The Daltons; Or, Three Roads In Life. Volume II

“Yet she never took the trouble to visit you when living under the same roof!” cried Grounsell, indignantly.

The old man laid down the letter, and seemed to ponder for some moments.

“What’s the amount? – how much is the sum?” asked Grounsell, bluntly.

“The amount! – the sum! – of what?” inquired Sir Stafford.

“I ask, what demand is she making, that it is prefaced thus?”

“By Heaven! if you were not a friend of more than fifty years’ standing, you should never address me as such again,” cried Onslow, passionately. “Has ill-nature so absorbed your faculties that you have not a good thought or good feeling left you?”

“My stock of them decreases every day, – ay, every hour, Onslow,” said he, with a deeper emotion than he had yet displayed. “It is, indeed, a sorry compromise, that if age is to make us wiser, it should make us less amiable, also!”

“You are not angry with me? – not offended, Grounsell?” said Onslow, grasping his hand in both his own.

“Not a bit of it But, as to temperament, I can no more help my distrust, than you can conquer your credulity, which is a happier philosophy, after all.”

“Then come, read that letter, Grounsell,” said Onslow, smiling pleasantly. “Put your prejudices aside for once, and be just, if not generous.”

Grounsell took the note, and walked to the window to read it. The note was just what he expected, – a prettily turned inquiry after her husband’s health, interwoven with various little pleasantries of travelling, incidents of the road, and so forth. The invitation was a mere suggestion, and Grounsell was half angry at how little there was to find fault with; for, even to the “Very sincerely yours, Hester Onslow,” all was as commonplace as need be. Accidentally turning over the page, however, he found a small slip of silver paper, – a bank check for five hundred pounds, only wanting Onslow’s signature. Grounsell crushed it convulsively in his palm, and handed the note back to Onslow, without a word.

“Well, are you convinced? – are you satisfied now?” asked Onslow, triumphantly.

“I am perfectly so!” said Grounsell, with a deep sigh. “You must write, and tell her that business requires your immediate presence in England, and that George’s condition will necessitate a return by sea. Caution her that the Daltons should be consulted about this marriage, which, so far as I know, they have not been; and I would advise, also, seeing that there may be some interval before you can write again, that you should send her a check, – say for five hundred pounds.”

“So you can be equitable, – Grounsell,” cried the other, joyously.

“And here is a letter from Lord Norwood,” said Grounsell, not heeding the remark, and breaking the seal as he spoke. “Laconic, certainly. ‘Let me have the enclosed by this evening. – N.’ The enclosed are five acceptances for two hundred each; the ‘value received’ being his Lordship’s services in upholding your son’s honor. Now here, at least, Onslow, I ‘ll have my own way.” And, with these words, he seated himself at a table and wrote: —

My Lord, – Living in a land where assassination is cheap, and even men of small fortune can keep a Bravo, I beg to return your Lordship’s bills, without submitting them to my friend for endorsement, your price being considerably above the tariff of the country, and more calculated to your own exigencies than the occasion which it was meant to remunerate. I am, yours,

Paul Grounsell.

“What have you said there, Grounsell? you look so self-satisfied, it can scarcely be over-civil.”

“There, – ‘To the Viscount Norwood’” said Grounsell, as he sealed and addressed the note. “We are getting through our work rapidly. In a week, or even less, if George’s symptoms show nothing worse, we shall get away from this; and even on the sea one feels half as though it were England.”

We need not follow Grounsell through the busy days which ensued, nor track him in his various negotiations with tradespeople, bankers, house-agents, and that legionary class which are called “commissionaires.” Enough if we say that, in arranging for the departure of his friends, his impressions of Italian roguery received many an additional confirmation; and that, when the last day of their sojourn arrived, his firm conviction was that none but a millionnaire could afford to live in this the very cheapest capital of Europe!

And now they are gone! steaming calmly away across the Gulf of Genoa. They have closed the little episode of their life in Italy, and with heavy hearts are turning homeward. The great Mazzarini Palace looks sad and forlorn; nor do we mean to linger much longer on a scene whence the actors have departed.

CHAPTER III. A LAST SCENE

One last glance at the Mazzarini Palace, and we leave it forever

Seated in the drawing-room where Lady Hester once held sway, in the very chair around which swarmed her devoted courtiers and admirers, Mrs. Ricketts now reclined, pretty much on the same terms, and with probably some of the same sentiments, as Louis Blanc or his friend Albert might have experienced on finding themselves domesticated within the Palace of the Luxembourg. They were, so to say, parallel circumstances. There had been a great reverse of fortune, an abdication, and a flight. The sycophants of the day before were the masters now, and none disputed the pretensions of any bold enough to assume dictation. To be sure, Mrs. Ricketts’s rule, like Ledru Rollings, was but a provisional government; for already the bills for an approaching sale of everything were posted over the front of the palace, and Racca Morlache’s people were cataloguing every article with a searching accuracy, very tormenting to the beholders.

From some confused impression that they were friends of Lady Hester, and that Mrs. Ricketts’s health was in a precarious condition, Sir Stafford gave orders that they should not be molested in any way, but permitted to prolong their stay to the latest period compatible with the arrangement for sale. A sense of gratitude, too, mingled with these feelings; for Mrs. Ricketts had never ceased to indite euphuistic notes of inquiry after George himself, – send presents of impracticable compounds of paste and preserves, together with bottles of mixtures, lotions, embrocations, and liniments, one tithe of which would have invalided a regiment Gronnsell, it is true, received these civilities in a most unworthy spirit; called her “an old humbug,” with a very unpolite expletive annexed to it; and all but hurled the pharmacopoeia at the head of the messenger. Still, he had other cares too pressing to suffer his mind to dwell on such trifles; and when Onslow expressed a wish that the family should not be disturbed in their occupancy, he merely muttered, “Let them stay and be d – d;” and thought no more of them.

