The Dodd Family Abroad Volume Ii Part 22

1 Does Mrs. D. mean Scylla and Charybdis?--Editor of "Dodd Correspondence."

There 's another thing fretting me, besides, Molly. It is what this same Lord George means about Mary Anne; for it's now more than six months since he grew particular; and yet there 's nothing come of it yet. I see it's preying on the girl herself, too,--and what's to be done? I am sure I often think of what poor old Jones McCarthy used to say about this: "If I 'd a family of daughters," says he, "I 'd do just as I manage with the horses when I want to sell one of them. There they are,--look at them as long as you like in the stable, but I 'll have no taking them out for a trial, and trotting them here, and cantering them there; and then, a fellow coming to tell me that they have this, that, and the other." And the more I think of it, Molly, the more I'm convinced it's the right way; though it's too late, maybe, to help it now.

As I mean to send you another letter soon, I 'll close this now, wishing you all the compliments of the season, except chilblains, and remain your true and affectionate friend,

Jemima Dodd.

P. S. You 'd better direct your next letter to us "Casa Dodd," for I remark that all the English here try and get rid of the Italian names to the houses as soon as they can.

LETTER XXVIII. JAMES DODD TO ROBERT DOOLAN, ESQ., TRINITY COLLEGE, DUBLIN.

Florence.

My dear Bob,--If you only knew how difficult it is to obtain even five minutes of quiet leisure in this same capital, you 'd at once absolve me from all the accusations in your last letter. It is pleasure at a railroad pace, from morning till night, and from night till morning.

Perhaps, after all, it is best there should be no time for reflection, since it would be like one waiting on the rails for an express train to run over him!

I can give you no better nor speedier ill.u.s.tration of the kind of life we lead here, than by saying that even the governor has felt the fascination of the place, and goes the pace, signing checks and drawing bills without the slightest hesitation, or any apparent sense of a coming responsibility. He plays, too, and loses his money freely, and altogether comports himself as if he had a most liberal income, or--terrible alternative--not a sixpence in the world. I own to you, Bob, that this recklessness affrights me far more than all his former grumbling over our expensive and wasteful habits. He seems to have adopted it, too, with a certain method that gives it all the appearance of a plan, though I confess what possible advantage could redound from it is utterly beyond my power of calculation.

Meanwhile our style of living is on a scale of splendor that might well suit the most ample fortune. Tiverton says that for a month or two this is absolutely necessary, and that in society, as in war, it is the first dash often decides a campaign. And really, even my own brief experience of the world shows that one's friends, as they are conventionally called, are far more interested in the skill of your cook than in the merits of your own character; and that he who has a good cellar may indulge himself in the luxury of a very bad conscience. You, of course, suspect that I am now speaking of a cla.s.s of people dubious both in fortune and position, and who have really no right to scrutinize too closely the characters of those with whom they a.s.sociate. Quite the reverse, Bob, I am actually alluding to our very best and most correct English, and who would not for worlds do at home any one of the hundred transgressions they commit abroad. For instance, we have, in this goodly capital of debt and divorce celebrity, a certain house of almost princely splendor; the furniture, plate, pictures, all perfection; the cook, an artist that once pampered royal palates; in a word, everything, from the cellar to the conservatory, a miracle of correct taste.

The owner of all this magnificence is--what think you?--a successful swindler!--the hero of a hundred bubble speculations,--the spoliator of some thousands of shareholders,--a fellow whose infractions have been more than once stigmatized by public prosecution, and whose rascalities are of European fame! You 'd say that with all these detracting influences he was a man of consummate social tact, refined manners, and at least possessing the outward signs of good breeding. Wrong again, Bob. He is coa.r.s.e, uneducated, and vulgar; he never picked up any semblance of the cla.s.s from whom he peculated; and has lived on, as he began, a "low comedy villain," and no more. Well, what think you, when I tell you that is "_the_ house," _par excellence_, where all strangers strive to be introduced,--that to be on the dinner-list here is a distinction, and that even a visitor enjoys an envied fortune,--and that at the very moment I write, the Dodd family are in earnest and active negotiation to attain to this inestimable privilege? Now, Bob, there's no denying that there must be something rotten, and to the core too, where such a condition of things prevails. If this man fed the hungry and sheltered the houseless, who had no alternative but his table or no food, the thing requires no explanation; or if his hospitalities were partaken of by that large floating cla.s.s who in every city are to be found, with tastes disproportionate to their fortunes, and who will at any time postpone their principles to their palates, even then the matter is not of difficult solution; but what think you that his company includes some of the very highest names of our stately n.o.bility, and that the t.i.tles that resound through his _salon_ are amongst the most honored of our haughty aristocracy! These people a.s.suredly stand in no want of a dinner. They are comfortably lodged, and at least reasonably well fed at the "Italie" or the "Grande Bretagne." Why should they stoop to such companionship? Who can explain this, Bob? a.s.suredly, I am not the dipus!

