THE RICH MR. LOBYER.
Before the season was over, Lady Cecil enjoyed the honour of an
introduction to Florence Crawford's wealthy admirer. Mr. Thomas Lobyer,
of Pevenshall Place, Yorkshire, and of the Lobyer Mills in the cotton
country. The dowager and her niece were amongst the Sunday-evening
droppers-in at the Fountains within a week of Mr. O'Boyneville's
declaration; and it was on that occasion that Cecil beheld her friend's
admirer for the first time. The deeply smitten Lobyer had made good
use of the Sunday-evening privilege, and every Sabbath found him
lounging with a lumbering gait and creaking footsteps in the painter's
pretty drawing-rooms, or lurking darkly in the dimmer light of the
conservatories, where he held mysterious converse with the cockatoos.
It was not that he so especially affected the society of cockatoos; but
he was a young man who always seemed restless and uneasy if deprived
of the companionship of some animal. He carried a toy-terrier in his
pocket when he made morning calls, and caressed the miniature brute
stealthily in the frequent pauses of the conversation. He was dull and
embarrassed in the presence of an accomplished young lady, but he got
on admirably with a ferret or a weasel; and there were people who said
he could have made himself at home with a boa-constrictor. The cry of
"Rats!" stirred him with as profound a thrill of emotion as that which
vibrates through the frame of a thoroughbred Dandy Dinmont, or agitates
the bosom of a sharp young bull-terrier.
He was fond of his horses, and still more fond of his dogs; but the
animals he affected were not the mighty natives of Newfoundland or
the noble denizens of Mount St. Bernard. The dogs which Mr. Lobyer
purchased at high prices from crack dog-fanciers were generally
accomplished ratters, and miniature specimens of the bull-dog tribe,
renowned for their tendency to attach themselves to the calves of
unoffending legs, and their high-bred objection to being severed from
their prey.
As the uncertain temper and occasional restlessness of his favourite
terriers rendered it rather dangerous to take them to evening parties,
Mr. Lobyer was always glad to fall back upon the society of any
animal attached to the household in which he visited. He would retire
into a dusky corner, and stir up the inhabitants of an aquarium with
the point of his gold pencil, in the apparent hope of getting up
intimate relations with a jelly-fish. He would beguile the golden
inmates of a crystal globe by tearing up minute fragments of one of
his visiting-cards, and passing them off for such edible morsels as
unwise benevolence offers to gold-fish. His intercourse with the
inferior animals was not necessarily of a friendly order. His hands
were disfigured by the teeth of his dogs, goaded into desperation by
his playful sallies; for it was sometimes his humour to worry the
distinguished ratters very much as the distinguished ratters worried
the rats.
In sorrowful earnest, Mr. Lobyer was not a nice young man. He was
rich; and there were many people who would have been very glad to
think him nice, but who were fain to abandon the attempt, and to
demand tribute of admiration for their favourite on other and loftier
grounds. And this was very easily done. There is no cub so brutish,
no lout so clumsy, uncouth, and insolent, who cannot be made to pass
for a rough diamond. Society--especially represented by matrons with
marriageable daughters--decided that Mr. Lobyer was a rough diamond,
a dear good candid creature, who blurted out every thing he thought.
He was an original character; and his unpolished manners were quite
a relief after the _fade_ graces and courtesies of over-educated
young diplomatists and amateur _littérateurs_. This was what people
said of Mr. Lobyer during the two seasons in which he exhibited
his clumsy figure and his bullet head in the assemblies of second
rate fashion--not the _crême de la crême_, but that excellent milk
from whose surface a very decent layer of cream may be gathered in
a second skimming--and society smiled upon the wealthiest bachelor
from Cottonopolis. He was neither handsome nor clever; he was neither
amiable nor well-bred; but he was the wealthiest available bachelor in
the circles which he adorned.
