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                         THE TALK OF THE TOWN

                                VOL. I.

[Illustration: MISS MARGARET LIFTED HER EYES FROM HER PLATE WITH A
SMILE OF WELCOME.]




                         THE TALK OF THE TOWN

                                  BY

                              JAMES PAYN

                    AUTHOR OF ‘BY PROXY’ ETC. ETC.

                            IN TWO VOLUMES

                                VOL. I.

                           _SECOND EDITION_

                                LONDON

                SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE

                                 1885

                        [_All rights reserved_]




                               CONTENTS

                                  OF

                           THE FIRST VOLUME.


   CHAP.                                                  PAGE

      I. AUNT MARGARET                                       1

     II. OUT IN THE COLD                                    11

    III. A RECITATION                                       28

     IV. A REAL ENTHUSIAST                                  47

      V. THE OLD SETTLE                                     66

     VI. AN AUDACIOUS CRITICISM                             87

    VII. A COLLECTOR’S GRATITUDE                           101

   VIII. HOW TO GET RID OF A COMPANY                       120

     IX. AN UNWELCOME VISITOR                              144

      X. TWO POETS                                         158

     XI. THE LOVE-LOCK                                     171

    XII. A DELICATE TASK                                   183

   XIII. THE PROFESSION OF FAITH                           196

    XIV. THE EXAMINERS                                     218

     XV. AT VAUXHALL                                       230

    XVI. A BOMBSHELL                                       246

   XVII. THE MARE’S NEST                                   259

  XVIII. ‘WHATEVER HAPPENS, I SHALL LOVE YOU, WILLIE’      271




                      _ILLUSTRATIONS TO VOL. 1._


  MISS MARGARET LIFTED HER EYES FROM HER
  PLATE WITH A SMILE OF WELCOME                    _Frontispiece_

  ‘SCIENCE!’ INTERRUPTED THE ANTIQUARY,
  VEHEMENTLY, ‘THAT IS THE ARGUMENT
  OF THE ATHEIST AGAINST THE SCRIPTURES.’      _to face p._    98

  THE DILETTANTI                                     ”        134

  ‘MAGGIE, MAGGIE, HERE IS A PRESENT FOR
  YOU.’                                              ”        174

  THE PROFESSION OF FAITH                            ”        206

  VAUXHALL GARDENS                                   ”        236

  A VERY CHEERLESS PROCEEDING                        ”        262




                         THE TALK OF THE TOWN.




CHAPTER I.

AUNT MARGARET.


[Illustration]

WHEN I was a very young man nothing used to surprise me more than the
existence of a very old one—one of those patriarchs who, instead of
linking the generations ‘each with each,’ include two or three in their
protracted span; a habit which runs in families, as in the case of the
old gentleman of our own time whose grandsire (once or twice ‘removed,’
it is true, but not nearly so often as ‘by rights’ he should have been)
gathered the arrows upon Flodden Field. Such persons seemed to me
little inferior in interest to ghosts (whom indeed in appearance they
greatly resembled), and I was wont to listen to their experiences of
the past with the same rapt attention, (unalloyed by the alarm), that
I should have paid to a denizen of another world. There are, it seems
to me, very few old persons about now, absolutely none (there used to
be plenty) three or four times my age; and this, perhaps, renders the
memory (for she did die at last) of my great-aunt Margaret a thing so
rare and precious to me.

She was born, as we, her young relatives, were wont to say, ‘ages and
ages ago,’ but as a matter of fact just one age ago; that is to say, if
she had been alive but a few years back, she would have been exactly
one hundred years old. Think of it, my young friends who are about to
be so good, in your turn, as to give her story your attention—think of
it having been possible that you yourselves should have met this very
personage in the flesh (though the poor dear had but little of it)—you
perhaps in your goat carriage, upon the King’s Parade, Brighton, and
she in her wheeled chair—the two extremities (on wheels) of human life!

To things you have read of as history, matters as dead and gone to
you, if not quite so old, as the Peloponnesian war, she was a living
witness. She was alive, for example, though not of an age to ‘take
notice’ of the circumstances, when the independence of America was
acknowledged by the mother country, and when England was beginning to
solace herself for that disruption by the acquisition of India. If Aunt
Margaret did not know as much about Hyder Ali as became a contemporary,
with matters nearer home, such as the loss of the ‘Royal George,’ ‘with
all her crew (or nearly so) complete,’ she was very conversant. ‘I saw
it,’ she was used to say, ‘with my own eyes;’ and it was only by the
strictest cross-examination that you could get her to confess that
she was but a child in arms when that catastrophe took place. As to
politics, indeed, though we were at war with everybody in those times,
the absence of special correspondents, telegraphs, and even newspapers,
made public matters of much more limited interest than it is nowadays
easy to imagine. Aunt Margaret, at all events, cared almost nothing
about them, with the exception of the doings of the pressgang—an
institution of which she always spoke with the liveliest horror. On
some one, however, chancing to say in her hearing (and by way of
corroboration of her views) that it was marvellous how men who had been
so infamously treated should have been got to fight under the national
flag, she let fly at him like the broadside of a seventy-gun frigate,
and gave him to understand that the sailors of those days had never
had their equals. On that, as on all other subjects, she exercised the
right of criticism upon the institutions of her time to an unlimited
extent, but if they were attacked by others she became their defender.

