Davenport Dunn, a Man of Our Day. Volume 1

“What does that wonderful calculation mean?” cried she, suddenly, as she saw him still reckoning on his fingers. “What deep process of reasoning is my learned guardian engaged in?”

“I ‘d give you a long time to guess,” said he, laughing.

“Am I personally concerned in it?” asked she.

“Yes, that you are!”

“Well,” said she, after a pause, “you are counting over the days we have passed, or are still to pass here?”

“No, not that!”

“You are computing, perhaps, one by one, all your fashionable friends who would be shocked by my levity – that ‘s the phrase, I believe, – meaning those outspoken impertinences you encourage me to utter about everything and everybody!”

“Far from it. I was – ”

“Oh! of course, you were charmed,” broke she in; “and so you ought to be, when one performs so dangerous a trick to amuse you. The audience always applauds the rope-dancer that perils his neck; and you ‘d be worse than ungrateful not to screen me when I ‘m satirized. But it may relieve somewhat the load of obligation when I say that I utter these things just to please myself. I bear the world no ill-will, it is true; but I ‘m very fond of laughing at it.”

“In the name and on behalf of that respectable community, let me return you my thanks,” said he, bowing.

“Remember,” said she, “how little I really know of what I ridicule, and so let my ignorance atone for my ill-nature; and now, to come back, what was it that you were counting so patiently on your fingers? Not my faults, I’m certain, or you’d have had both hands.”

“I’m afraid I could scarcely tell you,” said he, “though somehow I feel that if I knew you a very little longer, I could tell you almost anything.”

“I wish you could tell me that this pleasant time was coming. What is this?” asked she, as the waiter entered, and presented her with a visiting-card.

“Monsieur the Count desires to know if Mademoiselle will receive him,” said the man.

“What, how? What does this mean?” exclaimed Beecher, in terror and astonishment.

“Yes,” said she, turning to the waiter; “say, ‘With pleasure.’”

“Gracious mercy!” exclaimed Beecher, “you don’t know what you ‘re doing. Have you seen this person before?”

“Never!”

“Never heard of him!”

“Never,” said she, with a faint smile, for the sight of his terror amused her.

“But who is he, then? How has he dared – ”

“Nay,” said she, holding behind her back the visiting-card, which he endeavored to snatch from her hand, – “this is my secret!”

“This is intolerable!” cried Beecher. “What is your father to think of your admitting a person to visit you, – an utter stranger, – a fellow Heaven knows – ”

At this moment, as if to answer in the most palpable form the question he was propounding, a somewhat sprucely dressed man, middle-aged and comely, entered; and, passing Beecher by with the indifference he might have bestowed on a piece of furniture, advanced to where Lizzy was standing, and, taking her band, pressed it reverently to his lips.

So far from resenting the liberty, she smiled most courteously on him, and motioned to him to take a seat on the sofa beside her.

“I can’t stand this, by Jove!” said Beecher, aloud; while, with an assumption of courage his heart little responded to, he walked straight up to the stranger. “You understand English, I hope?” said he, in very indifferent French.

“Not a syllable,” replied the other, in the same language.

“I only know ‘All right’;” and he laughed pleasantly as he uttered the words in an imitation of English.

“Come, I ‘ll not torture you any longer,” said Lizzy, laughing; “read that.” And she handed him the card, whereon, in her father’s writing, there was, “See the Count; he’ll tell you everything. – C. D.”

“I have heard the name before. – Count Lienstahl,” said Beecher to himself. “Has he seen your father? Where is he?” asked he, eagerly.

“He’ll inform me on all, if you’ll just give him time,” said she; while the Count, with an easy volubility, was pouring out a flow of words perfectly unintelligible to poor Beecher.

Whether it was the pleasure of the tidings he brought, or the delicious enjoyment of once more hearing and replying in that charming tongue that she loved so dearly, but Lizzy ceased even to look at Beecher, and only occupied herself with her new acquaintance.

Now, while we leave her thus pleasantly engaged, let us present the visitor to our reader.

