Kept (26 page)

By the time he approached St. John’s Wood, Mr. Pardew’s mood was altogether placid. There was a little row of genteel shops in the street abutting the row of laburnum-shrouded villas, and he strode into one of them and made several little purchases and had them packed up nice and neat in a paper bag. On his reaching the house, the glimpse of a female face through the window of the drawing room told him that some entertainment was in progress, and opening the front door with his key, he stepped into the parlour, beckoning the servant girl, who had bobbed her head into the hall, to follow.

“Who is it that your mistress has with her?”

“Indeed, sir, it’s her sister,” replied the girl, who shared Mr. Pardew’s views about the people in Islington.

“Would you tell her that I would like to speak to her immediately?”

The girl did as she was bidden. Mr. Pardew went and stood in the corner of the room, beneath a very fanciful etching of a young lady on a swing, looked at the etching and at his boots, found pleasure in neither, opened the pianoforte and touched a note or two with just enough force to make them resonate and then straightened himself and clasped his hands behind his back. Near at hand he heard the sound of a door closing sharply, a rustle of silks in the passage and then Jemima was standing before him, somewhat flustered and with her complexion even more pink and white than ever.

“Upon my word, Richard, I did not expect you, indeed I did not. You said Thursday forenoon, I am sure of it.”

“What is that…person doing in the house?”

“Indeed, Richard, it is very hard if a woman cannot see her own sister.”

“I suppose she wants money. Isn’t that the case of it?”

“No more than a trifle. It is not her fault. They have shut the factory where Ned was working, and there is rent owing.”

“An idle, good-for-nothing scapegrace.”

“It may be as you say”—Jemima’s voice as she said this was studiously respectful—“but would you have me sit by and have my own flesh and blood starve?”

Mr. Pardew shrugged his shoulders and jingled his money in his pockets. This was not a question that he could decently answer, and he knew it. In fact it would not have disturbed him in the least to learn that Mrs. Robey—this was the name of Jemima’s sister—had starved to death, but gentlemen are generally shy of saying such things.

“Will you not come and have some tea, Richard?”

“No, I will not. The girl may bring me some here if she likes.”

Somewhat to his surprise, Mr. Pardew found that his ill humour was ebbing away. It occurred to him that, with the problem on which he had expended so much mental energy settled to his satisfaction, he
could afford to be polite even to Mrs. Robey. He would not unbend sufficiently to see Mrs. Robey, but he would be…polite.

“See here, Jemima,” he said. “I have had a great deal to trouble me today, and these things turn a man sour. I mean no harm to your sister, indeed I do not. You had better give her these two sovereigns”—he extracted the money from a little heap that he brought out of his trouser pocket—“with my compliments and ask that she will take herself off.”

Wondering a little at such largesse, Jemima took the sovereigns in her outstretched hand and retired into the passage. Presently there came the sound of a door closing, and gazing from the parlour window—having first chosen a vantage point from which he could not be seen—Mr. Pardew saw a stout, red-faced woman in a black coat and bonnet making her way hastily towards the gate. Once she was out of sight, the nervousness that had affected him since the beginning of the day began to recede. He looked around the parlour and its furnishings and remembered that he had paid for them. He recalled the morning’s interview with Mr. Crabbe and fancied that once again he had got the better of the old lawyer. He thought of Jemima and told himself that should events fall out as he proposed, there were certain things he might do for her: a house, perhaps, up the river in Richmond, far away from the base intimacies of Islington; a carriage in which she might be driven of an afternoon with himself beside her. In this way, standing on the parlour carpet with his hands in his pockets, Mr. Pardew built up numberless airy castles round whose battlements he stalked, until a soft step interrupted his reverie.

“Gracious, Richard, you have been a very long time.”

“Eh? Well, perhaps I have been. I shall come now, at any rate.”

