LXIX. The Election
Having thus given his challenge, reconnoitred the enemy, and pledged himself to do battle at the ensuing election, our Colonel took leave of the town of Newcome, and returned to his banking affairs in London. His departure was as that of a great public personage; the gentlemen of the Committee followed him obsequiously down to the train. “Quick,” bawls out Mr. Potts to Mr. Brown, the station-master, “Quick, Mr. Brown, a carriage for Colonel Newcome!” Half a dozen hats are taken off as he enters into the carriage, F. Bayham and his servant after him, with portfolios, umbrellas, shawls, despatch-boxes. Clive was not there to act as his father’s aide-de-camp. After their conversation together the young man had returned to Mrs. Clive and his other duties in life.
It has been said that Mr. Pendennis was in the country, engaged in a pursuit exactly similar to that which occupied Colonel Newcome. The menaced dissolution of Parliament did not take place so soon as we expected. The Ministry still hung together, and by consequence, Sir Barnes Newcome kept the seat in the House of Commons, from which his elder kinsman was eager to oust him. Away from London, and having but few correspondents, save on affairs of business, I heard little of Clive and the Colonel, save an occasional puff of one of Colonel Newcome’s entertainments in the Pall Mall Gazette, to which journal F. Bayham still condescended to contribute; and a satisfactory announcement in a certain part of that paper, that on such a day, in Hyde Park Gardens, Mrs. Clive Newcome had presented her husband with a son. Clive wrote to me presently, to inform me of the circumstance, stating at the same time, with but moderate gratification on his own part, that the Campaigner, Mrs. Newcome’s mamma, had upon this second occasion made a second lodgment in her daughter’s house and bedchamber, and showed herself affably disposed to forget the little unpleasantries which had clouded over the sunshine of her former visit.
Laura, with a smile of some humour, said she thought now would be the time when, if Clive could be spared from his bank, he might pay us that visit at Fairoaks which had been due so long, and hinted that change of air and a temporary absence from Mrs. Mackenzie might be agreeable to my old friend.
It was, on the contrary, Mr. Pendennis’s opinion that his wife artfully chose that period of time when little Rosey was, perforce, kept at home and occupied with her delightful maternal duties, to invite Clive to see us. Mrs. Laura frankly owned that she liked our Clive better without his wife than with her, and never ceased to regret that pretty Rosey had not bestowed her little hand upon Captain Hoby, as she had been very well disposed at one time to do. Against all marriages of interest this sentimental Laura never failed to utter indignant protests; and Clive’s had been a marriage of interest, a marriage made up by the old people, a marriage which the young man had only yielded out of good-nature and obedience. She would apostrophise her unconscious young ones, and inform those innocent babies that they should never be made to marry except for love, never—an announcement which was received with perfect indifference by little Arthur on his rocking-horse, and little Helen smiling and crowing in her mother’s lap.
So Clive came down to us, careworn in appearance, but very pleased and happy, he said, to stay for a while with the friends of his youth. We showed him our modest rural lions; we got him such sport and company as our quiet neighbourhood afforded, we gave him fishing in the Brawl, and Laura in her pony-chaise drove him to Baymouth, and to Clavering Park and town, and visit the famous cathedral at Chatteris, where she was pleased to recount certain incidents of her husband’s youth.
Clive laughed at my wife’s stories; he pleased himself in our home; he played with our children, with whom he had became a great favourite; he was happier, he told me with a sigh, than he had been for many a day. His gentle hostess echoed the sigh of the poor young fellow. She was sure that his pleasure was only transitory, and was convinced that many deep cares weighed upon his mind.
Ere long my old schoolfellow made me sundry confessions, which showed that Laura’s surmises were correct. About his domestic affairs he did not treat much; the little boy was said to be a very fine little boy; the ladies had taken entire possession of him. “I can’t stand Mrs. Mackenzie any longer, I own,” says Clive; “but how resist a wife at such a moment? Rosa was sure she would die, unless her mother came to her, and of course we invited Mrs. Mack. This time she is all smiles and politeness with the Colonel: the last quarrel is laid upon me, and in so far I am easy, as the old folks get on pretty well together.” To me, considering these things, it was clear that Mr. Clive Newcome was but a very secondary personage indeed in his father’s new fine house which he inhabited, and in which the poor Colonel had hoped they were to live such a happy family.
But it was about Clive Newcome’s pecuniary affairs that I felt the most disquiet when he came to explain these to me. The Colonel’s capital and that considerable sum which Mrs. Clive had inherited from her good old uncle, were all involved in a common stock, of which Colonel Newcome took the management. “The governor understands business so well, you see,” says Clive; “is a most remarkable head for accounts: he must have inherited that from my grandfather, you know, who made his own fortune: all the Newcomes are good at accounts, except me, a poor useless devil who knows nothing but to paint a picture, and who can’t even do that.” He cuts off the head of a thistle as he speaks, bites his tawny mustachios, plunges his hands into his pockets and his soul into reverie.
“You don’t mean to say,” asks Mr. Pendennis, “that your wife’s fortune has not been settled upon herself?”
“Of course it has been settled upon herself; that is, it is entirely her own—you know the Colonel has managed all the business, he understands it better than we do.”
“Do you say that your wife’s money is not vested in the hands of trustees, and for her benefit?”
“My father is one of the trustees. I tell you he manages the whole thing. What is his property is mine and ever has been; and I might draw upon him as much as I liked: and you know it’s five times as great as my wife’s. What is his is ours, and what is ours is his, of course; for instance, the India Stock, which poor Uncle James left, that now stands in the Colonel’s name. He wants to be a Director: he will be at the next election—he must have a certain quantity of India Stock, don’t you see?”
“My dear fellow, is there then no settlement made upon your wife at all?”
“You needn’t look so frightened,” says Clive. “I made a settlement on her: with all my worldly goods I did her endow three thousand three hundred and thirty-three pounds six and eightpence, which my father sent over from India to my uncle, years ago, when I came home.”
I might well indeed be aghast at this news, and had yet further intelligence from Clive, which by no means contributed to lessen my anxiety. This worthy old Colonel, who fancied himself to be so clever a man of business, chose to conduct it in utter ignorance and defiance of law. If anything happened to the Bundelcund Bank, it was clear that not only every shilling of his own property, but every farthing bequeathed to Rosa Mackenzie would be lost; only his retiring pension, which was luckily considerable, and the hundred pounds a year which Clive had settled on his wife, would be saved out of the ruin.
And now Clive confided to me his own serious doubts and misgivings regarding the prosperity of the Bank itself. He did not know why, but he could not help fancying that things were going wrong. Those partners who had come home, having sold out of the Bank, and living in England so splendidly, why had they quitted it? The Colonel said it was a proof of the prosperity of the company, that so many gentlemen were enriched who had taken shares in it. “But when I asked my father,” Clive continued, “why he did not himself withdraw, the dear old Colonel’s countenance fell: he told me such things were not to be done every day; and ended, as usual, by saying that I do not understand anything about business. No more I do: that is the truth. I hate the whole concern, Pen! I hate that great tawdry house in which we live; and those fearfully stupid parties:—Oh, how I wish we were back in Fitzroy Square! But who can recall bygones, Arthur; or wrong steps in life? We must make the best of to-day, and to-morrow must take care of itself. ‘Poor little child!’ I could not help thinking, as I took it crying in my arms the other day, ‘what has life in store for you, my poor weeping baby?’ My mother-in-law cried out that I should drop the baby, and that only the Colonel knew how to hold it. My wife called from her bed; the nurse dashed up and scolded me; and they drove me out of the room amongst them. By Jove, Pen, I laugh when some of my friends congratulate me on my good fortune! I am not quite the father of my own child, nor the husband of my own wife, nor even the master of my own easel. I am managed for, don’t you see? boarded, lodged, and done for. And here is the man they call happy. Happy! Oh!!! Why had I not your strength of mind; and why did I ever leave my art, my mistress?”
And herewith the poor lad fell to chopping thistles again; and quitted Fairoaks shortly, leaving his friends there very much disquieted about his prospects, actual and future.
The expected dissolution of Parliament came at length. All the country papers in England teemed with electioneering addresses; and the country was in a flutter with particoloured ribbons. Colonel Thomas Newcome, pursuant to his promise, offered himself to the independent electors of Newcome in the Liberal journal of the family town, whilst Sir Barnes Newcome, Bart., addressed himself to his old and tried friends, and called upon the friends of the constitution to rally round him, in the Conservative print. The addresses of our friend were sent to us at Fairoaks by the Colonel’s indefatigable aide-de-camp, Mr. Frederick Bayham. During the period which had elapsed since the Colonel’s last canvassing visit and the issuing of the writs now daily expected for the new Parliament, many things of great importance had occurred in Thomas Newcome’s family—events which were kept secret from his biographer, who was, at this period also, pretty entirely occupied with his own affairs. These, however, are not the present subject of this history, which has Newcome for its business, and the parties engaged in the family quarrel there.
There were four candidates in the field for the representation of that borough. That old and tried member of Parliament, Mr. Bunce, was considered to be secure; and the Baronet’s seat was thought to be pretty safe on account of his influence in the place. Nevertheless, Thomas Newcome’s supporters were confident for their champion, and that when the parties came to the poll, the extreme Liberals of the borough would divide their votes between him and the fourth candidate, the uncompromising Radical, Mr. Barker.
In due time the Colonel and his staff arrived at Newcome, and resumed the active canvass which they had commenced some months previously. Clive was not in his father’s suite this time, nor Mr. Warrington, whose engagements took him elsewhere. The lawyer, the editor of the Independent, and F. B., were the Colonel’s chief men. His headquarters (which F. B. liked very well) were at the hotel where we last saw him, and whence issuing with his aide-de-camp at his heels, the Colonel went round to canvass personally, according to his promise, every free and independent elector of the borough. Barnes too was canvassing eagerly on his side, and was most affable and active; the two parties would often meet nose to nose in the same street, and their retainers exchange looks of defiance. With Mr. Potts of the Independent, a big man, on his left; with Mr. Frederick, a still bigger man, on his right; his own trusty bamboo cane in his hand, before which poor Barnes had shrunk abashed ere now, Colonel Newcome had commonly the best of these street encounters, and frowned his nephew Barnes, and Barnes’s staff, off the pavement. With the non-electors the Colonel was a decided favourite; the boys invariably hurrayed him; whereas they jeered and uttered ironical cries after poor Barnes, asking, “Who beat his wife? Who drove his children to the workhouse?” and other unkind personal questions. The man upon whom the libertine Barnes had inflicted so cruel an injury in his early days, was now the Baronet’s bitterest enemy. He assailed him with curses and threats when they met, and leagued his brother-workmen against him. The wretched Sir Barnes owned with contrition that the sins of his youth pursued him; his enemy scoffed at the idea of Barnes’s repentance; he was not moved at the grief, the punishment in his own family, the humiliation and remorse which the repentant prodigal piteously pleaded. No man was louder in his cries of mea culpa than Barnes: no man professed a more edifying repentance. He was hat in hand to every black-coat, established or dissenting. Repentance was to his interest, to be sure, but yet let us hope it was sincere. There is some hypocrisy, of which one does not like even to entertain the thought; especially that awful falsehood which trades with divine truth, and takes the name of Heaven in vain.
The Roebuck Inn at Newcome stands in the market-place, directly facing the King’s Arms, where, as we know, Colonel Newcome and uncompromising toleration held their headquarters. Immense banners of blue and yellow floated from every window of the King’s Arms, and decorated the balcony from which the Colonel and the assistants were in the habit of addressing the multitude. Fiddlers and trumpeters, arrayed in his colours, paraded the town and enlivened it with their melodious strains. Other trumpeters and fiddlers, bearing the true-blue cockades and colours of Sir Barnes Newcome, Bart., would encounter the Colonel’s musicians, on which occasions of meeting, it is to be feared, small harmony was produced. They banged each other with their brazen instruments. The warlike drummers thumped each other’s heads in lieu of the professional sheepskin. The townboys and street-blackguards rejoiced in these combats, and exhibited their valour on one side or the other. The Colonel had to pay a long bill for broken brass when he settled the little accounts of the election.
In after times, F. B. was pleased to describe the circumstances of a contest in which he bore a most distinguished part. It was F. B.’s opinion that his private eloquence brought over many waverers to the Colonel’s side, and converted numbers of the benighted followers of Sir Barnes Newcome. Bayham’s voice was indeed magnificent, and could be heard from the King’s Arm’s balcony above the shout and roar of the multitude, the gongs and bugles of the opposition bands. He was untiring in his oratory—undaunted in the presence of the crowds below. He was immensely popular, F. B. Whether he laid his hand upon his broad chest, took off his hat and waved it, or pressed his blue and yellow ribbons to his bosom, the crowd shouted, “Hurra: silence! bravo! Bayham for ever!” “They would have carried me in triumph,” said F. B.; “if I had but the necessary qualification I might be member for Newcome this day or any other I chose.”
I am afraid in this conduct of the Colonel’s election Mr. Bayham resorted to acts of which his principal certainly would disapprove, and engaged auxiliaries whose alliance was scarcely creditable. Whose was the hand which flung the potato which struck Sir Barnes Newcome, Bart., on the nose as he was haranguing the people from the Roebuck? How came it that whenever Sir Barnes and his friends essayed to speak, such an awful yelling and groaning took place in the crowd below, that the words of those feeble orators were inaudible? Who smashed all the front windows of the Roebuck? Colonel Newcome had not words to express his indignation at proceedings so unfair. When Sir Barnes and staff were hustled in the market-place and most outrageously shoved, jeered, and jolted, the Colonel from the King’s Arms organised a rapid sally, which he himself headed with his bamboo cane; cut out Sir Barnes and his followers from the hands of the mob, and addressed those ruffians in a noble speech, of which bamboo-cane—Englishman—shame—fair-play, were the most emphatic expressions. The mob cheered Old Tom as they called him—they made way for Sir Barnes, who shrunk pale and shuddering back into his hotel again—who always persisted in saying that that old villain of a dragoon had planned both the assault and the rescue.
“When the dregs of the people—the scum of the rabble, sir, banded together by the myrmidons of Sir Barnes Newcome, attacked us at the King’s Arms, and smashed ninety-six pounds’ worth of glass at one volley, besides knocking off the gold unicorn head and the tail of the British lion; it was fine, sir,” F. B. said, “to see how the Colonel came forward, and the coolness of the old boy in the midst of the action. He stood there in front, sir, with his old hat off, never so much as once bobbing his old head, and I think he spoke rather better under fire than he did when there was no danger. Between ourselves, he ain’t much of a speaker, the old Colonel; he hems and haws, and repeats himself a good deal. He hasn’t the gift of natural eloquence which some men have, Pendennis. You should have heard my speech, sir, on the Thursday in the Town Hall—that was something like a speech. Potts was jealous of it, and always reported me most shamefully.”
In spite of his respectful behaviour to the gentlemen in black coats, his soup-tickets and his flannel-tickets, his own pathetic lectures and his sedulous attendance at other folk’s sermons, poor Barnes could not keep up his credit with the serious interest at Newcome, and the meeting-houses and their respective pastors and frequenters turned their backs upon him. The case against him was too flagrant: his enemy, the factory-man, worked it with an extraordinary skill, malice, and pertinacity. Not a single man, woman, or child in Newcome but was made acquainted with Sir Barnes’s early peccadillo. Ribald ballads were howled through the streets describing his sin, and his deserved punishment. For very shame, the reverend dissenting gentlemen were obliged to refrain from voting for him; such as ventured, believing in the sincerity of his repentance, to give him their voices, were yelled away from the polling-places. A very great number who would have been his friends, were compelled to bow to decency and public opinion, and supported the Colonel.
Hooted away from the hustings, and the public places whence the rival candidates addressed the free and independent electors, this wretched and persecuted Sir Barnes invited his friends and supporters to meet him at the Athenæum Room—scene of his previous eloquent performances. But, though this apartment was defended by tickets, the people burst into it; and Nemesis, in the shape of the persevering factory-man, appeared before the scared Sir Barnes and his puzzled committee. The man stood up and bearded the pale Baronet. He had a good cause, and was in truth a far better master of debate than our banking friend, being a great speaker amongst his brother-operatives, by whom political questions are discussed, and the conduct of political men examined, with a ceaseless interest and with an ardour and eloquence which are often unknown in what is called superior society. This man and his friends round about him fiercely silenced the clamour of “Turn him out,” with which his first appearance was assailed by Sir Barnes’s hangers-on. He said, in the name of justice he would speak up; if they were fathers of families and loved their wives and daughters he dared them to refuse him a hearing. Did they love their wives and their children? it was a shame that they should take such a man as that yonder for their representative in Parliament. But the greatest sensation he made was when, in the middle of his speech, after inveighing against Barnes’s cruelty and parental ingratitude, he asked, “Where were Barnes’s children?” and actually thrust forward two, to the amazement of the committee and the ghastly astonishment of the guilty Baronet himself.
“Look at them,” says the man: “they are almost in rags, they have to put up with scanty and hard food; contrast them with his other children, whom you see lording in gilt carriages, robed in purple and fine linen, and scattering mud from their wheels over us humble people as we walk the streets; ignorance and starvation is good enough for these, for those others nothing can be too fine or too dear. What can a factory-girl expect from such a fine, high-bred, white-handed, aristocratic gentleman as Sir Barnes Newcome, Baronet, but to be cajoled, and seduced, and deserted, and left to starve! When she has served my lord’s pleasure, her natural fate is to be turned into the street; let her go and rot there and her children beg in the gutter.
“This is the most shameful imposture,” gasps out Sir Barnes, “these children are not—are not——”
The man interrupted him with a bitter laugh. “No,” he says; “they are not his; that’s true enough, friends. It’s Tom Martin’s girl and boy, a precious pair of lazy little scamps. But, at least he thought they were his children. See how much he knows about them! He hasn’t seen his children for years; he would have left them and their mother to starve, and did, but for shame and fear. The old man, his father, pensioned them, and he hasn’t the heart to stop their wages now. Men of Newcome, will you have this man to represent you in Parliament?” And the crowd roared “No;” and Barnes and his shamefaced committee slunk out of the place, and no wonder the dissenting clerical gentlemen were shy of voting for him.
A brilliant and picturesque diversion in Colonel Newcome’s favour was due to the inventive genius of his faithful aide-de-camp, F. B. On the polling-day, as the carriages full of voters came up to the market-place, there appeared nigh to the booths an open barouche, covered all over with ribbon, and containing Frederick Bayham, Esq., profusely decorated with the Colonel’s colours, and a very old woman and her female attendant, who were similarly ornamented. It was good old Mrs. Mason, who was pleased with the drive and the sunshine, though she scarcely understood the meaning of the turmoil, with her maid by her side, delighted to wear such ribbons, and sit in such a post of honour. Rising up in the carriage, F. B. took off his hat, bade his men of brass be silent, who were accustomed to bray “See the Conquering Hero come,” whenever the Colonel, or Mr. Bayham, his brilliant aide-de-camp, made their appearance;—bidding, we say, the musicians and the universe to be silent, F. B. rose, and made the citizens of Newcome a splendid speech. Good old unconscious Mrs. Mason was the theme of it, and the Colonel’s virtues and faithful gratitude in tending her. “She was his father’s old friend. She was Sir Barnes Newcome’s grandfather’s old friend. She had lived for more than forty years at Sir Barnes Newcome’s door, and how often had he been to see her? Did he go every week? No. Every month? No. Every year? No. Never in the whole course of his life had he set his foot into her doors!” (Loud yells, and cries of ‘Shame!’) “Never had he done her one single act of kindness. Whereas for years and years past, when he was away in India, heroically fighting the battles of his country, when he was distinguishing himself at Assaye, and—and—Mulligatawny, and Seringapatam, in the hottest of the fight and the fiercest of the danger, in the most terrible moment of the conflict, and the crowning glory of the victory, the good, the brave, the kind old Colonel,—why should he say Colonel? why should he not say Old Tom at once?” (immense roars of applause) “always remembered his dear old nurse and friend. Look at that shawl, boys, which she has got on! My belief is that Colonel Newcome took that shawl in single combat, and on horseback, from the prime minister of Tippoo Sahib.” (Immense cheers and cries of ‘Bravo, Bayham!’) “Look at that brooch the dear old thing wears!” (he kissed her hand whilst so apostrophising her). “Tom Newcome never brags about his military achievements, he is the most modest as well as the bravest man in the world. What if I were to tell you that he cut that brooch from the throat of an Indian rajah? He’s man enough to do it.” (‘He is! he is!’ from all parts of the crowd.) “What, you want to take the horses out, do you?” (to the crowd, who were removing those quadrupeds). “I ain’t agoing to prevent you; I expected as much of you. Men of Newcome, I expected as much of you, for I know you! Sit still, old lady; don’t be frightened, ma’am: they are only going to pull you to the King’s Arms, and show you to the Colonel.”
This, indeed, was the direction in which the mob (whether inflamed by spontaneous enthusiasm, or excited by cunning agents placed amongst the populace by F. B., I cannot say), now took the barouche and its three occupants. With a myriad roar and shout the carriage was dragged up in front of the King’s Arms, from the balconies of which a most satisfactory account of the polling was already placarded. The extra noise and shouting brought out the Colonel, who looked at first with curiosity at the advancing procession, and then, as he caught sight of Sarah Mason, with a blush and a bow of his kind old head.
