It needed no syren to lure the baronet on the rocks; and, indeed, the tide of fortune, whether it ebbed or flowed, seemed alike to waft this reckless, easy-going mariner to certain shipwreck. His was a sadly shattered bark now, and he had abandoned all idea of making safe anchorage at last. He came back to England, rescued from ruin by the timely aid of a friend, and thought himself ill-used because that friend was on the eve of marriage with a woman whom he had neglected while he thought she liked him, to whose heartlessness, he now told himself, he was a martyr, because she had not waited for an uncertainty, but made a wise choice in pleasing herself.
The daughter he loved so dearly was about to settle happily in life; yet he could complain that he was deserted, bewailing his loneliness, though he saw the light in her eye, the peace on her brow, that told of heart's-ease and content. In the restless, dissatisfied longings of a confirmed selfishness, he tried hard to reestablish his former intimacy with Miss Ross, whose retreat he had found means to discover; and, failing to obtain an interview with that anxious and afflicted woman, found himself driven for solace and comfort to the society of Kate Cremorne.
This young person, whose knowledge of the world was drawn from men, not books, seeing through the weary, worn-out pleasure-seeker at a glance, fooled him with considerable dexterity, and no little mischievous amusement.
Of all his reckless moods, perhaps none had been so reckless as that in which he offered to make so free-spoken a damsel his wife; of all his humiliations none, perhaps, so galling as to accept a kindly, courteous, and dignified refusal from the wild, wayward girl, who bade him understand clearly that she respected herself too much to affect an attachment it was impossible to feel for a man old enough to be her father!
Mrs. Battersea was provoked, and opined Kate would never grow wiser, but Sir Henry, while to the outward world his good humour and good spirits remained unchanged, took the rebuff sorely to heart, and though he told his doctor he had been drinking sweet champagne, which never agreed with him, my own belief is that a fit of gout, which attacked him at this juncture more sharply than usual, was the effect of love rather than wine. When we begin twinges at the extremities, it is time to have done with pains of the heart.
So his doctor ordered him to Buxton, where, soothed by the bubble of those health-restoring springs, he forgot his sorrows in the unintermittent attention to self, required by the constant ablutions and daily discipline of the cure, deriving at the same time no small comfort from the contemplation of many sufferers more crippled, more peevish, more egotistical than himself.
There is no particular season at Buxton, as there is no forgiveness or immunity from Podagra, goddess of sloth, and luxury, and excess. Its waters are drunk, its baths are heated, its lodging-houses are occupied, its parade populous, during every month of the year. Nevertheless its frequenters are necessarily migratory. Those who get better go away, those who get worse die; but disease sends in a continuous supply of fresh afflictions, and the residence of a very few weeks causes a patient to be looked on as an old inhabitant and high authority in the place. The head of the table-d'hôte, the easiest chair on the parade, the newest books from the library, the choicest game from the poulterer, the sweetest smile from landlady, the lowest bow from landlord, are the advantages to be attained by six weeks' tenure of an obstinate case; and thus it came to pass that Sir Henry, though a far greater man in St. James's Street, found he could not hold a candle to Uncle Joseph at Buxton.
Like two veterans in Chelsea, like two old man-of-war's men in Greenwich Hospital, these campaigners of a less honourable warfare found themselves stranded in sadly shattered plight amongst the bare knolls and grey boulders of the Derbyshire Peak; but between them there was this important difference,—that whereas Sir Henry, still almost handsome, still gentleman-like, amusing, pleasant to women, had loved his love, gamed his gaming, and retired beaten from the strife; Uncle Joseph, older in years, ruder in speech, rounder of form, and stouter of heart, had refitted his shattered bark, and with favouring gales, backed by an energy that cannot be too highly commended, was prosecuting his suit with a widow almost as old, as round, and as gouty as himself.
There had been a time when Sir Henry would have laughed heartily at the confidential communications made by the respectable Mr. Groves, as the two drove out in a one-horse fly and halted to enjoy the mellow warmth of an autumn sun under a chasm, which takes from its impossible legend the name of the Lover's Leap; but he did not laugh to-day, listening with attention, interest, something akin to envy, at his heart. What would he not have given could he, too, take pleasure in a woman's smile, even though the woman were old and fat; could he, too, feel his blood course quicker at a woman's voice, even though it had a provincial accent, and an occasional confusion of the rules by which the aspirate is applied in our language?
"I congratulate you," said Sir Henry, lying languidly back in the carriage with a plaintive air of resignation, and a sad conviction that for him most pleasures were indeed over, since his doctor had even forbidden him to smoke. "You have retained the best faculties of youth, since you have still courage to hope, still energy to be vexed and disappointed. It is not so with me. Look here, my dear fellow; I have been ruined twice since I began, and twice set on my legs by a miracle. I would willingly be ruined a third time, and never be set up at all, if I could only take a real interest in any earthly thing, even in what I am going to have for dinner."