The great house in Soho Square was alive with movement and light, the going and coming of guests, the setting down of chairs and squabbles of coachmen and running footmen, the flare of torches in the autumn dusk. The Topsparkles were in town again, everybody of importance had come to town, to be present at the coronation, from old Duchess Sarah and her bouquet of Duchess daughters, and her wild grandsons and lovely granddaughters, and the mad Duchess of Buckingham, and Mary Wortley Montagu, otherwise Moll Worthless, and the wits and beaux and Italian singers—all the little great world of brilliant personalities, card-playing, dicing, intriguing, dancing, masquerading, duelling, running away with other men's wives or beating their own. The wild whirlpool of town life was at its highest point of ebullition, all the wheels were going madly round, and the devil and his imps had their hands full of mischief and iniquity.
It was the first winter season of the new reign. Caroline was triumphant in her assurance of a well-filled purse; in her security of dominion over a dull, dogged, self-willed little husband, who was never more her slave than when he affected to act and think for himself; happy too in the knowledge that she had two of the cleverest men in England for her prime minister and her chamberlain; scornfully tolerant of a rival who helped her to bear the burden of her husband's society; indulgent to all the world, and proud of being admired and loved by the cleverest men in her dominions. King George was happy also after his sober fashion, oscillating between St. James's and Richmond, with a secret hankering for Hanover, hating his eldest son, and with no passionate attachment to any other member of his numerous progeny. Amidst the brilliant Court circle there were few ladies whom the Queen favoured above Judith Topsparkle. She had even condescended so far as to wear the famous Topsparkle diamonds at her coronation; for of all Queen Anne's jewels but a pearl necklace or so descended to Queen Caroline, and it was generally supposed that his late Majesty had ransacked the royal jewel-caskets for gems to adorn his German mistresses, the fat and the lean; while perchance his later English sultana, bold Miss Brett, may have decked her handsome person with a few of those kingly treasures. At any rate, there was but little left to adorn Queen Caroline, who was fain to blaze on her coronation-day with a borrowed lustre.
It was November; the Houses were sitting, and Lavendale, after a period of complete seclusion and social extinguishment, had startled the town in a new character, as politician and orator. Perchance his friend's success in the Lower House may have stimulated his ambition, or his appearance in the senate may have been a whim of the moment in one whose actions had been too often governed by whim; but whatever the motive, Lord Lavendale startled the peers by one of the finest speeches that had been made in that august assembly for some time; and the House of Lords in the dawn of the Hanoverian dynasty was an assembly which exercised a far more potent influence for good or evil than the Upper House of that triply reformed Parliament which we boast of to-day.
People talked about Lord Lavendale's speech for at least a fortnight. It was not so much that the oration itself had been really fine and had vividly impressed those who heard it, but it was rather that such dignified opposition, such grave invective, and sound logic came from a survivor of the Mohawk and of the Calf's Head Clubs, a notorious rake and reveller, a man whose name five years ago had been a synonym for modish profligacy. It was as when Lucius Junius Brutus startled the Roman Forum; it was as when Falstaff's boon companion, wild Prince Hal, flung off his boyish follies and stood forth in all his dignity as the warrior king; it was a transformation that set all the town wondering; and Lavendale, who had plunged again into the whirlpool of society, found himself the fashion of the hour, a man with a new reputation.
Yes, he had gone back to the bustling crowded stage of Court life: he had emerged from the hermit-like seclusion of laboratory and library, from the wild walks and woodland beauties of Lavendale Manor. He was of the town again, and seemed as eager for pleasure as the youngest and gayest of the bloods and beaux of Leicester Fields and St. James's. He attended half a dozen assemblies of an evening, looked in nightly at opera or playhouse, gambled at White's, talked at Button's, dawdled away an occasional morning at Dick's, reading the newest pamphlet for or against the Government. He was seen everywhere.
"Lavendale has been in Medea's cauldron," said Captain Asterley. "He looks ten years younger than when I saw him last summer."
"I believe the man is possessed," replied Lady Polwhele; "he has an almost infernal gaiety. There is a malignant air about him that is altogether new. He used to be a good-natured rake, who said malicious things out of pure light-heartedness; but now there is a lurking devilry in every word he utters."
"He is only imitating the mad Irish parson," said Asterley. "Your most fashionable wit, nowadays, is a mixture of dirt and malignity such as the Dean affects. Everybody tries to talk and write like Cadenus, since it has been discovered that to be half a savage and more than half a beast is the shortest road to a woman's favour."
"I believe all you men are jealous of the Dean," retorted her ladyship, "and that is why his influential friends have conspired to keep him on the other side of the Irish Channel. He is a fine personable man, and if he has his savage gloomy moods, be sure he has his melting moments, or that poor Miss Vanhomrigh would not have made such a fool of herself. I saw her once at an auction, and thought her more than passable, and with the manners of a lady."
There had been no more spurts of jealousy on the part of Mr. Topsparkle. His wife and he had lived on the most courteous terms since last midsummer, Lavendale's disappearance from the scene had appeased the husband's anger. He concluded that his remonstrances had been taken in good part, and that Lady Judith had dismissed her flirt. That Lavendale had been anything more than her flirt Mr. Topsparkle did not believe; but from flirt to lover is but a swift transition, and there had assuredly been an hour of peril.
Mr. Topsparkle also had a rejuvenised air when he came up to town and made his reappearance in distinguished circles; but what in Lavendale was a caprice of nature, an erratic flash and sparkle of brilliancy in a waning light, was in Topsparkle the result of premeditated care and the highest development of restorative art. He had vegetated for the last three months at Ringwood Abbey, leaving his wife to do all the hard work of entertaining visitors, and sleeping through the greater portion of his existence; and now he reappeared in London full of energy and vivacity, and with an air of superiority to most of the younger men, who were content to show themselves in their true colours as exhausted debauchees, men who had drained the cup of sensual pleasure to the dregs, and whose jaded intellects were too feeble to originate any new departure in vicious amusements.
Though in society Mr. Topsparkle affected to be only the connoisseur, dilettante, and man of fashion, there was a leaven of hard-hearted commercial sagacity in his mind, an hereditary strain which marked his affinity to the trading classes. Keen though he was as a collector of pictures and curios, he was still keener as a speculator on 'Change, and knew every turn in the market, every trick of the hour.
He loved London because it brought him nearer to the money market, brought him, as it were, face to face with his millions, which were for the most part invested in public securities, Alderman Topsparkle having had no passion for adding field to field at two and a half per cent per annum. The alderman put out his wealth safely, in the New River Company and in the best National securities.
Vyvyan Topsparkle had done nothing to hazard those solid investments or to jeopardise his hereditary income; but he liked to trifle with the surplus thousands which accumulated at his banker's, and which even Judith's extravagance could not exhaust; he liked to sail his light bark over the billows of speculation, fanned by the summer winds of chance and change, and glorying in his skill as a navigator. Ombre and quadrille had very little excitement for him, but he loved to watch the fluctuations of a speculative stock, and to sell out at the critical moment when a bubble was on the point of bursting. He had been either wonderfully clever or wonderfully lucky; for he had contrived with but few exceptions to emerge from every risky enterprise with a profit. Such trivial speculations were but playing with money, and made no tangible impression upon the bulk of his wealth: but as the miser loves to hoard his guineas in a chest under his bed and to handle and toy with them, so Mr. Topsparkle loved to play at speculation, and to warm the dull blood of age with the fever of the money market.
