ROGUES AND VAGABONDS

CHAPTER I NEPTUNE’S GROTTO

SUPERIORFIRE WORKSat theNEPTUNE’S GROTTOTavern and Tea GardensPIMLICOon Thursday Evening, 20th, July, 1829.ByMADAME ORIANOThe Celebrated Pyrotechnic to HIS MAJESTYThe Exhibition will includeA Grand Display of various kinds ofWATER FIRE WORKSOn the Grosvenor Basin.ORDER OF FIRING

A Battery of Maroons, or imitation Cannon

A Bengal Light

Sky Rockets

A Saxon Wheel

Tourbillions

Phenomenon Box and Mime

Line Rockets

A Metamorphose with alternate changes, and a beautiful display of Chinese Lattice Work

Sky Rockets

10.

Horizontal Wheel with Roman Candles and Mine

11.

Tourbillions

12.

A regulating piece in two mutations, displaying a Vertical Wheel changing to five Vertical Wheels and a figure piece in Straw and brilliant fires

13.

Grand Battery of Roman Candles & Italian Streamers

14.

A regulating piece in four mutations displaying a Vertical Wheel changing to a Pyramid of Wheels, a Brilliant Sun, and a superb shower of fire

15.

Sky rockets

GRAND FINALEMADEMOISELLE LETIZIA ORIANO

Will with a temerity hitherto unknown in the blazing annals of her profession slide down an inclined rope 350 feet high, erected on the firework platform, wreathed in Fizgigs and Fiery Serpents and accompanied by the awful thunder of a Battery of Maroons.

Admission 1seachGardens open at half-past seven, and commences atNine o’clock precisely.

“Neptune’s Grotto” was one of the many pleasure-gardens that in the days when the Londoner was comparatively a free man helped to amuse his leisure. Yet even by the ninth year of the reign of King George IVmost of the famous resorts of the preceding century had already been built over, and now that Lord Grosvenor was developing the Manor of Ebury (Buckingham Palace appearing fixed as the metropolitan abode of the Sovereign) “Neptune’s Grotto” was likely to vanish soon and leave no more trace of its sparkling life than the smoke of a spent rocket. Indeed, change was already menacing. For two years Cubitt, the famous builder, had been filling up the swampy land between Vauxhall Bridge Road and Ranelagh with the soil he had excavated in the construction of St. Katharine’s Docks. His cadaverous grey plastered terraces were creeping nearer every week. Willow Walk, a low-lying footpath between the cuts of the Chelsea Water Works, in a cottage hard by which Jerry Abershaw and Gentleman James Maclaine the highwaymen once lodged, would soon be turned into the haggard Warwick Street we know to-day. The last osier bed would ultimately be replaced by the greasy aucubas of Eccleston Square, and Lupus Street would lie heavy on ancient gardens. The turnpike at Ebury Bridge had been gone these four years; the old country road to Chelsea would within a lustrum be lined by houses on either side and become Buckingham Palace Road. Even the great basin of the Grosvenor Canal would run dry at last and breed from its mud Victoria Station.

However, in 1829 “Neptune’s Grotto” still remained much as it had been for over a century. The house of mellow red brick was covered with lattice-work, which on this warm July evening was all fragrant and ablow with climbing roses. Only the box trees had changed the pattern of their topiary. In place of earlier warriors or statesmen you would have found Lord Nelson and the Duke of Wellington at this date, the general more freshly trimmed than the admiral, but likely to go unpruned in the years of his unpopularity that were coming. His sacred Majesty King George III had been allowed to sprout into the rounder bulk of his sacred Majesty King George IV, but the new portrait was hardly more attractive than theblowsy original. The garden paths were bordered with stocks and hollyhocks. There were bowling-greens and fishponds, and a dark alley in emulation of the notorious dark alley of Vauxhall. Most of these amenities, however, had been made familiar by a score of other pleasure-gardens all over London. What gave “Neptune’s Grotto” its peculiar charm was the wide green lawn running down to the edge of the great reservoir. In the middle of this was the grotto itself, under the ferny arches of which an orchestra of Tritons languorously invited the little world of pleasure to the waltz, or more energetically commanded it to the gallopade. The firework platform was built out over the water on piles; and the lawn was surrounded on three sides by small alcoves lined with oyster shells, in some of which the lightest footstep on a concealed mechanism would cause to spring up a dolphin, or a mermaid, a harlequin or a Mother Shipton, startling intruders for the maiden who first encountered them, so startling that she would usually fling herself into the arms of the beau in escort and require to be restored with various liquors much to the satisfaction of Mr. Seedwell, the owner of the gardens.

