Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman

by Stanley J Weyman

  In deciding that point he made a mistake. Unluckily for himself and others, in the version which he chose he was careful to include all matters likely to arouse Dunborough’s resentment; in particular he laid malicious stress upon the attorney’s scornful words about a marriage. This, however — and perhaps the care he took to repeat it — had an unlooked-for result. Mr. Dunborough began by cursing the rogue’s impudence, and did it with all the heat his best friend could desire. But, being confined to his room, haunted by the vision of his flame, yet debarred from any attempt to see her, his mood presently changed; his heart became as water, and he fell into a maudlin state about her. Dwelling constantly on memories of his Briseis — whose name, by the way, was Julia — having her shape and complexion, her gentle touch and her smile, always in his mind, while he was unable in the body to see so much as the hem of her gown, Achilles grew weaker in will as he grew stronger in body. Headstrong and reckless by nature, unaccustomed to thwart a desire or deny himself a gratification, Mr. Dunborough began to contemplate paying even the last price for her; and one day, about three weeks after the duel, dropped a word which frightened Mr. Thomasson.

  He was well enough by this time to be up, and was looking through one window while the tutor lounged in the seat of another. On a sudden ‘Lord!’ said he, with a laugh that broke off short in the middle. ‘What was the queer catch that fellow sang last night? About a bailiff’s daughter. Well, why not a porter’s daughter?’

  ‘Because you are neither young enough, nor old enough, nor mad enough!’ said Mr. Thomasson cynically, supposing the other meant nothing.

  ‘It is she that would be mad,’ the young gentleman answered, with a grim chuckle. ‘I should take it out of her sooner or later. And, after all, she is as good as Lady Macclesfield or Lady Falmouth! As good? She is better, the saucy baggage! By the Lord, I have a good mind to do it!’

  Mr. Thomasson sat dumbfounded. At length, ‘You are jesting! You cannot mean it,’ he said.

  ‘If it is marriage or nothing — and, hang her, she is as cold as a church pillar — I do mean it,’ the gentleman answered viciously; ‘and so would you if you were not an old insensible sinner! Think of her ankle, man! Think of her waist! I never saw a waist to compare with it! Even in the Havanna! She is a pearl! She is a jewel! She is incomparable!’

  ‘And a porter’s daughter!’

  ‘Faugh, I don’t believe it.’ And he took his oath on the point.

  ‘You make me sick!’ Mr. Thomasson said; and meant it. Then, ‘My dear friend, I see how it is,’ he continued. ‘You have the fever on you still, or you would not dream of such things.’

  ‘But I do dream of her — every night, confound her!’ Mr. Dunborough said; and he groaned like a love-sick boy. ‘Oh, hang it, Tommy,’ he continued plaintively, ‘she has a kind of look in her eyes when she is pleased — that makes you think of dewy mornings when you were a boy and went fishing.’

  ‘It is the fever!’ Mr. Thomasson said, with conviction. ‘It is heavy on him still.’ Then, more seriously, ‘My very dear sir,’ he continued, ‘do you know that if you had your will you would be miserable within the week. Remember —

  ‘’Tis tumult, disorder, ’tis loathing and hate;

  Caprice gives it birth, and contempt is its fate!’

  ‘Gad, Tommy!’ said Mr. Dunborough, aghast with admiration at the aptness of the lines. ‘That is uncommon clever of you! But I shall do it all the same,’ he continued, in a tone of melancholy foresight. ‘I know I shall. I am a fool, a particular fool. But I shall do it. Marry in haste and repent at leisure!’

  ‘A porter’s daughter become Lady Dunborough!’ cried Mr. Thomasson with scathing sarcasm.

  ‘Oh yes, my tulip,’ Mr. Dunborough answered with gloomy meaning. ‘But there have been worse. I know what I know. See Collins’s Peerage, volume 4, page 242: “Married firstly Sarah, widow of Colonel John Clark, of Exeter, in the county of Devon” — all a hum, Tommy! If they had said spinster, of Bridewell, in the county of Middlesex, ’twould have been as true! I know what I know.’

