Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges. William Makepeace Thackeray
engage in talk with Lord Mohun, to insult him, and so get the first of the quarrel. So when cards were proposed he offered to play. “Psha!” says my Lord Mohun (whether wishing to save Harry, or not choosing to try the botte de Jésuite, it is not to be known)—“young gentlemen from college should not play these stakes. You are too young.”
“Who dares say I am too young?” broke out Harry. “Is your lordship afraid?”
“Afraid!” cries out Mohun.
[pg 158]
But my good lord viscount saw the move—“I'll play you for ten moidores, Mohun,” says he—“You silly boy, we don't play for groats here as you do at Cambridge:” and Harry, who had no such sum in his pocket (for his half-year's salary was always pretty well spent before it was due), fell back with rage and vexation in his heart that he had not money enough to stake.
“I'll stake the young gentleman a crown,” says the Lord Mohun's captain.
“I thought crowns were rather scarce with the gentlemen of the army,” says Harry.
“Do they birch at college?” says the captain.
“They birch fools,” says Harry, “and they cane bullies, and they fling puppies into the water.”
“Faith, then, there's some escapes drowning,” says the captain, who was an Irishman; and all the gentlemen began to laugh, and made poor Harry only more angry.
My Lord Mohun presently snuffed a candle. It was when the drawers brought in fresh bottles and glasses and were in the room—on which my lord viscount said—“The deuce take you, Mohun, how damned awkward you are! Light the candle, you drawer.”
“Damned awkward is a damned awkward expression, my lord,” says the other. “Town gentlemen don't use such words—or ask pardon if they do.”
“I'm a country gentleman,” says my lord viscount.
“I see it by your manner,” says my Lord Mohun. “No man shall say ‘damned awkward’ to me.”
“I fling the words in your face, my lord,” says the other; “shall I send the cards too?”
“Gentlemen, gentlemen! before the servants?” cry out Colonel Westbury and my Lord Warwick in a breath. The drawers go out of the room hastily. They tell the people below of the quarrel upstairs.
“Enough has been said,” says Colonel Westbury. “Will your lordships meet to-morrow morning?”
“Will my Lord Castlewood withdraw his words?” asks the Earl of Warwick.
“My Lord Castlewood will be—— first,” says Colonel Westbury.
“Then we have nothing for it. Take notice, gentlemen, there have been outrageous words—reparation asked and refused.”
[pg 159]
“And refused,” says my Lord Castlewood, putting on his hat. “Where shall the meeting be? and when?”
“Since my lord refuses me satisfaction, which I deeply regret, there is no time so good as now,” says my Lord Mohun. “Let us have chairs and go to Leicester Field.”
“Are your lordship and I to have the honour of exchanging a pass or two?” says Colonel Westbury, with a low bow to my Lord of Warwick and Holland.
“It is an honour for me,” says my lord, with a profound congée, “to be matched with a gentleman who has been at Mons and Namur.”
“Will your reverence permit me to give you a lesson?” says the captain.
“Nay, nay, gentlemen, two on a side are plenty,” says Harry's patron. “Spare the boy, Captain Macartney,” and he shook Harry's hand—for the last time, save one, in his life.
At the bar of the tavern all the gentlemen stopped, and my lord viscount said, laughing, to the barwoman, that those cards set people sadly a-quarrelling; but that the dispute was over now, and the parties were all going away to my Lord Mohun's house, in Bow Street, to drink a bottle more before going to bed.
A half-dozen of chairs were now called, and the six gentlemen stepping into them, the word was privately given to the chairmen to go to Leicester Field, where the gentlemen were set down opposite the “Standard” Tavern. It was midnight, and the town was abed by this time, and only a few lights in the windows of the houses; but the night was bright enough for the unhappy purpose which the disputants came about; and so all six entered into that fatal square, the chairmen standing without the railing and keeping the gate, lest any persons should disturb the meeting.
All that happened there hath been matter of public notoriety, and is recorded, for warning to lawless men, in the annals of our country. After being engaged for not more than a couple of minutes, as Harry Esmond thought (though being occupied at the time with his own adversary's point, which was active, he may not have taken a good note of time), a cry from the chairmen without, who were smoking their pipes, and leaning over the railings of the field as they watched the dim combat within, announced that some catastrophe had happened which caused Esmond [pg 160] to drop his sword and look round, at which moment his enemy wounded him in the right hand. But the young man did not heed this hurt much, and ran up to the place where he saw his dear master was down.
My Lord Mohun was standing over him.
“Are you much hurt, Frank?” he asked, in a hollow voice.
“I believe I'm a dead man,” my lord said from the ground.
“No, no, not so,” says the other; “and I call God to witness, Frank Esmond, that I would have asked your pardon, had you but given me a chance. In—in the first cause of our falling out, I swear that no one was to blame but me, and—and that my lady——”
“Hush!” says my poor lord viscount, lifting himself on his elbow, and speaking faintly. “'Twas a dispute about the cards—the cursed cards. Harry, my boy, are you wounded, too? God help thee! I loved thee, Harry, and thou must watch over my little Frank—and—and carry this little heart to my wife.”
And here my dear lord felt in his breast for a locket he wore there, and, in the act, fell back, fainting.
We were all at this terrified, thinking him dead; but Esmond and Colonel Westbury bade the chairmen to come into the field; and so my lord was carried to one Mr. Aimes, a surgeon, in Long Acre, who kept a bath, and there the house was wakened up, and the victim of this quarrel carried in.
My lord viscount was put to bed, and his wound looked to by the surgeon, who seemed both kind and skilful. When he had looked to my lord, he bandaged up Harry Esmond's hand (who, from loss of blood, had fainted too, in the house, and may have been some time unconscious); and when the young man came to himself, you may be sure he eagerly asked what news there were of his dear patron; on which the surgeon carried him to the room where the Lord Castlewood lay; who had already sent for a priest; and desired earnestly, they said, to speak with his kinsman. He was lying on a bed, very pale and ghastly, with that fixed, fatal look in his eyes, which betokens death; and faintly beckoning all the other persons away from him with his hand, and crying out “Only Harry Esmond”, the hand fell powerless down on the coverlet, as Harry came forward, and knelt down and kissed it.
“Thou art all but a priest, Harry,” my lord viscount [pg 161] gasped out, with a faint smile, and pressure of his cold hand. “Are they all gone? Let me make thee a death-bed confession.”
And with sacred Death waiting, as it were, at the bed-foot, as an awful witness of his words, the poor dying soul gasped out his last wishes in respect of his family;—his humble profession of contrition for his faults;—and his charity towards the world he was leaving. Some things he said concerned Harry Esmond as much as they astonished him. And my lord viscount, sinking visibly, was in the midst of these strange confessions, when the ecclesiastic for whom my lord had sent, Mr. Atterbury, arrived.
This gentleman had reached to no great church dignity as yet, but was only preacher at St. Bride's, drawing all the town thither