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 University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/sevensonsofmammo01sala
 
 THE 
 
 SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON.
 
 THE 
 
 SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON 
 
 % $tor$- 
 
 BY 
 
 GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA, 
 
 AUTHOR OF "WILLIAM HOGARTH;" "DUTCH PICTURES;" "TWICE ROUND THE 
 CLOCK," &C, &C. 
 
 IN THREE VOLUMES, 
 VOL. I. 
 
 LONDON : 
 TINSLEY BUOTHEKS, 
 
 18, CATHERINE STREET, STRAND. 
 
 1862. 
 
 [The right of Translation is reserved.]
 
 LONDON : 
 BRADBURY AND EVANS, PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.
 
 8£3 
 
 v. 1 
 
 h 
 
 TO 
 
 EDMUND YATES, 
 
 IN MEMORY OF A VERY LONG AND CLOSE FRIENDSHIP, 
 
 WHICH 
 
 (as a rational alliance between two men who have 
 known each other, and worked together for 
 
 YEARS) 
 IS NOT LIKELY TO BE AFFECTED 
 
 BY ANY LITERARY JEALOUSIES, ANY LITERARY HATREDS, OR 
 ANY LITERARY CLIQUE WHATSOEVER, 
 
 €{iis fmk 
 
 IS MOST CORDIALLY AND SINCERELY DEDICATED.
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 A Book without a Preface has, ere now, been 
 likened to a Palace without a facade ; but I am 
 afraid that in too many instances the prefatory 
 observations which authors think themselves called 
 upon to make, more closely resemble that cum- 
 brous attic story added, by an after thought, to the 
 Mansion House, and which enabled the architect 
 to spoil an originally excellent edifice. As, however, 
 the postulate of excellence as regards this work may 
 be extremely questionable, I do not think that a 
 brief exordium is calculated to make it much better 
 or much worse. The only tribulation it has caused 
 me, has been in the endeavour to make it serve 
 some useful purpose. For, by this time, I should 
 imagine those who peruse novels must have grown 
 somewhat tired of being called " courteous readers" 
 — of being grinned and simpered at, and tickled, 
 and flattered, and cajoled by a person they never 
 saw, and whom most probably they do not care 
 to see. How do I know that the reader of these 
 lines is " courteous V He may be Ursa Major for 
 aught I can tell, and be grumbling and growling
 
 Vlll PREFACE. 
 
 fiercely because the tale does not finish to his 
 liking. Why should I endeavour to conciliate 
 some unknown reader, whose favour can do me no 
 good, and whose displeasure no harm? If the 
 public don't approve of the show, they need not 
 patronise it. There are other ways, thank Good- 
 ness, of getting a livelihood, besides dabbling in 
 literature. There are shoes to mend and stones 
 to crack; and, bearing this in mind, I can afford 
 to dispense with the deprecatory or complimentary 
 preface, and to brand it as useless and absurd. 
 
 I have something, however, to say ; and it could 
 not be said in a better place than this. The title of 
 "The Seven Sons of Mammon" may be regarded 
 by some persons as a misnomer, and others may 
 assume that I have failed in carrying out the plan 
 I originally proposed to myself. I beg to state, 
 that, in commencing the first chapter, I knew per- 
 fectly well what the last one was to be about; 
 and that I no more contemplated giving a dis- 
 tinct biography of each Son of Mammon than of 
 dancing on the tight rope and cooking an omelette 
 in medio. You see that, had each of the Seven 
 Sons an equal space apportioned to him, this 
 work had need to be in eighteen volumes instead 
 of three ; and I am afraid that the modern reading 
 public is not inclined to tolerate works of the 
 dimensions of the "Grand Cyrus," or even of 
 " Clarissa Harlowe." Whether there is to be
 
 PREFACE. IX 
 
 a sequel to what I have already given — whether 
 any more of Mammon or his Sons is to be heard 
 at a future period, must depend on the inclination 
 of the public. If they cry "Hold — enough!" 
 I shall stay my hand; if they are anxious for 
 additional particulars, they shall have them. 
 C'est a prendre ou a laisser. I have designed 
 my little Human Comedy on the model of an 
 American table d'hote, and the guests may drop 
 in as they choose, eat their fill, go away, or come 
 back again as the humour takes them. How 
 many incarnations, if you please, had Balzac's 
 Yautrin ? How many times, and in how many 
 novels, does Mr. Cooper's Natty Bumppo turn up; 
 and who would ever grow tired of the Marquis of 
 Steyne, were Mr. Thackeray to resuscitate him, 
 for the twentieth time, in his next fiction? You 
 may object that my characters are dull and stupid 
 and uninteresting. That is, again, a matter of 
 opinion. 
 
 With respect to the reception this novel may 
 meet with from professional critics, I am indif- 
 ferent. Of course, for my Publishers' sake, I 
 should wish it to be lauded to the skies ; but so 
 far as I am personally concerned, criticism, hostile 
 or amicable, is a matter of no moment whatso- 
 ever. Did I earn my bread by writing novels, 
 or did I look to booksellers for patronage, the 
 praise or the condemnation of a new work might
 
 X PREFACE. 
 
 make or break me; — were I young, or hopeful, 
 or ambitious, I might be overjoyed or driven to 
 despair by eulogy or blame. But I have reviewed 
 too many books in my time, and known too many 
 reviewers, to care much about such things. I have 
 found that slander has not diminished my income, 
 and that the lies that have been told about me 
 have not injured my digestion; and although it 
 is a very nice thing to be a popular author, and a 
 very terrible one to be castigated as a dullard and 
 an ignoramus by critics, I have come to be of the 
 opinion of Candide " qu'ilfaut cultiver sonjardin," 
 and that, so long as a man goes on cultivating his 
 cabbages in a quiet laborious manner, and earn- 
 ing his daily bread by the sweat of his brow, and 
 thanking God for it, he need not trouble himself in 
 any great degree about the applause or censure of 
 the world. Therefore, my intimate enemies, or 
 my inimical friends, if you feel inclined for the 
 attack, come on. Gentlemen of the Guard, fire 
 first. I have, myself, a faculty for sound hearty 
 abuse, and if you choose to brawl at me over the 
 hedge, I shall be very happy to look up from my 
 spade-husbandry, and return half a dozen good set 
 terms of invective for every six you may be pleased 
 to favour me with. 
 
 GEOKGE AUGUSTUS SALA. 
 
 Upion Court, Bucks, 
 
 December, 1861.
 
 CONTENTS, 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 WHAT CAME OUT OF A COURT IN THE CITY .... 1 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE TWENTY-SEVENTH OP DECEMBER 20 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 RETURN OP THE FIRST-BORN 42 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 LA DAME AU PREMIER 57 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 ON A FIELD, OR ; A CROSS, SABLE 94 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 "resurgam" I 16 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 MRS. ARMYTAGE IS AS MUCH AT HOME AS EVER . • . 136
 
 XU CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 SHEPHERD AND SHEEP 182 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 A LAY BROTHER 208 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 AN EXCEEDINGLY VULGAR PERSON 22G 
 
 CHAPTER XL 
 
 IN WHICH THE CURATE GOES TO LONDON .... 255 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 NO SCIENCE TO MR. SIMS IS A MYSTERY . . . 292
 
 THE SEVEN SONS OP MAMMON. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 WHAT CAME OUT OF A COURT IN THE CITY. 
 
 " Gold is a chimera/' I heard a man sing in 
 the opera of " Robert le Diable." Uor est une 
 chimre . Gold a chimera ! Is it ? Ask Sir 
 Jasper Goldthorpe. 
 
 He was the richest man on 'Change. The 
 richest man in the Bank Parlour. The richest 
 man in the East India Directory. The richest, 
 man at innumerable Boards, whose members sat 
 and coined money out of green baize. He was 
 the richest man in that Square full of palaces, 
 near to where stood an ugly monument that poor 
 rogues used to be suspended from, hard by the 
 Edgware Road. He was the richest man in the 
 county where he had his estate and his " place/'
 
 2 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 and of which lie was High Sheriff. When he 
 went down for a week to Brighton, his riches 
 awed the wealthiest stockbrokers and the grand- 
 est members of the fast decreasing class of 
 nabobs. And Rothschilds and Baring ? and the 
 Amsterdam Hopes ? and the Hamburgh Hemes ? 
 Pshaw ! Pshaw ! Sir Jasper Goldthorpe was 
 deemed to be richer than all these, for he was 
 alone on his throne of gold. He had no partners. 
 Mammon would not even let one of his sons 
 come into the firm. No shares were to be pur- 
 chased in the house of Goldthorpe and Co. The 
 Co. was a myth. Sir Jasper was the Co. — himself 
 and company. He had no fears that the Ant- 
 werp house would warn him against undue 
 speculations; that the Leghorn branch would 
 remonstrate if he drew too largely on them, or 
 the Frankfort firm give cause for remonstrance 
 by drawing too heavily on him. He stood alone. 
 His agents and correspondents were his obedient 
 and trembling slaves, and he the most generous 
 but the most exacting of taskmasters. There was 
 no trifling with Sir Jasper Goldthorpe. How 
 could one jest with a man who had so much 
 money? He had had rivals. Now and then
 
 WHAT CAME OUT OF A COURT IX THE CITY. 3 
 
 some gorged Hebrew capitalist of Paris or 
 Madrid would strive to shoulder his way past 
 him with bank-notes and bonds; but Sir Jasper 
 Goldthorpe, with icy English politeness, would 
 drop a couple of heavy golden ingots on the 
 capitalist's toes, and force him to retreat, howl- 
 ing and discomfited. Once or twice some lucky 
 speculator in Australian wool, some enriched 
 digger, some auriferous bubble-monger of rail- 
 way-shares and mining-schemes, would make a 
 dead set at Sir Jasper's supremacy, — would strive 
 to outvie him by taking a bigger house, giving 
 grander parties, purchasing more acres of park- 
 land, subscribing to more charities and packs of 
 hounds. Then Sir Jasper would smile his frigid 
 smile, step down to a little shooting-box, if it 
 were in autumn, or to the sea-side if in spring ; 
 pop away at the pheasants, or stroll about in a, 
 jacket and a slouched hat, as though he were 
 some miserable wretch of eight hundred pounds 
 a year ; and then, coming quietly back to town, 
 would manage somehow to crush his rivals. He 
 always crushed them. The Australian wool-spec- 
 ulator would spend some thousands in a con- 
 tested election — lose it; or gaining it, be un- 
 
 B 2
 
 4 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 seated for bribery, and be forced to retrench. 
 The diggers agents would fail, or he drink him- 
 self into a cerebral congestion. The bubble- 
 monger would burst and turn out a common 
 cheat. Alone, triumphant, and immovable, with- 
 out a wrinkle in his brow or a crease in his waist- 
 coat, would stand Sir Jasper Goldthorpe. At last 
 people gave up contending with him, and were 
 content to agree that he was a wonderful man. 
 
 His beginnings had been small enough. It 
 was rumoured that his father was but a small 
 tradesman in a country town. There were found 
 even those bold enough to whisper, "Bankrupt 
 in 'twenty -five; didn't pay twopence in the 
 pound/' — alluding to the paternal Goldthorpe, 
 Sir Jasper always spoke of his sire as " my excel- 
 lent and worthy father;" and you may be sure 
 that no word of detraction against his progenitor 
 was ever audible in his presence, or within a good 
 distance thereof. He had himself first made an 
 appearance in public with a company which cer- 
 tainly did not succeed after he left it, but which 
 realised tremendous profits while he was on the 
 direction. He had gone largely into government 
 contracts, and had been the special object of
 
 WHAT CAME OUT OF A COURT IN THE CITY. 5 
 
 several commissions of inquiry; but it always 
 turned out that it was somebody else, and not lie, 
 who was to be blamed for shoes that wouldn't go 
 on, and muskets that wouldn't go off; and com- 
 missioners, witnesses, and accountants were all 
 loud in their praises of Mr. Goldthorpe's — he was 
 Mr. Goldthorpe then — public spirit and unim- 
 peachable integrity. He had always been a pros- 
 perous man, with that wondrous Midas faculty 
 for turning everything which he touched into 
 gold ; but the termination of a particularly 
 searching committee, which had been moved for 
 in a series of vehement speeches by two Radical 
 members, and had very nearly been the means 
 of ejecting the Government of the day from 
 office, seemed the turning-point in his greater 
 fortune. How the man's riches swelled and 
 swelled after his contract rum had been de- 
 nounced as a fiery poison, and his contract rice 
 sneered at as the sweepings of the dock-ware- 
 houses ! He thenceforward devoted himself to 
 politics : one of the Radical members was regu- 
 larly coughed down for several sessions, and the 
 other, at the next general election, lost his seat, 
 and, more than suspected of debt, was compelled
 
 THE SEVEN SOXS OF MAMMON". 
 
 to fly to Brussels in Brabant. Mr. Hemp of the 
 Sheriff's Court makes proclamation of outlawry 
 against him with admirable regularity. After 
 this, naturally Mr. Goldthorpe gave up contracts 
 altogether. It was about this time that he made 
 such immense sums in the shipping line of busi- 
 ness. He had a fleet which sailed to the East 
 Indies, and a fleet which sailed to the West ; and 
 his Australian bullion dealings and speculations 
 in wool, copper, and tallow were prodigious. 
 With great meekness and condescension he con- 
 sented to serve the office of Sheriff in the metro- 
 polis. He might have been Alderman and Lord 
 Mayor, of course, had he so chosen; but these 
 latter dignities he declined. He got into Par- 
 liament ; his constituents, touched with gratitude 
 and reverence, it is to be supposed, for the im- 
 mense wealth he possessed, insisting on paying 
 his election expenses to the uttermost farthing. 
 When he was supposed to be worth about 
 a million of money, a committee of merchants 
 and bankers met at the London Tavern, and 
 boldly put down their hundreds and their 
 fifties for a testimonial, which — a chef-d'oeuvre 
 of the ateliers of Mr. Benson of Cornhill, and
 
 WHAT CAME OUT OF A COURT IN THE CITY. 7 
 
 forming a pleasing pyramidal composition in 
 burnished and frosted gold, including dolphins, 
 the Three Graces, emblematic figures of Peace 
 and Commerce, a nautilus-shell, an Egyptian 
 pyramid, and an Arab steed, — the malicious 
 described it as three race-cups hammered into 
 one — was presented to him at a grand banquet 
 held at the "Albion," Aldersgate Street. He 
 was master of the Mystery of Battleaxe-makers, 
 and gracefully presided over the patronage in the 
 gift of that wealthy company, in the shape of fat 
 livings in the Church, and presentations to the 
 Company's schools. He was great at Goldsmiths' 
 Hall; for if he didn't make actual plate and 
 jewellery, he made the raw material, gold, by 
 heaps : — which is far better. Soon after he 
 entered Parliament he was made a Baronet; — 
 'twas the least tribute that could be paid to his 
 transcendent merits and riches. He was received 
 with immense respect in the House of Commons, 
 and his opinions on financial questions, although 
 he scarcely ever spoke, were looked upon as in- 
 controvertible. The Chancellor of the Exchequer 
 was generally thought to be sure of another six 
 months' tenure of office if he could only be seen
 
 8 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 walking with Sir Jasper Goldthorpe on the river- 
 terrace. He was usually lucky enough to get 
 excused from committees ; it was known how rich 
 a man he was, and how much he had to do. 
 Had he not been so useful to the Government, 
 there is little doubt that, ere this history opens, 
 he would have been made a Peer. 
 
 The year 1847, and the succeeding year of 
 revolution and political turmoils, shook, as you 
 will remember, the commerce of the Continent to 
 its very centre, and some shocks of the universal 
 earthquake were felt even in the sound and stable 
 city of London. Many brave and ancient firms 
 utterly vanished. It was then, so the gossips 
 said, that Sir Jasper Goldthorpe made his famous 
 coup of purchasing, at about a third of their 
 value, the diamonds and other regalia of the 
 distressed and fugitive sovereigns of Europe. 
 When confidence was restored, and the reign of 
 legitimacy recommenced, diamonds were at a 
 premium again, and Sir Jasper Goldthorpe 
 realised. He had done with all his mercantile 
 speculations now, — had no longer large ventures 
 on the sea, or trains of obsequious shipping, and 
 colonial brokers at his heels. He dealt in Money,
 
 WHAT CAME OUT OF A COURT IX THE CITY. 9 
 
 and money alone. He turned money over, and 
 in the summersault it made itself into more 
 money. He crumpled a piece of paper and it 
 distilled drops of gold into his coffers. The more 
 bankrupt was a European state, or a South- 
 American republic, the richer became Sir Jasper 
 Goldthorpe. He purchased railways, but he did 
 not carry them out. He farmed mines and re- 
 venues, but he neither worked nor collected them. 
 They remained with him but a few days; but 
 every thing of which he took hold was a golden 
 orange, and he managed to squeeze it so long as 
 he held it. 
 
 In the year 1849 Sir Jasper Goldthorpe was 
 just fifty years of age. As Christmas came round, 
 he was good enough to remember, on returning 
 thanks for the proposal of his health at a grand feast 
 at Battleaxe-makeiV Hall, that he was born on the 
 twenty-seventh of December, Anno Domini seven- 
 teen hundred and ninety-nine. He said " Anno 
 Domini;" for though his words were few, they were 
 always sonorous, and had a rich metallic sound. 
 His admirers declared that they were worth their 
 weight in gold. The cheers at the announcement 
 of the date of his nativity were deafening. About
 
 10 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 Christmas time 1849, then, Sir Jasper Goldthorpe, 
 Bart., M.P., F.R.S. (he had contributed a wonder- 
 ful paper on the Greek drachma to the transac- 
 tions of the Royal Society, and was dignified 
 moreover with many more r initials than I care to 
 enumerate), was a hale fresh-coloured gentleman, 
 slightly corpulent, and with a very slight stoop in 
 his shoulders, but looking on the whole a model 
 of health and strength. He was not in the least 
 bald, — so rich a man could not afford to lose even 
 a hair, — and his locks, thin as they were, were 
 not even gray, but of a dull flaxen colour. " Tow 
 head" Sir Jasper had been opprobriously nick- 
 named by political opponents at election time. He 
 was quite cleanly shaven and very fresh-coloured. 
 His eyes were blue-gray, and mirrors of placidity 
 — that is,when you could get him to look at you ; 
 for Sir Jasper was short-sighted. He read with a 
 double eye-glass, and when he was not reading 
 usually bent his eyes downwards. He was a tall 
 man, and wore a white hat in winter. His hands 
 were very fat, smooth, and dimpled, his fingers 
 very short and thick at the tips. Much handling 
 of money had blunted them, perhaps. A black 
 frock-coat, gray trousers, the invariable buff waist-
 
 WHAT CAME OUT OF A COURT IN THE CITY. 11 
 
 coat already mentioned, the double eye-glass, a 
 plain black necktie, a very high skirt-collar, of 
 the old tape-tied kind, not buttoned ; no rings or 
 trinkets of any kind. Imagine the form I have 
 described so attired, and you will have a definite 
 notion of Sir Jasper Goldthorpe. He came down 
 to the Office every morning with unvarying punc- 
 tuality (save during the vacations he methodically 
 allowed himself) at ten o' clock. He always came 
 down in his carriage — a double-bodied, high-hung, 
 twc-hundred-guinea-pair-of-horses one. He would 
 as soon have thought of riding in a brougham at 
 the east end as of paying nineteen shillings in 
 the pound. At his villas and palaces he had 
 plenty of broughams, and phaetons, and curricles, 
 and things ; and in the country he did not disdain 
 to ride on a shaggy little pony, or to drive a tiny 
 wicker-work carriage, like a clothes-basket upon 
 wheels ; but between Temple Bar and Eastcheap 
 the carriage was part of his state and the hand- 
 maiden to his riches. But though he would not 
 ride eastward in a brougham, it was touching to 
 mark the humility with which this very rich man 
 would hire a common, lowly, four-wheeled cab for 
 conveyance to public meetings or railway-stations.
 
 12 THE SEVEN SONS OP MAMMON. 
 
 Those who knew how rich he was said he looked 
 ten times richer, meekly sitting on the shabby- 
 cushions of the four-wheeler, with his bundle of 
 papers — contracts for the new loan perhaps — or 
 his little locked travelling bag beside him. He 
 was fond, too, of walking ; and, with his umbrella 
 in one hand and his buckskin gloves (which he 
 never wore) in the other, might often be seen 
 peacefully strolling towards the Royal Exchange, 
 the Bank, or the India House, quite unmoved, 
 apparently, by the rush and turmoil of the Poul- 
 try, Cornhill, or Leadenhall Street. He was 
 never in a hurry; you might see him serenely 
 gazing in at the windows of the bullion-dealers 
 and jewellers, or blandly contemplating the fire- 
 proof safes and cash-boxes at ChubVs, as though 
 time was no object to him; although you knew 
 that hundreds of people were at that moment 
 anxiously waiting to see him, and hungering for 
 one of his golden smiles. What need had he 
 to be in a hurry? He knew that he, being so 
 rich, would be waited for; and yet Sir Jasper 
 Goldthorpe was proverbial for punctuality, 
 and in most cases, where any matters of 
 business were concerned, contrived to be a
 
 WHAT CAME OUT OF A COURT IN THE CITY. 13 
 
 little beforehand with those he had transactions 
 with. 
 
 "Who knows Beryl Court? It lies between 
 Temple Bar and Eastcheap, as aforesaid. Need I 
 be more explicit? Well, it is not a hundred 
 yards from St. Mary Axe. I daren't say more, 
 for fear of compromising people. The street from 
 which Beryl Court leads is very narrow, and very 
 poor, and very dirty; and although it is the 
 centre of a hive of wealth and industry, of lordly 
 counting-houses, board-rooms, and wholesale 
 groceries, is given up to the meanest description 
 of commerce. Petty little huckster and chandler's 
 shops nestle under the wing of the merchant 
 princes'' iron safes, crammed with gold and notes. 
 One side of the street may, however, for all its 
 dirt and squalor, be secretly wealthy; for it is 
 almost exclusively occupied by the unwindowed 
 shops of Jew-dealers in oranges, grapes, and 
 almonds, the which spread a very pleasant odour 
 in Beryl Court. It would be pleasanter, perhaps, 
 were it not mingled with the smell of fried fish 
 and strongly-pickled vegetables, retailed in the 
 few little stalls forming the exception to the rule 
 of fruit-selling. The Caucasian proprietors of
 
 14 THE SEVEN SOXS OP MAMMON. 
 
 these establishments are dirty and wretched- 
 looking from Sunday to Friday night ; but on 
 Saturdays they are splendid in brave garments 
 and rich gems. They all had the most intense 
 respect for Sir Jasper Goldthorpe and Sir Jasper 
 Goldthorpe , s carriage ; and their little black-eyed 
 chaffering children sometimes penetrated into 
 Beryl Court, and peered admiringly at the Palace 
 of Gold erected there. 
 
 For it was a palace; a marble-fronted house, 
 with wings forming three parts of a square ; the 
 fourth a red brick wall, with a porter's lodge in 
 one corner. The court itself beautifully flagged 
 with gray and white stone in chequers; and in 
 the centre a pretty fountain, where a little boy 
 with nothing on him spouted water from a conch- 
 shell all day long. The stream jseemed to be 
 murmuring odes in praise of riches. The windows 
 were all plate-glass, the wire-gauze blinds had 
 golden headings; over the door was sculptured 
 the Goldthorpe family cognizance, — three martlets 
 on a field or; the bloody hand of its proper 
 blazon ; motto, Ex sudor e, aurum, the whole em- 
 blazoned on a richly -framed marble escutcheon. 
 On the well-polished mahogany door glittered the
 
 WHAT CAME OUT OP A COURT IN THE CITY. 15 
 
 brass-plate of the firm " Goldtliorpe and Co." — a 
 plate burnished much brighter than gold. The 
 architecture of Beryl Court, exteriorly, was en- 
 tirely Italian Renaissance, and had been com- 
 manded by Sir Jasper, — in a letter of four lines 
 to his architect, — just after he achieved his 
 baronetcy. But his decorative fancy was an odd 
 one ; for, inside, the house was at least a hundred 
 and fifty years old. Some South- Sea director 
 had lived here in the reign of George I. ; and 
 there was a vast staircase painted with the story 
 of the Golden Fleece, and a pagan apotheosis 
 sprawled on the ceiling of almost every room. 
 The staircase, up which you might have driven a 
 coach-and-four, was of polished oak, with richly 
 carved balustrades, and its stairs were laid with 
 an oil-cloth painted in imitation of tiger's skin. 
 All the rooms were panelled, with enriched 
 marble mantelpieces and curiously inlaid floors ; 
 but all this work was of the old time of the 
 South- Sea director. No gas was permitted in 
 Beryl Court. The numerous staff of clerks 
 worked in winter time by the light of dumpy wax 
 candles. The balance of the petty cash account 
 exceeded the salary of a county court judge. The
 
 16 THE SEVEN SONS OP MAMMON. 
 
 heads of departments had Turkey carpets laid in 
 their rooms, rosewood escritoires to write upon, 
 morocco-covered easy-chairs to sit upon. Silent 
 and civil messengers glided in and out on their 
 behests. Lunch was brought to them when they 
 asked. Were those repasts charged in the petty 
 cash, I wonder ? Broughams came for many of 
 the superior clerks when office-hours were over. 
 Perhaps it was for that reason that Sir Jasper 
 Goldthorpe repudiated, while in the City, the 
 vehicles just spoken of. Everybody employed by 
 the firm, from the heads of departments to the 
 youngest office-boy, was paid so highly that em- 
 bezzlement was unheard of. A young man's 
 fortune was thought to be made if he could only 
 be got into Goldthorpe's house, although there 
 was not the remotest chance of his ever obtaining 
 a partnership therein ; and parents and guardians 
 used to intrigue for years to obtain junior clerk- 
 ships for their sons and wards, just as they 
 would intrigue for Indian cadetships or commis- 
 sions in the Guards. 
 
 What did all these chiefs of departments, clerks, 
 messengers, and office-boys do from nine in the 
 morning until live at night? None but those
 
 WHAT CAME OUT OF A COURT IN THE CITY. 17 
 
 employed by the firm could tell. They wrote, 
 wrote, and wrote: took letters off files and put 
 them on others ; consulted huge vellum-covered 
 volumes, and made entries in other tomes simi- 
 larly bound, perpetually ; but what they did was 
 a mystery. There was no faint odour about, of 
 samples of rice, indigo, coffee, sugar, opium, as in 
 merchants' and brokers' offices. No sea-captains 
 showed their bronzed faces in the counting-house. 
 No actual cash was ever seen ; but nobody had 
 the least doubt that the one great subject of work 
 at Goldthorpe's was Money. All day long a 
 stream of junior clerks with pocket-books secured 
 by leather-covered chains wound round their 
 waists, would drop Bills for Acceptance into the 
 great letter-box by the brass-plate in Beryl Court; 
 and all day long a counter-stream of Goldthorpian 
 messengers would issue from Beryl Court, and- 
 from their leather chain-secured pocket-books 
 drop Bills for Acceptance in other letter-boxes all 
 over the City. 
 
 Sir Jasper's room was the plainest in the entire 
 
 establishment. It was papered a sober drab, and 
 
 matted ; but it was a very Ear of Dionysius for 
 
 gutta-percha tubing and ivory mouth-pieces. 
 
 vol. i. c
 
 18 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 Nearly one side of the room was taken up by a 
 huge iron safe, which, with its many locks and 
 knobs and handles, looked like a monument to 
 Mammon. 
 
 Add to Beryl Court the palace in Onyx Square, 
 with its picture-gallery, its grand ball-room, and 
 its belvedere, towering above the neighbouring 
 mansions, sumptuous and superb. Add to these 
 the princely domain of Goldthorpe in Surrey, 
 with its deer-park and its home-park, its Vitru- 
 vian palazzo, its conservatories, graperies, pineries, 
 kennels, model-dairies, lawns, terraces, mazes, 
 grottoes and temples : — its stables and coach- 
 houses, its pavilions and lodges. Add to these a 
 fine house at Kemp Town, Brighton, and the 
 little shooting-box I have already glanced at. 
 Surely it needs no more to convince you that Sir 
 Jasper Goldthorpe was a power in the state and a 
 Prince in the land. 
 
 So gold is a chimera, is it ? Ah, my romantic 
 friends, you little know what a reality gold is. 
 See what it had given this fortunate man. 
 Power and influence, respect, adulation, wor- 
 ship almost. Houses and parks and palaces, 
 carriages and horses and hounds; a red hand
 
 WHAT CAME OUT OF A COURT ENf THE CITY. 19 
 
 in his escutcheon, a handle to his name, a 
 seat in the Parliament of the country, a peerage 
 in prospect; — and Gold, nothing but gold, had 
 done it all.
 
 20 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE TWENTY-SEVENTH OF DECEMBER. 
 
 "And if ever," exclaimed Lady Goldthorpe, 
 puffing with over- exertion, — " if ever I try to get 
 a Christmas-tree into a clarence again, I'm a 
 Dutchman, — that's to say, a Dutchwoman, — 
 that's all." 
 
 Lady Goldthorpe was stout in figure and 
 mature in years, and might be excused for puffing. 
 Moreover, although it was a very cold winter's 
 day, Lady Goldthorpe had on a very thick dress 
 of black velvet, beneath which was revealed an 
 underskirt of quilted silk ; and a long seal-skin 
 mantle trailed from her broad shoulders, and a 
 crimson silk scarf was tied round her comfortable 
 chin, and purple plush gloves defended her hands, 
 and goloshes covered her feet, and a bonnet of 
 velvet and lace sat closely to her round jovial- 
 looking face ; and there were plenty of rugs and 
 shawls and mufflers about her in the carriage where 
 she sat, and a muff of rich fur bolstered her up on
 
 THE TWENTY-SEVENTH OF DECEMBER. 21 
 
 one side, and a very fat shaggy Skye terrier on 
 the other. The very gold chain she wore round 
 her neck was heavy enough to make her warm ; 
 and as Lady Goldthorpe's clarence — she had taken 
 out the clarence that day — was cosily lined and 
 padded and cushioned, and had elastic stuffed 
 cushions and a fleecy rug at the bottom, it would 
 not, I think, have been a thing to be wondered 
 at if Lady^ Goldthorpe had puffed even without 
 excessive exertion. 
 
 But there was that Christmas-tree into the 
 bargain. Now you may get almost anything — 
 some people say everything — into a carpet-bag ; 
 but I much doubt whether, under any circum- 
 stances, a Christmas-tree can be comfortably 
 stowed away in the carriage called a clarence. It 
 isn't within the laws of nature or the fitness of 
 things. A flower-pot is bad enough; a vivarium 
 can with difficulty be conveyed in a hackney- 
 coach ; but a Christmas-tree, never ! Not that 
 this adjunct, which we have borrowed from the 
 German Vaterland to make our Christmas festi- 
 vals merrier, was of the largest size. 'Twas but a 
 poor little sapling evergreen, a supplementary 
 tree, designed to act as satellite to the monarchs
 
 22 THE SEVEN SONS OP MAMMON. 
 
 of the forest in Lady Goldthorpe , s saloons. Her 
 ladyship always had half a dozen trees at Christ- 
 mas. But one had caught fire from the premature 
 illumination by infantine hands of the waxen 
 tapers among its branches the night before, and 
 had not only been consumed to its roots, but had 
 very near burned the belvedered palace in Onyx 
 Square along with it. The twenty-seventh of 
 December was the day on which it was Lady 
 Goldthorpe's immemorial custom to have all her 
 trees in full bloom. It was essential to repair at 
 once the loss of the burnt-up arbuste; and so 
 Lady Goldthorpe had ordered the clarence, and 
 driven down to Fortnum and Mason's to buy an 
 additional tree, ready-hung with toys, and fit to 
 be lighted up instanter. 
 
 The tree was duly purchased — that was a very 
 easy matter ; but the difficulty was to get it into 
 the carriage, for Lady Goldthorpe was an impul- 
 sive lady and a determined one ; and when she 
 could have her own way — which she generally 
 had — liked to have it. She had said she would 
 carry home the tree with her, and, notwithstand- 
 ing the apparently insurmountable impediments 
 to the accomplishment of her design, she insisted
 
 THE TWENTY-SEVENTH OF DECEMBER. 23 
 
 upon its being carried out. First her embroi- 
 dered, buttoned, and striped foot-page tried, but 
 lamentably failed in the attempt ; and, uuder the 
 humiliating threat of having his ears boxed — a 
 menace rendered still more galliog by its being- 
 proffered in the presence of a momentarily in- 
 creasing circle of street-boys, who looked at the 
 whole affair with the liveliest interest — he retired 
 to the coach-box and snivelled : whereupon he 
 was called by the coachman, in a wheezy under- 
 tone, a li young warmint/' The domestic who 
 drove Lady Goldthorpe's clarence was so fat, so 
 warmly clad and wrapped up, and had so broad and 
 jovial a countenance, that he might have passed 
 for a poor relation of her ladyship's, whom the 
 inexorable logic of necessity compelled to hold the 
 reins, but who, off the box, was a Goldthorpe and 
 a brother. 
 
 One of Messrs. Fortnum and Mason's young 
 gentlemen — I dare not term them young men — 
 having likewise done his best, and been stigma- 
 tised as an idiot for his pains, at which he blushed, 
 smiled, rubbed his hands — as was seemly in the 
 presence of a lady-customer who ran such heavy 
 bills, and, what is more, paid them with unvarying
 
 24 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 regularity — Lady Goldthorpe took the refractory 
 tree (which wasn't more than a foot and a half 
 high) in hand herself. But the tree was as obsti- 
 nate as her ladyship. It wouldn't stand up, or lie 
 down, or lean against the side of the carriage. It 
 would protrude its branches either from one 
 window or the other. Once it fell a-top of the fat 
 terrier, irritating with its twigs that animal's nose, 
 and causing him to yelp piteously; and at last 
 Lady Goldthorpe's unsuccessful struggles with 
 the mutinous fragment of vegetation gave rise to 
 the exclamation recorded at the commencement of 
 this chapter. 
 
 " Drat the tree ! " the lady cried out, in 
 increasing exasperation. tl There's two drums off, 
 and a banjo, and a flying Cupid, and a sugarstuff 
 parrot. Now will you, then, obstinate." 
 
 She gave a vigorous pull and a wrench at the 
 recalcitrant tree. The last appeal seemed to have 
 touched its obdurate heart, and by dint of more 
 coaxing and a little propping up with the muff 
 and a couple of shawls, it gradually consented to 
 assume an erect and stationary position. 
 
 " Home ! " cried Lady Goldthorpe to the page, 
 who jumped down as Messrs. "Fortnum and
 
 THE TWENTY-SEVENTH OF DECEMBER. 25 
 
 Mason's young gentleman telegraphed to him 
 that peace was restored. The little street-boys 
 gave a cheer, — "why they scarcely knew, only, as 
 a reflective young butcher observed, "the old 
 an," meaning her ladyship, looked "such a jolly 
 party ;" the young gentleman who had been 
 called an idiot retired into the emporium of 
 Christmas and colonial luxuries to which he was 
 attached, and indulged in comments with his 
 comrades on Lady Goldthorpe's hasty temper, 
 and on the munificent Christmas boxes she 
 always distributed ; and away drove the clarence, 
 with its two showy horses, in the direction of 
 Park Lane, the toy-laden branches of the Christ- 
 mas-tree bobbing round Lady Goldthorpe's jovial 
 face, until she looked like a fat Fair Rosamond in 
 an ambulatory bower. 
 
 " Thank goodness for all things/' said the wife 
 of the Prince of Beryl Court. There couldn't be 
 two Lady Goldthorpes, you know, — the scheme of 
 the universe couldn't stand it. " Thank good- 
 ness," her ladyship repeated, when she had 
 recovered her breath and her usual equanimity of 
 temper, " one of my troubles is over. Not that 
 I've any thanks to give you, Magdalen Hill,"
 
 26 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 she continued, " sitting quiet and cool there like 
 a stuck pig, and me breaking my heart over the 
 thing, and the mother of Seven Children, all 
 boys, too." 
 
 Yes ; Lady Goldthorpe had the number of chil- 
 dren she alluded to : and there were Seven Sons 
 to the Mammon of Beryl Court. 
 
 " I can't see, mamma/ 1 answered a calm quiet 
 voice on the other side of her ladyship, "that 
 seven children have anything to do with your 
 trouble. Was the Christmas-tree an eighth 
 one ? " 
 
 " Then why didn't you help me, Miss Icicle ? " 
 
 " I knew I couldn't be of any use. You know 
 how weak and awkward I am. And besides, I 
 thought that you would desist, aod allow the 
 people at the shop to do that which they should 
 have done in the first instance : — send the thing 
 home." 
 
 "Ah, I dare say," grumbled, but not ill- 
 humouredly, the mother of seven children. " It's 
 always the same : — weak and awkward. You're 
 not weak and awkward when you're playing the 
 harp or the pianoforte like an angel, or painting 
 saints with gold cheese-plates round their heads,
 
 THE TWENTY-SEVENTH OF DECEMBER. 27 
 
 and their toes turned in : — poor deluded creeturs. 
 You're not weak and awkward when you're 
 writing letters five pages long, let alone the 
 crossing, to somebody in India, are you ? w 
 
 A faint blush rose on the pale face, and a 
 fainter smile played on the firm lips of Lady 
 Goldthorpe's companion. 
 
 "What companion ? Muffs don't blush, at least 
 not inanimate ones ; and Skye terriers, although 
 they sometimes grin and snarl, seldom smile. 
 TVho was Lady Goldthorpe's companion, occupy- 
 ing, indeed, the remaining back seat of the 
 carriage, the dog sitting in conscious majesty 
 between ? 
 
 Why, Magdalen Hill, to be sure. And who 
 was Magdalen Hill ? A very few words will 
 suffice to introduce her to you. She was very 
 tall, and very slender, and had an odd prejudice 
 against wearing crinoline, which, if you will carry 
 your remembrance back, began to show itself in 
 England as a French importation about ten years 
 ago.* She had very large gray eyes, veiled with 
 
 * Lest the author should be accused of an anachronism, he begs 
 to refer his readers to a comic publication called the Man in the 
 Moon, which may be consulted in the reading-room of the British 
 Museum, and in Volume II. (under the date of 1847) of which
 
 28 THE SEVEN SONS OP MAMMON. 
 
 very long lashes, and which had a fixed and stern 
 and not very pleasant expression. Her lips were, 
 as I have hinted, firmly cut — " chiselled " is I 
 believe the proper term — and when she opened 
 them very bitter words issued occasionally from 
 between them and her white teeth. Her feet — 
 what do I know about a lady's feet ? and what 
 gross dullards are those, who, looking on Woman, 
 cast down their eyes to the earth she walks upon, 
 nstead of looking upward to the Heaven in 
 her face ! "Well, her feet. They were hidden, as 
 a lady's feet should almost ever be ; and she 
 never danced, and he who describes her never met 
 her on a wet day. She had very long white 
 hands, and I can assure you that her fingers were 
 not tapering ; for albeit their hue was exquisite, 
 long practice on the pianoforte, on which she was 
 an accomplished performer, had given somewhat 
 of a muscular character to her digits, and to the 
 nerves and muscles that belonged to them. Her 
 hair — yes, her hair, how well that is remembered ! 
 — was raven black, was glossy, worn in two plain 
 
 work lie will find this paragraph : "All the cah-horses in Paris are 
 said to have lost their tails in consequence of the demand for 
 crinoline."
 
 THE TWENTY-SEVENTH OF DECEMBER. 29 
 
 bandeaux. I spoke of her pale face. It was pale 
 almost to the pallor of Death. You know the 
 pallor I mean — the first camellia-like waxiness of 
 the mortal that has put on immortality, not the 
 dreadful hues of after days. 
 
 Such was Magdalen Hill. She dressed habit- 
 ually in that which Chief-Justice Hale advised his 
 children to dress in, "sad colour" — grays and 
 fawns, and lilacs and blacks, relieved by lighter 
 rays. She wore high-necked dresses, always ; 
 and for all ornament carried a plain cross of dead 
 gold at her throat. And she seemed one of those 
 women who look neither happy nor unhappy, 
 despairing nor resigned, quick nor slow, clever 
 nor stupid ; but who are ready and able for any- 
 thing — to run away with you, or to go into a 
 convent and wear spiked girdles, and scourge 
 themselves thrice a day; to be the idol of a 
 Parisian salon, or to teach a Sunday-school full of 
 clod-hopping children; to say spontaneously, "I 
 love you," or to a fervent protestation of love to 
 answer, " Sir, I don't understand you; " to go to 
 the end of the world for an idea, or to go home to 
 their mothers, to bear blows, ill-usage, coarse 
 language, — anything but infidelity; or to take
 
 30 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 offence at the omission of a finger-napkin at 
 dinner, and serve yon with a citation in the 
 Divorce Court for cruelty because you have 
 taken them to the Opera in a cab instead of a 
 brougham. "Who has not known these fathomless 
 inscrutable women; looked upon those eyes, 
 whose glance would either beam out a message of 
 happiness to you, or turning towards the execu- 
 tioner send you to the block, and yet do neither; 
 but behave always in conformity with les parfaites 
 convenances ! Such was Magdalen Hill, with her 
 eyes, and her lips, and her long demure but cruel 
 hands, and her set phrases, and her sarcastic 
 parentheses, and the great mystery of Heart and 
 Soul within her, which would have baffled you, 
 La Bruyere, in all your skill in character, and 
 you, John W T ilkes, with all your boast of subduing 
 the untractable fair. And of such there are 
 thousands, who are born to be riddles and para- 
 doxes, and the despair of passionate men. 
 
 Magdalen Hill was an orphan. Her father had 
 been a colonial judge, and had died of the yellow 
 fever just at the time when he had laid by enough 
 money to give a dowry to his little daughter, then 
 at boarding-school, a mere child, in England.
 
 THE TWENTY- SEVENTH OF DECEMBER. 31 
 
 Magdalen was not a favourite at school. She 
 never played, never got into disgrace, never did 
 anything that her governesses had to forgive her 
 for, and love her more for the atonement of her 
 fault. She was always calm, equable, — not silent, 
 but incomprehensible. 
 
 " Upon my word," said, in despair, Miss ^lira- 
 belle, the duenna of Selina House, Brixton, ""if 
 Miss Hill had not had sixt} T thousand pounds to 
 her fortune, I do believe that the best thing that 
 could have happened to her would have been to 
 be an articled pupil, and turn out a 'trotting 
 governess ; ' " by which appellation was meant, I 
 believe, those unhappy females who, collected and 
 resigned, go out daily in rain, or sleet or snow, to 
 give lessons in middle class families, and are 
 spoken of by the servant who opens the door as 
 "that young pussonwho comes at twelve, and 
 will not wipe her feet." Poor wearied creature, 
 with an English lady's soul within you, how much 
 mud have you carried away from rich men's 
 houses, when you should have shaken off the dust 
 of your feet on the scraper i 
 
 But Magdalen Hill had sixty thousand pounds 
 to her fortune. She was a rich little girl and a
 
 32 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 rich young woman. Sir Jasper Goldthorpe had 
 been her guardian. Her holidays had been spent 
 in his family. After she came of age, — for she 
 was now twenty-two, — his house became her 
 home. And, as we have seen, she called good old 
 Lady Goldthorpe her " mamma/' 
 
 I come back to the blush and the smile — both 
 faint — awakened by the good-natured taunt that 
 she was neither weak nor awkward when she 
 wrote those voluminous epistles to " somebody in 
 India." 
 
 "You know that he is coming home, mamma," 
 she said, laying her hand on her companion's 
 arm, and in a voice that would have been soft and 
 kindly, had there not been, as in an old harpsi- 
 chord, a string broken somewhere. 
 
 " Yes, my darling Maggie, my own good 
 girl," the wife of the British baronet responded, 
 " I know it well. He has promised, he has 
 tried ; he will, I'm sure, if human will can pre- 
 vail. He knows that the twenty-seventh of 
 December is his father's birthday. He knows 
 that he is my own dear son, which I bore 
 him in travail and in sorrow twenty-seven years 
 ago, when we were poor, Magdalen Hill — when 
 
 i
 
 THE TWENTY-SEVENTH OF DECEMBER. 33 
 
 we were poor, when my Goldy wasn't the great man 
 he is now ; when Goldy "walked ten miles over the 
 snow to fetch a doctor, and the good gentleman 
 said that I bore up more bravely than mortal 
 woman ever did, and — Heaven bless him for it — 
 left half a sovereign on the mantelpiece of his own 
 gentleman's money, and hid the guinea fee my 
 husband had scraped together sixpence by sixpence 
 at the very back of the Bible on the chest of 
 drawers. I know that my son will come home 
 from the far East Indies. I know he will. He has 
 timed his time ; and if wind and weather don't stop 
 him, he'll be here to-night. He was born in '23. 
 He got his cadetship in MO, and Goldy thought it 
 a good catch ; although I'm sure, situated as he 
 now is, he'd make my youngest boy Emperor of 
 Kooshia. My son Hugh will be back to-night, 
 and you know what he's coming for. He's a 
 captain in the army. He's coming back, not 
 alone to see his father and mother and brothers, 
 but he's coming home to marry you, Magdalen 
 Hill, which he fell in love with you five years 
 back, when he was home on leave ; and I know, 
 for all your face that frightens me, that you love 
 him, and that he loves you ; and though I am but 
 
 VOL. I. D
 
 Si THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 a poor woman "which was ill brought up, and 
 wasn't always so, I love my son and daughter 
 which is to be, and I've had seven children, all 
 boys." 
 