“Look at him, boys!” cried the enraptured F. B., pointing up to the old man. “Look at him; the dear old boy! Isn’t he an old trump? which will you have for your Member, Barnes Newcome or Old Tom?”
And as might be supposed, an immense shout of “Old Tom!” arose from the multitude; in the midst of which, blushing and bowing still, the Colonel went back to his committee-room: and the bands played “See the Conquering Hero” louder than ever; and poor Barnes in the course of his duty having to come out upon his balcony at the Roebuck opposite, was saluted with a yell as vociferous as the cheer for the Colonel had been; and old Mrs. Mason asked what the noise was about; and after making several vain efforts, in dumb show, to the crowd, Barnes slunk back into his hole again as pale as the turnip which was flung at his head: and the horses were brought, and Mrs. Mason driven home; and the day of election came to an end.
Reasons of personal gratitude, as we have stated already, prevented His Highness the Prince de Moncontour from taking a part in this family contest. His brethren of the House of Higg, however, very much to Florac’s gratification, gave their second votes to Colonel Newcome, carrying with them a very great number of electors: we know that in the present Parliament, Mr. Higg and Mr. Bunce sit for the borough of Newcome. Having had monetary transactions with Sir Barnes Newcome, and entered largely into railway speculations with him, the Messrs. Higg had found reason to quarrel with the Baronet; accuse him of sharp practices to the present day, and have long stories to tell which do not concern us about Sir Barnes’s stratagems, grasping, and extortion. They their following, deserting Sir Barnes, whom they had supported in previous elections, voted for the Colonel, although some of the opinions of that gentleman were rather too extreme for such sober persons.
Not exactly knowing what his politics were when he commenced the canvass, I can’t say to what opinions the poor Colonel did not find himself committed by the time when the election was over. The worthy gentleman felt himself not a little humiliated by what he had to say and to unsay, by having to answer questions, and submit to familiarities, to shake hands which, to say truth, he did not care for grasping at all. His habits were aristocratic; his education had been military; the kindest and simplest soul alive, he yet disliked all familiarity, and expected from common people the sort of deference which he had received from his men in the regiment. The contest saddened and mortified him; he felt that he was using wrong means to obtain an end that perhaps was not right (for so his secret conscience must have told him); he was derogating from his own honour in tampering with political opinions, submitting to familiarities, condescending to stand by whilst his agents solicited vulgar suffrages or uttered claptraps about retrenchment and reform. “I felt I was wrong,” he said to me, in after days, “though I was too proud to own my error in those times, and you and your good wife and my boy were right in protesting against that mad election.” Indeed, though we little knew what events were speedily to happen, Laura and I felt very little satisfaction when the result of the Newcome election was made known to us, and we found Sir Barnes Newcome third, and Col. Thomas Newcome second upon the poll.
Ethel was absent with her children at Brighton. She was glad, she wrote, not to have been at home during the election. Mr. and Mrs. C. were at Brighton, too. Ethel had seen Mrs. C. and her child once or twice. It was a very fine child. “My brother came down to us,” she wrote, “after all was over. He is furious against M. de Moncontour, who, he says, persuaded the Whigs to vote against him, and turned the election.”
LXX. Chiltern Hundreds
We shall say no more regarding Thomas Newcome’s political doings; his speeches against Barnes, and the Baronet’s replies. The nephew was beaten by his stout old uncle.
In due time the Gazette announced that Thomas Newcome, Esq., was returned as one of the Members of Parliament for the borough of Newcome; and after triumphant dinners, speeches, and rejoicings, the Member came back to his family in London, and to his affairs in that city.
The good Colonel appeared to be by no means elated by his victory. He would not allow that he was wrong in engaging in that family war, of which we have just seen the issue; though it may be that his secret remorse on this account in part occasioned his disquiet. But there were other reasons, which his family not long afterwards came to understand, for the gloom and low spirits which now oppressed the head of their home.
It was observed (that is, if simple little Rosey took the trouble to observe) that the entertainments at the Colonel’s mansion were more frequent and splendid even than before; the silver cocoa-nut tree was constantly in requisition, and around it were assembled many new guests, who had not formerly been used to sit under those branches. Mr. Sherrick and his wife appeared at those parties, at which the proprietor of Lady Whittlesea’s Chapel made himself perfectly familiar. Sherrick cut jokes with the master of the house, which the latter received with a very grave acquiescence; he ordered the servants about, addressing the butler as “Old Corkscrew,” and bidding the footman, whom he loved to call by his Christian name, to “look alive.” He called the Colonel “Newcome” sometimes, and facetiously speculated upon the degree of relationship subsisting between them now that his daughter was married to Clive’s uncle, the Colonel’s brother-in-law. Though I dare say Clive did not much relish receiving news of his aunt, Sherrick was sure to bring such intelligence when it reached him; and announced, in due time, the birth of a little cousin at Boggley Wollah, whom the fond parents designed to name “Thomas Newcome Honeyman.”
A dreadful panic and ghastly terror seized poor Clive on occasion which he described to me afterwards. Going out from home one day with his father, he beheld a wine-merchant’s cart, from which hampers were carried down the area gate into the lower regions of Colonel Newcome’s house. “Sherrick and Co., Wine Merchants, Walpole Street,” was painted upon the vehicle.
“Good heavens! sir, do you get your wine from him?” Clive cried out to his father, remembering Honeyman’s provisions in early times. The Colonel, looking very gloomy and turning red, said, “Yes, he bought wine from Sherrick, who had been very good-natured and serviceable; and who—and who, you know, is our connexion now.” When informed of the circumstance by Clive, I too, as I confess, thought the incident alarming.
Then Clive, with a laugh, told me of a grand battle which had taken place in consequence of Mrs. Mackenzie’s behaviour to the wine-merchant’s wife. The Campaigner had treated this very kind and harmless, but vulgar woman, with extreme hauteur—had talked loud during her singing—the beauty of which, to say truth, time had considerably impaired—had made contemptuous observations regarding her upon more than one occasion. At length the Colonel broke out in great wrath against Mrs. Mackenzie—bade her to respect that lady as one of his guests—and, if she did not like the company which assembled at his house, hinted to her that there were many thousand other houses in London where she could find a lodging. For the sake of her grandchild, and her adored child, the Campaigner took no notice of this hint; and declined to remove from the quarter which she had occupied ever since she had become a grandmamma.
I myself dined once or twice with my old friends, under the shadow of the pickle-bearing cocoa-nut tree; and could not but remark a change of personages in the society assembled. The manager of the City branch of the B. B. C. was always present—an ominous-looking man, whose whispers and compliments seemed to make poor Clive, at his end of the table, very melancholy. With the City manager came the City manager’s friends, whose jokes passed gaily round, and who kept the conversation to themselves. Once I had the happiness to meet Mr. Ratray, who had returned, filled with rupees from the Indian Bank; who told us many anecdotes of the splendour of Rummun Loll at Calcutta, who complimented the Colonel on his fine house and grand dinners with sinister good-humour. Those compliments did not seem to please our poor friend; that familiarity choked him. A brisk little chattering attorney, very intimate with Sherrick, with a wife of dubious gentility, was another constant guest. He enlivened the table by his jokes, and recounted choice stories about the aristocracy, with certain members of whom the little man seemed very familiar. He knew to a shilling how much this lord owed—and how much the creditors allowed to that marquis. He had been concerned with such and such a nobleman, who was now in the Queen’s Bench. He spoke of their lordships affably and without their titles—calling upon “Louisa, my dear,” his wife, to testify to the day when Viscount Tagrag dined with them, and Earl Bareacres sent them the pheasants. F. B., as sombre and downcast as his hosts now seemed to be, informed me demurely that the attorney was a member of one of the most eminent firms in the City—that he had been engaged in procuring the Colonel’s parliamentary title for him—and in various important matters appertaining to the B. B. C.; but my knowledge of the world and the law was sufficient to make me aware that this gentleman belonged to a well-known firm of money-lending solicitors, and I trembled to see such a person in the home of our good Colonel. Where were the generals and the judges? Where were the fogies and their respectable ladies? Stupid they were, and dull their company; but better a stalled ox in their society, than Mr. Campion’s jokes over Mr. Sherrick’s wines.
After the little rebuke administered by Colonel Newcome, Mrs. Mackenzie abstained from overt hostilities against any guests of her daughter’s father-in-law; and contented herself by assuming grand and princess-like airs in the company of the new ladies. They flattered her and poor little Rosa intensely. The latter liked their company, no doubt. To a man of the world looking on, who has seen the men and morals of many cities, it was curious, almost pathetic, to watch that poor little innocent creature fresh and smiling, attired in bright colours and a thousand gewgaws, simpering in the midst of these darkling people—practising her little arts and coquetries, with such a court round about her. An unconscious little maid, with rich and rare gems sparkling on all her fingers, and bright gold rings as many as belonged to the late Old Woman of Banbury Cross—still she smiled and prattled innocently before these banditti—I thought of Zerlina and the Brigands, in Fra Diavolo.
Walking away with F. B. from one of these parties of the Colonel’s, and seriously alarmed at what I had observed there, I demanded of Bayham whether my conjectures were not correct, that some misfortune overhung our old friend’s house? At first Bayham denied stoutly or pretended ignorance; but at length, having reached the Haunt together, which I had not visited since I was a married man, we entered that place of entertainment, and were greeted by its old landlady and waitress, and accommodated with a quiet parlour. And here F. B., after groaning and sighing—after solacing himself with a prodigious quantity of bitter beer—fairly burst out, and, with tears in his eyes, made a full and sad confession respecting this unlucky Bundelcund Banking Company. The shares had been going lower and lower, so that there was no sale now for them at all. To meet the liabilities, the directors must have undergone the greatest sacrifices. He did know—he did not like to think what the Colonel’s personal losses were. The respectable solicitors of the Company had retired, long since, after having secured payment of a most respectable bill; and had given place to the firm of dubious law-agents of whom I had that evening seen a partner. How the retiring partners from India had been allowed to withdraw, and to bring fortunes along with them, was a mystery to Mr. Frederick Bayham. The great Indian millionnaire was in his, F. B.’s eyes, “a confounded mahogany-coloured heathen humbug.” These fine parties which the Colonel was giving, and that fine carriage which was always flaunting about the Park with poor Mrs. Clive and the Campaigner, and the nurse and the baby, were, in F. B.’s opinion, all decoys and shams. He did not mean to say that the meals were not paid, and that the Colonel had to plunder for his horses’ corn; but he knew that Sherrick, and the attorney, and the manager, insisted upon the necessity of giving these parties, and keeping up this state and grandeur, and opined that it was at the special instance of these advisers that the Colonel had contested the borough for which he was now returned. “Do you know how much that contest cost?” asks F. B. “The sum, sir, was awful! and we have ever so much of it to pay. I came up twice myself from Newcome to Campion and Sherrick about it. I betray no secrets—F. B., sir, would die a thousand deaths before he would tell the secrets of his benefactor!—But, Pendennis, you understand a thing or two. You know what o’clock it is, and so does yours truly, F. B., who drinks your health. I know the taste of Sherrick’s wine well enough. F. B., sir, fears the Greeks and all the gifts they bring. Confound his Amontillado! I had rather drink this honest malt and hops all my life than ever see a drop of his abominable sherry. Golden? F. B. believes it is golden—and a precious deal dearer than gold too”—and herewith, ringing the bell, my friend asked for a second pint of the just-named and cheaper fluid.
I have of late had to recount portions of my dear old friend’s history which must needs be told, and over which the writer does not like to dwell. If Thomas Newcome’s opulence was unpleasant to describe, and to contrast with the bright goodness and simplicity I remembered in former days, how much more painful is that part of his story to which we are now come perforce, and which the acute reader of novels has, no doubt, long foreseen? Yes, sir or madam, you are quite right in the opinion which you have held all along regarding that Bundelcund Banking Company, in which our Colonel has invested every rupee he possesses, Solvuntur rupees, etc. I disdain, for the most part, the tricks and surprises of the novelist’s art. Knowing, from the very beginning of our story, what was the issue of this Bundelcund Banking concern, I have scarce had patience to keep my counsel about it; and whenever I have had occasion to mention the Company, have scarcely been able to refrain from breaking out into fierce diatribes against that complicated, enormous, outrageous swindle. It was one of many similar cheats which have been successfully practised upon the simple folks, civilian and military, who toil and struggle—who fight with sun and enemy—who pass years of long exile and gallant endurance in the service of our empire in India. Agency houses after agency houses have been established, and have flourished in splendour and magnificence, and have paid fabulous dividends—and have enormously enriched two or three wary speculators—and then have burst in bankruptcy, involving widows, orphans, and countless simple people who trusted their all to the keeping of these unworthy treasurers.
The failure of the Bundelcund Bank which we now have to record, was one only of many similar schemes ending in ruin. About the time when Thomas Newcome was chaired as Member of Parliament for the borough of which he bore the name, the great Indian merchant who was at the head of the Bundelcund Banking Company’s affairs at Calcutta, suddenly died of cholera at his palace at Barackpore. He had been giving of late a series of the most splendid banquets with which Indian prince ever entertained a Calcutta society. The greatest and proudest personages of that aristocratic city had attended his feasts. The fairest Calcutta beauties had danced in his halls. Did not poor F. B. transfer from the columns of the Bengal Hurkaru to the Pall Mall Gazette the most astounding descriptions of those Asiatic Nights Entertainments, of which the very grandest was to come off on the night when cholera seized Rummun Loll in its grip? There was to have been a masquerade outvying all European masquerades in splendour. The two rival queens of the Calcutta society were to have appeared each with her court around her. Young civilians at the College, and young ensigns fresh landed, had gone into awful expenses and borrowed money at interest from the B. B. C. and other banking companies, in order to appear with befitting splendour as knights and noblemen of Henrietta Maria’s Court (Henrietta Maria, wife of Hastings Hicks, Esq., Sudder Dewanee Adawlut), or as princes and warriors surrounding the palanquin of Lalla Rookh (the lovely wife of Hon. Cornwallis Bobus, Member of Council): all these splendours were there. As carriage after carriage drove up from Calcutta, they were met at Rummun Loll’s gate by ghastly weeping servants, who announced their master’s demise.
On the next day the Bank at Calcutta was closed, and the day after, when heavy bills were presented which must be paid, although by this time Rummun Loll was not only dead but buried, and his widows howling over his grave, it was announced throughout Calcutta that but 800 rupees were left in the treasury of the B. B. C. to meet engagements to the amount of four lakhs then immediately due, and sixty days afterwards the shutters were closed at No. 175 Lothbury, the London offices of the B. B. C. of India, and 35,000 pounds worth of their bills refused by their agents, Messrs. Baines, Jolly and Co., of Fog Court.
When the accounts of that ghastly bankruptcy arrived from Calcutta, it was found, of course, that the merchant-prince Rummun Loll owed the B. B. C. twenty-five lakhs of rupees, the value of which was scarcely even represented by his respectable signature. It was found that one of the auditors of the bank, the generally esteemed Charley Conder (a capital fellow, famous for his good dinners, and for playing low-comedy characters at the Chowringhee Theatre), was indebted to the bank in 90,000 pounds; and also it was discovered that the revered Baptist Bellman, Chief Registrar of the Calcutta Tape and Sealing-Wax Office (a most valuable and powerful amateur preacher who had converted two natives, and whose serious soirées were thronged at Calcutta), had helped himself to 73,000 pounds more, for which he settled in the Bankruptcy Court before he resumed his duties in his own. In justice to Mr. Bellman, it must be said that he could have had no idea of the catastrophe impending over the B. B. C. For, only three weeks before that great bank closed its doors, Mr. Bellman, as guardian of the children of his widowed sister Mrs. Green, had sold the whole of the late Colonel’s property out of Company’s paper and invested it in the bank, which gave a high interest, and with bills of which, drawn upon their London correspondents, he had accommodated Mrs. Colonel Green when she took her departure for Europe with her numerous little family on board the Burrumpooter.
And now you have the explanation of the title of this chapter, and know wherefore Thomas Newcome never sat in Parliament. Where are our dear old friends now? Where are Rosey’s chariots and horses? Where her jewels and gewgaws? Bills are up in the fine new house. Swarms of Hebrew gentlemen with their hats on are walking about the drawing-rooms, peering into the bedrooms, weighing and poising the poor old silver cocoa-nut tree, eyeing the plate and crystal, thumbing the damask of the curtains, and inspecting ottomans, mirrors, and a hundred articles of splendid trumpery. There is Rosey’s boudoir which her father-in-law loved to ornament—there is Clive’s studio with a hundred sketches—there is the Colonel’s bare room at the top of the house, with his little iron bedstead and ship’s drawers, and a camel trunk or two which have accompanied him on many an Indian march, and his old regulation sword, and that one which the native officers of his regiment gave him when he bade them farewell. I can fancy the brokers’ faces as they look over this camp wardrobe, and that the uniforms will not fetch much in Holywell Street. There is the old one still, and that new one which he ordered and wore when poor little Rosey was presented at court. I had not the heart to examine their plunder, and go amongst those wreckers. F. B. used to attend the sale regularly, and report its proceedings to us with eyes full of tears. “A fellow laughed at me,” says F. B., “because when I came into the dear old drawing-room I took my hat off. I told him that if he dared say another word I would knock him down.” I think F. B. may be pardoned in this instance for emulating the office of auctioneer. Where are you, pretty Rosey and poor little helpless baby? Where are you, dear Clive—gallant young friend of my youth? Ah! it is a sad story—a melancholy page to pen! Let us pass it over quickly—I love not to think of my friend in pain.
LXXI. In which Mrs. Clive Newcome’s Carriage is ordered
All the friends of the Newcome family, of course, knew the disaster which had befallen the good Colonel, and I was aware, for my own part, that not only his own, but almost the whole of Rosa Newcome’s property was involved in the common ruin. Some proposals of temporary relief were made to our friends from more quarters than one, but were thankfully rejected—and we were led to hope that the Colonel, having still his pension secured to him, which the law could not touch, might live comfortably enough the retirement to which, of course, he would betake himself, when the melancholy proceedings consequent on the bankruptcy were brought to an end. It was shown that he had been egregiously duped in the transaction—that his credulity had cost him and his family a large fortune—that he had given up every penny which belonged to him—that there could not be any sort of stain upon his honest reputation. The judge before whom he appeared spoke with feeling and regard of the unhappy gentleman—the lawyer who examined him respected the grief and fall of that simple old man. Thomas Newcome took a little room near the court where his affairs and the affairs of the company were adjudged—lived with a frugality which never was difficult to him—And once when perchance I met him in the City, avoided me, with a bow and courtesy that was quite humble, though proud and somehow inexpressibly touching to me. Fred Bayham was the only person whom he admitted. Fred always faithfully insisted upon attending him in and out of court. J. J. came to me immediately after he heard of the disaster, eager to place all his savings at the service of his friends. Laura and I came to London, and were urgent with similar offers. Our good friend declined to see any of us. F. B., again, with tears trickling on his rough cheeks, and a break in his voice, told me he feared that affairs must be very bad indeed, for the Colonel absolutely denied himself a cheroot to smoke. Laura drove to his lodgings and took him a box, which was held up to him as he came to open the door to my wife’s knock by our smiling little boy, He patted the child on his golden head and kissed him. My wife wished he would have done as much for her—but he would not—though she owned she kissed his hand. He drew it across his eyes and thanked her in a very calm and stately manner—but he did not invite her within the threshold of his door, saying simply, that such a room was not a fit place to receive a lady, “as you ought to know very well, Mrs. Smith,” he said to the landlady, who had accompanied my wife up the stairs. “He will eat scarcely anything,” the woman told us, “his meals come down untouched; his candles are burning all night, almost, as he sits poring over his papers.”
“He was bent—he who used to walk so uprightly,” Laura said. He seemed to have grown many years older, and was, indeed, quite a decrepit old man.
“I am glad they have left Clive out of the bankruptcy,” the Colonel said to Bayham; it was almost the only time when his voice exhibited any emotion. “It was very kind of them to leave out Clive, poor boy, and I have thanked the lawyers in court.” Those gentlemen, and the judge himself, were very much moved at this act of gratitude. The judge made a very feeling speech to the Colonel when he came up for his certificate. He passed very different comments on the conduct of the Manager of the Bank, when that person appeared for examination. He wished that the law had power to deal with those gentlemen who had come home with large fortunes from India, realised but a few years before the bankruptcy. Those gentlemen had known how to take care of themselves very well; and as for the Manager, is not his wife giving elegant balls at her elegant house at Cheltenham at this very day?
