Narrating the Failure of a Loyal Attempt to Circumvent Adversity by means of Modern Appliances

If his name was Jabez, why weren’t we told so, I’d like to know?” demanded Mrs Albert of me, with a momentary flash in her weary glance. “What right had the papers to go on calling him J. Spencer, year after year, while he was deluding the innocent, and fattening upon the bodies of his dupes? To be sure, now that the mask is off, and he has fled, they speak of him always as Jabez. Why didn’t they do it before, while honest people might still have been warned? But no—they never did—and now it’s too late—too late!”

The poor lady’s voice broke pathetically upon this reiterated plaint. She bowed her head, and as I looked with pained sympathy upon the drooping angle of her proud face, I could see the shadows about her lips quiver.

A sad tale indeed it was, to which I had been listening—here in a lonesome corner of the cloistral, dim-lit solitude of the big drawing-room at Fernbank. It was not a new story. Kensington has known it by heart for a generation. Bloomsbury learned it earlier, and before that it was familiar in Soho—away off in the old days when the ruffling gentry of Golden Square fought for the chance of buying ingenious John Law’s South Sea scrip. And even then, the experience was an ancient and half-forgotten memory of Bishopsgate and the Minories. It was the old, old tragedy of broken fortunes.

Mrs Albert was clear that it began with the Liberator troubles. I had my own notion that Mr Albert Grundy was skating on thin ice before the collapse of the building societies came. However that may be, there was no doubt whatever that the cumulative Australian disasters had finished the business. There were melancholy details in her recital which I lack the courage to dwell upon. The horse and brougham were gone; the lease of Fernbank itself was offered for sale, with possession before Michaelmas, if desired; Ermyntrude’s engagement was as good as off.

“It won’t be a bankruptcy,” said Mrs Albert, lifting her face and resolutely winking the moisture from her lashes. “We shall escape that—but for the moment at least I must abandon my position in society. Dudley is over to-day looking at a small place in Highgate, although Albert thinks he would prefer Sydenham. My own feeling is that some locality from which you could arrive by King’s Cross or St Paneras would be best. One never meets anybody one knows there. Then, when matters adjust themselves again, as of course they will, we could return here—to this neighbourhood, at least—and just mention casually having been out at our country place—on the children’s account, of course. And Floribel is delicate, you know.”

“Oh well, then,” I said, trying to put buoyance into my tone, “it isn’t so had after all. And you feel—Albert feels—quite hopeful about things coming right again?”

My friend’s answering nod of affirmation had a certain qualifying dubiety about it. “Yes, we’re hopeful,” she said. “But a fortnight ago, I felt positively sanguine. Nobody ever worked harder than I did to deserve success, any way. I only failed through gross treachery—and that, too, at the hands of the very people of whom I could never, never have believed it. When you find the aristocracy openly actuated by mercenary motives, as I have done this past month, it almost makes you ask what the British nation is coming to!”

“Dear me!” I exclaimed, “is it as bad as that?”

“You shall judge for yourself,” said Mrs Albert gravely. “You know that I organised—quite early in the Spring—the Loyal Ladies’ Namesake Committee of Kensington. I do not boast in saying that I really organised it, quite from its beginnings. The idea was mine; practically all the labour was mine. But when one is toiling to realise a great ideal like that, one frequently loses sight of small details. I ought to have known better—but I took a serpent to my bosom. I was weak enough to associate with me in the enterprise that monument of duplicity and interested motives—the Hon. Mrs Coon-Alwyn. Why, she hadn’t so much as an initial letter to entitle her to belong——”

“I am not sure that I follow you,” I put in. “Ladies’ Namesake Committee—initial letter—I don’t seem to grasp the idea.”

“It’s perfectly simple,” explained Mrs Albert. “The idea was that all the ladies—our set, you know—whose name was ‘May’ should combine in subscribing for a present.”

“But your name is Emily,” I urged, thoughtlessly.

“Oh, we weren’t exactly literal about it,” said Mrs Albert; “we couldn’t be, you know. It would have shut out some of our very best people. But I came very near the standard, indeed. My second name is Madge. You take the first two letters of that, and the ‘y’ from Emily, and there you have it. Oh, I assure you, very few came even as near it as that—and as I said to Dudley at the time, if you think of it, even her name isn’t really May. It’s only a popular contraction. But that Hon. Mrs Coon-Alwyn, she had no actual right whatever to belong. Her names are Hester Winifred Edith. She h............