The Sack of Monte Carlo 3

The Sack of Monte Carlo 3

It was towards the middle of June, and the sun was just setting at the

end of a long, warm day. Mr. Thatcher showed us our rooms, and then took

us into the great hall up-stairs, from which a balcony and steps

descended into the garden. It had a very high-pitched roof, and was

decorated in the Moorish fashion (rather like the old London Crystal

Palace; where, by-the-way, I have eaten pop-corn many a time as a boy,

but cannot honestly say I ever enjoyed it), and would hold, I dare say,

a hundred and fifty people; rather senseless, I thought, seeing there

were only seven or eight bedrooms, but possibly useful for bean-feasts

or a printer’s wayz-goose.

 

The broad June sun was setting, as I say, and streamed right in from the

garden, as Forsyth and I ate our dinner. The only other guests were two

brothers named Walton, who spent their lives playing golf. They played

at Nesshaven all day, and wrote accounts of it every night, sitting

close together, smoking and mumbling about the condition of the greens

and their tee-shots, all of which was solemnly committed to paper.

 

What they would have done with themselves twenty years ago I can’t

conceive—possibly taken to drink. At any rate, now they only live for

golf, and their thick legs and indifferent play are to be seen wherever

there’s a links and they can get permission to perform.

 

Mr. Thatcher’s wife, a doctor’s daughter, had long been dead; but his

old mother, of the astonishing age of ninety-three, was still alive, and

lived with him in the inn. At first she had not at all liked the idea of

settling down almost at the gates of Wharton Park, her old home; but

every year since they came she had expected would be her last, and she

only lived on on sufferance, as it were, in the hope she would soon die.

Sprier old lady, however, I must say, I never saw. She wasn’t in the

least deaf, and never wore glasses, and she was simply the keenest hand

at bezique I ever encountered; at which entertaining game, by-the-way,

if she wasn’t watched, she would cheat outrageously.

 

She came of a good old Norfolk family, and actually remembered the

jubilee of George III. in 1810; but when asked for details of that

touching and patriotic event, all she could say was, “Well, I remember

the blacksmith’s children dressed in white.”

 

Old Mrs. Thatcher and I were great friends, and used to potter about the

garden together in the early mornings. Farther abroad she never

ventured, except once a year, I believe, when she trotted off to the

church to visit her husband’s grave and see the tablet inside was kept

clean.

 

So June and part of July slipped away, diversified, as I have explained,

by a visit to London and some melancholy pleasures sipped in Mabel

Harker’s society, from which I returned to “The French Horn” in a truly

desperate and pitiable frame of mind. Indeed, so low and forlorn was I

at times that Mr. Thatcher, with great sympathy, once or twice fetched

me out a bottle of old port (and not bad tipple, either, for a country

inn), which we drank together, while he related to me at some length the

misfortunes of his life.

 

Chief among them was the loss of his ancestral home, Wharton Park. The

Thatchers had lived there since the first of them, a Lord Mayor of the

time of Henry VIII., had built the house in the year 1543—of which

original structure only the stables, in an extremely ramshackle

condition, remained. A drunken Thatcher with a bedroom candle had burned

the rest, towards the end of the last century, when the present house

was built by my father-in-law’s grandfather; a bad man, apparently,

since though he had a wife and children established in Portman Square,

he kept a mistress in one of the wings of Wharton Park, where one night

she went suddenly raving mad (treading on her long boa and believing it

a serpent come from the lower regions to claim and devour her), and

filled the air with her screechings till, a year later, she died.

 

Mr. Thatcher’s father had mortgaged the place heavily to Mr. Crage, an

attorney and moneylender of Clement’s Inn, and soon after his death, in

1850, the mortgage was foreclosed, and Mr. Crage took possession and had

lived there with great disrepute ever since. He was a very vile old man,

who had killed his wife with ill-treatment and turned his daughters

out-of-doors; no female domestic servant was safe from his dreadful

advances, and at last he was left with no one to serve him but the

gardener and his wife, with whom, especially when they all got drunk

together on gin-and-water in the kitchen, he was as often as not engaged

in hand-to-hand fighting.

 

When I first saw him he was well over eighty, and a more

abandoned-looking old villain I never set eyes on; with a gashed,

slobbering mouth, in which the yellow teeth stuck up out of the

under-jaw like an old hound’s; a broken nose, which had once been

hooked, until displaced by a young carpenter in the village, whose

sweetheart he had been rude to; and the most extraordinary, bushy, black

eyebrows. His hand shook so he always cut himself shaving, and his chin

was always dabbled with dry blood. In short, a more malignant and gaunt

personality I never saw, as I first did quite close, leaning on a gate

and mumbling to himself, dressed in a tight body-coat, gaiters, and a

dull, square, black hat, like a horse-coper’s.

 

I remember he called out to me over the gate in a rasping voice, “Hi,

there, you young Cockney! what’s the time?” Whereupon I haughtily

replied it was time he thought of his latter end and behaved himself. At

which he fell to cursing and shaking his stick, and making sham,

impotent efforts to get over the gate. For they told me he was mortally

afraid of dying, as all bad (and, for the matter of that, many good) men

are. He knew, of course, Mr. Thatcher was the rightful owner of the

place, and he would sometimes come down to “The French Horn” and jeer

him about it, offering it for £30,000, which, he dared say, Mr. Thatcher

had in the house. And more than once, curse his senile impudence! Mr.

Thatcher told me he had offered to marry Lucy!—but this is really too

horrible a subject to be dwelt on.

