Confessions Of Con Cregan, the Irish Gil Blas. Lever Charles James

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СКАЧАТЬ Guess my surprise to see that the pieces were all bright yellow gold, – eight shining sovereigns!

      I had but that instant made the discovery, when the sailor who was to put me on shore jumped into the boat and seated himself.

      “Wait one instant,” cried I. “Sir Dudley – Sir Dudley Broughton!”

      “Well, what’s the matter?” said he, leaning over the side.

      “This money you gave me – ”

      “Not enough, of course! I ought to have known that,” said he, scornfully. “Give the whelp a couple of half-crowns, Halkett, and send him adrift.”

      “You ‘re wrong, sir,” cried I, with passionate eagerness; “they are gold pieces, – sovereigns.”

      “The devil they are!” cried he, laughing; “the better luck yours. Why did n’t you hold your tongue about it?”

      “You bid me take some shillings, sir,” answered I.

      “How d – d honest you must be! Do you hear that, Halkett? The fellow had scruples about taking his prize-money! Never mind, boy, I must pay for my blunder, – you may keep them now.”

      “I have pride, too,” cried I; “and hang me if I touch them.”

      He stared at me, without speaking, for a few minutes, and then said, in a low, flat voice, “Come on deck, lad.” I obeyed; and he took a lighted lantern from the binnacle, and held it up close to my face, and then moved it so that he made a careful examination of my whole figure.

      “I ‘d give a crown to know who was your father,” said he, dryly.

      “Con Cregan, of Kilbeggan, sir.”

      “Oh, of course, I know all that. Come, now, what say you to try a bit of life afloat? Will you stay here?”

      “Will you take me, sir?” cried I, in ecstasy.

      “Halkett, rig him out,” said he, shortly. “Nip the anchor with the ebb, and keep your course down channel.” With this he descended the cabin stairs and disappeared, while I, at a signal from Halkett, stepped down the ladder into the steerage. In the mean while it will not be deemed digressionary if I devote a few words to the singular character into whose society I was now thrown, inasmuch as to convey any candid narrative of my own career I must speak of those who, without influencing the main current of my life, yet certainly gave some impulse and direction to its first meanderings.

      Sir Dudley Broughton was the only son of a wealthy baronet, who, not from affection or overkindness, but out of downright indolent indifference, permitted him, first as an Eton boy, and afterwards as a gentleman commoner of Christ Church, to indulge in every dissipation that suited his fancy. An unlimited indulgence, a free command of whatever money he asked for, added to a temper constitutionally headstrong and impetuous, soon developed what might have been expected from the combination. He led a life of wild insubordination at school, and was expelled from Oxford. With faculties above rather than beneath mediocrity, and a certain aptitude for acquiring the knowledge most in request in society, he had the reputation of being one who, if he had not unhappily so addicted himself to dissipation, would have made a favorable figure in the world. After trying in vain to interest himself in the pursuits of a country life, of which the sporting was the only thing he found attractive, he joined a well-known light cavalry regiment, celebrated for numbering among its officers more fast men than any other corps in the service. His father, dying about the same time, left him in possession of a large fortune, which, with all his extravagance, was but slightly encumbered. This fact, coupled with his well-known reputation, made him popular with his brother officers, most of whom, having run through nearly all they possessed, saw with pleasure a new Croesus arrive in the regiment. Such a man as Broughton was just wanted. One had a charger to get off; another wanted a purchaser for his four-in-hand drag. The senior captain was skilful at billiards; and every one played “lansquenet” and hazard.

      Besides various schemes against his purse, the colonel had a still more serious one against his person. He had a daughter, a handsome, fashionable-looking girl, with all the manners of society, and a great deal of that tact only to be acquired in the very best foreign society. That she was no longer in the fresh bloom of youth, nor with a reputation quite spotless, were matters well known in the regiment; but as she was still eminently handsome, and “the Count Radchoffsky” had been recalled by the emperor from the embassy of which he was secretary, Lydia Delmar was likely, in the opinions of keen-judging parties, to make a good hit with “some young fellow who did n’t know town.” Broughton was exactly the man Colonel Delmar wanted, – good family, a fine fortune, and the very temper a clever woman usually contrives to rule with absolute sway.

      There would be, unfortunately, no novelty in recording the steps by which such a man is ruined. He did everything that men do who are bent upon testing Fortune to the utmost. He lent large sums to his “friends;” he lost larger ones to them. When he did win, none ever paid him, except by a good-humored jest upon his credit at Coutts’s. “What the devil do you want with money, Sir Dudley?” was an appeal he could never reply to. He ran horses at Ascot, and got “squeezed;” he played at “Crocky’s,” and fared no better; but he was the favorite of the corps. “We could never get on without Dudley,” was a common remark; and it satisfied him that, with all his extravagance, he had made an investment in the hearts at least of his comrades. A few months longer of this “fast” career would, in all likelihood, have ruined him. He broke his leg by a fall in a steeplechase, and was thus driven, by sheer necessity, to lay up, and keep quiet for a season. Now came Colonel Delmar’s opportunity; the moment the news reached Coventry, he set off with his daughter to Leamington. With the steeplechasing, hazard-playing, betting, drinking, yachting, driving Sir Dudley, there was no chance of even time for their plans; but with a sick man on the sofa, bored by his inactivity, hipped for want of his usual resources, the game was open. The Colonel’s visit, too, had such an air of true kindness!

      Broughton had left quarters without leave; but instead of reprimands, arrests, and Heaven knows what besides, there was Colonel Delmar, the fine old fellow, shaking his finger in mock rebuke, and saying, “Ah, Dudley, my boy, I came down to give you a rare scolding; but this sad business has saved you!” And Lydia also, against whom he had ever felt a dislike, – that prejudice your boisterous and noisy kind of men ever feel to clever women, whose sarcasms they know themselves exposed to, – why, she was gentle good-nature and easy sisterlike kindness itself! She did not, as the phrase goes, “nurse him,” but she seldom left the room where he lay. She read aloud, selecting with a marvellous instinct the very kind of books he fancied, – novels, tales of every-day life, things of whose truthfulness he could form some judgment; and sketches wherein the author’s views were about on a level with his own. She would sit at the window, too, and amuse him with descriptions of the people passing in the street; such smart shrewd pictures were they of watering-place folks and habits, Dudley never tired of them! She was unsurpassed for the style with which she could dress up an anecdote or a bit of gossip; and if it verged upon the free, her French education taught her the nice perception of the narrow line that separates “libertinage” from indelicacy.

      So far from feeling impatient at his confinement to a sofa, therefore, Broughton affected distrust in his renovated limb for a full fortnight after the doctor had pronounced him cured. At last he was able to drive out, and soon afterwards to take exercise on horseback, Lydia Delmar and her father occasionally accompanying him.

      People will talk at Leamington, as they do at other places; and so the gossips said that the rich – for he was still so reputed in the world – the “rich” Sir Dudley Broughton was going to marry Miss Delmar.

      Gossip is half-brother to that all-powerful director called “Public Opinion;” so that СКАЧАТЬ