J mmI > ! , mmvmm mmsm LIBR.AR.Y OF THE UN IVERSITY Of ILLINOIS 8Z3 $*3 lae v. 3 Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2010 with funding from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign http://www.archive.org/details/sevensonsofmammo03sala THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON: % £*nrg. BT GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA, AUTHOR OF "WILLIAM HOGARTH;" "DUTCH PICTURES;" "TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK," &C, &C, IN THREE VOLUMES. VOL. III. LONDON: TINSLEY BROTHERS, 18, CATHERINE STREET, STRAND, 1862. [The right of Translation is reserved.] : LONDON BBADBURY AND EVANS, PRINTERS, WH1TEFRIAR3. 8£3 CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. PAGE A MAN WEARING HIS HEART UPON HIS SLEEVE ... 1 CHAPTER II. NEMESIS IN PLAIN CLOTHES 17 CHAPTER III. THE RACE .40 CHAPTER IV. AFTER THE RACE 51 CHAPTER V, CAUGHT 82 CHAPTER VI, WHAT PEOPLE SAID IN THE CITY . .124 CHAPTER VII. THE FEET OF CLAY 136 CHAPTER VIII. AT THE WEST-END 152 IV CONTENTS. CHAPTER IX. PAGE THE AGONY OP FLORENCE ARMTTAGE \ STAGE THE FIRST . 179 CHAPTER X. TIME WORKS WONDERS 220 CHAPTER XI. UPWARDS AND DOWNWARDS TO AN END 263 CHAPTER XII. 274 THE AGONY OF FLORENCE ARMYTAGE : STAGE THE LAST " THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. CHAPTER I. A MAN WEARING HIS HEART UPON HIS SLEEVE. " Miss Salusbury is not so clever as the little widow," said Lord Carnation to himself; "but she's plucky, and knows a lot. But the widow ! •—what a committee she might get up for a burnt -out or a famine -relief fund. If the women didn't hate her so, she ought to go in against slavery. I wish she'd cram me about crime and reformation, and that sort of thing. I wonder where she lives. Where does she live?" he asked aloud, turning to Magdalen. " To whom do you allude, my lord ? " Why, our little friend Mrs. TVhat'shername —Mrs. Armytage." Z THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. "Behind the scenes, I should think/' broke in Letitia petulantly. "Inquire at the stage- door. This way for the riders. You'll soon find her out, Lord Carnation." The curate—they were inspecting the dormi- tories by this time — passed from a cold into a hot perspiration of dismay. " Beautiful, but lost creature," he mentally exclaimed, " deprived, no doubt, of maternal care at an early age; undisciplined mind, misapplied talents ! Ah, " what an Eden choked with weeds and tares ! The curate wasn't a humbug. He was only an amiable young man, who had been his mother's pet and the joy of a High- Church watering-place in Devonshire, where devotion and pretty things went hand in hand. He had looked at life through the stained-glass oriel of a gimcrack chapel, and had suddenly been transplanted from the carved and gilt and vellum- bound and wax-candled Yale of Rest in the sweet south, to this great brabbling, murky, gas-lit Soho, where he had his corns trodden on, and the angles of his fine feelings chipped off every day in the week. He was a curate with an Ideal; but to have turned it to any A MAN WEARING HIS HEART UPON HIS SLEEVE. 6 practical use, he should have been a police- constable, and taken a spell of night duty for a fortnight. To a clergyman who really wishes to do good among the poor and the vicious, a bull's-eye is an admirable companion to a Bible. "Mrs. Arrnytage," Magdalen said slowly, in reply to the earl's query, "resides habitually in Paris and in Brighton. Sometimes, I believe she stays with her aged father, who lives in some boarding-house near Bayswater, I believe, and to whom she is very kind. But she is of course free to go where she lists, and, as I have said, is very eccentric, and, I am told, stays a great deal at hotels, and even in furnished -" lodgings. " I have her address, if you please, my lady," the steward said. " Here it is, in Albert Street, Knightsbridge. She gave me the card the first time she employed Mr. Tottlepot, —that's one of our poor gentlemen, — the poet that she gives copying to." It was noticed afterwards, as strange circum- stances in the career of this woman, that she never assumed an alias, and that she never B 2 4 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. concealed her dwelling place. What she did was done in the open. Yon rememher the story of the First Napoleon and Cardinal Fesch, when the latter endeavoured to dissuade him from undertaking the invasion of Russia. He led the Cardinal to the window, opened it, and pointed out into the sky. It was night, and a black one. " Do you see that star?