Be it remembered, however, that I only became what I have set down here after an excellent dinner, a considerable quantity of champagne, and no small share of claret, strong-bodied enough to please the priest. From the moment we sat down to table, I conceived for him a sort of distrust. He was painfully polite and civil; he had a soft, slippery, Clare accent; but there was a malicious twinkle in his eye that showed he was by nature satirical. Perhaps because we were more reading men than the others that it was we soon found ourselves pitted against each other in argument, and this not upon one, but upon every possible topic that turned up. Hammond, I found, also stood by the priest; Oxley was my backer; and his Lordship played umpire. Dyke was a shrewd, sarcastic dog in his way, but he had no chance with me. How mercilessly I treated his church!—he pushed me to it—what an exposé did I make of the Pope and his government, with all their extortions and cruelties! how ruthlessly I showed them up as the sworn enemies of all freedom and enlightenment! The priest never got angry. He was too cunning for that, and he even laughed at some of my anecdotes, of which I related a great many.
“Don't be so hard on him, Potts,” whispered my Lord, as the day wore on; “he 's not one of us, you know!”
This speech put me into a flutter of delight. It was not alone that he called me Potts, but there was also an acceptance of me as one of hier own set. We were, in fact, henceforth nous autres. Enchanting recognition, never to be forgotten!
“But what would you do with us?” said Dyke, mildly remonstrating against some severe measures we of the landed interest might be yet driven to resort to.
“I don't know—that is to say—I have not made up my mind whether it were better to make a clearance of you altogether, or to bribe you.”
“Bribe us by all means, then!” said he, with a most serious earnestness.
“Ah! but could we rely upon you?” I asked.
“That would greatly depend upon the price.”
“I 'll not haggle about terms, nor I 'm sure would Keldrum,” said I, nodding over to his Lordship.
“You are only just to me, in that,” said he, smiling.
“That's all fine talking for you fellows who had the luck to be first on the list, but what are poor devils like Oxley and myself to do?” said Hammond. “Taxation comes down to second sons.”
“And the 'Times' says that's all right,” added Oxley.
“And I say it's all wrong; and I say more,” I broke in: “I say that of all the tyrannies of Europe, I know of none like that newspaper. Why, sir, whose station, I would ask, nowadays, can exempt him from its impertinent criticisms? Can Keldrum say—can I say—that to-morrow or next day we shall not be arraigned for this, that, or t'other? I choose, for instance, to manage my estate—the property that has been in my family for centuries—the acres that have descended to us by grants as old as Magna Charta. I desire, for reasons that seem sufficient to myself, to convert arable into grass land. I say to one of my tenant farmers—it's Hedgeworth—no matter, I shall not mention names, but I say to him—”
“I know the man,” broke in the priest; “you mean Hedgeworth Davis, of Mount Davis.”
“No, sir, I do not,” said I, angrily, for I resented this attempt to run me to earth.
“Hedgeworth! Hedgeworth! It ain't that fellow that was in the Rifles; the 2d battalion, is it?” said Ozley.
“I repeat,” said I, “that I will mention no names.”
“My mother had some relatives Hedgeworths, they were from Herefordshire. How odd, Potts, if we should turn out to be connections! You said that these people were related to you.”
“I hope,” I said angrily, “that I am not bound to give the birth, parentage, and education of every man whose name I may mention in conversation. At least, I would protest that I have not prepared myself for such a demand upon my memory.”
“Of course not, Potts. It would be a test no man could submit to,” said his Lordship.
“That Hedgeworth, who was in the Rifles, exceeded all the fellows I ever met in drawing the long bow. There was no country he had not been in, no army he had not served with; he was related to every celebrated man in Europe; and, after all, it turned out that his father was an attorney at Market Harborough, and sub-agent to one of our fellows who had some property there.” This was said by Hammond, who directed the speech entirely to me.
“Confound the Hedgeworths, all together,” Ozley broke in. “They have carried us miles away from what we were talking of.”
This was a sentiment that met my heartiest concurrence, and I nodded in friendly recognition to the speaker, and drank off my glass to his health.
“Who can give us a song? I 'll back his reverence here to be a vocalist,” cried Hammond. And sure enough, Dyke sang one of the national melodies with great feeling and taste. Ozley followed with something in less perfect taste, and we all grew very jolly. Then there came a broiled bone and some devilled kidneys, and a warm brew which Hammond himself concocted—a most insidious liquor, which had a strong odor of lemons, and was compounded, at the same time, of little else than rum and sugar.
There is an adage that says “in vino Veritas,” which I shrewdly suspect to be a great fallacy; at least, as regards my own case, I know it to be totally inapplicable. I am in my sober hours—and I am proud to say that the exceptions from such are of the rarest—one of the most veracious of mortals; indeed, in my frank sincerity, I have often given offence to those who like a courteous hypocrisy better than an ungraceful truth. Whenever by any chance it has been my ill-fortune to transgress these limits, there is no bound to my imagination. There is nothing too extravagant or too vainglorious for me to say of myself. All the strange incidents of romance that I have read, all the travellers' stories, newspaper accidents, adventures by sea and land, wonderful coincidences, unexpected turns of fortune, I adapt to myself, and coolly relate them as personal experiences. Listeners have afterwards told me that I possess an amount of consistence, a verisimilitude in these narratives perfectly marvellous, and only to be accounted for by supposing that I myself must, for the time being, be the dupe of my own imagination. Indeed, I am sure such must be the true explanation of this curious fact. How, in any other mode, explain the rash wagers, absurd and impossible engagements I have contracted in such moments, backing myself to leap twenty-three feet on the level sward; to dive in six fathoms water, and fetch up Heaven knows what of shells and marine curiosities from the bottom; to ride the most unmanageable of horses; and, single-handed and unarmed, to fight the fiercest bulldog in England? Then, as to intellectual feats, what have I not engaged to perform? Sums of mental arithmetic; whole newspapers committed to memory after one reading; verse compositions, on any theme, in ten languages; and once a written contract to compose a whole opera, with all the scores, within twenty-four hours. To a nature thus strangely constituted, wine was a perfect magic wand, transforming a poor, weak, distrustful modest man into a hero; and yet, even with such temptations, my excesses were extremely rare and unfrequent. Are there many, I would ask, that could resist the passport to such a dreamland, with only the penalty of a headache the next morning? Some one would, perhaps, suggest that these were enjoyments to pay forfeit on. Well, so they were; but I must not anticipate. And now to my tale.
To Hammond's brew there succeeded one by Oxley, made after an American receipt, and certainly both fragrant and insinuating; and then came a concoction made by the priest, which he called “Father Hosey's pride.” It was made in a bowl, and drunk out of lemon-rinds, ingeniously fitted into the wine-glasses. I remember no other particulars about it, though I can call to mind much of the conversation that preceded it. How I gave a long historical account of my family, that we came originally from Corsica, the name Potts being a corruption of Pozzo, and that we were of the same stock as the celebrated diplomatist Pozzo di Borgo. Our unclaimed estates in the island were of fabulous value, but in asserting my right to them I should accept thirteen mortal duels, the arrears of a