The Daltons; Or, Three Roads In Life. Volume I

The narrative was a very long one; nor was it rendered more succinct by the manner of the narrator, nor the frequent interruptions to which, for explanation’s sake, Foglass subjected him. Shall we own, too, that the punch had some share in the intricacy, Dalton’s memory and Foglass’s perceptions growing gradually more and more nebulous as the evening wore on. Without at all wishing to impugn Dalton’s good faith, it must be owned that, what between his occasional reflections, his doubts, guesses, surmises, and suspicions, his speculations as to the reason of this and the cause of that, it was very difficult for a man so deeply versed in punch as Foglass to carry away anything like a clear notion of the eventful occurrences related. The strength of the potation, the hour, the length of the story, the parenthetical interruptions, which, although only bypaths, often looked exactly like the high-road, and probably, too, certain inaccuracies in the adjustment of the ear-trumpet, which grew to be very difficult at last, all contributed, – more or less, to a mystification which finally resembled nothing so much as a very confused dream.

Had the worthy ex-Consul then been put on his oath, he could n’t have said whether or not Sir Stafford had murdered the late Mr. Godfrey, or if that crime should be attributed to Dalton’s late wife. Between Sir Gilbert Stafford and Sir Stafford Onslow, he had a vague suspicion of some Siamese bond of union, but that they were cut asunder late in life, and were now drifting in different currents, he also surmised. But which of them “got the fortune,” and which had not, who held the estate at present, and how Dalton came to be there at that moment relating the story, were Chinese puzzles to him.

Murder, matrimony, debts, difficulties, and Chancery suits danced an infernal reel through his brain; and, what with the scattered fragments of Irish life thrown in incidentally, of locking dinner-parties in, and barring the sheriff out, of being chased by bailiffs, or hunting them, all these divertissements ending in a residence abroad, with its manifold discomforts and incongruities, poor Foglass was in a state which, were it only to be permanent, would have presented a spectacle of very lamentable insanity.

The nearest approach to a fact that he could come to was that Dalton ought to be enormously rich, and that now he hadn’t a sixpence; that the wealthy banker was somehow the cause, Count Stephen being not altogether blameless; and that Kate was living a life of extravagance and waste, while her father and sister were waging a hard fight with the very “grimmest” of poverty.

“L’homme propose,” &c., says the adage; and the poet tells us an instance, that “those who came to scoff remained to pray.” So in the present case, Mr. Foglass, whose mission was to pump Peter Dalton out of every family secret and circumstance, had opened such an unexpected stream of intelligence upon himself that he was actually carried away in the flood.

“You’ve been badly used, Dalton,” said he, at last. “I may say, infamously treated! Not only your fortune taken away, but your children torn from you!”

“Ay, just so.” Dalton liked sympathy too well to cavil about his title to it. “True for you, a harder case than mine you ‘ll not hear of in a summer’s day. My elegant fine place, my beautiful domain, the seat of my ancestors, or, if they were n’t, they were my wife’s, and that ‘s all the same; and to be sitting here, in a foreign country r hundreds of miles away from home. Oh dear, oh dear! but that’s a change!” For an instant the thought overwhelmed him, and he was silent; then, fixing his eyes on Foglass, he added, in a dreamy soliloquy, “Hundreds of miles away from home, drinking bad brandy, with a deaf chap in a red wig for company.”

“I call yours a case of downright oppression, Dalton,” resumed the other, who fortunately overheard nothing of the last remark. “If you had been residing in Persia or the Caucasus even in the Danubian Provinces we ‘d have made you a case for the Foreign Office. You ‘d have had your compensation, sir. Ay, faith! you ‘d have had a good round sum for the murder of your father, old what ‘s his name? You ‘d have had your claim, sir, for the loss of that fine boy the Austrians have taken from you, Mrs. Dalton’s wardrobe, and all that sort of thing. I must repeat my conviction, you ‘ve been grossly infamously treated!”

“And just to think of my own flesh and blood, Stephen, my uncle!”

“I can’t think of him, sir! I can’t bear to think of him!” cried Foglass, with enthusiasm.

“A count of the Empire!” resumed Dalton; “a field-marshal, and a something else, with his Maria Teresa!”

“At his age he might give up those habits,” said Foglass, who had converted the Cross of the Empress into a very different relationship.

