CHAPTER X.
THE RICH MR. LOBYER.
Before the season was over, Lady Cecil enjoyed the honour of an introduction to Florence Crawford's wealthy admirer. Mr. Thomas Lobyer, of Pevenshall Place, Yorkshire, and of the Lobyer Mills in the cotton country. The dowager and her niece were amongst the Sunday-evening droppers-in at the Fountains within a week of Mr. O'Boyneville's declaration; and it was on that occasion that Cecil beheld her friend's admirer for the first time. The deeply smitten Lobyer had made good use of the Sunday-evening privilege, and every Sabbath found him lounging with a lumbering gait and creaking footsteps in the painter's pretty drawing-rooms, or lurking darkly in the dimmer light of the conservatories, where he held mysterious converse with the cockatoos. It was not that he so especially affected the society of cockatoos; but he was a young man who always seemed restless and uneasy if deprived of the companionship of some animal. He carried a toy-terrier in his pocket when he made morning calls, and caressed the miniature brute stealthily in the frequent pauses of the conversation. He was dull and embarrassed in the presence of an accomplished young lady, but he got on admirably with a ferret or a weasel; and there were people who said he could have made himself at home with a boa-constrictor. The cry of "Rats!" stirred him with as profound a thrill of emotion as that which vibrates through the frame of a thoroughbred Dandy Dinmont, or agitates the bosom of a sharp young bull-terrier.
He was fond of his horses, and still more fond of his dogs; but the animals he affected were not the mighty natives of Newfoundland or the noble denizens of Mount St. Bernard. The dogs which Mr. Lobyer purchased at high prices from crack dog-fanciers were generally accomplished ratters, and miniature specimens of the bull-dog tribe, renowned for their tendency to attach themselves to the calves of unoffending legs, and their high-bred objection to being severed from their prey.
As the uncertain temper and occasional restlessness of his favourite terriers rendered it rather dangerous to take them to evening parties, Mr. Lobyer was always glad to fall back upon the society of any animal attached to the household in which he visited. He would retire into a dusky corner, and stir up the inhabitants of an aquarium with the point of his gold pencil, in the apparent hope of getting up intimate relations with a jelly-fish. He would beguile the golden inmates of a crystal globe by tearing up minute fragments of one of his visiting-cards, and passing them off for such edible morsels as unwise benevolence offers to gold-fish. His intercourse with the inferior animals was not necessarily of a friendly order. His hands were disfigured by the teeth of his dogs, goaded into desperation by his playful sallies; for it was sometimes his humour to worry the distinguished ratters very much as the distinguished ratters worried the rats.
In sorrowful earnest, Mr. Lobyer was not a nice young man. He was rich; and there were many people who would have been very glad to think him nice, but who were fain to abandon the attempt, and to demand tribute of admiration for their favourite on other and loftier grounds. And this was very easily done. There is no cub so brutish, no lout so clumsy, uncouth, and insolent, who cannot be made to pass for a rough diamond. Society—especially represented by matrons with marriageable daughters—decided that Mr. Lobyer was a rough diamond, a dear good candid creature, who blurted out every thing he thought. He was an original character; and his unpolished manners were quite a relief after the fade graces and courtesies of over-educated young diplomatists and amateur littérateurs. This was what people said of Mr. Lobyer during the two seasons in which he exhibited his clumsy figure and his bullet head in the assemblies of second rate fashion—not the crême de la crême, but that excellent milk from whose surface a very decent layer of cream may be gathered in a second skimming—and society smiled upon the wealthiest bachelor from Cottonopolis. He was neither handsome nor clever; he was neither amiable nor well-bred; but he was the wealthiest available bachelor in the circles which he adorned.
