Mohawks: A Novel. Volume 3 of 3

"My good Fétis, a young woman must have some kind of diversion. If she does not gamble, she will play you a worse turn. See how indulgent I am to her ladyship on that score. 'Tis only when her losses become outrageous that I venture a gentle remonstrance. And so your pretty little French wife has learnt the trick of the town, and dreams of spadillo and codille, like a woman of fashion. By the way, I hear Lord Lavendale is in London again. Pray does he ever use your house?"

"No, sir, I have never seen him there. He is not in my set."

"And yet I take it your set is a wild one, and likely to suit his lordship."

"Nay, sir, they tell me Lavendale has sobered down since his return from the Continent, and neither drinks nor plays as deep as he did before he went abroad."

"Is it so? Well, he is a mighty pretty fellow, and a prime favourite with the women. Some one told me the other day that he was in a consumption. You may begin to dress my head. Is that true, d'ye think?"

"The consumption, sir. Nay, I fancy 'tis an idle story got up by his lordship to make him more interesting to the sex. Women love a man who is reported to be dying. I have known men whose lives have been despaired of for ten years at a stretch, and who have wound up by marrying fortunes, having very little but their bad health to recommend them. A fellow who has no other capital may marry a rich widow on the strength of a consumption or a heart complaint."

"I am told Lord Lavendale is looking younger and handsomer than ever," pursued Topsparkle; "but I thought it might be the hectic of disease which imparted a delusive beauty."

"I doubt, sir, the fellow is well enough, and will outlive us all," said Fétis, with a malicious pleasure in blighting his master's hopes.

He finished his work of art upon Topsparkle's countenance, putting in every minute touch as carefully as a miniature painter. He fitted the stately wig upon the bald pate, and then Mr. Topsparkle put his head into the powdering closet for the last sprinkle of maréchale, and emerged therefrom in all the perfection of artificial grace and court fashion. His coat and waistcoat were marvels of the tailor's and embroideress's art; his cravat was a miracle of Roman point worked by Ursuline nuns in a convent amidst the Apennines; his diamond shoe-buckles were of an exquisite neatness and elegance; his red-heeled shoes set off to perfection the narrow foot and arched instep.

The delicate duties of this elaborate toilet completed, Fétis was free till the evening. Mr. Topsparkle had meaner hirelings who attended to his lesser wants and waited upon him all day long. Fétis was the artist in chief, the high-priest in the temple, and his ministrations were confined to the sacred and secret hours in which youth and good looks were elaborated from age and decay.

To-day Fétis was inwardly impatient to be gone, yet was far too well bred to betray his impatience by the faintest indication. He seemed rather to linger, as if loth to depart, arranged the gold and ivory fittings of the nécessaire with nicest care, gave a finishing touch to patch and pulvilio boxes, perfume bottles, and tortoiseshell combs, and it was only when Mr. Topsparkle dismissed him that he gave a sliding bow and glided gracefully from the room, as elegant in every detail of his costume as his master, but with the subdued and sober colouring which implied gravity of manners and humility of station.

When he was gone, Mr. Topsparkle rose from the sofa where he had been reclining in an attitude of luxurious repose, and began to pace the room, full of thought.

"I don't like the rascal's manner," he said to himself. "He is too bold, presumes too much upon his usefulness in the present, and" – after a thoughtful pause – "in the past. He has become a horse leech, bleeds me of thousands with an insufferable audacity. Yet, after all, 'tis hardly worth troubling about. The mere amount in itself is scarce worth a thought to a man of my means, though I might endow a bishopric on a less income, and get some credit for my generosity. To maintain a profligate and gamester, a pander to fashionable follies, only because he has the art of laying on a cosmetic and pencilling an eyebrow to a higher degree than anyone else! Yet after all 'tis something to have one's toilet performed skilfully, and a blunderer would put me in a fever every time he touched me. Why should I grudge the fellow his wages? he is as necessary to me as Dubois was to the Duke, and he would accept no lesser recompense than to be prime minister, and have all the threads of state intrigue in his hands. This fellow of mine is an unambitious, innocuous scoundrel. He only preys upon my purse."

