Мэри Элизабет Брэддон
Mohawks: A Novel. Volume 3 of 3
CHAPTER V
"I'LL JOIN WITH THEE IN A MOST JUST REVENGE."
Fétis repaired to Bloomsbury Square next evening, not altogether with the innocent simplicity of the lamb that goes to the slaughter, but with the caution of an astute mind which perceives a snare in every civility, and suspects a trap in every invitation.
"Why was the man so civil, and what does he know about my life in Venice forty years ago?"
Those were the questions which had agitated the Frenchman's mind during that brief remnant of the night which he had spent in restless wakefulness, and they had proved unanswerable. Caution might have prompted him to avoid Lord Lavendale's house and turn a deaf ear to that nobleman's civilities; but anxiety made him curious, and fear of the future made him bold in the present. He wanted to know the extent of Lavendale's knowledge of his own past life, and to that end he accepted his lordship's invitation. His vanity again, which was large, made him suppose himself a match for Lord Lavendale in any intellectual encounter.
"If he has courted me in order to pump me for the secrets of the past, he will find he has wasted his trouble," thought Mr. Fétis, as his chair was being carried through perilous St. Giles's.
It was eleven o'clock, a late hour for supper; but Lord Lavendale had been at the House of Lords, and had dined with some of his brother peers after the debate. Supper had been prepared in the late lord's private sitting-room, a small triangular parlour at the end of a stately suite of reception-rooms, a room which had been rarely used of late, but which Herrick, for some unexplained motive, had selected as the scene of this evening's entertainment. It was altogether the cosiest room in the house, and with a heaped-up fire of sea-coal and oak logs in the wide grate, a small round table laid for supper, a pair of silver candelabra holding a dozen wax candles, and a side table loaded with all the materials for a jovial evening, the little triangular parlour looked the very picture of comfort.
The brightness and warmth of the room had an agreeable effect upon Mr. Fétis, who had been chilled and depressed for the moment by those cold and empty apartments through which a footman had ushered him by the light of a single candle, borne aloft as the man stalked in advance with a ghostlike air.
"Let me perish, my lord, but your empty saloons have given me the shivers," said Fétis, as he warmed his spindleshanks at the blaze; "your tall footman looked like a spectre."
"Come, come, Mr. Fétis, you are not the kind of man to believe in apparitions," said Durnford gaily. "I think we are all materialists here, are we not? We accept nothing for truth that cannot be mathematically demonstrated."
Lavendale looked grave. "It is not every sceptic who is free from superstition," he said. "There are men who cannot believe in a Personal God, and who will yet tremble at a shadow. I have known an infidel who would scoff at the Gospel, stand up for the story of the Witch of Endor."
Mr. Fétis shrugged his shoulders, and did not pursue the argument.
The butler and a pair of footmen brought in the hot dishes, and opened a magnum of champagne, and supper began in serious earnest – one of those exquisite suppers for which Lavendale had been renowned in his wild youth, when he had vied with the Regent Philip in the studied extravagance of his table.
Fétis was a connoisseur, and his secret anxieties did not hinder him from doing ample justice to the meal. Lavendale pretended to eat, but scarcely tasted the delicacies which were set before him. Durnford ate hurriedly, hardly knowing what he was eating, full of nervous anticipation. Fétis was the only one of the party who could calmly appreciate the talents of the chef and the aroma of the wines.
He refused champagne altogether, as a liquor only fit for boyhood and senility; but he highly approved the Burgundy, which had been laid down by the last Lord Lavendale, and had been maturing for nearly fifteen years.
"There is no wine like that which comes from the Côte d'Or," he said; and then, in a somewhat cracked voice, he chirruped a stanza of Villon's "Ballade joyeuse des Taverniers."
"I did not see your lordship at the opera to-night," he said presently.
"No, I was at a less agreeable entertainment. I was at the House of Lords. Was the Opera House full?"
"A galaxy of fashion and beauty; but I think that lady whom I may call my mistress still bears the palm. There was not a woman among them to outshine Mr. Topsparkle's wife."
"He has reason to be proud of such a wife," said Lavendale lightly. "Fill your glass, I beg, Mr. Fétis, or I shall doubt your liking for that wine. She is not his first wife, by the way – nor his first beautiful wife. My Italian friend told me that Topsparkle carried off one of the handsomest women in Venice when he left that city. What became of the lady?"