What weighed most upon the Colonel’s mind, F. B. imagined, was the thought that he had been the means of inducing many poor friends to embark their money in this luckless speculation. Take J. J.’s money after he had persuaded old Ridley to place 200 pounds in Indian shares! Good God, he and his family should rather perish than he would touch a farthing of it! Many fierce words were uttered to him by Mrs. Mackenzie, for instance—by her angry daughter at Musselburgh—Josey’s husband, by Mr. Smee, R.A., and two or three Indian officers, friends of his own, who had entered into the speculation on his recommendation. These rebukes Thomas Newcome bore with an affecting meekness, as his faithful F. B. described to me, striving with many oaths and much loudness to carry off his own emotion. But what moved the Colonel most of all, was a letter which came at this time from Honeyman in India, saying that he was doing well—that of course he knew of his benefactor’s misfortune, and that he sent a remittance which, D. V., should be annual, in payment of his debt to the Colonel, and his good sister at Brighton. “On receipt of this letter,” said F. B., “the old man was fairly beaten—the letter, with the bill in it, dropped out of his hands. He clasped them together, shaking in every limb, and his head dropped down on his breast as he said, ‘I thank my God Almighty for this!’ and he sent the cheque off to Mrs. Honeyman by the post that night, sir, every shilling of it; and he passed his old arm under mine—and we went out to Tom’s Coffee-House, and he ate some dinner the first time for ever so long, and drank a couple of glasses of port wine, and F. B. stood it, sir, and would stand his heart’s blood that dear old boy.”
It was on a Monday morning that those melancholy shutters were seen over the offices of the Bundelcund Bank in Lothbury, which were not to come down until the rooms were handed over to some other, and, let us trust, more fortunate speculators. The Indian bills had arrived, and been protested in the City on the previous Saturday. The Campaigner and Mrs. Rosey had arranged a little party to the theatre that evening, and the gallant Captain Goby had agreed to quit the delights of the Flag Club, in order to accompany the ladies. Neither of them knew what was happening in the City, or could account otherwise than by the common domestic causes, for Clive’s gloomy despondency and his father’s sad reserve. Clive had not been in the City on this day. He had spent it, as usual, in his studio, boudé by his wife, and not disturbed by the messroom raillery of the Campaigner. They had dined early, in order to be in time for the theatre. Goby entertained them with the latest jokes from the smoking-room at the Flag, and was in his turn amused by the brilliant plans for the season which Rosey and her mamma sketched out the entertainments which Mrs. Clive proposed to give, the ball—she was dying for a masked ball just such a one as that was described in the Pall Mall Gazette of last week, out of that paper with the droll title, the Bengal Hurkaru, which the merchant-prince, the head of the bank, you know, in India, had given at Calcutta. “We must have a ball, too,” says Mrs. Mackenzie; “society demands it of you.” “Of course it does,” echoes Captain Goby, and he bethought him of a brilliant circle of young fellows from the Flag, whom he would bring in splendid uniform to dance with the pretty Mrs. Clive Newcome.
After the dinner—they little knew it was to be their last in that fine house—the ladies retired to give their parting kiss to baby—a parting look to the toilettes, with which they proposed to fascinate the inhabitants of the pit and the public boxes at the Olympic. Goby made vigorous play with the claret-bottle during the brief interval of potation allowed to him; he, too, little deeming that he should never drink bumper there again; Clive looking on with the melancholy and silent acquiescence which had, of late, been his part in the household. The carriage was announced—the ladies came down—pretty capotes on the lovely Campaigner, Goby vowed, looking as young and as handsome as her daughter, by Jove, and the ball door was opened to admit the two gentlemen and ladies to their carriage, when, as they were about to step in, a hansom cab drove up rapidly, in which was perceived Thomas Newcome’s anxious face. He got out of the vehicle—his own carriage making way for him—the ladies still on the steps. “Oh, the play! I forgot,” said the Colonel.
“Of course we are going to the play, papa,” cries little Rosey, with a gay little tap of her hand.
“I think you had better not,” Colonel Newcome said gravely.
“Indeed my darling child has set her heart upon it, and I would not have her disappointed for the world in her situation,” cries the Campaigner, tossing up her head.
The Colonel for reply bade his coachman drive to the stables, and come for further orders; and, turning to his daughter’s guest, expressed to Captain Goby his regret that the proposed party could not take place on that evening, as he had matter of very great importance to communicate to his family. On hearing these news, and understanding that his further company was not desirable, the Captain, a man of great presence of mind, arrested the hansom cabman, who was about to take his departure, and who blithely, knowing the Club and its inmates full well, carried off the jolly Captain to finish his evening at the Flag.
“Has it come, father?” said Clive with a sure prescience, looking in his father’s face.
The father took and grasped the hand which his son held out. “Let us go back into the dining-room,” he said. They entered it, and he filled himself a glass of wine out of the bottle still standing amidst the dessert. He bade the butler retire, who was lingering about the room and sideboard, and only wanted to know whether his master would have dinner, that was all. And, this gentleman having withdrawn, Colonel Newcome finished his glass of sherry and broke a biscuit; the Campaigner assuming an attitude of surprise and indignation, whilst Rosey had leisure to remark that papa looked very ill, and that something must have happened.
The Colonel took both her hands and drew her towards him and kissed her, whilst Rosey’s mamma, flouncing down on a chair, beat a tattoo upon the tablecloth with her fan. “Something has happened, my love,” the Colonel said very sadly; “you must show all your strength of mind, for a great misfortune has befallen us.”
“Good heavens, Colonel, what is it? don’t frighten my beloved child,” cries the Campaigner, rushing towards her darling, and enveloping her in her robust arms. “What can have happened, don’t agitate this darling child, sir,” and she looked indignantly towards the poor Colonel.
“We have received the very worst news from Calcutta, a confirmation of the news by the last mail, Clivey, my boy.”
“It is no news to me. I have always been expecting it, father,” says Clive, holding down his head.
“Expecting what? What have you been keeping back from us? In what have you been deceiving us, Colonel Newcome?” shrieks the Campaigner; and Rosa, crying out, “Oh, mamma, mamma!” begins to whimper.
“The chief of the bank in India is dead,” the Colonel went on. “He has left its affairs in worse than disorder. We are, I fear, ruined, Mrs. Mackenzie.” And the Colonel went on to tell how the bank could not open on Monday morning, and its bills to a great amount had already been protested in the City that day.
Rosey did not understand half these news, or comprehend the calamity which was to follow; but Mrs. Mackenzie, rustling in great wrath, made a speech, of which the anger gathered as he proceeded; in which she vowed and protested that her money, which the Colonel, she did not know from what motives, had induced her to subscribe, should not be sacrificed, and that have it she would, the bank shut or not, the next Monday morning—that her daughter had a fortune of her own which her poor dear brother James should have divided and would have divided much more fairly, had he not been wrongly influenced—she would not say by whom, and she commanded Colonel Newcome upon that instant, if he was, as he always pretended to be, an honourable man, to give an account of her blessed darling’s property, and to pay back her own, every sixpence of it. She would not lend it for an hour longer, and to see that that dear blessed child now sleeping unconsciously upstairs, and his dear brothers and sisters who might follow, for Rosey was a young woman, a poor innocent creature, too young to be married, and never would have been married had she listened to her mamma’s advice. She demanded that the baby, and all succeeding babies, should have their rights, and should be looked to by their grandmother, if their father’s father was so unkind, and so wicked, and so unnatural, as to give their money to rogues, and deprive them of their just bread.
Rosey began to cry more loudly than ever during the utterance of mamma’s sermon, so loudly that Clive peevishly cried out, “Hold your tongue,” on which the Campaigner, clutching her daughter to her breast again, turned on her son-in-law, and abused him as she had abused his father before him, calling out that they were both in a conspiracy to defraud her child, and the little darling upstairs of its bread, and she would speak, yes, she would, and no power should prevent her, and her money she would have on Monday, as sure as her poor dear husband, Captain Mackenzie, was dead, and she never would have been cheated so, yes, cheated, if he had been alive.
At the word “cheated” Clive broke out with an execration—the poor Colonel with a groan of despair—the widow’s storm continued, and above that howling tempest of words rose Mrs. Clive’s piping scream, who went off into downright hysterics at last, in which she was encouraged by her mother, and in which she gasped out frantic ejaculations regarding baby; dear, darling, ruined baby, and so forth.
The sorrow-stricken Colonel had to quell the women’s tongues and shrill anger, and his son’s wrathful replies, who could not bear the weight of Mrs. Mackenzie upon him; and it was not until these three were allayed, that Thomas Newcome was able to continue his sad story, to explain what had happened, and what the actual state of the case was, and to oblige the terror-stricken women at length to hear something like reason.
He then had to tell them, to their dismay, that he would inevitably be declared a bankrupt in the ensuing week; that the whole of his property in that house, as elsewhere, would be seized and sold for the creditors’ benefit; and that his daughter had best immediately leave a home where she would be certainly subject to humiliation and annoyance. “I would have Clive, my boy, take you out of the country, and—and return to me when I have need of him, and shall send for him,” the father said fondly in reply to a rebellious look on his son’s face. “I would have you quit this house as soon as possible. Why not to-night? The law blood-hound may be upon us ere an hour is over—at this moment for what I know.”
At that moment the door-bell was heard to ring, and the women gave a scream apiece, as if the bailiffs were actually coming to take possession. Rosey went off in quite a series of screams, peevishly repressed by her husband, and always encouraged by mamma, who called her son-in-law an unfeeling wretch. It must be confessed that Mrs. Clive Newcome did not exhibit much strength of mind, or comfort her husband much at a moment when he needed consolation.
From angry rebellion and fierce remonstrance, this pair of women now passed to an extreme terror and desire for instantaneous flight. They would go that moment—they would wrap the blessed child up in its shawls—and nurse should take it anywhere—anywhere, poor neglected thing. “My trunks,” cries Mrs. Mackenzie, “you know are ready packed—I am sure it is not the treatment which I have received—it is nothing but my duty and my religion—and the protection which I owe to this blessed unprotected—yes, unprotected, and robbed, and cheated, darling child—which have made me stay a single day in this house. I never thought I should have been robbed in it, or my darlings with their fine fortunes flung naked on the world. If my Mac was here, you never had dared to have done this, Colonel Newcome—no, never. He had his faults—Mackenzie had—but he would never have robbed his own children! Come away, Rosey, my blessed love, come let us pack your things, and let us go and hide our heads in sorrow somewhere. Ah! didn’t I tell you to beware of all painters, and that Clarence was a true gentleman, and loved you with all his heart, and would never have cheated you out of your money, for which I will have justice as sure as there is justice in England.”
During this outburst the Colonel sat utterly scared and silent, supporting his poor head between his hands. When the harem had departed he turned sadly to his son. Clive did not believe that his father was a cheat and a rogue. No, thank God! The two men embraced with tender cordiality and almost happy emotion on the one side and the other. Never for one moment could Clive think his dear old father meant wrong—though the speculations were unfortunate in which he had engaged—though Clive had not liked them; it was a relief to his mind that they were now come to an end; they should all be happier now, thank God! those clouds of distrust being removed. Clive felt not one moment’s doubt but that they should be able to meet fortune with a brave face; and that happier, much happier days were in store for him than ever they had known since the period of this confounded prosperity.
“Here’s a good end to it,” says Clive, with flashing eyes and a flushed face, “and here’s a good health till to-morrow, father!” and he filled into two glasses the wine still remaining in the flask. “Good-bye to our fortune, and bad luck go with her—I puff the prostitute away—Si celeres quatit pennas, you remember what we used to say at Grey Friars—resigno quæ dedit, et mea virtute me involvo, probamque pauperiem sine dote quæro.” And he pledged his father, who drank his wine, his hand shaking as he raised the glass to his lips, and his kind voice trembling as he uttered the well-known old school words, with an emotion that was as sacred as a prayer. Once more, and with hearts full of love, the two men embraced. Clive’s voice would tremble now if he told the story, as it did when he spoke it to me in happier times, one calm summer evening when we sat together and talked of dear old days.
Thomas Newcome explained to his son the plan, which, to his mind, as he came away from the City after the day’s misfortunes, he thought it was best to pursue. The women and the child were clearly best out of the way. “And you too, my boy, must be on duty with them until I send for you, which I will do if your presence can be of the least service to me, or is called for by—by—our honour,” said the old man with a drop in his voice. “You must obey me in this, dear Clive, as you have done in everything, and been a good and dear, and obedient son to me. God pardon me for having trusted to my own simple old brains too much, and not to you who know so much better. You will obey me this once more, my boy—you will promise me this?” and the old man as he spoke took Clive’s hand in both his, and fondly caressed it.
Then with a shaking hand he took out of his pocket his old purse with the steel rings, which he had worn for many and many a long year. Clive remembered it, and his father’s face how it would beam with delight, when he used to take that very purse out in Clive’s boyish days and tip him just after he left school. “Here are some notes and some gold,” he said. “It is Rosey’s, honestly, Clive dear, her half-year’s dividend, for which you will give an order, please, to Sherrick. He has been very kind and good, Sherrick. All the servants were providentially paid last week—there are only the outstanding week’s bills out—we shall manage to meet those, I dare say. And you will see that Rosey only takes away such clothes for herself and her baby as are actually necessary, won’t you, dear? the plain things, you know—none of the fineries—they may be packed in a petara or two, and you will take them with you—but the pomps and vanities, you know, we will leave behind—the pearls and bracelets, and the plate, and all that rubbish—and I will make an inventory of them to-morrow when you are gone, and give them up, every rupee’s worth, sir, every anna, by Jove, to the creditors.”
The darkness had fallen by this time, and the obsequious butler entered to light the dining-room lamps. “You have been a very good and kind servant to us, Martin,” says the Colonel, making him a low bow. “I should like to shake you by the hand. We must part company now, and I have no doubt you and your fellow servants will find good places, all of you, as you merit, Martin—as you merit. Great losses have fallen upon our family—we are ruined, sir—we are ruined! The great Bundelcund Banking Company has stopped payment in India, and our branch here must stop on Monday. Thank my friends downstairs for their kindness to me and my family.” Martin bowed in silence with great respect. He and his comrades in the servants’-hall had been expecting this catastrophe, quite as long as the Colonel himself who thought he had kept his affairs so profoundly secret.
Clive went up into his women’s apartments, looking with but little regret, I dare say, round those cheerless nuptial chambers with all their gaudy fittings; the fine looking-glasses, in which poor Rosey’s little person had been reflected; the silken curtains under which he had lain by the poor child’s side, wakeful and lonely. Here he found his child’s nurse, and his wife, and wife’s mother, busily engaged with a multiplicity of boxes; with flounces, feathers, fal-lals, and finery, which they were stowing away in this trunk and that; while the baby lay on its little pink pillow breathing softly, a little pearly fist placed close to its mouth. The aspect of the tawdry vanities scattered here and there chafed and annoyed the young man. He kicked the robes over with his foot. When Mrs. Mackenzie interposed with loud ejaculations, he sternly bade her to be silent, and not wake the child. His words were not to be questioned when he spoke in that manner. “You will take nothing with you, Rosey, but what is strictly necessary—only two or three of your plainest dresses, and what is required for the boy. What is in this trunk?” Mrs. Mackenzie stepped forward and declared, and the nurse vowed upon her honour, and the lady’s-maid asserted really now upon honour too, that there was nothing but what was most strictly necessary in that trunk, to which affidavits, when Clive applied to his wife, she gave a rather timid assent.
“Where are the keys of that trunk?” Upon Mrs. Mackenzie’s exclamation of “What nonsense!” Clive, putting his foot upon the flimsy oil-covered box, vowed he would kick the lid off unless it was instantly opened. Obeying this grim summons, the fluttering women produced the keys, and the black box was opened before him.
The box was found to contain a number of objects which Clive pronounced to be by no means necessary to his wife’s and child’s existence. Trinket-boxes and favourite little gimcracks, chains, rings and pearl necklaces, the tiara poor Rosey had worn at court—the feathers and the gorgeous train which had decorated the little person—all these were found packed away in this one receptacle; and in another box, I am sorry to say, were the silver forks and spoons (the butler wisely judging that the rich and splendid electrotype ware might as well be left behind)—all the silver forks, spoons, and ladles, and our poor old friend the cocoa-nut tree, which these female robbers would have carried out of the premises.
Mr. Clive Newcome burst out into fierce laughter when he saw the cocoa-nut tree; he laughed so loud that baby woke, and his mother-in-law called him a brute, and the nurse ran to give its accustomed quietus to the little screaming infant. Rosey’s eyes poured forth a torrent of little protests, and she would have cried yet more loudly than the other baby, had not her husband, again fiercely checking her, sworn with a dreadful oath, that unless she told him the whole truth, “By heavens she should leave the house with nothing but what covered her.” Even the Campaigner could not make head against Clive’s stern resolution; and the incipient insurrection of the maids and the mistresses was quelled by his spirit. The lady’s-maid, a flighty creature, received her wages and took her leave: but the nurse could not find it in her heart to quit her little nursling so suddenly, and accompanied Clive’s household in the journey upon which those poor folks were bound. What stolen goods were finally discovered when the family reached foreign parts were found in Mrs. Mackenzie’s trunks, not in her daughter’s: a silver filigree basket, a few teaspoons, baby’s gold coral, and a costly crimson velvet-bound copy of the Hon. Miss Grimstone’s Church Service, to which articles, having thus appropriated them, Mrs. Mackenzie henceforward laid claim as her own.
So when the packing was done a cab was called to receive the modest trunks of this fugitive family—the coachman was bidden to put his horses to again, and for the last time poor Rosey Newcome sate in her own carriage, to which the Colonel conducted her with his courtly old bow, kissing the baby as it slept once more unconscious in its nurse’s embrace, and bestowing a very grave and polite parting salute upon the Campaigner.
Then Clive and his father entered a cab on which the trunks were borne, and they drove to the Tower Stairs, where the ship lay which was to convey them out of England; and, during that journey, no doubt, they talked over their altered prospects, and I am sure Clive’s father blessed his son fondly, and committed him and his family to a good God’s gracious keeping, and thought of him with sacred love when they had parted, and Thomas Newcome had returned to his lonely house to watch and to think of his ruined fortunes, and to pray that he might have courage under them; that he might bear his own fate honourably; and that a gentle one might be dealt to those beloved beings for whom his life had been sacrificed in vain.
LXXII. Belisarius
When the sale of Colonel Newcome’s effects took place, a friend of the family bought in for a few shillings those two swords which had hung, as we have said, in the good man’s chamber, and for which no single broker present had the heart to bid. The head of Clive’s father, painted by himself, which had always kept its place in the young man’s studio, together with a lot of his oil-sketchings, easels, and painting apparatus, were purchased by the faithful J. J., who kept them until his friend should return to London and reclaim them, and who showed the most generous solicitude in Clive’s behalf. J. J. was elected of the Royal Academy this year, and Clive, it was evident, was working hard at the profession which he had always loved; for he sent over three pictures to the Academy, and I never knew man more mortified than the affectionate J. J., when two of these unlucky pieces were rejected by the committee for the year. One pretty little piece, called “The Stranded Boat,” got a fair place on the Exhibition walls, and, you may be sure, was loudly praised by a certain critic in the Pall Mall Gazette. The picture was sold on the first day of the exhibition at the price of twenty-five pounds, which the artist demanded; and when the kind J. J. wrote to inform his friend of this satisfactory circumstance, and to say that he held the money at Clive’s disposal, the latter replied with many expressions of sincere gratitude, at the same time begging him directly to forward the money, with our old friend Thomas Newcome’s love, to Mrs. Sarah Mason, at Newcome. But J. J. never informed his friend that he himself was the purchaser of the picture; nor was Clive made acquainted with the fact until some time afterwards, when he found it hanging in Ridley’s studio.
I have said that we none of us were aware at this time what was the real state of Colonel Newcome’s finances, and hoped that, after giving up every shilling of his property which was confiscated to the creditors of the Bank, he had still, from his retiring pension and military allowances, at least enough reputably to maintain him. On one occasion, having business in the City, I there met Mr. Sherrick. Affairs had been going ill with that gentleman—he had been let in terribly, he informed me, by Lord Levant’s insolvency—having had large money transactions with his lordship. “There’s none of them so good as old Newcome,” Mr. Sherrick said with a sigh; “that was a good one—that was an honest man if ever I saw one—with no more guile, and no more idea of business than a baby. Why didn’t he take my advice, poor old cove?—he might be comfortable now. Why did he sell away that annuity, Pendennis? I got it done for him when nobody else perhaps could have got it done for him—for the security ain’t worth twopence if Newcome wasn’t an honest man;—but I know he is, and would rather starve and eat the nails off his fingers than not keep his word, the old trump. And when he came to me, a good two months before the smash of the Bank, which I knew it, sir, and saw that it must come—when he came and raised three thousand pounds to meet them d—d electioneering bills, having to pay lawyers, commission, premium, life-insurance—you know the whole game, Mr. P.—I as good as went down on my knees to him—I did—at the North and South American Coffee-house, where he was to meet the party about the money, and said, ‘Colonel, don’t raise it—I tell you, let it stand over—let it go in along with the bankruptcy that’s a-coming,’—but he wouldn’t—he went on like an old Bengal tiger, roaring about his honour; he paid the bills every shilling—infernal long bills they were, and it’s my belief that, at this minute, he ain’t got fifty pounds a year of his own to spend. I would send him back my commission—I would by Jove—only times is so bad, and that rascal Levant let me in. It went to my heart to take the old cock’s money—but it’s gone—that and ever so much more—and Lady Whittlesea’s Chapel too, Mr. P. Hang that young Levant.”
