“You do me too much honour, monsieur, you tempt me to try; and as you are a man of politesse auprès des dames, like my friend Monsieur Gillespie — — “
Here was an impatient grunt from the Scotchman.
“Suppose we talk of that inexhaustible mystery, the beau sexe, monsieur — that most charming of Nature’s enigmas.”
“I wonder whether that chap’s dead yet,” interrupted Mr. Gillespie, with savage impatience.
“What chap?” inquired Dacre.
“The chap ye’ve maist murdered,” answered the Scot.
“Now, come, we advised one another not to fash our beards, didn’t we? and that’s a disagreeable subject,” said Dacre. “He’s not dead — he’s not going to die; we have my excellent friend, Monsieur Droqueville’s word for that; haven’t we, monsieur?”
“Yes, monsieur, I am well assured; I have had some experience, and I am extremely happy that I dare to pronounce an opinion favourable to the young gentleman who suffers under a stroke of pistol — (how you say?) — an accident so unfortunate; the lead is placed in the most desirable way for that young gentleman. I have taken the liberty to look under his waistcoat, and I know precisely, for I have seen at different times three persons wounded in the same place, which, if you permit, I will explain.”
“On no account, monsieur,” replied Dacre with prompt politeness. “I quite assent to the conclusion, and the reasons might only unsettle our convictions. You now hear, Monsieur Gillespie, what my gallant friend Colonel Droqueville says upon that subject, and I hope you don’t mean to contradict him.”
“I don’t suppose the colonel is a doctor,” said Mr. Gillespie sourly, “they’re two very different trades, sir, asking your pardon, colonel; the colonel has a gude opinion how best to drive a bullet into your body, but it’s not his business to get it out again, nor to tell you what it’s like to do for you while it is there.”
“Well, I’ll not be bored any more about him,” said Dacre sharply; “I really thought I was rid of that subject for tonight at least, and I’d be glad to know how one is to get rid of a bore if shooting him wont do?”
“I doubt it may do for him and you both,” said Mr. Gillespie angrily.
“I’ve told you before I don’t mean to talk about him,” said Dacre with an odd laugh, “and you shan’t; I don’t care a farthing who I quarrel with tonight — I’m quite in that vein.”
“It’s well, mayhap, for some folk I’m never in that vein,” retorted Mr. Gillespie, with an angry sneer. “It’s a game that two must play at, if it’s played at all; and ye ken verra weel, sir, ye hae nae such fule to deal wi’ in me, Mr. Dacre.”
“Fool? Certainly, in some respects he’s no fool,” said Dacre, contemplatively. “I’ll tell you, however, if you intend croaking any more, that I shall take it as meaning that it is better you should be quite free to turn back and see the patient, and I shall set you down. I mean to return to town, and you can walk back to the Silver Dragon and help to nurse Mr. Mannering. It will be very goodnatured, but I’m hanged if I endure any more talk about him in this carriage.”
Mr. Dacre was talking with an excitement that was very like the menacing jocularity of a quarrelsome man who has been drinking; wine, however, had nothing to do with it, and the odd state of his temper and spirits arose, I suppose, from the transactions of the evening and his nervous suspense about Mannering.”
“Daft,” muttered Gillespie; “he’s lost his wits,” and turning away with an angry sniff he assumed that he had asserted himself, at least as much as was expedient.
CHAPTER XVIII.
PISTOLS AND GENTLEMEN COME HOME.
“I was going to say, monsieur, when Mr.. Gillespie was so good as to amuse us with another subject, that I should like very much to know exactly why I ever did anything in all my life — even this little affair in which you were so good as to lend me, as you once did before in another part of the world, your counsel and support, and become my right arm. I feel like a man who has waked from a dream. I wonder why I cared to take any step in the matter, and I am disposed to ask your pardon, monsieur, for having given you so much trouble.” Monsieur assured his friend Mr. Dacre, that there was no trouble, and that he was infinitely charmed of having been able to render his service.
