Podbury-street, a small and narrow street of unimportant houses, in the south-western postal district of London, has seen various mutations of fortune. Twenty years ago, it was Podbury-street, Pimlico, and the unimportant houses were for the most part occupied by persons who contented themselves with the basement floor, and let the rest of the rooms in lodgings. The tenants of these lodgings were generally young men who were engaged in qualifying themselves for the medical profession by 'walking' the near-lying St. George's Hospital; young men of convivial temperament, who attended lectures with regular irregularity, and never thought of giving up to study or sleep the hours which they apparently imagined should be devoted to comic singing. It was the perpetual presence of these gentlemen, no doubt, which caused the private residences of Podbury-street to be dotted here and there with public-houses and tobacconists' shops. A procession of slatternly maids-of-all-work, with the door-key in one hand, and a jug either dependent from the finger or firmly grasped by the other hand, was perpetually filing through Podbury-street; and the drivers of the Royal Blue omnibuses, which at that time used it as a thoroughfare, were, from the altitude of the box, enabled to peer into the drawing-room floors, or to gaze down into the parlours, in both of which localities the same spectacle of a table covered with pewter vessels, and flanked by half-a-dozen gentlemen in their shirt-sleeves, who, using it as a leg-rest, lay back in their armchairs with clay pipes in their mouths, invariably presented itself.
The lapse of time, and the enterprise of the late Mr. Cubitt, effected a wondrous change in the condition of Podbury-street. When its denizens saw themselves gradually surrounded by squares, terraces, and crescents of enormous mansions, which were each year springing up, and converting into a suburb of palaces what had recently been a dismal swamp, they unerringly perceived that the opportunity had arrived for changing the scale of their prices and the style of their lodgings. The medical students packed up their Lares and Penates, their preparations and tobacco-jars, and moved off with them to more distant quarters; the omnibuses went round another way; the beer-shops and tobacconists disappeared as the leases fell in; finally, the name of Pimlico became unsavoury in the nostrils of the neighbourhood, and the lodging-house letters had 'Podbury-street, Eaton-square,' imprinted on their cards; for they let lodgings still, but to a very different class of tenants. Gentlemen in the government offices, who invariably put on evening-dress even if they only dined at their club, who stuck the looking-glass full of the cards of invitation which they received from great people, and who smoked dainty Russian cigarettes, but would have fainted at the notion of anything so low as a pipe; managing mammas, who brought their marriageable daughters to London during the season; rich valetudinarians, who came up to town to consult famous physicians,--such were the persons of gentility who now found a temporary abode in Podbury-street. No slatternly maids-of-all-work were to be seen now; nearly every house boasted a page, a youth whose waiting at table would have been more pleasant had he been able to rid himself of the scent of the blacking which hung around him from his early domestic duties; and during the season, when some of the managing mammas gave little dinners or small musical evenings in return for the hospitality which they had experienced, and in the hope of making a specialcoupfor their marriageable daughters, the little passage, called by courtesy the 'hall,' would be so filled up by two footmen, that the other attendant giants in plush would have to cool their calves in the open air.
In a drawing-room floor in Podbury-street, Lady Forestfield had taken up her abode, and was living in seclusion, awaiting the result of her husband's application to the Divorce Court. After the scene with Mr. Bristow, and the degradation which she had suffered before her own servants, she felt it impossible to stay on in Seamore-place, and accordingly the next day, as soon as she was able to contemplate the immediate future with some degree of calmness, and to make up her mind as to the course she should best pursue, she had removed to these lodgings, accompanied only by a young girl who had been a housemaid at Seamore-place, had always shown a strong attachment for her mistress, and now refused to be separated from her. This girl's mother, a respectable woman, was the landlady of the house in Podbury-street, and everything was done as far as possible to insure Lady Forestfield's comfort.
As far as possible indeed, but, under the circumstances, worthy Mrs. Wilson's possible went but a little way. For the first fortnight of her tenancy, May Forestfield scarcely tasted food, scarcely lifted her head from the pillow, but lay there passing the bygone days of her life in review before her, and silently bemoaning her hard fate. The loss of wealth and position--the position, that is, which her rank had given her--affected her but little; she took no heed of them, she had no time to give them a thought, nor did she trouble herself in regard to the future; her whole time was occupied in thinking over the details of her early acquaintance with her husband, and in wondering at the infatuation which had induced her to prefer the other man to him. Not that she ignored or attempted to deceive herself in regard to his heartless cynicism and savage brutality. Every bitter word seemed burnt into her brain, each cruel deed seemed to rise before her fresh as at the time of its perpetration; and yet in her present mood she found excuses for them all, and ascribed to herself the provocation of epithets which a 'beggar in his drink' would not have fouled his mouth with.
Do you wonder at this conduct? I take it, it is common enough. May Forestfield was no peculiar character, and in some things had a certain clearness of sense and strength of mind; but she was a woman, and consequently when she found she had been deprived of something which up to this point she did not value, but which it was impossible to regain, she set about grieving after and bewailing its loss with all her strength. Never even in the early days of her acquaintance with Lord Forestfield, when uncertainty of his regard for her rendered her doubly keen in the chase, had she felt that worship, that hungering after him which now beset her.
While she was lying in this state she received the following letter, dated from Spa:
'You will have been surprised at my silence and apparent desertion of you, but I waited until I could learn what steps that scoundrel who calls himself your husband was about to take. I knew him to be too great a coward to ask satisfaction of me, but I doubted whether, knowing with what a character he himself must come into court, he would venture to claim the aid of the law. I learn now that he has done so, and that in a short time you are likely to be free. His plots were too skilfully concocted, his spies too carefully trained, to allow of there being any doubt in the matter; the court will pronounce for the divorce, and he will be at liberty to carry to its end a pursuit in which he has been long engaged.
'Blinded by my passion for you, I have done you a grievous wrong, for which there is but one reparation. That reparation I offer you now. One line from you will bring me at once to your feet, and I swear on my honour and my name that so soon as the decree of the court is pronounced I will make you my wife.
'GUSTAVE DE TOURNEFORT.'
