Plain Living

“Everything, indeed, and more besides. (Chablis, if you please!) Then I suppose you knew Mr. Grandison when he was not quite so well off? They say he got into society rather suddenly; but I’m afraid it doesn’t do the young people quite as much good as it might. There’s the eldest son, Carlo, as they call him – he used to be Charlie when I first knew them.”

“Why, what about him? Nothing wrong, is there? He seems a fine lad.”

“Well, nothing wrong yet. Not yet; oh, no! Only he spends half his time at the club, playing billiards from morning till night, and he’s always going about with that horrid gambling Captain Maelstrom. They do say – but you won’t let it go further – that he was one of that party at loo when young Weener lost five thousand pounds, and such a scandal arose out of it.”

“Good heavens! You horrify me! A mere boy like that! It can’t be true; surely not.”

“I heard it on good authority, I assure you, and other stories too, which I can’t repeat – really too shocking to talk about. See how empresse he is with that Mrs. Loreleigh! What men see in that women I really can’t think.”

“My old friend had both sense and right feeling once upon a time,” said Stamford. “He can’t be so weak as to allow all this.”

“He does all he can, poor old gentleman; but Mrs. Grandison is so absurdly vain about Carlo’s good looks, and the fine friends he goes about with, that she can’t see any danger. Lord Edgar Wildgrave and that Sir Harry Falconer who was here last year (you know they do say that Josie broke her heart about Lord Edgar, and that makes her so reckless). But I know his father is very uneasy about him, and well he may be. I’m afraid Ned bids fair to follow in his brother’s footsteps. Thanks – I will take an olive.”

“What a wretched state of things!” groaned Mr. Stamford, almost audibly. “I must hope, for the sake of my friend’s family, that matters may be exaggerated.”

“I wish they are, with all my heart,” said the candid friend. “They always have such delicious fruit here, haven’t they? I must say they do things well at Chatsworth House. I always enjoy a dinner here. I see Mrs. Grandison making a move. Thanks!”

And so Miss Crewitt followed the retreating file of ladies that, headed by Mrs. Grandison’s stately form, quitted the dining-room, leaving Mr. Stamford much disordered with the unpleasant nature of the ideas which he had perforce absorbed with his dinner. He could not forgive his late neighbour for introducing them into his system.

“Confounded, venomous, ungrateful cat!” he said in his righteous wrath. “How she enjoyed every mouthful of her dinner, pouring out malice and all uncharitableness the while! Serves Mrs. Grandison right, all the same. If she’d picked me out a nice girl, or a good motherly dame, I should not have heard all this scandal about her household. But what a frightful pity it seems! I must talk to Grandison about it.”

At this stage Mr. Stamford was aroused by his host’s voice. “Why, Harold, old man, where have you got to? Close up, now the women are gone. Bring your chair next to Carlo.”

He walked up as desired, the other guests having concentrated themselves in position nearer the head of the table, and found himself next to the heir of the house, Mr. Carlo Grandison. That young gentleman, whom he had observed during dinner talking with earnestness to a lady no longer young, but still handsome and interesting, in spite of Miss Crewitt’s acidulated denial of the fact, did not trouble himself to be over agreeable to his father’s old friend.

He devoted himself, however, with considerable assiduity to the decanters as they passed, and drank more wine in half an hour than Mr. Stamford had ever known Hubert to consume in a month.

He did talk after a while, but his conversation was mainly about the last Melbourne Cup, upon which he admitted that he had wagered heavily, and “dropped in for,” to use his own expression, “a beastly facer.”

“Was not that imprudent?” asked Mr. Stamford, as he looked sadly at the young man’s flushed face. “Don’t you think it a pity to lose more than you can afford?”

“Oh! the governor had to stand the racket, of course,” he said, filling his glass; “and a dashed row he made about it – very bad form, I told him – just as if a thousand or two mattered to him. Do you know what we stood to win?”

“Well, but you didn’t win!”

“I suppose in the bush, Mr. Stamford, you don’t do much in that way,” answered the young man with aristocratic hauteur, “but Maelstrom and I, Sir Harry Falconer and another fellow, whose name I won’t mention, would have pulled off forty-five thousand if that infernal First Robber hadn’t gone wrong the very day of the race. Think of that! He was poisoned, I believe. If I had my will I’d hang every blessed bookmaker in the whole colony. Never mind, I’ll land them next Melbourne Spring.”

