Arthur O'Leary: His Wanderings And Ponderings In Many Lands

Arthur, thou hast had a life of more than man’s share of pleasure; thou hast tasted much happiness, and known but few sorrows; but would not a moment like this outnumber them all? Where is love so full, so generous, so confiding? What affection comes so pure and unalloyed, not chilled by jealous doubts or fears, but warm and gushing – the incense of a happy heart, the outpourings of a guileless nature. Nothing can be more beautiful than the picture of maternal fondness, the gracefulness of woman thrown like a garment around her children. Her look of love etherealised by the holiest sentiment of tenderness; her loveliness exalted above the earth by the contemplation of those, her own dear ones, who are but a ‘little lower than the angels’ – is a sight to make the eyes gush tears of happiness, and the heart swell with thankfulness to Heaven. Second alone to this is the unbending of man’s stern nature before the charms of childhood, when, casting away the pride of manhood and the cold spirit of worldly ambition, he becomes like one among his children, the participator in their joys and sorrows, the companion of their games, the confidant of their little secrets. How insensibly does each moment thus passed draw him further from the world and its cares; how soon does he forget disappointments, or learn to think of them less poignantly; and how by Nature’s own magnetism does the sinless spirit of the child mix with the subtle workings of the man, and lift him above the petty jarrings and discords of life! And thus, while he teaches them precepts of truth and virtue, they pour into his heart lessons of humility and forbearance. If he point out the future to them, with equal force they show the past to him, and a blessing rests on both. The populus me sibilat of the miser is a miserable philosophy compared to his who can retire from the rancorous assaults of enemies and the dark treachery of false friends, to the bosom of a happy home, and feel his hearth a sanctuary where come no forms of malice to assail him!

Such were my musings as I saw the father pass on with his children; and never before did my loneliness seem so devoid of happiness.

Would that I could stop here; would that I might leave my reader to ponder over these things, and fashion them to his mind’s liking; but I may not. I have but one object in these notes of my loiterings. It is to present to those younger in the world, and fresher to its wiles than myself, some of the dangers as well as some of the enjoyments of foreign travel; and having surveyed the cost with much care and caution, I would fix a wreck-buoy here and there along the channel as a warning and a guide. And now to begin.

Let me take the character before me – one of whom I hesitate not to say that only the name is derived from invention. Some may have already identified him; many more may surmise the individual meant. It is enough that I say he still lives, and the correctness of the portrait may easily be tested by any traveller Rhinewards; but I prefer giving him a chapter to himself.

CHAPTER XXVI. SIR HARRY WYCHERLEY

Sir Harry Wycherley was of an old Hampshire family, who, entering the army when a mere boy, contrived, before he came of age, so completely to encumber a very large estate that his majority only enabled him to finish the ruin he had so actively begun, and to leave him penniless at seven-and-twenty. Before the wreck of his property became matter of notoriety, he married an earl’s daughter with a vast fortune, a portion of which was settled on any children that might be born to their union. She, poor girl, scarcely nineteen when she married (for it was a love match), died of a broken heart at three-and-twenty – leaving Sir Harry, with two infant children, all but irretrievably ruined, nearly everything he possessed mortgaged beyond its value, and not even a house to shelter him. By the advice of his lawyer, he left England secretly and came over to Paris, whence he travelled through Germany down to Italy, where he resided some time. The interest of the fortune settled on the children sufficed to maintain him in good style, and enabled him to associate with men of his own rank, provided he incurred no habits of extravagance. A few years of such prudence would, he was told, enable him to return with a moderate income; and he submitted.

