“He never gave me a chance, sir,—not one chance,” would he say. “Why, he knows Palmerston just as well as I know you; he can talk to Lord Derby as freely as I am speaking at this minute; and, would you believe it? he wouldn't say, 'There's Annesley—my brother Annesley—wants that commissionership or that secretary's place. Annesley 's a devilish clever fellow,—up to a thing or two,—ask Grog Davis if he ain't. Just try to get between him and the ropes, that's all; see if he does n't sleep with one eye open. 'Do you tell me there's one of them would refuse him? Grog said to his face, at Epsom Downs, the morning Crocus was scratched, 'My Lord,' says he, 'take all you can get upon Annesley; make your book on him; he's the best horse in your lot, and it's Grog Davis says it.'”
Very true was it that Grog Davis said so. Nay, to enjoy the pleasure of hearing him so discourse was about the greatest gratification of Annesley Beecher's present life. He was poor and discredited. The Turf Club would not have him; he durst not show at Tattersall's. Few would dine, none discount him; and yet that one man's estimate of his gifts sustained him through all. “If Grog be right—and he ought to be, seeing that a more dodgy, crafty fellow never lived—I shall come all round again. He that never backed the wrong horse could n't be far astray about men. He thinks I've running in me yet; he sees that I 'll come out one of these days in top condition, and show my number from the stand-house.” To have had the greatest opinion in Equity favorable to your cause in Chancery, to have known that Thesiger or Kelly said your case was safe, to learn that Faraday had pronounced your analysis correct, or White, of Cowes, had approved of the lines of your new yacht,—would any of them be very reassuring sensations; and yet were they as nothing to the unbounded confidence imparted to Beecher's mind by the encouraging opinion of his friend Grog Davis. It is only justice to say that Beecher's estimate of Davis was a feeling totally free of all the base alloy of any self-interest. With all Grog's great abilities, with talents of the very highest order, he was the reverse of a successful man. Trainer, auctioneer, sporting character, pugilist, publican, and hell-keeper, he had been always unlucky. He had his share of good things,—more than his share. He had been in at some of the “very best-robberies” ever done at Newmarket. The horses he had “nobbled,” the jockeys “squared,” the owners “hocussed,” were legion. All the matches he had “made safe,” all the fights he had sold, would have filled five columns of “Bell's Life.” In whatever called itself “sport” he had dabbled and cheated for years; and yet, there he was, with all his successes and all his experiences, something more than fifteen thousand pounds worse than ruined.
Worthy reader, have you stood by while some enthusiastic admirer of Turner's later works has, in all the fervor of his zeal, encomiumized one of those strange, incomprehensible creations, where cloud and sea, atmosphere, shadow and smoke, seem madly commingled with tall masts piercing the lurid vapor, and storm-clouds drifting across ruined towers? If at first you gladly welcomed any guidance through the wondrous labyrinth, and you accepted gratefully the aid of one who could reconcile seeming incongruities, and explain apparent difficulties, what was your disappointment, at last, to discover that from some defect of organization, some absent power of judgment, you could not follow the elucidation; that you saw no power in this, no poetry in that; that no light gleamed into your soul out of all that darkness, nor any hope into your heart, from the mad confusion of that chaos? Pretty much the same mystification had it been to you to have listened to Annes-ley Beecher's account of his friend Grog Davis. It was evident that he saw the reason for everything,—he could account for all; but, alas! the explanatory gift was denied him. The very utmost you could attain to was a glimmering perception that there were several young men of rank and station who had only half trusted the distinguished Davis, and in their sparing confidence had rescued themselves from his knavery; that very artful combinations occasionally require confederates, and confederates are not always loyal; that Grog occasionally did things with too high a hand,—in plain words, reserved for himself more than his share of the booty; and, in fact, that, with the best intentions and the most decided determination to put others “into the hole,” he fell in himself, and so completely, too, that he had never been able to show his head out of it ever since.
If, therefore, as we have said, Annesley Beecher's explanation of these tangled skeins was none of the clearest, there was nothing daunting to himself in that difficulty. On the contrary, he deemed his intimacy with Grog as one of his greatest privileges. Grog had told him things that he would not tell to another man breathing; he had seen, in Grog's own hand, what would, if not hang him, give him twenty years at Norfolk Island; he knew that Grog had done things no man in England but himself had ever dreamed of; in fact, as Othello's perils had won the fair Desdemona's love, Grog Davis's rascalities had captivated Beecher's admiration; and, as the recruit might gaze upon the thickly studded crosses on the breast of some glorious soldier, so did he venerate the proofs of the thousand-and-one knaveries of one who for thirty-odd years had been a “leg” and a swindler.
