Mrs. Borrodale was a frivolous old lady of some forty years, whose wealth, vanity, and frequent visits to Bond Street marked her out as a desirable client to the astute Rachel.
“You’ve won the heart of a great lord,” was her greeting one day, “who desires to see you in your natural beauty.”
Mrs. Borrodale, having first blushed through her enamel, was not long in consenting, and having stipulated for a subdued light, and that the “view” should be through a curtain, proceeded to be enamelled from head to foot. On a given day she posed in all the beauty of her birthday suit, and Lord Ranelagh, who was the reputed admirer, peeped through a slit in the tapestry—and, let us hope, then fled.
His lordship, it may be added, eventually died a bachelor. The very title is extinct, and the enamelled old Venus never assumed a coronet. After this, the old sinner was known as “Peeping Tom,” and the foal by a thoroughbred stallion of repute, Peeping Tom (which, however, never attained any position on the Turf), was christened Ranelagh.
Incredible as it may appear, this silly old woman capped her indiscretion by joining in the prosecution instituted by the stockbroker’s wife, and so published to a gaping world what might have better been left to the imagination.
Rachel has, it is currently reported, two sons at the present moment practising as solicitors under high-sounding names, who not long ago wriggled out of a nasty case by the skin of their teeth, whilst their less acute Christian colleagues suffered the penalty attendant on blackmailing.
But the Rachel establishment was by no means the only type that flourished in the long-ago sixties by pandering to human frailty, and the premises occupied by Madame Osch, situated at the corner of Piccadilly and St. James’s Street—and now, like Babylon, with not one stone standing upon another—could have told some curious tales of wards in Chancery and Hebrew jewellers, and of Tommy and John, and of how Tommy was arrested as he started for Monte Carlo, and how John, smelling a rat, evaded ill effects; but the recitation would only bore a twentieth-century reader, for human nature then is the same nature as now, and what flourished then in one shape still flourishes in another, and the only reflection worthy of consideration is that, if these things were done in the green tree, what is being done in the dry?
CHAPTER XXII.
REMINISCENCES OF THE PURPLE.
The death of the Duke of Cambridge recalled many instances of the kindly nature of the old warrior. Abused and ridiculed by the ignorant and unwashed for actions—more or less imaginary—that he was supposed to have been guilty of in the Crimea, it is established on the testimony of eye-witnesses that no man showed more personal bravery at Inkerman than the late illustrious Duke. Oblivious to danger, and literally wandering in and out amongst the dense masses of Russians, he seemed to bear a charmed life, and if on any occasion he selected an umbrella—which is by no means admitted—what greater proof of absolute indifference to danger? As well might one accuse Fred Burnaby of cowardice for confronting the Dervishes in the Soudan with a simple blackthorn. But royalty has its penalties as well as its advantages, and if the grandson of George III. was subject to intense excitement verging on delirium under exceptionally trying circumstances, let us be fair, gentlemen, and give the bluff old warrior his dues.
In the zenith of his career, so unable was his Highness to refuse almost any personal request, that it was found necessary to chain a bulldog of the most pronounced Peninsular type on the very threshold of the Commander-in-Chief’s office.