"THEY WERE BORN POOR, LIVED POOR, AND POOR THEY DIED."
Squire Bosworth sent his daughter back to Fairmile under close
guardianship, and gave up the Arlington Street lodgings, much to the
disgust of Lady Tredgold and her daughters, who enjoyed their free
quarters at the West End, and the fever of London drawing-rooms.
Even the gaieties of Bath, balls public and private, in Harrison's great
room, breakfasts of fifty and sixty people, and card-tables nightly,
morning parade upon the Gravel Walk or in the Abbey Gardens, the
afternoon lounge in the galleries of the tennis-court, the ever-changing
company at the White Hart lodgings, the high play, and all the other
diversions of that delightful city, which had been characterised by a
puritanical contemporary as "a valley of pleasure and a sink of
iniquity"--even these dissipations of the rich and idle were as nothing
to that concentrated blaze of pleasure and polite profligacy which
illumined the little world of Leicester Fields, Soho, Golden Square, and
St. James's.
Before he left town Mr. Bosworth called on Lord Lavendale in Bloomsbury
Square, and charged him with having screened his friend's underhand
pursuit of Irene.
"When I admitted Mr. Durnford to my house I believed that, as your
lordship's friend, he must needs be a man of honour," said the Squire.
"He rewards my confidence by making surreptitious love to my daughter
and heiress!"
Lavendale warmly defended his friend; praised his talents; assured Mr.
Bosworth that Durnford was likely to do well in the world; to win fame
and fortune before he reached life's meridian.
"I shall not be here to see him at the top of the ladder, my lord,"
answered the Squire grimly. "I want to marry my daughter to a man who
has no such troublesome ascent to make; I want something better than
castles in the air in return for solid guineas and broad acres. My
daughter's husband must bring his share of good things. If he has not
wealth he must at least have rank and high birth."
"Durnford is of a good old west-country family."
"A beggarly parson's penniless son. My dear lord, the matter will not
bear discussion. Warn your friend that I am adamant, and that 'twere but
to waste time and thought to try to move me. There may be other good
matches more attainable than my daughter. Let him look about him, and
find another outlet for his enterprise in heiress-hunting."
"You insult me, Mr. Bosworth, when you insult my friend. He is a man of
honour, and his passion for your daughter is entirely independent of her
fortune. He deplores the ill-gotten wealth that parts him from her."
This was a home-thrust for the Squire, who clapped his hand upon his
sword-hilt as if he would have challenged his host there and then, but
thought better of it instantly, and bade Lord Lavendale a stiff
good-morning.
Herrick rode down to Lavendale Manor next day, reached his friend's
house by nightfall, passed a sleepless night, and went prowling round
the fence that divided Fairmile Park from the Manor grounds all next
day. He loitered and rambled from sunrise till sundown, hanging about in
likely spots where he and Irene had met last summer; but there was no
sign of his mistress. She was under close watch and ward, poor soul,
Lady Tredgold and her daughters being her gaolers for the nonce. They
were to stay till the Squire relieved guard; and then the old family
coach, which had been built for Lady Tredgold when she married, was to
carry them on towards Bath. Weary and heart-sick after that
disappointing day, Herrick stole to the lodge at dusk, and dropped in
upon the old gardener's wife. He had been crafty enough to make friends
with her last summer, and had dropped more than one of his hard-earned
guineas into her horny palm; so he was welcome. She told him all the
news, and promised to convey a letter to Miss Bosworth, if he would only
give her leave to wait for an opportunity.
"My eldest boy works in the garden," she said, "and Mrs. Bosworth
always takes notice of him. He'll find a time for giving her your
letter."
Herrick wrote his letter that night, a long and exhaustive letter,
entreating his beloved to stand firm, to believe in the potency of true
love, and to refuse to yield her heart or her hand to any man till he
should come forward to win it.
"So soon as I am sure of a modest competence, Rena, I will find the way
to make you my wife, and we will laugh at your father's fortune. I will
not ask you to wed beggary; but it shall go hard if within two years I
am not secure of an income that will suffice for wedded lovers. Two
years will not seem an eternity, even though we are forced to dwell
apart. Your image will be the companion of all my hours; 'twill stand at
my elbow and guide my hand as I write; 'twill flit beside me as I trudge
about the town; 'twill comfort, and inspire, and guide, and protect me.
