Part 23
Lady Bauble waits patiently from March to May for the new Waverley novel, indulging perhaps in an occasional flirtation with Granby or a brief and hurried visit to Brambletye House, but turning eagerly from both to the prospect which the unnamed name of the Great Unknown opens before her imagination. Her visions are full of strange and appalling ideas. Some new Meg Merrilies appears to start into terrible existence; some second Balfour lifts up the sword of the Lord and of Gideon; Amy Robsart is regenerate, Front de Bœuf blasphemes again. But the three volumes come out, and present her with a commonplace bully or an everyday coquette--a lady who chatters at an evening party, a lord who figures in the _Morning Post_. “This really is too bad,” says Lady Bauble, yawning; “I must absolutely give up Sir Walter!”
Captain Eustace is ordered to Rangoon. Delightful dreams are his--dreams of success and of reputation, of promotion and of pay, of armies discomfited, of stockades stormed, of midnight glimpses of the King of Ava’s harem, of curry prepared in the King of Ava’s kitchen! A few short weeks, and the fairy vision fades with a vengeance: he finds an empty camp, and a crowded hospital; a weary surgeon, and a burning sun; a rifleman in every bramble-bush, and a rheumatism in every bone.
Ο that our hopes could last for ever! That we and the objects of our desire could run on, like the fore and hind wheels of a chariot, always close but never united. That we could be contented to let our enjoyments go on like the lamp of the Rosicrucians, burning and dazzling eternally; without advancing towards them the profane step which, by the essence and law of their nature, must destroy and crush them in a moment!
It is now about ten years since I left the residence of my respectable uncle and guardian in order to pay a visit of a few weeks to some friends at a neighbouring watering-place. My guardian, Sir Abraham, was in his day something of a character--and by-and-by I may sketch his portrait. For the present I shall only quote, as faithfully as I can, the old gentleman’s parting admonition, for so constantly and unremittingly had he laboured at my education, up to the age of sixteen, that he considered six weeks of absence a long period, and six miles an infinite distance.
“Hark ye, Frederic!” he began; “all young men are fools--very well! Some are more fools than others; there are degrees of comparison, but all are fools--very well! You I hold to be particularly and peculiarly a fool; no fault of mine--very well! Now you have been for the last two years pestering me with ravings and reveries about every pretty face that fell in your way; verses you have written, and they are my abomination--very well! I have found stanzas to Chloe in my shaving-pot, and sonnets to Araminta in the blank leaves of the Annual Registers--very well! You are going to-day to my cousin Sir Andrew’s; nobody to fall in love with there--too sensible a man; insists on a crooked nose in his laundress, and prefers a humpback to a ten years’ character in his choice of a dairymaid--very well! But hark you, sir! you may meet, at some of those hotbeds of frivolity and fevers, which are called card-parties, routs, balls, and I know not what beside--I say, sir, you may meet a girl called Adèle Lepicq--a fantastical name forsooth, but ladies are as fine now in their appellations as they are in their costume--very well! What’s in a name? I tell you, Frederic, if ever you mean to play the fool to any purpose, fall in love with that girl. Why, sir, she is rich enough to buy up the Bank of England--to keep even a ballad-monger from starving! Talk of beauty--sentiment--- affection! What are these to a rent-roll like hers? I tell you, a shape is as well set off by Mechlin lace as by brown holland; and a white neck is mere moonshine, till it has a diamond necklace about it. Bah!--very well!”
So spoke my revered relation, and the impression produced on my mind was that which similar speeches have produced on similar minds ever since old men were arbitrary and young men wilful. I sell myself for gold! I barter the first flush of the young heart’s emotion for what in poetry was always trash! I bend my knees to awkwardness or ugliness! I bow in adoration to malice and insipidity!