Two short weeks ago May would have welcomed this letter with eagerness, and would have accepted the proposal it contained with avidity; when the blow dealt her by her husband through Mr. Bristow's agency had fallen upon her with crushing force she would have welcomed almost any means to free herself from the thraldom which even the retention of his name seemed to imply. She felt most deeply the baseness of his conduct in continuing semi-amicable relations with her, relations such as for a long time had existed between them, up to the last moment of his leaving her for ever, and when he had planned and matured the design of casting her forth and holding her up to the reprobation of the world. Her caprice, passion, call it what you will, for Gustave de Tournefort had never been sufficiently strong to ennoble him in her eyes, or to prevent her from recognising him for what he really was--a careless libertine; but suffering as she had suffered at first, she would have been glad of any escape from the tortures of shame, degradation, and abandonment, and would have accepted his proffered hand, though knowing perfectly that what he called his heart would have no part in the alliance.
Now, however, all was changed. In the strange reaction which she had undergone under the revulsion of feeling which made her long to see her husband once again, she looked upon this letter from De Tournefort as little less than an insult. It was not a voluntary offer, she thought on reperusing it; it had been wrung from him by his yet remaining faint adhesion to that code of honour which even such men as he were bound to obey, and it was made, not from any love for her, but in order that he might stand well in the eyes of that world in which he still doubtless hoped to play many a similar part. He had 'done her a grievous wrong,' and he offered her 'reparation;' that was the keynote of the whole affair, his reading of that odious word 'duty,' which throughout her life she had always found put forward as an excuse. Had it been otherwise, had this offer been prompted by any feeling of liking or even of regard for what had occurred, it would have been made long since. He must have heard, for all that world in which he moved knew it perfectly, that she had left her home; and had there been the least spark of chivalrous feeling in him, he would have come to her at once. Her mind was speedily made up; she would not demean herself by accepting a proposition which was merely made to her out of charity, and M. de Tournefort's letter should remain unanswered.
O, the weary, weary days in Podbury-street! The getting-up, protracted until a late hour, in order to get over as much of the day as possible; the wretched little breakfast, with London eggs from fowls who lived in an area, and London milk from a cow which had not seen a green field for years; the long mornings, spent in reading in the newspaper the chronicled doings of that world in which she had once played so conspicuous a part,--records of dinners, balls, and fetes, with guest lists containing the names of persons her intimacy with whom she could scarcely even then imagine to be broken,--gossip of forthcoming arrangements at Goodwood and Cowes, in both of which places she had always held her court. The journal would drop from her hand as memory brought before her the ducal lawn, dotted all over with loveliest dresses, and ringing with merriest laughter from happily improvised luncheon parties; or a covered bit of sea-walk in front of the club-house at Cowes, where on the night of the last regatta-ball she had met De Tournefort, and listened to his impassioned pleading. Her thoughts were far away, busy with the memories of these once-happy times, but her eyes were gazing idly before her on the tradespeople flitting about from house to house, the flirtations of the stalwart and greasy young butcher with grinning Molly the cook, the heavily-laden postmen steadily pursuing their rounds, the loitering cabmen looking round for fares, and all the panorama of morning life in the great city.
In the afternoon, when the carriages were rolling about, and the little street was sonorous with the echoing double-knocks dealt on its tiny doors by huge footmen, May would sit behind the window-curtain watching all that was passing, and ever and anon drawing farther back into the shadow, as though fearful of being recognised. She had little cause for such anxiety, poor child, though in the course of the day she would see many of those with whom but a short time ago she used to be in constant association: the Duchess of Melrose, leaning back in her luxurious carriage, and surveying mankind superciliously, though not without interest, through her double glasses; Sir Wolfrey Delapryme in his mail phaeton, tooling his roan cobs; Captain Seaver on his neat hack; and Mrs. Ingram in her victoria. Mrs. Ingram had stopped in Podbury-street, and had come up to see May; it being her maxim, she said, that 'when any one had come to grief her pals should stick by her.' Kate Ingram's sympathy, however well meant, was not put in a very acceptable manner; she said that no doubt May had had a 'facer,' but that it was 'no use crying over spilt milk.' She spoke of De Tournefort as that 'foreign sportsman,' said she considered him a 'snob' and a 'cad,' and that May had done quite rightly in refusing to have anything more to say to him. She proposed to make up a little Sunday river-party of people who 'wouldn't mind, don't you know,' and to invite May to it, but she was rather pleased than otherwise when she found May quietly but firmly declined; and shortly after took her leave, promising to come again soon; a promise which she would not keep.
Once May saw her husband. Lord Forestfield drove through Podbury-street in a hansom cab, sitting well back, with his arms crossed and a pleasant smile upon his face. With her renewed feeling for him, May would rather not have seen that smile; it showed that he was happy and careless, while she was suffering such acute misery. In the eyes of the world she was the guilty one, and had to bear the consequences of her guilt; but in his own inmost mind he must know that he had been at least equally criminal, and that if it had not been for his neglect and desertion of her she would never have committed the crime for which he was now exacting so fearful a penalty.
And as she pondered over this a horrible idea flashed across her; a passage in De Tournefort's letter recurred to her mind, in which, speaking of Lord Forestfield, he had said, 'he will be at liberty to carry to its end a pursuit in which he has been long engaged.' What could that mean? What but that her husband had determined on divorcing her, with the view of marrying some one else to whom he had been long attached. Of marrying some one else! The fact that he himself was married had had no effect in preventing his forming other connections, but marriage while she lived undivorced was for him impossible; it was in that view, then, that he had determined on pursuing his vengeance to the bitter end.
The thought drove her nearly mad. She felt that she could not support it in silence, that she must go to him at once and make one final appeal. She rose and looked in the glass. Her beauty had suffered but little from what she had undergone; she was perhaps a trifle paler than usual, but Lord Forestfield had always expressed his dislike of blooming hoydens, and there was no doubt that at one time he admired her deeply and was greatly influenced by her beauty. Would he be so again? She would see.