Let us present Captain Davis—for by that title was he popularly known—to our reader. He was a short, red-faced—very red-faced—man, with a profusion of orange-red hair, while he wore beard and whiskers in that form so common in our Crimean experiences. He was long-armed and bandy, the legs being singularly short and muscular. He affected dress, and was remarkable for more ostentation of velvet than consisted with ordinary taste, and a far greater display of rings, charms, and watch trinkets than is common even to gentlemen of the “Jewish persuasion.” The expression of the man's face was eminently determination, and his greenish-gray eyes and thin-lipped, compressed mouth plainly declared, “Bet with me or not,—if you give me the shadow of a shade of impertinence I 'll fasten a quarrel upon you of which all your rank and station won't protect you from the consequences. I can hit a sixpence at twenty paces, and I 'll make you feel that fact in every word you say to me. In my brevet rank of the turf you can't disown me, and if you try, mine the fault if you succeed.” He had been out three or four times in very sanguinary affairs, so that the question as to “meeting” him was a settled point. He was one of those men to whom the epithet “dangerous” completely applies; he was dangerous alike to the young fellow entering life, unsuspectful of its wiles and ignorant of its rascalities; dangerous in the easy facility with which he would make foolish wagers, and lend even large sums on the very slightest acquaintance. He seemed so impressed with his theory that everybody ought to have all the enjoyment he liked, there was such a careless good-nature about him, such an uncalculating generosity, an air of such general kindliness, that very young men felt at once at ease in his company; and if there were sundry things in his manner that indicated coarseness or bad breeding, if his address was vulgar and his style “snobbish,” there were sufficient traits of originality about him to form a set-off for these defects, and “Old Grog” was pronounced an “out-and-out good fellow,” and always ready “to help one at a pinch.”
Such was he to the very young men just passing the threshold of life; to the older hands—fellows versed in all its acts and ways—he showed no false colors; such, then, he was, the character which no disguise conceals,—“the leg;” one whose solvency may be counted on more safely than his honesty, and whose dealings, however based on roguery, are still guided by that amount of honor which is requisite for transactions amongst thieves. There was an impression, too,—we have no warranty for saying how far it was well founded,—that Grog was behind the scenes in transactions where many high and titled characters figured; that he was confederate in affairs of more than doubtful integrity; and that, if he liked, he could make revelations such as all the dark days at Tattersall's never equalled. “They 'll never push me to the wall,” he would say, “take my word for it; they 'll not make Grog Davis turn Queen's evidence,” was the boastful exclamation of his after-dinner hours: and he was right. He could have told of strange doings with arsenic in the stable, and, stranger still, with hocussed negus in the back parlor; he had seen the certain favorite for the Oaks carted out stiff and cold on the morning that was to have witnessed her triumph; and he had opened the door for the ruined heir as he left his last thousand on the green baize of the hell table. He was so accustomed to all the vicissitudes of fortune—that is, he was so habituated to aid the goddess in the work of destiny—that nothing surprised him; and his red, carbuncled face and jaundiced eye never betrayed the slightest evidence of anything like emotion or astonishment
How could Beecher have felt any other than veneration for one so gifted? He approached him as might some youthful artist the threshold of Michael Angelo; he felt, when with him, that he was in the presence of one whose maxims were silver and whose precepts were gold, and that to the man who could carry away those experiences the secrets of life were no longer mysteries.
All the delight an old campaigner might have felt had the Great Duke vouchsafed to tell him of his achievements in the Peninsula—how he had planned the masterly defences of Torres Vedras, or conceived the bold advance upon Spain—would have been but a weak representation of the eager enjoyment Beecher experienced when Grog narrated some of his personal recollections: how he had squared Sir Toby at Manchester; the way he had won the York Handicap with a dead horse; and the still prouder day when, by altering the flags at Bolton, he gained twenty-two thousand pounds on the Great National Steeplechase. Nor was it without a certain vaingloriousness that Grog would speak of these, as, cigar in mouth and his hands deep in his breeches pockets, he grunted out, in broken sentences, the great triumphs of his life.
We began this chapter by saying that Lord Lackington was not an impassioned letter-writer; and here we are discoursing about Mr. Davis and his habits, as if these topics could possibly have any relation to the noble Viscount's ways; and yet they are connected, for it was precisely to read one of his Lordship's letters to his friend that Beecher was now Grog's guest, seated opposite to him at the fire, in a very humble room of a very humble cottage on the strand of Irish-town. Grog had sought this retirement after the last settling at Newmarket, and had been, in popular phrase, “missing” since that event.
“Well, it's a long one, at all events,” said Mr. Davis, as he glanced through his double eyeglass at the letter Beecher handed him,—“so long that I 'll be sworn it had no enclosure. When a man sends the flimsy, he spares you the flourish!”