The Newcomes

by William Makepeace Thackeray

able to help such dear friends.

  The Colonel said I had a good heart, and my wife had, though--though--he

  did not finish this sentence, but I could interpret it without need of

  its completion. My wife and the two ladies of Colonel Newcome's family

  never could be friends, however much my poor Laura tried to be intimate

  with these women. Her very efforts at intimacy caused a frigidity and

  hauteur which Laura could not overcome. Little Rosey and her mother set

  us down as two aristocratic personages; nor for our parts were we very

  much disturbed at this opinion of the Campaigner and little Rosa.

  I talked with the Colonel for half an hour or more about his affairs,

  which indeed were very gloomy, and Clive's prospects, of which he strove

  to present as cheering a view as possible. He was obliged to confirm the

  news which Sherrick had given me, and to own, in fact, that all his

  pension was swallowed up by a payment of interest and life insurance for

  sums which he had been compelled to borrow. How could he do otherwise

  than meet his engagements? Thank God, he had Clive's full approval for

  what he had done--had communicated the circumstance to his son almost

  immediately after it took place, and that was a comfort to him--an

  immense comfort. "For the women are very angry," said the poor Colonel;

  "you see they do not understand the laws of honour, at least as we

  understand them: and perhaps I was wrong in hiding the truth as I

  certainly did from Mrs. Mackenzie, but I acted for the best--I hoped

  against hope that some chance might turn in our favour. God knows, I had

  a hard task enough in wearing a cheerful face for months, and in

  following my little Rosa about to her parties and balls; but poor Mrs.

  Mackenzie has a right to be angry, only I wish my little girl did not

  side with her mother so entirely, for the loss of her affection gives me

  great pain."

  So it was as I suspected. The Campaigner ruled over this family, and

  added to all their distresses by her intolerable presence and tyranny.

  "Why, sir," I ventured to ask, "if, as I gather from you--and I

  remember," I added with a laugh, "certain battles-royal which Clive

  described to me in old days--if you and the Campai--Mrs. Mackenzie do not

  agree, why should she continue to live with you, when you would all be so

  much happier apart?"

  "She has a right to live in the house," says the Colonel; "It is I who

  have no right in it. I am a poor old pensioner, don't you see, subsisting

  on Rosey's bounty? We live on the hundred a year, secured to her at her

  marriage, and Mrs. Mackenzie has her forty pounds of pension which she

  adds to the common stock. It is I who have made away with every shilling

  of Rosey's 17,000 pounds, God help me, and with 1500 pounds of her

  mother's. They put their little means together, and they keep us--me and

  Clive. What can we do for a living? Great God! What can we do? Why, I am

  so useless that even when my poor boy earned 25 pounds for his picture, I

  felt we were bound to send it to Sarah Mason, and you may fancy when this

  came to Mrs. Mackenzie's ears, what a life my boy and I led. I have never

  spoken of these things to any mortal soul--I even don't speak of them

  with Clive--but seeing your kind and honest face has made me talk--you

  must pardon my garrulity--I am growing old, Arthur. This poverty and

  these quarrels have beaten my spirit down--there, I shall talk on this

  subject no more. I wish, sir, I could ask you to dine with us, but"--and

  here he smiled--"we must get the leave of the higher powers."

  I was determined, in spite of prohibitions and Campaigners, to see my old

  friend Clive, and insisted on walking back with the Colonel to his

  lodgings, at the door of which we met Mrs. Mackenzie and her daughter.

  Rosa blushed up a little--looked at her mamma--and then greeted me with a

  hand and a curtsey. The Campaigner also saluted me in a majestic but

  amicable manner, made no objection even to my entering her apartments and

  seeing the condition to which they were reduced: this phrase was uttered

  with particular emphasis and a significant look towards the Colonel, who

  bowed his meek head and preceded me into the lodgings, which were in

  truth very homely, pretty, and comfortable. The Campaigner was an

  excellent manager--restless, bothering, brushing perpetually. Such

  fugitive gimcracks as they had brought away with them decorated the

  little salon. Mrs. Mackenzie, who took the entire command, even pressed

  me to dine and partake, if so fashionable a gentleman would condescend to

  partake, of a humble exile's fare. No fare was perhaps very pleasant to

  me in company with that woman, but I wanted to see my dear old Clive, and

  gladly accepted his voluble mother-in-law's not disinterested

  hospitality. She beckoned the Colonel aside; whispered to him, putting

  something into his hand; on which he took his hat and went away. Then

  Rosey was dismissed upon some other pretext, and I had the felicity to be

  left alone with Mrs. Captain Mackenzie.