High tortoiseshell combs and full curled hair, wide skirts of Gros de Naples flounced and pinked and scalloped and fluted, white stockings and slippers of yellow prunella, Leghorn hats of transparent crape bound with lavender sarsenet or puffed with small bouquets of marabout, bonnets of jonquil-yellow with waving ostrich plumes, bonnets of marshmallow-rose with ribbons of lilac and hortensia floating loose, double Vandyke collars of Indian muslin, grass-green parasols and purple reticules, leg-of-mutton sleeves and satin roulades, pelisses and pèlerines most fashionably of camelopard-yellow, ivory shoulders, Canezon spencers and gauze capotes, fichus of ethereal-blue barège, laughter and whispers and murmurs and music (ah, yes, no doubt and plenty of simpers too), where now trains thunder past filled with jaded suburbans, whose faces peep from the windows astheir owners wonder if the new film at the picture-theatre will be worth the trouble of visiting after tea in our modish contemporary shades of nude, French nude, sunburn, and flesh. Would that Stephenson had never cursed humanity with his steam-engine, and would that this tale might never creep nearer to the present than that July night of 1829! Alas, it has more to do with the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those who fluttered out like moths in that summer dusk to watch Madame Oriano’s fireworks; and these at whom you gaze for the moment are but creatures in a prologue who will all be ghosts long before the last page is written.

However, here come those ghosts, still very much alive and shilling in hand, some from Knightsbridge, some from Chelsea, some from Westminster. “Strombolo House,” which used to charge half-a-crown for its fireworks, so famous were they, is closed. To be sure the “Monster” is still open, but there are no fireworks in the entertainment there to-night; a performing bear is all that the “Monster” can offer to-night. The “Orange Tea Gardens” are gone for good: St. Barnabas’ Pimlico, will occupy their site, and on it cause as much religious rowdiness in another twenty years as ever there was of secular rowdiness in the past. “Jenny’s Whim” hard by the old turnpike has already been covered with builder Cubitt’s beastly foundations. There is no longer much competition with “Neptune’s Grotto” in the manor of Ebury. A few pause in Vauxhall Bridge Road when they see the hackney-coaches filled with merry parties bound for the most famous gardens of all; but they decide to visit them another evening, and they cross the road to Willow Walk, where one remembers seeing Jerry Abershaw’s body swinging from the gibbet on Putney Common and that scarcely thirty years ago, and another marvels at the way the new houses are springing up all round. Some shake their heads over Reform, but most of them whisper of pleasure and of love while ghostly moths spin beside the path, and the bats are seen hawking against theluminous west and the dog-star which was glimmering long before his fellows is already dancing like a diamond in the south.

While the public was strolling on its way to “Neptune’s Grotto,” within the gardens themselves Mr. Seedwell, the proprietor, and Madame Oriano made a final inspection of the firework platform.

“You think she can do it?” he was saying.

“Offa coursa she can do it,” Madame replied sharply.

Mr. Seedwell shook his head in grave doubt. Weighing eighteen stone and a bit over he found it hard to put himself in Mademoiselle Letizia’s place.

“I don’t want an accident,” he explained. “The magistrates are only too glad of an excuse to close us down these days.”

“Dere willa not be no accident,” Madame Oriano assured him.

