Chapter XXI: I Am Metamorphosed

I had loved, and lost, and buried my dream of yesterday. It lay fathoms deep in the green forest. From the moment of my resurrection I knew myself for a changeling--a fairy creature quite other than the soft, emotional child who had cried herself to sleep on last night’s hearth. George was in his house of discipline; Portlock, with others, transported; my past was broken for me beyond repair. Facing me instead were the battlements and pinnacles of a new dominion, with what infinite potentialities behind its walls! Conscience makes no conquests. With my rebirth had come the lust to supply the deficiencies of the old. I laid my love in its grave with tears and kisses, and turned intrepid to the assault.

Memory, my friend, makes men good critics, but bad romancers. I was too indulgent of my kind to be the first: beauty invited me: I would forget. Remorse is, indeed, of all self-indulgences the most useless. It reconciles an offended Heaven to us no more than do tearful sighs win a wife her husband’s condonation of an ill-cooked dinner. An inch-narrow of reformation is better than an ell-broad of apology. Let our sweetness of to-day, rather, be our experience of yesterday. The gods find no entertainment in regrets. They shower their benefits on the unminding; and in the gifts of the present we are justified of our past actions. It is only when we are rich that we can afford to put up tablets to our memories; whence follows that we cannot more honour the dead than by taking our profit of the living. Well, once I had lived _for_ others; now I would live _on_ them--a word of distinction and a world of difference.

His lordship took me straight to London, and gave me a little suite of rooms in his fine house in Berkeley Square, where I was to remain during the next three years, until, in fact, I was come legally of age. He had decided, on reflection, that I was to be his niece. He was a very great man, and this gift was only one of many in his disposal. It was no business of mine how he accounted to the world for my title. _My_ interest was only to justify it, with a view to my position in life when I was become marriageable. Wherefore I would consent to give him none of my duty until he had drawn up a settlement in my favour, to date from my majority. I had had enough of unprofitable bargains.

Perhaps he would never have consented to this--for, like all covetous pluralists, he was parsimonious--had not the death of the young viscount about this time moved him to seek comfort in an artificial relationship for the real one he had lost. In the hearts of the worst of us, I suppose, such vacancies yearn to be filled; and so the poor childless wretch took his opportunity, and adopted me. I hope I acquitted myself properly for the favour; but, in truth, I could never quite forgive him his treachery to his brother.

In the meantime, I developed rapidly, and had my little court, quite exclusive of _les convenances_. The ladies, of course, looked askance at me; but what did I care? I had only to curtsey to my glass to procure the reason. And they made their _modistes_ their deputies in paying me the sincerest flattery. Instead, I experienced the high distinction of a whole _entourage_ of carpet-knights--captains and parsons and diplomatists unending--who came to ogle their own images in my blue eyes, and, losing their heads like Narcissus from giddiness, tumbled in by the score, until I was stocked as full under each brow as an abbot’s pond. It was a rare sport to throw crumbs of comfort to these gaping creatures, and see them rise and jostle one another for the best pickings. I assure you, my friend, I was a queen in my sphere, and had as much need to practise diplomacy. It was that first attached me to politics--the knowledge of into what good coin for bribery and the traffic of State secrets those pretty orbs might be converted. So soon, sure, as amongst my parliamentary followers I distinguished my favourites, I began to sift my political opinions, and to work for the handsomest. I have traced my measures in both Houses, believe me, my little monsieur: I have pulled some strings, sitting in my boudoir, with results as far-reaching as St. Stephen’s. Ah, well! they were days! But I will be true to myself in not bewailing them. Memory, in my philosophy, is a very lean old pauper, crumbling dried herbs into his broth. I never could abide mint sauce unless plucked from the green.

