THE Coffee-room of the Blue Boar wore a remarkably cheerful aspect on the evening of the day on which we have seen something of Beau Ripple's methods. There had been a splendid run from Oaktree Common across the downs to Deadman's Coppice, where a short check only lent a spice to that glorious final run across Baverstock Ridge until they killed just outside Farmer Hogbin's famous barn. And after the death what delicious musick acclaimed the deed—the baying of hounds, the chatter of maids, the clatter of horses' hoofs, the guffaws of Lieutenant Blewforth, the still louder guffaws of Farmer Hogbin mounted on his raw-boned hunter of sixteen hands, the blasts of the horns, the chink of glasses and the wind getting up in the South-west, all combined in harmonious delight. What a splendid ride home it was and how the riders went over each renowned minute of that for-ever-to-be-famous day. Lieutenant Blewforth swore he would forsake the sea for the life of a country gentleman, and everybody laughed when H.M.S. Centaur (so they had named Blewforth and his steed) shied at a belated calf.

"Egad! B-b-Blewforth," stammered little Peter Wingfield, "'tis lucky your stomach was trained on the roaring d-d-deep, for you pitch and roll like a sloop making Ushant."

"Ah! my boy," shouted Blewforth, "my pretty sloop don't shy like this d——d bum-boat I'm pulling."

How Mr. Golightly of Campbell's Grey Dragoons swore such a run was better than a frontal charge at the enemy's guns and how young Tom Chalkley of the Foot stiffened all over and muttered something about the Cavalry. Indeed the only person to look glum was Mr. Anthony Clare who, though he rode better than any of them and had shown them his horse's heels all the way, missed Charles Lovely.

As they walked along the road, fading into early dusk, and heard the wind sighing in the trim hedges and saw the lights of Curtain Wells seven miles away, Clare cursed that passion for cards which made a man forsake the bleak Spring fallows for pastures of green baize.

But later when the huge cold sirloin that sailed in so sleek, sailed out like a battered wreck, and when pints of generous Burgundy had coloured life to its own rich hue, and when Mr. Daish himself had coaxed the fire to roar and blaze up the chimney, and set out the walnuts and put half a dozen ample chairs round the fire, Mr. Clare could not resist the universal content, but must laugh and make merry and relate the events of the day for the seventh time, with as much zest as any of the returned heroes.

Charles had surely been winning: he was so flushed and talked so loudly. Actually he did not possess a penny, and what was worse, owed Mr. Vernon a couple of hundred guineas. Not much, but enough when you have only cloaths to sell, and not a prospect in the world.

Presently one by one the hunters dropped off to sleep with legs outstretched and doffed wigs and long church-wardens' pipes, that one by one dropped from slowly opening mouths, slid along unbuttoned waistcoats and snapped their slender stems upon the floor, until everybody except Mr. Vernon and our hero was snoring the eighth repetition of the events of that famous day.

The room was hot; the drawing of many breaths thick with fatigue, beef and Burgundy induced a meditative atmosphere; the fire no longer blazed, but sank to an intense crimson glow. Mr. Vernon counted up his gains, while Mr. Lovely pondered his losses in silence.

At last the latter got up suddenly.

"The cards?" inquired Mr. Vernon.

"Not to-night. I think I'll take the air," Charles replied.

"As you will," said the other and betook himself once more to his tablets.

Charles paused for a moment outside the Coffee-Room to take down his full black cloak and three-cornered hat. The night wind had brought in its track a melancholy drizzle of rain that suited his own melancholy mood. He wandered rather vaguely across the wide inn-yard, passed under the arch and sauntered along the deserted High Street.

To tell the truth, Mr. Lovely was very unpleasantly situated at this period. His father had been the ne'er-do-weel survivor of a long line of country squires away down in Devonshire. When he had eloped with Miss Joan Repington, to the eternal chagrin of the young lady's brother, a rich banker knighted for his loyal support of the Protestant Succession, Valentine Lovely ran through his own and his wife's fortune in the first six years of matrimony. Thence onwards they lived a hand-to-mouth existence, dependent on Valentine's luck at the tables and the inviolableness of an aunt's legacy of five thousand guineas.

Mrs. Lovely died, prematurely aged, in the birth of a still-born child, and Mr. Valentine Lovely and his young son continued to live the same haphazard existence for another ten years. Charles spent all his time with his father who in the intervals of drink and play taught his heir to step a minuet, sing a merry song, and indite a witty epigram; also he gave him a case of pistols, heavily chased with the Lovely arms, and lent him the family tree for target. Finally he made him proficient in the polite use of the smallsword and the dice-box.

