FANCY AND FACT.
Had Mrs. Frazer been thoroughly aware of to whom and to what she was
going, perhaps she might have delayed some considerable period weighing
the pro’s and con’s, on both sides, before she finally determined to
reject the old laird’s offer; and if, after all, she had set forth on
her Southern pilgrimage, it would have been with a much more mournful
face, and a far heavier heart than any person had ever supposed to
belong to, or dwell in the breast of, the widow of Allan Frazer, Esq.,
late Captain in His Majesty’s ——th regiment of Highlanders.
All she knew positively concerning her brother may be summed up in a
very few words. He was fifteen years older than herself—a bachelor—and
extremely rich.
Owing to the disparity of their ages, and the fact that John, disliking
parental control, especially in commercial matters, had at the early age
of eighteen “started for himself,” there was little intercourse betwixt
them before Mrs. Frazer’s marriage; and after that event, letters from
the London merchant to the Scottish gentleman’s wife came to Glenfiord
at such rare intervals, that, like the Lord Mayor’s show, they only
served to remind the fashionable lady there was such an individual in
existence—until she required help from him, until the choice lay between
“London with John Merapie,” and the “Highlands with the head of her
husband’s clan:” then quick as lightning she bethought herself how
wealthy her brother was; how delightful it would be to preside over a
grand establishment in her native city; how splendidly he could provide
for Malcolm and Mina; and how liberally, she might feel certain, he
would act towards her.
And so she wrote to say, “I am beggared;” and he, by return of post,
offered her a home and a cordial welcome,—which letter filled the poor
lady’s weak brain full of all sorts of absurd ideas concerning
“fashionable life in London;” self, children and brother, visitors,
servants, house, equipage and furniture, being the heroes, heroines, and
etceteras of the tale she so speedily imagined—but which like many
another, better and worse, fiction before and since—was never, spite of
the admiration its authoress felt for the same, destined to be
published.
How gladly she would have turned that dream into a reality, how fully
she expected it to become such, she herself and one or two others came
in time fully to understand; but she had, unhappily for her own comfort,
started on wrong data: she had taken a supposititious house for her
brother, furnished it with a vision, placed him therein with a false
character, and finally repaired to London under a delusion, in order to
see the “whirlwind from the desert come,” and level with its practical
breath all the fine airy castles she had comforted herself—since Captain
Frazer’s demise—with building.
“John is rich—of course he lives in style—of course he will do whatever
I ask him, as my poor dear father used.” So reasoned the lady, and on
this reasoning she managed to create for herself a great and most
unexpected disappointment; for nothing more different from his sister’s
mental portrait of him can be conceived, than John Merapie. He was a man
whose character might be thus briefly described:
“He liked his dinner; and he hated humbug.”
Now humbug, which was one of his pet expressions, meant in his
unrecognized dictionary, everything which he disapproved of—or rather,
everything for which he did not care. He thought marrying a humbug—but
not money; he considered fashion a humbug—but not a good fire; he deemed
it a humbug to care about where you lived—but a piece of solemn
necessity to take care where you dined; he denounced music as a
humbug—but not mince pies; he was perfectly satisfied fine ladies were
“regular humbugs;” but had a sort of reverence for a capital
housekeeper—that kind of thing, you know; he despised grand furniture,
but gloried in politics; thought tea only fit for women, but had a high
opinion of port wine; declared he detested evening parties and white kid
gloves, and all such humbug, but enjoyed a quiet rubber of whist, or a
social evening with half-a-dozen “steady-goers,” as much as mortal man
ever did. People wondered, when he had such an antipathy to affectation
and folly, that he got on so admirably with Alfred Westwood; but the
merchant mildly advised some one who ventured to propound the question
unto him—“Just try to cheat Westwood out of a sovereign, and note the
result; I don’t care, sir, what he seems, there’s no humbug in him, and
what’s better than that, there’s no deceiving him with it. He can see
further into the City than any man in London, and that is saying all I
can for him.” Which observation, it may be added, had reference, not to
the City buildings, but to the City people; Burke’s “Who’s Who” of the
West End, not being more voluminous than Westwood’s Who’s Who, of the
East—the former taking cognizance of the great at Court; the latter, of
the firm at the Bank; the one publishing volumes about landed gentry,
the other making telling concise little notes concerning merchant
princes. It was small marvel Mr. Merapie thought his clerk clever, for
he seemed to know by intuition how every man’s “book” stood; whether he
had over-drawn, or was possessed of “a balance;” if his wife had a
fortune; for how much he was “good,” whether he would stand or fall, and
if he fell who would “go” with him, and how much could be raked up out
of the ruins. It was something perfectly horrible, to the uninitiated,
to hear how Mr. Alfred Westwood had characters and capitals, and
probable bankrupts and doubtful bills at his finger’s end—and, if need
were, also on the tip of his smooth silvery tongue—for such astonishing
revelations occasionally give one the feeling, that there may be
mercantile as well as political spies; detective officers, not the less
dangerous because amateur, in the counting house as in the streets.
