‘I am afraid,’ replied Saxonstowe, ‘that I have had few opportunities of reading anything at all for the past five years. I think Mr. Damerel’s first volume had just appeared when I left England, and books, you know, are not easily obtainable in the wilds of Central Asia. Now that I have better chances, I must not neglect them.’
‘You have a great treat in store, my lord,’ said the publisher. He nodded his head several times, as if to emphasise the remark. ‘Yes,’ he continued, ‘Damerel has certainly been favoured by fortune. Everything has conspired to increase the sum of his fame. His romantic marriage, of course, was a great advertisement.’
‘An advertisement!’
‘I mean, of course, from my standpoint,’ said Mr. Robertson hastily. ‘He ran away with a very beautiful girl who was on the very eve of contracting a most advantageous marriage from a worldly point of view, and the affair was much talked about. There was a great rush on Damerel’s books during the next few weeks—it is wonderful how a little sensation like that helps the sale of a book. I remember that Lord Pintleford published a novel with me some years ago whichwe could not sell at all. He shot his coachman in a fit of anger—that sold the book like hot cakes.’
‘I trust the unfortunate coachman was not seriously injured,’ said Saxonstowe, who was much amused by these revelations. ‘It is, I confess, an unusual method of advertising a book, and one which I should not care to adopt.’
‘Oh, we can spare your lordship the trouble!’ said Mr. Robertson. ‘There’ll be no need to employ any unusual methods in making your lordship’s book known. I have already subscribed two large editions of it.’
With this gratifying announcement Mr. Robertson plunged into the business which had brought Lord Saxonstowe to his office, and for that time no more was said of Lucian Damerel and his great fame. But that night Saxonstowe dined with his aunt, Lady Firmanence, a childless widow who lived on past scandals and present gossip, and chancing to remark that he had encountered Lucian and renewed a very small acquaintance with him, was greeted with a sniff which plainly indicated that Lady Firmanence had something to say.
‘And where, pray, did you meet Lucian Damerel at any time?’ she inquired. ‘He was unknown, or just beginning to be known, when you left England.’
‘It is ten years since I met him,’ answered Saxonstowe. ‘It was when I was staying at Saxonstowe with my uncle. I met Damerel at Simonstower, and the circumstances were rather amusing.’
He gave an account of the duel, which afforded Lady Firmanence much amusement, and he showed her the scar on his hand, and laughed as he related the story of Lucian’s terrible earnestness.
‘But I have never forgotten,’ he concluded, ‘how readily and sincerely he asked my forgiveness when he found that he had been in the wrong—it rather knocked me over, you know, because I didn’t quite understand that he really felt the thing—we were both such boys, and the girl was a child.’
‘Oh, Lucian Damerel has good feeling,’ said LadyFirmanence. ‘You wouldn’t understand the Italian strain in him. But it is amusing that you should have fought over Haidee Brinklow, who is now Mrs. Lucian. I’m glad he married her, and that you didn’t.’
‘Considering that I am to dine with Mr. and Mrs. Lucian Damerel to-morrow,’ said Saxonstowe, ‘it is a bit odd that I don’t know any more of them than this. She, I remember, was some connection of Lord Simonstower’s; but who is he?’
‘Lucian Damerel? Oh, he was the son of Cyprian Damerel, an Italian artist who married the daughter of one of Simonstower’s tenants. Simonstower was at all times greatly interested in him, and it has always been my firm impression that it was he who sent the boy to Oxford. At any rate, when he died, which was just before Lucian Damerel came of age, Simonstower left him ten thousand pounds.’
‘That was good,’ said Saxonstowe.
‘I don’t know,’ said Lady Firmanence. ‘It has always seemed to me from what I have seen of him—and I keep my eyes open on most things—that it would have been far better for that young man if fortune had dealt him a few sound kicks instead of so many halfpence. Depend upon it, Saxonstowe, it’s a bad thing for a man, and especially for a man of that temperament, to be pampered too much. Now, Lucian Damerel has been pampered all his life—I know a good deal about him, because I was constantly down at Saxonstowe during the last two or three years of your uncle’s life, and Saxonstowe, as you may remember, is close to Simonstower. I know how Lucian was petted and pampered by his own people, and by the parson and his daughter, and by the old lord. His way has always been made smooth for him—it would have done him good to find a few rough places here and there. He had far too much flattery poured upon him when his success came, and he has got used to expecting it, though indeed,’ concluded the old lady, laughing, ‘Heaven knows I’m wrong in saying “got used,” for Damerel’sone of the sort who take all the riches and luxuries of the world as their just due.’
‘He seemed to me to be very simple and unaffected,’ said Saxonstowe.
Lady Firmanence nodded the ribbons of her cap.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘he’s sadly too simple, and I wish—for I can’t help liking him—that he was as affected as some of those young upstarts who cultivate long hair and velvet coats on the strength of a slim volume printed on one side of the paper only. No—Lucian Damerel hasn’t a scrap of affectation about him, and he isn’t aposeur. I wish he were affected and that he would pose—I do indeed, for his own sake.’
Saxonstowe knew that his aunt was a clever woman. He held his tongue, asking her by his eyes to explain this desire of hers, which seemed so much at variance with her well-known love of humbug and cant.
‘Oh, of course I know you’re wondering at that!’ she said. ‘Well, the explanation is simple enough. I wish Lucian Damerel were aposeur, I wish he were affected, even to the insufferable stage, for the simple reason that if he were these things it would show that he was alive to the practical and business side of the matter. What is he? A writer. He’ll have to live by writing—at the rate he and Haidee live they’ll soon exhaust their resources—and he ought to be alive to the £ s. d. of his trade, for it is a trade. As things are, he isn’t alive. The difference between Lucian Damerel and some other men of equal eminence in his own craft is just this: they are for ever in an attitude, crying out, “Look at me—is it not wonderful that I am so clever?” Lucian, on the other hand, seems to suggest an attitude and air of “Wouldn’t it be curious if I weren’t?”’
‘I think,’ said Saxonstowe, ‘that there may be some affectation in that.’
‘Affectation,’ said Lady Firmanence, ‘depends upon two things if it is to be successful: the power to deceive cleverly, and the ability to deceive for ever. Lucian Damerel couldn’t deceive anybody—he’s a child, thechild who believes the world to be an illimitable nursery crammed with inexhaustible toys.’
‘You mean that he plays at life?’
