BETTER THAN GOLD.
The little fleet of paper boats which Mr. Sheldon had pioneered so
skilfully over the commercial seas came to grief very soon after the
disappearance of the admiral. A bill drawn upon the Honduras Mahogany
Company, Limited, was the first to reach maturity. The bill was referred
to the drawer--the drawer was not to be found.
"I have not seen Sheldon for the last fortnight," Mr. Orcott informed the
gentleman who brought him the document.
"Out of business for a fortnight?"
"He has not been in business for a month. His stepdaughter has been very
ill--at death's door, and all that kind of thing, and my governor was
awfully cut up about it. There used to be a couple of doctors at the
house every day, and no end of fuss. I took Sheldon his letters, and
managed matters for him here, and so on. And one fine morning my young
lady runs off and gets married on the quiet; so I suspect there was a
good deal of shamming about the illness--and those old fogies, the
doctors, winked at it. Between them all, I fancy Sheldon was completely
sold; and he has turned savage and gone off somewhere in the sulks."
"I wish he had chosen any other time for his sulks," said the holder of
the bill; "my partner and I have discounted several acceptances for him.
He gave us liberal terms, and we considered any paper of his as safe as a
Bank of England note; and now this confounded bill comes back to us
through our bankers, noted, 'Refer to drawer'--a most unpleasant thing,
you know, and very inconsiderate of Sheldon to leave us in such a fix."
"He has forgotten the bill, I suppose," said Mr. Orcott.
"Well, but you see, really now, a business man ought not to forget that
kind of thing. And so Miss Halliday has made a runaway match, has she? I
remember seeing her when I dined at Bayswater--an uncommonly fine girl.
And she has gone and thrown herself away upon some penniless scapegrace,
most likely? Now, by the bye, how about this Honduras Company, Mr.
Orcott; they don't seem to have any London offices?"
"I believe not. We've some of their prospectuses somewhere about, I
think. Would you like to see one?"
"I should, very much."
Mr. Orcott opened two or three drawers, and after some little trouble
produced the required document.
It was a very flourishing prospectus, setting forth the enormous
benefits to be derived by shareholders from the profitable dealings of the
company. Some good high-sounding names figured in the list of directors,
and the chairman was Captain H. N. Cromie Paget. The prospectus looked
well enough, but the holder of Mr. Sheldon's dishonoured bill was not
able to derive much comfort from high-sounding phrases and high-sounding
names.
"I'll go down to Bayswater, and see if I can hear anything of your
governor," he said to Mr. Orcott.
"He was not there yesterday when I called, and his servants could tell me
nothing of his whereabouts," the young Yorkshireman said very coolly.
"Indeed!" cried the holder of the dishonoured bill in some alarm. "Now,
really, that is not right; a business man ought not to do that kind of
thing."
He called a cab and drove to the Lawn. There was the smart gothic villa,
with its pointed gables, and florid chimneys, and oriel windows, and in
the Tudor casements of the ground-floor appeared the bills of a West-end
auctioneer, announcing in large letters that the lease of this charming
mansion, together with the nearly new furniture, linen, books, china,
plate, carefully-selected proof-prints after distinguished modern
artists, small cellar of choice wines, &c., &c., &c., would be disposed
of by auction on the following day.
Mr. Sheldon's victim went into the house, where he found some men
preparing for the forthcoming sale.
"What is the meaning of all this?" he asked, aghast.
"A bill of sale, sir. Messrs. Napthali and Zabulon."
This was enough. The holder of the bill went back to the City. Another
bill came due on the following day, and before the members of the Stock
Exchange took their luncheon, it was known that Philip Sheldon's credit
was among the things of the past.
"I always thought he was out of his depth," said one set of talkers.
"He was the last man I should have expected to see come to grief," said
another set of talkers.
On settling-day came the awful proclamation--Philip Sheldon had
absconded, and would not meet his differences.
On the same day came a terrible revelation to Mr. George Sheldon, of
Gray's Inn, solicitor, genealogist, and pedigree hunter. The first
official step in the advancement of Gustave Lenoble's claim against the
Crown was taken by Messrs. Dashwood and Vernon, the solicitors, of
Whitehall; and George Sheldon discovered that between Charlotte
Hawkehurst and the Haygarth estate there stood a prior claimant, whereby
all his toil, trouble, costs out of pocket, and wear and tear of body and
mind, had been wasted.
"It is enough to make a man go and cut his throat," cried George, in his
first savage sense of utter disappointment.
He went into his slovenly bedroom, and took out one of his razors, and
felt the corrugated surface of the left side of his neck meditatively.
But the razor was blunt, and the corrugated surface seemed very tough and
unmanageable; so George Sheldon decided that this kind of operation was
an affair which might be deferred.
