Parties were running very high, and there were scurrilous
papers about, which my father perfectly abhorred;
and one day at dinner, when declaiming against something
he had seen, he laid down strict commands that none
should be brought into the house. Then, glancing
at Clarence, something possessed him to say, ’You
have not been buying any.’
‘No, sir,’ Clarence answered; but a few
minutes later, when we were alone together, the others
having left him to help me upstairs, he exclaimed,
’Edward, what is to be done? I didn’t
buy it; but there is one of those papers in my great-coat
pocket. Pollard threw it on my desk; and there
was something in it that I thought would amuse you.’
‘Oh! why didn’t you say so?’
’There I am again! I simply could not,
with his eye on me! Miserable being that I
am! Oh, where is the spirit of ghostly strength?’
‘Helping you now to take it to papa in the study
and explain!’ I cried; but the struggle in
that tall fellow was as if he had been seven years
old instead of seventeen, ere he put his hand over
his face and gave me his arm to come out into the
hall, fetch the paper, and make his confession.
Alas! we were too late. The coat had been
moved, the paper had fallen out; and there stood my
mother with it in her hand, looking at Clarence with
an awful stony face of mute grief and reproach, while
he stammered forth what he had said before, and that
he was about to give it to my father. She turned
away, bitterly, contemptuously indignant and incredulous;
and my corroborations only served to give both her
and my father a certain dread of Clarence’s
influence over me, as though I had been either deceived
or induced to back him in deceiving them. The
unlucky incident plunged him back into the depths,
just as he had begun to emerge. Slight as it
was, it was no trifle to him, in spite of Griffith’s
exclamation, ’How absurd! Is a fellow to
be bound to give an account of everything he looks
at as if he were six years old? Catch me letting
my mother pry into my pockets! But you are
too meek, Bill; you perfectly invite them to make a
row about nothing!’
’For he that needs five thousand pound to live
Is full as poor as he that needs but five.
But if thy son can make ten pound his measure,
Then all thou addest may be called his treasure.’
George Herbert.
It was in the spring of 1829 that my father received
a lawyer’s letter announcing the death of James
Winslow, Esquire, of Chantry House, Earlscombe, and
inviting him, as heir-at-law, to be present at the
funeral and opening of the will. The surprise
to us all was great. Even my mother had hardly
heard of Chantry House itself, far less as a possible
inheritance; and she had only once seen James Winslow.
He was the last of the elder branch of the family,
