My father began to open his morning’s packet of letters and newspapers. One letter, which had been directed to his house in the country, and which had followed him to town, seemed to, alarm him terribly. He put the letter into my mother’s hand, cursed all the post-masters in England, who were none of them to blame for its not reaching him sooner, called for his hat and cane, said he must go instantly to the city, but “feared all was, too late, and that we were undone.” With this comfortable assurance he left us. The letter was from a broker in Lombard-street, who did business for my father, and who wrote to let him know that, “in consequence of the destruction of a great brewery in the late riots, several mercantile houses had been injured. Alderman Coates had died suddenly of an apoplexy, it was said: his house had closed on Saturday; and it was feared that Baldwin’s bank would not stand the run made on it.”
Now in Baldwin’s bank, as my mother informed me, my father had eight days before lodged £30,000, the purchase money of that estate which he had been obliged to sell to pay for his three elections. This sum was, in fact, every shilling of it due to creditors, who had become clamorous; and “if this be gone,” said my mother, “we are lost indeed!—this house must go, and the carriages, and every thing; the Essex estate is all we shall have left, and live there as we can—very ill it must be, to us who have been used to affluence and luxury. Your father, who expects his table, and every individual article of his establishment, to be in the first style, as if by magic, without ever reflecting on the means, but just inviting people, and leaving it to me to entertain them properly—oh! I know how bitterly he would feel even retrenchment!—and this would be ruin; and every thing that vexes him of late brings on directly a fit of the gout—and then you know what his temper is! Heaven knows what I had to go through with my nerves, and my delicate health, during the last fit, which came on the very day after we left you, and lasted six weeks, and which he sets down to your account, Harrington, and to the account of your Jewess.”
I had too much feeling for my mother’s present distress to increase her agitation by saying any thing on this tender subject. I let her accuse me as she pleased—and she very soon began to defend me. The accounts she had heard in various letters of the notice that had been taken of Miss Montenero by some of the leading persons in the fashionable world, the proposals that had been made to her, and especially the addresses of Lord Mowbray, which had been of sufficient publicity, had made, I found, a considerable alteration in my mother’s judgment or feelings. She observed that it was a pity my father was so violently prejudiced and obstinate, for that, after all, it would not be an unprecedented marriage. My mother, after a pause, went on to say, that though she was not, she hoped, an interested person, and should scorn the idea of her son’s being a fortune-hunter—and indeed I had given pretty sufficient proof that I was not of that description of suitors; yet, if the Jewess were really amiable, and as capable of generous attachment, it would be, my mother at last acknowledged, the best thing I could do, to secure an independent establishment with the wife of my choice.
I was just going to tell my mother of the conversation that I had had with Mr. Montenero, and of the obstacle, when her mind reverted to the Lombard-street letter, and to Baldwin’s bank; and for a full hour we discussed the probability of Baldwin’s standing or failing, though neither of us had any means of judging—of this, being perhaps the least anxious of the two, I became sensible the first. I finished, by stationing myself at the window to watch for my father’s return, of which I promised to give my mother notice, if she would lie down quietly on the sofa, and try to compose her spirits; she had given orders to be denied to all visitors, but every knock at the door made her start, and “There’s your father! There’s Mr. Harrington!” was fifty times repeated before the hour when it was even possible that my father could have returned from the city.
When the probable time came and passed, when it grew later and later without my father’s appearing, our anxiety and impatience rose to the highest pitch.
At last I gave my mother notice that I saw among the walkers at the end of the street which joined our square, an elderly gentleman with a cane.
“But there are so many elderly gentlemen with canes,” said my mother, joining me at the window. “Is it Mr. Harrington?”
“It is very like my father, ma’am. Now you can see him plainly picking his way over the crossing.”
“He is looking down,” said my mother; “that is a very bad sign.—But is he not looking up now?”
“No, ma’am; and now he is taking snuff.”