Part 9 (1/2)
”He, he! That cavalry officer is another literary man of celebrity, and by profession an attorney. But he has quitted the law for the Muses, and it would appear that the Nine are never wooed except by gentlemen with mustachios.”
”Never wrote a verse in my life,” says the Colonel, laughing, and stroking his own.
”For I remark so many literary gentlemen with that decoration. The Jew with the beard, as you call him, is Herr von Lungen, the eminent hautboy-player. The three next gentlemen are Mr. Smee, of the Royal Academy (who is shaved as you perceive), and Mr. Moyes and Mr.
Cropper, who are both very hairy about the chin. At the piano, singing, accompanied by Mademoiselle Lebrun, is Signor Mezzocaldo, the great barytone from Rome. Professor Quartz and Baron Hammerstein, celebrated geologists from Germany, are talking with their ill.u.s.trious confrere, Sir Robert Craxton, in the door. Do you see yonder that stout gentleman with stuff on his s.h.i.+rt? the eloquent Dr. McGuffog, of Edinburgh, talking to Dr. Ettore, who lately escaped from the Inquisition at Rome in the disguise of a washerwoman, after undergoing the question several times, the rack and the thumbscrew. They say that he was to have been burned in the Grand Square the next morning; but between ourselves, my dear Colonel, I mistrust these stories of converts and martyrs. Did you ever see a more jolly-looking man than Professor Schnurr, who was locked up in Spielberg, and got out up a chimney, and through a window? Had he waited a few months there are very few windows he could have pa.s.sed through. That splendid man in the red fez is Kurbash Pasha--another renegade, I deeply lament to say--a hairdresser from Ma.r.s.eilles, by name Monsieur Ferehaud, who pa.s.sed into Egypt, and laid aside the tongs for a turban. He is talking with Mr. Palmer, one of our most delightful young poets, and with Desmond O'Tara, son of the late revered Bishop of Ballinafad, who has lately quitted ours for the errors of the Church of Rome. Let me whisper to you that your kinswoman is rather a searcher after what we call here notabilities. I heard talk of one I knew in better days--of one who was the comrade of my youth, and the delight of Oxford--poor Pidge of Brasenose, who got the Newdigate in my third year, and who, under his present name of Father Bartolo, was to have been here in his capuchin dress, with a beard and bare feet; but I presume he could not get permission from his Superior. That is Mr. Huff, the political economist, talking with Mr. Macduff, the Member for Glenlivat.
That is the coroner for Middles.e.x conversing with the great surgeon Sir Cutler Sharp, and that pretty laughing girl talking with them is no other than the celebrated Miss Pinnnifer, whose novel of Ralph the Resurrectionist created such a sensation after it was abused in the Trimestrial Review. It was a little bold certainly--I just looked at it at my club--after hours devoted to parish duty a clergyman is sometimes allowed, you know, desipere in loco--there are descriptions in it certainly startling--ideas about marriage not exactly orthodox; but the poor child wrote the book actually in the nursery, and all England was ringing with it before Dr. Pinnifer, her father, knew who was the author. That is the Doctor asleep in the corner by Miss Rudge, the American auth.o.r.ess, who I dare say is explaining to him the difference between the two Governments. My dear Mrs. Newcome, I am giving my brother-in-law a little sketch of some of the celebrities who are crowding your salon to-night. What a delightful evening you have given us!”
”I try to do my best, Colonel Newcome,” said the lady of the house.
”I hope many a night we may see you here; and, as I said this morning, Clive, when he is of an age to appreciate this kind of entertainment.
Fas.h.i.+on I do not wors.h.i.+p. You may meet that amongst other branches of our family; but genius and talent I do reverence. And if I can be the means--the humble means--to bring men of genius together--mind to a.s.sociate with mind--men of all nations to mingle in friendly unison--I shall not have lived altogether in vain. They call us women of the world frivolous, Colonel Newcome. So some may be; I do not say there are not in our own family persons who wors.h.i.+p mere worldly rank, and think but of fas.h.i.+on and gaiety; but such, I trust, will never be the objects in life of me and my children. We are but merchants; we seek to be no more.