The gold-worshippers, who saw in Mr. Lobyer the genius of commercial
prosperity, were anxious to make the best of their idol. He had
feminine admirers who called him handsome; he had masculine allies who
declared that he was clever. His features were regular, but cast in
that heavy mould which seems better adapted to a good-looking animal
than a handsome man. He had big brown eyes; but so has a Newfoundland
dog; and the eyes of an intelligent dog possess a beauty of expression
which was utterly wanting in the round Vandyke-brown orbs of Thomas
Lobyer. His complexion was dark and sallow--pale always--but capable
of assuming an unpleasant livid whiteness when he was very angry.
The physiognomists were tolerably unanimous as to the character of
his thick red lips and sloping chin; but the fair denizens of the
western suburbs were equally unanimous in their admiration of his
carefully-trained moustache, and the luxuriant beard amidst which he
was wont to entangle his fingers when temporarily excluded from animal
society.
He dressed well, for he had just sufficient good taste to know that
his taste was bad, and he delivered himself an unreasoning block of
humanity into the hand of the most expensive West-end tailor.
"_I_ don't pretend to know much about the build of the thing," he said,
when complimented on the fashion of a new overcoat; "but my fellow
charges me what he likes, and he gets a cheque for his account by
return of post. So I suppose I'm a good customer."
Mr. Lobyer had a lodging in Jermyn Street--a _pied-à-terre_, he called
it. And it is to be set down to his credit that his French would have
inflicted no outrage on ears accustomed to the pure accents of the
Français. The days are past in which commercial wealth and ignorance
have gone hand in hand.
The _parvenu_ of to-day is generally an elegant and highly-accomplished
gentleman, who has seen every thing that is to be seen, and been
taught every thing that an expensive course of education can teach.
Mr. Lobyer had played cricket with young lordlings on the meads of
Eaton--he had been plucked at Oxford--he had scampered over Europe, and
improved his mind in the society of the crocodiles of the Nile--he had
steeped himself to the lips in the worst dissipations of Paris, and had
given as much pain and anxiety to a very worthy father as can well be
concentrated in the declining years of a parent's life.
There were scandal-mongers in the cotton country who said that Thomas
Lobyer junior had broken the heart of Thomas Lobyer senior. He was an
only son--an only child; and the wealthy manufacturer had beguiled
the dull routine of his business life by a splendid dream during the
years of his son's boyhood. If the boy had been a prince his education
could scarcely have been more carefully supervised, or paid for with
a more lavish hand. But conscientious tutors washed their hands of
the profitable pupil when they found that he was stupid and arrogant,
profligate and hypocritical, and that he was gifted with a bull-dog
obstinacy which rendered all efforts at correction hopeless.
The time came before the death of his father, when there was no
alternative but to let him go his own way.
"I might disinherit you, and leave my money to an hospital," wrote the
old man in the last letter he ever addressed to his son; "and God knows
you have given me enough provocation to do so. But if I could forget
that you are the child of the wife I loved, I should still be deterred
from such a step by the fear of its consequences. If you have done
so badly with all the advantages of wealth, what would become of you
exposed to the temptations of poverty? Your grandfather began life as a
workhouse apprentice--there are plenty of people in Manchester who know
all about him; but there wasn't a man in his native city who wasn't
proud to shake him by the hand, or a woman who didn't point to him as
an example to her sons."
Thomas Lobyer the elder died within a few weeks after the writing of
this epistle; and his son who was giving a charming little dinner to
some distinguished friends in the pavilion of the Hôtel Henri Quatre at
St. Germains, while his father lay dying at Pevenshall, was summoned
homeward by a telegram, and arrived to find himself sole master of
the accumulated fruits of two industrious lives. The young man's
acquaintances and neighbours, his agents and advisers, were loud in his
praises during his brief residence at Pevenshall. It seemed as if the
old story of Prince Henry's reform were going to be acted over again.
Mr. Lobyer detained the lawyer who had made his father's will, and with
that gentleman's assistance he entered into a searching investigation
of his possessions. He, so dull to learn any thing appertaining to the
graces of life,--he, so slow of intellect where the wisdom of sages or
the harmonious numbers of poets were the subject of his study, proved
himself a match for the keenest in all that affected his interests or
touched his pocket. He, who had been so reckless in his extravagance
while drawing on the resources of a generous father, astonished the
family solicitor by the minuteness of his calculations, the sharp
economy which prompted all the changes he made in his dead father's
household, and the calm determination with which he announced that he
should make a rule of only spending a third of his income during his
bachelorhood.
