GEORGE SHELDON'S PROSPECTS.
For George Sheldon the passing years had brought very little
improvement of fortune. He occupied his old dingy chambers in Gray's
Inn, which had grown more dingy under the hand of Time; and he was wont
to sit in his second-floor window on sultry summer Sundays, smoking his
solitary cigar, and listening to the cawing of the rooks in the gardens
beneath him, mingled with the voices of rebellious children, and shrill
mothers threatening to "do for them," or to "flay them alive," in
Somebody's Rents below. The lawyer used to be quite meditative on those
Sunday afternoons, and would wonder what sort of a fellow Lord Bacon
was, and how he contrived to get into a mess about taking bribes, when
so many other fellows had done it quietly enough before the Lord of
Verulam's day, and even yet more quietly since--agreeably instigated
thereto by the casuistry of Escobar.
Mr. Sheldon's prospects were by no means promising. From afar off he
beheld his brother's star shining steadily in the commercial firmament;
but, except for an occasional dinner, he was very little the better for
the stockbroker's existence. He had reminded his brother very often,
and very persistently, of that vague promise which the dentist had made
in the hour of his adversity--the promise to help his brother if ever
he did "drop into a good thing." But as it is difficult to prevent a
man who is disposed to shuffle from shuffling out of the closest
agreement that was ever made between Jones of the one part, and Smith
of the other part, duly signed, and witnessed, and stamped with the
sixpenny seal of infallibility, so is it still more difficult to obtain
the performance of loosely-worded promises, uttered in the confidential
intercourse of kinsmen.
In the first year of his married life Philip Sheldon gave his brother a
hundred pounds for the carrying out of some grand scheme which the
lawyer was then engaged in, and which, if successful, would secure for
him a much larger fortune than Georgy's thousands. Unhappily the grand
scheme was a failure; and the hundred pounds being gone, George applied
again to his brother, reminding him once more of that promise made in
Bloomsbury. But on this occasion Mr. Sheldon plainly told his kinsman
that he could do no more for him.
"You must fight your own battle, George," he said, "as I have fought
mine."
"Thank you, Philip," said the younger brother; "I would rather fight it
any other way."
And then the two men looked at each other, as they were in the habit of
doing sometimes, with a singularly intent gaze.
"You're very close-fisted with Tom Halliday's money," George said
presently. "If I'd asked poor old Tom himself, I'm sure he wouldn't
have refused to lend me two or three hundred."
"Then it's a pity you didn't ask him," Mr. Sheldon answered, with
supreme coolness.
"I should have done so fast enough, if I had thought he was going to
die so suddenly. It was a bad day for me, and for him too, when he came
to Fitzgeorge-street."
"What do you mean by that?" asked Mr. Sheldon sharply.
"You can pretty well guess my meaning, I should think," George answered
in a sulky tone.
"No, I can't; and what's more, I don't mean to try. I'll tell you what
it is, Master George; you've been treating me to a good many hints and
innuendoes lately; and you must know very little of me if you don't
know that I'm the last kind of man to stand that sort of thing from
you, or from any one else. You have tried to take the tone of a man who
has some kind of hold upon another. You had better understand at once
that such a tone won't answer with me. If you had any hold upon me, or
any power over me, you'd be quick enough to use it; and you ought to be
aware that I know that, and can see to the bottom of such a shallow
little game as yours."
Mr. Sheldon the younger looked at his brother with an expression of
surprise that was not entirely unmingled with admiration.
"Well, you _are_ a cool hand, Phil!" he said.
Here the conversation ended. The two brothers were very good friends
after this, and George presented himself at the gothic villa whenever
he received an invitation to dine there. The dinners were good, and the
men who ate them were men of solidity and standing in the commercial
world; and George was very glad to eat good dinners, and to meet
eligible men; but he never again asked his brother for the loan of odd
hundreds.
He grubbed on, as best he might, in the dingy Gray's-Inn chambers. He
had a little business--business which lay chiefly amongst men who
wanted to borrow money, or whose halting footsteps required guidance
through the quagmire of the Bankruptcy Court. He just contrived to keep
his head above water, and his name in the Law-list, by means of such
business; but the great scheme of his life remained as yet unripened,
an undeveloped shadow to which he had in vain attempted to give a
substance.
The leading idea of George Sheldon's life was the idea that there were
great fortunes in the world waiting for claimants; and that a share of
some such fortune was to be obtained by any man who had the talent to
dig it out of the obscurity in which it was hidden. He was a student of
old county histories, and a searcher of old newspapers; and his studies
in that line had made him familiar with many strange stories--stories
of field-labourers called away from the plough to be told they were the
rightful owners of forty thousand a year; stories of old white-haired
men starving to death in miserable garrets about Bethnal-green or
Spitalfields, who could have claimed lands and riches immeasurable, had
they known how to claim them; stories of half-crazy old women, who had
wandered about the world with reticules of discoloured papers
clamorously asserting their rights and wrongs unheeded and unbelieved,
until they encountered sharp-witted lawyers who took up their claims,
and carried them triumphantly into the ownership of illimitable wealth.
