There are few sorrows so stubborn as to resist the united influence of wine, a circle of select friends, and a season of prescriptive gaiety. Even those pinching troubles of life, which come home to a man’s own bosom, will light up a smile, in such moments, at the beaming countenances and jocund looks of all the rest of the world; while your mere sympathetic or sentimental distress gives way, like the inconsolable affliction of a widow of twenty closely besieged by a lover of thirty.
A decorous sigh or two, a few becoming ejaculations, and an instructive observation upon the uncertainty of life, made up the sum of tender posthumous “offerings to the manes of poor George Fortescue,” as they proceeded to discharge the more important duties for which they had met. By the time the third glass of champagne had gone round, in addition to sundry potations of fine old hock, and “capital madeira,” they had ceased to discover anything so very pathetic in the inequality of the two sides of the table, or so melancholy in their crippled number of eleven.
The rest of the evening passed off to their hearts’ content. Conversation was briskly kept up amid the usual fire of pun, repartee, anecdote, politics, toasts, healths, jokes, broad laughter, erudite disquisitions upon the vintage of the wines they were drinking, and an occasional song. Towards twelve o’clock, when it might be observed that they emptied their glasses with less symptoms of palating the quality of what they quaffed, and filled them again with less anxiety as to which bottle or decanter they laid hold of, they gradually waxed moral and tender; sensibility began to ooze out; “Poor George Fortescue!” was once more remembered; those who could count, sighed to think there were only eleven of them; and those who could see, felt the tears come into their eyes, as they dimly noted the inequality of the two sides of the table. They all agreed, at parting, however, that they had never passed such a happy day, congratulated each other upon having instituted so delightful a meeting, and promised to be punctual to their appointment the ensuing evening, when they were to celebrate the new-year, whose entrance they had welcomed in bumpers of claret, as the watchman bawled “past twelve!” beneath the window.
They met accordingly; and their gaiety was without any alloy or drawback. It was only the first time of their assembling after the death of “poor George Fortescue,” that made the recollection of it painful; for, though but a few hours had intervened, they now took their seats at the table as if eleven had been their original number, and as if all were there that had been ever expected to be there.
It is thus in everything. The first time a man enters a prison—the first book an author writes—the first painting an artist executes—the first battle a general wins—nay, the first time a rogue is hanged (for a rotten rope may provide a second performance, even of that ceremony, with all its singleness of character), differ inconceivably from their first repetition. There is a charm, a spell, a novelty, a freshness, a delight, inseparable from the first experience (hanging always excepted, be it remembered), which no art or circumstance can impart to the second. And it is the same in all the darker traits of life. There is a degree of poignancy and anguish in the first assaults of sorrow, which is never found afterwards. Ask the weeping widow, who, “like Niobe all tears,” follows her fifth husband to the grave, and she will tell you that the first time she performed that melancholy office, it was with at least five times more lamentations than when she last discharged it. In every case, it is simply that the first fine edge of our feelings has been taken off, and that it can never be restored.
Several years had elapsed, and our eleven friends kept up their double anniversaries, as they might aptly enough be called, with scarcely any perceptible change. But, alas! there came one dinner at last, which was darkened by a calamity they never expected to witness, for on that very day their friend, companion, brother almost, was hanged! Yes! Stephen Rowland, the wit, the oracle, the life of their little circle, had, on the morning of that day, forfeited his life upon a public scaffold, for having made one single stroke of his pen in a wrong place. In other words, a bill of exchange which passed into his hands for £700 passed out of them for £1700; he having drawn the important little prefix to the hundreds, and the bill being paid at the banker’s without examining the words of it. The forgery was discovered,—brought home to Rowland,—and though the greatest interest was used to obtain a remission of the fatal penalty (the particular female favourite of the prime-minister himself interfering), poor Stephen Rowland was hanged. Everybody pitied him; and nobody could tell why he did it. He was not poor; he was not a gambler; he was not a speculator; but phrenology settled it. The organ of acquisitiveness was discovered in his head, after his execution, as large as a pigeon’s egg. He could not help it.