  She instantly improved the occasion; and with great eagerness and

  volubility entered into her statement of the present affairs and position

  of this unfortunate family. She described darling Rosey's delicate state,

  poor thing--nursed with tenderness and in the lap of luxury--brought up

  with every delicacy and the fondest mother--never knowing in the least

  how to take care of herself, and likely to fall down and perish unless

  the kind Campaigner were by to prop and protect her. She was in delicate

  health--very delicate--ordered cod-liver oil by the doctor. Heaven knows

  how he could be paid for those expensive medicines out of the pittance to

  which the imprudence--the most culpable and designing imprudence, and

  extravagance, and folly of Colonel Newcome had reduced them! Looking out

  from the window as she spoke I saw--we both saw--the dear old gentleman

  sadly advancing towards the house, a parcel in his hand. Seeing his near

  approach, and that our interview was likely to come to an end, Mrs.

  Mackenzie rapidly whispered to me that she knew I had a good heart--that

  I had been blessed by Providence with a fine fortune, which I knew how to

  keep better than some folks--and that if, as no doubt was my intention--

  for with what other but a charitable view could I have come to see them?

  --and most generous and noble was it of you to come, and I always thought

  it of you, Mr. Pendennis, whatever other people said to the contrary. If

  I proposed to give them relief, which was most needful--and for which a

  mother's blessings would follow me--let it be to her, the Campaigner,

  that my loan should be confided--for as for the Colonel, he is not fit to

  be trusted with a shilling, and has already flung away immense sums upon

  some old woman he keeps in the country, leaving his darling Rosey without

  the actual necessaries of life.

  The woman's greed and rapacity--the flattery with which she chose to

  belabour me at dinner, so choked and disgusted me, that I could hardly

  swallow the meal, though my poor old friend had been sent out to purchase

  a pate from the pastrycook's f
or my especial refection. Clive was not at

  the dinner. He seldom returned till late at night on sketching days.

  Neither his wife nor his mother-in-law seemed much to miss him; and

  seeing that the Campaigner engrossed the entire share of the

  conversation, and proposed not to leave me for five minutes alone with

  the Colonel, I took leave rather speedily of my entertainers, leaving a

  message for Clive, and a prayer that he would come and see me at my

  hotel.

  CHAPTER LXXIII

  In which Belisarius returns from Exile

  I was sitting in the dusk in my room at Hotel des Bains, when the visitor

  for whom I hoped made his appearance in the person of Clive, with his

  broad shoulders, and broad hat, and a shaggy beard, which he had thought

  fit in his quality of painter to assume. Our greeting it need not be said

  was warm; and our talk, which extended far into the night, very friendly

  and confidential. If I make my readers confidants in Mr. Clive's private

  affairs, I ask my friend's pardon for narrating his history in their

  behoof. The world had gone very ill with my poor Clive, and I do not

  think that the pecuniary losses which had visited him and his father

  afflicted him near so sorely as the state of his home. In a pique with

  the woman he loved, and from that generous weakness which formed part of

  his character, and which led him to acquiesce in most wishes of his good

  father, the young man had gratified the darling desire of the Colonel's

  heart, and taken the wife whom his two old friends brought to him. Rosey,

  who was also, as we have shown, of a very obedient and ductile nature,

  had acquiesced gladly enough in her mamma's opinion, that she was in love

  with the rich and handsome young Clive, and accepted him for better or

  worse. So undoubtedly would this good child have accepted Captain Hoby,

  her previous adorer, have smilingly promised fidelity to the Captain at

  church, and have made a very good, happy, and sufficient little wife for

  that officer,--had not mamma commanded her to jilt him. What wonder that

  these elders should wish to see their two dear young ones united? They

  began with suitable age, money, good temper, and parents' blessings. It

  is not the first time that, with all these excellent helps to prosperity

  and happiness, a marriage has turned out unfortunately--a pretty, tight

  ship gone to wreck that set forth on its voyage with cheers from the

  shore, and every prospect of fair wind and fine weather.