This career of quiet, unobtrusive character was gradually becoming more and more insupportable to him. At first the change from a life beset by duns and bailiffs, by daily interviews with Jews and consultations with scheming lawyers, was happiness itself; the freedom he enjoyed from pressing difficulties and contingencies which arose with every hour was a pleasure he never knew before, and he felt like a schoolboy escaped from the drudgery of the desk. But by degrees, as he mixed more with those who were his former associates and companions – many of them exiles on the same plea as himself – the old taste for past pleasures revived. Their conversation brought back London with all its brilliant gaiety before him. Its clubs and coteries, the luxurious display of the dinners at the ‘Clarendon’ or the reckless extravagance of the nights at Crockford’s, the triumphs of the Derby, and the glories of Ascot, passed all in review before him, heightened by the recollection of the high spirits of his youth. He began once more to hanker after the world he believed he had quitted without regret; and a morbid anxiety to learn what was doing and going forward in the circles he used to move in took possession of his mind. All the gossip of Tattersall’s, all the chitchat of the Carlton, all the scandal of Graham’s, became at once indispensable to his existence, Who was going it ‘fastest’ among the rising spirits of the day, and which was the favourite of ‘Scott’s lot,’ were points of vital interest to him; while he felt the deepest anxiety about the fortunes of those who were tottering on the brink of ruin, and spent many a sleepless night in conjectures as to how they were to get through this difficulty or that, and whether they could ever ‘come round’ again.

Not one of the actors in that busy scene, into whose wild chaos fate mixes up all that is highest and everything the most depraved of human nature, ever took the same interest in it as he did. He lived henceforth in an ideal world, ignorant and careless of what was passing around him; his faculties strained to regard events at a distance, he became abstracted and silent. A year passed over thus, twelve weary months, in which his mind dwelt on home and country with all the ardour of a banished man. At last the glad tidings reached him that a compromise had been effected with his principal creditors; his most pressing debts had been discharged, and time obtained to meet others of less moment; and no obstacle any longer existed to his returning to England.

What a glorious thing it was to come back again once more to the old haunts and scenes of pleasure; to revisit the places of which his days and nights were filled with the very memory; to be once again the distinguished among that crowd who ruled supreme at the table and on the turf, and whose fiat was decisive from the Italian Opera to Doncaster! Alas and alas! the resumption of old tastes and habits will not bring back the youth and buoyancy which gave them all their bright colouring. There is no standing still in life; there is no resting-place whence we can survey the panorama, and not move along with it. Our course continues, and as changes follow one another in succession without, so within our own natures are we conforming to the rule, and becoming different from what we had been. The dream of home, the ever-present thought to the exile’s mind, suffers the rude shock when comes the hour of testing its reality; happy for him if he die in the delusion! Early remembrances are hallowed by a light that age and experience dissipate for ever, and as the highland tarn we used to think grand in its wild desolation in the hours of our boyhood becomes to our manhoods eye but a mere pond among the mountains, so do we look with changed feelings on all about us, and feel disappointment where we expected pleasure.

In all great cities these changes succeed with fearful rapidity. Expensive tastes and extravagant habits are hourly ruining hundreds who pass off the scene where they shone, and are heard of no more. The ‘lion’ of the season – whose plate was a matter of royal curiosity, whose equipage gave the tone to the time, whose dinner invitations were regarded as the climax of fashionable distinction – awakes some morning to discover that an expenditure of four times a man’s income, continued for several years, may originate embarrassment in his affairs. He finds out that tailors can be uncivil, and coachmakers rude and – horror of horrors! – he sees within the precincts of his dressing-room the plebeian visage of a sherrifs officer, or the calculating countenance of a West-End auctioneer.

He who was booked for Ascot now hurries away to Antwerp. An ambiguous paragraph in an evening paper informs London that one among the ranks of extravagance has fallen; a notice of ‘public competition’ by the hand of George Robins comes next; a criticism, and generally a sharp one, on the taste of his furniture and the value of his pictures follows; the broad pages of the Morning Post become the winding-sheet of his memory, and the knock of the auctioneer’s hammer is his requiem! The ink is not dried on his passport ere he is forgotten. Fashionable circles have other occupations than regrets and condolences; so that the exile may be a proud man if he retain a single correspondent in that great world which yesterday found nothing better than to chronicle his doings.

