CHAPTER V

In the first few months after his success in the University examinations, Cosmo lived a life which should have proved a fitting introduction to the position his father had reserved for him.

With the middle of October he entered the business in Thames Street, and displayed an assiduity delightful for Mr Burden to witness.

The merchant was, indeed, astonished at the aptitude, or, perhaps, the inherited commercial talent, which had survived his son’s philological training, and was at times prepared to admit that the study of modern languages, even upon the side of pure literature, served (as he had often heard from its defenders) for a gymnastic to the growing mind.

Meanwhile, the young man was far from forgetting the pleasures due to his rank; but he used them in such a way that the development of his character was in no way injured. His health forbade excess. His acquaintances ensured, some that his pleasures should be refined, others that they should be energetic, all thatthey should be well selected. In a word he led, during the happy winter months that followed, the normal life of that class which is perhaps the soundest, as it is certainly the most many-sided in Europe—the class which has learnt to govern an immeasurable realm without corruption, and almost without ambition.

It was remarkable that, in spite of his prospects, he maintained a severe grasp over his private expenditure, and this wise economy helped still further to strengthen a character which might, at first, have shown signs of weakness. He managed to do thoroughly well without a private trap, replacing it by such cabs as his business or amusements demanded. As for riding, one horse sufficed him, and when he visited the country to hunt (as he would occasionally do in the middle of a business week), he was not above jobbing a mount from a local stable; he would not be at the expense of hunters. Did he visit the theatre, the stalls seemed to him his most natural place. He took a box but twice during the whole of that autumn, once when the house was full, and on another occasion when he had calculated that the number of friends whom he could accommodate in this manner would have cost a trifle more had he taken them to separate seats.

At the Empire, the Alhambra, and othermusic halls he made it a rule to break a sovereign as he entered, and to make that sum suffice him for the whole evening.

He but rarely visited the Savoy, the Carlton, or Prince’s. When he entertained it was at his club, and though he was careful that the wine and cooking should be of the best, yet he abhorred the ostentation of unseasonable flowers, and of vintages whose names might be unfamiliar to his guests. His dress was nearly always new, and always, always quiet. His linen fitted him with exactitude (a result of careful measurement). To his hats he paid that attention which is only to be discovered in men who comprehend the subtle importance of those ornaments.

In everything the management of his affairs displayed a wise reticence and balance; qualities most fortunately bestowed upon him by Providence, when we consider that his father’s old-fashioned standard forbade him an allowance of more than £250 a year.

His life, I say, through all that winter, was at once well-ordered and happy, and justly envied by his contemporaries. There was but one flaw in the perfection of his content, and that flaw was to be discovered in the very serious condition of his finances.

The interest upon £1250—an interest to bepaid half-yearly—even if it be at so small a rate as 15 per cent., may appear at the time of payment a sum of astonishing magnitude to the needy. It amounts, as the less classical of my readers will at once perceive, to no less than £93, 15s. at the end of every six months; and when the first of these terms approached him in the course of February, Cosmo had the misfortune to find himself for the moment unable to meet it.

I have already indicated to what an exaggerated extent he permitted such little matters to prey upon his mind. I need hardly say that in his distress he went to call upon Mr Harbury.

That excellent friend spoke to him more seriously than he had done upon the first occasion. He pointed out to him that, while debts of the more ordinary sort were often a matter for jest, the exact payment of interest was a duty upon the fulfilment of which a man’s honour was engaged. In a somewhat softer manner, Mr Harbury proceeded to inform Cosmo of the concern which Mr Barnett had begun to take in his career; nor did he conceal from him that, on hearing of his difficulty, the very first thing he had done had been to write to that large-hearted and widely-travelled man whom he (Mr Harbury) regarded almost in the light of a father. Rising at the close ofthis conversation, he laid his hand, not without dignity, upon the young man’s shoulder, and begged him to dismiss all further thought of the matter from his mind.... It would have been evident to a meaner intelligence than that of Mr Burden’s son, that he had once more been saved by agencies whose power he had long admired, and whose character he had begun to revere.

