Читать книгу The Daltons (Historical Novel) - Charles James Lever - Страница 18

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ONSLOW'S first thought, on awaking the next morning, was of last night's acquaintance, but all the information he could obtain concerning him was that he was an Englishman who had passed the summer in Baden, and during the season knew and was known by every one. The waiter called him, in the usual formulary, “a very nice gentleman;” and seemed by his manner to infer that any further account might be had by paying for it. Onslow, if he even understood the hint, was not the man to avail himself of it; so he simply ordered him to bring the hotel book, in which the names of all travellers are inscribed, and at once discovered that the proprietor of the humble entresol, No. 6, was a Mr. Albert Jekyl, with the ordinary qualification attached to him of “Rentier Anglais.” Searching back in the same instructive volume, he found that, on his arrival in June, Mr. Jekyl had occupied a small apartment on the first floor, from which he had subsequently removed to the second; thence to a single room in the third story, and finally settled down in the quiet seclusion of the small chamber where George had first seen him. These were very small materials from which to compile a history, but at least they conveyed one inference, and that a very common one, that the height of Mr. Jekyl's fortune and that of his dwelling observed to each other an inverse proportion, and that, as his means went down, he went up. If, then, no very valuable contribution to the gentleman's history was contained here, at least the page recorded his name; and George, reopening Norwood's letter, satisfied himself that this was the same confiding individual who had intrusted the noble viscount with a loan of twenty pounds. George now remembered to have seen his card on Lady Hester's table, with inquiry after Sir Stafford. “Poor fellow!” thought he; “another victim of 'trente-et-un.' They have cleared him out at the tables, and he is either ashamed to write home, or his friends have refused to assist him. And Norwood, too the heartlessness of putting to contribution a poor young fellow like this!” Onslow thought worse of this than of fifty other sharp things of the noble Lord's doing, and of some of which he had been himself the victim.

“I'll call upon him this very morning!” said George, half aloud, and with the tone and air of a man who feels he has said a very generous thing, and expressed a sentiment that he is well aware will expose him to a certain amount of reprobation. “Jekyl, after all, is a right good name. Lady Hester said something about Jekyls that she knew, or was related to. Good style of fellow he looked a little tigerish, but that comes of the Continent. If he be really presentable, too, my Lady will be glad to receive him in her present state of destitution. Norwood's ungracious message was a bore, to be sure, but then he need not deliver it there was no necessity of taking trouble to be disagreeable or, better again far better,” thought he, and he burst out laughing at the happy notion, “I 'll misunderstand his meaning, and pay the money. An excellent thought; for as I am about to book up a heavy sum to his Lordship, it 's only deducting twenty pounds and handing it to Jekyl, and I 'll be sworn he wants it most of us all.”

The more Onslow reflected on it, the more delighted was he with this admirable device; and it is but fair to add, that however gratified at the opportunity of doing a kindness, he was even better pleased at the thought of how their acquaintance at the “Grosvenor” and the “Ultras” would laugh at the “sharp viscount's being sold.” There was only one man of all Onslow's set on whom he would have liked to practise this jest, and that man was Norwood. Having decided upon this plan, he next thought of the execution of it, and this he determined should be by letter. A short note, conveying Norwood's message and the twenty pounds, would save all explanation, and spare Jekyl any unpleasant feeling the discussion of a private circumstance might occasion.

Onslow's note concluded with his “thanks for Mr. Jekyl's kindness on the preceding evening,” and expressing a wish to know “at what hour Mr. J. would receive a visit from him.”

Within a very few minutes after the billet was despatched, a servant announced Mr. Albert Jekyl; and that young gentleman, in the glory of a very magnificent brocade dressing-gown, and a Greek cap, with slippers of black velvet embroidered in gold, entered the room.

Onslow, himself a distinguished member of that modern school of dandyism whose pride lies in studs and shirt-pins, in watch-chains, rings, and jewelled canes, was struck by the costly elegance of his visitor's toilette. The opal buttons at his wrists; the single diamond, of great size and brilliancy, on his finger; even the massive amber mouthpiece of the splendid meerschaum he carried in his hand, were all evidences of the most expensive tastes. “Could this by possibility be the man he had seen at supper?” was the question he at once asked himself; but there was no time to discuss the point, as Jekyl, in a voice almost girlish in its softness, said,

“I could not help coming at once to thank you, Mr. Onslow, for your polite note, and say how gratified I feel at making your acquaintance. Maynard often spoke of you to me; and I confess I was twenty times a day tempted to introduce myself.”

