Illustrations of political economy, Volume 9 (of 9)

BUDGE-ROW AGAIN!

“Pray open the window, Morgan,” said Jane Farrer to the old servant who was assisting her to arrange for tea the room in which the family had dined.

“Perhaps you don’t know, Ma’am, what a cutting wind it is. More like December than March, Miss Jane; bitter enough to help on your rheumatism, my dear.”

And Morgan paused, with her hand on the sash. Miss Farrer chose that the room should be refreshed. She was aware that the scents from the shop were at all times strong enough for the nerves of any one unaccustomed to the atmosphere she lived in; and she did not wish that her brother Henry should have to encounter in addition those which the dinner had left behind. She tied a handkerchief over her head while the March wind blew in chilly, and Morgan applied herself to light the fire. When the dinner-table was set back against the wall, and the small Pembroke table brought forward, and the sofa, with its brown cotton cover, wheeled round, and the two candlesticks, with whole candles in them, placed in front of the tea-tray, Miss Farrer thought she would go up into Henry’s room, and see that all was right there, before she put off her black stuff apron, and turned down the cuffs of her gown, and took her seat beside the fire.

She tried to look at everything with the eyes she fancied her young brother would bring from the university. She, who had lived for five-and-thirty years in this very house, at the corner of Budge Row, among this very furniture, could not reasonably expect to view either the one or the other as it would appear to a youth of two-and-twenty, who had lived in a far different scene, and among such companions as Jane had no idea of. It was some vague notion of this improbability that made her linger about Henry’s little apartment, and wonder whether he would think she ought to have put up a stuff curtain before the window, and whether he had been accustomed to a bit of carpet, and whether the soap out of her father’s shop was such as he could use. Then came the odd mixture of feelings,—that her father’s youngest son ought not to dream of luxuries that his elder brother and sisters had not had,—and yet that Henry was a scholar and a gentleman, and therefore unavoidably held in awe by the family. When she reverted to the time, well remembered, when she upheld the little fellow, and coaxed him to set one tiny plump foot before the other, the idea of being now half afraid to receive him made her smile and then sigh, and hope that good might come of her father’s ambition to give a son of his a university education.

Before she had finished making herself as neat as usual, and rather more dressed, she heard, amidst all the noises that came in from the narrow bustling street, her own name called from the bottom of the stairs.

“I’m coming, father!—It never can be Henry yet. The postman’s bell is but just gone by, and the six o’clock cries are not all over; and there sound the chimes. It is full five minutes’ walk from Lad-lane, too. Perhaps there is something more to be done at the books: so I will carry down my apron.—Why, Morgan, it is well I did not throw you down stairs.”

Morgan’s face, entrenched in its mob cap, was just visible in the twilight, peeping into the room from the steep, narrow stair upon which the chamber-door directly opened. She came to say that her master wanted Miss Jane; that he was in a great hurry, and seemed to have some good news to tell.

Mr. Farrer was bustling about, apparently in a state of great happiness. His brown wig seemed to sit lightly on his crown; his shoes creaked very actively; his half whistle betokened a light heart, and he poked the fire as if he had forgotten how much coals were a bushel. He stretched out his arms when his daughter came down with a look of inquiry, and kissed her on either cheek, saying,

“I have news for thee, my dear. I say, Morgan, let us have plenty of buttered toast,—plenty and hot. Well, Jenny,—life is short enough to some folks. Of all people, who do you think are dead?”

Jane saw that it was nobody that she would be expected to grieve about. She had fallen enough into her father’s way of thinking to conjecture aright,—that some of the lot of lives with which her father and she were joined in a tontine annuity had failed.

“Poor souls! Yes: Jerry Hill and his brother,—both gone together of a fever, in the same house. Who would have thought it? Both younger lives than mine, by some years. I have no doubt they thought, many a time, that mine would be the first to fail. But this is a fine invention,—this way of purchasing annuities,—though I was against it at first, as being too much like a lottery for a sober man to venture upon. But, I say, Jane, I hope you are glad I made you invest your money in this way. You had a right to look to coming into their lives, sooner or later; but one would hardly have expected it in my time; though, somehow, I always had a notion it would turn out so.”

Jane’s colour had been much raised, from the first disclosure of the news. She now asked whether these were not the last lives of the lot, out of their own family;—whether her father’s, her brother Michael’s, and her own were not the only ones now left.

“To be sure they are! We have the whole thing to ourselves from this time. I think the minister will be for sending Michael and me to the wars, to have us killed off; though I hope, in that case, you would live on and on, and enjoy your own for many a year, to disappoint him. But, to be sure,” said the old man, checking his exultation as he saw his daughter look grave, “life is a very uncertain thing, as we may see by what has just happened.”