He heard the next day that his brother was _non est_, and, in his own
phraseology, that there was a pretty kettle of fish in the City.
"Upon my word, Phil and I seem to have brought our pigs to a very nice
market," he said. "I dare say, wherever that fellow has gone, he has
carried a well-lined purse with him. But I wouldn't have his conscience
for all the wealth of the Rothschilds. It's bad enough to see Tom
Halliday's face as I see it sometimes. What must it be to _him_?"
A little more than a year after this, and the yellow corn was waving on
the fertile plains of Normandy, fruit ripening in orchards on hillside
and in valley; merry holiday folks splashing and dabbling in the waves
that wash the yellow sands of Dieppe; horses coming to grief in Norman
steeplechases; desperate gamesters losing their francs and half-francs in
all kinds of frivolous games in the Dieppe _etablissement_; and yonder,
in the heart of Normandy, beyond the tall steeples of Rouen, a happy
family assembled at the Chateau Cotenoir.
One happy family--two happy families rather, but so closely united by the
bonds of love and friendship as to seem indeed one. Here are Gustave
Lenoble and his young wife Diana, with two tall slender damsels by their
side; and here is Valentine Hawkehurst, the successful young scribbler,
with his fair young wife Charlotte; and out on the terrace yonder are two
nurses walking with two babies, at that early, and, to some minds,
obnoxious stage of babyhood in which a perpetual rocking, and pacing to
and fro, and swaying backwards and forwards in the air, is necessary for
the preservation of anything approaching tranquillity. But to the minds
of the two young mothers and the two proud fathers, these small creatures
in their long white robes seem something too bright for earth. The united
ages of the babies do not amount to six months; but the mothers have
counted every gradual stage of these young lives, and to both it seems as
if there had been no time in which the children were not, with so firm a
hold have they possessed themselves of every thought in the foolish
maternal mind, of every impulse in the weak maternal heart.
Mrs. Hawkehurst has brought her son to see his aunt Diana; for Diana has
insisted upon assuming that relationship by letters-patent, as it were.
Madame Lenoble's baby is a daughter, and this fact in itself seems to the
two friends to be a special interposition of Providence.
"Would it not be delightful if they should grow up to love each other and
marry?" exclaimed Diana; and Charlotte agreed with her that such an event
in the future did indeed seem in a manner foreshadowed by the conduct of
the infants in the present.
"He takes notice of her already!" she exclaimed, looking out at the
little creature in white muslin robes, held up against the warm blue sky;
"see, they are cooing at each other! I am sure that must be cooing."
And then the two mothers went out upon the sunny terrace-walk and fondly
contemplated these domestic treasures, until the domestic treasures were
seized with some of the inexplicable throes and mysterious agonies of
early babyhood, and had to be borne off shrieking to their nurseries.
"Dear angel," said Gustave, of his "little last one," "she has the very
shriek of Clarice here, poignant and penetrating, until to drown the
heart. Dost thou figure to thyself that thy voice was penetrating as
that, my beautiful, in the time?"
He kissed his beautiful, and she ran off to join the procession following
the two babies,--alarmed nurses, distracted mammas, shrieking infants,
anxious damsels.
"_C'est un vrai tourbillon_," as Gustave remarked to his companion
Valentine Hawkehurst; "these women, how they love their children! What of
saints, what of Madonnas, what of angels!"
Whereupon he spouted Victor Hugo:
"Lorsque l'enfant parait, le cercle de famille
Applaudit a grands cris; son doux regard qui brille
Fait briller tous les yeux;
Et les plus tristes fronts, les plus souilles peut-etre,
Se derident soudain a voir l'enfant paraitre,
Innocent et joyeux."
All things had gone well for M. Lenoble. His direct descent from Matthew
Haygarth, the father of the intestate, had been proved to the
satisfaction of Crown lawyers and High Court of Chancery, and he had been
in due course placed in possession of the reverend intestate's estate, to
the profit and pleasure of his solicitors and M. Fleurus, and to the
unspeakable aggravation of George Sheldon, who washed his hands at once
and for ever of all genealogical research, and fell back in an embittered
and angry spirit upon the smaller profits to be derived from petty
transactions in the bill-discounting line, and a championship of
penniless sufferers of all classes, from a damsel who considered herself
jilted by a fickle swain, in proof of whose inconstancy she could produce
documentary evidence of the "pork-chop and tomato sauce" order, to a
pedestrian who knocked his head against a projecting shutter in the
Strand, and straightway walked home to Holloway to lay himself up for a
twelvemonth in a state of mental and bodily incapacity requiring large
pecuniary redress from the owner of the fatal shutter. To this noble
protection of the rights of the weak did George Sheldon devote his
intellect; and when malicious enemies stigmatized these Quixotic
endeavours as "speculative actions," or when, in the breaking-down of
some oppressed damsel's cause by reason of the slender evidence afforded
by some reticent lover's epistolary effusions, unjust judges told him
that he "ought to be ashamed of himself" for bringing such an action, the
generous attorney no doubt took consolation from an approving conscience,
and went forth from that court, to look for other oppressed damsels or
injured wayfarers, erect and unshaken.