But this was just what John Merapie required, a clever fellow who could
tell in two minutes, “who was who,” and “what was what”—at any time, in
any place; and he liked his clerk, and forgave his vanity, and imagined
Mr. Westwood had a heart-interest in his concerns; and it never seemed
to enter the worthy merchant’s brain that his subordinate was working,
not for him, but for himself—not for John Merapie, but for Alfred
Westwood—not for a fortune to his principal, but for a partnership to
crown his own individual wishes and deserts.
And thus the shrewd merchant, who spent half his leisure-time denouncing
other people’s follies, completely succeeded in “humbugging” himself
into the belief that a man, who, for years and years, had thought of
nothing, cared for nothing, but himself, was going to turn round at the
eleventh hour, and work disinterestedly and conscientiously for his
employer. What wonder, then, that when Mr. John Merapie, through the
beautifying medium of vanity and hope, lived in London under one
delusion, his weak, foolish sister, Mrs. Frazer, should come to London
labouring under several.
It grieves me to be at length reluctantly compelled to disclose that the
“Square” to which, in the brief conversation recorded in Chapter III.,
between Mr. John Merapie and his clerk, the former so familiarly yet
mysteriously alluded, was none other than Belerma—without exception the
dreariest, dingiest, and most depressing four-angled place of at all
respectable habitation to be met with in the whole of the vast
metropolis.
Fashionable readers may, perhaps, deem this name a fictitious one, and I
admit it is not discernible amongst any of the West End Squares
composing what may be termed a “genteel set” in society; yet, no doubt,
if we only traced back its history far enough, there would be found in
its annals—as in the pedigrees of many people who now are low and poor
enough—sufficient proofs of former grandeur to fling a sort of dim
aristocratic halo over the now desolate and deserted Square, where no
one ever penetrates who can avoid doing so, which is approached by a few
narrow twisted streets, which seems lonely and silent as the grave,
though hardly ten minutes’ walk from some of the noisiest London
thoroughfares.
Like the poor and the reduced, whose day of pride and glory has passed
away for ever, Belerma Square could tell its tale of former gentility,
were speech but vouchsafed unto the stones of its pavement, or the walls
of its mansions: perhaps the feet of nobles once crossed the thresholds
of those dingy tenements; treason may there have been hatched; beauty
has graced the now empty apartments; lights have there sparkled, glad
voices made melody; music has floated through open casements over the
now stunted blackened trees and shrubs, that make a sort of mockery of a
pleasure ground in the centre; existence was there entered on, death
encountered, sorrows endured; tears have there flowed, laughter echoed;
men and women, the great, and fair, and good, and noble of the land once
lived, rejoiced, and suffered there; and yet, in spite of its having at
one period been something more than respectable, “select,” the very name
of Belerma Square is blotted out from the memories of the descendants of
those who once resided there—the present aristocrats of Belgravia. Stone
walls may be possessed of ears, but, as a general rule, the power of
speech hath been denied unto them; and partly because of this, greatly
because of the whims and vagaries and changes of fashion, Belerma
Square, like a corpse wherefrom breath and spirit have departed, has
been left to moulder away into the dust of antiquity by the vast human
tide which, in these later days—growing broader, stronger, and more
unruly—has swept, with common consent, towards the West, and settled
temporarily in those regions which, though now deemed unexceptionable,
some future chronicler of high life in London will, in due course,
assuredly scoff at as being too far East for the sun of fashionable
society to shine on; for it may not be altogether out of place here to
remark that the luminary which irradiates genteel people dwelling in
England’s metropolis, unlike other and commoner suns, rises in the West,
and sets there also, without flinging even a solitary beam of light upon
the East.
