"HE SPRINGS TO VENGEANCE WITH AN EAGER PACE."
Lord Lavendale's house in Bloomsbury Square had an air of neglect and
desolation when the two young men arrived there unexpectedly in the dusk
of a summer evening, having ridden all the way from Lavendale Manor.
Dreary and cold looked that dining-room in which his lordship's father
had entertained the wits and politicians of King William's sober,
serious reign; and where his reprobate son had rivalled his chosen
model, Henry St. John, in drunkenness and profligacy, and, in sheer
defiance of decency, had feasted his friends of the Calf's Head Club, on
the twenty-ninth of January, with a calf's head, wearing the likeness of
a kingly crown made of cut lemon and parsley, to symbolise that royal
martyr whose sad memory the Whigs loved to insult and outrage; and where
the Mohawks had held many a revel, and brought many a victim, faint,
breathless, and half-dead with terror, to suffer some finishing touch
of brutality from those civilised savages, and then to be turned out
upon the town again and bade go take the law of their tormentors.
"What fools we have been in this room, Herrick!" said Lavendale, drawing
his chair to the hearth, where his man had lighted some logs, the night
being damp, and his lordship feeling chilly after his long ride. "What
senseless saturnalia we have held here at cost of health, wealth, and
honour! Yet that is what we called life in those days--to be blind-drunk
and half-mad, and to dance in a circle round some unoffending cit,
pricking his poor innocent legs with the points of our swords, or to
tilt some harmless servant-wench feet upwards and frighten her into an
apoplexy."
"Or to tip the lion, Jack; that was, I think, our highest achievement.
Shall you ever forget how we flattened the nose of the Jew money-lender,
and sent him home, moaning, and howling on Adonai?"
"Ay, that was a noble retribution; _that_ I am proud to remember."
"Or when we lured old Mother Triplet of the India shop in Paternoster
Row from her cosy back-parlour, on pretence of treating her to a
cow-heel supper and rumbullion at a tavern in Newgate Street, and then
sent her rolling down Snow Hill in an old tar-barrel. Methinks there was
a touch of righteousness there, for she had been the ruin of many a maid
and wife by her venal complaisance in finding a trysting-place for
clandestine lovers."
"True, Herrick; never was a hasty journey better deserved than that
comfortable stout old lady's descent of Avernus. After all, there was a
kind of wild justice in most of our pranks. Would that I were young
enough to play such fooleries again, or to drink the bravest of the
bottle-men under the table, as I once could! But the candle is near
burnt out, friend, the flame is dim and pale, and flickers in the socket
ever and anon, as if it would expire in the first gust of adverse fate!"
"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 _roué_."
"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 passions, 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 pawned more than their diamonds and parted with
more than I O U's after a night at basset."
"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 passionless 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,
balls, 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 _roué_. 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 passed 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 sturdy 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 passed. His entrance made a kind of
faint flutter in the assembly, every one looking up from cards or
conversation, pipe or glass, 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 nob with a lord.
"Fill your glass, 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 assailant, 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 basset, at which the lady lost
something over five thousand pounds. But surely Lady Judith has a right
to an expensive amusement 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 basset
which nearly parted Mr. Topsparkle and his beautiful wife."
"And was the breach healed? Are they friends again?" asked Durnford.
Lavendale sat silent, with a brooding air, listening intently under
those finely marked brows of his.
He had beautiful eyes, large, lustrous, of a bluish-gray, with dark
lashes, eyes which had haunted the memories of the women who had loved
him, even after love was dead. He had delicately cut features, a
sensitive mouth, a beautifully moulded but somewhat womanish chin. It
was the face of poet and dreamer, rather than of statesman, warrior, or
deep thinker; yet he had none of the effeminacy of Lord Hervey, nor yet
that nobleman's sickly pallor. But there was no bloom of health upon his
face; his cheeks were hollow, and a hectic flush gave fire and
brightness to eyes which had at other times a haggard and weary look.
