To be rich is a luxurious sensation – the more so when you have plumbed the depths of hard-up-ness as a Fleet Street hack, a picker-up of unconsidered pars, a reporter, an unappreciated journalist – all callings utterly inconsistent with one's family feeling and one's direct descent from the Dukes of Picardy.
When my Aunt Dorcas died and left me seven hundred a year and a furnished house in Chelsea, I felt that life had nothing left to offer except immediate possession of the legacy. Even Mildred Mayhew, whom I had hitherto regarded as my life's light, became less luminous. I was not engaged to Mildred, but I lodged with her mother, and I sang duets with Mildred, and gave her gloves when it would run to it, which was seldom. She was a dear good girl, and I meant to marry her some day. It is very nice to feel that a good little woman is thinking of you – it helps you in your work – and it is pleasant to know she will say "Yes" when you say "Will you?"
But, as I say, my legacy almost put Mildred out of my head, especially as she was staying with friends in the country just then.
Before the first gloss was off my new mourning I was seated in my aunt's own armchair in front of the fire in the dining-room of my own house. My own house! It was grand, but rather lonely. I did think of Mildred just then.
The room was comfortably furnished with oak and leather. On the walls hung a few fairly good oil-paintings, but the space above the mantelpiece was disfigured by an exceedingly bad print, "The Trial of Lord William Russell," framed in a dark frame. I got up to look at it. I had visited my aunt with dutiful regularity, but I never remembered seeing this frame before. It was not intended for a print, but for an oil-painting. It was of fine ebony, beautifully and curiously carved.
I looked at it with growing interest, and when my aunt's housemaid – I had retained her modest staff of servants – came in with the lamp, I asked her how long the print had been there.
"Mistress only bought it two days afore she was took ill," she said; "but the frame – she didn't want to buy a new one – so she got this out of the attic. There's lots of curious old things there, sir."
"Had my aunt had this frame long?"
"Oh yes, sir. It come long afore I did, and I've been here seven years come Christmas. There was a picture in it – that's upstairs too – but it's that black and ugly it might as well be a chimley-back."
I felt a desire to see this picture. What if it were some priceless old master in which my aunt's eyes had only seen rubbish?