And Mr. Seedwell, looking at the raven-haired and raven-beaked and raven-eyed woman beside him, took her word for it and went off to see that all was ready inside the house for the entertainment of his guests.

Madame Oriano squeezed a handful of her yellow satin gown.

“Bagnato!”[1]she murmured to herself. Then looking across to one of the alcoves she called out in a shrill harsh voice, “Caleb! Caleb Fuller!”

[1]Wet.

A beetle could not have left his carapace more unwillingly than Caleb Fuller that alcove. He was a young man—certainly not more than twenty-five, perhaps not as much—whose lumpish and pasty face suggested at first an extreme dulness of mind until one looked a little closer and perceived a pair of glittering granite-grey eyes that animated the whole countenance with an expression that passed beyond cunning and touched intelligence. Beside the dragon-fly vividness of his employer he appeared, as he shambled across the lawn to hear what she wanted of him, like an awkward underground insect, with his turgidrump and thin legs in tight pantaloons and his ill-fitting tail-coat of rusty black.

“Dissa English cleematnon è possibile,” Madame shrilled. “Everyting willa be wet before we beginna to fire.”

“It’s the heavy dew,” said Caleb.

“Oh,diavolo! What do it matter which it is, if de fireworks will alla be—how you say—spilt?”

“Spoilt,” he corrected gloomily.

“Che lingua di animali, questaEnglish linguage! Where issa John Gumm?”

“In the tap-room,” Caleb informed her.

“Drinking! Drinking,” she shrilled. “Why you don’ta to keep him notta to drink before we are finished?”

John Gumm who was Madame’s chief firer had already imperilled by his habits several of her performances.

“Somebody musta go and putta clothes on de fireworks.Non voglio che abbiamo un fiasco,[2]I don’ta wish it. You hear me, Caleb?”

[2]“I do not want us to have a fiasco.”

Caleb was used to these outbursts of nervous anxiety before every display, and on most evenings he would have humoured Madame by bullying the various assistants and have enjoyed giving such an exhibition of his authority. But this evening he would not have been sorry to see the damp air make the whole display such a fiasco as Madame feared, for he bitterly resented the public appearance of Letizia Oriano, not so much for the danger of the proposed feat, but for the gratification the sight of her shapely legs would afford the crowd. In fact when Madame had summoned him to her side, he was actually engaged in a bitter argument with Letizia herself and had even gone so far as to beg her to defy her mother and refuse to make the fire-clad descent.

“There won’t be enough dew to prevent the firing,” he argued. “And more’s the pity,” he added, gathering boldness as jealousy began once more to rack him. “More’s the pity, I say, when you’re letting your onlychild expose her—expose herself to danger.” He managed to gulp back the words he just lacked the courage to fling at her, and though his heart beat “Jezebel! Jezebel!” he dared not say it out.

“Dere is nottings dangerous,” she snapped. “She has walked the slacka rope and the tighta rope since she was abambina. Her fazer has learnt her to do it.”

Caleb groaned within himself. Letizia’s father was as mythical and as many-sided as Proteus. Italian prince, English nobleman, play-actor, ballet-master, acrobat, with as many aliases as a thief, he was whatever Madame chose he should be to suit her immediate argument. Nobody knew his real name or his real profession. Once, when Caleb had remonstrated with her for being apparently willing to sell Letizia to a rich and snivelling old rake, she had actually dared to argue that she was better capable of guarding her daughter’s virtue than anybody else because the father of her had been a cardinal. Caleb, who was sick with love for Letizia and sick with hate for Popery, was near losing his reason. Luckily, however, the old suitor fell into a hopeless palsy, and since then Madame’s financial affairs had prospered sufficiently to make her independent of Letizia’s cash value. That her affairs had prospered was largely due to Caleb himself, who, entering her service as a clerk when he was hardly nineteen, had lost no time in gathering into his own plump white hands the tangled skeins of the business so that he might unravel them at his own convenience without ever again letting them go.

