Part 7

He fought kingly to rally his nerves. A crown! A monstrous destiny! Yes, but its divine virtues engendered like qualities in those meet and resolute to assume them. He had striven, he would strive, to honour, according to his lights, the trust reposed in him. The will was his, if the lights were Heaven’s. God might decree him a fool; He should never call him a coward.

He rose to his feet once more and looked pallidly from the window. The sky was full of countless faces, and all gibing and distorted. There was not one among them but was known to him, or had been, though he could not recall when or how. Statesmen, warriors, servants, kith and kin--torn this way and that, they mingled, a multitudinous galaxy of spectres, with the darkness, and hemmed him in, a wall of mowing visages.

To stand thus and gaze upon the throng was to drink the very utterness of despair. Had none a gentle look for him? Were all kings doomed so to realise their loneliness in the vast of time? No mercy for him; no hope, no love. How was it possible to love one so singly exalted, so isolated from all contact with the dear common human emotions? Was it not appalling to be a king!

Sudden through the dark, through the twisted faces, a light twinkled. He started, he stared, he drew a deep ecstatic breath. He thought he heard a voice saying “Arise, and come forth!” and he shook the bandage from his head and stood erect.

The light! O God, not one, but infinite! Like daisies opening upon a hill, they climbed that wall of darkness and spread from town to sky. And in their blossoming the faces were gone.

And then in a moment he saw and understood. The wind had fallen, the sky was full of stars: they laughed and twinkled above the twinkling city. He was looking from a window of St. James’s Palace across the Mall----

What had happened? What had been affecting him a moment ago? He breathed a prayer of fervid thanksgiving to Heaven for his quick emergence from that terrific shadow--called down by what? He believed he penetrated the cause. It was only yesterday that the _pourparlers_ for his marriage had been begun; and was he so inhuman, or so superhuman, that, unlike all other men, he might experience no shock, no temporary unbalance of reason, in the immediate prospect of that tremendous change? Nay, was not the prospect more distracting for him than for most? seeing that no sentiment warmer than duty--duty to his people, duty to his succession--coloured its cold inevitability. He had heard of men, though bond-slaves to love, killing themselves in their inability to face that more lifelong bondage. What wonder that, in his case, a contract so based on policy should have terrified his reason in the thought?

Well--he was well now, he was well. The loveless lot of kings? That had been the chimera of a fancy momentarily diseased. No love for kings? He laughed softly to himself, and, crossing his arms on the sill, leaned down his face into them.

And then instantly a dream came to him. The stars of the sky--first one, then another, then dripping streams of them--descended from their high places and, enshrining themselves in crystal, became the lamps of the city. Faster and faster they poured, until he was treading a very milky-way of radiance. He could hardly see his path for the brightness as he walked--for, yes, he was walking! Half dazzled, with the glowing smile of all things reflected on his face, he pushed his way through the golden mist. It was jewelled and spangled everywhere with glittering thoughts; one might hardly know it for the London of one’s daily experience. He remembered when he had first encountered this transformation--he, a serious, well-intentioned young prince, resolute, in his sober, unimaginative way, to justify his election before the face of Heaven--and how of a sudden some spirit exquisite beyond conception had usurped in him the place of duty.

No, not usurped, but sanctified. Self-fulfilled through love, his debt to Heaven and his country would find him tenfold strengthened in its discharge.

Yet he walked like a thief, conscious through all the transcendent glow of a half-guilty rapture, glorying, though fearfully, in the thought of the treasure whose shrine he had desecrated to possess. He had never dreamed at one time of such a thing. It had come to him in a single moment how he, bred and educated under the severest maternal discipline, “cabin’d, cribbed, confined” within the narrowest limits of orthodoxy, was still not excluded from the destinies which Love creates. Why should he be? A King, and denied the prerogative of his meanest subject?

