The Way We Live Now III

THE WAY WE LIVE NOW

tongues. It was, however, Marylebone alone that spoke of a monument.

Mr. Longestaffe came back to his house, taking formal possession of it a few days after the verdict. Of course he was alone. There had been no further question of bringing the ladies of the family up to town; and Dolly altogether declined to share with his father the honour of encountering the dead man’s spirit. But there was very much for Mr. Longestaffe to do, and very much also for his son. It was becoming a question with both of them how far they had been ruined by their connection with the horrible man. It was clear that they could not get back the title-deeds of the Pickering property without paying the amount which had been advanced upon them, and it was equally clear that they could not pay that sum unless they were enabled to do so by funds coming out of the Melmotte estate. Dolly, as he sat smoking upon the stool in Mr. Squercum’s office, where he now passed a considerable portion of his time, looked upon himself as a miracle of ill-usage.

“By George, you know, I shall have to go to law with the governor. There’s nothing else for it; is there, Squercum?” Squercum suggested that they had better wait till they found what pickings there might be out of the Melmotte estate. He had made inquiries too about that, and had been assured that there must be property, but property so involved and tied up as to make it impossible to lay hands upon it suddenly. “They say that the things in the square, and the plate, and the carriages and horses, and all that, ought to fetch between twenty and thirty thousand. There were a lot of jewels,

but the women have taken them,” said Squercum.

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“By George, they ought to be made to give up everything. Did you ever hear of such a thing; — the very house pulled down; — my house; and all done without a word from me in the matter? I don’t suppose such a thing was ever known before, since properties were properties.” Then he uttered sundry threats against the Bideawhiles, in reference to whom he declared his intention of “making it very hot for them.”

It was an annoyance added to the elder Mr. Longestaffe that the management of Melmotte’s affairs fell at last almost exclusively into the hands of Mr. Brehgert. Now Brehgert, in spite of his many dealings with Melmotte, was an honest man, and, which was perhaps of as much immediate consequence, both an energetic and a patient man. But then he was the man who had wanted to marry Georgiana Longestaffe, and he was the man to whom Mr. Longestaffe had been particularly uncivil. Then there arose necessities for the presence of Mr. Brehgert in the house in which Melmotte had lately lived and had died. The dead man’s papers were still there, — deeds, documents, and such letters as he had not chosen to destroy; — and these could not be removed quite at once. “Mr. Brehgert must of course have access to my private room, as long as it is necessary, — absolutely necessary,” said Mr. Longestaffe in answer to a message which was brought to him; “but he will of course see the expediency of relieving me from such intrusion as soon as possible.” But he soon found it preferable to come to terms with the rejected suitor, especially as the man was singularly good-natured and forbearing after the injuries he had received.

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All minor debts were to be paid at once; an arrangement to which Mr. Longestaffe cordially agreed, as it included a sum of £300 due to him for the rent of his house in Bruton Street. Then by degrees it became known that there would certainly be a dividend of not less than fifty per cent. payable on debts which could be proved to have been owing by Melmotte, and perhaps of more; — an arrangement which was very comfortable to Dolly, as it had been already agreed between all the parties interested that the debt due to him should be satisfied before the father took anything. Mr. Longestaffe resolved during these weeks that he remained in town that, as regarded himself and his own family, the house in London should not only not be kept up, but that it should be absolutely sold, with all its belongings, and that the servants at Caversham should be reduced in number, and should cease to wear powder. All this was communicated to Lady Pomona in a very long letter, which she was instructed to read to her daughters. “I have suffered great wrongs,” said Mr. Longestaffe, “but I must submit to them, and as I submit so must my wife and children. If our son were different from what he is the sacrifice might probably be made lighter. His nature I cannot alter, but from my daughters I expect cheerful obedience.” From what incidents of his past life he was led to expect cheerfulness at Caversham it might be difficult to say; but the obedience was there. Georgey was for the time broken down; Sophia was satisfied with her nuptial prospects, and Lady Pomona had certainly no spirits left for a combat. I think the loss of the hair-powder afflicted her most; but she said not a word even about that.

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But in all this the details necessary for the telling of our story are anticipated. Mr. Longestaffe had remained in London actually over the 1st of September, which in Suffolk is the one great festival of the year, before the letter was written to which allusion has been made. In the meantime he saw much of Mr. Brehgert, and absolutely formed a kind of friendship for that gentleman, in spite of the abomination of his religion, — so that on one occasion he even condescended to ask Mr. Brehgert to dine alone with him in Bruton Street. This, too, was in the early days of the arrangement of the Melmotte affairs, when Mr. Longestaffe’s heart had been softened by that arrangement with reference to the rent. Mr. Brehgert came, and there arose a somewhat singular conversation between the two gentlemen as they sat together over a bottle of Mr. Longestaffe’s old port wine. Hitherto not a word had passed between them respecting the connection which had once been proposed, since the day on which the young lady’s father had said so many bitter things to the expectant bridegroom. But in this evening Mr. Brehgert, who was by no means a coward in such matters and whose feelings were not perhaps painfully fine, spoke his mind in a way that at first startled Mr. Longestaffe. The subject was introduced by a reference which Brehgert had made to his own affairs. His loss would be, at any rate, double that which Mr. Longestaffe would have to bear; — but he spoke of it in an easy way, as though it did not sit very near his heart. “Of course there’s a difference between me and you,” he said. Mr. Longestaffe bowed his head graciously, as much as to say that there was of course a very wide difference. “In our affairs,” continued Brehgert, “we expect gains, and of course

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look for occasional losses. When a gentleman in your position sells a property he expects to get the purchase-money.”