The gold-worshippers, who saw in Mr. Lobyer the genius of commercial prosperity, were anxious to make the best of their idol. He had feminine admirers who called him handsome; he had masculine allies who declared that he was clever. His features were regular, but cast in that heavy mould which seems better adapted to a good-looking animal than a handsome man. He had big brown eyes; but so has a Newfoundland dog; and the eyes of an intelligent dog possess a beauty of expression which was utterly wanting in the round Vandyke-brown orbs of Thomas Lobyer. His complexion was dark and sallow—pale always—but capable of assuming an unpleasant livid whiteness when he was very angry. The physiognomists were tolerably unanimous as to the character of his thick red lips and sloping chin; but the fair denizens of the western suburbs were equally unanimous in their admiration of his carefully-trained moustache, and the luxuriant beard amidst which he was wont to entangle his fingers when temporarily excluded from animal society.
He dressed well, for he had just sufficient good taste to know that his taste was bad, and he delivered himself an unreasoning block of humanity into the hand of the most expensive West-end tailor.
"I don't pretend to know much about the build of the thing," he said, when complimented on the fashion of a new overcoat; "but my fellow charges me what he likes, and he gets a cheque for his account by return of post. So I suppose I'm a good customer."
Mr. Lobyer had a lodging in Jermyn Street—a pied-à-terre, he called it. And it is to be set down to his credit that his French would have inflicted no outrage on ears accustomed to the pure accents of the Français. The days are past in which commercial wealth and ignorance have gone hand in hand.
The parvenu of to-day is generally an elegant and highly-accomplished gentleman, who has seen every thing that is to be seen, and been taught every thing that an expensive course of education can teach. Mr. Lobyer had played cricket with young lordlings on the meads of Eaton—he had been plucked at Oxford—he had scampered over Europe, and improved his mind in the society of the crocodiles of the Nile—he had steeped himself to the lips in the worst dissipations of Paris, and had given as much pain and anxiety to a very worthy father as can well be concentrated in the declining years of a parent's life.
There were scandal-mongers in the cotton country who said that Thomas Lobyer junior had broken the heart of Thomas Lobyer senior. He was an only son—an only child; and the wealthy manufacturer had beguiled the dull routine of his business life by a splendid dream during the years of his son's boyhood. If the boy had been a prince his education could scarcely have been more carefully supervised, or paid for with a more lavish hand. But conscientious tutors washed their hands of the profitable pupil when they found that he was stupid and arrogant, profligate and hypocritical, and that he was gifted with a bull-dog obstinacy which rendered all efforts at correction hopeless.
The time came before the death of his father, when there was no alternative but to let him go his own way.
"I might disinherit you, and leave my money to an hospital," wrote the old man in the last letter he ever addressed to his son; "and God knows you have given me enough provocation to do so. But if I could forget that you are the child of the wife I loved, I should still be deterred from such a step by the fear of its consequences. If you have done so badly with all the advantages of wealth, what would become of you exposed to the temptations of poverty? Your grandfather began life as a workhouse apprentice—there are plenty of people in Manchester who know all about him; but there wasn't a man in his native city who wasn't proud to shake him by the hand, or a woman who didn't point to him as an example to her sons."
Thomas Lobyer the elder died within a few weeks after the writing of this epistle; and his son who was giving a charming little dinner to some distinguished friends in the pavilion of the Hôtel Henri Quatre at St. Germains, while his father lay dying at Pevenshall, was summoned homeward by a telegram, and arrived to find himself sole master of the accumulated fruits of two industrious lives. The young man's acquaintances and neighbours, his agents and advisers, were loud in his praises during his brief residence at Pevenshall. It seemed as if the old story of Prince Henry's reform were going to be acted over again. Mr. Lobyer detained the lawyer who had made his father's will, and with that gentleman's assistance he entered into a searching investigation of his possessions. He, so dull to learn any thing appertaining to the graces of life,—he, so slow of intellect where the wisdom of sages or the harmonious numbers of poets were the subject of his study, proved himself a match for the keenest in all that affected his interests or touched his pocket. He, who had been so reckless in his extravagance while drawing on the resources of a generous father, astonished the family solicitor by the minuteness of his calculations, the sharp economy which prompted all the changes he made in his dead father's household, and the calm determination with which he announced that he should make a rule of only spending a third of his income during his bachelorhood.
