TEMPLE BAR.

NOVEMBER 1861.

TH

The Seven Sons of Mammon.

A STORY.

BY GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA.

CHAPTER XXIX.

THE FEET OF CLAỶ.

HE walls of Beryl Court, like those of Balclutha, were desolate. That feu d'enfer at Sebastopol, of which Menschikoff wrote such rueful accounts to his Emperor, was a mere popgun cannonade compared with the devastating bombardment of Bankruptcy. A fiat from Basinghall Street is like a trumpet, blowing down the walls of Jericho, commercial and financial, in an instant. No pantomimic change that Farley or Bradwell ever dreamt of is half so rapid as that which takes place when a great merchant's house is turned out of windows. 'Tis the old story of Aladdin's palace over again. The inestimable old, albeit rusty, lamp has been incautiously exchanged-beware of people who cry things in the street for a bran-new, tawdry, utterly worthless affair; and, presto, away goes palace, and down comes Aladdin, like Humpty Dumpty from the top of his wall.

It was speedily manifest that not all the king's horses nor all the king's men could ever set Sir Jasper Goldthorpe up again. His fall had been too violent; the Smash was too great. A wise man has said, that the success of the wicked resembles only the progress of some wretch urged towards the summit of the Tarpeian rock to be ruinously flung therefrom. I leave for the moment the question of Mammon's wickedness or virtue in abeyance. I only look at him as he lies, bleeding, mangled, crushed out of all solvent semblance, at the bottom of the precipice, to the brink of which he clomb so arrogantly.

Where Mammon had been only yesterday absolute,-supreme, wellnigh, in his earthly way, and among his earthly vassals omnipotent,—a

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Messenger in Bankruptcy now held undisputed sway. The Emperor was nowhere. He had been beaten; he had abdicated; his throne was vacant. The Messenger was the Provisional Government. He appointed a provisional ministry, and took provisional command of the remaining finances. Le roi était mort; but the kingly line was extinct, and there was no new sovereign to shout "Vive le roi!" for. The Messenger in Bankruptcy was a pleasant man in a Marseilles waistcoat, and with a bald pate so polished, that when he took off his hat the birds might have used his shining occiput for a mirror, and plumed themselves by its reflection. The Messenger netted a comfortable salary of two or three thousand a year by getting other people to execute his messages. He was a high Tory, and spent a portion of his earnings in the maintenance of a moribund, but highly orthodox, Church and State newspaper, of which the last proprietor had been a Unitarian, and the last but one a converted Jew. The Morning Mitre-thus was the Messenger's journal called-has since been sold, the True-Blue Club refusing to advance any more money for its support. It is now edited by a gentleman of Mormon tendencies, and is said to be the subsidised organ of the Turkish government,-since the black ambassador from Hayti wouldn't have any thing to do with it, but it is as orthodox and as Conservative as ever.

So the Messenger put his merry men into Beryl Court, and accountants began to range through the extensive library of ledgers, cash-books, journals, and so forth, in which the prodigious transactions of Goldthorpe and Co. were recorded. I am advancing matters if I speak of meetings for the choice of assignees, certificate discussions, and similar preliminaries to the great five-act drama of fivepence in the pound. I am now but at the morrow of the disaster; but was it fivepence, or was it nothing at all in the pound, that Goldthorpe's estate, after seven years' delay, rendered to the creditors?

Goldthorpe's estate! That now became the misty, hazy semi-entity into which the countless treasures of Mammon had resolved themselves. Every thing now belonged to the "estate," and seemed to wither and grow blighted under the baleful influence of Basinghall Street. The marblefronted palace in Beryl Court seemed suddenly afflicted with the same leprosy that is said to have attacked the stonework of the new Houses of Parliament. Of course the people whose business it was left off cleaning the windows, sweeping the door-step, and polishing the brass-plate. The muddy highlows of the Messenger's merry men made tesselations for themselves on the pavement of the entrance-hall. Bits of straw-how ever is it that bits of straw seem indissolubly connected with every case in bankruptcy?—began to be noticed about the Court, and even in offices and ante-chambers. The merry men belonging to the Messenger chewed bits of straw continually. The trim servitors, who were wont to glide about so noiselessly and so obediently on the behests of Mammon and the heads of his departments, suddenly disappeared, and were replaced, no one knew how, or why, by an inconceivable female of great but uncertain age,

