Catherine Sinclair

Marion Dunbar being by no means an arrant novel reader, knew nothing of those artificial feelings which too often obliterated the reality. Simple as a field-flower, her natural sensibility remained perfectly fresh and unimpaired, while now, for the first time, experiencing the withering disappointments, and blighting anxieties of life.

As she drove slowly along towards the sanctuary where Sir Patrick had taken refuge, the most prominent apprehension on her mind, was that of finding him on the eve of imprisonment; but she in some degree consoled herself by imagining the services that in such circumstances she might perhaps be able to do him, and the privations she could endure for his sake. The more proud, overbearing, and arbitrary, he had hitherto been, the more touching it appeared to her affectionate spirit, that one seemed born to command, should now be humbled; and impatiently did she long to prove, that, however all things might alter, yet, in prosperity or adversity, in sickness or in health, she was unchangeably the same; while her young heart glowed with the paramount hope of at last becoming useful to her brother, and therefore welcome.

As she proceeded, visions of deep distress and difficulty floated dimly through the mind of Marion, who could not entirely close her eyes against the iron truths, and stern realities of life, while considering how totally unsuited her brother was, to endure the privation of a single luxury, and now he could scarcely have enough to command the most ordinary necessaries.

In the mind of Marion, immediate starvation, and going out as a governess, were the two ideas that most prominently connected themselves with the consciousness of being ruined; for her conception of bankruptcy was of the most terrifying description.

In the few novels she had ever seen, the heroines could always support themselves by selling their drawings; but Marion did not hope to gain an independent livelihood by her slanting castles, and top-heavy trees, though taking in plain work, or teaching music, suggested themselves as possible resources. Marion thought of arrests, bailiffs, writs, and of the world come to an end. The sunny hours of her life seemed suddenly darkened, and she had grown old in a day! In the simplicity of her heart, she imagined that a ruined man of rank and fashion, was like a ruined man in earnest; obliged actually to reduce his establishment! to dismiss his servants! to dispose of his equipages! to make an auction of his furniture! to part with his plate! and really to live as if he were in downright matter-of-fact earnest, poor! "to exist," as Sir Patrick once contemptuously said of Richard Granville, "on twopence a year, paid quarterly!"

The slow-moving hackney-coach stopped at last before the gate of Sir Patrick's new residence, St. John's Lodge, a gloomy antique villa near Holyrood House, with gabled windows, stone balconies, richly carved balustrades, and pointed roof, surrounded by dusty beech-trees, and formal yew hedges, clipped into fifty unimaginable shapes. Marion was surprised, on hastily alighting, to perceive the whole house glittering with lights, and would have supposed she had made some mistake, had not the bell been instantly answered by Sir Patrick's own man, followed by the usual three yellow-plush footmen.

"Faithful creatures!" thought she, having often heard of old servants who insisted on being retained for nothing; "amidst all Patrick's distress, this must indeed be gratifying!"

In a tumult of emotion, Marion, throwing off her bonnet, rushed up a broad well-lighted flight of stairs, while, wound up to a pitch of heroism and romantic self-devotion, she thought only of her brother, impatiently longing to fly into his arms, and to express the whole fulness of her affection, and the whole depth of her sympathy. While her heart sprang forward to meet him, she eagerly threw open a door next the staircase, and entered with a hurried and tremulous step; but suddenly her eyes were dazzled and bewildered by the sight which met her agitated glance, while for a moment she became rooted to the floor, like one who had been stunned by a sudden blow. Marion gazed without seeing, and heard without knowing what was said, so unexpected and surprising was the scene to which she had thus suddenly introduced herself!

A murmur of noise and gayety rang in her ears, while the whole apartment was brilliantly illuminated, and the first object which became distinct to her vision was Sir Patrick, seated at the head of a superbly-decorated dinner-table, in a perfect uproar of merriment and hilarity. Around him were placed five or six of his gayest associates, dressed in their scarlet hunting-coats, and evidently in joyous spirit, like school-boys during vacation, while the whole party presented a most convivial aspect, laughing in merry chorus, and with claret circulating at full speed round the hospitable board.

Marion felt as if her feet had lost all power of motion, while, grasping the handle of the door with one hand, and shading her eyes with the other, she became transfixed to the spot. It was a shock of unexpected joy, and while standing in the deep embrasure of the door, her large eyes dilated, and her lips parted, with an expression of speechless amazement, she looked like a breathing portrait, which an artist might have shown as his master-piece—young, bright, and graceful, as the first crescent of the moon, or like the fabled houri of an eastern tale.

