Johnny Ludlow, First Series

“And the dying uncle was invented for the occasion, I presume,” remarked Mr. Duffham.

“All I know is, I never heard of an uncle before,” she tartly answered. “I asked Mrs. Clement-Pell on Sunday night where the uncle lived, and how long a journey they had to go: she answered shortly that he was at his country house, and bade me not tease her. Mr. Duffham, can my own boxes be stopped?”

“I should think no one would attempt to do it,” he answered. “But I’d get them out as soon as I could, were I you, Miss Phebus.”

“What a wreck it will be!” she exclaimed.

“You have used the right word, ma’am,” put in Mr. Brandon, who had left his horse outside. “And not only here. Wrecks they will be; and many of them.”

We stood looking at one another ruefully. The Pater had come to hunt up his two hundred pounds; but there did not seem much chance of his doing it. “Look here,” said he suddenly to the governess, “where was that telegram sent from?”

“We have not been able to discover. It was only seen by Mrs. Pell. After she had read it aloud, she crushed it up in her hand, as if in frightful distress, and called out about the poor dear old uncle. She took care it should not be seen: we may be very sure of that.”

“But who sent the telegram?”

“I don’t know,” said Miss Phebus viciously. “Her husband, no doubt. Neither was the luggage that they took with them labelled: we have remembered the fact since.”

“I think we might track them by that luggage,” observed the Pater. “Five big boxes.”

“If you do track them by it I’ll eat the luggage wholesale,” cried wise old Brandon. “Clement-Pell’s not a fool, or his wife either. They’ll go off just in the opposite direction that they appeared to go—and their boxes in another. As to Pell, he was probably unknown at the distant station the groom drove him to.”

There was no end to be served in staying longer at the house, and we quitted it, leaving poor Miss Phebus to her temper. I had never much liked her; but I could not help feeling for her that unlucky morning.

“What’s to be done now?” gloomily cried the Squire, while old Brandon was mounting. “It’s like being in a wood that you can’t get out of. If Clement-Pell had played an honest part with me: if he had come and said, ‘Mr. Todhetley, I am in sore need of a little help,’ and told me a bit about things: I don’t say that I would have refused him the money. But to dupe me out of it in the specious way he did was nothing short of swindling; and I will bring him to book for it if I can.”

That day was only the beginning of sorrow. There have been such cases since: perhaps worse; where a sort of wholesale ruin has fallen upon a neighbourhood: but none, to me, have equalled that. It was the first calamity of the kind in my experience; and in all things, whether of joy or sorrow, our earliest impressions are the most vivid. It is the first step that costs, the French tell us: and that is true of all things.

The ruin turned out to be wider even than was feared; the distress greater. Some had only lost part of their superfluous cash. It was mortifying; but it did not further affect their prosperity, or take from them the means of livelihood; no luxuries need be given up, or any servants dispensed with. Others had invested so much that it would throw them back years, perhaps cripple them for life. Pitiable enough, that, but not the worst. It was as nothing to those who had lost their all.

People made it their business to find out more about Mr. and Mrs. Clement-Pell than had been known before. Both were of quite obscure origin, it turned out, and he had not been a lawyer in London, but only a lawyer’s clerk. So much the more credit to him for getting on to be something better. If he had only had the sense to let well alone! But she?—well, all I mean to say here, is this: the farmers she had turned up her nose at were far, far better born and bred, even the smallest of them, than she was. Let that go: other women have been just as foolishly upstart as Mrs. Clement-Pell. One fact came out that I think riled the public worse than any other: that his Christian name was Clement and his surname Pell. He had united the two when growing into a great man, and put a “J.” before the Clement, which had no right there. Mr. Brandon had known it all along—at least he chanced to know that in early life his name was simply Clement Pell. The Squire, when he heard of this, went into a storm of reproach at old Brandon, because he had not told it.

“Nay, why should I have sought to do the man an injury?” remonstrated Mr. Brandon. “It was no business of mine, that I should interfere. We must live and let live, Squire, if we care to go through the world peaceably.”