Nothing could be less like the traditional “Continental Count” than the plump, close-shaven, blue-eyed gentlemen who sat beside Lizzy Davis, with an expression of bonhomie in his face that might have graced a squire of Devon. He was neither frogged nor moustached; his countenance neither boded ill to the Holy Alliance, nor any close intimacy with billiards or dice-boxes. A pleasant, easy-tempered, soft-natured man he seemed, with a ready smile and a happy laugh, and an air of yielding good-humor about him that appeared to vouch for his being one none need ever dispute with. If there were few men less generally known throughout Europe, there was not one whose origin, family, fortune, and belonging were wrapped in more complete obscurity. Some said he was a Pomeranian, others called him a Swede; many believed him Russian, and a few, affecting deeper knowledge, declared he was from Dalmatia. He was a Count, however, of somewhere, and as certainly was he one who had the entrée to all the best circles of the Continent, member of its most exclusive clubs, and the intimate of those who prided themselves on being careful in their friendships. While his manners were sufficiently good to pass muster anywhere, there was about him a genial kindliness, a sort of perennial pleasantry, that was welcome everywhere; he brought to society that inestimable gift of adhesiveness by which cold people and stiff people are ultimately enabled to approximate and understand each other. No matter how dull and ungenial the salon, he was scarcely across the doorway when you saw that an element of social kindliness had just been added, and in his little caressing ways and coaxing inquiries you recognized one who would not let condescension crush nor coldness chill him. If young people were delighted to see one so much their senior indulging in all the gay and light frivolities of life, older folk were gratified to find themselves so favorably represented by one able to dance, sing, and play like the youngest in company. So artfully, too, did he contribute his talent to society, that no thought of personal display could ever attach to him. It was all good-nature; he played to amuse you, – he danced to gratify some one else; he was full of little attentions of a thousand kinds, and you no more thought of repayment than you’d have dreamed of thanking the blessed sun for his warmth or his daylight. Such men are the bonbons of humanity, and even they who do not care for sweet things are pleased to see them.

If his birth and origin were mysterious, far more so were his means of life. Nobody ever heard of his agent or his banker. He neither owned nor earned, and yet there he was, as well dressed, as well cared for, and as pleasant a gentleman as you could see. He played a little, but it was notorious that he was ever a loser. He was too constantly a winner in the great game of life to be fortunate as a gambler, and he could well afford to laugh at this one little mark of spitefulness in Fortune. Racing and races were a passion with him; but he loved sport for itself, not as a speculation, – so, at least, he said; and when he threw his arm over your shoulder, and said anything in that tone of genial simplicity that was special to him, I ‘d like to have seen the man – or, still more, the woman – who would n’t have believed him.

The turf – like poverty – teaches one to know strange bed-fellows; and this will explain how the Count and Grog Davis became acquaintances, and something more.

The grand intelligence who discovered the great financial problem of France – the Crédit Mobilier– has proclaimed to the world that the secret lay in the simple fact that there were industrial energies which needed capital, and capital which needed industry, and that all he avowed to accomplish was to bring these two distant but all necessary elements into close union and co-operation. Now, something of the same kind moved Grog and the Count to cement their friendship; each saw that the other supplied some want of his own nature, and before they had passed an hour together they ratified an alliance. An instinct whispered to each, “We are going the same journey in life, let us travel together;” and some very profitable tours did they make in company!

His presence now was on a special mission from Davis, whom he just met at Treves, and who despatched him to request his daughter to come on to Carlsruhe, where he would await her. The Count was charged to explain, in some light easy way of his own, why her father had left Brussels so abruptly; and he was also instructed to take Annesley Beecher into his holy keeping, and not suffer him to fall into indiscretions, or adventure upon speculations of his own devising.

Lizzy thought him “charming,” – far more worldly-wise people than Lizzy had often thought the same. There was a bubbling fountain of good-humor about him that seemed inexhaustible. He was always ready for any plan that promised pleasure. Unlike Beecher, who knew nobody, the Count walked the street in a perpetual salutation, – bowing, hand-shaking, and sometimes kissing, as he went; and in that strange polyglot that he talked he murmured as he went, “Ah, lieber Freund!” – “Come sta?” – “Addio!” – “Mon meilleur ami!” to each that passed; so that veritably the world did seem only peopled with those who loved him.

As for Beecher, notwithstanding a certain distrust at the beginning, he soon fell captive to a manner that few resisted; and though the intercourse was limited to shaking hands and smiling at each other, the Count’s pleasant exclamation of “All right!” with a jovial slap on the shoulder, made him feel that he was a “regular trump,” and a man “to depend on.”

