A MUCH-STRICKEN young gentleman—very undeservedly released from the onus of a social embarrassment for which he was alone responsible—stood gravely bowing before the lady of the house. His face was quite white.
“I am vastly pleased,” said Mr Sheridan, “to be the means of presenting to madame the Countess of Genlis a neighbour, the Lord Viscount Murk. I have the honour of a slight acquaintance with his lordship. I was even more intimate with his predecessor in the title. But at least I can disabuse madame’s mind——”
Madame, who up to the moment had seemed half-amort, rose hurriedly all at once and swept her stranger a magnificent courtsey.
“I feel already that I have known monsieur for years,” she said, hard winter in her voice.
Mr Sheridan burst out laughing.
“Come, come,” he cried, “a mistake isn’t malice. There was never one yet that sinned against nature. Zounds, madame, when the respite arrives, we bear no grudge against the executioner! I can vouch for my lord that he had no thought of offending.”
Ned looked enormously amazed.
“None whatever,” he said. “Why should I, when I have not even the honour of madame’s acquaintance?”
This was certainly ambiguous. Mr Sheridan laughed again like a very groundling.
“Without affront,” said he, “let me ask your lordship a question. Why have you haunted madame, who is plaguily afeared of ghosts?”
“Haunted!” exclaimed Ned.
“Haunted,” replied the other. “Or is it, perhaps, one of madame’s sacred charges that is the object of your visitations?”
Madame de Genlis, who included in her répertoire of accomplishments the art of reading character, here, after gazing intently at the young man a few moments, permitted herself an immediate relaxation from severity to the most charming indulgence.
“Dieu du ciel!” she cried. “What an old, old, foolish woman! It is nussing, monsieur. I see you pass and come back, and come again one hundred time like a ’ope-goblin, and I sink—I sink—ah! no matter what I sink. I not know you less than nobody—not until Mr Sherree-den come and espy you and say, ‘Do not fear thees poor eenocent.’ And now I see it is not the old woman that attracts.”
Ned was by this up to the ears in a very slough of self-consciousness. To stand detected before the authority he had manœuvred to hoodwink!—so much of the innuendo he understood. For the first time, perhaps, he realised how, in lending himself to some traditional tactics, he had advertised himself of the common clay. He felt very hot, and a little angry; and his anger whipped his sense of personal dignity to a cream-like stiffness.
He was sorry, he said, he had been the cause of the least uneasiness to madame la comtesse. He was a man of a rambling disposition—of a peripatetic philosophy. Often, he had no doubt, absorbed in some train of reflection, he would unconsciously haunt a locality that, associating itself with the prolegomena of his meditations, would seem to supply the atmosphere most conducive to their regular progression. He——
And here the door opened, and a young lady ran into the room.
“A thousand pardons!” cried this young person. She did not know madame was engaged other than with Mr Sheridan, and he counted for nothing. But mademoiselle and she were learning to make artificial birds’-nests, with painted sugarplums for the eggs, and they looked to madame la gouvernante to advise them.
She curtseyed to my lord, with a little pert toss of her head like a wind-blown Iceland poppy-flower, when he was made known to her. She had no recollection of him, it was evident. All that play he had rehearsed to himself, according to fifty different readings, of the return of the red heels to their owner, became impossible of performance the moment he found his audience a reality. There and then he foresaw, and prepared himself heroically to meet, his martyrdom.
* * * * * * * *
Now all the glory and tragedy of Ned’s life came to crowd themselves into a few months—into a few days, indeed, so far as his connection with the strange household at Bury was concerned. Herein—no less on account of his magnetic leaning towards a bright particular star, than because he had made his entrée under the ægis of Mr Sheridan—he was accepted and discussed; pitied by some unsophisticated young hearts; weighed in the balance of a maturer brain, and found, perhaps, deficient.
“He has the grand air,” said madame; “he is noble and sedate, and of amiable principles. But—hélas! à quoi sert tout cela—if one so gives effect to the gospel of distribution as to deprive oneself of the means to honourably perpetuate one’s race!”
“I have always admired madame’s little ornament of the Bastille,” said Mr Sheridan.
“Ah!” cried the lady, smiling, “monsieur is varee arch; but beauty is not the common property, and the little Pamela shall ask a fair return for hers.”
