L. Clive in New Quarters
My wife was much better pleased with Clive than with some of his relatives to whom I had presented her. His face carried a recommendation with it that few honest people could resist. He was always a welcome friend in our lodgings, and even our uncle the Major signified his approval of the lad as a young fellow of very good manners and feelings, who, if he chose to throw himself away and be a painter, ma foi, was rich enough no doubt to follow his own caprices. Clive executed a capital head of Major Pendennis, which now hangs in our drawing-room at Fairoaks, and reminds me of that friend of my youth. Clive occupied ancient lofty chambers in Hanover Square now. He had furnished them in an antique manner, with hangings, cabinets, carved work, Venice glasses, fine prints, and water-colour sketches of good pictures by his own and other hands. He had horses to ride, and a liberal purse full of paternal money. Many fine equipages drew up opposite to his chambers: few artists had such luck as young Mr. Clive. And above his own chambers were other three which the young gentleman had hired, and where, says he, “I hope ere very long my dear old father will be lodging with me. In another year he says he thinks he will be able to come home; when the affairs of the Bank are quite settled. You shake your head! why? The shares are worth four times what we gave for them. We are men of fortune, Pen, I give you my word. You should see how much they make of me at Baynes and Jolly’s, and how civil they are to me at Hobson Brothers’! I go into the City now and then, and see our manager, Mr. Blackmore. He tells me such stories about indigo, and wool, and copper, and sicca rupees, and Company’s rupees. I don’t know anything about the business, but my father likes me to go and see Mr. Blackmore. Dear cousin Barnes is for ever asking me to dinner; I might call Lady Clara Clara if I liked, as Sam Newcome does in Bryanstone Square. You can’t think how kind they are to me there. My aunt reproaches me tenderly for not going there oftener—it’s not very good fun dining in Bryanstone Square, is it? And she praises my cousin Maria to me—you should hear my aunt praise her! I have to take Maria down to dinner; to sit by the piano and listen to her songs in all languages. Do you know Maria can sing Hungarian and Polish, besides your common German, Spanish, and Italian? Those I have at our other agents’, Baynes and Jolly’s—Baynes’s that is in the Regent’s Park, where the girls are prettier and just as civil to me as at Aunt Hobson’s.” And here Clive would amuse us by the accounts which he gave us of the snares which the Misses Baynes, those young sirens of Regent’s Park, set for him; of the songs which they sang to enchant him, the albums in which they besought him to draw—the thousand winning ways which they employed to bring him into their cave in York Terrace. But neither Circe’s smiles nor Calypso’s blandishments had any effect on him; his ears were stopped to their music, and his eyes rendered dull to their charms by those of the flighty young enchantress with whom my wife had of late made acquaintance.
Capitalist though he was, our young fellow was still very affable. He forgot no old friends in his prosperity; and the lofty antique chambers would not unfrequently be lighted up at nights to receive F. B. and some of the old cronies of the Haunt, and some of the Gandishites, who, if Clive had been of a nature that was to be spoiled by flattery, had certainly done mischief to the young man. Gandish himself, when Clive paid a visit to that illustrious artist’s Academy, received his former pupil as if the young fellow had been a sovereign prince almost, accompanied him to his horse; and would have held his stirrup as he mounted; whilst the beautiful daughters of the house waved adieus to him from the parlour-window. To the young men assembled in his studio, Gandish was never tired of talking about Clive. The Professor would take occasion to inform them that he had been to visit his distinguished young friend, Mr. Newcome, son of Colonel Newcome; that last evening he had been present at an elegant entertainment at Mr. Newcome’s new apartments. Clive’s drawings were hung up in Gandish’s gallery, and pointed out to visitors by the worthy Professor. On one or two occasions, I was allowed to become a bachelor again, and participate in these jovial meetings. How guilty my coat was on my return home; how haughty the looks of the mistress of my house, as she bade Martha carry away the obnoxious garment! How grand F. B. used to be as president of Clive’s smoking-party, where he laid down the law, talked the most talk, sang the jolliest song, and consumed the most drink of all the jolly talkers and drinkers! Clive’s popularity rose prodigiously; not only youngsters, but old practitioners of the fine arts, lauded his talents. What a shame that his pictures were all refused this year at the Academy! Alfred Smee, Esq., R.A., was indignant at their rejection, but J. J. confessed with a sigh, and Clive owned good-naturedly, that he had been neglecting his business, and that his pictures were not so good as those of two years before. I am afraid Mr. Clive went to too many balls and parties, to clubs and jovial entertainments, besides losing yet more time in that other pursuit we wot of. Meanwhile J. J. went steadily on with his work, no day passed without a line: and Fame was not very far off, though this he heeded but little; and Art, his sole mistress, rewarded him for his steady and fond pursuit of her.
“Look at him,” Clive would say with a sigh. “Isn’t he the mortal of all others the most to be envied! He is so fond of his art that in all the world there is no attraction like it for him. He runs to his easel at sunrise, and sits before it caressing his picture all day till nightfall. He takes leave of it sadly when dark comes, spends the night in a Life Academy, and begins next morning da capo. Of all the pieces of good fortune which can befall a man, is not this the greatest: to have your desire, and then never tire of it? I have been in such a rage with my own shortcomings that I have dashed my foot through the canvases, and vowed I would smash my palette and easel. Sometimes I succeed a little better in my work, and then it will happen for half an hour that I am pleased, but pleased at what? pleased at drawing Mr. Muggins’s head rather like Mr. Muggins. Why, a thousand fellows can do better, and when one day I reach my very best, yet thousands will be able to do better still. Ours is a trade for which nowadays there is no excuse unless one can be great in it: and I feel I have not the stuff for that. No. 666. ‘Portrait of Joseph Muggins, Esq., Newcome, Great George Street.’ No. 979. ‘Portrait of Mrs. Muggins, on her grey pony, Newcome.’ No. 579. ‘Portrait of Joseph Muggins Esq.’s dog Toby, Newcome’—this is—what I’m fit for. These are the victories I have set myself on achieving. Oh, Mrs. Pendennis, isn’t it humiliating? Why isn’t there a war? Why can’t I go and distinguish myself somewhere and be a general? Why haven’t I a genius? I say, Pen, sir, why haven’t I a genius? There is a painter who lives hard by, and who sends sometimes, to beg me to come and look at his work. He is in the Muggins line too. He gets his canvases with a good light upon them: excludes the contemplation of all other objects, stands beside his pictures in an attitude himself, and thinks that he and they are masterpieces. Masterpieces! Oh me, what drivelling wretches we are! Fame!—except that of just the one or two—what’s the use of it? I say, Pen, would you feel particularly proud now if you had written Hayley’s poems? And as for a second place in painting, who would care to be Caravaggio or Caracci? I wouldn’t give a straw to be Caracci or Caravaggio. I would just as soon be yonder artist who is painting up Foker’s Entire over the public-house at the corner. He will have his payment afterwards, five shillings a day, and a pot of beer. Your head a little more to the light, Mrs. Pendennis, if you please. I am tiring you, I dare say, but then, oh, I am doing it so badly!”
I, for my part, thought Clive was making a very pretty drawing of my wife, and having affairs of my own to attend to, would often leave her at his chambers as a sitter, or find him at our lodgings visiting her. They became the very greatest friends. I knew the young fellow could have no better friend than Laura; and not being ignorant of the malady under which he was labouring, concluded naturally and justly that Clive grew so fond of my wife, not for her sake entirely, but for his own, because he could pour his heart out to her, and her sweet kindness and compassion would soothe him in his unhappy condition.
Miss Ethel, I have said, also professed a great fondness for Mrs. Pendennis; and there was that charm in the young lady’s manner which speedily could overcome even female jealousy. Perhaps Laura determined magnanimously to conquer it; perhaps she hid it so as to vex me and prove the injustice of my suspicions: perhaps, honestly, she was conquered by the young beauty, and gave her a regard and admiration which the other knew she could inspire whenever she had the will. My wife was fairly captivated by her at length. The untameable young creature was docile and gentle in Laura’s presence; modest, natural, amiable, full of laughter and spirits, delightful to see and to hear; her presence cheered our quiet little household; her charm fascinated my wife as it had subjugated poor Clive. Even the reluctant Farintosh was compelled to own her power, and confidentially told his male friends, that, hang it, she was so handsome, and so clever, and so confoundedly pleasant and fascinating, and that—that he had been on the point of popping the fatal question ever so many times, by Jove. “And hang it, you know,” his lordship would say, “I don’t want to marry until I have had my fling, you know.” As for Clive, Ethel treated him like a boy, like a big brother. She was jocular, kind, pert, pleasant with him, ordered him on her errands, accepted his bouquets and compliments, admired his drawings, liked to hear him praised, and took his part in all companies; laughed at his sighs, and frankly owned to Laura her liking for him and her pleasure in seeing him. “Why,” said she, “should not I be happy as long as the sunshine lasts? To-morrow, I know, will be glum and dreary enough. When grandmamma comes back I shall scarcely be able to come and see you. When I am settled in life—eh! I shall be settled in life! Do not grudge me my holiday, Laura. Oh, if you knew how stupid it is to be in the world, and how much pleasanter to come and talk, and laugh, and sing, and be happy with you, than to sit in that dreary Eaton Place with poor Clara!”
“Why do you stay in Eaton Place?” asks Laura.
“Why? because I must go out with somebody. What an unsophisticated little country creature you are! Grandmamma is away, and I cannot go about to parties by myself.”
“But why should you go to parties, and why not go back to your mother?” says Mrs. Pendennis, gently.
“To the nursery, and my little sisters, and Miss Cann? I like being in London best, thank you. You look grave? You think a girl should like to be with her mother and sisters best? My dear mamma wishes me to be here, and I stay with Barnes and Clara by grandmamma’s orders. Don’t you know that I have been made over to Lady Kew, who has adopted me? Do you think a young lady of my pretensions can stop at home in a damp house in Warwickshire and cut bread-and-butter for little schoolboys? Don’t look so very grave and shake your head so, Mrs. Pendennis! If you had been bred as I have, you would be as I am. I know what you are thinking, madam.”
“I am thinking,” said Laura, blushing and bowing her head—“I am thinking, if it pleases God to give me children, I should like to live at home at Fairoaks.” My wife’s thoughts, though she did not utter them, and a certain modesty and habitual awe kept her silent upon subjects so very sacred, went deeper yet. She had been bred to measure her actions by a standard which the world may nominally admit, but which it leaves for the most part unheeded. Worship, love, duty, as taught her by the devout study of the Sacred Law which interprets and defines it—if these formed the outward practice of her life, they were also its constant and secret endeavours and occupation. She spoke but very seldom of her religion, though it filled her heart and influenced all her behaviour. Whenever she came to that sacred subject, her demeanour appeared to her husband so awful that he scarcely dared to approach it in her company, and stood without as this pure creature entered into the Holy of Holies. What must the world appear to such a person? Its ambitious rewards, disappointments, pleasures, worth how much? Compared to the possession of that priceless treasure and happiness unspeakable, a perfect faith, what has Life to offer? I see before me now her sweet grave face, as she looks out from the balcony of the little Richmond villa we occupied during the first happy year after our marriage, following Ethel Newcome, who rides away, with a staid groom behind her, to her brother’s summer residence, not far distant. Clive had been with us in the morning, and had brought us stirring news. The good Colonel was by this time on his way home. “If Clive could tear himself away from London,” the good man wrote (and we thus saw he was acquainted with the state of the young man’s mind), “why should not Clive go and meet his father at Malta?” He was feverish and eager to go; and his two friends strongly counselled him to take the journey. In the midst of our talk Miss Ethel came among us. She arrived flushed and in high spirits; she rallied Clive upon his gloomy looks; she turned rather pale, as it seemed to us, when she heard the news. Then she coldly told him she thought the voyage must be a pleasant one, and would do him good: it was pleasanter than that journey she was going to take herself with her dreary grandmother, to those German springs which the old Countess frequented year after year. Mr. Pendennis having business, retired to his study, whither presently Mrs. Laura followed, having to look for her scissors, or a book she wanted, or upon some pretext or other. She sate down in the conjugal study; not one word did either of us say for a while about the young people left alone in the drawing-room yonder. Laura talked about our own home at Fairoaks, which our tenants were about to vacate. She vowed and declared that we must live at Fairoaks; that Clavering, with all its tittle-tattle and stupid inhabitants, was better than this wicked London. Besides, there were some new and very pleasant families settled in the neighbourhood. Clavering Park was taken by some delightful people—“and you know, Pen, you were always very fond of fly-fishing, and may fish the Brawl, as you used in old days, when—” The lips of the pretty satirist who alluded to these unpleasant bygones were silenced as they deserved to be by Mr. Pendennis. “Do you think, sir, I did not know,” says the sweetest voice in the world, “when you went out on your fishing excursions with Miss Amory?” Again the flow of words is checked by the styptic previously applied.
“I wonder,” says Mr. Pendennis, archly, bending over his wife’s fair hand—“I wonder whether this kind of thing is taking place in the drawing-room?”
“Nonsense, Arthur. It is time to go back to them. Why, I declare, I have been three-quarters of an hour away!”
“I don’t think they will much miss you, my dear,” says the gentleman.
“She is certainly very fond of him. She is always coming here. I am sure it is not to hear you read Shakspeare, Arthur; or your new novel, though it is very pretty. I wish Lady Kew and her sixty thousand pounds were at the bottom of the sea.”
“But she says she is going to portion her younger brothers with a part of it; she told Clive so,” remarks Mr. Pendennis.
“For shame! Why does not Barnes Newcome portion his younger brothers? I have no patience with that——Why! Goodness! There is Clive going away, actually! Clive! Mr. Newcome!” But though my wife ran to the study-window and beckoned our friend, he only shook his head, jumped on his horse, and rode away gloomily.
“Ethel had been crying when I went into the room,” Laura afterwards told me. “I knew she had; but she looked up from some flowers over which she was bending, began to laugh and rattle, would talk about nothing but Lady Hautboi’s great breakfast the day before, and the most insufferable Mayfair jargon; and then declared it was time to go home and dress for Mrs. Booth’s déjeûner, which was to take place that afternoon.”
And so Miss Newcome rode away—back amongst the roses and the rouges—back amongst the fiddling, flirting, flattery, falseness—and Laura’s sweet serene face looked after her departing. Mrs. Booth’s was a very grand déjeûner. We read in the newspapers a list of the greatest names there. A Royal Duke and Duchess; a German Highness, a Hindoo Nabob, etc.; and, amongst the Marquises, Farintosh; and, amongst the Lords, Highgate; and Lady Clara Newcome, and Miss Newcome, who looked killing, our acquaintance Captain Crackthorpe informs us, and who was in perfectly stunning spirits. “His Imperial Highness the Grand Duke of Farintosh is wild about her,” the Captain said, “and our poor young friend Clive may just go and hang himself. Dine with us at the Gar and Starter? Jolly party. Oh! I forgot! married man now!” So saying, the Captain entered the hostelry near which I met him, leaving this present chronicler to return to his own home.
LI. An Old Friend
I might open the present chapter as a contemporary writer of Romance is occasionally in the habit of commencing his tales of Chivalry, by a description of a November afternoon falling leaves, tawny forests, gathering storms, and other autumnal phenomena; and two horsemen winding up the romantic road which leads from—from Richmond Bridge to the Star and Garter. The one rider is youthful, and has a blonde moustache. The cheek of the other has been browned by foreign suns; it is easy to see by the manner in which he bestrides his powerful charger that he has followed the profession of arms. He looks as if he had faced his country’s enemies on many a field of Eastern battle. The cavaliers alight before the gate of a cottage on Richmond Hill, where a gentleman receives them with eager welcome. Their steeds are accommodated at a neighbouring hostelry,—I pause in the midst of the description, for the reader has made the acquaintance of our two horsemen long since. It is Clive returned from Malta, from Gibraltar, from Seville, from Cadiz, and with him our dear old friend the Colonel. His campaigns are over, his sword is hung up, he leaves Eastern suns and battles to warm younger blood. Welcome back to England, dear Colonel and kind friend! How quickly the years have passed since he has been gone! There is a streak or two more silver in his hair. The wrinkles about his honest eyes are somewhat deeper, but their look is as steadfast and kind as in the early, almost boyish days when first we knew them.
We talk a while about the Colonel’s voyage home, the pleasures of the Spanish journey, the handsome new quarters in which Clive has installed his father and himself, my own altered condition in life, and what not. During the conversation a little querulous voice makes itself audible above-stairs, at which noise Mr. Clive begins to laugh, and the Colonel to smile. It is for the first time in his life Mr. Clive listens to the little voice; indeed, it is only since about six weeks that that small organ has been heard in the world at all. Laura Pendennis believes its tunes to be the sweetest, the most interesting, the most mirth-inspiring, the most pitiful and pathetic, that ever baby uttered; which opinions, of course, are backed by Mrs. Hokey, the confidential nurse. Laura’s husband is not so rapturous; but, let us trust, behaves in a way becoming a man and a father. We forgo the description of his feelings as not pertaining to the history at present under consideration. A little while before the dinner is served, the lady of the cottage comes down to greet her husband’s old friends.
And here I am sorely tempted to a third description, which has nothing to do with the story, to be sure, but which, if properly hit off, might fill half a page very prettily. For is not a young mother one of the sweetest sights which life shows us? If she has been beautiful before, does not her present pure joy give a character of refinement and sacredness almost to her beauty, touch her sweet cheeks with fairer blushes, and impart I know not what serene brightness to her eyes? I give warning to the artist who designs the pictures for this veracious story, to make no attempt at this subject. I never would be satisfied with it were his drawing ever so good.
When Sir Charles Grandison stepped up and made his very beautifullest bow to Miss Byron, I am sure his gracious dignity never exceeded that of Colonel Newcome’s first greeting to Mrs. Pendennis. Of course from the very moment they beheld one another they became friends. Are not most of our likings thus instantaneous? Before she came down to see him, Laura had put on one of the Colonel’s shawls—the crimson one, with the red palm-leaves and the border of many colours. As for the white one, the priceless, the gossamer, the fairy web, which might pass through a ring, that, every lady must be aware, was already appropriated to cover the cradle, or what I believe is called the bassinet, of Master Pendennis.
So we all became the very best of friends; and during the winter months whilst we still resided at Richmond, the Colonel was my wife’s constant visitor. He often came without Clive. He did not care for the world which the young gentleman frequented, and was more pleased and at home by my wife’s fireside than at more noisy and splendid entertainments. And, Laura being a sentimental person interested in pathetic novels and all unhappy attachments, of course she and the Colonel talked a great deal about Mr. Clive’s little affair, over which they would have such deep confabulations that even when the master of the house appeared, Pater Familias, the man whom, in the presence of the Rev. Dr. Portman, Mrs. Laura had sworn to love and honour these two guilty ones would be silent, or change the subject of conversation, not caring to admit such an unsympathising person as myself into their conspiracy.
From many a talk which they have had together since the Colonel and his son embraced at Malta, Clive’s father had been led to see how strongly the passion which our friend had once fought and mastered, had now taken possession of the young man. The unsatisfied longing left him indifferent to all other objects of previous desire or ambition. The misfortune darkened the sunshine of his spirit, and clouded the world before his eyes. He passed hours in his painting-room, though he tore up what he did there. He forsook his usual haunts, or appeared amongst his old comrades moody and silent. From cigar-smoking, which I own to be a reprehensible practice, he plunged into still deeper and darker dissipation; for I am sorry to say, he took to pipes and the strongest tobacco, for which there is no excuse. Our young man was changed. During the last fifteen or twenty months, the malady had been increasing on him, of which we have not chosen to describe at length the stages; knowing very well that the reader (the male reader at least) does not care a fig about other people’s sentimental perplexities, and is not wrapped up heart and soul in Clive’s affairs like his father, whose rest was disturbed if the boy had a headache, or who would have stripped the coat off his back to keep his darling’s feet warm.
The object of this hopeless passion had, meantime, returned to the custody of the dark old duenna, from which she had been liberated for a while. Lady Kew had got her health again, by means of the prescriptions of some doctors, or by the efficacy of some baths; and was again on foot and in the world, tramping about in her grim pursuit of pleasure. Lady Julia, we are led to believe, had retired upon half-pay, and into an inglorious exile at Brussels, with her sister, the outlaw’s wife, by whose bankrupt fireside she was perfectly happy. Miss Newcome was now her grandmother’s companion, and they had been on a tour of visits in Scotland, and were journeying from country-house to country-house about the time when our good Colonel returned to his native shores.
The Colonel loved his nephew Barnes no better than before, perhaps, though we must say that since his return from India the young Baronet’s conduct had been particularly friendly. “No doubt marriage had improved him; Lady Clara seemed a good-natured young woman enough; besides,” says the Colonel, wagging his good old head knowingly, “Tom Newcome, of the Bundelcund Bank, is a personage to be conciliated; whereas Tom Newcome, of the Bengal Cavalry, was not worth Master Barnes’s attention. He has been very good and kind on the whole; so have his friends been uncommonly civil. There was Clive’s acquaintance, Mr. Belsize that was, Lord Highgate who is now, entertained our whole family sumptuously last week—wants us and Barnes and his wife to go to his country-house at Christmas—is as hospitable, my dear Mrs. Pendennis, as man can be. He met you at Barnes’s, and as soon as we are alone,” says the Colonel, turning round to Laura’s husband, “I will tell you in what terms Lady Clara speaks of your wife. Yes. She is a good-natured, kind little woman, that Lady Clara.” Here Laura’s face assumed that gravity and severeness, which it always wore when Lady Clara’s name was mentioned, and the conversation took another turn.
Returning home from London one afternoon, I met the Colonel, who hailed me on the omnibus, and rode on his way towards the City, I knew, of course, that he had been colloquying with my wife; and taxed that young woman with these continued flirtations. “Two or three times a week, Mrs. Laura, you dare to receive a Colonel of Dragoons. You sit for hours closeted with the young fellow of sixty; you change the conversation when your own injured husband enters the room, and pretend to talk about the weather, or the baby. You little arch hypocrite, you know you do. Don’t try to humbug me, miss; what will Richmond, what will society, what will Mrs. Grundy in general say to such atrocious behaviour?”
“Oh! Pen,” says my wife, closing my mouth in a way which I do not choose further to particularise; “that man is the best, the dearest, the kindest creature. I never knew such a good man; you ought to put him into a book. Do you know, sir, that I felt the very greatest desire to give him a kiss when he went away; and that one which you had just now, was intended for him.
“Take back thy gift, false girl!” says Mr. Pendennis; and then, finally, we come to the particular circumstance which had occasioned so much enthusiasm on Mrs. Laura’s part.
Colonel Newcome had summoned heart of grace, and in Clive’s behalf had regularly proposed him to Barnes, as a suitor to Ethel, taking an artful advantage of his nephew Barnes Newcome, and inviting that Barnes to a private meeting, where they were to talk about the affairs of the Bundelcund Banking Company.
Now this Bundelcund Banking Company, in the Colonel’s eyes, was in reality his son Clive. But for Clive there might have been a hundred banking companies established, yielding a hundred per cent, in as many districts of India, and Thomas Newcome, who had plenty of money for his own wants, would never have thought of speculation. His desire was to see his boy endowed with all the possible gifts of fortune. Had he built a palace for Clive, and been informed that a roc’s egg was required to complete the decoration of the edifice, Tom Newcome would have travelled to the world’s end in search of the wanting article. To see Prince Clive ride in a gold coach with a princess beside him, was the kind old Colonel’s ambition; that done, he would be content to retire to a garret in the prince’s castle, and smoke his cheroot there in peace. So the world is made. The strong and eager covet honour and enjoyment for themselves; the gentle and disappointed (once, they may have been strong and eager, too) desire these gifts for their children. I think Clive’s father never liked or understood the lad’s choice of a profession. He acquiesced in it as he would in any of his son’s wishes. But, not being a poet himself, he could not see the nobility of that calling; and felt secretly that his son was demeaning himself by pursuing the art of painting. “Had he been a soldier, now,” thought Thomas Newcome, “(though I prevented that) had he been richer than he is, he might have married Ethel, instead of being unhappy as he now is, God help him! I remember my own time of grief well enough: and what years it took before my wound was scarred over.”
