BY THE AUTHOR OF "GEORGE GEITH," "MAXWELL DREWITT," &c. CHAPTER XXXIX.-LAWRENCE AND PERCY. NEXT day the owner of Reach House removed himself and a few of his effects to Mrs. Pratting's first-floor, to those rooms wherein Lawrence Barbour had, at an earlier period of this story, surrounded himself with the "gobbelets" and carpet, the chairs covered in "Geneva" velvet, the sprawling Cupids, and the gimcracks, which excited at once Mrs. Jackson's admiration, and animadversion. When Lawrence changed his state and his home, he took those various belongings with him to Stepney Causeway, and the vases and the statuettes lightened up the old drawingroom where he had sung to Olivine in the semi-darkness, and the various trifles which he had purchased, in order to make his rooms look as much like her rooms as possible, now went to beautify a house, presided over by Olivine Sondes, instead of by Etta Alwyn. Only the French lithograph found no place on any of the walls. It lay, face downwards, at the bottom of a large packing-case, with much of that useless rubbish piled above it which a man accumulates in the course of time, and keeps he knows not why, for some indefinite use in a remote future. Long afterwards Olivine found the lithograph there; and, when she found it, she propped the picture up on her knees, by on her knees, by passing her arms behind it, and looked into the eyes that languished back at her from the frame, till her own were dim, till face and neck, and hair and trick of expression were all like a confused mist before her. While she sat thus preoccupied, one entered the apartment, who took the picture from her, and, placing it on the floor, set his heel on the glass, and breaking it into a hundred pieces, stamped the beauty and the likeness, and the form and the colour, out of that fair, false face. "Olivine, my darling," he said, "did we not agree that bygones were to be bygones?" and he gathered up the fragments of frame and portrait, and piled them on the fire. "Yes; but I found it," was the answer; "and I could not help feeling sorry." "You will never feel sorry about anything concerning her again, I trust," he replied; and the leaping flame curled round the frame, and the fire consumed the picture. That time had all to come, however, when Percy Forbes transferred his quarters to Mrs. Pratting's rooms, which were plainly enough furnished to have satisfied Mrs. Jackson's economical tendencies. Half-a-dozen chairs, a much-worn druggetcarpet, a couple of China shepherdesses, moreen curtains, a stand of flowers executed in cut paper, a Pembroke table, a sofa covered in haircloth, and suggestive of the extremest unrest, were all the objects wherewith Percy No. 27. was expected to feast his eyes and refresh his soul. Anything duller than the rooms, the house, the situation, and the weather, could scarcely be imagined; but Percy was indifferent to one as to another. He was martyrising himself for Olivine's sake, and a man is but a poor lover who does not rather enjoy wetting his own feet, in order that the lady of his choice may cross the ford dry. This is the only sort of chivalry permitted to nineteenth-century cavaliers; and perhaps it is as true chivalry to bear discomfort pleasurably and in silence, to the end that the loved one may not be deprived of her accustomed luxuries, as it was to run a tilt at the sound of trumpets in the days when hero nes were called Edelgitha and Rowena. Not that Percy's self-imposed penance proved agreeable to Olivine; rather the reverse, indeed. She and her husband and Mrs. Gainswoode all entreated him with much earnestness and a profusion of words not to leave Reach House; but the master thereof was inexorable. "He knew Mrs. Barbour ought to have the rooms to herself and her uncle," he observed, glancing somewhat significantly at Mrs. Gainswoode. "Besides," he added, "my hours and my ways are not the hours and ways suited for an invalid: I should only be uncomfortable myself, and make every one else in the house uncomfortable also." "Then go to Stepney Causeway," Olivine suggested, eagerly. "Do," followed Mrs. Gainswoode, "and I will return there and make your coffee for you." "Ah! madam," he said, bowing low, "I could never put you to such vile uses.' "You cannot think the pleasure it would give me," she answered. 'Pray have mercy!" he exclaimed. "Remember what a lonely man I am, and do not drive me to distraction by placing before mine eyes the prospect of a bliss I may never realise." "Really, Percy, you are too absurd," remarked Mrs. Gainswoode. "I should have thought we were too old for any absurdity of that kind." "I should have thought so too," answered Mr. Forbes; whereupon Etta bit her lip, and colouring up a little, declared he was as great a teaze as ever. "That is only your kind partiality," observed Percy. "I wish she would go to make coffee for anybody," said Olivine, the first moment she found herself alone with Percy. "For me," he suggested. "Surely you would not be so cruel as to wish anything of the kind." Why, do you not like her?" asked Mrs. Barbour. "Do not you?" he retorted, and there was a moment's silence. "I am devoted to her!" he went on, finding the silence irksome," so