Meanwhile his Boston neighbours could not but remark that his home in the British haven of which he was a native and mariner, showed a considerable advance in prosperity. His wife was better dressed, his growing family could boast an increasing and superior acquaintance among children of a rank with whom they would not earlier have mixed. It was even whispered that Bill Bones had made formidable investments in the City of London, which he certainly had visited more than half a dozen times during his last winter stay in England; and though his friends very charitably agreed that the profits of the Baltic trade might be large, and that Bill Bones might have had exceptional opportunities, they none the less talked among themselves upon the various possible sources of a fortune which that trade could hardly account for.
With the fifth season there came an end to what had certainly been a remarkable series. Whatever advantages communion with a throne might have had for William Bones, the future would no doubt show; but the fifth season was the end. There had been farewells, and yet no loss of the high regard in which, for some extraordinary reason, he had been held by the Semiramis of the North. He had acquired a certain assurance of bearing which marked his new fortunes, and indeed, in this final scene of his presence upon the quays of St. Petersburg, he seemed by his gait to be some one of consequence. And no wonder, for he had left the Palace for the last time bearing secreted in the bosom of his ample coat a jewel worthy to be a memorial of the greatest passages in any life.
It was an emerald, exceptionally large—the largest, he had been assured, in the world—square in shape, of the purest water and set in a delicate little gold mounting after a fashion which recalled the ornaments of the French Court.
It speaks well for Captain Bones that on his return to Boston he handed this jewel to his wife, who thenceforward had it fixed with a pin, to serve the office of a brooch, and wore it upon great occasions; notably at a dance given by the mayor of the town, to which she brought her eldest daughter, though barely of an age for such ceremonials.
The next year William Bones let his house in Boston and abruptly transported himself and his family to the metropolis. His neighbours were interested to discover that before abandoning them he had purchased not a little property in the town and had even appointed a substantial agent to deal with his rentals. He was clearly an advancing man and their respect for him grew profound when they learnt what figure he now cut in a world above their own. In London he was found entertaining largely and standing upon an equal footing with merchants of repute, though not perhaps as yet of the first fortune. Meanwhile he had preferred the name of Bone, in the singular, to that of his earlier life, conceiving it to be more consonant with his present position and his residence in Cornhill and his interests in the banking world.
His only son George, when of an age for such occupations, which was some five years after the family had come up to London, was taken in as a partner by Mr. Worsle the India merchant, partly, no doubt, as a testimony of friendship to his father, but partly also because William Bone, who would now indifferently sign himself Bone or Bohun—the original form of the name—had put at the young fellow's disposal a very considerable capital.
William Bohun himself died somewhat prematurely in the eighth year after his transmigration, and his wife, who, though much desiring to cut a proper figure in her new world, had never properly succeeded in doing so, followed him within three months to the grave. Her younger daughters had received an excellent education; her eldest, born in her father's earlier days, had perhaps less refinement of accent and deportment—but on the other hand, her solid worth and quite exceptional dowry had procured her alliance with the heir to Sir Philip Goole, a landed gentleman in the West of England possessed of a fine town house in Cavendish Square, but indifferent to politics.
George de Bohun—he had at first rejected but later began to use the prefix "de" which a friend in the Heralds' College had suggested to him—prospered, I am glad to say, exceedingly, as the son of such a worthy father should, and acquired the playful nickname of "The Nabob," which spread from the city to the more exalted circles into which he was welcomed, west of Temple Bar. It is a sufficient indication of the respect in which he was held when I say that he was elected to Brooks's Club, and there, by his generous behaviour at the card table, failed not to become a favourite with the most exalted of his contemporaries in Whig circles.
It may or may not interest the reader to know that upon his father's death it was discovered that the Emerald of Catherine the Great had been made an heirloom and was devised by an explanatory letter—since the law could not enforce such a succession—for the eldest son, or, failing sons, the eldest daughter of the reigning de Bohun on arriving at his twenty-first, or her eighteenth birthday, his or her parents or trustees being its successive custodians until that date. Failing such a personage, the jewel was to be passed to any cadet branch, the eldest in succession. If the great line of de Bohun should fail—which Heaven forfend!—the sacred object was to be buried with the last of that illustrious lineage.
The legal complications to which such a disposition would give rise need not concern us, for in fact they never arose. George de Bohun had but one son, Richard, born in the same year that saw the death of General Bonaparte, the famous Corsican adventurer. To this son in his old age he conveyed the jewel with the instructions concerning it, but he had previously got rid of its unfashionable Louis XVI mounting and had it set again, now as a pendant, after the fashion prevalent in the first years of Queen Victoria.