If I can look around me and see as I do”-(she waves her fan round, and points to the ill.u.s.trations scintillating round the room)--”and see as I do now--a Poski, whose name is ever connected with Polish history--an Ettore, who has exchanged a tonsure and a rack for our own free country--a Hammerstein, and a Quartz, a Miss Rudge, our Transatlantic sister (who I trust will not mention this modest salon in her forthcoming work on Europe), and Miss Pinnifer, whose genius I acknowledge, though I deplore her opinions; if I can gather together travellers, poets, and painters, princes and distinguished soldiers from the East, and clergymen remarkable for their eloquence, my humble aim is attained, and Maria Newcome is not altogether useless in her generation.
Will you take a little refreshment? Allow your sister to go down to the dining-room supported by your gallant arm.” She looked round to the admiring congregation, whereof Honeyman, as it were acted as clerk, and flirting her fan, and flinging up her little head. Consummate Virtue walked down on the arm of the Colonel.
The refreshment was rather meagre. The foreign artists generally dashed downstairs, and absorbed all the ices, creams, etc. To those coming late there were chicken-bones, table-cloths puddled with melted ice, gla.s.ses hazy with sherry, and broken bits of bread. The Colonel said he never supped; and he and Honeyman walked away together, the former to bed, the latter, I am sorry to say, to his club; for he was a dainty feeder, and loved lobster, and talk late at night, and a comfortable little gla.s.s of something wherewith to conclude the day.
He agreed to come to breakfast with the Colonel, who named eight or nine for the meal. Nine Mr. Honeyman agreed to with a sigh. The inc.u.mbent of Lady Whittlesea's chapel seldom rose before eleven. For, to tell the truth, no French abbot of Louis XV. was more lazy and luxurious, and effeminate, than our polite bachelor preacher.
One of Colonel Newcome's fellow-pa.s.sengers from India was Mr. James Binnie of the Civil Service, a jolly young bachelor of two- or three-and-forty, who, having spent half of his past life in Bengal, was bent upon enjoying the remainder in Britain or in Europe, if a residence at home should prove agreeable to him. The Nabob of books and tradition is a personage no longer to be found among us. He is neither as wealthy nor as wicked as the jaundiced monster of romances and comedies, who purchases the estates of broken-down English gentlemen, with rupees tortured out of bleeding rajahs, who smokes a hookah in public, and in private carries about a guilty conscience, diamonds of untold value, and a diseased liver; who has a vulgar wife, with a retinue of black servants whom she maltreats, and a gentle son and daughter with good impulses and an imperfect education, desirous to amend their own and their parents' lives, and thoroughly ashamed of the follies of the old people. If you go to the house of an Indian gentleman now, he does not say, ”Bring more curricles,” like the famous Nabob of Stanstead Park.
He goes to Leadenhall Street in an omnibus, and walks back from the City for exercise. I have known some who have had maid-servants to wait on them at dinner. I have met scores who look as florid and rosy as any British squire who has never left his paternal beef and acres. They do not wear nankeen jackets in summer. Their livers are not out of order any more; and as for hookahs, I dare swear there are not two now kept alight within the bills of mortality; and that retired Indians would as soon think of smoking them, as their wives would of burning themselves on their husbands' bodies at the cemetery, Kensal Green, near to the Tyburnian quarter of the city which the Indian world at present inhabits. It used to be Baker Street and Harley Street; it used to be Portland Place, and in more early days Bedford Square, where the Indian magnates flourished; districts which have fallen from their pristine state of splendour now, even as Agra, and Benares, and Lucknow, and Tippoo Sultan's city are fallen.
After two-and-twenty years' absence from London, Mr. Binnie returned to it on the top of the Gosport coach with a hatbox and a little portmanteau, a pink fresh-shaven face, a perfect appet.i.te, a suit of clothes like everybody else's, and not the shadow of a black servant.
