive was painting his picture of the “Battle of Assaye” before mentioned, during the struggles incident on which composition he was not thinking much about Miss Ethel, or his papa, or any other subject but his great work. Whilst Assaye was still in progress, Thomas Newcome must have had an explanation with his sister-in-law, Lady Anne, to whom he frankly owned the hopes which he had entertained for Clive, and who must as frankly have told the Colonel that Ethel’s family had very different views for that young lady to those which the simple Colonel had formed. A generous early attachment, the Colonel thought, is the safeguard of a young man. To love a noble girl; to wait a while and struggle, and haply do some little achievement in order to win her; the best task to which his boy could set himself. If two young people so loving each other were to marry on rather narrow means, what then? A happy home was better than the finest house in Mayfair; a generous young fellow, such as, please God, his son was—loyal, upright, and a gentleman—might pretend surely to his kinswoman’s hand without derogation; and the affection he bore Ethel himself was so great, and the sweet regard with which she returned it, that the simple father thought his kindly project was favoured by Heaven, and prayed for its fulfilment, and pleased himself to think, when his campaigns were over, and his sword hung on the wall, what a beloved daughter he might have to soothe and cheer his old age. With such a wife for his son, and child for himself, he thought the happiness of his last years might repay him for friendless boyhood, lonely manhood, and cheerless exile; and he imparted his simple scheme to Ethel’s mother, who no doubt was touched as he told his story; for she always professed regard and respect for him, and in the differences which afterwards occurred in the family, and the quarrels which divided the brothers, still remained faithful to the good Colonel.
But Barnes Newcome, Esquire, was the head of the house, and the governor of his father and all Sir Brian’s affairs; and Barnes Newcome, Esquire, hated his cousin Clive, and spoke of him as a beggarly painter, an impudent snob, an infernal young puppy, and so forth; and Barnes with his usual freedom of language imparted his opinions to his Uncle Hobson at the bank, and Uncle Hobson carried them home to Mrs. Newcome in Bryanstone Square; and Mrs. Newcome took an early opportunity of telling the Colonel her opinion on the subject, and of bewailing that love for aristocracy which she saw actuated some folks; and the Colonel was brought to see that Barnes was his boy’s enemy, and words very likely passed between them, for Thomas Newcome took a new banker at this time, and, as Clive informed me, was in very great dudgeon because Hobson Brothers wrote to him to say that he had overdrawn his account. “I am sure there is some screw loose,” the sagacious youth remarked to me; “and the Colonel and the people in Park Lane are at variance, because he goes there very little now; and he promised to go to Court when Ethel was presented, and he didn’t go.”
Some months after the arrival of Mr. Binnie’s niece and sister in Fitzroy Square, the fraternal quarrel between the Newcomes must have come to an end—for that time at least—and was followed by a rather ostentatious reconciliation. And pretty little Rosey Mackenzie was the innocent and unconscious cause of this amiable change in the minds of the three brethren, as I gathered from a little conversation with Mrs. Newcome, who did me the honour to invite me to her table. As she had not vouchsafed this hospitality to me for a couple of years previously, and perfectly stifled me with affability when we met,—as her invitation came quite at the end of the season, when almost everybody was out of town, and a dinner to a man is no compliment,—I was at first for declining this invitation, and spoke of it with great scorn when Mr. Newcome orally delivered it to me at Bays’s Club.
“What,” said I, turning round to an old man of the world, who happened to be in the room at the time, “what do these people mean by asking a fellow to dinner in August, and taking me up after dropping me for two years?”
“My good fellow,” says my friend—it was my kind old Uncle Major Pendennis, indeed—“I have lived long enough about town never to ask myself questions of that sort. In the world people drop you and take you up every day. You know Lady Cheddar by sight? I have known her husband for forty years: I have stayed with them in the country, for weeks at a time. She knows me as well as she knows King Charles at Charing Cross, and a doosid deal better, and yet for a whole season she will drop me—pass me by, as if there was no such person in the world. Well, sir, what do I do? I never see her. I give you my word I am never conscious of her existence; and if I meet her at dinner, I’m no more aware of her than the fellows in the play are of Banquo. What’s the end of it? She comes round—only last Toosday she came round—and said Lord Cheddar wanted me to go down to Wiltshire. I asked after the family (you know Henry Churningham is engaged to Miss Rennet?—a doosid good match for the Cheddars). We shook hands and are as good friends as ever. I don’t suppose she’ll cry when I die, you know,” said the worthy old gentleman with a grin. “Nor shall I go into very deep mourning if anything happens to her. You were quite right to say to Newcome that you did not know whether you were free or not, and would look at your engagements when you got home, and give him an answer. A fellow of that rank has no right to give himself airs. But they will, sir. Some of those bankers are as high and mighty as the oldest families. They marry noblemen’s daughters, by Jove, and think nothing is too good for ’em. But I should go, if I were you, Arthur. I dined there a couple of months ago; and the bankeress said something about you: that you and her nephew were much together, that you were sad wild dogs, I think—something of that sort. ‘Gad, ma’am,’ says I, ‘boys will be boys.’ ‘And they grow to be men!’ says she, nodding her head. Queer little woman, devilish pompous. Dinner confoundedly long, stoopid, scientific.”
The old gentleman was on this day inclined to be talkative and confidential, and I set down some more remarks which he made concerning my friends. “Your Indian Colonel,” says he, “seems a worthy man.” The Major quite forgot having been in India himself, unless he was in company with some very great personage. “He don’t seem to know much of the world, and we are not very intimate. Fitzroy Square is a dev’lish long way off for a fellow to go for a dinner, and entre nous, the dinner is rather queer and the company still more so. It’s right for you who are a literary man to see all sorts of people; but I’m different, you know, so Newcome and I are not very thick together. They say he wanted to marry your friend to Lady Anne’s daughter, an exceedingly fine girl; one of the prettiest girls come out this season. I hear the young men say so. And that shows how monstrous ignorant of the world Colonel Newcome is. His son could no more get that girl than he could marry one of the royal princesses. Mark my words, they intend Miss Newcome for Lord Kew. Those banker fellows are wild after grand marriages. Kew will sow his wild oats, and they’ll marry her to him; or if not to him, to some man of high rank. His father Walham was a weak young man; but his grandmother, old Lady Kew, is a monstrous clever old woman, too severe with her children, one of whom ran away and married a poor devil without a shilling. Nothing could show a more deplorable ignorance of the world than poor Newcome supposing his son could make such a match as that with his cousin. Is it true that he is going to make his son an artist? I don’t know what the dooce the world is coming to. An artist! By gad, in my time a fellow would as soon have thought of making his son a hairdresser, or a pastrycook, by gad.” And the worthy Major gives his nephew two fingers, and trots off to the next club in St. James’s Street, of which he is a member.
The virtuous hostess of Bryanstone Square was quite civil and good-humoured when Mr. Pendennis appeared at her house; and my surprise was not inconsiderable when I found the whole party from Saint Pancras there assembled—Mr. Binnie; the Colonel and his son; Mrs. Mackenzie, looking uncommonly handsome and perfectly well-dressed; and Miss Rosey, in pink crape, with pearly shoulders and blushing cheeks, and beautiful fair ringlets—as fresh and comely a sight as it was possible to witness. Scarcely had we made our bows, and shaken our hands, and imparted our observations about the fineness of the weather, when, behold! as we look from the drawing-room windows into the cheerful square of Bryanstone, a great family coach arrives, driven by a family coachman in a family wig, and we recognise Lady Anne Newcome’s carriage, and see her ladyship, her mother, her daughter, and her husband, Sir Brian, descend from the vehicle. “It is quite a family party,” whispers the happy Mrs. Newcome to the happy writer conversing with her in the niche of the window. “Knowing your intimacy with our brother, Colonel Newcome, we thought it would please him to meet you here. Will you be so kind as to take Miss Newcome to dinner?”
Everybody was bent upon being happy and gracious. It was “My dear brother, how do you do?” from Sir Brian. “My dear Colonel, how glad we are to see you! how well you look!” from Lady Anne. Miss Newcome ran up to him with both hands out, and put her beautiful face so close to his that I thought, upon my conscience, she was going to kiss him. And Lady Kew, advancing in the frankest manner, with a smile, I must own, rather awful, playing round her many wrinkles, round her ladyship’s hooked nose, and displaying her ladyship’s teeth (a new and exceedingly handsome set), held out her hand to Colonel Newcome, and said briskly, “Colonel, it is an age since we met.” She turns to Clive with equal graciousness and good-humour, and says, “Mr. Clive, let me shake hands with you; I have heard all sorts of good of you, that you have been painting the most beautiful things, that you are going to be quite famous.” Nothing can exceed the grace and kindness of Lady Anne Newcome towards Mrs. Mackenzie: the pretty widow blushes with pleasure at this greeting; and now Lady Anne must be introduced to Mrs. Mackenzie’s charming daughter, and whispers in the delighted mother’s ear, “She is lovely!” Rosey comes up looking rosy indeed, and executes a pretty curtsey with a great deal of blushing grace.