“Monsieur is a philanthropist, and says so to satisfy my self-reproach. Was ever known moonlight so fortunate! how brilliant! no image fresh from the chisel ever showed sharper than the young gentleman who is comfortably in his bed, I hope, by this time; but you observed, no doubt, the distance seemed greater than it was; the illusion, however, did not avail. May I try one of your cigarettes, monsieur, they perfume so deliciously.”
So, for a time they all three smoked together in silence, and the atmosphere of the interior grew hazy. One cigarette satisfied Mr. Dacre this time, and that light quickly burns out. He leaned back for a little, then out of the window. “London! What a hell London really is, and how I like it,” mused Mr. Dacre, who was feverish and fidgety, and could endure nothing long that evening.
“We devils, Mr. Gillespie, have our affinities — our paradise is in the infernal,” continued Dacre.
“I don’t believe in devils nor paradise neither, except a fule’s paradise, and very densely populated, I warrant you,” sneered Mr. Gillespie.
“Very densely, sir, and I take the Fleet prison to be one of its suburbs, where a lot of fools are locked up for spending the money of other fools, who grin and swear at them through the bars.”
“And who do you allude to, sir?” demanded Mr. Gillespie, angrily.
“Well, one of the inhabitants of that paradise is a friend of ours; I visit him now and then, perhaps you’re aware, and so do you; but he owes me no money, and, therefore, I don’t look foolish when I see him.”
Mr. Gillespie did not like that joke at all, and muttering so as not to be audible, however— “Ye’ll look foolish enough one day, my fine fellow, if ye let your tongue wag as ye’re doing.”
He turned away, and settled in his corner and resumed his cheroot vigorously.
“Green — green — green,” murmured Mr. Dacre enigmatically, as he looked out of the carriage window; “tiresome thing green is; paradise — simplicity — verdure — moonshine; yes, I like the other world better; yellow stucco — red brick — gas light — and d — d clever fellows — devils. The angelic life is insupportable insipidity.”
And with a sigh and a shrug he threw himself back in his seat, and his discourse went rambling on.
“I wish I were altogether a devil; I’m perplexed and made inefficient by stupid yearnings after Eden; a divided being is self-torture, not a grain of conscience or all conscience, — anything between is loss of force and deep-seated incurable pain.”
Mr. Dacre was so obviously rhodomontading in soliloquy, and the noise of the carriage broke the continuity of hearing so effectually that the politeness of Monsieur Droqueville suffered no violence in his quiet attention to the flavour of his cigarette, which precluded any attempt to convert his comrade’s reverie into a colloquy.
Mr. Dacre repeated to himself some well-known verses thus: —
“That proud dame, for whom his soul
Was burnt within him to a coal,
Used him so like a base rascallion,
That old Pyg (what d’ye call him) Malion,
That cut his mistress out of stone,
Had not so hard a hearted one.”
Mr. Dacre smiled in his meditation.
“Yes,” continued he, “they are very odd cats. It is a great pity that philosophy has not weighed, measured, and analysed them. We talk of human nature, and we mean men’s nature; feminine human nature — a thing by itself — has never been analysed by grave psychologists; we leave it to be dogmatized on by the frivolous and the libertine, a study on which a metaphysician might easily go mad. Mad!” he repeated, “I sometimes think I am.”
And then this volatile young gentleman began to hum an air from an opera.
“It is the nature of the lioness,” he suddenly resumed, returning from music to metaphysics; “an instinct for picking out the grandest mate, whether they like him or not, and so with a vainglory strangely humble, to make him their boast, and their sex’s envy their happiness. Yes, mesdemoiselles, if the lioness is not satisfied with her suitor, when they take their moonlight walk together in the jungle, she roars and roars, despite the uneasiness of her lover, till from a distant jungle comes an answering roar, and nearer, and nearer, and nearer, and so a battle — and she secures the benefit of competition and the finer animal for a mate; and what, young ladies, is your courtesy at St. James’s — your coming out and all that? Is it not your way of roaring and inviting from all circumjacent jungles those lions whom it may concern?”
Now came another silence, during which Mr. Dacre amused himself by gazing, with his head out at the window, upon the landscape, all shrouded in the snowy moonlight. It did not induce serenity, however, so he thought he would try tobacco again.
“May I light this at yours? a thousand thanks, monsieur.”
