Only a clod
sitting. The march of progress, and the accompanying march of bricks and
mortar, had driven before them the cabbages and strawberry-beds, the
cucumber-frames and young plantations of evergreens, by the cultivation
of which Mr. Grunderson and his forefathers had lived comfortably upon
one-o’clock dinners of fat bacon and indigestible dumplings, with
occasional varieties of butcher’s meat, thinking themselves passing rich
when their ledgers showed a profit of two or three hundred pounds at the
end of the year.
The march of civilization, or rather the march of the myrmidons of that
unreasoning despot, that implacable ruler, whom women call Fashion,
always pushing westward, had contrived to push Mr. Grunderson’s gardens
off the face of the earth, and in so doing had set a Pactolus flowing
steadily into Mr. Grunderson’s pocket. The wealth poured in upon him
with a rapidity which was like nothing but a fairy tale. That heroic
Jack of the nursery story--who, by the bye, seems to have had no
surname--never looked in more amazement on the bean-stalk that shot into
the very skies in a single night, than did the honest market-gardener at
the stuccoed district which had arisen, seven or eight stories and a
campanello tower high, on the fields where he remembered execrating the
slugs on dewy mornings a few years before. Where a prairie of bright red
stocks had perfumed all the summer air with spicy odours, a square of
stately mansions stared grimly at each other, and prime ministers’
carriages rolled with meteor lamps through the midnight darkness. Where
ragged children, and gaunt sunburnt women, in blucher-boots and with
indescribable bonnets balanced on their freckled noses, had weeded
strawberry-beds for a pitiful sixpence a day, duchesses trailed their
silken trains and wearied of the rolling hours after the approved manner
of their kind in the pages of the poets and romancers. The
transformation was as perfect as it had been rapid; and instead of the
cabbages and cabbage-roses, the cucumber-frames and hothouse flowers of
his youth and early manhood, Mr. Grunderson found himself, at fifty
years of age, proprietor of ground-rents that made him a millionaire. He
had only one child, a daughter, who had been educated for some fifty
pounds a year at a seminary for young ladies, in which she had been
cruelly snubbed on account of her father’s cabbages, and who was now
determined to revenge herself on the companions of her blighted youth by
the splendour of her womanhood. Led by this young lady, who was blessed
with an energetic temperament and imperturbable good humour, Mr.
Grunderson found himself, always more or less independently of his own
agency, going through the complete formula of fashionable life according
to his daughter Rosa’s notion of that formula; which notion was
extremely variable, and took its colour from the last acquaintance to
whom the lively heiress was pleased to attach herself.
The very last just now happened to be Maude Tredethlyn, about whom Rosa
was ready to go off into raptures at any moment, and whom she always
spoke of as “a dear,” “a love,” or “a darling.” But there was a warm
womanly heart beating under Rosa’s fine dresses, and her raptures had
more meaning in them than the raptures of enthusiastic young ladies are
apt to have. She attached herself so effectually to Maude that Mrs.
Tredethlyn was fain to forget, or at any rate to forgive, the occasional
lapses in her grammar, the unpleasant warmth of her fat little hands,
which always came flopping down on the hands of her companion when she
was enthusiastic, and the shadow of vulgarity which is so apt to
accompany the sunshine of low-born liveliness.
Harcourt Lowther took an early opportunity to inform his elder brother
that the young lady in pink areophane was an heiress, and an heiress
well worthy the cultivation of any enterprising young diplomatist.
Roderick was not slow to take the hint, but he was a great deal too much
of a diplomatist to attempt any obvious angling for this rich prize. He
exerted all his powers of fascination in order to make himself agreeable
to Mrs. Tredethlyn, and he did not address so much as one syllable of
the most commonplace civility to the market-gardener’s daughter; the
consequence of which little manœuvre was, that as Rosa was sitting next
to Maude all the evening, she listened open-mouthed to every word he
uttered, and when she departed in her papa’s three-hundred-guinea
chariot--the market-gardener had insisted on possessing the traditional
lemon-coloured chariot with hammer-cloth, and powdered retainers, which
he had beheld and admired in his boyhood--she carried Roderick Lowther’s
image away with her.
It must be acknowledged, however, that it was no uncommon occurrence for
Miss Grunderson to carry the image of some tolerably good-looking and
passably well-mannered young man away from any festal gathering at which
she happened to find herself. The good-humoured Rosa had a habit of
falling desperately in love with any eligible person whom she
encountered either in public or private life, who did anything to make
himself notorious, or wore his hair long enough to be entitled a Being.
A long list of Beings had occupied that sentimental caravansary which
Miss Grunderson called her heart. She had been in love with all the
poets, from the Laureate to Mr. Tupper; with all the novelists, from the
great Sir Edward to the newest fledged of Mr. Mudie’s popularities; and
I fear she often fell in love with angels unawares in the shape of
feminine romancers who were pleased to hide their gentle sex under
masculine nomenclature. She had been in love--fathoms deep--with Lord
Palmerston, Signor Mario, Sir Edwin Landseer, and Mr. Charles Mathews.
She was wont to keep the three-hundred-guinea chariot waiting in Pall
Mall for an hour at a stretch while she hunted Mr. Graves and his
assistants for the last new portrait of her last new idol; and her room
was like a good Catholic’s chapel,--hung with the engraved effigies of
an army of saints.