Ethel has been so happy to see her dear uncle, that as yet she has had no eyes for any one else, until Clive advancing, those bright eyes become brighter still with surprise and pleasure as she beholds him. For being absent with his family in Italy now, and not likely to see this biography for many many months, I may say that he is a much handsomer fellow than our designer has represented; and if that wayward artist should take this very scene for the purpose of illustration, he is requested to bear in mind that the hero of this story will wish to have justice done to his person. There exists in Mr. Newcome’s possession a charming little pencil-drawing of Clive at this age, and which Colonel Newcome took with him when he went—whither he is about to go in a very few pages—and brought back with him to this country. A florid apparel becomes some men, as simple raiment suits others, and Clive in his youth was of the ornamental class of mankind—a customer to tailors, a wearer of handsome rings, shirt-studs, mustachios, long hair, and the like; nor could he help, in his costume or his nature, being picturesque and generous and splendid. He was always greatly delighted with that Scotch man-at-arms in Quentin Durward, who twists off an inch or two of his gold chain to treat a friend and pay for a bottle. He would give a comrade a ring or a fine jewelled pin, if he had no money. Silver dressing-cases and brocade morning-gowns were in him a sort of propriety at this season of his youth. It was a pleasure to persons of colder temperament to sun themselves in the warmth of his bright looks and generous humour. His laughter cheered one like wine. I do not know that he was very witty; but he was pleasant. He was prone to blush: the history of a generous trait moistened his eyes instantly. He was instinctively fond of children, and of the other sex from one year old to eighty. Coming from the Derby once—a merry party—and stopped on the road from Epsom in a lock of carriages, during which the people in the carriage ahead saluted us with many vituperative epithets, and seized the heads of our leaders,—Clive in a twinkling jumped off the box, and the next minute we saw him engaged with a half-dozen of the enemy: his hat gone, his fair hair flying off his face, his blue eyes flashing with fire, his lips and nostrils quivering wrath, his right and left hand hitting out, que c’étoit un plaisir à voir. His father sat back in the carriage, looking with delight and wonder—indeed it was a great sight. Policeman X separated the warriors. Clive ascended the box again with a dreadful wound in the coat, which was gashed from the waist to the shoulder. I hardly ever saw the elder Newcome in such a state of triumph. The postboys quite stared at the gratuity he gave them, and wished they might drive his lordship to the Oaks.
All the time we have been making this sketch Ethel is standing, looking at Clive; and the blushing youth casts down his eyes before hers. Her face assumes a look of arch humour. She passes a slim hand over the prettiest lips and a chin with the most lovely of dimples, thereby indicating her admiration of Mr. Clive’s mustachios and imperial. They are of a warm yellowish chestnut colour, and have not yet known the razor. He wears a low cravat; a shirt-front of the finest lawn, with ruby buttons. His hair, of a lighter colour, waves almost to his “manly shoulders broad.” “Upon my word; my dear Colonel,” says Lady Kew, after looking at him, and nodding her head shrewdly, “I think we were right.”
“No doubt right in everything your ladyship does, but in what particularly?” asks the Colonel.
“Right to keep him out of the way. Ethel has been disposed of these ten years. Did not Anne tell you? How foolish of her! But all mothers like to have young men dying for their daughters. Your son is really the handsomest boy in London. Who is that conceited-looking young man in the window? Mr. Pen—what? has your son really been very wicked? I was told he was a sad scapegrace.”
“I never knew him do, and I don’t believe he ever thought, anything that was untrue, or unkind, or ungenerous,” says the Colonel. “If any one has belied my boy to you, and I think I know who his enemy has been——”
“The young lady is very pretty,” remarks Lady Kew, stopping the Colonel’s further outbreak. “How very young her mother looks! Ethel, my dear! Colonel Newcome must present us to Mrs. Mackenzie and Miss Mackenzie;” and Ethel, giving a nod to Clive, with whom she has talked for a minute or two, again puts her hand in her uncle’s, and walks towards Mrs. Mackenzie and her daughter.
And now let the artist, if he has succeeded in drawing Clive to his liking, cut a fresh pencil, and give us a likeness of Ethel. She is seventeen years old; rather taller than the majority of women; of a countenance somewhat grave and haughty, but on occasion brightening with humour or beaming with kindliness and affection. Too quick to detect affectation or insincerity in others, too impatient of dulness or pomposity, she is more sarcastic now than she became when after years of suffering had softened her nature. Truth looks out of her bright eyes, and rises up armed, and flashes scorn or denial, perhaps too readily, when she encounters flattery, or meanness, or imposture. After her first appearance in the world, if the truth must be told, this young lady was popular neither with many men, nor with most women. The innocent dancing youth who pressed round her, attracted by her beauty, were rather afraid, after a while, of engaging her. This one felt dimly that she despised him; another, that his simpering commonplaces (delights of how many well-bred maidens!) only occasioned Miss Newcome’s laughter. Young Lord Croesus, whom all maidens and matrons were eager to secure, was astounded to find that he was utterly indifferent to her, and that she would refuse him twice or thrice in an evening, and dance as many times with poor Tom Spring, who was his father’s ninth son, and only at home till he could get a ship and go to sea again. The young women were frightened at her sarcasm. She seemed to know what fadaises they whispered to their partners as they paused in the waltzes; and Fanny, who was luring Lord Croesus towards her with her blue eyes, dropped them guiltily to the floor when Ethel’s turned towards her; and Cecilia sang more out of time than usual; and Clara, who was holding Freddy, and Charley, and Tommy round her enchanted by her bright conversation and witty mischief, became dumb and disturbed when Ethel passed her with her cold face; and old Lady Hookham, who was playing off her little Minnie now at young Jack Gorget of the Guards, now at the eager and simple Bob Bateson of the Coldstreams, would slink off when Ethel made her appearance on the ground, whose presence seemed to frighten away the fish and the angler. No wonder that the other Mayfair nymphs were afraid of this severe Diana, whose looks were so cold and whose arrows were so keen.
But those who had no cause to heed Diana’s shot or coldness might admire her beauty; nor could the famous Parisian marble, which Clive said she resembled, be more perfect in form than this young lady. Her hair and eyebrows were jet black (these latter may have been too thick according to some physiognomists, giving rather a stern expression to the eyes, and hence causing those guilty ones to tremble who came under her lash), but her complexion was as dazzlingly fair and her cheeks as red as Miss Rosey’s own, who had a right to those beauties, being a blonde by nature. In Miss Ethel’s black hair there was a slight natural ripple, as when a fresh breeze blows over the melan hudor—a ripple such as Roman ladies nineteen hundred years ago, and our own beauties a short time since, endeavoured to imitate by art, paper, and I believe crumpling-irons. Her eyes were grey; her mouth rather large; her teeth as regular and bright as Lady Kew’s own; her voice low and sweet; and her smile, when it lighted up her face and eyes, as beautiful as spring sunshine; also they could lighten and flash often, and sometimes, though rarely, rain. As for her figure—but as this tall slender form is concealed in a simple white muslin robe (of the sort which I believe is called demie toilette), in which her fair arms are enveloped, and which is confined at her slim waist by an azure ribbon, and descends to her feet—let us make a respectful bow to that fair image of Youth, Health, and Modesty, and fancy it as pretty as we will. Miss Ethel made a very stately curtsey to Mrs. Mackenzie, surveying that widow calmly, so that the elder lady looked up and fluttered; but towards Rosey she held out her hand, and smiled with the utmost kindness, and the smile was returned by the other; and the blushes with which Miss Mackenzie was always ready at this time, became her very much. As for Mrs. Mackenzie—the very largest curve that shall not be a caricature, and actually disfigure the widow’s countenance—a smile so wide and steady, so exceedingly rident, indeed, as almost to be ridiculous, may be drawn upon her buxom face, if the artist chooses to attempt it as it appeared during the whole of this summer evening, before dinner came (when people ordinarily look very grave), when she was introduced to the company: when she was made known to our friends Julia and Maria,—the darling child, lovely little dears! how like their papa and mamma!—when Sir Brian Newcome gave her his arm downstairs to the dining-room; when anybody spoke to her; when John offered her meat, or the gentleman in the white waistcoat, wine; when she accepted or when she refused these refreshments; when Mr. Newcome told her a dreadfully stupid story; when the Colonel called cheerily from his end of the table, “My dear Mrs. Mackenzie, you don’t take any wine to-day; may I not have the honour of drinking a glass of champagne with you?” when the new boy from the country upset some sauce upon her shoulder: when Mrs. Newcome made the sign for departure; and I have no doubt in the drawing-room, when the ladies retired thither. “Mrs. Mack is perfectly awful,” Clive told me afterwards, “since that dinner in Bryanstone Square. Lady Kew and Lady Anne are never out of her mouth; she has had white muslin dresses made just like Ethel’s for herself and her daughter. She has bought a Peerage, and knows the pedigree of the whole Kew family. She won’t go out in a cab now without the boy on the box; and in the plate for the cards which she has established in the drawing-room, you know, Lady Kew’s pasteboard always will come up to the top, though I poke it down whenever I go into the room. As for poor Lady Trotter, the governess of St. Kitt’s, you know, and the Bishop of Tobago, they are quite bowled out: Mrs. Mack has not mentioned them for a week.”
