Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, fifth series, no. 121, vol. III, April 24, 1886

Another curious fact regarding Joint-stock Company speculation is that what may be called the fashion, which changes, so to speak, as often as that of a lady’s bonnet, and which does not admit of more than one kind of enterprise being popular at the same time. Thus, during all last year and a great portion of 1884, little found favour with the share-taking public save Companies for the extension of the electric light. This fancy seems to be for the present at least played out, and for the year, gold mines appear to be popular.

As matters now stand, the man who steals a few shillings is summarily dealt with, and rarely escapes the punishment due to his crime. But the Company promoter or Financial Agent who deliberately plans to ruin hundreds, and who, so soon as the harvest of one bogus Company is reaped, hastens to sow the seed of another, is allowed to go on with impunity, obtaining by falsehood and misrepresentation infinitely more than many others can by the legitimate use of capital; and defrauding their victims of what in many cases has cost a lifetime of long and patient toil.

One thing seems very certain; and the more any impartial person looks into the subject, the more convinced he must be that some supervision ought to be exercised with reference to all Joint-stock Company prospectuses which are published, and which increase in number every day. It is very true that fools are, like the poor, always with us; but this ought not to deter the authorities from taking care of those who cannot take care of themselves. We have already admitted that there are Companies and Companies—that there are some undertakings offered to the public which are perfectly honest and legitimate; whilst others are got up for the express purpose of swindling the many, and of putting money into the pockets of the few. If, then, supervision were enforced, and no Company allowed to be advertised until it had undergone investigation by competent persons, would it not be all the better for such concerns as are certified to be sound? If it were possible to obtain a reliable return of those who have been beggared by these swindles during the last ten or fifteen years, there would soon be a public outcry in favour of this supervision of proposed Companies; and a very great evil, the greatest financial evil of the present day, would be quickly and surely remedied.

That the whole system must ere long undergo revision, and that it must be sooner or later put under proper control, is what no one who has had opportunity of witnessing the working behind the curtains can doubt. Promoters and Financial Agents have had a good time of it for the last twenty years, and it will be only fair if they are now obliged to retire on their laurels; and their calling, so far as dishonesty be concerned, become a thing of the past. Finance without funds has had its day, and for the general public, that day has been allowed to continue too long. The anomaly of protecting people from the wiles of the gaming-tables, and yet leaving them to be the victims of plausible schemers, who entice them to a very much more dangerous (because a more hidden) ruin, is too palpably wrong for any honest person to defend; and it behoves the authorities to put a stop to what has become one of the greatest social evils of the day.

IN ALL SHADES.

CHAPTER XXII.

Three or four months rolled rapidly away, and the Hawthorns began to feel themselves settling down quietly to their new, strange, and anomalous position in the island of Trinidad. In spite of her father’s prohibition, Nora often came around to visit them; and though Mr Dupuy fought hard against her continuing ‘that undesirable acquaintance,’ he soon found that Nora, too, had a will of her own, and that she was not to be restrained from anything on which she had once set her mind, by such very simple and easy means as mere prohibition. ‘The girl’s a Dupuy to the backbone,’ her cousin Tom said to her father more than once, in evident admiration. ‘Though she does take up with a lot of coloured trash—which, of course, is very unladylike—when once she sets her heart upon a thing sir, she does it too, and no mistake about it either.’

Dr Whitaker was another not infrequent visitor at the Hawthorns’ bungalow. He had picked up, as he desired, a gratuitous practice among the poorer negroes; and though it often sorely tried his patience and enthusiasm, he found in it at least some relief and respite from the perpetual annoyance and degradation of his uncongenial home-life with his father and Miss Euphemia. His botany, too, gave him another anodyne—something to do to take his mind off the endless incongruity of his settled position. He had decided within himself, almost from the very first day of landing, to undertake a Flora of Trinidad—a new work on all the flower-plants in the rich vegetation of that most luxuriant among tropical islands; and in every minute of leisure time that he could spare from the thankless care of his poor negro patients, he was hard at work among the tangled woods and jungle undergrowth, or else in his own little study at home, in his father’s house, collecting, arranging, and comparing the materials for this his great work on the exquisite flowers of his native country. The faithful violin afforded him his third great resource and alleviation. Though Miss Euphemia and her lively friends were scarcely of a sort to appreciate the young doctor’s touching and delicate execution, he practised by himself for an hour or two in his own rooms every evening; and as he did so, he felt that the strings seemed ever to re-echo with one sweet and oft-recurring name—the name of Nora. To be sure, he was a brown man, but even brown men are more or less human. How could he ever dream of falling in love with one of Miss Euphemia’s like-minded companions?