So with these things occupying his brain Thomas Newcome artfully invited Barnes, his nephew, to dinner under pretence of talking of the affairs of the great B. B. C. With the first glass of wine at dessert, and according to the Colonel’s good old-fashioned custom of proposing toasts, they drank the health of the B. B. C. Barnes drank the toast with all his generous heart. The B. B. C. sent to Hobson Brothers and Newcome a great deal of business, was in a most prosperous condition, kept a great balance at the bank, a balance that would not be overdrawn, as Sir Barnes Newcome very well knew. Barnes was for having more of these bills, provided there were remittances to meet the same. Barnes was ready to do any amount of business with the Indian bank, or with any bank, or with any individual, Christian or heathen, white or black, who could do good to the firm of Hobson Brothers and Newcome. He spoke upon this subject with great archness and candour: of course as a City man he would be glad to do a profitable business anywhere, and the B. B. C.’s business was profitable. But the interested motive which he admitted frankly as a man of the world, did not prevent other sentiments more agreeable. “My dear Colonel,” says Barnes, “I am happy, most happy, to think that our house and our name should have been useful, as I know they have been, in the establishment of a concern in which one of our family is interested; one whom we all so sincerely respect and regard.” And he touched his glass with his lips and blushed a little, as he bowed towards his uncle. He found himself making a little speech, indeed; and to do so before one single person seems rather odd. Had there been a large company present Barnes would not have blushed at all, but have tossed off his glass, struck his waistcoat possibly, and looked straight in the face of his uncle as the chairman; well, he did very likely believe that he respected and regarded the Colonel.
The Colonel said—“Thank you, Barnes, with all my heart. It is always good for men to be friends, much more for blood relations, as we are.”
“A relationship which honours me, I’m sure!” says Barnes, with a tone of infinite affability. You see, he believed that Heaven had made him the Colonel’s superior.
“And I am very glad,” the elder went on, “that you and my boy are good friends.”
“Friends! of course. It would be unnatural if such near relatives were otherwise than good friends.”
“You have been hospitable to him, and Lady Clara very kind, and he wrote to me telling me of your kindness. Ahem! this is tolerable claret. I wonder where Clive gets it?”
“You were speaking about that indigo, Colonel!” here Barnes interposes. “Our house has done very little in that way, to be sure but I suppose that our credit is about as good as Baines and Jolly’s, and if——” but the Colonel is in a brown study.
“Clive will have a good bit of money when I die,” resumes Clive’s father.
“Why, you are a hale man—upon my word, quite a young man, and may marry again, Colonel,” replies the nephew fascinatingly.
“I shall never do that,” replies the other. “Ere many years are gone, I shall be seventy years old, Barnes.”
“Nothing in this country, my dear sir! positively nothing. Why, there was Titus, my neighbour in the country—when will you come down to Newcome?—who married a devilish pretty girl, of very good family, too, Miss Burgeon, one of the Devonshire Burgeons. He looks, I am sure, twenty years older than you do. Why should not you do likewise?”
“Because I like to remain single, and want to leave Clive a rich man. Look here, Barnes, you know the value of our bank shares, now?”
“Indeed I do; rather speculative; but of course I know what some sold for last week,” says Barnes.
“Suppose I realise now. I think I am worth six lakhs. I had nearly two from my poor father. I saved some before and since I invested in this affair; and could sell out to-morrow with sixty thousand pounds.”
“A very pretty sum of money, Colonel,” says Barnes.
“I have a pension of a thousand a year.”
“My dear Colonel, you are a capitalist! we know it very well,” remarks Sir Barnes.
“And two hundred a year is as much as I want for myself,” continues the capitalist, looking into the fire, and jingling his money in his pockets. “A hundred a year for a horse; a hundred a year for pocket-money, for I calculate, you know, that Clive will give me a bedroom and my dinner.”
“He! he! If your son won’t, your nephew will, my dear Colonel!” says the affable Barnes, smiling sweetly.
“I can give the boy a handsome allowance, you see,” resumes Thomas Newcome.
“You can make him a handsome allowance now, and leave him a good fortune when you die!” says the nephew, in a noble and courageous manner,—and as if he said Twelve times twelve are a hundred and forty-four and you have Sir Barnes Newcome’s authority—Sir Barnes Newcome’s, mind you—to say so.
“Not when I die, Barnes,” the uncle goes on. “I will give him every shilling I am worth to-morrow morning, if he marries as I wish him.”
“Tant mieux pour lui!” cries the nephew; and thought to himself, “Lady Clara must ask Clive to dinner instantly. Confound the fellow. I hate him—always have; but what luck he has!”
“A man with that property may pretend to a good wife, as the French say; hey Barnes?” asks the Colonel, rather eagerly looking up in his nephew’s face.
That countenance was lighted up with a generous enthusiasm. “To any woman, in any rank—to a nobleman’s daughter, my dear sir!” exclaims Sir Barnes.
“I want your sister; I want dear Ethel for him, Barnes,” cries Thomas Newcome, with a trembling voice, and a twinkle in his eyes. “That was the hope I always had till my talk with your poor father stopped it. Your sister was engaged to my Lord Kew then; and my wishes of course were impossible. The poor boy is very much cut up, and his whole heart is bent upon possessing her. She is not, she can’t be, indifferent to him. I am sure she would not be, if her family in the least encouraged him. Can either of these young folks have a better chance of happiness again offered to them in life? There’s youth, there’s mutual liking, there’s wealth for them almost—only saddled with the encumbrance of an old dragoon, who won’t be much in their way. Give us your good word, Barnes, and let them come together; and upon my word the rest of my days will be made happy if I can eat my meal at their table.”
Whilst the poor Colonel was making his appeal, Barnes had time to collect his answer; which, since in our character of historians we take leave to explain gentlemen’s motives as well as record their speeches and actions, we may thus interpret. “Confound the young beggar!” thinks Barnes, then. “He will have three or four thousand a year, will he? Hang him, but it’s a good sum of money. What a fool his father is to give it away! Is he joking? No, he was always half crazy—the Colonel. Highgate seemed uncommonly sweet on her, and was always hanging about our house. Farintosh has not been brought to book yet; and perhaps neither of them will propose for her. My grandmother, I should think, won’t hear of her making a low marriage, as this certainly is: but it’s a pity to throw away four thousand a year, ain’t it?” All these natural calculations passed briskly through Barnes Newcome’s mind, as his uncle, from the opposite side of the fireplace, implored him in the above little speech.
“My dear Colonel,” said Barnes, “my dear, kind Colonel! I needn’t tell you that your proposal flatters us, as much as your extraordinary generosity surprises me. I never heard anything like it—never. Could I consult my own wishes I would at once—I would, permit me to say, from sheer admiration of your noble character, say yes, with all my heart, to your proposal. But, alas, I haven’t that power.”
“Is—is she engaged?” asks the Colonel, looking as blank and sad as Clive himself when Ethel had conversed with him.
“No—I cannot say engaged—though a person of the very highest rank has paid her the most marked attention. But my sister has, in a way, gone from our family, and from my influence as the head of it—an influence which I, I am sure, had most gladly exercised in your favour. My grandmother, Lady Kew, has adopted her; purposes, I believe, to leave Ethel the greater part of her fortune, upon certain conditions; and, of course, expects the—the obedience, and so forth, which is customary in such cases. By the way, Colonel, is our young soupirant aware that papa is pleading his cause for him?”
The Colonel said no; and Barnes lauded the caution which his uncle had displayed. It was quite as well for the young man’s interests (which Sir Barnes had most tenderly at heart) that Clive Newcome should not himself move in the affair, or present himself to Lady Kew. Barnes would take the matter in hand at the proper season; the Colonel might be sure it would be most eagerly, most ardently pressed. Clive came home at this juncture, whom Barnes saluted affectionately. He and the Colonel had talked over their money business; their conversation had been most satisfactory, thank you. “Has it not, Colonel?” The three parted the very best of friends.
As Barnes Newcome professed that extreme interest for his cousin and uncle, it is odd he did not tell them that Lady Kew and Miss Ethel Newcome were at that moment within a mile of them, at her ladyship’s house in Queen Street, Mayfair. In the hearing of Clive’s servant, Barnes did not order his brougham to drive to Queen Street, but waited until he was in Bond Street before he gave the order.
And, of course, when he entered Lady Kew’s house, he straightway asked for his sister, and communicated to her the generous offer which the good Colonel had made.
You see, Lady Kew was in town, and not in town. Her ladyship was but passing through, on her way from a tour of visits in the North, to another tour of visits somewhere else. The newspapers were not even off the blinds. The proprietor of the house cowered over a bed-candle and a furtive teapot in the back drawing-room. Lady Kew’s gens were not here. The tall canary ones with white polls, only showed their plumage and sang in spring. The solitary wretch who takes charge of London houses, and the two servants specially affected to Lady Kew’s person, were the only people in attendance. In fact, her ladyship was not in town. And that is why, no doubt, Barnes Newcome said nothing about her being there.
LII. Family Secrets
The figure cowering over the furtive teapot glowered grimly at Barnes as he entered; and an old voice said—“Ho, it’s you!”
“I have brought you the notes, ma’am,” says Barnes, taking a packet of those documents from his pocket-book. “I could not come sooner, I have been engaged upon bank business until now.”
“I dare say! You smell of smoke like a courier.”
“A foreign capitalist: he would smoke. They will, ma’am. I didn’t smoke, upon my word.”
“I don’t see why you shouldn’t, if you like it. You will never get anything out of me whether you do or don’t. How is Clara? Is she gone to the country with the children? Newcome is the best place for her.”
“Doctor Bambury thinks she can move in a fortnight. The boy has had a little——”
“A little fiddlestick! I tell you it is she who likes to stay, and makes that fool, Bambury, advise her not going away. I tell you to send her to Newcome. The air is good for her.”
“By that confounded smoky town, my dear Lady Kew?”
“And invite your mother and little brothers and sisters to stay Christmas there. The way in which you neglect them is shameful, it is, Barnes.”
“Upon my word, ma’am, I propose to manage my own affairs without your ladyship’s assistance,” cries Barnes, starting up, “and did not come at this time of night to hear this kind of——”
“Of good advice. I sent for you to give it you. When I wrote to you to bring me the money I wanted it was but a pretext; Barkins might have fetched it from the City in the morning. I want you to send Clara and the children to Newcome. They ought to go, sir. That is why I sent for you; to tell you that. Have you been quarrelling as much as usual?”
“Pretty much as usual,” says Barnes, drumming on his hat.
“Don’t beat that devil’s tattoo; you agacez my poor old nerves. When Clara was given to you she was as well broke a girl as any in London.”
Sir Barnes responded by a groan.
“She was as gentle and amenable to reason, as good-natured a girl as could be; a little vacant and silly, but you men like dolls for your wives; and now in three years you have utterly spoiled her. She is restive, she is artful, she flies into rages, she fights you and beats you. He! he! and that comes of your beating her!”
“I didn’t come to hear this, ma’am,” says Barnes, livid with rage
“You struck her, you know you did, Sir Barnes Newcome. She rushed over to me last year on the night you did it, you know she did.”
“Great God, ma’am! You know the provocation,” screams Barnes.
“Provocation or not, I don’t say. But from that moment she has beat you. You fool, to write her a letter and ask her pardon. If I had been a man I would rather have strangled my wife, than have humiliated myself so before her. She will never forgive that blow.”
“I was mad when I did it; and she drove me mad,” says Barnes. “She has the temper of a fiend, and the ingenuity of the devil. In two years an entire change has come over her. If I had used a knife to her I should not have been surprised. But it is not with you to reproach me about Clara. Your ladyship found her for me.”
“And you spoilt her after she was found, sir. She told me part of her story that night she came to me. I know it is true, Barnes. You have treated her dreadfully, sir.”
“I know that she makes my life miserable, and there is no help for it,” says Barnes, grinding a curse between his teeth. “Well, well, no more about this. How is Ethel? Gone to sleep after her journey? What do you think, ma’am, I have brought for her? A proposal.”
“Bon Dieu! You don’t mean to say Charles Belsize was in earnest!” cries the dowager. “I always thought it was a——”
“It is not from Lord Highgate, ma’am,” Sir Barnes said, gloomily. “It is some time since I have known that he was not in earnest; and he knows that I am now.”
“Gracious goodness! come to blows with him, too? You have not? That would be the very thing to make the world talk,” says the dowager, with some anxiety.
“No,” answers Barnes. “He knows well enough that there can be no open rupture. We had some words the other day at a dinner he gave at his own house; Colonel Newcome and that young beggar, Clive, and that fool, Mr. Hobson, were there. Lord Highgate was confoundedly insolent. He told me that I did not dare to quarrel with him because of the account he kept at our house. I should like to have massacred him! She has told him that I struck her,—the insolent brute—he says he will tell it at my clubs; and threatens personal violence to me, there, if I do it again. Lady Kew, I’m not safe from that man and that woman,” cries poor Barnes, in an agony of terror.
“Fighting is Jack Belsize’s business, Barnes Newcome; banking is yours, luckily,” said the dowager. “As old Lord Highgate was to die and his eldest son, too, it is a pity certainly they had not died a year or two earlier, and left poor Clara and Charles to come together. You should have married some woman in the serious way; my daughter Walham could have found you one. Frank, I am told, and his wife go on very sweetly together; her mother-in-law governs the whole family. They have turned the theatre back into a chapel again: they have six little ploughboys dressed in surplices to sing the service; and Frank and the Vicar of Kewbury play at cricket with them on holidays. Stay, why should not Clara go to Kewbury?”
“She and her sister have quarrelled about this very affair with Lord Highgate. Some time ago it appears they had words about it and when I told Kew that bygones had best be bygones, that Highgate was very sweet upon Ethel now, and that I did not choose to lose such a good account as his, Kew was very insolent to me; his conduct was blackguardly, ma’am, quite blackguardly, and you may be sure but for our relationship I would have called him to——”
Here the talk between Barnes and his ancestress was interrupted by the appearance of Miss Ethel Newcome, taper in hand, who descended from the upper regions enveloped in a shawl.
“How do you do, Barnes? How is Clara? I long to see my little nephew. Is he like his pretty papa?” cries the young lady, giving her fair cheek to her brother.
“Scotland has agreed with our Newcome rose,” says Barnes, gallantly. “My dear Ethel, I never saw you in greater beauty.”
“By the light of one bedroom candle! what should I be if the whole room were lighted? You would see my face then was covered all over with wrinkles, and quite pale and woebegone, with the dreariness of the Scotch journey. Oh, what a time we have spent! haven’t we, grandmamma? I never wish to go to a great castle again; above all, I never wish to go to a little shooting-box. Scotland may be very well for men; but for women—allow me to go to Paris when next there is talk of a Scotch expedition. I had rather be in a boarding-school in the Champs Elysées than in the finest castle in the Highlands. If it had not been for a blessed quarrel with Fanny Follington, I think I should have died at Glen Shorthorn. Have you seen my dear, dear uncle, the Colonel? When did he arrive?”
“Is he come? Why is he come?” asks Lady Kew.
“Is he come? Look here, grandmamma! did you ever see such a darling shawl! I found it in a packet in my room.”
“Well, it is beautiful,” cries the Dowager, bending her ancient nose over the web. “Your Colonel is a galant homme. That must be said of him; and in this does not quite take after the rest of the family. Hum! hum! is he going away again soon?”
“He has made a fortune, a very considerable fortune for a man in that rank in life,” says Sir Barnes. “He cannot have less than sixty thousand pounds.”
“Is that much?” asks Ethel.
“Not in England, at our rate of interest; but his money is in India, where he gets a great percentage. His income must be five or six thousand pounds, ma’am,” says Barnes, turning to Lady Kew.
“A few of the Indians were in society in my time, my dear,” says Lady Kew, musingly. “My father has often talked to me about Barbell of Stanstead, and his house in St. James’s Square; the man who ordered more curricles when there were not carriages enough for his guests. I was taken to Mr. Hastings’s trial. It was very stupid and long. The young man, the painter, I suppose will leave his paint-pots now, and set up as a gentleman. I suppose they were very poor, or his father would not have put him to such a profession. Barnes, why did you not make him a clerk in the bank, and save him from the humiliation?”
“Humiliation! why, he is proud of it. My uncle is as proud as a Plantagenet; though he is as humble as—as what! Give me a simile Barnes. Do you know what my quarrel with Fanny Follington was about? She said we were not descended from the barber-surgeon, and laughed at the Battle of Bosworth. She says our great-grandfather was a weaver. Was he a weaver?”
“How should I know? and what on earth does it matter, my child? Except the Gaunts, the Howards, and one or two more, there is scarcely any good blood in England. You are lucky in sharing some of mine. My poor Lord Kew’s grandfather was an apothecary at Hampton Court, and founded the family by giving a dose of rhubarb to Queen Caroline. As a rule, nobody is of a good family. Didn’t that young man, that son of the Colonel’s, go about last year? How did he get in society? Where did we meet him? Oh! at Baden, yes; when Barnes was courting, and my grandson—yes, my grandson, acted so wickedly.” Here she began to cough, and to tremble so, that her old stick shook under her hand. “Ring the bell for Ross. Ross, I will go to bed. Go you too, Ethel. You have been travelling enough to-day.”
“Her memory seems to fail her a little,” Ethel whispered to her brother; “or she will only remember what she wishes. Don’t you see that she has grown very much older?”
“I will be with her in the morning. I have business with her,” said Barnes.
“Good night. Give my love to Clara, and kiss the little ones for me. Have you done what you promised me, Barnes?”
“What?”
“To be—to be kind to Clara. Don’t say cruel things to her. She has a high spirit, and she feels them, though she says nothing.”
“Doesn’t she?” said Barnes, grimly.
“Ah, Barnes, be gentle with her. Seldom as I saw you together, when I lived with you in the spring, I could see that you were harsh, though she affected to laugh when she spoke of your conduct to her. Be kind. I am sure it is the best, Barnes; better than all the wit in the world. Look at grandmamma, how witty she was and is; what a reputation she had, how people were afraid of her; and see her now—quite alone.”
“I’ll see her in the morning quite alone, my dear,” says Barnes, waving a little gloved hand. “Bye-bye!” and his brougham drove away. While Ethel Newcome had been under her brother’s roof, where I and friend Clive, and scores of others, had been smartly entertained, there had been quarrels and recriminations, misery and heart-burning, cruel words and shameful struggles, the wretched combatants in which appeared before the world with smiling faces, resuming their battle when the feast was concluded and the company gone.
On the next morning, when Barnes came to visit his grandmother, Miss Newcome was gone away to see her sister-in-law, Lady Kew said, with whom she was going to pass the morning; so Barnes and Lady Kew had an uninterrupted tête-à-tête, in which the former acquainted the old lady with the proposal which Colonel Newcome had made to him on the previous night.
Lady Kew wondered what the impudence of the world’s would come to. An artist propose for Ethel! One of her footmen might propose next, and she supposed Barnes would bring the message. “The father came and proposed for this young painter, and you didn’t order him out of the room!”
Barnes laughed. “The Colonel is one of my constituents. I can’t afford to order the Bundelcund Banking Company out of its own room.”
“You did not tell Ethel this pretty news, I suppose?”
“Of course I didn’t tell Ethel. Nor did I tell the Colonel that Ethel was in London. He fancies her in Scotland with your ladyship at this moment.”
“I wish the Colonel were at Calcutta, and his son with him. I wish he was in the Ganges, I wish he was under Juggernaut’s car,” cried the old lady. “How much money has the wretch really got? If he is of importance to the bank, of course you must keep well with him. Five thousand a year, and he says he will settle it all on his son? He must be crazy. There is nothing some of these people will not do, no sacrifice they will not make, to ally themselves with good families. Certainly you must remain on good terms with him and his bank. And we must say nothing of the business to Ethel, and trot out of town as quickly as we can. Let me see? We go to Drummington on Saturday. This is Tuesday. Barkins, you will keep the front drawing-room shutters shut, and remember we are not in town, unless Lady Glenlivat or Lord Farintosh should call.”
“Do you think Farintosh will—will call, ma’am?” asked Sir Barnes demurely.
“He will be going through to Newmarket. He has been where we have been at two or three places in Scotland,” replies the lady, with equal gravity. “His poor mother wishes him to give up his bachelor’s life—as well she may—for you young men are terribly dissipated. Rossmont is quite a regal place. His Norfolk house is not inferior. A young man of that station ought to marry, and live at his places, and be an example to his people, instead of frittering away his time at Paris and Vienna amongst the most odious company.”
“Is he going to Drummington?” asks the grandson.
“I believe he has been invited. We shall go to Paris for November: he probably will be there,” answered the Dowager casually; “and tired of the dissipated life he has been leading, let us hope he will mend his ways, and find a virtuous, well-bred young woman to keep him right.” With this her ladyship’s apothecary is announced, and her banker and grandson takes his leave.
Sir Barnes walked into the City with his umbrella, read his letters, conferred with his partners and confidential clerks; was for a while not the exasperated husband, or the affectionate brother, or the amiable grandson, but the shrewd, brisk banker, engaged entirely with his business. Presently he had occasion to go on ’Change, or elsewhere, to confer with brother-capitalists, and in Cornhill behold he meets his uncle, Colonel Newcome, riding towards the India House, a groom behind him.
The Colonel springs off his horse, and Barnes greets him in the blandest manner. “Have you any news for me, Barnes?” cries the officer.
“The accounts from Calcutta are remarkably good. That cotton is of admirable quality really. Mr. Briggs, of our house, who knows cotton as well as any man in England, says——”
“It’s not the cotton, my dear Sir Barnes,” cries the other.
“The bills are perfectly good; there is no sort of difficulty about them. Our house will take half a million of ’em, if——”
“You are talking of bills, and I am thinking of poor Clive,” the Colonel interposes. “I wish you could give me good news for him, Barnes.”
“I wish I could. I heartily trust that I may some day. My good wishes you know are enlisted in your son’s behalf,” cries Barnes, gallantly. “Droll place to talk sentiment in—Cornhill, isn’t it? But Ethel, as I told you, is in the hands of higher powers, and we must conciliate Lady Kew if we can. She has always spoken very highly of Clive; very.”
“Had I not best go to her?” asks the Colonel.
“Into the North, my good sir? She is—ah—she is travelling about. I think you had best depend upon me, Good morning. In the City we have no hearts, you know, Colonel. Be sure you shall hear from me as soon as Lady Kew and Ethel come to town.”
And the banker hurried away, shaking his finger-tips to his uncle, and leaving the good Colonel utterly surprised at his statements. For the fact is, the Colonel knew that Lady Kew was in London, having been apprised of the circumstance in the simplest manner in the world, namely, by a note from Miss Ethel, which billet he had in his pocket, whilst he was talking with the head of the house of Hobson Brothers:—
“My dear Uncle” (the note said), “how glad I shall be to see you! How shall I thank you for the beautiful shawl, and the kind, kind remembrance of me? I found your present yesterday evening, on our arrival from the North. We are only here en passant, and see nobody in Queen Street but Barnes, who has just been about business, and he does not count, you know. I shall go and see Clara to-morrow, and make her take me to see your pretty friend, Mrs. Pendennis. How glad I should be if you happened to pay Mrs. P. a visit about two! Good-night. I thank you a thousand times, and am always your affectionate E.”
“QUEEN STREET. Tuesday night. Twelve o’clock.”
