Puck — September 18, 1878 — page 12: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

12 PUCK. gent, and sprightly, but the attorneys had not fallen in love with him, nor had he fallen in love with an attorney’s daughter. He had fallen in love with Miss Myra Patterini, who by rights should have been a Baroness like her mother, for one of the great charms of a foreign title is that it descends and spreads, so that one’s whole stock is glorified, and one begets, not boys and girls, like the common herd of parents, but Barons and Baronesses. Anything more ludicrous than Mr. Cyril Clarke's pretensions to this young lady's hand it would have been difficult to conceive. His family, though respectable enough—his father was a minor canon of some cathedral or another, and had a living in the Fens — were by no means Norman; he had not a shilling in the world— that is to say, judged by an Evelyn Lodge standard; he had in reality an allowance of £250 a year, paid quarterly by his papa, and how he managed to clothe himself in the way he did, and smoke such excellent cigars, was a marvel except to those who knew that he paid nobody except the bankers of his club on the 1st of January. He was not a poet nor a novelist; he had discovered no new religion nor any flaws in the old ones. He had no dis- tinction of any kind which could be supposed by the most charitable to bridge over the great | gulf that lay between him and Miss Myra. And | yet he dared to love her, and one of her parents | knew it. Of course it was the female one, Pat- terini pére knew nothing except the share list, British and foreign, and which of the great City houses was “shaky”—a piece of intelligence he always managed to acquire in time to prevent it shaking Aim, One thing more he knew- that under no circumstances whatsoever was he to interfere with the plans of Mrs. Patterini; his i ¢ was confined to paying for their exe- cution, ‘To look at him you would say he was the honestest man, I do not say in Greece, but | i gland. And far be it from me to hint that he was not honest. He looked like a highly respectable grazier, whose talk should have been of beeves when it was not of repairing his parish church, situated in a pastoral district. He had not only the air of a churchwarden, but of the parson’s own churchwarden, ‘The keys which he was wont to rattle in his pocket when taking his wife’s orders might have belonged to the vestry, instead of fitting desks full of myterious documents, with seals and stamps upon them— mostly foreign—that represented tens of thou- sands of pounds, He rather liked Cyril Clarke, and was pleasur- | ably surprised that the young man had never | asked him to lend him money. His calling was that of a lender, and nothing had yet occurred to him in the semblance of friendship with necdy men that had not sooner or later taken that professional term, He had done several ‘smart’ things—a term used in the City for benevolent actions—to such persons during his commercial career, and would have been very willing to have given Cyril Clarke a hundred or two for the asking. If he had asked for his | daughter, he would not have been angry, but would probably have offered to provide for him for life in a first-class lunatic asylum, ‘The Baroness, as 1 am afraid the young bar- rister was wont to call his hostess in the family circle, had even a higher ambition with respect to the disposal of her daughter's hand than her husband, and yet she permitted this young man to pay her Myra marked attentions, Nothing serious could possibly come of it, and Cyril was extremely useful to her, and could be retained by no other sort of fee, He was a pleasant, agreeable young fellow, and ‘knew every- body.” He brought people—chiefly males, however—to Evelyn Lodge who would never ‘There are three classes of society in London each of whom “entertain” in a magnificent fashion: the aristocracy, whose re-unions are sometimes lively, but more generally dull; the Bohemian rich (a small body, who despise con- vention, and gather around them all those who have talent to recommend them, though it is essential that their lady guests, at least, should be of good character); and the millionaires. ‘These last, of course, can give you everything that money can buy; but ‘good company” not being in the market, is rarely found under their roof. ‘The table groans with delicacies, but the guest, if he likes to be amused as well as fed, groans also. When you have been told in a stage whisper that your next neighbor has four hundred thousand pounds, and that the man opposite has made a hundred thousand by “an operation” upon ‘Turks (by which is indicated the Turkish Loan), there is little else to learn, The old gentlemen are mere walking moneybags; they chink, but cannot converse. The young ones are hateful imitations of the real “gilt youth” of the aristocracy, and dis- gust as well as bore one. ‘The ladies—well, the ladies are not nice. ‘They are mostly very “fine women.” I have an idea that their hus- bands buy them by weight. But they are not good-natured, as all fat people are bound to be. ‘To dine, in short, at Evelyn Lodge was a social martyrdom, ‘The glare of the women’s diamonds and of the men's studs; the glare of the gold plate; the enormous length of the entertainment, and the extreme tenuity of the small-talk; the stoutness of the people; their large noses; the absence of the letter 4, and the substitution of the letter 4 for the letter 7 —the moral and material oppression caused by all this splendid vulgarity was overwhelming. Now, the Baroness was sagacious enough. to perceive this; she remarked that when Cyril Clarke was present the