Lord Kilgobbin. Charles James Lever
a sherry-cobbler I thought of suicide after it. Self-indulgence and self-reproach got linked in my nature so inseparably, it was hopeless to summon one without the other, till at last I grew to believe it was very heroic in me to deny myself nothing, seeing how sorry I should be for it afterwards. But come, old fellow, don’t lose your evening; we’ll have time enough to talk over these things—where are you going?’
‘To the Clancys’.’
‘To be sure; what a fellow I am to forget it was Letty’s birthday, and I was to have brought her a bouquet! Dick, be a good fellow and tell her some lie or other—that I was sick in bed, or away to see an aunt or a grandmother, and that I had a splendid bouquet for her, but wouldn’t let it reach her through other hands than my own, but to-morrow—to-morrow she shall have it.’
‘You know well enough you don’t mean anything of the sort.’
‘On my honour, I’ll keep my promise. I’ve an old silver watch yonder—I think it knows the way to the pawn-office by itself. There, now be off, for if I begin to think of all the fun you’re going to, I shall just dress and join you.’
‘No, I’d not do that,’ said Dick gravely, ‘nor shall I stay long myself. Don’t go to bed, Joe, till I come back. Good-bye.’
‘Say all good and sweet things to Letty for me. Tell her—’ Kearney did not wait for his message, but hurried down the steps and drove off.
Joe sat down at the fire, filled his pipe, looked steadily at it, and then laid it on the mantel-piece. ‘No, no, Master Joe. You must be thrifty now. You have smoked twice since—I can afford to say—since dinner-time, for you haven’t dined. It is strange, now that the sense of hunger has passed off, what a sense of excitement I feel. Two hours back I could have been a cannibal. I believe I could have eaten the vice-provost—though I should have liked him strongly devilled—and now I feel stimulated. Hence it is, perhaps, that so little wine is enough to affect the heads of starving people—almost maddening them. Perhaps Dick suspected something of this, for he did not care that I should go along with him. Who knows but he may have thought the sight of a supper might have overcome me. If he knew but all. I’m much more disposed to make love to Letty Clancy than to go in for galantine and champagne. By the way, I wonder if the physiologists are aware of that? It is, perhaps, what constitutes the ethereal condition of love. I’ll write an essay on that, or, better still, I’ll write a review of an imaginary French essay. Frenchmen are permitted to say so much more than we are, and I’ll be rebukeful on the score of his excesses. The bitter way in which a Frenchman always visits his various incapacities—whether it be to know something, or to do something, or to be something—on the species he belongs to; the way in which he suggests that, had he been consulted on the matter, humanity had been a much more perfect organisation, and able to sustain a great deal more of wickedness without disturbance, is great fun. I’ll certainly invent a Frenchman, and make him an author, and then demolish him. What if I make him die of hunger, having tasted nothing for eight days but the proof-sheets of his great work—the work I am then reviewing? For four days—but stay—if I starve him to death, I cannot tear his work to pieces. No; he shall be alive, living in splendour and honour, a frequenter of the Tuileries, a favoured guest at Compiègne.’
Without perceiving it, he had now taken his pipe, lighted it, and was smoking away. ‘By the way, how those same Imperialists have played the game!—the two or three middle-aged men that Kinglake says, “put their heads together to plan for a livelihood.” I wish they had taken me into the partnership. It’s the sort of thing I’d have liked well; ay, and I could have done it, too! I wonder,’ said he aloud—‘I wonder if I were an emperor should I marry Letty Clancy? I suspect not. Letty would have been flippant as an empress, and her cousins would have made atrocious princes of the imperial family, though, for the matter of that—Hullo! Here have I been smoking without knowing it! Can any one tell us whether the sins we do inadvertently count as sins, or do we square them off by our inadvertent good actions? I trust I shall not be called on to catalogue mine. There, my courage is out!’ As he said this he emptied the ashes of his pipe, and gazed sorrowfully at the empty bowl.