The days went on, swelling the list of creditors who came forward to declare themselves. The wonder was, that so many had been taken in. But you see, people had not made it their business to proclaim that their money lay with Clement-Pell. Gentlefolk who lived on their fortunes; professional men of all classes, including the clergy; commercial men of high and low degree; small tradespeople; widows with slender incomes, and spinsters with less. If Clement-Pell had taken the money of these people, not intentionally to swindle them, as the Squire put it in regard to his own, but only knowing there was a chance that it would not be safe, he must have been a hard and cruel man. I think the cries of the defrauded of that unhappy time must have gone direct to heaven.

He was not spared. Could hard words injure an absentee, Clement-Pell must have come in for all sorts of harm. His ears burned, I should fancy—if there’s any truth in the saying that ears burn when distant friends give pepper. The queerest fact was, that no money seemed to be left. Of the millions that Clement-Pell had been worth, or had had to play with, nothing remained. It was inconceivable. What had become of the stores? The hoards of gold; the chests, popularly supposed to be filled with it; the bank-notes; the floating capital—where was it all? No one could tell. People gazed at each other with dismayed faces as they asked it. Bit by bit, the awful embarrassment in which he had been plunged for years came to light. The fictitious capital he had created had consumed itself: and the good money of the public had gone with it. Of course he had made himself secure and carried off loads, said the maddened creditors. But they might have been mistaken there.

For a week or two confusion reigned. Accountants set to work in a fog; official assignees strove to come to the bottom of the muddy waters. There existed some of what people called securities; but they were so hemmed in by claims that the only result would be that there would not be anything for any one. Clement-Pell had done well to escape, or the unhappy victims had certainly tarred and feathered him. All that time he was being searched for, and not a clue could be obtained to him. Stranger perhaps to say, there was no clue to his wife and daughters either. The five boxes had disappeared. It was ascertained that certain boxes, answering to the description, had been sent to London on the Monday from a populous station by a quick train, and were claimed at the London terminus by a gentleman who did not bear any resemblance to Clement-Pell. I’m sure the excitement of the affair was something before unknown to the Squire, as he raged up hill and down dale in the August weather, and it must have been as good as a course of Turkish baths to him.

Ah me! it is all very well to write of it in a light strain at this distance of time; but God alone knows how many hearts were broken by it.

One of the worst cases was poor Jacob Palmerby’s. He had saved money that brought him in about a hundred a year in his old age. Clement-Pell got hold of the money, doubled the interest, and Palmerby thought that a golden era had set in. For several years now he had enjoyed it. His wife was dead; his only son, who had been a sizar at Cambridge, was a curate in London. With the bursting up of Clement-Pell, Jacob Palmerby’s means failed: he had literally not a sixpence left in the world. The blow seemed to have struck him stupid. He mostly sat in silence, his head down; his clothes neglected.

“Come, Palmerby, you must cheer up, you know,” said the Squire to him one evening that we looked in at Rock Cottage, and found Mr. Brandon there.

“Me cheer up,” he returned, lifting his face for a moment—and in the last fortnight it had grown ten years older. “What am I to cheer up for? There’s nothing left. I can go into the workhouse—but there’s poor Michael.”

“Michael?”

“My son, the parson. The capital that ought to have been his after me, and brought him in his hundred a year, as it did me before I drew it from the funds, is gone. Gone. It is of him I think. He has been a good son always. I hope he won’t take to cursing me.”

“Parsons don’t curse, you know, and Michael will be a good son still,” said Mr. Brandon, shrilly. “Don’t you fret, Palmerby. Fretting does no good.”

“It ’ud wear out a donkey—as I tell him,” put in the old woman-servant, Nanny, who had brought in his supper of bread-and-milk.

He did not lift his head; just swayed it once from side to side by way of general response.

“It’s the way he goes on all day, masters,” whispered Nanny when we went out. “His heart’s a-breaking—and I wish it was that knave of a Pell’s instead. All these purty flowers to be left,” pointing to the clusters of roses and geraniums and honeysuckles within the gate, “and the chairs and tables to be sold, and the very beds to be took from under us!”

“Nay, nay, Nanny, it may turn out better than that,” spoke the Squire.

“Why, how can it turn out better, sirs?” she asked. “Pell didn’t pay the dividends this two times past: and the master, believing as all his excuses was gospel, never thought of pressing for it. If we be in debt to the landlord and others, is it our fault? But the sticks and stones must be sold to pay, and the place be given up. There be the work’us for me; I know that, and it don’t much matter; but it’ll be a crying shame if the poor master have to move into it.”