The gentlemen all instinctively stood up with one accord the moment she appeared, giving her looks of embarrassed astonishment and admiration, while Marion hastily retreating, in an agony of confusion, heard her own voice inadvertently exclaim, "Patrick!"

"Marion!" cried her brother, in a frenzy of astonishment more than equal to her own, while the flowing bumper which had been raised to his lips remained suspended there, and in an instant afterwards, his tone of surprise became changed into angry imperative remonstrance. "Marion! what brought you here, child?"

Before she had quite retreated, suspecting the real state of the case, and not wishing for any public explanation, Sir Patrick added, in an accent of careless good humor, "Agnes is up stairs dressing for the ball, so make yourself scarce, and find her if possible. The house is not large enough to puzzle any one long, but I suppose you mistook this room for hers!"

"Patrick is not ruined after all!" thought the delighted Marion, vanishing in a transport of joy, while her brother's jovial companions became vehemently energetic in expressing their admiration of the beautiful apparition.

"Can that be the darling cherub Marion, who used to call herself my little wife? I wish she may do so in earnest now! She is undoubtedly the loveliest creature that my sight ever looked upon, her eyes glittering like stars beneath that rich cloud of hair! Let us drink a bumper to her health!" exclaimed Captain De Crespigny, in a spontaneous impulse of enthusiasm, filling his glass, and singing in a fine, full-toned tenor, the favorite ballad,

"I saw her but a moment,

And methinks I see her yet,

With the wreath of summer flow'rs

Beneath her curls of jet."

"That must mean Agnes, for Marion's hair is brown," interrupted Sir Patrick, in a rallying tone, yet his manner betrayed the excited and exaggerated vivacity of one who evidently forced his spirits, endeavoring to banish care by ceasing to think. "Be constant for one entire week, and I shall then think Agnes has achieved a wonder indeed."

"You do me injustice, Dunbar! I must be allowed to beg your pardon! I have not been what is called 'in love' above nine times in my life! Well! you may laugh—anybody can laugh, but I consider that smile of yours exceedingly malicious!"

"When a man is on the ice, you know his best safety is to keep moving," replied Sir Patrick, drily. "People talk of two strings to their bow, De Crespigny, but you are never satisfied under two dozen!"

"Tant mieux et tant pis! As Rosamond says, 'Thou canst not tell yet, how many fathoms deep I am in love;' how concealment is preying on my damask cheek, and what violent heart-quakes I am continually enduring! The girl before last that I died for was my idol for an eternity of three months' duration. I might have continued most deplorably in love yet, if she had not imprudently appeared before me one day in an unbecoming east wind, with considerably more color in her nose than in her cheek!"

"You are the most observant of men, De Crespigny! If you only pass a young lady at full speed on a staircase, you can describe her eyes, complexion, figure, and expression, before I could be certain whether she has one eye or two! But what is this Irish story I heard about you! Some lady with seven brothers, and you threatened to shoot them all that she might become an heiress! What were the particulars?"

"You seem to know more than I do, or anybody else!" replied Captain De Crespigny, hastily tossing off a bumper to conceal his confusion. "There are so many girls whose peace of mind I annihilate, that it is next to impossible for me to remember them, but I can think of nothing now except my cousin Marion, who always promised to be beautiful, and has more than fulfilled her promise. Tell me, Dunbar! when does that pearl come out of the shell?"

"If you please, sir!" said a servant, entering, "the hackney coachman is waiting to be paid seven shillings for bringing Miss Dunbar from Dartmore House!"

"Let him wait all night if he chooses!" replied Sir Patrick, angrily frowning away his footman, "as the Irishman said, 'may he live till I pay him!' Tell the man to come again to-morrow—and next day—and the next—to come back in short, whenever he has nothing else to do! Perhaps in a delirium of generosity I may some day think of paying him."

"At our usual rate of payment, seven shillings from you would be equal to £7!" said Captain De Crespigny, laughing, "let him put it down to your account!"

"Yes! I have already more creditors than pence, therefore one more less can be of no consequence! That fellow of mine is the most officious rascal!—and he begins every sentence the same, 'If you please, sir, the plate-chest has been robbed!' or, 'If you please, sir, the bay mare is dead!' But I am never pleased to pay when it can be avoided, and especially now. This is one of my moneyless days! My banker's bulletins continue unfavorable! I cannot raise another shilling! The handle of the pump is chained. All my relations have made wills in my favor, but not one of them will die! As Falstaff says, 'What money's in my purse? seven groats and twopence!'"