I am nothing surprised that people like ourselves, for instance, seek to enjoy even this pa.s.sing splendor, and find themselves at a princely board, served with a more than royal costliness. One of these grand dinners is like a page of the Arabian Nights to a man of ordinary condition; but surely his Grace the Duke, or the most n.o.ble the Marquis has no such illusions. With _him_ it is only a question whether the Madeira over-flavored the soup, or that the ortolans might possibly have been fatter. _He_ dines pretty much in the same fashion every day during the London season, and a great part of the rest of the year afterwards.

Why then should he descend to any compromise to accept Count "Dragonards's" hospitality? for I must tell you that "Dives" is a Count, and has orders from the Pope and the Queen of Spain.

With the explanation, as I have said, I have nothing to do. It is beyond and above me. For the fact alone I am guarantee; and here comes Tiverton in a transport of triumph to say that "Heaven is won," or, in humbler phrase, "Monsieur le Comte de Dragonards prie Phonneur," &c, and that Dodd _pre_ and Dodd _mre_ are requested to dine with him on Tuesday, the younger Dodds to a.s.sist at a reception in the evening.

Tiverton a.s.sures me that by accepting with a good grace the humbler part of a "refresher," I am certain of promotion afterwards to a higher range of character; and in this hope I live for the present.

It is likely I shall not despatch this without being able to tell you more of this great man's house; meanwhile--"majora cantamus"--I am in love, Bob! If I did n't dash into the confession at once, as one springs into the sea of a chilly morning, I'd even put on the clothes of secrecy, and walk off unconfessed. She is lovely, beyond anything I can give you an idea of,--pale as marble; but such a flesh tint! a sunset sleeping upon snow, and with lids fringed over a third of her cheek.

You know the tender, languid, longing look that vanquishes me,--that's exactly what she has! A glance of timid surprise, like an affrighted fawn, and then a downcast consciousness,--a kind of self-reproaching sense of her own loveliness,--a sort of a--what the devil kind of enchantment and witchery, Bob? that makes a man feel it's all no use struggling and fighting,--that his doom is _there!_ that the influence which is to rule his destiny is before him, and that, turn him which way he will, his heart has but one road--and _will_ take it!

She was in Box 19, over the orchestra! I caught a glimpse of her shoulder--only her shoulder--at first, as she sat with her face to the stage, and a huge screen shaded her from the garish light of the l.u.s.tre.

How I watched the graceful bend of her neck each time she saluted--I suppose it was a salutation--some new visitor who entered! The drooping leaves and flowers of her hair trembled with a gentle motion, as if to the music of her soft voice. I thought I could hear the very accents echoing within my heart! But oh! my ecstasy when her hand stole forth and hung listlessly over the cushion of the box! True it was gloved, yet still you could mark its symmetry, and, in fancy, picture the rosy-tipped fingers in all their graceful beauty.

Night after night I saw her thus; yet never more than I have told you.

I made superhuman efforts to obtain the box directly in front; but it belonged to a Russian princess, and was therefore inaccessible. I bribed the ba.s.soon and seduced the oboe in the orchestra; but nothing was to be seen from their inferno of discordant tunings. I made love to a ballet-dancer, to secure the _entre_ behind the scenes; and on the night of my success _she_--my adored one--had changed her place with a friend, and sat with her back to the stage. The adverse fates had taken a spite against me, Bob, and I saw that my pa.s.sion must prove unhappy!

Somehow it is in love as in hunting, you are never really in earnest so long as the country is open and the fences easy; but once that the ditches are "yawners," and the walls "raspers," you sit down to your work with a resolute heart and a steady eye, determined, at any cost and at any peril, to be in at the death. Would that the penalties were alike also! How gladly would I barter a fractured rib or a smashed collar-bone for the wrecked and cast-away spirit of my lost and broken heart!

