The Bramleighs of Bishop's Folly

“Not a word. Indeed, he had little time, for we did nothing but squabble since he came in.”

“It was Harding told me. He said that Jack did not seem overjoyed at his good luck; and declared that he was not quite sure he would accept it.”

“Indeed,” said she, thoughtfully.

“That’s not the only news. Colonel Bramleigh was summoned to town by a telegram this morning, but what about I did n’t hear. If Harding knew – and I ‘m not sure that he did – he was too discreet to tell. But I am not at the end of my tidings. It seems they have discovered coal on Lord Culduff’s estate, and a great share company is going to be formed, and untold wealth to be distributed amongst the subscribers.”

“I wonder why Jack did not tell me he was going away?” said she.

“Perhaps he does not intend to go; perhaps the Colonel has gone up to try and get something better for him; perhaps – ”

“Any perhaps will do, George,” said she, like one willing to change the theme. “What do you say to my decorations? Have you no compliments to make me on my exquisite taste?”

“Harding certainly thinks well of it,” said he, not heeding her question.

“Thinks well of what, George?”

“He’s a shrewd fellow,” continued he; “and if he deems the investment good enough to venture his own money in, I suspect, Ju, we might risk ours.”

“I wish you would tell me what you are talking about; for all this is a perfect riddle to me.”

“It ‘s about vesting your two thousand pounds, Julia, which now return about seventy pounds a year, in the coal speculation. That’s what I am thinking of. Harding says, that taking a very low estimate of the success, there ought to be a profit on the shares of fifteen per cent. In fact, he said he wouldn’t go into it himself for less.”

“Why, George, why did he say this? Is there anything wrong or immoral about coal?”

“Try and be serious for one moment, Ju,” said he, with a slight touch of irritation in his voice. “What Harding evidently meant was, that a speculative enterprise was not to be deemed good if it yielded less. These shrewd men, I believe, never lay out their money without large profit.”

“And, my dear George, why come and consult me about these things? Can you imagine more hopeless ignorance than mine must be on all such questions?”

“You can understand that a sum of money yielding three hundred a year is more profitably employed than when it only returned seventy.”

“Yes; I think my intelligence can rise to that height.”

“And you can estimate, also, what increase of comfort we should have if our present income were to be more than doubled – which it would be in this way.”

“I’d deem it positive affluence, George.”

“That’s all I want you to comprehend. The next question is to get Vickars to consent; he is the surviving trustee, and you’ll have to write to him, Ju. It will come better from you than me, and say – what you can say with a safe conscience – that we are miserably poor, and that, though we pinch and save in every way we can, there’s no reaching the end of the year without a deficit in the budget.”

“I used that unlucky phrase once before, George, and he replied, ‘Why don’t you cut down the estimates?’”

“I know he did. The old curmudgeon meant I should sell Nora, and he has a son, a gentleman commoner at Cambridge, that spends more in wine-parties than our whole income.”

“But it ‘s his own, George. It is not our money he is wasting.”

“Of course it is not; but does that exempt him from all comment? Not that it matters to us, however,” added he, in a lighter tone. “Sit down, and try what you can do with the old fellow. You used to be a great pet of his once on a time.”

“Yes, he went so far as to say that if I had even twenty thousand pounds, he did n’t know a girl he ‘d rather have for a daughter-in-law.”

“He did n’t tell you that, Ju?” said L’Estrange, growing almost purple with shame and rage together.

“I pledge you my word he said it.”

“And what did you say? What did you do?”

“I wiped my eyes with my handkerchief, and told him it was for the first time in my life I felt the misery of being poor.”

“And I wager that you burst out laughing.”

“I did, George. I laughed till my sides ached. I laughed till he rushed out of the room in a fit of passion, and I declare, I don’t think he ever spoke ten words to me after.”

“This gives me scant hope of your chance of success with him.”

“I don’t know, George. All this happened ten months ago, when he came down here for the snipe-shooting. He may have forgiven, or better still, forgotten it. In any case, tell me exactly what I ‘m to write, and I ‘ll see what I can do with him.”

