Family Secrets in a Changing Metropolis

Had Mrs. Frazer been thoroughly aware of to whom and to what she was going, perhaps she might have delayed some considerable period weighing the pro’s and con’s, on both sides, before she finally determined to reject the old laird’s offer; and if, after all, she had set forth on her Southern pilgrimage, it would have been with a much more mournful face, and a far heavier heart than any person had ever supposed to belong to, or dwell in the breast of, the widow of Allan Frazer, Esq., late Captain in His Majesty’s ——th regiment of Highlanders.

All she knew positively concerning her brother may be summed up in a very few words. He was fifteen years older than herself—a bachelor—and extremely rich.

Owing to the disparity of their ages, and the fact 100that John, disliking parental control, especially in commercial matters, had at the early age of eighteen “started for himself,” there was little intercourse betwixt them before Mrs. Frazer’s marriage; and after that event, letters from the London merchant to the Scottish gentleman’s wife came to Glenfiord at such rare intervals, that, like the Lord Mayor’s show, they only served to remind the fashionable lady there was such an individual in existence—until she required help from him, until the choice lay between “London with John Merapie,” and the “Highlands with the head of her husband’s clan:” then quick as lightning she bethought herself how wealthy her brother was; how delightful it would be to preside over a grand establishment in her native city; how splendidly he could provide for Malcolm and Mina; and how liberally, she might feel certain, he would act towards her.

And so she wrote to say, “I am beggared;” and he, by return of post, offered her a home and a cordial welcome,—which letter filled the poor lady’s weak brain full of all sorts of absurd ideas concerning “fashionable life in London;” self, children and brother, visitors, servants, house, equipage and furniture, being the heroes, heroines, and etceteras of the tale she so speedily imagined—but which 101like many another, better and worse, fiction before and since—was never, spite of the admiration its authoress felt for the same, destined to be published.

How gladly she would have turned that dream into a reality, how fully she expected it to become such, she herself and one or two others came in time fully to understand; but she had, unhappily for her own comfort, started on wrong data: she had taken a supposititious house for her brother, furnished it with a vision, placed him therein with a false character, and finally repaired to London under a delusion, in order to see the “whirlwind from the desert come,” and level with its practical breath all the fine airy castles she had comforted herself—since Captain Frazer’s demise—with building.

“John is rich—of course he lives in style—of course he will do whatever I ask him, as my poor dear father used.” So reasoned the lady, and on this reasoning she managed to create for herself a great and most unexpected disappointment; for nothing more different from his sister’s mental portrait of him can be conceived, than John Merapie. He was a man whose character might be thus briefly described:

“He liked his dinner; and he hated humbug.”

Now humbug, which was one of his pet expressions, 102meant in his unrecognized dictionary, everything which he disapproved of—or rather, everything for which he did not care. He thought marrying a humbug—but not money; he considered fashion a humbug—but not a good fire; he deemed it a humbug to care about where you lived—but a piece of solemn necessity to take care where you dined; he denounced music as a humbug—but not mince pies; he was perfectly satisfied fine ladies were “regular humbugs;” but had a sort of reverence for a capital housekeeper—that kind of thing, you know; he despised grand furniture, but gloried in politics; thought tea only fit for women, but had a high opinion of port wine; declared he detested evening parties and white kid gloves, and all such humbug, but enjoyed a quiet rubber of whist, or a social evening with half-a-dozen “steady-goers,” as much as mortal man ever did. People wondered, when he had such an antipathy to affectation and folly, that he got on so admirably with Alfred Westwood; but the merchant mildly advised some one who ventured to propound the question unto him—“Just try to cheat Westwood out of a sovereign, and note the result; I don’t care, sir, what he seems, there’s no humbug in him, and what’s better than that, there’s no deceiving him with it. He can see further into the City 103than any man in London, and that is saying all I can for him.” Which observation, it may be added, had reference, not to the City buildings, but to the City people; Burke’s “Who’s Who” of the West End, not being more voluminous than Westwood’s Who’s Who, of the East—the former taking cognizance of the great at Court; the latter, of the firm at the Bank; the one publishing volumes about landed gentry, the other making telling concise little notes concerning merchant princes. It was small marvel Mr. Merapie thought his clerk clever, for he seemed to know by intuition how every man’s “book” stood; whether he had over-drawn, or was possessed of “a balance;” if his wife had a fortune; for how much he was “good,” whether he would stand or fall, and if he fell who would “go” with him, and how much could be raked up out of the ruins. It was something perfectly horrible, to the uninitiated, to hear how Mr. Alfred Westwood had characters and capitals, and probable bankrupts and doubtful bills at his finger’s end—and, if need were, also on the tip of his smooth silvery tongue—for such astonishing revelations occasionally give one the feeling, that there may be mercantile as well as political spies; detective officers, not the less dangerous because amateur, in the counting house as in the streets.