‘I mean that he playsinlife,’ said Lady Firmanence. ‘He’s still sporting on his mother’s breast, and he’ll go on sporting until somebody picks him up, smacks him soundly, and throws him into a corner. Then, of course, he will be vastly surprised to find that such treatmentcouldbe meted out to him.’
‘Then let us hope that he will be able to live in his world of dreams for ever,’ said Saxonstowe.
‘So he might, if the State were to establish an asylum for folk of his sort,’ said Lady Firmanence. ‘But he happens to be married, and married to Haidee Brinklow.’
‘My publisher,’ remarked Saxonstowe, ‘gloated over the romantic circumstances of the marriage, and appeared to think that that sort of thing was good for trade—made books sell, you know.’
‘I have no doubt that Damerel’s marriage made his books sell, and keptDomitiarunning at the Athenæum for at least three months longer,’ replied Lady Firmanence.
‘Were the circumstances, then, so very romantic?’
‘I dare say they appealed to the sensations, emotions, feelings, and notions of the British public,’ said the old lady. ‘Haidee Brinklow, after a campaign of two seasons, was about to marry a middle-aged person who had made much money in something or other, and was prepared to execute handsome settlements. It was all arranged when Lucian burst upon the scene, blazing with triumph, youth, and good looks. He was the comet of that season, and Haidee was attracted by the glitter of his tail. I suppose he and she were madly in love with each other for quite a month—unfortunately, during that month they committed the indiscretion of marriage.’
‘A runaway marriage, was it not?’
‘Under the very noses of the mamma and the bridegroom-elect. There was one happy result of the affair,’said Lady Firmanence musingly; ‘it drove Mrs. Brinklow off to somewhere or other on the Continent, and there she has since remained—she took her defeat badly. Now the jilted gentleman took it in good part—it is said that he is quite a sort of grandpapa in the establishment, and has realised that there are compensations even in being jilted.’
Saxonstowe meditated upon these things in silence.
‘Mrs. Damerel was a pretty girl,’ he said, after a time.
‘Mrs. Damerel is a nice little doll,’ said Lady Firmanence, ‘a very pretty toy indeed. Give her plenty of pretty things to wear and sweets to eat, and all the honey of life to sip at, and she’ll do well and go far; but don’t ask her to draw cheques against a mental balance which she never had, or you’ll get them back—dishonoured.’
‘Are there any children?’ Saxonstowe asked.
‘Only themselves,’ replied his aunt, ‘and quite plenty too, in one house. If it were not for Millie Chilverstone, I don’t know what they would do—she descends upon them now and then, straightens them up as far as she can, and sets the wheels working once more. She is good to them.’
‘And who is she? I have some sort of recollection of her name,’ said Saxonstowe.
‘She is the daughter of the parson at Simonstower—the man who tutored Lucian Damerel.’
‘Ah, I remember—she was the girl who came with him to the Castle that day, and he called her Sprats. A lively, good-humoured girl, with a heap of freckles in a very bright face,’ said Saxonstowe.
‘She is little altered,’ remarked Lady Firmanence. ‘Now, that was the girl for Lucian Damerel! She would have taken care of his money, darned his socks, given him plain dinners, seen that the rent was paid, and made a man of him.’
‘Admirable qualifications,’ laughed Saxonstowe. ‘But one might reasonably suppose that a poet ofDamerel’s quality needs others—some intellectual gifts, for example, in his helpmeet.’
‘Stuff and nonsense!’ retorted Lady Firmanence. ‘He wants a good managing housekeeper with a keen eye for the butcher’s bill and a genius for economy. As for intellect—pray, Saxonstowe, don’t foster the foolish notion that poets are intellectual. Don’t you know that all genius is lopsided? Your poet has all his brain-power in one little cell—there may be a gold-mine there, but the rest of him is usually weak even to childishness. And the great need of the weak man is the strong woman.’
Saxonstowe’s silence was a delicate and flattering compliment to Lady Firmanence’s perspicacity.
Lady Firmanence’sobservations upon the family history of Mr. and Mrs. Lucian Damerel sent Lord Saxonstowe to their house at seven o’clock the following evening with feelings of pleasant curiosity. He had been out of the world—as that phrase is known by people whose chief idea of life is to live in social ant-heaps—long enough to enjoy a renewed acquaintance with it, and since his return to England had found a hitherto untasted pleasure in studying the manners and customs of his fellow-subjects. He remembered little about them as they had presented themselves to him before his departure for the East, for he was then young and unlicked: the five years of comparative solitude which he had spent in the deserts and waste places of the earth, only enlivened by the doubtful company of Kirghese, Tartars, and children of nature, had lifted him upon an eminence from whence he might view civilised humanity with a critical eye. So far everything had amused him—it seemed to him that never had life seemed so small and ignoble, so mean and trifling, as here where the men and women were as puppets pulled by strings which fate had attached to most capricious fingers. Like all the men who come back from the deserts and the mountains, he gazed on the whirling life around him with a feeling that was half pity, half contempt. The antics of the puppets made him wonder, and in the wonder he found amusement.
Mr. and Mrs. Lucian Damerel, as befitted young people untroubled by considerations of economy, resided in one of those smaller streets in Mayfair wherein one may find a house large enough to turn round in without more than an occasional collision with the walls. Such a house is not so comfortable as a suburban residence at one-tenth the rent, but it has the advantage of beingin the middle of the known world, and if its frontage to the street is only one of six yards, its exterior may be made pretty and even taking by a judicious use of flowering plants, bright paint, and a quaint knocker. The interior is usually suggestive of playing at doll’s house; but the absence of even one baby makes a great difference, and in Lucian’s establishment there were no children. Small as it was, the house was a veritable nest of comfort—Lucian and Haidee had the instinct of settling themselves amongst soft things, and surrounding their souls with an atmosphere of æsthetic delight, and one of them at least had the artist’s eye for colour, and the true collector’s contempt for the cheap and obvious. There was scarcely a chair or table in the rooms sacred to the householders and their friends which had not a history and a distinction: every picture was an education in art; the books were masterpieces of the binder’s craft; the old china and old things generally were the despair of many people who could have afforded to buy a warehouse full of the like had they only known where to find it. Lucian knew, and when he came into possession of Lord Simonstower’s legacy he began to surround himself with the fruits of money and knowledge, and as riches came rolling in from royalties, he went on indulging his tastes until the house was full, and would hold no more examples of anything. But by that time it was a nest of luxury wherein even the light, real and artificial, was graduated to a fine shade, where nothing crude in shape or colour interfered with the delicate susceptibilities of a poetic temperament.