Madame Oriano had been glad enough to put the financial side of the business in Caleb’s hands, for, having inherited from her father, Padua’s chief artist in pyrotechny, a genuine passion for inventing new effects, she devoted herself to these with renewed interest, an interest moreover that was no longer liable to be interrupted by amours. She had grown gaunt and her temper, never of the sweetest, had long made her an impossible mistress for any man however young he might be. At the age ofsixteen she had eloped from her father’s house in Padua with an English adventurer. After a year of doubtful bliss he had left her stranded in a Soho garret with a cageful of love-birds and twenty pairs of silk stockings—he had intended these as a present for the schoolgirl he was planning to abduct, but in the confusion of escaping from his old sweetheart he had left them behind him. Maria Oriano entered upon a period of fortune-telling, then went into partnership with an Italian pyrotechnist to whom with intervals of amorous escapades she remained loyal for ten years, in fact till he died, after which she carried on the business in her own name. Letizia was born when her mother was approaching forty, and since neither Letizia nor anybody else ever discovered who the father was, it may safely be assumed that Madame really did not know herself which of her lovers might be congratulated. She had a dozen in tow about this time. No solution of the mystery had ever been provided by Letizia herself, who now, at seventeen, was the image of her own mother when she, a year younger, ran away from Padua, a dark and slim and supple and lustrous-eyed young termagant.

There she was now, fretfully tapping the floor of the alcove with her dainty foot and wondering what her mother could want with Caleb. It was not that she wanted Caleb so much for herself, not at any rate for the pleasure of his conversation. But she was used to quarrelling with him, and she missed his company much as a child might miss a toy that it could maltreat whenever it was in the mood to do so. She might laugh at his awkward attempts to make love to her, but she would have been piqued by his indifference, piqued and puzzled by it as she would have been puzzled by the failure of her spaniel to wag its tail when she entered a room. There was Caleb bowing and scraping to her mother (who looked a pretty sight in that yellow satin gown) while she who after all was this evening indubitablytheattraction was left alone in this dull alcove without so much as a glass of champagne to sip. How much would her mother worry aboutthe dampness of the fireworks, were she to announce that she could not make the descent that was to bring the display to such a grand conclusion? It would serve them all right if she did rebel. They would appreciate her much more were she sometimes to assert herself. Letizia pulled open the cloak of light blue velvet that she was wearing over her costume and contemplated her slim legs and the beautifully unwrinkled tights. The upper part of her dress consisted of an abbreviated tunic of asbestos round which the unlit fireworks coiled like blue snakes.

“Or sausages,” murmured Letizia resentfully. “If I did not look like Guy Fawkes and if it were a little darker, I’d put on a mask and have such fun amongst the crowd. Oh gemini, wouldn’t I just!”

She jumped up in a fit of impatience. Her foot pressed the concealed mechanism in the floor of the alcove, and immediately there sprang up before her a life-size Mother Shipton, quivering all over and shaking her steeple hat, and seeming in the twilight most horribly real.

“Gesù Maria, Giuseppe!” she shrieked, crossing herself in an agony of terror.

Caleb, whose first thought was that some young buck was trying to kiss Letizia, paid no more attention to Madame Oriano’s complaints of Gumm’s drunkenness and the dewy nightfall, but plunged off to the rescue, splitting the seat of his pantaloons in an effort to move his clumsy legs really fast.

“Oh gemini, Caleb, the Devil’s been sitting beside me all the time and I never knew it,” Letizia cried, when she saw him.

“I make no doubt he has,” said Caleb in lugubrious agreement. “But this ain’t him. This ain’t no more than one of those fortune-telling figures you’ll see at fairs. That’s what they call fun, that is,” he groaned.

“It sprang up so sudden, Caleb. The Devil couldn’t have sprung up no faster. Oh gemini, it set me off praying, Caleb.”

“Praying!” he scoffed. “I wouldn’t give much for youif the Devil did come to take you, and you had to trust to your prayers.”