He was sitting before a boule bureau, with three rows of pigeon-holes stuffed with papers in front of him, and a litter of papers on his desk, when Fétis entered, carrying his master's periwig. The room was spacious, half dressing-room and half study, with panelled walls richly adorned with old Italian pottery, and a fireplace in an angle of the room, with a mantelpiece carried up to the ceiling by narrow shelves and quaint divisions, all filled with curios; delf and china, India monsters, Dutch teapots, German chocolate-pots, jars, and tea-cups. In one window stood the toilet-table, a veritable laboratory, before which Mr. Topsparkle sat for an hour every morning while his complexion was composed for the day. In the corner opposite the fireplace was the triangular closet in which Mr. Topsparkle's full-bottomed wig was besprinkled with maréchale powder. The atmosphere of the room was loaded with various perfumes, including a faint suggestion of burnt rappee, a kind of snuff which had been fashionable ever since a fire at a famous tobacconist's, which had thrown a large quantity of scorched snuff upon the market, and had given the bucks a new sensation and a new taste.
Fétis put the wig on a stand near the dressing-table, adjusted the feathery curls carefully with delicate finger-tips, fell a step or two back to contemplate his work, gazing at it dreamily as at the perfection of beauty, suggesting the august countenance of its wearer, who was looking over a sheaf of documents and seemed preoccupied.
His valet watched him deferentially for some minutes, and then coughed gently as if to attract attention.
Topsparkle looked up suddenly. He had not heard the cautious opening of the door or the velvet tread of his slave.
"Your wig is quite ready, sir."
"I am not ready for it yet."
"Could I speak with you, sir, for a minute?"
"Of course, you can always speak with me. What do you want?"
Mr. Topsparkle laid down his papers, and faced about as he asked the question.
"I am sorry to say, sir, that fortune has been against me since I came back to London. I have lost heavily at basset, and I am in sore need of money."
"Again!" exclaimed Topsparkle impatiently; "you are everlastingly a loser. What right has a fellow of your quality to gamble? Dice and cards are a diversion for gentlemen, sir."
"Fellows of my quality are human, sir, and have minds that are subject to temptation and example. We can but imitate our betters. As for cards and dice, I am drawn into play by gentlemen who come to my house and are gracious enough to invite my company."
"They should know their position better than to associate with a lodging-house keeper."
"O sir, these are gentlemen of rank; dukes, marquises, earls, who have no fear of derogating by low company. They stand secure in a nobility three and four centuries old. My society cannot degradethem."
"How much do you want?" asked Topsparkle, with suppressed rage.
He took some papers out of the pigeon-hole labelled F, and turned them over with a hand that shook a little, till he came to one which he drew out and unfolded. It was a list of figures, headed by the name of Fétis, and against each amount there was a date.
"If you would oblige me with a paltry thousand, sir, I could set myself right. I have the honour to owe seven hundred and fifty to his grace the Duke of Bolton."
"A thousand pounds! Egregious insolence. Do you know that you had three thousand, in sums of five hundred, from me last winter? Four thousand a year! Was ever valet paid such wages since the world began?"
"Nay, sir, it is not every valet who has the honour to serve a gentleman in whose exorbitant income thousands count as hundreds do with meaner men. Nor do I rank with the common herd of servants; I have been your secretary and your confidant, often your nurse, and sometimes even your physician. I have prescribed for you in some of the most difficult occasions of your life—and successfully. I have made an end of your trouble."
"You are a villain," said Topsparkle, sitting in a brooding attitude, staring at the carpet.
"I do not pretend—never have pretended—to be a saint. A man of rigid principles would not have served you as I have done. I have been useful to your loves and to your antipathies. I do not expect to be paid as a common servant. I have a claim upon your fortune inferior to none."
"O, you are a vastly clever person, and no doubt think you have been useful to me. Well, I will advance this money—mind, as I advanced the last, on your note of hand. It must be a loan."
"I have no objection, sir."
There had been many such transactions. Fétis thought that this loan theory was a salve to his employer's wounded pride. He would not suppose himself completely under the influence of his servant. He would assert an independent position, play the patron, hug himself with the idea of power over his slave.
"He would never dare to sue me for the money," Fétis told himself. "It can be no more than an empty form."
And with this sense of security Fétis signed anything that was offered to him for signature. He had lived a good many years in London, but was still a thorough Frenchman in his profound ignorance of English law, and he had, moreover, a somewhat exaggerated estimate of his influence over his master. He had never yet failed in his attacks upon Mr. Topsparkle's purse, and he thought his resources in that direction were almost unlimited. This had encouraged him in extravagance, and had fostered the habit of reckless gaming, which was the open vice of the age.
"You ought to be making a fortune, not losing one, Fétis, with such a house as yours," said Topsparkle, counting over a bundle of bank-notes after the note of hand had been duly executed. "I am told that the most fashionable men in town patronise your supper-room, and build their occasional nests upon your upper floors, where you have bachelor quarters, as I understand, for gentlemen who are in town for too short a season to disturb the desolation of their family mansions."
"The business is not unprofitable," replied Fétis deprecatingly, "and my patrons are among the flower of the aristocracy. But I have an expensive wife."
"What can we expect, my good fellow, when at our age we marry reigning beauties," asked Topsparkle lightly. "Your lady was a dancer at the Opera House, as I am told, and a toast among the bloods who frequent the green-room. Did you think she would transform herself into a Dutch housewife, tuck up her sleeves and peel vegetables in the kitchen, because you chose to marry her?"
"Unhappily she has caught the infection of that accursed house, and plays as deep as a lady of fashion," said Fétis ruefully.
"My good Fétis, a young woman must have some kind of diversion. If she does not gamble, she will play you a worse turn. See how indulgent I am to her ladyship on that score. 'Tis only when her losses become outrageous that I venture a gentle remonstrance. And so your pretty little French wife has learnt the trick of the town, and dreams of spadillo and codille, like a woman of fashion. By the way, I hear Lord Lavendale is in London again. Pray does he ever use your house?"
"No, sir, I have never seen him there. He is not in my set."
"And yet I take it your set is a wild one, and likely to suit his lordship."
"Nay, sir, they tell me Lavendale has sobered down since his return from the Continent, and neither drinks nor plays as deep as he did before he went abroad."
"Is it so? Well, he is a mighty pretty fellow, and a prime favourite with the women. Some one told me the other day that he was in a consumption. You may begin to dress my head. Is that true, d'ye think?"
"The consumption, sir. Nay, I fancy 'tis an idle story got up by his lordship to make him more interesting to the sex. Women love a man who is reported to be dying. I have known men whose lives have been despaired of for ten years at a stretch, and who have wound up by marrying fortunes, having very little but their bad health to recommend them. A fellow who has no other capital may marry a rich widow on the strength of a consumption or a heart complaint."
"I am told Lord Lavendale is looking younger and handsomer than ever," pursued Topsparkle; "but I thought it might be the hectic of disease which imparted a delusive beauty."
"I doubt, sir, the fellow is well enough, and will outlive us all," said Fétis, with a malicious pleasure in blighting his master's hopes.