When Lord Saxonstowe was shown into the small drawing-room of this small house he marvelled at the cleverness and delicacy of the taste which could make so much use of limited dimensions. It was the daintiest and prettiest room he had ever seen, and though he himself had small inclinations to ease and luxury of any sort, he drank in the pleasantness of his surroundings with a distinct sense of personal gratification. The room was empty of human life when he entered it, but themarks of a personality were all over it, and the personality was neither masculine nor feminine—it was the personality of a neuter thing, and Saxonstowe dimly recognised that it meant Art. He began to understand something of Lucian as he looked about him, and to conceive him as a mind which dominated its enveloping body to a love of beauty that might easily degenerate into a slavedom to luxury. He began to wonder if Lucian’s study or library, or wherever he worked, were similarly devoted to the worship of form and colour.
He was turning over the leaves of an Italian work, a book sumptuous in form and wonderful in its vellum binding and gold scroll-work, when a rustle of skirts aroused him from the first stages of a reverie. He turned, expecting to see his hostess—instead he saw a young lady whom he instinctively recognised as Miss Chilverstone, the girl of the merry eyes and the innumerable freckles of ten years earlier. He looked at her closely as she approached him, and he saw that the merry eyes had lost some of their roguery, but were still frank, clear, and kindly; some of the freckles had gone, but a good many were still there, adding piquancy to a face that had no pretensions to beauty, but many to the charms which spring from the possession of a kindly heart and a purposeful temperament. Good temper and good health appeared to radiate from Miss Chilverstone; the active girl of sixteen had developed into a splendid woman, and Lord Saxonstowe, as she moved towards him, admired her with a sudden recognition of her feminine strength—she was just the woman, he said to himself, who ought to be the mate of a strong man, a man of action and purpose and determination.
She held out her hand to him with a frank smile.
‘Do you remember me?’ she said. ‘It is quite ten years since that fateful afternoon at Simonstower.’
‘Was it fateful?’ he answered. ‘Yes, I remember quite well. In those days you were called Sprats.’
‘I am still Sprats,’ she answered, with a laugh. ‘Ishall always be Sprats. I am Sprats to Lucian and Haidee, and even to my children.’
‘To your children?’ he said wonderingly.
‘I have twenty-five,’ she replied, smiling at his questioning look. ‘But of course you do not know. I have a private orphanage, all of my own, in Bayswater—it is my hobby. If you are interested in babies and children, do come to see me there, and I will introduce you to all my charges.’
‘I will certainly do that,’ he said. ‘Isn’t it hard work?’
‘Isn’t everything hard work that is worth doing?’ she answered. ‘Yes, I suppose it is hard work, but I like it. I have a natural genius for mothering helpless things—that is why I occasionally condescend to put on fine clothes and dine with children like Lucian and Haidee when they entertain great travellers who are also peers of the realm.’
‘Do they require mothering?’ he asked.
‘Very much so sometimes—they are very particular babies. I come to them every now and then to scold them, smack them, straighten them up, and see that they are in no danger of falling into the fire or upsetting anything. Afterwards I dine with them in order to cheer them up after the rough time they have had.’
Saxonstowe smiled. He had been watching her closely all the time.
‘I see,’ he said, ‘that you are still Sprats. Has the time been very rough to-day?’
‘Somewhat rough on poor Haidee, perhaps,’ answered Sprats. ‘Lucian has wisely kept out of the way until he can find safety in numbers. But please sit down and tell me about your travels until our hostess appears—it seems quite funny to see you all in one piece after such adventures. Didn’t they torture you in some Thibetan town?’ she inquired, with a sudden change from gaiety to womanly concern.
‘They certainly were rather inhospitable,’ he answered. ‘I shouldn’t call it torture, I think—it wasmerely a sort of gentle hint as to what they would do if I intruded upon them again.’
‘But I want to know what they did,’ she insisted. ‘You look so nice and comfortable sitting there, with no other sign of discomfort about you than the usual I-want-my-dinner look, that one would never dream you had gone through hardships.’
Saxonstowe was not much given to conversation—his nomadic life had communicated the gift of silence to him, but he recognised the sympathetic note in Miss Chilverstone’s voice, and he began to tell her about his travels in a somewhat boyish fashion that amused her. As he talked she examined him closely and decided that he was almost as young as on the afternoon when he occasioned such mad jealousy in Lucian’s breast. His method of expressing himself was simple and direct and schoolboyish in language, but the exuberance of spirits which she remembered had disappeared and given place to a staid, old-fashioned manner.
‘I wonder what did it?’ she said, unconsciously uttering her thought.
‘Did what?’ he asked.
‘I was thinking aloud,’ she answered. ‘I wondered what had made you so very staid in a curiously young way—you were a rough-and-tumble sort of boy that afternoon at Simonstower.’
Saxonstowe blushed. He had recollections of his youthfulness.
‘I believe I was an irrepressible sort of youngster,’ he said. ‘I think that gets knocked out of you though, when you spend a lot of time alone—you get no end of time for thinking, you know, out in the deserts.’
‘I should think so,’ she said. ‘And I suppose that even this solitude becomes companionable in a way that only those who have experienced it can understand?’
He looked at her with some surprise and with a new interest and strange sense of kinship.
‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘That’s it—that is it exactly. How did you know?’
‘It isn’t necessary to go into the deserts and steppes to feel a bit lonely now and then, is it?’ she said, with a laugh. ‘I suppose most of us get some sort of notion of solitude at some time or other.’
