Mr. Tressayle was decidedly the most fashionable man at Saratoga. With a fine person, a handsome countenance, the most courtly manners, and more than all supposed to be possessed of a fortune as extensive as his establishment was fashionable, he was looked up to by all as the match of the season. The Belvilles, therefore, with whom he was now conversing, were not a little flattered by the attentions which he paid them. True they were the wealthiest family at the Springs; but then Mr. Belville had made his princely fortune as a distiller. Originally the keeper of a green-grocer’s shop, he had risen afterward into an obscure tavern-keeper, and from thence by slow gradations, he had become a wine-merchant, a distiller, a usurer, and a millionaire. Latterly, his lady, discarding the shop, and affecting to despise tradesmen’s wives, had set up for a woman of fashion, and nothing gave her, in her eyes, more importance than the attentions obviously paid by Mr. Tressayle to her only child, Araminta Melvina Belville, a long, scraggy young lady of about two-and-twenty, but who affected the manners of “sweet sixteen.” The devotion of Tressayle to such a being was indeed surprising to all who did not know how involved was his fortune.
What reply might have been made by Tressayle to this remark we know not, for his answer was cut short by the appearance of no less a personage than Mr. Belville.
“How are you, Tressayle, fine girls here, eh!” said this gentleman, slapping the young man somewhat familiarly on the shoulder, “deuced handsome gal that, just come in, and has fell heiress to a cool three hundred thousand. By Jove she’s a lucky thing to get the hunk of money old Snarler made in the East India trade.”
“Clara Fletcher heiress to Mr. Snarler!—you surprise me,” said Tressayle, “I thought he had sworn to cut off her mother, who was his sister, you know, and all her family with a shilling, merely for marrying Mr. Fletcher, who, though poor, was in every respect a gentleman.”
“Ay, so he did—so he did, but he died at last—d’ye see?—without a will,—and so Clara Fletcher, the only daughter of his only sister, cuts into his fortune fat.”
“It’s singular I never heard of this before,” said Tressayle, half musingly.
“Mamma, la! if I don’t think Mr. Tressayle has seen Miss Fletcher before,” whispered the daughter behind her fan; and then raising her voice and simpering and blushing as Tressayle looked down on overhearing her, she continued, “dear me, you haven’t been listening all the while, have you? But do tell, Mr. Tressayle, who is that young man talking with her?”
“I believe it is Mr. Rowley.”
“Gad is he the feller,” broke in Mr. Belville, “that published the poems so many people are cracking up? Why he isn’t much after all I guess. For my part I don’t see why some people get praised for writing poetry—it’s nothing—I could do it myself if I’d try,” said he, with a sneer. “I don’t think this Mr. Rowley a man of talent; no poet is.” And finishing his sentence with a supercilious look at the subject of his remarks, the ci-devant green-grocer, inflated with the consciousness of his wealth, thrust his fingers into his waistcoat pockets, and marched off to join another group.
“Why, my dear Miss Fletcher, how d’ye do?” said the shrill voice of Mrs. Belville, at this moment, as Mr. Rowley led his beautiful partner to a seat near the pretender to ton, “how have you been this age? Why how well you are looking. Laws me, and so you know Mr. Tressayle. Well now I do say how quiet you’ve all kept it.”