  We have before quoted poor Clive's simile of the shoes with which his

  good old father provided him--as pretty a little pair of shoes as need

  be--only they did not fit the wearer. If they pinched him at first, how

  they blistered and tortured him now! If Clive was gloomy and discontented

  even when the honeymoon had scarce waned, and he and his family sat at

  home in state and splendour under the boughs of the famous silver

  cocoa-nut tree, what was the young man's condition now in poverty, when

  they had no love along with a scant dinner of herbs; when his

  mother-in-law grudged each morsel which his poor old father ate--when a

  vulgar, coarse-minded woman pursued with brutal sarcasm and deadly

  rancour one of the tenderest and noblest gentlemen in the world--when an

  ailing wife, always under some one's domination, received him with

  helpless hysterical cries and reproaches--when a coarse female tyrant,

  stupid, obstinate, utterly unable to comprehend the son's kindly genius,

  or the father's gentle spirit, bullied over both, using the intolerable

  undeniable advantage which her actual wrongs gave her to tyrannise over

  these two wretched men! He had never heard the last of that money which

  they had sent to Mrs. Mason, Clive said. When the knowledge of the fact

  came to the Campaigner's ears, she raised such a storm as almost killed

  the poor Colonel, and drove his son half mad. She seized the howling

  infant, vowing that its unnatural father and grandfather were bent upon

  starving it--she consoled and sent Rosey into hysterics--she took the

  outlawed parson to whose church they went, and the choice society of

  bankrupt captains, captains' ladies, fugitive stockbrokers' wives, and

  dingy frequenters of billiard-rooms, and refugees from the Bench, into

  her councils; and in her daily visits amongst these personages, and her

  walks on the pier, whither she trudged with poor Rosey in her train, Mrs.

  Mackenzie made known her own wrongs and her daughter's--showed how the

  Colonel, having robbed and cheated them previously, was now living upon

  them; insomuch that Mrs. Bolter, the levanting auctioneer's wife, would

  not make the poor old man a bow when she met him--that Mrs. Captain

  Kitely, whose husband had lain for seven years past in Boulogne gaol

  ordered her son to cut Clive; and when, the child being sick, the poor

  old Colonel went for arrowroot to the chemist's, young Snooks, the

  apothecary's assistant, refused to allow him to take the powder away

  without previously depositing the money.

  He had no money, Thomas Newcome. He gave up every farthing. After having

  impoverished all around him, he had no right, he said, to touch a

  sixpence of the wretched pittance remaining to them--he had even given up

  his cigar, the poor old man, the companion and comforter of forty years.

  He was "not fit to be trusted with money," Mrs. Mackenzie said, and the

  good man owned as he ate his scanty crust, and bowed his noble old head

  in silence under that cowardly persecution.

  And this, at the end of threescore and seven or eight years, was to be

  the close of a life which had been spent in freedom and splendour, and

  kindness and honour; this the reward of the noblest heart that ever beat

  --the tomb and prison of a gallant warrior who had ridden in twenty

  battles--whose course through life had been a bounty wherever it had

  passed--whose name had been followed by blessings, and whose career was

  to end here--here--in a mean room, in a mean alley of a foreign town--a

  low furious woman standing over him and stabbing the kind defenceless

  heart with killing insult and daily outrage!

