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