able to help such dear friends.
The Colonel said I had a good heart, and my wife had, though--though--he
did not finish this sentence, but I could interpret it without need of
its completion. My wife and the two ladies of Colonel Newcome's family
never could be friends, however much my poor Laura tried to be intimate
with these women. Her very efforts at intimacy caused a frigidity and
hauteur which Laura could not overcome. Little Rosey and her mother set
us down as two aristocratic personages; nor for our parts were we very
much disturbed at this opinion of the Campaigner and little Rosa.
I talked with the Colonel for half an hour or more about his affairs,
which indeed were very gloomy, and Clive's prospects, of which he strove
to present as cheering a view as possible. He was obliged to confirm the
news which Sherrick had given me, and to own, in fact, that all his
pension was swallowed up by a payment of interest and life insurance for
sums which he had been compelled to borrow. How could he do otherwise
than meet his engagements? Thank God, he had Clive's full approval for
what he had done--had communicated the circumstance to his son almost
immediately after it took place, and that was a comfort to him--an
immense comfort. "For the women are very angry," said the poor Colonel;
"you see they do not understand the laws of honour, at least as we
understand them: and perhaps I was wrong in hiding the truth as I
certainly did from Mrs. Mackenzie, but I acted for the best--I hoped
against hope that some chance might turn in our favour. God knows, I had
a hard task enough in wearing a cheerful face for months, and in
following my little Rosa about to her parties and balls; but poor Mrs.
Mackenzie has a right to be angry, only I wish my little girl did not
side with her mother so entirely, for the loss of her affection gives me
great pain."
So it was as I suspected. The Campaigner ruled over this family, and
added to all their distresses by her intolerable presence and tyranny.
"Why, sir," I ventured to ask, "if, as I gather from you--and I
remember," I added with a laugh, "certain battles-royal which Clive
described to me in old days--if you and the Campai--Mrs. Mackenzie do not
agree, why should she continue to live with you, when you would all be so
much happier apart?"
"She has a right to live in the house," says the Colonel; "It is I who
have no right in it. I am a poor old pensioner, don't you see, subsisting
on Rosey's bounty? We live on the hundred a year, secured to her at her
marriage, and Mrs. Mackenzie has her forty pounds of pension which she
adds to the common stock. It is I who have made away with every shilling
of Rosey's 17,000 pounds, God help me, and with 1500 pounds of her
mother's. They put their little means together, and they keep us--me and
Clive. What can we do for a living? Great God! What can we do? Why, I am
so useless that even when my poor boy earned 25 pounds for his picture, I
felt we were bound to send it to Sarah Mason, and you may fancy when this
came to Mrs. Mackenzie's ears, what a life my boy and I led. I have never
spoken of these things to any mortal soul--I even don't speak of them
with Clive--but seeing your kind and honest face has made me talk--you
must pardon my garrulity--I am growing old, Arthur. This poverty and
these quarrels have beaten my spirit down--there, I shall talk on this
subject no more. I wish, sir, I could ask you to dine with us, but"--and
here he smiled--"we must get the leave of the higher powers."
I was determined, in spite of prohibitions and Campaigners, to see my old
friend Clive, and insisted on walking back with the Colonel to his
lodgings, at the door of which we met Mrs. Mackenzie and her daughter.
Rosa blushed up a little--looked at her mamma--and then greeted me with a
hand and a curtsey. The Campaigner also saluted me in a majestic but
amicable manner, made no objection even to my entering her apartments and
seeing the condition to which they were reduced: this phrase was uttered
with particular emphasis and a significant look towards the Colonel, who
bowed his meek head and preceded me into the lodgings, which were in
truth very homely, pretty, and comfortable. The Campaigner was an
excellent manager--restless, bothering, brushing perpetually. Such
fugitive gimcracks as they had brought away with them decorated the
little salon. Mrs. Mackenzie, who took the entire command, even pressed
me to dine and partake, if so fashionable a gentleman would condescend to
partake, of a humble exile's fare. No fare was perhaps very pleasant to
me in company with that woman, but I wanted to see my dear old Clive, and
gladly accepted his voluble mother-in-law's not disinterested
hospitality. She beckoned the Colonel aside; whispered to him, putting
something into his hand; on which he took his hat and went away. Then
Rosey was dismissed upon some other pretext, and I had the felicity to be
left alone with Mrs. Captain Mackenzie.
