“Yes, I suppose I understand you, papa,” replied Patty, “but I can’t help thinking that what you say is very nonsensical, because it is downright humbug, and nothing else, to talk of you and mamma being like Tornorino and me. However, I’ll do just whatever you like about it. And though you are so old now, it is a beautiful love story as ever was wrote in a book, and I must and will tell my Don of it. You won’t mind that I suppose?”
“No, my dear Patty, not at all,” replied her father, affectionately. “On the contrary, my love, I wish him to be made acquainted with all the peculiarities of my situation. They are very peculiar; and now I must proceed to explain to you why it is, that now, for the first time, I consider it proper to open my heart to you on this painful subject. It is, believe me, a theme inexpressibly distressing to me, particularly at this moment, when I would willingly have devoted myself to making the early days of your married life, my poor child, pass gaily and joyously. But unhappily I am compelled to announce to you the very disagreeable fact that, unless your husband has a home of his own to take you to, your honeymoon, my pretty Patty, must be passed on board ship.”
“Good gracious, why? I shan’t like that at all, I promise you. I mean that mamma shall go out with me directly to buy some wedding clothes, and there will be no fun in being fine unless there is somebody to admire me. I do beg, papa, that wherever you are going, you won’t set off till I have received all my visits, and returned them too. I am dying for my cousin Elizabeth to see my wedding-ring, and hear me call my tall, grand-looking husband, Tornorino. I am certain as that I am here, that she will be just ready to die with envy.”
“Nothing can be more natural than your feelings, my dear Patty, and it grieves me to the heart that I cannot indulge you in them. But you have not heard my sad story yet, my dear. The persecution I have undergone has been terrible beyond belief. As long as the sweet angel lived I was obliged either to remain out of the country, or else return under a feigned name, and live in the most complete retirement, to avoid the possibility of her knowing that I was near her. Alas! Patty, a jealous husband is the most terrible of tyrants. God grant that this dreadful fate may never be yours.”
“Oh! there is no danger at all of that, papa, for I love my handsome husband a great deal too well to let anybody else make love to me.”
“That is a great blessing, my dear, a very great blessing. But to return to my sad story. One might have hoped, Patty, might one not, that when the lovely countess was no more, the tyrants might have ceased to persecute? The hope of this was, I assure you, the only thing which enabled me to retain my senses when I lost her. But no! even in this I have been deceived.
“For a short time, indeed, after my last return from abroad, on which return you and your excellent mother accompanied me, I was permitted to breathe the air of my native land unmolested; and it was dear to me because it was the air my Eleonora had breathed! But last night I received the astounding information that your appearance at court (where you were recognised as my daughter), had given rise to the most injurious suspicions. There are persons in certain circles, Patty, who have not scrupled to hint that the excellent woman, whom before heaven I declare to be your mother, is no more to you than your nurse, and that your real mother was no other than the lamented heiress I have named to you! This, as you will immediately perceive, throws a doubt upon the succession to her title and estates which, if it takes wind, may plunge the whole of her noble family into the horrible exposure of a trial and a lawsuit. I have accordingly received official hints that unless by at once withdrawing myself I relieve the family from this alarm, measures will be immediately resorted to for the purpose of removing me from England for ever. I leave you to guess what my feelings were on receiving this intimation.”
“Why, they don’t mean to say that I ought to be the countess, do they, papa?” demanded Patty, with considerable vivacity.
“Not exactly that, my dear. No one, I believe, has hitherto ventured to assert as a fact, what, under the circumstances, it would be so exceedingly difficult to prove. Nobody, as yet, has gone that length. But be this as it may, of the necessity of our immediately leaving England there can be no question. Were I to delay a week, I have little doubt that I should find myself an object of the most tyrannical persecution — and that, probably, for life. I have, therefore, no time to lose, and I have taken this early opportunity of communicating these facts to you, in order that you might make up your mind either to accompany your mother and myself to the United States of America, or to go immediately with your husband to such home as he can provide for you. How do you decide, Patty?”
“I will tell you in a minute, papa, if you will only let me ask you one or two questions,” she replied.
“Then make short work of your questions, Patty, for I have no time to lose,” said Mr. O’Donagough, once again portentously knitting his brows.
“Don’t look cross, papa, find I will have done in a minute. And please, in the first place, to tell me whether it is quite sure and certain that I never can be a countess in my own right?”
“I am sorry to say, my dear, that there is not the slightest chance of it,” gravely replied Mr. O’Donagough.
“That’s no go, then,” responded Patty, with a slight sigh.
“Now then,” she resumed, “my next question is, whether being so fond of me as you are, and I your only child, whether, I say, you could not give me, before you go, fortune enough for me and Don Tornorino to live on here a little, in good flashing style, just to plague the Huberts, and that nasty beast, Jack, before we go out after you and mamma to America?”
“Here, again, my dear child,” said Mr. O’Donagough, with a truly paternal smile, “I recognise the most natural feelings, and believe me, I fully sympathise in them; but I lament to say that what you ask is altogether impossible. For the tyrants who pursue me with their jealous vengeance—”
“Do you mean the lady’s husband, papa?” cried Patty, with a sudden burst of irrepressible curiosity.
