Devereux — Complete

Before I could reply, our conversation received an abrupt and complete interruption for the night. The door was thrown open, and a man, pushing aside the servant with a rude and yet a dignified air, entered the room unannounced, and with the most perfect disregard to ceremony—

“How d’ye do, Mr. St. John,” said he,—“how d’ye do?—Pretty sort of a day we’ve had. Lucky to find you at home,—that is to say if you will give me some broiled oysters and champagne for supper.”

“With all my heart, Doctor,” said St. John, changing his manner at once from the pensive to an easy and somewhat brusque familiarity,—“with all my heart; but I am glad to hear you are a convert to champagne: you spent a whole evening last week in endeavouring to dissuade me from the sparkling sin.”

“Pish! I had suffered the day before from it; so, like a true Old Bailey penitent, I preached up conversion to others, not from a desire of their welfare, but a plaguy sore feeling for my own misfortune. Where did you dine to-day? At home! Oh! the devil! I starved on three courses at the Duke of Ormond’s.”

“Aha! Honest Matt was there?”

“Yes, to my cost. He borrowed a shilling of me for a chair. Hang this weather, it costs me seven shillings a day for coach-fare, besides my paying the fares of all my poor brother parsons, who come over from Ireland to solicit my patronage for a bishopric, and end by borrowing half-a-crown in the meanwhile. But Matt Prior will pay me again, I suppose, out of the public money?”

“To be sure, if Chloe does not ruin him first.”

“Hang the slut: don’t talk of her. How Prior rails against his place!17 He says the excise spoils his wit, and that the only rhymes he ever dreams of now-a-days are ‘docket and cocket.’”

“Ha, ha! we must do something better for Matt,—make him a bishop or an ambassador. But pardon me, Count, I have not yet made known to you the most courted, authoritative, impertinent, clever, independent, haughty, delightful, troublesome parson of the age: do homage to Dr. Swift. Doctor, be merciful to my particular friend, Count Devereux.”

Drawing himself up, with a manner which contrasted his previous one strongly enough, Dr. Swift saluted me with a dignity which might even be called polished, and which certainly showed that however he might prefer, as his usual demeanour, an air of negligence and semi-rudeness, he had profited sufficiently by his acquaintance with the great to equal them in the external graces, supposed to be peculiar to their order, whenever it suited his inclination. In person Swift is much above the middle height, strongly built, and with a remarkably fine outline of throat and chest; his front face is certainly displeasing, though far from uncomely; but the clear chiselling of the nose, the curved upper lip, the full, round Roman chin, the hanging brow, and the resolute decision, stamped upon the whole expression of the large forehead, and the clear blue eye, make his profile one of the most striking I ever saw. He honoured me, to my great surprise, with a fine speech and a compliment; and then, with a look, which menaced to St. John the retort that ensued, he added: “And I shall always be glad to think that I owe your acquaintance to Mr. Secretary St. John, who, if he talked less about operas and singers,—thought less about Alcibiades and Pericles,—if he never complained of the load of business not being suited to his temper, at the very moment he had been working, like Gumdragon, to get the said load upon his shoulders; and if he persuaded one of his sincerity being as great as his genius,—would appear to all time as adorned with the choicest gifts that Heaven has yet thought fit to bestow on the children of men. Prithee now, Mr. Sec., when shall we have the oysters? Will you be merry to-night, Count?”

“Certainly; if one may find absolution for the champagne.”

“I’ll absolve you, with a vengeance, on condition that you’ll walk home with me, and protect the poor parson from the Mohawks. Faith, they ran young Davenant’s chair through with a sword, t’ other night. I hear they have sworn to make daylight through my Tory cassock,—all Whigs you know, Count Devereux, nasty, dangerous animals, how I hate them! they cost me five-and-sixpence a week in chairs to avoid them.”

“Never mind, Doctor, I’ll send my servants home with you,” said St. John.

“Ay, a nice way of mending the matter—that’s curing the itch by scratching the skin off. I could not give your tall fellows less than a crown a-piece, and I could buy off the bloodiest Mohawk in the kingdom, if he’s a Whig, for half that sum. But, thank Heaven, the supper is ready.”