Now, although the palace was, so to speak, dismantled, the servants discharged, the horses sent to livery for sale, the mere residence was convenient for Mrs. Ricketts. It afforded a favorable opportunity for a general “doing up of the Villino Zoe,” – a moment for which all her late ingenuity had not been able to provide. It opened a convenient occasion, too, for supplying her own garden with a very choice collection of flowers from the Mazzarini, – fuchsias, geraniums, and orchidae, being far beyond all the inventoriai science of Morlache’s men; and lastly, it conferred the pleasing honor of dating all her despatches to her hundred correspondents from the Palazzo Mazzarini, where, to oblige her dear Lady Hester, she was still lingering, – “Se sacrificando” as she delighted to express it, “Jai doveri dell’ amicizia.” To these cares she had now vowed herself a martyr. The General believed in her sorrows; Martha would have sworn to them; and not a whit the less sincerely that she spent hours in secreting tulip roots and hyacinths, while a deeper scheme was in perpetration, – no less than to substitute a copy of a Gerard Dow for the original, and thus transmit the genius of the Ricketts family to a late posterity. Poor Martha would have assisted in a murder at her bidding, and not had a suspicion of its being a crime!

It was an evening “at home to her few most intimate friends,” when Mrs. Ricketts, using the privilege of an invalid, descended to the drawing-room in a costume which united an ingenious compromise between the habit of waking and sleeping. A short tunic, a kind of female monkey-jacket, of faded yellow satin edged with swansdown, and a cap of the same material, whose shape was borrowed from that worn by the beef-eaters, formed the upper portion of a dress to which wide fur boots, with gold tassels, and a great hanging pocket, like a sabretasche, gave a false air of a military costume. “It was singular,” she would remark, with a bland smile, “but very becoming!” Besides, it suited every clime. She used to come down to breakfast in it at Windsor Castle. “The Queen liked it;” the Bey of Tripoli loved it; and the Hospodar of Wallachia had one made for himself exactly from the pattern. Her guests were the same party we have already introduced to our reader in the Villino Zoe, – Haggerstone, the Pole, and Foglass being the privileged few admitted into her august presence, and who came to make up her whist-table, and offer their respectful homage on her convalescence.

The Carnival was just over, the dull season of Lent had begun, and the Rickettses’ tea-table was a resource when nothing else offered. Such was the argument of Haggerstone as he took a cheap dinner with Foglass at the Luna.

“She ‘s an infernal bore, sir, – that I know fully as well as you can inform me; but please to tell me who is n’t a bore.” Then he added, in a lower voice, “Certainly it ain’t you!”

“Yes, yes, – I agree with you,” said Foglass; “she has reason to be sore about the Onslows’ treatment.”

“I said a bore, sir, – not sore,” screamed out Haggerstone.

“Ha!” replied the other, not understanding the correction. “I remember one day, when Townsend – ”

“D – n Townsend!” said Haggerstone.

“No, not Dan, – Tom Townsend. That fellow who was always with Mathews.”

“Walk a little quicker, and you may talk as much balderdash as you please,” said the other, buttoning up his coat, and resolving not to pay the slightest attention to his companion’s agreeability.

“Who is here?” asked Haggerstone, as he followed the servant up the stairs.

“Nobody but Count Petrolaffsky, sir.”

“Un Comte à bon compte,” muttered Haggerstone to himself, always pleased when he could be sarcastic, even in soliloquy. “They ‘ll find it no easy matter to get a tenant for this house nowadays. Florence is going down, sir, and will soon be little better than Boulogne-sur-Mer.”

“Very pleasant, indeed, for a month in summer,” responded Foglass, who had only caught up the last word. “Do you think of going there?”

“Going there!” shouted out the other, in a voice that made misconception impossible. “About as soon as I should take lodgings in Wapping for country air!”

This speech brought them to the door of the drawing-room, into which Haggerstone now entered, with that peculiar step which struck him as combining the jaunty slide of a man of fashion with the martial tread of an old soldier.

“Ha! my old adherents, – all my faithful ones!” sighed Mrs. Ricketts, giving a hand to each to kiss; and then, in a voice of deep emotion, she said, “Bless you both! May peace and happiness be beneath your roof-trees! joy sit beside your hearth!”

Haggerstone reddened a little; for, however alive to the ludicrous in his neighbors, he was marvellously sensitive as to having a part in the piece himself.

“You are looking quite yourself again,” said he, bluntly.

“The soul, indeed, is unchanged; the spirit – ”

“What’s become of Purvis?” broke in Haggerstone, who never gave any quarter to these poetic flights.

“You ‘ll see him presently. He has been so much fatigued and exhausted by this horrid police investigation, that he never gets up till late. I ‘ve put him on a course of dandelion and aconite, too; the first effect of which is always unpleasant.”

Leaving Foglass in conclave with the hostess, Haggerstone now approached the Count, who had for several times performed his toilet operation of running his hands through his hair, in expectation of being addressed.

“How d’ye do, – any piquet lately?” asked the Colonel, half cavalierly.

“As if I was tinking of piquet, wid my country in shains! How you can aske me dat?”