His way did not lie far through that garden of lamps; but others were incessantly crossing and obstructing it. These shadows worried him: he seemed to know so many of them, yet the instant he thought to identify one it would fade and disappear. Along Pall Mall, across St. James’s Square, into Charles Street, and thence towards the glare and bustle of the Market--throughout the whole short route it was always the same. Thicker and thicker they came, hurrying across his path, until at length he could hardly force his way through the press. Their insistence, their air of urgency, amazed and troubled him; yet, possessed of a stubborn will, he would not be gainsaid. He knew the goal of his wild desires, and inch by inch he fought his way to attain it.

And then in a moment he was standing before the door, and he saw that it was closed and dark. The whole house was lightless, the window-panes were broken, there was no sign of life in all the empty place.

With a gasp he stepped back into the kennel. What did it mean? Had he all this time been dreaming a dream, never realising its unreality, of a little Quaker bird whose song had once filled his soul with a passion for possession? Had there ever been for him a “Nanny,” a large-eyed, lovely child, who had captivated him with her sweet looks and words, and been lost somewhere in the gulfs of the dead past? For whom, then, if not for him? He could remember her pretty ways; the very tones of her young voice when she first called him “Friend,” and choked over the whispered daring. And what then--what thereafter? Surely no dream?

Of a sudden he became aware that the throng was all about him again--faces, a wall of white, mowing faces such as he had seen in the clouds. There were hundreds there, each one somehow known to him, and all congregated without relation to the sequence of time. _Time?_--Merciful God! It had ceased to exist for him; and now in a moment he remembered. What could have driven him to seek Nanny on the eve of his own wedding? He had forgotten that. He was to be married, he was to give the people a Queen and a succession, and Nanny had long been made to disappear from the path to that tremendous end. Months ago had it been, or years and years? It was all one to him in the terror of his utter loneliness. These faces! If they could arise and crowd upon him so confusedly, so irrelatively, why not Nanny’s amongst them? He wanted her, and they were crushing forward to withhold, to intercept him. She was there within all the time, and they had taken this cruel means to blind him to the truth. They were moving, they were sweeping upon him like a rushing wind; with a cry he turned, and beat with frantic hands upon the closed door----

A quick step came down the corridor, and a formal, stiff-lipped gentleman paused beside the King.

“What are you doing, sir?” he said. “You must please to control yourself.”

His Majesty turned, clutching his hand above his wild eyes. He was not standing and sobbing, a young emotional prince, before Nanny’s house in the street off the old Market; he had not come from St. James’s Palace at all. He was standing in the dark corridor at Windsor Castle, beating with feeble fingers on the storm-thrashed casement--an old, old mad and weary man, age-long forgetting and forgotten by all the world.

“You must not thump the window like that, sir,” said Willis, the cold-eyed doctor in attendance, “or you will cut your hands. What is it you need?”

The tears dropped from the old King’s eyes. He shook his head, muttering and mumbling.

“I was thinking,” he said, “I was thinking. I need very little--only a new suit of clothes. But they must be black--black, in memory of George the Third.”

The Hero of Waterloo

Colonel Manton put up his rod and demanded to be set ashore. It had been his first experience of coarse fishing on the river, and it had not proved to his taste. It was not that the perch had been distant or the chub unapproachable. On the contrary, the place having been ground-baited overnight, the sport had been excellent. It was the worms and one other thing which decided him. He had been present at Talavera, at Ciudad Rodrigo, at Badajos, at Vittoria, at Quatre Bras, at Waterloo; he had seen as much carnage as most men, but this bloodless impaling of lob-worms on hooks, and then casting them, so transfixed, to lie writhing on the river bottom for an indefinite period at the end of a ledger-line, offended his sense of fitness. It was not, it seemed to him, playing the game. The worms had no chance, and they could not bite back. He hated to sit there and think of what was going on under the quiet water, and the reflection gained nothing in relish from the fact that, by refusing to soil his own hands with the viscous contortions of the creatures, he must appear, in delegating that operation to the boatman, to torture by deputy, like the most cowardly of Eastern despots. And so when, as presently happened, this same stolid deputy, in “disgorging” an obstinate hook from a barbel’s throat, tore away---- But it is enough to say that the Colonel put down his rod and demanded there and then to be set ashore.