‘Now, if I were the son of some good house, with a high-sounding name, and well-to-do relations, I’d soon bring them to terms if they dared to cast me off. I’d turn milk or muffin man, and serve the street they lived in. I’d sweep the crossing in front of their windows, or I’d commit a small theft, and call on my high connections for a character—but being who and what I am, I might do any or all o these, and shock nobody.
‘Next to take stock of my effects. Let me see what my assets will bring when reduced to cash, for this time it shall be a sale.’ And he turned to a table where paper and pens were lying, and proceeded to write. ‘Personal, sworn under, let us say, ten thousand pounds. Literature first. To divers worn copies of Virgil, Tacitus, Juvenal, and Ovid, Cæsar’s Commentaries, and Catullus; to ditto ditto of Homer, Lucian, Aristophanes, Balzac, Anacreon, Bacon’s Essays, and Moore’s Melodies; to Dwight’s Theology—uncut copy, Heine’s Poems—very much thumbed, Saint Simon—very ragged, two volumes of Les Causes Célèbres, Tone’s Memoirs, and Beranger’s Songs; to Cuvier’s Comparative Anatomy, Shroeder on Shakespeare, Newman’s Apology, Archbold’s Criminal Law and Songs of the Nation; to Colenso, East’s Cases for the Crown, Carte’s Ormonde, and Pickwick. But why go on? Let us call it the small but well-selected library of a distressed gentleman, whose cultivated mind is reflected in the marginal notes with which these volumes abound. Will any gentleman say, “£10 for the lot”? Why the very criticisms are worth—I mean to a man of literary tastes—five times the amount. No offer at £10? Who is it that says “five”? I trust my ears have deceived me. You repeat the insulting proposal? Well, sir, on your own head be it! Mr. Atlee’s library—or the Atlee collection is better—was yesterday disposed of to a well-known collector of rare books, and, if we are rightly informed, for a mere fraction of its value. Never mind, sir, I bear you no ill-will! I was irritable, and to show you my honest animus in the matter, I beg to present you in addition with this, a handsomely-bound and gilt copy of a sermon by the Reverend Isaac Atlee, on the opening of the new meeting-house in Coleraine—a discourse that cost my father some sleepless nights, though I have heard the effect on the congregation was dissimilar.
‘The pictures are few. Cardinal Cullen, I believe, is Kearney’s; at all events, he is the worse for being made a target for pistol firing, and the archiepiscopal nose has been sorely damaged. Two views of Killarney in the weather of the period—that means July, and raining in torrents—and consequently the scene, for aught discoverable, might be the Gaboon. Portrait of Joe Atlee, ætatis four years, with a villainous squint, and something that looks like a plug in the left jaw. A Skye terrier, painted, it is supposed, by himself; not to recite unframed prints of various celebrities of the ballet, in accustomed attitudes, with the Reverend Paul Bloxham blessing some children—though from the gesture and the expression of the juveniles it might seem cuffing them—on the inauguration of the Sunday school at Kilmurry Macmacmahon.
‘Lot three, interesting to anatomical lecturers and others, especially those engaged in palæontology. The articulated skeleton of an Irish giant, representing a man who must have stood in his no-stockings eight feet four inches. This, I may add, will be warranted as authentic, in so far that I made him myself out of at least eighteen or twenty big specimens, with a few slight “divergencies” I may call them, such as putting in eight more dorsal vertebrae than the regulation, and that the right femur is two inches longer than the left. The inferior maxillary, too, was stolen from a “Pithacus Satyrus” in the Cork Museum by an old friend, since transported for Fenianism. These blemishes apart, he is an admirable giant, and fully as ornamental and useful as the species generally.
‘As to my wardrobe, it is less costly than curious; an alpaca paletot of a neutral tint, which I have much affected of late, having indisposed me to other wear. For dinner and evening duty I usually wear Kearney’s, though too tight across the chest, and short in the sleeves. These, with a silver watch which no pawnbroker—and I have tried eight—will ever advance more