And to supper we went. The oysters and champagne seemed to exhilarate, if it did not refine, the Doctor’s wit. St. John was unusually brilliant. I myself caught the infection of their humour, and contributed my quota to the common stock of jest and repartee; and that evening, spent with the two most extraordinary men of the age, had in it more of broad and familiar mirth than any I have ever wasted in the company of the youngest and noisiest disciples of the bowl and its concomitants. Even amidst all the coarse ore of Swift’s conversation, the diamond perpetually broke out; his vulgarity was never that of a vulgar mind. Pity that, while he condemned St. John’s over affectation of the grace of life, he never perceived that his own affectation of coarseness and brutality was to the full as unworthy of the simplicity of intellect;18 and that the aversion to cant, which was the strongest characteristic of his mind, led him into the very faults he despised, only through a more displeasing and offensive road. That same aversion to cant is, by the way, the greatest and most prevalent enemy to the reputation of high and of strong minds; and in judging Swift’s character in especial, we should always bear it in recollection. This aversion—the very antipodes to hypocrisy—leads men not only to disclaim the virtues they have, but to pretend to the vices they have not. Foolish trick of disguised vanity! the world, alas, readily believes them! Like Justice Overdo, in the garb of poor Arthur of Bradley, they may deem it a virtue to have assumed the disguise; but they must not wonder if the sham Arthur is taken for the real, beaten as a vagabond, and set in the stocks as a rogue!

CHAPTER VIII

LIGHTLY WON, LIGHTLY LOST.—A DIALOGUE OF EQUAL INSTRUCTION AND AMUSEMENT.—A VISIT TO SIR GODFREY KNELLER

ONE morning Tarleton breakfasted with me. “I don’t see the little page,” said he, “who was always in attendance in your anteroom; what the deuce has become of him?”

“You must ask his mistress; she has quarrelled with me, and withdrawn both her favour and her messenger.”

“What! the Lady Hasselton quarrelled with you! Diable! Wherefore?”

“Because I am not enough of the ‘pretty fellow;’ am tired of carrying hood and scarf, and sitting behind her chair through five long acts of a dull play; because I disappointed her in not searching for her at every drum and quadrille party; because I admired not her monkey; and because I broke a teapot with a toad for a cover.”

“And is not that enough?” cried Tarleton. “Heavens! what a black bead-roll of offences; Mrs. Merton would have discarded me for one of them. However, thy account has removed my surprise; I heard her praise thee the other day; now, as long as she loved thee, she always abused thee like a pickpocket.”

“Ha! ha! ha!—and what said she in my favour?”

“Why, that you were certainly very handsome, though you were small; that you were certainly a great genius, though every one would not discover it; and that you certainly had the air of high birth, though you were not nearly so well dressed as Beau Tippetly. But entre nous, Devereux, I think she hates you, and would play you a trick of spite—revenge is too strong a word—if she could find an opportunity.”

“Likely enough, Tarleton; but a coquette’s lover is always on his guard; so she will not take me unawares.”

“So be it. But tell me, Devereux, who is to be your next mistress, Mrs. Denton or Lady Clancathcart? the world gives them both to you.”

“The world is always as generous with what is worthless as the bishop in the fable was with his blessing. However, I promise thee, Tarleton, that I will not interfere with thy claims either upon Mrs. Denton or Lady Clancathcart.”

“Nay,” said Tarleton, “I will own that you are a very Scipio; but it must be confessed, even by you, satirist as you are, that Lady Clancathcart has a beautiful set of features.”

“A handsome face, but so vilely made. She would make a splendid picture if, like the goddess Laverna, she could be painted as a head without a body.”

“Ha! ha! ha!—you have a bitter tongue, Count; but Mrs. Denton, what have you to say against her?”

“Nothing; she has no pretensions for me to contradict. She has a green eye and a sharp voice; a mincing gait and a broad foot. What friend of Mrs. Denton would not, therefore, counsel her to a prudent obscurity?”

“She never had but one lover in the world,” said Tarleton, “who was old, blind, lame, and poor; she accepted him, and became Mrs. Denton.”

“Yes,” said I, “she was like the magnet, and received her name from the very first person19 sensible of her attraction.”

“Well, you have a shrewd way of saying sweet things,” said Tarleton; “but I must own that you rarely or never direct it towards women individually. What makes you break through your ordinary custom?”

