It must be explained at this point that the comedy with which we are
especially concerned formed only one of innumerable kindred sideshows
in the endless junketing fair at Whitehall Palace, where, ever since
the first days of the Restoration, the high revel which that reaction
from Cimmerian glooms had come to inaugurate had been steadily
degenerating into a Saturnalia as unblushing as it was universal. It
represents, in fact, but one among many such performances, and, though
isolated by us for purely dramatic purposes, is none the less to be
understood as constituting part of the general entertainment. Thus,
you can picture our little company, if you will, as joining, in the
intervals between the acts, in the common hilarity, as forming part of
the glittering personnel which daily, in that idle, pleasure-loving
Court, laughs and fribbles away the hours. The young Countess is
there, _ingénue_, childish, but already a mark for predatory eyes,
and not, alas! in her proud revolt, wholly, or wholly innocently,
unconscious of the fact. My lord her husband, secretly watchful of the
change, conceals, under an affectation of _insouciance_, the jealousy
which is beginning to set him speculating as to any reason which may
exist for it. Hamilton, who holds in his hand, or imagines that he
holds, the strings of all the puppets implicated in this play of
cross-purposes, pervades the entire scene, a figure of wit and grace,
handsome, urbane, and popular wherever he chooses to distribute his
favours. Of the Court and its demoralizing atmosphere are all these
lives, is all this complication of unscrupulous intrigue; and, if we
leave that Court out of our account, it is not to imply thereby that
the aforesaid lives are not nine-tenths subject to its baneful
influences, but simply because to mix any such complex ingredients
with a plain tale were hopelessly to confuse the issues thereof.
Wherefore we will continue to confine our _mise en scène_, if you
please, to that district of the huge, rambling palace in which my lord
of Chesterfield has his quarters. It is there that the sole business
with which we are concerned develops itself.
Now, it comes to include, this business, in the process of its
unfolding, a certain illustrious figure, with whose name we have dealt
hitherto but in parenthesis. His Royal Highness the Duke of York was
at this date a young man of twenty-seven, and somewhat notable, in a
reckless community, for the comparative propriety of his conduct. At
least, he kept his lapses within reasonable, if infrequent, bounds,
and, in erring, showed some occasional capacity for shamefacedness. He
had virtues--courage, truth to his word, fidelity, and application;
vices--parsimony, excessive hauteur, and an implacable enmity for his
foes. Yet, commonly master of himself, he possessed one cardinal
weakness, and that showed itself in a remarkable susceptibility to
feminine allurements--showed itself, I say, for he seemed unable to
conceal it; he was, according to Grammont, the most completely
unguarded ogler of his time.
Fresh, unspoiled, and possessed of the double recommendation of having
a husband, and notoriously an indifferent one, the little Countess
with the rose-leaf face was not long, you may be sure, in attracting
the rather prominent inquisition of those wandering orbs, and not
altogether, be it said, without some flattered consciousness, on her
part, of their interested scrutiny. The Duke, though austere to
severity, was not an uncomely Stuart; he was tall, well formed, and
the sallow melancholy of his look, when tempered to a soft occasion,
could be sufficiently moving. Satisfied as to first impressions, he
began to consider his further policy; and in the meantime he ogled.
His ogling, it seemed, was not, in spite of its temerity, suspected by
Hamilton. Perhaps Cousin George’s confidence in his own most-favoured
position was too absolute to cherish a thought of any rival influence
outside it. But, whatever the case, it is certain that, even if he
observed, he gave himself no concern whatever about an ocular
blandishment which was generally at the service of any _beaux yeux_ of
a pattern finer than the common.
