Part 7

The next day, Dr. OILY GAMMON ROBERTS, whom I had known a long time, called upon me. He had just had the supreme felicity of becoming Lord PALMERSTON’S medical attendant, and is just the smooth, mellifluous, double-dealing, Jesuitical personage, who would be happy to accept a reversionary emetic from any of the peers or peeresses whom he attends, (or) though an infidel, to do any amount of canting with Lord SHAFTESBURY in Exeter Hall in the morning, or any amount of pimping for Lady SHAFTESBURY all the evening. The dear Conservatives having fallen upon evil days, _via_ their Colonial Secretary, was of course nuts to the dear Whigs, though as far as any amount of dirty work, back-stair climbing, and athletic, indefatigable, political, and every other sort of jobbery, the two parties are in reality “_one_ concern;” and having the same “bonnets,” during their alternate ins and outs, always know the exact thimble the pea lurks under. Well, Dr. OILY GAMMON came, and his manner was a perfect emulsion of almonds when I told him of Mr. HYDE’S audacious proposition about the £500 a year. He urged me to be firm and not take a doit less than a thousand a year; which, as he truly said, was little enough after such an outrage. “For which,” said I, “no money could compensate.” “Very true,” said he, and after assuring me of the universal indignation and sympathy my case had excited, he took his departure, promising soon to call again. The plot was now evidently thickening, for the next morning the fair SOPHIA, alias SPARROW, came twittering into my room, and said a groom had ridden out in such haste that the horse was covered with foam to tell Mr. H. he must go to London without a _moment’s_ delay; and “I cannot but think and hope,” said she, “that it means some good to your ladyship.” About five o’clock H. returned from town, more fat, frowsy, head-wagging, and eye-rolling, than ever; but desperately civil! and _aux petits soins_, and asked me if I would like a drive as far as Richmond? I said, “Yes, amazingly, provided Miss H. went with us.” “Oh yes, certainly,” said he, with a smile, or rather a dyspeptic leer, which he meant to be half _prevenant_, half paternal, but which only made him look as

“Hyenas in love are supposed for to look, or A something between ABELARD and old BLUCHER.”

“Oh, certainly, for your ladyship has quite bewitched my little MARY, and she cries every time a servant is sent up to you with anything instead of her.” Never was anything so beautiful! as that always lovely view from Richmond Hill upon that glorious July evening, with the golden sun steeping it in light and turning the “Silver Thames” into a perfect Pactolus, while the fresh breeze from the river was a real luxury after my nearly three weeks’ incarceration in that large, but low-ceilinged stuffy room, with its nailed down windows. And as caged birds are always wild when they do get out, MARY HILL and I took to running races, and not the least part of the pleasure of which to me was seeing old fat H—— “Like panting Time, toiling after us in vain,” and puffing and blowing like a steam engine; till he made almost as much noise as all his ten children with their hoops and skipping ropes under my windows of a morning, when, groaning in my cage, I used to say, “Why skip ye so ye little HILLS?”

By the time we got back to T—— L—— the evening was fast closing in, and though as always I had an invitation to sit below in a really magnificent groined lofty roofed banquetting room, some 50 feet long, that they had there, I always preferred my own society, even with my own ills, to Mrs. H—— and all her Ills,—which with the greatest Ill of all—her husband—made a party of thirteen of them, which yet did not comprise _all_ the ills that flesh is heir to.

