Prince Fortunatus Part 4

"Anything--with salad," Mangan answered; he was examining a series of old engravings that hung around the walls.

"On a warm night like this what do you say to cold lamb, salad, and some hock and iced soda-water?"

"All right."

Supper was speedily forthcoming, and, as they took their places, Mangan said,

"You don't often go down to see the old people, Linn?"

"I'm so frightfully busy!"

"Has Miss Francie ever been up to the theatre--to see 'The Squire's Daughter,' I mean?"--this question he seemed to put rather diffidently.

"No. I've asked her often enough; but she always laughs and puts it off.

She seems to be as busy down there as I am up here."

"What does she think of the great name and fame you have made for yourself?"

"How should I know?"

Then there was silence for a second or two.

"I wish you'd run down to see them some Sunday, Linn; I'd go down with you."

"Why not go down by yourself?--they'd be tremendously glad to see you."

"I should be more welcome if I took you with me. You know your cousin likes you to pay a little attention to the old people. Come! Say Sunday week."

"My dear fellow, Sunday is my busiest day. Sunday night is the only night I have out of the seven. And I fancy that it is for that very Sunday evening that Lord Rockminster has engaged the Lansdowne Gallery; he gives a little dinner-party, and his sisters have a big concert afterwards--we've all got to sing the chorus of the new marching-song Lady Sybil has composed for the army."

"Who is Lady Sybil?"

"The sister of the auth.o.r.ess whose novel you were reading."

"My gracious! is there another genius in the family?"

"There's a third," said Lionel, with a bit of a smile. "What would you say if Lady Rosamund Bourne were to paint a portrait of me as Harry Thornhill for the Royal Academy?"

"I should say the betting was fifty to one against its getting in."

"Ah, you're unjust, Maurice; you don't know them. I dare say you judged that novel by some high literary standard that it doesn't pretend to reach. I am sure of this, that if it's half as clever as Lady Adela Cunyngham herself, it will do very well."

"It will do very well for the kind of people who will read it," said the other, indifferently.

This was a free-and-easy place; when they had finished supper, Lionel Moore lit a cigarette, and his friend a briar-root pipe, without moving from the table; and Mangan's prayer was still that his companion should fix Sunday week for a visit to the little Surrey village where they had been boys together, and where Lionel's father and mother (to say nothing of a certain Miss Francie Wright, whose name cropped up more than once in Mangan's talk) were still living. But during this entreaty Lionel's attention happened to be attracted to the gla.s.s door communicating with the hall; and instantly he said, in an undertone:

"Here's a stroke of luck, Maurice; Quirk has just come in. How am I to sound him? What should I do?"

"Haven't I told you?" said Mangan, curtly. "Get your swell friends to feed him."

Nevertheless, this short, fat man, who now strode into the room and nodded briefly to these two acquaintances, speedily showed that on occasion he knew how to feed himself. He called a waiter, and ordered an underdone beefsteak with Spanish onions, toasted cheese to follow, and a large bottle of stout to begin with; then he took the chair at the head of the table, thus placing himself next to Lionel Moore.

"A very empty den to-night," observed this new-comer, whose heavy face, watery blue eyes, lank hair plentifully streaked with gray, and unwholesome complexion would not have produced a too-favorable impression on any one unacquainted with his literary gifts and graces.

Lionel agreed; and then followed a desultory conversation about nothing in particular, though Mr. Octavius Quirk was doing his best to say clever things and show off his boisterous humor. Indeed, it was not until that gentleman's very substantial supper was being brought in that Lionel got an opportunity of artfully asking him whether he had heard anything of Lady Adela Cunyngham's forthcoming novel. He was about to proceed to explain that "Lady Arthur Castletown" was only a pseudonym, when he was interrupted by Octavius Quirk bursting into a roar--a somewhat affected roar--of scornful laughter.

"Well, of all the phenomena of the day, that is the most ludicrous," he cried, "--the so-called aristocracy thinking that they can produce anything in the shape of art or literature. The aristocracy--the most exhausted of all our exhausted social strata--what can be expected from _it_? Why, we haven't anywhere nowadays either art or literature or drama that is worthy of the name--not anywhere--it is all a ghastly, spurious make-believe--a mechanical manufactory of paintings and books and plays without a spark of life in them--"

[Ill.u.s.tration: "_When they had finished supper, Lionel Moore lit a cigarette, and his friend a brier-root pipe._"]

Lionel Moore resentfully thought to himself that if Mr. Quirk had been able to do anything in any one of these directions he might have held less despairing views; but, of course, he did not interrupt this feebly tempestuous monologue.