At that juncture Haidee entered, and Saxonstowe turned to her with a good deal of curiosity. He was somewhat surprised to find that ten years of added age had made little difference in her. She was now a woman, it was true, and her girlish prettiness had changed into a somewhat luxurious style of beauty—there was no denying the loveliness of face and figure, of charm and colour, he said to himself, but he was quick to observe that Haidee’s beauty depended entirely upon surface qualities. She fell, without effort or consciousness, into poses which other women vainly tried to emulate; it was impossible to her to walk across a room, sit upon an unaccommodating chair, or loll upon a much becushioned sofa in anything but a graceful way; it was equally impossible, so long as nothing occurred to ruffle her, to keep from her lips a perpetual smile, or inviting glances from her dark eyes. She reminded Saxonstowe of a fluffy, silky-coated kitten which he had seen playing on Lady Firmanence’s hearthrug, and he was not surprised to find, when she began to talk to him, that her voice had something of the feline purr in it. Within five minutes of her entrance he had determined that Mrs. Damerel was a pretty doll. She showed to the greatest advantage amidst the luxury of her surroundings, but her mouth dropped no pearls, and her pretty face showed no sign of intellect, or of wit, or of any strong mental quality. It was evident that conversation was not Mrs. Damerel’s strong point—she indicated in an instinctive fashion that men were expected to amuse and admire her without drawing upon her intellectual resources, and Saxonstowe soon formed the opinion that a judicious use of monosyllables would carry her a long way in uncongenial company. Her beauty had something of sleepiness about it—there was neither vivacity nor animation in her manner, but she was beautifullygowned and daintily perfect, and as a picture deserved worship and recognition.
Saxonstowe was presently presented to another guest, Mrs. Berenson, a lady who had achieved great distinction on the stage, and who claimed a part proprietorship in Lucian Damerel because she had created the part of the heroine in his tragedy, and almost worn herself to skin and bone in playing it in strenuous fashion for nearly three hundred nights. She was now resting from these labours, and employing her leisure in an attempt to induce Lucian to write a play around herself, and the project was so much in her mind that she began to talk volubly of it as soon as she entered his wife’s drawing-room. Saxonstowe inspected her with curiosity and amusement. He had seen her described as an embodiment of sinuous grace; she seemed to him an angular, scraggy woman, whose joints were too much in evidence, and who would have been the better for some addition to her adipose tissue. From behind the footlights Mrs. Berenson displayed many charms and qualities of beauty—Saxonstowe soon came to the conclusion that they must be largely due to artificial aids and the power of histrionic art, for she presented none of them on the dull stage of private life. Her hair, arranged on the principle of artful carelessness, was of a washed-out colour; her complexion was mottled and her skin rough; she had an unfortunately prominent nose which evinced a decided partiality to be bulbous, and her mouth, framed in harsh lines and drooping wrinkles, was so large that it seemed to stretch from one corner of an elongated jaw to the other. She was noticeable, but not pleasant to look upon, and in spite of a natural indifference to such things, Saxonstowe wished that her attire had been either less eccentric or better suited to her. Mrs. Berenson, being very tall and very thin, wore a gown of the eighteenth-century-rustic-maiden style, made very high at the waist, low at the neck, and short in the sleeves—she thus looked like a lamp-post, or a bean-stalk, topped with a mask and a flaxen wig. She was one of thosewomen who wear innumerable chains, and at least half-a-dozen rings on each hand, and she had an annoying trick of clasping her hands in front of her and twisting the chains round her fingers, which were very long and very white, and apt to get on other people’s nerves. It was also to be observed that she never ceased talking, and that her one subject of conversation was herself.
As Saxonstowe was beginning to wish that his host would appear, Mr. Eustace Darlington was announced, and he found himself diverted from Mrs. Berenson by a new object of interest, in the shape of the man whom Mrs. Damerel had jilted in order to run away with Lucian. Mr. Darlington was a man of apparently forty years of age; a clean-shaven, keen-eyed individual, who communicated an immediate impression of shrewd hard-headedness. He was very quiet and very self-possessed in manner, and it required little knowledge of human nature to predict of him that he would never do anything in a hurry or in a perfunctory manner—a single glance of his eye at the clock as eight struck served to indicate at least one principal trait of his character.
‘It is utterly useless to look at the clock,’ said Haidee, catching Mr. Darlington’s glance. ‘That won’t bring Lucian any sooner—he has probably quite forgotten that he has guests, and gone off to dine at his club or something of that sort. He gets more erratic every day. I wish you’d talk seriously to him, Sprats. He never pays the least attention to me. Last week he asked two men to dine—utter strangers to me—and at eight o’clock came a wire from Oxford saying he had gone down there to see a friend and was staying the night.’
‘I think that must be delightful in the man to whom you are married,’ said Mrs. Berenson. ‘I should hate to live with a man who always did the right thing at the right moment—so dull, you know.’
‘There is much to be said on both sides,’ said Darlington dryly. ‘In husbands, as in theology, a happy medium would appear to be found in thevia media. I presume, Mrs. Berenson, that you would like your husbandto wear his waistcoat outside his coat and dine at five o’clock in the morning?’
‘I would prefer even that to a husband who lived on clock-work principles,’ Mrs. Berenson replied. ‘Eccentricity is the surest proof of strong character.’
‘I should imagine,’ said Sprats, with a glance at Saxonstowe which seemed to convey to him that the actress was amusing. ‘I should imagine that Lord Saxonstowe and Mr. Darlington are men of clock-work principles.’
Mrs. Berenson put up her pince-nez and favoured the two men with a long, steady stare. She dropped the pince-nez with a deep sigh.
‘They do look like it, don’t they?’ she said despairingly. ‘There’s something in the way they wear their clothes and hold their hands that suggests it. Do you always rise at a certain hour?’ she went on, turning to Saxonstowe. ‘My husband had a habit of getting up at six in summer and seven in winter—it brought on an extraordinary form of nervous disease in me, and the doctors warned him that they would not be responsible for my life if he persisted. I believe he tried to break the habit off, poor fellow, but he died, and so of course there was an end of it.’
Ere Saxonstowe could decide whether he was expected to reply to the lady’s question as to his own habits, the sound of a rapidly driven and sharply pulled-up cab was heard outside, followed by loudly delivered instructions in Lucian’s voice. A minute later he rushed into the drawing-room. He had evidently come straight out of the cab, for he wore his hat and forgot to take it off—excitement and concern were written in large letters all over him. He began to gesticulate, addressing everybody, and talking very quickly and almost breathlessly. He was awfully sorry to have kept them waiting, and even now he must hurry away again immediately. He had heard late that afternoon of an old college friend who had fallen on evil days after an heroic endeavour to make a fortune out of literature, and had gone to himto find that the poor fellow, his wife, and two young children were all in the last stages of poverty, and confronting a cold and careless world from the insecure bastion of a cheap lodging in an unknown quarter of the town named Ball’s Pond. He described their plight and surroundings in a few graphic sentences, looking from one to the other with quick eager glances, as if appealing to them for comprehension, or sympathy, or assent.
