part I

should not be afraid to show clean linen to any man, Bow or whatsoever."

"'Tis not to talk of plackets that I called you, hussy, but of packets--love-packets, notes, letters, assignations."

Betty began to understand. She remembered how they had met Mr. Ripple that morning in Curtain Garden, and at once connected the two incidents.

"'Twould be about this very forenoon that you are talking, ma'am?"

The widow was surprized. She had expected an impregnable barrier of mock stupidity.

"It would," she answered severely.

"Well, there now! And if I didn't say as 'twas very wrong, but indeed, he was so genteel and made such very grand bows that I didn't think as 'twould be kind to refuse him."

"Refuse him what?"

"Why, direction, ma'am, for the handsome poor soul was lost in the Maze. He was just twirling around from North to South like the weathercock on the old Parish Church at home."

"Does it take an hour and a half to direct a man out of a shrubbery?"

"No, indeed, ma'am, but hearing we was from Hampshire, he fell a-talking and said as when he was last there he was staying with my Lord Senna at Camomile Hall, and was bosom friend of Mr. the Honourable John Squills."

The widow grew interested. The latter had once attended a hunting breakfast at Courteen Grange.

"And what was the loquacious gentleman's name?"

"Ah there! indeed, 'twas wrong of me, but if I didn't go and forget to axe him!"

"Idiot!" said Mrs. Courteen, "and where does he lodge?"

"He intends to post to Bristol Well to-night."

"Is this true?"

"La, dearest ma'am, how does I know. But he spoke as though 'twas."

"You are a pair of simpletons. Lud! you might have been ravished and no one the wiser. I doubt you both deserve a whipping."

Mrs. Courteen dismissed the subject and turned to survey the ravages of emotion on her own face. Betty retired to warn her young mistress.

The widow was considerably vexed. Vain woman as she was, she was not too dull to perceive that the Beau's complaint of her daughter levelled an indirect reproof at herself. The late Squire Courteen, a-man of plethorick habit and a good seat, had broken his neck over a five-barred gate more than seven years ago. Some said his recklessness was too deliberate. Certainly the week before, young Mr. Standish had left the neighbourhood in a great hurry. Moreover when the Will was read it appeared that a codicil had been added the day before the Squire died by which his lady had forfeited every halfpenny of his money if she married before her daughter and by an ingenious stroke did the same if she failed to find a husband during the ensuing six months. Farther, a provision was inserted that this husband must be ten years younger than herself. It was all very much complicated and extremely malicious.

Mrs. Courteen fanned herself reflectively. She was perfectly happy in the ridiculous attentions and elderly gallantries of Major Tarry and Justice Moon. At twenty-nine she had still possessed enough florid beauty to excuse her ill-spelled love-letters. Moreover, she had a husband and was safe sport for young gentlemen who lost the hounds somewhat early in the day. When she was widowed, most of her attraction vanished. She grew fat and had to content herself with middle-aged suitors for whom she became a placid ideal on the dull journey of their lives. Mrs. Courteen continued to fan herself.

That absurd codicil drifted across her thoughts. If Phyllida married she was condemned to poverty or a young husband. Yet, after all, Moon or Tarry had enough--not much, but enough; but then both firmly believed in the annuity. The bitterness of her husband's dying jest stung her for the first time. What a fool she would be made to seem! Certainly Phyllida must not be allowed a wedding; that was the solution.

How fatiguing solutions were, to be sure! She felt quite vapoured. At any rate she would look after her for the future. If she had a gallant he should be discovered. If Betty's tale were true, why, prevention was better than cure.

"Alas!" sighed the widow. "I shall play indifferent well and yet--no matter. Perhaps I shall hold Spadille every hand of the game." Wafted by this pleasant hope, the widow sailed upstairs to assume the scarlet and black gown and the spade-patch which she wore to propitiate the cards; also to embellish her fingers with rings; also to trim her nails to a perfect curve and polish to whiteness the peering moon at their base. To such cardboard emotions was this lady come whose husband broke his neck out hunting.

_Chapter the Fourteenth_

MONARCHY IN REPOSE

On the following morning after breakfast Mrs. Courteen produced a strip of faded rose ribband.

"Try to match this, child," she said to Phyllida.

"But mamma, 'tis not possible. The silk is old," expostulated the daughter who was dressed and ready to take the air.

"Nothing is impossible, child," generalised the widow. "Do your best--all that is required of human beings. You may take Thomas with you."

"But mamma, I don't want Thomas. I would rather take Betty."

"People can't always take what they desire in this world, and a very good thing too," remarked Mrs. Courteen, "for the world would be a wickeder place if they could. Betty must stay and help me."

The widow was determined to begin the supervision of her daughter recommended by Mr. Ripple. It was the old story of Sisyphus and the Stones, of Tregeagle and the Thimble; as mischievous spirits are kept occupied in Tartarus, and condemned for ever to the performance of the impossible, so was Phyllida to be kept from the temptations of idleness, in order to save, if not her soul, at any rate her reputation.

The widow apprehended that obedience would be more easily secured by guile than the direct imposition of a command.

Miss Phyllida Courteen went out that morning with a sullen little frown above her charming little nose, and walked so fast that Thomas was hard put to keep his proper distance behind her as he continued to mutter, 'How long, O Lord?' with many a dolorous wheeze and mortified grunt.

In and out of a dozen haberdashers they went. All the young women behind the counters were very polite and amazingly hopeful, but when they came to pull out the long drawers filled with ribbands of every size and colour, they could only produce the gayest pinks, the most brilliant shades of rose, and though they continued to be very cheerful and persuaded themselves and their rather petulant customer that the match was as near as could be expected, they were quite unsuccessful, and the ribbands were put back in the drawers to await a less exacting purchaser.

Finally Phyllida, turning out of the tenth shop, heard St. Simon's clock strike eleven. It was a moderately fine morning, and she knew her beau was at that moment turning into Curtain Garden. She stamped her foot with vexation and disappointment.

"Oh Thomas, Thomas! was ever such a mad errand before?" complained his mistress.

"Velvet! Vanity! and a-whoring after strange silks," groaned Thomas.

"Thomas," said Miss Courteen in her most engaging voice, "you would do anything for me?"

"With God's help," agreed the footman.

"And you'd do a great deal for a shilling-piece?"

"To spite Beelzebub," said Thomas.

"Then, Thomas, step down to the Western Colonnade, make my compliments to Miss Sukey Morton, say I hope she is better of her cold, and will she give Miss Phyllida Courteen the pleasure of her company to Mrs. Pinkle's Conversazione. But perhaps you'll forget that long message?"

Thomas replied in accents of unctuous solemnity:

"Better of her cold and quite recovered."

"Yes, but there's more."

"Waste not, want not," he answered severely.

"Oh Lud! I suppose I were wise to write it down," with which Miss Courteen tried the eleventh haberdasher. The pinks were just as light, the carmines as crude and fresh as ever.

But at the opposite counter it was possible to buy the most agreeable paper; so Miss Courteen bought a quire, and also a box of wafers marked with a laurel-wreathed C. Then she borrowed old Mrs. Rambone's crow-quill pen with which the accounts were made up every evening in the little back parlour, and Miss Lettice Rambone politely cleared a corner of the counter and brought out a standish, while Phyllida put her swansdown muff on the chair because, though it was high enough to pull about haberdashery, it wasn't high enough for writing letters. After much arrangement, she wrote:

"MY DEAREST MISS MORTON,--_I hope you are better of your cold. I am truly anxious that you should come and see me this afternoon at four o'clock on a matter of great importance. I am truly distressed by a most unlucky Event. I doubt my dearest Sukey can guess what disturbs her.

Ever affect. and truly devoted_

PHYLLIDA.

P.S. _Pray come_.

P.P.S. _I saw a Red Coat not unknown to a certain young lady now resident at Curtain Wells. The said Red Coat made a most polite bow_."

Ph. C.

Then Phyllida sealed the note with one of her new wafers, and Thomas unscrewed the knob of his tall stick and put the note inside and the shilling-piece in his waistcoat pocket and marched away down the High Street, while Phyllida rushed off with her muff held up to the East wind which was quite cold when one was walking so fast. For the Western Colonnade, you turned to the right, but if you were going to Curtain Garden, you turned to the left, and Phyllida turned to the left.

She had to pass the end of the Crescent on her way, and hurried past, afraid for her life to see Mrs. Courteen sailing round the corner. She was now outside the Great House, and could not help looking up to the big bow-windows to see if Mr. Ripple was there. There he was, very calm and very dignified, but a little out of focus because his windows all had such very thick glass. She caught his eye, and the Great little Man smiled at her. She smiled back and blushed, thinking of the meeting of yesterday. Suddenly the window shot up, and Phyllida turned her head to see the Beau beckoning. She stopped in dismay, while Mr. Ripple, having first spread his handkerchief on the sill, leaned out to speak to her.

"Pray pardon this ungenteel summons, my dear Miss Courteen, but if you would not consider yourself compromised by such an adventure, I should be vastly honoured by your inspection of some proper new prints which have fallen into my hands."

Miss Courteen was overwhelmed by this invitation. What could she do but murmur assent?

The Beau, with a delightfully suave gesture, hurried to open the front door for Miss Courteen who tripped up the dazzling white steps, all swansdown and blushes.

Mr. Ripple begged her to follow him upstairs to the drawing-room and be seated before the fire.

It was a fine high room of good proportions, with three large sash-windows and a wrought-iron balcony running along the breadth of the house. The walls were panelled and painted white, and the floor was stained and varnished to a glaze of immense brilliancy. The rugs scattered about it were Aubusson, of rare hues in fawn and puce and faded lavender and old rose interwoven with queer dead greens. There were several prints on the walls, mostly after Watteau and Fragonard. The whole room wore the indescribable air that is only to be found in the house of a bachelor of comfortable means, good taste and a certain age. There was no trace of a woman's hand in its arrangement, and yet one felt that the owner, through long seclusion from the other sex, had softened towards it with the years until, secure at last, he was able to admit a feminine cirrhus into the limpid and rarefied air of his remote celibacy.

Phyllida, as she watched the firelight ripple in orange wavelets across the surface of the blue and white Dutch tiles set on either side of the hob, wondered what the Beau meant by this sudden invitation.

Just then he begged to be excused for a moment while he fetched the portfolio containing his new purchase.

She heard the door gently closed and looked round the room.

How tall and white it was, just like Mr. Ripple's hand, smooth and white and exquisitely shaped. Outside, the grey weather mellowed the ivory of the room. There was a curious stillness as of frost, and she watched the reflection of the fire leaping in opalescent miniature about the high windows. There was a new spinet, set at an angle to the rest of the furniture, in a case of light-coloured wood, painted with cupids, zephyrs and roses, all waxen-pale. The tall, quiet chamber began to depress her spirits, so that she felt compelled to strike the extreme treble note of the spinet which through the stillness rang out like the unwonted pipe of a bird in a hot August woodland.

At last, Phyllida, whose whole body was beginning to tingle with the effort of waiting in such breathless quiet, heard some one coming upstairs. Gog, the Beau's diminutive negro, entered with a silver tray; on which small and shining lake swam coffee cups like swans or fairy shells. The Great little Man followed close upon the dusky heels of his squire and soon Phyllida found herself sipping her coffee in easy conversation with the King of Curtain Wells.

"Do you know the, Maze? he was asking.

"Oh yes," said Phyllida.

"A pleasant spot, cool and green."

"It is indeed."

"I often sit there," said the Beau.

"'Tis a pleasant spot."

"Less fortunate than my poetick namesake, I have no plane-tree there, no long-buried Falernian; but I am unjust to my time, for, after all, I have Curtain Garden and Chalybeate that springs from the depths of earth," continued the Beau, half to himself.

Phyllida was not quite sure what he was talking about, but agreed politely.

"My dear Miss Courteen," said the Beau suddenly, "may I say something very abrupt and perhaps intolerably free, but nevertheless something which I feel ought to be said?"

"Oh yes, sir," Phyllida replied, wishing devoutly that she was well out of this tall, white room.

"My dear Miss Courteen," he went on, "I am a man who knows something of life on its merely social side. I have been an observer, if I may say so, a naturalist of humanity. My self-chosen attitude has forbidden me all passion, save that which is the recognized privilege of an audience. Of love I am supposed to know nothing, save in that third person whose company is unwelcome and superfluous. Perhaps my devotion to the _Odes_ has led me to see too many Lalages, too many Lyces. Perhaps I regard women too much as roses that bloom, scatter their sweets and die. In a word, perhaps I am unsympathetick."

"I don't think you are at all, sir," cried Phyllida, surprized by her own boldness.

"Thank you," said the Beau, with the merest hint of a tremour in his equable voice.

"But," he went on, "if I regard women as roses, I never seek to pluck them: most men do. Miss Phyllida, pray pardon a man of some age who cares more for Youth than he is willing to admit, who is not quite the phantastick, the fop, the cynick that his subjects make him out. You know what Shakespeare says: 'Each man in his time plays many parts.' I, my dear, have remained for more than thirty years faithful to one. That is why I am considered so eccentrick--well, well, I grow loquacious. My dear Miss Courteen, it is very unwise to make assignations in the pride of youth. Assignations belong to the middle-aged, the disillusioned. If you love a young gentleman, make no secret of it, and let the whole world join in your happiness; but if it be necessary to love this young gentleman in Mazes and such clandestine spots, this young gentleman is not worth so much devotion. Who is he?"

"Mr. Amor, Sir," said Phyllida, feeling half inclined to cry.

"Amor? Amor? I don't know the family. Is it by his wish these meetings are kept secret? Yes! yes! I know 'tis very romantick and very rapturous, but, believe me, my dear Miss Courteen, it is not worth the cost. You must think of your reputation."

"I do, Mr. Ripple, indeed I do--all the time!"

"Come, come then, present me to your Amor at the Chinese Masquerade. I'll talk to the rogue, and egad! we'll have the wedding in June. What do you say?"

"I don't think Mr. Amor would be very willing, and I'm sure my mamma would be monstrous vexed."

"Nonsense," said the Beau, "nonsense! You won't be happy, till you've packed yourself into a post-chaise smelling vilely of stale tobacco and horse-cloths. And when you've found some Fleet Street parson to marry you, you'll wish for a fine wedding and a bride-cake, and your tenants cheering and holloaing at the lodge-gates."

Here the Beau showed himself too unfamiliar with the mind of a young woman. The idea of eloping had never yet entered that dainty head of glistening chestnut curls; but from that moment Phyllida began to play with the notion.

"Come, come," he went on, "let's have no more of clandestine courtship. Heiresses and dace both attract by reason of their silver: libertines and pike have much in common. Moreover, you must think of your mother."

"I doubt you don't know my mamma very well. She swears I'm but a child, but I'm not a child, am I, sir?"

Mr. Ripple put up his monocle and solemnly stared at his fair impenitent.

"You are not a very old woman."

"Besides, my mamma doesn't understand the meaning of love."

"My dear young lady," protested the Beau, "that is a very common error with the young. Don't you think that shaded lane once lisped to her footsteps? Don't you think April once broke as sweet for her?"

"Well, if it did," argued Phyllida, "she's forgotten all she ever knew."

"Come, come, I dare swear she has a secret drawer fragrant with cedar. Find it, my dear Miss Phyllida, and you'll find many old letters, many withered nosegays."

