CHAPTER XXI. LADY DOROTHEA
The Cour de Bade, at which excellent hotel the Martins were installed, received on the day we have just chronicled a new arrival. He had come by the diligence, one of that undistinguishable ten thousand England sends off every week from her shores to represent her virtues or her vices, her oddities, vulgarities, and pretensions, to the critical eyes of continental Europe.
Perfectly innocent of any foreign language, and with a delightful ambiguity as to the precise geography of where he stood, he succeeded, after some few failures, in finding out where the Martins stopped, and had now sent up his name to Lady Dorothea, that name being “Mr. Maurice Scanlan.”
Lady Dorothea Martin had given positive orders that except in the particular case of this individual she was not to be interrupted by any visitor. She glanced her eye at the card, and then handed it across the table to her son, who coolly read it, and threw it from him with the air of one saying to himself, “Here's more of it! more complication, more investigation, deeper research into my miserable difficulties, and consequently more unhappiness.” The table at which they were seated was thickly covered with parchments, papers, documents, and letters of every shape and size. There were deeds, and bonds, and leases, rent-rolls, and valuations, and powers of attorney, and all the other imposing accessories of estated property. There were also voluminous bills of costs, formidable long columns of figures, “carried over” and “carried over” till the very eye of the reader wearied of the dread numerals and turned recklessly to meet the awful total at the bottom! Terrified by the menacing applications addressed to Mr. Martin on his son's account, and which arrived by every post, Lady Dorothea had resolved upon herself entering upon the whole state of the Captain's liabilities, as well as the complicated questions of the property generally.
Distrust of her own powers was not in the number of her Ladyship's defects. Sufficiently affluent to be always able to surround herself with competent subordinates, she fancied—a not very uncommon error, by the way—that she individually accomplished all that she had obtained through another. Her taste in the fine arts, her skill in music, her excellence as a letter-writer, were all accomplishments in this wise; and it is not improbable that, had she been satisfied to accept her success in finance through a similar channel, the result might have proved just as fortunate. A shrinking dislike, however, to expose the moneyed circumstances of the family, and a feeling of dread as to the possible disclosures which should come out, prevented her from accepting such co-operation. She had, therefore, addressed herself to the task with no other aid than that of her son,—a partnership, it must be owned, which relieved her very little of her burden.
Had the Captain been called away from the pleasures and amusements of life to investigate the dry records of some far-away cousin's embarrassments,—to dive into the wearisome narrative of money-borrowing, bill-renewing, and the rest of it, by one whom he had scarcely known or seen,—his manner and bearing could not possibly have betrayed stronger signs of utter weariness and apathy than he now exhibited. Smoking his cigar, and trimming his nails with a very magnificent penknife, he gave short and listless replies to her Ladyship's queries, and did but glance at the papers which from time to time she handed to him for explanation or inquiry.
“So he is come at last!” exclaimed she, as the Captain threw down the visiting-card. “Shall we see him at once?”
“By Jove! I think we've had enough of 'business,' as they call it, for one morning,” cried he. “Here have we been since a little after eleven, and it is now four, and I am as sick of accounts and figures as though I were a Treasury clerk.”
“We have done next to nothing, after all!” said she, peevishly.