He met Nora from time to time in the Hawthorns’ drawing-room; there was no other place under the circumstances of Trinidad where he was at all likely ever to meet her. Nora was more frankly kind to him now than formerly; she felt that to be cool or indifferent towards him before Edward and Marian might seem remotely like an indirect slight upon their own position. One afternoon he met her there accidentally, and she asked him, with polite interest, how his work on the flowers of Trinidad was getting on.

The young doctor cast down his eyes and answered timidly that he had collected an immense number of specimens, and was arranging them slowly in systematic order.

‘And your music, Dr Whitaker?’

The mulatto stammered for a moment. ‘Miss Dupuy,’ he said with a slight hesitation, ‘I have—I have published the little piece—the Hurricane Symphony, you know—that I showed you once on board the _Severn_. I have published it in London. If you will allow me—I—I will present you, as I promised, with a copy of the music.’

‘Thank you,’ Nora said. ‘How very good of you. Will you send it to me to Orange Grove, or—will you leave it here some day with Mrs Hawthorn?’

The mulatto felt his face grow hot and burning as he answered with as much carelessness as he could readily command: ‘I have a copy here with me—it’s with my hat in the piazza. If you will permit me, Mrs Hawthorn, I’ll just step out and fetch it. I brought it with me, Miss Dupuy, thinking it just possible I might happen to meet you here this morning.’ He didn’t add that he had brought it out with him day after day for the last fortnight, in the vain hope of chancing to meet her; and had carried it back again with a heavy heart night after night, when he had failed to see her in that one solitary possible meeting-place.

Nora took the piece that he handed her, fresh and white from the press of a famous London firm of music-sellers, and glanced hastily at the top of the title-page for the promised dedication. There was none visible anywhere. The title-page ran simply: ‘Op. 14. Hurricane Symphony. Souvenir des Indes. By W. Clarkson Whitaker.’

‘But, Dr Whitaker,’ Nora said, pouting a little in her pretty fashion, ‘this isn’t fair, you know. You promised to dedicate the piece to me. I was quite looking forward to seeing my name in big letters, printed in real type, on the top of the title-page!’

The mulatto doctor’s heart beat fast that moment with a very unwonted and irregular pulsation. Then she really wished him to dedicate it to her! Why on earth had he been so timorous as to strike out her name at the last moment on the fair copy he had sent to London for publication? ‘I thought, Miss Dupuy,’ he answered slowly, ‘our positions were so very different in Trinidad, that when I came here and felt how things actually stood, I—I judged it better not to put your name in conjunction with mine on the same title-page.’

‘Then you did quite wrong!’ Nora retorted warmly; ‘and I’m very angry with you—I am really, I assure you. You ought to have kept your promise when you gave it me. I wanted to see my own name in print, and on a piece of music too. I expect, now, I’ve lost the chance of seeing myself in black and white for ever and ever.’

The mulatto smiled a smile of genuine pleasure. ‘It’s easily remedied, Miss Dupuy,’ he answered quickly. ‘If you really mean it, I shall dedicate my very next composition to you. You’re extremely kind to take such a friendly interest in my poor music.’

‘I hope I’m not overdoing it,’ Nora thought to herself. ‘But the poor fellow really has so much to put up with, that one can’t help behaving a little kindly to him, when one happens to get the opportunity.’

When Dr Whitaker rose to leave, he shook hands with Nora very warmly, and said as he did so: ‘Good-bye, Miss Dupuy. I shan’t forget next time that the dedication is to be fairly printed in good earnest.’

‘Mind you don’t, Dr Whitaker,’ Nora responded gaily. ‘Good-bye. I suppose I shan’t see you again, as usual, for another week of Sundays!’

The mulatto smiled once more, a satisfied smile, as he answered quickly: ‘O yes, Miss Dupuy. We shall meet on Monday next. Of course, you’re going to the governor’s ball at Banana Garden!’

Nora started. ‘The governor’s ball!’ she repeated—‘the governor’s ball! O yes, of course I’m going there, Dr Whitaker.—But are you invited?’

She said it thoughtlessly, on the spur of the moment, for it had never occurred to her that the brown doctor would have an invitation also; but the tone of surprise in which she spoke cut the poor young mulatto to the very quick in that moment of triumph. He drew himself up proudly as he answered in a hasty tone: ‘O yes; even I am invited to Banana Garden, Miss Dupuy. The governor of the colony at least can recognise no distinction of class or colour in his official capacity.’

Nora’s face flushed crimson. ‘I shall hope to see you there,’ she answered quickly. ‘I’m glad you’re going.—Marian, dear, we shall be quite a party. I only wish I was going with you, instead of being trotted off in that odiously correct style by old Mrs Pereira.’