"Indeed, I've searched."

"Perhaps her escritoire is the heart."

"'Tis very well for you, Sir, to talk thus, but my parents were never happy."

The Beau mentally cursed the pertinacious memories of servants.

"Then, if that was the case," he went on, "there is the greater reason for your friends to secure you against such an irreparable misadventure. Now come, you'll present me to this Mr. Amor? I may not understand all women, but trust me, I have a tolerable knowledge of men."

The pale February sun cast a watery beam through the high windows and Mr. Ripple's face caught an added lustre, was in fact so bright and kindly that Phyllida promised, subject to Mr. Amor's consent.

And soon they were both bending over the portfolio of prints--very diverting prints they were too, caricatures of the foibles of fashion.

It was certainly very delightful to see tranquil monarch and fervent maid laughing very heartily together at the most prodigious head-dress the world ever saw.

_Chapter the Fifteenth_

PHOEBUS ADEST

The Coffee-room of the _Blue Boar_ wore a remarkably cheerful aspect on the evening of the day on which we have seen something of Beau Ripple's methods. There had been a splendid run from Oaktree Common across the downs to Deadman's Coppice, where a short check only lent a spice to that glorious final run across Baverstock Ridge until they killed just outside Farmer Hogbin's famous barn. And after the death what delicious musick acclaimed the deed--the baying of hounds, the chatter of maids, the clatter of horses' hoofs, the guffaws of Lieutenant Blewforth, the still louder guffaws of Farmer Hogbin mounted on his raw-boned hunter of sixteen hands, the blasts of the horns, the chink of glasses and the wind getting up in the South-west, all combined in harmonious delight. What a splendid ride home it was and how the riders went over each renowned minute of that for-ever-to-be-famous day. Lieutenant Blewforth swore he would forsake the sea for the life of a country gentleman, and everybody laughed when H.M.S. _Centaur_ (so they had named Blewforth and his steed) shied at a belated calf.

"Egad! B-b-Blewforth," stammered little Peter Wingfield, "'tis lucky your stomach was trained on the roaring d-d-deep, for you pitch and roll like a sloop making Ushant."

"Ah! my boy," shouted Blewforth, "my pretty sloop don't shy like this d----d bum-boat I'm pulling."

How Mr. Golightly of Campbell's Grey Dragoons swore such a run was better than a frontal charge at the enemy's guns and how young Tom Chalkley of the Foot stiffened all over and muttered something about the Cavalry. Indeed the only person to look glum was Mr. Anthony Clare who, though he rode better than any of them and had shown them his horse's heels all the way, missed Charles Lovely.

As they walked along the road, fading into early dusk, and heard the wind sighing in the trim hedges and saw the lights of Curtain Wells seven miles away, Clare cursed that passion for cards which made a man forsake the bleak Spring fallows for pastures of green baize.

But later when the huge cold sirloin that sailed in so sleek, sailed out like a battered wreck, and when pints of generous Burgundy had coloured life to its own rich hue, and when Mr. Daish himself had coaxed the fire to roar and blaze up the chimney, and set out the walnuts and put half a dozen ample chairs round the fire, Mr. Clare could not resist the universal content, but must laugh and make merry and relate the events of the day for the seventh time, with as much zest as any of the returned heroes.

Charles had surely been winning: he was so flushed and talked so loudly. Actually he did not possess a penny, and what was worse, owed Mr. Vernon a couple of hundred guineas. Not much, but enough when you have only cloaths to sell, and not a prospect in the world.

Presently one by one the hunters dropped off to sleep with legs outstretched and doffed wigs and long church-wardens' pipes, that one by one dropped from slowly opening mouths, slid along unbuttoned waistcoats and snapped their slender stems upon the floor, until everybody except Mr. Vernon and our hero was snoring the eighth repetition of the events of that famous day.

The room was hot; the drawing of many breaths thick with fatigue, beef and Burgundy induced a meditative atmosphere; the fire no longer blazed, but sank to an intense crimson glow. Mr. Vernon counted up his gains, while Mr. Lovely pondered his losses in silence.

At last the latter got up suddenly.

"The cards?" inquired Mr. Vernon.

"Not to-night. I think I'll take the air," Charles replied.

"As you will," said the other and betook himself once more to his tablets.

Charles paused for a moment outside the Coffee-Room to take down his full black cloak and three-cornered hat. The night wind had brought in its track a melancholy drizzle of rain that suited his own melancholy mood. He wandered rather vaguely across the wide inn-yard, passed under the arch and sauntered along the deserted High Street.

To tell the truth, Mr. Lovely was very unpleasantly situated at this period. His father had been the ne'er-do-weel survivor of a long line of country squires away down in Devonshire. When he had eloped with Miss Joan Repington, to the eternal chagrin of the young lady's brother, a rich banker knighted for his loyal support of the Protestant Succession, Valentine Lovely ran through his own and his wife's fortune in the first six years of matrimony. Thence onwards they lived a hand-to-mouth existence, dependent on Valentine's luck at the tables and the inviolableness of an aunt's legacy of five thousand guineas.

Mrs. Lovely died, prematurely aged, in the birth of a still-born child, and Mr. Valentine Lovely and his young son continued to live the same haphazard existence for another ten years. Charles spent all his time with his father who in the intervals of drink and play taught his heir to step a minuet, sing a merry song, and indite a witty epigram; also he gave him a case of pistols, heavily chased with the Lovely arms, and lent him the family tree for target. Finally he made him proficient in the polite use of the smallsword and the dice-box.

Once, when an early summer made the Bath intolerably hot, Mr. Lovely and his heir posted down to Devonshire in a crimson chariot putting up at the _Prior's Head_, in Danver Monachorum. He spent a week paying unwelcome visits to the neighbouring gentry who looked askance at the crimson chariot and still more askance at the degenerate heir of the Lovelys. Valentine soon tired of so much pastoral exercise and departed to St. Germain's, leaving young Charles in the care of an old stillroom maid, now a prosperous farmer's wife. The boy spent placid hours in rich meadows, ate a quantity of scalded cream, and grew out of knowledge in the six months of his stay. He used to wander down to the park gates--gloriously wrought-iron gates between massive stone pillars that bore on each summit a quintett of cannon balls, the reputed trophy of some seafaring Elizabethan Lovely. There was a picture in the great hall, of curiously inferior execution, portraying numbers of Devon sailormen led by a huge-ruffed gentleman with a long peaked beard, swarming up the towering sides of the galleon _Jesu Maria_. Charles was taken to see it when the new family was gone up to London town. He also saw the great stone swan over the vast fireplace, with the motto of his house, _Sum decorus_.

Later in the autumn his father returned and the old life of lodgings, inland Spas and long posting journeys was resumed. He had never again visited that remote Devon village, with its cows and pastures and dairymaids and famous chronicles.

Then, just after Charles reached his majority, Mr. Lovely Senior died quite suddenly, and our hero found himself in undisputed possession of the interest on five thousand guineas and as much more in cash, owing to a lucky run by his father in the week before his death.

Charles now indulged the family vice of throwing money to the dogs and, having lost the earnings of his father, set about realizing a trifle of ready money on the five thousand guineas left him by his mother's aunt. This step brought him into pen-and-ink contact with old Sir George Repington who wrote him a stern letter of advice, with a postscript offering him a stool in the Repington bank. Charles was furious and did not reply.

About that time he renewed the friendship with Mr. Anthony Clare begun in that far-off summer away down in Devonshire. The latter persuaded him to leave London and come to Curtain Wells where for a time he lived happily enough on his small annuity. However, just before our story opened, he had been hard hit at loo and had raised a thousand guineas by making over the interest on his inheritance to the friendly moneylender who advanced the needed sum. On the top of this came his losses to Vernon, and now he was stranded indeed.

Therefore the melancholy drizzle of rain suited his melancholy mood. Of course he could borrow, play again and perhaps win, but if he should lose he would be in debt to a friend, a position which he disliked. His father, less scrupulous in this respect, was always content to lay himself under fresh obligations. To Charles, however, something of the pride which sustains a great financial house had descended through his mother and, prodigal though he was, he would never borrow money from a friend. Of course a moneylender was different, but what security could he offer? It looked as if he would have to appeal to his uncle after all. This alternative was thoroughly odious, and Charles racked his brains to discover a way out of the difficulties into which he was plunged.

In such despondent meditation he wandered on until the dancing glare of two large flambeaux, stuck in iron sockets, caught his attention. He found himself outside the Great House.

The project of consulting with the Beau entered his mind, but St. Simon's struck the hour of ten, and he knew Mr. Ripple would be retiring to rest, since he was accustomed to preserve his energy on those nights when he was not called out to preside over an assembly, rout, or masquerade. At that moment the two flambeaux, as if to proclaim their owner's withdrawal from the claims of society, simultaneously collapsed and strewed Mr. Ripple's fair white steps with ashes.

The sudden darkness betrayed the opalescent windows of the Beau's bed-chamber. He had neglected to draw the curtains, and on the blind his suave shadow disported itself in preparation for the night and the next morning.

Charles watched the shadow dip giant fingers into monstrous pomade pots. Now those fast deepening crowsfeet were being vigorously rubbed. Now that swift creasing neck was being smoothed with slow caressing movements. The wig-block displayed itself in generous shadowy curves. Now, surely, the shadow's sudden inaction betokened a contemplation of creeping age.

"And this," thought Charles, "is the destiny marked out for me by Ripple."

He knew if he waited upon him on the morrow, explained his reverses, and promised amendment, the Beau would one day procure for him the monarchy of the Wells, but Charles was not inclined to manipulate the strings of marionettes, himself suspended from a longer cord and dancing for the amusement of a higher power.

The incongruity of the situation, disclosed by the Beau's window, tickled his sense of humour. There was the monarch of an artificial kingdom caulking his wrinkles like a beldame in search of her youth; there he was, that despotick king who prescribed Chalybeate as the Panacea for all earthly ills, in ludicrous terror at the swift flight of his complexion.

There he was, no better than the chief eunuch of a Persian harem with authority over women and the power of lock and key against intrusive fops.

Yet he was a kindly man and a gentleman. He was feared and loved, a man whom the world called successful. Charles himself liked fine cloaths, found talking pleasant, enjoyed the organization of splendid entertainments, yet he could not condemn himself to eternal celibacy and the preservation of his figure. The restriction of such an existence would be unendurable.

You will remember perhaps that in our first Chapter we caught Beau Ripple in undignified pursuit of a button. We agreed how rash it was for Gods and Goddesses to discover their anatomy to mortals, and here is the very fact being forced home to Mr. Charles Lovely, an understudy to divinity.

Our hero went on his way, fortified against one ambition.

Presently he passed by the lodgings of Mrs. Courteen as the door was being opened to let out the satellite Moon and the appropriately named Tarry. The pair of them paused on the steps to ascertain the state of the weather and discuss the several games of ombre which they had played for mother-o'-pearl counters.

"Gadslife!" murmured Charles, "Ombre for counters! Then is great Anna really dead?"

The expensive lodgings of the Earl of Vanity towered above him and he heard my Lord, with a flowered dressing-gown wrapped about his skinny shanks, d----g his daughter's eyes for being so late at old Mrs. Frillface's quadrille party. Farther down the Crescent was old Mrs. Frillface's house, and outside stood two handsome chairs with the chairmen fast asleep on the cushions, soon to be wakened from the frowsy damask by Mrs. Frillface's bloated footman.

And so on past all the lodgings of Curtain Wells.

There was young Miss Kitcat who was really twenty-nine and single only because, so they said, no one would marry her since that affair with Sir Hector Macwrath, the young, Nova Scotia Baronet, more than ten years ago. To be sure, the matter was never rightly explained, and everybody excused the poor child because her mother never set her the best of examples, and as for her father, everybody knew that he thought of nothing but Mdlle. Dancaboute who had such trim ankles and spent so many guineas and even wore the Kitcat rubies at a Ranelagh supper-party. So Sir Hector married the lean heiress of Lord Glew, the chief of the MacStikkeys, and Miss Kitcat remained young Miss Kitcat for many a long day. There she was, swaying sleepily to the motion of the chair while now and then her hair would catch in a splinter of wood as the first chairman stumbled over a loose cobble.

There was little Pinhorn whose father was a ship's chandler at Rye, but had made money as fast as money could be made over the War commissariat; there he was, strutting home from my Lady Bunbutter's, quite inlaid with diamonds, and with a swinging fob near as big as his own bullet head.

Charles gave him a curt good-night as he passed, and wondered to himself how little Pinhorn ever dared challenge Captain Lagge to walk with him in Curtain Meads. Unluckily the Beau had heard of the meeting and went to remonstrate with the gallant Captain.

"What did you say?" asked the Beau.

"I said I would gladly cut the claws of every harpy on the transport," answered the sailor.

"Well, so you may, sir," said Mr. Ripple, "but by Heaven! you shan't do so here."

Next morning the Captain had his orders and was shot through the heart in the Carthagena business. Poor Captain Lagge, he had a wife and a little maid waiting for him in the prettiest cottage between Pevensey and Brighthelmstone.

Charles passed many others whose small histories, could I recount them, would fill this book to overflowing. For each one he could recall some unsavoury episode, some mean adventure that made its hero contemptible.

"Oddslife," thought Charles, "was ever Society so corrupt, so insincere, so entirely damnable?"

By this time he was back in the High Street after a long circuit, and just as he was thinking of crossing the road to reach the _Blue Boar_ and bed, he noticed a candle was burning in his bookseller's little back parlour.

"I'll inquire after the sale of my poems," he decided, and without more ado hammered loudly on the door of the shop. Presently in answer to his continuous rappings, a foxy-faced old young man with a premature stoop and cloaths both squalid and ill-cut, shuffled through the shop and asked who was there.

"A mendicant poet," cried Charles.

"Be d----d," muttered the foxy-faced man, preparing to go back.

"Come, Mr. Virgin, you'll open to me, Charles Lovely?"

"Go away, Mr. Lovely, go away. I'm very busy--very busy indeed. I never remember when I was so busy before, so full of business."

"So much the better," cried Charles jumping up to smite the signboard that hung over the door till it swung round on its hinges with a rattle and a squeak.

"Now don't be rough, Mr. Lovely. I've had the lady's face repainted. 'Tis beautifully done, Mr. Lovely. Do look. Can you see? 'Mr. Paul Virgin. Bookseller and Publisher. At the Sign of the _Woman_.'"

"Pshaw!" said Charles. "Will you open to me, or I'll turn the woman into a w----!"

"I suppose you must have your way, but oddscods, indeed I'm monstrous busy. Oh! Mr. Lovely, I am so busy, you wouldn't believe."

With this final protest, the old young man slowly drew the bolts of the door and allowed Mr. Lovely to step inside.

There was a musty smell in the shop and the shelves of calf-bound volumes seemed alive in the uncertain flame of the candle. The counter was heaped high with volumes and on the floor lay gigantick tomes bound in jaundiced vellum covers.

Lovely followed the foxy-faced man into the back parlour which in addition to the general mustiness of the premises had a rank odour of printer's ink and newly struck proofs.

"I am so busy, Mr. Lovely. Mr. Antique Burrowes' great work on the Abbeys of England and Wales must positively appear before the publick next week; the subscription lists are filled up, and we expect a very favourable reception, and so we ought, for the woodcuts are beautiful. Look at this one, Mr. Lovely--this is Glastonbury--the Abbot's Kitchen. What a place just for one man! Ah! those monks: what bellies they had."

