A TALE OF TWO KNAVERIES.
IN FOUR CHAPTERS.—CHAP. II.
Tom and Lucy Wedlake were two young people who had loved one another well enough, and had had sufficient courage to marry on two hundred pounds a year in the teeth of their respective families, both of which were highly respectable, extremely proud, but very poor. Tom was a Civil Service clerk, aged twenty-eight, whose salary had reached the above annual sum; and it was insisted by all their relations that the young people ought to wait until he should get his first class—which he might hope to do about forty—and be in receipt of three hundred a year; that being the smallest income upon which any lady and gentleman could contrive to support existence together. The pair declined to accept this view; so they got married; and Tom took his pretty gentle wife to live in a little house on the north-east of the Regent’s Park, which he had furnished with money lent him, free of interest, by a well-to-do friend. For the rest, they were content to trust to youth, health, and determination to keep from absolute destitution themselves and any little folks who might hereafter come.
They did not, after all, find the struggle so terrible as it had been described to them. They were not blessed—or burdened—with children until they had been some time married, nor until circumstances had put it into their power to maintain and educate them without difficulty; and they had no expensive tastes. They were extremely fond of one another, and lived in great happiness for one year. Then Uncle Franklin took up his abode with them, and their happiness was for a time considerably clouded. Mr Franklin was Lucy’s maternal uncle. In his business—that of a wine-merchant—he had made money, which he had increased by successful speculation. But in proportion as his purse grew bulky, his manners deteriorated. The latter fact was forgiven in consideration of the former; and by the time he retired, the master of a moderate fortune, the family toleration of him had developed into positive affection. Yet he was as we have seen him—rough, harsh, coarse, selfish, and overbearing; faults which were easily overlooked by the half-dozen sets of brothers and sisters, plentifully garnished with nephews and nieces, who remembered only that Uncle Franklin was old, rich, and a bachelor, and forgot the wine-merchant’s business, and the continual snubs and insults which it had always been the old gentleman’s pleasure to inflict upon his affectionate relatives. So that, when he began to lament the loneliness of his age, and to hint at his longings for the comforts and pleasures of family life, quite a number of hospitable doors flew open to him on the instant. Uncle Franklin entered all those doors, and left each of them before many weeks were over, shaking the dust off his feet against the inhabitants. In every house which he honoured with a brief sojourn, he comported himself more like a fiend than a human being. His selfishness, his ill-temper, his insolence, his coarseness, his tyranny, his general powers of exasperation, would have been unendurable by any save possible legatees, whose meekness, however, instead of disarming the old savage, seemed to incite him to yet greater cruelties. The end was the same in every case. He would fasten some perfectly unreasonable quarrel upon his hosts, and fling out of the house in a furious passion; subsequently amusing himself by inditing from his next abode injurious replies to the petitions for pardon and reconciliation which pursued him.
One day a cab drove up to Tom Wedlake’s door, and Uncle Franklin, alighting therefrom, walked into the parlour, plumped himself into the most comfortable armchair, and announced his intention of remaining, adding that his luggage would arrive shortly. Lucy, in consternation, entertained him as well as she could, which did not appear to be very well, until her husband came home and they were able to take counsel together.
Tom was at first entirely opposed to the whole thing; and being himself of a somewhat fiery temper, hinted at forcible expulsion as a means of solving the difficulty. But Lucy begged him to do nothing hastily, and suggested that the self-invited guest might at all events remain for a few days, until they should be able to see for themselves whether he were in reality so black as he had been painted. And whether it was the excellence of the little dinner which Lucy dished up, or the bright though homely comfort around him, or certain indications in Tom’s look and manner, the dreadful uncle, having come in like a lion, seemed disposed to remain in the character of a lamb. He actually tried, in the course of the evening, to pay Lucy a compliment on her good looks, which only missed fire because no one could possibly have understood it.
Before he went to bed, Uncle Franklin repeated his proposal, offering very liberal terms; and he lamented his lonely old age and the evident disposition of all his relatives to quarrel with him, in a way which went to Lucy’s soft heart. Even Tom, than whom there was no better fellow breathing, was taken in so far that he forgot much that he had heard of the woes attending Uncle Franklin’s irruption into any household. It so happened that he had never troubled Lucy’s own family circle, who alone of all his relatives lived at some distance from London. The young couple sat late that night, discussing the matter from all sides, and at last determined to make the trial. Lucy was influenced partly by pity, partly by the hope, which had in it little indeed of the mercenary element, that her uncle might leave her some small legacy, so that her darling husband might not, after all, have an altogether undowered bride. Tom, on his side, thought only of the wife he loved; the additional income would enable her to keep another servant, would relieve her from hard and menial labour, and would even afford her some few little feminine luxuries which had hitherto been beyond her reach. So each, for the other’s sake, was willing to bow the back for the burden.
For a time all went well. The old man seemed to have made a sudden and vast amendment. True, he was generally irritable, always selfish, and sometimes expressed himself in rather odd language. But these, after all, were mere eccentricities, failings of old age, results of a life apart from all refining influences. They were not insupportable by two people who had youth, health, and good spirits to their aid. And it was evident that Uncle Franklin had taken a fancy to his niece. He liked to have her sitting near him at work; and she made an exemplary listener while he fought over again the battles of business, or indulged in tirades against the baseness and ingratitude of mankind in general and his other relations in particular. To Tom he was civil, and even friendly after his fashion; altogether, he was an endurable inmate; and his entertainers began to believe that the tales which they had heard must at least have been highly coloured.
But after a month of this, Tom and Lucy began to discover that very little present advantage was likely to result to them from the arrangement, which was also irksome in many ways. Uncle Franklin paid well; but then his ideas on the subjects of eating and drinking and minor luxuries were on an even more liberal scale. In fact, after his requirements in this way were provided for, and the expense of the necessary additional servant met, there was little or no margin of profit remaining. And the demands upon Lucy’s time and energies were considerable. Uncle Franklin liked attention, and was unsparing in exacting it; he was, in truth, something of an invalid, which perhaps partly accounted for his temper and other peculiarities; so that Tom began to think seriously of hinting to his guest that it was hardly convenient to entertain him longer; when one evening the old man, being alone with his host and in an unusually equable frame of mind, made an explicit declaration of his intentions. Having first anathematised all his other relations in a general but very hearty manner, he vowed that his niece and her husband were so far the only people with whom he had been able to get on; that he found himself more comfortable with them than he had ever been in his life; and that, with their permission, he proposed to end his days in their company. Tom looked a little awkward; but Mr Franklin, as if guessing at what was in his mind, went on to say that on this condition he should make Lucy his sole legatee; there being, as he considered, no one who had a better claim upon him, or to whom he would willingly leave a fraction of his wealth. Of course Tom could only express his grateful acknowledgments. He was too poor, his prospects were too uncertain for him to be justified in standing in the light of his wife and possible children; so Uncle Franklin was given to understand that his proposal was accepted.
Lucy was full of delight when her husband told her what had passed; but Tom himself was by no means disposed to be sanguine.