One lurking thought alone disturbed this esteem, – he was jealous of his influence over Lizzy; he marked the pleasure with which she listened to him, the eager delight she showed when he came, her readiness to sing or play for him. Beecher saw all these in sorrow and bitterness; and though twenty times a day he asked himself, “What the deuce is it to me, – how can it possibly matter to me whom she cares for?” the haunting dread never left his mind, and became his very torturer. But why should he worry himself about it at all? The fellow did what he liked with every one. Rivers, the sulky training-groom, that would not have let a Royal Highness see “the horse,” actually took Klepper out and galloped him for the Count. The austere landlady of the inn was smiles and courtesy to him; even to that unpolished class, the hackney coachmen, his blandishments extended, and they vied with each other who should serve him.

“We are to start for Wiesbaden to-morrow,” said Lizzy to Beecher.

“Why so, – who says so?”

“The Count”

“Si, si, andiamo, – all right!” cried the Count, laughing; and the march was ordered.

CHAPTER XXXV. A FOREIGN COUNT

The announcement of Count Lienstahl’s arrival at Wiesbaden was received with rejoicing. “Now we shall open the season in earnest. We shall have balls, picnics, races, hurdle-matches, gypsy parties, excursions by land and water. He ‘ll manage everything and everybody.” Such were the exclamations that resounded along the Promenade as the party drove up to the hotel. Within less than an hour the Count had been to Beberich to visit the reigning Duke, he had kissed hands with half-a-dozen serene highnesses, made his bow to the chief minister and the Governor of Wiesbaden, and come back to dinner all smiles and delight at the condescension and kindness of the court and the capital.

If Lienstahl’s popularity was great, he only shared a very humble portion of public attention when they appeared at the table d’hote. There Lizzy Davis attracted every look, and the fame of her beauty was already wide-spread. Such was the eagerness to obtain place at the table that the most extravagant bribes were offered for a seat, and a well-known elegant of Vienna actually paid a waiter five louis to cede his napkin to him and let him serve in his stead. Beecher was anything but gratified at these demonstrations. If his taste was offended, his fears were also excited. “Something bad must come of it,” was his own muttered reflection; and as they retired after dinner to take their coffee, he showed very palpably his displeasure.

“Eh, caro mio, – all right?” said the Count, gayly, as he threw an arm over his shoulder.

“No, by Jove! – all wrong. I don’t like it. It’s not the style of thing I fancy.” And here his confusion overwhelmed him, and he stopped abruptly; for the Count, seating himself at the piano, and rattling off a lively prelude, began a well-known air from a popular French vaudeville, of which the following is a rude version: —

“With a lovely face beside you,You can’t walk this world far,But from those who ‘ve closely eyed you,Comes the question, Who are you?And though Dowagers will send youCutting looks and glances keen,The men will comprehend youWhen you say, ‘C’est ma cousine.’”

He was preparing for the second verse when Lizzy entered the room, and, turning at once to her, he poured forth some sentences with all that voluble rapidity he possessed.

“So,” said she, addressing Beecher, “it seems that you are shocked or horrified, or your good taste is outraged, by certain demonstrations of admiration for me exhibited by the worthy public of this place; and, shall I own to you, I liked it I thought it very nice, and very flattering, and all that, until I thought it was a little – a very little, perhaps, but still a little – impertinent Was that your opinion?”

There was a blunt frankness about this question, uttered in such palpable honesty of intention that Beecher felt overwhelmed at once.

“I don’t know the Continent like your friend there. I can’t pretend to offer you advice and counsel like him; but if you really ask me, I ‘d say, ‘Don’t dine below any more; don’t go to the rooms of an evening; don’t frequent the Promenade – “’

“What would you say to my taking the veil, for I fancy I ‘ve some vocation that way?” And then, turning to the Count, she said something in French, at which he laughed immoderately.

