In which the Newcome Brothers once more meet together in Unity

His narrative, as the judicious reader no doubt is aware, is written maturely and at ease, long after the voyage is over, whereof it recounts the adventures and perils; the winds adverse and favourable; the storms, shoals, shipwrecks, islands, and so forth, which Clive Newcome met in his early journey in life. In such a history events follow each other without necessarily having a connection with one another. One ship crosses another ship, and after a visit from one captain to his comrade, they sail away each on his course. The Clive Newcome meets a vessel which makes signals that she is short of bread and water; and after supplying her, our captain leaves her to see her no more. One or two of the vessels with which we commenced the voyage together, part company in a gale, and founder miserably; others, after being wofully battered in the tempest, make port, or are cast upon surprising islands where all sorts of unlooked-for prosperity awaits the lucky crew. Also, no doubt, the writer of the book, into whose hands Clive Newcome’s logs have been put, and who is charged with the duty of making two octavo volumes out of his friend’s story, dresses up the narrative in his own way; utters his own remarks in place of Newcome’s; makes fanciful descriptions of individuals and incidents with which he never could have been personally acquainted; and commits blunders, which the critics will discover. A great number of the descriptions in Cook’s Voyages, for instance, were notoriously invented by Dr. Hawkesworth, who “did” the book: so in the present volumes, where dialogues are written down, which the reporter could by no possibility have heard, and where motives are detected which the persons actuated by them certainly never confided to the writer, the public must once for all be warned that the author’s individual fancy very likely supplies much of the narrative; and that he forms it as best he may, out of stray papers, conversations reported to him, and his knowledge, right or wrong, of the characters of the persons engaged. And, as is the case with the most orthodox histories, the writer’s own guesses or conjectures are printed in exactly the same type as the most ascertained patent facts. I fancy, for my part, that the speeches attributed to Clive, the Colonel, and the rest, are as authentic as the orations in Sallust or Livy, and only implore the truth-loving public to believe that incidents here told, and which passed very probably without witnesses, were either confided to me subsequently as compiler of this biography, or are of such a nature that they must have happened from what we know happened after. For example, when you read such words as QVE ROMANVS on a battered Roman stone, your profound antiquarian knowledge enables you to assert that SENATVS POPVLVS was also inscribed there at some time or other. You take a mutilated statue of Mars, Bacchus, Apollo, or Virorum, and you pop him on a wanting hand, an absent foot, or a nose which time or barbarians have defaced. You tell your tales as you can, and state the facts as you think they must have been. In this manner, Mr. James (historiographer to Her Majesty), Titus Livius, Professor Alison, Robinson Crusoe, and all historians proceeded. Blunders there must be in the best of these narratives, and more asserted than they can possibly know or vouch for.

To recur to our own affairs, and the subject at present in hand, I am obliged here to supply from conjecture a few points of the history, which I could not know from actual experience or hearsay. Clive, let us say, is Romanus, and we must add Senatus Populusque to his inscription. After Mrs. Mackenzie and her pretty daughter had been for a few months in London, which they did not think of quitting, although Mr. Binnie’s wounded little leg was now as well and as brisk as ever it had been, a redintegration of love began to take place between the Colonel and his relatives in Park Lane. How should we know that there had ever been a quarrel, or at any rate a coolness? Thomas Newcome was not a man to talk at length of any such matter; though a word or two occasionally dropped in conversation by the simple gentleman might lead persons who chose to interest themselves about his family affairs to form their own opinions concerning them. After that visit of the Colonel and his son to Newcome, Ethel was constantly away with her grandmother. The Colonel went to see his pretty little favourite at Brighton, and once, twice, thrice, Lady Kew’s door was denied to him. The knocker of that door could not be more fierce than the old lady’s countenance, when Newcome met her in her chariot driving on the cliff. Once, forming the loveliest of a charming Amazonian squadron, led by Mr. Whiskin, the riding-master, when the Colonel encountered his pretty Ethel, she greeted him affectionately, it is true; there was still the sweet look of candour and love in her eyes; but when he rode up to her she looked so constrained, when he talked about Clive, so reserved, when he left her, so sad, that he could not but feel pain and commiseration. Back he went to London, having in a week only caught this single glance of his darling.

