"How so?"
"How so! Why, my dear Philip, I told you the very first day she came. How so! when she is John Montolieu's daughter, when she has no birth to speak of, and not a farthing to her fortune."
"If she were Jack Ketch's daughter, you could not speak much worse. Her high-breeding might do credit to a Palace; I only wish one found it in all Palaces! and I never knew you before measure people by their money."
"My dear Philip, no more I do. I can't bear you when you speak in that tone; it's so hard and sarcastic, and unlike you.Idon't know what you mean either. I should have thought a man of the world like yourself knew well enough what I intend when I say Flora is a detrimental. She has a sweet temper, very clever, very lively, very charming, as any one knows by the number of men that crowd about her, but a detrimental she is——"
"Poor little heart!" muttered Carruthers in his beard, too low for his mother to hear.
"—And yet I am quite positive that if she herself act judiciously, and it is well managed for her, Goodwood may be won before the season is over," concluded Lady Marabout.
Carruthers, not feeling much interest, it is presumed, in the exclusively feminine pursuit of match-making, returned no answer, but played with Bijou's silver bells, and twisted his own tawny moustaches.
"I am quite positive itmay be, if properly managed," reiterated Lady Marabout. "You might second me a little, Philip."
"I?Good Heavens! my dear mother, what are you thinking of? I would sooner turn torreador, and throw lassos over bulls at Madrid, than help you to fling nuptial cables over poor devils in Belgravia. Twenty to one?I'm going to the Yard to look at a bay filly of Cope Fielden's, and then on to a mess-luncheon of the Bays."
"Must you go?" said his mother, looking lovingly on him. "You look tired, Philip. Don't you feel well?"
"Perfectly; but Cambridge had us out over those confounded Wormwood Scrubs this morning, and three hours in this June sun, in our harness, makes one swear. If it were a sharp brush, it would put life into one; as it is, it only inspires one with an intense suffering from boredom, and an intense desire for hock and seltzer."
"I am very glad you haven't a sharp brush, as you call it, for all that," said Lady Marabout. "It might be very pleasant to you, Philip, but it wouldn't be quite so much so to me. I wish you would stay to luncheon."
"Not to-day, thanks; I have so many engagements."
"You have been very good in coming to see me this season—even better than usual. Itisvery good of you, with all your amusements and distractions. You have given me a great many days this month," said Lady Marabout, gratefully. "Anne Hautton sees nothing of Hautton, she says, except at a distance in Pall-Mall or the Park, all the season through. Fancy if I saw no more of you! Do you know, Philip, I am almost reconciled to your never marrying. I have never seen anybody I should like at all for you, unless you had chosen Cecil Ormsby—Cecil Cheveley I mean; and I am sure I should be very jealous of your wife if you had one. I couldn't help it!"
"Rest tranquil, my dear mother; you will never be put to the test!" said Carruthers, with a laugh, as he bid her good morning.
"Perhaps itisbest he shouldn't marry: I begin to think so," mused Lady Marabout, as the door closed on him. "I used to wish it very much for some things. He is the last of his name, and it seems a pity; there ought to be an heir for Deepdene; but still marriageissuch alottery (he is right enough there, though I don't admit it to him: it's a tombola where there is one prize to a million of blanks; one can't help seeing that, though, on principle, I never allow it to him or any of his men), and if Philip had any woman who didn't appreciate him, or didn't understand him, or didn't make him happy, how wretchedIshould be! I have often pictured Philip's wife to myself, I have often idealized the sort of woman I should like to see him marry, but it's very improbable I shall ever meet my ideal realized; one never does! And, after all, whenever I have fancied, years ago, hemightbe falling in love, I have always felt a horrible dread lest she shouldn't be worthy of him—a jealous fear of her that I could not conquer. It's much better as it is; there is no woman good enough for him."
With which compliment to Carruthers at her sex's expense Lady Marabout returned to weaving her pet projected toils for the ensnaring of Goodwood, for whom also, if asked, I dare say the Duchess of Doncaster would have averred onherpart, looking throughhermaternal Claude glasses, no woman was good enough either. When ladies have daughters to marry, men always present to their imaginations a battalion of worthless, decalogue-smashing, utterly unreliable individuals, amongst whom there is not one fit to be trusted or fit to be chosen; but when their sons are the candidates for the holy bond, they view all women through the same foggy and non-embellishing medium, which, if it does not speak very much for their unprejudiced discernment, at least speaks to the oft-disputed fact of the equality of merit in the sexes, and would make it appear that, in vulgar parlance, there must be six of the one and half a dozen of the other.
"Flora, soft and careless, and rebellious as she looks,isambitious, and has set her heart on winning Goodwood, I do believe, as much as ever poor Valencia did. True, she takes a different plan of action, as Philip would callit, and treats him with gay nonchalante indifference, which certainly seems to pique him more than ever my poor niece's beauty and quiet deference to his opinions did; but that is because she reads him better, and knows more cleverly how to rouse him. She has set her heart on winning Goodwood, I am certain, ambitious as it seems. How eagerly she looked out for the Blues yesterday at that Hyde Park inspection—though I am sure Goodwood does not look half so handsome as Philip does in harness, as they call it; Philip is so much the finer man! I will just sound her to-day—or to-night as we come back from the opera," thought Lady Marabout, one morning.
Things were moving to the very best of her expectations. Learning experience from manifold failures, Lady Marabout had laid her plans this time with a dexterity that defied discomfiture: seconded by both the parties primarily necessary to the accomplishment of her man[oe]uvres, with only a little outer-world opposition to give it piquancy and excitement, she felt that she might defy the fates to checkmate her here. This should be her Marathon and Lemnos, which, simply reverted to, should be sufficient to secure her immunity from the attacks of any feminine Xantippus who should try to rake up her failures and tarnish her glory. To win Goodwood with a nobody's daughter would be a feat as wonderful in its way as for Miltiades to have passed "in a single day and with a north wind," as Oracle exacted, to the conquest of the Pelasgian Isles; and Lady Marabout longed to do it, as you, my good sir, may have longed in your day to take a king in check with your only available pawn, or win one of the ribands of the turf with a little filly that seemed to general judges scarcely calculated to be in the first flight at the Chester Consolation Scramble.
Things were beautifully in train; it even began to dawn on the perceptions of the Hauttons, usually very slow to open to anything revolutionary and unwelcome. HerGrace of Doncaster, a large, lethargic, somnolent dowager, rarely awake to anything but the interests and restoration of the old ultra-Tory party in a Utopia always dreamed of and never realized, like many other Utopias political and poetical, public and personal, had turned her eyes on Flora Montolieu, and asked her son the question inevitable, "Whois she?" to which Goodwood had replied with a devil-may-care recklessness and a headlong indefiniteness which grated on her Grace's ears, and imparted her no information whatever: "One of Lady Tattersall's yearlings, and the most charming creatureIever met. You know that? Why did you ask me, then? You know all I do, and all I care to do!"—a remark that made the Duchess wish her very dear and personal friend, Lady Marabout, were comfortably and snugly interred in the mausoleum of Fern Ditton, rather than alive in the flesh in Belgravia, chaperoning young ladies whom nobody knew, and who were not to be found in any of Sir E. Burke's triad of volumes.