During the dinner it seemed to me that the lovely young lady by whom I sate cast many glances towards Mrs. Mackenzie, which did not betoken particular pleasure. Miss Ethel asked me several questions regarding Clive, and also respecting Miss Mackenzie: perhaps her questions were rather downright and imperious, and she patronised me in a manner that would not have given all gentlemen pleasure. I was Clive’s friend, his schoolfellow? had I seen him a great deal? know him very well—very well indeed? Was it true that he had been very thoughtless? very wild? Who told her so? That was not her question (with a blush). It was not true, and I ought to know? He was not spoiled? He was very good-natured, generous, told the truth? He loved his profession very much, and had great talent? Indeed she was very glad. Why do they sneer at his profession? It seemed to her quite as good as her father’s and brother’s. Were artists not very dissipated? Not more so, nor often so much as other young men? Was Mr. Binnie rich, and was he going to leave all his money to his niece? How long have you known them? Is Miss Mackenzie as good-natured as she looks? Not very clever, I suppose. Mrs. Mackenzie looks very—No, thank you, no more. Grandmamma (she is very deaf, and cannot hear) scolded me for reading the book you wrote, and took the book away. I afterwards got it, and read it all. I don’t think there was any harm in it. Why do you give such bad characters of women? Don’t you know any good ones? Yes, two as good as any in the world. They are unselfish: they are pious; they are always doing good; they live in the country? Why don’t you put them into a book? Why don’t you put my uncle into a book? He is so good, that nobody could make him good enough. Before I came out, I heard a young lady—(Lady Clavering’s daughter, Miss Amory) sing a song of yours. I have never spoken to an author before. I saw Mr. Lyon at Lady Popinjoy’s, and heard him speak. He said it was very hot, and he looked so, I am sure. Who is the greatest author now alive? You will tell me when you come upstairs after dinner;—and the young lady sails away, following the matrons, who rise and ascend to the drawing-room. Miss Newcome has been watching the behaviour of the author by whom she sate; curious to know what such a person’s habits are; whether he speaks and acts like other people; and in what respect authors are different from persons “in society.”
When we had sufficiently enjoyed claret and politics below-stairs, the gentlemen went to the drawing-room to partake of coffee and the ladies’ delightful conversation. We had heard previously the tinkling of the piano above, and the well-known sound of a couple of Miss Rosey’s five songs. The two young ladies were engaged over an album at a side-table, when the males of the party arrived. The book contained a number of Clive’s drawings made in the time of his very early youth for the amusement of his little cousins. Miss Ethel seemed to be very much pleased with these performances, which Miss Mackenzie likewise examined with great good-nature and satisfaction. So she did the views of Rome, Naples, Marble Hill in the county of Sussex, etc., in the same collection: so she did the Berlin cockatoo and spaniel which Mrs. Newcome was working in idle moments: so she did the “Books of Beauty,” “Flowers of Loveliness,” and so forth. She thought the prints very sweet and pretty: she thought the poetry very pretty and sweet. Which did she like best, Mr. Niminy’s “Lines to a bunch of violets,” or Miss Piminy’s “Stanzas to a wreath of roses”? Miss Mackenzie was quite puzzled to say which of these masterpieces she preferred; she found them alike so pretty. She appealed, as in most cases, to mamma. “How, my darling love, can I pretend to know?” mamma says. “I have been a soldier’s wife, battling about the world. I have not had your advantages. I had no drawing-masters, nor music-masters as you have. You, dearest child, must instruct me in these things.” This poses Rosey: who prefers to have her opinions dealt out to her like her frocks, bonnets, handkerchiefs, her shoes and gloves, and the order thereof; the lumps of sugar for her tea, the proper quantity of raspberry jam for breakfast; who trusts for all supplies corporeal and spiritual to her mother. For her own part, Rosey is pleased with everything in nature. Does she love music? Oh, yes. Bellini and Donizetti? Oh, yes. Dancing? They had no dancing at grandmamma’s, but she adores dancing, and Mr. Clive dances very well indeed. (A smile from Miss Ethel at this admission.) Does she like the country? Oh, she is so happy in the country! London? London is delightful, and so is the seaside. She does not really know which she likes best, London or the country, for mamma is not near her to decide, being engaged listening to Sir Brian, who is laying down the law to her, and smiling, smiling with all her might. In fact, Mr. Newcome says to Mr. Pendennis in his droll, humorous way, “That woman grins like a Cheshire cat.” Who was the naturalist who first discovered that peculiarity of the cats in Cheshire?
In regard to Miss Mackenzie’s opinions, then, it is not easy to discover that they are decided, or profound, or original; but it seems pretty clear that she has a good temper, and a happy contented disposition. And the smile which her pretty countenance wears shows off to great advantage the two dimples on her pink cheeks. Her teeth are even and white, her hair of a beautiful colour, and no snow can be whiter than her fair round neck and polished shoulders. She talks very kindly and good-naturedly with Julia and Maria (Mrs. Hobson’s precious ones) until she is bewildered by the statements which those young ladies make regarding astronomy, botany, and chemistry, all of which they are studying. “My dears, I don’t know a single word about any of these abstruse subjects: I wish I did,” she says. And Ethel Newcome laughs. She too is ignorant upon all these subjects. “I am glad there is some one else,” says Rosey, with naivete, “who is as ignorant as I am.” And the younger children, with a solemn air, say they will ask mamma leave to teach her. So everybody, somehow, great or small, seems to protect her; and the humble, simple, gentle little thing wins a certain degree of goodwill from the world, which is touched by her humility and her pretty sweet looks. The servants in Fitzroy Square waited upon her much more kindly than upon her smiling bustling mother. Uncle James is especially fond of his little Rosey. Her presence in his study never discomposes him; whereas his sister fatigues him with the exceeding activity of her gratitude, and her energy in pleasing. As I was going away, I thought I heard Sir Brian Newcome say, “It” (but what “it” was, of course I cannot conjecture)—“it will do very well. The mother seems a superior woman.”
XXV. Is passed in a Public-house
I had no more conversation with Miss Newcome that night, who had forgotten her curiosity about the habits of authors. When she had ended her talk with Miss Mackenzie, she devoted the rest of the evening to her uncle, Colonel Newcome; and concluded by saying, “And now you will come and ride with me to-morrow, uncle, won’t you?” which the Colonel faithfully promised to do. And she shook hands with Clive very kindly: and with Rosey very frankly, but as I thought with rather a patronising air: and she made a very stately bow to Mrs. Mackenzie, and so departed with her father and mother. Lady Kew had gone away earlier. Mrs. Mackenzie informed us afterwards that the Countess had gone to sleep after her dinner. If it was at Mrs. Mack’s story about the Governor’s ball at Tobago, and the quarrel for precedence between the Lord Bishop’s lady, Mrs. Rotchet, and the Chief Justice’s wife, Lady Barwise, I should not be at all surprised.
A handsome fly carried off the ladies to Fitzroy Square, and the two worthy Indian gentlemen in their company; Clive and I walking, with the usual Havannah to light us home. And Clive remarked that he supposed there had been some difference between his father and the bankers: for they had not met for ever so many months before, and the Colonel always had looked very gloomy when his brothers were mentioned. “And I can’t help thinking,” says the astute youth, “that they fancied I was in love with Ethel (I know the Colonel would have liked me to make up to her), and that may have occasioned the row. Now, I suppose, they think I am engaged to Rosey. What the deuce are they in such a hurry to marry me for?”
Clive’s companion remarked, “that marriage was a laudable institution: and an honest attachment an excellent conservator of youthful morals.” On which Clive replied, “Why don’t you marry yourself?”
This it was justly suggested was no argument, but a merely personal allusion foreign to the question, which was, that marriage was laudable, etc.
