Chapter: The winter had been a trying one.  Ernest had only paid his way by
selling his piano.  With this he seemed to cut away the last link that
connected him with his earlier life, and to sink once for all into the
small shop-keeper.  It seemed to him that however low he might sink his
pain could not last much longer, for he should simply die if it did.

He hated Ellen now, and the pair lived in open want of harmony with each
other.  If it had not been for his children, he would have left her and
gone to America, but he could not leave the children with Ellen, and as
for taking them with him he did not know how to do it, nor what to do
with them when he had got them to America.  If he had not lost energy he
would probably in the end have taken the children and gone off, but his
nerve was shaken, so day after day went by and nothing was done.

He had only got a few shillings in the world now, except the value of his
stock, which was very little; he could get perhaps 3 or 4 pounds by
selling his music and what few pictures and pieces of furniture still
belonged to him.  He thought of trying to live by his pen, but his
writing had dropped off long ago; he no longer had an idea in his head.
Look which way he would he saw no hope; the end, if it had not actually
come, was within easy distance and he was almost face to face with actual
want.  When he saw people going about poorly clad, or even without shoes
and stockings, he wondered whether within a few months' time he too
should not have to go about in this way.  The remorseless, resistless
hand of fate had caught him in its grip and was dragging him down, down,
down.  Still he staggered on, going his daily rounds, buying second-hand
clothes, and spending his evenings in cleaning and mending them.

One morning, as he was returning from a house at the West End where he
had bought some clothes from one of the servants, he was struck by a
small crowd which had gathered round a space that had been railed off on
the grass near one of the paths in the Green Park.

It was a lovely soft spring morning at the end of March, and unusually
balmy for the time of year; even Ernest's melancholy was relieved for a
while by the look of spring that pervaded earth and sky; but it soon
returned, and smiling sadly he said to himself: "It may bring hope to
others, but for me there can be no hope henceforth."

As these words were in his mind he joined the small crowd who were
gathered round the railings, and saw that they were looking at three
sheep with very small lambs only a day or two old, which had been penned
off for shelter and protection from the others that ranged the park.

They were very pretty, and Londoners so seldom get a chance of seeing
lambs that it was no wonder every one stopped to look at them.  Ernest
observed that no one seemed fonder of them than a great lubberly butcher
boy, who leaned up against the railings with a tray of meat upon his
shoulder.  He was looking at this boy and smiling at the grotesqueness of
his admiration, when he became aware that he was being watched intently
by a man in coachman's livery, who had also stopped to admire the lambs,
and was leaning against the opposite side of the enclosure.  Ernest knew
him in a moment as John, his father's old coachman at Battersby, and went
up to him at once.

"Why, Master Ernest," said he, with his strong northern accent, "I was
thinking of you only this very morning," and the pair shook hands
heartily.  John was in an excellent place at the West End.  He had done
very well, he said, ever since he had left Battersby, except for the
first year or two, and that, he said, with a screw of the face, had well
nigh broke him.

Ernest asked how this was.

"Why, you see," said John, "I was always main fond of that lass Ellen,
whom you remember running after, Master Ernest, and giving your watch to.
I expect you haven't forgotten that day, have you?"  And here he laughed.
"I don't know as I be the father of the child she carried away with her
from Battersby, but I very easily may have been.  Anyhow, after I had
left your papa's place a few days I wrote to Ellen to an address we had
agreed upon, and told her I would do what I ought to do, and so I did,
for I married her within a month afterwards.  Why, Lord love the man,
whatever is the matter with him?"--for as he had spoken the last few
words of his story Ernest had turned white as a sheet, and was leaning
against the railings.

"John," said my hero, gasping for breath, "are you sure of what you
say--are you quite sure you really married her?"

"Of course I am," said John, "I married her before the registrar at
Letchbury on the 15th of August 1851.

"Give me your arm," said Ernest, "and take me into Piccadilly, and put me
into a cab, and come with me at once, if you can spare time, to Mr
Overton's at the Temple."





I do not think Ernest himself was much more pleased at finding that he
had never been married than I was.  To him, however, the shock of
pleasure was positively numbing in its intensity.  As he felt his burden
removed, he reeled for the unaccustomed lightness of his movements; his
position was so shattered that his identity seemed to have been shattered
also; he was as one waking up from a horrible nightmare to find himself
safe and sound in bed, but who can hardly even yet believe that the room
is not full of armed men who are about to spring upon him.