Squeezing my hand after this speech, Sherrick ran across the street after some other capitalist who was entering the Diddlesex Insurance Office, and left me very much grieved and dismayed at finding that my worst fears in regard to Thomas Newcome were confirmed. Should we confer with his wealthy family respecting the Colonel’s impoverished condition? Was his brother Hobson Newcome aware of it? As for Sir Barnes, the quarrel between him and his uncle had been too fierce to admit of hopes of relief from that quarter. Barnes had been put to very heavy expenses in the first contested election; had come forward again immediately on his uncle’s resignation, but again had been beaten by a more liberal candidate, his quondam former friend, Mr. Higg—who formally declared against Sir Barnes, and who drove him finally out of the representation of Newcome. From this gentleman it was vain of course for Colonel Newcome’s friends to expect relief.
How to aid him? He was proud—past work—nearly seventy years old. “Oh, why did those cruel Academicians refuse Clive’s pictures?” cries Laura. “I have no patience with them—had the pictures been exhibited I know who might have bought them—but that is vain now. He would suspect at once, and send her money away. Oh, Pen! why, why didn’t he come when I wrote that letter to Brussels?”
From persons so poorly endowed with money as ourselves, any help, but of the merest temporary nature, was out of the question. We knew our friends too well not to know that they would disdain to receive it. It was agreed between me and Laura that at any rate I should go and see Clive. Our friends indeed were at a very short distance from us, and, having exiled themselves from England, could yet see its coasts from their windows upon any clear day. Boulogne was their present abiding-place—refuge of how many thousands of other unfortunate Britons—and to this friendly port I betook myself speedily, having the address of Colonel Newcome. His quarters were in a quiet grass-grown old street of the Old Town. None of the family were at home when I called. There was indeed no servant to answer the bell, but the good-natured French domestic of a neighbouring lodger told me that the young monsieur went out every day to make his designs, and that I should probably find the elder gentleman upon the rampart, where he was in the custom of going every day. I strolled along by those pretty old walks and bastions, under the pleasant trees which shadow them, and the grey old gabled houses from which you look down upon the gay new city, and the busy port, and the piers stretching into the shining sea, dotted with a hundred white sails or black smoking steamers, and bounded by the friendly lines of the bright English shore. There are few prospects more charming than the familiar view from those old French walls—few places where young children may play, and ruminating old age repose more pleasantly than on those peaceful rampart gardens.
I found our dear old friend seated on one of the benches, a newspaper on his knees, and by his side a red-cheeked little French lass, upon whose lap Thomas Newcome the younger lay sleeping. The Colonel’s face flushed up when he saw me. As he advanced a step or two towards me I could see that he trembled in his walk. His hair had grown almost quite white. He looked now to be more than his age—he whose carriage last year had been so erect, whose figure had been so straight and manly. I was very much moved at meeting him, and at seeing the sad traces which pain and grief had left in the countenance of the dear old man.
“So you are come to see me, my good young friend,” cried the Colonel, with a trembling voice. “It is very, very kind of you. Is not this a pretty drawing-room to receive our friends in? We have not many of them now; Boy and I come and sit here for hours every day. Hasn’t he grown a fine boy? He can say several words now, sir, and can walk surprisingly well. Soon he will be able to walk with his grandfather, and then Marie will not have the trouble to wait upon either of us.” He repeated this sentiment in his pretty old French, and turning with a bow to Marie. The girl said monsieur knew very well that she did not desire better than to come out with baby; that it was better than staying at home, pardieu; and, the clock striking at this moment, she rose up with her child, crying out that it was time to return or madame would scold.
“Mrs. Mackenzie has rather a short temper,” the Colonel said with a gentle smile. “Poor thing, she has had a great deal to bear in consequence, Pen, of my imprudence. I am glad you never took shares in our bank. I should not be so glad to see you as I am now, if I had brought losses upon you as I have upon so many of my friends.” I, for my part, trembled to hear the good old man was under the domination of the Campaigner.
“Bayham sends me the paper regularly; he is a very kind faithful creature. How glad I am that he has got a snug berth in the City! His company really prospers, I am happy to think, unlike some companies you know of, Pen. I have read your two speeches, sir, and Clive and I liked them very much. The poor boy works all day at his pictures. You know he has sold one at the exhibition, which has given us a great deal of heart—and he has completed two or three more—and I am sitting to him now for—what do you think, sir? for Belisarius. Will you give Belisarius and the Obolus kind word?”
“My dear, dear old friend,” I said in great emotion, “if you will do me the kindness to take my Obolus or to use my services in any way, you will give me more pleasure than ever I had from your generous bounties in old days. Look, sir, I wear the watch which you gave me when you went to India. Did you not tell me then to look over Clive and serve him if I could? Can’t I serve him now?” and I went on further in this strain, asseverating with great warmth and truth that my wife’s affection and my own were most sincere for both of them, and that our pride would be to be able to help such dear friends.
The Colonel said I had a good heart, and my wife had, though—though—he did not finish this sentence, but I could interpret it without need of its completion. My wife and the two ladies of Colonel Newcome’s family never could be friends, however much my poor Laura tried to be intimate with these women. Her very efforts at intimacy caused a frigidity and hauteur which Laura could not overcome. Little Rosey and her mother set us down as two aristocratic personages; nor for our parts were we very much disturbed at this opinion of the Campaigner and little Rosa.
I talked with the Colonel for half an hour or more about his affairs, which indeed were very gloomy, and Clive’s prospects, of which he strove to present as cheering a view as possible. He was obliged to confirm the news which Sherrick had given me, and to own, in fact, that all his pension was swallowed up by a payment of interest and life insurance for sums which he had been compelled to borrow. How could he do otherwise than meet his engagements? Thank God, he had Clive’s full approval for what he had done—had communicated the circumstance to his son almost immediately after it took place, and that was a comfort to him—an immense comfort. “For the women are very angry,” said the poor Colonel; “you see they do not understand the laws of honour, at least as we understand them: and perhaps I was wrong in hiding the truth as I certainly did from Mrs. Mackenzie, but I acted for the best—I hoped against hope that some chance might turn in our favour. God knows, I had a hard task enough in wearing a cheerful face for months, and in following my little Rosa about to her parties and balls; but poor Mrs. Mackenzie has a right to be angry, only I wish my little girl did not side with her mother so entirely, for the loss of her affection gives me great pain.”
So it was as I suspected. The Campaigner ruled over this family, and added to all their distresses by her intolerable presence and tyranny. “Why, sir,” I ventured to ask, “if, as I gather from you—and I remember,” I added with a laugh, “certain battles-royal which Clive described to me in old days—if you and the Campai—Mrs. Mackenzie do not agree, why should she continue to live with you, when you would all be so much happier apart?”
“She has a right to live in the house,” says the Colonel; “It is I who have no right in it. I am a poor old pensioner, don’t you see, subsisting on Rosey’s bounty? We live on the hundred a year, secured to her at her marriage, and Mrs. Mackenzie has her forty pounds of pension which she adds to the common stock. It is I who have made away with every shilling of Rosey’s 17,000 pounds, God help me, and with 1500 pounds of her mother’s. They put their little means together, and they keep us—me and Clive. What can we do for a living? Great God! What can we do? Why, I am so useless that even when my poor boy earned 25 pounds for his picture, I felt we were bound to send it to Sarah Mason, and you may fancy when this came to Mrs. Mackenzie’s ears, what a life my boy and I led. I have never spoken of these things to any mortal soul—I even don’t speak of them with Clive—but seeing your kind and honest face has made me talk—you must pardon my garrulity—I am growing old, Arthur. This poverty and these quarrels have beaten my spirit down—there, I shall talk on this subject no more. I wish, sir, I could ask you to dine with us, but”—and here he smiled—“we must get the leave of the higher powers.”
I was determined, in spite of prohibitions and Campaigners, to see my old friend Clive, and insisted on walking back with the Colonel to his lodgings, at the door of which we met Mrs. Mackenzie and her daughter. Rosa blushed up a little—looked at her mamma—and then greeted me with a hand and a curtsey. The Campaigner also saluted me in a majestic but amicable manner, made no objection even to my entering her apartments and seeing the condition to which they were reduced: this phrase was uttered with particular emphasis and a significant look towards the Colonel, who bowed his meek head and preceded me into the lodgings, which were in truth very homely, pretty, and comfortable. The Campaigner was an excellent manager—restless, bothering, brushing perpetually. Such fugitive gimcracks as they had brought away with them decorated the little salon. Mrs. Mackenzie, who took the entire command, even pressed me to dine and partake, if so fashionable a gentleman would condescend to partake, of a humble exile’s fare. No fare was perhaps very pleasant to me in company with that woman, but I wanted to see my dear old Clive, and gladly accepted his voluble mother-in-law’s not disinterested hospitality. She beckoned the Colonel aside; whispered to him, putting something into his hand; on which he took his hat and went away. Then Rosey was dismissed upon some other pretext, and I had the felicity to be left alone with Mrs. Captain Mackenzie.
She instantly improved the occasion; and with great eagerness and volubility entered into her statement of the present affairs and position of this unfortunate family. She described darling Rosey’s delicate state, poor thing—nursed with tenderness and in the lap of luxury—brought up with every delicacy and the fondest mother—never knowing in the least how to take care of herself, and likely to fall down and perish unless the kind Campaigner were by to prop and protect her. She was in delicate health—very delicate—ordered cod-liver oil by the doctor. Heaven knows how he could be paid for those expensive medicines out of the pittance to which the imprudence—the most culpable and designing imprudence, and extravagance, and folly of Colonel Newcome had reduced them! Looking out from the window as she spoke I saw—we both saw—the dear old gentleman sadly advancing towards the house, a parcel in his hand. Seeing his near approach, and that our interview was likely to come to an end, Mrs. Mackenzie rapidly whispered to me that she knew I had a good heart—that I had been blessed by Providence with a fine fortune, which I knew how to keep better than some folks—and that if, as no doubt was my intention—for with what other but a charitable view could I have come to see them?—“and most generous and noble was it of you to come, and I always thought it of you, Mr. Pendennis, whatever other people said to the contrary—if I proposed to give them relief, which was most needful—and for which a mother’s blessings would follow me—let it be to her, the Campaigner, that my loan should be confided—for as for the Colonel, he is not fit to be trusted with a shilling, and has already flung away immense sums upon some old woman he keeps in the country, leaving his darling Rosey without the actual necessaries of life.
The woman’s greed and rapacity—the flattery with which she chose to belabour me at dinner, so choked and disgusted me, that I could hardly swallow the meal, though my poor old friend had been sent out to purchase a pâté from the pastrycook’s for my especial refection. Clive was not at the dinner. He seldom returned till late at night on sketching days. Neither his wife nor his mother-in-law seemed much to miss him; and seeing that the Campaigner engrossed the entire share of the conversation, and proposed not to leave me for five minutes alone with the Colonel, I took leave rather speedily of my entertainers, leaving a message for Clive, and a prayer that he would come and see me at my hotel.
LXXIII. In which Belisarius returns from Exile
I was sitting in the dusk in my room at Hotel des Bains, when the visitor for whom I hoped made his appearance in the person of Clive, with his broad shoulders, and broad hat, and a shaggy beard, which he had thought fit in his quality of painter to assume. Our greeting it need not be said was warm; and our talk, which extended far into the night, very friendly and confidential. If I make my readers confidants in Mr. Clive’s private affairs, I ask my friend’s pardon for narrating his history in their behoof. The world had gone very ill with my poor Clive, and I do not think that the pecuniary losses which had visited him and his father afflicted him near so sorely as the state of his home. In a pique with the woman he loved, and from that generous weakness which formed part of his character, and which led him to acquiesce in most wishes of his good father, the young man had gratified the darling desire of the Colonel’s heart, and taken the wife whom his two old friends brought to him. Rosey, who was also, as we have shown, of a very obedient and ductile nature, had acquiesced gladly enough in her mamma’s opinion, that she was in love with the rich and handsome young Clive, and accepted him for better or worse. So undoubtedly would this good child have accepted Captain Hoby, her previous adorer, have smilingly promised fidelity to the Captain at church, and have made a very good, happy, and sufficient little wife for that officer,—had not mamma commanded her to jilt him. What wonder that these elders should wish to see their two dear young ones united? They began with suitable age, money, good temper, and parents’ blessings. It is not the first time that, with all these excellent helps to prosperity and happiness, a marriage has turned out unfortunately—a pretty, tight ship gone to wreck that set forth on its voyage with cheers from the shore, and every prospect of fair wind and fine weather.
We have before quoted poor Clive’s simile of the shoes with which his good old father provided him—as pretty a little pair of shoes as need be—only they did not fit the wearer. If they pinched him at first, how they blistered and tortured him now! If Clive was gloomy and discontented even when the honeymoon had scarce waned, and he and his family sat at home in state and splendour under the boughs of the famous silver cocoa-nut tree, what was the young man’s condition now in poverty, when they had no love along with a scant dinner of herbs; when his mother-in-law grudged each morsel which his poor old father ate—when a vulgar, coarse-minded woman pursued with brutal sarcasm and deadly rancour one of the tenderest and noblest gentlemen in the world—when an ailing wife, always under some one’s domination, received him with helpless hysterical cries and reproaches—when a coarse female tyrant, stupid, obstinate, utterly unable to comprehend the son’s kindly genius, or the father’s gentle spirit, bullied over both, using the intolerable undeniable advantage which her actual wrongs gave her to tyrannise over these two wretched men! He had never heard the last of that money which they had sent to Mrs. Mason, Clive said. When the knowledge of the fact came to the Campaigner’s ears, she raised such a storm as almost killed the poor Colonel, and drove his son half mad. She seized the howling infant, vowing that its unnatural father and grandfather were bent upon starving it—she consoled and sent Rosey into hysterics—she took the outlawed parson to whose church they went, and the choice society of bankrupt captains, captains’ ladies, fugitive stockbrokers’ wives, and dingy frequenters of billiard-rooms, and refugees from the Bench, into her councils; and in her daily visits amongst these personages, and her walks on the pier, whither she trudged with poor Rosey in her train, Mrs. Mackenzie made known her own wrongs and her daughter’s—showed how the Colonel, having robbed and cheated them previously, was now living upon them; insomuch that Mrs. Bolter, the levanting auctioneer’s wife, would not make the poor old man a bow when she met him—that Mrs. Captain Kitely, whose husband had lain for seven years past in Boulogne gaol ordered her son to cut Clive; and when, the child being sick, the poor old Colonel went for arrowroot to the chemist’s, young Snooks, the apothecary’s assistant, refused to allow him to take the powder away without previously depositing the money.
He had no money, Thomas Newcome. He gave up every farthing. After having impoverished all around him, he had no right, he said, to touch a sixpence of the wretched pittance remaining to them—he had even given up his cigar, the poor old man, the companion and comforter of forty years. He was “not fit to be trusted with money,” Mrs. Mackenzie said, and the good man owned as he ate his scanty crust, and bowed his noble old head in silence under that cowardly persecution.
And this, at the end of threescore and seven or eight years, was to be the close of a life which had been spent in freedom and splendour, and kindness and honour; this the reward of the noblest heart that ever beat—the tomb and prison of a gallant warrior who had ridden in twenty battles—whose course through life had been a bounty wherever it had passed—whose name had been followed by blessings, and whose career was to end here—here—in a mean room, in a mean alley of a foreign town—a low furious woman standing over him and stabbing the kind defenceless heart with killing insult and daily outrage!
As we sat together in the dark, Clive told me this wretched story, which was wrung from him with a passionate emotion that I could not but keenly share. He wondered the old man lived, Clive said. Some of the women’s taunts and gibes, as he could see, struck his father so that he gasped and started back as if some one had lashed him with a whip. “He would make away with himself,” said poor Clive, “but he deems this is his punishment, and that he must bear it as long as it pleases God. He does not care for his own losses, as far as they concern himself: but these reproaches of Mrs. Mackenzie, and some things which were said to him in the Bankruptcy Court, by one or two widows of old friends, who were induced through his representations, to take shares in that infernal bank, have affected him dreadfully. I hear him lying awake and groaning at night, God bless him. Great God! what can I do—what can I do?” burst out the young man in a dreadful paroxysm of grief. “I have tried to get lessons—I went to London on the deck of a steamer, and took a lot of drawings with me—tried picture-dealers—pawnbrokers—Jews—Moss, whom you may remember at Gandish’s, and who gave me for forty-two drawings, eighteen pounds. I brought the money back to Boulogne. It was enough to pay the doctor, and bury our last poor little dead baby. Tenez, Pen, you must give me some supper: I have had nothing all day but a pain de deux sous; I can’t stand it at home. My heart’s almost broken—you must give me some money, Pen, old boy. I know you will. I thought of writing to you, but I wanted to support myself, you see. When I went to London with the drawings I tried George’s chambers, but he was in the country, I saw Crackthorpe on the street in Oxford Street, but I could not face him, and bolted down Hanway Yard. I tried, and I could not ask him, and I got the 18 pounds from Moss that day, and came home with it.”
Give him money? of course I would give him money—my dear old friend! And, as an alternative and a wholesome shock to check that burst of passion and grief in which the poor fellow indulged, I thought fit to break into a very fierce and angry invective on my own part, which served to disguise the extreme feeling of pain and pity that I did not somehow choose to exhibit. I rated Clive soundly, and taxed him with unfriendliness and ingratitude for not having sooner applied to friends who would think shame of themselves whilst he was in need. Whatever he wanted was his as much as mine. I could not understand how the necessity of the family should, in truth, be so extreme as he described it, for after all many a poor family lived upon very much less; but I uttered none of these objections, checking them with the thought that Clive, on his first arrival at Boulogne, entirely ignorant of the practice of economy, might have imprudently engaged in expenses which had reduced him to this present destitution.*
* I did not know at the time that Mrs. Mackenzie had taken entire superintendence of the family treasury—and that this exemplary woman was putting away, as she had done previously, sundry little sums to meet rainy days.
I took the liberty of asking about debts, and of these Clive gave me to understand there were none—at least none of his or his father’s contracting. “If we were too proud to borrow, and I think we were wrong, Pen, my dear old boy—I think we were wrong now—at least, we were too proud to owe. My colourman takes his bill out in drawings, and I think owes me a trifle. He got me some lessons at fifty sous a ticket—a pound the ten—from an economical swell who has taken a château here, and has two flunkeys in livery. He has four daughters, who take advantage of the lessons, and screws ten per cent upon the poor colourman’s pencils and drawing-paper. It’s pleasant work to give the lessons to the children; and to be patronised by the swell; and not expensive to him, is it, Pen? But I don’t mind that, if I could but get lessons enough: for, you see, besides our expenses here, we must have some more money, and the dear old governor would die outright if poor old Sarah Mason did not get her 50 pounds a year.”
And now there arrived a plentiful supper, and a bottle of good wine, of which the giver was not sorry to partake after the meagre dinner at three o’clock, to which I had been invited by the Campaigner; and it was midnight when I walked back with my friend to his house in the upper town; and all the stars of heaven were shining cheerily; and my dear Clive’s face wore an expression of happiness, such as I remembered in old days, as we shook hands and parted with a “God bless you.”
To Clive’s friend, revolving these things in his mind, as he lay in one of those most snug and comfortable beds at the excellent Hotel des Bains, it appeared that this town of Boulogne was a very bad market for the artist’s talents; and that he had to bring them to London, where a score of old friends would assuredly be ready to help him. And if the Colonel, too, could be got away from the domination of the Campaigner, I felt certain that the dear old gentleman could but profit by his leave of absence. My wife and I at this time inhabited a spacious old house in Queens Square, Westminster, where there was plenty of room for father and son. I knew that Laura would be delighted to welcome these guests—may the wife of every worthy gentleman who reads these pages be as ready to receive her husband’s friends. It was the state of Rosa’s health, and the Campaigner’s authority and permission, about which I was in doubt, and whether this lady’s two slaves would be allowed to go away.
These cogitations kept the present biographer long awake, and he did not breakfast next day until an hour before noon. I had the coffee-room to myself by chance, and my meal was not yet ended when the waiter announced a lady to visit Mr. Pendennis, and Mrs. Mackenzie made her appearance. No signs of care or poverty were visible in the attire or countenance of the buxom widow. A handsome bonnet, decorated within with a profusion of poppies, bluebells; and ears of corn; a jewel on her forehead, not costly, but splendid in appearance, and glittering artfully over that central spot from which her wavy chestnut hair parted to cluster in ringlets round her ample cheeks; a handsome India shawl, smart gloves, a rich silk dress, a neat parasol of blue with pale yellow lining, a multiplicity of glittering rinks, and a very splendid gold watch and chain, which I remembered in former days as hanging round poor Rosey’s white neck;—all these adornments set off the widow’s person, so that you might have thought her a wealthy capitalist’s lady, and never could have supposed that she was a poor, cheated, ruined, robbed, unfortunate Campaigner.