From that moment he threw himself with a kind of zeal into the companionship of such friends. The ensuing spring was largely passed in their society. Gratitude alone would have compelled him to frequent their houses: to gratitude, admiration was added, and to admiration a sudden access of a sense of familiarity, when he discovered that no less a person than Charles Benthorpe was very often a fellow guest with himself.

The historic name which this young man bore so easily; the consummate knowledge of the world which he had acquired as the companion of his father’s official life, the public reputation of the family, and to some extent the titular honour it boasted, had drawn Cosmo warmly towards the enjoyment of Charles Benthorpe’s friendship, during their contemporary residence at the University.

Nay more, Lord Benthorpe himself, asCosmo discovered with astonishment and pleasure, was, in a manner, the familiar of these few who had at heart the glory of England in the delta of the great African river. Often as the name M’Korio would enter into the conversation, still more often would the experience, and occasionally the name, of Lord Benthorpe accompany the judgment of Mr Harbury, of Mr Barnett, and of that Major Pondo, whom it will be my business upon a later page to describe. Charles Benthorpe, in spite of the reserve which properly accompanies exalted social rank, was not unwilling to describe his father’s attitude upon those Imperial matters whereof that statesman’s long political and administrative experience had given him an exhaustive knowledge.

Nor was it only the name and opinions of Lord Benthorpe that mingled with their discussions. Once his lordship came in person to a dinner of Mr Barnett’s, and was willing to express by word of mouth his strong faith in the future of the M’Korio Delta. Upon another occasion, Mr Harbury was able to read a letter from him, regretting the peer’s inability to address a small private meeting upon the potentialities of the M’Korio, potentialities which, in his absence, were set forth by that Major Pondo, with whom, as I have just remarked,and shall probably remark again, a future page must deal.

Were it my task (which I thank Heaven it is not) to compose a work of fiction, I should attempt to exclude all persons and scenes irrelevant to the simple current of my story. The more suitable, but I fear less entertaining, relation upon which I am engaged permits no such artistic selection: I am compelled to describe all those who in any principal way entered the last days of Mr Burden’s life, and, delicate as is the business of portraying a living peer and politician, it is my duty to present (with all the reticence and courtesy due to such a figure) the character of Lord Benthorpe.

To this end I must first sketch, in the most summary manner, that distinguished family history upon which depends no small part of the affection and esteem in which all Englishmen delight to hold him.

A subtle admixture of talent and inherited rank is to-day more than ever the strength of our folk. Nor do I fear to offend the modern taste by printing here the typical record of a great line.

Lord Benthorpe’s family is first heard of more than a century ago. His grandfather,John Calvin Benthorpe was, at the close of December 1796,[7]a young solicitor[8]in the town of Dublin. In the very next year we find him put into the Irish Parliament by the Duke of Meath as a recognition of his strong sympathy with the national aspirations of the time, and, Presbyterian as he was, with the legitimate demands for religious emancipation preferred by the bulk of his fellow-citizens: co-religionists of his Grace.

His fine talents and excellent appreciation of men soon won him a political position independent of his early patron; and he had the good fortune to be instrumental, both as a principal and as a shrewd negotiator, in the passing of the Act of Union. He had indeed permitted himself certain rhetorical exercises against that measure in debate; but, in the hard practical matter of voting, his inheritance of Scotch common-sense had outweighed his Irish enthusiasm, and he soon found himself in a position to purchase an estate in Wiltshire, some fifteen miles to the north-east of Old Sarum.

A character too weighty, and perhaps toosincerely Christian, to feel in middle age the continued attraction of political life, he applied himself rather to the founding of a family worthy of the title which His Majesty King George III. had, at the respectful entreaty of Mr Pitt, conferred upon him.