“Well,” said Mr Sheridan, “’tis notorious that Damon hath squandered his inheritance on a very virtuous hobby, and lives meanly in the result. And that, be assured, is a pity; for he seems a young gentleman of parts.”
It was thus he played the devil’s advocate to Ned’s beatification. Early he began to harp upon the one string behind the poor fellow’s back. He professed to be in love with Pamela himself, and the intrusion of this most serious suitor interfered with his amusement. He trifled, no doubt, in a very July mood; he loved the girl for her prettiness and her saucy manner of speech; he was humorously flattered by the familiar deference accorded him in a house of which he was claimed the dear friend and protector. And on this account, and because he was nothing if not unscrupulous in affairs of gallantry, he condescended to acknowledge himself Ned’s rival for the favour of Mademoiselle, née Sims (that was Pamela), and to make good his suit with arguments of wit and brilliancy that threw poor Damon’s solid virtues into the shade.
Perhaps Madame de Genlis may have been the more inclined to besprinkle with cold water the ardour of the young lord, in that she took the other with a rather confounding seriousness. Mr Sheridan, indeed, offered himself at this period a particularly desirable match for a nameless young woman of inconsiderable fortune. He was only a little past the zenith of his reputation, and the glamour of his best work yet went always, an atmosphere of greatness, with him. At forty-one years of age he was equipped with such a personality of wit, eloquence, and riches (presumable) in proportion, as, combined, made him a very alluring parti. In addition to this he could claim the advantages of a tall, well-proportioned figure; of a striking, though not handsome, face; of an education in the most liberal modishness of the age. His expression was frank, his manner cordial and free from arrogance. From first to last he was a formidable rival.
Now, on the very day (the little comedy was all a matter of days) following Ned’s introduction by him to the family, he—seeing how the wind blew, and at once regretting his complaisance—began some petty tactics for the stultifying of a possible antagonist. He drove the ladies, uninvited, over to lunch at “Stowling,” on the chance of taking Master Ned unawares, and so of exposing the intrinsic poverty of a specious wooer. Nor was his astuteness miscalculated. My Lord Viscount, in the act of sitting down to a mutton-chop, was overwhelmed in fathomless waters of confusion. He hastily organised—even personally commanded—a raid on the larders; but their yield was inadequate to the occasion.
He apologised with desperate dignity. A merry enough meal ensued; but, throughout, hatred of his own self-sacrificing principles dwelt in him like a jaundice, and he could have pronounced fearful anathema on all the fools of philanthropy who omitted to stock their cellars with nectar and ambrosia against the casual coming of angels.
Mr Sheridan supplied a feast of wit, however, and Ned was grateful to him for it. He even revived so far at the end as to beg the honour of providing the ladies with invitations to an Assembly ball that was to be holden in Bury on the Thursday of that same week. Rather to his surprise they accepted with alacrity; and so the matter was arranged. And then, at Mr Sheridan’s request, but unwillingly, he played cicerone to his own domain, and thought at every turn he recognised a conscious pity for his indigent condition to underlie the fair compliments of his guests.
When these were gone he sent straightway for his steward, and surprised the good man by an extraordinary jeremiad on the maladministration of a trust that fattened the dependants of a starving lord. He himself, he said, was expected to dress like a bagman and feed like a kennel-scraper, in order that his household might gorge itself disgustingly in silken raiment. He would have reforms; he would have money; he would have the house victualled as for a siege, and grind the faces of the poor did they question his right to drink, like Cleopatra, of dissolved pearls. And then he burst out laughing, and shook the honest man by the hand, and turned him out of the room; after which he sat down by the window and gnawed his thumb-nails.
Now, it will be understood, this unfortunate youth was fairly in the grip of that demoralising but evasive demon that is the sworn foe to philosophy. He was entered of the amorous germ; and the procreative atom, multiplying, was with amazing quickness to convert to misuse all the sound humours of his constitution. He could not seek to exercise a normal faculty, but it confused and routed what he had always recognised for the plain logic of existence. He was ready to discount facts; to magnify trifles; to attach an unwarranted significance to specious vacuities; to fathom a deep meaning with the very plumb he used for the sounding of a shallow artifice. Sometimes, in a recrudescence of reason, he would think, like any calm-souled rationalist, to analyse his own symptoms, to annotate the course of his disease for the benefit of future victims to a like morbosity. It was of no use. His moral vision was so out of focus as to distort to him not only his present condition, but all the processes that had conduced thereto. He was humiliated; and he writhed under, and gloried in, his humiliation. To him, as to many in like circumstance, it seemed preposterous that he should have come unscathed through many battles to be outfenced by a child with a sword of lath. So feels the warrior of a hundred fights when he is “run in” by a street constable for brawling.