Nothing could be more gracious than the accueil of this lady. She paid me many handsome compliments about my literary work—asked most affectionately for dear Mrs. Pendennis and the dear children—and then, as I expected, coming to business, contrasted the happiness and genteel position of my wife and family with the misery and wrongs of her own blessed child and grandson. She never could call that child by the odious name which he received at his baptism. I knew what bitter reasons she had to dislike the name of Thomas Newcome.
She again rapidly enumerated the wrongs she had received at the hands of that gentleman; mentioned the vast sums of money out of which she and her soul’s darling had been tricked by that poor muddle-headed creature, to say no worse of him; and described finally their present pressing need. The doctors, the burial, Rosey’s delicate condition, the cost of sweetbreads, calf’s-foot jelly, and cod-liver oil, were again passed in a rapid calculation before me; and she ended her speech by expressing her gratification that I had attended to her advice of the previous day, and not given Clive Newcome a direct loan; that the family wanted it, the Campaigner called upon Heaven to witness; that Clive and his absurd poor father would fling guineas out of the window was a fact equally certain; the rest of the argument was obvious, namely, that Mr. Pendennis should administer a donation to herself.
I had brought but a small sum of money in my pocket-book, though Mrs. Mackenzie, intimate with bankers, and having, thank Heaven, in spite of all her misfortunes, the utmost confidence of all her tradesmen, hinted a perfect willingness on her part to accept an order upon her friends, Hobson Brothers of London.
This direct thrust I gently and smilingly parried by asking Mrs. Mackenzie whether she supposed a gentleman who had just paid an electioneering bill, and had, at the best of times, but a very small income, might sometimes not be in a condition to draw satisfactorily upon Messrs. Hobson or any other bankers? Her countenance fell at this remark, nor was her cheerfulness much improved by the tender of one of the two bank-notes which then happened to be in my possession. I said that I had a use for the remaining note, and that it would not be more than sufficient to pay my hotel bill, and the expenses of my party back to London.
My party? I had here to divulge, with some little trepidation, the plan which I had been making overnight; to explain how I thought that Clive’s great talents were wasted at Boulogne, and could only find a proper market in London; how I was pretty certain, through my connection with booksellers, to find some advantageous employment for him, and would have done so months ago had I known the state of the case; but I had believed, until within a very few days since, that the Colonel, in spite of his bankruptcy, was still in the enjoyment of considerable military pensions.
This statement, of course, elicited from the widow a number of remarks not complimentary to my dear old Colonel. He might have kept his pensions had he not been a fool—he was a baby about money matters—misled himself and everybody—was a log in the house, etc. etc. etc.
I suggested that his annuities might possibly be put into some more satisfactory shape—that I had trustworthy lawyers with whom I would put him in communication—that he had best come to London to see to these matters—and that my wife had a large house where she would most gladly entertain the two gentlemen.
This I said with some reasonable dread—fearing, in the first place, her refusal; in the second, her acceptance of the invitation, with a proposal, as our house was large, to come herself and inhabit it for a while. Had I not seen that Campaigner arrive for a month at poor James Binnie’s house in Fitzroy Square, and stay there for many years? Was I not aware that when she once set her foot in a gentleman’s establishment, terrific battles must ensue before she could be dislodged? Had she not once been routed by Clive? and was she not now in command and possession? Do I not, finally, know something of the world; and have I not a weak, easy temper? I protest it was with terror that I awaited the widow’s possible answer to my proposal.
To my great relief, she expressed the utmost approval of both my plans. I was uncommonly kind, she was sure, to interest myself about the two gentlemen, and for her blessed Rosa’s sake, a fond mother thanked me. It was most advisable that he should earn some money by that horrid profession which he had chosen to adopt—trade, she called it. She was clearly anxious get rid both of father and son, and agreed that the sooner they went the better.
We walked back arm-in-arm to the Colonel’s quarters in the Old Town, Mrs. Mackenzie, in the course of our walk, doing me the honour to introduce me by name to several dingy acquaintances, whom we met sauntering up the street, and imparting to me, as each moved away, the pecuniary cause of his temporary residence in Boulogne. Spite of Rosey’s delicate state of health, Mrs. Mackenzie did not hesitate to break the news to her of the gentlemen’s probable departure, abruptly and eagerly, as if the intelligence was likely to please her:—and it did, rather than otherwise. The young woman, being in the habit of letting mamma judge for her, continued it in this instance; and whether her husband stayed or went, seemed to be equally content or apathetic. “And is it not most kind and generous of dear Mr. and Mrs. Pendennis to propose to receive Mr. Newcome and the Colonel?” This opportunity for gratitude being pointed out to Rosey, she acquiesced in it straightway—it was very kind of me, Rosey was sure. “And don’t you ask after dear Mrs. Pendennis and the dear children—you poor dear suffering darling child?” Rosey, who had neglected this inquiry, immediately hoped Mrs. Pendennis and the children were well. The overpowering mother had taken utter possession of this poor little thing. Rosey’s eyes followed the Campaigner about, and appealed to her at all moments. She sat under Mrs. Mackenzie as a bird before a boa-constrictor, doomed—fluttering—fascinated—scared and fawning as a whipt spaniel before a keeper.
The Colonel was on his accustomed bench on the rampart at this sunny hour. I repaired thither, and found the old gentleman seated by his grandson, who lay, as yesterday, on the little bonne’s lap, one of his little purple hands closed round the grandfather’s finger. “Hush!” says the good man, lifting up his other finger to his moustache, as I approached, “Boy’s asleep. Il est bien joli quand il dort—le Boy, n’est-ce pas, Marie?” The maid believed monsieur well—the boy was a little angel. “This maid is a most trustworthy, valuable person, Pendennis,” the Colonel said, with much gravity.
The boa-constrictor had fascinated him, too—the lash of that woman at home had cowed that helpless, gentle, noble spirit. As I looked at the head so upright and manly, now so beautiful and resigned—the year of his past life seemed to pass before me somehow in a flash of thought. I could fancy the accursed tyranny—the dumb acquiescence—the brutal jeer—the helpless remorse—the sleepless nights of pain and recollection—the gentle heart lacerated with deadly stabs—and the impotent hope. I own I burst into a sob at the sight, and thought of the noble suffering creature, and hid my face, and turned away.
He sprang up, releasing his hand from the child’s, and placing it, the kind shaking hand, on my shoulder. “What is it, Arthur—my dear boy?” he said, looking wistfully in my face. “No bad news from home, my dear? Laura and the children well?”
The emotion was mastered in a moment, I put his arm under mine, and as we slowly sauntered up and down the sunny walk of the old rampart, I told him how I had come with special commands from Laura to bring him for a while to stay with us, and to settle his business, which I was sure had been wofully mismanaged, and to see whether we could not find the means of getting some little out of the wreck of the property for the boy yonder.
At first Colonel Newcome would not hear of quitting Boulogne, where Rosey would miss him—he was sure she would want him—but before the ladies of his family, to whom we presently returned, Thomas Newcome’s resolution was quickly recalled. He agreed to go, and Clive coming in at this time was put in possession of our plan and gladly acquiesced in it. On that very evening I came with a carriage to conduct my two friends to the steamboat. Their little packets were made and ready. There was no pretence of grief at parting on the women’s side, but Marie, the little maid, with Boy in her arms, cried sadly; and Clive heartily embraced the child; and the Colonel, going back to give it one more kiss, drew out of his neckcloth a little gold brooch which he wore, and which, trembling, he put into Marie’s hand, bidding her take good care of Boy till his return.
“She is a good girl—a most faithful, attached girl, Arthur, do you see,” the kind old gentleman said; “and I had no money to give her—no, not one single rupee.”
LXXIV. In which Clive begins the World
We are ending our history, and yet poor Clive is but beginning the world. He has to earn the bread which he eats henceforth; and, as I saw his labours, his trials, and his disappointments, I could not but compare his calling with my own.
The drawbacks and penalties attendant upon our profession are taken into full account, as we well know, by literary men, and their friends. Our poverty, hardships, and disappointments are set forth with great emphasis, and often with too great truth by those who speak of us; but there are advantages belonging to our trade which are passed over, I think, by some of those who exercise it and describe it, and for which, in striking the balance of our accounts, we are not always duly thankful. We have no patron, so to speak—we sit in ante-chambers no more, waiting the present of a few guineas from my lord, in return for a fulsome dedication. We sell our wares to the book-purveyor, between whom and us there is no greater obligation than between him and his paper-maker or printer. In the great towns in our country immense stores of books are provided for us, with librarians to class them, kind attendants to wait upon us, and comfortable appliances for study. We require scarce any capital wherewith to exercise our trade. What other so-called learned profession is equally fortunate? A doctor, for example, after carefully and expensively educating himself, must invest in house and furniture, horses, carriage, and menservants, before the public patient will think of calling him in. I am told that such gentlemen have to coax and wheedle dowagers, to humour hypochondriacs, to practise a score of little subsidiary arts in order to make that of healing profitable. How many many hundreds of pounds has a barrister to sink upon his stock-in-trade before his returns are available? There are the costly charges of university education—the costly chambers in the Inn of Court—the clerk and his maintenance—the inevitable travels on circuit—certain expenses all to be defrayed before the possible client makes his appearance, and the chance of fame or competency arrives. The prizes are great, to be sure, in the law, but what a prodigious sum the lottery-ticket costs! If a man of letters cannot win, neither does he risk so much. Let us speak of our trade as we find it, and not be too eager in calling out for public compassion.
The artists, for the most part, do not cry out their woes as loudly as some gentlemen of the literary fraternity, and yet I think the life of many of them is harder; their chances even more precarious, and the conditions of their profession less independent and agreeable than ours. I have watched Smee, Esq., R.A., flattering and fawning, and at the same time boasting and swaggering, poor fellow, in order to secure a sitter. I have listened to a Manchester magnate talking about fine arts before one of J. J.’s pictures, assuming the airs of a painter, and laying down the most absurd laws respecting the art. I have seen poor Tomkins bowing a rich amateur through a private view, and noted the eager smiles on Tomkins’ face at the amateur’s slightest joke, the sickly twinkle of hope in his eyes as Amateur stopped before his own picture. I have been ushered by Chipstone’s black servant through hall after hall peopled with plaster gods and heroes, into Chipstone’s own magnificent studio, where he sat longing vainly for an order, and justly dreading his landlord’s call for the rent. And, seeing how severely these gentlemen were taxed in their profession, I have been grateful for my own more fortunate one, which necessitates cringing to no patron; which calls for no keeping up of appearances; and which requires no stock-in-trade save the workman’s industry, his best ability, and a dozen sheets of paper.
Having to turn with all his might to his new profession, Clive Newcome, one of the proudest men alive, chose to revolt and to be restive at almost every stage of his training. He had a natural genius for his art, and had acquired in his desultory way a very considerable skill. His drawing was better than his painting (an opinion which, were my friend present, he of course would utterly contradict); his designs and sketches were far superior to his finished compositions. His friends, presuming to judge of this artist’s qualifications, ventured to counsel him accordingly, and were thanked for their pains in the usual manner. We had in the first place to bully and browbeat Clive most fiercely, before he would take fitting lodgings for the execution of those designs which we had in view for him. “Why should I take expensive lodgings?” says Clive, slapping his fist on the table. “I am a pauper, and can scarcely afford to live in a garret. Why should you pay me for drawing your portrait and Laura’s and the children? What the deuce does Warrington want with the effigy of his old mug? You don’t want them a bit—you only want to give me money.—It would be much more honest of me to take the money at once and own that I am a beggar; and I tell you what, Pen, the only money which I feel I come honestly by, is that which is paid me by a little printseller in Long Acre who buys my drawings, one with another, at fourteen shillings apiece, and out of whom I can earn pretty nearly two hundred a year. I am doing Coaches for him, sir, and Charges of Cavalry; the public like the Mail Coaches best—on a dark paper—the horses and miles picked out white—yellow dust—cobalt distance, and the guard and coachman of course in vermilion. That’s what a gentleman can get his bread by—portraits, pooh! it’s disguised beggary, Crackthorpe, and a half-dozen men of his regiment came, like good fellows as they are, and sent me five pounds apiece for their heads, but I tell you I am ashamed to take the money.” Such used to be the tenor of Clive Newcome’s conversation as he strode up and down our room after dinner, pulling his moustache, and dashing his long yellow hair off his gaunt face.
When Clive was inducted into the new lodgings at which his friends counselled him to hang up his ensign, the dear old Colonel accompanied his son, parting with a sincere regret from our little ones at home, to whom he became greatly endeared during his visit to us, and who always hailed him when he came to see us with smiles and caresses and sweet infantile welcome. On that day when he went away, Laura went up and kissed him with tears in her eyes. “You know how long I have been wanting to do it,” this lady said to her husband. Indeed I cannot describe the behaviour of the old man during his stay with us, his gentle gratitude, his sweet simplicity and kindness, his thoughtful courtesy. There was not a servant in our little household but was eager to wait upon him. Laura’s maid was as tender-hearted at his departure as her mistress. He was ailing for a short time, when our cook performed prodigies of puddings and jellies to suit his palate. The youth who held the offices of butler and valet in our establishment—a lazy and greedy youth whom Martha scolded in vain—would jump up and leave his supper to carry a message to our Colonel. My heart is full as I remember the kind words which he said to me at parting, and as I think that we were the means of giving a little comfort to that stricken and gentle soul.
Whilst the Colonel and his son stayed with us, letters of course passed between Clive and his family at Boulogne, but my wife remarked that the receipt of those letters appeared to give our friend but little pleasure. They were read in a minute, and he would toss them over to his father, or thrust them into his pocket with a gloomy face. “Don’t you see,” groans out Clive to me one evening, “that Rosa scarcely writes the letters, or if she does, that her mother is standing over her? That woman is the Nemesis of our life, Pen. How can I pay her off? Great God! how can I pay her off?” And so having spoken, his head fell between his hands, and as I watched him I saw a ghastly domestic picture before me of helpless pain, humiliating discord, stupid tyranny.
What, I say again, are the so-called great ills of life compared to these small ones?
The Colonel accompanied Clive to the lodgings which we had found for the young artist, in a quarter not far removed from the old house in Fitzroy Square, where some happy years of his youth had been spent. When sitters came to Clive—as at first they did in some numbers, many of his early friends being anxious to do him a service—the old gentleman was extraordinarily cheered and comforted. We could see by his face that affairs were going on well at the studio. He showed us the rooms which Rosey and the boy were to occupy. He prattled to our children and their mother, who was never tired of hearing him, about his grandson. He filled up the future nursery with a hundred little knick-knacks of his own contriving; and with wonderful cheap bargains, which he bought in his walks about Tottenham Court Road. He pasted a most elaborate book of prints and sketches for Boy. It was astonishing what notice Boy already took of pictures. He would have all the genius of his father. Would he had had a better grandfather than the foolish old man who had ruined all belonging to him!
However much they like each other, men in the London world see their friends but seldom. The place is so vast that even next door is distant; the calls of business, society, pleasure, so multifarious that mere friendship can get or give but an occasional shake of the hand in the hurried moments of passage. Men must live their lives; and are perforce selfish, but not unfriendly. At a great need you know where to look for your friend, and he that he is secure of you. So I went very little to Howland Street, where Clive now lived; very seldom to Lamb Court, where my dear old friend Warrington still sate in his old chambers, though our meetings were none the less cordial when they occurred, and our trust in one another always the same. Some folks say the world is heartless: he who says so either prates commonplaces (the most likely and charitable suggestion), or is heartless himself, or is most singular and unfortunate in having made no friends. Many such a reasonable mortal cannot have: our nature, I think, not sufficing for that sort of polygamy. How many persons would you have to deplore your death; or whose death would you wish to deplore? Could our hearts let in such a harem of dear friendships, the mere changes and recurrences of grief and mourning would be intolerable, and tax our lives beyond their value. In a word, we carry our own burthen in the world; push and struggle along on our own affairs; are pinched by our own shoes—though Heaven forbid we should not stop and forget ourselves sometimes, when a friend cries out in his distress, or we can help a poor stricken wanderer in his way. As for good women—these, my worthy reader, are different from us—the nature of these is to love, and to do kind offices, and devise untiring charities:—so I would have you to know, that, though Mr. Pendennis was parcus suorum cultor et infrequens, Mrs. Laura found plenty of time to go from Westminster to Bloomsbury; and to pay visits to her Colonel and her Clive, both of whom she had got to love with all her heart again, now misfortune was on them; and both of whom returned her kindness with an affection blessing the bestower and the receiver; and making the husband proud and thankful whose wife had earned such a noble regard. What is the dearest praise of all to a man? his own—or that you should love those whom he loves? I see Laura Pendennis ever constant and tender and pure, ever ministering in her sacred office of kindness—bestowing love and followed by blessings. Which would I have, think you; that priceless crown hymeneal, or the glory of a Tenth Edition?
Clive and his father had found not only a model friend in the lady above mentioned, but a perfect prize landlady in their happy lodgings. In her house, besides those apartments which Mr. Newcome had originally engaged, were rooms just sufficient to accommodate his wife, child, and servant, when they should come to him, with a very snug little upper chamber for the Colonel, close by Boy’s nursery, where he liked best to be. “And if there is not room for the Campaigner, as you call her,” says Mrs. Laura, with a shrug of her shoulders, “why, I am very sorry, but Clive must try and bear her absence as well as possible. After all, my dear Pen, you know he is married to Rosa and not to her mamma; and so, and so I think it will be quite best that they shall have their ménage as before.”
The cheapness of the lodgings which the prize landlady let, the quantity of neat new furniture which she put in, the consultations which she had with my wife regarding these supplies, were quite singular to me. “Have you pawned your diamonds, you reckless little person, in order to supply all this upholstery?” “No, sir, I have not pawned my diamonds,” Mrs. Laura answers; and I was left to think (if I thought on the matter at all) that the landlady’s own benevolence had provided these good things for Clive. For the wife of Laura’s husband was perforce poor; and she asked me for no more money at this time than at any other.
At first, in spite of his grumbling, Clive’s affairs looked so prosperous, and so many sitters came to him from amongst his old friends, that I was half inclined to believe with the Colonel and my wife, that he was a prodigious genius, and that his good fortune would go on increasing. Laura was for having Rosey return to her husband. Every wife ought to be with her husband. J. J. shook his head about the prosperity. “Let us see whether the Academy will have his pictures this year, and what a place they will give him,” said Ridley. To do him justice, Clive thought far more humbly of his compositions than Ridley did. Not a little touching was it to us, who had known the young men in former days, to see them in their changed positions. It was Ridley, whose genius and industry had put him in the rank of a patron—Ridley, the good industrious apprentice, who had won the prize of his art—and not one of his many admirers saluted his talent and success with such a hearty recognition as Clive, whose generous soul knew no envy, and who always fired and kindled at the success of his friends.
When Mr. Clive used to go over to Boulogne from time to time to pay his dutiful visits to his wife, the Colonel did not accompany his son, but, during the latter’s absence, would dine with Mrs. Pendennis.
Though the preparations were complete in Howland Street, and Clive dutifully went over to Boulogne, Mrs. Pendennis remarked that he seemed still to hesitate about bringing his wife to London.
Upon this Mr. Pendennis observed that some gentlemen were not particularly anxious about the society of their wives, and that this pair were perhaps better apart. Upon which Mrs. Pendennis, drubbing on the ground with a little foot, said, “Nonsense, for shame, Arthur! How can you speak so flippantly? Did he not swear before Heaven to love and cherish her, never to leave her, sir? Is not his duty his duty, sir?” (a most emphatic stamp of the foot). “Is she not his for better, or for worse?”
“Including the Campaigner, my dear?” says Mr. P.
“Don’t laugh, sir! She must come to him. There is no room in Howland Street for Mrs. Mackenzie.”
“You artful scheming creature! We have some spare rooms. Suppose we ask Mrs. Mackenzie to come and live with us, my dear? and we could then have the benefit of the garrison anecdotes, and mess jocularities of your favourite, Captain Goby.”
“I could never bear the horrid man!” cried Mrs. Pendennis. And how can I tell why she disliked him?
Everything being now ready for the reception of Clive’s little family, we counselled our friend to go over to Boulogne, and bring back his wife and child, and then to make some final stipulation with the Campaigner. He saw, as well as we, that the presence and tyranny of that fatal woman destroyed his father’s health and spirits—that the old man knew no peace or comfort in her neighbourhood, and was actually hastening to his grave under that dreadful and unremitting persecution. Mrs. Mackenzie made Clive scarcely less wretched than his father—she governed his household—took away his weak wife’s allegiance and affection from him—and caused the wretchedness of every single person round about her. They ought to live apart. If she was too poor to subsist upon her widow’s pension, which, in truth, was but a very small pittance, let Clive give up to her, say, the half of his wife’s income of one hundred pounds a year. His prospects and present means of earning money were such that he might afford to do without that portion of his income; at any rate, he and his father would be cheaply ransomed at that price from their imprisonment to this intolerable person. “Go, Clive,” said his counsellors, “and bring back your wife and child, and let us all be happy together.” For, you see, those advisers opined that if we had written over to Mrs. Newcome—“Come”—she would have come with the Campaigner in her suite.