"I don't wonder my father was always growling about _my_ extravagance,
considering the amount of money he contrived to get rid of here,"
said the amiable young man. "Two of the housemaids may go, and two
of the grooms may go. One man will look after half-a-dozen horses in
a livery-stable in London, and keep them in better condition than my
horses are in; and one man can look after half-a-dozen here. I shall
only come down in the hunting-season; and I don't want to pay lazy
hulking fellows for gorging themselves with meat and making themselves
dropsical with beer at my expense; and I don't want to pay young women
for looking out of the windows and talking to them. In the gardens I
shall not make any changes; but I must have an arrangement made with
the fruiterers in the market-town by which the forcing houses may be
made to pay their own expenses. When I marry and come to live here, I
shall double the household, and build a new wing to the stables, for
I like to see plenty of fellows, and horses and dogs, and that kind
of thing, about a place; but for the present we must retrench, Mr.
Gibson,--we must retrench."
Such was Mr. Lobyer. He came to London, and took his place in a
certain circle of London society, with nothing to recommend him but a
reputation for enormous wealth. There were those who remembered him in
Paris, and who knew the manner in which he had completed his education
in that brilliant capital. But if there went abroad the rumour that
the millionaire's youth had been wild and foolish, feminine compassion
and masculine generosity conspired to forget and ignore his early
follies.
From a crowd of beautiful and intellectual women the Manchester man
might have chosen the loveliest, and would have incurred small hazard
of a refusal. There were women who scorned his money as utterly as they
despised himself; but in the drawing-rooms of Tyburnia and Kensingtonia
those women were few and far between. The value of wealth increases
with the growing refinement of taste. The purest attributes of the
human mind--the love of art, the worship of beauty, the keen sense
of grace--combine to render intellectual man the slave of material
prosperity. The gems of ancient art, the work of modern artists, the
thoroughbred hack on which Beauty prances in the Row, the villa on
Streatham Common or the cottage by Strawberry Hill, for whose shelter
the soul of the retiring citizen yearns as the refuge of his declining
age,--all command a higher price every year; and every year the steady
march of intellect advances, and there are more connoisseurs to sigh
for old pictures, more would-be patrons of modern art, more citizens
whose cultivated sense of the beautiful inspires a yearning for villas
on Streatham Common or cottages by Strawberry Hill, more ambitious
middle-class belles who have seen from afar off the prancing of
patrician Beauty's steeds, and who sigh for thoroughbred saddle-horses
of their own.
Mr. Lobyer himself was unattractive; but in Mr. Lobyer's wealth there
lurked the elements of all those costly treasures and refinements that
make life beautiful. He was known to be stupid; and mercenary Beauty,
jumping at a conclusion, decided that he was just the sort of person
to submit himself unresistingly to the management of a wife. Under the
wand of that enchantress, the dull figures in his banking-book might
be transformed into the art-treasures of a second Grosvenor House, the
gardens of a new Chatsworth, the stables of a Lord Stamford, a fairy
boudoir which even the Empress Eugénie might approve, and jewels which
the Duchess of Newcastle might admire and the Duke of Brunswick envy.
This was what portionless Beauty had in her mind when she smiled on Mr.
Lobyer. Rich as he really was, the amount of his riches was doubled
and trebled by the tongue of rumour. And there is really something
interesting in boundless wealth, for its own sake. It is a kind of
power; and there seems to be some slavish attribute inherent in the
breast of man, which prompts him to fawn upon every species of power,
from the physical force of a Ben Caunt to the intellectual supremacy
of a Voltaire. A flavour of Monte Christo hovered about the person
of Thomas Lobyer; and though he had never been known to say any
thing worth listening to, or to do any thing worth recording, he was
interesting nevertheless. The men who had borrowed money from him, or
who thought they might some day have occasion to borrow money of him,
said that there was "a stamp of power about the fellow, you know;" and
there was "something racy even in his cubbishness, you know, for it
isn't every fellow would have the pluck to be such a thoroughbred cub."
