CHAPTER VI.

A LITTLE DINNER.

Mrs. Chadwick was in the drawing-room when Eleanor came down, and looked up as her sister entered the room to see whether Eleanor had adopted her suggestion as to her dress. A plain black-silk gown with simple muslin frilling such as Eleanor wore was not much to Mrs. Chadwick's taste, for it was her custom to attire herself in bright colours made in the extremest fashion, and to wear about her head and shoulders so many flowers and trinkets as to make her look like a combination of a florist's shop and a jeweller's window. This was done partly in accordance with her own rather vulgar taste, and partly out of desire to please Mr. Chadwick, who, all generous as he was, liked to see what he called 'his money's worth.' For this reason, though a great patron of art, he never bought specimens of the old masters, arguing that there was 'nothing to look at in them;' never gave still champagne; and on the occasion of his entertainments liked to have as few of the blinds drawn as possible, in order that the outside world might see what was going on. But Mrs. Chadwick, who was in no way jealous of her sister, could not help admitting to herself that she had never seen Eleanor more to advantage; and the gentleman who was sitting by her roused up at once from the somewhat indolent manner in which he had been carrying on conversation and awoke to life. A somewhat romantic-looking gentleman this--rather like a Velasquez portrait--with long dark hair parted in the middle and taken off behind the ears, dark eyes, regular features, peaked beard, and sallow complexion. He wore tiny mosaic studs in his shirt, and a large antique cameo on his little finger; had the finest line of coral links for a watch-chain; and during his talk with Mrs. Chadwick had been engaged in contemplating with great admiration his little feet, which were incased in black-silk socks and shoes with silver buckles. This was Mr. Spiridion Pratt, who rose to greet Miss Irvine, and to express his delight at finding her still in town.

'I was just saying to Mrs. Chadwick,' he murmured, 'that, delighted as I have always been to find myself a guest at this house, I never found it so delightful as now, when it is positively an oasis in this desert of London.'

'We may think ourselves lucky in securing you, Mr. Pratt,' said Eleanor. 'I should have thought that you, who are so essentially a portion of the world, would have been with the world.'

'Where should I go to, my dear Miss Irvine?' said Spiridion plaintively. 'To Goodwood, to sit on the burnt lawn in a broiling sun, with a hundred wretches bawling their wagers in my ears; to Cowes, to sit on the damp deck of a yacht with my knees up to my chin, to have to move perpetually while the men shift their horrible sails, and to get my fingers covered with pitch and tar? That's what the world is doing just now, I believe, and I confess it has no attraction in my eyes.'

'Mrs. Hamblin is still in town, is she not?' asked Mrs. Chadwick, looking fixedly at him.

'Yes, I believe she is,' said Spiridion, with the faintest trace of colour appearing in his cheeks; 'Mr. Hamblin's official position prevents his getting away just yet, and--and--'

'Exactly,' said Mrs. Chadwick. 'Where will they go when Mr. Hamblin can get away?'

'I have no idea for certain,' said Spiridion, who was growing uncomfortable under Mrs. Chadwick's gaze. 'I don't think, however, that they will leave town till October, and then I heard something of their going to Italy.'

'You had yourself some idea of wintering in Rome, had you not?' asked his unswerving questioner.

'I had at one time, but that was before you--I mean to say that I have given up that notion, and I am now by no means certain of my plans.'

To relieve him from his confusion, Mr. Spiridion Pratt was only too glad to welcome the entrance of Mr. Chadwick; a big, burly, broad-shouldered man of about fifty, with a bald head fringed with crisp iron-gray hair, clean-shaved ruddy face, merry gray eyes, and a manner redeemed from vulgarity by its hearty geniality.

'Glad to see you, Mr. Pratt,' said he, seizing Spiridion's little hand in a tight grip, which printed off an impression of the cameo on his other finger. 'How d'ye do? Nell, you were off early this morning, young lady; I thought to see you at breakfast, but they told me you had gone out.'

'To see her sick schoolfellow, you know,' said Mrs. Chadwick. Then turning towards Spiridion Pratt, she whispered, 'She has such a tender heart.'

'Quite right,' said Mr. Chadwick; 'always look after those who are down on their luck, Nelly. I recollect when I was a youngster being laid by the heels with typhus fever down at Jarrow, when I would have given anything for the sight of a kindly woman's face at my bedside; but I never saw anybody except the pitman's wife who kept the cottage where I lodged, and the doctor attached to the works, who had to attend to about two hundred of us for thirty pounds a year. I pulled through somehow, though.'

