PAGE 20
The Fatal Boots
by
“She has money, has she?”
“Eighty thousand pounds, and twenty thousand for each of her children. I know it FOR A FACT,” said the strange gentleman. “I am in the law, and we of our faith, you know, know pretty well what the great families amongst us are worth.”
“Who was Mr. Manasseh?” said I.
“A man of enormous wealth–a tobacco-merchant–West Indies; a fellow of no birth, however; and who, between ourselves, married a woman that is not much better than she should be. My dear sir,” whispered he, “she is always in love. Now it is with that Captain Dobble; last week it was somebody else–and it may be you next week, if–ha! ha! ha!–you are disposed to enter the lists. I wouldn’t, for MY part, have the woman with twice her money.”
What did it matter to me whether the woman was good or not, provided she was rich? My course was quite clear. I told Dobble all that this gentleman had informed me, and being a pretty good hand at making a story, I made the widow appear SO bad, that the poor fellow was quite frightened, and fairly quitted the field. Ha! ha! I’m dashed if I did not make him believe that Mrs. Manasseh had MURDERED her last husband.
I played my game so well, thanks to the information that my friend the lawyer had given me, that in a month I had got the widow to show a most decided partiality for me. I sat by her at dinner, I drank with her at the “Wells”–I rode with her, I danced with her, and at a picnic to Kenilworth, where we drank a good deal of champagne, I actually popped the question, and was accepted. In another month, Robert Stubbs, Esq., led to the altar, Leah, widow of the late Z. Manasseh, Esq., of St. Kitt’s!
*****
We drove up to London in her comfortable chariot: the children and servants following in a post-chaise. I paid, of course, for everything; and until our house in Berkeley Square was painted, we stopped at “Stevens’s Hotel.”
*****
My own estate had been sold, and the money was lying at a bank in the City. About three days after our arrival, as we took our breakfast in the hotel, previous to a visit to Mrs. Stubbs’s banker, where certain little transfers were to be made, a gentleman was introduced, who, I saw at a glance, was of my wife’s persuasion.
He looked at Mrs. Stubbs, and made a bow. “Perhaps it will be convenient to you to pay this little bill, one hundred and fifty-two pounds?”
“My love,” says she, “will you pay this–it is a trifle which I had really forgotten?”
“My soul!” said I, “I have really not the money in the house.”
“Vel, denn, Captain Shtubbsh,” says he, “I must do my duty–and arrest you–here is the writ! Tom, keep the door?” My wife fainted–the children screamed, and I fancy my condition as I was obliged to march off to a spunging-house along with a horrid sheriff’s officer?
OCTOBER.–MARS AND VENUS IN OPPOSITION.
I shall not describe my feelings when I found myself in a cage in Cursitor Street, instead of that fine house in Berkeley Square, which was to have been mine as the husband of Mrs. Manasseh. What a place!–in an odious, dismal street leading from Chancery Lane. A hideous Jew boy opened the second of three doors and shut it when Mr. Nabb and I (almost fainting) had entered; then he opened the third door, and then I was introduced to a filthy place called a coffee-room, which I exchanged for the solitary comfort of a little dingy back-parlor, where I was left for a while to brood over my miserable fate. Fancy the change between this and Berkeley Square! Was I, after all my pains, and cleverness, and perseverance, cheated at last? Had this Mrs. Manasseh been imposing upon me, and were the words of the wretch I met at the table-d’hote at Leamington only meant to mislead me and take me in? I determined to send for my wife, and know the whole truth. I saw at once that I had been the victim of an infernal plot, and that the carriage, the house in town, the West India fortune, were only so many lies which I had blindly believed. It was true that the debt was but a hundred and fifty pounds; and I had two thousand at my bankers’. But was the loss of HER 80,000L. nothing? Was the destruction of my hopes nothing? The accursed addition to my family of a Jewish wife and three Jewish children, nothing? And all these I was to support out of my two thousand pounds. I had better have stopped at home with my mamma and sisters, whom I really did love, and who produced me eighty pounds a year.