On the whole, occupied though Mrs. M.'s mind chanced at the time to be with other matters, it was quite as well for J. J. that the 'Daily News' was not a paper which the local vendor generally left at Homewood.
CHAPTER IV.
SUMMER DAYS.
Pedigree is one of those intangible and incontrovertible commodities which never commands a premium in the busy, bustling, practical city of London.
A long course of successful trade, big warehouses, troops of clerks, fleets of vessels,—by these things and such as these shall a man work out his temporal salvation; and, therefore, to those persons who, in the ordinary course of business, had come in contact with Mortomley, it did not signify in the slightest degree whether he had raised himself from the gutter, or was the last male of a family which had been of some reputation in days when England and Englishmen cared for something beyond sale and barter; when they laid down their lives for the sake of King, Country, Religion; and entertained grand ideas on the subject of Loyalty, Patriotism, and Courage, which pounds shillings and pence, the yard measure, and the modern god Commerce have long since elbowed out of court.
And yet the fact remained that the Mortomleys had once been country squires of some reputation, and that, notwithstanding their long connection with trade, and their inter-marriages with the daughters of a lower social scale, some gentle blood flowed in the veins of Archibald Mortomley, who was about to be delivered bound hand and foot to the tormentors.
There is an inevitable decay in some great business houses as there is in some great families.
Properties change hands, titles become extinct; the trade made so hardly, the money garnered so carefully, pass into other hands. It has always been thus; it will be thus till the end, and the reasons are not perhaps far to seek.
If time brings with it ripeness, it brings with it rottenness also; it brings the mature fruit, but it brings likewise the dead leaf and the bare brown branches. If it brings the strength of manhood, it brings sooner or later the weakness of age.
That weakness had fallen on Archibald Mortomley, not because he was old or because he was by constitution delicate, but merely because he had carried the traditions of a bygone and romantic age down into one eminently utilitarian,—because with every condition of existence changed, he had tried to do as his fathers had done before him,—because with rogues multiplying on every side as, like caterpillars, they are certain to do where the land is well planted and fertile, he refused to believe in the possibility of being brought personally into contact with them.