Charles scarcely glanced at the proof.

"Very proper," he said, "and what about my poems?"

"Ah! you always have your joke, Mr. Lovely. That's always the way with poets--they will have their jokes just when I'm so busy too," said Mr. Virgin sidling across the room to a shelf full of ledgers bound in hideous marble boards.

"How many sold, these three months?"

"One, Mr. Lovely. One copy. You see it entered."

"Who was the purchaser," said Charles with affectation of great indifference. "Not a lady, I presume?"

"Ha, ha, you poets--so fond of the women. Singers and poets always like the women. There was Signor Amoroso, d'ye know him? The famous Tenore, now singing every night at Vauxhall--he used to buy all my books about the ladies. But, pray excuse my chatter, Mr. Lovely. I'm sure I oughtn't to be talking, just when I'm so busy too. Let me see, who was the purchaser--ah! here it is--it was Miss----"

"Courteen?" Charles let slip in his eagerness.

"Ha-ha! ha-ha!" laughed the foxy-faced bookseller, "Ha-ha! You must keep your love-secrets better than that. No, it wasn't Miss----" he pursued.

"Oh!" said Charles coldly.

"It was Sir George Repington--I remember now--he wrote from the North."

"Sir George Repington?" exclaimed Charles, completely surprized. "Humph! I wish him joy of my effusions."

"Oh, no doubt he'll like them or he wouldn't have sent all that way for them. Well! well! some men are mighty whimsical in their tastes, and there's no denying that people do read verses."

"However," said Charles, "I take it the taste is not an extended one?"

"Well! you mustn't complain. You had two hundred taken by subscription and half a dozen copies sold to casual purchasers. You won't lose a vast deal over the publication."

"No," said Charles, "you wouldn't like that?"

"No, indeed I shouldn't, sir, I take a pride in the success of my clients. So did my father, sir, and he became an alderman of this town, though he was a native of Exeter."

"I take it, then, you are not prepared to offer a sum of money on account of a new volume?"

"Ho-ho!" laughed Mr. Virgin, "what a droll gentleman you are to be sure. You will have your joke, and don't seem to regard how busy I am."

"Very well, sir," said Charles, "I'll wish you a good night."

"_Good_ night, Mr. Lovely, good night, sir. When I'm not so busy perhaps, another time, I'll be most happy to talk over your--ahem--literary projects."

Mr. Virgin held up the candle to light Mr. Lovely through the shop. The rays happened to fall on a pile of slim volumes reposing on the counter.

"What are those?" Charles asked.

"Ah, 'tis a great pity you can't write verse like that."

"Poems?" said Mr. Lovely in accents of incredulity.

"To be sure--poems, but such poems,--lampoons, squibs, and pasquinades. 'Tis a Satire on the characters of the Bath--very scandalous, they tell me, but oddscods, 'tas run through nine editions in as many weeks. Now, if your name was Lively, sir, instead of Lovely."

"Mr. Virgin!"

"No offence. What I mean is, if you could write something similar about the visitors to Curtain Wells."

"You'd publish it?"

"Well, perhaps that's going too far, but I would give it my very best attention."

"Humph! Good night," and Charles went out into the drizzle.

On his way home, he saw the Exquisite Mob and the Exquisite Mob-master grouped before a satirist; and very soon he saw them performing their anticks thinly disguised by initials and asterisks.

That is how Mr. Charles Lovely sat down to indite

_CURTAIN POLLS_ severely lashed by a _Curtain Rod_.

_Chapter the Sixteenth_

THE CHINESE MASQUERADE

The Chinese Masquerade was the outstanding event of early Spring at Curtain Wells. It was the quintessence of refined affectation, the great fount in which many tributary delights found their source. Moreover, in its character there was a national significance. It was not held merely to emphasize the importance of being seriously amused; it was not one of many entertainments sacred to Epicurus; it did not serve to commemorate the fleetingness of life; it was no Burial Service with a ritual of flung roseleaves and spilt wine. The Chinese Masquerade of Curtain Wells was something far more grand than any of these, being a great national act of homage to the beverage of Tea. Of old, Bacchus was saluted in Samothrace, and the festival of wine was celebrated with all the absence of restraint that might be expected from the past. Nymphs raved, Satyrs danced, and garlanded leopards jigged to one wild inspiration. Phrenzy footed it; troop followed troop, broke and dissolved in flashes of white limbs when Dionysus of the sly smile and rosy cheeks bewitched thousands with his strange madness. In fact, the whole affair was an intolerable concession to Nature. At Curtain Wells you saw the centuries at work. There the Bacchantes were corseted and hooped to primness; the Satyrs had high red heels for hoofs, silken breeches for the fur of goats. Instead of velvety leopards that used to amble over tuffets of fragrant thyme, each with a hussy astride his supple back, went greasy chairmen in lurching escort of dowagers and misses. Dionysus himself was changed. He had kept his sly smile and rosy cheeks, but his vine wreaths were become ruffles and ties, while his body glittered, not with youth and health and immortality, but with paste buckles and brooches and solitaires. The crashing cymbals of Thrace found a thin echo in the delicate tinkle of tea-spoons and frail sounds of porcelain. To be sure, the whole of the difference between the worship of Wine and the worship of Tea was expressed by the fact that to honour the former, society took off its cloaths, whereas in order to celebrate the latter, all the world dressed itself up.

Mr. Ripple wore above his suit of amber a robe resembling a golden dressing-gown. He was the Gold Mandarin, decorated with dragons, tall pagodas, flowers and fireworks. The Blue Mandarin, whose robe concealed the pearl-grey suit of Mr. Charles Lovely, seemed as he moved across the room like a blue garden, so many small landskips wrought in azure silks trembled in the folds of his garment. Only these two officers of the Pageant were privileged to remain unmasked. The rest of the company wore yellow vizards whose painted eyebrows soared at a celestial angle over eyeslits, cut almondwise. The general effect was of animated Ming laughing, jesting, talking, and dancing with the lacker cabinets that were used to contain it.

The ballroom had pagodas in each of the corners where the children of the Exquisite Mob dressed to a more exact replica[1] of the farthest Orientals, nodded and peeped and chirped the austere maxims of Confucius without the slightest idea of their meaning, but all convinced that it was extremely diverting to partake of a grown-up entertainment, and far better to drink real tea out of real cups in a delightful palace of their own, than to play with acorns and ditchwater in the mildewed Dorick summer-house at the head of the Park avenue.

[1] They wore pigtails, which were considered unbecoming by the older Follies. Besides, head-dresses were too elaborate to be ruined for the sake of one entertainment.

Chinese lanterns bobbed on golden wires slung from wall to wall whence the gilt mirrours with the wax candles of the West had all been removed. This Eastern light softened the mingled hues of blue and gold to a gorgeous moving twilight stained by the afterglow of sunset. All along the sides of the ballroom were placed for seats queer twisted animals, winged dragons, squat bronzes, Chinese geese, monkeys and parrots in crude shades of green and vermilion, while at suitable intervals were set little houses to contain two persons. These were intended to encourage the intimate amenities of polite conversation.

Outside in the Rococo cloister unknown flowers expanded and curious fruits ripened by lanternlight; and though the flowers were made of linen dipped in scent, they served very well to pluck and offer to a masked fair and as for the fruits, they were all filled with comfits. Finally, here and there, smoking sandal-wood torches lent a remote perfume to the Mise en Scene, and curled in scented wreaths about the motley forms of the masqueraders. To say truth, the Eastern veneer was more than usually superficial, even for a veneer. The result of the attempt to secure reality only accentuated the difference between East and West: still the latter enjoyed making believe so far as it consorted with true gentility, and it may very easily be understood that nothing low was permitted by the British Nation in the eighteenth glorious century of Christian civilization.

Thia was the first masked ball that had been held since Phyllida grew enamoured of Mr. Francis Vernon, so she made no doubt he would avail himself of the opportunity to be present. As soon as the Exquisite Mob was assembled (at half-past seven o'clock precisely, because it was considered vulgar to be late) there was a solemn drinking of tea, no mere handing round of teacups and saucers, but a far more impressive ritual, invented to mark the occasion with due importance.

The Gold Mandarin seated himself on an ivory stool whose claw legs were fretted with diminutive foliage, temples and flying birds. This was set on a small platform draped with broideries at the foot of which was an azure velvet cushion where, with crossed legs, sat the Blue Mandarin.

Mr. Ripple clapped his hands twice to command the entrance of the Procession of Tea. First walked two musicians slowly tapping gongs shaped like saucers with large spoons. These were followed by six children with nodding porcelain Mandarins whose tongues trembled in and out of their surprized mouths. Then came the bearer of the Caddy--a magnificently decorated specimen of lackerwork. On either side of the Caddy was borne a Nankin jar full of milk. Finally, a lacker table on wheels, overhung by a fringed canopy that protected an enormous bowl of rarest Ming whither odorous vapours ascended from the flowery liquid, was pushed along in slow and reverend state.

The company opened its ranks to allow the procession a way until it stopped before the Gold Mandarin's ivory throne. The Beau at once descended, dipped a diminutive teacup into the bowl, took three sips and sighed rapturously. The six porcelain Mandarins were set nodding with redoubled vigour, gongs boomed from the topmost windows of the pagodas, and the procession re-formed and passed into the upper room, whither the assembled company followed it in order to drink in turn from teacups filled at the sacred fountain.

In the crush, Phyllida, who was wearing a gown faint blue like the March sky, felt her sleeve pulled gently by a tall mask in tawny raiment. She recognized the pointed white fingers and whispered 'Amor.'

The mask shook his head to indicate silence, but presently Phyllida succeeded in conveying her cup of tea to the outskirts of the crowd and hurried through a corridor to a side-door opening into the cloister where she waited for her lover's approach. In a minute he was sitting beside her.

She turned to him delightedly.

"Dear Amor! This will be the first ball that I shall have truly enjoyed."

This statement scarcely did justice to the many pleasant hours she had spent to the sound of fiddles, horns, and clarinets.

"Why was my charmer absent yesterday? The Maze was prodigiously dull without the sweet Nymph who loves to haunt its verdurous ways."

"Oh! Amor, we are discovered."

"Faith, is that so?" remarked Vernon, without any apparent concern.

"Mr. Ripple told my mother I was conversing with a gentleman for one hour and a half by the clock."

"Interfering dancing-master!"

"And yesterday I was sent to match a ribband quite impossible to match; I'm sure 'twas done to keep me employed and when I heard eleven chime, I could bear it no longer, but almost ran towards Curtain Garden, and on my way the Beau beckoned me to come in and, pray don't be angry, dear Amor, he was so vastly kind that I told him your name."

"Here's a pretty state of affairs," muttered Vernon.

"He asked me to present you to him to-night, and vowed we should be wed in June."

"Gadslife! I hope you sent him about his business?"

"Not exactly," said Phyllida, "indeed he was so good-natured that I promised--at least I half promised to do so."

"Confusion take him," swore Vernon, "for a prating, meddlesome, tailor-made gentleman. Harkee! I'll not have myself discussed by Mr. Horace Ripple. I dare swear he patted your hands, eh? called you his pretty dear, made old man's love, eh? A plague on his impudence!"

Phyllida shrank from her lover's wrath.

"Indeed, sir, I vow he did nothing of the kind. He behaved with some of that propriety for which I could wish in my Amor." Phyllida remembered a young woman talking something like this in the first volume of _The Fair Inconstant_. Vernon could not keep back a smile. "I doubt I'm not inclined to hear you farther."

Vernon began to chuckle.

"And let me tell you, sir, your behaviour becomes you very ill, and moreover I told him your name, and the milk's spilt, and 'tis useless to cry over spilt milk as all the world knows."

A tear-drop trembled in each corner of Phyllida's eyes, making them seem more clearly blue, as crystals that surround great sapphires enhance their beauty.

"Sweet indiscretion," began Vernon, who having been politick enough to conceal his true name, could afford to be generous.

A very faint sob was the sole response.

"Nay, prithee, dear one," he continued, catching hold of a tremulous hand, "let's have no quarrels at our first ball; I bear you no malice."

"I should never have told him, had I been ashamed of you," she interrupted.

"Just so, adorable creature, but since we had resolved to keep our affair secret, and since we were agreed that stolen meetings, like stolen fruit, taste the sweetest, I was surprized to hear you had told every one."

"I did not tell any one."

"But, my angel, you did."

"Not until I was forced. 'Tis very well for you. You're a man of fashion and independence, and I'm a young woman."

"Incontestable truth!"

"Now you're being satirical, and I vow I detest sarcasm. Indeed, I think it has all been a mistake, and I'll go back to Hampshire to-morrow, and you may go back to your Haymarket."

"Very well, madam, since you dismiss my suit, I will go back to my Haymarket. It may be vastly diverting for you, madam, to break a man's heart. You, secure in the verdant meads and--er--meadows of the county of Hampshire, you, wandering among fields of daffadillies, at peace, beneath a summer sun."

"Daffadillies don't grow in the summer."

"Alas! madam, I am ignorant of these pastoral delights."

This was perfectly true since Mr. Vernon's mother was a lady who thought a bough-pot in Air Street worth the finest estate in the Kingdom.

"I," he continued, "have lived my life in cities, and though I have often hoped to hear the cuckoo wake me at dawn, 'tis very evident I must for ever bid farewell to such vain dreams."

Here, Mr. Vernon, who had inherited considerable histrionick ability on the female side, contrived to get an effective break into his usually smooth enunciation.

"But I don't want to quarrel for ever," protested Phyllida.

Mr. Vernon turned his head away, probably to hide a tear.

"For my part," she went on, "I should be very willing to live always as we are living now."

"My angel!"

"But since the world is so censorious and seems to concern itself with every unimportant young woman's affairs, I thought--I thought----"

"You thought a wedding would put a stop to scandal. How little you know the world. Why! madam, a hasty wedding would set people's tongues wagging at once. Come, come, pay no attention to old Ripple. He knows my name. If he chuse, he can seek me out. I warrant I shall hear no more about it."

"But we shall be watched."

"Then we'll change our trysting-place. At any rate, prithee, let us enjoy to-night." Here Mr. Vernon put on his mask and taking off his gown resumed it inside out. "Do you see, dear charmer, I am both porcelain and lacker, so that no one will be able to say you prefer the one to the other. Hark! the fiddles have begun--let's go and step our first gavotte together."

Phyllida took his arm and they returned to the ballroom. The vizards made all the faces appear fixed and wooden and Miss Courteen could not help looking very often at Mr. Charles Lovely who was sitting cross-legged on his azure cushion and, in contrast to the rest of the masquerade, was plainly a man. Once she fancied she caught his eye, and when he came up and asked her to honour his arm for the third gavotte, she knew she had not been mistaken. Mr. Vernon silently relinquished his partner.

"Who was your late Vis a Vis?" Charles inquired. "I beg your pardon," he added as he saw Phyllida hesitate, "my manners grow as barbarick as my costume."

He had noticed with devout jealousy that Miss Courteen's fingers reposed a moment longer than was necessary upon that sattin forearm.

"How did you discover me?" she asked with frank interest.

"'Twas not difficult."

"But masked as I am?"