"She died young."
"In Italy?"
"No, my lord. Mr. Topsparkle brought the young lady to London, and she died of colic – or in all likelihood of the plague – at his house in Soho Square."
"Was she his wife?"
"That question, my lord, rests with Mr. Topsparkle's conscience. If he was married to the young lady I was not admitted to his confidence. I was not present at the marriage; but she was always spoken of in the household as Mrs. Topsparkle; and I, as a servant, had no right to question her claim to that title."
"I have heard that there was something mysterious about her death; something that aroused suspicion in the neighbourhood."
"O, my lord, all sudden deaths are accounted suspicious nowadays. There has not been a prince of the blood royal, or a nobleman that has died in France during the last thirty years, but there has been talk of poison, although the disease has been as obvious in its characteristics as disease can ever be. Smallpox, ague, putrid fever, have one and all been put down to the late Regent and his accomplices; whereas that poor good-natured prince would scarce have trodden willingly upon a worm. Never was a kinder creature, yet his heart was wrung many a time by the vilest accusations circulated with an insolent openness. As for Mrs. Topsparkle's death, I could give you all the medical details, were you curious enough to listen to them."
His manner was serenity itself; and it was difficult to suppose that guilt could lurk under so placid an aspect, so easy a bearing. Yet last night the first allusion to his life in Venice had blanched his cheek and made his hand tremulous. The difference was that he had then been unprepared, while to-night he was fortified against every shock, and had schooled himself to answer every question.
"The suspicion was doubtless unfounded," said Lavendale, "but I have heard that the slander banished Mr. Topsparkle from this country."
"My master was over sensitive regarding the lampoons and libels which are rife at all elections, and which were directed against him with peculiar venom on account of his wealth, his youth, and his accomplishments," answered Fétis. "He left England in a fit of disgust after the Brentford Election; and as a Continental life had always suited his humour, he lived abroad for thirty years, with but occasional visits to his native country."
"You stand by him with a truly loyal spirit, which is worthy of all admiration," said Durnford.
"'Twere hard if there were no fidelity between master and servant after forty years' service. I know Mr. Topsparkle's failings, and can compassionate him where he is weak and erring. He is a man of a jealous temper, and did not live altogether happily with the Italian lady of whom you were talking. It was known in the household that they had quarrelled – that there had been tears, scenes, recrimination on his side, distress on hers. This knowledge was the only ground for suspicion among the busy-bodies of the neighbourhood when the young lady died after an illness of two days. The fools did not take the trouble to know or to consider that she had never properly recovered her health after the birth of her infant."
"What became of that infant, Mr. Fétis?"
"She was educated abroad, and turned out badly. I can tell you nothing about her," replied Fétis, with an impatient shrug. "I had nothing to do with her bringing up, nor do I know her fate. I have never tried to pry into my master's secrets."
"But surely you, who were so much more than a servant, almost a brother, must have known everything," urged Lavendale; and then with a lighter air he added, "but 'tis inhospitable to plague you about the history of the past when we are met here to enjoy the present. What say you to a shake of the dice-box to raise our spirits?"
Fétis assented eagerly, with all a gamester's gusto, and he and Lord Lavendale spent nearly an hour at hazard, until the Frenchman had a pile of guineas lying in front of him, and in the pleasure of winning had drank deep of that fine old Burgundy which he had praised at supper. He played with a feverish excitement which Lavendale had remarked in his manner on the previous evening; but to-night the fiery energies of the man were intensified. He was like a man possessed by devils.
When Lavendale grew weary of losing, and would have left off, the Frenchman urged him to go on a little longer.
"I am generally an unlucky wretch: you will have your revenge presently," he said eagerly, and after a few more turns Fétis began to lose.
Lavendale swept up the dice and flung them into a drawer.
"It would have been unmannerly to leave off while you were winning, Monsieur Fétis," he said; "but now the luck is turned against you, I will own I have had enough. What can be this passion of cards which possesses some of us to grovel for a long night over the board of green cloth? I have never known the gambler's fiercest fever, though I have played deep enough in my time; and now my soul soon sickens of the stale diversion."
The Frenchman pocketed his pile of gold with a mechanical air, and looked about him like a man awakened suddenly from a feverish dream. His hands trembled a little as he adjusted his wig, which had been pushed awry in his excitement. His eyes had a glassy brightness, and it was obvious that he was the worse for liquor.
