"It's a mistake, my dear Churchill; I'm convinced of it. We're not fit for these charming creatures, we artists and writers, believe me. We're a deucedly irritable, growling, horrible set of ruffians, who ought to be left, like a lot of Robinson Crusoes, each on a separate island. I can fully enter into Mrs. Churchill's feelings; and I've no doubt that Mrs. Lacy feels exactly the same. But what do I do? I'm compelled to shut the door in Mrs. Lacy's face--to lock Mrs. Lacy out. She's a most excellent woman, as you know, Churchill; but she always wants to talk to me when I ought to be at work; now, on a sky-day, for instance! There are very few days in the year in this detestable climate, my dear Mrs. Churchill, which permit of one's seeing the sky sufficiently to paint it. When such a day does happen, I go to my studio and lock the door; but I've scarcely set my palette, before they come and rap, and want to talk to me--to ask me about the butcher, or to tell me about the nurse's sister, or something; and I'm obliged to whistle or sing to prevent my hearing 'em, or I should get interested about the nurse's sister, and open the door, and then my day's work would be spoilt."
"You're right, Lacy," said Dunster: "men who've got work to do should remain single. They'll never--"
"Come, you're polite to my wife," said Frank. "This is flat blasphemy against the state into which we've just entered."
"Oh, pray don't let the conversation, evidently so genial, be stopped on my account. I'm tired, and am just going;" and with a sweeping bow Barbara sailed out of the room.
An hour afterwards, when Frank looked in from his dressing-room, he saw in the dim light Barbara's hair streaming over the pillow, and going to her found traces of tears on her cheeks. Tenderly and eagerly he asked her what had happened.
"Oh, Frank, Frank!" she exclaimed, bursting into fresh sobs; "I see it all now! What those horrid men said is too true! We were worse than mad to marry. Your friends will never understand me, while I shall interfere with your work and your pleasure; and, oh! I am so very, very miserable myself!"
[CHAPTER XXI.]
THE FLYBYNIGHTS.
To such of womankind as knew of its existence there were few places in London so thoroughly unpopular as the Flybynights Club. And yet it was an unpretending little room, boasting none of the luxury of decoration generally associated in the female mind with notions of club-life, and offering no inducement for membership save that it was open at very abnormal hours, and that it was very select. The necessary qualification for candidature was that you should be somebody; no matter what your profession (provided, of course, that you were a gentleman by position), you must have made some mark in it, shown yourself ahead of the ruck of competitors, before you could have been welcome among the Flybynights. Two or three leading advocates, attached for the most part to the criminal bar; half-a-dozen landscape and figure painters of renown; half-a-dozen actors; a sporting man or two, with the power of talking about something else besides Brother to Bluenose's performances; two or three City men, who combined the most thorough business habits with convivial tastes in the "off" hours; a few members of Parliament, who were compelled to respect the room as a thoroughly neutral ground; a few journalists and authors, and a sprinkling of nothing-doing men about town,--formed the corporate body of the club. What was its origin? I believe that certain members of the Haresfoot Club, finding that establishment scarcely so convivial as report had led them to believe; that the Dii majores of the house were a few snuffy old gentlemen, without an idea beyond the assertion of their own dignity and the keeping up of some dreary fictions and time-worn conventionalities; that the delights of the smoking-room, so much talked of in the outer world, in reality consisted in sitting between a talkative barrister and a silent stockbroker, or listening to the complaints against the management of the club by the committee; finding, in fact, that the place was dull, bethought them of establishing another where they could be more amused. Hence the Flybynights.
The Flybynights had no house of their own; they merely occupied a room on the basement of the Orpheus tavern,--a dull sombre old room, with big couches and lounges covered with frayed leather, with a smoky old green-flock paper, and with no ornament save a battered old looking-glass in a fly-blown frame. Occasionally roisterers new to town, on their way to the big concert-room of the Orpheus, where they were to be enchanted with the humour of Mr. Bloss's "Dying Cadger's Lament," or the pathos of Mr. Seeinault's "Trim-built Wherry," would in mistake push open the green-baize door leading to the Flybynights sanctum, and immediately withdraw in dismay at the dinginess of the room and the grim aspect of its occupants. That grimness, however, was only assumed at the apparition of a stranger; when the members were alone among themselves, perfect freedom from restraint was the rule. And if, on the next morning, the jurymen who listened with awe to the withering denunciations which fell from the lips of the learned counsel for the prosecution,--the bank-directors who nodded approval to the suggestions of certain shrewd financiers,--the noble sitters who marked the brows of the artists engaged on their portraits, "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,"--nay, even the patients who gazed with eager eyes to glean something from the countenances of the physicians then clutching their pulses,--had seen counsel, financiers, artists, and physicians on the previous evening at the Flybynights, they could not have recognised them for the same men. The fame of the club spread; anecdotes and bon-mots ran round town more quickly, and were better received, when they had the Flybynight stamp. It was rumoured that O'Blank and Macaster, the great authors, were occasionally to be seen there in the flesh, conversing like ordinary mortals; heavy swells found out that it was open as late as Pratt's, and asked each other, in elliptic phraseology, "Whether 'twasn't good kind place, eh? met 'musing kind fellahs there; made laugh'n, that kind thing?" But though they made various attempts at election, they never got beyond an occasional visit to the club; friendly attempts to smuggle them in as members were dead failures; and at every ballot, generally held at midnight, the strident voice of Rupert Robinson, author and dramatist, could be heard asking, at the mention of any candidate's name, "Who is he? what can he do? what has he done?" questions which, unless satisfactorily answered, caused the immediate pilling of the pretender to association with the Flybynights.