Whatever resentment might have been bred up in Jemima’s pink and white bosom by Mr. Pardew’s remarks about her sister had been softened by receipt of the two sovereigns. Leading her lord and master to the drawing room, she administered tea and certain of the delicacies he had brought home in the paper bag with a humility that Mr. Pardew found very agreeable. Beyond the window the rain had ceased to fall and a weak sun was shining across the mottled grass and the laburnums, and Mr. Pardew rather thought that he liked it. In this
way he passed a very pleasant half hour drinking his tea, staring at Mr. Etty’s cupids and supposing that the day had turned out largely to his advantage.

“What was it that you had to trouble you today?” Jemima wondered meekly as the servant girl came in to clear away the tea things.

“To trouble me? I don’t know that there was so very much. There is a gentleman—the Earl of——in fact—whom I was compelled to go and see at his club to remind him that he owed me money.”

“Gracious! And you told him so to his face?”

“Well…I left a letter there for him, which is much the same thing.”

“I should think that it was,” replied Jemima, who loved talk of this kind.

“His Lordship spends too much on horses, that is my opinion of it. By the by,” Mr. Pardew persisted, whose benevolence knew no bounds, “how should you like to go to the Derby this year?”

“I should like it very much.”

And so they sat and talked some more about your young fashionable sprigs of aristocracy and their weakness for the turf—Mr. Pardew meditating once more on the decision he had reached, Jemima thinking of the Derby and what she might wear and what might be the outcome of things—and eventually had supper over the fire and were very comfortable together.

In the course of the next few days, when not engaged in discounting his bills or sitting in his office devising tasks for his clerk, Mr. Pardew undertook a number of useful and prudent activities. Arriving at Carter Lane early the next morning, so early as to precede Grace by a full eighty minutes, he wrote a letter, in a disguised hand and signing himself “Elias Goodfellow,” to William Tester, Esquire, of Fairfax Street, the Borough, and caused this missive to be taken off immediately by a messenger boy whom he found lurking by the side door of an inn twenty yards farther down the lane. If Bob Grace, arriving at his customary hour of ten, wondered at his master’s presence behind his
desk, he did not say so but contented himself with whistling under his breath and laying out fresh sheets of blotting paper in a very significant manner. “Upon my soul, Grace, you are very cheerful this morning,” Mr. Pardew observed at one point. “Indeed I am, sir, as cheerful as may be,” Grace told him, even going so far as to buff the bleary window with a piece of rag he produced from a basket.

All this took place quite early in the morning. Subsequently, having left his clerk in charge, Mr. Pardew betook himself to Clerkenwell and to a little alley in the vicinity of Amwell Street, where lodged a gentleman named Mr. File. Mr. File was a demure little man of about sixty with a bald head and a very powerful pair of spectacles who some ten years before had been greatly celebrated in the City of London as a locksmith. It was said at the time that Messrs. Chubb, by whom he was employed, could do nothing without him, and that the safes of half a dozen of the great banking houses had been secured by his agency alone. A champion cracksman, arraigned at the Old Bailey, confessed that Mr. File’s skill had altogether defeated him and was chided for this failing by the prosecuting barristers. And yet somehow Mr. File’s reputation had not thrived in the wake of these accomplishments. It was rumoured that the company he kept was not of a kind that Messrs. Chubb, or indeed the City police force, would have liked had they known of it. Towards the end of the year in which the champion cracksman had stood at the dock of the Old Bailey and testified to Mr. File’s ingenuity, there was a robbery at Messrs. Collingwood, the City tallow dealers, in which a quantity of bullion was got out of a safe and spirited away into thin air, the doors of Messrs. Collingwood’s establishment remaining bolted throughout, and it was said by those who knew about these things that Mr. File had something to do with it. Naturally, Mr. File had protested this libel, which appeared in an evening newspaper, but it was noticeable that no action was brought and that very soon after, Mr. File’s employers decided that they would dispense with his services. Thereafter Mr. File retired into private life, in which capacity Mr. Pardew, who had perhaps had some earlier dealings with him, sought him out and talked to him for upwards of an hour. Their conversation concluded with Mr. Pardew shaking his head and enquiring of Mr. File if he thought it could be done and Mr. File
nodding his and remarking that he thought that, given fair weather, if not with odds so great as Lombard Street to a china orange, it possibly might.

