CHAPTER XII. ANNESLEY BEECHER'S “PAL”
Lord Lackington was not much of a letter-writer; correspondence was not amongst the habits of his day. The society in which he moved, and of which, to some extent, he was a type, cared more for conversational than epistolary graces. They kept their good things for their dinner-parties, and hoarded their smart remarks on life for occasions where the success was a personal triumph. Twice or thrice, however, every year, he was obliged to write. His man of business required to be reminded of this or that necessity for money, and his brother Annesley should also be admonished, or reproved, or remonstrated with, in that tone of superiority and influence so well befitting one who pays an annuity to him who is the recipient. In fact, around this one circumstance were grouped all the fraternal feelings and brotherly interest of these two men. One hundred and twenty-five pounds sterling every half-year represented the ties of blood that united them; and while it offered to the donor the proud reflection of a generous self-sacrifice, it gave to him who received the almost as agreeable occasion for sarcastic allusion to the other's miserly habits and sordid nature, with a contrast of what he himself had done were their places in life reversed.
It was strange enough that the one same incident should have begotten such very opposite emotions; and yet the two phrases, “If you knew all I have done for him,” and the rejoinder, “You 'd not believe the beggarly pittance he allows me,” were correct exponents of their several feelings.
Not impossible is it that each might have made out a good case against the other. Indeed, it was a theme whereon, in their several spheres, they were eloquent; and few admitted to the confidence of either had not heard of the utter impossibility of doing anything for Annesley,—his reckless folly, his profligacy, and his waste; and, on the other hand, “the incredible meanness of Lackington, with at least twelve thousand a year, and no children to provide for, giving me the salary of an upper butler.” Each said far too much in his own praise not to have felt, at least, strong misgivings in his conscience. Each knew far too well that the other had good reason in many things he said; but so long had their plausibilities been repeated, that each ended by satisfying himself he was a paragon of fraternal affection, and, stranger still, had obtained for this opinion a distinct credence in their several sets in society; so that every peer praised the Viscount, and every hard-up younger son pitied poor Annesley, and condemned the “infamous conduct of the old coxcomb his brother.”
“That scampish fellow's conduct is killing poor Lackington,” would say a noble lord.
“Annesley can't stand old Lackington's treatment much longer,” was the commentary of half-pay captains of dragoons.
Had you but listened to Lord Lackington, he would have told you of at least fifty distinct schemes he had contrived for his brother's worldly success, all marred and spoiled by that confounded recklessness, “that utter disregard, sir, of the commonest rules of conduct that every man in life is bound to observe.” He might have been, by this time, colonel of the Fifty-something; he might have been governor of some fortunate island in the Pacific; consul-general at Sunstroke Town, in Africa, where, after three years, you retire with a full pension. If he 'd have gone into the Church,—and there was no reason why he should n't,—there was the living of St. Cuthbert-in-the-Vale, eight hundred a year, ready for him. Every Administration for years back had been entreated in his favor; and from Ordnance clerkships to Commissions in Lunacy he had been offered places in abundance. Sinecures in India and jobs in Ireland had been found out in his behalf, and deputy-somethings created in Bermuda just to provide for him.
The concessions he had made, the proxies he had given, “just for Annesley's sake,” formed a serious charge against the noble Lord's political consistency; and he quoted them as the most stunning evidences of fraternal love, and pointed out where he had gone against his conscience and his party as to a kind of martyrdom that made a man illustrious forever.
As for Annesley, his indictment had, to the full, as many counts. What he might have been,—not in a mere worldly sense, not as regards place, pension, or emolument, but what in integrity, what in fair fame, what in honorable conduct and unblemished character, if Lackington had only dealt fairly with him,—“there was really no saying.” The noble motives which might have prompted, the high aspirations that might have moved him, all the generous impulses of a splendid nature were there, thwarted, baffled, and destroyed by Lackington's confounded stupidity. What the Viscount ought to have done, what precise species of culture he should have devoted to these budding virtues, how he ought to have trained and trellised these tender shoots of aspiring goodness, he never exactly detailed. It was only clear that, whatever the road, he had never taken it; and it was really heart-breaking to hear what the world had lost in public and private virtues, all for Lackington's indolence and folly.