They made her so exceptional in fact, that her god-mother left her eight thousand pounds. She would not have left her eight pence in the Dassell days, but after spending a fortnight at Homewood she returned home, altered her will which had provided for the establishment and preservation of certain useless charities, and bequeathed eight thousand pounds, her plate, and her jewellery, and her lace, to her beloved god-daughter Dollabella, wife of Archibald Mortomley, Esquire, of Homewood.
If people be travelling downhill the devil is always conveniently at hand to give the vehicle they occupy a shove. That eight thousand pounds proved a nice impetus to the Mortomleys, and a further legacy from a distant relative which dropped in shortly after the previous bequest, accelerated the descent.
When Dolly was married, no girl could have come to a husband with more economical ideas than she possessed. Poverty and she had been friends all her life; she had been accustomed to shortness of money, to frugal fare, to the closest and strictest expenditure from her childhood upwards, and had Mortomley been wise as he was amiable, she might have regarded changing a five-pound note with a certain awe and hesitation to the end of her days.
In money as in other matters, however, she speedily, in that different atmosphere, lost her head. There can be no greater mistake than to suppose, because a person has made both ends meet on, say a hundred and fifty pounds a year, he will be able to manage comfortably on fifteen hundred; on the contrary, he is nearly certain either to turn miser or spendthrift. Dolly had not the faintest idea how to deal with a comfortable income, and as her husband was as incompetent as herself, he let her have pretty well her own way, which was a very bad way indeed. Like his wife, perhaps, he thought those legacies represented a great deal more money than was the case, since money only represents money according to the way in which it chances to be expended.
It is not in the unclouded noontide, however, when fortune wears its brightest smiles, that any one dreams of the wild night—the darkness of despair to follow. It seems to me that the stories we hear of second sight, of presentiments, of warnings, had a deeper origin than the usual superstitious fantasies we associate with them. I think they were originally intended as parables—as prophecies.
I believe the words of dark import were designed to convey to the man—prosperous, victorious—safe in the security of his undiscovered sins, the same lesson that Nathan's final sentence, "Thou art the Man," conveyed in his hour of fancied safety to the heart of David. I believe under the disguise of a thrice-told tale, those inscrutable warnings of which we hear, arresting a man in the middle of a questionable story or a peal of drunken laughter, were meant to be as truly writings on the wall as ever silenced the merriment in Belshazzar's halls—as certainly prophecies as that dream which prefigured Nebuchadnezzar's madness.
And there was a time when portents, prophecies, and parables did influence men for good, did turn them from the evil, did turn their thoughts from earth to heaven, but that was in the days when people having time to think—thought; when sometimes alone, separate from their fellow-creatures, able to forget for a period the world and its requirements, they were free to think of that which, spite of a learned divine's dictum, is more wonderful and more bewildering than eternity—the soul of man—the object of his creation, the use and reason and purpose of his ever having been made in God's image to walk erect upon the earth.
There were not wanting, in the very middle of their abundant prosperity, signs and tokens sufficient to have assured the Mortomleys that to the life, one at least of them was leading, there must come an end; but neither husband nor wife had eyes to see presages which were patent to the very ordinary minds of some of the business men with whom the owner of Homewood had dealings. Notwithstanding his large connexion, his monopoly of several lucrative branches of his trade, his own patrimony, his wife's thousands, Mortomley was always short of money.
When once shortness of money becomes chronic, it is quite certain the patient is suffering under a mortal disease. People who are clever in commercial matters understand this fact thoroughly. Chronic shortness of money has no more to do with unexpected reverses, with solvent poverty, with any ailment curable by any means short of sharp and agonizing treatment, than the heart throbs of a man destined some day to fall down stone dead in the middle of a sentence, has a likeness to the pulsations of fever, or the languid flow of life which betokens that the body is temporarily exhausted.
Like all persons, however, who are sickening unto death, Mortomley was the last to realize the fact.