CHAPTER XXIII.

Goldsmith for the next few days felt very ill at ease. He had a consciousness of having wasted a good deal of valuable time waiting upon Mrs. Abington and discussing with her the possibility of accomplishing the purpose which he had at heart; for he could not but perceive how shallow was the scheme which she had devised for the undoing of Mary Horneck's enemy. He felt that it would, after all, have been better for him to place himself in the hands of the fencing-master whom Baretti had promised to find out for him, and to do his best to run the scoundrel through the body, than to waste his time listening to the crude scheme concocted by Mrs. Abington, in close imitation of some third-class playwright.

He felt, however, that he had committed himself to the actress and her scheme. It would be impossible for him to draw back after agreeing to join her at supper on the Thursday night. But this fact did not prevent his exercising his imagination with a view to find out some new plan for obtaining possession of the letters. Thursday came, however, without seeing him any further advanced in this direction than he had been when he had first gone to the actress, and he began to feel that hopelessness which takes the form of hoping for the intervention of some accident to effect what ingenuity has failed to accomplish-Mrs. Abington had suggested the possibility of such an accident taking place—in fact, she seemed to rely rather upon the possibility of such an occurrence than upon the ingenuity of her own scheme; and Oliver could not but think that she was right in this respect. He had a considerable experience of life and its vicissitudes, and he knew that when destiny was in a jesting mood the most judicious and cunningly devised scheme may be overturned by an accident apparently no less trivial than the raising of a hand, the fluttering of a piece of lace, or the cry of a baby.

He had known of a horse's casting a shoe preventing a runaway match and a vast amount of consequent misery, and he had heard of a shower of rain causing a confirmed woman hater to take shelter in a doorway, where he met a young woman who changed—for a time—all his ideas of the sex. As he recalled these and other freaks of fate, he could not but feel that Mrs. Abington was fully justified in her confidence in accident as a factor in all human problems. But he was quite aware that hoping for an accident is only another form of despair.

In the course of the day appointed by Mrs. Abington for her supper he met Baretti, and reminded him of the promise he had made to find an Italian fencing master and send him to Brick Court.

“What!” cried Baretti. “Have you another affair on your hands in addition to that in which you have already been engaged? Psha! sir. You do not need to be a swordsman in order to flog a bookseller.”

“I do not look forward to fighting booksellers,” said Goldsmith. “They have stepped between me and starvation more than once.”

“Would any one of them have taken that step unless he was pretty certain to make money by his philanthropy?” asked Baretti in his usual cynical way.

“I cannot say,” replied Goldsmith. “I don't think that I can lay claim to the mortifying reflection that I have enriched any bookseller. At any rate, I do not mean ever to beat another.”

“'Tis, then, a critic whom you mean to attack? If you have made up your mind to kill a critic, I shall make it a point to find you the best swordsman in Europe,” said Baretti.

“Do so, my friend,” said Goldsmith; “and when I succeed in killing a critic, you shall have the first and second fingers of his right hand as a memento.”

“I shall look for them—yes, in five years, for it will certainly take that time to make you expert with a sword,” said the Italian. “And, meantime, you may yourself be cut to pieces by even so indifferent a fighter as Kenrick.”

“In such a case I promise to bequeath to you whatever bones of mine you may take a fancy to have.”

“And I shall regard them with great veneration, being the relics of a martyr—a man who did not fear to fight with dragons and other unclean beasts. You may look for a visit from a skilful countryman of mine within a week; only let me pray of you to be guided by his advice. If he should say that it is wiser for you to beware the entrance to a quarrel, as your poet has it, you will do well to accept his advice. I do not want a poet's bones for my reliquary, though from all that I can hear one of our friends would have no objection to a limb or two.”

“And who may that friend be?”

“You should be able to guess, sir. What! have you not been negotiating with the booksellers for a life of Dr. Johnson?”

“Not I, sir. But, if I have been doing so, what then?”

“What then? Why, then you may count upon the eternal enmity of the little Scotchman whom you once described not as a cur but only a bur. Sir, Boswell robbed of his Johnson would be worse than—than——”

“A lioness robbed of her whelps?”

“Well, better say a she-bear robbed of her cubs, only that Johnson is the bear and Boswell the cub. Boswell has been going about saying that you had boasted to him of your intention to become Johnson's biographer; and the best of the matter is that Johnson has entered with great spirit into the jest and has kept his poor Bossy on thistles—reminiscent of his native land—ever since.”

Goldsmith laughed, and told Baretti how he had occasion to get rid of Boswell, and had done so by pretending that he meant to write a life of Johnson. Baretti laughed and went on to describe how, on the previous evening, Garrick had drawn on Boswell until the latter had imitated all the animals in the farmyard, while narrating, for the thousandth time, his first appearance in the pit of Drury Lane. Boswell had felt quite flattered, Baretti said, when Garrick, making a judicial speech, which every one present except Boswell perceived to be a fine piece of comedy, said he felt constrained to reverse the judgment of the man in the pit who had shouted: “Stick to the coo, mon!” On the whole, Garrick said, he thought that, while Boswell's imitation of the cow was most admirable in many respects, yet for naturalness it was his opinion—whatever it might be worth—that the voice of the ass was that which Boswell was most successful in attempting.