He finished his work of art upon Topsparkle's countenance, putting in every minute touch as carefully as a miniature painter. He fitted the stately wig upon the bald pate, and then Mr. Topsparkle put his head into the powdering closet for the last sprinkle of maréchale, and emerged therefrom in all the perfection of artificial grace and court fashion. His coat and waistcoat were marvels of the tailor's and embroideress's art; his cravat was a miracle of Roman point worked by Ursuline nuns in a convent amidst the Apennines; his diamond shoe-buckles were of an exquisite neatness and elegance; his red-heeled shoes set off to perfection the narrow foot and arched instep.
The delicate duties of this elaborate toilet completed, Fétis was free till the evening. Mr. Topsparkle had meaner hirelings who attended to his lesser wants and waited upon him all day long. Fétis was the artist in chief, the high-priest in the temple, and his ministrations were confined to the sacred and secret hours in which youth and good looks were elaborated from age and decay.
To-day Fétis was inwardly impatient to be gone, yet was far too well bred to betray his impatience by the faintest indication. He seemed rather to linger, as if loth to depart, arranged the gold and ivory fittings of thenécessairewith nicest care, gave a finishing touch to patch and pulvilio boxes, perfume bottles, and tortoiseshell combs, and it was only when Mr. Topsparkle dismissed him that he gave a sliding bow and glided gracefully from the room, as elegant in every detail of his costume as his master, but with the subdued and sober colouring which implied gravity of manners and humility of station.
When he was gone, Mr. Topsparkle rose from the sofa where he had been reclining in an attitude of luxurious repose, and began to pace the room, full of thought.
"I don't like the rascal's manner," he said to himself. "He is too bold, presumes too much upon his usefulness in the present, and"—after a thoughtful pause—"in the past. He has become a horse leech, bleeds me of thousands with an insufferable audacity. Yet, after all, 'tis hardly worth troubling about. The mere amount in itself is scarce worth a thought to a man of my means, though I might endow a bishopric on a less income, and get some credit for my generosity. To maintain a profligate and gamester, a pander to fashionable follies, only because he has the art of laying on a cosmetic and pencilling an eyebrow to a higher degree than anyone else! Yet after all 'tis something to have one's toilet performed skilfully, and a blunderer would put me in a fever every time he touched me. Why should I grudge the fellow his wages? he is as necessary to me as Dubois was to the Duke, andhewould accept no lesser recompense than to be prime minister, and have all the threads of state intrigue in his hands. This fellow of mine is an unambitious, innocuous scoundrel. He only preys upon my purse."
He rang for his footman, one of those splendid functionaries being always in attendance in a three-cornered lobby or ante-room outside Mr. Topsparkle's study. This chamber was an oak-panelled well, lighted from a skylight, cold in winter and suffocating in summer; but the lacquey, sitting on a velvet-covered bench with his silken legs stretched out before him, was supposed to enjoy a life of luxurious idleness.
"My chocolate and the papers," ordered Mr. Topsparkle. "Stay, you can put on some logs before you go. 'Tis odiously cold this morning."
He went back to his sofa, which was in front of the fire. The chocolate was brought almost immediately, as if by magic, most of Mr. Topsparkle's desires being divined beforehand and duly prepared for, lest he should complain, like the late French King, that he had "almost waited."
The footman wheeled a little table beside the sofa, and arranged his master's pillows, while a second attendant spirit brought the silver-gilt chocolate service and the fashionable journals, those thin and meagre papers which in the absence of parliamentary debates eked out their scanty public news with much private scandal, announcements of intended marriages that never came off, hints at reported elopements under the thin veil of initials, theatrical criticism, and quotations from some lordling's satiric poem, for in those days almost all lordlings had an itch for satire, and fancied they could write. If the verses appeared anonymously, were fairly metrical and particularly spiteful, they were generally debited to Pope or Lady Mary, and the anonymous lordling went about for a week or two rubbing his hands and chuckling and telling all the town under the seal of secrecy that he was the author of that remarkable lampoon which had just convulsed society.
Mr. Topsparkle sipped his chocolate, and tried to read his papers: but this morning he found himself in no humour for public news—the last letter from the Continent—the last highway robbery in Denmark Street, St. Giles—or even for the more appetising private scandal, about the Lady at Richmond Court who had suddenly retired from society, but wasnotin a wasting sickness, or the celebrated Duchess, once a famous beauty, whose housemaids had left her in a body because the ducal board wages were two shillings a week under the customary allowance. Mr. Topsparkle's mind was too intently occupied upon his own business to compassionate the Richmond lady or to speculate whether the anonymous duchess was the mighty Sarah of Blenheim, or her mad Grace of Buckinghamshire, both alike notorious for pride and parsimony.
He flung the journals aside with an oath.
"These scribblers are the stupidest scoundrels alive," he muttered, "there is not an ounce of wit in the whole fraternity. O, for the days of Steele and Addison, when one was sure of pleasant reading with one's breakfast! Their trumpery imitators give the outward form of the essay without its inward spirit."
The footman appeared
"A lady is below, sir, who says she will be mightily obliged if you will allow her ten minutes' conversation."
"Pray, who is the lady who calls at such an extraordinary hour, before a gentleman's day has begun?"
"She gave no name, sir."
"Go ask who she is."
The man retired, and returned to say the lady was a stranger to Mr. Topsparkle, and asked an interview as a favour.
"So! That sounds mysterious," said Topsparkle. "Pray, what manner of personage is she? Does she look like a genteel beggar, elderly and shabby, in a greasy black-silk hood and mantle, eh, my man?"
"No, sir, the person is young and handsome. She looks rather like one of the foreign singing-women your honour is pleased to patronise."
"Singing women! Why, do you know, block-head, that those singing women, as you call them, are the beloved of princes, and have the salaries of prime ministers? Singing women, forsooth! And this stranger is young and pretty, you say?"
"Yes, sir."
"And a foreigner?"
"I am sure of that, sir."
"You can show her up."
Mr. Topsparkle composed himself into an attitude on the sofa, like Louis XIV. Flatterers told him that he resembled that superb monarch, as he did in the fact that much of his dignity and splendour was derived from costume. Seated upon his cut velvet sofa, with the skirts of his coat spreading wide, his jewelled rapier at his side, he had certainly an almost regal air, calculated to overawe a nameless foreign woman, who was in all probability an adventuress whose audacity was her only passport to that stately mansion.
The footman threw open the door, and announced "A lady to wait upon your honour," whereupon there came tripping in a plump little woman in a quilted satin petticoat, and short tucked-up gown, fluttering all over with cherry-coloured bows, and with a cherry-coloured hood setting off but in no wise concealing a mass of unpowdered black hair which clustered about a low forehead, and agreeably shaded the brightest black eyes Mr. Topsparkle had seen for a long time, eyes brimming with coquetry, and not without a lurking craftiness of expression which set the admiring gentleman upon his guard.
The lady's nose wasretroussé, her lips were too thick for beauty, but of a carmine tint which was accentuated by the artful adjustment of patches; the lady's complexion was not quite so artificial as Mr. Topsparkle's, but it revealed an acquaintance with some of the highest branches of the face-painting art. The lady in general effect looked about three-and-twenty. Mr. Topsparkle put her down for eight-and-thirty.
"My dear madam, I beg you to be seated," said Topsparkle, waving his attenuated hand graciously towards a chair, and admiring his rings and point lace ruffle as he did so. "You honour me vastly by this pleasant impromptu visit. May I offer you a cup of chocolate?"