“It’s made my heart thump, Caleb. Only feel how fast it beats.”

The young man snatched his hand away from her.

“Hussy! Nought would please you so well as to lead me on into sin.”

It was Caleb’s heart that was beating now, so fast indeed that he turned in desperation to strike down the puppet that seemed to be leering at him like an old bawd in a dark entry.

“Oh, you sicken me,” she pouted. “I’ll surely never have the courage to mount to the top of the mast now. At least, I won’t unless I have some champagne, Caleb.”

There was no answer.

“Did you hear me, Caleb?” she pressed softly. “I said champagne.”

He turned his back and feigned not to hear. But a passing waiter heard and came into the alcove, rubbing his hands in anticipation of serving them.

“Champagne, Caleb.”

“Yes, ma’am. Certainly, ma’am.”

“No,” Caleb shouted.

The waiter inclined his head in sarcastic acknowledgment.

“And light the lamp,” Caleb told him.

Above the circular stone hung a great green globe painted over with fish, which when lighted up shed a kind of subaqueous sheen upon the alcove.

“And the champagne, sir?” the waiter asked.

“Bring a bottle quickly,” Letizia commanded with a laugh of mockery.

“Bring nothing at all,” cried Caleb, swinging round on his heels in a rage.

“Oh gemini, Caleb,” Letizia cried. “Your handkerchief’s falling out of your pocket.”

She grabbed at it, and pulled out the tail of his shirt.

Letizia flung herself into a chair, clapping her handsand throwing her legs into the air in a very ecstasy of delight.

“Oh gemini, Mr. Waiter; bring two bottles,” she cried. “And a needle and a thread, for I’ll burst my own trunks next and never dare stand on a chair, let alone come sliding down to the ground from a mast.”

The waiter departed to obey her commands, a wide grin on his insolent face.

“Listen to me, Letizia,” Caleb cried in a rage, seizing her wrist. “I’ll pay for not one drop of champagne, d’ye hear me? Little Jezebel that you are! You love to make me suffer for your wantonness. I was pure till your Popish gipsy eyes crossed mine and turned them to thoughts of sin. Isn’t it enough that you’re going to mount that accursed firework platform for every gay young sprig to stare at you carnally and gloat on your limbs and lust after you? Isn’t it enough, I say, for one evening?”

“You’re a fine one to accuse me of making myself a show,” she retorted, wresting herself from his grasp. “And you with the tail of your shirt sticking out of your breeches! You’d better call it your flag of truce, Caleb, and cry peace.”

“I’ll make no peace with you, young Jezebel, in this wanton humour.”

“Why then, catch me if you can, Mr. Preacher, for I’ll have my champagne, and Mr. Devil can pay for it, if you won’t.”

With this she stood mocking him from the lawn outside.

“Come back,” he groaned, the sweat all beady on his forehead.

“I won’t come back neither,” laughed Letizia, pirouetting.

“Pull your cloak round you, shameless minx.”

“No, and I won’t do that, neither.”

She flung it farther from her and taunted him with thesight of her legs so slim and so shapely in the light blue silk.

“You dursn’t run after me, Caleb, or you’ll be taken to Bedlam for a lunatic when the people see you running after me like a draggle-tailed duck. Quack-quack, Caleb! I’m the grand finale to-night, and if you won’t give me champagne I’ll find some one who will, and he’ll have the grandest finale of all.”

Unfortunately for Letizia when she turned round to run away she ran into her mother, who caught her by the ear and led her back into the alcove.

“Sei pazza?” she demanded.

“If I am mad, it’s his fault,” protested Letizia angrily. “Let go of my ear, mamma! You’re hurting me.”

“Vuoi far la putanella, eh?”[3]cried Madame Oriano furiously, squeezing her daughter’s ear even harder.

[3]“You want to play the little wanton, eh?”