When Sir Harry Wycherley then came back to London he was only remembered – nothing more. The great majority of his contemporaries had, like himself, passed off the boards during the interval; such of them as remained were either like vessels too crippled in action to seek safety in flight, or, adopting the philosophy of the devil when sick, had resolved on prudence when there was no more liking for dissipation. He was almost a stranger in his club; the very waiters at Mivart’s asked his name; while the last new peer’s son, just emerging into life, had never even heard of him before. So is it decreed – dynasties shall fall and others succeed them; Charles le Dix gives place to Louis-Philippe, and Nugee occupies the throne of Stultz.

Few things men bear worse than this oblivion in the very places where once their sway was absolute. It is very hard to believe that the world has grown wiser and better, more cultivated in taste and more correct in its judgments than when we knew it of old; and a man is very likely to tax with ingratitude those who, superseding him in the world’s favour, seem to be forgetful of claims which in reality they never knew of.

Sir Harry Wycherley was not long in England ere he felt these truths in all their bitterness, and saw that an absence of a few years teaches one’s friends to do without them so completely that they are absolutely unwilling to open a new want of acquaintance, as though it were an expensive luxury they had learned to dispense with. Besides, Wycherley was decidedly rococo in all his tastes and predilections. Men did not dine now where they used in his day – Doncaster was going out, Goodwood was coming in; people spoke of Grisi, not Pasta, Mario more than Rubini. Instead of the old absolute monarchy of fashion, where one dictated to all the rest, a new school sprung up, a species of democracy, who thought Long Wellesley and D’Orsay were unclean idols, and would not worship anything but themselves.

Now of all the marks of progress which distinguish men in the higher circles, there is none in these latter days at all comparable with the signs of – to give it a mild name – increased ‘sharpness,’ distinguishable amongst them. The traveller by the heavy Falmouth mail whisked along forty miles per hour in the Grand Junction, would see far less to astonish and amaze him than your shrewd man about town of some forty years back, could he be let down any evening among the youth at Tattersall’s, or introduced among the rising generation just graduating at Graham’s.

The spirit of the age is unquestionably to be ‘up and doing.’ A good book on the Oaks has a far higher preeminence, not to say profit, than one published in ‘the Row’; the ‘honours’ of the crown are scarcely on a par with those scored at whist; and to predict the first horse at Ascot would be a far higher step in the intellectual scale than to prophesy the appearance of a comet or an eclipse; the leader in the House can only divide public applause with the winner of the Léger, and even the versatile gyrations of Lord Brougham himself must yield to the more fascinating pirouettes of Fanny Ellsler. Young men leave Eton and Sandhurst now with more tact and worldly wit than their fathers had at forty, or than their grandfathers ever possessed.

Short as Sir Harry Wycherley’s absence had been, the march of mind had done much in all these respects. The babes and sucklings of fashion were more than his equals in craft and subtlety; none like them to ascertain what was wrong with the favourite, or why ‘the mare’ would not start; few could compete with them in those difficult walks of finance which consist in obtaining credit from coach-makers, and cash from Jews. In fact, to that generation who spent profusely to live luxuriously had succeeded a race who reversed the position, and lived extravagantly in order to have the means of spending. Wiser than their fathers, they substituted paper for cash payments, and saw no necessity to cry ‘stop’ while there was a stamp in England.

It was a sad thing for one who believed his education finished to become a schoolboy once more, but there was nothing else for it. Sir Harry had to begin at the bottom of the class; he was an apt scholar it is true, but before he had completed his studies he was ruined. High play and high interest, Jews and jockeys, dinners and danseuses, with large retinues of servants, will help a man considerably to get rid of his spare cash; and however he may – which in most cases he must – acquire some wisdom en route, his road is not less certain to lead to ruin. In two years from the time of his return, another paragraph and another auction proclaimed that ‘Wycherley was cleaned out,’ and that he had made his ‘positively last appearance’ in England.

The Continent was now to be his home for life. He had lost his ‘means,’ but he had learned ‘ways’ of living, and from pigeon he became rook.