“Pardon me, my dear, I cannot answer,” replied her father with solemnity. “Nor is it in any way necessary that I should, in order to make you fully comprehend my position. Whoever they be who pursue me, their power over me is such that I cannot, without the most imminent risk to my liberty, and even to my life, attempt to realise any part of my property. Indeed, I have but too much reason to fear that by far the greater portion of the funds upon which I reckoned as the source from which your fortune should be drawn, and our own handsome manner of living supplied, will be rendered entirely unavailable by this last stroke of barbarous jealousy. All that can be done for our future comfort, depend upon it, my dear Patty, I will do; but if you and your husband, after properly taking into consideration the fact of my almost ruined fortunes, shall still decide upon accompanying us into exile, it must be with the understanding that you are uniting your fortunes to those of a poor man — compared to what I believed myself to be — a very poor man, and must conduct yourselves accordingly.”
Patty looked exceedingly grave, and remained silent considerably longer than was her wont on any occasion; but her father wished to hear what she had got to say in reply to his communication, and waited patiently till she spake. At length, after heaving rather a deep sigh, she said, with an expression somewhat indicative of alarm upon her countenance —
“I don’t know what my Don will say to it, papa, because I always told him that you was so monstrous rich. Good gracious, what shall I do, if he should grow cross about it and leave off loving me? I do think, upon my honour, that it would drive me mad.”
“In that case, my dear love,” replied her father, composedly, “I should, of course, turn him out of doors immediately.”
“What? my own dear, darling husband? and I left by myself without any husband at all? No, no, Mr. Pap, you’ll do no such thing as that, I promise you. What you must do is this, dear papa, you must squeeze out every penny you can save from every other earthly thing, and give it all to my dear
Don; and that, you know, will keep him in good humour, even if you don’t happen to live out in America in such a grand house as this. That is what you really will do, my own dear darling pap, isn’t it?”
And Patty sprung across the space which divided them, threw her arms round his neck, and began kissing him with more vehemence than she had ever done before, save once when she had conceived an ardent affection for a pink-satin dress, which his fiat alone could enable her to obtain.
Upon that occasion she had succeeded — the pink-satin dress had been the reward of her kisses, and it was, perhaps, the remembrance of this fact which made her now shower them so liberally. But her father seemed not in the kissing vein; for he disengaged himself, though gently, from her clinging embraces, and quietly replied —
“The best thing you can do, Patty, is to tell your husband the whole of the melancholy story which I have just told you; he will then understand how things are, and if, as I suspect, his own circumstances are such as still to make his sticking close to us the best thing he can do, I dare say he will have common sense enough to keep his ground without being very troublesome. It is, indeed, not impossible that I may find him useful, and in that case I have no doubt but we shall go on very comfortably.”
Patty pretty well knew when there was anything to be gained from “Pa,” and when there was not; the present use of which experience was to make her quietly walk on, saying, “that she would soon make her dear Don understand all about it.”
CHAPTER IV.
To prepare his beautiful Patty for the change she was about to undergo, was perhaps not the least disagreeable of the various operations which Mr. John William Patrick Allen O’Donagough knew that he had to perform before he set out upon the expedition which (as doubtless all the world will remember) General Hubert had so strenuously recommended. It had taken the affectionate father some fifteen or twenty minutes to decide in what manner the news could be conveyed to the happy bride, his daughter, with the least annoyance to her sensitive feelings; but from the moment the matter presented itself to his imagination in the shape which has been shown forth in the last chapter, every unpleasant sensation vanished. Nay, the interview, which he had previously dreaded, became, in a considerable degree, agreeable to him.
It is, I believe, a notorious fact in natural history, that, whatever instinct or faculty nature has bestowed upon an animal with predominating strength, causes in its exercise the most decided gratification; and it would be difficult to bring in evidence a stronger confirmation of this interesting phenomenon, than the state of feeling produced on the mind of Mr. O’Donagough by the act of lying. His spirits seemed to rise, his faculties to expand themselves, his features assumed a look of animation and intelligence inconceivably beyond what they ever manifested at any other time; and if the observer’s eye could have gone deeper and penetrated to his heart, it would have been found gaily bounding in his bosom, in a sort of triumphant jubilee at the bold feats of his undaunted tongue.
On the whole, therefore, the half-hour he had bestowed upon Patty had done him good, and it was with no faltering voice that he called to her as she quitted the room, bidding her to send her mother to him.
