Part 58 (1/2)
The hour at length arrived; the carriage that was to convey me stood at the door; and as I took a look at myself, full dressed and powdered, in the gla.s.s, I remember that my sensations vibrated between the exulting vanity and pride of a gallant about to set out for a fete, and the terrors of a criminal on his way to the block. My head grew more and more confused as I drove along. At moments I thought that all was a dream, and I tried to arouse and wake myself; then I fancied that it was the past was fict.i.tious,--that my poverty, my want, and my hards.h.i.+p were all imaginary; that my real condition was one of rank and affluence.
I examined the rich lace of my ruffles, the sparkling splendor of my sword-knot, and said, ”Surely these are not the signs of squalid misery and want.” I called to mind my impressions of the world, my memories of life and society, and asked, ”Can these be the sentiments of a miserable outcast?” a.s.suredly, my poor brain was sorely tried to reconcile these strong contradictions; nor do I yet understand how I obtained sufficient mastery over my emotions to present myself at the house of my entertainer.
”What name, sir?” said the obsequious servant, who, with noiseless footsteps, had preceded me to the drawing-room door.
”What name shall I announce, sir?” said he a second time, as, overwhelmed with confusion, I still stood speechless before him. Till that very moment all thought on the subject had escaped me, and I utterly forgot that I was actually without a designation in the world.
In all my shame and misery it had been a kind of consolation to me that the name of my father had never been degraded, and that whatever might have been my portion of worldly hards.h.i.+p, the once-honored appellation had not shared in it. To a.s.sume it at this instant was too perilous.
Another day, one short night, would again reduce me to the same ignominious station; and I should have thus, by a momentary rashness, compromised the greatest secret of my heart. A third time did he ask the same question; and as I stood uncertain and overwhelmed, a quiet foot was heard ascending the stairs, a handsome, bright-looking man came forward, the door was flung open at his approach, and the servant called out, ”Mr. Sheridan.” I followed quickly, and the door closed behind us.
Hastily pa.s.sing from Sheridan, O'Kelly came forward to me and shook me cordially by the hand. Thanking me politely for my punctuality, he welcomed me with all the semblance of old friends.h.i.+p.
”Colonel Conway and Payne you are already acquainted with,” said he; ”but your long absence from England excuses you for not knowing my other friends. This is Mr. Sheridan,”--we bowed,--”Mr. Malcomb, Captain Seymour, Sir George Begley,” and so on, with two or three more. He made a rapid tour of the party, holding me by the arm as he went, till he approached a chair where a young and very handsome man sat, laughing immoderately at some story another at his side was whispering to him.
”What the devil am I to call you?” said O'Kelley to me in my ear. ”Tell me quickly.”
Before I could stammer out my own sense of confusion, the person seated in the arm-chair called out,--
”By Jove! O'Kelly must hear that. Tell him, Wynd-ham.” But as suddenly stopping, he said, ”A friend of yours, O'Kelly?”
”Yes, your Royal Highness, a very old and valued friend, whom I have not seen since our school-days. He has been vagabondizing over the whole earth, fighting side by side with I know not how many of your Royal Highness's enemies; and, having made his fortune, has come back to lose it here amongst us, as the only suitable reparation in his power for all his past misconduct.”
”With such excellent intentions, he could not have fallen into better hands than yours, O'Kelly,” said the Prince, laughing; ”and I wish all the fellows we have been subsidizing these ten years no worse than to be your antagonists at piquet.” Then, addressing me, he said, ”An Irishman, I presume?”
”Yes, your Royal Highness,” said I, bowing deeply.
”He started as an something, or Mac somebody,” said O'Kelly, interrupting; ”but having been Don'd in Spain, 'Strissemoed' in Italy, and almost guillotined in France for calling himself Monsieur, he has come back to us without any designation that he dares to call his own.”
”That is exactly what happened to a very well known character in the reign of Charles I.,” said Conway, ”who called himself by the t.i.tle of his last conquest in the fair s.e.x, saying, 'When I take a reputation, I accept all the reproach of the name.'”
”There was another authority,” said Sheridan,--”a fellow who called himself the King of the Beggars, who styled himself each day after the man who gave him most, and died inheriting the name of Bamfield Moore Carew.”
”Carew will do admirably for my friend here, then,” said O'Kelly, ”and we 'll call him so henceforth.”
It may be imagined with what a strange rush of emotion I accepted this designation, and laughingly joined in the caprice of the hour. I saw enough to convince me that all around received O'Kelly's story as a mere piece of jest, and that none had any suspicion of my real condition save himself and his two friends. This conviction served to set me much at my ease, and I went down to dinner with far less of constraint than might have been supposed for one in my situation.
I will not disguise the fact that I thought for the first half-hour that every eye was on me, that whatever I did or said was the subject of general remark, and that my manner as I ate, and my tone as I spoke, were all watched and scrutinized. Gradually, however, I grew to perceive that I attracted no more notice than others about me, and that, to all purposes, I was admitted to a perfect equality with the rest.
Conversation ranged freely over a wide field. Politics of every state of Europe, the leading public characters and statesmen, their opinions and habits, the modes of life abroad, literature and the drama, were all discussed, if not always with great knowledge, still with the ready smartness of practised talkers. Anecdotes and incidents of various kinds were narrated, quips and sharp replies abounded; and amidst much cleverness and agreeability, a truly good-humored, convivial spirit leavened the whole ma.s.s, and made up a most pleasant party.
So interested had I become in the conversation about me that I did not perceive how, by degrees, I had been drawn on to talk on a variety of subjects which travel had made me familiar with, and to speak of persons of mark and station whom I had met and known. Still less did I remark that I was submitted to a species of examination as to my veracity, and that I was asked for dates, and times, and place, in a manner that might have startled one more susceptible. Warmed with what I may dare to call my success, and heated with wine, I grew bolder; I stigmatized as gross ignorance and folly the policy of the English Government in maintaining a war for what no success could ever bring back again,--the prestige of loyalty, and the respect once tendered to n.o.bility.
I know not into what excesses my enthusiasm may have carried me. Enough when I say that I encountered the most brilliant talkers without fear, and entered the list with all that the day possessed of conversational power, without any sense of faint-heartedness. On such questions as the military system of France, the division of parties in that country, the probable issue to which the struggle pointed, I was, indeed, better informed than my neighbors; but when they came to discuss the financial condition of the French, and what it had been in the late reigns, I at once recalled all my conversations with Law, with every detail of whose system I was perfectly familiar.
Of the anecdotes of that time--a most amusing ill.u.s.tration of society as it then existed--I remembered many; and I had the good fortune to see that the Prince listened with evident pleasure to my recitals; and, at last, it was in the very transport of success I found myself ascending the stairs to the drawing-room, while O'Kelly whispered in my ear,--
”Splendidly done, by Jove! The Prince is going to invite you to Carlton House.”
After coffee was served, the party sat down to play of various kinds,--dice, cards, and backgammon. At the Prince's whist-table there was a vacant place, and I was invited to take it. I had twenty guineas in gold in my pocket. They were my all in the world; but had they been as many millions, I would not have scrupled to risk them at such a moment. There was a strange, almost insane spirit that seemed to whisper to me that nothing could be too bold to adventure--no flight too high--no contrast with my real condition too striking to attempt! They who have braved danger and death to ascend some great glacier, the whole object the one triumphant moment on which they behold the blaze of sunrise, may form some conception of the maddening ecstasy of my sensations.
”Do you play at whist? If so, come and join us,” said the Prince.