He rang for his footman, one of those splendid functionaries being always in attendance in a three-cornered lobby or ante-room outside Mr. Topsparkle's study. This chamber was an oak-panelled well, lighted from a skylight, cold in winter and suffocating in summer; but the lacquey, sitting on a velvet-covered bench with his silken legs stretched out before him, was supposed to enjoy a life of luxurious idleness.

"My chocolate and the papers," ordered Mr. Topsparkle. "Stay, you can put on some logs before you go. 'Tis odiously cold this morning."

He went back to his sofa, which was in front of the fire. The chocolate was brought almost immediately, as if by magic, most of Mr. Topsparkle's desires being divined beforehand and duly prepared for, lest he should complain, like the late French King, that he had "almost waited."

The footman wheeled a little table beside the sofa, and arranged his master's pillows, while a second attendant spirit brought the silver-gilt chocolate service and the fashionable journals, those thin and meagre papers which in the absence of parliamentary debates eked out their scanty public news with much private scandal, announcements of intended marriages that never came off, hints at reported elopements under the thin veil of initials, theatrical criticism, and quotations from some lordling's satiric poem, for in those days almost all lordlings had an itch for satire, and fancied they could write. If the verses appeared anonymously, were fairly metrical and particularly spiteful, they were generally debited to Pope or Lady Mary, and the anonymous lordling went about for a week or two rubbing his hands and chuckling and telling all the town under the seal of secrecy that he was the author of that remarkable lampoon which had just convulsed society.

Mr. Topsparkle sipped his chocolate, and tried to read his papers: but this morning he found himself in no humour for public news – the last letter from the Continent – the last highway robbery in Denmark Street, St. Giles – or even for the more appetising private scandal, about the Lady at Richmond Court who had suddenly retired from society, but was not in a wasting sickness, or the celebrated Duchess, once a famous beauty, whose housemaids had left her in a body because the ducal board wages were two shillings a week under the customary allowance. Mr. Topsparkle's mind was too intently occupied upon his own business to compassionate the Richmond lady or to speculate whether the anonymous duchess was the mighty Sarah of Blenheim, or her mad Grace of Buckinghamshire, both alike notorious for pride and parsimony.

He flung the journals aside with an oath.

"These scribblers are the stupidest scoundrels alive," he muttered, "there is not an ounce of wit in the whole fraternity. O, for the days of Steele and Addison, when one was sure of pleasant reading with one's breakfast! Their trumpery imitators give the outward form of the essay without its inward spirit."

The footman appeared

"A lady is below, sir, who says she will be mightily obliged if you will allow her ten minutes' conversation."

"Pray, who is the lady who calls at such an extraordinary hour, before a gentleman's day has begun?"

"She gave no name, sir."

"Go ask who she is."

The man retired, and returned to say the lady was a stranger to Mr. Topsparkle, and asked an interview as a favour.

"So! That sounds mysterious," said Topsparkle. "Pray, what manner of personage is she? Does she look like a genteel beggar, elderly and shabby, in a greasy black-silk hood and mantle, eh, my man?"

"No, sir, the person is young and handsome. She looks rather like one of the foreign singing-women your honour is pleased to patronise."

"Singing women! Why, do you know, block-head, that those singing women, as you call them, are the beloved of princes, and have the salaries of prime ministers? Singing women, forsooth! And this stranger is young and pretty, you say?"

"Yes, sir."

"And a foreigner?"

"I am sure of that, sir."

"You can show her up."

Mr. Topsparkle composed himself into an attitude on the sofa, like Louis XIV. Flatterers told him that he resembled that superb monarch, as he did in the fact that much of his dignity and splendour was derived from costume. Seated upon his cut velvet sofa, with the skirts of his coat spreading wide, his jewelled rapier at his side, he had certainly an almost regal air, calculated to overawe a nameless foreign woman, who was in all probability an adventuress whose audacity was her only passport to that stately mansion.

The footman threw open the door, and announced "A lady to wait upon your honour," whereupon there came tripping in a plump little woman in a quilted satin petticoat, and short tucked-up gown, fluttering all over with cherry-coloured bows, and with a cherry-coloured hood setting off but in no wise concealing a mass of unpowdered black hair which clustered about a low forehead, and agreeably shaded the brightest black eyes Mr. Topsparkle had seen for a long time, eyes brimming with coquetry, and not without a lurking craftiness of expression which set the admiring gentleman upon his guard.

