Rhoda Fleming. Complete

CHAPTER XXV

It requires, happily, many years of an ordinary man’s life to teach him to believe in the exceeding variety and quantity of things money can buy: yet, when ingenuous minds have fully comprehended the potent character of the metal, they are likely enough to suppose that it will buy everything: after which comes the groaning anxiety to possess it.

This stage of experience is a sublime development in the great souls of misers. It is their awakening moment, and it is their first real sense of a harvest being in their hands. They have begun under the influence of the passion for hoarding, which is but a blind passion of the finger-ends. The idea that they have got together, bit by bit, a power, travels slowly up to their heavy brains. Once let it be grasped, however, and they clutch a god. They feed on everybody’s hunger for it. And, let us confess, they have in that a mighty feast.

Anthony Hackbut was not a miser. He was merely a saving old man. His vanity was, to be thought a miser, envied as a miser. He lived in daily hearing of the sweet chink of gold, and loved the sound, but with a poetical love, rather than with the sordid desire to amass gold pieces. Though a saving old man, he had his comforts; and if they haunted him and reproached him subsequently, for indulging wayward appetites for herrings and whelks and other sea-dainties that render up no account to you when they have disappeared, he put by copper and silver continually, weekly and monthly, and was master of a sum.

He knew the breadth of this sum with accuracy, and what it would expand to this day come a year, and probably this day come five years. He knew it only too well. The sum took no grand leaps. It increased, but did not seem to multiply. And he was breathing in the heart of the place, of all places in the world, where money did multiply.

He was the possessor of twelve hundred pounds, solid, and in haven; that is, the greater part in the Bank of England, and a portion in Boyne’s Bank. He had besides a few skirmishing securities, and some such bits of paper as Algernon had given him in the public-house on that remarkable night of his visit to the theatre.

These, when the borrowers were defaulters in their payments and pleaded for an extension of time, inspired him with sentiments of grandeur that the solid property could not impart. Nevertheless, the anti-poetical tendency within him which warred with the poetical, and set him reducing whatsoever he claimed to plain figures, made it but a fitful hour of satisfaction.

He had only to fix his mind upon Farmer Fleming’s conception of his wealth, to feel the miserable smallness of what seemed legitimately his own; and he felt it with so poignant an emotion that at times his fears of death were excited by the knowledge of a dead man’s impotence to suggest hazy margins in the final exposure of his property. There it would lie, dead as himself! contracted, coffined, contemptible!

What would the farmer think when he came to hear that his brother Tony’s estate was not able to buy up Queen Anne’s Farm?—when, in point of fact, he found that he had all along been the richer man of the two!

Anthony’s comfort was in the unfaltering strength of his constitution. He permitted his estimate of it to hint at the probability of his outlasting his brother William John, to whom he wished no earthly ill, but only that he should not live with a mitigated veneration for him. He was really nourished by the farmer’s gluttonous delight in his supposed piles of wealth. Sometimes, for weeks, he had the gift of thinking himself one of the Bank with which he had been so long connected; and afterward a wretched reaction set in.

It was then that his touch upon Bank money began to intoxicate him strangely. He had at times thousands hugged against his bosom, and his heart swelled to the money-bags immense. He was a dispirited, but a grateful creature, after he had delivered them up. The delirium came by fits, as if a devil lurked to surprise him.

“With this money,” said the demon, “you might speculate, and in two days make ten times the amount.”

To which Anthony answered: “My character’s worth fifty times the amount.”

Such was his reply, but he did not think it. He was honest, and his honesty had become a habit; but the money was the only thing which acted on his imagination; his character had attained to no sacred halo, and was just worth his annual income and the respect of the law for his person. The money fired his brain!

“Ah! if it was mine!” he sighed. “If I could call it mine for just forty or fifty hours! But it ain’t, and I can’t.”

He fought dogged battles with the tempter, and beat him off again and again. One day he made a truce with him by saying that if ever the farmer should be in town of an afternoon he would steal ten minutes or so, and make an appointment with him somewhere and show him the money-bags without a word: let him weigh and eye them: and then the plan was for Anthony to talk of politics, while the farmer’s mind was in a ferment.