“And now, there ‘s Kate,” said Dalton, who never heard his comment, “there ‘s Kate, my own favorite of them all! thinks no more about us than if we did n’t belong to her!”

“Living in splendor!” mumbled Foglass. “Boundless extravagance!”

“Just so! Wasting hundreds flinging the money about like chaff!”

“I saw a ball dress of hers myself, at Madame Fanchone’s, that was to cost three thousand francs!”

“Three thousand francs! How am I to bear it all?” exclaimed Dalton, fiercely. “Will any man tell me how an Irish gentleman, with an embarrassed estate, and in the present times, can meet such extravagance as that? Three thousand francs! and, maybe, for a flimsy rag that wouldn’t stand a shower of rain! Oh, Fogles, you don’t know the man that ‘s sitting before you, hale and stout and hearty as he looks, the trials he has gone through, and the troubles he has faced, just for his children. Denying himself every enjoyment in life!” (here he sipped his glass), “giving up every little comfort he was used to!” (another sip), “all for his family! Look at my coat; feel the wool of it. See my breeches; ‘tis like the hide of a bear they are. Take notice of my shoes; and there’s my purse, with two florins and eight kreutzers in it; and, may I never see glory, if I don’t owe a little bill in every shop that will trust me! And for what? answer me that, for what?”

Although the savage energy with which this question was put would have extorted an answer from the least willing witness, Foglass was unable to reply, and only stared in mute astonishment.

“I’ll tell you for what, Fogles,” resumed Dalton, with a stroke of his clenched fist on the table, “I’ll tell you for what! To have a son in the Hussars, and a daughter in all the height of fashion and fine life! That ‘s it, Fogles. My boy keeping company with all the first people in Austria, hand and glove with what ‘s his name? something like ‘Misty,’ or ‘Hazy’ I forget it now dining, driving, and shooting with them. And my girl, Kate. But sure you know better than myself what style she ‘s keeping! That ‘s the reason I ‘m what you see me here, pining away in solitude and small means! All for my children’s sake!”

“It is highly meritorious. It does you honor, Dalton,” said the other, emphatically.

“Well, I hope it does,” said he, with a sigh. “But how few know it, after all!”

“And has this same Sir Stafford never taken any steps towards recompensing you? Has there been nothing like an amende for the great losses you ‘ve sustained?”

“Oh, indeed, to do him justice, he made me a kind of an offer once; but you see it was hampered with so many conditions and restrictions, and the like, that I rejected it with contempt. ‘No!’ says I, ‘‘t is n’t poverty will ever make me demean the old family! The Daltons won’t suffer disgrace from me!’”

“He could have assisted you without such an alternative, Dalton.”

“Maybe he could, indeed!” sighed the other.

“I know it well; the man is one of the richest in England; the head of a great bank, besides, making thousands every week.”

“I often thought of that,” said Dalton. “Sure it would cost him little just to discount a small thing for me at three months. I’d take care to meet it, of course; and he’d never lose a sixpence by me. Indeed, he’d be gaining; for he ‘d have the commission, and the discount, and the interest, and the devil knows what besides of law expenses – ”

Here he stopped abruptly, for he had unwittingly strayed into another and very different hypothesis regarding the fate of his bill. However, he pulled up short, tossed off his punch, and said, “I only wish he ‘d do it!”

“Why not try him, then? you ought, at least, to give yourself the chance.”

“And, if he refused me, I’d have to call him out,” said Dalton, gravely; “and just see all the confusion that would lead to. My daughter on a visit there, myself here, and, maybe, obliged to go hundreds of miles to meet him, and no end to the expense, taking a friend with me, too. No, no! that would be too selfish entirely.”

“What if you were to throw out a hint, when you write to your daughter, allude to present pressure for money; speak of tenants in arrear; remittances not arrived?”

“Oh, faith! there’s no need prompting me about these things,” said Dalton, with a bitter laugh. “I know them too well already.”

“Write a few lines, then; you’ll find paper and pens on that table. I ‘ve told you that I will send it under my own seal, with the despatches.”

