of demeanour which we carry everywhere, swindling
inn-landlords, passing fictitious cheques upon credulous
bankers, robbing coach-makers of their carriages, goldsmiths
of their trinkets, easy travellers of their money at cards,
even public libraries of their books--thirty years ago you
needed but to be a Milor Anglais, travelling in a private
carriage, and credit was at your hand wherever you chose
to seek it, and gentlemen, instead of cheating, were
cheated. It was not for some weeks after the Crawleys'
departure that the landlord of the hotel which they
occupied during their residence at Paris found out the losses
which he had sustained: not until Madame Marabou, the
milliner, made repeated visits with her little bill for
articles supplied to Madame Crawley; not until Monsieur
Didelot from Boule d'Or in the Palais Royal had asked
half a dozen times whether cette charmante Miladi who
had bought watches and bracelets of him was de retour.
It is a fact that even the poor gardener's wife, who
had nursed madame's child, was never paid after the
first six months for that supply of the milk of human
kindness with which she had furnished the lusty and
healthy little Rawdon. No, not even the nurse was paid
--the Crawleys were in too great a hurry to remember
their trifling debt to her. As for the landlord of the hotel,
his curses against the English nation were violent for the
rest of his natural life. He asked all travellers whether
they knew a certain Colonel Lor Crawley--avec sa
femme une petite dame, tres spirituelle. "Ah,
Monsieur!" he would add--"ils m'ont affreusement vole." It
was melancholy to hear his accents as he spoke of that
catastrophe.
Rebecca's object in her journey to London was to
effect a kind of compromise with her husband's numerous
creditors, and by offering them a dividend of ninepence
or a shilling in the pound, to secure a return for him into
his own country. It does not become us to trace the steps
which she took in the conduct of this most difficult
negotiation; but, having shown them to their satisfaction
that the sum which she was empowered to offer was all
her husband's available capital, and having convinced
them that Colonel Crawley would prefer a perpetual
retirement on the Continent to a residence in this country
with his debts unsettled; having proved to them that there
was no possibility of money accruing to him from other
quarters, and no earthly chance of their getting a larger
dividend than that which she was empowered to offer,
she brought the Colonel's creditors unanimously to
accept her proposals, and purchased with fifteen hundred
pounds of ready money more than ten times that amount
of debts.
Mrs. Crawley employed no lawyer in the transaction.
The matter was so simple, to have or to leave, as she
justly observed, that she made the lawyers of the
creditors themselves do the business. And Mr. Lewis
representing Mr. Davids, of Red Lion Square, and Mr. Moss
acting for Mr. Manasseh of Cursitor Street (chief
creditors of the Colonel's), complimented his lady upon the
brilliant way in which she did business, and declared
that there was no professional man who could beat her.
Rebecca received their congratulations with perfect
modesty; ordered a bottle of sherry and a bread cake
to the little dingy lodgings where she dwelt, while
conducting the business, to treat the enemy's lawyers:
shook hands with them at parting, in excellent good
humour, and returned straightway to the Continent, to
rejoin her husband and son and acquaint the former
with the glad news of his entire liberation. As for the
latter, he had been considerably neglected during his
mother's absence by Mademoiselle Genevieve, her French
maid; for that young woman, contracting an attachment
for a soldier in the garrison of Calais, forgot her charge
in the society of this militaire, and little Rawdon very
narrowly escaped drowning on Calais sands at this
period, where the absent Genevieve had left and lost
him.
And so, Colonel and Mrs. Crawley came to London:
and it is at their house in Curzon Street, May Fair, that
they really showed the skill which must be possessed by
those who would live on the resources above named.
CHAPTER XXXVII
The Subject Continued
In the first place, and as a matter of the greatest
necessity, we are bound to describe how a house
may be got for nothing a year. These mansions
are to be had either unfurnished, where, if you
have credit with Messrs. Gillows or Bantings, you
can get them splendidly montees and decorated
entirely according to your own fancy; or they are
to be let furnished, a less troublesome and
complicated arrangement to most parties. It was so
that Crawley and his wife preferred to hire their house.
