THE STORY OF THE PAST.
The history of George Mowbray Vandeleur Vane was the history of many
men whose lot it was to shine in that brilliant orbit of which George,
Prince Regent, was the ruling star. Around that dazzling royal planet
how many smaller lights revolved, twinkling in humble emulation of
their prince’s glory. What were fortune, friends, children, wives,
or creditors, when weighed in the balance, if the royal favour, the
princely smile, hung on the other side of the scale? If George the
Fourth was pleased to bring ruin upon himself and his creditors, how
should his friends and associates do less? Looking backward at the
spurious glitter, the mock splendour, the hollow delight of that
wonderful age which is so near us in point of time, so far away from us
by reason of the wide differences which divide to-day from that foolish
yesterday, we can of course afford to be very wise, and can clearly see
what a very witches’ sabbath was that long revelry in which the Fourth
George of England led the dance. But who shall doubt that the dancers
themselves saw the fantastic caperings of their leader in a very
different light, and looked upon their model as worthy of all mortal
praise and imitation.
The men of that frivolous era seem to have abandoned themselves to
unmanly weakness, and followed the fashions set them by the fat and
pale-faced Royal Adonis, as blindly as the women of to-day emulate the
Imperial caprices of the Tuileries, sacrificing themselves as burnt
offerings to the Moloch of Fashion, in obedience to the laws made
by a lady who lives in a palace; and who, when she wears her silken
robe three yards in length and six in circumference, can scarcely be
expected to foresee the nervous tortures by-and-by to be endured by Mr.
John Smith, of Peckham Rye, whose wife will insist on having a hoop
and train _à l’ Oojénee_, and sweeping her superabundant skirts into
the fender and across the back of the grate every time she steers her
difficult way about the worthy Smith’s fourteen feet by twelve front
parlour.
Yes, if Cleopatra melts pearls in her wine, and sails in a galley of
gold, we must have sham jewels to dissolve in our inferior vintages,
and sham gold to adorn our galleys. If Pericles, or Charles, or George,
affects splendour and ruin, the prince’s devoted subjects must ruin
themselves also, never letting their master see anything but smiling
faces amid the general wreck, and utterly heedless of such minor
considerations as wives and children, creditors and friends.
George Mowbray Vandeleur Vane ruined himself with a grace that was only
second to that of his royal model. He began life with a fair estate
left him by his father, and having contrived to squander the best part
of his patrimony within a few years of his coming of age, was so lucky
as to marry the only daughter and heiress of a rich banker, thereby
acquiring a second fortune just at that critical moment when the first
was on the verge of exhaustion. He was not a bad husband to the simple
girl who loved and worshipped him with a foolishly confiding worship.
It was not in his nature to be wilfully bad to anybody; for he was of a
genial, generous spirit, with warm affections for those who pleased him
and ministered to his happiness. He introduced his young wife to very
brilliant people, and led her into sacred and inner circles, whither
her father the banker could never have taken her; but he squandered
her money foolishly and recklessly. He broke down the bulwarks of
parchment with which the lawyers had hoped to protect her fortune. He
made light of the settlements which were to provide for the future of
his children. They were only blooming and beautiful young creatures
in cambric frocks and blue sashes; and surely, Mr. Vane urged, they
had nothing to complain of, for hadn’t they splendid apartments and
costly dresses, nurses, governesses, masters, carriages, ponies, and
indulgences of every kind? What did they want, then, or in what manner
did he fail in his duty towards those innocent darlings? Had not his
Royal Highness the Duke of Kent himself come to Vandeleur to stand
sponsor for Edward George? Had not Hortensia Georgina received her
second name after the beautiful Duchess of Devonshire, in whose lovely
arms she had been dandled when only a fortnight old?
Were there any earthly honours or splendours, within the limit of
reasonable desire, which George Vane had failed to procure for his wife
and children?
