The Bramleighs of Bishop's Folly

“Who talks of old Borchester?” said he, gayly. “My father used to tell me such stories of him. They sent him over to Hanover once, to report on the available Princesses to marry the Prince: and, egad! he played his part so well that one of them – Princess Helena I think it was – fell in love with him; and if it was ‘t that he had been married already, – May I offer my arm?” And the rest of the story was probably told as he led Miss Bramleigh in to dinner.

Mr. Cutbill only arrived as they took their places, and slunk into a seat beside Jack, whom, of all the company, he judged would be the person he could feel most at ease with.

“What a fop!” whispered Jack, with a glance at the peer.

“Is n’t he an old humbug?” muttered Cutbill. “Do you know how he managed to appear in so short a time? We stopped two hours at a little inn on the road while he made his toilette; and the whole get-up – paint and padding and all – was done then. The great fur pelisse, in which he made his entrance into the drawing-room, removed, he was in full dinner-dress underneath. He’s the best actor living.”

“Have you known him long?”

“Oh, yes! I know all of them,” said he, with a little gesture of his hand: “that is, they take devilish good care to know me.”

“Indeed!” exclaimed Jack, in the tone which seemed to ask for some explanation.

“You see, here’s how it is,” said Cutbill, as he bent over his plate and talked in a tone cautiously subdued: “All those swells – especially that generation yonder – are pretty nigh aground. They have been living for forty or fifty years at something like five times their income; and if it had n’t been for this sudden rush of prosperity in England, caused by railroads, mines, quarries, or the like, these fellows would have been swept clean away. He ‘s watching me now. I ‘ll go on by-and-by. Have you any good hunting down here, Colonel Bramleigh?” asked he of the host, who sat half hid by a massive centrepiece.

“You ‘ll have to ask my sons what it’s like; and I take it they ‘ll give you a mount too.”

“With pleasure, Mr. Cutbill,” cried Augustus. “If we have no frost, we’ll show you some sport on Monday next.”

“Delighted, – I like hunting of all things.”

“And you, my Lord, is it a favorite sport of yours?” asked Temple.

“A long life out of England – which has unfortunately been my case – makes a man sadly out of gear in all these things; but I ride, of course,” and he said the last words as though he meant to imply “because I do everything.”

“I’ll send over to L’Estrange,” said Augustus; “he’s sure to know where the meet is for Monday.”

“Who is L’Estrange?” asked his Lordship.

“Our curate here,” replied Colonel Bramleigh, smiling. “An excellent fellow, and a very agreeable neighbor.”

“Our only one, by Jove!” cried Jack.

“How gallant to forget Julia!” said Nelly, tartly.

“And the fair Julia, – who is she?” asked Lord Culduff.

“L’Estrange’s sister,” replied Augustus.

“And now, my Lord,” chimed in Jack, “you know the whole neighborhood, if we don’t throw in a cross-grained old fellow, a half-pay lieutenant of the Buffs.”

“Small but select,” said Lord Culduff, quietly. “May I venture to ask you, Colonel Bramleigh, what determined you in your choice of a residence here?”

“I suppose I must confess it was mainly a money consideration. The bank held some rather heavy mortgages over this property, which they were somewhat disposed to consider as capable of great improvement, and as I was growing a little wearied of City life, I fancied I ‘d come over here and – ”

“Regenerate Ireland, eh?”

“Or, at least, live very economically,” added he, laughing.

“I may be permitted to doubt that part of the experiment,” said Lord Culduff, as his eyes ranged over the table, set forth in all the splendor that plate and glass could bestow.

“I suspect papa means a relative economy,” said Marion, “something very different from our late life in England.”

“Yes, my last three years have been very costly ones,” said Colonel Bramleigh, sighing. “I lost heavily by the sale of Earlshope, and my unfortunate election, too, was an expensive business. It will take some retrenchment to make up for all this. I tell the boys they’ll have to sell their hunters, or be satisfied, like the parson, to hunt one day a week.” The self-complacent, mock humility of this speech was all too apparent.

“I take it,” said Culduff, authoritatively, “that every gentleman” – and he laid a marked emphasis on the “gentleman” – “must at some period or the other of his life have spent more money than he ought – more than was subsequently found to be convenient.”

“I have repeatedly done so,” broke in Cutbill, “and invariably been sorry for it afterwards, inasmuch as each time one does it the difficulty increases.”

“Harder to get credit, you mean?” cried Jack, laughing.

