Part 24 (1/2)
Why, when you were in the West Indies, if you ever read the English newspapers, you must have read of the fame of Miss Folthorpe. Mrs.
Sherrick is no other than the famous artist, who, after three years of brilliant triumphs at the Scala, the Pergola, the San Carlo, the opera in England, forsook her profession, rejected a hundred suitors, and married Sherrick, who was Mr. c.o.x's lawyer, who failed, as everybody knows, as manager of Drury Lane. Sherrick, like a man of spirit, would not allow his wife to sing in public after his marriage; but in private society, of course, she is welcome to perform: and now with her daughter, who possesses a n.o.ble contralto voice, she takes her place royally at the piano, and the two sing so magnificently that everybody in the room, with one single exception, is charmed and delighted; and that little Miss Cann herself creeps up the stairs, and stands with Mrs.
Ridley at the door to listen to the music.
Miss Sherrick looks doubly handsome as she sings. Clive Newcome is in a rapture; so is good-natured Miss Rosey, whose little heart beats with pleasure, and who says quite unaffectedly to Miss Sherrick, with delight and grat.i.tude beaming from her blue eyes, ”Why did you ask me to sing, when you sing so wonderfully, so beautifully, yourself? Do not leave the piano, please--do sing again!” And she puts out a kind little hand towards the superior artist, and, blus.h.i.+ng, leads her back to the instrument. ”I'm sure me and Emily will sing for you as much as you like, dear,” says Mrs. Sherrick, nodding to Rosey good-naturedly. Mrs.
Mackenzie, who has been biting her lips and drumming the time on a side-table, forgets at last the pain of being vanquished in admiration of the conquerors. ”It was cruel of you not to tell us, Mr. Honeyman,”
she says, ”of the--of the treat you had in store for us. I had no idea we were going to meet professional people; Mrs. Sherrick's singing is indeed beautiful.”
”If you come up to our place in the Regent's Park, Mr. Newcome,” Mr.
Sherrick says, ”Mrs. S. and Emily will give you as many songs as you like. How do you like the house in Fitzroy Square? Anything wanting doing there? I'm a good landlord to a good tenant. Don't care what I spend on my houses. Lose by 'em sometimes. Name a day when you'll come to us; and I'll ask some good fellows to meet you. Your father and Mr.
Binnie came once. That was when you were a young chap. They didn't have a bad evening, I believe. You just come and try us--I can give you as good a gla.s.s of wine as most, I think,” and he smiles, perhaps thinking of the champagne which Mr. Warrington had slighted. ”I've ad the close carriage for my wife this evening,” he continues, looking out of window at a very handsome brougham which has just drawn up there. ”That little pair of horses steps prettily together, don't they? Fond of horses? I know you are. See you in the Park; and going by our house sometimes. The Colonel sits a horse uncommonly well: so do you, Mr. Newcome. I've often said, 'Why don't they get off their horses and say, Sherrick, we're come for a bit of lunch and a gla.s.s of Sherry?' Name a day, sir. Mr. P., will you be in it?”
Clive Newcome named a day, and told his father of the circ.u.mstance in the evening. The Colonel looked grave. ”There was something which I did not quite like about Mr. Sherrick,” said that acute observer of human nature. ”It was easy to see that the man is not quite a gentleman. I don't care what a man's trade is, Clive. Indeed, who are we, to give ourselves airs upon that subject? But when I am gone, my boy, and there is n.o.body near you who knows the world as I do, you may fall into designing hands, and rogues may lead you into mischief: keep a sharp look-out, Clive. Mr. Pendennis, here, knows that there are designing fellows abroad” (and the dear old gentleman gives a very knowing nod as he speaks). ”When I am gone, keep the lad from harm's way, Pendennis.
Meanwhile Mr. Sherrick has been a very good and obliging landlord; and a man who sells wine may certainly give a friend a bottle. I am glad you had a pleasant evening, boys. Ladies, I hope you have had a pleasant afternoon. Miss Rosey, you are come back to make tea for the old gentlemen? James begins to get about briskly now. He walked to Hanover Square, Mrs. Mackenzie, without hurting his ankle in the least.”
”I am almost sorry that he is getting well,” says Mrs. Mackenzie sincerely. ”He won't want us when he is quite cured.”
”Indeed, my dear creature!” cries the Colonel, taking her pretty hand and kissing it; ”he will want you, and he shall want you. James no more knows the world than Miss Rosey here; and if I had not been with him, would have been perfectly unable to take care of himself. When I am gone to India, somebody must stay with him; and--and my boy must have a home to go to,” says the kind soldier, his voice dropping. ”I had been in hopes that his own relatives would have received him more, but never mind about that,” he cried more cheerfully. ”Why, I may not be absent a year! I perhaps need not go at all--I am second for promotion. A couple of our old generals may drop any day; and when I get my regiment I come back to stay, to live at home. Meantime, whilst I am gone, my dear lady, you will take care of James; and you will be kind to my boy.”