 

In short, I loathed the old wretch so heartily that it was perhaps the

happiest moment of my life (with the exception of that blessed February

morning when I stood at the altar of Nesshaven church with Lucy and

heard her sweet and tremulous “I will”) when, after our triumphant

return from Monte Carlo, Mr. Thatcher and I went up to Wharton Park with

the £30,000 in notes and gold and paid the old ruffian out over the

coarse kitchen-table, almost the only furniture of the grand

drawing-room, where there were still the old yellow silk hangings—as

will all come in its place, later on.

 

Lucy Thatcher at this time, in June and July, was staying with her aunt,

Miss Young, her mother’s sister, who kept a girls’ school in the

Ladbroke Grove Road, out at Notting Hill. She taught some of the younger

children and made herself generally useful, taking them out walks in

Kensington Gardens; for Mr. Thatcher wisely thought her too beautiful to

be always at “The French Horn,” since bicyclists and golfers are

somewhat apt to be too boldly attentive to the lovely faces they meet

with on their roundabouts. Nor can I altogether blame them. So, as I

have said, I never saw her till my return in September, when her beauty

and modesty—which in my judgment are synonymous—at once captured me,

and always will hold me captive till I die.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER III

 

I CONTINUE TO KEEP OUT OF MABEL HARKER’S WAY AND GO TO GORING—

RETURN TO “THE FRENCH HORN”—WANDERINGS WITH LUCY—MR. CRAGE

REHEARSES HIS OWN FUNERAL

 

 

AS August approached I began to feel apprehensive as to the right course

to pursue with regard to Mabel Harker, my _fiancée_. I don’t want to say

anything unkind about her here in print, but, the fact is, the

engagement had been an unfortunate one from the first. Let me only

observe that I really honestly think if a man is to choose between

behaving like a brute (as people say you do when you break off an

engagement) and making himself miserable for life (as I most certainly

should if I had married Mabel), he had much better select the former

course. At any rate, I know now that if I had had the brutality, or the

courage, to tell Mabel point-blank at first that I was very sorry, but I

didn’t care for her sufficiently to marry her, I should have spared

myself a vast deal of annoyance and self-reproach, which now I

understand to have been altogether unnecessary; seeing, I know now very

well, she didn’t really care for me in the least, but simply regarded me

as a lay-figure (with eight hundred a year) to stand beside her at the

altar rails and mechanically say “_I will_” and “_I do_” and the rest of

it.

 

After her visit to her sister’s in the Regent’s Park, in July, she had

gone back to Folkestone, and I was in some tremor whether she might not

desire me to spend the holiday months with them there; but, most

fortunately, Mrs. Harker, her aunt, received a very good offer for her

house in Clifton Gardens, which she determined to take, and go abroad to

Switzerland, where she and Mabel could live in a _pension_ and save

quite three-fourths of the home rent.

 

Mabel wanted me to join them, but I managed to get out of it, and very

lucky I did; for it was at that very _pension_ at Lucerne she met

Charles Byles, the architect, her present husband, and a great ass he

must have looked with that small face of his and huge mustache, and a

rope round him for going up Pilatus; besides being slightly bandy.

 

As for me, I went off down to my sister’s, Mrs. Rivers, married to the

publisher, who had taken a little house on the river at Taplow, where I

spent the end of August and early part of September with great content,

more especially in the middle of the week, when my precious

brother-in-law (a dull fellow and a prig) was away doing his publishing

in town.

 

I left Taplow the second week in September, and something gentle, yet

persuasive and strong, seeming to call me back to “The French Horn,” off

I went there; and there, as I have already mentioned, I met and fell

madly in love with Lucy Thatcher at first sight, a passion deepening to

a tempest before October dawned.

 

Now, as I am telling the truth in this work, and not writing a romance,

I have to admit that the month I had of Lucy’s dear companionship,

before I knew I was free, was by no means spent idly, and that I made

all the running with her of which my amorous wits are capable, just as

though I had been really unappropriated.

 

Nor was this altogether wrong, for I felt quite sure Providence would

stand my good friend, as always in such affairs before, and direct Mabel

Harker’s hopes into another, sounder matrimonial channel than mine. Even

if Providence had not, but had stood aloof and fought shy, I should then

most certainly have deemed it necessary to play the part myself, seeing

how deeply and truly my heart was now _for the first time_ engaged.

 

Dear! dear! at what amazing speed that happy month flew past; how little

there seems I can say about it now. Isn’t it strange that Time, whom

poets prefigure as an ancient person with anchylosed joints, further

encumbered, notwithstanding his great age, with a scythe and an enormous

hour-glass, is yet on occasion capable of showing the panting hurry of a

sprinter?

 

With Lucy I was alone almost all the time, for Mr. Thatcher, very

properly, wouldn’t allow her to help in the bar—a department he

gracefully presided over himself in his dirty blazer, grasping the

handle of the beer engine, and sometimes, on Saturday nights mostly,

slightly shaken with a gentlemanly but unmistakable attack of hiccoughs.

So dear Lucy had nothing much to do but go bathing and help her

grandmother in the garden, gathering the plums and raking down the

ripening apples. And though there were days when, womanlike, she shunned

me and kept out of my way (so as not to make herself too cheap), yet she

was very frank and simple and trusting in giving me at other times her

constant companionship; and as on the days when she desired to be more

alone I always respected her wish and kept away (just turning at the

fourth hole on the links to watch her light, firm figure crossing down

to her bathing-tent on the shore, and waving the putter at her), she

was, as she has since told me, pleased at my delicacy and perception,

and showed her pleasure when we again met by the extraordinary

brightness of her eyes and the sweet readiness of her smile.