A Story

by William Makepeace Thackeray

hark ye, you dirty one-eyed scoundrel, if you don't immadiately make

  way for these leedies, and this lily-livered young jontleman who's

  crying so, the Meejor here and I will lug out and force you." And

  so saying, he drew his great sword and made a pass at Mr. Sicklop;

  which that gentleman avoided, and which caused him and his companion

  to retreat from the door. The landlady still kept her position at

  it, and with a storm of oaths against the Ensign, and against two

  Englishmen who ran away from a wild Hirishman, swore she would not

  budge a foot, and would stand there until her dying day.

  "Faith, then, needs must," said the Ensign, and made a lunge at the

  hostess, which passed so near the wretch's throat, that she

  screamed, sank on her knees, and at last opened the door.

  Down the stairs, then, with great state, Mr. Macshane led the elder

  lady, the married couple following; and having seen them to the

  street, took an affectionate farewell of the party, whom he vowed

  that he would come and see. "You can walk the eighteen miles aisy,

  between this and nightfall," said he.

  "WALK!" exclaimed Mr. Hayes. "Why, haven't we got Ball, and shall

  ride and tie all the way?"

  "Madam!" cried Macshane, in a stern voice, "honour before

  everything. Did you not, in the presence of his worship, vow and

  declare that you gave me that horse, and now d'ye talk of taking it

  back again? Let me tell you, madam, that such paltry thricks ill

  become a person of your years and respectability, and ought never to

  be played with Insign Timothy Macshane."

  He waved his hat and strutted down the street; and Mrs. Catherine

  Hayes, along with her bridegroom and mother-in-law, made the best of

  their way homeward on foot.

  CHAPTER VII. WHICH EMBRACES A PERIOD OF SEVEN YEARS.

  The recovery of so considerable a portion of his property from the

  clutches of Brock was, as may be imagined, no trifling source of joy

  to that excellent young man, Count Gustavus Adolphus de Galgenstein;

  and he was often known to say, with much archness, and a proper

  feeling of gratitude to the Fate which had ordained things so, that

  the robbery was, in reality, one of the best things that could have

  happened to him: for, in event of Mr. Brock's NOT stealing the

  money, his Excellency the Count would have had to pay the whole to

  the Warwickshire Squire, who had won it from him at play. He was

  enabled, in the present instance, to plead his notorious poverty as

  an excuse; and the Warwickshire conqueror got off with nothing,

  except a very badly written autograph of the Count's, simply

  acknowledging the debt.

  This point his Excellency conceded with the greatest candour; but

  (as, doubtless, the reader may have remarked in the course of his

  experience) to owe is not quite the same thing as to pay; and from

  the day of his winning the money until the day of his death the

  Warwickshire Squire did never, by any chance, touch a single bob,

  tizzy, tester, moidore, maravedi, doubloon, tomaun, or rupee, of the

  sum which Monsieur de Galgenstein had lost to him.

  That young nobleman was, as Mr. Brock hinted in the little

  autobiographical sketch which we gave in a former chapter,

  incarcerated for a certain period, and for certain other debts, in

  the donjons of Shrewsbury; but he released himself from them by that

  noble and consolatory method of whitewashing which the law has

  provided for gentlemen in his oppressed condition; and he had not

  been a week in London, when he fell in with, and overcame, or put to

  flight, Captain Wood, alias Brock, and immediately seized upon the

  remainder of his property. After receiving this, the Count, with

  commendable discretion, disappeared from England altogether for a

  while; nor are we at all authorised to state that any of his debts

  to his tradesmen were discharged, any more than his debts of honour,

  as they are pleasantly called.

