CHAPTER XXVII.

IN BRUSSELS.

‘Of course, this is a plant, my dear.’

‘Really, Colonel,’ said the lady addressed, ‘I wish you would not use such improper language; children so easily pick up slang. You ought to be very careful. It is too bad, just as we are about to move to England, where you will take your rightful place in county society as head of our ancient family.’

‘You’re right there,’ said the Colonel to his lady in a laughing tone; ‘you’re right there, I believe. We are one of the oldest families in the country. It was one of them who was with Noah in the ark. You recollect the old epitaph—

‘“Nobles and heralds, by your leave, Here lies what once was Matthew Prior, The son of Adam and of Eve, Can Bourbon or Nassau go higher?”’

‘Colonel,’ said the lady, ‘I am ashamed of you.’

‘What for, dearest?’

‘For quoting such a worldly poet. We were not allowed to read him in school. I am sure many of his poems are highly improper.’

‘Oh, then you’ve looked into him, have you?’

‘Certainly not,’ said the lady, with an affected shake of her head.

‘Then how can you condemn him?’

‘Easily enough. He was of the world. His was an unsanctified genius. He had no part or lot in the one thing needful.’

‘At any rate,’ replied the Colonel, ‘he’s buried in Westminster Abbey.’

‘The more’s the pity.’

‘And he was the friend of the clergy.’

‘Yes, of the carnal and unregenerate. There are too many of such, alas, in the Church of England—wolves in sheep’s clothing.’

The lady was an Evangelical of the bitterest type.

‘Well, dear, we won’t discuss the question,’ said the Colonel meekly. ‘What am I to reply to this letter?’

‘What, the letter from London, from Mr. Wentworth? Short and sharp. Say the idea is perfectly ridiculous. We can hear of no compromise. It is quite out of the question for us to give up our rights just as Providence has opened to us a means of extended usefulness. Mr. Wentworth is only a newspaper writer, a man of no position in society, and I am told his wife was actually an actress.’

‘Yes, I believe so,’ said the Colonel. This was enough. The Colonel’s lady was one of the elect—a model in a certain section of society of holy living. Yet, under a sanctified exterior, she was as hard, and bitter, and selfish, and uncharitable as it was possible for any woman to be, and the beauty of it was, that she thought herself, and was considered by her friends, to be in a state of exalted spiritualism, living in close communion with God.

Such people are by no means uncommon, the creatures of a self-deception of a most odious kind. Their language is full of Scripture phraseology; they delight in pious hymns; all their reading is confined to pious biographies, especially religious diaries, the morbid revelations of which record at nauseous length their diseased state of mind, which they assume to be the direct results of a Divine inspiration and tokens of a Divine love. When they are in distress, it is not the natural result of the circumstances in which they are placed, or the conditions of ordinary life, but the Divine will and purpose. If they neglect the laws of health, and are ill in consequence, it is the Lord’s doing. If they lose their money owing to imprudence in trusting it in rotten companies, it is the Lord’s doing. If trade is bad and creature comforts fail, or they live beyond their means and are in embarrassed circumstances, it is the Lord’s doing, to wean them from the world and its sinful vanities, and to lead them back to Himself.

There are no mysteries to them; all is clear, and their knowledge of the Divine way is only equalled by their thorough acquaintance with those of His great adversary the devil. In them, peace of mind is the result of this knowledge. To the carnal mind their self-sufficiency and self-satisfaction is amusing. It is almost beautiful, the smile with which they listen to one another, and the calm contempt with which they regard everyone not of their way of thinking. By the side of them an iceberg is genial, and their power is as great as their faith. All the artillery of heaven is in their hands. Peace is theirs, but it is truly a peace that passeth all understanding; they are not as other men are. To the outer world their cry is, ‘Procul este, profani!’

But let us return to the Colonel’s lady.

She continues:

‘We are not wealthy, you see,’ she was wont to say to the kind-hearted Belgian ladies, when they called on her for a subscription. ‘We are, I may say, living quite up to our income, and we have got our duty to do to the family, and the Colonel keeps the money-bags so tight that I can never get a franc. But what I can do I do, and, after all, it matters little—the contemptible dross of the world—if I can give to the needy the riches, that never fade nor pass away, of the Divine Word.’

And thus the lady excused to herself, as so many of us do, her lack of true charity.