I set off, however, and found the stage which was to be my conveyance occupied by a fox-hunter and a brace of Militia officers, who were discussing the case of a poor man, named, for his sins, John Smith. He had been severely wounded in a duel. I listened with great interest to the usual interesting details--the chaises ordered at five in the morning; the vain attempt at a reconciliation; the ground measured; the surgeon in attendance; the firing, the dropping; the deep regret of the antagonist; the absconding; the apprehension of danger. All this was very well; but when, after going through the action, they proceeded to investigate the cause, what was my astonishment at finding that all this, which was to engross conversation for a week and fill the newspapers for a month, was occasioned by the fascinations of Adèle Lepicq!
“I never would risk my life for deformity,” said I, in a fit of enthusiasm. “Deformity!” quoth the foe of foxes, opening his eyes very wide; “why she is a divinity! Venus was a wax doll to her--Diana a dowdy! One glance of her might charm a statue from its pedestal, or inspire the Bench of Bishops with wit!” And then all three joined in a sort of chorus of eulogy, which conveyed to me no definite idea of form or feature, but expressed simply the conviction of the speakers that every perfection of both had been collected by the munificence of a bountiful destiny in the person of Adèle Lepicq.
I arrived at my journey’s end pretty considerably puzzled, and not a little annoyed. I fortified myself, however, in my preconceived dislike of my guardian’s angel, by remembering that wealth and want of ideas, loveliness and imbecility, were perfectly compatible qualities. “Some silly uneducated heiress--all heiresses are silly and uneducated--who knows nothing but what she has learnt from her glass, and likes no one who does not corroborate daily its assertions; who votes literature _mauvais ton_, and would rather look into a coffin than a quarto.” So thought I with myself as I lounged into Sir Andrew’s library, in the pride of my mathematical studies, to take down Laplace from the neglect in which I flattered myself he had slumbered for years. Laplace was gone; and the card, which according to the custom of the place accounted for the vacancy on the shelf, informed me that the appropriator of the treasure was Adèle Lepicq.
I was petrified. But distrust is slow to depart, when it has once been admitted. “A Blue, then--who studies Aristotle, I warrant, and criticizes Plato! who keeps a journal in Hebrew, and scribbles notes in the arrow-headed writing! She has, I doubt not, an album--full of doggerel compliments and pen-and-ink drawings, a cabinet of shells and fossils, a museum of butterflies and beetles! After all, the days were blest when women attempted nothing beyond embroidery and the making of puddings!” And with these charitable reflections I sat down to dinner. There was at table a detestable story-teller; I have met him often since, and have heard his fifty-nine stories fifty-nine times over; but on this occasion it was as much as he could do to get through one of them. It was about an _omelette soufflée_: how he was very partial to an _omelette soufflée_; how he ate an _omelette soufflée_ seven times a week in Paris; how he never tasted a good _omelette soufflée_ out of France except once; how a very romantic incident belonged to that _omelette soufflée_; how it was composed by a beauty--an heiress of sixteen; how she had studied the whole theory of an _omelette soufflée_ for her father’s gratification, because the old man could not live without an _omelette soufflée_. This tale, interrupted of course by the usual accidents which disturb at a dinner-table the most experienced narrator, concluded by a rhapsody concerning filial duty, and her who was the gastronomical example of its excellence--Adèle Lepicq.
I began to be infinitely plagued by this continual recurrence of Monsieur Tonson in the shape of a reigning toast. But I was haunted for more than a week by unceasing and unpitying rumours. The shops were full of Adèle bonnets and Lepicq shawls; the musicians dedicated their quadrilles to Miss Lepicq; the Poet’s Corner in the newspaper had always its stanzas to A---- L----. By her the harp I admired at Schneider’s had been bespoken; the Arabian I noticed at the riding-house was breaking for her. By degrees my imagination became more and more engrossed by the thought which was thus eternally forced upon its notice. I began to delight in forming conjectures about the extraordinary being who did all things, and all things well. First, I painted her reserved, retiring, shrinking from her own praises, and winning, in consequence, many more than she deserved. Then I drew her wild, piquante, with a little dash of the masculine, and spirits enough to provoke the advances which her pride checked in a moment. Sometimes she was alone by the side of a river stream, reading Shakespeare, and weeping unconsciously as she read; presently afterwards she was galloping along the hard sands of the sea-shore, her horse starting in vain from the echoing waters, and her hair floating long and dark upon the ocean breeze. She was my thought by day, my vision by night. I became like the lunatic who beholds, whithersoever he turns his eyes, an unvarying attendant figure, distinct in shape and hue to his own sight, but impalpable and unperceived to the gaze of others.
