CHAPTER XIII

THE WORLD

SELLING THE COPYRIGHT--THE POLITICIAN’S DAY-DREAMS--TATTERSALL’S AT FLOOD--A DANDY’S DESTINY

“Can’t do it, my lord--your lordship must consider--overwritten yourself sadly of late--your ‘Broadsides from the Baltic’ were excellent--telling, clever, and eloquent; but you’ll excuse me--you were incorrect in your statistics and mistaken in your facts. Then your last novel, ‘Captain Flash; or, the Modern Grandison,’ was a dead loss to us--lively work--well reviewed--but it _didn’t sell_. In these days people don’t care to go behind the scenes for a peep at aristocratic ruffians and chivalrous black-legs--no, what we want is something original--hot and strong, my lord, and lots of nature. Now, these translations”--and the publisher, for a publisher it was who spoke, waved his sword of office, a huge ivory paper-cutter, towards a bundle of manuscripts--“these translations from the ‘Medea’ are admirably done--elegant language--profound scholarship--great merit--but the public won’t look at them; and even with your lordship’s name to help them off, we cannot say more than three hundred--in point of fact, I think we are hardly justified in going as far as that;” and the publisher crossed his legs and sat back in his arm-chair, like a man who had made up his mind.

We have almost lost sight of Lord Mount Helicon since the Guyville ball, but he now turns up, attending to business, as he calls it, and is sitting in Mr. Bracketts’ back-room, driving as hard a bargain as he can for the barter of his intellectual produce, and conducting the sale in his usual careless, good-humoured manner, although he has a bill coming due to-morrow, and ready money is a most important consideration. The little back-room is perfectly lined with newspapers, magazines, prospectuses, books, proof-sheets, and manuscripts, whilst the aristocracy of talent frown in engravings from the walls--faces generally not so remarkable for their beauty as for a dishevelled, untidy expression, consequent on disordered hair pushed back from off the temples, and producing the unbecoming effect of having been recently exposed to a gale of wind; nevertheless, the illegible autographs beneath symbolise names which fill the world.

Mr. Bracketts, the presiding genius of the place, is a remarkable man; his broad, high brow and deep-set flashing eyes betray at once the man of intellect, the champion whose weapon is the brain, whilst his spare, bent frame is attenuated by that mental labour which produces results precisely the converse of healthy physical exertion. Mr. Bracketts might have been a great poet, a successful author, or a scientific explorer; but, like the grocer’s apprentice who is clogged with sweets till he loathes the very name of sugar, our publisher has been surfeited with talent till he almost pines to be a boor, to exchange the constant intellectual excitement which wears him to shreds for placid ignorance, a good appetite, and fresh air. How can he find time to embody his own thoughts who is continually perusing, rejecting, perhaps licking into shape those of others? How can he but be disgusted with the puny efforts of the scribbler’s wing, when he himself feels capable of flights that would soar far out of the ken of that every-day average authorship of which his soul is sick?--so beyond an occasional slashing review, written in no forbearing spirit, he seldom puts pen to paper, save to score and interline and correct; yet is he, with all his conscious superiority, not above our national prejudices in favour of what we playfully term _good_ society. We fear he had rather go to a “crush” at Lady Dinadam’s than sup with Boz. He is an Englishman, and his heart warms to a peer--so he lets Lord Mount Helicon down very easy, and offers him three hundred for his manuscript.

“Hang it, Bracketts,” said his lordship, “it’s worth more than that--look what it cost me; if it hadn’t been for that cursed ‘Sea-breeze’ chorus I should have been at Newmarket, when ‘Bowse-and-Bit’ won ‘The Column’--and I should have landed ‘_a Thou_’ _at least_. But I was so busy at it I was late for the train. Come, Bracketts, spring a point, and I’ll put you ‘on’ about ‘Sennacherib’ for the Goodwood Cup.”

“We should wish to be as liberal as possible, my lord,” replied Mr. Bracketts, shaking his head with a smile, “but we have other interests to consult--if I was the only person concerned it would be different--but, in short, I have already rather exceeded my powers, and I can go no farther!”

“Very well,” said Lord Mount Helicon, looking at his watch, and seeing it was time for him to be at Tattersall’s; “only if it goes through another edition, we’ll have a fresh arrangement. It’s time for me to be off. Any news among the fraternity? Anything _good_ coming out soon?”