Some little profit Mr. Sheldon of Gray's Inn did derive from the Haygarth
estate; for at the request of Gustave Lenoble Messrs. Dashwood and Vernon
sent him a cheque for one thousand pounds, as the price of those early
investigations which had set the artful Captain upon the right track. He
wrote a ceremoniously grateful letter to Gustave Lenoble on receiving
this honorarium. It is always well to be grateful for benefits received
from a rich man; but in the depths of his heart he execrated the
fortunate inheritor of the Haygarthian thousands.
Mr. Hawkehurst was not quite so vehement in the expression of his
feelings as that lively Celt, Gustave; but deep in his heart there was a
sense of happiness no less pure and exalted.
Providence had given him more than he had ever dared to hope; not
John Haygarth's thousands; not a life of luxurious idleness, and
dinner-giving, and Derby days, and boxes on the grand tier, and
carriage-horses at five hundred guineas a pair; not a palace in
Belgravia, and a shooting-box in the Highlands, and a villa at Cowes;
not these things, in which he would once have perceived the _summum
bonum_; but a fair price for his labour, a dear young wife, a tranquil
home.
Nor had his researches among the dusty records of the departed Haygarths
been profitless in a pecuniary sense to himself. Gustave Lenoble insisted
that he should accept that honorarium of three thousand pounds which had
been promised by George Sheldon as the reward of his success.
"Captain Paget would never have been put on the right track if he had
not filched your secrets from you," said the son and heir of Susan
Meynell. "It is to your researches, in the first place, that I owe
this inheritance; and you cannot refuse to accept the agreed price of
your labour."
Valentine did not refuse this fairly-earned reward, nor did he oppose the
settlement which Gustave made in favour of Charlotte's infant son. It
seemed to him only just that some share of the heritage should fall to
the descendant of poor Susan's younger sister and faithful friend.
With this capital of three thousand pounds comfortably invested in
consols, and with the interest of that sum of ten thousand pounds settled
on his infant son, Mr. Hawkehurst began the world, in his new character
of a husband and a father, very pleasantly.
Of his literary career very little need be said here. He was yet at the
beginning of the long dusty road that leads to the temple of Fame. It is
enough to state that he found the dusty high-road rather difficult
walking, and that he was pelted with more mud, flung by nameless
assailants hidden behind the hedges, than he had anticipated when he set
out upon the first stage of his journey. Happily, he found pleasant
fellow-travellers and kindly encouragement from an indulgent public, and
was thus able to accept the mud which bespattered his garments in a very
placid spirit, and to make light of all obstacles in the great highway.
The cottage at Wimbledon was no longer a dream. It was a pleasant
reality, the pride and delight of Mrs. Sheldon and Ann Woolper. It was a
picturesque dwelling-place, half cottage, half villa, situated on the
broad high-road from London to Kingston, with all the woodland of
Richmond Park to be seen from the windows at the back. Only a wall
divided Mr. Hawkehurst's gardens from the coverts of the Queen. It was
like a royal demesne, Charlotte said; whereupon her husband insisted that
it should be christened by the name of a royal dwelling, and so called it
Charlottenburgh.
Mr. Hawkehurst had secured this delightful abode for a considerable term
of years, and upon the furnishing and decoration of the pretty rustic
rooms Charlotte and he lavished unmeasured care. The delicious excitement
of "picking up," or, in more elegant parlance, "collecting," was to these
two happy people an inexhaustible source of pleasure. Every eccentric
little table, every luxurious chair, had its special history, and had
been the subject of negotiation and diplomacy that might have sufficed a
Burleigh in the reorganization of Western Europe. The little Dresden and
Vienna cups and saucers in the maple cabinet had been every one bought
from a different dealer. The figures on the mantelpiece were Old Chelsea,
of a quality that would have excited the envy of a Bernal or a Bonn, and
had only fallen to the proud possessors by a sequence of fortuitous
circumstances, the history of which was almost as thrilling as the
story of Boehmer's diamond-necklace. The curtains in the drawing-room
had draped the _portieres_ of the lovely Lady Blessington, and had been
bought for a song by Valentine Hawkehurst, after passing through the
hands of brokers and dealers innumerable. The tapestry-covered
Louis-Quatorze chairs had belonged to Madame de Sevigne, and had
furnished that dull country house whence she wrote the liveliest letters
extant to her disreputable cousin, Bussy, Count of Babutin. These
inestimable treasures had been picked up by Mr. and Mrs. Hawkehurst from
a bric-a-brac merchant in a little court at the back of the Rue Vivienne,
whither the young couple had gone arm-in-arm to choose a bonnet on their
first pleasure-trip to Paris. The clock in the modest dining-room had
been secured from the repository of the same merchant, and was warranted
to have sounded the last domestic hours of Maximilian Robespierre in his
humble lodging _chez le Menuisier_. The inkstand into which Mr.
