The Fortunes Of Glencore Part 27

Scaresby was, however, too busy in recounting his news to others to perceive the signals the old Princess held out; and it was only as her cha.s.seur, six feet three of green and gold, bent down to give her Highness's message, that the Major hurried off, in all the importance of a momentary scandal, to the side of her carriage.

"Here I am, all impatience. What is it, Scaresby? Tell me quickly,"

cried she.

"A smash, my dear Princess,--nothing more or less," said he, in a voice which nature seemed to have invented to utter impertinences, so harsh and grating, and yet so painfully distinct in all its accents,--"as complete a smash as ever I heard of."

"You can't mean that her fortune is in peril?"

"I suppose that must suffer also. It is her character--her station as one of us--that's shipwrecked here."

"Go on, go on," cried she, impatiently; "I wish to hear it all."

"All is very briefly related, then," said he. "The charming Countess, you remember, ran away with a countryman of mine, young Glencore, of the 8th Hussars; I used to know his father intimately."

"Never mind his father."

"That 's exactly what Glencore did. He came over here and fell in love with the girl, and they ran off together; but they forgot to get married, Princess. Ha--ha--ha!" And he laughed with a cackle a demon could not have rivalled.

"I don't believe a word of it,--I'll never believe it," cried the Princess.

"That's exactly what I was recommending to the Mar-quesa Guesteni. I said, you need n't believe it. Why, how do we go anywhere, nowadays, except by 'not believing' the evil stories that are told of our entertainers."

"Yes, yes; but I repeat that this is an infamous calumny. She, a Countess, of a family second to none in all Italy; her father a Grand d'Espagne. I 'll go to her this moment."

"She'll not see you. She has just refused to see La Genori," said the Major, tartly. "Though, if a cracked reputation might have afforded any sympathy, she might have admitted _her_."

"What is to be done?" exclaimed the Princess, sorrowfully.

"Just what you suggested a few moments ago,--don't believe it. Hang me, but good houses and good cooks are growing too scarce to make one credulous of the ills that can be said of their owners."

"I wish I knew what course to take," muttered the Princess.

"I'll tell you, then. Get half a dozen of your own set together to-morrow morning, vote the whole story an atrocious falsehood, and go in a body and tell the Countess your mind. You know as well as I, Princess, that social credit is as great a bubble as commercial; we should all of us be bankrupts if our books were seen. Ay, by Jove! and the similitude goes farther too; for when one old established house breaks, there is generally a crash in the whole community around it."

While they thus talked, a knot had gathered around the carriage, all eager to hear what opinion the Princess had formed on the catastrophe.

Various were the sentiments expressed by the different speakers,--some sorrowfully deploring the disaster; others more eagerly inveighing against the infamy of the man who had proclaimed it. Many declared that they had come to the determination to discredit the story. Not one, however, sincerely professed that he disbelieved it.

Can it be, as the French moralist a.s.serts, that we have a latent sense of satisfaction in the misfortunes of even our best friends; or is it, as we rather suspect, that true friendship is a rarer thing than is commonly believed, and has little to do with those conventional intimacies which so often bear its name?

a.s.suredly of all this well-bred, well-dressed, and wellborn company, now thronging the courtyard of the palace and the street in front of it, the tone was as much sarcasm as sorrow, and many a witty epigram and smart speech were launched over a disaster which might have been spared such levity. At length the s.p.a.ce slowly began to thin. Slowly carriage after carriage drove off,--the heaviest grief of their occupants often being over a lost _soiree_, an unprofited occasion to display toilette and jewels; while a few, more reflective, discussed what course was to be followed in future, and what recognition extended to the victim.

The next day Florence sat in committee over the lost Countess. Witnesses were heard and evidence taken as to her case. They all agreed it was a great hardship,--a terrible calamity; but still, if true, what could be done?

Never was there a society less ungenerously prudish, and yet there were cases--this, one of them--which transgressed all conventional rule.

Like a crime which no statute had ever contemplated, it stood out self-accused and self-condemned. A few might, perhaps, have been merciful, but they were overborne by numbers. Lady Glencore's beauty and her vast fortune were now counts in the indictment against her, and many a jealous rival was not sorry at this hour of humiliation. The despotism of beauty is not a very mild sway, after all; and perhaps the Countess had exercised her rule right royally. At all events, it was the young and the good-looking who voted her exclusion, and only those who could not enter into compet.i.tion with her charms who took the charitable side. They discussed and debated the question all day; but while they hesitated over the reprieve, the prisoner was beyond the law. The gate of the palace, locked and barred all day, refused entrance to every one; at night, it opened to admit the exit of a travelling-carriage. The next morning large bills of sale, posted over the walls, declared that all the furniture and decorations-were to be sold.