“You’re to say that your brother has just heard from a person, in whom he places the most perfect confidence, say Harding in short – Colonel Bramleigh’s agent – that an enterprise which will shortly be opened here offers an admirable opportunity of investment, and that as your small fortune in Consols – ”

“In what?”

“No matter. Say that as your two thousand pounds – which now yield an interest of seventy, could secure you an income fully four times that sum, you hope he will give his consent to withdraw the money from the Funds, and employ it in this speculation. I ‘d not say speculation, I ‘d call it mine at once – coal-mine.”

“But if I own this money, why must I ask Mr. Vickars’ leave to make use of it as I please?”

“He is your trustee, and the law gives him this power, Ju, till you are nineteen, which you will not be till May next.”

“He’ll scarcely be disagreeable, when his opposition must end in five months.”

“That’s what I think too, but before that five months run over the share list may be filled, and these debentures be probably double the present price.”

“I ‘m not sure I understand your reasoning, but I ‘ll go and write my letter, and you shall see if I have said all that you wished.”

CHAPTER XIV. OFFICIAL CONFIDENCES

Lord Culduff accompanied Colonel Bramleigh to town. He wanted a renewal of his leave, and deemed it better to see the head of the department in person than to address a formal demand to the office. Colonel Bramleigh, too, thought that his Lordship’s presence might be useful when the day of action had arrived respecting the share company – a lord in the City having as palpable a value as the most favorable news that ever sent up the Funds.

When they reached London they separated, Bramleigh taking up his quarters in the Burlington, while Lord Culduff – on pretence of running down to some noble duke’s villa near Richmond – snugly installed himself in a very modest lodging off St. James’s Street, where a former valet acted as his cook and landlord, and on days of dining out assisted at the wonderful toilet, whose success was alike the marvel and the envy of Culduff s contemporaries.

Though a man of several clubs, his Lordship’s favorite haunt was a small unimposing-looking house close to St. James’s Square, called the “Plenipo.” Its members were all diplomatists, nothing below the head of a mission being eligible for ballot. A Masonic mystery pervaded all the doings of that austere temple, whose dinners were reported to be exquisite, and whose cellar had such a fame that “Plenipo Lafitte” had a European reputation.

Now, veteran asylums have many things recommendatory about them, but from Greenwich and the Invalides downwards there is one especial vice that clings to them – they are haunts of everlasting complaint. The men who frequent them all belong to the past, their sympathies, their associations, their triumphs and successes, all pertain to the bygone. Harping eternally over the frivolity, the emptiness, and sometimes the vulgarity of the present, they urge each other on to most exaggerated notions of the time when they were young, and a deprecatory estimate of the world then around them.

It is not alone that the days of good dinners and good conversation have passed away, but even good manners have gone, and more strangely too, good looks. “I protest you don’t see such women now” – one of these bewigged and rouged old debauchees would say, as he gazed at the slow procession moving on to a drawing-room, and his compeers would concur with him, and wonderingly declare that the thing was inexplicable.

In the sombre-looking breakfast-room of this austere temple, Lord Culduff sat reading the “Times.” A mild, soft rain was falling without; the water dripping tepid and dirty through the heavy canopy of a London fog; and a large coal fire blazed within – that fierce furnace which seems so congenial to English taste; not impossibly because it recalls the factory and the smelting-house – the “sacred fire” that seems to inspire patriotism by the suggestion of industry.

Two or three others sat at tables through the room, all so wonderfully alike in dress, feature, and general appearance, that they almost seemed reproductions of the same figure by a series of mirrors; but they were priests of the same “caste,” whose forms of thought and expression were precisely the same; and thus as they dropped their scant remarks on the topics of the day, there was not an observation or a phrase of one that might not have fallen from any of the others.

“So,” cried one, “they ‘re going to send the Grand Cross to the Duke of Hochmaringen. That will be a special mission. I wonder who ‘ll get it?”

“Cloudesley, I’d say,” observed another; “he’s always on the watch for anything that comes into the ‘extraordinaries.’”

“It will not be Cloudesley,” said a third. “He stayed away a year and eight months when they sent him to Tripoli, and there was a rare jaw about it for the estimates.”

“Hochmaringen is near Baden, and not a bad place for the summer,” said Culduff. “The duchess, I think, was daughter of the margravine.”

