CHAPTER XIII.DISAPPOINTED.
Montague Stondon, Esquire, barrister-at-law, heir presumptive to Marshlands, fifteenth, or twentieth, or thirtieth cousin, or something equally near of kin to the man who had just taken unto himself a wife, lived in Chapel Street, Grosvenor Place, in a house which commanded in front a cheerful view of the other side of the way, and at the back looked out over Tattersall’s to St. George’s Hospital.
It was not a large house, it was not a convenient one, it was far and away too expensive for Mr. Stondon’s means; but it was sufficiently genteel, it was within five minutes of the Row, it was close to the Green Park, it touched elbows with Belgrave Square, and altogether suited the barristeras well as any house is ever likely to suit any man who is overwhelmed with debt, and who, having the tastes of a millionaire, is often at his wits’ end to know where to raise twenty pounds.
If you are not bidden to a banquet, I cannot see the precise pleasure that accrues from beholding others partaking of it. If you have not the means to visit with his Grace the Duke, it is beyond my capacity to understand why you should pay fabulous rents for the mere enjoyment of living near his Grace, and seeing her Grace’s carriage pass your door; but Montague Stondon felt that there was a satisfaction in residing within call of nobility, and that their footmen, their equipages, their crests, and coats of arms conferred a certain importance on him. The earth would not be a very cheerful dwelling-place if it were beyond reach of the sun’s rays, and in the opinion of Montague Stondon the sun never rose except about Belgrave Square and those other regions affected by the nobility and gentry of England.
When he rode out on his hired horse, he could be in the midst of rank and fashion immediately;he could take his fine whiskers into the Park and air them there, while he gnawed the handle of his riding-whip, and wondered how the deuce he was to carry on for a year or two longer.
When Mrs. Stondon, a faded fashionable woman, who had brought her husband some fortune, “received,” she liked to think that the carriages of her visitors and the carriages of the great people hard by touched wheels in the street.
It was nice to lie on the sofa and listen to the thundering double knocks powdered footmen were giving in the neighbouring square; it would have been impossible to have ordered goods home, if home had chanced to be outside the radius of fashion; it would have done Basil harm at school had his parents not lived in a genteel quarter; it would have been fatal to him at college had the parental letters been dated from any locality less desirable than Chapel Street.
Fashion—even the flimsiest and falsest kind of fashion—was a good to be purchased at any price, at any risk. They had been used to it—they had been accustomed to terrible dinner parties, tocrowded assemblies, to boxes at the Opera, to all the hundred weary pleasures which so many Londoners consider necessary to their very existence; and the consequence was that, as they could not relinquish any of their usual indulgences, they got more and more involved while the years went by, and less and less able to extricate themselves from their embarrassments.
But for the hope of Marshlands, but for the idea that some day they should have money in plenty, life would scarcely have been supportable. As it was, they went on their way, trusting that news would soon come of Captain Stondon’s death, and of their own accession to fortune.
“What right has a man like that to own such a property?” demanded Mrs. Montague Stondon. “He might just as well give it to us for all the enjoyment he takes out of it. I am positive he cannot spend more than five hundred a year!” and the lady sighed at the idea of Marshlands belonging to a person who could so limit his personal expenditure.
As for his profession, Montague Stondon madevery little of it. If he possessed any natural abilities he never used them. If there was money to be earned at the Bar, scarcely any of it found its way into his pocket. He was good company, but he was not much of an opinion. He could shoot better than he could plead; he liked lounging in his own drawing-room, cantering up the Row, criticising the latest beauty, far more than sitting in his chambers or cross-examining witnesses.
His manners would have brought him business, his address made him a favourite with the judges; but his intense dislike for work, his inordinate love of pleasure, rendered his career a failure, his whole existence but a race after amusement, a longing for dead men’s shoes, a staving-off of duns, an incessant struggle with debt and poverty.
It is astonishing how miserably poor, people living in a respectable manner, inhabiting a house in a desirable neighbourhood, keeping several servants, eating of the best, sleeping on the softest, may really be. The sempstress living in BethnalGreen had not more anxiety for the morrow, more care for the day, than Montague Stondon, Esq., of Chapel Street, Grosvenor Place, who was over head and ears in debt, and who spent that portion of his life which he passed in the bosom of his family in alternately cursing his luck and praying for the death of his relative.
“If that fellow do not soon go home,” he remarked one morning to his wife, “I shall have to figure in the ‘Gazette;’ we cannot carry on much longer as we are doing now!” and he flung down letter after letter containing requests for debts recently incurred, more pressing demands for bills of longer standing, and threats of law from creditors whose large stock of patience was at last fairly exhausted. “I am sure I do not know what we are to do unless we can retrench.”