The gentle lady was fain to answer this question in the negative, and
to accept it for what it was not; namely, an answer to the questions
_she_ had ventured to ask touching the future of those unconscious
children. Mr. Vane could always persuade his simple wife to sign
away any of those parchment defences the lawyers had devised for her
protection; and when, after an elegant little _tête-à-tête_ dinner, in
the arrangement of which the _chef_ had displayed his most consummate
skill, the affectionate husband produced a diamond bracelet or an
emerald heart from its morocco casket, and clasped the jewel upon his
wife’s slender arm, or hung it round her delicate throat, with the
tears glistening in his handsome blue eyes, gentle Margaret Vane forgot
the sacrifices of the morning, and all those shadowy doubts which were
wont to torment her when she contemplated the future.
Then, again, Mr. Vane had an unfailing excuse for present imprudence in
the expectation of a third fortune, which was to come to him from his
bachelor uncle and godfather, Sir Milwood Mowbray, of Mowbray Castle,
York; so that there were no vulgar retrenchments either at Vandeleur
Park or in Berkeley Square, and when Sir Milwood’s fortune did come,
in the due course of life and death, to his nephew’s hands, it only
came just in time to stave off the rain that threatened George Vane’s
household.
If Mr. Vane had then taken his wife’s advice, all might have been
well; but the Mowbray fortune seemed like the two other fortunes,
quite inexhaustible; the sanguine gentleman forgetting that he was in
debt to full half its amount. The French _chef_ still prepared dinners
which might have made Oude himself tremble for his laurels; the German
governess and the Parisian lady’s-maids still attended upon Mr. Vane’s
daughters; the old career of extravagance went on. George Vane carried
his family to the Continent, and plunged them in to new gaieties at
the court of the restored Louis. He sent his daughters to the most
expensive finishing-school in Paris, that very Madame Marly’s of whom
mention has been made in the last chapter. He took them to Italy and
Switzerland. He hired a villa by the Lake of Como; a chateau on the
borders of Lucerne. He followed the footsteps of Byron and D’Orsay,
Madame de Staël and Lady Blessington; he affected art, literature, and
music. He indulged his children’s every caprice, he gratified their
wildest fancies. It was only when the sons saw themselves penniless and
professionless, with the great battle of life all before them, and with
no weapons wherewith to fight; and the daughters found themselves left
portionless, to win the best husbands they might in the matrimonial
lottery: it was only at this crisis that these ungrateful children
turned round upon poor, indulgent Lear, and reproached him for the
extravagances they had helped him to perpetrate.
This was a cruelty which George Vane could never bring himself to
comprehend. Had he denied them anything, these heartless children,
that they should turn upon him now in his old age—it would have been
rather a dangerous thing for any one else to have alluded to his age,
though he spoke freely enough of his grey hairs when bewailing his
wrongs—and be angry with him because he could not give them fortunes?
This thanklessness was worse than a serpent’s tooth. It was now that
Mr. Vane began to quote “King Lear,” piteously likening himself to that
too confiding monarch.
But he was sixty years old now, and had lived his life. His gentle and
trusting wife had died ten years before his money was gone, and of
all his four children there was not one who would say a word in his
defence. The most affectionate and dutiful of them were only silent,
and thought they did much in withholding their reproaches. So he let
them go their ways, the two sons to fight the battle of life how
they might—the two daughters to marry. They were both handsome and
accomplished, and they married well. And being left quite alone in the
world, with nothing but the traditions of a brilliant past, Mr. Vane
united his misfortunes to those of a very beautiful girl, who had been
his daughters’ governess, and who had fallen in love with his splendid
graces in the very simplicity of her heart, thinking his grey hairs
more beautiful than the raven locks of meaner men.
Yes: George Vane possessed this gift of fascination in a dangerous
degree, and his second wife loved and believed in him in the day of his
decline, as entirely as his first wife had done in the brighter hours
of his prosperity. She loved and trusted him. She bore with a life of
perpetual debt and daily difficulty. She sacrificed herself to the mean
shifts and petty stratagems of a dishonest existence. She, whose nature
was truth itself, humiliated herself for her husband’s sake, and helped
to play that pitiful, skulking game of hide-and-seek in which George
Vane hoped to escape the honest struggles of poverty.
But she died young, worn out, perhaps, by these incessant miseries,
and not able to draw consolation from the sham splendour and tinselly
grandeur with which George Vane tried to invest his fallen state.
