"THE DEVIL'S DEAD, THE FURIES NOW MAY LAUGH."
Among the habitations of eighteenth-century London, it would have been
difficult to find a more dismal den than that house of entertainment
which Mr. Marjory and his family kept for insolvent debtors, and which,
with two other houses of the same stamp, formed a kind of antechamber to
the Fleet Prison, where Governor Bambridge at this period reigned
supreme. Hovels there were more squalid, rottener roofs, and darker
garrets than those of Marjory, within sound of Bow bells; abodes where
crime was rifer, and where midnight orgies and midnight quarrels were of
a more brutal character than such as resounded under Mr. Marjory's
roof-tree. But for sheer gloom, and for dulness and despair, the Marjory
establishment was scarcely to be matched. There needed no inscription
above the greasy portal to tell that he who entered there left hope
behind him. There was an atmosphere of hopelessness in that
establishment which needed no translation in words.
And yet there were rioters who drank and gamed and put on a show of
joviality within those abhorred precincts; but these were only the
hardened few--reprobates so steeped in vice and ignominy, that they
would have made merry in Newgate on the eve of an execution.
Louis Fétis had been a dweller in that sinister abode for more than a
week. At the commencement of his captivity he had carried himself
haughtily enough; had blustered and swaggered, and told his gaolers that
the debt for which he was arrested was but a bagatelle, which he should
be able to settle off-hand directly he had communicated with his
friends. He had sent a ticket-porter to Soho Square and Poland Street,
with messages to his wife and to Mr. Topsparkle. There had been some
difficulty about finding letter-paper, or he would have written; but he
was too impatient to wait while Marjory's down-at-heel daughter hunted
for a couple of sheets of paper and a pen. The reply in both cases had
been in the negative. His wife could not help him; his master would not.
"You have been drawing upon me very heavily of late, my good Fétis, and
I have your notes of hand to the amount of some thousands," wrote
Topsparkle. "You cannot, therefore, expect that I shall hasten to your
rescue, when a less forbearing creditor claps you in prison. Your house
and furniture must be worth something; so, no doubt, Mrs. Fétis will be
able to raise money enough to extricate you. For my own part, I am your
milch cow no longer."
Mrs. Fétis informed her dearest husband, upon paper blotted with her
tears, that she had not a guinea in her possession. She would have flown
to him to comfort and weep with him, but the shock of his arrest had
made her so ill that she was unable to leave her bed.
Fétis burst into a torrent of Gallic oaths after reading this
affectionate scrawl. She was a traitress, a hypocrite, the falsest of
women. She was glad to be free of him, to coquette with the fine
gentlemen who frequented his house, to flaunt in brocade and powder,
and gamble and drink ratafia with those middle-aged bucks who had
admired her on the stage, who had watched her dancing and simpering
behind the oil-lamps in a ballet divertissement.
"She is a whited sepulchre," said Fétis; and then he sat down in a dusty
corner of the shabby sitting-room at Marjory's, and sobbed aloud. He
felt himself abandoned by all the world, alone in his misery like a
poisoned rat in a hole.
"It is not the wine-merchant," he said to himself; "'tis these
two--traitor and traitress--false master, false wife. These two have
plotted together to shut me up in gaol. He fears me and the secrets I
can tell, and he thinks that here the scorpion cannot sting."
He asked for pens, ink, and paper, intending to pen a denunciation of
his late master for one of the newspapers; and again there was a
difficulty. Miss Marjory could not find a sheet of letter-paper
anywhere. It was odd; but there had been such a call for it yesterday,
there was not a sheet left, and it was too late to get any out of doors.
"'Twill do to-morrow," answered Fétis moodily; "what I have to write
cannot be written in an hour."
He sat by the smoky fire, brooding over a letter to the _Flying Post_--a
letter in which, without betraying himself, he should blast Mr.
Topsparkle's reputation. He could not afford to speak plainly, but he
could insinuate evil; he could deal in such slander as the town loved,
and do infinite harm without risking his own neck.
The idea of this mischief comforted him a little; but when the next day
came, he was too ill to rise from the pallet which he occupied in a
draughty apartment on the first floor, where there were three other
beds. It was a back room, looking into a yard, and affording a prospect
of dead wall and water-butt. He was not alone in his indisposition.
There was an invalid in the next bed, hidden from him by a faded old
green baize curtain--a man who had been delirious in the night, but who
lay for the greater part of the day in a kind of stupor. Fétis took both
these conditions to be the consequences of a heavy drinking bout.
