Page:A Legend of Camelot, Pictures and Poems, etc. George du Maurier, 1898.djvu/199

 with imperial Norman blood! who could forget them who had once shrivelled and laid bare their souls under the scapulary of their cold indifferent gaze? They had that strange quality peculiar to Paul Potter's portraits of the Flemish aristocracy, that seem to follow you whithersoever you move; all who had met Vavasour had felt the spell of this ubiquitous glance, which gave him a terrible vantage over the dwarfed heroes of modern fiction, whose gaze is limited to one object at a time. Well has it been said of him—

Cold, haughty, sarcastic, unbending to a fault, he never stooped—no, not even when he picked up a lady's fan, or laced his own faultless Balmoral boot.

His small taper white hand was the envy of every duchess who had been privileged to behold it ungloved, and had lived to rue the privilege—yet was it hard as thrice-tempered crystal adamant—yet could it have bent and twisted the chiselled features of the Theseus so that Michael Angelo Buonarotti could scarce have recognised his own handiwork—crushed the full bronze torso of the Florentine Venus out of all semblance to a human face!

But, oh, reader! his voice!! full, dry, mellow, rich in musical impossibilities, it intoxicated one like wine, and left one staggering and powerless to resist; he, who hated music, was well aware of the potency of this spell—for yes, reader, he hated music, little as he was wont to boast of this aversion; his towering intellect and haughty Norman ancestry left such innocuous pastimes to meaner men—for him the passionate strains of Verdi had no charm—yet was his very silence full of melody! Rich, scornful, cruel, imperial, vindictive, unrelenting melody, whose cadences had been the sarcophagus of many! It is told of him that once, at a royal matinee musicàl, a Princess, secure in the "divinity that beats upon a throne" had dared to banter him on his indifference to the art of Balfe and Beethoven; curling his lip till the sangre azur flowed freely, he rose to his full height, stalked to the platform where the petted Tenor of the day held his audience in thrall, tore the music from his hands, and taking up the area where the astonished Italian had left it off, he finished it in tones so suave and enervating, with so passionate a pathos that all there who heard, hung on his lips for ever and a day, and the rest became epileptic for the remainder of their lives. The luckless vertuoso, Signor Gusberitartini, went home, and sickened, and died of that song!

Poetry he despised. Yet full oft had he, blindfolded, with his gloved left hand written impromptu epics that would have smitten a Tennyson with the palsy of incompetency! Art he loathed, with a guardsman's loathing; yet who does not recollect that exquisite picture of Rimini and Francesco di Paola, which all London flocked to see—painted by him for a wager on the bare back of a buck-jumping blood-mare that Rarey had given up as intractable?

He who knew every living idiom down to its very finger-nails—he for whom every dead and decayed tongue had yielded up its fragrance—had long found out the vanity of all things. Every science had he mastered, but only to sound the emptiness thereof. What wonder that this man believed in nothing under the sun? Nay, denied even that two and two made four. 'Tis but justice to state that he denied they made anything else worth living for. In his utter negation of all things, he did not even believe in the well authenticated tales that had reached England of his own marvellous adventures in untrodden zones, 93