The Adventures of Philip

by William Makepeace Thackeray

At one of these clubs of their order, Lord Todmorden's man was in the constant

  habit of meeting Lord Ringwood's man, when their lordships (master and man) were

  in town. These gentlemen had a regard for each other; and, when they met,

  communicated to each other their views of society, and their opinions of the

  characters of the various noble lords and influential commoners whom they

  served. Mr. Rudge knew everything about Philip Firmin's affairs, about the

  doctor's flight, about Philip's generous behaviour. "Generous! I call it

  admiral!" old Ridley remarked, while relating this trait of our friend's, and

  his present position. And Rudge contrasted Philip's manly behaviour with the

  conduct of some sneaks which he would not name then, but which they were always

  speaking ill of the poor young fellow behind his back, and sneaking up to my

  lord, and greater skinflints and meaner humbugs never were: and there was no

  accounting for tastes, but he, Rudge, would not marry his daughter to a black

  man,

  Now, that day when Mr. Firmin went to see my Lord Ringwood was one of my lord's

  very worst days, when it was almost as dangerous to go near him as to approach a

  Bengal tiger. "When he is going to have a fit of gout, his lordship," Mr. Rudge

  remarked, "was hawful. He curse and swear, he do, at everybody; even the clergy

  or the ladies��all's one. On that very day when Mr. Firmin called he had said to

  Mr. Twysden, 'Get out, and don't come slandering, and backbiting, and bullying

  that poor devil of a boy any more. Its blackguardly, by George, sir��it's

  blackguardly.' And Twysden came out with his tail between his legs, and he says

  to me��'Rudge,' says he, 'my lord's uncommon bad to-day.' Well. He hadn't been

  gone an hour when pore Philip comes, bad luck to him, and my lord, who had just

  heard from Twysden all about that young woman��that party at Paris, Mr.

  Ridley��and it is about as great a piece of folly as ever I heard tell of�� my

  lord turns upon the pore young fellar and call him names worse than Twysden. But

  Mr. Firmin ain't that sort of man, he isn't. He won't suffer any man to call him

  names; and I suppose he gave my lord his own back again, for I heard my lord

  swear at him tremendous, I did, with my own ears. When my lord has the gout

  flying about, I told you he is awful. When he takes his colchicum he's worse.

  Now, we have got a party at Whipham at Christmas, and at Whipham we must be. And

  he took his colchicum night before last, and to-day he was in such a tremendous

  rage of swearing, cursing, and blowing up everybody, that it was as if he was

  red hot. And when Twysden and Mrs. Twysden called that day��(if you kick that

  fellar out at the hall door, I'm blest if he won't come smirkin' down the

  chimney)��and he wouldn't see any of them. And he bawled out after me, 'If

  Firmin comes, kick him downstairs��do you hear?' with ever so many oaths and

  curses against the poor fellow, while he vowed he would never see his hanged

  impudent face again. But this wasn't all, Ridley. He sent for Bradgate, his

  lawyer, that very day. He had back his will, which I signed myself as one of the

  witnesses��me and Wilcox, the master of the hotel��and I know he had left Firmin

  something in it. Take my word for it. To that poor young fellow he means

  mischief." A full report of this conversation Mr. Ridley gave to his little

  friend Mrs. Brandon, knowing the interest which Mrs. Brandon took in the young

  gentleman; and with these unpleasant news Mrs. Brandon came off to advise with

  those, who ��the good nurse was pleased to say��were Philip's best friends in

  the world. We wished we could give the Little Sister comfort: but all the world

  knew what a man Lord Ringwood was��how arbitrary, how revengeful, how cruel.

  I knew Mr. Bradgate the lawyer, with whom I had business, and called upon him,

  more anxious to speak about Philip's affairs than my own. I suppose I was too

  eager in coming to my point, for Bradgate saw the meaning of my questions, and

  declined to answer them. "My client and I are not the dearest friends in the

  world," Bradgate said, "but I must keep his counsel, and must not tell you

  whether Mr. Firmin's name is down in his lordship's will or not. How should I

  know? He may have altered his will. He may have left Firmin money; he may have

  left him none. I hope young Firmin does not count on a legacy. That's all. He

  may be disappointed if he does. Why, you may hope for a legacy from Lord

  Ringwood, and you may be disappointed. I know scores of people who do hope for

  something, and who won't get a penny." And this was all the reply I could get at

  that time from the oracular little lawyer.

