It may have been at the very minute that Basil and his bride quitted Primrose Place, that a letter was delivered at Jericho House. The letter was for Miss Pennibacker, written in the pangs of disappointment, in the agony of a broken heart, by the Hon. Cesar Candituft. We sum up the meaning of the epistle, gladly avoiding the fulness of its contents—gladly, too, avoiding any attempted description of the profound astonishment, disgust, and horror, of poor Monica. It may be remembered that the lover, baulked of the dowry by the loathsome avarice of Mr. Jericho, was fain to trust to the successful issue of some vague law-suit for the means of married life in its required magnificence. Well, the uncertainty of the law, is a grim joke that generations of men have suffered and bled under. And—to be brief—Candituft after his late visit to Jericho House, discovered that, with the best of causes he had the worst of luck, and so—and so—with a bleeding heart he released from all her vows the betrayed Monica. He was about to leave London, to seek consolation in the society of his brother-in-law and his sweet sister.
“The villain!” cried Monica, “and after I had been brought to promise him my hand! To leave me, and perhaps for another.”
“The cruel creature!” little Agatha spoke of Hodmadod—“after I had cured his hand, to go before my face, and give it to that—that little scorpion!”
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The earliest attempt to introduce bees from England was made by Mrs. Wills, in May 1842; but this first colony died on the passage. Shortly afterwards, a healthy hive sent by Mrs. Allom, of London, arrived safely, and was established at Nelson.—Handbook for New Zealand.
CHAPTER XXIV.
Though Mrs. Jericho had failed in her hopes of sympathetic assistance from the friends she had summoned about her, she would not quit the field. She would dispute the ground inch by inch. On her final interview with Basil—she would rather not see Bessy, she wished to be spared the trial—she declared that, albeit Mr. Jericho was strangely wayward, it was but a passing whim. However, be that as it might, it was her duty as a wife and mother to remain where she was. And Basil, having taken his measures that, at the worst, his mother and sisters might be protected, bade them a gay farewell; for he felt that the separation would be only for a short time. “My dear mother,” he said, “in a while, and you’ll be making pumpkin pie in a log-hut; as rosy as the ruddiest milkmaid.” Mrs. Jericho smiled very wanly at the picture. “And you, girls, why, what hands you’ll be at rearing chicks, and fattening pigs.” The young ladies shuddered at the thought. And when Basil prophesied for them a brace of stalwart farmers for husbands, why, in their own words, “their blood ran cold at the bare idea.”
Meanwhile our Man of Money hugged himself in his triumph. He had despoiled his wife and her daughters of the costly gifts that in his horns of ignorant weakness had been beguiled from him. And when he looked at the jewels—when he knew that they were his own again,—the victory was saddened by the despairing thought that, he could by no known means, repossess himself of all the money—all he had wasted upon them. “No; no. It is a curse to think it, but they cannot to the crucible. They cannot yield up an ounce—nay not a grain—of the glorious money cast away upon their pampered flesh—their mincing appetites—their brainsick whims. No: that money is gone; buried in the graves of vanity, and gluttony, and show. Gone! Gone! In another land I might have sold those milk-faced witches for something to reimburse me. But there is no help for it here—none.” These savage and fantastic thoughts fermented in the brain of Jericho; and, still defeated in his moody musings, he would still return to the idea of his loss, to the hope to cover it. “To think that they—the sleek white cats!—to think that they should be the tombs wherein I have buried so much! To think that they should have so devoured me! That they should have worn my heart! Should have been arrayed with my life! Should have worn it in their ears, about their tiny wrists! Nay, should have trod upon it, in their damned glass slippers! And not a penny—not a penny can I melt from them!” And then, as some consolation, the miser would look at the jewels—the plunder he had secured. Any way, that was something snatched from the wreck. Yet it was hard to gain nothing more. Hard to know that the cost of past days, the bye-gone pomp and luxury,—was irrevocable as the departed hours.
The Man of Money sat crouched in the scullion’s garret. His sordid serving-man—with his eyes fiercely bent upon his master; his mouth curved with a sharp grin, as though he read odd, strange, diabolic matter in the brain laid bare to his looks—his servant Plutus stood apart. The morning was come, and in a while, the buyers would crowd to purchase; to buy the contents of the mansion bit by bit, so that—as Jericho rejoiced—he might carry them in his pocket.