"Pray, who is the lady who calls at such an extraordinary hour, before a gentleman's day has begun?"

"She gave no name, sir."

"Go ask who she is."

The man retired, and returned to say the lady was a stranger to Mr.

Topsparkle, and asked an interview as a favour.

"So! That sounds mysterious," said Topsparkle. "Pray, what manner of personage is she? Does she look like a genteel beggar, elderly and shabby, in a greasy black-silk hood and mantle, eh, my man?"

"No, sir, the person is young and handsome. She looks rather like one of the foreign singing-women your honour is pleased to patronise."

"Singing women! Why, do you know, block-head, that those singing women, as you call them, are the beloved of princes, and have the salaries of prime ministers? Singing women, forsooth! And this stranger is young and pretty, you say?"

"Yes, sir."

"And a foreigner?"

"I am sure of that, sir."

"You can show her up."

Mr. Topsparkle composed himself into an att.i.tude on the sofa, like Louis XIV. Flatterers told him that he resembled that superb monarch, as he did in the fact that much of his dignity and splendour was derived from costume. Seated upon his cut velvet sofa, with the skirts of his coat spreading wide, his jewelled rapier at his side, he had certainly an almost regal air, calculated to overawe a nameless foreign woman, who was in all probability an adventuress whose audacity was her only pa.s.sport to that stately mansion.

The footman threw open the door, and announced "A lady to wait upon your honour," whereupon there came tripping in a plump little woman in a quilted satin petticoat, and short tucked-up gown, fluttering all over with cherry-coloured bows, and with a cherry-coloured hood setting off but in no wise concealing a ma.s.s of unpowdered black hair which cl.u.s.tered about a low forehead, and agreeably shaded the brightest black eyes Mr. Topsparkle had seen for a long time, eyes br.i.m.m.i.n.g with coquetry, and not without a lurking craftiness of expression which set the admiring gentleman upon his guard.

The lady's nose was _retrousse_, her lips were too thick for beauty, but of a carmine tint which was accentuated by the artful adjustment of patches; the lady's complexion was not quite so artificial as Mr.

Topsparkle's, but it revealed an acquaintance with some of the highest branches of the face-painting art. The lady in general effect looked about three-and-twenty. Mr. Topsparkle put her down for eight-and-thirty.

"My dear madam, I beg you to be seated," said Topsparkle, waving his attenuated hand graciously towards a chair, and admiring his rings and point lace ruffle as he did so. "You honour me vastly by this pleasant impromptu visit. May I offer you a cup of chocolate?"

"You are too condescending, sir. I took my chocolate before I left home," replied the cherry-coloured intruder, sinking gracefully into a chair, and rounding her plump white arms as she adjusted her cherry satin m.u.f.f. "I venture to call at this early hour, before the great world has begun to besiege your lordship's door, because I have an appeal to make to your generous heart."

"I thought as much," said Mr. Topsparkle within himself. "This cherry-coloured personage has come to beg."

He was so used to be begged of that his heart had hardened itself, was adamant against all such pet.i.tions; but he did not object when the mendicant was a pretty woman, with whom he might indulge in half an hour's innocent persiflage at the cost of a few guineas.

"Dearest madam, I am all ears," he murmured languidly.

"Sir, you behold a deeply-injured woman," said the lady, with a tragic air, and the announcement sounded like the beginning of a very long story.

"Say not so, I beseech you, madam; the character is so odiously common,"

protested Mr. Topsparkle. "That piquant countenance, those brilliant eyes, bespeak originality. Such a face is designed only to injure, the mission of such beauty is to destroy."

"Ah, sir, there was a day when I knew my power and used it; you who are a frequenter of the opera may perhaps remember the name and person of Coralie Legrand."

"Your person, madam, once seen can never be forgotten; and if I had heard you sing in the opera--"

"Sir, I was a dancer, not a singer," exclaimed the lady, with a wounded air.

"Was, madam; nay, speak not of yourself in the past, '_Fuit Ilium_;'

say not that such charms are for ever withdrawn from the public eye--that the flame of the candles no longer shines upon that beauty--that some selfish churl, some avaricious h.o.a.rder of loveliness, has appropriated so fair a being for his own exclusive property."

"It is true, sir. I who had once half the town at my feet am now mewed up in a stuffy parlour, and scolded if I venture to exchange half a dozen sentences with some aristocratic pretty fellow, or to venture a guinea or so at ombre."

"Soho!" exclaimed Topsparkle, becoming suddenly intent. "Your name, madam, your name, I entreat."