Whether vexed with himself or with her, or, more probably still, annoyed by not being able to understand what passed in a foreign language, Beecher took his hat and left the room. Without his ever suspecting it, a new pang was just added to his former griefs, and he was jealous! It is very rare that a man begins by confessing a sense of jealousy to his own heart; he usually ascribes the dislike he feels to a rival to some defect or some blemish in his nature. He is a coarse fellow; rude, vulgar, a coxcomb, or, worst of all, a bore. In some such disposition as this Beecher quitted the town, and strolled away into the country. He felt he hated the Count, and yet he could not perceive why; Lienstahl possessed a vast number of the qualities he was generally disposed to like. He was gay, lively, light-hearted, never out of humor, never even thoughtful; his was that easy temperament that seemed to adapt itself to every phase of life. What was it, then? What could it be that he disliked about him? It was somewhat “cool,” too, of Grog, to send this fellow over without even the courtesy of a line to himself. “Serve him right – serve them all right – if I were to cut my lucky;” and he ruminated long and anxiously over the thought. His present position was anything but pleasant or flattering to him. For aught he knew, the Count and Lizzy Davis passed their time laughing at his English ignorance of all things foreign. By dint of a good deal of such self-tormenting, he at last reached that point whereat the very slightest additional impulse would have determined him to decamp from his party, and set out all alone for Italy. The terror of a day of reckoning with Davis was, however, a dread that he could never shake off. Grog the unforgiving, the inexorable! Grog, whose greatest boast in his vainglorious moments was that, in the “long run,” no man ever got the better of him, would assuredly bring him to book one day or other; and he knew the man’s nature well enough to be aware that no fear of personal consequences would ever balk him on the road to a vengeance.

Sometimes the thought occurred to him that he would make a frank and full confession to Lackington of all his delinquencies, even to that terrible “count” by which the fame and fortune of his house might be blasted forever. If he could but string up his courage to this pitch, Lackington might “pull him through,” Lackington would see that “there was nothing else for it,” and so on. It is marvellous what an apparent strength of argument lies in those slang expressions familiar to certain orders of men. These conventionalities seem to settle at once questions which, if treated in more befitting phraseology, would present the gravest difficulties.

He walked on and on, and at last gained a pine wood which skirted the base of a mountain, and soon lost himself in its dark recesses. Gloomier than the place itself was the tone of his reflections. All that he might have been, all that lay so easily within his reach, all that life once offered him, contrasted bitterly with what he now saw himself. Conscience, it is true, suggested few of his present pangs; he believed – ay, sincerely believed – that he had been more “sinned against than sinning.” Such a one had “let him in” here; such another “had sold him” there. In his reminiscences he saw himself trustful, generous, and confiding, while the world – the great globe that includes Tattersalls, Goodwood, Newmarket, and Ascot – was little better than a nest of knaves and vagabonds.

Why could n’t Lackington get him something abroad, – in the Brazils or Lima, for instance? He was n’t quite sure where they were; but they were far away, he thought, – places too remote for Grog Davis to hunt him out, and whence he could give the great Grog a haughty defiance. They – how it would have puzzled him to say who “they” were – they couldn’t refuse Lackington if he asked. He was always voting and giving his proxies, and doing all manner of things for them; he made a speech, too, last year at Hoxton, and gave a lecture upon something that must have served them. Lackington would begin the old story about character; “but who had character nowadays?” “Take down the Court Guides,” cried he, aloud, “and let me give you the private life and adventures of each as you read out the names. Talk of me! why, what have I done equal to what Lockwood, Hepton, Bulkleigh, Frank Melton, and fifty more have done? No, no; for public life, now, they must do as a sergeant of the Ninety-fifth told me t’ other day, ‘We ‘re obliged to take ‘em little, sir, and glad to get ‘em too!’”

It might be that there was something grateful to his feelings, reassuring to his heart, in this reflection, for he walked along now more briskly, and his head higher than before. Without being aware, he had already gone some miles from the town, and now found himself in one of those long grassy alleys which traversed the dense wood in various directions. As he looked down the narrow road which seemed like the vast aisle of some Gothic cathedral, he felt a sort of tremulous motion beneath his feet; and then, the moment after, he could detect the measured tramp of a horse at speed. A slight bend of the alley had hitherto shut out the view; but, suddenly, a dark object came sweeping round the turn and advancing towards him.