There was no gainsaying him, of course. It was sufficient that he was the guest of a distinguished General living at Datchet; but in addition to this the Colonel’s personal actions invited no criticism. He fished--as he walked, as he rode, as he appeared on all secular occasions--in a dark blue wasp-waisted frock-coat with frogs, in tight nankeen trousers strapped under neat insteps, in a stiff collar and full black stock, in a tall hat with a brim so crescented that its front peak looked like the “nasal” of a Norman helmet. And for the rest he carried himself and his white moustache with the conscious authority of a cock of a hundred fights.

The boatman put him ashore on the riverbank some half-mile below Datchet, towards which village he immediately addressed his steps. The path was lonely and unfrequented, and it gave the Colonel some surprise to observe, as he turned a clump of bushes, a fashionable old beau toddling along it in front of him. In a few moments the latter paused, nonplussed, at a stile, and the Colonel came up with him.

The pedestrian was a man of uncouth bulk but distinguished mien. He wore a black frock-coat of a somewhat military cut, with a rich fur collar. Curly auburn locks, obviously artificial, showed beneath the brim of his glossy hat, and accented somewhat ghastfully the puffy pallor of a face whose texture betrayed its age. His eyes had a glutinous, half-blind appearance; his loose lower lip perpetually trembled. He peered at the new-comer, panting a good deal, as if the sudden apparition had shaken his nerves.

“If I may venture, sir,” said Colonel Manton, and proffered his arm. The other accepted it to mount the stile. It was an ungraceful business, and, once over, he stood, with his hands to his sides, vibrating heavily, like a worn-out engine, to his own respirations. Presently he was sufficiently recovered to speak.

“A damned obstruction--a damned obstruction! Cannot I leave my carriage a moment to walk round by the water but this annoyance must appear in my path?”

“A villainous stile,” said the Colonel. “We will indict it for a trespass.”

He was a reasonable man, and he felt the absurdity of the complaint. But, to his surprise, his sarcasm missed fire.

“Do so, do so,” said the old gentleman, and took his arm again, as it might have been his own walking-stick. They went on together, and in a little the stranger had opened a conversation with all the effrontery in the world.

“My boy, what’s your rank?” said he. “I perceive you are a soldier.”

The officer stared, and drew himself up.

“Colonel Manton, sir, at your service,” he answered distantly.

He was surprised; but the man was old, near seventy by his appearance, and very possibly from his cut a retired veteran like himself. Familiarity from a general, say, would be pardonable, and even kindly. Besides, he did not dislike the implied suggestion of juniority.

“Hey!” said the stranger--“retired?”

“Yes, sir, retired.”

“Brevet rank?”

“Brevet be damned!” said Colonel Manton hotly. “I owe my promotion, sir, if you wish to know, to Waterloo.”

The stranger glanced at him with a curiously sly look, and pinched the arm on which his own fingers rested.

“What!” he said, “were you there?”

“I had the honour, sir,” said the Colonel grandiloquently, “of playing my little part in that Homeric contest.”

“Whose division, hey?”

“Picton’s--Pack’s brigade. You are a little--you will excuse my saying it--particular.”

“Certainly I will, my boy. Wounded--hey?”

A distinct flush suffused the Colonel’s cheek.

“Wounded--yes,” he replied shortly.

The old fellow nudged him confidentially.

“Tell me,” he said--“how?”

“Look here--you must forgive me, you know,” exploded the Colonel; “but I must point out that we are strangers. Still--as a fellow-campaigner--if that is the case--may I ask, sir, if _you_ were at Waterloo?”

The other laughed enjoyingly.

“_Was_ I?” he said. “To be sure I was. You had all good reason for knowing it.”

Colonel Manton’s eyes opened. Here was a momentous implication. Evidently he had to do with some great general of division, though the boast sounded a little extravagant and unmilitary. He ran over in his mind a dozen possible names, but without success. And then the thought occurred to him: “Good reason for knowing it? What the devil! Is it possible he was on the other side?”