  After that Mr. Thomasson went out of Magdalen, feeling that the world was turning round with him. If Dunborough were capable of such a step as this — Dunborough, who had seen life and service, and of whose past he knew a good deal — where was he to place dependence? How was he to trust even the worst of his acquaintances? The matter shook the pillars of the tutor’s house, and filled him with honest disgust.

  Moreover, it frightened him. In certain circumstances he might have found his advantage in fostering such a mésalliance. But here, not only had he reason to think himself distasteful to the young lady whose elevation was in prospect, but he retained too vivid a recollection of Lady Dunborough to hope that that lady would forget or forgive him! Moreover, at the present moment he was much straitened for money; difficulties of long standing were coming to a climax. Venuses and Titian copies have to be paid for. The tutor, scared by the prospect, to which he had lately opened his eyes, saw in early preferment or a wealthy pupil his only way of escape. And in Lady Dunborough lay his main hope, which a catastrophe of this nature would inevitably shatter. That evening he sent his servant to learn what he could of the Mastersons’ movements.

  The man brought word that they had left the town that morning; that the cottage was closed, and the key had been deposited at the college gates.

  ‘Did you learn their destination?’ the tutor asked, trimming his fingernails with an appearance of indifference.

  The servant said he had not; and after adding the common gossip of the court, that Masterson had left money, and the widow had gone to her own people, concluded, ‘But they were very close after Masterson’s death, and the neighbours saw little of them. There was a lawyer in and out, a stranger; and it is thought he was to marry the girl, and that that had set them a bit above their position, sir.’

  ‘That will do,’ said the tutor. ‘I want to hear no gossip,’ And, hiding his joy, he went off hot-foot to communicate the news to his pupil.

  But Mr. Dunborough laughed in his face. ‘Pooh!’ he said. ‘I know where they are.’

  ‘You know? Then where are they?’ Thomasson asked.

  ‘Ah, my good Tommy, that is telling.’

  ‘Well,’ Mr. Thomasson answered, with an assumption of dignity. ‘At any rate they are gone. And you must allow me to say that I am glad of it — for your sake!’

  ‘That is as may be,’ Mr. Dunborough answered. And he took his first airing in a sedan next day. After that he grew so reticent about his affairs, and so truculent when the tutor tried to sound him, that Mr. Thomasson was at his wits’ end to discern what was afoot. For some time, however, he got no clue. Then, going to Dunborough’s rooms one day, he found them empty, and, bribing the servant, learned that his master had gone to Wallingford. And the man told him his suspicions. Mr. Thomasson was aghast; and by that day’s post — after much searching of heart and long pondering into which scale he should throw his weight — he despatched the following letter to Lady Dunborough:

  ‘HONOURED MADAM, — The peculiar care I have of that distinguished and excellent gentleman, your son, no less than the profound duty I owe to my lord and your ladyship, induces me to a step which I cannot regard without misgiving; since, once known, it must deprive me of the influence with Mr. Dunborough which I have now the felicity to enjoy, and which, heightened by the affection he is so good as to bestow on me, renders his society the most agreeable in the world. Nevertheless, and though considerations of this sort cannot but have weight with me, I am not able to be silent, nor allow your honoured repose among the storied oaks of Papworth to be roughly shattered by a blow that may still be averted by skill and conduct.

  ‘For particulars, Madam, the young gentleman — I say it with regret — has of late been drawn into a connection with a girl of low origin and suitable behaviour, Not that your ladyship is to think me so wanting in savoir-faire as to trouble your ears with this, were it all; but the person concerned — w
ho (I need scarcely tell one so familiar with Mr. Dunborough’s amiable disposition) is solely to blame — has the wit to affect virtue, and by means of this pretence, often resorted to by creatures of that class, has led my generous but misguided pupil to the point of matrimony. Your ladyship shudders? Alas! it is so. I have learned within the hour that he has followed her to Wallingford, whither she has withdrawn herself, doubtless to augment his passion; I am forced to conclude that nothing short of your ladyship’s presence and advice can now stay his purpose. In that belief, and with the most profound regret, I pen these lines; and respectfully awaiting the favour of your ladyship’s commands, which shall ever evoke my instant compliance,

  ‘I have the honour to be while I live, Madam,

  Your ladyship’s most humble obedient servant,

  ‘FREDERICK THOMASSON.

