The Bramleighs of Bishop's Folly Part 9

"If I can only supply it, pray command me, Mr. Cutbill."

"I want this, then," said Cutbill, pursing up his mouth at one side, while he opened the other as if to emit the smoke of a cigar.

"Do you mean smoking?" asked Colonel Bramleigh, in a half-irritable tone.

"You have it."

"Are you a smoker, my Lord?" asked the host, turning to Lord Culduff.

"A very moderate one. A cigarette after breakfast, and another at bed time, are about my excesses in that direction."

"Then I'm afraid I must defraud you of the full measure of your enjoyment, Mr. Cutbill; we never smoke in the dining-room. Indeed, I myself have a strong aversion to tobacco, and though I have consented to build a smoking-room, it is as far off from me as I have been able to contrive it."

"And what about his choice Cubans, eh?" whispered Cutbill to Jack.

"All hypocrisy. You'll find a box of them in your dressing-room," said Jack, in an undertone, "when you go upstairs."

Temple now led his distinguished friend into those charming pasturages where the flocks of diplomacy love to dwell, and where none other save themselves could find herbage. Nor was it amongst great political events, of peace or war, alliances or treaties, they wandered--for perhaps in these the outer world, taught as they are by newspapers, might have taken some interest and some share. No; their talk was all of personalities, of Russian princes and grandees of Spain, archd.u.c.h.esses and "marchesas," whose crafts and subtleties, and pomps and vanities, make up a world like no other world, and play a drama of life--happily it may be for humanity--like no other drama that other men and women ever figured in. Now it is a strange fact--and I appeal to my readers if their experience will not corroborate mine--that when two men thoroughly versed in these themes will talk together upon them, exchanging their stories and mingling their comments, the rest of the company will be struck with a perfect silence, unable to join in the subject discussed, and half ashamed to introduce any ordinary matter into such high and distinguished society. And thus Lord Culduff and Temple went on for full an hour or more, pelting each other with little court scandals and small state intrigues, till Colonel Bramleigh fell asleep, and Cutbill, having finished his Madeira, would probably have followed his host's example, when a servant announced tea, adding, in a whisper, that Mr. L'Estrange and his sister were in the drawing-room.

CHAPTER IX. OVER THE FIRE.

In a large room, comfortably furnished, but in which there was a certain blending of the articles of the drawing-room with those of the dining-room, showing unmistakably the bachelor character of the owner, sat two young men at opposite sides of an ample fireplace. One sat, or rather reclined, on a small leather sofa, his bandaged leg resting on a pillow, and his pale and somewhat shrunken face evidencing the results of pain and confinement to the house. His close-cropt head and square-cut beard, and a certain mingled drollery and fierceness in the eyes, proclaimed him French, and so M. Anatole Pracontal was; though it would have been difficult to declare as much from his English, which he spoke with singular purity and the very faintest peculiarity of accent.

Opposite him sat a tall well-built man of about thirty-four or five, with regular and almost handsome features, marred, indeed, in expression by the extreme closeness of the eyes, and a somewhat long upper lip, which latter defect an incipient moustache was already concealing. The color of his hair was, however, that shade of auburn which verges on red, and is so commonly accompanied by a much freckled skin. This same hair, and hands and feet almost enormous in size, were the afflictions which imparted bitterness to a lot which many regarded as very enviable in life; for Mr. Philip Longworth was his own master, free to go where he pleased, and the owner of a very sufficient fortune. He had been brought up at Oscot, and imbibed, with a very fair share of knowledge, a large stock of that general mistrust and suspicion which is the fortune of those entrusted to priestly teaching, and which, though he had travelled largely and mixed freely with the world, still continued to cling to his manner, which might be characterized by the one word--furtive.

Longworth had only arrived that day for dinner, and the two friends were now exchanging their experience since they had parted some eight months before at the second cataract of the Nile.

"And so, Pracontal, you never got one of my letters?"

"Not one,--on my honor. Indeed, if it were not that I learned by a chance meeting with a party of English tourists at Cannes that they had met you at Cairo, I 'd have begun to suspect you had taken a plunge into the Nile, or into Mohammedom, for which latter you were showing some disposition, you remember, when we parted."

"True enough; and if one was sure never to turn westward again, there are many things in favor of the turban. It is the most sublime conception of egotism possible to imagine."

"Egotism is a mistake, _mon cher_," said the other; "a man's own heart, make it as comfortable as he may, is too small an apartment to live in.

I do not say this in any grand benevolent spirit. There 's no humbug of philanthropy in the opinion."

"Of that I 'm fully a.s.sured," said Longworth, with a gravity which made the other laugh.

"No," continued he, still laughing. "I want a larger field, a wider hunting-ground for my diversion than my own nature."