  Having thus settled with his creditors, the gallant Count had

  interest enough with some of the great folk to procure for himself a

  post abroad, and was absent in Holland for some time. It was here

  that he became acquainted with the lovely Madam Silverkoop, the

  widow of a deceased gentleman of Leyden; and although the lady was

  not at that age at which tender passions are usually inspired--being

  sixty--and though she could not, like Mademoiselle Ninon de

  l'Enclos, then at Paris, boast of charms which defied the progress

  of time,--for Mrs. Silverkoop was as red as a boiled lobster, and as

  unwieldy as a porpoise; and although her mental attractions did by

  no means make up for her personal deficiencies,--for she was

  jealous, violent, vulgar, drunken, and stingy to a miracle: yet her

  charms had an immediate effect on Monsieur de Galgenstein; and

  hence, perhaps, the reader (the rogue! how well he knows the world!)

  will be led to conclude that the honest widow was RICH.

  Such, indeed, she was; and Count Gustavus, despising the difference

  between his twenty quarterings and her twenty thousand pounds, laid

  the most desperate siege to her, and finished by causing her to

  capitulate; as I do believe, after a reasonable degree of pressing,

  any woman will do to any man: such, at least, has been MY

  experience in the matter.

  The Count then married; and it was curious to see how he--who, as we

  have seen in the case of Mrs. Cat, had been as great a tiger and

  domestic bully as any extant--now, by degrees, fell into a quiet

  submission towards his enormous Countess; who ordered him up and

  down as a lady orders her footman, who permitted him speedily not to

  have a will of his own, and who did not allow him a shilling of her

  money without receiving for the same an accurate account.

  How was it that he, the abject slave of Madam Silverkoop, had been

  victorious over Mrs. Cat? The first blow is, I believe, the

  decisive one in these cases, and the Countess had stricken it a week

  after their marriage;--establishing a supremacy which the Count

  never afterwards attempted to question.

  We have alluded to his Excellency's marriage, as in duty bound,

  because it will be necessary to account for his appearance hereafter

  in a more splendid fashion than that under which he has hitherto

  been known to us; and just comforting the reader by the knowledge

  that the union, though prosperous in a worldly point of view, was,

  in reality, extremely unhappy, we must say no more from this time

  forth of the fat and legitimate Madam de Galgenstein. Our darling

  is Mrs. Catherine, who had formerly acted in her stead; and only in

  so much as the fat Countess did influence in any way the destinies

  of our heroine, or those wise and virtuous persons who have appeared

  and are to follow her to her end, shall we in any degree allow her

  name to figure here. It is an awful thing to get a glimpse, as one

  sometimes does, when the time is past, of some little little wheel

  which works the whole mighty machinery of FATE, and see how our

  destinies turn on a minute's delay or advance, or on
the turning of

  a street, or on somebody else's turning of a street, or on somebody

  else's doing of something else in Downing Street or in Timbuctoo,

  now or a thousand years ago. Thus, for instance, if Miss Poots, in

  the year 1695, had never been the lovely inmate of a Spielhaus at

  Amsterdam, Mr. Van Silverkoop would never have seen her; if the day

  had not been extraordinarily hot, the worthy merchant would never

  have gone thither; if he had not been fond of Rhenish wine and

  sugar, he never would have called for any such delicacies; if he had

  not called for them, Miss Ottilia Poots would never have brought

  them, and partaken of them; if he had not been rich, she would

  certainly have rejected all the advances made to her by Silverkoop;

  if he had not been so fond of Rhenish and sugar, he never would have

  died; and Mrs. Silverkoop would have been neither rich nor a widow,

  nor a wife to Count von Galgenstein. Nay, nor would this history

  have ever been written; for if Count Galgenstein had not married the

  rich widow, Mrs. Catherine would never have--

  Oh, my dear madam! you thought we were going to tell you. Pooh!

  nonsense!--no such thing! not for two or three and seventy pages or

  so,--when, perhaps, you MAY know what Mrs. Catherine never would

  have done.

  The reader will remember, in the second chapter of these Memoirs,

  the announcement that Mrs. Catherine had given to the world a child,

  who might bear, if he chose, the arms of Galgenstein, with the

  further adornment of a bar-sinister. This child had been put out to

  nurse some time before its mother's elopement from the Count; and as

  that nobleman was in funds at the time (having had that success at

  play which we duly chronicled), he paid a sum of no less than twenty

  guineas, which was to be the yearly reward of the nurse into whose

  charge the boy was put. The woman grew fond of the brat; and when,

  after the first year, she had no further news or remittances from

  father or mother, she determined, for a while at least, to maintain

  the infant at her own expense; for, when rebuked by her neighbours

  on this score, she stoutly swore that no parents could ever desert

  their children, and that some day or other she should not fail to be

  rewarded for her trouble with this one.