 It was a very indecorous thing to do at Gros- 
 venor Gate, Park Lane ; but it is none the less 
 true that Lady Goldthorpe, the mother of seven 
 children, all boys, and the wife of the richest man 
 in the City of London, did, there and then, and 
 within the very shadow of Grosvenor Gate, and in 
 her own clarence, throw her arms about the neck 
 of her companion, and vehemently kiss her. Who 
 let her kiss, and returned the embrace. 
 
 " I'm sure," the good lady remarked, affection- 
 ately smoothing the dark bands of Magdalen 
 Hill, which had become slightly disarranged, 
 " that we've all got our troubles, even to the rich- 
 est of us. It was years, my dear, before I could 
 receive company without trembling all over, or 
 give an evening party without wishing that I might 
 sink through the drawing-room carpet. When I 
 married my Goldy, I hadn't an h in my alphabet," 
 — in making this confession Lady Goldthorpe very 
 nearly succeeded in putting an li to the alphabet 
 she mentioned, — "and now every thing's pros-
 
 THE TWENTY-SEVENTH OF DECEMBER. 35 
 
 pered with us. I'm sure that the very potato- 
 peelings seemed to turn to gold in Goldy's hands ; 
 and you're going to marry Hugh, and I'm the 
 happy mother of seven children." 
 
 Yes ; the Goldthorpe quiver was furnished with 
 that number of arrows. Let us mark off, one by 
 one, the Seven Sons of Mammon. 
 
 First came Hugh Jasper Goldthorpe. His first 
 name from a godfather, Mr. Hugh Desborough, 
 who during Sir Jasper's early career had been 
 intimately connected with him in friendship and 
 in business. Hugh was twenty-six years of 
 age. He was but a captain in a regiment of 
 native infantry in the service of the East India 
 Company; but he had held important staff ap- 
 pointments, had been resident and political agent 
 at the court of more than one native prince, and 
 had obtained great renown during the last cam- 
 paign against the Sikhs as the commander of that 
 famous corps of indigenous troopers, the Daglish- 
 wallah Irregular Cavalry. 
 
 Second came Ernest, born in the year 'twenty- 
 four, and consequently that number of years old 
 at the commencement of this history. Ernest 
 had early manifested a serious and studious dis-
 
 36 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 position; had passed with great distinction through 
 Rugby school; gained high honours at Cam- 
 bridge ; took holy orders ; and had been recently 
 inducted into the rectory of Swordsley, worth a 
 good nine hundred per annum, one of the com- 
 fortable benefices in the gift of the Battleaxe- 
 makers' Company. 
 
 The third son, "William, who was now twenty- 
 three, had chosen, like his eldest brother, the 
 army for his profession ; but the times being very 
 different with his papa to those in which he had 
 been glad to obtain a humble cadetship for his 
 firstborn, a commission in a crack cavalry regi- 
 ment had been purchased for him, and he was 
 now a lieutenant in the 19th Hussars. 
 
 The fourth Son of Mammon, Henry, was at 
 sea. He had entered a line-of-battle ship as 
 naval cadet, and having served his time as mid- 
 shipman, and passed his examination with much 
 eclat, was now a mate, awaiting his lieutenant's 
 commission on board the Magnanimous, ninety- 
 one gun ship, at Malta. 
 
 George, the fifth son, aged nineteen, was an 
 undergraduate at Oxford, and was destined for 
 the bar; his mother haying the firmest persuasion
 
 THE TWENTY- SEVENTH OF DECEMBER. 37 
 
 that Sir Jasper Goldthorpe had only to say the 
 word to have her George made Lord-Chancellor 
 the moment after he had donned his wig and 
 gown. 
 
 Charles, the sixth son, was scarcely eighteen, 
 but he was already installed in a clerkship in the 
 Foreign Office ; and Sir Jasper's great friend, the 
 Earl of Mount Olympus, had promised Charles 
 the very first foreign attacheship — at a nice 
 court where there was plenty of good society 
 and a healthy climate — that should become avail- 
 able. 
 
 Alfred, the seventh son, and who at Christmas 
 1849 was nearly eleven years of age, was a boy at 
 school at Eton, where he had much more pocket- 
 money, and had very nearly as much respect paid 
 to him as though he had been a little Duke. 
 Having a taste for history and a turn for recita- 
 tion, his career was destined to be " politics/' by 
 which Lady Goldthorpe understood that her 
 youngest son was to be made Prime Minister of 
 England so soon as he arrived at years of dis- 
 cretion. 
 
 At the grand Christmas party given in Onyx 
 Square on the twenty-seventh of December, in
 
 OS THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 honour of the double event, — the joyful season 
 and the birthday of Sir Jasper Goldthorpe, — five 
 of the seven Sons of Mammon were present. 
 The Reverend Ernest Goldthorpe, who was pale 
 and demure, and wore a high black silk waistcoat 
 that met his bow-less white neckcloth, came and 
 talked church decoration and illuminated litera- 
 ture with Magdalen Hill. Lieutenant William, 
 of the 19th Hussars, danced and flirted and 
 supped copiously, and was admired — chiefly for 
 his moustaches and his impertinence — by all the 
 young ladies present, and was positively idolised 
 by the said young ladies' mammas. George, the 
 fifth arrow in the auriferous quiver, was there 
 from Oxford. Charles, the sixth, the most lan- 
 guid of bureaucratic dandies, was there from the 
 Foreign Office. Alfred, the seventh, was there 
 from Eton ; and although he declined dancing, on 
 the ground that it was " so precious slow," made 
 ample amends for his inactivity by energetic 
 attacks on the sweet things and the champagne 
 at supper-time. 
 
 It was a juvenile party as well as an evening 
 one. Good-natured Lady Goldthorpe loved to 
 have other people's children besides her own
 
 THE TWENTY-SEVENTH OF DECEMBER. 39 
 
 around her at Christmas time. A bright band 
 of children overran the gorgeous saloons, and 
 mingled with the throng of grown-up fashionables 
 and celebrities, who were but too glad to pay 
 their court at Onyx House and to its potent 
 master. Many pages would be needed to de- 
 scribe that distinguished company, or even to 
 enumerate their names and dignities. There 
 were peers and peeresses, numerous foreigners 
 of rank and celebrity, immensely rich bald- 
 headed old gentlemen, belonging mostly to 
 Banks and Boards, from the City; marriageable 
 young ladies, marriage-making old ladies, and 
 unmarriageable middle-aged ladies. There were 
 members of parliament, barristers, doctors, 
 wealthy solicitors, proctors from Doctors' Com- 
 mons, wild slips of college-lads, friends of Willy 
 Goldthorpe, Eton boys, young ladies from board- 
 ing-school, and a sprinkling even of artists and 
 literary men ; for Sir Jasper Goldthorpe liked to 
 be well with all classes, and by his bounty golden 
 rays were cast into the humblest homes. Amidst 
 this varied, glittering, rejoicing throng, the 
 Great Millionnaire glided about bland, serene, 
 and silent. Nobody found fault with him for
 
 40 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 his taciturnity. It was sufficient to look upon 
 him, to talk about his wealth in whispers, on 
 staircases, in conservatories, by mantle-pieces, 
 and in retired corners. The talking department 
 of the firm of Goldthorpe and Co. fell entirely 
 to the share of her ladyship, whose conversa- 
 tion was not very profound, nor, to tell truth, 
 very grammatical, but who gossiped and laughed, 
 and pressed people to dance and eat and drink, 
 until every body was delighted with her. If 
 she had Been as mum as her husband, or, 
 talking, had given utterance to the baldest 
 nonsense, the admiration expressed for her 
 would yet have been universal. Was she not 
 the wife of the master of Beryl Court ? 
 
 So all these fine folks enjoyed themselves in 
 junketing and feasting till the night was very 
 old, and the small hours began to chime from 
 the buhl clocks. But a certain gloom and 
 anxiety had stolen in among the gaiety and 
 rioting, and sat on the countenances of three 
 persons — Sir Jasper Goldthorpe, his wife, and 
 Magdalen Hill. No Hugh Goldthorpe had made 
 his appearance. Midnight came, and no Hugh. 
 The time when his arrival imgl^ have been
 
 THE TWENTY-SEVENTH OF DECEMBER. 41 
 
 expected was long past. Had lie missed a train 
 from Marseilles? Had he been detained in 
 Paris ? Had he fallen ill on the road ? His 
 brothers did not know that his coming was so 
 imminently looked for. It was to be a surprise 
 to all — to his relatives as to his friends. 
 
 One,, two o'clock in the morning, and no Hugh 
 Goldthorpe. The gay company broke up and 
 went home to talk of the delightful evening they 
 had spent, the boundless riches of Sir Jasper, the 
 charming eccentricity — had she been poor they 
 w r ould have called it vulgarity — of Lady Gold- 
 thorpe. The Sons of Mammon bade their 
 parents good night, and retired to their rooms — 
 all save the subaltern of hussars, whose cabriolet 
 was waiting for him, and who drove down gaily to 
 his club to spend the evening. Three persons 
 w r ere left in the stately crimson drawing-room in 
 Onyx Square : Sir Jasper, evidently perturbed ; 
 Lady Goldthorpe, who made no secret of her 
 approaching intention of seeking consolation in a 
 flood of tears ; and Magdalen Hill, with her pale 
 face.
 
 42 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 RETURN OF THE FIRST-BORN. 
 
 Captain Hugh Goldthorpe, M.N.I.j ex-com- 
 mander of the Daglishwallah Irregulars, ex-Resi- 
 dent at the Court of Duffa Khan Sahib, Rajah of 
 Jowlapore, is weary of Indian service. Barely five 
 years have elapsed, since he was last in England 
 on sick leave; but he has sought and obtained 
 fresh conge. He contemplates a much longer 
 stay in Europe ; and, indeed, it is exceedingly 
 problematical whether he will ever return to 
 either of the three Presidencies. He has shaken 
 the branches of the Pagoda tree quite long 
 enough, and longs to enjoy his siesta at the foot 
 thereof. Six feet two in his stockings stands 
 Hugh Goldthorpe, strongest and coolest sabreur 
 of his corps, skilful in diplomacy, wise in durbar. 
 He is of the stuff of which great soldiers and 
 statesmen are made ; but his father is too rich, 
 and his allowances have been too handsome, for 
 him to continue seeking fresh advancement in
 
 RETURN OF THE ITRST-BORX. 43 
 
 either career. He has had enough of glory, both 
 in soldiering and negotiation, and is only desirous 
 of rest, and the enjoyment of the wealth that is 
 to be, or is already his, and the wife long since 
 promised to him. His desires are modest, you see. 
 The affianced one — the Beloved One — is a stately 
 lady, and a haughty one, withal; but she has 
 told him that she loves him with her whole heart 
 and soul, and that is enough for Captain Hugh. 
 So the hero of many intricate negotiations with 
 crafty Asiatics, and of fifty hand-to-hand combats 
 with fierce Sikhs and Afghans, tranquilly puffs 
 his cheroot in the expectation of a speedy return 
 to England, home, and beauty. He has engaged a 
 saloon berth in the Peninsula and Oriental Com- 
 pany's ship Isis, and, by the last days of Decem- 
 ber, he gaily augurs that he will be in London. 
 He feels happier than many passengers on board, 
 albeit they may be nearly as rich as he, can feel ; 
 for he has been fortunate enough to bring his 
 liver away with him. He is broad of chest and 
 sturdy of limb, with handsome straight-cut fea- 
 tures, a mobile yet determined mouth, shaded 
 with a thick Saxon moustache, and a long silken 
 beard curling down nearly to his waist. He will
 
 44 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 have that latter appendage trimmed within mode- 
 rate limits when he reaches the shores of Albion. 
 He is very brave, and strong, and resolute ; but 
 he is none the less joyous and amiable in private 
 life. A lion in the field, a fox in the council, he 
 is a very lamb in the compound ; and scores of 
 blushing virgins of all ages — from innocent, trust- 
 ing seventeen to perspicacious thirty-five — who 
 had been imported to India by rusee female 
 relatives, with a view of putting a stop to their 
 dreary state of celibacy, have ogled Captain 
 Hugh, and sung songs at him, and embroidered 
 pretty trifles for him, and laid siege to his heart 
 in a hundred different ways, every one of which, 
 for all his lamb-like demeanour, have proved 
 totally unavailing. Perhaps there was no citadel 
 to besiege, nothing but embankments and out- 
 works; the heart itself was in England, in Onyx 
 Square, with Magdalen Hill. He has been away 
 five years; but as he paces the deck of the his 
 he can scarcely persuade himself that so long a 
 period has passed away. He leans against the 
 bulwarks of the vessel ploughing her way through 
 the long rolling waves of the Red Sea. He puffs 
 at that cheroot again, and gazes upward at the
 
 RETURN OF THE FIRST-BORN. 45 
 
 fleecy clouds, passing gingerly — as though they 
 feared to take too great a liberty with the Queen 
 of Night — across the face of the shining moon. 
 He thinks on his boyhood, on the happy day 
 when he received his direct appointment in the 
 Honourable Company's service, on his transition 
 period of "griffdom," of his efflorescence as a 
 full-blown subaltern. The dead dull heat of the 
 climate falls harmlessly on him now; for he has 
 sweltered year after year in the tightest of uni- 
 forms, and the heaviest of accoutrements, and 
 again in all the charming abandon, full of wild 
 sartorial reveries, and of his irregular costume, 
 beneath the hottest-blazing sunshine. The mere 
 heavy sultry languor of the Red Sea feels com- 
 paratively cool to him; but he recollects his 
 sensations when, as a boy, he first reached that 
 " other side " which, to Anglo-Indians means all 
 the country that lies eastward beyond the Egyp- 
 tian desert, and firmly believed that his young 
 life would be fairly scorched out of him before he 
 reached his destination. Freshly came back to 
 him the old doubts and fears, and surmises of 
 what his career in India would end in ; whether 
 he would be slain in battle, or rise in civil em-
 
 46 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 ployments, or in any case vindicate the old 
 sobriquet of "Cockey Goldthorpe" bestowed upon 
 him at school. How well he remembered his 
 first sword, new and slender and shining ! now 
 he has half a dozen blades with him, all notched 
 and red-rusted from deadly frays. He is coming 
 Home. That one thought has absorbed, for 
 weeks, all the thoughts of his waking hours, and 
 even of his dreams. 
 
 Home ! He has reached Aden on his way ; he 
 has gone down into Egypt, and come to Cairo. 
 At Shepherd's Hotel, where the Overland cara- 
 van rests for a night, he declines joining the 
 dinner-party, and devotes his brief period of 
 repose to eagerly devouring the contents of the 
 English newspapers, brought by the outward- 
 bound party of young cadets and yellow civilians 
 who have just arrived. As the mail nears Eng- 
 land Hugh's impatience and home-sickness in- 
 crease. The three days between Alexandria and 
 Malta are spent almost in a fever. At the 
 Valetta post-office he gets a packet of letters 
 from Home,— letters which breathe love and 
 tender interest in every line, — letters that tell 
 him of the glorious reception that awaits him
 
 RETURN OF THE FIRST-BORX. 47 
 
 ■when he reaches his father's house. He sees no 
 reason why he should not arrive in England on 
 the long-looked-for day, — his father's birthday. 
 
 He leaves Malta for. Marseilles. The confine- 
 ment of the vessel becomes almost intolerable to 
 him. He indulges in wild speculations of days 
 vrhen monster viaducts shall cross the Mediter- 
 ranean, and express trains run without stopping 
 from Marseilles to Malta. He sits in the bows 
 of the Messageries Imperiales steamer all day 
 long ; and when a sudden squall comes on in the 
 Gulf of Lyons, and delays the way of the ship 
 by some three or four hours, Captain Hugh 
 becomes almost frantic with impatience. Why 
 can't squalls be put down by Act of Parliament ? 
 
 Marseilles has been made, at last. Captain 
 Hugh, during the last portions of the trip, has had 
 his wits sufficiently about him to make friends 
 with the mail-agent, who, he knows, will go straight 
 through to London at express speed, and whom 
 he has persuaded to accept hiin as a companion. 
 
 Up the steep hilly streets of Marseilles dashes 
 the post-waggon. Cutting in between long tum- 
 brils drawn by long-horned oxen, and driven by 
 Spanish- clad, swarthy, sleepy varlets, dashes and
 
 48 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 rattles, but never too rapidly for Captain Hugh, 
 the homeward-bound convoy of letters and news- 
 papers. Then he comes on to the French railway, 
 and finds himself in mid-winter, and discovers that 
 the pelisse he has been careful enough to bring 
 with him, lined throughout with fur, is none too 
 warm. Away over the flat dusky plains of the 
 Midi flies the express train with its one carriage 
 attached, shrieking, and sputtering, and roaring, 
 but not too fast for Captain Hugh. He cannot 
 sleep. Wakeful and lynx-eyed, he remains up 
 and anxious ; while his companions, the English 
 and French post-couriers, are slumbering in their 
 respective corners. There is no time for set 
 breakfasts or set dinners. Long dusky loaves, 
 with slices of Lyons sausage and fragrant-smell- 
 ing Brie cheese are thrust into the carriage at 
 certain stations, and. then and there devoured by 
 the three travellers. The repast is washed down 
 by great gulps of Medoc imbibed in the most 
 primitive fashion from the bottle's mouth. 
 
 Paris at last, and in time to catch the 7*30 
 p.m. express from Paris. In the rapidest of 
 cabs, Captain Hugh scurries from the terminus of 
 the Lyons railway to that of the Chemin de Fer
 
 RETURN OF THE EIRST-BORN. 49 
 
 du Nord. He makes such haste that he is there 
 a twenty-five minutes before the departure of the 
 Calais train. He has parted company by this 
 time with his friends the mail-agents, English 
 and French; and they are quite busy enough 
 over the stowage of their innumerable boxes to 
 dispense with his society. Captain Hugh is 
 admitted by special favour on to the platform, 
 instead of having to wait in the Salle d'attente. 
 That is the last favour the English courier shows 
 him. Captain Hugh secures a place for himself 
 in a particularly comfortable-looking carriage, 
 and places on the corner seat his pelisse lined 
 throughout with fur, and his Russia-leather- 
 covered despatch-box. He strolls into the re- 
 freshment-room, and has even five minutes for 
 the discussion of his beloved cheroot. 
 
 About seven o'clock there has drawn up at the 
 entrance to the terminus a pretty little one-horse 
 brougham, with a coachman in a livery that has 
 something of an English fashion. A lacquey 
 who sits beside him dismounts, and assists a lady, 
 who is the sole occupant of the carriage, to alight. 
 A porter comes up, and, touching his cap, asks 
 politely whether Madame is going by the train
 
 50 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 express. No ; Madame has not any such inten- 
 tion. She is merely here to see a friend off. 
 She bids the coachman go away, and away he 
 drives. Then, followed by a little Blenheim 
 spaniel, Madame walks into the great entrance 
 vestibule of the station, where porters are rush- 
 ing about with trucks full of luggage, and people 
 are crowding to the ticket-office, and vendors of 
 cheap periodicals are offering their wares for sale, 
 and idlers are wandering about and staring, and 
 police agents are watching. 
 
 Madame is very short and slight in stature, 
 and is richly clad in very wide-spreading skirts. 
 The hems of her garments are marvels of fine 
 linen and needlework. She is exquisitely gantee. 
 She has sparkling bracelets on her arms. Her 
 bonnet is a paragon. She wears her veil down ; 
 but it is transparent enough for you to see, 
 beneath, that her face is very pretty, that she has 
 a very fine colour in her cheeks, that her teeth 
 are very white, that her mouth is very smiling, 
 and that she has very fair flowing ringlets. 
 
 She looks about her, and stamps her little foot 
 as though in impatience. Anon she espies a 
 diminutive and shabbily-attired man, with curly
 
 RETURN OF THE FIRST-BORN. 51 
 
 gray hair, and a peaked nose somewhat purple in 
 hue. In face and gesture he is not unlike a 
 ferret. She beckons to him imperiously ; and 
 the little "man comes smirking and bowing up to 
 her, rubbing his hands. 
 
 " Is he here, Sims ? " Madame asks in the 
 English language. 
 
 "He is, and, O be joyful/' answers the little 
 shabby man, with a grin that makes his face look 
 more and more like a ferret, " our agents have 
 uot deceived us. The telegraphic message from 
 Marseilles was perfectly correct. He came with 
 the courier in charge of the mails, and I have 
 just seen him in the refreshment-room. This has 
 been a day of great grace." 
 
 w Do your errand/' Madame says, tossing her 
 ringlets, and turning to caress her Blenheim 
 spaniel. 
 
 The little shabby man hurries away, and at the 
 door of the Salle d'attente he meets a stalwart 
 young Englishman with a fair moustache and a 
 silky beard. 
 
 "Captain Hugh Gold thorpe?" the little man 
 says, tentatively rubbing his hands and grinning 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF 
 ILLINOIS LIBRARY
 
 52 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 "That's my name," answers the individual so 
 addressed ; " and what might yon want with 
 me?" 
 
 "There's a lady close by who would 'just have 
 one moment's conversation with you." 
 
 Hugh's thoughts revert to his mother and 
 Magdalen Hill. Could they have come to Paris 
 to meet him ? 
 
 " A lady ! where is she ? " he cries out eagerly. 
 "Yonder," answers the messenger, and points 
 to where the lady who has despatched him stands, 
 her back turned, and caressing her little spaniel. 
 
 The loving eyes of Hugh could see at a 
 glance that this was neither Lady Goldthorpe 
 nor Magdalen Hill. Whom could it be? He 
 knew scarcely any one in Paris, and certainly he 
 had no female acquaintances in that capital. He 
 laughed, and looked at his watch. 
 
 " It's twenty-two minutes past seven," he says; 
 " I've not much time to talk to a lady. Does she 
 know me, and how long will she keep me ? " 
 
 " She knows you perfectly well, and she won't 
 detain you an instant," the shabby messenger 
 replies. 
 
 With another laugh, thinking there must be
 
 RETURN OF THE FIRST-BORN. 53 
 
 some mistake, gallant Captain Hugh advances to 
 a lady, takes off his hat, and, with a low bow, 
 asks in French of what service he can be to her. 
 
 " The lady speaks English," remarks the 
 shabby little man, with the most peculiar grin he 
 has yet given. 
 
 The lady turns round, raises her veil, and looks 
 Captain Hugh Goldthorpe full in the face. He 
 starts back with something very like a cry of 
 horror. 
 
 " Merciful Heavens ! " he exclaims, " it is 
 Mrs. Armytage ! " 
 
 But time and the express-train will wait for no 
 man. The bell rings. The cry of " Prenez vos 
 places- — en voiture " is heard. The passengers 
 rush through the opened doors of the Salle 
 d'attente on to the platform. A stalwart young 
 man, with a thick beard and moustache, hurriedly 
 opens the door of a carriage, sees a furred pelisse 
 and a Russia leather despatch-box lying on one 
 seat, and jumps in. Doors are slammed, a shrill 
 whistle is audible, and the Calais express starts. 
 
 On that selfsame evening of the 27th of 
 December, shortly before midnight, an appalling
 
 54 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 accident happened to the express train from 
 Paris. Close to a station called Armentieres, 
 between Arras and Hazehrouck, the engine ran 
 off the rails and into a luggage-train going np 
 the line. Both trains came into dire collision. 
 The damage was tremendous, the carnage awful. 
 Seven persons were killed and nearly thirty 
 frightfully injured. 
 
 When assistance had been procured, the 
 labourers and police wdio had hastened to the 
 scene of the catastrophe proceeded to extricate 
 the dead and dying from the shattered ruins of 
 the passenger-train. One carriage was found 
 positively crushed to pieces, and a full hour 
 elapsed before it could be ascertained whether 
 any traveller lay buried beneath its fragments. 
 At last the task was accomplished, and a doleful 
 spectacle presented itself. One corpse was found; 
 but it was so awfully disfigured, so crushed and 
 pounded and mashed and battered and gashed, as 
 to have scarcely any human semblance left. Of 
 the countenance, indeed, there remained posi- 
 tively nothing that could lead to the discovery of 
 its identity. 
 
 " Rien dans les poches -," nothing in the pockets
 
 RETURN OF THE FIRST-BORN. 55 
 
 save French and English money, and his watch, 
 marked " Benson, London, 55,304," the chief of 
 the station remarks, with a melancholy shake of 
 the head, after such dreadful superficial examina- 
 tion as was possible had taken place of the dead 
 thing's garments. " Stay, what is this beside the 
 cadavre ? " 
 
 The assistants turned their lanterns to the spot 
 pointed out by the inspector. Close to the side of 
 the corpse, drenched with blood, but quite intact, 
 they found a despatch-box covered with Russia 
 leather, and a pelisse lined throughout with rich 
 sable fur. The leathern case was locked; but 
 in the side-pocket of the pelisse was a morocco 
 pocket-book, wdiich being examined was found to 
 contain a packet of letters, with the English and 
 Maltese post-marks, addressed to Captain Hugh 
 Goldthorpe, H.E.I. C.S. ; and a passport five 
 years old, and covered with visas, in which the 
 principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs 
 of her Britannic Majesty requested all authorities, 
 civil and military, to allow free passage, and afford 
 assistance in case of need, to Captain Hugh Gold- 
 thorpe, captain in the service of the Honourable 
 East India Company, travelling abroad.
 
 56 THE SEVEN SONS OP MAMMON. 
 
 " II n'y a plus de doute" said the inspector, 
 with a melancholy shrug of the shoulders. 
 " That mass of bloody clay must be the captain. 
 Pauvre enfant ! And he has a mother, perhaps, 
 la-bas, in England."
 
 LA DAME ATJ PREMIER. 57 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 LA DAME ATJ PREMIER. 
 
 The Hue Grande-des-Petites-Maisons runs at 
 right angles from the Boulevard Pompadour to 
 the Place Dubarry. Are any further particulars 
 needed to tell you that the thoroughfare just 
 named is in the very centre of fashionable Paris ? 
 But you may be exigent. Therefore, let it be 
 also hinted that, branching from the Rue Grande- 
 des-Petites-Maisons, runs that well-known arcade 
 full of old curiosity dealers, jewellers, and print- 
 sellers, the Passage Agnes-Sorel. You are scarcely 
 a stone's throw, either, from the Rue Diane-de- 
 Poictiers, which has for termination the Cite La 
 Yalliere ; and, parallel to the Rue Grande, 
 stretches the great, teeming Faubourg Ste. 
 Predegonde, the chosen mart of silk-mercers and 
 antique furniture sellers. This being all duly 
 mapped down, you are now recommended to take 
 your Galignani's Guide, and find out the Rue 
 Grande-des-Petites-Maisons if you can.
 
 58 THE SEVEN" SONS OP MAMMON. 
 
 It is a street of the very newest, and belonging 
 wholly to new France. The old site, once occu- 
 pied by those quiet, sombre, narrow thoroughfares, 
 the Eue-des-Bons-Epiciers, the Rue Cherche- 
 cinq-francs, and the Carrefour-des-vieilles-para- 
 pluies, had been cleared shortly after the revolu- 
 tion of '48, to form the approaches to a certain 
 Golden House of Nero, which had been centuries 
 a-building. The Rue Grande appertains, stucco 
 and soul, to the fresh dynasty. No grim hotels, 
 entre cour et jardm, as in the Faubourg St. 
 Germain, tenanted by fossil legitimists, whose 
 hearts are in the highlands of Frohsdorff, and 
 who call the proprietor therefore Henri Cinq, are 
 to be found in the Rue Grande. It is disfigured 
 by no shabby maisons meublees, or tenth-rate 
 hotels, smelling all day long of cabbage-soup. It 
 is debased by no mean cremeries, greengrocers, 
 or gargotte restaurants. No; the street is long 
 and wide, and clean and comely, gas-lit, well 
 paved, full of new, handsome, dazzling white 
 houses, with green blinds, with plate-glass 
 windows, with veined and varnished doors, or else 
 with entrance-gates in elaborate iron filagree. Its 
 railings are of gilt bronze, and its door-steps of
 
 LA DAME AU PREMIER. 59 
 
 granite. The houses all seem to be striving to 
 effect a compromise between solid English com- 
 fort and flimsy French luxury; but they are 
 altogether as unlike the old mansions of Bourbon 
 or Orleanist Paris as a snug little remise rolling 
 swiftly up the Avenue Marigny is unlike the 
 lumbering old coucous that used to creep to 
 Versailles and St. Cloud. For a new Paris has 
 sprung up over the water; a Lutetia that has 
 knockers to its doors ; partakes of lunch — some- 
 times, it must be admitted, spelt "laounch;" 
 rides in pill-box broughams and Hansom cabs ; 
 stares, eye-glass on cheek, oat of the casements of 
 clubs, instead of sipping barley-syrup at a marble 
 table outside a cafe-door ; and has recently 
 Gallicised " blackballer," as a verb signifying 
 " to exclude ; " bets at its TattersalPs ; reads its 
 Bell's Life and its city article, rigs its market and 
 posts its ponies in the purlieus of the Bourse. 
 Paris est mart — the old, the witty, the polite ; 
 vive Paris the new, the impudent, the brazen- 
 faced, the speculative ! But vice and frivolity are 
 undying, and Paris is still as vicious and as 
 frivolous as ever. 
 
 In 1S49 the Rue Grande-des-Petites-Maisons
 
 60 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 had not attained the imperial splendour it now 
 enjoys. Caesar was not yet emperor. He scarcely 
 was dictator, and every day of his tenure of power 
 he was badgered, well nigh to the death, by 
 politicians of every degree. In 1849 the Rue 
 Grande smelt of scarcely dried cement and fresh 
 paint. It had not received the impress of im- 
 perialism. At the present time, on reference to 
 the Almanack des vingt-cinq milks Adresses, I 
 find that it is tenanted by one Grand Referendary, 
 two auditors of the Cour des Comptes, one 
 Austrian Archduchess, one Moldo-Wallachian 
 Kaimakan, and at least a dozen female celebrities 
 of the Parisian minor theatres, whose individual 
 salaries average about thirty shillings a week, and 
 who certainly do not spend less than a hundred 
 thousand francs per annum, each and every one 
 of them. Unless I am very much mistaken, too, 
 the Rue Grande-des-Petites-Maisons contains* the 
 charming little Pompeian house of the Princess 
 Rostolka, with "Salve" on the pavement of the 
 vestibule, and "Cave ca?iem" on the wall, and "Hie 
 Icetantur Lares " over the porch ; and all the rest 
 of it. Likewise the sumptuous hotel of M. Israel 
 Portesac des Trois Chapeaux, millionnaire of
 
 LA DAME AU PREMIER. 61 
 
 Marseilles, formerly of the Temple, dealer in 
 ancient garments, and genealogically of Judea ; 
 but lately, alas ! of Mazas, and now, I know not 
 of what Maison centrale of detention and correc- 
 tion. Finally, I think I discover in the Rue 
 Grande the gorgeous bachelor quarters of M. 
 Roguet de la Poguerie, member of the Council of 
 State, journalist of Napoleonic tendencies, for- 
 merly deputy for the department of the Haute- 
 Dou, and member of the Academie des jeux floraux 
 of Rascaille-sur-le-Neve. In 1840 there was no 
 Rue Grande to boast such illustrious occupants. 
 Plain Israel Portesac bought and sold old cocked 
 hats, and was not above dealing, occasionally, in 
 the furry robes of departed rabbits; and simple 
 Jeannot Roguet was a doctor's boy in his native 
 town of Rascaille, vigorously pounding medica- 
 ments in a mortar. Still in 1S49 the new street 
 was very fashionable, and very wealthy, and very 
 gay. How could it be otherwise when its dainty 
 tenements were already the residence of two 
 Russian princesses, one English nobleman (Lord 
 Barrymore of Wharton, who had not been to 
 England since the revolution of '30, bought more 
 pictures in a month than Mr. Farrer could sell in
 
 62 THE SEVEN SONS OP MAMMON. 
 
 a year, and whose morals were not quite secure 
 from the tittle-tattle of the English community in 
 the neighbouring Faubourg St. Honore) ; of the 
 mysterious and fabulously wealthy Grand Duke 
 of Grimgribberstadt ; of Mesdemoiselles Henriette 
 Coquillard, Nini Casseinajou, Euphrosine Tur- 
 lupin, Aspasie Catin, Herminie Languedouce, 
 Jenny Eagotin, and other dramatic heroines; 
 and, to sum up, of La Dame au Premier ? 
 
 La Dame au Premier, or, to come down to plain 
 Saxon, the Lady on the First Floor, lived at 
 Number one, Rue Grande-des-Petites-Maisons, 
 and in a house seemingly large enough to lodge a 
 regiment of dragoons; but having neither husband 
 nor children she contented herself with the first 
 floor, and was but a lodger, condescending to 
 permit a banker to occupy the rez-de-chaussee, a 
 stockbroker to live on the second floor, a pre- 
 mier sujet of the opera to be installed on the 
 third, and any body who liked, and could afford 
 to pay an enormous rent for somewhat straitened 
 accommodation, to shelter themselves in the 
 fourth or attic story. The name of the lady on 
 the first floor was Mrs. Armytage. 
 
 She was a rich English widow, whose husband
 
 LA DAME ATI PREMIER. 63 
 
 had died in the Indies. That the concierge knew 
 well. The great Indies, he called our Oriental 
 Empire. To that functionary she was the most 
 adorable of her sex. A superb woman, he 
 declared, pursing in his lips. A queen-like 
 creature. An angel. She showered five-franc 
 pieces on him. That woman should have the 
 ribbon of the Legion of Honour, or the prix 
 Mont hy on, opined the concierge. She did not give 
 anything to the poor: they are always in the 
 way, ces gens, those poor (muttered the concierge), 
 but she was liberal, nay, munificent to him, to 
 the postmen, to her servants, to her tradespeople. 
 She received the very best society — the very best 
 of the semi-imperial court of the Elvsee Bourbon, 
 the plutocracy of the Chaussee d'Antin, the most 
 distinguished illustrations of the world of the 
 Bourse, the Palais, the Green-room, the Republic 
 of Letters, and the Jockey Club. The Faubourg 
 St. Germain stood aloof from her; for had not 
 Madame proclaimed her enthusiastic adhesion to 
 Bonapartism? Was not her bed-chamber hung 
 with green velvet, powdered with Napoleonic 
 bees ? Did she not wear an eagle in diamonds 
 in her blonde tresses? The Faubourg St. Ger-
 
 64 THE SEVEN SONS OP MAMMON. 
 
 main, in its dynastic sense, stayed away from the 
 Rue Grande, and the fascinating first-floor lodger 
 thereof, and was not missed ; but many a son and 
 heir of the Faubourg, many a haughty young 
 yicomte, with more quarterings in his scutcheon 
 than thousands of francs in his purse; many 
 a wrinkled old chevalier or parchment-faced 
 Vidame, with the cross of St. Louis at his button- 
 hole, and the memory of the dear wicked old 
 times when Charles the Tenth was only the 
 Comte d'Artois, in his heart, stole away from the 
 crumbling quarter of Divine Right to bask in the 
 smiles of Madame on the first floor. Her salons 
 were crowded to the vestibule every evening. 
 The ladies and gentlemen of the English com- 
 munity before named came from the Faubourg 
 St. Honore to eat, and drink, and sing, and dance, 
 and play. The gentlemen were in raptures with 
 the rich Indian widow. The ladies were all but 
 unanimous in abusing her. She was a little too 
 charming to be admired by her own sex. On her 
 part the lady on the first floor frankly accepted 
 all invitations from foreigners of distinction, and 
 contributed to the delices of many French, German, 
 and Russian salons; but she resolutely declined
 
 LA DAME AU PREMIER. 65 
 
 visiting, tinder any circumstances, her own coun- 
 trymen and countrywomen. "Let them come to 
 me" she said, tossing her pretty head ; " I don't 
 want to go to them. v The English communit}^ 
 had no excuse for cutting Mrs. Armytage, or for 
 sending her to Coventry; for we English carry a 
 Coventry about with us wherever we go — whether 
 it be to the North Pole or the Andaman Islands. 
 There was no mystery about her. Her conduct 
 as a wife had been irreproachable. Scores of 
 yellow-visaged Anglo-Indians resident in the 
 Erench capital had known her husband, Major 
 Armytage, of the Queen's army, who died of a 
 fever at Goggerdebad in 1S43. People knew that 
 she had a pension; people surmised from her 
 manner of living that the major had died rich. 
 She had resided alternately in Paris, London, and 
 Brighton during the seven years of her widow- 
 hood, keeping open house everywhere, receiving 
 the cream of society, but never returning visits. 
 "Why should the English ladies of the Eaubourg 
 and the Cite Beaujou be continually girdiag at 
 her, and yet be glad to rustle their flounces in the 
 grand suite of apartments where Mrs. Armytage 
 reigned supreme ? 
 
 VOL. I. }?
 
 (jC) THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 The first floor in winch she lived might have 
 belonged to a palace of the Arabian Nights. Major 
 Armytage must have shaken the Indian pagoda- 
 tree to some purpose, if all the fine things be- 
 longing to his widow had come out of her jointure 
 and the pensionary liberality of the Honourable 
 East India Company. She lived en princesse. 
 The suite of rooms on the first floor of the Rue 
 Grande comprised a vestibule (coloured marble, 
 fresco copy of Cephalus and Aurora, statuary, 
 alabaster vases, &c), a dining-room (inlaid parquet, 
 pictures of game by Mytens, boar-hunt by 
 Snyders, fruit after Rubens, insects by Abraham 
 Mignon, silver Venetian frames, Japanese bird- 
 screen, &c.) ; a grand saloon for receptions (needle- 
 work, tapestried furniture, ebony, mother-of-pearl, 
 consoles, gueridons, cabarets full of porcelain, 
 ceiling painted by Diaz, carpet of velvet pile 
 d 'Aubusso?i, pianoforte by Pleyel, harp by Erard, 
 &c, &c.) ; a little drawing-room (pink silk and 
 malachite, Turkish scenes by Decamps, aquarelles 
 by Eugene Lamy, statuettes by Pradier, &c.) ; a 
 delicious boudoir (white and gold, select library in 
 alternate vellum and crimson morocco bindings, 
 stained-glass windows, porcelain door-panels,
 
 LA DAME AU PREMIER. 67 
 
 aquarium, miniature conservatory, aviary, prie- 
 dieu in carved oak, every conceivable variety of 
 arm-chair, ottoman, divan, sofa, tabouret, dormeuse, 
 caaseuse, and boudeuse, and the entire apartment 
 not much bigger than a butler's pantry, &c. &c. &c.) . 
 Finally, there was my lady's own chamber, the 
 chambre-a-coucher, — remember that we are in 
 Paris, and that there is consequently no impro- 
 priety in alluding to a lady's sleeping apartment, 
 with the famous green velvet hangings, powdered 
 with golden bees, and a bed in carved rosewood 
 and gold standing in an alcove; quilt of eider- 
 down enclosed in apple-green brocade,; gauze 
 curtains ; a plenitude of mirrors ; floor of polished 
 oak, inlaid, with rugs of lion and tiger skins ; 
 Beauty's altar in the shape of a toilet-table; 
 infinite trifles from Froment Meurice and Tahans' ; 
 tiny arsenal of pistols, damascened sabres, 
 poignards, and fowling-pieces, — an odd fancy for 
 a lady's chamber, but they were perhaps trophies 
 belonging to the defunct major, — and massive 
 Elizabethan wardrobe. The bed-chamber was, 
 according to continental custom, thrown open 
 on reception nights," and, lighted up by scores 
 of wax tapers, produced sensations of delight in 
 
 F 2
 
 63 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 in the spectator -which frequently approached 
 frenzy. 
 
 It is time to send the upholsterer away, and 
 bid the broker's man close his inkhorn and pocket 
 his inventory. Mrs. Armytage is on her way 
 home even as I write, and it might be dangerous 
 to be detected in enacting the part of Paul Pry 
 in her apartments. There is just time to let you 
 know that the valetaille, the inferiors of Mrs. 
 Armytage's household, had their quarters, as 
 beseemed their degree, on the same vast first 
 floor of No. 1 Rue Grande-des-Petites-Maisons. 
 Where the kitchen was situated remained a 
 mystery ; but there must have been one on the 
 premises, else how could M. Estragon (formerly 
 of the Chimborazan embassy), the accomplished 
 chef of the lady on the first floor, have concocted 
 those delicate little dinners, those exquisite little 
 suppers, for which he and Mrs. Armytage were 
 alike renowned, and which had extorted the 
 admiration of the most exacting epicures of Paris 
 — epicures before whose searching gaze the butler 
 of the Trois Freres faltered, and the waiters of 
 the Cafe de Paris trembled. Mrs. Armytage's 
 wines had a special celebrity of their own. She
 
 LA DAME AU PREMIER. 69 
 
 had a dry champagne which made fools witty and 
 ugly women look handsome. She had a sparkling 
 Burgundy which seemed to sing songs of its own 
 accord as it danced in the glass. She had a 
 Romanee Conti, after drinking which authors 
 rushed home and wrote thrilling romances, and 
 M. Israel des Trois Chapeaux added hundreds of 
 thousands of francs to his fortune by bold specu- 
 lations on the hausse. 
 
 "For servants there were M. Estragon, erst of 
 the Chimborazan embassy, cook and maitre d' hotel 
 as aforesaid — of foolish fat scullions, I say nothing 
 Mademoiselle Reine, lady's maid, tall, supple, and 
 discreet; Monsieur Benoit, valet de chambre, 
 butler and factotum, grave, solemn, silent, clean 
 shaven, clad in raven black, and on gala occasions 
 appearing in black shorts and silk 'stockings. 
 When the Grand Duke of Grimgribberstadt 
 came — he was expected on the very night of 
 which I am speaking — M. Benoit appeared with 
 a slender silver chain round his neck, ruffles, and 
 a slim mourning sword by his side. The ladies 
 of the English community sneered at what they 
 stigmatised as ridiculous ostentation. Mrs. 
 Armytage laughed — she was always laughing —
 
 70 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 and declared that Benoit had served crowned heads 
 in his time, and that if she did not allow him to 
 wear his sword and chain on state occasions he 
 would give her warning. She did not even resent 
 the satirical inquiry of the young Marquis 
 Boissec de Puitssec, as to whether her valet de 
 chambre w r as in the employ of the Pompes 
 Funebres, — and indeed his ceremonial costume 
 did not ill resemble that of the head undertaker 
 at a French funeral. This was the same M. de 
 Boissec de Puitssec who was shortly afterwards 
 slain in a duel in the Bois de Vincennes by M. 
 Hector de Viellesouche, formerly of the Gardes 
 du Corps, on a quarrel arising from a bet as to 
 the number of Mrs. Armytage's flaxen ringlets. 
 Boissec said there were fifteen on one side and 
 fourteen on the other; Yiellesouche betted that 
 the numbers were equal. They could not agree 
 about payment; so they quarrelled and fought, 
 and he died, and she — the lady on the first floor 
 — laughed louder than ever. 
 
 I have omitted to mention one domestic of 
 Mrs. Arrnytage's following ; yet Hercule Mous- 
 tachu deserves a word. He was the lady's 
 chasseur, and wore a green pelisse elaborately
 
 LA DAME AU PREMIER. 71 
 
 embroidered, a gigantic cocked hat and plumes* 
 Hessian boots, and an ivory-handled hunting- 
 knife in his belt. Again the English community 
 of the Faubourg had something to sneer at. 
 " What does she want with that ruffianly creature, 
 six feet high, with whiskers like blacking-brushes, 
 and his absurd masquerade dress ? " they kindly 
 asked. Mrs. Armytage shrugged her pretty 
 shoulders and laughed. Moustachu was her 
 chasseur, she simply remarked, and wore the 
 ordinary uniform of his station. Go to the 
 hotel of the Chimborazan ambassador, of the 
 Baratarian minister, or of the Ashantee envoy 
 even, and you would find chasseurs similarly 
 accoutred. He ivas a droll creature certainly, 
 she admitted, with his cocked hat and his big 
 whiskers ; and she laughed till her ringlets shook 
 like the leaves in a summer's breeze. She was 
 but a mite of a woman, and Moustachu was her 
 protection. He sat on the box of her brougham 
 beside the coachman ; and when she walked 
 abroad on the boulevard, or in the Bois de 
 Boulogne, he followed her, bearing a great 
 golden-tipped staff of office, colossal, imposing, 
 and severe. In the winter he wore a pelisse of
 
 72 
 
 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 bearskin, which, made him look, to say the least, 
 tremendous and appalling. Great men — the very- 
 greatest — have their foibles, and Moustaches 
 weakness was absinthe. When excited by that 
 stimulant, he was at first ferocious and the terror 
 of peaceful wineshop-keepers, but would ulti- 
 mately subside into the tears of happy infancy. 
 The malicious whispered that Moustachu had once 
 been a giant at the fairs; and sarcastic M. de 
 Boissec (only a week before the duel) declared 
 that he recognised the chasseur as a former 
 assistant to a travelling quack doctor, and that 
 he had seen him in a scarlet toga and a Roman 
 helmet 'grinding the organ in the dickey of a 
 phaeton, while Dulcamara, his master, vaunted 
 his pills and potions to the simpletons around. 
 
 " What a droll idea ! n cried Mrs. Armytage, 
 laughing, when some kind friend — I think it was 
 an English lady of the community — repeated M. 
 de Boissec's words to her. 
 
