James Greenacre.Sarah Gale & Child.
There were plenty of girls and matrons in Camberwell who would not have objected to becoming Mrs. James Greenacre, but they all lacked the necessary qualification for the partner of the prosperous quack and politician, and their dreams of wealth soon faded. Greenacre, however, kept a sharp lookout, and one evening he casually made the acquaintance of a widow named Hannah Browne. She was between thirty-five and forty and ever since childhood had toiled laboriously. Even a short spell of married life had brought her no relief, for the late Mr. Browne had had an incurable objection to work, and his unfortunate wife had been the breadwinner for both of them. But Mrs. Browne was apparently a cheerful and free-from-care person when she was introduced to the avaricious rascal. If she was not exactly a beauty, she had features which were pleasing, and she possessed sufficient womanly tact to make the most of Greenacre's weak points. She flattered him as much as she could; dwelt on his popularity and his fearlessness as a politician—he was a stentor of the street-corner—and, doubtless, predicted that one day he would be a Member of Parliament. He swallowed the flattery, large as the doses were; but, while he liked Mrs. Browne for the sensible woman that she was, he did not forget the qualification he demanded from the person who aspired to become his wife. He had been particularly touched, however, by her references to his fame as a politician, for Greenacre was a self-styled champion of the people, and in Camberwell his voice was often raised in denunciation of those eminent statesmen with whose views he did not agree. It was a time of general unrest in home affairs, and four years previously the great Reform Bill of 1832 had started the movement which eventually was to give the electors the complete control of Parliament.
Mrs. Browne resolved to marry the grocer and share his savings, and to impress Greenacre she invented a story of house property which she, a helpless widow, found difficult to manage. She told him she had been left some houses by Mr. Browne and that these with her savings made her fairly well off. Greenacre succumbed to the temptation; proposed and was accepted.
It was now late autumn, Christmas was approaching, and Hannah Browne complained of feeling lonely. Her only relative, a brother, who lived near Tottenham Court Road, had his own interests, and she was without a real friend. The widow's object was to get the marriage ceremony over as quickly as possible, for every day's delay increased the danger of Greenacre's discovery of her lies. She was confident that once she was his wife she would be all right. He might be angry; perhaps threaten her; but his standing in Camberwell would compel him to accept her as his wife and give her the shelter of his house, and she and Time would do the rest. Anyhow, the risk was small compared with the benefits to be gained by a successful issue to her plot. She had had enough of hard work, poverty and loneliness. So all through the courtship she lied and lied, and the mercenary rogue believed her because he wanted those houses and meant to have them at any price.
Urged by him Hannah Browne named a day for the wedding—the last Wednesday of the year, 1836—and to celebrate her decision Greenacre invited her to dine with him on Christmas Eve at his own house. He promised her that his housekeeper, Sarah Gale, would prepare a meal which would do credit to the occasion, and Hannah gladly accepted, delighted as she was at the success of her scheme to secure a well-to-do husband.
What would her brother and his family say now? She glowed with gratification when she pictured their amazement when she told them that she was the wife of a prosperous trader and property-owner! The years of humiliation would be wiped out by her second marriage. Her first had been a failure, but the second would more than compensate for it.
In the early part of the day before Christmas she met several acquaintances, in whom she confided her secret, bubbling over with pride as she told it. They congratulated her and passed on, probably not giving the subject another thought. Hannah Browne had always been ambitious, and her tale of a rich husband was received with disbelief. Nevertheless, those casual meetings on Christmas Eve proved of more than ordinary interest some three months later. She had already intimated to her brother that James Greenacre was to be her husband, and the grocer had met his future brother-in-law once. Greenacre, however, was in a far better position than Gay, and did not trouble to cultivate his acquaintance. On his part, Gay was only too pleased to learn that some one was willing to take his sister off his hands, and he felt indebted to Greenacre and did not resent his indifference to him after their first meeting.
But something very important happened between the fixing of the date of the ceremony and the dinner at Carpenters Buildings, Camberwell, and that was the discovery by Greenacre that Hannah Browne was actually penniless. It came to him with all the force of a knock-down blow, and he perspired as he thought how near he had been to entering into a contract to provide another man's daughter with board and lodging for life. He trembled as he estimated how much that would have cost him; but when his surprise and nervousness went a fierce hatred of the deceiver took possession of his small and mean soul.
Hannah Browne had lied to him. She was penniless; indeed, she had been compelled to borrow small sums of money from casual acquaintances on the security of her forthcoming marriage to him. The respectable grocer and popular overseer went black with rage. His housekeeper, who had contemplated the marriage with dismay because it was certain that it would lead to the disinheritance of her child, of whom her employer was the father, fed his anger with the fuel of innuendo and jeers. She blackened Hannah's character, declared that the widow would make him the laughing-stock of Camberwell, and, if he declined to marry her, would most likely either try blackmail or sue him for damages.