And yet the fact remained that the Mortomleys had once been country squires of some reputation, and that, notwithstanding their long connection with trade, and their inter-marriages with the daughters of a lower social scale, some gentle blood flowed in the veins of Archibald Mortomley, who was about to be delivered bound hand and foot to the tormentors.

There is an inevitable decay in some great business houses as there is in some great families.

Properties change hands, titles become extinct; the trade made so hardly, the money garnered so carefully, pass into other hands. It has always been thus; it will be thus till the end, and the reasons are not perhaps far to seek.

If time brings with it ripeness, it brings with it rottenness also; it brings the mature fruit, but it brings likewise the dead leaf and the bare brown branches. If it brings the strength of manhood, it brings sooner or later the weakness of age.

That weakness had fallen on Archibald Mortomley, not because he was old or because he was by constitution delicate, but merely because he had carried the traditions of a bygone and romantic age down into one eminently utilitarian,--because with every condition of existence changed, he had tried to do as his fathers had done before him,--because with rogues multiplying on every side as, like caterpillars, they are certain to do where the land is well planted and fertile, he refused to believe in the possibility of being brought personally into contact with them.

Like his progenitors, without a doubt of failure, he, full of generous impulses and philanthropic feeling, started on his business journey, and behold, he fell among thieves.

The stage at which he had therefore arrived when we make his acquaintance was something a hundred times worse than bankruptcy--a thousand times worse than friendly liquidation by arrangement. Coolly those about him, with his most innocent concurrence, handed the cards which dropped from his feeble fingers to his worst enemies, who, under the guise of friendship, undertook to play out the game for him, and played it as we shall see.

About a century ago there came up to London the younger son of a Leicestershire squire, who, having quarrelled with his father, thought he would see whether the great metropolis might not prove a more genial parent.

He came up with some money, good looks, the manners of a gentleman, and that certain quantity of brains which Heaven, since the time of Jacob, usually inclines, no doubt for good and equitable reasons, to bestow on the junior members of a family.

In London he was fortunate enough to make the acquaintance of a certain Philip Gyson, whose ancestors had long and honourably been connected with the city, and who was about to start a colour works in the then rural village of Hackney.

Into this works Hildebrand Mortomley--his family had not then lost either the names or the traditions of those who, having fought on the losing side for King and Crown, were loyal spite of royal ingratitude, when the King came to his own again--threw himself, his money, his energy, and his genius.

For he had genius. First of all he set himself to master his trade. When he had mastered it, he at once began to reject its crude old-fashioned formulae, and invent, and simplify, and improve for himself.

A story of a successful man's life might have been written about this first Mortomley, who, forsaking the paths hitherto trodden by his progenitors, struck out one for himself which led to fortune and domestic happiness.

He married a daughter of Philip Gyson, a maiden fair, discreet, young and well-dowered. When evil days came to the old man, his father, he succoured him as Joseph succoured Jacob. When famine, sore and sudden, fell upon the Mortomleys, in Leicestershire, he bade his brothers and his sisters welcome to sit at his board, and share of the plenty which had fallen to his lot in the strange land of Cockaigne. He helped the males of his family to wend their way to foreign lands as the humour seized them; the females married or died. He buried his father in a vault he built for the purpose in Hackney old church-yard,--and when his own time came, he was laid beside him, and his son succeeded him.

This son was not the Archibald mentioned in the preceding chapter as connected with an unpleasant occurrence in Mr. Asherill's experience, but a Mortomley christened Hill--the name to which his father's somewhat lengthy cognomen had been judiciously abbreviated--who worked even harder at the colour trade than his father had done, and who, when he died, left behind him not merely the original little factory enlarged, but a new and extensive works, situate on the north bank of the Thames, between what is now called the Regent's Canal and the then unbuilt West India Docks. Further, during his reign the old city warehouse in Thames Street,--where Philip Gyson carried on his business and lived when in town, and not at his country seat in the delightful village of Hackney, famous in his day for the salubrity of its air, and a favourite resort of city merchants and their families,--was enlarged and altered so as to suit the requirements of his extending business. Much more he might have done, but that in his prime he caught a cold which turned to a fever that ended in his being carried likewise to the family vault at Hackney.

Out of many children only one son remained, Archibald, and with him began, not the downfall of the business edifice, but the commencement of that dead level of successful trading which indicates surely that the table land is reached, and the next incline will have to be trodden down, not up.

A man who found and maintained a most lucrative business, who was content to leave things as he found them, to do all the good he could in life, whose delight it was to make other people happy, who, excepting theoretically, had no faith whatever in original sin, and who, thanks to those who had gone before, never found himself in a serious embarrassment or difficulty from the time he entered man's estate till his turn came to take possession of that other property which Adam with strict impartiality left a share of to all his descendants for ever.

Before Archibald Mortomley's death he had, however, lived a sufficient number of years to leave some difficult problems for the solution of his next heir, if that next heir had, in addition to being a clever, chanced likewise to be a wise man. The two phrases are not inter-changeable.

