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Updated: June 1, 2025
But no man could paint her eyes, my lord," rubbing his head ruefully; "no man could paint them. Mr. Kneller will not when she weds a Duke and comes to queen it at the Court." He had managed to keep before the picture as he spoke, and now he stepped aside and let them behold it, glancing from one to the other. "Damn!" cried Tom Tantillion, and sprang forward from his chair at sight of it.
From young Tantillion he could, without any apparent approach at questioning, hear such details of Gloucestershire life in the neighbourhood of Wildairs as made him feel that he was not far separated from that which his mind dwelt on.
Little Lady Betty Tantillion, who was an embryo coquette of thirteen, had been to visit her relations in Warwickshire, and during her stay among them had found the chief topic of conversation a certain mad creature over the borders of Gloucestershire a Mistress Clorinda Wildairs, who was the scandal of the county, and plainly the delight of all the tongue-waggers.
"The tall gentleman with so superb an air," the poor man said, proudly, trembling with triumphant joy, "is my lord Marquess of Roxholm, and he is the heir of the ducal house of Osmonde, and promises me patronage." When they passed out into the street and were on their way to St. James's Park, Tom Tantillion was in a state of much interested excitement.
My Lord Marlborough brings her up to me at his quarters, I leave them; and going to my own, meet with Tantillion and his letter; I enter a coffee-house and hear wild talk of her; I go to my own house and my mother paints a picture of her which stirs my very depths; I walk in the streets of London and am dragged aside to find myself gazing at her portrait; I leave it, and meet my Lord Dunstanwolde, who prays me to go to Warwickshire, where I shall be within a few miles of her and may encounter her any hour.
"Perhaps your Lordship has heard of her, since she is so much gossiped of Mistress Clorinda Wildairs, who has been brought up half boy by her father and his cronies, and is already the strappingest beauty in England." "He is too great a gentleman to have heard of such an ill-mannered young hoyden," said Tantillion, "but we will tell him.
Throughout the reading of the letter uproarious shouts of laughter had burst forth at almost every sentence, and when he had finished the epistle, little Tantillion fell forward, his face on his arms on the table, his mirth almost choking him, while the others leaned back and roared.
"With his fat, slapped face and his streaming eyes and bloody nose!" shouted Langford. "Serve him damn right!" said Tantillion, sobering and wiping his own eyes. "To put their heads into such hornets' nests would make a lot of them behave more decent." And then he picked up the letter again and made brotherly comments upon it.
Tom Tantillion had not appeared at the ball, having otherwise entertained himself for the evening, but at an hour when most festivities were at an end and people were returning from them, rolling through the streets in their coaches, the young man was sitting at a corner table in Cribb's Coffee-House surrounded by glasses and jolly companions and clouds of tobacco-smoke.
"Yes, safer!" said his Lordship. "Yet what a woman! What a woman!" and here he broke off speech again. In which my Lady Betty Tantillion writes of a Scandal Scarce two years later, King William riding in the park at Hampton Court was thrown from his horse the animal stumbling over a mole-hill and his collar-bone broken.
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