CHAPTER XX.
During the short course of his restoration to vigour, Mr Murk, indulging that power of self-abstraction that was constitutionally at his command, gave himself no further concern about his uncle’s affairs, paramorous or political. His resolving of the Chevalier d’Eon’s little riddle of intrigue was, perhaps, an achievement less remarkable than it appeared to be. His own knowledge of my lord’s partial boon-companionship with the Prime Minister at Putney, and the notoriety of a particular kind that attached to the chevalier’s name, coupled with the more or less perilous gossip he had heard abroad, had winged the shaft that had—something to his surprise—struck so near home. Now (having proved to his satisfaction his own percipience), in the conviction that the artifice of this intrigante was destined to procure of itself nothing but a political abortion, he rested tranquilly, and devoted his spare—which was all but his meal—time to trying to play the harp.
This was a mournful misapplication of energy. He had never known but one tune—the “Young Shepherd by love sore opprest,” which he would intone in moments of exaltation. Now he could not reconcile it to the practical intervals of performance, but was fain to introduce crippling variations in his hunt for the befitting string. It was the merest game of disharmonic spillikins, the contemplation of which affected his landlord almost to tears, and to any such enigmatical protest as the following:—
“You’ve no-ought to make such a noration about nothing!”
“Very well,” Ned would answer; “but the spheres, you know, wrought harmony out of chaos.”
Nevertheless he took his characteristic place in the hearts of the simple folk with whom he lodged.
When, by-and-by, he was in a condition to stroll out into the living world once more, it was agreeable to him to learn that the old seaport place had been quit for some days of all that connection that had been the cause of his detention in it. His uncle was returned to town, carrying presumably Mademoiselle Lambertine with him; and the chevalier also had disappeared. He dozed out his second week, therefore—yielding his brain to the droning story of the sea—on the mattress of the sands; and, at last, revivified, braced up his energies and turned his face to the London that had grown unfamiliar to him.
* * * * * * * *
In accusing his nephew of inhabiting at some beggarly “Cock-and-Pye” tavern, my Lord Murk had uttered a vexatious anachronism that testified to little but his own antiquity. In the nobleman’s youth, indeed, the fields called after this hostelry, though then occupied by the seven recently laid-out fashionable streets that made “a star from a Doric pillar plac’d in the middle of a circular area” (abrégé, “Seven Dials,” though the capital of the column was, in fact, a hexagon only), were a traditional byword for low-life frivolity. Their character, however, was now long redeemed, or, at least, altered.
But, though Ned might not so far condescend to a philosophic vagrancy as to consort with beggars and “mealmen,” it was certainly much his humour, at this period of his life, to rove from old inn to inn, having any historic associations, of his native city; while during long intervals his chambers knew him not. Thus his uncle was so far near the mark as that for months antecedent to his continental excursion traces of him were only occasionally forthcoming from amongst the ancient hostelries that neighboured on the St Giles quarter of the town. The “Rose” on Holborn Hill, made memorable by the water-poet; the “Castle” tavern, where, later, “Tom Spring” threw up the sponge to death; the “George and Blue Boar,” ever famous in history as the scene of Cromwell and Ireton’s interception of that damning letter that the poor royal wren, who hovered “between hawk and buzzard,” was sending to his mate; the venerable “Maidenhead,” with its vast porch and ghostly attics—in all of these antique shells, and in many others, had the young man buried himself for days or weeks, according to his whim, until periodically his uncle would be moved to exult over the probability of his having been knocked on the head in some low-browed rookery, his very detested eccentricities serving for the means to his removal. Then suddenly Ned would put in an appearance at the house in Cavendish Square, and all the old rascal’s dreams would be shattered at a blow.