Mortomley's Estate.

Vol. I.

by Charlotte Elizabeth Lawson Cowan Riddell.

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCES MR. ASHERILL TO THE READER.

During the course of the last ten or at most fifteen years, a new class of building has, mushroom like, sprung up in the Metropolis, which cannot perhaps better be described in a sentence than as

"The City of London Offices" (Limited).

True, none of the "Houses," "Chambers," "Halls," "Buildings" that swell the ranks of this new army of offices, are so far as I know called by the above name, but they are all situated within the precincts of the City; they have been promoted by City men, they all belong to Limited Companies or to the liquidators of those Companies, and they all resemble each other more or less--more indeed rather than less.

They are to be met with in various lanes, alleys, streets, and courts.

So far as a casual observer can see, they are principally remarkable for an utter absence of comfort. They possess longer corridors, smaller rooms, steeper and more unpromising stone staircases than any other class of building, Newgate not excepted, east of Temple Bar.

So far as the mind can grasp, they are tenanted by a more wonderful race of men than Captain Cook discovered in the South Sea Islands, or Darwin conceived could ever have been eliminated from monkeys.

The windows are noticeable for having no front light, the edifices themselves are curious for the simple reason that they have been apparently built without the usual preliminaries of either architect or plan, while the men who during business hours inhabit the offices afford subject for the wildest speculation.

They have as a rule come from no one knows where; they live no one, save their victims, knows how; their business, though stated with sufficient distinctness on the walls of the halls and corridors, and the glass and panels of the doors, is a sealed mystery to every one but themselves and the poor wretches who in those dreary offices are stripped of every valuable they possess, every rag of social consideration, every vestige of self-respect, and turned out naked as they came into the world to meet the world's opprobrium and that which is tenfold harder to bear--the world's pity, and to try to make their way once again through a world it is unhappily necessary for them to pass through. And yet the men who are able to set up in business in the trade or profession (which?) that I have indicated, like the wicked, flourish as green bay trees; they gather riches, they purchase houses and inhabit them, they build barns and fill them, they lay by much treasure, they hug themselves on their balances, their position, the deference shown fearfully and servilely by those who are poorer than themselves, the familiarity of those who are richer,--never recking of that possible hour when poverty shall come upon them like an armed man, and when a hand more terrible than that of death itself shall be laid upon their shoulders and a voice whisper in their ear, "Thou fool, this night thy substance is required of thee."

As for their souls, they never think of them either. Money is palpable, spirit impalpable.

If in their blindness they ignore the probability of money making unto itself wings--even money coined as theirs has been out of the blood drawn from men's hearts, the anguished tears of women, the broken hopes of youth, and the disgrace heaped upon old age--it is not in the slightest degree likely they trouble themselves concerning the possible vagaries of their spirits.

Death, if the idea of dying present itself, is looked at either as an end of happiness or a cessation from anxiety.

It is bankruptcy in both cases. It ends a successful career; it smooths all difficulties in the path of those whose experiments have proved abortive, whose attempts have resulted in failure; and, as the earth-worm is no respecter of persons, it cuts short the career of worldly consideration, it renders men's good opinion valueless, it places the best-esteemed City magnate in a position where even a plum of money will not enable him to pass muster in a more creditable manner than the Bethnal Green pauper who has nothing to leave his family except his bones.

Death is bankruptcy. Can I say more in its disfavour when writing of a class who hold personal bankruptcy--their own, I mean--a calamity too great to contemplate; who estimate a man's standing, for here and hereafter, by the amount he has managed to rake and scrape together; and who live by swooping down upon his possessions, and selling the house which shelters him, the bed he lies on, the toys his children have played with, the dog he has fondled, the horses he has ridden, the harp his dead mother's fingers have touched?

Much more might be said of the race, but as one man of the genus waits, claiming particular attention, you and I reader will, leaving generalities, walk up to the first floor of Salisbury Buildings, Leadenhall Street, City, and enter the private office of Mr. Asherill, senior partner in the firm of Asherill and Swanland, Public Accountants.