There were people who called Mr. Lobyer generous; and there always
will be people who will call the giver of sumptuous dinners a noble
and generous creature. The man who keeps a drag for his own pleasure,
and allows his friends to ride upon the roof of it, is likely to be
considered more or less their patron and benefactor, though their
companionship is as indispensable to his triumph as the slaves who
attend the chariot-wheels of an emperor are necessary to complete the
glory of their master. Mr. Lobyer was as generous as the man who never
stints the cost of his own pleasure; as mean as the man who grudges the
outlay of a sixpence that is not spent for his own gratification.
This was the individual who, after inspiring alternate hope and despair
in unnumbered breasts by the fickleness of his clumsy attentions,
succumbed at last to the piquant charm of Florence Crawford's bright
hair and tiny _retrouseé_ nose.
She was insolent to him, and her insolence charmed him, for it
surprised him, and stirred the dull stagnation of his brain with a
sensation that was like pleasure. She laughed at him; and he, so keen
in his perception of the weaknesses of better men than himself, was
weak enough to think that she alone, of all the women he knew, was
uninfluenced by any consideration of his wealth.
"The girls I meet make as much of me as if I were a sultan, and seem
to be waiting for me to throw my handkerchief amongst 'em," said Mr.
Lobyer. "I like that painter-fellow's girl, because she laughs in my
face, and treats me as if I were a government clerk with a hundred and
fifty pounds a-year. That's the sort of girl I call jolly."
The Sunday-evening visitors at the Fountains were not slow to perceive
Florence Crawford's conquest. She was a coquette of the first water,
and encouraged her loutish admirer by a persistent avoidance of him. If
he hung over her piano, she rattled brilliantly through the shortest of
_valses du salon_, or sang the briefest and crispest of her ballads,
and had risen from the instrument and flitted away before Mr. Lobyer
had made up his mind as to what he should say to her. If he worked
his way to the sofa on which she was seated, or the open window by
which she was standing, the lively Florence immediately became absorbed
in confidential discourse with a feminine visitor, and intensely
unconscious of Mr. Lobyer.
If Florence Crawford--anxious to marry this man for the sake of his
money--had acted on the most profound knowledge of his character,
she could scarcely have played her cards better. A dogged obstinacy
of purpose was the ruling attribute of Thomas Lobyer's mind; and
the coquettish trifling of a schoolgirl aroused that bull-dog
characteristic as it had seldom been aroused before.
Miss Crawford was eager to know what Cecil Chudleigh thought of her
new conquest. She was childish enough to be proud of having made such
a conquest. She was weak enough to be flattered by the admiration of
a man whose sole title to respect was summed up in the figures in his
banking-book.
"What do you think of him, Cecil?" she asked her friend.
"You mean Mr. Lobyer?"
"Yes, of course."
"I don't think he is particularly agreeable, Flory. He seems to me to
be rather stupid and awkward."
"Oh, but he's not stupid. I hear that he has a great deal of
common-sense. He's rather good-looking, isn't he, Cecil?"
"I suppose he would be called so; but I don't admire his face. Oh,
Flory, you surely cannot be interested in my opinion of him?"
"Why shouldn't I be interested in your opinion of him?" Flo echoed,
peevishly. "He is good-looking, and well dressed, and--by no means
stupid. He may be a little clumsy, perhaps; but I have seen heavy
cavalry officers quite as clumsy, and in them clumsiness is considered
_distinguè_. However, I won't talk to you about him any more, Cecil.
You are as romantic as a girl in a novel."
Amongst the witnesses of Miss Crawford's triumph was one in whom the
spectacle inspired despair. Philip Foley, the landscape-painter,
privileged to join the miscellaneous crowd at the Fountains, looked on
from the shadowy corner where he sat unnoticed and little known, and
ground his strong white teeth as he watched the tactics of the coquette
and the hopeless entanglement of the cub. His old friend Sigismund was
near him; but Sigismund Smythe the novelist was better known to fame
than Philip Foley the unsuccessful landscape-painter; and some people
were eager to be introduced to Mr. Smythe, and liked to talk to him for
five minutes or so, after which they were apt to retire disappointed.
