"This gentleman I take to have been a somewhat near relation, Sir John, since it was to you he turned in the hour of his direst necessities."
"Yes, sir, they all do that: they go to a well-to-do relative as naturally as an old dog-fox goes to ground."
"Do you remember a cousin who came to you in the year nine—'twas in the autumn, shortly after Malplaquet—with a little girl, a mere baby—"
"I'm not likely to forget the fact, sir. What, a trumpery third or fourth cousin to come to my house, with a squaller of eighteen months old, expecting to be housed and fed for an indefinite period; since, having once found comfortable quarters, that kind of vagrant would not be inclined to resume his march in a hurry! It was as much as I could do to be barely civil to that idle vagabond; but I mastered my indignation so far as to offer him a substantial meal, which he refused, and a guinea, which he flung to the footman who showed him the way out—"
"Preferring to tramp back towards London with an empty stomach rather than to feed on your charity," said Durnford; "a false pride, no doubt, sir, but there are men who would die rather than accept a reluctant favour. Your hospitable offer was the last chance of a meal your kinsman had, for he died of starvation on the road to London, and his orphan was adopted by one Squire Bosworth, a landed gentleman at Fairmile in Surrey."
"How do you know that he died of want, sir?" asked Sir John, somewhat dashed in his spirits.
"O sir, the fact is notorious;" and then Durnford related those two chapters of Chumleigh's story which he had heard from Mr. Ludderly and the nurse at Chelsea, and from Mrs. Bridget and others at Fairmile.
"Well, sir, 'tis a pitiful tale," said the Baronet, "but there is hardly a man in England rich enough to provide for all his poor relations. The lean kine would eat up all the fat kine, sir, if mistaken benevolence were to attempt the task, and the kingdom would be reduced to a dead level of poverty. Gad's curse, sir! everybody would be paupers. There would be no green spot in the desert. 'Tis sounder wisdom and truer benevolence in the rich to keep their estates together, to maintain a good household, feed their dependents, and uphold trade. However, I am sorry this misguided young man came to a scurvy end."
"Dare I ask why you call him misguided, sir?"
"Because he made the vast mistake of trying to live by his wits, instead of by some steady and honest industry—because he thought to make his living by hanging about London, sitting idle in coffee-houses, and picking up stray notions from the town wits—Dryden, Congreve, Wycherley, Addison, Steele, and the rest of 'em—to retail secondhand in the newspapers at a penny a line. Better to have carried a musket or swept a crossing. And then when he was bear-leader and earning handsome wages, with the run of his teeth at the best inns on the Continent, and a coach-and-six to carry him all over Europe—an education which should have made him as good a writer as that Mr. Addison whom people thought so much of—he must needs spoil all his chances by running off with a girl out of an Italian convent, and causing a fine hubbub among the priests."