You will remember perhaps that in our first Chapter we caught Beau Ripple in undignified pursuit of a button. We agreed how rash it was for Gods and Goddesses to discover their anatomy to mortals, and here is the very fact being forced home to Mr. Charles Lovely, an understudy to divinity.
Our hero went on his way, fortified against one ambition.
Presently he passed by the lodgings of Mrs. Courteen as the door was being opened to let out the satellite Moon and the appropriately named Tarry. The pair of them paused on the steps to ascertain the state of the weather and discuss the several games of ombre which they had played for mother-o'-pearl counters.
"Gadslife!" murmured Charles, "Ombre for counters! Then is great Anna really dead?"
The expensive lodgings of the Earl of Vanity towered above him and he heard my Lord, with a flowered dressing-gown wrapped about his skinny shanks, d----g his daughter's eyes for being so late at old Mrs. Frillface's quadrille party. Farther down the Crescent was old Mrs. Frillface's house, and outside stood two handsome chairs with the chairmen fast asleep on the cushions, soon to be wakened from the frowsy damask by Mrs. Frillface's bloated footman.
And so on past all the lodgings of Curtain Wells.
There was young Miss Kitcat who was really twenty-nine and single only because, so they said, no one would marry her since that affair with Sir Hector Macwrath, the young, Nova Scotia Baronet, more than ten years ago. To be sure, the matter was never rightly explained, and everybody excused the poor child because her mother never set her the best of examples, and as for her father, everybody knew that he thought of nothing but Mdlle. Dancaboute who had such trim ankles and spent so many guineas and even wore the Kitcat rubies at a Ranelagh supper-party. So Sir Hector married the lean heiress of Lord Glew, the chief of the MacStikkeys, and Miss Kitcat remained young Miss Kitcat for many a long day. There she was, swaying sleepily to the motion of the chair while now and then her hair would catch in a splinter of wood as the first chairman stumbled over a loose cobble.
There was little Pinhorn whose father was a ship's chandler at Rye, but had made money as fast as money could be made over the War commissariat; there he was, strutting home from my Lady Bunbutter's, quite inlaid with diamonds, and with a swinging fob near as big as his own bullet head.
Charles gave him a curt good-night as he passed, and wondered to himself how little Pinhorn ever dared challenge Captain Lagge to walk with him in Curtain Meads. Unluckily the Beau had heard of the meeting and went to remonstrate with the gallant Captain.
"What did you say?" asked the Beau.
"I said I would gladly cut the claws of every harpy on the transport," answered the sailor.
"Well, so you may, sir," said Mr. Ripple, "but by Heaven! you shan't do so here."
Next morning the Captain had his orders and was shot through the heart in the Carthagena business. Poor Captain Lagge, he had a wife and a little maid waiting for him in the prettiest cottage between Pevensey and Brighthelmstone.
Charles passed many others whose small histories, could I recount them, would fill this book to overflowing. For each one he could recall some unsavoury episode, some mean adventure that made its hero contemptible.
"Oddslife," thought Charles, "was ever Society so corrupt, so insincere, so entirely damnable?"
By this time he was back in the High Street after a long circuit, and just as he was thinking of crossing the road to reach the _Blue Boar_ and bed, he noticed a candle was burning in his bookseller's little back parlour.
"I'll inquire after the sale of my poems," he decided, and without more ado hammered loudly on the door of the shop. Presently in answer to his continuous rappings, a foxy-faced old young man with a premature stoop and cloaths both squalid and ill-cut, shuffled through the shop and asked who was there.
"A mendicant poet," cried Charles.
"Be d----d," muttered the foxy-faced man, preparing to go back.
"Come, Mr. Virgin, you'll open to me, Charles Lovely?"
"Go away, Mr. Lovely, go away. I'm very busy--very busy indeed. I never remember when I was so busy before, so full of business."
"So much the better," cried Charles jumping up to smite the signboard that hung over the door till it swung round on its hinges with a rattle and a squeak.
"Now don't be rough, Mr. Lovely. I've had the lady's face repainted. 'Tis beautifully done, Mr. Lovely. Do look. Can you see? 'Mr. Paul Virgin. Bookseller and Publisher. At the Sign of the _Woman_.'"
"Pshaw!" said Charles. "Will you open to me, or I'll turn the woman into a w----!"