"I shall set up a hackney coach, and drive one myself if it pays so well!" exclaimed Captain De Crespigny indignantly, "What an extortioner the fellow is! up to snuff and a pinch above it! He deserves to be executed!"

"Don't speak of executions in this house! we have had enough of them already," replied Sir Patrick, forcing a laugh that sounded very like a stage laugh. "What brings me here, if I am to be dunned in the very sanctuary by a set of rascally creditors! You can take the hackney coach home, if the man waits a few hours longer, De Crespigny, and pay him off! It would be difficult generally to say which of us is best off for ready money, but as Jeremy Diddler says, 'You don't happen to have such a thing as ten-pence there, have you?'"

"No! I make it a principle never now to patronize the paper currency or bullion ca m'est egal. Scotch notes are so atrociously filthy, and gold is too heavy for the pocket. I am hastening as fast as possible to my last shilling! Money is a bore! As for you, Dunbar, if you wished to borrow a glass of water, I shall not be the man to lend it! I would not for worlds be included among your 'rascally creditors!'"

"They beset my door so incessantly the week before we came here," said Sir Patrick, laughing, "that I played the fellows an admirable trick by connecting a strong galvanic battery with the knocker of the door, so that the more angrily they grasped it, the stronger was the shock they received. I sat with Wigton for an hour at the window in perfect fits, when we saw the look of astonishment and terror with which, one after another, they staggered away. One impudent rascal absolutely succeeded in serving a writ on me for £200, but happening to have as much in the house, I thought it best for once to pay him off, and——"

"This is a most remarkable story! almost incredible!" exclaimed Captain De Crespigny, laughing; "not so much your being arrested, for that might happen to any of us, any day, but your having £200 in the house, Dunbar! Excuse me there! I have as much credulity as most people, but you should keep to probabilities!"

"If one could pay people off with golden opinions," observed Sir Patrick conceitedly, "I flatter myself in that case, that all my creditors might be more than satisfied."

"When are those fellows to have their next meeting?"

"I wish we knew, that I might give them a harangue on agricultural distress!" replied Sir Patrick, carelessly plunging his whole hand into his luxuriant hair. "It gives me no scruple to disappoint the shop-keeping world! None whatever! These rascals have not the slightest hesitation in making punctual customers pay their bills twice, therefore it is quite fair that others should not pay at all. I could point out a dozen of my tradespeople who, knowing they risk only a sheet of paper by re-sending their bills a year after they are paid, make a practice of doing so. If the ill-used customer produces a receipt, why then, an angry bow and a sulky apology are all the satisfaction to be got; but if the receipt, by good chance, be lost, then he becomes perfectly cheatable, and no remedy can be had but to pay over again! I have seen the thing happen fifty times, long ago, when I really did sometimes pay my debts, and of course never took the trouble to keep any receipts."

"On such occasions," said Captain De Crespigny, "the offending shopkeeper, when proved in the wrong, should be fined double the amount of his bill, to be expended for the benefit of meritorious men like you and me, Dunbar, who cannot pay once. The sight of every poor man I meet gives me a moral to avoid poverty, coute qui coute; but as for you, Dunbar, prudence and economy are not certainly to be enumerated in the catalogue of your many virtues! As sure as your name is Patrick, if £1000 dropped into your pocket now, it would be squandered with the liberality of a prince before you walked to the next street."

"Most uncommonly true, De Crespigny!" replied Sir Patrick, ringing to order a fresh bottle of claret. "But in these days of bankruptcies, revolutions, robberies, sudden deaths, and murders, the only way to make sure of enjoying my own is, to spend it immediately. In that case there can be no mistake! I long ago discovered that it is impossible to be both merry and wise; therefore give me joy at any price. Happiness is to be bought, like everything else, if people have only the heart to pay for it. In my opinion a long face and a short purse are the two great evils of existence, both to be avoided at the risk of one's life."

"Perfectly unanswerable, Dunbar! Money is the patent sauce for giving a relish to everything! It throws dust in the eyes of all the world, till they can observe none of our faults, and yet see all our perfections magnified and enlarged, as we see them ourselves. Misers make money the end of life, but we make it the only means of enjoying existence; a sure ticket to pleasure of every kind and of every degree!"

"One of these years, De Crespigny, your grave will be dug with a golden spade! You are growing mercenary! But every man living is, in one way or other, deranged about money;—those who have much, hoarding as if their lives depended on amassing another shilling."

"I wish, Dunbar, you would write a treatise on the art of living well, after we have been obliged to calculate that difficult sum in arithmetic, 'take nothing from nothing, and nothing remains!'"