She instantly improved the occasion; and with great eagerness and
volubility entered into her statement of the present affairs and position
of this unfortunate family. She described darling Rosey's delicate state,
poor thing--nursed with tenderness and in the lap of luxury--brought up
with every delicacy and the fondest mother--never knowing in the least
how to take care of herself, and likely to fall down and perish unless
the kind Campaigner were by to prop and protect her. She was in delicate
health--very delicate--ordered cod-liver oil by the doctor. Heaven knows
how he could be paid for those expensive medicines out of the pittance to
which the imprudence--the most culpable and designing imprudence, and
extravagance, and folly of Colonel Newcome had reduced them! Looking out
from the window as she spoke I saw--we both saw--the dear old gentleman
sadly advancing towards the house, a parcel in his hand. Seeing his near
approach, and that our interview was likely to come to an end, Mrs.
Mackenzie rapidly whispered to me that she knew I had a good heart--that
I had been blessed by Providence with a fine fortune, which I knew how to
keep better than some folks--and that if, as no doubt was my intention--
for with what other but a charitable view could I have come to see them?
--and most generous and noble was it of you to come, and I always thought
it of you, Mr. Pendennis, whatever other people said to the contrary. If
I proposed to give them relief, which was most needful--and for which a
mother's blessings would follow me--let it be to her, the Campaigner,
that my loan should be confided--for as for the Colonel, he is not fit to
be trusted with a shilling, and has already flung away immense sums upon
some old woman he keeps in the country, leaving his darling Rosey without
the actual necessaries of life.
The woman's greed and rapacity--the flattery with which she chose to
belabour me at dinner, so choked and disgusted me, that I could hardly
swallow the meal, though my poor old friend had been sent out to purchase
a pate from the pastrycook's f
or my especial refection. Clive was not at
the dinner. He seldom returned till late at night on sketching days.
Neither his wife nor his mother-in-law seemed much to miss him; and
seeing that the Campaigner engrossed the entire share of the
conversation, and proposed not to leave me for five minutes alone with
the Colonel, I took leave rather speedily of my entertainers, leaving a
message for Clive, and a prayer that he would come and see me at my
hotel.
CHAPTER LXXIII
In which Belisarius returns from Exile
I was sitting in the dusk in my room at Hotel des Bains, when the visitor
for whom I hoped made his appearance in the person of Clive, with his
broad shoulders, and broad hat, and a shaggy beard, which he had thought
fit in his quality of painter to assume. Our greeting it need not be said
was warm; and our talk, which extended far into the night, very friendly
and confidential. If I make my readers confidants in Mr. Clive's private
affairs, I ask my friend's pardon for narrating his history in their
behoof. The world had gone very ill with my poor Clive, and I do not
think that the pecuniary losses which had visited him and his father
afflicted him near so sorely as the state of his home. In a pique with
the woman he loved, and from that generous weakness which formed part of
his character, and which led him to acquiesce in most wishes of his good
father, the young man had gratified the darling desire of the Colonel's
heart, and taken the wife whom his two old friends brought to him. Rosey,
who was also, as we have shown, of a very obedient and ductile nature,
had acquiesced gladly enough in her mamma's opinion, that she was in love
with the rich and handsome young Clive, and accepted him for better or
worse. So undoubtedly would this good child have accepted Captain Hoby,
her previous adorer, have smilingly promised fidelity to the Captain at
church, and have made a very good, happy, and sufficient little wife for
that officer,--had not mamma commanded her to jilt him. What wonder that
these elders should wish to see their two dear young ones united? They
began with suitable age, money, good temper, and parents' blessings. It
is not the first time that, with all these excellent helps to prosperity
and happiness, a marriage has turned out unfortunately--a pretty, tight
ship gone to wreck that set forth on its voyage with cheers from the
shore, and every prospect of fair wind and fine weather.