  As we sat together in the dark, Clive told me this wretched story, which

  was wrung from him with a passionate emotion that I could not but keenly

  share. He wondered the old man lived, Clive said. Some of the women's

  taunts and gibes, as he could see, struck his father so that he gasped

  and started back as if some one had lashed him with a whip. "He would

  make away with himself," said poor Clive, "but he deems this is his

  punishment, and that he must bear it as long as it pleases God. He does

  not care for his own losses, as far as they concern himself: but these

  reproaches of Mrs. Mackenzie, and some things which were said to him in

  the Bankruptcy Court, by one or two widows of old friends, who were

  induced through his representations, to take shares in that infernal

  bank, have affected him dreadfully. I hear him lying awake and groaning

  at night, God bless him. Great God! what can I do--what can I do?" burst

  out the young man in a dreadful paroxysm of grief. "I have tried to get

  lessons--I went
to London on the deck of a steamer, and took a lot of

  drawings with me--tried picture-dealers--pawnbrokers--Jews--Moss, whom

  you may remember at Gandish's, and who gave me for forty-two drawings,

  eighteen pounds. I brought the money back to Boulogne. It was enough to

  pay the doctor, and bury our last poor little dead baby. Tenez, Pen, you

  must give me some supper: I have had nothing all day but a pain de deux

  sous; I can't stand it at home. My heart's almost broken--you must give

  me some money, Pen, old boy. I know you will. I thought of writing to

  you, but I wanted to support myself, you see. When I went to London with

  the drawings I tried George's chambers, but he was in the country, I saw

  Crackthorpe on the street in Oxford Street, but I could not face him, and

  bolted down Hanway Yard. I tried, and I could not ask him, and I got the

  eighteen pounds from Moss that day, and came home with it."

  Give him money? of course I would give him money--my dear old friend!

  And, as an alterative and a wholesome shock to check that burst of

  passion and grief in which the poor fellow indulged, I thought fit to

  break into a very fierce and angry invective on my own part, which served

  to disguise the extreme feeling of pain and pity that I did not somehow

  choose to exhibit. I rated Clive soundly, and taxed him with

  unfriendliness and ingratitude for not having sooner applied to friends

  who would think shame of themselves whilst he was in need. Whatever he

  wanted was his as much as mine. I could not understand how the necessity

  of the family should, in truth, be so extreme as he described it, for

  after all many a poor family lived upon very much less; but I uttered

  none of these objections, checking them with the thought that Clive, on

  his first arrival at Boulogne, entirely ignorant of the practice of

  economy, might have imprudently engaged in expenses which had reduced him

  to this present destitution. (I did not know at the time that Mrs.

  Mackenzie had taken entire superintendence of the family treasury--and

  that this exemplary woman was putting away, as she had done previously,

  sundry little sums to meet rainy days.)

  I took the liberty of asking about debts, and of these Clive gave me to

  understand there were none--at least none of his or his father's

  contracting. "If we were too proud to borrow, and I think we were wrong,

  Pen, my dear old boy--I think we were wrong now--at least, we were too

  proud to owe. My colourman takes his bill out in drawings, and I think

  owes me a trifle. He got me some lessons at fifty sous a ticket--a pound

  the ten--from an economical swell who has taken a chateau here, and has

  two flunkeys in livery. He has four daughters, who take advantage of the

  lessons, and screws ten per cent upon the poor colourman's pencils and

  drawing-paper. It's pleasant work to give the lessons to the children;

  and to be patronised by the swell; and not expensive to him, is it, Pen?

  But I don't mind that, if I could but get lessons enough: for, you see,

  besides our expenses here, we must have some more money, and the dear old

  governor would die outright if poor old Sarah Mason did not get her fifty

  pounds a year."

  And now there arrived a plentiful supper, and a bottle of good wine, of

  which the giver was not sorry to partake after the meagre dinner at three

  o'clock, to which I had been invited by the Campaigner; and it was

  midnight when I walked back with my friend to his house in the upper

  town; and all the stars of heaven were shining cheerily; and my dear

  Clive's face wore an expression of happiness, such as I remembered in old

  days, as we shook hands and parted with a "God bless you."

  To Clive's friend, revolving these things in his mind, as he lay in one

  of those most snug and comfortable beds at the excellent Hotel des Bains,

  it appeared that this town of Boulogne was a very bad market for the