How very little does the amateur, dwelling at home at ease, comprehend
the labours and perils of the author, and, when he smilingly skims the
surface of a work of fiction, how little does he consider the hours
of toil, consultation of authorities, researches in the Bodleian,
correspondence with learned and illegible Germans--in one word, the vast
scaffolding that was first built up and then knocked down, to while away
an hour for him in a railway train! Thus I might begin this tale with
a biography of Tonti--birthplace, parentage, genius probably inherited
from his mother, remarkable instance of precocity, etc--and a complete
treatise on the system to which he bequeathed his name. The material
is all beside me in a pigeon-hole, but I scorn to appear vainglorious.
Tonti is dead, and I never saw anyone who even pretended to regret him;
and, as for the tontine system, a word will suffice for all the purposes
of this unvarnished narrative.
A number of sprightly youths (the more the merrier) put up a certain sum
of money, which is then funded in a pool under trustees; coming on for
a century later, the proceeds are fluttered for a moment in the face of
the last survivor, who is probably deaf, so that he cannot even hear of
his success--and who is certainly dying, so that he might just as well
have lost. The peculiar poetry and even humour of the scheme is now
apparent, since it is one by which nobody concerned can possibly profit;
but its fine, sportsmanlike character endeared it to our grandparents.
When Joseph Finsbury and his brother Masterman were little lads
in white-frilled trousers, their father--a well-to-do merchant
in Cheapside--caused them to join a small but rich tontine of
seven-and-thirty lives. A thousand pounds was the entrance fee; and
Joseph Finsbury can remember to this day the visit to the lawyer’s,
where the members of the tontine--all children like himself--were
assembled together, and sat in turn in the big office chair, and signed
their names with the assistance of a kind old gentleman in spectacles
and Wellington boots. He remembers playing with the children afterwards
on the lawn at the back of the lawyer’s house, and a battle-royal that
he had with a brother tontiner who had kicked his shins. The sound of
war called forth the lawyer from where he was dispensing cake and
wine to the assembled parents in the office, and the combatants were
separated, and Joseph’s spirit (for he was the smaller of the two)
commended by the gentleman in the Wellington boots, who vowed he had
been just such another at the same age. Joseph wondered to himself if
he had worn at that time little Wellingtons and a little bald head,
and when, in bed at night, he grew tired of telling himself stories
of sea-fights, he used to dress himself up as the old gentleman, and
entertain other little boys and girls with cake and wine.
In the year 1840 the thirty-seven were all alive; in 1850 their number
had decreased by six; in 1856 and 1857 business was more lively, for the
Crimea and the Mutiny carried off no less than nine. There remained
in 1870 but five of the original members, and at the date of my story,
including the two Finsburys, but three.
By this time Masterman was in his seventy-third year; he had long
complained of the effects of age, had long since retired from business,
and now lived in absolute seclusion under the roof of his son Michael,
the well-known solicitor. Joseph, on the other hand, was still up and
about, and still presented but a semi-venerable figure on the streets
in which he loved to wander. This was the more to be deplored because
Masterman had led (even to the least particular) a model British life.
Industry, regularity, respectability, and a preference for the four per
cents are understood to be the very foundations of a green old age. All
these Masterman had eminently displayed, and here he was, ab agendo, at
seventy-three; while Joseph, barely two years younger, and in the most
excellent preservation, had disgraced himself through life by idleness
and eccentricity. Embarked in the leather trade, he had early wearied
of business, for which he was supposed to have small parts. A taste for
general information, not promptly checked, had soon begun to sap his
manhood. There is no passion more debilitating to the mind, unless,
perhaps, it be that itch of public speaking which it not infrequently
accompanies or begets. The two were conjoined in the case of Joseph; the
acute stage of this double malady, that in which the patient delivers
gratuitous lectures, soon declared itself with severity, and not many
years had passed over his head before he would have travelled thirty
miles to address an infant school. He was no student; his reading was
confined to elementary textbooks and the daily papers; he did not even
fly as high as cyclopedias; life, he would say, was his volume. His
lectures were not meant, he would declare, for college professors; they
were addressed direct to ‘the great heart of the people’, and the
heart of the people must certainly be sounder than its head, for his
lucubrations were received with favour. That entitled ‘How to Live
Cheerfully on Forty Pounds a Year’, created a sensation among the
unemployed. ‘Education: Its Aims, Objects, Purposes, and Desirability’,
gained him the respect of the shallow-minded. As for his celebrated
essay on ‘Life Insurance Regarded in its Relation to the Masses’, read
before the Working Men’s Mutual Improvement Society, Isle of Dogs, it
was received with a ‘literal ovation’ by an unintelligent audience of
both sexes, and so marked was the effect that he was next year elected
honorary president of the institution, an office of less than
no emolument--since the holder was expected to come down with a
donation--but one which highly satisfied his self-esteem.
