Mr. Witt's Widow: A Frivolous Tale

CHAPTER I.

HOW GEORGE NESTON JUMPED

The Nestons, of Tottlebury Grange in the county of Suffolk, were an ancient and honourable family, never very distinguished or very rich, but yet for many generations back always richer and more distinguished than the common run of mankind. The men had been for the most part able and upright, tenacious of their claims, and mindful of their duties; the women had respected their betters, exacted respect from their inferiors, and educated their brothers’ wives in the Neston ways; and the whole race, while confessing individual frailties, would have been puzzled to point out how, as a family, it had failed to live up to the position in which Providence and the Constitution had placed it. The error, if any, had indeed been on the other side in one or two cases. The last owner of the Grange, a gay old bachelor, had scorned the limits of his rents and his banking-account, and added victories on the turf to the family laurels at a heavy cost to the family revenues. His sudden death had been mourned as a personal loss, but silently acknowledged as a dynastic gain, and ten years of the methodical rule of his brother Roger had gone far to efface the ravages of his merry reign. The younger sons of the Nestons served the State or adorned the professions, and Roger had spent a long and useful life in the Office of Commerce. He had been a valuable official, and his merits had not gone unappreciated. Fame he had neither sought nor attained, and his name had come but little before the public, its rare appearances in the newspapers generally occurring on days when our Gracious Sovereign completed another year of her beneficent life, and was pleased to mark the occasion by conferring honour on Mr. Roger Neston. When this happened, all the leader-writers looked him up in “Men of the Time,” or “Whitaker,” or some other standard work of reference, and remarked that few appointments would meet with more universal public approval, a proposition which the public must be taken to have endorsed with tacit unanimity.

Mr. Neston went on his way, undisturbed by his moments of notoriety, but quietly pleased with his red ribbon, and, when he entered into possession of the family estate, continued to go to the office with unabated regularity. At last he reached the pinnacle of his particular ambition, and, as Permanent Head of his Department, for fifteen years took a large share in the government of a people almost unconscious of his existence, until the moment when it saw the announcement that on his retirement he had been raised to the peerage by the title of Baron Tottlebury. Then the chorus of approval broke forth once again, and the new lord had many friendly pats on the back he was turning to public life. Henceforth he sat silent in the House of Lords, and wrote letters to the Times on subjects which the cares of office had not previously left him leisure to study.

But fortune was not yet tired of smiling on the Nestons. Lord Tottlebury, before accepting his new dignity, had impressed upon his son Gerald the necessity of seeking the wherewith to gild the coronet by a judicious marriage. Gerald was by no means loth. He had never made much progress at the Bar, and felt that his want of success contrasted unfavourably with the growing practice of his cousin George, a state of things very unfitting, as George represented a younger branch than Gerald. A rich marriage, combined with his father’s improved position, opened to him prospects of a career of public distinction, and, what was more important, of private leisure, better fitted to his tastes and less trying to his patience; and, by an unusual bit of luck, he was saved from any scruples about marrying for money by the fact that he was already desperately in love with a very rich woman. She was of no high birth, it is true, and she was the widow of a Manchester merchant; but this same merchant, to the disgust of his own relatives, had left her five thousand a year at her absolute disposal. The last fact easily outweighed the two first in Lord Tottlebury’s mind, while Gerald rested his action on the sole ground that Neaera Witt was the prettiest girl in London, and, by Jove, he believed in the world; only, of course, if she had money too, all the better.

Accordingly, the engagement was an accomplished fact. Mrs. Witt had shown no more than a graceful disinclination to become Mrs. Neston. At twenty-five perpetual devotion to the memory of such a mere episode as her first marriage had been was neither to be desired nor expected, and Neaera was very frankly in love with Gerald Neston, a handsome, open-faced, strapping fellow, who won her heart mainly because he was so very unlike the late Mr. Witt. Everybody envied Gerald, and everybody congratulated Neaera on having escaped the various chasms that are supposed to yawn in the path of rich young widows. The engagement was announced once, and contradicted as premature, and then announced again; and, in a word, everything pursued its pleasant and accustomed course in these matters. Finally, Lord Tottlebury in due form entertained Mrs. Witt at dinner, by way of initiation into the Neston mysteries.