*1 he asked. "No, Sire/* answered the Cardinal. "But I do/* said the Emperor, and shut the window, and invaded Russia, and came to the end you all know. Florence Armytage had her star, invisible to other eyes, and it bade her keep straight on in the broad, smooth, shining road, unto the end that was coming. The distinguished party saw all that was to be seen in the Monmouth Chambers : —dormi- tories, kitchens, coffee-room, smoking-room even, and, of course, praised and admired the general air of neatness, cleanliness, and comfort that reigned. I wonder they did not ask to see the refractory-ward or the solitary cell, or the cat-o'-ninc-tails, sealed with the seal of the risiting justice. For it is a strange, but never- theless a very true thing, that people who haunt A MAN WEARING HIS HEA11T UPON HIS SLEEVE. O " institutions " grow hardened to them. What- ever the place be,—hospital, school, gaol, asylum, or madhouse, — an indefinable sensation comes over the visitor that he is a superior being-, and that the inmates have got into some in- explicable scrape. I have been myself over some hundreds of these institutions, but have tried in vain to attain the hardened stage which comes so naturally to professed philanthropists. I always feel uneasy, and ask myself what right I have to be there, and how I should like myself to be put into a description of moral cage, and exhibited by a kind of moral Beef- eater, as though I were a wombat or a giraffe, and inspected, patronised, and approved of. For who knows what to-morrow may bring forth? Who is so sane but he may need the douche- bath and the padded room some day ? Who so virtuous but he may have to hold up his hand at the bidding of the clerk of the arraigns and plead? Who so hale and strong but he may find the water-bed a luxury, and the hospital- nurse his best friend? Who so rich but the time may come when his only refuge shall be the old man's ward, and he look out eagerly 6 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. for meat-days, and remember Christmas chiefly in connection with an allowance of snuff and a pint of strong ale : — the bounty of the guardians? Haughty and insolent salt ones of the earth, take down a book written by one who was the pride of his age, and the favourite of a queen, and lay for years a captive in a hole of the White Tower. Read what Raleigh writes of Darius. How he wore purple and a crown of gold in the morning, and was the master of millions, and how at night he lay naked and bleeding and forlorn on the ground. Yelvet and brocade, carving and gilding, may fade away, and leave nothing but the pauper's pallet, or, worse, a whitewashed cell, and the prison task-master instructing you in the art of cobbling shoes, or making cane-bottoms for chairs. And the first shall be last, and the last first; and the High Sheriff take a turn in the dock, and the beggar make out Dives's mittimus for sleeping under a hedge instead of a fourposter with an eider-down quilt; and thank God for it, or the gorge of pride would rise and burst us asunder. The Earl of Carnation troubled not his noble A MAN WEARING HIS HEART UPON HIS SLEEVE. / mind with such reflections. Don't you who read them think them stale and trite,—if, indeed, you have not skipped them altogether? But the mania for patronising and placarding the Eighth Commandment, and showering tracts, and " going over institutions," is one of the great curses of this age, next to the eternal n " talkee, talkee about people's " missions " and " Social Science," and similar lunacies of dis- tempered vanity ; and many philanthropists would do well to remember what Richard Oastler said to Sir Robert Peel in the picture-gallery at Tamworth: " Good God, Sir Robert," — looking at an exquisite child -picture by Landseer, —"your daughter might have been a factory- girl." Yes ; and the factory-girl might have been cited as a shining example of all the virtues, regal as well as domestic, had she been born to be Empress of Mofussilistan, with twenty millions a year for a Civil List. The tour of inspection came to an end at last. It was close upon noon, and the horizon of the Earl of Carnation began to be gilt with the prospect of luncheon. There was but one place more to visit — the reading-room. To the library 8 THE SEVEN SONS OF MAMMON. the harmless curate had been a munificent donor, and had made the shelves creak beneath High- Church chronicles, tales, tracts, and poetry. Just as the steward was opening the door, there glided by, coming from the regions above, the poet Tottlepot.