"And it is I," he said, "who not an hour ago complained that I was
without hope.  It is I, who for weeks have been railing at fortune, and
saying that though she smiled on others she never smiled at me.  Why,
never was anyone half so fortunate as I am."

"Yes," said I, "you have been inoculated for marriage, and have
recovered."

"And yet," he said, "I was very fond of her till she took to drinking."

"Perhaps; but is it not Tennyson who has said: ''Tis better to have loved
and lost, than never to have lost at all'?"

"You are an inveterate bachelor," was the rejoinder.

Then we had a long talk with John, to whom I gave a 5 pound note upon the
spot.  He said, "Ellen had used to drink at Battersby; the cook had
taught her; he had known it, but was so fond of her, that he had chanced
it and married her to save her from the streets and in the hope of being
able to keep her straight.  She had done with him just as she had done
with Ernest--made him an excellent wife as long as she kept sober, but a
very bad one afterwards."

"There isn't," said John, "a sweeter-tempered, handier, prettier girl
than she was in all England, nor one as knows better what a man likes,
and how to make him happy, if you can keep her from drink; but you can't
keep her; she's that artful she'll get it under your very eyes, without
you knowing it.  If she can't get any more of your things to pawn or
sell, she'll steal her neighbours'.  That's how she got into trouble
first when I was with her.  During the six months she was in prison I
should have felt happy if I had not known she would come out again.  And
then she did come out, and before she had been free a fortnight, she
began shop-lifting and going on the loose again--and all to get money to
drink with.  So seeing I could do nothing with her and that she was just
a-killing of me, I left her, and came up to London, and went into service
again, and I did not know what had become of her till you and Mr Ernest
here told me.  I hope you'll neither of you say you've seen me."

We assured him we would keep his counsel, and then he left us, with many
protestations of affection towards Ernest, to whom he had been always
much attached.

We talked the situation over, and decided first to get the children away,
and then to come to terms with Ellen concerning their future custody; as
for herself, I proposed that we should make her an allowance of, say, a
pound a week to be paid so long as she gave no trouble.  Ernest did not
see where the pound a week was to come from, so I eased his mind by
saying I would pay it myself.  Before the day was two hours older we had
got the children, about whom Ellen had always appeared to be indifferent,
and had confided them to the care of my laundress, a good motherly sort
of woman, who took to them and to whom they took at once.

Then came the odious task of getting rid of their unhappy mother.
Ernest's heart smote him at the notion of the shock the break-up would be
to her.  He was always thinking that people had a claim upon him for some
inestimable service they had rendered him, or for some irreparable
mischief done to them by himself; the case however was so clear, that
Ernest's scruples did not offer serious resistance.

I did not see why he should have the pain of another interview with his
wife, so I got Mr Ottery to manage the whole business.  It turned out
that we need not have harrowed ourselves so much about the agony of mind
which Ellen would suffer on becoming an outcast again.  Ernest saw Mrs
Richards, the neighbour who had called him down on the night when he had
first discovered his wife's drunkenness, and got from her some details of
Ellen's opinions upon the matter.  She did not seem in the least
conscience-stricken; she said: "Thank goodness, at last!"  And although
aware that her marriage was not a valid one, evidently regarded this as a
mere detail which it would not be worth anybody's while to go into more
particularly.  As regards his breaking with her, she said it was a good
job both for him and for her.

"This life," she continued, "don't suit me.  Ernest is too good for me;
he wants a woman as shall be a bit better than me, and I want a man that
shall be a bit worse than him.  We should have got on all very well if we
had not lived together as married folks, but I've been used to have a
little place of my own, however small, for a many years, and I don't want
Ernest, or any other man, always hanging about it.  Besides he is too
steady: his being in prison hasn't done him a bit of good--he's just as
grave as those as have never been in prison at all, and he never swears
nor curses, come what may; it makes me afeared of him, and therefore I
drink the worse.  What us poor girls wants is not to be jumped up all of
a sudden and made honest women of; this is too much for us and throws us
off our perch; what we wants is a regular friend or two, who'll just keep
us from starving, and force us to be good for a bit together now and
again.  That's about as much as we can stand.  He may have the children;
he can do better for them than I can; and as for his money, he may give
it or keep it as he likes, he's never done me any harm, and I shall let
him alone; but if he means me to have it, I suppose I'd better have
it."--And have it she did.