The next day the maid, who had been sent to see her former fellow-servants in Seamore-place, returned with the information that Lord Forestfield had gone down to Woodburn. May looked upon this as a happy chance, and determined on following him there at once. She could see him more readily, could speak to him more freely, in the seclusion of Woodburn than if he had remained in town; she would go down there that very afternoon. In pursuance of this determination she set out, accompanied only by her maid, and dressed in a common gown and bonnet in order to escape any recognition. After a two hours' railway journey they arrived at Crawley, the station from which Lord Forestfield's seat was reached, and taking a fly were driven over to the gates of Woodburn Park. There they halted, leaving the vehicle to await their return. The maid, who was known to the lodge-keeper, went forward; and after learning that his lordship was there and alone, easily obtained admission for herself and friend to pass through the gates. Up the long avenue, the scene of her great reception by her husband's tenants on her return home after her marriage, May Forestfield now crept with trembling limbs and a desperate sinking at heart, her humble companion endeavouring to sustain her by well-meant though ill-chosen exhortation. Far away in the distance glimmered the house, a long low stone building, from one window of which a light was shining. So far as May could make out, this proceeded from the library, a room immediately on the left hand of the porch, to which access was perfectly easy. The thought of seeing her husband and completely humbling herself before him, and of begging, not indeed to be placed back in her old position in the eyes of the world--that she scarcely dared to wish, much more to hope--but for restoration to his favour and his love, for permission at least to pass some portion of her life in his society,--the thought of this nerved her with fresh strength, and enabled her to reach the end of the avenue. There she and her companion halted for a moment and looked around them. So far as they could make out through the deepening dusk the hall-door was open. It was May's intention to creep in there, and enter the library immediately, to throw herself at her husband's feet. By the aid of the lamp which burned on the writing-table, she could discern through the open window the dim outline of Lord Forestfield's figure bending over some papers. From time to time he looked up, and it was necessary for her to watch the moment of his absorption in order to effect her entrance unobserved.
The opportunity offered itself, and May stole quietly towards the porch. Just at that moment Lord Forestfield walked to the window and peered out into the gloom.
'Who is there?' he cried, as he observed the shrinking figure.
May was silent.
'Who is there?' he repeated. 'I insist upon an answer.'
'Richard,' faltered May, spreading her hands towards him, 'I--'
'I thought it was you,' he said, in a harsh low tone. 'I shall discharge the lodge-keeper to-morrow for having permitted you to pass the gate. Now be off!' he cried, waving his hand; 'I should be sorry to have to ring for the servants to turn you away. Be off, do you hear?'
But May heard nothing. She had sunk in a fainting state on the steps.
Lord Forestfield then turned to the maid, who was hastening to her mistress's assistance. 'Take this woman away,' he cried; 'and if you value your own liberty, never bring her here again.' Then he violently closed the window and returned to his papers.
May Forestfield was brought back to her lodgings in Podbury-street--how she never knew. The maid, whose devotion had brought such obloquy upon her, half helped, half carried her mistress down the avenue, and at the lodge they found the fly which had brought them from Crawley. All the way to the station, and in the railway carriage up to town, May lay in a half-comatose, half-hysterical state; and when she had reached her lodging, and was once more installed in her clean and pretty, if not luxurious, bedroom, it was plain to the maid and to Mrs. Wilson that Lady Forestfield was 'in for an illness' of some kind or other. Their predictions were speedily verified. When the maid visited her mistress next morning, she found her in a burning fever, so far advanced that her utterances were already half delirious. The girl, who was tolerably bright, as well as thoroughly devoted, remembered that in one or two cases of slight illness, under which Lady Forestfield had suffered in Seamore-place, a fashionable physician, Dr. Chenoweth, had been called in to attend her. By the aid of the Blue-Book his address was obtained, and the maid started off in a cab to beg an immediate visit from him.
Dr. Chenoweth was something more than a fashionable physician; he was, like most of his brethren with whom the present writer is acquainted, a gentleman, kind-hearted, self-sacrificing, and benevolent to a rare degree. He knew all about the story of Lord and Lady Forestfield. There were few scandals of any kind which did not come to his ears, to be listened to generally with a smile and a shrug, to be repeated sometimes--for there are certain patients to whom gossip is better than medicine, and to whom the sound of the doctor's cheery voice is of more service than his learned prescriptions--but never to be allowed to militate in his mind against those who were the subjects of them. Dr. Chenoweth thought it not at all improbable that in visiting Lady Forestfield he might affront some of his most important patients; for the affair had been much discussed, and it is needless to say that few partisans ranged themselves on poor May's side. He knew nothing of the pecuniary circumstances in which Lady Forestfield was then placed, and would not have been surprised had they been such as possibly to preclude the payment of his fees; he only recollected May Dunmow, the pretty child whom he remembered riding with her father Lord Stortford in the Row, and at whose wedding at St. Andrew's, Wells-street, he, an old and intimate friend of the family, had been present. Dr. Chenoweth accordingly bade his servant tell the messenger that his first visit that day would be to Podbury-street.
May Forestfield had a very sharp attack; indeed, for more than a fortnight she lay between life and death. Dr. Chenoweth's earliest and latest visits were paid to her, and two professional nurses, hospital sisters--skilled and attentive women who have succeeded to the Gamp and Prig creatures--relieved each other in daily and nightly watch at her bedside. When, however, one morning in the beginning of the third week of her illness, May opened her weary eyes, and for the first time was able to recognise things around her, her glance fell, not upon any hired attendant, but upon the upturned face of a pretty girl; a delicate, pensive face surrounded with shining fair hair, a face which, though half strange to her, seemed to bring back pleasantly familiar recollections of long ago.
The girl's attention was at once attracted by the movement of the patient, and she rose from her seat and placed herself quietly by the bedside.
'It is Eleanor,' murmured May, raising her hand to shade her eyes; 'it must be Eleanor, and yet how can she be here? My head throbs, and I feel as though I were yet in a dream. Speak to me and say whether you are really there.'
'It is Eleanor,' said the girl, bending over the bed and smoothing the rumpled pillow; 'it is Eleanor, and you are in no dream, dear Lady Forestfield; but I must implore you not to talk now. Dr. Chenoweth has left the strictest orders that you should have no excitement, and, for your own sake, I must see that he is obeyed.'
May made no resistance; the mere effort of speech had completely exhausted her; and she sank back into a slumber, during which, as her gentle nurse noted with pleasure, her breathing was regular and her whole manner devoid of the feverish restlessness which had characterised her slumbers during her illness. When, after a couple of hours' peaceful repose, May again opened her eyes, she recognised her companion in an instant, and in a clearer and firmer voice spoke to her at once.