Mr. O’Donagough was, as we have said, a man of very considerable firmness of nerve, and had never, at any period of his life, been found infirm of purpose. Within half an hour of leaving his “third drawing-room” on the preceding night, in the manner described in a former series of the records of this interesting family, he had pretty fully made up his mind as to what he should do with himself and his belongings. Though he felt that the earth was not wholly before him where to choose, he was aware that quite a sufficient quantity remained open for him to prevent any embarrassment on the score of elbow-room. Nor had he that very dispiriting misfortune to contend with, which arises from the want of those sinews so well known to be necessary in every operation which man carries on, either with or against man. His lady’s provident wisdom had taken care, at the time of their marriage, that all that was hers should remain her own, and her little income was therefore as long as they remained together a sort of pis aller fund, which would always prevent their being in actual want. This was well, snug, comfortable, and soothing; but this was, by no means, the most agreeable financial feature in his case.
From the time that — to use his own phrase — he had sown those wild oats which had, in some way or other, occasioned his last excursion across the ocean to the present period, when it was likely that a second voyage would be the best remedy for the little contretemps which had occurred in his “third drawing-room,” he had never ceased adding to that small stock of private pocket-money, which he had begun to collect at his sociable whist-parties at Sydney. It is hardly fair, perhaps, to lift the veil of reserve by which he had ever kept the amount of this concealed, even from the wife of his bosom; but, as accident has made me acquainted with the amount thus collected, I am tempted to name it as a proof (useful may it prove to the unthrifty!) of what may be done by steady and persevering labour.
Mr. O’Donagough, then, at this time, stood possessed of a sum amounting to £12,899, of which his wife had no more knowledge than the man in the moon. And this, be it observed, was safely stowed and funded in the English stocks, so that it was exclusive of the contents of poor Mr. Ronaldson’s purse and pocket-book, which, however, amounted to very nearly a thousand more, and which now made the pleasant-feeling lining of his own coat-pocket. Assuredly, if ever man deserved the honourable title of a chevalier d’industrie, it was Mr. John William Patrick Allen O’Donagough, for never did he lose an opportunity of putting his time to profit, let it occur at what period of twenty-four hours it might. It may be thought, perhaps, that, in this statement of Mr. O’Donagough’s possessions, I have carelessly overlooked the very showy furniture of his handsome house in Curzon-street; but, in point of fact, I have been strictly accurate inasmuch as no single article of that furniture had been paid for, and consequently, in a statement so precise as the present, it could not properly have been brought to account.
Mr. O’Donagough was in the act of mentally running over precisely the same figures as I have been now laying before the reader, when the door of his library opened and his wife appeared. The interview, which was about to take place, would have been considerably more agreeable to the gentleman’s feelings, had he deemed it advisable, in stating to his lady the sudden necessity for breaking up his London establishment, to have indulged in the same imaginative species of narrative as that in which he had conveyed the same information to his daughter. But after a moment’s consideration, his admirable judgment decided him against attempting anything of the kind; for he felt that, in the first place, it would rob him of the advantage he might hope to obtain from the very acute faculties of his admirable wife; and secondly, those very acute faculties, now fully ripened into strong practical sharpness, would be exceedingly likely to detect what was purely inventive, and thereby render his explanation of no effect.
Determined, therefore, to be as candid in his exposition of facts as if he had been stating matters to his own conscience, he lost no time in circumlocution.
“Shut the door, wife,” he said, rather gravely, as Mrs. O’Donagough came in, and then added, rather in a lower key, “and you may as well bolt it, my dear, and then we shall not be interrupted.”
“Dear me, Mr. O’Donagough, how very foolish this is of you!” she replied, but obeyed his command however before she advanced into the room. “I know exactly, word for word, what you are going to say, as well as if you had spoken it every syllable already.”
“Do you, my dear?” said O’Donagough. “I doubt it!”
“Yes, I do. You are going to make a preachment as long as my arm about Patty’s marriage; and what good is it when the thing is done and over? I know very well that I would rather have had an English lord for her; but there’s no use fretting about it, and I will never forgive you as long as I live, if you refuse to give me down a good handsome sum of money out of you
r last night’s winnings to buy the dear creature’s wedding clothes. A good deal of it, I know, we may have on credit, but not all, nor anything like all. And, if you please, I want to set about it immediately.”
“I have not the least objection in the world, my dear,” replied Mr. O’Donagough; “and if you will be kind enough to hear what I was going to say — which has nothing whatever to do with Patty — you shall set out and buy the wedding clothes immediately after, if you like it.”
Mrs. O’Donagough was too reasonable a woman to ask for a fairer promise than this, and accordingly she placed herself in the chair that her daughter had just before occupied, and replied —
“Now, then, Donny!” with the most sweet-tempered smile in the world.
“It is rather an awkward thing, my dear, that I have got to mention to you, and if you were not the devilish clever woman that you are, I should never tell you of it at all. But if you will set your wit side by side with mine, I am not the least bit afraid but what we shall get through the business perfectly well, and do better, for what I know, than if it had never happened.” —
“And what has happened?” replied his wife, in an accent of considerable alarm.
“Why, first and foremost, that hideous old maid, Elizabeth Peters, hit off the truth last night as cleverly as if she had been the witch she looks like, and obligingly addressed me as Major Allen before Mrs. Stephenson, civilly requesting me to tell her why I had changed my name.”
Collected Works of Frances Trollope Page 330