TEMPLE BAR.

OCTOBER 1861.

A

The Seven Sons of Mammon.

A STORY.

BY GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA.

CHAPTER XXVI.

AFTER THE RACE.

ND the Tower of Babel, Messieurs Essayists and Reviewers. Is that an Allegory? is that to be taken "ideologically"? Granted that it is to be so accepted, let us allegorise and idealise it, here, upon the Downs. Yonder is the Tower of Babel, there, the Grand Stand. But for the infirm and impotent purpose of Man it would have mounted higher, higher, and higher, until it had soared miles beyond the altitude ever attained by the carrier-pigeons liberated each race-day from the summit, with news of the great Event tied under their wings. But a term was to be put to Babel, and the Builder stayed his hand, and then all around arose the confusion of tongues.

The myriad-langued brabble had ceased at the starting; and respiration paused in a hundred thousand pair of lungs as the horses came round the Corner. He who stood at the end of the Stand nearest the Judge's chair, and looked at the hive of heads upon it, saw but a mass of black; when by came the horses, and forthwith the black ant-hill turned pallid white, as the mass of faces, blanched with anxiety, were turned towards the goal. Then Teddy the Tyler came out of a squad of three that had long since abandoned the rest, and leaving Shandrydan to admire his tail, and beating Brother to Desdichardo by a neck cleverly, came in triumphantly, and won the Race.

I often wonder what the last jockey on the last horse thinks about as the turf gives out sullen echoes to the hoofs of his lagging steed. Do hopes of "better luck next time" encourage him under defeat, or did he never mean to win the race at all? Somebody must be last, of course;

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somebody must be beaten. What did the last cuirassier escorting Napoleon from the lost field of Waterloo towards Genappe think about? "Here is a pretty piece of business. It is all over with the Chief-fini with the Little Corporal. Shall we ever get to Genappe? Shall I be sabred by the Prussians, or taken prisoner by the Rosbifs? Shall I ever see Fanchon again, or the Champs Elysées, or drink petit bleu at the Barrier, or get admitted to the Invalides if I lose my leg?" Thus may run the thoughts coursing through such a trooper's mind; and yet just as probably he may be like the "jolly young waterman," not rowing, but riding along, "thinking of nothing at all." A great power, that temporary but complete suspension of thought! Perhaps the last jockey in the race can so give himself a mental holiday. I have often noticed a vacuous and abstracted expression beneath the velvet or particoloured cap. What does it matter, after all? He has lost the blue ribbon of the turf, but he may win some gaudy little bit of tape at Northampton or Goodwood. He is young yet. There are plenty of gentlemen who will give him a mount; meanwhile he rides and thinks not, unless indeed he has sold the race, and "pulled" his steed at some knave's bidding; and then he may be half-chuckling in his silken sleeve to think that it is lined with bank-notes, and half-apprehensive of the Vehmgericht of the Jockey Club, with their "cord-and-dagger" decrees of suspension or expulsion from the ring and turf; or else he may be a mere child, as many jockeys are, who has ridden carelessly or clumsily, and dreads fierce reprehension, or fiercer double-thonging, when he returns to the training-stable. The confusion of tongues, stilled at the starting, surging again as the horses swept away, hushed again at the critical turn of the Corner, breaking into a delirious dropping-fire of "It is!" "It isn't!" "Red wins!" "Yellow wins!" "Hurrah for Blue-cap!" "Lord Punter's horse wins!" "I'll bet against the Tyler!"-now, when the event was decided, burst into a huge frenzy of howling, yelling, cheering, bawling, screaming, cursing, laughing, screeching, hooting, yelping, and general mad gabbling and turmoil. And the Ring, all whose thoughts a moment before had been centred on this race, forthwith began to speculate on the race for the ensuing year, and back Teddy the Tyler for the Leger. Inspector Millament, his Sergeant, and his French friend, seemed in no kind of hurry to get through their little business.

"There's plenty of time," the Inspector remarked quietly.

"Let 'em have their lunch," said the Sergeant with a grin.

"With all my heart," acquiesced the genial Simon Lefranc. "We too will lunch, and eat of the salade du homard, and sabler the petit vin mousseux."

They kept their eyes open, however. From ten minutes to ten minutes people past them who had a sign of intelligence to give, a word of intelligence to whisper. Now it was a hot hostler hurrying by, with a wisp of straw and a pail of water. Now a little ragamuffin, bawling forth the correctness of race-cards of the year before last. Now a monstrously attired Ethiopian serenader, with his Welsh wig all awry, and the black

ening streaming off his pockmarked face with heat. Now came a trampish woman with a tambourine, but also with a nod and a wink for Sergeant South. Now a remarkably dingy foreign gentleman, seemingly of the interpreting persuasion from Leicester Square, who carelessly flung a half-burnt cigar on the turf,-no sooner flung than picked up by Simon Lefranc.