It would be injustice to the ten to say, that even wine, friendship, and a merry season, could dispel the gloom which pervaded this dinner. It was agreed beforehand that they should not allude to the distressing and melancholy theme; and having thus interdicted the only thing which really occupied all their thoughts, the natural consequence was, that silent contemplation took the place of dismal discourse, and they separated long before midnight. An embarrassing restraint, indeed, pervaded the little conversation which grew up at intervals. The champagne was not in good order, but no one liked to complain of its being ropy. A beautiful painting of Vandyke which was in the room, became a topic of discussion. They who thought it was hung in a bad place, shrunk from saying so; and not one ventured to speak of the execution of that great master. Their host was having the front of his house repaired, and at any other time he would have cautioned them, when they went away, as the night was very dark, to take care of the scaffold; but no, they might have stumbled right and left before he would have pronounced that word, or told them not to break their necks. One, in particular, even abstained from using his customary phrase, “this is a drop of good wine;” and another forbore to congratulate the friend who sat next him, and who had been married since he last saw him, because he was accustomed on such occasions to employ figurative language and talk of the holy noose of wedlock.
Some fifteen years had now glided away since the fate of poor Rowland, and the ten remained; but the stealing hand of time had written sundry changes in most legible characters. Raven locks had become grizzled—two or three heads had not as many locks altogether as may be reckoned in a walk of half a mile along the Regent’s Canal—one was actually covered with a brown wig—the crow’s-feet were visible in the corner of the eye—good old port and warm madeira carried it against hock, claret, red burgundy, and champagne—stews, hashes, and ragouts, grew into favour—crusts were rarely called for to relish the cheese after dinner—conversation was less boisterous, and it turned chiefly upon politics and the state of the funds, or the value of landed property—apologies were made for coming in thick shoes and warm stockings—the doors and windows were more carefully provided with list and sand-bags—the fire more in request—and a quiet game of whist filled up the hours that were wont to be devoted to drinking, singing, and riotous merriment. Two rubbers, a cup of coffee, and at home by eleven o’clock, was the usual cry, when the fifth or sixth glass had gone round after the removal of the cloth. At parting, too, there was now a long ceremony in the hall, buttoning up great-coats, tying on woollen comforters, fixing silk handkerchiefs over the mouth and up to the ears, and grasping sturdy walking-canes to support unsteady feet.
Their fiftieth anniversary came, and death had indeed been busy. One had been killed by the overturning of the mail, in which he had taken his place in order to be present at the dinner, having purchased an estate in Monmouthshire, and retired thither with his family. Another had undergone the terrific operation for the stone, and expired beneath the knife—a third had yielded up a broken spirit two years after the loss of an only-surviving and beloved daughter—a fourth was carried off in a few days by a cholera morbus—a fifth had breathed his last the very morning he obtained a judgment in his favour by the Lord Chancellor, which had cost him his last shilling nearly to get, and which, after a litigation of eighteen years, declared him the rightful possessor of ten thousand a-year—ten minutes after he was no more. A sixth had perished by the hand of a midnight assassin, who broke into his house for plunder, and sacrificed the owner of it, as he grasped convulsively a bundle of Exchequer bills, which the robber was drawing from beneath his pillow, where he knew they were every night placed for better security.
Four little old men, of withered appearance and decrepit walk, with cracked voices, and dim, rayless eyes, sat down, by the mercy of Heaven (as they themselves tremulously declared), to celebrate, for the fiftieth time, the first day of the year—to observe the frolic compact which, half a century before, they had entered into at the Star and Garter at Richmond! Eight were in their graves! The four that remained stood upon its confines. Yet they chirped cheerily over their glass, though they could scarcely carry it to their lips, if more than half full; and cracked their jokes, though they articulated their words with difficulty, and heard each other with still greater difficulty. They mumbled, they chattered, they laughed (if a sort of strangled wheezing might be called a laugh); and when the wines sent their icy blood in warmer pulse through their veins, they talked of their past as if it were but a yesterday that had slipped by them,—and of their future, as if it were a busy century that lay before them.