Goldsmith knew that even Garrick's broadest buffoonery was on occasions accepted by Boswell with all seriousness, and he had no hesitation in believing Baretti's account of the party on the previous evening.

He went to Mrs. Abington's room at the theatre early in the night to inquire if she had made any change in her plans respecting the supper, and he found that the lady had come to think as poorly of the scheme which she had invented as he did. She had even abandoned her idea of inducing the man to confess, when in a state of intoxication, where he was in the habit of keeping the letters.

“These fellows are sometimes desperately suspicious when in their cups,” said she; “and I fear that at the first hint of our purpose he may become dumb, no matter how boldly he may have been talking previously. If he suspects that you have a desire to obtain the letters, you may say farewell to the chance of worming anything out of him regarding them.”

“What then is to be gained by our supping with him?” said Goldsmith.

“Why, you are brought into contact with him,” she replied. “You will then be in a position, if you cultivate a friendship with him, to take him unawares upon some occasion, and so effect your purpose. Great? heavens, sir! one cannot expect to take a man by storm, so to speak—one cannot hope to meet a clever scoundrel for half an hour-in the evening, and then walk away with all his secrets. You may have to be with this fellow every day for a month or two before you get a chance of putting the letters into your pocket.”

“I'll hope for better luck than that,” said Oliver.

“Oh, with good luck one can accomplish anything,” said she. “But good luck is just one of the things that cannot be arranged for even by the cleverest people.”

“That is where men are at a disadvantage in striving with destiny,” said Goldsmith. “But I think that any man who succeeds in having Mrs. Abington as his ally must be regarded as the most fortunate of his sex.”

“Ah, sir, wait for another month before you compliment me,” said she.

“Madam,” said he, “I am not complimenting you, but myself. I will take your advice and reserve my compliments to you for—well, no, not a month; if I can put them off for a week I shall feel that I have done very well.”

As he made his bow and left her, he could not help feeling more strongly that he had greatly overrated the advantages to be derived from an alliance with Mrs. Abington when his object was to get the better of an adroit scoundrel. He had heard—nay, he had written—of the wiles of women, and yet the first time that he had an opportunity of testing a woman's wiles he found that he had been far too generous in his estimate of their value.

It was with no little trepidation that he went to the Shakespeare tavern at supper time and inquired for Mrs. Abington. He had a roll of manuscript in his hand, according to agreement, and he desired the waiter to inform the lady that he would not keep her for long. He was very fluent up to this point; but he was uncertain how he would behave when he found himself face to face with the man who had made the life of Mary Horneck miserable. He wondered if he would be able to restrain his impulse to fly at the scoundrel's throat.

When, however, the waiter returned with a message from Mrs. Abington that she would see Dr. Goldsmith in the supper room, and he ascended the stairs to that apartment, he felt quite at his ease. He had nerved himself to play a part, and he was convinced that the rôle was not beyond his powers.

Mrs. Abington, at the moment of his entrance, was lying back in her chair laughing, apparently at a story which was being told to her by her vis-à-vis, for he was leaning across the table, with his elbow resting upon it and one expressive finger upraised to give emphasis to the points of his narrative.

When Goldsmith appeared, the actress nodded to him familiarly, pleasantly, but did not allow her attention to be diverted from the story which Captain Jackson was telling to her. Goldsmith paused with his fingers still on the handle of the door. He knew that the most inopportune entrance that a man can make upon another is when the other is in the act of telling a story to an appreciative audience—say, a beautiful actress in a gown that allows her neck and shoulders to be seen to the greatest advantage and does not interfere with the ebb and flow of that roseate tide, with its gracious ripples and delicate wimplings, rising and falling between the porcelain of her throat and the curve of the ivory of her shoulders.

The man did not think it worth his while to turn around in recognition of Goldsmith's entrance; he finished his story and received Mrs. Abington's tribute of a laugh as a matter of course. Then he turned his head round as the visitor ventured to take a step or two toward the table, bowing profusely—rather too profusely for the part he was playing, the artistic perception of the actress told her.

“Ha, my little author!” cried the man at the table with the swagger of a patron.

“You are true to the tradition of the craft of scribblers—the best time for putting in an appearance is when supper has just been served.”

“Ah, sir,” said Goldsmith, “we poor devils are forced to wait upon the convenience of our betters.”

“Strike me dumb, sir, if 'tis not a pity you do not await their convenience in an ante-room—ay, or the kitchen. I have heard that the scribe and the cook usually become the best of friends. You poets write best of broken hearts when you are sustained by broken victuals.”

“For shame, Captain!” cried Mrs Abington. “Dr. Goldsmith is a man as well as a poet. He has broken heads before now.”