 The English community — the female part of it, 
 at least — had once endeavoured to put down Mrs. 
 Armytage. There was positively nothing against 
 her, — not a speck on the ermine of her fair fame, 
 — not a flaw in her diadem of good repute, — not
 
 LA DAME AU PREMIER. 73 
 
 the tiniest peg whereon to hang scandal; but they 
 tried to put her down notwithstanding. "That 
 serpent must be crushed/' said Lady Eagles- 
 borough emphatically ; and when Lady Eagles- 
 borough said a thing, important results generally 
 followed. She was the leader of the serious 
 (Anglican) world of Paris, w~as very nearly as tall 
 as Moustacku, had four daughters almost as tall 
 as herself, whom, rumour said, she caned, and 
 was altogether a woman not to be trifled with. 
 Mrs. Cowpon, the banker's wife (Cowpon, Pecule, 
 Filicoteaux, et C ie ., Rue St. Lazare), entered into 
 an offensive and defensive alliance with Lady 
 Eaglesborough ; Mrs. St. Leger Levius, about 
 whom scandal had more than once, and with some 
 appearance of reality, been whispered, petitioned 
 to be allowed to join the league ; the Honour- 
 able Mrs. Dipton, whose husband led her such a 
 sad life ; the two Miss M'Caws whose father made 
 that unfortunate mistake about the trust-money : 
 gathered round Lady Eaglesborough. The ser- 
 pent must be crushed, they all agreed. The 
 terms " basilisk/' u cockatrice," " crocodile," and 
 u syren," were freely applied to Mrs. Armytage. 
 She was to be cut, repudiated, ostracised, black-
 
 74 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 balled, sent to that terrible Coventry more dreaded 
 than Norfolk Island ever was. The news of the 
 conspiracy soon reached the widow of the Rue 
 Grande-des-Petites-Maisons, and she laughed for 
 at least twelve consecutive minutes. " They crush 
 me ! " she repeated, almost with a shriek of merri- 
 ment. " The insensates ! You may tell them/' 
 she continued, turning to Mr. Simperleigh, of the 
 British embassy, who was her informant as to the 
 hostile intentions of the Faubourg, "that if I hear 
 any more of this nonsense, Lord B anymore shall 
 produce all Mrs. St. Leger Levius's letters to him, 
 written while her husband was in Jamaica. The 
 plain reasons why Frank Dipton shot himself 
 shall be put down in writing by my man Sims. 
 I've got the newspaper report of the bankruptcy 
 of that wicked old Dr. M'Caw, who was a school- 
 master at Greenock, and starved his pupils, the 
 wretch, besides spending his ward's trust-money. 
 Young Mistigris, the artist of the Rue de Boheme 
 sketches capitally in pen and ink, and he shall 
 draw me such a caricature of Lady Eaglesborough 
 caning her grenadier daughters ; and as for Mrs. 
 Cowpon, all Paris shall know how she pretended 
 to go to Aix-la-Chapelle for her health, went on
 
 LA DAME AU PREMIER. 75 
 
 to Baden-Baden instead, lost five-thousand francs 
 at roulette, — on a Sunday night, Mr. Simperleigh 
 — and, not daring to face her red-headed husband 
 had to borrow money of Captain Lovelace to pay 
 her hotel-bill and come home. They crush me, 
 indeed ! Unless ample apologies are made to me, 
 FU tear off all their false fronts and have half 
 their young men in Clichy in a fortnight." 
 
 Mrs. Army tage did not insist upon the apology, 
 but the conspiracy melted at once into thin air. 
 Lady Eaglesborough called on her to beg a sub- 
 scription for the Destitute Couriers and Footmen 
 out-of-place Relief Fund, and publicly declared 
 that she, Mrs. Armytage, was a person of superior 
 attainments and great energy of character. Mrs. 
 St. Leger Levius went to spend six months at 
 Bagneres de Bigorres ; and when next old Lord 
 Barrymore of \Yharton dined en petit comite with 
 the lady of the first floor, they both laughed till 
 the vermeil and porcelain on the damask clinked 
 again. His Lordship liked to dine in the Rue 
 Grande-des-Petites-Maisons. He was to have 
 dined there on the 27th of December, 1849, but, 
 having a prior engagement with the Grand Duke 
 of Grimgribberstadt, sent an apology, and pro-
 
 76 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 mised to look in during the evening. For Lord 
 Barrymore of Wharton belonged to the old school 
 and liked to dine as well as sup. 
 
 The half-past seven train express had started a 
 good hour ere Mrs. Armytage left the vicinity of 
 the Northern Railway terminus. " My man 
 Sims" — the diminutive personage of ferret-like 
 appearance — had quitted her, and Mrs. Armytage 
 was alone. She had not even Moustachu the 
 chasseur to protect her ; but she was a woman of 
 great mental resources, and feared nothing. She 
 hailed a little voiture bourgeoise and bade the 
 driver proceed to the Boulevard Pompadour ; and 
 just as the multitude of clocks scattered all over 
 her apartments were tinkling out the hour of nine, 
 Mrs. Armytage was in her cabinet de toilette, 
 arraying herself for a festal evening. It was a fete 
 every night with Mrs. Armytage. Her sands of 
 life were diamond dust, and Time gave her his 
 arm with dainty politeness, and conducted her 
 along a path all strewn with flowers. How old 
 was she ? You might have asked yourself the 
 question a hundred times looking at her as she 
 sat on one of the luxurious couches in her boudoir 
 waiting for her guests, and have reaped only
 
 LA DAME AU PREMIER. 77 
 
 bewilderment and perplexity from your inquiries. 
 As a rule, you are aware, it is difficult to tell the 
 ages of blondes. Their complexion keeps; wrinkles 
 and crows' feet are slow to appear, and their 
 furrows cast no deep shadows ; their hair rarely 
 becomes gray. Fair women of fifty may often 
 pass for their own daughters, unless indeed they 
 become fat, when the secret is at once disclosed. 
 Fat is fatal to either sex, and under any circum- 
 stances. Mrs. Armytage had no tendency to 
 embonpoint. She was the rather svelte, slim, tiny, 
 slender. You saw none of her bones, but you did 
 not see too much of her flesh. Her shoulders 
 were much whiter than the whitest opera cloak 
 she could wear. Her eyes were very large and 
 very blue, and they laughed at you to the full as 
 much as her mouth did. As to the laugh itself, it 
 was almost incessant, but it was neither a simper 
 nor a snigger. You know the blondes who laugh 
 in that manner, and who are, for the most part, 
 utter and hopeless simpletons. Mrs. Armytage's 
 laugh was bv no means a hollow one — nothing 
 like that dreadful cavernous "he-hee" of the 
 actress on the stage — the laugh which is twin- 
 sister to the stereotyped grin of the ballet-dancer.
 
 78 THE SEVEN SONS OE MAMMON. 
 
 It was not a jocund laugh ; it was not a " bitter " 
 laugh (risas sardonicus) ; and the merriment in 
 which this lady indulged was by no means 
 contagious. Very few people felt inclined to laugh 
 with, or at, or after the laughing lady of the Rue 
 Grande-des-Petites-Maisons. " She is a mermaid 
 whose mother was a laughing hyena/' said Lord 
 Barrymore of Wharton of the lady, with whom he 
 was so fond of dining. 
 
 All this brings us no nearer the solution of the 
 problem as to Mrs. Armytage's age. She was 
 not the kind of person to let you into the secret 
 herself. There were ladies and gentlemen in 
 plenty who came to her saloons, and who had 
 known her, some for ten and some for fifteen 
 years ; but they were no closer to certainty 
 than her most recent acquaintances. She had 
 always looked young. She always had that 
 fresh bloom on her cheeks, the bloom which 
 didn't look like rouge, and which I don't believe 
 was rouge. There were no fossettes in her neck, 
 no creases beneath her eyes, not a touch of the 
 Enemy's finger round the muscles of her mouth. 
 There she sat on the couch in the boudoir, 
 radiant in sea-green silk and pink bows and point-
 
 LA DAME AU PREMIER. 79 
 
 lace, and blazing with diamonds and rubies, and 
 shaking her blonde ringlets as she played with 
 and laughed at her little Blenheim spaniel. 
 
 She had dined alone, and in this same boudoir. 
 M. Estragon had taken the same pains with her 
 solitary repast as though it had been a banquet 
 for fifteen. Moustachu the chasseur brought the 
 dishes to the door, but he was not suffered to pass 
 the magic portal. M. Benoit, in full dress, him- 
 self, served the lady on the first floor. She tasted 
 a little puree, a morsel of turbot a la creme, a tiny 
 corner of vol-au-vent, a delicate slice of chevreuil 
 en poivrade; but she ate up the whole of a fat 
 little bird in a very nimble and catlike manner, 
 and crunched its succulent bones with great appa- 
 rent gusto. Wines were presented to her in due 
 course, the still and^ sparkling, the vintages of 
 Bordeaux and of the Cote d'Or. She barely put 
 her lips to the glittering crystal, but she drank a 
 little glass of Curacoa after her thimblefull of 
 black coffee served up in a tiny cup of eggshell 
 porcelain — real Sevres, you may rest assured. 
 
 So she sat and played with the lap-dog, laugh- 
 ing at his gambols, and, anon, took down a 
 daintily-bound novel — it was one of the admired
 
 80 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 •works of M. Pigault-le-Brun, I am afraid, al- 
 though on the back the volume was lettered 
 (Euvres de Racine. She sat and laughed, and 
 read and waited, but not long. Ere ten o' clock 
 the salons were full of company. It was the most 
 refined of Liberty Halls, and the guests wandered 
 about pretty much as they pleased; t only they 
 were expected to take their departure at midnight. 
 Special invitations were issued to the favoured few 
 who partook of Mrs. Armytage's famous suppers. 
 I look back years, and stroll in spirit across the 
 years through the dazzling chambers. I see the 
 groups at the card-tables, piles of napoleons by 
 them, silently but eagerly playing ecarte or baccara, 
 lansquenet was never heard of in this particular 
 house of the Rue Grande. Respectable English 
 fogies played whist sometimes for five-franc points. 
 The starched married ladies of the English com- 
 munity generally kept together, and whispered 
 disparagement of the hostess. " That horrid 
 gambling" they were chiefly severe against. 
 Young English lads were warned by prudent 
 mammas against baccara, and, stealing into the 
 contiguous saloon, began immediately to play at 
 the pleasing game denounced ; young English
 
 LA DAME AU PREMIER. SI 
 
 ladies were warned, by the same anxious parents, 
 not to enter into flirtations with those " dangerous 
 Frenchmen \ " but the peril of the Gallic element 
 was overrated, so far at least as the daughters 
 of Albion were concerned. Plenty of French 
 dandies came from the Jockey Club, the Fau- 
 bourg St. Germain, and the Cafe de Paris ; but, 
 as the knowledge of the English language pos- 
 sessed by the majority of their number was in- 
 finitesimal, their active flirtation with les blanches 
 meess did not extend beyond ogling the fair ones, 
 and twirling their moustaches at them in a fas- 
 cinating and engaging manner. 
 
 I look back across the years, and see the boudoir 
 whose threshold only the elite of the company 
 dared, by a tacit kind of understanding, to pass. 
 It is there the lady on the first floor by preference 
 remains. She glides in and about all her rooms 
 and all her company, and performs all the duties' 
 of hospitality with irreproachable ease and grace ; 
 but her home is in the boudoir, and there chiefly 
 she sits enthroned. On one divan you may see the 
 rigid form and coalblack beard of the Grand Duke 
 of Grimgribberstadt. He was reigning Grand 
 Duke once; but political complications, culmi- 
 toi. i. o
 
 82 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 nating, to tell truth, in the summary burning of 
 his palace about his ears, caused his separation from 
 an ungrateful people, and the enforced abdica- 
 tion of a remarkably prickly crown. His Efful- 
 gency — such is his Teutonic title — is very wealthy 
 and very peculiar. It is said that his cheeks are 
 painted, and that his beard is dyed. It is 
 reported that he keeps the whole of his fortune in 
 v, ready money between the mattress and the palliasse 
 of his bed ; and that around his couch is a terrible 
 assortment of spring-guns, and twenty-bladed 
 poniards that dart forth at the slightest touch like 
 the instruments of a cupper. It is rumoured also 
 that he will trust no servant of his to prepare his 
 meals — having a dread of poison — and that his 
 daily repasts are sent to him hot and hot each day 
 from a different 'restaurant. Certain it is that 
 the Grand Duke of Grimgribberstadt is a myste- 
 rious-looking personage, and that his eye is an 
 evil one. He has a cluster of diamond rings on 
 every finger. The buttons of his waistcoat are 
 brilliants of the purest water. His studs in rose 
 diamonds are prodigious. He is the only man in 
 Europe who possesses an orange tawny diamond, 
 with, wonder of wonders, the Grand Ducal arms
 
 LA DAME AU PREMIER. 83 
 
 of Grimgribberstadt engraved thereupon. He sits 
 rigid and superb, and blazing. His conversation 
 is limited to one topic, the Italian Opera, and, it 
 must be further admitted, to one opera, The 
 Barber of Seville. " Est-ce qu'on se fatigue jamais 
 du Barbier ? " — " Do we ever grow tired of the 
 Barber?" — asks his Effulgency, and poses you. 
 Then he is silent for half an hour. " Mais Vair 
 de la Calomnie ! " he interposes clinchingly, when 
 something is said about evil speaking. Another 
 half-hour of silence elapses. Suddenly he rises, 
 murmurs, " Buona sera" recalling the famous con- 
 certed piece in his beloved opera, and, dislocating 
 for one instant one of his cervical vertebras, by 
 which it is understood that his Effulgency bows, 
 he sails away, and is conducted by M. Benoit, 
 bearing waxen tapers, to his carriage — that heavy 
 vehicle with the panels and shutters said to be of 
 iron and shot-proof, and of which the two coal- 
 black horses with the silvered harness have been 
 pawing the flags impatiently these two hours. 
 
 About eleven, a little brougham drives up to 
 the door of Number One. A tall footman jumps 
 off the box, darts upstairs, pulls the crimson silk 
 cord at Mrs. Armytage's door, says to the chas- 
 
 o2
 
 SI THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 seur, " Madame la Baronne" darts down-stairs 
 again, flings open the brougham-door, cries " On 
 attend Madame " to the inmate, and hustles or 
 carries, or pushes, — he seems to do it so rapidly, 
 — rather than conducts, a little ball of rich sable 
 fur, surmounted by a little sky-blue hood, up to 
 the apartments of La Dame au Premier. Made- 
 moiselle Reine is in waiting, and unwinds the 
 little cocoon of sable and sky-blue. With light- 
 ning rapidity you see Mrs. Armytage in her 
 boudoir, curtseying to a dumpy little woman in 
 black velvet and amethysts, with a towering plume 
 on her little head. She looks like Humpty Dumpty 
 who has fallen off the Avail and has been half 
 submerged in an ink-bottle. The company crowd 
 about the silken hangings of the boudoir portal, 
 and listen with rapt attention while, in a deep 
 contralto voice, the little dumpy woman declaims 
 something; it may be the grand tirade from 
 Mary Stuart, the Helas ! scene in Les Horaces, 
 the " Es ist nicht lange" speech from William 
 Tell, the Timbaliers of Victor Hugo, or the "Pour 
 nous conserver purs " passage from Lamartine's 
 Jocelyn. She declaims, perorates ; there is a 
 burst of applause; Mrs. Armytage curtseys again;
 
 LA DAME AU PREMIER. S5 
 
 fifty people say what they do not in the least 
 mean ; the dumpy little woman hurries away 
 again, is robed by Mademoiselle Reine, caught 
 up again by her footman, popped into her car- 
 riage, and rattled away to the far end of the Rue 
 de Lille, where she will favour the guests of La 
 Princesse de Chinon-Croisy with a similar burst 
 of elocution. Mrs. Armytage's guests burst out 
 laughiug, and whisper, "La Baronne is madder 
 than ever." This is the Baronne de Bifnnbach. 
 Her spouse, M. de Bifnnbach, formerly Hof Kam- 
 merer to the Landgrave of Sachspfiugen-Hamstein, 
 is an entomologist, and passes the best part of his 
 existence in the society of spiders, alive and dead. 
 The Baronne has a rage for elocution. She will 
 probably declaim at five or six houses this evening. 
 Last year her lune was for fresco-painting, and 
 she insisted on being suspended in a basket to 
 the ceiling of her dining-room while she executed 
 Cupids and Muses thereupon. Some wet plaster 
 got into the Baroness's eye one day, and she 
 abandoned Art for Eloquence. She has had 
 manias for animal magnetism, for ascetic devotion, 
 for lansquenet, for St. Simonianism, and for tricks 
 of legerdemain ; but she has always been a very
 
 S6 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 charitable, kind-hearted woman, and every body 
 likes her. 
 
 That grand old man, so grave, so dignified, so 
 venerable in his flowing white locks, with such an 
 exquisite hand, such a symmetrical foot — le beau 
 vieillarcl—is M. Laplace de Fontenelle the Acade- 
 mician ? Not in the least. Yonder mean-looking 
 little old man, dabbing his forehead with a blue 
 cotton pocket-handkerchief, is the illustrious writer 
 and savant you mean. Well, it must be my Lord 
 Barrymore. You are wrong again. His Lord- 
 ship is the jovial, red-faced gentleman with the 
 white teeth and the black whiskers who is bend- 
 ing over Mrs. Army t age, and slily chuckling over 
 some story she is telling him. The grand and 
 dignified patriarch is no less than old Monsieur 
 Fourbel — Papa Fourbel — Nini Fourbel, the wags 
 of the small satirical journals call him. He has 
 been a chemist and druggist, and has made a for- 
 tune out of lollipops to cure catarrh. He has 
 been a stockbroker, and made another fortune out 
 of the hausse and the baisse. He has been 
 manager of the Opera, and made fortune number 
 three out of the throat of Duprez and the ankles 
 of innumerable coryphees. He has been pro-
 
 LA DAME AU PREMIER. 87 
 
 prietor of the Republico-Monarchico-Orleanico- 
 Bonapartist journal the Girouette. He started 
 the Carpentras and Brives-la-Gaillarde Railway, 
 and realised early. He sold, at premium, all his 
 shares in the Docks Elagabale, the Societe 
 anonyme des Marchands de Marrons chauds, the 
 Compagnie d' Assurances contre la Migraine, and 
 other notable speculations. Had he resided in 
 England, Sir Jasper Goldthorpe would have been 
 proud of his acquaintance. This lucky old man 
 might have rivalled the great Hebrew M. Portesac 
 des Troix Chapeaux in wealth, but for his insa- 
 tiable devotion to eating and drinking. The 
 magnificence of his dinners is only equalled by 
 that of his breakfasts. In oysters alone he spends 
 a princely revenue. He is the one gourmet who 
 has ortolans on his table all the year round. " To 
 others the fame of Croesus, of Ouvrard, or Paris- 
 Duvernay," he says, proudly: "I am the emu- 
 lator of Lucullus ; I am the successor of Cam- 
 baceres. I would settle fifty thousand francs a 
 year on the widow of the man who would consent 
 to be thrown into a fish-pond to feed my carp ; 
 and were Yattel alive he should be cook to 
 Casserole Fourbel."
 
 88 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 Back across the years, back till I can see the jour- 
 nalists, the dandies, the political adventurers, the 
 foreign counts, the financiers, the stock-jobbers, 
 the painters and poets of a perturbed period of 
 transition and suspense. Things had not fallen 
 into their places in 1849, and every one wondered 
 at the position in which he found himself. Back ! 
 I hear a voice, sonorous, solemn, touching, wild 
 almost in its searching tones, through the door- 
 way of the chamber where the grand piano is. 
 Ah ! I know who this is. The Princess Okolska 
 is singing. " Princess, you must sing," Mrs. 
 Armytage has said laughing; " Society entreats 
 this favour from you." The Princess rises and 
 goes to the piano. She is a gaunt, bony woman, 
 in an ill-fitting dress of tartan poplin, and a head- 
 dress made of gold coins of Oriental look. She 
 has big black eyes, and blue-black hair. Her hus- 
 band, it is whispered, helped to strangle a certain 
 emperor, and she herself is reported to be the 
 daughter of a Circassian slave. She sings some 
 strange ballad in an unknown tongue. The song, 
 at first monotonous and faint, rises first to plaintive 
 dolence, then to a passionate wail, then to a sort 
 of cry of rage and despair. " That woman has
 
 LA DAME AU PREMIER. 89 
 
 been devoured by passions/' says a journalist to a 
 painter. At the end of the song, the Princess 
 Okolska faints away. She always faints on these 
 occasions. She is restored to consciousness, and 
 caressed and complimented, and has a glass of hot 
 sugar and orange-flower water brought her, in 
 which, I am afraid, there is something stronger 
 than either of the ingredients above named. 
 
 This was the twenty-seventh of December 1849. 
 Seldom had so brilliant a gathering been seen 
 in the Rue Grande-des-Petites-Maisons. There 
 were richer guests, perhaps, at that very moment 
 at a certain family party in Onyx Square, Ty- 
 burnia, London — a party where a father and a 
 mother, and a tall girl with a pale face, were 
 waiting ; but for rank, and talent, and wit, Mrs. 
 Armytage's visitors had undoubtedly the supe- 
 riority. And while the lights shone brightly, and 
 the music streamed in either brave house on 
 either side of the Channel, the Calais express was 
 ploughing through the night towards the shores 
 of the cold and complaining sea. 
 
 The majority of the company left, as was the 
 custom, at midnight. After that came supper, of 
 the richest and rarest, to the chosen ones who
 
 90 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 remained. Songs were sung, arrowy jests flew 
 about, political intrigues were dissected, wicked 
 anecdotes were told. There was deep drinking ; 
 there was deep play; and Mrs. Armytage laughed 
 continually. 
 
 At last she was alone. The bedchamber was 
 being prepared for her. Mademoiselle Reine 
 awaited her coming. She stood with her white 
 shoulders and her sea-green robe, and daintily 
 toasting one little foot at the embers that glowed 
 on the polished hearth. Tiny tongues of flame 
 came out of the logs, as if to lick her garments 
 hem in homage. The mirror on the velvet-hung 
 mantel reflected something else beside lustres and 
 Sevres vases and Buhl clock. It reflected a 
 woman's face and yellow ringlets and dancing 
 gems. Something else, too. A face haggard and 
 pallid, eyes vengeful and terrible. 
 
 She struck her little hand on the mantel with 
 violence enough to wound it. She looked angrily 
 at her bruised wrist, and twisted it in her other 
 hand. She laughed no more. 
 
 " I would kill myself, if I dared," she muttered. 
 " I am as beautiful now as I was four years since ; 
 and he has spurned me, spurned me again as he
 
 LA DAME ATJ PREMIER. 91 
 
 did before. I am richer than ever. There is not 
 a penny belonging to his wretched father but I 
 could call it mine ; and he has spurned me. . . 
 But I will crush him; yes, Hugh Goldthorpe," 
 she continued, — and seeming to address a locket 
 which she took from her bosom, — " I will crush 
 you, body and soul, and the woman who is wait- 
 ing for you yonder shall see you no more." 
 
 She made as though to kiss something inside 
 the locket, which she held open before her. But 
 she closed the bauble with a sudden click, and 
 thrust it into her white breast; and then Mrs. 
 Armytage went to bed. 
 
 She was breakfasting at noon the next day — 
 breakfasting in her little purple Morocco slippers 
 and her morning wrapper of China silk, when M. 
 Benoit announced M. Sims. 
 
 M. Sims was as diminutive and as ferret- 
 looking, but he looked more excited than usual. 
 
 " Have you heard the news ? " 
 
 " What news ? " the lady asked disdainfully. 
 "That you smell of tobacco, as you do always, 
 and do now ? That is no news to me." 
 
 "You are cross this morning, ma'am," Mr. 
 Sims remarked, shrugging his shoulders. " I have
 
 92 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 something here that will put you in a better 
 temper.' 5 
 
 T\ ith trembling hands he unfolded a copy of 
 that morning's Girouette, and read out : — 
 
 "Telegraphic despatch from Armentieres. Epouvantdble Sin- 
 istre on the Northern Railway. Calais express came into collision 
 •with up luggage-train. Thirty-seven persons killed and wounded. 
 Among the sufferers has been recognised by his papers the body of 
 M. le Capitaine Hugh Goldthorpe, officer in the military service of 
 the Honourable Company of the Oriental Indies, and son of Sir 
 Goldthorpe, Baronet, and member of the Chamber of Lords of 
 Great Britain. Further details will be given in our edition of the 
 evening." 
 
 Mr. Sims had probably never in his life executed 
 a translation from the French with such rapidity. 
 Nor, I should think, was the recital of an appalling 
 occurrence often received in so strange a manner 
 as it was by Mrs. Armytage. It is a fact that she 
 burst out laughing, and laughed so long and so 
 loudly that the Blenheim spaniel, thinking that 
 he too would be of the party, began to bark in 
 doggish merriment. 
 
 " Was there any thing ever so fortunate ? " said 
 the lady, at last panting for breath. 
 
 " It is a joyful thing," responded Mr. Sims, 
 rubbing his peaked nose. 
 
 "There, Sims!" cried Mrs. Armytage, catch-
 
 LA DAME ATJ PREMIER. 93 
 
 ing up her spaniel and bestowing a kiss upon his 
 snub nose. " You must go to the Prefecture and 
 get my passport vised. I start for England to- 
 night. I hope the train won't have another 
 accident, and kill poor little me. Ha ! ha ! 
 ha!"
 
 94 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 ON A FIELD, OR ; A CROSS, SABLE. 
 
 The blackest winter baked the earth, to stone ; 
 and in the fields thin spikes of grass just contrived 
 to pierce the hoar crust, naked and rigid. It was 
 a black frost. The roads, the kennels, the pave- 
 ments, the bare trees were dark and glossy. The 
 roofs only were white with frozen snow, and had 
 been so for weeks. 
 
 Strong-handed Labour, frozen out of bread- 
 earning, stalked starving through the town; 
 wretched women whined and cowered, but hungry 
 men wandered scowling and with folded arms 
 about the shells of houses they should have been 
 building. It was winter every where, and Misery 
 came abroad, forlorn and piteous. Thousands were 
 enjoying themselves on the glassy surface of the 
 park-waters, skating, and sliding, and shouting, 
 and tumbling over one another for joy; but thou-
 
 ON A FIELD, OR; A CKOSS, SABLE. 95 
 
 sands more looked on from the banks, silent, 
 savage, and famished. Vast blocks of ice floated 
 down the river, and, collecting in creeks, ground 
 up against each other with sharp noises. News 
 came from the country of trains snowed-up, of 
 whole flocks of sheep lost in drifts, of villages in 
 the Yorkshire wolds cut off from all communica- 
 tion with towns and markets; of gullies between 
 them choked with snow, of cattle frost-bitten, vil- 
 lagers half-starving. The Old Year laid himself 
 down to die in an adamantine coffin, and the New 
 Year was swaddled in icy bands. There was much 
 feasting and merry-making in rich men's houses ; 
 yule-logs were burned, Christmas-trees shaken ; 
 dancing and singing were heard. The cold was 
 not severely felt in warmly-lined carriages ; and 
 in thick-carpeted drawing-rooms and bed-cham- 
 bers thickly-curtained, the price of fuel was not 
 of much account. But in the narrow courts and 
 dens, and over the London border, and on the 
 skirts of clocks and factory yards, and in the 
 avenues of police-courts, before the relieving 
 officer's strong door, and by the Union Work- 
 house's pitiless walls, Starvation and Destitution 
 cowered in their rags, and moaned their lack of
 
 96 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 common food, and warmth, and shelter, and made 
 the evil season more hideous to the view. 
 
 If you take a million-rich man, and put him 
 naked and without victuals or a roof to cover 
 him, on a rock, and expose him to the nipping 
 frost and the January blast, it will not be 
 long ere he begins to shiver, and anon to howl 
 in agony and despair; and at last he will 
 crouch prone to his jagged bed and die. But 
 in the very centre of London, with his palaces 
 and his vassals around him, it is difficult for 
 the rich man to feel the cold. On that bare 
 rock his millions in gold or crisp paper would 
 not warm him, unless haply he had needles 
 and thread to sew the money-bags together for 
 raiment. 'When he is in London, however, 
 the money will buy furred robes and Wallsend 
 coals, and sand-bags to exclude the wind, and 
 well-closed chariots to ride in, and Welsh wigs 
 to draw over his head, plush gloves to cover 
 his hands, and hot- water bottles to put to his 
 feet. Ptailway rugs, scalding soups and drinks, 
 shawls and comforters, are all ready for him and 
 purchaseable. The theatres, the churches, the 
 counting-houses, the board -rooms, the marts
 
 ON A FIELD, Oil; A CROSS, SABLE. 97 
 
 and exchanges which he frequents, have all 
 their warming apparatus, and become snug and 
 cosy. No ; I cannot see how it is possible for 
 the English Dives to shiver, — were even Siberia 
 brought to London, and the North Pole set 
 up in the Strand in lieu of the Maypole which 
 once adorned that thoroughfare. The milliners 
 that serve Dives' wives and daughters may sell 
 as many fans for Christmas balls as for Mid- 
 summer picnics; and after Dives' New-year's 
 feasts the ice-creams and the ice-paddings are 
 positively refreshing after the spiced viands and 
 generous wines. 
 
 Sir Jasper Goldthorpe was the richest of 
 rich men. The quilt of his bed might have 
 been stuffed with bank-notes instead of eider- 
 down. He could have afforded, had he needed 
 caloric, to have burned one of his own palaces 
 down, and warmed his hands by the conflagra- 
 tion. From his warm bed-room, breakfast-room, 
 and study, his warm carriage took him, swathed 
 in warm wrappers, to the warm sanctum of his 
 warm counting-housa. His head clerks wore 
 respirators, and had mulligatawney soup for 
 lunch. The Times' City article was carefully 
 
 VOL. I. H
 
 98 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 warmed for him ere he perused it. His mes- 
 sengers comforted themselves with alamode beef 
 and hot sausages and fried potatoes before 
 roaring fires; and, when they were despatched 
 on errands, slipped into heated taverns in little 
 City lanes, where they hastily swallowed mugs 
 full of steaming egg-hot and cordialised porter. 
 The only cold that could seemingly touch so 
 rich a man as Sir Jasper Goldthorpe was a cold 
 in the head ; and what possets, white-wine- 
 wheys, gruels, footbaths, doctors' prescriptions, 
 and hot flannels, were there not in readiness 
 to drive catarrh away from him ! Lived there 
 in the whole realm of England one man or 
 boy mad or desperate enough to cast a snow- 
 ball at the millionaire of Beryl Court ? I think 
 not. He was above the cold. It was street- 
 people only who were cold, just as the little 
 princess asked the painter who came to take 
 her portrait whether it was not true that "only 
 street-people died." So Sir Jasper Goldthorpe, 
 his sons and their thralls and churls, their tri- 
 butaries and feudatories, Jet the street - people 
 shiver as beseemed their degree, flinging them 
 cheques and sovereigns sometimes in their
 
 ON A FIELD, OR; A CROSS, SABLE. 99 
 
 haughty unbending way, and went on, warm 
 and glowing, from a prosperous old year to a 
 prosperous new one, when suddenly a Hand 
 of Ice, that thrilled them all to the very bones 
 and marrow, was laid just above the heart of 
 Mammon, and of his wife, and of his children. 
 
 It was the Hand of Death, and it touched 
 each with a cold pang, and went onwards, to 
 touch some transiently, but to grasp others 
 without release. Whoever felt its lightest 
 pressure was chilled and benumbed. The icy 
 hand came to Beryl Court and to Onyx Square, 
 and all the gold of Mammondom could not, 
 for that season, bring cheerful warmth again. 
 
 The News had come. A brief telegraphic 
 message like a thunderbolt first fell. Then 
 followed the lightning flashes of more messages ; 
 then the driving tempest of full details, — and 
 the happiness of a household was scathed and 
 blasted. No doubt, no hope could glimmer in 
 the black night of their woe. The crushed, 
 mangled, unrecognisable corpse had been ga- 
 thered up at Armentieres : the fragments of 
 clothes, mingled with its remnants, were such 
 as a man of Hugh's degree would have worn.
 
 100 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 There was the conclusive evidence of the furred 
 coat, the writing-case, the pocket-book, and the 
 passport. Hugh Jasper Goldthorpe was surely 
 dead. According to the law of France, the 
 remains should have been interred within four- 
 and- twenty hours following the decease; but 
 telegraphic messages stopped the interment. 
 The dust of so rich a man's son was not to be 
 lightly disposed of. The prefect of the depart- 
 ment was written to ; the English ambassador 
 in Paris condescended to wait upon the Minister 
 of the Interior and tell him of what golden 
 parentage the young man came; and orders 
 were issued to permit the transmission of his 
 body to England. 
 
 The Reverend Ernest Goldthorpe remained 
 in Onyx Square to comfort his bereaved parents. 
 Lieutenant William Goldthorpe and his brother 
 Edward, the Oxford Undergraduate, had to 
 undertake a sad pilgrimage to Calais. They 
 were preceded two days beforehand by Mr. 
 Screwm, foreman to that eminent firm Messrs. 
 Uavenbury Brothers, of St. James's Street. 
 All the melancholy arrangements necessary were 
 confided to this well-known, and, indeed, his-
 
 ON A EIELD, or; a cross, sable. 101 
 
 torical house. They had buried the Princess 
 Charlotte; and old Mr. Simon Ravenbury, who 
 used facetiously to say that the elm wasn't 
 grown nor the lead dug from the mine that 
 would be needed for his shell and coffin, had 
 married the grand-daughter of the undertaker to 
 whose care had been intrusted the disposal of the 
 decollated remains of the last nobleman executed 
 for high treason in England — Lord Lovat. 
 
 The ill-omened messengers did their work, 
 and met the two brothers at Calais. A party 
 of French actors and actresses were coming over 
 in the mail-steamer, but, though the night was 
 wild and stormy, they huddled themselves on 
 deck, and dared not enter the cabin, knowing 
 what lay in the hold beneath. A hearse, all 
 plumed and garnished, with a mourning coach 
 and four, waited on the Admiralty Quay at 
 Dover. The family lawyer, Mr. Drossleigh, head 
 of a confidential department in Beryl Court, 
 and Mr. Plumer Ravenbury himself, junior in 
 the historical firm of St. James's Street, were 
 also in attendance. Mr. Ravenbury's own black 
 brougham, with the showy long-tailed black 
 horse — its dam a Flanders mare that had assisted
 
 102 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 at the obsequies of AVilliam the Fourth — followed 
 the coach that contained the brothers, the 
 lawyer, and the confidential Mr. Drossleigh. 
 A slight sojourn took place for refreshment at 
 the "Lord Warden;" and it must be men- 
 tioned, as a stroke of genius on the part of 
 Mr. Ravenbury, that the chambermaids who 
 conducted the brothers to their apartments had 
 black bows in their caps, and that the waiters 
 who served breakfast were the most mournful 
 looking of their class, and had strips of black 
 crape on their arms. This last, indeed, may 
 not be so very surprising ; for from the waiter to 
 the mute there is but half a step, and vice versa. 
 
 Mr. Ravenbury, so far as was consistent with 
 his professional woe, thoroughly enjoyed him- 
 self. It was his and his firm ; s pride and 
 pleasure to furnish rich men's funerals in the 
 first style of Black Art. He was a little, 
 bustling, bald-headed man, whose voice scarcely 
 ever rose above a whisper, and every one of 
 whose plaited shirt-fronts was worth three 
 guineas. The black brougham and black horse 
 were merely his professionally private equipage ; 
 and when a very rich "party" was to be con-
 
 ON A FIELD, Oft; A CROSS, SABLE. 103 
 
 veyed to town, he took the sable vehicle and 
 its grim steed down by rail. In Hyde Park, 
 away from business, Mr. Ravenbury, covered with 
 gold chains, with a white hat and a black band, 
 — it is said that he continually wore mourning 
 for a defunct earl, regarding whose funeral he 
 had given too lax reins to his imagination, and 
 whose executors had refused to pay the bill, 
 — drove a dashing mail phaeton, with two grays 
 full of fire and action. He gave joyous dinner- 
 parties and balls at St. John's Wood, and at 
 Gunnersbury. His wife was a handsome lady, 
 with a mezzo-soprano voice and a mania for 
 Verdi. Her musical matinees were delicious; 
 and the same embroideress who arabesqued the 
 hems of her underskirts pinked the shrouds and 
 ruffled the winding-sheets for Ravenbury Bro- 
 thers. Plumer Ravenbury betted; but he had 
 a keen eye for safe joint-stock speculations. 
 Sir Jasper Goldthorpe did not disdain to bow 
 to the undertaker when he met him at boards 
 and public dinners. "Why should not an 
 eminent upholsterer, who performs the last sad 
 offices for the very highest nobility, go into 
 Parliament 1 " asked Ravenbury's friends after
 
 104 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 dinner at St. John's Wood. His sparkling hock 
 was superlative! "Why indeed?" mused Mrs. 
 Plumer Ravenbury, as her jewelled fingers paused 
 on the keyboard of her Broadwood's grand. "I 
 wish he would, and cut the bone -grubbing 
 business," savagely cried Tressel Ravenbury, 
 gentleman cadet at Woolwich; when his com- 
 rades taunted him on the paternal vocation, and 
 nicknamed him " Hatchment." " Stuff and non- 
 sense ! " wheezed old Mr. Simon Ravenbury; 
 "let him stick to the shop." Plumer's only 
 son was destined for the Artillery. His papa 
 would have preferred the Church — with an eye 
 to a cemetery chaplaincy, the ill-natured sur- 
 mised ; and he had always had a great penchant 
 for classical studies, being supposed to know 
 all the Latin mottoes on his hatchments by 
 heart; but Mrs. Plumer Ravenbury declared 
 there was quite enough black already in the 
 family, and Tressel was sent to Woolwich. 
 
 A dense crowd, whispering comments on 
 the fabulous wealth of the Goldthorpe family, 
 followed the mournful train from the hotel to 
 the railway station. A special train had been 
 secured, and Death and Sorrow sped through
 
 ON A FIELD, OR; A CROSS, SABLE. 105 
 
 the icebound Kentish country to London Bridge. 
 The same lugubrious ceremonial took place at 
 the metropolitan terminus. Waggoners and cab- 
 men stared in crowded Cannon Street, and 
 Fleet Street, and Oxford Street, as the embryo 
 funeral swept along. In the western part of 
 Oxford Street, and the Edgware Road, where 
 some of Sir Jasper's tenants dwelt, the shutters 
 of the shops were closed. There was a great 
 silent throng in Onyx Square as the dead man 
 was brought home to his father's house. 
 
 Sir Jasper Goldthorpe had seen no one but 
 his wife, his body-servant Argent, and the con- 
 fidential Mr. Drossleigh, since the news came. 
 He alternated between his bedroom and his 
 study, and his children; — nay, Magdalen Hill 
 even, did not dare approach him. Argent 
 described him to his familiars, the lady's maid, 
 the housekeeper, and the butler, as being less 
 overwhelmed by grief than furious at his loss. 
 The unhappy man's ravings and complaints had 
 been fearful. He, usually so silent, had poured 
 forth, hour after hour, torrents of passionate 
 ejaculations. He disputed the justice of the 
 decree that had taken his son from him. He
 
 106 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 menaced and defied the ravisher Death. His 
 first-born could not, should not die, he wildly- 
 repeated. It was a shame. It ought not to 
 happen. He was the richest man in the City 
 of London. Then he relapsed into a silence 
 that seemed to approach stupefaction. Let us 
 draw a veil over this dismal spectacle. Who 
 meets Death or bears its visitations in the same 
 manner \ Piety and Faith oft await its coming, 
 shrinking and terrified; while sceptic cynicism 
 turns its face to the wall, smiling. Nothing is 
 there so unjust as to estimate man or woman's 
 reality by the way they die, or undergo the 
 bereavements in which Death is for ever dealing. 
 Judge not from the dried -up eye; from the 
 commonplace remark at the very grave's brink; 
 from the solicitude for petty things while yet It 
 is in the house. Judge not from the floods of 
 tears, from the agonising wailings, from the 
 days and nights passed crouching on carpets, 
 or on stairs ; from the hands that are wrung, 
 the eyes that stream, the hair that is disheveled. 
 From earliest time men have set up a conven- 
 tional standard of sorrow to be observed at the 
 death of their fellows. But it so rarely is the
 
 ON A FIELD, OR; A CROSS, SABLE. 107 
 
 nature of humanity to act exactly up to the 
 standard : there is so much grief that cannot 
 be seen, and so much that is simulated and 
 over-acted, that it is the rather a commendable 
 convenience than a hypocritical formula to have 
 professional howlers and mourners — hirelings 
 who will tear their hair, and blacken their 
 faces, and rend their garments ; or their modern 
 substitutes, who will carry staves in their hands 
 and trays of feathers on their heads for a given 
 sum. Let them do their office for the sake of 
 the World and its usages, and we shall have 
 time to grieve, each in our own fashion. 
 
 And as each of these children of Mammon so 
 grieved, at their great and appalling loss, I leave 
 the father and the mother : their woe is not for 
 contemplation. If a man were as rich in children 
 as Numenius, he is not to be comforted for the 
 loss of his first child, any more than a woman 
 can ever be comforted for the destruction of her 
 first love. But those to whom Hugh had been 
 brother felt the loss in more mingled kind. The 
 Reverend Ernest Goldthorpe was now the Heir. 
 His profession forbade that he should ever become 
 occupant of the throne of Mammon in Beryl
 
 108 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 Court; vet still lie might expect to enter one 
 day into the possession of a title and almost 
 boundless wealth. Would he rest content with 
 a country rectory ? Would his golden thousands 
 prove stepping-stones to a bishopric ? The second 
 son of Sir Jasper Goldthorpe became at once a 
 mark for eager eyes. He was but twenty-five 
 years of age. He was unmarried. The nine 
 hundred a year he had from his living could 
 matter but little to him now. What a prospect 
 lay before him ! Did he love his dead brother ? 
 Did he regret his loss ? The Reverend Ernest 
 made no sign. He was a pale bloodless man, 
 and ordinarily reserved. Solemn and severe, he 
 took up his quarters in his father's house, and 
 obeyed the behests which, almost hourly, were 
 transmitted to him either in Sir Jasper's hand- 
 writing or by word of mouth of the confidential 
 Mr. Drossleigh. There was an immensity of work 
 to do. Drossleigh took care of the City business, 
 and, had he even not attended to affairs in Beryl 
 Court, there is no doubt that Sir Jasper's money- 
 bags would have turned themselves over of their 
 own accord, and multiplied themselves spon- 
 taneously. There were perpetual interviews with
 
 ON A FIELD, OR; A CROSS, SABLE. 109 
 
 Mr. Plumer Ravenbury and his prime minister, 
 Mr. Screwm. There were servants' and family 
 mourning to be ordered; for the superior 
 womankind of Onyx Square were quite beyond 
 direction and advice. Mrs. Cashman, the house- 
 keeper, had carte blanche, or rather carte noire, 
 for the habiliments of woe. A select committee 
 of Lady Goldthorpe's female friends kindly 
 assisted her; and Cashman, installed in one of 
 the Goldthorpe carriages, was continually driving 
 backwards and forwards between Onyx Square 
 and Mr. Jay's in Regent Street. That urbane 
 and distinguished purveyor of ladies' mourning 
 took her at once to the Unmitigated Woe Depart- 
 ment. Whole bales of the paraphernalia of incon- 
 solable grief were despatched to Onyx Square. 
 Mr. Jay's young ladies plied their busy needles : 
 tried on bonnets, and mantles, and skirts. All 
 the lower rooms of Mammon's house were littered 
 with funeral trappings, and the maid-servants 
 dreamt of crape and bombazine. 
 
 There were hundreds of letters to be written 
 to the vast circle of Goldthorpe's friends and 
 clients, bidding them to the funeral, or merely 
 apprising them of the loss. There were the long
 
 1]0 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 and pompous advertisements to be drawn up for 
 the Times and Morning Post. There was a sad 
 letter to be sent to Malta, that the young sailor 
 on board the Magnanimous should know that 
 Mammon had one son the less. 
 
 It was premature as yet to speak of the tomb 
 or the inscription. "I suppose Ernest Goldthorpe 
 will write that himself. His Latin was never 
 very good/' opined many a clerical and scholastic 
 admirer of the Goldthorpian grandeur. "He 
 fought bravely enough at the Sutlej. They can't 
 do less than give him a statue down at Gold- 
 thorpe, or at least a couple of busts for town and 
 country/' reasoned Tom Praxtiles the sculptor, 
 fondly regarding his unsold Bacchante and his 
 unsuccessful design for a monument to Lord Hill, 
 in his not too frequented studio in Charlotte 
 Street, Fitzroy Square. 
 
 "And then there'll be the monument in the 
 cemetery, Praxtiles, my chick/' would hint 
 friendly George Gafferer, Praxtiles' boon com- 
 panion, Boswell, and critic, who had looked in 
 to inform him that there was a neat little para- 
 graph about his last bust (Pessawee Ramjetjee 
 Bobbajee Lai, the rich Parsee of Bombay) in
 
 ON A FIELD, OR; A CROSS, SABLE. Ill 
 
 that morning's Comet, smoke a quiet pipe, drink 
 a bottle of pale ale, and give him another sitting 
 for his own (complimentary) bust. 
 