104But this was just what John Merapie required, a clever fellow who could tell in two minutes, “who was who,” and “what was what”—at any time, in any place; and he liked his clerk, and forgave his vanity, and imagined Mr. Westwood had a heart-interest in his concerns; and it never seemed to enter the worthy merchant’s brain that his subordinate was working, not for him, but for himself—not for John Merapie, but for Alfred Westwood—not for a fortune to his principal, but for a partnership to crown his own individual wishes and deserts.

And thus the shrewd merchant, who spent half his leisure-time denouncing other people’s follies, completely succeeded in “humbugging” himself into the belief that a man, who, for years and years, had thought of nothing, cared for nothing, but himself, was going to turn round at the eleventh hour, and work disinterestedly and conscientiously for his employer. What wonder, then, that when Mr. John Merapie, through the beautifying medium of vanity and hope, lived in London under one delusion, his weak, foolish sister, Mrs. Frazer, should come to London labouring under several.

It grieves me to be at length reluctantly compelled to disclose that the “Square” to which, in 105the brief conversation recorded in Chapter III., between Mr. John Merapie and his clerk, the former so familiarly yet mysteriously alluded, was none other than Belerma—without exception the dreariest, dingiest, and most depressing four-angled place of at all respectable habitation to be met with in the whole of the vast metropolis.

Fashionable readers may, perhaps, deem this name a fictitious one, and I admit it is not discernible amongst any of the West End Squares composing what may be termed a “genteel set” in society; yet, no doubt, if we only traced back its history far enough, there would be found in its annals—as in the pedigrees of many people who now are low and poor enough—sufficient proofs of former grandeur to fling a sort of dim aristocratic halo over the now desolate and deserted Square, where no one ever penetrates who can avoid doing so, which is approached by a few narrow twisted streets, which seems lonely and silent as the grave, though hardly ten minutes’ walk from some of the noisiest London thoroughfares.

Like the poor and the reduced, whose day of pride and glory has passed away for ever, Belerma Square could tell its tale of former gentility, were speech but vouchsafed unto the stones of its pavement, 106or the walls of its mansions: perhaps the feet of nobles once crossed the thresholds of those dingy tenements; treason may there have been hatched; beauty has graced the now empty apartments; lights have there sparkled, glad voices made melody; music has floated through open casements over the now stunted blackened trees and shrubs, that make a sort of mockery of a pleasure ground in the centre; existence was there entered on, death encountered, sorrows endured; tears have there flowed, laughter echoed; men and women, the great, and fair, and good, and noble of the land once lived, rejoiced, and suffered there; and yet, in spite of its having at one period been something more than respectable, “select,” the very name of Belerma Square is blotted out from the memories of the descendants of those who once resided there—the present aristocrats of Belgravia. Stone walls may be possessed of ears, but, as a general rule, the power of speech hath been denied unto them; and partly because of this, greatly because of the whims and vagaries and changes of fashion, Belerma Square, like a corpse wherefrom breath and spirit have departed, has been left to moulder away into the dust of antiquity by the vast human tide which, in these later days—growing broader, stronger, and 107more unruly—has swept, with common consent, towards the West, and settled temporarily in those regions which, though now deemed unexceptionable, some future chronicler of high life in London will, in due course, assuredly scoff at as being too far East for the sun of fashionable society to shine on; for it may not be altogether out of place here to remark that the luminary which irradiates genteel people dwelling in England’s metropolis, unlike other and commoner suns, rises in the West, and sets there also, without flinging even a solitary beam of light upon the East.