'I know you now, Eleanor,' she said, 'but even now I cannot account for your presence here. I know perfectly well I am at Mrs. Wilson's lodgings in Podbury-street, but that knowledge does not account for your presence. My head is heavy and my limbs horribly weak and languid. I feel as though I had gone through an illness.'
'You have gone through a very severe illness, dear Lady Forestfield,' said the girl, fanning the patient's face with a huge palm-leaf, on which she had previously sprinkled some drops of scent, 'and even now, though I am delighted to see you recognise me, and to hear your own well-remembered voice once again, I must warn you that you are only in the very earliest stage of convalescence. It will be brave news for Dr. Chenoweth when he comes to-night, for though he anticipated your recovery, he did not think it would commence so soon.'
'Have I, then, been so very ill?' asked May.
'For more than a fortnight you have lain here so completely prostrated with fever that the doctor would not answer for you from day to day. Now, however, thank God, we may think that all danger is passed.'
May buried her face in the pillow and was silent for some minutes. When she looked up again there were traces of tears upon her cheeks.
'And during all that time,' she whispered, stretching out her thin wan hand, 'you, dear Eleanor, have been my nurse.'
'I have been here off and on for the last ten days,' said the girl. 'I did not hear of your illness until some little time after you had been attacked, or, of course, I should have been with you before.'
'And how did you hear of it?' asked May.
'In a very curious way,' said the girl. 'It appears that in your delirium--you must not mind my mentioning it, dear Lady Forestfield--you talked about all kinds of curious things, declared that you were destitute, and that your only means of supporting yourself would be by painting pictures for your livelihood. In connection with this you mentioned the name of your old drawing-master, Mr. Irvine, who, you said, could speak as to your capability in art. Your frequent repetition of this name attracted the attention of Dr. Chenoweth, who was an old friend of my poor father, and who still keeps up his acquaintance with my sister, Mrs. Chadwick. He knew I was staying at their house, and one day, when he was calling there, he took me aside before my sister came down, and told me how very ill you were; told me, moreover, that while you were carefully and assiduously attended by the good people in this house, he thought that when you came to yourself--a period which he anticipated, but for which he could fix no date--it would be a comfort to you if your eyes could fall upon a face which you had known in--in happier times, and of which you had nothing but pleasant reminiscences. I understood him at once. I told him I thought I could say there had been no cloud upon the friendship with which you had once honoured me; and I came here that day with a letter from the doctor, which secured me a pleasant reception from Mrs. Wilson.'
May's heart was too full to speak. She pressed the young girl's hand and fell back dreamily on the pillow, grateful to the Providence which, in the midst of her complete abandonment, by those who in her prosperity she had imagined were devoted to her, had sent her one friend to prove that the old-fashioned sentiment called gratitude, mocked at and ignored nowadays, yet existed.
It was a strange history, that of the friendship between these two young women, so different in birth and surroundings. Eleanor's father, Angus Irvine, the son of a small Scotch farmer, had at an early age evinced such artistic talent as to attract the attention of the old Lord Stortford, the great landowner of the district, who purchased two or three of the young lad's early sketches, and better still, furnished him with the means of establishing himself for two or three years as an art student in Rome. The good which the young man here did for himself (on his first arrival his tastes and sympathies, quickened by the ever-present daily surroundings, so fired his eye and nerved his hand that old Roman colonists, whose judgment had been tempered by time and experience, predicted the greatest things of him) was not without a certain counterbalance of evil. The loose life led by many of his Bohemian companions, the gatherings at the Caffè Greco, thesoirées intimesof men and women at which he was a constant guest, had a baleful effect on the hitherto strictly-kept Scottish youth, and his name was scarcely known in the art circles of Rome before a rumour ran round that Angus Irvine was following in the footsteps of so many other young men of promise, and was becoming dissipated, not to say drunken. The rumour was harsh and exaggerated, and it had an exaggerated and harsh effect. He was a mere boy after all, this gaunt beardless youth of two or three and twenty, and a few glasses of wine had unwonted power on one who, in the seclusion of his mountain home, had been brought up a strict abstainer; and had the censorious left him in peace, it is probable that, so far as the drink was concerned, he would soon have got the better of his newly-acquired freedom, and settled down to a steady plodding life. As it was, when he learned--as he did speedily--that his conduct had become the subject of conversation amongst a certain set, he received the news with an outbreak of wrath, which, cooling down, was supplanted by a sturdy Scotch obstinacy, under which he determined to 'gang his ain gait,' and to treat the animadversion of his detractors with contempt. He laboured fitfully thenceforward, turning out now brilliant work, now pictures which, though undeniaSSTAVEbly possessing genius, were hurried and scamped; his doing of that which he ought not to have done was more regular, while his drinking was harder than ever.
Suddenly there came a change. Angus Irvine received a letter from Lord Stortford intimating a desire that he should come to London, it being the old lord's wish to see his protégé settled and striving for the honours of the Academy before he died. Irvine was sensible enough to know that this was the turning-point of his fate, and that if he neglected such an opportunity he would have no other chance. He was aware of his lamentable failing, and was determined to seize on and overcome it there and then; and being a man of great power of will and determination, he was able to carry out his intention. He started for England within a few weeks, and immediately on his arrival paid a visit to his patron. The old nobleman was delighted with the modest demeanour and brilliant conversational powers of the young artist; he introduced him to his son, Mr. Dunmow, a young man of about Angus's own age, who had already made a brilliant figure in Parliament, and who was about to be married to a charming girl, to whom Angus was also made known. He presented him to the leading art critics and connoisseurs of the day, from some of whom the young Scotchman received valuable commissions; and when, in the course of a couple of years, Lord Stortford heard from Angus of his approaching marriage with a young lady, the daughter of a brother artist, the old nobleman was scarcely less happy than he had been at his own son's wedding, which had taken place a year previously, and he bestowed a substantial mark of his regard upon the bride and bridegroom.