‘Well,’ said the Colonel, ‘what shall I say to this Wentworth?’

‘Take no notice of him. Refer him to your lawyer in London. The path of duty is very clear. We find ourselves, by a merciful interposition of Providence, restored to our rightful position in society. You to take your place as the head of one of the old county families, I to still labour for my blessed Master in a sphere of increased usefulness. You owe it to your family to at once take possession of the title and estate, and not to have a moment’s delay.’

‘But,’ said the Colonel, ‘if there should be a grain of truth in this cock-and-bull story it might be awkward. I should like to have an inquiry made about this boy.’

‘Pray, do nothing of the kind. You only open the way to fraud and imposition. Your late brother never treated us fairly. He was often positively rude to me, and his son—if this boy is such—has no claims on us.’

‘Well,’ said the Colonel, ‘I should not like to behave shabbily.’

‘What do you mean, Colonel?’ said the lady indignantly. ‘I am not the one to recommend you to do that. The boy is no concern of ours. We take what the law gives us. It is a duty we owe to society to do that. I am aware,’ added the lady, ‘that Sir Watkin had a son, that the infant was stolen, and that the dead body was placed in the family vault. Not all the lawyers in London, and they are bad enough, can upset that.’

‘But suppose the wrong child was buried?’

‘Fiddle-de-dee!’ said the lady. ‘We know better than that. The estates are fairly ours, and we return to England as soon as we can to take our rights. Mr. Wentworth and his wife between them have concocted this villainous story, which no decent person would ever think of believing.’

Wentworth and his wife were quite aware of that; they believed in the boy, who was—to judge from the family portraits—a striking representation of the deceased Baronet at his time of life. But would the world believe it? that was the question to be asked.

Poor Sally on her deathbed had no inducement to tell a lie. Unfortunately, she had kept her secret too long. She had hoped to have made a harvest of the boy, but death had come to her, and all her hopes had ended in the grave. As is often the case, she was too clever by half.

Wentworth and his wife had an unpleasant time of it. Indeed, the family lawyer had intimated in a genial mood that he might possibly feel it his painful duty to place them in the dock, on a charge of conspiracy to defraud—a situation for which neither of them had any fancy. Their best friends seemed to regard the story with suspicion. What jury would be convinced by the testimony of ‘our Sally,’ whose head was generally fuddled with drink, and whom they could not even produce in court? It was true that the lad very much resembled the deceased Baronet. It was quite within probability that the latter was his father, but that did not legally make him the son and heir. It was felt that they had better talk over the matter with the lad himself, who was then an officer on board one of the floating hotels plying between Liverpool and New York.

Accordingly, Rose undertook the task of interviewing him in one of those sumptuous hotels for which Liverpool is famed. The boy had never heard of Sir Watkin, nor were his recollections of the deceased Sally of a very decided character. He had, however, never believed that she was his mother, and from her mysterious hints when under the influence of drink he had come to the conclusion that he had been stolen, though when or why he could not make out.

It is true there was an old woman at Sloville, a pal of Sally’s, the one who had written to Rose, who had the identical dress which the baby wore when it was stolen, but it was felt that the production of the article in question in court would not much advance matters. She had not stolen the baby. She could only say that the deceased Sally had asserted she had, and had bidden her be quiet, as one day or other she would astonish everybody by the wonderful revelation she had it in her power to make. It was true that Sally had been suspected, and the more so that she was no more to be seen, having been clever enough to put the detectives on the wrong scent.

It was hinted that an Italian lady had been mixed up in the matter. The world said there had been an intrigue between the Baronet and a fair Italian, and that thus she had revenged herself for his throwing her overboard.