While Joseph was thus building himself up a reputation among the more
cultivated portion of the ignorant, his domestic life was suddenly
overwhelmed by orphans. The death of his younger brother Jacob saddled
him with the charge of two boys, Morris and John; and in the course of
the same year his family was still further swelled by the addition of a
little girl, the daughter of John Henry Hazeltine, Esq., a gentleman
of small property and fewer friends. He had met Joseph only once, at a
lecture-hall in Holloway; but from that formative experience he returned
home to make a new will, and consign his daughter and her fortune to the
lecturer. Joseph had a kindly disposition; and yet it was not without
reluctance that he accepted this new responsibility, advertised for a
nurse, and purchased a second-hand perambulator. Morris and John he made
more readily welcome; not so much because of the tie of consanguinity
as because the leather business (in which he hastened to invest their
fortune of thirty thousand pounds) had recently exhibited inexplicable
symptoms of decline. A young but capable Scot was chosen as manager to
the enterprise, and the cares of business never again afflicted Joseph
Finsbury. Leaving his charges in the hands of the capable Scot (who was
married), he began his extensive travels on the Continent and in Asia
Minor.
With a polyglot Testament in one hand and a phrase-book in the other,
he groped his way among the speakers of eleven European languages.
The first of these guides is hardly applicable to the purposes of the
philosophic traveller, and even the second is designed more expressly
for the tourist than for the expert in life. But he pressed interpreters
into his service--whenever he could get their services for nothing--and
by one means and another filled many notebooks with the results of his
researches.
In these wanderings he spent several years, and only returned to England
when the increasing age of his charges needed his attention. The two
lads had been placed in a good but economical school, where they had
received a sound commercial education; which was somewhat awkward, as
the leather business was by no means in a state to court enquiry. In
fact, when Joseph went over his accounts preparatory to surrendering his
trust, he was dismayed to discover that his brother’s fortune had not
increased by his stewardship; even by making over to his two wards
every penny he had in the world, there would still be a deficit of seven
thousand eight hundred pounds. When these facts were communicated to the
two brothers in the presence of a lawyer, Morris Finsbury threatened
his uncle with all the terrors of the law, and was only prevented from
taking extreme steps by the advice of the professional man. ‘You cannot
get blood from a stone,’ observed the lawyer.
And Morris saw the point and came to terms with his uncle. On the one
side, Joseph gave up all that he possessed, and assigned to his
nephew his contingent interest in the tontine, already quite a hopeful
speculation. On the other, Morris agreed to harbour his uncle and Miss
Hazeltine (who had come to grief with the rest), and to pay to each
of them one pound a month as pocket-money. The allowance was amply
sufficient for the old man; it scarce appears how Miss Hazeltine
contrived to dress upon it; but she did, and, what is more, she never
complained. She was, indeed, sincerely attached to her incompetent
guardian. He had never been unkind; his age spoke for him loudly; there
was something appealing in his whole-souled quest of knowledge and
innocent delight in the smallest mark of admiration; and, though the
lawyer had warned her she was being sacrificed, Julia had refused to add
to the perplexities of Uncle Joseph.
In a large, dreary house in John Street, Bloomsbury, these four dwelt
together; a family in appearance, in reality a financial association.
Julia and Uncle Joseph were, of course, slaves; John, a gentle man with
a taste for the banjo, the music-hall, the Gaiety bar, and the sporting
papers, must have been anywhere a secondary figure; and the cares
and delights of empire devolved entirely upon Morris. That these are
inextricably intermixed is one of the commonplaces with which the bland
essayist consoles the incompetent and the obscure, but in the case of
Morris the bitter must have largely outweighed the sweet. He grudged no
trouble to himself, he spared none to others; he called the servants
in the morning, he served out the stores with his own hand, he took
soundings of the sherry, he numbered the remainder biscuits; painful
scenes took place over the weekly bills, and the cook was frequently
impeached, and the tradespeople came and hectored with him in the back
parlour upon a question of three farthings. The superficial might have
deemed him a miser; in his own eyes he was simply a man who had been
defrauded; the world owed him seven thousand eight hundred pounds, and
he intended that the world should pay.