“Nothing but a novel by a lady of rank,” returned Mr. Bracketts, with a meaning smile; “and we all know what that is likely to be. Capital title, though: ‘Blue-bell; or, the Double Infidelity’--the name will sell it. Good-morning; good-morning, my lord. Pray look in again, when you are this way.” And the publisher, having bowed out his noble guest, returned to his never-ending labours, whilst Lord Mount Helicon whisked into the street, with five hundred things to do, and, as usual, a dozen appointments to keep, all at the same time.

Let us follow him down to Tattersall’s, whither, on the principle of “business first and pleasure afterwards,” he betakes himself at once, treading as it were upon air, his busy imagination teeming with a thousand schemes, and his spirits rising with that self-distilled elixir which is only known to the poetic temperament, and which, though springing to a certain extent from constitutional recklessness, owes its chief potency to the self-confidence of mental superiority--the reflection that, when all externals are swept away, when ruin and misfortune have done their wickedest, the productive treasure, the germ of future success, is still untouched within.

“If the worst comes to the worst,” thinks his lordship, “if ‘Sennacherib’ breaks down, and Blanche Kettering fights shy, and the sons of Judah thunder at the door of the ungodly, and ‘the pot boils over,’ and the world says ‘it’s all up with Mount,’ have I not still got something to fall back upon? Shall not my very difficulties point the way to overcome them? and when I am driven into a corner, _won’t_ I come out and astonish them all? I’ve got it _in_ me--I know I have. And the reviewers--pshaw! I defy them! Let them but lay a finger on my ‘Medea,’ and I’ll give them such a roasting as they haven’t had since the days of the ‘Dunciad.’ Byron did it: why shouldn’t I? If I could only settle down--and I _could_ settle down if I was regularly cleaned out--I think I am man enough to succeed. Bring out a work that would shake the Ministry, and scatter the moderate party--then for Progress, Improvement, Enfranchisement, and the March with the Times (rogue’s march though it be), and Mount Helicon, at the head of an invincible phalanx, in the House, with unbounded popularity out of doors, an English peerage--fewer points to the coronet--a seat in the Cabinet--why not? But here we are at Tattersall’s;” and the future statesman is infernally in want of a few hundreds, so now for “good information, long odds, a safe man, and a shot at the favourite!”

As he walked down the narrow passage out of Grosvenor Place, now bowing to a peer, now nodding to a trainer, now indulging in quaint _badinage_, which the vulgar call “chaff,” with a dog-stealer, who would have suspected the rattling, agreeable, off-hand Mount Helicon of deep-laid schemes and daring ambition? Nobody saw through him but old Barabbas, the Leg; and he once confided to a confederate on Newmarket Heath, “There’s not one of the young ones as knows his alphabet, ’cept the Lively Lord; and take my word for it, Plunder, he’s a deep ’un.”

If a foreigner would have a comprehensive view of our system of English society all at one glance, let him go into the yard at Tattersall’s any crowded “comparing day,” before one of our great events on the turf. There will he see, in its highest perfection, the apparent anomaly of aristocratic opinions and democratic habits, the social contradiction by which the peer reconciles his familiarity with the Leg, and his _hauteur_ towards those almost his equals in rank, who do not happen to be “of his own set.” There he may behold Privy Councillors rubbing shoulders with convicted swindlers, noblemen of unstained lineage, themselves the “mirror of honour,” passing their jests for the time, on terms of the most perfect equality, with individuals whose only merit is success; and that indescribable immunity some persons are allowed to enjoy, by which, according to the proverb, “one man is entitled to steal a horse, when another may not even look at a halter.” But this apparent equality can only flourish in the stifling atmosphere of the ring, or the free breezes of Newmarket Heath. Directly the book is shut my lord is a very different man, and Tom This or Dick That would find it another story altogether were he to expect the same familiarity in the county-rooms or the hunting-field which he has enjoyed in that vortex of speculation, where, after all, he merely represents a “given quantity,” as a layer of the odds, and where his money is as good as another man’s, or, at least, is so considered. Nay, the very crossing which divides Grosvenor Place from the Park is a line of demarcation quite sufficient to convert the knowing, off-hand nod of our lordly speculator into the stiff, cold bow and studiously polite greeting of the “Grand Seigneur.” Verily, would-be gentlemen, who take to racing as a means of “getting into society,” must often find themselves grievously deceived. But Lord Mount Helicon is in the thick of it. Tattersall greets him with that respectful air which his good taste never permits him to lay aside, whether he is discussing a matter of thousands with Sir Peter Plenipo, or arranging the sale of a forty-pound hack for an ensign in the Guards; therefore is he himself respected by all. “_You_ should have bought two of the yearlings, my lord,” says he, in his quiet, pleasant voice; “Colonel Cavesson never sent us up such a lot in his life before.”

