The History of Pendennis | Page 6

honour, but that in
his second year at Cambridge his father died insolvent, and poor Pen
was obliged to betake himself to the pestle and apron. He always

detested the trade, and it was only necessity, and the offer of his
mother's brother, a London apothecary of low family, into which
Pendennis's father had demeaned himself by marrying, that forced John
Pendennis into so odious a calling.
He quickly after his apprenticeship parted from the coarse-minded
practitioner his relative, and set up for himself at Bath with his modest
medical ensign. He had for some time a hard struggle with poverty; and
it was all he could do to keep the shop and its gilt ornaments in decent
repair, and his bed-ridden mother in comfort: but Lady Ribstone
happening to be passing to the Rooms with an intoxicated Irish
chairman who bumped her ladyship up against Pen's very door-post,
and drove his chair-pole through the handsomest pink bottle in the
surgeon's window, alighted screaming from her vehicle, and was
accommodated with a chair in Mr. Pendennis's shop, where she was
brought round with cinnamon and sal-volatile.
Mr. Pendennis's manners were so uncommonly gentlemanlike and
soothing, that her ladyship, the wife of Sir Pepin Ribstone, of
Codlingbury, in the county of Somerset, Bart., appointed her preserver,
as she called him, apothecary to her person and family, which was very
large. Master Ribstone coming home for the Christmas holidays from
Eton, over-ate himself and had a fever, in which Mr. Pendennis treated
him with the greatest skill and tenderness. In a word, he got the good
graces of the Codlingbury family, and from that day began to prosper.
The good company of Bath patronised him, and amongst the ladies
especially he was beloved and admired. First his humble little shop
became a smart one: then he discarded the selling of tooth-brushes and
perfumery, as unworthy of a gentleman of an ancient lineage: then he
shut up the shop altogether, and only had a little surgery attended by a
genteel young man: then he had a gig with a man to drive him; and,
before her exit from this world, his poor old mother had the happiness
of seeing from her bedroom window to which her chair was rolled, her
beloved John step into a close carriage of his own, a one-horse carriage
it is true, but with the arms of the family of Pendennis handsomely
emblazoned on the panels. "What would Arthur say now?" she asked,
speaking of a younger son of hers--"who never so much as once came

to see my dearest Johnny through all the time of his poverty and
struggles!"
"Captain Pendennis is with his regiment in India, mother," Mr.
Pendennis remarked, "and, if you please, I wish you would not call me
Johnny before the young man--before Mr. Parkins."
Presently the day came when she ceased to call her son by the name of
Johnny, or by any other title of endearment or affection; and his house
was very lonely without that kind though querulous voice. He had his
night-bell altered and placed in the room in which the good old lady
had grumbled for many a long year, and he slept in the great large bed
there. He was upwards of forty years old when these events befell;
before the war was over; before George the Magnificent came to the
throne; before this history indeed: but what is a gentleman without his
pedigree? Pendennis, by this time, had his handsomely framed and
glazed, and hanging up in his drawing-room between the pictures of
Codlingbury House in Somersetshire, and St. Boniface's College,
Cambridge, where he had passed the brief and happy days of his early
manhood. As for the pedigree he had taken it out of a trunk, as Sterne's
officer called for his sword, now that he was a gentleman and could
show it.
About the time of Mrs. Pendennis's demise, another of her son's
patients likewise died at Bath; that virtuous woman, old Lady
Pontypool, daughter of Reginald twelfth Earl of Bareacres, and by
consequence great-grand-aunt to the present Earl, and widow of John
second Lord Pontypool, and likewise of the Reverend Jonas Wales, of
the Armageddon Chapel, Clifton. For the last five years of her life her
ladyship had been attended by Miss Helen Thistlewood, a very distant
relative of the noble house of Bareacres, before mentioned, and
daughter of Lieutenant R. Thistlewood, R.N., killed at the battle of
Copenhagen. Under Lady Pontypool's roof Miss Thistlewood found a
comfortable shelter, as far as boarding and lodging went, but suffered
under such an infernal tyranny as only women can inflict on, or bear
from, one another: the Doctor, who paid his visits to my Lady
Pontypool at least twice a day, could not but remark the angelical

sweetness and