The next day I went to Conran while he was breakfasting, and unburdened my mind to him. He looked ill and haggard, but he listened to me very kindly, though he spoke of the people at the Casa di Fiori in a hard, brief, curious manner.
"Plenty have been taken in like you, Gus," he said "I was, years ago, in my youth, when I joined the Army. There are scores of such women, as I told you, down the line of the Pacific, and about here; anywhere, in fact, where the army and navy give them fresh pigeons to be gulled. They take titles that sound grand in boys' ears, and fascinate them till they've won all their money, and then—send them to the dogs. Your Marchioness St. Julian's real name is Sarah Briggs."
I gave an involuntary shriek. Sarah Briggs finished me. It was the death-stroke, that could never be got over.
"She was a ballet-girl in London," continued Conran; "then, when she was sixteen, married that Fitzhervey,aliasBriggs,aliasSmith,aliaswhat you please, and set up in her present more lucrative employment with her three or four confederates. Saint-Jeu was expelled from Paris for keeping a hell in the Chaussée d'Antin, Fitzhervey was a leg at Newmarket, Orangia Magnolia a lawyer's clerk, who was had up for forgery, Guatamara is—byanother name—a scoundrel of Rome. There is the history of your Maltese Peerage, Gussy. Well, you'll be wider awake next time. Wait, there is somebody at my door. Stay here a moment, I'll come back to you."
Accordingly, I stayed in his bedroom, where I had found him writing, and he went into his sitting-room, of which, from the diminutiveness of his domicile, I commanded a full view, sit where I would. What was my astonishment to see Lucrezia! I went to his bedroom door; it was locked from the outside, so I perforce remained where I was, to,nolens volens, witness the finish of last night's interview.
Stern to the last extent and deadly pale, Conran stood, too surprised to speak, and most probably at a loss for words.
Lucrezia came up to him nevertheless with the abandonment of youth and southern blood.
"Victor! Victor! let me speak to you. You shall listen; you shall not judge me unheard."
"Signorina, I have judged you by only too ample evidence."
He had recovered himself now, and was as cool as needs be.
"I deny it. But you love me still?"
"Love you? More shame on me! A laugh, a compliment, a caress, a cashmere, is as much as such women as you are worth. Love becomes ridiculous named in the same breath with you."
She caught hold of his hand and crushed it in both her own.
"Kill me you will. Death would have no sting from your hand, but never speak such words tome."
His voice trembled.
"How can I choose but speak them? You know that I believed you in Italy, and how on that belief I offeredyou my name—a name never yet stained, never yet held unworthy. I lost you, to find you in society which stamped you for ever. A lovely fiend, holding raw boys enchained, that your associates might rifle their purses with marked cards and cogged dice. I hoped to have found a diamond, without spot or flaw. I discovered my error too late; it was only glass, which all men were free to pick up and trample on at their pleasure."
He tried to wrench his hand away, but she would not let it go.
"Hush! hush! listen to me first. If you once thought me worthy of your love, you may, surely, now accord me pity. I shall not trouble you long. After this, you need see me no more. I am going back to my old convent. You and the world will soon forget me, but I shall remember you, and pray for you, as dearer than my own soul."
Conran's head was bent down now, and his voice was thick, as he answered briefly,
"Go on."
This scene half consoled me for Eudoxia Adelaida—(I mean, O Heavens, Sarah Briggs!)—it was so exquisitely romantic, and Conran and Lucrezia wouldn't have done at all badly for Monte Cristo and that dear little Haidee. I was fearfully poetic in those days.
"When I met you in Rome," Lucrezia went on, in obedience to his injunction, "two years ago, you remember I had only left my convent and lived with my father but a month or two. I told you he was an officer. I only said what I had been told, and I knew no more than you that he was the keeper of a gambling house."