But it was in his dealings with Joseph that Morris’s character
particularly shone. His uncle was a rather gambling stock in which he
had invested heavily; and he spared no pains in nursing the security.
The old man was seen monthly by a physician, whether he was well or ill.
His diet, his raiment, his occasional outings, now to Brighton, now to
Bournemouth, were doled out to him like pap to infants. In bad weather
he must keep the house. In good weather, by half-past nine, he must
be ready in the hall; Morris would see that he had gloves and that his
shoes were sound; and the pair would start for the leather business
arm in arm. The way there was probably dreary enough, for there was no
pretence of friendly feeling; Morris had never ceased to upbraid
his guardian with his defalcation and to lament the burthen of Miss
Hazeltine; and Joseph, though he was a mild enough soul, regarded his
nephew with something very near akin to hatred. But the way there
was nothing to the journey back; for the mere sight of the place of
business, as well as every detail of its transactions, was enough to
poison life for any Finsbury.
Joseph’s name was still over the door; it was he who still signed the
cheques; but this was only policy on the part of Morris, and designed
to discourage other members of the tontine. In reality the business was
entirely his; and he found it an inheritance of sorrows. He tried to
sell it, and the offers he received were quite derisory. He tried to
extend it, and it was only the liabilities he succeeded in extending; to
restrict it, and it was only the profits he managed to restrict. Nobody
had ever made money out of that concern except the capable Scot, who
retired (after his discharge) to the neighbourhood of Banff and built a
castle with his profits. The memory of this fallacious Caledonian Morris
would revile daily, as he sat in the private office opening his mail,
with old Joseph at another table, sullenly awaiting orders, or savagely
affixing signatures to he knew not what. And when the man of the heather
pushed cynicism so far as to send him the announcement of his second
marriage (to Davida, eldest daughter of the Revd. Alexander McCraw), it
was really supposed that Morris would have had a fit.
Business hours, in the Finsbury leather trade, had been cut to the
quick; even Morris’s strong sense of duty to himself was not strong
enough to dally within those walls and under the shadow of that
bankruptcy; and presently the manager and the clerks would draw a long
breath, and compose themselves for another day of procrastination. Raw
Haste, on the authority of my Lord Tennyson, is half-sister to Delay;
but the Business Habits are certainly her uncles. Meanwhile, the leather
merchant would lead his living investment back to John Street like a
puppy dog; and, having there immured him in the hall, would depart for
the day on the quest of seal rings, the only passion of his life. Joseph
had more than the vanity of man, he had that of lecturers. He owned he
was in fault, although more sinned against (by the capable Scot) than
sinning; but had he steeped his hands in gore, he would still not
deserve to be thus dragged at the chariot-wheels of a young man, to sit
a captive in the halls of his own leather business, to be entertained
with mortifying comments on his whole career--to have his costume
examined, his collar pulled up, the presence of his mittens verified,
and to be taken out and brought home in custody, like an infant with
a nurse. At the thought of it his soul would swell with venom, and he
would make haste to hang up his hat and coat and the detested mittens,
and slink upstairs to Julia and his notebooks. The drawing-room at least
was sacred from Morris; it belonged to the old man and the young girl;
it was there that she made her dresses; it was there that he inked
his spectacles over the registration of disconnected facts and the
calculation of insignificant statistics.
Here he would sometimes lament his connection with the tontine. ‘If it
were not for that,’ he cried one afternoon, ‘he would not care to keep
me. I might be a free man, Julia. And I could so easily support myself
by giving lectures.’
‘To be sure you could,’ said she; ‘and I think it one of the meanest
things he ever did to deprive you of that amusement. There were those
nice people at the Isle of Cats (wasn’t it?) who wrote and asked you so
very kindly to give them an address. I did think he might have let you
go to the Isle of Cats.’
‘He is a man of no intelligence,’ cried Joseph. ‘He lives here literally
surrounded by the absorbing spectacle of life, and for all the good
it does him, he might just as well be in his coffin. Think of his
opportunities! The heart of any other young man would burn within him
at the chance. The amount of information that I have it in my power
to convey, if he would only listen, is a thing that beggars language,
Julia.’