“If there were no young gentlemen who backed the favourite, there would be fewer bookmakers,” replied Stamford, peaceably. “But don’t you think it a waste of time devoting so much of it to horseracing?”

“What can a fellow do? There’s coursing, to be sure, and they’re getting up a trotting match. I make believe to do a little work in the governor’s office, you know, but I’m dead beat to get through the day as it is.”

“Try a year in the bush, my dear boy. You could soon learn to manage one of your father’s stations. It would be a healthy change from town life.”

“By Jove! It would be a change indeed! Ha, ha! ‘Right you are, says Moses.’ But I stayed at Banyule one shearing, and I give you my word I was that sick of it all that I should have suicided if I had not been let come to town. The same everlasting grind – sheep, supers, and saltbush; rides, drives, wire fences, dams, dampers, and dingoes – day after day. At night it was worse – not a blessed thing to amuse yourself with. I used to play draughts with the book-keeper.”

“But you could surely read! Books are easy to get up, and there are always neighbours.”

“I couldn’t stand reading out there, anyhow; the books we had were all dry stuff, and the neighbours were such a deuced slow lot. Things are not too lively in Sydney, but it’s heaven compared with the bush. I want the governor to let me go to Europe. I should fancy Paris for a year or so. Take another glass of this Madeira; it’s not an everyday wine. No! Then I will, as I see the governor’s toddlin’.”

In the drawing-room matters were in a general way more satisfactory. A lady with a voice apparently borrowed from the angelic choir was singing when they entered, and Mr. Stamford, passionately fond of music, moved near the grand piano to listen. The guests disposed themselves au plaisir.

Master Carlo, singling out Mrs. Loreleigh, devoted himself to her for the rest of the evening, with perfect indifference to the claims of the other lady guests.

“What a lovely voice Mrs. Thrushton has!” said his hostess to Stamford, as soon as the notes of enchantment came to an end.

“Lovely indeed!” echoed he; “it is long since I have heard such a song, if ever – though my daughter Laura has a voice worth listening to. But will not Miss Grandison sing?” he said after a decent interval.

“Josie has been well taught, and few girls sing better when she likes,” said her mother with a half sigh; “but she is so capricious that I can’t always get her to perform for us. She has got into an argument with Count Zamoreski, that handsome young Pole you see across the room, and she says she’s not coming away to amuse a lot of stupid people. Josie is quite a character, I assure you, and really the girls are so dreadfully self-willed nowadays, that there is no doing anything with them. But you must miss society so much in the bush! Don’t you? There are very few nice men to be found there, I have heard.”

“We are not so badly off as you suppose, Mrs. Grandison. People even there keep themselves informed of the world’s doings, and value art and literature. I often think the young people devote more time to mental culture than they do in town.”

“Indeed! I should hardly have supposed so. They can get masters so easily in town, and then again the young folks have such chances of meeting the best strangers – people of rank, for instance, and so on – that they never can dream of even seeing, away from town. Mr. Grandison wanted me to go into the bush when the children were young; and indeed one of his stations, Banyule, was a charming place, but I never would hear of it.”

“A town life fulfilled all your expectations, I conclude.”

“Yes, really, I think so; very nearly, that is to say. Josie has such ease of manner and is so thoroughly at home with people in every rank of life that I feel certain she will make her mark some day.”

“And your son Carlo?”

“Well, I don’t mind telling you, as an old friend, Mr. Stamford, that Mr. Grandison is uneasy about him sometimes, says he won’t settle down to anything, and is – well not really dissipated, you know, but inclined to be fast. But I tell him that will wear off as he gets older. Boys will be boys. Besides, see what an advantage it is to him to be in the society of men like Captain Maelstrom, Sir Harry Falconer, and people of that stamp.”

“I am not so sure of that, but I trust all will come right, my dear Mrs. Grandison. It is a great responsibility that we parents undertake. There is nothing in life but care and trouble, it seems to me, in one form or another. And now, as I hear the carriages coming up, I will say good night.”

