It was an age when great ladies wept out of wounded vanity or for a loss
at cards--yet made a show of their children lying in state; when men
entertained the wits and made their wills in company, before they bowed
a graceful exit from the room and life. Doubtless people felt, feared,
hoped, and perspired as they do now, and had their ambitions apart from
Pam and the loo table. Nay, Rousseau was printing. But the 'Nouvelle
Héloïse,' though it was beginning to be read, had not yet set the mode
of sensibility, or sent those to rave of nature who all their lives had
known nothing but art. The suppression of feeling, or rather the
cultivation of no feeling, was still the mark of a gentleman; his
maxim; honoured alike at Medmenham and Marly, to enjoy--to enjoy, be the
cost to others what it might.
Bred in such a school, Sir George should have viewed what had happened
with polite indifference, and put himself out no further than was
courteous, or might serve to set him right with a jury, if the worst
came to the worst. But, whether because he was of a kindlier stuff than
the common sort of fashionables, or was too young to be quite spoiled,
he took the thing that had occurred with unexpected heaviness; and,
reaching his inn, hastened to his room to escape alike the curiosity
that dogged him and the sympathy that, for a fine gentleman, is never
far to seek. To do him justice, his anxiety was not for himself, or the
consequences to himself, which at the worst were not likely to exceed a
nominal verdict of manslaughter, and at the best would be an acquittal;
the former had been Lord Byron's lot, the latter Mr. Brown's, and each
had killed his man. Sir George had more savoir faire than to trouble
himself about this; but about his opponent and his fate he felt a
haunting--and, as Lord Almeric would have said, a low--concern that
would let him neither rest nor sit. In particular, when he remembered
the trifle from which all had arisen, he felt remorse and sorrow; which
grew to the point of horror when he recalled the last look which
Dunborough, swooning and helpless, had cast in his face.
In one of these paroxysms he was walking the room when the elder
surgeon, who had attended his opponent to the field, was announced.
Soane still retained so much of his life habit as to show an unmoved
front; the man of the scalpel thought him hard and felt himself
repelled; and though he had come from the sick-room hot-foot and laden
with good news, descended to a profound apology for the intrusion.