Ned dressed for the ball with particular care. He was to constitute himself of madame’s party, and for that purpose had engaged to dine with it before the event. The meal was a desultory one, the ladies’ toilettes serving as excuse for an unpunctuality that was generally opposed to the principles of la gouvernante. But, one by one, all took their places at the table—Mademoiselle d’Orléans, in a fine-powdered head-dress, having a single feather in it like a cockade, and with her little plaintive rabbit eyes looking from a soft mist of fur; Pamela, sweet and roguish, wearing her own brown curls filleted with a double ribbon of yellow; and Mademoiselle Sercey, another young relative of madame’s, and an inconsiderable item of the household at Bury. There were also accommodated with places three or four of the Bœotians before referred to—silent, awkward men, painfully conscious of their quasi-elevation, who sat below the salt and talked together in whispers.
Mr Sheridan came in late. He had compromised with his grief so far as to exchange his black stockings for white, and to wear a diamond brooch in his breast linen. His hair was powdered and tied into a black ribbon. Ned must acknowledge to himself that he looked a very engaging gentleman.
He sparkled with fun and frolic, and he fed the sparkle liberally from the long glass that stood beside him.
“Mademoiselle,” he said to the princess, “your hair is very pretty. Love hath nested in it, and is hidden all but his wing. But is it not ill-manners to keep him whispering into your ear in company?”
“He talk only of the folly of flattery, monsieur,” said the little lady, simpering and bashful.
“A ruse,” cried the other, “that he learned when he played the monk. Beware of him most when he preaches.”
“Mademoiselle is told to beware of you, monsieur,” said Pamela to a gravely ecstatic young gentleman who sat next to her.
“Of me?”
“Are you not then the monk, the airmeet; and is it not mademoiselle’s ear you seek?”
“No,” said Ned brusquely.
He looked at the pretty insolent face, at the toss of brown curls, the little straight saucy nose, the lowered lids. He thought he had never seen anything so wonderful and so fair as this human flower. The neck of her frock was cut down to a point. She seemed the very bud of white womanhood breaking from its sheath.
Did she gauge the admiration of his soul? He was not a boisterous wooer or a talkative. For days he had purposed lightening the conscious gravity of his suit by “springing” her lost heels upon his inamorata. He could never, however, make up his mind as to the right wisdom of the course. A dozen considerations kept him undecided—as to the possibility of giving offence, of appearing a buffoon, of failing, out of the depths of his infatuation, to introduce into the conduct of the jest a necessary barm of gaiety. Without this, how little might the result justify the venture? It was an anxious dilemma. The thought of it threw into the shade all questions of a merely national character in which he had once taken an interest; and, in the meantime, he continued to carry the ridiculous baubles about in his pocket.
Now, is it not one of Love’s ironies to depress a wooer by the very circumstance that should exalt him; to make him so fearful of his own inadequacy as that he seeks to stultify in himself the very qualities that Nature has amiably gifted him withal? Thus Ned, naturally a quite lovable youth when he had no thought of love, was no sooner come under its spell than he was moved to forego that pretty, self-confident deportment, that was his particular charm, for an uncommunicative diffidence that appeared to present him as a hobbledehoy. He lived in the constant dread, indeed, of procuring his own discomfiture by an assumption of assurance.
“You know it is not,” he said—daring greatly, as it seemed to him.
“I know, monsieur!”
The blue eyes were lifted a moment to his. Perhaps they recognised a latency of meaning in the gaze they encountered. Madame de Genlis had once summed up the character of this sweet protégée of hers. “Idle, witty, vivacious,” she called her; a person the least capable of reflection. Idle, without doubt, she was, in the nursery-maid’s acceptance of the term—a child full of caprice and mischief.
