William Bones was a stalwart man, some thirty-five years of age, the
master of a Brig which sailed from the port of Boston in Lincolnshire
and was half his own property. He was a native of that town, his father
having been therein a pork butcher in a fair way of business, his mother
the daughter of a small farmer in the Wring Land. He traded with the
Baltic when George the Third was King--indeed, when George the Third was
still young and long before George the Third first went mad.
Among other ports, he had found profit more than once in visiting that
of the River Neva, and was acquainted with the Russian trade. The great
city of St. Petersburg, still new but already splendid, became familiar
to him; and he himself, in his humble visits to the local factors,
became a familiar figure to the Secret Police of that capital. Even his
most domestic and private actions during his dealings in this port were
registered; and, it must be added, his strong English frame and handsome
English face admired, but also duly noted and their description passed
on to the proper authorities.
On his third voyage to Russia he was honoured by the invitation of a
merchant somewhat wealthier than the common of his acquaintance and at
that table met some official of the Court, of what exact situation his
ignorance of Russian and of French forbade him to inquire. Before
returning to his native Lincolnshire, his happy spouse and his young
family, he enjoyed the singular privilege of a further unexpected
invitation from this same Court official whom he had thus chanced to
meet, and so found himself at supper in one of the smaller and more
discreet rooms of the Palace, upon its mezzanine floor, in a choice
company of both sexes.
It is characteristic of the Empress herself--a great woman!--that a
large humanity and a laudable curiosity combined rendered her
indifferent to the conventions of rank. No sooner had she heard of the
British merchant captain's cheerful and manly habit than she desired a
more exact description, upon her receiving which he was permitted an
entrance to the Presence.
He enjoyed, partly by means of an elderly female who interpreted for him
until he had improved his few words of German--the Empress's mother
tongue and most familiar idiom--no little conversation with the august
sovereign, who, when he arrived at this stage, deigned to keep him by
her alone for some while. The interview was repeated upon more than one
occasion and her Imperial Majesty was so good, upon his reluctant
leave-taking some two or three weeks after his first arrival, as to
press him with an invitation to return.
Next season, the moment the Baltic ice was melted, he did so, disposing
of a mixed cargo; and, while leisurely awaiting his return charge, was
almost daily conveyed to the Palace from his humble lodging. For four
successive seasons running this strange adventure persisted.
Meanwhile his Boston neighbours could not but remark that his home in
the British haven of which he was a native and mariner, showed a
considerable advance in prosperity. His wife was better dressed, his
growing family could boast an increasing and superior acquaintance among
children of a rank with whom they would not earlier have mixed. It was
even whispered that Bill Bones had made formidable investments in the
City of London, which he certainly had visited more than half a dozen
times during his last winter stay in England; and though his friends
very charitably agreed that the profits of the Baltic trade might be
large, and that Bill Bones might have had exceptional opportunities,
they none the less talked among themselves upon the various possible
sources of a fortune which that trade could hardly account for.
With the fifth season there came an end to what had certainly been a
remarkable series. Whatever advantages communion with a throne might
have had for William Bones, the future would no doubt show; but the
fifth season was the end. There had been farewells, and yet no loss of
the high regard in which, for some extraordinary reason, he had been
held by the Semiramis of the North. He had acquired a certain assurance
of bearing which marked his new fortunes, and indeed, in this final
scene of his presence upon the quays of St. Petersburg, he seemed by his
gait to be some one of consequence. And no wonder, for he had left the
Palace for the last time bearing secreted in the bosom of his ample coat
a jewel worthy to be a memorial of the greatest passages in any life.
It was an emerald, exceptionally large--the largest, he had been
assured, in the world--square in shape, of the purest water and set in a
delicate little gold mounting after a fashion which recalled the
ornaments of the French Court.
It speaks well for Captain Bones that on his return to Boston he handed
this jewel to his wife, who thenceforward had it fixed with a pin, to
serve the office of a brooch, and wore it upon great occasions; notably
at a dance given by the mayor of the town, to which she brought her
eldest daughter, though barely of an age for such ceremonials.
