Lady Good-for-Nothing: A Man's Portrait of a Woman

  Chapter VI.

  PARENTHETICAL--OF THE FAMILY OF VYELL.

  Captain Oliver Vyell, as we have seen, set store upon pedigree: andhere, as well in compliment to him as to make our story clearer, we willinterrupt it with a brief account of his family and descent.

  The tomb of Sir Thomas Vyell, second Baronet, at whose house ofCarwithiel in Cornwall our Collector spent some years of his boyhood,may yet be seen in the church of that parish, in the family transept.It bears the coat of the Vyells (gules, a fesse raguly argent) with noless than twenty-four quarterings: for an Odo of the name had fought onthe winning side at Hastings, and his descendants, settling in the West,had held estates there and been people of importance ever since.

  The Wars of the Roses, to be sure, had left them under a cloud, shorn ofthe most of their wealth and a great part of their lands. Yet they keptthemselves afloat (if this riot of metaphor may be pardoned) and theirheads moderately high, until Sir William, the first Baronet, bydeveloping certain tin mines on his estate and working them by newprocesses, set up the family fortunes once more.

  His son, Sir Thomas, steadily bettered them. A contemporary narrativedescribes him as "chief of a very good Cornish family, with a very goodestate. His marrying a grand-daughter of the Lord Protector (Oliver)first recommended him to King William, who at the Revolution made himCommissioner of the Excise and some years after Governor of the PostOffice. . . . The Queen, by reason of his great capacity and honesty,hath continued him in the office of Postmaster. He is a gentleman of asweet, easy, affable disposition--a handsome man, of middle stature,towards forty years old." This was written in 1713. Sir Thomas died in1726, of the smallpox, having issue (by his one wife, who survived himbut a few years) seven sons and three daughters.

  1. Thomas, the third Baronet: of whom anon.

  2. William, who became a Senior Student of Christ Church, Oxford, a page to Queen Mary, and a Fellow of the Royal Society. A memoir of the time preserves him for us as "a tall sanguineman, with a merry eye and talkative in his cups." He married a Walpole, but his children died young.

  3. John, who, going on a diplomatic mission to Hamburg, took a fever and died there, unmarried.

  4. Henry, the father of our Collector. He married Jane, second daughter of the Marquis of Lomond; increased his wealth in Bengal as governor of the East India Company's Factory, and while yet increasing it, died at Calcutta in 1728. His children were two sons, Oliver and Henry, with both of whom our story deals.

  5. Algernon, who went to Jesus College, Cambridge, became a Fellow there, practised severe parsimony, and dying unmarried in 1742, had his eyes closed by his college gyp and weighted with two penny pieces--the only coins found in his breeches pocket. He left his very considerable savings to young Oliver, whom he had never seen.

  6. Frederick Penwarne, barrister-at-law. We shall have something to do with him.

  7. Roger, who traded at Calcutta and making an expedition to the Persian Gulf, was killed there in a chance affray with some Arabs.

  8. Anne, who married Sackville.

  9. Frances Elizabeth, who married Pelham.

  10. Arabella, whose affections went astray upon a young Cornish yeoman. Her family interfering, the match was broken off and she died unmarried.

  Oliver and Henry, born at Calcutta, were for their health's sake senthome together--he one aged four, the other three--to be nurtured atCarwithiel. Here under the care of their grandparents, Sir Thomas andLady Vyell (the Protector's grand-daughter), they received instructionat the hands--often very literally at the hands--of the Rev. IsaacToplady, Curate in Charge of Carwithiel, a dry scholar, a wetfly-fisher, and something of a toad-eater. They had for sole playmateand companion their Cousin Diana, or Di, the seven-year-old daughter oftheir eldest uncle, Thomas, heir to the estates and the baronetcy.

  This Thomas--a dry, peevish man, averse from country pursuits, penuriousand incurably suspicious of all his fellow-men--now occupied after afashion and with fair diligence that place in public affairs from whichhis father had, on approach of age, withdrawn. He sat in Parliament forthe family borough of St. Michael, and by family influence had risen tobe a Lord of the Admiralty. He had married Lady Caroline Pett, adaughter of the first Earl of Portlemouth, and the pair kept house inArlington Street, where during the session they entertained with afrugality against which Lady Caroline fought in vain. They were known(and she was aware of it) as "Pett and Petty," and her life wasembittered by the discovery, made too late, that her husband was inevery sense a mean man, who would never rise and never understand whynot, while he nursed an irrational grudge against her for havingpresented him with a daughter and then ceased from child-bearing.

  Unless she repented and procured him a male heir, the baronetcy wouldcome to him only to pass at his death to young Oliver; and the couple,who spent all the Parliamentary recesses at Carwithiel because Mr.Thomas found it cheap, bore no goodwill to that young gentleman.He _en revanche_ supplied them with abundant food for censure, beingwilful from the first, and given in those early years to consorting withstable-boys and picking up their manners and modes of speech. The uncleand aunt alleged--and indeed it was obvious--that the unruly boys passedon the infection to Miss Diana. Miss Diana never accompanied herparents to London, but had grown up from the first at Carwithiel--againbecause Mr. Thomas found it cheap.