It was for this dinner that Mr. George Neston, barrister-at-law, was putting on his white tie one May evening in his chambers off Piccadilly. George was the son of Lord Tottlebury’s younger brother. His father had died on service in India, leaving a wife, who survived him but a few years, and one small boy, who had developed into a rising lawyer of two or three-and-thirty, and was at this moment employed in thinking what a lucky dog Gerald was, if all people said about Mrs. Witt were true. Not that George envied his cousin his bride. His roving days were over. He had found what he wanted for himself, and Mrs. Witt’s beauty, if she were beautiful, was nothing to him. So he thought with mingled joy and resignation. Still, however much you may be in love with somebody else, a pretty girl with five thousand a year is luck, and there’s an end of it! So concluded George Neston as he got into his hansom, and drove to Portman Square.

The party was but small, for the Nestons were not one of those families that ramify into bewildering growths of cousins. Lord Tottlebury of course was there, a tall, spare, rather stern-looking man, and his daughter Maud, a bright and pretty girl of twenty, and Gerald, in a flutter ill concealed by the very extravagance of nonchalance. Then there were a couple of aunts and a male cousin and his wife, and George himself. Three of the guests were friends, not relatives. Mrs. Bourne had been the chosen intimate of Lord Tottlebury’s dead wife, and he honoured his wife’s memory by constant attention to her friend. Mrs. Bourne brought her daughter Isabel, and Isabel had come full of curiosity to see Mrs. Witt, and also hoping to see George Neston, for did she not know what pleasure it would give him to meet her? Lastly, there towered on the rug the huge form of Mr. Blodwell, Q.C., an old friend of Lord Tottlebury’s and George’s first tutor and kindly guide in the law, famous for rasping speeches in court and good stories out of it, famous, too, as one of the tallest men and quite the fattest man at the Bar. Only Neaera Witt was wanting, and before Mr. Blodwell had got well into the famous story about Baron Samuel and the dun cow Neaera Witt was announced.

Mrs. Witt’s widowhood was only two years old, and she was at this time almost unknown to society. None of the party, except Gerald and his father, had seen her, and they all looked with interest to the door when the butler announced her name. She had put off her mourning altogether for the first time, and came in clothed in a gown of deep red, with a long train that gave her dignity, her golden hair massed low on her neck, and her pale, clear complexion just tinged with the suspicion of a blush as she instinctively glanced round for her lover. The entry was, no doubt, a small triumph. The girls were lost in generous admiration; the men were startled; and Mr. Blodwell, finishing the evening at the House of Commons, remarked to young Sidmouth Vane, the Lord President’s private secretary (unpaid), “I hope, my boy, you may live as long as I have, and see as many pretty women; but you’ll never see a prettier than Mrs. Witt. Her face! her hair! and Vane, my boy, her waist!” But here the division-bell rang, and Mr. Blodwell hastened off to vote against a proposal aimed at deteriorating, under the specious pretence of cheapening, the administration of justice.

Lord Tottlebury, advancing to meet Neaera, took her by the hand and proudly presented her to his guests. She greeted each gracefully and graciously until she came to George Neston. As she saw his solid jaw and clean-shaved keen face, a sudden light that looked like recollection leaped to her eyes, and her cheek flushed a little. The change was so distinct that George was confirmed in the fancy he had had from the first moment she came in, that somewhere before he had seen that golden hair and those dark eyes, that combination of harmonious opposites that made her beauty no less special in kind than in degree. He advanced a step, his hand held half out, exclaiming —

“Surely – ”

But there he stopped dead, and his hand fell to his side, for all signs of recognition had faded from Mrs. Witt’s face, and she gave him only the same modestly gracious bow that she had bestowed on the rest of the party. The incident was over, leaving George sorely puzzled, and Lord Tottlebury a little startled. Gerald had seen nothing, having been employed in issuing orders for the march in to dinner.

The dinner was a success. Lord Tottlebury unbent; he was very cordial and, at moments, almost jovial. Gerald was in heaven, or at least sitting directly opposite and in full view of it. Mr. Blodwell enjoyed himself immensely: his classic stories had never yet won so pleasant a reward as Neaera’s low rich laugh and dancing eyes. George ought to have enjoyed himself, for he was next to Isabel Bourne, and Isabel, heartily recognising that she was not to-night, as, to do her justice, she often was, the prettiest girl in the room, took the more pains to be kind and amusing. But George was ransacking the lumber-rooms of memory, or, to put it less figuratively, wondering, and growing exasperated as he wondered in vain, where the deuce he’d seen the girl before. Once or twice his eyes met hers, and it seemed to him that he had caught her casting an inquiring apprehensive glance at him. When she saw that he was looking, her expression changed into one of friendly interest, appropriate to the examination of a prospective kinsman.

