'At last I met Providence in the form of Dan McCarthy, of Doonas. "Hyacinth," said he, "do you know anything of boxing?" I was puzzled, for I wasn't sure but he meant boxing the compass, but I found I had got into the wrong box there. The long and short of it was, a friend of his had asked him to look up a smart man with a ready pen and a vigorous imagination, who would undertake to write racy accounts of some of the renowned fisticuff fights of old, for a publican's newspaper. That's what I am doing now, God forgive me! The pay is good, but the work does not like me, I am wise in the "upper-cut," and am known to every "scrapper" in the "drums" of the East and West End, and all the rest; in short, I am comparatively comfortable, but completely demoralized. When you come over next, I can take you, perhaps, to a "merry little mill," for I am always in the "know."
'Don't come, though, an you're sensible, in such weather as we have now. Fog! fog!! fog!!! How I envy you the clear skies of the one city in the world outside Ireland worth living in—wicked, delightful Paris. D——n the London fog! It caught me by the larynx and laid me by the heels three days last November. It steals on you like a garrotter, throttles you, chokes your lungs, clogs your fancy, clouds your good-humour, and sets your drunken landlady stealing your coal by the scuttle and your gin by the quartern.
'Your affectionate coz,
'HYACINTH BLAKE.
'P.S.—And so it is after Bidelia Blake you'd be asking, Mr. Slyboots? Faith! she has changed her name. Bidelia, or "Biddy," as we knew her, transmogrified herself into Beatrice when she came over here. Not satisfied with that, she has altered her surname to Clarke. A fine, handsome, wealthy, warm-hearted husband he is, and no fool. He's a deal better than Biddy deserved. They have a mansion in Mayfair, and I have the run of the house, but I seldom go there, as I do not wish to make myself too cheap. I met them in the Park yesterday. Dash my buttons! as Li-Chung, the Chinaman, says, if you'd recognise Biddy. She was rosy with health and spirits (Nature's, not Kinahan's), and burning with jewels. I don't know if her husband chains her up at night, but she had a something like a brass dog-collar round her neck. And her wool—I believe you got a tress of it once—is not black now, but yellow—the effect, I am seriously afraid, not so much of London sunshine or London fog, as of golden hairwash. You had better ask her for another tress.
'H. B.'
O'Hara's face, as he perused this letter, would have served as a model for an actor charged with the duty of reading a similar epistle on the stage. He liked his cousin, but he did not seek to conceal his impatience—nobody else was present—at Blake's recital of his meanderings in quest of a social position. The letter was humorous here and there, but he did not appreciate the humour. He wanted to hear of Bidelia; and when he did hear of her, in the abrupt way Hyacinth put it in his postscript,—well, his face was a study. He coloured, he re-read the passage, he clutched the paper tightly in his palm, he laughed, he sat down in his arm-chair, he read the postscript for the third time, and then he lit his pipe.
It is an excellent plan to light one's pipe in moments of vexation.
O'Hara was vexed, more vexed than sorry. He puffed and thought, and thought and puffed, and knit his brows, and occasionally took the amber mouthpiece from between his lips and grinned in a scornful fashion, like the baffled villain of tragedy in a show-booth. He stood up at length, took the paper in which the tress of hair was confined, did not kiss it as his wont was, but flung it into the stove, where it lit up, as if it were well preserved in pomatum, crackled crisply, flared, and left a sharp ugly smell of singed goose behind it. O'Hara thought there was a peculiar repulsiveness in the odour. It was the result of his frame of mind. The perfumed locks of Cleopatra would have smelled as foul. The laws of nature are not affected by our prejudices. The body of the hero putrefies by the same process as the body of Hodge.
O'Hara then sat down and set himself a-thinking anew. This was the sum of his thoughts; being literary, they wandered into quotation:
'"Frailty, thy name is woman!"' (Shakespeare; this is good to begin with!) 'Bidelia never had an ounce of sentiment in her. D——n sentiment! I don't regret her. Pshaw! not I; in fact, I'm pleased—pleased, no, rejoiced, that she's well married. What's this Noll says? "She who makes her husband happy leaves nowhere in the running the novel-reading hussy, whose sole aim is to murder mankind with shafts from her quiver."' (This is better: substantially, it is Goldsmith, but it has been very, very queerly committed to memory. Poor fellow! his nerves must have been unstrung.) 'To Connaught with Bidelia I'll marry the Frenchwoman through spite. I'll throw myself at her feet next week, or next year—I'll swear I love, I do love her—that is to say, I do not dislike her—and I'll send Missus Beatrice Clarke—oh, the short-sightedness of some girls!—an invitation to the ceremony and the wedding-breakfast to follow, with a promise of a bit of bride-cake to cheer her if she is debarred by previous engagements from the pleasure of accepting my very kind invitation. Good! "Remove far from me vanity and lies: give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with food convenient for me."' (Holy Writ; this is getting serious, friend O'Hara.) 'Caroline was evidently designed for me by nature. My mind is made up.'