The next year William Bones let his house in Boston and abruptly
transported himself and his family to the metropolis. His neighbours
were interested to discover that before abandoning them he had purchased
not a little property in the town and had even appointed a substantial
agent to deal with his rentals. He was clearly an advancing man and
their respect for him grew profound when they learnt what figure he now
cut in a world above their own. In London he was found entertaining
largely and standing upon an equal footing with merchants of repute,
though not perhaps as yet of the first fortune. Meanwhile he had
preferred the name of Bone, in the singular, to that of his earlier
life, conceiving it to be more consonant with his present position and
his residence in Cornhill and his interests in the banking world.
His only son George, when of an age for such occupations, which was some
five years after the family had come up to London, was taken in as a
partner by Mr. Worsle the India merchant, partly, no doubt, as a
testimony of friendship to his father, but partly also because William
Bone, who would now indifferently sign himself Bone or Bohun--the
original form of the name--had put at the young fellow's disposal a very
considerable capital.
William Bohun himself died somewhat prematurely in the eighth year after
his transmigration, and his wife, who, though much desiring to cut a
proper figure in her new world, had never properly succeeded in doing
so, followed him within three months to the grave. Her younger daughters
had received an excellent education; her eldest, born in her father's
earlier days, had perhaps less refinement of accent and deportment--but
on the other hand, her solid worth and quite exceptional dowry had
procured her alliance with the heir to Sir Philip Goole, a landed
gentleman in the West of England possessed of a fine town house in
Cavendish Square, but indifferent to politics.
George de Bohun--he had at first rejected but later began to use the
prefix "de" which a friend in the Heralds' College had suggested to
him--prospered, I am glad to say, exceedingly, as the son of such a
worthy father should, and acquired the playful nickname of "The Nabob,"
which spread from the city to the more exalted circles into which he was
welcomed, west of Temple Bar. It is a sufficient indication of the
respect in which he was held when I say that he was elected to Brooks's
Club, and there, by his generous behaviour at the card table, failed not
to become a favourite with the most exalted of his contemporaries in
Whig circles.
It may or may not interest the reader to know that upon his father's
death it was discovered that the Emerald of Catherine the Great had been
made an heirloom and was devised by an explanatory letter--since the law
could not enforce such a succession--for the eldest son, or, failing
sons, the eldest daughter of the reigning de Bohun on arriving at his
twenty-first, or her eighteenth birthday, his or her parents or trustees
being its successive custodians until that date. Failing such a
personage, the jewel was to be passed to any cadet branch, the eldest in
succession. If the great line of de Bohun should fail--which Heaven
forfend!--the sacred object was to be buried with the last of that
illustrious lineage.
The legal complications to which such a disposition would give rise need
not concern us, for in fact they never arose. George de Bohun had but
one son, Richard, born in the same year that saw the death of General
Bonaparte, the famous Corsican adventurer. To this son in his old age he
conveyed the jewel with the instructions concerning it, but he had
previously got rid of its unfashionable Louis XVI mounting and had it
set again, now as a pendant, after the fashion prevalent in the first
years of Queen Victoria.
Mr. George de Bohun had acquired--perhaps from his father--an unusual
reverence for the gem which he believed, with a mystical devotion
curious in a business man, to be in some way the tutelary genius of his
House. He would frequently tell young Richard, his heir, during the
boyhood of that philanthropist, the story of how Catherine the Great
herself had given it to his own father, the grandfather of the lad, when
that powerful genius was engaged upon a secret diplomatic mission to the
Russian Court. Hence had the emerald come to be known by the title of
"The Emerald of Catherine the Great" in the private circle of the de
Bohuns--pronounced "Deboons." That it should be preserved in the family,
certainly never sold and--please God!--never lost, was a religion with
George, which grew more fanatical as he approached the tomb. He came,
perhaps from an idea inherited from his father, to regard it as a
necessary condition of their prosperity, and he imbued his son Richard
with I know not what vague fears of disaster should its possession be
abandoned or should the stone itself be mislaid.