It will be to me as an armour against all evil."
He waited about at Lavendale, haunting the park-rails by day, and
visiting the gardener's lodge at sundown for full five days. It took the
gardener's boy all that time to find an opportunity for delivering his
letter. Then there were two more days before Irene could see the boy
alone and return her answer. But at last that blessed reply came, full
of assurances of fidelity.
"I shall never be an undutiful daughter, or cease to think with love and
gratitude of my father," she wrote in conclusion; "but my hand and my
heart are my own, and those I will give to none but you."
Comforted and sustained by this letter, Herrick went back to London, and
established himself there in a modest lodging of his own in a court
leading out of Russell Street, Covent Garden, hard by those classic
coffee-houses where all the wits and politicians of the day were wont to
meet in rooms which but lately had echoed the laughter of Steele and the
quieter sallies of Addison. The greatest of Queen Anne's wits had passed
away; but the world of letters was still illumined by Pope, and
Bolingbroke, and Swift, and Warburton, and Berkeley, and a whole galaxy
of wit, erudition, and natural genius. Chief among them all perhaps was
that lively Frenchman, whose vivid pen touched perfection in every line
of literature, who was by turns poet, philosopher, historian, political
economist, trifler, critic, and theologian, and with whom an airy grace,
a supreme audacity, and an incomparable clearness of style, served
instead of the deeper thought and wider erudition of Clarke or Berkeley.
In such society no intellectual man could be unhappy, and Herrick
Durnford was frankly accepted in this charmed circle. He was on good
terms alike with the Ministry and with the Opposition. He dined and
slept at Dawley at the beginning of the week, and drank Sir Robert's
port on a Saturday evening. He loved Bolingbroke as a noble specimen of
highly gifted humanity, despite his many faults; but he honoured Walpole
as a master of statecraft, the minister who had the interests of the
people and the country most at heart, and who knew how to maintain the
prestige of England without plunging her into war. Walpole had been
struck by Herrick's letters in the _Flying Post_, had asked him to
dinner, and had even introduced him to Mrs. Skerritt. This last honour
meant real friendship. Molly Skerritt had read the letters to her
dearest friend Lady Mary, and the two had agreed that they were clever
enough to have been written by Swift. Mrs. Skerritt suggested that dear
Sir Robert should give Mr. Durnford the very next vacant borough. A man
who could write so well ought to be a good speaker, and good speakers
were wanted now that all the best orators had gone over to the
Opposition.
"The finest of them all is that poor fellow you keep muzzled yonder in
his fancy farm at Uxbridge," said Mrs. Molly, somewhat pertly.
She was beautiful, and her admirer was stout, clumsy, and
commonplace-looking; so she could afford to take liberties.
"Would to God I could muzzle his pen as easily as I can keep him out of
the House of Lords!" answered Walpole. "The fellow is an arrant traitor,
and this _Craftsman_ of his will wreck the country, unless I can be a
match for him and that renegade Pulteney."
When Molly Skerritt put in her word in an aspirant's favour his chances
of promotion were no longer chimerical. The borough was soon found, and
within six weeks of Mrs. Skerritt's recommendation Herrick Durnford was
elected for Bossiney in Cornwall, a charming little nomination borough,
then in the disposal of Sir John St. Aubyn, a staunch Whig and
Walpolian. The late member had been a ponderous Cornish squire who
always voted as he was told, and rarely spoke. His vote was useful, his
speech might have been damaging. This worthy member having expired
unpretentiously of an apoplexy, Walpole sent his young friend Durnford
down to Bossiney with a letter of introduction to Sir John St. Aubyn.
That gentleman took his young friend round to the half a dozen tenant
farmers who constituted the free and independent electors of Bossiney;
Herrick drank their cider, which was nearly as bad as that he had tasted
in Brittany, kissed their wives, who were buxom and fresh-complexioned,
praised their horses, patted their dogs, and was returned unanimously at
the polling-place, which was on a hillock beside the high-road, the
central point of an imaginary village. Tradition averred that Bossiney
had once been an important town, but its streets and market-place,
church and chapel, had disappeared as completely as the submerged city
of Lyonesse.