Before Mr. Bowls came to preside over Miss Crawley's
house and cellar in Park Lane, that lady had had
for a butler a Mr. Raggles, who was born on the family
estate of Queen's Crawley, and indeed was a younger
son of a gardener there. By good conduct, a handsome
person and calves, and a grave demeanour, Raggles rose
from the knife-board to the footboard of the carriage;
from the footboard to the butler's pantry. When he had
been a certain number of years at the head of Miss
Crawley's establishment, where he had had good wages,
fat perquisites, and plenty of opportunities of saving, he
announced that he was about to contract a matrimonial
alliance with a late cook of Miss Crawley's, who had
subsisted in an honourable manner by the exercise of a
mangle, and the keeping of a small greengrocer's shop in
the neighbourhood. The truth is, that the ceremony had
been clandestinely performed some years back; although
the news of Mr. Raggles' marriage was first brought to
Miss Crawley by a little boy and girl of seven and eight
years of age, whose continual presence in the kitchen
had attracted the attention of Miss Briggs.
Mr. Raggles then retired and personally undertook the
superintendence of the small shop and the greens. He
added milk and cream, eggs and country-fed pork to his
stores, contenting himself whilst other retired butlers
were vending spirits in public houses, by dealing in the
simplest country produce. And having a good connection
amongst the butlers in the neighbourhood, and a
snug back parlour where he and Mrs. Raggles received
them, his milk, cream, and eggs got to be adopted by
many of the fraternity, and his profits increased every
year. Year after year he quietly and modestly amassed
money, and when at length that snug and complete bachelor's
residence at No. 201, Curzon Street, May Fair, lately
the residence of the Honourable Frederick Deuceace,
gone abroad, with its rich and appropriate furniture by
the first makers, was brought to the hammer, who should
go in and purchase the lease and furniture of the house
but Charles Raggles? A part of the money he borrowed, it
is true, and at rather a high interest, from a brother
butler, but the chief part he paid down, and it was with
no small pride that Mrs. Raggles found herself sleeping in
a bed of carved mahogany, with silk curtains, with a
prodigious cheval glass opposite to her, and a wardrobe
which would contain her, and Raggles, and all the family.
Of course, they did not intend to occupy permanently
an apartment so splendid. It was in order to let the house
again that Raggles purchased it. As soon as a tenant
was found, he subsided into the greengrocer's shop once
more; but a happy thing it was for him to walk out of
that tenement and into Curzon Street, and there survey
his house--his own house--with geraniums in the
window and a carved bronze knocker. The footman
occasionally lounging at the area railing, treated him with
respect; the cook took her green stuff at his house and
called him Mr. Landlord, and there was not one thing
the tenants did, or one dish which they had for dinner,
that Raggles might not know of, if he liked.
He was a good man; good and happy. The house
brought him in so handsome a yearly income that he was
determined to send his children to good schools, and
accordingly, regardless of expense, Charles was sent to
boarding at Dr. Swishtail's, Sugar-cane Lodge, and
little Matilda to Miss Peckover's, Laurentinum House,
Clapham.
Raggles loved and adored the Crawley family as the
author of all his prosperity in life. He had a silhouette of
his mistress in his back shop, and a drawing of the
Porter's Lodge at Queen's Crawley, done by that spinster
herself in India ink--and the only addition he made to
the decorations of the Curzon Street House was a print
of Queen's Crawley in Hampshire, the seat of Sir Walpole
Crawley, Baronet, who was represented in a gilded car
drawn by six white horses, and passing by a lake
covered with swans, and barges containing ladies in hoops,
and musicians with flags and penwigs. Indeed Raggles
thought there was no such palace in all the world, and
no such august family.
As luck would have it, Raggles' house in Curzon Street
was to let when Rawdon and his wife returned to London.