She shuddered as she paused, and leaned her forehead on Conran's hand. He did not repulse her, and she continued, in her broken, simple English:
"The evening you promised me what I should have needed to have been an angel to be worthy of—your loveand your name—that very evening, when I reached home, my father bade me dress for a soirée he was going to give. I obeyed him, of course. I knew nothing but what he told me, and I went down, to find a dozen young nobles and a few Englishmen drinking and playing on a table covered with green cloth. Some few of them came up to me, but I felt frightened; their looks, their tones, their florid compliments, were so different to yours. But my father kept his eye on me, and would not let me leave. While they were leaning over my chair, and whispering in my ear,youcame to the door of the salon, and I went towards you, and you looked cold, and harsh, as I had never seen you before, and put me aside, and turned away without a word. Oh, Victor! why did you not kill me then? Death would have been kindness. Your Othello was kinder to Desdemona; he slew her—he did notleaveher. From that hour I never saw you, and from that hour my father persecuted me because I would never join in his schemes, nor enter his vile gaming-rooms. Yet I have lived with him, because I could not get away. I have been too carefully watched. We Italians are not free, like your happy English girls. A few weeks ago we were compelled to leave Rome, the young Contino di Firenze had been stilettoed leaving my father's rooms, and he could stay in Italy no longer. We came here, and joined that hateful woman, who calls herself Marchioness St. Julian; and, because she could not bend me to her will, gives out that I am her niece, and mad! I wonder I amnotmad, Victor. I wish hearts would break, as the romancers make them; but how long one suffers and lives on! Oh, my love, my soul, my life, only say that you believe me, and look kindly at me once again, then I will never trouble you again, I will only pray for you. But believe me, Victor. The Mother Superior of my convent will tell you it is the truth thatI speak. Oh, for the love of Heaven, believe me! Believe me or I shall die!"
It was not in the nature of man to resist her; there was truth in the girl's voice and face, if ever truth walked abroad on earth. And Conran did believe her, and told her so in a few unconnected words, lifting her up in his arms, and vowing, with most unrighteous oaths, that her father should never have power to persecute her again as long as he himself lived to shelter and take care of her.
I was so interested in my Monte Cristo and Haidee (it was so like a chapter out of a book), that I entirely forgot my durance vile, and my novel and excessively disgraceful, though enforced, occupation of spy; and there I stayed, alternating between my interest in them and my agonies at the revelations concerning my Eudoxia Adelaida—oh, hang it! I mean Sarah Briggs—till, after a most confounded long time, Conran saw fit to take Lucrezia off, to get asylum for her with the Colonel's wife for a day or two, that "those fools might not misconstrue her." By which comprehensive epithet he, I suppose, politely designated "Ours."
Then I went my ways to my own room, and there I found a scented, mauve-hued, creamy billet-doux, in uncommon bad handwriting, though, from my miserable Eudoxia Adelaida to the "friend and lover of her soul." Confound the woman!—how I swore at that daintily-perfumed and most vilely-scrawled letter. To think that where that beautiful signature stretched from one side to the other—"Eudoxia Adelaida St. Julian"—thereoughtto have been that short, vile, low-bred, hideous, Billingsgate cognomen of "Sarah Briggs!"
In the note she reproached me—the wretched hypocrite!—for my departure the previous night, "without one farewell to your Eudoxia, O cruel Augustus!" and asked me to give her a rendezvous at some vineyards lying a little way off the Casa di Fiori, on the road toMelita. Now, being a foolish boy, and regarding myself as having been loved and wronged, whereas I had only been playing the very commonrôleof pigeon, I could not resist the temptation of going, just to take one last look of that fair, cruel face, and upbraid her with being the first to sow the fatal seeds of lifelong mistrust and misery in my only too fond and faithful, &c. &c. &c.
So, at the appointed hour, just when the sun was setting over the far-away Spanish shore, and the hush of night was sinking over the little, rocky, peppery, military-thick, Mediterranean isle, I found myselfen routeto the vineyards; which, till I came to Malta, had been one of my delusions, Idea picturing them in wreaths and avenues, Reality proving them hop-sticks and parched earth. I drew near; it was quite dark now, the sun had gone to sleep under the blue waves, and the moon was not yet up. Though I knew she was Sarah Briggs, and an adventuress who had made game of me, two facts that one would fancy might chill the passion out of anybody, so mad was I about that woman, that, if I had met her then and there, I should have let her wheedle me over, and gone back to the Casa di Fiori with her and been fleeced again: I am sure I should, sir, and so would you, if, at eighteen, new to life, you had fallen in with Eudox——pshaw!—with Sarah Briggs, my Marchioness St Julian.
I drew near the vineyards: my heart beat thick, I could not see, but I was certain I heard the rustle of her dress, caught the perfume of her hair. All her sins vanished: how could I upbraid her, though she were three times over Sarah Briggs? Yes, she was coming; Ifelther near; an electric thrill rushed through me as soul met soul. I heard a murmured "Dearest, sweetest!" I felt the warm clasp of two arms, but—a cold row of undress waistcoat-buttons came against my face, and a voice I knew too well cried out, as I rebounded from him, impelled thereto by a not gentle kick,—
"The devil! get out! Who the deuce are you?"