“Retrench!” repeated Mrs. Stondon, raising her light eyebrows at the very idea. “How are we to do that? If you can show me how it is possible for us to retrench,” she proceeded, with quite a show of energy, “I am willing to begin.” And the lady went on opening her letters, whileMontague Stondon took refuge behind the “Times,” muttering, as he did so,
“Willing or not, there will soon have to be something done, I see that plainly.”
Meantime Mrs. Stondon read her letters. They were, as a rule, the customary letters which ladies write to ladies, crossed as if note-paper had been ten guineas a quire and postage three shillings the half ounce; but occasionally there intervened a short curt note from some indignant milliner, or a pathetic entreaty for money from a struggling dressmaker.
These Mrs. Stondon dropped as though they had burnt her fingers; but to the small gossip, the petty tittle-tattle, the long rambling epistles of her friendly correspondents, she devoted herself with praiseworthy earnestness.
“Mary Monk is going to be married,”—these were the pieces of information to which she treated her husband—“a very nice match, Mrs. Monk says. Three thousand a year, and a most lovely place in Derbyshire. So devotedly attached to her, and so fond of all her family. Well, Mrs.Monk is fortunate—she has got rid of four out of the seven now. Julia Enon has another boy, so there will be no want of heirs there; and Sir John Martingale has proposed for and been accepted by a widow who has a hundred thousand pounds fortune. Caroline wants us to go and stay with her for a month before she leaves for the Continent, and Mrs. Leigh hopes we will not forget them this summer. What a pleasant world this would be if one had plenty of money!” sighed Mrs. Stondon, laying down Mrs. Leigh’s letter and taking up another.
“I wonder who this is from?” she said, turning it over; “post-mark Grassenfel—who do we know in Grassenfel, Montague?”
“That is the place where Henry was laid-up at,” answered her husband, his interest excited in a moment. “I wish to heaven he had broken his neck there!”
“Hush! you should not say such things,” expostulated his wife.
“Only think them, I suppose,” was his reply. “Well, what have you got? What have you got,I say?” and he snatched the enclosure out of his wife’s hand, and read—
“Captain Stondon,—Mrs. Stondon.”
“Captain Stondon,—Mrs. Stondon.”
“Captain Stondon,—Mrs. Stondon.”
“Captain Stondon,—Mrs. Stondon.”
“Damn him!” said Mr. Montague Stondon, when he had taken in what it all meant. “Damn her—damn them both!”
And having concluded this little commination service, he looked at his wife, and his wife looked at him; and then they looked with one accord at the bills and letters strewing the breakfast-table.
“It is a cursed shame!” broke out Mr. Stondon, and his brown eyes seemed to grow black with rage as he spoke; “a man ought to be locked up for doing such a thing—at his time of life, too! He must be mad—he has no right to be at large!”
“Some designing creature, doubtless,” wept Mrs. Stondon.
“That cuts Basil out for ever,” said Mr. Stondon, with another oath.
“She may not have any children,” observedhis wife, clutching at the only straw within reach.
“Won’t she?” answered the barrister, “won’t she? by George! She’ll have scores of them, and Basil may go and enlist as soon as he likes, for none of us will ever touch a penny of the Marshlands rents now.”
“I wonder who she is, Montague? Look in the ‘Times’ and see if it is there.”
And it was there.
“At Tordale, by the Rev. Edward Conbyr, Vicar—Henry Gower Stondon, Esq., late Captain in the —th Hussars, to Euphemia, only daughter of the late Ernest Keller, Esq., and niece of General Keller, Roundwood, Sussex.”
“How the deuce did he meet one of the Roundwood Kellers at Grassenfel?” demanded Mr. Stondon, and his wife said feebly that she really did not know.
“Depend upon it,” went on the barrister, “there is something queer about the business, otherwise he never would have kept it so quiet. There is a screw loose somewhere, but that won’tdo us any good. He might just as well have broken his neck.” And Montague Stondon, aged a dozen years in as many minutes, tossed over his bills with the air of a man who did not know which way to turn for assistance. “It will bring them all down upon me,” he said; and he began swearing once again, when his wife suggested that perhaps Captain Stondon would help him over his difficulties and do something for Basil.
“You do not know what you are talking about,” was his reply; “you do not know how much we owe. It would not take a shilling less than ten thousand pounds to put us straight, and you do not expect him to give us that, I suppose, with a wife in the present, and a tribe of children coming?”
“She may not have any family,” repeated Mrs. Stondon.