We have before quoted poor Clive's simile of the shoes with which his
good old father provided him--as pretty a little pair of shoes as need
be--only they did not fit the wearer. If they pinched him at first, how
they blistered and tortured him now! If Clive was gloomy and discontented
even when the honeymoon had scarce waned, and he and his family sat at
home in state and splendour under the boughs of the famous silver
cocoa-nut tree, what was the young man's condition now in poverty, when
they had no love along with a scant dinner of herbs; when his
mother-in-law grudged each morsel which his poor old father ate--when a
vulgar, coarse-minded woman pursued with brutal sarcasm and deadly
rancour one of the tenderest and noblest gentlemen in the world--when an
ailing wife, always under some one's domination, received him with
helpless hysterical cries and reproaches--when a coarse female tyrant,
stupid, obstinate, utterly unable to comprehend the son's kindly genius,
or the father's gentle spirit, bullied over both, using the intolerable
undeniable advantage which her actual wrongs gave her to tyrannise over
these two wretched men! He had never heard the last of that money which
they had sent to Mrs. Mason, Clive said. When the knowledge of the fact
came to the Campaigner's ears, she raised such a storm as almost killed
the poor Colonel, and drove his son half mad. She seized the howling
infant, vowing that its unnatural father and grandfather were bent upon
starving it--she consoled and sent Rosey into hysterics--she took the
outlawed parson to whose church they went, and the choice society of
bankrupt captains, captains' ladies, fugitive stockbrokers' wives, and
dingy frequenters of billiard-rooms, and refugees from the Bench, into
her councils; and in her daily visits amongst these personages, and her
walks on the pier, whither she trudged with poor Rosey in her train, Mrs.
Mackenzie made known her own wrongs and her daughter's--showed how the
Colonel, having robbed and cheated them previously, was now living upon
them; insomuch that Mrs. Bolter, the levanting auctioneer's wife, would
not make the poor old man a bow when she met him--that Mrs. Captain
Kitely, whose husband had lain for seven years past in Boulogne gaol
ordered her son to cut Clive; and when, the child being sick, the poor
old Colonel went for arrowroot to the chemist's, young Snooks, the
apothecary's assistant, refused to allow him to take the powder away
without previously depositing the money.
He had no money, Thomas Newcome. He gave up every farthing. After having
impoverished all around him, he had no right, he said, to touch a
sixpence of the wretched pittance remaining to them--he had even given up
his cigar, the poor old man, the companion and comforter of forty years.
He was "not fit to be trusted with money," Mrs. Mackenzie said, and the
good man owned as he ate his scanty crust, and bowed his noble old head
in silence under that cowardly persecution.
And this, at the end of threescore and seven or eight years, was to be
the close of a life which had been spent in freedom and splendour, and
kindness and honour; this the reward of the noblest heart that ever beat
--the tomb and prison of a gallant warrior who had ridden in twenty
battles--whose course through life had been a bounty wherever it had
passed--whose name had been followed by blessings, and whose career was
to end here--here--in a mean room, in a mean alley of a foreign town--a
low furious woman standing over him and stabbing the kind defenceless
heart with killing insult and daily outrage!