Herrick entered the House determined that the member for Bossiney should
no longer rank among dumb-dogs. Despite his success at the University as
an after-supper speaker, he was not a great orator, not a man to thrill
the House, but he was a clever debater, and he knew when and how to
raise a laugh against his antagonist. He was skilled in all the passes
of senatorial fence; for as some men are by instinct orators, so are
some by instinct debaters. He had a knack of asking damaging questions,
and seemed almost as keen on financial subjects as his illustrious
chief.
His contributions to the _Flying Post_ were as frequent as before he
became a senator, and were more telling, for he had now the knowledge
which he had lacked before. It was high treason in those days to report
the proceedings of the House; but a man who knew what was happening
there could give the public some benefit from his knowledge without
infringing that mysterious law which protected the senate. He answered
those brilliant diatribes against the government which Bolingbroke and
Pulteney were daily contributing to the _Craftsman_; and his answers,
though they may have lacked the matured style and lofty grace of him who
wrote the _Patriot King_, were neither insignificant nor impotent. Men
read them and talked about them, and the writer who signed himself "An
Honest Englishman" was fast becoming a recognised power in the world of
politics.
Neither senate nor literature kept Herrick from thinking of his
betrothed. He rode down to Lavendale at least once in a fortnight, saw
the friendly lodge-keeper, fee'd her useful son, and exchanged letters
with Irene. On one occasion he was so happy as to see her by the old
moss-grown park-rail. The watch and ward over her, kept scrupulously by
kind old Mademoiselle Latour, had been relaxed so far as to allow of her
riding her pony about the park; and so the lovers met, clasped hands,
touched lips, and vowed to be true to each other till death. And again,
as he looked at the lovely face, Herrick was struck by Irene's likeness
to that hidden portrait in Mr. Topsparkle's cabinet.
"If it is an accidental likeness, 'tis the most wonderful accident that
ever came within my knowledge," he said to himself, as he sauntered back
to the Manor; "but there are times when I doubt if it can be an
accident. It is not a likeness in feature only, but there are
characteristic points in each face which match exactly--family marks, as
it were, which indicate a particular race."
Upon his next visit he chanced for the first time to find company at the
gardener's lodge, in the person of Mrs. Bridget, the nurse, who had been
to Kingston in the coach for a day's holiday, and whom the return coach
had just deposited at the lodge.
The nurse was loquacious, and inclined to be confidential towards one
whom she knew as the beloved of her adored young mistress. From her, for
the first time, Herrick heard the exact story of the finding of the dead
man and the living child on the common, and how the foundling and the
heiress had played together like twin cherries on one stalk till death
parted them.
Herrick was deeply interested in those points of the story which were
new to him. He had heard of that infantine companionship from Rena, but
she, who but vaguely remembered it, could only describe vaguely, and the
story so told had been dim and shadowy. He questioned Mrs. Bridget
closely, and encouraged her to dwell with a morbid diffuseness on the
particulars of the orphan's illness and death. She described how both
children had been brought to death's door.
"'Twas lucky the heiress recovered, and not the nameless waif," said
Herrick, looking at her closely.
She returned his gaze with equal steadfastness; but he noticed that her
lips whitened.
"'Twould have been a hard thing for Squire Bosworth to lose his only
daughter," he went on, "while the orphan's death could matter very
little to any one."
"It mattered to the poor little dear that was left behind," answered
Mrs. Bridget. "She fretted sorely for her playfellow."
Herrick went back to town that night with a fixed belief and a fixed
determination. He felt that he had now one more business added to the
multitude of his pursuits; and that business was to find out the
parentage of the nameless orphan and the history of her unlucky father.
It would be no easy task, since he had to start from zero. He had no
clue to the man's identity save the place and date of his death, and
Mrs. Bridget's description, derived at secondhand through Farmer Bowman,
of the dead man's appearance.
It was to Tom Philter, that living register of other people's business,
that he applied himself in the first instance on the very next occasion
of their meeting at the Roebuck. They dined at adjacent tables, and
Herrick invited Mr. Philter to join him in a pint of claret when his
steak was despatched.