This note came to Colonel Newcome’s breakfast-table, and he smothered the exclamation of wonder which was rising to his lips, not choosing to provoke the questions of Clive, who sate opposite to him. Clive’s father was in a woeful perplexity all that forenoon. “Tuesday night, twelve o’clock,” thought he. “Why, Barnes must have gone to his grandmother from my dinner-table; and he told me she was out of town, and said so again just now when we met in the City.” (The Colonel was riding towards Richmond at this time.) “What cause had the young man to tell me these lies? Lady Kew may not wish to be at home for me, but need Barnes Newcome say what is untrue to mislead me? The fellow actually went away simpering, and kissing his hand to me, with a falsehood on his lips! What a pretty villain! A fellow would deserve, and has got, a horse-whipping for less. And to think of a Newcome doing this to his own flesh and blood; a young Judas!” Very sad and bewildered, the Colonel rode towards Richmond, where he was to happen to call on Mrs. Pendennis.
It was not much of a fib that Barnes had told. Lady Kew announcing that she was out of town, her grandson, no doubt, thought himself justified in saying so, as any other of her servants would have done. But if he had recollected how Ethel came down with the Colonel’s shawl on her shoulders, how it was possible she might have written to thank her uncle, surely Barnes Newcome would not have pulled that unlucky long-bow. The banker had other things to think of than Ethel and her shawl.
When Thomas Newcome dismounted at the door of Honeymoon Cottage, Richmond, the temporary residence of A. Pendennis, Esq., one of the handsomest young women in England ran into the passage with outstretched arms, called him her dear old uncle, and gave him two kisses, that I dare say brought blushes on his lean sunburnt cheeks. Ethel clung always to his affection. She wanted that man, rather than any other in the whole world, to think well of her. When she was with him, she was the amiable and simple, the loving impetuous creature of old times. She chose to think of no other. Worldliness, heartlessness, eager scheming, cold flirtations, marquis-hunting and the like, disappeared for a while—and were not, as she sate at that honest man’s side. O me! that we should have to record such charges against Ethel Newcome!
“He was come home for good now? He would never leave that boy he spoiled so, who was a good boy, too: she wished she could see him oftener. At Paris, at Madame de Florac’s—I found out all about Madame de Florac, sir,” says Miss Ethel, with a laugh—“we used often to meet there; and here, sometimes, in London. But in London it was different. You know what peculiar notions some people have; and as I live with grandmamma, who is most kind to me and my brothers, of course I must obey her, see her,” etc. etc. That the young lady went on talking, defending herself, whom nobody attacked, protesting her dislike to gaiety and dissipation—you would have fancied her an artless young country lass, only longing to trip back to her village, milk her cows at sunrise, and sit spinning of winter evenings by the fire.
“Why do you come and spoil my tête-à-tête with my uncle, Mr. Pendennis?” cries the young lady to the master of the house, who happens to enter “Of all the men in the world the one I like best to talk to! Does he not look younger than when he went to India? When Clive marries that pretty little Miss Mackenzie, you will marry again, uncle, and I will be jealous of your wife.”
“Did Barnes tell you that we had met last night, my dear?” asks the Colonel.
“Not one word. Your shawl and your dear kind note told me you were come. Why did not Barnes tell us? Why do you look so grave?”
“He has not told her that I was here, and would have me believe her absent,” thought Newcome, as his countenance fell. “Shall I give her my own message, and plead my poor boy’s cause with her?” I know not whether he was about to lay his suit before her; he said himself subsequently that his mind was not made up; but at this juncture, a procession of nurses and babies made their appearance, followed by the two mothers, who had been comparing their mutual prodigies (each lady having her own private opinion)—Lady Clara and my wife—the latter for once gracious to Lady Clara Newcome, in consideration of the infantine company with which she came to visit Mrs. Pendennis.
Luncheon was served presently. The carriage of the Newcomes drove away, my wife smilingly pardoning Ethel for the assignation which the young person had made at our house. And when those ladies were gone, our good Colonel held a council of war with us his two friends, and told us what had happened between him and Barnes on that morning and the previous night. His offer to sacrifice every shilling of his fortune to young Clive seemed to him to be perfectly simple (though the recital of the circumstance brought tears into my wife’s eyes)—he mentioned it by the way, and as a matter that was scarcely to call for comment, much less praise.
Barnes’s extraordinary statements respecting Lady Kew’s absence puzzled the elder Newcome; and he spoke of his nephew’s conduct with much indignation. In vain I urged that her ladyship desiring to be considered absent from London, her grandson was bound to keep her secret. “Keep her secret, yes! Tell me lies, no!” cries out the Colonel. Sir Barnes’s conduct was in fact indefensible, though not altogether unusual—the worst deduction to be drawn from it, in my opinion, was, that Clive’s chance with the young lady was but a poor one, and that Sir Barnes Newcome, inclined to keep his uncle in good-humour, would therefore give him no disagreeable refusal.
Now this gentleman could no more pardon a lie than he could utter one. He would believe all and everything a man told him until deceived once, after which he never forgave. And wrath being once roused in his simple mind and distrust firmly fixed there, his anger and prejudices gathered daily. He could see no single good quality in his opponent; and hated him with a daily increasing bitterness.
As ill luck would have it, that very same evening, at his return to town, Thomas Newcome entered Bays’s club, of which, at our request, he had become a member during his last visit to England, and there was Sir Barnes, as usual, on his way homewards from the City. Barnes was writing at a table, and sealing and closing a letter, as he saw the Colonel enter; he thought he had been a little inattentive and curt with his uncle in the morning; had remarked, perhaps, the expression of disapproval on the Colonel’s countenance. He simpered up to his uncle as the latter entered the clubroom, and apologised for his haste when they met in the City in the morning—all City men were so busy! “And I have been writing about that little affair, just as you came in,” he said; “quite a moving letter to Lady Kew, I assure you, and I do hope and trust we shall have a favourable answer in a day or two.”
“You said her ladyship was in the North, I think?” said the Colonel, drily.
“Oh, yes—in the North, at—at Lord Wallsend’s—great coal-proprietor, you know.”
“And your sister is with her?”
“Ethel is always with her.”
“I hope you will send her my very best remembrances,” said the Colonel.
“I’ll open the letter, and add ’em in a postscript,” said Barnes.
“Confounded liar?” cried the Colonel, mentioning the circumstance to me afterwards, “why does not somebody pitch him out of the bow-window?”
If we were in the secret of Sir Barnes Newcome’s correspondence, and could but peep into that particular letter to his grandmother, I dare say we should read that he had seen the Colonel, who was very anxious about his darling youth’s suit, but, pursuant to Lady Kew’s desire, Barnes had stoutly maintained that her ladyship was still in the North, enjoying the genial hospitality of Lord Wallsend. That of course he should say nothing to Ethel, except with Lady Kew’s full permission: that he wished her a pleasant trip to ——, and was, etc. etc.
Then if we could follow him, we might see him reach his Belgravian mansion, and fling an angry word to his wife as she sits alone in the darkling drawing-room, poring over the embers. He will ask her, probably with an oath, why the —— she is not dressed? and if she always intends to keep her company waiting? An hour hence, each with a smirk, and the lady in smart raiment, with flowers in her hair, will be greeting their guests as they arrive. Then will come dinner and such conversation as it brings. Then at night Sir Barnes will issue forth, cigar in mouth; to return to his own chamber at his own hour; to breakfast by himself; to go Citywards, money-getting. He will see his children once a fortnight, and exchange a dozen sharp words with his wife twice in that time.
More and more sad does the Lady Clara become from day to day; liking more to sit lonely over the fire; careless about the sarcasms of her husband; the prattle of her children. She cries sometimes over the cradle of the young heir. She is aweary, aweary. You understand, the man to whom her parents sold her does not make her happy, though she has been bought with diamonds, two carriages, several large footmen, a fine country-house with delightful gardens, and conservatories, and with all this she is miserable—is it possible?
LIII. In which Kinsmen fall out
Not the least difficult part of Thomas Newcome’s present business was to keep from his son all knowledge of the negotiation in which he was engaged on Clive’s behalf. If my gentle reader has had sentimental disappointments, he or she is aware that the friends who have given him most sympathy under these calamities have been persons who have had dismal histories of their own at some time of their lives, and I conclude Colonel Newcome in his early days must have suffered very cruelly in that affair of which we have a slight cognisance, or he would not have felt so very much anxiety about Clive’s condition.
A few chapters back and we described the first attack, and Clive’s manful cure: then we had to indicate the young gentleman’s relapse, and the noisy exclamations of the youth under this second outbreak of fever. Calling him back after she had dismissed him, and finding pretext after pretext to see him,—why did the girl encourage him, as she certainly did? I allow, with Mrs. Grundy and most moralists, that Miss Newcome’s conduct in this matter was highly reprehensible; that if she did not intend to marry Clive she should have broken with him—altogether; that a virtuous young woman of high principle, etc. etc., having once determined to reject a suitor, should separate from him utterly then and there—never give him again the least chance of a hope, or reillume the extinguished fire in the wretch’s bosom.
But coquetry, but kindness, but family affection, and a strong, very strong partiality for the rejected lover—are these not to be taken in account, and to plead as excuses for her behaviour to her cousin? The least unworthy part of her conduct, some critics will say, was that desire to see Clive and be well with him: as she felt the greatest regard for him, the showing it was not blameable; and every flutter which she made to escape out of the meshes which the world had cast about her was but the natural effort at liberty. It was her prudence which was wrong; and her submission wherein she was most culpable. In the early church story, do we not read how young martyrs constantly had to disobey worldly papas and mammas, who would have had them silent, and not utter their dangerous opinions? how their parents locked them up, kept them on bread-and-water, whipped and tortured them in order to enforce obedience?—nevertheless they would declare the truth: they would defy the gods by law established, and deliver themselves up to the lions or the tormentors. Are not there Heathen Idols enshrined among us still? Does not the world worship them, and persecute those who refuse to kneel? Do not many timid souls sacrifice to them; and other bolder spirits rebel and, with rage at their hearts, bend down their stubborn knees at their altars? See! I began by siding with Mrs. Grundy and the world, and at the next turn of the see-saw have lighted down on Ethel’s side, and am disposed to think that the very best part of her conduct has been those escapades which—which right-minded persons most justly condemn. At least, that a young beauty should torture a man with alternate liking and indifference; allure, dismiss, and call him back out of banishment; practise arts to please upon him, and ignore them when rebuked for her coquetry—these are surely occurrences so common in young women’s history as to call for no special censure; and if on these charges Miss Newcome is guilty, is she, of all her sex, alone in her criminality?
So Ethel and her duenna went away upon their tour of visits to mansions so splendid, and among hosts and guests so polite, that the present modest historian does not dare to follow them. Suffice it to say that Duke This and Earl That were, according to their hospitable custom, entertaining a brilliant circle of friends at their respective castles, all whose names the Morning Post gave; and among them those of the Dowager Countess of Kew and Miss Newcome.
During her absence, Thomas Newcome grimly awaited the result of his application to Barnes. That Baronet showed his uncle a letter, or rather a postscript, from Lady Kew, which probably had been dictated by Barnes himself, in which the Dowager said she was greatly touched by Colonel Newcome’s noble offer; that though she owned she had very different views for her granddaughter, Miss Newcome’s choice of course lay with herself. Meanwhile, Lady K. and Ethel were engaged in a round of visits to the country, and there would be plenty of time to resume this subject when they came to London for the season. And, lest dear Ethel’s feelings should be needlessly agitated by a discussion of the subject, and the Colonel should take a fancy to write to her privately, Lady Kew gave orders that all letters from London should be despatched under cover to her ladyship, and carefully examined the contents of the packet before Ethel received her share of the correspondence.
To write to her personally on the subject of the marriage, Thomas Newcome had determined was not a proper course for him to pursue. “They consider themselves,” says he, “above us, forsooth, in their rank of life (oh, mercy! what pigmies we are! and don’t angels weep at the brief authority in which we dress ourselves up!) and of course the approaches on our side must be made in regular form, and the parents of the young people must act for them. Clive is too honourable a man to wish to conduct the affair in any other way. He might try the influence of his beaux yeux, and run off to Gretna with a girl who had nothing; but the young lady being wealthy, and his relation, sir, we must be on the point of honour; and all the Kews in Christendom shan’t have more pride than we in this matter.”
All this time we are keeping Mr. Clive purposely in the background. His face is so woebegone that we do not care to bring it forward in the family picture. His case is so common that surely its lugubrious symptoms need not be described at length. He works away fiercely at his pictures, and in spite of himself improves in his art. He sent a “Combat of Cavalry,” and a picture of “Sir Brian the Templar carrying off Rebecca,” to the British Institution this year; both of which pieces were praised in other journals besides the Pall Mall Gazette. He did not care for the newspaper praises. He was rather surprised when a dealer purchased his “Sir Brian the Templar.” He came and went from our house a melancholy swain. He was thankful for Laura’s kindness and pity. J. J.’s studio was his principal resort; and I dare say, as he set up his own easel there, and worked by his friend’s side, he bemoaned his lot to his sympathising friend.
Sir Barnes Newcome’s family was absent from London during the winter. His mother, and his brothers and sisters, his wife and his two children, were gone to Newcome for Christmas. Some six weeks after seeing him, Ethel wrote her uncle a kind, merry letter. They had been performing private theatricals at the country-house where she and Lady Kew were staying. “Captain Crackthorpe made an admirable Jeremy Diddler in ‘Raising the Wind.’ Lord Farintosh broke down lamentably as Fusbos in ‘Bombastes Furioso.’” Miss Ethel had distinguished herself in both of these facetious little comedies. “I should like Clive to paint me as Miss Plainways,” she wrote. “I wore a powdered front, painted my face all over wrinkles, imitated old Lady Griffin as well as I could, and looked sixty at least.”
Thomas Newcome wrote an answer to his fair niece’s pleasant letter; “Clive,” he said, “would be happy to bargain to paint her, and nobody else but her, all the days of his life; and,” the Colonel was sure, “would admire her at sixty as much as he did now, when she was forty years younger.” But, determined on maintaining his appointed line of conduct respecting Miss Newcome, he carried his letter to Sir Barnes, and desired him to forward it to his sister. Sir Barnes took the note, and promised to despatch it. The communications between him and his uncle had been very brief and cold, since the telling of these little fibs concerning old Lady Kew’s visits to London, which the Baronet dismissed from his mind as soon as they were spoken, and which the good Colonel never could forgive. Barnes asked his uncle to dinner once or twice, but the Colonel was engaged. How was Barnes to know the reason of the elder’s refusal? A London man, a banker, and a Member of Parliament, has a thousand things to think of; and no time to wonder that friends refuse his invitations to dinner. Barnes continued to grin and smile most affectionately when he met the Colonel; to press his hand, to congratulate him on the last accounts from India, unconscious of the scorn and distrust with which his senior mentally regarded him. “Old boy is doubtful about the young cub’s love-affair,” the Baronet may have thought. “We’ll ease his old mind on that point some time hence.” No doubt Barnes thought he was conducting the business very smartly and diplomatically.
I heard myself news at this period from the gallant Crackthorpe, which, being interested in my young friend’s happiness, filled me with some dismay. “Our friend the painter and glazier has been hankering about our barracks at Knightsbridge” (the noble Life Guards Green had now pitched their tents in that suburb), “and pumping me about la belle cousine. I don’t like to break it to him—I don’t really, now. But it’s all up with his chance, I think. Those private theatricals at Fallowfield have done Farintosh’s business. He used to rave about the Newcomes to me, as we were riding home from hunting. He gave Bob Henchman the lie, who told a story which Bob got from his man, who had it from Miss Newcome’s lady’s-maid, about—about some journey to Brighton, which the cousins took.” Here Mr. Crackthorpe grinned most facetiously. “Farintosh swore he’d knock Henchman down; and vows he will be the death of—will murder our friend Clive when he comes to town. As for Henchman, he was in a desperate way. He lives on the Marquis, you know, and Farintosh’s anger or his marriage will be the loss of free quarters, and ever so many good dinners a year to him.” I did not deem it necessary to impart Crackthorpe’s story to Clive, or explain to him the reason why Lord Farintosh scowled most fiercely upon the young painter, and passed him without any other sign of recognition one day as Clive and I were walking together in Pall Mall. If my lord wanted a quarrel, young Clive was not a man to balk him; and would have been a very fierce customer to deal with, in his actual state of mind.
A pauper child in London at seven years old knows how to go to market, to fetch the beer, to pawn father’s coat, to choose the largest fried fish or the nicest ham-bone, to nurse Mary Jane of three,—to conduct a hundred operations of trade or housekeeping, which a little Belgravian does not perhaps acquire in all the days of her life. Poverty and necessity force this precociousness on the poor little brat. There are children who are accomplished shoplifters and liars almost as soon as they can toddle and speak. I dare say little Princes know the laws of etiquette as regards themselves, and the respect due to their rank, at a very early period of their royal existence. Every one of us, according to his degree, can point to the Princekins of private life who are flattered and worshipped, and whose little shoes grown men kiss as soon almost as they walk upon ground.
It is a wonder what human nature will support: and that, considering the amount of flattery some people are crammed with from their cradles, they do not grow worse and more selfish than they are. Our poor little pauper just mentioned is dosed with Daffy’s Elixir, and somehow survives the drug. Princekin or lordkin from his earliest days has nurses, dependants, governesses, little friends, schoolfellows, schoolmasters, fellow-collegians, college tutors, stewards and valets, led captains of his suite, and women innumerable flattering him and doing him honour. The tradesman’s manner, which to you and me is decently respectful, becomes straightway frantically servile before Princekin. Honest folks at railway stations whisper to their families, “That’s the Marquis of Farintosh,” and look hard at him as he passes. Landlords cry, “This way, my lord; this room for your lordship.” They say at public schools Princekin is taught the beauties of equality, and thrashed into some kind of subordination. Psha! Toad-eaters in pinafores surround Princekin. Do not respectable people send their children so as to be at the same school with him; don’t they follow him to college, and eat his toads through life?
And as for women—oh, my dear friends and brethren in this vale of tears—did you ever see anything so curious, monstrous, and amazing as the way in which women court Princekin when he is marriageable, and pursue him with their daughters? Who was the British nobleman in old old days who brought his three daughters to the King of Mercia, that His Majesty might choose one after inspection? Mercia was but a petty province, and its king in fact a Princekin. Ever since those extremely ancient and venerable times the custom exists not only in Mercia, but in all the rest of the provinces inhabited by the Angles, and before Princekins the daughters of our nobles are trotted out.
There was no day of his life which our young acquaintance, the Marquis of Farintosh, could remember on which he had not been flattered; and no society which did not pay him court. At a private school he could recollect the master’s wife stroking his pretty curls and treating him furtively to goodies; at college he had the tutor simpering and bowing as he swaggered over the grass-plat; old men at clubs would make way for him and fawn on him—not your mere pique-assiettes and penniless parasites, but most respectable toad-eaters, fathers of honest families, gentlemen themselves of good station, who respected this young gentleman as one of the institutions of their country, and the admired wisdom of the nation that set him to legislate over us. When Lord Farintosh walked the streets at night, he felt himself like Haroun Alraschid—(that is, he would have felt so had he ever heard of the Arabian potentate)—a monarch in disguise affably observing and promenading the city. And let us be sure there was a Mesrour in his train to knock at the doors for him and run the errands of this young caliph. Of course he met with scores of men in life who neither flattered him nor would suffer his airs; but he did not like the company of such, or for the sake of truth undergo the ordeal of being laughed at; he preferred toadies, generally speaking. “I like,” says he, “you know, those fellows who are always saying pleasant things, you know, and who would run from here to Hammersmith if I asked ’em—much better than those fellows who are always making fun of me, you know.” A man of his station who likes flatterers need not shut himself up; he can get plenty of society.
As for women, it was his lordship’s opinion that every daughter of Eve was bent on marrying him. A Scotch marquis, an English earl, of the best blood in the empire, with a handsome person, and a fortune of fifteen thousand a year, how could the poor creatures do otherwise than long for him? He blandly received their caresses; took their coaxing and cajolery as matters of course; and surveyed the beauties of his time as the Caliph the moonfaces of his harem. My lord intended to marry certainly. He did not care for money, nor for rank; he expected consummate beauty and talent, and some day would fling his handkerchief to the possessor of these, and place her by his side upon the Farintosh throne.
At this time there were but two or three young ladies in society endowed with the necessary qualifications, or who found favour in his eyes. His lordship hesitated in his selection from these beauties. He was not in a hurry, he was not angry at the notion that Lady Kew (and Miss Newcome with her) hunted him. What else should they do but pursue an object so charming? Everybody hunted him. The other young ladies, whom we need not mention, languished after him still more longingly. He had little notes from these; presents of purses worked by them, and cigar-cases embroidered with his coronet. They sang to him in cosy boudoirs—mamma went out of the room, and sister Ann forgot something in the drawing-room. They ogled him as they sang. Trembling they gave him a little foot to mount them, that they might ride on horseback with him. They tripped along by his side from the Hall to the pretty country church on Sundays. They warbled hymns: sweetly looking at him the while mamma whispered confidentially to him, “What an angel Cecilia is!” And so forth, and so forth—with which chaff our noble bird was by no means to be caught. When he had made up his great mind, that the time was come and the woman, he was ready to give a Marchioness of Farintosh to the English nation.
Miss Newcome has been compared ere this to the statue of “Huntress Diana” at the Louvre, whose haughty figure and beauty the young lady indeed somewhat resembled. I was not present when Diana and Diana’s grandmother hunted the noble Scottish stag of whom we have just been writing; nor care to know how many times Lord Farintosh escaped, and how at last he was brought to bay and taken by his resolute pursuers. Paris, it appears, was the scene of his fall and capture. The news was no doubt well known amongst Lord Farintosh’s brother-dandies, among exasperated matrons and virgins in Mayfair, and in polite society generally, before it came to simple Tom Newcome and his son. Not a word on the subject had Sir Barnes mentioned to the Colonel: perhaps not choosing to speak till the intelligence was authenticated; perhaps not wishing to be the bearer of tidings so painful.
Though the Colonel may have read in his Pall Mall Gazette a paragraph which announced an approaching MARRIAGE IN HIGH LIFE, “between a noble young marquis and an accomplished and beautiful young lady, daughter and sister of a Northern baronet,” he did not know who were the fashionable persons about to be made happy, nor, until he received a letter from an old friend who lived at Paris, was the fact conveyed to him. Here is the letter preserved by him along with all that he ever received from the same hand:—
“Rue St. Dominique, St. Germain, Paris, 10 Fev.
“So behold you of return, my friend! you quit for ever the sword and those arid plains where you have passed so many years of your life, separated from those to whom, at the commencement, you held very nearly. Did it not seem once as if two hands never could unlock, so closely were they enlaced together? Ah, mine are old and feeble now; forty years have passed since the time when you used to say they were young and fair. How well I remember me of every one of those days, though there is a death between me and them, and it is as across a grave I review them! Yet another parting, and tears and regrets are finished. Tenez, I do not believe them when they say there is no meeting for us afterwards, there above. To what good to have seen you, friend, if we are to part here, and in Heaven too? I have not altogether forgotten your language, is it not so? I remember it because it was yours, and that of my happy days. I radote like an old woman as I am. M. de Florac has known my history from the commencement. May I not say that after so many of years I have been faithful to him and to all my promises? When the end comes with its great absolution, I shall not be sorry. One supports the combats of life, but they are long, and one comes from them very wounded; ah, when shall they be over?
“You return and I salute you with wishes for parting. How much egotism! I have another project which I please myself to arrange. You know how I am arrived to love Clive as own my child. I very quick surprised his secret, the poor boy, when he was here it is twenty months. He looked so like you as I repeal me of you in the old time! He told me he had no hope of his beautiful cousin. I have heard of the fine marriage that one makes her. Paul, my son, has been at the English Ambassade last night and has made his congratulations to M. de Farintosh. Paul says him handsome, young, not too spiritual, rich, and haughty, like all, all noble Montagnards.