“Sure, sir,” she added, with a sudden thrilling demureness, “you must know me for a low-born maid?”
She was a little startled into the half-conscious naïveté by the dumb demand of the look fastened upon her. Besides, she was certainly moved—in despite of mère-adoptive and some significant warnings received from her—by the submission to her thrall of a seigneur whose ancient nobility no present penury could impeach.
But she had no sooner spoken than she recollected herself.
“Do you think me like Mademoiselle d’Orléans?” she said, hurriedly stopping one question with another. “It is some that say we might be sœurs consanguines.”
What did the child mean? Had she any secret theory as to her own origin; and, if so, was she subtly intent upon discounting her first avowal? She may have wished to imply that no real necessity was for her self-depreciation. She may have wished only to divert the course of her neighbour’s thoughts. He was about to answer in some astonishment, ridiculing the suggestion, when Mr Sheridan hailed Pamela from his place opposite.
“A nosegay!” he cried, tapping his own flushed cheek in illustration. “Give me a rose to wear for a favour.”
“It is easy,” said the girl. Her eyes sparkled. She turned to a servant. “Go, fetch for Mr Sherree-den my rouge in the little box,” she said.
“Fie, then, naughty child!” cried madame; “it merits you rather to receive the little box on the ear.” But the great orator chuckled with laughter.
“Pigwidgeon, pigwidgeon!” he said, nodding his head at the culprit. “Not for youth and health are rouge and enamel, and all the vestments of vanity.”
“Not eiser for youth or age,” said madame severely.
“But only for ugliness,” said Sheridan.
“No,” said madame—“nor for zat. It is all immoral.”
“Immoral!” he cried; “immoral to put a good face on misfortune!” He looked only across the table, over the brim of his glass, when he had uttered his mot. He delighted to make the girl laugh. His own wonderful eyes would seem to ripple with merriment when he saw the light of glee spring forward in hers. Pigwidgeon he called her, and she answered to the name with all the sprightliness it expressed.
“Pigwidgeon,” says he, “when you come to the age of crow’s foot, you shall know ’tis a lying proverb that preacheth what’s done cannot be undone, or, as a pedantic fellow writes it, ‘what cannot be repaired is not to be regretted.’”
“And it is vary true,” says madame stiffly—“whosoever the pedant.”
“Well,” says Sheridan, “’twas no other than him that writ ‘Rasselas’; for which work let us hope that God by this time hath damned him—with faint praise.”
He checked himself immediately.
“That were better left unnoticed,” says he, with great soberness; “’tis only the fool that uses the sacred name in flippancy.”
He fell suddenly quiet, and a momentary surprised silence depressed the company. It did not last long. All were shortly in a final bustle of preparation for the ball. The ladies were bowed, the Bœotians melted, from the room. The two gentlemen were left to their wine; the elder’s eyes twinkled back the ruddy glow of the decanters.
“Come, my lord,” says he, “you are staid company, I vow. A toast or two before we leave the table.”
“‘Here’s to the widow of fifty!’” cries Ned, adapting from the great man himself, and raising his glass.
The other laughed.
“I drink her,” he said. “A full bumper to Mrs Sims!”
“’Twas Madame de Genlis I meant.”
“And I meant the mother of Pamela.”
“You take it so, then?”
“I take the child, at least,” said Sheridan evasively, “to be ‘the queen of curds and cream.’”
Ned was, of course, not ignorant of the scandal attaching to this little waif of royalty. It made no difference in his regard for her, though perhaps the other wished it might. Mr Sheridan, maybe, had shot a tiny bolt of jealousy—a tentative hint as to the vulgar origin of the pigwidgeon. It missed fire, and that gave him a thrill of annoyance. He was conscious of some actual resentment against this solemn suitor who had come into his field of enamoured observation. He did not fear him; but he wished him out of the way, that he might flirt in peace. At the same time he may have possibly undervalued the determination of his reticent adversary.
“Well,” said Ned, “here’s to the mother of Pamela, whoever she be!”
“With all my heart,” cried Sheridan, “and to the father, by the same token.”
Ned turned his calm eyes so as to look into the injected orbs of his companion.
“What manner of presence hath monsieur the Duke of Orleans?” said he; “it was never my fortune to happen on him in Paris.”