“Because I am angry with women collectively; and must pour my spleen through whatever channel presents itself.”

“Astonishing,” said Tarleton; “I despise women myself. I always did; but you were their most enthusiastic and chivalrous defender a month or two ago. What makes thee change, my Sir Amadis?”

“Disappointment! they weary, vex, disgust me; selfish, frivolous, mean, heartless: out on them! ‘tis a disgrace to have their love!”

“O Ciel! What a sensation the news of thy misogyny will cause; the young, gay, rich Count Devereux, whose wit, vivacity, splendour of appearance, in equipage and dress, in the course of one season have thrown all the most established beaux and pretty fellows into the shade; to whom dedications and odes and billet-doux are so much waste paper; who has carried off the most general envy and dislike that any man ever was blest with, since St. John turned politician; what! thou all of a sudden to become a railer against the divine sex that made thee what thou art! Fly, fly, unhappy apostate, or expect the fate of Orpheus, at least!”

“None of your raileries, Tarleton, or I shall speak to you of plebeians and the canaille!”

“Sacre! my teeth are on edge already! Oh, the base, base canaille, how I loathe them! Nay, Devereux, joking apart, I love you twice as well for your humour. I despise the sex heartily. Indeed, sub rosa be it spoken, there are few things that breathe that I do not despise. Human nature seems to me a most pitiful bundle of rags and scraps, which the gods threw out of Heaven, as the dust and rubbish there.”

“A pleasant view of thy species,” said I.

“By my soul it is. Contempt is to me a luxury. I would not lose the privilege of loathing for all the objects which fools ever admired. What does old Persius say on the subject?

“‘Hoc ridere meum, tam nil, nulla tibi vendo Iliade.’”20

“And yet, Tarleton,” said I, “the littlest feeling of all is a delight in contemplating the littleness of other people. Nothing is more contemptible than habitual contempt.”

“Prithee, now,” answered the haughty aristocrat, “let us not talk of these matters so subtly: leave me my enjoyment without refining upon it. What is your first pursuit for the morning?”

“Why, I have promised my uncle a picture of that invaluable countenance which Lady Hasselton finds so handsome; and I am going to give Kneller my last sitting.”

“So, so, I will accompany you; I like the vain old dog; ‘tis a pleasure to hear him admire himself so wittily.”

“Come, then!” said I, taking up my hat and sword; and, entering Tarleton’s carriage, we drove to the painter’s abode.

We found him employed in finishing a portrait of Lady Godolphin.

“He, he!” cried he, when he beheld me approach. “By Got, I am glad to see you, Count Tevereux; dis painting is tamned poor work by one’s self, widout any one to make des grands yeux, and cry, ‘Oh, Sir Godfrey Kneller, how fine dis is!’”

“Very true, indeed,” said I, “no great man can be expected to waste his talents without his proper reward of praise. But, Heavens, Tarleton, did you ever see anything so wonderful? that hand, that arm, how exquisite! If Apollo turned painter, and borrowed colours from the rainbow and models from the goddesses, he would not be fit to hold the pallet to Sir Godfrey Kneller.”

“By Got, Count Tevereux, you are von grand judge of painting,” cried the artist, with sparkling eyes, “and I will paint you as von tamned handsome man!”

“Nay, my Apelles, you might as well preserve some likeness.”

“Likeness, by Got! I vill make you like and handsome both. By my shoul you make me von Apelles, I vill make you von Alexander!”

“People in general,” said Tarleton, gravely, “believe that Alexander had a wry neck, and was a very plain fellow; but no one can know about Alexander like Sir Godfrey Kneller, who has studied military tactics so accurately, and who, if he had taken up the sword instead of the pencil, would have been at least an Alexander himself.”

“By Got, Meester Tarleton, you are as goot a judge of de talents for de war as Count Tevereux of de genie for de painting! Meester Tarleton, I vill paint your picture, and I vill make your eyes von goot inch bigger than dey are!”

“Large or small,” said I (for Tarleton, who had a haughty custom of contracting his orbs till they were scarce perceptible, was so much offended, that I thought it prudent to cut off his reply), “large or small, Sir Godfrey, Mr. Tarleton’s eyes are capable of admiring your genius; why, your painting is like lightning, and one flash of your brush would be sufficient to restore even a blind man to sight.”