“But it is not of M. de Farintosh I write, whose marriage, without doubt, has been announced to you. I have a little project; very foolish, perhaps. You know Mr. the Duke of Ivry has left me guardian of his little daughter Antoinette, whose affreuse mother no one sees more. Antoinette is pretty and good, and soft, and with an affectionate heart. I love her already as my infant. I wish to bring her up, and that Clive should marry her. They say you are returned very rich. What follies are these I write! In the long evenings of winter, the children escaped it is a long time from the maternal nest, a silent old man my only company,—I live but of the past; and play with its souvenirs as the detained caress little birds, little flowers, in their prisons. I was born for the happiness; my God! I have learned it in knowing you. In losing you I have lost it. It is not against the will of Heaven I oppose myself. It is man, who makes himself so much of this evil and misery, this slavery, these tears, these crimes, perhaps.
“This marriage of the young Scotch Marquis and the fair Ethel (I love her in spite of all, and shall see her soon and congratulate her, for, do you see, I might have stopped this fine marriage, and did my best and more than my duty for our poor Clive) shall make itself in London next spring, I hear. You shall assist scarcely at the ceremony; he, poor boy, shall not care to be there. Bring him to Paris to make the court to my little Antoinette: bring him to Paris to his good friend, Comtesse de Florac.”
“I read marvels of his works in an English journal, which one sends me.”
Clive was not by when this letter reached his father. Clive was in his painting-room, and lest he should meet his son, and in order to devise the best means of breaking the news to the lad, Thomas Newcome retreated out of doors; and from the Oriental he crossed Oxford Street, and from Oxford Street he stalked over the roomy pavements of Gloucester Place, and there he bethought him how he had neglected Mrs. Hobson Newcome of late, and the interesting family of Bryanstone Square. So he went to leave his card at Maria’s door: her daughters, as we have said, are quite grown girls. If they have been lectured, and learning, and back-boarded, and practising, and using the globes, and laying in a store of ’ologies, ever since, what a deal they must know! Colonel Newcome was admitted to see his nieces, and Consummate Virtue, their parent. Maria was charmed to see her brother-in-law; she greeted him with reproachful tenderness: “Why, why,” her fine eyes seemed to say, “have you so long neglected us? Do you think because I am wise, and gifted, and good, and you are, it must be confessed, a poor creature with no education, I am not also affable? Come, let the prodigal be welcomed by his virtuous relatives: come and lunch with us, Colonel!” He sate down accordingly to the family tiffin.
When the meal was over, the mother, who had matter of importance to impart to him, besought him to go to the drawing-room, and there poured out such a eulogy upon her children’s qualities as fond mothers know how to utter. They knew this and they knew that. They were instructed by the most eminent professors; “that wretched Frenchwoman, whom you may remember here, Mademoiselle Lenoir,” Maria remarked parenthetically, “turned out, oh, frightfully! She taught the girls the worst accent, it appears. Her father was not a colonel; he was—oh! never mind! It is a mercy I got rid of that fiendish woman, and before my precious ones knew what she was!” And then followed details of the perfections of the two girls, with occasional side-shots at Lady Anne’s family, just as in the old time. “Why don’t you bring your boy, whom I have always loved as a son, and who avoids me? Why does not Clive know his cousins? They are very different from others of his kinswomen, who think best of the heartless world.”
“I fear, Maria, there is too much truth in what you say,” sighs the Colonel, drumming on a book on the drawing-room table, and looking down sees it is a great, large, square, gilt Peerage, open at FARINTOSH, MARQUIS OF.—Fergus Angus Malcolm Mungo Roy, Marquis of Farintosh, Earl of Glenlivat, in the peerage of Scotland; also Earl of Rossmont, in that of the United Kingdom. Son of Angus Fergus Malcolm, Earl of Glenlivat, and grandson and heir of Malcolm Mungo Angus, first Marquis of Farintosh, and twenty-fifth Earl, etc. etc.
“You have heard the news regarding Ethel?” remarks Hobson.
“I have just heard,” says the poor Colonel.
“I have a letter from Anne this morning,” Maria continues. “They are of course delighted with the match. Lord Farintosh is wealthy, handsome; has been a little wild, I hear; is not such a husband as I would choose for my darlings, but poor Brian’s family have been educated to love the world; and Ethel no doubt is flattered by the prospects before her. I have heard that some one else was a little épris in that quarter. How does Clive bear the news, my dear Colonel?”
“He has long expected it,” says the Colonel, rising: “and I left him very cheerful at breakfast this morning.”
“Send him to see us, the naughty boy!” cries Maria. “We don’t change; we remember old times, to us he will ever be welcome!” And with this confirmation of Madame de Florac’s news, Thomas Newcome walked sadly homewards.
And now Thomas Newcome had to break the news to his son; who received the shot in such a way as caused his friends and confidants to admire his high spirit. He said he had long been expecting some such announcement: it was many months since Ethel had prepared him for it. Under her peculiar circumstances he did not see how she could act otherwise than she had done. And he narrated to the Colonel the substance of the conversation which the two young people had had together several months before, in Madame de Florac’s garden.
Clive’s father did not tell his son of his own bootless negotiation with Barnes Newcome. There was no need to recall that now; but the Colonel’s wrath against his nephew exploded in conversation with me, who was the confidant of father and son in this business. Ever since that luckless day when Barnes thought proper to—to give a wrong address for Lady Kew, Thomas Newcome’s anger had been growing. He smothered it yet for a while, sent a letter to Lady Anne Newcome, briefly congratulating her on the choice which he had heard Miss Newcome had made; and in acknowledgment of Madame de Florac’s more sentimental epistle he wrote a reply which has not been preserved, but in which he bade her rebuke Miss Newcome for not having answered him when he wrote to her, and not having acquainted her old uncle with her projected union.
To this message, Ethel wrote back a brief, hurried reply; it said:—
“I saw Madame de Florac last night at her daughter’s reception, and she gave me my dear uncle’s messages. Yes, the news is true which you have heard from Madame de Florac, and in Bryanstone Square. I did not like to write it to you, because I know one whom I regard as a brother (and a great, great deal better), and to whom I know it will give pain. He knows that I have done my duty, and why I have acted as I have done. God bless him and his dear father!
“What is this about a letter which I never answered? Grandmamma knows nothing about a letter. Mamma has enclosed to me that which you wrote to her, but there has been no letter from T. N. to his sincere and affectionate E. N.
“Rue de Rivoli. Friday.”
This was too much, and the cup of Thomas Newcome’s wrath overflowed. Barnes had lied about Ethel’s visit to London: Barnes had lied in saying that he delivered the message with which his uncle charged him: Barnes had lied about the letter which he had received, and never sent. With these accusations firmly proven in his mind against his nephew, the Colonel went down to confront that sinner.
Wherever he should find Barnes, Thomas Newcome was determined to tell him his mind. Should they meet on the steps of a church, on the flags of ’Change, or in the newspaper-room at Bays’s, at evening-paper time, when men most do congregate, Thomas the Colonel was determined upon exposing and chastising his father’s grandson. With Ethel’s letter in his pocket, he took his way into the City, penetrated into the unsuspecting back-parlour of Hobson’s bank, and was disappointed at first at only finding his half-brother Hobson there engaged over his newspaper. The Colonel signified his wish to see Sir Barnes Newcome. “Sir Barnes was not come in yet. You’ve heard about the marriage,” says Hobson. “Great news for the Barnes’s, ain’t it? The head of the house is as proud as a peacock about it. Said he was going out to Samuels, the diamond merchants; going to make his sister some uncommon fine present. Jolly to be uncle to a marquis, ain’t it, Colonel? I’ll have nothing under a duke for my girls. I say, I know whose nose is out of joint. But young fellows get over these things, and Clive won’t die this time, I dare say.”
While Hobson Newcome made these satiric and facetious remarks, his half-brother paced up and down the glass parlour, scowling over the panes into the bank where the busy young clerks sate before their ledgers. At last he gave an “Ah!” as of satisfaction. Indeed, he had seen Sir Barnes Newcome enter into the bank.
The Baronet stopped and spoke with a clerk, and presently entered, followed by that young gentleman into his private parlour. Barnes tried to grin when he saw his uncle, and held out his hand to greet the Colonel; but the Colonel put both his behind his back—that which carried his faithful bamboo cane shook nervously. Barnes was aware that the Colonel had the news. “I was going to—to write to you this morning, with—with some intelligence that I am—very—very sorry to give.”
“This young gentleman is one of your clerks?” asked Thomas Newcome, blandly.
“Yes; Mr. Boltby, who has your private account. This is Colonel Newcome, Mr. Boltby,” says Sir Barnes, in some wonder.
“Mr. Boltby, brother Hobson, you heard what Sir Barnes Newcome said just now respecting certain intelligence which he grieved to give me?”
At this the three other gentlemen respectively wore looks of amazement.
“Allow me to say in your presence, that I don’t believe one single word Sir Barnes Newcome says, when he tells me that he is very sorry for some intelligence he has to communicate. He lies, Mr. Boltby; he is very glad. I made up my mind that in whatsoever company I met him, and on the very first day I found him—hold your tongue, sir; you shall speak afterwards and tell more lies when I have done—I made up my mind, I say, that on the very first occasion I would tell Sir Barnes Newcome that he was a liar and a cheat. He takes charge of letters and keeps them back. Did you break the seal, sir? There was nothing to steal in my letter to Miss Newcome. He tells me people are out of town, when he goes to see in the next street, after leaving my table, and whom I see myself half an hour before he lies to me about their absence.”
“D—n you, go out, and don’t stand staring there, you booby!” screams out Sir Barnes to the clerk. “Stop, Boltby. Colonel Newcome, unless you leave this room I shall—I shall——”
“You shall call a policeman. Send for the gentleman, and I will tell the Lord Mayor what I think of Sir Barnes Newcome, Baronet. Mr. Boltby, shall we have the constable in?”
“Sir, you are an old man, and my father’s brother, or you know very well I would——”
“You would what, Sir? Upon my word, Barnes Newcome” (here the Colonel’s two hands and the bamboo cane came from the rear and formed in front), “but that you are my father’s grandson, after a menace like that, I would take you out and cane you in the presence of your clerks. I repeat, sir, that I consider you guilty of treachery, falsehood, and knavery. And if I ever see you at Bays’s Club, I will make the same statement to your acquaintance at the west end of the town. A man of your baseness ought to be known, sir; and it shall be my business to make men of honour aware of your character. Mr. Boltby, will you have the kindness to make out my account? Sir Barnes Newcome, for fear of consequences that I should deplore, I recommend you to keep a wide berth of me, sir.” And the Colonel twirled his mustachios, and waved his cane in an ominous manner, and Barnes started back spontaneously out of its dangerous circle.
What Mr. Boltby’s sentiments may have been regarding this extraordinary scene in which his principal cut so sorry a figure;—whether he narrated the conversation to other gentlemen connected with the establishment of Hobson Brothers, or prudently kept it to himself, I cannot say, having no means of pursuing Mr. B.’s subsequent career. He speedily quitted his desk at Hobson Brothers; and let us presume that Barnes thought Mr. B. had told all the other clerks of the avuncular quarrel. That conviction will make us imagine Barnes still more comfortable. Hobson Newcome no doubt was rejoiced at Barnes’s discomfiture; he had been insolent and domineering beyond measure of late to his vulgar good-natured uncle, whereas after the above interview with the Colonel he became very humble and quiet in his demeanour, and for a long, long time never said a rude word. Nay, I fear Hobson must have carried an account of the transaction to Mrs. Hobson and the circle in Bryanstone Square; for Sam Newcome, now entered at Cambridge, called the Baronet “Barnes” quite familiarly; asked after Clara and Ethel; and requested a small loan of Barnes.
Of course the story did not get wind at Bays’s; of course Tom Eaves did not know all about it, and say that Sir Barnes had been beaten black-and-blue. Having been treated very ill by the committee in a complaint which he made about the Club cookery, Sir Barnes Newcome never came to Bays’s, and at the end of the year took off his name from the lists of the Club.
Sir Barnes, though a little taken aback in the morning, and not ready with an impromptu reply to the Colonel and his cane, could not allow the occurrence to pass without a protest; and indited a letter which Thomas Newcome kept along with some others previously quoted by the compiler of the present memoirs.
It is as follows:—
Belgrave St., Feb. 15, 18—.
“Colonel Newcome, C.B., private.
“SIR—The incredible insolence and violence of your behaviour to-day (inspired by whatever causes or mistakes of your own), cannot be passed without some comment, on my part. I laid before a friend of your own profession, a statement of the words which you applied to me in the presence of my partner and one of my clerks this morning; and my adviser is of opinion, that considering the relationship unhappily subsisting between us, I can take no notice of insults for which you knew when you uttered them, I could not call you to account.”
“There is some truth in that,” said the Colonel. “He couldn’t fight, you know; but then he was such a liar I could not help speaking my mind.”
“I gathered from the brutal language which you thought fit to employ towards a disarmed man, the ground of one of your monstrous accusations against me, that I deceived you in stating that my relative, Lady Kew, was in the country, when in fact she was at her house in London.
“To this absurd charge I at once plead guilty. The venerable lady in question was passing through London, where she desired to be free from intrusion. At her ladyship’s wish I stated that she was out of town; and would, under the same circumstances, unhesitatingly make the same statement. Your slight acquaintance with the person in question did not warrant that you should force yourself on her privacy, as you would doubtless know were you more familiar with the customs of the society in which she moves.
“I declare upon my honour as a gentleman, that I gave her the message which I promised to deliver from you, and also that I transmitted a letter with which you entrusted me; and repel with scorn and indignation the charges which you were pleased to bring against me, as I treat with contempt the language and the threats which you thought fit to employ.
“Our books show the amount of x£. xs. xd. to your credit, which you will be good enough to withdraw at your earliest convenience; as of course all intercourse must cease henceforth between you and—Yours, etc.
“B. Newcome Newcome.”
“I think, sir, he doesn’t make out a bad case,” Mr. Pendennis remarked to the Colonel, who showed him this majestic letter.
“It would be a good case if I believed a single word of it, Arthur,” replied my friend, placidly twirling the old grey moustache. “If you were to say so-and-so, and say that I had brought false charges against you, I should cry mea culpa and apologise with all my heart. But as I have a perfect conviction that every word this fellow says is a lie, what is the use of arguing any more about the matter? I would not believe him if he brought twenty as witnesses, and if he lied till he was black in the other liars’ face. Give me the walnuts. I wonder who Sir Barnes’s military friend was.”
Barnes’s military friend was our gallant acquaintance General Sir George Tufto, K.C.B., who a short while afterwards talked over the quarrel with the Colonel, and manfully told him that (in Sir George’s opinion) he was wrong. “The little beggar behaved very well, I thought, in the first business. You bullied him so, and in the front of his regiment, too, that it was almost past bearing; and when he deplored, with tears in his eyes, almost, the little humbug! that his relationship prevented him calling you out, ecod, I believed him! It was in the second affair that poor little Barnes showed he was a cocktail.”
“What second affair?” asked Thomas Newcome.
“Don’t you know? He! he! this is famous!” cries Sir George. “Why, sir, two days after your business, he comes to me with another letter and a face as long as my mare’s, by Jove. And that letter, Newcome, was from your young ’un. Stop, here it is!” and from his padded bosom General Sir George Tufto drew a pocket-book, and from the pocket-book a copy of a letter, inscribed, “Clive Newcome, Esq., to Sir B. N. Newcome.” “There’s no mistake about your fellow, Colonel. No,——him!” and the man of war fired a volley of oaths as a salute to Clive.
And the Colonel, on horseback, riding by the other cavalry officer’s side read as follows:—
“George Street, Hanover Square, February 16.
“SIR—Colonel Newcome this morning showed me a letter bearing your signature, in which you state—1. That Colonel Newcome has uttered calumnious and insolent charges against you. 2. That Colonel Newcome so spoke, knowing that you could take no notice of his charges of falsehood and treachery, on account of the relationship subsisting between you.
“Your statements would evidently imply that Colonel Newcome has been guilty of ungentlemanlike conduct, and of cowardice towards you.
“As there can be no reason why we should not meet in any manner that you desire, I here beg leave to state, on my own part, that I fully coincide with Colonel Newcome in his opinion that you have been guilty of falsehood and treachery, and that the charge of cowardice which you dare to make against a gentleman of his tried honour and courage, is another wilful and cowardly falsehood on your part.
“And I hope you will refer the bearer of this note, my friend, Mr. George Warrington, of the Upper Temple, to the military gentleman whom you consulted in respect to the just charges of Colonel Newcome. Waiting a prompt reply,
“Believe me, sir—Your obedient servant, Clive Newcome.
“Sir Barnes Newcome Newcome, Bart., M. P., etc.”
“What a blunderhead I am!” cries the Colonel, with delight on his countenance, spite of his professed repentance. “It never once entered my head that the youngster would take any part in the affair. I showed him his cousin’s letter casually, just to amuse him, I think, for he has been deuced low lately, about—about a young man’s scrape that he has got into. And he must have gone off and despatched his challenge straightway. I recollect he appeared uncommonly brisk at breakfast the next morning. And so you say, General, the Baronet did not like the poulet?”
“By no means; never saw a fellow show such a confounded white feather. At first I congratulated him, thinking your boy’s offer must please him, as it would have pleased any fellow in our time to have a shot. Dammy! but I was mistaken in my man. He entered into some confounded long-winded story about a marriage you wanted to make with that infernal pretty sister of his, who is going to marry young Farintosh, and how you were in a rage because the scheme fell to the ground, and how a family duel might occasion unpleasantries to Miss Newcome; though I showed him how this could be most easily avoided, and that the lady’s name need never appear in the transaction. ‘Confound it, Sir Barnes,’ says I, ‘I recollect this boy, when he was a youngster throwing a glass of wine in your face! We’ll put it upon that, and say it’s an old feud between you.’ He turned quite pale, and he said your fellow had apologised for the glass of wine.”
“Yes,” said the Colonel, sadly, “my boy apologised for the glass of wine. It is curious how we have disliked that Barnes ever since we set eyes on him.”
“Well, Newcome,” Sir George resumed, as his mettled charger suddenly jumped and curvetted, displaying the padded warrior’s cavalry-seat to perfection. “Quiet, old lady!—easy, my dear! Well, when I found the little beggar turning tail in this way I said to him, ‘Dash me, sir, if you don’t want me, why the dash do you send for me, dash me? Yesterday you talked as if you would bite the Colonel’s head off, and to-day, when his son offers you every accommodation, by dash, sir, you’re afraid to meet him. It’s my belief you had better send for a policeman. A 22 is your man, Sir Barnes Newcome.’ And with that I turned on my heel and left him. And the fellow went off to Newcome that very night.”
“A poor devil can’t command courage, General,” said the Colonel, quite peaceably, “any more than he can make himself six feet high.”
“Then why the dash did the beggar send for me?” called out General Sir George Tufto, in a loud and resolute voice; and presently the two officers parted company.
When the Colonel reached home, Mr. Warrington and Mr. Pendennis happened to be on a visit to Clive, and all three were in the young fellow’s painting-room. We knew our lad was unhappy, and did our little best to amuse and console him. The Colonel came in. It was in the dark February days: we lighted the gas in the studio. Clive had made a sketch from some favourite verses of mine and George’s: those charming lines of Scott’s:—
“He turned his charger as he spake, Beside the river shore; He gave his bridle-rein a shake, With adieu for evermore, My dear! Adieu for evermore!”
Thomas Newcome held up a finger at Warrington, and he came up to the picture and looked at it; and George and I trolled out:
“Adieu for evermore, My dear! Adieu for evermore!”
From the picture the brave old Colonel turned to the painter, regarding his son with a look of beautiful inexpressible affection. And he laid his hand on his son’s shoulder, and smiled, and stroked Clive’s yellow moustache.
“And—and did Barnes send no answer to that letter you wrote him?” he said, slowly.
Clive broke out into a laugh that was almost a sob. He took both his father’s hands. “My dear, dear old father!” says he, “what a—what an—old—trump you are!” My eyes were so dim I could hardly see the two men as they embraced.
LIV. Has a Tragical Ending
Clive presently answered the question which his father put to him in the last chapter, by producing from the ledge of his easel a crumpled paper, full of Cavendish now, but on which was written Sir Barnes Newcome’s reply to his cousin’s polite invitation. Sir Barnes Newcome wrote, “that he thought a reference to a friend was quite unnecessary, in the most disagreeable and painful dispute in which Mr. Clive desired to interfere as a principal; that the reasons which prevented Sir Barnes from taking notice of Colonel Newcome’s shameful and ungentlemanlike conduct applied equally, as Mr. Clive Newcome very well knew, to himself; that if further insult was offered, or outrage attempted, Sir Barnes should resort to the police for protection; that he was about to quit London, and certainly should not delay his departure on account of Mr. Clive Newcome’s monstrous proceedings; and that he desired to take leave of an odious subject, as of an individual whom he had striven to treat with kindness, but from whom, from youth upwards, Sir Barnes Newcome had received nothing but insolence, enmity, and ill-will.”
“He is an ill man to offend,” remarked Mr. Pendennis. “I don’t think he has ever forgiven that claret, Clive.”
“Pooh! the feud dates from long before that,” said Clive; “Barnes wanted to lick me when I was a boy, and I declined: in fact, I think he had rather the worst of it; but then I operated freely on his shins, and that wasn’t fair in war, you know.”
“Heaven forgive me,” cries the Colonel; “I have always felt the fellow was my enemy: and my mind is relieved now war is declared. It has been a kind of hypocrisy with me to shake his hand and eat his dinner. When I trusted him it was against my better instinct; and I have been struggling against it these ten years, thinking it was a wicked prejudice, and ought to be overcome.”
“Why should we overcome such instincts?” asks Mr. Warrington. “Why shouldn’t we hate what is hateful in people and scorn what is mean? From what friend Pen has described to me, and from some other accounts which have come to my ears, your respectable nephew is about as loathsome a little villain as crawls on the earth. Good seems to be out of his sphere, and away from his contemplation. He ill-treats every one he comes near; or, if, gentle to them, it is that they may serve some base purpose. Since my attention has been drawn to the creature, I have been contemplating his ways with wonder and curiosity. How much superior Nature’s rogues are, Pen, to the villains you novelists put into your books! This man goes about his life business with a natural propensity to darkness and evil—as a bug crawls, and stings, and stinks. I don’t suppose the fellow feels any more remorse than a cat that runs away with a mutton-chop. I recognise the Evil Spirit, sir, and do honour to Ahrimanes, in taking off my hat to this young man. He seduced a poor girl in his father’s country town—is it not natural? Deserted her and her children—don’t you recognise the beast? married for rank—could you expect otherwise from him? invites my Lord Highgate to his house in consideration of his balance at the bank;—sir, unless somebody’s heel shall crunch him on the way, there is no height to which this aspiring vermin mayn’t crawl. I look to see Sir Barnes Newcome prosper more and more. I make no doubt he will die an immense capitalist, and an exalted Peer of this realm. He will have a marble monument, and a pathetic funeral sermon. There is a divine in your family, Clive, that shall preach it. I will weep respectful tears over the grave of Baron Newcome, Viscount Newcome, Earl Newcome; and the children whom he has deserted, and who, in the course of time, will be sent by a grateful nation to New South Wales, will proudly say to their brother convicts,—‘Yes, the Earl was our honoured father.’”
“I fear he is no better than he should be, Mr. Warrington,” says the Colonel, shaking his head. “I never heard the story about the deserted children.”
“How should you, O you guileless man!” cries Warrington.
“I am not in the ways of scandal-hearing myself much: but this tale I had from Sir Barnes Newcome’s own country. Mr. Batters of the Newcome Independent is my esteemed client. I write leading articles for his newspaper, and when he was in town last spring he favoured me with the anecdote; and proposed to amuse the Member for Newcome by publishing it in his journal. This kind of writing is not much in my line: and, out of respect to you and your young one, I believe—I strove with Mr. Batters, and—entreated him and prevailed with him, not to publish the story. That is how I came to know it.”
