"Tush, Jack, you love to put on the dolefuls! That melancholy air of yours has been but too successful with women. There"s nothing so fascinating as the sadness of a _roue_."
"I dreamt of my mother last night, Durnford. It was Miss Bosworth"s face that was in my mind as I laid my head on my pillow; but it was the mournful countenance of my mother which visited my slumbers. She pleaded with me against my evil pa.s.sions, as she had done many a time when I was a wayward wilful boy; urged me to lead a good life. "Yes, for your sake," I answered; "only for your sake, mother;" and woke with those words on my lips. My voice had a ghostly sound as I woke in the darkness and heard it; and after that there was not a wink of sleep for me in all the long slow hours that followed the summer dawn. I lay and thought of Judith. O Herrick, how I loved that woman!"
"Yes, and love her still, and yet would marry another."
"I must marry in order that I may mend. Nothing but a good wife and a happy home can cure my wounds. Do you call this a home, for instance?"
he asked bitterly, looking round the large room, with its handsome ponderous furniture and crimson damask hangings, so dark a red as to seem almost black in the dim light of the two tall candles. "Has it not a funereal air? And yet it smells of old orgies. It seems to me as if those curtains exhale Burgundy and champagne, and still reek of strong waters."
Late as it was by the time they had supped, Lavendale insisted upon going out and on taking Durnford with him. There would be some of the chocolate-houses or gambling-dens in the neighbourhood of Leicester Fields or Soho still open, though it was past eleven o"clock.
"I will go with you if you like," said Durnford, "but I shall be like a skeleton at your feast, for I have made up my mind never again to touch a card."
"And how many nights or hours will that mind of yours last, do you suppose, Herrick, when you hear the musical rattle of the ivories, the soft seductive sound of the dice sliding gently on to the board of green cloth? Pshaw, man! as if I did not know you, and that you are at heart a gambler!"
"Perhaps, but my gambling henceforth shall take a loftier aim. I will play at cards with fortune, and my counters shall be courage and industry. I am going to turn over a new leaf, Jack."
"You have turned over so many that you must be pretty well through the book of good resolutions by this time. But what in the name of all that"s wonderful has made you virtuous, Herrick? You are not in love with an heiress, and bent upon domesticity as I am."
"If you are so, stop at home."
"Not in this house. It smells like the tomb of dead pleasures. When I look back and think of my wild youth within these four walls I feel like an old man. And yet thirty-one is hardly on the confines of senility, is it, Herrick?"
"Thirty-one should be the bloom of youth."
"Come, boy, let us to the little chocolate-house at the corner of Golden Square, which is nearly as modish as White"s, and much more select. The proprietor boasts of dukes who have been ruined on his premises, and of women of rank who have p.a.w.ned more than their diamonds and parted with more than I O U"s after a night at ba.s.set."
"I will go with you, but not to play," answered Herrick, as they put on their hats.
"You were always as obstinate as Old Nick. Yet you should be fond of the dice-box, for you have ever had the devil"s luck at cards, and ought to live by play."
"Yes, I have had that kind of diabolical good fortune which seems like an omen that I shall be lucky in nothing else. But I am not going to live by hazard, even to oblige you. I would rather starve."
"You are right, Herrick. It is the basest mode of subsistence, or almost the basest. There are one or two worse ways of living in this modern Babylon of ours; but for a gentlemanly profession, I grant you gambling is about the worst. We need neither of us play, but we may as well stroll to Golden Square and take a dish of chocolate, and hear what is going on at the Court end of town, now that everybody is in the country, and the last good story about the Prince and his wife"s waiting-woman."
"Strange how these sober Hanoverians, these pa.s.sionless money-grubbers, affect the libertine airs of a Philip of Orleans or a Duc de Richelieu," said Herrick.
"O, but we cannot do without a profligate king," exclaimed Lavendale.
"See how much gayer and pleasanter town has been since sober-minded, pious, domestic Anne gave place to these gay Hanoverian dogs, who imitate old Rowley in little, yet with a certain bourgeois respectability in their arrangements to which he never condescended. See how the theatres have multiplied, and how Italian opera and French plays have thriven, in spite of the prejudiced mob; and our masquerades, b.a.l.l.s, ridottos, call them what you will, do we not owe them also to King George, who has encouraged enterprising Heidegger? No such benefaction for a nation as a prince who loves pleasure. Trade thrives and the land fattens under the rule of a _roue_. Remember how England prospered under Charles II."
