And every now and again, in the midst of all this pleasant foregathering and communion of long-parted friends, the pangs of Little Billee’s miserable mind-malady would shoot through him like poisoned arrows.
He would catch himself thinking how fat and fussy and serious about trifles Taffy had become; and what a shiftless, feckless, futile duffer was the Laird; and how greedy they both were, and how red and coarse their ears and gills and cheeks grew as they fed, and how shiny their faces; and how little he would care, try as he might, if they both fell down dead under the table! And this would make him behave more caressingly to them, more genially and demonstratively than ever—for he knew it was all a gruesome physical ailment of his own, which he could no more help than a cataract in his eye!
Then, catching sight of his own face and form in a mirror, he would curse himself for a puny, misbegotten shrimp, an imp—an abortion—no bigger, by the side of the herculean Taffy or the burly Laird of Cockpen, than six-pennorth o’ halfpence: a wretched little overrated follower of a poor trivial craft—a mere light amuser! For what did pictures matter, or whether they were good or bad, except to the triflers who painted them, the dealers who sold them, the idle, uneducated, purse-proud fools who bought them and stuck them up on their walls because they were told!
And he felt that if a dynamite shell were beneath the table where they sat, and its fuse were smoking under their very noses, he would neither wish to warn his friends nor move himself. He didn’t care a d⸺!
And all this made him so lively and brilliant in his talk, so fascinating and droll and witty, that Taffy and the Laird wondered at the improvement success and the experience of life had wrought in him, and marvelled at the happiness of his lot, and almost found it in their warm, affectionate hearts to feel a touch of envy!
Oddly enough, in a brief flash of silence, “entre la poire et le fromage,” they heard a foreigner at an adjoining table (one of a very noisy group) exclaim: “Mais quand je vous dis que j’l’ai entendue, moi, la Svengali! et même qu’elle a chanté l’Impromptu de Chopin absolument comme si c’était un piano qu’on jouait! voyons! …”
“Farceur! la bonne blague!” said another—and then the conversation became so noisily general it was no good listening any more.
“Svengali! how funny that name should turn up! I wonder what’s become of our Svengali, by-the-way?” observed Taffy.
“I remember his playing Chopin’s Impromptu,” said Little Billee; “what a singular coincidence!”
There were to be more coincidences that night; it never rains them but it pours!
So our three friends finished their coffee and liqueured up, and went to Cornelys’s, three in a hansom—
“Like Mars,
A-smokin’ their poipes and cigyars.”
Sir Louis Cornelys, as everybody knows, lives in a palace on Campden Hill, a house of many windows; and whichever window he looks out of, he sees his own garden and very little else. In spite of his eighty years, he works as hard as ever, and his hand has lost but little of its cunning. But he no longer gives those splendid parties that made him almost as famous a host as he was an artist.
When his beautiful wife died he shut himself up from the world; and now he never stirs out of his house and grounds except to fulfil his duties at the Royal Academy and dine once a year with the Queen.
It was very different in the early sixties. There was no pleasanter or more festive house than his in London, winter or summer—no lordlier host than he—no more irresistible hostesses than Lady Cornelys and her lovely daughters; and if ever music had a right to call itself divine, it was there you heard it—on late Saturday nights during the London season—when the foreign birds of song come over to reap their harvest in London Town.
It was on one of the most brilliant of these Saturday nights that Taffy and the Laird, chaperoned by Little Billee, made their début at Mechelen Lodge, and were received at the door of the immense music-room by a tall, powerful man with splendid eyes and a gray beard, and a small velvet cap on his head—and by a Greek matron so beautiful and stately and magnificently attired that they felt inclined to sink them on their bended knees as in the presence of some overwhelming Eastern royalty—and were only prevented from doing so, perhaps, by the simple, sweet, and cordial graciousness of her welcome.
And whom should they be shaking hands with next but Antony, Lorrimer, and the Greek—with each a beard and mustache of nearly five years’ growth!
But they had no time for much exuberant greeting, for there was a sudden piano crash—and then an immediate silence, as though for pins to drop—and Signor Giuglini and the wondrous maiden Adelina Patti sang the Miserere out of Signor Verdi’s most famous opera—to the delight of all but a few very superior ones who had just read Mendelssohn’s letters (or misread them) and despised Italian music; and thought cheaply of “mere virtuosity,” either vocal or instrumental.
When this was over, Little Billee pointed out all the lions to his friends—from the Prime Minister down to the present scribe—who was right glad to meet them again and talk of auld lang syne, and present them to the daughters of the house and other charming ladies.
Then Roucouly, the great French baritone, sang Durien’s favorite song,
“Plaisir d’amour ne dure qu’un moment;
Chagrin d’amour dure toute la vie. …”
with quite a little drawing-room voice—but quite