Dalton was very little given to letter-writing at any period; but to encounter the labor at night by candle-light, and after a few hours’ carouse, seemed to him quite out of the question. Still, the Embassy seal, whatever that might be, was no common temptation. Perhaps he fancied it to be like one of those portentous appendages which are seen attached to royal grants! Who can tell what amount of wax and ribbon his imagination bestowed upon it! Besides this, there was another motive, never again, perhaps, should he be able to write without Nelly’s knowledge. This consideration decided the question at once. Accordingly, he put on his spectacles, and seated himself gravely to the work, which proceeded thus:

DEAR KATE, I ‘m spending the evening with your friend the Ambassador of I forget where – Fogles is his name and as pleasant a man as I ever met; and he sends his regards to you and all the family, and transmits this under his own seal. Things is going on bad enough here. Not a shilling out of Crognoborraghan. Healey ran away with the November rent and the crops, and Sweeney ‘s got into the place, and won’t give it up to any one with out he gets forty pound! I ‘d give him forty of my teeth as soon, if I had them! Ryan shot Mr. Johnson coming home from work, and will be hanged on Saturday; and that ‘s in our favor, as he was a life in Honan’s lease. There ‘s no money in Ireland, Kellet tells me, and there ‘s none here. Where the blazes is it all gone to? Maybe, like the potatoes ‘t is dying out! Frank ‘s well sick of soldiering; they chained him up like a dog, with his hand to his leg, the other night for going to the play; and if he was n’t a born gentleman, he says, they ‘d have given him “four-and-twenty,” as he calls it, with a stick for impudence. Stephen ‘s no more good to him than an old umbrella, never gave him bit nor sup! Bad luck to the old Neygur I can’t speak of him. Nelly goes on carving and cutting away as before. There ‘s not a saint in the calendar she did n’t make out of rotten wood this winter, and little Hans buys them all, at a fair price, she says; but I call a Holy Family cheap at ten florins, and ‘t is giving the Virgin away to sell her for a Prussian dollar. ‘T is a nice way for one of the Daltons to be living by her own industry! I often wish for you back here; but I ‘d be sorry, after all, ye ‘d come, for the place is poorer than ever, and you ‘re in good quarters, and snug where you are. Tell me how they treat you if they’re as kind as before and how is the old man, and is the gout bad with him still? I send you in this a little bill Martin Cox, of Drumsnagh, enclosed me for sixty-two ten-and-eight. Could you get the old Baronet to put his name on it for me? Tell him ‘t is as good as the bank paper, that Cox is as respectable a man as any in Leitrim, and an estated gentleman, like myself, and of course that we’ll take care to have the cash ready for it when due. This will be a great convenience to me, and Fogles says it will be a pleasure to Sir Stafford, besides extending his connection among Irish gentlemen. If he seems to like the notion, say that your father is well known in Ireland, and can help him to a very lively business in the same way. Indeed, I ‘d have been a fortune to him myself alone, if he ‘d had the discounting of me for the last fifteen years! Never mind this, however, for bragging is not genteel; but get me his name, and send me the “bit of stiff” by return of post. If he wants to be civil, maybe he ‘ll put it into the bank himself, and send me the money; and if so, let the order be on Haller and Oelcher, for I ‘ne a long account with Koch and Elz, and maybe they ‘d keep a grip of the cash, and I ‘d just be where I was before. If I can get out of this next spring – it would be a great economy, for I owe something to everybody, and a new place always gives courage. I ‘m hesitating whether I ‘ll go to Genoa or New York, but cheapness will decide me, for I only live now for my family.

With all my affection,

Believe me your fond father,

PETER DALTON.

P. S. If Sir S. would rather have my own acceptance, let him draw for a hundred, at three months, and I ‘m ready; but don’t disappoint me, one way or other. Wood is fifteen florins a “klafter” here, now, and I ‘ve nobody to cut it when it comes home, as Andy took a slice out of his shin on Friday last with the hatchet, and is in bed ever since. Vegetables, too, is dear; and since Frank went, we never see a bit of game.

2nd P. S. If you had such a thing as a warm winter cloak that you did n’t want, you might send it to Nelly. She goes out in a thing like a bit of brown paper, and the wooden shoes is mighty unhandy with her lameness. Mind the bill.

“You are writing a rather lengthy despatch, Dalton,” said Foglass, who had twice dozed off to sleep, and woke again, only to see him still occupied with his epistle.

“It’s done now,” said Dalton, with a sigh; for, without well knowing why, he was not quite satisfied with the performance.

“I wish you ‘d just add a line, to say that Mrs. Ricketts, Mrs. Major-General Ricketts, who resides at Florence, is so desirous to know her. You can mention that she is one of the first people, but so exclusive about acquaintance, that it is almost impossible to get presented to her; but that this coming winter the Embassy will, in all likelihood, open a door to so desirable an object.”