Dr Whitaker said no more, but raised his hat upon the piazza steps, jumped upon his horse, and took his way along the dusty road that led from the Hawthorns’ cottage to the residence of the Honourable Robert Whitaker. As he reached the house, Miss Euphemia was laughing loudly in the drawing-room with her bosom friend, Miss Seraphina M‘Culloch. ‘Wilberforce!’ Miss Euphemia cried, the moment her brother made his appearance on the outer piazza, ‘jest you come straight in here, I tellin’ you. Here’s Pheenie come around to hab a talk wit you. You is too unsocial altogedder. You always want to go an’ bury yourself in your own study. O my, O my! Young men dat come from England, dey hasn’t got no conversation at all for to talk wit de ladies.’

Dr Whitaker was not in the humour just that moment to indulge in pleasantries with Miss Seraphina M‘Culloch, a brown young lady of buxom figure and remarkably free-and-easy conversation; so he sighed impatiently as he answered with a hasty wave of his hand: ‘No, Euphemia; I can’t come in and see your friend just this minute. I must go into my own room to make up some medicines—some very urgent medicines—wanted immediately—for some of my poor sick patients.’ Heaven help his soul for that transparent little prevarication, for all the medicine had been sent out in charge of a ragged negro boy more than two hours ago; and it was Dr Whitaker’s own heart that was sick and ill at ease, beyond the power of any medicine ever to remedy.

Miss Euphemia pouted her already sufficiently protruding lips. ‘Always dem stoopid niggers,’ she answered contemptuously. ‘How on eart a man like you, Wilberforce, dat has always been brought up respectable an’ proper, in a decent fam’ly, can bear to go an’ trow away his time in attendin’ to a parcel of low nigger people, is more dan I can ever understan’.—Can you, Seraphina?’

Miss Seraphina responded immediately, that, in her opinion, niggers was a disgraceful set of dat low, disreputable people, dat how a man like Dr Wilberforce Whitaker could so much demean hisself as ever to touch dem, really surpassed her limited comprehension.

Dr Whitaker strode angrily away into his own room, muttering to himself as he went, that one couldn’t blame the white people for looking down upon the browns, when the browns themselves, in their foolish travesty of white prejudice, looked down so much upon their brother blacks beneath them. In a minute more, he reappeared with a face of puzzled bewilderment at the drawing-room door, and cried to his sister angrily: ‘Euphemia, Euphemia! what have you done, I’d like to know, with all those specimens I brought in this morning, and left, when I went out, upon my study table?’

‘Wilberforce,’ Miss Euphemia answered with stately dignity, rising to confront him, ‘I tink I can’t stand dis mess an’ rubbish dat you make about de house a minute longer.—Pheenie! I tell you how dat man treat de fam’ly. Every day, he goes out into de woods an’ he cuts bush—common bush, all sort of weed an’ trash an’ rubbish; an’ he brings dem home, an’ puts dem in de study, so dat de house don’t never tidy, however much you try for to tidy him. Well, dis mornin’ I say to myself: “I don’t goin’ to stand dis lumber-room in a respectable fam’ly any longer.” So I take de bush dat Wilberforce bring in; I carry him out to de kitchen altogedder; I open de stove, an’ I trow him in all in a lump into de very middle of de kitchen fire. Ha, ha, ha! him burn an’ crackle all de same as if he was chock-full of blazin’ gunpowder!’

Dr Whitaker’s eyes flashed angrily as he cried in surprise: ‘What! all my specimens, Euphemia! all my specimens! all the ferns and orchids and curious club-mosses I brought in from Pimento Valley Scrubs early this morning!’

Miss Euphemia tossed her head contemptuously in the air. ‘Yes, Wilberforce,’ she answered with a placid smile; ‘every one of dem. I burn de whole nasty lot of bush an’ trash togedder. An’ den, when I finished, I burn de dry ones—de nasty dry tings you put in de cupboards all around de study.’

Dr Whitaker started in horror. ‘My herbarium!’ he cried—‘my whole herbarium! You don’t mean to say, Euphemia, you’ve actually gone and wantonly destroyed my entire collection?’

‘Yes,’ Miss Euphemia responded cheerfully, nodding acquiescence several times over; ‘I burn de whole lot of dem—paper an’ everyting. De nasty tings, dey bring in de cockroach an’ de red ants into de study cupboards.’

The mulatto rushed back eagerly and hastily into his own study; he flung open the cupboard doors, and looked with a sinking heart into the vacant spaces. It was too true, all too true! Miss Euphemia had destroyed in a moment of annoyance the entire result of his years of European collection and his five months’ botanical work since he had arrived in Trinidad.

