Читать книгу The Martins Of Cro' Martin, Vol. II (of II) - Lever Charles James - Страница 2

The French have invented a slang word for a quality that deserves a more recognized epithet, and by the expression chic have designated a certain property by which objects assert their undoubted superiority over all their counterfeits. Thus, your coat from Nugee’s, your carriage from Leader’s, your bracelet from Storr’s, and your bonnet from Madame Palmyre, have all their own peculiar chic, or, in other words, possess a certain invisible, indescribable essence that stamps them as the best of their kind, with an excellence unattainable by imitation, and a charm all their own!

Of all the products in which this magical property insinuates itself, there is not one to which it contributes so much as the man of fashion. He is the very type of chic. To describe him you are driven to a catalogue of negatives, and you only arrive at anything like a resemblance by an enumeration of the different things he is not.

The gentleman who presented himself to Martin at the close of our last chapter was in many respects a good specimen of his order. He had entered the room, believing Martin to be there alone; but no sooner had he perceived another, and that other one not known to him, than all the buoyant gayety of his manner was suddenly toned down into a quiet seriousness; while, taking his friend’s arm, he said in a low voice, – “If you ‘re busy, my dear Martin, don’t hesitate for a moment about sending me off; I had not the slightest suspicion there was any one with you.”

“Nor is there,” said Martin, with a supercilious glance at Merl, who was endeavoring in a dozen unsuccessful ways to seem unaware of the new arrival’s presence.

“I want to introduce him to you,” said Martin.

“No, no, my dear friend, on no account.”

“I must; there’s no help for it,” said Martin, impatiently, while he whispered something eagerly in the other’s ear.

“Well, then, some other day; another time – ”

“Here and now, Claude,” said Martin, peremptorily; while, without waiting for reply, he said aloud, “Merl, I wish to present you to Lord Claude Willoughby, – Lord Claude, Mr. Herman Merl.”

Merl bowed and smirked and writhed as his Lordship, with a bland smile and a very slight bow, acknowledged the presentation.

“Had the pleasure of meeting your Lordship at Baden two summers ago,” said the Jew, with an air meant to be the ideal of fashionable ease.

“I was at Baden at the time you mention,” said he, coldly.

“I used to watch your Lordship’s game with great attention; you won heavily, I think?”

“I don’t remember, just now,” said he, carelessly; not, indeed, that such was the fact, or that he desired it should be thought so; he only wished to mark his sense of what he deemed an impertinence.

“The man who can win at rouge-et-noir can do anything, in my opinion,” said Merl.

“What odds are you taking on Rufus?” said Martin to Willoughby, and without paying the slightest attention to Merl’s remark.

“Eleven to one; but I’ll not take it again. Hecuba is rising hourly, and some say she ‘ll be the favorite yet.”

“Is Rufus your Lordship’s horse?” said the Jew, insinuatingly.

Willoughby bowed, and continued to write in his note-book.

“And you said the betting was eleven to one on the field, my Lord?”

“It ought to be fourteen to one, at least.”

“I ‘ll give you fourteen to one, my Lord, just for the sake of a little interest in the race.”

Willoughby ceased writing, and looked at him steadfastly for a second or two. “I have not said that the odds were fourteen to one.”

“I understand you perfectly, my Lord; you merely thought that they would be, or, at least, ought to be.”

“Merl wants a bet with you, in fact,” said Martin, as he applied alight to his meerschaum; “and if you won’t have him, I will.”

“What shall it be, sir,” said Lord Claude, pencil in hand; “in ponies – fifties?”

“Oh, ponies, my Lord. I only meant it, just as I said, to give me something to care for in the race.”

“Will you put him up at the ‘Cercle’ after that?” whispered Martin, with a look of sly malice.

“I’ll tell you when the match is over,” said Willoughby, laughing; “but if I won’t, here ‘s one that will. That’s a neat phaeton of Cavendish’s.” And at the same instant Martin opened the window, and made a signal with his handkerchief.