"O, they are friends again, be sure," answered Philter gaily, refilling
his glass with the silver ladle, which had King William's head on a
crown-piece embedded in the bowl. "Topsparkle adores his wife, and is
the veriest slave to her caprices. And even if he were less devoted he
would hardly venture to rebel. A man of his doubtful antecedents cannot
afford to wage domestic war."
"Are Mr. Topsparkle's antecedents so very bad?" asked Durnford, Lord
Lavendale still keeping silence.
Mr. Philter bent across the table to answer confidentially. "I believe
there is only one man in London who knows how bad, and he has just
entered this room," he said, with a jerk of his thumb across his
shoulder: "mum's the word."
Lavendale and Durnford looked at the new-comer. He was elderly, but well
preserved, wore the most fashionable style of peruke, and had as fine a
complexion as white lead and vermilion could give him, set off by
elaborate patches. His mouse-coloured grosgrain suit was trimmed with a
narrow edging of silver braid, his waistcoat buttons were filigree
silver. His mouse-coloured silk stockings and red-heeled shoes were
perfection. Nothing could be more subdued or gentlemanlike than the
man's costume, nothing more graceful and unobtrusive than his air. He
carried a tortoiseshell eyeglass, with which he gravely regarded the
assembly as he glided sinuously through the narrow space between the
tables towards one particular corner.
"That is Monsieur Fétis, Mr. Topsparkle's valet, secretary, and _âme
damnée_," said Philter. "He has been in the gentleman's service for the
last forty years. They were young men together. Some say he is a natural
son of Topsparkle the elder by a French actress, but that is a foolish
tradition. He has done Topsparkle's dirty work for forty years, been
secret as the grave, and as faithful as a man who knows his interest
lies in fidelity. And now he has a house in Poland Street, a useful kind
of establishment, half lodging-house, half hotel, and wholly hospitable,
which is rumoured to yield him two or three thousand a year. And yet he
is content to curl Mr. Topsparkle's wig, and train Mr. Topsparkle's
eyebrows, and apply hare's-foot and lip-salve, as submissively as the
veriest drudge at twenty pound a year."
"The bond between them must be close," remarked Durnford, while
Lavendale still sat brooding, with lowered eyelids and thoughtful brow.
"Be sure it is close as crime can make it," answered Philter. "There is
no bond I know of that will keep service or friendship faithful for
forty years, unless it be a guilty secret."
He had drawn his chair close between Lavendale and Durnford at the
beginning, and now spoke with head bent and voice lowered
confidentially, so that there was little risk of his being overheard by
any one beyond that table. Yet the conversation hardly seemed of a kind
to be carried on in a public room.
Lavendale rose suddenly and took up his hat.
"Are you going to play to-night, Mr. Philter?" he asked.
"Your lordship ought to know that a man who lives by his pen can have
very little cash to risk at the gaming-table. I come here only to see
the world."
"Then if you have seen enough of it for to-night, what say you to our
walking homewards together? I think your lodgings lie somewhere near
Bloomsbury."
"Your lordship is right. I have some pleasant airy rooms in the Gray's
Inn Road, overlooking the old Inn garden and Lord Bacon's catalpa-tree,
where I shall be enchanted to see you two gentlemen any afternoon that
you will drop in upon me for a dish of tea, and will condescend to
listen to an act or so of a new comedy which only cabal and
self-interest have kept off the boards of Lincoln's Inn."
The three men left the tavern together, Tom Philter highly elated at
being seen in the company of a man of Lavendale's rank and fashion. He
could not help swaggering a little as he picked his way through the
room, with elbows jauntily elevated, and slim court rapier swaying at
his side, and hat cocked lightly over the left eyebrow.
"Now, Mr. Philter," said Lavendale, when they were in the shadowy
street, where the lamps were unlit when the moon was at the full, albeit
Luna is a somewhat capricious luminary, given to dodging behind clouds,
"tell me what you mean about Vyvyan Topsparkle and his guilty secrets.
You seem to be on such familiar terms with the valet that you must needs
know something about the master. You and Monsieur Fétis have often
hob-nobbed together, I take it."