If I suffer myself to expand upon my feelings, there will be no end of this, Bob. I already have a kind of consciousness that I could fill three hundred and fifty folio volumes, like "Hansard's," in subtle description and discrimination of sensations that were not exactly "_this_," but were very like "_that_;" and of impressions, hopes, fancies, fears, and visions, a thousand times more real than all the actual events of my _bona fide_ existence. And, after all, what balderdash it is to compare the little meaningless incidents of our lives with the soul-stirring pa.s.sions that rage within us! the thoughts that, so to say, form the very fuel of our natures! These are, indeed, the realities; and what we are in the habit of calling such are the mere mockeries and semblances of fact! I can honestly aver that I suffered--in the true sense of the word--more intense agony from the conflict of my distracted feelings than I ever did when lying under the pangs of a compound fracture; and I may add of a species of pain not to be alleviated by anodynes and soothed by hot flannels.

To be brief, Bob, I felt that, though I had often caught slight attacks of the malady, at length I had contracted it in its deadliest form,--a regular "blue case," as they say, with bad symptoms from the start. Has it ever struck you that a man may go through every stage of a love fever without even so much as speaking to the object of his affections? I can a.s.sure you that the thing is true, and I myself suffered nightly every vacillating sense of hope, fear, ecstasy, despair, joy, jealousy, and frantic delight, just by following out the suggestions of my own fancy, and exalting into importance the veriest trifles of the hour.

With what gloomy despondence did I turn homeward of an evening, when she sat back in the box, and perhaps nothing of her but her bouquet was visible for a whole night!--with what transports have I carried away the memory of her profile, seen but for a second! Then the agonies of my jealousy, as I saw her listening, with pleased attention, to some essenced puppy--I could swear it was such--who lounged into her box before the ballet! But at last came the climax of my joy, when I saw her "lorgnette" directed towards me, as I stood in the pit, and actually felt her eyes on me! I can imagine some old astronomer's ecstasy, as, gazing for hours on the sky of night, the star that he has watched and waited for has suddenly shone through the gla.s.s of his telescope, and lit up his very heart within him with its radiance. I 'd back myself to have experienced a still more thrilling sense of happiness as the beams of her bright eyes descended on me.

At first, Bob, I thought that the glances might have been meant for another. I turned and looked around me, ready to fasten a deadly quarrel upon him, whom I should have regarded at once as my greatest enemy. But the company amidst which I stood soon rea.s.sured me. A few snuffy-looking old counts, with brown wigs and unshaven chins,--a stray Government clerk with a pinchbeck chain and a weak moustache, couldn't be my rivals. I looked again, but she had turned away her bead; and save that the "lorgnette" still rested within her fingers, I'd have thought the whole a vision.

Three nights after this the same thing occurred. I had taken care to resume the very same place each evening, to wear the same dress, to stand in the very same att.i.tude,--a very touching "pose," which I had practised before the gla.s.s. I had not been more than two hours at my post, when she turned abruptly round and stared full at me. There could be no mistake, no misconception whatever; for, as if to confirm my wavering doubts, her friend took the gla.s.s from her, and looked full and long at me. You may imagine, Bob, somewhat of the preoccupation of my faculties when I tell you that I never so much as recognized her friend.

I had thoughts, eyes, ears, and senses for one,--and one only. Judge, then, my astonishment when she saluted me, giving that little gesture with the hand your Florentines are such adepts in,--a species of salutation so full of most expressive meaning.

Short of a crow-quilled billet, neatly endorsed with her name, nothing could have spoken more plainly. It said, in a few words, "Come up here, Jim, we shall be delighted to see you." I accepted the augury, Bob, as we used to say in Virgil, and in less than a minute had forced my pa.s.sage through the dense crowd of the pit, and was mounting the box stairs, five steps at a spring. "Whose box is No. 19?" said I to an official. "Madame de Goranton," was the reply. Awkward this; never had heard the name before; sounded like French; might be Swiss; possibly Belgian.

No time for debating the point, tapped and entered,--several persons within barring up the pa.s.sage to the front,--suddenly heard a well-known voice, which accosted me most cordially, and, to my intense surprise, saw before me Mrs. Gore Hampton! You know already all about her, Bob, and I need not recapitulate.

"I fancied you were going to pa.s.s your life in distant adoration yonder, Mr. Dodd," said she, laughingly, while she tendered her hand for me to kiss. "Adeline, dearest, let me present to you my friend Mr. Dodd." A very cold--an icy recognition was the reply to this speech; and Adeline opened her fan, and said something behind it to an elderly dandy beside her, who laughed, and said, "Parfaitement, ma foi!"