"I don't wonder my father was always growling about my extravagance, considering the amount of money he contrived to get rid of here," said the amiable young man. "Two of the housemaids may go, and two of the grooms may go. One man will look after half-a-dozen horses in a livery-stable in London, and keep them in better condition than my horses are in; and one man can look after half-a-dozen here. I shall only come down in the hunting-season; and I don't want to pay lazy hulking fellows for gorging themselves with meat and making themselves dropsical with beer at my expense; and I don't want to pay young women for looking out of the windows and talking to them. In the gardens I shall not make any changes; but I must have an arrangement made with the fruiterers in the market-town by which the forcing houses may be made to pay their own expenses. When I marry and come to live here, I shall double the household, and build a new wing to the stables, for I like to see plenty of fellows, and horses and dogs, and that kind of thing, about a place; but for the present we must retrench, Mr. Gibson,—we must retrench."
Such was Mr. Lobyer. He came to London, and took his place in a certain circle of London society, with nothing to recommend him but a reputation for enormous wealth. There were those who remembered him in Paris, and who knew the manner in which he had completed his education in that brilliant capital. But if there went abroad the rumour that the millionaire's youth had been wild and foolish, feminine compassion and masculine generosity conspired to forget and ignore his early follies.
From a crowd of beautiful and intellectual women the Manchester man might have chosen the loveliest, and would have incurred small hazard of a refusal. There were women who scorned his money as utterly as they despised himself; but in the drawing-rooms of Tyburnia and Kensingtonia those women were few and far between. The value of wealth increases with the growing refinement of taste. The purest attributes of the human mind—the love of art, the worship of beauty, the keen sense of grace—combine to render intellectual man the slave of material prosperity. The gems of ancient art, the work of modern artists, the thoroughbred hack on which Beauty prances in the Row, the villa on Streatham Common or the cottage by Strawberry Hill, for whose shelter the soul of the retiring citizen yearns as the refuge of his declining age,—all command a higher price every year; and every year the steady march of intellect advances, and there are more connoisseurs to sigh for old pictures, more would-be patrons of modern art, more citizens whose cultivated sense of the beautiful inspires a yearning for villas on Streatham Common or cottages by Strawberry Hill, more ambitious middle-class belles who have seen from afar off the prancing of patrician Beauty's steeds, and who sigh for thoroughbred saddle-horses of their own.
Mr. Lobyer himself was unattractive; but in Mr. Lobyer's wealth there lurked the elements of all those costly treasures and refinements that make life beautiful. He was known to be stupid; and mercenary Beauty, jumping at a conclusion, decided that he was just the sort of person to submit himself unresistingly to the management of a wife. Under the wand of that enchantress, the dull figures in his banking-book might be transformed into the art-treasures of a second Grosvenor House, the gardens of a new Chatsworth, the stables of a Lord Stamford, a fairy boudoir which even the Empress Eugénie might approve, and jewels which the Duchess of Newcastle might admire and the Duke of Brunswick envy.
This was what portionless Beauty had in her mind when she smiled on Mr. Lobyer. Rich as he really was, the amount of his riches was doubled and trebled by the tongue of rumour. And there is really something interesting in boundless wealth, for its own sake. It is a kind of power; and there seems to be some slavish attribute inherent in the breast of man, which prompts him to fawn upon every species of power, from the physical force of a Ben Caunt to the intellectual supremacy of a Voltaire. A flavour of Monte Christo hovered about the person of Thomas Lobyer; and though he had never been known to say any thing worth listening to, or to do any thing worth recording, he was interesting nevertheless. The men who had borrowed money from him, or who thought they might some day have occasion to borrow money of him, said that there was "a stamp of power about the fellow, you know;" and there was "something racy even in his cubbishness, you know, for it isn't every fellow would have the pluck to be such a thoroughbred cub."