“What do you think of her?” asked Isabel Bourne, in a low voice. “Beautiful, isn’t she?”

“She is indeed,” George answered, “I can’t help thinking I’ve seen her somewhere before.”

“She is a person one would remember, isn’t she? Was it in Manchester?”

“I don’t think so. I haven’t been in Manchester more than two or three times in my life.”

“Well, Maud says Mrs. Witt wasn’t brought up there.”

“Where was she brought up?”

“I don’t know,” said Isabel, “and I don’t think Maud knew either. I asked Gerald, and he said she probably dropped down from heaven somewhere a few years ago.”

“Perhaps that’s how I come to remember her,” suggested George.

Failing this explanation, he confessed himself puzzled, and determined to dismiss the matter from his thoughts for the present. Aided by Isabel Bourne, he was very successful in this effort: a pretty girl’s company is the best modern substitute for the waters of Lethe.

Nevertheless, his interest remained strong enough to make him join the group which Gerald and Mr. Blodwell formed with Neaera as soon as the men went upstairs. Mr. Blodwell made no secret of the fact that it was with him a case of love at first sight, and openly regretted that his years prevented him fighting Gerald for his prize. Gerald listened with the complacent happiness of a secure lover, and Neaera gravely apologised for not having waited to make her choice till she had seen Mr. Blodwell.

“But at least you had heard of me?” he urged.

“I am terribly ignorant,” she said. “I don’t believe I ever did.”

“Neaera’s not one of the criminal classes, you see, sir,” Gerald put in.

“He taunts me,” exclaimed Mr. Blodwell, “with the Old Bailey!”

George had come up in time to hear the last two remarks. Neaera saw him, and smiled pleasantly.

“Here’s a young lady who knows nothing about the law, George,” continued Blodwell. “She never heard of me – nor of you either, I dare say. It reminds me of what they used to say about old Dawkins. Old Daw never had a brief, but he was Recorder of some little borough or other – place with a prisoner once in two years, you know – I forget the name. Let’s see – yes, Peckton.”

“Peckton!” exclaimed George Neston, loudly and abruptly.

Neaera made a sudden motion with one hand – a sudden motion suddenly checked – and her fan dropped with a clatter on the polished boards.

Gerald dived for it, so did Mr. Blodwell, and their heads came in contact with such violence as to drive all reminiscences of Recorder Dawkins out of Mr. Blodwell’s brain. They were still indulging in recriminations, when Neaera swiftly left them, crossed to Lord Tottlebury, and took her leave.

George went to open the door for her. She looked at him curiously.

“Will you come and see me, Mr. Neston?” she asked.

He bowed gravely, answering nothing.

The party broke up, and as George was seeing Mr. Blodwell’s bulk fitted into a four-wheeler, the old gentleman asked,

“Why did you do that, George?”

“What?”

“Jump, when I said Peckton.”

“Oh, I used to go sessions there, you know.”

“Do you always jump when people mention the places you used to go sessions at?”

“Generally,” replied George.

“I see,” said Mr. Blodwell, lighting his cigar. “A bad habit, George; it excites remark. Tell him the House.”

“Good night, sir,” said George. “I hope your head is better.”

Mr. Blodwell snorted indignantly as he pulled up the window, and was driven away to his duties.

CHAPTER II.

WHY GEORGE NESTON JUMPED

“How could I ever have forgotten?” said George, aloud, as he walked home. “I remember her now as if it was yesterday.”

Memory, like much else that appertains to man, is a queer thing, and the name of Peckton had supplied the one link missing in his recollection. How, indeed, had he ever forgotten it? Can a man forget his first brief any more than his first love? – so like are they in their infinite promise, so like in their very finite results!

