“Will not Monsieur tell him himself? His smile is such a surety, and I cannot reproduce it.”
Brummell burst into a scream of rage.
“You dare to mock me! Leave the room, you scoundrel!”
The man grinned and disappeared. The spurt of fury ran to instant waste. Brummell set to pacing the room, eyeing successively the walls, the shining mantelpiece, his own shoes—all with an expression of the most complacent satisfaction. The last, indeed, as he saw them, evoked a positive sigh of transport.
“That Vernis de Guiton!” he murmured: “positively a Corinthian polish! But it’s devilish expensive—devilish.”
He strutted again, sticking out his chest and quavering a little stanza of his own, which someone at some time had set to music:
“Oh ye! who so lately were blithesome and gay,
At the Butterfly’s banquet carousing away;
Your feasts and your revels of pleasure are fled,
For the soul of the banquet, the Butterfly’s dead!”
He paused, cocking his head on one side, inquisitive.
“Now, where did I hear that?” he said. “Aye, aye—the poor butterfly, and dead, with the honey in his throat! Well, ’tis best—to fold one’s plumes upon the feast, and, sunk in the happy flush of revelry, to die and leave a golden record. So may Fortune favour me. But there’s time yet—poor butterfly, poor butterfly! Gad! he makes me weep.”
But it was only the oil dropping from his wig and running down his face. He attended personally to its lubrication in these days, and far too liberally. In a moment he looked up, the transcendent light returned to his eyes. He hummed a livelier air. Self-gratification beamed from him. It was something, after all, in this world, he reflected, to have that indomitable spirit which could rebound, like an india-rubber ball, from the blows of Fortune, the rebuffs of false friends, and exhibit always the same polished, undinted surface. He had not allowed hard Fate to subdue his spirit, to impair his wit, to hammer him into forgetfulness of his duty to his own original ineffable self, and he prayed only that the doom of the butterfly might overtake him long before age came to blunt his exquisite perceptions of fitness, his fastidious taste, his delicate palate! What if one were to come to realise, in moments of lucidity, one’s debased reputation, out-of-dateness, personal uncleanliness, perhaps?—O horrible, horrible! He shuddered; he touched the immaculate frill at his throat, smoothed the satin on his thighs with a trembling hand. An ugly dream! Thank God he could congratulate himself, had always been able to congratulate himself, on an intellectual strength capable of carrying the extremest extravagance of foppery. He had shaped himself deliberately to a fame he would never have attained on the force of his wit alone. And yet he had always remained a gentleman, and a gentleman could never come to forget himself. Intellect and character both told against any such possible demoralisation.