CHAPTER XXVIII

Beauty, of course, is for the hero.  Nevertheless, it is not always he on whom beauty works its most conquering influence.  It is the dull commonplace man into whose slow brain she drops like a celestial light, and burns lastingly.  The poet, for instance, is a connoisseur of beauty:  to the artist she is a model.  These gentlemen by much contemplation of her charms wax critical.  The days when they had hearts being gone, they are haply divided between the blonde and the brunette; the aquiline nose and the Proserpine; this shaped eye and that.  But go about among simple unprofessional fellows, boors, dunderheads, and here and there you shall find some barbarous intelligence which has had just strength enough to conceive, and has taken Beauty as its Goddess, and knows but one form to worship, in its poor stupid fashion, and would perish for her.  Nay, more:  the man would devote all his days to her, though he is dumb as a dog.  And, indeed, he is Beauty’s Dog.  Almost every Beauty has her Dog.  The hero possesses her; the poet proclaims her; the painter puts her upon canvas; and the faithful Old Dog follows her:  and the end of it all is that the faithful Old Dog is her single attendant.  Sir Hero is revelling in the wars, or in Armida’s bowers; Mr. Poet has spied a wrinkle; the brush is for the rose in its season.  She turns to her Old Dog then.  She hugs him; and he, who has subsisted on a bone and a pat till there he squats decrepit, he turns his grateful old eyes up to her, and has not a notion that she is hugging sad memories in him:  Hero, Poet, Painter, in one scrubby one!  Then is she buried, and the village hears languid howls, and there is a paragraph in the newspapers concerning the extraordinary fidelity of an Old Dog.

Excited by suggestive recollections of Nooredeen and the Fair Persian, and the change in the obscure monotony of his life by his having quarters in a crack hotel, and living familiarly with West-End people—­living on the fat of the land (which forms a stout portion of an honest youth’s romance), Ripton Thompson breakfasted next morning with his chief at half-past eight.  The meal had been fixed overnight for seven, but Ripton slept a great deal more than the nightingale, and (to chronicle his exact state) even half-past eight rather afflicted his new aristocratic senses and reminded him too keenly of law and bondage.  He had preferred to breakfast at Algernon’s hour, who had left word for eleven.  Him, however, it was Richard’s object to avoid, so they fell to, and Ripton no longer envied Hippias in bed.  Breakfast done, they bequeathed the consoling information for Algernon that they were off to hear a popular preacher, and departed.

“How happy everybody looks!” said Richard, in the quiet Sunday streets.

“Yes—­jolly!” said Ripton.

“When I’m—­when this is over, I’ll see that they are, too—­as many as I can make happy,” said the hero; adding softly:  “Her blind was down at a quarter to six.  I think she slept well!”