Belgravia, and her sister Mayfair, wondered at it, and talked over it, raked up the parental Montolieu lineage mercilessly, and found out, from the Bishop of Bonviveur and Sauceblanche, that the uncle on the distaff side had been only a Tug at Eton, and had lived and died at Fern Ditton a perpetual curate and nothing else—not even a dean, not even a rector! Goodwoodcouldn'tbe serious, settled the coteries. But the more hints, innuendoes, questions, and adroitly concealed but simply suggested animadversion Lady Marabout received, the greater was her glory, the warmer her complacency, when she saw her Little Montolieu, who was not little at all, leading, as she undoubtedly did lead, the most desired eligible of the day captive in her chains, sent bouquets by him, begged for waltzes by him, followed by him at the Ride, riveting his lorgnon at the Opera, monopolizing his attention—though, clever little intriguer, she knew too well how to pique him ever to let him monopolize hers.
"She certainly makes play, as Philip would call it, admirably with Goodwood," said Lady Marabout, admiringly, at a morning party, stirring a cup of Orange Pekoe, yet with a certain irrepressible feeling that she should almost prefer so very young a girl not to be quite so adroit a schemer at seventeen. "That indifference and nonchalance is the very thing to pique and retain such a courted fastidious creature as Goodwood; and she knows it, too. Now a clumsy casual observer might even fancy that she liked some others—even you, Philip, for instance—much better; she talks to you much more, appeals to you twice as often, positively teases you to stop and lunch or come to dinner here, and really told you the other night at the Opera she missed you when you didn't come in the morning; but to anybody who knows anything of the world, it is easy enough to see which way her inclinations (yes, Idohope it is inclination as well as ambition—I am not one of those who advocate puremariages de convenance; I don't think them right, indeed, though they are undoubtedly very expedient sometimes) turn. I do not thinkanybodyever could prove me to have erred in my quick-sightedness in those affairs. I may have been occasionally mistaken in other things, or been the victim of adverse and unforeseen circumstances which were beyond my control, and betrayed me; but I know no one can read a girl's heart more quickly and surely than I, or a man's either, for that matter."
"Oh, we all know you are a clairvoyante in heart episodes, my dear mother; they are the one business of your life!" smiled Carruthers, setting down his ice, and lounging across the lawn to a group of cedars, where Flora Montolieu stood playing at croquet, and who, like a scheming adventuress, as she was, immediately verified Lady Marabout's words, and piqued Goodwood à outrance by avowing herself tired of the game, and entering with animated verve into the prophecies for Ascot with Carruthers,whose bay filly Sunbeam, sister to Wild-Falcon, was entered to run for the Queen's Cup.
"What an odd smile that was of Philip's," thought Lady Marabout, left to herself and her Orange Pekoe. "He has been very intimate with Goodwood ever since they joined the Blues, cornets together, three-and-twenty years ago; surely he can't have heard him drop anything that would make him fancy he wasnot serious?"
An idle fear, which Lady Marabout dismissed contemptuously from her mind when she saw how entirely Goodwood—in defiance of the Hauttons' sneer, the drowsy Duchess's unconcealed frown, all the comments sure to be excited in feminine minds, and all the chaff likely to be elicited from masculine lips at the mess-table, and in the U. S., and in the Guards' box before the curtain went up for the ballet—vowed himself to the service of the little detrimental throughout that morning party, and spoke a temporary adieu, whose tenderness, if she did not exactly catch, Lady Marabout could at least construe, as he pulled up the tiger-skin over Flora's dainty dress, before the Marabout carriage rolled down the Fulham Road to town. At which tenderness of farewell Carruthers—steeled to all such weaknesses himself—gave a disdainful glance and a contemptuous twist of his moustaches, as he stood by the door talking to his mother.
"You too, Phil?" said Goodwood, with a laugh, as the carriage rolled away.
Carruthers stared at him haughtily, as he will stare at his best friends if they touch his private concerns more nearly than he likes; a stare which said disdainfully, "I don't understand you," and thereby told the only lie to which Carruthers ever stooped in the whole course of his existence.
Goodwood laughed again.
"If you poach on my manorhere, I shall kill you Phil; sogare à vous!"
"You are in an enigmatical mood to-day! I can't say I see much wit in your riddles," said Carruthers, with his grandest and most contemptuous air, as he lit his Havana.
"Confound that fellow! I'd rather have had any other man in London for a rival! Twenty and more years ago how he cut me out with that handsome Virginie Peauderose, that we were both such mad boys after in Paris. However, it will be odd ifIcan't win the day here. A Goodwood rejected—pooh! There isn't a woman in England that would do it!" thought Goodwood, as he drove down the Fulham Road.
"'Hismanor!' Who's told him it's his? And if it be, what is that to me?" thought Carruthers, as he got into his tilbury. "Philip,you're not a fool, like the rest of them, I hope? You've not forsworn yourself surely? Pshaw!—nonsense!—impossible!"
"Certainly shehassomething very charming about her. If I were a man I don't think I could resist her," thought Lady Marabout, as she sat in her box in the grand tier, tenth from the Queen's, moving her fan slowly, lifting her lorgnon now and then, listening vaguely to the music of the second act of the "Barbiere," for probably about the two hundredth time in her life, and looking at Flora Moutolieu, sitting opposite to her.
"The women are eternally asking me who she is, I don't care a hangwho, but she's the prettiest thing in London," said Fulke Nugent, which was the warmest praise that any living man about town remembered to have heard fall from his lips, which limited themselves religiously to one legitimate laudation, which is a superlative nowadays, though Mr. Lindley Murray, if alive, wouldn't, perhaps, receive or recognize it as such: "Not bad-looking."
"It isn'twhoa woman is, it'swhatshe is, that's the question, I take it," said Goodwood, as he left the Guards' box to visit the Marabout.
"By George!" laughed Nugent to Carruthers, "Goodey must be serious, eh, Phil? He don't care a button for little Bibi; he don't care even for Zerlina. When the ballet begins, I verily believe he's thinking less of the women before him than of the woman who has left the house; and if a fellow can give more ominous signs of being 'serious,' as the women phrase it, I don't know 'em, do you?"
"I don't know much about that sort of thing at all!" muttered Carruthers, as he went out to follow Goodwood to the Marabout box.
That is an old, old story, that of the fair Emily stirring feud between Palamon and Arcite. It has been acted out many a time since Beaumont and Fletcher lived and wrote their twin-thoughts and won their twin laurels; but the bars that shut the kinsmen in their prison-walls, the ivy-leaves that filled in the rents of their prison-stones, were not more entirely and blissfully innocent of the feud going on within, and the battle foaming near them, than the calm, complacent soul of Lady Marabout was of the rivalry going on close beside her for the sake of little Montolieu.
She certainly thought Philip made himself specially brilliant and agreeable that night; but then that was nothing new, he was famous for talking well, and liked his mother enough not seldom to shower out for her some of his very best things; certainly she thought Goodwood did not shine by the contrast, and looked, to use an undignified word, rather cross than otherwise; but then nobodydidshine beside Philip, and she knew a reason that made Goodwood pardonably cross at the undesired presence of his oldest and dearest chum. Evenshealmost wished Philip away. If the presence of her idolized son could have been unwelcome to her at any time, it was so that night.
