'Be hanged to your aristocrats!' Ponto said, in some conversation we had
regarding the family at Carabas, between whom and the Evergreens there
was a feud. 'When I first came into the county--it was the year before
Sir John Buff contested in the Blue interest--the Marquis, then Lord St.
Michaels, who, of course, was Orange to the core, paid me and Mrs. Ponto
such attentions, that I fairly confess I was taken in by the old humbug,
and thought that I'd met with a rare neighbour. 'Gad, Sir, we used to
get pines from Carabas, and pheasants from Carabas, and it was--“Ponto,
when will you come over and shoot?”--and--“Ponto, our pheasants want
thinning,”--and my Lady would insist upon her dear Mrs. Ponto coming
over to Carabas to sleep, and put me I don't know to what expense for
turbans and velvet gowns for my wife's toilette. Well, Sir, the election
takes place, and though I was always a Liberal, personal friendship of
course induces me to plump for St. Michaels, who comes in at the head of
the poll. Next year, Mrs. P. insists upon going to town--with lodgings
in Clarges Street at ten pounds a week, with a hired brougham, and new
dresses for herself and the girls, and the deuce and all to pay. Our
first cards were to Carabas House; my Lady's are returned by a great big
flunkey; and I leave you to fancy my poor Betsy's discomfiture as the
lodging-house maid took in the cards, and Lady St. Michaels drives away,
though she actually saw us at the drawing-room window. Would you believe
it, Sir, that though we called four times afterwards, those infernal
aristocrats never returned our visit; that though Lady St. Michaels gave
nine dinner-parties and four DEJEUNERS that season, she never asked us
to one; and that she cut us dead at the Opera, though Betsy was nodding
to her the whole night? We wrote to her for tickets for Almack's; she
writes to say that all hers were promised; and said, in the presence of
Wiggins, her lady's-maid, who told it to Diggs, my wife's woman, that
she couldn't conceive how people in our station of life could so far
forget themselves as to wish to appear in any such place! Go to
Castle Carabas! I'd sooner die than set my foot in the house of that
impertinent, insolvent, insolent jackanapes--and I hold him in scorn!'
After this, Ponto gave me some private information regarding Lord
Carabas's pecuniary affairs; how he owed money all over the county; how
Jukes the carpenter was utterly ruined and couldn't get a shilling of
his bill; how Biggs the butcher hanged himself for the same reason; how
the six big footmen never received a guinea of wages, and Snaffle, the
state coachman, actually took off his blown-glass wig of ceremony and
flung it at Lady Carabas's feet on the terrace before the Castle; all
which stories, as they are private, I do not think proper to divulge.
But these details did not stifle my desire to see the famous mansion
of Castle Carabas, nay, possibly excited my interest to know more about
that lordly house and its owners.
At the entrance of the park, there are a pair of great gaunt mildewed
lodges--mouldy Doric temples with black chimney-pots, in the finest
classic taste, and the gates of course are surmounted by the CHATS
BOTTES, the well-known supporters of the Carabas family. 'Give the
lodge-keeper a shilling,' says Ponto, (who drove me near to it in his
four-wheeled cruelty-chaise). 'I warrant it's the first piece of ready
money he has received for some time. I don't know whether there was any
foundation for this sneer, but the gratuity was received with a curtsey,
and the gate opened for me to enter. 'Poor old porteress!' says I,
inwardly. 'You little know that it is the Historian of Snobs whom you
let in!' The gates were passed. A damp green stretch of park spread
right and left immeasurably, confined by a chilly grey wall, and a damp
long straight road between two huge rows of moist, dismal lime-trees,
leads up to the Castle. In the midst of the park is a great black tank
or lake, bristling over with rushes, and here and there covered over
with patches of pea-soup. A shabby temple rises on an island in this
delectable lake, which is approached by a rotten barge that lies at
roost in a dilapidated boat house. Clumps of elms and oaks dot over the
huge green flat. Every one of them would have been down long since, but
that the Marquis is not allowed to cut the timber.
Up that long avenue the Snobographer walked in solitude. At the
seventy-ninth tree on the left-hand side, the insolvent butcher hanged
himself. I scarcely wondered at the dismal deed, so woful and sad were
the impressions connected with the place. So, for a mile and a half I
walked--alone and thinking of death.
I forgot to say the house is in full view all the way--except when
intercepted by the trees on the miserable island in the lake--an
enormous red-brick mansion, square, vast, and dingy. It is flanked by
four stone towers with weathercocks. In the midst of the grand facade is
a huge Ionic portico, approached by a vast, lonely, ghastly staircase.
Rows of black windows, framed in stone, stretch on either side, right
and left--three storeys and eighteen windows of a row. You may see
a picture of the palace and staircase, in the 'Views of England and
Wales,' with four carved and gilt carriages waiting at the gravel walk,
and several parties of ladies and gentlemen in wigs and hoops, dotting
the fatiguing lines of stairs.