Under ordinary circumstances Mr. Fétis would perhaps have hardly been
ill enough to keep his bed all that November day; but he lay there in an
apathy of despair, waiting for his fate; wondering helplessly whether
Topsparkle would relent, and hasten to liberate him, and whether that
false wife of his would think better of her treachery, and come to his
relief. He had a racking headache, and he dozed a good deal. And so the
day passed.
He got up next morning, in spite of heavy head and aching limbs, and
went down to the sitting-room, where he breakfasted in his solitary
corner, shunning all companionship with his fellow-captives--an elderly
parson, a scribbler of the Philter type, and a decayed tradesman--all
equally hopeless and dismal.
"We are kept here to swell Bambridge's profits," protested the parson.
"Charges are being run up against us all for our commons in this
wretched hole, and still worse extortions of a so-called legal nature;
and I am told there is a fever of some kind in the house, and that we
may all sicken of it before we are transferred to the Fleet."
Fétis heard almost indifferently. He had entered that accursed house in
a state of low fever, disturbed mentally and bodily. It seemed to him he
could scarcely become worse than he was. He sat in his corner by the
fireplace, sipping brandy all through the dreary winter day; would fain
have attempted that letter to the newspaper, but there was again a
difficulty about writing materials, and he had not strength to be
persistent, and insist that he should be accommodated in that way. A
lethargy was creeping over him; he sat staring at the dull fire,
sometimes shivering, sometimes oppressed by heat. Next morning he awoke
in a much worse condition, and could not lift his head from his pillow;
next night he was delirious, and for more than a week he languished in a
state betwixt apathy and raving madness; then came a lull in the fever,
and one afternoon, in a lucid interval, he heard the word smallpox
pronounced by an ancient beldame who had been the only attendant upon
him and his neighbour; and then gradually--for there was a dulness in
his mind which made him slow to apprehend anything--he began to
understand what had happened to him.
He had been put into a room with a smallpox patient, and he was smitten
by that fell disease. The house was infected; he had been sent there to
his doom. It was Topsparkle's scheme for getting rid of a dangerous
tool. The arrest had been prompted by Topsparkle; the whole business
planned by Topsparkle.
He asked to see Mr. Marjory, and after much expostulation and
heart-sickening delay the proprietor of the den appeared.
Fétis accused him of murder, of having entrapped an unconscious victim
into his poisonous den, with deliberate purpose to compass his death.
"You have been bribed to get me out of the way," he said. "This house of
yours is a _guetapens_;" and then he entreated that he might be removed
to the Fleet prison till his debts were paid.
"You'll have first to settle with me," answered Marjory, "and the
tipstaff, and the warders;" and thereupon he produced a bill of nearly
thirty pounds.
Fétis had entered the house with less than thirty shillings on his
person, and the greater part of those shillings had dribbled away in
payment for drams. He had less than a crown left.
"Send for my wife," he screamed, "send for that cold-blooded hussy! I
have a house full of furniture, I have powerful friends. Send for the
Duke of Wharton."
"What, all the way to Spain? I doubt Wharton is almost as hard up as
your honour, and could scarcely help you if he had a mind to it," jeered
Marjory.
"Send for the Duke of Bolton."
"How many more Dukes would your worship summon? There is my little
account, Mr. Fétis, and till that is squared you'll not budge. Smallpox
be d--d! There's no such thing; 'tis a slander upon a respectable house
to say so. Why there are but two or three pimples on your face,
doubtless the result of a surfeit. Your neighbour has been down with an
attack of jaundice from over-free living, but he's on the mending hand,
and will be about in a few days. As for you, sir, I take it you have one
of those timid constitutions that can put themselves into an ague at
the slightest hint of danger."
"Send me a doctor, if you won't release me from this devilish man-trap,
and send for my wife instantly," cried Fétis, in an agony of indignant
feeling, fear, wrath, vengeance.
Marjory left him to rave as he pleased. He was powerless to help himself
in any way, and seemed as if he had scarce strength to move. He lay
there impotent and raging, like a poisoned rat in a hole, as he said to
himself again; there was no other similitude that fitted him so well.
And so the short winter day waned till it was growing towards dusk. His
neighbour in the bed behind the baize curtain was sleeping heavily. His
stertorous breathing was the only sound in the room, intolerable in its
monotony. His unseen presence was the sole company that Fétis had
enjoyed for the last two hours.