"It isn't like Philip to monopolize her so, he who hasso much tact usually, and cares nothing for girls himself," thought Lady Marabout; "he must do it for mischief, and yetthatisn't like him at all; it's very tiresome, at any rate."
And with that skilful diplomacy in such matters, on which, if it was sometimes overthrown, Lady Marabout not unjustly plumed herself, she dexterously entangled Carruthers in conversation, and during the crash of one of the choruses whispered, as he bent forward to pick up her fan, which she had let drop,
"Leave Flora a little to Goodwood; he has a right—he spoke decisively to her to-day."
Carruthers bowed his head, and stooped lower for the fan.
He left her accordingly to Goodwood till the curtain fell after the last act of the "Barbiere;" and Lady Marabout congratulated herself on her own adroitness. "There is nothing like a little tact," she thought; "what would society be without the guiding genius of tact, I wonder? One dreadful Donnybrook Fair!"
But, someway or other, despite all her tact, or because her son inherited that valuable quality in a triple measure to herself, someway, it was Goodwood who led her to her carriage, and Carruthers who led the little Montolieu.
"Terriblybêteof Philip; how very unlike him!" mused Lady Marabout, as she gathered her burnous round her.
Carruthers talked and laughed as he led Flora Montolieu through the passages, more gayly, perhaps, than usual.
"My mother has told me some news to-night, Miss Montolieu," he said, carelessly. "Am I premature in proffering you my congratulations? But even if I be so, you will not refuse the privilege to an old friend—to a very sincere friend—and will allow me to be the first to wish you happiness?"
Lady Marabout's carriage stopped the way. FloraMontolieu colored, looked full at him, and went to it, without having time to answer his congratulations, in which the keenest-sighted hearer would have failed to detect anything beyond every-day friendship and genuine indifference. The most truthful men will make the most consummate actors when spurred up to it.
"My dear child, you look ill to-night; I am glad you have no engagements," said Lady Marabout, as she sat down before the dressing-room fire, toasting her little satin-shod foot—she has a weakness for fire even in the hottest weather—while Flora Montolieu lay back in a low chair, crushing the roses mercilessly. "Youdofeel well? I should not have thought so, your face looks so flushed, and your eyes so preternaturally dark. Perhaps it is the late hours; you were not used to them in France, of course, and it must be such a change to this life from your unvarying conventual routine at St. Denis. My love, what was it Lord Goodwood said to you to-day?"
"Do not speak to me of him, Lady Marabout, I hate his name!"
Lady Marabout started with an astonishment that nearly upset the cup of coffee she was sipping.
"Hate his name? My dearest Flora, why, in Heaven's name?"
Flora did not answer; she pulled the roses off her hair as though they had been infected with Brinvilliers' poison.
"What has he done?"
"Hehas done nothing!"
"Who has done anything, then?"
"Oh, no one—no one has done anything, but—I am sick of Lord Goodwood's name—tired of it!"
Lady Marabout sat almost speechless with surprise.
"Tired of it, my dear Flora?"
Little Montolieu laughed:
"Well, tired of it, perhaps from hearing him praised so often, as the Athenian trader grew sick of Aristides,and the Jacobin of Washington's name. Is it unpardonably heterodox to say so?"
Lady Marabout stirred her coffee in perplexity:
"My dear child, pray don't speak in that way; that's like Philip's tone when he is enigmatical and sarcastic, and worries me. I really cannot in the least understand you about Lord Goodwood, it is quite incomprehensible to me. I thought I overheard him to-day at Lady George's concert speak very definitely to you indeed, and when he was interrupted by the Duchess before you could give him his reply, I thought I heard him say he should call to-morrow morning to know your ultimate decision. Was I right?"
"Quite right."
"He really proposed marriage to you to-day?"
"Yes."
"And yet you say you are sick of his name?"
"Does it follow, imperatively, Lady Marabout, that because the Sultan throws his handkerchief, it must be picked up with humility and thanksgiving?" asked Flora Montolieu, furling and unfurling her fan with an impatient rapidity that threatened entire destruction of its ivory and feathers, with their Watteau-like group elaborately painted on them—as pretty a toy of the kind as could be got for money, which had been given her by Carruthers one day in payment of some little bagatelle of a bet.
"Sultan!—Humility!" repeated Lady Marabout, scarcely crediting her senses. "My dear Flora, do you know what you are saying? You must be jesting! There is not a woman in England who would be insensible to the honor of Goodwood's proposals. You are jesting, Flora!"
"I am not, indeed!"
"You mean to say, you could positively think ofrejectinghim!" cried Lady Marabout, rising from her chair in the intensity of her amazement, convinced that she was the victim of some horrible hallucination.
"Why should it surprise you if I did?"
"Why?" repeated Lady Marabout, indignantly. "Do you ask mewhy? You must be a child, indeed, or a consummate actress, to put such a question; excuse me, my dear, if I speak a little strongly: you perfectly bewilder me, and I confess I cannot see your motives or your meaning in the least. You have made a conquest such as the proudest women in the peerage have vainly tried to make; you have one of the highest titles in the country offered to you; you have won a man whom everybody declared would never be won; you have done this, pardon me, without either birth or fortune on your own side, and then you speak of rejecting Goodwood—Goodwood, of all the men in England! You cannot be serious, Flora, or, if you are, you must be mad!"
Lady Marabout spoke more hotly than Lady Marabout had ever spoken in all her life. Goodwood absolutely won—Goodwood absolutely "come to the point"—the crowning humiliation of the Hauttons positively within her grasp—her Marathon and Lemnos actually gained! and all to be lost and flung away by the unaccountable caprice of a wayward child! It was sufficient to exasperate a saint, and a saint Lady Marabout never pretended to be.
Flora Montolieu toyed recklessly with her fan.
"You told Sir Philip this evening, I think, of——"
"I hinted it to him, my dear—yes. Philip has known all along how much I desired it, and as Goodwood is one of his oldest and most favorite friends, I knew it would give him sincere pleasure both for my sake and Goodwood's, and yours too, for I think Philip likes you as much as he ever does any young girl—better, indeed; and I could not imagine—I could not dream for an instant—that there was any doubt of your acceptation, as, indeed, therecannotbe. You have been jesting to worry me, Flora!"
Little Montolieu rose, threw her fan aside, as if its ivory stems had been hot iron, and leaned against the mantelpiece.
"You advise me to accept Lord Goodwood, then, Lady Marabout?"
"My love, if you need my advice, certainly!—such an alliance will never be proffered to you again; the brilliant position it will place you in I surely have no need to point out!" returned Lady Marabout. "The little hypocrite!" she mused, angrily, "as if her own mind were not fully made up—as if any girl in Europe would hesitate over accepting the Doncaster coronet—as if a nameless Montolieu could doubt for a moment her own delight at being created Marchioness of Goodwood! Such a triumph asthat—why I wouldn't creditanywoman who pretended she wasn't dazzled by it!"
"I thought you did not approve of marriages of convenience?"
Lady Marabout played a tattoo—slightly perplexed tattoo—with her spoon in her Sèvres saucer.