 "There'll be no stonecutters' work where a 
 Goldthorpe's concerned, my chick,'" George would 
 continue. The worthy soul was thus naively 
 affectionate with every body, and would have 
 called the judge who sentenced him to death 
 "my chick." No broken columns, or quenched 
 torches there, you may depend. Why, they'll have 
 a mausoleum, Praxtiles, with slabs of Carrara, 
 and verde antique and scagliola columns, with 
 gilt capitals and a bronze railing, and a weeping 
 Victory at top. Write in at once, my dearest 
 chick." 
 
 Praxtiles didn't write, but he left his card 
 with kind inquiries, that afternoon, in Onyx 
 Square; and meeting the Lieutenant of Hussars 
 moodily walking through Bayswater, grasped 
 his hand with a depth of sympathy that would 
 have drawn tears from one of Praxtiles' own 
 marble blocks. The sculptor had had the 
 honour of dining more than once at Sir 
 Jasper's, and he never dined with a rich man 
 without at once laying the foundation of a plot
 
 112 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 for hewing his bust while alive, or his statue 
 when dead. 
 
 Lieutenant William was constrained to walk 
 moodily about Bayswater, for he could not sit 
 all day in the darkened house, or in the frigid 
 Jermyn Street Hotel where he slept. He scarcely 
 knew his dead brother ; but he was very sorry — 
 the sorrier because his kind father and mother 
 were in such dire grief. He was a good-natured 
 young man, who could not think much. The 
 most he could say about the dreadful catastrophe 
 at Armentieres was that it was "a shocking 
 thing," and that "poor Hugh was gone, you 
 know/'' He did not know how to employ his 
 time. He wrote to his colonel and to one or two 
 friends about the "shocking thing," and the 
 gallant officers of the Nineteenth repeated at 
 mess that it was shocking, and that "poor Hugh 
 Goldthorpe had gone to the bad." But they 
 talked much more about his father's money, 
 and indulged in many surmises as to whether 
 the parson would come in for the bulk, or whether 
 Willy Goldthorpe would sell out and turn money- 
 grubber in the City. 
 
 The subaltern would have liked to look in at
 
 ON A FIELD, OB, A CROSS, SABLE. 113 
 
 his club in St. James's Square, but he knew 
 that etiquette inhibited his going there. He 
 dared scarcely enter the shop of his cigar-dealer 
 in ordinary. The Reverend Ernest was too busy 
 to talk with him. Miss Hill did not leave her 
 room. He had an odd disdain for his three 
 younger brothers, to whom he could not talk, 
 and who could not talk to him. It was incon- 
 venient to walk about Bayswater all day long; 
 but at last he hit upon a happy expedient and 
 compromise, and retaining a private room at his 
 hotel, did there entertain a select circle of tall, 
 stupid, good-natured fellows, mostly with tawny 
 moustaches, and belonging to the profession of 
 arms, who drank sodawater dashed with cognac, 
 smoked very large and powerful cigars, made 
 occasional bets on current events, and bade him 
 " cheer up, old fellow," Lieutenant William got 
 on very well with these friends until the funeral. 
 It was just the kind of consolation he needed. 
 He was not hard-hearted — only somewhat obtuse, 
 and nearly a stranger to the kinsman he had lost 
 Who shall say that he was not as sorry as he 
 might reasonably be expected to be ? 
 
 The undergraduate and the clerk in the Civil 
 
 TOL. I. I
 
 114 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 Service had been mere boys when Hugh had paid 
 his visit to England. They were bewildered and 
 shocked by the awful intelligence of his death, 
 but they could scarcely bewail it. They talked 
 incessantly about it to each other, canvassed 
 every item of the tragedy as lads will do; but 
 how were they to weep, and what were they 
 to weep about ? 
 
 As for Alfred Goldthorpe, he was a child. 
 The best thing that could be done for him was 
 done; and the Honourable Mrs. Conybeare, 
 who had a whole tribe of boys home for the 
 holidays, took temporary charge of him. The 
 little fellow did not understand much about the 
 bereavement his family had suffered. He had 
 never seen Hugh. He was chiefly sorry when 
 the lady's maid told him that Miss Magdalen, 
 of whom he was dotingly fond, was ill with grief. 
 But the laughter of his playmates — their toys, 
 and games, and sponge-cakes, and oranges, soon 
 controlled him; nor could Alfred resist an odd 
 feeling of gratification at the thought of the fine 
 clothes for which the tailor had measured him, 
 and which he was to wear; or banish from his 
 young mind the knowledge that the sad mis-
 
 ON A FIELD, OR; A CROSS, SABLE. 115 
 
 fortune that had happened in his family would 
 invest him with a strange importance and interest 
 when he went back to school. 
 
 Should these brothers of the dead have shown 
 their sorrow otherwise ? — and if so, in what 
 manner? 
 
 i2
 
 116 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 " RESURGAM." 
 
 In the early days of January 1850, the solemn 
 funeral of Hugh Jasper Goldthorpe took place. 
 The locality chosen was the cemetery at Kensal 
 Green. The Goldthorpe family had been too 
 recently inscribed in the Libro d> Oro of pro- 
 vincial aristocracy (Burke's Landed Gentry) to 
 claim sepulture in some ivy -grown country 
 church, the pavement of whose chancel was 
 sown thick with monumental brasses and cross- 
 legged figures, couchant, of mediaeval Gold- 
 thorpes, dead and gone. Hugh could not be 
 laid with his ancestors ; and Sir Jasper had ever 
 calmly repudiated the convenient insinuation 
 of heraldic parasites, that it might be possible 
 to find a Goldthorpe well known as a Saxon 
 franklin whose fathers had been here long before 
 the Conqueror's coming, and the registration of 
 whose land and swine had been unaccountably 
 omitted from Domesday-book. The potentate
 
 " EESURGAM." 117 
 
 of Beryl Court prided himself on being the 
 Rodolph of Hapsburg — read "Lucksburg ;1 — of 
 his race. There had been some talk of a mauso- 
 leum in the park at Goldthorpe j but this idea was 
 abandoned at the earnest instance of the mother 
 of the deceased. Where her son's ashes were 
 laid, she was determined, she said, to lie some 
 day; and it should be, she insisted, in a Christian 
 graveyard, not among the deer in a park. There 
 were those among the Goldthorpe following who 
 expressed themselves of opinion that Westminster 
 Abbey was the most appropriate place for inter- 
 ment. Why had not Captain Hugh been killed at 
 the Sutlej ? — his representatives might have de- 
 manded a niche in the Abbey for him then, as of 
 right. Sir Jasper knew the Dean. What were 
 Deans good for but to be civil and do what they 
 were asked ? In the end, Kensal Green was fixed 
 upon, and the freehold of a huge family grave 
 purchased there. Praxtiles the sculptor knew 
 its superficial area to an inch two days before 
 the funeral. So did Fiddyas of Eccleston Street 
 Pimlico ; so did Roubiliac Tompkins of the Euston 
 Road. Now was the time. Tompkins fondly 
 pictured to himself the means of getting rid of
 
 118 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 that long-completed group, "Pity weeping over 
 Valour," which, in despair at seeing marble lie 
 idle, he had begun to think of exhibiting at 
 Canterbury Hall, or selling to the proprietor 
 of a tea-garden. 
 
 The day of the funeral was kept as a kind of 
 mournful fete in Onyx Square. The little Miss 
 Sardonixes (Dr. Sardonix, physician to the Court), 
 next door to the house of Mammon, were excused 
 that morning from attendance at the Hyde Park 
 College for Young Ladies. They stood at the 
 dining-room windows instead, and glued their 
 young noses to the panes thereof, until the last of 
 the brave funeral had disappeared from the Square. 
 Pappadaggi, the music-master, was bidden to 
 forego his bi-weekly lesson at Number Twelve. 
 The Miss Bosuns (Admiral Bosun) were eagerly 
 scanning the funeral from their drawing-room 
 casements. Mrs. Twizzle from Maida Hill, Miss 
 Ashtaroth, the old maid from the Harrow Boad^ 
 who regularly attended the marriages at St. 
 George's, Hanover Square, and (by special favour 
 of a subsidised pew-opener) was permitted to 
 weep plenteously in the organJoft, with Captain 
 Hawksley, B.N., and one or two evening-party
 
 " RESUHGAM." 119 
 
 young men, looked in before noon. There was 
 a nice hot lunch at two. The Bosuns didn't 
 know the Goldthorpes. The dead man was no 
 kinsman of theirs. What harm was there in their 
 having a little singing, and spending a most 
 delightful afternoon ? Old Chewke, the plethori- 
 cally wealthy retired timber-merchant, formerly 
 of Riga, went purposely two hours later to the 
 Union Club that morning. He had declined an 
 invitation to the funeral. He was a selfish old 
 man, who ate hot veal cutlets in bed, and was 
 afraid of the weather; but he watched the start 
 of the procession narrowly, and to Chipp, his 
 body servant, imparted his opinion that it was 
 deuced well done, and a credit to Goldthorpe. 
 Chewke knew Plumer Kavenbury quite well, and 
 nodded familiarly to that monarch of funeral- 
 furnishing as he saw him hand the chief mourner 
 into his coach; then, remembering the solecism 
 in etiquette he had committed, he retreated to 
 his study, and took Chipp severely to task for 
 daring to peep at the cortege through the half- 
 opened door. " Think of my health, sir," 
 thundered the retired timber-merchant. Mr. 
 Chewke did not like draughts in his house —
 
 120 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 always excepting hot ones (with spices and sugar) 
 before going to bed. 
 
 Truly, it was the grandest funeral that had ever 
 been seen in Onyx Square. There was no cheap 
 local papers in those days (capital institutions are 
 those cheap local papers), else some Bayswater 
 Chronicle or Paddington Gazette would have de- 
 scribed the order of the procession: the hearse 
 and plumes, with the cypher of the deceased 
 embroidered on the horses' trappings; the long 
 train of mourning coaches ; the longer file of pri- 
 vate carriages — from those of dukes and marquises 
 downwards, all with shutters closely drawn up, all 
 with coachmen and footmen with long hatbands ; 
 — the policemen who cleared the way and closed 
 the procession ; the crowds that lined the streets 
 through which it passed. The chief daily news- 
 papers did indeed each devote a paragraph to the 
 description of the melancholy spectacle. 
 
 Throughout, it was the strangest mixture of the 
 things of this world and those that belong no 
 more to the world at all. You could not keep 
 wealth and pride and feasting away from the 
 black, dreary drama of death. Those who were 
 being arrayed for mourners could not help finger-
 
 121 
 
 ing their scarves and hatbands, and wondering at 
 the thickness and richness of the silk. There 
 was cake and wine everywhere; and people 
 could not help taking port and sherry with one 
 another. The maid servants could not help 
 looking prettier than usual in their new black 
 and glossy-ribboned caps. There was a buzzing 
 of murmuring conversation most mundane while 
 the last dread preparations were going on above 
 — and till murmuring was hushed by the creak- 
 ing of the stairs and the coming down of the 
 bearers. Dr. [Sardonix was one of the family 
 physicians. His little daughters wagged their 
 heads affectionately, and pointed their innocent 
 fingers, until reproved by Zenobia, their mamma, 
 when they saw the Doctor emerge, pilloried in 
 the highest of white cravats, from Mammon's 
 portals, and bow gravely to the undertaker's 
 aide-de-camp, who assisted him into the mourn- 
 ing-coach. Dr. Sardonix knew the man by 
 sight ; and, in good sooth, Beaver, the functionary 
 in question, had often officiated as toastmaster at 
 the anniversary festivals of the hospital of which 
 the Doctor was chief physician. In the dining- 
 room, pending departure, Dr. Sardonix was, as
 
 122 THE SEVEN SONS OP MAMMON. 
 
 usual, gravely eloquent. He was shorn of one 
 customary subject of conversation, for he could 
 not dilate on the curative treatment to which he 
 had subjected the deceased: — "but Nature was 
 too strong for us — too strong, my dear sir," 
 would the Doctor wind up. But he was a ready 
 man, and atoned for the loss of his topic by 
 pleasing anecdotes of railway accidents. Here 
 Bolsover, M.P. — who always went in for his 
 borough as a red-hot Liberal at every general 
 election, spoke and voted as a determined Tory 
 till the last month of the session, then turned 
 Liberal again, and was triumphantly re-elected 
 after the dissolution — cut in with quotations of 
 celebrated epitaphs, and " Sidney's sister, Pem- 
 broke's mother," " Martini Luigi implora pace," 
 and similar mortuary inscriptions that have 
 become historical, were handed about with the 
 cake and wine. 
 
 It was the same in the carriages during the 
 dreary ride up the Harrow Road. The lawyers 
 talked of abstruse conveyances, and notable wills, 
 and picturesque Chancery suits, in which all the 
 costs were costs in the cause, and none of the 
 suitors got anything: — "Not a rap, sir," whispers
 
 123 
 
 Mr. Probate of Bedford Row, suiting the action 
 to the word on his silver snuff-box, and treating 
 himself to a pinch of Macabaw. The legislators 
 talked politics. The clubmen talked club scandal 
 and girded at the committee; the clergymen 
 talked schools, missionary societies, Ecclesiastical 
 Commission, and the Times newspaper; — I don't 
 know how it is, but the clerical body seem better 
 read in the contents of the leading journal than 
 the members of any other class in the com- 
 munity; — and the merchants and money -dealers, 
 of whom there were very many in the funeral 
 following, talked stocks and shipping, bullion, 
 bills, and bankruptcy, and Manirnoniana gene- 
 rally. The most direct reference to Sir Jasper 
 Goldthorpe was made by Mr. Deedes (Deedes, 
 Ferret, and Wax), the great bank solicitors, who 
 opined that, after all, Sir Jasper would be better 
 for his calamity, for that " they could hardly keep 
 him out of his peerage now." 
 
 At every funeral there is a mourner — in mien, 
 the gravest among the whole company — who 
 makes jokes. I suppose he cannot help being 
 jocose. His notorious propensity does not pre- 
 vent his being bidden to funerals. The strangest
 
 124 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 thing about him is that he is only facetious at 
 funerals, and that at ordinary dinner-parties he is 
 the dullest dog present. There was such a joker 
 present at the solemnity now recorded. His 
 name was Grygger. He primed himself well 
 with old Madeira before starting. He was funny 
 (behind the largest white pocket-handkerchief) 
 all the way from Onyx Square till the tombstone- 
 cutters' yards that herald the vicinity of the 
 cemetery began to loom in sight ; and he never 
 forgot to precede each joke with a chuckle, and 
 end it with a sigh. He was universally popular, 
 although all his hearers were strongly of opinion 
 that he ought to be thrown out of the coach- 
 window. 
 
 And so, with faces that belie their thoughts, 
 these children of mortality follow the poor 
 crushed mortal who has put on immortality. 
 There is a larger crowd at the cemetery gates. 
 The spectators are packed closely in the street of 
 tombs, up which the black train passes. The 
 chapel is densely filled ; the last orisons are said ; 
 the grave has been reached ; the handful of earth 
 thrown in ; the cords are dragged rattling up ; 
 the company throng round the frost-covered
 
 125 
 
 planks that edge the grave, and peep over each 
 other's shoulders to read the inscription on the 
 gilded coffin-plate : 
 
 HUGH JASPER GOLDTHORPE, 
 
 Captain H.E.I.C.S. 
 
 &c. &c. &c. 
 
 Died, Twenty-seventh December, 
 
 1849, 
 
 aged Twenty-seven Years. 
 
 " Resurgam." 
 
 "What does the last word mean?" timidly 
 asks of Doctor Sardonix a little milliner's girl in 
 a skimping plaid shawl, who has come to the 
 funeral as to a show, and has edged herself in 
 among the mourners. 
 
 Dr. Sardonix looks condescendingly over his 
 pillory of starched muslin at the inquisitive 
 modiste. 
 
 "' Resurgam,' my young friend," he responds 
 in a dulcet undertone, "is a Latin word, and 
 signifies ' I shall arise again?" 
 
 " Thank you, sir," says the little milliner with 
 a curtsey, and runs off to tell Amy, her friend, 
 who is staring at the tomb of the late Mr.
 
 126 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 Ducrow, of the grand crimson velvet coffin she 
 has seen, with its gilt handles and cherubim 
 heads, and golden plate, and how kindly the nice 
 old gentleman in the white neckcloth answered 
 her. 
 
 " Resurgam" One need not look into a grave 
 to read that motto. You may see it painted on 
 the hatchments in every undertaker's shop- 
 window. 
 
 It was all over. The sexton who locked the 
 chapel-door just paused as he noticed a fresh line 
 of furrows on the great wooden turntable bier, 
 covered with thousands of dints, in the centre of 
 the edifice. "What a heavy coffin, to be sure \" 
 he said meditatively. "Might have held three. 
 Ravenbury Brothers have made a good thing of it 
 this time." And so locked all up and went to 
 smoke his pipe at the little beershop hard by. 
 The undertaker's men crammed the rich pall into 
 the hearse, and hauled the plumes off their 
 several pegs as though they were extinguishing 
 so many corpse-candles. Then they rattled off to 
 town, their legs swinging over the sides of the 
 vehicle, and their jolly noses brightening up 
 with the bracing motion and the thoughts of the
 
 " kesurgam." 127 
 
 bowls of punch they would partake of that night. 
 For Ravenbury Brothers gave an annual supper 
 to those who did "black work" for them, and 
 this festival happened to be concurrent with the 
 grand funeral at Kensal Green Cemetery. 
 
 The carriages, of which the shutters had been 
 so closely drawn up, and whose attendants had 
 assumed such mournful adjuncts to their garb, 
 did good service that evening in the conveyance 
 of their distinguished proprietors to balls, and 
 suppers, and pantomimes. Everybody went 
 about his several business, and was business-like 
 or convivial, sleepy or snappish, preoccupied or 
 simply indifferent, as circumstances or inclination 
 led him. Only Grygger the joker had the blues, 
 slipped off to his lonely chambers in Duke Street, 
 Adelphi, sipped mutton-broth for his dinner, and 
 passed the evening in the perusal of Sir Thomas 
 Browne's "Urn Burial." 
 
 Mr. Plumer Ravenbury had not conducted the 
 funeral on foot. Members of the firm never did. 
 It was Mr. Screwm who, ebony baton in hand, 
 marshalled the procession, and walked valorously 
 through the frozen mud to Kensal Green. He 
 would not have derogated from his position by
 
 128 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 accepting a "lift" on the road, for worlds. In- 
 ferior undertakers might do it; but, as Mr. 
 Screwm observed to his immediate subordinate, 
 Beaver (by night a checktaker at the Olympic 
 Theatre, Wych Street, Strand, — and much success 
 to you, Messrs. Robson and Emden), "hif. 
 Ravenbury Brothers' 'ed man can't afford shoe- 
 leather, and charge chilblains to the 'ouse, the 
 dickens is in it. I'll have the next warm, my 
 dear." The colloquy took place at the Mute's 
 Head, Church Passage, Jermyn Street, the 
 favourite house of call for gentlemen who did 
 black work. Mr. Plumer Ravenbury followed 
 the cortege at a decorous distance in his black 
 brougham; but he was on the ground and at the 
 grave, and adjusted the chief mourner's cloak, 
 and placed his Prayer-book for him. He had a 
 civil word to say, too, for the Cemetery Chaplain, 
 a pallid young man with a fishy eye, one of a race 
 of hapless curates who had desperately clutched 
 at the large salary attached to a charnel-house 
 chaplaincy. Do these chaplains ever go raving 
 mad from incessantly repeating the same solemn 
 ritual, I wonder ? We who listen to the noble 
 Burial-service of the Church of England, and
 
 129 
 
 dwell upon its beautiful language, its austere 
 eloquence, sit with charmed ears and reverent 
 awe to hear the priest ; but how is it with the 
 unhappy ecclesiastic who has to read the service 
 perhaps fifty times a day? 
 
 Sir Jasper Goldthorpe went straight from the 
 cemetery to the South- Western Railway Station. 
 Argent, his body-servant, waited for him with 
 one of his own close carriages at the gate. 
 The Baronet had borne up wonderfully. Natural 
 emotion, and of the bitterest, he had shown 
 in the chapel, and at the grave of him who had 
 been his hope, his pride, and his joy ; but he was 
 soon nearly himself again ; and save that there 
 were deep-sunk cavities beneath his eyes, and 
 that his hands and knees trembled (perchance 
 with the cold), you would scarcely have thought 
 that he had suffered this dreadful blow. He 
 bowed to the company on leaving the grave, 
 said a kind word to Mr. Ravenbury, who was 
 thrilled to the soul with gratitude thereby, 
 pressed the hand of each of his children 
 present, and, leaning on his second son's arm, 
 proceeded to his carriage. Plumer Ravenbury 
 scarcely thought it in accordance with strict
 
 130 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 etiquette that the chief mourner's departure 
 should take place in this abrupt manner; but 
 he consoled himself with the thought that 
 grief so intense and wealth so prodigious must 
 be humoured, and, when the carriage had 
 driven away, conducted Ernest Goldthorpe and 
 his four brothers to the mourning coach (for 
 even little Alfred had been brought thither), 
 with a dignity worthy of a chambellan of Louis 
 Quatorze. 
 
 Sir Jasper Goldthorpe found a companion 
 within his carriage. Magdalen Hill was there. 
 The blinds were down. The girl flung herself 
 into his arms. They sobbed in concert, till 
 the vehicle stopped at the entrance to the 
 Terminus an hour afterwards; scarcely a word 
 had been exchanged ; and both were the better 
 for their undisturbed grief. 
 
 Everybody in office at the Railway Station 
 knew whom they were, and turned their heads 
 away as they alighted, that they might not be 
 seen to notice the swollen eyes of Sir Jasper 
 and his companion. Argent had secured a 
 carriage. Officials conducted them to it with 
 silent respect, and policemen stood on ^the "plat-
 
 131 
 
 form near, quietly warning off inquisitive travel- 
 lers with a whisper that Sir Jasper Goldthorpe 
 was there. 
 
 An hour's journey brought ' them to Gold- 
 thorpe Station, formerly Pogthorpe Road, but 
 which had been rechristened in honour of the 
 contiguity of Goldthorpe Manor, Sir Jasper's 
 marvel of a place hard by. The mansion was 
 a good two miles' distance from the station. 
 Another carriage was in waiting ; the servants in 
 deep mourning. The lodge-keeper at Gold- 
 thorpe who flung open the gilded gates was 
 in profound black. The little charity- children 
 who passed them on the road had crape on 
 their arms. Tears trickled down the cheeks of 
 the ancient butler and housekeeper, who received 
 them in the grand entrance-hall; and Plutus, 
 the big mastiff, whined as he crept towards his 
 master and licked his hand. 
 
 There was a bright and cheerful fire burning 
 in the dining-room : and when Sir Jasper and 
 Magdalen had removed their travelling wrappers, 
 the ancient butler, who had been nervously 
 twitching his fingers and scraping his feet, as 
 though he had some message to deliver about
 
 132 THE SEVEN SONS OP MAMMON. 
 
 whose reception he was not quite certain, said, 
 bowing deferentially : 
 
 " If you please, Sir Jasper, I was to give you 
 this card, and ftie lady has been waiting more 
 than an hour to see you." 
 
 The card was slim and limp, and glazed and 
 scented. There was a crest engraven on it, and 
 a name ; and beneath, these words in pencil : 
 
 " 3 uiu&t 6ee you, indtant£u, and aCone. 3 
 fearut tfiat uoii wcze comma Vieze, flm moiutuq. 
 ^on cannot ze$ui>e me. 3 £>aw tlie faat of 
 jfCuqn." 
 
 Sir Jasper Goldthorpe hastily glanced at 
 Magdalen, murmured " Some City business/' 
 crumpled the card in his hand, and hurried to 
 the door. He darted across the hall into his 
 study, where, sitting before a fire as bright 
 and as cheerful as that which he had left, was 
 a lady in very deep but very rich black, with 
 a very elaborate black bonnet, and pretty little 
 black kid-gloved hands. The drapery beneath 
 her sombre dress was wonderfully embroidered, 
 and she had just lifted it to toast one of her
 
 133 
 
 little feet, daintily arrayed in a shining little 
 black bottine, at the fire. 
 
 " Alone ? " said the lady in black, inquiringly, 
 when the Baronet entered. 
 
 " We are alone." 
 
 " Be kind enough to lock that door. Doubly. 
 There's no bolt? "Well, never mind. Thank 
 you." 
 
 The lady rose, and put out one little gloved 
 hand to Sir Jasper Goldthorpe, smiling, showing 
 her dazzling white teeth, and shaking her sunny 
 ringlets — of which she had a profusion — as she 
 did so. The Baronet took her hand, shuddering, 
 but let it fall again as though he had come in 
 contact with some noxious reptile. 
 
 "And so you have buried your son?" she 
 continued, quite jauntily. " Poor fellow ! He 
 was with me only five minutes before the train 
 for Calais started." 
 
 Sir Jasper Goldthorpe groaned, and hid his 
 face in his hands. 
 
 "Only five minutes," the lady in black repeated. 
 
 There was no response. 
 
 "You see I wear mourning for him. It was 
 due to his memory. It is fit that I should go
 
 134 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 into the very deepest black for Hugh. I killed 
 him." 
 
 The Baronet turned his eyes, wild in amaze- 
 ment, towards the speaker. 
 
 " Yes ! " the lady in black airily repeated. " I 
 killed him. I'm not a luggage-train, though; I 
 had nothing to do with that horrid accident." 
 
 " Do you wish to drive me mad ? " moaned 
 the father. 
 
 " Not at all. Only to make you remember old 
 times and old promises. Look here, Sir Jasper 
 Goldthorpe," the lady went on, and seating 
 herself coquettishly on one arm of the chair in 
 which her companion crouched rather than sat, 
 " you once threatened to have me transported." 
 
 " Woman, there were circumstances — " 
 
 " There were Devils, and there is one," 
 interrupted the lady in black, with pretty testiness 
 and swinging one of the dainty bottines to and 
 fro. "You threatened to transport me — poor 
 little Me ! And to think that I should have 
 killed your son, the heir to your riches and your 
 baronetcy ! Sir Jasper Goidthorpe I killed him 
 with these ! " 
 
 As she spoke she produced a charming little
 
 RESUBGAM." 1 
 
 ■^o 
 
 bijou of a pocket-book in morocco and gold. 
 She took out an oblong packet of papers, the 
 topmost one seemingly covered with faded writing, 
 and crossed at right angles by more manuscript. 
 
 " Regardez done," she said; "how pleasant the 
 
 old writing looks. f Accepted payable at' 
 
 wherever is the place ? n 
 
 A minute afterwards she had unlocked the 
 door, and stood in the hall, calling for " somebody, 
 please ! " 
 
 "Ah! there is Miss Hill," cried Mrs. Armytage 
 cheerfully, as Magdalen's blanched face showed 
 at the dining-room door. " Quite eploree she 
 looks. Oh ! here is a servant. If you please/' 
 she continued, addressing the butler, "you had 
 better bring some water, or some brandy, or some 
 smelling salts, or something. I don't think Sir 
 Jasper is very well."
 
 136 THE SEVEN SONS OE MAMMON. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 MRS. ARMYTAGE IS AS MUCH AT HOME AS EVER. 
 
 Mrs. Armytage did not care to stay for the 
 succour she had requested to be afforded to Sir 
 Jasper Goldthorpe. She had done all that in her 
 opinion was due to the claims of humanity. Could 
 she, a lady and a comparative stranger, assist 
 with propriety in the resuscitation of a gentleman 
 — such a very rich one, too — who had fallen down 
 in a fit caused, no doubt, by excessive grief and 
 by reaction of the nerves after the melancholy 
 ordeal through which he had just passed? Sir 
 Jasper was in his own house, and surrounded by 
 his own attached domestics. The presence of 
 Mrs. Armytage was clearly no longer needed ; so 
 she slipped through the throng of frightened 
 servants, who were crying out that their master 
 was dying ; brushed past Magdalen Hill, who wa 
 hastening towards the study, and who regarded 
 her with a look of haughty aversion mingled with 
 amazement, and tripped down the great marble
 
 MBS. ARMYTAGE IS AS MUCH AT HOME AS EVER. 137 
 
 steps on to the terrace. Mrs. Armytage and 
 Magdalen were old acquaintances. The house-dog 
 Plutus sprang towards her with a growl ; but she 
 waved him off with her tiny kid-gloved hand. She 
 was very fond of dogs, and called this one " poor 
 fellow;" but as the animal stood regarding her 
 with uncertain eyes, and uttered a low querulous 
 baying, she sighed to herself, " Will nobody love 
 me, — not even a dog I " The golden and purple 
 peacocks, in their house by the frozen lake, craned 
 forth their necks as Mrs. Army tage approached in 
 her way down a lower terrace into the park that 
 stretched for full a mile before Goldthorpe Manor. 
 It was quite pretty to see her picking her way 
 along the carriage-drive between the tall old trees. 
 She saw the woodman with his billhook pruning 
 the dead branches. The man made a clumsy bow 
 to her fair face and rich clothes. Her golden 
 ringlets seemed to belong, somehow, to Mammon. 
 She smiled graciously, and put a shilling into the 
 man's leathern-covered paw — at least, it looked a 
 paw, swathed in his huge verderer's glove. "A 
 civil fellow," she thought. " What would he do 
 to me if I were a ragged, barefooted girl caught 
 stealing dead wood in Sir Jasper's park ? There
 
 138 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 is a cage in the village, I suppose. Would thejf 
 send poor little Me to gaol, or put me into the 
 stocks ? " And she broke into a bitter little fit of 
 laughter, which rang very strangely through the 
 frosty air of the evening. It was twilight when 
 she reached the lodge-gates. The ancient keeper 
 came out with a lantern to open the portals for 
 her. The light shone upon her sombre dress, 
 upon her white skirts and tinselled hair. It 
 shone, too, upon the heavy gate-posts, upon the 
 gilding and tracery, and the armorial bearings of 
 the rich man displayed above the entrance to his 
 demesne. "A pretty place," murmured Mrs. 
 Armytage, giving the lodge-keeper another shil- 
 ling. "And it might all belong to poor little 
 Me!" 
 
 " You've seen Sir Jasper, my lady, may be ? " 
 Huggins the lodge-keeper inquired, in a respect- 
 fully sympathetic voice. 
 
 "I have just left the house," Mrs. Armytage 
 replied. 
 
 " Do he bear up, my lady ? " added Huggins, in 
 a tone of affectionate solicitude. 
 
 " Wonderfully. He will soon get over it. A 
 little this way with the lantern. Thank you.
 
 MRS. ARMITAGE IS AS MUCH AT HOME AS EVER. 139 
 
 Good night. " And the gates closed with a clang 
 and Mrs. Armytage was gone. 
 
 " A nice-spoken lady as ever was/' remarked 
 Mr. Huggins to his wife, as he dropped the shil- 
 ling through the orifice in a missionary society's 
 box. " She didn't come up, though, with Sir 
 Jasper and Miss Magdalen, surety. Didst thou 
 let the lady in, Moggy ? " 
 
 "Not I," answered Mrs. Huggins, his wife, 
 addressed as " Moggy." " A'nt I been down to 
 Pogthorpe till a quarter of an hour ago ? " 
 
 " Then 'twas you, Tib." 
 
 " I never saw the lady," protested the young 
 person hight Tib, who was a red-headed girl of 
 fifteen, the lodge-keeper's granddaughter. 
 
 " That's strange," grumbled old Huggins, 
 settling himself down in a rush-bottomed chair to 
 enjoy his customary afternoon's cough, which as 
 customarily followed the afternoon's pipe, from 
 which he had been disturbed by Mrs. Armytage's 
 summons to open the gate. "That's pertickler 
 strange," he continued. "I thought I should ha' 
 recklected all that gold-coloured hair if I'd seen 
 it afore. My memory must be getting uncommon 
 bad, surety." And here, the customary cough
 
 140 THE SEVEN SONS OP MAMMON. 
 
 overtaking Mr. Huggins, he substituted a bark 
 for a wheeze, and so went off to a growl and a 
 rattle, until his tea was ready. 
 
 Meanwhile Mrs. Armytage walked through the 
 black winter gloaming. She met a rural police- 
 man, and wished him good night with much 
 sweetness. She was troubled with no fears of 
 poachers or rustic burglars ; although there were 
 some very coarse, ruffianly-looking fellows loung- 
 ing about the door of the Goldthorpe Arms, half 
 way between Pogthorpe and the manor. She was 
 a courageous little woman, and went straight on. 
 There was no village at Goldthorpe Station, for- 
 merly Pogthorpe Eoad, only a few stucco villas 
 run up by a speculative builder, who had gone 
 mad immediately after mortgaging the carcasses 
 of his houses for thrice their value, and who was 
 now expiating his taste for architecture at Colney 
 Hatch. Two or three forlorn little shops had 
 been started by traders who hoped to get some 
 custom from the occupants of the villas ; but as 
 half of these edifices were not finished, and the 
 other half had hitherto found only insolvent and 
 fraudulent tenants, and one also, as it was, had 
 already the reputation of being haunted, from
 
 MBS. ABJfYTAGE IS AS MUCH AT HOME AS EVER. 141 
 
 the fact of a retired pig-jobber of evil disposition 
 having cloven his wife's skull with a chopper in 
 the front parlour the preceding Christmas Eve, 
 commercial activity was not very remarkable at 
 Goldthorpe Station. In fact, but for its vicinage 
 to the manor of Mammon, the Company might 
 have shut it up altogether without much detriment 
 to the traffic. There was an unhappy little beer- 
 shop, u The Railway Arms ; " but the topers of 
 the neighbourhood preferred either the "Gold- 
 thorpe Arms M or the " Jolly Beggars " at Pog- 
 thorpe village proper, which was distant a mile 
 from Sir Jasper's. The great man had once 
 thought of taking Pogthorpe Road in hand, and 
 had he deigned to smile upon it, it would 
 doubtless by this time be as prosperous as 
 Wimbledon or Kingston j but one of the porters 
 happened to offend him one morning, by omit- 
 ting to hand him his Times before he entered 
 the train, and thenceforth desolation gathered 
 over the yet uncompleted station of Pogthorpe 
 Road. 
 
 It looked gay and cheerful enough, however, to 
 Mrs. Armytage, as she terminated her dark walk, 
 and was accosted at the entrance to the station by
 
 142 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 the driver of the solitary fly with the knock-kneed 
 horse attached to Pogthorpe Road, who, as she 
 wished to proceed to town, wanted, of course, to 
 drive her "any where, any where out of the world." 
 There was light, there was warmth at the station- 
 brilliant gas and a roaring fire in the waiting-room. 
 The clerk was a species of Robinson Crusoe, 
 in a sealskin-cap, who resided in a small hutch 
 surrounded by skirting boards, and who, in the 
 intervals of the arrival and departure of trains, 
 amused himself by cutting out models of Hansom 
 cabs in cardboard. There were two porters, 
 moody and saturnine men, one of whom perpetu- 
 ally studied the time-bill, the proclamations 
 against smoking, and the " awful examples " 
 shown in placards announcing the recent convic- 
 tion of Keziah Bopps of Portsea for travelling 
 without a return ticket, and the fining of Wilhel- 
 mina Lightfoot of Basingstoke for leaving the 
 train while in motion. As he studied, he whistled 
 a lugubrious melody that began like " Old Dan 
 Tucker," and ended like " The Dead March in 
 Saul." The other porter used habitually to sit 
 on his truck on the platform, inspecting the in- 
 terior of his bell, as though to find out if it were
 
 MRS. ARMYTAGE IS AS MUCH AT HOME AS EVER. 143 
 
 possible to ring it without agitating the clapper; 
 while the odd boy who ran errands, attended to 
 the newspaper department, and had to be care- 
 fully watched lest he should get at the electric 
 telegraph, continually ascertained his own ponde- 
 rosity by standing on the weighing machine, and, 
 when he could do it without observation, pasted 
 luggage-labels on the knees of his corduroys. It 
 was a very dreary little station, but hundreds of 
 times its solitude had been enlivened and its 
 dreariness converted into splendour and gaiety by 
 the guests who had come down to visit Goldthorpe 
 Manor. The flyman had conveyed peers of the 
 realm and foreign ambassadors, when they had 
 missed the Goldthorpe carriages. The gorgeous 
 vehicles last named — barouches, curricles, broug- 
 hams, dog-carts, chars a banc — had gathered by 
 droves at the station-door, and towering, pow- 
 dered, purple-and-yellow footmen had con- 
 descended to quaff the mildest of mild ales at the 
 little beershop. The dull platform had been 
 swept by the robes of beautiful women ; it had 
 been trodden by statesmen, diplomatists, and mil- 
 lionaires ; but where is the use of telling you of 
 the had-beens ? — it was silent and deserted now,
 
 144 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 and there was no one who sought warmth at the 
 waiting-room fire save Mrs. Armytage. 
 
 She would have to wait a full hour, the odd boy- 
 told her, for the eight p.m. up-train. The moody 
 porter paused in his study of the time-bill, hushed 
 his whistling, and stared vacantly at the visitor. 
 The Robinson Crusoe of a clerk, who had just 
 made a slip with his penknife, and severed two of 
 the spokes of a cab-wheel from the axle, opened 
 the sliding panel of his hutch, and angrily bade 
 the odd boy, for a " young limb," hold his noise. 
 When Robinson Crusoe was not modelling Hansom 
 cabs, or performing his ticket-dispensing duties, 
 he cultivated hollyhocks on the slope of the em- 
 bankment. He used to envy his brother, who 
 was an agent for coals about a hundred yards 
 beyond the station. He envied the landlord of 
 the beershop. He envied the guards, engine- 
 drivers, and stokers, who were at least continually 
 going up and down the line. Nature may have 
 fitted him to be a poet, an artist, an orator ; stern 
 Fate condemned him to be a station-master. He 
 used to say, like Mariana, that his life was 
 dreary, and that he was a-weary, a-weary. Pro- 
 motion came not, he said. He did not wish
 
 MRS. ARMYTAGE IS AS MUCH AT HOME AS EVER. 3 45 
 
 that lie was dead, mainly, I think, because he 
 was a [ full-blooded young fellow, only three- 
 and-twenty years of age, and keenly interested 
 in the eventualities of the next Newmarket 
 meeting. 
 
 As there was an hour to wait, and no refresh- 
 ment-room and no book-stall at the station, Mrs. 
 Armytage found time hang rather heavy on her 
 hands. She got over about five minutes of the 
 sixty by her favourite employment of toasting her 
 little bottines at the fire. Then she read all the 
 advertisements, chromo-lithographed and other- 
 wise, which hung framed and glazed on the walls, 
 and wondered what manner of artists they could 
 be who devoted themselves to the composition of 
 cartoons representing gentlemen's hats, boneless 
 corsets, taps for beer-barrels, iron bedsteads, and 
 isometrical views of ginger-beer manufactories at 
 Eermondsey. Then, what with her two miles' 
 walk, the cold without, the warm fire within, the 
 deathlike stillness, relieved only by the ticking of 
 the waiting-room clock, Mrs. Armytage grew 
 drowsy. Her little head fell gently back, her 
 hands sank down among her drapery, she released 
 her hold of a tract which some pious well-wisher 
 
 VOL. i. l
 
 146 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 had left on the table, and she sank into a profound 
 sleep. 
 
 The tract was solemn, and rather fierce in its 
 solemnity. It was entitled, "Where are you 
 going ? ,J and on its title-page was a neat woodcut 
 of a young woman bearing a basket of flowers, 
 rapidly descending a mountain-path, at whose 
 base was couched a grisly bear. Mrs. Armytage 
 had glanced at the tract with considerable interest 
 just before she went to sleep. She was a well- 
 read little woman, and liked literature for its own 
 sake. " Where are you going ? " she repeated, 
 with a tinkling laugh. "Ah, if one could but 
 tell ! Sait on oic Von va ? Didn't Diderot ask 
 the question ? Does any one know whither they 
 are going?" and so fell into a slumber. 
 
 I declare that she slept as peacefully and as pret- 
 tily as a baby. Her little lips were just parted, and 
 a brighter glow than ordinary from the fire would 
 momentarily come and tip her teeth with pellicles 
 of crimson. As she lay back in the chair, her 
 head reclining, the deep shadows were on her 
 forehead and above her cheeks. Her fair throat 
 shone radiant above the lace of her collar ; while, 
 enshrined in the trappings of her bonnet, lay, all
 
 MRS. ARMYTAGE IS A3 MUCH AT HOME AS EVER. 147 
 
 tumbled and flung back, those waves of golden 
 ringlets. Had the moody porter, or he who pored 
 into the bell, or the Robinson-Crusoe clerk, entered 
 while she so slept, they would have been asses had 
 they not kissed her, whatever might have been 
 the penalty. There was no Aggravated Assaults 
 Act in 1850. She looked so calm, so tranquil, so 
 happy. No shadow of the clouds that sometimes 
 pass over the sea of sleep disturbed her closed 
 lids, with those long lashes trailing gently, like 
 the fringe of some gorgeous drapery that veils a 
 cabinet of gems. She smiled once or twice, meekly, 
 gently, coaxingly enough to melt a man whose 
 heart was triply plated; the beadwork of her 
 mantle just glanced in the light as it rose and fell 
 with the beating of her heart; and a soft sigh 
 stole from those half-opened lips, as if to reproach 
 the waiting-room clock for its remorseless ticking, 
 and hush it while the fair creature slept. 
 
 And so she slept for twenty minutes about; 
 when with a quick, sharp, painful scream, she 
 started up, erect, trembling, fluttering like a bird 
 become suddenly aware of the ruthless hawk above 
 him ; first flushed, then pale, almost breathless. 
 
 " Hands off ! " she cried ; " you shaVt touch 
 
 l2
 
 148 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 me. Fll go quietly. It isn't — Miss Hill/* she 
 continued hurriedly, — " am I dreaming ? ,; 
 
 Mrs. Array tage had not been dreaming. Hands 
 had been laid upon her, but with no stern grasp. 
 Only Magdalen Hill, draped from head to foot 
 in her mourning raiment, and with the rime of 
 the night-frost upon her, was there, and had 
 awakened her. 
 
 The two women — the girl and the widow — had 
 been acquainted for years ; had been at the same 
 balls and feasts ; but they had never been alone 
 together until this moment. Mrs. Armytage was 
 evidently flurried; but then you must recollect 
 how suddenly she had been aroused from a com- 
 fortable sleep. In less than a minute she was 
 herself again, — shook her ringlets and arranged 
 her dress. She stayed the laugh that was rising 
 to her lips; but, as she eyed Magdalen keenly, 
 she laughed internally, in what sleeve of her soul 
 I am not psychological milliner enough to deter- 
 mine. "The little weasel was very nearly being 
 caught asleep," thought Mrs. Armytage. 
 
 The girl stood looking at her with sad eyes. 
 Remorseful, wistful, well-nigh imploring — not 
 haughty, not full of aversion now.
 
 MRS. ARMYTAGE IS AS MUCH AT HOME AS EVER. 149 
 
 "Oh, Mrs. Armytage," she said, in a low 
 pleading tone, "what is this? What have you 
 told Sir Jasper? He is dreadfully ill. I thought 
 he would die. He had but just recovered con- 
 sciousness when I started, hearing from the 
 lodge-keeper that you had left, in the endeavour 
 to find you. What terrible business could it 
 have been to bring you to our house at such a 
 time?" 
 
 " My dear Miss Hill," asked the widow, " before 
 I answer your question, allow me to ask you 
 another. Is Sir Jasper in danger ? " 
 
 "I scarcely know," replied Magdalen, in a 
 broken voice, " There was not time. I hurried 
 after you. I rushed into a carriage. Fortunately 
 the house-steward bled him, and Dr. Medley has 
 been sent for." 
 
 " I am very sorry, then," interposed Mrs. 
 Armytage ; u but I don't see that I have anything 
 more to do with the matter. Had the news I 
 conveyed to Sir Jasper Goldthorpe brought about 
 fatal, or even dangerous consequences, no one 
 would have regretted it more than I. As it is, he 
 has just had a fit of syncope, and will get on 
 nicely. As I am neither a village apothecary nor
 
 150 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 a member of the Royal College of Surgeons, I 
 can't be of any use ; and as I am going to London 
 by the 8 p.m. train, you will permit me to remain 
 your most humble servant to command." 
 
 So saying, and with a sarcastic laugh which 
 seemed irrepressible, she dropped a very low 
 curtsy, and would have passed out. But Mag- 
 dalen Hill was determined. She put back Mrs. 
 Armytage with a calm sternness before which 
 the Lady on the first-floor, courageous as she 
 was, could not avoid quailing, and in a tone of 
 resolution, placing herself before the door, she 
 said: 
 
 "Pardon me, madam, you cannot, you shall 
 not, leave me thus. We have but to consult each 
 our own instinct to know that we are no great 
 friends. It is not through affection for you that 
 I am here. I come through love for my dear dead 
 Hugh j I come through love for my dearest friends 
 and guardians. What has brought you to sow 
 additional sorrow among us, wretched as we 
 are ? It is something that concerns poor Hugh's 
 memory, it is something that concerns Sir Jasper; 
 and I ask because I feel that I have a right to 
 know."
 
 MRS. ARMYTAGE IS AS MUCH AT HOME AS EVER. 151 
 
 "I will not answer one word," quoth Mrs. 
 Armytage, clenching her little hands. 
 
