CHAPTER XIV. OFFICIAL CONFIDENCES.
Lord Culduff accompanied Colonel Bramleigh to town. He wanted a renewal of his leave, and deemed it better to see the head of the department in person than to address a formal demand to the office. Colonel Bramleigh, too, thought that his Lordship's presence might be useful when the day of action had arrived respecting the share company—a lord in the City having as palpable a value as the most favorable news that ever sent up the Funds.
When they reached London they separated, Bramleigh taking up his quarters in the Burlington, while Lord Culduff—on pretence of running down to some noble duke's villa near Richmond—snugly installed himself in a very modest lodging off St. James's Street, where a former valet acted as his cook and landlord, and on days of dining out assisted at the wonderful toilet, whose success was alike the marvel and the envy of Culduff s contemporaries.
Though a man of several clubs, his Lordship's favorite haunt was a small unimposing-looking house close to St. James's Square, called the “Plenipo.” Its members were all diplomatists, nothing below the head of a mission being eligible for ballot. A Masonic mystery pervaded all the doings of that austere temple, whose dinners were reported to be exquisite, and whose cellar had such a fame that “Plenipo Lafitte” had a European reputation.
Now, veteran asylums have many things recommendatory about them, but from Greenwich and the Invalides downwards there is one especial vice that clings to them—they are haunts of everlasting complaint. The men who frequent them all belong to the past, their sympathies, their associations, their triumphs and successes, all pertain to the bygone. Harping eternally over the frivolity, the emptiness, and sometimes the vulgarity of the present, they urge each other on to most exaggerated notions of the time when they were young, and a deprecatory estimate of the world then around them.
It is not alone that the days of good dinners and good conversation have passed away, but even good manners have gone, and more strangely too, good looks. “I protest you don't see such women now”—one of these bewigged and rouged old debauchees would say, as he gazed at the slow procession moving on to a drawing-room, and his compeers would concur with him, and wonderingly declare that the thing was inexplicable.
In the sombre-looking breakfast-room of this austere temple, Lord Culduff sat reading the “Times.” A mild, soft rain was falling without; the water dripping tepid and dirty through the heavy canopy of a London fog; and a large coal fire blazed within—that fierce furnace which seems so congenial to English taste; not impossibly because it recalls the factory and the smelting-house—the “sacred fire” that seems to inspire patriotism by the suggestion of industry.
Two or three others sat at tables through the room, all so wonderfully alike in dress, feature, and general appearance, that they almost seemed reproductions of the same figure by a series of mirrors; but they were priests of the same “caste,” whose forms of thought and expression were precisely the same; and thus as they dropped their scant remarks on the topics of the day, there was not an observation or a phrase of one that might not have fallen from any of the others.
“So,” cried one, “they 're going to send the Grand Cross to the Duke of Hochmaringen. That will be a special mission. I wonder who 'll get it?”