This event occurred while Clive was painting his picture of the “Battle of Assaye” before mentioned, during the struggles incident on which composition he was not thinking much about Miss Ethel, or his papa, or any other subject but his great work. Whilst Assaye was still in progress, Thomas Newcome must have had an explanation with his sister-inlaw, Lady Anne, to whom he frankly owned the hopes which he had entertained for Clive, and who must as frankly have told the Colonel that Ethel’s family had very different views for that young lady to those which the simple Colonel had formed. A generous early attachment, the Colonel thought, is the safeguard of a young man. To love a noble girl; to wait a while and struggle, and haply do some little achievement in order to win her; the best task to which his boy could set himself. If two young people so loving each other were to marry on rather narrow means, what then? A happy home was better than the finest house in Mayfair; a generous young fellow, such as, please God, his son was — loyal, upright, and a gentleman — might pretend surely to his kinswoman’s hand without derogation; and the affection he bore Ethel himself was so great, and the sweet regard with which she returned it, that the simple father thought his kindly project was favoured by Heaven, and prayed for its fulfilment, and pleased himself to think, when his campaigns were over, and his sword hung on the wall, what a beloved daughter he might have to soothe and cheer his old age. With such a wife for his son, and child for himself, he thought the happiness of his last years might repay him for friendless boyhood, lonely manhood, and cheerless exile; and he imparted his simple scheme to Ethel’s mother, who no doubt was touched as he told his story; for she always professed regard and respect for him, and in the differences which afterwards occurred in the family, and the quarrels which divided the brothers, still remained faithful to the good Colonel.

But Barnes Newcome, Esquire, was the bead of the house, and the governor of his father and all Sir Brian’s affairs; and Barnes Newcome, Esquire, hated his cousin Clive, and spoke of him as a beggarly painter, an impudent snob, an infernal young puppy, and so forth; and Barnes with his usual freedom of language imparted his opinions to his Uncle Hobson at the bank, and Uncle Hobson carried them home to Mrs. Newcome in Bryanstone Square; and Mrs. Newcome took an early opportunity of telling the Colonel her opinion on the subject, and of bewailing that love for aristocracy which she saw actuated some folks; and the Colonel was brought to see that Barnes was his boy’s enemy, and words very likely passed between them, for Thomas Newcome took a new banker at this time, and, as Clive informed me, was in very great dudgeon because Hobson Brothers wrote to him to say that he had overdrawn his account. “I am sure there is some screw loose,” the sagacious youth remarked to me; “and the Colonel and the people in Park Lane are at variance, because he goes there very little now; and he promised to go to Court when Ethel was presented, and he didn’t go.”

Some months after the arrival of Mr. Binnie’s niece and sister in Fitzroy Square, the fraternal quarrel between the Newcomes must have come to an end — for that time at least — and was followed by a rather ostentatious reconciliation. And pretty little Rosey Mackenzie was the innocent and unconscious cause of this amiable change in the minds of the three brethren, as I gathered from a little conversation with Mrs. Newcome, who did me the honour to invite me to her table. As she had not vouchsafed this hospitality to me for a couple of years previously, and perfectly stifled me with affability when we met — as her invitation came quite at the end of the season, when almost everybody was out of town, and a dinner to a man is no compliment — I was at first for declining this invitation, and spoke of it with great scorn when Mr. Newcome orally delivered it to me at Bays’s Club.

“What,” said I, turning round to an old man of the world, who happened to be in the room at the time, “what do these people mean by asking a fellow to dinner in August, and taking me up after dropping me for two years?”

“My good fellow,” says my friend — it was my kind old Uncle Major Pendennis, indeed —“I have lived long enough about town never to ask myself questions of that sort. In the world people drop you and take you up every day. You know Lady Cheddar by sight? I have known her husband for forty years: I have stayed with them in the country, for weeks at a time. She knows me as well as she knows King Charles at Charing Cross, and a doosid deal better, and yet for a whole season she will drop me — pass me by, as if there was no such person in the world. Well, sir, what do I do? I never see her. I give you my word I am never conscious of her existence; and if I meet her at dinner, I’m no more aware of her than the fellows in the play are of Banquo. What’s the end of it? She comes round — only last Toosday she came round — and said Lord Cheddar wanted me to go down to Wiltshire. I asked after the family (you know Henry Churningham is engaged to Miss Rennet? — a doosid good match for the Cheddars). We shook hands and are as good friends as ever. I don’t suppose she’ll cry when I die, you know,” said the worthy old gentleman with a grin. “Nor shall I go into very deep mourning if anything happens to her. You were quite right to say to Newcome that you did not know whether you were free or not, and would look at your engagements when you got home, and give him an answer. A fellow of that rank has no right to give himself airs. But they will, sir. Some of those bankers are as high and mighty as the oldest families. They marry noblemen’s daughters, by Jove, and think nothing is too good for ’em. But I should go, if I were you, Arthur. I dined there a couple of months ago; and the bankeress said something about you: that you and her nephew were much together, that you were sad wild dogs, I think — something of that sort. ‘Gad, ma’am,’ says I, ‘boys will be boys.’ ‘And they grow to be men!’ says she, nodding her head. Queer little woman, devilish pompous. Dinner confoundedly long, stoopid, scientific.”