much so that I really could not endure to see her perform a single kindness for me." "I wish she would go-I do wish she would," Olivine broke out, passionately. Really, truly, you say that, not as a mere passing wish, but from your very heart ?" "From the bottom of my heart, Mr. Forbes; and if she goes now, I will never ask her to return-never;" and Mrs. Barbour's eyes sparkled as she spoke. Percy Forbes laughed. "You dear women!" he said; "how charmingly inconstant, how deliciously changeable you are, the bosom friend of to-day is the bitter enemy of a month hence. Talk about men! Believe me, Mrs. Barbour, not being of the same mind for a week at a time is the prerogative of your sex." Perhaps so;" and she stood, bringing home the general proposition to her own experience, instead of arguing from her own experience to a general proposition. "Do you not think," she said at last, raising her eyes from the carpet, "that if this be as you declare, it is so, simply because we love what we fancy, and dislike what we know ?" "My dear Mrs. Barbour," laughed Percy; "will you pardon my remarking that your way of expressing yourself is exceedingly vague, and unintelligible to ordinary comprehensions." "You visit your disappointment on them; in fact, detest your old friends for falling short of a standard they never professed to be able to reach. Woman's justice, is it not, to punish a person for the vagaries of your own imagination ?" "You are very unkind," she returned; very, for you know perfectly well what I mean, and whom I mean, and who seemed at one time very different to what she is now; and you are of my opinion, if you would only confess. Now, are you not?" "I never confess," he answered; " and further, I do not want to know what you mean, or who you mean, or anything about anybody. Remember that it is safer for me not to know-for me to remain in utter ignorance; it is indeed." And Percy looked at Olivine, and she looked THE RACE FOR WEALTH. back at him as he uttered these words; then she bowed her head slowly, and as it sank lower and lower, the blood mounted into her face, and covered cheek, and brow, and throat with a burning blush. Gentle though she might be, that blush was to the full as much one of anger as of pain and shame. What right had he to rebuke her for the half-confidence she reposed in him? How dare he even imply that she was going to say anything against her husband? If she chose to dislike Etta Gainswoode, she would dislike her, and express the feeling. knew Mrs. Gainswoode was a flirt; that is, Every one every one except a few-she would tell Percy Forbes what she thought of his speech and his warning: and it is probable she might have carried this idea into execution, but that when she lifted her head again she found Percy had gone. He took good care the subject was not discussed again: to Mrs. Gainswoode he evinced as much courtesy and paid quite as much attention as to Olivine; but yet, when at the end of three days Mr. Gainswoode came down to the Isle of Dogs, in a state bordering on distraction, and insisted that his wife should at once return with him to Hereford Street and nurse "if you must nurse some one," was Mr. Gainswoode's pleasant way of putting matters-the future heir of Mallingford, in preference to a man who might be ill of anything, "small-pox, or fever, or- or leprosy,' finished her husband, whose ideas on the subject of disease were of the very vaguest description-Olivine could not help thinking that she was very probably indebted to Percy for this good office. Mrs. Gainswoode at first thought so, too, apparently, for she never rested till she ascertained how her husband became informed of Mr. Sondes' illness. "I am certain I never told you," she remarked. No," was the reply; "Oh!" thought Etta-and as it never occurred to her that old Barbour had heard the news from anyone excepting his son, she felt angry with Lawrence accordingly. "It will be much pleasanter for me to be in Hereford-street," she said, with a sweet smile; "only I thought it was my duty to remain and help that dear, sweet Olivine, if I could." Duty, like charity, begins at home," growled Mr. Gainswoode; and Etta, being conscious she had not made so thorough a beginning at home as could be desired, refrained 3 from replying that, like charity, also, it did Reach House, to re-visit that pleasant habitanot end there. And thus she departed from tion no more. it a particularly cheerful residence. No house, perhaps, ever does seem cheerful when sickIn those days, however, Olivine did not find and in the dull time of the year, with snow on ness is sojourning within, even though the warm summer sun is shining down upon it; against the dull leaden sky-with life and the ground, with sleet falling aslant the landscape, with the trees standing brown and bare |—Olivine thought she had never been in such a death fighting out their battle hour after hour miserable, wretched place in the whole of her short existence. that she never could feel so unhappy again. Further, she was satisfied she had never felt so unhappy before-and If the troubles of early life bear no proporbalanced by the power of the glass through tion to the sorrows of later