It was a very pure flame which burnt before so many shrines, and a very
harmless one; and perhaps if Mr. Lowther the elder had known Rosa
Grunderson’s little idiosyncrasies, he would not have felt quite so
complacently triumphant in the consciousness that her round grey eyes
had been fixed upon him all the evening with the fond gaze of
hero-worship. Harcourt contrived to swell this triumph by artful little
brotherly compliments, as the two young men walked Londonwards under the
starlit summer sky, smoking their regalias, and talking as men about
town do talk under those sublime stars. Sentimental Rosa was gazing at
those luminous unknown worlds from the covert of the pinkest curtains in
Stuccoville, and thinking about _Him_! Rosa’s last adoration was always
mysteriously alluded to under cover of a personal pronoun. Her
admiration for Roderick Lowther was multiplied a hundredfold by the
young diplomatist’s disregard of her. Poor Rosa had been accustomed to
be made the object of what, in the argotic parlance of her age, she
called “a dead set,” on account of her papa’s ground-rents; and she was
inclined to imagine Mr. Lowther the noblest and most disinterested of
mankind because he did not commence this “dead set” immediately after
being introduced to her.
“I wonder whether he knows that I’m _the_ Miss Grunderson?” she thought,
as she looked up at those romantic stars so familiar to her in her
Byron. “Of course he does, though, ’Pa is _so_ different from the rest
of society, that people always know there’s some reason for his being
where he is, and they’re not very long guessing that the reason is
money. Will anybody ever want to marry me for my own sake, I wonder? Ah,
how I wish the Marquis of Westminster would fall in love with me! _He_
couldn’t want pa’s ground-rents.”
Thus the maiden mused in her bower, while Roderick Lowther, encouraged
by his junior, talked complacently of his conquest.
“She’s the simplest little thing in Christendom,” he said; “simpler
than--anybody I ever met in my life. The disinterested game is the dodge
in that quarter, dear boy. Do you remember how Frederic Soulié’s _Lion_
treats the little shopkeeper’s daughter? First with the elegant devotion
of a fashionable Romeo, then with the _brusquerie_ of a Benedick or a
Petruchio. _Lise Laloine_ died under the treatment; but I don’t think
the plump Rosa is made of quite such ethereal stuff. _La Petite_ is
sentimental, and wants to be loved for herself alone; ‘O, wert thou in
the cauld blast!’ ‘And long he mourned, the Lord of Burleigh;’ and that
sort of thing. She shall have it, the darling innocent! Tennyson and
Owen Meredith by the _kilo_, disinterested devotion by the bushel. But
oh, my Harcourt, do not lure your loving brother into the quagmire of
delusive wealth! Make sure that our simple-looking Grunderson does not
hide the cloven hoof of insolvency under the golden fleece in which he
drapes himself: those simple-looking men generally fail for half a
million. I like your Mrs. Tredethlyn, by the bye; she is very pretty and
very elegant; but, to be candid, my dear Harcourt--a brother ought to be
candid, you know, even at the risk of being unpleasant--I fancy there is
more in the husband than you imagine. A man with such a chest must have
some solidity in his composition. If I am anything of a physiologist, it
is not in that man’s organization to be made a fool of. Ah, I see you
don’t care to talk about it; you like to keep your own secrets, and play
your own game without backers or advisers. So be it. For myself, I am of
an open disposition; I like to talk of my own affairs when they go
smoothly, and to drop them when they take the crooked course. I don’t
suppose Napoleon the First was very fond of talking about Waterloo. He
forgot _that_ little skirmish, you may depend; and talked of Arcola and
Lodi, the Pyramids, Austerlitz, Wagram, and Auerstadt. I dare say Mr.
Merry holds his tongue about those two-thousand-guinea colts that
_didn’t_ win the Derby. People are _not_ eloquent about their failures.
I shall look up my old aunt early to-morrow morning; and after that, if
you have any excuse for calling on Mrs. Tredethlyn, I shall be glad to
accompany you. Unless I am very much at fault in feminine psychology,
Miss Grunderson will drop in upon her friend, to discuss my bearish
behaviour, on the earliest opportunity. Nothing impresses a sentimental
young person so favourably as downright rudeness. The heroine in a
lady’s novel always adores the man who snubs her.”
Thus argued the diplomatist by profession, strolling Strand-wards in the
starlight; while the diplomatist by organization listened quietly, and
thought his own thoughts as regarded this grand conquest, of which his
kinsman was so proud. Harcourt Lowther was not apt to resent the
insolent _insouciance_, the calm assurance of superiority, with which
his senior treated him, and indeed had treated him from that early
boyhood in which the lads had played together at Eton. But the wrongs
that rankle deeply in a man’s breast are sometimes those which he
endures silently. Harcourt believed that his own prospects had been
sacrificed to the advancement of Roderick; and he was not sorry when the
elder son went wild, and turned his back as coolly upon his father as if
he had never been the pampered favourite of weak love, the all-absorbing
drain upon a limited income. In every way Roderick had fared better than
his brother. Lowther Hall, surrounded by park and farm-lands that
constituted an estate of some three hundred acres, might not be worth
very much to a man of large ideas and lofty inspirations; but whatever
it was worth, it was tightly entailed upon the heir of the Lowthers, and