“He is a friend of mine, sir,” said Sheridan. “From what point of view am I to describe him? His enemies—of whom there are many in England—say that the fruit of evil buds in his face. Egad! I was near seeing it break into flower once. ’Twas at Vauxhall, when the company turned him its back. He would have thought like a Caligula then, I warrant. A prince, sir, something superior to the worst in him, which is all that men will recognise.”
“But his personal appearance?” said Ned.
The other returned the young man’s gaze with a thought of insolence.
“Am I to smoke you?” he said. “Mademoiselle d’Orléans is a little like her father in expression; but our Pamela is not at all like Mademoiselle d’Orléans.”
Ned came to an immediate resolution.
“Mr Sheridan,” said he, “I would crave your indulgence for a word in season. You have advantages in this house that are not mine. You are a great person and a welcome guest, while I am only here—I know it—on sufferance. You may turn your exceptional position to the profit of your amusement. If it is to do no more, it is asking you little to beg you to forego so trifling a sport. If you are serious, then let us, in Heaven’s name, come to a candid understanding.”
He set his lips to suppress any show of emotion. But he was moved, and it was not for the other, however dumfoundered, to put a jesting construction on the fact.
“My lord,” said he, pretty coldly, though his words seemed to belie the tone in which they were spoken, “it would ill beseem a feeling heart at any juncture—mine, particularly, at the present—to refuse its sympathy to an appeal of so nice a nature. I will not pretend to misapprehend your lordship, nor will I fail to respond in kind to your lordship’s frankness.”
“Then you relieve me of the awkward necessity of an explanation,” said Ned. “Heaven knows, there is no question of any right of mine to fall foul of your attitude towards one who may be your debtor for fifty benefactions. Heaven knows, also, that I never intended to imply that my most humble suit towards a certain lady was conditional on any information I might receive as to her actual parentage. Born in honour or out of it—I tell you, sir, so far as she is concerned, ’tis all one to me. I speak straight to the point. You may claim priority of acquaintance; you may be able to advance twenty reasons why my taking you to task is an impertinence. Yet, when all is said—if you are not serious, it is just that you should yield the situation to one who is.”
Mr Sheridan had sat through all this, twirling his glass with a rather lowering smile on his face.
“Yield the situation!” he said; “but you take me by the throat, sir. I must assure you there is no situation of my contriving.”
“Indeed,” said Ned, “I am rejoiced to hear you say so, and do desire to convince you that I find nothing more than a very engaging playfulness in your treatment of the young lady.”
“Then, why the plague,” said Mr Sheridan, opening his eyes, “all this exception to my attitude?”
“Because you choose—let me be plain, sir—to constitute yourself my rival in her favour.”
Mr Sheridan exploded into irrepressible laughter.
“Zounds!” he cried; “here, if I will not be something other than myself, I shall have my throat cut.”
“Is it,” said Ned firmly—“pardon me, sir—is it to be other than yourself to refrain from indulging a whim that is obviously another man’s distress?”
“My lord,” said Mr Sheridan, twinkling into sudden gravity and replenishing his glass, “this aspect of the case is such a one as I really had not considered. But let me assure you that you were one of the direct causes of my coming down here at all.”
“I?”
“You, most certainly.” (He crossed his arms on the table and leaned forward.) “Madame, by her own assertion, was being watched and shadowed. She claimed the protection of our laws. She appealed to our Government in the person of Mr Fox. The gracious office of succouring the afflicted he deputed to me. I hurried down to Bury St Edmunds, and the first suspicious character pointed out to me was my Lord Viscount Murk.”
“Ridiculous!”
“Of course. But the situation, you see, is none of my handling.”
He drank down his glassful, and fell suddenly grave.
“I have no wish, nec cupias nec metuas, to constitute myself your rival. This mourning suit, my lord, is of a recent cut.”
His tone was so dignified, the illusion so sorrowfully significant, that Ned was smitten in a moment. How were his ears startled then to hear a rallying laugh for anticlimax!
“My dear fellow, believe me, I am not of those who imagine a bond in every light exchange of glances. My dear fellow, all we who are not Turks are shareholders in a woman’s beauty. There may be a managing director who has the right to a more intimate knowledge of it: what care we who speculate in the open market, so long as it flatters us with the soundness of our investment! We draw the interest without responsibility, and are always ready to commit the conduct of the business to him that hath the acknowledged right to control it.”