years, their want of absolute magnitude is more than counterwhich youth regards them. and the griefs of one time of existence are, blunted as the years go by, the mental nerves more. But trouble of any kind was new to Olivine, and she did not take to it naturally. The long struggling sickness, the weary night-watches, the days without amendment, the mornings and afternoons when the rain poured down ceaselessly, or the snow lay without on the ground, while she sat in that still room all alone, so far as sympathy or companionship went, seemed to her insupportable. The hammering in the ship-yard grew to be intolerable, the look of the bare and leafless trees mournful in the extreme. Lawrence could not be much at Reach House. Of Percy she saw little, or nothing. "How I wish he had not gone," she was wont to sigh; but Percy knew what was best in the matter, and, keeping himself out of the way of temptation, left the house free for Olivine to do as she liked in. "Shan't you be glad, Lawrence," she asked her husband, "when we get back to Stepney Causeway?" "That I will," he answered; "it is such a deuce of a way from here to the City." "What do you want to be continually going into the City for?" Olivine enquired. 66 meant to become? about the fine lady she was to be metamorphosed into, when the ships he and his friends were trying to float had made their voyages, and reached the destined harbour in safety? Those were the palmy days of limited liability and unlimited speculation; those were the days in which people prophesied that a business millennium was at hand; in which thousands were made and lost; in which the beggars out of the streets, the men who had a twelvemonth before scarcely a shoe to their foot, certainly not half-a-crown in their pockets, were mounted on horseback, and, fulfilling the old proverb, rode literally to the devil. In its way, that time was like the time of the railway mania. The individual who, in threadbare coat and patched boots, and no linen to speak of, except a very conspicuous shirt-collar, borrowed five shillings from his more responsible acquaintance to-day, and gave an IOU for the same on a piece of paper two inches square, bowled past the lender of that crown a month afterwards in a phaeton and pair, or received him with over Business," was the reply with which his powering condescension in offices furnished wife had to rest satisfied. There are various kinds of businesses which a man may find to take him into the City; but of these only two are now necessary to be specified-legitimate and illegitimate-one connected with his regular trade, and another that has no sort of concern with it. Almost by accident Percy Forbes had discovered Lawrence's frequent visits to various courts and lanes, and yards, west of Gracechurch Street were to be attributed rather to speculations utterly unconnected with either the chemical works or the sugar-house, than arising in any way from his position in those establishments; but Olivine remained in absolute ignorance of this fact. She, in her innocence, thought that Goodman's Fields required his incessant supervision-that Mr. Perkins was but a child in Distaff Yard without the constant counsel and assistance of her husband. Concerning business Olivine knew literally nothing; she was as totally in the dark about her husband's operations, as though his trade had been in Canada, and she still a resident in London. Any excuse he thought proper to make for his eternal absences, was regarded by Olivine like a revelation from on high. What did she know about shares and companies? about enormous fortunes being made in a few weeks? about the express trains, which were to supersede all the old stage-coaches on the road to fortune? about the great man her husband according to the latest fashion, with boardroom-table of carved oak, chairs upholstered in leather, curtains of the richest materials, and bookcase manufactured by Gillow. This individual was but the type of a class of men who, having each and all some patent, good or bad, for sale, sold it, and were installed as managers of the companies formed to work such patents. A year previously he was grateful if a friend stopped to speak to him in the street; he kept to the back thoroughfares; he had an uncertain and eternally varying address; he could barely afford omnibus fares; he lived, God knew how; for certainly no fellow-being, unless it might be a much-enduring wife, was in his confidence; but when once the Limited Liability Act was passed, the grub changed into a chrysalis, the chrysalis into a butterfly, with its hunters in the country, its yacht at Southampton, its house in town, its villa on the banks of the Thames, its French cook, its rare wines, its box at the opera, its brougham, and its pits and vineries. Heavens it was a merry life, if it could but have lasted. Happy would the human butterfly have been if at the end of its brilliant season it could have fluttered out of life, and cut the world when the financial crisis arrived, and the company collapsed, and the sheriff's officers came to take possession, and the horses were sold, and the town and country house, and the wild excitement of that mad time passed away like a