With this object, he considered for some years the contracting of a suitable marriage, and, after a deliberation whose purpose he was far too chivalrous to conceal, he decided to honour from among many, and to lead to the altar, the charming Laetitia Green, only child of Mr Groen, senior partner in the well-known banking firm of Strong-i’-th’-arm and Hurst.

His wife’s and his own remaining fortune he sank in further purchases of land, and in the erection of a very fine mansion in the Debased Palladian manner. This great house (to which its owner first attached the name of Placton) is not only famous with most educated men, but will also be familiar to the general reader from its frequent appearance in the Memoirs of Lady Graftham, and in the Life of Mr Groen, recently published by his nephew, Lord Hurst of Hatton.

George Patrick Frederick-Culson Delamaine, the fruit of this marriage, was born in 1823, at a moment when his father, the firstLord Benthorpe, was at the zenith of his career as a land-owner. All the gifts of fortune seemed to have been showered upon the boy; his youth was leading to a manhood of the most brilliant promise, when, at the age of twenty-two, romance or folly led him into an alliance with a woman hopelessly beneath him in station.

She was the daughter of some local lawyer or other, and so betrayed, in every accent and gesture, the restrictions of her upbringing, as to be incapable of that moulding influence which her father-in-law’s family had hoped to exercise. Her rare visits to Placton grew to be an increasing embarrassment for the spacious dignity of the household, and it was perhaps but a merciful intervention of Providence when she was left a widow in June 1852, as the result of her husband walking inadvertently into the well of a lift: a new invention, to which the upper classes were as yet unaccustomed.

He left two children: Mary, born in February 1847, and Albert Delamaine (the present Lord Benthorpe) born in July 1849.

To these children the old man showed a peculiar and a noble devotion. He paid the mother a yearly allowance of no less than £400, on the strict condition that she should live out of England, and enter into no communicationwith the family. He was even at the charge of employing private agents to see that this condition was observed.

In the choice of their occupations, their servants, their expenses, their very lap-dogs, nay, their governesses and tutors, he directed himself to the single object of making the boy and girl that which their high station would later require them to be; dying in 1858, he left his task as a sacred legacy to his wife, the children’s grandmother, who kept in view, with admirable firmness, that ideal of ancient lineage which her husband had so constantly cherished.

Not that any hint of their coming responsibility was permitted to enter the children’s fresh young minds. Mary, until her seventeenth birthday, dressed upon less than a hundred a year; rode out attended by a groom in the plainest livery; and was permitted upon no occasion, save that of indisposition, to absent herself from morning prayers. Albert was thrust willy-nilly into the rough and tumble of public school life, and discovered, in the rude manliness of Eton, just what was needed to correct a somewhat oversensitive temperament.

In a word, the first Lord Benthorpe had proved characteristically successful in this his last and (as it proved) posthumous task.

His wife lived to purchase her grandchild his commission in a cavalry regiment, and to see the second Lord Benthorpe attain his majority amid those plaudits which the tenants of Placton loyally reserved for a family to which they owe their material and moral prosperity.

As a soldier, young Lord Benthorpe, though quiet to a fault, proved deservedly popular. His entertainments, which were numerous, were marked by an absolute refinement, and, if he exceeded in expense, it was through no leaning towards ostentation, but rather from the natural desire of a rich and reserved young man to gather, by the sole means in his power, a number of acquaintance.

He was sincerely glad when his regiment was ordered abroad; he saw active service in the Seychelles, he received in person the surrender of seventeen half-breeds of Princess Martha’s Own during the great mutiny of 1872, and was mentioned in despatches. His wound in the fleshy part of the leg, received during the dreadful affair at Pútti-Ghâl, is a matter so generally known that I need hardly allude to it, save to remind my readers that the incident is the subject of a fine steel engraving of Hogge’s now sold in its original state by Messrs Washington for the price of 21s., though soiled copies are obtainable at a considerable reduction.

