Home > Authors Index > Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch > Lady Good-for-Nothing > This page
Lady Good-for-Nothing, a novel by Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch |
||
Book 1. Port Nassau - Chapter 6. Parenthetical--Of The Family Of Vyell |
||
| < Previous |
Table of content |
Next > |
|
________________________________________________
_ BOOK I. PORT NASSAU CHAPTER VI. PARENTHETICAL--OF THE FAMILY OF VYELL Captain Oliver Vyell, as we have seen, set store upon pedigree: and here, as well in compliment to him as to make our story clearer, we will interrupt it with a brief account of his family and descent. The tomb of Sir Thomas Vyell, second Baronet, at whose house of Carwithiel in Cornwall our Collector spent some years of his boyhood, may yet be seen in the church of that parish, in the family transept. It bears the coat of the Vyells (gules, a fesse raguly argent) with no less than twenty-four quarterings: for an Odo of the name had fought on the winning side at Hastings, and his descendants, settling in the West, had held estates there and been people of importance ever since. The Wars of the Roses, to be sure, had left them under a cloud, shorn of the most of their wealth and a great part of their lands. Yet they kept themselves afloat (if this riot of metaphor may be pardoned) and their heads moderately high, until Sir William, the first Baronet, by developing certain tin mines on his estate and working them by new processes, set up the family fortunes once more. His son, Sir Thomas, steadily bettered them. A contemporary narrative describes him as "chief of a very good Cornish family, with a very good estate. His marrying a grand-daughter of the Lord Protector (Oliver) first recommended him to King William, who at the Revolution made him Commissioner of the Excise and some years after Governor of the Post Office. . . . The Queen, by reason of his great capacity and honesty, hath continued him in the office of Postmaster. He is a gentleman of a sweet, easy, affable disposition--a handsome man, of middle stature, towards forty years old." This was written in 1713. Sir Thomas died in 1726, of the smallpox, having issue (by his one wife, who survived him but a few years) seven sons and three daughters. 1. Thomas, the third Baronet: of whom anon. 2. William, who became a Senior Student of Christ Church, Oxford, a page to Queen Mary, and a Fellow of the Royal Society. A memoir of the time preserves him for us as "a tall sanguineman, with a merry eye and talkative in his cups." He married a Walpole, but his children died young. 3. John, who, going on a diplomatic mission to Hamburg, took a fever and died there, unmarried. 4. Henry, the father of our Collector. He married Jane, second daughter of the Marquis of Lomond; increased his wealth in Bengal as governor of the East India Company's Factory, and while yet increasing it, died at Calcutta in 1728. His children were two sons, Oliver and Henry, with both of whom our story deals. 5. Algernon, who went to Jesus College, Cambridge, became a Fellow there, practised severe parsimony, and dying unmarried in 1742, had his eyes closed by his college gyp and weighted with two penny pieces--the only coins found in his breeches pocket. He left his very considerable savings to young Oliver, whom he had never seen. 6. Frederick Penwarne, barrister-at-law. We shall have something to do with him. 7. Roger, who traded at Calcutta and making an expedition to the Persian Gulf, was killed there in a chance affray with some Arabs. 8. Anne, who married Sackville. 9. Frances Elizabeth, who married Pelham. 10. Arabella, whose affections went astray upon a young Cornish yeoman. Her family interfering, the match was broken off and she died unmarried.