‘Whatever you do, my dear, you mustn’t excite yourself,’ said Julia;
‘for you know, if you look at all ill, the doctor will be sent for.’
‘That is very true,’ returned the old man humbly, ‘I will compose myself
with a little study.’ He thumbed his gallery of notebooks. ‘I wonder,’
he said, ‘I wonder (since I see your hands are occupied) whether it
might not interest you--’
‘Why, of course it would,’ cried Julia. ‘Read me one of your nice
stories, there’s a dear.’
He had the volume down and his spectacles upon his nose instanter, as
though to forestall some possible retractation. ‘What I propose to read
to you,’ said he, skimming through the pages, ‘is the notes of a highly
important conversation with a Dutch courier of the name of David Abbas,
which is the Latin for abbot. Its results are well worth the money
it cost me, for, as Abbas at first appeared somewhat impatient, I was
induced to (what is, I believe, singularly called) stand him drink. It
runs only to about five-and-twenty pages. Yes, here it is.’ He cleared
his throat, and began to read.
Mr Finsbury (according to his own report) contributed about four hundred
and ninety-nine five-hundredths of the interview, and elicited from
Abbas literally nothing. It was dull for Julia, who did not require to
listen; for the Dutch courier, who had to answer, it must have been
a perfect nightmare. It would seem as if he had consoled himself by
frequent appliances to the bottle; it would even seem that (toward the
end) he had ceased to depend on Joseph’s frugal generosity and called
for the flagon on his own account. The effect, at least, of some
mellowing influence was visible in the record: Abbas became suddenly a
willing witness; he began to volunteer disclosures; and Julia had just
looked up from her seam with something like a smile, when Morris burst
into the house, eagerly calling for his uncle, and the next instant
plunged into the room, waving in the air the evening paper.
It was indeed with great news that he came charged. The demise was
announced of Lieutenant-General Sir Glasgow Biggar, KCSI, KCMG, etc.,
and the prize of the tontine now lay between the Finsbury brothers. Here
was Morris’s opportunity at last. The brothers had never, it is true,
been cordial. When word came that Joseph was in Asia Minor, Masterman
had expressed himself with irritation. ‘I call it simply indecent,’ he
had said. ‘Mark my words--we shall hear of him next at the North Pole.’
And these bitter expressions had been reported to the traveller on his
return. What was worse, Masterman had refused to attend the lecture on
‘Education: Its Aims, Objects, Purposes, and Desirability’, although
invited to the platform. Since then the brothers had not met. On the
other hand, they never had openly quarrelled; Joseph (by Morris’s
orders) was prepared to waive the advantage of his juniority; Masterman
had enjoyed all through life the reputation of a man neither greedy nor
unfair. Here, then, were all the elements of compromise assembled;
and Morris, suddenly beholding his seven thousand eight hundred pounds
restored to him, and himself dismissed from the vicissitudes of the
leather trade, hastened the next morning to the office of his cousin
Michael.
Michael was something of a public character. Launched upon the law at a
very early age, and quite without protectors, he had become a trafficker
in shady affairs. He was known to be the man for a lost cause; it was
known he could extract testimony from a stone, and interest from a
gold-mine; and his office was besieged in consequence by all that
numerous class of persons who have still some reputation to lose, and
find themselves upon the point of losing it; by those who have
made undesirable acquaintances, who have mislaid a compromising
correspondence, or who are blackmailed by their own butlers. In
private life Michael was a man of pleasure; but it was thought his dire
experience at the office had gone far to sober him, and it was known
that (in the matter of investments) he preferred the solid to the
brilliant. What was yet more to the purpose, he had been all his life a
consistent scoffer at the Finsbury tontine.
It was therefore with little fear for the result that Morris presented
himself before his cousin, and proceeded feverishly to set forth his
scheme. For near upon a quarter of an hour the lawyer suffered him to
dwell upon its manifest advantages uninterrupted. Then Michael rose from
his seat, and, ringing for his clerk, uttered a single clause: ‘It won’t
do, Morris.’
It was in vain that the leather merchant pleaded and reasoned, and
returned day after day to plead and reason. It was in vain that he
offered a bonus of one thousand, of two thousand, of three thousand
pounds; in vain that he offered, in Joseph’s name, to be content with
only one-third of the pool. Still there came the same answer: ‘It won’t
do.’
