The Bramleighs of Bishop's Folly. Lever Charles James

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      “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 СКАЧАТЬ