“Just so; and one’s friends get tired of helping one. Just as they told me, there was a fellow at Blackwall used to live by drowning himself. He was regularly fished up once a week, and stomach-pumped and ‘cordialled’ and hot-blanketed, and brought round by the Humane Society’s people, till at last they came to discover the dodge, and refused to restore him any more; and now he’s reduced to earn his bread as a water-bailiff – cruel hard on a fellow of such an ingenious turn of mind.”

While the younger men laughed at Cutbill’s story, Lord Culduff gave him a reproving glance from the other end of the table, palpably intended to recall him to a more sedate and restricted conviviality.

“Are we not to accompany you?” said Lord Culduff to Marion, as she and her sister arose to retire. “Is this barbarism of sitting after dinner maintained here?”

“Only till we finish this decanter of claret, my Lord,” said Colonel Bramleigh, who caught what was not intended for his ears.

“Ask the governor to give you a cigar,” whispered Jack to Cutbill; “he has some rare Cubans.”

“Now, this is what I call regular jolly,” said Cutbill, as he drew a small spider table to his side, and furnished himself with a glass and a decanter of Madeira, “and,” added he in a whisper to Jack, “let us not be in a hurry to leave it. We only want one thing to be perfect, Colonel Bramleigh.”

“If I can only supply it, pray command me, Mr. Cutbill.”

“I want this, then,” said Cutbill, pursing up his mouth at one side, while he opened the other as if to emit the smoke of a cigar.

“Do you mean smoking?” asked Colonel Bramleigh, in a half-irritable tone.

“You have it.”

“Are you a smoker, my Lord?” asked the host, turning to Lord Culduff.

“A very moderate one. A cigarette after breakfast, and another at bed time, are about my excesses in that direction.”

“Then I’m afraid I must defraud you of the full measure of your enjoyment, Mr. Cutbill; we never smoke in the dining-room. Indeed, I myself have a strong aversion to tobacco, and though I have consented to build a smoking-room, it is as far off from me as I have been able to contrive it.”

“And what about his choice Cubans, eh?” whispered Cutbill to Jack.

“All hypocrisy. You’ll find a box of them in your dressing-room,” said Jack, in an undertone, “when you go upstairs.”

Temple now led his distinguished friend into those charming pasturages where the flocks of diplomacy love to dwell, and where none other save themselves could find herbage. Nor was it amongst great political events, of peace or war, alliances or treaties, they wandered – for perhaps in these the outer world, taught as they are by newspapers, might have taken some interest and some share. No; their talk was all of personalities, of Russian princes and grandees of Spain, archduchesses and “marchesas,” whose crafts and subtleties, and pomps and vanities, make up a world like no other world, and play a drama of life – happily it may be for humanity – like no other drama that other men and women ever figured in. Now it is a strange fact – and I appeal to my readers if their experience will not corroborate mine – that when two men thoroughly versed in these themes will talk together upon them, exchanging their stories and mingling their comments, the rest of the company will be struck with a perfect silence, unable to join in the subject discussed, and half ashamed to introduce any ordinary matter into such high and distinguished society. And thus Lord Culduff and Temple went on for full an hour or more, pelting each other with little court scandals and small state intrigues, till Colonel Bramleigh fell asleep, and Cutbill, having finished his Madeira, would probably have followed his host’s example, when a servant announced tea, adding, in a whisper, that Mr. L’Estrange and his sister were in the drawing-room.

CHAPTER IX. OVER THE FIRE

In a large room, comfortably furnished, but in which there was a certain blending of the articles of the drawing-room with those of the dining-room, showing unmistakably the bachelor character of the owner, sat two young men at opposite sides of an ample fireplace. One sat, or rather reclined, on a small leather sofa, his bandaged leg resting on a pillow, and his pale and somewhat shrunken face evidencing the results of pain and confinement to the house. His close-cropt head and square-cut beard, and a certain mingled drollery and fierceness in the eyes, proclaimed him French, and so M. Anatole Pracontal was; though it would have been difficult to declare as much from his English, which he spoke with singular purity and the very faintest peculiarity of accent.

Opposite him sat a tall well-built man of about thirty-four or five, with regular and almost handsome features, marred, indeed, in expression by the extreme closeness of the eyes, and a somewhat long upper lip, which latter defect an incipient moustache was already concealing. The color of his hair was, however, that shade of auburn which verges on red, and is so commonly accompanied by a much freckled skin. This same hair, and hands and feet almost enormous in size, were the afflictions which imparted bitterness to a lot which many regarded as very enviable in life; for Mr. Philip Longworth was his own master, free to go where he pleased, and the owner of a very sufficient fortune. He had been brought up at Oscot, and imbibed, with a very fair share of knowledge, a large stock of that general mistrust and suspicion which is the fortune of those entrusted to priestly teaching, and which, though he had travelled largely and mixed freely with the world, still continued to cling to his manner, which might be characterized by the one word – furtive.