“Niece, not daughter,” said a stern-looking man, who never turned his eyes from his newspaper.

“Niece or daughter, it matters little which,” said Culduff, irritated at correction on such a point.

“I protest I ‘d rather take a turn in South Africa,” cried another, “than accept one of those missions to Central Germany.”

“You ‘re right, Upton,” said a voice from the end of the room; “the cookery is insufferable.”

“And the hours. You retire to bed at ten.”

“And the ceremonial. Blounte never threw off the lumbago he got from bowing at the court of Bratensdorf.”

“They ‘re ignoble sort of things, at the best, and should never be imposed on diplomatic men. These investitures should always be entrusted to court functionaries,” said Culduff, haughtily. “If I were at the head of F. O., I’d refuse to charge one of the ‘line’ with such a mission.”

And now something that almost verged on an animated discussion ensued as to what was and what was not the real province of diplomacy; a majority inclining to the opinion that it was derogatory to the high dignity of the calling to meddle with what, at best, was the function of the mere courtier.

“Is that Culduff driving away in that cab?” cried one, as he stood at the window.

“He has carried away my hat, I see, by mistake,” said another. “What is he up to at this hour of the morning?”

“I think I can guess,” said the grim individual who had corrected him in the matter of genealogy; “he’s off to F. O. to ask for the special mission he has just declared that none of us should stoop to accept.”

“You ‘ve hit it, Grindesley,” cried another. “I ‘ll wager a pony you ‘re right.”

“It’s so like him.”

“After all, it’s the sort of thing he’s best up to. La Ferronaye told me he was the best master of the ceremonies in Europe.”

“Why come amongst us at all, then? Why not get himself made a gold-stick, and follow the instincts of his genius?”

“Well, I believe he wants it badly,” said one who affected a tone of half kindliness. “They tell me he has not eight hundred a year left him.”

“Not four. I doubt if he could lay claim to three.”

“He never had in his best day above four or five thousand, though he tells you of his twenty-seven or twenty-eight.”

“He had originally about six; but he always lived at the rate of twelve or fifteen, and in mere ostentation too.”

“So I ‘ve always heard.” And then there followed a number of little anecdotes of Culduff’s selfishness, his avarice, his meanness, and such like, told with such exactitude as to show that every act of these men’s lives was scrupulously watched, and when occasion offered mercilessly recorded.

While they thus sat in judgment over him, Lord Culduff himself was seated at a fire in a dingy old room in Downing Street, the Chief Secretary for Foreign Affairs opposite him. They were talking in a tone of easy familiarity, as men might who occupied the same social station, a certain air of superiority, however, being always apparent in the manner of the Minister towards the subordinate.

“I don’t think you can ask for this, Culduff,” said the great man, as he puffed his cigar tranquilly in front of him. “You’ve had three of these special missions already.”

“And for the simple reason that I was the one man in England who knew how to do them.”

“We don’t dispute the way you did them; we only say all the prizes in the wheel should not fall to the same man.”

“You have had my proxy for the last five years.”

“And we have acknowledged the support – acknowledged it by more than professions.”

“I can only say this, that if I had been with the other side, I ‘d have met somewhat different treatment.”

“Don’t believe it, Culduff. Every party that is in power inherits its share of obligations. We have never disowned those we owe to you.”

“And why am I refused this, then?”

“If you wanted other reasons than those I have given you, I might be able to adduce them – not willingly indeed – but under pressure, and especially in strict confidence.” “Reasons against my having the mission?”

“Reasons against your having the mission.”

“You amaze me, my Lord. I almost doubt that I have heard you aright I must, however, insist on your explaining yourself. Am I to understand that there are personal grounds of unfitness?”

The other bowed in assent.

“Have the kindness to let me know them.”

“First of all, Culduff, this is to be a family mission – the duchess is a connection of our own royal house – and a certain degree of display and consequent expense will be required. Your fortune does not admit of this.”

“Push on to the more cogent reason, my Lord,” said Culduff, stiffly.

