London is the candle which, ever attracting country moths by its feverish glare destroys them remorselessly in its cruel flame.
Reginald Blake was not enjoying himself very much in Town owing to his disturbed state of mind. For years he had pictured to himself the marvellous city and his life therein; how he would one day find himself a denizen of the great metropolis, eager to win fame and fortune by the magic of his voice, how he would delight in leading the ambitious, half Bohemian, wholly delightful existence of a singer, and how he would be able to wander about the streets and see the brilliant life of the mighty city with its restless activity and ardent strivings after wealth, fame and novelty. Grey Westminster Abbey, noble St. Paul's, the enormous pile of the Parliament House, the golden-topped column of the Monument, he would see all these, with their wealth of historical, religious and artistic associations. He would tread the very streets over whose stones wandered proud poverty-stricken Chatterton, courtly Addison and ponderous Dr. Johnson; he would find the picturesque alleys, houses and roads described in the fascinating pages of Dickens, and he would stray about the sacred purlieus of Drury Lane, haunted by the stately shades of Wilkes, of Siddons, of Bracegirdle, and David Garrick. Good heavens, what innumerable fantastic castles did he not build in Cloud Cuckoo Land about the unseen glories of London, where every street and stone was redolent of the glorious history of England from Plantagenet to Guelph.
Oh, beautiful castles of Cloudland, how rapidly did their gorgeousness disappear from his fancy before the disenchanting touch of chilling reality. He was indeed in London, but alas it was not the magic London of his dreams, this enormous assemblage of houses through which flowed a melancholy grey river and over which hung a dismal dark cloud of smoke and fog. The London of romance and the London of reality were two very different things, yet the disenchantment of this dreaming youth was not wholly due to the prosaic appearance of the city itself but rather to the gloom and depression of his spirits.
The recollection of how his wealth had come to him weighed heavily on his mind, causing him to view all things in a most dismal manner, and tortured his sensitive disposition with irritating thoughts and maddening delusions. In vain he tried hard to shake off this gloomy feeling and enjoy the many-coloured life of the great city; in vain he told himself that the accident of his birth was no fault of his own and in vain he strove to take pleasure in the society of the men and women to whom he had been introduced by Basil Beaumont. It was all useless, for a dark cloud of bitterness and distrust seemed to settle upon the joyousness of his life which led him to view everything with jaundiced eyes. He felt that he had lost the adolescent zest for life as Donatello must have done after he had stained his hands with blood, and although he had youth, talent, good looks, and wealth, yet all these delightful gifts of the fairies were neutralized by the fatal gift of dishonour bestowed upon him by the malignant beldame who had proved herself the evil genius of his life.
As soon as the business connected with the Garsworth estate was properly completed and he had been fully recognized as the heir of the old Squire, Bolby considering that he had done his duty, left the young man and his friend Dick pretty well to their own devices. Dick enjoyed everything with the inexhaustible appetite of youth, but Reginald took his pleasures, such as they were, in a listless manner, which showed how completely he had lost all capabilities of enjoyment.
Mr. Pemberton had been rather irritated by the prosaic life they led when in the leading strings of Mr. Bolby, whose ideas of amusement were of the most primitive nature, rarely extending beyond an afternoon at the Zoo or a night at Madame Tussaud's or the Egyptian Hall. The only thing Dick saw in Mr. Bolby's ideas of life, which he considered at all meritorious were the excellent dinners which the little lawyer gave them, but Dick in his flying visits to Town had tasted of the Tree of Knowledge beneath whose shade were the music halls and the burlesque theatres, so he was anxious to go to such like places for his amusement.
When they left Mr. Bolby, therefore, and were comfortably established in a quiet hotel in Jermyn Street, Dick, seeing that Reginald was absolutely indifferent as to where he went, or what he did, took the whole arrangement of their London life into his own hands and succeeded in going to a good many places which would have terribly shocked the vicar had he known. Not that such forbidden pleasures did them much harm, for both lads were extremely sensible for their age, still Dick finding himself able, through Reginald's generosity, to spend a good deal of money, took his friend and himself to sundry shady places of which they might just as well have been ignorant. But Nemesis soon came down upon the unhappy Richard, and just as he was developing into a fair specimen of a man about Town his bachelor uncle at Folkestone wrote him a letter asking him to come down on a visit and as Dick was supposed to be his bachelor uncle's heir, he had to leave Town, much to his own disgust and to the regret of Reginald, who missed his lively friend every hour of the day.
He still stayed in Town, however, but as he knew no one, his existence was to say the least extremely dull. Reginald was essentially of a social nature and wanted someone to whom he could talk, therefore he was not sorry when one day Basil Beaumont, who had been waiting for the departure o............