'Thanks to our blessed Nature,' said Spiridion, with a side-glance at Eleanor, to see if she were looking at him. 'What beneficent wonders does she not work when left to herself!'

'She has worked the beneficent wonder of giving me a rare appetite this evening,' said Mr. Chadwick; 'not that that is a wonder though, when I come to think of it, as I have it pretty nigh every day about this time. My Fan, shall I ring for dinner, or do you expect any more swells?'

Mrs. Chadwick crimsoned as the objectionable word--of the perpetual use of which she had tried so hard to break her husband--struck upon her ear; but seeing that Mr. Pratt, being engaged in conversation with Eleanor, evidently had not heard it, she merely said, 'I am waiting for Mr. Eardley, my dear James, and a friend of his whom he has promised to bring with him.'

'Any friend of his will be welcome,' said Mr. Chadwick. 'I like Eardley, and I like his pictures, though I don't quite understand them; but he puts in plenty of colour; and though I wish he wouldn't paint so many people without their clothes, I--'

'James!' whispered his wife; and at that moment the door was thrown open, and the butler announced Mr. Eardley and Mr. Huff. It was not, however, under that name that Mr. Eardley introduced his friend to the hostess. 'Let me present to you Sir Nugent Uffington, my dear Mrs. Chadwick,' said he; 'a friend whose acquaintance I made under strange circumstances in a wild place several years ago, and to whose kindness and attention I owe my life.'

'Pray don't believe a word of this, Mrs. Chadwick,' said Uffington, with a somewhat cynical smile; 'our friend Eardley carries that romantic spirit which is so invaluable to him in his painting into his daily life, and unconsciously allows it to colour his utterances. His recovery was due rather to my medicine-chest than to my exertions, and there was nothing wonderful about it.'

'You say that out of courtesy, Sir Nugent, but I have heard Mr. Eardley speak of it before,' said Mrs. Chadwick, with her most gracious smile. 'Let me introduce you to my husband--Sir Nugent Uffington.'

'Glad to know you, sir,' said Mr. Chadwick, putting out his hand--'glad to know any friend of Mr. Eardley's. Are you in this line?' pointing to the pictures on the walls.

'Not I, Mr. Chadwick,' said Uffington, with a laugh. 'I wish I were anything as useful. I have the misfortune to do nothing, to have been doing it all my life, and,' he added in rather a lower tone, 'to have made a singularly bad job of it.'

And then dinner was announced, and the conversation stopped.

Charley Ormerod was quite right when he spoke with such high praise of the quality of the dinners and the wines in Fairfax-gardens. Mr. Chadwick looked after these himself. He had a natural taste for good living, and though in his early days he had been quite content with a chump of coarse-grained meat broiled by himself over the furnace fire, and washed down by some cold weak tea out of a soda-water bottle, as soon as he could provide himself with better fare he took care to have it. 'A man is like an engine,' he used to say; 'his bearings get hot, and the whole thing goes crank and stiff, unless his works have been properly greased. Half my planning and thinking is done at night, after a good dinner and a bottle of fizz, when my Fan's in bed, and all these chattering servants are out of the way, and I sit up in the library and put down all I have got in my head. It's no good to attempt to plan anything up in the North, for there they have their heavy meal in the middle of the day, and after that I am good for nothing but to go to sleep, or to see what I have ordered is carried out; but here, after a _filly dy sole_ and a bottle of _Irroy_, I am as clear as a bell and as fresh as a two-year-old.'

The dinner on this occasion was especially good, for it was the host's boast that, whatever kudos he might have gained in the world for his 'large spreads,' his 'little feeds,' or, as Mrs. Chadwick called them, their dinners '_en petit comité_,' were really much better. Spiridion Pratt, who was a _gourmet_, revelled in the various dishes, and the rare wines brought a slight flush into Uffington's usually pale cheeks.

'Like that sherry, Sir Nugent?' cried the host, beaming from his side of the round table. 'That's some of the Emperor's wine from the Tooleries. I was in Paris at the time of the sale, and when I tasted, I determined to have some. This is the real stuff, I know, because I took care to have it put aside and brought over at once. But, lor bless you, at some of the houses where my Fan and me dine--you know the parties I am alluding to, Eardley--they have got some stuff which passes for the Emperor's wine that old Nap would never have put his beak into.'

'My dear James!' murmured Mrs. Chadwick.

'Fact, Fan,' said her husband, who misunderstood the gist of the hint--'never put his beak into; though I daresay the Swassers--what a fellow I am! there I have been and let the name out!--well, I daresay the Swassers paid a long figure for it, and believed it was old Nap's own tipple. Poor old Nap! fancy him gone, and Ujaney left alone!'

