CHAPTER VI
It must be explained at this point that the comedy with which we are especially concerned formed only one of innumerable kindred sideshows in the endless junketing fair at Whitehall Palace, where, ever since the first days of the Restoration, the high revel which that reaction from Cimmerian glooms had come to inaugurate had been steadily degenerating into a Saturnalia as unblushing as it was universal. It represents, in fact, but one among many such performances, and, though isolated by us for purely dramatic purposes, is none the less to be understood as constituting part of the general entertainment. Thus, you can picture our little company, if you will, as joining, in the intervals between the acts, in the common hilarity, as forming part of the glittering personnel which daily, in that idle, pleasure-loving Court, laughs and fribbles away the hours. The young Countess is there, ingénue, childish, but already a mark for predatory eyes, and not, alas! in her proud revolt, wholly, or wholly innocently, unconscious of the fact. My lord her husband, secretly watchful of the change, conceals, under an affectation of insouciance, the jealousy which is beginning to set him speculating as to any reason which may exist for it. Hamilton, who holds in his hand, or imagines that he holds, the strings of all the puppets implicated in this play of cross-purposes, pervades the entire scene, a figure of wit and grace, handsome, urbane, and popular wherever he chooses to distribute his favours. Of the Court and its demoralizing atmosphere are all these lives, is all this complication of unscrupulous intrigue; and, if we leave that Court out of our account, it is not to imply thereby that the aforesaid lives are not nine-tenths subject to its baneful influences, but simply because to mix any such complex ingredients with a plain tale were hopelessly to confuse the issues thereof. Wherefore we will continue to confine our mise en scène, if you please, to that district of the huge, rambling palace in which my lord of Chesterfield has his quarters. It is there that the sole business with which we are concerned develops itself.
Now, it comes to include, this business, in the process of its unfolding, a certain illustrious figure, with whose name we have dealt hitherto but in parenthesis. His Royal Highness the Duke of York was at this date a young man of twenty-seven, and somewhat notable, in a reckless community, for the comparative propriety of his conduct. At least, he kept his lapses within reasonable, if infrequent, bounds, and, in erring, showed some occasional capacity for shamefacedness. He had virtues—courage, truth to his word, fidelity, and application; vices—parsimony, excessive hauteur, and an implacable enmity for his foes. Yet, commonly master of himself, he possessed one cardinal weakness, and that showed itself in a remarkable susceptibility to feminine allurements—showed itself, I say, for he seemed unable to conceal it; he was, according to Grammont, the most completely unguarded ogler of his time.
Fresh, unspoiled, and possessed of the double recommendation of having a husband, and notoriously an indifferent one, the little Countess with the rose-leaf face was not long, you may be sure, in attracting the rather prominent inquisition of those wandering orbs, and not altogether, be it said, without some flattered consciousness, on her part, of their interested scrutiny. The Duke, though austere to severity, was not an uncomely Stuart; he was tall, well formed, and the sallow melancholy of his look, when tempered to a soft occasion, could be sufficiently moving. Satisfied as to first impressions, he began to consider his further policy; and in the meantime he ogled.
His ogling, it seemed, was not, in spite of its temerity, suspected by Hamilton. Perhaps Cousin George’s confidence in his own most-favoured position was too absolute to cherish a thought of any rival influence outside it. But, whatever the case, it is certain that, even if he observed, he gave himself no concern whatever about an ocular blandishment which was generally at the service of any beaux yeux of a pattern finer than the common.