New things have become old, and old have disappeared from view; and strange events have varied the history and altered the apparent destinies of kingdoms and races, since the noble of the land raised mansions in that now neglected corner of the metropolis, and dwelt therein; and its name, like that of Moore’s heroine, “is never heard” spoken by anybody who is anybody, in any place that is any place. Therefore I regret to confess the merchant tenanted—stay, he did more, he owned one of the dreary-looking brick houses forming the southern side of the quadrangle called Belerma; and it can scarcely be marvelled at if it went unto the very soul of the newly-made widow to discover that her 108brother was actually dwelling in such a locality. For, owing to his having for years flitted about from lodging to lodging, seeking rest and finding none; his being one of the briefest, and driest, and most uncommunicative of correspondents, and his requesting all missives, whether business or private, to be addressed to his office, situate (as no letters can be forwarded to him now, there is no necessity to be very precise) between London Bridge and Wapping, the overwhelming fact of his having, in default of a better tenant, installed himself in one of three houses he had bought—of course, a “dead bargain,” but which turned out almost a “dead loss”—remained an unsuspected mystery at Craigmaver.

When he wrote kindly and shortly, offering his sister a home, he merely said, “My house in the ‘Square’ is large enough for us all, and, if you think you will be more comfortable here than in Scotland, pray come immediately, only let me know what day to expect you:” in consequence of which extreme brevity he left Mrs. Frazer in a state of happy ignorance concerning the exact distance from Belgravia at which his home might be; or what number of hundreds per annum he paid—as she felt sure he did—for liberty to set himself down a West End man, who made all his money in the East.

109She hoped for Grovesnor; she would have been content with Berkeley; she could not urge any particular objection to Cavendish; but aught on the other side of Regent street, the lady had obstinately discarded from her imaginings. True, time had been, when she considered Gower-street—where her worthy father, removing himself and money bags out of the city, retired to spend a fortune after he had made one—something perfectly unexceptionable, quite grand enough for any peer in the realm; but school had speedily opened her eyes in this particular, school and (after her marriage) genteel society: so during the whole of her wedded life, when any inquisitive acquaintance enquired in what part of London her juvenile lot had been cast, she answered vaguely and carelessly—“Oh! the West End”—and calmed her conscience, which asserted she had told a fib, by thinking,—“comparatively it was so.” “Comparatively” with the City or St. Luke’s, perhaps!

“Belerma Square,” she gasped forth on the evening of her arrival, when Mr. Westwood, in his most silvery accents, assured her that was indeed the goal towards which the cab’s snail’s pace was tending: “Belerma Square! my dear sir, you must be mistaken; my brother could never dream of inviting me to such a place.”

110“It is his present home,” was the emphatic rejoiner.

There was a pause, during which the widow swallowed her chagrin and amazement as best she might: then she drawled forth, as if to account for the phenomenon—

“Bachelors do live in such strange places; and after all it does not much matter where they reside”—

“As we must be miserable even in palaces,” added Mr. Westwood; which speech, as it was intended it should, showed the lady he was a bachelor, though the smile that accompanied it implied, a tolerably happy one.

“Oh! I did not mean that,” returned Mrs. Frazer, “what I intended to remark was, they are not obliged to keep up appearances in the same way as if heads of families.”

“We are not, indeed,” assented Mr. Westwood, still resolutely adhering to the first person plural.

“No one ever enquires where an unmarried man lives,” resumed the widow, pursuing her own train of thought without reference to his, “excepting some bachelor friend, who likewise resides in an extraordinary locality; but when there are ladies, of course matters must be differently arranged: I shall speak to my brother on the subject directly.”

111“I believe,” remarked Mr. Westwood, in his most soothing tones, “I believe Mr. Merapie has purchased the house to which I have the honor of conducting you.”

“That can make no difference,” rejoined Mrs. Frazer: “he must let it for a shop, or a warehouse, or something. In fact, I mean to tell him he must discard all his bachelor modes of life at once, and take a house in a genteel neighbourhood, and give me what I have been since infancy accustomed to. I never should have left Craigmaver or Glenfiord, to live in Belerma Square; and of that my brother is perfectly well aware. He can merely intend this as a temporary home, and it will do remarkably well for that, till we can select a more suitable one. We must have a long conversation about these matters; I know he will do precisely as I wish.”

