Part 3

The next day came a note from Mrs. B——, expressing her great sympathy with all I had suffered; and as the cuisine was not particularly good at those lodgings, would I do them the favour of dining with them at the hotel? I sent down a verbal message to say that I never dined out. The next day the pair took their departure for London; but the people of the house became suddenly and unbearably insolent; and although I had taken the rooms for six months certain, said I must leave them _immediately_, as they had let them. This was pleasant, for lodgings are difficult to get at Llangollen, and worse than that, it wanting six weeks to the time I should receive my parish allowance, and also to the time when the two months’ rent would become due, I had not a _sou_ wherewith to meet this sudden and unfair demand in the teeth of a written agreement. But my kind old Dr. PRICE not only came to the rescue, rating these vile people soundly, and telling them they would repent their shameful conduct before they were much older (which they did), but he kindly got me another lodging higher up in the same road, in which I had not been installed a week when Dr. PRICE wrote to me, saying that horrid woman Mrs. B——, and a woman she called her maid, were installed in my old lodgings. I put on my bonnet and went out to pass the house, and what should I see but Mrs. B—— and her _soi-disant_ maid sitting on the _sill_ of the open drawing-room window, with a salver between them with two decanters of wine on it, and glasses in their hands, over which they were laughing and singing; and as soon as they saw me they set up a perfect shout.

Two nights after this, the lady and her maid were literally drummed out of the place for roaring and screaming about the streets with men, at between one and two in the morning, and disturbing the quiet village. So Mrs. P—— and her brother did not get much by their infamy to me, and to their highly connected Patroness Mrs. B——, more especially as I lodged a complaint of their conduct with the Baptist minister, who lectured them publicly in chapel for it. A fortnight after Mrs. B——’s expulsion, Mr. B—— came down solo, and went to the Chester races, in an open carriage and four, with those two blackguards, J—— of the Gin Shop, and D—— of the Post-office, driving past my windows, shouting and roaring and waving their hats; and previous to his departure, B—— wrote me a most infamous anonymous letter, beginning that “he had the QUEEN’S and ——’s permission to sleep with me”—which letter was _precisely_ in the same hand-writing as all those purporting to be from Mr. L——, the _soi-disant_ Theatrical Manager, _which infamous letter, and all the rest_, I have got. Upon this crowning outrage inflicted by that far more ruffianly B——’s myrmidons, I sent for Mr. WHALLEY, the Magistrate, the present member for Peterborough—(Maynooth WHALLEY), and he told J—— he would take away his licence. I, of course, could not stay in a place where I had been so outraged and persecuted; and then it was I wrote to a friend of mine to engage me rooms in some Hotel in this dead-letter town; and sending all my luggage on to London, directed to a Mrs. WILSON, for her to forward them _here_; I took a young person who used to make my dresses at Llangollen as my maid, coming on here without any luggage but a carpet bag with “passenger” on it, so that none of the Llangollen people knew _where_ I was going, by which means Sir —— completely lost the track of his victim, which made him so furious that when good Mr. HODGSON went to receive my pittance, as he always did, Sir —— and the ruffian L—— vowed they would not pay it till they had a clergyman’s certificate! to say I was alive! which was, of course, as they thought, a clever plan to find out _where_ I was; but Mr. HYDE, my solicitor, whose country place was at Sangport, 16 miles from this, and who was then alive, and had not _yet_ found his account in selling me “_to screen the party_,” wrote to say, that if my beggarly pittance was not instantly paid, Sir —— should have the best of all assurances that I was _alive_, as he, Mr. HYDE, would drive down to K—— with me to take possession, and remain there with me to protect me. So the dastardly brute was foiled for the nonce. Soon after I came here Miss R—— again was homeless, and gave me the benefit—no, the discipline—of her company, and worried me into sending a statement of my case to Lord LYNDHURST, who was then, with MESSALINA NORTON, concocting the job of the Divorce Court. Apropos of the latter, she is such an awful hypocrite, quite of Sir ——’s calibre, that they would have made a matchless pair, because she is actually a _proverb_ for brutalising servants and governesses. I see in to-day’s _Times_ she has a long and charmingly benevolent letter advocating the cause of Poor Servants against their not sufficiently considerate masters and mistresses! Oh! why does not the Devil foreclose his mortgage upon those three such hypocrites, Mother NORTON, Sir ——, and DICKENS, and drive them and their fine sentiments round his dominions. Sir —— at least would not be quite new to the lash, as years ago, when that infamous Mrs. NORTON kept her amateur house of ill-fame in Bolton-row, and Sir —— was intriguing with a cousin of hers, a Mrs. BARTON, the wife of a clergyman—some “good-natured friend” wrote to Mr. BARTON and told him if he would go at such an hour to Mrs. NORTON’S, and walk up into the back bedroom, he would find Sir —— with his wife. He did so, and horsewhipped Sir ——. Whereupon MESSALINA, putting her arms akimbo, said, “If you are such a d——d fool that you cannot manage