David Christie Murray was born at West Bromwich, England,
April 13, 1847, and began his journalistic career at
Birmingham. In 1873 he moved to London and joined the staff of
the "Daily News" and in 1878 he was correspondent of the
"Times" and the "Scotsman" in the Russo-Turkish war. He now
began to transfer his abundant experience of life to the pages
of fiction. His first novel, "A Life's Atonement," was
published in 1880, and was followed a year later by "Joseph's
Coat." In "The Way of the World," published in 1884, his art
as a story-teller and his keen observation of men and manners
were displayed as strikingly as in any of his later works--
several of which were written in collaboration with other
authors. Altogether he produced over thirty volumes of short
stories and novels single-handed. At the end of last century
he emerged from his literary seclusion in Wales and became
active in current affairs; he was one of the leading English
champions of Dreyfus, and obtained the warm friendship of
Emile Zola. He died on August 1, 1907.
_I.--The Upstart_
Your sympathies are requested for Mr. Bolsover Kimberley, a gentleman
embarrassed beyond measure.
Mr. Kimberley was thirty-five years of age. He was meek, and had no
features to speak of. His hair was unassuming, and his whiskers were too
shy to curl. He was a clerk in a solicitor's office in the town of
Gallowbay, and he seemed likely to live to the end of his days in the
pursuit of labours no more profitable or pretentious.
A cat may look at a king. A solicitor's clerk may love an earl's
daughter. It was an undeniable madness in Kimberley even to dream of
loving the Lady Ella Santerre. He knew perfectly well what a fool he
was; but he was in love for all that.
To Bolsover Kimberley, seated in a little room with a dingy red desk and
cobwebbed skylight, there entered Mr. Ragshaw, senior clerk to Messrs.
Begg, Batter, and Bagg, solicitors.
"My dear Mr. Kimberley," said Mr. Ragshaw, "allow me the honour of
shaking hands with you. I believe that I am the first bearer of good
news."
Mr. Kimberley turned pale.
"My firm, sir," pursued Mr. Ragshaw, "represented the trustees of the
late owner of the Gallowbay Estate, who died three months ago at the age
of twenty, leaving no known relatives. We instituted a search, which
resulted in the discovery of an indisputable title to the estate. Permit
me to congratulate you, sir--the estate is yours."
Bolsover Kimberley gasped, and his voice was harsh.
"How much?"
"The estate, sir, is now approximately valued at forty-seven thousand
per annum."
Kimberley lurched forward, and fell over in a dead faint. Mr. Ragshaw's
attentions restored him to his senses, and he drank a little water, and
sobbed hysterically.
When he had recovered a little, he arose weakly from the one office
chair, took off his office coat, rolled it up neatly, and put it in his
desk. Then he put on his walking coat and his hat and went out.
"Don't you think, Mr. Kimberley," asked Mr. Ragshaw, with profound
respect, "that a little something----"
They were outside the Windgall Arms, and Kimberley understood.
"Why, yes, sir," he said; "but I never keep it in the 'ouse, and having
had to pay a tailor's bill this week, I don't happen----"
"My _dear_ sir, allow me!" said Ragshaw, with genuine emotion.
The champagne, the dinner that followed, the interviews with pressmen,
the excitement and obsequiousness of everybody, conveyed to Kimberley's
mind, in a dizzy sort of a way, that he was somebody in the world, and
ought to be proud of it. But his long life of servitude, his shyness and
want of nerve, all weighed heavily upon him, and he was far from being
happy.
Mr. Begg, senior partner of Messrs. Begg, Batter, and Bagg, was sitting
in his office a day or two later when a clerk ushered in the Earl of
Windgall.
"What's this news about Gallowbay, Begg? Is it true?" asked the earl.
"It is certainly true," answered Begg.
"What sort of fellow is this Kimberley?"
"Well, he seems to be a shy little man, _gauche_, and--and--underbred,
even for his late position."
"That's a pity. I should like to see him," added the grey little
nobleman. "I suppose you will act for him as you did for poor young
Edward?"
Poor young Edward was the deceased minor whose early death had wrecked
the finest chances the Windgall family craft had ever carried.