"You are too condescending, sir. I took my chocolate before I left home," replied the cherry-coloured intruder, sinking gracefully into a chair, and rounding her plump white arms as she adjusted her cherry satin muff. "I venture to call at this early hour, before the great world has begun to besiege your lordship's door, because I have an appeal to make to your generous heart."
"I thought as much," said Mr. Topsparkle within himself. "This cherry-coloured personage has come to beg."
He was so used to be begged of that his heart had hardened itself, was adamant against all such petitions; but he did not object when the mendicant was a pretty woman, with whom he might indulge in half an hour's innocent persiflage at the cost of a few guineas.
"Dearest madam, I am all ears," he murmured languidly.
"Sir, you behold a deeply-injured woman," said the lady, with a tragic air, and the announcement sounded like the beginning of a very long story.
"Say not so, I beseech you, madam; the character is so odiously common," protested Mr. Topsparkle. "That piquant countenance, those brilliant eyes, bespeak originality. Such a face is designed only to injure, the mission of such beauty is to destroy."
"Ah, sir, there was a day when I knew my power and used it; you who are a frequenter of the opera may perhaps remember the name and person of Coralie Legrand."
"Your person, madam, once seen can never be forgotten; and if I had heard you sing in the opera—"
"Sir, I was a dancer, not a singer," exclaimed the lady, with a wounded air.
"Was, madam; nay, speak not of yourself in the past, 'Fuit Ilium;' say not that such charms are for ever withdrawn from the public eye—that the flame of the candles no longer shines upon that beauty—that some selfish churl, some avaricious hoarder of loveliness, has appropriated so fair a being for his own exclusive property."
"It is true, sir. I who had once half the town at my feet am now mewed up in a stuffy parlour, and scolded if I venture to exchange half a dozen sentences with some aristocratic pretty fellow, or to venture a guinea or so at ombre."
"Soho!" exclaimed Topsparkle, becoming suddenly intent. "Your name, madam, your name, I entreat."
"I was Coralie Legrand, leading dancer in the first division of the ballet at the Royal Haymarket Opera. I am Mrs. Fétis, your valet's ill-used wife; and it is on my husband's account that I venture—"
"Madam, you have the strongest claim upon me. Fétis is an old servant—"
"He is an old servant. If I had known how old before I married him—"
"O, madam, he is not a septuagenarian; Fétis is my junior."
"He looks your lordship's senior; but it is not so much his age I object to. I would forgive him for being ninety if he were only indulgent and generous."
"Is he capable of meanness to so bewitching a wife?"
"Yes, sir, he is horribly stingy. At this hour I am being dunned to death by my next-door neighbour, to whom I owe a paltry fifteen guineas. She is Madame Furbelow, the Court milliner, a person of some ton, and she and I were dearest friends till this money trouble parted us—but 'tis shocking not to be able to pay one's debts of honour. Yet, to my certain knowledge, Fétis has lost hundreds in a single night to some of his fine gentlemen customers, who fool him by pretending to treat him as a friend. There was the wild Duke of Wharton, for instance, and his club of intriguers, the Schemers they called themselves, a committee of gallants, who used to hold their meetings at our house and plot mischief against poor innocent women—how to carry off silly heiresses and to conquer rich widows. His Grace had a bank at faro, and that foolish husband of mine was a frequent loser."
"He must have won sometimes, madam. He must have had his lucky nights, like the rest of us."
"Then he kept his good luck to himself, sir; I never heard of it. He said he ought to have the devil's luck in love since he was so cursedly unlucky at cards and dice. And then, though he has the effrontery to deny me a few guineas, I have heard him boast that he has claims upon you which you must always honour, that your purse was a golden stream which could never run dry."
"O, he has boasted, has he, the poor foolish fellow, boasted of his power over me?"
"Nay, sir, I did not presume to mention the word 'power.' He has bragged of his services to you—long and faithful services such as no other man in Europe would have rendered to a master. He has curious fits at times—but I did not come hither to betray his secrets, poor creature; I came in the hope that your lordship, who has been ever so bountiful to my husband, could perhaps grant some small pecuniary favour to a poor woman in distress—"
"Madam, my purse is at your service," exclaimed Topsparkle eagerly, taking out a well-filled pocket-book, and selecting a couple of bank-notes. "Here is a trifling sum which will enable you to pay your neighbour and leave a surplus for some future transactions of the same kind, or for another hood like that which becomes you so admirably. Pray, never hesitate to call upon me for any petty assistance of this kind."
The fair Coralie cooed her thanks with a gentle murmuring as of a wood-pigeon, and ventured so far as to imprint her rosy lips upon her benefactor's lean hand, a kiss which Mr. Topsparkle received as a compliment, although he stealthily wiped his hand with his cambric handkerchief the next minute.
"And you say that my poor Louis is odd at times," he said caressingly. "I hope he does not drink?"
"I think not, sir. There is a terrible deal of drinking goes on in our house, but I doubt if my husband is ever the worse for liquor. But he has strange fits sometimes of a night, cannot sleep, or sleeps but for five minutes at a time, and then starts up from his bed and walks up and down the room, saying that he is haunted, haunted by the souls he has ruined. He says there is a ghost inthishouse."
"Indeed," cried Mr. Topsparkle, looking around him, and assuming his airiest manner, "and yet I do not fancy this looks like the habitation of ghosts. There are no cobwebs festooning the walls, no bats and owls flitting across the ceiling, no dirt, decay, or desolation."
"Nay, sir, it is a splendid house, full of beautifulest things. Yet I have heard my husband on those sleepless nights of his when he has talked more to himself than to me—I have heard him say that he has rushed out of this house at twilight with the cold sweat pouring down his face."
"Then, my dear lady, I fear there is no room to doubt that your husband has taken to drink. The symptoms you depict are precisely those of a drunkard's disease known to all medical men. The sleepless nights—the imagination of ghosts and phantoms—the cold sweat—these are as common and as plain as the pustules that denote smallpox or the spots that indicate scarlet fever. If your husband does not drink openly, be assured he drinks deep in secret. You had better get him away from London. What say you to returning to your native country?"
Mrs. Fétis shrugged her shoulders with a doubtful air. She often talked rapturously of La Belle France, raved of her sunny south, that gracious city of Périgord where she had been born and reared to the age of fifteen. Yet for all the common purposes of life she had liked London a great deal better.
"There is nothing I should love so much," she protested. "But 'twould be madness to leave a house in which we have sunk all our means and our labour with the hope of getting our reward by a competence in our old age. Indeed, sir, we could not afford to leave Poland Street."
"Not if you were amply provided for elsewhere?" asked Topsparkle.
"Ah, sir, to be provided for by others—by a kind of pension from a wealthy benefactor for instance," looking at him searchingly, as if she were measuring his capacity for generosity, "that is all very well for poor-spirited people—the English lower classes have no pride. But my husband and I are of an independent mind. We would rather have our liberty even in poverty than be pensioners upon any one's bounty, which might be withdrawn at a day's notice."
"Nay, a pension of that kind to be useful must be assured to you—something in the way of an annuity in the public funds, for instance—dependent on your own lives, and not upon any one else's frail thread of existence."
Mrs. Fétis looked interested, and almost convinced.
"'Twould be a delicious life and free from care; but Fétis has a passion for London, and all whom I love in my own country are dead. It would be but to go back to their graves."