  Under this strange mental hallucination poor Goody Billings, who had

  five children and a husband of her own, continued to give food and

  shelter to little Tom for a period of no less than seven years; and

  though it must be acknowledged that the young gentleman did not in

  the slightest degree merit the kindnesses shown to him, Goody

  Billings, who was of a very soft and pitiful disposition, continued

  to bestow them upon him: because, she said, he was lonely and

  unprotected, and deserved them more than other children who had

  fathers and mothers to look after them. If, then, any difference

  was made between Tom's treatment and that of her own brood, it was

  considerably in favour of the former; to whom the largest

  proportions of treacle were allotted for his bread, and the

  handsomest supplies of hasty pudding. Besides, to do Mrs. Billings

  justice, there WAS a party against him; and that consisted not only

  of her husband and her five children, but of every single person in

  the neighbourhood who had an opportunity of seeing and becoming

  acquainted with Master Tom.

  A celebrated philosopher--I think Miss Edgeworth--has broached the

  consolatory doctrine, that in intellect and disposition all human

  beings are entirely equal, and that circumstance and education are

  the causes of the distinctions and divisions which afterwards

  unhappily take place among them. Not to argue this question, which

  places Jack Howard and Jack Thurtell on an exact level,--which would

  have us to believe that Lord Melbourne is by natural gifts and

  excellences a man as honest, brave, and far-sighted as the Duke of

  Wellington,--which would make out that Lord Lyndhurst is, in point

  of principle, eloquence, and political honesty, no better than Mr.

  O'Connell,--not, I say, arguing this doctrine, let us simply state

  that Master Thomas Billings (for, having no other, he took the name

  of the worthy people who adopted him) was in his long-coats

  fearfully passionate, screaming and roaring perpetually, and showing

  all the ill that he COULD show. At the age of two, when his

  strength enabled him to toddle abroad, his favourite resort was the

  coal-hole or the dung-heap: his roarings had not diminished in the

  least, and he had added to his former virtues two new ones,--a love

  of fighting and stealing; both which amiable qualities he had many

  opportunities of exercising every day. He fought his little

  adoptive brothers and sisters; he kicked and cuffed his father and

  mother; he fought the cat, stamped upon the kittens, was worsted in

  a severe battle with the hen in the backyard; but, in revenge,

  nearly beat a little sucking-pig to death, whom he caught alone and

  rambling near his favourite haunt, the dung-hill. As for stealing,

  he stole the eggs, which he perforated and emptied; the butter,

  which he ate with or without bread, as he could find it; the sugar,

  which he cunningly secreted in the leaves of a "Baker's Chronicle,"

  that nobody in the establishment could read; and thus from the pages

  of history he used to suck in all he knew--thieving and lying

  namely; in which, for his years, he made wonderful progress. If any

  followers of Miss Edgeworth and the philosophers are inclined to

  disbelieve this statement, or to set it down as overcharged and

  distorted, let them be assured that just this very picture was, of

  all the pictures in the world, taken from nature. I, Ikey Solomons,

  once had a dear little brother who could steal before he could walk

  (and this not from encouragement,--for, if you know the world, you

  must know that in families of our profession the point of honour is

  sacred at home,--but from pure nature)--who could steal, I say,

  before he could walk, and lie before he could speak; and who, at

  four and a half years of age, having attacked my sister Rebecca on

  some question of lollipops, had smitten her on the elbow with a

  fire-shovel, apologising to us by saying simply, "---- her, I wish

  it had been her head!" Dear, dear Aminadab! I think of you, and

  laugh these philosophers to scorn. Nature made you for that career

  which you fulfilled: you were from your birth to your dying a

  scoundrel; you COULDN'T have been anything else, however your lot

  was cast; and blessed it was that you were born among the prigs,-

  -for had you been of any other profession, alas! alas! what ills

  might you have done! As I have heard the author of "Richelieu,"

  "Siamese Twins," etc. say "Poeta nascitur non fit," which means that

  though he had tried ever so much to be a poet, it was all moonshine:

  in the like manner, I say, "ROAGUS nascitur, non fit." We have it

  from nature, and so a fig for Miss Edgeworth.

