"You can't have that table, sir, it is engaged," said a waiter
at the Athenaeum" to a member of the club who seemed unmindful
of the type of appropriation which in the shape of an inverted
plate, ought to have warned him off the coveted premises.
"It is always engaged," grumbled the member. "Who has taken
it?"
"Mr Hatton, sir."
And indeed at this very moment, it being about eight o'clock
of the same day on which the meeting detailed in the last
chapter had occurred, a very handsome dark brougham with a
beautiful horse was stopping in Waterloo Place before the
portico of the Athenaeum Club-house, from which equipage
immediately emerged the prosperous person of Baptist Hatton.
This club was Hatton's only relaxation. He had never entered
society; and now his habits were so formed, the effort would
have been a painful one; though with a first-rate reputation
in his calling and supposed to be rich, the openings were
numerous to a familiar intercourse with those middle-aged
nameless gentlemen of easy circumstances who haunt clubs, and
dine a great deal at each others' houses and chambers; men who
travel regularly a little, and gossip regularly a great deal; who lead a sort of facile, slipshod existence, doing nothing, yet mightily interested in what others do; great critics of little things; profuse in minor luxuries and inclined to the respectable practice of a decorous profligacy; peering through the window of a clubhouse as if they were discovering a planet; and usually much excited about things with which they have no concern, and personages who never heard of them.
All this was not in Hatton's way, who was free from all
pretension, and who had acquired, from his severe habits of
historical research, a respect only for what was authentic. These nonentities flitted about him, and he shrunk from an existence that seemed to him at once dull and trifling. He had a few literary acquaintances that he had made at the Antiquarian Society, of which he was a distinguished member; a vice-president of that body had introduced him to the Athenaeum. It was the first and only club that Hatton had ever belonged to, and he delighted in it. He liked splendour and the light and bustle of a great establishment. They saved him from that melancholy which after a day of action is the doom of energetic celibacy. A luxurious dinner without trouble, suited him after his exhaustion; sipping his claret, he revolved his plans. Above all, he revelled in the magnificent library, and perhaps was never happier, than when after a stimulating repast he adjourned up stairs, and buried himself in an easy chair with Dugdale or Selden, or an erudite treatise on forfeiture or abeyance.
To-day however Hatton was not in this mood. He came in
exhausted and excited; eat rapidly and rather ravenously; despatched a pint of champagne; and then called for a bottle of Lafitte. His table cleared; a devilled biscuit placed before him, a cool bottle and a fresh glass, he indulged in that reverie, which the tumult of his feelings and the physical requirements of existence had hitherto combined to prevent.
"A strange day," he thought, as with an abstracted air he
filled his glass, and sipping the wine, leant back in his
chair. "The son of Walter Gerard! A chartist delegate! The
best blood in England! What would I not be, were it mine.
"Those infernal papers! They made my fortune—and yet, I know
not how it is, the deed has cost me many a pang. Yet it
seemed innoxious! the old man dead—insolvent; myself
starving; his son ignorant of all, to whom too they could be
of no use, for it required thousands to work them, and even
with thousands they could only be worked by myself. Had I not
done it, I should ere this probably have been swept from the
surface of the earth, worn out with penury, disease, and
heart-ache. And now I am Baptist Hatton with a fortune almost
large enough to buy Mowbray itself, and with knowledge that
can make the proudest tremble.
"And for what object all this wealth and power? What memory
shall I leave? What family shall I found? Not a relative in
the world, except a solitary barbarian, from whom when, years
ago I visited him as a stranger I recoiled with unutterable
loathing.
"Ah! had I a child—a child like the beautiful daughter of
Gerard!"
And here mechanically Hatton filled his glass, and quaffed at
once a bumper.