“And what will Mr. Gainsborough say?” asked the duchess.
“If he were a man like one of us, he would be in despair of ever being able to execute the task which your Grace imposes on him,” said Walpole.
“True, if he were not supported from one day to the next by the thought of being for another hour in your Grace’s presence,” said Selwyn.
The beautiful lady held up both her hands in pretty protest, while she cried:
“If I tarry here much longer, I shall find myself promising to give sittings to Sir Joshua Reynolds and the full company of Academicians; so a good-night to you pair of flatterers. Heaven grant that I get safe home! Your al fresco concert-goers jostle one horribly.”
The two gentlemen bowed while her Grace’s chair was borne on through the sauntering crowd, for the house which had been the centre of the gathering had now become silent, and the candles in the drawing-room were extinguished. The clocks had chimed out the first quarter past eleven—an hour when most Londoners were in bed; but Bath during the eighteenth century was the latest town in England, and long after the duchess’s chair had been borne away, long after Walpole and his friend had sauntered on to Gilly Williams’s; long after Johnson had lectured the saturnine brewer, Mr. Thrale, on the evil of Mr. Thrale’s practice of over-eating (Johnson himself was enough of an anchorite to limit himself when at Streatham to fifteen peaches before breakfast, and an equal number before dinner, and had never been known to swallow more than twenty cups of tea at a sitting); long after Dr. Goldsmith had worried poor Mr. Boswell by pretending to be taking a note of Dr. Johnson’s sayings for the day, having, as he affirmed, an eye to a future biography of the great man; long after Miss Linley had knelt down by her bedside to thank Providence for having restored her dear brother to his home, even though Providence had seen fit to supplant her in her brother’s affection by an abstraction which he called his Art; long after the night had closed upon all these incidents in the beautiful city of Bath, some people were still sauntering through Pierrepont Street.
From the left there sauntered a young man of good figure and excellent carriage. He wore a cloak, and he had tilted his hat over his eyes, in imitation of the prowling young man on the stage. He kept on the dark side of the street and looked furtively round every now and again. He slipped into a deep doorway when almost opposite the house of the Linleys, and stood there with his eyes fixed on the highest windows.
“Sleep, beloved, sleep,” he murmured, with a sentimental turn of his head. “Sleep, knowing naught of the passion that burns in the heart of thy faithful swain, who wakes to watch over thy slumbers.”
He was so absorbed in his rhapsodising that he failed to notice the approach of another young man from the opposite direction to that from which he himself had come. The other was somewhat taller, and his carriage was better displayed by the circumstance of his being uncloaked, and of his walking frankly along the street until he too had reached the dim doorway. Then with a glance up to the windows of the Linleys’ house, he too slipped into that doorway.
He started, finding that another person was there—a man who quickly turned away his head and let his chin fall deep into the collar of his cloak.