 "I entreat, I implore you, then," Magdalen 
 went on, her sternness failing her, and her voice 
 choked with sobs. "Oh, Mrs. Armytage, you 
 cannot be so cruel ! Is there any peril that can 
 be averted from Sir Jasper? Is there anything 
 you know of Hugh's last moments that can inflict 
 pain on his relatives, on me, on any one ? Oh, 
 speak, I adjure you ! " 
 
 Mrs. Armytage took from her pocket a little 
 jewelled bonbonniere, took out a chocolate praline, 
 and began daintily nibbling it. 
 
 "The train-bell must ring presently," she re- 
 marked, " and you will be compelled to let me go. 
 As it is, you have laid yourself open to an action 
 for assault and false imprisonment. Imagine, 
 ' Armytage v. Hill. Extraordinary case, cross- 
 examination of witnesses.' Ha ! ha ! " 
 
 "If I interposed somewhat abruptly — " Mag- 
 dalen broke in, apologetically. 
 
 "There, there," continued the widow, "no 
 harm is done; you want to be told something 
 that I won't tell you. You thought to frighten 
 me with your Tragedy-queen airs, and now you
 
 152 
 
 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON, 
 
 are fit to cry your eyes out. You are an over- 
 grown " school-girl, and I am a woman of the 
 world — a clever woman, you understand. Go, 
 and paint your missals, and leave serious things 
 to men and women of business. What I know, 
 I know, and it is a matter between Sir Jasper 
 Goldthorpe and myself. Be a good girl, and 
 get from before that door. Will you have a 
 praline ? " 
 
 She held out the box of sweetmeats to her 
 rival with a merry, roguish twinkle in her eyes. 
 She was quite at home again. The weasel was 
 thoroughly awake. Poor Magdalen felt very much 
 like a bird in the clutches of a fine silky-furred 
 cat. She was powerless, and dropped her head, 
 and almost involuntarily moved away from the 
 door. 
 
 "That is better," laughed Mrs. Armytage. 
 " There's nothing like common sense. Common 
 sense has been worth six thousand a year to me, 
 a poor little Indian widow, with a twopenny- 
 halfpenny pension. It was sensible in you to 
 stand away from the door as I bid you; because, 
 if you had not, and for all that you are the grand 
 young lady Miss Magdalen Hill, I would have
 
 MES. ARMITAGE IS AS MUCH AT HOME AS EVER. 153 
 
 torn your bonnet off your head and your dress 
 off your back." 
 
 What could Magdalen do? How could she 
 cope with this affable tigress ? She averted her 
 gaze, and drew herself closely together, as the 
 widow, iu all the pride of her rustling skirts, swept 
 onwards. 
 
 " A word ere we go," she said, in a hot whisper 
 that almost blistered Magdalen's cheek. " Just 
 now you said, and truly, that Ave needed but to 
 consult our instincts to know that we were not 
 friends. We are not. We are enemies. I am 
 glad that Hugh was killed; and had he come 
 home and made you his wife, you cat, I would 
 have poisoned or shot you before ever you sat at 
 his table or lay in his bed. Good-by, and bless 
 you ! " 
 
 These were the last words of Mrs. Armytage, 
 on that occasion at least, heard at Goldthorpe 
 Station, erst Pogthorpe Road; and with this fare- 
 well and benediction she went out into the night, 
 and on to the platform. The moody porters, the 
 clerk who made the models, the boy who weighed 
 himself, all woke up to temporary life and activity 
 as the bell rang out, and the train rattled and
 
 154 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 screeched into the station. The little platform 
 shook; the people on it drew hack, lest they 
 should he sucked into destruction hy the mon- 
 ster's breath, and smashed to paste among its 
 whirling wheels. It came out of a deep cutting, 
 and disappeared in a dark tunnel. Green and red 
 lights fitfully shone as it dashed away. The 
 red smoke made lurid the face of the engine- 
 driver, as he stood with arms folded, thoughtful, 
 at his post. From the carriage windows dozens 
 of visages of men and women peered out on to 
 the station • many of them seeing it for the first 
 time, and being seen by those who peopled it for 
 the last time in their lives. So away sped the up- 
 express, carrying its load of loves and hatreds, 
 and hopes and fears, and joys and sorrows; bearing 
 mothers, perchance, as bereaved as she of the 
 House of Mammon was ; sons as fair and brave 
 as he who had been slain at Armentieres ; girls 
 as young and haughty and as loving as Magdalen ; 
 foreigners and British men, lisping children and 
 doddering dotards, honest people and foul rogues, 
 Cornelia going to her children and Lais going to 
 a masked ball, millionaires whose ships have come 
 home and bankrupts flying from a fiat — hundreds
 
 MRS. ARMYTAGE IS AS MUCH AT HOME AS EYER. 155 
 
 of patches towards the make-up of that vast motley 
 counterpane we call society; but not, in all its 
 medley company, one woman, I will wager, prettier 
 or wickeder than the Lady in black, who tripped 
 with such grace into a first-class coupe, and dis- 
 played such dainty white drapery to the admiring 
 eyes of the guard. 
 
 The train was gone. It had its goal, but whither 
 went its occupants ? " Where are you going ? n 
 asked the station-room tract. TThither are we all 
 going, and where is the terminus where the last 
 tickets shall be asked for in a Trumpet tone ? 
 
 The romancer's privilege can assign a destination 
 to two persons who so parted on this January 
 night. Foiled and repulsed, Magdalen Hill wept 
 no more. The hot fire of the waiting-room, the 
 hotter farewell whisper of the widow, had dried 
 her tears for good. " She will tell me nothing," 
 she murmured, " nothing, although I know that 
 she is working fearful evil to me and mine. 
 Heaven grant me strength and patience to watch 
 and pray." The carriage was waiting for her, and, 
 sad and sorrowful, but calm and resigned now, she 
 was borne back to Goldthorpe Manor, where 
 physicians and nurses were bending over an old
 
 156 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 man very different to the blandly strong man 
 who lorded it in Beryl Court, and who lay now 
 feebly moaning and half unconscious in his great 
 bed of state. A messenger on horseback passed 
 Magdalen or ever she had cleared the environs of 
 the station. He had been bidden to telegraph to 
 Dr. Sardonix, in London, desiring his immediate 
 attendance. The Doctor was called away from 
 the dinner-table of a rich East-Indian Director, 
 who, having quarrelled with most of his friends 
 and turned his children out of doors, had adopted 
 a liver complaint as his son, and, indeed, his heir, 
 — for he had made his will in favour of a Special 
 Hospital, — and now got on very well with curry, 
 mulligatawny, and Doctor Sardonix in the evening, 
 and tarraxicum, blue-pill, and Doctor Sardonix in 
 the morning. The Doctor used to remonstrate 
 with the Director; but how could you coerce a 
 man who had sat under the pagoda-tree until a 
 golden apple had dropped on his nose, and imbued 
 him with directorial gravity ; who had tossed up 
 heads or tails, with Sir Mungo Chutnee, in 
 Leadenhall Street, as to whether the Rajah of 
 Cadmore should be maintained in his sovereignty 
 or deposed, whether the Begum of Boocherabad
 
 MRS. ARMYTAGE IS AS MUCH AT HOME AS EVER. 157 
 
 (vehemently suspected of having boiled her pet 
 dwarf in Macassar oil, specially imported from 
 Europe for the purpose, and buried a nautch girl 
 under a marble pavement, alive) should be prose- 
 cuted or pensioned ; and who gave away commis- 
 sions in the Bengal cavalry as though they were 
 soup-tickets? The claret bell had just rung when 
 one of Sardonix's black-worsted footmen brought 
 him the telegraphic message from his house. He 
 rose in haste, had scarcely time to take his usual 
 after-dinner dose of carbonate of soda in the hall, 
 and was very nearly committing a robbery in a 
 dwelling-house, by cramming one of the Director's 
 damask napkins into his pocket. " I thought so/' 
 he said, in a soothing tone, apologising to his host. 
 " Poor dear Sir Jasper ! Nerves, my dear sir, 
 nerves. We must be very cautious. We cannot 
 take too much care of ourselves. Such a precious 
 life must be guarded by the minutest precautions." 
 It was Dr. Sardonix's practice, whenever he found 
 it feasible, to pay double-barrelled compliments, 
 or to hit two birds with one nattering bullet. The 
 Director felt grateful for the allusion to his 
 " precious life/' and growled out an expression of 
 admiration as the Doctor took his departure.
 
 158 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 " Sensible man that," lie said, half inclined to pnt 
 the Doctor in his will by the side of the Hospital 
 for Dyspepsia, bnt for economy's sake resolving 
 to get the Doctor appointed physician extraor- 
 dinary to the special establishment in question. 
 " Bobus," he continued to the butler, " now he's 
 gone I won't have claret, I'll have Port. The 
 e tawny ' twenty-four, you know : Herringpond's 
 port, — the banker fellow who was hanged. Capital 
 port he had." 
 
 Dr. Sardonix paid a whole academy of compli- 
 ments before he reached Goldthorpe Manor. He 
 asked the butler after his gout, and called that 
 delighted servitor "my good friend." I believe 
 that if the footman had consulted him as to the 
 malady which prevented the calves of his legs 
 from fattening, he would have given him the 
 most friendly advice. He complimented the cab- 
 man on the swiftness of his pace, and even pre- 
 sented him with an extra sixpence. " We doctors 
 are hard masters to horseflesh," he sympatheti- 
 cally remarked. The black-worsted footman who 
 accompanied his master to the station had not 
 failed to tell the driver how distinguished a prac- 
 titioner he was carrying; and the charioteer,
 
 MRS, ARMYTAGE IS AS MUCH AT HOME AS EVER. 159 
 
 could he have mustered up courage, would have 
 begged a prescription for the bronchial affection 
 under which his horse was suffering. The South- 
 Western Railway officials were deeply impressed 
 with a sense of Doctor Sardonix's talents and 
 affability before the special train that he had 
 ordered — no expense was spared when Mammon 
 was sick — could be got ready. The keeper of the 
 book-stall bowed to him, handed him the third 
 edition of the Express, damp with the latest news, 
 and respectfully informed him that the sale of his 
 work, "The curative Properties of stuffed Sweet- 
 bread in its Action on the human Pancreas," by 
 E. Mollyent Sardonix, M.D., E.R.S/' was going 
 on wonderfully. The guard would have allowed 
 him to smoke like Etna had the Doctor felt so 
 disposed, and numerous hats were lifted as his 
 " special " quitted the terminus. Such homage is 
 due to the princes of science. There are some 
 modest and retiring princes who never get it, and 
 don't want it; but Dr. Sardonix had long since 
 determined that the barque in which he navigated 
 the sea of life should be a golden galley and a 
 pleasure-barge. He greased the ways assiduously 
 at launching, and, with a fair start, the craft went
 
 160 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 on swimmingly. He had no need to puff himself 
 in print ; his natural suavity was far more effective 
 than leaded type. " One compliment is worth a 
 hundred advertisements * was a favourite apoph- 
 thegm with this astute physician. He has long 
 since got his baronetage; and I have no doubt 
 that the next generation will hear Sardonician 
 orations delivered at the Royal College of Physi- 
 cians by practitioners as polite as he was. 
 
 The special train that took the Doctor down to 
 Goldthorpe passed the ordinary up express, and 
 the illustrious medical man was near enough at 
 one moment to a certain first-class coupe to have 
 shaken hands with its occupant had he chosen to 
 run the risk" of fracturing his arm in so doing. 
 Mrs. Armytage no more dreamed of the Doctor's 
 proximity, nor the Doctor of Mrs. Army tage's, than 
 you or I when we pass in the street our dearest 
 unknown friend or our bitterest unknown enemy 
 — the woman who would marry us to-morrow were 
 we to ask her, or the man who would force a dose 
 of strychnine down our throats for twopence. 
 There are human parallel lines which are conti- 
 nued to infinity, and never meet. Mrs. Army- 
 tage arrived at Waterloo, quite unconscious as to
 
 MRS. ARMYTAGE IS AS MUCH AT HOME AS EVER. 161 
 
 whom her transient neighbour had been, and 
 comforting herself with a bath-bun — of which she 
 ate little more than the sugared top and the 
 carraway- seeds — and a bottle of lemonade, entered 
 a cab — I am ashamed to say that it was a Hansom 
 — but she was of so frolicsome a disposition ! — 
 and was driven to the Victoria Hotel, Euston 
 Square. Properly, her palfrey with embroidered 
 housings, or her armoried litter drawn by dos 
 arrog antes midas, like Gil Bias' uncle, the canon's : 
 with her squire and seneschal and page, should 
 have been waiting for her ; but I am writing in a 
 prosaic time, and the characters in my drama 
 must have recourse for their more or less momen- 
 tous movements to such prosaic modes of convey- 
 ance as railways and steamboats, cabs an 
 broughams. 
 
 She had brought her bower-maiden, Mademoi- 
 selle Heine, with her to London. That young lady 
 detested England and the English ; and when not 
 required at her mistress's toilet, sat immured in her 
 bedroom, sipping sugar-and-water, and perusing 
 the charming novels of M. Xavier de Montepin. 
 She was an oral cabinet de lecture. The Blenheim 
 spaniel was on duty also, and yowled fractiously
 
 162 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 at the inferior quality of the London chickens, 
 and the shameful adulteration of the London 
 cream. Moustachu, the chasseur, was likewise in 
 attendance, officiating, when Mrs. Armytage tra- 
 velled, as courier ; on which occasions he appeared 
 elaborately got up in a braided pandour jacket 
 liued with silver fox-skin, a gold-laced cap, and a 
 tawny leathern pouch slung round him, containing 
 an assortment of every European coinage. Mous- 
 tachu had been fearfully seasick in crossing the 
 Channel. He consoled himself with potent 
 draughts of the brown beer of Albion when he 
 landed ; and his mistress very nearly caught him 
 smoking a silver mounted meerchaum at the 
 corner of Seymour Street as her cab drove by. 
 
 Nor, finally, was " my man Sims " wanting to 
 complete the train of the Princess who lived in 
 that sumptuous first-floor in Paris yonder. It was, 
 however, Mr. Sims's invariable practice to keep 
 himself in the background. I question if he had 
 even a passport of his own ; or passed among Mrs. 
 Armytnge's " suite." While the accommodation 
 afforded to Mademoiselle Heine and the Sieur 
 Moustachu heavily contributed to the expansion 
 of the widow's hotel-bill, the modest Sims took
 
 MRS. ARMYTAGE IS AS MUCH AT HOME AS EVER. 163 
 
 up his quarters at a neighbouring coffee-shop, 
 where he dined off saltpetred bacon and boiled 
 tea-leaves, read papers five days old, played 
 draughts with a contemplative signalman from the 
 station over the way, and was regarded by the 
 landlord as a quiet party from the manufacturing 
 districts, who was seeking for a situation as a 
 clerk in a London house. If I had committed a 
 murder and wished to avoid detection, I would 
 hide in a coffee-shop close to a railway station. 
 Pay as you go, and nobody will take any notice of 
 you, save perhaps to remark to you how strange it 
 is that the detectives haven't captured that san- 
 guinary villain Slaughterford yet. 
 
 Mrs. Armytage was very well known and 
 highly respected at the hotel. Faithful to her 
 taste for a first-floor, she always had a suite of 
 apartments one story high, and retained a broug- 
 ham while staying in town. Her little malachite 
 card-basket was on the drawing-table, and when 
 she returned it was full of scented and heraldically 
 emblazoned cards. The announcement, " At the 
 Yictoria Hotel, Euston Square : — Mrs. Armytage 
 and suite/' met her eyes among the "fashionable 
 arrivals" in the Post. Sims had seen to that.
 
 164 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 Sims was in attendance,, having been fetched by 
 Moustachu from the coffee- shop. " Quoi de 
 nouveau ? " the lady carelessly asked of Mr. Sims 
 in French, for a waiter was present solemnly 
 lighting a galaxy of wax-candles. Darkness 
 was the only ^thing that made Mrs. Armytage 
 nervous. 
 
 " II fait gros temps dans la ckiourme," enigmati- 
 cally replied Mr. Sims. " Madame attendra que ce 
 butor soit parti." 
 
 The solemn lamp-lighter spoken of so uncom- 
 plimentarily as a " butor" a blockhead, having 
 taken his departure, Mr. Sims, as was his wont 
 when conferring alone with his patroness, lightly 
 turned the key in the door. 
 
 " What is it ? " Mrs. Armytage asked, speak- 
 ing very rapidly, and a feverish flush rising to her 
 cheeks. 
 
 "Bad as bad can be. The reddest of red 
 lamps. Total, dangerous. Prospect, smash." 
 
 " Don't torture me. Go on." 
 
 " Saddington and Dedwards." 
 
 "Well!" 
 
 " Won't renew. — Whittle and Gum tickler." 
 
 « Well ! "
 
 MRS. ARMYTAGE IS AS MUCH AT HOME AS EVER. 165 
 
 " Have bad the two five hundreds returned 
 from New Orleans. Furious, but don't suspect 
 any thing." 
 
 " Any thing else ? " Mrs. Armytage's foot was 
 drumming on the carpet, and her fingers were 
 twitching at her dress. 
 
 " Something to tickle your fancy, as the valen- 
 tines say. Ephraim Tigg of Stockwell." 
 "What of him?" 
 
 "Ephraim Tigg of Stockwell/' slowly and 
 quietly continued Mr. Sims : — he had been read- 
 ing the names just quoted from a scrap of paper, 
 taken from a greasy pocket-book, and now care- 
 fully closed it, strapped it up, and replaced it in 
 his pocket — " Ephraim Tigg of Stockwell is a 
 Rasper." 
 " Go on, go on ; I shall lose my wits." 
 "Ephraim Tigg knows all about it, and won't 
 wait. He found the counterfoil; you must have 
 been silly to leave that" 
 
 A piercing scream was rising to the pretty 
 woman's lips ; but she checked herself, biting her 
 lips till the blood came. Then she started up, 
 shaking her yellow hair about her like a Fury, 
 and wringing her hands.
 
 166 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 " I am ruined, I am ruined ! " she panted out. 
 " Why did I ever go near that horrible old man ? 
 I have never lost sight of his white face and red 
 eyelids, He has haunted me for days. The 
 others are nothing. Fool that I was not to get 
 the money from Goldthorpe before I struck him 
 down : to-morrow may be too late. O Sims, 
 Sims, help me ; what am I to do ? " 
 
 I know that what I am going to relate is 
 exceedingly improbable ; but it is true, never- 
 theless, that the brilliant widow of the Rue 
 Grande-des-Petites-Maisons, with starting eyes, 
 with swollen veins, with dishevelled hair, threw 
 herself on her knees before the modest Mr. Sims, 
 who lived at a coffee-shop, who had a face like a 
 ferret, and whose nose was not only peaked but 
 purple at the ends.* 
 
 * "It is scarcely possible to quit this horrid subject without 
 observing that the facts which have now been demonstrated were in 
 the highest degree improbable. Who could have believed that two 
 wretches of the ages of fifteen and sixteen years could have con- 
 tinued . . . . . . Let us not, then, too hastily conclude on other 
 
 occasions that what does not appear probable is necessarily false, 
 nor rashly reject every proposition for which we cannot fully ac- 
 count. Let our inquiry be cool, critical, and deliberate ; but as 
 evils multiply beyond probability, let our vigilance be not only 
 constant but scrupulous, not resting on slight appearances, but 
 passing on to facts." — Edmund Bukke on a celebrated Criminal 
 Case, a.d. 1767.
 
 MRS. ARMYTAGE IS AS MUCH AT HOME AS EVER. 167 
 
 "Mercy, mercy!" she repeated, in scarce arti- 
 culate accents. It was well that the door was 
 fastened. The solemn torch-bearing waiter would 
 have been scandalised; but an artist would have 
 rejoiced in the disordered folds of her drapery, 
 spread over the carpet ; in her attitude of de- 
 spairing supplication. She was not acting. Her 
 laughing mask was thrown aside ; real grief and 
 terror raged beneath. She might, for her wild and 
 scared looks, have been a Helen, remembering 
 that the woes of Troy were due alone to her, that 
 she was growing old, and that Paris had frowned 
 upon her. She might have been a Brinvilliers, 
 with all her wiles detected, and the lieutenant 
 criminel, with his exempts, thundering at the door. 
 
 "Get up," was the unceremonious response 
 made by Mr. Sims to the impassioned appeal 
 made to him. "For laughing like a Cheshire 
 cat, and going on your knees like Ada the Out- 
 cast, I never did see your equal. What's the 
 good of play-acting to me ? " 
 
 "I'm not acting," groaned Mrs. Armytage. 
 I have said as much for her already. 
 
 "Well, get up, at all events," Mr. Sims con- 
 tinued. " For such a plucky one as you generally
 
 168 THE SEVEN SONS OP MAMMON. 
 
 are, you do break down shamefully sudden some- 
 times. You'll show the white feather at the 
 C. C. C. some of these days, if you don't take 
 care. Think of your dignity. There's nothing 
 like dignity ; and the shorter you are, the more 
 dignified you ought to be. I'm too old for it, 
 and always liked a quiet life; but you're just 
 young enough to dignify yourself into a coronet." 
 Mrs. Armytage no longer knelt ; she sat rather 
 in the midst of the carpet, looking up with a 
 strange expression of mingled fear and curiosity 
 in Mr. Sims' s face. 
 
 " Is there any hope ? " she asked. 
 " To be sure there is," replied Sims. " Every 
 thing's as right as can be." 
 
 She arose radiant, but trembling. She sum- 
 moned up her laugh, but it died away in a fitful 
 gasp, and she had to place her hand on her 
 labouring heart. 
 
 "Why did you frighten me?" she said, in 
 broken tones, "I have been in tortures, in 
 agony." 
 
 "To let you know what an excellent friend 
 you can always reckon upon in an emergency, 
 and may reckon on if you only follow his advice.
 
 MRS. ARMYTAGE IS AS MUCH AT HOME AS EVER. 169 
 
 Ephraim Tigg and I have done business for years 
 in all sorts of things, from lottery-tickets to the 
 lead off roofs. He daren't squeak ; but he would 
 have squeaked but for me. You went to him 
 without my sanction, and you see the scrape you 
 have nearly got yourself into. The money was 
 a mere fleabite, a miserable fifty. But your con- 
 founded imprudence has nearly knocked down 
 your palace, just as if it had been made of cards. 
 At your time of life, too, and after all the 
 experience you have had, you really ought to 
 know better, ma'am." 
 
 There was nothing openly disrespectful in Mr. 
 Sims's tone, even when ,he had used his rudest 
 words of expostulation. He spoke calmly and 
 quietly, as though he were despatching a matter 
 of business, such as conferring about a schedule 
 with an insolvent, and a schedule concerning which 
 it was necessary to speak without disguise. And 
 so soon as Mrs. Armytage had reached a sofa, and 
 had sunk down upon its luxurious cushions, the 
 normal state of things between mistress and man 
 seemed of itself to return : Mr. Sims addressing 
 her with his customary deference, and she treating 
 him with her usual familiar disdain. The little
 
 170 
 
 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 Blenheim spaniel on the hearthrug, who had per- 
 haps been dreaming of pullet prepared in the 
 superior Parisian fashion, woke up when his mis- 
 tress, on her knees, was adjuring Sims. He yelped 
 peevishly ; but no notice being taken of his com- 
 plaints, turned himself round, like a sensible dog, 
 and went to sleep again. This was by no means 
 the first scene in which Mrs. Armytage had 
 figured as an actress, and at which Mouche the 
 Blenheim had assisted. Matters assuming a 
 more cheerful aspect, he leapt up to his mis- 
 tress's lap, and took her caresses with much 
 complacency. 
 
 " And how/' demanded Mrs. Armytage gaily, 
 and toying with the dog, — " how did you manage 
 it all, my good faithful Sims ? Stay, you are sure 
 there is no one at the door." 
 
 " Unless walls have ears," was the answer, " we 
 are unheard. There are some fools who, when 
 they lock a door, put the key in their pocket. 
 Always leave it inside. Nobody can look through 
 the keyhole then." 
 
 "You are wondrous wise, Sims, but tiresome. 
 Proceed, my excellent agent." 
 
 "I shaVt take you long. Saddington and
 
 MRS. ARMYTAGE IS AS MUCH AT HOME AS EVER. 171 
 
 Dedwards must have the diamonds; you can't 
 wear them. It's a bad moment for selling, though. 
 "We've glutted too many markets already, and 
 another sale might bring on a stoppage of the 
 firm of Armytage and Co. Besides, you have 
 jewels enough already to cover the Queen of 
 Sheba." 
 
 "Let the diamonds go. I don't like to part 
 with them : those nice glittering things are so 
 compact, tell such few tales, and sew up so neatly 
 in one's dress. For a rainy day, at the North 
 Pole or at the Tropics, there's no umbrella so 
 good as a diamond/'' 
 
 "It's a pity you can't keep these; but the 
 figure is heavy. Whittle and Gumtickler could 
 have done nothing but sue. Had Somebody 
 been alive at New Orleans, it might have been 
 a different matter. Fortunately, a champagne 
 supper and the yellow fever — only thirty-six 
 hours — kept your secret for you." 
 
 Mrs. Armytage just raised her eyes, and her 
 hand rested for a moment immobile on the silken 
 head of the dog. 
 
 " Dead ? " she rather looked than spoke as she 
 made the inquiry.
 
 172 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 "Dead as mutton/' echoed Mr. Sims; "our 
 dear brother departed, and so on. He left a good 
 crop of debts behind him, and a large family." 
 
 " Poor Bellasis ! " mused the widow. " He 
 was always too fond of champagne, and would 
 take the miss at loo." And she went on playing 
 with Mouche. 
 
 "Ephraim Tigg," went on Mr. Sims, "was 
 the worst. As I told you, he is a Rasper." 
 
 "What is a rasper?" asked the widow, ele- 
 vating her eyebrows. 
 
 "You would be one if you had only a little 
 more decision. He vowed vengeance, and was 
 going to do all sorts of things. But for some 
 little business transactions of old date between 
 us, when my name was Des — " he checked him- 
 self — "when it wasn't Sims, Ephraim might have 
 done all he threatened. But I paid him. I 
 burnt the ugly bit of paper, and there's an end 
 of that business. But he knows what he ought 
 not to know, ma'am, and that's a red lamp as 
 big as a pumpkin." 
 
 " Is he a man to kill, to gain over, or to tell 
 lies to ? and what should be done to prevent him 
 annoying us ? "
 
 MRS. ARMYTAGE IS AS MUCH AT HOME AS EVER 173 
 
 "He is a man," remarked Mr. Sims, with 
 much calmness, "to die. He is a man to have 
 another paralytic stroke. He's had one, and I 
 think the next will be pretty nearly his good-by 
 to stamped paper. He's got just about strength 
 enough to creep into a witness-box, and that's all. 
 He's got a hundred thousand pounds, lives in a 
 kitchen, and feeds on the rats and blackbeetles 
 that swarm in it, I think. I never did see such 
 an old atomy. No ; there's nothing to be feared 
 from him, unless" — he paused in his speech, 
 and spoke very slowly and deliberately — "unless 
 you've been making him any more morning calls, 
 ma'am." 
 
 u On my honour, no ! * asseverated Mrs. Army- 
 tage, turning nervously among her cushions. " I 
 never saw the old brute but once, and never wish 
 to see him again." 
 
 " Then you can go to bed and sleep comfortably 
 on your honour. Do you want me any more to- 
 night ? I think I shall go to the play." 
 
 " You go to the play ! " repeated his patroness, 
 in some astonishment. "Why, you don't go once 
 in six months. What on earth has put that into 
 your head ? "
 
 174 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 "Well, I like theatricals/' Mr. Sims explained, 
 slowly rubbing his hands together. "They're 
 warm, and bright, and cheap; and you can let 
 the people on the stage talk away without bother- 
 ing yourself. Then you can look at the people 
 in the boxes; and you're so close-seated in the 
 pit, that you can't well help hearing all that your 
 neighbours have got to say among themselves. 
 Oh, I like the play ! I used to be fond of going to 
 chapel ; but it's the audience there who are acting, 
 and you can't tell what they are really up to." 
 
 "I think I know where you would like to be 
 much better, Sims," his mistress observed, with 
 good-humoured contempt. "What a pity there 
 is no hazard left, no roulette, no rouge-et-noir ! " 
 
 Mr. Sims shrugged his shoulders, and was 
 silent; but a tiny red spot on either cheek 
 showed that the widow's lance had hit home. 
 
 "Well, go to the play, most virtuous Sims," 
 Mrs. Armytage resumed, with a slight yawn. 
 " If you want any thing to drink, they will give 
 it you down-stairs. Please come to me very 
 early in the morning, and send Heine to me." 
 
 She waved her hand in gracious dismissal, 
 and Mr. Sims, with a jerk that may have been
 
 MRS. ARMYTAGE IS AS MUCH AT HOME AS EVER. 175 
 
 meant for a bow, turned on his heel, unlocked 
 the door, and departed. He walked gingerly 
 along the richly carpeted corridor of the hotel, 
 stopping ever and anon before some particular 
 door, and studying the number with a look of 
 owl-like wisdom. He also meditated for full 
 three minutes before a vast pyramid of bedroom 
 candles, and meeting a pretty chambermaid bade 
 her good night in a fatherly manner. To the 
 waiter, whose life seemed to be passed in torch- 
 bearing, and who was just lighting up a county 
 magistrate in a private room, he imparted his 
 lady's behests; and as the bells began to ring 
 for somebody to tell somebody that number 
 eleven's maid was wanted, Mr. Sims stepped 
 into Euston Square. 
 
 "A clever woman, but rash, and cannot resist 
 her impulses/'' he soliloquised, — "her One im- 
 pulse, at least. That is irresistible, and will be 
 the ruin of her. Who can overcome one's little 
 fancy ? I can't. With proper management that 
 woman ought to be a Russian archduchess, at 
 least; but she'll end badly, I fear, all through 
 impulse." 
 
 He was decidedly the most retiring and least
 
 176 THE SEVEN SONS OP MAMMON. 
 
 ostentatious of mankind, Mr. Sims. He walked 
 all the way from Euston Square, through Covent 
 Garden, to the Strand, and was positively not 
 above supping off a dozen oysters at a stall 
 beneath the pillars of Clement's Inn. Then, after 
 a sober libation of stout, he resumed his walk 
 westward. 
 
 "No hazard left!" he thought. "No hazard, 
 eh ? not a tiny nook and corner where a gentle- 
 man from the Continent can sport a fifty ? Well, 
 we'll have a try." 
 
 Mr. Sims went to the play, but he passed both 
 the Haymarket and Adelphi theatres without 
 availing himself of the privileges of half-price. 
 Where he went to, what play he saw, and in how 
 many acts, and whom were the players, it is no 
 business of mine to inquire. 
 
 The lady's-maid came, disrobed her mistress, 
 and went back to long-protracted vigils of sugar- 
 and-water and M. Xavier de Montepin. Mrs. 
 Armytage did not read; but it was late ere she 
 sought her couch in the adjoining bedchamber. 
 They brought her a little carafon of Maraschino, 
 and she sipped a tiny glassful now and then. 
 She had drawn an easy chair to the fire, and
 
 MRS. ARMYTAGE IS AS MUCH AT HOME AS EVER. 177 
 
 wrapped in her China silk peignoir had got to 
 her old trick of toasting her little feet at the 
 fire. There were no bottines to toast now, and 
 the little feet, covered with a film of open- 
 worked silk, looked ravishing in the morocco 
 slippers. 
 
 "It is a hard life," she said to herself. "A 
 convict, or a minister of state, can't be much 
 harder worked. It is all sowing and ploughing, 
 and harrowing and weeding, and what will the 
 harvest be? Do I shrink? do I falter? am I 
 afraid ? No ; but the life is very wearisome. It 
 makes my head ache. It makes my heart ache. 
 I suppose I have a heart as well as other 
 people. I know I feel it more than other people 
 do, and that I shall die some day of palpi- 
 tation, or aneurism, or something. Heigho ! 
 heigho ! * 
 
 The little dog, snoozling on the hearthrug, 
 lifted up his blinking eyes, as though in sur- 
 prise at the unwonted sounds. Screams and 
 laughter he was accustomed to — but sighs ! 
 
 " Down, Mouche," his mistress cried pettishly, 
 as though offended that the animal had heard 
 her. "What was it that the stupid tract said 
 
 VOL. I. H
 
 178 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 at the railway ? " she went on cogitating. 
 <ec Where are you going?' Do the good people 
 know where they are going? I should like to 
 be good, but I can't. I used to scream, ' I will 
 be good ! I will be good !' as a child, when 
 they punished me; but I never could be good 
 when the smart was over. I suppose it isn't 
 in me. There must be some pleasure, though, 
 in being able to sleep without horrid dreams, 
 in being able to walk without looking over one's 
 shoulder every five minutes. Good people pray. 
 Where is the good of my praying ? Will the 
 words of a prayer help me ? My thoughts used 
 to wander away from the words of the service 
 at church. What am I to do, where am I 
 going, and where am I to go ? " 
 
 She uttered these words against her wicked 
 will, and aloud. The innermost voice had 
 started up unbidden, and overwhelmed her with 
 the imperious suddenness of its summons. It 
 was not a still small voice — the creeping un- 
 easiness of conscience: — that had been stifled 
 long ago. No; this was a sharp, harsh cry. 
 It seemed as though her name were pronounced 
 close to her, — as if some one said, " Florence
 
 MRS. ARMYTAGE IS AS MUCH AT HOME AS EVER. 179 
 
 Armytage, Florence Arroytage, where are you 
 going?" 
 
 Among the trinkets and the gold-bedizened 
 scent-bottles of her dressing-case in the next 
 room, was a little crystal phial, carefully stop- 
 pered, and half- full of a dark liquid. She 
 opened it, and, holding it from her, allowed 
 its vapid odour to exhale. 
 
 "But a little courage, and it would all be 
 over. Bah ! 'tis an idiot's resource to kill one- 
 self. I may win the grand coup, and leave 
 this life. But that isn't it. I haven't the 
 courage." 
 
 She never bed to herself; she was too clever. 
 
 " Why can't I cry ? " she exclaimed passion- 
 ately, looking at herself as in the mirror at 
 Paris. " Why can't I squeeze a few tears out ? 
 I never could. That white-faced puss at Gold- 
 thorpe can whine and sob. I can't even weep 
 when I think of Hugh. Am I to begin to 
 learn whimpering now?" 
 
 She had yet some little business to go through 
 ere she sought her bed. From a secret drawer 
 in her jewel-case she took a common red penny 
 memorandum-book, and opened it. The columns 
 
 k2
 
 180 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 were full of figures in English and foreign 
 moneys. These she dwelt long over. Then 
 she turned to another page with writing on 
 it. 
 
 " Amiens, St. r Lazare, La Bourbe, Nice, 
 Preston, Philadelphia, Kilmainham, Kirkdale, 
 Lewes, Manheim, Milan : a pretty catalogue ! " 
 she said, with a bitter smile. i( Ah, I have 
 been a great traveller. Where is the journey 
 to end?" 
 
 Once more, as though dreading to go to 
 rest, she went from her sleeping to her sitting 
 room, took writing materials, and, sitting down, 
 penned a long letter on foreign post -paper. 
 She carefully folded it, gummed the envelope 
 all round, sealed it, and addressed it thus : 
 
 " Dominique Cosson, 
 Frere lai'que, 
 Aux Peres Maristes des Bonnes-CEuvres, 
 
 Hoogendracht (pres Louvain), 
 Brabant, 
 
 Belgique." 
 
 "Sims must post this the first thing in the 
 morning," she said almost gaily, as she rose 
 from her seat. And then for the second time
 
 MRS. ARMYTAGE IS AS MUCH AT HOME AS EVER. 181 
 
 I leave her to her bed, and to Sleep, which comes 
 alike to the evil and the just, to the criminal 
 in his cell and the anchorite on his pallet, and 
 covers all over with the Death that is in the 
 midst of Life.
 
 I 
 
 182 THE SEVEN SONS OE MAMMON. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 SHEPHERD AND SHEEP. 
 
 Sixteen months had passed, and crazy fanatics 
 who had predicted the end of the world before 
 the year was out — not forgetting to take houses 
 at long leases meanwhile — found for the 
 thousandth time that their reckoning was con- 
 fusion, and that their prophecies were wind. 
 The old world went on, and men-children were 
 born to supply the loss of those who had been 
 taken away; and kings and cadgers alike gave 
 up the ghost; and Death as usual met the 
 wedding-guest on the threshold, and with un- 
 varying politeness bade him pass in first, as 
 there would be plenty of time for him. 
 
 It was the merry month of May of the year 
 eighteen fifty-one, and London was in a frenzy 
 about the Great Exhibition. The glass-house 
 in Hyde Park has, directly, nothing to do with 
 the conduct of this story; and you will hear 
 little about it from me. But the influence of
 
 SHEPHERD AND SHEEP. 183 
 
 the fever that raged in London was felt in the 
 remotest portions of the English provinces. A 
 gadding- abont mania seized on all ranks and 
 conditions of men. Women went up in droves 
 to London professedly to see the Exhibition — 
 actually to stare at the dresses and bonnets in 
 the shop-windows. Ancient hedgers and ditchers 
 who were scarcely yet familiar with the high- 
 street of their market-town, were put into clean 
 smockfrocks, and paraded by their pastors 
 through the giant metropolis, and the wonderful 
 structure in the park. The very paupers in 
 rural workhouses were dressed in their best, 
 taken to town, permitted to croon forth feeble 
 notes of admiration in nave and transept, and were 
 regaled with unwonted meat and beer. Some 
 such kindly feelings from the rich towards the 
 poor are generally brought forth by great public 
 festivals. He who has all is even anxious to 
 let him who has nothing share — in the infini- 
 tesimal degrees. Exclusive possession palls. If 
 Flag gets a couple of thousand pounds as prize- 
 money, he flings fourteenth-class half-a-crown 
 as his portion. A man who has a blue diamond, 
 or a cabinet full of Rafaelles, is frequently most
 
 184 THE SEVEN SONS OP MAMMON. 
 
 liberal in permitting the gratuitous inspection 
 of his treasures. 
 
 It has been said that the Great Exhibition 
 made itself felt all over the land. The press 
 and the post-office between them distributed 
 hundreds of thousands of journals teeming with 
 woodcuts, and glowing with descriptions of the 
 rare contents of Paxton's Palace. Every rustic 
 Paul who found himself in London wrote letters to 
 his kinsfolk. The humours of the Great Exhibi- 
 tion and " Lunnon town " were put into the Lan- 
 cashire dialect, and chanted by the descendants 
 of those Troubadours, of whom Tim Bobbin was 
 the Elondel. Somersetshire, Westmoreland, York- 
 shire, Northumbria had ballads in their vernacular 
 about the great carnival of industry in the capital 
 — ballads which would have delighted Prince 
 Lucien Solomon Bonaparte. This was the time 
 when lads ran away from home to seek their for- 
 tune, and expecting to find London paved with 
 gold, discovered that pockets might be so lined, 
 but that the streets themselves were jagged and 
 muddy; and so, Bow Bells seeming to chime 
 out more to the effect that they were fools for 
 their pains, than to bid them turn again and
 
 SHEPHERD AXD SHEEP. 185 
 
 be Lords Mayor of London, betook themselves 
 to their homes, and were feasted on the fatted 
 calf, or the cold shoulder, as the case might be. 
 It was in all respects — you, who remember it, 
 will agree with me — an exceptional year. Gentle- 
 men fell in love at first sight, not in three-volume 
 novels, but in actual reality, with young ladies 
 they met in railway carriages, or at Osier's 
 Crystal Fountain, and married them out of 
 hand. Freemasons from Mount Atlas frater- 
 nised with Freemasons from Primrose Hill, and 
 the Polish Lodge entertained a Babel of foreign 
 brethren. The oldest habitues of the Park and 
 the Opera were forced to confess that they saw 
 daily and nightly in Rotten Row and the Halls 
 amazons and amateurs with whose faces they 
 were not familiar; and the learned in social 
 statistics ascertained for a fact, that from May 
 to September — such was the mollifying effect 
 of the season — vast numbers of born and well- 
 born Englishmen and Englishwomen made no 
 scruple of conversing with persons to whom they 
 had never been formally introduced. 
 
 But, as in the midst of a railway loopline, 
 or between its parallels, or midway between
 
 186 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 its horns, you shall find some hamlet — some 
 small country town sometimes — which has no 
 station, no omnibus nor fly communication, no 
 gas, no police, and no roads much better than 
 bridle-paths, and which is, to all intents and 
 purposes of civilisation, five hundred years behind 
 the age; so down in the county of Kent was 
 there a village whose inhabitants did not trouble 
 themselves in the slightest degree about the 
 Great Exhibition — and many of them had but a 
 very hazy and uncertain knowledge of what 
 an exhibition was — at all. 
 
 This place was called Swordsley; and the 
 rector of Swordsley was the Reverend Ernest 
 Goldthorpe. The village was of some size, its 
 population numbering nearly nine hundred. It 
 was not a specially ignorant or uncouth village ; 
 it was simply indifferent to all that went on 
 out of its precincts. If a Swordsley man had 
 designed the House of Eame in Hyde Park, or 
 the heir of the lord of the manor of Swordsley 
 — who was a Captain in the Guards — had been 
 sent to the House of Correction for assaulting 
 a policeman in Rotten Row, the villagers might 
 have taken some interest in the World's Fair.
 
 SHEPHERD AND SHEEP. 187 
 
 As it was, none of those in whom they interested 
 themselves had anything to do with it; so 
 they left the Great Exhibition to its own 
 devices. 
 
 To the inhabitants of this tranquil place, the 
 world was bounded by the limits of Swordsley 
 parish. The ancient cathedral-town of St. Beck- 
 etsbury was not very far distant, — scarce ten 
 miles, in fact ; but that was a matter concerning 
 the rector and his curate, and not the laymen 
 of Swordsley. There was a station at Daisey- 
 bridge, four miles distant, belonging to the 
 South-Eastern Railway, and the aristocracy of 
 Swordsley might avail themselves of it ; but the 
 Swordsleians were profoundly indifferent and all 
 but unconscious of the existence of such things 
 as trains and locomotives. An early village bard 
 had made a satirical song, in days gone by, 
 against the railway movement generally, deriding 
 it as a new-fangled invention, and lampooning 
 it as a "Long-Tom's Coffin,"— hit which told 
 immensely, more for the sound of the phrase 
 than for its actual signification. When a 
 Swordsley man was pressed to accede to a 
 branch-line from Daiseybridge through Swords-
 
 188 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 ley, and so on to the little seaport of Shrimp- 
 ington-super-Mare, he ordinarily made answer, 
 "We want none of your Long -Tom Coffins 
 hereabouts," and was supposed thereafter to have 
 irretrievably demolished his adversary. A sharp 
 lawyer from St. Becketsbury once threatened the 
 intractable villagers with an Act of Parliament 
 which should compel them to have either a 
 railway, or gas or water pipes, or some other 
 filaments of the crinoline of civilisation j but 
 Chuff the saddler, who was the village oracle, 
 and the " Cromwell guiltless of his country's 
 blood" of Swordsley, cried, "Let un try it. Fll 
 Parliament House un. I'll sow their Acts up 
 like so much pig-skin." And it was universally 
 believed (in Swordsley) that any attempt on the 
 part of the Legislature to coerce Swordsley into 
 light, or cleanliness, or activity, would be met 
 by the erection of barricades, and the invocation 
 of the Patron of battles. 
 
 There was a society, less convivial than con- 
 servative and inquisitorial, held at the " Old 
 Dun Horse" tavern, called "The Leave-us-alone 
 Club," in Swordsley. It was particularly active 
 in suppressing new-fangled inventions. It was
 
 SHEPHERD AND SHEEP. 189 
 
 stanchty Protectionist, had burnt Peel and 
 Cobden in effigy, and debated the propriety of 
 presenting a silver pitchfork to the once illus- 
 trious, but now forgotten, champion of costly 
 i corn — Chowler. The St. Becketsbury lawyer, 
 aided by one or two incendiaries among the 
 neighbouring gentry, — for at Swordsley, and not 
 for the first time since the Creation, it was the 
 patricians who were strong liberals, and the 
 yeomen and peasantry who were bigoted Tories, 
 — had actually got a Bill affecting Swordsley 
 sufficiently into work as to have complied with 
 the standing orders of the House. There was 
 an indignation meeting among the villagers, and 
 a secret sederunt of the " Leave-us-alone Club," 
 who, from their own funds, despatched a depu- 
 tation, consisting of Chuff the saddler, Mug- 
 geridge, mine host of the " Old Dun Horse," and 
 Scrase the corn-chandler, to London, with strict 
 injunctions to spare neither labour, expense, nor 
 physical force— even to the "punching" of the 
 St. Becketsbury lawyer's head — to defeat the 
 abhorred measure. The Bill came to nothing, 
 which was a triumph to Swordsley; but the end 
 of the deputation was curious. The delegates
 
 190 THE SEVEN SONS OE MAMMON. 
 
 were absent a long time, and wrote more than 
 once for remittances to the Club. Muggeridge 
 informed Mr. Pearkleborough the grocer (chair- 
 man pro tern, of the " Leave-us-alones ") that 
 parliament business was terribly dry work. On 
 his return he evinced a remarkable taciturnity, 
 merely deigning to observe occasionally that the 
 deputation had had " awful times of it;" and the 
 face of Mrs. Muggeridge, his spouse, should 
 properly have been as flat as the countenance 
 of a Kalmuck, for, as she informed Miss Chuff, 
 the saddler's daughter, Muggeridge was in the 
 practice, when spoken to, of biting her nose 
 off from morning till night. There was a dread- 
 ful to-do about auditing the account, and the 
 examiners objecting to an item of nine pounds 
 for " sundries/' Mr. Muggeridge offered to fight 
 the committee all round (four being a quorum) ; 
 and as the host of the " Old Dun Horse " was a 
 notoriously hard hitter, the auditors perpended 
 and passed his account. Two members of the 
 deputation remained for a considerable period 
 unaccounted for, which necessitated the sending 
 of fresh envoys to the capital in search of 
 them. Chuff the saddler was discovered at an
 
 SHEPHERD AND SHEEP. 191 
 
 hotel in Old Palace Yard, reduced by a reckless 
 course of hot suppers and heavy lunches to a 
 state of semi-idiocy. He was rapidly being 
 converted to liberalism by an unscrupulous 
 attorney's clerk Avho used the coffee-room ; but 
 was rescued by his friends just in time to 
 save his political principles and discharge his 
 bill before it grew too heavy to be paid any- 
 how. 
 