Mr. Topsparkle said no more. He did not want to appear over anxious to banish his old servant, yet the man's tone to-day and the wife's revelations had intensified a feeling he had entertained for a long time, a feeling that the hour had come when it would be very agreeable to get rid of hisâme damnée. He would suffer considerable inconvenience undoubtedly from the loss of a valet who so thoroughly understood his complexion; but anything was better than the everlasting vicinity of a servant who knew too much.
He dismissed the Frenchwoman with a compliment, escorted her to the ante-room, and kissed her hand with a finished courtesy before he committed her to the care of the footman, and then he went back to his sofa, warmed his feet at the log-fire, and gave himself up to a serious thought.
"The man is getting dangerous," he thought; "he always was a creature of excitable temper, and now he has drunk or gamed himself into a kind of mental fever, from which perhaps the next stage would be madness. Better so! Nobody believes a madman. And if he were to make any revelations about the remote past, who is there to confirm him? No one. The old Venetian must long since have been numbered with his ancestors. The apothecary disappeared thirty years ago and left no trace behind him. If it had not been for that damnable scandal at the time, set on foot and fostered by that villain Churchill, I could laugh any accusation of Fétis to scorn; but there are a few of my contemporaries malicious enough to have long memories, and I would do much to avoid a revival of that hellish outcry which drove me from the hustings and from the country. I have not forgotten. That hateful scene at Brentford is as vivid in my mind as if it had happened yesterday. And he has begun to talk, to get up in the middle of the night and to rave about being haunted. And this loquacious wife of his will repeat his ravings to all her gossips. Yes, there is danger, were it ever so slight. A man of my importance is a target for every venomous arrow. Fétis, you must be silenced."
He rose and paced the room slowly, meditating upon the position in all its aspects, and with all its possibilities of evil. There was his wife, of whose loyalty he was ever doubtful. What if that ancient scandal were to reach her ears? Would she not use it as a weapon against him, ally herself with her old lover for his destruction? The very thought made that magnificent periwig of his tremulous as if with a palsy.
The man must be got out of the way somehow. If he did not snap at the bait of a handsome annuity and accept retirement to his native land, there might be other means, nearer, shorter, of disposing of him.
Yes, there was one way, short and easy, as it seemed to Mr. Topsparkle; a way of making Louis Fétis safe for ever: but that way would leave the wife at liberty—and she might be dangerous.
"No, she can be bought," thought Topsparkle, "she is vain and empty-headed. I can manage her—but he—I have been an idiot to keep him about me so long—and yet he has been useful. I have leant upon him—never knowing when I might need his help. I believed in his discretion, thought him secret as the grave; and now he has begun to blab to that silly wife of his, my confidence is destroyed for ever—all sense of security is gone."
With Vincenti's narrative fresh in his mind, and with a very lively recollection of Mr. Philter's story, Lord Lavendale had a keen desire to see something more of the French valet—or private secretary—who had been so diabolically subservient to his master's jealousy and revenge. There was of course always the possibility that Vincenti's theory and the floating suspicions of the neighbourhood might be without substantial foundation. People have had a knack of attributing all sudden or mysterious deaths to poison ever since the days of Sir Thomas Overbury—nor could Lord Essex cut his throat with his own razor without giving rise to an accusation of murder. In any case Lavendale was determined to see something more of the supposed tool, and to study him on his own ground, at the house in Poland Street.
It was very easy for him to get invited to supper at this favourite rendezvous. The Schemers' Club was extinct, and almost forgotten. It had expired with Wharton's disgrace and exile; and Wharton himself, the brilliant orator, the unscrupulous turncoat, the prodigal and profligate, was a wanderer in the wilds of Catalonia, ruined, broken, and dying.
There were other bloods of the same kidney, lesser lights in the firmament of pleasure, and one of these, Sir Randal Hetherington, invited Lavendale to a card party at the house in Poland Street.
"'Tis a snug retreat, where a gentleman can receive his friends without being stared at by the chance mob of a chocolate house; 'tis more secluded even than a club, and has the advantage of admitting feminine company," he said; "and Fétis has one of the best cooks in London. A very clever fellow, Fétis, monstrously superior to his station—knows more about foreign politics than Peterborough or Horace Walpole; I have sometimes suspected that he is one of old Fleury's spies."
Lavendale went, supped, and drank deep of the champagne which Mr. Fétis supplied to his patrons at a guinea a bottle, but not so deep as to lose a word that was spoken or a single indication which could enlighten him as to the character of his host, who waited upon the little party in person during supper, and afterwards sat down to cards with them, received upon a footing which was more familiar than friendship, something after the kind of condescending jocose intimacy which obtained between the princes and court jesters of old.
Fétis under such conditions was an altogether different person from Mr. Topsparkle's sedate and silent valet. He had a Rabelaisian wit which kept the table in a roar, had a fund of French anecdotes, short, sharp, and pungent,à proposto every turn of the conversation. He had been carefully and piously educated in his early youth, and out of the theological learning acquired in those days was able to furnish an inexhaustible flow of blasphemy.
"I never knew a man who could get such a fine effect out of so small a knowledge of the Scriptures," said young Spencer, the Duchess of Marlborough's prodigal grandson, and one of the finest gentlemen upon town. He and his elder brother were both patrons of the house in Poland Street, supped there with a confidential friend or two on a bladebone of mutton and a magnum of Burgundy, after the play, as the prologue to a quiet hour at hazard, or gave a choice banquet in the French style to a bevy of stage beauties.
Lavendale marked the change in Fétis from the grave and high-bred servant to the audacious jester, and saw in it the clue to the man's character—a creature of various masks, who could fit his manners to the occasion; but he saw also that the man was of a highly nervous excitable temperament, and that a long life of iniquity had wasted his physical forces to extreme attenuation.
"He is of a more spiritual type than his master, in spite of that gentleman's various accomplishments," thought Lavendale, "and with him the flame in the lamp burns brighter, the oil that feeds it wastes faster. Not a man to stand a violent shock of any kind, I doubt."
As the night wore on, and the party grew more riotous, and less observant of one another, Lavendale took an opportunity to talk apart with Fétis.
"I think we have met before, Monsieur Fétis?" he said.
"Yes, my lord, frequently. I was at Ringwood Abbey in attendance upon Mr. Topsparkle while you were visiting there last winter."
"True, 'twas there I saw you, slipping past me in a corridor with a most incomparable modesty. I dreamt not what a roguish wit was hidden under so subdued and sober an aspect."
"Your lordship must consider that in Mr. Topsparkle's house I am in some measure a servant. Here I am on my own ground, and these gentlemen are good enough to indulge all my follies."
"Ringwood Abbey did not give me my first knowledge of you," said Lavendale, watching the crafty face, as Fétis trifled with a silver-gilt snuffbox. "Your renown had reached me before then. I heard of you some years ago when I was travelling in Italy, where you are still remembered."
"Indeed, my lord! It is ten years since I was in Italy."
"These memories were of an older date. They went back to the last century, when you were a youth and a student, an adept in chemistry, I am told."
Fétis started, and turned towards his interlocutor with an ashen countenance, the snuffbox shaking in his tremulous hand.
"Who told you that?" he asked; "who remembers me so long?"
"An old Venetian who happened to hear of you at that time, and who is one of my most intimate friends."
"Will your lordship tell me his name?"
