O thou wonderful nineteenth century! thou that believest in no miracles and doest so many, hast thou brought this, too, about, that ladies’ hearts should be won, and gentlemen’s also, not in courts of tourney or halls of revel, but over a counter and behind a stall? We are, indeed, a nation of shopkeepers!
The king of Otaheite, though a despot, was a reformer. He discovered that the eating of bread-fruit was a barbarous custom, which would infallibly prevent his people from being a great nation. He determined to introduce French rolls. A party rebelled; the despot was energetic; some were executed; the rest ejected. The vagabonds arrived in England. As they had been banished in opposition to French rolls, they were declared to be a British interest. They professed their admiration of civil and religious liberty, and also of a subscription. When they had drunk a great deal of punch, and spent all their money, they discovered that they had nothing to eat, and would infallibly have been starved, had not an Hibernian Marchioness, who had never been in Ireland, been exceedingly shocked that men should die of hunger; and so, being one of the bustlers, she got up a fancy sale and a Sandwich Isle Bazaar.
All the world was there and of course our hero. Never was the arrival of a comet watched by astronomers who had calculated its advent with more anxiety than was the appearance of the young Duke. Never did man pass through such dangers. It was the fiery ordeal. St. Anthony himself was not assailed by more temptations. Now he was saved from the lustre of a blonde face by the superior richness of a blonde lace. He would infallibly have been ravished by that ringlet had he not been nearly reduced by that ring which sparkled on a hand like the white cat’s. He was only preserved from his unprecedented dangers by their number. No, no! He had a better talisman: his conceit.
‘Ah, Lady Balmont!’ said his Grace to a smiling artist, who offered him one of her own drawings of a Swiss cottage, ‘for me to be a tenant, it must be love and a cottage!’
‘What! am I to buy this ring, Mrs. Abercroft? Point de jour. Oh! dreadful phrase! Allow me to present it to you, for you are the only one whom such words cannot make tremble.’
‘This chain, Lady Jemima, for my glass! It will teach me where to direct it.’
‘Ah! Mrs. Fitzroy!’ and he covered his face with affected fear. ‘Can you forgive me? Your beautiful note has been half an hour unanswered. The box is yours for Tuesday.’
He tried to pass the next stall with a smiling bow, but he could not escape. It was Lady de Courcy, a dowager, but not old. Once beautiful, her charms had not yet disappeared. She had a pair of glittering eyes, a skilfully-carmined cheek, and locks yet raven. Her eloquence made her now as conspicuous as once did her beauty. The young Duke was her constant object and her occasional victim. He hated above all things a talking woman; he dreaded above all others Lady de Courcy.
He could not shirk. She summoned him by name so loud that crowds of barbarians stared, and a man called to a woman, and said, ‘My dear! make haste; here’s a Duke!’
Lady de Courcy was prime confidant of the Irish Marchioness. She affected enthusiasm about the poor sufferers. She had learnt Otaheitan, she lectured about the bread-fruit, and she played upon a barbarous thrum-thrum, the only musical instrument in those savage wastes, ironically called the Society Islands, because there is no society. She was dreadful. The Duke in despair took out his purse, poured forth from the pink and silver delicacy, worked by the slender fingers of Lady Aphrodite, a shower of sovereigns, and fairly scampered off. At length he reached the lady of his heart.