Arthur O'Leary Part 43

'So it would; where is he?' interrupted the baronet, as he pushed through the crowd towards the play-room.

'I told you he was a trump,' said Crotty, as we followed him--'the fellow to do a good-natured thing at any moment.

While we endeavoured to get through after him, we pa.s.sed close beside a small supper-table, where sat the alderman and his two pretty daughters, the Honourable Jack between them. It was evident from his boisterous gaiety that he had triumphed over all his fears of detection by any of the numerous fair ones he spoke of--his great object at this instant appearing to be the desire to attract every one's attention towards him, and to publish his triumph to all beholders. For this, Jack conversed in a voice audible at some distance off, surveying his victims from time to time with the look of the Great Mogul; while they, poor girls, only imagined themselves regarded for their own attractions, which were very considerable, and believed that the companions.h.i.+p of the distinguished Jack was the envy of every woman about them. As for the father, he was deep in the mysteries of a _vol-au-vent_, and perfectly indifferent to such insignificant trifles as Jack's blandishments and the ladies'

blushes.

Poor girls! no persuasion in life could have induced them to such an exhibition in their own country, and in company with one their equal in cla.s.s. But the fact of its being Germany, and the escort being an Honourable, made all the difference in the world; and they who would have hesitated with maiden coyness at the honourable proposals of one of their own cla.s.s, felt no scruple at compromising themselves before hundreds, to indulge the miserable vanity of a contemptible c.o.xcomb. I stood for a second or two beside the table, and thought within myself, 'Is not this as much a case to call for the interference of friendly caution as that of the gambler yonder?' But then, how was it possible?

We pa.s.sed on and reached the play-table, where we found Sir Harry Wycherley in low and earnest conversation with the young gentleman.

I could only catch a stray expression here and there, but even they surprised me--the arguments advanced to deter him from gambling being founded on the inconsiderate plan of his game, rather than on the immorality and vice of the practice itself.

'Don't you see,' said Sir Harry, throwing his eye over the card all dotted with pinholes--'don't you see it's a run, a dead run; that you may bet on red, if you like, a dozen times, and only win once or twice?'

The youth blushed and said nothing.

'I 've seen forty thousand francs lost that way in less than an hour.'

'I've lost _seventy_ thousand!' muttered the young man, with a shudder like one who felt cold all over.

'Seventy!--not to-night, surely?'

'Yes, to-night,' replied he. 'I won fourteen hundred naps here when I came first, and didn't play for three weeks afterwards; but unfortunately I strolled in here a few nights ago, and lost the whole back, as well as some hundreds besides; but this evening I came bent on winning back--that was all I desired--winning back my own.'

As he said these words, I saw Sir Harry steal a glance at Crotty. The thing was as quick as lightning, but never did a glance reveal more; he caught my eye upon him, and looking round fully at me said, in a deep, ominous voice--

'That's the confounded part of it; it's so hard to stop when you 're losing.'

'Hard!--impossible!' cried the youth, whose eyes were now riveted on the table, following every card that fell from the banker's hands, and flus.h.i.+ng and growing pale with every alternation of the game. 'See now, for all you've said, look if the red has not won four times in succession?'

'So it has,' replied the baronet coolly; 'but the previous run on black would have left your purse rather shallow, or you must have a devilish deep one, that's all.'

He took up a pencil as he spoke, and began to calculate on the back of the card; then holding it over, he said, 'There's what you 'd have lost if you went on betting.'

'What!--two hundred and eighty thousand francs?'

'Exactly! Look here'; and he went over the figures carefully before him.

'Don't you think you've had enough of it to-night?' said Crotty, with an insinuating smile; 'what say you if we all go and sup together in the Saal?'

'Agreed,' said Sir Harry, rising at once. 'Crotty, will you look at the carte and do the needful? You may trust him, gentlemen,' continued he, turning towards us with a smile; 'old Crotty has a most unexceptionable taste in all that regards _cuisine_ and _cave_; save a slight leaning towards expense, he has not a fault!'

I mumbled out something of an apology, which was unfortunately supposed by the baronet to have reference to his last remark. I endeavoured to explain away the mistake, and ended like a regular awkward man by complying with a request I had previously resolved to decline. The young man had already given his consent, and so we arose and walked through the rooms, while Crotty inspected the bill of fare and gave orders about the wine.

Wycherley seemed to know and be known by every one, and as he interchanged greetings with the groups that pa.s.sed, declined several pressing invitations to sup. 'The fact is,' said he to one of his most anxious inviters, 'the fact is'--and the words were uttered in a whisper I could just hear--'there's a poor young fellow here who has been getting it rather sharp at the gold table, and I mustn't lose sight of him to-night, or he'll inevitably go back there.'