Suddenly it seemed to Fétis that he might see for himself what ailed the
man. If his disease were jaundice, he would be as yellow as a new
guinea; if it were that hideous malady which had been spoken of, the
signs would be but too obvious.
Fétis gathered himself together with an effort, got out of bed, and
plucked back the baize curtain.
There was a gleam of wintry sunset shining in at the window. It fell
upon the sick man's face. God! what a face, seamed, scarred, ravaged by
that foul disease! God's image for ever marred, humanity almost
obliterated, by that dread visitation. He stood beside the bed staring
at that disfigured sleeper, as if that sickening aspect had turned him
into stone. Then he recoiled shuddering from that loathsome bed, the
curtain dropped from his trembling hand, and he fell back upon his
pallet in a mute agony of despair.
There was no longer room for doubt. He had been put into this contagious
den with a deliberate purpose. This was Topsparkle's ghastly answer to
his incautious menaces. He had aroused his master's suspicions, awakened
his fears; and _this_ was how Vyvyan Topsparkle defended himself.
He lay shivering under the dingy coverlet, his limbs like ice, his head
on fire, meditating his revenge. He was not going to lie there like an
unreasoning animal till death released him from suffering. He would be
even with Vyvyan Topsparkle before he died, brief as his time might be.
The beldame came in presently, before he had had time to shape his
thoughts. She brought two basins of gruel, and a rushlight in a great
iron cage, which she set upon the empty hearth, where it looked like a
lighthouse shedding long slanting lines of light over a dark sea.
"You'll not want anything more to-night, will you, good gentleman?" she
asked. "I'm going home to my family, and there's no one else in the
house that cares to come into this room; so I hope you'll spend a
comfortable night, and to-morrow morning old Biddy Flanagan will come
and look after ye again. Lord! how sweet he sleeps!" looking down at the
slumberer behind the curtain. "Sure, there never was such a cure; but
I'm afraid his beauty is a thrifle damaged, poor dear sowl."
"What's the hour, woman?" asked Fétis.
"Sure, darlint, 'tis just on the stroke of six."
"And quite dark outside?"
"As black as your hat, surr. God bless your honour, and give yez a good
night's rest!"
She was gone, in haste to return to her brood, and to feed them with
broken victuals secreted about her person at odd intervals during her
daily duties. 'Twas almost as tender a thing, though not altogether so
honest, as the maternal ministrations of the pelican.
Fétis dozed for a little, wandered in his mind for a little, then woke
with a start, perfectly lucid, and heard the clock of St. Bride's strike
ten.
No, he would not lie there like a dog. He would find a way of escape
somehow.
He got up, and though he reeled and staggered for the first minute or
two, while he groped for his clothes by the dim glimmer of the
rushlight, he felt stronger presently--much stronger than he had felt in
the morning, when he tried to dress himself and gave it up for a bad
job. It was but the strength of fever, perhaps, but it served. He
shuffled on his clothes and went to the door. It was locked on the
outside. Then he tried the window, a rotten old guillotine sash, which
opened easily and hung loose upon a frayed and rotten cord. He found a
piece of wood in the fireplace, and propped the sash up before he dared
look out.
His fellow-patient had been wakeful and slightly delirious in the
earlier part of the evening, but had sunk off to sleep again, and was
snoring heavily.
Fétis looked down into the yard, which was not more than fourteen feet
below him. There was a water-butt in an angle made by the wall of the
house and that of the yard, and there was a wooden pipe fixed in a
slanting position to carry the rain from the gutters above to the butt
below. This pipe passed within a few feet of the window, and Fétis, even
at sixty-six years of age, and with a fever upon him, felt agile enough
to descend by it to the edge of the water-butt and thence drop into the
yard. It was a descent which a schoolboy might have made half a dozen
times a day for sport. He buttoned his coat across his chest, clapped
his hat firmly over his brow, and clambered out of the window,
cautiously, slowly, seating himself upon the timber pipe, and letting
himself gradually down the incline, hugging the wall as he went.
