Reginald Cruden by Talbot Baines Reed (8 ebook reader .txt) 📖

It is strange how often our fortunes and misfortunes, which we are so apt to suppose depend on our own successes or failures, turn out to have fallen into hands we least expected, and to have been depending on trains of circumstances utterly beyond our range of imagination.

Who, for instance, would have guessed that a meeting of half a dozen business men in a first-floor room of a New York office could have any bearing on the fate of the Cruden family? Or that an accident to Major Lambert’s horse while clearing a fence at one of the —shire hunts should also affect their prospects in life?

But so it was.

While Reginald, tenderly nursed by his old school friend, was slowly recovering from his illness in Liverpool, and while Mrs Cruden and Horace, in their shabby London lodging, were breaking into their last hundred pounds, and wondering how, even with the boy’s improved wages and promise of literary success, they should be able to keep a comfortable home for their scattered but shortly to be reunited family—at this very time a few of the leading creditors of the Wishwash and Longstop Railway assembled in the old office of that bankrupt undertaking, and decided to accept an offer from the Grand Roundabout Railway to buy up their undertaking at half-price, and add its few hundred miles of line to their own few thousand.

A very important decision this for the little Dull Street family. For among the English creditors of this same Wishwash and Longstop Railway Mr Cruden had been one of the most considerable—so considerable that the shares he held in it had amounted to about half his fortune.

And when the division of the proceeds of the sale of the railway came to be divided it turned out that Mr Cruden’s administrators, heirs, and assigns were entitled to about a third of the value of that gentleman’s shares, or in other words, something like a sixth of their old property, which little windfall, after a good deal of wandering about and search for an owner, came finally under the notice of Mr Richmond’s successors, who in turn passed it over to Mrs Cruden with a very neat little note of congratulation on the good fortune which had made her and her sons the joint proprietors of a snug little income of from £300 to £400 a year.

Of course the sagacious reader will remark on this that it is only natural that towards the end of my story something of this sort should happen, in order to finish up with the remark that “they lived happily ever after.” And his opinion of me will, I fear, be considerably lowered when he finds that instead of Reginald dying in the smallpox hospital, and Mrs Cruden and Horace ending their days in the workhouse, things looked up a little for them towards the finish, and promised a rather more comfortable future than one had been led to expect.

It is sad, of course, to lose any one’s good esteem, but as things really did look up for the Crudens—as Reginald really did recover, as Mrs Cruden and Horace really did not go to the workhouse, and as the Grand Roundabout Railway really was spirited enough to buy up the Wishwash and Longstop Railway at half-price, I cannot help saying so, whatever the consequences may be.

But several weeks before Mr Richmond’s successors announced this windfall to their clients, the accident to Major Lambert’s horse had resulted in comfort to the Crudens of another kind, which, if truth must be told, they expected quite as little and valued quite as much.

That worthy Nimrod, once an acquaintance and neighbour of the Garden Vale family in the days of their prosperity, was never known to miss a winter’s hunting in his own county if he could possibly help it, and during the present season had actually come all the way from Malta, where his regiment was stationed, on short leave, for the sake of two or three days of his favourite sport in the old country.

Such enthusiasm was worthy of a happier fate than that which befell him. For on his first ride out his horse came to grief, as we have said, over a hedge, and left the gallant major somewhat knocked about himself, with nothing to do for half a day but to saunter disconsolately up and down the country lanes and pay afternoon calls on some of his old comrades.

Among others, he knocked at the door of an elderly dowager named Osborn, who was very sympathetic with him in his misfortunes, and did her best to comfort him with afternoon tea and gossip.

The latter lasted a good deal longer than the former. One after another the major’s old friends were mentioned and discussed and talked about as only folk can be talked about over afternoon tea.

“By the way,” said the caller, “I hear poor Cruden didn’t leave much behind him after all. Is Mrs Cruden still at Garden Vale?”

“No, indeed,” said the lady; “it’s a sad story altogether. Mr Cruden left nothing behind him, and Garden Vale had to be sold, and the family went to London, so I was told, in very poor circumstances.”

“Bless me!” said the honest major, “haven’t you looked them up? Cruden was a good sort of a fellow, you know.”

“Well, I’ve always intended to try and find out where they are living, but really, major, you have no idea how one’s time gets filled up.”

“I’ve a very good idea,” said the major with a groan. “I have to sail in a week, and there’s not much spare time between now and then, I can tell you. Still, I’d like to call and pay my respects to Mrs Cruden if I knew where she lived.”

“I daresay you could find out. But I was going to say that only yesterday I saw something in the paper which will hardly make Mrs Cruden anxious to see any of her old friends at present. The eldest son, I fear, has turned out badly.”

“Who? young—what was his name?—Reginald? Can’t believe it. He always seemed one of the right sort. A bit of a prig perhaps, but straight enough. What has he been up to?”

“You’d better see for yourself, major,” said the lady, extracting a newspaper from a heap under the dinner-waggon. “He seems to have been mixed up in a rather discreditable affair, as far as I could make out, but I didn’t read the report through.”

The major took the paper, and read a short report of the proceedings at the Liverpool Police-Court.

“You didn’t read it through, you say,” observed he, when he had finished; “you saw he was let off?”

“Yes, but I’m afraid—well, it’s very sad for them all.”

“Of course it is,”