"The spare Sabine feast,
A radish and an egg,"
but perfectly simple, and perfectly elegant. The service was Sevre, and I observed on it the arms of the Duke of Orleans, combined with those of the Prince. It had been a present from the most luxurious, and most unfortunate, man on earth. And thus closed my first day in the exclusive world.
On the next evening, I had exchanged fresh breezes and bright skies for the sullen atmosphere and perpetual smoke of the great city; stars for lamps, and the gentle murmurs of the tide, for the turbid rush and heavy roar of the million of London. During the day, I had been abandoned sufficiently to my own meditations. For though we did not leave Brighton till noon, Marianne remained steadily, and I feared angrily, invisible. Mordecai, during the journey, consulted nothing but his tablets, and was evidently plunged in some huge financial speculation; and when he dropped me at a hotel in St James's, and hurried towards his den in the depths of the city, like a bat to its cave, I felt as solitary as if I had dropped from the moon.
But an English hotel is a cure for most of the sorrows of English life. The well-served table—the excellent sherry—a blazing fire, not at all unrequired in the first sharp evenings of our autumn—and the newspaper "just come in," are capital "medicines for the mind diseased." And like old Maréchal Louvois, who recommended roast pigeons as a cure for grief—observing that, "whenever he heard of the loss of any of his friends, he ordered a pair, and found himself always much comforted after eating them"—I was beginning to sink into that easy oblivion of the rules of life, which, without actual sleep, has all the placid enjoyment of slumber; when a voice pronounced my name, and I was startled and half suffocated by the embrace of a figure who rushed from an opposite box, and in a torrent of French poured out a torrent of raptures on my arriving in London.
When I contrived at last to disengage myself, I saw Lafontaine; but so hollow-cheeked and pale-visaged, that I could scarcely recognize my showy friend in the skeleton knight who stood gesticulating his ultra-happiness before me.
At length he drew, with a trembling touch and a glistening eye, from his bosom a letter, which he placed in my hand with a squeeze of eternal friendship. "Read," said he, "read, and then wonder, if you can, at my misery and my gratitude." The letter was from Mariamne, and certainly a very pretty one—gay and tender at once; gracefully alluding to some little fretfulness on her part, or his, I could scarcely tell which; but assuring him that all this was at an end—that she foreswore the world henceforth, and was quite his own. All this was expressed with an elegance which I was not quite prepared to find in the fair one, and with a tone of sincerity for which I was still less prepared; yet with the coquette in every line.
I should have been glad to see him at any time, but now I received him as a resource from solitude, or rather from those restless thoughts which made solitude so painful to me. Another bottle, perhaps, made me more sensitive, and him more willing to communicate; and before it was finished, he had opened his whole heart and emptied his letter-case, and I had consulted him on the _im_probabilities of my ever being able to succeed in the object which had so strangely, yet so totally, occupied all my feelings.
It was clear, from her correspondence, that his pretty Jewess had played him much as the angler plays the trout which he has secured on his hook. She evidently enjoyed the display of her skill in tormenting: every second letter was almost a declaration of breaking off the correspondence altogether; or, what was even worse, mingled with those menaces, there were from time to time allusions to my opinions, and quotations of my chance remarks, which, rather to my surprise, showed me that the proverb, "Les absens ont toujours tort," was true in more senses than one, and that the Frenchman occasionally lost ground by being fifty miles off. Once or twice it seemed to me that the little "betrothed" was evidently thinking of the error of precipitate vows, and was beginning to change her mind. But her last letter was a complete extinguisher of all my vanity, if it had ever been awakened. It was a curious mingling of poignancy and penitence; an acknowledgment of the pain which she felt in ever having given pain, and almost an entreaty that he would hasten his affairs in London, and return to Brighton, to "guard her against herself, once and for ever."
All this was quite as it should be; but the envelope contained an enormous postscript, of which I happened to be the theme. It was evidently written in another mood of mind; and except that passion is blind, and even refuses to see, when it might, I should probably have had another rencontre with the best swordsman in the Chevaux Legers. After speaking of me and my prospects in life, with an interest which reached at least to the full amount of friendship, the subject of my reveries came on the tapis. "My father and Mr Marston are on the point of going to town," said the postscript; "the latter to dream of Mademoiselle De Tourville, without the smallest hope of ever obtaining her hand. But I scarcely know what to think of him and his feelings—if feelings they can be called—which change like the fashions of the day, and at the mercy of all the triflers of the day; or like the butterfly fluttering round the garden, as if merely to show that it can flutter. This habit must make him for ever incapable of the generous devotedness of heart and truth of affection which I so much value in my 'friend.'" But here Lafontaine interfered, obviously through fear of my plunging into some discovery of my own demerits, which had not struck him on his first perusal; and I surrendered the letter, postscript and all, having first ascertained by a glance, that the former was dated at the very hour of the discovery of my unlucky stanzas to Clotilde, and the latter probably after the "fair penitent" had time to reflect on the matter, and let compassion make its way. Woman is a brilliant problem—but a problem after all.
A sudden trampling of cavalry and loud rush of carriages prevented my attempting the solution—at least for that sitting. All the guests crowded to the door. "His Majesty was going to Drury-Lane!" It was a performance "by command." The never-failing pulse in the foreign heart was touched. Lafontaine crushed his correspondence into his bosom, sprang on his feet, wiped his eyes of all their sorrows, and proposed that we should see the display. I was rejoiced to escape a topic too delicate for my handling. A carriage was called, and by a double fee we contrived, through many a hazard, in the narrowest and most dangerous defiles of any Christian city, to reach the stately entrance, just as the troopers were brushing away the mob from the steps, and the trumpets were outringing the cries of the orangewomen.