"No, she can be bought," thought Topsparkle, "she is vain and empty-headed. I can manage her—but he—I have been an idiot to keep him about me so long—and yet he has been useful. I have leant upon him—never knowing when I might need his help. I believed in his discretion, thought him secret as the grave; and now he has begun to blab to that silly wife of his, my confidence is destroyed for ever—all sense of security is gone."
CHAPTER IV.
"SMITE HIS HARD HEART, AND SHAKE HIS REPTILE SOUL."
With Vincenti's narrative fresh in his mind, and with a very lively recollection of Mr. Philter's story, Lord Lavendale had a keen desire to see something more of the French valet—or private secretary—who had been so diabolically subservient to his master's jealousy and revenge. There was of course always the possibility that Vincenti's theory and the floating suspicions of the neighbourhood might be without substantial foundation. People have had a knack of attributing all sudden or mysterious deaths to poison ever since the days of Sir Thomas Overbury—nor could Lord Essex cut his throat with his own razor without giving rise to an accusation of murder. In any case Lavendale was determined to see something more of the supposed tool, and to study him on his own ground, at the house in Poland Street.
It was very easy for him to get invited to supper at this favourite rendezvous. The Schemers' Club was extinct, and almost forgotten. It had expired with Wharton's disgrace and exile; and Wharton himself, the brilliant orator, the unscrupulous turncoat, the prodigal and profligate, was a wanderer in the wilds of Catalonia, ruined, broken, and dying.
There were other bloods of the same kidney, lesser lights in the firmament of pleasure, and one of these, Sir Randal Hetherington, invited Lavendale to a card party at the house in Poland Street.
"'Tis a snug retreat, where a gentleman can receive his friends without being stared at by the chance mob of a chocolate house; 'tis more secluded even than a club, and has the advantage of admitting feminine company," he said; "and Fétis has one of the best cooks in London. A very clever fellow, Fétis, monstrously superior to his station—knows more about foreign politics than Peterborough or Horace Walpole; I have sometimes suspected that he is one of old Fleury's spies."
Lavendale went, supped, and drank deep of the champagne which Mr. Fétis supplied to his patrons at a guinea a bottle, but not so deep as to lose a word that was spoken or a single indication which could enlighten him as to the character of his host, who waited upon the little party in person during supper, and afterwards sat down to cards with them, received upon a footing which was more familiar than friendship, something after the kind of condescending jocose intimacy which obtained between the princes and court jesters of old.
Fétis under such conditions was an altogether different person from Mr. Topsparkle's sedate and silent valet. He had a Rabelaisian wit which kept the table in a roar, had a fund of French anecdotes, short, sharp, and pungent, àpropos to every turn of the conversation. He had been carefully and piously educated in his early youth, and out of the theological learning acquired in those days was able to furnish an inexhaustible flow of blasphemy.