And so, another cigarette, and then Dacre returned to his reverie.
“Of course, there are conditions. You must not be corpulent and bald, and covered with snuff; you must not be aged, white-headed and cross; you must not be fifty things that are obvious, but these excepted, you may almost anything provided you are distinguished and run after; women like fame; they worship masculine renown more than men do. Then what is a poor devil to do who can’t declare his fame, such as it is?”
Mr. Dacre spoke this in a disjointed way; blowing out films of perfumed smoke in the intervals, and with the last sentence he threw the end of his cigarette out of the window and laughed sarcastically.
“And, yet, the moonlight is very pretty,” he said, as he looked out again, once more passing to a new theme. “As good, very nearly, as anything they make in her Majesty’s Theatre, for those happy fellows Don Giovanni or Don anything else. It sometimes makes a fellow almost spoony.”
“Ah! yes; the moon — the moon — the lamp of the lovers, I never see it without to feel some sentiment what you call romantic — eh!” said monsieur, leaning forward and smiling, and shrugging upward plaintively, and then a sigh. “Ah!”
“Come, monsieur, our emotions musn’t overcome us.”
“N’ atteste point sa lumière infidèle!” Monsieur shrugged, smiled, and sighed again.
“AH! Monsieur,” replied Droqueville, “there are so many tender recollections and ideas. This is so beautiful moon, and — what you call? — paysage — ces bois — all these things recall so many circumstances of tender regret. These pistols, they do not to incommode your feet, I hope?” inquired Monsieur, as Dacre’s foot knocked on the case which they had so lately used.
“Many thanks no, Monsieur, I can quite understand you —
“Dans ces bois, Lise en vain me jure
Qu’elle m’aimera constamment;
O Bonheur! ta douce imposture
N’est que le rêve d’un moment;
Et, comme aux loix du changement
Tout est soumis dans la nature,
Ces bois changeront de verdure,
Et Lise changera d’amant.”
“EH! Monsieur, is not that very like it? however, let us dry our eyes and try another cigar.”
So saying he offered his case, and monsieur with suitable acknowledgments accepted one, and offered his in return with a very animated description of its peculiarities and flavor, and so politely Mr. Dacre relieved himself of dialogue, and that cigar ended, broke again into rambling soliloquy.
“A very good plan is to make yourself a little bit mysterious, to pique curiosity — mother Eve fell by it; to make a confidence — a secret known only to you two — an excuse for whispers — a germ of sympathy — to undertake a service — danger, if by any means it can be had; and so always in her thoughts — always there; very dangerous, young ladies, is not it? Danger, ay, action and reaction; take care, Mr. Gillespie, ‘when you try that experiment, you don’t run into some little danger yourself.”
Mr. Gillespie uttered a grunt of contempt, shook the ashes from his cigar and smoked on.
“Excite their curiosity, their romance, penetrate feelings akin to gratitude, and inspire admiration by self-devotion. Is not that a gas lamp?”
Mr. Gillespie nodded gruffly.
“Old London town again, Monsieur Droqueville, how can I thank you?” said Dacre.
“By not to say one word of an obligation which is altogether mine; I have to thank Monsieur very much for the distinction of having been selected for a post so confidential.”
“Where shall we set you down, sir?” asked Mr. Gillespie of the Frenchman.
He named his hotel.
“I wish, dear Droqueville, I could offer you any hospitality; but I am, as you know, a mere bird of passage here; and— “
“A thousand thanks; say not one word; I am going for half-an-hour to look into the theatre near this, where my compatriots play of vaudevilles; and Monsieur Gillespie, how shall we know how Monsieur Mannering recovers?”
“What for, do you want to know, sir?” answered Mr. Gillespie.
“It affects in some measure, sir, my safety, because I have taken part in the affair of this evening, and I should be compromised were Monsieur Mannering’s indisposition, by misfortune, to end unhappily.”
“A pretty hot kettle-o’-fish for us all, sir; I wish he may be spared, sir. I thought ye were confident on that head, sir — ye spoke as if ye were. I don’t understand, sir. I don’t know why ye should say all ye did if ye thought he was like to die, sir.”