His slim fleshless figure and light weight served him well; he dropped
from the edge of the water-butt on to the stone pavement as lightly as a
rabbit; and then he had no more to do but to find an egress from the
yard, which might prove impossible, and so all his work wasted. He
groped about him in the darkness till he discovered a narrow passage
which went under a house at the back of Marjory's, and opened into an
alley. There was an iron gate which was generally locked; but fortune
favoured the fugitive. One of Marjory's slipshod daughters had gone on
an errand to the dram-shop in the alley, and had left the gate ajar. In
another moment Fétis was beyond the precincts. He ran along the narrow
court as fast as his thin legs could carry him, hearing voices and
laughter in the dram-shop as he sped past its open door. A turn of the
alley brought him into Fleet Street, and in his blind rush for freedom
he nearly went head over heels over one of the posts that guarded the
footway.
Late as the hour was, the business of life was not over. A train of
heavy wagons and tired cattle choked the road; a ballad-singer was
shrilling a political ballad in front of a public-house, while a roar of
festal noises testified to the carousal within. A street-fight blocked
the rough pavement between Chancery Lane and St. Dunstan's, much to the
discomfiture of an alderman, who was being carried westward after a City
dinner, in a chair guarded by a couple of linkmen.
Fétis changed his pace from a run to a walk, hurried along, threading
his way safely amidst all obstacles, scarce conscious of fatigue in that
hypernatural condition of his mind and body. Yet he had sense enough to
know that his strength might fail him at any moment, and was on the
look-out for a coach or chair.
He saw a coach standing just inside Temple Bar, hailed the driver, who
was half-asleep on his box, and jumped in.
"Soho Square," he said, "the corner of Greek Street."
He had five shillings in his pocket, which would be more than enough for
so short a journey. The coach rattled along the Strand in a series of
short stages, having to pull up every now and then to make way for some
heavier vehicle, and then by Leicester Fields to Soho Square, where the
coachman pulled up his horses at the corner, as he had been bidden.
Here Fétis alighted--weak and tottering after the interval of rest--paid
the man, and then crept off to a court at the back of the great house in
the square--a court in which there was a private door of communication
with Mr. Topsparkle's offices. This was the entrance and exit which
Fétis had generally used in his attendance upon his master, and he had
always carried a key to this door about his person. He had the key in
his pocket when he was arrested, and he had it ready for use to-night.
He opened the door softly and let himself in then crept stealthily along
a passage leading to the servants' staircase. This part of the house was
a labyrinth of passages and small rooms, devoted to various domestic
uses. He could hear the voices of the servants at supper yonder in the
great stone hall, where they ate and drank to repletion at this hour,
and where, Mr. Topsparkle and Lady Judith being out, they were riotous
in their mirth, and indulged in many a coarse jest at the expense of
master and mistress, and the company they kept.
It was the hour at which all the restraints of servitude were thrown
off, and when men and maids romped and revelled without fear of
interruption; since the housekeeper had her own evening engagements, and
was rarely home till midnight; and the steward might be relied upon as
drunk and speechless in his private apartment, snug for the night; while
there was no likelihood that Mr. Topsparkle or Lady Judith and her
running footmen would be home before three o'clock in the morning. Her
evening was a progress from one assembly to another, with occasional
intervals at Opera-house or masquerade. She came home worn out, and
sighing over the weariness of life. There never were such dull parties;
'twas a tiresome world, and she wondered at her patience in bearing with
it. And then, if she were in the humour, she would bring home two or
three of her satellites, and sit down to cards and ratafia until the
late sunrise shone redly through the cracks of the shutters, with the
suggestion of a conflagration.
The passages and stairs were all in darkness; but Mr. Fétis knew every
angle and every step. He crept to the back staircase, which wound itself
sinuously upward between the state apartments and the offices, and then
he ascended noiselessly to a narrow landing outside Mr. Topsparkle's
bedroom. He opened the door of that sacred apartment, and went in. There
was a fire burning on the hearth, and light enough to show that the room
was empty. It was a small room, luxuriously furnished, the low narrow
French bed draped with cut velvet of so dark a red that it looked black
in the firelight. A great fur rug lay in front of the bed, and an
immense armchair, with wings at the sides to screen off the draught,
stood by the fireplace. A little spindle-legged tea-table, and an
Italian coffer upon carved legs, completed the furniture.
Three choicest gems of Italian art, a Carlo Dolci, a Leonardo, and a
Titian--cabinet pictures all of them--adorned the walls, and a Venetian
mirror in a carved ebony and silver frame hung above the mantelpiece.