Longworth had only arrived that day for dinner, and the two friends were now exchanging their experience since they had parted some eight months before at the second cataract of the Nile.

“And so, Pracontal, you never got one of my letters?”

“Not one, – on my honor. Indeed, if it were not that I learned by a chance meeting with a party of English tourists at Cannes that they had met you at Cairo, I ‘d have begun to suspect you had taken a plunge into the Nile, or into Mohammedom, for which latter you were showing some disposition, you remember, when we parted.”

“True enough; and if one was sure never to turn westward again, there are many things in favor of the turban. It is the most sublime conception of egotism possible to imagine.”

“Egotism is a mistake, mon cher,” said the other; “a man’s own heart, make it as comfortable as he may, is too small an apartment to live in. I do not say this in any grand benevolent spirit. There ‘s no humbug of philanthropy in the opinion.”

“Of that I ‘m fully assured,” said Longworth, with a gravity which made the other laugh.

“No,” continued he, still laughing. “I want a larger field, a wider hunting-ground for my diversion than my own nature.”

“A disciple, in fact, of your great model, Louis Napoleon. You incline to annexations. By the way, how fares it with your new projects? Have you seen the lawyer I gave you the letter to?”

“Yes. I stayed eight days in town to confer with him. I heard from him this very day.”

“Well, what says he?”

“His letter is a very savage one. He is angry with me for having come here at all; and particularly angry because I have broken my leg, and can’t come away.”

“What does he think of your case, however?”

“He thinks it manageable. He says – as of course I knew he would say – that it demands most cautious treatment and great acuteness. There are blanks, historical blanks, to be filled up; links to connect, and such like, which will demand some time and some money. I have told him I have an inexhaustible supply of the one, but for the other I am occasionally slightly pinched.”

“It promises well, however?”

“Most hopefully. And when once I have proved myself – not always so easy as it seems – the son of my father, I am to go over and see him again in consultation.”

“Kelson is a man of station and character, and if he undertakes your cause it is in itself a strong guarantee of its goodness.”

“Why, these men take all that is offered them. They no more refuse a bad suit than a doctor rejects a hopeless patient.”

“And so will a doctor, if he happen to be an honest man,” said Longworth, half peevishly. “Just as he would also refuse to treat one who would persist in following his own caprices in defiance of all advice.”

“Which touches me. Is not it so?” said the other, laughing. “Well, I think I ought to have stayed quietly here, and not shown myself in public. All the more, since it has cost me this,” and he pointed to his leg as he spoke. “But I can’t help confessing it, Philip, the sight of those fellows in their gay scarlet, caracoling over the sward, and popping over the walls and hedges, provoked me. It was exactly like a challenge; so I felt it, at least. It was as though they said, ‘What if you come here to pit your claims against ours, and you are still not gentleman enough to meet us in a fair field and face the same perils that we do.’ And this, be it remembered, to one who had served in a cavalry regiment, and made campaigns with the Chasseurs d’Afrique. I could n’t stand it, and after the second day I mounted, and – ” a motion of his hand finished the sentence.

“All that sort of reasoning is so totally different from an Englishman’s that I am unable even to discuss it. I do not pretend to understand the refined sensibility that resents provocations which were never offered.”

“I know you don’t, and I know your countrymen do not either. You are such a practical people that your very policemen never interfere with a criminal till he has fully committed himself.”

“In plain words, we do not content ourselves with inferences. But tell me, did any of these people call to see you, or ask after you?”

“Yes, they sent the day after my disaster, and they also told the doctor to say how happy they should be if they could be of service to me. And a young naval commander, – his card is yonder, – came, I think, three times, and would have come up if I had wished to receive him; but Kelson’s letter, so angry about my great indiscretion, as he called it, made me decline the visit, and confine my acknowledgment to thanks.”

“I wonder what my old gatekeeper thought when he saw them, or their liveries in this avenue?” said Longworth, with a peculiar bitterness in his tone.

“Why, what should he think, – was there any feud between the families?”

“How could there be? These people have not been many months in Ireland. What I meant was with reference to the feud that is six centuries old, the old open ulcer, that makes all rule in this country a struggle, and all resistance to it a patriotism. Don’t you know,” asked he, almost sternly, “that I am a Papist?” “Yes, you told me so.”