'Were you ever at the imperial court?' asked Spiridion.

'O yes,' replied the host. 'We supplied a set of engines for the imperial yacht Leagle, I think it was called--the Eagle--very like English, ain't it? And there was some talk about our building a new vessel for him, and I was sent for to see the Emperor about it. I shall never forget. Just before I started, I was talking to some funny fellows I knew then who wrote in the newspapers, and when I told them I was going to see the Emperor, one of them, named Rupert Robinson, said, "Well, then, just have the kindness to ask him for the eighteenpence he owes me." "Eighteenpence!" says I. "How can he owe you eighteenpence?" "Why," he says, "I often used to see him in the old days at Lady Blessington's, at Gore House, on a Sunday night; and one night we came home together in a cab, and he asked me to pay his share as well as my own, as he had no change, and he would pay me next time he saw me. Next time I saw him," Robinson said, "he was driving in his carriage, with an escort riding beside him, and I thought that was a bad time to ask him for the eighteenpence; so he owes it me still."'

'I suppose you did not ask the Emperor for it?' said Spiridion.

'Not I,' said Mr. Chadwick, with a laugh. 'I had enough to do to mind my own business. Our friend Eardley here tells me that you have been a great traveller, Sir Nugent?'

'Yes, I have knocked about a good deal, Mr. Chadwick,' said Uffington, turning towards him. 'I have been and done and suffered as much as most men.'

'Quite like a dear old verb, isn't he?' said Eardley, shaking back his clustering locks and smiling at Eleanor.

'I had a great notion of travelling once myself,' said Mr. Chadwick. 'When I was first apprentice, at the Jarrow works, I thought I would like to see the world, and I was very nearly running off to be a cabin-boy.'

'My dear James!' murmured Mrs. Chadwick. Then turning to Spiridion with a sweet smile, 'You too, Mr. Pratt, have been a great traveller; only the other day I was reading to Eleanor that delightful description of your being stopped by the brigands in Greece.'

'The description, I imagine, was a good deal pleasanter than the reality,' murmured Eardley. 'They kept dear old Prattikins on very short commons, and wouldn't let him have a comb to do his back hair with.'

'Well, I'm a queer kind of John Bull, I suppose, in my notions,' said Mr. Chadwick; 'but I don't hold much with all this travelling abroad and intercourse with foreign nations. It's all very well so far as business is concerned--gives us an outlet for our goods, and enables us to pick up a good many wrinkles in matters in which these fellows beat us hollow--but I don't think we have gained much by being so hand and glove with these chaps, having them at our houses, and that sort of thing.'

'Ungrateful monster,' laughed Eardley, 'to say such things when the work of the French stranger within your gates has scarcely left the table! Could any one but a Frenchman have made that _bonne femme_ soup? Is there a British hand light enough to have turned out that _soufflet_?'

'I wasn't talking about cooking,' said Mr. Chadwick; 'there they're A1, and no mistake. When I was a lad we used to think that all Frenchmen were either cooks or dancing-masters; and I imagined all French boys were brought up in the belief that Englishmen were either sailors or grooms. No; what I meant to say,' he continued, looking a little more serious, 'is, that I don't think we are quite so respectable since we have mixed so freely with foreigners.'

'You are not alluding to ourselves, James, I suppose,' interposed Mrs. Chadwick. 'I am sure that--'

'No, no, my dear Fan,' said her husband; 'I mean English people generally. It don't appear to me that we are so strong in temperance, soberness, and chastity--those three virtues which the Catechism tells us to look sharp after--as we were before the days of excursions abroad and cheap tourists' tickets.'

'I don't see that anything could possibly be more temperate than the French and the Italian gentlemen who come to this house, James. Some of the Germans are large eaters, we know, but seem to be even more so than they are from the manner in which they handle their knives and forks and swallow their food.'

'I rather think that it is to a falling off in the other virtues named to which Mr. Chadwick is making special allusion,' said Spiridion Pratt, with a smile. 'Some of our continental visitors have recently proved themselves rather destructive to the peace of families.'

'Are you speaking generally, or alluding to any special case?' asked Uffington.

'I was speaking generally,' said Spiridion; 'but there are doubtless special cases which would point the--immoral.'

'There is one, a very flagrant case, which quite bears out what my husband says,' observed Mrs. Chadwick, drawing herself up and looking as virtuous as the mother of the Gracchi. 'I understand that you have only just returned to England, Sir Nugent Uffington, and therefore, perhaps, you have not heard of it--the scandal about Lady Forestfield.'

Uffington bowed coldly. He had heard some mention of that sad story, he said.