  ‘Nota bene. — I do not commend the advantage of silence in regard to this communication, this being patent to your ladyship’s sagacity.’

  CHAPTER VIII

  THE OLD BATH ROAD

  In the year 1757 — to go back ten years from the spring with which we are dealing — the ordinary Englishman was a Balbus despairing of the State. No phrase was then more common on English lips, or in English ears, than the statement that the days of England’s greatness were numbered, and were fast running out. Unwitting the wider sphere about to open before them, men dwelt fondly on the glories of the past. The old babbled of Marlborough’s wars, of the entrance of Prince Eugene into London, of choirs draped in flags, and steeples reeling giddily for Ramillies and Blenheim. The young listened, and sighed to think that the day had been, and was not, when England gave the law to Europe, and John Churchill’s warder set troops moving from Hamburg to the Alps.

  On the top of such triumphs, and the famous reign of good Queen Anne, had ensued forty years of peace, broken only by one inglorious war. The peace did its work: it settled the dynasty, and filled the purse; but men, considering it, whispered of effeminacy and degeneracy, and the like, as men will to the end of time. And when the clouds, long sighted on the political horizon, began to roll up, they looked fearfully abroad and doubted and trembled; and doubted and trembled the more because in home affairs all patriotism, all party-spirit, all thought of things higher than ribbon or place or pension, seemed to be dead among public men. The Tories, long deprived of power, and discredited by the taint or suspicion of Jacobitism, counted for nothing. The Whigs, agreed on all points of principle, and split into sections, the Ins and Outs, solely by the fact that all could not enjoy places and pensions at once, the supply being unequal to the demand — had come to regard politics as purely a game; a kind of licensed hazard played for titles, orders, and emoluments, by certain families who had the entrée to the public table by virtue of the part they had played in settling the succession.

  Into the midst of this state of things, this world of despondency, mediocrity, selfishness, and chicanery, and at the precise crisis when the disasters which attended the opening campaigns of the Seven Years’ War — and particularly the loss of Minorca — seemed to confirm the gloomiest prognostications of the most hopeless pessimists, came William Pitt; and in eighteen months changed the face of the world, not for his generation only, but for ours. Indifferent as an administrator, mediocre as a financier, passionate, haughty, headstrong, with many of the worst faults of an orator, he was still a man with ideals — a patriot among placemen, pure where all were corrupt. And the effect of his touch was magical. By infusing his own spirit, his own patriotism, his own belief in his country, and his own belief in himself, into those who worked with him — ay, and into the better half of England — he wrought a seeming miracle.

  See, for instance, what Mr. Walpole wrote to Sir Horace Mann in September, 1757. ‘For how many years,’ he says, ‘have I been telling you that your country was mad, that your country was undone! It does not grow wiser, it does not grow more prosperous! ... How do you behave on these lamentable occasions? Oh, believe me, it is comfortable to have an island to hide one’s head in! ...’ Again he writes in the same month,’ ‘It is time for England to slip her own cables, and float away into some unknown ocean.’

  With these compare a letter dated November, 1759. ‘Indeed,’ he says to the same correspondent, ‘one is forced to ask every morning what victory there is, for fear of missing one.’ And he wrote with reason. India, Canada, Belleisle, the Mississippi, the Philippines, the Havanna, Martinique, Guadaloupe — there was no end to our conquests. Wolfe fell in the arms of victory, Clive came home the satrap of sovereigns; but day by day ships sailed in and couriers spurred abroad with the news that a new world and a nascent empire were ours. Until men’s heads reeled and maps failed them, as they asked each morning ‘What new land, to-day?’ Until those who had despaired of England awoke and rubbed their eyes — awoke to find three nations at her feet, and the dawn of a new and wider day breaking in the sky.