“Eh,basta,[4]mamma! Or I’ll be no grand finale to-night for you or nobody else. I only asked for champagne because that old witch jumped up out of the floor and frightened me. If you hadn’t been screaming so loud yourself, you might have heard me scream.”

[4]Enough.

“Insolente,” cried Madame, making coral of her daughter’s ivory cheeks with several vicious slaps.

Luckily for Letizia the waiter came back at this moment with a tray on which were glasses and the bottle of champagne. This gave Madame Oriano a real opportunity. Picking up her skirt as if she were going to drop a curtsey, she raised one foot and kicked the tray and its contents up to the oyster-inlaid ceiling of the alcove. She might have been giving the signal for the fireworks to begin, for just as the contents of the tray crashed to the ground the thunder of the maroons reverberated about the pale sapphire of the nine o’clock sky.

Madame hurried out into the excited crowd of spectators, clapping her skinny hands and crying, “Bravo!Bravimissimo!” at the top of her voice. She believed in the power of the claque and always led the applause of her own creations. Immediately after the maroons the Bengal light flared and turned the upturned faces of the crowd to a lurid rose, the glassy waters of the basin to garnets. Letizia, who had been sobbing with pain and fury while the maroons were exploding, responded with all her being to the excitement of the Bengal light. She forgot her pain, her rage, her disappointment. She quivered like the Mother Shipton, became like the puppet a mere dressed-up spring. She longed for the moment when she should be summoned to ascend the platform and climb the mast to the crow’s-nest on the summit, and most of all for the moment she should hear the sausages round her asbestos tunic fizz and cackle and spit, and when wreathed in flames, balancing herself with a flashing Italian streamer in each hand, she should slide down the long rope into the tumultuous cheers of the public below.

Caleb was aware of her eagerness and, having in himself nothing of the mountebank, supposed that she was merely longing to display her legs to the mob. He vented the bile of his jealousy upon the waiter.

“I’ll report you to Mr. Seedwell,” he stormed. “How dare you bring champagne without an order?”

“Madame....”

“Get out of here,” Caleb shouted. “This is no madam, you lousy wretch. I’ll have no rascals like you come pimping round this young lady.”

Sky rockets were shedding their fiery blossoms upon the air, and the water below was jewelled with their reflections. Tourbillions leapt up to tremble for a moment in golden spirals. Mutation followed mutation as shivered wheels of rubies turned to fountains of molten emeralds and amethysts and blazing showers of topaz. Above the explosions, above the applause, the shrill voice of Madame Oriano rang out continually, “Bravo! Bravissimo! Ancora! Bene! Benissimo! Che Splendore! Che magnificenza!”

Letizia stood rapt like a saint that expects a corporeal assumption to the seventh heaven.

“It’s time I went up,” she breathed.

“Not yet,” Caleb pleaded, in horror of the moment when that lewd and accursed mob should gloat upon her slim form.

“It is. It is! Let me go, Caleb! Gemini, you crazy fool, you’ll make me late.”

Letizia sprang away from his detaining arms.

“Why don’t you set fire to your shirt, Caleb, and slide down behind me?” she called back to him in mockery.

There were shouts of enthusiasm when the figure of Letizia stood up dimly against the stars. Followed a silence. Old John Gumm fired the fizgigs and the serpents. With a shriek of triumphant joy Letizia launched herself from the mast. High above the wondering murmurs of the crowd her mother’s voice resounded.

“Che bella ragazza![5]Brava! Bravissima! Avanti, figlia mia! Che forma di Venere!”[6]

[5]“What a lovely girl!”

[6]“Forward, my daughter! What a figure of Venus!”

“Almighty God,” Caleb groaned. “She might be naked.”

When the flaming vision touched earth, he rushed forward to recapture it; but Letizia, intoxicated with success, flung herself into the arms of three or four young bucks who were waiting to carry her off to champagne, while from the grotto in the middle of the lawn the Triton orchestra struck up Weber’s seductiveInvitation to the Waltz.

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