There were people who called Mr. Lobyer generous; and there always will be people who will call the giver of sumptuous dinners a noble and generous creature. The man who keeps a drag for his own pleasure, and allows his friends to ride upon the roof of it, is likely to be considered more or less their patron and benefactor, though their companionship is as indispensable to his triumph as the slaves who attend the chariot-wheels of an emperor are necessary to complete the glory of their master. Mr. Lobyer was as generous as the man who never stints the cost of his own pleasure; as mean as the man who grudges the outlay of a sixpence that is not spent for his own gratification.
This was the individual who, after inspiring alternate hope and despair in unnumbered breasts by the fickleness of his clumsy attentions, succumbed at last to the piquant charm of Florence Crawford's bright hair and tiny retrouseé nose.
She was insolent to him, and her insolence charmed him, for it surprised him, and stirred the dull stagnation of his brain with a sensation that was like pleasure. She laughed at him; and he, so keen in his perception of the weaknesses of better men than himself, was weak enough to think that she alone, of all the women he knew, was uninfluenced by any consideration of his wealth.
"The girls I meet make as much of me as if I were a sultan, and seem to be waiting for me to throw my handkerchief amongst 'em," said Mr. Lobyer. "I like that painter-fellow's girl, because she laughs in my face, and treats me as if I were a government clerk with a hundred and fifty pounds a-year. That's the sort of girl I call jolly."
The Sunday-evening visitors at the Fountains were not slow to perceive Florence Crawford's conquest. She was a coquette of the first water, and encouraged her loutish admirer by a persistent avoidance of him. If he hung over her piano, she rattled brilliantly through the shortest of valses du salon, or sang the briefest and crispest of her ballads, and had risen from the instrument and flitted away before Mr. Lobyer had made up his mind as to what he should say to her. If he worked his way to the sofa on which she was seated, or the open window by which she was standing, the lively Florence immediately became absorbed in confidential discourse with a feminine visitor, and intensely unconscious of Mr. Lobyer.
If Florence Crawford—anxious to marry this man for the sake of his money—had acted on the most profound knowledge of his character, she could scarcely have played her cards better. A dogged obstinacy of purpose was the ruling attribute of Thomas Lobyer's mind; and the coquettish trifling of a schoolgirl aroused that bull-dog characteristic as it had seldom been aroused before.
Miss Crawford was eager to know what Cecil Chudleigh thought of her new conquest. She was childish enough to be proud of having made such a conquest. She was weak enough to be flattered by the admiration of a man whose sole title to respect was summed up in the figures in his banking-book.
"What do you think of him, Cecil?" she asked her friend.
"You mean Mr. Lobyer?"
"Yes, of course."
"I don't think he is particularly agreeable, Flory. He seems to me to be rather stupid and awkward."
"Oh, but he's not stupid. I hear that he has a great deal of common-sense. He's rather good-looking, isn't he, Cecil?"
"I suppose he would be called so; but I don't admire his face. Oh, Flory, you surely cannot be interested in my opinion of him?"
"Why shouldn't I be interested in your opinion of him?" Flo echoed, peevishly. "He is good-looking, and well dressed, and—by no means stupid. He may be a little clumsy, perhaps; but I have seen heavy cavalry officers quite as clumsy, and in them clumsiness is considered distinguè. However, I won't talk to you about him any more, Cecil. You are as romantic as a girl in a novel."
Amongst the witnesses of Miss Crawford's triumph was one in whom the spectacle inspired despair. Philip Foley, the landscape-painter, privileged to join the miscellaneous crowd at the Fountains, looked on from the shadowy corner where he sat unnoticed and little known, and ground his strong white teeth as he watched the tactics of the coquette and the hopeless entanglement of the cub. His old friend Sigismund was near him; but Sigismund Smythe the novelist was better known to fame than Philip Foley the unsuccessful landscape-painter; and some people were eager to be introduced to Mr. Smythe, and liked to talk to him for five minutes or so, after which they were apt to retire disappointed.