She died within five years of her marriage, leaving a distracted and
despairing old man as the sole guardian and protector of her only child.
This calamity was the bitterest blow that George Vane had ever been
called upon to endure. He had loved his second wife, the wife of his
poverty and humiliation, far more dearly than he had loved the obedient
partner of his splendour and prosperity. She had been more to him a
thousand times, this gentle girl who had so uncomplainingly accepted
the hardships of her lot, because there had been no idle vanities, no
hollow glories, no Princes and Beefsteak Clubs, to stand between him
and his love of her.
She was lost, and he remembered how little he had done to prove
his affection for her. _She_ had never reproached him; no word of
upbraiding had ever crossed those tender lips. But how did he know
that he had not wronged her as cruelly as he had wronged those noisy
children who had betrayed and deserted him?
He remembered how often he had slighted her advice, her loving counsel,
so pure and true, so modestly offered, so gently spoken. He remembered
how many humiliations he had forced upon her, how many falsehoods he
had compelled her to tell; how often he had imposed upon her affection,
suffering her to slave for him in his blind selfishness.
He could remember all these things now that she was gone, and that it
was too late; too late to fall at her feet and tell her that he was all
unworthy of her love and goodness; too late to offer her even such poor
atonement for the past as penitence and tears. A hundred tokens of her
in his poor lodgings recalled her a hundred times a day, bringing the
tears into this poor broken-down mourner’s eyes.
He did not need the presence of his little daughter, whose dark grey
eyes looked at him like hers, whose auburn hair had the same golden
glory that he had so often seen glistening in the sunshine as he sat
lazily watching the low evening light upon his wife’s drooping head.
It seemed only yesterday that she had stood in the window working for
him—for him.
His affliction left him for a long time a broken old man. He did not
care in this dull interval of despair to keep up those outward shams
of prosperity which he had so persistently preserved. His fashionable
coats and boots, treasured so carefully of late, were no longer
objects of tender care and delight to him. He ceased to go out into
that ignorant and careless world in which he could still play the fine
gentleman. He shut himself up and abandoned himself to his grief, and
it was a long time before his frivolous nature recovered the shock
he had suffered. It is not to be wondered at that, in the agony of
his bereavement, his youngest child became unspeakably dear to him.
He had severed all the links which had bound him to the past, and to
his elder children. His second marriage had made a new era in his
life. If he thought of these elder children at all, it was only to
remember that some of them were living in luxury, and that they ought
to support him in his penniless old age. If he wrote to them, he wrote
begging-letters, appealing to them in exactly the same spirit as he
might have appealed to the Duke of Wellington or Miss Burdett Coutts.
Yes; his youngest daughter usurped the place of an only child in the
old man’s heart. He indulged her as he had indulged the ungrateful
elder children. He could not give her carriages and horses, liveried
servants and splendid houses, but he could now and then prevail upon
some weak-minded creditor to trust him, and would come home triumphant
to his shabby lodging, bearing spoils for his beloved Eleanor. He
would hire a brougham from a confiding livery-stable keeper, and would
take his little girl for a drive in the country. He would get her fine
dresses from the silk-mercers who had supplied his elder daughters,
and he would compensate her for the shabby miseries of her every-day
existence by chance flashes of radiance and glory.
Then, again, he would very often obtain small sums of money, loans from
private friends, it may be, or fleeting treasures from a mysterious
source, of which his innocent little daughter had no knowledge. So, for
the first ten or eleven years of her life, Miss Vane’s existence was
chequered by sudden glimpses of abnormal wealth—wonderful feast days
of luxury and extravagance—which contrasted sharply with the dreary
poverty of her ordinary experiences.