"--We are all played out, that is the fact--the soil is exhausted--we want a great national upheaval--a new condition of things--a social revolution, in short. And we're going to get it" he continued, in a sort of triumphant way; "there's no mistake about that; the social revolution is in the air, it is under our feet, it is pressing in upon us from every side; and yet at the very moment that the aristocracy have got notice to quit their deer-forests and their salmon-rivers and grouse-moors, they so far mistake the signs of the times that they think they should be devoting themselves to art and going on the stage! Was there ever such incomprehensible madness?"

"I hope they won't sweep away deer-forests and grouse-moors just all at once," the young baritone said, modestly, "for I am asked to go to the Highlands at the beginning of next August."

"Make haste, then, and see the last of these doomed inst.i.tutions"

observed Mr. Quirk, with dark significance, as he looked up from his steak and onions. "I tell you deer-forests are doomed; grouse-moors are doomed; salmon-rivers are doomed. They are a survival of feudal rights and privileges which the new democracy--the new ruling power--will make short work of. The time has gone by for all these absurd restrictions and reservations! There is no defence for them; there never was; they were conceived in an iniquity of logic which modern common-sense will no longer suffer. _Bona vacantia_ can't belong to anybody--therefore they belong to the king; that's a pretty piece of reasoning, isn't it?

And if the crofter or the laborer says, '_Bona vacantia_ can't belong to anybody--therefore they belong to me'--isn't the reasoning as good? But it is not merely game-laws that must be abolished, it is game itself."

"If you abolish the one, you'll soon get rid of the other," Maurice Mangan said, with a kind of half-contemptuous indifference; he was examining this person in a curious way, as he might have looked through the wires of a cage in the Zoological Gardens.

"Both must be abolished," Mr. Octavius Quirk continued, with windy vehemence. "The very distinction that takes any animal _ferae naturae_ and const.i.tutes it game is a relic of cla.s.s privilege and must go--"

"Then Irish landlords will no longer be considered _ferae naturae_?"

Mangan asked, incidentally.

"We must be free from these feudal tyrannies, these mediaeval chains and manacles that the Norman kings imposed on a conquered people. We must be as free as the United States of America--"

"America!" Mangan said; and he was rude enough to laugh. "The State of New York has more stringent game-laws than any European country that I know of; and why not? They wanted to preserve certain wild animals, for the general good; and they took the only possible way."

Quirk was disconcerted only for a moment; presently he had resumed, in his reckless, _mouton-enrage_ fashion,

"That may be; but the Democracy of Great Britain has p.r.o.nounced against game; and game must go; there is no disputing the fact. Hunting in any civilized community is a relic of barbarism; it is worse in this country--it is an infringement of the natural rights of the tiller of the soil. What is the use of talking about it?--the whole thing is doomed; if you're going to Scotland this autumn, Mr. Moore, if you are to be shown all those exclusive pastimes of the rich and privileged cla.s.ses, well, I'd advise you to keep your eyes open, and write as clear an account of what you see as you can; and, by Jove, twenty years hence your book will be read with amazement by the new generation!"

Here the pot of foaming stout claimed his attention; he buried his head in it; and thereafter, sitting back in his chair, sighed forth his satisfaction. The time was come for a large cigar.

And how, in the face of this fierce denunciation of the wealthy cla.s.ses and all their ways, could Lionel Moore put in a word for Lady Adela's poor little literary infant? It would be shrivelled into nothing by a blast of this simulated simoom. It would be trodden under foot by the log-roller's elephantine jocosity. In a sort of despair he turned to Maurice Mangan, and would have entered into conversation with him but that Mangan now rose and said he must be going, nor could he be prevailed on to stay. Lionel accompanied him into the hall.

"That Jabberwock makes me sick; he's such an ugly devil," Mangan said, as he put on his hat; and surely that was strange language coming from a grave philosopher who was about to publish a volume on the "Fundamental Fallacies of M. Comte."

"But what am I to do, Maurice?" Lionel said, as his friend was leaving.

"It's no use asking for his intervention at present; he's simply running amuck."

"If your friend--Lady What's-her-name--is as clever as you say, she'll just twist that fellow round her finger," the other observed, briefly.

"Good-night, Linn."