“It is tamned true,” said Sir Godfrey, earnestly; “and it did restore von man to sight once! By my shoul, it did! but sit yourself town, Count Tevereux, and look over your left shoulder—ah, dat is it—and now, praise on, Count Tevereux; de thought of my genius gives you—vat you call it—von animation—von fire, look you—by my shoul, it does!”

And by dint of such moderate panegyric, the worthy Sir Godfrey completed my picture, with equal satisfaction to himself and the original. See what a beautifier is flattery: a few sweet words will send the Count Devereux down to posterity with at least three times as much beauty as he could justly lay claim to.21

CHAPTER IX

A DEVELOPMENT OF CHARACTER, AND A LONG LETTER; A CHAPTER, ON THE WHOLE, MORE IMPORTANT THAN IT SEEMS

THE scenes through which, of late, I have conducted my reader are by no means episodical: they illustrate far more than mere narration the career to which I was so honourably devoted.

Dissipation,—women,—wine,—Tarleton for a friend, Lady Hasselton for a mistress. Let me now throw aside the mask.

To people who have naturally very intense and very acute feelings, nothing is so fretting, so wearing to the heart, as the commonplace affections, which are the properties and offspring of the world. We have seen the birds which, with wings unclipt, children fasten to a stake. The birds seek to fly, and are pulled back before their wings are well spread; till, at last, they either perpetually strain at the end of their short tether, exciting only ridicule by their anguish and their impotent impatience; or, sullen and despondent, they remain on the ground, without any attempt to fly, nor creep, even to the full limit which their fetters will allow. Thus it is with the feelings of the keen, wild nature I speak of: they are either striving forever to pass the little circle of slavery to which they are condemned, and so move laughter by an excess of action and a want of adequate power; or they rest motionless and moody, disdaining the petty indulgence they might enjoy, till sullenness is construed into resignation, and despair seems the apathy of content. Time, however, cures what it does not kill; and both bird and beast, if they pine not to the death at first, grow tame and acquiescent at last.

What to me was the companionship of Tarleton, or the attachment of Lady Hasselton? I had yielded to the one, and I had half eagerly, half scornfully, sought the other. These, and the avocations they brought with them, consumed my time, and of Time murdered there is a ghost which we term ennui. The hauntings of this spectre are the especial curse of the higher orders; and hence springs a certain consequence to the passions. Persons in those ranks of society so exposed to ennui are either rendered totally incapable of real love, or they love far more intensely than those in a lower station; for the affections in them are either utterly frittered away on a thousand petty objects (poor shifts to escape the persecuting spectre), or else, early disgusted with the worthlessness of these objects, the heart turns within and languishes for something not found in the daily routine of life. When this is the case, and when the pining of the heart is once satisfied, and the object of love is found, there are two mighty reasons why the love should be most passionately cherished. The first is, the utter indolence in which aristocratic life oozes away, and which allows full food for that meditation which can nurse by sure degrees the weakest desire into the strongest passion; and the second reason is, that the insipidity and hollowness of all patrician pursuits and pleasures render the excitement of love more delicious and more necessary to the “ignavi terrarum domini,” than it is to those orders of society more usefully, more constantly, and more engrossingly engaged.

Wearied and sated with the pursuit of what was worthless, my heart, at last, exhausted itself in pining for what was pure. I recurred with a tenderness which I struggled with at first, and which in yielding to I blushed to acknowledge, to the memory of Isora. And in the world, surrounded by all which might be supposed to cause me to forget her, my heart clung to her far more endearingly than it had done in the rural solitudes in which she had first allured it. The truth was this; at the time I first loved her, other passions—passions almost equally powerful—shared her empire. Ambition and pleasure—vast whirlpools of thought—had just opened themselves a channel in my mind, and thither the tides of my desires were hurried and lost. Now those whirlpools had lost their power, and the channels, being dammed up, flowed back upon my breast. Pleasure had disgusted me, and the only ambition I had yet courted and pursued had palled upon me still more. I say, the only ambition, for as yet that which is of the loftier and more lasting kind had not afforded me a temptation; and the hope which had borne the name and rank of ambition had been the hope rather to glitter than to rise.