I sate with the Colonel in the evening, when he commented on Warrington’s story and Sir Barnes’s adventures in his simple way. He said his brother Hobson had been with him the morning after the dispute, reiterating Barnes’s defence of his conduct: and professing on his own part nothing but goodwill towards his brother. “Between ourselves the young Baronet carries matters with rather a high hand sometimes, and I am not sorry that you gave him a little dressing. But you were too hard upon him, Colonel—really you were.” “Had I known that child-deserting story I would have given it harder still, sir,” says Thomas Newcome, twirling his mustachios: “but my brother had nothing to do with the quarrel, and very rightly did not wish to engage in it. He has an eye to business, has Master Hobson too,” my friend continued: “for he brought me a cheque for my private account, which of course, he said, could not remain after my quarrel with Barnes. But the Indian bank account, which is pretty large, he supposed need not be taken away? and indeed why should it? So that, which is little business of mine, remains where it was; and brother Hobson and I remain perfectly good friends.
“I think Clive is much better since he has been quite put out of his suspense. He speaks with a great deal more kindness and good-nature about the marriage than I am disposed to feel regarding it: and depend on it has too high a spirit to show that he is beaten. But I know he is a good deal cut up, though he says nothing; and he agreed willingly enough to take a little journey, Arthur, and be out of the way when this business takes place. We shall go to Paris: I don’t know where else besides. These misfortunes do good in one way, hard as they are to bear: they unite people who love each other. It seems to me my boy has been nearer to me, and likes his old father better than he has done of late.” And very soon after this talk our friends departed.
The Bulgarian minister having been recalled, and Lady Anne Newcome’s house in park Lane being vacant, her ladyship and her family came to occupy the mansion for this eventful season, and sate once more in the dismal dining-room under the picture of the defunct Sir Brian. A little of the splendour and hospitality of old days was revived in the house: entertainments were given by Lady Anne: and amongst other festivities a fine ball took place, when pretty Miss Alice, Miss Ethel’s younger sister, made her first appearance in the world, to which she was afterwards to be presented by the Marchioness of Farintosh. All the little sisters were charmed, no doubt, that the beautiful Ethel was to become a beautiful Marchioness, who, as they came up to womanhood one after another, would introduce them severally to amiable young earls, dukes, and marquises, when they would be married off and wear coronets and diamonds of their own right. At Lady Anne’s ball I saw my acquaintance, young Mumford, who was going to Oxford next October, and about to leave Rugby, where he was at the head of the school, looking very dismal as Miss Alice whirled round the room dancing in Viscount Bustington’s arms;—Miss Alice, with whose mamma he used to take tea at Rugby, and for whose pretty sake Mumford did Alfred Newcome’s verses for him and let him off his thrashings. Poor Mumford! he dismally went about under the protection of young Alfred, a fourth-form boy—not one soul did he know in that rattling London ballroom; his young face—as white as the large white tie, donned two hours since at the Tavistock with such nervousness and beating of heart!
With these lads, and decorated with a tie equally splendid, moved about young Sam Newcome, who was shirking from his sister and his mamma. Mrs. Hobson had actually assumed clean gloves for this festive occasion. Sam stared at all the “Nobs:” and insisted upon being introduced to “Farintosh,” and congratulated his lordship with much graceful ease: and then pushed about the rooms perseveringly hanging on to Alfred’s jacket. “I say, I wish you wouldn’t call me Al’,” I heard Mr. Alfred say to his cousin. Seeing my face, Mr. Samuel ran up to claim acquaintance. He was good enough to say he thought Farintosh seemed devilish haughty. Even my wife could not help saying, that Mr. Sam was an odious little creature.
So it was for young Alfred, and his brothers and sisters, who would want help and protection in the world, that Ethel was about to give up her independence, her inclination perhaps, and to bestow her life on yonder young nobleman. Looking at her as a girl devoting herself to her family, her sacrifice gave her a melancholy interest in our eyes. My wife and I watched her, grave and beautiful, moving through the rooms, receiving and returning a hundred greetings, bending to compliments, talking with this friend and that, with my lord’s lordly relations, with himself, to whom she listened deferentially; faintly smiling as he spoke now and again; doing the honours of her mother’s house. Lady after lady of his lordship’s clan and kinsfolk complimented the girl and her pleased mother. Old Lady Kew was radiant (if one can call radiance the glances of those darkling old eyes). She sate in a little room apart, and thither people went to pay their court to her. Unwillingly I came in on this levee with my wife on my arm: Lady Kew scowled at me over her crutch, but without a sign of recognition. “What an awful countenance that old woman has!” Laura whispered as we retreated out of that gloomy presence.
And Doubt (as its wont is) whispered too a question in my ear, “Is it for her brothers and sisters only that Miss Ethel is sacrificing herself? Is it not for the coronet, and the triumph, and the fine houses?” “When two motives may actuate a friend, we surely may try and believe in the good one,” says Laura. “But, but I am glad Clive does not marry her—poor fellow—he would not have been happy with her. She belongs to this great world: she has spent all her life in it: Clive would have entered into it very likely in her train; and you know, sir, it is not good that we should be our husbands’ superiors,” adds Mrs. Laura, with a curtsey.
She presently pronounced that the air was very hot in the rooms, and in fact wanted to go home to see her child. As we passed out, we saw Sir Barnes Newcome, eagerly smiling, smirking, bowing, and in the fondest conversation with his sister and Lord Farintosh. By Sir Barnes presently brushed Lieutenant-General Sir George Tufto, K.C.B., who, when he saw on whose foot he had trodden, grunted out, “H’m, beg your pardon!” and turning his back on Barnes, forthwith began complimenting Ethel and the Marquis. “Served with your lordship’s father in Spain; glad to make your lordship’s acquaintance,” says Sir George. Ethel bows to us as we pass out of the rooms, and we hear no more of Sir George’s conversation.
In the cloak-room sits Lady Clara Newcome, with a gentleman bending over her, just in such an attitude as the bride is in Hogarth’s “Marriage à la Mode” as the counsellor talks to her. Lady Clara starts up as a crowd of blushes come into her wan face, and tries to smile, and rises to greet my wife, and says something about its being so dreadfully hot in the upper rooms, and so very tedious waiting for the carriages. The gentleman advances towards me with a military stride, and says, “How do you do, Mr. Pendennis? How’s our young friend, the painter?” I answer Lord Highgate civilly enough, whereas my wife will scarce speak a word in reply to Lady Clara Newcome.
Lady Clara asked us to her ball, which my wife declined altogether to attend. Sir Barnes published a series of quite splendid entertainments on the happy occasion of his sister’s betrothal. We read the names of all the clan Farintosh in the Morning Post, as attending these banquets. Mr. and Mrs. Hobson Newcome, in Bryanstone Square, gave also signs of rejoicing at their niece’s marriage. They had a grand banquet followed by a tea, to which latter amusement the present biographer was invited. Lady Anne, and Lady Kew and her granddaughter, and the Baronet and his wife, and my Lord Highgate and Sir George Tufto attended the dinner; but it was rather a damp entertainment. “Farintosh,” whispers Sam Newcome, “sent word just before dinner that he had a sore throat, and Barnes was as sulky as possible. Sir George wouldn’t speak to him, and the Dowager wouldn’t speak to Lord Highgate. Scarcely anything was drank,” concluded Mr. Sam, with a slight hiccup. “I say, Pendennis, how sold Clive will be!” And the amiable youth went off to commune with others of his parents’ guests.
Thus the Newcomes entertained the Farintoshes, and the Farintoshes entertained the Newcomes. And the Dowager Countess of Kew went from assembly to assembly every evening, and to jewellers and upholsterers and dressmakers every morning; and Lord Farintosh’s town-house was splendidly re-decorated in the newest fashion; and he seemed to grow more and more attentive as the happy day approached, and he gave away all his cigars to his brother Rob; and his sisters were delighted with Ethel, and constantly in her company, and his mother was pleased with her, and thought a girl of her spirit and resolution would make a good wife for her son: and select crowds flocked to see the service of plate at Handyman’s, and the diamonds which were being set for the lady; and Smee, R.A., painted her portrait, as a souvenir for mamma when Miss Newcome should be Miss Newcome no more; and Lady Kew made a will leaving all she could leave to her beloved granddaughter, Ethel, daughter of the late Sir Brian Newcome, Baronet; and Lord Kew wrote an affectionate letter to his cousin, congratulating her, and wishing her happiness with all his heart; and I was glancing over The Times newspaper at breakfast one morning; when I laid it down with an exclamation which caused my wife to start with surprise.
“What is it?” cries Laura, and I read as follows:—
“‘Death of the Countess Dowager of Kew.—We regret to have to announce the awfully sudden death of this venerable lady. Her ladyship, who had been at several parties of the nobility the night before last, seemingly in perfect health, was seized with a fit as she was waiting for her carriage, and about to quit Lady Pallgrave’s assembly. Immediate medical assistance was procured, and her ladyship was carried to her own house, in Queen Street, Mayfair. But she never rallied, or, we believe, spoke, after the first fatal seizure, and sank at eleven o’clock last evening, The deceased, Louisa Joanna Gaunt, widow of Frédéric, first Earl of Kew, was daughter of Charles, Earl of Gaunt, and sister of the late and aunt of the present Marquis of Steyne. The present Earl of Kew is her ladyship’s grandson, his lordship’s father, Lord Walham, having died before his own father, the first earl. Many noble families are placed in mourning by this sad event. Society has to deplore the death of a lady who has been its ornament for more than half a century, and who was known, we may say, throughout Europe for her remarkable sense, extraordinary memory, and brilliant wit.’”
LV. Barnes’s Skeleton Closet
The demise of Lady Kew of course put a stop for a while to the matrimonial projects so interesting to the house of Newcome. Hymen blew his torch out, put it into the cupboard for use on a future day, and exchanged his garish saffron-coloured robe for decent temporary mourning. Charles Honeyman improved the occasion at Lady Whittlesea’s Chapel hard by; and “Death at the Festival” was one of his most thrilling sermons; reprinted at the request of some of the congregation. There were those of his flock, especially a pair whose quarter of the fold was the organ-loft, who were always charmed with the piping of that melodious pastor.
Shall we too, while the coffin yet rests on the earth’s outer surface, enter the chapel whither these void remains of our dear sister departed are borne by the smug undertaker’s gentlemen, and pronounce an elegy over that bedizened box of corruption? When the young are stricken down, and their roses nipped in an hour by the destroying blight, even the stranger can sympathise, who counts the scant years on the gravestone, or reads the notice in the newspaper corner. The contrast forces itself on you. A fair young creature, bright and blooming yesterday, distributing smiles, levying homage, inspiring desire, conscious of her power to charm, and gay with the natural enjoyment of her conquests—who in his walk through the world has not looked on many such a one; and, at the notion of her sudden call away from beauty, triumph, pleasure; her helpless outcries during her short pain; her vain pleas for a little respite; her sentence, and its execution; has not felt a shock of pity? When the days of a long life come to its close, and a white head sinks to rise no more, we bow our own with respect as the mourning train passes, and salute the heraldry and devices of yonder pomp, as symbols of age, wisdom, deserved respect and merited honour; long experience of suffering and action. The wealth he may have achieved is the harvest which he sowed; the titles on his hearse, fruits of the field he bravely and laboriously wrought in. But to live to fourscore years, and be found dancing among the idle virgins! to have had near a century of allotted time, and then be called away from the giddy notes of a Mayfair fiddle! To have to yield your roses too, and then drop out of the bony clutch of your old fingers a wreath that came from a Parisian bandbox! One fancies around some graves unseen troops of mourners waiting; many and many a poor pensioner trooping to the place; many weeping charities; many kind actions; many dear friends beloved and deplored, rising up at the toll of that bell to follow the honoured hearse; dead parents waiting above, and calling, “Come, daughter!” lost children, heaven’s fondlings, hovering round like cherubim, and whispering, “Welcome, mother!” Here is one who reposes after a long feast where no love has been; after girlhood without kindly maternal nurture; marriage without affection; matronhood without its precious griefs and joys; after fourscore years of lonely vanity. Let us take off our hats to that procession too as it passes, admiring the different lots awarded to the children of men, and the various usages to which Heaven puts its creatures.
Leave we yonder velvet-palled box, spangled with fantastic heraldry, and containing within the aged slough and envelope of a soul gone to render its account. Look rather at the living audience standing round the shell;—the deep grief on Barnes Newcome’s fine countenance; the sadness depicted in the face of the most noble the Marquis of Farintosh; the sympathy of her ladyship’s medical man (who came in the third mourning carriage); better than these, the awe, and reverence, and emotion, exhibited in the kind face of one of the witnesses of this scene, as he listens to those words which the priest rehearses over our dead. What magnificent words! what a burning faith, what a glorious triumph; what a heroic life, death, hope, they record! They are read over all of us alike; as the sun shines on just and unjust. We have all of us heard them; and I have fancied, for my part, that they fell and smote like the sods on the coffin.
The ceremony over, the undertaker’s gentlemen clamber on the roof of the vacant hearse, into which palls, tressels, trays of feathers, are inserted, and the horses break out into a trot, and the empty carriages, expressing the deep grief of the deceased lady’s friends, depart homeward. It is remarked that Lord Kew hardly has any communication with his cousin, Sir Barnes Newcome. His lordship jumps into a cab, and goes to the railroad. Issuing from the cemetery, the Marquis of Farintosh hastily orders that thing to be taken off his hat, and returns to town in his brougham, smoking a cigar. Sir Barnes Newcome rides in the brougham beside Lord Farintosh as far as Oxford Street, where he gets a cab, and goes to the City. For business is business, and must be attended to, though grief be ever so severe.
A very short time previous to her demise, Mr. Rood (that was Mr. Rood—that other little gentleman in black, who shared the third mourning coach along with her ladyship’s medical man) had executed a will by which almost all the Countess’s property was devised to her granddaughter, Ethel Newcome. Lady Kew’s decease of course delayed the marriage projects for a while. The young heiress returned to her mother’s house in Park Lane. I dare say the deep mourning habiliments in which the domestics of that establishment appeared, were purchased out of the funds left in his hands, which Ethel’s banker and brother had at her disposal.
Sir Barnes Newcome, who was one of the trustees of his sister’s property, grumbled no doubt because his grandmother had bequeathed to him but a paltry recompense of five hundred pounds for his pains and trouble of trusteeship; but his manner to Ethel was extremely bland and respectful: an heiress now, and to be a marchioness in a few months, Sir Barnes treated her with a very different regard to that which he was accustomed to show to other members of his family. For while this worthy Baronet would contradict his mother at every word she uttered, and take no pains to disguise his opinion that Lady Anne’s intellect was of the very poorest order, he would listen deferentially to Ethel’s smallest observations, exert himself to amuse her under her grief, which he chose to take for granted was very severe, visit her constantly, and show the most charming solicitude for her general comfort and welfare.
During this time my wife received constant notes from Ethel Newcome, and the intimacy between the two ladies much increased. Laura was so unlike the women of Ethel’s circle, the young lady was pleased to say, that to be with her was Ethel’s greatest comfort. Miss Newcome was now her own mistress, had her carriage, and would drive day after day to our cottage at Richmond. The frigid society of Lord Farintosh’s sisters, the conversation of his mother, did not amuse Ethel, and she escaped from both with her usual impatience of control. She was at home every day dutifully to receive my lord’s visits; but though she did not open her mind to Laura as freely regarding the young gentleman as she did when the character and disposition of her future mother and sisters-in-law was the subject of their talk, I could see, from the grave look of commiseration which my wife’s face bore after her young friend’s visits, that Mrs. Pendennis augured rather ill of the future happiness of this betrothed pair. Once, at Miss Newcome’s special request, I took my wife to see her in Park Lane, where the Marquis of Farintosh found us. His lordship and I had already a half-acquaintance, which was not, however, improved after my regular presentation to him by Miss Newcome: he scowled at me with a countenance indicative of anything but welcome, and did not seem in the least more pleased when Ethel entreated her friend Laura not to take her bonnet, not to think of going away so soon. She came to see us the very next day, stayed much longer with us than usual, and returned to town quite late in the evening, in spite of the entreaties of the inhospitable Laura, who would have had her leave us long before. “I am sure,” says clear-sighted Mrs. Laura, “she is come out of bravado, and after we went away yesterday that there were words between her and Lord Farintosh on our account.”
“Confound the young man,” breaks out Mr. Pendennis in a fume; “what does he mean by his insolent airs?”
“He may think we are partisans de l’autre,” says Mrs. Pendennis, with a smile first, and a sigh afterwards, as she said “poor Clive!”
“Do you ever talk about Clive?” asks the husband.
“Never. Once, twice, perhaps, in the most natural manner in the world we mentioned where he is; but nothing further passes. The subject is a sealed one between us. She often looks at his drawings in my album (Clive had drawn our baby there and its mother in a great variety of attitudes), and gazes at his sketch of his dear old father: but of him she never says a word.”
“So it is best,” says Mr. Pendennis.
“Yes—best,” echoes Laura, with a sigh.
“You think, Laura,” continues the husband, “you think she——”
“She what?” What did Mr. Pendennis mean? Laura his wife certainly understood him, though upon my conscience the sentence went no further—for she answered at once:
“Yes—I think she certainly did, poor boy! But that, of course, is over now: and Ethel, though she cannot help being a worldly woman, has such firmness and resolution of character, that if she has once determined to conquer any inclination of that sort I am sure she will master it, and make Lord Farintosh a very good wife.”
“Since the Colonel’s quarrel with Sir Barnes,” cries Mr. Pendennis, adverting by a natural transition from Ethel to her amiable brother, “our banking friend does not invite us any more: Lady Clara sends you no cards. I have a great mind to withdraw my account.”
Laura, who understands nothing about accounts, did not perceive the fine irony of this remark: but her face straightway put on the severe expression which it chose to assume whenever Sir Barnes’s family was mentioned, and she said, “My dear, I am very glad indeed that Lady Clara sends us no more of her invitations. You know very well why I disliked them.”
“Why?”
“I hear baby crying,” says Laura. Oh, Laura, Laura! how could you tell your husband such a fib?—and she quits the room without deigning to give any answer to that “Why?”
Let us pay a brief visit to Newcome in the north of England, and there we may get some answer to the question of which Mr. Pendennis had just in vain asked a reply from his wife. My design does not include a description of that great and flourishing town of Newcome, and of the manufactures which caused its prosperity; but only admits of the introduction of those Newcomites who are concerned in the affairs of the family which has given its respectable name to these volumes.
Thus in previous pages we have said nothing about the Mayor and Corporation of Newcome the magnificent bankers and manufacturers who had their places of business in the town, and their splendid villas outside its smoky precincts; people who would give their thousand guineas for a picture or a statue, and write you off a cheque for ten times the amount any day; people who, if there was a talk of a statue to the Queen or the Duke, would come down to the Town All and subscribe their one, two, three undred apiece (especially if in the neighbouring city of SLOWCOME they were putting up a statue to the Duke or the Queen)—not of such men have I spoken, the magnates of the place; but of the humble Sarah Mason in Jubilee Row—of the Reverend Dr. Bulders the Vicar, Mr. Vidler the apothecary, Mr. Puff the baker—of Tom Potts, the jolly reporter of the Newcome Independent, and —— Batters, Esq., the proprietor of that journal—persons with whom our friends have had already, or will be found presently to have, some connexion. And it is from these that we shall arrive at some particulars regarding the Newcome family, which will show us that they have a skeleton or two in their closets, as well as their neighbours.
Now, how will you have the story? Worthy mammas of families—if you do not like to have your daughters told that bad husbands will make bad wives; that marriages begun in indifference make homes unhappy; that men whom girls are brought to swear to love and honour are sometimes false, selfish, and cruel; and that women forget the oaths which they have been made to swear—if you will not hear of this, ladies, close the book, and send for some other. Banish the newspaper out of your houses, and shut your eyes to the truth, the awful truth, of life and sin. Is the world made of Jennies and Jessamies; and passion the play of schoolboys and schoolgirls, scribbling valentines and interchanging lollipops? Is life all over when Jenny and Jessamy are married; and are there no subsequent trials, griefs, wars, bitter heart-pangs, dreadful temptations, defeats, remorses, sufferings to bear, and dangers to overcome? As you and I, friend, kneel with our children round about us, prostrate before the Father of us all, and asking mercy for miserable sinners, are the young ones to suppose the words are mere form, and don’t apply to us?—to some outcasts in the free seats probably, or those naughty boys playing in the churchyard? Are they not to know that we err too, and pray with all our hearts to be rescued from temptation? If such a knowledge is wrong for them, send them to church apart. Go you and worship in private; or if not too proud, kneel humbly in the midst of them, owning your wrong, and praying Heaven to be merciful to you a sinner.
When Barnes Newcome became the reigning Prince of the Newcome family, and after the first agonies of grief for his father’s death had subsided, he made strong attempts to conciliate the principal persons in the neighbourhood, and to render himself popular in the borough. He gave handsome entertainments to the townsfolk and to the county gentry; he tried even to bring those two warring classes together. He endeavoured to be civil to the Newcome Independent, the Opposition paper, as well as to the Newcome Sentinel that true old Uncompromising Blue. He asked the Dissenting clergyman to dinner, and the Low Church clergyman, as well as the orthodox Doctor Bulders and his curates. He gave a lecture at the Newcome Athenæum, which everybody said was very amusing, and which Sentinel and Independent both agreed in praising. Of course he subscribed to that statue which the Newcomites were raising; to the philanthropic missions which Reverend Low Church gentlemen were engaged in; to the races (for the young Newcomite manufacturers are as sporting as any gents in the North), to the hospital, the People’s Library, the restoration of the rood-screen and the great painted window in Newcome Old Church (Rev. J. Bulders), and he had to pay in fine a most awful price for his privilege of sitting in Parliament as representative of his native place—as he called it in his speeches “the cradle of his forefathers, the home of his race,” etc., though Barnes was in fact born at Clapham.
Lady Clara could not in the least help this young statesman in his designs upon Newcome and the Newcomites. After she came into Barnes’s hands, a dreadful weight fell upon her. She would smile and simper, and talk kindly and gaily enough at first, during Sir Brian’s life; and among women, when Barnes was not present. But as soon as he joined the company, it was remarked that his wife became silent, and looked eagerly towards him whenever he ventured to speak. She blundered, her eyes filled with tears; the little wit she had left her in her husband’s presence: he grew angry, and tried to hide his anger with a sneer, or broke out with gibe and an oath, when he lost patience, and Clara, whimpering, would leave the room. Everybody at Newcome knew that Barnes bullied his wife.
People had worse charges against Barnes than wife-bullying. Do you suppose that little interruption which occurred at Barnes’s marriage was not known in Newcome? His victim had been a Newcome girl, the man to whom she was betrothed was in a Newcome factory. When Barnes was a young man, and in his occasional visits to Newcome, lived along with those dashing young blades Sam Jollyman (Jollyman Brothers and Bowcher), Bob Homer, Cross Country Bill, Al Rackner (for whom his father had to pay eighteen thousand pounds after the Leger, the year Toggery won it) and that wild lot, all sorts of stories were told of them, and of Barnes especially. Most of them were settled, and steady business men by this time. Al, it was known had become very serious, besides making his fortune in cotton. Bob Homer managed the Bank; and as for S. Jollyman, Mrs. S. J. took uncommon good care that he didn’t break out of bounds any more; why, he was not even allowed to play a game at billiards; or to dine out without her——I could go on giving you interesting particulars of a hundred members of the Newcome aristocracy, were not our attention especially directed to one respectable family.