"Good-night, my lord; Mr. Durnford, your servant. I fear I have kept your lordship up very late. If we have trenched somewhat on the dead of night – "
"Monsieur Fétis, the pleasure of your society has been an ample recompense for the loss of slumber," said Lavendale. "My chairmen shall take you home. They have been told to wait for you."
"Indeed, your lordship is too considerate."
"The rest of my people have gone to bed, I believe; Durnford, will you light Monsieur Fétis to the hall?"
Herrick took a candle from a side table and led the way through the empty rooms, cold and dark and unspeakably dismal after the light and warmth of that cosy parlour in which the three men had supped. The atmosphere struck a chill to the soul of Fétis as he entered the first of those disused reception-rooms. Herrick's one candle shed but a faint gleam of light, which served only to accentuate the gloom. Gigantic shadows, strange forms of vague blackness, like the monstrous inhabitants of some mysterious underworld, seemed to emerge out of the corners and creep towards Fétis – dragon-like monsters, with spreading pinions and eagle claws. They were but the shadow-forms of incipient delirium tremens; but to him who beheld them they were unspeakably horrible.
Yet these were as nothing to that which came afterwards.
He crept with a curious cat-like gait across the room, shrinking from side to side to avoid the clutch of those shadowy claws, to avoid being caught up and enfolded for ever beneath those dark pinions, but on the threshold of the next room he gave a wild yell of agony, and fell on his knees, grovelling, the powdered wig pushed from his bald head by those nerveless hands of his, and drops of cold sweat breaking out upon his wrinkled forehead.
At the further end of the room, luminous in the faint rays of a lamp, he saw a shadow in a long white garment, a pale face, and dark eyes gazing upon him with a solemn stillness, a pale immovable countenance, like that of the dead.
"Spare me! spare me!" he cried. "O, pale, sad victim, have I not atoned? Haunt me no more, poor murdered wretch, betrayed, betrayed, betrayed at every turn! Thy cup of sorrow was full, but O, forgive thy much more wretched murderer! Pity, and pardon!"
The words came in short gasps – uttered in a shrill treble that was almost a scream. They had a sound like the cry of a tortured animal – seemed hardly human to those who heard them. He held his hands before his eyes, clasped convulsively over the eyeballs to shut out the vision that appalled him; and then gradually he collapsed altogether, and sank fainting on the threshold.
When consciousness returned he was seated in front of an open window, the cool night air blowing in upon him, sharp with the breath of late autumn.
"Where am I?" he faltered.
"You are with those who have judged and condemned you," answered Lavendale solemnly. "Murderer!"
"Who dares call me by that name?"
"I, Lavendale. My friend here, Durnford, is witness with me of your guilty terror. You have seen the ghost of her whom you murdered, or helped to murder. You have seen the ghost of your innocent victim, Margharita Vincenti."
"It was Topsparkle's crime. I was but the assistant and tool. The guilt was his. I was only a faithful servant."
"I doubt you were the inspirer of most of his iniquities at that time," said Lavendale. "It was your knowledge of poisons which put him in the way of accommodating his sated love and gratifying his revenge at one stroke. It is only the dead who do not come back."
That last gust of October wind did its work. Fétis rose to his feet with his nerves restored, and faced his accuser with an easy insolence.
"Your lordship's wine has been too strong for my poor brain," he said lightly, "and I fear I have troubled you with one of my raving fits. My good little wife will tell you that I am subject to a kind of brain fever after anything in the way of a debauch. Your lordship should not have tempted me to so far exceed my usual two bottles. Pray, Mr. Durnford, be so good as to show me to the hall. I shall not trouble your lordship's chairmen. The walk home will steady my poor head. Your lordship's most humble and deeply obliged servant."
He gave a low bow, a succession of bows rather, with which he bent and wriggled himself out of Lord Lavendale's presence, in a series of serpentine curves.
Lavendale made as if he would have sprung at him, longing to clutch at that wizened throat and pin the secret murderer to the floor, to imprison him for the rest of the night, and deliver him over to the officers of justice in the morning; but Durnford laid a warning hand upon his shoulder.
"Let him go," he whispered. "There is no evidence against him yet."
Lavendale submitted, and Durnford led the way to the hall, and saw Mr. Fétis out of doors with supreme courtesy. Fétis flung a couple of crowns to the sleepy chairmen as he passed out.
