Charles Lever - Davenport Dunn, a Man of Our Day. Volume 1

“Well, you ‘ll see. I ‘ll beat every cover for you!” said she, laughing; “and Mrs. Hawksey desires to have it back, for there is something about the Alderman having said or done – I don’t know what or where.”

“How I hate the very name of an Alderman!” said Kellett, peevishly; “regular vagabonds, with gilt coaches and red cloaks, running about prating of taxes and the pipe-water! The devil a thing I feel harder to bear in my poverty than to think you ‘re a visiting governess in an Alderman’s family. Paul Kellett’s daughter a visiting governess!”

“And very proud am I to be thought equal to the charge,” said she, resolutely; “not to say how grateful to you for having enabled me to undertake it.”

“Myself in the Customs is nothing; that I’d put up with. Many a reduced gentleman did the same. Sam Crozier was a marker at a billiard-table in Tralee, and Ennis Magrath was an overseer on the very road he used to drive his four-in-hand. ‘Many a time,’ says he, ‘I cursed that fresh-broken stone, but I never thought I ‘d be measuring it!’ ‘T is the Encumbered Court has brought us all down, Bella, and there’s no disgrace in being ruined with thousands of others. Just begin with the sales of estates, and tell us who is next for sentence. God forgive me, but I feel a kind of pleasure in hearing that we ‘re all swamped together.”

The girl smiled as though the remark were merely uttered in levity and deserved no more serious notice; but a faint sigh, which she could not repress, betrayed the sorrow with which she had heard it.

She opened the paper and glanced at its contents. They were as varied and multifarious as are usually to be found in weekly “channels of information.” What struck her, however, most was the fact that, turn where she would, the name of Davenport Dunn was ever conspicuous. Sales of property displayed him as the chief creditor or petitioner; charities paraded him as the first among the benevolent; Joint-stock companies exhibited him as their managing director; mines, and railroads, and telegraph companies, harbor committees, and boards of all kinds, gave him the honors of large type; while in the fashionable intelligence from abroad, his arrivals and departures were duly chronicled, and a letter of our own correspondent from Venice communicated the details of a farewell dinner given him, with a “Lord” in the chair, by a number of those who had so frequently partaken of his splendid hospitalities while he resided in that city.

“Well – well – well!” said Kellett, with a pause between each exclamation, “this is more than I can bear. Old Jerry Dunn’s son, – the brat of a boy I remember in the Charter’ School! He used to be sent at Christmas time up to Ely Place, when my father was in town, to get five shillings for a Christmas-box; and I mind well the day he was asked to stay and dine with my sister Matty and myself, and he taught us a new game with six little bits of sticks; how we were to do something, I forget what, – but I know how it ended, – he won every sixpence we had. Matty had half a guinea in gold and some tenpenny pieces, and I had, I think, about fifteen shillings, and sorrow a rap he left us; and, worse still, I mortgaged my school maps, and got a severe thrashing for having lost them from Old White in Jervas Street; and poor Matty’s doll was confiscated in the same way, and carried off with a debt of three-and-fourpence on her head. God forgive him, but he gave us a sorrowful night, for we cried till daybreak.”

“And did you like him as a playfellow?” asked she.

“Now, that’s the strangest thing of all,” said Kellett, smiling. “Neither Matty nor myself liked him; but he got a kind of influence over us that was downright fascination. No matter what we thought of doing before he came, when he once set foot in the room everything followed his dictation. It was n’t that he was overbearing or tyrannical in the least; just as little could you say that he was insinuating or nattering; but somehow, by a kind of instinct, we fell into his ways, and worked out all his suggestions just as if we were mere agents of his will. Resistance or opposition we never dreamed of while he was present; but after he was gone away, once or twice there came the thought that there was something very like slavery in all this submission, and we began to concert how we might throw off the yoke.

“‘I won’t play toll-bar any more,’ said I, resolutely; ‘all my pocket-money is sure to go before it is over.’

“‘And I,’ said Matty, ‘won’t have poor “Mopsy” tried for a murder again; every time she’s hanged, some of the wax comes off her neck.’”

“We encouraged each other vigorously in these resolves; but before he was half an hour in the house ‘Mopsy’ had undergone the last sentence of the law, and I was insolvent.”

“What a clever rogue he must have been!” said Bella, laughing.

“Was n’t he clever!” exclaimed Kellett. “You could not say how, – nobody could say how, – but he saw everything the moment he came into a new place, and marked every one’s face, and knew, besides, the impression he made on them, just as if he was familiar with them for years.”

“Did you continue to associate with him as you grew up?” asked she.

“No; we only knew each other as children. There was a distressing thing – a very distressing thing – occurred one day; I’m sure to this very hour I think of it with sorrow and shame, for I can’t believe he had any blame in it. We were playing in a room next my father’s study, and running every now and then into the study; and there was an old-fashioned penknife – a family relic, with a long bloodstone handle – lying on the table; and when the play was over, and Davy, as we called him, had gone home, this was missing. There was a search made for it high and low, for my father set great value on it. It was his great-great-grandmother’s, I believe; at all events, no one ever set eyes on it afterwards, and nothing would persuade my father but that Davy stole it! Of course he never told us that he thought so, but the servant did, and Matty and myself cried two nights and a day over it, and got really sick.

“I remember well; I was working by myself in the garden, Matty was ill and in bed, when I saw a tall old man, dressed like a country shopkeeper, shown into the back parlor, where my father was sitting. There was a bit of the window open, and I could hear that high words were passing between them, and, as I thought, my father getting the worst of it; for the old fellow kept repeating, ‘You ‘ll rue it, Mister Kellett, – you ‘ll rue it yet!’ And then my father said, ‘Give him a good horsewhipping, Dunn; take my advice, and you ‘ll spare yourself some sorrow, and save him from even worse hereafter.’ I ‘ll never forget the old fellow’s face as he turned to leave the room. ‘Davy will live to pay you off for this,’ said he; ‘and if you ‘re not to the fore, it will be your children, or your children’s children, will have to ‘quit the debt!’

“We never saw Davy from that hour; indeed, we were strictly forbidden ever to utter his name; and it was only when alone together, that Matty and I would venture to talk of him, and cry over – and many a time we did – the happy days when we had him for our playfellow. There was a species of martyrdom now, too, in his fate, that endeared him the more to our memories; every play he had invented, every spot he was fond of, every toy he liked, were hallowed to our minds like relics. At last poor Matty and I could bear it no longer, and we sat down and wrote a long letter to Davy, assuring him of our fullest confidence in his honor, and our broken-heartedness at separation from him. We inveighed stoutly against parental tyranny, and declared ourselves ready for open rebellion, if he, that was never deficient in a device, could only point out the road. We bribed a stable-boy, with all our conjoined resources of pocket-money, to convey the epistle, and it came back next morning to my father, enclosed in one from Davy himself, stating that he could never countenance acts of disobedience, or be any party to a system by which children should deceive their parents. I was sent off to a boarding-school the same week, and poor Matty committed to the charge of Miss Morse, a vinegar-faced old maid, that poisoned the eight best years of her life!”