Dust. Julian Hawthorne

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СКАЧАТЬ perceived this, and had shaped his conduct accordingly. Nor is it impossible—the greatest of men being but men after all—that Mr. Bendibow may have taken his son into his confidence as much to guard against his own human weakness as to provide against the contingency of his death or incapacity. Proudly though he asserted the staunchness of his purpose, he had that day felt the tug of temptation, and may have been unwilling to risk the strain unaided again. Be that as it may, it is certain that the confidence came none too soon. When the evening meal was ready Mr. Bendibow did not appear; his customary punctuality made the delay seem extraordinary; so, after waiting half an hour, Jacob went to summon him. He knocked at the door, but no response came. At last he made bold to open the door; and there sat Abraham Bendibow in his chair, with the key of the strong box in his hand, looking, in the dusk, very much as he had looked when Jacob left him three hours before. But Abraham Bendibow was dead.

      All his affairs were found to be in order; and, among the other contents of the strong box, was the book of rules of which he had spoken to Jacob. As to the South Sea stock, it sank and sank, and Jacob’s heart sank with it; and when the stock had reached six hundred and forty, Jacob’s heart was in his boots. Nevertheless he was faithful to his trust, and held on. Soon afterward the agents of the Company bought largely, and stock rose once more, and practically for the last time. The hour came at last when it was quoted at one thousand, and then, with a trembling delight, and with a conviction of his father’s prescience and wisdom, that amounted to religious veneration, Jacob went forth and sold; and that night he deposited in the strong box bank-notes and bullion to the amount of one hundred and fifty thousand pounds. Such was the beginning of the famous house of Bendibow.

CHAPTER VII.

       Table of Contents

      THE history of the house of Bendibow & Son—or of Bendibow Brothers, as it came to be called—was broadly the history of the eighteenth century in England. Persons who deal in money are apt to come into relation with most of the prominent characters and events of their time, and Bendibow Brothers dealt in that commodity very extensively. The thirty years covered by the reign of George the Second was a picturesque and brilliant period. Famous personages were to be met everywhere—in London, Epsom, Bath, Tunbridge and Scarborough: York, too, was a fashionable place in those days; Shrewsbury was full of merry-making, and Newmarket attracted other people beside professed lovers of the turf. Congreve was living out the last years of his life, and Mrs. Bracegirdle was still acting his plays, when the second representative of the Brunswick line came to the throne. Addison had died a few years previously, Steele a year or two afterward; Pope, Swift, Fielding and Defoe were all in full cry and condition. Lord Bathurst was in mid-career as patron of literary celebrities, and the fascinating and romantic Earl of Peterborough was losing his heart to the sweet voice and face of Anastasia Robinson. Hogarth and Kneller were in existence, and Arbuthnot was witty and wise. Handsome Tom Grantley, destined to become one of the foremost men of fashion and intrigue of his time, was in 1732 a little squalling baby in the south of Ireland. George the First had created the earldom of Seabridge upward of fifteen years before, in consequence of assistance rendered to him by the then head of the family during the Rebellion; and it was at about the same date that Mary Lancaster, niece of Lord Croftus, first saw the light—she who was afterward to unite the two families by her marriage with the second Earl of Seabridge. Meanwhile Mary Bellenden was esteemed the loveliest, and Mary Wortley Montague the cleverest of living women. As time went on, and the century approached its middle age, Garrick began to act in London; Beau Nash, superb, autocratic and imperturbable, ruled the roast at Bath; Horace Walpole embroidered society with the brilliance of his affected and sentimental persiflage; Smollet hobnobbed with Quin, and the Great Commoner stalked about, glaring out appallingly from the jungle of his shaggy wig. Amusement was the religion of the age, and recklessness was its morality. It was the apotheosis of card playing; literature was not good form; cards and men formed the library of the Duchess of Marlborough. What are now termed the mental resources of civilization, being as yet unknown, life was so conducted as to become a constant variety and succession of condiments. Criminals were made to minister to the general entertainment by being drawn and quartered, as well as beheaded and hanged; gentlemen pistoled and skewered one another instead of being contented with calling each other names, and sueing for damages and defamation. Tempers were hot, hearts were bold, and conversation was loose on all sides. Wine was cheap, tea was dear, gluttony and drunkenness were anything but improper. The country folks were no less energetic on their own scale. They romped and shouted at village fairs and wakes; they belabored one another scientifically with cudgels; half-naked women ran races and jumped hurdles; Maypoles were hoisted on every green; and the disaffected rode out on the king’s highway with masks and pistols. Love-making, with persons of condition at least, was a matter less of hearts than of fortunes and phases: it was etiquette for everybody in small clothes to languish at the feet of everybody in petticoats. The externals of life were sumptuous and splendid, because no time and trouble were wasted upon internals. An element of savagery and brutality pervaded all classes, high and low, without which the game could not have been kept up with such unflagging plausibility and zeal.

      But all this fun had to be fed with money, or at all events with credit; and Bendibow Brothers were always prepared, on proper security, to furnish either; wherefore a great portion of this gorgeous procession passed through their dingy office in the city, on its way to or from its debaucheries. And since the brethren (following the injunctions of their long-headed founder) aimed no less at social distinction than at the wealth which should render that distinction profitable, they frequently saw their way to accept, from certain of their customers, interest payable otherwise than in hard cash. An introduction to Lord Croftus’s drawing-room, for example, might be cheaply purchased for an advance of a thousand pounds; a sinecure post in the army for a junior member of the firm, or a foreign order for the senior, would be worth three or four times as much; while, for the hand of a daughter of the junior branch of a titled family, twenty or thirty thousand pounds down would be considered a profitable transaction. Worldly wisdom and foresight, in short, formed as important a part of the Bendibow policy as direct and literal pecuniary returns. Indeed, it was upon the profit of their innumerable small transactions that they relied for the bulk of their material wealth: with the great and haughty their dealings were uniformly liberal and dignified. The consequence was, that when the Jacobite rebellion broke out, the Government accepted a substantial loan from Bendibow Brothers, as being not only the richest but the most loyal and respectable firm of bankers in England. Mr. Joseph Bendibow, one of the partners, was, for some unexplained reason, “promoted” to the rank of colonel in the regular army; and five years later the head of the family was raised to the baronetage. Hereupon a constituency was purchased at a not too exorbitant rate, and—the Bendibows having long since abandoned their Jewish proclivities, and presented themselves to the world as immaculate Protestant Christians—for the remainder of their career the descendants of the obscure Hebrew goldsmith and money-lender were numbered among the law-givers of their country and trusty advisers of the Crown.

      It was an honorable position, patiently tried for and cleverly won. None of the Bendibows, since the time of Abraham, their progenitor, had been in any sense men of genius; but, on the other hand, none of them had been destitute of common sense, prudence, steadiness, suppleness, and persistency; and they had also possessed—what perhaps was of more value to them than any of their native virtues—a private family bible, in the shape of the book of rules, written and bequeathed to them by the patriarch above mentioned. It would be interesting, and possibly edifying, to review the contents of this work. No doubt it was brimming over with human astuteness; and might be described as a translation into eighteenth-century ideas and language of the mystic injunctions of the old alchemists in reference to the Philosopher’s Stone. Be that as it may, the book went far toward achieving the end for which it was composed; and if the Bendibows were as yet not quite a hundredfold millionaires and peers of the realm, they seemed fairly on their way to be so. To that consummation the brethren themselves looked forward with justifiable confidence. Nevertheless, looking at their whole history from the vantage-ground of our own century, we can see that the accession of George the Third was СКАЧАТЬ