These few words dispelled any uneasiness I had already laboured under from finding myself so unexpectedly linked with two strangers. It was quite clear that Sir Harry was a fine-hearted fellow, and that his manly, frank countenance was no counterfeit. As we went along, Wycherley amused us with his anecdotes of the company, with whose private history he was conversant in its most minute details; and truly, low as had been my estimate of the society at first, it fell considerably lower as I listened to the private memoirs with which he favoured us.

Some were the common narratives of debt and desertion, protested bills, and so forth; others were the bit-by-bit details of extravagant habits pushed beyond all limits, and ending in expatriation for ever. There were faithless husbands, outraging all decency by proclaiming their bad conduct; there were as faithless wives, parading about in all the effrontery of wickedness. At one side sat the roue companion of George the Fourth, in his princely days, now a mere bloated debauchee, with rouged cheeks and dyed whiskers, living on the hackneyed anecdotes of his youthful rascality, and earning his daily bread by an affected epicurism and a Sybarite pretension, which nattered the vulgar vanity of those who fed him; while the lion of the evening was a newly arrived earl, whose hunters were that very day sold at Tattersall's, and whose beautiful countess, horror-stricken at the ruin so unexpectedly come upon them, was lying dangerously ill at her father's house in London.

The young peer, indeed, bore up with a fort.i.tude that attracted the highest encomiums, and from an audience the greater portion of which knew in their own persons most of the ills he suffered. He exchanged an easy nod or a familiar shake of the hand with several acquaintances, not seen before for many a day, and seemed to think that the severest blow fortune had dealt him was the miserable price his stud would fetch at such a time of the year.

'The old story,' said Wycherley, as he shook him by the hand, and told him his address--'the old story; he thought twenty thousand a year would do anything, but it won't though. If men will keep a house in town, and another in Gloucesters.h.i.+re, with a pack of fox-hounds, and have four horses in training at Doncaster--not to speak of a yacht at Cowes and some other fooleries--they must come to the Jews; and when they come to the Jews, the pace is faster than for the Derby itself. Two hundred per cent, is sharp practice, and I can tell you not uncommon either; and then when a man does begin to topple, his efforts to recover always ruin him. It's like a fall from your horse--make a struggle, and you 're sure to break your leg or your collar-bone; take it kindly, and the chances are that you get up all right again, after the first shock.'

I did not like either the tone or the morality of my companion; but I well knew both were the conventional coinage of his set, and I suffered him to continue without interruption.

'There's Mosely Cranmer,' said he, pointing to a slight, effeminate-looking young man, with a most girlish softness about his features. He was dressed in the very extreme of fas.h.i.+on, and displayed all that array of jewelry in pins, diamond vest-b.u.t.tons, and rings, so frequently a.s.sumed by modern dandyism. His voice was a thin reedy treble, scarcely deep enough for a child.

'Who is he, and what is he doing here?' asked I.

'He is the heir to about eighty thousand per annum, to begin with,' said Wycherley, 'which he has already dipped beyond redemption. So far for his property. As to what he is doing here, you may have seen in the _Times_ last week that he shot an officer of the Guards in a duel--killed him on the spot. The thing was certain--Cranmer's the best pistol-shot in England.'

'Ah, Wycherley, how goes it, old fellow?' said the youth, stretching out two fingers of his well-gloved hand. 'You see Edderdale is come over.

Egad! we shall have all England here soon--leave the island to the Jews, I think!'

Sir Harry laughed heartily at the conceit, and invited him to join our party at supper; but he was already, I was rejoiced to find, engaged to the Earl of Edderdale, who was entertaining a select few at his hotel, in honour of his arrival.

A waiter now came to inform us that Mr. Crotty was waiting for us, to order supper, and we immediately proceeded to join him in the Saal.

The baronet's eulogium on his friend's taste in _gourmandise_ was well and justly merited. The supper was admirable--the 'potage printaniere'

seasoned to perfection, the 'salmi des perdreaux, aux points d'asperges,' delicious, and the 'ortolans a la provencale' a dish for the G.o.ds; while the wines were of that _cru_ and flavour that only favoured individuals ever attained to at the hands of a landlord.

As _plat_ succeeded _plat_, each admirably selected in the order of succession to heighten the enjoyment and gratify the palate of the guest, the conversation took its natural turn to matters gastronomic, and where, I must confess, I can dally with as sincere pleasure as in the discussion of any other branch of the fine arts. Mr. Crotty's forte seemed essentially to lie in the tact of ordering and arranging a very admirable repast. Wycherley, however, took a higher walk; he was historically _gastronome_, and had a store of anecdotes about the dishes and their inventors, from Clovis to Louis Quatorze. He knew the favourite meats of many ill.u.s.trious personages, and told his stories about them with an admirable blending of seriousness and levity.