”That I will!” said the widow, radiant with pleasure, and she took one of Clive's hands and pressed it for an instant; and from Clive's father's kind face there beamed out that benediction which always made his countenance appear to me among the most beautiful of human faces.
CHAPTER XXIV. In which the Newcome Brothers once more meet together in Unity
His narrative, as the judicious reader no doubt is aware, is written maturely and at ease, long after the voyage is over, whereof it recounts the adventures and perils; the winds adverse and favourable; the storms, shoals, s.h.i.+pwrecks, islands, and so forth, which Clive Newcome met in his early journey in life. In such a history events follow each other without necessarily having a connection with one another. One s.h.i.+p crosses another s.h.i.+p, and after a visit from one captain to his comrade, they sail away each on his course. The Clive Newcome meets a vessel which makes signals that she is short of bread and water; and after supplying her, our captain leaves her to see her no more. One or two of the vessels with which we commenced the voyage together, part company in a gale, and founder miserably; others, after being wofully battered in the tempest, make port, or are cast upon surprising islands where all sorts of unlooked-for prosperity awaits the lucky crew. Also, no doubt, the writer of the book, into whose hands Clive Newcome's logs have been put, and who is charged with the duty of making two octavo volumes out of his friend's story, dresses up the narrative in his own way; utters his own remarks in place of Newcome's; makes fanciful descriptions of individuals and incidents with which he never could have been personally acquainted; and commits blunders, which the critics will discover. A great number of the descriptions in Cook's Voyages, for instance, were notoriously invented by Dr. Hawkesworth, who ”did” the book: so in the present volumes, where dialogues are written down, which the reporter could by no possibility have heard, and where motives are detected which the persons actuated by them certainly never confided to the writer, the public must once for all be warned that the author's individual fancy very likely supplies much of the narrative; and that he forms it as best he may, out of stray papers, conversations reported to him, and his knowledge, right or wrong, of the characters of the persons engaged.
And, as is the case with the most orthodox histories, the writer's own guesses or conjectures are printed in exactly the same type as the most ascertained patent facts. I fancy, for my part, that the speeches attributed to Clive, the Colonel, and the rest, are as authentic as the orations in Sall.u.s.t or Livy, and only implore the truth-loving public to believe that incidents here told, and which pa.s.sed very probably without witnesses, were either confided to me subsequently as compiler of this biography, or are of such a nature that they must have happened from what we know happened after. For example, when you read such words as QVE ROMANVS on a battered Roman stone, your profound antiquarian knowledge enables you to a.s.sert that SENATVS POPVLVS was also inscribed there at some time or other. You take a mutilated statue of Mars, Bacchus, Apollo, or Virorum, and you pop him on a wanting hand, an absent foot, or a nose which time or barbarians have defaced. You tell your tales as you can, and state the facts as you think they must have been. In this manner, Mr. James (historiographer to Her Majesty), t.i.tus Livius, Professor Alison, Robinson Crusoe, and all historians proceeded.
Blunders there must be in the best of these narratives, and more a.s.serted than they can possibly know or vouch for.
To recur to our own affairs, and the subject at present in hand, I am obliged here to supply from conjecture a few points of the history, which I could not know from actual experience or hearsay. Clive, let us say, is Roma.n.u.s, and we must add Senatus Populusque to his inscription.
After Mrs. Mackenzie and her pretty daughter had been for a few months in London, which they did not think of quitting, although Mr. Binnie's wounded little leg was now as well and as brisk as ever it had been, a redintegration of love began to take place between the Colonel and his relatives in Park Lane. How should we know that there had ever been a quarrel, or at any rate a coolness? Thomas Newcome was not a man to talk at length of any such matter; though a word or two occasionally dropped in conversation by the simple gentleman might lead persons who chose to interest themselves about his family affairs to form their own opinions concerning them. After that visit of the Colonel and his son to Newcome, Ethel was constantly away with her grandmother. The Colonel went to see his pretty little favourite at Brighton, and once, twice, thrice, Lady Kew's door was denied to him. The knocker of that door could not be more fierce than the old lady's countenance, when Newcome met her in her chariot driving on the cliff. Once, forming the loveliest of a charming Amazonian squadron, led by Mr. Whiskin, the riding-master, when the Colonel encountered his pretty Ethel, she greeted him affectionately, it is true; there was still the sweet look of candour and love in her eyes; but when he rode up to her she looked so constrained, when he talked about Clive, so reserved, when he left her, so sad, that he could not but feel pain and commiseration. Back he went to London, having in a week only caught this single glance of his darling.
This event occurred while Clive was painting his picture of the ”Battle of a.s.saye” before mentioned, during the struggles incident on which composition he was not thinking much about Miss Ethel, or his papa, or any other subject but his great work. Whilst a.s.saye was still in progress, Thomas Newcome must have had an explanation with his sister-in-law, Lady Anne, to whom he frankly owned the hopes which he had entertained for Clive, and who must as frankly have told the Colonel that Ethel's family had very different views for that young lady to those which the simple Colonel had formed. A generous early attachment, the Colonel thought, is the safeguard of a young man. To love a n.o.ble girl; to wait a while and struggle, and haply do some little achievement in order to win her; the best task to which his boy could set himself.