But I had never seen her, and I left the place in all the tortures of unsatisfied curiosity. If I was to meet her at a ball, she had a plaguy cold, and was confined to her room; if I looked for her on the public walk, she was the only person between the ages of seven and seventy who was not there; if I went to the theatre, she patronized the concert; if I rode on the downs, she rambled in the forest.
It was nearly a twelvemonth afterwards that I was one of three hundred who crowded, almost to bursting, two small drawing-rooms, not a hundred miles from Cavendish Square. I had picked up a lost fan, while the hurry and bustle of departure was going on, and was examining it in a fit of vacant abstraction, when I heard some charitable old lady annoying her friends with officious inquiries: “Where is Miss Lepicq’s fan?” “Who has seen Miss Lepicq’s fan?” “Where can Miss Lepicq’s fan be?” I started from my trance. The deuce take the fan, and the querist--but where is Miss Lepicq? She had just left the room--her carriage was stopping the way. I rushed to the landing-place, cleared the stairs with the celerity of a kangaroo, overturned a brace of footmen, and broke my shins over the pole of a sedan, arriving at the house-door just in time to see the last gleam of a kid slipper glide into the concealment of a carriage, to hear the “Home!” of the footman, and to make the best of my way to my hotel, with a head-ache and a sprained ankle.
Inquiries were bootless; she left London, England, the world; for she shut herself up in a convent, Heaven knows why: and, as her epitaph might say, is remembered with regret by all who knew her--and by one who did not.
Perhaps I ought not to lament--perhaps I do not lament--that I saw no more of Adèle Lepicq. I might have been blind to beauties which all the world adored; I might have discovered imperfections of which no others dreamed. It is pleasant, when I find in all I meet some little admixture of human frailty, to look back to one object which appears still all divine; it is charming, when I am deserted by the fondest friends, betrayed by the dearest hopes, to cling to an imaginative pleasure from which I can expect no treason or desertion. I have flirted with some score of beauties with sufficiently great perseverance, and sufficiently poor success; I have been desperately in love more than once; but if all the rapture of my real passions were set in one scale of a balance, and the luxury of this ideal one were put into the other, I believe the madder weight of the two would preponderate. I remember that in the fervour of my last disappointment I wrote a very fine copy of verses to the same effect; and thus, or nearly thus, they ran--
Many a beaming brow I’ve known, And many a dazzling eye, And I’ve listened to many a melting tone In magic fleeting by; And mine was never a heart of stone, And yet my heart hath given to none The tribute of a sigh; For fancy’s wild and witching mirth Was dearer than aught I found on earth; And the fairest forms I ever knew Were far less fair than--L’Inconnue!
Many an eye that once was bright Is dark to-day in gloom; Many a voice that once was light Is silent in the tomb; Many a flower that once was dight In beauty’s most entrancing might Hath faded in its bloom; But she is still as fair and gay As if she had sprung to life to-day; A ceaseless tone and a deathless hue Wild Fancy hath given to--L’Inconnue!
Many an eye of piercing jet Hath only gleamed to grieve me Many a fairy form I’ve met, But none have wept to leave me; When all forsake, and all forget, One pleasant dream shall haunt me yet, One hope shall not deceive me; For oh! when all beside is past, Fancy is found our friend at last, And the faith is firm, and the love is true, Which are vowed by the lips of--L’Inconnue!
THE INCONVENIENCE OF HAVING AN ELDER BROTHER.