Once, when an early summer made the Bath intolerably hot, Mr. Lovely and his heir posted down to Devonshire in a crimson chariot putting up at the Prior's Head, in Danver Monachorum. He spent a week paying unwelcome visits to the neighbouring gentry who looked askance at the crimson chariot and still more askance at the degenerate heir of the Lovelys. Valentine soon tired of so much pastoral exercise and departed to St. Germain's, leaving young Charles in the care of an old stillroom maid, now a prosperous farmer's wife. The boy spent placid hours in rich meadows, ate a quantity of scalded cream, and grew out of knowledge in the six months of his stay. He used to wander down to the park gates—gloriously wrought-iron gates between massive stone pillars that bore on each summit a quintett of cannon balls, the reputed trophy of some seafaring Elizabethan Lovely. There was a picture in the great hall, of curiously inferior execution, portraying numbers of Devon sailormen led by a huge-ruffed gentleman with a long peaked beard, swarming up the towering sides of the galleon Jesu Maria. Charles was taken to see it when the new family was gone up to London town. He also saw the great stone swan over the vast fireplace, with the motto of his house, Sum decorus.

Later in the autumn his father returned and the old life of lodgings, inland Spas and long posting journeys was resumed. He had never again visited that remote Devon village, with its cows and pastures and dairymaids and famous chronicles.

Then, just after Charles reached his majority, Mr. Lovely Senior died quite suddenly, and our hero found himself in undisputed possession of the interest on five thousand guineas and as much more in cash, owing to a lucky run by his father in the week before his death.

Charles now indulged the family vice of throwing money to the dogs and, having lost the earnings of his father, set about realizing a trifle of ready money on the five thousand guineas left him by his mother's aunt. This step brought him into pen-and-ink contact with old Sir George Repington who wrote him a stern letter of advice, with a postscript offering him a stool in the Repington bank. Charles was furious and did not reply.

About that time he renewed the friendship with Mr. Anthony Clare begun in that far-off summer away down in Devonshire. The latter persuaded him to leave London and come to Curtain Wells where for a time he lived happily enough on his small annuity. However, just before our story opened, he had been hard hit at loo and had raised a thousand guineas by making over the interest on his inheritance to the friendly moneylender who advanced the needed sum. On the top of this came his losses to Vernon, and now he was stranded indeed.

Therefore the melancholy drizzle of rain suited his melancholy mood. Of course he could borrow, play again and perhaps win, but if he should lose he would be in debt to a friend, a position which he disliked. His father, less scrupulous in this respect, was always content to lay himself under fresh obligations. To Charles, however, something of the pride which sustains a great financial house had descended through his mother and, prodigal though he was, he would never borrow money from a friend. Of course a moneylender was different, but what security could he offer? It looked as if he would have to appeal to his uncle after all. This alternative was thoroughly odious, and Charles racked his brains to discover a way out of the difficulties into which he was plunged.

In such despondent meditation he wandered on until the dancing glare of two large flambeaux, stuck in iron sockets, caught his attention. He found himself outside the Great House.

The project of consulting with the Beau entered his mind, but St. Simon's struck the hour of ten, and he knew Mr. Ripple would be retiring to rest, since he was accustomed to preserve his energy on those nights when he was not called out to preside over an assembly, rout, or masquerade. At that moment the two flambeaux, as if to proclaim their owner's withdrawal from the claims of society, simultaneously collapsed and strewed Mr. Ripple's fair white steps with ashes.

The sudden darkness betrayed the opalescent windows of the Beau's bed-chamber. He had neglected to draw the curtains, and on the blind his suave shadow disported itself in preparation for the night and the next morning.

Charles watched the shadow dip giant fingers into monstrous pomade pots. Now those fast deepening crowsfeet were being vigorously rubbed. Now that swift creasing neck was being smoothed with slow caressing movements. The wig-block displayed itself in generous shadowy curves. Now, surely, the shadow's sudden inaction betokened a contemplation of creeping age.

"And this," thought Charles, "is the destiny marked out for me by Ripple."

He knew if he waited upon him on the morrow, explained his reverses, and promised amendment, the Beau would one day procure for him the monarchy of the Wells, but Charles was not inclined to manipulate the strings of marionettes, himself suspended from a longer cord and dancing for the amusement of a higher power.

The incongruity of the situation, disclosed by the Beau's window, tickled his sense of humour. There was the monarch of an artificial kingdom caulking his wrinkles like a beldame in search of her youth; there he was, that despotick king who prescribed Chalybeate as the Panacea for all earthly ills, in ludicrous terror at the swift flight of his complexion.

There he was, no better than the chief eunuch of a Persian harem with authority over women and the power of lock and key against intrusive fops.

Yet he was a kindly man and a gentleman. He was feared and loved, a man whom the world called successful. Charles himself liked fine cloaths, found talking pleasant, enjoyed the organization of splendid entertainments, yet he could not condemn himself to eternal celibacy and the preservation of his figure. The restriction of such an existence would be unendurable.

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. DanÇaboute 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.

That is how Mr. Charles Lovely sat down to indite

CURTAIN POLLS
severely lashed
by a
Curtain Rod.