[CHAPTER XXXIV]
The next morning Lord Ebrington called on me in his cabriolet. Meyler, who had just left me, was watching my house from his own window opposite.
Meyler was man of the world enough to subdue his feelings so far as to treat Ebrington with something like civility. Not that he feared fighting; ridicule alone was the bugbear, which made him smother his rising anger till he had quite subdued it. My two beaux seemed bent on sitting each other out; the difficulty was to hit upon subjects for conversation. We had gone over that lame one, the weather, at least three times, and the dirty streets of Paris, the French cookery, &c. Ebrington now tried Bonaparte, then pictures, next statues: but Meyler knew no more about them all than the man in the moon, even if he had been disposed to converse, which was seldom the case at any time. At last, luckily for me, they both recollected that they were invited to a large dinner with some of the French royal family, and had only just time to dress. Meyler called me aside to entreat that I would receive him after dinner. I refused. Meyler was in a passion. I declared we must part, since those Frenchwomen had for ever spoiled the pleasure I used to feel in his society.
"Then I'll cut the dinner, and stay here all my life," said Meyler, quietly seating himself.
"We shall be too late, Meyler," called out Ebrington from the drawing-room.
Dreading some difference between these two gentlemen, I at length promised to receive Meyler in the evening, since that appeared to be my only chance of getting rid of him. I had this day invited a new and very pleasing female acquaintance to dine with me. She was an Italian widow, of exactly my own age, with the true, soft, Italian expression of countenance. A native of Naples, she had accompanied her son to Paris for the purpose of placing him in a celebrated college. He was a delicate, bilious-looking, interesting child of eleven years of age, with large, pensive black eyes, and thick black fringes to them. He wore, in common with all the youths of that institution, a large cocked hat, with a tight, military blue coat, faced with a lighter shade of the same colour. His appearance formed an odd contrast to that of my young nephew, George Woodcock, whom I had brought to Paris with me. George was a fair, fresh-coloured, remarkably strong, active boy, with white, thick curly hair, dressed in a light blue jacket and trousers, with a small ruff round his throat. He did not know one single word of French: nay, more, was such a complete John Bull as to declare upon his word and honour that he would take all the care he possibly could not to learn it. All he feared and dreaded was that the vile jargon should come to him by itself, in spite of all he could do to prevent it.
My Italian friend, whose Christian name was Rosabella, inhabited the same hotel with me. Her constant visitor was a most sanguine Bonapartist, who had formerly been employed by that emperor as ambassador to the court of Naples. I forget this man's name; but I remember he treated Rosabella with the affectionate kindness of a father. His manners were very refined; but so excessively formal and ceremonious that he used to put me into a fever. If he came up to a carriage during a heavy fall of rain, nothing we could say would induce him to put on his hat, and as to putting on his great coat in a room where I happened to be sitting, even at Rosabella's own house, he could not endure such an idea.