And now comes the most horrible and cruel part of this history, and which is so painful to me to write, or rather to excavate out of the desolate grave of all my hopes, where it has lain buried for the last five years and a half, and where I thought it would remain till GOD had mercy on me and I was buried with it. But it would have been impossible to tell you all the rest without telling this too; or you would really think me not only mad, but a liar, that I had not in our Courts of Justice, or more frequently of Injustice, fully exposed, and got at least as much redress as public indignation and condemnation can afford to the Victim, when bestowed upon the perpetrators of such dastardly and chronic and complex infamy. But Sir EDWARD does not do his fiendish work by halves. He knew that from me _he_ could neither expect mercy nor longer forbearance. So he, with demoniacal and _unscrupulous_ astuteness baited the trap with the two lacerated hearts of both Mother and Child; for he knew that even to expose him I would not, and could not, expose my own son—whom GOD forgive—though I firmly believe that _he_, at _first_, was as much duped as I was. For though under ordinary circumstances—he was well aware, from bitter experience, that he could not believe in any promise his father ever made—still he naturally thought that after standing upon the brink of such a ruinous Abyss, and having been only saved by nature’s great miracle, a Mother’s Love—he would for once in fear and trembling have kept faith with his victims wholly and solely in his own sordid and selfish interest. And so this truly unhappy young martyr did evil that good might come of it; and that, as he at the time told me, he might buy his Mother back at any price. It is WALTER SCOTT, I think, who says—“There can be no Virtue without Truth, and there can be no Truth without Moral Courage.” But where was this poor predestined young victim to acquire that? when the whole course of his accursed literary training was to _develope_ his intellect, and _stultify_ his moral qualities, by, from his youth denying to his _naturally_ gentle and affectionate nature the holy vigils of a Mother’s care, and the humanizing and heart-expanding influences of HOME. While the diplomatic obligations of his detestable profession could not fail to weaken to annihilation that plebeian appendage called conscience; so surely does custom blunt and familiarize either the worst or most frightful things. No wonder then that I should have no admiration for, but a positive contempt for, mere intellect; as intellect without a moral _fulcrum_ is, of all the Devil’s levers, the one that raises the most fearful preponderances of evil, and causes them to float buoyantly and triumphantly over the world. But I must get on, and get over this last heartquake of mine as rapidly as I can. GOD knows I would not injure him in the world’s estimation (little as it is worth) more than he has already injured himself; and GOD, I am convinced, has punished him far more than He has thought fit to afflict me. Five years and a half since this crowning iniquity have I waited, hoping against hope that now, that he was no longer a Boy, he would shake off the glamour of his father’s terrorism, and show some spark of manliness and human feeling, if only as a sort of expiatory conscience tax to GOD. But when was conscience, courage, or feeling, ever evinced by either a B—— or a L——? For the rest of this disgraceful history, I should be only too glad if you proclaimed it at the market cross. But _that_ I am very sure you will not do; as I am fully aware of the requirements of literary amenities and social conventionalities; and therefore it is that I have lived too long alone with GOD, and the bitter sorrows He has sent me, not to gauge everything by simple Truth, unalloyed by expediency; and, perhaps too, as ESMOND says, “I have seen too much of success in life to take off my hat and huzza to it, in its gilt coach, as it passes.” I am also fully aware of literary posthumous chivalry, and its Bayard courage! upon the safe vantage ground of posterity! therefore, when I have been dead some hundred years,—how pens will start from their inkstands, like swords from their scabbards, to avenge me! while Electric Caligraphy will not have left sufficient ink in Christendom to blacken Sir EDWARD, the CÆSAR BORGIA of the nineteenth century (with the beauty and the courage left out) up to his natural hue. Gentlemen of 1964, I cannot find words to thank you—for all I shall have to say then, is what I pray now—_Implora Pace!_