"And I," thought Ernest to himself again when the arrangement was
concluded, "am the man who thought himself unlucky!"

I may as well say here all that need be said further about Ellen.  For
the next three years she used to call regularly at Mr Ottery's every
Monday morning for her pound.  She was always neatly dressed, and looked
so quiet and pretty that no one would have suspected her antecedents.  At
first she wanted sometimes to anticipate, but after three or four
ineffectual attempts--on each of which occasions she told a most pitiful
story--she gave it up and took her money regularly without a word.  Once
she came with a bad black eye, "which a boy had throwed a stone and hit
her by mistake"; but on the whole she looked pretty much the same at the
end of the three years as she had done at the beginning.  Then she
explained that she was going to be married again.  Mr Ottery saw her on
this, and pointed out to her that she would very likely be again
committing bigamy by doing so.  "You may call it what you like," she
replied, "but I am going off to America with Bill the butcher's man, and
we hope Mr Pontifex won't be too hard on us and stop the allowance."
Ernest was little likely to do this, so the pair went in peace.  I
believe it was Bill who had blacked her eye, and she liked him all the
better for it.

From one or two little things I have been able to gather that the couple
got on very well together, and that in Bill she has found a partner
better suited to her than either John or Ernest.  On his birthday Ernest
generally receives an envelope with an American post-mark containing a
book-marker with a flaunting text upon it, or a moral kettle-holder, or
some other similar small token of recognition, but no letter.  Of the
children she has taken no notice.





Ernest was now well turned twenty-six years old, and in little more than
another year and a half would come into possession of his money.  I saw
no reason for letting him have it earlier than the date fixed by Miss
Pontifex herself; at the same time I did not like his continuing the shop
at Blackfriars after the present crisis.  It was not till now that I
fully understood how much he had suffered, nor how nearly his supposed
wife's habits had brought him to actual want.

I had indeed noted the old wan worn look settling upon his face, but was
either too indolent or too hopeless of being able to sustain a protracted
and successful warfare with Ellen to extend the sympathy and make the
inquiries which I suppose I ought to have made.  And yet I hardly know
what I could have done, for nothing short of his finding out what he had
found out would have detached him from his wife, and nothing could do him
much good as long as he continued to live with her.

After all I suppose I was right; I suppose things did turn out all the
better in the end for having been left to settle themselves--at any rate
whether they did or did not, the whole thing was in too great a muddle
for me to venture to tackle it so long as Ellen was upon the scene; now,
however, that she was removed, all my interest in my godson revived, and
I turned over many times in my mind, what I had better do with him.

It was now three and a half years since he had come up to London and
begun to live, so to speak, upon his own account.  Of these years, six
months had been spent as a clergyman, six months in gaol, and for two and
a half years he had been acquiring twofold experience in the ways of
business and of marriage.  He had failed, I may say, in everything that
he had undertaken, even as a prisoner; yet his defeats had been always,
as it seemed to me, something so like victories, that I was satisfied of
his being worth all the pains I could bestow upon him; my only fear was
lest I should meddle with him when it might be better for him to be let
alone.  On the whole I concluded that a three and a half years'
apprenticeship to a rough life was enough; the shop had done much for
him; it had kept him going after a fashion, when he was in great need; it
had thrown him upon his own resources, and taught him to see profitable
openings all around him, where a few months before he would have seen
nothing but insuperable difficulties; it had enlarged his sympathies by
making him understand the lower classes, and not confining his view of
life to that taken by gentlemen only.  When he went about the streets and
saw the books outside the second-hand book-stalls, the bric-a-brac in the
curiosity shops, and the infinite commercial activity which is
omnipresent around us, he understood it and sympathised with it as he
could never have done if he had not kept a shop himself.