“Lady Hester will know her, of course?” said Dalton, whose sense of proprieties was usually clear enough when selfishness did not interfere, “and I don’t see that my daughter should extend her acquaintance through any other channel.”

“Oh, very true; it’s of no consequence. I only meant it as an attention to Miss Dalton; but your observation is very just,” said Foglass, who suddenly felt that he was on dangerous ground.

“Depend upon ‘t, Fogles, my daughter is in the best society of the place, whatever it is. It ‘s not a Dalton would be left out.”

Foglass repeated his most implicit conviction in this belief, and did all in his power to efface the memory of the suggestion, but without success. Family pride was a kind of birdlime with old Dalton, and if he but touched, he could not leave it. The consequences, however, went no further than a long and intricate dissertation on the Dalton blood for several centuries back, through which Foglass slept just as soundly as the respected individuals there recorded, and was only awoke at last by Dalton rising to take leave, an event at last suggested by the empty decanter.

“And now, Fogles,” said he, summing up, “you’ll not wonder, that if we ‘re poor we ‘re proud. I suppose you never heard of a better stock than that since you were born?”

“Never, by Jove! Guelphs, Ghibellines, and Hapsburgs are nothing to them. Good-night, good-night! I ‘ll take care of your letter. It shall go to-morrow in the Embassy bag.”

CHAPTER XXXII. AN INVASION

To afford the reader the explanation contained in the preceding chapter, we have been obliged to leave Kate Dalton waiting, in mingled anxiety and suspense, for the hour of Mrs. Ricketts’s visit. Although her mind principally dwelt upon the letter which had been announced as coming from her father, an event so strange as naturally to cause astonishment, she also occasionally recurred to the awkwardness of receiving persons whom Lady Hester had so scrupulously avoided, and being involved in an acquaintanceship so unequivocally pronounced vulgar. A few short months before, and the incident would have worn a very different aspect to her eyes. She would have dwelt alone on the kindness of one, an utter stranger, addressing her in terms of respectful civility, and proffering the attention of a visit. She would have been grateful for the goodnature that took charge of a communication for her. She would have viewed the whole as a sort of flattering notice, and never dreamed of that long catalogue of “inconveniences” and annoyances so prolifically associated with the event as it at present stood. She was greatly changed in many respects. She had been daily accustomed to hear the most outrageous moral derelictions lightly treated, or, at least, but slightly censured. For every fault and failing there was a skilful excuse or a charitable explanation. The errors of the fashionable world were shown to be few, insignificant, and venial; and the code showed no exception to the rule that “well-bred people can do no wrong.” Vulgarity alone was criminal; and the sins of the underbred admitted of no palliation. Her sense of justice might have revolted against such judgments, had reason been ever appealed to; but such was not the case. Ridicule alone was the arbiter; whatever could be scoffed at was detestable, and a solecism in dress, accent, or demeanor was a higher crime than many a grave transgression or glaring iniquity.

The little mimicries of Albert Jekyl, as he described Mrs. Ricketts, the few depreciatory remarks of Lady Hester concerning her, would have outweighed her worth had her character been a cornucopia of goodness. It was, then, in no pleasant flurry of spirits, that, just as the clock struck three, Kate heard the heavy door of the palace flung wide, and the sound of wheels echo beneath the vaulted entrance. The next moment a small one-horse phaeton, driven by a very meagre servant in a tawdry livery, passed into the courtyard, having deposited its company in the hall.

There had been a time, and that not so very far back either, when the sight of that humble equipage, with visitors, would have made her heart beat to the full as strong, albeit with very different emotions. Now, however, she actually glanced at the windows to see if it had attracted notice, with a kind of terror at the ridicule it would excite. Never did she think an old gray horse could be so ugly; never did wheels make so intolerable a noise before! Why would people dress up their servants like harlequins? What was the meaning of that leopard-skin rug for the feet? It was an odious little vehicle, altogether. There was a tawdry, smirking, self-satisfied pretension about its poverty that made one wish for a break-down on looking at it.

“Mrs. Montague Ricketts and Miss Ricketts,” said a very demure-looking groom of the chambers; and although his features were immaculate in their expressions of respect, Kate felt offended at what she thought was a flippancy in the man’s manner.

Although the announcement was thus made, the high and mighty personages were still three rooms off, and visible only in the dim distance, coming slowly forward.