The picture was now complete in his mind: the little, muggy court at Peckton; old Dawkins, his wig black with age, the rest of him brown with snuff; the fussy clerk; the prosecuting counsel, son to the same fussy clerk; he himself, thrusting his first guinea into his pocket with shaking hand and beating heart (nervous before old Daw! Imagine!); the fat, peaceful policeman; the female warder, in her black straw-bonnet trimmed with dark-blue ribbons; and last of all, in the dock, a young girl, in shabby, nay, greasy, black, with pale cheeks, disordered hair, and swollen eyelids, gazing in blank terror on the majesty of the law, strangely expressed in the Recorder’s ancient person. And, beyond all doubt or imagination of a doubt, the girl was Gerald’s bride, Neaera Witt.

“I could swear to her to-day!” cried George.

She had scraped together a guinea for his fee. “I don’t know where she got it from,” the fat policeman said with professional cynicism as he gave it to George. “She pleads guilty and wants you to address the court.” So George had, with infinite trepidation, addressed the court.

The girl had a father – drunk when not starving, and starving when not drunk. Now he was starving, and she had stolen the shoes (oh! the sordidness of it all!) to pawn, and buy food – or drink. It was a case for a caution merely – and – and – and George himself, being young to the work, stammered and stuttered as much from emotion as from fright. You see the girl was pretty!

All old Daw said was, “Do you know anything about her, policeman?” and the fat policeman said her father was a bad lot, and the girl did no work, and —

“That’s enough,” said old Daw; and, leaning forward, he pronounced his sentence:

“I’ll deal lightly with you. Only” – shaking a snuffy forefinger – “take care you don’t come here again! One calendar month, with hard labour.”

And the girl, gazing back at honest old Daw, who would not have hurt a fly except from the Bench, softly murmured, “Cruel, cruel, cruel!” and was led away by the woman in the black straw bonnet.

Whereupon George did a very unprofessional thing. He gave his guinea, his firstborn son, back to the fat policeman, saying, “Give it her when she comes out. I can’t take her money.” At which the policeman smiled a smile that convicted George of terrible youthfulness.

It was all complete – all except the name by which the fussy clerk had called on the girl to plead, and which old Dawkins had mumbled out in sentencing her. That utterly escaped him. He was sure it was not “Neaera” – of course not “Neaera Witt;” but not “Neaera Anything,” either. He would have remembered “Neaera.”

“What on earth was it?” he asked himself as he unlocked his door and went upstairs. “Not that it matters much. Names are easily changed.”

George Neston shared his chambers in Half Moon Street with the Honourable Thomas Buchanan Fillingham Myles, commonly known (as the peerage has it) as Tommy Myles. Tommy also had a small room in the Temple Chambers, where the two Nestons and Mr. Blodwell pursued their livelihood; but Tommy’s appearances at the latter resort were few and brief. He did not trouble George much in Half Moon Street either, being a young man much given to society of all sorts, and very prone to be in bed when most people are up, and vice versâ. However, to-night he happened to be at home, and George found him with his feet on the mantelpiece, reading the evening paper.

“Well, what’s she like?” asked Tommy.

“She’s uncommonly pretty, and very pleasant,” said George. Why say more, before his mind was made up?

“Who was she?” pursued Tommy, rising and filling his pipe.

“Ah! I don’t know. I wish I did.”

“Don’t see that it matters to you. Anybody else there?”

“Oh, a few people.”

“Miss Bourne?”

“Yes, she was there.”

Tommy winked, sighed prodigiously, and took a large drink of brandy and soda.

“Where have you been?” asked George, changing the subject.

“Oh, to the Escurial – to a vulgar, really a very vulgar entertainment – as vulgar as you could find in London.”

“Are you going out again?”

“My dear George! It’s close on twelve!” said Tommy, in reproving tones.

“Or to bed?”

“No. George, you hurt my feelings. Can it be that you wish to be alone?”

“Well, at any rate, hold your tongue, Tommy. I want to think.”

“Only one word. Has she been cruel?”

“Oh, get out. Here, give me a drink.”

Tommy subsided into the Bull’s-eye, that famous print whose motto is Lux in tenebris (meaning, of course, publicity in shady places), and George set himself to consider what he had best do in the matter of Neaera Witt.

