‘Methinks they have here little need of me!’”
CHAPTER XIX
THE BURNING OF AN EFFIGY
Bean Brummell, pattern of the dandies, stood in Almack’s Assembly Rooms, bowing right and left with the languid elegance of his station. The night before, in play at the Argyle, he had lost twenty thousand pounds at macao, but what mattered that to the czar of fashion, who had introduced starch into neck-cloths and had his top-boots polished with champagne, whose very fob-design was a thing of more moment in Brookes’ Club than the fall of Bonaparte, and whose loss even of the regent’s favor had not been able to affect his reign. He was a still fool that ran deep. He had been in debt ever since a prince’s whim had given him a cornetcy in the Tenth Hussars; the episode now meant to him only another ruined Jew, and a fresh flight for his Kashmerian butterfly career.
He took snuff with nonchalant grace from a buhl snuff-box,—he had one for each day in the year,—and touched his rouged lips with a lace handkerchief of royal rose-point. His prestige had never been higher, nor his insolence more accurately applied than on this evening of the last of the Dandy Balls.
The club tables, where ordinarily were grouped players at whist and hazard, had vanished; brackets holding glass candelabra were distributed along the walls, and the pink shaded glow of myriads of wax tapers was reflected from mirrors set crosswise in every angle and surrounded by masses of flowers. The great tapestried ball-room,—a hundred feet in length,—in which Madame Catalani had given her famous concerts and Kean his readings from Shakespeare, was decorated with gilt columns, pilasters, and classic medallions with candles in cut-glass lusters. A string orchestra played behind a screen of palms and a miniature stage had been built across the lower end of the room.
Here were gathered the oligarchs of fashion and the tyrants of ton. The dandies—Pierrepont, Alvanley, Petersham, the fop lieutenants and poodle-loving worshipers of Brummell—with gold buckles glittering in their starched stocks, and brave in tight German trousers and jewelled eye-glasses, preened and ogled among soberer wearers of greater names and ladies of title, whose glistening shoulders and bare arms flashed whitely through the shifting stir of bright colors.
On the broad stair, under the chandeliers of crystal and silver, in the ball-room,—wherever the groups and the gossip moved that evening, one name was on every tongue. The series of tableaux rehearsed under direction of Lady Heathcote, and the new quadrille introduced from Paris by Lady Jersey, the features of the evening, were less speculated upon than was George Gordon. The hissing at Drury Lane had several new versions, and there were more sensational stories afloat. It was said he had entered Brookes’ Club the day before, where no one had spoken to him; that the Horse Guards had had to be sent for to prevent his being mobbed in Palace Yard as he attempted to enter the House of Lords. It was even confidently asserted that a motion was to be introduced in Parliament to suspend him from his privileges as a peer.
Lady Jersey, stately in black velvet and creamy lace, met John Hobhouse on the stair.
“Have you seen him?” she asked anxiously.
“No, but I have called every day. It was courageous of you to send him the invitation for to-night. No other patroness would have dared.”