Archibald the second was not a wise man, and therefore he did not try to solve the problems; he accepted them.

What his father had done seemed right in his eyes; and as his father had permitted himself to be governed by his wife, so he allowed himself to be ruled by his mother.

Early in life the first Archibald Mortomley had a disappointment in love sufficient to wean his thoughts from matrimony till he was surely old enough never to have thought of it at all.

Perhaps he did not think of it till the idea was suggested by a widow lady already the happy mother of one son.

For this son and herself she was anxious to find a suitable home, and as no more eligible victim offered, she secured that home by marrying Mortomley.

From the hour she did so she devoted herself to sounding his praises; and poor Mr. Mortomley, who in his modesty really believed she had thrown herself away upon him, would cheerfully have laid down his life to please her.

Unhappily for him and those who were to come after she did not want him to do anything of the kind. She wanted him to live, she wanted him to push on her first-born; she wished him to see Archibald their son grow to manhood; she nursed, coddled, petted, flattered him to such good purpose that, although his will did not prove to have been made exactly in accordance with her secret desires, still he had lived long enough to indoctrinate his son with his own opinions, so that in effect the document which left the business and properties to Archibald junior and to herself only a life annuity proved a mere form.

To all intents and purposes she and Richard, her eldest son, long married to a most disagreeable woman, had the ball at their feet.

Archibald worshipped his mother with a worship worthy of a better object, and in his eldest brother he believed with that touching faith which would be pathetic were it not irritating, which single-minded, honest men will persist occasionally on lavishing on rogues and vagabonds.

Not that Richard Halling came precisely under either category. He was a man who, while he wilfully deceived himself, was too selfish to understand his deceit might chance to prove the ruin of other people.

He ran into debt meaning to repay; he borrowed money intending to return; he took the roads which pleased him best, and let others settle for the cost of conveyance and maintenance, with the full determination of making all their fortunes when he reached his goal. But, like other men of his temperament, he never reached that goal; he lay down by the way weary, and died, confessing himself a "gigantic failure," which, indeed, he was not, since he had never even striven to rise to any height; blessing his brother for his generous kindness; and lest that kindness should be in danger of rusting for want of exercise, leaving him in trust a son and daughter,--that son and daughter, in fact, of which Mr. Kleinwort had spoken in anything rather than flattering terms to Mr. Asherill.

Some time, however, before Mr. Halling--long a widower--went to rejoin his wife, Mortomley, motherless too late, had met the one woman of his life.

She would not have been every one's fancy, but she was his, and the way in which he chanced to meet with her was in this wise.

He had been working hard and fretting, in his own silent fashion, concerning the death of his mother, and these two causes combined found him, towards the beginning of a summer which was ever after stamped on his memory,--ill, languid, in poor health, and worse spirits.

Hitherto he had been wont to take his holidays at the sea-side, in Scotland, Ireland, or on the Continent; but on this occasion, when the doctors told him he required change and must have it, he elected to seek that change in Leicestershire, and look at the old acres and trees and houses which had formerly made the name of Mortomley a household one in the county.

The Mortomleys who had preceded this man, being nearer to the root of the family tree, felt only a vague gratification in being the son, grandson, and great-grandson of the last squire, but to the Archibald Mortomley of whom I am writing, the glories of his race, fast merging in the mists of distance, had been his thought and pride since earliest boyhood. If they were vanishing it was the more reason he should try to grasp them; if they were in danger of becoming mere memories of the past, there was all the more reason why he should strive to make them once again realities of the present.

From his mother he had inherited a pride of family which would have been at once ludicrous and intolerable, but that such pride, unlike that of wealth, rarely finds voice sufficient to proclaim itself. Herself, the daughter of one parvenu, and the widow of another, it was perhaps natural that after Mrs. Halling married Mortomley the elder, she should, when reckoning up his claims to social and personal consideration, have placed rather an undue value on the monuments, tablets, brasses, lists of doles, and other such like matters, which were still to be seen in Great Dassell Church, where the Mortomleys had once their great family pew, that now, with the lands and woods and manors, was merged in larger properties owned by mightier men than they had ever been.

And the reader may be quite sure that she instructed her son in all these matters. Not merely had he grown up to think his father the cleverest man in the world, his mother the wisest woman, his step-brother a model of what a brother and a son should be, but the Mortomley family as one of the first consideration; and, therefore, it is not, perhaps, a matter for astonishment, that when ill and out of spirits, he should try to recruit his health and improve his mental tone by visiting a place where those of his ancestors, who would have turned up their patrician noses at colour works and colour-makers, had, from cradle to grave, travelled that pleasant road which leads to ruin.

To Great Dassell he accordingly made his way, companionless; for one of the many evils of a youth having been brought up under the eye of a woman is, that when manhood surprises him with its presence, he finds the capacity for making male friends has somehow been lost in the process of his one-sided education.

He rented farmhouse apartments, from the windows of which he could see the turrets and chimneys of the old mansion, now owned by Lord Darsham, and called Dassell Court, that had been formerly known as Mortomley Place, or most commonly, "The Place;" and before a week was over, it was rumoured through all the country round and about Great Dassell, that a great-great-grandson of the last Mortomley, of The Place, was lodging at Braffin's Farm, and hand-and-glove with the vicar, a nephew of the late Lord Darsham.