‘I can’t see the bottom of this,’ he said at last. ‘You answer none of
my arguments; you haven’t a word to say. For my part, I believe it’s
malice.’
The lawyer smiled at him benignly. ‘You may believe one thing,’ said he.
‘Whatever else I do, I am not going to gratify any of your curiosity.
You see I am a trifle more communicative today, because this is our last
interview upon the subject.’
‘Our last interview!’ cried Morris.
‘The stirrup-cup, dear boy,’ returned Michael. ‘I can’t have my business
hours encroached upon. And, by the by, have you no business of your own?
Are there no convulsions in the leather trade?’
‘I believe it to be malice,’ repeated Morris doggedly. ‘You always hated
and despised me from a boy.’
‘No, no--not hated,’ returned Michael soothingly. ‘I rather like you
than otherwise; there’s such a permanent surprise about you, you look so
dark and attractive from a distance. Do you know that to the naked
eye you look romantic?--like what they call a man with a history? And
indeed, from all that I can hear, the history of the leather trade is
full of incident.’
‘Yes,’ said Morris, disregarding these remarks, ‘it’s no use coming
here. I shall see your father.’
‘O no, you won’t,’ said Michael. ‘Nobody shall see my father.’
‘I should like to know why,’ cried his cousin.
‘I never make any secret of that,’ replied the lawyer. ‘He is too ill.’
‘If he is as ill as you say,’ cried the other, ‘the more reason for
accepting my proposal. I will see him.’
‘Will you?’ said Michael, and he rose and rang for his clerk.
It was now time, according to Sir Faraday Bond, the medical baronet
whose name is so familiar at the foot of bulletins, that Joseph (the
poor Golden Goose) should be removed into the purer air of Bournemouth;
and for that uncharted wilderness of villas the family now shook off
the dust of Bloomsbury; Julia delighted, because at Bournemouth she
sometimes made acquaintances; John in despair, for he was a man of city
tastes; Joseph indifferent where he was, so long as there was pen and
ink and daily papers, and he could avoid martyrdom at the office; Morris
himself, perhaps, not displeased to pretermit these visits to the city,
and have a quiet time for thought. He was prepared for any sacrifice;
all he desired was to get his money again and clear his feet of leather;
and it would be strange, since he was so modest in his desires, and the
pool amounted to upward of a hundred and sixteen thousand pounds--it
would be strange indeed if he could find no way of influencing Michael.
‘If I could only guess his reason,’ he repeated to himself; and by day,
as he walked in Branksome Woods, and by night, as he turned upon his
bed, and at meal-times, when he forgot to eat, and in the bathing
machine, when he forgot to dress himself, that problem was constantly
before him: Why had Michael refused?
At last, one night, he burst into his brother’s room and woke him.
‘What’s all this?’ asked John.
‘Julia leaves this place tomorrow,’ replied Morris. ‘She must go up to
town and get the house ready, and find servants. We shall all follow in
three days.’
‘Oh, brayvo!’ cried John. ‘But why?’
‘I’ve found it out, John,’ returned his brother gently.
‘It? What?’ enquired John.
‘Why Michael won’t compromise,’ said Morris. ‘It’s because he can’t.
It’s because Masterman’s dead, and he’s keeping it dark.’
‘Golly!’ cried the impressionable John. ‘But what’s the use? Why does he
do it, anyway?’
‘To defraud us of the tontine,’ said his brother.
‘He couldn’t; you have to have a doctor’s certificate,’ objected John.
‘Did you never hear of venal doctors?’ enquired Morris. ‘They’re as
common as blackberries: you can pick ‘em up for three-pound-ten a head.’
‘I wouldn’t do it under fifty if I were a sawbones,’ ejaculated John.
‘And then Michael,’ continued Morris, ‘is in the very thick of it. All
his clients have come to grief; his whole business is rotten eggs. If
any man could arrange it, he could; and depend upon it, he has his plan
all straight; and depend upon it, it’s a good one, for he’s clever, and
be damned to him! But I’m clever too; and I’m desperate. I lost seven
thousand eight hundred pounds when I was an orphan at school.’
‘O, don’t be tedious,’ interrupted John. ‘You’ve lost far more already
trying to get it back.’