The lady's nose was retroussé, her lips were too thick for beauty, but of a carmine tint which was accentuated by the artful adjustment of patches; the lady's complexion was not quite so artificial as Mr. Topsparkle's, but it revealed an acquaintance with some of the highest branches of the face-painting art. The lady in general effect looked about three-and-twenty. Mr. Topsparkle put her down for eight-and-thirty.

"My dear madam, I beg you to be seated," said Topsparkle, waving his attenuated hand graciously towards a chair, and admiring his rings and point lace ruffle as he did so. "You honour me vastly by this pleasant impromptu visit. May I offer you a cup of chocolate?"

"You are too condescending, sir. I took my chocolate before I left home," replied the cherry-coloured intruder, sinking gracefully into a chair, and rounding her plump white arms as she adjusted her cherry satin muff. "I venture to call at this early hour, before the great world has begun to besiege your lordship's door, because I have an appeal to make to your generous heart."

"I thought as much," said Mr. Topsparkle within himself. "This cherry-coloured personage has come to beg."

He was so used to be begged of that his heart had hardened itself, was adamant against all such petitions; but he did not object when the mendicant was a pretty woman, with whom he might indulge in half an hour's innocent persiflage at the cost of a few guineas.

"Dearest madam, I am all ears," he murmured languidly.

"Sir, you behold a deeply-injured woman," said the lady, with a tragic air, and the announcement sounded like the beginning of a very long story.

"Say not so, I beseech you, madam; the character is so odiously common," protested Mr. Topsparkle. "That piquant countenance, those brilliant eyes, bespeak originality. Such a face is designed only to injure, the mission of such beauty is to destroy."

"Ah, sir, there was a day when I knew my power and used it; you who are a frequenter of the opera may perhaps remember the name and person of Coralie Legrand."

"Your person, madam, once seen can never be forgotten; and if I had heard you sing in the opera – "

"Sir, I was a dancer, not a singer," exclaimed the lady, with a wounded air.

"Was, madam; nay, speak not of yourself in the past, 'Fuit Ilium;' say not that such charms are for ever withdrawn from the public eye – that the flame of the candles no longer shines upon that beauty – that some selfish churl, some avaricious hoarder of loveliness, has appropriated so fair a being for his own exclusive property."

"It is true, sir. I who had once half the town at my feet am now mewed up in a stuffy parlour, and scolded if I venture to exchange half a dozen sentences with some aristocratic pretty fellow, or to venture a guinea or so at ombre."

"Soho!" exclaimed Topsparkle, becoming suddenly intent. "Your name, madam, your name, I entreat."

"I was Coralie Legrand, leading dancer in the first division of the ballet at the Royal Haymarket Opera. I am Mrs. Fétis, your valet's ill-used wife; and it is on my husband's account that I venture – "

"Madam, you have the strongest claim upon me. Fétis is an old servant – "

"He is an old servant. If I had known how old before I married him – "

"O, madam, he is not a septuagenarian; Fétis is my junior."

"He looks your lordship's senior; but it is not so much his age I object to. I would forgive him for being ninety if he were only indulgent and generous."

"Is he capable of meanness to so bewitching a wife?"

"Yes, sir, he is horribly stingy. At this hour I am being dunned to death by my next-door neighbour, to whom I owe a paltry fifteen guineas. She is Madame Furbelow, the Court milliner, a person of some ton, and she and I were dearest friends till this money trouble parted us – but 'tis shocking not to be able to pay one's debts of honour. Yet, to my certain knowledge, Fétis has lost hundreds in a single night to some of his fine gentlemen customers, who fool him by pretending to treat him as a friend. There was the wild Duke of Wharton, for instance, and his club of intriguers, the Schemers they called themselves, a committee of gallants, who used to hold their meetings at our house and plot mischief against poor innocent women – how to carry off silly heiresses and to conquer rich widows. His Grace had a bank at faro, and that foolish husband of mine was a frequent loser."

"He must have won sometimes, madam. He must have had his lucky nights, like the rest of us."

"Then he kept his good luck to himself, sir; I never heard of it. He said he ought to have the devil's luck in love since he was so cursedly unlucky at cards and dice. And then, though he has the effrontery to deny me a few guineas, I have heard him boast that he has claims upon you which you must always honour, that your purse was a golden stream which could never run dry."