He had recovered himself by this time, and had closed the snuffbox, not without spilling a slight shower of the scented mixture upon his olive-silk knee-breeches.
"Borromeo."
Fétis shook his head.
"I have no memory of such a person. Yes, my lord, I was in Venice forty years ago as a travelling secretary to Mr. Topsparkle. We were both young men in those days, and I was more of a student than I have ever been since that time. The world soon drew me from the study of science; but at three-and-twenty I was full of enthusiasm, hoped to discover the philosopher's stone, to make myself as powerful as Dr. Faustus. Idle dreams, my lord. The world is wiser nowadays. I am told that Sir Richard Steele was the last person who ever cultivated the necromantic arts in England, and that he set up his laboratory at Islington. But even he learnt to laugh at his own delusions."
"But there are more practical studies for the chemist than the arts of Paracelsus or the Geber Arabs," said Lavendale lightly. "My informant told me that you had the repute of being a great toxicologist."
Fétis looked at the speaker intently, but did not answer for the moment. He seemed sunk in a reverie.
"Borromeo," he muttered to himself; "I know no such name."
"Fétis, the deal is yours," cried Mr. Spencer, and Fétis took the cards with a mechanical air, and went on with the game.
Lavendale was satisfied. He had gone far enough for a first attack, and he had seen enough in the manner and expression of the man to assure him that Vincenti's story was true.
"And the woman I love is married to a secret assassin!" he thought despairingly, "and when I might have plucked her out of that hell yonder, I drew back and left her there at peril of her life! If he was capable of murdering that early victim of his forty years ago, at what crime would he stop now, hardened and emboldened by a long life of wickedness? She has but to go a step too far—provoke his jealousy beyond endurance—and Mr. Fétis and his black art may be invoked again. Fool that I was to leave her in his power, and yet—" And yet he felt that the alternative might have been worse—to ally her to a fast vanishing life, to leave her with a dishonoured name, ruined in worldly circumstance, widowed in heart without a widow's title of honour, desolate, unpitied, to wander about the Continent in fourth-rate society—an outcast—as the Duke of Wharton was wandering now. No, that would have been a moral murder, worse than the hazard of Topsparkle's revenge. Again, there was always this to be considered—that, although a nameless foreign mistress might be murdered almost with impunity, it would be a very perilous matter to make away with an English lady of rank.
"No, she is safe," reflected Lavendale, "and if she is unhappy she wears her rue with a difference—everybody thinks her the gayest and luckiest of women. I will not waste my pity upon her."
Before the entertainment was over, his lordship and Mr. Fétis were on the friendliest terms.
"You must visit me in Bloomsbury Square, Monsieur Fétis," said Lavendale. "The house is not without interest, for 'twas a chosen resort of the Whigs in Godolphin's time, and it has seen some curious meetings at the beginning of the late king's reign."
"I shall be proud to wait upon your lordship."
"Say you so; then name your evening to sup with me. Shall it be to-morrow?"
"If your lordship has no better occupation."
"I could have none better. Your mind is a treasury of interesting facts, Mr. Fétis, and your conversation is the best entertainment I can imagine for an idle hour after supper. I want to talk with you of my poor friend Wharton. He and I have been companions in many a revel in London and Vienna; and 'tis sad to think that fiery comet should have plunged so fast into space and darkness, a burnt-out shell."
"His grace was one of my most generous friends and patrons, and I mourn for him as for a son," said Fétis.
Lavendale went home in a thoughtful mood, and was glad to find lights burning in Durnford's study, and that his friend was sitting up late to finish his newspaper work, after a long afternoon at the House. Herrick and Irene were still his lordship's guests, and he was very loth to part with them; but they had found a cottage at Battersea, with a garden sloping to the river, not far from that big house of Lord St. John's which dominated the village. The cottage was in a wretched state of repair, and a month or more must elapse before it could be made habitable; but to Herrick and Irene there was rapture in the idea of this modest home which was to be all their own, maintained by the husband's industry, brightened and beautified by the young wife's care.
Mdlle. Latour was in possession already, living in the one habitable room, and superintending the repairs and improvements. She was installed as Irene's housekeeper, with a stout servant-girl for the rest of the establishment.
Lavendale was vexed that his friend should not be content to share his home in London and Surrey.
"'Tis churlish of you to go and build your own nest four miles off, and leave me to the desolation of empty rooms and echoing passages," he complained. "Pray, have I been over-officious in my hospitality, or intrusive of my company? Have I ever disturbed your billing and cooing?"
"You have done all that hospitality and delicatest feeling could do to make us happy, dear Jack," returned Herrick warmly; "but it is not well for any man to set up his Lares and Penates under another man's roof. The sense of independence, the burden of bread-winning, is the one attribute of manhood which no man dare surrender, least of all when he has a dear soul dependent upon him. What would the world say, d'ye think, were my wife and I to riot in luxury at your cost?"
"Damn the world!"
"Ay, Jack, I could afford to say that while I was a bachelor; but for my wife's sake I must truckle to the town, and do nothing to forfeit the most pragmatical person's good opinion. Do you think I shall love you less when I am living at Battersea?"
"I know that I shall have less of your society—that when my dark hour is on there will be no one to cheer me."
"Order your horse and ride to Battersea whenever the dark hour comes. The ride will do you good, and you shall have a loving welcome and a decent meal, come when you may. We shall always keep open house for you."
"And I shall visit you so often as to make you heartily sick of me. Good God, Herrick, how I envy you your happiness, your future with its fulness of hope; while for me there is nothing—"
Herrick clasped his hand without a word; that honest affectionate grasp was all the comfort he could offer to one whose wasted life and broken constitution left scarce the possibility of hope on this side of the grave; and to suggest spiritual consolation at all times and seasons was not in Herrick's line. He knew too well that no man could be preached into piety.
Lavendale went straight to the room where his friend was at work, and told him of his evening in Poland Street, and of his invitation to Fétis. He had told Herrick all the facts in Vincenti's narrative, and the two had discussed the story together. Herrick was keenly interested, and it was partly on his suggestion that Lavendale had made himself familiar with the Fétis establishment.
"Let him come to-morrow night by all means," he said eagerly, "and if we lay our heads together meanwhile, we might, I think, with Irene's help, frighten the wretch into a confession."
"What, after forty years of secrecy, after having so hardened himself in crime!"
"Well, say an admission of some kind—a full confession were perhaps too much to expect. Nothing but the immediate prospect of a hempen necklace would extort that. And yet it has been found that the most hardened villain has sometimes a vein of superstition, an abject terror of that spirit world whose judgments and punishments he has hazarded so audaciously."
"With Irene's help, you said. What has Irene to do with the matter?"
"Have you forgotten that picture in Mr. Topsparkle's cabinet—that Italian head which might have been intended for my wife's portrait, so vivid was the likeness?"
"Yes, I remember it perfectly."
"I have a notion that I can play upon Fétis's feelings by means of that resemblance."
"But the likeness will not be new to him. He saw your wife at Ringwood Abbey."
"Yes; but the circumstances under which he shall see her again will be new, and his own feelings will be new. Leave me to work out my scheme after my own fashion, Jack. All you have to do is to ply your guest with the strongest liquor he will swallow, and then watch and listen."
Fétis repaired to Bloomsbury Square next evening, not altogether with the innocent simplicity of the lamb that goes to the slaughter, but with the caution of an astute mind which perceives a snare in every civility, and suspects a trap in every invitation.
