A Rogues Life | Page 4

magnificent
practice as a physician.
As a general practitioner, he might have bought a comfortable business,
with a house and snug surgery-shop attached; but the son-in-law of
Lady Malkinshaw was obliged to hold up his head, and set up his
carriage, and live in a street near a fashionable square, and keep an
expensive and clumsy footman to answer the door, instead of a cheap
and tidy housemaid. How he managed to "maintain his position" (that
is the right phrase, I think), I never could tell. His wife did not bring
him a farthing. When the honorable and gallant baronet, her father, died,
he left the widowed Lady Malkinshaw with her worldly affairs in a
curiously involved state. Her son (of whom I feel truly ashamed to be
obliged to speak again so soon) made an effort to extricate his

mother--involved himself in a series of pecuniary disasters, which
commercial people call, I believe, transactions--struggled for a little
while to get out of them in the character of an independent
gentleman--failed--and then spiritlessly availed himself of the
oleaginous refuge of the soap and candle trade. His mother always
looked down upon him after this; but borrowed money of him also--in
order to show, I suppose, that her maternal interest in her son was not
quite extinct. My father tried to follow her example--in his wife's
interests, of course; but the soap-boiler brutally buttoned up his pockets,
and told my father to go into business for himself. Thus it happened
that we were certainly a poor family, in spite of the fine appearance we
made, the fashionable street we lived in, the neat brougham we kept,
and the clumsy and expensive footman who answered our door.
What was to be done with me in the way of education?
If my father had consulted his means, I should have been sent to a
cheap commercial academy; but he had to consult his relationship to
Lady Malkinshaw; so I was sent to one of the most fashionable and
famous of the great public schools. I will not mention it by name,
because I don't think the masters would be proud of my connection
with it. I ran away three times, and was flogged three times. I made
four aristocratic connections, and had four pitched battles with them:
three thrashed me, and one I thrashed. I learned to play at cricket, to
hate rich people, to cure warts, to write Latin verses, to swim, to recite
speeches, to cook kidneys on toast, to draw caricatures of the masters,
to construe Greek plays, to black boots, and to receive kicks and
serious advice resignedly. Who will say that the fashionable public
school was of no use to me after that?
After I left school, I had the narrowest escape possible of intruding
myself into another place of accommodation for distinguished people;
in other words, I was very nearly being sent to college. Fortunately for
me, my father lost a lawsuit just in the nick of time, and was obliged to
scrape together every farthing of available money that he possessed to
pay for the luxury of going to law. If he could have saved his seven
shillings, he would certainly have sent me to scramble for a place in the

pit of the great university theater; but his purse was empty, and his son
was not eligible therefore for admission, in a gentlemanly capacity, at
the doors.
The next thing was to choose a profession.
Here the Doctor was liberality itself, in leaving me to my own devices.
I was of a roving adventurous temperament, and I should have liked to
go into the army. But where was the money to come from, to pay for
my commission? As to enlisting in the ranks, and working my way up,
the social institutions of my country obliged the grandson of Lady
Malkinshaw to begin military life as an officer and gentleman, or not to
begin it at all. The army, therefore, was out of the question. The Church?
Equally out of the question: since I could not pay for admission to the
prepared place of accommodation for distinguished people, and could
not accept a charitable free pass, in consequence of my high
connections. The Bar? I should be five years getting to it, and should
have to spend two hundred a year in going circuit before I had earned a
farthing. Physic? This really seemed the only gentlemanly refuge left;
and yet, with the knowledge of my father's experience before me, I was
ungrateful enough to feel a secret dislike for it. It is a degrading
confession to make; but I remember wishing I was not so highly
connected, and absolutely thinking that the life of a commercial traveler
would have suited me exactly, if I had not