The old gentleman was on this day inclined to be talkative and confidential, and I set down some more remarks which he made concerning my friends. “Your Indian Colonel,” says he, “seems a worthy man.” The Major quite forgot having been in India himself, unless he was in company with some very great personage. “He don’t seem to know much of the world, and we are not very intimate. Fitzroy Square is a dev’lish long way off for a fellow to go for a dinner, and entre nous, the dinner is rather queer and the company still more so. It’s right for you who are a literary man to see all sorts of people; but I’m different, you know, so Newcome and I are not very thick together. They say he wanted to marry your friend to Lady Anne’s daughter, an exceedingly fine girl; one of the prettiest girls come out this season. I hear the young men say so. And that shows how monstrous ignorant of the world Colonel Newcome is. His son could no more get that girl than he could marry one of the royal princesses. Mark my words, they intend Miss Newcome for Lord Kew. Those banker fellows are wild after grand marriages. Kew will sow his wild oats, and they’ll marry her to him; or if not to him, to some man of high rank. His father Walham was a weak young man; but his grandmother, old Lady Kew, is a monstrous clever old woman, too severe with her children, one of whom ran away and married a poor devil without a shilling. Nothing could show a more deplorable ignorance of the world than poor Newcome supposing his son could make such a match as that with his cousin. Is it true that he is going to make his son an artist? I don’t know what the dooce the world is coming to. An artist! By gad, in my time a fellow would as soon have thought of making his son a hairdresser, or a pastrycook, by gad.” And the worthy Major gives his nephew two fingers, and trots off to the next club in St. James’s Street, of which he is a member.

The virtuous hostess of Bryanstone Square was quite civil and good-humoured when Mr. Pendennis appeared at her house; and my surprise was not inconsiderable when I found the whole party from Saint Pancras there assembled — Mr. Binnie; the Colonel and his son; Mrs. Mackenzie, looking uncommonly handsome and perfectly well-dressed; and Miss Rosey, in pink crape, with pearly shoulders and blushing cheeks, and beautiful fair ringlets — as fresh and comely a sight as it was possible to witness. Scarcely had we made our bows, and shaken our hands, and imparted our observations about the fineness of the weather, when, behold! as we look from the drawing-room windows into the cheerful square of Bryanstone, a great family coach arrives, driven by a family coachman in a family wig, and we recognise Lady Anne Newcome’s carriage, and see her ladyship, her mother, her daughter, and her husband, Sir Brian, descend from the vehicle. “It is quite a family party,” whispers the happy Mrs. Newcome to the happy writer conversing with her in the niche of the window. “Knowing your intimacy with our brother, Colonel Newcome, we thought it would please him to meet you here. Will you be so kind as to take Miss Newcome to dinner?”

Everybody was bent upon being happy and gracious. It was “My dear brother, how do you do?” from Sir Brian. “My dear Colonel, how glad we are to see you! how well you look!” from Lady Anne. Miss Newcome ran up to him with both hands out, and put her beautiful face so close to his that I thought, upon my conscience, she was going to kiss him. And Lady Kew, advancing in the frankest manner, with a smile, I must own, rather awful, playing round her many wrinkles, round her ladyship’s hooked nose, and displaying her ladyship’s teeth (a new and exceedingly handsome set), held out her hand to Colonel Newcome, and said briskly, “Colonel, it is an age since we met.” She turns to Clive with equal graciousness and good-humour, and says, “Mr. Clive, let me shake hands with you; I have heard all sorts of good of you, that you have been painting the most beautiful things, that you are going to be quite famous.” Nothing can exceed the grace and kindness of Lady Anne Newcome towards Mrs. Mackenzie: the pretty widow blushes with pleasure at this greeting; and now Lady Anne must be introduced to Mrs. Mackenzie’s charming daughter, and whispers in the delighted mother’s ear, “She is lovely!” Rosey comes up looking rosy indeed, and executes a pretty curtsey with a great deal of blushing grace.

Ethel has been so happy to see her dear uncle, that as yet she has had no eyes for any one else, until Clive advancing, those bright eyes become brighter still with surprise and pleasure as she beholds him. For being absent with his family in Italy now, and not likely to see this biography for many many months, I may say that he is a much handsomer fellow than our designer has represented; and if that wayward artist should take this very scene for the purpose of illustration, he is requested to bear in mind that the hero of this story will wish to have justice done to his person. There exists in Mr. Newcome’s possession a charming little pencil-drawing of Clive at this age, and which Colonel Newcome took with him when he went — whither he is about to go in a very few pages — and brought back with him to this country. A florid apparel becomes some men, as simple raiment suits others, and Clive in ............