All Barnes’s endeavours at popularity were vain, partly from his own fault, and partly from the nature of mankind, and of the Newcome folks especially, whom no single person could possibly conciliate. Thus, suppose he gave the advertisements to the Independent; the old Blue paper the Sentinel was very angry: suppose he asked Mr. Hunch, the Dissenting minister, to bless the tablecloth after dinner, as he had begged Dr. Bulders to utter a benediction on the first course, Hunch and Bulders were both angry. He subscribed to the races—what heathenism! to the missionaries—what sanctimonious humbug! And the worst was that Barnes being young at that time, and not able to keep his tongue in order, could not help saying not to but of such and such a man, that he was an infernal ass, or a confounded old idiot, and so forth—peevish phrases, which undid in a moment the work of a dozen dinners, countless compliments, and months of grinning good-humour.
Now he is wiser. He is very proud of being Newcome of Newcome, and quite believes that the place is his hereditary principality. But still, he says, his father was a fool for ever representing the borough. “Dammy, sir,” cries Sir Barnes, “never sit for a place that lies at your park-gates, and above all never try to conciliate ’em. Curse ’em! Hate ’em well, sir! Take a line, and flog the fellows on the other side. Since I have sate in Parliament for another place, I have saved myself I don’t know how much a year. I never go to High Church or Low; don’t give a shillin’ to the confounded races, or the infernal souptickets, or to the miserable missionaries; and at last live in quiet.”
So, in spite of all his subscriptions, and his coaxing of the various orders of Newcomites, Sir Barnes Newcome was not popular among them; and while he had enemies on all sides, had sturdy friends not even on his own. Scarce a man but felt Barnes was laughing at him; Bulders in his pulpit, Holder who seconded him in his election, the Newcome society; and the ladies, even more than the men, were uneasy under his ominous familiarity, and recovered their good-humour when he left them. People felt as if it was a truce only, and not an alliance with him, and always speculated on the possibility of war: when he turned his back on them in the market, men felt relieved, and, as they passed his gate, looked with no friendly glances over his park-wall.
What happened within was perfectly familiar to many persons. Our friend was insolent to all his servants; and of course very well served, but very much disliked, in consequence. The butler was familiar with Taplow—the housekeeper had a friend at Newcome; Mrs. Taplow, in fact, of the King’s Arms—one of the grooms at Newcome Park kept company with Mrs. Bulder’s maid: the incomings and outgoings, the quarrels and tears, the company from London, and all the doings of the folks at Newcome Park were thus known to the neighbourhood round about. The apothecary brought an awful story back from Newcome. He had been called to Lady Clara in strong hysterical fits. He found her ladyship with a bruise on her face. When Sir Barnes approached her (he would not allow the medical man to see her except in his presence) she screamed and bade him not come near her. These things did Mr. Vidler weakly impart to Mrs. Vidler: these, under solemn vows of secrecy, Mrs. Vidler told to one or two friends. Sir Barnes and Lady Clara were seen shopping together very graciously in Newcome a short time afterwards; persons who dined at the Park said the Baronet and his wife seemed on very good terms; but—but that story of the bruised cheek remained in the minds of certain people, and lay by at compound interest as such stories will.
Now, say people quarrel and make it up; or don’t make it up, but wear a smirking face to society, and call each other “my dear” and “my love,” and smooth over their countenances before John, who enters with the coals as they are barking and biting, or who announces the dinner as they are tearing each other’s eyes out? Suppose a woman is ever so miserable, and yet smiles, and doesn’t show her grief? “Quite right,” say her prudent friends, and her husband’s relations above all. “My dear, you have too much propriety to exhibit your grief before the world, or above all, before the darling children.” So to lie is your duty, to lie to your friends, to yourself if you can, to your children.
Does this discipline of hypocrisy improve any mortal woman? Say she learns to smile after a blow, do you suppose in this matter alone she will be a hypocrite? Poor Lady Clara! I fancy a better lot for you than that to which fate handed you over. I fancy there need have been no deceit in your fond simple little heart, could it but have been given into other keeping. But you were consigned to a master, whose scorn and cruelty terrified you; under whose sardonic glances your scared eyes were afraid to look up, and before whose gloomy coldness you dared not be happy. Suppose a little plant, very frail and delicate from the first, but that might have bloomed sweetly and borne fair flowers, had it received warm shelter and kindly nurture; suppose a young creature taken out of her home, and given over to a hard master whose caresses are as insulting as his neglect; consigned to cruel usage; to weary loneliness; to bitter, bitter recollections of the past; suppose her schooled into hypocrisy by tyranny—and then, quick, let us hire an advocate to roar out to a British jury the wrongs of her injured husband, to paint the agonies of his bleeding heart (if Mr. Advocate gets plaintiff’s brief in time, and before defendant’s attorney has retained him), and to show Society injured through him. Let us console that martyr, I say, with thumping damages; and as for the woman—the guilty wretch!—let us lead her out and stone her.
LVI. Rosa quo locorum sera moratur
Clive Newcome bore his defeat with such a courage and resolution as those who knew the young fellow’s character were sure he would display. It was whilst he had a little lingering hope still that the poor lad was in the worst condition; as a gambler is restless and unhappy whilst his last few guineas remain with him, and he is venturing them against the overpowering chances of the bank. His last piece, however, gone, our friend rises up from that unlucky table beaten at the contest but not broken in spirit. He goes back into the world again and withdraws from that dangerous excitement; sometimes when he is alone or wakeful, tossing in his bed at nights, he may recall the fatal game, and think how he might have won it—think what a fool he was ever to have played it at all—but these cogitations Clive kept for himself. He was magnanimous enough not even to blame Ethel much, and to take her side against his father, who it must be confessed now exhibited a violent hostility against that young lady and her belongings. Slow to anger and utterly beyond deceit himself, when Thomas Newcome was once roused, or at length believed that he was cheated woe to the offender! From that day forth, Thomas believed no good of him. Every thought or action of his enemy’s life seemed treason to the worthy Colonel. If Barnes gave a dinner-party, his uncle was ready to fancy that the banker wanted to poison somebody; if he made a little speech in the House of Commons (Barnes did make little speeches in the House of Commons), the Colonel was sure some infernal conspiracy lay under the villain’s words. The whole of that branch of the Newcomes fared little better at their kinsman’s hands—they were all deceitful, sordid, heartless, worldly;—Ethel herself no better now than the people who had bred her up. People hate, as they love, unreasonably. Whether is it the more mortifying to us, to feel that we are disliked or liked undeservedly?
Clive was not easy until he had the sea between him and his misfortune: and now Thomas Newcome had the chance of making that tour with his son, which in early days had been such a favourite project with the good man. They travelled Rhineland and Switzerland together—they crossed into Italy—went from Milan to Venice (where Clive saluted the greatest painting in the world—the glorious ‘Assumption’ of Titian)—they went to Trieste and over the beautiful Styrian Alps to Vienna—they beheld Danube, and the plain where the Turk and Sobieski fought. They travelled at a prodigious fast pace. They did not speak much to one another. They were a pattern pair of English travellers: I dare say many persons whom they met smiled to observe them; and shrugged their shoulders at the aspect of ces Anglais. They did not know the care in the young traveller’s mind; and the deep tenderness and solicitude of the elder. Clive wrote to say it was a very pleasant tour, but I think I should not have liked to join it. Let us dismiss it in this single sentence. Other gentlemen have taken the same journey, and with sorrow perhaps as their silent fellow-traveller. How you remember the places afterwards, and the thoughts which pursued you! If in after days, when your grief is dead and buried, you revisit the scenes in which it was your companion, how its ghost rises and shows itself again! Suppose this part of Mr. Clive’s life were to be described at length in several chapters, and not in a single brief sentence, what dreary pages they would be! In two or three months our friends saw a number of men, cities, mountains, rivers, and what not. It was yet early autumn when they were back in France again, and September found them at Brussels, where James Binnie, Esq., and his family were established in comfortable quarters, and where we may be sure Clive and his father were very welcome.
Dragged abroad at first sorely against his will, James Binnie had found the Continental life pretty much to his liking. He had passed a winter at Pau, a summer at Vichy, where the waters had done him good. His ladies had made several charming foreign acquaintances. Mrs. Mackenzie had quite a list of counts and marchionesses among her friends. The excellent Captain Goby, wandered about the country with them. Was it to Rosey, was it to her mother, the Captain was most attached? Rosey received him as a godpapa; Mrs. Mackenzie as a wicked, odious, good-for-nothing, dangerous, delightful creature. Is it humiliating, is it consolatory, to remark, with what small wit some of our friends are amused? The jovial sallies of Goby appeared exquisite to Rosey’s mother, and to the girl probably; though that young Bahawder of a Clive Newcome chose to wear a grave face (confound his insolent airs!) at the very best of the Goby jokes.
In Goby’s train was his fervent admirer and inseparable young friend, Clarence Hoby. Captain Hoby and Captain Goby travelled the world together, visited Hombourg and Baden, Cheltenham and Leamington, Paris and Brussels, in company, belonged to the same club in London—the centre of all pleasure, fashion, and joy, for the young officer and the older campaigner. The jokes at the Flag, the dinners at the Flag, the committee of the Flag, were the theme of their constant conversation. Goby fifty years old, unattached, and with dyed moustaches, was the affable comrade of the youngest member of his club: when absent, a friend wrote him the last riddle from the smoking-room; when present, his knowledge of horses, of cookery, wines, and cigars, and military history, rendered him a most acceptable companion. He knew the history and achievements of every regiment in the army; of every general and commanding officer. He was known to have been ‘out’ more than once himself, and had made up a hundred quarrels. He was certainly not a man of an ascetic life or a profound intellectual culture: but though poor he was known to be most honourable; though more than middle-aged he was cheerful, busy, and kindly; and though the youngsters called him Old Goby, he bore his years very gaily and handsomely, and I dare say numbers of ladies besides Mrs. Mackenzie thought him delightful. Goby’s talk and rattle perhaps somewhat bored James Binnie, but Thomas Newcome found the Captain excellent company; and Goby did justice to the good qualities of the Colonel.
Clive’s father liked Brussels very well. He and his son occupied very handsome quarters, near the spacious apartments in the Park which James Binnie’s family inhabited. Waterloo was not far off, to which the Indian officer paid several visits with Captain Goby for a guide; and many of Marlborough’s battlefields were near, in which Goby certainly took but a minor interest; but on the other hand Clive beheld these with the greatest pleasure, and painted more than one dashing piece, in which Churchill and Eugene, Cutts and Cadogan, were the heroes; whose flowing periwigs, huge boots, and thundering Flemish chargers were, he thought, more novel and picturesque than the Duke’s surtout, and the French Grenadiers’ hairy caps, which so many English and French artists have portrayed.
Mr. and Mrs. Pendennis were invited by our kind Colonel to pass a month—six months if they chose—at Brussels, and were most splendidly entertained by our friends in that city. A suite of handsome rooms was set apart for us. My study communicated with Clive’s atelier. Many an hour did we pass, and many a ride and walk did we take together. I observed that Clive never mentioned Miss Newcome’s name, and Laura and I agreed that it was as well not to recall it. Only once, when we read the death of Lady Glenlivat, Lord Farintosh’s mother, in the newspaper, I remember to have said, “I suppose that marriage will be put off again.”
“Qu’est ce que cela me fait?” says Mr. Clive gloomily, over his picture—a cheerful piece representing Count Egmont going to execution; in which I have the honour to figure as a halberdier, Captain Hoby as the Count, and Captain Goby as the Duke of Alva, looking out of window.
Mrs. Mackenzie was in a state of great happiness and glory during this winter. She had a carriage, and worked that vehicle most indefatigably. She knew a great deal of good company at Brussels. She had an evening for receiving. She herself went to countless evening-parties, and had the joy of being invited to a couple of court balls, at which I am bound to say her daughter and herself both looked very handsome. The Colonel brushed up his old uniform and attended these entertainments. M. Newcome fils, as I should judge, was not the worst-looking man in the room; and, as these young people waltzed together (in which accomplishment Clive was very much more skilful than Captain Goby) I dare say many people thought he and Rosey made a pretty couple.
Most persons, my wife included, difficult as that lady is to please, were pleased with the pretty little Rosey. She sang charmingly now, and looked so while singing. If her mother would but have omitted that chorus, which she cackled perseveringly behind her daughter’s pretty back: about Rosey’s angelic temper; about the compliments Signor Polonini paid her; about Sir Horace Dash, our minister, insisting upon her singing “Batti Batti” over again, and the Archduke clapping his hands and saying, “Oh, yes!” about Count Vanderslaapen’s attentions to her, etc. etc.; but for these constant remarks of Mrs. Mack’s, I am sure no one would have been better pleased with Miss Rosey’s singing and behaviour than myself. As for Captain Hoby, it was easy to see how he was affected towards Miss Rosalind’s music and person.
And indeed few things could be pleasanter than to watch the behaviour of this pretty little maid with her Uncle James and his old chum the Colonel. The latter was soon as fond of her as James Binnie himself, whose face used to lighten with pleasure whenever it turned towards hers. She seemed to divine his wants, as she would trip across the room to fulfil them. She skipped into the carriage and covered his feet with a shawl. James was lazy and chilly now, when he took his drive. She sate opposite to him and smiled on him; and, if he dozed, quick, another handkerchief was round his neck. I do not know whether she understood his jokes, but she saluted them always with a sweet kind smile. How she kissed him, and how delighted she was if he bought her a bouquet for her ball that night! One day, upon occasion of one of these balls, James and Thomas, those two old boys, absolutely came into Mrs. Mackenzie’s drawing-room with a bouquet apiece for Miss Rosey; and there was a fine laughing.
“Oh, you little Susanna!” says James, after taking his usual payment; “now go and pay t’other elder.” Rosey did not quite understand at first, being, you see, more ready to laugh at jokes than to comprehend them: but when she did, I promise you she looked uncommonly pretty as she advanced to Colonel Newcome and put that pretty fresh cheek of hers up to his grizzled moustache.
“I protest I don’t know which of you blushes the most,” chuckles James Binnie—and the truth is, the old man and the young girl had both hung out those signals of amiable distress.
On this day, and as Miss Rosey was to be overpowered by flowers, who should come presently to dinner but Captain Hoby, with another bouquet? on which Uncle James said Rosey should go to the ball like an American Indian with her scalps at her belt.
“Scalps!” cries Mrs. Mackenzie.
“Scalps! Oh law, uncle!” exclaims Miss Rosey. “What can you mean by anything so horrid?”
Goby recalls to Mrs. Mack, Hook-ee-ma-goosh the Indian chief, whom she must have seen when the Hundred and Fiftieth were at Quebec, and who had his lodge full of them; and who used to lie about the barracks so drunk, and who used to beat his poor little European wife: and presently Mr. Clive Newcome joins this company, when the chirping, tittering, joking, laughing, cease somehow.
Has Clive brought a bouquet too? No. He has never thought about a bouquet. He is dressed in black, with long hair, a long moustache, and melancholy imperial. He looks very handsome, but as glum as an undertaker. And James Binnie says, “Egad, Tom, they used to call you the knight of the woeful countenance, and Clive has just inherited the paternal mug.” Then James calls out in a cheery voice, “Dinner, dinner!” and trots off with Mrs. Pendennis under his arm; Rosey nestles up against the Colonel; Goby and Mrs. Mack walk away arm-in-arm very contentedly; and I don’t know with which of her three nosegays pretty Rosey appears at the ball.
Our stay with our friends at Brussels could not be prolonged beyond a month, for at the end of that period we were under an engagement to other friends in England, who were good enough to desire the presence of Mrs. Pendennis and her suite of baby, nurse, and husband. So we presently took leave of Rosey and the Campaigner, of the two stout elders, and our melancholy young Clive, who bore us company to Antwerp, and who won Laura’s heart by the neat way in which he took her child on board ship. Poor fellow! how sad he looked as he bowed to us and took off his hat! His eyes did not seem to be looking at us, though they and his thoughts were turned another way. He moved off immediately, with his head down, puffing his eternal cigar, and lost in his own meditations; our going or our staying was of very little importance to the lugubrious youth.
“I think it was a great pity they came to Brussels,” says Laura, as we sate on the deck, while her unconscious infant was cheerful, and while the water of the lazy Scheldt as yet was smooth.
“Who? The Colonel and Clive? They are very handsomely lodged. They have a good maître-d’hôtel. Their dinners, I am sure, are excellent; and your child, madam, is as healthy as it possibly can be.”
“Blessed darling! Yes!” (Blessed darling crows, moos, jumps in his nurse’s arms, and holds out a little mottled hand for a biscuit of Savoy, which mamma supplies.) “I can’t help thinking, Arthur, that Rosey would have been much happier as Mrs. Hoby than she will be as Mrs. Newcome.”
“Who thinks of her being Mrs. Newcome?”
“Her mother, her uncle, and Clive’s father. Since the Colonel has been so rich, I think Mrs. Mackenzie sees a great deal of merit in Clive. Rosey will do anything her mother bids her. If Clive can be brought to the same obedience, Uncle James and the Colonel will be delighted. Uncle James has set his heart on this marriage. (He and his sister agree upon this point.) He told me, last night, that he would sing ‘Nunc dimittis,’ could he but see the two children happy; and that he should lie easier in purgatory if that could be brought about.”
“And what did you say, Laura?”
“I laughed, and told Uncle James I was of the Hoby faction. He is very good-natured, frank, honest, and gentlemanlike, Mr. Hoby. But Uncle James said he thought Mr. Hoby was so—well, so stupid—that his Rosey would be thrown away upon the poor Captain. So I did not tell Uncle James that, before Clive’s arrival, Rosey had found Captain Hoby far from stupid. He used to sing duets with her; he used to ride with her before Clive came. Last winter, when they were at Pau, I feel certain Miss Rosey thought Captain Hoby very pleasant indeed. She thinks she was attached to Clive formerly, and now she admires him, and is dreadfully afraid of him. He is taller and handsomer, and richer and cleverer than Captain Hoby, certainly.”
“I should think so, indeed,” breaks out Mr. Pendennis. “Why, my dear, Clive is as fine a fellow as one can see on a summer’s day. It does one good to look at him. What a frank pair of bright blue eyes he has, or used to have, till this mishap overclouded them! What a pleasant laugh he has! What a well-built, agile figure it is—what pluck, and spirit, and honour, there is about my young chap! I don’t say he is a genius of the highest order, but he is the staunchest, the bravest, the cheeriest, the most truth-telling, the kindest heart. Compare him and Hoby! Why, Clive is an eagle, and yonder little creature a mousing owl!”
“I like to hear you speak so,” cries Mrs. Laura, very tenderly. “People say that you are always sneering, Arthur; but I know my husband better. We know papa better, don’t we, baby?” (Here my wife kisses the infant Pendennis with great effusion, who has come up dancing on his nurse’s arms.) “But,” says she, coming back and snuggling by her husband’s side again—“But suppose your favourite Clive is an eagle, Arthur, don’t you think he had better have an eagle for a mate? If he were to marry little Rosey, I dare say he would be very good to her; but I think neither he nor she would be very happy. My dear, she does not care for his pursuits; she does not understand him when he talks. The two captains, and Rosey and I, and the campaigner, as you call her, laugh and talk, and prattle, and have the merriest little jokes with one another, and we all are as quiet as mice when you and Clive come in.”
“What, am I an eagle, too? I have no aquiline pretensions at all, Mrs. Pendennis.”
“No. Well, we are not afraid of you. We are not afraid of papa, are we, darling?” this young woman now calls out to the other member of her family; who, if you will calculate, has just had time to be walked twice up and down the deck of the steamer, whilst Laura has been making her speech about eagles. And soon the mother, child, and attendant descend into the lower cabins: and then dinner is announced: and Captain Jackson treats us to champagne from his end of the table: and yet a short while, and we are at sea, and conversation becomes impossible: and morning sees us under the grey London sky, and amid the million of masts in the Thames.
LVII. Rosebury and Newcome
The friends to whom we were engaged in England were Florac and his wife, Madame la Princesse de Moncontour, who were determined to spend the Christmas holidays at the Princess’s country seat. It was for the first time since their reconciliation, that the Prince and Princess dispensed their hospitalities at the latter’s château. It is situated, as the reader has already been informed, at some five miles from the town of Newcome; away from the chimneys and smoky atmosphere of that place, in a sweet country of rural woodlands; over which quiet villages, grey church spires, and ancient gabled farmhouses are scattered: still wearing the peaceful aspect which belonged to them when Newcome was as yet but an antiquated country town, before mills were erected on its river-banks, and dyes and cinders blackened its stream. Twenty years since Newcome Park was the only great house in that district; now scores of fine villas have sprung up in the suburb lying between the town and park. Newcome New Town, as everybody knows, has grown round the park-gates, and the New Town Hotel (where the railway station is) is a splendid structure in the Tudor style, more ancient in appearance than the park itself; surrounded by little antique villas with spiked gables, stacks of crooked chimneys, and plate-glass windows looking upon trim lawns; with glistening hedges of evergreens, spotless gravel walks, and Elizabethan gig-houses. Under the great railway viaduct of the New Town, goes the old tranquil winding London highroad, once busy with a score of gay coaches, and ground by innumerable wheels: but at a few miles from the New Town Station the road has become so mouldy that the grass actually grows on it; and Rosebury, Madame de Moncontour’s house, stands at one end of a village-green, which is even more quiet now than it was a hundred years ago.
When first Madame de Florac bought the place, it scarcely ranked amongst the country-houses; and she, the sister of manufacturers at Newcome and Manchester, did not of course visit the county families. A homely little body, married to a Frenchman from whom she was separated, may or may not have done a great deal of good in her village, have had pretty gardens, and won prizes at the Newcome flower and fruit shows; but, of course, she was nobody in such an aristocratic county as we know ———shire is. She had her friends and relatives from Newcome. Many of them were Quakers—many were retail shopkeepers. She even frequented the little branch Ebenezer, on Rosebury Green; and it was only by her charities and kindness at Christmas-time, that the Rev. Dr. Potter, the rector at Rosebury, knew her. The old clergy, you see, live with the county families. Good little Madame de Florac was pitied and patronised by the Doctor, treated with no little superciliousness by Mrs. Potter, and the young ladies, who only kept the first society. Even when her rich brother died, and she got her share of all that money Mrs. Potter said poor Madame de Florac did well in not trying to move out of her natural sphere (Mrs. P. was the daughter of a bankrupt hatter in London, and had herself been governess in a noble family, out of which she married Mr. P., who was private tutor). Madame de Florac did well, she said, not to endeavour to leave her natural sphere, and that The County never would receive her. Tom Potter, the rector’s son, with whom I had the good fortune to be a fellow-student at Saint Boniface College, Oxbridge—a rattling, forward, and it must be owned, vulgar youth—asked me whether Florac was not a billiard-marker by profession? and was even so kind as to caution his sisters not to speak of billiards before the lady of Rosebury. Tom was surprised to learn that Monsieur Paul de Florac was a gentleman of lineage incomparably better than that of any, except two or three families in England (including your own, my dear and respected reader, of course, if you hold to your pedigree). But the truth is, heraldically speaking, that union with the Higgs of Manchester was the first misalliance which the Florac family had made for long long years. Not that I would wish for a moment to insinuate that any nobleman is equal to an English nobleman; nay, that an English snob, with a coat-of-arms bought yesterday, or stolen out of Edmonton, or a pedigree purchased from a peerage-maker, has not a right to look down upon any of your paltry foreign nobility.
One day the carriage-and-four came in state from Newcome Park, with the well-known chaste liveries of the Newcomes, and drove up Rosebury Green, towards the parsonage gate, when Mrs. and the Miss Potters happened to be standing, cheapening fish from a donkey-man, with whom they were in the habit of dealing. The ladies were in their pokiest old head-gear and most dingy gowns, when they perceived the carriage approaching; and considering, of course, that the visit of the Park people was intended for them, dashed into the rectory to change their clothes, leaving Rowkins, the costermonger, in the very midst of the negotiation about the three mackerel. Mamma got that new bonnet out of the bandbox; Lizzy and Liddy skipped up to their bedroom, and brought out those dresses which they wore at the déjeûner at the Newcome Athenæum, when Lord Leveret came down to lecture; into which they no sooner had hooked their lovely shoulders, than they reflected with terror that mamma had been altering one of papa’s flannel waistcoats and had left it in the drawing-room, when they were called out by the song of Rowkins, and the appearance of his donkey’s ears over the green gate of the rectory. To think of the Park people coming, and the drawing-room in that dreadful state!