  In this atmosphere of stable slang, surrounded by a sort of protectiveouter aura in their grandparents' godliness, the three children grew up:mischievous indeed and without rein, but by no means vicious.Their first separation came in 1726 when Master Oliver, now rising ten,left for London, to be entered at Westminster School. Harry was tofollow him; and did, in a twelve-month's time; but just before thishappened, in Oliver's summer holidays. Sir Thomas took the smallpox anddied and went to his tomb in the Carwithiel transept. Harry took ittoo; but pulled through, not much disfigured. Oliver and Diana escaped.

  The boys, to whom their grandfather--so far as they regarded him atall--had mainly presented himself as a benevolent old proser, weresurprised to find that they sincerely regretted him; and the events ofthe next few weeks threw up his merits (now that the time was past forrewarding them) into a sharp light which memory overarched with a halo.Tenderly into that halo dissolved his trivial faults--his trick, forexample, of snoring between the courses at dinner, or of awaking andpulling his fingers till they cracked with a distressing sound.These and other small frailties were forgotten as the new Sir Thomas andhis spouse took possession and proceeded in a few weeks to turn theplace inside out, dismissing five of the stable-boys, cutting down thegarden staff by one-third, and carrying havoc into the housekeeper'sapartments, the dairy, the still-room.

  In these dismissals I have no doubt that Sir Thomas and Lady Carolinehit (as justice is done in this world) upon the chief blackguards.But the two boys, asking one another why So-and-so had been marked downwhile This-other had been spared, and observing that the So-and-so'sincluded an overbalancing number of their own cronies, found malice inthe discrimination, and a malice directed with intent upon themselves.

  Young Oliver, as soon as Harry was convalescent, discussed thisvehemently with him. Harry, weak with illness, took it passively.He was destined for the Navy. To him already the sea meant everything:as a child of three, on his voyage home in the _Mogul_ East Indiaman, hehad caught the infection of it; on it, as offering the only career fitfor a grown man, his young thoughts brooded, and these annoyances wereto him but as chimney-pots and pantiles falling about the heads of folksashore. But he agreed that Di's conduct needed explaining. She hadtaken a demure turn, and was not remonstrating with her parents as sheought--not playing fair, in short. "It must be pretty difficult forher," said Harry. "I don't see," said Oliver.

  The two boys went back to Westminster together. They spent theChristmas holidays with their Uncle Frederick, the barrister, whopractised very little at the law either in court or in ch
ambers, hutdwelt somewhat luxuriously in the Inner Temple and lived the life of aman-about-town. Their summer vacation was to be spent at Carwithiel;but, as it happened, they were not to see Carwithiel again, for beforesummer came news of their father's death at Calcutta. He had amassed afortune which, translated out of rupees, amounted to 400,000 pounds.To his widow, in addition to her jointure, he left a life interest of athousand pounds _per annum_; a sum of 20,000 pounds was set aside forHarry, to accumulate until his twenty-first birthday; while themagnificent residue in like manner accumulated for young Oliver, theheir.

  Lady Jane returned to England, to live in decent affluence at Bath; andat Bath, of course, Oliver and Harry spent their subsequent holidays,while their Uncle Frederick continued by occasional dinners and gifts ofpocket money, by outings down the river to Greenwich, by seats at thetheatre or at state shows and pageants, to mitigate the rigours ofschool. Had it occurred to Oliver Vyell in later life to set down his"Reflections" in the style of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, he mighthave begun them in some such words as these: "From my mother, Lady JaneVyell, I learned to be proud of good birth, to esteem myself agentleman, and to regulate my actions by a code proper to my station inlife. This code she reconciled with the Gospels, and indeed, she restedit on the rock of Holy Scripture. From my Uncle Frederick I learnedthat self-interest was the key of life; that the teachings of thepriest-hood were more or less conscious humbug; that all men could bebought; that their god was vanity, and the Great Revolution the noblestevent in English history. . . ."

  The sane infusion of Father Neptune in Master Harry's blood preservedhim from these doctrines, and before long indeed removed him out of theway of hearing them. Soon after his fifteenth birthday he sailed tolearn his profession shipping (by a fiction of the service), as"cabin boy" under his mother's brother. Lord Robert Soules, thencommanding the _Merope_ frigate.

  Oliver proceeded to Christ Church, Oxford, and thence (without waitingfor a degree) to make the Grand Tour; in the course of which and incompany with his cousin, Dick Pelham, and a Mr. Batty Langton, a ChristChurch friend, he visited Florence, Rome, Naples, Athens, andConstantinople, returning through Rome again and by way of Venice,Switzerland, Paris. He reached home to find that his mother, whobelieved in keeping young men employed, had procured him a cornetcy inLord Lomond's Troop of Horse. He was now in possession of an amplefortune. He would certainly succeed to the baronetcy, and to the Vyellacres, which were mostly entailed.

  But the grave itself could not give lessons in greed to a true Whigfamily of that period. Lady Jane had it in her blood, every traditionof it. Her son (though within a few months he rose to command of atroop) detested all military routine save active service. He despisedthe triumphs of the Senate. To keep him out of mischief--or, rather, asyou shall hear, to extricate him from it--the good dame made applicationto the Duke of Newcastle; and so in the year 1737, at the age oftwenty-one, Captain Oliver Vyell was appointed to the lucrative post ofCollector to the port of Boston.

  He had held it, now, for close upon seven years.