New things have become old, and old have disappeared from view; and
strange events have varied the history and altered the apparent
destinies of kingdoms and races, since the noble of the land raised
mansions in that now neglected corner of the metropolis, and dwelt
therein; and its name, like that of Moore’s heroine, “is never heard”
spoken by anybody who is anybody, in any place that is any place.
Therefore I regret to confess the merchant tenanted—stay, he did more,
he owned one of the dreary-looking brick houses forming the southern
side of the quadrangle called Belerma; and it can scarcely be marvelled
at if it went unto the very soul of the newly-made widow to discover
that _her_ brother was actually dwelling in such a locality. For, owing
to his having for years flitted about from lodging to lodging, seeking
rest and finding none; his being one of the briefest, and driest, and
most uncommunicative of correspondents, and his requesting all missives,
whether business or private, to be addressed to his office, situate (as
no letters can be forwarded to him now, there is no necessity to be very
precise) between London Bridge and Wapping, the overwhelming fact of his
having, in default of a better tenant, installed himself in one of three
houses he had bought—of course, a “dead bargain,” but which turned out
almost a “dead loss”—remained an unsuspected mystery at Craigmaver.
When he wrote kindly and shortly, offering his sister a home, he merely
said, “My house in the ‘Square’ is large enough for us all, and, if you
think you will be more comfortable here than in Scotland, pray come
immediately, only let me know what day to expect you:” in consequence of
which extreme brevity he left Mrs. Frazer in a state of happy ignorance
concerning the exact distance from Belgravia at which his home might be;
or what number of hundreds per annum he paid—as she felt sure he did—for
liberty to set himself down a West End man, who made all his money in
the East.
She hoped for Grovesnor; she would have been content with Berkeley; she
could not urge any particular objection to Cavendish; but aught on the
other side of Regent street, the lady had obstinately discarded from her
imaginings. True, time had been, when she considered Gower-street—where
her worthy father, removing himself and money bags out of the city,
retired to spend a fortune after he had made one—something perfectly
unexceptionable, quite grand enough for any peer in the realm; but
school had speedily opened her eyes in this particular, school and
(after her marriage) genteel society: so during the whole of her wedded
life, when any inquisitive acquaintance enquired in what part of London
her juvenile lot had been cast, she answered vaguely and carelessly—“Oh!
the West End”—and calmed her conscience, which asserted she had told a
fib, by thinking,—“comparatively it was so.” “Comparatively” with the
City or St. Luke’s, perhaps!
“Belerma Square,” she gasped forth on the evening of her arrival, when
Mr. Westwood, in his most silvery accents, assured her that was indeed
the goal towards which the cab’s snail’s pace was tending: “Belerma
Square! my dear sir, you _must_ be mistaken; my brother could never
dream of inviting me to such a place.”
“It is his present home,” was the emphatic rejoiner.
There was a pause, during which the widow swallowed her chagrin and
amazement as best she might: then she drawled forth, as if to account
for the phenomenon—
“Bachelors do live in such strange places; and after all it does not
much matter where they reside”—
“As we must be miserable even in palaces,” added Mr. Westwood; which
speech, as it was intended it should, showed the lady _he_ was a
bachelor, though the smile that accompanied it implied, a tolerably
happy one.
“Oh! I did not mean that,” returned Mrs. Frazer, “what I intended to
remark was, they are not obliged to keep up appearances in the same way
as if heads of families.”
“We are not, indeed,” assented Mr. Westwood, still resolutely adhering
to the first person plural.
“No one ever enquires where an unmarried man lives,” resumed the widow,
pursuing her own train of thought without reference to his, “excepting
some bachelor friend, who likewise resides in an extraordinary locality;
but when there are ladies, of course matters must be differently
arranged: I shall speak to my brother on the subject directly.”
“I believe,” remarked Mr. Westwood, in his most soothing tones, “I
believe Mr. Merapie has purchased the house to which I have the honor of
conducting you.”
“That can make no difference,” rejoined Mrs. Frazer: “he must let it for
a shop, or a warehouse, or something. In fact, I mean to tell him he
must discard all his bachelor modes of life at once, and take a house in
a genteel neighbourhood, and give me what I have been since infancy
accustomed to. I never should have left Craigmaver or Glenfiord, to live
in Belerma Square; and of that my brother is perfectly well aware. He
can merely intend this as a temporary home, and it will do remarkably
well for that, till we can select a more suitable one. We must have a
long conversation about these matters; I know he will do precisely as I
wish.”
