Family Secrets

The figure cowering over the furtive teapot glowered grimly at Barnes as he entered; and an old voice said —“Ho, it’s you!”

“I have brought you the notes, ma’am,” says Barnes, taking a packet of those documents from his pocket-book. “I could not come sooner, I have been engaged upon bank business until now.”

“I dare say! You smell of smoke like a courier.”

“A foreign capitalist: he would smoke. They will, ma’am. I didn’t smoke, upon my word.”

“I don’t see why you shouldn’t, if you like it. You will never get anything out of me whether you do or don’t. How is Clara? Is she gone to the country with the children? Newcome is the best place for her.”

“Doctor Bambury thinks she can move in a fortnight. The boy has had a little ——”

“A little fiddlestick! I tell you it is she who likes to stay, and makes that fool, Bambury, advise her not going away. I tell you to send her to Newcome. The air is good for her.”

“By that confounded smoky town, my dear Lady Kew?”

“And invite your mother and little brothers and sisters to stay Christmas there. The way in which you neglect them is shameful, it is, Barnes.”

“Upon my word, ma’am, I propose to manage my own affairs without your ladyship’s assistance,” cries Barnes, starting up, “and did not come at this time of night to hear this kind of ——”

“Of good advice. I sent for you to give it you. When I wrote to you to bring me the money I wanted it was but a pretext; Barkins might have fetched it from the City in the morning. I want you to send Clara and the children to Newcome. They ought to go, sir. That is why I sent for you; to tell you that. Have you been quarrelling as much as usual?”

“Pretty much as usual,” says Barnes, drumming on his hat.

“Don’t beat that devil’s tattoo; you agacez my poor old nerves. When Clara was given to you she was as well broke a girl as any in London.”

Sir Barnes responded by a groan.

“She was as gentle and amenable to reason, as good-natured a girl as could be; a little vacant and silly, but you men like dolls for your wives; and now in three years you have utterly spoiled her. She is restive, she is artful, she flies into rages, she fights you and beats you. He! he! and that comes of your beating her!”

“I didn’t come to hear this, ma’am,” says Barnes, livid with rage

“You struck her, you know you did, Sir Barnes Newcome. She rushed over to me last year on the night you did it, you know she did.”

“Great God, ma’am! You know the provocation,” screams Barnes.

“Provocation or not, I don’t say. But from that moment she has beat you. You fool, to write her a letter and ask her pardon. If I had been a man I would rather have strangled my wife, than have humiliated myself so before her. She will never forgive that blow.”

“I was mad when I did it; and she drove me mad,” says Barnes. “She has the temper of a fiend, and the ingenuity of the devil. In two years an entire change has come over her. If I had used a knife to her I should not have been surprised. But it is not with you to reproach me about Clara. Your ladyship found her for me.”

“And you spoilt her after she was found, sir. She told me part of her story that night she came to me. I know it is true, Barnes. You have treated her dreadfully, sir.”

“I know that she makes my life miserable, and there is no help for it,” says Barnes, grinding a curse between his teeth. “Well, well, no more about this. How is Ethel? Gone to sleep after her journey? What do you think, ma’am, I have brought for her? A proposal.”

“Bon Dieu! You don’t mean to say Charles Belsize was in earnest!” cries the dowager. “I always thought it was a ——”

“It is not from Lord Highgate, ma’am,” Sir Barnes said, gloomily. “It is some time since I have known that he was not in earnest; and he knows that I am now.”

“Gracious goodness! come to blows with him, too? You have not? That would be the very thing to make the world talk,” says the dowager, with some anxiety.

“No,” answers Barnes. “He knows well enough that there can be no open rupture. We had some words the other day at a dinner he gave at his own house; Colonel Newcome and that young beggar, Clive, and that fool, Mr. Hobson, were there. Lord Highgate was confoundedly insolent. He told me that I did not dare to quarrel with him because of the account he kept at our house. I should like to have massacred him! She has told him that I struck her — the insolent brute — he says he will tell it at my clubs; and threatens personal violence to me, there, if I do it again. Lady Kew, I’m not safe from that man and that woman,” cries poor Barnes, in an agony of terror.

“Fighting is Jack Belsize’s business, Barnes Newcome; banking is yours, luckily,” said the dowager. “As old Lord Highgate was to die and his eldest son, too, it is a pity certainly they had not died a year or two earlier, and left poor Clara and Charles to come together. You should have married some woman in the serious way; my daughter Walham could have found you one. Frank, I am told, and his wife go on very sweetly together; her mother-inlaw governs the whole family. They have turned the theatre back into a chapel again: they have six little ploughboys dressed in surplices to sing the service; and Frank and the Vicar of Kewbury play at cricket with them on holidays. Stay, why should not Clara go to Kewbury?”

“She and her sister have quarrelled about this very affair with Lord Highgate. Some time ago it appears they had words about it and when I told Kew that bygones had best be bygones, that Highgate was very sweet upon Ethel now, and that I did not choose to lose such a good account as his, Kew was very insolent to me; his conduct was blackguardly, ma’am, quite blackguardly, and you may be sure but for our relationship I would have called him to ——”

Here the talk between Barnes and his ancestress was interrupted by the appearance of Miss Ethel Newcome, taper in hand, who descended from the upper regions enveloped in a shawl.

“How do you do, Barnes? How is Clara? I long to see my little nephew. Is he like his pretty papa?” cries the young lady, giving her fair cheek to her brother.

“Scotland has agreed with our Newcome rose,” says Barnes, gallantly. “My dear Ethel, I never saw you in greater beauty.”

