The House on the Beach | Page 2

who has been tempted to abandon
the source of fifty per cent. So, if noble imagery were allowable in our
time in prose, might alarms and partial regrets be assumed to animate
the splendid pumpkin cut loose from the suckers. Deprived of that
prodigious nourishment of the shop in the fashionable seaport of
Helmstone, he retired upon his native town, the Cinque Port of
Crikswich, where he rented the cheapest residence he could discover
for his habitation, the House on the Beach, and lived imposingly,
though not in total disaccord with his old mother's principles. His
income, as he observed to his widowed sister and solitary companion
almost daily in their privacy, was respectable. The descent from an
altitude of fifty to five per cent. cannot but be felt. Nevertheless it was a
comforting midnight bolster reflection for a man, turning over to the
other side between a dream and a wink, that he was making no bad
debts, and one must pay to be addressed as esquire. Once an esquire,
you are off the ground in England and on the ladder. An esquire can
offer his hand in marriage to a lady in her own right; plain esquires
have married duchesses; they marry baronets' daughters every day of
the week.
Thoughts of this kind were as the rise and fall of waves in the bosom of
the new esquire. How often in his Helmstone shop had he not heard
titled ladies disdaining to talk a whit more prettily than ordinary
women; and he had been a match for the subtlety of their pride--he

understood it. He knew well that at the hint of a proposal from him they
would have spoken out in a manner very different to that of ordinary
women. The lightning, only to be warded by an esquire, was in them.
He quitted business at the age of forty, that he might pretend to
espousals with a born lady; or at least it was one of the ideas in his
mind.
And here, I think, is the moment for the epitaph of anticipation over
him, and the exclamation, alas! I would not be premature, but it is
necessary to create some interest in him, and no one but a foreigner
could feel it at present for the Englishman who is bursting merely to do
like the rest of his countrymen, and rise above them to shake them class
by class as the dust from his heels. Alas! then an--undertaker's pathos is
better than none at all--he was not a single-minded aspirant to our
social honours. The old marketing mother; to whom he owed his
fortunes, was in his blood to confound his ambition; and so
contradictory was the man's nature, that in revenge for disappointments,
there were times when he turned against the saving spirit of parsimony.
Readers deep in Greek dramatic writings will see the fatal Sisters
behind the chair of a man who gives frequent and bigger dinners, that
he may become important in his neighbourhood, while decreasing the
price he pays for his wine, that he may miserably indemnify himself for
the outlay. A sip of his wine fetched the breath, as when men are in the
presence of the tremendous elements of nature. It sounded the
constitution more darkly-awful, and with a profounder testimony to
stubborn health, than the physician's instruments. Most of the guests at
Mr. Tinman's table were so constructed that they admired him for its
powerful quality the more at his announcement of the price of it; the
combined strength and cheapness probably flattering them, as by
another mystic instance of the national energy. It must have been so,
since his townsmen rejoiced to hail him as head of their town. Here and
there a solitary esquire, fished out of the bathing season to dine at the
house on the beach, was guilty of raising one of those clamours
concerning subsequent headaches, which spread an evil reputation as a
pall. A resident esquire or two, in whom a reminiscence of Tinman's
table may be likened to the hook which some old trout has borne away
from the angler as the most vivid of warnings to him to beware for the

future, caught up the black report and propagated it.
The Lieutenant of the Coastguard, hearing the latest conscious victim,
or hearing of him, would nod his head and say he had never dined at
Tinman's table without a headache ensuing and a visit to the chemist's
shop; which, he was assured, was good for trade, and he acquiesced, as
it was right to do in a man devoted to his country. He dined with
Tinman again. We try our best to be social. For eight months in our
year he had little choice but to dine with Tinman or be a