George Sheldon had read of these things until it had seemed to him that
there must be some such chance for any man who would have patience to
watch and wait for it. He had taken up several cases, and had fitted
link after link together with extreme labour, and had hunted in parish
registers until the cold mouldy atmosphere of vestries was as familiar
to him as the air of Gray's Inn. But the cases had all broken down at
more or less advanced stages; and after infinite patience and trouble,
a good deal of money spent upon travelling and small fees to all manner
of small people, and an incalculable number of hours wasted in
listening to the rambling discourse of parish-clerks and oldest
inhabitants, Mr. Sheldon had been compelled to abandon his hopes time
after time, until a man with less firmly rooted ideas would have given
up the hunting of registers and grubbing up of genealogies as a
delusion and a snare.
George Sheldon's ideas were very firmly rooted, and he stuck to them
with that dogged persistency which so often achieves great ends, that
it seems a kind of genius. He saw his brother's success, and
contemplated the grandeurs of the gothic villa in a cynical rather than
an envious spirit. How long would it all last? How long would the
stockbroker float triumphantly onward upon that wonderful tide which is
constituted by the rise and fall of the money-market?
"That sort of thing is all very well while a man keeps his head cool
and clear," thought George; "but somehow or other men always seem to
lose their heads on the Stock Exchange before they have done with it,
and I daresay my wise brother will drop into a nice mess sooner or
later. Setting aside all other considerations, I think I would rather
have my chances than his; for I speculate very little more than my time
and trouble, and I stand in to win a bigger sum than he will ever get
in his line, let stocks rise and fall as they may."
During that summer in which Miss Halliday bade farewell to Hyde Lodge
and her school-days, George Sheldon was occupied with the early steps
in a search which he hoped would end in the discovery of a prize rich
enough to reward him for all his wasted time and labour.
Very early in the previous year there had appeared the following brief
notice in the _Observer_:--
"The Rev. John Haygarth, late vicar of Tilford Haven, Kent, died
lately, without a will, or relation to claim his property, 100,000
pounds. The Crown therefore claimed it. And last court-day the
Prerogative Court of Canterbury decreed letters of Administration to
Mr. Paul, the nominee of the Crown."
Some months after this an advertisement had been inserted in the
_Times_ newspaper to the following effect:--
"NEXT OF KIN.--If the relatives or next of kin of the Rev. John
Haygarth, late vicar of Tilford Haven, in the county of Kent, clerk,
deceased, who has left property of the value of one hundred thousand
pounds, will apply, either personally or by letter, to Stephen Paul,
Esq., solicitor for the affairs of Her Majesty's Treasury, at the
Treasury Chambers, Whitehall, London, they may hear of something to
their advantage. The late Rev. John Haygarth is supposed to have been
the son of Matthew Haygarth, late of the parish of St. Judith,
Ullerton, and Rebecca his wife, formerly Rebecca Caulfield, spinster,
late of the same parish; both long since deceased."
Upon the strength of this advertisement George Sheldon began his
search. His theory was that there always existed an heir-at-law
somewhere, if people would only have the patience to hunt him or her
out; and he attributed his past failures rather to a want of endurance
on his own part than to the breaking down of his pet theory.
On this occasion he began his work with more than usual determination.
"This is the biggest chance I've ever had," he said to himself, "and I
should be something worse than a fool if I let it slip through my
fingers."
The work was very dry and dreary, involving interminable hunting of
registers, and questioning of oldest inhabitants. And the oldest
inhabitants were so stupid, and the records of the registers so
bewildering. One after another Mr. Sheldon set himself to examine the
lines of the intestate's kindred and ancestors; his father's only
sister, his grandfather's brothers and sisters, and even to the
brothers and sisters of his great-grandfather. At that point the
Haygarth family melted away into the impenetrable darkness of the past.
They were no high and haughty race of soldiers and scholars, churchmen
and lawyers, or the tracing of them would have been a much easier
matter. Burke would have told of them. There would have been old
country houses filled with portraits, and garrulous old housekeepers
learned in the traditions of the past. There would have been mouldering
tombs and tarnished brasses in quiet country churches, with descriptive
epitaphs, and many escutcheons. There would have been crumbling
parchments recording the prowess of Sir Reginald, knight, or the
learning of Sir Rupert, counsellor and judge. The Haygarths were a race
of provincial tradesmen, and had left no better record of their
jog-trot journey through this world than the registry of births,
marriages, and deaths in obscure churches, or an occasional entry in
the fly-leaf of a family Bible.
At present Mr. Sheldon was only at the beginning of his work. The
father and grandfather and uncle and great-uncles, the
great-grandfather and great-great-uncles, with all their progenies, lay
before him in a maze of entanglement which it would be his business to
unravel. And as he was obliged to keep his limited legal connection
together while he devoted himself to this task, the work promised to
extend over months, or indeed years; and in the meanwhile there was
always the fear that some one else, as quick-witted and indefatigable
as himself, would take up the same tangled skein and succeed in the
unravelment of it. Looking this fact full in the face, Mr. Sheldon
decided that he must have an able and reliable coadjutor; but to find
such a coadjutor, to find a man who would help him, on the chance of
success, and not claim too large a share of the prize if success came,
was more than the speculative attorney could hope. In the meantime his
work progressed very slowly; and he was tormented by perpetual terror
of that other sharp practitioner who might be following up the same
clue, and whose agents might watch him in and out of parish churches,
and listen at street-corners when he was hunting an oldest inhabitant.