I do not care for the paternal acres. To say the truth, Halbert Hall never pleased me. As a child I detested the long dark avenues of stunted trees; and the heavy melancholy stream of moaning water, and the long passages, with their doleful echoes, and their countless doors, and the vast chambers with all their pomp and pageantry of faded furniture and family portraits. I am happier here in Lincoln’s Inn, though one floor is my palace and one lackey my establishment; and I leave the Hall, without a sigh, to my elder brother.
I shall not die for the lack of ten thousand a year. I never longed to keep hounds, or an opera dancer; to give champagne dinners, or to represent a county; to win at Doncaster, or to lose at _rouge et noir_. Your true Epicurean does not need great wealth; I can afford to wear a tolerable coat, and drive an unexceptionable cabriolet; to be seen sometimes at the Opera, and keep myself out of reach of the Bench; to throw away a trifle at picquet, and cook a wild duck for my antagonist. These things content me; and, except when some unusual temptation has awakened my appetite or some more than common loss, for a time, ruffled my philosophy, I would not readily exchange them for the rent-roll and the three per cents. of my elder brother.
As for the title, it is not to be mentioned seriously as the object of a reasonable man’s ambition. In old times a belted lord had certain privileges and pastimes, which might make life pass pleasantly enough. It was interesting to war upon his equals; it was amusing to trample on his inferiors; there was some merriment in the demolition of an abbey; there was some excitement in the settlement of a succession. Nowadays, it is as well to be called Tom as my Lord, unless you have a mind to dine at the dullest tables, and make speeches to the drowsiest audience in the world. So I resign my chance of the peerage without reluctance; the more that the coronet must pass from the temples of its present apoplectic possessor over an artillery officer, a rural dean, and an attaché to an embassy, before it decorates the honoured brows of my elder brother.
But when I have resigned philosophically all longings after these distinctions and advantages, which would be mine if I could date my birth but a twelvemonth earlier--when I have congratulated myself that I am not bound, by any necessity or interest, to do battle for the privileges of the order or talk nonsense in support of the Game Laws--why am I to be crossed at every turning by some hateful memento of the inferiority to which my unlucky planets have doomed me? Why are smiles to grow colder, and conversation more constrained, at my approach? Why are my witticisms listened to with such imperturbable gravity? And why does Lady Montdragon look zero when I bow, and turn away to whisper “Viper!” in her daughter’s ear?
Thus it has been from my infancy. My mother, to be sure, had the usual maternal peculiarities, and was always in our nursery squabbles the unfailing protectress of the party which was most immediately dependent upon her protection. But she died, poor lady, almost before I could be sensible how much I needed her alliance, leaving me to carry on the war unaided against an adversary whose auxiliaries were many and zealous, in the butler’s pantry and the servants’ hall, in the tenant’s cottage and the keeper’s lodge. I was as handsome as Frederic; but his dress was more carefully tended, and his ringlets more studiously arrayed. I was as ravenous as Frederic; but his acquaintance with the cellar was more close and his visits to the store-closet more frequent. I was the bolder rider, but my pony was as rough as a bear. I was the better shot, but my gun was as heavy as a blunderbuss. Both learnt the lesson, but the praise and the shilling were for him; both plundered the orchard, but the reproof and the correction were for me. And when our father, with an unwonted exertion of impartiality, sent us to the same school, and supplied us with the same means of extravagance, though my hexameter was as smooth and my laugh as hearty, my scholarship as sound and my pluck as indisputable as my brother’s, he had more patrons and more friends than I had; and somehow or other, between Halbert major and Halbert minor there was a plaguy difference, though I scarcely yet suspected where it lay.
But I was soon able to discover of what materials the talisman was composed. My father broke his neck in a fox-chase, and my brother was master of the kennel and the stud; my uncle died of a late division, and my brother represented the borough. We came into the world, and began to jostle for places like the rest of its industrious citizens.