"Why, really, as a shillingless spendthrift, I could say enough to make all of you misers during life; but for my own part, as long as I possess a guinea, the first man who wants it may get the half. Hoarding is the only enjoyment which increases, I am told, with increasing years; but it is the only enjoyment of life I never intend to taste. I mean always to live rich, that I am determined on; and if I die rich, I shall out-hospital every fool who ever left a will, by endowing a 'Dunbar Dispensary for superannuated bon-vivants!'"

"How well the world would get on if everybody were of your way of thinking!"

"Thinking! my dear fellow—I never think! What do you take me for?"

"For a strange being, certainly, and for my own particular friend. Besides, as the poet beautifully expresses it, in speaking of such friendship as ours:—

"Thank you, De Crespigny! I shall send a file of mine to you to-morrow! Do you remember the memorable hour at old Brownlow's long ago, when my first bright guinea glittered in our hands, while he detained us to enumerate all the various uses it might and ought to be put to. I never forgot his oration—that is to say, I have thought of other things certainly during the intervening ten years; but it has often occurred to me, that if I had, as he proposed, hoarded my treasure till another came, I should have been a miser for life. I did, however, squander it then, with the spirit of a gentleman; and ever since, whenever any one lectures on economy, I put cotton in my ears. Wigton, the wine stands with you!"

"Capital claret this, Dunbar! My uncle Doncaster would not have quarrelled with Crockford, if he had given him such a bottle as this. Claret is certainly the poetry of wine, and I should like to have a cascade of this pouring down my throat all day and every day! Your own importation, I suppose? It does your cellar great credit."

"It has been, at any rate, placed to my credit in Morton's books. I am very fastidious now, and owe it to myself to have the best."

"I can't tell what you may owe to yourself," said Captain De Crespigny, laughingly turning his dark keen eyes on Sir Patrick; "but you certainly owe a great deal to other people."

"Very true, and I owe you a grudge for saying so. I never can forgive myself for not having been born to a larger estate! £50,000 a year would have suited me so much better than my paltry pittance of twenty! These are very hard times! The fellow who supplied this claret might have enjoyed my custom for ten years to come, if he would have waited as long for payment! It is a man's own fault always when he loses my business! The moment he takes to dunning, we part. It is a rule with me, and I told him so. He did not take warning!—actually sent in his account a second time!—a most ungentleman-like thing to do!—an offence I never pardon! So now——"

"He may retire from business at once!" added Captain De Crespigny, filling his glass. "Did I not hear that the house had failed next morning! We all know what your countenance is worth!"

"Three farthings a-year, paid at sight! We should make it a principle to discourage duns; but they do occasionally force their way upon me in some unaccountable manner, like a draught of air through the key-hole, and then I can look as grand and immovable as George the Fourth's statue; but fortune will be in good-humor with us again some day, and take me under her especial patronage, when I shall pay everybody thirty shillings in the pound, and——"

"Hear! hear! and a laugh! as they say in the House of Commons!" exclaimed Lord Wigton. "Well done, Sir Patrick, the Great——"

"The great what? Your speech is a fragment," said Sir Patrick, in his liveliest accents; "besides which, it was an interruption to mine, Wigton; and I intended to have said something particularly amusing, if you had not broken the thread prematurely. It is lost to you for ever now! I am dumb as a flounder; and you may pity all the present company, as they have really missed a very good thing."

"We shall place it to your credit accordingly, Dunbar," said Captain De Crespigny, laughing. "It was rather annoying to have perhaps the only good thing you ever could have said in your life nipped in the bud. I hate sometimes to see a joke of mine standing with its back to the wall, and struggling in vain for existence."

"Dunbar has talked himself into such a fit of parsimony," said Lord Wigton, laughing, "that he is ever economizing his words."

"N'importe," replied Sir Patrick, gaily circulating the bottles. "You are all mistaken, and you particularly, Wigton. I can economize my way up the hill of life as well as any of you, and shall yet live upon an income of nothing per annum. My plan is, to keep only five hunters—to stay but one month at Melton—to feed upon sunshine—to fill my head with the rule of three—in short, to become actually quite a pauper in my style of life; and, if all things else should fail, I can, as a last resource, turn patriot, and subsist upon liberalism and mob-popularity!"

"That sounds vastly prudent and proper, Dunbar; but all I say is, whatever desperate schemes you arrive at in the way of retrenchment, give me the income you spend, rather than the income you have!" replied Captain De Crespigny. "I took a fit of arithmetic one day, and discovered, upon accurate calculation, that scattering £20,000 a-year on an income of ten, gradually drains off the whole!"