Philter had lived by his pen from the age of eighteen to a
well-preserved nine-and-forty; and if the waif's father were, as it was
supposed, a political scribbler, it was likely Philter would know
something about him.
"If I know of one such starving wretch as you describe, I know of
fifty," said Philter, when he had heard all that Durnford could tell
him. "They were hatched on the hotbed of the Revolution, and swarmed
like emmets on a nest in the Queen's time, which has been called the
golden age for men of letters, because a lucky few had rich patrons,
and made fortunes by venal pens. For one man that could live by
literature there have always been ninety-nine that have narrowly escaped
actual starvation. And it seems that this one man of yours did verily
die of want on the Queen's highway. A hard case undoubtedly. A young,
well-looking man, tramping about the country with a year-old baby; a
strange spectacle. No, I can recall no man of my acquaintance that would
have burdened himself so over-conscientiously with his domestic
obligations while there was an unguarded doorstep on which he could
deposit them. Truth to tell, Mr. Durnford, I have been tolerably
successful as wit and journalist for the last twenty years, and I have
given the hungry brotherhood a wide berth. They are bloodsuckers, my
dear sir, bloodsuckers of the most tenacious order. Your vampire cannot
hold a candle to them for voracity. 'Twas only yesterday afternoon I
refused a crown to that hotheaded sot Savage, whose fine-lady mother
ought to keep her brat out of the gutter.' 'Go to mamma, my dear
fellow,' says I: 'a man of your rank, with a mother who _is_ a fortune
and _has been_ a countess should not be hard up for five shillings.' I
think I hit him pretty hard there, Durnford."
"I think you had more than five shillings' worth without paying your
score," answered Herrick. "I am very sorry for Dick Savage, who has
talents, and is about the hardest-used wretch I ever met with. The worst
stepmother in a fairy tale was never crueller than Colonel Brett's wife,
and yet I daresay she will fatten and prosper, and live to a ripe old
age."
"She was a bold hussy," said Philter: "a woman who would brazen her
shame before the House of Lords, in order to divorce herself from a
husband she hated, can at least claim credit for strength of character."
"Which she shows now in denying herself to her son, the innocent witness
of her dishonour, and the avowed ground for her divorce."
"I doubt by the time she had survived her passion for Lord Rivers she
had exhausted her regard for his offspring," said Philter carelessly.
"Nay, she betrayed her indifference from the hour of his birth, handed
him over at once to his grandmother, Lady Mason, who immediately
transferred him to a foster-nurse, with whom he languished in obscurity
through his joyless boyhood, until his mother had him apprenticed to a
cobbler in Holborn, having previously, by a most malignant lie, deprived
him of a provision which Lord Rivers on his death-bed desired to
bequeath him. Poor Dick has told me the story at least a dozen times."
Durnford parted with the journalist in disappointment and disgust. He
knew not to whom else he could apply for help in his investigation of an
unknown past. He knew not where else to turn for information, was
altogether at a loss how to proceed, when a chance glimpse of Jemmy
Ludderly's ferret-face in the eighteenpenny gallery at a revival of
Steele's _Conscious Lovers_ reminded him that here was one who belonged
to a lower grade of letters, or, at all events, to a less prosperous
group of scribblers and artists, than that pseudo-fashionable circle
which Mr. Philter adorned. Ludderly claimed no acquaintance with modish
beauties or elderly demi-reps, waved no clouded cane, affected no
mincing walk, flourished no amber snuffbox, neither scented himself with
pulvilio nor expended a month's pay on a periwig. Mr. Ludderly wore the
same suit of clothes from January to December, and on to a second
January and a second December, would they but endure as long. Whatever
money he earned he spent upon the inner rather than the outer man, drank
deep in cosy tavern parlours when he was in funds, and toasted his
herring or his rasher in the solitude of his garret when he was hard up,
and managed to maintain a contented spirit at all times. Nothing short
of absolute hunger could have spoilt his temper.