Mr. Stamford went home to his hotel, much musing on the events of the evening, nor was he able to sleep, indeed, during the early portion of the night, in consequence of the uneasiness which the unsatisfactory condition of his friend’s family caused him.

“Poor Grandison!” he said to himself. “More than once have I envied him his easy circumstances. I suppose it is impossible for a man laden with debt and crushed with poverty to avoid that sort of thing. But I shall never do so again. With all my troubles, if I thought Hubert and Laura were likely to become like those two young people as a natural consequence, I would not change places with him to-morrow. The boy, so early blasé, with evil knowledge of the world, tainted with the incurable vice of gambling, too fond of wine already, what has he to look forward to? What will he be in middle age? And the girl, selfish and frivolous, a woman of the world, when hardly out of her teens, scorning her mother’s wishes, owning no law but her own pleasure, looking forward but to a marriage of wealth or rank, if her own undisciplined feelings stand not in the way! Money is good, at any rate, as far as it softens the hard places of life; but if I thought that wealth would bring such a blight upon my household, would so wither the tender blossoms of hope and faith, would undermine manly endeavour and girlish graces, I would spurn it from me to-morrow. I would – ”

With which noble and sincere resolve Mr. Stamford fell asleep.

Upon awaking next morning, he was almost disposed to think that the strength of his disapproval as to the younger members of the Grandison family might only have been enthusiasm, artificially heightened by his host’s extremely good wine. “That were indeed a breach of hospitality,” he said to himself. “And after all, it is not, strictly speaking, my affair. I am grown rusty and precise, it may be, from living so monotonous a life in the bush, so far removed from the higher fashionable existence. Doubtless these things, which appear to me so dangerous and alarming, are only the everyday phenomena of a more artificial society. Let us hope for the best – that Carlo Grandison may tone down after a few years, and that Miss Josie’s frivolity may subside into mere fashionable matronhood.”

Mr. Stamford finished his breakfast with an appetite which proved either his moderation in the use of the good familiar creature over-night, or a singularly happy state of the biliary secretions. He then proceeded in a leisurely way to open his letters. Glancing at the postmark “Mooramah,” the little country town near home, and recognising Hubert’s bold, firm handwriting, he opened it, and read as follows: —

“My dear old Dad, – I have no doubt you are enjoying yourself quietly, but thoroughly, now that you have cleared off the Bank of New Guinea and got in with the Austral Agency Company. Mother says you are to give yourself all reasonable treats, and renew your youth if possible, but not to think you have the Bank of England to draw upon just yet.

“I told her you were to be trusted, and I have a piece of good news for you, which will bear a little extravagance on its back. I am very glad we were able to pay off that bank.

“They had no right to push you as they did. However, I suppose they can’t always help it. Now for the news, if some beastly telegram has not anticipated it. We have had RAIN!

“Yes, rain in large letters! What do you think of that? Forty-eight hours of steady rain! Five inches sixty points! Didn’t it come down! – cats and dogs, floods and waterspouts!

“The drought has broken up. The river is tearing down a banker. You can see the grass grow already. All bother about feed and water put safely away for a year at least. Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!

“I have sent most of the sheep out back. Dams all full, but none carried away, thank goodness!

“I got the hill paddock fence finished and the weaners all into it yesterday. Didn’t get home till midnight.

“The run like a batter pudding, soaked right down to the bed rock. We shall have more grass than we can use. Old Saville (Save-all, I call him!) would sell five thousand young sheep, mixed sexes. He wants to realise. If Mr. Barrington Hope, or whatever his name is, will stand it, they would pay to buy. Wire me if I can close, but of course I don’t expect it.

“I think I may safely treat myself to John Richard Green’s Making of England and Motley’s Rise of the Dutch Republic, so please post them. Everything looking first-rate. Laura is writing too.

“Your loving son,

Hubert Stamford.”

Next came a letter in a neat, characteristic, legible hand, not angular-feminine, which he well knew: —

“Oh! darling Dad, – We are all gone straight out of our senses with joy. We have had such blessed and beauteous rain. The windows of Heaven have indeed been opened – where else could such a lovely downpour come from?

