hark ye, you dirty one-eyed scoundrel, if you don't immadiately make
way for these leedies, and this lily-livered young jontleman who's
crying so, the Meejor here and I will lug out and force you." And
so saying, he drew his great sword and made a pass at Mr. Sicklop;
which that gentleman avoided, and which caused him and his companion
to retreat from the door. The landlady still kept her position at
it, and with a storm of oaths against the Ensign, and against two
Englishmen who ran away from a wild Hirishman, swore she would not
budge a foot, and would stand there until her dying day.
"Faith, then, needs must," said the Ensign, and made a lunge at the
hostess, which passed so near the wretch's throat, that she
screamed, sank on her knees, and at last opened the door.
Down the stairs, then, with great state, Mr. Macshane led the elder
lady, the married couple following; and having seen them to the
street, took an affectionate farewell of the party, whom he vowed
that he would come and see. "You can walk the eighteen miles aisy,
between this and nightfall," said he.
"WALK!" exclaimed Mr. Hayes. "Why, haven't we got Ball, and shall
ride and tie all the way?"
"Madam!" cried Macshane, in a stern voice, "honour before
everything. Did you not, in the presence of his worship, vow and
declare that you gave me that horse, and now d'ye talk of taking it
back again? Let me tell you, madam, that such paltry thricks ill
become a person of your years and respectability, and ought never to
be played with Insign Timothy Macshane."
He waved his hat and strutted down the street; and Mrs. Catherine
Hayes, along with her bridegroom and mother-in-law, made the best of
their way homeward on foot.
CHAPTER VII. WHICH EMBRACES A PERIOD OF SEVEN YEARS.
The recovery of so considerable a portion of his property from the
clutches of Brock was, as may be imagined, no trifling source of joy
to that excellent young man, Count Gustavus Adolphus de Galgenstein;
and he was often known to say, with much archness, and a proper
feeling of gratitude to the Fate which had ordained things so, that
the robbery was, in reality, one of the best things that could have
happened to him: for, in event of Mr. Brock's NOT stealing the
money, his Excellency the Count would have had to pay the whole to
the Warwickshire Squire, who had won it from him at play. He was
enabled, in the present instance, to plead his notorious poverty as
an excuse; and the Warwickshire conqueror got off with nothing,
except a very badly written autograph of the Count's, simply
acknowledging the debt.
This point his Excellency conceded with the greatest candour; but
(as, doubtless, the reader may have remarked in the course of his
experience) to owe is not quite the same thing as to pay; and from
the day of his winning the money until the day of his death the
Warwickshire Squire did never, by any chance, touch a single bob,
tizzy, tester, moidore, maravedi, doubloon, tomaun, or rupee, of the
sum which Monsieur de Galgenstein had lost to him.
That young nobleman was, as Mr. Brock hinted in the little
autobiographical sketch which we gave in a former chapter,
incarcerated for a certain period, and for certain other debts, in
the donjons of Shrewsbury; but he released himself from them by that
noble and consolatory method of whitewashing which the law has
provided for gentlemen in his oppressed condition; and he had not
been a week in London, when he fell in with, and overcame, or put to
flight, Captain Wood, alias Brock, and immediately seized upon the
remainder of his property. After receiving this, the Count, with
commendable discretion, disappeared from England altogether for a
while; nor are we at all authorised to state that any of his debts
to his tradesmen were discharged, any more than his debts of honour,
as they are pleasantly called.
Having thus settled with his creditors, the gallant Count had
interest enough with some of the great folk to procure for himself a
post abroad, and was absent in Holland for some time. It was here
that he became acquainted with the lovely Madam Silverkoop, the
widow of a deceased gentleman of Leyden; and although the lady was
not at that age at which tender passions are usually inspired--being
sixty--and though she could not, like Mademoiselle Ninon de
l'Enclos, then at Paris, boast of charms which defied the progress
of time,--for Mrs. Silverkoop was as red as a boiled lobster, and as
no means make up for her personal deficiencies,--for she was
jealous, violent, vulgar, drunken, and stingy to a miracle: yet her
charms had an immediate effect on Monsieur de Galgenstein; and
hence, perhaps, the reader (the rogue! how well he knows the world!)
will be led to conclude that the honest widow was RICH.
Such, indeed, she was; and Count Gustavus, despising the difference
between his twenty quarterings and her twenty thousand pounds, laid
the most desperate siege to her, and finished by causing her to
capitulate; as I do believe, after a reasonable degree of pressing,
any woman will do to any man: such, at least, has been MY
experience in the matter.
The Count then married; and it was curious to see how he--who, as we
have seen in the case of Mrs. Cat, had been as great a tiger and
domestic bully as any extant--now, by degrees, fell into a quiet
submission towards his enormous Countess; who ordered him up and
down as a lady orders her footman, who permitted him speedily not to
have a will of his own, and who did not allow him a shilling of her
money without receiving for the same an accurate account.
How was it that he, the abject slave of Madam Silverkoop, had been
victorious over Mrs. Cat? The first blow is, I believe, the
decisive one in these cases, and the Countess had stricken it a week
after their marriage;--establishing a supremacy which the Count
never afterwards attempted to question.