He got to his feet.
“Hush!” he said; “we are summoned. Elect yourself to be this managing director if you will. I am quite content to rest, drawing my modest dividend that you have no right to begrudge me.”
* * * * * * * *
The advent of so distinguished a party in the assembly rooms created quite a little furore of excitement amongst the honest burgesses of Bury. My lord, the reserved and almost inaccessible; the illustrious parliamentarian, whose very presence seemed to secure to all in the place a sort of reversionary interest in those glories of Carlton House with which he was notoriously familiar; the little stranger princess, whose sojourn in the remote English town was so eloquent of the tragedy that even then was threatening to foreclose upon her house—these were the nucleus of such a coruscation of stars of the first magnitude as had never, within living memory, added its lustre to the congregated social lights of the borough.
But when madame la comtesse, adapting her conduct of the expedition to those principles of which she was the present representative, permitted her royal young charge the unconventional licence of dancing with any and all who had the high good fortune to procure themselves an introduction to her, local opinion underwent a gradual transformation that culminated, it is to be feared, in actual scandalisation.
“It transcends,” was the pronunciation, in a deep voice, of Mrs Prodmore. “Anything so unblushingly shameless I had not dreamed could be. I protest we are threatened with a Gomorrah.”
She was so very décolletée as to figure for the type of self-renunciation offering to strip itself of all that it possessed. That was much, and much in little, yet much in evidence. Her bodice—what there was of it—was sewn with gems. Indeed, her judgment of the new-comers may have been tainted by the fact that madame had declined to be introduced to her—to her, the richest woman in the room. She was already fat, yet she swelled with righteousness. She suggested a little a meat pudding bulging from its basin.
“Perhaps,” said timid Mrs Lawless, whom she addressed, “the French adhere to a standard of propriety that is only different from ours in degree. She may not mean any harm.”
She spoke with anxious diffidence, conscious of the fact that at that very moment her son, Squire Bob Lawless, was dancing with Pamela.
“Thank you, ma’am,” said Mrs Prodmore loftily, “but whether she means harm or not, I prefer, with my traditions, to consider such behaviour an outrage. Ignorance does not condone indelicacy.”
In the meanwhile, the dance having come to an end, Pamela and her partner were strolled to within earshot of a saturnine young gentleman who stood glowering in a corner.
“Ecod!” Mr Lawless was saying, “’twas the finest sport, miss. Two broke collar-bones and a splintered wrist, and all for the sake of experiment, as you might call it.”
Pamela looked up with her soft eyes.
“It is cruel,” she said. “I do not like fox-hunting at all—so many giants riding down the one little poor pigmy.”
“Why,” said the other, in a surprised voice, “you’re wilful, miss. Wasn’t the point of it all that ’twas nought but a drag hunt?”
“Comment?” said Pamela.
“With a herring,” explained the squire.
“Well,” said Pamela, “that is just as cruel to the herring.”
She turned round on the instant to the sound of a little explosion of laughter.
“My lord!” she exclaimed.
She dropped her companion’s arm; bowed graciously to him.
“I commit myself to this escort,” she said. “A thousand thanks for the dance, monsieur.”
Poor Nimrod had no choice but to accept his dismissal. He had crowed over his fellow-squireens. He must come down now, a humbled cockerel. He walked away sulkily enough.
“Monsieur,” said Pamela to Ned, “I am glad to have amused you.”
“It is for the first time this evening,” said his lordship grimly.
She was beginning, in a little sputter of fire, “And pray what right have you——” when the expression in his face stopped her. A woman, no doubt, has some spiritual probe for testing the presence of love, as a butterfly feels for honey in a flower.
“None whatever,” said Ned. “It is my unhappiness.”
She looked at him quite kindly. The sweetest babies of pity sat in the blue flowers of her eyes.
“Why have you not ask me to dance?” she said. “Poor Pamela is flouted of all of whom she had the hope to be honoured. You do not desire my hand; no, nor Mr Sherree-den eiser. ‘I am not to lead you out, ma chèrie,’ he say. ‘It is because I am ask to drop the sobstance for the shadow.’ I request of him what he mean. ‘’Tis only