who had a face like an exaggerated Norfolk biffin, and the arrangement of whose costume was after the engraved portrait of Mother Bunch, and whose pattens were perpetual, and who wore a bonnet that may be said to have resembled the design of a Turkey carpet, for it was like nothing in the sky, or upon the earth, or in the waters under them. This phenomenon announced herself to be Mrs. Runt, laundress, and invariably soiled every article with which she came in contact. She was always sipping halfpints of porter, and always talking with indecorous glibness about the "estate" and the assignees. In all the catastrophes of life,-in childbirth, in bankruptcy, in captivity, in sickness, and in death,—these appalling women start up unbidden, and have dominion almost as great as that claimed by commissioners, by turnkeys, by doctors, and by undertakers. When they are not prattling about the "assignees," their theme is the "trustees" or the "executors." They are all sisters. Mrs. Runt pervades Beryl Court, and Mrs. Bunt, when you are sick in chambers, administers to you, internally, the liniment instead of the draught. Mrs. Grunt comes to the lying-in, and Mrs. Hunt lays you out. Were they ever young, these standing protests against the laws on witchcraft? Had they ever good looks? Did they ever know what it was to be pretty, and cheerful, and honest, and sober? What were their husbands, if they ever had any, -mutes, or dissecting-room porters, or resurrection men, or watchmen? I think, myself, that they were all born old, that they had the rheumatism in their cradles, and were suckled on beer and weaned on gin, and that their fathers were all Chelsea pensioners, and their mothers all workhouse

nurses.

The clerks and other employés of the great House did not take the ruin of Mammon much to heart. There was something in having belonged to a firm that had smashed for so tremendous an amount. The sage heads of other City firms looked on a man out of Goldthorpe's as one whose experiences had been vast, whose knowledge of monetary ramifications must be prodigious, and who must necessarily be up, not to a thing or two, but to a thing or twenty. So when the brief notice accorded to them had expired, they readily found other engagements. The heads of departments were as undismayed. One gentleman positively married on the strength of Goldthorpe's bankruptcy. Another, as precautionary measures, immediately increased his tailor's bill, ordered some peculiar port from his wine-merchant, and took a house on a long lease. A third published a book on the History of Great Speculations, which had a rapid sale, and obtained for its gifted author the appointment of Secretary of the Imperial Clerical and General Purchase of Pawnbrokers' Duplicates Association (offices in Cannon Street and Pall Mall); and one gentleman, more aspiring than the rest, added another horse to his brougham, took a house in Tyburnia, went into business for himself, and was blithely bankrupt at the end of twelve months. He had so closely imitated the system of operations pursued by his great chief, that his Smash was the very image of Mammon's seen through the small end of an opera-glass.

The fountain in the Court ceased playing of course; and then it came out how much money was owing to the Water Company, in which Sir Jasper was a shareholder. The scrip, it is needless to say, had been mortgaged for twice its value. Money had been raised upon every thing on which it was possible to raise a stiver,-upon title-deeds and dock-warrants, upon bills and cheques, upon bills-of-sale of phantom furniture, upon shares, and bonds, and bills of lading, and policies of insurance, and reversions, and the contents of Mammon's waste-paper basket generally. The assets, if they could only have been realised, ought to have been enormous. Hundreds of thousands of pounds sterling were owed to Sir Jasper Goldthorpe; only Brumm Brothers of Finsbury Circus, and Poulgar and Tyke of Manchester, and J. C. Whittlestool of New York, and Solomon Bennosey and Co. of Vienna and Trieste, and Jacob van Scholdup and Nephews of the Hague, and Caïkjee, Ferikjee, and Bostandji-Bashi of Constantinople, those great Greek bankers and farmers of the MoldavioWallachian tribute,-all happened to smash up simultaneously with Sir Jasper Goldthorpe, or as early, at least, as the return of post would permit them. None of these reputedly-wealthy houses had any assets worth speaking of; and people did say that Brumm Brothers never had any more tangible representatives than a very large mahogany-desk, and an office-boy at fifteen shillings a week; that Poulgar and Tyke of Manchester were simply myths; that J. C. Whittlestool of New York was a gentleman of the "loafing" persuasion, who, after an unsuccessful speculation in dry goods, had taken to school-teaching, and to lecturing on the Od. Force, and to writing epic poems and five-act tragedies, purporting to be the composition of Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare respectively, for a spirit-rapping circle at Fantombrowski City, Mass. Ugly rumours also got abroad that Solomon Bennosey and Jacob van Scholdup, Company, Nephews, and all, were personages equally fabulous with the foregoing; and that Caïkjee, Ferikjee, and Bostandji-Bashi were only petty money-changers in the Grande Rue de Péra. Be it as it may, nothing came out of the stoppage or the "liquidation" of these shadowy firms; in fact, they liquidated themselves so completely, that their names might have been written in water.