Well, on the evening after my return from Richmond, while I was at tea, the door was thrown open and Miss R—— was announced. I reproached myself with ingratitude at the time, but she was more antipathetic to me than ever; her manner was so brusque, coarse, and unfeeling—meeting me for the first time in such a place. And she did look so dreadfully ugly, and so additionally dirty! a great _tour de force_! that I recoiled from her touch, and when she said, without any preparation in that sharp, shrill, cracked bell of a voice of hers, “Shure I’ve brought _your_ son to see you,” I felt almost as though she had knocked me down, and burst out crying—“Then,” said I, “I won’t see him; he has never acted like a son to me; and I suppose his infamous father is springed in his own trap, and he has sent his son to get him out of it.” For two hours ineffectually, for I would not yield to this evident bullying, did Miss R——, with her usual want of tact, want of feeling, and coarse uncouthness, irritate every nerve in my body. I may as well here give you the keynote of her character. It is an inane and egregious vanity—and a mania _pour se faire personnage_; one of that dangerous class of meddling fools, who are for ever rushing in “where angels fear to tread.” She was indeed “a thing of shreds and patches,” made up of the fragments of other person’s thoughts and opinions—which she invariably retailed as her _own_. In all things a mere ape and echo. During the Crimean War, she read up the leaders in the _Times_, and Mr. RUSSELL’S letters, and then thought herself quite competent to argue with, or rather to dictate to the first military authorities, past, or present. Vilely ill-educated, or rather not educated at all, she could not open her mouth without mutilating the QUEEN’S English, and, like “The Wife of Bath,” her “French was French of Bow,” or, rather, of Boœtia—“for French of Paris knew she none,” and her grotesque and barbaric pronunciation of what she called such, was worthy of Sir EDWARD himself! or of that other universal genius (in his own opinion) Mr. W—— R——. She also had, like most vain fools, a literary mania, and a great ambition to appear very _blue_. I am confident, from her subsequent ingratitude towards me, who, as she acknowledged to my son, was the only benefactress she had ever had, that next to her fear, by my incarceration for life, of losing an excellent milch cow, which she had no chance of replacing, her motive in writing to the papers, and making my iniquitous abduction public, was that she thought by so doing she should put herself forward, and become quite a heroine. I am also certain that when Sir LIAR got hold of her, and that other patent scoundrel E—— J—— (who had been plied for him by that little Red Rat, COCKBURN—as of course it does not do for a Chief Justice to _appear_ in dirty work, all English virtue, being strictly PUBLIC!), seeing the empty, heartless, vain, unprincipled ass they had to deal with, they fooled her to the very top of her bent; the rascally Q.C. telling her, that he, Sir LIAR’S _ame damnée_, had only undertaken the business in _my_ and my son’s interest; and what a thing it would be for her to heal family differences! and what a proud position for her, a young girl (39), to be the sole pivot that could keep the DERBY Ministry in! and E—— J——, knowing that there was no friend like a woman, and no head like a woman’s, when dictated to by her heart. All this I learned from herself after; but where it struck me, like an electric flash, how they had fooled, and sold—or rather _bought_—her, for I was the sold! was her saying, the day I left H——’s stronghold, and we were driving to town, as she pointed out of the window to the Asylum for Idiots, on the left-hand side of the road, and said, with one of her vain-glorious chuckles, “As E—— J—— said, ‘we won’t put _you_ there, Miss R——!’” “Then,” said I, “I am certain that he, and his infamous client, _must_ have fooled you to their heart’s content.” I have no doubt, too, that when she heard the jingle of the thimbles, about keeping the DERBY Ministry in! and she being the sole pivot! that could secure the Cabinet!! a vista opened to her of all the salons in London; _ibid_, the becoming an honorary member of all the literary cliques; and ditto, of her being made free of the sesame of all the backstairs in Downing-street! To say nothing of her having fallen desperately in love with Mr. L——! (poor fellow, how soon his punishment overtook him), whom she used to rave about as the _bo_-eye-dale (alias _beau ideal_) of what a young poet ought to be; so handsome, so elegant, so charming! and I have no doubt in the plenitude of her imbecile conceit, she thought she would fasten herself on me, as a daughter-in-law, for the rest of my life. What a pity she could not hear the loathing disgust that her _bo-eye-dale_ used to speak of her with. At all events, it is some comfort to know how those he-villains—the brand new Baronet, and the outlawed, swindling Q.C.—squeezed the orange and then threw away the rind, and when they had got all they wanted of her, kicked her off in a way _quite_ worthy of them. And it is also a consolation, that, as a Frenchman said to me, when she used to be talking about her _cost hume de cheval_ (Amazone), as she called her habit, “_Ah! madame, quel bonheur puisque que cette drolesse la c’en est amourachée de monsieur votre fils qu’elle ne peut jamais devenir votre belle-fille!_”