  I told my wife, as of course every dutiful man tells everything to every dutiful

  wife: but though Bradgate discouraged us, there was somehow a lurking hope still

  that the old nobleman would provide for our friend. Then Philip would marry

  Charlotte. Then he would earn ever so much more money by his newspaper. Then he

  would be happy ever after. My wife counts eggs not only before they are hatched,

  but before they are laid. Never was such an obstinate hopefulness of character.

  I, on the other hand, take a rational and despondent view of things; and if they

  turn out better than I expect, as sometimes they will, I affably own that I have

  been mistaken.

  But an early day came when Mr. Bradgate was no longer needful, or when he

  thought himself released from the obligations of silence with regard to his

  noble client. It was two days before Christmas, and I took my accustomed

  afternoon saunter to Bays's, where other habitu�s of the club were assembled.

  There was no little buzzing, and excitement among the frequenters of the place.

  Talbot Twysden always arrived at Bays's at ten minutes past four, and scuffled

  for the evening paper, as if its contents were matter of great importance to

  Talbot. He would hold men's buttons, and discourse to them the leading article

  out of that paper with an astounding emphasis and gravity. On this day, some ten

  minutes after his accustomed hour, he reached the club. Other gentlemen were

  engaged in perusing the evening journal. The lamps on the tables lighted up the

  bald heads, the grey heads, dyed heads, and the wigs of many assembled

  fogies��murmurs went about the room. "Very sudden." "Gout in the stomach."

  "Dined here only four days ago." "Looked very well." "Very well? No! Never saw a

  fellow look worse in my life." "Yellow as a guinea." "Couldn't eat." "Swore

  dreadfully at the waiters, and at Tom Eaves who dined with him." "Seventy-six, I

  see.��Born in the same year with the Duke of York." "Forty thousand a-year."

  "Forty? fifty-eight thousand three hundred, I tell you. Always been a saving

  man." "Estate goes to his cousin, Sir John Ringwood; not a member here��member

  of Boodle's." "Hated each other furiously. Very violent temper, the old fellow

  was. Never got over the Reform Bill, they used to say." "Wonder whether he'll

  leave anything to old bowwow Twys��" Here enters Talbot Twysden, Esq.�� "Ha,

  Colonel! How are you? What's the news to-night? Kept late at my office, making

  up accounts. Going down to Whipham to-morrow to pass Chris
tmas with my wife's

  uncle��Ringwood, you know. Always go down to Whipham at Christmas. Keeps the

  pheasants for us��no longer a hunting man myself. Lost my nerve, by George."

  Whilst the braggart little creature indulged in this pompous talk, he did not

  see the significant looks which were fixed upon him, or if he remarked them, was

  perhaps pleased by the attention which he excited. Bays's had long echoed with

  Twysden's account of Ringwood, the pheasants, his own loss of nerve in hunting,

  and the sum which their family would inherit at the death of their noble

  relative.

  "I think I have heard you say Sir John Ringwood inherits after your relative?"

  asked Mr. Hookham.

  "Yes; the estate, not the title. The earldom goes to my lord and his

  heirs��Hookham. Why shouldn't he marry again? I often say to him, 'Ringwood, why

  don't you marry, if it's only to disappoint that Whig fellow Sir John. You are

  fresh and hale, Ringwood. You may live twenty years, five and twenty years. If

  you leave your niece and my children anything, we're not in a hurry to inherit,'

  I say; 'why don't you marry?"'

  "Ah! Twysden, he's past marrying," groans Mr. Hookham.

  "Not at all. Sober man, now. Stout man. Immense powerful man. Healthy man, but

  for gout. I often say to him, 'Ringwood!' I say��"

  "Oh, for mercy's sake! stop this," groans old Mr. Tremlett, who always begins to

  shudder at the sound of poor Twysden's voice. "Tell him somebody."

  "Haven't you heard, Twysden? Haven't you seen? Don't you know?" asks Mr. Hookham

  solemnly.

  "Heard, seen, known��what?" cries the other.