This Thomas--a dry, peevish man, averse from country pursuits, penurious and incurably suspicious of all his fellow-men--now occupied after a fashion and with fair diligence that place in public affairs from which his father had, on approach of age, withdrawn. He sat in Parliament for the family borough of St. Michael, and by family influence had risen to be a Lord of the Admiralty. He had married Lady Caroline Pett, a daughter of the first Earl of Portlemouth, and the pair kept house in Arlington Street, where during the session they entertained with a frugality against which Lady Caroline fought in vain. They were known (and she was aware of it) as "Pett and Petty," and her life was embittered by the discovery, made too late, that her husband was in every sense a mean man, who would never rise and never understand why not, while he nursed an irrational grudge against her for having presented him with a daughter and then ceased from child-bearing. Unless she repented and procured him a male heir, the baronetcy would come to him only to pass at his death to young Oliver; and the couple, who spent all the Parliamentary recesses at Carwithiel because Mr. Thomas found it cheap, bore no goodwill to that young gentleman. He _en revanche_ supplied them with abundant food for censure, being wilful from the first, and given in those early years to consorting with stable-boys and picking up their manners and modes of speech. The uncle and aunt alleged--and indeed it was obvious--that the unruly boys passed on the infection to Miss Diana. Miss Diana never accompanied her parents to London, but had grown up from the first at Carwithiel--again because Mr. Thomas found it cheap. In this atmosphere of stable slang, surrounded by a sort of protective outer aura in their grandparents' godliness, the three children grew up: mischievous indeed and without rein, but by no means vicious. Their first separation came in 1726 when Master Oliver, now rising ten, left for London, to be entered at Westminster School. Harry was to follow him; and did, in a twelve-month's time; but just before this happened, in Oliver's summer holidays. Sir Thomas took the smallpox and died and went to his tomb in the Carwithiel transept. Harry took it too; but pulled through, not much disfigured. Oliver and Diana escaped. The boys, to whom their grandfather--so far as they regarded him at all--had mainly presented himself as a benevolent old proser, were surprised to find that they sincerely regretted him; and the events of the next few weeks threw up his merits (now that the time was past for rewarding them) into a sharp light which memory overarched with a halo. Tenderly into that halo dissolved his trivial faults--his trick, for example, of snoring between the courses at dinner, or of awaking and pulling his fingers till they cracked with a distressing sound. These and other small frailties were forgotten as the new Sir Thomas and his spouse took possession and proceeded in a few weeks to turn the place inside out, dismissing five of the stable-boys, cutting down the garden staff by one-third, and carrying havoc into the housekeeper's apartments, the dairy, the still-room. In these dismissals I have no doubt that Sir Thomas and Lady Caroline hit (as justice is done in this world) upon the chief blackguards. But the two boys, asking one another why So-and-so had been marked down while This-other had been spared, and observing that the So-and-so's included an overbalancing number of their own cronies, found malice in the discrimination, and a malice directed with intent upon themselves. Young Oliver, as soon as Harry was convalescent, discussed this vehemently with him. Harry, weak with illness, took it passively. He was destined for the Navy. To him already the sea meant everything: as a child of three, on his voyage home in the _Mogul_ East Indiaman, he had caught the infection of it; on it, as offering the only career fit for a grown man, his young thoughts brooded, and these annoyances were to him but as chimney-pots and pantiles falling about the heads of folks ashore. But he agreed that Di's conduct needed explaining. She had taken a demure turn, and was not remonstrating with her parents as she ought--not playing fair, in short. "It must be pretty difficult for her," said Harry. "I don't see," said Oliver.
Lady Jane returned to England, to live in decent affluence at Bath; and at Bath, of course, Oliver and Harry spent their subsequent holidays, while their Uncle Frederick continued by occasional dinners and gifts of pocket money, by outings down the river to Greenwich, by seats at the theatre or at state shows and pageants, to mitigate the rigours of school. Had it occurred to Oliver Vyell in later life to set down his "Reflections" in the style of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, he might have begun them in some such words as these: "From my mother, Lady Jane Vyell, I learned to be proud of good birth, to esteem myself a gentleman, and to regulate my actions by a code proper to my station in life. This code she reconciled with the Gospels, and indeed, she rested it on the rock of Holy Scripture. From my Uncle Frederick I learned that self-interest was the key of life; that the teachings of the priest-hood were more or less conscious humbug; that all men could be bought; that their god was vanity, and the Great Revolution the noblest event in English history. . . ." The sane infusion of Father Neptune in Master Harry's blood preserved him from these doctrines, and before long indeed removed him out of the way of hearing them. Soon after his fifteenth birthday he sailed to learn his profession shipping (by a fiction of the service), as "cabin boy" under his mother's brother. Lord Robert Soules, then commanding the _Merope_ frigate. Oliver proceeded to Christ Church, Oxford, and thence (without waiting for a degree) to make the Grand Tour; in the course of which and in company with his cousin, Dick Pelham, and a Mr. Batty Langton, a Christ Church friend, he visited Florence, Rome, Naples, Athens, and Constantinople, returning through Rome again and by way of Venice, Switzerland, Paris. He reached home to find that his mother, who believed in keeping young men employed, had procured him a cornetcy in Lord Lomond's Troop of Horse. He was now in possession of an ample fortune. He would certainly succeed to the baronetcy, and to the Vyell acres, which were mostly entailed. But the grave itself could not give lessons in greed to a true Whig family of that period. Lady Jane had it in her blood, every tradition of it. Her son (though within a few months he rose to command of a troop) detested all military routine save active service. He despised the triumphs of the Senate. To keep him out of mischief--or, rather, as you shall hear, to extricate him from it--the good dame made application to the Duke of Newcastle; and so in the year 1737, at the age of twenty-one, Captain Oliver Vyell was appointed to the lucrative post of Collector to the port of Boston. He had held it, now, for close upon seven years. _ |
||