Two days later, Mr. Pardew could be found at London Bridge Station, very spruce in a green travelling cape with a bag under his arm and looking for all the world like a man who intends to avail himself of the amenity of the boat train. In this capacity he could be seen, by anyone who cared to look, prowling in a very interested manner up and down the station concourse, examining the timetables and generally immersing himself in the life of the place. A wagon came rattling up from the City as he stood there, and Mr. Pardew looked on with apparent nonchalance as a couple of policemen came forward under the stationmaster’s eye and superintended the transfer of a large crate, bound around with red and black tape, into that gentleman’s office. In short, there was nothing that Mr. Pardew did not see. He peered into the gentlemen’s cloakrooms and satisfied himself of their salubrity. He went and had his boots shined by the bootblack, took a cup of coffee in the refreshment rooms and purchased a newspaper at the bookstall. Then, when perhaps half an hour had passed, he proceeded to the ticket office and, emerging from it some few minutes later, stepped onto the Dover train. Here, seated in a third-class compartment, he took quite a lively interest in his surroundings: in the attentions of the guard who moved up and down the train, in the number of stations through which they passed and the time it took to pass them. At Redhill, through which the Dover train in those days passed, he got up from his seat and took a little saunter, walking as far as the guard’s van, into which he surreptitiously peeped, assuring himself that it contained a safe, and then wandering back, passing the guard as he did so, that official very courteously holding a connecting door between two carriages open for him as he went by.

Arriving at Folkestone, where a spring breeze had got up, causing him to press the collar of his cape more tightly around him, Mr. Pardew, in common with those of his fellow passengers who alighted from the train, made his way to the harbour pier. He did not, however, purchase a ticket at the shipping office. Instead he amused himself by observing preparations for the departure of the Boulogne steamer,
noting as he did so the location of the railway office and the behaviour of the railway superintendent, who several times emerged from it to conduct some piece of business before returning to the room and locking the door behind him. For an hour Mr. Pardew stood on the pier amidst the crowds of people watching the steamer make ready. At length there was a crunch of iron wheels and a vehicle rolled up to the harbour from which was lowered the safe that Mr. Pardew believed he had seen in the guard’s van. And Mr. Pardew marked down in his mind the manner in which it was picked up, set down and examined before being deposited out of sight in the ship’s hold. The wind picked up and drops of rain blew in from the grey clouds massing beyond the arm of the sea, and Mr. Pardew walked to the end of the pier and stood looking at the waves with keen satisfaction as the ship’s bell rang and the gangways were gathered up and the idlers and the venerable gentlemen in oilskin suits stood back from the pier rail and went in search of some fresh diversion. The ship passed by, its prow dipping into the waves and then rising again, with the gulls wheeling in its wake and black smoke disgorging into the shifting air above, and Mr. Pardew, seeing all these things, went off to eat his dinner in the Folkestone Harbour Hotel, where he pecked up a beefsteak, drank off a pint of porter and was as comfortable as a man can be who finds himself in a seaside hotel out of season when the wind is up.

U
pon my word, Mother, I think you have been very imprudent!”

“Imprudent! I suppose that is one way of looking at it.”

“You will not mind my saying that it is the only way of looking at it. To arrive at a gentleman’s house in the middle of nowhere, unannounced, in absolute defiance of his wishes and the advice of his lawyers—well!”

“Gracious, John. You talk as if I had wished to walk off with his plate or—or had asked to see the deeds to the house.”

Neither of the participants in this exchange, who were Mr. John Carstairs and his mother, took part in it with the least enthusiasm or with the merest semblance of personal ease. Just at this moment they were both in the back parlour: John Carstairs seated at the table behind his breakfast cup; Mrs. Carstairs standing in an uncertain attitude by the mantelpiece. A parlourmaid, half in and half out of the doorway, completed the scene.