We have alluded to his Excellency's marriage, as in duty bound,
because it will be necessary to account for his appearance hereafter
in a more splendid fashion than that under which he has hitherto
been known to us; and just comforting the reader by the knowledge
that the union, though prosperous in a worldly point of view, was,
in reality, extremely unhappy, we must say no more from this time
forth of the fat and legitimate Madam de Galgenstein. Our darling
is Mrs. Catherine, who had formerly acted in her stead; and only in
so much as the fat Countess did influence in any way the destinies
of our heroine, or those wise and virtuous persons who have appeared
and are to follow her to her end, shall we in any degree allow her
name to figure here. It is an awful thing to get a glimpse, as one
sometimes does, when the time is past, of some little little wheel
which works the whole mighty machinery of FATE, and see how our
destinies turn on a minute's delay or advance, or on
the turning of
a street, or on somebody else's turning of a street, or on somebody
else's doing of something else in Downing Street or in Timbuctoo,
now or a thousand years ago. Thus, for instance, if Miss Poots, in
the year 1695, had never been the lovely inmate of a Spielhaus at
Amsterdam, Mr. Van Silverkoop would never have seen her; if the day
had not been extraordinarily hot, the worthy merchant would never
have gone thither; if he had not been fond of Rhenish wine and
sugar, he never would have called for any such delicacies; if he had
not called for them, Miss Ottilia Poots would never have brought
them, and partaken of them; if he had not been rich, she would
certainly have rejected all the advances made to her by Silverkoop;
if he had not been so fond of Rhenish and sugar, he never would have
died; and Mrs. Silverkoop would have been neither rich nor a widow,
nor a wife to Count von Galgenstein. Nay, nor would this history
have ever been written; for if Count Galgenstein had not married the
rich widow, Mrs. Catherine would never have--
Oh, my dear madam! you thought we were going to tell you. Pooh!
nonsense!--no such thing! not for two or three and seventy pages or
so,--when, perhaps, you MAY know what Mrs. Catherine never would
have done.
The reader will remember, in the second chapter of these Memoirs,
the announcement that Mrs. Catherine had given to the world a child,
who might bear, if he chose, the arms of Galgenstein, with the
further adornment of a bar-sinister. This child had been put out to
nurse some time before its mother's elopement from the Count; and as
that nobleman was in funds at the time (having had that success at
play which we duly chronicled), he paid a sum of no less than twenty
guineas, which was to be the yearly reward of the nurse into whose
charge the boy was put. The woman grew fond of the brat; and when,
after the first year, she had no further news or remittances from
father or mother, she determined, for a while at least, to maintain
on this score, she stoutly swore that no parents could ever desert
their children, and that some day or other she should not fail to be
rewarded for her trouble with this one.
Under this strange mental hallucination poor Goody Billings, who had
five children and a husband of her own, continued to give food and
shelter to little Tom for a period of no less than seven years; and
though it must be acknowledged that the young gentleman did not in
the slightest degree merit the kindnesses shown to him, Goody
Billings, who was of a very soft and pitiful disposition, continued
to bestow them upon him: because, she said, he was lonely and
unprotected, and deserved them more than other children who had
fathers and mothers to look after them. If, then, any difference
was made between Tom's treatment and that of her own brood, it was
considerably in favour of the former; to whom the largest
proportions of treacle were allotted for his bread, and the
handsomest supplies of hasty pudding. Besides, to do Mrs. Billings
justice, there WAS a party against him; and that consisted not only
of her husband and her five children, but of every single person in
the neighbourhood who had an opportunity of seeing and becoming
acquainted with Master Tom.
A celebrated philosopher--I think Miss Edgeworth--has broached the
consolatory doctrine, that in intellect and disposition all human
beings are entirely equal, and that circumstance and education are
the causes of the distinctions and divisions which afterwards
unhappily take place among them. Not to argue this question, which
places Jack Howard and Jack Thurtell on an exact level,--which would
have us to believe that Lord Melbourne is by natural gifts and
excellences a man as honest, brave, and far-sighted as the Duke of
Wellington,--which would make out that Lord Lyndhurst is, in point
of principle, eloquence, and political honesty, no better than Mr.