Vowing that he would behave like a man of courage—and we knew that Clive had shown himself to be such in two or three previous battles—Clive crossed the water to bring back his little Rosey. Our good Colonel agreed to dine at our house during the days of his son’s absence. I have said how beloved he was by young and old there—and he was kind enough to say afterwards, that no woman had made him so happy as Laura. We did not tell him—I know not from what reticence—that we had advised Clive to offer a bribe of fifty pounds a year to Mrs. Mackenzie; until about a fortnight after Clive’s absence, and a week after his return, when news came that poor old Mrs. Mason was dead at Newcome, whereupon we informed the Colonel that he had another pensioner now in the Campaigner.
Colonel Newcome was thankful that his dear old friend had gone out of the world in comfort and without pain. She had made a will long since, leaving all her goods and chattels to Thomas Newcome—but having no money to give, the Colonel handed over these to the old lady’s faithful attendant, Keziah.
Although many of the Colonel’s old friends had parted from him or quarrelled with him in consequence of the ill success of the B. B. C., there were two old ladies who yet remained faithful to him—Miss Cann, namely, and honest little Miss Honeyman of Brighton, who, when she heard of the return to London of her nephew and brother-in-law, made a railway journey to the metropolis (being the first time she ever engaged in that kind of travelling), rustled into Clive’s apartments in Howland Street in her neatest silks, and looking not a day older than on that when we last beheld her; and after briskly scolding the young man for permitting his father to enter into money affairs—of which the poor dear Colonel was as ignorant as a baby—she gave them both to understand that she had a little sum at her banker’s at their disposal—and besought the Colonel to remember that her house was his, and that she should be proud and happy to receive him as soon and as often and for as long a time as he would honour her with his company. “Is not my house full of your presents”—cried the stout little old lady—“have I not reason to be grateful to all the Newcomes—yes, to all the Newcomes;—for Miss Ethel and her family have come to me every year for months, and I don’t quarrel with them, and I won’t, although you do, sir? Is not this shawl—are not these jewels that I wear,” she continued, pointing to those well-known ornaments, “my dear Colonel’s gift? Did you not relieve my brother Charles in this country and procure for him his place in India? Yes, my dear friend—and though you have been imprudent in money matters, my obligations towards you, and my gratitude, and my affection are always the same.” Thus Miss Honeyman spoke, with somewhat of a quivering voice at the end of her little oration, but with exceeding state and dignity—for she believed that her investment of two hundred pounds in that unlucky B. B. C., which failed for half a million, was a sum of considerable importance, and gave her a right to express her opinion to the Managers.
Clive came back from Boulogne in a week, as we have said—but he came back without his wife, much to our alarm, and looked so exceedingly fierce and glum when we demanded the reason of his return without his family, that we saw wars and battles had taken place, and thought that in this last continental campaign the Campaigner had been too much for her friend.
The Colonel, to whom Clive communicated, though with us the poor lad held his tongue, told my wife what had happened:—not all the battles; which no doubt raged at breakfast, dinner, supper, during the week of Clive’s visit to Boulogne,—but the upshot of these engagements. Rosey, not unwilling in her first private talk with her husband to come to England with him and the boy, showed herself irresolute on the second day at breakfast, when the fire was opened on both sides; cried at dinner when fierce assaults took place, in which Clive had the advantage; slept soundly, but besought him to be very firm, and met the enemy at breakfast with a quaking heart; cried all that day during which, pretty well without cease, the engagement lasted; and when Clive might have conquered and brought her off, but the weather was windy and the sea was rough, and he was pronounced a brute to venture on it with a wife in Rosey’s situation.
Behind that “situation” the widow shielded herself. She clung to her adored child, and from that bulwark discharged abuse and satire at Clive and his father. He could not rout her out of her position. Having had the advantage on the first two or three days, on the four last he was beaten, and lost ground in each action. Rosey found that in her situation she could not part from her darling mamma. The Campaigner for her part averred that she might be reduced to beggary; that she might be robbed of her last farthing and swindled and cheated; that she might see her daughter’s fortune flung away by unprincipled adventurers, and her blessed child left without even the comforts of life; but desert her in such a situation, she never would—no, never! Was not dear Rosa’s health already impaired by the various shocks which she had undergone? Did she not require every comfort, every attendance? Monster! ask the doctor! She would stay with her darling child in spite of insult and rudeness and vulgarity. (Rosey’s father was a King’s officer, not a Company’s officer, thank God!) She would stay as long at least as Rosey’s situation continued, at Boulogne, if not in London, but with her child. They might refuse to send her money, having robbed her of all her own, but she would pawn her gown off her back for her child. Whimpers from Rosey—cries of “Mamma, mamma, compose yourself,”—convulsive sobs—clenched knuckles—flashing eyes—embraces rapidly clutched—laughs—stamps—snorts—from the dishevelled Campaigner; grinding teeth—livid fury and repeated breakages of the third commandment by Clive—I can fancy the whole scene. He returned to London without his wife, and when she came she brought Mrs. Mackenzie with her.
LXXV. Founder’s Day at the Grey Friars
Rosey came, bringing discord and wretchedness with her to her husband, and the sentence of death or exile to his dear old father, all of which we foresaw—all of which Clive’s friends would have longed to prevent—all of which were inevitable under the circumstances. Clive’s domestic affairs were often talked over by our little set. Warrington and F. B. knew of his unhappiness. We three had strongly opined that the women being together at Boulogne, should stay there and live there, Clive sending them over pecuniary aid as his means permitted. “They must hate each other pretty well by this time,” growls George Warrington. “Why on earth should they not part?” “What a woman that Mrs. Mackenzie is!” cries F. B. “What an infernal tartar and catamaran! She who was so uncommonly smiling and soft-spoken, and such a fine woman, by jingo! What puzzles all women are!” F. B. sighed, and drowned further reflection in beer.
On the other side, and most strongly advocating Rosey’s return to Clive, was Mrs. Laura Pendennis; with certain arguments for which she had chapter and verse, and against which we of the separatist party had no appeal. “Did he marry her only for the days of her prosperity?” asked Laura. “Is it right, is it manly, that he should leave her now she is unhappy—poor little creature—no woman had ever more need of protection; and who should be her natural guardian save her husband? Surely, Arthur, you forget—have you forgotten them yourself, sir?—the solemn vows which Clive made at the altar. Is he not bound to his wife to keep only unto her so long as they both shall live, to love and comfort her, honour her, and keep her in sickness and health?”
“To keep her, yes—but not to keep the Campaigner,” cries Mr. Pendennis. “It is a moral bigamy, Laura, which you advocate, you wicked, immoral young woman!”
But Laura, though she smiled at this notion, would not be put off from her first proposition. Turning to Clive, who was with us, talking over his doleful family circumstances, she took his hand, and pleaded the cause of right and religion with sweet artless fervour. She agreed with us that it was a hard lot for Clive to bear. So much the nobler the task, and the fulfilment of duty in enduring it. A few months too would put an end to his trials. When his child was born Mrs. Mackenzie would take her departure. It would even be Clive’s duty to separate from her then, as it now was to humour his wife in her delicate condition, and to soothe the poor soul who had had a great deal of ill-health, of misfortune, of domestic calamity to wear and shatter her. Clive acquiesced with a groan, but—with a touching and generous resignation as we both thought. “She is right, Pen,” he said, “I think your wife is always right. I will try, Laura, and bear my part, God help me! I will do my duty and strive my best to soothe and gratify my poor dear little woman. They will be making caps and things, and will not interrupt me in my studio. Of nights I can go to Clipstone Street and work at the Life. There’s nothing like the Life, Pen. So you see I shan’t be much at home except at meal-times, when by nature I shall have my mouth full, and no opportunity of quarrelling with poor Mrs. Mac.” So he went home, followed and cheered by the love and pity of my dear wife, and determined stoutly to bear this heavy yoke which fate had put on him.
To do Mrs. Mackenzie justice, that lady backed up with all her might the statement which my wife had put forward, with a view of soothing poor Clive, viz., that the residence of his mother-in-law in his house was only to be temporary. “Temporary!” cries Mrs. Mac (who was kind enough to make a call on Mrs. Pendennis, and treat that lady to a piece of her mind). “Do you suppose, madam, that it could be otherwise? Do you suppose that worlds would induce me to stay in a house where I have received such treatment; where, after I and my daughter had been robbed of every shilling of our fortune, where we are daily insulted by Colonel Newcome and his son? Do you suppose, ma’am, that I do not know that Clive’s friends hate me, and give themselves airs and look down upon my darling child, and try and make differences between my sweet Rosa and me—Rosa who might have been dead, or might have been starving, but that her dear mother came to her rescue? No, I would never stay. I loathe every day that I remain in the house—I would rather beg my bread—I would rather sweep the streets and starve—though, thank God, I have my pension as the widow of an officer in Her Majesty’s Service, and I can live upon that—and of that Colonel Newcome cannot rob me; and when my darling love needs a mother’s care no longer, I will leave her. I will shake the dust off my feet and leave that house. I will—And Mr. Newcome’s friends may then sneer at me and abuse me, and blacken my darling child’s heart towards me if they choose. And I thank you, Mrs. Pendennis, for all your kindness towards my daughter’s family, and for the furniture which you have sent into the house, and for the trouble you have taken about our family arrangements. It was for this I took the liberty of calling upon you, and I wish you a very good morning.” So speaking, the Campaigner left my wife; and Mrs. Pendennis enacted the pleasing scene with great spirit to her husband afterwards, concluding the whole with a splendid curtsey and toss of the head, such as Mrs. Mackenzie performed as her parting salute.
Our dear Colonel had fled before. He had acquiesced humbly with the decree of fate; and, lonely, old and beaten, marched honestly on the path of duty. It was a great blessing, he wrote to us, to him to think that in happier days and during many years he had been enabled to benefit his kind and excellent relative, Miss Honeyman. He could thankfully receive her hospitality now, and claim the kindness and shelter which this old friend gave him. No one could be more anxious to make him comfortable. The air of Brighton did him the greatest good; he had found some old friends, some old Bengalees there, with whom he enjoyed himself greatly, etc. How much did we, who knew his noble spirit, believe of this story? To us Heaven had awarded health, happiness, competence, loving children, united hearts, and modest prosperity. To yonder good man, whose long life shone with benefactions, and whose career was but kindness and honour, fate decreed poverty, disappointment, separation, a lonely old age. We bowed our heads, humiliated at the contrast of his lot and ours; and prayed Heaven to enable us to bear our present good fortune meekly, and our evil days, if they should come, with such a resignation as this good Christian showed.
I forgot to say that our attempts to better Thomas Newcome’s money affairs were quite in vain, the Colonel insisting upon paying over every shilling of his military allowances and retiring pension to the parties from whom he had borrowed money previous to his bankruptcy. “Ah! what a good man that is,” says Mr. Sherrick with tears in his eyes, “what a noble fellow, sir! He would die rather than not pay every farthing over. He’d starve, sir, that he would. The money ain’t mine, sir, or if it was do you think I’d take it from the poor old boy? No, sir; by Jove! I honour and reverence him more now he ain’t got a shilling in his pocket, than ever I did when we thought he was a-rolling in money.”
My wife made one or two efforts at Samaritan visits in Howland Street, but was received by Mrs. Clive with such a faint welcome, and by the Campaigner with so grim a countenance, so many sneers, innuendoes, insults almost, that Laura’s charity was beaten back, and she ceased to press good offices thus thanklessly received. If Clive came to visit us, as he very rarely did, after an official question or two regarding the health of his wife and child, no further mention was made of his family affairs. His painting, he said, was getting on tolerably well; he had work, scantily paid it is true, but work sufficient. He was reserved, uncommunicative, unlike the frank Clive of former times, and oppressed by his circumstances, as it was easy to see. I did not press the confidence which he was unwilling to offer, and thought best to respect his silence. I had a thousand affairs of my own; who has not in London? If you die to-morrow, your dearest friend will feel for you a hearty pang of sorrow, and go to his business as usual. I could divine, but would not care to describe, the life which my poor Clive was now leading; the vulgar misery, the sordid home, the cheerless toil, and lack of friendly companionship which darkened his kind soul. I was glad Clive’s father was away. The Colonel wrote to us twice or thrice; could it be three months ago?—bless me, how time flies! He was happy, he wrote, with Miss Honeyman, who took the best care of him.
Mention has been made once or twice in the course of this history of the Grey Friars school,—where the Colonel and Clive and I had been brought up,—an ancient foundation of the time of James I., still subsisting in the heart of London city. The death-day of the founder of the place is still kept solemnly by Cistercians. In their chapel, where assemble the boys of the school, and the fourscore old men of the Hospital, the founder’s tomb stands, a huge edifice: emblazoned with heraldic decorations and clumsy carved allegories. There is an old Hall, a beautiful specimen of the architecture of James’s time; an old Hall? many old halls; old staircases, passages, old chambers decorated with old portraits, walking in the midst of which we walk as it were in the early seventeenth century. To others than Cistercians, Grey Friars is a dreary place possibly. Nevertheless, the pupils educated there love to revisit it; and the oldest of us grow young again for an hour or two as we come back into those scenes of childhood.
The custom of the school is, that on the 12th of December, the Founder’s Day, the head gown-boy shall recite a Latin oration, in praise of Fundatoris Nostri, and upon other subjects; and a goodly company of old Cistercians is generally brought together to attend this oration: after which we go to chapel and hear a sermon; after which we adjourn to a great dinner, where old condisciples meet, old toasts are given, and speeches are made. Before marching from the oration-hall to chapel, the stewards of the day’s dinner, according to old-fashioned rite, have wands put into their hands, walk to church at the head of the procession, and sit there in places of honour. The boys are already in their seats, with smug fresh faces, and shining white collars; the old black-gowned pensioners are on their benches; the chapel is lighted, and Founder’s Tomb, with its grotesque carvings, monsters, heraldries, darkles and shines with the most wonderful shadows and lights. There he lies, Fundator Noster, in his ruff and gown, awaiting the great Examination Day. We oldsters, be we ever so old, become boys again as we look at that familiar old tomb, and think how the seats are altered since we were here, and how the doctor—not the present doctor, the doctor of our time—used to sit yonder, and his awful eye used to frighten us shuddering boys, on whom it lighted; and how the boy next us would kick our shins during service time, and how the monitor would cane us afterwards because our shins were kicked. Yonder sit forty cherry-cheeked boys, thinking about home and holidays to-morrow. Yonder sit some threescore old gentlemen pensioners of the hospital, listening to the prayers and the psalms. You hear them coughing feebly in the twilight,—the old reverend blackgowns. Is Codd Ajax alive, you wonder?—the Cistercian lads called these old gentlemen Codds, I know not wherefore—I know not wherefore—but is old Codd Ajax alive, I wonder? or Codd Soldier? or kind old Codd Gentleman, or has the grave closed over them? A plenty of candles lights up this chapel, and this scene of age and youth, and early memories, and pompous death. How solemn the well-remembered prayers are, here uttered again in the place wherein childhood we used to hear them! How beautiful and decorous the rite; how noble the ancient words of the supplications which the priest utters, and to which generations of fresh children and troops of bygone seniors have cried Amen! under those arches! The service for Founder’s Day is a special one; one of the psalms selected being the thirty-seventh, and we hear—
23. The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord: and he delighteth in his way. 24. Though he fall, he shall not be utterly cast down: for the Lord upholdeth him with his hand. 25. I have been young, and now am old: yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging their bread.
As we came to this verse, I chanced to look up from my book towards the swarm of black-coated pensioners: and amongst them—amongst them—sate Thomas Newcome.
His dear old head was bent down over his prayer-book—there was no mistaking him. He wore the black gown of the pensioners of the Hospital of Grey Friars. His order of the Bath was on his breast. He stood there amongst the poor brethren, uttering the responses to the psalm. The steps of this good man had been ordered him hither by Heaven’s decree: to this almshouse! Here it was ordained that a life all love, and kindness, and honour, should end! I heard no more of prayers, and psalms, and sermon, after that. How dared I to be in a place of mark, and he, he yonder among the poor? Oh, pardon, you noble soul! I ask forgiveness of you for being of a world that has so treated you—you my better, you the honest, and gentle, and good! I thought the service would never end, or the organist’s voluntaries, or the preacher’s homily.
The organ played us out of chapel at length, and I waited in the ante-chapel until the pensioners took their turn to quit it. My dear, dear old friend! I ran to him with a warmth and eagerness of recognition which no doubt showed themselves in my face and accents, as my heart was moved at the sight of him. His own face flushed up when he saw me, and his hand shook in mine. “I have found a home, Arthur,” said he. “Don’t you remember before I went to India, when we came to see the old Grey Friars, and visited Captain Scarsdale in his room?—a poor brother like me—an old Peninsular man. Scarsdale is gone now, sir, and is where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest; and I thought then, when we saw him,—here would be a place for an old fellow when his career was over, to hang his sword up; to humble his soul, and to wait thankfully for the end. Arthur. My good friend, Lord H., who is a Cistercian like ourselves, and has just been appointed a governor, gave me his first nomination. Don’t be agitated, Arthur my boy, I am very happy. I have good quarters, good food, good light and fire, and good friends; blessed be God! my dear kind young friend—my boy’s friend; you have always been so, sir; and I take it uncommonly kind of you, and I thank God for you, sir. Why, sir, I am as happy as the day is long.” He uttered words to this effect as he walked through the courts of the building towards his room, which in truth I found neat and comfortable, with a brisk fire crackling on the hearth; a little tea-table laid out, a Bible and spectacles by the side of it, and over the mantelpiece a drawing of his grandson by Clive.
“You may come and see me here, sir, whenever you like, and so may your dear wife and little ones, tell Laura, with my love;—but you must not stay now. You must go back to your dinner.” In vain I pleaded that I had no stomach for it. He gave me a look, which seemed to say he desired to be alone, and I had to respect that order and leave him.
Of course I came to him on the very next day; though not with my wife and children, who were in truth absent in the country at Rosebury, where they were to pass the Christmas holidays; and where, this school-dinner over, I was to join them. On my second visit to Grey Friars my good friend entered more at length into the reasons why he had assumed the Poor Brother’s gown; and I cannot say but that I acquiesced in his reasons, and admired that noble humility and contentedness of which he gave me an example.
“That which had caused him most grief and pain,” he said, “in the issue of that unfortunate bank, was the thought that poor friends of his had been induced by his representations to invest their little capital in that speculation. Good Miss Honeyman, for instance, meaning no harm, and in all respects a most honest and kindly-disposed old lady, had nevertheless alluded more than once to the fact that her money had been thrown away; and these allusions, sir, made her hospitality somewhat hard to bear,” said the Colonel. “At home—at poor Clivey’s, I mean—it was even worse,” he continued; “Mrs. Mackenzie for months past, by her complaints, and—and her conduct, has made my son and me so miserable—that flight before her, and into any refuge, was the best course. She too does not mean ill, Pen. Do not waste any of your oaths upon that poor woman,” he added, holding up his finger, and smiling sadly. “She thinks I deceived her, though Heaven knows it was myself I deceived. She has great influence over Rosa. Very few persons can resist that violent and headstrong woman, sir. I could not bear her reproaches, or my poor sick daughter, whom her mother leads almost entirely now, and it was with all this grief on my mind, that, as I was walking one day upon Brighton cliff, I met my schoolfellow, my Lord H——, who has ever been a good friend of mine—and who told me how he had just been appointed a governor of Grey Friars. He asked me to dine with him on the next day, and would take no refusal. He knew of my pecuniary misfortunes, of course—and showed himself most noble and liberal in his offers of help. I was very much touched by his goodness, Pen,—and made a clean breast of it to his lordship; who at first would not hear of my coming to this place—and offered me out of the purse of an old brother-schoolfellow and an old brother soldier as much—as much as should last me my time. Wasn’t it noble of him, Arthur? God bless him! There are good men in the world, sir, there are true friends, as I have found in these later days. Do you know, sir”—here the old man’s eyes twinkled,—“that Fred Bayham fixed up that bookcase yonder—and brought me my little boy’s picture to hang up? Boy and Clive will come and see me soon.”
“Do you mean they do not come?” I cried.
“They don’t know I am here, sir,” said the Colonel, with a sweet, kind smile. “They think I am visiting his lordship in Scotland. Ah! they are good people! When we had had a talk downstairs over our bottle of claret—where my old commander-in-chief would not hear of my plan—we went upstairs to her ladyship, who saw that her husband was disturbed, and asked the reason. I dare say it was the good claret that made me speak, sir; for I told her that I and her husband had had a dispute and that I would take her ladyship for umpire. And then I told her the story over, that I had paid away every rupee to the creditors, and mortgaged my pensions and retiring allowances for the same end, that I was a burden upon Clivey, who had enough, poor boy, to keep his own family, and his wife’s mother, whom my imprudence had impoverished,—that here was an honourable asylum which my friend could procure for me, and was not that better than to drain his purse? She was very much moved, sir—she is a very kind lady, though she passed for being very proud and haughty in India—so wrongly are people judged. And Lord H. said, in his rough way, ‘that, by Jove, if Tom Newcome took a thing into his obstinate old head no one could drive it out.’ And so,” said the Colonel, with his sad smile, “I had my own way. Lady H. was good enough to come and see me the very next day—and do you know, Pen, she invited me to go and live with them for the rest of my life—made me the most generous, the most delicate offers. But I knew I was right, and held my own. I am too old to work, Arthur: and better here whilst I am to stay, than elsewhere. Look! all this furniture came from H. House—and that wardrobe is full of linen, which she sent me. She has been twice to see me, and every officer in this hospital is as courteous to me as if I had my fine house.”