“And don’t you know that my religion is not a mere barrier to my advancement in many careers of life, but is a social disqualification – that it is, like the trace of black blood in a créole, a ban excluding him from intercourse with his better-born neighbors – that I belong to a class just as much shut out from all the relations of society as were the Jews in the fifteenth century?”

“I remember that you told me so once, but I own I never fully comprehended it, nor understood how the question of a man’s faith was to decide his standing in this world, and that, being the equal of those about you in birth and condition, your religion should stamp you with inferiority.”

“But I did not tell you I was their equal,” said Longworth, with a slow and painful distinctness. “We are novi homines here; a couple of generations back we were peasants – as poor as anything you could see out of that window. By hard work and some good luck – of course there was luck in it – we emerged, and got enough together to live upon, and I was sent to a costly school, and then to college, that I might start in life the equal of my fellows. But what avails it all? To hold a station in life, to mix with the world, to associate with men educated and brought up like myself, I must quit my own country and live abroad. I know, I see, you can make nothing of this. It is out and out incomprehensible. You made a clean sweep of these things with your great Revolution of ‘93. Ours is yet to come.”

“Per Dio! I ‘d not stand it,” cried the other, passionately.

“You could n’t help it. You must stand it; at least, till such time as a good many others, equally aggrieved as yourself, resolve to risk something to change it; and this is remote enough, for there is nothing that men – I mean educated and cultivated men – are more averse to, than any open confession of feeling a social disqualification. I may tell it to you here, as we sit over the fire, but I ‘ll not go out and proclaim it, I promise you. These are confessions one keeps for the fireside.”

“And will not these people visit you?”

“Nothing less likely.”

“Nor you call upon them?”

“Certainly not.”

“And will you continue to live within an hour’s drive of each other without acquaintance or recognition?”

“Probably – at least we may salute when we meet.”

“Then I say the guillotine has done more for civilization than the schoolmaster,” cried the other. “And all this because you are a Papist?”

“Just so. I belong to a faith so deeply associated with a bygone inferiority that I am not to be permitted to emerge from it – there’s the secret of it all.”

“I ‘d rebel. I ‘d descend into the streets!”

“And you’d get hanged for your pains.”

A shrug of the shoulders was all the reply, and Longworth went on: —

“Some one once said, ‘It was better economy in a state to teach people not to steal than to build jails for the thieves;’ and so I would say to our rulers it would be cheaper to give us some of the things we ask for than to enact all the expensive measures that are taken to repress us.”

“What chance have I, then, of justice in such a country?” cried the foreigner, passionately.

“Better than in any land of Europe. Indeed I will go further, and say it is the one land in Europe where corruption is impossible on the seat of judgment. If you make out your claim, as fully as you detailed it to me, if evidence will sustain your allegations, your flag will as certainly wave over that high tower yonder as that decanter stands there.”

“Here’s to la bonne chance,” said the other, filling a bumper and drinking it off.

“You will need to be very prudent, very circumspect: two things which I suspect will cost you some trouble,” said Longworth. “The very name you will have to go by will be a difficulty. To call yourself Bramleigh will be an open declaration of war; to write yourself Pracontal is an admission that you have no claim to the other appellation.”

“It was my mother’s name. She was of a Provençal family, and the Pracontals were people of good blood.”

“But your father was always called Bramleigh?”

“My father, mon cher, had fifty aliases; he was Louis Lagrange under the Empire, Victor Cassagnac at the Restoration, Carlo Salvi when sentenced to the galleys at Naples, Niccolo Baldassare when he shot the Austrian colonel at Capua, and I believe when he was last heard of, the captain of a slaver, he was called, for shortness’ sake, ‘Brutto,’ for he was not personally attractive.”

“Then when and where was he known as Bramieigh?”

“Whenever he wrote to England. Whenever he asked for money, which, on the whole, was pretty often, he was Montagu Bramieigh.”

“To whom were these letters addressed?”

“To his father, Montagu Bramieigh, Portland Place, London. I have it all in my note-book.”

“And these appeals were responded to?”

“Not so satisfactorily as one might wish. The replies were flat refusals to give money, and rather unpleasant menaces as to police measures if the insistence were continued.

“You have some of these letters?”

“The lawyer has, I think, four of them. The last contained a bank order for five hundred francs, payable to Giacomo Lami, or order.”

“Who was Lami?”