"I did not regard your mask--I saw your eyes."

Phyllida was conscious of a blush and a faint quickening of the pulses, all over her body. There was certainly something very satisfactory in such a compliment. It was genuine moreover, for indeed he had discovered her through the distorted yellow vizard which concealed her roses.

Presently the dance began, and, though Phyllida liked every moment of it, she could not help observing Amor, half buried in the greenery of an alcove and, as it seemed to her, forbidding too keen a pleasure.

Charles found it difficult to extract from his partner more than the ordinary small talk of ballrooms, and as she became more and more absent-minded during the progress of the dance, he let her go at the end of it without a very valiant attempt to detain her for the next. Presently he saw her join a blue mask and lose herself in the flickering throng. Last time he had remarked particularly that her Vis a Vis wore brown and gold, yet the two figures were alike in movement and gesture and he could swear the hands were identical. It was the same without a doubt. Charles bit his nails with vexation, and fretted confoundedly.

"My dear boy, my dear Charles, pray do not gnaw your fingers. Narcissus admired himself, 'tis true, but without carrying his devotion to cannibality."

Charles turned to the well-known voice of Mr. Ripple.

"A thousand pardons, dear Beau, I was vexed by a trifle. The masquerade comports itself with tolerable success."

"I think so," the Beau replied, adjusting his monocle and gazing critically at his subjects. "I certainly think so, but I am never easy in my mind until the Grand Minuet has concluded the entertainment, yet even so, I do not think you will ever find me preying upon my extremities."

Charles laughed.

"They take their pleasures very easily, sir." Again the Beau examined his puppets.

"The burden of amusement certainly weighs very lightly on them, and yet, Charles, I sometimes fancy I detect a shade too much of self-consciousness in their movements. I could wish for a less anxious grace, a less ordered abandon. My monocle which diminishes their size, diminishes their importance; and I must confess that the motion of dancing, if one regards the Ensemble, appears to me nothing less than idiotical. However, do not let my cynical attitude prove contagious--I have watched so many dances."

"Yet you are willing for me to succeed you," said Charles. "Foregad, Mr. Ripple, I was never intended for a spectator."

"I have energy to keep me in office long enough to let you grow older. Come, come, Charles, admit the career I offer would tempt many more deserving young men."

"But I have passions, feelings, desires, ambitions."

"All very suitable," commented the Beau, "till you grow tired of versifying life. We write poetry, Charles, in order to improve our prose."

"Some men write poetry to the end."

"Usually a bitter end; but, indeed, I would not goad you into accepting my offer. Have your dramas, lose your money, expose your heart to Cupid, commit the thousand and one foolish actions that will afford you a moral occupation for your middle age."

"What would that be?"

"A leisurely repentance."

"Sir, I think you spin the natural functions into silk like the silkworm."

"Well, Charles, and isn't silk a more durable excrement than most? You are still devouring the tender shoots of the mulberry tree; I am already in the cocoon and shall go down to posterity as a very reputable moth vouched for by a cenotaph in St. Simon's Church, Curtain Wells."

"Sir, I doubt they will never say of me 'Vive le roi!'"

"We shall see, we shall see. By the way, do you know a Miss Phyllida Courteen? Her mother, a widow whose charms are as ample as her dowry, is lodging in the Crescent."

Charles was taken aback for a moment.

"I believe I have met her once or twice at Assemblies."

"At any rate, you know her by sight."

"Oh yes!" replied our hero.

"Now, I wonder whether you could pick her out from this multitude of masks."

Charles at once perceived the subject of the question.

"She is standing over there by the second pillar and talking to a mask in porcel--no, in lacker. That's strange."

"What is strange?" inquired Mr. Ripple mildly.

"Nothing--a lantern effect," Charles explained.

Surely he could not be mistaken in those taper fingers. Moreover, they were familiar to him. Where could he have seen them?

"So that is Miss Courteen," said the Beau, looking at her very intently. "Yes, now that you have pointed her out, I certainly seem to recognize her. Who is her Vis a Vis?"

"That I do not know," said Charles rather gloomily.

"Then, pray, be so good-natured as to make an attempt to ascertain and you'll oblige me monstrously. Or stay--perhaps I had better inquire myself."

Mr. Ripple, observing that Mr. Lovely looked somewhat melancholy, patted him on the shoulder.

"Don't look so full of disapprobation, Charles. Inquisitiveness, with ordinary men and women, is a breach of good manners: with kings, it is a condescension. Dear me! how time runs!" the Beau continued, tripping from an epigram to a truism. "I will leave you to superintend the Country Dances. Let them be as Oriental as possible, I beg."

With this admonition the Great little Man threaded his way through the Exquisite Mob.

Charles d----d the country dances very devoutly. He was not enjoying the evening at all, and wished he were sitting in the cosy firelight of the _Blue Boar_, lulled by the whispers of playing cards, shuffled and dealt. Where could he raise that two hundred pounds he owed Vernon? Vernon--by G...! now he recognized those taper fingers. Vernon! they belonged to Vernon, he could swear to them. Too often had he watched their delicate harvesting of his guineas. He began to fret more than ever. Suddenly he noticed that everybody was looking in his direction, and became aware that time was indeed running and the moment for the Country Dances had arrived.

Meanwhile Mr. Ripple searched in vain for Phyllida and a Vis a Vis in brown and gold.

_Chapter the Seventeenth_

THE GRAND MINUET OF CATHAY

The Country Dances of these powderpuff Orientals were so truly inappropriate to the celebration that they almost succeeded in convincing by sheer want of fitness. Picture to yourselves two hundred blue and golden marionettes jigging to _Sir Roger de Coverley_ or bobbing to _Come Lasses and Lads_. There was Merry England underneath this hugger mugger of yellow masks, yet the sustained motion was decidedly Eastern. Hands across, back to back, right hand, left hand--each change of attitude was marked by a crashing gong; and he who sounded this barbarick instrument was Mr. Charles Lovely. He stood upon a tripod of ebony quite high enough for a hero of comedy, as I am sure you will admit.

As soon as his proconsulate was over, he jumped from the pedestal and, once more assuming our poor humanity, sought desperately for Mr. Vernon and Miss Phyllida Courteen.

And now the great ballroom was cleared. The Exquisite Mob refreshed itself not with chopsticks, but with two pronged forks and stout-handled knives. Nor was the fare ascetick rice, but pies of mutton, rounds of beef, custards, gay jellies and dappled puddings. In the ballroom the attendants busily ran hither and thither in preparation for the Grand Minuet of Cathay. Four pagodas guarded four corners; little bridges spanned little rivers of blue silk. There were miniature groves that shielded queer little Chinese gods and goddesses, while here and there were temples with crooked roofs, hung round with silver bells destined to be jingled at set moments of this incomparable minuet. High up near the ceiling among the swinging lanterns one saw the peaked faces of giant kites gazing benignly down. Finally in the very centre of the room was a small fountain with a pond all about it of real water, starred with white water lilies, on the highest jet of which a little god, inflated by air, jigged to the rise and fall of the water. Mr. Ripple had not been able to find Miss Courteen and was interrupted in his search by a call to inspect the scene of the Minuet. Gog was sent to fetch Mr. Lovely and presently the Gold Mandarin and the Blue Mandarin were stepping over each bridge, peering from each pagoda, gently trying the bells, lending a last touch to the rivers of silk and coming to a standstill in silent admiration of the dancing water-god.

"I think," said Mr. Ripple, "we may venture to proclaim, the Minuet of Cathay."

"I think so," said Mr. Lovely as he cast a quick eye in the direction of every entrance in turn.

"I could not find Miss Courteen," said the Beau, "have you had better luck?"

Lovely hesitated a moment.

"No," he said finally.

The Beau looked at him a moment.

"I cannot imagine who this Amor can be. He is not down in my list."

"Amor?" inquired Charles, somewhat too suddenly, "is his name Amor?"

"So the young lady informed me, when we considered the situation together. I perceive you know him."

"Indeed, sir, I am acquainted with no one of that name."

"I never imagined you were," replied the Beau testily. "'Tis too plainly a Nom d'amour; but I'll wager you are able to extract a personality from this pseudonym."

"Nay, indeed, I----"

"Very well," said the Beau, cutting him short, "there is no more to be said," and he turned away to order a burly Oriental who on less decorated occasions was wont to assist Mr. Balhatchett the butcher, to sound the gong of invitation.

While the huge sullen instrument boomed a diapason that threatened more than it cajoled, Charles wondered if he had been wise to conceal his knowledge of Mr. Amor's identity. Ripple had obviously not believed him and was moreover very sensitive to any concealment on the part of his subjects. He, as his own subaltern, was especially bound to indulge this foible. Besides, what good had he done? thought Charles. Not much indeed, for soon Ripple would certainly find out the whole affair. He ought to tell him all he knew. Ripple would act for the best and close the Pump Room against the intruder. It would be kill or cure.

But just as he was upon the point of informing the Great little Man, our hero remembered he owed Vernon two hundred pounds. O resolute hero! Be quick to mount your ebony pedestal or we shall think you no better than a walking gentleman.

The Exquisite Mob of crimped and corseted Orientals began to saunter back from supper, and the debate between honesty and honour was adjourned to a more meditative opportunity. By this hour of the evening most of the Masks were tolerably sure of each other's identity, and though it was an acknowledged custom of the Chinese Masquerade as opposed to other masked balls that all vizards should be worn from door to door, the Grand Minuet of Cathay afforded much scandalous talk for the ensuing days, all the more potent because a convention of anonymity was sedulously maintained. It was not surprizing that intrigue should flourish at a dance where half the company was hidden for many moments at a stretch. The Minuet lasted a whole hour. It reproduced in the various side-figures many emotions. It was a hundred dances in a grand Ensemble. The musick was now courtly, now passionate: sometimes it clanged in barbarick interludes of noise: sometimes but three or four flutes twittered above the plash of the fountain.

Over the bridges pattered the dancers: in and out of the diminutive groves twinkled their scarlet heels. Now a couple swayed in a stationary boat on a motionless river: now at the topmost window of a pagoda, cambrick handkerchief and painted fan kept time to the tune. The Gold Mandarin lived in a golden house beside the fountain and, if he chose, could live a century of sound and perfume in that fragrant hour of dancing. Far away at the other corner of the room lived the Blue Mandarin in a small house at the foot of a small volcano that ceaselessly puffed out clouds of incense. Wherever you went in that strange dance of dances some new delight assailed your senses.

Here, before a temple hung with silver bells, a dozen of these blue and golden dolls moved with grace and precision through many variations of the Minuet. They would carry away with them that night no more than a memory of bells and stately movement by the rosy light of many lanterns. Purged of all feeling save for correct gesture, the vizards seemed no more alive than their mirroured counterparts that moved with equal grace upside down in the polished floor of parquet.

But step over one of these bridges where false white flowers hang in scented clusters: go softly through that Bonbon grove, and there in an alcove fretted to the semblance of wrought ivory, you shall see two masks that are enraptured beneath a white moon-lantern, tracing the melody with long caresses. In one of these fanciful resorts, sat Vernon and Phyllida making love among the shadows, as in pairs and dainty quartetts the dancers darkened the carved portal when they passed. For Phyllida, the Assembly Rooms had been snatched up by some powerful magician and set down in a land of Ombres Chinoises. Many a time had she sat in the theatre and watched these silent black and white tragedies and comedies. Now she had joined that whimsical procession which capers across the draughty sheet. She recalled a particular entertainment of this character last December. First the Columbine had pirouetted across and made a light phantastick entrance into the shadow of the house at the extreme corner. Presently came the Pierrot with a lantern swaying atop of a tall pole. Up and down the sheet he had danced with incredible agility, until a Pulcinello shook his bells from the window of the house, and he floated away gathering giant size as he went. Then came Harlequin, dancing almost more beautifully than Pierrot, and a quiet murder was done in the laurel shadows round the house. Pierrot lay dead and Harlequin, the slim and debonair assassin had donned his vizard: Columbine wept a while until the lights were turned up, when everybody agreed that the whole performance was in the best of taste and vastly well executed.

Phyllida came to herself and found Mr. Vernon gazing steadily at her with his velvet eyes, all the more disconcerting set almondwise in the Chinese mask. She shuddered.

To say truth, this exotick minuet of strange perfumes and processions, was not the sanest amusement for a maid who should have lived always among the roses. The heat was growing intolerable, and still her lover with persistent, regular motion bewitched her hand as it lay in his.

The dancers passed and repassed them as they sat in artificial dusk. Phyllida began to hate them when they fluttered their fans and handkerchiefs. They were sickly things these dancers--crotchets and quavers and semiquavers who had captured the semblance of humanity, who breathed and bowed and capered, merely because musick had conjured them into existence. Suddenly an amazing clangour of gongs and cymbals waked her completely from the fever into which she had been flung, and, waking, she found herself encircled by her lover's arms, his eyes burning into hers and his lips, all that was left alive by the stolid vizard, eager to meet her own.

"Don't," she gasped. "Don't. I hate you, I hate you when you do that."

"Nay, my angel must not be so prudish. Come, kiss me of your own will and we'll gallop to Gretna Green next week."

Phyllida still repulsed him.

"To Gretna Green," he went on. "Drawn by a pair of cream-coloured horses, in a chaise all citron silk and rosy sattin with my Phyllida plunged into the softest cushions and her Amor to love her so fondly while trees and milestones fly past."

Vernon inherited much talent from his mother, and as he breathed his persuasions in the most refined modulations of intensity, half looked over his shoulder, for an audience.

"My Phyllida, your lips are soft as moths."

"Don't, Amor, don't."

"Soft as little moths that in wet garden paths brush the cheeks with feathery wings."

"Release my hand, detestable Amor. I will sit here no longer to be tortured by your boorishness."

"But why will you repulse me? you love me? We are to be wed almost at once. Why were you willing to sit in this dark corner, unless for the charms of love?"

The Minuet was drawing to a close. Long since the musick had departed into wilder channels. This was now no courtly measure, but a barbarick medley of noise, fit for trumpets of India, cymbals of Ethiopia, and the hollow booming of drums that affright wrecked pirates in the green swamps of Madagascar.

Vernon stood up and drew Phyllida closer.

"By G----, child, you madden me with your prettiness. Come, I swear you shall kiss me before the end of the dance. You shall, by G---- you shall!"

Miss Phyllida Courteen, all swansdown and blushes in our first chapter, is scarcely recognizable now. She is growing old fast. She is kindling the faggots that will warm her chill old age.

But still, though passion tugged at her heart strings, the school-miss, the older Eve before the Fall, made her struggle against knowledge.

"I hate you, I hate you like this. Let me go, sir, let me go!"

With a sudden effort, she escaped from his arms, and he, plunging back at the same moment, struck the frail summer house of ivory so that it toppled over in front of the Blue Mandarin who was crossing a bridge over a silken stream that flowed in the direction of his little house beneath the miniature volcano. The Bonbon grove was strewn with fragments. Like Cinderella fled Miss Courteen and was quickly lost in the gold and azure company. With careless air, Mr. Vernon stooped to buckle his shoe and Charles, seeing the taper fingers, stood for a moment petrified upon the ridiculous bridge over which he had been stepping with such an affectation of importance.