“All our doubts and fears are cleared away. Hubert has been working himself to death, poor boy; off before daylight and never home till twelve or one in the morning. He says that we shall have the best season known for years, and that nothing can possibly hurt the grass for a whole twelvemonth. Besides, more rain is sure to come. They always say that though. Some water came through here and there, but it was a blessing that Hubert and the old splitter put the new roof over the kitchen before the drought broke up. The dear garden looks lovely, I have been sowing a few flower seeds – so fresh and beautiful it is already.

“I rode to one of the out-stations with Hubert yesterday, and we got such glorious ferns coming back. I am sorry to say dear mother is not over strong. The hot weather, and the old trouble, ‘no servants,’ have been too much for her. Do you think you could bring back a good, willing girl as cook and laundress – that would shift the hardest part of the work off our shoulders – and I think Linda and I could manage the house-work, and be thankful too? Try your best, that’s a good old dad!

“I have been reading Middlemarch strictly in spare time, and am getting on pretty well with my German and Italian. If you could bring up two or three books, and by all means a pretty song or two, we should have nothing left to wish for. Now that the rain has come, it seems like a new world. I intend to do great things in languages next year. How about Mrs. Carlyle’s letters? From the review we saw in The Australasian, they must be deeply interesting. We expect you to return quite restored to your old self. Write longer letters, and I am always,

“Your loving daughter,“Laura Stamford.”

“So far, so good, indeed,” quoth Mr. Stamford to himself. “The year has turned with a vengeance. Let me see what the Herald’s telegrams say. Lucky I did not look at the paper. So Hubert’s letter gives me first news. Ah! another letter. Handwriting unknown, formal, with the English postmark, too. No bad news, I hope. Though I can hardly imagine any news of importance from the old country, good or bad, now. Luckily, I am outside the pale of bad news for a while, thanks to Barrington Hope and this breaking up of the drought. What says the Herald?

”Mooramah“(From our Own Correspondent.)

“Drought broken up. Heavy, continuous rain. Six inches in forty-eight hours. Country under water. Dams full. A grand season anticipated.

“Quite right for once, ‘Our Own Correspondent,’ albeit too prone to pronounce the ‘drought broken up’ on insufficient data. But now accurately and carefully observant. I drink to him in a fresh cup of tea.

“And now for the unknown correspondent. Here we have him.”

Mr. Stamford carefully and slowly opened his letter, after examining all outward superscription and signs. Thus went the unaccustomed missive: —

”Harold Stamford, Esq.,

“Windāhgil Station, Mooramah,

“New South Wales, Australia.

”London, 23 Capel Court,“April 14, 1883.

“Sir, – It has become our duty to announce the fact that, consequent upon the death of your cousin, Godwin Stamford, Esq., late of Stamford Park, Berkshire, you are entitled to the sum of one hundred and seventy-three thousand four hundred and sixty-nine pounds fourteen shillings and ninepence (£173,469 14s. 9d.), with interest from date, which sum now stands to your credit in the Funds.

“You are possibly aware that your cousin’s only son, Mark Atheling Stamford, would have inherited the said sum, and other moneys and property, at the death of his father, had he not been unfortunately lost in his yacht, the Walrus, in a white squall in the Mediterranean, a few days before the date of this letter.

“In his will, the late Mr. Godwin Stamford named you, as next of kin, to be the legatee of this amount, in the case of the deceased Mark Atheling Stamford dying without issue. We have communicated with our agent, Mr. Worthington, of Phillip Street, Sydney, from whom you will be enabled to learn all necessary particulars. We shall feel honoured by your commands as to the disposal or investment of this said sum, or any part of it. All business with which you may think fit to entrust our firm shall have prompt attention. – We have the honour to be, Sir, your obedient servants,

“Wallingford, Richards & Stowe.”

Mr. Stamford read the letter carefully from end to end, twice, indeed, with an unmoved countenance. He pushed it away; he walked up and down the room. Then he went into the balcony of the hotel and gazed at the people in the street. He retired to his bed-room after this, whence he did not emerge for a short space.