a little affair of this sort without being found out, you must go elsewhere.” The uninitiated keep wondering how the _Examiner_ could puff that intensely trashy and immensely infamous last book of Mrs. NORTON’S. But those who know that she used to intrigue with that hideous old ALBANY FONBLANQUE, and any other dirty editor that came in her way, for a puff, don’t wonder at all. If any of Mrs. NORTON’S ill-used servants were to write to the _Times_, illustrating by a few _facts_ her practical benevolence and consideration towards them, I should just like to see the _Times_ printing _them_, though thanks to our wheel within wheel of Humbug within Humbug, and Sham upon Sham, the _Times_ can do its cheap brummagem philanthropy and championship of the oppressed as well as any other “Tartuffe” in the kingdom. And yet this most vile woman (with plenty of others of the same sort) is received at “our Virtuous Court,” and quite worthy of being so, by the little selfish sensuous Inanity who rules over it, the Murderess of poor Lady FLORA HASTINGS, and the _amiable_ daughter who did all she could to hold up her own mother with Sir JOHN CONROY. Poor excellent Prince ALBERT, a _rara avis_—a man who _had principle_ and acted up to it, from the smallest to the greatest things,—knowing neither truckling nor _expediency_, had a life of it! happy he to have so soon escaped, and gone home to a more congenial sphere, where he invested the great treasure of _good deeds_, while still a labourer here.—But to return to the LYNDHURST affair: I told Miss R—— that my sending my case to Lord L—— was like writing in water; nothing would come of it. Still, I drew it up as briefly as I could, with a full statement of the last Llangollen infamy; but fortunately I was obstinate in my own common sense and would not yield to the _sapient_ Miss R——’s advice to send him some infamous letters of Sir R——’s, which he, the ruffian, has denied on oath! For what are perjuries to one who has lived upon them as MITHRIDATES did on poisons, till they have become his daily food? Neither did I send him any original documents, beyond my own written statement of facts. So well am I aware, with regard to the thimble-rig of Politics, of what _my_ fate would be, no matter who were the _ins_ or the outs. I told Lord LYNDHURST _not_ to take the trouble of writing, but merely make his secretary acknowledge the receipt of my papers till he returned them with his opinion. But two months passed and I had no acknowledgment of even the receipt of the packet. I then wrote again, expressing my surprise at this, when I received a note from Lord LYNDHURST, beginning, “My dear lady L——.” Cool, from a man I did not know personally. This is the note—

“My dear Lady L——, In the hurry of business I mislaid your _present_ address, and therefore wrote to you at Llangollen, telling you that I had read your papers, and written my opinion on them, and that they were left with my porter ready for you whenever you sent for them. Ten days after I had despatched my letter to you, a young woman called at my house, saying she had been sent by Lady L—— for her papers, and my porter gave her the packet addressed to you. Therefore I was much surprised on the receipt of your letter this morning, saying you had _not_ received the papers.—Believe me, yours faithfully, LYNDHURST.”

In reply to this “Strange Story,” before Sir L——’s other blasphemous “Strange Story,” that that brute DICKENS just published, I wrote to Lord LYNDHURST to say that in the first place I never should have sent in that vulgar, cavalier way, without writing a note to him for my papers; in the next, it was strange he should have forgotten my _present address_! and only remember my former one at Llangollen, since BOTH addresses were _equally mentioned in the papers he said he had left with his porter for me_. But that such being the case, it behoved him for his own honour (?!) to stir in the matter, and find out who had got the letter he wrote to me at Llangollen, out of the Llangollen post-office, and who the woman was who had called for the papers, with the infamous lie that I had sent her. And the first step towards this was to tell the date of the letter he had written to me, and the day, and then the office in London at which the letter had been posted; and next, to employ Mr. PEACOCK, the Solicitor of the post-office, to sift out the affair, as, like a true-born Briton, he of course would be likely to put more zeal into his measures if employed by Lord LYNDHURST to detect an affront and fraud practised upon _him_, than merely an outrage and an injustice practised upon me, or every other defenceless woman in England. To this I received a _palpably_ shuffling and wide of the mark note from Lord LYNDHURST, and the farce was gone through of writing to that vile fellow D——, at Llangollen, who actually had the effrontery to pretend that no such letter had ever arrived at Llangollen post-office for me. Then _how_—as I told my Lord LYNDHURST, _could_ the swindlers who called for my papers have known where to do so, but for the information contained in that letter? unless, indeed, the letter _was a myth_, and his lordship, to make things pleasant to _the party_, had kindly made over my papers to my Lord DERBY’S creditable Colonial Secretary? which was the only other _possible_ solution of the affair. D—— then wrote to me, “did I suppose that after my great kindness to his poor wife, in her last illness, which he should never forget, that he could do anything to injure me?” To which I replied yes, that was the very reason why he would; as I had never yet served anyone, in