Half to secure a position, and half with the thought of watching what this might portend, Beecher stepped aside into the dense brushwood at the side of the alley, and which effectually hid him from view. He had barely time to make his retreat when a horse swept past him at full stride, and with one glance he recognized him as “Klepper.” It was Rivers, too, who rode him, sitting high over the saddle and with his hands low, as if racing. Now, it was but that very morning Rivers had told him that the horse was not “quite right,” – a bit heavy or so about the eyes, – “out of sorts” he called it; and there he was now, flying along at the top of his speed in full health and condition. It needed but the fortieth part of this to suggest a suspicion to such a mind as his, and with the speed of lightning there flashed across him the notion of a “cross.” He, Annesley Beecher, was to be “put into the hole,” to be “squared,” and “nobbled,” and all the rest of it! It did not, indeed, occur to him how very unprofitably such an enterprise would reward its votaries, that it would be a most gratuitous iniquity to “push him to the wall,” that all the ingenious malevolence in the world could never make the venture “pay;” his self-conceit smothered these reasonings, and he determined to watch and to see how the scheme was to be developed. He had not to wait long in suspense; at the bend of the alley where the horse had disappeared, two horsemen were now seen slowly approaching him. As they drew nearer, Beecher could mark that they were in close, and what seemed confidential conversation. One he quickly recognized to be the Count; the other, to his amazement, was Spicer, of whose arrival at Aix he had not heard anything. They moved so slowly past the spot where he was standing that he could gather some of the words that escaped them, although being in French. The sound of his own name quickly caught his ear. It was the Count spoke as they came up, —

“He is a pauvre sire, this Beecher, and I don’t yet see what use he can be to us.”

“Davis likes him, or, at least, he wants him,” replied Spicer, “and that’s enough for us. Depend upon it, Grog makes no mistakes.” The other laughed; but what he replied was lost in the distance?

It was some time ere Beecher could summon resolution to leave the place of his concealment and set out towards the town. Of all the sentiments that swayed and controlled him, none had such a perfect mastery over his nature as distrust. It was, in fact, the solitary lesson his life’s experience had taught him. He fancied that he could trace every mistake he had ever made, every failure he had ever incurred, to some unlucky movement of credulity on his own part, and that “believing” was the one great error of his whole life. He had long been of opinion that high station and character had no greater privileges than the power they possessed of imposing a certain trustfulness in their pledges, and that the great “pull” a duke had over a “leg” was that his Grace would be believed in preference. But it also appeared to him that rogues were generally true to each other; now, if this last hope were to be taken away, what was there left in life to cling to? Spicer had said, “Davis wants him.” What did that mean? – what could it mean? Simply that Grog found him, not an associate or colleague, but a convenient tool. What an intolerable insult, that he, the Honorable Annesley Beecher, whose great connections rambled through half Debrett, was to be accounted a mere outpost sentry in the corps of Grog Davis!

His anger increased as he went along. The wound to his self-esteem was in the very tenderest spot of his nature. Had any man ever sacrificed so much to be a sharp fellow as he had? Who had, like him, given up friends, station, career, and prospects? Who had voluntarily surrendered the society of his equals, and gone down to the very dregs of mankind, just to learn that one great secret? And was it to be all in vain? Was all his training and teaching to go for nothing? Was he, after descending to the ranks, to discover that he never could learn the manual exercise? How often, in the gloomiest hours of his disappointment, had he hugged the consolation to his heart, that Grog Davis knew and valued him! “Ask G. D. if I’m a flat,” was the proud rejoinder he would hurl at any attempt to depreciate his shrewdness. What was to become of him, then, if the bank that held all his fortune were to fail? If Beecher deemed a sharp fellow the most enviable of all mortals, so he regarded a dupe as the meanest and most miserable, and the very thought of such a fate was almost maddening. “No, confound me! they sha’n’t have it to say that they ‘landed’ A. B.; they shall never boast they nobbled me,” cried he, warming with the indignation that worked within him. “I ‘m off, and this time without beat of drum. Davis may do his worst. I’ll lie by snug for a year or two. There must be many a safe spot in Germany or Italy, where a man may defy detection.” And then he ran over in his mind all the successful devices he had seen adopted for disguising a man’s appearance. Howard Vane had a wig and whiskers that left him unrecognized by his own mother; Crofton Campbell travelled with Inspector Field in search of himself, all by means of a nose. It was wonderful what science was accomplishing every day for the happiness and welfare of mankind!