‘Actresses,’ continued the Colonel’s lady, ‘are not particular sort of people, and newspaper writers are not much better, I believe. I can’t think how old county families can be civil to them. In my young days such an idea would have been scouted, and I must say then they knew their place. My papa helped the local printer to start a paper on condition that it was to support Church and State. Occasionally my papa had the man up in the Castle, and would sit down to a bottle of port with him, but he never took any notice of him elsewhere, nor ever introduced him to his family. I believe the man was a very respectable tradesman. He was regular in his attendance at church, and always stood by our family in election contests; but the modern literary man gives himself the most ridiculous airs, fancies he is a genius because he can scribble, and that he can wield the destinies of the nation because he is connected with some low paper. I hear he belongs to clubs, and goes into society just as if he were a gentleman. Every time,’ added the lady piteously, ‘every time that I take up an English newspaper, I see the country going to the bad, the people more intolerant of good government, the upper classes more careless as to the future, recklessly acting in accordance with the motto, “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.” The Sunday is desecrated by all classes, and the Lord will have no pity in the day of His wrath for Sabbath-breakers. The philosophers are in favour of Godless education, and now they tell me there are people who argue that Atheists have a right to sit in a Christian Parliament. Oh dear! the vials of God’s wrath will soon be flung down upon that unhappy country. The signs of the times tell us that we have reached the beginning of the end. There will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, and the day of the Lord shall come.’

The gallant Colonel was accustomed to that sort of thing, and took it calmly. Whether he believed what his wife said I don’t know. He always acted as if he did; never contradicted her, as he had found that to be no use; attended her to church, sat out with well-bred polish the dreary minutes devoted to staring the domestics out of countenance called family prayers. He was always ready at his wife’s bidding to attend Bible-readings for the select few, and when joked on the subject by his chums, if he had any at his club, never gave railing for railing, but took it as if it was a cross laid on him to bear.

That he was a sincere believer no one, however, who caught him apart from the presiding influence of his wife believed for a moment. He swore too much for that, and occasionally he had been heard, when sentimental and under the influence of wine, to refer to Cremorne, to Evans’s and the Cider Cellars, to the Closerie du Lilas, to the Mabille, and other places in London and Paris where wicked people, in old times, were wont to enjoy themselves after their kind. Beneath his frosted exterior there was a good deal of the old Adam yet.

Once upon a time, according to William of Malmesbury, a merchant named Swelf had been in the habit of calling on the holy St. Wolstan once a year, to receive his advice in the healing of his spiritual ailments. After giving the needed absolution, the prelate observed:

‘You often repeat the sins which you have confessed, because, as the proverb goes, opportunity makes the thief. Wherefore, I advise you to become a monk, which if you do, you will not long have the opportunity for these sins.’

Upon this, the other rejoined that he could not possibly become a monk, because he found it so difficult to bring his mind to it.

‘Go your ways,’ said the bishop, in somewhat of a passion: ‘a monk you will become, whether you choose it or not, but only when the appliances and means of vice have waxen old in you;’ which fact, adds the historian, ‘we afterwards witnessed, because when now broken down by old age, he betook himself to our monastery.’

It was the decay of nature rather than the growth of grace which made that man a monk. What we lack in old age is the power to sin. The body ceases to be the servant of the senses. We lead a better life possibly, from a conventional point of view, but is it not often terribly against the grain? A man gives up a dissipated career because his strength is not equal to its demands. His vitality has been prematurely exhausted.

The conversation referred to took place in the breakfast-room of one of the attractive residences lining the route to the Bois du Cambre, which all my readers know is one of the fairest suburbs of Brussels, and of which, as most of them have gone there, I doubt not, to spend a happy day, I need say no more. The family did not reside there, but far away in the suburb, where rents and wages and provisions were alike cheap. The Colonel had gone abroad to educate his daughters more cheaply than he could in London, and the plan had so far succeeded that the young ladies had managed to read a good many French novels, the perusal of which not a little interfered with the enjoyment of family prayers, Bible-reading, and religious conferences, to which they were invariably taken by their mamma, and other means of grace. The family funds had been rather restricted, and at Brussels the mamma had assured herself that there was an exceptionally attractive Evangelical ministry in the Church of England, under the special license of the Bishop of London, and that was enough for her, the Colonel merely considering he could vegetate more cheaply in Belgium than in London. But they were all quite ready to leave for England; the Colonel to strut as a baronet and landed proprietor, the young ladies with a view to the matrimonial market—for, alas! they had met with few eligibles in Brussels—and the mamma that she might carry on on a larger scale and with increased success the missionary operations of which she had been the centre in Brussels. If she had not done much good among the people, she had—and that was her one great reward—managed considerably to annoy the priests, who glared at her with evil eyes as they watched her sallying forth daily with her bag of tracts. Money it was hard to get out of the Colonel’s lady, even in the most urgent cases; but no one was more ready with her tracts.