dream. Oh! ye sober plodders, who have seen all this and wondered; who have thought it at times a little hard that such an one should splash the mud upon you from his chariot-wheels; who have writhed under his patronising manner, and felt envious, it may be, because of the terms of easy intimacy on which he appeared to be with my Lord This and Sir Somebody That-open your cash-box, and lift the tray, and turn over the papers that have lain there for many a day! There is the IO U you knew was only so much waste paper at the time you accepted it, which has been hidden there through the days of his adversity and of his prosperity likewise. Slowly you tear the paper across and thrust it into the fire; the man has been down, the man has been up, and he is down again, whilst you are where you stood at first; better perhaps a little, but certainly not any the worse. He is wearing out the broadcloth of his prosperity now in adversity; but he will soon pawn that, and come down once again to the buttoned-up coat, to the wisp of black handkerchief, to the miraculous shirt-collar, to the patched boots, to the house-side of the thoroughfares, to the back streets, to the low eating-houses, to the public-houses frequented by carriers and cabmen, where he will thankfully take a treat from you if you are inclined to be generous. The days of "Limited Liability" are not all spent yet-but there were worse days in the early period of its history, even, than those in which our present lot is cast-when the devil of speculation was loosed in order to deceive the nations; when small capitalists were snuffed out by great companies; when only honest men were ever again to be poor; when the rogues had entered into their temporal heaven; when everybody one met was going to make his fortune either by shares, by promoting, by selling his inventions, by lending his name, by procuring noblemen as directors, by starting projects, by advertising the company, or by helping to float it off the stocks. The cholera and Limited Liability reached a point at about the same period. The same post that brought newspapers containing the Registrar-General's report to quiet country districts, brought likewise unwonted-looking letters enclosing samples of all manner of new fabrics, prospectuses of wonderful companies, forms of application for shares, moderate calculations of the thousand per cent. returns to be expected, and such flourishing statements, combined with such lists of names, as caused Paterfamilias to place his spectacles on his honoured nose and peruse the document with much interest and astonishment. There were companies for everything-for banking, for dining, for driving, for drinking, for bathing, and burying, and clothing, and washing, and furnishing. No person who has not studied the statistics of companies can have the faintest idea of the deluge which came upon the earth for its wickedness when once Parliament opened the sluice-gates by doing away with Unlimited Responsibility. The thing was never thought of or imagined by man which did not, in the days of which I am speaking, find some one to make it into a body, with a tail of secretaries, directors, solicitors, brokers, bankers, managers, agents-what you will. There was a story told long ago of a simpleminded clergyman, who, being asked by his publisher how many copies he wished to have printed of a particular sermon, went into a calculation of the number of towns and villages in England, and then, estimating that each town and village would furnish one customer, desired an edition of some hundreds of thousands to be struck off. Companies in the first blush of limited liability were got up on precisely the same principle. Suppose, for example, it was the Consolidated Coffin Company: first of all you had in round numbers a statement of the annual deaths in Great Britain and Ireland; next, an impartial division of those numbers into adults and children; thirdly, a calculation of the cost of manufacture, and of the ordinary exorbitant charge for a very inferior article; fourthly, you had a sum in subtraction, and a sum in multiplication, thus-profit per coffin and consequent profit on a million of coffins; fifthly, the probable expenses of working the company were deducted from the probable returns of the company, the amount which had to be paid to Messrs. Steel and Crabbe, whose valuable patents the directors had secured; the said patents being, the one for a new screw, and the other for a mode of running the sides of the coffin into grooves, thereby avoiding the unsightliness and expense of nails; and the public appetite, having by this time been sufficiently whetted, the percentage to be expected was then declared, and the project confidently submitted to the nation. It is but justice to state that the nation amply deserved the confidence reposed in it, and nobly responded to the demands made upon its credulity. From east and west, from north and south, applications for shares flowed in. People thought in those days they could not get their letters posted fast enough, and were always dreading that all the shares would be allotted before their epistles could reach London. The South Sea scheme will be longer re |