'A sad story indeed, and a great disgrace to our English nobility, of which we are naturally so proud,' said Mrs. Chadwick. 'Anything worse than the conduct of Lady Forestfield could not well be imagined.'

Eleanor Irvine, who had been endeavouring to hide her agitation as this conversation proceeded, could restrain herself no longer. 'Surely Lady Forestfield is not entirely to blame, Fanny!' she cried. 'Surely some excuse is to be made for one who was cruelly treated and almost wholly deserted by her husband, whose sole recognition of her was to throw dust in the world's eyes!'

'Eleanor,' cried Mrs. Chadwick, bridling up, 'I cannot understand what you mean.' Then, seeing that the sharpness of her tone had been remarked by the company, she changed her voice, and said, with affected gaiety, 'You must allow me, as an old married woman, to be a much better judge of such matters than you. It is not to be surprised at,' she said, turning to Spiridion Pratt, 'that Eleanor, who has the sweetest nature in the world, should feel a strong compassion for Lady Forestfield, for they were brought up together, and in their childhood were quite like sisters, though Lady Forestfield is two or three years the elder of the two. I admire her generosity,' she added, in a lower tone; 'but of course it is my duty, in my position as elder sister and married woman, to rebuke the expression of such sentiments.'

'Gad, I don't see that,' returned Spiridion in the same undertone. 'She seems to me perfectly charming, and it is, we are told, the duty of angels to plead for the fallen.'

'You asked me if I had heard anything of this wretched case,' said Uffington to Mrs. Chadwick. 'What has been mentioned to me is, that for some time before their separation Lord Forestfield had been in the habit of treating his wife with systematic rudeness and even cruelty. If that be the case, he has himself to thank for all that has subsequently happened to him.'

'It is as bad a case against him as could possibly be,' said Eardley, turning to Uffington, who was his neighbour, and speaking quietly. 'Both before and after the birth of her child he worried her so savagely, that the baby, naturally small and weak, only lived a few months. She was desperately fond of this infant, and from the time of its death, which she attributed entirely to her husband's misconduct, she has been scarcely accountable for her actions.'

'That, I suppose, Mr. Eardley,' said Mrs. Chadwick, who caught the last words, 'will be the excuse for Lady Forestfield taking up with such people as Mrs. Ingram and Lady Northaw, and declining to associate with others who, though they cannot boast of being fast, have at least a reputation, and are visited by some of the best people.'

'I don't think,' said Mr. Chadwick, who had been silent for some time, 'that we ought to lay the blame wholly upon one or the other of these unfortunate young people. I don't quite agree with my Fan that Lady F.'s the party in fault, though I daresay she was flighty, and didn't keep herself as strict as she would have done had she lived half a century two ago; and I don't think Lord F. is to be entirely blamed, though from what I have seen of him in one or two matters of business he is a roughish customer. My verdict should be against the third person in the case; the man who, in the guise of a friend, comes into a house where, to all outward appearance at least, and for anything that he could tell, things were going on quite smoothly, and takes advantage of the opportunities of his intimacy to bring ruin upon one and misery upon both. Upon both, I say. Don't tell me--whatever sort of man this Lord Forestfield may be, however glad he may be now to be freed from his wife, he will not be able to give up all thought of her. He may get rid of her, as of course he will; and he may marry again, as they say he wants to; but he cannot get rid of the memory of her, let him be as happy as he may. Years hence he will find himself thinking about her, wondering what has become of her, what she may be like then--thinking of the early days of their courtship, when she was a pretty girl and he a likely young fellow, when their lines lay in pleasant places and all that the world held good seemed to be in store for them. Lord, Lord, they will be wretched enough then! The crime in a case of this kind belongs to the seducer. Don't you think so, Sir Nugent Uffington?'

Uffington started for an instant, as did Eardley, to whom his story was known. Then he said quietly, 'No doubt; but it brings its own punishment with it sooner or later, as he will find.'

The conversation then turned into another channel, and soon afterwards the ladies retired.

Uffington, who had been much struck with Eleanor's outburst in defence of Lady Forestfield, made up his mind to have some farther talk with her; but when they reached the drawing-room they found Mrs. Chadwick alone.

'Eleanor had a headache,' the hostess explained to Spiridion Pratt; 'and though I did all I could to persuade her, I found it impossible to make her await your coming.'

'She was right,' Uffington muttered to himself, pondering over this as he walked home. 'Headache or no headache, she is far too sensible a girl to waste her time on such a donkey as that man Pratt. There must be something more in Lady Forestfield than I imagined to enlist the sympathies of such a girl as this. For the first time for years I really begin to feel interested in something.'