“By the light of one bedroom candle! what should I be if the whole room were lighted? You would see my face then was covered all over with wrinkles, and quite pale and woebegone, with the dreariness of the Scotch journey. Oh, what a time we have spent! haven’t we, grandmamma? I never wish to go to a great castle again; above all, I never wish to go to a little shooting-box. Scotland may be very well for men; but for women — allow me to go to Paris when next there is talk of a Scotch expedition. I had rather be in a boarding-school in the Champs Elysees than in the finest castle in the Highlands. If it had not been for a blessed quarrel with Fanny Follington, I think I should have died at Glen Shorthorn. Have you seen my dear, dear uncle, the Colonel? When did he arrive?”

“Is he come? Why is he come?” asks Lady Kew.

“Is he come? Look here, grandmamma! did you ever see such a darling shawl! I found it in a packet in my room.”

“Well, it is beautiful,” cries the Dowager, bending her ancient nose over the web. “Your Colonel is a galant homme. That must be said of him; and in this does not quite take after the rest of the family. Hum! hum! is he going away again soon?”

“He has made a fortune, a very considerable fortune for a man in that rank in life,” says Sir Barnes. “He cannot have less than sixty thousand pounds.”

“Is that much?” asks Ethel.

“Not in England, at our rate of interest; but his money is in India, where he gets a great percentage. His income must be five or six thousand pounds, ma’am,” says Barnes, turning to Lady Kew.

“A few of the Indians were in society in my time, my dear,” says Lady Kew, musingly. “My father has often talked to me about Barbell of Stanstead, and his house in St. James’s Square; the man who ordered more curricles when there were not carriages enough for his guests. I was taken to Mr. Hastings’s trial. It was very stupid and long. The young man, the painter, I suppose will leave his paint-pots now, and set up as a gentleman. I suppose they were very poor, or his father would not have put him to such a profession. Barnes, why did you not make him a clerk in the bank, and save him from the humiliation?”

“Humiliation! why, he is proud of it. My uncle is as proud as a Plantagenet; though he is as humble as — as what! Give me a simile Barnes. Do you know what my quarrel with Fanny Follington was about? She said we were not descended from the barber-surgeon, and laughed at the Battle of Bosworth. She says our great-grandfather was a weaver. Was he a weaver?”

“How should I know? and what on earth does it matter, my child? Except the Gaunts, the Howards, and one or two more, there is scarcely any good blood in England. You are lucky in sharing some of mine. My poor Lord Kew’s grandfather was an apothecary at Hampton Court, and founded the family by giving a dose of rhubarb to Queen Caroline. As a rule, nobody is of a good family. Didn’t that young man, that son of the Colonel’s, go about last year? How did he get in society? Where did we meet him? Oh! at Baden, yes; when Barnes was courting, and my grandson — yes, my grandson, acted so wickedly.” Here she began to cough, and to tremble so, that her old stick shook under her hand. “Ring the bell for Ross. Ross, I will go to bed. Go you too, Ethel. You have been travelling enough today.”

“Her memory seems to fail her a little,” Ethel whispered to her brother; “or she will only remember what she wishes. Don’t you see that she has grown very much older?”

“I will be with her in the morning. I have business with her,” said Barnes.

“Good night. Give my love to Clara, and kiss the little ones for me. Have you done what you promised me, Barnes?”

“What?”

“To be — to be kind to Clara. Don’t say cruel things to her. She has a high spirit, and she feels them, though she says nothing.”

“Doesn’t she?” said Barnes, grimly.

“Ah, Barnes, be gentle with her. Seldom as I saw you together, when I lived with you in the spring, I could see that you were harsh, though she affected to laugh when she spoke of your conduct to her. Be kind. I am sure it is the best, Barnes; better than all the wit in the world. Look at grandmamma, how witty she was and is; what a reputation she had, how people were afraid of her; and see her now — quite alone.”

“I’ll see her in the morning quite alone, my dear,” says Barnes, waving a little gloved hand. “Bye-bye!” and his brougham drove away. While Ethel Newcome had been under her brother’s roof, where I and friend Clive, and scores of others, had been smartly entertained, there had been quarrels and recriminations, misery and heart-burning, cruel words and shameful struggles, the wretched combatants in which appeared before the world with smiling faces, resuming their battle when the feast was concluded and the company gone.

On the next morning, when Barnes came to visit his grandmother, Miss Newcome was gone away to see her sister-inlaw, Lady Kew said, with whom she was going to pass the morning; so Barnes and Lady Kew had an uninterrupted tete-a-tete, in which the former acquainted the old lady with the proposal which Colonel Newcome had made to him on the previous night.

Lady Kew wondered what the impudence of the world’s would come to. An artist propose for Ethel! One of her footmen might propose next, and she supposed Barnes would bring the message. “The father came and proposed for this young painter, and you didn’t order him out of the room!”

Barnes laughed. “The Colonel is one of my constituents. I can’t afford to order the Bundelcund Banking Company out of its own room.”

“You did not tell Ethel this pretty news, I suppose?”

“Of course I didn’t tell Ethel. Nor did I tell the Colonel that Ethel was in London. He fancies her in Scotland with your ladyship at this moment.”

“I wish the Colonel were at Calcutta, and his son with him. I wish he was in the Ganges, I wish he was under Juggernaut’s car,” cried the old lady. “How much money has the wretch really got? If he is of importance to the bank, of course you must keep well with him. Five thousand a year, and he says he will settle it all on his son? He must be crazy. There is nothing some of these people will not do, no sacrifice they will not make, to ally themselves with good families. Certainly you must remain on good terms with him and his bank. And we must say nothing of the business to Ethel, and trot out of town as quickly as we can. Let me see? We go to Drummington on Saturday. This is Tuesday. Barkins, you will keep the front drawing-room shutters shut, and remember we are not in town, unless Lady............