Mr. Clive laughed. “Rosey is as good a little creature as can be,” he said. “She is never out of temper, though I fancy Mrs. Mackenzie tries her. I don’t think she is very wise: but she is uncommonly pretty, and her beauty grows on you. As for Ethel, anything so high and mighty I have never seen since I saw the French giantess. Going to Court, and about to parties every night where a parcel of young fools flatter her, has perfectly spoiled her. By Jove, how handsome she is! How she turns with her long neck, and looks at you from under those black eyebrows! If I painted her hair, I think I should paint it almost blue, and then glaze over with lake. It is blue. And how finely her head is joined on to her shoulders!”—And he waves in the air an imaginary line with his cigar. “She would do for Judith, wouldn’t she? Or how grand she would look as Herodias’s daughter sweeping down a stair—in a great dress of cloth-of-gold like Paul Veronese—holding a charger before her with white arms, you know—with the muscles accented like that glorious Diana at Paris—a savage smile on her face and a ghastly solemn gory head on the dish. I see the picture, sir, I see the picture!” and he fell to curling his mustachios just like his brave old father.
I could not help laughing at the resemblance, and mentioning it to my friend. He broke, as was his wont, into a fond eulogium of his sire, wished he could be like him—worked himself up into another state of excitement, in which he averred “that if his father wanted him to marry, he would marry that instant. And why not Rosey? She is a dear little thing. Or why not that splendid Miss Sherrick? What ahead!—a regular Titian! I was looking at the difference of their colour at Uncle Honeyman’s that day of the déjeuner. The shadows in Rosey’s face, sir, are all pearly-tinted. You ought to paint her in milk, sir!” cries the enthusiast. “Have you ever remarked the grey round her eyes, and the sort of purple bloom of her cheek? Rubens could have done the colour: but I don’t somehow like to think of a young lady and that sensuous old Peter Paul in company. I look at her like a little wild-flower in a field—like a little child at play, sir. Pretty little tender nursling! If I see her passing in the street, I feel as if I would like some fellow to be rude to her, that I might have the pleasure of knocking him down. She is like a little songbird, sir,—a tremulous, fluttering little linnet that you would take into your hand, pavidam quaerentem matrem, and smooth its little plumes, and let it perch on your finger and sing. The Sherrick creates quite a different sentiment—the Sherrick is splendid, stately, sleepy——”
“Stupid,” hints Clive’s companion.
“Stupid! Why not? Some women ought to be stupid. What you call dulness I call repose. Give me a calm woman, a slow woman,—a lazy, majestic woman. Show me a gracious virgin bearing a lily: not a leering giggler frisking a rattle. A lively woman would be the death of me. Look at Mrs. Mack, perpetually nodding, winking, grinning, throwing out signals which you are to be at the trouble to answer! I thought her delightful for three days; I declare I was in love with her—that is, as much as I can be after—but never mind that, I feel I shall never be really in love again. Why shouldn’t the Sherrick be stupid, I say? About great beauty there should always reign a silence. As you look at the great stars, the great ocean, any great scene of nature: you hush, sir. You laugh at a pantomime, but you are still in a temple. When I saw the great Venus of the Louvre, I thought—Wert thou alive, O goddess, thou shouldst never open those lovely lips but to speak lowly, slowly: thou shouldst never descend from that pedestal but to walk stately to some near couch, and assume another attitude of beautiful calm. To be beautiful is enough. If a woman can do that well: who shall demand more from her? You don’t want a rose to sing. And I think wit is out of place where there’s great beauty; as I wouldn’t have a Queen to cut jokes on her throne. I say, Pendennis,”—here broke off the enthusiastic youth,—“have you got another cigar? Shall we go into Finch’s, and have a game at billiards? Just one—it’s quite early yet. Or shall we go in the Haunt? It’s Wednesday night, you know, when all the boys go.” We tap at a door in an old, old street in Soho: an old maid with a kind, comical face opens the door, and nods friendly, and says, “How do, sir? ain’t seen you this ever so long. How do, Mr. Noocom?” “Who’s here?” “Most everybody’s here.” We pass by a little snug bar, in which a trim elderly lady is seated by a great fire, on which boils an enormous kettle; while two gentlemen are attacking a cold saddle of mutton and West India pickles: hard by Mrs. Nokes the landlady’s elbow—with mutual bows—we recognise Hickson, the sculptor, and Morgan, the intrepid Irish chieftain, chief of the reporters of the Morning Press newspaper. We pass through a passage into a back room, and are received with a roar of welcome from a crowd of men, almost invisible in the smoke.
“I am right glad to see thee, boy!” cries a cheery voice (that will never troll a chorus more). “We spake anon of thy misfortune, gentle youth! and that thy warriors of Assaye have charged the Academy in vain. Mayhap thou frightenedst the courtly school with barbarous visages of grisly war.—Pendennis, thou dost wear a thirsty look! Resplendent swell! untwine thy choker white, and I will either stand a glass of grog, or thou shalt pay the like for me, my lad, and tell us of the fashionable world.” Thus spake the brave old Tom Sarjent,—also one of the Press, one of the old boys: a good old scholar with a good old library of books, who had taken his seat any time these forty years by the chimney-fire in this old Haunt: where painters, sculptors, men of letters, actors, used to congregate, passing pleasant hours in rough kindly communion, and many a day seeing the sunrise lighting the rosy street ere they parted, and Betsy put the useless lamp out and closed the hospitable gates of the Haunt.
The time is not very long since, though to-day is so changed. As we think of it, the kind familiar faces rise up, and we hear the pleasant voices and singing. There are they met, the honest hearty companions. In the days when the Haunt was a haunt, stage-coaches were not yet quite over. Casinos were not invented: clubs were rather rare luxuries: there were sanded floors, triangular sawdust-boxes, pipes, and tavern parlours. Young Smith and Brown, from the Temple, did not go from chambers to dine at the Polyanthus, or the Megatherium, off potage à la Bisque, turbot au gratin, cotelettes a la What-do-you-call-’em, and a pint of St. Emilion; but ordered their beefsteak and pint of port from the “plump head-waiter at the Cock;” did not disdain the pit of the theatre; and for a supper a homely refection at the tavern. How delightful are the suppers in Charles Lamb to read of even now!—the cards—the punch—the candles to be snuffed—the social oysters—the modest cheer! Whoever snuffs a candle now? What man has a domestic supper whose dinner-hour is eight o’clock? Those little meetings, in the memory of many of us yet, are gone quite away into the past. Five-and-twenty years ago is a hundred years off—so much has our social life changed in those five lustres. James Boswell himself, were he to revisit London, would scarce venture to enter a tavern. He would find scarce a respectable companion to enter its doors with him. It is an institution as extinct as a hackney-coach. Many a grown man who peruses this historic page has never seen such a vehicle, and only heard of rum-punch as a drink which his ancestors used to tipple.
Cheery old Tom Sarjent is surrounded at the Haunt by a dozen of kind boon companions. They toil all day at their avocations of art, or letters, or law, and here meet for a harmless night’s recreation and converse. They talk of literature, or politics, or pictures, or plays; socially banter one another over their cheap cups: sing brave old songs sometimes when they are especially jolly kindly ballads in praise of love and wine; famous maritime ditties in honour of Old England. I fancy I hear Jack Brent’s noble voice rolling out the sad, generous refrain of “The Deserter,” “Then for that reason and for a season we will be merry before we go,” or Michael Percy’s clear tenor carolling the Irish chorus of “What’s that to any one, whether or no!” or Mark Wilder shouting his bottle-song of “Garryowen na gloria.” These songs were regarded with affection by the brave old frequenters of the Haunt. A gentleman’s property in a song was considered sacred. It was respectfully asked for: it was heard with the more pleasure for being old. Honest Tom Sarjent! how the times have changed since we saw thee! I believe the present chief of the reporters of the newspaper (which responsible office Tom filled) goes to Parliament in his brougham, and dines with the Ministers of the Crown.
Around Tom are seated grave Royal Academicians, rising gay Associates; writers of other journals besides the Pall Mall Gazette; a barrister maybe, whose name will be famous some day: a hewer of marble perhaps: a surgeon whose patients have not come yet; and one or two men about town who like this queer assembly better than haunts much more splendid. Captain Shandon has been here, and his jokes are preserved in the tradition of the place. Owlet, the philosopher, came once and tried, as his wont is, to lecture; but his metaphysics were beaten down by a storm of banter. Slatter, who gave himself such airs because he wrote in the —— Review, tried to air himself at the Haunt, but was choked by the smoke, and silenced by the unanimous pooh-poohing of the assembly. Dick Walker, who rebelled secretly at Sarjent’s authority, once thought to give himself consequence by bringing a young lord from the Blue Posts, but he was so unmercifully “chaffed” by Tom, that even the young lord laughed at him. His lordship has been heard to say he had been taken to a monsus queeah place, queeah set of folks, in a tap somewhere, though he went away quite delighted with Tom’s affability, but he never came again. He could not find the place, probably. You might pass the Haunt in the daytime, and not know it in the least. “I believe,” said Charley Ormond (A.R.A. he was then)—“I believe in the day there’s no such place at all: and when Betsy turns the gas off at the door-lamp as we go away, the whole thing vanishes: the door, the house, the bar, the Haunt, Betsy, the beer-boy, Mrs. Nokes and all.” It has vanished: it is to be found no more: neither by night nor by day—unless the ghosts of good fellows still haunt it.