 The catastrophe which overtook the third dele- 
 gate, Scrase the corn-chandler, was even more 
 tragic. Scrase was a vain old fellow, of a bilio- 
 sanguineous temperament, and was a continual 
 butt for the shafts of Love. The wretched man 
 had the folly to propose marriage to a lady who 
 sang comic duets at an East-end coffee-room with 
 a negro vocalist, who said that he came from 
 Alabama, but who sprang in reality from Agar 
 Town. Love, harmony, and Jamaica rum were 
 his ruin. The great breach-of-promise case of De 
 la Quaverdille (otherwise Siphkins) versus Scrase 
 must be fresh in the recollection of my middle- 
 aged readers. Heliogabalus Jones, Q.C., was for 
 the plaintiff. Wumpkins, Q.C., made nothing of 
 the defence. The judge — he was a joking judge,
 
 192 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 and his father had been a hanging judge — riddled 
 Scrase with witticisms upon his love-letters. The 
 jury gave swingeing damages. Scrase was hooted 
 by the populace, and pursued to a cab by those 
 infuriated females with umbrellas, who always 
 seem ready to enact gratuitously the part of out- 
 door Nemesises to the courts of justice. Scrase 
 sold his business, paid the damages and costs, and 
 retired in dudgeon to St. Becketsbury, where he 
 set up as a stationer, dealt in cheap literature, and 
 became the most rampant of radicals. His former 
 comrades sorrowed sternly over the defection of 
 this Erastian. His name was erased from the 
 club-book, — to add to his crimes, he had left 
 three half-years' subscription unpaid, — and over 
 his portrait (painted by Spillmegelp, author of the 
 restorations in the sign of the " Old Dun Horse ") 
 was wafered a copy of Bell's Weekly Messenger. 
 Unconsciously, the Leave-us-alones followed the 
 example of the Venetian counsellors, who hung 
 the black veil over the picture of Marino Faliero. 
 It was to wrestle with these somewhat obsti- 
 nate and prejudiced, albeit very worthy people, 
 that the Reverend Ernest Goldthorpe came to 
 Swordsley. The living was a handsome one,
 
 SHEIHERD AND SHEEP. 193 
 
 certainly: that was something; but had Ernest 
 not been an upright and conscientious man, 
 anxious and determined to do his duty in his 
 state of life, the first month of his residence in 
 Swordsley would have disgusted him with his pre- 
 ferment, and he would have left the place to a 
 curate, and only regarded it as a milch-cow. The 
 Reverend Ernest Goldthorpe took a different view 
 of his obligations. He would fertilise, he thought, 
 this intellectual desert; he would clear away all 
 this tangled jungle of bigotry and prejudice. So, 
 axe in hand, he walked into the wilderness, and 
 began to lay about him lustily. He was not 
 unpopular at first. The former rector had been 
 deaf, paralytic, and all but blind. There had 
 been a curate who stammered, a curate who 
 couldn't pronounce his H's, — the Swordsley men, 
 although they had a pretty broad dialect of their 
 own, were vastly critical as to cockneyisms, — and 
 a curate with a red head — all abominations in the 
 sight of Swordsley. Ernest at first made himself 
 liked. He preached eloquently; he visited the sick 
 sedulously ; he kept port wine in his cellar much 
 more for the poor and ailing than for himself; 
 and on Sundays, after morning service, he would 
 vol. i. o
 
 194 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 give his arm to some fair parishioner, and, arrayed 
 in his gown and bands, conduct her through the 
 churchyard. The Swordsley people were pleased 
 at this. ct I like to see a parson in his cassock — 
 it shows he knows his station," was the sage 
 observation made by Mr. Pearkleborough the 
 grocer. As for Ernest's liberality, the villagers 
 did not care much about his open purse. They 
 were very well to do. They had scarcely any 
 paupers ; and the infirm were mostly provided for 
 by their relatives, or in the ancient almshouses of 
 the Battle-axe Makers' Company. Many bed- 
 ridden octogenarians turned up their noses at the 
 rector's port-wine ; and as for the flannel-petti- 
 coats which his housekeeper made for them, they 
 preferred their own hooded cloaks, dyed in grain. 
 The neighbouring farmers, who had been totally 
 ruined at intervals during the half-century, were 
 generally very wealthy; and "purse-proud Swords- 
 ley" was a by-word to the country-side. 
 
 It was an evil hour for Ernest Goldthorpe, so 
 far as his professional peace of mind was concerned, 
 when he became by his brother's lamented death 
 heir to the title and the vast treasures of Mam- 
 mon. When the season of mourning was drawing
 
 SHEPHERD AND SHEEP. 195 
 
 to a close, the gentry of the vicinity made a point 
 of offering him. their more than tacit congratula- 
 tions. A rector already passing rich, and who in 
 all human probability would be a baronet and a 
 niillionnaire, was not a person to be slighted. 
 The great country families called assiduously on 
 the incumbent of Swordsley. He was unmarried, 
 and the fact of how eligible a match he was did not 
 escape the notice of numerous wary mammas. But 
 in proportion as the consideration in which he was 
 held among those of his own degree increased, so 
 did it decline and diminish among his immediate 
 parishioners. They began to sneer at his bounty 
 as ostentation, to stigmatise his shy and reserved 
 demeanour as pride. The surest way of making 
 a shy man proud is to tell him of his haughtiness. 
 By somewhat of the feeling, si vult decipi, deci- 
 piatur, one feels inclined, in sheer retaliation, to 
 become distant and austere. The gulf between 
 the rector and his flock widened every day ; and 
 it wanted but one element of discord to make it 
 impassable. The men and, worse than all, the 
 women of Swordsley began to take exception to 
 the Reverend Ernest Goldthorpe's doctrine. The 
 unlucky young man had a taste for mediaeval art, 
 
 o2
 
 196 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 and lie held notions somewhat advanced of the 
 kind advocated in certain famous Tracts for cer- 
 tain troubled Times. If he was not a Puseyite, 
 at least his congregation declared he was one ; and 
 he did a good deal towards encouraging the belief. 
 At his own expense he had done much towards 
 restoring the fine old early English church of St. 
 Marjr-la-Douce, at Swordsley; but the clearing 
 away of the hideous wainscoating flaming with 
 the golden names of departed churchwardens, and 
 the rubbing off the smearing of whitewash which 
 concealed some fine old fresco paintings, — both 
 parts of the process by which the church had been 
 " beautified " during the Georgian era, — involved 
 him in unseemly broils with his own church- 
 warden, and caused him to be denounced by the 
 " Leave-us-alone-Club " as a pervert, an Escobar, 
 an Ignatius Loyola, who was moved by the horrid 
 intention of once more inflicting Popery, brass 
 money, and wooden shoes on this free and Protes- 
 tant land. Presuming to decorate the church 
 with evergreens at Easter and Whitsuntide as well 
 as at Christmas time, his harmless horticulture 
 raised a shout about pagan idolatry and popish 
 mummeries. He preached in a surplice, where-
 
 SHEPHERD ASD SHEEP. 197 
 
 upon Pearkleborough the grocer positively wrote, 
 and had printed at St. Becketsbury and circulated 
 at his own expense, an eight-page pamphlet, 
 headed "The Wolf in the Fold." It commenced 
 with u Remember the Smithfield fires," and ended 
 with the quotation from King John abou* Italian 
 priests tithing and tolling in the English dominions. 
 Ernest had spent much more in Swordsley than 
 he had ever got out of it ; but no account was 
 taken of that. Finally, he put the climax to his 
 offences in the eyes of his parishioners by pre- 
 senting one of the Sunday-school children with a 
 prize in the shape of a church-service, on which 
 was embossed a cross in crimson morocco. It was 
 about this time that the vestry wrote to the bishop 
 about Ernest's proceedings — his " shameful goings 
 on," as they were termed in Swordsley. They 
 likewise memorialised the Battle-axe Maker's Com- 
 pany ; and Chuff threatened the rector that 
 " some of these fine mornings he would have him 
 in the privy council." I have not dwelt on the 
 commotion raised when Ernest took eight little 
 boys from frightening birds and picking up stones 
 in the fields, arrayed them in little white night- 
 gowns worn over their clothes, taught them the
 
 198 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 Gregorian chant, and called them his choristers. 
 Less need also is there to mention the rumour 
 that he had set up the tribunal of Penitence in 
 his back parlour, and that by dint of strong 
 cordials and pecuniary gratifications, he had in- 
 duced old Biddy Cubley, the habitually inebriated 
 washerwoman of the village, to confess her mani 
 fold sins and do penance. 
 
 It may thus be imagined, when this state of 
 things is borne in mind, that the inhabitants of 
 Swordsley had quite enough to do in the month 
 of May 1851 without troubling themselves about 
 the Great Exhibition. The very few comments 
 that were bestowed upon it generally concurred 
 in the opinion that Exhibitions were a dangerous 
 encouragement to foreigners, and a consequent 
 upholding of papistry. The odium theologicum 
 against Ernest alone was sufficient to engross all 
 the evil passions of the little community; their 
 better sympathies were, I trust, reserved for their 
 relations and friends. What slight surplus of 
 hatred there remained was liberally bestowed, 
 in fee simple, upon Miss Magdalen Hill, who, 
 desirous of being near her almost kinsman 
 Ernest, had for the last six months resided at
 
 SHEPHERD AND SHEEP. 199 
 
 the old mansion-house, known as "The Case- 
 ments/' not half a mile from Swordsley on the 
 St. Becketsbury Road. The Casements, which 
 was said to have fifty-two windows, named each 
 after a popish saint, which had been the hiding- 
 place of one of the Gunpowder-Plot conspirators, 
 which had stood a siege (for the king) during the 
 civil wars, and was said to be triply haunted, 
 through an agreeable series of assassinations which 
 had occurred there, — this old Elizabethan brick- 
 house, with stone gables and quaint terraces and 
 complicated carvings, belonged to Lady Talmash. 
 There was no mistake about Lady Talmash's theo- 
 logical views. She was of the very highest church, 
 and very, very old, and very arbitrary, and very 
 active, and one of Ernest Goldthorpe's most in- 
 fluential supporters. She had known Magdalen 
 from a child, and regarded the young woman with 
 a sincere affection. My lady was a widow, and 
 wealthy. Before Magdalen had come to cheer 
 her solitude, she had had no other companions save 
 a High-Church parrot, — which had been taught 
 to scream " Canting Roundheads," and " wicked 
 old Pope," with much distinctness of utterance 
 and acrimony of tone, — a rigid old lady's maid,
 
 200 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 and her own temper, which was of a somewhat 
 hot and intolerant nature. Lady Talmash was 
 only too glad to have [Magdalen near her. The 
 girl was rich in her own right, and knew that she 
 could not be looked upon as a dependent. Above 
 all, she was near her adopted brother's church 
 and flock, and persuaded herself that she could 
 find congenial and useful employment for herself 
 within Ernest's sphere of action. 
 
 Magdalen was very pale and thin, — much thin- 
 ner and paler since the awful day when the news 
 came from Armentieres, — and her eyes had a 
 strange look ; but to most men she seemed emi- 
 nently beautiful; and, although the other sex 
 would rarely admit her good looks, they were 
 generally unanimous in being jealous of her. 
 What did she want, they asked, in Swordsley ? 
 She had lost one husband among the Sons of 
 Mammon ; was she seeking a new one in the heir 
 to the title and the riches ? If Ernest Goldthorpe 
 wanted a wife, and if he disdained to seek a 
 partner among the ancient county gentry of Kent, 
 he could surely find one among his fine friends in 
 London. Everybody knew that Magdalen was 
 sensible and good; but the knowledge of her
 
 SHEPHERD AND SHEEP. 201 
 
 many excellent qualities rather embittered the 
 feeling against her than otherwise. Had she been 
 perfect, she would not have escaped censure ; but 
 it was a point in favour of her detractors that she 
 missed perfection by one fatal failing — the weak 
 pinion in the wings of the fallen angels : Pride. 
 Ernest was merely shy; Magdalen was really 
 proud. The settled melancholy which had come 
 upon her since the death of her affianced husband 
 rendered her even more frigid and repellent. She 
 had been sarcastic ; she was so no more, but silent 
 and preoccupied. The girls who came to The 
 Casements when, as rarely happened, Lady Tal- 
 mash gave a party, or who returned the old lady's 
 visits, could find nothing to talk about with 
 Magdalen Hill. They dared not prattle about 
 fashions and flounces to her. It was known that 
 she held balls, operas, and flirtations to be sinful. 
 They could not talk to her about the Early Fathers, 
 about the Council of Trent, or German art or 
 Gothic architecture. Not that her hose was in 
 the slightest degree tinged with blue. She knew 
 much theoretically and practically ; but with men 
 who could converse with her on letters or on art she 
 disdained to interchange information or ideas.
 
 202 THE SEVEN SONS OE MAMMON. 
 
 Even Ernest, who, enthusiast as he was on High- 
 Church and mediaeval revivalism, was not devoid 
 of a certain amount of timidity, was half-afraid of 
 the beautiful sister-in-law that should have been. 
 You see that one can be afraid of other things 
 besides ghosts or dragons; and to the strongest 
 mind it might be unpleasant to sit up all night in 
 a sculpture gallery, with the moonbeams glancing 
 on Pallas Athene's marble figure. Magdalen sel- 
 dom went to the rectory; but she ruled the 
 rector's domain, both there and in the church. 
 She gave audience at The Casements to stainers 
 of glass windows, to carvers of rood-screens and 
 bench-ends, to embroiderers of altar-cloths, to 
 makers of brass sconces and emblazoned candles. 
 To her was due the episcopal Faculty which per- 
 mitted the erection in the chancel of St. Mary-la- 
 Douce of a magnificent memorial, in the form of 
 a window, to Captain Hugh Jasper Goldthorpe, 
 deceased. She controlled the discipline of the 
 Reverend Ernest's own proprietary schools; 
 punished or rewarded the children as she liked, — 
 much to the discontent of the schoolmaster and 
 .mistress, — and deluged the school-library with 
 little mediasvalising tracts about Saxon saints and
 
 SHEPHERD AND SHEEP. 203 
 
 Cappadocian martyrs. In the Sunday-school the 
 young ladies of the environs, and even the trades- 
 men's daughters of the village who were teachers 
 there, made a bold stand against her sway. They 
 rapped the knuckles of the girls she favoured, 
 they presented surreptitious plum-cake to those 
 who fell under her displeasure. Miss Chuff, 
 driven to desperation by her assumption, stoutly 
 demanded one Sunday morning whether Miss Hill 
 thought herself Empress of Rooshia ? Magdalen 
 vouchsafed no response ; but Chuff, speedily col- 
 lapsing into floods of tears, and adding irrelevant 
 riders to her queries by demanding whether she 
 was a door-mat for Miss Hill to wipe her feet 
 upon; whether her connections were not to the 
 full as respectable as Miss Hill's, although they 
 were not money-grubbers that lived on the taxes 
 got by grinding poor people's faces j with similar 
 incongruities — she was easily vanquished by the 
 stately silent lady, who withered people with one 
 glance of her proud eye. 
 
 To the poor, Magdalen was a sedulous benefactor 
 and an affectionate friend. But she could not 
 get on even with them. The bed-ridden old 
 women regarded her bounty with greater distaste
 
 204 THE SEVEN SONS OP MAMMON. 
 
 than they did that of the rector. They would 
 not look at her tracts ; they did not care for her 
 cold, measured accents when she read to them. 
 They wanted something warm and comforting, they 
 said, and they found only coldness and discomfort 
 in Magdalen's ministrations. They hesitated to 
 take the remedies she brought them. They re- 
 garded her with vague distrust. Even the curly- 
 headed little children were afraid of the proud, 
 severe lady in mourning who never smiled. She 
 felt, though she was straining every nerve to do 
 her duty as a Christian woman, that there was 
 something that impeded her progress, — something 
 that she could not remove or quell. Where w r as 
 she going ? Truly she was pursuing the narrow, 
 thorny path that should probably lead to reward ; 
 but was her mode of travelling the right one? 
 Should she have trampled on the brambles and 
 the sharp pebbles instead of gently moving them 
 aside? She asked herself the question sometimes, 
 —asked if she could not conciliate instead of com- 
 manding, invite instead of repelling. Pride 
 stepped in, and forbade further research ; and in 
 pride and silence she wrapped herself up, and 
 went on her lonely way. The women, as I have
 
 SHEPHERD AND SHEEP. 205 
 
 hinted, regarded her -with a lively aversion; the 
 gentlemen admired, but gradually avoided her. 
 She was a little too freezing. Now and then 
 William the dragoon, whose regiment was by this 
 time in garrison at St. Becketsbury, came over 
 to The Casements. He was highly popular, even 
 with Lady Talmash, and he could make his brother 
 laugh ; but so soon as he was gone, the temporary 
 gaieties of the Elizabethan mansion were discon- 
 tinued, and Magdalen resumed her icy empire, 
 not only there, but at the rectory and the church. 
 " One doesn't like sitting next to a snowball, you 
 know," the jolly young fox-hunting squires used 
 to say; so Lady Talmash's severe although 
 hospitable table became as deserted as she liked 
 it to be, — not for economy's sake, Dut for pride. 
 The two women, the old hermit and the young 
 anchorite, used to sit opposite each other in state, 
 eating scarcely anything. The table was loaded 
 with plate; wine sparkled in the decanters; yet 
 the dinner was more barren than a Barmecide's 
 feast. The butler and his subordinates went 
 through all the forms of a ceremonial dinner; 
 but they knew that it was given for Pride's sake ; 
 that Pride sat bodkin between the two ladies, and
 
 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 was the only guest that went away filled from that 
 dreary board. 
 
 The Casements was, however, Magdalen's only 
 home. The dragoon was wild; the clergyman 
 was celibate ; none of the other Sons of Mammon 
 were old enough to offer her a home. The 
 position she held was anomalous. The link of 
 the dead man was wanting to bind her to the 
 family who should have been her brothers. She 
 felt this, and mourned, and said nothing. Sir 
 Jasper Goldthorpe had happily recovered the 
 shock brought about by his great grief, and which 
 had culminated in a series of fainting fits at 
 Goldthorpe Manor on the evening of the funeral. 
 But he was sadly shaken. His physicians had 
 insisted that he should temporarily abstain from 
 the cares of business. He went away to Nice, to 
 Naples, to Malta, with Lady Goldthorpe; came 
 back in the autumn of 1850; once more made 
 his appearance among the clerks in Beryl Court ; 
 but suffered a relapse on the very anniversary of 
 his son's death, and went abroad again. He was 
 now in Belgium, whither he had come from 
 Paris, and was staying at the residence of some 
 great financial dignitary of the Low Countries.
 
 SHEPHERD AND SHEEP. 207 
 
 His affairs in Beryl Court had gone on pros- 
 perously during his absence, and he was richer 
 than ever. But Sir Jasper was expected back : 
 of course, being so rich a man, he had been made 
 a commissioner of the Exhibition, foreman of a 
 jury, and all sorts of things. From ill health he 
 had been unable to attend the opening cere- 
 monial, but he was now convalescent ; and on his 
 return Magdalen was to join him in Onyx 
 Square : only for a few days, however, for the 
 girl loathed London and the gilded palace there, 
 and seemed to prefer her residence in the village 
 where she was hated. Had she gone away from 
 Swordsley for good, there would have been pro- 
 bably, with the exception of the rector and Lady 
 Talmash, but one person who would have re* 
 gretted her absence. That person was the 
 Reverend Ruthyn Pendragon, B.A., the Reve- 
 rend Ernest Goldthorpe's curate, and who, in his 
 clumsy fashion, had fallen madly in love with 
 Magdalen Hill.
 
 208 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON, 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 A LAY BROTHER. 
 
 A lay Brother came out of the convent on the 
 hill, and so by the winding road into the valley 
 where lay the village of Hoogendracht. It was 
 an evening in May, and the far landscape was 
 bathed in mellow hues. A fat and fair prospect 
 was that Belgian champaign to look upon. Far 
 as the eye could reach, to east and west the corn- 
 fields ranged and waved, and the* warm sun had 
 just begun to sprinkle their green expanse with 
 golden patches — pale gold as yet, and unalloyed 
 by July fierceness. To the south the valley rose 
 again into thick-wooded heights, where the birds 
 held high harmony all day long, and partridges 
 and pheasants might have thanked their stars that 
 Flanders had a code of game-laws as well as 
 England, and that their respite lasted until the 
 latter days of August. Embowered in the woods 
 shone out two or three blocks of white masonry, 
 pierced by many windows, on which the sun
 
 A LAY BROTHER. 209 
 
 gleamed with, an arrowy sharpness, and which, I 
 grieve to say, for the sake of the picturesque, 
 were also provided with tall chimneys, from whose 
 tops smoke curled and diapered the wood- 
 land distance. These were cloth factories ; for 
 Hoogendracht was rich in manufacture of woollens. 
 Hight down in the midst of the valley was the 
 straggling village of Hoogendracht proper, with 
 its church of St. Josse-ten-Groode, its fountain, 
 its antique stone cross, and quaint little Town- 
 house, now the quarters of the village-mayor. It 
 was girt about by farm premises, rich in kine, in 
 sheep, in pigs, in breweries, in wheelwrights' 
 shops, and in beetroot crushing-mills. Half-way 
 down the winding road which the Lay Brother 
 traversed was the chateau of St, Hendrik, held 
 for ages by the noble family of Vandercoocken- 
 hagen, now represented by TVilhem, twenty- 
 second baron of that name ; and to the north, on 
 the summit of a high hill, the only object, barren, 
 savage, and gloomy to look upon in the whole 
 cheerful picture, was the monastery of the Peres 
 Maristes des Bonnesceuvres, — the Marist Fathers 
 of Goodworks, — a religious community of the very 
 strictest discipline and rule of life, and who were 
 vol. i. *
 
 210 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 generally considered to be a succursal offshoot of 
 the stern ascetics of La Trappe. 
 
 When you had turned your back to the grey, 
 timeworn abode of the monks, and looked around 
 to the corn- fields swelling in lazy undulations ; to 
 the umbrageous thickets where the partridges 
 and pheasants rejoiced and the cloth factories 
 nestled ; to the prosperous village in the middle 
 of the vale, and on whose southern side the little 
 river Dracht babbled and struggled, all seemed 
 happy, smiling Peace. Beyond that bare hill not 
 an inch of ground lay waste. What ponds or 
 rivulets the vale had, — tiny tributaries to the 
 Dracht, — were either the elected swimming-baths 
 of ducks and geese, or turned the wheels of mills, 
 or were rich in roach and dace and trout, sternly 
 tabooed to piscatorial interlopers by threatening 
 notices. The abundant manure-heaps in the 
 farm-yards, the turkeys that gobbled over the 
 scandal of the poultry-yard, the well- stored barns, 
 the sturdy Flemish cocks that continually crowed 
 forth their shrill pseans of defiance to all the 
 Gallic cocks beyond Lille and Yerviers, the pigs 
 that grunted a Brabanconne in bassetaille, the 
 sheep that fed, not forty, but four hundred like
 
 A LAY BROTHER. 211 
 
 one, on the beetroot peelings, the fat lazy horses 
 that had grown epicures in pasturage, and, tired 
 of grazing, rubbed their noses against palings, 
 or with dull thuds beat now one hoof, and now 
 the other on the turf to wile away the time : all 
 these spoke of Peace. The cows were too proud 
 to rise and stalk away as a stranger passed, but 
 looked at him instead with their vast chests prone 
 to the grass and their haunches bent, with a lazy, 
 landed-proprietor kind of air, chewing the cud 
 disdainfully as though the}' thought, "We are 
 the cows that Cuyp and Karl du Jardin painted 
 in the sheeny fields and the golden sunset, and 
 that Yerbeckhoeven paints so well now. We are 
 historic cows. Reason not about us. Regard 
 our horns, our mild eyes, our well-set bones, our 
 heaving flanks. Regard, and pass." 
 
 The chateau of St. Hendrik had been recently 
 redecorated, for the Baron Vandercoockenhagen 
 XXII. was rich and a nobleman of taste. But 
 the old forms and the old carvings had been well 
 imitated, and the mansion-house had a respectably 
 mediaeval look. It had need to have been 
 renovated. We are in 1851. Five-and-thirty 
 years before, the chateau of St. Hendrik had 
 
 p2
 
 212 THE SEVEN SONS OE MAMMON. 
 
 been turned inside out. The walls had been 
 riddled by bullets, the roof blown off by grenades, 
 the rich furniture smashed, the windows torn 
 from their frames. Of the orchard, only a few 
 blackened stumps of apple-trees remained. The 
 bearded barley that was threshing in the barn 
 was trampled into a gory mud, and among the 
 parterres of the flower-garden men had hacked 
 and hewed each other until the life-blood floated 
 the tall lilies, and made the red roses pale beside 
 it. Here the warriors of Napoleon the Great had 
 left their sign and cast their crimson shadow. 
 Here, as there, as far beyond, and to every point 
 of the compass, there had been slaughter and 
 rapine, and burning of houses and outraging of 
 women, not alone in the year of the Waterloo 
 campaign, but for many, many ages — almost 
 since Christianity began. For Gaul is divided 
 into parts three, and this was Belgic Gaul, "the 
 cockpit of Europe ; " and men had so cut each 
 other's throats here and hereabouts, for the last 
 sixteen hundred years, that Prseliuin would have 
 been a far more appropriate name for the village 
 in the vale than Hoogendracht. Scarcely a 
 farmer was there in the place but whose fore-
 
 A LAY BROTHER. 213 
 
 elders had been burnt out, or slain, or pillaged 
 by the Romans or Frenchmen, Imperialists or 
 Republicans : Spaniards, Englishmen, Halians, 
 Walloons, Croats, and Pandours had come to this 
 out-of-the-way place to fight. The husbandman 
 could scarcely trace a furrow without turning up 
 a splinter of bone; and in the church a stately 
 monument to Don Esteban de Lara y Lara, 
 killed in a skirmish at Hoogeudracht a.d. 1580, 
 was neighboured by a humble mural tablet, 
 setting forth in lean English characters that 
 Captain Basil Horton, who fell by a hand- 
 grenade in defending Hoogendracht against the 
 French king's troops a.d. 1707, had been buried 
 (he belonging to the ancient faith) in the adjoin- 
 ing graveyard, and that this memorial had been 
 erected by the High and Mighty Prince John 
 Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, to whom the 
 deceased was aide-de-camp. 
 
 Flanders, however, has always been remarkable 
 for a sound flesh and a healthy skin, and the 
 wounds inflicted upon her speedily heal. So 
 soon as the blood has ceased to flow and the 
 anguish is over, the patient begins to smile 
 again; and in a year's time or so, scarcely a
 
 214 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 cicatrix remains to tell of the hideous gash. The 
 husbandmen of Hoogendracht, when they had 
 escaped the conscription, troubled themselves 
 very little with the thought that their fathers had 
 been forced into the ranks to lose their lives in 
 quarrels that did not concern them. Peterkin's 
 beet-root crop was abundant. What mattered it 
 to Peterkin if his great uncle's acres had been 
 grubbed up, his homestead ruined, and half-a- 
 dozen ruffian soldiers of the Danube or the 
 Douro quartered on him? Jan walked firmly 
 and trippingly. His ancestor's wooden leg did 
 not lie heavy on his soul. He hummed the 
 Brabanconne at his work, and thought King 
 Leopold the very best sovereign in Christendom, 
 St. Gudule, St. Hendrik, and St. Josse-ten- 
 Groode the very pinks and pearls of sanctity, and 
 Genevieve de Brabant the cynosure of noble 
 damsels. He ate his rye-bread, drank his sour 
 beer, clumped about in his sabots, said his 
 prayers, burnt his tallow-candles to the Virgin, 
 and sold his bees-wax to the dealers at Louvain, 
 kept his kermesses, hoarded his money in earthen 
 pots and worsted stockings, and paid his taxes 
 without grumbling. What more could he do to
 
 A LAY BROTHER. Silo 
 
 repeat in his Flemish tongue the spirit, if not the 
 words, of the Latin inscription on the old house 
 in Brussels, " From plague, famine, and war, 
 good Lord, deliver us ! " 
 
 So peace reigned in Hoogendracht, and the 
 corn and flowers grew above the mouldering 
 bones, the shattered blades, the rusty cannon- 
 balls, and the dinted head-pieces ; and every man 
 lived under the shield of the law, and in the quiet 
 possession of his own flocks and herds, till it 
 should please some conqueror to come and root 
 up Hoogendracht again, and strip every peasant 
 as bare as a forked radish. Meanwhile the place 
 smiled and gladdened every mans eyes to behold 
 it. It might have gladdened those of the Lay 
 Brother; but as he walked he kept them bent 
 resolutely to the ground. He was a tall and 
 stalwart brother, with a Saxon face, and closely 
 shaven. He had not assumed the tonsure, but 
 his hair — what little, at least, could be seen 
 under his coarse woollen cap — was rigidly 
 cropped to his head. For all raiment he had a 
 long, loose, amply-sleeved, and hooded frock, of 
 some rough woollen stuff, reaching from his neck 
 to his heels, and girt about his waist by a cord,
 
 216 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 from which hung neither cross nor rosary. Those 
 simple ornaments of monachism were reserved for 
 the fathers of the convent. His unstockinged 
 feet were thrust into wooden shoes, hay being 
 stuffed into the interstices between his flesh and 
 the rough wood. And so, in mean and sordid 
 garb that had a mixture of the monk and of the 
 farm-labourer in it, the Lay Brother stalked 
 silent, and with his eyes cast down. 
 
 His life was a hard one. He was but servus 
 servorum, the slave of the slaves of self-mortifica- 
 tion. The intervals between his rude labours, 
 or his menial services, might be filled up in pious 
 meditation ; but he was not yet admitted even to 
 the noviciate. He might remain for life a lay 
 brother; and his companions in solitude were 
 stolid and ignorant — Flemish boors, in fact, of a 
 serious turn of mind, who were content to hew 
 wood and draw water for the good fathers, 
 without a chance, or indeed a hope, of ever 
 putting on the cowl. The Lay Brother, how- 
 ever, was on a partial equality, so far as his 
 material life was concerned, with the monks. 
 He was allowed to share their toil and their 
 privations. He rose with them in the middle of
 
 A LAY BROTHER. 217 
 
 the night and at dawn to attend mass, and to 
 hear gloomy chants. He stood with them in the 
 refectory, listened during meal-time to the same 
 austere homilies against the lusts of the flesh, 
 read by the Father Prselector, partook standing 
 of the same Spartan diet of lentil-soup, brown 
 bread, black radish, cheese, and cold water. He, 
 as a lay brother, was allowed to eat meat at 
 Easter ; but his comrades, the boors, did not eat 
 it, and he abstained. He worked and vegetated. 
 Were he to die here, he would again be put on an 
 equality with the brethren, and be thrust into a 
 hole in his rope-girt gaberdine, unshrouded and 
 uncoffinecl, with a plain wooden cross above his 
 grave. For this consummation the Lay Brother 
 devoutly prayed. For him, peace was not in the 
 cheerful vale of Hoogendracht, but in the field 
 behind the convent, on the plateau, which served 
 as a cemetery. 
 
 There were forty Fathers of Good-works at the 
 convent. They had been dispossessed at the Re- 
 volution, and persecuted with unrelenting severity 
 by the elder Napoleon. Their passive, uncom- 
 plaining forbearance, under unmerited oppression 
 irritated the Emperor and King much more than
 
 218 THE SEVEN SOUS OF MAMMON. 
 
 overt resistance would have done. " Sapristi ! " 
 cried his Majesty one day, I will turn every one 
 of these forty shavelings into grenadiers of the 
 Guard. His Imperial Majesty did a great many 
 more quiet little things in the way of despotism — 
 things much more cruel and arbitrary than 
 shooting Palm the bookseller, or sending the 
 brave guerillas of Major S chill, as though they 
 were felons, to the galleys — than even his bitterest 
 enemies in England are aware of. It was thought 
 an act of clemency on his part when he permitted 
 the intractable, albeit inoffensive, Marist Fathers 
 to emigrate to America. After Waterloo a poor 
 and scattered remnant, most of them feeble and 
 ancient men, but who had preserved the tradi- 
 tions of their discipline intact, came back to 
 Belgium. They were soon driven out again by 
 the Dutch dynasty, to whom the Low Countries 
 had been apportioned; but after 1831, the con- 
 ciliatory government of Leopold permitted them 
 to return, and to enjoy their humble own again. 
 
 They wore long-cowled frocks, of form like 
 unto that of the lay brothers, but of coarse 
 white flannel. Their feet were bare and sandled, 
 their heads, but for the ring of hair at the base
 
 A LAY BROTHER. 219 
 
 of the skull, shaven. They ate little; they 
 worked long hours in the rudest employments 
 of field industry. They taught a school of 
 vagrant children sanctioned by the State, and 
 were the physicians and the relieving officers 
 to the poor. Their farm-lands brought them 
 in rich annual profits, but not one brother had 
 a sou of his own, or even a purse to put it in. 
 The consolation of literary study was even denied 
 them ; and in their wretched cells, on their hard 
 pallets, they were expected to meditate on death, 
 and not to read. They observed the rule of 
 silence with a severity even more frightful than 
 ever reigned in a modern penitentiary; and the 
 deadliest sin against conventual discipline, was 
 the utterance of a word not warranted by the 
 actual requirements of labour. No ghastly re- 
 minders of " Brother, w T e must die " were inter- 
 changed between them. They plied their spades 
 and broke their clods in mute companionship. 
 The Guest-master only, or Pere Hospitalier, and 
 the Reverend Superior of the convent, who wore a 
 golden chain above his flannel robe, but lived as 
 poorly and worked as hard as his brethren — ■ 
 these and the lay brethren who fetched and
 
 220 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 carried from tlie village were permitted to speak 
 on matters of necessity. So, without books to 
 read, without human converse to hear or smiles to 
 cheer them, without shirts, without shoes, without 
 pocket-handkerchiefs, or sheets, or pillows, — with 
 no money to spend, no meat to eat, no kindly words 
 to soothe their last moments, lived the Marist 
 Fathers of Good- works— sternly and gloomily, 
 and confident that the road they were treading 
 was the sure one, and torturing themselves in 
 hopes of a blessed immortality. The publica- 
 tions of the Tract Society never reached their 
 grim abode. They would have spurned such 
 heretical pamphlets ; and yet I think more than 
 one of these devoted friars might have asked 
 himself with advantage the question, " Where 
 are you going ? " 
 
 Among these forty men who herded in one 
 common living sepulchre, there were the usual 
 number of Fathers Hulbert, Austin, Jerome, 
 Francis, Joseph, Stephen, Philip, Luke, and so 
 forth. They assumed their new baptism in taking 
 the cowl; but they did not all belong to one 
 nation, and in the great outside world they had 
 gone by very many different names. Thus, Father
 
 A LAY BROTHER. 221 
 
 Hulbert may have been a once famous tenor- 
 singer at the Grand Opera in Paris, to whom 
 Emperors had sent diamond snuff-boxes, and who 
 had lain in the alcoves of princesses of the 
 blood royal. Father Austin had been a chamber- 
 lain at the court of Leopold ; Stephen a wealthy 
 iron-master at Liege; Jerome an officer in the 
 Royal Guard; Joseph a brilliant poet and wit; 
 
 Francis a fashionable roue; Luke a ; but 
 
 there is no need to pursue the catalogue further. 
 The world was quite shut out from the convent of 
 Hoogendracht, and all the pomp, pride, and 
 ambition of man disappeared beneath the flannel 
 frock and the hempen girdle. 
 
 As the Lay Brother neared the chateau of St. 
 Hendrik, he found a handsome barouche and pair 
 standing at the gates. M. le Baron Vander- 
 coockenhagen XXII. had visitors staying at the 
 chateau, and he was about to take an airing with 
 two guests, one of whom had been an invalid. 
 The horses champed, the postilion, in the lightest 
 of jackets and the brightest of top-boots, clacked 
 his whip. Two spruce outriders reined their 
 horses in, a little in advance. M. le Baron Van- 
 dercoockenhagen XXII. was a burly Belgian
 
 222 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 magnifico, with quite a conservatory of coloured 
 ribbons at his button-hole. He came forth from 
 the chateau with a lady and gentleman, whom 
 with the utmost politeness, he assisted into the 
 barouche. The lady was stout, and had been 
 comely and cheerful, but she looked pale and 
 careworn. The gentleman was tall and broadly 
 built. His hair was light; his age might have 
 been a little over fifty ; but he stooped and shook 
 painfully, and could only walk with the assistance 
 of a stick. At length the three were comfortably 
 seated in a barouche ; the Baron waved his hand, 
 the postilion gave another clack to his whip, and 
 the rapid wheels rolled down the winding road. 
 
 The Lay Brother had stood apart, by a wayside 
 cross. When the party had left, he made to 
 resume his way ; but the gate-porter, a fat Fle- 
 ming, in a gorgeous livery of green and gold, 
 recognised, stopped him, and bade him good 
 even. 
 
 The Lay Brother turned his feet towards 
 Hoogendracht, bowed his head and would have 
 passed on ; but the gate-porter was not so to be 
 put off.
 
 A LAY BROTHER. 223 
 
 " Have you heard the news, Brother Domi- 
 nique ? " 
 
 " We hear no news. I have heard nothing." 
 
 "Our guests leave us to-morrow. They are 
 called to England. And you, whither may you 
 be bound ? " 
 
 u To the post-office, for the Reverend Superior's 
 letters." 
 
 "Ah, the barouche will be there long before 
 you. M. le Baron does not feed his horses with 
 broken bottles ; and when they go it is with a 
 will. Do you know whom our guests are, Brother 
 Dominique ? " 
 
 " I am not permitted to ask. No." 
 
 "Well, they are English; no conceited beg- 
 garly 'upstarts of Frenchmen. Oh, no. The 
 invalid gentleman you saw is a great English 
 milord, — Sir Jasper Goldthorpe by name, a mem- 
 ber of the British parliament, and richer they say 
 than Rothschild." 
 
 "Ah!" 
 
 " And the belle dame, whom should she be but 
 Miladi Goldthorpe, his wife." 
 
 " Good evening," said the Lay Brother, turning 
 his eyes to the ground and walking on.
 
 224 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 " Sont-ils rustres, ces freres laiques ? " mut- 
 tered the porter, as he closed the gate. " That 
 Brother Dominique is as surly as a bear. I 
 wonder to what nation that lay brother belongs. 
 He can speak no Flemish, and his French is 
 decidedly not of Paris. Perhaps he is a Walloon. " 
 
 When the Lay Brother arrived at the post-office 
 in the main street of Hocgendracht, the official 
 handed him a packet of letters for the Reverend 
 Superior. He bowed his head and was going 
 away, when the postmaster called him back. 
 
 " Stay/' he said ; " there is a letter for you, 
 Brother Dominique, with the English postmark, 
 and in a very pretty female hand. Vons etes en 
 bonne fortune, mon frere" 
 
 " It is from my sister," observed Brother Domi- 
 nique coldly ; but as he extended his hand for the 
 letter his fingers trembled, and he clutched rather 
 than took it. 
 
 "I don't believe in lay brothers' lay sisters/' 
 was the sage remark of the postmaster, as he pro- 
 ceeded to stamp the contents of the outgoing 
 letter-bag. 
 
 The Lay Brother pursued his road back towards 
 the convent on the hill until he had passed the
 
 A LAY BROTHER. 225 
 
 chateau of St. Hendrik by full a hundred yards. 
 Then he drew the letter in a woman's hand from 
 the bosom of his gaberdine, broke the seal, and 
 eagerly tore open the envelope. His pale face 
 was flushed, and his whole frame shook. 
 
 " At last," groaned the Lay Brother, and in the 
 English tongue. i{ At last. A letter in January, 
 and a letter in May, and sixteen months have 
 passed in this prison, and yet no hope/'
 
 226 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 AN EXCEEDINGLY VULGAR PERSON. 
 
 What is a gentleman ? Who is a gentleman ? 
 I pause for a reply. Of course there will be at 
 once as many score thousand answers, indignant, 
 sarcastic, explanatory, and argumentative, to my 
 queries as there are readers to this story. But I 
 must repeat them nevertheless. "What is a 
 gentleman ? and who, if you please, has a right to 
 be considered one ? " Maginn once, discussing 
 the vexed question, quoted an Irish authority, who 
 laid it down that for duelling purposes any one 
 might be considered a gentleman who wore a 
 clean shirt once a week. The present generation 
 is more fastidious, and would not be satisfied with 
 such a standard of gentility. The Byronic idea 
 of a gentleman we are all familiar with : small 
 hands and feet, a high forehead (warranted ala- 
 baster), curly hair, and a fine taste for hock and 
 soda-water in the morning ; but when we find a 
 being so endowed squabbling with his wife, recom-
 
 AN EXCEEDINGLY VULGAR PERSON. 227 
 
 mending Mr. Grimaldi, the clown, to take soy with 
 his apple-tart, and composing a scurril poem 
 under the inspiration not of Rhenish wine, hut of 
 diluted Geneva, one begins to doubt somewhat of 
 the correctness of the Byronic theory. It is plain, 
 I am afraid, that manners have little to do with 
 making a gentleman — in the world's sense of the 
 term. The Plantagenets ate their meals with their 
 fingers, slept on straw, and did not use pocket- 
 handkerchiefs j and Charlemagne, not being able 
 to write, was compelled to dip the fore-finger of 
 his glove in ink and smear it over the parchment, 
 when it was necessary that the imperial sign- 
 manual should he affixed to an edict. Imagine 
 " Carolus Magnus X his mark " ! The best -bred 
 men of modern times have often been of the most 
 plebeian extraction. The French Duke de Noail- 
 les-Noailles confessed that the dancing-master 
 Vestris, if his demeanour was to be taken as a 
 criterion, was the most polished gentleman he 
 ever saw ; whereas, per contra, read what St. 
 Simon has to say of the bearish and brutish 
 manners of the great Dukes and Peers of his 
 time. Brummell, the pattern of English patri- 
 cians, was the son of a petty lodging-house 
 
 Q 2
 
 ZZ& THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 keeper, and the grandson of a menial servant ; — 
 if lie ever had a grandfather at all. Again, as to 
 appearance. Take down your Lavater's Physiog- 
 nomy, and, placing your hand over the names 
 appended to the portraits, just strive by guess- 
 work to determine who are the nobly descended 
 and who the base-born in that long panorama of 
 faces. Long odds may be laid that when you 
 come to remove your hand, you will discover that 
 this eagle-nosed, lofty-browed worthy, who by his 
 countenance should be of the bluest-blood of 
 Castile, is the son of a cobbler, and that this bull- 
 necked, snub-nosed, thick-lipped, clod-hopping- 
 looking fellow is a grandee of a hundred quarter- 
 ings, or a prince of an imperial house. Now, do 
 you think I am about to launch into some liotly 
 democratic invective against the folly and fallacy 
 of claims of long descent; that I am about to 
 quote the " grand old gardener and his wife ; " or 
 ask, with Wat Tyler's crew, who was a gentleman 
 when the gardener delved and his wife span ; or 
 chuckle over the ambassador - poet's proposed 
 epitaph : 
 
 " Ladies and gentles, by your leave, 
 
 Here lies the body of Matthew Prior ; 
 The son of Adam and of Eve : 
 Can Bourbon or Nassau go higher ? "
 
 AM EXCEEDINGLY VULGAR PERSON. ZZV 
 
 No : I have not any wish to attempt sarcasm 
 either one way or the other— either about " tenth 
 transmitters of foolish faces/' or poor varlets 
 whose blood " has crept through scoundrels ever 
 since the Flood/' Blood, quotha! If I am. 
 pricked, will not my veins yield the life current ; 
 and if I choose to wear blue spectacles, may I not 
 declare it to be the real tap — the genuine sangre 
 azul? Blood, forsooth ! What are your two- 
 penny-halfpenny Howards and Percys to my 
 ancestry, — to yours, my descendant of five hun- 
 dred cattle-lifters, — to yours, Pitz Bogie designed 
 of Macgillicuddy ; to yours, M. de Sidonia, who 
 carry three trumpets proper in memory of your 
 ancestor who helped to blow the walls of Jericho 
 down ? and what are all our boastings of ancient 
 descent compared with those of the Chuggs of Suf- 
 folk, who have held the plough and cracked the 
 clods for twice five hundred years. Let us all be 
 proud of our progenitors, and think ourselves each 
 and severally the very finest gentlemen that ever 
 stepped ; and when a rude person says, " Sir, you 
 are no gentleman," let us answer him, " Sir, you 
 you are no judge." 
 