“Ha! Mount!” exclaims Lord Middle Mile, with a hearty smack on his friend’s shoulders, “the very man I wanted to see,” and straightway he draws him aside, and plunges into an earnest conversation, in which, ever and anon, the whispered words--“Carry the weight,” “Stay the distance,” and “Stand _a cracker_ on Sennacherib,” are distinctly audible.

“I can afford to lay your lordship seven to one,” observes an extra-polite individual, who seems to consider the laying and taking the odds as the normal condition of man, and whose superabundant courtesy is only equalled by the deliberate carefulness of his every movement, masking, as it does, the lightning perception of the hawk, and, shall we add, the insatiable rapacity of that bird of prey? Mount Helicon moves from one group to another, intent on the business in hand. He invests largely against “Nesselrode” (not the diplomatist nor the pudding, but the race-horse of that name), and backs “Sennacherib” heavily for the Goodwood Cup. He takes the odds to a hundred pounds, besides, from his polite friend, “who regrets he cannot offer him a point or two more,” and, on looking over the well-filled pages of his book, hugs himself with the self-satisfied feeling of a man who has done a good day’s work, and effected the crowning stroke to a flourishing speculation.

As he walks up the yard a quick step follows close upon him, a hand is laid upon his shoulder, and a well-known voice greets him in drawling tones, which he recognises as the property of our military Adonis, the irresistible Captain Lacquers. “Going to the Park, Mount?” says the hussar, with more animation than he usually betrays. “If you’ve a mind for a turn, I’ll send my cab away;” and the peer, who cultivates Lacquers, as he himself says, “for amusement, just as he goes to see Keeley,” replying in the affirmative, a tiny child, in top-boots and a cockade, is with difficulty woke, and dismissed, in company with a gigantic chestnut horse, towards his own stables. How that urchin, who, being deprived of his natural rest at night, constantly sleeps whilst driving by day, is to steer through the omnibuses in Piccadilly, is a matter of speculation for those who love “horrid accidents”; but it is fortunate that the magnificent animal knows his own way home, and will only stop once, at a door in Park Lane, where he is used to being pulled up, and where, we are concerned to add, his master has no business, although he is sufficiently welcome. “The fact is, I want to consult you, Mount, about a deuced ticklish affair,” proceeded the dandy, as he linked his arm in his companion’s, and wended his way leisurely towards the Park.

“Not going to call anybody out, are you?” rejoined Mount, with a quaint expression of countenance. “’Pon my soul, if you are, I’ll put you up with your back to a tree, or along a furrow, or get you shot somehow, and then no one will ever ask me to be a ‘friend’ again.”

“Worse than that,” replied Lacquers, looking very grave; “I’m in a regular fix--_up a tree_, by Jove. Fact is, I’m thinking of marrying--marrying, you know; devilish bad business, isn’t it?”

“Why, that depends,” said his confidant; “of course you’ll be a great loss, and all that; break so many hearts too; but then, think--the duty you owe your country. The breed of such men must not be allowed to become extinct. No; I should say you ought to make the sacrifice.”

Lacquers looked immensely comforted, and went on--“Well, I’ve made arrangements--that’s to say, I’ve ordered some of the things--dressing-case, set of phaeton-harness, large chest of cigars--but, of course, it’s no use getting everything till it’s all settled. Now, _you_ know, Mount, I’m a deuced domestic fellow, likely to make a girl happy. I’m not one of your tearing dogs that require constant excitement; I could live in the country quite contentedly part of the year. I’ve got resources within myself--I’m fond of hunting and shooting and--no, I can’t stand fishing, but still, don’t you think I’m just the man to settle?”

“Certainly; it’s all you’re fit for,” replied his friend.

“Well, now to the point. I’ve not asked the girl yet, you know, but I don’t anticipate much difficulty there,” and the suitor smoothed his moustaches with a self-satisfied smile; “but, of course, the relations will make a bother about settlements, ‘love light as air,’ you know, and ‘human flies,’ and that; still we must provide for everything. Well, _my_ lawyer informs me that I can’t settle anything during my brother’s lifetime, and he’s just a year older than myself--that’s what I call ‘a stopper.’ Now, Mount, you’re a sharp fellow--man of intellect, you know--’gad, I wouldn’t give a pin for a fellow without brains--what do you advise me to do?”