Thus it was no uncommon thing for this young lady to dine to-day in a
tawdry and rather dirty parlour at Chelsea upon tea and red-herrings,
and to-morrow to sit opposite her father in one of the sunny windows
at the Crown and Sceptre, eating whitebait with the calm enjoyment of
a connoisseur, and looking placidly on while Mr. Vane gave himself
ducal airs to the waiters, and found fault with the icing of his
sparkling hock. There was scarcely any extravagance which this little
girl had not seen her father perpetrate. She had received from him a
birthday present of a two-guinea wax doll, at the very time at which
her schooling account, at a certain humble little seminary near Cheyne
Walk, remained unpaid, and her education was brought to a dead-lock by
reason of this default. She had sighed for that golden-haired waxen
plaything, and her father gave it to her because he loved her as he had
always loved, weakly and foolishly.
She loved him in return: repaying him a hundredfold for his affection
by her innocent love and trust. To her he was all that was perfect,
all that was noble and generous. The big talk, the glowing and
sentimental discourse by which he was wont to impose upon himself,
imposed upon her. She believed in that fancy portrait which he painted
of himself, and which he himself believed in as a most faithful and
unflattered likeness. She believed in that highly-coloured picture,
and thought that George Mowbray Vandeleur Vane was indeed what he
represented himself, and thought himself to be,—an injured old man, a
sainted martyr to the forgetfulness of the world, and the ingratitude
of his children.
Poor Eleanor was never weary of listening to her father’s stories about
the Prince Regent, and all the lesser planets of the darkened sky in
which Mr. Vane’s light had once shone. She used to walk in the park
with the old man in the sunny summer evenings, proud to see him bow
to great people, who returned his recognition with friendly courtesy.
She liked to fancy him in the days that were gone, riding side by side
with those mighty ones of the earth, whom he was now content to watch
wistfully across the iron railings. She was pleased to stroll about
the West End in the dusky gloaming of the soft May night, and to look
up at the lights in that princely mansion in Berkeley Square which
George Vane had once occupied. He showed her the windows which had
belonged to this and that apartment; the drawing-room; the first Mrs.
Vane’s boudoir; the little girls’ nursery and morning-room. She fancied
all those fairy chambers radiant with light and splendour; and then
remembering the shabby rooms at Chelsea, clung closer to her father’s
arm, in her tender sorrow for his fallen state.
But she had inherited much of George Vane’s sanguine temperament, and
almost as firm as her belief in the past, which had been a reality,
was her confidence in the splendid future which her father hoped in.
Nothing could have been more shadowy than the foundations upon which
Mr. Vane had built for himself an airy castle. In his youth and middle
age his most intimate friend and companion had been a certain Maurice
de Crespigny, the owner of a noble estate in Berkshire, and _not_ a
friend of the Prince Regent’s. So, while George Vane’s two estates
had melted away, and his three fortunes had been expended, Mr. de
Crespigny, who was an invalid and a bachelor, had contrived to keep his
land and his money.
There was only the difference of two or three years between the ages of
the two friends. I believe that Maurice de Crespigny was the younger of
the two. And it was during their early college life that the young men
had entered into a romantic alliance, very chivalrous and honourable in
its nature, but scarcely likely to stand the wear and tear of worldly
experience.
They were to be friends through life and until death. They were
to have no secrets from each other. If by any chance they should
happen to fall in love with the same person—and I really think these
sentimental collegians rather wished that such a contingency might
arise—one of them, the most noble, the most heroic, was quietly to fall
back and suffer in silence, while the weaker won the prize. If either
died a bachelor, he was to leave his fortune to the other, whatever
less romantic and more commonplace claimants, in the way of heirs
presumptive, might press upon him.
These vows had been made at least five-and-forty years ago, but out
of this folly of the past George Vane built his hope in the future.
Maurice de Crespigny was now a soured and hypochondriacal old bachelor,
shut in and defended on every side by greedy and sycophantic relations,
and utterly unapproachable to his shabby old bosom friend; who could
as easily have made his way out of one of the lowest dungeons of the
Bastille as he could force an entrance into that closely-guarded
citadel within which his college companion sat, lonely and dismal,
a desolate old man, watched over by sharp eyes, greedily noteful of
every token of his decay, ministered to by hands that would have worked
eagerly at his winding-sheet, if by so doing they could have hastened
the hour of his death.