But, if he remained indifferent, it was far otherwise with the
husband, whose vision in a night had changed its blindness for the
thousand-lensed optic of spiderous jealousy. Realizing, too late, his
own infatuated folly, reduced to a vain coveting of what was by all
legal right his own possession, forced into an attitude of apparent
insensibility to the promiscuous gallantries offered to his lady on
the strength of their estrangement, and prevented, both by policy and
pride, from confessing to his altered sentiments, the unhappy man was,
in these days, suffering all the pangs the most vindictive wife could
have wished. And yet she would have forgiven him, even now, could he
have brought that obstinate devil in him to submit to the one
condition she had dictated, and have owned to his iniquity and asked
absolution for it. But to that extreme he could not go; it was still a
point of honour with him to force her into being the first to break
the silence; and so he continued to ground what hopes he had on the
nature of the compromise suggested by Hamilton. To that absurd faith
he clung, soon wearying of the little malapert instrument lent, though
he never guessed it, to his purpose, but desperately continuing to
play her for the success he looked to achieve. And, in the meanwhile,
if his part in private was a difficult one, in public it was an
endless anguish. It was not only that, cursed to that compact of
silence, he must be perpetually manœuvring to avoid its discovery by
others--and always on the edge of a fear lest what he so carefully
concealed should be mockingly made known, in a spasm of feminine
perversity, by the capricious partner thereto--but that he was wholly
debarred by it from uttering a word of warning or menace to that same
partner on the subject of the perils, to which her own wilfulness was
subjecting her, from oglings, princely or otherwise. He himself was so
acutely sensitive to the danger that he found a suggestive meaning in
every appreciative glance, every small natural homage paid to a beauty
which could not be seen but to be admired. The attractions which
should have been his pride had become his torment, while his mind
revolted from the memory of a dead infatuation as from something
noisome: and in so much the Nemesis of deserved retribution had
swiftly overtaken him. From his jealous misery he could find no relief
at last but in confiding its fancied justifications to his friend
Hamilton. Him, for some inexplicable reason, he never suspected.
“Curse it, George!” he would say. “I am so driven and harassed, curse
it! A little more and I shall pack her off to the Peak!”
He spoke of the Peak in Derbyshire, near which his country seat,
Bretby Hall, was situated. The phrase at Court came to pass into a
jocular proverb; so that to rid oneself of a tiresome wife was to send
her to the Peak. But the threat a little alarmed Hamilton. It was true
that, if carried into effect, it might prove itself the short cut to
his own desired goal, since friends come doubly welcomed into killing
solitudes; still, that welcome, gained at the sacrifice, perhaps, of a
month in town, was a prospect altogether too wry to be entertained
with composure. No, he must certainly counter the suggestion with all
his wits.
“Why?” he said. “What is poor Kate’s new offence?”
“Did I speak of any?” snarled Chesterfield. “The old is wide enough
and long enough to serve the purpose of a score.”
“How do you mean?”
“How, says he! Why, does she not take advantage of my tongue-tied
state to flaunt her coquetries in my very face?”
“Speak to her, then.”
“You know I cannot.”
“O, you can, indeed!”
“I’ll see her damned first!”
“Why, there you are. You’ll see her damned first, and so you will.”
“So I will? What do you imply by that?”
“Did you not say you would? Your word on it, then, you will.”
“Curse you! You mean the Duke.”
“Curse you! What Duke?”
“Don’t you know very well?”
“O, a pox on these conundrums! What Duke, I say?”
“York, then.”
“What! Is _he_ the villain?”
“I’ve watched them exchange glances.”
“Why, so have I, and so have hundreds.”
“You own it?”
“With perfect equanimity. Such frank barter of the eyes is your surest
proof of innocence. Give me your stolen look for mischief.”
“You think he means none, then?”
Hamilton laughed, and clapped his friend on the shoulder.
“O, Phil!” said he, “thou art surely possessed. The Duke hath other
fish to fry; his net is full. Believe me, on my sincerity” (and he
meant it), “your jealousy corrupts your judgment. And more--it
dishonours your wife. Come, tell me--how goes it with the little
country skit, Kate’s friend?”
Chesterfield, but half convinced, shook his head and growled.
“She wearies me. A tasteless business.”
“What!” said the other, again perturbed: “you are not crying off?”
“No”--he shrugged--“O, faith, no! But, ’tis uphill work.”
“The looser rein to give yourself. A plague on distaste! That is to
put on the brake uphill.”
“A common creature, nevertheless, to appear my more natural
choice--and when _she_ is by. I think Kate must hold me despicable.”
“Is the skit so common?”
“Troth, you’d think it: though, to do her justice, she makes one
laugh.”
“Still, though against your inclinations, you play the part?”
“O! I play it.”
“And with what effect so far?”