They were in the street by this time, or rather that mixture of town and country which lay between Bloomsbury and Golden Square. The rain had ceased, the sky had cleared, and the moon was high, a night such as footpads and highwaymen love not. In this clear summer weather there were fewer murders and robberies than in the long dark nights of autumn and winter, and even that favourite haunt of London banditti, Denmark Street, St. Giles"s, might be pa.s.sed with safety.
Golden Square was then one of the newest and handsomest squares in London. It had been built towards the close of the last reign, and it was here that St. John in his brief day of power had furnished and decorated a splendid mansion, from which disgrace drove him across the Channel, a fugitive in an ignominious disguise, six months after the late Queen"s death, to return on sufferance only the other day, after long years of exile, with honours shorn and mind embittered; to return as clever, as unscrupulous, and as mischievous in his impotent maturity as ever he had been in his active and brilliant youth.
The chocolate-house was full of company when the two gentlemen entered.
Although London was supposed to be empty at this time of the year, there was always a section of society which preferred the town to the country--wits, journalists, actors, garreteers, reprobates of all kinds, to whom rusticity was revolting, and the song of the nightingale an intolerable monotony. The King"s Theatre was closed for the dull season, but there had been a company of French players at the new theatre on the opposite side of the Haymarket, and these had been the occasion of a good deal of talk, and some ill-feeling among the more bigoted British playgoers; for st.u.r.dy John Bull bore almost as deep a grudge against the French comedians as against Heidegger"s Italian singers, who were paid better than bishops or Cabinet Ministers.
The company was curiously mixed on this particular evening. At one table sat a little group of fashionable gentlemen, including a brace of peers and a baronet; at another a knot of pamphleteers, in which Mr. Philter was conspicuous by the loudness of his voice and the arrogance of his opinions.
"A new poem by the Poet Pug," he cried, in answer to a grave-looking gentleman opposite him; "a satirical epic better than anything he ever writ before, say you, sir? Whoever told you of such a work was fooling you. Why, the man"s vein was exhausted a year ago. His tiny talent reached its apogee in "The Rape of the Lock." And to talk of a satirical epic from that effete little hunchback, whose meretricious Muse was at best but a jackdaw stalking in borrowed plumes, a mere tricky adapter of Horace and Boileau, who by the aid of a little Latin, less French, and a great deal of audacity, contrived to take the town!"
"Nay, "twas not so much by his verse as by the magnitude of his libels and the pettiness of his amours that our Alexander the Little contrived to conquer notoriety," said Philter"s umbra, fat little Jemmy Ludderly, who was supposed to live upon tripe and cow-heel at the cheap eating-houses in Clare or Newport Market, except when the swaggering Philter treated him at the West End.
"You are not an admirer of Mr. Pope, sir," remarked the grave gentleman.
"No, sir. I knew his master, Dryden. I have sat at Wills"s coffee-house many a night with glorious John."
"No man is glorious till after death," said the other. "I have a notion that with posterity Pope will enjoy a more universal popularity than his great predecessor; there may be less grandeur and force in his verses, but there is more music and a finer wit. I can scarce contain my indignation against the kennel of petty curs, poetasters, caricaturists, and half-fledged wits, who are for ever libelling so great a master of his art, and who pretend to despise the finest mind in England because it has the misfortune to be allied to a misshapen body."
"I see, sir, you are a close friend of the poet"s."
"I am something more, sir," replied the other, with dignity; "I am his publisher."
"Then I have the honour of addressing Mr. Lintot."
"The same, sir."
Lord Lavendale took his place at an unoccupied table, nodding to an acquaintance here and there as he pa.s.sed. His entrance made a kind of faint flutter in the a.s.sembly, every one looking up from cards or conversation, pipe or gla.s.s, to note him as he went by. His person was known to almost everybody in London, and his long absence and the rumours of strange adventures in Eastern Europe had made him an object of general curiosity. People were of different opinions as to how many duels he had fought, and how many women he had run away with; but all were agreed that his course in foreign countries had been that of a malignant star, the harbinger of dishonour and death.
"I was told Lavendale had grown old and ugly," said Lord Liskeard, a Tory peer and bosom friend of Bolingbroke, to a Whig baronet; "but to my mind he looks as handsome and as young as he did the year he stole Chichinette from the Duke of Wharton."