“All I can say, Mother, is that I should like to know what you meant by it.”

“Meant by it! I simply determined—there is no need to leave the room, Jane—that as you would do nothing about the matter, I should do something.”

“After I had expressly gone to discuss it with Mr. Crabbe!”

“And got a very unsatisfactory answer for your pains.”

The presence of the parlourmaid leaning over the table to retrieve the breakfast things now preventing any harsher expostulation, mother and son fell silent and looked at one another again. Each was crosser with the other than at any time in their previous dealings: Mrs. Carstairs because she believed that her son had been weak; John Carstairs because he believed that his mother had wantonly meddled in affairs that were quite outside her proper sphere. Each, though,
was quietly resolved to conciliate the other: John Carstairs because he hated all disputes and disagreements, whether with his mother or anyone else; Mrs. Carstairs because she was aware that a united front with her son offered the only means of settling the business to her satisfaction.

The parlourmaid now having left the room bearing the breakfast things before her, John Carstairs became conscious that his mother’s last remark had left him at a disadvantage, and that it behoved him to say something more, something that would, as he saw it, clinch the argument in his favour. As he could think of nothing, was in fact desperate to leave the room and present himself at his office, he picked up the letter that had been the cause of this dissension and poked it across the table with his forefinger.

“Well, here is Crabbe’s letter. You had better read it.”

Mrs. Carstairs pulled the piece of foolscap out of its envelope, placed her lorgnettes before her eyes and read the following:

Dear Sir,

We are instructed to communicate with you by our client, Mr. James Dixey of Easton Hall, Watton, in the county of Norfolk.

Mr. Dixey begs us to inform you, presuming that you are not cognisant of this fact, that on the 16
^th
inst. he was visited at his residence by a lady representing herself as Mrs. Carstairs, whose object was to discuss with him the matter of his ward, Mrs. Ireland.

Mr. Dixey also begs us to inform you that he can entertain no further communication on this subject, and that any subsequent enquiries, whether of a personal or written nature, will be ignored.

Yours very faithfully,

CRABBE
&
ENDERBY
Solicitors and Commissioners for Oaths

 

“Well, that is plain enough, is it not?”

“Very plain. As plain as a pikestaff,” John Carstairs remarked. “Look, there is another note in here from Crabbe. Deep regret at
having to write in these terms and that kind of thing. A trifle mealy-mouthed, I dare say. You had better see it too.”

Mrs. Carstairs picked up the second letter, which contained additional remarks on the delicate state of Mrs. Ireland’s health and the fiat on disturbance pronounced by her medical men, and made a pretence of reading it, but her mind was already deep in consideration of the first. In her heart she was not displeased by this exposure: on the one hand, because she was an honest woman who deplored duplicity, especially when it was practised on those she loved best in the world; on the other, because experience had taught her that affairs of this kind have a habit of breaking out into the public gaze. And yet on two counts she was afraid: of her son’s displeasure, certainly—although she knew that this was likely to be short-lived—but also that he would regard Mr. Crabbe’s letter as a final prohibition of her involvement in the case. Her task, as she saw it, was to stimulate John Carstairs’s interest in the matter of Mrs. Ireland’s disappearance but to do so indirectly, or at any rate in such a way that he would mistake this prompting for something else. Thinking of all of this she continued to stare at the letter while John Carstairs drummed one set of his fingers on the tablecloth and shook the seals of his watch with the other.

“Upon my word, Mother. There had better be an end to this. As it is I do not know how I shall be able to look old Crabbe in the face again when I see him at the club.”

“Very well. Perhaps you are right,” Mrs. Carstairs replied with a meekness that would have surprised a less unobservant person than her son. “All I can say is that it is a great pity.”