More than that, Sir Thomas Laman left his card at Braffin's, and supplemented that delicate attention by asking Mr. Mortomley to dinner; and it was well known Sir Thomas was twice as rich as Lord Darsham, for he could afford to reside on his property, whilst his lordship was obliged to shut up the Court and live upon as little as might be in "foreign parts."

In one wing of Dassell Court Miss Trebasson resided with her mother, the Honourable Mrs. Trebasson, sister-in-law to his lordship; and in that part of the shire mother and daughter made genteel poverty not merely respectable, but almost fashionable. They dressed like nuns and lived like anchorites; but being ladies born, of a stately carriage and wont to dispense alms out of a most insufficient income, people of all classes bowed down before and did them homage.

Even Sir Thomas and his wife and daughters they received with a distant courtesy, which taught the worthy baronet and his family they were too rich and too new to be received quite on an exact equality by their poorer neighbours.

To Miss Trebasson, whom he chanced to meet at the Vicarage, Mr.

Mortomley was indebted for that private view of Dassell Court, which showed him at once how little and how much the Mortomleys had formerly been; how little, that is, without the glamour and how much with it.

Mrs. Trebasson, who was slightly paralysed, received him with great kindness, and, so far as her infirmity would permit, waxed eloquent on the subject of family histories in general, and the history of the Mortomley family in particular.

Drinking tea out of very fine china in company with these ladies, listening to Mrs. Trebasson's slow talk and old-world ideas, his eyes wandering over woods and park, and the great silence which necessarily surrounds a secluded country mansion, causing a tension on his nerves of hearing which the rattle of East-cheap had never done,--Mortomley felt for the time a convert to the doctrine that, as compared with birth, riches were but dross; that the lives of these two must be happy and peaceful beyond that of dwellers in towns; that it would be delightful to dream existence away in just such an old mansion as this, which had once belonged to his ancestors, reading, thinking, experimenting, without a thought of profit or dread of failure to break in even for a moment upon the illusions of his life.

Mortomley was an experimenter. When ruin has marked a family for her own, she usually endows the last of the race with some such form of genius, which clings about and lends a certain picturesque grace to his decay, as ivy climbing around an almost lifeless tree clothes it with a freshness and a beauty it lacked in the days of its strength.

And the form of genius of the first Mortomley who engaged in trade had, with every condition of existence altered, reappeared in this later, weaker, and more sensitive descendant.

Even in his father's time he had introduced processes and combinations into their laboratory hitherto unthought of; and since he had been sole master of the business, strange and unwonted colours had appeared in the market which caused astonishment, not unmixed with dread, to fill the hearts of those who had hitherto been content to travel in the footsteps of their predecessors, but who now confessed they must move quicker or they would be left far in the rear.

Of all these things Mrs. Trebasson encouraged Mr. Mortomley to speak as she would have encouraged any former Mortomley to talk of his hunters, his hounds, his library, or anything else in which he took delight; and Mortomley, flattered and pleased, talked of his plans and hopes with the simplicity of a boy, and further, as the intimacy grew closer, told the old lady about his lonely home, his lack of all near relatives, the love he had borne for his mother, and the tender respect, the unquestioning admiration, the devoted affection he had felt for his father--a Mortomley every inch--though a Mortomley of The Place no more.

And Miss Trebasson, in her plain nun-like dress, her beauty unheightened by decking or jewel, sat by and listened; and Mortomley never knew he had spoken to such purpose of himself and his surroundings, that the daughter had given him her heart and the mother was willing to give him her daughter before his holiday came to an end. But it was not to be.

Had that ever been, this story must have remained unwritten. With Leonora Trebasson for his wife, it is quite certain Mortomley never would, whether ill or well, successful or defeated, have been permitted to make the awful _fiasco_ of delivering himself, hair-shorn, strength gone, into the hands of the Philistines. There are wives and wives; and Mortomley, people said, was not fortunate in the choice of his. Spite of her almost judicial wisdom, other people thought Miss Trebasson had not been fortunate in the choice of her dearest friend. Perhaps for a time she thought so herself, when she found that friend had bound Mortomley to her chariot wheels. Perhaps for one night her heart did feel very bitter towards her inseparable companion; but if this were so, she was too essentially just to allow her disappointment to overpower her reason. If her eyes had been unclouded by prejudice, she would have understood long before, that although Dolly Gerace was not apparently possessed of a single quality likely to win a man like Mortomley, yet in reality she was precisely the sort of girl a keen observer would have prophesied certain to attract him.

And yet so little observant had she been that the truth came upon her like the stab of a sharp knife, and so little observant had Mrs.

Trebasson been that she actually encouraged Dolly to visit the Court more frequently than ever during Mr. Mortomley's stay in the neighbourhood to act as a foil--so the would-be worldly old lady thought--to her own stately and beautiful daughter.