But these stairs are made in great houses for people NOT to ascend. The
first Lady Carabas (they are but eighty years in the peerage), if she
got out of her gilt coach in a shower, would be wet to the skin before
she got half-way to the carved Ionic portico, where four dreary statues
of Peace, Plenty, Piety and Patriotism, are the only sentinels. You
enter these palaces by back-doors. 'That was the way the Carabases got
their peerage,' the misanthropic Ponto said after dinner.
Well--I rang the bell at a little low side-door; it clanged and jingled
and echoed for a long, long while, till at length a face, as of a
housekeeper, peered through the door, and, as she saw my hand in my
waistcoat pocket, opened it. Unhappy, lonely housekeeper, I thought. Is
Miss Crusoe in her island more solitary? The door clapped to, and I was
in Castle Carabas.
'The side entrance and All,' says the housekeeper. 'The halligator
hover the mantelpiece was brought home by Hadmiral St. Michaels, when
a Capting with Lord Hanson. The harms on the cheers is the harms of the
Carabas family.' The hall was rather comfortable. We went clapping up a
clean stone backstair, and then into a back passage cheerfully decorated
with ragged light-green Kidderminster, and issued upon
'THE GREAT ALL.
'The great all is seventy-two feet in lenth, fifty-six in breath, and
thirty-eight feet 'igh. The carvings of the chimlies, representing the
birth of Venus, and Ercules, and Eyelash, is by Van Chislum, the most
famous sculpture of his hage and country. The ceiling, by Calimanco,
represents Painting, Harchitecture and Music (the naked female figure
with the barrel horgan) introducing George, fust Lord Carabas, to the
Temple of the Muses. The winder ornaments is by Vanderputty. The floor
is Patagonian marble; and the chandelier in the centre was presented to
Lionel, second Marquis, by Lewy the Sixteenth, whose 'ead was cut hoff
in the French Revelation. We now henter
THE SOUTH GALLERY.
'One 'undred and forty-eight in lenth by thirty-two in breath; it is
profusely hornaminted by the choicest works of Hart. Sir Andrew Katz,
founder of the Carabas family and banker of the Prince of Horange,
Kneller. Her present Ladyship, by Lawrence. Lord St. Michaels, by the
same--he is represented sittin' on a rock in velvit pantaloons. Moses in
the bullrushes--the bull very fine, by Paul Potter. The toilet of Venus,
Fantaski. Flemish Bores drinking, Van Ginnums. Jupiter and Europia, de
Horn. The Grandjunction Canal, Venis, by Candleetty; and Italian Bandix,
by Slavata Rosa.'--And so this worthy woman went on, from one room into
another, from the blue room to the green, and the green to the grand
saloon, and the grand saloon to the tapestry closet, cackling her list
of pictures and wonders: and furtively turning up a corner of brown
holland to show the colour of the old, faded, seedy, mouldy, dismal
hangings.
At last we came to her Ladyship's bed-room. In the centre of this dreary
apartment there is a bed about the size of one of those whizgig temples
in which the Genius appears in a pantomime. The huge gilt edifice is
approached by steps, and so tall, that it might be let off in floors,
for sleeping-rooms for all the Carabas family. An awful bed! A murder
might be done at one end of that bed, and people sleeping at the other
end be ignorant of it. Gracious powers! fancy little Lord Carabas in a
nightcap ascending those steps after putting out the candle!
The sight of that seedy and solitary splendour was too much for me.
I should go mad were I that lonely housekeeper--in those enormous
galleries--in that lonely library, filled up with ghastly folios that
nobody dares read, with an inkstand on the centre table like the coffin
of a baby, and sad portraits staring at you from the bleak walls with
their solemn Mouldy eyes. No wonder that Carabas does not come down here
often.
It would require two thousand footmen to make the place cheerful. No
wonder the coachman resigned his wig, that the masters are insolvent,
and the servants perish in this huge dreary out-at-elbow place.
A single family has no more right to build itself a temple of that sort
than to erect a Tower of Babel. Such a habitation is not decent for a
mere mortal man. But, after all, I suppose poor Carabas had no choice.
Fate put him there as it sent Napoleon to St. Helena. Suppose it had
been decreed by Nature that you and I should be Marquises? We wouldn't
refuse, I suppose, but take Castle Carabas and all, with debts, duns,
and mean makeshifts, and shabby pride, and swindling magnificence.
Next season, when I read of Lady Carabas's splendid entertainments in
the MORNING POST, and see the poor old insolvent cantering through the
Park--I shall have a much tenderer interest in these great people than
I have had heretofore. Poor old shabby Snob! Ride on and fancy the world
is still on its knees before the house of Carabas! Give yourself airs,
poor old bankrupt Magnifico, who are under money-obligations to your
flunkeys; and must stoop so as to swindle poor tradesmen! And for us, O
my brother Snobs, oughtn't we to feel happy if our walk through life is
more even, and that we are out of the reach of that surprising arrogance
and that astounding meanness to which this wretched old victim is
obliged to mount and descend.