“Well yes, no doubt it is.” As Mrs. Carstairs had anticipated, this hint of contrition produced an immediate softening of her son’s tone. “The fact is, Mother, that questions of this kind must always be carried on through the proper channels. Imagine what would be the result if every time that a gentleman had a question to ask of another gentleman he simply called at his house to ask it. Now”—he began to pull on his gloves in a way that suggested he thought the interview was at an end—“I should be obliged if we could no longer discuss the matter, or at any rate”—and he went so far as to give his mother a smile—“not in quite the manner that we have been doing, eh?”

Mrs. Carstairs was conscious that she had succeeded in the first of her endeavours, which was the drawing of her son’s wrath, but that she had yet to lure him into the second snare. Accordingly, and nervously aware of the risk she took, she changed tack.

“But John, it is all so very mysterious. To think of Isabel Ireland simply vanishing in this way. And then there is this Mr. Farrier that everyone talks of…”

“Richard Farrier! A man that nobody seems to know anything about!”

“But that he is her cousin, and was supposed to have been in love with her, and has now disappeared too.”

“Upon my honour, Mother!” John Carstairs had succeeded in drawing on his gloves and was now reaching for his walking stick and newspaper. “It is this d——d female hankering after sentiment that confuses everything—excuse me, I did not mean to be so candid. Richard Farrier, wherever he may be, no more loved her than I did. As for the poor girl, she is, well…not in her right mind, and we had better leave her to those who have a duty to care for her.”

“That is all very well, John, but…”

“But what, Mother?”

“It is just that—you will not mind my saying this—it comes from love of you, indeed it does—I would wish you were not so, so…”

“So what?” He was looking at her keenly now, with his walking stick in his hand and his hat halfway to his head.

“So…so lacking in resolve.”

“Lacking in resolve!” Fortunately for Mrs. Carstairs, it seemed from his tone that her son was prepared to treat this remark as a joke. “Let me tell you, Mother, that when a man is informed by a lawyer that someone for whom he is…hm…responsible has behaved foolishly, and he chooses to mention that foolishness, then he can scarcely be accused of being lacking in resolve. No, don’t trouble to see me out.”

And with that, making a great show of haste and eagerness to attend to his duties, Mr. John Carstairs pulled on his hat and quitted the house. It may be said, though, that his mother, left alone in the empty parlour, was confident that she had achieved the second of her objects.

Indeed, had Mrs. Carstairs been able to observe her son’s conduct over the next half-dozen hours, she would have congratulated herself still further. John Carstairs, as he made his way from the Marylebone Road to Whitehall, found that his mind turned—
burned
were not too strong a verb—upon a single question. Did he, as his mother had suggested, lack resolve? Was he, to use a yet more objectionable word,
weak
? Mr. Carstairs was disposed to think that he did not and that he was not. A matter had been offered for his consideration, he had meditated on it, taken the most prudent advice and reached a decision. He had subsequently been embarrassed by one very dear to him and had sought to prevent a repetition of that embarrassment. All in all, it seemed to him, turning the question ceaselessly over in his mind, that he had done what he ought to have done and that his actions could not seriously be faulted by anyone with a knowledge of the case. At the same time, John Carstairs was aware that there is a difference between acting in a way that does not incur reproach and acting well. Perhaps, too, the memory of those earlier episodes in his life when he might have been thought to lack resolve played upon him. At any rate, the half hour that he occupied between leaving his, or rather his mother’s, house and arriving at his place of work was not pleasant to him and may explain certain of the events that very quickly followed.

The public, perhaps, has a somewhat exaggerated idea of the amenities enjoyed by young men who work at the Board of Trade. The public, perhaps, imagines an environment of high-ceilinged chambers, soft carpets and crackling fires, in which damask-coated attendants steal discreetly to and fro while in inner sanctums noble lords gravely attend to the affairs of the nation. The public, if it imagines this, is altogether wrong. It can be stated, by way of correction, that the office in which John Carstairs laboured with his colleague the Honourable Mr. Cadnam, was about twelve feet square, consisting of two japanned desks joined together, an immense bookcase and a recess in which sat, or did not sit, an inky clerk, that on his arrival the fire was unlit and the papers on his desk untidied, and that his first action was to fling
his hat on its peg and to ask in an aggrieved voice, where the devil was that boy with his coffee?