As the genial talk and glass go round, and after Clive and his friend have modestly answered the various queries put to them by good old Tom Sarjent, the acknowledged Praeses of the assembly and Sachem of this venerable wigwam, the door opens and another well-known figure is recognised with shouts as it emerges through the smoke. “Bayham, all hail!” says Tom. “Frederick, I am right glad to see thee!”
Bayham says he is disturbed in spirit, and calls for a pint of beer to console him.
“Hast thou flown far, thou restless bird of night?” asks Father Tom, who loves speaking in blank verses.
“I have come from Cursitor Street,” says Bayham, in a low groan. “I have just been to see a poor devil in quod there. Is that you, Pendennis? You know the man—Charles Honeyman.”
“What!” cries Clive, starting up.
“O my prophetic soul, my uncle!” growls Bayham. “I did not see the young one; but ’tis true.”
The reader is aware that more than the three years have elapsed, of which time the preceding pages contain the harmless chronicle; and while Thomas Newcome’s leave has been running out and Clive’s mustachios growing, the fate of other persons connected with our story has also had its development, and their fortune has experienced its natural progress, its increase or decay. Our tale, such as it has hitherto been arranged, has passed leisurely in scenes wherein the present tense is perforce adopted; the writer acting as chorus to the drama, and occasionally explaining, by hints or more open statements, what has occurred during the intervals of the acts; and how it happens that the performers are in such or such a posture. In the modern theatre, as the play-going critic knows, the explanatory personage is usually of quite a third-rate order. He is the two walking-gentlemen friends of Sir Harry Courtly, who welcome the young baronet to London, and discourse about the niggardliness of Harry’s old uncle, the Nabob; and the depth of Courtly’s passion for Lady Annabel the première amoureuse. He is the confidant in white linen to the heroine in white satin. He is “Tom, you rascal,” the valet or tiger, more or less impudent and acute—that well-known menial in top-boots and a livery frock with red cuffs and collar, whom Sir Harry always retains in his service, addresses with scurrilous familiarity, and pays so irregularly: or he is Lucetta, Lady Annabel’s waiting-maid, who carries the billets-doux and peeps into them; knows all about the family affairs; pops the lover under the sofa; and sings a comic song between the scenes. Our business now is to enter into Charles Honeyman’s privacy, to peer into the secrets of that reverend gentleman, and to tell what has happened to him during the past months, in which he has made fitful though graceful appearances on our scene.
While his nephew’s whiskers have been budding, and his brother-in-law has been spending his money and leave, Mr. Honeyman’s hopes have been withering, his sermons growing stale, his once blooming popularity drooping and running to seed. Many causes have contributed to bring him to his present melancholy strait. When you go to Lady Whittlesea’s Chapel now, it is by no means crowded. Gaps are in the pews: there is not the least difficulty in getting a snug place near the pulpit, whence the preacher can look over his pocket-handkerchief and see Lord Dozeley no more: his lordship has long gone to sleep elsewhere and a host of the fashionable faithful have migrated too. The incumbent can no more cast his fine eyes upon the French bonnets of the female aristocracy and see some of the loveliest faces in Mayfair regarding his with expressions of admiration. Actual dowdy tradesmen of the neighbourhood are seated with their families in the aisles: Ridley and his wife and son have one of the very best seats. To be sure Ridley looks like a nobleman, with his large waistcoat, bald head, and gilt book: J. J. has a fine head; but Mrs. Ridley! cook and housekeeper is written on her round face. The music is by no means of its former good quality. That rebellious and ill-conditioned basso Bellew has seceded, and seduced the four best singing boys, who now perform glees at the Cave of Harmony. Honeyman has a right to speak of persecution, and to compare himself to a hermit in so far that he preaches in a desert. Once, like another hermit, St. Hierome, he used to be visited by lions. None such come to him now. Such lions as frequent the clergy are gone off to lick the feet of other ecclesiastics. They are weary of poor Honeyman’s old sermons.
Rivals have sprung up in the course of these three years—have sprung up round about Honeyman and carried his flock into their folds. We know how such simple animals will leap one after another, and that it is the sheepish way. Perhaps a new pastor has come to the church of St. Jacob’s hard by—bold, resolute, bright, clear, a scholar and no pedant: his manly voice is thrilling in their ears, he speaks of life and conduct, of practice as well as faith; and crowds of the most polite and most intelligent, and best informed, and best dressed, and most selfish people in the world come and hear him twice at least. There are so many well-informed and well-dressed etc. etc. people in the world that the succession of them keeps St. Jacob’s full for a year or more. Then, it may be, a bawling quack, who has neither knowledge, nor scholarship, nor charity, but who frightens the public with denunciations and rouses them with the energy of his wrath, succeeds in bringing them together for a while till they tire of his din and curses. Meanwhile the good quiet old churches round about ring their accustomed bell: open their Sabbath gates: receive their tranquil congregations and sober priest, who has been busy all the week, at schools and sick-beds, with watchful teaching, gentle counsel, and silent alms.
Though we saw Honeyman but seldom, for his company was not altogether amusing, and his affectation, when one became acquainted with it, very tiresome to witness, Fred Bayham, from his garret at Mrs. Ridley’s, kept constant watch over the curate, and told us of his proceedings from time to time. When we heard the melancholy news first announced, of course the intelligence damped the gaiety of Clive and his companion; and F. B., who conducted all the affairs of life with great gravity, telling Tom Sarjent that he had news of importance for our private ear, Tom with still more gravity than F. B.’s, said, “Go, my children, you had best discuss this topic in a separate room, apart from the din and fun of a convivial assembly;” and ringing the bell he bade Betsy bring him another glass of rum-and-water, and one for Mr. Desborough, to be charged to him.
We adjourned to another parlour then, where gas was lighted up: and F. B. over a pint of beer narrated poor Honeyman’s mishap. “Saving your presence, Clive,” said Bayham, “and with every regard for the youthful bloom of your young heart’s affections, your uncle Charles Honeyman, sir, is a bad lot. I have known him these twenty years, when I was at his father’s as a private tutor. Old Miss Honeyman is one of those cards which we call trumps—so was old Honeyman a trump; but Charles and his sister——”
I stamped on F. B.’s foot under the table. He seemed to have forgotten that he was about to speak of Clive’s mother.
“Hem! of your poor mother, I—hem—I may say vidi tantum. I scarcely knew her. She married very young: as I was when she left Borhambury. But Charles exhibited his character at a very early age—and it was not a charming one—no, by no means a model of virtue. He always had a genius for running into debt. He borrowed from every one of the pupils—I don’t know how he spent it except in hardbake and alycompaine—and even from old Nosey’s groom,—pardon me, we used to call your grandfather by that playful epithet (boys will be boys, you know),—even from the doctor’s groom he took money, and I recollect thrashing Charles Honeyman for that disgraceful action.
“At college, without any particular show, he was always in debt and difficulties. Take warning by him, dear youth! By him and by me, if you like. See me—me, F. Bayham, descended from the ancient kings that long the Tuscan sceptre swayed, dodge down a street to get out of sight of a boot-shop, and my colossal frame tremble if a chap puts his hand on my shoulder, as you did, Pendennis, the other day in the Strand, when I thought a straw might have knocked me down! I have had my errors, Clive. I know ’em. I’ll take another pint of beer, if you please. Betsy, has Mrs. Nokes any cold meat in the bar? and an accustomed pickle? Ha! Give her my compliments, and say F. B. is hungry. I resume my tale. Faults F. B. has, and knows it. Humbug he may have been sometimes; but I’m not such a complete humbug as Honeyman.”
Clive did not know how to look at this character of his relative, but Clive’s companion burst into a fit of laughter, at which F. B. nodded gravely, and resumed his narrative. “I don’t know how much money he has had from your governor, but this I can say, the half of it would make F. B. a happy man. I don’t know out of how much the reverend party has nobbled his poor old sister at Brighton. He has mortgaged his chapel to Sherrick, I suppose you know, who is master of it, and could turn him out any day. I don’t think Sherrick is a bad fellow. I think he’s a good fellow; I have known him do many a good turn to a chap in misfortune. He wants to get into society: what more natural? That was why you were asked to meet him the other day, and why he asked you to dinner. I hope you had a good one. I wish he’d ask me.
“Then Moss has got his bills, and Moss’s brother-in-law in Cursitor Street has taken possession of his revered person. He’s very welcome. One Jew has the chapel, another Hebrew has the clergyman. It’s singular, ain’t it? Sherrick might turn Lady Whittlesea into a synagogue and have the Chief Rabbi into the pulpit, where my uncle the Bishop has given out the text.