I thought of the psalm we had heard on the previous evening, and turned to it in the opened Bible, and pointed to the verse, “Though he fall, he shall not be utterly cast down: for the Lord upholdeth him.” Thomas Newcome seeing my occupation, laid a kind, trembling hand on my shoulder; and then, putting on his glasses, with a smile bent over the volume. And who that saw him then, and knew him and loved him as I did—who would not have humbled his own heart, and breathed his inward prayer, confessing and adoring the Divine Will, which ordains these trials, these triumphs, these humiliations, these blest griefs, this crowning Love?
I had the happiness of bringing Clive and his little boy to Thomas Newcome that evening; and heard the child’s cry of recognition and surprise, and the old man calling the boy’s name, as I closed the door upon that meeting; and by the night’s mail I went down to Newcome, to the friends with whom my own family was already staying.
Of course, my conscience-keeper at Rosebury was anxious to know about the school-dinner, and all the speeches made, and the guests assembled there; but she soon ceased to inquire about these when I came to give her the news of the discovery of our dear old friend in the habit of a Poor Brother of Grey Friars. She was very glad to hear that Clive and his little son had been reunited to the Colonel; and appeared to imagine at first, that there was some wonderful merit upon my part in bringing the three together.
“Well—no great merit, Pen, as you will put it,” says the Confessor; “but it was kindly thought, sir—and I like my husband when he is kind best; and don’t wonder at your having made a stupid speech at the dinner, as you say you did, when you had this other subject to think of. That is a beautiful psalm, Pen, and those verses which you were reading when you saw him, especially beautiful.”
“But in the presence of eighty old gentlemen, who have all come to decay, and have all had to beg their bread in a manner, don’t you think the clergyman might choose some other psalm?” asks Mr. Pendennis.
“They were not forsaken utterly, Arthur,” says Mrs. Laura, gravely: but rather declines to argue the point raised by me; namely, that the selection of that especial thirty-seventh psalm was not complimentary to those decayed old gentlemen.
“All the psalms are good, sir,” she says, “and this one, of course, is included,” and thus the discussion closed.
I then fell to a description of Howland Street, and poor Clive, whom I had found there over his work. A dubious maid scanned my appearance rather eagerly when I asked to see him. I found a picture-dealer chaffering with him over a bundle of sketches, and his little boy, already pencil in hand, lying in one corner of the room, the sun playing about his yellow hair. The child looked languid and pale, the father worn and ill. When the dealer at length took his bargains away, I gradually broke my errand to Clive, and told him from whence I had just come.
He had thought his father in Scotland with Lord H.: and was immensely moved with the news which I brought.
“I haven’t written to him for a month. It’s not pleasant the letters I have to write, Pen, and I can’t make them pleasant. Up, Tommykin, and put on your cap.” Tommykin jumps up. “Put on your cap, and tell them to take off your pinafore, tell grandmamma——”
At that name Tommykin begins to cry.
“Look at that!” says Clive, commencing to speak in the French language, which the child interrupts by calling out in that tongue. “I speak also French, papa.”
“Well, my child! You will like to come out with papa, and Betsy can dress you.” He flings off his own paint-stained shooting-jacket as he talks, takes a frock-coat out of a carved wardrobe, and a hat from a helmet on the shelf. He is no longer the handsome splendid boy of old times. Can that be Clive, with that haggard face and slouched handkerchief? “I am not the dandy I was, Pen,” he says bitterly.
A little voice is heard crying overhead—and giving a kind of gasp the wretched father stops in some indifferent speech he was trying to make. “I can’t help myself,” he groans out; “my wife is so ill, she can’t attend to the child. Mrs. Mackenzie manages the house for me—and—here! Tommy, Tommy! papa is coming!” Tommy has been crying again; and flinging open the studio door, Clive calls out, and dashes upstairs.
I hear scuffling, stamping, loud voices, poor Tommy’s scared little pipe—Clive’s fierce objurgations, and the Campaigner’s voice barking out—“Do, sir, do! with my child suffering in the next room. Behave like a brute to me, do. He shall not go! He shall not have the hat”—“He shall”—“Ah—ah!” A scream is heard. It is Clive tearing a child’s hat out of the Campaigner’s hands, with which, and a flushed face, he presently rushes downstairs, bearing little Tommy on his shoulder.
“You see what I am come to, Pen,” he says with a heartbroken voice, trying, with hands all of a tremble, to tie the hat on the boy’s head. He laughs bitterly at the ill success of his endeavours. “Oh, you silly papa!” laughs Tommy, too.
The door is flung open, and the red-faced Campaigner appears. Her face is mottled with wrath, her bandeaux of hair are disarranged upon her forehead, the ornaments of her cap, cheap, and dirty, and numerous, only give her a wilder appearance. She is in a large and dingy wrapper, very different from the lady who had presented herself a few months back to my wife—how different from the smiling Mrs. Mackenzie of old days!
“He shall not go out of a winter day, sir,” she breaks out. “I have his mother’s orders, whom you are killing. Mr. Pendennis!” She starts, perceiving me for the first time, and her breast heaves, and she prepares for combat, and looks at me over her shoulder.
“You and his father are the best judges upon this point, ma’am,” said Mr. Pendennis, with a bow.
“The child is delicate, sir,” cries Mrs. Mackenzie; “and this winter——”
“Enough of this,” says Clive with a stamp, and passes through her guard with Tommy, and we descend the stairs, and at length are in the free street. Was it not best not to describe at full length this portion of poor Clive’s history?
LXXVI. Christmas at Rosebury
We have known our friend Florac under two aristocratic names, and might now salute him by a third, to which he was entitled, although neither he nor his wife ever chose to assume it. His father was lately dead, and M. Paul de Florac might sign himself Duc d’Ivry if he chose, but he was indifferent as to the matter, and his wife’s friends indignant at the idea that their kinswoman, after having been a Princess, should descend to the rank of a mere Duchess. So Prince and Princess these good folks remained, being exceptions to that order, inasmuch as their friends could certainly put their trust in them.
On his father’s death Florac went to Paris, to settle the affairs of the paternal succession; and, having been for some time absent in his native country, returned to Rosebury for the winter, to resume that sport of which he was a distinguished amateur. He hunted in black during the ensuing season; and, indeed, henceforth laid aside his splendid attire and his allures as a young man. His waist expanded, or was no longer confined by the cestus which had given it a shape. When he laid aside his black, his whiskers, too, went into a sort of half-mourning, and appeared in grey. “I make myself old, my friend,” he said, pathetically; “I have no more neither twenty years nor forty.” He went to Rosebury Church no more; but, with great order and sobriety, drove every Sunday to the neighbouring Catholic chapel at C—— Castle. We had an ecclesiastic or two to dine with us at Rosebury, one of whom I inclined to think was Florac’s director.
A reason, perhaps, for Paul’s altered demeanour, was the presence of his mother at Rosebury. No politeness or respect could be greater than Paul’s towards the Countess. Had she been a sovereign princess, Madame de Florac could not have been treated with more profound courtesy than she now received from her son. I think the humble-minded lady could have dispensed with some of his attentions; but Paul was a personage who demonstrated all his sentiments, and performed his various parts in life with the greatest vigour. As a man of pleasure, for instance, what more active roué than he? As a jeune homme, who could be younger, and for a longer time? As a country gentleman, or an homme d’affaires, he insisted upon dressing each character with the most rigid accuracy, and an exactitude that reminded one somewhat of Bouffé, or Ferville, at the play. I wonder whether, when is he quite old, he will think proper to wear a pigtail, like his old father? At any rate, that was a good part which the kind fellow was now acting, of reverence towards his widowed mother, and affectionate respect for her declining days. He not only felt these amiable sentiments, but he imparted them to his friends most freely, as his wont was. He used to weep freely,—quite unrestrained by the presence of the domestics, as English sentiment would be:—and when Madame de Florac quitted the room after dinner, would squeeze my hand and tell me with streaming eyes, that his mother was an angel. “Her life has been but a long trial, my friend,” he would say. “Shall not I, who have caused her to shed so many tears, endeavour to dry some?” Of course the friends who liked him best encouraged him in an intention so pious.
The reader has already been made acquainted with this lady by the letters of hers, which came into my possession some time after the events which I am at present narrating: my wife, through our kind friend, Colonel Newcome, had also had the honour of an introduction to Madame de Florac at Paris; and, on coming to Rosebury for the Christmas holidays, I found Laura and the children greatly in favour with the good Countess. She treated her son’s wife with a perfect though distant courtesy. She was thankful to Madame de Moncontour for the latter’s great goodness to her son. Familiar with but very few persons, she could scarcely be intimate with her homely daughter-in-law. Madame de Moncontour stood in the greatest awe of her; and, to do that good lady justice, admired and reverenced Paul’s mother with all her simple heart. In truth, I think almost every one had a certain awe of Madame de Florac, except children, who came to her trustingly, and, as it were, by instinct. The habitual melancholy of her eyes vanished as they lighted upon young faces and infantile smiles. A sweet love beamed out of her countenance: an angelic smile shone over her face, as she bent towards them and caressed them. Her demeanour then, nay, her looks and ways at other times;—a certain gracious sadness, a sympathy with all grief, and pity for all pain; a gentle heart, yearning towards all children; and, for her own especially, feeling a love that was almost an anguish: in the affairs of the common world only a dignified acquiescence, as if her place was not in it, and her thoughts were in her Home elsewhere;—these qualities, which we had seen exemplified in another life, Laura and her husband watched in Madame de Florac, and we loved her because she was like our mother. I see in such women, the good and pure, the patient and faithful, the tried and meek, the followers of Him whose earthly life was divinely sad and tender.
But, good as she was to us and to all, Ethel Newcome was the French lady’s greatest favourite. A bond of extreme tenderness and affection united these two. The elder friend made constant visits to the younger at Newcome; and when Miss Newcome, as she frequently did, came to Rosebury, we used to see that they preferred to be alone; divining and respecting the sympathy which brought those two faithful hearts together. I can imagine now the two tall forms slowly pacing the garden walks, or turning, as they lighted on the young ones in their play. What was their talk! I never asked it. Perhaps Ethel never said what was in her heart, though, be sure, the other knew it. Though the grief of those they love is untold, women hear it; as they soothe it with unspoken consolations. To see the elder lady embrace her friend as they parted was something holy—a sort of saintlike salutation.
Consulting the person from whom I had no secrets, we had thought best at first not to mention to our friends the place and position in which we had found our dear Colonel; at least to wait for a fitting opportunity on which we might break the news to those who held him in such affection. I told how Clive was hard at work, and hoped the best for him. Good-natured Madame de Moncontour was easily satisfied with my replies to her questions concerning our friend. Ethel only asked if he and her uncle were well, and once or twice made inquiries respecting Rosa and her child. And now it was that my wife told me, what I need no longer keep secret, of Ethel’s extreme anxiety to serve her distressed relatives, and how she, Laura, had already acted as Miss Newcome’s almoner in furnishing and hiring those apartments, which Ethel believed were occupied by Clive and his father, and wife and child. And my wife further informed me with what deep grief Ethel had heard of her uncle’s misfortune, and how, but that she feared to offend his pride, she longed to give him assistance. She had even ventured to offer to send him pecuniary help; but the Colonel (who never mentioned the circumstance to me or any other of his friends), in a kind but very cold letter, had declined to be beholden to his niece for help.
So I may have remained some days at Rosebury, and the real position of the two Newcomes was unknown to our friends there. Christmas Eve was come, and, according to a long-standing promise, Ethel Newcome and her two children had arrived from the Park, which dreary mansion, since his double defeat, Sir Barnes scarcely ever visited. Christmas was come, and Rosebury hall was decorated with holly. Florac did his best to welcome his friends, and strove to make the meeting gay, though in truth it was rather melancholy. The children, however, were happy: and they had pleasure enough, in the school festival, in the distribution of cloaks and blankets to the poor, and in Madame de Moncontour’s gardens, delightful and beautiful though the winter was there.
It was only a family meeting, Madame de Florac’s widowhood not permitting her presence in large companies. Paul sate at his table between his mother and Mrs. Pendennis; Mr. Pendennis opposite to him, with Ethel and Madame de Moncontour on each side. The four children were placed between these personages, on whom Madame de Florac looked with her tender glances, and to whose little wants the kindest of hosts ministered with uncommon good-nature and affection. He was very soft-hearted about children. “Pourquoi n’en avons-nous pas, Jeanne? He! quoi n’en avons-nous pas?” he said, addressing his wife by her Christian name. The poor little lady looked kindly at her husband, and then gave a sigh, and turned and heaped cake upon the plate of the child next to her. No mamma or Aunt Ethel could interpose. It was a very light wholesome cake. Brown made it on purpose for the children, “the little darlings!” cries the Princess.
The children were very happy at being allowed to sit up so late to dinner, at all the kindly amusements of the day, at the holly and mistletoe clustering round the lamps—the mistletoe, under which the gallant Florac, skilled in all British usages, vowed he would have his privilege. But the mistletoe was clustered round the lamp, the lamp was over the centre of the great round table—the innocent gratification which he proposed to himself was denied to M. Paul.
In the greatest excitement and good-humour, our host at the dessert made us des speech. He carried a toast to the charming Ethel, another to the charming Mistriss Laura, another to his good fren’, his brave frren’, his ’appy fren’, Pendennis—’appy as possessor of such a wife, ’appy as writer of works destined to the immortality, etc. etc. The little children round about clapped their happy little hands, and laughed and crowed in chorus. And now the nursery and its guardians were about to retreat, when Florac said he had yet a speech, yet a toast—and he bade the butler pour wine into every one’s glass—yet a toast—and he carried it to the health of our dear friends, of Clive and his father,—the good, the brave Colonel! “We who are happy,” says he, “shall we not think of those who are good? We who love each other, shall we not remember those whom we all love?” He spoke with very great tenderness and feeling. “Ma bonne mere, thou too shalt drink this toast!” he said, taking his mother’s hand, and kissing it. She returned his caress gently, and tasted the wine with her pale lips. Ethel’s head bent in silence over her glass; and, as for Laura, need I say what happened to her! When the ladies went away my heart was opened to my friend Florac, and I told him where and how I had left my dear Clive’s father.
The Frenchman’s emotion on hearing this tale was such that I have loved him ever since. Clive in want! Why had he not sent to his friend? Grands Dieux! Clive who had helped him in his greatest distress! Clive’s father, ce preux chevalier, ce parfait gentilhomme! In a hundred rapid exclamations Florac exhibited his sympathy, asking of Fate, why such men as he and I were sitting surrounded by splendours—before golden vases crowned with flowers—with valets to kiss our feet—(those were merely figures of speech in which Paul expressed his prosperity)—whilst our friend the Colonel, so much better than we, spent his last days in poverty, and alone.
I liked Florac none the less, I own, because that one of the conditions of the Colonel’s present life, which appeared the hardest to most people, affected Florac but little. To be a Pensioner of an Ancient Institution? Why not? Might not a man retire without shame to the Invalides at the close of his campaigns, and, had not Fortune conquered our old friend, and age and disaster overcome him? It never once entered Thomas Newcome’s head; nor Clive’s, nor Florac’s, nor his mother’s, that the Colonel demeaned himself at all by accepting that bounty; and I recollect Warrington sharing our sentiment and trowling out those noble lines of the old poet:—
“His golden locks time hath to silver turned; O time too swift, O swiftness never ceasing! His youth ’gainst time and age hath ever spurned, But spurned in vain; youth waneth by encreasing. Beauty, strength, youth, are flowers but fading seen. Duty, faith, love, are roots, and ever green.
“His helmet now shall make a hive for bees, And lovers’ songs be turned to holy psalms; A man at arms must now serve on his knees, And feed on prayers, which are old age’s alms.”
These, I say, respected our friend, whatever was the coat he wore; whereas, among the Colonel’s own kinsfolk, dire was the dismay, and indignation even, which they expressed when they came to hear of this, what they were pleased to call degradation to their family. Clive’s dear mother-in-law made outcries over the good old man as over a pauper, and inquired of Heaven, what she had done that her blessed child should have a mendicant for a father? And Mrs. Hobson, in subsequent confidential communication with the writer of these memoirs, improved the occasion religiously as her wont was; referred the matter to Heaven too, and thought fit to assume that the celestial powers had decreed this humiliation, this dreadful trial for the Newcome family, as a warning to them all that they should not be too much puffed up with prosperity, nor set their affections too much upon things of this earth. Had they not already received one chastisement in Barnes’s punishment, and Lady Clara’s awful falling away? They had taught her a lesson, which the Colonel’s lamentable errors had confirmed,—the vanity of trusting in all earthly grandeurs! Thus it was this worthy woman plumed herself, as it were, on her relative’s misfortunes; and was pleased to think the latter were designed for the special warning and advantage of her private family. But Mrs. Hobson’s philosophy is only mentioned by the way. Our story, which is drawing to its close, has to busy itself with other members of the house of The Newcomes.
My talk with Florac lasted for some time: at its close, when we went to join the ladies in the drawing-room, we found Ethel cloaked and shawled, and prepared for her departure with her young ones, who were already asleep. The little festival was over, and had ended in melancholy—even in weeping. Our hostess sate in her accustomed seat by her lamp and her worktable; but, neglecting her needle, she was having perpetual recourse to her pocket-handkerchief, and uttering ejaculations of pity between the intervals of her gushes of tears. Madame de Florac was in her usual place, her head cast downwards, and her hands folded. My wife was at her side, a grave commiseration showing itself in Laura’s countenance, whilst I read a yet deeper sadness in Ethel’s pale face. Miss Newcome’s carriage had been announced; the attendants had already carried the young ones asleep to the vehicle; and she was in the act of taking leave. We looked round at this disturbed party, guessing very likely what the subject of their talk had been, to which, however, Miss Ethel did not allude: but, announcing that she had intended to depart without disturbing the two gentlemen, she bade us farewell and good night. “I wish I could say a merry Christmas,” she added gravely, “but none of us, I fear, can hope for that.” It was evident that Laura had told the last chapter of the Colonel’s story.
Madame de Florac rose up and embraced Miss Newcome, and, that farewell over, she sank back on the sofa exhausted, and with such an expression of affliction in her countenance, that my wife ran eagerly towards her. “It is nothing, my dear,” she said, giving a cold hand to the younger lady, and sate silent for a few moments, during which we heard Florac’s voice without crying Adieu! and the wheels of Miss Newcome’s carriage when it drove away.
Our host entered a moment afterwards; and remarking, as Laura had done, his mother’s pallor and look of anguish, went up and spoke to her with the utmost tenderness and anxiety.
She gave her hand to her son, and a faint blush rose up out of the past as it were, and trembled upon her wan cheek. “He was the first friend I ever had in the world, Paul,” she said “the first and the best. He shall not want, shall he, my son?”
No signs of that emotion in which her daughter-in-law had been indulging were as yet visible in Madame de Florac’s eyes, but, as she spoke, holding her son’s hand in hers, the tears at length overflowed, and with a sob, her head fell forwards. The impetuous Frenchman flung himself on his knees before his mother, uttered a hundred words of love and respect for her, and with tears and sobs of his own called God to witness that their friend should never want. And so this mother and son embraced each other, and clung together in a sacred union of love, before which we who had been admitted as spectators of that scene, stood hushed and respectful.
That night Laura told me, how, when the ladies left us, the talk had been entirely about the Colonel and Clive. Madame de Florac had spoken especially, and much more freely than was her wont. She had told many reminiscences of Thomas Newcome, and his early days; how her father taught him mathematics when they were quite poor, and living in their dear little cottage at Blackheath; how handsome he was then, with bright eyes, and long black hair flowing over his shoulders; how military glory was his boyish passion, and he was for ever talking of India, and the famous deeds of Clive and Lawrence. His favourite book was a history of India—the history of Orme. “He read it, and I read it also, my daughter,” the French lady said, turning to Ethel; “ah! I may say so after so many years.”
Ethel remembered the book as belonging to her grandmother, and now in the library at Newcome. Doubtless the same sympathy which caused me to speak about Thomas Newcome that evening, impelled my wife likewise. She told her friends, as I had told Florac, all the Colonel’s story; and it was while these good women were under the impression of the melancholy history, that Florac and his guest found them.
Retired to our rooms, Laura and I talked on the same subject until the clock tolled Christmas, and the neighbouring church bells rang out a jubilation. And, looking out into the quiet night, where the stars were keenly shining, we committed ourselves to rest with humbled hearts; praying, for all those we loved, a blessing of peace and goodwill.
LXXVII. The Shortest and Happiest in the Whole History
In the ensuing Christmas morning I chanced to rise betimes, and entering my dressing-room, opened the windows and looked out on the soft landscape, over which mists were still lying; whilst the serene sky above, and the lawns and leafless woods in the foreground near, were still pink with sunrise. The grey had not even left the west yet, and I could see a star or two twinkling there, to vanish with that twilight.