Now was his opportunity to probe Mr. Vernon, or rather to lead him gradually into the urbane presence of Mr. Ripple who would certainly probe him deep enough. There was every reason to admonish him for, as he knelt over his shoe, Charles could plainly see his costume was reversible. Such a device was a breach of etiquette, deserving publick censure. Himself as viceroy of Society, should not be backward in arresting a traitor to Society's rules. Of old, the favourites of monarchs had not scrupled to owe money to those whom they denounced as dangerous to the State.

Charles took a step forward.

"Sir," he said, pointing with a tasselled wand whose handle was a squat Buddha, "you have broken a law of the Chinese Masquerade."

"Indeed," said Vernon, rising from his knees, not at all perturbed apparently by the accusation.

"Yes," went on the Blue Mandarin. Pray let our hero be impersonal for a while, "You are wearing a double costume."

"What a monstrous breach of privilege," said Vernon chilly, unmoved.

"And it is my duty to report the incident to Beau Ripple. Your name, sir?"

It was now the turn of our villain to hesitate. If he frankly avowed his identity, Lovely was bound to say no more about it, but did the interloping young Jackanapes know the heroine of the affair?--he had danced with her once that night. If he said Amor, Lovely might easily inform Ripple and plead ignorance. D---- n the young fool! Why didn't he pass over his absurd stream and take his callow brain, stuffed with ceremonies, to the sugar-plum atmosphere of the Beaux' ante-room?

"Why Lovely, man, don't you know me? 'Tis I, Vernon, what the plague do you mean by so much impertinence? Were you shocked to see me trying to kiss a saucy school-minx, eh? That was little Miss----"

"Her mask, sir, should conceal her name."

With what fair Incognita Mr. Vernon intended to couple himself, will never be known. No doubt a pseudonym as nice as his own would have been forthcoming, since he was of an inventive disposition and had on occasions a pretty turn of fancy.

The musick had stopped; the Grand Minuet of Cathay was finished. Mr. Charles Lovely was aware of a rival to whom, by cursed ill-fortune, he owed money which he was unable to pay.

"Shall I give you your revenge?" murmured Vernon.

The company, still masked, were hurrying in blue and golden bunches to their coaches and chairs.

"Not tonight," said Charles. "But on my honour, Vernon, you must really be careful not to offend against our rules on another occasion."

So, lightly enough, with no appearance of mutual ill-will the rivals passed on. Phyllida was gone home, her face afire beneath her Chinese mask. To her virginal chamber, I shall presently take you in order to hear what Mistress Betty has to say about the ways of lovers. And while we walk in the direction of the Crescent, somewhat overwrought by a plethora of colour, scent, movement and sound, we may be tolerably certain that young Mr. Charles Lovely--no longer Blue Mandarin, but again our admired hero--is seated furiously inditing the most satirical verses on the residents and visitors of Curtain Wells, in order to make money enough to pay Mr. Vernon his guineas, and be able to run him through in Curtain Mead with a clear conscience and a clean smallsword.

_Chapter the Eighteenth_

THE CONFIDANTE

If Eve had possessed a Confidante, it is probable that the evil wrought by Woman would have been double as great as it is reputed to be. Miss Courteen had stepped into the mud of reality and, not unnaturally, was eager to tell Mistress Betty of the accident and ascertain by candlelight consultation, whether or not her glass slipper was truly lost.

As they drove home in the rumbling coach, Phyllida experienced an emotion of futility as she half listened, half dozed, to the conversation of the Major, the Justice and her mother. To this came Youth. Bumpety-bump went the coach, bumpety-bump went the conversation, bumpety-bump went Thomas' broad back on the Jimmy, bumpety-bump went Phyllida's head, while her thoughts and memories kept pace in the darkness like swift sparks that are blown along by the wind. At last the coach drew up before their house in the Crescent: Phyllida and her mother alighted: Betty opened the door and the coach drove off to put down Major Tarry and Mr. Moon at their lodgings.

The hall seemed drab and unfamiliar; the bedchamber candle-sticks set out upon the little gate table had an air of reproof about them; they seemed to say as they sat in a prim row: "Look at us, we are quite content. Last night our candles burnt an inch lower, and the candle suffers diminution, but we remain the same. We are quite content."

"My pretty one looks pale," said Betty, full of solicitude.

"I'm tired," said Phyllida.

"Betty," said Mrs. Courteen, "you must help me to undress. The evening has been most enjoyable, and my lady Bunbutter tore her gown on a monkey's tail. Now, Phyllida, do you run quickly to bed, for to-morrow Mr. Moon and the Major have promised to drive with us to see Melton Abbey. You will enjoy the excursion vastly."

"What a whimsical place to visit."

"Whimsical! How can you be so irreverend, Phyllida?"

"But why, mamma, do you suddenly drive to Melton Abbey?"

"Why, child! because I wish to train your mind to be sure. Nothing tests deportment so severely as wandering round a Gothick ruin. However, they tell me that Gothick will soon be a la Mode, and who am I to dispute the commands of fashion?"

Upon the heels of this humble interrogation, the widow betook herself to bed.

"When you have undressed my mamma, Betty, come to my chamber, I have a thousand things to tell you," Phyllida whispered as they went up the narrow stairs.

She lighted all the candles in her room and looked round in sudden affright. It was as if some one had trespassed upon those virginal solitudes while she was away. Yet her room was the same as usual; the dimity covers were all in their places: the fire was burning merrily in the hearth: the bed-cloaths were turned back, fresh, cool and lavendered. Her slippers knelt devoutly by the fender: the fire-irons looked just as stilted and apologetick as usual. Everything was perfectly familiar, perfectly ordinary and perfectly safe; yet something in the room was strange, or was it herself who was altered? Was she out of harmony with this palace of amber morning dreams, this treasure-box of twilight hopes and imaginations?

Down she sat in the big flowered arm-chair and stared at the crackling logs--a stranger to her own possessions, and, as she untied one by one the ribbands from her glinting chestnut hair, she seemed to smell the jasmine of Courteen Grange and hear her father calling below her casement to come down quickly and count the buds on the York and Lancaster rose, as he was used to call in those sweet dead Junes.

Presently came Betty with a soft knock and Phyllida, starting away from the host of childish memories that assailed her, sprang up as the maid came in on tiptoe.

"Now, sit down, Betty, and listen with all your ears, for I dearly need your advice."

"My sweet one, I'm listening to 'ee," said Betty, pulling forward a fat lop-eared hassock and squeezing herself as close to the fender as possible.

"Betty, Mr. Amor kissed me this evening, and what should I do?"

"What were 'ee best to do? Why think no more about it, for indeed I dare vow you're not the first maid that was kissed."

"But the worst of the matter is that, though I struggled hard to escape, and though I detested him for his persistence, yet, oh! Betty, I don't like to tell you--I did not struggle as hard as I might have done."

As she made this confession, Phyllida went carnation red from forehead to pointed dimpled chin.

"There's no call for blushes," said Betty emphatically, "for you must learn the love of man soon or late, and Mr. Vernon is a proper enough gentleman for sure."

"And he said we should presently elope."

"Oh! time enough to be wed come three years or more," commented Betty.

"Oh! but you would not have me allow a gentleman to take my hand, and kiss me, and call me his dearest life without being married immediately. It would be most unbecoming."

"If all the world knew, 'twould, but then nobody don't know, and that's the best way for all true lovers."

"Nevertheless, Betty, I feel uneasy."

"'Tis only the stirring of your blood, my dear. Only to think," went on the confidante, "that last sweet Spring time you was building great cowslip balls in the green meadows, and now you are quite grown up with a bow of your own to arm you through the minivets and gawottes, so grand as may be."

"Yes, love makes one grow old, Betty. I've aged very much these weeks."

"Well, and 'twouldn't be right otherwise, for Life bean't all a long sweet April month, my pretty one."

"Then truly, dear Betty, you swear you think there is no harm in what I have done?"

"Oh, my dear, harm? Why, what harm could there be with your great fat Betty to watch and guard 'ee?"

"Still, I'm not sure, Betty. There's something tells me not to be sure."

"Then, do 'ee listen hard to me, my dear, while I tell 'ee what I do think about life. Life! 'Tis a garden and 'tis a wilderness, and between them there's a gaate and 'tis a kissing gaate. The wilderness is fine for children--a great open plaace fit for scampering Jack hares and such like, but bare enough and bleak enough when you do grow old, and then you're too fat to get through that kissing gaate, and then you do wish wi' all your might and main that when you was young you'd gotten into the garden among the sweet flowers."

Betty stopped, exhausted by the allegory.

"Yes, Betty, that is all very well, but you must go through the gate with the person whom you love for ever and a day."

"Nay, you can meet him inside and say Good-day and thank you kindly to the arm you went in on."

"I don't believe you give me good advice. If I told you that to-morrow morning I was going to run away with Mr. Amor to Gretna Green, what would you say?"

"Oh, God preserve you from the wicked thought, Gretna Green or any other such unlawful heathenish village green!"

"There you see," complained Phyllida, "you do not take me seriously, and it was foolish of me ever to tell you about this evening. But now that I have told you, you must never breathe a word to a living soul--never--never--promise!

"I do promise," said Betty.

"With the old rhyme--till Christmas--you remember?"

Betty stood up, while a ritual, sacred to the childhood of Phyllida, was solemnly enacted. In a monotonous whispered chaunt, Betty promised:

"_I will not tell at primrose tide, At cherry tide I'll silent be, At barley harvest I'll be dumb Till Christmas come and set me free._"

Phyllida was satisfied that her indiscreet confidence was safely locked up in Betty's bosom, capacious, homely, sweet-savoured as an apple-closet.

You have seen the confidante in action. Is it not well that we have banished her from society? No longer may she enter stark mad in white muslin, as the play directs. We have put her away in an old chest with hoops and tie-wigs and gibbets and pirates and Newgate ordinaries and rotten boroughs and watchet ribbands. No longer does she play asterisk to a heroine, because nowadays the adventures of our heroines are entirely introspective. But, as upon all time-honoured institutions, let us drop a tear for the confidante; she has helped a thousand perplexed authors to unfold their simple dramas, she has helped many a scene-shifter to leisure.

Mr. Sheridan could laugh at Mr. Cumberland through this artful, artless medium, but he too had his Lucy. Mr. Smollett depended upon Miss Williams (a lady of the loosest character) in order to help his Narcissa to reveal herself and you, Mr. Goldsmith whose name, like immortal Madame Blaize, is 'bedizened and brocaded,' you had your dearest Neville.

Yet, after all, however much we may regret them, confidantes were very bad for heroines. They would encourage them in all that was most reprehensible. Here you see, is our own confidante encouraging her mistress to play with Love's torch and for all you or she know, get badly scorched by the purple flame. Such temerity is very well for country wenches to whom a green gown is a proper delight for May morning. Betty, with her memories of many barley breaks, junketings and Hallowe'en festivals, where ripe lips are as common as cherries at midsummer, was not the perfect monitor for swansdown misses brought up under Miss Prudence Prim's long rattan, taught to sit up straight and put into corsets almost as soon as they were out of robe-coats. In fact she was a confidante, a match-maker, to whom a wedding-ring was a Post Hoc horse-collar, through which to grin at the censorious world.

After all, where's the ultimate difference between sweet sensibility a hundred and fifty years ago and sweet sensibility today? We should consider it _demode_ for the latter to gossip with her maid. Now every schoolboy and schoolgirl knows how to spell psychology, and has been awarded a sub-conscious self to enliven the lonely hours. And this sub-conscious self, what is it, under analysis? Why, nothing more than the old confidante in ghostly guise with as long a tongue and as rich a store of bad advice.

So now, having successfully, as I hope, occupied your attention while sweet sensibility gets into bed, let us snuff the candles and leave the room to Phyllida and wavering firelight.

_Chapter the Nineteenth_

BLACKHART FARM WITH A COCK-FIGHT

About ten miles from Curtain Wells on the Bristol road stood a ruined cottage. With thatch discoloured, torn by gales and sparrows, and with windows made crooked by internal decay, its expression was grotesque and unpleasant. A tangled bed of rotten nettles filled the space before it, and all the vegetation beside was rank and desolate. This cottage served as fitting lodge to a sinister bye-way covered with weeds and almost overhung in summer by hedges dark with masses of black bryony, but in winter and spring sufficiently open to admit the cold grey sky overhead, and the chill Easterly rain, which on the morning after the Chinese Masquerade fell with dreary persistence.

Pray pardon me that I take you so far from wit, fashion, and beauty, along this unsavoury path, but indeed the journey is inevitable if you are at all anxious to understand something of Mr. Francis Vernon's intentions. The road leads to Blackhart Farm, famous, no doubt, in days gone by for the cherries of that denomination; but since the last dying speech and confession of Mrs. Mawhood the name has acquired a new and sinister significance.

Now you understand my apologies; or is it possible you have forgotten Mrs. Mawhood of Blackhart Farm, who was turned off at Tyburn amid the execrations of the mob in 17--? Yet her long black gloves and white face haunted many pillows on the night when she paid the ultimate penalty; and for what was she hanged? Come, come, this history is not the Newgate Calendar--you must search that bloody register.

At the time, however, of Mr. Vernon's visit, Mrs. Mawhood was alive and, I am sorry to add, flourishing. He followed the roadway for about a quarter of a mile between tall, damp hedgerows, dismounted at a small wicket-gate and, leading his horse, turned aside through a plantation of close-set, withered larches under which the grass grew pale and thin, with a sweet unhealthy odour of fungus. Blackhart Farm appeared in view--a long, low building with slated roof, trim enough, but repulsive and barren. From a pile of chimney stacks smoke was rising hardly through the heavy atmosphere.

The path by which Vernon arrived led immediately to the front door. Had he continued along the cart track he would have reached, by way of a bleak paved courtyard, the back of the house. Only a very shallow strip of garden separated the front of the farm from the gloomy plantation that served as barrier to the curious world.

Vernon tied his horse to the gate of the garden, walked up the moss-grown path between clipped bushes of box, and knocking with the handle of his riding-whip on the heavy door, waited. Several moments passed, and in the deep silence that surrounded this ill-wished abode, he could distinctly hear a clock ticking on the other side of the heavy door. This, the drip of trees, and the noise of his horse chewing the rank herbage by the gate, were the only sounds that broke the stillness.

At last footsteps shuffled over the stone-paved floor within. A small panel slid away from a grating and a voice of that peculiar unctuous hoarseness only heard in a prodigiously fat man or woman, inquired his name.

"I want to see you, old Mother Mawhood."

"Love o'maids!" said the fat voice, "'tis Fancy Vernon, or I'm not a fat old sinner."

The bolts were pushed back, the latch clicked, the door swung open, and Mrs. Mawhood, whose bulk, but little reduced by Newgate fare, was soon to test severely the three-legged tenement, occupied the portal.

Take a good look at Mrs. Mawhood, while with pursy greetings she makes Fancy Vernon welcome. She is like an idol in a cavernous East Indian temple, or a giant toadstool, or weight of unbaked dough, or in fact anything that is slow, sleepy, and horrible. Almost buried in folds of flesh is a pair of beady black eyes, as steady and wicked as those of a puff-adder or seaman's parroquet. She is dressed in black, and her nails are bitten to the quick.

Mr. Vernon was probably less narrow-minded than the mob which howled at her infamy during the Tyburn journey. At any rate he chatted with her amicably enough on this grey February forenoon.