But, if he remained indifferent, it was far otherwise with the husband, whose vision in a night had changed its blindness for the thousand-lensed optic of spiderous jealousy. Realizing, too late, his own infatuated folly, reduced to a vain coveting of what was by all legal right his own possession, forced into an attitude of apparent insensibility to the promiscuous gallantries offered to his lady on the strength of their estrangement, and prevented, both by policy and pride, from confessing to his altered sentiments, the unhappy man was, in these days, suffering all the pangs the most vindictive wife could have wished. And yet she would have forgiven him, even now, could he have brought that obstinate devil in him to submit to the one condition she had dictated, and have owned to his iniquity and asked absolution for it. But to that extreme he could not go; it was still a point of honour with him to force her into being the first to break the silence; and so he continued to ground what hopes he had on the nature of the compromise suggested by Hamilton. To that absurd faith he clung, soon wearying of the little malapert instrument lent, though he never guessed it, to his purpose, but desperately continuing to play her for the success he looked to achieve. And, in the meanwhile, if his part in private was a difficult one, in public it was an endless anguish. It was not only that, cursed to that compact of silence, he must be perpetually manœuvring to avoid its discovery by others—and always on the edge of a fear lest what he so carefully concealed should be mockingly made known, in a spasm of feminine perversity, by the capricious partner thereto—but that he was wholly debarred by it from uttering a word of warning or menace to that same partner on the subject of the perils, to which her own wilfulness was subjecting her, from oglings, princely or otherwise. He himself was so acutely sensitive to the danger that he found a suggestive meaning in every appreciative glance, every small natural homage paid to a beauty which could not be seen but to be admired. The attractions which should have been his pride had become his torment, while his mind revolted from the memory of a dead infatuation as from something noisome: and in so much the Nemesis of deserved retribution had swiftly overtaken him. From his jealous misery he could find no relief at last but in confiding its fancied justifications to his friend Hamilton. Him, for some inexplicable reason, he never suspected.
“Curse it, George!” he would say. “I am so driven and harassed, curse it! A little more and I shall pack her off to the Peak!”
He spoke of the Peak in Derbyshire, near which his country seat, Bretby Hall, was situated. The phrase at Court came to pass into a jocular proverb; so that to rid oneself of a tiresome wife was to send her to the Peak. But the threat a little alarmed Hamilton. It was true that, if carried into effect, it might prove itself the short cut to his own desired goal, since friends come doubly welcomed into killing solitudes; still, that welcome, gained at the sacrifice, perhaps, of a month in town, was a prospect altogether too wry to be entertained with composure. No, he must certainly counter the suggestion with all his wits.
“Why?” he said. “What is poor Kate’s new offence?”
“Did I speak of any?” snarled Chesterfield. “The old is wide enough and long enough to serve the purpose of a score.”
“How do you mean?”
“How, says he! Why, does she not take advantage of my tongue-tied state to flaunt her coquetries in my very face?”
“Speak to her, then.”
“You know I cannot.”
“O, you can, indeed!”
“I’ll see her damned first!”
“Why, there you are. You’ll see her damned first, and so you will.”
“So I will? What do you imply by that?”
“Did you not say you would? Your word on it, then, you will.”
“Curse you! You mean the Duke.”
“Curse you! What Duke?”
“Don’t you know very well?”
“O, a pox on these conundrums! What Duke, I say?”
“York, then.”
“What! Is he the villain?”
“I’ve watched them exchange glances.”
“Why, so have I, and so have hundreds.”
“You own it?”
“With perfect equanimity. Such frank barter of the eyes is your surest proof of innocence. Give me your stolen look for mischief.”
“You think he means none, then?”
Hamilton laughed, and clapped his friend on the shoulder.
“O, Phil!” said he, “thou art surely possessed. The Duke hath other fish to fry; his net is full. Believe me, on my sincerity” (and he meant it), “your jealousy corrupts your judgment. And more—it dishonours your wife. Come, tell me—how goes it with the little country skit, Kate’s friend?”
Chesterfield, but half convinced, shook his head and growled.
“She wearies me. A tasteless business.”
“What!” said the other, again perturbed: “you are not crying off?”
“No”—he shrugged—“O, faith, no! But, ’tis uphill work.”
“The looser rein to give yourself. A plague on distaste! That is to put on the brake uphill.”
“A common creature, nevertheless, to appear my more natural choice—and when she is by. I think Kate must hold me despicable.”
“Is the skit so common?”
“Troth, you’d think it: though, to do her justice, she makes one laugh.”
“Still, though against your inclinations, you play the part?”
“O! I play it.”
“And with what effect so far?”