“Maynard Sir Horace Maynard!” cried Onslow, with a slight flush, half pleasure, half surprise, for the baronet was the leader of the set George belonged to, a man of great fortune, ancient family, the most successful on the English Turf, and the envy of every young fellow about town. “Do you know Maynard?”

“Oh, very well indeed,” lisped Jekyl; “and like him much.”

Onslow could not help a stare at the man who, with perfect coolness and such an air of patronage, professed his opinion of the most distinguished fashionable of the day.

“He has a very pretty taste in equipage,” continued Jekyl, “but never could attain to the slightest knowledge of a dinner.”

Onslow was thunderstruck. Maynard, whose entertainments were the triumph of the Clarendon, thus criticised by the man he had seen supping like a mouse on a morsel of mouldy cheese!

“Talking of dinners, by the way,” said Jekyl, “what became of Merewater?”

“Lord Merewater? he was in waiting when we left England.”

“A very tidy cook he used to have, a Spaniard called Jose, a perfect hand at all the Provencal dishes. Good creature, Merewater. Don't you think so?”

Ouslow muttered a kind of half-assent; and added, “I don't know him.” Indeed, the lord in question was reputed as insufferably proud, and as rarely admitting a commoner to the honor of his acquaintance.

“Poor Merewater! I remember playing him such a trick: to this hour he does not know who did it. I stole the menu of one of his grand dinners, and gave it to old Lord Bristock's cook, a creature that might have made the messes for an emigrant ship, and such a travesty of an entertainment never was seen. Merewater affected illness, and went away from the table firmly persuaded that the whole was got up to affront him.”

“I thought the Earl of Bristock lived well and handsomely,” said George.

“Down at Brentwood it was very well one was in the country and grouse and woodcocks, and salmon and pheasants, came all naturally and seasonably; besides, he really had some very remarkable Burgundy; and, though few people will drink it nowadays, Chambertin is a Christmas wine.”

The cheese and the decanter of water were uppermost in George's mind, but he said nothing, suffering his companion to run on, which he did, over a wide expanse of titled and distinguished families, with all of whom he appeared to have lived on the closest terms of intimacy. Certainly of those Onslow himself knew, Jekyl related twenty little traits and tokens that showed he was speaking with true knowledge of the parties. Unlike Haggerstone, he rarely, if ever, alluded to any of those darker topics which form the staple of scandal. A very gentle ridicule of some slight eccentricity, a passing quiz of some peculiarity in dress, voice, or manner, was about the extent of Jekyl's criticism, which on no occasion betrayed any malice. Even the oddities that he portrayed were usually done by some passing bit of mimicry of the individual in question. These he threw into the dialogue of his story without halt or impediment, and which, being done with great tact, great command of face, and a most thorough appreciation of humor, were very amusing little talents, and contributed largely to his social success. Onslow laughed heartily at many of the imitations, and thus recognized characters that were introduced into a narrative without the trouble of announcing them.

“You've heard, perhaps, the series of mishaps which compelled us to take refuge here,” said George, leading the way to what he supposed would induce an equal degree of communicativeness on the other side.

“Oh! yes, the landlord told me of your disasters.”

“After all, I believe the very worst of them was coming to this place in such a season.”

“It is certainly seeing it en papillate” said Jekyl, smiling; “and you, perhaps, are not an admirer of beauty unadorned.”

“Say, rather, of Nature at her ugliest; for whatever it may be in summer, with foliage, and clear streams, flowers, smart folk airing and driving about, equipage, music, movement, and merry voices, now it is really too dismal. Pray, how do you get through the day?”

Jekyl smiled one of his quiet, equivocal smiles, and slightly raised his shoulders without speaking.

“Do you shoot?”

“No,” said he.

“But why do I ask? there's nothing to shoot. You ride, then?”

“No.”

“Cigars will do a great deal; but, confound it, there must be a large share of the day very heavy on your hands, even with a reasonable allowance for reading and writing.”

“Seldom do either!” said Jekyl, with his usual imperturbed manner.

“You have n't surely got up a flirtation with some 'Frdulein with yellow hair '?”

“I cannot lay claim to such good fortune. I really do nothing. I have not even the usual English resource of a terrier to jump over my stick, nor was I early enough initiated into the mystery of brandy-and-water in fact, a less occupied individual cannot well be imagined; but somehow you'll smile if I say I am not bored.”

“It would be very ungenerous, then, to conceal your secret,” cried Onslow; “for assuredly the art of killing time here, without killing one's self, is worth knowing.”