Durnford called in May's Buildings next day, and unearthed the
caricaturist and lampooner in his kennel. It was Mr. Ludderly's usual
breakfast-hour, and he was meekly cooking his morning rasher in an easy
attire of shirt and breeches, with ungartered stockings, and the most
dilapidated slippers Herrick had ever seen off a dust-heap. But the man
of letters was in no wise embarrassed by his unsophisticated
surroundings. He received his visitor with a friendly air, and insisted
on vacating the one serviceable chair for his accommodation, while he
balanced himself adroitly upon a seat from whose wooden framework the
worn-out rushes hung in a picturesque fringe.
"Don't mention it," said Jimmy, when Herrick apologised for disturbing
him. "There is the bed yonder," pointing to the disordered pallet with
its ragged patchwork coverlet, "a most comfortable seat at all times.
Pardon me if I am for the moment preoccupied by the preparation of my
modest meal," laying down his toasting-fork, and filling a little black
teapot from the steaming kettle. "I am no sybarite or epicure, but I can
offer you a cup of the choicest tea in London. 'Tis bohea, at a guinea a
pound, from the Barber's Pole in Southampton Street. 'Twas given me
t'other day by a dear creature whose latest adventure offered particular
attractions to the comic Muse, but for whose sweet sake I restrained my
wit."
"Boileau could not have been more gallant. And was Thalia gagged for a
pound of bohea?"
"O sir, I do not say there was no solider consideration. The tea was the
tilly in. I beg you to taste a dish of it."
He brought a second cup and saucer from a corner cupboard, which was at
once larder, cellar, and pantry, and poured out some tea for his guest.
"I thought you were addicted to somewhat stronger liquor, Mr. Ludderly,"
said Durnford. "Burgundy, Champagne, or Hollands, for instance."
"My dear sir, over-night I will steep myself in an ocean of Burgundy,
and will sing you that fine old French drinking-song;" and he trolled in
a worn-out baritone,
"'Beau nez, dont les rubis ont cousté mainte pipe
De vin blanc et clairet,
Et duquel la couleur richement participe
De rouge et violet.'
"But I am no morning dram-drinker. 'Tis from the teapot I take my
noontide inspiration. Yet I know not if bohea be not as fatal to the
nerves as Hollands. I have heard that Lord Bristol attributes his son
Hervey's ill-health to the use of that detestable and poisonous plant
tea. Those were his very words, as told me by no less a person than Lord
Hervey's valet, who frequents my favourite tavern. Well, if 'tis poison,
'tis a pleasant poison, and keeps the brain alive while it kills the
body. I learnt the habit of bohea-bibbing from a sprig of good family
who chummed with me twenty years ago in this very garret. He was a
delicate effeminate creature, brought up gingerly by a widowed mother,
and then flung upon the world to waste a small patrimony and starve when
it was gone."
Durnford put down his cup hastily and stared the speaker in the face.
"A friend of twenty years back!" he said. "What became of him?"
Ludderly shrugged his shoulders, and shook his head.
"I know not, unless he went as sailor or soldier, and flung away a life
which he could not maintain as a civilian. He had sunk pretty low when
he became my fellow-lodger, and was trying to live by his pen. He had
inherited a strong attachment to the King over the water, and wrote on
the losing side, a fatal mistake, till he turned his coat at my advice,
and scribbled for the Whigs. I am at heart a friend to the Stuarts, but
I have got my bread by abusing them. Half my living at one time was made
out of Father Peter and the warming-pan."
"How long is it since you saw this gentleman?"
"He disappeared from my ken in the autumn of the year nine, the year of
Malplaquet. He left London on a pilgrimage to a wealthy relative in
Hampshire, whom he fancied his destitution might move to pity; but I
thought that if the gentleman were a man of the world, he was more
likely to set his dogs at my poor friend than to take him in and feed
him. He was very low by that time, and he had an impediment to a
relation's hospitality which I should deem fatal."
"What kind of impediment?"
"A motherless baby of a year and a half old--you need not blush, sir,
'twas born in wedlock--the offspring of a foolish runaway match made
abroad, where my friend was bear-leader to a young nobleman."
"By heaven, it is the very man!" cried Herrick. "I thought as much from
the beginning. Was not your friend's wife called Belinda?"
"That was her name. Many a night have I heard him utter it,
half-strangled in a sob, as he lay dreaming. The poor girl died in
childbirth at Montpellier, where they were living for cheapness. What do
you know of him?"