The Colonel knew it and its owner quite well; the latter's
connection with the Crawley family had been kept up
constantly, for Raggles helped Mr. Bowls whenever Miss
Crawley received friends. And the old man not only let
his house to the Colonel but officiated as his butler
whenever he had company; Mrs. Raggles operating in the
kitchen below and sending up dinners of which old Miss
Crawley herself might have approved. This was the way,
then, Crawley got his house for nothing; for though
Raggles had to pay taxes and rates, and the interest of the
mortgage to the brother butler; and the insurance of his
life; and the charges for his children at school; and the
value of the meat and drink which his own family--and
for a time that of Colonel Crawley too--consumed; and
though the poor wretch was utterly ruined by the
transaction, his children being flung on the streets, and himself
driven into the Fleet Prison: yet somebody must pay even
for gentlemen who live for nothing a year--and so it was
this unlucky Raggles was made the representative of
Colonel Crawley's defective capital.
I wonder how many families are driven to roguery and
to ruin by great practitioners in Crawlers way?--how
many great noblemen rob their petty tradesmen,
condescend to swindle their poor retainers out of wretched
little sums and cheat for a few shillings? When we read
that a noble nobleman has left for the Continent, or that
another noble nobleman has an execution in his house
--and that one or other owes six or seven millions, the
defeat seems glorious even, and we respect the victim in
the vastness of his ruin. But who pities a poor barber who
can't get his money for powdering the footmen's heads;
or a poor carpenter who has ruined himself by fixing up
ornaments and pavilions for my lady's dejeuner; or the
poor devil of a tailor whom the steward patronizes, and
who has pledged all he is worth, and more, to get the
liveries ready, which my lord has done him the honour
to bespeak? When the great house tumbles down, these
miserable wretches fall under it unnoticed: as they say in
the old legends, before a man goes to the devil himself,
he sends plenty of other souls thither.
Rawdon and his wife generously gave their patronage
to all such of Miss Crawley's tradesmen and purveyors
as chose to serve them. Some were willing,enough,
especially the poor ones. It was wonderful to see the
pertinacity with which the washerwoman from Tooting
brought the cart every Saturday, and her bills week after week.
Mr. Raggles himself had to supply the greengroceries. The
bill for servants' porter at the Fortune of War public
house is a curiosity in the chronicles of beer. Every
servant also was owed the greater part of his wages, and
thus kept up perforce an interest in the house. Nobody in
fact was paid. Not the blacksmith who opened the lock;
nor the glazier who mended the pane; nor the jobber who
let the carriage; nor the groom who drove it; nor the
butcher who provided the leg of mutton; nor the coals
which roasted it; nor the cook who basted it; nor the
servants who ate it: and this I am given to understand is not
unfrequently the way in which people live elegantly on
nothing a year.
In a little town such things cannot be done without
remark. We know there the quantity of milk our
neighbour takes and espy the joint or the fowls which are
going in for his dinner. So, probably, 200 and 202 in Curzon
Street might know what was going on in the house
between them, the servants communicating through the
area-railings; but Crawley and his wife and his friends
did not know 200 and 202. When you came to 201 there
was a hearty welcome, a kind smile, a good dinner, and
a jolly shake of the hand from the host and hostess there,
just for all the world as if they had been undisputed
masters of three or four thousand a year--and so they were,
not in money, but in produce and labour--if they did
not pay for the mutton, they had it: if they did not give
bullion in exchange for their wine, how should we know?
Never was better claret at any man's table than at honest
Rawdon's; dinners more gay and neatly served. His
drawing-rooms were the prettiest, little, modest salons
conceivable: they were decorated with the greatest taste,
and a thousand knick-knacks from Paris, by Rebecca:
and when she sat at her piano trilling songs with a
lightsome heart, the stranger voted himself in a little
paradise of domestic comfort and agreed that, if the
husband was rather stupid, the wife was charming, and the
dinners the pleasantest in the world.
Rebecca's wit, cleverness, and flippancy made her speedily
