Our Lady of Darkness

by Bernard Capes

“I have always admired madame’s little ornament of the Bastille,” said Mr Sheridan.

“Ah!” cried the lady, smiling, “monsieur is varee arch; but beauty is not the common property, and the little Pamela shall ask a fair return for hers.”

“Well,” said Mr Sheridan, “’tis notorious that Damon hath squandered his inheritance on a very virtuous hobby, and lives meanly in the result. And that, be assured, is a pity; for he seems a young gentleman of parts.”

It was thus he played the devil’s advocate to Ned’s beatification. Early he began to harp upon the one string behind the poor fellow’s back. He professed to be in love with Pamela himself, and the intrusion of this most serious suitor interfered with his amusement. He trifled, no doubt, in a very July mood; he loved the girl for her prettiness and her saucy manner of speech; he was humorously flattered by the familiar deference accorded him in a house of which he was claimed the dear friend and protector. And on this account, and because he was nothing if not unscrupulous in affairs of gallantry, he condescended to acknowledge himself Ned’s rival for the favour of Mademoiselle, née Sims (that was Pamela), and to make good his suit with arguments of wit and brilliancy that threw poor Damon’s solid virtues into the shade.

Perhaps Madame de Genlis may have been the more inclined to besprinkle with cold water the ardour of the young lord, in that she took the other with a rather confounding seriousness. Mr Sheridan, indeed, offered himself at this period a particularly desirable match for a nameless young woman of inconsiderable fortune. He was only a little past the zenith of his reputation, and the glamour of his best work yet went always, an atmosphere of greatness, with him. At forty-one years of age he was equipped with such a personality of wit, eloquence, and riches (presumable) in proportion, as, combined, made him a very alluring parti. In addition to this he could claim the advantages of a tall, well-proportioned figure; of a striking, though not handsome, face; of an education in the most liberal modishness of the age. His expression was frank, his manner cordial and free from arrogance. From first to last he was a formidable rival.

Now, on the very day (the little comedy was all a matter of days) following Ned’s introduction by him to the family, he—seeing how the wind blew, and at once regretting his complaisance—began some petty tactics for the stultifying of a possible antagonist. He drove the ladies, uninvited, over to lunch at “Stowling,” on the chance of taking Master Ned unawares, and so of exposing the intrinsic poverty of a specious wooer. Nor was his astuteness miscalculated. My Lord Viscount, in the act of sitting down to a mutton-chop, was overwhelmed in fathomless waters of confusion. He hastily organised—even personally commanded—a raid on the larders; but their yield was inadequate to the occasion.

He apologised with desperate dignity. A merry enough meal ensued; but, throughout, hatred of his own self-sacrificing principles dwelt in him like a jaundice, and he could have pronounced fearful anathema on all the fools of philanthropy who omitted to stock their cellars with nectar and ambrosia against the casual coming of angels.

Mr Sheridan supplied a feast of wit, however, and Ned was grateful to him for it. He even revived so far at the end as to beg the honour of providing the ladies with invitations to an Assembly ball that was to be holden in Bury on the Thursday of that same week. Rather to his surprise they accepted with alacrity; and so the matter was arranged. And then, at Mr Sheridan’s request, but unwillingly, he played cicerone to his own domain, and thought at every turn he recognised a conscious pity for his indigent condition to underlie the fair compliments of his guests.

When these were gone he sent straightway for his steward, and surprised the good man by an extraordinary jeremiad on the maladministration of a trust that fattened the dependants of a starving lord. He himself, he said, was expected to dress like a bagman and feed like a kennel-scraper, in order that his household might gorge itself disgustingly in silken raiment. He would have reforms; he would have money; he would have the house victualled as for a siege, and grind the faces of the poor did they question his right to drink, like Cleopatra, of dissolved pearls. And then he burst out laughing, and shook the honest man by the hand, and turned him out of the room; after which he sat down by the window and gnawed his thumb-nails.

Now, it will be understood, this unfortunate youth was fairly in the grip of that demoralising but evasive demon that is the sworn foe to philosophy. He was entered of the amorous germ; and the procreative atom, multiplying, was with amazing quickness to convert to misuse all the sound humours of his constitution. He could not seek to exercise a normal faculty, but it confused and routed what he had always recognised for the plain logic of existence. He was ready to discount facts; to magnify trifles; to attach an unwarranted significance to specious vacuities; to fathom a deep meaning with the very plumb he used for the sounding of a shallow artifice. Sometimes, in a recrudescence of reason, he would think, like any calm-souled rationalist, to analyse his own symptoms, to annotate the course of his disease for the benefit of future victims to a like morbosity. It was of no use. His moral vision was so out of focus as to distort to him not only his present condition, but all the processes that had conduced thereto. He was humiliated; and he writhed under, and gloried in, his humiliation. To him, as to many in like circumstance, it seemed preposterous that he should have come unscathed through many battles to be outfenced by a child with a sword of lath. So feels the warrior of a hundred fights when he is “run in” by a street constable for brawling.