There is a class, possibly the most dangerous that exists, of men, who without having gone so far as to forfeit pretension to the society and acquaintance of gentleman, have yet involved their name and reputation in circumstances which are more than suspicious. Living expensively, without any obvious source of income; enjoying every luxury, and indulging every taste that costs dearly, without any difficulty in the payment, their intimacy with known gamblers and blacklegs exposes them at once to the inevitable charge of confederacy. Rarely or never playing themselves, however, they reply to such calumnies by referring to their habits; their daily life would indeed seem little liable to reproval. If married, they are the most exemplary of husbands. If they have children, they are models for fathers. Where can you see such little ones, so well-mannered, so well-dressed, with such beautifully curled hair, and such perfectly good-breeding – or, to use the proper phrase, ‘so admirably taken care of’? They are liberal to all public charities; they are occasionally intimate with the chaplain of the Embassy too – of whom, a word hereafter; and, in fact, it would be difficult to find fault with any circumstance in their bearing before the world. Their connection by family with persons of rank and condition is a kind of life-buoy of which no shipwreck of fortune deprives them, and long after less well-known people have sunk to the bottom, they are to be found floating on the surface of society. In this way they form a kind of ‘Pont du Diable’ between persons of character and persons of none – they are the narrow isthmus, connecting the mainland with the low reef of rocks beyond it.

These men are the tame elephants of the swindling world, who provide the game, though they never seem to care for the sport. Too cautious of reputation to become active agents in these transactions, they introduce the unsuspecting traveller into those haunts and among those where ruin is rife; and as the sheriff consigns the criminal to the attentions of the hangman, so these worthies halt at the ‘drop,’ and would scorn with indignation the idea of exercising the last office of the law.

Far from this, they are eloquent in their denunciations of play. Such sound morality as theirs cannot be purchased at any price; the dangers that beset young men coming abroad – the risk of chance acquaintance, the folly of associating with persons not known – form the staple of their talk – which, lest it should seem too cynical in its attack on pleasure, is relieved by that admirable statement so popular in certain circles. ‘You know a man of the world must see everything for himself, so that though I say don’t gamble, I never said don’t frequent the Cursaal; though I bade you avoid play, I did not say shun blacklegs.’ It is pretty much like desiring a man not to take the yellow fever, but to be sure to pass an autumn on the coast of Africa!

Such, then, was the character of him who would once have rejected with horror the acquaintance of one like himself. A sleeping partner in swindling, he received his share of the profits, although his name did not appear in the firm. His former acquaintances continued to know him, his family connections were large and influential, and though some may have divined his practices, he was one of those men that are never ‘cut.’ Some pitied him; some affected to disbelieve all the stories against him; some told tales of his generosity and kindness, but scarcely any one condemned him – ‘Ainsi va le monde?’

Once more I ask forgiveness, if I have been too prolix in all this; rather would I have you linger in pleasanter scenes, and with better company, but – there must always be a ‘but’ – he is only a sorry pilot who would content himself with describing the scenery of the coast, expatiating on the beauty of the valleys and the boldness of the headlands, while he let the vessel take her course among reefs and rocks, and risk a shipwreck while he amused the passengers. Adieu, then, to Spas and their visitors! The sick are seldom the pleasantest company; the healthy at such places are rarely the safest.

‘You are going, Mr. O’Leary?’ said a voice from a window opposite the hotel, as my luggage was lifted into a fiacre, I looked up. It was the youth who had lost so deeply at the Cursaal.

‘Only to Ooblentz, for a few days,’ said I; ‘I am weary of gaiety and fine people. I wish for quiet just now.’

‘I would that I had gone some weeks ago,’ exclaimed he, with a sigh. ‘May I walk with you as far as the river?’

I assented with pleasure, and in a moment after he was by my side.

‘I trust,’ said I, when we had walked together some time – ‘I trust you have not been to the Cursaal again?’

‘Never since I met you; that night was the last I ever passed there!’ He paused for some minutes, and then added, ‘You are not acquainted with either of the gentlemen in whose company we supped – I think you told me so on the way home?’

‘No, they were both strangers to me; it was a chance rencontre, and in the few weeks I passed at Wiesbaden I learned enough not to pursue the acquaintance further. Indeed, to do them justice, they seemed as well disposed as myself to drop the intimacy; I seldom play, never among strangers.’