“The shares of that concern ain’t at a premium. I have had immense fun with Sherrick about it. I like the Hebrew, sir. He maddens with rage when F. B. goes and asks him whether any more pews are let overhead. Honeyman begged and borrowed in order to buy out the last man. I remember when the speculation was famous, when all the boxes (I mean the pews) were taken for the season, and you couldn’t get a place, come ever so early. Then Honeyman was spoilt, and gave his sermons over and over again. People got sick of seeing the old humbug cry, the old crocodile! Then we tried the musical dodge. F. B. came forward, sir, there. That was a coup: I did it, sir. Bellew wouldn’t have sung for any man but me—and for two-and-twenty months I kept him as sober as Father Mathew. Then Honeyman didn’t pay him: there was a row in the sacred building, and Bellew retired. Then Sherrick must meddle in it. And having heard a chap out Hampstead way who Sherrick thought would do, Honeyman was forced to engage him, regardless of expense. You recollect the fellow, sir? The Reverend Simeon Rawkins, the lowest of the Low Church, sir—a red-haired dumpy man, who gasped at his h’s and spoke with a Lancashire twang—he’d no more do for Mayfair than Grimaldi for Macbeth. He and Honeyman used to fight like cat and dog in the vestry: and he drove away a third part of the congregation. He was an honest man and an able man too, though not a sound Churchman” (F. B. said this with a very edifying gravity): “I told Sherrick this the very day I heard him. And if he had spoken to me on the subject I might have saved him a pretty penny—a precious deal more than the paltry sum which he and I had a quarrel about at that time—a matter of business, sir—a pecuniary difference about a small three months’ thing which caused a temporary estrangement between us. As for Honeyman, he used to cry about it. Your uncle is great in the lachrymatory line, Clive Newcome. He used to go with tears in his eyes to Sherrick, and implore him not to have Rawkins, but he would. And I must say for poor Charles that the failure of Lady Whittlesea’s has not been altogether Charles’s fault; and that Sherrick has kicked down that property.
“Well, then, sir, poor Charles thought to make it all right by marrying Mrs. Brumby;—and she was very fond of him and the thing was all but done, in spite of her sons, who were in a rage as you may fancy. But Charley, sir, has such a propensity for humbug that he will tell lies when there is no earthly good in lying. He represented his chapel at twelve hundred a year, his private means as so-and-so; and when he came to book up with Briggs the lawyer, Mrs. Brumby’s brother, it was found that he lied and prevaricated so, that the widow in actual disgust would have nothing more to do with him. She was a good woman of business, and managed the hat-shop for nine years, whilst poor Brumby was at Dr. Tokelys. A first-rate shop it was, too. I introduced Charles to it. My uncle the Bishop had his shovels there: and they used for a considerable period to cover this humble roof with tiles,” said F. B., tapping his capacious forehead; “I am sure he might have had Brumby,” he added, in his melancholy tones, “but for those unlucky lies. She didn’t want money. She had plenty. She longed to get into society, and was bent on marrying a gentleman.
“But what I can’t pardon in Honeyman is the way in which he has done poor old Ridley and his wife. I took him there, you know, thinking they would send their bills in once a month: that he was doing a good business: in fact, that I had put ’em into a good thing. And the fellow has told me a score of times that he and the Ridleys were all right. But he has not only not paid his lodgings, but he has had money of them: he has given dinners: he has made Ridley pay for wine. He has kept paying lodgers out of the house, and he tells me all this with a burst of tears, when he sent for me to Lazarus’s to-night, and I went to him, sir, because he was in distress—went into the lion’s den, sir!” says F. B., looking round nobly. “I don’t know how much he owes them: because of course you know the sum he mentions ain’t the right one. He never does tell the truth—does Charles. But think of the pluck of those good Ridleys never saying a single word to F. B. about the debt! ‘We are poor, but we have saved some money and can lie out of it. And we think Mr. Honeyman will pay us,’ says Mrs. Ridley to me this very evening. And she thrilled my heart-strings, sir; and I took her in my arms, and kissed the old woman,” says Bayham; “and I rather astonished little Miss Cann, and young J. J., who came in with a picture under his arm. But she said she had kissed Master Frederick long before J. J. was born—and so she had: that good and faithful servant—and my emotion in embracing her was manly, sir, manly.”
Here old Betsy came in to say that the supper was a-waitin’ for Mr. Bayham and it was a-getting’ very late; and we left F. B. to his meal; and bidding adieu to Mrs. Nokes, Clive and I went each to our habitation.
XXVI. In which Colonel Newcome’s Horses are sold
At an hour early the next morning I was not surprised to see Colonel Newcome at my chambers, to whom Clive had communicated Bayham’s important news of the night before. The Colonel’s object, as any one who knew him need scarcely be told, was to rescue his brother-in-law; and being ignorant of lawyers, sheriffs’-officers, and their proceedings, he bethought him that he would apply to Lamb Court for information, and in so far showed some prudence, for at least I knew more of the world and its ways than my simple client, and was enabled to make better terms for the unfortunate prisoner, or rather for Colonel Newcome, who was the real sufferer, than Honeyman’s creditors might otherwise have been disposed to give.
I thought it would be more prudent that our good Samaritan should not see the victim of rogues whom he was about to succour; and left him to entertain himself with Mr. Warrington in Lamb Court, while I sped to the lock-up house, where the Mayfair pet was confined. A sickly smile played over his countenance as he beheld me when I was ushered to his private room. The reverent gentleman was not shaved; he had partaken of breakfast. I saw a glass which had once contained brandy on the dirty tray whereon his meal was placed: a greasy novel from a Chancery Lane library lay on the table: but he was at present occupied in writing one or more of those great long letters, those laborious, ornate, eloquent statements, those documents so profusely underlined, in which the machinations of villains are laid bare with italic fervour; the coldness, to use no harsher phrase, of friends on whom reliance might have been placed; the outrageous conduct of Solomons; the astonishing failure of Smith to pay a sum of money on which he had counted as on the Bank of England; finally, the infallible certainty of repaying (with what heartfelt thanks need not be said) the loan of so many pounds next Saturday week at farthest. All this, which some readers in the course of their experience have read no doubt in many handwritings, was duly set forth by poor Honeyman. There was a wafer in a wine-glass on the table, and the bearer no doubt below to carry the missive. They always sent these letters by a messenger, who is introduced in the postscript; he is always sitting in the hall when you get the letter, and is “a young man waiting for an answer, please.”
No one can suppose that Honeyman laid a complete statement of his affairs before the negotiator who was charged to look into them. No debtor does confess all his debts, but breaks them gradually to his man of business, factor or benefactor, leading him on from surprise to surprise; and when he is in possession of the tailor’s little account, introducing him to the bootmaker. Honeyman’s schedule I felt perfectly certain was not correct. The detainees against him were trifling. “Moss of Wardour Street, one hundred and twenty—I believe I have paid him thousands in this very transaction,” ejaculates Honeyman. “A heartless West End tradesman hearing of my misfortune—all these people a linked together, my dear Pendennis, and rush like vultures upon their prey!—Waddilove, the tailor, has another writ out for ninety-eight pounds; a man whom I have made by my recommendations! Tobbins, the bootmaker, his neighbour in Jermyn Street, forty-one pounds more, and that is all—I give you my word, all. In a few months, when my pew-rents will be coming in, I should have settled with those cormorants; otherwise, my total and irretrievable ruin, and the disgrace and humiliation of a prison attends me. I know it; I can bear it; I have been wretchedly weak, Pendennis: I can say mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, and I can—bear—my—penalty.” In his finest moments he was never more pathetic. He turned his head away, and concealed it in a handkerchief not so white as those which veiled his emotions at Lady Whittlesea’s.
How by degrees this slippery penitent was induced to make other confessions; how we got an idea of Mrs. Ridley’s account from him, of his dealings with Mr. Sherrick, need not be mentioned here. The conclusion to which Colonel Newcome’s ambassador came was, that to help such a man would be quite useless; and that the Fleet Prison would be a most wholesome retreat for this most reckless divine. Ere the day was out, Messrs. Waddilove and Tobbins had conferred with their neighbour in St. James’s, Mr. Brace; and there came a detainer from that haberdasher for gloves, cravats, and pocket-handkerchiefs, that might have done credit to the most dandified young Guardsman. Mr. Warrington was on Mr. Pendennis’s side, and urged that the law should take its course. “Why help a man,” said he, “who will not help himself? Let the law sponge out the fellow’s debts; set him going again with twenty pounds when he quits the prison, and get him a chaplaincy in the Isle of Man.”