He has often told me that when he used to travel on a railway that
overlooked populous suburbs, and looked down upon street after street of
dingy houses, he used to wonder what kind of people lived in them, what
they did and felt, and how far it was like what he did and felt himself.
Now, he said he knew all about it.  I am not very familiar with the
writer of the Odyssey (who, by the way, I suspect strongly of having been
a clergyman), but he assuredly hit the right nail on the head when he
epitomised his typical wise man as knowing "the ways and farings of many
men."  What culture is comparable to this?  What a lie, what a sickly
debilitating debauch did not Ernest's school and university career now
seem to him, in comparison with his life in prison and as a tailor in
Blackfriars.  I have heard him say he would have gone through all he had
suffered if it were only for the deeper insight it gave him into the
spirit of the Grecian and the Surrey pantomimes.  What confidence again
in his own power to swim if thrown into deep waters had not he won
through his experiences during the last three years!

But, as I have said, I thought my godson had now seen as much of the
under currents of life as was likely to be of use to him, and that it was
time he began to live in a style more suitable to his prospects.  His
aunt had wished him to kiss the soil, and he had kissed it with a
vengeance; but I did not like the notion of his coming suddenly from the
position of a small shop-keeper to that of a man with an income of
between three and four thousand a year.  Too sudden a jump from bad
fortune to good is just as dangerous as one from good to bad; besides,
poverty is very wearing; it is a quasi-embryonic condition, through which
a man had better pass if he is to hold his later developments securely,
but like measles or scarlet fever he had better have it mildly and get it
over early.

No man is safe from losing every penny he has in the world, unless he has
had his facer.  How often do I not hear middle-aged women and quiet
family men say that they have no speculative tendency; _they_ never had
touched, and never would touch, any but the very soundest, best reputed
investments, and as for unlimited liability, oh dear! dear! and they
throw up their hands and eyes.

Whenever a person is heard to talk thus he may be recognised as the easy
prey of the first adventurer who comes across him; he will commonly,
indeed, wind up his discourse by saying that in spite of all his natural
caution, and his well knowing how foolish speculation is, yet there are
some investments which are called speculative but in reality are not so,
and he will pull out of his pocket the prospectus of a Cornish gold mine.
It is only on having actually lost money that one realises what an awful
thing the loss of it is, and finds out how easily it is lost by those who
venture out of the middle of the most beaten path.  Ernest had had his
facer, as he had had his attack of poverty, young, and sufficiently badly
for a sensible man to be little likely to forget it.  I can fancy few
pieces of good fortune greater than this as happening to any man,
provided, of course, that he is not damaged irretrievably.

So strongly do I feel on this subject that if I had my way I would have a
speculation master attached to every school.  The boys would be
encouraged to read the _Money Market Review_, the _Railway News_, and all
the best financial papers, and should establish a stock exchange amongst
themselves in which pence should stand as pounds.  Then let them see how
this making haste to get rich moneys out in actual practice.  There might
be a prize awarded by the head-master to the most prudent dealer, and the
boys who lost their money time after time should be dismissed.  Of course
if any boy proved to have a genius for speculation and made money--well
and good, let him speculate by all means.

If Universities were not the worst teachers in the world I should like to
see professorships of speculation established at Oxford and Cambridge.
When I reflect, however, that the only things worth doing which Oxford
and Cambridge can do well are cooking, cricket, rowing and games, of
which there is no professorship, I fear that the establishment of a
professorial chair would end in teaching young men neither how to
speculate, nor how not to speculate, but would simply turn them out as
bad speculators.

I heard of one case in which a father actually carried my idea into
practice.  He wanted his son to learn how little confidence was to be
placed in glowing prospectuses and flaming articles, and found him five
hundred pounds which he was to invest according to his lights.  The
father expected he would lose the money; but it did not turn out so in
practice, for the boy took so much pains and played so cautiously that
the money kept growing and growing till the father took it away again,
increment and all--as he was pleased to say, in self defence.

I had made my own mistakes with money about the year 1846, when everyone
else was making them.  For a few years I had been so scared and had
suffered so severely, that when (owing to the good advice of the broker
who had advised my father and grandfather before me) I came out in the
end a winner and not a loser, I played no more pranks, but kept
henceforward as nearly in the middle of the middle rut as I could.  I
tried in fact to keep my money rather than to make more of it.  I had
done with Ernest's money as with my own--that is to say I had let it
alone after investing it in Midland ordinary stock according to Miss
Pontifex's instructions.  No amount of trouble would have been likely to
have increased my godson's estate one half so much as it had increased
without my taking any trouble at all.