Sir Jasper Goldthorpe was seen no more on his accustomed walk in the Royal Exchange. He took his name off the books of the Callipash Club in Old Broad Street. He was one of the Wardens of the Worshipful Company of Battle-axe Makers; but he did not join that ancient Society at their June feast in Battle-axe-Makers' Hall, or drink prosperity to the Company "root and branch." He was to have taken the chair at the annual dinner of the Hospital for Elephantiasis; but declining the honour, for obvious reasons, the indefatigable Secretary, W. R. Y. Noceros, Esq. (subsequently public prosecutor to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Fleas,-the post which friendly George Gafferer tried so hard to obtain), succeeded in persuading his Grace the Duke of Clubfoot to officiate as chairman, who, had he not been stone

deaf, and had he not in his speech in advocacy of the claims of the Insti tution confounded it with the Royal Queen-Charlotte Institution for supplying Wet-nurses with Snuff, would have afforded the highest satisfaction to the numerous and distinguished company present.

It was about this time that Sir Jasper's former chums and associates —if a man so mighty can be said to have ever had chums or associates— were found to turn their heads the other way, or to cross discreetly to the other side of the road, when the ruined man crept by on his way to his lawyers'. The cabmen, too, whom he had once held in such awe, now openly scorned him, and would have over-charged him because he was poor, and braved his ire had he remonstrated. The red-nosed and whiteaproned ticket-porters, the ward-beadles and turncocks, the hangers-on at City taverns and coffee-houses, even the man who sold dog-collars, pocket-books, and toy copper coal-scuttles and coffee-pots, under the lee of Bow Church and the Poultry Chapel, quite forgot to touch their hats now when the Baronet passed. With that idiosyncrasy peculiar to ruined men, he persisted in hanging about the scenes of his former glories;-a poor broken-down old Marius wandering amidst the ruins of a golden Carthage. There was no great need for him to be seen on the eastern side of Temple Bar. He was not often wanted at his lawyers' or at Basinghall Street; in fact, they could have got on quite as well there without as with him. But he would hanker after the old scenes; he would prowl about Beryl Court, and the marts and exchanges where he had been so well known, and where he had achieved in bygone times such triumphant successes. Some of his former companions took it quite ill that he did not absent himself for good and all. He was smashed; he was done for; he belonged henceforth to the Court and the Commissioners. What did he want "humbugging"-I use their terms, not mine-about Cheapside and Cornhill?

"There's a want of decency in it," quoth one. "He ought to know better," said another. "Hain't proper," was the opinion of a third. Joddles, of Joddles and Toddles, Turkey brokers, had a dreadful dream about Sir Jasper Goldthorpe, and told it the next morning, coldly perspiring as he spoke to a friend. "By Jove, sir!" he said, "I dreamt last night of that fellow Goldthorpe coming to my place, and wanting to borrow halfa-sufferin of me. And of course I wouldn't lend it to him. And then he seized me by the throat; and then he changed into the Rotunda of the Bank of England; and then I fell into a tureenful of scalding hot turtle; and then I woke. Sir, if that man had any sense of decency in him, he'd emigrate."

The Church had something to say, too, about the luckless wretch. The Reverend Hugh Hango Hollowpenny, who, through Sir Jasper's influence, had been presented to the comfortable living of St.-Pogis-underPump (resident population thirteen hundred and thirteen, average congregation nine and a half,—the half being a hunch-backed charity-boy), took the ruined Goldthorpe as the text for a very neat sermon preached in the