The idea seemed too preposterous for belief; the stranger was so obviously British. Who, in wonder’s name, could he be, then? Hill, Macdonnell, Saltoun, Uxbridge, Vandeleur, Somersett, Hackett--all divisional or brigadier-generals? He could not identify him, of his knowledge, with any one of these. The Iron Duke himself? He had never been brought into very close personal contact with the great man, but naturally he was familiar with his features. Could it be possible that time had so fused and blunted those that their characteristic contour had degenerated into this scarce distinguishable pulp? Prosperity, he knew, could play strange tricks with countenances, yet a _volte-face_ so revolutionary seemed incredible. And yet who else but the Duke had been on that day as indispensable as implied? But it was conceivable that some might have so regarded themselves--that certain heads might have been turned by their share in the success of so stupendous a victory.

Colonel Manton had been living abroad on his half-pay for some years, and, until the occasion of this visit during the summer of 1830, had dwelt for long a stranger to his native land. He could but suppose that he had in a measure lost the clue, through subsequent developments, to old events. It remained clear only that he was in the presence of one who had, or believed himself to have, contributed signally to the success of the epoch-making battle. And that must be enough for him. He spoke thenceforth as a subordinate to his commanding officer.

“I beg your indulgence, sir,” he said. “I have been absent from my country for a considerable time, and features once familiar elude me. You asked about my wound. It is a ridiculous matter, and I recall it without enthusiasm. The fact is that, when d’Erlon’s guns were pounding us before the advance, a ball smashed the head of a sergeant standing near me, and one of the fellow’s cursed double-teeth was driven into my neck. It was not enough to cripple my fighting power, but I would have given a dozen of my own to boast a more honourable scar.”

The stranger chuckled.

“Scars are not the only guarantee of valour,” he said.

The Colonel ventured: “You brought away some of your own, sir?”

“No,” said the old fellow. “No; Wellington and I got off scot-free.”

The Colonel dared again: “Were you, may I ask, on his personal staff?”

“Well, yes,” said the stranger, chuckling still more, “I suppose you might call it that.”

Suppose? Colonel Manton gaped. It was positively a matter of history that not one of that staff had escaped death or mutilation. The other may have noticed his perplexity, for he turned on him with an air of sudden annoyance.

“You haven’t the assurance to question my word, I hope, sir?” he demanded.

“Certainly not,” answered the Colonel.

“I could give you convincing proof,” said the stranger. “Did the Commander-in-Chief--now did he or did he not--visit General Blücher at Wavre the night before the battle to make sure of his co-operation?”

“It is a disputed point, sir,” said the Colonel. “I believe that even his Grace has been known to contradict himself in the matter, saying at one time that he would never have fought without Blücher’s explicit promise to back him up, at another flatly contradicting the report that he saw the Prussian general on the night before the battle.”

“And he did not, my boy,” sniggered the old fellow triumphantly, “for his interview with him was after midnight, and therefore on the day _of_ the battle. I ought to know, _for I sent him off there myself_.”

He cackled into such a spasm of laughter that the convulsion caught his wind.

“O, my chest!” he wheezed and gasped, “my miserable chest! I’m the most wretched creature on earth. But it’s nothing, nothing--the youngest fellows are subject to it.” He coughed and wiped his eyes with a heavily scented handkerchief. “Yes,” he said presently, “yes, Wellington was a sound workaday general, a fine soldier, an inspired commissary, but, of genius--h’m! We need only suggest, Manty my boy, that he was well advised. The man at his elbow, hey? You need not mention it, you know, but the real hero of Waterloo--hey, d’ye see? Keep it to yourself; there were reasons against its being divulged--you understand? What, my boy!”

The Colonel stared before him as if hypnotised; he stumbled in his walk. Was it possible to mistake the implication--that the laurels ought by rights to have adorned the brow of this stranger beside him? He felt like one whose faith had suddenly exploded of its own intensity, leaving his breast a blackened shell. Could there actually have been another, of whom he had never heard, at the Duke’s right hand on that tremendous day, the presiding but unconfessed genius of it? He had heard speak of the Corsican’s little red familiar. Was his great rival, were possibly all commanding intellects, so supernaturally provided?