With this arrangement the infernal Power appeared to be content, and Anthony was temporarily relieved of his trouble. In other words, the intermittent fever of a sort of harmless rascality was afflicting this old creature. He never entertained the notion of running clear away with the money entrusted to him.

Whither could an aged man fly? He thought of foreign places as of spots that gave him a shivering sense of its being necessary for him to be born again in nakedness and helplessness, if ever he was to see them and set foot on them.

London was his home, and clothed him about warmly and honourably, and so he said to the demon in their next colloquy.

Anthony had become guilty of the imprudence of admitting him to conferences and arguing with him upon equal terms. They tell us, that this is the imprudence of women under temptation; and perhaps Anthony was pushed to the verge of the abyss from causes somewhat similar to those which imperil them, and employed the same kind of efforts in his resistance.

In consequence of this compromise, the demon by degrees took seat at his breakfast-table, when Mrs. Wicklow, his landlady, could hear Anthony talking in the tone of voice of one who was pushed to his sturdiest arguments. She conceived that the old man’s head was softening.

He was making one of his hurried rushes with the porterage of money on an afternoon in Spring, when a young female plucked at his coat, and his wrath at offenders against the law kindled in a minute into fury.

“Hands off, minx!” he cried. “You shall be given in charge. Where’s a policeman?”

“Uncle!” she said.

“You precious swindler in petticoats!” Anthony fumed.

But he had a queer recollection of her face, and when she repeated piteously: “Uncle!” he peered at her features, saying,—

“No!” in wonderment, several times.

Her hair was cut like a boy’s. She was in common garments, with a close-shaped skull-cap and a black straw bonnet on her head; not gloved, of ill complexion, and with deep dark lines slanting down from the corners of her eyes. Yet the inspection convinced him that he beheld Dahlia, his remembering the niece. He was amazed; but speedily priceless trust in his arms, and the wickedness of the streets, he bade her follow him. She did so with some difficulty, for he ran, and dodged, and treated the world as his enemy, suddenly vanished, and appeared again breathing freely.

“Why, my girl?” he said: “Why, Dahl—Mrs. What’s-your-name? Why, who’d have known you? Is that”—he got his eyes close to her hair; “is that the ladies’ fashion now? ‘Cause, if it is, our young street scamps has only got to buy bonnets, and—I say, you don’t look the Pomp. Not as you used to, Miss Ma’am, I mean—no, that you don’t. Well, what’s the news? How’s your husband?”

“Uncle,” said Dahlia; “will you, please, let me speak to you somewhere?”

“Ain’t we standing together?”

“Oh! pray, out of the crowd!”

“Come home with me, if my lodgings ain’t too poor for you,” said Anthony.

“Uncle, I can’t. I have been unwell. I cannot walk far. Will you take me to some quiet place?”

“Will you treat me to a cab?” Anthony sneered vehemently.

“I have left off riding, uncle.”

“What! Hulloa!” Anthony sang out. “Cash is down in the mouth at home, is it? Tell me that, now?”

Dahlia dropped her eyelids, and then entreated him once more to conduct her to a quiet place where they might sit together, away from noise. She was very earnest and very sad, not seeming to have much strength.

“Do you mind taking my arm?” said Anthony.

She leaned her hand on his arm, and he dived across the road with her, among omnibuses and cabs, shouting to them through the roar,—

“We’re the Independence on two legs, warranted sound, and no competition;” and saying to Dahlia: “Lor’ bless you! there’s no retort in ‘em, or I’d say something worth hearing. It’s like poking lions in cages with raw meat, afore you get a chaffing-match out o’ them. Some of ‘em know me. They’d be good at it, those fellows. I’ve heard of good things said by ‘em. But there they sit, and they’ve got no circulation—ain’t ready, except at old women, or when they catch you in a mess, and getting the worst of it. Let me tell you; you’ll never get manly chaff out of big bundles o’ fellows with ne’er an atom o’ circulation. The river’s the place for that. I’ve heard uncommon good things on the river—not of ‘em, but heard ‘em. T’ other’s most part invention. And, they tell me, horseback’s a prime thing for chaff. Circulation, again. Sharp and lively, I mean; not bawl, and answer over your back—most part impudence, and nothing else—and then out of hearing. That sort o’ chaff’s cowardly. Boys are stiff young parties—circulation—and I don’t tackle them pretty often, ‘xcept when I’m going like a ball among nine-pins. It’s all a matter o’ circulation. I say, my dear,” Anthony addressed her seriously, “you should never lay hold o’ my arm when you see me going my pace of an afternoon. I took you for a thief, and worse—I did. That I did. Had you been waiting to see me?”