"How's business, ma'am?" he asked.

"Very bad," she wheezed. "Only three of 'em upstairs and none of 'em real quality. Still, the flowers in the garden vant fresh food, especially the blood-red toolips. Ah! it was two lips that was the undoin' of the hussies, and, 'tis fair they should profit by the harvest."

This devilish joke was followed by a low rumbling chuckle echoed above by a thin wail.

Mrs. Mawhood waddled to the foot of the stairs.

"Keep that d----d brat quiet, you charity bastard," she wheezed angrily. "She'll hev to get up to-morrow," she continued, seating herself in a wide arm-chair beside the empty grate, "and a sickly puling jade she is. I suppose you've come for the Main?"

"No," answered Vernon, "indeed, I did not know there was to be one. Good birds?"

Mrs. Mawhood nodded. "Thirty-two cocks and a Velch main. 'Tis some of those baby gentlemen from the Vells as finks they's seeing life ven a dozen lousy chairmen sveats thesselves 'oarse over a pair of bleeding chickens. And ven they's 'ad their pockets picked, they goes 'ome 'appy."

"Is Moll here?" asked Vernon.

"No, Moll's keeping a gay house Catherine Street vay."

"Egad, I've a pretty little job for Moll."

"Now don't you go leading Moll astray. She ain't been in Bridewell not these two years, and she don't vant to neither."

"This job won't take her there. I'm in need of a housewife for a month, and Moll's a nice homely woman."

"'Oo's she to look after, eh?"

"A pearl necklace," said Vernon.

"And a pretty neck, eh?"

"Tolerable," said Vernon.

"When do you want her?"

"Let me see--February. Shall we say the last week in March?"

"I'll tell her: I shall be sending a hussy from here presently to a nice honest sitivation." Again the chuckle was heard.

"I want lodgings near the Haymarket. Nice and airy--with a balcony if possible, and--well, Moll knows what attracts sweet seventeen."

"That's young for a pearl necklace."

"'Tis hers by inheritance. The lodgings must be cheerful because Miss is shy."

"Oh, Moll knows what every age likes best. She'll buy a dear little singing goldfinch and put him in a cage and hang him up in the window. Who knows? P'raps it'll breed a nice little nestful of goldfinches for Moll. 'Ow many?"

"I can discuss that with Moll herself," said Vernon.

"Ah, but Moll's so soft 'arted. Not less than fifty goldfinches, mind, and if a little hindrance arrives, 'tis to come down to Blackhart Farm--mind--and be cared for by old Mother Mawhood wot's kind even to the pore little flies on the pane."

"You look too far into the future, old lady," said Vernon.

"And so a body should, my fancy boy," the hag answered. "Now I wager you ain't thought nothin' about postillions?"

"Time enough for that."

"Yes, time enough I dare say, but you ought to engage 'em in advance. That's vat the quality does ven they writes to me. Have you got a pair of good honest postboys?"

"No, but----"

"Vell! and good honest boys ain't so easy found in Curtain Vells! Boys who'll do vat's vanted and no questions axed and none answered."

"But I thought----"

"That's all werry fine," said the monstrous old woman. "But p'raps there'll be another elopement. Maids is thick in Curtain Vells, and p'raps you won't find your boys so easy. There's some that don't like the job--don't like two brace of pops behind 'em and a galloping brother and father."

"We shan't be followed," said Vernon contemptuously.

"No, I dare say you von't, but 'tis as vell to be behind a couple of good honest boys as'll use their pops when they're turning a corner and ready to swear they thought it was two gentlemen on the high toby as vas a followin' of 'em so fast."

"Very well," said Vernon, "whom do you want me to employ?"

"Vy, there's my two nephews, Charlie and Dickie Maggs, vot 'ud drive 'ard and fast all the vay to Lunnon town and no questions axed either end, but vot could easily be ansered wiv golden Georges."

"Let 'em wait on me when I send the word, and hark'ee, they must be ready any time this month, for Miss may take it into her head to run before I expect."

Further intercourse between Mr. Francis Vernon and old Mother Mawhood was interrupted by loud knocks on the door at the back, supported by catcalls, yells, horn-blowing and whip-cracking.

"That's for the Main," said Mrs. Mawhood. "Vill you stay to see the sport?"

"'Tis a Welch main?"

"Ay--thirty-two birds."

"Well, send a boy to put my horse in the stable."

"This way, my fancy, this way," wheezed the hag, as she waddled towards the courtyard where the noise was growing louder every minute.

It may strike the reader as strange that the young gentlemen of the _Blue Boar_ (they were all there save Mr. Lovely) should come ten miles to a disreputable farm for the purpose of seeing thirty-two cocks of the game butchered. The Welch Main was a peculiarly bloody form of cock-fighting, as it was determined by a series of rounds fought by the respective survivors until at the end a pair of already vilely scarred and mutilated birds were placed beak to beak by the Feeder to determine the ultimate victor of the Main.

Ten miles was not too far to travel for such glorious sport in the days of the Georges, but that they were compelled to travel at all was due to the squeamishness of Beau Ripple, who had a singular aversion from the game and would allow no cock-pit to be established within his jurisdiction. He used to say the martyrdom of chickens should never extend beyond the demand for painted fans.

Therefore a suitable cockpit had been set up in one of the outlying barns of Blackhart Farm, whither at discreet intervals went Lieutenant Blewforth of the _Lively_, Mr. Golightly of Campbell's Grey Dragoons, Mr. Tom Chalkley of the Foot, little Peter Wingfield, and many other young gentlemen. They would sit in the first tier and allow their exquisite necks to be blown upon by the stinking breath of the second tier which, in turn, was not unwilling to allow the third tier to spit over its shoulders in the intervals of yelling, 'Three to one on the Blotch-breasted Red!' 'Six to five against the Cheshire Pile!' 'Two to one on the Black-breasted Birchin!' and other such bewildering proclamations of their confidence in particular cocks of the game.

Vernon was not at all displeased that his visit to Blackhart Farm should have ostensible justification. Looking back, as he emerged into the courtyard, he noticed all the windows of the house were blind on that side and wondered why so ill-favoured and disreputable a dwelling-place had never been investigated by the servants of justice. So it was, however, not long after this date, and a gruesome day's work it was beneath the hot August sun: and not the least gruesome sight was old Mother Mawhood, monstrous, flabby and terror-stricken, quivering in her chair by the empty fireside, opposite a Robin Redbreast from Bow Street drinking many quarts of beer and regarding her with unfavourable glances, while he listened to the chink of the spades in the flower garden by the plantation. The runners would never have visited Blackhart Farm had not a certain lady of quality, who travelled in a post-chaise with muffled windows, dallied a month too long, thereby raising the suspicions of her eagle-nosed aunt, the Countess of----, but what has all this to do with cock-fighting?

In the pit the spectators were arranging themselves. In front sat Lieutenant Blewforth and little Peter Wingfield as Masters of the Match. In the front tier sat the leading amateurs of Curtain Wells. Behind them were the shopkeepers, and behind the shopkeepers was the riff-raff of the Wells and its satellite villages.

Everybody was bawling odds at top voice, and occasionally one of the birds crowed. This was an infringement of etiquette and, being considered a sign of cowardice, immediately lengthened the odds against the offender. The tallowy man in a blue kerseymere coat and breeches is one of the Feeders, and is acting in that capacity for the Services represented by Lieutenant Blewforth, while the civilians are employing the good offices of Jimmy Trickett, who on less exciting occasions is one of the hostlers of the _Blue Boar_.

Vernon, looking for a vacant place in the front tier found himself next to Mr. Anthony Clare, who, for all he sat so unmoved, had provided eight cocks for the civilians and stood to lose a pretty pile of guineas.

"Where's Lovely?" asked Vernon, shaking the sawdust from his boots.

"He never comes to cock-fights," Clare replied rather coldly.

"Too brutal for a poet, eh?"

"I have never heard him say so," said Clare.

As a matter of fact Charles strongly disapproved of the sport and it is a significant fact that at this very moment, he was trotting along the Bristol road, tired of lashing Curtain polls and determined, against the advice of his conscience, to stake fifty guineas on the result of the Main.

The latter progressed with monotonous cruelty until, of the thirty-two cocks who began, but two pairs were left, all bleeding profusely. And now with a refinement of brutality, the steel gaffles, hitherto used to shorten the earlier and less interesting matches, were removed and silver ones fastened on in their place, because, the latter, being less deadly, prolonged the miserable contest.

During this momentary lull, Charles entered the barn and was greeted with cheers in which could be detected a note of surprize. Clare moved along in order to make room for his friend, and squeezed Mr. Vernon somewhat unceremoniously in doing so.

"What birds are being set to?" inquired Lovely.

"My Knowsley and Chalkley's Cheshire Pile, and a White Pile of Campbell's against Winnington's Cuckoo."

The semi-final dragged out its bloody length, until for the final was left Mr. Clare's famous Knowsley cock, his ebony breast dabbled with blood and his red pinions ragged and broken, but still preserving some of the smartness of their slantwise trimming--trimmed so in order that by a lucky stroke an adversary's eye might be put out. The survivor of the two Services was Mr. Campbell's White Pile, stained with crimson.

"Will your bird win?" whispered Mr. Lovely.

"I think so," said Clare, "he comes of a good breed."

"Two to one in Tens against the Pile," shouted Mr. Lovely.

"Done," said Vernon.

"Two to one in Twenties against the Pile," shouted Mr. Lovely.

"Done," said Mr. Vernon.

"Three to one in Fifties," shouted Mr. Lovely.

And this wager also was taken by Mr. Francis Vernon.

The Feeders were setting the birds beak to beak. The shouting of odds was deafening: the gallant cocks were both exhausted by the four previous fights, but the feathers flew, the wings whirred, the gaffles clicked, and the blood flowed fast enough to please the vile faces that looked down through the murky atmosphere.

At last the White Pile, blinded in one eye, began to retreat before the Knowsley.

"I pound the cock," shouted Charles, flinging his hat into the pit.

The Teller of the Law, a seedy vagabond with a red nose, began to count in raucous accents. Twice he counted twenty slowly, and

"Vill any vun take it?" he asked.

"Yes," said Mr. Vernon, and just as Mr. Vernon said 'Yes,' the brave Knowsley cock, the champion of many famous fights, toppled over on his side, dead.

The Naval and Military Amateurs had won the Welch Main, and Mr. Charles Lovely had lost two hundred and ten guineas, not to mention ten pounds for so rashly pounding the cock.

The young gentlemen went back to Curtain Wells much pleased with the afternoon's entertainment, while the riff-raff walked or drove in queer vehicles back to their squalid homes, all save one unfortunate individual, unable to meet a debt of ten shillings incurred by backing the brave Knowsley, who for all he was dying had pursued his antagonist so confidently. He spent the night in a basket close to the roof and was not set down till the next morning by one of the labourers on Blackhart Farm.

_Chapter the Twentieth_

IN WHICH EVERYTHING GROWS BUT THE PLOT

You will remember, if you have not put this book upon the table meanwhile, that in the last paragraph of the last chapter, we left an unfortunate individual swinging in a basket hard by the roof of a barn. He was hoisted by a pulley amid the acclamations of the mob because he was unable to fulfil an obligation so small that half a guinea would have covered it. There he swung amid cobwebs and bats, fearful every time the basket creaked he should fall into the blood-stained sawdust of the cock-pit. I cannot tell you his name, but that is no great matter since we must examine him not as a man, but as a symbol.

Possibly with the Beau's perspective, we might diminish him to the size of a textual illustration, for this unfortunate man is a textual illustration, and though not etched with the care of Mr. Stothard, will serve his purpose well enough.

Suspension is a disreputable attitude for the human body, whatever way it is brought about, yet I doubt this maltreated anonymity was in better case than our hero. He paid the penalty for laying unwise wagers and found earth on the next morning much as he had left it on the afternoon of the day before. Moreover, he never paid his half-guinea, which was a real source of consolation. But our hero swung that night in an immaterial basket that creaked thrice as damnably as the other, and found no good-natured labouring man to put him on the ground next morning. The only result of opposing the advice of his conscience, was an additional debt of two hundred and twenty guineas to our villain.

To make matters worse, he had to meet his creditor over the breakfast table, and of the many dooms measured out to sinners, this is surely one of the most difficult to face with equanimity.

In despair, he took to drinking the waters with the rest of the Exquisite Mob, and earned a few golden glances from Beau Ripple, but nothing more tangible. Even the advantage of these was neutralized by the chalybeate, which acted with disconcerting abruptness upon a healthy body unused to medicinal spurs.

The wry water served a good purpose, however, by souring his point-of-view. The liquid iron entered into his soul and he lashed the Curtain Polls in a variety of metres. He also took long walks into the country, and sought by the contemplation of scenery to acquire an impersonal attitude towards his fellow creatures. After all, there is no better training for a mob-master than the exercise of a satirical pen, and as time went on Mr. Lovely's book increased in bulk, although it never achieved more than a suggestive slimness even when bound in calf.

February faded into March, and in accordance with the season everything began to grow.

Mr. Lovely's book we have already noticed.

Mr. Vernon's seductive arts grew daily more seductive, and, though for a week or two after Mr. Ripple's warning, Mrs. Courteen arranged for the complete occupation of Phyllida's leisure, the growth of Mrs. Courteen's figure necessitated a stricter attention to diet and exercise, and caused her so much anxiety that her vigilance was soon relaxed. So whenever the forenoons were fine enough, Phyllida sat on the moss-grown seat in the centre of the Maze, and, under the patronage of the little stone Cupid, grew daily more powerfully enchanted by the magical personality of Mr. Francis Vernon.

Thomas, the footman, grew daily more unctuous owing to the visit of a gouty dean who, being invited to occupy St. Simon's pulpit, preached a remarkable sermon in seven divisions and twenty-three sub-divisions, conclusively establishing the identity of the English Nation with the tribe of Benjamin. Mr. Moon and Major Tarry grew more entirely devoted to the widow, and Thomasina the cat also grew owing to the advent of kittens. In fact, everybody and everything grew prodigiously in the merry springtime.

The list of visitors grew. Rich Mrs. Bendish arrived and made all the dowagers jealous with her chest of precious stones that she brought back from an island in the Caribbean Sea--buried treasure that was actually discovered. Lord Rocquepool came, and his daughters, the Honourable Georgina and the Honourable Caroline de Winqule. The Honourable Mrs. Winter-Green came, and the Welch baronet, Sir Owen Ap Taffy. The Marquess of Hurricane arrived, and several members of the great Wind family. Also, with all these aristocratick visitors, it is not surprizing that Mr. Ripple's snuff bill grew daily.

March came in like a lamb that year, and the sweet season danced in the bleak furrows over which the lank hares leaped and scampered. White violets scented equinoctial dusks, and in every window of the Wells big daffodils hung down their golden ruffs. March went by to the tune of fiddles and flutes. Mr. Ripple had to attend near half a dozen routs every night, and the weekly Assemblies were more fully thronged than ever before.

Every day the jolly sun grew more powerful and the noise of polite conversation was almost drowned by the twittering of the sparrows as they, like their betters, made a chorus of loves, jealousies, hopes, plans and disappointments in a world of chimney-stacks and slanting roofs. They perched in the most fashionable gutters, just as, down below on the sunny side of the High Street, the Exquisite Mob ruffled before the gayest shops.

