“My son insists that it is my duty to help him, and I am inclined to agree with him,” a clear decided voice announced. “And after all he is a gentleman, to say nothing of the fact that time was when he had to hide himself from the importunities of Bath House. But since that unhappy affair—I fear our sex had much to answer for—but he has suffered enough——”
“No doubt!” broke in a caustic voice, “but that is hardly the point. He has taken to ways of relieving his sufferings which make him quite unfit for decent society——”
“He can be reformed.”
“Fiddlesticks. No one ever reforms. He merely changes his vice. And he! Mr. Mortlake, who is fond of what he calls the picturesqueness of Charlestown by night, has seen him—well, it is enough that I should have heard. You have been too intimate with the little Queen lately. You never could stand it! Suffice it to say, that brandy, or rum, or whatever he takes by the barrel, makes a madman of him.”
“I have heard these stories, but I also know that he only drinks by fits and starts——”
“Worse and worse.”
“Well!” in tones of great decision, “since a woman, and a woman of our own class ruined him, Constance Mortlake, I believe it to be the duty of our sex and rank to redeem him. Do you,” with high and increasing impatience, “realise that the man is a genius, the poet of the age?”
“Haven’t I always doted on poetry since I was in love with Byron? But we can buy this young man’s poetry for a guinea a volume—ten guineas for special editions at Christmas. I hear that Lady Blessington paid him a hundred pounds for three pages in last year’s ‘Book of Beauty.’ I am glad he is in no danger of starving, and am quite willing to do my little share toward keeping him off the parish; but I prefer to enjoy his genius without being inflicted by the horrid tenement in which that genius has taken up its abode. Most undiscriminating faculty genius seems to be. Besides, I have no respect for a man who lets his life be ruined by a woman. Heavens, supposing we—we women——”
“You can’t have everything, and a man who can write like Byam Warner——”
“Don’t believe you ever read a line of him. What on earth has a leader of ton to do with poetry, unless, to be sure, to read up a bit before caging the lion for a dinner where everybody will bore the poor wretch to death by quoting his worst lines at him. As for Warner there is no question that he writes even better than before he went to the dogs, and that, to my mind, is proof that he holds his gifts in fief from the devil not from Almighty God——”