“That’s the thing for you, Merl,” said Martin, pointing down to a splendid pair of dark chestnuts harnessed to a handsome phaeton. “It’s worth five hundred pounds to any fellow starting an equipage to chance upon one of Cavendish’s. He has not only such consummate taste in carriage and harness, but he makes his nags perfection.”

“He drives very neatly,” said Willoughby.

“What was it he gave for that near-side horse? – a thousand pounds, I think.”

“Twelve hundred and fifty, and refused a hundred for my bargain,” said a very diminutive, shrewd-looking man of about five-and-thirty, who entered the room with great affectation of juvenility. “I bought him for a cab, never expecting to ‘see his like again,’ as Shakspeare says.”

“And you offered the whole concern yesterday to Damre-mont for fifty thousand francs?”

“No, Harry, that’s a mistake. I said I ‘d play him a match at piquet, whether he gave seventy thousand for the equipage or nothing. It was he that proposed fifty thousand. Mine was a handsome offer, I think.”

“I call it a most munificent one,” said Martin. “By the way, you don’t know my friend here, Mr. Merl, Sir Spencer Cavendish.” And the baronet stuck his glass in his eye, and scanned the stranger as unscrupulously as though he were a hack at Tattersairs.

“Where did he dig him up, Claude?” whispered he, after a second.

“In India, I fancy; or at the Cape.”

“That fellow has something to do with the hell in St. James’s Street; I ‘ll swear I know his face.”

“I ‘ve been telling Merl that he ‘s in rare luck to find such a turn-out as that in the market; that is, if you still are disposed to sell.”

“Oh, yes, I’ll sell it; give him the tiger, boots, cockade, and all, – everything except that Skye terrier. You shall have the whole, sir, for two thousand pounds; or, if you prefer it – ”

A certain warning look from Lord Claude suddenly arrested his words, and he added, after a moment, – “But I ‘d rather sell it off, and think no more of it.”

“Try the nags; Sir Spencer, I’m sure, will have no objection,” said Martin. But the baronet’s face looked anything but concurrence with the proposal.

“Take them a turn round the Bois de Boulogne, Merl,” said Martin, laughing at his friend’s distress.

“And he may have the turn-out at his own price after the trial,” muttered Lord Claude, with a quiet smile.

“Egad! I should think so,” whispered Cavendish; “for, assuredly, I should never think of being seen in it again.”

“If Sir Spencer Cavendish has no objection, – if he would permit his groom to drive me just down the Boulevards and the Rue Rivoli – ”

The cool stare of the baronet did not permit him to finish. It was really a look far more intelligible than common observers might have imagined, for it conveyed something like recognition, – a faint approach to an intimation that said, “I ‘m persuaded that we have met before.”

“Yes, that is the best plan. Let the groom have the ribbons,” said Martin, laughing with an almost schoolboy enjoyment of a trick. “And don’t lose time, Merl, for Sir Spencer would n’t miss his drive in the Champs Elysees for any consideration.”

“Gentlemen, I am your very humble and much obliged servant!” said Cavendish, as soon as Merl had quitted the room. “If that distinguished friend of yours should not buy my carriage – ”

“But he will,” broke in Martin; “he must buy it.”

“He ought, I think,” said Lord Claude. “If I were in his place, there’s only one condition I ‘d stipulate for.”

“And that is – ”

“That you should drive with him one day – one would be enough – from the Barrière de l‘Étoile to the Louvre.”

“This is all very amusing, gentlemen, most entertaining,” said Cavendish, tartly; “but who is he? – I don’’t mean that, – but what is he?”

“Martin’s banker, I fancy,” said Lord Claude.

“Does he lend any sum from five hundred to twenty thousand on equitable terms on approved personal security?” said Cavendish, imitating the terms of the advertisements.

“He ‘ll allow all he wins from you to remain in your hands at sixty per cent interest, if he doesn’t want cash!” said Martin, angrily.

“Oh, then, I ‘m right. It is my little Moses of St. James’s Street. He was n’t always as flourishing as we see him now. Oh dear, if any man, three years back, had told me that this fellow would have proposed seating himself in my phaeton for a drive round Paris, I don’t believe – nay, I ‘m sure – my head couldn’t have stood it.”