"No more I do, my dear—that is, under some circumstances; it is impossible to lay down a fixed rule for everything! Marriages of convenience—well, perhaps not; but asIunderstand these words, they mean a mere business affair, arranged as they are in France, without the slightest regard to the inclinations of either; merely regarding whether the incidents of fortune, birth, and station are equal and suitable. Marriagesde convenanceare when a parvenu barters his gold for good blood, or where anancienne princessemends her fortune with anouveau riche, profound indifference, meanwhile, on each side. I do not call this so; decidedly not! Goodwood must be very deeply attached to you to have forgotten his detestation of marriage, and laid such a title as his at your feet. Have you any idea of the weight of the Dukes of Doncaster in the country? Have you any notion ofwhat their rent-roll is? Have you any conception of their enormous influence, their very high place, the magnificence of their seats? Helmsley almost equals Windsor! All these are yours if you will; and you affect to hesitate——"
"To let Lord Goodwood buy me!"
"Buy you? Your phraseology is as strange as my son's!"
"To accept him only for the coronet and the rent-roll, his position and his Helmsley, seems not a very grateful and flattering return for his preference?"
"I do not see that at all," said Lady Marabout, irritably. Is there anything more annoying than to have unwelcome truths thrust in our teeth? "It is not as though he were odious to you—a hideous man, a coarse man, a cruel man, whose very presence repelled you. Goodwood is a man quite attractive enough to merit some regard, independent of his position; you have an affectionate nature, you would soon grow attached to him——"
Flora Montolieu shook her head.
"And, in fact," she went on, warming with her subject, and speaking all the more determinedly because she was speaking a little against her conscience, and wholly for her inclinations, "my dear Flora, if you need persuasion—which you must pardon me if I doubt your doing in your heart, for I cannot credit any woman as being insensible to the suit of a future Duke of Doncaster, or invulnerable to the honor it does her—if you need persuasion, I should think I need only refer to the happiness it will afford your poor dear mother, amidst her many trials, to hear of so brilliant a triumph for you. You are proud—Goodwood will place you in a position where pride may be indulged with impunity, nay, with advantage. You are ambitious—what can flatter your ambition more than such an offer. You are clever—as Goodwood's wife you may lead society like Madame de Rambouilletor immerse yourself in political intrigue like the Duchess of Devonshire. It is an offer which places within your reach everything most dazzling and attractive, and it is one, my dear Flora, which you must forgive me if I say a young girl of obscure rank, as rank goes, and no fortune whatever, should pause before she lightly rejects. You cannot afford to be fastidious as if you were an heiress or a lady-in-your-own-right."
That was as ill-natured a thing as the best-natured lady in Christendom ever said on the spur of self-interest, and it stung Flora Montolieu more than her hostess dreamed.
The color flushed into her face and her eyes flashed.
"You have said sufficient, Lady Marabout, I accept the Marquis to-morrow!"
And taking up her fan and her opera-cloak, leaving the discarded roses unheeded on the floor, she bade her chaperone good-night, and floated out of the dressing-room, while Lady Marabout sat stirring the cream in a second cup of coffee, a good deal puzzled, a little awed by the odd turn affairs had taken, with a slight feeling of guilt for her own share in the transaction, an uncomfortable dread lest the day should ever come when Flora should reproach her for having persuaded her into the marriage, a comfortable conviction that nothing but goodcouldcome of such a brilliant and enviable alliance, and, above all other conflicting feelings, one delicious, dominant, glorified security of triumph over the Hauttons,mère et filles.
But when morning dawned, Lady Marabout's horizon seemed cleared of all clouds, and only radiant with unshadowed sunshine. Goodwood was coming, and coming to be accepted.
She seemed already to read the newspaper paragraphs announcing his capture and Flora's conquest, already to hear the Hauttons' enforced congratulations, already to see the nuptial party gathered round the altar rail of St.George's. Lady Marabout had never felt in a sunnier, more light-hearted mood, never more completely at peace with herself and all the world as she sat in her boudoir at her writing-table, penning a letter which began:
"My dearest Lilla,—What happiness it gives me to congratulate you on the brilliant future opening to your sweet Flora——"
"My dearest Lilla,—What happiness it gives me to congratulate you on the brilliant future opening to your sweet Flora——"
And which would have continued, no doubt, with similar eloquence if it had not been interrupted by Soames opening the door and announcing "Sir Philip Carruthers," who walked in, touched his mother's brow with his moustaches, and went to stand on the hearth with his arm on the mantelpiece.
"My dear Philip, you never congratulated me last night; pray do so now!" cried Lady Marabout, delightedly, wiping her pen on the pennon, which a small ormolu knight obligingly carried for that useful purpose. Ladies always wipe their pens as religiously as they bolt their bedroom doors, believe in cosmetics, and go to church on a Sunday.
"Was your news of last night true, then?" asked Carruthers, bending forwards to roll Bijou on its back with his foot.
"That Goodwood had spoken definitively to her? Perfectly. He proposed to her yesterday at the Frangipane concert—notatthe concert, of course, but afterwards, when they were alone for a moment in the conservatories. The Duchess interrupted them—did it on purpose—and he had only time to whisper hurriedly he should come this morning to hear his fate. I dare say he felt tolerably secure of it. Last night I naturally spoke to Flora about it. Oddly enough, she seemed positively to think at first of rejecting him—rejectinghim!—only fancy the madness! Between ourselves, I don't think she cares anything about him, but with such an alliance as that, ofcourse I felt it my bounden duty to counsel her as strongly as I could to accept the unequalled position it proffered her. Indeed, it could have been only a girl's waywardness, a child's caprice to pretend to hesitate, for sheisvery ambitious and very clever, and I would never believe that any woman—and she less than any—would be proof against such dazzling prospects. It would be absurd, you know, Philip. Whether it was hypocrisy or a real reluctance, because she doesn't feel for him the idealic love she dreams of, I don't know, but I put it before her in a way that plainly showed her all the brilliance of the proffered position, and before she bade me good night, I had vanquished all her scruples, if she had any, and I am able to say——"
"Good God, what have you done?"
"Done?" re-echoed Lady Marabout, vaguely terrified. "Certainly I persuaded her to accept him. Shehasaccepted him probably; he is here now! I should have been a strange person indeed to let any young girl in my charge rashly refuse such an offer."
"You induced her to accept him! God forgive you!"
Lady Marabout turned pale as death, and gazed at him with undefinable terror.
"Philip! You do not mean——"
"Great Heavens! have you never seen, mother——?"
He leaned his arms on the marble, with his forehead bowed upon them, and Lady Marabout gazed at him still, as a bird at a basilisk.
"Philip, Philip! what have I done? How could I tell?" she murmured, distractedly, tears welling into her eyes. "If I had only known! But how could I dream that child had any fascination for you? How could I fancy——"
"Hush! No, you are in no way to blame. You could not know it.Ibarely knew it till last night," he answered, gently.
"Philip loves her, andIhave made her marry Goodwood!" thought Lady Marabout, agonized, remorseful, conscience-struck, heart-broken in a thousand ways at once. The climax of her woes was reached, life had no greater bitterness for her left; her son loved, and loved the last woman in England she would have had him love; that woman was given to another, andshehad been the instrument of wrecking the life to save or serve which she would have laid down her own in glad and instant sacrifice! Lady Marabout bowed her head under a grief, before which the worries so great before, the schemes but so lately so precious, the small triumphs just now so all-absorbing, shrank away into their due insignificance. Philip suffering, and suffering through her! Self glided far away from Lady Marabout's memory then, and she hated herself, more fiercely than the gentle-hearted soul had ever hated any foe, for her own criminal share in bringing down this unforeseen terrific blow on her beloved one's head.