heavy atmosphere lifted a little, that where he sat there was an oa in this desert of dulness where laughter rippled. In time he grew to be indispensable, She had wit enough to see that he did not like it, that rich wines and a fine feast were not sufticient attractions to a man of his stamp, that he came, in short, after Myra; and yet the Baron- ess encouraged him, If she discarded him, the men he had brought to the Lodge, and who leavened her parties so pleasantly, would in all likelihood go away, and everything would be as it used to be—as dull as ditch-water. More- over, she did not give up all hope of getting into society —real society—through Cyril's good offices. He had procured invitations for Myra fora ball or two at houses of undoubted fashion, and the girl had attended them under the escort of a great lady, whose fo.tman had left her card at the lodge. But these fashionable doors had never been opened for the Baroness herself, and to her they were the gates of para- dise. ‘To have had a square card from the Dutch- ess of Doldrum, requesting the pleasure of Mr., Mrs., and Miss Patterini’s company at Dol- drum House, she would have sacrificed half her fortune; to have procured her Grace's presence under her own roof, she would have bartered her hopes of heaven, She had left no stone unturned to ‘get into society; she had taken a house at Ascot every season, and thrown it open during the race week; she had actually ventured upon having outriders to her carriage - a distinction | reserved by tacit consent for royalty and Lady Blanche Mildew—but had only got laughed at for her pains. Once she had been upon the very brink of bliss. Cyril Clarke had somehow arranged for her to be presented at Court; it was to cost a thousand pounds “in fees, &c.,” have come thither of their own accord, and he relieved the otherwise insufferable tedium of her dinner parties, none of which, it is fair to say, was to go into his pocket. She would have been quite con- | tent to pay the money had it been twice as much, But at the very last moment the affair broke down, and ended in a very ill-natured paragraph in the Court /ntedligencer. Myra was not very pretty nor very dis- tinguished-looking, but she was a good-looking, intelligent girl—evidently a well-to-do grazier's daughter —and would have found no difficulty in getting a fitting mate, had she not had £25,000 of her own, and been heiress to as much per annum, ‘This made it very difficult, No one who was in a social position to merit stich a prize made any advances; the score or two of young gentlemen who did were “not to be thought of,” as her mother said. I am afraid, however, Myra did think of one of them. “If 1 could only get my mother's consent, Cyril, I would marry you to-morrow,” she had told the young barrister; “ but you know that that is impossible. I will never marry you without it, so you had much better cease your visits to the Lodge, which only give m:un- necessary pain.” She was a very sensible girl, who saw through her mother’s weakness for fashionable life, and despised it; but she had honest scruples, 1 am afraid Mr. Cyril Clarke did not share them, He thoroughly understood his position at the Lodge, and resented the Baroness's treatment of him, as any man of spirit would have done; but he loved Myra quite independently of her fortune - although he was not one to despise fortune—and he persevered in his attentions. I shall make no apologies for what he after- wards did, for it was indefensible; but 1 must say that there were excuses for him. A few years ago it was noised abroad that a great Eastern potentate, the Shah of Persia, was about to. visit England. Cyril Clarke brought the news, twenty-four hours before it published in the papers, to Evelyn Lodge: one of his missions was to bring the Baroness ariy intelligence of all fashionable movements, nd he was very skilled in acquiring it, But these particular tidings he had learned from a nd of his in the Foreign Office under pecu- jar circumstanc: ‘This gentleman had at one time resided in Persia, and could speak its tongue, and he had been sounded by the chief of his department that very morning as to whether, in case his Imperial Majesty the Shah should come, he would be attached to his cred person while in England. News of this kind was meat, drink and clothing to the Baroness, “My dear Cyril,” she said, ‘you are in- valuable, and you will find Myra in the conser- vatory.”” She knew that a squeeze of her daughter's hand would repay him for all his trouble in pumping the Foreign Office clerk, as indeed it did, Her twenty-four hours’ start of the news- papers gave the Baroness quite a reputation, and would have made her very happy had the public she enlightened by it been other than of her own class; but she was already one of its chiefs, and little cared for such supremacy. As time went on, and the tidings came to be com- mon property, she envied Baron Reuter, at whose instance the Shah was said to have deter- mined upon his Western journey, above every- body. If she could only get his Imperial High- ness to take any notice of Aer, that would be bliss indeed, and Mr. Cyril Clarke actually gave her hopes of it. He thoaght it not impossible that through his friend in the Foreign Office the Shah might be induced to believe that Evelyn Lodge was one of the centres of finan- cial greatness, and that, as such, it was worth his while to visit it; the Persian Loan would certainly be all the better for the backing of Patterini_ and Company, while at Patterini’s mansion his Imperial Majesty would have the opportunity of beholding a type of social life in financial circles, comicbooks.com