To-day Fétis was inwardly impatient to be gone, yet was far too well bred to betray his impatience by the faintest indication. He seemed rather to linger, as if loth to depart, arranged the gold and ivory fittings of the nécessaire with nicest care, gave a finishing touch to patch and pulvilio boxes, perfume bottles, and tortoiseshell combs, and it was only when Mr. Topsparkle dismissed him that he gave a sliding bow and glided gracefully from the room, as elegant in every detail of his costume as his master, but with the subdued and sober colouring which implied gravity of manners and humility of station.
When he was gone, Mr. Topsparkle rose from the sofa where he had been reclining in an attitude of luxurious repose, and began to pace the room, full of thought.
"I don't like the rascal's manner," he said to himself. "He is too bold, presumes too much upon his usefulness in the present, and"—after a thoughtful pause—"in the past. He has become a horse leech, bleeds me of thousands with an insufferable audacity. Yet, after all, 'tis hardly worth troubling about. The mere amount in itself is scarce worth a thought to a man of my means, though I might endow a bishopric on a less income, and get some credit for my generosity. To maintain a profligate and gamester, a pander to fashionable follies, only because he has the art of laying on a cosmetic and pencilling an eyebrow to a higher degree than anyone else! Yet after all 'tis something to have one's toilet performed skilfully, and a blunderer would put me in a fever every time he touched me. Why should I grudge the fellow his wages? he is as necessary to me as Dubois was to the Duke, and he would accept no lesser recompense than to be prime minister, and have all the threads of state intrigue in his hands. This fellow of mine is an unambitious, innocuous scoundrel. He only preys upon my purse."
He rang for his footman, one of those splendid functionaries being always in attendance in a three-cornered lobby or ante-room outside Mr. Topsparkle's study. This chamber was an oak-panelled well, lighted from a skylight, cold in winter and suffocating in summer; but the lacquey, sitting on a velvet-covered bench with his silken legs stretched out before him, was supposed to enjoy a life of luxurious idleness.
"My chocolate and the papers," ordered Mr. Topsparkle. "Stay, you can put on some logs before you go. 'Tis odiously cold this morning."
He went back to his sofa, which was in front of the fire. The chocolate was brought almost immediately, as if by magic, most of Mr. Topsparkle's desires being divined beforehand and duly prepared for, lest he should complain, like the late French King, that he had "almost waited."
The footman wheeled a little table beside the sofa, and arranged his master's pillows, while a second attendant spirit brought the silver-gilt chocolate service and the fashionable journals, those thin and meagre papers which in the absence of parliamentary debates eked out their scanty public news with much private scandal, announcements of intended marriages that never came off, hints at reported elopements under the thin veil of initials, theatrical criticism, and quotations from some lordling's satiric poem, for in those days almost all lordlings had an itch for satire, and fancied they could write. If the verses appeared anonymously, were fairly metrical and particularly spiteful, they were generally debited to Pope or Lady Mary, and the anonymous lordling went about for a week or two rubbing his hands and chuckling and telling all the town under the seal of secrecy that he was the author of that remarkable lampoon which had just convulsed society.
Mr. Topsparkle sipped his chocolate, and tried to read his papers: but this morning he found himself in no humour for public news—the last letter from the Continent—the last highway robbery in Denmark Street, St. Giles—or even for the more appetising private scandal, about the Lady at Richmond Court who had suddenly retired from society, but was not in a wasting sickness, or the celebrated Duchess, once a famous beauty, whose housemaids had left her in a body because the ducal board wages were two shillings a week under the customary allowance. Mr. Topsparkle's mind was too intently occupied upon his own business to compassionate the Richmond lady or to speculate whether the anonymous duchess was the mighty Sarah of Blenheim, or her mad Grace of Buckinghamshire, both alike notorious for pride and parsimony.
He flung the journals aside with an oath.
"These scribblers are the stupidest scoundrels alive," he muttered, "there is not an ounce of wit in the whole fraternity. O, for the days of Steele and Addison, when one was sure of pleasant reading with one's breakfast! Their trumpery imitators give the outward form of the essay without its inward spirit."