So it would be. And there were others in a similar plight to his; nothing else but the workhouse before them.

“He won’t never live to go—that’s one consolation,” was Nanny’s last comment as she held the gate open. “Good evening to ye, sirs; good evening, Master Johnny.”

What with talking to Dobbs the blacksmith, and staying with Duffham to drink what he called a dish of tea, it was almost dark when I set out home; the Squire and Mr. Brandon having gone off without me. I was vaulting over the stile the near way across the fields, expecting to catch it for staying, when a man shot into my path from behind the hedge.

“Johnny Ludlow.”

Well, I did feel surprised. It was Gusty Pell!

“Halloa!” said I. “I thought you were in Scotland.”

“I was there,” he answered. And then, while we looked at one another, he began to tell me the reason of his coming away. Why it is that all kinds of people seem to put confidence in me and trust me with matters they’d never speak of to others, I have never found out. Had it been Tod, for instance, Gusty Pell would never have shown himself out of the hedge to talk to him.

Gusty, shooting the grouse on the moors, had found his purse emptied of its last coin. He wrote to his father for more money: wrote and wrote; but none arrived: neither money nor letter. Being particularly in want of supplies, he borrowed a sovereign or two from his friends, and came off direct to see the reason why. Arrived within a few miles of home he heard very ugly rumours; stories that startled him. So he waited and came on by night, thinking it more prudent not to show himself.

“Tell me all about it, Johnny Ludlow, for the love of goodness!” he cried, his voice a little hoarse with agitation, his hand grasping my arm like a vice. “I have been taking a look at the place outside”—pointing up the road towards Parrifer Hall—“but it seems to be empty.”

It was empty, except for a man who had charge of the things until the sale could take place. Softening the narrative a little, and not calling everything by the name the public called it, I gave the facts to Gusty.

He drew a deep breath at the end, like a hundred sighs in one. Then I asked him how it was he had not heard these things—had not been written to.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I have been moving about Scotland: perhaps a letter of theirs may have miscarried; and I suppose my later letters did not reach them. The last letter I had was from Constance, giving me an account of some grand fête here that had taken place the previous day.”

“Yes. I was at it with Todhetley and the Whitneys. The—the crisis came three or four days after that.”

“Johnny, where’s my father?” he asked, after a pause, his voice sunk to a whisper.

“It is not known where he is.”

“Is it true that he is being—looked for?”

“I am afraid it is.”

“And, if they find him—what then? Why don’t you speak?” he added impatiently.

“I don’t know what. Some people say it will only be a bad case of bankruptcy.”

“Any way, it is a complete smash.”

“Yes, it’s that.”

“Will it, do you think, be ruin, Johnny? Ruin utter and unmitigated?”

“It is that already—to many persons round about.”

“But I mean to my own people,” said he, impatiently.

“Well, I should fear it would be.”

Gusty took off his hat to wipe his brow. He looked white in the starlight.

“What will become of me? I must fly too,” he muttered, as if to the stars. “And what of Fabian?—he cannot remain in his regiment. Johnny Ludlow, this blow is like death to me.”

And it struck me that of the two calamities, Gusty Pell, non-religious though he was, would rather have met death. I felt dreadfully sorry for him.

“Where’s James?” he suddenly asked. “Is he gone too?”

“James disappeared on the Sunday, it is said. It would hardly have been safe for him to remain: the popular feeling is very bitter.”

“Well, I must make myself scarce again also,” he said, after a pause. “Could you lend me a pound or so, Johnny, if you’ve got it about you?”

I told him I wished I had; he should have been heartily welcome to it. Pulling out my pockets, I counted it all up—two shillings and fivepence. Gusty turned from it with disdain.

“Well, good evening, Johnny. Thank you for your good wishes—and for telling me what you have. I don’t know to whom else I could have applied: and I am glad to have chanced to meet you.”

He gave another deep sigh, shook my hand, got over the stile, and crept away, keeping close to the hedge, as if he intended to make for Alcester, I stood and watched him until he was lost in the shadows.

And so the Pells, one and all, went into exile in some unknown region, and the poor duped people stayed to face their ruin at home. It was an awful time, and that’s the truth.