O'Connell,--not, I say, arguing this doctrine, let us simply state
that Master Thomas Billings (for, having no other, he took the name
of the worthy people who adopted him) was in his long-coats
fearfully passionate, screaming and roaring perpetually, and showing
all the ill that he COULD show. At the age of two, when his
strength enabled him to toddle abroad, his favourite resort was the
coal-hole or the dung-heap: his roarings had not diminished in the
least, and he had added to his former virtues two new ones,--a love
of fighting and stealing; both which amiable qualities he had many
opportunities of exercising every day. He fought his little
adoptive brothers and sisters; he kicked and cuffed his father and
mother; he fought the cat, stamped upon the kittens, was worsted in
a severe battle with the hen in the backyard; but, in revenge,
nearly beat a little sucking-pig to death, whom he caught alone and
rambling near his favourite haunt, the dung-hill. As for stealing,
he stole the eggs, which he perforated and emptied; the butter,
which he ate with or without bread, as he could find it; the sugar,
which he cunningly secreted in the leaves of a "Baker's Chronicle,"
that nobody in the establishment could read; and thus from the pages
of history he used to suck in all he knew--thieving and lying
namely; in which, for his years, he made wonderful progress. If any
followers of Miss Edgeworth and the philosophers are inclined to
disbelieve this statement, or to set it down as overcharged and
distorted, let them be assured that just this very picture was, of
all the pictures in the world, taken from nature. I, Ikey Solomons,
once had a dear little brother who could steal before he could walk
(and this not from encouragement,--for, if you know the world, you
must know that in families of our profession the point of honour is
sacred at home,--but from pure nature)--who could steal, I say,
before he could walk, and lie before he could speak; and who, at
four and a half years of age, having attacked my sister Rebecca on
some question of lollipops, had smitten her on the elbow with a
fire-shovel, apologising to us by saying simply, "---- her, I wish
it had been her head!" Dear, dear Aminadab! I think of you, and
laugh these philosophers to scorn. Nature made you for that career
which you fulfilled: you were from your birth to your dying a
scoundrel; you COULDN'T have been anything else, however your lot
was cast; and blessed it was that you were born among the prigs,-
-for had you been of any other profession, alas! alas! what ills
might you have done! As I have heard the author of "Richelieu,"
"Siamese Twins," etc. say "Poeta nascitur non fit," which means that
though he had tried ever so much to be a poet, it was all moonshine:
in the like manner, I say, "ROAGUS nascitur, non fit." We have it
from nature, and so a fig for Miss Edgeworth.
In this manner, then, while his father, blessed with a wealthy wife,
was leading, in a fine house, the life of a galley-slave; while his
mother, married to Mr. Hayes, and made an honest women of, as the
saying is, was passing her time respectably in Warwickshire, Mr.
Thomas Billings was inhabiting the same county, not cared for by
either of them; but ordained by Fate to join them one day, and have
a mighty influence upon the fortunes of both. For, as it has often
happened to the traveller in the York or the Exeter coach to fall
snugly asleep in his corner, and on awaking suddenly to find himself
sixty or seventy miles from the place where Somnus first visited
him: as, we say, although you sit still, Time, poor wretch, keeps
perpetually running on, and so must run day and night, with never a
pause or a halt of five minutes to get a drink, until his dying day;
let the reader imagine that since he left Mrs. Hayes and all the
other worthy personages of this history, in the last chapter, seven
years have sped away; during which, all our heroes and heroines have
been accomplishing their destinies.
Seven years of country carpentering, or rather trading, on the part
of a husband, of ceaseless scolding, violence, and discontent on the
part of a wife, are not pleasant to describe: so we shall omit
altogether any account of the early married life of Mr. and Mrs.
John Hayes. The "Newgate Calendar" (to which excellent compilation
we and the OTHER popular novelists of the day can never be
sufficiently grateful) states that Hayes left his house three or
four times during this period, and, urged by the restless humours of
his wife, tried several professions: returning, however, as he grew
weary of each, to his wife and his paternal home. After a certain
time his parents died, and by their demise he succeeded to a small
property, and the carpentering business, which he for some time
followed.
What, then, in the meanwhile, had become of Captain Wood, or Brock,
and Ensign Macshane?--the only persons now to be accounted for in
our catalogue. For about six months after their capture and release
of Mr. Hayes, those noble gentlemen had followed, with much prudence
and success, that trade which the celebrated and polite Duval, the
ingenious Sheppard, the dauntless Turpin, and indeed many other
heroes of our most popular novels, had pursued,--or were pursuing,
in their time. And so considerable were said to be Captain Wood's
gains, that reports were abroad of his having somewhere a buried
treasure; to which he might have added more, had not Fate suddenly
cut short his career as a prig. He and the Ensign were--shame to
say--transported for stealing three pewter-pots off a railing at
Exeter; and not being known in the town, which they had only reached
that morning, they were detained by no further charges, but simply
condemned on this one. For this misdemeanour, Her Majesty's
Government vindictively sent them for seven years beyond the sea;
and, as the fashion then was, sold the use of their bodies to
Virginian planters during that space of time. It is thus, alas!
that the strong are always used to deal with the weak, and many an
honest fellow has been led to rue his unfortunate difference with
the law.
Thus, then, we have settled all scores. The Count is in Holland
with his wife; Mrs. Cat in Warwickshire along with her excellent
husband; Master Thomas Billings with his adoptive parents in the
same county; and the two military gentlemen watching the progress
and cultivation of the tobacco and cotton plant in the New World.
All these things having passed between the acts,
dingaring-a-dingaring-a-dingledingleding, the drop draws up, and the
next act begins. By the way, the play ENDS with a drop: but that
is neither here nor there.
* * *
(Here, as in a theatre, the orchestra is supposed to play something
melodious. The people get up, shake themselves, yawn, and settle