"I suppose so," said Begg.
"I presume," said the earl, "that even if he wanted to call in his money
you could arrange elsewhere?"
"With regard to the first mortgage?" asked Mr. Begg. "Certainly."
"And what about the new arrangement?" asked the earl nervously.
"Impossible, I regret to say."
"Very well," returned the earl, with a sigh. "I suppose the timber must
go. If poor Edward had lived, it would all have been very different."
Next day, when Kimberley, preposterously overdressed and thoroughly
ashamed of himself, was trying to talk business in Mr. Begg's office,
the Earl of Windgall was announced. There was nothing in the world that
could have terrified him more. And when the father of his ideal love,
Lady Ella Santerre, shook him by the hand, he could only gasp and gurgle
in response. But the earl's manner gradually reassured him, and in a
little time he began to plume himself in harmless trembling vanity upon
sitting in the same room with a nobleman and a great lawyer.
"I am pleased to have met Mr. Kimberley," said the earl, in going; "and
I trust we shall see more of each other."
Mr. Kimberley flushed, and bowed in a violent flutter.
As the earl was driven homeward he could not help feeling that he was
engaged in a shameful enterprise. People would talk if he invited this
gilded little snob to Shouldershott Castle, and would know very well why
he was asked there. Let them talk.
"A million and a quarter!" said the poor peer. "And if I don't catch
him, somebody else will."
Meanwhile, Captain Jack Clare, an extremely popular young officer of
dragoons, was in the depths of despair. He was the younger brother of
Lord Montacute, whose family was poor; he loved Lady Ella Santerre,
whose family was still poorer. The heads of the families had forbidden
the match for financial reasons. He had stolen an interview with Ella,
and had found that she bowed to the decision of the seniors.
"It is all quite hopeless and impossible," she had said. "Good-bye,
Jack!"
As he rode dispiritedly away, he could not see, for the intervening
trees, that she was kneeling in the fern and crying.
_II.--A Peer in Difficulties_
The Lady Ella slipped an arm about her father's neck.
"You are in trouble, dear," she said. "Can I help you?"
"No," said the poor nobleman. "There's no help for it, Beggs says, and
they'll have to cut down the timber in the park. Poverty, my dear,
poverty."
This was a blow, and a heavy one.
"That isn't the worst of it," said Windgall, after a pause. "I am in the
hands of the Jews. A wretched Hebrew fellow says he _will_ have a
thousand pounds by this day week. He might as well ask me for a
million."
"The diamonds are worth more than a thousand pounds, dear," she said
gently.
"No, no, my darling," he answered. "I have robbed you of everything
already."
"You must take them, papa," she said in tender decision. She left him,
only to return in a few minutes' time with a dark shagreen case in her
hands. The earl paced about the room for a minute or two.
"I take these," he said at last, "in bitter unwillingness, because I
can't help taking them, my dear. I had best get the business over, Ella.
I will go up to town this afternoon."
During the whole of his journey the overdressed figure of Kimberley
seemed to stand before the embarrassed man, and a voice seemed to issue
from it. "Catch me, flatter me, wheedle me, marry me to one of your
daughters, and see the end of your woes." He despised himself heartily
for permitting the idea to enter his mind, but he could not struggle
against its intrusion.
Next day Kimberley entered his jewellers to consult him concerning a
scarf-pin. It was a bull-dog's head, carved in lava, and not quite
life-size. The eyes were rubies, the collar was of gold and brilliants.
This egregious jewel was of his own designing, and was of a piece with
his general notions of how a millionaire should attire himself.
As he passed through the door somebody leapt from a cab carrying
something in his hands, and jostled against him. He turned round
apologetically, and confronted the Earl of Windgall.
His lordship looked like a man detected in a theft, and shook hands with
a confused tremor.
"Can you spare me half an hour?" he asked. Then he handed the package to
the shop-man. "Take care of that," he stammered. "It is valuable. I will
call to-morrow."
That afternoon Kimberley accepted an invitation to stay at Shouldershott
Castle.