This second in the great line, George de Bohun--pronounced Deboon--the
son of its founder, though born as long ago as 1780, lived to see the
inauguration of the Hyde Park Exhibition by Queen Victoria in 1851, and,
having refused a peerage, closed his eyes in the fine country house
known as Paulings.
This mansion was--and is--situated in Herts, at no more than twenty-five
miles from Westminster. The successful Russian merchant purchased it
upon advantageous terms from the bankrupt and disreputable Parrall
family, whose last and seventeenth representative not only proved
incapable of preserving the patrimony of his ancestors, but had joined
the Romish Church and perished miserably at Boulogne.
Richard de Bohun was of course the "Dirty Dick" of mid-Victorian
politics, and an intimate friend of Lord Palmerston. There is little to
record of him except that after doing good and lucrative work in two
administrations he also refused a peerage; in which he was wise, for
though the family fortunes had not diminished, the general increase of
wealth around him made his position less conspicuous than that of his
father had been in the City of London. Indeed, the family was now no
longer connected with trade.
He died--as he had been born--at Paulings, a country house of such
absorbing interest that I shall later be compelled to describe it in
accurate if tedious terms.
The now reigning de Bohun, called Humphrey--after an illustrious
ancestor, the Humphrey de Bohun who fought at Bannockburn under Edward
II and undoubtedly held land, through his wife, in the neighbourhood of
Boston--the son of this statesman, is the Mr. de Bohun--pronounced
Deboon--of our own day: the highly respected Home Secretary who has
already passed with such distinction through what he himself will call
the _Cursus honorum_, having been Parliamentary Secretary to Harry Gates
during all of the great Paramooka Scandal--when he was the Baby of the
House--then successively rejected by Middleham West after the Seychelles
Scandal--when Gates went to the Lords--elected after a second attempt by
Middleham East, Under-Secretary during the period of the Second General
Strike and at last, after the usual vicissitudes of public life,
occupying the exalted position which he still adorns.
His figure is familiar to the public, I fear, rather by early
photographs than by recent portraits. He is a man tall and carefully
clothed, with a rather weary expression, set on a long face, with
insufficient grey hair neatly brushed. He is of a courteous demeanour.
He is much attached to his country life at Paulings, so happily
convenient to London, and sheltered from the large growth of suburban
villas about it by a dense fringe of more or less ancient trees. He is a
widower, possessed of three motor cars, but with only a flat in town. He
has refused a baronetcy, for he has (alas!) no son, but one daughter,
now just entering her nineteenth year. The name of the charming child is
Marjorie, and it was but recently, upon her eighteenth birthday, the
15th of January, that her father somewhat solemnly presented her with
the famous heirloom.
He had used no little ceremonial, speaking a little pompously of her
dead mother--a Ginningham--of the immemorial traditions of their house,
and with curious insistence upon the supposed influence of the jewel
upon their fortunes. He smiled somewhat lugubriously as he touched that
point, but Marjorie, though not extravagantly intelligent, had brains
enough to believe in omens, mascots, talismans, and was proud, as a girl
should be at her age, to enter upon the possession of the Sacred Gem of
the de Bohuns.
Her father had discarded, for so great an occasion, the Victorian gold
setting which, he was assured by Mr. Marolovitch and other experts, was
in deplorable taste. The jewel was now set once more--by Mr.
Marolovitch--as a brooch, since a woman was to wear it. The new setting
was in platinum, designed in the finest taste of Berlin, with writhing
curves and dead square divisions of the most entrancing variety. Large
as the Emerald was, and its new Prussian setting adequately broad, yet
the whole lay easily on the palm.
If it be not blasphemy to suggest any inefficiency in our Teutonic
cousins, I should suggest that the pin was a thought too long and
capable, on careless handling, of biting the hand that fed it. But for
any such trifling defect the grey colour of the new and more expensive
mounting, resembling that of a leaded grate, and the awful severity of
its odd rectangles and unexpected heavings of its re-entrant curves,
made ample atonement. Such was the aspect of the Emerald of Catherine
the Great in the winter when it entered upon its liveliest activities.