“Lami was the name of my grandmother; her father was Giacomo. He was the old fresco-painter who came over from Rome to paint the walls of that great house yonder, and it was his daughter that Bramleigh married.”

“Which Bramleigh was the father of the present possessor of Castello?”

“Precisely. Montagu Bramleigh married my grandmother here in Ireland, and when the troubles broke out, either to save her father from the laws or to get rid of him, managed to smuggle him out of the country over to Holland – the last supposition, and the more likely, is that he sent his wife off with her father.”

“What evidence is there of this marriage?”

“It was registered in some parish authority; at least so old Giacomo’s journal records, for we have the journal, and without it we might never have known of our claim; but besides that, there are two letters of Montagu Bramleigh’s to my grandmother, written when he had occasion to leave her about ten days after their marriage, and they begin, ‘My dearest wife.’ and are signed, ‘Your affectionate husband, M. Bramleigh.’ The lawyer has all these.”

“How did it come about that a rich London banker, as Bramleigh was, should ally himself with the daughter of a working Italian tradesman?”

“Here’s the story as conveyed by old Giacomo’s notes. Bramleigh came over here to look after the progress of the works for a great man, a bishop and a lord marquis too, who was the owner of the place; he made the acquaintance of Lami and his daughters: there were two; the younger only a child, however. The eldest, Enrichetta, was very beautiful, so beautiful indeed, that Giacomo was eternally introducing her head into all his frescos; she was a blonde Italian, and made a most lovely Madonna. Old Giacomo’s journal mentions no less than eight altar-pieces where she figures, not to say that she takes her place pretty frequently in heathen society also, and if I be rightly informed, she is the centre figure of a ‘fresco’ in this very house of Castello, in a small octagon tower, the whole of which Lami painted with his own hand. Bramleigh fell in love with this girl and married her.”

“But she was a Catholic.”

“No. Lami was originally a Waldensian, and held some sort of faith, I don’t exactly know what, that claimed affinity with the English Church; at all events, the vicar here, a certain Robert Mathews – his name is in the precious journal – married them, and man and wife they were.”

“When and how did all these facts come to your knowledge?”

“As to the when and the how, the same answer will suffice. I was serving as sous-lieutenant of cavalry in Africa when news reached me that the ‘Astradella,’ the ship in which my father sailed, was lost off the Cape Verde islands, with all on board. I hastened off to Naples, where a Mr. Bolton lived, who was chief owner of the vessel, to hear what tidings had reached him of the disaster, and to learn something of my father’s affairs, for he had been, if I might employ so fine a word for so small a function, his banker for years. Indeed, but for Bolton’s friendship and protection – how earned I never knew – my father would have come to grief years before, for he was a thorough Italian, and always up to the neck in conspiracies; he had been in that Bonapartist affair at Home; was a Carbonaro and a Camorrist, and Heaven knows what besides. And though Bolton was a man very unlikely to sympathize with these opinions, I take it my respected parent must have been a bon diable that men who knew him would not willingly see wrecked and ruined. Bolton was most kind to myself personally. He received me with many signs of friendship, and without troubling me with any more details of law than were positively unavoidable, put me in possession of the little my father had left behind him, which consisted of a few hundred francs of savings and an old chest, with some older clothes and a mass of papers and letters – dangerous enough, as I discovered, to have compromised scores of people – and a strange old manuscript book, clasped and locked, called the ‘Diary of Giacomo Lami,’ with matter in it for half a dozen romances; for Giacomo, too, had the conspirator’s taste, had known Danton intimately, and was deep in the confidence of all the Irish republicans who were affiliated with the French revolutionary party. But besides this the book contained a quantity of original letters; and when mention was made in the text of this or that event, the letter which related to it, or replied to some communication about it, was appended in the original. I made this curious volume my study for weeks, till, in fact, I came to know far more about old Giacomo and his times than I ever knew about my father and his epoch. There was not a country in Europe in which he had not lived, nor, I believe, one in which he had not involved himself in some trouble. He loved his art, but he loved political plotting and conspiracy even more, and was ever ready to resign his most profitable engagement for a scheme that promised to overturn a government or unthrone a sovereign. My first thought on reading his curious reminiscences was to make them the basis of a memoir for publication. Of course they were fearfully indiscreet, and involved reputations that no one had ever thought of assailing; but they were chiefly of persons dead and gone, and it was only their memory that could suffer. I spoke to Bolton about this. He approved of the notion, principally as a means of helping me to a little money, which I stood much in need of, and gave me a letter to a friend in Paris, the well-known publisher, Lecoq, of the Rue St. Honoré.