Returning to the table he sat calmly down, gazing at his letter, and again examining the signature, the important figures, which also had the value set forth formally in writing. Yes, there was no mistake. It was not seven thousand four hundred and sixty-nine pounds. Nothing of the kind. One hundred and seventy thousand pounds and the rest. “One hundred and seventy thousand!” He repeated the words over and over again in a calm and collected voice. Then the tears rushed to his eyes, and he laid his head on his hands and sobbed like a child.

“For what did it all mean? Nothing less than this. That he was a rich man for life. That his wife, best-beloved, tender, patient, self-sacrificing as she had always been since he took her, a fresh-hearted, beautiful girl, from her father’s house, where she had never known aught but the most loving care, the most elaborate comfort, would henceforth be enabled to enjoy all the old pleasures, even the luxuries of life, from which they had all been so long debarred. They could live in Sydney or Melbourne, as it pleased them best. They could even sojourn in London or Paris, and travel on the continent of Europe.

“The girls could have all the ‘advantages,’ as they are called, of the best teaching, the best society, change of scene, travel.

“Great Heaven! what a vista of endless bliss seemed opening before him!”

But then, as he sat and thought, another aspect of the case, dimly, shadowy, of darker colours and stranger light, seemed to pass before him.

“Would the effect of the sudden withdrawal of all necessity for effort, all reason for self-denial, be favourable to the development of these tenderly-cultured, generous but still youthful natures?

“When the cares of this world – which up to this point had served but to elevate and ennoble – were dismissed, would ‘the deceitfulness of riches’ have power to choke the good seed?

“Would the tares multiply and flourish, overrunning the corn, and would the uprooting of them import another trouble – a difficulty which might be enlarged into a sorrow?

“Would indolence and reckless enjoyment succeed to the resolute march along the pathway of duty, to the prayerful trust in that Almighty Father who granted strength from day to day? Would the taste for simple pleasures, which now proved so satisfying, be lost irrevocably, to be succeeded, perhaps, by a dangerous craving for excitement, by satiety or indifferentism?

“What guarantee was there for this conservation of the healthful tone of body and mind when the mainsprings of all action, restraint, and self-discipline were in one hour relaxed or broken?

“Could he bear to behold the gradual degeneration which might take place, which had so manifested itself, as he had witnessed, in natures perhaps not originally inferior to their own?”

Long and anxiously did Harold Stamford ponder over these thoughts, with nearly as grave a face, as anxious a brow, as he had worn in his deepest troubles.

At length he arose with a resolved air. He left the hotel, and took his way to the office of Mr. Worthington, whom he knew well, who had been his legal adviser and the depository of all official confidences for many years past.

It was he who had drawn the deed by which the slender dowry of his wife, with some moderate addition of his own, had been settled upon her. He knew that he could be trusted implicitly with his present intentions; that the secret he intended to confide in him this day would be inviolably preserved.

This, then, was the resolution at which Harold Stamford had arrived. He would not abruptly alter the conditions of his family life; he would gradually and unostentatiously ameliorate the circumstances of the household. But he would defer to a future period the information that riches had succeeded to this dreaded and probable poverty. He would endeavour to maintain the standard of “plain living and high thinking,” in which his family had been reared; he would preserve it in its integrity, as far as lay in his power until, with characters fully formed, tried, and matured, his children would in all probability be enabled to withstand the allurements of luxury, the flatteries of a facile society, the insidious temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil.

Intent upon removing such dangers from their path in life, he felt himself warranted in using the suppressio veri which he meditated. And he implored the blessing of God upon his endeavours to that end.

Then, again, the station? It must stand apparently upon its own foundation. What pride and joy to Hubert’s ardent nature for the next few years would it be to plot and plan, to labour and to endure, in order to compass the freedom of the beloved home from debt! Now that the rain had come, that the account was in good standing, he had felt so sanguine of success that it would be cruel to deprive him of the gratification he looked forward to – the privilege he so prized.

And what task would employ every faculty of mind and body more worthily, more nobly, than this one to which he had addressed himself! Hubert’s favourite quotation occurred to him —

And how can man die betterThan facing fearful odds,For the ashes of his fathers,And the temples of his gods?

This he was wont to declaim when his mother, meeting him as he returned from weary rides, chilled by winter frosts, burnt black well-nigh by summer suns, had many a time and oft expostulated, telling him that he would kill himself.