If George Vane—remembering his old friend, perhaps, with some latent
feeling of tenderness intermingled with his mercenary hopes—made an
effort to penetrate the cruel barriers about him, he was repulsed with
ignominy by the two maiden nieces who kept watch and ward at Woodlands.
If he wrote to Mr. de Crespigny, his missive was returned unopened,
with a satirical intimation that the dear invalid’s health was not in a
state to endure the annoyance of begging letters. He had made a hundred
attempts to cross the lines of the enemy, and had been mortified by a
hundred failures; but his sanguine nature was not to be subdued by any
humiliation, and he still believed, firmly and entirely, that whenever
Maurice de Crespigny’s will came to be opened, his name, and his alone,
would appear as sole heir to his old friend’s wealth. He forgot that
Maurice de Crespigny was his junior by some two or three years; for
he had always heard of him of late as a feeble invalid, tottering
upon the verge of the grave; while he himself was erect and stalwart,
broad-chested and soldierly-looking; so very soldierly in appearance
that the sentinels on guard in the park were wont to salute him as he
passed them, mistaking him for some military magnate.
Yes, he believed the day would come when poor De Crespigny—he always
spoke of his friend with a certain pitiful tenderness—would drop
quietly into his grave, and when _he_ would reign at Woodlands with
his darling Eleanor, avenging himself upon his ungrateful elder
children, reopening accounts with his old creditors—in all his visions
of grandeur and patronage he never thought of paying his debts——and
arising from the dull ashes of his poverty, a splendid phœnix,
golden-plumed and exultant.
He taught his daughter this belief as religiously as he taught her the
simple prayers which she said nightly at his knee. With all his faults
he was no unbeliever, though the time which he devoted to religious
observances made a very small portion of his existence. He taught
Eleanor to believe in the day that was to come, and the little girl
saw the light of future splendour gleaming athwart the dreary swamp of
difficulty through which she waded patiently by her father’s side.
But the day came when George Vane and his child were to be separated,
for a time at least. Eleanor’s twelfth birthday was very near at
hand, and she had as yet received no better education than the rather
limited course of instruction which was to be obtained for a guinea and
a half a quarter at the day-school near Cheyne Walk. For nearly six
years, inclusive of many intervals of non-attendance consequent upon
non-payment, Miss Vane had frequented this humble seminary, in company
with the daughters of the butchers and bakers and the other plebeian
inhabitants of the district. But by the time she was twelve years old
the various sources from which her father’s very desultory income had
been drawn had one by one run dry and failed him. The weakest and most
long-suffering of his creditors had crossed his name out of their
ledgers, his friends had ceased to believe in the fiction of delayed
remittances, urgent temporary need, and early repayment; and he could
no longer count upon an occasional five-pound note when the Chelsea
landlady became clamorous, and the Chelsea general dealer refused to
send home another ounce of tea, except on payment of ready money.
A desperate crisis had come, and in his despair the old man forgot
his pride. For Eleanor’s sake, if not for his own, he must endure
humiliation. He must appeal to his eldest daughter, the hard-hearted
but wealthy Hortensia Bannister, who had lost her stockbroker husband
a twelvemonth before, and was now a rich and childless widow. Yes—he
wiped the tears of humiliation away from his faded cheeks as he arrived
at this resolution—he would try and forget the past, and would take
Eleanor with him to Hyde Park Gardens, and appeal to her cruel sister
in her behalf. His determination was speedily carried out, for he went
to work with something of that desperate courage which a condemned
criminal may feel when he goes to execution; and one sunny morning
early in the June of 1850, he and his daughter sat in Mrs. Bannister’s
handsome drawing-room, fearfully awaiting the advent of that lady. She
came to them after a very brief delay, for she was business-like and
uncompromising in her habits, and she had been prepared for this visit
by a long, pitiful, explanatory letter from her father, in reply to
which she had written very coldly and concisely, appointing an early
interview.
She was a severe-looking woman of about five-and-thirty, with a hard
face, and heavy black eyebrows, which met over her handsome aquiline
nose when she frowned, which she did a great deal too often, poor
Eleanor thought. Her features were like those of her father, but her
grim and stony expression was entirely her own, and was perhaps the
result of that early and bitter disappointment of finding herself a
portionless girl, deserted by the man she loved, who fell away from her
when he discovered the state of her father’s fortunes, and compelled
to marry for money, or to accept the wretched alternative of a life of
poverty and drudgery.