As I looked out, I saw the not very distant lodge-gate open after a brief parley, and a lady on horseback, followed by a servant, rode rapidly up to the house. This early visitor was no other than Miss Ethel Newcome. The young lady espied me immediately. “Come down; come down to me this moment, Mr. Pendennis,” she cried out. I hastened down to her, supposing rightly that news of importance had brought her to Rosebury so early.
The news were of importance indeed. “Look here!” she said, “read this;” and she took a paper from the pocket of her habit. “When I went home last night, after Madame de Florac had been talking to us about Orme’s India, I took the volumes from the bookcase and found this paper. It is in my grandmother’s—Mrs. Newcome’s—handwriting; I know it quite well, it is dated on the very day of her death. She had been writing and reading in her study on that very night; I have often heard papa speak of the circumstance. Look and read. You are a lawyer, Mr. Pendennis; tell me about this paper.”
I seized it eagerly, and cast my eyes over it; but having read it, my countenance fell.
“My dear Miss Newcome, it is not worth a penny,” I was obliged to own.
“Yes, it is, sir, to honest people!” she cried out. “My brother and uncle will respect it as Mrs. Newcome’s dying wish. They must respect it.”
The paper in question was a letter in ink that had grown yellow from time, and was addressed by the late Mrs. Newcome, to “my dear Mr. Luce.”
“That was her solicitor, my solicitor still,” interposes Miss Ethel.
“THE HERMITAGE, March 14, 182-.
“My Dear Mr. Luce” (the defunct lady wrote)—“My late husband’s grandson has been staying with me lately, and is a most pleasing, handsome, and engaging little boy. He bears a strong likeness to his grandfather, I think; and though he has no claims upon me, and I know is sufficiently provided for by his father Lieutenant-Colonel Newcome, C.B., of the East India Company’s Service, I am sure my late dear husband will be pleased that I should leave his grandson, Clive Newcome, a token of peace and goodwill; and I can do so with the more readiness, as it has pleased Heaven greatly to increase my means since my husband was called away hence.
“I desire to bequeath a sum equal to that which Mr. Newcome willed to my eldest son, Brian Newcome, Esq., to Mr. Newcome’s grandson, Clive Newcome; and furthermore, that a token of my esteem and affection, a ring, or a piece of plate, of the value of one £100, be given to Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Newcome, my stepson, whose excellent conduct for many years, and whose repeated acts of gallantry in the service of his sovereign, have long obliterated the just feelings of displeasure with which I could not but view his early disobedience and misbehaviour, before he quitted England against my will, and entered the military service.
“I beg you to prepare immediately a codicil to my will providing for the above bequests; and desire that the amount of these legacies should be taken from the property bequeathed to my eldest son. You will be so good as to prepare the necessary document, and bring it with you when you come on Saturday, to
yours very truly, “Sophia Alethea Newcome.
“Tuesday night.”
I gave back the paper with a sigh to the finder. “It is but a wish of Mrs. Newcome, my dear Miss Ethel,” I said. “Pardon me, if I say, I think I know your elder brother too well to supposes that he will fulfil it.”
“He will fulfil it, sir, I am sure he will,” Miss Newcome said, in a haughty manner. “He would do as much without being asked, I am certain he would, did he know the depth of my dear uncle’s misfortune. Barnes is in London now, and——”
“And you will write to him? I know what the answer will be.”
“I will go to him this very day, Mr. Pendennis! I will go to my dear, dear uncle. I cannot bear to think of him in that place,” cried the young lady, the tears starting into her honest eyes. “It was the will of Heaven. Oh, God be thanked for it! Had we found my grandmamma’s letter earlier, Barnes would have paid the legacy immediately, and the money would have gone in that dreadful bankruptcy. I will go to Barnes to-day. Will you come with me? Won’t you come to your old friends? We may be at his—at Clive’s house this evening; and oh, praise be to God! there need be no more want in his family.”
“My dear friend, I will go with you round the world on such an errand,” I said, kissing her hand. How beautiful she looked; the generous colour rose in her face, her voice thrilled with happiness. The music of Christmas church bells leaped up at this moment with joyful gratulations; the face of the old house, before which we stood talking, shone out in the morning sun.
“You will come I thank you! I must run and tell Madame de Florac,” cried the happy young lady, and we entered the house together. “How came you to be kissing Ethel’s hand, sir; and what is the meaning of this early visit?” asks Mrs. Laura, as soon as I had returned to my own apartments.
“Martha, get me a carpet-bag! I am going to London in an hour,” cries Mr. Pendennis. If I had kissed Ethel’s hand just now, delighted at the news which she brought to me, was not one a thousand times dearer to me, as happy as her friend? I know who prayed with a thankful heart that day as we sped, in the almost solitary train, towards London.
LXXVIII. In which the Author goes on a Pleasant Errand
Before I parted with Miss Newcome at the station, she made me promise to see her on the morrow at an early hour at her brother’s house; and having bidden her farewell and repaired to my own solitary residence, which presented but a dreary aspect on that festive day, I thought I would pay Howland Street a visit; and, if invited, eat my Christmas dinner with Clive.
I found my friend at home, and at work still, in spite of the day. He had promised a pair of pictures to a dealer for the morrow. “He pays me pretty well, and I want all the money he will give me, Pen,” the painter said, rubbing on at his canvas. “I am pretty easy in my mind since I have become acquainted with a virtuous dealer. I sell myself to him, body and soul, for some half-dozen pounds a week. I know I can get my money, and he is regularly supplied with his pictures. But for Rosey’s illness we might carry on well enough.”
Rosey’s illness? I was sorry to hear of that: and poor Clive, entering into particulars, told me how he had spent upon doctors rather more than a fourth of his year’s earnings. “There is a solemn fellow, to whom the women have taken a fancy, who lives but a few doors off in Gower Street; and who, for his last sixteen visits, has taken sixteen pounds sixteen shillings out of my pocket, and as if guineas grew there, with the most admirable gravity. He talks the fashions to my mother-in-law. My poor wife hangs on every word he says. Look! There is his carriage coming up now! and there is his fee, confound him!” says Clive, casting a rueful look towards a little packet lying upon the mantelpiece, by the side of that skinned figure in plaster of Paris which we have seen in most studios.
I looked out of window and saw a certain Fashionable Doctor tripping out of his chariot; that Ladies’ Delight, who has subsequently migrated from Bloomsbury to Belgravia; and who has his polite foot now in a thousand nurseries and boudoirs. What Confessors were in old times, Quackenboss and his like are in our Protestant country. What secrets they know! into what mystic chambers do they not enter! I suppose the Campaigner made a special toilette to receive her fashionable friend, for that lady attired in considerable splendour, and with the precious jewel on her head, which I remembered at Boulogne, came into the studio two minutes after the Doctor’s visit was announced, and made him a low curtsey. I cannot describe the overpowering civilities of that woman.
Clive was very gracious and humble to her. He adopted a lively air in addressing her—“Must work, you know, Christmas Day and all—for the owner of the pictures will call for them in the morning. Bring me a good report about Rosey, Mrs. Mackenzie, please—and if you will have the kindness to look by the écorché there, you will see that little packet which I have left for you.” Mrs. Mack, advancing, took the money. “I thought that plaster of Paris figure was not the only écorché in the room.”
“I want you to stay to dinner. You must stay, Pen, please,” cried Clive; “and be civil to her, will you? My dear old father is coming to dine here. They fancy that he has lodgings at the other end of the town, and that his brothers do something for him. Not a word about Grey Friars. It might agitate Rosa, you know. Ah! isn’t he noble, the dear old boy! and isn’t it fine to see him in that place?” Clive worked on as he talked, using up the last remnant of the light of Christmas Day, and was cleaning his palette and brushes, when Mrs. Mackenzie returned to us.
Darling Rosey was very delicate, but Doctor Quackenboss was going to give her the very same medicine which had done the charming young Duchess of Clackmannanshire so much good, and he was not in the least disquiet.
On this I cut into the conversation with anecdotes concerning the family of the Duchess of Clackmannanshire, remembering early days, when it used to be my sport to entertain the Campaigner with anecdotes of the aristocracy, about whose proceedings she still maintained a laudable curiosity. Indeed, one of few the books escaped out of the wreck of Tyburn Gardens was a Peerage, now a well-worn volume, much read by Rosa and her mother.
The anecdotes were very politely received—perhaps it was the season which made Mrs. Mack and her son-in-law on more than ordinarily good terms. When, turning to the Campaigner, Clive said he wished that she could persuade me to stay to dinner, she acquiesced graciously and at once in that proposal, and vowed that her daughter would be delighted if I could condescend to eat their humble fare. “It is not such a dinner as you have seen at her house, with six side-dishes, two flanks, that splendid epergne, and the silver dishes top and bottom; but such as my Rosey has she offers with a willing heart,” cries the Campaigner.
“And Tom may sit to dinner, mayn’t he, grandmamma?” asks Clive, in a humble voice.
“Oh, if you wish it, sir.”
“His grandfather will like to sit by him,” said Clive. “I will go out and meet him; he comes through Guildford Street and Russell Square,” says Clive. “Will you walk, Pen?”
“Oh, pray don’t let us detain you,” says Mrs. Mackenzie, with a toss of her head: and when she retreated Clive whispered that she would not want me; for she looked to the roasting of the beef and the making of the pudding and the mince-pie.
“I thought she might have a finger in it,” I said; and we set forth to meet the dear old father, who presently came, walking very slowly, along the line by which we expected him. His stick trembled as it fell on the pavement: so did his voice, as he called out Clive’s name: so did his hand, as he stretched it to me. His body was bent, and feeble. Twenty years had not weakened him so much as the last score of months. I walked by the side of my two friends as they went onwards, linked lovingly together. How I longed for the morrow, and hoped they might be united once more! Thomas Newcome’s voice, once so grave, went up to a treble, and became almost childish, as he asked after Boy. His white hair hung over his collar. I could see it by the gas under which we walked—and Clive’s great back and arm, as his father leaned on it, and his brave face turned towards the old man. Oh, Barnes Newcome, Barnes Newcome! Be an honest man for once, and help your kinsfolk! thought I.
The Christmas meal went off in a friendly manner enough. The Campaigner’s eyes were everywhere: it was evident that the little maid who served the dinner, and had cooked a portion of it under their keen supervision, cowered under them, as well as other folks. Mrs. Mack did not make more than ten allusions to former splendours during the entertainment, or half as many apologies to me for sitting down to a table very different from that to which I was accustomed. Good, faithful F. Bayham was the only other guest. He complimented the mince-pies, so that Mrs. Mackenzie owned she had made them. The Colonel was very silent, but he tried to feed Boy, and was only once or twice sternly corrected by the Campaigner. Boy, in the best little words he could muster, asked why grandpapa wore a black cloak? Clive nudged my foot under the table. The secret of the Poor Brothership was very nearly out. The Colonel blushed, and with great presence of mind said he wore a cloak to keep him warm in winter.
Rosey did not say much. She had grown lean and languid: the light of her eyes had gone out: all her pretty freshness had faded. She ate scarce anything, though her mother pressed her eagerly, and whispered loudly that a woman in her situation ought to strengthen herself. Poor Rosey was always in a situation.
When the cloth was withdrawn, the Colonel bending his head said, “Thank God for what we have received,” so reverently, and with an accent so touching, that Fred Bayham’s big eyes as he turned towards the old man filled up with tears. When his mother and grandmother rose to go away, poor little Boy cried to stay longer, and the Colonel would have meekly interposed, but the domineering Campaigner cried, “Nonsense, let him go to bed!” and flounced him out of the room: and nobody appealed against that sentence. Then we three remained, and strove to talk as cheerfully as we might, speaking now of old times, and presently of new. Without the slightest affectation, Thomas Newcome told us that his life was comfortable, and that he was happy in it. He wished that many others of the old gentlemen, he said, were as contented as himself, but some of them grumbled sadly, he owned and quarrelled with their bread-and-butter. He, for his part, had everything he could desire: all the officers of the Establishment were most kind to him; an excellent physician came to him when wanted; a most attentive woman waited on him. “And if I wear a black gown,” said he, “is not that uniform as good as another, and if we have to go to church every day, at which some of the Poor Brothers grumble, I think an old fellow can’t do better; and I can say my prayers with a thankful heart, Clivey my boy, and should be quite happy but for my—for my past imprudence, God forgive me. Think of Bayham here coming to our chapel to-day!—he often comes—that was very right, sir—very right.”
Clive, filling a glass of wine, looked at F. B. with eyes that said God bless you. F. B. gulped down another bumper. “It is almost a merry Christmas,” said I; “and oh, I hope it will be a happy New Year!”
Shortly after nine o’clock the Colonel rose to depart, saying he must be “in barracks” by ten; and Clive and F. B. went a part of the way with him. I would have followed them, but he whispered me to stay and talk to Mrs. Mack, for Heaven’s sake, and that he would be back ere long. So I went and took tea with the two ladies; and as we drank it, Mrs. Mackenzie took occasion to tell me she did not know what amount of income the Colonel had from his wealthy brother, but that they never received any benefit from it; and again she computed to me all the sums, principal and interest, which ought at that moment to belong to her darling Rosey. Rosey now and again made a feeble remark. She did not seem pleased or sorry when her husband came in; and presently, dropping me a little curtsey, went to bed under charge of the Campaigner. So Bayham and I and Clive retired to the studio, where smoking was allowed, and where we brought that Christmas day to an end.
At the appointed time on the next forenoon I called upon Miss Newcome at her brother’s house. Sir Barnes Newcome was quitting his own door as I entered it, and he eyed me with such a severe countenance, as made me augur but ill of the business upon which I came. The expression of Ethel’s face was scarcely more cheering: she was standing at the window, sternly looking at Sir Barnes, who yet lingered at his own threshold, having some altercation with his cab-boy ere he mounted his vehicle to drive into the City.
Miss Newcome was very pale when she advanced and gave me her hand. I looked with some alarm into her face, and inquired what news?
“It is as you expected, Mr. Pendennis,” she said—“not as I did. My brother is averse to making restitution. He just now parted from me in some anger. But it does not matter; the restitution must be made, if not by Barnes, by one of our family—must it not?”
“God bless you for a noble creature, my dear, dear Miss Newcome!” was all I could say.
“For doing what is right? Ought I not to do it? I am the eldest of our family after Barnes: I am the richest after him. Our father left all his younger children the very sum of money which Mrs. Newcome here devises to Clive; and you know, besides, I have all my grandmother’s, Lady Kew’s, property. Why, I don’t think I could sleep if this act of justice were not done. Will you come with me to my lawyer’s? He and my brother Barnes are trustees of my property; and I have been thinking, dear Mr. Pendennis—and you are very good to be so kind, and to express so kind an opinion of me, and you and Laura have always, always been the best friends to me”—(she says this, taking one of my hands and placing her other hand over it)—“I have been thinking, you know, that this transfer had better be made through Mr. Luce, you understand, and as coming from the family, and then I need not appear in it at all, you see; and—and my dear good uncle’s pride need not be wounded.” She fairly gave way to tears as she spoke—and for me, I longed to kiss the hem of her robe, or anything else she would let me embrace, I was so happy, and so touched by the simple demeanour and affection of the noble young lady.
“Dear Ethel,” I said, “did I not say I would go to the end of the world with you—and won’t I go to Lincoln’s Inn?”
A cab was straightway sent for, and in another half-hour we were in the presence of the courtly little old Mr. Luce in his chambers in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
He knew the late Mrs. Newcome’s handwriting at once. He remembered having seen the little boy at the Hermitage, had talked with Mr. Newcome regarding his son in India, and had even encouraged Mrs. Newcome in her idea of leaving some token of goodwill to the latter. “I was to have dined with your grandmamma on the Saturday, with my poor wife. Why, bless my soul! I remember the circumstance perfectly well, my dear young lady. There can’t be a doubt about the letter, but of course the bequest is no bequest at all, and Colonel Newcome has behaved so ill to your brother that I suppose Sir Barnes will not go out of his way to benefit the Colonel.”
“What would you do, Mr. Luce?” asks the young lady.
“H’m! And pray why should I tell you what I should do under the circumstances?” replied the little lawyer. “Upon my word, Miss Newcome, I think I should leave matters as they stand. Sir Barnes and I, you are aware, are not the very best of friends—as your father’s, your grandmother’s old friend and adviser, your own too, my dear young lady, I and Sir Barnes Newcome remain on civil terms. But neither is over much pleased with the other, to say the truth; and, at any rate, I cannot be accused—nor can any one else that I know of—of being a very warm partisan of your brother’s. But candidly, were his case mine—had I a relation who had called me unpleasant names, and threatened me I don’t know with what, with sword and pistol—who had put me to five or six thousand pounds’ expense in contesting an election which I had lost,—I should give him, I think, no more than the law obliged me to give him; and that, my dear Miss Newcome, is not one farthing.”
“I am very glad you say so,” said Miss Newcome, rather to my astonishment.
“Of course, my dear young lady; and so you need not be alarmed at showing your brother this document. Is not that the point about which you came to consult me? You wished that I should prepare him for the awful disclosure, did you not? You know, perhaps, that he does not like to part with his money, and thought the appearance of this note might agitate him? It has been a long time coming to its address, but nothing can be done, don’t you see? and be sure Sir Barnes Newcome will not be the least agitated when I tell him its contents.”
“I mean I am very glad you think my brother is not called upon to obey Mrs. Newcome’s wishes, because I need not think so hardly of him as I was disposed to do,” Miss Newcome said. “I showed him the paper this morning, and he repelled it with scorn; and not kind words passed between us, Mr. Luce, and unkind thoughts remained in my mind. But if he, you think, is justified, it is I who have been in the wrong for saying that he was self—for upbraiding him as I own I did.”
“You called him selfish!—You had words with him! Such things have happened before, my dear Miss Newcome, in the best-regulated families.”
“But if he is not wrong, sir, holding his opinions, surely I should be wrong, sir, with mine, not to do as my conscience tells me; and having found this paper only yesterday at Newcome, in the library there, in one of my grandmother’s books, I consulted with this gentleman, the husband of my dearest friend, Mrs. Pendennis—the most intimate friend of my uncle and cousin Clive; and I wish, and I desire and insist, that my share of what my poor father left us girls should be given to my cousin, Mr. Clive Newcome, in accordance with my grandmother’s dying wishes.”
“My dear, you gave away your portion to your brothers and sisters ever so long ago!” cried the lawyer.
“I desire, sir, that six thousand pounds may be given to my cousin,” Miss Newcome said, blushing deeply. “My dear uncle, the best man in the world, whom I love with all my heart, sir, is in the most dreadful poverty. Do you know where he is, sir? My dear, kind, generous uncle!”—and, kindling as she spoke, and with eyes beaming a bright kindness, and flushing cheeks, and a voice that thrilled to the heart of those two who heard her, Miss Newcome went on to tell of her uncle’s and cousin’s misfortunes, and of her wish, under God, to relieve them. I see before me now the figure of the noble girl as she speaks; the pleased little old lawyer, bobbing his white head, looking up at her with his twinkling eyes—patting his knees, patting his snuff-box—as he sits before his tapes and his deeds, surrounded by a great background of tin boxes.
“And I understand you want this money paid as coming from the family, and not from Miss Newcome?” says Mr. Luce.
“Coming from the family—exactly,” answers Miss Newcome.
Mr. Luce rose up from his old chair—his worn-out old horsehair chair—where he had sat for half a century and listened to many a speaker, very different from this one. “Mr. Pendennis,” he said, “I envy you your journey along with this young lady. I envy you the good news you are going to carry to your friends—and, Miss Newcome, as I am an old—old gentleman who have known your family these sixty years, and saw your father in his long-clothes, may I tell you how heartily and sincerely I—I love and respect you, my dear? When should you wish Mr. Clive Newcome to have his legacy?”
“I think I should like Mr. Pendennis to have it this instant, Mr. Luce, please,” said the young lady—and her veil dropped over her face as she bent her head down, and clasped her hands together for a moment, as if she was praying.
Mr. Luce laughed at her impetuosity; but said that if she was bent upon having the money, it was at her instant service; and before we left the room, Mr. Luce prepared a letter, addressed to Clive Newcome, Esquire, in which he stated, that amongst the books of the late Mrs. Newcome a paper had only just been found, of which a copy was enclosed, and that the family of the late Sir Brian Newcome, desirous to do honour to the wishes of the late Mrs. Newcome, had placed the sum of 6000 pounds at the bank of Messrs. H. W——, at the disposal of Mr. Clive Newcome, of whom Mr. Luce had the honour to sign himself the most obedient servant, etc. And, the letter approved and copied, Mr. Luce said Mr. Pendennis might be the postman thereof; if Miss Newcome so willed it; and, with this document in my pocket, I quitted the lawyer’s chambers, with my good and beautiful young companion.
Our cab had been waiting several hours in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and I asked Miss Ethel whither I now should conduct her?
“Where is Grey Friars?” she said. “Mayn’t I go to see my uncle?”