Chief among my favourites was a madcap young member, whose wit was never so impertinent as when, flitting here and there for an opportunity, it could prick the sides of some great parliamentary bull, and elicit a roar for its pains. He was that Mr. Roper who, indeed, went so far, on somebody’s instigation, as to tease the great Mr. Pitt himself on certain measures introduced for the betterment of the Roman Catholics, and who, in consequence, redeemed himself a little, it was whispered, in the eyes of high personages with whom he had long been in disgrace. His father was Robert Lord Beltower, that deplorable old nobleman who was reported early in life to have staked his honour on some trifling issue, and lost; and who always described himself as living a posthumous life, since he had been carried off by a petticoat in the fifteenth year of his age. Father and second son (the heir to the title, Lord Roper of Loftus, was eminently respectable and pious) were known as Bob Major and Bob Minor; and, indeed, apart or together, could ring the changes on some very pretty tunes. But the minor, who had been a scapegrace page at court and early dismissed, was _my enfant gâté_, as well for his wit and information as for a daring that recked nothing of the deuce itself. He owned to no party, and as to his principles, “Why,” said he, “I throw up my hat to the best shot, and that isn’t always to the heavenly marksman. I have known the devil score some points in charity.”

He never truckled to me, which was perhaps one of the reasons of my favour; but was like a licensed brother--a relationship I had come to regard. Indeed, he most offended me by his outrageous independence of my partialities.

“Hey! Come, rogue, rogue!” sniggered his father to him once, on the occasion of some abominable impertinence; “you go too far. What the devil means this disrespect to our goddess? You’ll be pricked, egad, one of these days, like that fellow Atlas, or Actæon, or what the devil was his name, that was tore for his impudence.”

The son bowed to the sire, quoting Slender’s words to Shallow: “‘I will marry her, sir, at your request; but if there be no great love in the beginning, yet Heaven may decrease it upon better acquaintance, when we are married and have more occasion to know one another: I hope, upon familiarity will grow more contempt; but if you say “Marry her,” I will marry her, that I am freely dissolved, and dissolutely.’”

“Why, you villain,” said his lordship, with a grin, “if you’re the devil quoting Scripture, I’m done with you.”

“Nay, sir,” said the other, “you flatter yourself. I quote no better than my father.”

“No better, you dog! And how?”

“Why, sir, wasn’t it you taught me that the more one sees of a woman the less one respects her?”

“I?”

“’Twas _à propos_ the Chudleigh, sir, you may remember, whom you met at Ranelagh--in ’49, I think it was--undressed as Iphigenia. She came clothed in little but her virtue, and caught a bad cold a-consequence. You may have forgot the moral of your sermon, sir, but I, as a dutiful son, have stored it.”

“Hang you, Bob! What moral?”

“Why, sir, that a woman dreads exposure in nothing but her weakness to stand the test of it. If she’s a peculiar fineness anywhere, she’ll take some means to let you know.”

“Then, sir,” cried I, with a flaming face, “I pride myself on nothing so much as my hand!”--and I brought it down stingingly on his ear.

“But I don’t want your hand,” he cried, stamping about, while his father roared, “Didn’t I tell you as much?”

Nevertheless, we were fast comrades, and together in some captivating peccancies, of which I only learned to rue the publicity when they led to my undoing.

Mr. Roper, as I have said, found a particular delight in galling--_on somebody’s instigation_--the sides of the promoters of the new pro-Papish Bills. Well, I will ask you, what did I owe to that Church? Was it likely that my treatment at its hands had left any love between us, or that I should wish its disabilities removed, who had suffered so much from it muzzled? I had been educated, under its shadow, to a full understanding of its juggleries and impostures. Now was the time, the country being still in a ferment over its heir-apparent’s alleged marriage with the Fitzherbert, to relate my experiences.

There was at that date published in London a little fashionable scapegrace of a paper called the _World_, the property of a Major Topham, who made it the vehicle for such a _chronique scandaleuse_ as the town had never yet known; and in this paper I began (by preconcert with my political ally) to disclose, over the signature “Angélique,” the true story and circumstances of a certain beautiful young lady, who had been practised upon, and in the very heart of Protestant England, by a worse than Spanish Inquisition. The series, cautiously as I began by handling it, made an immediate sensation, and was, you may be sure, deftly engineered in the House by Mr. Roper for the Opposition. Moreover, “Angélique”--which delighted me as much--gave her sweet and melancholy name to a mourning gauze, which was so pretty that I had to kill an aunt to give me a title to wear it. At the same time her instant popularity made me tremble for my incognito, which, nevertheless, I knew to be the major’s very best asset in a profitable bargain. Still, not even his tact could altogether explain away the association of ideas implied in Mr. Roper’s common friendship with me and with that poor persecuted anonymity; and that I had made myself by no means so secure as Junius was a fact disagreeably impressed upon me on a certain evening.

