"Ah, that is indeed a miracle," replied Chambers. "I sometimes catch myself wondering at the long-suffering of my creditors. Yet their patience is not altogether unrewarded. I have introduced some very pretty fellows to my old purveyors. There are innocent young gentlemen from the country who would never know where to go for their finery if there wasn't an experienced man of fashion to put them in the right path."

"Ay, Bob, we all understand your pleasant ways. When a man loses the ability to spend on his own account, he may still flourish as the source of spending in others. Tradesmen are always civil to Captain Rook if he visits them in company with Squire Pigeon."

"'Sdeath, Middleton, d'ye mean to insult me?" cried Chambers, with his hand on his sword.

"Nay, Captain, I did but respond in tune with your own ethics, which were never of the strictest."

"Faith, you're right, friend! I was never given to riding the high horse of morality. I spent my money like a gentleman, and any wife's money after it, and have earned the right to take things easily."

"Till you find yourself in the sponging-house, Bob. That evil day must come. All your creditors will not be equally placable."

"Whenever I get into the sponging-house, the odds are I shall be kicked out again for want of funds to make me worth keeping. Your sponging-house, kept by some dirty Jew, and waited on by a drab, is the most expensive hotel in London."

"Then they'll put you among the poor prisoners, and let you fetch and carry for those that are better off. 'Twill be a sorry end for Buck Chambers, the man who used to keep two servants to attend to his jackboots."

"Hang it! 'twas no superfluity of service. No man can be expected to do more than look after three horses or six pairs of boots."

"If they do nab you, Bob," said another friend, who had been attracted from a neighbouring table as the conversation grew louder, Mr.

Topsparkle sipping his chocolate silently all the while, and listening in a half-abstracted mood, only reflecting within himself much as Romeo did about the apothecary, that here was a fellow who would do anything for gold; "if the limbs of the law do get you in their clutches, let us hope, for the sake of a world that could scarce exist pleasurably without you, that they won't put you into Marjory's."

"Marjory's! What, the sponging-house in Shoe Lane!" cried Chambers; "'tis an execrable den, but not a whit worse than their other holes. I have hobbed and n.o.bbed with my friends in most of their rat-traps, and know the geography of them. I'd as lief be at Marjory's as anywhere else, if I must needs have the key turned upon me."

"Not just now, Bob; for there was an honest fellow--an Exeter tradesman up in London for a holiday, and arrested by mistake for another--who died of smallpox at Marjory's only yesterday morning; and they say the disease rages in the house, and has done for the last ten days."

The Captain sprang to his feet in a fury.

"And yet they go on taking prisoners there," he cried; "poor innocent wretches, whose only crime is to have lived like gentlemen! What a vile world we live in!"

"A vile world with a vengeance. Marjory's is a gold-mine for Bambridge.

He claps all his prisoners into that h.e.l.l, and makes them pay heavily before he allows them to be removed to the purgatory of another house, or the paradise of prison and chummage. This poor wretch from Exeter had not a stiver about him, so they refused to shift him. He was put in a room with three other men, one of whom was just recovering from the disease. The Exeter man took it badly, and died off-hand."

The Captain put on his hat.

"Farewell, friends," he said; "I'm off by to-night's fast coach to Bristol, and from thence to the wilds of Connemara. I was not born to be carrion for the vulture Bambridge."

He pulled himself together with a debonair movement, and staggered gaily out of the house, amidst the laughter of his friends.

"Was there ever such a good-humoured hardened villain?" exclaimed Middleton; "'tis a perpetual conundrum to me how he keeps out of gaol."

"He will get there some day," said a gentleman of clerical aspect; "our friend will have his pennyworth of prison, with a noose to follow."

Mr. Topsparkle paid his score, and sauntered away.

Not a word had he heard, nor had he made any inquiry, about madhouses, public or private; yet it seemed to him that he was wiser than when he entered the chocolate house, and that he knew all he wanted to know.

CHAPTER VII.

THE SMILES OF NATURE AND THE CHARMS OF ART.