But when they came downstairs the Park people were not in the room—the woollen garment was still on the table (how they plunged it into the chiffonier!)—and the only visitor was Rowkins, the costermonger, grinning at the open French windows, with the three mackerel, and crying, “Make it sixpence, miss—don’t say fippens, maam, to a pore fellow that has a wife and family.” So that the young ladies had to cry—“Impudence!” “Get away, you vulgar insolent creature!—Go round, sir, to the back door!” “How dare you?” and the like; fearing lest Lady Anne Newcome, and Young Ethel, and Barnes should enter in the midst of this ignoble controversy.
They never came at all—those Park people. How very odd! They passed the rectory gate; they drove on to Madame de Florac’s lodge. They went in. They stayed for half an hour; the horses driving round and round the gravel road before the house; and Mrs. Potter and the girls speedily going to the upper chambers, and looking out of the room where the maids slept, saw Lady Anne, Ethel, and Barnes walking with Madame de Florac, going into the conservatories, issuing thence with MacWhirter, the gardener, bearing huge bunches of grapes and large fasces of flowers; they saw Barnes talking in the most respectful manner to Madame de Florac: and when they went downstairs and had their work before them—Liddy her gilt music-book, Lizzy her embroidered altar-cloth, mamma her scarlet cloak for one of the old women—they had the agony of seeing the barouche over the railings whisk by, with the Park people inside, and Barnes driving the four horses.
It was on that day when Barnes had determined to take up Madame de Florac; when he was bent upon reconciling her to her husband. In spite of all Mrs. Potter’s predictions, the county families did come and visit the manufacturer’s daughter; and when Madame de Florac became Madame la Princesse de Moncontour, when it was announced that she was coming to stay at Rosebury for Christmas, I leave you to imagine whether the circumstance was or was not mentioned in the Newcome Sentinel and the Newcome Independent; and whether Rev. G. Potter, D.D., and Mrs. Potter did or did not call on the Prince and Princess. I leave you to imagine whether the lady did or did not inspect all the alterations which Vineer’s people from Newcome were making at Rosebury House—the chaste yellow satin and gold of the drawing-room—the carved oak for the dining-room—the chintz for the bedrooms—the Princess’s apartment—the Prince’s apartment—the guests’ apartments—the smoking-room, gracious goodness!—the stables (these were under Tom Potter’s superintendence), “and I’m finished,” says he one day, “if here doesn’t come a billiard-table!”
The house was most comfortably and snugly appointed from top to bottom; and thus it will be seen that Mr. and Mrs. Pendennis were likely to be in very good quarters for Christmas of 184-.
Tom Potter was so kind as to call on me two days after our arrival; and to greet me in the Princess’s pew at church on the previous day. Before desiring to be introduced to my wife, he requested me to present him to my friend the Prince. He called him your Highness. His Highness, who had behaved with exemplary gravity, save once when he shrieked an “ah!” as Miss Liddy led off the children in the organ-loft in a hymn, and the whole pack went woefully out of tune, complimented Monsieur Tom on the sermon of monsieur his father. Tom walked with us to Rosebury lodge-gate. “Will you not come in, and make a party of billiard with me?” says His Highness. “Ah Pardon! I forgot, you do not play the billiard the Sunday!” “Any other day, Prince, I shall be delighted,” says Tom; and squeezed His Highness’s hand tenderly at parting. “Your comrade of college was he?” asks Florac. “My dear, what men are these comrades of college! What men are you English! My word of honour, there are some of them here—if I were to say to them wax my boots, they would take them and wax them! Didst thou see how the Révérend eyed us during the sermon? He regarded us over his book, my word of honour!”
Madame de Florac said simply, she wished the Prince would go and hear Mr. Jacob at the Ebenezer. Mr. Potter was not a good preacher, certainly.
“Savez-vous qu’elle est furieusement belle, la fille du Révérend?” whispered His Highness to me. “I have made eyes at her during the sermon. They will be of pretty neighbours these meess!” and Paul looked unutterably roguish and victorious as he spoke. To my wife, I am bound to say, Monsieur de Moncontour showed a courtesy, a respect and kindness, that could not be exceeded. He admired her. He paid her compliments innumerable, and gave me I am sure sincere congratulations at possessing such a treasure. I do not think he doubted about his power of conquering her, or any other of the daughters of women. But I was the friend of his misfortunes—his guest; and he spared me.
I have seen nothing more amusing, odd, and pleasant than Florac at this time of his prosperity. We arrived, as this veracious chronicle has already asserted, on a Saturday evening. We were conducted to our most comfortable apartments; with crackling fires blazing on the hearths, and every warmth of welcome. Florac expanded and beamed with good-nature. He shook me many times by the hand; he patted me; he called me his good—his brave. He cried to his maître-d’hôtel, “Frédéric, remember monsieur is master here! Run before his orders. Prostrate thyself to him. He was good to me in the days of my misfortune. Hearest thou, Frédéric? See that everything be done for Monsieur Pendennis—for madame sa charmante lady—for her angelic infant, and the bonne. None of thy garrison tricks with that young person, Frédéric! vieux scélérat! Garde-toi de là, Frédéric; si non, je t’envoie à Botani Bay; je te traduis devant le Lord-Maire!”
“En Angleterre je me fais Anglais, vois-tu, mon ami,” continued the Prince. “Demain c’est Sunday, et tu vas voir! I hear the bell, dress thyself for the dinner—my friend!”; Here there was another squeeze of both hands from the good-natured fellow. “It do good to my art to ’ave you in my ’ouse! Heuh!” He hugged his guest; he had tears in his eyes as he performed this droll, this kind embrace. Not less kind in her way, though less expensive and embracive, was Madame de Moncontour to my wife, as I found on comparing notes with that young woman, when the day’s hospitalities were ended. The little Princess trotted from bedchamber to nursery to see that everything was made comfortable for her guests. She sate and saw the child washed and put to bed. She had never beheld such a little angel. She brought it a fine toy to play with. She and her grim old maid frightened the little creature at first, but it was very speedily reconciled to their countenances. She was in the nursery almost as early as the child’s mother. “Ah!” sighed the poor little woman, “how happy you must be to have one!” In fine, my wife was quite overcome by her goodness and welcome.
Sunday morning arrived in the course of time, and then Florac appeared as a most wonderful Briton indeed! He wore top-boots and buckskins; and after breakfast, when we went to church, a white great-coat with a little cape, in which garment he felt that his similarity to an English gentleman was perfect. In conversation with his grooms and servants he swore freely,—not that he was accustomed to employ oaths in his own private talk, but he thought the employment of these expletives necessary as an English country gentleman. He never dined without a roast-beef, and insisted that the piece of meat should be bleeding, “as you love it, you others.” He got up boxing-matches: and kept birds for combats of cock. He assumed the sporting language with admirable enthusiasm—drove over to cover with a steppère—rode across countri like a good one—was splendid in the hunting-field in his velvet cap and Napoleon boots, and made the Hunt welcome at Rosebury where his good-natured little wife was as kind to the gentlemen in scarlet as she used to be of old to the stout Dissenting gentlemen in black, who sang hymns and spake sermons on her lawn. These folks, scared at the change which had taken place in the little Princess’s habits of life, lamented her falling away: but in the county she and her husband got a great popularity, and in Newcome town itself they were not less liked, for her benefactions were unceasing, and Paul’s affability the theme of all praise. The Newcome Independent and the Newcome Sentinel both paid him compliments; the former journal contrasting his behaviour with that of Sir Barnes, their member. Florac’s pleasure was to drive his Princess with four horses into Newcome. He called his carriage his “trappe,” his “drague.” The street-boys cheered and hurrayed the Prince as he passed through the town. One haberdasher had a yellow stock called the “Moncontour” displayed in his windows; another had a pink one marked “The Princely,” and as such recommended it to the young Newcome gents.
The drague conveyed us once to the neighbouring house of Newcome, whither my wife accompanied Madame de Moncontour at that lady’s own request, to whom Laura very properly did not think fit to confide her antipathy for Lady Clara Newcome. Coming away from a great house, how often she and I, egotistical philosophers, thanked our fates that our own home was a small one! How long will great houses last in this world? Do not their owners now prefer a lodging at Brighton, or a little entresol on the Boulevard, to the solitary ancestral palace in a park barred round with snow? We were as glad to get out of Newcome as out of a prison. My wife and our hostess skipped into the carriage, and began to talk freely as the lodge-gates closed after us. Would we be lords of such a place under the penalty of living in it? We agreed that the little angle of earth called Fairoaks was dearer to us than the clumsy Newcome-pile of Tudor masonry. The house had been fitted up in the time of George IV. and the quasi-Gothic revival. We were made to pass through Gothic dining-rooms, where there was now no hospitality,—Gothic drawing-rooms shrouded in brown hollands, to one little room at the end of the dusky suite, where Lady Clara sate alone, or in the company of the nurses and children. The blank gloom of the place had fallen upon the poor lady. Even when my wife talked about children (good-natured Madame de Moncontour vaunting ours as a prodigy) Lady Clara did not brighten up! Her pair of young ones was exhibited and withdrawn. A something weighed upon the woman. We talked about Ethel’s marriage. She said it was fixed for the new year, she believed. She did not know whether Glenlivat had been very handsomely fitted up. She had not seen Lord Farintosh’s house in London. Sir Barnes came down once—twice—of a Saturday sometimes, for three or four days to hunt, to amuse himself, as all men do she supposed. She did not know when he was coming again. She rang languidly when we rose to take leave, and sank back on her sofa, where lay a heap of French novels. “She has chosen some pretty books,” says Paul, as we drove through the sombre avenues through the grey park, mists lying about the melancholy ornamental waters, dingy herds of huddled sheep speckling the grass here and there; no smoke rising up from the great stacks of chimneys of the building we were leaving behind us, save one little feeble thread of white which we knew came from the fire by which the lonely mistress of Newcome was seated. “Ouf!” cries Florac, playing his whip, as the lodge-gates closed on us, and his team of horses rattled merrily along the road, “what a blessing it is to be out of that vault of a place! There is something fatal in this house—in this woman. One smells misfortune there.”
The hotel which our friend Florac patronised on occasion of his visits to Newcome was the King’s Arms, and it happened, one day, as we entered that place of entertainment in company, that a visitor of the house was issuing through the hall, to whom Florac seemed as if he would administer one of his customary embraces, and to whom the Prince called out “Jack,” with great warmth and kindness as he ran towards the stranger.
Jack did not appear to be particularly well pleased on beholding us; he rather retreated from before the Frenchman’s advances.
“My dear Jack, my good, my brave Ighgate! I am delighted to see you!” Florac continues, regardless of the stranger’s reception, or of the landlord’s looks towards us, who was bowing the Prince into his very best room.
“How do you do, Monsieur de Florac?” growls the new comer, surlily; and was for moving on after this brief salutation; but having a second thought seemingly, turned back and followed Florac into the apartment where our host conducted us. A la bonne heure! Florac renewed his cordial greetings to Lord Highgate. “I knew not, mon bon, what fly had stung you,” says he to my lord. The landlord, rubbing his hands, smirking and bowing, was anxious to know whether the Prince would take anything after his drive. As the Prince’s attendant and friend, the lustre of his reception partially illuminated me. When the chief was not by, I was treated with great attention (mingled with a certain degree of familiarity) by my landlord.
Lord Highgate waited until Mr. Taplow was out of the room; and then said to Florac, “Don’t call me by my name here, please, Florac, I am here incog.”
“Plait-il?” asks Florac. “Where is incog.?” He laughed when the word was interpreted to him. Lord Highgate had turned to me. “There was no rudeness, you understand, intended, Mr. Pendennis, but I am down here on some business, and don’t care to wear the handle to my name. Fellows work it so, don’t you understand? never leave you at rest in a country town—that sort of thing. Heard of our friend Clive lately?”
“Whether you ’ave ’andle or no ’andle, Jack, you are always the bien-venu to me. What is thy affair? Old monster! I wager——”
“No, no, no such nonsense,” says Jack, rather eagerly. “I give you my honour, I—I want to—to raise a sum of money—that is, to invest some in a speculation down here—deuced good the speculations down here; and, by the way, if the landlord asks you, I’m Mr. Harris—I’m a civil engineer—I’m waiting for the arrival of the Canada at Liverpool from America, and very uneasy about my brother who is on board.”
“What does he recount to us there? Keep these stories for the landlord, Jack; to us ’tis not the pain to lie. My good Mr. Harris, why have we not seen you at Rosebury? The Princess will scold me if you do not come; and you must bring your dear brother when he arrive too. Do you hear?” The last part of this sentence was uttered for Mr. Taplow’s benefit, who had re-entered the George bearing a tray of wine and biscuit.
The Master of Rosebury and Mr. Harris went out presently to look at a horse which was waiting the former’s inspection in the stableyard of the hotel. The landlord took advantage of his business, to hear a bell which never was rung, and to ask me questions about the guest who had been staying at his house for a week past. Did I know that party? Mr. Pendennis said, “Yes, he knew that party.”
“Most respectable party, I have no doubt,” continues Boniface. “Do you suppose the Prince of Moncontour knows any but respectable parties?” asks Mr. Pendennis—a query of which the force was so great as to discomfit and silence our landlord, who retreated to ask questions concerning Mr. Harris of Florac’s grooms.
What was Highgate’s business here? Was it mine to know? I might have suspicions, but should I entertain them or communicate them, and had I not best keep them to myself? I exchanged not a word on the subject of Highgate with Florac, as we drove home: though from the way in which we looked at one another each saw that the other was acquainted with that unhappy gentleman’s secret. We fell to talking about Madame la Duchesse d’Ivry as we trotted on; and then of English manners by way of contrast, of intrigues, elopements, Gretna Grin, etc., etc. “You are a droll nation!” says Florac. “To make love well, you must absolutely have a chaise-de-poste, and a scandal afterwards. If our affairs of this kind made themselves on the grand route, what armies of postillions we should need!”
I held my peace. In that vision of Jack Belsize I saw misery, guilt, children dishonoured, homes deserted,—ruin for all the actors and victims of the wretched conspiracy. Laura marked my disturbance when we reached home. She even divined the cause of it, and charged me with it at night, when we sate alone by our dressing-room fire, and had taken leave of our kind entertainers. Then, under her cross-examination, I own that I told what I had seen—Lord Highgate, under a feigned name staying at Newcome. It might be nothing. “Nothing! Gracious heavens! Could not this crime and misery be stopped?” “It might be too late,” Laura’s husband said sadly, bending down his head into the fire.
She was silent too for a while. I could see she was engaged where pious women ever will betake themselves in moments of doubt, of grief, of pain, of separation, of joy even, or whatsoever other trial. They have but to will, and as it were an invisible temple rises round them; their hearts can kneel down there; and they have an audience of the great, the merciful untiring Counsellor and Consoler. She would not have been frightened at Death near at hand. I have known her to tend the poor round about us, or to bear pain—not her own merely, but even her children’s and mine, with a surprising outward constancy and calm. But the idea of this crime being enacted close at hand, and no help for it—quite overcame her. I believe she lay awake all that night; and rose quite haggard and pale after the bitter thoughts which had deprived her of rest.
She embraced her own child with extraordinary tenderness that morning, and even wept over it, calling it by a thousand fond names of maternal endearment “Would I leave you, my darling—could I ever, ever, ever quit you, my blessing, and treasure!” The unconscious little thing, hugged to his mother’s bosom, and scared at her tones and tragic face, clung frightened and weeping round Laura’s neck. Would you ask what the husband’s feelings were as he looked at that sweet love, that sublime tenderness, that pure Saint blessing the life of him unworthy? Of all the gifts of Heaven to us below, that felicity is the sum and the chief. I tremble as I hold it lest I should lose it, and be left alone in the blank world without it: again, I feel humiliated to think that I possess it; as hastening home to a warm fireside and a plentiful table, I feel ashamed sometimes before the poor outcast beggar shivering in the street.
Breakfast was scarcely over when Laura asked for a pony carriage, and said she was bent on a private visit. She took her baby and nurse with her. She refused our company, and would not even say whither she was bound until she had passed the lodge-gate. I may have suspected what the object was of her journey. Florac and I did not talk of it. We rode out to meet the hounds of a cheery winter morning: on another day I might have been amused with my host—the splendour of his raiment, the neatness of his velvet cap, the gloss of his hunting-boots; the cheers, shouts, salutations, to dog and man; the oaths and outcries of this Nimrod, who shouted louder than the whole field and the whole pack too—but on this morning—I was thinking of the tragedy yonder enacting, and came away early from the hunting-field, and found my wife already returned to Rosebury.
Laura had been, as I suspected, to Lady Clara. She did not know why, indeed. She scarce knew what she should say when she arrived—how she could say what she had in her mind. “I hoped, Arthur, that I should have something—something told me to say,” whispered Laura, with her head on my shoulder; and as I lay awake last night thinking of her, prayed—that is, hoped, I might find a word of consolation for that poor lady. Do you know, I think she has hardly ever heard a kind word? She said so; she was very much affected after we had talked together a little.
“At first she was very indifferent; cold and haughty in her manner; asked what had caused the pleasure of this visit, for I would go in, though at the lodge they told me her ladyship was unwell, and they thought received no company. I said I wanted to show our boy to her—that the children ought to be acquainted—I don’t know what I said. She seemed more and more surprised—then all of a sudden—I don’t know how—I said, ‘Lady Clara, I have had a dream about you and your children, and I was so frightened that I came over to you to speak about it.’ And I had the dream, Pen; it came to me absolutely as I was speaking to her.
“She looked a little scared, and I went on telling her the dream. ‘My dear’ I said, ‘I dreamed that I saw you happy with those children.’
“‘Happy!’ says she—the three were playing in the conservatory into which her sitting-room opens.
“‘And that a bad spirit came and tore them from you, and drove you out into the darkness; and I saw you wandering about quite lonely and wretched, and looking back into the garden where the children were playing. And you asked and implored to see them; and the Keeper at the gate said ‘No, never.’ And then—then I thought they passed by you, and they did not know you.’
“‘Ah!’ said Lady Clara.
“‘And then I thought, as we do in dreams, you know, that it was my child who was separated from me, and who would not know me: and oh, what a pang that was! Fancy that! Let us pray God it was only a dream. And worse than that, when you, when I implored to come to the child, and the man said, ‘No, never,’ I thought there came a spirit—an angel that fetched the child to heaven, and you said, ‘Let me come too; oh, let me come too, I am so miserable.’ And the angel said, ‘No, never, never.’
“By this time Lady Clara was looking very pale. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked of me,” Laura continued.
“‘Oh, dear lady, for the sake of the little ones, and Him who calls them to Him, go you with them. Never, never part from them! Cling to His knees, and take shelter there.’ I took her hands, and I said more to her in this way, Arthur, that I need not, that I ought not to speak again. But she was touched at length when I kissed her; and she said I was very kind to her, and no one had ever been so, and that she was quite alone in the world and had no friend to fly to; and would I go and stay with her? and I said ‘yes;’ and we must go, my dear. I think you should see that person at Newcome—see him, and warn him,” cried Laura, warming as she spoke, “and pray God to enlighten and strengthen him, and to keep him from this temptation, and implore him to leave this poor, weak, frightened, trembling creature; if he has the heart of a gentleman and the courage of a man, he will, I know he will.”
“I think he would, my dearest,” I said, “if he but heard the petitioner.” Laura’s cheeks were blushing, her eyes brightened, her voice rang with a sweet pathos of love that vibrates through my whole being sometimes. It seems to me as if evil must give way, and bad thoughts retire before that purest creature.
“Why has she not some of her family with her, poor thing!” my wife continued. “She perishes in that solitude. Her husband prevents her, I think—and—oh—I know enough of him to know what his life is. I shudder, Arthur, to see you take the hand of that wicked, selfish man. You must break with him, do you hear, sir?”
“Before or after going to stay at his house, my love?” asks Mr. Pendennis.
“Poor thing! she lighted up at the idea of any one coming. She ran and showed me the rooms we were to have. It will be very stupid; and you don’t like that. But you can write your book, and still hunt and shoot with our friends here. And Lady Anne Newcome must be made to come back again. Sir Barnes quarrelled with his mother and drove her out of the house on her last visit—think of that! The servants here know it. Martha brought me the whole story from the housekeeper’s room. This Sir Barnes Newcome is a dreadful creature, Arthur. I am so glad I loathed him from the very first moment I saw him.”
“And into this ogre’s den you propose to put me and my family, madam!” says the husband. “Indeed, where won’t I go if you order me? Oh, who will pack my portmanteau?”
Florac and the Princess were both in desolation when, at dinner, we announced our resolution to go away—and to our neighbours at Newcome! that was more extraordinary. “Que diable goest thou to do in this galley?” asks our host as we sat alone over our wine.
But Laura’s intended visit to Lady Clara was never to have a fulfilment, for on this same evening, as we sate at our dessert, comes a messenger from Newcome, with a note for my wife from the lady there:—
“Dearest, kindest Mrs. Pendennis,” Lady Clara wrote, with many italics, and evidently in much distress of mind. “Your visit is not to be. I spoke about it to Sir B., who arrived this afternoon, and who has already begun to treat me in his usual way. Oh, I am so unhappy! Pray, pray do not be angry at this rudeness—though indeed it is only a kindness to keep you from this wretched place! I feel as if I cannot bear this much longer. But, whatever happens, I shall always remember your goodness, your beautiful goodness and kindness; and shall worship you as an angel deserves to be worshipped. Oh, why had I not such a friend earlier! But alas! I have none—only his odious family thrust upon me for companions to the wretched, lonely, C. N.
“P.S.—He does not know of my writing. Do not be surprised if you get another note from me in the morning, written in a ceremonious style and regretting that we cannot have the pleasure of receiving Mr. and Mrs. Pendennis for the present at Newcome.
“P.S.—The hypocrite!”
This letter was handed to my wife at dinner-time, and she gave it to me as she passed out of the room with the other ladies.
I told Florac that the Newcomes could not receive us, and that we would remain, if he willed it, his guests for a little longer. The kind fellow was only too glad to keep us. “My wife would die without Bébi,” he said. “She becomes quite dangerous about Bébi.” It was gratifying that the good old lady was not to be parted as yet from the innocent object of her love.
My host knew as well as I the terms upon which Sir Barnes and his wife were living. Their quarrels were the talk of the whole county; one side brought forward his treatment of her, and his conduct elsewhere, and said that he was so bad that honest people should not know him. The other party laid the blame upon her, and declared that Lady Clara was a languid, silly, weak, frivolous creature; always crying out of season; who had notoriously taken Sir Barnes for his money and who as certainly had had an attachment elsewhere. Yes, the accusations were true on both sides. A bad, selfish husband had married a woman for her rank: a weak, thoughtless girl had been sold to a man for his money; and the union, which might have ended in a complete indifference, had taken an ill turn and resulted in misery, cruelty, fierce mutual recriminations, bitter tears shed in private, husband’s curses and maledictions, and open scenes of wrath and violence for servants to witness and the world to sneer at. We arrange such matches every day; we sell or buy beauty, or rank, or wealth; we inaugurate the bargain in churches with sacramental services, in which the parties engaged call upon Heaven to witness their vows—we know them to be lies, and we seal them with God’s name. “I, Barnes, promise to take you, Clara, to love and honour till death do us part” “I Clara, promise to take you, Barnes,” etc, etc. Who has not heard the ancient words; and how many of us have uttered them, knowing them to be untrue: and is there a bishop on the bench that has not amen’d the humbug in his lawn sleeves and called a blessing over the kneeling perjurers?