“I tell you she will,” answered her husband. “Women always have children when you don’t want them to have any; and even if she have not, what good will that be to us? She will take care of him now, and he will live for—God onlyknows how long.” And Mr. Montague Stondon thrust the ends of his whiskers into his mouth, and chewed them savagely, while he wrought out this problem to his own dissatisfaction.
For a minute some vague idea of setting to work even at the eleventh hour—of struggling for wealth, position, ease—crossed the barrister’s mind.
What was the good of such a life, after all? Where was the pleasure of running into debt? What did the opinion of the world signify? What did it matter whether he met fifty fashionable people in the course of the day, who were as perfectly indifferent to him as he was to them? Was this weary game worth the price of the candle which he was burning down and down, day after day, and week after week? Could he do nothing to retrieve the past? or was it too late for everything but debt, and duns, and discontent?
“If he had any family pride, I would go into trade to spite him,” said the barrister at last. “I would take a shop and put on an apron, andpaint Montague Stondon, grocer, up in the High Street of Disley, as fast as I would walk into the Park; but he would only say he hoped I should do a good business, and offer to pay my rent for the first year, and tell me to send over half a dozen pounds of tea to Marshlands. Hang him!” finished Mr. Stondon, with fervour. “I wish he was being tried for his life at the Old Bailey, and that I was for the Crown. He should die if he had fifty lives; he should swing from a gallows as high as Haman’s, if I had any voice in the matter.”
“My dear Montague!” entreated Mrs. Stondon.
“He might just as well and better have died in India,” proceeded her husband; “nobody would have missed him, and I should then have succeeded to Marshlands. When a man goes out to India, he is expected to stay there, and he has no right to come back to stand in the way of his relations. I wish I was twenty years younger, I would show Captain Stondon how a man may get on without Marshlands: but Basil shall work.He shall not lead the life I have done. If I could but get rid of these cursed liabilities, I would think about him.”
“Perhaps Captain Stondon would do something,” suggested the lady.
“He only paid for his education when he was single,” retorted the barrister; “do you think he will do more now he is married?” And Mrs. Stondon had to take refuge in her private opinion, which was that the very first time she had a chance she would “humble herself,” as she expressed it, to her kinsman, and ask him to help Mr. Stondon, and to push on her son.
“Only give me an opportunity,” thought this wise lady, “and I will improve it.”
And without saying a word to her husband, the very day she heard of Captain Stondon’s arrival in town, she called upon the bride, whom she offered to take with her to every possible and impossible place; whom she kissed; whom she flattered; whom she treated as though Phemie had been one of the blood royal, or a countess in her own right.
Then she told Mr. Stondon that he must call also, and Mr. Stondon called.
“The girl is pretty,” he said, on his return home, “and I do not think she has fooled him. It is her face that has done it; and somehow or other, though how I can’t imagine, it is a great match for her. She has no manners; she has no confidence; she is just an unfledged country wench whom he has fallen in love with on account of her beauty;” and Montague Stondon cursed her beauty, and wished all women were born a hundred years old and as ugly as witches. “She will lead him a pretty dance before long,” finished the barrister; “why there must be forty years between them: he might be her grandfather. Do you know how they happened to meet with one another, and who made her marry him? for, of course, she never did it of her own free will.”
“I know nothing,” answered Mrs. Montague Stondon. “I have never seen her alone; he will not trust her out of his sight. I said if he had any business to attend to, before he went abroad, I would try to amuse her; but he said that he hadno business, and that he thought ‘Phemie,’ as he calls her, would like best to go about with him. And if you believe me, Montague,” went on the lady, “the girl said she did not want to go anywhere without him; an ungrateful minx! and I think she is fond of him; positively, my dear, I think she is.”
“So should I be, if he gave me Marshlands,” answered Mr. Stondon.
“Ah! but I mean without Marshlands. I think she is one of those soft, pulpy, characterless girls who like anybody who is fond of them. Whatever he says, she agrees with. She does nothing but blush and answer every question through him. ‘I do not know what Captain Stondon intends to do.’ ‘Henry, where shall we be going to first?’ ‘Shall we return to England this year, Henry?’ It is Henry this, and Henry that, and ‘May I, Henry?’—perfectly disgusting, you know; bad enough when the husband is a boy, but simply ridiculous when he might be her great-grandfather.”
“I must try to get something more out of herwhen they dine here,” remarked Mr. Stondon; “you have asked them, have you not?”
“Yes,” answered Mrs. Stondon, “and what is more, they are coming. I thought I never should have persuaded Captain Stondon, but he ultimately yielded. I suppose the bride knows nothing ofles convenances, and that he is afraid of her making somefaux pas.”
“Poor little soul!” ejaculated the barrister.
“Little simpleton,” remarked his wife.