Towards the end of the year 1875, when he was but twenty-six years old, he thought it his duty to sever his connection with the army and to enter politics. To this piece of self-sacrifice must be ascribed, I fear, all the future misfortunes of his life.

He married.

Warned, I do not say by his father’s example, but doubtless by some instinct, he took to wife the Lady Arabella Hunt, of an age not far distant from his own, of descent a trifle superior, of a fortune which permitted him—I fear imprudently—to rebuild the stables.

Such of my readers as may find their lot cast upon the clayey, the calcareous, or the oolitic soils of our beloved country, will appreciate what I mean, when I allude to the agricultural depression which afflicted the years immediately subsequent to his marriage.

Lord Benthorpe, like so many others of his ancient station, refused to believe that the star of England had set. He was too generous to reduce his splendid hospitality; too patriotic to admit that the country and he could go otherwise than forward; too proud of his superb lineage to regret the investments in arable land, pasture, undergrowth, common, waste and marsh, which his forefathers had made. He did indeed attempt to develop asmall town in his neighbourhood which boasted a medicinal well. He bought certain freeholds within the borough, and the medical profession were enthusiastic in their praise of the waters. The less healthy of the governing classes began to drink them in increasing numbers; but that fatality which seemed to dog his every effort caused an epidemic of acute colic to coincide with the second year of his effort, and he lost upon this chivalrous venture the considerable sum of two hundred thousand pounds.

He borrowed.

At first, for his daily needs, from local banks; later, to repay their claims and to set himself afloat again, from the more imposing corporations of the metropolis; from these he received such aid as he imagined would carry him forward to a better day. But that day tarried.

He maintained his rents with difficulty. He attempted to increase them. He lost the affection of his tenants, a disaster for which the remaining respect of his equals scarcely compensated him. He was finally compelled to abandon, most reluctantly, the society of public entertainers, political, literary and racing men, to which all his early manhood had rendered him familiar. He grew to inviting to Placton none but those to whom noother hospitality offered. When these failed him, he fell back upon his relatives; when these, upon the local clergy, the smaller squires—the very doctors of his country town. It was of no avail!

The government of Lord Beaconsfield, ever solicitous for the honour of an ancient name, did all that could be done. He was offered posts well suited to his talents; he was eagerly welcomed back to public life. Indeed, it was his public work during the first years of his difficulties—the last of the Conservative cabinet—which has rendered his name so familiar to all of us. How young he was in those brave days! How admirably did he support, and with what courage, the singular place Great Britain vaunted in that better time!

I may be excused some enthusiasm as I recall his speech at Salisbury upon “Peace with Honour,” his piloting of the Laundry Bill through the House of Lords, his contribution to the Party funds during the Midlothian campaign, a contribution which I know from personal evidence to have been made possible only by the courtesy of the present Marquis of Bramber, then better known as “Jim.”

Certainly he loved his country. It is to the honour of our party system that the Liberal Ministry of the eighties did not misunderstanda patriotism of this calibre. He was sent to Raub, to the Marranagoes, to Pilgrim’s Island: positions which the routine of our Permanent Service will not permit to be highly paid, but which should normally offer ample opportunities for experience. This experience he acquired—but, alas! unfruitfully. Nothing he touched succeeded. On his return to England after an absence of three years, he abandoned his official work that he might be freer to retrieve his fortunes. His connection with Colonial Government should have aided him in the financial development of our dependencies. His advice was, indeed, solicited by the promoters of companies, but it proved almost invariably unfortunate.

True to the straight line of honour in which he had been brought up, he refused to be mentioned publicly in connection with the Raub Central, the Marranagoes Guanos, or the Pilgrim’s Island Oil Syndicate. They all went down; but, through that mysterious bond which permits the outer public to scent out, as it were, whatever the City privately honours, his reputation, already great with experts, became general when he permitted his name to stand at the head of the Carria Canal Company. It is no small testimony to the probity of our public life that he benefited in no way from the rapidsuccess of that enterprise. He was paid an honest salary—a small salary; he demanded no more. It pushed his name to the very front rank of our Builders of Empire. I would it had done more. It failed.