He was prodigiously flattered and fluttered. When he thought of being
beneath the same roof with Lady Ella, he flushed and trembled as he had
never done before.
"I shall see her," he muttered wildly to himself. "I shall see her in
the 'alls, the 'alls of dazzling light." It is something of a wonder
that he did not lose his mental balance altogether.
When he was daily in the presence of Ella, the little man's heart ached
with sweet anguish and helpless worship and desire. Yet before her he
was tongue-tied, incapable of uttering a consecutive sentence. With her
sister, Lady Alice Santerre, who had been the intended bride of the
deceased heir to the Gallowbay Estate, Kimberley felt on a different
footing. He had hardly ever been so much at ease with anybody in his
life as this young lady made him.
Kimberley's own anxious efforts at self-improvement, Lady Alice's
good-natured advice, and the bold policy of the earl, who persuaded him
to undergo the terrors of an election, and get returned to Parliament as
member for Gallowbay, gradually made the millionaire a more presentable
person. He learned how to avoid dropping his h's; but two vices were
incurable--the shyness and his appalling taste in dress.
The world, meanwhile, had guessed at the earl's motives in extending his
friendship to Kimberley, and the little man's name was knowingly linked
with that of Lady Alice. Kimberley came to hear what the world was
saying through meeting Mr. Blandy, his former employer. Mr. Blandy
invited him to his house, honoured the occasion with champagne, drank
freely of it, and became confidential.
"The noble earl'll nail you f' one o' the girls, Kimbly. I'm a lill bit
'fected when I think, seeing my dear Kimbly 'nited marriage noble
family. That's what makes me talk like this. I b'leeve you're gone coon
already, ole man. 'Gratulate you, allmy heart."
Kimberley went away in a degradation of soul. Was it possible that this
peer of the realm could be so coarsely and openly bent on securing him
and his money that the whole world should know of it? What had
Kimberley, he asked himself bitterly, to recommend him but his money?
But then, triumphing over his miseries, came the fancy--he could have
his dream of love; he had cried for the moon, and now he could have it.
_III.--Ella's Martyrdom_
The earl's liabilities amounted roughly to ninety thousand pounds. The
principal mortgagee was insisting upon payment or foreclosure, and there
was a general feeling abroad that the estate was involved beyond its
capacity to pay.
Kimberley learned these circumstances in an interview with Mr. Begg. A
few days afterwards he drove up desperately to the castle and asked for
a private interview with his lordship.
"My lord," he said, when they were alone, "I want to ask your lordship's
acceptance of these papers."
The earl understood them at a glance. Kimberley had bought his debts.
"I ask you to take them now," Kimberley went on, "before I say another
word."
He rose, walked to the fire, and dropped the papers on the smouldering
coal. The earl seized the papers and rescued them, soiled but unsinged.
"Kimberley," he said, "I dare not lay myself under such an obligation to
any man alive."
"They are yours, my lord," replied Kimberley. "I shall never touch them
again. You're under no obligation to me, my lord. But"--he blushed and
stammered--"I want to ask you for the hand of Lady Ella."
It took Windgall a full minute to pull himself together. He had schooled
himself to the trembling hope that Alice might be chosen; but Ella!
"Forgive me," he began, "I was unprepared--I was not altogether
unprepared--" Then he lapsed into silence.
"I will submit your proposal to my daughter," he said after a time,
"but--I am powerless--altogether powerless."
Kimberley went home in a tremor of nervous anxiety, and Windgall sent
for his daughter.
"I want you to understand, my dear," he began nervously, "that you are
free to act just as you will. Mr. Kimberley gave these into my hands
this morning"--showing her the papers. "He gave them freely, as a gift.
If I could accept them I should be free from the nightmare of debt. But
in the same breath with that unconditional gift, he asked me for your
hand in marriage."
She kept silence.
"You know our miserable necessities, Ella," he pleaded. "But I can't
force your inclinations in a matter like this, my dear."
She ran to him, and threw her arms about his neck.
"If it depends upon me to end your troubles, my dear, they are ended
already."
"Shall I," he asked lamely, "make Kimberley happy?"