“You know him, then?” said Willoughby.

“I should think every man about town a dozen years ago must know him. There was a kind of brood of these fellows; we used to call them Joseph and his brethren. One sold cigars, another vended maraschino; this discounted your bills, that took your plate or your horses – ay, or your wardrobe – on a bill of sale, and handed you over two hundred pounds to lose at his brother’s hell in the evening. Most useful scoundrels they were, – equally expert on ‘Change and in the Coulisses of the Opera!”

“I will say this for him,” said Martin, “he ‘s not a hard fellow to deal with; he does not drive a bargain ungenerously.”

“Your hangman is the tenderest fellow in the world,” said Cavendish, “till the final moment. It’s only in adjusting the last turn under the ear that he shows himself ‘ungenerous.’”

“Are you deep with him, Harry?” said Willoughby, who saw a sudden paleness come over Martin’s face.

“Too deep!” said he, with a bitter effort at a laugh, – “a great deal too deep.”

“We ‘re all too deep with those fellows,” said Cavendish, as, stretching out his legs, he contemplated the shape and lustre of his admirably fitting boots. “One begins by some trumpery loan or so; thence you go on to a play transaction or a betting-book with them, and you end – egad, you end by having the fellow at dinner!”

“Martin wants his friend to be put up for the Club,” said Willoughby.

“Eh, what? At the ‘Cercle,’ do you mean?”

“Why not? Is it so very select?”

“No, not exactly that; there are the due proportions of odd reputations, half reputations, and no reputations; but remember, Martin, that however black they be now, they all began white. When they started, at least, they were gentlemen.”

“I suspect that does not make the case much better.”

“No; but it makes ours better, in associating with them. Come, come, you know as well as any one that this is impossible, and that if you should do it to-day, I should follow the lead to-morrow, and our Club become only an asylum for unpayable tailors and unappeasable bootmakers!”

“You go too fast, sir,” exclaimed Martin, in a tone of anger. “I never intended to pay my debts by a white ball in the ballot-box, nor do I think that Mr. Merl would relinquish his claim on some thousand pounds, even for the honor of being the club colleague of Sir Spencer Cavendish.”

“Then I know him better,” said the other, tapping his-boot with his cane; “he would, and he ‘d think it a right good bargain besides. From seeing these fellows at racecourses and betting-rooms, always cold, calm, and impassive, never depressed by ill-luck, as little elated by good, we fall into the mistake of esteeming them as a kind of philosophers in life, without any of those detracting influences that make you and Willoughby, and even myself, sometimes rash and headstrong. It is a mistake, though; they have a weakness, – and a terrible weakness, – which is, their passion to be thought in fashionable society. Yes, they can’t resist that! All their shrewd calculations, all their artful schemes, dissolve into thin air, at the bare prospect of being recognized ‘in society.’ I have studied this flaw in them for many a year back. I ‘ll not say I haven’t derived advantage from it.”

“And yet you ‘d refuse him admission into a club,” cried Martin.

“Certainly. A club is a Democracy, where each man, once elected, is the equal of his neighbor. Society is, on the other hand, an absolute monarchy, where your rank flows from the fountain of honor, – the host. Take him along with you to her Grace’s ‘tea,’ or my Lady’s reception this evening, and see if the manner of the mistress of the house does not assign him his place, as certainly as if he were marshalled to it by a lackey. All his mock tranquillity and assumed ease of manner will not be proof against the icy dignity of a grande dame; but in the Club he’s as good as the best, or he’ll think so, which comes to the same thing.”

“Cavendish is right, – that is, as much so as he can be in anything,” said Willoughby, laughing. “Don’t put him up, Martin.”

“Then what am I to do? I have given a sort of a pledge. He is not easily put off; he does not lightly relinquish an object.”

“Take him off the scent. Introduce him at the Embassy. Take him to the Courcelles.”