I saw by the Colonel’s grave kind face that these hard opinions did not suit him. “At all events, sir, promise us,” we said, “that you will pay nothing yourself—that you won’t see Honeyman’s creditors, and let people, who know the world better, deal with him.” “Know the world, young man!” cries Newcome; “I should think if I don’t know the world at my age, I never shall.” And if he had lived to be as old as Jahaleel, a boy could still have cheated him.
“I do not scruple to tell you,” he said, after a pause during which a plenty of smoke was delivered from the council of three, “that I have—a fund—which I had set aside for mere purposes of pleasure, I give you my word, and a part of which I shall think it my duty to devote to poor Honeyman’s distresses. The fund is not large. The money was intended, in fact:—however, there it is. If Pendennis will go round to these tradesmen, and make some composition with them, as their prices have been no doubt enormously exaggerated, I see no harm. Besides the tradesfolk, there is good Mrs. Ridley and Mr. Sherrick—we must see them; and, if we can, set this luckless Charles again on his legs. We have read of other prodigals who were kindly treated; and we may have debts of our own to forgive, boys.”
Into Mr. Sherrick’s account we had no need to enter. That gentleman had acted with perfect fairness by Honeyman. He laughingly said to us, “You don’t imagine I would lend that chap a shilling without security? I will give him fifty or a hundred. Here’s one of his notes, with What-do-you-call-’ems—that rum fellow Bayham’s name as drawer. A nice pair, ain’t they? Pooh! I shall never touch ’em. I lent some money on the shop overhead,” says Sherrick, pointing to the ceiling (we were in his counting-house in the cellar of Lady Whittlesea’s Chapel), “because I thought it was a good speculation. And so it was at first. The people liked Honeyman. All the nobs came to hear him. Now the speculation ain’t so good. He’s used up. A chap can’t be expected to last for ever. When I first engaged Mademoiselle Bravura at my theatre, you couldn’t get a place for three weeks together. The next year she didn’t draw twenty pounds a week. So it was with Pottle and the regular drama humbug. At first it was all very well. Good business, good houses, our immortal bard, and that sort of game. They engaged the tigers and the French riding people over the way; and there was Pottle bellowing away in my place to the orchestra and the orders. It’s all a speculation. I’ve speculated in about pretty much everything that’s going: in theatres, in joint-stock jobs, in building-ground, in bills, in gas and insurance companies, and in this chapel. Poor old Honeyman! I won’t hurt him. About that other chap I put in to do the first business—that red-haired chap, Rawkins—I think I was wrong. I think he injured the property. But I don’t know everything, you know. I wasn’t bred to know about parsons—quite the reverse. I thought, when I heard Rawkins at Hampstead, he was just the thing. I used to go about, sir, just as I did to the provinces, when I had the theatre—Camberwell, Islington, Kennington, Clapton, all about, and hear the young chaps. Have a glass of sherry; and here’s better luck to Honeyman. As for that Colonel, he’s a trump, sir! I never see such a man. I have to deal with such a precious lot of rogues, in the City and out of it, among the swells and all, you know, that to see such a fellow refreshes me; and I’d do anything for him. You’ve made a good thing of that Pall Mall Gazette! I tried papers too; but mine didn’t do. I don’t know why. I tried a Tory one, moderate Liberal, and out-and-out uncompromising Radical. I say, what d’ye think of a religious paper, the Catechism, or some such name? Would Honeyman do as editor? I’m afraid it’s all up with the poor cove at the chapel.” And I parted with Mr. Sherrick, not a little edified by his talk, and greatly relieved as to Honeyman’s fate. The tradesmen of Honeyman’s body were appeased; and as for Mr. Moss, when he found that the curate had no effects, and must go before the Insolvent Court, unless Moss chose to take the composition which we were empowered to offer him, he too was brought to hear reason, and parted with the stamped paper on which was poor Honeyman’s signature. Our negotiation had like to have come to an end by Clive’s untimely indignation, who offered at one stage of the proceedings to pitch young Moss out of window; but nothing came of this most ungentlemanlike behaviour on Noocob’s part, further than remonstrance and delay in the proceedings; and Honeyman preached a lovely sermon at Lady Whittlesea’s the very next Sunday. He had made himself much liked in the sponging-house, and Mr. Lazarus said, “if he hadn’t a got out time enough, I’d a let him out for Sunday, and sent one of my men with him to show him the way ome, you know; for when a gentleman behaves as a gentleman to me, I behave as a gentleman to him.”
Mrs. Ridley’s account, and it was a long one, was paid without a single question, or the deduction of a farthing; but the Colonel rather sickened of Honeyman’s expressions of rapturous gratitude, and received his professions of mingled contrition and delight very coolly. “My boy,” says the father to Clive, “you see to what straits debt brings a man, to tamper with truth to have to cheat the poor. Think of flying before a washerwoman, or humbling yourself to a tailor, or eating a poor man’s children’s bread!” Clive blushed, I thought, and looked rather confused.
“Oh, father,” says he, “I—I’m afraid I owe some money too—not much; but about forty pound, five-and-twenty for cigars, and fifteen I borrowed of Pendennis, and—and I’ve been devilish annoyed about it all this time.”
“You stupid boy,” says the father “I knew about the cigars bill, and paid it last week. Anything I have is yours, you know. As long as there is a guinea, there is half for you. See that every shilling we owe is paid before—before a week is over. And go down and ask Binnie if I can see him in his study. I want to have some conversation with him.” When Clive was gone away, he said to me in a very sweet voice, “In God’s name, keep my boy out of debt when I am gone, Arthur. I shall return to India very soon.”
“Very soon, sir! You have another year’s leave,” said I.
“Yes, but no allowances, you know; and this affair of Honeyman’s has pretty nearly emptied the little purse I had set aside for European expenses. They have been very much heavier than I expected. As it is, I overdrew my account at my brother’s, and have been obliged to draw money from my agents in Calcutta. A year sooner or later (unless two of our senior officers had died, when I should have got my promotion and full colonel’s pay with it, and proposed to remain in this country)—a year sooner or later, what does it matter? Clive will go away and work at his art, and see the great schools of painting while I am absent. I thought at one time how pleasant it would be to accompany him. But l’homme propose, Pendennis. I fancy now a lad is not the better for being always tied to his parent’s apron-string. You young fellows are too clever for me. I haven’t learned your ideas or read your books. I feel myself very often an old damper in your company. I will go back, sir, where I have some friends, where I am somebody still. I know an honest face or two, white and brown, that will lighten up in the old regiment when they see Tom Newcome again. God bless you, Arthur. You young fellows in this country have such cold ways that we old ones hardly know how to like you at first. James Binnie and I, when we first came home, used to talk you over, and think you laughed at us. But you didn’t, I know. God Almighty bless you, and send you a good wife, and make a good man of you. I have bought a watch, which I would like you to wear in remembrance of me and my boy, to whom you were so kind when you were boys together in the old Grey Friars.” I took his hand, and uttered some incoherent words of affection and respect. Did not Thomas Newcome merit both from all who knew him?
His resolution being taken, our good Colonel began to make silent but effectual preparations for his coming departure. He was pleased during these last days of his stay to give me even more of his confidence than I had previously enjoyed, and was kind enough to say that he regarded me almost as a son of his own, and hoped I would act as elder brother and guardian to Clive. Ah! who is to guard the guardian? The younger brother had many nobler qualities than belonged to the elder. The world had not hardened Clive, nor even succeeded in spoiling him. I perceive I am diverging from his history into that of another person, and will return to the subject proper of the book.
Colonel Newcome expressed himself as being particularly touched and pleased with his friend Binnie’s conduct, now that the Colonel’s departure was determined. “James is one of the most generous of men, Pendennis, and I am proud to be put under an obligation to him, and to tell it too. I hired this house, as you are aware, of our speculative friend Mr. Sherrick, and am answerable for the payment of the rent till the expiry of the lease. James has taken the matter off my hands entirely. The place is greatly too large for him, but he says that he likes it, and intends to stay, and that his sister and niece shall be his housekeepers. Clive” (here, perhaps, the speaker’s voice drops a little)—“Clive will be the son of the house still, honest James says, and God bless him. James is richer than I thought by near a lakh of rupees—and here is a hint for you, Master Arthur. Mr. Binnie has declared to me in confidence that if his niece, Miss Rosey, shall marry a person of whom he approves, he will leave her a considerable part of his fortune.”