‘And of course I must see to the poor chap and his family,’ he said. ‘They want food, and money, and lots of things. And the two children—Sprats,youmust come back with me just now. I am keeping the cab—you must come and take those children away to your hospital. And where is Hoskins? I want food and wine for them; he must put it on top of the hansom.’
‘Are we all to go without dinner?’ asked Mrs. Damerel.
‘By no means, by no means!’ said Lucian. ‘Pray do not wait longer—indeed I don’t know when I shall return, there will be lots to do, and——’
‘But Sprats, if she goes with you, will go hungry,’ Mrs. Damerel urged.
Lucian stared at Sprats, and frowned, as if some deep mental problem had presented itself to him.
‘You can’t be very hungry, Sprats, you know,’ he said, with visible impatience. ‘You must have had tea during the afternoon—can’t you wait an hour or two and we’ll get something later on? Those two children must be brought away—my God! you should see the place—you must come, of course.’
‘Oh, I’m going with you!’ answered Sprats. ‘Don’t bother about us, you other people—angels of mercy are not very pleasant things at the moment you’re starving for dinner—go and dine and leave Lucian to me; I’ll put a cloak or something over my one swell gown and go with him. Now, Lucian, quick with your commissariat arrangements.’
‘Yes, yes, I’ll be quick,’ answered Lucian. ‘You see,’ he continued, turning to Saxonstowe with the airof a child who has asked another child to play with it, and at the last moment prefers an alternative amusement; ‘it’s an awful pity, isn’t it, but you do quite understand? The poor chap’s starving and friendless, you know, and I don’t know when I shall get back, but——’
‘Please don’t bother about me,’ said Saxonstowe; ‘I quite understand.’
Lucian sighed—a sigh of relief. He looked round; Sprats had disappeared, but Hoskins, a staid and solemn butler, lingered at the door. Lucian appealed to him with the pathetic insistence of the man who wants very much to do something, and is not quite sure how to do it.
‘Oh, I say, Hoskins, I want—some food, you know, and wine, and——’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Hoskins. ‘Miss Chilverstone has just given me instructions, sir.’
‘Oh, then we can go!’ exclaimed Lucian. ‘I say, you really mustn’t mind—oh! I am forgetting that I must take some money,’ he said, and hurriedly left the room. His wife sighed and looked at Darlington.
‘I suppose we may now go to dinner,’ she said. ‘Lucian will sup on a sandwich somewhere about midnight.’
In the hall they found Sprats enveloped in an ulster which completely covered her dinner-gown; Lucian was cramming a handful of money, obviously taken at random from a receptacle where paper-currency and gold and silver coins were all mingled together, into a pocket; a footman was carrying a case of food and wine out to the cab. Mrs. Berenson insisted on seeing the two apostles of charity depart—the entire episode had put her into a good temper, and she enlivened the next hour with artless descriptions of her various states of feeling. Her chatter amused Saxonstowe; Darlington and Mrs. Damerel appeared to have heard much of it on previous occasions, and received it with equanimity. As soon as dinner was over she announced that if Lucianhad been at home she had meant to spend the rest of the evening in expounding her ideas on the subject of the wished-for drama to him, but as things were she would go round to the Empire for an hour—she would just be in time, she said, to see a turn in which the performer, a contortionist, could tie himself into a complicated knot, dislocate every joint in his body, and assume the most grotesque positions, all without breaking himself in pieces.
‘It is the grimmest performance,’ she said to Saxonstowe; ‘it makes me dream, and I wake screaming; and the sensation of finding that the dream is a dream, and not a reality, is so exquisite that I treat myself to it at least once a week. I think that all great artists should cultivate sensations—don’t you?’
Upon this point Saxonstowe was unable to give a satisfactory answer, but he replied very politely that he trusted Mrs. Berenson would enjoy her treat. Soon after her departure he made his own adieu, leaving Mrs. Damerel to entertain Darlington and two or three other men who had dropped in after dinner, and who seemed in nowise surprised to find Lucian not at home.
Lucianswooped down upon the humble dwelling in which his less fortunate fellow resided, like an angel who came to destroy rather than to save. He took everything into his own hands, as soon as the field of operations lay open to him, and it was quite ten minutes before Sprats, by delicate finesse, managed to shut him up in one room with the invalid, while she and the wife talked practical matters in another. At the end of an hour she got him safely away from the house. He was in a pleasurable state of mind; the situation had been full of charm to him, and he walked out into the street gloating over the fact that the sick man and his wife and children were now fed and warmed and made generally comfortable, and had money in the purse wherewith to keep the wolf from the door for many days. His imagination had seized upon the misery which the unlucky couple must have endured before help came in their way: he conjured up the empty pocket, the empty cupboard, the blank despair that comes from lack of help and sympathy, the heart sickness which springs from the powerlessness to hope any longer. He had read of these things but had never seen them: he only realised what they meant when he looked at the faces of the sick man and his wife as he and Sprats left them. Striding away at Sprats’s side, his head drooping towards his chest and his hands plunged in his pockets, Lucian ruminated upon these things and became so keenly impressed by them that he suddenly paused and uttered a sharp exclamation.
‘By George, Sprats!’ he said, standing still and staring at her as if he had never seen her before, ‘what an awful thing poverty must be! Did that ever strike you?’
‘Often,’ answered Sprats, with laconic alacrity, ‘asit might have struck you, too, if you’d kept your eyes open.’
‘I am supposed to have excellent powers of observation,’ he said musingly, ‘but somehow I don’t think I ever quite realised what poverty meant until to-night. I wonder what it would be like to try it for a while—to go without money and food and have no hope?—but, of course, one couldn’t do it—one would always know that one could go back to one’s usual habits, and so on. It would only be playing at being poor. I wonder, now, where the exact line would be drawn between the end of hope and the beginning of despair?—that’s an awfully interesting subject, and one that I should like to follow up. Don’t you think——’
‘Lucian,’ said Sprats, interrupting him without ceremony, ‘are we going to stand here at the street corner all night while you moon about abstract questions? Because if you are, I’m not.’
Lucian came out of his reverie and examined his surroundings. He had come to a halt at a point where the Essex Road is transected by the New North Road, and he gazed about him with the expression of a traveller who has wandered into strange regions.
‘This is a quarter of the town which I do not know,’ he said. ‘Not very attractive, is it? Let us walk on to those lights—I suppose we can find a hansom there, and then we can get back to civilisation.’