Mr. Westwood politely said,
“He felt satisfied no one could do otherwise,” and civilly thought:
“Well, how this woman can be even half-sister to John Merapie is a
mystery I cannot solve; but, if she think to drag him into fashionable
life, or to persuade him to do any one thing he does not feel inclined
to do himself, she will find herself most miserably mistaken.”
Having finished which mental soliloquy, complimentary both to the
merchant and his sister, the clerk handed Mrs. Frazer to the door of Mr.
Merapie’s house, they having at length arrived there; and, after giving
her and her children “in charge,” as it were, of a grim old housekeeper,
and declining to enter the drawing-room and sit down, though specially
invited to do so, and saying “Good night!” to the trio, individually and
collectively, Mr. Westwood went quietly home to his lodgings, murmuring,
as he walked, the sentence duly chronicled at the conclusion of Chapter
III.
Very wearily and very discontentedly did Mrs. Frazer survey the
furniture and appointments of her brother’s house, on that, the night of
her return to the City where she had been born—to the place she had
pined for years to see.
“This will never do,” she murmured, as she glanced around at moth-eaten
carpets, and faded curtains, and antique chairs, and dingy mirrors; all
of which articles John Merapie—who, to do him justice, cared as little
for what he called “frippery” as any man in existence—had picked up at
auctions and old furniture stalls, either personally, or through the
instrumentality of an agent. “Not a particle of taste, or fashion, or
refinement, or comfort, or even cleanliness; this will never
do—never—never:” and having, after a mournful scrutiny, arrived at this
conclusion, the widow first partook of tea and toast and muffins with
what appetite she might, and then ascended the broad creaking and, after
the first flight, carpetless stairs, and went drearily to bed; where she
lay awake half the night, thinking what she should say to her brother on
the subject of his _ménage_, and where she would like to ask him to take
a house, and of what coloured damask the drawing-room curtains should
be. Having decided which latter point in favour of amber, she fell
asleep and dreamt they were dwelling in Hyde Park Terrace, with only a
brick wall and French satin paper dividing them to right and left from a
dowager Duchess and a spendthrift Earl.
Ostensibly in honour of his sister’s advent, but more probably in
consequence of the Lord Mayor’s banquet—which, by the way, Mr. Westwood
had informed the widow his principal was _compelled_ to attend—Mr. John
Merapie permitted the day to be “thoroughly aired” before he descended
to the breakfast parlour, where he discovered Mina and Malcolm sitting
very peaceably together on the hearth rug, discoursing, as they looked
into the bright blazing fire, about Craigmaver, their journey, and their
new home.
The children arose at the entrance of their uncle, who, laying a hand on
the head of each, welcomed them kindly. He gazed first with something
wonderfully like admiration at the boy, whose personal beauty, bold
carriage, graceful movements, and gay laughter-loving temperament, more
than half excused his mother’s excessive partiality for her first-born;
but, then, the merchant casting a more attentive glance on Mina, was so
struck by the delicacy of her appearance, that he involuntarily
exclaimed,—
“How ghastly pale the child is, to be sure!”
“Poor Mina has been very ill, you know,” explained her brother.
“Ah! true. I had forgotten that,” said Mr. Merapie (which, indeed, was
perfectly correct). “What made you so ill, Mina.”
A bright flush coloured her cheek for a minute, and the dark eyes became
moistened as Malcolm answered, in a low hushed voice,
“Crying for her papa.”
The merchant looked from one to the other, from the bright healthy boy
to the little fragile girl; then stooping, he abruptly kissed her
forehead, after the fashion of a man to whom such an exertion was a
rarity, and saying almost tenderly, “She must get better here;” placed a
chair for her close beside his own at the breakfast table, and added
that, as their mamma was going to take coffee in her own room, there was
no necessity to delay the morning meal any longer.
And whilst engaged in the pleasant task of despatching that which, next
to his dinner, an Englishman considers the most important business of
life, Mr. John Merapie remained happily unconscious of the storm which
was raging in the bosom of his sole female dependant—to wit, the grim
housekeeper afore honourably mentioned.