"No, my lord, I do not chink glasses with valets, but I have supped at
his house with some of the best company in London. 'Twas a
_pied-à-terre_ of Wharton's when he was in his glory; and 'twas there I
met the Duke of Bolton and pretty Mrs. Fenton, a poor actress but a
sweet little woman, and most disinterestedly devoted to his grace."
"Pshaw, Philter! Who believes in an actress's disinterestedness? But it
is not at a ducal supper-party you would hear queer stories of Mr.
Topsparkle. No one talks of the past or of the future in such uproarious
society as that. Every man lives for the present moment; his hopes and
his ambition are bounded by the eyes and lips that are smiling at him;
his views of life are as sparkling and as transient as the bubbles on a
glass of champagne, and as rosy as the deepest glow of Burgundy. You
must have had better opportunities of drawing Monsieur Fétis!"
"Fétis is not a man to be drawn, my lord. Walpole himself could not
extort a secret from him. He has thriven too well by fidelity to turn
traitor. My intelligence comes from higher sources."
"I understand; from some friendly housemaid's attic, no doubt," laughed
Lavendale. "Don't be angry, Philter; I forgive you the sources if you
will but give me your intelligence. I would give much to know that
fribble's past career, with all its dark mysteries."
"That is a tangled web which will take time to unravel," answered the
oracle.
"I am willing to devote time, money, patience, anything, to the
unravelment!"
"I have no positive information; only vague hints which might afford a
clue to a man who would take the pains to follow it."
"I am that man!" exclaimed Lavendale, putting his arm through that of
Philter, who regretted that they were not in broad daylight and Bond
Street. "Man," said he, "in such a quest I am a sleuth-hound."
"Well, my lord," rejoined Philter, "there is a queer story of
Topsparkle's early youth which I have heard elderly men harp upon--a
beautiful woman, commonly supposed to be an opera singer, whom he
brought from Italy with him just before the Revolution, and kept immured
in that great rambling house of his in Soho Square. The lady was
reported to be exquisitely beautiful, but as she never appeared in
public the town had no opportunity of judging for itself; yet she was
not the less talked about, and perhaps all the more admired, for being
invisible. Then came a report that John Churchill, at that time in the
bloom of his irresistible youth, flushed with his conquests of
duchesses, had been seen hanging about the house; that Topsparkle was
mad with jealousy, had challenged Churchill, had been laughed at and
insulted, his challenge flung in his teeth. 'If a man of your quality
offends me I always horsewhip him, but as you haven't offended me I have
nothing to say to you,' Churchill is reported to have said in a public
assemblage. 'I hope you don't suppose that the fortune your worthy
alderman-father amassed by the petty chicaneries of trade can ever put
you on a duelling level with gentlemen.' I had this speech verbatim from
my grandfather, who was present on the occasion."
"And did Topsparkle swallow the affront?"
"There was a row, and he wanted to maul the young Alcibiades; but
friends and bystanders intervened, and Churchill, for the lady's sake,
assured Topsparkle on his honour, that if he had been seen in Soho
Square at unseemly hours, the Hero whose tower he had scaled was not
Mrs. Topsparkle. The citizen's son appeared to be satisfied at this
assurance, peace was made, and the town thought no more of Mr.
Topsparkle's lady till a fortnight later, when a funeral was seen to
leave his house in Soho Square, and a brief notice in the news-letter
informed the world at large that Margharita, lady of Vyvyan Topsparkle,
Esquire, had deceased on such and such a day, after twenty-four hours'
illness, aged twenty-one."
"Did any one suspect foul play?" asked Lavendale.