  In this manner, then, while his father, blessed with a wealthy wife,
<
br />   was leading, in a fine house, the life of a galley-slave; while his

  mother, married to Mr. Hayes, and made an honest women of, as the

  saying is, was passing her time respectably in Warwickshire, Mr.

  Thomas Billings was inhabiting the same county, not cared for by

  either of them; but ordained by Fate to join them one day, and have

  a mighty influence upon the fortunes of both. For, as it has often

  happened to the traveller in the York or the Exeter coach to fall

  snugly asleep in his corner, and on awaking suddenly to find himself

  sixty or seventy miles from the place where Somnus first visited

  him: as, we say, although you sit still, Time, poor wretch, keeps

  perpetually running on, and so must run day and night, with never a

  pause or a halt of five minutes to get a drink, until his dying day;

  let the reader imagine that since he left Mrs. Hayes and all the

  other worthy personages of this history, in the last chapter, seven

  years have sped away; during which, all our heroes and heroines have

  been accomplishing their destinies.

  Seven years of country carpentering, or rather trading, on the part

  of a husband, of ceaseless scolding, violence, and discontent on the

  part of a wife, are not pleasant to describe: so we shall omit

  altogether any account of the early married life of Mr. and Mrs.

  John Hayes. The "Newgate Calendar" (to which excellent compilation

  we and the OTHER popular novelists of the day can never be

  sufficiently grateful) states that Hayes left his house three or

  four times during this period, and, urged by the restless humours of

  his wife, tried several professions: returning, however, as he grew

  weary of each, to his wife and his paternal home. After a certain

  time his parents died, and by their demise he succeeded to a small

  property, and the carpentering business, which he for some time

  followed.

  What, then, in the meanwhile, had become of Captain Wood, or Brock,

  and Ensign Macshane?--the only persons now to be accounted for in

  our catalogue. For about six months after their capture and release

  of Mr. Hayes, those noble gentlemen had followed, with much prudence

  and success, that trade which the celebrated and polite Duval, the

  ingenious Sheppard, the dauntless Turpin, and indeed many other

  heroes of our most popular novels, had pursued,--or were pursuing,

  in their time. And so considerable were said to be Captain Wood's

  gains, that reports were abroad of his having somewhere a buried

  treasure; to which he might have added more, had not Fate suddenly

  cut short his career as a prig. He and the Ensign were--shame to

  say--transported for stealing three pewter-pots off a railing at

  Exeter; and not being known in the town, which they had only reached

  that morning, they were detained by no further charges, but simply

  condemned on this one. For this misdemeanour, Her Majesty's

  Government vindictively sent them for seven years beyond the sea;

  and, as the fashion then was, sold the use of their bodies to

  Virginian planters during that space of time. It is thus, alas!

  that the strong are always used to deal with the weak, and many an

  honest fellow has been led to rue his unfortunate difference with

  the law.

  Thus, then, we have settled all scores. The Count is in Holland

  with his wife; Mrs. Cat in Warwickshire along with her excellent

  husband; Master Thomas Billings with his adoptive parents in the

  same county; and the two military gentlemen watching the progress

  and cultivation of the tobacco and cotton plant in the New World.

  All these things having passed between the acts,

  dingaring-a-dingaring-a-dingledingleding, the drop draws up, and the

  next act begins. By the way, the play ENDS with a drop: but that

  is neither here nor there.

  * * *

  (Here, as in a theatre, the orchestra is supposed to play something

  melodious. The people get up, shake themselves, yawn, and settle