Well known was Mr. Asherill in the City; his large frame, his high well-developed forehead, his massive head, his broad shoulders, his perfectly white hair, were as familiar to the _habitues_ of Basinghall Street, and the thorough-fares conducting to that heaven for rogues and hell for honest people, as the faces of the ticket-porters in Lombard Street, or the livery of those stately gentlemen who lounge about the entrance to the Bank of England.

And indeed it must have been accounted a shame had it proved otherwise, for Mr. Asherill was living, moving, and having his being in the City for five-and-twenty years at all events, before the new Bankruptcy Act developed that particular class of industry in which Mr. Asherill is at this present moment employing the great and varied talents with which, to quote his own modest phrase,--"The Lord has seen fit to bless him."

How he employed the thirty-five years preceding the above-mentioned twenty-five of his sojourn in this wicked world, it would be tedious to specify.

His enemies--for even such is the depravity of human nature, Mr.

Asherill had enemies--said a considerable portion of the period must have been spent in obtaining a practical knowledge of the roguery, vice, falsehood, and trickery, which he denounced so unctuously; and it is quite certain that in whatever school he may have graduated, his information on the subject of all the sins to which flesh is prone, his thorough acquaintance with all the forms of lying and cheating, to which what he habitually styled "poor human nature" is addicted, were as complete as marvellous.

There must have been a black night at some period or other in his life; but no man in the City, at all events, could fix a date and locality when and where that event happened which caused Mr. Asherill to conceive a dread of, and dislike for, gentlemen and ladies, which was the one weak spot in an otherwise almost perfect Christian character.

Mr. Asherill's account of his own early life was that he worked in a cotton mill at Manchester; that through the kindness of a poor scholar who lodged in the house of his, Asherill's, sole surviving relative, his grandmother, he learned to read, write and cipher; that, being steady and hardworking, he attracted the attention and secured the interest of a Christian blessed with worldly means and influence, who took him first into his own warehouse, and subsequently procured for him an appointment in India, where he remained for a long time, and might have remained till the end of his life, had not the delicate health of his wife compelled him, ten years after his marriage, to choose the alternative of parting from her or leaving India.

"Guided by Providence," said Mr. Asherill, "I decided on returning to England."

Which was all likely enough and plausible enough, only it happened to be untrue in one particular at least.

An unregenerate wag who met Mr. Asherill at the Crystal Palace in the days when the mysteries of cotton spinning were expounded in the machinery department for the benefit of the masses, who were then supposed to be hungering and thirsting after solid information, persuaded that gentleman to inspect the process, and under pretence of ignorance beguiled the former factory lad into making various statements which proved conclusively he never could have been in a mill, save as a mere visitor, in his life.

One swallow, however, does not make a summer; and even though a man be convicted of having uttered one untruth, it does not follow that all his other statements are necessarily false.

That Mr. Asherill had been in India there could be no question. He had been there long enough to place a very effectual gulf between his present and his past, and to render all attempts to fathom whatever mystery may have attached to his early life utterly futile.

It might be the case, as some people declared, that he had not risen from the ranks--that his real name was not Asherill--that he and his father, a respectable tradesman, having had some difference concerning the contents of the till, he was shipped out of the country and requested to stay out of it--all this might be so, but who was to prove it? and supposing it all capable of proof, who would be interested in the matter?

All the king's horses and all the king's men could not undo the fact, that for twenty-five years Mr. Asherill had held up his head in the City--that he was a man of weight whom aldermen and common-councilmen delighted to honour--who had been connected with every form of speculation which the fashion of the day and the opportunities of each commercial year brought into repute. He had made money by railways and lost it, and come up again fresh and smiling as the director of various banks and insurance companies, the very names of which are now almost forgotten, so rapidly is the memory of one swindle wiped out by the collapse of another more recent. He had something to do, directly or indirectly, with nearly every "big thing" which was floated in the City.

To a nicety he knew the price of a lord, and was once clever enough to bait a hook which enabled him to land a bishop. He was acquainted with baronets and knights, whose names looked remarkably well on the list of directors, whilst he had an army of generals, colonels, and majors ready at any moment to take the financial field.