"Society is given to that kind of suspicion; and the lady's death
occurred in an agitating time, when the minds of men were full of Jesuit
plots, supposititious babies, poison, and treason. I have read some
curious paragraphs in the newspapers of that year, in which the
suspicious circumstances of Mrs. Topsparkle's death were hinted at,
together with various insinuations and innuendoes questioning the
lady's character, and suggesting that she had no legal claim to the
name of Topsparkle. But it was only when Topsparkle ventured to stand
for Brentford as a high Tory in the beginning of William's reign that
the Whig pamphleteers and lampooners let fly their venomed arrows. Then
it was broadly stated that Mr. Topsparkle had run away with an Italian
dancing-girl--she was no longer a singer, you will mark: that would have
been too reputable. He had stolen her out of a booth where she was
Columbine to an itinerant Harlequin; he had brought her to London, shut
her up in his house in Soho Square, surprised her treachery with a
gentleman of good birth and superior personal attractions, best known to
society for former favours bestowed upon him by her Grace of Cleveland,
and had made away with her, whether by bowstring or poisoned bowl the
lampooners averred not, but bills setting forth this scandal were freely
distributed in Brentford. Mr. Topsparkle was challenged with his guilt
on the hustings, and narrowly escaped being mauled by the mob. It was
altogether a very ugly experience in the way of electioneering
adventures, and you can hardly wonder that Topsparkle's ardour for
parliamentary fame cooled from that hour."
"Did he do nothing to refute this slander?" asked Durnford.
"A great deal--and too little. He laid a criminal information against
the least cautious of his libellers, and got him put in the pillory; but
public feeling was altogether against the libelled gentleman, and the
pillory was as a bower of roses to the venal scribbler, who doubtless
had written just what he was told to write by Topsparkle's political
opponent. Perhaps, had Topsparkle stayed in England and held his own
boldly, the scandal would have passed as the mere scum of the political
cauldron; but as he sneaked off to the Continent almost immediately
afterwards, under pretence of offering his allegiance to the Royal
Exile, most people were of opinion that the story was not altogether a
baseless fabrication, and, taken in conjunction with the rest of Mr.
Topsparkle's experiences and his personal character, the suspected
tragedy put the finishing touch to a ripening reputation, and kept him
out of the way of his fellow-countrymen for over thirty years."
"I should be slow to believe a slander so circulated, and resting on
such slight foundations," said Lavendale gravely.
"So should I, my lord, nor have I refused Mr. Topsparkle my friendship,"
answered Philter, with a grand air. "I spent a week at his country seat
last winter; a most magnificent mansion, a mediæval abbey furnished with
all the luxuries which modern art and the invention of a sybarite could
devise. Mr. Topsparkle is a connoisseur, an enthusiast in painting and
sculpture, porcelains, enamels, bronzes, and boule cabinets, and as he
draws upon a kind of Fortunatus's purse, he can afford to gratify every
fancy, however exorbitant. Nor does he stint the pleasures of his
friends. Although no sportsman, he has the finest stud and the finest
stable in Hampshire, and although an absolute ascetic in his eating and
drinking, he has the best table and the best cellar of any gentleman of
my acquaintance."
"I can easily credit that," said Lavendale, "since I opine you do not
count your moneyed friends by the dozen."
"O, but there are varieties of the species," answered Philter,
unabashed by the snub. "There are many who have a genius for making
money, but few who possess the noble art of spending it. Indeed, I doubt
if you ever get those two faculties united in the same person. The man
who makes his own fortune has a silly greed for keeping it. Only in the
second generation of money-getters do you find the royal art of the
spender and the connoisseur. Now, our friend Topsparkle was born in the
purple. He was swaddled in point d'Alençon, and fed out of a parcel-gilt
porringer."
"So you have been at Ringwood Abbey, Tom," said Lavendale, with a
half-unconscious insolence. "The company there must be curiously mixed,
I take it."
"So much the better for the company. 'Tis only in mixed society you find
the true sparkle, the fire of clashing wits, the lightning flashes of
adverse opinions. Yes, at Ringwood one finds every shade of opinion in
politics, from the notorious Jack to the sleek Muggite--from satisfied
placemen to discontented non-jurors. Bolingbroke was there last winter,
the object of everybody's interest and curiosity, after his long exile.