These passions, not yet experienced when I lost Isora, had afforded me at that period a ready comfort and a sure engrossment. And, in satisfying the hasty jealousies of my temper, in deeming Isora unworthy and Gerald my rival, I naturally aroused in my pride a dexterous orator as well as a firm ally. Pride not only strengthened my passions, it also persuaded them by its voice; and it was not till the languid yet deep stillness of sated wishes and palled desires fell upon me, that the low accent of a love still surviving at my heart made itself heard in answer.

I now began to take a different view of Isora’s conduct. I now began to doubt where I had formerly believed; and the doubt, first allied to fear, gradually brightened into hope. Of Gerald’s rivalry, at least of his identity with Barnard, and, consequently, of his power over Isora, there was, and there could be, no feeling short of certainty. But of what nature was that power? Had not Isora assured me that it was not love? Why should I disbelieve her? Nay, did she not love myself? had not her cheek blushed and her hand trembled when I addressed her? Were these signs the counterfeits of love? Were they not rather of that heart’s dye which no skill can counterfeit? She had declared that she could not, that she could never, be mine; she had declared so with a fearful earnestness which seemed to annihilate hope; but had she not also, in the same meeting, confessed that I was dear to her? Had not her lip given me a sweeter and a more eloquent assurance of that confession than words?—and could hope perish while love existed? She had left me,—she had bid me farewell forever; but that was no proof of a want of love, or of her unworthiness. Gerald, or Barnard, evidently possessed an influence over father as well as child. Their departure from———might have been occasioned by him, and she might have deplored, while she could not resist it; or she might not even have deplored; nay, she might have desired, she might have advised it, for my sake as well as hers, were she thoroughly convinced that the union of our loves was impossible.

But, then, of what nature could be this mysterious authority which Gerald possessed over her? That which he possessed over the sire, political schemes might account for; but these, surely, could not have much weight for the daughter. This, indeed, must still remain doubtful and unaccounted for. One presumption, that Gerald was either no favoured lover or that he was unacquainted with her retreat, might be drawn from his continued residence at Devereux Court. If he loved Isora, and knew her present abode, would he not have sought her? Could he, I thought, live away from that bright face, if once allowed to behold it? unless, indeed (terrible thought!) there hung over it the dimness of guilty familiarity, and indifference had been the offspring of possession. But was that delicate and virgin face, where changes with every moment coursed each other, harmonious to the changes of the mind, as shadows in a valley reflect the clouds of heaven!—was that face, so ingenuous, so girlishly revelant of all,—even of the slightest, the most transitory, emotion,—the face of one hardened in deceit and inured to shame? The countenance is, it is true, but a faithless mirror; but what man that has studied women will not own that there is, at least while the down of first youth is not brushed away, in the eye and cheek of zoned and untainted Innocence, that which survives not even the fruition of a lawful love, and has no (nay, not even a shadowed and imperfect) likeness in the face of guilt? Then, too, had any worldlier or mercenary sentiment entered her breast respecting me, would Isora have flown from the suit of the eldest scion of the rich house of Devereux? and would she, poor and destitute, the daughter of an alien and an exile, would she have spontaneously relinquished any hope of obtaining that alliance which maidens of the loftiest houses of England had not disdained to desire? Thus confused and incoherent, but thus yearning fondly towards her image and its imagined purity, did my thoughts daily and hourly array themselves; and, in proportion as I suffered common ties to drop from me one by one, those thoughts clung the more tenderly to that which, though severed from the rich argosy of former love, was still indissolubly attached to the anchor of its hope.

It was during this period of revived affection that I received the following letter from my uncle:—

I thank thee for thy long letter, my dear boy; I read it over three times with great delight. Ods fish, Morton, you are a sad Pickle, I fear, and seem to know all the ways of the town as well as your old uncle did some thirty years ago! ‘Tis a very pretty acquaintance with human nature that your letters display. You put me in mind of little Sid, who was just about your height, and who had just such a pretty, shrewd way of expressing himself in simile and point. Ah, it is easy to see that you have profited by your old uncle’s conversation, and that Farquhar and Etherege were not studied for nothing.