FROM two till four o’clock on any summer afternoon during the penultimate decade of the last century, the Right Honourable Gustavus Hilary George, third Viscount Murk, Baron Brindle and Knight of the Stews, with orders of demerit innumerable—and, over his quarterings, that bar-sinister which would appear to be designed for emphasis of the fact that the word rank has a double meaning—might be seen (in emulation of a more notable belswagger) ogling the ladies from the verandah of his house in Cavendish Square. That this, his lordship’s daily habit, was rather the expression of an ineradicable self-complacency than its own justification by results, the appearance of the withered old applejohn himself gave testimony. For here, in truth, was a very doyen of dandy-cocks—a last infirmity of fribbles—a macaroni with a cuticle so hardened by the paint and powder of near fourscore years as to be impervious to the shafts of ridicule. He would blow a kiss along the palm of his palsied hand, and never misdoubt the sure flight of this missive, though his unmanageable wrist should beat a tattoo on his nose the while; he would leer through quizzing-glasses of a power to exhibit in horrible accent the rheum of his eyes; he would indite musky billets-doux, like meteorological charts, to Dolly or Dorine, and, forgetting their direction when despatched, would simper over the quiddling replies as if they were archly amorous solicitations. Upon the truth that is stranger than fiction he had looked all his life as upon an outer barbarian, the measure of whose originality was merely the measure of uncouthness. Nature, in fact, was a dealer of ridiculous limitations; art, a merchant of inexhaustible surprises. Vanity! he would quote one fifty instances in support of the fact that it was the spring-head of all history. Selfishness! was it not the first condition of organic existence? Make-believe! the whole world’s system of government, from royalty to rags, was founded upon it. Therefore he constituted himself understudy to his great prototype of Queensberry; and therefore he could actually welcome the loss or deterioration of anything bodily and personal for the reason that it presented him with the opportunity to substitute mechanical perfection for natural deficiency. Perhaps at no period of his life had he so realised his ideal of existence as when, upon his seventy-seventh year, he found himself false—inside and out—from top to toe.
“Death,” he chuckled, “will be devilish put to it to stab me in a vital part.”
He said this to his grand-nephew, the orphaned heir-apparent to his title and moderate estates and to nothing else that he valued.
The young man was, indeed, his uncle’s very antithesis—his butt, his foil, his aggravation. He, the nephew, considered no doubt that he held a brief for the other side (truth to oneself, we will call it); and he was never at great pains to disguise his contempt of a certain order of licence. Cold, dry, austere, he had yet that observant faculty that, conceiving of circumstance, may fall pregnant with either justice or inhumanity. At present, from the height of his twenty-five years, he looked with a tolerant serenity into the arena of struggling passions.
“This is all vastly foolish,” was his superior reflection. “Am I destined to make a practice of turning my thumb up or down?”
Now, on a certain day of ’88, he walked into the house in Cavendish Square and joined his unvenerable elder on the balcony.
“Give me the parasol, Jepps,” said he. “I will hold it over Lord Murk’s head.”
The man obeyed, and withdrew. The uncle turned himself about, with a little feint of protest.
“Well,” he said resignedly, “your chacolate makes a pretty foil to my azure; and if you must dress like an attorney’s clerk, you hev at least the unspeakable satisfaction of posing as background to a gentleman.”
His glasses dangled from his neck by a broad black ribbon. He lifted them as he spoke, and conned a passing face.
“Egad!” said he, involuntarily extending his left hand as if to deprecate interruption, “what a form! What a ravishing and seductive elegance! Strake me, Ned, but if thou wert other than a bran-stuffed jackalent, I’d send thee thither to canvass for me.”
He scratched his chin testily with one from several little cocked-hat notes that lay on a chair at his side. His fingers were steeped to the knuckles in gems; his cheeks, plastered with chalk and rouge, looked in texture like the dinted covering of honeycomb. Now and again he would shoot at his young relative a covert glance of extreme dislike.
“Rat thee, Ned!” he exclaimed suddenly; “thou hast a devilish face!”
“’Tis no index to my character, then, sir, I can assure you.”
“You needn’t, egad! There’s a shrewd measure of reserve in these matters. Show me a face that’s an index and I’ll show you an ass. But I’d like to learn, as a mere question of curiasity, why you persist in dressing like a cit, eating at beef ordinaries, and sleeping at some demned low tavern over against the Cock and Pye ditch?”
“Sure, sir, in this connection at least, you’ll grant me the authority of fashion?”
“Fashion! Paris fashion! Franklin fashion! But it’s not for the heir to an English viscountcy to model himself on a Yankee tallow-chandler.”
“I model myself on the principles of independence, sir.”
“Principles, quotha! Why, ’od rat me, Ned, you make me sick. Principles of independence are like other principals, I presume—clamorous for high rates of interest.”
“I think not, indeed.”
“Do you, indeed? But you’re a convert to the new religion, and rabid, of course; and a mighty pretty set of priests you’ve got to expound you your gospels.”
