As Clive lay awake revolving the strange incidents of the day, and speculating upon the tragedy in which he had been suddenly called to take a certain part, a sure presentiment told him that his own happy holiday was come to an end, and that the clouds and storm which he had always somehow foreboded, were about to break and obscure this brief pleasant period of sunshine. He rose at a very early hour, flung his windows open, looked out no doubt towards those other windows in the neighbouring hotel, where he may have fancied he saw a curtain stirring, drawn by a hand that every hour now he longed more to press. He turned back into his chamber with a sort of groan, and surveyed some of the relics of the last night’s little feast, which still remained on the table. There were the champagne-flasks which poor Jack Belsize had emptied, the tall seltzer-water bottle, from which the gases had issued and mingled with the hot air of the previous night’s talk; glasses with dregs of liquor, ashes of cigars, or their black stumps, strewing the cloth; the dead men, the burst guns of yesterday’s battle. Early as it was, his neighbour J. J had been up before him. Clive could hear him singing as was his wont when the pencil went well, and the colours arranged themselves to his satisfaction over his peaceful and happy work.
He pulled his own drawing-table to the window, set out his board and colour-box, filled a great glass from the seltzer-water bottle, drank some of the vapid liquor, and plunged his brushes in the rest, with which he began to paint. The work all went wrong. There was no song for him over his labour; he dashed brush and board aside after a while, opened his drawers, pulled out his portmanteaus from under the bed, and fell to packing mechanically. J. J. heard the noise from the next room, and came in smiling, with a great painting-brush in his mouth.
“Have the bills in, J. J.,” says Clive. “Leave your cards on your friends, old boy; say good-bye to that pretty little strawberry-girl whose picture you have been doing; polish it off to-day, and dry the little thing’s tears. I read P.P.C. in the stars last night, and my familiar spirit came to me in a vision, and said, ‘Clive, son of Thomas, put thy travelling-boots on.’”
Lest any premature moralist should prepare to cry fie against the good, pure-minded little J. J., I hereby state that his strawberry-girl was a little village maiden of seven years old, whose sweet little picture a bishop purchased at the next year’s Exhibition.
“Are you going already?” cries J. J., removing the bit out of his mouth. “I thought you had arranged parties for a week to come, and that the princesses and the duchesses had positively forbidden the departure of your lordship!”
“We have dallied at Capua long enough,” says Clive; “and the legions have the route for Rome. So wills Hannibal, the son of Hasdrubal.”
“The son of Hasdrubal is quite right,” his companion answered; “the sooner we march the better. I have always said it; I will get all the accounts in. Hannibal has been living like a voluptuous Carthaginian prince. One, two, three champagne-bottles! There will be a deuce of a bill to pay.”
“Ah! there will be a deuce of a bill to pay,” says Clive, with a groan whereof J. J. knew the portent; for the young men had the confidence of youth one in another. Clive was accustomed to pour out his full heart to any crony who was near him; and indeed had he spoken never a word, his growing attachment to his cousin was not hard to see. A hundred times, and with the glowing language and feelings of youth, with the fire of his twenty years, with the ardour of a painter, he had spoken of her and described her. Her magnanimous simplicity, her courage and lofty scorn, her kindness towards her little family, her form, her glorious colour of rich carnation and dazzling white, her queenly grace when quiescent and in motion, had constantly formed the subjects of this young gentleman’s ardent eulogies. As he looked at a great picture or statue, as the Venus of Milo, calm and deep, unfathomably beautiful as the sea from which she sprung; as he looked at the rushing Aurora of the Rospigliosi, or the Assumption of Titian, more bright and glorious than sunshine, or that divine Madonna and divine Infant, of Dresden, whose sweet faces must have shone upon Raphael out of heaven; his heart sang hymns, as it were, before these gracious altars; and, somewhat as he worshipped these masterpieces of his art, he admired the beauty of Ethel.
J. J. felt these things exquisitely after his manner, and enjoyed honest Clive’s mode of celebration and rapturous fioriture of song; but Ridley’s natural note was much gentler, and he sang his hymns in plaintive minors. Ethel was all that was bright and beautiful but—but she was engaged to Lord Kew. The shrewd kind confidant used gently to hint the sad fact to the impetuous hero of this piece. The impetuous hero knew this quite well. As he was sitting over his painting-board he would break forth frequently, after his manner, in which laughter and sentiment were mingled, and roar out with all the force of his healthy young lungs—
“But her heart it is another’s, she never—can—be—mine;”