"How well that chip hat becomes me!"

"What wonderful silks are being displayed this spring!"

"They say that hoops and head-dresses will both show a monstrous increase in size this year."

As if the daffodils had intoxicated the whole race of dyers, nothing but shades of yellow were to be seen. In these happier days for the followers of the Mode, Blonda and Brunetta, those charming sisters, were not compelled to rely on their natural complexions in order to wear a certain shade. In these happier days, powder, rouge and patches availed to make the gaudy apricock glow even beside the blooming peach without injury to either. Therefore the artfully arranged bow-windows with rolls of citron damasks, canary velvets, golden brocades, lemon sattins and orange silks, dismayed not Blonda any more than the sapphire and turquoise of the autumnal mode fretted the vanity of Brunetta. As for young maidens, their fashion like the eternal mountains was always white.

But suddenly on the twenty-seventh of the month the weather changed. Masses of wet grey clouds swept in from the Atlantick, and March prepared to go out like a lion.

And on this very morning _Curtain Polls severely lashed by a Curtain Rod_ appeared on Mr. Paul Virgin's counter.

This small work produced far greater consternation than the sudden change in the weather. Though it rained and blew, and whistled and streamed, nobody paid the slightest attention, nobody said 'What a change in the weather,' for all the world was deeply engrossed in reading about his asterisked self and his asterisked neighbour.

_Chapter the Twenty-first_

CURTAIN POLLS

There had been nothing to prepare Curtain Wells for its chastizement. No wreathed pamphlet warned readers in the most choice preliminary duff that a sarcastick comet would presently singe their vices, their follies and their vanities. Nobody had been invited to subscribe in advance to his own ridicule. As it were on the wings of a Westerly gale, these destructive little volumes settled upon the fields of Pleasure like locusts on a Bedouin plantation.

Two speculative chap-book pedlars sold the first twenty to as many drinkers of chalybeate hastening home to breakfast. For those who stopped to buy there was no breakfast that morning. The kidneys and the bacon and the eggs and the ham and the loin chops and the red herrings and the toasted bread were neglected. The vanguard of purchasers were, in reading about neighbours, too much diverted, and, in reading about themselves, too indignant to eat.

Out went the kidneys and the bacon and the eggs and the ham and the loin chops and the red herrings and the toasted bread, frozen stiff in their own fat; and out went the vanguard to warn the main army of fashion that scurrility, satire and malice were abroad in many metres.

"Listen to this, Moon," ejaculated Major Tarry, as, undeterred by the driving wind, he strode along, quoting extracts that were perfectly inaudible to his companion.

"Listen to this, will you listen to this,"

"_Like a lap-dog he's fed with a second-best spoon, And bays as he should at the sight of the Moon_."

"Yes, but listen to this," said the Justice treading heavily in a puddle as he spoke.

"_Do not tarry, M**n, but marry, While you're still upon the wax, Though above her, You can love her, And avoid the window tax_."

"Very low, very low indeed," said Tarry.

"So 'tis," quoth the Justice, "but the next verse is lower still."

"_For that coat of Him we wrote of Will be in your parlour soon, And be reigning When you're waning, And we whisper horned M**n_."

"Ha, ha," said Tarry, "low, d----d low! But 'sblood, the fellow has humour."

"Humour," said the Justice, "you call this obscene doggerel, humour?"

"In parts, sir, in parts."

"I call it melancholy and libidinous."

Mrs. Courteen was seated at her window disconsolately regarding the rain.

"Gemini, child!" she exclaimed. "What can be the matter with Mr. Moon and the Major that they gesticulate so wildly."

"They're reading books, ma'am," Betty announced.

"Reading book, but they are standing at the street corner like Methodies!"

"They'm beaent gone sick mad for love of 'ee, do 'ee think, Ma'am?"

"Flatterer," sighed Mrs. Courteen. "No, child, they have probably been converted. I detect Methodism in their madness. Te-hee! I must keep that for Archdeacon Conybeare, who so dislikes extremes of sensibility in anything that pertains to so sacred a thing as religion. Ah, dear! Religion, what is it?"

"There's many ways of it ma'am, I do think. 'Tis true religious not to laugh when the lads tickle thy ankles wi' straws during the prayer for Good King George!"

"Tut-tut, how disloyal!"

Just then the raucous voice of one of the itinerant booksellers shouted "Curtain Polls severely lashed by a Curtain-Rod."

"Run, Betty, and inquire the price at once," cried Mrs. Courteen perceiving that this was the cause of the gentlemen's delay. "'Tis evidently a rumour on the best authority about the Day of Judgment."

Presently Betty returned.

"'Tis a book, ma'am."

"I know that, simpleton, how much?"

"Four shillings and sixpence, ma'am, for a little mimsy book not so thick as the magick history of Jack the Giant Killer."

"But what was inside, foolish one?"

"Oh, 'twas full of stars, ma'am."

"'Tis certainly a work on fortune-telling. Pray buy it instantly, here is the money."

Back came Betty with the volume, and presently Mrs. Courteen fainted.

Downstairs ran Betty, and upstairs walked Mr. Thomas and Betty.

"'Twas the book as done it," said the latter vehemently.

The offending volume lay face downwards upon the quilted apricock of Mrs. Courteen's lap, so Thomas picked it up and began to read:

"_At the Wells many elegant widows are seen, But no one so modish as Mrs. C******n, Her hoop_----"

So far he read, but, rubicund though he was, modesty was still able to deepen his colour.

"Yes," said Betty, "pray do 'ee read us some more, Mr. Thomas."

"What Jebusite wrote this book? I will smite him and all his works," replied Thomas, flinging the volume into the fire. Whether the odour of burning leather or the profuse drops of Sal Volatile revived the offended lady I do not know, but she instantly sat up and, in a voice tremulous with anxiety, bade her footman call a chair.

"For," said she, "I must pay a visit of condolence to my Lady Bunbutter, whose propriety has suffered an almost irreparable injury."

She did not stay to change her dress; she passed her suitors still quoting scurrility, one against the other in the wind and rain, without a smile of recognition or sympathy.

Outside my Lady Bunbutter's stood a row of sedan-chairs, and as Mrs. Courteen walked up my Lady Bunbutter's front door-step, the knot of chairmen packed more closely over a copy of _Curtain Polls_ indiscreetly left behind by one of their fares. There was a rustle of pages quickly turned by dirty thumbs, and as Mrs. Courteen was ushered in by my Lady Bunbutter's claret-coloured footman, there followed her upstairs a burst of ribald laughter.

My Lady Bunbutter had, by reason of her superior bulk and wealth, successfully repelled all rival claimants to the throne of dowagership. She reigned supreme; moreover her advice on this gusty forenoon was

## particularly valuable, inasmuch as she had just shaken off the waters of

Bath on account of the publication there of some odious verses, in which her name and her person were treated with intolerably small respect. Therefore it was not surprizing to find her drawing-room the haunt of innumerable widows, old maids and long-established wives. There they sat, supplying asterisks with immense volubleness. As it happened, they had just tittered behind their fans over the odiously vulgar, but undeniably appropriate--yes! the odious fellow was certainly witty--when the subject of their malicious laughter and false blushes entered the room.

With the tact bred of many a Quadrille party, my lady Bunbutter advanced to meet Mrs. Courteen, murmuring, 'poor dear little Miss Kitcat, so spiteful and yet, my dear Mrs. Courteen, since we are all friends, alas! how true!'

Now young Miss Kitcat was still young Miss Kitcat, and simply would not become old maid or dowager, and would allow herself to be ogled by that notorious rake and disreputable--yes! disreputable, card-sharper, Captain Mann.

While the dowagers discussed the situation and vowed that the rogue of an author sadly needed a lesson, Beau Ripple himself, with many an urbane tut-tut was reading _Curtain Polls_ in his tall white drawing-room, where the firelight danced and flickered over the gleaming ivory panels.

"Too bad," said the Beau to himself as he turned the scandalous pages. He did not, however, treat them less carefully because they were scandalous, for to Mr. Ripple a book was always a book, and he paid as much ceremony to the emanations of Grub Street as he would have shown to the copper plates of an elephant folio.

"This is, indeed, too bad," said the Beau, "and yet the rascal has wit. Oh, yes, he certainly has wit, but what an excellent example this volume affords of the superiority of prose over verse. A poetick satirist too often sacrifices his good breeding for the sake of the rhymes. Now I should never have said that. No, no, that is too bad, and this--good G----! this is unpardonable!"

The Great little Man jumped up as red as one of the big chintz roses that bloomed so prodigally all over his winged chair.

The King of Fashion looked very small as he stood in the middle of an Aubusson rug, yet I think he never looked more truly a monarch than at this moment. Unfortunately there was nobody to see him as he stood in his little world of mirrours and engravings.

And what had upset his equanimity? Certainly not the following lines:

"_Where R*****, gentlest, kindliest of Beaux, To all the world an urbane presence shows: Proclaims the tropick joys of China Tea, And rules e'en Fashion with his polished sway. At his approach the graceless ruffle shakes, While every waistcoat in its buttons quakes; Each conscious shoe more luminously shines, And puckered breeches haste to smooth their lines_."

Whatever the Curtain Rod thought of the subjects, to the Monarch he was always complimental.

"Intolerable! unpardonable!" cried the Beau, tapping his snuff-box so fiercely that some of the powder was spilled over the grey Angora cat which was purring against his gold-clocked stockings in the heart of a faded Aubusson rose. Octavia (the cat) sneezed assent. What had upset his equanimity? You shall take a short journey to find out, for I perceive a break in the weather and sweet April is in the West.

We will walk just so far as Curtain Garden, but, pray, do not turn into the Maze where the paths are atrociously damp. Alas, the rain is beginning again, but at the end of that long alley is a summer house, the abode of many Rococo Dryads, although 'tis haunted at present by amorous mortals, for I caught the glint of a buckle and a shimmer of chestnut ringlets.

It does not require King OEdipus to guess that those eyes which stare so into the heavens are the blue eyes of Phyllida, while any one would recognize in that smooth voice the careful enunciation of Mr. Francis Vernon.

He, like every one else that forenoon, was reading _Curtain Polls severely lashed by a Curtain Rod_. Perchance the following lines were they that lately enraged Mr. Horace Ripple:

"_Now is it a hoyden, a hussy or Miss, Who listens to love but refuses a kiss? 'Tis said every morning she flies to the Maze, And buries her head from the Publick's low gaze_

_Of Love in a Maze, pretty charmer, beware, For under the rose there are thorns ev'rywhere, And if you should chance the wrong turning to take, 'Tis odds that you'll trip on a tall garden Rake._

_The Cits, when you pass, point you out to their Belles, You serve as a moral all over the Wells, And Dowagers, drinking your health in green tea, Express a faint hope that man will not betray_."

"Those are pretty stanzas for a lover to read," said Vernon, who, to do him justice, did not seem very greatly perturbed by the insult.

"Oh, Amor," said poor Phyllida, "they can't truly be intended for me!"

"For whom else?"

"But who would write such cruel words of a young woman?"

"That puppy, Lovely."

"Mr. Lovely! Oh! no, he's a gentleman and a man of family and a man of taste and a friend of Beau Ripple."

"He may be all this and more," declared Vernon, "but he wrote this book."

"I don't believe it."

"He did, I say, for he informed me so himself--at least he as good as informed me!"

"Amor! you must have been mistook."

"On my life, not at all. He owes me near five hundred guineas, and when I hinted that the expense of inland Spas tells upon a gentleman's resources, begged my pardon, swore he had a literary project on hand, and promised me a hundred guineas on Lady Day. That was the day before yesterday."

"A gamester!" said Miss Phyllida, who, with the injustice of her age and sex, neglected to see that her lover was as much to blame in this

## particular as Lovely.

"Ay! a gamester," said Vernon with fervid indignation.

"And for the sake of a hundred guineas he was ready to cheapen the honour of a maid?"

"My angel forgets the Chinese Masquerade. Mr. Lovely was piqued by her obvious weakness for a less fashionable, less conspicuous gentleman."

"Oh, I will never forgive him. He has ruined me."

"Nay, come, come, 'tis not so bad as that. Amor will never desert his Phyllida."

"I'm ruined, I'm ruined," she sobbed. "I shall never dare go to visit my cousin Barbara, who is as prim and proper as----" Nothing was prim enough for the comparison. "And she has the most delicious hot buns you ever tasted, and the dearest spaniel and the most beautiful pugdog. Oh dear! oh dear! oh dear! how all the neighbours will laugh, and old Rumble the carrier will be telling tales about me in every kitchen in the county, and 'tis all your fault."

"My fault?"

"Yes, yours, for asking me to come and meet you and making love, while all the while there was somebody peeping over the hedges. I'll never forgive you, never, never!----"

"Dearest life, we can put a stop to scandal by being wed immediately. Listen! I'll have a post-chaise ready at dawn, and post-boys in scarlet, and lodgings with a balcony and a goldfinch singing in a cage. My Phyllida, will you come?"

"Oh! I dare not, I dare not--not yet, oh lud, oh lud! how shall I look the world in the face?"

Vernon thought for a moment.

"Where are your pearls kept?"

"In my mamma's trunkmail, but Betty could give me the key--and sometimes in her jewel case."

"On the thirtieth," said Vernon, "there will be a ball at Daish's Rooms, next to the _Blue Boar_ where I lodge. You will surely be there, 'tis my lady Bunbutter's rout."

"Yes, we shall be there," said Phyllida.

"At two o'clock in the morning, I will have a post-chaise waiting by St. Simon's Church corner, opposite Leonard's toy shop. Would you have the courage to slip out, my dearest heart, my Phyllida?"

"Oh, no, I could not travel by night."

"'Twould be safer," urged Vernon.

"No, no, I could not."

"Then for your sake, I'll take the risque and have the post-chaise in the same place at three o'clock in the afternoon of the next day. Promise you will come."

"No, no, I shall never be brave enough, and I must go for I hear voices, and I must never be seen with you again. Good-bye, good-bye," and before Vernon could stop her, Phyllida was running down the poplar alley to escape from Curtain Garden.

Our villain began to wonder whether she would elope after all. If she were shy, he might secure the necklace at any rate. With slow steps, his mind full of silken pearls, Mr. Vernon went slowly homewards. Half way down the High Street, he passed a narrow street known as Blood Passage from the vicinity of a large slaughter-house. He hesitated; made up his mind, and, turning down it, came to a crooked house over a low tumble-down doorway. He knocked fastidiously with the amber knob of his cane. A slatternly woman, whose last night's rouge was streaked with the matutinal ashes, opened the door.

"Does Mr. Maggs live here?"

"Come in," said the frowsy light o' love.

_Chapter the Twenty-second_

THE CURTAIN ROD

The satirist stood in his publisher's back parlour, and, through the dusty glass of the partition, observed the Exquisite Mob purchase their castigation.

"'Tis strange," he pondered, "that mankind should be willing to pay four-and-sixpence to be laughed at. Yet it is!"

Mr. Lovely was awaiting a draught for one hundred guineas, and Mr. Paul Virgin, glad of anything that would delay for a while such an unwelcome disbursement, continued to bow and smirk over the counter as the neat little piles of new volumes speedily diminished. At last the hour for the midday meal arrived with a temporary lull in the storm of purchasers. Mr. Virgin turned with a sigh into his little back parlour and, wading carefully through the heaps of uncatalogued tomes, set out with a wry face to unlock his walnut writing-cabinet.