“This is intolerable,” broke in Martin, angrily. “I ask for advice, and you reply by a sneer and a mockery.”

“Not at all. I never was more serious. But here he comes! Look only how the fellow lolls back in the phaeton. Just see how contemptuously he looks down on the foot-travellers. I’d lay on another hundred for that stare; for, assuredly, he has already made the purchase in his own mind.”

“Well, Merl, what do you say to Sir Spencer’s taste in horseflesh?” said Martin, as he entered.

“They ‘re nice hacks; very smart.”

“Nice hacks!” broke in Cavendish, “why, sir, they’re both thoroughbred; the near horse is by Tiger out of a Crescent mare, and the off one won the Acton steeple-chase. When you said hacks, therefore, you made a cruel blunder.”

“Well, it’s what a friend of mine called them just now,” said Merl; “and remarked, moreover, that the large horse had been slightly fired on the – the – I forget the name he gave it.”

“You probably remember your friend’s name better,” said Cavendish, sneeringly. “Who was he, pray?”

“Massingbred, – we call him Jack Massingbred; he’s the Member for somewhere in Ireland.”

“Poor Jack!” muttered Cavendish, “how hard up he must be!”

“But you like the equipage, Merl?” said Martin, who had a secret suspicion that it was now Cavendish’s turn for a little humiliation.

“Well, it’s neat. The buggy – ”

“The buggy! By Jove, sir, you have a precious choice of epithets! Please to let me inform you that full-blooded horses are not called hacks, nor one of Leader’s park-phaetons is not styled a buggy.”

Martin threw himself into a chair, and after a moment’s struggle, burst out into a fit of laughter.

“I think we may make a deal after all, Sir Spencer,” said Merl, who accepted the baronet’s correction with admirable self-control.

“No, sir; perfectly impossible; take my word for it, any transaction would be difficult between us. Good-bye, Martin; adieu, Claude.” And with this brief leave-taking the peppery Sir Spencer left the room, more flushed and fussy than he had entered it.

“If you knew Sir Spencer Cavendish as long as we have known him, Mr. Merl,” said Lord Claude, in his blandest of voices, “you’d not be surprised at this little display of warmth. It is the only weakness in a very excellent fellow.”

“I ‘m hot, too, my Lord,” said Merl, with the very slightest accentuation of the “initial H,” “and he was right in saying that dealings would be difficult between us.”

“You mentioned Massingbred awhile ago, Merl. Why not ask him to second you at the Club?” said Martin, rousing himself suddenly from a train of thought.

“Well, somehow, I thought that he and you did n’t exactly pull together; that there was an election contest, – a kind of a squabble.”

“I ‘m sure that he never gave you any reason to suspect a coldness between us; I know that I never did,” said Martin, calmly. “We are but slightly acquainted, it is true, but I should be surprised to learn that there was any ill-feeling between us.”

“One’s opponent at the hustings is pretty much the same thing as one’s adversary at a game, – he is against you to-day, and may be your partner to-morrow; so that, putting even better motives aside, it were bad policy to treat him as an implacable enemy,” said Lord Claude, with his accustomed suavity. “Besides, Mr. Merl, you know the crafty maxim of the French moralist, ‘Always treat your enemies as though one day they were to become your friends.’” And with this commonplace, uttered in a tone and with a manner that gave it all the semblance of a piece of special advice, his Lordship took his hat, and, squeezing Martin’s hand, moved towards the door.

“Come in here for a moment,” said Martin, pushing open the door into an adjoining dressing-room, and closing it carefully after them. “So much for wanting to do a good-natured thing,” cried he, peevishly. “I thought to help Cavendish to get rid of those ‘screws,’ and the return he makes me is to outrage this man.”

“What are your dealings with him?” asked Willoughby» anxiously.

“Play matters, play debts, loans, securities, post-obits, and every other blessed contrivance you can think of to swamp a man’s present fortune and future prospects. I don’t think he is a bad fellow; I mean, I don’t suspect he ‘d press heavily upon me, with any fair treatment on my part. My impression, in short, is that he’d forgive my not meeting his bill, but he ‘d never get over my not inviting him to a dinner!”