Lady Benthorpe held the helm meanwhile unflinchingly in her large grasp. She was of that kind which old Sutter finely calls “strong women of the Lord”; of that kind which devised the motto: “Homo sum: nihil humanum a me alienum puto.” To the last she kept an open political drawing-room, of considerable if decreasing account with the literary and professional classes, using for that purpose in winter the town house of her sister, but during the season the large room of the Progress Galleries, to the left—on the first landing.

Most women, under such a strain, would have abandoned the struggle. Many would have demanded the adventitious aid of stimulating drugs. Her pride disdained it.

She sought the relief of which she stood in need, from wines of the more hygienic sort, especially the lighter sparkling wines so strongly recommended by the Faculty; and even to such medicine she forebore to have recourse until the years of decline, when the frail body could no longer support the indomitable soul within.

Her doctor was fully cognisant of her need. He has assured me that the last sad months owed their tragedy to nothing more than the exhaustion of that admirable brain.

To the very end she was occasionally present at her husband’s table, though her conversation was no longer of the sobriety which once lent a special distinction to that board; and when Lord Benthorpe found it necessary in 1886 to step once more upon the platform in defence of the integrity of the Empire—or, as it was then called, the Kingdom—she accompanied him several times. It was with difficulty that she was persuaded to abandon her design to appear at the great meeting in the Albert Hall.

She died in February 1887, at the early age of forty-one years, three months and two days.

Her end, though clouded by the most grievous nervous trouble, was comforted and enlightened by the presence of two beings whom it would be ignoble to dismiss from this record without a passing mention: Mr Warner, the amiable scholar, to whom (as his former tutor) Lord Benthorpe had presented the living of Great Monckton, at the very gates of the park, and his wife, Mrs Warner, whose wonderful little book, “Hours of Healing” wafted the spirit of the dying peeress from earth to heaven.

LORD BENTHORPE PREVENTING THE DISRUPTION OF THE EMPIRE

It has been remarked that the difficulty of pronouncing the aspirates in the title of this spiritual work betrayed a novice in the art of letters. I am not competent to adjudge upon this criticism; but, if it be well found, I may at least point out the marvel of a faith which could redeem any ignorance of mere composition, and infuse so exalted a quality into the prose of an untried pen.

Lord Benthorpe, thus left a widower, with his little son Charles no more than four years old, applied himself to his public work with a redoubled zeal. His weight in Hampshire during the early nineties, when that great agricultural county was, I regret to say, flirting with Home Rule, cannot be overestimated; yet it formed but a slight part of his beneficent influence. His speeches in the House of Lords recalled the old days when he had been entrusted by the government with the Bill to which allusion has been made; and it was confidently predicted that, on the restoration of his Party to power, he would be given some post in the cabinet.

These hopes were not fulfilled. His disappointment appeared the more bitter, when he considered how widely the journalists upon whom he had wasted his attentions, had recentlyspread his public reputation; it appeared appalling when he contemplated the condition of his fortunes. For, it must be admitted (though it cuts one to the heart to expose the humiliation of a man so prominent in our commonweal) that, towards 1895, Lord Benthorpe found himself deprived of all resources whatsoever. The interest upon his various mortgages was met precisely, in good years, by the rent of his land and the products of the home farm. In bad years by these combined with the letting of Placton—a source alas! too often insufficient.

Our society does not permit men to fall unaided. If this is true of the generality of citizens, it is still more true of those whose names seem to stand for the stability of the country itself. Help was immediately found. The management of the house and estate was taken over (together with the mortgages) by the Anglo-Saxon Loan and Investment Company, with which, by a happy coincidence, the name of Mr Barnett was prominently associated. The house and grounds were kept by this financial company in a condition worthy of the name they bore; and Lord Benthorpe was generously permitted to make them his permanent home, not only from a sentiment of what was due to the dignity of his name, but also from a consideration of the added valuewhich he lent to the premises by his continued residence.