“But Monsieur is not a prophet, nor even a doctor,” said Dacre.
“Well, I call ye both to witness I had neither act nor part in it; it is yer ain affair, gentlemen, I wash my hands o’t.”
“I hope they wont hang you by mistake, Mr. Gillespie, it would be a very melancholy end for so cautions a gentleman,”’ said Dacre.
“I’ll take care they shan’t, sir; deevelish gude care, sir,” replied Mr. Gillespie.
“AND in the interval you must make out how he is doing?” said Dacre.
“I’ll hear that; I tauld them to let me know, though, except for gude-nature’s sake, there’s nae need I should care the snap or my finger whether the fule lives or dees.”
“Well, monsieur, Mr. Gillespie will do himself the honour to let you know punctually how Mr. Mannering does, and I’ll let you know also,” said Dacre.
Monsieur Droqueville was profuse in his acknowledgments.
A little out of their way they had to go, to knock up the honest gunsmith of whom Mr. Dacre had hired the pistols for a shooting match, for a wager of twenty pounds, as that circumstantial teller of a story informed him. Then they dropped Monsieur Droqueville at his hotel.
CHAPTER XIX.
MR. DACRE TAKES THE COMMAND.
THE driver came to the window.
“Where do you want to go?” asked Mr. Gillespie of his companion, with a surly and threatening countenance.
“To hell,” said that gentleman, whose gayer levity seemed to have broken down altogether on the departure of their companion.
“Time enough, sir, for that; I’ll tell him to drive to my door.”
“The nearest entrance to the place I spoke of,” said the young man with a dreary scoff.
Mr. Gillespie gave the man his order, and as soon as they were in motion, being himself in no pleasant temper, he said —
“Mr. — a — a — Dacre, yer no’ that deevil the night, sir.”
“As ceevil as I wish to be,” said Dacre. “Verra unceevil, sir, and what’s more, deevelish imprudent, sir; where’s the gude in talkin’ in that violent, daft fashion before people? Why, any fule would see ye were in a commotion o’ mind, sir; that fellow that’s driving us, he’ll never believe it was an accident; he’ll smell a rat, Mr. Dacre; he’ll be conjecturing and talking, sir.”
“And suspect you,” sai
d Dacre.
“Nothing o’ the kind, sir; but I tell ye, Mr. Dacre, you had no business engaging in a thing o’ that sort, no business in life, sir; ye tauld me ye wanted to conceeliate the young blockhead, when, in point o’ fact, sir, ye only wanted to shoot him.”
“We’ve had a charming day,” said Dacre. “And a bludey evening,” added Gillespie. “Yes, a bloody evening. Now, see, Mr. Gillespie, you are a clever man in your way, a clever usurer — don’t mind the phrase — and you’ve made a fortune; but you’ll leave the management of this affair to me; you don’t comprehend such mechanism; nothing is done without a reason, not the least perfect move has been the occurrence of this evening, which seems to have frightened you half out of your wits.”
“Well, if he dies, I conjecture ye’ll be probably hanged, and a verra perfect move — out o’ the world — it will prove; and I’d like to know, in that case’ what’s been gained by it; or even if ‘twere no more than two years’ imprisonment, I think it will be quite enough to knock your chances pretty well on the head. I didn’t think ye capable, Mr. Dacre, of anything so eediotic.”
Dacre smiled.
“Ye may laugh as ye will, Mr. Dacre; ye may laugh now, but ye’ll think shame o’ yourself, when ye come to reflect, how ye’ve put everything in jeopardy, and other people besides yourself — and — and a’maist ruined all, sir, by this one night’s wark.”
Again the young gentleman smiled. It was not a pleasant smile; his face was pale, and he looked as tired as if he had walked fifty miles fasting; and the smile was but momentary — nothing enjoying in the light that darkened so instantaneously into apathy.
“I did not think ye were one o’ those ranting fellows. What for should ye go to put yerself on a footing with these bleezing braggarts? Why, sir, if ye chanced to shoot him dead on the spot, it would ha’ been worse, a’maist, than if he had killed you.”
Delphi Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu Page 461