"Why was the man so civil, and what does he know about my life in Venice forty years ago?"
Those were the questions which had agitated the Frenchman's mind during that brief remnant of the night which he had spent in restless wakefulness, and they had proved unanswerable. Caution might have prompted him to avoid Lord Lavendale's house and turn a deaf ear to that nobleman's civilities; but anxiety made him curious, and fear of the future made him bold in the present. He wanted to know the extent of Lavendale's knowledge of his own past life, and to that end he accepted his lordship's invitation. His vanity again, which was large, made him suppose himself a match for Lord Lavendale in any intellectual encounter.
"If he has courted me in order to pump me for the secrets of the past, he will find he has wasted his trouble," thought Mr. Fétis, as his chair was being carried through perilous St. Giles's.
It was eleven o'clock, a late hour for supper; but Lord Lavendale had been at the House of Lords, and had dined with some of his brother peers after the debate. Supper had been prepared in the late lord's private sitting-room, a small triangular parlour at the end of a stately suite of reception-rooms, a room which had been rarely used of late, but which Herrick, for some unexplained motive, had selected as the scene of this evening's entertainment. It was altogether the cosiest room in the house, and with a heaped-up fire of sea-coal and oak logs in the wide grate, a small round table laid for supper, a pair of silver candelabra holding a dozen wax candles, and a side table loaded with all the materials for a jovial evening, the little triangular parlour looked the very picture of comfort.
The brightness and warmth of the room had an agreeable effect upon Mr. Fétis, who had been chilled and depressed for the moment by those cold and empty apartments through which a footman had ushered him by the light of a single candle, borne aloft as the man stalked in advance with a ghostlike air.
"Let me perish, my lord, but your empty saloons have given me the shivers," said Fétis, as he warmed his spindleshanks at the blaze; "your tall footman looked like a spectre."
"Come, come, Mr. Fétis, you are not the kind of man to believe in apparitions," said Durnford gaily. "I think we are all materialists here, are we not? We accept nothing for truth that cannot be mathematically demonstrated."
Lavendale looked grave. "It is not every sceptic who is free from superstition," he said. "There are men who cannot believe in a Personal God, and who will yet tremble at a shadow. I have known an infidel who would scoff at the Gospel, stand up for the story of the Witch of Endor."
Mr. Fétis shrugged his shoulders, and did not pursue the argument.
The butler and a pair of footmen brought in the hot dishes, and opened a magnum of champagne, and supper began in serious earnest—one of those exquisite suppers for which Lavendale had been renowned in his wild youth, when he had vied with the Regent Philip in the studied extravagance of his table.
Fétis was a connoisseur, and his secret anxieties did not hinder him from doing ample justice to the meal. Lavendale pretended to eat, but scarcely tasted the delicacies which were set before him. Durnford ate hurriedly, hardly knowing what he was eating, full of nervous anticipation. Fétis was the only one of the party who could calmly appreciate the talents of thechefand the aroma of the wines.
He refused champagne altogether, as a liquor only fit for boyhood and senility; but he highly approved the Burgundy, which had been laid down by the last Lord Lavendale, and had been maturing for nearly fifteen years.
"There is no wine like that which comes from the Côte d'Or," he said; and then, in a somewhat cracked voice, he chirruped a stanza of Villon's "Ballade joyeuse des Taverniers."
"I did not see your lordship at the opera to-night," he said presently.
"No, I was at a less agreeable entertainment. I was at the House of Lords. Was the Opera House full?"
"A galaxy of fashion and beauty; but I think that lady whom I may call my mistress still bears the palm. There was not a woman among them to outshine Mr. Topsparkle's wife."
"He has reason to be proud of such a wife," said Lavendale lightly. "Fill your glass, I beg, Mr. Fétis, or I shall doubt your liking for that wine. She is not his first wife, by the way—nor his first beautiful wife. My Italian friend told me that Topsparkle carried off one of the handsomest women in Venice when he left that city. What became of the lady?"
"She died young."
"In Italy?"
"No, my lord. Mr. Topsparkle brought the young lady to London, and she died of colic—or in all likelihood of the plague—at his house in Soho Square."
"Was she his wife?"
"That question, my lord, rests with Mr. Topsparkle's conscience. If he was married to the young lady I was not admitted to his confidence. I was not present at the marriage; but she was always spoken of in the household as Mrs. Topsparkle; and I, as a servant, had no right to question her claim to that title."
"I have heard that there was something mysterious about her death; something that aroused suspicion in the neighbourhood."
"O, my lord, all sudden deaths are accounted suspicious nowadays. There has not been a prince of the blood royal, or a nobleman that has died in France during the last thirty years, but there has been talk of poison, although the disease has been as obvious in its characteristics as disease can ever be. Smallpox, ague, putrid fever, have one and all been put down to the late Regent and his accomplices; whereas that poor good-natured prince would scarce have trodden willingly upon a worm. Never was a kinder creature, yet his heart was wrung many a time by the vilest accusations circulated with an insolent openness. As for Mrs. Topsparkle's death, I could give you all the medical details, were you curious enough to listen to them."
His manner was serenity itself; and it was difficult to suppose that guilt could lurk under so placid an aspect, so easy a bearing. Yet last night the first allusion to his life in Venice had blanched his cheek and made his hand tremulous. The difference was that he had then been unprepared, while to-night he was fortified against every shock, and had schooled himself to answer every question.
"The suspicion was doubtless unfounded," said Lavendale, "but I have heard that the slander banished Mr. Topsparkle from this country."
"My master was over sensitive regarding the lampoons and libels which are rife at all elections, and which were directed against him with peculiar venom on account of his wealth, his youth, and his accomplishments," answered Fétis. "He left England in a fit of disgust after the Brentford Election; and as a Continental life had always suited his humour, he lived abroad for thirty years, with but occasional visits to his native country."
"You stand by him with a truly loyal spirit, which is worthy of all admiration," said Durnford.
"'Twere hard if there were no fidelity between master and servant after forty years' service. I know Mr. Topsparkle's failings, and can compassionate him where he is weak and erring. He is a man of a jealous temper, and did not live altogether happily with the Italian lady of whom you were talking. It was known in the household that they had quarrelled—that there had been tears, scenes, recrimination on his side, distress on hers. This knowledge was the only ground for suspicion among the busy-bodies of the neighbourhood when the young lady died after an illness of two days. The fools did not take the trouble to know or to consider that she had never properly recovered her health after the birth of her infant."
"What became of that infant, Mr. Fétis?"
"She was educated abroad, and turned out badly. I can tell you nothing about her," replied Fétis, with an impatient shrug. "I had nothing to do with her bringing up, nor do I know her fate. I have never tried to pry into my master's secrets."
"But surely you, who were so much more than a servant, almost a brother, must have known everything," urged Lavendale; and then with a lighter air he added, "but 'tis inhospitable to plague you about the history of the past when we are met here to enjoy the present. What say you to a shake of the dice-box to raise our spirits?"
Fétis assented eagerly, with all a gamester's gusto, and he and Lord Lavendale spent nearly an hour at hazard, until the Frenchman had a pile of guineas lying in front of him, and in the pleasure of winning had drank deep of that fine old Burgundy which he had praised at supper. He played with a feverish excitement which Lavendale had remarked in his manner on the previous evening; but to-night the fiery energies of the man were intensified. He was like a man possessed by devils.