I do not mention this magnanimity on the part of a group of business men in order to impair their reputation for shrewdness and commercial capacity. Everything, down to the wages of the servants, passed through their hands; and they had made it a condition—a condition to which Lord Benthorpe very readily agreed—that even for such small hospitalities as he might desire to extend to neighbours he should, in every case, receive the written permission of the mortgagees.

Lord Benthorpe, at the moment when the great affair of the M’Korio entered the arena of politics, bore an appearance which those unaccustomed to our administrative classes might have mistaken for weakness.

His figure, very tall and spare, was crowned by a head in which the length of the face was perhaps the most prominent characteristic. His thin aquiline nose, his pale grey eyes, set close together and drooping somewhat at the corners, would not of themselves have led to so false a judgment, nor would the shape and position of his ears, to which the narrowness of the head and the sparseness of the hair lent perhaps an undue prominence; it was rather his mouth, which, from an unfortunate habit, he maintained permanently half open, thus displayingsomewhat long and projecting teeth, which met at a slight angle, as do those of the smaller rodents. A slight growth upon the upper lip emphasised the unfortunate character of this feature, whose misleading effect was further heightened by a nervous trick of drumming or tapping continually with the fingers, commonly upon his knee, but sometimes upon the table, or whatever else might offer itself to his hand.

As for his attitude, he would most commonly be seen sitting with one leg crossed over the other, and in an inclination of body that gave no hint of the intellectual energy which had inspired so many years.

I say that a foreigner imperfectly acquainted with our polity, and even the less experienced among our own fellow citizens, would not have guessed what power and initiative the whole picture concealed; but those of us who remember the annexation of Raub, the firm hand which suppressed the mutiny in the Seychelles, the disappointment of Germany in the Marranagoes, the settlement of Pilgrim’s Island, and especially the dreadful affair of Pútti-Ghâl, are not slow to recognise in Lord Benthorpe, elements of that which has brought our country to its present position among the nations.

Such was the man whom perhaps the best judge of character in our time—I mean Mr Barnett—had designed with slow deliberation to associate in his great enterprise. Lord Benthorpe and Mr Burden were the two pillars upon which Mr Barnett intended the fabric of the M’Korio Delta Development to repose.

Need it be added that he approached Cosmo with a frankness native to all leaders of men, that he pointed out the difficulties which would surround any attempt to persuade the old merchant, his father, of what the M’Korio was and should be, and that he asked—almost with humility—for the help of a young man whom he had himself so conspicuously befriended?

Need it be added that the request was no sooner made than granted?

To the letter, with infinite tact, Cosmo (as I shall show in a moment) carried out those instructions which he knew so well to be to the advantage, not only of Mr Barnett, his benefactor, but of himself, his family, and indeed the whole Empire. He was chosen to bring into just those relations which the situation demanded, his father, and that accomplished politician whose impoverishment, dignity, and judgment it has been my tragic, but not unpleasing task, to recall in the chapter which I now close.

FOOTNOTES:[7]Dublin Almanack and Register, vol. xiv. p. 26; also Rolls, Anno xxti4 etc., Dubl. Reg. ff.[8]The “Pettifogging Attorney” of Grattan’s tirade. As a fact he was a fairly prosperous young man with offices at a rental of £40 a year, and already the mortgagee of two public-houses.

[7]Dublin Almanack and Register, vol. xiv. p. 26; also Rolls, Anno xxti4 etc., Dubl. Reg. ff.

[8]The “Pettifogging Attorney” of Grattan’s tirade. As a fact he was a fairly prosperous young man with offices at a rental of £40 a year, and already the mortgagee of two public-houses.

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