The Countess had left Florence, none knew whither.

"I must really have those large Sevres jars," said one.

"And I, the small park phaeton," cried another.

"I hope she has not taken Horace with her; he was the best cook in Italy. Splendid hock she had,--I wonder is there much of it left?"

"I wish we were certain of another bad reputation to replace her,"

grunted out Scaresby; "they are the only kind of people who give good dinners, and never ask for returns."

And thus these dear friends--guests of a hundred brilliant fetes--discussed the fall of her they once had worshipped.

It may seem small-minded and narrow to stigmatize such conduct as this.

Some may say that for the ordinary courtesies of society no pledges of friendship are required, no real grat.i.tude incurred. Be it so. Still, the revulsion, from habits of deference and respect, to disparagement, and even sarcasm, is a sorry evidence of human kindness; and the threshold, over which for years we had only pa.s.sed as guests, might well suggest sadder thoughts as we tread it to behold desolation.

The fair Countess had been the celebrity of that city for many a day.

The stranger of distinction sought her, as much as a matter of course as he sought presentation to the sovereign. Her _salons_ had the double eminence of brilliancy in rank and brilliancy in wit; her entertainments were cited as models of elegance and refinement; and now she was gone!

The extreme of regret that followed her was the sorrow of those who were to dine there no more; the grief of him who thought he should never have a house like it.

The respectable vagabonds of society are a large family, much larger than is usually supposed. They are often well born, almost always well mannered, invariably well dressed. They do not, at first blush, appear to discharge any very great or necessary function in life; but we must by no means, from that, infer their inutility. Naturalists tell us that several varieties of insect existence we rashly set down as mere annoyances, have their peculiar spheres of usefulness and good; and, doubtless, these same loungers contribute in some mysterious manner to the welfare of that state which they only seem to burden. We are told that but for flies, for instance, we should be infested with myriads of winged tormentors, insinuating themselves into our meat and drink, and rendering life miserable. Is there not something very similar performed by the respectable cla.s.s I allude to? Are they not invariably devouring and destroying some vermin a little smaller than themselves, and making thus a healthier atmosphere for their betters? If good society only knew the debt it owes to these defenders of its privileges, a "Vagabonds'

Home and Aged Asylum" would speedily figure amongst bur national charities.

We have been led to these thoughts by observing how distinctly different was Major Scaresby's tone in talking of the Countess when he addressed his betters or spoke in his own cla.s.s. To the former he gave vent to all his sarcasm and bitterness; they liked it just because they would n't condescend to it themselves. To his own he put on the bullying air of one who said, "How should _you_ possibly know what vices such great people have, any more than you know what they have for dinner? _I_ live amongst them,--_I_ understand them,--_I_ am aware that what would be very shocking in _you_ is quite permissible to _them_. _They_ know how to be wicked; _you_ only know how to be gross." And thus Scaresby talked, and sneered, and scoffed, making such a hash of good and evil, such a Maelstrom of right and wrong, that it were a subtle moralist who could have extracted one solitary sc.r.a.p of uncontaminated meaning from all his muddy lucubrations.

He, however, effected this much: he kept the memory of her who had gone, alive by daily calumnies. He embalmed her in poisons, each morning appearing with some new trait of her extravagance, till the world, grown sick of himself and his theme, vowed they would hear no more of either; and so she was forgotten.

Ay, good reader, utterly forgotten! The gay world, for so it likes to be called, has no greater element of enjoyment amongst all its high gifts than its precious power of forgetting. It forgets not only all it owes to others,--grat.i.tude, honor, and esteem,--but even the closer obligations it has contracted with itself. The Palazzo della Torre was for a fortnight the resort of the curious and the idle. At the sale crowds appeared to secure some object of especial value to each; and then the gates were locked, the shutters closed, and a large, ill-written notice on the door announced that any letters for the proprietor were to be addressed to "Pietro Arretini, Via del Sole."

CHAPTER XXII. AN UPTONIAN DESPATCH

British Legation, Naples. My dear Harcourt,--It would seem that a letter of mine to you must have miscarried,--a not unfrequent occurrence when entrusted to our Foreign Office for transmission. Should it ever reach you, you will perceive how unjustly you have charged me with neglecting your wishes. I have ordered the Sicilian wine for your friend; I have obtained the Royal leave for you to shoot in Calabria; and I a.s.sure you it is rather a rare incident in my life to have forgotten nothing required of me! Perhaps you, who know me well, will do me this justice, and be the more grateful for my present prompt.i.tude.