Registering a secret vow to be the death of the antiquated tiger aforesaid, I entered into conversation with Mrs. G. H., who, notwithstanding some unpleasant pa.s.sages between our families, expressed unqualified delight at the thought of meeting us all once more; inquired after my mother most affectionately; and asked if the girls were looking well, and whether they rode and danced as beautifully as ever. She made, between times, little efforts to draw her friend into conversation by some allusion to Mary Anne's grace or Cary's accomplishments; but all in vain. Adeline only met the advances with a cold stare, or a little half-smile of most sneering expression. It was not that she was distant and reserved towards me. No, Bob; her manner was downright contemptuous; it was insulting; and yet such was the fascination her beauty had acquired over me that I could have knelt at her feet in adoration of her. I have no doubt that she saw this. I soon perceived that Mrs. Gore Hampton did. There is a wicked consciousness in a woman's look as she sees a man "hooked," there's no mistaking. Her eyes expressed this sentiment now; and, indeed, she did not try to hide it.

She invited me to come home and sup with them. She half tried to make Adeline say a word or two in support of the invitation; but no, she would not even hear it; and when I accepted, she half peevishly declared she had got a bad headache, and would go to bed after the play. I tell you these trivial circ.u.mstances, Bob, just that you may fancy how irretrievably lost I was when such palpable signs of dislike could not discourage me. I felt this all--and acutely too; but somehow with no sense of defeat, but a stubborn, resolute determination to conquer them.

I went back to sup with Mrs. G. H., and Adeline kept her word and retired. There were a few men--foreigners of distinction--but I sat beside the hostess, and heard nothing but praises of that "dear angel."

These eulogies were mixed up with a certain tender pity that puzzled me sadly, since they always left the impression that either the angel had done something herself, or some one else had done it towards her, that called for all the most compa.s.sionate sentiments of the human heart.

As to any chance of her history--who she was, whence she came, and so on--it was quite out of the question; you might as well hope for the private life of some aerial spirit that descends in the midst of canvas clouds in a ballet. She was there--to be worshipped, wondered at, and admired, but not to be catechised.

I left Mrs. H.'s house at three in the morning,--a sadder but scarcely a wiser man. She charged me most solemnly not to mention to any one where I had been,--a precaution possibly suggested by the fact that I had lost sixty Napoleons at lansquenet,--a game at which I left herself and her friends deeply occupied when I came away. I was burning with impatience for Tiverton to come back to Florence. He had gone down to the Maremma to shoot snipe. For, although I was precluded by my promise from divulging about the supper, I bethought me of a clever stratagem by which I could obtain all the counsel and guidance without any breach of faith, and this was, to take him with me some evening to the pit, station him opposite to No. 19, and ask all about its occupants; he knows everybody everywhere, so that I should have the whole history of my unknown charmer on the easiest of all terms.

From that day and that hour, I became a changed creature. The gay follies of my fashionable friends gave me no pleasure. I detested b.a.l.l.s.

I abhorred theatres. _She_ ceased to frequent the opera. In fact, I gave the most unequivocal proof of my devotion to one by a most sweeping detestation of all the rest of mankind. Amidst my other disasters, I could not remember where Mrs. Gore Hampton lived. We had driven to her house after the theatre; it was a long way off, and seemed to take a very circuitous course to reach, but in what direction I had not the very vaguest notion of. The name of it, too, had escaped me, though she repeated it over several times when I was taking my leave of her. Of course, my omitting to call and pay my respects would subject me to every possible construction of rudeness and incivility, and here was, therefore, another source of irritation and annoyance to me.

My misanthropy grew fiercer. I had pa.s.sed through the sad stage, and now entered upon the combative period of the disease. I felt an intense longing to have a quarrel with somebody. I frequented _cafe's_, and walked the streets in a battle, murder, and sudden-death humor,--frowning at this man, scowling at that. But, have you never remarked, the caprice of Fortune is in this as in all other things? Be indifferent at play, and you are sure to win; show yourself regardless of a woman, and you are certain to hear she wants to make your acquaintance. Go out of a morning in a mood of universal love and philanthropy, and I'll take the odds that you have a duel on your hands before evening.

There was one man in Florence whom I especially desired to fix a quarrel upon,--this was Morris, or, as he was now called, Sir Morris Penrhyn. A fellow who unquestionably ought to have had very different claims on my regard, but who now, in this perversion of my feelings, struck me as exactly the man to shoot or be shot by. Don't you know that sensation, Bob, in which a man feels that he must select a particular person, quite apart from any misfortune he is suffering under, and make _him_ pay its penalty? It is a species of antipathy that defies all reason, and, indeed, your attempt to argue yourself out of it only serves to strengthen and confirm its hold on you.