"Get to your beds, my good fellows," he said. "My legs are steady enough to carry me home, in spite of your master's Burgundy."
"Why did you not help me to detain him?" asked Lavendale, when Durnford rejoined him in the wainscoted parlour. "What can justice want more than the wretch's own confession of his guilt?"
"Justice – as represented by a Bow Street magistrate – would want a great deal more evidence than the incoherent ravings of a drunkard, repeated at second hand. Our moral certainty that Fétis poisoned your old Venetian's granddaughter will not hang him, any more than the suspicions of the neighbours and the apothecary forty years ago."
"Yet I think your little play succeeded, and that the craven hound revealed himself clearly enough at sight of your poor pale wife, scared to death at the part she had to act, and looking every inch a ghost. Neither you nor I can ever doubt that he and Topsparkle were accomplices in a villainous murder. A pleasant reflection for one who loves Topsparkle's wife, and might have run away with her, yet chose to play the moralist and leave her in a murderer's clutches."
"'Twould have been a worse murder to slay her honour, as you would have done. She is safe enough with her wicked old husband, guarded and fenced round by society. Lady Judith is a personage. Topsparkle trembles at her frown."
"Yes, as the devils are said to tremble before the Eternal; but his heart may rebel against her all the same, torn by jealous fury. To know himself old, effete, a mere simulacrum of humanity, and to see her surrounded by all the bucks and bloods of the town, idolising and pursuing her: could the infernal powers in Tartarus invent a more horrible agony for a worn-out old profligate? And when once a man has got his hand at poisoning, how easy the art! See how often my Lord This or my Lady That is hustled into the family vault after a three days' illness – a fever, a putrid sore-throat, the Lord knows what! Two or three doses of arsenic or antimony, and the trick is done. 'Putrid fever,' says the physician. 'Your house is unhealthy, Mr. Topsparkle. I have heard your first wife died of the same kind of malady. You should move further to the West; the new houses in Cavendish Square are almost in the country. Here you are too near to Newgate and the Compter. The foul odours of the gaol-birds are blown in at your windows by every east wind.' Do you think Lady Judith's untimely death would be more than a nine days' wonder, happen when it might?"
"I think you should concern yourself less about her, dear Jack, for your own peace of mind."
"That was shattered long ago, friend. It is gone irrevocably, shivered, smashed, annihilated, like that glass goblet which was once the luck of Eden Hall. O, that Topsparkle is a damned villain! Could I but see him and his accomplice at the Old Bailey, I would answer the dread summons cheerfully. But to die and leave those two behind, and to leave her in their power!"
"God grant that you may outlive those ancient sinners."
"God will not grant it, Herrick. My days are numbered, like the beads upon a rosary – I am telling them off bead by bead – 'tis but a short string."
"Dear Jack, if thou would'st consult a physician instead of talking this wild nonsense, and if thou would'st but take care of thyself – "
"I might live to be ninety – on ass's milk – like Hervey. Open another bottle of Burgundy, Herrick, we are too much in the dismals."
"You shall have no more to-night."
"Shall I not, Mentor? Then I will go to bed and dream I am in Mahomet's paradise, where lovely woman intoxicates instead of wine."
CHAPTER VI
"WHEN SCREECH-OWLS CROAK UPON THE CHIMNEY-TOPS."
The house in Poland Street was scarce alive with the sound of footsteps on the stairs, or the opening and shutting of doors, until the day was well on towards noon. The cry of the sweep and the small coal man, the baker with his rolls, and Irish Molly with her clattering milk-pails, passed over the sleeping household, and was scarce heard dimly in a dream by any member of that strangely compacted family. The lodgers were for the most part such gentlemen as only began to think of their morning tea or chocolate when it was afternoon by the sundial. The landlord and his wife, being always among the last to retire, rose late in the morning with a struggle, lamenting the brevity of the night. Your bad sleeper is ever the most reluctant to rise, for his one chance of slumber comes generally in that fatal hour when business or duty compels him to leave his bed. Fétis, who passed most of his nights in feverish unrest, was apt after sunrise to sink into the deep sleep of mental and bodily exhaustion; but he must needs rise at ten in order to wait upon his master in Soho Square, whose toilet generally began at eleven. Madame Fétis coiled herself round like a dormouse, and would have slept twelve hours at a stretch if permitted; but as she rarely went to bed before three o'clock in the morning, so much indulgence was impossible. The house must be in order soon after noon, and delicate dainty little breakfasts must be served up for any distinguished patrons who might have spent the night upon the premises. And neither cook nor underlings could be trusted unless Madame was there with her keen bright eyes overlooking everything. It was Madame who made my lord Duke's chocolate, and buttered my lord Marquis's toast. She was the moving principle of grace and order in the household.