"I suppose you must have your way, but oddscods, indeed I'm monstrous busy. Oh! Mr. Lovely, I am so busy, you wouldn't believe."
With this final protest, the old young man slowly drew the bolts of the door and allowed Mr. Lovely to step inside.
There was a musty smell in the shop and the shelves of calf-bound volumes seemed alive in the uncertain flame of the candle. The counter was heaped high with volumes and on the floor lay gigantick tomes bound in jaundiced vellum covers.
Lovely followed the foxy-faced man into the back parlour which in addition to the general mustiness of the premises had a rank odour of printer's ink and newly struck proofs.
"I am so busy, Mr. Lovely. Mr. Antique Burrowes' great work on the Abbeys of England and Wales must positively appear before the publick next week; the subscription lists are filled up, and we expect a very favourable reception, and so we ought, for the woodcuts are beautiful. Look at this one, Mr. Lovely--this is Glastonbury--the Abbot's Kitchen. What a place just for one man! Ah! those monks: what bellies they had."
Charles scarcely glanced at the proof.
"Very proper," he said, "and what about my poems?"
"Ah! you always have your joke, Mr. Lovely. That's always the way with poets--they will have their jokes just when I'm so busy too," said Mr. Virgin sidling across the room to a shelf full of ledgers bound in hideous marble boards.
"How many sold, these three months?"
"One, Mr. Lovely. One copy. You see it entered."
"Who was the purchaser," said Charles with affectation of great indifference. "Not a lady, I presume?"
"Ha, ha, you poets--so fond of the women. Singers and poets always like the women. There was Signor Amoroso, d'ye know him? The famous Tenore, now singing every night at Vauxhall--he used to buy all my books about the ladies. But, pray excuse my chatter, Mr. Lovely. I'm sure I oughtn't to be talking, just when I'm so busy too. Let me see, who was the purchaser--ah! here it is--it was Miss----"
"Courteen?" Charles let slip in his eagerness.
"Ha-ha! ha-ha!" laughed the foxy-faced bookseller, "Ha-ha! You must keep your love-secrets better than that. No, it wasn't Miss----" he pursued.
"Oh!" said Charles coldly.
"It was Sir George Repington--I remember now--he wrote from the North."
"Sir George Repington?" exclaimed Charles, completely surprized. "Humph! I wish him joy of my effusions."
"Oh, no doubt he'll like them or he wouldn't have sent all that way for them. Well! well! some men are mighty whimsical in their tastes, and there's no denying that people do read verses."
"However," said Charles, "I take it the taste is not an extended one?"
"Well! you mustn't complain. You had two hundred taken by subscription and half a dozen copies sold to casual purchasers. You won't lose a vast deal over the publication."
"No," said Charles, "you wouldn't like that?"
"No, indeed I shouldn't, sir, I take a pride in the success of my clients. So did my father, sir, and he became an alderman of this town, though he was a native of Exeter."
"I take it, then, you are not prepared to offer a sum of money on account of a new volume?"
"Ho-ho!" laughed Mr. Virgin, "what a droll gentleman you are to be sure. You will have your joke, and don't seem to regard how busy I am."
"Very well, sir," said Charles, "I'll wish you a good night."
"_Good_ night, Mr. Lovely, good night, sir. When I'm not so busy perhaps, another time, I'll be most happy to talk over your--ahem--literary projects."
Mr. Virgin held up the candle to light Mr. Lovely through the shop. The rays happened to fall on a pile of slim volumes reposing on the counter.
"What are those?" Charles asked.
"Ah, 'tis a great pity you can't write verse like that."
"Poems?" said Mr. Lovely in accents of incredulity.
"To be sure--poems, but such poems,--lampoons, squibs, and pasquinades. 'Tis a Satire on the characters of the Bath--very scandalous, they tell me, but oddscods, 'tas run through nine editions in as many weeks. Now, if your name was Lively, sir, instead of Lovely."
"Mr. Virgin!"
"No offence. What I mean is, if you could write something similar about the visitors to Curtain Wells."
"You'd publish it?"
"Well, perhaps that's going too far, but I would give it my very best attention."
"Humph! Good night," and Charles went out into the drizzle.
On his way home, he saw the Exquisite Mob and the Exquisite Mob-master grouped before a satirist; and very soon he saw them performing their anticks thinly disguised by initials and asterisks.