Fétis squatted in front of the fire and warmed his aching limbs. One of
his shivering fits came upon him as he sat there, and his teeth
chattered; but the fever was soon upon him again, and then he left the
fire and lay down on his master's bed, defiling the embroidered Indian
coverlet with the dust and grime of the street. It was a masterpiece
chosen by Lady Judith at the India house where she spent so much money
and wasted so much time; a rendezvous and gossiping place for her idlest
acquaintances; a resort where reputations were murdered daily in the
politest fashion, and where modish women envied and hated each other
with unvarying civility.
Fétis lay on those Oriental roses and lilies, staring at the fire,
wondering what Mr. Topsparkle would think were he to come in and find
him there. But he did not intend to be discovered immediately. He meant
to hide himself in that luxurious bower, to rise up like a spectre
before his guilty master. There was a narrow space between the bed and
the wall, just large enough to accommodate Fétis, and into this gully he
slipped presently when he heard approaching footsteps, and lay there
among the voluminous folds of the velvet curtains, warmly and even
luxuriously lodged.
Here he slept the sleep of exhaustion. It was daylight when he awoke:
the fire was still burning, had been tended by the slave who kept watch
in the great house o' nights.
Fétis could hear the light fall of wood ashes in the grate, and the
monotonous breathing of his slumbering master.
He crept out from his hiding-place, and went round to the hearth. He
seated himself in the deep armchair, warmed his aching limbs at the
fire, and waited for his master's awakening.
He had slept long and profoundly, but he was unrefreshed by his
slumbers. He drained a carafe of water that stood on the table by the
bed, and sat waiting and shivering.
The clock struck eight, and Mr. Topsparkle stretched himself and rubbed
his eyes. However late were his revels over-night, he invariably awoke
at this hour. It was his habit to lounge in bed for an hour or two after
that awakening, while the day was airing; but his slumbers were
generally over with the stroke of eight.
His first glance was at the fire, to see that his slaves had not
neglected him, for the nights were chilly. Gazing dreamily at the
burning logs and sea-coal, straight in front of him, Mr. Topsparkle was
unconscious of that small slender figure beside the hearth, almost
hidden by the side-pieces of the easy-chair. But as consciousness became
keener in the newly awakened senses, as the passage from dreams to
waking became complete, Mr. Topsparkle's instinct told him that he was
not alone. He looked round the room nervously, saw that figure in the
chair, the ghastly face covered with pustules, and gave a shriek of
absolute terror.
"'Tis a ghost," he muttered, after the first shock, "Fétis's ghost!"
"'Tis stern reality, Vyvyan Topsparkle, 'tis the pestilence that walketh
at noonday. You sent me to an infected den, of malice aforethought,
planned to trap me like a rat; sent me to die and rot there, lest this
tongue of mine should tell how you tempted me to give your mistress her
last sleeping draught when you were alike weary of her charms and
doubtful of her fidelity. You meant to make a swift end of a foolish
babbler whose awakened conscience threatened your safety. But 'twas not
so easy as you thought. I have brought contagion to your own couch, the
venom of virulent smallpox has poisoned your pillow. I lay for an hour
upon your bed last night before you came to it. Your down coverlet is
tainted by my breath, your satin and velvet are reeking with infection.
I slept beside you all night. 'Twill be a miracle if you escape the
disease."
"You are a maniac," cried Topsparkle, "a malignant maniac; and I will
have you clapped in a strait-waistcoat before this world is an hour
older."
He lifted his arm to ring for aid, but the bell-pull had been plucked
down by Fétis over-night.
"You have trapped me once," said the valet. "You shall not catch me so
easily again. If I am to die, it shall be in my own hole, not in a trap
of your choosing."
He opened the door and was gone before Mr. Topsparkle, helpless in the
elegant disorder of his night raiment, could attempt to detain him. He
fled with swift footsteps from the house which had been the scene of
murder forty years ago, and which had been hateful to this cowardly
sinner ever since. Topsparkle was a bolder villain, and was not open to
such influences.
* * * * *
A week later, everybody at the Court end of London was talking of poor
Mr. Topsparkle, who was stricken with smallpox, a malady which at his
age was likely to be fatal, despite the assiduous attendance of
fashionable physicians, learned in the latest treatment of this terrible
disease.
