privately one day: ' Colonel, may I be permitted to ask a perhaps indiscreet question—why is it that you have never married?', he heaved a deep sigh and took fully a minute to answer.
Then he explained that he had been one of five brothers, of which he was now the sole survivor. 'They each and all died by pistol shot,' he added.
'They were inveterate duellists, I suppose ?' Dr Knight suggested.
The Colonel shook his head mournfully.
'Ah, so they fell in battle?' pursued Dr Knight.
Again a shake of the head. 'We Brookes are a melancholy breed, Sir,' the Colonel at last forced himself to say, 'and each of my brothers in turn, when the unhappiness of living this life out proved too great for him, blew out his own brains. That is the reason why I have never married; I cannot wish either to perpetuate the family taint of suicide by begetting children, or to bring disgrace on their mother. For though I have fought successfully against the temptation of self-murder all my life, and though its recurrence has become both less frequent and less violent with advancing age, I can never be sure that it will not one day leap upon me like a lurking tiger. Indeed, only the other evening
Emotion prevented the Colonel from completing the sentence, but Dr Knight made him promise that if he ever felt a return of the evil, he would promise on his honour to call without delay at the surgery, whatever the hour, for consolation and friendly support. Colonel Brookes pledged him his word as a soldier, and appeared to be very much heartened by the old Doctor's evident sympathy.
I had, by the way, also introduced Colonel Brookes to the Mr Thomas Weaver of whom I spoke just now: a competent solicitor, then entrusted with my own business affairs, who seemed willing enough to undertake the Colonel's. Mr Weaver advised him to buy a property in the town consisting of seventeen acres of land, valued at three to four hundred pounds the acre; also of nine fine dwelling houses at the back of St Mary's Church, the leases of winch brought in a handsome income, or at least handsome in comparison with the purchase price. The largest of these had lately become unoccupied at the expiration of its lease.
Now, though Colonel Brookes was a model citizen in all other respects, chronic ill-health had blunted neither his sexual appetite nor his virility; and when he engaged a widow and her daughter to act, respectively, as his cook and his parlour-maid, trouble soon ensued. Disdaining the widow, a buxom woman of forty who had already set her cap at him, he made surreptitious love to the seventeen-year-old daughter who (let me be frank), failed to repel his advances with the firmness that might have been expected of a decent girl. The mother, returning from the market one day, caught the pair together in the parlour: the Colonel seated on the sofa, the girl mounted astride his bony knees, while his aged hands greedily explored her young bosom. Rage and jealousy did their work: the widow not only gave immediate notice, but demanded fifty guineas from him as the price of silence.
Their precipitate departure from the house, and the blushes of the daughter when questioned on it, gave rise to so much talk among neighbours and tradespeople, that the Colonel was hard pressed to find domestic service; for Stafford is not a large town. He therefore privately consulted Mr Weaver, making a clean breast of the affair and begging for his help. Mr Weaver hummed and hawed for a while before he ventured:' Well, Colonel Brookes, I understand that you are not a marrying man, but that neither are you a monk, and I daresay during your stay in India you found little difficulty in assuaging . . .'
' No difficulty at all,' agreed the Colonel Among the heathen Hindoos these matters are easily and cheaply arranged. And I have always liked young bed-fellows; the younger the better, let me confess.'
Mr Weaver hummed and hawed again. Then he came out with: 'Well, Sir, I am not a pander by profession, but you consult me as a friend in trouble . . . well, there's pretty Mary Ann Thornton, who was in great distress last year. Captain John Browne, of the Royal Navy, her employer ... in short, he died suddenly, leaving her in the family way. However, since the child did not long survive its birth, no claim for maintenance was made on his estate, and Miss Thornton is at present unemployed. She has the reputation of being a hard worker, and appears to prefer mature men to her own contemporaries. She can't be a day above eighteen years old, with fair hair, blue eyes, and a good figure. May I send her along to your residence?'
The affair was thus arranged, and Mary Ann Thornton came to the Front Street house, bringing with her as cook an elderly aunt, whom the Colonel agreed to pay pretty high wages. Miss Thornton herself doubled the parts of housekeeper and concubine. The Colonel became passionately addicted to her company.