And now, before telling you what remains of this terrible history I must exonerate my unhappy Son from ever having gone such lengths in impious falsehood and hypocrisy, as to have written that disgusting “Dedication of Lucile” to his infamous father’s “loved” and honoured name. He _never did write it_; but how could a son publicly disclaim it, and say my father is a Liar and a Forger? Of course he could _not_. But where he is eternally to be blamed is for ever having let weakness and subserviency come to _that_; when, instead of thanks for having thrown himself into the breach to save his fiend father from the crushing disgrace of a full _exposé_ of the Mad House Conspiracy, he found that unscrupulous monster only wanted him to tell more lies, and forge new springes for his Victim Mother, he should have unhesitatingly and firmly refused, and said—No, sir, I have done everything I could, and more than I ought, to screen you; setting facts, and truth, and my own feelings, and all justice, at defiance to do so; but if you now intend to break faith, and go back from all you promised in a moment of imminent peril, you cannot expect me to write myself down a Coward or a Villain by deserting and betraying the Mother, through whose unexampled forbearance and noble self-abnegation I was alone able to serve you. For had not my poor, generous Mother accepted _me_ as a hostage, you know the QUEEN’S dominions would not have bribed her to forego the public redress she was so more than entitled to. But this would have been honest and true; and how could Sir E——’s son, pupil, and tool, be either? And, alas! the Bible is right—as the twig is bent, so will it grow. Poor, poor, unfortunate young martyr! as his Fiend Father has crushed my life from out its setting, so has he crushed that young and once bright soul from out its orbit, and sent it erring through the tenebrous nebula of his own Avernus. Poor young victim! truly

“His honour, rooted in dishonour stood, And faith, unfaithful! made him falsely true.”

For if you only knew his opinion of and feeling towards that vile Father, you would not wonder that after, through sheer moral cowardice, having been made to run counter to all his _feelings_ and his whole nature, and play the part of a sort of _Judas tranie Tartufe_! he should have written in that heart-cry of his, called “Last Words,” that appeared three years ago in the _Cornhill Magazine_.

“But what will the angels say, when they are looking at me?”

They will tell him perhaps that his Mother pitied even while she despised him. There _are_ some persons who can manage to love, and yet despise; I cannot, as I told him; for with me contempt is a moral bourne from which no affection ever returns. But I am _not_ angry with him. Oh no, I wish I was; for that would pass. No, I am not angry with him; I have left him all I have in the world—not money, for I have none; but all my pictures, books, bronzes, rare carvings, and rarer historical enamel portraits, and miniatures, including a most exquisite one of _la belle Ferronière_, that belonged to FRANCOIS PREMIER, and a fine miniature of Madame DE MONTESPAN, set in a diamond bracelet, which had belonged to her son, the Duc DE MAINE! also a fine miniature of the great Lord STRAFFORD, and that most beautiful miniature of Lord BYRON that Lady CAROLINE LAMB left me; my large Sèvres jewelled _Ecrelles_, with a portrait of LOUIS Quinze on it, which he gave to poor MARIE ANTOINETTE when she was Dauphine; and which she gave to the Comte D’ARTOIS (CHARLES DIX), who gave it to his cousin, the Duc DE BOILLON, and he it was left it to my mother. All my _bijouterie_ I have also left him, but with a solemn injunction in my will, on pain of GOD’S judgment! that he should never desecrate the grave of the Mother he had so _cruelly betrayed_, and inhumanly neglected, by any tombstone, verbiage, or any impious posthumous sentimentalities! in Poems or Magazines.—Amen.

And yet with all my knowledge of and unlimited faith in the diabolical villainy of Sir EDWARD, there is _still_ a mystery of iniquity about his unhallowed power (divorced as it is from all affection and respect) over his truly unfortunate Son, that even I cannot fathom, nor even guess at. But I must get to the end as quickly as possible; for much as I have tried to condense this complex tissue of iniquity, which after all is but a drop in the great ocean of it, in which I have been plunged; it would have been quite unintelligible to you, as a stranger to both the actors, and their actions, had I not, in narrating the latter, put you in some degree _au fait_ to the former.