"We were hurried too much, Mr. Lovely, sir. We han't had leisure to bind the book as it should be bound. Ye would hurry us so, Mr. Lovely."

"You wouldn't pay me till the book was published, and I want the money, so d----n all grumbling and be grateful that you'll make a small fortune."

"A small fortune! What a jester you are, Mr. Lovely. I declare you put me in mind of the old plays, such jests!"

Mr. Paul Virgin seated before his cabinet, was writing the draught with tardy fingers.

"There ye are, Mr. Lovely, and never say I don't treat ye with consideration, with generosity, sir, for I dare swear I shall lose fifty pounds sterling by this adventure."

"Be d----d, you peevish rogue. Why all the world of fashion has thronged your shop since nine o'clock this morning."

"Yes, but it takes a deal to make a hundred guineas. Now let me make it pounds, Mr. Lovely, sir. Do let me make it pounds."

The latter snatched the draught from the old young bookseller and, having read it through with much deliberation, transferred it to the seclusion of his innermost pocket.

After this transaction, which was effected with a singular grace, I am sorry to add that he put his tapered finger to his tapered nose and winked several times at the disconsolate Mr. Virgin.

"The books are so ill-bound, look at this one, Mr. Lovely, your honour. The leaves are falling apart already, just because you would hurry us so terribly."

Mr. Lovely stooped and picked up some loose pages.

"Ay, 'tis autumn already with this copy," he said, glancing casually at the page he held in his hand. "Why who wrote this?"

"You did, Mr. Lovely, you did."

"I wrote this--this d----d vile verse, this--" and Charles read aloud the lines that so dismayed our heroine. "I wrote this damnable doggerel? By G----, Mr. Virgin, I never wrote this."

"Why, who else could have written it?"

"That's what I want to know. Come back, you hound," shouted the irate author, grabbing his publisher by the tails of his coat, just as he was edging his way back to the shop. "Come back," he said, jerking him over Mr. Bayle's Dictionary. "You moth-eaten vagabond, you impostor, you thief." Charles began to belabour Mr. Virgin with a folio copy of the _Anatomy of Melancholy_. Round and round the little back parlour he thumped the publisher; the dust rose from innumerable ancient tomes. Surely never were books so rudely disturbed since the niece and the Padre flung the library of the illustrious Don Quixote de la Mancha out of the window, and burned a hundred volumes of chivalry.

"How came these d----d lines into my book, eh, sir, answer me that, sir," and having dissected the _Anatomy of Melancholy_, Charles picked up Sir Roger L'Estrange's translation of AEsop to continue the assault.

"I don't understand, Mr. Lovely, sir. Pray desist, Mr. Lovely, your honour, sir. The printer must have printed them."

"'Sdeath and fury! you rascal, I know that. Who wrote them, who wrote them?"

In order to supply the correct twirl to this note of interrogation, Charles flung the little bookseller to the farthest corner of his little back parlour, at the same time arming himself with half a dozen fresh volumes.

Mr. Virgin cowered in the dust and cobwebs.

"Who wrote them?" Charles demanded.

"I don't----"

"What!" and the--th volume of the _Gentleman's Magazine_, newly arrived from the binder, winged its way in the direction of the quivering bookseller. This he ducked to avoid, but even as he ducked, the five volumes of Mr. Ozell's revision of Urquhart and Motteux' _Rabelais_ burst over him like an exploded hand grenade.

"Who wrote them?"

"Truly I don't----"

This time Mr. Prior's _Poems on Several Occasions_ carried his wig into obscurity, and the owner clapped a hand to his head just in time to receive the bevelled morocco edges of the _Beggar's Opera_ full on the fingers.

"Mr. Lovely, sir, you are too violent."

"Violent, you dog? By G---- if you don't give the name of the son of a w---- that wrote these damnable lines, I'll flay you alive and bind my next edition of poems with your lousy skin." The foxy-faced old young man commenced to wring his hands.

"Mr. Lovely," he almost screamed. "Mr. Lovely, you're mad--go out of my shop."

"Who wrote those lines? Answer, or I'll break up your shop--ay! break it up with your own sign-board. At the Sign of the Woman--at the Sign of the Strumpet! Answer me, you lickspittle vermin, answer me."

Charles had now seized his wretched publisher by the neck-band, and shook him so roughly that the latter, fearing for his teeth, the most extravagant purchase in his mean little life, began to whine.

"A gentleman--a gentleman----"

"Well, you misbegotten toad, I never supposed 'twas a midwife."

"No, certainly not, Mr. Lovely, a gentleman--a gentleman."

"His name, dog."

"I don't know."

"Yes, you do, answer will you."

"He told me 'twas Amor."

"I knew it, I knew it, you sneaking son of a b----, and he gave you twenty guineas to print the verses."

"No, not twenty, only ten, Mr. Lovely, on my soul."

"On your soul! H---- l take your soul! Why you were spawned in a ditch, you viper. So you let my honour go for ten guineas. Give them to me."

"Oh! Mr. Lovely."

"Give them to me."

The miserable little old young man produced the money, unluckily for himself, in paper.

"Now since you love money so dearly, by heaven, you shall eat money." And Mr. Lovely, making a bolus of the bribe, crammed it down the reluctant bookseller's throat with his own ruler. Then our hero walked out of the shop.

I hope you will not deny this scene was in the true vein of heroism. Aye! aye! 'tis full of bombast as you very properly observe, ma'am or sir; but that is the part of a hero. He must follow the Prince of Denmark's directions to the players. Aye! aye! and 'tis full of wind, but so was the great Montgolfier balloon, and surely every aeronaut is a hero, even in his descents at the tail-end of a parachute.

So pray judge Mr. Lovely, not as a man, but as a hero, for I think you'll do me the justice to admit I never tried to conceal his position.

But he owes the villain a considerable sum of money. Of course he does, and this awkward fact is perplexing him very much indeed as he strides down Curtain High Street. To tell the truth, when he emerged from Mr. Virgin's shop, he found that when the Fates dipped him into Styx, they made the same mistake as Madame Thetis, with this difference, that, whereas Achilles was left with a vulnerable heel, our hero preserved a vulnerable conscience.

It would have been mighty heroick to march into the _Blue Boar_, run Mr. Vernon through the lungs, wed the injured heroine and tread after death the golden fields of Elysium; but his silly conscience would not allow him to kill a man to whom he was under a monetary obligation.

So he borrowed four hundred guineas from Mr. Antony Clare, who could ill afford the loan, and putting this sum with what he had earned from lashing the Curtain Polls in an extra thick paper envelope, he sealed it with his own heroick seal. This fulfilment of earthly debts he sent up to Mr. Francis Vernon by the hand of Mr. Daish himself, and set to work to make his conscience less vulnerable by many consecutive pints of heroick Burgundy.

You thought that he was going to turn out poor humanity after bullying Mr. Virgin so heroically? Egad, ma'am or sir, you thought wrong. You doubt anybody can be a Burgundian hero? So he can; there has been more than one Charles the Bold of Burgundy.

The very word is as fire to the most pusillanimous: the very thought of its crimson depths should set us all tilting.

'Bring me a quart bottle of Burgundy.' The phrase is like a trumpet-call outside the keep of Paradise.

'Bring me another quart of Burgundy.' Down goes the portcullis before the hero's charge.

Port may turn a man into a hero--in his dreams; yet I doubt they are too heavy. As for Sherry, it will serve to sharpen the wits of a dried-up attorney, but is poor stuff to weave into heroes. On Champagne, a man will talk like the crew of the _Argo_, but there's the end of the whole business.

Charles drank Burgundy and I promise you some fine heroicks presently.

_Chapter the Twenty-third_

SPACE BETWEEN AN HEROICK COUPLET

A discouraging fact for the Persii of yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow, is that, however needle-sharp their thrusted rapiers, however thorough their castigations, Society never shows weal or scar at the end of it all.

Here was profligate, card-playing, snobbish, vapoured Society, quite recovered of its whipping and, by candletime, setting out to perform, just those very actions Persius most bitterly abuses.

My lady Bunbutter continued to observe every Matador in her opponents' hands, continued to rake in ill-gotten guineas, continued to use a quadrille pack with Manille stained, Spadille nicked, Basto dog-eared, and Ponto scratched. The Most Honble. the Marchioness of Hurricane continued to help herself five times to the richest Fricassees; continued to allow her lap-dog liberty of vomit in alien drawing-rooms, continued to breathe stertorous bawdry into the prominent ears of her Italian son-in-law--el Conde di Scirocco--while her daughter the Contessa snored in a corner.

Young Miss Kitcat continued to encourage the addresses of the disreputable Captain Mann, and even went so far as to tap that military scoundrel three times with her fan in coy avowal of his charming naughtiness.

The Earl of Cinderton drank five bottles of Port that very night in order to emphasize his indifference to satire, and slept under his own mahogany table because his lackeys below stairs were too drunk to carry him to bed.

In fact, nobody save the publisher of Curtain Polls displayed sign or sense of injury.

Our heroine indeed was vastly affected, but her misfortunes were due to a gloss upon the original.

As it happened, Mrs. Courteen did not discover the reference to her daughter's indiscretion, until she was asked by an inquisitive dowager to explain the allusion in the twelve lines. She managed to conceal her agitation, thanks to the permanency of the newest rouge, but presently called for her chair and arrived home a full two hours before she was expected.

When she sailed into the parlour Phyllida was languishingly occupied with a blue vase of pot-pourri, and the parlour fire was trying to burn up beneath a weight of blackened notepaper.

The suddenness of the widow's entrance alarmed her daughter so much that she dropped the vase, and the contents were strewn over the carpet. The faint perfume that slowly permeated the stuffy atmosphere of the lodgings, should have reminded Mrs. Courteen of her youth, of long June eves and blossoms plucked awhile ago by fingers now wrinkled and stained with years of snuff.

Mrs. Courteen also neglected to remember that so far as ridicule went, she had brought enough of that upon her own head.

However, she recalled neither memory nor fact, and was properly enraged with her daughter's light behaviour.

"You have ruined my good name, child. I can never again look the world in the face. How we shall be laughed at in Hampshire, for be sure that odious Miss Talker whose sister married the Rector of Slumber, has already despatched a copy to her brother-in-law, and you know what chatterboxes parsons always are: I suppose because they preach, though I should have thought, lud! that with so much breath used on Sunday, they might be as dumb as dumb for the rest of the week, and hurt nobody, least of all their own wives and neighbours. But there! what good is it to educate a young woman in the way she should go? I might better have set an example to the village clock. At all events that does possess a face. Put down your handkerchief, hussy."

"Dear mamma----"

"Don't excuse yourself, pray do not excuse yourself, I doubt 'tis all my fault. I doubt I han't looked after you, taken you to Melton Abbey, and prayed for you, minx, yes, prayed for you. And have you got any good from learning the collects for Sunday and the Benedicite and the Athanasian Creed and the thirty-nine Articles? None! A pretty thing, truly, that after so much honourable religion, I should have my daughter pointed out as a--as what no respectable young woman is. Pointed at! And I, your mother, am to be laughed at, mocked at, jeered at, because you suffer every down-at-heel fop to make gross love to you, sheltered from the eye of men--yes! vastly well--but you forget the eye of one above and the tongue of scandal."

"Madam, I am truly, deeply ashamed. If I promise never, never again to cause you the slightest uneasiness, will you forgive me for once, and take me away from this odious town?"

"Take you away? A pretty request truly; and give every old maid in Curtain Wells the opportunity of saying I was afraid to show my face and your figure. Take you away, miss? No, indeed, I shall take you around. I shall try by exhibiting you beneath your mother's protection, to give the lie to these atrocious reports and, next year, miss, next year, we will pay a visit to Tunbridge Wells in order to provide a husband whom you may kiss in the privacy of your own estate, with no one but a wandering gamekeeper any the wiser."

"I never kissed Mr. Amor," protested Phyllida.

"Amor? Amor? And who is Mr. Amor?"

"He is my true love, ma'am, whom I love with all my might and main."

"There's indecency! there's impropriety! Lud! I vow, vixen, you are as wanton as a goddess. You love him, eh?"

"That is my only excuse, ma'am, for having behaved so ill."

"What business, I should like to know, has a child of fifteen----"

"Seventeen, ma'am."

"Fifteen, girl."

"Then, sure, you are reckoning by leap years, ma'am."

"Do not be impudent. I repeat, Phyllida, I will not have impudence. You know dear Doctor Makewell particularly enjoined me not to allow impudence. 'Your heart won't stand it, ma'am.' Cruel Phyllida, not content with deceiving your mother, you are willing to injure her health by impudence."

"You think only of yourself," said Phyllida bitterly.

"Only of myself! Oh! Phyllida, how dare you accuse me of selfishness? My whole life since the death of your father who was a most exacting man and would ride Pegasus, though I told him a hundred times if I told him once that the brute would murder him. Now I've forgotten what I was saying, and 'tis all your fault, ungrateful child. Go to bed instantly and to-morrow I will have all your dresses starched as stiff as leather, so that nobody, not even that spiteful Lady Jane Vane, can say I don't take care that whatever your mind may be, your dresses leave nothing to be desired. Go to bed, go to bed. I can't listen to you any longer. I feel humiliated by your abominable behaviour. Judge of my feelings when I tell you I did not dare invite either Mr. Moon or Major Tarry to escort me home for fear the world would say I was setting you a bad example. Now, perhaps you'll accuse me of not possessing a conscience. Indeed, my conscience is too tender. 'Tis the tenderest part of me, though I have one of the most delicate skins--a skin that bruises if I ring a bell with unwonted celerity."

"Mamma, I----" Phyllida began.

"Pray do not say another word, you have said enough to-night to last a lifetime. Send Betty with my bedgown worked in crimson hollyhocks and I will try to forget this wretched experience by attempting to ascertain--please get the playing cards--how Miss Trumper managed to secure codille in the last hand but four of this extremely unpleasant and unprofitable evening. Go to bed, Phyllida, don't dally. Here is Betty. Go to bed, Phyllida."

So Phyllida went to bedew her lavendered pillow. Anything was better than listening to her mother's perpetual reproaches. Anything, anything was better. Even to be betrayed. Ha! ha! now I think for the first time you will admit Miss Phyllida to be a true heroine. Poor Clarie Harlowe! How Phyllida had wept over her adventures and, even in the midst of tears, how quick she had always been to thrust the forbidden volumes out of sight when she heard her mother's step on the stairs.

Poor Clarie Harlowe! She began to sign her name to innumerable nobly penitent epistles.

_Your cruelly abandoned Phyllida. Your wretched, but still loving Phyllida. Your heartbroken, hopeless Phyllida. Your betrayed daughter Phyllida. Your forsaken, but affectionate Phyllida. Your seduced (or was it seducted, or abduced, or abducted?) Phyllida_.

Oh, dear! Oh, dear! what a muddle fine language was to be sure!

I have not yet apologized for my very ancient story, but faith! you must blame the period and the intolerable system of female education. Amor had either to be a Lovelace or a Joseph at a time when young maidenhood fainted before an ardent glance.

After all we do not now apologize for our strong silent men and hysterical girls. Why should we? And yet for my own