People talked even more of Mr. Topsparkle's wife, who, with heroic
self-abnegation, had insisted upon nursing her husband. She had shut
herself up in his room with the sufferer, and never left that tainted
atmosphere. She had been inoculated three years before, at Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu's entreaty, submitting to the operation rather in sport
than in earnest, to please that clever eccentric, whom she loved partly
for the lady's own merits, and partly because she was related to
Lavendale. She had suffered a slight attack of the disease, which her
splendid constitution and high spirits had thrown off as lightly as if
it had been but a fit of the vapours. And now, armed by this
preparation, she took her seat fearlessly beside her husband's pillow;
she ordered the servants in their goings to and fro between the
sick-room and the outer world; she watched day and night, and took care
that not the slightest detail in the regimen prescribed by the
physicians should be neglected. She performed the duties of sick-nurse
as one who had a natural genius for the task.
One night, in an interval of consciousness after a period of delirium,
Mr. Topsparkle took his wife's hand in his, kissed it, and cried over
it, and thanked her feebly for her devotion.
"I never expected that you would be so good to me," he faltered. "I know
you never loved me."
"I owe you something for your indulgence," she answered gently. "You
rescued me from genteel poverty; you let me waste your money as if it
were water; and I have scarcely been grateful. I think it was less my
fault than that of the world in which we live. It would have been so
unfashionable to be grateful or over-civil to my husband," with a
sardonic smile. "But now you are ill, I feel that I may do something to
prove that my heart is not the nethermost millstone."
"And when I am dead you will marry Lavendale."
"O, but you are not going to die this bout. You are better to-night. Dr.
Chessenden told me this morning there was a change for the better."
"Would I could feel it! But I don't, and I doubt the end is near. And
when I am gone you will marry Lavendale."
"He was my first love," she answered gravely: "be assured I shall marry
none other."
"Well, I won't begrudge you your happiness. When my dry bones are
mouldering in the dark it can make but little difference to me. You will
have wealth enough to please yourself in a husband or any other whim. I
made my will a week ago, and left you three-fourths of my fortune. The
remaining quarter goes to a person who is represented to have a claim
upon me."
"You are too generous; but, indeed, I have no desire for inordinate
wealth."
"Nay, but you have a very pretty talent for spending. You will not
discredit your position as Croesus's widow any more than you have done
as Croesus's wife. There, there, Judith, I forgive all your follies.
You have given me a good deal of pain at odd times by your flirtation
with Lavendale; but, on the whole, I have been proud of you."
He lay muttering little speeches of this kind at intervals all that
night; kissed his wife's hand ever and anon with maudlin fondness; was
declared by the physicians next morning to be convalescent; and three
days afterwards was dead; just a week after his valet had been buried in
the churchyard of St. Giles's in the Fields.
* * * * *
Vyvyan Topsparkle's funeral was the most splendid function of the
funereal kind that had been seen in London since the burial of the Duke
of Buckinghamshire, and the most distinguished assemblage of mourners
that had followed a hearse since the great ones of the land bore Sir
Isaac Newton's pall, and followed genius and philosophy to the grave, a
few months before. As that frivolous great world had done reverence to
intellect, so now it did homage to wealth and fashion. Mr. Topsparkle
was buried in the family vault in the crypt of St. Paul's Cathedral,
where the bones of his father the Alderman had been laid five-and-forty
years before, in a sarcophagus of Florentine marble, sent from Rome by
his dutiful son. The plumes, the sable horses, the mourning chariots,
and procession of hireling mourners, the long train of fashionable
carriages, made a striking impression upon the crowd in the Strand and
Fleet Street, Ludgate Hill and St. Paul's Churchyard. Nor was Lady
Judith, in her sable robes, the least imposing figure in that stately
ceremonial. Calm and dignified in her sober bearing, affecting no false
hysteria of grief, but shedding a womanly tear or two for poor humanity
at those pathetic words, "Man, that is born of a woman, hath but a short
time to live, and is full of misery," she won the sympathy and
admiration of all who looked upon her.
"I protest she is the most beautiful woman in England," said
Bolingbroke to Pulteney, as they stood side by side in the shadowy
crypt.
"And the richest, Harry. Are you not almost sorry you are
married--though 'tis to the most charming woman of my acquaintance?"
"Faith, Will, yonder handsome widow would be a glorious chance for a
greater man than your humble servant, and my admiration of her only
stops short of passionate love. Her money would have been my salvation;
for I confess my own fortune has dwindled atrociously since I bought
Lord Tankerville's place, and turned gentleman farmer; and my father's
unamiable pertinacity in living might force his son to an untimely death
in a debtors' prison, were there no such thing as privilege."