  "An accident has happened to Lord Ringwood. Look at the paper. Here it is." And

  Twysden pulls out his great gold eye-glasses, holds the paper as far as his

  little arm will reach, and �� and mercif ul Powers! �� but I will not venture to

  depict the agony on that noble face. Like Timanthes, the painter, I hide this

  Agamemnon with a veil. I cast the Globe newspaper over him. Illabatur orbis: and

  let imagination depict our Twysden under the ruins.

  What Twysden read in the Globe was a mere curt paragraph; but in next morning's

  Times there was one of those obituary notices to which noblemen of eminence must

  submit from the mysterious necrographer engaged by that paper.

  CHAPTER VI. PULVIS ET UMBRA SUMUS.

  The first and only Earl of Ringwood has submitted to the fate which peers and

  commoners are alike destined to undergo. Hastening to his magnificent seat of

  Whipham Market, where he proposed to entertain an illustrious Christmas party,

  his lordship left London scarcely recovered from an attack of gout to which he

  has been for many years a martyr. The disease must have flown to his stomach,

  and suddenly mastered him. At Turreys Regum, thirty miles from his own princely

  habitation, where he had been accustomed to dine on his almost royal progresses

  to his home, he was already in a state of dreadful suffering, to which his

  attendants did not pay the attention which his condition ought to have excited;

  for when labouring under this most painful malady his outcries were loud, and

  his language and demeanour exceedingly violent. He angrily refused to send for

  medical aid at Turreys, and insisted on continuing his journey homewards. He was

  one of the old school, who never would enter a railway (though his fortune was

  greatly increased by the passage of the railway through his property); and his

  own horses always met him at Popper's Tavern, an obscure hamlet, seventeen miles

  from his princely seat. He made no sign on arriving at Popper's, and spoke no

  word, to the now serious alarm of his servants. When they came to light his

  carriage-lamps, and look into his postchaise, the lord of many thousand acres,

  and, according to report, of immense wealth, was dead. The journey from Turreys

  had been the last stage of a long, a prosperous, and, if not a famous, at least

  a notorious and magnificent career.

  "The late John George Earl and Baron Ringwood and Viscount Cinqbars entered into

  public life at the dangerous period before the French Revolution; and commenced

  his career as the friend and companion of the Prince of Wales. When his Royal

  Highness seceded from the Whig party, Lord Ringwood also joined the Tory side of

  politicians, and an earldom was the price of his fidelity. But on the elevation

  of Lord Steyne to a marquisate, Lord Ringwood quarrelled for awhile with his

  royal patron and friend, deeming his own services unjustly slighted as a like

  dignity was not conferred on himself. On several occasions he gave his vote

  against Government, and caused his nominees in the House of Commons to vote with

  the Whigs. He never was reconciled to his late Majesty George IV., of whom he

  was in the habit of speaking with characteristic bluntness. The approach of the

  Reform Bill, however, threw this nobleman definitively on the Tory side, of

  which he has ever since remained, if not an eloquent, at least a violent

  supporter. He was said to be a liberal landlord, so long as his tenants did not

  thwart him in his views. His only son died early; and his lordship, according to

  report, has long been on ill terms with his kinsman and successor, Sir John

  Ringwood, of Appleshaw, Baronet. The Barony has been in this ancient family

  since the reign of George I., when Sir John Ringwood was ennobled, and Sir

  Francis, his brother, a Baron of the Exchequer, was advanced to the dignity of a

  Baronet by the first of our Hanoverian sovereigns."

  This was the article which my wife and I read on the morning of Christmas eve,

  as our children were decking lamps and looking-glasses with holly and red

  berries for the approaching festival. I had despatched a hurried note,

  containing the news, to Philip on the night previous. We were painfully anxious

  about his fate now, when a few days would decide it. Again my business or

  curiosity took me to see Mr. Bradgate the lawyer. He was in possession of the

  news, of course. He was not averse to talk about it. The death of his client

  unsealed the lawyer's lips partially: and I must say Bradgate spoke in a manner

  not flattering to his noble deceased client. The brutalities of the late

  nobleman had been very hard to bear. On occasion of their last meeting his oaths

  and disrespectful behaviour had been specially odious. He had abused almost

  every one of his relatives. His heir, he said, was a prating Republican humbug.