The Colonel’s confidant here said that his own arrangements were made in another quarter, to which statement the Colonel replied knowingly, “I thought so. A little bird has whispered to me the name of a certain Miss A. I knew her grandfather, an accommodating old gentleman, and I borrowed some money from him when I was a subaltern at Calcutta. I tell you in strict confidence, my dear young friend, that I hope and trust a certain young gentleman of your acquaintance may be induced to think how good and pretty and sweet-tempered a girl Miss Mackenzie is, and that she may be brought to like him. If you young men would marry in good time good and virtuous women—as I am sure—ahem!—Miss Amory is—half the temptations of your youth would be avoided. You would neither be dissolute, has many of you seem to me, or cold and selfish, which are worse vices still. And my prayer is, that my Clive may cast anchor early out of the reach of temptation, and mate with some such kind girl as Binnie’s niece. When I first came home I formed other plans for him which could not be brought to a successful issue; and knowing his ardent disposition, and having kept an eye on the young rogue’s conduct, I tremble lest some mischance with a woman should befall him, and long to have him out of danger.”
So the kind scheme of the two elders was, that their young ones should marry and be happy ever after, like the Prince and Princess of the Fairy Tale: and dear Mrs. Mackenzie (have I said that at the commencement of her visit to her brother she made almost open love to the Colonel?), dear Mrs. Mack was content to forgo her own chances so that her darling Rosey might be happy. We used to laugh and say, that as soon as Clive’s father was gone, Josey would be sent for to join Rosey. But little Josey being under her grandmother’s sole influence took a most gratifying and serious turn; wrote letters, in which she questioned the morality of operas, Towers of London, and waxworks; and, before a year was out, married Elder Bogie, of Mr. M’Craw’s church.
Presently was to be read in the Morning Post an advertisement of the sale of three horses (the description and pedigree following), “the property of an officer returning to India. Apply to the groom, at the stables, 150 Fitzroy Square.”
The Court of Directors invited Lieutenant-Colonel Newcome to an entertainment given to Major-General Sir Ralph Spurrier, K.C.B., appointed Commander-in-Chief at Madras. Clive was asked to this dinner too, “and the governor’s health was drunk, sir,” Clive said, “after dinner, and the dear old fellow made such a good speech, in returning thanks!”
He, Clive, and I made a pilgrimage to Grey Friars, and had the Green to ourselves, it being the Bartlemytide vacation, and the boys all away. One of the good old Poor Brothers whom we both recollected accompanied us round the place; and we sate for a while in Captain Scarsdale’s little room (he had been a Peninsular officer, who had sold out, and was fain in his old age to retire into this calm retreat). And we talked, as old schoolmates and lovers talk, about subjects interesting to schoolmates and lovers only.
One by one the Colonel took leave of his friends, young and old; ran down to Newcome, and gave Mrs. Mason a parting benediction; slept a night at Tom Smith’s, and passed a day with Jack Brown; went to all the boys’ and girls’ schools where his little protégés were, so as to be able to take the very last and most authentic account of the young folks to their parents in India; spent a week at Marble Hill, and shot partridges there, but for which entertainment, Clive said, the place would have been intolerable; and thence proceeded to Brighton to pass a little time with good Miss Honeyman. As for Sir Brian’s family, when Parliament broke up, of course, they did not stay in town. Barnes, of course, had part of a moor in Scotland, whither his uncle and cousin did not follow him. The rest went abroad. Sir Brian wanted the waters of Aix-la-Chapelle. The brothers parted very good friends; Lady Anne, and all the young people, heartily wished him farewell. I believe Sir Brian even accompanied the Colonel downstairs from the drawing-room, in Park Lane, and actually came out and saw his brother into his cab (just as he would accompany old Lady Bagges when she came to look at her account at the bank, from the parlour to her carriage). But as for Ethel, she was not going to be put off with this sort of parting and the next morning a cab dashed up to Fitzroy Square, and a veiled lady came out thence, and was closeted with Colonel Newcome for five minutes, and when he led her back to the carriage there were tears in his eyes.
Mrs. Mackenzie joked about the transaction (having watched it from the dining-room windows), and asked the Colonel who his sweetheart was? Newcome replied very sternly, that he hoped no one would ever speak lightly of that young lady, whom he loved as his own daughter; and I thought Rosey looked vexed at the praises thus bestowed. This was the day before we all went down to Brighton. Miss Honeyman’s lodgings were taken for Mr. Binnie and his ladies. Clive and her dearest Colonel had apartments next door. Charles Honeyman came down and preached one of his very best sermons. Fred Bayham was there, and looked particularly grand and noble on the pier and the cliff. I am inclined to think he had had some explanation with Thomas Newcome, which had placed F. B. in a state of at least temporary prosperity. Whom did he not benefit whom he knew, and what eye that saw him did not bless him? F. B. was greatly affected at Charles’s sermon, of which our party of course could see the allusions. Tears actually rolled down his brown cheeks; for Fred was a man very easily moved, and, as it were, a softened sinner. Little Rosey and her mother sobbed audibly, greatly to the surprise of stout old Miss Honeyman, who had no idea of such watery exhibitions, and to the discomfiture of poor Newcome, who was annoyed to have his praises even hinted in that sacred edifice. Good Mr. James Binnie came for once to church; and, however variously their feelings might be exhibited or, repressed, I think there was not one of the little circle there assembled who did not bring to the place a humble prayer and a gentle heart. It was the last Sabbath-bell our dear friend was to hear for many a day on his native shore. The great sea washed the beach as we came out, blue with the reflection of the skies, and its innumerable waves crested with sunshine. I see the good man and his boy yet clinging to him, as they pace together by the shore.
The Colonel was very much pleased by a visit from Mr. Ridley and the communication which he made (my Lord Todmorden has a mansion and park in Sussex, whence Mr. Ridley came to pay his duty to Colonel Newcome). He said he “never could forget the kindness with which the Colonel have a treated him. His lordship have taken a young man, which Mr. Ridley had brought him up under his own eye, and can answer for him, Mr. R. says, with impunity; and which he is to be his lordship’s own man for the future. And his lordship have appointed me his steward, and having, as he always hev been, been most liberal in point of sellary. And me and Mrs. Ridley was thinking, sir, most respectfully, with regard to our son, Mr. John James Ridley—as good and honest a young man, which I am proud to say it, that if Mr. Clive goes abroad we should be most proud and happy if John James went with him. And the money which you have paid us so handsome, Colonel, he shall have it; which it was the excellent ideer of Miss Cann; and my lord have ordered a pictur of John James in the most libral manner, and have asked my son to dinner, sir, at his lordship’s own table, which I have faithfully served him five-and-thirty years.” Ridley’s voice fairly broke down at this part of his speech, which evidently was a studied composition, and he uttered no more of it, for the Colonel cordially shook him by the hand, and Clive jumped up clapping his, and saying that it was the greatest wish of his heart that J. J. and he should be companions in France and Italy. “But I did not like to ask my dear old father,” he said, “who has had so many calls on his purse, and besides, I knew that J. J. was too independent to come as my follower.”
The Colonel’s berth has been duly secured ere now. This time he makes the overland journey; and his passage is to Alexandria, taken in one of the noble ships of the Peninsular and Oriental Company. His kit is as simple as a subaltern’s; I believe, but for Clive’s friendly compulsion, he would have carried back no other than the old uniform which has served him for so many years. Clive and his father travelled to Southampton together by themselves. F. B. and I took the Southampton coach: we had asked leave to see the last of him, and say a “God bless you” to our dear old friend. So the day came when the vessel was to sail. We saw his cabin, and witnessed all the bustle and stir on board the good ship on a day of departure. Our thoughts, however, were fixed but on one person—the case, no doubt, with hundreds more on such a day. There was many a group of friends closing wistfully together on the sunny deck, and saying the last words of blessing and farewell. The bustle of the ship passes dimly round about them; the hurrying noise of crew and officers running on their duty; the tramp and song of the men at the capstan-bars; the bells ringing, as the hour for departure comes nearer and nearer, as mother and son, father and daughter, husband and wife, hold hands yet for a little while. We saw Clive and his father talking together by the wheel. Then they went below; and a passenger, her husband, asked me to give my arm to an almost fainting lady, and to lead her off the ship. Bayham followed us, carrying their two children in his arms, as the husband turned away and walked aft. The last bell was ringing, and they were crying, “Now for the shore.” The whole ship had begun to throb ere this, and its great wheels to beat the water, and the chimneys had flung out their black signals for sailing. We were as yet close on the dock, and we saw Clive coming up from below, looking very pale; the plank was drawn after him as he stepped on land.
Then, with three great cheers from the dock, and from the crew in the bows, and from the passengers on the quarter-deck, the noble ship strikes the first stroke of her destined race, and swims away towards the ocean. “There he is, there he is,” shouts Fred Bayham, waving his hat. “God bless him, God bless him!” I scarce perceived at the ship’s side, beckoning an adieu, our dear old friend, when the lady, whose husband had bidden me to lead her away from the ship, fainted in my arms. Poor soul! Her, too, has fate stricken. Ah, pangs of hearts torn asunder, passionate regrets, cruel, cruel partings! Shall you not end one day, ere many years; when the tears shall be wiped from all eyes, and there shall be neither sorrow nor pain?