"Philip, my dearest, whatcanI do?" she cried, distractedly; "if I had thought—if I had guessed——"
"Do nothing. A woman who could give herself to a man whom she did not love should be no wife of mine, let me suffer what I might."
"ButIpersuaded her, Philip! Mine is the blame!"
His lips quivered painfully:
"Had she cared for me as—I may have fancied, she had not been so easy to persuade! She has much force of character, where she wills. He is here now, you say; I cannot risk meeting him just yet. Leave me for a little while; leave me—I am best alone."
Gentle though he always was to her, his mother knew him too well ever to dispute his will, and the most bitter tears Lady Marabout had ever known, ready as she was to weep for other people's woes, and rarely as she had to weep for any of her own, choked her utterance andblinded her eyes as she obeyed and closed the door on his solitude. Philip—her idolized Philip—that ever her house should have sheltered this creature to bring a curse upon him! that ever she should have brought this tropical flower to poison the air for the only one dear to her!
"I am justly punished," thought Lady Marabout, humbly and penitentially—"justly. I thought wickedly of Anne Hautton. I did not do as I would be done by. I longed to enjoy their mortification. I advised Flora against my own conscience and against hers. I am justly chastised! But thatheshould suffer through me, that my fault has fallen on his head, that my Philip, my noble Philip, should love and not be loved, and thatIhave brought it on him——Good Heaven! what is that?"
"That" was a man whom her eyes, being misty with tears, Lady Marabout had brushed against, as she ascended the staircase, ere she perceived him, and who, passing on with a muttered apology, was down in the hall and out of the door Mason held open before she had recovered the shock of the rencontre, much before she had a possibility of recognizing him through the mist aforesaid.
A fear, a hope, a joy, a dread, one so woven with another there was no disentangling them, sprang up like a ray of light in Lady Marabout's heart—a possibility dawned in her: to be rejected as an impossibility? Lady Marabout crossed the ante-room, her heart throbbing tumultuously, spurred on to noble atonement and reckless self-sacrifice, if fate allowed them.
She opened the drawing-room door; Flora Montolieu was alone.
"Flora, you have seen Goodwood?"
She turned, her own face as pale and her own eyes as dim as Lady Marabout's.
"Yes."
"You have refused him?"
Flora Montolieu misconstrued her chaperone's eagerness, and answered haughtily enough:
"I have told him that indifference would be too poor a return for his affections to insult him with it, and that I would not do him the injury of repaying his trust by falsehood and deception. I meant what I said to you last night; I said it on the spur of pain, indignation, no matter what; but I could not keep my word when the trial came."
Lady Marabout bent down and kissed her, with a fervent gratitude that not a little bewildered the recipient.
"My dear child! thank God! little as I thought to say so. Flora, tell me, you love some one else?"
"Lady Marabout, you have no right——"
"Yea, I have a right—the strongest right! Is not that other my son?"
Flora Montolieu looked up, then dropped her head and burst into tears—tears that Lady Marabout soothed then, tears that Carruthers soothed, yet more effectually still, five minutes afterwards.
"ThatIshould have sued that little Montolieu, and sued to her for Philip!" mused Lady Marabout. "It is very odd. Perhaps I get used to being crossed and disappointed and trampled on in every way and by everybody; but certainly, though it is most contrary to my wishes, though a child like that is the last person I should ever have chosen or dreamt of as Philip's wife, though it is a great pain to me, and Anne Hautton of course will be delighted to rake up everything she can about the Montolieus, and itisheart-breaking when one thinks how a Carruthersmightmarry, how the Carruthers alwayshavemarried, rarely any but ladies in their own right for countless generations, still itisvery odd, but I certainly feel happier than ever I did in my life, annoyed as I am and grieved as I am. Itisheart-breaking (that horridJohn Montolieu! I wonder what relation one stands in legally to the father of one's son's wife; I will ask Sir Fitzroy Kelley; not that the Montolieus are likely to come to England)—it is very sad when one thinks whom Philip might have married; and yet she certainly is infinitely charming, and she really appreciates and understands him. If it were not for what Anne Hautton will always say, I could really be pleased! To think what an anxious hope, what a dreaded ideal, Philip's wife has always been to me; and now, just as I had got reconciled to his determined bachelor preferences, and had grown to argue with him that it was best he shouldn't marry, he goes and falls in love with this child! Everything is at cross-purposes in life, I think! There is only one thing I am resolved upon—I willNEVERchaperone anybody again."
And she kept her vow. None can christen her Lady Tattersall any longer with point, for there are no yearling sales in that house in Lowndes Square, whatever there be in the other domiciles of that fashionable quarter. Lady Marabout has shaken that burden off her shoulders, and moves in blissful solitude and tripled serenity through Belgravia, relieved of responsibility, and wearing her years as lightly, losing the odd trick at her whist as sunnily, and beaming on the world in general as radiantly as any dowager in the English Peerage.
That she was fully reconciled to Carruthers's change of resolve was shown in the fact that when Anne Hautton turned to her, on the evening of his marriage-day, after the dinner to which Lady Marabout had bidden all her friends, and a good many of her foes, with an amiable murmur:
"I amsogrieved for you, dearest Helena—I know what your disappointment must be!—what shouldIfeel if Hautton——Yourbelle-filleis charming, certainly, very lovely; but then—such a connection! You havemy deepest sympathies! I always told you how wrong you were when you fancied Goodwood admired little Montolieu—I beg her pardon, I mean Lady Carruthers—but youwillgive your imagination such reins!"
Lady Marabout smiled, calmly and amusedly, felt no pang, and—thought of Philip.
I take it things must be very rose-colored with us when we can smile sincerely on our enemies, and defeat their stings simply because we feel them not.
* * * * *
* * * * *
OR,
I have, among others hanging on my wall, a pastel of La Tour's; of the artist-lover of Julie Fel, of the monarch of pastellistes, the touch of whose crayons was a "brevet of wit and of beauty," and on whose easel bloomed afresh the laughing eyes, the brilliant tints, the rose-hued lips of all the loveliest women of the "Règne Galant," from the princesses of the Blood of the House of Bourbon to the princesses of the green-room of the Comédie-Française. Painted in the days of Louis Quinze, the light of more than a century having fallen on its soft colors to fade and blot them with the icy brush of time, my pastel is still fresh, still eloquent. The genius that created it is gone—gone the beauty that inspired it—but the picture is deathless! It shows me the face of a woman, of a beautiful woman, else, be sure she would not have been honored by the crayons of La Tour; her full Southern lips are parted with a smile of triumph; a chef-d'[oe]uvre of coquetry, a head-dress of lace and pearls and little bouquets of roses is on her unpowdered hair, which is arranged much like Julie Fel's herself in the portrait that hangs, if I remember right, at the Musée de Saint Quentin; and her large eyes are glancing at you with languor, malice, victory, all commingled. At the back of the picture is written "Mlle. Thargélie Dumarsais;" the letters are faded and yellow, but the pastelis living and laughing yet, through the divine touch of the genius of La Tour. With its perfume of dead glories, with its odor of the Beau Siècle, the pastel hangs on my wall, living relic of a buried age, and sometimes in my mournful moments the full laughing lips of my pastel will part, and breathe, and speak to me of the distant past, when Thargélie Dumarsais saw all Paris at her feet, and was not humbled then as now by being only valued and remembered for the sake of the talent of La Tour. My beautiful pastel gives me many confidences. I will betray one to you—a single leaf from a life of the eighteenth century.
