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122 THE ADVENTURES OF PHILIP
were suffering under ever so much calamity—you could not help
laughing. He was the butt of all his acquaintances, the laughingstock
of high and low, and he had as loving, gentle, faithful, honourable
a heart as ever beat in a little bosom. He is gone to his rest
now; his palette and easel are waste timber; his genius, which
made some little flicker of brightness, never shone much, and is
extinct. In an old album that dates back for more than a score
of years, I sometimes look at poor Andrew's strange wild sketches.
He might have done something had he continued to remain poor ;
but a rich widow, whom he met at Rome, fell in love with the
strange errant painter, pursued him to England, and married him
in spite of himself. His genius drooped under the servitude : he
lived but a few short years, and died of a consumption, of which
the good Goodenough's skill could not cure him.
One day, as he was driving with his wife in her splendid
barouche through the Haymarket, he suddenly bade the coachman
stop, sprang over the side of the carriage before the steps could
be let fall, and his astonished wife saw him shaking the hands of
a shabbily dressed little woman who was passing,—shaking both
her hands, and weeping, and gesticulating, and twisting his beard
and mustachios, as his wont was when agitated. Mrs. Montfitchet
(the wealthy Mrs. Carrickfergus she had been, before she married
the painter), the owner of a young husband, who had sprung from
her side, and out of her carriage, in order to caress a young woman
passing in the street, might well be disturbed by this demonstration
; but she was a kind-hearted woman, and when Montfitchet, on
reascending into the family coach, told his wife the history of the
person of whom he had just taken leave, she cried plentifully too.
She bade the coachman drive straightway to her own house : she
rushed up to her own apartments, whence she emerged, bearing
an immense bag full of wearing apparel, and followed by a panting
butler, carrying a bottle-basket and a pie : and she drove off,
with her pleased Andrew by her side, to a court in St. Martin's
Lane, where dwelt the poor woman with whom he had just been
conversing.
It had pleased Heaven, in the midst of dreadful calamity, to
send her friends and succour. She was suffering under misfortune,
poverty, and cowardly desertion. A man who had called himself
Brandon when he took lodgings in her father's house, married her,
brought her to London, tired of her, and left her. She had reason
to think he had given a false name when he lodged with her father :
he fled, after a few months, and his real name she never knew.
When he deserted her, she went back to her father, a weak man,
married to a domineering woman, who pretended to disbelieve the