"Lavendale is like a beauty in her third or fourth season," answered Sir Humphrey Dalmaine. "He looks his best by candlelight."
Lavendale ordered a bowl of punch, and presently invited Mr. Philter to his table, who made no difficulty about leaving his friend Ludderly, and came over at once, charmed to hob and n.o.b with a lord.
"Fill your gla.s.s, Tom, and tell us the news of the town," said Lavendale. "You are better than a gazette."
"I should be sorry to be as bad as the best of them, your lordship, for I never looked at a newspaper yet, Whig or Jacobite, _Flying Post_ or _St. James"s Journal_, that was not a tissue of lies. I heard t"other day that Lord Bolingbroke was incubating a new journal in the interests of faction and of treachery."
"Do you know what new plot that shifty politician and her Grace of Kendal are hatching?" inquired Lavendale.
"Nothing of any moment. There has been a dead level of stagnation in Jacobite plots since the great conspiracy four years ago, when Bishop Atterbury was sent to prison, and when the Irish priest Neynoe let himself down from a two-story window by a rope of bed-clothes, leapt into the Thames, and escaped the hangman by the less discreditable fate of a watery grave. It was somewhat strange that those two arch-plotters, his Grace of Rochester and Harry St. John, should meet and cross each other at Calais, one going into exile, and t"other returning from it.
Since that famous explosion of ill-directed zeal we have had nothing worth talking about in the way of plots, though you may be sure neither his Grace of Rochester nor my Lord Bolingbroke has been idle, and that the Channel between them has been crossed pretty often by letters from the Pretender"s friends."
"And for domestic news?" asked Lavendale. "Leave this great chessboard, upon which princes, bishops, and Cabinet Ministers are trying to over-reach and countermarch each other, and tell us of that little world of pleasure and fashion in which we are really interested."
"There is not much stirring, except that Lady Polwhele has at last thrown off Captain Asterley. She allowed him to marry a rich tallow-chandler"s daughter, upon the strict understanding that he was to ill-treat or at least neglect his wife. The tallow-chandler"s daughter was young and pretty, wore her own teeth and her own hair; and Asterley was so perverse as to get fond of her, broke several appointments with her ladyship, and was foolish enough to boast of his wife"s approaching maternity, which Lady Polwhele considered a premeditated insult to herself. They quarrelled, the Countess was vehement to hysteria, and Asterley appeared next day with a scratched face. A fine Angora tom-cat of her ladyship"s, seeing his mistress in hysterics, and fancying her aggrieved, had flown at the supposed a.s.sailant, and clawed him from temple to chin. So the story goes: but if ever human nails tore human countenance, those talons which clawed Asterley grew at the roseate tips of Lady Polwhele"s taper fingers."
"It is like you and the town to say so," said Durnford, laughing.
"I grant that the town and I always think the worst of everybody; and that is why we are generally right. By the bye, I suppose you have heard that Lady Judith and her elderly Croesus have been falling out?"
"Indeed!" said Lavendale, interested in a moment. "Was it about a lover?"
"A lover! No, Dian herself is not colder than Lady Judith Topsparkle, unless it were to Endymion. Of course there always is the Endymion, if one but knew where to put one"s hand upon him." Mr. Philter"s fingers rested airily for an instant or so on Lavendale"s velvet cuff as he spoke. "No, "twas no jealousy that roused the citizen once removed: only avarice. The quarrel was about a game at ba.s.set, at which the lady lost something over five thousand pounds. But surely Lady Judith has a right to an expensive amus.e.m.e.nt on her side, since she is most obligingly indulgent to the gentleman"s musical craze, and allows him to invite all Heidegger"s crew to Ringwood Abbey, where Handel is the family idol, and where there is squalling enough to explode the roof and rouse the ghosts of all the monks from their graves."
"Play is as high as ever, then, I conclude?" said Durnford.
"Higher; people seem more eagerly bent upon losing their money now there is less money to lose, and everybody crying out that the country is on the brink of ruin. They play in the green-rooms of the theatres, at the Bath, at Leicester House, and at St. James"s--everywhere. The Duke of Devonshire lost an estate t"other night at that same game of ba.s.set which nearly parted Mr. Topsparkle and his beautiful wife."