  He had a relative (whom Bradgate said he would not name) who was a scheming,

  swaggering, swindling lickspittle parasite, always cringing at his heels, and

  longing for his death. And he had another relative, the impudent son of a

  swindling doctor, who had insulted him two hours before in his own room;��a

  fellow who was a pauper, and going to propagate a breed for the workhouse; for,

  after his behaviour of that day, he would be condemned to the lowest pit of

  Acheron, before he (Lord Ringwood) would give that scoundrel a penny of his

  money. "And his lordship desired me to send him back his will," said Mr.

  Bradgate. "And he destroyed that will before he went away: it was not the first

  he had burned. And I may
tell you, now all is over, that he had left his

  brother's grandson a handsome legacy in that will, which your poor friend might

  have had, but that he went to see my lord in his unlucky fit of gout." Ah, mea

  culpa! mea culpa! And who sent Philip to see his relative in that unlucky fit of

  gout? Who was so worldly-wise��so Twysden-like, as to counsel Philip to flattery

  and submission? But for that advice he might be wealthy now; he might be happy;

  he might be ready to marry his young sweetheart. Our Christmas turkey choked me

  as I ate of it. The lights burned dimly, and the kisses and laughter under the

  mistletoe were but melancholy sport. But for my advice, how happy might my

  friend have been! I looked askance at the honest faces of my children. What

  would they say if they knew their father had advised a friend to cringe, and

  bow, and humble himself before a rich, wicked old man? I sate as mute at the

  pantomime as at a burial; the laughter of the little ones smote me as with a

  reproof. A burial? With plumes and lights, and upholsterers' pageantry, and

  mourning by the yard measure, they were burying my Lord Ringwood, who might have

  made Philip Firmin rich but for me.

  All lingering hopes regarding our friend were quickly put to an end. A will was

  found at Whipham, dated a year back, in which no mention was made of poor Philip

  Firmin. Small legacies��disgracefully shabby and small, Twysden said��were left

  to the Twysden family, with the full-length portrait of the late earl in his

  coronation robes, which, I should think, must have given but small satisfaction

  to his surviving relatives; for his lordship was but an ill-favoured nobleman,

  and the price of the carriage of the large picture from Whipham was a tax which

  poor Talbot made very wry faces at paying. Had the picture been accompanied by

  thirty or forty thousand pounds, or fifty thousand��why should he not have left

  them fifty thousand?��how different Talbot's grief would have been! Whereas when

  Talbot counted up the dinners he had given to Lord Ringwood, all of which he

  could easily calculate by his cunning ledgers and journals in which was noted

  down every feast at which his lordship attended, every guest assembled, and

  every bottle of wine drunk, Twysden found that he had absolutely spent more

  money upon my lord than the old man had paid back in his will. But all the

  family went into mourning, and the Twysden coachman and footman turned out in

  black worsted epaulettes in honour of the illustrious deceased. It is not every

  day that a man gets a chance of publicly bewailing the loss of an earl his

  relative. I suppose Twysden took many hundred people into his confidence on this

  matter, and bewailed his uncle's death and his own wrongs whilst clinging to

  many scores of button-holes.

  And how did poor Philip bear the disappointment? He must have felt it, for I

  fear we ourselves had encouraged him in the hope that his grand-uncle would do

  something to relieve his necessity. Philip put a bit of crape round his hat,

  wrapped himself in his shabby old mantle, and declined any outward show of grief

  at all. If the old man had left him money, it had been well. As he did not,��a

  puff of cigar, perhaps, ends the sentence, and our philosopher gives no further

  thought to his disappointment. Was not Philip the poor as lordly and independent

  as Philip the rich? A struggle with poverty is a wholesome wrestling match at

  three or five and twenty. The sinews are young, and are braced by the contest.

  It is upon the aged that the battle falls hardly, who are weakened by failing

  health, and perhaps enervated by long years of prosperity.

  Firmin's broad back could carry a heavy burden, and he was glad to take all the

  work which fell in his way. Phipps, of the Daily Intelligencer, wanting an

  assistant, Philip gladly sold four hours of his day to Mr. Phipps: translated