They walked forward in the direction of Islington High Street: round about the Angel there was life and animation and a plenitude of bright light; Lucian grew interested, and finally asked a policeman what part of the town he found himself in. On hearing that that was Islington he was immediately reminded of the ‘Bailiff’s Daughter’ and began to recall lines of it. But Islington and old ballads were suddenly driven quite out of his thoughts by an object which had no apparent connection with poetry.
Sprats, keeping her eyes open for a hansom, suddenly missed Lucian from her side, and turned to find himgazing at the windows of a little café-restaurant with an Italian name over its door and a suspicion of Continental cookery about it. She turned back to him: he looked at her as a boy might look whose elder sister catches him gazing into the pastry-cook’s window.
‘I say, Sprats,’ he said coaxingly, ‘let’s go in there and have supper. It’s clean, and I’ve suddenly turned faint—I’ve had nothing since lunch. Dinner will be all over now at home, and besides, we’re miles away. I’ve been in these places before—they’re all right, really, something like theristorantiin Italy, you know.’
Sprats was hungry too. She glanced at the little café—it appeared to be clean enough to warrant one in eating, at any rate, a chop in it.
‘I think I should like some food,’ she said.
‘Come on, then,’ said Lucian gaily. ‘Let’s see what sort of place it is.’
He pushed open the swinging doors and entered. It was a small place, newly established, and the proprietor and his wife, two Italians, and their Swiss waiter were glad to see customers who looked as if they would need something more than a cup of coffee and a roll and butter. The proprietor bowed himself double and ushered them to the most comfortable corner in his establishment: he produced a lengthymenuand handed it to Lucian with greatempressement; the waiter stood near, deeply interested; the proprietor’s wife, gracious of figure and round of face, leaned over the counter thinking of the coins which she would eventually deposit in her cash drawer. Lucian addressed the proprietor in Italian and discussed themenuwith him; while they talked, Sprats looked about her, wondering at the red plush seats, the great mirrors in their gilded frames, and the jars of various fruits and conserves arranged on the counter. Every table was adorned with a flowering plant fashioned out of crinkled paper; the ceiling was picked out in white and gold; the Swiss waiter’s apron and napkin were very stiffly starched; the proprietor wore a frock coat, which fitted very tightly at the waist,and his wife’s gown was of a great smartness. Sprats decided that they were early customers in the history of the establishment—besides themselves there were only three people in the place: an old gentleman with a napkin tucked into his neckband, who was eating his dinner and reading a newspaper propped up against a bottle, and a pair of obvious lovers who were drinkingcafé-au-laitin a quiet corner to the accompaniment of their own murmurs.
‘I had no idea that I was so hungry,’ said Lucian when he and the proprietor had finally settled upon what was best to eat and drink. ‘I am glad I saw this place: it reminds me in some ways of Italy. I say, I don’t believe those poor people had had much to eat to-day, Sprats—it is a most fortunate thing that I happened to hear of them. My God! I wouldn’t like to get down to that stage—it must be dreadful, especially when there are children.’
Sprats leaned her elbows on the little table, propped her chin in her hands, and looked at him with a curious expression which he did not understand. A half-dreamy, half-speculative look came into her eyes.
‘I wonder what you would do if youdidget down to that stage?’ she said, with a rather quizzical smile.
Lucian stared at her.
‘I? Why, what do you mean?’ he said. ‘I suppose I should do as other men do.’
‘It would be for the first time in your life, then,’ she answered. ‘I fancy seeing you do as other men do in any circumstances.’
‘But I don’t think I could conceive myself at such a low ebb as that,’ he said.
Sprats still stared at him with a speculative expression.
‘Lucian,’ she said suddenly, ‘do you ever think about the future? Everything has been made easy for you so far; does it ever strike you that fortune is in very truth a fickle jade, and that she might desert you?’
He looked at her as a child looks who is requested to face an unpleasant contingency.
‘I don’t think of unpleasant things,’ he answered. ‘What’s the good? And why imagine possibilities which aren’t probabilities? There is no indication that fortune is going to desert me.’
‘No,’ said Sprats, ‘but she might, and very suddenly too. Look here, Lucian; I’ve the right to play grandmother always, haven’t I, and there’s something I want to put before you plainly. Don’t you think you are living rather carelessly and extravagantly?’
Lucian knitted his brows and stared at her.
‘Explain,’ he said.
‘Well,’ she continued, ‘I don’t think it wants much explanation. You don’t bother much about money matters, do you?’
He looked at her somewhat pityingly.
‘How can I do that and attend to my work?’ he asked. ‘I could not possibly be pestered with things of that sort.’
‘Very well,’ said Sprats, ‘and Haidee doesn’t bother about them either. Therefore, no one bothers. I know your plan, Lucian—it’s charmingly simple. When Lord Simonstower left you that ten thousand pounds you paid it into a bank, didn’t you, and to it you afterwards added Haidee’s two thousand when you were married. Twice a year Mr. Robertson pays your royalties into your account, and the royalties from your tragedy go to swell it as well. That’s one side of the ledger. On the other side you and Haidee each have a cheque-book, and you draw cheques as you please and for what you please. That’s all so, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ answered Lucian, regarding her with amazement, ‘of course it is; but just think what a very simple arrangement it is.’
‘Admirably simple,’ Sprats replied, laughing, ‘so long as there is an inexhaustible fund to draw upon. But seriously, Lucian, haven’t you been drawing onyour capital? Do you know, at this moment, what you are worth?—do you know how you stand?’
‘I don’t suppose that I do,’ he answered. ‘But why all this questioning? I know that Robertson pays a good deal into my account twice a year, and the royalties from the tragedy were big, you know.’
‘But still, Lucian, you’ve drawn off your capital,’ she urged. ‘You have spent just what you pleased ever since you left Oxford, and Haidee spends what she pleases. You must have spent a lot on your Italian tour last year, and you are continually running over to Paris. You keep up an expensive establishment; you indulge expensive tastes; you were born, my dear Lucian, with the instincts of an epicure in everything.’
‘And yet I am enjoying a supper in an obscure little café!’ he exclaimed laughingly. ‘There’s not much extravagance here.’
