HIS FATHER'S SON.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 4574, 20 February 1893, Page 1

HIS FATHER'S SON.

There had been <ew gayor or more reckless young bloods about town in the fifties than Lord j St Simon, although very few of those who bad made his acquaintance in later life would have guessed that such had over been the case. Like . a great many other men who have sown their wild ; oats in the days of their youth and duly reaped i the consequent crop in middle age, he had repedted ; somewhat bitterly of the bargain in which he had ' traded away the best years of his life for pleasures . which, after all, real'y only looked pleasant from the standpoint of anticipation. But in addition to the usual follies of the golden i youth of his period, Lard St Simon had been guilty | of a mixture of sentimentality and blind (recklessness, the result of which; had been to embitter his life for years, and indeed to threaten to wreck it permanently. It came about in this wise. • \ One evening while the fifties were yet young he was passing through the purlieus of Drury Xane with a couple of friends, in search of something in tbo way of an evening's entertainment. Outside tho door of one of the then newlyestablished gin palaces a man was playing a Scotch reel on a somewhat wiry fiddle, and in front of him, surrounded by a small crowd, a couple of young girls, apparently about twelve or thirteen, wexe dancing with grace and skill which contrasted somewhat oddly with the sofdidness of the scene of their performance. His lordship and his friends stopped to see what was going on, and remained to admire until the end of the reel that wbb in progress when (hey came upon the scene. Then one of the girls came round with a little tin cup to coUoefc the pennies, and instead of a penny Lord St' Simon dropped half a crown in the cup, and then went and asked a few questions of the musician. ', He learnt that the two girls were his daughters, an assertion which was quite true enough for his lordship's purposes; and he also learnt that the father had trained them to dance in the hope of getting them engagements on the stage in the ■chorus or the ballet. . Now Lord St. Simon saw in this combination of circumstances a chance fur a new diversion which promised employment and amusement for some time to come. He had, of course, had several adventures of a more or less creditable character with sylphs of the stage, but so far he had not yet tasted the pleasure of bringing out a stage celebrity all to his own credit. ' Long and interested observations had made him an excellent judge of stage-dancing, and he saw quite enough of the two .girls and their, performance on the pavement to see that one of them at least had in her the makings of something much more than an ordinary dancer, w ■ < - : The upshotof the chance i meeting with the fiddler and his two daughters, was that his lordship gave his card to the man and told him to bring' lihVWo^ i'girlß''tb^::W^mlanl ''the 'next morning,' in,' order that' ne"taight' havis'% better opportunity of judging whether o*' not either oil both of them possessed sufficient talent to be regularly trained for. the stage at his lordship's expense. The appointment was kept to the minute, for the opportunity was too good to be missed. Lord St Simon was well known as one of the wealthiest and most lavish of the golden youth of the day?, and as both the girls were pretty and bright, and -excedingly anxious' to get on to tho stage, why there was no telling how profitably the affair might turn out—especially from the speculative parent's point of view. Accordingly his lordship and one or two of his most favoured iriends had the pleasure of witnessing one of the most entertaining. little diplays of the poetry of motion that even they had ever seen. The exhibition practically resolved itself into a trial of skill between the two girls, and the result of the trial was so near a dead heat that his lordship decided, on the advice of one of his friends, who was himself connected with the variety stage, to stand as professional sponsor to both of them. By way of making up for the loss of the coppers which their performances had won from their audiences in the street, the father was given thirty shillings a week as commutation of his righte for the time being in tho product of their art, and the two girls were plaoed at Lord St Simon's expense under the tuition of a professor of atageiandng and patter-singing. That was in the early summer, and six months •f regular training produced such satisfactory results that the two young ladies were sufficiently prepared to accept a very fair pantomime engagement at the end of the following autumn. . Their first appearance was at the transformation of the chrysalis into the butterfly, and his lordship reaped a rich reward for the expenses that he had 60 kindly incurred on their behalf in the universal congratulations that lie received on the subject of his artiatio perception, and also in the very satisfactory position that he held as patron and bringer out of the two pretty dancers. The story got round the town, and Jenny and Sally Smithera, as they were known in private life, became, as the charming Bisters Benßon on the stage, quite the sensation of the season. When the pantomimes were over other engagements followed, and by the time the next season came round their re-appearance on the London stage as full blown artists at handsome salaries was warmly welcomed, and his lordship reaped a further reward in the/ congratulations of his set albeit they were not unmixed with insinuations •f ulterior motives. If he had been content to let matters rest as they were, the result of his philanthropic enterprise might have been nothing but satisfactory. Unhappily, however, eighteen months had made a very great difference in the two erstwhile pave-ment-dancers, and they were now .both of them possessed with more than sufficient womanly attractions to make them dangerous to the peace of mind of a young, idle, and wealthy bachelor such as the nobleman to whom they owed in such a large degree their rapid rise in the professional world. As some of the wiseacres had predicted from the beginning, his lordship goon began to take a very much warmer interest in them than was warranted by his professional sponsorship, and this fact becoming known, the busy tongue of Scandal began to wag at a very considerable rate at his expense and theirs. Both these young ladies, however, were a great deal too well versed, both in tho. wayß of the world and the canons of female propriety, to give anything more than the most shadowy basis for the romances of ill-natured rumour. Suffice it to flay that, without the slightest warning,- Miss Sally Smithers disappeared one : fine day from the horizon of the theatrical world and re-appeared a.short time later as Lady St Simon. The wedding was naturally an extremely quiet; one; the only bridesmaid was Jenny, the best man was a confidential friend of the bridegroom, and the bride was given away by the gentleman who some two years before might have been seen manipulating a somewhat decrepit fiddle outsido a Drury Lane public-houso. The fact that he was only. just; sober enough to go through his part of the ceremony without 100 flagrantly outraging the sacred character of the building in which it was performed remained a family secret until some years later. The fatal knot being duly tied, her ladyship disappeared on to the Continent, to re-appear as the leader, of a brilliant if somewhat adventurous set in London, while Jenny went back to tho boards to work at her profession and ultimately to marry the h&Aef of the orchestra at Sadler's - weiu/ ■■■■•■■'■•. ■•'■'■.■■;..'. . • ■