Mr. Westwood politely said,

“He felt satisfied no one could do otherwise,” and civilly thought: “Well, how this woman can be even half-sister to John Merapie is a mystery I cannot solve; but, if she think to drag him into fashionable life, or to persuade him to do any one thing he does not feel inclined to do himself, she will find herself most miserably mistaken.”

112Having finished which mental soliloquy, complimentary both to the merchant and his sister, the clerk handed Mrs. Frazer to the door of Mr. Merapie’s house, they having at length arrived there; and, after giving her and her children “in charge,” as it were, of a grim old housekeeper, and declining to enter the drawing-room and sit down, though specially invited to do so, and saying “Good night!” to the trio, individually and collectively, Mr. Westwood went quietly home to his lodgings, murmuring, as he walked, the sentence duly chronicled at the conclusion of Chapter III.

Very wearily and very discontentedly did Mrs. Frazer survey the furniture and appointments of her brother’s house, on that, the night of her return to the City where she had been born—to the place she had pined for years to see.

“This will never do,” she murmured, as she glanced around at moth-eaten carpets, and faded curtains, and antique chairs, and dingy mirrors; all of which articles John Merapie—who, to do him justice, cared as little for what he called “frippery” as any man in existence—had picked up at auctions and old furniture stalls, either personally, or through the instrumentality of an agent. “Not a particle of taste, or fashion, or refinement, or comfort, or even 113cleanliness; this will never do—never—never:” and having, after a mournful scrutiny, arrived at this conclusion, the widow first partook of tea and toast and muffins with what appetite she might, and then ascended the broad creaking and, after the first flight, carpetless stairs, and went drearily to bed; where she lay awake half the night, thinking what she should say to her brother on the subject of his ménage, and where she would like to ask him to take a house, and of what coloured damask the drawing-room curtains should be. Having decided which latter point in favour of amber, she fell asleep and dreamt they were dwelling in Hyde Park Terrace, with only a brick wall and French satin paper dividing them to right and left from a dowager Duchess and a spendthrift Earl.

Ostensibly in honour of his sister’s advent, but more probably in consequence of the Lord Mayor’s banquet—which, by the way, Mr. Westwood had informed the widow his principal was compelled to attend—Mr. John Merapie permitted the day to be “thoroughly aired” before he descended to the breakfast parlour, where he discovered Mina and Malcolm sitting very peaceably together on the hearth rug, discoursing, as they looked into the bright blazing fire, about Craigmaver, their journey, and their new home.

114The children arose at the entrance of their uncle, who, laying a hand on the head of each, welcomed them kindly. He gazed first with something wonderfully like admiration at the boy, whose personal beauty, bold carriage, graceful movements, and gay laughter-loving temperament, more than half excused his mother’s excessive partiality for her first-born; but, then, the merchant casting a more attentive glance on Mina, was so struck by the delicacy of her appearance, that he involuntarily exclaimed,—

“How ghastly pale the child is, to be sure!”

“Poor Mina has been very ill, you know,” explained her brother.

“Ah! true. I had forgotten that,” said Mr. Merapie (which, indeed, was perfectly correct). “What made you so ill, Mina.”

A bright flush coloured her cheek for a minute, and the dark eyes became moistened as Malcolm answered, in a low hushed voice,

“Crying for her papa.”

The merchant looked from one to the other, from the bright healthy boy to the little fragile girl; then stooping, he abruptly kissed her forehead, after the fashion of a man to whom such an exertion was a rarity, and saying almost tenderly, “She must get 115better here;” placed a chair for her close beside his own at the breakfast table, and added that, as their mamma was going to take coffee in her own room, there was no necessity to delay the morning meal any longer.

And whilst engaged in the pleasant task of despatching that which, next to his dinner, an Englishman considers the most important business of life, Mr. John Merapie remained happily unconscious of the storm which was raging in the bosom of his sole female dependant—to wit, the grim housekeeper afore honourably mentioned.