"Nothing--except that if he was the man I think, he died on the
Portsmouth road, died of want and exhaustion, and was found lying stark
and cold, with his baby daughter beside him."
"Do you know the date of his death?"
"Yes, 'twas the twenty-eighth of September."
"And it was on the fifteenth he took his child from her nurse at
Chelsea, over against Mrs. Gwynne's Hospital, and started on his
wild-goose chase after a kinsman's benevolence. He thought his relative
would melt at sight of the child, which shows how little he knew of the
world, poor wretch! Doubtless he arrived at his destination, had the
door shut upon him, civilly or uncivilly--'twould be the same as to
result--and turned his face Londonwards again, to tramp back to his den
here, where he knew there was at least shelter for him. He was weak and
ill when he left London, and he was all but penniless, and intended to
make the journey on foot. I am not surprised that he died on the road.
I am not surprised; but even after eighteen years, I am sorry."
Honest Jemmy wiped a tear or two from his unwashed cheek with the back
of a grimy hand.
"Where did they find him, sir?" he asked, after a brief silence.
"On Flamestead Common, thirty miles from London."
"He had come all the way from his kinsman's seat on the other side of
Winchester. The man was a distant cousin of his father's. 'Twas not a
close tie; but common humanity might have afforded him at least a
temporary shelter."
"My dear Mr. Ludderly, common humanity is the most uncommon virtue I
know of; 'tis rarer than common sense. Pray let me hear more of your
friend. Did he ever tell you of his wife's family and origin?"
"Very little. He was strangely silent about her, and as I knew he
lamented her death with an intensity of grief that was singular in a
young widower, I shrank from irritating an open wound by any impertinent
questions. All I ever heard of the lady is that she was an Italian, and
that if she had had her rights she would have enjoyed a handsome
fortune. It is my private opinion that he stole her from her father's
house, and so blighted her chance of wealth and favour."
"You do not know where they met, or where they were married?"
"No; I cannot tell you the where, but I have heard the how. They were
united by an English parson whom Chumleigh met on his travels; a scamp,
I take it, of your Parson Keith stamp. They were married in the house of
a British consul. 'Twas a legal ceremonial; the knot could scarce have
been more securely tied. Unhappily Death snapped it before the rich
father could relent."
"Were pardon likely upon his part, surely the widower would have sued
for it for the sake of his motherless infant?"
"Whether he sued and was refused, or never sued at all, I know not,"
answered Ludderly; "the man could hardly have been more secret than he
was about his wife's history."
"Was he a friend of long standing?"
"No; he and I were only poverty's strange bedfellows. I picked him up
one night sleeping under an archway in Holborn, penniless, dispirited,
and took him home to my garret. I saw that he was a gentleman and a man
of parts. I was just rich enough to give him a shelter from the wind and
rain, and a supper of bread and cheese, and I had just influence enough
to get him a little journeyman's work in the way of translation, as I
found he was a linguist. 'Twas the year I brought out my _Adventures of
Fidelia, a Young Lady of Fortune_, modelled upon Mrs. Manly's _New
Atalantis_. 'Twas one of my prosperous years, and I would have kept that
poor devil all the winter, could he but have pocketed his independence,
and been content to share my loaf. But when I could get him no more work
he grew restless and impatient, and nothing would serve him but he must
go off to try his luck with his Hampshire relation. I doubt what pierced
him sharpest was that he could not pay the nurse at Chelsea, and she was
growing clamorous, and bade him provide otherwise for his orphan. That
decided him, and he trudged off one fair September morning with the
little girl nestling on his shoulder. I bore him company as far as
Putney village, and there parted with him, little thinking 'twas for
ever."
"He may have been more communicative to the child's nurse than to this
friendly babbler," thought Durnford; and then he asked the nurse's name,
which Ludderly happened to remember, because it reminded him of his
favourite paper the _Tatler_, at that time being issued thrice weekly,
and its wit and humour in all men's mouths.
