LAMBERT _V._ BEVAN
Now the germinal spot of this veracious history consists in the fact
that numbered amongst Mr James Hancock's most prized clients was a young
gentleman of the name of Bevan; the gentleman, in short, whom Miss Fanny
Lambert described as "frightfully rich and a beast."
Mr Charles Maximilian Bevan, to give him his full title, inhabited a set
of chambers in the "Albany," midway between the Piccadilly end and the
end opening upon Vigo Street.
He was a young man of about twenty-three years of age, of a not
unpleasing but rather heavy appearance, absolutely unconscious of the
humour that lay in himself or in the world around him, and possessed of
a fine, furious, old-fashioned temper; a temper that would burst out
over an ill-cooked beef steak or a missing stud, and which vented itself
chiefly upon his valet Strutt. In most of us the port of our ancestors
runs to gout; in Mr Bevan it ran to temper.
He was a bachelor. Hamilton Cox, the author of "The Pillar of Salt,"
once said that the Almighty had appointed Charles Bevan to be a
bachelor, and that he had taken up his appointment. To his friends it
seemed so, and it seemed a pity, for he was an orphan and very wealthy,
and had no unpleasant vices. He possessed Highshot Towers and five
thousand acres of land in the richest part of Buckinghamshire, a moor in
Scotland which he let each autumn to a man from Chicago, and a house in
Mayfair which he also let.
Mr Bevan was not exactly a miser, but he was careful; no cabman ever
received more from him than his legal fare; he studied the city news in
the _Times_ each morning, and Strutt was kept informed as to the price
of Consols by the state of his master's temper, also as to the dividends
declared by the Great Northern, South Eastern, London North Western
Railways, and the Glasgow Gas Works, in all of which concerns Mr Bevan
was a heavy holder.
In his life he had rarely been known to give a penny to a beggar man,
yet each year he gave a good many pounds to the Charity Organisation
Society, and the Hospitals, feeling sure that money invested in these
institutions would not be misspent, and might even, perhaps, bear some
shadowy dividend in the life to come.
He had a horror of cardsharpers, poets, foreigners, inferior artists,
and badly dressed people in general--every one, in fact, beyond the pale
of what he was pleased to call "Respectability"--but beyond all these
and above all these, he had a horror of spendthrifts.
The Bevans had always been like that; there had been drinking Bevans,
and fighting Bevans, and foolish Bevans of various descriptions, even
open-handed Bevans, but there had never been a thoroughpaced squandering
Bevan. Very different was it with the Lamberts, whose estate lay
contiguous to that of Bevan, down in Bucks. How the Lamberts had held
together as a family for four hundred years, certain; through the
spacious times of Elizabeth, the questionable time of Charles, the
winter of the Commonwealth; how the ship of Lambert passed entire
between the Scylla of the Cocoa tree and the charybdis of Crockfords;
how it weathered the roaring forties, are question constituting a
problem indissoluble, even when we take into account the known capacity
of the Lamberts for trimming, swashbuckling and good fellowship
generally. A problem, however, upon which the present story will,
perhaps, cast some light.
How jolly Jack Lambert played with Gerald Fiennes till he lost his
house, his horses, his carriages, and his deaf and dumb negro servant.
How with a burst of laughter he staked his wife and won back his negro,
staked both, and retrieved his horses and his carriages, and at five
o'clock of a bright May morning rose from the table having eternally
broken and ruined Fiennes, was a story current in the days when William,
the first of the Bevans, was a sober cloth merchant in Wych Street, and
Charles, the first of the Stuarts, held his pleasant Court at
Windsor--_Carpe Diem_, it was the motto of jolly Jack Lambert. _Festina
Lente_ said William of the cloth-yard.
The houses of Bevan and Lambert had never agreed, brilliancy and dulness
rarely do, they had intermarried, however, with the result that the
present George Lambert and the present Charles Bevan were cousins of a
sort, cousins that had never spoken one to the other, and, moreover, at
the present moment, were engaged, as we know, in active litigation as to
the rights of fishing in an all but fishless stream some twelve feet
broad, which separated the estates and the kinsmen.
Some twelve months previously it appears Strutt being sent down to
Highshot Towers to superintend some alterations, had found in the
gun-room a fishing-rod, and yielding to his cockney instincts, had
fished, catching by some miracle a dilapidated looking jack.
He had promptly been set upon and beaten by a person whom Lambert called
his keeper, and who, according to Strutt, swam the stream like an otter,
hit him in the eye, broke the rod, and vanished with the jack.
So began the memorable action of Bevan _v._ Lambert, which, having been
won in the Queen's Bench by Charles Bevan, was now at the date of our
story, waiting its turn to appear before the Lords Justices of Appeal.
It was stated, such was the animus with which this lawsuit was
conducted, that George Lambert was cutting down timber to defray the
costs of the lawyers, a fallacious statement, for the estate of Lambert
was mortgaged beyond the hope of redemption.