"I was Coralie Legrand, leading dancer in the first division of the ballet at the Royal Haymarket Opera. I am Mrs. Fetis, your valet's ill-used wife; and it is on my husband's account that I venture--"

"Madam, you have the strongest claim upon me. Fetis is an old servant--"

"He is an old servant. If I had known how old before I married him--"

"O, madam, he is not a septuagenarian; Fetis is my junior."

"He looks your lordship's senior; but it is not so much his age I object to. I would forgive him for being ninety if he were only indulgent and generous."

"Is he capable of meanness to so bewitching a wife?"

"Yes, sir, he is horribly stingy. At this hour I am being dunned to death by my next-door neighbour, to whom I owe a paltry fifteen guineas.

She is Madame Furbelow, the Court milliner, a person of some ton, and she and I were dearest friends till this money trouble parted us--but 'tis shocking not to be able to pay one's debts of honour. Yet, to my certain knowledge, Fetis has lost hundreds in a single night to some of his fine gentlemen customers, who fool him by pretending to treat him as a friend. There was the wild Duke of Wharton, for instance, and his club of intriguers, the Schemers they called themselves, a committee of gallants, who used to hold their meetings at our house and plot mischief against poor innocent women--how to carry off silly heiresses and to conquer rich widows. His Grace had a bank at faro, and that foolish husband of mine was a frequent loser."

"He must have won sometimes, madam. He must have had his lucky nights, like the rest of us."

"Then he kept his good luck to himself, sir; I never heard of it. He said he ought to have the devil's luck in love since he was so cursedly unlucky at cards and dice. And then, though he has the effrontery to deny me a few guineas, I have heard him boast that he has claims upon you which you must always honour, that your purse was a golden stream which could never run dry."

"O, he has boasted, has he, the poor foolish fellow, boasted of his power over me?"

"Nay, sir, I did not presume to mention the word 'power.' He has bragged of his services to you--long and faithful services such as no other man in Europe would have rendered to a master. He has curious fits at times--but I did not come hither to betray his secrets, poor creature; I came in the hope that your lordship, who has been ever so bountiful to my husband, could perhaps grant some small pecuniary favour to a poor woman in distress--"

"Madam, my purse is at your service," exclaimed Topsparkle eagerly, taking out a well-filled pocket-book, and selecting a couple of bank-notes. "Here is a trifling sum which will enable you to pay your neighbour and leave a surplus for some future transactions of the same kind, or for another hood like that which becomes you so admirably.

Pray, never hesitate to call upon me for any petty a.s.sistance of this kind."

The fair Coralie cooed her thanks with a gentle murmuring as of a wood-pigeon, and ventured so far as to imprint her rosy lips upon her benefactor's lean hand, a kiss which Mr. Topsparkle received as a compliment, although he stealthily wiped his hand with his cambric handkerchief the next minute.

"And you say that my poor Louis is odd at times," he said caressingly.

"I hope he does not drink?"

"I think not, sir. There is a terrible deal of drinking goes on in our house, but I doubt if my husband is ever the worse for liquor. But he has strange fits sometimes of a night, cannot sleep, or sleeps but for five minutes at a time, and then starts up from his bed and walks up and down the room, saying that he is haunted, haunted by the souls he has ruined. He says there is a ghost in _this_house."

"Indeed," cried Mr. Topsparkle, looking around him, and a.s.suming his airiest manner, "and yet I do not fancy this looks like the habitation of ghosts. There are no cobwebs festooning the walls, no bats and owls flitting across the ceiling, no dirt, decay, or desolation."

"Nay, sir, it is a splendid house, full of beautifulest things. Yet I have heard my husband on those sleepless nights of his when he has talked more to himself than to me--I have heard him say that he has rushed out of this house at twilight with the cold sweat pouring down his face."

"Then, my dear lady, I fear there is no room to doubt that your husband has taken to drink. The symptoms you depict are precisely those of a drunkard's disease known to all medical men. The sleepless nights--the imagination of ghosts and phantoms--the cold sweat--these are as common and as plain as the pustules that denote smallpox or the spots that indicate scarlet fever. If your husband does not drink openly, be a.s.sured he drinks deep in secret. You had better get him away from London. What say you to returning to your native country?"

Mrs. Fetis shrugged her shoulders with a doubtful air. She often talked rapturously of La Belle France, raved of her sunny south, that gracious city of Perigord where she had been born and reared to the age of fifteen. Yet for all the common purposes of life she had liked London a great deal better.

"There is nothing I should love so much," she protested. "But 'twould be madness to leave a house in which we have sunk all our means and our labour with the hope of getting our reward by a competence in our old age. Indeed, sir, we could not afford to leave Poland Street."