There are excellent people, Arthur, who will call you sensualist for all this--good souls, who eat like Cossacks and drink like camels in the desert; before whose masticatory powers joints become beautifully less in shortest s.p.a.ce of time, and who while devouring in greedy silence think nothing too severe to say of him who, with more cultivated palate and discriminating taste, eats sparingly but choicely, making the nourishment of his body the nutriment of his mind, and while he supports nature, can stimulate his imagination and invigorate his understanding.

The worthy votaries of boiled mutton and turnips, of ribs and roasts, believe themselves temperate and moderate eaters, while consuming at a meal the provender sufficient for a family; and when, after an hour's steady performance, they sit with hurried breathing and half-closed eyelids, sullen, stupid, and stertorous, drowsy and dull, saturated with stout and stuffed with Stilton, they growl out a thanksgiving that they are not like other men--epicures and wine-bibbers. Out upon them, I say!

Let me have my light meal, be its limits a cress, and the beverage that ripples from the rock beside me; but be it such, that, while eating, there is no transfusion of the beast devoured into the man, nor, when eaten, the semi-apoplectic stupor of a gorged boa!

Sir Harry did the honours of the table, and sustained the burden of the conversation, to which Crotty contributed but little, the young man and myself being merely noneffectives; nor did we separate until the _garcon_ came to warn us that the Saal was about to close for the night.

CHAPTER XXV. A WATERING-PLACE DOCTOR

Nothing is more distinct than the two cla.s.ses of people who are to be met with in the morning and in the afternoon, sauntering along the _allees_ of a German watering-place. The former are the invalid portion, poured forth in numbers from hotel and lodging-house; attired in every absurdity of dressing-room toilette, with woollen nightcaps and flannel jackets, old-fas.h.i.+oned _douillettes_ and morocco slippers, they glide along, gla.s.s in hand, to some sulphur spring, or to repose for an hour or two in the delights of a mud bath. For the most part, they are the old and the feeble, pale of face and tottering in step. The pursuit of health with them would seem a vain and fruitless effort; the machine appears to have run its destined time, and all the skill of man is unavailing to repair it. Still, hope survives when strength and youth have failed, and the very grouping together in their gathering-places has its consolation; while the endless diversity of malady gives an interest in the eye of a sick man.

This may seem strange, but it is nevertheless perfectly true. There is something which predisposes an invalid to all narratives of illness; they are the topics he dwells on with most pleasure, and discourses about with most eagerness. The anxiety for the 'gentleman next door' is neither philanthropy, nor is it common curiosity. No, it is perfectly distinct from either; it is the deep interest in the course of symptoms, in the ups and downs of chance; it is compounded of the feelings which animate the physician and those which fill the invalid. And hence we see that the severest sufferings of their neighbours make less impression on the minds of such people than on those in full health. It is not from apathy nor selfishness they are seemingly indifferent, but simply because they regard the question in a different light: to take an ill.u.s.tration from the gaming-table, they have too deep an interest in the game itself to feel greatly for the players. The visit of the doctor is to them the brightest moment of the day; not only the messenger of good tidings to the patient, he has a thousand little bits of sick-room gossip, harmless, pointless trifles, but all fraught with their own charm to the greedy ear of the sick man. It is so pleasant to know how Mrs. W. bore her drive, or Sir Arthur liked his jelly; what Mrs. T. said when they ordered her to be bled, and whether dear Mr. H. would consent to the blister. And with what consummate tact your watering-place doctor doles out the infinitesimal doses of his morning's intelligence! How different his visit from the hurried flight of a West-End pract.i.tioner, who, while he holds his watch in hand, counts the minutes of his stay while he feels your pulse, and whose descent downstairs is watched by a cordon of the household, catching his directions as he goes, and learning his opinion as he springs into his chariot! Your Spa doctor has a very different mission; his are no heroic remedies, which taken to-day are to cure tomorrow; his character is tried by no subtle test of immediate success; his patients come for a term, or, to use the proper phrase, for 'a course of the waters'--then they are condemned to chalybeates for a quarter of the year, so many gla.s.ses per diem. With their health, properly speaking, he has no concern; his function is merely an inspection that the individual drinks his fluid regularly, and takes his mud like a man. The patient is invoiced to him, with a bill of lading from Bell or Brodie; he has full information of the merchandise transmitted, and the mode in which the consignee desires it may be treated--out of this ritual he must not move. The great physician of the West End says, 'Bathe and drink'; and his _charge d'affaires_ at Wiesbaden takes care to see his orders obeyed. As well might a _forcat_ at Brest or Toulon hope to escape the punishment described in the catalogue of prisoners, as for a patient to run counter to the remedies thus arranged, and communicated by post. Occasionally changes will take place in a sick man's condition _en route_ which alter the applicability of his treatment; but, then, what would you have? Brodie and Chambers are not prophets; divination and augury are not taught in the London and Middles.e.x hospitals!

