[MR. KELLY HAS AN ADVENTURE AT A MASQUERADE BALL]
For the greater part of that year Mr. Kelly simply went about his business. He travelled backwards and forwards from General Dillon, Lord Lansdowne, the Duke of Mar, in Paris, to the Bishop of Rochester, in London, and from the Bishop to the others of the five who mismanaged the Chevalier's affairs in England, Lord Arran, Lord Strafford, Lord North and Grey, Lord Orrery, and last, though not least, the Earl of Oxford. Thus business brought him more than once knocking again at the doors of Brampton Bryan Manor, though he did not always find her ladyship at home to welcome him. On such occasions he found the great house very desolate for the want of her footstep and her voice, and so would pull out his watch and fall to wondering what at that precise moment she was engaged upon in town.
Thus things dallied, then, until a warm wet night of summer in the year 1720. Mr. Kelly was in London and betook himself to His Majesty's Theatre in Drury Lane, where he witnessed a farce which was very much to his taste. It was entitled 'South-Sea; or the Biter Bit,' and was happy not merely in its quips, but in the moment of its performance. For the King, or, as the honest party called him, the Elector, and his lords had sold out, and were off to Germany with their plunder, and the stocks were falling by hundreds every week. Mr. Kelly might well laugh at the sallies on the stage and the wry faces with which the pit and boxes received them. For he had recently sold out his actions in the Mississippi scheme at a profit of 1,200 per cent., and had his money safe locked up at Mr. Child's, the goldsmith. Kelly's, however, was not a mere wanton pleasure. For the floating of the bubble out of reach meant a very solid change in the Jacobite prospects. So long as the South-Sea scheme prospered and all the town grew wealthy, there would be no talk of changing kings and no chance for Mr. Kelly's friends. That great and patriotic bishop whom he served, my Lord of Rochester, had said to him this many a month past, 'Let 'em forget their politics, let 'em all run mad in Change Alley, and the madder the better. For the funds will fall and be the ruin of thousands, and when England is sunk into a salutary wretchedness and discontent, then our opportunity will come.'
It was altogether, then, in a very good humour that Mr. Kelly left the theatre. The night was young, and he disinclined for his lodgings. He strolled across to the Groom Porters, in White Hall, where his spirits were mightily increased. For taking a hand there at Bassette, in three deals he won nine rich septlevas, and, for once, did not need the money, and when he left the Groom Porters his pockets were heavy with gold, and his head swimming with the fumes of punch.
It is not to be wondered at that those same fumes of punch floated Lady Oxford into Mr. Kelly's mind. He swaggered up St. James's Street with her ladyship consequently riding atop of his bemused fancies. It was a gay hour in St. James's, being then about half past one of the morning. Music rippled out of windows open on the night. Kelly heard the dice rattle within and the gold clink on the green cloth; lovers were whispering on the balconies; the world seemed to be going very well for those who had not their money in the Bubble, and for no one better than for Mr. Kelly. He looked about him, if by chance he might catch a glimpse of his divinity among the ladies of fashion as he watched them getting into their chairs, pushing their hoops sidelong before them, and the flambeaux flaring on their perfections. He imagined himself a Paladin rescuing her from innumerable foes. She was an angel, a sprite, a Hamadryad, in fact everything tender and immaterial.
He was roused from these dreams by an illumination of more than ordinary brilliancy, and looking up saw that he had wandered to the theatre in the Haymarket. A ragged crowd of pickpockets and the like was gathered about the portico. Carriages and chairs set down in quick succession, ladies in dominoes, gentlemen in masks. Mr. Kelly remembered that it was a night of the masquerades; all the world would be gathered in the theatre, and why not Lady Oxford, who was herself the better half of it? Kelly had a ticket in his pocket, pushed through the loiterers, and stood on the inner rim of the crowd watching the masqueraders arrive. Every carriage that drew up surely concealed her ladyship, every domino that passed up the steps hid her incomparable figure. Mr. Kelly had staked his soul with unruffled confidence upon her identity with each of the first twelve women who thus descended before he realised that he was not the only one who waited. From the spot where he stood he could see into the lobby of the theatre. Heidegger, M. le surintendant des plaisirs du Roi de l'Angleterre,
'With a hundred deep wrinkles impressed on his front,
Like a map with a great many rivers upon 't,'
was receiving the more important of his guests. The guests filed past him into the parterre, Heidegger remained. But another man loitered ever in the lobby too. He was evidently expecting someone, and that with impatience. For as each coach or chaise drew up he peered eagerly forward; as it delivered its occupants he turned discontentedly away. It is perhaps doubtful whether Mr. Kelly would have paid him any great attention but for his dress, which arrested all eyes and caused the more tender of the ladies who passed him to draw their cloaks closer about them with a gesture of disgust. For he was attired to represent a headsman, being from head to foot in black, with a crape mask upon his face and a headsman's axe in his hand. He had carried his intention out with such thoroughness, moreover, that he had daubed his doublet and hose with red.
Mr. Kelly was in a mood to be charmed by everything strange and eccentric, and the presence of this bloodsmeared executioner at a masquerade seemed to him a piece of the most delicate drollery. Moreover, the executioner was waiting like Mr. Kelly, and with a like anxiety. Mr. Kelly had a fellow-feeling for him in his impatience which prompted him suddenly to run up the steps and accost him.
'Like me, you are doubtless waiting for your aunt,' said the Parson courteously.