much, or in little, that they had not repaid me by the basest ingratitude, treachery, and injury—of some kind. My Lord LYNDHURST, finding I would _not_ be quiet, though the old Tory jobbing attorney Mr. C—— H——, under the pretence of setting Mr. PEACOCK to work, but in _reality_ to seize the golden opportunity of scraping personal acquaintance with an old Tory law lord, and by joining issue with him, to make things pleasant to the _party_, and crush and gag their victim a little more. So, finding that I was not the plastic, swallow-anything Fool that men think women ought to be, and which for the propagation and comfortable impunity of their vice, too many women are, my Lord LYNDHURST sent down his nephew and private secretary, Mr. RICHARD CLARKE, to see what he could do in the much-ado-about-nothing-humbug line. I boldly taxed him with this Divorce Bill being a job concocted between Lord LYNDHURST and Mother NORTON. “Well,” said he, “you put it in such a point blank way, that I cannot deny it.” You can, if you like, said I, or anything else, but I’m not bound to believe you. I then taxed D—— with having a finger in the pie with regard to the swindle of my papers; knowing the creditable way in which, years ago, his acquaintance with Lord LYNDHURST (which was his first political stepping stone, after poor fool of a WYNDHAM LEWIS had paid his election expenses at Maidstone) had begun, namely, by their joint property with three more in Lady SYKES. “Oh,” said Mr. CLARKE, “D—— and Lord LYNDHURST are two. D—— has not crossed our threshold for ages; and we all nearly fell off of our chairs laughing at breakfast, the other morning, at the capital, and to the life facsimile you gave in that imaginary conversation you put into his mouth, in your last letter to Lord LYNDHURST.” But Mr. RICHARD CLARKE could do nothing with me, for I assured him this disgraceful affair should _not_ rest between Lord LYNDHURST, me, _and the post_. I then, as a _pis aller_, got General THOMPSON to present a petition in the House of Commons demanding an inquiry into the fate of the papers sent to Lord LYNDHURST, of which I could obtain no _clear_ or satisfactory account. The poor superannuated Conservative peer, from his place in the House of Lords, mumbled some circumlocution rubbish about his being the last man to be guilty of want of courtesy to a lady.—Hang his courtesy!! his justice and common honesty were what I wanted, and not his courtesy; but it is precisely those two exotics which are not to be had in this accursed land of crime and cant, and so this infamy ended in smoke, as most things do in the two Houses of Humbug down at Westminster. I need not tell you, from the day I ordered her out of Llangollen to this, _dear_ Miss G—— never brought any action against me. No doubt your Orthodox English Conventionality is greatly shocked at my “coarse,” “violent,” “unladylike language”! But you must make some allowance (though English people never do, being wisely and justly only shocked and scandalized at terrible results, while they remain perfectly placid and piano upon terrible _causes_); but I was going to say you must make some allowance for a person writhing under nearly life-long, unparalleled, ever-recurring, and never-redressed outrages,—and suffering from a chronic indigestion of falsehood, hypocrisy, and unscrupulous villainy. No wonder, then, that the other day I cordially sympathised with a man who said, that though no more fires blazed, or faggots crackled in Smithfield—for which thank GOD—he should like to make a bonfire of all the fine benevolent sentiments DICKENS, Sir EDWARD LYTTON, and Mrs. NORTON ever wrote, with those of that other scoundrel LAWRENCE STERNE, and placing the three former within smelting heat of the flames, collect an equivalent quantity of ink to all they had ever used in gulling the public, and force the black-lie-vehicle down their throats! It was this same man who wittily said, constituting himself _Advocatus Diaboli_, when a whole room full of people were crying out against the utter trash and horrible immorality of Mrs. NORTON’S last book—“Well, now, I like the book, for it may be considered as Mrs. NORTON’S oral confession, her _peccavi_, in fact, as it so clearly and abundantly proves that there is not a single _Traviata_ ‘dodge’ in all Babylon that she is not _practically up to_.” Which sally was received with peals of laughter, and “Hear, Hear’s.”—Talking of the humbug and omnipresence of _Self_ in Authors, how thoroughly characteristic was that vainglorious “_In Memoriam_” of poor THACKERAY by Mr. DICKENS in this month’s _Cornhill_; it being a mere stalking-horse to parade his own importance and repeat the compliments poor THACKERAY had paid him, though there were so many other and better things the public would all have rather heard of _good_ THACKERAY. It was also a way of letting the groundlings know that his son, Master DICKENS had been at Eton, though he took good care not to tell them that Miss BURDETT COUTTS had paid for him there. For she can do these supererogatory display things, and build churches, though she cannot give a private _unknown_ guinea to her own starving relations, of which, like everyone else, she has some. I liked Mr. TROLLOPE’S “_In Memoriam_” much better, and from the extracts I have read from his wishy-washy vulgar Novels, I did not think he could have written so well. Only I wish he had not opened with that tag Latin quotation; for though Latin is all very well, and indeed at times necessary for terseness’ sake to add force to sense or satire, _real_ feeling generally finds expression in our mother tongue.