It was only last season that they set up a carriage—the modestest little vehicle conceivable—driven by Kirby, who had
THE MAN IN POSSESSION.
been in Dixon’s troop in the regiment, and had followed him into private life as coachman, footman, and page.
One day lately I went into Dixon’s house, hearing that some calamities had befallen him, the particulars of which Miss Clapperclaw was desirous to know. The creditors of the Tregulpho mines had got a verdict against him as one of the directors of that company; the engineer of the Little Diddlesex Junction had sued him for two thousand three hundred pounds—the charges of that scientific man for six weeks’ labour in surveying the line. His brother directors were to be discovered nowhere; Windham, Dodgin, Mizzlington, and the rest, were all gone long ago.
When I entered, the door was open—there was a smell of smoke in the dining-room, where a gentleman at noon-day was seated with a pipe and a pot of beer—a man in possession indeed, in that comfortable pretty parlour, by that snug round table where I have so often seen Fanny Dixon’s smiling face.
Kirby, the ex-dragoon, was scowling at the fellow, who lay upon a little settee reading the newspaper, with an evident desire to kill him. Mrs. Kirby, his wife, held little Danby, poor Dixon’s son and heir. Dixon’s portrait smiled over the sideboard still, and his wife was up stairs in an agony of fear, with the poor little daughters of this bankrupt, broken family.
This poor soul had actually come down and paid a visit to the man in possession. She had sent wine and dinner to “the gentleman down stairs,” as she called him in her terror. She had tried to move his heart, by representing to him how innocent Captain Dixon was, and how he had always paid, and always remained at home when everybody else had fled. As if her tears, and simple tales and entreaties, could move that man in possession out of the house, or induce him to pay the costs of the action which her husband had lost.
Danby meanwhile was at Boulogne, sickening after his wife and children. They sold everything in his house—all his smart furniture, and neat little stock of plate; his wardrobe and his linen, “the property of a gentleman gone abroad;” his carriage by the best maker; and his wine selected without regard to expense. His house was shut up as completely as his opposite neighbour’s; and a new tenant is just having it fresh painted inside and out, as if poor Dixon had left an infection behind.