But among the amiable characteristics of Captain Jones was a love of wife and child, scarcely to
be wondered at, indeed, considering his wife’s lively and entertaining disposition and
the extraordinary promise of that little girl who was later to become the wife of Lord
Cornwallis. At whatever risk to himself, Captain Jones would steal back to revisit his
wife and to hear his little girl recite the part of Juliet which, under his teaching,
she had perfectly by heart. On one such secret journey he was hurrying to get within
the royal sanctuary of St. James’s when a voice called on him to stop. His fears
obsessing him, he hurried the faster, his pursuer close at his heels. Realizing
that escape was impossible, Jones wheeled about and facing his pursuer, whom he
recognized as the Attorney Brown, demanded what his enemy wanted of him. Far
from being his enemy, said Brown, he was the best friend he had ever had, which
he would prove if Jones would accompany him to the first tavern that came to
hand. There, in a private room over a fire, Mr. Brown disclosed the following
astonishing story. An unknown friend, he said, who had scrutinized Jones’s conduct
carefully and concluded that his deserts outweighed his misdemeanours, was prepared
to settle all his debts and indeed to put him beyond the reach of such tormentors
in future. At these words a load was lifted from Jones’s heart, and he cried out
“Good God! Who can this paragon of friendship be?” It was none other, said Brown,
than General Skelton. General Skelton, the man whom he had only met to chat with on
a bench in St. James’s Park? Jones asked in wonderment. Yes, it was the General,
Brown assured him. Then let him hasten to throw himself in gratitude at his benefactor’
s knee! Not so fast, Brown replied; General Skelton will never speak to you again
. General Skelton died last night.
The extent of Captain Jones’s good fortune was indeed magnificent.
The General had left Captain Jones sole heir to all his possessions
on no other condition than that he should assume the name of Skelton
instead of Jones. Hastening through streets no longer dreadful, since
every debt of honour could now be paid, Captain Jones brought his wife
the astonishing news of their good fortune, and they promptly set out to
view that part which lay nearest to hand — the General’s great house in
Henrietta Street. Gazing about her, half in dream, half in earnest, Mrs. Jones
Was so overcome with the tumult of her emotions that she could not stay to gather
in the extent of her possessions, but ran to Little Bedford Street, where Mrs.
Wilkinson was then living, to impart her joy. Meanwhile, the news that General
Skelton lay dead in Henrietta Street without a son to succeed him spread abroad, a
nd those who thought themselves his heirs arrived in the house of death to take stock
of their inheritance, among them one great and beautiful lady whose avarice was her
undoing, whose misfortunes were equal to her sins, Kitty Chudleigh, Countess
of Bristol, Duchess of Kingston. Miss Chudleigh, as she then called herself,
believed, and who can doubt that with her passionate nature, her lust for wealth
and property, her pistols and her parsimony, she believed with vehemence and
asserted her belief with arrogance, that all General Skelton’s property had
legally descended to her. Later, when the will was read and the truth made
public that not only the house in Henrietta Street, but Pap Castle in Cumberland
and the lands and lead mines pertaining to it, were left without exception to an
unknown Captain Jones, she burst out in “terms exceeding all bounds of delicacy.”
She cried that her relative the General was an old fool in his dotage, that Jones
and his wife were impudent low upstarts beneath her notice, and so flounced into her
aving new furnished the house in Henrietta Street, the Jones family set out when
summer came to visit their estates in Cumberland. The country was so fair,
the Castle so stately, the thought that now all belonged to them so gratifying
that their progress for three weeks was one of unmixed pleasure and the spot
where they were now to live seemed a paradise. But there was an eagerness, an
impetuosity about James Jones which made him impatient to suffer even the smiles
of fortune passively. He must be active — he must be up and doing. He must be
“let down,” for all his friends could do to dissuade him, to view a lead mine.
The consequences as they foretold were disastrous. He was drawn up, indeed,
but already infected with a deadly sickness of which in a few days he died,
in the arms of his wife, in the midst of that paradise which he had toiled so
long to reach and now was to die without enjoying.