“Does Mr. Harris know of Newcome’s return?” Florac asked, when I acquainted him with this intelligence. “Ce scelerat de Highgate—Va!”
“Does Newcome know that Lord Highgate is here?” I thought within myself, admiring my wife’s faithfulness and simplicity, and trying to believe with that pure and guileless creature that it was not yet too late to save the unhappy Lady Clara.
“Mr. Harris had best be warned,” I said to Florac; “will you write him a word, and let us send a messenger to Newcome?”
At first Florac said, “Parbleu! No;” the affair was none of his, he attended himself always to this result of Lady Clara’s marriage. He had even complimented Jack upon it years before at Baden, when scenes enough tragic, enough comical, ma foi, had taken place à propos of this affair. Why should he meddle with it now?
“Children dishonoured,” said I, “honest families made miserable; for Heaven’s sake, Florac, let us stay this catastrophe if we can.” I spoke with much warmth, eagerly desirous to avert this calamity if possible, and very strongly moved by the tale which I had heard only just before dinner from that noble and innocent creature, whose pure heart had already prompted her to plead the cause of right and truth, and to try and rescue an unhappy desperate sister trembling on the verge of ruin.
“If you will not write to him,” said I, in some heat, “if your grooms don’t like to go out of a night” (this was one of the objections which Florac had raised), “I will walk.” We were talking over the affair rather late in the evening, the ladies having retreated to their sleeping apartments, and some guests having taken leave, whom our hospitable host and hostess had entertained that night, and before whom I naturally did not care to speak upon a subject so dangerous.
“Parbleu, what virtue, my friend! what a Joseph!” cries Florac, puffing his cigar. “One sees well that your wife had made you the sermon. My poor Pendennis! You are henpecked, my pauvre bon! You become the husband model. It is true my mother writes that thy wife is an angel!”
“I do not object to obey such a woman when she bids me do right,” I said; and would indeed at that woman’s request have gone out upon the errand, but that we here found another messenger. On days when dinner-parties were held at Rosebury, certain auxiliary waiters used to attend from Newcome whom the landlord of the King’s Arms was accustomed to supply; indeed, it was to secure these, and make other necessary arrangements respecting fish, game, etc., that the Prince de Moncontour had ridden over to Newcome on the day when we met Lord Highgate, alias Mr. Harris, before the bar of the hotel. Whilst we were engaged in the above conversation a servant enters, and says, “My lord, Jenkins and the other man is going back to Newcome in their cart, and is there anything wanted?”
“It is the Heaven which sends him,” says Florac, turning round to me with a laugh; “make Jenkins to wait five minutes, Robert; I have to write to a gentleman at the King’s Arms.” And so saying, Florac wrote a line which he showed me, and having sealed the note, directed it to Mr. Harris at the King’s Arms. The cart, the note, and the assistant waiters departed on their way to Newcome. Florac bade me go to rest with a clear conscience. In truth, the warning was better given in that way than any other, and a word from Florac was more likely to be effectual than an expostulation from me. I had never thought of making it, perhaps; except at the expressed desire of a lady whose counsel in all the difficult circumstances of life I own I am disposed to take.
Mr. Jenkins’s horse no doubt trotted at a very brisk pace, as gentlemen’s horses will of a frosty night, after their masters have been regaled with plentiful supplies of wine and ale. I remember in my bachelor days that my horses always trotted quicker after I had had a good dinner; the champagne used to communicate itself to them somehow, and the claret get into their heels. Before midnight the letter for Mr. Harris was in Mr. Harris’s hands in the King’s Arms.
It has been said that in the Boscawen Room at the Arms, some of the jolly fellows of Newcome had a club, of which Parrot the auctioneer, Tom Potts the talented reporter, now editor of the Independent, Vidler the apothecary, and other gentlemen, were members.
When we first had occasion to mention that society, it was at an early stage of this history, long before Clive Newcome’s fine moustache had grown. If Vidler the apothecary was old and infirm then, he is near ten years older now; he has had various assistants, of course, and one of them of late years had his become his partner, though the firm continues to be known by Vidler’s ancient and respectable name. A jovial fellow was this partner—a capital convivial member of the Jolly Britons, where he used to sit very late, so as to be in readiness for any night-work that might come in.
So the Britons were all sitting, smoking, drinking, and making merry, in the Boscawen Room, when Jenkins enters with a note, which he straightway delivers to Mr. Vidler’s partner. “From Rosebury? The Princess ill again, I suppose,” says the surgeon, not sorry to let the company know that he attends her. “I wish the old girl would be ill in the daytime. Confound it,” says he, “what’s this——” and he reads out, “‘Sir Newcome est de retour. Bon voyage, mon ami.—F.’ What does this mean?”
“I thought you knew French, Jack Harris,” says Tom Potts; “you’re always bothering us with your French songs.”
“Of course I know French,” says the other; “but what’s the meaning of this?”
“Screwcome came back by the five o’clock train. I was in it, and his royal highness would scarcely speak to me. Took Brown’s fly from the station. Brown won’t enrich his family much by the operation,” says Mr. Potts.
“But what do I care?” cries Jack Harris; “we don’t attend him, and we don’t lose much by that. Howell attends him, ever since Vidler and he had that row.”
“Hulloh! I say, it’s a mistake,” cries Mr. Taplow, smoking in his chair. “This letter is for the party in the Benbow. The gent which the Prince spoke to him, and called him Jack the other day when he was here. Here’s a nice business, and the seal broke, and all. Is the Benbow party gone to bed? John, you must carry him in this here note.” John, quite innocent of the note and its contents, for he that moment had entered the clubroom with Mr. Potts’s supper, took the note to the Benbow, from which he presently returned to his master with a very scared countenance. He said the gent in the Benbow was a most harbitrary gent. He had almost choked John after reading the letter, and John wouldn’t stand it; and when John said he supposed that Mr. Harris in the Boscawen—that Mr. Jack Harris, had opened the letter, the other gent cursed and swore awful.
“Potts,” said Taplow, who was only too communicative on some occasions after he had imbibed too much of his own brandy-and-water, “it’s my belief that that party’s name is no more Harris than mine is. I have sent his linen to the wash, and there was two white pocket-handkerchiefs with H. and a coronet.”
On the next day we drove over to Newcome, hoping perhaps to find that Lord Highgate had taken the warning sent to him and quitted the place. But we were disappointed. He was walking in front of the hotel, where a thousand persons might see him as well as ourselves.
We entered into his private apartment with him, and there expostulated upon his appearance in the public street, where Barnes Newcome or any passer-by might recognise him. He then told us of the mishap which had befallen Florac’s letter on the previous night.
“I can’t go away now, whatever might have happened previously: by this time that villain knows that I am here. If I go, he will say I was afraid of him, and ran away. Oh, how I wish he would come and find me!” He broke out with a savage laugh.
“It is best to run away,” one of us interposed sadly.
“Pendennis,” he said with a tone of great softness, “your wife is a good woman. God bless her! God bless her for all she has said and done—would have done, if that villain had let her! Do you know the poor thing hasn’t a single friend in the world, not one, one—except me, and that girl they are selling to Farintosh, and who does not count for much. He has driven away all her friends from her: one and all turn upon her. Her relations, of course; when did they ever fail to hit a poor fellow or a poor girl when she was down? The poor angel! The mother who sold her comes and preaches at her; Kew’s wife turns up her little cursed nose and scorns her; Rooster, forsooth, must ride high the horse, now he is married and lives at Chanticlere, and give her warning to avoid my company or his! Do you know the only friend she ever had was that old woman with the stick—old Kew; the old witch whom they buried four months ago after nobbling her money for the beauty of the family? She used to protect her—that old woman; heaven bless her for it, wherever she is now, the old hag—a good word won’t do her any harm. Ha! ha!” His laughter was cruel to hear.
“Why did I come down?” he continued in reply to our sad queries. “Why did I come down, do you ask? Because she was wretched, and sent for me. Because if I was at the end of the world, and she was to say, ‘Jack, come!’ I’d come.”
“And if she bade you go?” asked his friends.
“I would go; and I have gone. If she told me to jump into the sea, do you think I would not do it? But I go; and when she is alone with him, do you know what he does? He strikes her. Strikes that poor little thing! He has owned to it. She fled from him and sheltered with the old woman who’s dead. He may be doing it now. Why did I ever shake hands with him? that’s humiliation sufficient, isn’t it? But she wished it; and I’d black his boots, curse him, if she told me. And because he wanted to keep my money in his confounded bank; and because he knew he might rely upon my honour and hers, poor dear child, he chooses to shake hands with me—me, whom he hates worse than a thousand devils—and quite right too. Why isn’t there a place where we can go and meet, like man to man, and have it over! If I had a ball through my brains I shouldn’t mind, I tell you. I’ve a mind to do it for myself, Pendennis. You don’t understand me, Viscount.”
“Il est vrai,” said Florac, with a shrug, “I comprehend neither the suicide nor the chaise-de-poste. What will you? I am not yet enough English, my friend. We make marriages of convenance in our country, que diable, and what follows follows; but no scandal afterwards! Do not adopt our institutions à demi, my friend. Vous ne me comprenez pas non plus, men pauvre Jack!”
“There is one way still, I think,” said the third of the speakers in this scene. “Let Lord Highgate come to Rosebury in his own name, leaving that of Mr. Harris behind him. If Sir Barnes Newcome wants you, he can seek you there. If you will go, as go you should, and God speed you, you can go, and in your own name, too.”
“Parbleu, c’est ça,” cries Florac, “he speaks like a book—the romancier!” I confess, for my part, I thought that a good woman might plead with him, and touch that manly not disloyal heart now trembling on the awful balance between evil and good.
“Allons! let us make to come the drague!” cries Florac. “Jack, thou returnest with us, my friend! Madame Pendennis, an angel, my friend, a quakre the most charming, shall roucoule to thee the sweetest sermons. My wife shall tend thee like a mother—a grandmother. Go make thy packet!”
Lord Highgate was very much pleased and relieved seemingly. He shook our hands, he said he should never forget our kindness, never! In truth, the didactic part of our conversation was carried on at much greater length than as here noted down: and he would come that evening, but not with us, thank you; he had a particular engagement, some letters he must write. Those done, he would not fail us, and would be at Rosebury by dinner-time.
LVIII. “One more Unfortunate”
The Fates did not ordain that the plan should succeed which Lord Highgate’s friends had devised for Lady Clara’s rescue or respite. He was bent upon one more interview with the unfortunate lady; and in that meeting the future destiny of their luckless lives was decided. On the morning of his return home, Barnes Newcome had information that Lord Highgate, under a feigned name, had been staying in the neighbourhood of his house, and had repeatedly been seen in the company of Lady Clara. She may have gone out to meet him but for one hour more. She had taken no leave of her children on the day when she left her home, and, far from making preparations for her own departure, had been engaged in getting the house ready for the reception of members of the family, whose arrival her husband announced as speedily to follow his own. Ethel and Lady Anne and some of the children were coming. Lord Farintosh’s mother and sisters were to follow. It was to be a reunion previous to the marriage which was closer to unite the two families. Lady Clara said Yes to her husband’s orders; rose mechanically to obey his wishes and arrange for the reception of the guests; and spoke tremblingly to the housekeeper as her husband gibed at her. The little ones had been consigned to bed early and before Sir Barnes’s arrival. He did not think fit to see them in their sleep; nor did their mother. She did not know, as the poor little creatures left her room in charge of their nurses, that she looked on them for the last time. Perhaps, had she gone to their bedsides that evening, had the wretched panic-stricken soul been allowed leisure to pause, and to think, and to pray, the fate of the morrow might have been otherwise, and the trembling balance of the scale have inclined to right’s side. But the pause was not allowed her. Her husband came and saluted her with his accustomed greetings of scorn, and sarcasm, and brutal insult. On a future day he never dared to call a servant of his household to testify to his treatment of her; though many were ready to attend to prove his cruelty and her terror. On that very last night, Lady Clara’s maid, a country girl from her father’s house at Chanticlere, told Sir Barnes in the midst of a conjugal dispute that her lady might bear his conduct but she could not, and that she would no longer live under the roof of such a brute. The girl’s interference was not likely to benefit her mistress much: the wretched Lady Clara passed the last night under the roof of her husband and children, unattended save by this poor domestic who was about to leave her, in tears and hysterical outcries, and then in moaning stupor. Lady Clara put to sleep with laudanum, her maid carried down the story of her wrongs to the servants’ quarters; and half a dozen of them took in their resignation to Sir Barnes as he sat over his breakfast the next morning—in his ancestral hall—surrounded by the portraits of his august forefathers—in his happy home.
Their mutiny of course did not add to their master’s good-humour; and his letters brought him news which increased Barnes’s fury. A messenger arrived with a letter from his man of business at Newcome, upon the receipt of which he started up with such an execration as frightened the servant waiting on him, and letter in hand he ran to Lady Clara’s sitting-room. Her ladyship was up. Sir Barnes breakfasted rather late on the first morning after an arrival at Newcome. He had to look over the bailiff’s books, and to look about him round the park and grounds; to curse the gardeners; to damn the stable and kennel grooms; to yell at the woodman for clearing not enough or too much; to rail at the poor old workpeople brooming away the fallen leaves, etc. So Lady Clara was up and dressed when her husband went to her room, which lay at the end of the house as we have said, the last of a suite of ancestral halls.
The mutinous servant heard high voices and curses within; then Lady Clara’s screams; then Sir Barnes Newcome burst out of the room, locking the door and taking the key with him, and saluting with more curses James, the mutineer, over whom his master ran.
“Curse your wife, and don’t curse me, Sir Barnes Newcome!” said James, the mutineer; and knocked down a hand which the infuriated Baronet raised against him, with an arm that was twice as strong as Barnes’s own. This man and maid followed their mistress in the sad journey upon which she was bent. They treated her with unalterable respect. They never could be got to see that her conduct was wrong. When Barnes’s counsel subsequently tried to impugn their testimony, they dared him; and hurt the plaintiff’s case very much. For the balance had weighed over; and it was Barnes himself who caused what now ensued; and what we learned in a very few hours afterwards from Newcome, where it was the talk of the whole neighbourhood.
Florac and I, as yet ignorant of all that was occurring, met Barnes near his own lodge-gate riding in the direction of Newcome, as we were ourselves returning to Rosebury. The Prince de Moncontour, who was driving, affably saluted the Baronet, who gave us a scowling recognition, and rode on, his groom behind him. “The figure of the garçon,” says Florac, as our acquaintance passed, “is not agreeable. Of pale, he has become livid. I hope these two men will not meet, or evil will come!” Evil to Barnes there might be, Florac’s companion thought, who knew the previous little affairs between Barnes and his uncle and cousin; and that Lord Highgate was quite able to take care of himself.
In half an hour after Florac spoke, that meeting between Barnes and Highgate actually had taken place—in the open square of Newcome, within four doors of the King’s Arms inn, close to which lives Sir Barnes Newcome’s man of business; and before which, Mr. Harris, as he was called, was walking, and waiting till a carriage which he had ordered came round from the inn yard. As Sir Barnes Newcome rode into the place many people touched their hats to him, however little they loved him. He was bowing and smirking to one of these, when he suddenly saw Belsize.
He started back, causing his horse to back with him on to the pavement, and it may have been rage and fury, or accident and nervousness merely, but at this instant Barnes Newcome, looking towards Lord Highgate, shook his whip.
“You cowardly villain!” said the other, springing forward. “I was going to your house.”
“How dare you, sir,” cries Sir Barnes, still holding up that unlucky cane, “how dare you to—to——”
“Dare, you scoundrel!” said Belsize. “Is that the cane you strike your wife with, you ruffian!” Belsize seized and tore him out of the saddle, flinging him screaming down on the pavement. The horse, rearing and making way for himself, galloped down the clattering street; a hundred people were round Sir Barnes in a moment.
The carriage which Belsize had ordered came round at this very juncture. Amidst the crowd, shrinking, bustling, expostulating, threatening, who pressed about him, he shouldered his way. Mr. Taplow, aghast, was one of the hundred spectators of the scene.
“I am Lord Highgate,” said Barnes’s adversary. “If Sir Barnes Newcome wants me, tell him I will send him word where he may hear of me.” And getting into the carriage, he told the driver to go “to the usual place.”
Imagine the hubbub in the town, the conclaves at the inns, the talks in the counting-houses, the commotion amongst the factory people, the paragraphs in the Newcome papers, the bustle of surgeons and lawyers, after this event. Crowds gathered at the King’s Arms, and waited round Mr. Speers the lawyer’s house, into which Sir Barnes was carried. In vain policemen told them to move on; fresh groups gathered after the seceders. On the next day, when Barnes Newcome, who was not much hurt, had a fly to go home, a factory man shook his fist in at the carriage window, and, with a curse, said, “Serve you right, you villain.” It was the man whose sweetheart this Don Juan had seduced and deserted years before; whose wrongs were well known amongst his mates, a leader in the chorus of hatred which growled round Barnes Newcome.
Barnes’s mother and sister Ethel had reached Newcome shortly before the return of the master of the house. The people there were in disturbance. Lady Anne and Miss Newcome came out with pallid looks to greet him. He laughed and reassured them about his accident: indeed his hurt had been trifling; he had been bled by the surgeon, a little jarred by the fall from his horse; but there was no sort of danger. Still their pale and doubtful looks continued. What caused them? In the open day, with a servant attending her Lady Clara Newcome had left her husband’s house; and a letter was forwarded to him that same evening from my Lord Highgate, informing Sir Barnes Newcome that Lady Clara Pulleyn could bear his tyranny no longer, and had left his roof; that Lord Highgate proposed to leave England almost immediately, but would remain long enough to afford Sir Barnes Newcome the opportunity for an interview, in case he should be disposed to demand one: and a friend (of Lord Highgate’s late regiment) was named who would receive letters and act in any way necessary for his lordship.
The debates of the House of Lords must tell what followed afterwards in the dreary history of Lady Clara Pulleyn. The proceedings in the Newcome Divorce Bill filled the usual number of columns in the papers,—especially the Sunday papers. The witnesses were examined by learned peers whose business—nay, pleasure—it seems to be to enter into such matters; and, for the ends of justice and morality, doubtless, the whole story of Barnes Newcome’s household was told to the British public. In the previous trial in the Court of Queen’s Bench, how grandly Serjeant Rowland stood up for the rights of British husbands! with what pathos he depicted the conjugal paradise, the innocent children prattling round their happy parents, the serpent, the destroyer, entering into that Belgravian Eden; the wretched and deserted husband alone by his desecrated hearth, and calling for redress on his country! Rowland wept freely during his noble harangue. At not a shilling under twenty thousand pounds would he estimate the cost of his client’s injuries. The jury was very much affected: the evening papers gave Rowland’s address in extenso, with some pretty sharp raps at the aristocracy in general. The Day, the principal morning journal of that period, came out with a leading article the next morning, in which every party concerned and every institution was knocked about. The disgrace of the peerage, the ruin of the monarchy (with a retrospective view of the well-known case of Gyges and Candaules), the monstrosity of the crime, and the absurdity of the tribunal and the punishment, were all set forth in the terrible leading article of the Day.
But when, on the next day, Serjeant Rowland was requested to call witnesses to prove that connubial happiness which he had depicted so pathetically, he had none at hand.
Oliver, Q.C., now had his innings. A man, a husband, and a father, Mr. Oliver could not attempt to defend the conduct of his unfortunate client; but if there could be any excuse for such conduct, that excuse he was free to confess the plaintiff had afforded, whose cruelty and neglect twenty witnesses in court were ready to prove—neglect so outrageous, cruelty so systematic, that he wondered the plaintiff had not been better advised than to bring this trial, with all its degrading particulars, to a public issue. On the very day when the ill-omened marriage took place, another victim of cruelty had interposed as vainly—as vainly as Serjeant Rowland himself interposed in Court to prevent this case being made known—and with piteous outcries, in the name of outraged neglected woman, of castaway children pleading in vain for bread, had besought the bride to pause, and the bridegroom to look upon the wretched beings who owed him life. Why had not Lady Clara Pulleyn’s friends listened to that appeal? And so on, and so on, between Rowland and Oliver the battle waged fiercely that day. Many witnesses were mauled and slain. Out of that combat scarce anybody came well, except the two principal champions, Rowland, Serjeant, and Oliver, Q.C. The whole country looked on and heard the wretched story, not only of Barnes’s fault and Highgate’s fault, but of the private peccadilloes of their suborned footmen and conspiring housemaids. Mr. Justice C. Sawyer charged the jury at great length—those men were respectable men and fathers of families themselves—of course they dealt full measure to Lord Highgate for his delinquencies; consoled the injured husband with immense damages, and left him free to pursue the further steps for releasing himself altogether from the tie which had been bound with affecting episcopal benediction at St. George’s, Hanover Square.
So Lady Clara flies from the custody of her tyrant, but to what a rescue! The very man who loves her, and gives her asylum, pities and deplores her. She scarce dares to look out of the windows of her new home upon the world, lest it should know and reproach her. All the sisterhood of friendship is cut off from her. If she dares to go abroad she feels the sneer of the world as she goes through it; and knows that malice and scorn whisper behind her. People, as criminal but undiscovered, make room for her, as if her touch were pollution. She knows she has darkened the lot and made wretched the home of the man whom she loves best; that his friends who see her, treat her with but a doubtful respect; and the domestics who attend her, with a suspicious obedience. In the country lanes, or the streets of the county town, neighbours look aside as the carriage passes in which she sits splendid and lonely. Rough hunting companions of her husband’s come to her table: he is driven perforce to the company of flatterers and men of inferior sort; his equals, at least in his own home, will not live with him. She would be kind, perhaps, and charitable to the cottagers round about her, but she fears to visit them lest they too should scorn her. The clergyman who distributes her charities, blushes and looks awkward on passing her in the village, if he should be walking with his wife or one of his children. Shall they go to the Continent, and set up a grand house at Paris or at Florence? There they can get society, but of what a sort! Our acquaintances of Baden,—Madame Schlangenbad, and Madame de Cruchecassée, and Madame d’Ivry, and Messrs. Loder, and Punter, and Blackball, and Deuceace, will come, and dance, and flirt, and quarrel, and gamble, and feast round about her; but what in common with such wild people has this poor, timid, shrinking soul? Even these scorn her. The leers and laughter on those painted faces are quite unlike her own sad countenance. She has no reply to their wit. Their infernal gaiety scares her more than the solitude at home. No wonder that her husband does not like home, except for a short while in the hunting season. No wonder that he is away all day; how can he like a home which she has made so wretched? In the midst of her sorrow, and doubt, and misery, a child comes to her: how she clings to it! how her whole being, and hope, and passion centres itself on this feeble infant!——but she no more belongs to our story; with the new name she has taken, the poor lady passes out of the history of the Newcomes.
If Barnes Newcome’s children meet yonder solitary lady, do they know her? If her once-husband thinks upon the unhappy young creature whom his cruelty drove from him, does his conscience affect his sleep at night? Why should Sir Barnes Newcome’s conscience be more squeamish than his country’s, which has put money in his pocket for having trampled on the poor weak young thing, and scorned her, and driven her to ruin? When the whole of the accounts of that wretched bankruptcy are brought up for final Audit, which of the unhappy partners shall be shown to be most guilty? Does the Right Reverend Prelate who did the benedictory business for Barnes and Clara his wife repent in secret? Do the parents who pressed the marriage, and the fine folks who signed the book, and ate the breakfast, and applauded the bridegroom’s speech, feel a little ashamed? O Hymen Hymenæe! The bishops, beadles, clergy, pew-openers, and other officers of the temple dedicated to Heaven under the invocation of St. George, will officiate in the same place at scores and scores more of such marriages: and St. George of England may behold virgin after virgin offered up to the devouring monster, Mammon (with many most respectable female dragons looking on)—may see virgin after virgin given away, just as in the Soldan of Babylon’s time, but with never a champion to come to the rescue!