Mr. Fetis slept until late in the afternoon, and awoke restored to his senses and so far recovered in his health as to be able to dress himself and go down-stairs. He was taking a cup of coffee strengthened with cognac in his wife's parlour when the Topsparkle orange and brown livery again enlivened the doorstep, and a note was handed in at the door.

It was a somewhat urgent summons from Fetis's patron and master.

"If you are well enough to come to me this afternoon, I should like to see you," wrote Mr. Topsparkle; "my messenger will get you a chair."

Fetis told the footman that he was able to walk, and would wait upon Mr.

Topsparkle almost immediately. He followed the footman in about five minutes, and was at once admitted to his master's dressing-room, where he found Mr. Topsparkle sitting before the fire, in slippers and a crimson brocade _neglige_.

"My good Fetis, pray think me not inhuman in sending for you," he exclaimed, in his airiest manner, "but if you have vital power enough to put my head and complexion in order for the evening, it will be a real benevolence on your part. I am to go to an a.s.sembly at Henrietta's, and I don't want to look older than poor Mr. Congreve, who has the aspect of a sickly Methuselah."

"I do not believe her Grace thinks so, sir," said Fetis, going over to the toilet-table and beginning to arrange his a.r.s.enal of little china pots and crystal bottles, brushes and sponges, and hare's-feet.

"O, for her he is always Adonis. But he grows daily more wrinkled and mummified, and he paints as badly as Kneller at his worst, which is saying much," replied Topsparkle, seating himself in front of the gla.s.s, a Venetian mirror, framed in filagree silver, which ought to have reflected beauty as young and fresh as Belinda's. "And so, my poor friend," he continued with a sympathetic air, "you have been very ill.

May I ask the nature of your malady?"

"I was as near death as I could be, I believe, sir," answered Fetis gloomily, still occupied with cosmetics and paint-brushes, and going on with his work as he spoke. "You will laugh at me doubtless when I tell you the cause of my indisposition, for you have a lighter nature than mine, or you could scarce live contentedly in this house."

"I have less education, and more philosophy, Fetis. That is the secret of my easier temper."

"I saw a ghost last night, sir," said Fetis, beginning his operations on his master's complexion.

"Indeed, my dear Fetis, I am told they swarm in the neighbourhood of Bloomsbury, where I hear you spent last midnight in most patrician society."

"How did you know where I spent my evening?" gasped Fetis.

"A little bird, my dear friend, a sweet little singing bird. Our London groves are vocal with such airy songsters. Pray keep your hand steady.

G.o.d's curse, fellow, that wash of yours is revolting when 'tis not laid on smoothly. You are too thick over the right temple."

There was a pause, during which Fetis finished his ground-colour and outlined an eyebrow with a miniature-painter's pencil.

"And so you saw a ghost last night. Was it in Denmark Street, St.

Giles's, as you reeled homewards after your orgy?"

"No, sir, 'twas before I left Lord Lavendale's house. I had supped with his lordship and Mr. Durnford--"

"A fellow I hate!" interrupted Topsparkle; "a sinister, prying knave!"

"We had played cards for an hour or so, and I had been sole winner. I was in excellent spirits, elated, rejuvenated by my good luck. I had to pa.s.s through a suite of cold and empty rooms, dark except for the candle carried by my companion, Durnford, and a gleam of light from a lamp on the staircase beyond. It was in this semi-darkness I saw the shape of her whose death we compa.s.sed, in that room yonder, forty years ago!"

He pointed to the door opening into Topsparkle's bedchamber.

"My good Fetis, you were drunk," said his master, without moving a muscle. "His lordship had plied you with wine till your highly imaginative mind was on the alert for phantoms. An effect of light and shade in a dusky room, a white curtain perchance, an optical delusion of some kind. I should have given you credit for more sense and less superst.i.tion."

"I tell you 'twas she, Margharita Vincenti. It was her face, sad, reproachful, as it has looked upon me many a time in this house. It was her figure, her att.i.tude, standing there before me in the light of Mr.

Durnford's uplifted candle, with all the reality of life."