Well, Sir, men are men, and we of the whist club turned a blind eye to these domesticities, as being none of our business; especially after Dr Knight dropped a broad hint of why the Colonel shrank from marriage. 'And I am sure it is far better,' he said, 'that the
Colonel should keep a healthy young mistress, than be obliged to seek the doubtful solace of a bawdy house—his visits there would be not only dangerous, as exposing him to venereal infection, but also scandalous. We do not, I take it, wish to be known as persons who regularly associate with an old rake.'
We assented, though not without presentiment of some unhappy sequel. Miss Thornton soon came to realize the Colonel's increasing dependence on her services. She grew worldly and ambitious, and nothing would satisfy her save that 'he should make an honest woman of me', as she put it, paradoxically enough. Yet he continued obdurate in his resolve to stay a bachelor, even when she announced her pregnancy. It has, by the bye, been said that a younger lover fathered the child; this is Market gossip, though, and the Colonel at least believed himself responsible for her condition. I took the view that he could do worse than marry the girl, despite her gross ignorance and low birth. The former fault might have been remedied by private tuition; the latter would have been cancelled by the adoption of his name. He felt very tenderly towards her, that is certain, and made a solemn undertaking, in Mr Weaver's presence, not only to keep her in the style which she might have expected as a wife, but to remember her handsomely in his will. All her tears and pleadings, however, failed to shake his resolution not to marry. When he offered to arrange an abortion, if she so desired, she professed to be outraged, saying that this was a crime against the laws of England and against Nature. Until the very end of her confinement she cherished hopes for a change of heart in him, but all that he would do by way of placating her was to move from their somewhat cramped and public quarters in Front Street to the more commodious vacant house behind St Mary's Church, and furnish it regardless of expense. She suffered a difficult pregnancy, which made her behave in a very strange manner, casting the wildest threats at the Colonel. On one occasion (so he confided to Dr Knight) she snatched up a kitchen knife and chased him around the table. On another, when he went to his bedroom, shortly before dinner, he found her lying drunk on the floor, with an empty quartern bottle of gin tumbled beside her.
Nevertheless, the child, a girl, was born safe and sound. The Colonel felt lasting chagrin, since it had been to avoid the begetting of children that he had registered his vow; and Mary Ann Thornton, unappeasable resentment. Even if he now made her
Mrs Brookes, that honour would come too late: the child was born illegitimate. She continued to drink heavily and, since the Colonel had guilty feelings in regard to her, tyrannized over him with impunity. The affair reached such a pitch that neither old Mr Wright, Dr Knight, nor myself dared call at his house for fear of witnessing disgraceful scenes. The blue-eyed belle was fast losing her looks, becoming thin and angular, with that blueish pallor which betrays a constant recourse to gin; and made no attempt to rule her excessively foul and vulgar tongue. She never ceased to blame him for 'whoring' her and, by his cruelty and neglect, driving her to the bottle.
The chief bone of contention between them was the child, whom Miss (now Mrs) Thornton regarded with possessive greed, and on whom Colonel Brookes doted, for he loved the company of children. In better moods she encouraged his affection for little Annie, but when the gin was working in her, would roughly
order him out of the nursery. 'This is my b…. child,' she would scream. 'It could also have been yours, you toad, you turd, you Turk, if you had been the gentleman I first mistook you for! But you have cast a blight on the poor innocent's life by your refusal to lend her your name, and neither she nor I will ever forgive you. So, go, go— out with you—before I tear your eyes from their sockets! And one word of protest—you b—— you—and I'll dame you with these shears!'
She would then pick up the shears, or it might be a knife, or a cleaver, and my unhappy old friend would run for shelter to The Lamb and Flag. He even, on one occasion, took sanctuary in the vestry of St Mary's Church. Thus the scandal which Mr Weaver had hoped to avert, by his discreet pandering to the Colonel's weaknesses, grew a thousand times worse than if the unfortunate man had merely been known as a frequenter of bawdy houses. He could, of course, have posted out of the country for his weekly pleasures; to Liverpool, for example, and little harm done. But now, when one of her ungovernable rages overcame her, she would follow him all the way to The Lamb and Flag—not fully clad neither, her hair in curling pins—where with her ramping, stamping, tearing and swearing,