I remember, myself, a marquis of gigantic proportions, who had kept his prescription by him from the time of his being a stripling till he weighed twenty stone. The fault here lay not with the doctor. The bath he was to take contained some powerful ingredient--a preparation of iron, I believe; well, he got into it, and immediately began swelling and swelling out, till, big as he was before, he was now twice the size, and at last, like an overheated boiler, threatened to explode with a crash. What was to be done? To lift him was out of the question--he fitted the bath like a periwinkle in its sh.e.l.l; and in this dilemma no other course was open than to decant him, water and all--which was performed, to the very considerable mirth of the bystanders.

The Spa doctor, then, it will be seen, moves in a very narrow orbit.

He must manage to sustain his reputation without the aid of the pharmacopoeia, and continue to be imposing without any a.s.sistance from the dead languages.

Hard conditions! but he yields to them, like a man of nerve.

He begins, then, by extolling the virtues of the waters, which by a.n.a.lysis of 'his own making,' and set forth in a little volume published by himself, contain very different properties from those ascribed to them by others. He explains most clearly to his non-chemical listener how 'pure silica found in combination with oxide of iron, at a temperature of thirty-nine and a half, Fahrenheit,' must necessarily produce the most beneficial effects on the knee-joint; and he describes, with all the ardour of science, the infinite satisfaction the nerves must experience when invigorated by 'free carbonic gas' sporting about in the system. Day by day he indoctrinates the patient into some stray medical notion, giving him an interest in his own anatomy, and putting him on terms of familiar acquaintance with the formation of his heart or his stomach. This flatters the sick man, and, better still, it occupies his attention. He himself thus becomes a _particeps_ in the first degree to his own recovery; and the simplicity of treatment, which had at first no attractions for his mind, is now complicated with so many little curious facts about the blood and the nerves, mucous membranes and muscles, as fully to compensate for any lack of mystery, and is in truth just as unintelligible as the most involved inconsistency of any written prescription. Besides this, he has another object which demands his attention. Plain, common-sense people, who know nothing of physic or its mysteries, might fall into the fatal error of supposing that the wells so universally employed by the people of the country for all purposes of was.h.i.+ng, bathing, and cooking, however impregnated by mineral properties, were still by no means so capable, in proportions of great power and efficacy, of effecting either very decided results, curative or noxious. The doctor must set his heel on this heresy at once; he must be able to show how a sip too much or a half-gla.s.s too many can produce the gravest consequences; and no summer must pa.s.s over without at least one death being attributed to the inconsiderate rashness of some insensate drinker. Woe unto him then who drinks without a doctor! You might as well, in an access of intense thirst, rush into the first apothecary's shop, and take a strong pull at one of the vicious little vials that fill the shelves, ignorant whether it might not be aqua fortis or Prussic acid.

Armed, then, with all the terrors of his favourite Spa, rich in a following which is as much partisan as patient, the Spa doctor has an admirable life of it. The severe and trying cases of illness that come under the notice of other physicians fall not to his share; the very journey to the waters is a trial of strength which guards against this.

His disciples are the dyspeptic "diners-out" in the great worlds of London, Paris, or Vienna; the nervous and irritable natures, cloyed with excess of enjoyment and palled with pleasure; the imaginary sick man, or the self-created patient who has dosed himself into artificial malady--all of necessity belonging to the higher or at least the wealthier cla.s.ses of mankind, with whom management goes further than medicine, and tact is a hundred times better than all the skill of Hippocrates. He had need, then, to be a clever man of the world; he may dispense with science, he cannot with _savoir faire_. Not only must he be conversant with the broader traits of national character, but he must be intimately acquainted with the more delicate and subtle workings of the heart in cla.s.ses and gradations of mankind, a keen observer and a quick actor. In fact, to get on well, he must possess in a high degree many of those elements, any one of which would insure success in a dozen other walks in life.

And the Spa doctor must have all these virtues, as Swift says, 'for twenty pounds per annum'--not literally, indeed, but for a very inadequate recompense. These watering-place seasons are brief intervals, in which he must make hay while the sun s.h.i.+nes. With the approach of winter the tide turns, and the human wave retires faster than it came.

Silent streets and deserted promenades, closed shutters and hermetically sealed cafes, meet him at every step; and then comes the long, dreary time of hibernation. Happy would it be for him if he could but imitate the seal, and spend it in torpor; for if he be not a sportsman, and in a country favourable to the pursuit, his life is a sad one. Books are generally difficult to come at; there is little society, there is no companions.h.i.+p; and so he has to creep along the tedious time silent and sad, counting over the months of his durance, and longing for spring.