At one o'clock on the day after Lord Lavendale's supper-party, at an hour when the sober jog-trot citizens of London had dined or were in the act of dining, Madame sat sipping her chocolate, in a morning négligé of dove-coloured tabinet – a material which Dr. Swift had done his best to make popular, through the Queen and Princesses, for the benefit of the Irish weavers. Her lace ruffles at neck and wrist were of the finest Buckinghamshire, and she wore a little mob-cap upon her piled-up tresses of unpowdered hair, which was vastly becoming. At her side lay an open ledger, and a brace of bills, which were to be delivered to his Grace and the Marquis later in the afternoon. As she sipped and munched, the lady compared the items in the bills with the figures in the ledger, and with this reading solaced her morning meal. She stopped occasionally to make a calculation with the aid of her roseate finger-tips, laboriously counted, for she resembled the great Duchess Sarah alike in being an excellent woman of business, and completely ignorant of the simplest rules of arithmetic.
For the first time for at least a year Mr. Fétis had failed in his morning duties at Mr. Topsparkle's toilet. He had come home from his evening entertainment very ill, and he was no better this morning; so Madame had been obliged to send a little note of apology to Soho Square, a missive composed in equal parts of French and English, with an impartial measure of bad spelling in both languages.
Madame's apartment was a small front parlour, close to the street door. From her window she could survey an approaching visitor, while from her door she could overhear any conversation that was carried on in the passage, and keep herself informed as to every one who went out or came in. It was the spider's little parlour into which many a giddy buzzing fly had fluttered unwarily, to emerge with clipped wings. It was Circe's cave; and the bones of innumerable victims lay bleaching there, from a metaphorical point of view.
To-day Madame Fétis was so deeply absorbed in the addition of that long column of figures that she was less on the alert than usual for external sounds, and she was surprised by the setting down of a sedan in front of her door, and within three feet of her window. It was a private sedan, painted and fitted with that studied simplicity which indicated distinction in the owner. The panels were a dark brown, the armorial bearings were unobtrusive – all was dark, plain, sober in style. Madame Fétis had not time to wonder, for the orange and brown liveries of the footmen who preceded the vehicle informed her that the chair could belong to no less important a person than her husband's patron and quasi-master, the rich Mr. Topsparkle; and the little Frenchwoman's heart fluttered with gratified vanity at the idea that her fascinations had brought Mr. Topsparkle to her husband's house, which he had never visited before.
"The powdered pert proficient in the art" of disturbing a whole street by his performance on the knocker now proceeded to startle the midday quiet by a most prodigious fantasia in iron. Madame flew to open the door, and stood smiling and curtseying as Mr. Topsparkle descended from his chair, treading delicately, like the ladies of ancient Jerusalem.
"Dear Madam, you do me too much honour," he protested, as he entered the panneled passage, bringing a cloud of perfumed powder and an overpowering odour of attar of roses into the semi-darkness of the narrow entry. "It is not often that Cerberus is replaced by Hebe."
"My servants are so lazy, your honour," apologised Madame; "our Cerberus is cleaning the shoes in his morning sleep, and my femme de chambre has scarce made up her mind whether the broom she is using is a dream or a reality. If your honour will be so condescending as to step into the parlour – "
"One moment, madam," said Topsparkle, and then turning to the open door he waved his hand to the footmen. "You can take my chair home, you fellows. I shall walk."
The chairmen took up their lightened load, and the footmen trudged off in front of the sedan, as Madame Fétis shut the door, and followed her visitor into the little parlour, where she drew forward a large armchair, in which she was wont to take her afternoon sleep, and which was naturally the most luxurious seat in the room, or it would not have been so favoured.
"So my good Fétis has broken down at last," said Mr. Topsparkle, as he seated himself.
"Yes, sir; he is very ill."