He was really a simple man, with a mind ruled to certain prescriptive lines of conduct. He glanced askance at his companion, who was smiling and murmuring to himself. Who in Heaven’s name could he be? and why had he selected _him_ for his astounding confidences? For all his own fearless rectitude, an uncanny feeling began to possess him. He was glad, in turning a corner, to see the end of the path, and the head of a waiting coachman showing above the hedge. And the next moment they had emerged on to the village green.

A barouche stood there, with a bare-headed gentleman standing at its door. The liveries of the servants were scarlet, and a mounted man in a scarlet embroidered coat waited a little apart. The gentleman came forward.

“Will your Majesty be pleased to ascend?” he asked.

The King dropped the Colonel’s arm, and appeared on the instant to forget all about him.

“Yes, Watty; yes, certainly, my boy,” he said. “Is that the fiery chariot?”

Beau Brummell

George Bryan Brummell, Esq., his Britannic Majesty’s Consul in the Norman city of Caen, was about to entertain. He had given instructions to his attendant that great company was expected, together with a list of the distinguished names to be announced; and by eight o’clock his room in the Hôtel d’Angleterre was prepared, the tables for whist were set out and the _bougies_ lighted. Staring, half hypnotised, into the radiance of one of these placed on the mantelpiece, the Beau’s eyes blinked, and the Beau himself faced about with a puzzled look and a suspicious sniff.

“What is that smell, Loustalot?”

He spoke to the attendant, who in his little black _jaquette_ and blue apron looked very much like what, in fact, he was--a waiter at the hotel. The expression on this man’s face scintillated between gravity and mockery; the tone of his voice hovered between audacity and deference.

“It will doubtless be the soot in the chimney, Monsieur,” he said coolly.

“H’m! You are sure it is not a candle in need of snuffing?”

“The best wax, Monsieur? Monsieur speaks as if he burnt filthy tallow. Monsieur’s nostrils are more sensitive than discriminating. _A, là!_ What it is to be bred to this imperishable refinement!”

He was busy while he spoke in snuffing the wick, and in privately depositing the reeking instrument on the hob.

“I go to announce the company, Monsieur,” he said. “In the meantime, if I were Monsieur, I would not spit too much on the carpet.”

“An insolent rascal!” muttered the Beau to himself as the man disappeared. “I shall have to discharge him.”

He had, however, so completely forgotten his resolve the next minute, that when Loustalot, returning, thrust his head round the door, he could not for the moment recall who he was.

“O! by the by, Monsieur,” said the man, “Monsieur Magdelaine, the confectioner, desires to know if you will settle with him your little account for Maraschino and Biscuits de Rheims.”

The Beau smiled, waving his hand.

“To be sure--when it is full moon. Tell him so, my friend.”

“Will not Monsieur tell him himself? His smile is such a surety, and I cannot reproduce it.”

Brummell burst into a scream of rage.

“You dare to mock me! Leave the room, you scoundrel!”

The man grinned and disappeared. The spurt of fury ran to instant waste. Brummell set to pacing the room, eyeing successively the walls, the shining mantelpiece, his own shoes--all with an expression of the most complacent satisfaction. The last, indeed, as he saw them, evoked a positive sigh of transport.

“That Vernis de Guiton!” he murmured: “positively a Corinthian polish! But it’s devilish expensive--devilish.”

He strutted again, sticking out his chest and quavering a little stanza of his own, which someone at some time had set to music:

“_Oh ye! who so lately were blithesome and gay,_ _At the Butterfly’s banquet carousing away;_ _Your feasts and your revels of pleasure are fled,_ _For the soul of the banquet, the Butterfly’s dead!_”

He paused, cocking his head on one side, inquisitive.

“Now, where did I hear that?” he said. “Aye, aye--the poor butterfly, and dead, with the honey in his throat! Well, ’tis best--to fold one’s plumes upon the feast, and, sunk in the happy flush of revelry, to die and leave a golden record. So may Fortune favour me. But there’s time yet--poor butterfly, poor butterfly! Gad! he makes me weep.”