“The misfortune is, I cannot communicate it; that is, even giving me credit for possessing one, my skill is like that of some great medical practitioner, who has learnt to look on disease with such practised eyes that the appropriate remedy rises as it were instinctively to his mind, he knows not how or why, and who dies, without being able to transmit the knowledge to a successor. I have, somewhat in the same way, become an accomplished idler; and with such success that the dreariest day of rain that ever darkened the dirty windows of a village inn, the most scorching dog-day that ever emptied the streets of an Italian city, and sent all the inhabitants to their siesta, never hipped me. I have spent a month with perfect satisfaction in quarantine, and bobbed for three weeks in a calm at sea, with no other inconvenience than the moans of my fellow-passengers. There 's no secret in it, Mr. Onslow; or, if there be, it lies in this pretty discovery, that we are always bored by our habit of throwing ourselves on the resources of somebody else, who, in his turn, looks out for another, and so on. Now, a man in a fever never dreams of cooling his hand by laying it on another patient's cheek; yet this is what we do. To be thoroughly bored, you must associate yourself with some half-dozen tired, weary, dyspeptic twaddles, and make up a joint-stock bank of your several incapacities, learn to growl in chorus, and you'll be able to go home and practise it as a solo.”

“And have you been completely alone here of late?” said George, who began to fear that the sermon on ennui was not unaccompanied by a taste of the evil.

“Occasionally I 've chatted for half an hour with two gentlemen who reside here, a Colonel Haggerstone—”

“By the way, who is he?” broke in Onslow, eagerly.

“He has been traced back to Madras, but the most searching inquiries have failed to elicit anything further.”

“Is he the man they called Arlington's Colonel Haggerstone?”

Jekyl nodded; but with an air that seemed to say, he would not enter more deeply into the subject.

“And your other companion who is he?”

“Peter Dalton, of I am ashamed to say I forget where,” said Jekyl; who, at once assuming Dalton's bloated look, in a well-feigned Irish accent, went on: “a descendant of as ancient and as honorable a familee as any in the three kingdoms, and if a little down in the world bad luck to them that done it! just as ready as ever he was to enjoy agreeable society and the ganial flow of soul.”

“He 's the better of the two, I take it,” said Onslow.

“More interesting, certainly, just as a ruined chateau is a more picturesque object than a new police-station or a cut-stone penitentiary. There 's another feature also which ought to give him the preference. I have seen two very pretty faces from time to time as I have passed the windows, and which I conjecture to belong to his daughters.”

“Have you not made their acquaintance?” asked Onslow, in some surprise.

“I grieve to say I have not,” sighed Jekyl, softly.

“Why, the matter should not be very difficult, one might opine, in such a place, at such a time, and with—”

He hesitated, and Jekyl added,

“With such a papa, you were about to say. Well, that is precisely the difficulty. Had my excellent friend, Peter, been a native of any other country, I flatter myself I should have known how to make my advances; but with these dear Irish their very accessibility is a difficulty of no common order. Assume an air of deference and respect, and they 'll set you down for a cold formalist, with whom they can have nothing in common. Try the opposite line, and affect the free and easy, and the chances are that you have a duel to fight before you know you have offended. I confess that I have made several small advances, and thrown out repeated little hints about loneliness, and long evenings, and so forth; and although he has concurred with me in every word, yet his practice has never followed his precept. But I don't despair. What say you, if we attack the fortress as allies? I have a notion we should succeed?” “With all my heart. What's your plan?” “At this moment I have formed none, nor is there need of any. Let us go out, like the knight-errants of old, in search of adventures, and see if they will not befall us. The first step will be to make Dalton's acquaintance. Now, he always takes his walk in bad weather in the great Saal below; should he not make his appearance there to-day, as he has already absented himself for some days, I 'll call to inquire after him at his own house. You 'll accompany me. The rest we 'll leave to fortune.”

Although On slow could not see that this step could lead to anything beyond a civil reply to a civil demand, he assented readily, and promised to meet his companion at four o'clock the same evening. As for Jekyl, he took a very different view of the whole transaction, for he knew that while to him there might be considerable difficulty in establishing any footing with the Daltons, the son of the wealthy baronet would be, in all likelihood, very differently looked on. In presenting him, thought he, I shall have become the friend of the family at once. It had often before been his fortune in life to have made valuable acquaintances in this manner; and although the poor Daltons were very unlikely to figure in the category of profitable friends, they would at least afford an agreeable resource against the dulness of wintry evenings, and prevent what he himself called the “demoralization” of absence from female society. Lastly, the scheme promised to establish a close intimacy between Onslow and himself; and here was a benefit worth all the others.