He is as handsome as ever, and almost as fascinating as when he
bewitched half the women of fashion and quality, and yet was the abject
slave of Clara, a nymph who sold oranges in the Court of Requests. Now
he brags of his French wife and his farm near Uxbridge, a poor plaything
of a place on which he has just spent a trifling twenty thousand or so.
Here he grows turnips and affects Cincinnatus, pretends to have done
with politics and to live only for breeding cattle and cultivating the
classics. And no sooner had that sun sunk below the horizon than there
rose a more prosperous luminary in the person of Walpole. Carteret, the
all-accomplished, have I met there, and punning Pulteney, and hesitating
Grafton, with his grand airs of royalty by the left hand; and in fact
the society at Ringwood Abbey is but a new illustration of an ancient
truth, that if a man be but rich enough, he can always keep the highest
company in the land."
"And how do you pay your footing among all these grandees, Mr. Philter?
Do you write an acrostic for one, and a love-song for another, fetch
and carry between peers and their mistresses, or comb shock-dogs for
peeresses?"
"I hope you have not such a low idea of a journalist's status, my lord.
Be assured that I do nothing to degrade the dignity of letters."
"What, not borrow a ten-pound note from St. John, or sell a political
secret to Walpole? Be not offended, Tom; I must have my jest. 'Tis but
gaiety of spirits that makes me impertinent. And at Ringwood, now, did
you surprise no domestic mysteries, hear no hints about that tragedy you
have suggested?"
"Not a word. All there seemed sunshine. Topsparkle adores his wife with
an almost servile devotion, lives only upon her smiles, follows in her
footsteps like her lap-dog. I believe in his heart of hearts he is
jealous of poor pampered pug, and would not regret to see the little
beast expire of a surfeit of cream and kisses."
"And she--is she happy?" asked Lavendale, relaxing from simulated gaiety
to moodiness.
"There I dare not answer off-hand. Who can swear to a fine lady's
happiness? Her heart is a close-locked coffer, of which only her
abigail or her lover has the key. I can pledge myself to the brilliancy
of Lady Judith's eyes and conversation, to the lightness of her foot in
a minuet or a country dance, to her dash and courage in the
hunting-field, her impertinence to her superiors in rank, up to the
throne itself; I can testify to her superb recklessness in expenditure
and her princely hospitality: but to pronounce whether she is happy or
miserable must be left to her guardian angel, if she have one."
"Such a frivolous existence would be rather under the care of Belinda's
ministering sylphs," said Durnford, as they turned into Bloomsbury
Square.
It was after midnight, but Philter never refused a drink, so he accepted
Lavendale's invitation to a bottle of some particularly choice Burgundy
which had been laid down by his lordship's father. The bottle, with such
a potent imbiber as Mr. Philter, led to a second, and as glass followed
glass, the journalist talked more and more freely of the scandals of the
town.
"But mark you, I have never heard a breath against Lady Judith," he
said; "she has the reputation of Diana's coldness backed by Juno's
pride. She never has bestowed favour on mortal; she would destroy a
modern Actæon for a disrespectful look; she would pursue with direst
wrath the Paris who dared to place her second in the royalty of beauty.
And yet I believe she is human," added Philter, with a significant
glance at Lord Lavendale, "and that a passionate heart beats under the
snow of that majestic bosom."
"Pray do not suspect his lordship of any designs in that quarter," said
Durnford bitterly. "He has only an eye for youth and simplicity. He is
courting an heiress just escaped from the nursery."
"O, but there is always a charm in bread-and-butter for your thorough
_roué_," answered Philter, with a knowing air; "that hardened man about
town Horace is never more enthusiastic than when he sings the
half-fledged beauty shrinking from a lover's pursuit. I congratulate
your lordship on the prospect of a match with youth, beauty, and
bullion. I once thought my own mission would have been to marry money;
but no less than three young women of fortune whom I had at various
times in tow, and almost as good as anchored in the safe harbour of
matrimony, got wind of certain conquests of mine which shall be
nameless, and from my infidelities as a lover doubted my capacity to
keep faith as a husband."
And having hiccoughed out this boast, Mr. Philter wiped his wine-stained
lips and departed.