“Here, then, is the more cogent reason. The court has not forgotten – what possibly the world may have forgotten – some of those passages in your life for which you, perhaps, have no other remorse than that they are not likely to recur; and as you have given no hostages for good behavior, in the shape of a wife, the court, I say, is sure to veto your appointment. You see it all as clearly as I do.”

“So far as I do see,” said Culduff, slowly: “the first objection is my want of fortune, the second, my want of a wife?”

“Exactly so.”

“Well, my Lord, I am able to meet each of these obstacles; my agent has just discovered coal on one of my Irish estates, and I am now in town to make arrangements on a large scale to develop the source of wealth. As to the second disability, I shall pledge myself to present the Viscountess Culduff at the next drawing-room.”

“Married already?”

“No, but I may be within a few weeks. In fact, I mean to place myself in such a position, that no one holding your office can pass me over by a pretext, or affect to ignore my claim by affirming that I labor under a disability.”

“This sounds like menace, does it not?” said the other as he threw his cigar impatiently from him.

“A mere protocol, my Lord, to denote intention.”

“Well, I’ll submit your name. I’ll go further, – I’ll support it. Don’t leave town for a day or two. Call on Beadlesworth and see Repsley; tell him what you ‘ve said to me. If you could promise it was one of his old maiden sisters that you thought of making Lady Culduff, the thing could be clenched at once. But I take it you have other views?”

“I have other views,” said he, gravely.

“I’m not indiscreet, and I shall not ask you more on that head. By the way, is n’t your leave up, or nearly up?”

“It expired on Wednesday last, and I want it renewed for two months.”

“Of course, if we send you on this mission, you ‘ll not want the leave. I had something else to say. What was it?”

“I have not the very vaguest idea.”

“Oh! I remember. It was to recommend you not to take your wife from the stage. There’s a strong prejudice in a certain quarter as to that – in fact, I may say it couldn’t be got over.”

“I may relieve you of any apprehensions on that score. Indeed, I don’t know what fact in my life should expose me to the mere suspicion.”

“Nothing, nothing – except that impulsive generosity of your disposition, which might lead you to do what other men would stop short to count the cost of.”

“It would never lead me to derogate, my Lord,” said he, proudly, as he took his hat, and bowing haughtily left the room.

“The greatest ass in the whole career, and the word is a bold one,” said the Minister, as the door closed. “Meanwhile, I must send in his name for this mission, which he is fully equal to. What a happy arrangement it is, that in an age when our flunkies aspire to be gentlemen, there are gentlemen who ask nothing better than to be flunkies!”

CHAPTER XV. WITH HIS LAWYER

Though Colonel Bramleigh’s visit to town was supposed to be in furtherance of that speculation by which Lord Culduff calculated on wealth and splendor, he had really another object, and while Culduff imagined him to be busy in the City, and deep in shares and stock lists, he was closely closeted with his lawyer, and earnestly poring over a mass of time-worn letters and documents, carefully noting down dates, docketing, and annotating, in a way that showed what importance he attached to the task before him.

“I tell you what, Sedley,” said he, as he threw his pen disdainfully from him, and lay back in his chair, “the whole of this move is a party dodge. It is part and parcel of that vile persecution with which the Tory faction pursued me during my late canvass. You remember their vulgar allusions to my father, the brewer, and their coarse jest about my frothy oratory? This attack is but the second act of the same drama.”

“I don’t think so,” mildly rejoined the other party. “Conflicts are sharp enough while the struggle lasts; but they rarely carry their bitterness beyond the day of battle.”

“That is an agent’s view of the matter,” said Bramleigh, with asperity. “The agent always persists in believing the whole thing a sham fight; but though men do talk a great deal of rot and humbug about their principles on the hustings, their personal feelings are just as real, just as acute, and occasionally just as painful, as on any occasion in their lives; and I repeat to you, the trumped-up claim of this foreigner is neither more nor less than a piece of party malignity.”

“I cannot agree with you. The correspondence we have just been looking at shows how upwards of forty years ago the same pretensions were put forward, and a man calling himself Montagu Lami Bramleigh declared he was the rightful heir to your estates.”

“A rightful heir whose claims could be always compromised by a ten-pound note was scarcely very dangerous.”

“Why make any compromise at all if the fellow was clearly an impostor?”