Midland stock at the end of August 1850, when I sold out Miss Pontifex's
debentures, stood at 32 pounds per 100 pounds.  I invested the whole of
Ernest's 15,000 pounds at this price, and did not change the investment
till a few months before the time of which I have been writing
lately--that is to say until September 1861.  I then sold at 129 pounds
per share and invested in London and North-Western ordinary stock, which
I was advised was more likely to rise than Midlands now were.  I bought
the London and North-Western stock at 93 pounds per 100 pounds, and my
godson now in 1882 still holds it.

The original 15,000 pounds had increased in eleven years to over 60,000
pounds; the accumulated interest, which, of course, I had re-invested,
had come to about 10,000 pounds more, so that Ernest was then worth over
70,000 pounds.  At present he is worth nearly double that sum, and all as
the result of leaving well alone.

Large as his property now was, it ought to be increased still further
during the year and a half that remained of his minority, so that on
coming of age he ought to have an income of at least 3500 pounds a year.

I wished him to understand book-keeping by double entry.  I had myself as
a young man been compelled to master this not very difficult art; having
acquired it, I have become enamoured of it, and consider it the most
necessary branch of any young man's education after reading and writing.
I was determined, therefore, that Ernest should master it, and proposed
that he should become my steward, book-keeper, and the manager of my
hoardings, for so I called the sum which my ledger showed to have
accumulated from 15,000 to 70,000 pounds.  I told him I was going to
begin to spend the income as soon as it had amounted up to 80,000 pounds.

A few days after Ernest's discovery that he was still a bachelor, while
he was still at the very beginning of the honeymoon, as it were, of his
renewed unmarried life, I broached my scheme, desired him to give up his
shop, and offered him 300 pounds a year for managing (so far indeed as it
required any managing) his own property.  This 300 pounds a year, I need
hardly say, I made him charge to the estate.

If anything had been wanting to complete his happiness it was this.  Here,
within three or four days he found himself freed from one of the most
hideous, hopeless _liaisons_ imaginable, and at the same time raised from
a life of almost squalor to the enjoyment of what would to him be a
handsome income.

"A pound a week," he thought, "for Ellen, and the rest for myself."

"No," said I, "we will charge Ellen's pound a week to the estate also.
You must have a clear 300 pounds for yourself."

I fixed upon this sum, because it was the one which Mr Disraeli gave
Coningsby when Coningsby was at the lowest ebb of his fortunes.  Mr
Disraeli evidently thought 300 pounds a year the smallest sum on which
Coningsby could be expected to live, and make the two ends meet; with
this, however, he thought his hero could manage to get along for a year
or two.  In 1862, of which I am now writing, prices had risen, though not
so much as they have since done; on the other hand Ernest had had less
expensive antecedents than Coningsby, so on the whole I thought 300
pounds a year would be about the right thing for him.

 Following her breakdown, Ellen once again takes the pledge of abstinence. After she is delivered of a second child, a boy, her relationship with Ernest again improves, but she no longer commands Ernest's respect and increasingly resents his expectations of her. When Ellen relapses into drinking again, Ernest's lack of respect turns into hatred. He would take the children with him to America where he possessed of sufficient means, nerve, and energy. Ernest's physical and mental condition is such, however, that he can only grimly resolve to shoulder his burden in full expectation of being reduced to penury. A chance encounter with John, the coachman, however, unexpectedly brings about a sudden reversal of fortune to Ernest. John, who is taken to Overton's living quarters by Ernest, tells of having married Ellen shortly after they left the service of Ernest's parents. Ellen, who began to drink secretly at Battersby, continued her tippling as the wife of John. Her conduct as John's wife was, in fact, much the same as it was when she lived with Ernest: near perfect when sober, but impossibly irresponsible when not. Upon hearing John's story, Overton and Ernest both experience intense relief, for Ellen's previous marriage invalidates her marriage contract with Ernest. Overton immediately arranges for Ellen to agree to a separation from Ernest and places the children in the care of his own laundress. He also hires Ernest as his secretary, for he believes that Ernest, now twenty-six years old, has suffered enough. As Overton's secretary, Ernest will, unknown to himself, be engaged to manage the fortune which he is to receive in two years' time.