The difficulties of the situation were obvious enough, but to George’s mind they consisted not so much in the question of what to do as in that of how to do it. He had been tolerably clear from the first that Gerald must not marry Neaera without knowing what he could tell him; if he liked to do it afterwards, well and good. But of course he would not. No Neston would, thought George, who had his full share of the family pride. Men of good family made disgraceful marriages, it is true, but not with thieves; and anyhow nothing of the kind was recorded in the Neston annals. How should he look his uncle and Gerald in the face if he held his tongue? His course was very clear. Only – well, it was an uncommonly disagreeable part to be cast for – the denouncer and exposer of a woman who very probably was no worse than many another, and was unquestionably a great deal better-looking than most others. The whole position smacked unpleasantly of melodrama, and George must figure in the character of the villain, a villain with the best motives and the plainest duty. One hope only there was. Perhaps Mrs. Witt would see the wisdom of a timely withdrawal. Surely she would. She could never face the storm. Then Gerald need know nothing about it, and six months’ travel – say to America, where pretty girls live – would bind up his broken heart. Only – again only – George did not much fancy the interview that lay before him. Mrs. Witt would probably cry, and he would feel a brute, and —

“Mr. Neston,” announced Tommy’s valet, opening the door.

Gerald had followed his cousin home, very anxious to be congratulated, and still more anxious not to appear anxious. Tommy received him with effusion. Why hadn’t he been asked to the dinner? Might he call on Mrs. Witt? He heard she was a clipper; and so forth. George’s felicitations stuck in his throat, but he got them out, hoping that Neaera would free him from the necessity of eating them up at some early date. Gerald was radiant. He seemed to have forgotten all about “Peckton,” though he was loud in denouncing the unnatural hardness of Mr. Blodwell’s head. Oh, and the last thing Neaera said was, would George go and see her?

“She took quite a fancy to you, old man,” he said affectionately. “She said you reminded her of a judge.”

George smiled. Was Neaera practising double entente on her betrothed?

“What an infernally unpleasant thing to say!” exclaimed Tommy.

“Of course I shall go and see her,” said George, – “to-morrow, if I can find time.”

“So shall I,” added Tommy.

Gerald was pleased. He liked to see his taste endorsed with the approbation of his friends. “It’s about time old George, here, followed suit, isn’t it, Tommy? I’ve given him a lead.”

George’s attachment to Isabel Bourne was an accepted fact among his acquaintance. He never denied it: he did like her very much, and meant to marry her, if she would have him. And he did not really doubt that she would. If he had doubted, he would not have been so content to rest without an express assurance. As it was, there was no hurry. Let the practice grow a little more yet. He and Isabel understood one another, and, as soon as she was ready, he was ready. But long engagements were a nuisance to everybody. These were his feelings, and he considered himself, by virtue of them, to be in love with Isabel. There are many ways of being in love, and it would be a want of toleration to deny that George’s is one of them, although it is certainly very unlike some of the others.

Tommy agreed that George was wasting his time, and with real kindness led Gerald back to the subject which filled his mind.

Gerald gladly embraced the opportunity. “Where did I meet her? Oh, down at Brighton, last winter. Then, you know, I pursued her to Manchester, and found her living in no end of a swell villa in the outskirts of that abominable place. Neaera hated it, but of course she had to live there while Witt was alive, and she had kept the house on.”

“She wasn’t Manchester-born, then?”

“No. I don’t know where she was born. Her father seems to have been a romantic sort of old gentleman. He was a painter by trade – an artist, I mean, you know, – landscapes and so on.”

“And went about looking for bits of nature to murder, eh?” asked Tommy.

“That’s about it. I don’t think he was any great shakes at it. At least, he didn’t make much; and at last he settled in Manchester, and tried to pick up a living, working for the dealers. Witt was a picture-fancier, and, when Neaera came to sell, he saw her, and – ”

“The late Witt’s romance began?”

“Yes, confound him! I’m beastly jealous of old Witt, though he is dead.”

“That’s ungrateful,” remarked George, “considering – ”

“Hush! You’ll wound his feelings,” said Tommy. “He’s forgotten all about the cash.”

“It’s all very well for you – ” Gerald began.

But George cut in, “What was his name?”

“Witt’s? Oh, Jeremiah, I believe.”

“Witt? No. Hang Witt! The father’s name.”

“Oh! – Gale. A queer old boy he seems to have been – a bit of a scholar as well as an artist.”