The Works of Max Beerbohm, Max Beerbohm [epub read online books .txt] 📗

the night before as cheerful as could be. He’d said he didn’t mind what the public thought of his acting. But in the morning a letter was brought for him, and when he read it he seemed to go quite mad.”

“I wonder what was in the letter!” I asked. “Did your father never know who sent it?”

“Ah,” my greybeard rejoined, “that’s the most curious thing. And it’s a secret. I can’t tell you.”

He was not as good as his word. I bribed him delicately with the purchase of more than one old book. Also, I think, he was flattered by my eager curiosity to learn his long-pent secret. He told me that the letter was brought to the house by one of the footmen of Sir James Tylney Long, and that his father himself delivered it into the hands of Mr. Coates.

“When he had read it through, the poor gentleman tore it into many fragments, and stood staring before him, pale as a ghost. ‘I must not stay another hour in Bath,’ he said. When he was gone, my father (God forgive him!) gathered up all the scraps of the letter, and for a long time he tried to piece them together. But there were a great many of them, and my father was not a scholar, though he was affluent.”

“What became of the scraps?” I asked. “Did your father keep them?”

“Yes, he did. And I used to try, when I was younger, to make out something from them. But even I never seemed to get near it. I’ve never thrown them away, though. They’re in a box.”

I got them for a piece of gold that I could ill spare⁠—some score or so of shreds of yellow paper, traversed with pale ink. The joy of the archaeologist with an unknown papyrus, of the detective with a clue, surged in me. Indeed, I was not sure whether I was engaged in private inquiry or in research; so recent, so remote was the mystery. After two days’ labour, I marshalled the elusive words. This is the text of them:

Mr. Coates, Sir,

They say Revenge is sweet. I am fortunate to find it is so. I have compelled you to be far more a Fool than you made me at the fête-champêtre of Lady B. & I, having accomplished my aim, am ready to forgive you now, as you implored me on the occasion of the fête. But pray build no Hope that I, forgiving you, will once more regard you as my Suitor. For that cannot ever be. I decided you should show yourself a Fool before many people. But such Folly does not commend your hand to mine. Therefore desist your irksome attention &, if need be, begone from Bath. I have punished you, & would save my eyes the trouble to turn away from your person. I pray that you regard this epistle as privileged and private.

E. T. L. 10 of February.

The letter lies before me as I write. It is written throughout in a firm and very delicate Italian hand. Under the neat initials is drawn, instead of the ordinary flourish, an arrow, and the absence of any erasure in a letter of such moment suggests a calm, deliberate character and, probably, rough copies. I did not, at the time, suffer my fancy to linger over the tessellated document. I set to elucidating the reference to the fête-champêtre. As I retraced my footsteps to the little bookshop, I wondered if I should find any excuse for the cruel faithlessness of Emma Tylney Long.

The bookseller was greatly excited when I told him I had recreated the letter. He was very eager to see it. I did not pander to his curiosity. He even offered to buy the article back at cost price. I asked him if he had ever heard, in his youth, of any scene that had passed between Miss Tylney Long and Mr. Coates at some fête-champêtre. The old man thought for some time, but he could not help me. Where then, I asked him, could I search old files of local newspapers? He told me that there were supposed to be many such files mouldering in the archives of the Town Hall.

I secured access, without difficulty, to these files. A whole day I spent in searching the copies issued by this and that journal during the months that Romeo was in Bath. In the yellow pages of these forgotten prints I came upon many complimentary allusions to Mr. Coates: “The visitor welcomed (by all our aristocracy) from distant Ind,” “the ubiquitous,” “the charitable riche.” Of his “forthcoming impersonation of Romeo and Juliet” there were constant puffs, quite in the modern manner. The accounts of his début all showed that Mr. Pryse Gordon’s account of it was fabulous. In one paper there was a bitter attack on “Mr. Gordon, who was responsible for this insult to Thespian art, the gentry, and the people, for he first arranged the whole production”⁠—an extract which makes it clear that this gentleman had a good motive for his version of the affair.

But I began to despair of ever learning what happened at the fête-champêtre. There were accounts of “a grand garden-party, whereto Lady Belper, on March the twenty-eighth, invited a host of fashionable persons.” The names of Mr. Coates and of “Sir James Tylney Long and his daughter” were duly recorded in the lists. But that was all. I turned at length to a tiny file, consisting of five copies only, Bladud’s Courier. Therein I found this paragraph, followed by some scurrilities which I will not quote:

“Mr. C⁠—t-s, who will act Romeo (Wherefore art thou Romeo?) this coming week for the pleasure of his fashionable circle, incurred the contemptuous wrath of his Lady Fair at the Fête. It was a sad pity she entrusted him to hold her purse while she fed the goldfishes. He was very proud of the honour till the gold fell from