‘Ah,’ said he, in an accent of some bitterness, ‘that resolve would avail you little with them; they can win without playing for it.’

‘How so; what do you mean?’

‘Have you a mind for a short story? It is my own adventure, and I can vouch for the truth.’ I assented, and he went on: —

‘About a week ago, Mr. Crotty, with two others, one of whom was called Captain Jacob, came to invite me to a little excursion to Kreuznach. They were to go one day and return the following one. Sir Harry was to join the party also, and they spoke of Lord Edderdale and some others. But Wycherley only came down to the steamboat, when a messenger arrived with a pressing letter, recalling him to Wiesbaden, and the rest never appeared. Away we went, however, in good spirits; the day was fine, and the sail down the Rhine, as you know, delightful. We arrived at Kreuznach to dinner, spent the evening in wandering about the pretty scenery, and came back by moonlight to a late supper. As usual with them, cards were produced after supper, but I had never touched a card, nor made a bet, since my unlucky night at the Cursaal; so I merely sat by the table and looked on at the game – of course taking that interest in it a man fond of play cannot divest himself of – but neither counselling any party, nor offering a bet to either side. The game gradually became interesting, deeply so, as well from the skill of the players as the high stakes they played for. Large sums of money changed owners, and heavy scores were betted besides. Meanwhile, champagne was called for, and, as the night wore on, a bowl of smoking bishop, spiced and seasoned to perfection. My office was to fill the glasses of the party, and drink toasts with each of them in succession, as luck inclined to this side or that.

‘The excitement of play needs not wine to make it near to madness; but with it no mania is more complete. Although but a looker-on, my attention was bent on the game; and what with the odorous bowl of bishop, and the long-sustained interest, the fatigue of a day more than usually laborious, and a constitution never strong, I became so heavy that I threw myself upon a sofa, and fell fast asleep.

‘How I reached my bed and became undressed, I never knew since; but by noon the next day I was awakened from a deep slumber, and saw Jacob beside me.

‘“Well, old fellow, you take it coolly,” said he, laughing; “you don’t know it’s past twelve o’clock.”

‘“Indeed!” said I, starting up, and scarce remembering where I was. “The fact is, my wits are none of the clearest this morning – that bowl of bishop finished me.”

‘“Did it, by Jove?” replied he, with a half saucy laugh; “I’ll wager a pony, notwithstanding, that you never played better in your life.”

‘“Played! why, I never touched a card,” said I, in horror and amazement.

‘“I wish you hadn’t, that’s all,” said he, while he took a pocket-book from his pocket, and proceeded to open it on the bed. “If you hadn’t, I should have been somewhat of a richer man this morning.”

‘“I can only tell you,” said I, as I rubbed my eyes, and endeavoured to waken up more completely – “I can only tell you that I don’t remember anything of what you allude to, nor can I believe that I would have broken a firm resolve I made against play – ”

‘“Gently, sir, gently,” said he, in a low, smooth voice; “be a little careful, I beseech you; what you have just said amounts to something very like a direct contradiction of my words. Please to remember, sir, that we were strangers to each other yesterday morning. But to be brief, was your last bet a double or quit, or only a ten-pound note, for on that depends whether I owe you two hundred and sixty, or two hundred and seventy pounds? Can you set me right on that point – they made such a noise at the time, I can’t be clear about it.”

‘“I protest, sir,” said I, once more, “this is all a dream to me; as I have told you already, I never played – ”

‘“You never played, sir?”

‘“I mean, I never knew I played, or I have no remembrance of it now.”

‘“Well, young gentleman, fortune treats you better when asleep than she does me with my eyes open, and as I have no time to lose, for I leave for Bingen in half an hour, I have only to say, here is your money. You may forget what you have won; I have also an obligation, but a stronger one, to remember what I have lost; and as for the ten pounds, shall we say head or tail for it, as we neither of us are quite clear about it?”

‘“Say anything you like, for I firmly believe one or the other of us must be out of our reason.”

‘“What do you say, sir – head or tail?”

‘“Head!” cried I, in a frenzy; “there ought to be one in the party.”