"O, he has boasted, has he, the poor foolish fellow, boasted of his power over me?"

"Nay, sir, I did not presume to mention the word 'power.' He has bragged of his services to you – long and faithful services such as no other man in Europe would have rendered to a master. He has curious fits at times – but I did not come hither to betray his secrets, poor creature; I came in the hope that your lordship, who has been ever so bountiful to my husband, could perhaps grant some small pecuniary favour to a poor woman in distress – "

"Madam, my purse is at your service," exclaimed Topsparkle eagerly, taking out a well-filled pocket-book, and selecting a couple of bank-notes. "Here is a trifling sum which will enable you to pay your neighbour and leave a surplus for some future transactions of the same kind, or for another hood like that which becomes you so admirably. Pray, never hesitate to call upon me for any petty assistance of this kind."

The fair Coralie cooed her thanks with a gentle murmuring as of a wood-pigeon, and ventured so far as to imprint her rosy lips upon her benefactor's lean hand, a kiss which Mr. Topsparkle received as a compliment, although he stealthily wiped his hand with his cambric handkerchief the next minute.

"And you say that my poor Louis is odd at times," he said caressingly. "I hope he does not drink?"

"I think not, sir. There is a terrible deal of drinking goes on in our house, but I doubt if my husband is ever the worse for liquor. But he has strange fits sometimes of a night, cannot sleep, or sleeps but for five minutes at a time, and then starts up from his bed and walks up and down the room, saying that he is haunted, haunted by the souls he has ruined. He says there is a ghost in thishouse."

"Indeed," cried Mr. Topsparkle, looking around him, and assuming his airiest manner, "and yet I do not fancy this looks like the habitation of ghosts. There are no cobwebs festooning the walls, no bats and owls flitting across the ceiling, no dirt, decay, or desolation."

"Nay, sir, it is a splendid house, full of beautifulest things. Yet I have heard my husband on those sleepless nights of his when he has talked more to himself than to me – I have heard him say that he has rushed out of this house at twilight with the cold sweat pouring down his face."

"Then, my dear lady, I fear there is no room to doubt that your husband has taken to drink. The symptoms you depict are precisely those of a drunkard's disease known to all medical men. The sleepless nights – the imagination of ghosts and phantoms – the cold sweat – these are as common and as plain as the pustules that denote smallpox or the spots that indicate scarlet fever. If your husband does not drink openly, be assured he drinks deep in secret. You had better get him away from London. What say you to returning to your native country?"

Mrs. Fétis shrugged her shoulders with a doubtful air. She often talked rapturously of La Belle France, raved of her sunny south, that gracious city of Périgord where she had been born and reared to the age of fifteen. Yet for all the common purposes of life she had liked London a great deal better.

"There is nothing I should love so much," she protested. "But 'twould be madness to leave a house in which we have sunk all our means and our labour with the hope of getting our reward by a competence in our old age. Indeed, sir, we could not afford to leave Poland Street."

"Not if you were amply provided for elsewhere?" asked Topsparkle.

"Ah, sir, to be provided for by others – by a kind of pension from a wealthy benefactor for instance," looking at him searchingly, as if she were measuring his capacity for generosity, "that is all very well for poor-spirited people – the English lower classes have no pride. But my husband and I are of an independent mind. We would rather have our liberty even in poverty than be pensioners upon any one's bounty, which might be withdrawn at a day's notice."

"Nay, a pension of that kind to be useful must be assured to you – something in the way of an annuity in the public funds, for instance – dependent on your own lives, and not upon any one else's frail thread of existence."

Mrs. Fétis looked interested, and almost convinced.

"'Twould be a delicious life and free from care; but Fétis has a passion for London, and all whom I love in my own country are dead. It would be but to go back to their graves."

Mr. Topsparkle said no more. He did not want to appear over anxious to banish his old servant, yet the man's tone to-day and the wife's revelations had intensified a feeling he had entertained for a long time, a feeling that the hour had come when it would be very agreeable to get rid of his âme damnée. He would suffer considerable inconvenience undoubtedly from the loss of a valet who so thoroughly understood his complexion; but anything was better than the everlasting vicinity of a servant who knew too much.