“None that you promised—unless rank mutiny lay in your scheme. She seems determined to show me that, of all men she encounters, I stand least in her regard.”
“So you are signalled out for her slights. What could you wish more? I’d rather be the one scorned by a woman than the fifty favoured. ’Tis to stand alone in her estimation, and be thought of always for yourself. She’s jealous, take my word. These coquetries you speak of are but retorts on you in kind. Be thankful that she thinks you worth them. It works, Phil—believe me, it works.”
“Do you really think so?”
“I’m sure of it.”
“Come, visit us this night, and make sureness surer.”
Hamilton feigned to reflect.
“To-night? Why, the truth is——”
Chesterfield, breaking into a chuckle, nudged him roguishly.
“Hey-hey! I see: an assignation. Well, another night.”
“Nay; to prove you’re wrong, I’ll come.”
It so happened that, passing along a corridor that afternoon, Hamilton encountered the Duke of York, who took his arm and held him in friendly talk as he paced the matting with him up and down. His Royal Highness was in a suit of plain black, which became his sombre visage very well, and wore no ornament but the “George” suspended from his neck by a blue ribbon.
“I know your love for music, Geordie,” says he. “What is this new saraband that all seem suddenly crazed about?”
Hamilton told him. It was by the Signor Francesco Corbetti, that famous master of the guitar, who had lately come from Paris to Whitehall, and with such good result for himself that the King, who loved his art, had actually appointed him a groom of the Queen’s privy chamber, with a princely salary, in order that he might attach him permanently to the Court.
“’Tis nothing else, both morning and noon,” said the young man, with a groan: “till, for my very love of music, I could throttle these mutilators of it with their own guitar strings. Not a doting coxcomb or lang’rous amourette but murders the ‘jealous-pated swain’ six times a day. I wish he were rotten. Is it not strange how vanity will never learn that to sing the nightingale’s song is not necessarily to sing the nightingale!”
The Duke smiled tolerantly.
“Are they all such bunglers?” said he. “I have heard of some reputed to handle their instruments well.”
“Arran is one,” said Hamilton, “and there is another accomplished performer among them—your Royal Highness’s self. But, for the rest, it is not that I object to their twanging to their hearts’ content; it is that they must all do it to the same tune. This saraband is indeed a ravishing air—as Corbetti plays it; but watered nectar was never to my taste. God forbid I should quarrel with a vogue his Majesty started, or curse to hear this discordant plucking of strings come wailing eternally like the wind through a hundred keyholes; all I ask is an occasional change in the theme.”
“You think, nevertheless, the air itself beautiful?”
“O! it is. Your Royal Highness should hear it.”
“What did you remark of Lord Arran, Geordie?”
“Why, he knows and plays it, after Corbetti, the best of all.”
This Earl of Arran, Kate Chesterfield’s younger brother, was a little callow perfumed exquisite, a little lisping buck, who could play many parts prettily, but none to such effect as that of minstrel, for which, like Moore, and Leigh Hunt, and other twitterers of a later date, he had a small natural aptitude. So, when the Italian, by the King’s grace, brought guitars into that fashion that no lady’s toilet table was thought complete without it included a beribboned instrument among its rouge and powder-puffs, this curled darling found his opportunity, and earned through it a more devoted attention than any of his puppyish charms had hitherto been able to procure him.
“He must play it to me,” said the Duke. “The boy has a fine touch, though something due, no doubt, to the quality of his instrument. They say ’tis the best in all England.”
“No, that it is not,” said Hamilton unguardedly. “His sister owns the best.”
The Duke affected an air of momentary abstraction before he answered—
“What did you say? O, my lady Chesterfield! She plays too?”
“Faith! that is the word for it,” answered the other. “She plays, as they all do—at playing.”
“And she has a finer guitar than her brother, was it? She should lease it to him.”
“Doubtless she would, if asked.”
Again his answer seemed to pass unnoticed. Then the Duke started, as if recollecting himself.
“Eh?” he said: “we were discussing—what or whom? I’ve forgot. But let it pass. There was something of interest—what was it?—that I had in my mind to mention to you.”