"I was hardly surprised at receiving your amiable billet. I have been meditating on our little chat t'other day, my good Madame Fétis," pursued Topsparkle, lolling negligently forward in the commodious chair, with his elbow on his knee, and drawing figures upon the dusty carpet with the amber tip of his cane, "and as I am deeply concerned in the health – above all in the mental health – of your excellent husband, I felt an anxiety to hear more from the same source; so instead of sending a footman to make inquiries, I have come myself. I know the uneasiness of a wife's affection, and that her tenderness may exaggerate the signs of evil – "
"Indeed, sir, I don't exaggerate my husband's condition," exclaimed the lady, with a fretful air; "it grows worse and worse; and I dread the day when I shall see him carried off to Bedlam in a strait waistcoat. 'Twas only last night that he had a worse outbreak than ever, and the night before that – "
"The night before that you had Jack Spencer, and Lord Lavendale, and a party to supper and cards," interrupted Topsparkle, tapping Madame's plump arm with the tips of his skinny fingers. "Oh, I have heard of your banquetings and revelries, ma belle, and the money that is lost and won under this modest roof of yours."
"Indeed, sir, it was a very sober party. There were no ladies, and there was no broken glass, nor an item of furniture damaged. I protest we should never make both ends meet by such parties as that, though I own Mr. Spencer flings a guinea where any other gentleman would give a shilling. But 'tis the mad-cap evenings – when the ladies and gentlemen take to romping over their supper, or when there are swords drawn at cards, and the furniture damaged – that bring grist to the mill."
"And so there was not much diversion at Mr. Spencer's party – 'twas a grave and sedate assembly," said Topsparkle, with a trivial gossiping air, as of one who talked from sheer idleness; "but those quiet evenings are more dangerous than your romping revelries. I'll warrant the play was high."
Madame shook her head gloomily.
"Ay, I'll warrant it was, your honour, for that silly husband of mine tossed about in a wakeful fever till daylight, and raved like a lunatic towards nine o'clock, when he fell asleep – raved about Venice and one Borromeo. Does your honour remember any friend of my husband's by that name?"
"Borromeo?" repeated Topsparkle meditatively. "No, the name is strange to me. And so your husband talked in his sleep, and about Venice? Do his thoughts often turn that way?"
"'Tis the first time I have heard him. His ravings have been mostly about your honour's house in Soho Square. What can there be in that splendid mansion which should give Louis such a horror of it? He is always prating of ghosts. Do you really think 'tis haunted, sir?"
"Not one whit more than this cosy little parlour of yours, my fair friend; but servants are superstitious, and have a way of inventing a ghost for every fine old house. Mine was once occupied by Lord Grey, who was beheaded after Monmouth's rebellion; and those fools of mine have concocted a story that his headless figure stalks in the corridors between midnight and cock-crow. There are no ghosts in Soho Square, madam, save such childish inventions as I tell you of; but I fear your husband is in a very bad way, and that these ravings of his are but too sure an indication of the brandy-drinker's disease. You must be careful of him, my good Madame Fétis, if you would not see him expire in a madhouse."
"Alas, sir, how can I take care of a man who refuses to take care of himself? 'Twas only last night I implored him not to go to a supper at Lord Lavendale's house in Bloomsbury Square, to which his lordship had invited him."
"So his lordship invited your husband to sup, did he? Vastly condescending, I protest."
"Your honour would hardly believe how much notice the highest gentlemen in the land have taken of Fétis. 'Tis that has been his ruin. Lord Lavendale was monstrously taken with him. In his sleep that night it was Lavendale at every turn – Venice – Borromeo – Lavendale – mixed in all his ravings; and then yesterday evening, after the opera, he calls for a chair and is carried to his lordship's house, in spite of my protesting that the company he was going into would lead him into high play and hasten our ruin. He would not listen to me, but off he goes, in a sage-green ribbed velvet suit which your honour had made for the last birthday, and never wore but once – "
"I remember the suit," said Topsparkle, "it made me look as sickly as a lady of fashion in her morning cap before she puts on her rouge. It cost me ninety-five guineas for the birthday, and I gave it to Fétis next morning. 'Tis my rule never to wear a suit a second time if I don't like myself in it on the first wearing. 'Tis against good sense that a man should disgust himself with his own person for the sake of a few paltry guineas. I dare swear Fétis looks admirable in the suit. 'Tis just the colour of his own complexion."