"You are a perfect Babbage, my good fellow; but you know I have expectations from three uncles in Australia, and one in the West Indies!"

"Uncles! except the brave old Admiral, you scarcely possess a relation besides myself in the world; but as long as Sir Arthur lives, you have something to be proud of. The only thing I envy you on earth is for being his nephew. I reverence him. I never pass him, hail, rain, or sunshine, without taking off my hat. He is quite a jewel of a man."

"You shall have him very cheap!" replied Sir Patrick, assuming a careless tone, to conceal a great deal of irritation. "What will you bid? I wish he were 'going! going! and gone!' I never knew such an old bore as he is, always interfering about my sisters, and fussing about my debts. The world ought to be entirely peopled with uncles, aunts, and grandmothers, for they all know so much better how to act than anybody else."

"It is setting a very bad example for old people to live very long. My uncle Doncaster took a twenty years' lease of his house in Belgrave Square lately, and told me afterwards, he thought of having the term 'extended' to the period of his natural life! I am sure his life is perfectly supernatural already! What would the old fellow have!"

"Those superannuated people who outlive themselves have nothing else to do but to sit in their arm chairs and find fault! The world is good enough if they would only think so; but all their world-before-the-flood ideas are picked up in a different state of existence from ours. Everything changes in half a century—customs, dress, modes of thinking, notions of honor, ideas of pleasure, habits of society—all are turned upside down; so there can be no use in your uncle or mine prosing about the past and the future. There is neither past nor future in my plans of existence now."

"Why, really, if men would neither look backwards nor forwards, there is scarcely a moment of any man's life which is not very tolerably agreeable. The rule that carries me joyously forward through life, is to make the best of everything. We borrow all our annoyances from anticipation of the future, which often turns out perfectly groundless, or from regret of the past. We cannot alter the stream of events; therefore I am for floating along the tide with my arms folded, and looking neither to the right hand nor to the left."

"Quite right; and take my word for it, that in this little trumpery world of ours, ruined men enjoy the best of it. We have nothing to lose—our estates are managed for us—we care not the toss of a farthing about politics—we have no fear of a reverse—we are always the most liberal of what we have—and in short, it is true enough, that 'menage sans souci is the menage six sous——'"

"I have generally got through all the difficulties of life hitherto with a hop-skip-and-a-jump; so I mean always to keep myself in practice; but after all, Dunbar, money has its merits, and the best profession for a ruined man is to marry an heiress. They always select the greatest roue who makes them an offer! Why do you not propose to Miss Crawford and her £60,000?"

"I never answer questions in the dog-days! My dear fellow! £60,000 would not be a breakfast to me! It would scarcely supply copper-caps to my gun! Besides which, I cannot make a low marriage, and pick money out of the puddle! An heiress at best always seems to me a personification of all my creditors! A person one should marry to please them! but the only thing on earth I would not sell is—myself!"

"Being beyond all price, of course, Dunbar! I am still insufferably bored at Beaujolie Castle to marry that cousin of mine with a purse as long as her nose, and both I believe are miraculous, but we have not met in the memory of man! Perhaps I may some day yet be obliged to welcome gold from whatever pocket it comes, but I am not very impatient to see Miss Howard at the head of my table!"

"My dear fellow! you would be sitting at the bottom of her table, if Miss Howard Smytheson accepted you! It is unlucky that a fairy-like fortune and a fairy-like person are so seldom united in one individual."

"I have no objection to marry for money as soon as they are. Love among the roses would not be in my line at all, but when I see gold in a beautiful enough casket, then 'les beaux yeux de sa casette pour moi!' 'Mammon wins its way, where seraphs might despair!'"

"But if we must choose between them, give me love, and let money take care of itself!"

"Splendidly said! you are growing magnanimous, Dunbar. What has happened to you since we met last? Did I not hear some romantic tale of true love lately, connected with yourself and Granville's pretty sister, Clara! 'a portionless lass wi' a land pedigree!' I vehemently contradicted the whole affair, as Lady Towercliffe's entire story was so very unlike you, but——"

Captain De Crespigny paused suddenly—filled his glass—averted his eye—and pushed the bottles hastily round, for he had observed with astonishment that Sir Patrick's under lip became violently compressed, his white forehead became visibly paler, a bright flash was emitted from his eye, and his agitation became so obvious to every one around, that a deep silence fell over the whole party, which soon after dispersed.