"A disciple, in fact, of your great model, Louis Napoleon. You incline to annexations. By the way, how fares it with your new projects? Have you seen the lawyer I gave you the letter to?"

"Yes. I stayed eight days in town to confer with him. I heard from him this very day."

"Well, what says he?"

"His letter is a very savage one. He is angry with me for having come here at all; and particularly angry because I have broken my leg, and can't come away."

"What does he think of your case, however?"

"He thinks it manageable. He says--as of course I knew he would say--that it demands most cautious treatment and great acuteness. There are blanks, historical blanks, to be filled up; links to connect, and such like, which will demand some time and some money. I have told him I have an inexhaustible supply of the one, but for the other I am occasionally slightly pinched."

"It promises well, however?"

"Most hopefully. And when once I have proved myself--not always so easy as it seems--the son of my father, I am to go over and see him again in consultation."

"Kelson is a man of station and character, and if he undertakes your cause it is in itself a strong guarantee of its goodness."

"Why, these men take all that is offered them. They no more refuse a bad suit than a doctor rejects a hopeless patient."

"And so will a doctor, if he happen to be an honest man," said Longworth, half peevishly. "Just as he would also refuse to treat one who would persist in following his own caprices in defiance of all advice."

"Which touches me. Is not it so?" said the other, laughing. "Well, I think I ought to have stayed quietly here, and not shown myself in public. All the more, since it has cost me this," and he pointed to his leg as he spoke. "But I can't help confessing it, Philip, the sight of those fellows in their gay scarlet, caracoling over the sward, and popping over the walls and hedges, provoked me. It was exactly like a challenge; so I felt it, at least. It was as though they said, 'What if you come here to pit your claims against ours, and you are still not gentleman enough to meet us in a fair field and face the same perils that we do.' And this, be it remembered, to one who had served in a cavalry regiment, and made campaigns with the Cha.s.seurs d'Afrique. I could n't stand it, and after the second day I mounted, and--" a motion of his hand finished the sentence.

"All that sort of reasoning is so totally different from an Englishman's that I am unable even to discuss it. I do not pretend to understand the refined sensibility that resents provocations which were never offered."

"I know you don't, and I know your countrymen do not either. You are such a practical people that your very policemen never interfere with a criminal till he has fully committed himself."

"In plain words, we do not content ourselves with inferences. But tell me, did any of these people call to see you, or ask after you?"

"Yes, they sent the day after my disaster, and they also told the doctor to say how happy they should be if they could be of service to me. And a young naval commander,--his card is yonder,--came, I think, three times, and would have come up if I had wished to receive him; but Kelson's letter, so angry about my great indiscretion, as he called it, made me decline the visit, and confine my acknowledgment to thanks."

"I wonder what my old gatekeeper thought when he saw them, or their liveries in this avenue?" said Longworth, with a peculiar bitterness in his tone.

"Why, what should he think,--was there any feud between the families?"

"How could there be? These people have not been many months in Ireland.

What I meant was with reference to the feud that is six centuries old, the old open ulcer, that makes all rule in this country a struggle, and all resistance to it a patriotism. Don't you know," asked he, almost sternly, "that I am a Papist?" "Yes, you told me so."

"And don't you know that my religion is not a mere barrier to my advancement in many careers of life, but is a social disqualification--that it is, like the trace of black blood in a creole, a ban excluding him from intercourse with his better-born neighbors--that I belong to a cla.s.s just as much shut out from all the relations of society as were the Jews in the fifteenth century?"

"I remember that you told me so once, but I own I never fully comprehended it, nor understood how the question of a man's faith was to decide his standing in this world, and that, being the equal of those about you in birth and condition, your religion should stamp you with inferiority."

"But I did not tell you I was their equal," said Longworth, with a slow and painful distinctness. "We are _novi homines_ here; a couple of generations back we were peasants--as poor as anything you could see out of that window. By hard work and some good luck--of course there was luck in it--we emerged, and got enough together to live upon, and I was sent to a costly school, and then to college, that I might start in life the equal of my fellows. But what avails it all? To hold a station in life, to mix with the world, to a.s.sociate with men educated and brought up like myself, I must quit my own country and live abroad. I know, I see, you can make nothing of this. It is out and out incomprehensible.

You made a clean sweep of these things with your great Revolution of '93. Ours is yet to come."

"Per Dio! I 'd not stand it," cried the other, pa.s.sionately.

"You could n't help it. You must stand it; at least, till such time as a good many others, equally aggrieved as yourself, resolve to risk something to change it; and this is remote enough, for there is nothing that men--I mean educated and cultivated men--are more averse to, than any open confession of feeling a social disqualification. I may tell it to you here, as we sit over the fire, but I 'll not go out and proclaim it, I promise you. These are confessions one keeps for the fireside."

"And will not these people visit you?"

"Nothing less likely."

"Nor you call upon them?"