I had been entertaining late that night, when his lordship entered unexpected. He came from St. James’s and from playing backgammon with the king, and wore his orders on a pearl-silk coat and, for contrast, a mighty scowling face over. I took no heed of him as he walked up the room towards me, humping his shoulders, and acknowledging wintrily the salutations of my little court, but went on laughing and rallying a dear little ensign Percy, with whom I was in love just then, _pour faire passer le temps_. However, the boy could not stand the inquisition of the red eyes, and joked himself into other company, with a blush and a bow to the ogre; at which I laughed, lolling back in my chair.

“Well, madam,” said Hardrough, knuckling his snuff-box softly, “when you can vouchsafe me a moment of your attention.”

I recognised the compelling tone in his voice, and rose, with a little show of indolence.

“O!” I said, yawning, “what sin has found me out now? I vow it can never be so ugly as it looks.”

He gave me his arm, mighty ceremonious, and, conducting me into an antechamber, shut the door.

“That is for you to prove,” he said, taking snuff, and stood glaring into my soul. “So, madam,” he said, “you are for setting your little teeth into the hands that have warmed you?”

I sat down, fluttering my fan, and pretty pale, I daresay. But I was not surprised. My conscience had pricked me at the first sight of his face. He pulled from his pocket a copy of the damning sheet, and “Tell me,” says he, “if His Majesty was justified in asking me if this did not refer to some member of my family?”

I did not answer, and he threw the paper on the floor.

“Well, you are condemned,” he said drily; and at that I found my wits.

“Condemned?” I cried. “By whom? Why, my lord, how can you, being of the Court party and in Opposition, condemn an anti-papish tract?”

“That is all very well,” he said acridly; “but the stone once set rolling against a house, who knows who may be included in the ruin?”

I knew very well, of course, to what he referred; for had he not been subsidised by his sister (and during the time, too, when he had figured hottest against Catholic emancipation) into overlooking the establishment by her, in the very heart of his estate, of that community of Sisters whose complicity in my abduction I was bent upon exposing? And was I not aware, too, that the appointment he coveted to a vacant garter trembled at the moment in the balance of such revelations? O, I held some strings, my friend, you may believe! though at present I had the opposite to any inducement to pull this particular one.

“Why, Nunky!” I cried, “is not this, your succour and protection of madam’s poor victim, the best proof of your orthodoxy?”

He regarded me grimly, but with some shadow of returning good-humour.

“That’s true enough,” he said, “so long as you use _me_, if at all, for no worse than to point the moral of _her_ damnation.”

“Why should I not? ’Tis my interest to, at least.”

“Ha!” he said; “there you speak. And stap me if I love you the less for it.”

He took a turn or two, and came back grinning.

“They’re damn clever, Di: there, I’ll admit they’re damn clever! But ’tis a perilous game you play, my girl; and you’ll do well to take care you play it to none but your own interests.”

He went off again, and returned.

“Harkee!” he said; “there’s Beltower’s whelp, and--and I don’t care a fig for your predilections. Work your oracle as you will; only be faithful to me, and you won’t suffer for’t in the end.”

He finished in such spirits that he was moved to show me a letter he had received from his sister but a few days before. In it she upbraided him for his treachery,--of which she only recently had certain information--in converting his capture of me to such infamous account; and called upon him, as he valued his soul, to turn his Jezebel adrift again to her merited deserts.

“_Enfin_,” I said, handing him back the effusion, “for a respectable lady she shows a vigorous vocabulary. She writes in London, I see.”

He chuckled like a demon.

“She writes in hell, and bites the more viciously for her roasting. ’Tis that fellow has led her here, dancing after some new fancy of his; and, by God, she’s paid for her stubbornness, and must vent her spite on someone.”

“Well,” I said, “tell her so from me; and that, for my part, I’d rather be Jezebel than what came to lap her blood.”

At which he neighed, vowing he’d take me at my word.