Morris and I had ceased to speak when we met; we merely saluted coldly, and with that rigid observance of a courtesy that makes the very easiest prelude to a row, each party standing ready prepared to say "check"

whenever the other should chance to make a wrong move. Perhaps I am not justified in saying so much of _him_, but I know that I do not exaggerate my own intentions. I fancied--what will a man not fancy in one of these eccentric stages of his existence?--that Morris saw my purpose, and evaded me. I argued myself into the notion that he was deficient in personal courage, and constructed upon this idea a whole edifice of absurdity.

I am ashamed, even before you, to acknowledge the extent to which my stupid infatuation blinded me; perhaps the best penalty to pay for it is an open confession.

I overtook our valet one morning with a letter in my governor's hand addressed to Sir Morris Penrhyn, and on inquiring, discovered that he and my father had been in close correspondence for the three days previous. At once I jumped to the conclusion that I was, somehow or other, the subject of these epistles, and in a fit of angry indignation I drove off to Morris's hotel.

When a man gets himself into a thorough pa.s.sion on account of some supposed injury, which even to himself he is unable to define, his state is far from enviable. When I reached the hotel, I was in the hot stage of my anger, and could scarcely brook the delay of sending in my card.

The answer was, "Sir Morris did not receive." I asked for pen and ink to write a note, and scribbled something most indiscreet and offensive. I am glad to say that I cannot now remember a line of it. The reply came that my "note should be attended to," and with this information I issued forth into the street half wild with rage.

I felt that I had given a deadly provocation, and must now look out for some "friend" to see me through the affair. Tiverton was absent, and amongst all my acquaintances I could not pitch upon one to whose keeping I liked to entrust my honor. I turned into several _cafs_, I strolled into the club, I drove down to the Cascini, but in vain; and at last was walking homeward, when I caught sight of a friendly face from the window of a travelling-carriage that drove rapidly by, and, hurrying after, just came up as it stopped at the door of the Htel d'Italie.

You may guess my astonishment as I felt my hand grasped cordially by no other than our old neighbor at Bruff, Dr. Belton, the physician of our county dispensary. Five minutes explained his presence there. He had gone out to Constantinople as the doctor to our Emba.s.sy, and by some piece of good luck and his own deservings to boot, had risen to the post of Private Secretary to the Amba.s.sador, and was selected by him to carry home some very important despatches, to the rightful consideration of which his own presence at the Foreign Office was deemed essential.

Great as was the difference between, his former and his present station, it was insignificant in comparison with the change worked in himself.

The country doctor, of diffident manners and retiring habits, grateful for the small civilities of small patrons, cautiously veiling his conscious superiority under an affected ignorance, was now become a consummate man of the world,--calm, easy, and self-possessed. His very appearance had undergone an alteration, and he held himself more erect, and looked not only handsomer but taller. These were the first things that struck me; but as we conversed together, I found him the same hearty, generous fellow I had ever known him, neither elated by his good fortune, nor, what is just as common a fault, contemptuously pretending that it was only one-half of his deserts.

One thing alone puzzled me, it was that he evinced no desire to come and see our family, who had been uniformly kind and good-natured to him; in fact, when I proposed it, he seemed so awkward and embarra.s.sed that I never pressed my invitation, but changed the topic. I knew that there bad been, once on a time, some pa.s.sages between my sister Mary Anne and him, and therefore supposed that possibly there might have been something or other that rendered a meeting embarra.s.sing. At all events, I accepted his half-apology on the ground of great fatigue, and agreed to dine with him.

What a pleasant dinner it was! He related to me all the story of his life, not an eventful one as regarded incident, but full of those traits which make up interest for an individual. You felt as you listened that it was a thoroughly good fellow was talking to you, and that if he were not to prove successful in life, it was just because his were the very qualities rogues trade on for their own benefit. There was, moreover, a manly sense of independence about him, a consciousness of self-reliance that never approached conceit, but served to nerve his courage and support his spirit, which gave him an almost heroism in my eyes, and I own, too, suggested a most humiliating comparison with my own nature.

I opened my heart freely to him about everything, and in particular about Morris; and although I saw plainly enough that he took very opposite views to mine about the whole matter, he agreed to stop in Florence for a day, and act as my friend in the transaction. This being so far arranged, I started for Carrara, which, being beyond the Tuscan frontier, admits of our meeting without any risk of interruption,--for that it must come to such I am fully determined on. The fact is, Bob, my note is a "stunner," and, as I won't retract, Morris has no alternative but to come out.