Years went on, and after a lapse of some sixteen or seventeen of them, the two pretty girls who had been born to Mr. and Mrs. Irvine were growing into young women, and Angus Irvine himself, his constitution undermined by excesses of all kinds, was rapidly lapsing into a broken elderly man; for within a very few years of his marriage, so soon as the joys of domesticity were beginning to pall upon him, he found delight in the loose and brilliant society only too ready to welcome him; the old desire for drink came upon him, and he yielded to it with scarcely a struggle. All the young fellows about town were delighted to have the company of Angus Irvine, who talked so brilliantly, and sung the homely Scotch ditties with such exquisite pathos; who could brew a bowl of punch as quickly and as deftly as he could sketch a delicious caricature, and who never minded to what hour of the morning he sat up. Nor did this cheery convivialist confine himself to men's society, or blush to be seen driving in the carriages or seated in the opera-boxes of some of the most noted improprieties of the time. Old Lord Stortford was dead; but his son and his son's wife, and the friends to whom they had introduced their northern protégé, shook their heads dismally, prophesied Angus's ruin, and wondered what Mrs. Irvine would do.
Mrs. Irvine settled that question within a very few months. She was a meek little woman, devoted to her Angus, with a sweet temper and a bad constitution; and when she found that she was deserted by her husband, and that the establishment generally was going to ruin, she thought the best thing she could do was to die--and she did it off-hand. The shock of her death sobered the poor wretch for a time. He had long since given up all hope of selling, or indeed of painting, any more pictures; his muddled brain and unsteady hand forbade that; but Lord Stortford and a few other gentlemen who had known him in better times had engaged him as drawing-master to their children, more for the sake of bestowing a small annuity on him than from the idea of any good to be obtained from his instruction, and he now saw his way to a new method of money-making.
His elder daughter, Fanny, who was eighteen years of age, inherited from him a remarkably sweet voice, and sung Scotch ballads with all the taste and pathos which had been so much applauded in her father. This was a talent which it struck Angus should be cultivated, and accordingly, by Lord Stortford's aid, he procured herentréeas a pupil at the Academy of Music, and, after a few years' instruction, she made herdébutas a concert-singer with considerable success. The talent of one daughter having been thus utilised, Angus Irvine thought it time that the younger, Eleanor, should take her turn at bread-winning. What to do with her was the crux. Eleanor had a good speaking voice, but no ear and no musical talent; neither of the children had inherited her father's artistic ability, and the education which they had received, though fair enough, was not sufficient to qualify them to act as governesses in the present day, when ladies, possessed of every possible accomplishment and willing to accept next to nothing, are advertising for situations.
What occurred to him as a happy thought at length flashed into Angus Irvine's brain--he would make his girl an actress! She was really good-looking--much handsomer than many of those women whom he used to know in the old time, and who drew large salaries. He could get her taught to speak by a professional elocutionist, and she would soon be able to contribute to the household expenses.
When this plan was mooted to Eleanor, her horror was extreme. She implored her father not to attempt to carry it out, declared her readiness to undertake any kind of service, no matter how menial, but spoke in such piteous terms of the degradation she should feel in having to appear before the public, that the Angus Irvine of a few years before would not have required her to speak twice on the subject. Now, however, drink and misfortune had rendered him callous; he released himself from his daughter's weeping embrace, and bade her make up her mind to what he had decided. In an agony of terror and fright, the girl rushed off to the one person in London whom she knew to be a true and influential friend of her father's, Lord Stortford, and told him all, imploring his interference on her behalf. Lord Stortford was greatly touched at the girl's entreaties, and after a consultation with his wife, he called on Angus Irvine, and, without hinting at his interview with Eleanor, said that he had a plan to which he requested Mr. Irvine's sanction. This was that Eleanor should come to and live in Grosvenor-square as companion to his daughter May. This proposition suited Angus Irvine very well. He would be rid of the very moderate expense entailed upon him by Eleanor, who would hand over to him the liberal salary she was to receive in consideration of her services; so that he made no objection, and the next week saw Eleanor installed as May's companion in Grosvenor-square, where, a great friendship having grown up between the girls, she remained for eighteen months, until May's marriage with Lord Forestfield.
Later in the afternoon of the first day of her convalescence, May renewed her conversation with her friend.
'You must have thought it very unkind of me, dear,' she said, placing her hand in Eleanor's, 'that notwithstanding our great intimacy, and the love and affection I had from you in Grosvenor-square, I have scarcely taken any notice of you since my marriage.'
'Not at all, dear Lady Forestfield,' said Eleanor. 'I never imagined that that intimacy, pleasant as it was to me, could be kept up. You were not out during the most part of the time I was with you, you must remember, and after your marriage I knew that you would take up your position in society, which involved innumerable claims upon you, and would form your own circle of friends.'
'From which circle,' said May, with a sigh, 'I omitted you, the very best of them, the only one who has remembered me in my time of trouble. I think you said you were staying with your sister? Where is Mr. Irvine?'
'Papa has been dead for nearly a twelvemonth,' said Eleanor, glancing down at her black dress. 'He was ill, if you recollect, just before your marriage, and he never recovered, but faded gradually away.'
'I wish my poor papa had been alive to help him,' said May; 'he would have seen that his old friend wanted for nothing.'
'I am sure of that,' said Eleanor; 'but, fortunately, my sister was enabled to take care of her father in his last illness. She was married a few months before his death to a very rich man.'
'Indeed!' said May. 'Who is he?'
'His name is Chadwick,' said Eleanor. 'I suppose he would be called a tradesman, for he is the senior member of a firm which employs hundreds of men in making boilers and engines for steam vessels. He attends to business himself, and is every day at his works, which are down the river somewhere; but they live in a splendid house in Fairfax-gardens, and Fanny now receives and goes into a great deal of what I suppose is called excellent society.'
'I recollect having heard of Mrs. Chadwick's parties, now you mention the name,' said May, 'and of their having some specialty, but what it is I cannot remember.'
'They are very grand, very hot, and, I believe, considered very splendid,' said Eleanor; 'but I do not know that there is anything particular about them, unless it be the presence of a large number of artists of different kinds--painters and musical people I mean. Fanny always takes occasion to say that she never forgets the class of which she was once a member, but I am bound to say her recognition of them is something too like patronage for my taste.'
'And you live with Mr. and Mrs. Chadwick, Eleanor? and you are happy?'
'Yes,' said Eleanor, 'I suppose so.'