“None that you promised--unless rank mutiny lay in your scheme. She
seems determined to show me that, of all men she encounters, I stand
least in her regard.”
“So you are signalled out for her slights. What could you wish more?
I’d rather be the one scorned by a woman than the fifty favoured. ’Tis
to stand alone in her estimation, and be thought of always for
yourself. She’s jealous, take my word. These coquetries you speak of
are but retorts on you in kind. Be thankful that she thinks you worth
them. It works, Phil--believe me, it works.”
“Do you really think so?”
“I’m sure of it.”
“Come, visit us this night, and make sureness surer.”
Hamilton feigned to reflect.
“To-night? Why, the truth is----”
Chesterfield, breaking into a chuckle, nudged him roguishly.
“Hey-hey! I see: an assignation. Well, another night.”
“Nay; to prove you’re wrong, I’ll come.”
It so happened that, passing along a corridor that afternoon, Hamilton
encountered the Duke of York, who took his arm and held him in
friendly talk as he paced the matting with him up and down. His Royal
Highness was in a suit of plain black, which became his sombre visage
very well, and wore no ornament but the “George” suspended from his
neck by a blue ribbon.
“I know your love for music, Geordie,” says he. “What is this new
saraband that all seem suddenly crazed about?”
Hamilton told him. It was by the Signor Francesco Corbetti, that
famous master of the guitar, who had lately come from Paris to
Whitehall, and with such good result for himself that the King, who
loved his art, had actually appointed him a groom of the Queen’s privy
chamber, with a princely salary, in order that he might attach him
permanently to the Court.
“’Tis nothing else, both morning and noon,” said the young man, with a
groan: “till, for my very love of music, I could throttle these
mutilators of it with their own guitar strings. Not a doting coxcomb
or lang’rous amourette but murders the ‘jealous-pated swain’ six times
a day. I wish he were rotten. Is it not strange how vanity will never
learn that to sing the nightingale’s song is not necessarily to sing
the nightingale!”
The Duke smiled tolerantly.
“Are they all such bunglers?” said he. “I have heard of some reputed
to handle their instruments well.”
“Arran is one,” said Hamilton, “and there is another accomplished
performer among them--your Royal Highness’s self. But, for the rest,
it is not that I object to their twanging to their hearts’ content; it
is that they must all do it to the same tune. This saraband is indeed
a ravishing air--as Corbetti plays it; but watered nectar was never to
my taste. God forbid I should quarrel with a vogue his Majesty
started, or curse to hear this discordant plucking of strings come
wailing eternally like the wind through a hundred keyholes; all I ask
is an occasional change in the theme.”
“You think, nevertheless, the air itself beautiful?”
“O! it is. Your Royal Highness should hear it.”
“What did you remark of Lord Arran, Geordie?”
“Why, he knows and plays it, after Corbetti, the best of all.”
This Earl of Arran, Kate Chesterfield’s younger brother, was a little
callow perfumed exquisite, a little lisping buck, who could play many
parts prettily, but none to such effect as that of minstrel, for
which, like Moore, and Leigh Hunt, and other twitterers of a later
date, he had a small natural aptitude. So, when the Italian, by the
King’s grace, brought guitars into that fashion that no lady’s toilet
table was thought complete without it included a beribboned instrument
among its rouge and powder-puffs, this curled darling found his
opportunity, and earned through it a more devoted attention than any
of his puppyish charms had hitherto been able to procure him.
“He must play it to me,” said the Duke. “The boy has a fine touch,
though something due, no doubt, to the quality of his instrument. They
say ’tis the best in all England.”
“No, that it is not,” said Hamilton unguardedly. “His sister owns the
best.”
The Duke affected an air of momentary abstraction before he answered--
“What did you say? O, my lady Chesterfield! She plays too?”
“Faith! that is the word for it,” answered the other. “She plays, as
they all do--at playing.”
“And she has a finer guitar than her brother, was it? She should lease
it to him.”
“Doubtless she would, if asked.”
Again his answer seemed to pass unnoticed. Then the Duke started, as
if recollecting himself.
“Eh?” he said: “we were discussing--what or whom? I’ve forgot. But let
it pass. There was something of interest--what was it?--that I had in
my mind to mention to you.”