The cuttings from old newspapers belonged to the days when Frederick Strangway had commanded a war-ship, to the days when he fought in the Chinese war. Some of them recorded the honour he had won for himself at different stages of his career, and it was only natural that these should have been carefully preserved by him in all his wanderings. But there were other cuttings—the report of the court martial that broke him—the trial in which he stood accused of having risked the loss of his ship with all hands aboard by his dissolute habits—a shameful and a painful story. This record of his folly had been kept by that strange perversity of the human mind which makes a man secrete and treasure documents which must wring his heart and bow his head with shame every time he looks at them. There were other extracts of a like shameful kind—reports of street rows, two cases of drunken assault in San Francisco, one of a fight in Sydney harbour. He had kept them all as if they had been words of praise and honour.
The letters were most of them trivial—letters from brother officers of the past—“very sorry to hear of your embarrassments,” “regret inability to do more than the enclosed small cheque,” “the numerous claims upon my purse render it impossible for me to grant the loan requested,” the usual variations upon the old tune in which a heavily-taxed pater familias fences with the appeal of an unlucky acquaintance. They were such letters as are left by the portmanteauful among the effects of the man for whom the world has been too hard.
Theodore put aside all this correspondence after a brief glance, and there remained only four letters in the same strong, resolute hand—the hand of Reginald Strangway.
The first in date was written on Army and Navy Club paper, and was addressed to Captain Strangway, R.N., H.M.S. Cobra, Hong Kong.
“My dear Fred,
“I have been sorry to leave your letter so long unanswered, but I am bothered about a great many things. My wife has been out of health for nearly a year. The doctors fear her chest is affected, and tell me I ought to get her away from England before the winter. As things have been going very badly with me for a long time I shall not be sorry to cut this beastly town, where the men who have made their money, God knows how, are now upon the crest of the wave, and by their reckless expenditure have made it impossible for a man of small means to live in London—if he wants to live like a gentleman. Everything is twice as dear as it used to be when I was a subaltern. My wife and I are pigging in two rooms on a second floor in Jermyn Street. I live at my club, and she lives on her relatives, so that we don’t often have to sit down to a lodging-house dinner of burnt soles and greasy chops, but the whole business is wretched. She has to go to parties in a four-wheel cab, and I can hardly afford the risk of a rubber. So I shall be uncommonly glad to cut it all, and settle in some out-of-the-way place where we can live cheap, and where the climate will suit Millicent.
“My first idea was Algiers, but things are still rather unsettled there, as you know. Lambton, of the Guards, has been shooting in Corsica lately, and came home with a glowing account of the climate and the cheapness of the inns, which are roughish, but clean and fairly comfortable; so I have determined on Corsica. We shall be within a day’s sail of Nice, so not utterly out of reach of civilization, and we can live there how we like, without entertaining a mortal, or having to buy new clothes. Millicent, who is fond of novelty, is in love with the notion, and Dangerfield has behaved very well to her, promising her an extra hundred a year if we will live quietly and keep out of debt, which, considering he is as poor as Job, is not so bad. As for my creditors, they are pretty quiet since I got Aunt Belle’s legacy, part of which I divided among ’em as a sop to Cerberus. They’ll have to be still quieter when I’m settled in Corsica.
“Of course, you heard of that wretched woman’s kicking over the traces altogether at last. God knows what will become of her. I believe she had been carrying on rather badly for some time before Tom found out anything. You know what an ass he is. However, he got hold of a letter one evening—met the postman at the door and took her letters along with his own, and didn’t like the look of one and opened it; and then there was an infernal row, and she just put on her bonnet and shawl, walked out of the house and called a cab and drove off. He followed in another cab, but it was a foggy night, and he lost her before she’d gone far. They were in lodgings in Essex Street, and it isn’t easy for one cab to chase another on a foggy evening. She never went back to him, and he went all over London denouncing her, naming first one man and then another, but without any definite idea as to who the real man was. The letter was only a couple of sentences in Italian, which Tom only knew by sight—but he could see it was an appointment at a theatre, for the theatre and hour were named. She snatched the letter out of his hand while they were quarrelling, he told me, and chucked it into the fire, so he hasn’t even the man’s handwriting as evidence against him. It was a hand he had never seen before, he says. However, if he wants to find her no doubt he can do so, if he takes the trouble. I am sorry she should disgrace her family, and of course my wife feels the scandal uncommonly hard upon her. I can’t say that I feel any pity for Tom Darcy. She had led a wretched life with him ever since he sold out, and I don’t much wonder at her being deuced glad to leave him. As it’s Tom’s business to shoot her lover, and not mine, I shan’t mix myself up in the affair—and as for her, well, she has made her bed——!”
There was more in the letter, but the rest was of no interest to Theodore.
The letter was dated January 3rd, 1851.