"You do not manage your agents well in England," the volatile Simon remarked; "I observe that you let them speak to you. I never let mine say a word. Tenez, this bit of cigar is a whole phrase to me."

"We're not so clever at the deaf-and-dumb language, maybe, as you are," retorted Sergeant South, somewhat nettled.

"That isn't it," interposed the pacific Inspector Millament; "our men are so confoundedly free and independent. We're obliged to pick 'em up where we can, and they will have their own way. You have 'em all under your control. We haven't. Our Government's dreadfully shabby to the Force, and it's as much as we can do to make both ends meet."

"There may be something in that," remarked Simon Lefranc reflectively. "That's one of your constitutional weaknesses. Chez nous on a

carte blanche."

“And then, you see," continued the Inspector, "whenever one of these gentry has got rather clever in picking up information, and has done us a good turn in a pretty stiffish case or two, what does he do but set up in business for himself, and start a 'private inquiry' office, to set genteel families by the ears, and rip up all the secrets of the first nobility of the land. I've no patience with 'em."

"Nor I," the accommodating M. Lefranc agreed. "Nor would I, nor would M. le Prefet. Peste! we suffer no amateurs in our vocation. Il faut être à nous corps et ame, sinon, on va là d'où l'on vient. By which I mean, my friends," he continued, "that we know a little too much about our assistants; and that if they play us any little tricks, we send them back to where we took them from. You understand, eh?"

"I wonder where his came from, at the first going off," whispered Sergeant South to his superior. "He can't be under fifty. He must have seen a lot, and have been in a lot of queer places; ay, and done a lot of queer things in his time. I should like to know where he learnt to speak English so well."

"Hush," the Inspector returned, first with a movement of an eyelid, sufficient to indicate the near neighbourhood of Simon Lefranc, who, wearing his heart upon his sleeve, according to custom, seemed likewise to have eyes in his coat-back and in his boot-heels, and to see laterally, and dorsally, and obliquely, and every where.

None of the three gentlemen had tickets for the Grand Stand; but they all passed unquestioned in and out of the enclosure, and up and down the staircases of that Tower of Babel. Their business was at present in the midst of the confusion of tongues in the Ring.

see.

A strange and edifying sight that enclosure and its occupants were to A more marvellous one was that Ring,-not to be equalled in any

country but our own,-without a parallel in any age of civilisation but the present one. Simon Lefranc looked upon all he saw with a calmly critical eye, and in contemptuous disparagement thought on what comparatively lean and barren sights Chantilly and other Continental race-courses presented. An Englishman, even, familiar with the thousand and one "events" with which our racing calendar teems, must have been fain to acknowledge that these Downs, this Enclosure, this Ring, were unequalled in his experience, and in the world.

The great tournament was over-gone and done with, to be remembered only gleefully or ruefully on settling-day; to find only its record as the "Teddy the Tyler year" among the fasti of the turf; to be perpetuated only in garish mezzotint engravings, that are framed and hung up in tavern-parlours. Well, and is that not fame enough? Do the great enjoy a much brighter, a much more durable renown when they have passed away to the cold dark house where you and I, and all the world, -athletes and paralytics, Adonis and Quasimodo, the Prime Minister and Blondin the tight-rope dancer,-must one day find a home and peace? Here is a veteran who has filled Europe with his fame, stormed redoubts, planted banners on earthworks, done all the deeds of a Paladin. He has won crosses and orders, titles and a pension. Years before he dies, the world which was wont to applaud him so loudly has quite forgotten him. His laurels are as withered as the orange-flowers in the chaplet of last year's bride. Nobody cares to inquire who that feeble old gentleman in the blue frock and buff waistcoat may be, who hobbles from his lodgings in St. Alban's Place to the United Service Club, and scolds the waiters, and is voted a nuisance in the library because he wheezes and coughs so. One day he does not come down-stairs to breakfast; the undertakers go upstairs to him, instead. His man-servant improves the occasion, and his own particular wardrobe. Somebody puts a distringas upon his balance at the banker's; sometimes it happens that he has lived so long as not even to leave nephews and nieces to squabble over his heritage. He dies, and they bury him but for one brief day one paragraph of the military intelligence in the newspapers is illuminated by a flash of his old fame; the laurels bloom once more; again is the trumpet sounded, as we are told that the poor old gentleman deceased was the gallant Sir Hercules Lyon Choker, the hero of where was it?-Walcheren, Orthes, Nivelle, Ticonderaga?-it might have been the Battle of Blenheim for ought the public care about it twenty-four hours afterwards;-the intrepid General whose first commission bore date January 1st, 1787; who was all through the Peninsular War; who was at Washington, and only missed Waterloo through his services being required on the other side of the Atlantic. He was a K.C.B., he was a General, he was Colonel of the Fifth Toughs; and so he ends: and this is Fame.

The three police-officers, too, this race-day, were elbowing their way through a compact mass of fame. Even they, thief-catchers as they were, had a kind of celebrity, and felt proud of it. Now and then Inspector