“Who, for an instance?”
The uncle leered round viciously. When he was moved to raise his voice, old age piped in him like winter in an empty house.
“I don’t know why I call you Ned,” he protested peevishly. “I don’t feel it, and it fits you worse than your cravat. Who, for an instance, Mr Edward Murk? Why, a defaulting exciseman for one, a reskel by the name of Paine, that writ a pamphlet on Common Sense to prove himself devoid of it.”
“According to the point of view.”
“Oh, I cry you pardon, sir! I judge from a less exalted one than this patriarch of principles here.”
“But Voltaire—Diderot, my lord?”
“Gads my life! And now you hev me! A school of incontinent rakes to reform the warld! And not a man of ’em, I vow, but had drained his last glass of pleasure before he set to disparaging the feast.”
The nephew was silent. What, indeed, would it profit him to answer? He looked, with a passionless scrutiny, at the face so near his own. He could have thought that the old wood, the old block, had shrunk beneath its veneer, and he had an odd temptation to prod it with his finger and see if it would crackle.
“Oxford,” snapped his lordship, “is the very market-garden of self-sufficiency. Thou needst a power of weeding, nephew.”
“Oh, it’s possible, sir; only I would clear the ground myself.”
“Indeed! And how would you set about it?”
“By observing and selecting, that is all; by forming independent judgments uninfluenced by the respect of position; by assuming continence and sobriety to be the first conditions of happiness; by analysing impressions and restraining impulse; by studying what to chip away from the block out of which I intend to shape my own character, with the world for model.”
“I see, I see. A smug modest programme, i’ faith. I’d not have thy frog’s blood, Ned, though it meant another twenty years of life to me. And so you’ll do all this before you step into my shoes—and may the devil wedge them on thy feet!”
“You are bitter, sir. I think, perhaps, you misconstrue me. I’m no fanatic of prudery, but an earnest student of happiness. Were I to convince myself that yours was the highest expression of this, I would not hesitate to become your convert.”
“I’d not ask thee, thou chilly put. Hadst thou been my son, ’twere different. But thou’st got thine independent jointure, and thou’lt go thy ways—over the Continent, as I understand,—not making the Grand Tour like a gentleman of position, but joggling it in diligences, faugh! or stumping on thy soles like a demned brawny pedlar. And what is to be thy equipment for the adventure?”
“A fair knowledge of French, a roll of canvas, and a case of colours.”
“Cry you mercy, sir; I’d forgat you were an artist. Wilt thou paint me some naked women?”
“Ay, sir, and see no pleasant shame in it.”
“Ned, Ned—give me a hope of thee!”
“Oh, sir, believe me, ’tis only when woman begins to clothe herself that indelicacy is suggested. A hat, a pair of shoes, a shoulder-strap even, would have made a jill-flirt of Godiva.”
“H’mph! Looked at from my standpoint, that’s the first commendable thing thou’st said. But it’s a monstrous ungentlemanly occupation, Ned; and that, no doubt, is the reason that moves thee to it.”
“No, sir; but the reason that a painter, more than another, has the opportunity to arrest and record for private analysis what is of its nature fugitive and perishable. His canvases, indeed, should be his text-book, his confessor, and his mentor.”
“Oh, spare me, Parson! Thou shalt go cully my neighbour here with thy plaguey texts. They’ll fit him like a skin glove.”
“What neighbour, sir?”
“Him that sold his brush to Charlie Greville’s mistress, a grim little toad—Romney by name—that my Lord Thurlow pits against Reynolds for something better than a whore’s sign-painter.”
“Well, sir, doubtless the man will learn to read himself in his work, and to profit by the lesson.”
“Master Ned Parson, when do you go? It cannot be too soon for me.”
“I may start at any moment.”
“Heaven be praised! And whither?”
“Possibly by way of the Low Countries at the outset. Will your lordship give me some letters of introduction?”
“What! Your independence doesn’t strake at that?”
“You greatly misapprehend me, sir. I go to seek mental, not bodily discipline; chastisement, as a forcing medium, ceases of its effect with the second age of reason.”
“And that you have come to, I presume. Go to the Low Countries, i’ Gad’s name, and find your level there! I’ll give you fifty recommendations, and trust to procure you a year’s hospitality from each. Only, one word in your ear, Ned: if you bring back a prig to wife, I’ll hev the two of ye poisoned, if I hang for it.”
The nephew condescended to a smile of some amused toleration.
“My marriage, when it occurs,” said he, “will mark a simple period in the evolution of my character. That, it may be easily understood, might require a foil to its processes of development, as a hen swallows gravel to assist her digestion. You need feel no surprise, sir, if in the end I marry a properly wicked woman.”
“Egad! ’tis my devout hope you will, and that she’ll brain you with that demned Encyclopedia that you get all your gallimaufry about equality from. Call back Jepps, and I’ll dictate the letters.”