The Newcomes | Page 8

hat, seizing
his stick, and looking as ferocious as though he had been going to do
battle with a Pindaree.
"Silence!" he roared out.
"Hear, hear!" cried certain wags at a farther table. "Go on, Costigan!"
said others.
"Go on!" cries the Colonel, in his high voice trembling with anger.
"Does any gentleman say 'Go On?' Does any man who has a wife and

sisters, or children at home, say 'Go on' to such disgusting ribaldry as
this? Do you dare, sir, to call yourself a gentleman, and to say that you
hold the King's commission, and to sit down amongst Christians and
men of honour, and defile the ears of young boys with this wicked
balderdash?"
"Why do you bring young boys here, old boy?" cries a voice of the
malcontents.
"Why? Because I thought I was coming to a society of gentlemen,"
cried out the indignant Colonel. "Because I never could have believed
that Englishmen could meet together and allow a man, and an old man,
so to disgrace himself. For shame, you old wretch! Go home to your
bed, you hoary old sinner! And for my part, I'm not sorry that my son
should see, for once in his life, to what shame and degradation and
dishonour, drunkenness and whisky may bring a man. Never mind the
change, sir!-- Curse the change!" says the Colonel, facing the amazed
waiter. "Keep it till you see me in this place again; which will be
never--by George, never!" And shouldering his stick, and scowling
round at the company of scared bacchanalians, the indignant gentleman
stalked away, his boy after him.
Clive seemed rather shamefaced; but I fear the rest of the company
looked still more foolish.
"Aussi que diable venait--il faire dans cette galere?" says King of
Corpus to Jones of Trinity; and Jones gave a shrug of his shoulders,
which were smarting, perhaps; for that uplifted cane of the Colonel's
had somehow fallen on the back of every man in the room.


CHAPTER II
Colonel Newcome's Wild Oats

As the young gentleman who has just gone to bed is to be the hero of
the following pages, we had best begin our account of him with his
family history, which luckily is not very long.
When pigtails still grew on the backs of the British gentry, and their
wives wore cushions on their heads, over which they tied their own hair,
and disguised it with powder and pomatum: when Ministers went in
their stars and orders to the House of Commons, and the orators of the
Opposition attacked nightly the noble lord in the blue ribbon: when Mr.
Washington was heading the American rebels with a courage, it must
be confessed, worthy of a better cause: there came up to London, out of
a northern county, Mr. Thomas Newcome, afterwards Thomas
Newcome, Esq., and sheriff of London, afterwards Mr. Alderman
Newcome, the founder of the family whose name has given the title to
this history. It was but in the reign of George III. that Mr. Newcome
first made his appearance in Cheapside; having made his entry into
London on a waggon, which landed him and some bales of cloth, all his
fortune, in Bishopsgate Street; though if it could be proved that the
Normans wore pigtails under William the Conqueror, and Mr.
Washington fought against the English under King Richard in Palestine,
I am sure some of the present Newcomes would pay the Heralds' Office
handsomely, living, as they do, amongst the noblest of the land, and
giving entertainments to none but the very highest nobility and elite of
the fashionable and diplomatic world, as you may read any day in the
newspapers. For though these Newcomes have got a pedigree from the
College, which is printed in Budge's Landed Aristocracy of Great
Britain, and which proves that the Newcome of Cromwell's army, the
Newcome who was among the last six who were hanged by Queen
Mary for Protestantism, were ancestors of this house; of which a
member distinguished himself at Bosworth Field; and the founder, slain
by King Harold's side at Hastings, had been surgeon-barber to King
Edward the Confessor; yet, between ourselves, I think that Sir Brian
Newcome, of Newcome, does not believe a word of the story, any more
than the rest of the world does, although a number of his children bear
names out of the Saxon Calendar.
Was Thomas Newcome a foundling--a workhouse child out of that

village which has now become a great manufacturing town, and which
bears his name? Such was the report set about at the last election, when
Sir Brian, in the Conservative interest contested the borough; and Mr.
Yapp, the out-and-out Liberal candidate, had a picture of the old
workhouse placarded over the town as the birthplace of the