In the heart of Lorraine, nestled down among its woods, stood an old château that might have been the château of the Sleeping Beauty of fairy fame, so sequestered it stood amidst its trees chained together by fragrant fetters of honeysuckle and wild vine, so undisturbed slept the morning shadows on the wild thyme that covered the turf, so unbroken was the silence in which the leaves barely stirred, and the birds folded their wings and hushed their song till the heat of the noonday should be passed. Beyond the purple hills stretching up in the soft haze of distance in the same province of laughing, luxurious, sunlit Lorraine, was Lunéville, the Lunéville of Stanislaus, Montesquieu, of Voltaire, of Hénault, of Boufflers, a Versailles in miniature, even possessing a perfect replica of Pompadour in its own pretty pagan of a Marquise. Within a few leagues was Lunéville, but the echo of its mots and madrigals did not reach over the hills, did not profane the sunny air, did not mingle with the vintage-song of the vine-dressers, the silver babble of the woodland brook, the hushed chant of the Ave Maria, the vesper bellschimed from the churches and monasteries, which made the sole music known or heard in this little valley of Lorraine.
The château of Grande Charmille stood nestled in its woods, gray, lonely, still, silent as death, yet not gloomy, for white pigeons circled above its pointed towers, brilliant dragon-flies fluttered above the broken basin of the fountain that sang as gayly as it rippled among the thyme as though it fell into a marble cup, and bees hummed their busy happy buzz among the jessamine that clung to its ivy-covered walls—walls built long before Lorraine had ceased to be a kingdom and a power, long before a craven and effeminated Valois had dared to kick the dead body of a slaughtered Guise. Not gloomy with the golden light of a summer noon playing amidst the tangled boughs and on the silvered lichens; not gloomy, for under the elm-boughs on the broken stone steps that led to the fountain, her feet half buried in violet-roots and wild thyme, leaning her head on her hand, as she looked into the water, where the birds flew down to drink, and fluttered their wings fearless of her presence, was a young girl of sixteen—and if women sometimes darken lives, it must be allowed that they always illumine landscapes!
Aline, when Boufflers saw her in the spring morning, in all the grace of youth and beauty, unconscious of themselves, made not a prettier picture than this young dreamer under the elm-boughs of the Lorraine woods, as she bent over the water, watching it bubble and splash from the fountain-spout, and hide itself with a rippling murmur under the broad green reeds and the leaves of the water-lily. She was a charming picture: a brunette with long ebon tresses, with her lashes drooping over her black, languid, almond-shaped eyes, a smile on her half-pouted lips, and all the innocence and dawning beauty of her sixteen years about her, while she sat on thebroken steps, now brushing the water-drops off the violets, now weaving the reeds into a pretty, useless toy, now beckoning the birds that came to peck on the rose-sprays beside her.
"Favette! where are your dreams?"
Favette, the young naïad of the Lorraine elm-woods, looked up, the plait of rushes dropping from her hands, and a warm sudden blush tinging her cheeks and brow with a tint like that on the damask rose-leaves that had fallen into the water, and floated there like delicate shells.
"Mon Dieu, Monsieur Léon! how you frightened me!"
And like a startled fawn, or a young bird glancing round at a rustle amidst the leaves, Favette sprang up, half shy, half smiling, all her treasures gathered from the woods—of flowers, of mosses, of berries, of feathery grasses, of long ivy-sprays—falling from her lap on to the turf in unheeded disorder.
"Ifrightened you, Favette? Surely not. Are you sorry to see me, then?"
"Sorry? Oh no, Monsieur Léon!" and Favette glanced through her thick curled lashes, slyly yet archly, and began to braid again her plait of rushes.
"Come, tell me, then, what and whom were you dreaming of, ma mie, as you looked down into the water? Tell me, Favette. You have no secrets from your playmate, your friend, your brother?"
Favette shook her head, smiling, and plaited her rushes all wrong, the blush on her cheeks as bright as that on the cups of the rose-leaves that the wind shook down in a fresh shower into the brook.
"Come, tell me, mignonne. Was it—of me?"
"Of you? Well, perhaps—yes!"
It was first love that whispered in Favette's pretty voice those three little words; it was first love that answered in his, as he threw himself down on the violet-tufted turf at her feet, as Boufflers at Aline's.
"Ah, Favette, so should it be! for every hope, every dream, every thought ofmine, is centred in and colored by you."
"Yet you can leave me to-day," pouted Favette, with a sigh and amoue mutine, and gathering tears in her large gazelle eyes.
"Leave you? Would to Heaven I were not forced! But against a king's will what power has a subject? None are too great, none are too lowly, to be touched by that iron hand if they provoke its grasp. Vincennes yawns for those who dare to think, For-l'Evêque for those who dare to jest. Monsieur de Voltaire was sent to the Bastille for merely defending a truth and his own honor against De Rohan-Chabot. Who am I, that I should look for better grace?"
Favette struck him, with her plaited rushes, a reproachful little blow.
"Monsieur Vincennes—Monsieur Voltaire—who are they? I know nothing of those stupid people!"
He smiled, and fondly stroked her hair:
"Little darling! The one is a prison that manacles the deadly crimes of Free Speech and Free Thought; the other, a man who has suffered for both, but loves both still, and will, sooner or later, help to give both to the world——"
"Ah, you think of your studies, of your ambitions, of your great heroes! You think nothing of me, save to call me a little darling. You are cruel, Monsieur Léon!"
And Favette twisted her hand from his grasp with petulant sorrow, and dashed away her tears—the tears of sixteen—as bright and free from bitterness as the water-drops on the violet-bells.
"Icruel—and to you! My heart must indeed be badly echoed by my lips, if you have cause to fancy so a single moment. Cruel to you? Favette, Favette! is a man ever cruel to the dearest thing in his life, the dearestname in his thoughts? If I smiled I meant no sneer; I love you as you are, mignonne; the picture is so fair, one touch added, or one touch effaced, would mar the whole inmyeyes. I love you as you are! with no knowledge but what the good sisters teach you in their convent solitude, and what the songs of the birds, the voices of the flowers, whisper to you of their woodland lore. I love you as you are! Every morning when I am far away from you, and from Lorraine, I shall think of you gathering the summer roses, calling the birds about you, bending over the fountain to see it mirror your own beauty; every evening I shall think of you leaning from the window, chanting softly to yourself the Ora pro nobis, while the shadows deepen, and the stars we have so often watched together come out above the pine-hills. Favette, Favette! exile will have the bitterness of death to me; to give me strength to bear it, tell me that you love me more dearly than as the brother you have always called me; that you will so love me when I shall be no longer here beside you, but shall have to trust to memory and fidelity to guard for me in absence the priceless treasure of your heart?"
Favette's head drooped, and her hands played nervously with the now torn and twisted braid of rushes: he saw her heart beat under its muslin corsage, like a bee caught and caged in the white leaves of a lily; and she glanced at him under her lashes with a touch of naïve coquetry.