I met Lord Fortalice at a dinner-party. What could be more condescending than his lordship’s manner, or more flattering than his expressions? He had heard of my renown at college; he was confident of my success in life; he knew a host of my connections; he had had the sincerest respect for my father, he could assure me the Duke of Merino entertained the highest opinion of my talents, and Lady Eleanor had pointed me out last week as a model to her son. But when at last his lordship hoped that my principles would allow me to support the Bill which’ was next week to be before Parliament, and understood from me that the interests of sixty-seven independent men were in my brother’s hands, not mine, he gradually withdrew his civilities from me, and devoted himself thenceforth to the entertainment of a puny divine, who spoke in monosyllables, and took an appalling quantity of snuff.
I was introduced to Tom Manille at the Opera. He was charmed to make my acquaintance; he had been told of my good fortune at the Salon, and was aware what a favourite I had been with the Baronne de Lusignan. Did I want a servant? A friend of his was going to dismiss one who was worth all the Indies. Was I looking for a hunter? His cousin had one, which would suit my weight exactly. He would make my betting-book, he would superintend my cellar, he would take me to a _soirée chez Mademoiselle_, he would give me a special recommendation to his tailor. He must make me known to the Somerses--their cook was Ude’s first pupil. Of course I should belong to the Club--his influence was omnipotent there. A few weeks elapsed; and Tom Manille was riding my brother’s horses, and drinking my brother’s chambertin. He always calls me “My dear fellow!” and never passes me without a most encouraging nod. But I have never dined with the Somerses, and last week I was blackballed at the Club.
I wrote a treatise on the state of the nation, and submitted it to an eminent publisher. He was wonderfully delighted with the work. The views were so sound, the arguments so convincing, the style so pure, the illustration so apposite. I began to look forward to an infinity of popularity and an eternity of fame; I dreamed of laurel wreaths; I calculated the profits of tenth editions. In imagination I was already the pilot of popular opinion, the setter-up and the putter-down of Cabinets. But when I struck out the magical M.P. from the proof-sheet of my title-page, my fall was immediate and disastrous. My language lost its elegance, and my subject its importance; and my pamphlet lies forgotten in the limbo of unpublished embryos, wanting only life, and willing to win immortality. I should have been the most influential writer of the day if I had not had an elder brother.
At Brighton I fell in love with Caroline Merton. She was an angel, of course; and it is not necessary to describe her more particularly. Her mother behaved to me with the greatest kindness; she was a respectable old lady who wore a magnificent cap, and played casino while her daughter was waltzing. Caroline liked me, I am sure; for she discarded a dress because I disliked the colour, and insulted a colonel because I thought him a fool. I was in the seventh heaven for a fortnight; I rode with her on the downs, and walked with her on the Chain Pier. I drew sketches for her scrap-book, and scribbled poetry in her album. I gave her the loveliest poodle that ever was washed with rose-water, and called out a corpulent gentleman for talking politics while she played. Caroline was a fairy of a thousand spells; she danced like a mountain nymph and sang like a syren; she made beautiful card-racks and knew Wordsworth by heart; but to me her deepest fascination was her simplicity of feeling, her independence of every mercenary consideration, her scorn of Stars and Garters, her _penchant_ for cottages and waterfalls. I was already meditating what county she would choose for her retirement, and what furniture she would prefer for her boudoir, when she asked me, at an ill-omened fancy ball, who was that clumsy Turk, in the green turban and the saffron slippers. It was my elder brother. She did not start nor change colour; well-taught beauties never do; but she danced that night with the clumsy Turk in the green turban and the saffron slippers; and when I made my next visit she was just sealing a note of invitation to him, and had lighted her taper with the prettiest verses I ever wrote in my life.
If your father was an alderman, you may nevertheless be voted _comme il faut_; if your nose is as long as the spire of Strasburg, you may yet be considered good-looking; if you have published a sermon, you may still be reputed a wit; if you have picked a pocket, you may by-and-by be restored to society. But if you have an elder brother--migrate! Go to Crim Tartary or to Cochin China--wash the Hottentot--convert the Hindoo! At home you cannot escape the stigma that pursues you. You may have honesty, genius, industry--no matter. You are a “detrimental” for all that.