Читать книгу Devereux — Complete - Эдвард Джордж Бульвер-Литтон, Эдвард Бульвер-Литтон - Страница 23

THE BEAU IN HIS DEN, AND A PHILOSOPHER DISCOVERED

MR. FIELDING having twice favoured me with visits, which found me from home, I thought it right to pay my respects to him; accordingly one morning I repaired to his abode. It was situated in a street which had been excessively the mode some thirty years back; and the house still exhibited a stately and somewhat ostentatious exterior. I observed a considerable cluster of infantine ragamuffins collected round the door, and no sooner did the portal open to my summons than they pressed forward in a manner infinitely more zealous than respectful. A servant in the Austrian livery, with a broad belt round his middle, officiated as porter. “Look, look!” cried one of the youthful gazers, “look at the Beau’s keeper!” This imputation on his own respectability and that of his master, the domestic seemed by no means to relish; for, muttering some maledictory menace, which I at first took to be German, but which I afterwards found to be Irish, he banged the door in the faces of the intrusive impertinents, and said, in an accent which suited very ill with his Continental attire,—

“And is it my master you’re wanting, Sir?”

“It is.”

“And you would be after seeing him immediately?”

“Rightly conjectured, my sagacious friend.”

“Fait then, your honour, my master’s in bed with a terrible fit of the megrims.”

“Then you will favour me by giving this card to your master, and expressing my sorrow at his indisposition.”

Upon this the orange-coloured lacquey, very quietly reading the address on the card, and spelling letter by letter in an audible mutter, rejoined,

“C—o—u (cou) n—t (unt) Count, D—e—v. Och, by my shoul, and it’s Count Devereux after all I’m thinking?”

“You think with equal profundity and truth.”

“You may well say that, your honour. Stip in a bit: I’ll tell my master; it is himself that will see you in a twinkling!”

“But you forget that your master is ill?” said I.

“Sorrow a bit for the matter o’ that: my master is never ill to a jontleman.”

And with this assurance “the Beau’s keeper” ushered me up a splendid staircase into a large, dreary, faded apartment, and left me to amuse myself with the curiosities within, while he went to perform a cure upon his master’s “megrims.” The chamber, suiting with the house and the owner, looked like a place in the other world set apart for the reception of the ghosts of departed furniture. The hangings were wan and colourless; the chairs and sofas were most spiritually unsubstantial; the mirrors reflected all things in a sepulchral sea-green; even a huge picture of Mr. Fielding himself, placed over the chimney-piece, seemed like the apparition of a portrait, so dim, watery, and indistinct had it been rendered by neglect and damp. On a huge tomb-like table in the middle of the room, lay two pencilled profiles of Mr. Fielding, a pawnbroker’s ticket, a pair of ruffles, a very little muff, an immense broadsword, a Wycherley comb, a jackboot, and an old plumed hat; to these were added a cracked pomatum-pot containing ink, and a scrap of paper, ornamented with sundry paintings of hearts and torches, on which were scrawled several lines in a hand so large and round that I could not avoid seeing the first verse, though I turned away my eyes as quickly as possible; that verse, to the best of my memory, ran thus: “Say, lovely Lesbia, when thy swain.” Upon the ground lay a box of patches, a periwig, and two or three well thumbed books of songs. Such was the reception-room of Beau Fielding, one indifferently well calculated to exhibit the propensities of a man, half bully, half fribble; a poet, a fop, a fighter, a beauty, a walking museum of all odd humours, and a living shadow of a past renown. “There are changes in wit as in fashion,” said Sir William Temple, and he proceeds to instance a nobleman who was the greatest wit of the court of Charles I., and the greatest dullard in that of Charles II.13