A ready man and an able--a man, a Yankee speculator, a canny Scot, a German adventurer, or a religious philanthropist might have sat up all night to catch napping, and eventually found the intended victim wider awake than themselves.

If there were one thing more than another, always excepting sanctimoniousness, which distinguished Mr. Asherill from other people, it was his intense respectability. From the crown of his head to the sole of his foot he looked the incarnation of that god which is the Englishman's Fetish.

The folds of his immaculate white cravat were in themselves letters of recommendation. Whenever any especially profitable and delicate piece of business had to be manipulated in the Bankruptcy Court, Mr. Asherill always made it a point to be present in person; and, with the exception of one Commissioner, no Judge had ever yet been known to urge an objection to any course Mr. Asherill suggested, and throw cold water on any scheme that emanated from the brain which found no mean habitation in the massive head covered with thick but perfectly snowy hair.

And whatever Mr. Asherill engaged in, he carried on and through respectably. Had his lot been cast in a different sphere, he would have made a splendid butler, a model parish clerk, or a magnificent hall porter.

As it was he associated himself with company after company, and then almost wept for those who lost their little savings, their policies of insurance, their deposits, and their incomes.

Whoever else might be to blame in the affair, he never was. He was always deceived; if there were one especial enterprise in which Mr.

Asherill had invested his largest stock of faith, it always proved to be that which came to the most utter grief, which collapsed with the mightiest shock.

Not only this, but the amount of money Mr. Asherill, according to his own showing, lost on each of these occasions was positively appalling.

He would shake his head and beg that the subject might not be mentioned to him, it was all so terrible; and then he would contrive to drop a hint as to how far he was "in," and the majority of people believed him, and the minority who did not believe was too small to count.

After that especial Friday, in eighteen hundred and sixty-six, when, had any former citizen liked to get out of his coffin in the vaults of St.

Edmund the King and Martyr, adjacent to the notorious Corner House, he might have fancied a second South Sea Bubble had just burst, after that Black Afternoon which brought ruin to thousands, Mr. Asherill quietly packed up a few clothes and left town.

Perhaps he had been waiting for some such opportunity; perhaps some stray brick of that mighty pile touched him. Be this as it may, he went quietly down to Lewes, got himself decorously arrested and lodged in gaol, and then without the slightest fuss or useless publicity passed his examination, received his certificate, joined his wife at Brighton, and spent the summer at the sea-side. It was then he became a Christian and began to wear white neckcloths.

As he said it himself, there can be no harm in my remarking that up to the period of Overend and Gurney's collapse, he had not been a Christian. He was not one when he visited Lewes--he was not one when he reached Brighton, where, after more than a quarter of a century's bad health, his wife was at length dying with a commendable if late rapidity.

Whilst engaged in this occupation, she made the acquaintance of a widow lady, who was serious and possessed of an ample competency, and who being, moreover, amiably and charitably disposed, took the invalid drives, and furnished her with many luxuries and comforts to which she had always latterly been accustomed, but which, in the then state of the Asherill finances, she might otherwise have sighed for in vain.

When Mr. Asherill once more returned to business--the City, his old haunts, and companions--he was a changed man. If he had been respectable before, he was ten times more respectable now.

He was a widower, and he mourned for his deceased wife in a hat-band a foot deep, in black clothes of the best quality and of regular City make; in jet studs, a ring containing her hair, and a white cravat which would have made the fortune of an undertaker.

Nor was this all. Short as had been his absence, it proved long enough to enable him to acquire the language and manners of the people amongst whom he meant for the future to cast his lot; and he went about the City lanes and streets, informing all with whom he stopped to speak, of the irreparable loss he had sustained, of the great change which had been wrought in himself. If he heard naughty words uttered in railway carriages, he was wont to say, "Hush," and then read his dear young friends a homily on their thoughtlessness and profanity.

He did not hesitate to tell them he had once been sinful, even as they, and he always finished by expressing a hope they might be converted earlier in life than had been the case with him.