"It's no use disguising the fact," the young man said plaintively; "I
do not meet their views, and they don't hesitate to let me know that
I'm a failure. I ought to be dark and swarthy, like Dumas; or tall, and
thin, and wiry, and hook-nosed, and satanic. What would I not give to
Madame Rachel if she would make me diabolical for ever! What recompense
should I think too much for my tailor if he could build me a coat that
would make me look like Mephistopheles! I know a literary man who _is_
like Mephistopheles, and a very handsome fellow he is too; but he
writes essays on political economy, and his demoniac appearance is of
no use to him."
In spite of Mr. Lobyer, poor Philip contrived to speak to Florence
before he left the Fountains.
"So you are going to be married, Miss Crawford?" he said.
"Who told you any thing so absurd?" cried Flo, with a disdainful little
laugh.
"Every body tells me so."
"Then every body is wrong," she answered, with an airy toss of her
head; "and even if every body were not as utterly absurd and incorrect
as a stupid gossiping every body generally is, I don't see what right
you have to catechise me, Mr. Foley."
"No; I forgot my place. I forgot that I was only here on sufferance.
What has an unsuccessful painter in common with the daughter of the
most popular of modern artists? And yet I have heard your father talk
of his probation. I have heard him speak of the day when he went to
Trafalgar Square, in a fever of hope and expectation, to find the
picture he believed in, glimmering through the darkness of the octagon
room, an unmeaning daub of red, and blue, and yellow."
"It is very good of you to remind me that papa was once a pauper,"
answered Florence haughtily; and before Philip could say any thing
more, she had turned away from him to shake hands with some of her
departing guests.
After this the young man watched in vain for any opportunity of
addressing Florence Crawford. He saw the rooms grow empty, and waited
with the dogged determination of outstaying the cub; but the cub made
no sign of departure, though the last of the other guests had vanished,
and though Flo, who sat in a listless attitude beside a stand of
engravings, and yawned audibly more than once. The prince of the cotton
country stood by her side, stolid and unabashed, pretending to be
interested in the engravings, which she turned with careless hands, and
glaring at Mr. Foley in the intervals of his conversation.
Florence yawned for the third time, and more audibly than before. Mr.
Crawford, who had been walking up and down the room, with his hands
in his pockets, staring absently at the pictures, and stopping before
one of them every now and then to meditate, with bent head and moody
brow roused himself suddenly from his reverie, and looked from the
little group by the open portfolio to the spot where Philip Foley stood
leaning against a low marble chimneypiece, glum and dejected of aspect.
"Come, young men," said the painter; "my daughter seems tired, so
you had better bid her good-night, and come and smoke a cigar in my
painting-room."
Florence rose and made a curtsey, which included both her admirers; but
she did not seem to perceive Mr. Lobyer's out-stretched hand, nor did
she deign to reward Philip for the _empressement_ with which he flew
to open the door for her as she passed out of the room. But when she
was alone in her own room, sitting before her pretty dressing-table,
and looking at herself dreamily in the glass as she removed the slender
golden necklace and glittering locket from her neck, it was of Philip
and not of Mr. Lobyer that she thought.
"What a nice fellow he would be if he were rich!" she said to herself.
"How frank and brave he is! I never like him so much as when he is
uncivil to me. And if I were quite a different sort of girl, I can
fancy that it would be very nice to marry him, and live in lodgings,
and take an interest in his painting. But what would become of me
if I were to marry such a man?--I, who haven't the faintest idea of
a pudding, and never could sew a button on one of my muslin sleeves
without spoiling half-a-dozen needles, and making myself like a
murderer with blood. I never could marry a poor man after the things
I've said. I can fancy how Lucy Chamberlayne, and those Verner girls,
and Mary Masters, and all the girls who know me, would laugh. No, the
day is past for that sort of thing: and as my heart is so free that
I don't even know whether I've got a heart, and as Mr. Lobyer is by
no means bad-looking, and as papa seems to like him--or, at any rate,
doesn't seem to dislike him,--I suppose it is my fate to be mistress of
Pevenshall."