This was rather a poser, even for a gentleman of Lord Mount Helicon’s fertile resources; but he was never long at a loss, so as he took off his hat to a very pretty woman in a barouche, he replied, in his off-hand way, “Do? why, elope, my good fellow--run away with her--carry her off like a Sabine bride, only let her take all her clothes with her--save you a _trousseau_. Has she money?”

“Plenty, I fancy; from what I hear, I should think Miss Kettering can’t have less than----”

“The devil!” interrupted Lord Mount Helicon, in a tone that would have made most men start. “You don’t mean to say _you_ want to marry Miss Kettering?”

“Well, I think _she_ wants to marry _me_,” rejoined Lacquers, perfectly unmoved; “and you know one can’t refuse a lady; but it’s only fair to say she hasn’t actually _asked_ me.”

Lord Mount Helicon felt for a moment intensely disgusted. Blanche’s beauty, and her simple, pretty manner, had touched him, as far as a man could be touched who had so many irons in the fire as his lordship, but the impulse for _fun_, the delight he experienced in quizzing his unsuspecting friend, soon overcame all other feelings, and he proceeded to egg Lacquers on, and assure him of his undoubted success, for the express purpose of amusing himself with the hussar’s method of courtship. “Besides,” thought he, “such a flat as this hanging about her will keep the other fellows off; and with a girl like _her_, I shall have little difficulty in ‘cutting _him_ out.’” So he advised his friend to take time, and “allow her to get accustomed to his society, and gradually entangled in his fascinations; and then, my dear fellow,” he added, “when she finds she can’t live without you--when she has got used to your engaging ways, as she is to her poodle’s--when she can no more bear to be parted from you than from her bullfinch, then speak up like a man--bring all your science into play--come with a rush--and win cleverly at the finish!”

“Ay, that’s all very well,” mused the captain, “that’s just my idea; but in the meantime some fellow might cut me out. Now, there’s our Major--D’Orville, you know (’gad, how hot it is! let’s lean over the rails)--D’Orville seems to be always in Grosvenor Square. He’s an old fellow, too, but he has a deuced taking way with women. I don’t know what they see in him either. To be sure he _was_ good-looking; but he’s a man of no education” (Lacquers himself could scarcely spell his own name), “and he must be forty, if he’s a day. Look at this fellow on the black cob. By Jove! it’s old Bounce, and talk of the devil--there’s D’Orville riding with Miss Kettering next the rails. This _is_ a go.”

Now, the little guileless conversation we have here related was hardly more worthy of record than the hundred and one nothings by the interchange of which gentlemen of the present day veil their want of ideas from each other, save for the fact of its being overheard by ears into which it sank like molten lead, creating an effect far out of proportion to its own triviality. Frank Hardingstone was walking close behind the speakers, and unwittingly heard their whole dialogue, even to the concluding remark with which Lacquers, as he leaned his elbows on the rails, and passed the frequenters of “the Ride” in review before him, expressed his disapprobation of the terms on which Major D’Orville stood with Blanche Kettering. Poor Frank! How often a casual word, dropped perhaps in jest from a coxcomb’s lips, has power to wring an honest, manly heart to very agony! Our man of action had been endeavouring, ever since the Guyville ball, to drive Blanche’s image from his thoughts, with an energy worthy of better success than it obtained. He had busied himself at his country place with his farm and his library and his tenants and his poor, and had found it all in vain. The fact is, he was absurdly in love with Blanche--that was the long and short of it--and after months of self-restraint and self-denial and discomfort, he resolved to do what he had better have done at first, to go to London, mingle in society, and enter the lists for his lady-love on equal terms with his rivals. And this was the encouragement he received on his appearance in the metropolis. He had a great mind to go straight home again, so he resolved to call on the morrow in Grosvenor Square, to ascertain with his own eyes the utter hopelessness of his affection, and then--why, then make up his mind to the worst, and bear his destiny like a man, though the world would be a lonely world to him for evermore. Frank was still young, and would have repelled indignantly the consolation, had such been offered him, of brighter eyes and a happier future. No, at his age there is but one woman in the universe. Seared, callous hearts, that have sustained many a campaign, know better; but verily in this respect we hold that ignorance is bliss. Frank, too, leaned against the rails when Mount Helicon and Lacquers passed on, and gazed upon the sunshiny, gaudy scene around him with a wistful eye and an aching heart.