'That was but a half-hearted answer,' said May. 'Are you really happy? You, used to speak frankly to me in the old days; are you frank now?'
'I never could be otherwise with you, dear Lady Forestfield, and I will tell you plainly that just now I have some cause for discomfort. The general life at Fairfax-gardens is not particularly suited to my taste; but everybody is especially kind to me, and I should make no complaint, were it not that recently Fanny seems to have made up her mind to carry out a project with which I am greatly concerned, and to which I have a strong objection.'
'This project is, of course, to marry you,' said May, 'to some friend of her own?'
'Not particularly a friend of hers,' said Eleanor, 'but a man of fashion, and for the matter of that, a celebrity, a connection with whom would, she thinks, be advantageous.'
'And you don't care for him?' asked May.
'Not in the faintest degree,' replied Eleanor. 'He is very clever, very agreeable, and particularly polished and courteous in his manner towards women; a little too polished perhaps,' she added.
'May I ask his name?' said Lady Forestfield. 'Certainly,' said Eleanor, with a smile. 'It is a curious one, but his mother or grandmother--I do not know which--was originally Greek: his name is Spiridion Pratt.'
Lady Forestfield started. 'Spiridion Pratt!' she echoed; 'I think I know him; there could not be two men of that name.'
'O, he knows you,' said Eleanor; 'he has been to your house; he was taken there by Mrs. Hamblin.'
'Exactly,' said Lady Forestfield; 'I remember now.'
'Do you dislike him?' asked Eleanor, looking up astonished at her friend's evident embarrassment.
'I know--I know very little of Mr. Pratt. And it is to him that your sister wishes to marry you?'
'Yes,' said Eleanor. 'And from what little you do know of him, you think I am right in objecting, do you not?'
'I don't say that, dear,' said May, 'but I certainly do not think you are wrong.'
Eleanor Irvine spoke with perfect truth when she said that her brother-in-law, Mr. Chadwick, was a very rich man. Boiler-making and engine-supplying, when you have secured almost a monopoly of the business, are very paying concerns; and very few of the large steam-shipping companies, not only in England but on the Continent, did not procure their propelling apparatus from Chadwick and Co. In the United States, too, the firm was well known and largely employed. Some of the largest grain elevators in Chicago had been supplied by them, and the lifts which convey you to your bedroom on the tenth story at the Jefferson House, Saratoga, or the Great Atlantic Hotel, Newport, N.J., bear the familiar name. This preëminence in his trade had all been achieved by Mr. Chadwick himself. He was a very poor boy, with but a smattering of education, when he first went in as an apprentice to the drawing-office of the works at Newcastle, the manager having taken him on out of friendship for his father, then recently dead; but he went through the whole routine of that establishment, from the hardest hand-labour to the highest head-work, until he emerged from it as its owner, and now held it as a kind of adjunct to his larger and more important establishment on the Thames. Mr. Chadwick was not a speculative man, and was never tempted to put out any of his capital with the perspective hope of large interests in Baratarian loans or investments in the enormous silver mines of Grass Valley, Colorado. He held a certain number of shares, just sufficient to make the directors regard it as good policy to keep well with him, in such steam-shipping companies as he supplied with engines, but he found that the profits derived from his legitimate undertaking brought him in income sufficient to satisfy all his wants.
This income enabled him to maintain a handsome residence in Fairfax-gardens; to entertain company constantly, and with more than ordinary hospitality; to allow his wife to commit any extravagances she pleased at the milliner's and the jeweller's, and to have all the carriages and horses she chose. It gave him a villa on the Thames, and a shooting-box in Aberdeenshire; and if it did not make him happy, there were plenty of people who said it ought to have done so, and who passed their lives in envying him and wishing to be in his place.
On the whole, however, Mr. Chadwick is a happy man. He has an imperturbably good temper, which no amount of business worry can upset, and he is very proud of his wife. There were plenty of men of birth and breeding whom Mr. Chadwick had met in business, and who, knowing his wealth and the value of a connection with him, would have been only too glad to introduce the rich boiler-maker to their sisters and daughters, and to use all their influence to induce those female members of their family to secure his hand. But Mr. Chadwick, in his own frank phraseology, 'did not go in for swells;' and though in later days he was pleased to see a large number of smart people at his house, and to read their names and titles duly set forth in the next morning's paper, it was because he knew this gave pleasure to his wife, whose every wish he delighted in forestalling. When Mr. Chadwick first saw Miss Irvine, with a rose in her hair and a piece of music in her hand, in front of the orchestra at the St. James's Hall, and heard her warble 'Coming through the Rye,' he determined that, if possible, she should be his wife. The difficulty was not great; the young lady was ambitious, her father was mercenary; and from the day on which they were married, 'my Fan' was Mr. Chadwick's first consideration, ranking even before 'the works,' which up to that time had held possession of his mind, to the exclusion almost of any other subject.
Mrs. Chadwick was what is called 'an elegant-looking woman,' with dark complexion, regular features, and a slight figure; her manners were good, she spoke French and Italian with fluency, had sufficient shrewdness to catch the pervading tone, and was altogether quite presentable in society. She had been ambitious when she was only a concert-singer, and dependent on her own resources. Now that she had a large income at her command she determined to make her mark; to be talked of, renowned, the object of curiosity, and the subject of gossip, was her dearest wish. She could have obtained the notoriety she wanted in one season, by entering into a desperate flirtation--for there would have been no lack of men willing to flirt to any extent with her, some for mere fun, and others in the hope of making a good thing of it--and there are always plenty of persons ready to spread scandal and slander. But Mrs. Chadwick had no intention of entering upon any flirtation, even of the mildest kind; she said she was 'not naturally given that way,' and moreover she had seen quite enough of poverty and precarious existence to prevent her from compromising the very excellent position which fate had assigned her; so she sat herself calmly down at the foot of the social ladder, determined to scale it by entertainments given to the best people whom she could induce to accept her invitations. She began by inviting the wives of the baronets and members of parliament with whom Mr. Chadwick was concerned in various business matters; and though these ladies, who were for the most part intensely respectable, at first hung back, having heard rumours of Mrs. Chadwick's ante-nuptial professional experiences, and having a vague idea that she had been 'on the stage,' their husbands, to whom the business connection with Mr. Chadwick was valuable, insisted on their not merely accepting the invitation, but on their behaving themselves without the stiffness and frigidity which they delighted to display whenever they thought they could safely do so.
