‘Don’t you think you’ve had enough of it to-night?’ said Crotty, with an insinuating smile; ‘what say you if we all go and sup together in the Saal?’
‘Agreed,’ said Sir Harry, rising at once. ‘Crotty, will you look at the carte and do the needful? You may trust him, gentlemen,’ continued he, turning towards us with a smile; ‘old Crotty has a most unexceptionable taste in all that regards cuisine and cave; save a slight leaning towards expense, he has not a fault!’
I mumbled out something of an apology, which was unfortunately supposed by the baronet to have reference to his last remark. I endeavoured to explain away the mistake, and ended like a regular awkward man by complying with a request I had previously resolved to decline. The young man had already given his consent, and so we arose and walked through the rooms, while Crotty inspected the bill of fare and gave orders about the wine.
Wycherley seemed to know and be known by every one, and as he interchanged greetings with the groups that passed, declined several pressing invitations to sup. ‘The fact is,’ said he to one of his most anxious inviters, ‘the fact is’—and the words were uttered in a whisper I could just hear—‘there’s a poor young fellow here who has been getting it rather sharp at the gold table, and I mustn’t lose sight of him to-night, or he’ll inevitably go back there.’
These few words dispelled any uneasiness I had already laboured under from finding myself so unexpectedly linked with two strangers. It was quite clear that Sir Harry was a fine-hearted fellow, and that his manly, frank countenance was no counterfeit. As we went along, Wycherley amused us with his anecdotes of the company, with whose private history he was conversant in its most minute details; and truly, low as had been my estimate of the society at first, it fell considerably lower as I listened to the private memoirs with which he favoured us.
Some were the common narratives of debt and desertion, protested bills, and so forth; others were the bit-by-bit details of extravagant habits pushed beyond all limits, and ending in expatriation for ever. There were faithless husbands, outraging all decency by proclaiming their bad conduct; there were as faithless wives, parading about in all the effrontery of wickedness. At one side sat the roué companion of George the Fourth, in his princely days, now a mere bloated debauchee, with rouged cheeks and dyed whiskers, living on the hackneyed anecdotes of his youthful rascality, and earning his daily bread by an affected epicurism and a Sybarite pretension, which flattered the vulgar vanity of those who fed him; while the lion of the evening was a newly arrived earl, whose hunters were that very day sold at Tattersall’s, and whose beautiful countess, horror-stricken at the ruin so unexpectedly come upon them, was lying dangerously ill at her father’s house in London. The young peer, indeed, bore up with a fortitude that attracted the highest encomiums, and from an audience the greater portion of which knew in their own persons most of the ills he suffered. He exchanged an easy nod or a familiar shake of the hand with several acquaintances, not seen before for many a day, and seemed to think that the severest blow fortune had dealt him was the miserable price his stud would fetch at such a time of the year.
‘The old story,’ said Wycherley, as he shook him by the hand, and told him his address—‘the old story; he thought twenty thousand a year would do anything, but it won’t though. If men will keep a house in town, and another in Gloucestershire, with a pack of fox-hounds, and have four horses in training at Doncaster—not to speak of a yacht at Cowes and some other fooleries—they must come to the Jews; and when they come to the Jews, the pace is faster than for the Derby itself. Two hundred per cent, is sharp practice, and I can tell you not uncommon either; and then when a man does begin to topple, his efforts to recover always ruin him. It’s like a fall from your horse—make a struggle, and you ‘re sure to break your leg or your collar-bone; take it kindly, and the chances are that you get up all right again, after the first shock.’
I did not like either the tone or the morality of my companion; but I well knew both were the conventional coinage of his set, and I suffered him to continue without interruption.
‘There’s Mosely Cranmer,’ said he, pointing to a slight, effeminate-looking young man, with a most girlish softness about his features. He was dressed in the very extreme of fashion, and displayed all that array of jewelry in pins, diamond vest-buttons, and rings, so frequently assumed by modern dandyism. His voice was a thin reedy treble, scarcely deep enough for a child.
‘Who is he, and what is he doing here?’ asked I.