“Of course he does, Mr. Brehgert. That’s what made it so hard.”

“I can’t even yet quite understand how it was with him, or why he took upon himself to spend such an enormous deal of money here in London. His business was quite irregular, but there was very much of it, and some of it immensely profitable. He took us in completely.”

“I suppose so.”

“It was old Mr. Todd that first took to him; — but I was deceived as much as Todd, and then I ventured on a speculation with him outside of our house. The long and the short of it is that I shall lose something about sixty thousand pounds.”

“That’s a large sum of money.”

“Very large; — so large as to affect my daily mode of life. In my correspondence with your daughter, I considered it to be my duty to point out to her that it would be so. I do not know whether she told you.”

This reference to his daughter for the moment altogether upset Mr. Longestaffe. The reference was certainly most indelicate, most deserving of censure; but Mr. Longestaffe did not know how to pronounce his censure on the spur of the moment, and was moreover at the present time so very anxious for Brehgert’s assistance in the arrangement of his affairs that, so to say, he could not afford to quarrel with the man. But he assumed something more than his normal dignity as he asserted that his daughter had never mentioned the fact.

“It was so,” said Brehgert.

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“No doubt;” — and Mr. Longestaffe assumed a great deal of dignity.

“Yes; it was so. I had promised your daughter when she was good enough to listen to the proposition which I made to her, that I would maintain a second house when we should be married.”

“It was impossible,” said Mr. Longestaffe, — meaning to assert that such hymeneals were altogether unnatural and out of the question.

“It would have been quite possible as things were when that proposition was made. But looking forward to the loss which I afterwards anticipated from the affairs of our deceased friend, I found it to be prudent to relinquish my intention for the present, and I thought myself bound to inform Miss Longestaffe.”

“There were other reasons,” muttered Mr. Longestaffe, in a suppressed voice, almost in a whisper, — in a whisper which was intended to convey a sense of present horror and a desire for future reticence.

“There may have been; but in the last letter which Miss Longestaffe did me the honour to write to me, — a letter with which I have not the slightest right to find any fault, — she seemed to me to confine herself almost exclusively to that reason.”

“Why mention this now, Mr. Brehgert; why mention this now? The subject is painful.”

“Just because it is not painful to me, Mr. Longestaffe; and because I wish that all they who have heard of the matter should know that it is not painful. I think that throughout I behaved

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per and print cannot be had for nothing, and advertisements are very costly. An edition may be sold with startling rapidity, but it may have been but a scanty edition. When Lady Carbury received from Messrs. Leadham and Loiter their second very moderate cheque, with the expression of a fear on their part that there would not probably be a third, — unless some unforeseen demand should arise, — she repeated to herself those well-known lines from the satirist, —

“Oh, Amos Cottle, for a moment think

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But not on that account did she for a moment hesitate as to further attempts. Indeed she had hardly completed the last chapter of her «Criminal Queens» before she was busy on another work; and although the last six months had been to her a period of incessant trouble, and sometimes of torture, though the conduct of her son had more than once forced her to declare to herself that her mind would fail her, still she had persevered. From day to day, with all her cares heavy upon her, she had sat at her work, with a firm resolve that so many lines should be always forthcoming, let the difficulty of making them be what it might. Messrs. Leadham and Loiter had thought that they might be justified in offering her certain terms for a novel, — terms not very high indeed, and those contingent on the approval of the manuscript by their reader. The smallness of the sum offered, and the want of certainty, and the pain of the work in her present circumstances, had all

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been felt by her to be very hard. But she had persevered, and the novel was now complete.

It cannot with truth be said of her that she had had any special tale to tell. She had taken to the writing of a novel because Mr. Loiter had told her that upon the whole novels did better than anything else. She would have written a volume of sermons on the same encouragement, and have gone about the work exactly after the same fashion. The length of her novel had been her first question. It must be in three volumes, and each volume must have three hundred pages. But what fewest number of words might be supposed sufficient to fill a page? The money offered was too trifling to allow of very liberal measure on her part. She had to live, and if possible to write another novel, — and, as she hoped, upon better terms, — when this should be finished. Then what should be the name of her novel; what the name of her hero; and above all what the name of her heroine? It must be a love story of course; but she thought that she would leave the complications of the plot to come by chance, — and they did come. «Don’t let it end unhappily, Lady Carbury,» Mr. Loiter had said, «because though people like it in a play, they hate it in a book. And whatever you do, Lady Carbury, don’t be historical. Your historical novel, Lady Carbury, isn’t worth a — “ Mr. Loiter stopping himself suddenly, and remembering that he was addressing himself to a lady, satisfied his energy at last by the use of the word “straw.” Lady Carbury had followed these instructions with accuracy.

The name for the story had been the great thing. It did not occur to the authoress that, as the plot was to be allowed to

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