“I sent him out for some,” observed the Honourable Mr. Cadnam, who was a somewhat dandified young man of about twenty-six. “Indeed I did. But there’s no dealing with the boys they send us these days.”

Replying with an oath that he didn’t suppose there was, Mr. Carstairs seated himself at his desk, where he discovered, to the further ruin of his temper, that there was a letter from the Undersecretary, Mr. Bounderby, requesting attendance in his room at the hour of noon.

“Damnation! And here is a note from old Bounderby, too. What on earth does he want?”

The Honourable Mr. Cadnam looked up from his desk, where he was now perusing a sporting newspaper, with an expression of languid horror. “Upon my word, I couldn’t say. But he has been here not half an hour since searching for you. I should say he looked exceedingly fierce.”

“Hm. Where did you say I was?”

“I said I thought you were with the Earl of——.” And here Mr. Cadnam named a gentleman who was great in the counsels of the Board of Trade and to whom it was known that Mr. Bounderby, who was reputed to be the son of a Manchester manufacturer, habitually deferred.

“Well, that was very sporting of you, Cadnam. Now where is that boy with the coffee?”

It will be seen from this conversation that John Carstairs was used to getting his way at his place of work, that he enjoyed the esteem of his colleagues and was well able to fight any battles that needed to be fought with his superiors. The morning, or what remained of it, brought further proofs of his enviable position in this regard. At midday he was closeted with Mr. Bounderby, and if he did not exactly say that he had been attending on the Earl of——, gave the former gentleman to understand that he was detained on the most pressing official business. A noble lord passing through the building nodded to him in the most friendly way, and another gentleman, the private
secretary to a cabinet minister no less, asked him whether he would be attending a certain soirée in Mayfair that evening and whether he thought a certain unmarried lady would be present. All this was very gratifying to John Carstairs’s sense of what the world owed him and what he in turn owed the world, as well as comforting him greatly as to that charge of want of resolve, and he ate his luncheon with the Honourable Mr. Cadnam in a chophouse in Whitehall Place in excellent high spirits.

“Upon my honour,” Cadnam remarked, as they returned to their room and the glance of the inky clerk, “I feel most dreadfully fagged. We were dancing at Lady Jane’s until two, you know. I think I should feel better if I could sit down, indeed I should.”

It was the Honourable Mr. Cadnam’s invariable habit to spend the hour between three and four of an afternoon in secret slumber at his desk.

“Very well, Caddy. Have no fear. You sit down, and I shall go and attend upon the board.”

All this was breathed in an access of the high spirits that had enlivened John Carstairs’s chop and his half pint of sherry. Unhappily, the remainder of the day offered two proofs that the satisfaction with which he regarded his prospects was not wholly shared by other people. As he had promised Mr. Cadnam, John Carstairs did indeed attend upon the board—this was not, it should be said, the Board of Trade itself but a subsidiary board which was thought to be the exclusive property of Mr. Bounderby and over which he tyrannised—for he had a special reason for wishing to ingratiate himself with its members. A certain high official—not so highly placed as Mr. Bounderby, but high nonetheless—was awaiting transfer to another department, and it was known that a vacancy existed. Now, much as he enjoyed the society of the Honourable Mr. Cadnam and the somewhat lax hours tolerated by his superiors, it was John Carstairs’s ambition to prosper in the service of his country and at the very least to acquire a room that would accommodate only himself, where the coffee was, so to speak, on tap and where there were no Mr. Bounderbys to enquire of his whereabouts. Accordingly, he was very kind to that gentleman this
afternoon, and to the Earl of——, who was also present, handed their respective papers to them with an exquisite courtesy and played his own smaller part in the proceedings with a modest punctiliousness.