"If I tell you so, what gage have I, Monsieur Léon, that, a few months gone by, you will even remember it? In those magnificent cities you will soon forget Lorraine; with thegrandes damesof the courts you will soon cease to care for Favette?"
"Look in my eyes, Favette, they alone can answer you as I would answer! Till we meet again none shall supplant you for an hour, none rob you of one thought; you have my first love, you will have my last. Favette, you believe me?"
"Yes—I believe!" murmured Favette, resting her large eyes fondly on him. "We will meet as we part, though you are the swallow, free to take flight over the seas to foreign lands, and I am the violet, that must stay where it is rooted in the Lorraine woods!"
"Accept the augury," he whispered, resting his lips upon her low smooth brow. "Does not the swallow ever return to the violet, holding it fairer than all the gaudy tropical flowers that may have tempted him to rest on the wing and delay his homeward flight? Does not the violet ever welcome him the same, in its timid winning spring-tide loveliness, when he returns to, as when he quitted, the only home he loves? Believe the augury, Favette; we shall meet as we part!"
And they believed the augury, as they believed in life, in love, in faith; they who were beginning all, and had proved none of the treacherous triad!
What had he dreamed of in his solitary ancestral woods fairer than this Lorraine violet, that had grown up with him, side by side, since he, a boy of twelve, gathered heaths from the clefts of the rocks that the little child of six years old cried for and could not reach? What had she seen that she loved half so well as M. le Chevalier from the Castle, whom her uncle, the Curé, held as his dearest and most brilliant pupil, whose eyes always looked so lovingly into hers, and whose voice was always lavishing fond names on his petite Favette?
They believed the augury, and were happy even in the sweet sorrow of parting—sorrow that they had never known before—as they sat together in the morning sunlight, while the water bubbled among the violet tufts, among the grasses and wild thyme, and the dragon-flies fluttered their green and gold and purple wings amidst the tendrils of the vines, and the rose-leaves, drifted gently by the wind, floated down the brook, till they were lost in deepening shadow under the drooping boughs.
"Savez-vous que Favart va écrire une nouvelle comédie—La Chercheuse d'Esprit?"
"Vraiment? Il doit bien écrire cela, car il s'occupe toujours à lechercher, et n'arrive jamais à le trouver!"
The mot had true feminine malice, but the lips that spoke it were so handsome, that had even poor Favart himself, the poet-pastrycook who composed operas and comedies while he made méringues and fanfreluches, and dreamed of libretti while he whisked the cream for a supper, been within hearing, they would have taken the smart from the sting; and, as it was, the hit only caused echoes of softly-tuned laughter, for the slightest word of those lips it was the fashion through Paris just then to bow to, applaud, and re-echo.
Before her Psyche, shrouded in cobweb lace, powdered by Martini, gleaming with pearls and emeralds, scented with most delicate amber, making her morning toilette, and receiving her morning levee according to the fashion of the day, sat the brilliant satirist of poor Favart. Theruellewas crowded; three marshals, De Richelieu, Lowendal, and Maurice de Saxe; a prince, De Soubise; a poet, Claude Dorat; an abbé, Voisenon; a centenarian, Saint-Aulaire; peers uncounted, De Bièvre, De Caylus, De Villars, D'Etissac, Duras, D'Argenson—a crowd of others—surrounded and superintended her toilette, in a glittering troop of courtiers and gentlemen. Dames d'atours (for she had her maids of honor as well as Marie Leczinska) handed her her flacons of perfume, or her numberless notes, on gold salvers, chased by Réveil; the ermine beneath her feet, humbly sent by the Russian ambassador—far superior to what the Czarina sent to Madame de Mailly—had cost two thousand louis; herbedroom outshone in luxury any at Versailles, Choisy, or La Muette, with its Venetian glass, its medallions of Fragonard, its plaques of Sèvres, its landscapes of Watteau, framed in the carved and gilded wainscoting, its Chinese lamps, swinging by garlands of roses, its laughing Cupids, buried under flowers, painted in fresco above the alcove, its hangings of velvet, of silk, of lace; and its cabinets, its screens, its bonbonnières, its jewel-boxes, were costly as those of the Marquises de Pompadour or De Prie.
Who was she?—a Princess of the Blood, a Duchess of France, a mistress of the King?
Lords of the chamber obeyed her wishes, ministers signed lettres de cachet at her instance; "ces messieurs," la Queue de la Régence, had their rendezvous at her suppers; she had a country villa that eclipsed Trianon; she had fêtes that outshone the fêtes at Versailles; she had a "droit de chasse" in one of the royal districts; she had the first place on the easels of Coypel, Lancret, Pater, Vanloo, La Tour; the first place in the butterfly odes of Crébillon le Gai, Claude Dorat; Voisenon.
Who was she?—the Queen of France? No; much more—the Queen of Paris!
She was Thargélie Dumarsais; matchless as Claire Clairon, beautiful as Madeleine Gaussin, resistless as Sophie Arnould, great as Adrienne Lecouvreur. She was a Power in France—for was she not the Empress of the Comédie? If Madame Lenormand d'Etioles ruled the government at Versailles, Mademoiselle Thargélie Dumarsais ruled the world at Paris; and if the King's favorite could sign her enemies, by a smile, to the Bastille, the Court's favorite could sign hers, by a frown, to For-l'Evêque.
The foyer was nightly filled while she played inZaïre, orPolyeucte, orLes Folies Amoureuses, with a court of princes and poets, marshals and marquises, beaux espritsand abbés galants; and mighty nobles strewed with bouquets the path from her carriage to the coulisses; bouquets she trod on with nonchalant dignity, as though flowers only bloomed to have the honor of dying under her foot. Louis Quinze smilingly humored her caprices, content to wait until it was her pleasure to play at his private theatre; dukes, marquises, viscounts, chevaliers, vied who should ruin himself most magnificently and most utterly for her; and lovers the most brilliant and the most flattering, from Richelieu, Roi de Ruelles, to Dorat, poet of boudoir-graces and court-Sapphos, left the titled beauties of Versailles for the self-crowned Empress of the Français. She had all Paris for her chentela, from Versailles to the Caveau; for even the women she deposed, the actors she braved, the journalists she consigned to For-l'Evêque, dared not raise their voice against the idol of the hour. A Queen of France? Bah! Pray what could Marie Leczinska, the pale, dull pietist, singing canticles in her private chapel, compare for power, for sway, for courtiers, for brilliant sovereignty, for unrivalled triumph, with Thargélie Dumarsais, the Queen of the Theatre?
Ravishingly beautiful looked the matchless actress as she sat before her Psyche, flashing[oe]illadeson the brilliant group who made every added aigrette, every additional bouquet of the coiffure, every littlemouche, every touch to the already perfect toilette, occasion for flattering simile and soft-breathed compliment; ravishingly beautiful, as she laughed at Maurice de Saxe, or made a disdainfulmoueat an impromptu couplet of Dorat's, or gave a blow of her fan to Richelieu, or asked Saint-Aulaire what he thought of Vanloo's portrait of her asRodugune; ravishingly beautiful, with her charms that disdained alike rouge and maréchale powder, and were matchless by force of their own coloring, form, and voluptuous languor, when, her toilette finished, followed by her glittering crowd, she let Richelieu lead her to his carriage.
