Page:Once a Week Volume 8.djvu/87

. 10, 1863.] and prayed against it. When she caught him up she was out of breath, so swiftly had she sped.

“Lucy!” he uttered. “Lucy! What do you do here!”

“I came out to look for you,” she simply said: “there was nobody else at home to come. I went to Jan’s, thinking you might be there. Mrs. Verner has dressed herself to go to Sir Edmund’s. You may be in time to stop her if you make haste.”

With a half-uttered exclamation, Lionel was speeding off, when he appeared to remember Lucy. He turned to take her with him.

“No,” said Lucy, stopping. “I could not go as quickly as you: and a minute, more or less, may make all the difference. There is nothing to hurt me. You make the best of your way. It is for your wife’s sake.”

There was good sense in all she said, and Lionel started off with a fleet foot. Before Lucy had quite gained the Court, she saw him coming back to meet her. He drew her hand within his arm in silence, and kept his own upon it for an instant’s grateful pressure.

“Thank you, Lucy, for what you have done. Thank you now and ever. I was too late.”

“Is Mrs. Verner gone?”

“She is gone these ten minutes past, Catherine says. A fly was found immediately.”

They turned into the house; into the sitting-room. Lucy threw off the large shawl and the shapeless green bonnet: at any other moment she would have laughed at the figure she must have looked in them. The tea-things still waited on the table.

“Shall I make you some tea?” she asked.

Lionel shook his head. “I must go up and dress. I shall go after Sibylla.”

of the many results of the strange misfortunes of the departing year has been a disclosure of personal pecuniary affairs, or of notions about such private affairs, unparalleled since, at least, the “crash” of 1825-6. The prostration of our chief industrial interest, the sudden overthrow of hundreds of thousands of our proudest and most independent class of people, and the necessity that the nation at large should undertake the support of that class till the mills should open again,—this singular crash has broken up our personal and social reserve, and laid open our circumstances, and notions, and ways of living in a manner sufficiently astonishing to persons who have always supposed the subject of income and expenditure to be one of those doubtful, delicate, sacred topics which could be approached only in an abstract way.

It has been all very well, we have been wont to say, that the proper expenditure of 300l. or 400l. a-year should be treated in an abstract way in letters to the “Times” about dinners, and servants, and inn-charges. Everybody reads such things, even while heartily despising them. The subject is an interesting one to almost everybody; but surely nobody ever expected that we should discuss our incomes and expenditure so freely, and feel again so like a young and frank people, sounding its way in life, as we do at the end of the memorable year 1862. As it has so happened, I shall use the opportunity of commenting on some things in this line which I have observed, and perhaps of saying something of what I think on the really important subject of what means one has, and how one uses them.

Some years ago, I read in “Chambers’ Journal” the remark that it is the rarest thing in the world for anybody to have 5l. to do what he or she likes with. This declaration probably astonished some of the humbler readers of that publication not a little; but it must have struck many as very true. The vulgar notion of wealth is that the rich man has a closet full of gold, or desks and pockets bursting with banknotes; and that the owner is always looking about him to see how he can spend most. On the contrary, says the writer in the “Journal,” the income of the wealthiest man is always pre-engaged to certain objects; and as it is generally the case that the calls exceed the estimate, the proprietor finds himself bare,— with not even a 5l. note left over, to do what he likes with. No doubt, in many cases, the laying by a certain amount is one of the objects; but when a man has resolved to lay by a certain amount, he is not free (or does not think himself so) to take 5l. out of his savings, and say, “I may spend this as I please.”

Within this universal limit—of no one having anything over and above his needs—there is an immense variety of ideas, principles and feelings about spending. People’s notions and impressions are almost as various as their temperaments; and there are very few indeed whose plans are approved by their neighbours and friends. Not a little of this immense diversity has been either avowed or betrayed under the peculiar circumstances of the last few months.

Early in this century, the political economists considered themselves to be the proper guides in this particular field of morals. I well remember the earnestness with which some of the leaders preached, in season and out of season, the bounden duty of everybody to lay by something. Seeing in the labour-market of that day the normal labour-market of modern civilisation, they conceived that the great need of human society was more capital, in order to employ more labour. It is true they preached also the corresponding duty of restricting the supply of labour; but this did not interfere with the duty of augmenting capital from day to day. Before we condemn or deride this zeal, and the maxim which grew out of it—“Parsimony is a virtue”—we must remember the state of the labouring classes (and indeed of all classes) in England at that time. In fact, the morals and manners, the health, the comfort, and even the life of multitudes then depended on an increase of the means of employing labour; and the “hard” political economists were the very persons who insisted most strongly that, to do anything with men, women, or children, you must first make them comfortable. It might therefore be neither so