“I am sure it is the last thing I thought of,” observed Jane.

“Ay. It is a pretty yearly addition to us three;—two dropping together in this way: and, as I said, I hope you will enjoy it for many a year when I am dead and gone; as I am sure you deserve, for you have been a good daughter to me,—keeping the house as well as your mother did before you, and the books better than I could myself, leaving me free to attend to the shop. But, let us see. The room is half full of smoke still; and you will say that comes of my poking the fire. What have you got for Harry’s tea? The lad will want something solid, though he be a student. I remember his telling me last time that no folks are more hungry than those that have been a long while over their books.”

Jane moved about like one in a dream, till, the shop-boy’s heavy tread having been heard in the passage, Morgan put her head in at the parlour door to say that Michael and a gentleman with him might be seen from the shop-door to have turned the corner at the other end of the Row.

“’Tis a pity Patience can’t be here to-night, now really,” said the old man: “but she always manages to be confined just when we have a merry-making. ’Tis as perverse as her husband not choosing to buy a tontine annuity when he had the cash by him. He will find now he had better have done it. I wish I had thought of it in time to have made it a condition of his marrying Patience.—Well, Harry, lad! I hope you are come home hearty. What! You are not ashamed of your kin, though you have been seeing lords at every turn?”

“How well Jane looks!” was Henry’s first remark, after all the greetings were over. “She is not like the same person that she was the last time I came home.”

Henry was not the only one who saw a change in Jane, this evening. Her eyes shone in the light of the fire, and there was a timidity in her manner which seemed scarcely to belong to the sober age she had attained. Instead of making tea in the shortest and quietest way, as usual, she was hesitating and absent, and glanced towards Henry as often as her father and Michael joked, or the opening of the door let in a whiff of the scent of cheese and the et ceteras of a grocer’s establishment.

Mr. Farrer remarked that Henry would find London a somewhat busier place just now than he had been accustomed to. London had been all in a bustle since the King’s speech, so that there was no such thing as getting shop-boys back when they had been sent of an errand. What with the soldiers in the Parks, and the fuss upon the river when any news came, and the forces marching to embark, and the shows some of the emigrants made in the streets, there was enough to entice idle boys from their duty.

“Not only from their duty of coming home,” said Michael. “There was our Sam to-day,—’tis a fact,—left the shop while I was half a mile off, and the Taylors’ maid came in for half a pound of currants, and would have gone away again if Morgan had not chanced to pass the inside door and look over the blind at the moment. ’Tis a fact: and Sam had nothing to say but that he heard firing, and the newsmen’s horns blowing like mad, and he went to learn what it was all about.”

“I’ll teach him! I’ll make him remember it!” cried Mr. Farrer. “But we want another pair of eyes in the shop, sure enough. ’Tis not often that you and I want to be away at the same time; but——”

And the father and son talked over their shop plans, and prepared vengeance for Sam, while Henry told his sister what signs of public rejoicing he had seen this day on his journey;—flags on the steeples, processions of little boys, and evergreen boughs on the stage coaches. The war seemed a very amusing thing to the nation at present.

“Stocks are up to-day. The people are in high spirits.”

“When people are bent on being in high spirits, anything will do to make them so. We were in high spirits six years ago because a few bad taxes were taken off; and now we are merrier than ever under the necessity of laying on more.”

“Come, come, Hal,” said his father, “don’t grudge the people a taste of merriment while they can get it. You will see long faces enough when these new taxes come to be paid. I hope you are not so dead set against the minister as you used to be when younger; or so given to find fault with all that is done.”

“So far from being an enemy to the minister, father, I think it is very hard that the nation, or the part of them that makes itself heard by the minister, should be so fond of war as to encourage him to plunge us into it. These very people will not abuse him the less, in the long run, for getting the nation into debt.”

“Well, well. We won’t abuse the debt, and loans, and that sort of thing to-day,—eh, Jane!” And Mr. Farrer chuckled, and Michael laughed loudly.

“For my part,” continued the old man, “I think the debt is no bad thing for showing what sort of spirits the nation is in. You may depend upon it, Peek, and all other husbands who have wives apt to be high and low, would be very glad of such a thermometer to measure the ladies’ humour by. ’Tis just so, I take it, with Mr. Pitt and the nation. If he wants to know his mistress’s humour, he has only just to learn the state of the stocks.”

“Just the same case,” said Michael, laughing.

“Not quite,” said Henry. “Peek would rather do without such a thermometer, or barometer, if Patience must ruin herself to pay for it: much more, if she must leave it to her children to pay it after her. I should not have expected, father, to find you speaking up for war and the debt.”