It was quite a mistake sending me here; for anything there is to be done, Spencer or Lonsdale would perfectly suffice. _I_ ought to have gone to Vienna,--and so they know at home; but it's the old game played over again. Important questions! why, my dear friend, there is not a matter between this country and our own that rises above the capacity of a Colonel of Dragoons. Meanwhile really great events are preparing in the East of Europe,--not that I am going to inflict them upon you, nor ask you to listen to speculations which even those in authority turn a deaf ear to.

It is very kind of you to think of my health. I am still a sufferer; the old pains rather aggravated than relieved by this climate. You are aware that, though warm, the weather here has some exciting property, some excess or other of a peculiar gas in the atmosphere, prejudicial to certain temperaments. I feel it greatly; and though the season is midsummer, I am obliged to dress entirely in a light costume of buckskin, and take Marsalla baths, which refresh me, at least for the while. I have also taken to smoke the leaves of the nux vomica, steeped in arrack, and think it agrees with me. The King has most kindly placed a little villa at Ischia at my disposal; but I do not mean to avail myself of the politeness. The Duke of San Giustino has also offered me his palace at Baia; but I don't fancy leaving this just now, where there is a doctor, a certain Luigi Buffeloni, who really seems to have hit off my case. He calls it arterial arthriticis,--a kind of inflammatory action of one coat of the arterial system; his notion is highly ingenious, and wonderfully borne out by the symptoms. I wish you would ask Brodie, or any of our best men, whether they have met with this affection; what cla.s.s it affects, and what course it usually takes?

My Italian doctor implies that it is the pa.s.sing malady of men highly excitable, and largely endowed with mental gifts. He may, or may not, be correct in this. It is only nature makes the blunder of giving the sharpest swords the weakest scabbards. What a pity the weapon cannot be worn naked!

You ask me if I like this place. I do, perhaps, as well as I should like anywhere. There is a wonderful sameness over the world just now, preluding, I have very little doubt, some great outburst of nationality from all the countries of Europe,--just as periods of Puritanism succeed intervals of gross licentiousness.

Society here is, therefore, what you see it in London or Paris; well-bred people, like Gold, are current everywhere. There is really little peculiar to observe. I don't perceive that there is more levity than elsewhere. The difference is, perhaps, that there is less shame about it, since it is under the protection of the Church.

I go out very little; my notion is, that the Diplomatist, like the ancient Augur, must not suffer himself to be vulgarized by contact. He can only lose, not gain, by that mixed intercourse with the world. I have a few who come when I want them, and go in like manner. They tell me "what is going on," far better and more truthfully than paid employees, and they cannot trace my intentions through my inquiries, and hasten off to retail them at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Of my colleagues I see as little as possible, though, when we do meet, I feel an unbounded affection for them. So much for my life, dear Harcourt; on the whole, a very tolerable kind of existence, which if few would envy, still fewer would care to part with.

I now come to the chief portion of your letter. This boy of Glencore's, I rather like the account you give of him, better than you do yourself.

Imaginative and dreamy he may be, but remember what he was, and where we have placed him. A moonstruck, romantic youth at a German University. Is it not painting the lily?

I merely intended he should go to Gottingen to learn the language,--always a difficulty, if not abstracted from other and more dulcet sounds. I never meant to have him domesticated with some rusty Hochgelehrter, eating sauer-kraut in company with a green-eyed Fraulein, and imbibing love and metaphysics together. Let him "moon away," as you call it, my dear Harcourt. It is wonderfully little consequence what any one does with his intellect till he be three or four and twenty. Indeed, I half suspect that the soil might be left quietly to rear weeds till that time; and as to dreaminess, it signifies nothing if there be a strong "physique." With a weak frame, imagination will play the tyrant, and never cease till it dominates over all the other faculties; but where there is strength and activity, there is no fear of this.

You amuse me with your account of the doctor; and so the Germans have actually taken him for a savant, and given him a degree "honoris causa." May they never make a worse blunder. The man is eminently remarkable,--with his opportunities, miraculous. I am certain, Harcourt, you never felt half the pleasure on arriving at a region well stocked with game, that he did on finding himself in a land of Libraries, Museums, and Collections. Fancy the poor fellow's ecstasy at being allowed to range at will through all ancient literature, of which hitherto a stray volume alone had reached him. Imagine his delight as each day opened new stores of knowledge to him, surrounded as he was by all that could encourage zeal and reward research. The boy's treatment of him pleases me much; it smacks of the gentle blood in his veins. Poor lad, there is something very sad in his case.