When Lavendale grew weary of losing, and would have left off, the Frenchman urged him to go on a little longer.
"I am generally an unlucky wretch: you will have your revenge presently," he said eagerly, and after a few more turns Fétis began to lose.
Lavendale swept up the dice and flung them into a drawer.
"It would have been unmannerly to leave off while you were winning, Monsieur Fétis," he said; "but now the luck is turned against you, I will own I have had enough. What can be this passion of cards which possesses some of us to grovel for a long night over the board of green cloth? I have never known the gambler's fiercest fever, though I have played deep enough in my time; and now my soul soon sickens of the stale diversion."
The Frenchman pocketed his pile of gold with a mechanical air, and looked about him like a man awakened suddenly from a feverish dream. His hands trembled a little as he adjusted his wig, which had been pushed awry in his excitement. His eyes had a glassy brightness, and it was obvious that he was the worse for liquor.
"Good-night, my lord; Mr. Durnford, your servant. I fear I have kept your lordship up very late. If we have trenched somewhat on the dead of night—"
"Monsieur Fétis, the pleasure of your society has been an ample recompense for the loss of slumber," said Lavendale. "My chairmen shall take you home. They have been told to wait for you."
"Indeed, your lordship is too considerate."
"The rest of my people have gone to bed, I believe; Durnford, will you light Monsieur Fétis to the hall?"
Herrick took a candle from a side table and led the way through the empty rooms, cold and dark and unspeakably dismal after the light and warmth of that cosy parlour in which the three men had supped. The atmosphere struck a chill to the soul of Fétis as he entered the first of those disused reception-rooms. Herrick's one candle shed but a faint gleam of light, which served only to accentuate the gloom. Gigantic shadows, strange forms of vague blackness, like the monstrous inhabitants of some mysterious underworld, seemed to emerge out of the corners and creep towards Fétis—dragon-like monsters, with spreading pinions and eagle claws. They were but the shadow-forms of incipient delirium tremens; but to him who beheld them they were unspeakably horrible.
Yet these were as nothing to that which came afterwards.
He crept with a curious cat-like gait across the room, shrinking from side to side to avoid the clutch of those shadowy claws, to avoid being caught up and enfolded for ever beneath those dark pinions, but on the threshold of the next room he gave a wild yell of agony, and fell on his knees, grovelling, the powdered wig pushed from his bald head by those nerveless hands of his, and drops of cold sweat breaking out upon his wrinkled forehead.
At the further end of the room, luminous in the faint rays of a lamp, he saw a shadow in a long white garment, a pale face, and dark eyes gazing upon him with a solemn stillness, a pale immovable countenance, like that of the dead.
"Spare me! spare me!" he cried. "O, pale, sad victim, have I not atoned? Haunt me no more, poor murdered wretch, betrayed, betrayed, betrayed at every turn! Thy cup of sorrow was full, but O, forgive thy much more wretched murderer! Pity, and pardon!"
The words came in short gasps—uttered in a shrill treble that was almost a scream. They had a sound like the cry of a tortured animal—seemed hardly human to those who heard them. He held his hands before his eyes, clasped convulsively over the eyeballs to shut out the vision that appalled him; and then gradually he collapsed altogether, and sank fainting on the threshold.
When consciousness returned he was seated in front of an open window, the cool night air blowing in upon him, sharp with the breath of late autumn.
"Where am I?" he faltered.
"You are with those who have judged and condemned you," answered Lavendale solemnly. "Murderer!"
"Who dares call me by that name?"
"I, Lavendale. My friend here, Durnford, is witness with me of your guilty terror. You have seen the ghost of her whom you murdered, or helped to murder. You have seen the ghost of your innocent victim, Margharita Vincenti."
"It was Topsparkle's crime. I was but the assistant and tool. The guilt was his. I was only a faithful servant."
"I doubt you were the inspirer of most of his iniquities at that time," said Lavendale. "It was your knowledge of poisons which put him in the way of accommodating his sated love and gratifying his revenge at one stroke. It is only the dead who do not come back."
That last gust of October wind did its work. Fétis rose to his feet with his nerves restored, and faced his accuser with an easy insolence.
"Your lordship's wine has been too strong for my poor brain," he said lightly, "and I fear I have troubled you with one of my raving fits. My good little wife will tell you that I am subject to a kind of brain fever after anything in the way of a debauch. Your lordship should not have tempted me to so far exceed my usual two bottles. Pray, Mr. Durnford, be so good as to show me to the hall. I shall not trouble your lordship's chairmen. The walk home will steady my poor head. Your lordship's most humble and deeply obliged servant."
He gave a low bow, a succession of bows rather, with which he bent and wriggled himself out of Lord Lavendale's presence, in a series of serpentine curves.
Lavendale made as if he would have sprung at him, longing to clutch at that wizened throat and pin the secret murderer to the floor, to imprison him for the rest of the night, and deliver him over to the officers of justice in the morning; but Durnford laid a warning hand upon his shoulder.
"Let him go," he whispered. "There is no evidence against him yet."
Lavendale submitted, and Durnford led the way to the hall, and saw Mr. Fétis out of doors with supreme courtesy. Fétis flung a couple of crowns to the sleepy chairmen as he passed out.
"Get to your beds, my good fellows," he said. "My legs are steady enough to carry me home, in spite of your master's Burgundy."
"Why did you not help me to detain him?" asked Lavendale, when Durnford rejoined him in the wainscoted parlour. "What can justice want more than the wretch's own confession of his guilt?"
"Justice—as represented by a Bow Street magistrate—would want a great deal more evidence than the incoherent ravings of a drunkard, repeated at second hand. Our moral certainty that Fétis poisoned your old Venetian's granddaughter will not hang him, any more than the suspicions of the neighbours and the apothecary forty years ago."
"Yet I think your little play succeeded, and that the craven hound revealed himself clearly enough at sight of your poor pale wife, scared to death at the part she had to act, and looking every inch a ghost. Neither you nor I can ever doubt that he and Topsparkle were accomplices in a villainous murder. A pleasant reflection for one who loves Topsparkle's wife, and might have run away with her, yet chose to play the moralist and leave her in a murderer's clutches."
"'Twould have been a worse murder to slay her honour, as you would have done. She is safe enough with her wicked old husband, guarded and fenced round by society. Lady Judith is a personage. Topsparkle trembles at her frown."
"Yes, as the devils are said to tremble before the Eternal; but his heart may rebel against her all the same, torn by jealous fury. To know himself old, effete, a mere simulacrum of humanity, and to see her surrounded by all the bucks and bloods of the town, idolising and pursuing her: could the infernal powers in Tartarus invent a more horrible agony for a worn-out old profligate? And when once a man has got his hand at poisoning, how easy the art! See how often my Lord This or my Lady That is hustled into the family vault after a three days' illness—a fever, a putrid sore-throat, the Lord knows what! Two or three doses of arsenic or antimony, and the trick is done. 'Putrid fever,' says the physician. 'Your house is unhealthy, Mr. Topsparkle. I have heard your first wife died of the same kind of malady. You should move further to the West; the new houses in Cavendish Square are almost in the country. Here you are too near to Newgate and the Compter. The foul odours of the gaol-birds are blown in at your windows by every east wind.' Do you think Lady Judith's untimely death would be more than a nine days' wonder, happen when it might?"