“New lights shining through old windows, indeed,” she angrily muttered, wending her way up the interminable stairs conducting from the kitchen to Mrs. Frazer’s apartment on the second floor. The widow’s own servant being, as she said, “so hoverdone with that ’orrid journey from that ’eathen place,” as to be incapable of eating any breakfast herself, and, consequently, of procuring the same for her disconsolate mistress. “New lights shining through old windows, indeed, when ladies can’t come down to breakfast, but must have it trailed up three flights of stairs to them. Mr. Merapie may get another servant to attend to the children, and keep this grand lady’s-maid to wait on his sister, or else 116take my warning; and that I shall tell him before I am two hours older. Fine work, truly, fires lighted in bed rooms and dressing rooms; I suppose one will be wanted in the drawing-room next; and coffee carried in cupfuls up sixty-six steps—neither more nor less, many a time I’ve counted them. And John Merapie’s sister taking her breakfast at eleven o’clock in the day, as if it were second nature to her, and may be so it is.”

Which soliloquy terminating at the door of the lady’s chamber, the housekeeper flung it fiercely open and deposited the tray she carried with such a bang on the table, that a portion of the contents of the coffee cup was jerked over into the saucer.

“Gently, gently,” gasped Mrs. Frazer, withdrawing her eyes from a wrapt contemplation of the ceiling, upon which she had been writing out a mental inventory of the furniture needful to make a house “habitable.” “There, that will do, thank you: pray stay for a moment till I see if it be sweet enough. Ah! scarcely, it requires a little more sugar.”

“Will it not do?” demanded the housekeeper in a tone that surprised Mrs. Frazer into asking,

“Why?”

“Because it’s sixty-six steps down to the sugar 117from here, and sixty-six up again, and it’s not a journey I’m fond of taking if I can help it,” was the response.

“You will have to go, even before we remove to another house,” thought the widow; but she merely responded, “In that case you can bring it with my next cup—and—if you have a little, cream also.”

“Cream,” repeated the woman, “we London folks makes milk do us; cream is not to be had for nothing here, ma’am.”

“It is not to be had for nothing anywhere,” responded Mrs. Frazer with wonderful temper; “but, still, as it is obtainable for money, and as I have been accustomed to it, we must get a little; that is all. However, you need not mind it at present. I shall speak to my brother about a number of things I wish attended to. Will you tell him, when he has quite finished breakfast, I should like to see him here.”

And the widow sinking back on the sofa, waved her hand, after the manner of a queen, unto the incensed housekeeper, and languidly commenced sipping her coffee with the air of an amiable martyr, whilst the dethroned potentate went grumbling down the stairs, humming a tune, the purport whereof Mr. Merapie’s sister little suspected.

118“Cream, indeed! less might do her father’s daughter, I think: a better man than she is a woman—and that’s John Merapie, my master—never put up to airs like that; you never would have heard his voice in the house; he never said yet to me, ‘Crooked was a bias.’ Ay! there are very few like him, very; and she thinks she will be able to lead him about with a silken thread; get him to make a fine lady of her; and leave all his money to her children, ha, ha! I know something she does not, and that Westwood does not, but that Westwood would give gold to hear; but he won’t hear it from me yet, may be, never—may be, never.” And so she went on, muttering and mumbling, and shaking her head and clenching her hand, till she reached the hall, where, encountering Mr. Merapie, she delivered unto him, first his sister’s message, and then added,

“And, sir, I think it’s just as well for me to tell you I do not intend to stay here any longer than you can well suit yourself; but, if you have no objection to my still staying on in your service, sir, I have none to the country;” and the expression of the woman’s face became perfectly diabolical as she spoke, so full was it of cunning, and mystery, and meaning.

119The merchant flung a hurried glance behind him, as if fearful of being overheard, then answered in a low tone, slipping, at the same time, a golden coin into her hand,

“We will speak of this another day; meanwhile, I rely on your discretion.”

“You may, sir,” she replied, nodding her head, partly over the money, partly at him, “you may, sir, and that you know.”

Upon the strength of which assurance, Mr. Merapie repaired, though not with an unclouded brow, to the room where his sister awaited his advent.