"I want to be so I can sing my part," said J. B. good-humouredly. "It's hard to sing on top of a big dinner like this, you know, Ted. Better look out, hadn't you?—For Heaven's sake, somebody tell Huddesley not to give him any more!" he added in a whisper to his neighbours, and tried to catch the servant's eye. But Huddesley was bending all his energies to scooping up with exemplary method and expedition the mess of syrup and broken glass; it seemed impossible to attract his attention. And in another tour of the table he filled Teddy's glass again, no one remembering, or perhaps noticing at all, J. B.'s telegrams of consternation. "Well, damn it, I'm not his keeper!" said the latter to himself, in a rage. "Everybody's forgotten that Ted's pretty near the whole show, and they're letting him drink himself blind drunk. He won't be able to stand up after this—I've done my best anyhow," and in a spirit of savage recklessness, he swallowed his own champagne at one gulp, and turned to find Huddesley at his elbow with another bottle. Caution returned upon him.
"Say, Huddesley, didn't you see me shake my head when you gave Mr. Johns that last glass? He's had all that's good for him already. Now you quit it, you hear me?" said J. B., conscious of some confusion in his own head where his last glass was apparently hurrying to and fro uneasily. He spoke with huge severity; the more as Huddesley met his eye with disconcerting intelligence.
"Oh, Lord love you, Mr. Breckinridge, 'e ain't 'ad enough to 'urt," said he soothingly. "Hi won't let 'im get hout o' hand, sir."
J. B. all at once found himself standing up. Why was he standing up? The occasion somehow seemed to require it.
"You mind what I tell you. He's got a very impartont port—I mean a perry veportant imp—I say a very important-part-in-the-play-and-I-don't-want-him-to-be-too-drunk-to-speakstinctly," said J. B. painstakingly.
"That's all right, Mr. Taylor, you just sit right down in your chair—it's a nice chair; you just sit right down, now won't you?" said Huddesley still soothingly—too soothingly by far to suit J. B.
"Don't you give me any impudence," he said darkly. He sat down surveying the assembly with scorn shading into pity. He wasn't drunk, anyhow. But now Doctor Vardaman had risen in his place at the head of the table, and was asking silence at the top of his lungs—not the best way in the world of getting it, to the mind of a disinterested onlooker, but, as nobody was so far gone yet as not to heed the host of the evening, he was finally obeyed, after Teddy, under the mistaken impression that he was being called on to give his justly famous rendition of the farmer about to kill a turkey, had been quelled.
"Gentlemen," said the doctor, casting a look of some anxiety over his table-full, "let us not forget, that, however much we may be enjoying the present hour—I speak for myself"—here a number of voices assured him heartily, "So are we! You bet!" and so on—"I say, gentlemen, we must not forget that time is passing, and we are due for the entertainment of our friends at nine o'clock. It would never do, I think, to keep the ladies waiting. And, having their convenience in view, I propose that we drink a final glass—" said the doctor, unable to avoid a slight stress on the adjective—"a final glass to the success of the performance and adjourn. Reversing what seems to have been the practice of Scriptural times, I will offer you a very rare and choice old vintage—you will pardon the conceit that calls attention to its excellence—a wine that was laid down by my father, gentlemen, in eighteen-fifteen, the year of the battle of New Orleans, the Waterloo year, and, as it happens, the year of my birth. He obtained it—for it has its history—of a Dutch merchant in Cadiz, and we have since called it, not knowing in truth what its real name should be, Mynheer Van der Cuyp's wine. Huddesley——"
Here Huddesley stepped forward, and set before the doctor with something of a flourish two thick black bottles, dusty as to the shoulders, with the corks drawn, and a tray of the smallest variety of glasses—rather miserly provision, it might appear, for such a company, but Doctor Vardaman, not without considerable show of embarrassment, proceeded to explain: "I—I find myself obliged to warn you, gentlemen, inhospitable as it seems, that Mynheer Van der Cuyp's wine, what with age and the richness of its ingredients, is of an unexampled potency. It is at once smooth and heady, and—and I would not have you taken at unawares. In short, boys," he added earnestly, abandoning his formal manner, "it's the very deuce to go to one's head, and you all have to be careful. Huddesley——" Again that invaluable person began to circulate.
Doctor Vardaman did not get through his little speech (which he delivered in a style quaintly reminiscent of the after-dinner orators of his youth, in an attitude with one hand beneath his coat-tails) without some uproarious interruptions; the momentary pause that followed had the surprising effect of clearing the brain of at least one in his audience. Whatever the others felt, J. B. suddenly realised, as he afterwards put it, that "he had reached his limit." He knew when he'd had enough, and the trepidation visible in the doctor's face as Mynheer Van der Cuyp's wine went on its devastating way, was repeated in his own. If the truth were known, the old gentleman had been congratulating himself on bringing off what he considered a tolerably clever coup to end a sitting which promised disaster to some of the company; and doing it without offence. But alas! for the best-laid plans of mice and men! The catastrophe had occurred; some, perhaps most of the men were a little the worse for liquor; a few minutes of cool night air would cure them; but Teddy Johns, their prime performer, the peg upon which hung all their hopes of success, Teddy was hopelessly drunk. No night air, no applications of crushed ice and wet towels would cure him. Teddy was very good-natured; he sang, he winked, he joked, he told stories, he lavished endearments on his "frenge." Even in his worry, the doctor found time for the reflection that wine in, truth out is the most solid of maxims; liquor puts nothing into a man's nature that was not there already, it can but reveal him naked; and if he will be a brute in his cups, it is odds but you shall find him a brute at heart out of them. There was nothing brutal about poor Teddy; you could no more be angry with him than with a child. Too late the doctor regretted his hospitality, too late he lamented the love of good cheer and youthful company that had prompted him to this inordinate abundance. He was in the frame of mind to write a temperance tract; and a sarcastic grin fled across his features as he pictured what that celebrity of his earlier years, Mr. T. S. Arthur, would have made of the scene—the moral he would have drawn therefrom.