"The creature's name was Wagstaff," he said, "which puts me in mind of
Isaac Bickerstaff and his lucubrations. I had thoughts of starting a
journal upon the same model, and flatter myself that with a smart fellow
like Philter to help me, as Addison helped poor Dick, I could have run
the _Tatler_ hard. But I could not budge for want of capital. Your
printer is such an inquisitive devil, always eager to see the colour of
his employer's money."
"Her name was Wagstaff," repeated Durnford, not even affecting an
interest in Mr. Ludderly's blighted ambitions, "and she lived at
Chelsea, facing the Hospital for old soldiers?"
"Lived, and lives there to this day, for aught I know to the contrary,"
answered Ludderly.
"My dear sir, I am deeply beholden to you for so much information given
with such friendly frankness. We must see more of each other. Will you
dine with me at the Roebuck at four this afternoon, or will you honour
me with your company at Drury Lane to see _The Conscious Lovers_, and
sup at White's after the play?"
Herrick knew that to a man of Ludderly's stamp a dinner or a supper is
ever a welcome attention.
"The play and the supper, by all means. I revel in the select company at
White's, and though I am no gamester, there is an atmosphere in a place
where they play high that flutters my breast with an emotion akin to
rapture. I feel all the fever of the players without their risks."
"Mr. Ludderly, you are at once a wit and a philosopher. I shall look for
you in the box-office at six o'clock. Till then, adieu."
Durnford hurried off, delighted to be free until evening. He had to go
down to the House at three o'clock. There was no measure of importance
in hand, but as a tyro he was eager to watch the progress of the
session. He could not afford to neglect politics even for a day, but he
was bent on discovering Belinda's nurse as early as possible.
It was not quite one by the clock in the newly-finished church of St.
Martin's-in-the-Fields, which stood out spick and span in all the
brightness of stone and marble not yet discoloured by London smoke or
London weather. He set out to walk across St. James's Park and the Five
Fields to Chelsea, and was in front of the Hospital within an hour.
Chelsea had a pleasant rustic air, a country road thinly fringed with
houses. The village was a holiday resort for the idle, famous for its
Bun House, and for Barber Salter's museum of curiosities. Facing the
broad open space in front of the Hospital, and at some considerable
distance from that new and handsome edifice--begun by Charles II., but
only finished under William and Mary--there was a row of old-fashioned
cottages, including two or three of the humblest kind of shops. The
corner house nearest the country was adorned with a sign setting forth
that Mary Wagstaff, widow, was licensed to sell tea and tobacco; and the
unpretending lattices exhibited a small assortment of elecampane,
peppermint, clay pipes, pigtail tobacco, peg-tops, battledores,
worsteds, and red-herrings.
"If Mary Wagstaff be not gathered to her fathers, and yonder sign the
inheritance of a stranger, I am in luck," thought Durnford.
A gray-haired matron of obese figure waddled out of a little parlour at
the back of the shop on the summons of a cracked bell which dangled from
the half-door. Herrick did not waste time upon preliminaries, but at
once stated his business.
Was the obese lady Mrs. Wagstaff? Yes. Did she remember a certain Mr.
Chumleigh who left an infant girl at nurse with her nineteen years ago?
This question was like the opening of a sluice. Mrs. Wagstaff let loose
a torrent of angry speech, which sounded as if she had been brooding
upon her wrongs for all those nineteen years, and had never till this
moment relieved herself by uttering them. Yet doubtless she had treated
her gossips to many a lengthy disquisition upon the same theme over a
supper of tripe or cow-heel.
"Well do I remember him, and with good cause," she began. "An arrant
swindler as ever lived, yet with all the grand airs of a fine gentleman.
And the care I took of that baby! and the money I laid out upon bread
and milk to feed it!"
"But did Mr. Chumleigh never pay you anything?"
"O, he brought me dribs and drabs of money sometimes--a crown-piece or a
half-guinea once in a way. There was never such a pauper; he looked
half-starved; and would come with his long face and paltry excuses, when
I had kept his brat till my patience was worn out--she was a sweet
child, I will not deny, and I was very fond of her."
Mrs. Wagstaff rambled on with an air of being inexhaustible in speech,
and Herrick listened with admirable patience. He wanted to hear all that
she could tell him about the child's father, and was therefore content
to listen to a great deal of extraneous matter respecting the nurse and
her charge's infantine maladies.