 And yet: Who is a gentleman? What is a
 
 230 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 gentleman ? The question is as far from solution 
 as ever. / don't know, for one ; but if, as we are 
 generally compelled to do, the general verdict of 
 the world is to be fallen back upon, it is very- 
 certain, not only that the "Reverend Ruthyn Pen- 
 dragon was no gentleman, but that he was, on 
 the contrary, an exceedingly vulgar person. 
 
 There had been curates and curates at Swords- 
 ley. The rector, who was deaf, paralytic, and all 
 but blind, had been taken care of for a long 
 period by his relatives, who found the mild and 
 genial climate of Torquay most suited to his 
 infirm state of health. The large revenues of the 
 incumbency had been carefully paid in to the 
 bankers of the Reverend Mr. Marrowfat — that 
 was the name of the invalid rector; and the 
 successive curates had been as punctually paid 
 their small and not increasing stipends. The evil- 
 tongued, who were neither more nor less numerous 
 at Swordsley than elsewhere, averred that the 
 patroness in ordinary to ecclesiastical preferment 
 under the Rector of Swordsley was a certain Mrs. 
 Gryphon, by the mother's side a Marrowfat, by 
 conjugal relation the widow of a broken ship- 
 broker, and who was good enough to officiate as
 
 AN EXCEEDINGLY VULGAR PEHSON. 231 
 
 housekeeper, companion, and general locum tenens 
 to the infirm clerical gentleman. She did every 
 thing for him. She opened his letters and read 
 those which he received ; nay, after the Reverend 
 Mr. Marrowfat's death, human malignity went so 
 far as to say — in the great probate case of Mar- 
 rowfat and Wife versus Gryphon — that this inde- 
 fatigable widow-lady made the rector's will for 
 him, and had it all her own way in making it. 
 This, however, is only by the way. I am afraid 
 that she did appoint the curates, and that the 
 advent of the ecclesiastic who stammered, and of 
 the other one who had no H's, must be laid to 
 her charge. Of the red-headed curate, however, 
 Mrs. Gryphon must be held blameless. He of the 
 scarlet locks was a nominee of the Chucklebuxes, 
 a rival branch of the Marrowfat family, who 
 obtained temporary dominion over the poor old 
 clergyman during an absence of Mrs. Gryphon in 
 London. The widow had a graceless nephew, — a 
 Gryphon, not a Marrowfat, — who, having spent a 
 large legacy, principally in hire of dogcarts, and 
 the purchase of cherry-brandy, shirts of extra- 
 ordinary pattern, and coloured lithographs of 
 eminent dramatic performers, had enlisted in the
 
 232 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 Hussars, but was speedily bought off from the 
 draff and husks of the depot at Maidstone by his 
 affectionate aunt. Having unsuccessfully tempted 
 fortune as a commercial traveller for an article 
 in general demand (the celebrated steel-edge 
 wooden razors), as a billiard-marker, and as a 
 frequenter of certain dry skittle-alleys, whithe 
 gentlemen of agricultural appearance were brough 
 to play, and where, it is said, they were sometimes 
 drugged and robbed, young Ripton Gryphon 
 again enlisted; this time in her Majesty's infantry 
 of the line. He was again bought off; and after 
 enjoying for a short time an appointment in the 
 metropolitan police force, from which he was dis- 
 missed for a fault, harmless in itself but highly 
 subversive of discipline, being that of offering to 
 fight his inspector for half a crown, this gay youth 
 became an omnibus conductor, a waiter at a 
 tavern where the hours were rather early than 
 late, and an attendant at fictitious auctions, 
 where his business was to bid for gigantic plated 
 cruet-stands, and, with an air of extreme solici- 
 tude, to inspect curiously-inlaid writing desks, 
 handed round for that purpose on a japanned tea- 
 tray. In this place of business he was ordinarily
 
 AN EXCEEDINGLY VULGAR PERSON. 233 
 
 known by the familiar sobriquet of " Rip the 
 Bonnet." If I have mentioned the peculiar 
 phases in the career of this sportive young man 
 it has been merely to mark the strong points of 
 contrast in his character. Ripton Gryphon was 
 exceedingly intelligent. His education had been 
 excellent. He was a good classical scholar, a 
 ready speaker, and he wrote a beautiful hand. 
 These acquirements did not in the least militate 
 against his being, root and branch, a hopeless 
 and incurable scamp. With that odd perversity 
 not uncommon to her sex, Mrs. Gryphon posi- 
 tively adored this lamentable scapegrace ; and as 
 he happened to be at the same time tall, curly- 
 haired, straight of limb, bright of eye, and gene- 
 rally good-looking, the w T idow declared that her 
 Ripton was born to be a gentleman; that he 
 would sow his wild oats ; that he should go into 
 the Church, and that a country curacy was the 
 very thing to suit him, pending, of course, his 
 elevation to the episcopal bench. To all appear- 
 ance, it certainly appeared that the soil of Mr. 
 Ripton Gryphon's moral nature had been ex- 
 hausted by the cultivation of wild oats, and that 
 unless it lay fallow for a time it was not likely to
 
 234 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 produce anything but an abundant crop of hemp; 
 but with the energy and audacity characteristic of 
 a lady accustomed to deal only with weak and 
 timid people, and to work her will upon them, 
 Mrs. Gryphon set about converting a young 
 fellow who was bidding fair to graduate at the 
 hulks into a candidate for holy orders. She 
 found out the easy chaplain to an easy bishop, 
 who had already ordained a gentleman not quite 
 right in his head for a living near the Land's End, 
 and another who was not quite right in his morals 
 for a chaplaincy in the West Indies. Mrs. Gry- 
 phon learned to know, as some of us know, and as 
 all of us ought to know, that other means exist for 
 wearing a cassock and bands, and tacking f reve- 
 rend ' to one's name, besides taking a university 
 degree. The easy chaplain recommended her 
 to a tutor for her Ripton, — a college man, a 
 ripe scholar, who had taken deacon's orders, 
 who was as proud as Lucifer and as poor as Job, 
 and whose name was Euthyn Pendragon. The 
 graceless nephew was confided to the care of 
 this instructor, and in a quiet retirement at 
 Clapham, supported from the widow-lady's fun s, 
 did, for a certain period, make some progress in
 
 AN EXCEEDINGLY VULGAR PERSON. 235 
 
 leaving off sack and living cleanly, like a gentle- 
 man. What is a gentleman ? It was during the 
 sojourn of Mrs. Gryphon in London, of course in 
 the interests of her protege, that the Chucklebux 
 faction achieved a momentary triumph ; and the 
 reverend gentleman who had no IPs, having 
 married a lady who had two thousand pounds, 
 and so resigned his appointment, brought in the 
 curate with the red head. Mrs. Gryphon returned 
 to Torquay in a rage, and the shock of her temper 
 was almost too much for the poor old rector. 
 She was appeased, however, by abject concessions, 
 and the immediate and ignominious dismissal 01 
 the entire Chucklebux faction (the . danger was 
 imminent ; for there was one Chucklebux who 
 was medical, of the homcepathic persuasion, and 
 who was also a distinguished amateur will- 
 maker) ; and she soon resumed her empire over 
 her reverend patient and relative. So hard did 
 this lady work towards the accomplishment of her 
 purpose, so various were her resources, so strong 
 was her will, so feeble were those with whom she 
 had to deal, that I for one should not have been 
 surprised if success had crowned her enterprise, 
 and if Bipton Gryphon had at last crept through
 
 236 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 the hawse-holes on board the ecclesiastical bark. 
 Stranger things have happened, believe me. I 
 am not writing from imagination or without 
 book. All the widow's plots and schemes were, 
 alas, foiled by Ripton Gryphon taking it into his 
 head to vindicate his natural character. He ran 
 away from Mr. Pendragon, his tutor, and was not 
 heard of any more. Many a similar scapegrace, 
 whose relatives are vainly inquiring after him, 
 or, through the medium of newspaper advertise- 
 ments, as vainly entreating him to return, is 
 quietly tried under a false name at some provin- 
 cial assizes, and quietly transported, without any 
 body save some chance gaoler being the wiser for 
 it. " That's a baronet, sir," said a convict's 
 warder to me once on Southsea Common, point- 
 ing to a peculiarly villanous-looking individual in 
 cross-barred canvas and an oil-skin hat, who was 
 leisurely tickling the turf with his spade, — " that's 
 a baronet, and kep' his 'osses and his 'ounds. 
 But, Lord love you, sir, he ain't at Portsmouth, 
 leastways as his genteel fam'ly think. Must live 
 abroad for his 'elth, sir. He's at Paw, in the 
 Pyrenees, a living in his own chatow, is that 
 baronet." But what became of Ripton Gryphon
 
 AN EXCEEDINGLY VULGAR PERSON. 237 
 
 there was no deponent to say. He went away, 
 and did'nt come back. He may have subsided 
 into penal servitude, as has already been hinted. 
 He may have turned up swollen, blue, ghastly, 
 and drowned, in the ooze of some riverain creek, 
 and have passed from a parish dead-house to a 
 parish grave. He may have enlisted agaiu, have 
 died on board a transport, and been flung to the 
 fishes. He may have been murdered. Who 
 knows ? Men pass and pass in the great glass of 
 Life like the Kings in Macbeth' s vision; and 
 there is no remembrance of those that have gone 
 before, and no knowledge of those that are to 
 come afterwards. 
 
 Who, for instance, could have foretold that 
 Ruthyn Pendragon, the tutor of the graceless 
 scion of the Gryphons, would have ever become 
 curate of Swordsley ! yet it was his kismet, his 
 fate, to occupy that post. By one of those odd 
 coincidences which are perpetually baffling and 
 perplexing us, Pendragon, having passed into 
 priests' orders, was recommended to the new 
 rector of Swordsley, — poor old Mr. Marrowfat 
 having been gathered to his fathers, — and 
 obtained employment from the Reverend Ernest
 
 238 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 Goldthorpe. It is not fitting to tell how the 
 widow, at once bereaved of her rector and of 
 her nephew, raged and stormed at the course 
 which events had taken. It wasn't Ruthyn 
 Pendragon's fault if Ernest Goldthorpe chose 
 to take him. He wanted a curacy, and Ernest 
 wanted a curate : what was more natural ? Why 
 should Mrs. Gryphon charge him with the 
 blackest ingratitude, and accuse him of being 
 a traitor and an intriguer. He had not soli- 
 cited the appointment. It had fallen in his 
 way, and he had taken it. The widow would 
 have liked to say all kinds of possible things 
 against the new curate; but there was nothing 
 to be said against him. He was stanchly 
 recommended by college magnates. He was 
 eminently learned. His poverty was noto- 
 rious; but his moral character was without 
 stain. Ernest Goldthorpe was glad to be 
 able to do a service to so able and respectable 
 a young man. So the Gryphon was finally 
 discomfited, — she had got all the rector's money 
 though, and all the Marrowfats and Chuckle- 
 buxes, with their lawyers to boot, failed in dispos- 
 sessing her thereof, — and the Reverend Ruthyn
 
 AN EXCEEDINGLY VULGAR PERSON. 239 
 
 Pendragon was curate to the Rector of 
 Swordsley. 
 
 Stay, — learning, respectability, character, all 
 granted, — there might have been one little thing 
 to be alleged against the Reverend Ruthyn 
 Pendragon. He was a very vulgar person. He 
 had plenty of H's, and used them in the right 
 place, but he was desperately vulgar. He looked 
 like a vulgar person. He talked like one. He 
 ate and drank like one. He dressed like one. 
 There was a vague but uncertain vulgarity in 
 his face, his smile, his demeanour. His bold, 
 firm, defined handwriting was vulgar to every 
 cross of a /, to every dot of an i. When he 
 first entered the presence of Lady Talmash, that 
 aristocratic church-woman held up her hands, 
 and whispered to Magdalen, cc However comes 
 that boor by the name of Pendragon ? " 
 
 By lineage Ruthyn was a gentleman of the 
 most ancient descent. What were Normans, 
 Saxons, Danes, to his old stock ? He sprang 
 from the genuine Phoenician souche, as I suppose 
 all the Tre, Pols, and Pens of Cornwall do. 
 Ruthyn came from that famous although some- 
 what remote province. Uuhappily there were
 
 240 THE SEVEN SONS OE MAMMON. 
 
 no tin-mines in his family, nor, had Pendragon 
 died, would there have been twenty thousand 
 or ten underground in Cornwall anxious to know 
 the reason why. He had no money. He was 
 an orphan, and alone in the world. 
 
 An old grandmother at St. Mawes had brought 
 this vulgar person up. She did what she could 
 for him, and her small savings were laid out 
 for his benefit. Ruthyn's father was a gentleman, 
 who, about the year 18£5, in company with other 
 adventurous Cornish men, had gone in quest 
 of some silver - mines in Peru, and found the 
 vomito nero instead, of which, at Lima, he 
 straightway died. The old grandmother did 
 what she could for the orphan, which was not 
 much. The father had, on the principle of 
 conveying coals to Newcastle, taken most of the 
 available ready money of the family with him 
 to the silver- mines of Peru. In after years 
 Ruthyn Pendragon did not mind confessing that 
 in his boyhood he had made a voyage in a 
 fishing-smack, with a view to see whether he 
 would like to be apprenticed to the sea; and 
 that he had served a short probation behind 
 the shop-counter of a chemist, who likewise sold
 
 AN EXCEEDINGLY VULGAR PEESON. 24 L 
 
 grocery and haberdashery, at Truro. These 
 early associations may have been instrumental 
 in planting the first seeds of that vulgarity for 
 which Ruthyn Pendragon was always noted, and 
 for which he eventually became famous. In 
 process of time a Cornish gentleman of means, 
 who had known the paternal Pendragon, advised 
 Ptuthyn^s grandmother to send him to a certain 
 ancient and well-known grammar-school in the 
 "West Country. He made great progress in his 
 studies here, and was commended by his master 
 as a very diligent and capable boy, while he was 
 excepted to by his schoolfellows as being a 
 pitiably vulgar one. He obtained an exhibition 
 at last, and took that, and his vulgarity, and a 
 huge stock (for a boy) of book-learning, and 
 a vast fund of natural shrewdness, observation, 
 and humour, with him to college. Anything 
 else? well, he had a slender wardrobe, and his 
 grandmother's blessing. His successes at the 
 university were solid, if not brilliant. It is said 
 of him, that leaving school, and entering the 
 mail-coach which was to convey him to town, 
 Ruthyn Pendragon flung his hat into the air, 
 and cried, " Here goes for Archbishop of Canter- 
 
 VOL. I. r
 
 242 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 bury;" but at the university it was speedily 
 decided that such a vulgar fellow would never 
 obtain a fellowship, while doubts were expressed 
 as to whether any gentlemanly bishop could 
 ever be persuaded to ordain such a lout. He 
 was not likely to go wrong at the university. 
 His health was of the rudest, his frame of the 
 strongest ; and excesses of dissipation would have 
 hurt him no more than excess of study; but 
 he was wise, and chose the latter. He read 
 desperately and continuously. All that the gay 
 youth of the university could say against him 
 was that he was vulgar. They could not in 
 their charmingly contemptuous manner call him 
 a " cad." There was no denying his gentle 
 blood. There was no finding a blot on his 
 scutcheon. His great-great-grandfather was duly 
 enshrined in Fuller's Worthies; a great-grand- 
 uncle was mentioned in Anthony a Wood. The 
 university tradesmen refrained from soliciting 
 his custom; they knew that he could do them 
 no good, and that they could do him no 
 harm. Of what use were well-cut coats and 
 brilliant scarves to one who, winter and summer, 
 wore a plain black coat, which he acknowledged
 
 AN EXCEEDINGLY VULGAR PERSON. 24<o 
 
 to have bought second-hand, and which he himself 
 mended when it required repair; and beneath 
 that a waistcoat and trousers of coarse gray serge, 
 made by his old grandmother at St, Mawes? 
 Where he first purchased his cap and gown was 
 a mystery; the triflers declared that he had 
 bought them at a London masquerade warehouse, 
 on his way to college. They were certainly 
 curiosities of faded shabbiness. His linen was 
 dreadfully coarse, but scrupulously clean. He 
 was in the habit of biting his nails to the quick, 
 and no scissors were needed for his large healthy- 
 looking hands. His hair was naturally dark 
 and glossy, and he wanted no Macassar. He 
 looked like a man who washed with yellow soap. 
 He never had a row with the bargemen on 
 the river. They respected and feared him, not 
 alone for his strength, which was palpably pro- 
 digious, but for his homely, kindly manners; 
 for he was not above holding the poorest and 
 roughest in discourse, and would talk to them 
 by the half-hour together of common things and 
 their daily avocations. He was not vulgar to them. 
 Some called him a "true gentleman," but more 
 frequently working-men exclaimed: "We likes
 
 244 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 him, for he talks like one of us/ 5 Clearly a 
 very vulgar person this Ruthyn Pendragon. 
 
 There were young gentlemen of his college 
 whose quarterly cigar bills came to ten, nay 
 twenty, pounds. Viscount Racquetborough, 
 indeed, owed his tobacconist two hundred and 
 odd, but, then, most of that was discount. 
 Ruthyn rarely smoked; but he casually men- 
 tioned that the use of a short pipe had been 
 habitual to him before he was twelve years of 
 age; and when from time to time some new 
 man who thought him an original persuaded 
 him to come to his rooms, he indulged in a 
 calumet of that very strongest cavendish which 
 young undergraduates buy, like Editions of the 
 Fathers, more for show than use. Such strong 
 meat is not fit for babes. He was by rule a 
 water-drinker; but sometimes after rowing he 
 would drink of the country beer that labourers 
 drank. Somebody mentioned Allsopp's bitter 
 ale to him, and he returned for answer, " What 
 is that?" The Dons could not like him; he 
 was too vulgar, and yet he was not offensive. 
 He was innocent of any sins against collegiate 
 discipline, but he neither invited nor seemed
 
 AN EXCEEDINGLY VULGAR PERSON. :M-> 
 
 thankful for praise. The Dons were of course 
 absolved from toadying him, and he seemed to 
 be utterly ignorant of the fact that anything 
 was to be got from toadying the Dons. He 
 was a great eater, although occasionally it was 
 known that he passed the twenty-four hours 
 without any sustenance more solid than bread 
 and butter; yet those who watched him — and 
 he was strange enough to have many observers 
 — remarked that he could eat voraciously of 
 cold meat, of suet pudding, and of buttered 
 toast. He was not taciturn, for he was always 
 ready to speak when spoken to ; but he seldom 
 volunteered conversation. Those who most ob- 
 jected to his vulgarity could not help admiring 
 his honest discourse, full of manly and sensible 
 reflection. He was one in whose presence young 
 men were somehow ashamed to swear, to talk 
 of loose and shameful things, or, indeed, to talk 
 nonsense, if they could avoid it. The most 
 brilliant conversationalists were on their mettle 
 in the presence of Kuthyn Pendragon. And 
 yet he could enjoy humour, and at a droll story, 
 proper for a decorous man to hear, would open 
 his large mouth and laugh sonorously. The
 
 246 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 only overt act against the usages of society 
 which, he had been known to commit was this. 
 He had gone to a man's rooms to return some 
 books he had borrowed — he was not above 
 borrowing books. A dozen young fellows were 
 present, and as Ruthyn Pendragon turned to 
 depart, he saw a pack of cards which had been 
 inadvertently left exposed on a table. Without 
 any more ado he seized the cards, flung them 
 into the fire, put his back before it, folded his 
 arms, and said, " I am no censor of manners, 
 Proctor, or Puritan, and you may think that 
 this is no business of mine. But it is. Cards 
 are the Devil's books. Wherever I find them, 
 I burn them. Good morning. If anybody 
 thinks he has a right to complain, I will fight 
 him, here or elsewhere." But nobody cared 
 to complain, or to fight Ruthyn Pendragon; 
 so he went, and, indeed, the sound that accom- 
 panied his departure much more resembled a 
 cheer than a murmur of discontent. The story 
 was told about and gained him much esteem, 
 although men were careful not to invite this 
 rigid hater of graven images to their card-parties. 
 It was known that he was not a hypocrite, and
 
 AN EXCEEDINGLY VULGAR PERSON. 247 
 
 would not lie. Lord Racquetborough expressed 
 himself much pleased when he heard of the 
 story. "By Jove," he said, "the Grisly Bear 
 is a trump. I wish I could lend him fifty 
 pounds. He looks so deuced hard up. I wish 
 my father could put a living by for him.' , 
 Viscount Racquetborough's papa was the Earl 
 of Tenniscourt (family name De la Paume), 
 very noble, but impoverished. Viscount Racquet- 
 borough was always wishing good things to 
 everybody, but his lordship's habits were ex- 
 pensive and his means were limited. He ended 
 by owing the tobacconist many hundreds of 
 pounds ; and, going through the court, retired 
 to Baden-Baden until such time as he should 
 be called to the House of Lords to legislate for 
 vulgar people. 
 
 In the second year of Ruthyn's residence the 
 old grandmother at St. Mawes died. The few 
 pounds that were left of her savings barely 
 sufficed to bury her, and to pay the expenses 
 of her grandson to Cornwall and back. He 
 had no kindred now, no money, and no friends. 
 The country gentleman who had advised his 
 being sent to the grammar-school was dead. He
 
 248 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 •was known at the university, and might have 
 earned some money by reading with men ; but 
 he preferred to leave college for a while. He 
 went away, and found a situation as usher in 
 a school near London. The master was an 
 ignorant brute, who had been bankrupt in the 
 linen- drapery line, and who, when his certificate 
 was definitely refused, had hesitated whether he 
 should turn corn-cutter, low comedian, or school- 
 master. He had an aptitude for the two former 
 vocations ; for the latter his capacity was limited 
 to the possession of a very strong arm and a 
 cruel disposition. Broomback, of Clapham Rise 
 (he is Dr. Broomback now, a German degree), 
 was glad to secure the services of a good classical 
 scholar, and a university man to boot, for forty 
 pounds a year. So ixuthyn Pendragon taught 
 the boys, and Broomback beat them, and his 
 wife took tithe and toll on their clothes and 
 linen; and thus the division of scholastic labour 
 was complete. The boys used to laugh at the 
 usher's odd, rough ways, as he read Greek 
 Testament to them, with a great hole under 
 the arm of his black coat; but he was kind 
 and just, and I think that before he went away
 
 AX EXCEEDINGLY VULGAR PERSON". 249 
 
 nine out of ten of those children loved the poor 
 usher. By great good luck there was a boy 
 at Broomback's who was the son of a lady of 
 some fortune. It having occurred to Broomback 
 to beat this lad (who was frail and delicate) into 
 a fever, he was removed from Clapham Rise; 
 and when he got well, he begged so earnestly 
 that his studies might be directed by his dear 
 old usher, — so he called Ruthyn, — that his 
 mamma forthwith engaged the friendless Cornish- 
 man as domestic tutor to her darling. In time 
 Pendragon saved enough money to take a small 
 house of his own, and advertise for pupils ; and 
 one of those pupils was the Bipton Gryphon you 
 have heard of. I don't know what Buthyn 
 Pendragon thought of the preposterous plan 
 of turning a scamp into a clergyman, indulged 
 in by the vain and self-willed housekeeper of 
 the Reverend Mr. Marrowfat ; but he did his 
 duty by the prodigal, even to the extent of 
 having one or two up and down fights with 
 him. In these combats it must be admitted 
 that Rip, although for his youth a somewhat 
 experienced bruiser, invariably got the worst 
 of it. He was the last pupil that Ruthyn
 
 250 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 Pendragon took. He was rich enough to go 
 back to the university and take his degree. 
 He was ordained on the strength of a miserable 
 cure offered him by the proprietor of a large 
 bone-boiling manufactory in the Essex marshes, 
 who had a chapel on his premises for the benefit 
 of his work-people, and thought it rather a grand 
 thing to entertain a chaplain at his own expense. 
 The young curate — he was now five-and-twenty 
 years of age — did not stay long in Essex. The 
 people were willing enough to receive religious 
 instruction; but when they were not at work 
 they straggled away to the adjacent beer-shops 
 and got tipsy, and on Sundays they generally 
 had the ague ; and finally the bone-boiler break- 
 ing, it was discovered that he had been robbing 
 everybody for the last fifteen years (he was the 
 man who did eighty-seven thousand pounds worth 
 of bills in one morning, assuring the firm who 
 discounted them that every bill "had bones at 
 the bottom of it," but it turned out rather 
 that every bill was fundamentally fraudulent) ; 
 and Ruthyn Pendragon lost his chaplaincy. He 
 was for a while unemployed; but, on the recom- 
 mendation of a college -acquaintance, he became
 
 AN EXCEEDINGLY VULGAR PERSON. 251 
 
 known to the Reverend Ernest Goldthorpe, 
 whose views on Church matters, in the latter 
 part of 1849, had not become so strongly pro- 
 nounced, and who was happy to have a person 
 so fitted by education and principles for the 
 responsible position confided to him, and who, 
 by family descent at least, was undeniably a 
 gentleman. 
 
 Such was the curate of Swordsley, who had 
 not been six months in the village before he was 
 idolised by the inhabitants, and who, when 
 Ernest began to lean towards High-Church 
 doctrines, became, by tacit consent, and without 
 the slightest manifestation of open opposition 
 on his part, the leader of the Low-Church party. 
 "Ah, if he was only our rector!" cried the 
 men of Swordsley. The women, too, were 
 unanimous in his praise, — all save the haughty 
 maiden at The Casements, Miss Magdalen 
 Hill. 
 
 This young lady took no pains to disguise 
 her disdain and aversion for the curate. He 
 was from the very first eminently distasteful 
 to her. She shuddered at the contrast between 
 the pale, thoughtful, refined Ernest, with his
 
 252 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 high white brow, his crisply curled chestnut 
 locks, — he was a delicate copy of his brother 
 Hugh, — his tiny hands aud feet, his neat and 
 well-fitting garments, and this brawny, swarthy, 
 hirsute, round-shouldered, bull -necked, large - 
 limbed, Ruthyn Pendragon. The man's head 
 was capacious enough, but his black hair grew 
 thick and tufted down to within a couple of 
 inches of his bushy eye-brows. Had he let 
 Nature have her way, he would have been 
 bearded like a pioneer. His hands were un- 
 couthly shaped, and corrugated with knotty 
 veins. Although he had the arms and the torso 
 of a Hercules, he was short and clumsy in 
 stature, and his legs were slightly bowed. She 
 raged within herself to think that this ragged, 
 vulgar, truncated colossus, who blew his nose 
 with a trumpet-sound, who trampled rather than 
 walked over the flowers of a carpet, who 
 clattered his tea-cup and ate his food ravenously, 
 who dragged books from shelves, and if he took 
 notice of a lap-dog only forced open its mouth 
 to look at his teeth, who never wore gloves, 
 — should be a gentleman of long descnet ; whereas 
 Ernest, with all his refinement and his address,
 
 AN EXCEEDINGLY VULGAR PERSON. 253 
 
 and the title that was in store for him, was 
 but the son of a city money-spinner of mush- 
 room extraction. Why should this vulgar 
 person, she thought, be a gentleman ? What 
 right had he to a proud name, — he who looked 
 like some Cornish miner fresh from wielding; 
 
 o 
 
 the pick ? She did not soften in the least when 
 she heard how good and kind and thoughtful he 
 was to the poor. Had she no goodness, no 
 kindness, and no thought ? Was Ernest des- 
 titute of these good qualities? She bit her 
 lip in anger when she heard that this rough, 
 awkward man, who could not speak French, who 
 had plainly said that people should come to 
 church to pray, and not to look at pictures, and 
 that the best mural decoration for the chancel 
 was a fresh coat of whitewash; who lodged at 
 Pearkleborouglr's the grocer's, and bought his 
 own chop or steak at the butcher's (who could 
 scarcely bring himself to charge the curate any- 
 thing for it) — should be revered and beloved 
 by the parishioners, who looked on Ernest with 
 a dislike that was little short of hatred. She 
 heard that this man, who could scarcely handle 
 a knife and fork, and was not fit to be trusted
 
 254 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 with a teacup, could bandage wounds, could 
 bleed a horse, or put leeches on a child's temples ; 
 could dandle babies, could make out petty trades- 
 men's bills, could appease lovers' quarrels, and 
 prevent contentious neighbours from going to 
 law; and that he did all this without currying 
 favour with the poor (who are as easily and as 
 often toadied as the rich), but always with a 
 homely, sensible, simple-mindedness. Magdalen 
 knew that the curate disapproved of the rector's 
 views. She disliked him for that. She disliked 
 him for his popularity. She disliked him for 
 his very goodness. She did. And yet she was 
 a virtuous, pious, and — so far as her purse went 
 — a charitable young woman. How much more 
 reason had she to dislike Euthyn Pendragon, 
 when, as he had the ineffable presumption to 
 do, he told her that he loved her ?
 
 IX "WHICH THE CURATE GOES TO LONDON. 255 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 IN WHICH THE CURATE GOES TO LONDON. 
 
 " He did," Magdalen exclaimed indignantly, — 
 almost passionately for one of her composed man- 
 ner. " He told me so in this very room." 
 
 " And what if he did, Maggy ? " was the reply 
 of the person to whom Miss Hill addressed her- 
 self. u Did you expect him to tell you so in the 
 church-porch, or in front of the village-inn ? If 
 you have curates here, you must expect them to 
 make love to you. It stands to reason." 
 
 This conversation took place one May morning 
 in the antique drawing-room of The Casements. 
 Magdalen Hill was sitting at her perpetual hard 
 labour of illuminating select martyrologies on 
 vellum; and her sole companion was a lady of 
 about her own age, who, in certainly an easy if 
 not elegant posture, reclined in a large arm-chair 
 just opposite to Miss Hill's working-table, and 
 contemplated, with that complacent interest which 
 only habitual laziness can give, the delicate and
 
 25G THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 minute pursuit in which the other was en- 
 gaged. 
 
 The lady was young — a year in advance of 
 Magdalen perhaps, and although not beautiful, 
 comely to look upon. She had more than what 
 is termed " a tendency to emhonpoint" for she 
 was decidedly plump, tottering on the verge of 
 corpulence, so to speak. Now of fat girls there 
 are several varieties. There is your fat baby- 
 girl, a delightful little dumpling of a child, every 
 one of whose dimples is a mine of delight, and 
 every one of the creases in whose rosy limbs 
 inspires you with an irresistible propensity to 
 tickle it. These are the little baby-children that 
 Rubens painted so gloriously. He made their 
 little puffed-out cheeks celestially roseate ; he 
 curled their flaxen locks like unto the young ten- 
 drils of the vine ; he tipped their little heels and 
 elbows with rich carnations ; he took away their 
 sex, and made them epicene; and when he had 
 added little wings of green and golden plumage to 
 their shoulders, they were no longer baby-chil- 
 dren, but angels, ministering in the apotheoses of 
 kings and emperors, who, I sincerely trust, have 
 reached the destination which the courtly pencil
 
 IN WHICH THE CURATE GOES TO LONDON. 257 
 
 of Peter Paul ascribed to their dead majesties. 
 Then there is your fat school-girl, with long, fair 
 ringlets, profuse as a Louis-Quatorze perruque 
 with fixed blue eyes that remind you unpleasantly 
 of the Pantheon Bazaar and Madame Montanari's 
 wax-work shop, and with a dull, listless fixity of 
 demeanour that makes one always wish to find 
 out whereabouts the string is, in order to pull it, 
 and cause the eyes to move and the great doll to 
 squeak " pa-pa " and " ma-ma." Yet another 
 variety of the fat school- girl is there in the romp, 
 or "toin-boy," who has cheeks as ruddy and as 
 hard as a Ribstone pippin ; who is continually 
 grazing the skin off her arms, and tearing the 
 trimming off the ends of her trousers j who, if 
 she lives in the country, is in the habit of catching 
 young colts, and riding them without saddle or 
 bridle round paddocks; who is always getting 
 into domestic trouble through her transactions 
 with a big black dog fond of the water and of 
 chivying cats ; who is always laughing, has a tre- 
 mendous appetite, and once fought with a Boy 
 and came off victorious. The decline of the old- 
 fashioned system of education, and the rise of 
 seminaries and collegiate institutions, where
 
 258 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 young ladies attend lectures on the Od force and 
 the Therapeutic Cosmogony of Ancient Art, has 
 made the tom-boy fat girl an exceedingly rare 
 specimen of femininity ; but she is still occasion- 
 ally to be met with — notably in Westmoreland 
 boarding-schools, and in farm-houses of the West. 
 I lament the progressive extinction of the merry 
 fat girl. She usually grew up to be a jolly, com- 
 fortable matron, with a tribe of sunny children, 
 all as great romps as she had been. Her pickled 
 walnuts were perfection. She was one of those 
 admirable women who always give you something 
 to eat when you call upon them, and if you are 
 neither hungered nor athirst, insist on your 
 carrying away a pot of preserves or a slice of 
 bride-cake with you. It was in the golden age, 
 and England was merry England indeed, when 
 those fat matrons who had been fat girls flou- 
 rished. They used to entertain you at "mea 
 teas " — bounteous repasts, where there were 
 sausages and pressed beef, soused mackerel, and 
 potato-cakes. 
 
 The fat young lady need not have been a fat 
 child. Some are of the lean kind in early girl- 
 hood, and fall into fatness as others fall into love
 
 IN WHICH THE CURATE GOES TO LONDON. 259 
 
 The Germans are the most prolific in fat young 
 ladies. Their names are Ermengarde, Hilda, 
 Dorothea. Their eyes are blue, but not doll-like, 
 for they are full of sentiment. They call each 
 other " Du" and continuously embroider cigar- 
 cases, tobacco-pouches, nay, carpet-bags even, for 
 officers in the Grand-Duke's army, or students of 
 the university of Katzelstein. They sit and sigh, 
 and carve Ludolf or HeinricVs names on the bark 
 of linden-trees. They write pretty little sonnets 
 to the sky and the birds in fat albums bound in 
 blue watered silk. They make little sketches in 
 coloured crayons, representing Korner going to the 
 wars, the Fahnenwacht keeping his lonely watch 
 and not daring to name the lady of his love. 
 They wish they were not quite so fat ; but they 
 are above drinking vinegar to make themselves 
 thin. Perhaps they eat a little too much. They, 
 too, marry, and have prodigious families ; but they 
 don't become jolly. They go through life with 
 a meek smile of placid resignation, eating plenti- 
 fully, and reading many novels. " Elle a peau- 
 coup zouffert, Matame la Paronne, tans le temps," 
 tawny-moustached Captain Kalbsneich whispers to 
 you at the table-d'hote. You look at " Matame la 
 
 3 2
 
 2 GO THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 Paronne," and see that she has got very well 
 through two courses, and is making a vigorous 
 onslaught on the third, — let us say of stewed 
 trout and macaroons, hot roast-veal and raspberry- 
 jam, or some equally anomalous German dish, — 
 and find it difficult to persuade yourself that the 
 Baroness has ever suffered from anything more 
 serious than indigestion. 
 
 The lady who sat in the great arm-chair oppo- 
 site Magdalen Hill by no means belonged to the 
 sentimental or to the doll-like category of stout 
 young ladies. Far more probable that ten years 
 before she had belonged to the order of tom-boys ; 
 indeed, it may be as well to make a clean breast 
 of it at once, and avow that, at fourteen years of 
 age, there had never been a franker, merrier, 
 or noisier hoyden than the Honourable Letitia 
 Salusbury. She was an only child; that may 
 have had something to do with it. The lady her 
 mother — a meek woman, who was frightened at 
 mice, and firmly believed in the Apparition of 
 Mrs. Veal, as related by Daniel Defoe — had died 
 during her infancy, which may have had more 
 to do with it. At all events, Letitia grew up 
 through childhood petted, caressed, and humoured
 
 IN WHICH THE CURATE GOES TO LONDON. 20 1 
 
 in every caprice, and if she was not spoiled her- 
 self, she spoiled, at least, innumerable frocks, 
 pinafores, pairs of socks, and garden-hats. To 
 enumerate the panes of glass fractured by this 
 young lady, tbe lustres, china monsters, rare tea- 
 cups, irrevocably smashed ; the dolls she dismem- 
 bered ; the injuries she did to marqueterie tables 
 and costly carpets ; and the immense benefit she 
 conferred on the bookselling trade by destroying 
 every book that came within her reach, and so 
 increasing the consumption of juvenile literature, 
 — would be a task as wearisome as to learn the 
 annual speeches on the Army and Navy Estimates 
 by heart, throwing in the Chancellor of the Ex- 
 chequer's financial statement by way of epilogue. 
 She condescended to learn very little, but what 
 she did learn she learned very well. She was the 
 bane, terror, and despair of eight successive gover- 
 nesses, native and foreign ; but she took a fancy 
 to the Swordsley curate who stammered, and 
 actually went through the Latin Accidence with 
 him. Her indulgent papa, after vainly explaining 
 to her that it was necessary for a young lady of 
 her high station to attain some proficiency in the 
 Continental languages, in music, and in drawing,
 
 282 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 despatched her to a Parisian pensionnat. After 
 an enforced sojourn of three years, equally irk- 
 some to parent and child, Letitia returned to 
 Swordsley a very fair French scholar. Of her 
 drawing, it may be sufficient to say that she had a 
 particular aptitude for sketching horses and dogs ; 
 but as to music, I am afraid that her progress 
 had not extended farther than enabled her to 
 whistle sundry lively airs familiar to the youth of 
 Paris, and to join in the chorus of numerous con- 
 vivial melodies, of which the wonder was to know 
 where she had picked them up. It is certain, 
 however, that she had publicly diswigged the 
 dancing-master at the establishment of Madame 
 Givry de la Ronciere in the Champs Elysees; 
 that she had organised numerous hot suppers in 
 the dormitory, the preparation of one of which 
 surreptitious banquets had nearly set the school on 
 fire ; and that she had blown up the bust of the 
 sainted M. de Fenelon, Archbishop of Cambrai, 
 which stood in the garden, with gunpowder. She 
 was the delight of her schoolfellows ; but the dis- 
 wigged dancing-master called her " une belle 
 megere" Madame Givry de la Ronciere bore with 
 her eccentricities, for the quarterly bills sent to
 
 IN WHICH THE CURATE GOES TO LONDON. 263 
 
 her papa, and so punctually settled by his solicitor 
 at St. Becketsbury, were very large, and made 
 her a valuable pupil; but after the departure of 
 the Honourable Miss Salusbury, the much-suffer- 
 ing schoolmistress spoke of her privately, only as 
 " cett epetite diablesse" and in public, warned her 
 flock against the example of " la conduite incon- 
 cevablement devergondee d'une demoiselle que la 
 convenance m'empeche de nommer" 
 
 The Honourable Letitia had, as a child, always 
 had her own way; and she was not likely to aban- 
 don it on coming to woman's estate. Her papa 
 was very old, and adored her. She returned all 
 his love with interest, but that did not hinder her 
 from tyrannising over him in a manner quite as 
 good-natured as it was arbitrary. She had been, 
 at school, and with the exception of her brief pro- 
 bation under the curate who stammered, a very 
 close imitation of a dunce ; but on her return to 
 England she began to read with much avidity. 
 The bent of her literary studies was peculiar. 
 She had a healthy scorn for French romances, and 
 esteemed them all, from beginning to end, as so 
 much vicious. humbug. The historians, essayists, 
 and moralists, whose bulky tomes graced the
 
 264 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 morocco- valanced shelves of her father's library, 
 she classed, generically, as " old fogies/' and she 
 kept fishhooks in a very splendidly bound copy of 
 Elegant Extracts. Nor did our English three- 
 volume novels, mainly relating to the cultivation 
 of the affections among the upper classes of 
 society, please her any more than the little 
 brochures, full of paper poison, which are so 
 plentiful in Paris. " Trash," " rubbish," and 
 " rigmarole " the Honourable Letitia Salusbury 
 called the staple products of the circulating 
 library at St. Becketsbury. But, for the enli- 
 vening works of Captain Marryat and the other 
 nautical novelists, and for the Ingoldsby Legends, 
 Miss Salusbury took an immense liking. She 
 had the dreadful heresy to declare all poetry — 
 except it was " funny v — a bore ; but she luxuri- 
 ated in the perusal of Nimrod's sporting sketches. 
 She yawned over Sir Walter Scott, and intimated 
 her opinion that Diana Vernon was a designing 
 minx, who only put on a riding-habit to hook 
 Frank Osbaldistone ; but I much fear that she 
 had heard of a work written by the late Mr. Pierce 
 Egan, and called Boociana. It is terrible to tell, but 
 the Honourable Letitia Salusburv was an assiduous
 
 IN WHICH THE CURATE GOES TO LONDON. 265 
 
 student of Ruff's Guide to the Turf and the 
 Racing Calendar. You see that I wish to ex- 
 tenuate nothing of her faults ; but, in order that 
 nothing may be set down in malice concerning 
 her, I must, while admitting that she did shoot, 
 fish, hunt, drive, — tandem occasionally, — and bet, 
 deny in the most unqualified manner what has 
 been averred by the malevolent, viz. that the 
 Honourable Letitia Salusbury smoked cigars and 
 drank brandy-and-water. As to her conversation, 
 you will be enabled to judge of its tenor; and as 
 to another accusation which has been brought, 
 against her, of swearing, you may be sure that, if 
 Miss Salusbury did now and then rap out an ugly 
 word, I shall always, for good manners' sake, 
 suppress it. 
 
 I say that she was not beautiful, but was still 
 comely to look upon. She had great flashing 
 brown eyes and a quantity of vagrant brown hair, 
 which was ordinarily thrust into a net, or tumbled 
 off her forehead anyhow. She had a great deal 
 too much colour — at least, of that colour which is 
 not sold by the perfumers, and that won't rub off. 
 Her mouth would have been handsome had it 
 been a little smaller. Her teeth were very white,
 
 266 THE SEVEN SONS OP MAMMON. 
 
 but they were large and square. Her nose 
 wavered between the mild retrousse and the de- 
 cided snub. But her whole face beamed with can- 
 dour, happiness, and good -nature, and these 
 amply redeemed the irregularity of her features. 
 Her figure, for all its plumpness, was graceful and 
 supple, and she was as agile as a squirrel. No- 
 body conld precisely say that Miss Salusbury was 
 masculine, although she delighted and excelled in 
 most of the pursuits and the exercises of men. No ; 
 she was not masculine, and yet she had, it must be 
 confessed, something of the Amazon of the Cirque 
 about her, with a more considerable admixture of 
 a good-looking milkmaid. It is very improper to 
 say so. No doubt it is unpardonable to unveil a 
 heroine who, albeit she was a peer's daughter, 
 frequently spoke of money as "tin," of a carriage 
 as a "trap," of a gentleman as a "fellow." She 
 could not help it, she said, when remonstrated 
 with by Magdalen. It was her way. There was 
 no harm in it, and she hated humbug. So, as it 
 was her way, there was but one course open, and 
 that was to let her have it. 
 
 I have hinted that the papa of this young lady, 
 who knew quite as much about horses, dogs, rats,
 
 IH WHICH THE CUEATE GOES TO LONDON. 267 
 
 and badgers as one of her own grooms, Vas a peer 
 of the realm. You may take down your peerage 
 and look for Chalkstonehengist (Viscount). Jehan 
 de Salusbury did good service at Agincourt. Sir 
 Mulciber Salusbury, of Chalkstonehengist, was 
 summoned as a baron to Henry the Eighth's first 
 parliament. The Salusburys fought on the 
 King's side during the civil wars, and the pos- 
 sessor of the title was made a Yiscount at the 
 Restoration. " Le roij, la foy, la loy" was the 
 Salusbury motto. The Lord Chalkstonehengist, 
 regnant, was a very old gentleman, born while 
 the American War was at its hottest. He was the 
 most consistent, but the mildest and most bene- 
 volent, of Tories of the old school. He spoke of 
 the Reform Bill as "that grievous error in 
 legislation," and of the Reformers as "gentlemen 
 who hold the pernicious doctrines of Mr. Hunt 
 and Mr. Cobbett." A bitter Tory lord held his 
 proxy, for Lord Chalkstonehengist seldom made 
 his appearance in the senate-house. He wore a 
 blue coat and brass buttons, low-crowned white 
 hat and top-boots. He had not forgotten his 
 scholarship, and the composition of Latin verses 
 sometimes served to while away an odd hour. It
 
 268 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 was even said that he had been engaged for years 
 in writing a history of the American War, in 
 which the Stamp Act was incontrovertibly de- 
 fended, and Mr. Washington very hardly dealt by. 
 Until years and infirmities had overtaken him, he 
 had been an enthusiast in the sports of the field ; 
 and it was with an irrepressible pleasure, mingled 
 with an odd sensation that the thing wasn't 
 exactly proper, that he heard of the daring deeds 
 of his daughter, in riding 'cross country, leaping 
 gates and clearing ditches. For Miss Salusbury 
 was in all respects a worthy descendant of the old 
 monastic huntress, Dame Juliana Berners; and, 
 from her own practical experience, could have 
 capped the sporting wisdom of the noble lady who 
 wrote 
 
 1 ' Wheresoever ye fare by fryth or by fell 
 My dere chylde take heede bow Tryst ram do you tell 
 How manie manere bestys of venerie there were, 
 Lysten to youre dame, and she shalle you lere : 
 Four inaner bestys of venerie there are, — 
 The fyrst of them the harte, the second is the hare ; 
 The boore is one of tho : the wulfe and not one more " 
 
 — only, Dame Letitia Salusbury would have taken 
 away the "boore" and the "wulfe/' and added 
 the fox. 
 