The poor young man sat down distracted in his easy-chair, and flinging himself back on the padded cushions, ruefully surveyed the bare and empty shelves of his rifled cupboards. It was not so much the mere loss of the pile of specimens—five months’ collection only, as well as the European herbarium he had brought with him for purposes of comparison—the one could be easily replaced in a second year; the other could be bought again almost as good as ever from a London dealer—it was the utter sense of loneliness and isolation, the feeling of being so absolutely misunderstood, the entire want of any reasonable and intelligent sympathy. He sat there idly for many minutes, staring with blank resignation at the empty cases, and whistling to himself a low plaintive tune, as he gazed and gazed at the bare walls in helpless despondency. At last, his eye fell casually upon his beloved violin. He rose up, slowly and mournfully, and took the precious instrument with reverent care from its silk-lined case. Drawing his bow across the familiar strings, he let the music come forth as it would; and the particular music that happened to frame itself upon the trembling catgut on the humour of the moment was his own luckless Hurricane Symphony. For half an hour he sat there still, varying that well-known theme with unstudied impromptus, and playing more for the sake of forgetting everything earthly, than of producing any very particular musical effect. By-and-by, when his hand had warmed to its work, and he was beginning really to feel what it was he was playing, the door opened suddenly, and a bland voice interrupted his solitude with an easy flow of colloquial English.

‘Wilberforce, my dear son,’ the voice said in its most sonorous accents, ‘dere is company come; you will excuse my interruptin’ you. De ladies an’ gentlemen dat we expec’ to dinner has begun to arrive. Dey is waitin’ to be introduced to de inheritor of de tree names most intimately connected wit de great revolution which I have had de pleasure an’ honour of bringin’ about for my enslaved bredderin’. De ladies especially is most anxious to make your acquaintance. He, he, he! de ladies is most anxious. An’, my dear son, whatever you do, don’t go on playin’ any longer dat loogoobrious melancholy fiddle-toon. If you _must_ play someting, play us someting lively—_Pretty little yaller Gal_, or someting of dat sort!’

Dr Whitaker almost flung down his beloved violin in his shame and disgrace at this untimely interruption. ‘Father,’ he said, as kindly as he was able, ‘I am not well to-night—I am indisposed—I am suffering somewhat—you must excuse me, please; I’m afraid I shan’t be able to meet your friends at dinner this evening.’ And taking down his soft hat from the peg in the piazza, he crushed it despairingly upon his aching head, and stalked out, alone and sick at heart, into the dusty, dreary, cactus-bordered lanes of that transformed and desolate Trinidad.

(_To be continued._)

FRENCH AND ENGLISH PROVERBS.

The object of the writer of this paper has been to collect and compare a few of the most familiar English and French proverbs or sayings; and to bring together a few of those sayings which exist as such in both languages, expressing the same idea, or nearly so, in each. To begin with a few similes.

We English seem to have selected the mouse as an emblem in our ‘As dumb as a mouse;’ the French have preferred a glass, for they say, ‘As dumb as a glass.’ We say, ‘As deaf as a post;’ the French, ‘As deaf as a pot.’ ‘As dull as ditch-water,’ Gallicised becomes, ‘As sad as a nightcap.’ ‘Don’t count your chickens before they are hatched,’ is changed into, ‘Don’t sell the skin of a bear before having killed it.’ Instead of, ‘Biting off one’s nose to spite one’s face,’ a similarly useless experiment is illustrated by ‘Spitting in the air that it may fall on one’s nose.’ The self-evident impossibility in the words, ‘You can’t get blood out of a stone,’ is represented by, ‘One could not comb a thing that has no hair.’ (This last also ‘goes without saying,’ which, as literally translated from the French, now forms a proverb in our own language.) In the proverb, ‘One man may lead a horse to the water, but a hundred can’t make him drink,’ our neighbours have not inappropriately selected an ‘ass’ as the illustrative animal. ‘When you’re in Rome, you must do as Rome does,’ every Englishman will tell you; though few perhaps could say why Rome was chosen as an example; and whether it is more necessary, when in Rome, to follow the general lead, than in anywhere else, is to us a matter of doubt. To the Frenchman, the idea is sufficiently well expressed, however, by impressing upon you the necessity of ‘howling with the wolves.’ ‘Easy come, easy go,’ though terse and to the point, is in itself scarcely so intelligible as the somewhat longer sentence, ‘That which comes with the flood, returns with the ebb.’ That ‘a burnt child dreads the fire’ is perfectly true, as every one will admit: our neighbours go farther than this, and, in choosing a ‘scalded cat’ as the object of consideration, speak of it as being in fear of ‘cold’ water even, thus expressing the natural distrust of the cat, after having once been scalded, as extending even to ‘cold’ water. ‘Money makes the mare to go;’ and ‘For money, dogs dance.’