  And what of the minister? They called him the Great Commoner, the heaven-born statesman; they showered gold boxes upon him; they bore him through the city, the centre of frantic thousands, to the effacement even of the sovereign. Where he went all heads were bared; while he walked the rooms at Bath and drank the water, all stood; his very sedan, built with a boot to accommodate his gouty foot, was a show followed and watched wherever it moved. A man he had never seen left him a house and three thousand pounds a year; this one, that one, the other one, legacies. In a word, for a year or two he was the idol of the nation — the first great People’s Minister.

  Then, the crisis over, the old system lifted its head again; the mediocrities returned; and, thwarted by envious rivals and a jealous king, Pitt placed the crown alike on his services and his popularity by resigning power when he could no longer dictate the policy which he knew to be right. Nor were events slow to prove his wisdom. The war with Spain which he would have declared, Spain declared. The treasure fleet which he would have seized, escaped us. Finally, the peace when it came redounded to his credit, for in the main it secured his conquests — to the disgrace of his enemies, since more might have been obtained.

  Such was the man who, restored to office and lately created an earl by the title of Chatham, lay ill at Bath in the spring of ‘67. The passage of time, the course of events, the ravages of gout, in a degree the acceptance of a title, had robbed his popularity of its first gloss. But his name was still a name to conjure with in England. He was still the idol of the City. Crowds still ran to see him where he passed. His gaunt figure racked with gout, his eagle nose, his piercing eyes, were still England’s picture of a minister. His curricle, his troop of servants, the very state he kept, the ceremony with which he travelled, all pleased the popular fancy. When it was known that he was well enough to leave Bath, and would lie a night at the Castle Inn at Marlborough, his suite requiring twenty rooms, even that great hostelry, then reputed one of the best, as it was certainly the most splendid in England, and capable, it was said, of serving a dinner of twenty-four covers on silver, was in an uproar. The landlord, who knew the tastes of half the peerage, and which bin Lord Sandwich preferred, and which Mr. Rigby, in which rooms the Duchess or Lady Betty liked to lie, what Mr. Walpole took with his supper, and which shades the Princess Amelia preferred for her card-table — even he, who had taken his glass of wine with a score of dukes, from Cumberland the Great to Bedford the Little, was put to it; the notice being short, and the house somewhat full.

  Fortunately the Castle Inn, on the road between London and the west, was a place of call, not of residence. Formerly a favourite residence of the Seymour family, and built, if tradition does not lie, by a pupil of Inigo Jones, it stood — and for the house, still stands — in a snug fold of the downs, at the end of the long High Street of Marlborough; at the precise point where the route to Salisbury debouches from the Old Bath Road. A long-fronted, stately mansion of brick, bosomed in trees, and jealous of its historic past — it had sheltered William of Orange — it presented to the north and the road, fr
om which it was distant some hundred yards, a grand pillared portico flanked by projecting wings. At that portico, and before those long rows of shapely windows, forty coaches, we are told, changed horses every day. Beside the western wing of the house a green sugarloaf mound, reputed to be of Druidical origin, rose above the trees; it was accessible by a steep winding path, and crowned at the date of this story by a curious summer-house. Travellers from the west who merely passed on the coach, caught, if they looked back as they entered the town, a glimpse of groves and lawns laid out by the best taste of the day, between the southern front and the river. To these a doorway and a flight of stone steps, corresponding in position with the portico in the middle of the north front, conducted the visitor, who, if a man of feeling, was equally surprised and charmed to find in these shady retreats, stretching to the banks of the Kennet, a silence and beauty excelled in few noblemen’s gardens. In a word, while the north front of the house hummed with the revolving wheels, and echoed the chatter of half the fashionable world bound for the Bath or the great western port of Bristol, the south front reflected the taste of that Lady Hertford who had made these glades and trim walks her principal hobby.