There was a review of Guards on the plain at Sablons that morning, a fête afterwards, at which she would be surrounded by the most brilliant staff of an army of Noblesse, and Richelieu was at that moment the most favored of her troop of lovers. M. le Duc, as every one knows, never sued at court or coulisse in vain, and the love of Thargélie Dumarsais, though perhaps with a stronger touch of romance in it than was often found in the atmosphere of the foyer, was, like the love of her time and her class, as inconstant and vivacious, now settling here, now lighting there, as any butterfly that fluttered among the limes at Trianon. Did not the jest-lovingparterreever salute with gay laughter two lines in a bagatelle-comedy of the hour—
Oui l'Amour papillonne, sans entraves, à son gré;Chargé longtemps de fers, de soie même, il mourrait!—
when spoken by Thargélie Dumarsais—laughter that hailed her as head-priestess of her pleasant creed, in a city and a century where the creed was universal?
"Ah, bonjour! You have not seen her before, have you, semi-Englishman? You have found nothing like her in the foggy isles, I wager you fifty louis!" cried one of Thargélie Dumarsais's court, the Marquis de la Thorillière, meeting a friend of his who had arrived in Paris only the day before, M. le Chevalier de Tallemont des Réaux, as Richelieu's cortége rolled away, and the Marquis crossed to his own carriage.
"Her? Whom? I have not been in Paris for six years, you know. What can I tell of its idols, as I remember of old that they change every hour?"
"True! but, bon Dieu! not to know la Dumarsais! What it must be to have been buried in those benighted Britannic Isles! Did you not see her in Richelieu's carriage?"
"No. I saw a carriage driving off with such an escort and such fracas, that I thought it could belong to nobody less than to Madame Lenormand d'Etioles; but I did not observe it any further. Who is this beauty I ought to have seen?"
"Thargélie Dumarsais, for whom we are all ruining ourselves with the prettiest grace in the world, and for whom you will do the same when you have been once to the Français; that is, if you have the good fortune to attract her eyes and please her fancy, which you may do, for the fogs have agreed with you, Léon!—I should not wonder if you become the fashion, and set the women raving of you as 'leur zer zevalier!'"
"Thanks for the prophecy, but I shall not stay long enough to fulfil it, and steal your myrtle crowns. I leave again to-morrow."
"Leave?Sapristi! See what it is to have become half English, and imbibed a taste for spleen and solitude! Have you written another satire, or have you learned such barbarism as to dislike Paris?"
"Neither; but I leave for Lorraine to-morrow. It is five years since I saw my old pine-woods."
"Dame! it is ten years sinceIsaw the wilds of Bretagne, and I will take good care it shall be a hundred before I see them again.Hors de Paris, c'est hors du monde.Come with me to La Dumarsais'spetit souperto-night, and you will soon change your mind."
"My good Armand, you have not been an exile, as I have; you little know how I long for the very scent of the leaves, the very smell of the earth at Grande Charmille! But bah! I talk in Hebrew to you. You have been lounging away your days in titled beauties,petits salons, making butterfly verses, learning their broidery, their lisp, and their perfumes, talking to their parrots, and using their cosmétiques, till you care for no air butwhat is musk-scented! But what of this Dumarsais of yours—does she equal Lecouvreur?"
"Eclipses her!—with Paris as with Maurice de Saxe. Thargélie Dumarsais is superb, mon cher—unequalled, unrivalled! We have had nothing like her for beauty, for grace, for talent, nor, pardieu! for extravagance! She ruinedmelast year in a couple of months. Richelieu is in favor just now—with what woman is he not? Thargélie is very fond of the Marshals of France! Saxe is fettered to her hand and foot, and the Duchesse de Bouillon hates her as rancorously as she does Adrienne. Come and see her playPhèdreto-night, and you will renounce Lorraine. I will take you to supper with her afterwards; she will permit any friend of mine entry, and then, generous man that I am, I shall have put youen cheminto sun yourself in her smiles and ingratiate yourself in her favor. Don't give me too much credit for the virtue though, for I confess I should like to see Richelieu supplanted."
"Does his reign threaten to last long, then?"
The Marquis shrugged his shoulders, and gave his badine an expressive whisk.
"Dieu sait! we are not prophets in Paris. It would be as easy to say where that weathercock may have veered to-morrow, as to predict where la Dumarsais's love may have lighted ere a month! Where are you going, may I ask?"
"To see Lucille de Verdreuil. I knew her at Lunéville; she and Madame de Boufflers were warm friends till Stanislaus, I believe, found Lucille's eyes lovelier than Madame la Marquise deemed fit, and then they quarrelled, as women ever do, with virulence in exact proportion to the ardor of their friendship."
"As the women quarrel at Choisy fornotre maître! They will be friends again when both have lost the game, like Louise de Mailly and the Duchesse de Châteauroux.The poor Duchess! Fitz-James and Maurepas, Châtillon and Bouillon, Rochefoucauld and le Père Pérussot, all together, were too strong for her. All the gossip of that Metz affair reached you across the water, I suppose? Those pests of Jesuits! if they want him to be their Very Christian King, and to cure him of his worship of Cupidon, they will have to pull down all the stones of La Muette and the Parc aux Cerfs! What good is it to killonepoor woman when women are as plentiful as roses at Versailles? And now let me drive you to Madame de Vaudreuil; ifshedo not convert you from your fancy for Lorraine this morning, Thargélie Dumarsais will to-night."
"Mon zer zevalier, Paris at ado'able! Vous n'êtes pas sé'ieux en voulant le quitter, z'en suis sûre!" cried the Comtesse de Vaudreuil, in the pretty lisp of the day, a charming little blonde, patched and powdered, nestled in a chair before a fire of perfumed wood, teasing her monkey Zulmé with a fan of Pater's, and giving a pretty little sign of contempt and disbelief with some sprays of jessamine employed in the chastisement of offenders more responsible and quite as audacious as Zulmé.
Her companion, her "zer zevalier," was a young man of seven-and-twenty, with a countenance frank, engaging, nobly cast, far more serious, far more thoughtful in its expression, than was often seen in that laughing and mocking age. Exiled when a mere boy for a satirical pamphlet which had provoked the wrath of the Censeur Royal, and might have cost him the Bastille but for intercession from Lunéville, he had passed his youth less in pleasure than in those philosophical and political problems then beginning to agitate a few minds; which were developed later on in the "Encyclopédie," later still in the Assemblée Nationale. Voltaire andHelvétiushad spoken well of him at Madame de Geoffrin's; Claudine de Tencin had introduced him the night before in herbrilliant salons; the veteran Fontenelle had said to him, "Monsieur, comme censeur royal je refusai mon approbation à votre brochure; comme homme libre je vous en félicite"—all that circle was prepared to receive him well, the young Chevalier de Tallemont might make a felicitous season in Paris if he chose, with the romance of his exile about him, and Madame de Vaudreuil smiling kindly on him.
"The country!" she cried; "the country is all very charming in eclogues and pastorals, but out of them it is a desert of ennui! Whatcanyou mean, Léon, by leaving Paris to-morrow? Ah, méchant, there must be something we do not see, some love besides that of the Lorraine woods!"
"Madame, is there not my father?"
"Bien zoli!But at your age men are not so filial. There is some other reason—but what? Any love you had there five years ago has hardly any attractions now. Five years! Ma foi, five months is an eternity that kills the warmest passion!"