‘You may gratify epicurean tastes by a sudden whim to be Spartan-like,’ answered Sprats. ‘I say that you have the instincts of an epicure, and you have so far gratified them. You’ve never known what it was, Lucian, to be refused anything, have you? No: well, that naturally inclines you to the opinion that everything will always be made easy for you. Now supposing you lost your vogue as a poet—oh, there’s nothing impossible about it, my dear boy!—the public are as fickle as fortune herself—and supposing your next tragedy does not catch the popular taste—ah, and that’s not impossible either—what are you going to do? Because, Lucian, you must have dipped pretty heavily into your capital, and if you want some plain truths from your faithful Sprats, you spend a great deal more than you earn. Now give me another potato, and tell me plainly if you know how much your royalties amounted to last year and how much you and Haidee spent.’
‘I don’t know,’ answered Lucian. ‘I could tell by asking my bankers. Of course I have spent a good deal of money in travel, and in books, and in pictures, and in furnishing a house—could I have laid out LordSimonstower’s legacy in better fashion? And I do earn large sums—I had a small fortune out ofDomitia, you know.’
‘There is no doubt,’ she replied, ‘that you have had enough money to last you for all the rest of your life if it had been wisely invested.’
‘Do you mean to say that I have no investments?’ he said, half angrily. ‘Why, I have thousands of pounds invested in pictures, books, furniture, and china—my china alone is worth two thousand.’
‘Dear boy, I don’t doubt it,’ she answered soothingly, ‘but you know it doesn’t produce any interest. I like you to have pretty things about you, but you have precious little modesty in your mighty brain, and you sometimes indulge tastes which only a millionaire ought to possess.’
‘Well,’ he said, sighing, ‘I suppose there’s a moral at the end of the sermon. What is it, Sprats? You are a brick, of course—in your way there’s nobody like you, but when you are like this you make me think of mustard-plaisters.’
‘The moral is this,’ she answered: ‘come down from the clouds and cultivate a commercial mind for ten minutes. Find out exactly what you have in the way of income, and keep within it. Tell Haidee exactly how much she has to spend.’
‘You forget,’ he said, ‘that Haidee has two thousand pounds of her own. It’s a very small fortune, but it’s hers.’
‘Had, you mean, not has,’ replied Sprats. ‘Haidee must have spent her small fortune twice over, if not thrice over.’
‘It would be an unkind thing to be mean with her,’ said Lucian, with an air of wise reflection. ‘If Haidee had married Darlington she would have had unlimited wealth at her disposal; as she preferred to throw it all aside and marry me, I can’t find it in me to deny her anything. No, Sprats—poor little Haidee must haveher simple pleasures even if I have to deny myself of my own.’
‘Oh, did you ever hear such utter rot!’ Sprats exclaimed. ‘Catch you denying yourself of anything! Dear boy, don’t be an ass—it’s bad form. And Haidee’s pleasures are not simple.’
‘They are simple in comparison with what they might have been if she had married Darlington,’ he said.
‘Then why didn’t she marry Darlington?’ inquired Sprats.
‘Because she married me,’ answered Lucian. ‘She gave up the millionaire for the struggling poet, as you might put it if you were writing a penny-dreadful. No; seriously, Sprats, I think there’s a good deal due to Haidee in that respect. I think she is really easily contented. When you come to think of it, we are not extravagant—we like pretty things and comfortable surroundings, but when you think of what some people do——’
‘Oh, you’re hopeless, Lucian!’ she said. ‘I wish you’d been sent out to earn your living at fifteen. Honour bright—you’re living in a world of dreams, and you’ll have a nasty awakening some day.’
‘I have given the outer world something of value from my world of dreams,’ he said, smiling at her.
‘You have written some very beautiful poetry, and you are a marvellously gifted man who ought to feel the responsibility of your gifts,’ she said gravely. ‘And all I want is to keep you, if I can, from the rocks on which you might come to grief. I’m sure that if you took my advice about business matters you would avoid trouble in the future. You’re too cock-sure, too easy-going, too thoughtless, Lucian, and this is a hard and a cruel world.’
‘It’s been a very pleasant world to me so far,’ he said. ‘I’ve never had a care or a trouble; I’ve heaps of friends, and I’ve always got everything that I wanted. Why, it’s a very pleasant world! You, Sprats, have found it so, too.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I have found it pleasant, but it is hard and cruel nevertheless, and one realises it sometimes when one least expects to. One may wake out of a dream to a very cruel reality.’
‘You speak as of a personal experience,’ he said smiling. ‘And yet I swear you never had one.’
‘I don’t want you to have one,’ she answered.
‘Is sermonising a cruel reality?’ he asked with a mock grimace.
‘No, it’s a necessary thing; and that reminds me that I have not quite finished mine. Look here, Lucian, here’s a straight question to you. Do you think it a good thing to be so very friendly with Mr. Darlington?’
Lucian dropped his knife and fork and stared at her in amazement.
‘Why on earth not?’ he said. ‘Darlington is an awfully good fellow. Of course, I know that he must have felt it when Haidee ran away with me, but he has been most kind to both of us—we have had jolly times on his yacht and at his Scotch place; and you know, Sprats, when you can’t afford things yourself it’s rather nice to have friends who can give them to you.’
‘Lucian, that’s a piece of worldliness that’s unworthy of you,’ she said. ‘Well, I can’t say anything against Mr. Darlington. He seems kind, and he is certainly generous and hospitable, but it is well known that he was very, very much in love with Haidee, and that he felt her loss a good deal.’
‘Yes, it was awfully hard on him,’ said Lucian, stroking his chin with a thoughtful air; ‘and of course that’s just why one feels that one ought to be nice to him. He and Haidee are great friends, and that’s far better than that he should cherish any bitter feelings against her because she preferred me to him.’
Sprats looked at him with the half-curious, half-speculative expression which had filled her eyes in the earlier stages of their conversation. They had now finished their repast, and she drew on her gloves.
‘I want to go home to my children,’ she said. ‘Oneof the babies has croup, and it was rather bad when I left. Pay the bill, Lucian, and get them to call a hansom.’
Lucian put his hands in his pockets, and uttered a sudden exclamation of dismay.
‘I haven’t any money,’ he said. ‘I left it all with poor Watson. Have you any?’
‘No,’ she answered, ‘of course I haven’t. You dragged me away in my dinner-dress, and it hasn’t even a pocket in it. What are you going to do?’
‘What an awkward predicament!’ said Lucian, searching every pocket. ‘I don’t know what to do—I haven’t a penny.’
‘Well, you must walk back to Mr. Watson’s and get some money there,’ said Sprats. ‘You will be back in ten minutes.’
‘What! borrow money from a man to whom I have just given it?’ he cried. ‘Oh, I couldn’t do that!’
Sprats uttered an impatient exclamation.
