KING
O fearful price for victory! Add thereto
All those I lost at Walchere.—A crime
Lay there!... I stood on Chatham’s being sent:
It wears on me, till I am unfit to live!
WILLIS [aside to the others]
Don’t let him get on that Walcheren business. There will be another
outbreak. Heberden, please ye talk to him. He fancies you most.
HEBERDEN
I’ll tell him some of the brilliant feats of the battle. [He goes
and talks to the KING.]
WILLIS [to the rest]
Well, my inside begins to cry cupboard. I had breakfast early. We
have enough particulars now to face the Queen’s Council with, I
should say, Sir Henry?
HALFORD
Yes.—I want to get back to town as soon as possible to-day. Mrs
Siddons has a party at her house at Westbourne to-night, and all the
world is going to be there.
BAILLIE
Well, I am not. But I have promised to take some friends to Vauxhall,
as it is a grand gala and fireworks night. Miss Farren is going to
sing “The Canary Bird.”—The Regent’s fete, by the way, is postponed
till the nineteenth, on account of this relapse. Pretty grumpy he
was at having to do it. All the world will be THERE, sure!
WILLIS
And some from the Shades, too, of the fair, sex.—Well, here comes
Heberden. He has pacified his Majesty nicely. Now we can get away.
[The physicians withdraw softly, and the scene is covered.]
SCENE VI
LONDON. CARLTON HOUSE AND THE STREETS ADJOINING
[It is a cloudless midsummer evening, and as the west fades the
stars beam down upon the city, the evening-star hanging like a
jonquil blossom. They are dimmed by the unwonted radiance which
spreads around and above Carlton House. As viewed from aloft the
glare rises through the skylights, floods the forecourt towards
Pall Mall, and kindles with a diaphanous glow the huge tents in
the gardens that overlook the Mall. The hour has arrived of the
Prince Regent’s festivity.
A stream of carriages and sedan-chairs, moving slowly, stretches
from the building along Pall Mall into Piccadilly and Bond Street,
and crowds fill the pavements watching the bejewelled and feathered
occupants. In addition to the grand entrance inside the Pall Mall
colonnade there is a covert little “chair-door” in Warwick Street
for sedans only, by which arrivals are perceived to be slipping in
almost unobserved.]
SPIRIT IRONIC
What domiciles are those, of singular expression,
Whence no guest comes to join the gemmed procession;
That, west of Hyde, this, in the Park-side Lane,
Each front beclouded like a mask of pain?