“A little,” Dahlia replied, breathless.

“You have been ill?”

“A little,” she said.

“You’ve written to the farm? O’ course you have!”

“Oh! uncle, wait,” moaned Dahlia.

“But, ha’ you been sick, and not written home?”

“Wait; please, wait,” she entreated him.

“I’ll wait,” said Anthony; “but that’s no improvement to queerness; and ‘queer’’s your motto. Now we cross London Bridge. There’s the Tower that lived in times when no man was safe of keeping his own money, ‘cause of grasping kings—all claws and crown. I’m Republican as far as ‘none o’ them’—goes. There’s the ships. The sun rises behind ‘em, and sets afore ‘em, and you may fancy, if you like, there’s always gold in their rigging. Gals o’ your sort think I say, come! tell me, if you are a lady?”

“No, uncle, no!” Dahlia cried, and then drawing in her breath, added: “not to you.”

“Last time I crossed this bridge with a young woman hanging on my arm, it was your sister; they say she called on you, and you wouldn’t see her; and a gal so good and a gal so true ain’t to be got for a sister every day in the year! What are you pulling me for?”

Dahlia said nothing, but clung to him with a drooping head, and so they hurried along, until Anthony stopped in front of a shop displaying cups and muffins at the window, and leprous-looking strips of bacon, and sausages that had angled for appetites till they had become pallid sodden things, like washed-out bait.

Into this shop he led her, and they took possession of a compartment, and ordered tea and muffins.

The shop was empty.

“It’s one of the expenses of relationship,” Anthony sighed, after probing Dahlia unsatisfactorily to see whether she intended to pay for both, or at least for herself; and finding that she had no pride at all. “My sister marries your father, and, in consequence—well! a muffin now and then ain’t so very much. We’ll forget it, though it is a breach, mind, in counting up afterwards, and two-pences every day’s equal to a good big cannonball in the castle-wall at the end of the year. Have you written home?”

Dahlia’s face showed the bright anguish of unshed tears.

“Uncle-oh! speak low. I have been near death. I have been ill for so long a time. I have come to you to hear about them—my father and Rhoda. Tell me what they are doing, and do they sleep and eat well, and are not in trouble? I could not write. I was helpless. I could not hold a pen. Be kind, dear uncle, and do not reproach me. Please, tell me that they have not been sorrowful.”

A keenness shot from Anthony’s eyes. “Then, where’s your husband?” he asked.

She made a sad attempt at smiling. “He is abroad.”

“How about his relations? Ain’t there one among ‘em to write for you when you’re ill?”

“He… Yes, he has relatives. I could not ask them. Oh! I am not strong, uncle; if you will only leave following me so with questions; but tell me, tell me what I want to know.”

“Well, then, you tell me where your husband banks,” returned Anthony.

“Indeed, I cannot say.”

“Do you,” Anthony stretched out alternative fingers, “do you get money from him to make payments in gold, or, do you get it in paper?”

She stared as in terror of a pit-fall. “Paper,” she said at a venture.

“Well, then, name your Bank.”

There was no cunning in her eye as she answered: “I don’t know any bank, except the Bank of England.”

“Why the deuce didn’t you say so at once—eh?” cried Anthony. “He gives you bank-notes. Nothing better in the world. And he a’n’t been givin’ you many lately—is that it? What’s his profession, or business?”

“He is…he is no profession.”

“Then, what is he? Is he a gentleman?”

“Yes,” she breathed plaintively.

“Your husband’s a gentleman. Eh?—and lost his money?”

“Yes.”