‘Well, do something!’ she said. ‘We can’t sit here all night.’
Lucian summoned the proprietor and explained the predicament. The situation ended in a procession of two hansom cabs, in one of which rode Sprats and Lucian, in the other the Swiss waiter, who enjoyed a long drive westward and finally returned to the heights of Islington with the amount of the bill and a substantial gratuity in his pocket. As Sprats pointed out with force and unction, Lucian’s foolish pride in not returning to the Watsons and borrowing half a sovereign had increased the cost of their supper fourfold. But Lucian only laughed, and Sprats knew that the shillings thrown away were to him as things of no importance.
Therehad been a moment in Sprats’s life when she had faced things—it was when she heard that Lucian and Haidee had made a runaway marriage. This escapade had been effected very suddenly; no one had known that these two young people were contemplating so remarkable a step. It was supposed that Miss Brinklow was fully alive to the blessings and advantages attendant upon a marriage with Mr. Eustace Darlington, who, as head of a private banking firm which carried out financial operations of vast magnitude, was a prize of much consequence in the matrimonial market: no one ever imagined that she would throw away such a chance for mere sentiment. But Haidee, shallow as she was, had a certain vein of romance in her composition; and when Lucian, in all the first flush of manhood and the joyous confidence of youth, burst upon her, she fell in love with him in a fashion calculated to last for at least a fortnight. He, too, fell madly in love with the girl’s physical charms: as to her mental qualities, he never gave them a thought. She was Aphrodite, warm, rosy-tinted, and enticing; he neither ate, slept, nor drank until she was in his arms. He was a masterful lover; his passion swept Haidee out of herself, and before either knew what was really happening, they were married. They lived on each other’s hearts for at least a week, but their appetites were normal again within the month, and there being no lack of money and each having a keen perception of thejoie de vivre, they settled down very comfortably.
Sprats had never heard of Haidee from the time of the latter’s visit to Simonstower until she received the news of her marriage to Lucian. The tidings came to her with a curious heaviness. She had never disguised from herself the fact that she herself loved Lucian: now thatshe knew he was married to another woman she set herself the task of distinguishing between the love that she might have given him and the love which she could give him. Upon one thing she decided at once: since Lucian had elected Haidee as his life’s partner, Haidee must be Sprats’s friend too, even if the friendship were all on one side. She would love Haidee—for Lucian’s sake, primarily: for her own if possible. But when events brought the three together in London, Sprats was somewhat puzzled. Lucian as a husband was the must curious and whimsical of men. He appeared to be absolutely incapable of jealousy, and would watch his wife flirting under his eyes with appreciative amusement. He himself made love to every girl who aroused any interest or curiosity in him—to women who bored him he was cold as ice, and indifferent to the verge of rudeness. He let Haidee do exactly as she pleased; with his own liberty in anything, and under any circumstances, he never permitted interference. Sprats was never able to decide upon his precise feelings for his wife or his attitude towards her—they got on very smoothly, but each went his or her own way. And after a time Haidee’s way appeared to run in parallel lines with the way of her jilted lover, Eustace Darlington.
Mr. Darlington had taken his pill with equanimity, and had not even made a wry face over it. He had gone so far as to send the bride a wedding present, and had let people see that he was kindly disposed to her. When the runaways came back to town and Lucian began the meteor-like career which brought his name so prominently before the world, Darlington saw no reason why he should keep aloof. He soon made Lucian’s acquaintance, became his friend, and visited the house at regular intervals. Some people, who knew the financier rather well, marvelled at the kindness which he showed to these young people—he entertained them on his yacht and at his place in Scotland, and Mrs. Damerel was seen constantly, sometimes attended byLucian and sometimes not, in his box at the opera. At the end of two years Darlington was regarded as Haidee’s particular cavalier, and one half their world said unkind things which, naturally, never reached Lucian’s ears. He was too fond of smoothness in life to say No to anything, and so long as he himself could tread the primrose path unchecked and untroubled, he did not care to interfere in anybody’s arrangements—not even in Haidee’s. It seemed to him quite an ordinary thing, an everyday occurrence, that he and she and Darlington should be close friends, and he went in and out of Darlington’s house just as Darlington went in and out of his.
Lucian, all unconsciously, had developed into an egoist. He watched himself playing his part in life with as much interest as the lover of dramatic art will show in studying the performance of a great actor. He seemed to his own thinking a bright and sunny figure, and he arranged everything on his own stage so that it formed a background against which that figure moved or stood with striking force. He was young; he was a success; people loved to have him in their houses; his photograph sold by the thousands in the shop windows; a stroll along Bond Street or Piccadilly was in the nature of a triumphal procession; hostesses almost went down on their knees to get him to their various functions; he might have dined out every night, if he had liked. He very often did like—popularity and admiration and flattery and homage were as incense to his nostrils, and he accepted every gift poured at his shrine as if nothing could be too good for him. And yet no one could call him conceited, or vain, or unduly exalted: he was transparently simple, ingenuous, and childlike; he took everything as a handsome child takes the gifts showered upon him by admiring seniors. He had a rare gift of making himself attractive to everybody—he would be frivolous and gay with the young, old-fashioned and grave with the elderly. He was a butterfly and a man of fashion; there was no better dressed man in town,nor a handsomer; but he was also a scholar and a student, and in whatever idle fashion he spent most of his time, there were so many hours in each day which he devoted to hard, systematic reading and to his own work. It was the only matter in which he was practical; in all other moods he was a gaily painted, light-winged thing that danced and fluttered in the sunbeams. He was careless, thoughtless, light-hearted, sanguine, and he never stopped to think of consequences or results. But through everything that critical part of him kept an interested and often amused eye on the other parts.
Sprats at this stage watched him carefully. She had soon discovered that he and Haidee were mere children in many things, and wholly incapable of management or forethought. It had been their ill-fortune to have all they wanted all their lives, and they lived as if heaven had made a contract with them to furnish their table with manna and their wardrobes with fine linen, and keep no account of the supply. She was of a practical mind, and had old-fashioned country notions about saving up in view of contingencies, and she expounded them at certain seasons with force and vigour to both Lucian and Haidee. But as Lucian cherished an ineradicable belief in his own star, and had never been obliged to earn his dinner before he could eat it, there was no impression to be made upon him; and Haidee, having always lived in the softest corner of luxury’s lap, could conceive of no other state of being, and was mercifully spared the power of imagining one.