As we sat together in the dark, Clive told me this wretched story, which
was wrung from him with a passionate emotion that I could not but keenly
share. He wondered the old man lived, Clive said. Some of the women's
taunts and gibes, as he could see, struck his father so that he gasped
and started back as if some one had lashed him with a whip. "He would
make away with himself," said poor Clive, "but he deems this is his
punishment, and that he must bear it as long as it pleases God. He does
not care for his own losses, as far as they concern himself: but these
reproaches of Mrs. Mackenzie, and some things which were said to him in
the Bankruptcy Court, by one or two widows of old friends, who were
induced through his representations, to take shares in that infernal
bank, have affected him dreadfully. I hear him lying awake and groaning
at night, God bless him. Great God! what can I do--what can I do?" burst
out the young man in a dreadful paroxysm of grief. "I have tried to get
lessons--I went
to London on the deck of a steamer, and took a lot of
drawings with me--tried picture-dealers--pawnbrokers--Jews--Moss, whom
you may remember at Gandish's, and who gave me for forty-two drawings,
eighteen pounds. I brought the money back to Boulogne. It was enough to
pay the doctor, and bury our last poor little dead baby. Tenez, Pen, you
must give me some supper: I have had nothing all day but a pain de deux
sous; I can't stand it at home. My heart's almost broken--you must give
me some money, Pen, old boy. I know you will. I thought of writing to
you, but I wanted to support myself, you see. When I went to London with
the drawings I tried George's chambers, but he was in the country, I saw
Crackthorpe on the street in Oxford Street, but I could not face him, and
bolted down Hanway Yard. I tried, and I could not ask him, and I got the
eighteen pounds from Moss that day, and came home with it."
Give him money? of course I would give him money--my dear old friend!
And, as an alterative and a wholesome shock to check that burst of
passion and grief in which the poor fellow indulged, I thought fit to
break into a very fierce and angry invective on my own part, which served
to disguise the extreme feeling of pain and pity that I did not somehow
choose to exhibit. I rated Clive soundly, and taxed him with
unfriendliness and ingratitude for not having sooner applied to friends
who would think shame of themselves whilst he was in need. Whatever he
wanted was his as much as mine. I could not understand how the necessity
of the family should, in truth, be so extreme as he described it, for
after all many a poor family lived upon very much less; but I uttered
none of these objections, checking them with the thought that Clive, on
his first arrival at Boulogne, entirely ignorant of the practice of
economy, might have imprudently engaged in expenses which had reduced him
to this present destitution. (I did not know at the time that Mrs.
Mackenzie had taken entire superintendence of the family treasury--and
that this exemplary woman was putting away, as she had done previously,
sundry little sums to meet rainy days.)
I took the liberty of asking about debts, and of these Clive gave me to
understand there were none--at least none of his or his father's
contracting. "If we were too proud to borrow, and I think we were wrong,
Pen, my dear old boy--I think we were wrong now--at least, we were too
proud to owe. My colourman takes his bill out in drawings, and I think
owes me a trifle. He got me some lessons at fifty sous a ticket--a pound
the ten--from an economical swell who has taken a chateau here, and has
two flunkeys in livery. He has four daughters, who take advantage of the
lessons, and screws ten per cent upon the poor colourman's pencils and
drawing-paper. It's pleasant work to give the lessons to the children;
and to be patronised by the swell; and not expensive to him, is it, Pen?
But I don't mind that, if I could but get lessons enough: for, you see,
besides our expenses here, we must have some more money, and the dear old
governor would die outright if poor old Sarah Mason did not get her fifty
pounds a year."
And now there arrived a plentiful supper, and a bottle of good wine, of
which the giver was not sorry to partake after the meagre dinner at three
o'clock, to which I had been invited by the Campaigner; and it was
midnight when I walked back with my friend to his house in the upper
town; and all the stars of heaven were shining cheerily; and my dear
Clive's face wore an expression of happiness, such as I remembered in old
days, as we shook hands and parted with a "God bless you."
To Clive's friend, revolving these things in his mind, as he lay in one
of those most snug and comfortable beds at the excellent Hotel des Bains,
it appeared that this town of Boulogne was a very bad market for the