"Ah, and bad work I had with her, for she was cutting her teeth all the
time, and used to keep me awake night after night, walking up and down
with her and singing to her. But she throve with me wonderful, and she
was a fine healthy baby as ever was, though I doubt she'd been ill-used
before she came to me."
"Ill-used, do you think?"
"Yes, sir, that was my very word, and I'm not going to take it back
again," answered Mrs. Wagstaff defiantly. "I don't mean that her father
ill-treated her, or her mother; but the poor little thing had been put
out to one of those French nurses," with ineffable disgust, "a nice pack
of trumpery, no better than your Leaguer ladies for morals. Mr.
Chumleigh told me how he found out that the hussy who suckled his child
was no better than she should be, and drank like a fish. And one night
that she was nursing the baby, and making believe to rock it to sleep,
when she was half asleep herself with Burgundy wine, she tilted her
chair forward a little too far and tumbled over into the fire, baby and
all, she did. The nurse was burnt worse than the child, and it's a
wonder she lived to tell the tale: but the baby struck her poor little
shoulder against a red-hot iron bar, and if she's alive she carries the
scar to this day. 'Twas a deep brand just where the arm joins the
shoulder, and I take it 'twill never wear out."
"How long was the little one with you?"
"Between nine and ten months. I kept her as long as I could, but my poor
husband was living at that time, and he was a man of his word. Mr.
Chumleigh was to pay me three-and-sixpence a week for the child, and he
owed me over three pounds, when my good man lost patience, and
threatened to throw the child into the street if I didn't get rid of it
civilly. I was to deliver it back to its father, or take it to the
constable. So I had no help but to tell Mr. Chumleigh he must fetch the
child away, and I told him so point-blank the next time he came to see
the little one. He was shabbier than ever, poor soul, and he looked
pinched and hungry. I'd rather have offered him a dinner than flung his
child upon his hands, but my good man was sitting in the parlour there,
listening to every word I said; so I just told Mr. Chumleigh I could
hold out no longer, he must just take the child and go about his
business. He looked very sorrowful, and then he seemed to recover
himself in a minute, and threw up his head with a proud air, as if he
had been a nobleman. 'Very well, Mrs. Wagstaff,' he said: 'I grant you
have been ill-treated, but it might have been better if you'd had more
patience with me. Fortune must turn at last for the most miserable of
us. I've a rich relation in the country. I must plod down to him and ask
for a home for my motherless one. Sure he can't resist these sweet
eyes.' I was almost crying when he shook hands and bade me good-bye,
though I tried to be hard with him. 'If ever I can pay you my debt,
madam, be sure I will,' says he; and so he went out at that door, with
the child cooing in his arms, and I never saw more of him from that day
to this."
"And never will, madam, on this side of Eternity," said Herrick gravely;
"the poor creature sank upon that cruel journey on which your husband
sent him."
"O sir, don't blame my husband! Remember, the poor gentleman owed us
over three guineas. 'Tis a good deal for people in our station."
"Yet I'll warrant you had a few guineas in a stocking somewhere. 'Twould
not have broken you if you had kept the child a little longer."
"No, sir, I don't say that it would have broken us--"
"Then it must go hard with you to remember how cruelly you dealt with an
unfortunate gentleman. But I am not here to reproach you, madam. I came
for information, and I thank you for having given it me so freely."
He tried to learn more of Chumleigh's character and circumstances, but
here Mrs. Wagstaff's information was of the most limited order. The
broken-down gentleman had been singularly silent about his past life.
Mrs. Wagstaff only knew that he was a gentleman, and this knowledge she
had by intuition, not being versed in the ways of gentlefolks, but
finding in this one something that was not in the commonality.
Herrick went back to London feeling very well satisfied with his
morning's work, though it would not seem that he had learnt much from
nurse Wagstaff.
"There is at any rate the means of settling one doubt," he told himself,
as he walked back by the Five Fields, a place of unhappy notoriety as a
favourite duelling-ground; and duelling was still a prevailing fashion,
though Steele and Addison had done their best to write it down in the
_Tatler_, and though the mutual murder of the Duke of Hamilton and Lord
Mohun in Hyde Park had not long ago given a shock to polite society.