Hawkehurst dipped his rapid pen had served the literary career of
Voltaire; the blotting-book on which he wrote had been used by Balzac.
To the plausible fictions of the second-hand dealer Mr. and Mrs.
Hawkehurst lent willing ears, and it seemed to them as if these
associations, for which they had paid somewhat dearly, imparted a new
grace to their home.
The arrangement and superintendence of all these treasures gave poor
Georgy endless pleasure and employment; but in her heart of hearts she
believed in the prim splendours of the dismantled Lawn as much superior
to these second-hand objects of art and upholstery. Nor did Ann Woolper
regard the Chelsea figures and Dresden teacups and old black Albert-Duerer
engravings as anything better than an innocent eccentricity on the part
of the master of the house, for the saving of whose purse she managed and
economized as faithfully as she had done for that lost master whereof the
memory was so bitter.
It will be seen, therefore, that Mr. Hawkehurst with a wife, a
mother-in-law, and a faithful old servant, was likely to be well taken
care of; a little spoiled perhaps by "much cherishing," but carefully
guarded from all those temptations which are supposed to assail the
bachelor man-of-letters, toiling alone and neglected in Temple chambers.
For him the days passed in a pleasant monotony of constant labour,
lightened always by the thought of those for whom he worked, cheered ever
by the fond hope of future fame. He was no longer a bookmaker. He had
written a book, the proceeds of which had enabled him to furnish the
Wimbledon villa; and he was engaged in writing a second book, the fruits
whereof would secure the needs of the immediate future. He had insured
his life for a considerable amount, and had shown himself in all things
prudent to a degree that verged upon Philistinism. But the policies taken
out on Charlotte's life by Mr. Sheldon had been suffered to lapse.
Valentine would have no money staked on that dear head.
The steed which Charlotte had desired for her husband's pleasure, the
library which she had catalogued so often, were yet among the delights of
the future; but life has lost half its brightness when there is no
unfulfilled desire left to the dreamer; and the horse which Mr.
Hawkehurst was to ride in time to come, and the noble library which he
was to collect, were the pleasant themes of Charlotte's conversation very
often, as she and her husband walked on the heights of Wimbledon in the
twilight, when his day's work was done.
These twilight walks were the happy holidays of his life, and a part of
his liberal education. He told his wife everything, every literary
scheme, every fancy, every shadowy outline of future work, every new
discovery in the boundless realms of Bookland. His enthusiasm; his
hero-worship; his setting-up of one favourite and knocking-down of
another; his unchristian pleasure in that awful slating of poor Jones in
this week's _Saturday_, or the flaying alive of Robinson in the _Bond
Street Backbiter_;--in a word, his "shop" never became wearisome to
Charlotte. She listened always with a like rapture and sympathy; she
worshipped his favourites of Bookland; she welcomed his friends and
fellow-workers with unvarying sweetness; she devised and superintended the
fitting-up of a smoking-room that was perfectly paradisaical, a glimpse
of the Alhambra in miniature; and that obnoxious dish, the cold shoulder,
was never served in Mr. Hawkehurst's dwelling. So sweet a wife, so
pleasant a home, popularized the institution of matrimony among the young
writer's bachelor friends; and that much-abused and cruelly maligned
member of the human race, the mother-in-law, was almost rehabilitated by
Mrs. Sheldon's easy good-nature and evident regard for the interests of
her daughter's husband.
And after all the groping among dry as dust records of a bygone century,
after all the patient following of those faint traces on the sands of
time left by the feet of Matthew Haygarth, _this_ was Charlotte's
Inheritance,--a heart whose innocence and affection made home a kind of
earthly paradise, and gave to life's commonest things a charm that all
the gold ever found in California could not have imparted to them. This
was Charlotte's Inheritance,--the tender, unselfish nature of the
Haygarths and Hallidays; and thus dowered, her husband would not have
exchanged her for the wealthiest heiress whose marriage was ever
chronicled in _Court Circular_ or _Court Journal_.