Unfortunately for his lordship's domestiepeace, either he had chosen the wrong girl or the right one had declined him with thanks. 'Her sudden elevation from the stage to the peerage fay no moans improved Lady St Simon. On the contrary, if; practically proved the ruin of her. ' She got stout and loud, which perhaps was not altogether her fault, seeing that Nature possibly intended her to be both. She also developed a possibly inherited taste for strong 'drink, to which she gave way upon every available occasion, to the great disgust of his lordship and the disturbance of the peace of their very limited family circle. / Drinking to excess was not one of his lordship's sufficiently plentiful vices, and this fact made her ladyship's indulgence all the more disgraceful in his eye 3. They quarrelled almost as a matter of course. High words on one disastrous occasion led to blows, not on his lordship's part, for, after all, he was too much of a gentleman for that, but on her ladyship's, and then she, not content with considerably disfiguring the ■countenance of her noble spouse and sometime benefactor, disappeared a eecond time to tho Continent. Some eighteen months later she returned a ruined woman, and threw herself upon his lordship's charity, with no more satisfactory result than a peremptory order to lie down upon the bed that Bhe had made for herself. A few days afterwards there was an inquest on the body of a woman that had been taken out of tho I Thames. ! A scrap of paper found upon her identified her, to Lord St Simon's intense disgust, as his, erring spouse. Bowing to circumstances, he buried her decently, and as quietly as he could, and by means of a liberal disbursement of coins of tho realm, managed to procure such garbled reports of the inquest, that none, save two or three of his most intimate friends, ever., know how lamentably tho romance of his youth had closed. Naturally the affair had a very serious, but, on the.whole, salutary effect upon his lordship. He had Bown his wild oats in lightness of heart, and had reaped the usual crop in bitterness of spirit. 80, like a wise man of tho world, he decided to turn down that page in his life's story for good, and* settle down into as close an imitation of a respectable member of Society as he could manage to make, himself. He was still under thirty-five when it happened, and as he was rich and of a good breeding and presence, his sins, so far as they were known, were readily forgiven by Society — all the more readily because he was unencumbered with an heir to his property — and a Couple of years more saw him comfortably and respectably married to the daughter of a county family whoso property adjoined his own estate in Lincolnshire. As the fruit of this marriage he was blessed with two eons, both good-looking and highspirited young fellows, upon whom, as soon aB they had arrived at y^ars of discretion, he lost tio pbpojfturiity^^ of impressing. the vanity and vexation/of spirit that accrued to young men of fortune and title from any connection with the syrens of the stage. These good counsels he further enforced by a declaration that ho who neglected them should pay for his indiscretion the utmost penalty that the law permitted him to inflict In the casß of the elder, Francis Viscount Louthmere, this would amount practically to a deprivation of everything but the bare title, while to the younger it meant beggary, for both of them were entirely dependent upon their father during his lifetime, and for almost all their future prospects u^on the terms of his will. It was a well-laid scheme, no doubt, and arranged by his lordship with, the very best intention of saving his eons from what might possibly be even a worse fate than that which had gone perilously near to wrecking his own life. Unhappily, however, the best laid schemes of parental wisdom too often go wrong in tho very direction in which they aro intended to erect tho barrier against evil. ' Lord St Simon hod paid protty dearly for his folly ; but if the effects of it had stopped with himself, the price would have been a fairly reasonable one, considering tho circumstances. But^unhappily it appeared that the whole of the wild oats harvest had not yet been reaped, and that it was written in the Book of Fate that the follies of the father vrera to be visited upon afc leaefc one of his bods. Tho 'younger, the Honorable James Louthmere, was hs good and steady-going a specimen of tho budding country gentleman as either the paternal or the maternal heart could have wished for ; but Francis was his father's son to a somewhat threatening degree. There was no real vice in him, so far as could be seen; and, saving perhaps for a somewhat decided inclination towards the gayer side of life, ho was everything that could be looked for in the heir to a good title and considerable broad acres. With biro, too, all might have gone well and smoothly, and he might have married. into his own order in life, and in due course taken his place in his father's room, had it not been for a certain fatal visit that he paid to London shortly after taking a very creditable degree at Oxford. During that visit he went one night to the Frivolity Theatre of Varieties, and there saw, and on tho* spot fell in love with, one of the most delightful little dancers that ever turned men's head by the deft manipulation of her feet. Night after night he occupied the same position in the stalls, and night after night the enchantment grew stronger and stronger upon him. Two or three times ho mado a manly attempt to tear himself free from the fascinations of the dancing syren, and, being a young man of considerable strength of mind, it is possible that in the end he might havo succeeded but for a fatal facility that chance offered him for falling yet deeper into the pleasant toils. One night he make the acquaintance of a man who happened to know a friend and stage-mate of Sylvia Leyton, the young lady whose personal and artistic charms had enthralled his youthful senses. This lod to. an introduction, and the introduction led to an acquaintance that deepened' with alarming rapidity on both sides into something a good deal warmer than friendship. The result was that by the' time he brought himself to obey the third summons from his father to return to the ancestral roof he went back home the plighted lover of the pretty little dancer. For twelve months he managed to keep the matter within the limits of his own counsel, and then, in the course of a conversation between himself and his father, in which the latter somewhat peremptorily insisted upon tho necessity of his immediate selection of a partner of his future honours, the secret came out. (To be continued.)