Leaning on her sister’s arm, and with a step at once graceful and commanding, Mrs. Ricketts came on. At least, so Kate judged an enormous pyramid of crimson velvet and ermine to be, from the summit of which waved a sufficiency of plumes for a moderate hearse. The size and dignity of this imposing figure almost entirely eclipsed poor Martha, and completely shut out the slender proportions of Mr. Scroope Purvis, who, from being loaded like a sumpter-mule with various articles for the road, was passed over by the groom of the chambers, and believed to be a servant. Slow as was the order of march, Purvis made it still slower by momentarily dropping some of the articles with which he was charged; and as they comprised a footstool, a poodle, two parasols, an album, a smelling-bottle, a lorgnette, with various cushions, shawls, and a portable tire-screen, his difficulties may be rather compassionated than censured.

“Scroope, how can you? Martha, do speak to him. It’s down again! He’ll smash my lorgnette he’ll smother Fidele. How very awkward how absurd we shall look!” Such were the sotto voce accompaniments that filled up the intervals till they arrived at the great drawing-room, where Kate Dalton sat.

If the reader has ever watched a great tragedy queen emerging from the flats, when, after a lively dialogue with the prompter, and the utterance of a pleasant jest, she issues forth upon the open stage, to vent the sorrows or the wrongs of injured womanhood, he may form some faint idea of the rapid transformation that Mrs. Ricketts underwent as she passed the door-sill. Her first movement was a sudden bound forwards, or, at least, such an approach to a spring as a body so imposing could accomplish, and then, throwing her arms wide, she seemed as if about to enclose Miss Dalton in a fast embrace; and so, doubtless, had she done, if Kate had responded to the sign. A deep and very formal courtesy was, however, her only acknowledgment of this spontaneous burst of feeling; and Mrs. Ricketts, like a skilful general, at once changing her plan of attack, converted her ardor into astonishment, and exclaimed,

“Did you ever see such a resemblance? Could you believe it possible, Martha? A thousand apologies, my dear Miss Dalton, for this rudeness; but you are so wonderfully like our dear, dear friend Lady Caroline Montressor, that I actually forgot myself. Pray forgive me, and let me present my sister, Miss Ricketts. My brother, Mr. Scroope Purvis, Miss Dalton.”

The ceremonial of introduction over, and Mrs. Ricketts being at last seated, a very tedious operation, in which the arrangement of cushions, pillows, and footstools played a conspicuous part, that bland lady began, in her very softest of voices,

“This, indeed, repays me, amply, fully repays me! eh, Martha?”

“Quite so, sister,” responded Martha, in a meek whisper.

“A poor invalid as I am, rarely rising from a sofa except to snatch the perfumed odors of a violet in spring, or to listen to the murmurs of a rippling fountain; denied all the excitements of society by a nervous temperament so finely strung as to be jarred by contact, even the remotest, with inferior souls think of what ecstasy a moment like this affords me!”

As Kate was profoundly ignorant to what happy combination of circumstances this blissful state could be attributed, she could only smile courteously, and mutter some vague expressions of her pleasure, satisfaction, and so forth.

“Eve in her own paradise!” exclaimed Mrs. Ricketts, as she turned her eyes from Kate to the gorgeous chamber in which they were seated. “May I ask if the taste of these decorations be yours, Miss Dalton?”

“Lady Hester Onslow’s, madam,” said Kate, quietly.

“I declare, I like these hangings better than ‘Gobelins’ they are lighter and more graceful. You remember, Martha, I told the dear Queen of Saxony that blue velvet would go so well with her small pictures. We discussed the point every morning at breakfast for a week, and the poor dear King at last called us the ‘blue devils; ‘very happy, wasn’t it, Miss Dalton? But he speaks English just like one of ourselves.”

“These are all Dutch pictures, I perceive,” said Purvis, who, with his poodle under his arm, was making a tour of the room, peering into everything, opening books, prying into china jars, and spying into work-boxes, as though in search of some missing article.

“I ‘m tired of Wou-Wou-Wou – ” Here the poodle barked, doubtless in the belief that he was responding to an invitation. “Down, Fidele! Wou-ver-mans,” gulped out Purvis. “He ‘s always the same.”

“But those dear white palfreys, how I love them! I always have a white horse, out of regard for Wouvermans.”

Kate thought of the poor gray in the courtyard, and said nothing.