“Well,” said Willoughby, encouragingly, “we live in admirable times for such practices. There used to be a vulgar prejudice in favor of men that one knew, and names that the world was familiar with. It is gone by entirely; and if you only present your friend – don’t wince at the title – your friend, I say – as the rich Mr. Merl, the man who owns shares in mines, canals, and collieries, whose speculations count by tens of thousands, and whose credit rises to millions, you’ll never be called on to apologize for his parts of speech, or make excuse for his solecisms in good breeding.”

“Will you put up his name, then, at the Club?” asked Martin, eagerly. “It would not do for me to do so.”

“To be sure I will, and Massingbred shall be his seconder.” And with this cheering pledge Lord Claude bade him good-bye, and left him free to return to Mr. Merl in the drawing-room. That gentleman had, however, already departed, to the no small astonishment of Martin, who now threw himself lazily down on a sofa, to ponder over his difficulties and weave all manner of impracticable schemes to meet them.

They were, indeed, very considerable embarrassments. He had raised heavy sums at most exorbitant rates, and obtained money – for the play-table – by pledging valuable reversions of various kinds, for Merl somehow was the easiest of all people to deal with; one might have fancied that he lent his money only to afford himself an occasion of sympathy with the borrower, just as he professed that he merely betted “to have a little interest in the race.” Whatever Martin, then, suggested in the way of security never came amiss; whether it were a farm, a mill, a quarry, or a lead mine, he accepted it at once, and, as Martin deemed, without the slightest knowledge or investigation, little suspecting that there was not a detail of his estate, nor a resource of his property, with which the wily Jew was not more familiar than himself. In fact, Mr. Merl was an astonishing instance of knowledge on every subject by which money was to be made, and he no more advanced loans upon an encumbered estate than he backed the wrong horse or bid for a copied picture. There is a species of practical information excessively difficult to describe, which is not connoisseurship, but which supplies the place of that quality, enabling him who possesses it to estimate the value of an object, without any admixture of those weakening prejudices which beset your mere man of taste. Now, Mr. Merl had no caprices about the color of the horse he backed, no more than for the winning seat at cards; he could not be warped from his true interests by any passing whim, and whether he cheapened a Correggio or discounted a bill, he was the same calm, dispassionate calculator of the profit to come of the transaction.

Latterly, however, he had thrown out a hint to Martin that he was curious to see some of that property on which he had made such large advances; and this wish – which, according to the frame of mind he happened to be in at the moment, struck Martin as a mere caprice or a direct menace – was now the object of his gloomy reveries. We have not tracked his steps through the tortuous windings of his moneyed difficulties; it is a chapter in life wherein there is wonderfully little new to record; the Jew-lender and his associates, the renewed bill and the sixty per cent, the non-restored acceptances flitting about the world, sold and resold as damaged articles, but always in the end falling into the hands of a “most respectable party,” and proceeded on as a true debt; then, the compromises for time, for silence, for secrecy, – since these transactions are rarely, if ever, devoid of some unhappy incident that would not bear publicity; and there are invariably little notes beginning “Dear Moses,” which would argue most ill-chosen intimacies. These are all old stories, and the “Times” and the “Chronicle” are full of them. There is a terrible sameness about them, too. The dupe and the villain are stock characters that never change, and the incidents are precisely alike in every case. Humble folk, who are too low for fashionable follies, wonder how the self-same artifices have always the same success, and cannot conceal their astonishment at the innocence of our young men about town; and yet the mystery is easily solved. The dupe is, in these cases, just as unprincipled as his betrayer, and their negotiation is simply a game of skill, in which Israel is not always the winner.

If we have not followed Martin’s steps through these dreary labyrinths, it is because the path is a worn one; for the same reason, too, we decline to keep him company in his ponderings over them. All that his troubles had taught him was an humble imitation of the tricky natures of those he dealt with; so that he plotted and schemed and contrived, till his very head grew weary with the labor. And so we leave him.