He called a cab at the White Horse Cellar, and drove to Nerot's Hotel, Clifford Street; and he gave the cabman eightpence, making the fellow, who grumbled, understand that Clifford Street was not two hundred yards from Bond Street, and that he was paid at the rate of five s.h.i.+llings and fourpence per mile--calculating the mile at only sixteen hundred yards.
He asked the waiter at what time Colonel Newcome had ordered dinner, and finding there was an hour on his hands before the meal, walked out to examine the neighbourhood for a lodging where he could live more quietly than in a hotel. He called it a hotel. Mr. Binnie was a North Briton, his father having been a Writer to the Signet, in Edinburgh, who had procured his son a writers.h.i.+p in return for electioneering services done to an East Indian Director. Binnie had his retiring pension, and, besides, had saved half his allowances ever since he had been in India. He was a man of great reading, no small ability, considerable accomplishment, excellent good sense and good humour. The ostentatious said he was a screw; but he gave away more money than far more extravagant people: he was a disciple of David Hume (whom he admired more than any other mortal), and the serious denounced him as a man of dangerous principles, though there were, among the serious, men much more dangerous than James Binnie.
On returning to his hotel, Colonel Newcome found this worthy gentleman installed in his room in the best arm-chair sleeping cosily; the evening paper laid decently over his plump waistcoat, and his little legs placed on an opposite chair. Mr. Binnie woke up briskly when the Colonel entered. ”It is you, you gad-about, is it?” cried the civilian. ”How has the beau monde of London treated the Indian Adonis? Have you made a sensation, Newcome? Gad, Tom, I remember you a buck of bucks when that coat first came out to Calcutta--just a Barrackpore Brummell--in Lord Minto's reign, was it, or when Lord Hastings was satrap over us?”
”A man must have one good coat,” says the Colonel; ”I don't profess to be a dandy; but get a coat from a good tailor, and then have done with it.” He still thought his garment was as handsome as need be.
”Done with it--ye're never done with it!” cries the civilian.
”An old coat is an old friend, old Binnie. I don't want to be rid of one or the other. How long did you and my boy sit up together--isn't he a fine lad, Binnie? I expect you are going to put him down for something handsome in your will.”
”See what it is to have a real friend now, Colonel! I sate up for ye, or let us say more correctly, I waited for you--because I knew you would want to talk about that scapegrace of yours. And if I had gone to bed, I should have had you walking up to No. 28, and waking me out of my first rosy slumber. Well, now confess; avoid not. Haven't ye fallen in love with some young beauty on the very first night of your arrival in your sister's salong, and selected a mother-in-law for young Scapegrace?”
”Isn't he a fine fellow, James?” says the Colonel, lighting a cheroot as he sits on the table. Was it joy, or the bedroom candle with which he lighted his cigar, which illuminated his honest features so, and made them so to s.h.i.+ne?
”I have been occupied, sir, in taking the lad's moral measurement: and have pumped him as successfully as ever I cross-examined a rogue in my court. I place his qualities thus:--Love of approbation sixteen.
Benevolence fourteen. Combativeness fourteen. Adhesiveness two.
Amativeness is not yet of course fully developed, but I expect will be prodeegiously strong. The imaginative and reflective organs are very large--those, of calculation weak. He may make a poet or a painter, or you may make a sojer of him, though worse men than him's good enough for that--but a bad merchant, a lazy lawyer, and a miserable mathematician.
He has wit and conscientiousness, so ye mustn't think of making a clergyman of him.”
”Binnie!” says the Colonel gravely, ”you are always sneering at the cloth.”
”When I think that, but for my appointment to India, I should have been a luminary of the faith and a pillar of the church! grappling with the ghostly enemy in the pulpit, and giving out the psawm. Eh, sir, what a loss Scottish Divinity has had in James Binnie!” cries the little civilian with his most comical face. ”But that is not the question.