“New lights shining through old windows, indeed,” she angrily muttered,
wending her way up the interminable stairs conducting from the kitchen
to Mrs. Frazer’s apartment on the second floor. The widow’s own servant
being, as she said, “so hoverdone with that ’orrid journey from that
’eathen place,” as to be incapable of eating any breakfast herself, and,
consequently, of procuring the same for her disconsolate mistress. “New
lights shining through old windows, indeed, when ladies can’t come down
to breakfast, but must have it trailed up three flights of stairs to
them. Mr. Merapie may get another servant to attend to the children, and
keep this grand lady’s-maid to wait on his sister, or else take my
warning; and that I shall tell him before I am two hours older. Fine
work, truly, fires lighted in bed rooms and dressing rooms; I suppose
one will be wanted in the drawing-room next; and coffee carried in
cupfuls up sixty-six steps—neither more nor less, many a time I’ve
counted them. And John Merapie’s sister taking her breakfast at eleven
o’clock in the day, as if it were second nature to her, and may be so it
is.”
Which soliloquy terminating at the door of the lady’s chamber, the
housekeeper flung it fiercely open and deposited the tray she carried
with such a bang on the table, that a portion of the contents of the
coffee cup was jerked over into the saucer.
“Gently, gently,” gasped Mrs. Frazer, withdrawing her eyes from a wrapt
contemplation of the ceiling, upon which she had been writing out a
mental inventory of the furniture needful to make a house “habitable.”
“There, that will do, thank you: pray stay for a moment till I see if it
be sweet enough. Ah! scarcely, it requires a _little_ more sugar.”
“Will it not do?” demanded the housekeeper in a tone that surprised Mrs.
Frazer into asking,
“Why?”
“Because it’s sixty-six steps down to the sugar from here, and sixty-six
up again, and it’s not a journey I’m fond of taking if I can help it,”
was the response.
“You will have to go, even before we remove to another house,” thought
the widow; but she merely responded, “In that case you can bring it with
my next cup—and—if you have a little, cream also.”
“Cream,” repeated the woman, “we London folks makes milk do us; cream is
not to be had for nothing here, ma’am.”
“It is not to be had for nothing anywhere,” responded Mrs. Frazer with
wonderful temper; “but, still, as it is obtainable for money, and as I
have been accustomed to it, we must get a little; that is all. However,
you need not mind it at present. I shall speak to my brother about a
number of things I wish attended to. Will you tell him, when he has
quite finished breakfast, I should like to see him here.”
And the widow sinking back on the sofa, waved her hand, after the manner
of a queen, unto the incensed housekeeper, and languidly commenced
sipping her coffee with the air of an amiable martyr, whilst the
dethroned potentate went grumbling down the stairs, humming a tune, the
purport whereof Mr. Merapie’s sister little suspected.
“Cream, indeed! less might do her father’s daughter, I think: a better
man than she is a woman—and that’s John Merapie, my master—never put up
to airs like that; you never would have heard his voice in the house; he
never said yet to me, ‘Crooked was a bias.’ Ay! there are very few like
him, very; and she thinks she will be able to lead him about with a
silken thread; get him to make a fine lady of her; and leave all his
money to her children, ha, ha! I know something she does not, and that
Westwood does not, but that Westwood would give gold to hear; but he
won’t hear it from me yet, may be, never—may be, never.” And so she went
on, muttering and mumbling, and shaking her head and clenching her hand,
till she reached the hall, where, encountering Mr. Merapie, she
delivered unto him, first his sister’s message, and then added,
“And, sir, I think it’s just as well for me to tell you I do not intend
to stay here any longer than you can well suit yourself; but, if you
have no objection to my still staying on in your service, sir, I have
none to the country;” and the expression of the woman’s face became
perfectly diabolical as she spoke, so full was it of cunning, and
mystery, and meaning.
The merchant flung a hurried glance behind him, as if fearful of being
overheard, then answered in a low tone, slipping, at the same time, a
golden coin into her hand,
“We will speak of this another day; meanwhile, I rely on your
discretion.”
“You may, sir,” she replied, nodding her head, partly over the money,
partly at him, “you may, sir, and that you know.”
Upon the strength of which assurance, Mr. Merapie repaired, though not
with an unclouded brow, to the room where his sister awaited his advent.