“For the very reason that you yourself now counsel a similar course: to avoid the scandal of a public trial. To escape all those insolent comments which a party press is certain to pass on a political opponent.”

“That could scarcely have been apprehended from the Bramleigh I speak of, who was clearly poor, illiterate, and friendless; whereas the present man has, from some source or other, funds to engage eminent counsel and retain one of the first men at the bar.”

“I protest, Sedley, you puzzle me,” said Bramleigh, with an angry sparkle in his eye. “A few moments back you treated all this pretension as a mere pretext for extorting money, and now you talk of this fellow and his claim as subjects that may one day be matter for the decision of a jury. Can you reconcile two views so diametrically opposite?”

“I think I can. It is at law as in war. The feint may be carried on to a real attack whenever the position assailed be possessed of an over-confidence or but ill defended. It might be easy enough, perhaps, to deal with this man. Let him have some small success, however; let him gain a verdict, for instance, in one of those petty suits for ejectment, and his case at once becomes formidable.”

“All this,” said Bramleigh, “proceeds on the assumption that there is something in the fellow’s claim?”

“Unquestionably.”

“I declare,” said Bramleigh, rising and pacing the room, “I have not temper for this discussion. My mind has not been disciplined to that degree of refinement that I can accept a downright swindle as a demand founded on justice.”

“Let us prove it a swindle, and there is an end of it.”

“And will you tell me, sir,” said he, passionately, “that every gentleman holds his estates on the condition that the title may be contested by any impostor who can dupe people into advancing money to set the law in motion?”

“When such proceedings are fraudulent a very heavy punishment awaits them.”

“And what punishment of the knave equals the penalty inflicted on the honest man in exposure, shame, insolent remarks, and worse than even these, a contemptuous pity for that reverse of fortune which newspaper writers always announce as an inevitable consummation?”

“These are all hard things to bear, but I don’t suspect they ever deterred any man from holding an estate.”

The half jocular tone of his remark rather jarred on Bramleigh’s sensibilities, and he continued to walk the room in silence; at last, stopping short, he wheeled round and said, —

“Do you adhere to your former opinion? would you try a compromise?”

“I would. The man has a case quite good enough to interest a speculative lawyer – good enough to go before a jury – good enough for everything but success. One half what the defence would cost you will probably satisfy his expectations, not to speak of all you will spare yourself in unpleasantness and exposure.”

“It is a hard thing to stoop to,” said Bramleigh, painfully.

“It need not be, at least not to the extent you imagine; and when you throw your eye over your lawyer’s bill of costs, the phrase ‘incidental expenses’ will spare your feelings any more distinct reference to this transaction.”

“A most considerate attention. And now for the practical part. Who is this man’s lawyer?”

“A most respectable practitioner, Kelson, of Temple Court. A personal friend of my own.”

“And what terms would you propose?”

“I ‘d offer five thousand, and be prepared to go to eight, possibly to ten.”

“To silence a mere menace?”

“Exactly. It’s a mere menace to-day, but six months hence it may be something more formidable. It is a curious case, cleverly contrived and ingeniously put together. Don’t say that we could n’t smash it; such carpentry always has a chink or an open somewhere. Meanwhile the scandal is spreading over not only England, but over the world, and no matter how favorable the ultimate issue, there will always remain in men’s minds the recollection that the right to your estate was contested, and that you had to defend your possession.”

“I had always thought till now,” said Bramleigh, slowly, “that the legal mind attached very little importance to the flying scandals that amuse society. You appear to accord them weight and influence.”

“I am not less a man of the world because I am a lawyer, Colonel Bramleigh,” said the other, half tartly.

“If this must be done the sooner it be over the better. A man of high station – a peer – is at this moment paying such attention to one of my daughters that I may expect at any moment, to-day perhaps, to receive a formal proposal for her hand. I do not suspect that the threat of an unknown claimant to my property would disturb his Lordship’s faith in my security or my station, but the sensitive dislike of men of his class to all publicity that does not redound to honor or distinction – the repugnance to whatever draws attention to them for aught but court favor or advancement – might well be supposed to have its influence with him, and I think it would be better to spare him – to spare us, too – this exposure.”