Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 1.djvu/33

 THE PEDIGREE OF ROYALTY.

��25

��these interesting worthies, and she se- cretly resolved that, come what might, she never would become a burden to the parish.

No sooner, therefore, was the form of her dearly beloved mother committed to the dust, than she quietly disposed of what few articles of furniture the house afforded, settled with the parish beadle, who had defrayed the funeral expenses in the first instance, and the next morning turned her face resolutely in the direction of London.

She had heard a great deal of London, though she had never been there. Her ideas of metropolitan life were necessa- rily vague — possibly extravagant; but her will was iron.

After a journey of four or five hours, weary and foot-sore, she reached a poor inn in the suburbs of the town.

It was during the troublous times of the first Charles ; and coming with no recommendation, she found it impossible to obtain a situation, even as a servant girl.

The little money she possessed being at length exhausted, and no other oppor- tunity of a place presenting itself, she engaged her services to a wealthy brew- er to carry out beer from his brew-house — becoming, in consequence, one of those persons denominated "tub-women."

Mr. Peasley, the brewer, who happened to be a single gentleman, observing a good-looking girl in this most menial and degrading of occupations, took her in- stantly into his employ as a house servant. If Ellen was attractive in the mean at- tire of a tub-woman, she became posi- tively irresistible to the brewer ir. the neat garb of a servant-girl.

She was sprightly and intelligent — modest, likewise, yet open and unreserv- ed ; and the brewer, whose heart was not adamant, found himself day by day be- coming insensibly entangled in the mesh- es of love.

Of course he could not fail to perceive that a wide disparity in a social sense ex- isted between himself— one of the richest commoners in England — and a poor ser- vant-girl, who had neither money nor friends, and perhaps not even respectable antecedents to recommend her.

��But she was superior to all the seduc- tive arts and blandishments of that dis- solute period, and finding it impossible by presents or promises to tempt her from the paths of virtue, the enamored brewer, no longer able to restrain his pas- sion, prostrated himself before the incor- rigible Ellen, and offered her his hand and fortune, which she, considering the liberality of the proposal, if not the pas- sion which had prompted it, very joyfully accepted.

Ellen Forsyth, now the wife of a wealthy citizen, and possessed of charms that the loveliest lady in the realm might have coveted, soon became courted, pet- ted, and flattered by many, and hated in the same proportion by others who had jealously regarded her progress from the low calling of a "tub-woman" to acoach- and-four, and the arms and exhaustless purse of the prince of the brewers of London.

Peasley, who was more than double the age of his wife when he married her, died while she was yet a young woman of twenty-five, leaving her undisputed heir to the bulk of his property, which rendered her more than ever the object of flattery, and fortune-hunting persecu- tions.

The vulgar business of the brewery was of course dropped, and no one but those far beneath her in social dignity, and maliciously inclined at that, presum- ed to question her antecedents, or to rec- ollect aught of that period when she had first appeared iu the real-life scenes of London low-life as a "tub-woman."

Of course the lords, dukes, and earls, to whom she nodded through her coach window, had no disposition to know ought of so scandalous a matter, so long as the rich and beautiful widow was wil- ling to receive their attentions, and to encourage them with her smiles to hope for still greater favors.

On the death of Mr. Peasley, an emi- nent young counsellor at law, named Hyde, was recommended to the bloom- ing and dashing young widow as a suita- ble person to arrange her late husband's affairs.

Now novelists do not work without a precedent, as may easily be surmised

�� �