The step thus made was satisfactory, but the society obtained by it was rather poor. It began to improve when some of the younger members of the House, and the private secretaries of ministers whom Mr. Chadwick had now and then occasion to wait upon, found out and appreciated the excellence of the cuisine and the cellar in Fairfax-gardens, and not only came themselves when asked, but brought their friends--guardsmen, Foreign-office clerks, and men about town of various ages and degrees. So far as the men were concerned, this was all very well; but Mrs. Chadwick saw with regret that, with the ladies she had made very little way. The extremely proper and generally plain-headed wives of the commercial baronets and M.P.s turned up their eyes at each other in horror at some of the male company, whose loose living was notorious, and whom they saw dancing attendance in Fairfax-gardens; dear Lord George never brought dear Lady George, the Marquis never so much as mentioned the Marchioness, although Mrs. Chadwick gave him frequent opportunities for doing so; and though several of the private secretaries chattered volubly enough about their sisters, no cards from those ladies were ever delivered in Fairfax-gardens.
Mrs. Chadwick suffered deeply under this social ban; she could not see the way to fight against it herself, and at last took Charley Ormerod, one of the private secretaries, and the best leader of acotillonin London, into her confidence. Charley was very frank in deed upon the point. 'If you want to get hold of this sort of people, my dear Mrs. Chadwick,' said he, 'and 'pon my word I don't see why--you being so very charming yourself, and all that sort of thing--you will find it uncommonly difficult. There is so much going on in their own set, that they won't go anywhere, don't you know, unless it is to meet some particular person or to see some particular thing. Now your cook is first class, and Chadwick has some dry champagne that is really A1, and if there were nothing so good elsewhere in both those ways, they would come for that; but there is, and so they won't. You will ask how it is that Madame Schottenberger and Mrs. Stutterheim go into society when their position is no better than yours, and their houses, I think, nothing like so nice; but then, you see, both Schottenberger and Stutterheim are in the City, and they are able, don't you know, to give these people what one may call a leg-up in the way of making a little premium on shares. Mr. Chadwick is not in that line; he is the last man who would think of doing anything of that sort if he were. Now if you could only give them some specialty. There is that fine billiard-room at the back; what do you say to turning it into a theatre, having a stage at the end, and that sort of thing? And there are lots of amateurs who would be only too delighted to come and act; or you could get up tableaux, don't you know, with pretty girls, and have Eardley or some of those fellows to pose them, and then supper, don't you know, and that sort of thing; if you could do one, and just get it talked about, everybody would be wild to come to the next.'
Mrs. Chadwick ponders over this idea, but is afraid it will not do, at least so far as dramatic representation is concerned. The tableaux might be managed quietly at some future time; but Mr. Chadwick, whose childhood was passed among strict dissenters in the North, has a strong objection to theatrical entertainments, and his wife thinks best to give him no cause for complaint. Nevertheless, the attempt to secure superior society must be made; and it is first made with concerts. Mrs. Chadwick drives round to some of those whom she used to know in her professional days; old Sir Gottlieb Moto, the famous music-master, who smiles and rubs his hands, and will give her all the assistance in his power, and Mr. Bluck, the well-knownentrepreneurof the Ante-Chamber Concerts, who every year produces such a wonderful prospectus, and who knows far too much about music to attempt to play or sing. By the aid of these gentlemen a very excellent concert was given, at which all the noted singers of the day were present, and were exceptionally treated in being asked to remain after their labours were over, and mingle with the company. Mrs. Chadwick made a great point of this, and went about murmuring to the wives and daughters of the baronets and M.P.s that she did not forget the time when she herself was in a similar position, and that she would always be glad to welcome her brothers and sisters in art; at which the wives and daughters muttered 'How charming!' to her face, and shrugged their shoulders and raised their eyebrows to each other when her back was turned.
All those who were present congratulated Mrs. Chadwick on her delightful concert, but she was shrewd enough to see that she was no nearer the end she had proposed to herself--the entertainment of a better class of society; so Charley Ormerod was again called into consultation, with the result that the tableaux were determined upon, and set about in earnest. There was no difficulty in finding good-looking young people to volunteer for the different characters so soon as the idea was promulgated, and it was understood that the thing was to be carried out without reference to expense. The sisters of two or three of the private secretaries, who knew the fascination of dishevelled hair and bare arms, and who saw their way to Andromache lamenting over the dead body of Hector, or Jephtha's daughter in her solitude amongst the mountain fastnesses, induced their brothers to propose them at once; and amongst Mr. Chadwick's plutocratic Tyburnian connection there were many pretty girls only too glad to be utilised. The committee of management was composed of men of the highest artistic repute in London. Old Mr. Tabardy, who passed his early life in writing burlesques, and whose latter days are spent in even a more comic way in the manufacture of pedigrees and the search for coats-of-arms for parvenus, came up from the Heralds' College, bearing two elaborate books of costume pictures; Mr. Eardley, R.A., who looks like Glaucus the Athenian, was there to superintend the embodiment of one of his own dreamy sensuous creations; and Mr. Gurth, who would be Eardley's shadow if he had not a large body and capable brain of his own, was of course there also. Mogg, R.A., came (of course in his worsted comforter, though the month was June), and gave excellent advice and assistance in preparing a tableau of the days of Charles II.; and Ghoule, the great tragedian, who was never before seen in the daylight, 'made up' the gentleman who was to portray the dead body of Hector in the most approved charnel-house fashion. Each tableau was to be ushered in by music, and the choice of that music and its direction was left to Mr. Shamus O'Voca, who is as popular in society as he is clever in his art. Auguste and Nathan were nearly worried out of their lives; and in addition to them, by favour of the managers, various theatrical tailors were busily engaged in the preparation of costumes. All this preparation began to be talked of in those circles amongst which Mrs. Chadwick most wanted it made known; faint wishes for invitations were heard, which, after the full-dress rehearsal carefully arranged for by Charley Ormerod and duly notified in the newspapers, grew into furious desire. Under Charley's advice, Mrs. Chadwick at first stood firm, and issued very few cards to persons whom she had not previously known. 'There would be another representation later on,' she said to those asking on behalf of their friends, 'and they could come then.' This reply, of course, fanned the flame--they must come the first time, nothing could prevent them; and eventually, by what Charley called 'jockey-ship' And Mrs. Chadwick 'diplomacy,' the boilermaker's wife had the pleasure of receiving one duchess, two marchionesses, four countesses, and a great number of lords and ladies at the first representation of her tableaux.