If two young people so loving each other were to marry on rather narrow means, what then? A happy home was better than the finest house in Mayfair; a generous young fellow, such as, please G.o.d, his son was--loyal, upright, and a gentleman--might pretend surely to his kinswoman's hand without derogation; and the affection he bore Ethel himself was so great, and the sweet regard with which she returned it, that the simple father thought his kindly project was favoured by Heaven, and prayed for its fulfilment, and pleased himself to think, when his campaigns were over, and his sword hung on the wall, what a beloved daughter he might have to soothe and cheer his old age. With such a wife for his son, and child for himself, he thought the happiness of his last years might repay him for friendless boyhood, lonely manhood, and cheerless exile; and he imparted his simple scheme to Ethel's mother, who no doubt was touched as he told his story; for she always professed regard and respect for him, and in the differences which afterwards occurred in the family, and the quarrels which divided the brothers, still remained faithful to the good Colonel.
But Barnes Newcome, Esquire, was the bead of the house, and the governor of his father and all Sir Brian's affairs; and Barnes Newcome, Esquire, hated his cousin Clive, and spoke of him as a beggarly painter, an impudent sn.o.b, an infernal young puppy, and so forth; and Barnes with his usual freedom of language imparted his opinions to his Uncle Hobson at the bank, and Uncle Hobson carried them home to Mrs. Newcome in Bryanstone Square; and Mrs. Newcome took an early opportunity of telling the Colonel her opinion on the subject, and of bewailing that love for aristocracy which she saw actuated some folks; and the Colonel was brought to see that Barnes was his boy's enemy, and words very likely pa.s.sed between them, for Thomas Newcome took a new banker at this time, and, as Clive informed me, was in very great dudgeon because Hobson Brothers wrote to him to say that he had overdrawn his account. ”I am sure there is some screw loose,” the sagacious youth remarked to me; ”and the Colonel and the people in Park Lane are at variance, because he goes there very little now; and he promised to go to Court when Ethel was presented, and he didn't go.”
Some months after the arrival of Mr. Binnie's niece and sister in Fitzroy Square, the fraternal quarrel between the Newcomes must have come to an end--for that time at least--and was followed by a rather ostentatious reconciliation. And pretty little Rosey Mackenzie was the innocent and unconscious cause of this amiable change in the minds of the three brethren, as I gathered from a little conversation with Mrs.
Newcome, who did me the honour to invite me to her table. As she had not vouchsafed this hospitality to me for a couple of years previously, and perfectly stifled me with affability when we met,--as her invitation came quite at the end of the season, when almost everybody was out of town, and a dinner to a man is no compliment,--I was at first for declining this invitation, and spoke of it with great scorn when Mr.
Newcome orally delivered it to me at Bays's Club.
”What,” said I, turning round to an old man of the world, who happened to be in the room at the time, ”what do these people mean by asking a fellow to dinner in August, and taking me up after dropping me for two years?”
”My good fellow,” says my friend--it was my kind old Uncle Major Pendennis, indeed--”I have lived long enough about town never to ask myself questions of that sort. In the world people drop you and take you up every day. You know Lady Cheddar by sight? I have known her husband for forty years: I have stayed with them in the country, for weeks at a time. She knows me as well as she knows King Charles at Charing Cross, and a doosid deal better, and yet for a whole season she will drop me--pa.s.s me by, as if there was no such person in the world. Well, sir, what do I do? I never see her. I give you my word I am never conscious of her existence; and if I meet her at dinner, I'm no more aware of her than the fellows in the play are of Banquo. What's the end of it? She comes round--only last Toosday she came round--and said Lord Cheddar wanted me to go down to Wilts.h.i.+re. I asked after the family (you know Henry Churningham is engaged to Miss Rennet?--a doosid good match for the Cheddars). We shook hands and are as good friends as ever. I don't suppose she'll cry when I die, you know,” said the worthy old gentleman with a grin. ”Nor shall I go into very deep mourning if anything happens to her. You were quite right to say to Newcome that you did not know whether you were free or not, and would look at your engagements when you got home, and give him an answer. A fellow of that rank has no right to give himself airs. But they will, sir. Some of those bankers are as high and mighty as the oldest families. They marry n.o.blemen's daughters, by Jove, and think nothing is too good for 'em. But I should go, if I were you, Arthur. I dined there a couple of months ago; and the bankeress said something about you: that you and her nephew were much together, that you were sad wild dogs, I think--something of that sort.
'Gad, ma'am,' says I, 'boys will be boys.' 'And they grow to be men!'
says she, nodding her head. Queer little woman, devilish pompous. Dinner confoundedly long, stoopid, scientific.”
The old gentleman was on this day inclined to be talkative and confidential, and I set down some more remarks which he made concerning my friends. ”Your Indian Colonel,” says he, ”seems a worthy man.”