This harsh disappointed woman affected no pretence of tender feeling
for her half-sister. Perhaps the sight of Eleanor’s childish beauty was
scarcely pleasant to her. She herself had drawn a dreary blank in the
great lottery of life, in spite of her wealth; and she may have envied
this child her unknown future, which could not well be so dismal as the
childless widow’s empty existence.
But Mrs. Bannister was a religious woman, and tried to do her duty in
a hard, uncompromising way, in which good works were not beautified
by any such flimsy adornments as love and tenderness. So when she
heard that her father lived from day to day a wretched hand-to-mouth
existence, haunted by the grim phantom of starvation, she was seized
with a sudden sense that she had been very wicked to this weak old
man, and she agreed to allow him a decent pittance, which would enable
him to live about as comfortably as a half-pay officer or a small
annuitant. She made this concession sternly enough, and lectured her
father so severely that he may be perhaps forgiven if he was not
very grateful for his daughter’s bounty, so far as he himself went;
but he did make a feeble protestation of his thankfulness when Mrs.
Bannister further declared her willingness to pay a certain premium, in
consideration of which Eleanor Vane might be received in a respectable
boarding-school as an apprentice or pupil-teacher.
It was thus that the little girl became acquainted with the Misses
Bennett, of Wilmington House, Brixton; and it was in the household
of these ladies that three years of her life had been passed. Three
quiet and monotonous years of boarding-school drudgery, which had only
been broken by two brief visits to her father, who had taken up his
abode in Paris; where he lived secure from the persecution of a few
of his latter-day creditors—not the west-end tradesmen who had known
him in his prime, _they_ were resigned and patient enough under their
losses—but a few small dealers who had trusted him in his decline, and
who were not rendered lenient by the memory of former profits.
In Paris, Mr. Vane had very little chance of obtaining any information
about his friend Maurice de Crespigny, but he still looked forward
confidently to that visionary future in which he was to be master of
the Woodlands estate. He had taken care to write a letter, soon after
Eleanor’s birth, which had been artfully conveyed to his friend,
announcing the advent of this youngest child, and dwelling much on his
love for her. He cherished some vague notion that, in the event of his
death occurring before that of Maurice de Crespigny, the old man might
leave his wealth to Eleanor. The contumely with which, he had been
treated by the maiden harpies who kept watch over his old friend had
been pleasant to him rather than otherwise, for in the anger of these
elderly damsels he saw an evidence of their fear.
“If they knew that poor Crespigny’s money was left to them, they
wouldn’t be so savage,” he thought. “It’s evident they’re by no means
too confident about the future.”
But there were other relatives of the old man’s, less fortunate than
the maiden sisters, who had found their way into the citadel, and
planted themselves _en permanence_ at Woodlands. There was a married
niece, who had once been a beauty. This lady had been so foolish as to
marry against her rich uncle’s wishes, and was now a widow, living in
the neighbourhood of Woodlands upon an income of two hundred a year.
This lady’s only son, Launcelot Darrell, had in his boyhood been a
favourite with the old man, and was known to cherish expectations about
Maurice de Crespigny’s fortune. But the maiden sisters were patient and
indefatigable women. No sacred fire was ever watched more carefully by
classic vestal than was the ireful flame which burned in Maurice de
Crespigny’s heart when he remembered his married niece’s ingratitude
and disobedience. The unwearying old maids kept his indignation alive
by every feminine subtlety, by every diplomatic device. Heaven knows
what they wanted with their uncle’s money, for they were prim damsels,
who wore stuff shoes and scanty dresses made in the fashion of their
youth. They had outlived the very faculty of enjoyment, and their wants
were almost as simple as those of the robins that perched upon their
window-sills; but for all this they were as eager to become possessors
of the old man’s wealth as the most heartless and spendthrift heir,
tormented by Israelitish creditors, and subsisting entirely upon post
obits.