From that time forth Mrs. Chadwick's course was easy. After her second season, now just concluded, she was honoured by the presence of royalty at her tableaux, and a garden-party which she gave at the villa on the Thames was pronounced the most perfect fête seen for many years; the description of it and of the company assembled filled a column of theSluice, a journal not generally given to reporting such matters; and old Lord Quoch wrote a poem about it, which was made to do duty as letter-press to a fanciful river-side illustration, and published in theAlbert-gate Magazine. By this means Mrs. Chadwick was fully established as one of the personages of the day, and her movements were duly chronicled among the 'fashionable arrangements' advertised by the fashionable journal.
With all her frivolity and her hankering after great society, the woman was kindhearted, as she had proved by her treatment of her sister. When in the days gone by it was proposed by Mr. Irvine that Eleanor should be sent upon the stage, the plan was rather approved of than otherwise by Fanny, who thought it time that her sister should be earning her own livelihood, and saw nothing to be complained of in the means by which it was proposed she should do so. After her marriage, indeed, while enlarging on her own experiences in the concert-rooms, she would aver it to be a very different arena from the stage, would shake her head at the mention of ladies of the theatrical profession, of whom not more than two (who were supposed to have certificates of character from the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Editor ofPunch) were admitted into Mrs. Chadwick's society. But formerly, when there had seemed to be a chance of thirty shillings a week being added to the general income, Fanny not merely had felt no scruple at Eleanor's following this despised profession, but had rated her sister soundly when the girl expressed her horror at the career in store for her; nor while she was still toiling in concert-rooms was she best pleased that Eleanor should be leading a comparatively easy life in that very society to which she, Fanny, had always aspired. After her marriage, however, all was very different. Mrs. Chadwick then thought it scarcely right that her sister should be 'dependent on a fine lady,' more especially a fine lady who could not be induced to take any notice of Mrs. Chadwick, although that worthy woman had what children call 'spelled' for it in every possible way; and when Mr. Irvine died, Fanny took her sister from her father's poor lodging, to which she had returned after May Dunmow's marriage, and bade her be happy at Fairfax-gardens until she should possess a home of her own.
At Fairfax-gardens Eleanor lived happily enough until this question of her marriage arose to cause her annoyance. Occasions of difference between the sisters had previously been slight and few, for Eleanor was in the habit of giving way to her sister's whims, and save when she was requested to give up her black dress at the end of six months--a period which Mrs. Chadwick thought quite long enough to show any outward signs of lamentation for her deceased father--she had but little difficulty in doing so. On that point, however, she was firm; and as it would have been impossible for her in her mourning attire to take part in the festivities which commenced so soon as the prescribed time was over, Eleanor did not mix with the general society, but only saw those who were intimate friends at the house. Amongst the latter was Mr. Spiridion Pratt, a dilettante gentleman of five or six and thirty, who, having an excellent fortune and a cultivated taste, chose to pass the 'fallow leisure of his life' with painters, sculptors, writers, musicians, and actors, and to attempt himself to shine a little in each of those vocations in which his friends were proficient. Poems signed 'S.P.' were not uncommon in the pages of the fashionable magazines; the President of the Royal Academy (remembering a commission which he had received and executed for painting an equestrian portrait of the late Mr. Pratt for presentation to the Muffletubbe Hunt, of which he had been M.F.H.) had made a very graceful allusion at one of the annual banquets to 'an amateur contribution of great merit which graces our walls,' and all the R.A.s of Spiridion's acquaintance, who were in the habit of dining with him very often, tried to catch his downcast eyes, and in their after-dinner perambulations through the room nudged each other as they pointed out a rather gloomy canvas representing a Rhenish wineglass, a bunch of grapes, half a cut orange, and two boiled prawns, which, under the title of 'Still Life,' had been S.P.'s contribution to the exhibition. It is needless to say that 'Ballads of the Blighted,' words and music by Spiridion Pratt, Esq., are on every piano, and that two of them, 'My Muffineer' and 'Take, O take the toast away,' have achieved an unparalleled success.
With all these social advantages, and with a certain amount of good looks of the black-eyed, straight-nosed, hairdresser's-dummy style, Mr. Pratt was naturally a favourite with the ladies, and certainaffaireswith which his name was mixed up had been freely discussed in society. TheseaffairesMrs. Chadwick professed to look upon as mere trifles, though one of them had lasted for a considerable time, and was supposed to be even then in existence. Any discreditable connection of the kind, however, could not possibly be known to a lady of Mrs. Chadwick's virtue, and wholly ignoring it, she laid plans for making a match between her sister and the accomplished Spiridion. Eleanor, as we have seen, was by no means pleased at the idea; but Mr. Pratt was not merely much struck by the girl's beauty, but thought it would be very delightful to have the moulding of such a young and ingenuous creature, and to undertake the formation of her character on a plan peculiarly his own. The already existing connection threatened to prove an obstacle; but that connection must be broken at some time or other, and Spiridion thought he would have little chance of finding a better excuse than Eleanor Irvine.
Such was the state of affairs at the time when Eleanor was paying her stolen visits to Lady Forestfield; necessarily stolen, because Mrs. Chadwick imagined that all connection between Eleanor and her quondam patroness had ceased, and would have been horribly scandalised at the notion that her sister was in the habit of seeing one 'who had so painfully forgotten herself.' Fanny had never had any liking for Lord Stortford's family, and the fact that her younger sister had been preferred to her for adoption in the Grosvenor-square household had never ceased to rankle in her mind. When, therefore, the story of Lady Forestfield's disgrace became known, Mrs. Chadwick made it the theme of many bitter discourses, with which she improved the occasion, and inflicted the deepest pain on her sister when kindness was needed.
When she left Podbury-street after the conversation recorded in the last