Her chief concern, however, was with social matters, when speaking of
which she seemed entirely to forget the age in which she was living:
it was as though some ancestress, in hoop and farthingale, had stepped
down from her picture and read us a page of the diary she had written
overnight. She seemed hardly like one of ourselves at all, though
it was obvious enough that she was of the female gender, from the
prominence she gave to the topic of costumes. She confessed that she
preferred the hair ‘undressed’—a phrase which misled her more youthful
hearers, who imagined her to be praising a dissolute luxuriance of
love-locks, which was very far from her intention; on the other hand,
she lamented the disuse of black satin breeches, which she ascribed to
the general decay of limb among the male sex. There was nothing like
your top-boots and hessians, she would say, for morning wear, but in
the evening, every man that had a leg was, in her opinion, bound to
show it.

I have reason to believe that my aunt Margaret was the last person
who ever journeyed from London to Brighton in a post-chaise—a mode
of travel, she was wont to remark, justly eulogised by the wisest and
best of men and Londoners. If he had been spared to see a railway
locomotive, she expressed herself as confident that he would have
considered it the direct offspring of the devil; and that conjectural
opinion of the great lexicographer she herself shared to her dying
day. Like him, she was a Londoner, and took an immense interest, not
municipal of course, but social, in the affairs of the great city. ‘My
dear,’ she often used to say reprovingly, when speaking of some event
of which I was obliged to confess I had never so much as heard, ‘it was
the topic of every tongue.’

Although she had never been the theme of London gossip herself,
she had been very closely connected with one who had been; and to
those who were intimate with her he was the constant subject of her
discourse. Her thoughts dwelt more with him, I am sure, than with all
the other personages together with whom she had been acquainted during
her earthly pilgrimage; and yet she always thought of him in his
adolescence, as a very young man.

‘He was just your age, my dear,’ she was wont to say to me, ‘when he
became the “Talk of the Town.”’

Perhaps this circumstance gave him an additional interest in my eyes;
but certainly her account of this one famous personage was more
interesting to me than everything else which Aunt Margaret had to
tell me. It has dwelt in my mind for many a year, and when this is
the case with any story, I have generally found that I have been able
to interest others in its recital. In this particular case, however,
my way is not so plain as usual. The story is not _my_ story, nor
even Aunt Margaret’s; in its more important details it is common
property. On the other hand, not even the oldest inhabitant has any
remembrance of it. The hearts that were once wounded to the quick by
the occurrences which I am about to describe can be no more pained
by any allusion to them; they have long been dust. No relative, to
my knowledge, is now living of the unfortunate young man whose
memory—execrated by the crowd—was kept so green and fresh (watered by
her tears) by one living soul for nearly eighty years. Why should I not
tell his ‘pitiful story?’

A second question, however, presents itself at the outset concerning
him. Shall I give or conceal his name? I here frankly confess that in
its broad details the tale has no novelty to recommend it: it is not
only true, but it has been told. The bald, bare facts have been put
before the public by the youth himself nearly a hundred years since.
There is the rub. To a few ‘persons of culture,’ as the phrase goes
nowadays, the main incident of his career will be familiar; though,
however cultured, it is unlikely they will know how it affected my
great-aunt Margaret; but to tens of thousands (including, I’ll be
bound, the upper ten) it will be utterly unknown.

Now I have noticed that there is nothing your well-informed person so
much delights in as to make other people aware of his being so. Indeed,
the chief use of information in his eyes is not so much to raise
oneself above the crowd (though a sense of elevation is agreeable), as
to have the privilege of imparting it to others with a noble air of
superiority and self-importance. I will therefore call my hero by such
a name as will at once be recognised by the learned, whom I shall thus
render my intermediaries—exponents of the transparent secret to those
who are in blissful ignorance of it. I will call him William Henry Erin.

I must add in justice to myself that the story was not told me in
confidence.

How could it be so when at the very beginning of our intimacy the
narrator had already almost reached the extreme limit of human life,
while I had but just left school? It was the similarity of age on my
part with that of the person she had in her mind which no doubt, in
part at least, caused her to make me the repository of her long-buried
sorrow. She judged, and rightly judged, that for that reason I was more
likely to sympathise with it. Indeed, whenever she spoke of it I forgot
her age; as in the case of the pictured grandmamma so felicitously
described by Mr. Locker, I used to think of her at such times—

  As she looked at seventeen
          As a bride.

  Her rounded form was lean,
  And her silk was bombazine,
          Well I wot.
  With her needles she would sit,
  And for hours would she knit,
          Would she not?

  Ah, perishable clay!
  Her charms had dropped away,
          One by one.

Yet when she spoke of the lover of her youth, there seemed nothing
incongruous in her so doing. I forgot the Long Ago in which her tale
was placed; her talk, indeed, on those occasions being of those human
feelings which are independent of any epoch, took little or no colour
from the past; it seemed to me a story of to-day, and as such I now
relate it.




CHAPTER