"It's no use disguising the fact," the young man said plaintively; "I do not meet their views, and they don't hesitate to let me know that I'm a failure. I ought to be dark and swarthy, like Dumas; or tall, and thin, and wiry, and hook-nosed, and satanic. What would I not give to Madame Rachel if she would make me diabolical for ever! What recompense should I think too much for my tailor if he could build me a coat that would make me look like Mephistopheles! I know a literary man who is like Mephistopheles, and a very handsome fellow he is too; but he writes essays on political economy, and his demoniac appearance is of no use to him."
In spite of Mr. Lobyer, poor Philip contrived to speak to Florence before he left the Fountains.
"So you are going to be married, Miss Crawford?" he said.
"Who told you any thing so absurd?" cried Flo, with a disdainful little laugh.
"Every body tells me so."
"Then every body is wrong," she answered, with an airy toss of her head; "and even if every body were not as utterly absurd and incorrect as a stupid gossiping every body generally is, I don't see what right you have to catechise me, Mr. Foley."
"No; I forgot my place. I forgot that I was only here on sufferance. What has an unsuccessful painter in common with the daughter of the most popular of modern artists? And yet I have heard your father talk of his probation. I have heard him speak of the day when he went to Trafalgar Square, in a fever of hope and expectation, to find the picture he believed in, glimmering through the darkness of the octagon room, an unmeaning daub of red, and blue, and yellow."
"It is very good of you to remind me that papa was once a pauper," answered Florence haughtily; and before Philip could say any thing more, she had turned away from him to shake hands with some of her departing guests.
After this the young man watched in vain for any opportunity of addressing Florence Crawford. He saw the rooms grow empty, and waited with the dogged determination of outstaying the cub; but the cub made no sign of departure, though the last of the other guests had vanished, and though Flo, who sat in a listless attitude beside a stand of engravings, and yawned audibly more than once. The prince of the cotton country stood by her side, stolid and unabashed, pretending to be interested in the engravings, which she turned with careless hands, and glaring at Mr. Foley in the intervals of his conversation.
Florence yawned for the third time, and more audibly than before. Mr. Crawford, who had been walking up and down the room, with his hands in his pockets, staring absently at the pictures, and stopping before one of them every now and then to meditate, with bent head and moody brow roused himself suddenly from his reverie, and looked from the little group by the open portfolio to the spot where Philip Foley stood leaning against a low marble chimneypiece, glum and dejected of aspect.
"Come, young men," said the painter; "my daughter seems tired, so you had better bid her good-night, and come and smoke a cigar in my painting-room."
Florence rose and made a curtsey, which included both her admirers; but she did not seem to perceive Mr. Lobyer's out-stretched hand, nor did she deign to reward Philip for the empressement with which he flew to open the door for her as she passed out of the room. But when she was alone in her own room, sitting before her pretty dressing-table, and looking at herself dreamily in the glass as she removed the slender golden necklace and glittering locket from her neck, it was of Philip and not of Mr. Lobyer that she thought.
"What a nice fellow he would be if he were rich!" she said to herself. "How frank and brave he is! I never like him so much as when he is uncivil to me. And if I were quite a different sort of girl, I can fancy that it would be very nice to marry him, and live in lodgings, and take an interest in his painting. But what would become of me if I were to marry such a man?—I, who haven't the faintest idea of a pudding, and never could sew a button on one of my muslin sleeves without spoiling half-a-dozen needles, and making myself like a murderer with blood. I never could marry a poor man after the things I've said. I can fancy how Lucy Chamberlayne, and those Verner girls, and Mary Masters, and all the girls who know me, would laugh. No, the day is past for that sort of thing: and as my heart is so free that I don't even know whether I've got a heart, and as Mr. Lobyer is by no means bad-looking, and as papa seems to like him—or, at any rate, doesn't seem to dislike him,—I suppose it is my fate to be mistress of Pevenshall."