He dismissed the Frenchwoman with a compliment, escorted her to the ante-room, and kissed her hand with a finished courtesy before he committed her to the care of the footman, and then he went back to his sofa, warmed his feet at the log-fire, and gave himself up to a serious thought.

"The man is getting dangerous," he thought; "he always was a creature of excitable temper, and now he has drunk or gamed himself into a kind of mental fever, from which perhaps the next stage would be madness. Better so! Nobody believes a madman. And if he were to make any revelations about the remote past, who is there to confirm him? No one. The old Venetian must long since have been numbered with his ancestors. The apothecary disappeared thirty years ago and left no trace behind him. If it had not been for that damnable scandal at the time, set on foot and fostered by that villain Churchill, I could laugh any accusation of Fétis to scorn; but there are a few of my contemporaries malicious enough to have long memories, and I would do much to avoid a revival of that hellish outcry which drove me from the hustings and from the country. I have not forgotten. That hateful scene at Brentford is as vivid in my mind as if it had happened yesterday. And he has begun to talk, to get up in the middle of the night and to rave about being haunted. And this loquacious wife of his will repeat his ravings to all her gossips. Yes, there is danger, were it ever so slight. A man of my importance is a target for every venomous arrow. Fétis, you must be silenced."

He rose and paced the room slowly, meditating upon the position in all its aspects, and with all its possibilities of evil. There was his wife, of whose loyalty he was ever doubtful. What if that ancient scandal were to reach her ears? Would she not use it as a weapon against him, ally herself with her old lover for his destruction? The very thought made that magnificent periwig of his tremulous as if with a palsy.

The man must be got out of the way somehow. If he did not snap at the bait of a handsome annuity and accept retirement to his native land, there might be other means, nearer, shorter, of disposing of him.

Yes, there was one way, short and easy, as it seemed to Mr. Topsparkle; a way of making Louis Fétis safe for ever: but that way would leave the wife at liberty – and she might be dangerous.

"No, she can be bought," thought Topsparkle, "she is vain and empty-headed. I can manage her – but he – I have been an idiot to keep him about me so long – and yet he has been useful. I have leant upon him – never knowing when I might need his help. I believed in his discretion, thought him secret as the grave; and now he has begun to blab to that silly wife of his, my confidence is destroyed for ever – all sense of security is gone."

CHAPTER IV

"SMITE HIS HARD HEART, AND SHAKE HIS REPTILE SOUL."

With Vincenti's narrative fresh in his mind, and with a very lively recollection of Mr. Philter's story, Lord Lavendale had a keen desire to see something more of the French valet – or private secretary – who had been so diabolically subservient to his master's jealousy and revenge. There was of course always the possibility that Vincenti's theory and the floating suspicions of the neighbourhood might be without substantial foundation. People have had a knack of attributing all sudden or mysterious deaths to poison ever since the days of Sir Thomas Overbury – nor could Lord Essex cut his throat with his own razor without giving rise to an accusation of murder. In any case Lavendale was determined to see something more of the supposed tool, and to study him on his own ground, at the house in Poland Street.

It was very easy for him to get invited to supper at this favourite rendezvous. The Schemers' Club was extinct, and almost forgotten. It had expired with Wharton's disgrace and exile; and Wharton himself, the brilliant orator, the unscrupulous turncoat, the prodigal and profligate, was a wanderer in the wilds of Catalonia, ruined, broken, and dying.

There were other bloods of the same kidney, lesser lights in the firmament of pleasure, and one of these, Sir Randal Hetherington, invited Lavendale to a card party at the house in Poland Street.

"'Tis a snug retreat, where a gentleman can receive his friends without being stared at by the chance mob of a chocolate house; 'tis more secluded even than a club, and has the advantage of admitting feminine company," he said; "and Fétis has one of the best cooks in London. A very clever fellow, Fétis, monstrously superior to his station – knows more about foreign politics than Peterborough or Horace Walpole; I have sometimes suspected that he is one of old Fleury's spies."

Lavendale went, supped, and drank deep of the champagne which Mr. Fétis supplied to his patrons at a guinea a bottle, but not so deep as to lose a word that was spoken or a single indication which could enlighten him as to the character of his host, who waited upon the little party in person during supper, and afterwards sat down to cards with them, received upon a footing which was more familiar than friendship, something after the kind of condescending jocose intimacy which obtained between the princes and court jesters of old.