 Father and daughter lived pleasantly and com-
 
 IN WHICH THE CURATE GOES TO LONDON* 2G9 
 
 fortably enough in their old house on the older 
 estate of Chalkstonehengist, about a mile and a 
 quarter from The Casements. Lord Chalkstone- 
 hengist was not very rich, but had enough and to 
 spare. His high Tory predilections did not pre- 
 vent him from being kind, hospitable, and bene- 
 volent, to his neighbours, to his tenants, and to 
 the poor. As a landlord he was of the most 
 liberal, and, although he preserved his game 
 in moderation, never refused a farmer a day's 
 shooting. As a magistrate he was of the most mer- 
 ciful. They used to tell a story of one Giles Cony- 
 beare, an incorrigible poacher, who was brought 
 before his lordship sitting in petty sessions. It 
 was about the twenty-fifth time that Giles had so 
 fallen into trouble for wilful contravention of the 
 Game Laws. His lordship put on his sternest 
 expression of countenance, which at the worst 
 was but dove-like. "Here again, Giles Cony- 
 beare," he thundered, or at least tried to thunder. 
 " AVere I your lordship, I should make an exam- 
 ple of him," whispered the clerk. " Yes," answered 
 the noble magistrate, " an example, certainly, an 
 example must be made of Giles Conybeare." 
 u For the sake of the public," whispered the clerk.
 
 270 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 " For the sake of the public/' his lordship re- 
 peated. The wretched Giles began to blubber. 
 He could not deny that he had been taken red- 
 handed, with one pocket full of hares and the 
 other full of springes ; but he pleaded his grand- 
 mother bedridden with the " rheuinatiz/' his own 
 want of employment, his large family. For Giles 
 was a philoprogenitive poacher, and had no less 
 than eleven children. "It makes his offence 
 worse," murmured the clerk sot to voce. " All this 
 only aggravates your offence, prisoner," said his 
 lordship aloud ; and he went on to tell the cap- 
 tive that he ought to be hanged, that he ought to 
 be transported ; that he was a disgrace to the 
 village, to the estate, to the country, and so forth. 
 "Wurzel, the steward, inclined his head towards 
 the bench, and delivered a pitiable character of 
 Giles from behind his hand. The prisoner could 
 only continue to blubber, to wring his handcuffed 
 hands, and to talk about his bedridden grand- 
 mother and his eleven children. " This must be 
 put a stop to," continued his lordship, glancing 
 with benign severity at the culprit. " 1*11 — no, I 
 w 7 on't. How many children did he say he had ? 
 Eleven ! Ah, dear me ! And his grandmother
 
 IN WHICH THE CURATE GOES TO LONDON. 271 
 
 bedridden, too. And no work. Ah ! poor fellow. 
 I — ril give him a pig, Wurzel, give him a pig/* 
 quoth Lord Chalkstonehengist, throwing himself 
 back in his arm-chair. You may understand from 
 this that his lordship was not unlikely to be a 
 somewhat indulgent parent. 
 
 4 
 
 " And what answer did you return to this 
 lovelorn swain ?" said Miss Salusbury, breaking 
 a somewhat irksome silence which had ensued. 
 
 "I told him/' Magdalen replied, " that I 
 should feel it my duty to acquaint my brother 
 — I mean Ernest — with his conduct, if he pre- 
 sumed to repeat it." 
 
 " Well, that wasn't very encouraging ; but 
 it's an answer that may cut both ways. Appeals 
 to one's brother may mean anything. Don't 
 you remember the story of the young lady in 
 Australia — I should like to go to Australia — 
 who wrote just this in a book, and left it, quite 
 by accident of course, in the way of a bashful 
 swain, ' If he doesn't propose to-morrow, I'll 
 get my brother to thrash him ? ' " 
 
 " I must beg you, Miss Salusbury — " inter- 
 rupted Magdalen, looking up from her work —
 
 272 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 "I must beg you, my dear Maggy/' retorted 
 the daughter of the House of Chalkstonehengist, 
 " to remember that there is nothing, after all, 
 so wonderful in the conduct of Mr. Pendragon. 
 He is a gentleman of good family, and although 
 he is only a curate now, why, bless us, he may 
 be made Archbishop of Canterbury some fine 
 morning." 
 
 " He had the miserable vanity to tell me 
 as much. He vaunted his poverty, and said 
 that he would hew steps out of the rock of 
 knowledge, whereby to mount to fame and 
 fortune." 
 
 "I think I've heard that before," Miss Salus- 
 bury remarked with semi-gravity. " It sounds 
 like poetry. I hope it isn't; for I hate poetry, 
 except when it's jolly; and I should be sorry 
 if Pendragon turned out a humbug. Did you 
 ever hear the e Ratcatcher's [Daughter/ Maggy ? 
 I made Willy Goldthorpe sing it to me the 
 last time he came over from St. Becketsbury." 
 
 It is scarcely necessary to say that Lord Chalk- 
 stonehengist's daughter was an immense favourite 
 with young men, both of sporting tendency and 
 the military profession, who voted Lady Talmash
 
 IN WHICH THE CURATE GOES TO LONDON. 273 
 
 a dragon, and Magdalen Hill a snowball. She 
 was declared to be a stunner, a screamer, an 
 out-and-outer, — all kinds of superlatives of ad- 
 miration were applied to her. She was perfectly 
 frank and unrestrained with the young men. 
 They would have liked to elect her an honorary 
 member of the cavalry mess at St. Beckets- 
 bury. At the cover-side her gray riding-habit, 
 and the red feather in her cap, were as well 
 known as Lord Chalkstonehengist's white pony, 
 — he could not follow the hounds now, but liked 
 to see the meet and chat with his neighbours, — 
 or as Farmer Turmut's big brown horse with, 
 the star on his forehead. She tolerated smoking 
 after permission had been asked ; but woe betide 
 the luckless wight who lit his cigar without leave 
 being granted, or who by word or deed took 
 a liberty with the Honourable Letitia Salusbury ! 
 An unhappy cornet, raw to the service, was 
 once rash enough to chaff her, whereupon the 
 daughter of Chalkstonehengist pulled his ears 
 till they were as crimson as his sash, flung his 
 undress cap out of window, and bade him follow 
 it, or she would make him, she added signifi- 
 cantly. You could not take a liberty with her,
 
 274 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 although she did know the " Ratcatcher's 
 Daughter, " and had besides an astounding 
 repertoire of ballads and melodies more popular 
 than refined. The Onzeport hounds met near 
 St. Becketsbury, and Letitia rode regularly to 
 them. There had come down a certain cele- 
 brated sportswoman — who but the famous Miss 
 Soutkbank, indeed ! — who sometimes hunted 
 other animals besides hares and foxes. She 
 thought it would be capital fun to engage the 
 eccentric daughter of Lord Chalkstonehengist 
 in conversation. Up rode the dashing South- 
 bank, splendid in a scarlet riding-habit, spatter- 
 dashed with patent leather, with the big diamond 
 horseshoe given to her by Lord Racquetborough 
 just previous to his insolvency at her throat, 
 and the riding-whip with the emerald handle 
 presented to her by that well-known sporting 
 blade, Charley Pettycash, who kept so many 
 race-horses, theatres, and dancers, who spent 
 so many thousands a year, and who, when he 
 was transported for life for his innumerable 
 forgeries, turned out to have been all along a 
 clerk in a bank with 150// a year salary. Up 
 rode the Southbank, saucy and radiant, on
 
 IX WHICH THE CURATE GOES TO LONDON. 275 
 
 her noted black mare " Shiny Face/' I wonder 
 the horse had not a jewelled surcingle. His 
 mistress was always covered with splendour, 
 and jewels, and shame ; and every one of her 
 gewgaws had some history of sin or of folly 
 connected with it. The Southbank presumed 
 to "pass the time of day" to Miss Salusbury, 
 and to ask her whether she meant to put the 
 pot on for the Metropolitan ? Letitia started 
 back so as nearly to throw her steed on his 
 haunches, and, trembling with passion, made 
 this reply, " You are an abandoned hussy. I 
 know all about you; and if you dare to speak 
 to me again, I'll cut your wicked face in two 
 with my whip." The Southbank was not very 
 remarkable for placidity of temper, but she was 
 somehow cowed as much by Miss SalusbmVs 
 manner as by the matter of her answer. She 
 rode away quite crest-fallen, and at the Onze- 
 port hounds was seen no more. She alluded 
 subsequently to Letitia as an " uppish party," 
 but without bitterness. The Southbank was 
 sensible. Of course the blame of having incited 
 her to address Letitia was laid at the door of 
 Puffin, the wretched cornet, who had had his
 
 276 THE SEVEN SONS OF- MAMMON. 
 
 ears pulled. She vainly denied the charge ; 
 but it did not much matter. Some months 
 afterwards that well-remembered and eccentric 
 captain of dragoons, Lord Snowstorm, having 
 rendered Puffin's life a burden to him by cutting 
 up hair-brushes in his bed, filling his boots 
 with coal-tar, charging his cigars with moistened 
 gunpowder, corking his face, and shaving off 
 one of his whiskers, the cornet's mamma in- 
 dignantly interfered, and caused her darling to 
 sell his commission, and quit the wicked, 
 depraved service, just after Lord Snowstorm 
 had been turned out of it by the Commander- 
 in-Chief. 
 
 Letitia and Magdalen were very good friends ; 
 but the intimacy was one-sided. William the 
 dragoon was a favourite with the Amazon, and 
 she extended her fondness to Miss Hill; drove 
 over two or three times to see her, invited her 
 to Chalkstonehengist much oftener than Miss 
 Hill chose to come, and persisted in calling her 
 Maggy. But the haughty illuminator never 
 went beyond "Miss Salusbury" in addressing 
 her. 
 
 The subject ot the curate was anything but
 
 IN WHICH THE CURATE GOES TO LONDON. 2/7 
 
 an agreeable one ; but Letitia, for some capri- 
 cious reason of her own, continued to press 
 it. 
 
 " Well/' she went on. " He did repeat his 
 1 conduct/ as you call it, didn't he ? M 
 
 "He wrote/' Magdalen replied, with cold 
 severity. 
 
 "And you — " 
 
 "Returned his letter. More than that, I felt 
 it my duty to carry out my threat. I made 
 my brother — I made Ernest acquainted with 
 the affair/' 
 
 "In other words, you tried to get this poor 
 curate the sack/' the unaffected Letitia remarked. 
 " That wasn't very kind-hearted of you, Maggy. 
 And what did the reverend say ? " 
 
 " He agreed with me that I was not to be 
 insulted with impunity." 
 
 " Insulted ! where' s the insult ? " 
 
 " Miss Salusbury ! " Magdalen exclaimed in 
 proud surprise, and with a positive blush on 
 her pale face. 
 
 " Miss Hill ! " the other rejoined, mimicking 
 her. "Dear Maggy," she continued, "you are 
 a good girl, after all, although you are as proud
 
 278 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 as a dog with two tails/' — whence the Honour 
 able Miss Salusbury gathered her prolific 
 collection of similes was always a matter of 
 intense surprise. " What great offence has 
 Pendragon committed ? You are both young. 
 He is a clergyman and a gentleman. You are 
 a lady. Surely you can strike a balance between 
 High Church and Low Church. You can't go 
 on for ever moping here, and grizzling about 
 that poor dear Hugh Goldthorpe." 
 
 " You forget my position," Magdalen said, in 
 a sad low voice. 
 
 "Well, I do perhaps. I forgot that you had 
 a fortune. But what does that matter? Is 
 Pendragon the first man who has wanted to 
 marry a rich woman ? Don't you remember 
 the old lines ? 
 
 " ' Cloth of frize, be not too bold 
 
 If thou art match' d with cloth of gold : 
 Cloth of gold, do not despise 
 If thou art match' d with cloth of frize.' 
 
 Besides/' she added, " I don't think that Bruin 
 is mercenary after all." 
 
 "No, indeed," quoth Magdalen, half to her- 
 self.
 
 IN WHICH THE CURATE GOES TO LONDON. 279 
 
 "Then why not have him. Better to be a 
 curate's wife than a lonely spinster, painting 
 away at those everlasting saints and martyrs 
 with their heads on one side, and worrying your- 
 self about High Church and Low Church and 
 Ernest Goldthorpe, who would be a good fellow 
 enough if he didn't wear swanshot in his shoes, 
 and live on pickled eggs and boiled soda- 
 water. 1 ' 
 
 Again, and at the mention of the rector's 
 name, Magdalen blushed. " I declare/' con- 
 tinued Miss Salusbury, " that if Bruin asked 
 me, I'd marry him myself, and beg papa to 
 get him made something better than a curate; 
 though for the matter of that, I think Pendragon 
 would do best in the Life-Guards. I'm getting 
 tired of the life I lead. It's very jolly, but 
 it's lonely. I don't seem to know where I'm 
 going. I suppose nobody does. Sometimes, 
 when I'm reading Bell's Life, I seem to fancy 
 that I should like to be a man. They have 
 a good many advantages over us, those men. 
 Why can't I play at nurr and spell, and walk 
 a thousand miles in a thousand hours? Why 
 can't I match my novice to fight any man in
 
 280 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 England, bar the ' Mumper ' — who is the 
 Mumper? — at catch -weight for a hundred 
 pounds a side? Why can't I show toy-dogs? 
 or patronise the noble sport of ratting ? or 
 frequent the Bendigo's Head, where Boxiana 
 is kept at the bar, and gloves are always ready 
 for the convenience of gentlemen ? Why can't 
 I go to the^festive board, where harmony prevails, 
 and the eccentric Joey Jones is in the chair? 
 Who is Joey Jones, and why is he eccentric, 
 and called Joey ? and is he a broker's man, 
 that he is always taking the chair? I should 
 like to be a man. No; I should like to be a 
 Bloomer, or Dr. Elizabeth Johnson, or Madame 
 Ida Pfeiffer, and travel the whole world over; 
 or Richard Carr, the female sailor. What a 
 brick Grace Darling was ? I wonder whether 
 Joan of Arc's armour hurt her. I tried on one 
 of the old helmets in our hall the other day, 
 and had a frightful headache for hours after- 
 wards. Perhaps the best thing to do would be 
 to marry somebody.-" 
 
 " I think so too," responded Magdalen, glanc- 
 ing with solemn pity at this misguided young 
 woman.
 
 IN WHICH THE CURATE GOES TO LONDON. 281 
 
 "The difficulty is to find somebody. The 
 daughter and heiress of Lord Chalkstonehengist 
 can't go to the barracks at St. Becketsbury, and 
 say, Messieurs of the dragoons, or gentlemen of 
 the Onzeport hunt, will you marry me \ I can't 
 pickle and I can't preserve. I can't play and I 
 can't sing, but I can leap a five -barred gate, make 
 the best flies in Kent, and shoot a trout in the 
 water. Heigho !" 
 
 " Truly, the daughter of Lord Chalkstonehen- 
 gist could not do this j but might she not find 
 pursuits more in keeping with her rank in life, 
 and to that which society expects from her ?" 
 
 " Society is all humbug," cried the Honourable 
 Miss Salusbury, in something like a passion ; 
 u and Fve tried all the pursuits in keeping with 
 my rank in life, and they're all botheration." 
 
 " There remains marriage as a resource open to 
 you ; and surely, if the gentleman in whom you 
 take so great an interest — " 
 
 "Pickles!" exclaimed the Honourable Miss 
 Salusbury. Her expletives were positively un- 
 precedented in lack of refinement. "My honest 
 persuasion is, that if I let Pendragon know that I 
 liked him, he would calmly tell me that he didn't
 
 282 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 want to have anything to say to me. I know the 
 man. Besides, I was but jesting about him. He 
 is and can be nothing to me. You know that he 
 is over head and ears in love with you, Maggy ; 
 and cold and angry with him as you seem, I 
 can't help fancying — v 
 
 "It is too late," said Magdalen, poising her 
 brush, and resolutely driving a spike into the 
 bosom of a martyr on the vellum before her. 
 " Ernest knows all. He was justly shocked and 
 indignant. He summoned Mr. Pendragon before 
 him. High words passed between them only 
 yesterday; and I believe that Mr. Pendragon 
 will shortly leave this part of the country." 
 
 " Then, Fm very sorry for it ; and the fat's all 
 in the fire," Miss Salusbury remarked, and rising 
 in dudgeon. " I shall go home to lunch ; will you 
 come? I've got the trap and the two piebalds 
 on the lawn. St. Gengulphus the Great can wait 
 a couple of hours for his eyebrows," she con- 
 cluded, glancing in great disdain at the spiked 
 martyr. 
 
 Magdalen sadly shook her head, and declined 
 the offer. 
 
 "Then Pm off. Good-bye, Maggy. Why
 
 IN WHICH THE CURATE GOES TO LONDON. £83 
 
 don't you turn nun, or Sister of Charity, or 
 something of that sort? You might be a martyr 
 then yourself, without the trouble of painting 
 whole armies of them on parchment. Bye, bye." 
 
 "A nun or a Sister of Charity," repeated 
 Magdalen, when, having coldly returned the 
 good-natured shake of the hand which her easily- 
 pacified friend had proffered her, the door had 
 closed upon the Honourable Miss Salusbury. 
 " A nun or a Sister of Charity ! why not, in- 
 deed I" And she went on very carefully and 
 deliberately marking in the eyebrows of St. 
 Gengulphus the Great. 
 
 "Poor Pendragon \" 
 
 Who said " poor Pendragon" ? Letitia Salus- 
 bury or Magdalen Hill? You see the words are 
 between inverted commas, so the exclamation 
 can't be mine. 
 
 The Amazon's " trap," a pretty little phaeton, 
 with two prettier piebald ponies, and a diminutive 
 groom in gray-and-black livery, and perhaps the 
 tiniest buckskins and top-boots ever seen since 
 the visit of General Tom Thumb to this country, 
 awaited their mistress on the lawn before The 
 Casements. Letitia was very anxious before she
 
 284 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 took the reins, and settled herself on the high 
 cushion of the vehicle, to know if Twitters had 
 had his beer. Twitters was the Lilliputian 
 groom ; and he, smacking his lips, made answer 
 that he had had a pint of the right sort, but that 
 it might have been a trifle older. Miss Salus- 
 bury delighted in this Twitters. He was so 
 charmingly wicked, she said. He was, indeed, a 
 most precocious imp. He betted; his talk was 
 essentially " horsy ;" he was the proprietor of a 
 terrier which could be backed to kill a maximum 
 of rats in a minimum of minutes, and which had 
 been favourably noticed in the sporting journals ; 
 and when his mistress was at a loss for a line in 
 the cc Ratcatcher's Daughter," she would turn 
 round to Twitters and seek his infallible aid. 
 
 Chalkstonehengist was towards St. Beckets- 
 bury, and thither the Amazon drove at a smart 
 trot. Just where another road turns off in the 
 direction of Tiburnhurst is a blackened and 
 jagged stump of timber ; and here, according to 
 the legend, once stood the gibbet where, a hun- 
 dred and fifty years ago, had swung in a grisly 
 apparatus of chains the corpse of an atrocious 
 murderer. By this spot of ill omen there stood
 
 IN WHICH THE CURATE GOES TO LONDON. 2S5 
 
 a short, broad-sliouldered man with his arms 
 folded. He raised his hat, and, with a grim bow, 
 would have turned down the Tiburnhurst road, 
 but for the adjuration of " Hillo there !" by which 
 Miss Salusbury commanded him to stop. 
 
 " Why, it's Pendragon," she cried. " Come 
 over to the house and have some lunch. Don't 
 stand staring there, man, like a stuck pig. 
 Get in." 
 
 No other young lady in the neighbourhood 
 would have dared to ask a clergyman to enter the 
 phaeton which she was driving; and had any 
 dared to do so, the pendulum of scandal would 
 have so incessantly wagged between Swordsley 
 and St. Becketsbury, that one might have thought 
 the perpetual motion had been discovered. But 
 Miss Salusbury frankly owned that she did not 
 care one brass farthing for public opinion, and 
 that she would do what she liked when she liked. 
 There was perhaps some consideration due to 
 what might be said concerning the curate's accept- 
 ance of the proposition; but ladies who do as 
 they like are not much in the habit of considering 
 the interests of other people. At any other time, 
 Ruthyn Pendragon would have felt bound to
 
 286 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 decline the invitation. As it was, perhaps for 
 sundry good reasons of his own, he chose to 
 accept it now, and took his seat beside Miss 
 Salusbury. As he said never a word, that young 
 lady chose to inform him that he was as 
 " grumpy" as ever. Then she adjured the pie- 
 balds to " come up." Then she entered into a 
 short conversation with Twitters relative to a 
 new collar for Betty the near piebald, and the 
 propriety of putting a kicking -strap on Harlequin 
 the off one ; — he was vicious when separated from 
 his companion — when she drove him in the tax- 
 cart. For the Honourable Letitia delighted in 
 driving a neat vehicle under duty, on the con- 
 spicuous sides of which were painted the style 
 and titles of Lancelot Brian De Crux Salusbury, 
 Viscount Chalkstonehengist, of Chalkstonehen- 
 gist, Kent. 
 
 They reached the house, and had lunch ; the 
 Amazon proving by ocular demonstration that 
 she had a keen appetite for game-pie, and fully 
 understood the flavour of old Madeira. Then 
 she took the curate to her own little boudoir, 
 with the carved oak fittings and the walls 
 hung with antlers, brushes, guns, fishing-rods,
 
 IN WHICH THE CURATE GOES TO LONDON. 287 
 
 eel-spears, whips, spurs, and similar sporting 
 gear. 
 
 "We don't allow pipes here/'' she said quite 
 gravely, and without the slightest touch of irony. 
 u Papa even objected to Mr. Neilgherry's hubble- 
 bubble. You know; — the yellow man who was 
 so long in India, and talks about pig-sticking and 
 tiger-hunting so well, though every other word 
 he says is a crammer, I do believe. You can 
 have a cigar, if you like ; but, for my part, I think 
 they make the curtains smell much worse than 
 pipes do. Mrs. Major Kanaster at St. Becketsbury 
 says so too." 
 
 Pendragon, who had not spoken ten words since 
 he entered the house, respectfully declined the 
 cigar. He had definitively given up smoking, he 
 said. 
 
 " Is there anything else you have given up," 
 asked Letitia, in a dry voice. 
 
 "I am going away," he said, for all explanation. 
 
 " Then you've had a quarrel " — she was nearly 
 saying a "row" — "with the reverend." 
 
 " It is so," he answered, bowing his head sadly. 
 
 " Where are you going ? " 
 
 "To London."
 
 288 THE SEVEN SONS OP MAMMON. 
 
 " What to do ? " It is melancholy to have to 
 record it, but Letitia was within an ace of asking 
 "what's your game ? " 
 
 "To work." 
 
 " That's right/' said the heiress. " I only wish 
 I could work at something. And so you are 
 going. Poor old Pendragon. Poor old fellow. 
 I know all about it. Give us your hand." 
 
 She held out her honest palm and left it in the 
 curate's grasp, while he pressed it long and cor- 
 dially. He looked in her face, and saw nothing 
 in that wild, wilful face but truth and generosity. 
 He would have liked to have kissed her. 
 
 " You are a good woman," he murmured, going 
 towards the door. " God bless you." 
 
 " Stop," cried Letitia hastily ; " London's a 
 long way off, Pendragon, and the pigs have left 
 off running ready roasted through the streets. 
 Do you want any money? " 
 
 " I have enough and to spare," the curate 
 made answer, after expressing his gratitude for 
 the offer. 
 
 " Well, if you ever do want any money," she 
 resumed, " write to me, under cover to papa. You 
 will go ? Well, good bye, Pendragon."
 
 IN WHICH THE CURATE GOES TO LONDON. 289 
 
 She gave him her hand again, and again he 
 pressed it and departed. She watched him long 
 from her window striding towards the spot where 
 she had met him. When his form had disap- 
 peared, she took np a book, — it was Strutt's 
 Sports and Pastimes, — and tried to read, but the 
 letters danced before her eves, and she flunsr the 
 volume down. Then she took up a parchment 
 portfolio and ran through her collection of salmon 
 flies, gorgeous in pheasants' feathers and yellow 
 floss silk and golden wire. And then she threw 
 herself into a chair, and burst into a passionate 
 fit of weeping. 
 
 ec A good cry always does me good when Fve 
 got the blues," she said, drying her eyes. " Poor 
 Pendragon ! I wish I was a man, or a dress- 
 maker, or a charwoman, or a fairy, or anything 
 else that would enable me to help him ; but it's no 
 good ; and now I think Pll go and see how Brindle 
 gets on." Brindle was the newest-imported Alder- 
 ney calf in the byre, and the Honourable Miss 
 Salusbury forthwith proceeded to inspect him. 
 
 As for the curate, he walked past the old gibbet 
 stump and past The Casements, towards whose 
 glancing windows he never looked, and to his
 
 290 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 lodgings in Swordsley village. His rent was paid. 
 His chattels had already been sent to St. Beckets- 
 bury Station, and thence to one farther up the line 
 towards London. He purposed to reach the station 
 by a circuitous route of about eight miles. There 
 was no leave-taking to be got through. He had 
 strictly enjoined his landlady to keep his depar- 
 ture a secret for at least twenty minutes after he 
 was clear of the town ; and the good woman, who 
 loved him, promised to obey. Words of hot dis- 
 pleasure, of furious wrath, had passed between 
 him and Ernest. Each had said things which he 
 would gladly have recalled. It was too late now. 
 The notice he might have demanded had been 
 foregone by mutual consent. The curate was 
 paid the balance of his wages, and was free to go 
 wheresoever he listed. 
 
 The station he was bound for was Tib urn - 
 hurst ; but by a long walk round he could reach 
 it without retracing his steps and passing The 
 Casements again. He had to leave the Church 
 of St. Mary-la-Douce, which lay at the back of 
 the village, to his left. He halted as he wound 
 round the grassy knoll on whose summit the 
 timeworn fabric stood.
 
 IN WHICH THE CURATE GOES TO LONDON. 291 
 
 ft In that gray and crumbling fane," the curate 
 murmured low, as with arms folded he gazed long 
 and earnestly at the church, " I have prayed and 
 I have preached, when my lord the rector would 
 grant me his high permission. There I have mar- 
 ried, and buried, and christened. There is no 
 grave in that yard that holds a corpse more dead 
 than I am to that which I once was. And my 
 lord rector and my lady Magdalen have trampled 
 on the wretched curate, have they ? Old Church," 
 he finished, raising his right hand almost me- 
 nacingly, " the struggle is henceforth between you 
 and me. 11 
 
 And so K/Uthyn Pendragon turned his face away 
 from the Church of England, and went on his 
 journey, whitherwards he deemed best. And I 
 have heard a wise man say that what is said to 
 be done for Conscience-sake is often done for 
 spite. 
 
 u 2
 
 292 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 NO SCIENCE TO MR. SIMS IS A MYSTERY. 
 
 It was on a Tuesday in the month of May, 
 1851 ; and Mr. Sims, having business to transact 
 in Cogens Inn, Strand, betook himself thither at 
 about ten o'clock on a sunshiny morning. He 
 eyed those who passed him, as was his wont, 
 narrowly ; yet he seemed with his bent- down eyes 
 to be occupied in counting the number of iron 
 plates in the pavement that covered the coal-holes. 
 It should be mentioned that Mr. Sims was accus- 
 tomed to wear a broad-brimmed hat, which was 
 convenient for many reasons, and that his eyes 
 possessed the faculty of looking round corners. 
 
 Sixteen months, or thereabouts, had elapsed 
 since we last had the pleasure of meeting Mr. 
 Sims ; and he was then going to the play. He 
 was bent on the same errand now, although the 
 theatres do not usually open their doors at ten 
 o'clock in the morning. But the whole of human 
 life was a play to Mr. Sims, and he was always, to
 
 NO SCIENCE TO MR. SIMS IS A MYSTERY. 293 
 
 use a gallicism, "assisting'' at the representations 
 of the Theatre Royal Humanity. He did not 
 care to be a conspicuous actor on the noisy stage 
 thereof. He was content to be Signor N. N., 
 non nominato, as the Opera play-bills call the 
 illustrious incogniti who, in a bar and a half of 
 recitative, announce that the coach is at the door, 
 or that the fatal hour has arrived. Or rather he 
 liked to be prompter, or to have the care of the 
 trap-door department, or to stand patiently at the 
 wing with a pan of blue fire, waiting to light up 
 the last scene 'with a lurid glare. 
 
 Time had not thinned the flowing locks of Mr. 
 Sims. He had none that flowed for the Great 
 Gleaner to operate upon. Nature had provided 
 him with a close-set and spiky black caul of hair, 
 much resembling a horsehair cushion. Time had 
 inserted, since January '50, a few thousand spikes 
 of rusty gray among the sable stubble, and on the 
 crown of his head had mown a little circular 
 tonsure quite bald. His nose was a little more 
 peaked, and a trifle more purple in hue, and that 
 was all. 
 
 Mr. Sims came from the west, and set his watch 
 by the Horse Guards. The watch very much
 
 294 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 resembled the model of a potato in silver, and the 
 disc which prudent housewives sometimes slice off 
 that esculent, to allow the steam to escape while 
 boiling, was represented by the dial. It had 
 belonged to a railway engine-driver, and to it was 
 attached a history. At the corner of St. Martin's 
 Lane it is on record that Mr. Sims purchased a 
 pennyworth of apples. There is nothing so very 
 strange in this fact ; but it may be just hinted 
 that Mr. Sims entered into a somewhat lengthy 
 conversation with the fruit-seller, who was an 
 Irishwoman of the purest growth, and earned a 
 considerable addition to her weekly income by 
 colouring cutty pipes for gentlemen whose heads 
 were too weak to allow them to swallow about an 
 ounce of nicotine every day. A clean pipe, half 
 a pound of the strongest tobacco, half-a-crown, 
 and a week's fair smoking, given to Biddy 
 McGrath, and she would colour a cutty for you as 
 black as my hat. 
 
 " Five times within a fortnight, eh ?" said Mr. 
 Sims, as he turned down King William Street. 
 l( For watching closely, and never losing a minute, 
 there's nothing like an apple-woman. She never 
 moves, and nobody suspects her. For following,
 
 NO SCIENCE TO MK. SIMS IS A MYSTERY. 295 
 
 give me an orange-girl." So you see that Mr. 
 Sims did business even as lie walked. 
 
 In Mid-Strand Mr. Sims held brief parley with 
 a Hansom cabman, which ended in that charioteer 
 giving him a ticket, receiving a shilling, laying his 
 forefinger by the side of his nose, and driving on. 
 Had Mr. Sims designed to take a drive anywhere, 
 and had he suddenly changed his mind ? At all 
 events, he reached Cogens Inn on foot, and 
 entering the open doorway of No. 20, mounted 
 briskly to the third floor. 
 
 Coger's Inn is not in the Strand, but off it, and 
 is about the dingiest, rottenest old inn of chancery 
 in the metropolis. It should have been pulled 
 down a century since ; but as, let out in tenements, 
 it realises a considerable and tolerably safe annual 
 rental, its proprietors — whoever they may be — 
 have excellent reasons for allowing it to stand. 
 The windows are never cleaned ; the staircases are 
 never swept ; the mangy old courtyard is never 
 weeded or rolled. It is a sandy desert in fine 
 weather, and a miry puddle in wet weather. It 
 was a place of legal habitations once, but very 
 few men of the law care to abide in it now. Its 
 tenants are all cloudy and mysterious. They come
 
 296 • THE SEVEN SONS OP MAMMON. 
 
 nobody knows whence, and go nobody knows 
 where. They have slips of foolscap pasted on 
 their doors, saying that they will be " back in five 
 minutes ;" return in ten years, paste a fresh slip 
 over the old one, saying that they will be "back 
 in a quarter of an hour/' and never return at all. 
 Letters fall through the slits of the door, and 
 moulder away there; cats die of starvation, and 
 the crannies of lonely chambers are fusty with the 
 skeletons of mice. It would be a bold flea that 
 took up his quarters within those pinched precincts, 
 thinking to live on the fat of the land, or of the 
 lodgers, and hoping to drink his pint of blood a 
 day like a gentleman. Coger's Inn was the very 
 place to suit Mr. Sims, and for that reason he had 
 chambers there. 
 
 Tie third-floor back, No. 20, had a huge outer 
 door, which was a mass of knobs and staples, and 
 iron bands and plates, and great cross-beams of 
 oak. . You might have murdered a man behind 
 that door, and nobody on the staircase would have 
 been the wiser for it; nor, if by holding the 
 ear to the letter- slit, the screams of the dying 
 man had been heard, could any one without a 
 dozen sledge-hammers, or an engineer's petard,
 
 no science to me. sims is a mystery. 297 
 
 have burst the massive portal open. When Mr. 
 Sims had reached this door, and produced his 
 latch-key, he tapped one of the iron plates ap- 
 provingly with that instrument, remarking, in a 
 satisfied under-tone, that it (meaning the door) 
 was uncommonly strong, and quiet, and safe. The 
 key looked large enough to have fitted the great 
 door of Newgate, and to it, by a piece of red 
 tape, was attached a tiny little Chubb that might 
 have opened a lady's portfolio or a pocket-ledger. 
 Mr. Sims applied the big key, which made a 
 noise of mingled ferocity and anger as it was 
 turned twice or thrice round in the lock, and so 
 passed into his chambers. It has been omitted 
 to state, that in the midst of the mass of iron and 
 oak forming the door, was painted in faded white 
 letters the name of "Filoe and Co." Whether 
 Mr. Sims was Filoe and Co., or Filoe and Co. 
 had once lived there, but had left the place a 
 quarter of a century since, or the day before 
 yesterday, is uncertain and immaterial. 
 
 There was an inner door, panelled, smooth, and 
 knockerless, and with the minutest of keyholes, 
 to which Mr. Sims applied his Chubb, and was 
 fairly within his premises. He who was behind
 
 298 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 the smooth-panelled door might have seen that 
 it was backed by one solid sheet of iron. " An 
 Englishman's house is his castle/' soliloquised 
 Mr. Sims ; " and, egad, I think Coger's Castle 
 would stand a pretty strong siege." 
 
 Mr. Sims's chambers comprised three rooms, 
 each with a single window, through whose infi- 
 nitely dirty panes could be faintly descried an 
 agreeable perspective of roofs and chimney-pots. 
 For this was the third-floor back, and the back- 
 ground of Cogens Inn was Cadger's Market. 
 The rooms were en suite ; and as Mr. Sims stood 
 at the first one he heard a great noise of scuffling 
 and stamping, the clatter of some metallic 
 substance, and the sound of a human voice, 
 crying, 
 
 " Saha ! Saha ! there ! Come on, three, six, 
 twelve of you ! Come on, ye wolves ! Buffalmacco 
 the Ruthless never yields ! " 
 
 Mr. Sims did not seem in the least disconcerted 
 by this strange discourse, but entered the room, 
 which was low and dusty, very bare of furniture, 
 but, with what little there was, of a counting- 
 house character; and in the centre of whose car- 
 petless floor stood a tall youth about seventeen,
 
 NO SCIENCE TO MR. SIMS IS A MYSTERY. 299 
 
 marked with the small-pox, and endowed with a 
 shock head of hair of the hue that may be called 
 a fine sunset, inasmuch that it was flaming red. 
 He was stamping very violently on the deal boards, 
 and brandishing an old broadsword, and occa- 
 sionally dealing a sounding thwack to an office- 
 desk, adjuring some imaginary enemy, by the 
 name of Spadacapo, to " come on." 
 
 "At it again, Buff," Mr. Sims tranquilly re- 
 marked. " Where are the letters, and has any- 
 body called ? " 
 
 "Buffalmacco the Ruthless," or Buff, as by 
 default of any better name I must call him, was 
 almost breathless with excitement and the broad- 
 sword exercise. He did not appear at all ashamed 
 in being detected in his strange occupation, but, 
 leaning on the hilt of his weapon, informed his 
 master that there was a heap of letters in the 
 next room, and that nobody had called except 
 the Gas, who had looked at the meter, and found 
 they had only burned eighteenpennyworth during 
 the last quarter. 
 
 "And quite enough, too, Buff," Mr. Sims 
 cheerfully remarked. " When gas is given away, 
 we will burn more of it. As Fm going to be
 
 300 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 very busy for the next hour, you will oblige me 
 by suspending your infernal row during that 
 period ; after which, I will see anybody who 
 calls/ 5 
 
 Mr. Sims passed through the second room, 
 which was entirely empty, unless a huge splash 
 of ink in the middle of the floor could be called 
 furniture. He entered the third room, his own 
 private sanctum, and carefully locked the door, 
 leaving, according to his already-mentioned prin- 
 ciple, the key therein. Buffalmacco the Ruthless, 
 being temporarily prohibited from indulging in 
 the broadsword exercise, betook himself to his 
 library, which, in a very greasy, tattered, and 
 coverless condition, stood on a shelf by the win- 
 dow, and consisted of copies of the exciting dramas 
 of The Castle Spectre, Jonathan Bradford, and 
 The Iron Chest, an odd volume of the Neivgate 
 Calendar, the Sam-Hall Songster, and sundry 
 numbers of a thrilling romance entitled Murder 
 Castle, or the Heads of the Headless. Buff had 
 commenced taking in The Hatchet of Horror : or, 
 Love and Madness ; but he found Murder Castle 
 more attractive, and so dropped The Hatchet. 
 "An invaluable boy, that," Mr. Sims said,
 
 NO SCIENCE TO MR. SIMS IS A MYSTERY. 301 
 
 taking off his plain black frock, and donning a 
 dressing-gown of gray striped flannel. " He lives 
 in the realms of fancy and the Victoria Theatre. 
 His wages enable him to go four times a week to 
 the upper gallery, and he is happy. He could 
 rob me if he liked very conveniently, but he is 
 scrupulously honest. So long as he has enough 
 for the gallery, thousands might pass through 
 his hands without a penny sticking to his fingers. 
 I know it, for time out of mind I have laid traps 
 for him. Here's one, for instance." And from 
 a pyramid of at least two hundred and fifty penny - 
 post letters Sims turned up one, the seal of which 
 he carefully broke, and, from several thicknesses 
 of paper in the envelope, took out twenty-four 
 postage-stamps. Mr. Sims had himself posted 
 this letter to himself on the preceding afternoon ; 
 but he had been careful to have the address 
 written in a strange hand. He usually tried this 
 little manoeuvre about four or five times every 
 week, always selecting a different handwriting, 
 and had never found one of his letters miscarry. 
 
 n Here's another little test," muttered Mr. 
 Sims as he opened another letter, and, peering 
 anxiously into its enclosure, took forth, with the
 
 30.2 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 greatest caution, a human hair, which he held up 
 for an instant to the light, and then blew away. 
 
 Ci Letters may be unsealed and resealed," 
 thought Mr. Sims ; " but if I tell my correspon- 
 dent, by word of mouth, to pluck out one of his 
 hairs and pop it into the envelope before he sends 
 it, I don't think it very probable that a letter 
 would be opened without the hair being dis- 
 placed/' 
 
 Mr. Sims said, luckily, none of this aloud, else 
 Buffalmacco the Euthless might by chance have 
 heard the things he should not. Mr. Sims 
 addressed himself to his own inner self, and 
 hugged his secrets in his own secretive bosom. 
 He continued opening letters until long past the 
 hour of which he had spoken had expired, when 
 a discreet tap was heard at the door, accompanied 
 by a more discreet cough. 
 
 " What is it, Buff?" he asked, opening the door 
 to the red-headed youth. 
 
 "She's here," the fencing clerk, if clerk he 
 was, responded, and pointing with his thumb 
 over his left shoulder. 
 
 " Phew !" and Mr. Sims gave utterance to a 
 prolonged whistle. " Dear me, Mrs. Clapperton,"
 
 NO SCIENCE TO Mil. SIMS IS A MYSTERY. 303 
 
 lie continued, pushing past Buff, and eagerly 
 ushering a handsomely-attired lady into his 
 sanctum, " to what may I ascribe the honour of 
 this unexpected visit ?" 
 
 He knew very well, did Mr. Sims, that the 
 handsomely-attired, lady's name was not Mrs. 
 Clapperton. Perhaps Buffalmacco the Ruthless 
 knew it quite as well ; but it was the invariable 
 practice with Mr. Sims never to address a client 
 who called upon him by his or her proper name. 
 It kept things so snug, he was wont to say. The 
 handsomely-attired lady was a client of Mr. 
 Sims, and her name was Mrs. Armytage. She 
 was out of mourning, and looked prettier than ever. 
 
 i{ Fait-il gros temps dans la chiourme?'' asked 
 Mr. Sims, — what necessity was there for him to 
 speak French ? — when he had handed the lady to 
 a chair, had locked, the door and left the key 
 inside. " Is it business ? or is it on purely senti- 
 mental grounds that we are come to see our Sims, 
 all in the morning early? Has the obdurate 
 heart at Hoogendracht relented ?" 
 
 " It is not that," replied Mrs. Armytage ; "the 
 heart you speak of is as hard, and I am as 
 wretched as ever.*''
 
 304 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 She looked more scared and terrified than she 
 had done at the room in the hotel that night. 
 
 " Then there is a red lamp out ; where is the 
 danger ?" 
 
 "I want five hundred pounds." 
 
 " Five hundred jars of pickled gherkins ! 
 Why, to my certain knowledge, ma'am, you 
 had five thousand pounds at your banker's only 
 yesterday." 
 
 "I know that, but I want five hundred pounds 
 directly : this instant." 
 
 " Draw a cheque, then. Here are pens, ink, 
 and paper." 
 
 "It's of no use, he won't take it." 
 
 "Who won't take it?" 
 
 " Sims, I want five hundred pounds. Let me 
 have them at once, for mercy's sake, or all is 
 over." 
 
 "Is it a real smash?" Mr. Sims asked search- 
 in gly. 
 
 "It is ruin and despair. You know that I 
 never lie to you." 
 
 " I don't think you do ; but you keep back the 
 truth till the last moment, which is quite as bad; 
 and then the train shunts away on the branch
 
 NO SCIENCE TO MR. SIMS IS A MYSTERY. 305 
 
 line that leads to smash, and after that we come 
 to our Sims and eat humble pie." 
 
 " Will you give me the money ?" 
 
 " I haven't got it. I've only a bunch of keys, 
 sevenpence halfpenny, and half an Abernethy 
 biscuit, — my breakfast, ma'am, — in my pocket, 
 and eight pounds fourteen in postage- stamps. 
 There has been a joyful delivery this morning." 
 
 " Draw me a cheque, then." 
 
 " You know I never draw cheques myself. I 
 have a blank one, however, with somebody else's 
 name to it ; but where's the use of it ? He won't 
 take a cheque." 
 
 "Yes he will, with a line from you." 
 
 "Who will?" 
 
 " His man is down stairs. 
 
 "Whose?" 
 
 "Tigg's." 
 
 "Ephraim Tigg of Stockwell !" Mr. Sims re- 
 peated, with another prolonged whistle ; " I 
 thought so. And so you've found out again that 
 he's a Rasper, have you?" 
 
 "Will you let me have the money?" 
 
 " I must, ma'am," responded Mr. Sims, shrug- 
 ging his shoulders. "I can't afford to let the 
 vol. i. x
 
 306 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. 
 
 concern go to smash, although, if this kind of 
 business continues, I shall be obliged to take my 
 capital out of the firm. Why on earth can't you 
 come and see me before you pay that walking 
 museum of the College of Surgeons a visit, instead 
 of afterwards ? Did your Sims ever refuse you 
 the genial loan?" 
 
 " I can't help it/' said Mrs. Armytage, with a 
 murmur that was half a groan. 
 
 "I don't think you can/' observed Mr. Sims, 
 scanning her from beueath his eyebrows, as from 
 a huge leathern pocket-book he produced a blank 
 cheque, and filled it up. " There, Ephraim will 
 take Filoe and Co.'s signature, particularly if I 
 put this upon it." 
 
 He made a minute tick in the corner of the 
 cheque, partly with a pen, partly with his nail, 
 and handed the document to her. 
 
 " You have a flying pen, ma'am," he observed 
 calmly, " and the bump of imitation ought to be 
 strongly developed somewhere among those pretty 
 curls; but I think that mark will puzzle even 
 you, my lady. I suppose you don't want me any 
 more, till the next time ; but take care. It's a 
 long lane that has no turning; and, as sure as
 
 NO SCIENCE TO MR. SIMS IS A MYSTERY. 307 
 
 my name's Des Sims, I mean, — the very next 
 
 thoroughfare on the wrong-hand side is C. C. C. 
 Street/' 
 
 She had scarcely heard his concluding remark. 
 She crumpled the cheque in her hand, and walked 
 to the door, and was gone. 
 
 " Impulse again," Mr. Sims muttered ; " I 
 thought so. Five times within a fortnight. La 
 chiourme chauffe. If that woman doesn't put a 
 stopper on her impulse, it will most inevitably 
 end in the cultivation of the science of botany in 
 the pleasant bay of that name. Buff," he con- 
 tinued, " I'm at home to everybody. I think I 
 shall have a harvest this morning." 
 
 And Mr. Sims went on opening letters, and 
 taking out postage-stamps. 
 
 END OF VOL. I. 
 
 BRADBURY AND EVANS, PRINTERS. WHITEFRIARS.
 
 
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