We both stopped for breath. At that minute up rose the silver moon, and in its tell-tale rays we glared on one another, I and Little Grand.
That silence was sublime: the pause between Beethoven's andante allegro—the second before the Spanish bull rushes upon the torreador.
"You little miserable wretch!" burst out Grand, slowly and terribly; "you little, mean, sneaking, spying, contemptible milksop! I should like to know what you mean by bringing out your ugly phiz at this hour, when you used to be afraid of stirring out for fear of nurse's bogies? And to dare to come lurking after me!"
"After you, Mr. Grandison!" I repeated, with grandiloquence. "Really you put too much importance on your own movements. I came by appointment to meet the Marchioness St. Julian, whom, I presume, as you are well acquainted with her, you know in her real name of Sarah Briggs, and to——"
"Sarah Briggs!—youcome by appointment?" stammered Little Grand.
"Yes, sir; if you disbelieve my word of honor, I will condescend to show you my invitation."
"You little ape!" swore Grand, coming back to his previous wrath; "it is a lie, a most abominable, unwarrantable lie!Icame by appointment, sir; you did no such thing. Look there!"
And he flaunted before my eyes in the moonlight the fac-simile of my letter, verbatim copy, save that in his Cosmo was put in the stead of Augustus.
"Look there!" said I, giving him mine.
Little Grand snatched it, read it over once, twice, thrice, then drooped his head, with a burning color in his face, and was silent.
The "knowing hand" was done!
We were both of us uncommonly quiet for ten minutes, neither of us liked to be the first to give in.
At last Little Grand looked up and held out his hand, no more nonsense about him now.
"Simon, you and I have been two great fools; we can't chaff one another. She's a cursed actress, and—let's make it up, old boy."
We made it up accordingly—when Little Grand was not conceited he was a very jolly fellow—and then I gave him my whole key to the mysteries, intricacies, and charms of our Casa di Fiori. We could not chaff one another, but poor Little Grand was pitiably sore then, and for long afterwards. He, the "old bird," the cool hand, the sharp one of Ours, to have been done brown, to be the joke of the mess, the laugh of all the men, down to the weest drummer-boy! Poor Little Grand! He was too done up to swagger, too thoroughly angry with himself to swear at anybody else. He only whispered to me, "Why the dickens could she want you and me to meet our selves?"
"To give us a finishing hoax, I suppose," I suggested.
Little Grand drew his cap over his eyes, and hung his head down in abject humiliation.
"I suppose so. What fools we have been, Simon! And, I say, I've borrowed three hundred of old Miraflores, and it's all gone up at that devilish Casa; and how I shall get it from the governor, Heaven knows, forIdon't."
"I'm in the same pickle, Grand," I groaned. "I've given that old rascal notes of hand for two hundred pounds, and, if it don't drop from the clouds, I shall never pay it. Oh, I say, Grand, love comes deucedly expensive."
"Ah!" said he, with a sympathetic shiver, "think what a pair of hunters we might have had for the money!" With which dismal and remorseful remembrance the old bird, who had been trapped like a young pigeon, swore mightily, and withdrew into humbled and disgusted silence.
Next morning we heard, to our comfort—what lots of people there always are to tell us how to lock our stable-door when our solitary mare has been stolen—that, with a gentle hint from the police, the Marchioness St. Julian, with herconfrères, had taken wing to the Ionian Isles, where, at Corfu or Cephalonia, they will re-erect the Casa di Fiori, and glide gently on again from vingt-et-un to loo, and from loo to lansquenet, under eyes as young and blinded as our own. They went without Lucrezia. Conran took her into his own hands. Any other man in the regiment would have been pretty well ridiculed at taking a bride out of theCasadi Fiori; but the statements made by the high-born Abbess of her Roman convert were so clear, and so to the girl's honor, and he had such a way of holding his own, of keeping off liberties from himself and anything belonging to him, and was, moreover, known to be of such fastidious honor, that his young wife was received as if she had been a Princess in her own right. With her respected parent Conran had a brief interview previous to his flight from Malta, in which, with a few gentle hints, he showed that worthy it would be wiser to leave his daughter unmolested for the future, and I doubt if Mr. Orangia Magnolia,aliasPepe Guari, would know his own child in the joyous, graceful, daintily-dressed mistress of Conran's handsome Parisian establishment.
Little Grand and I suffered cruelly. We were the butts of the mess for many a long month afterwards, when every idiot's tongue asked us on every side after the health of the Marchioness St. Julian? when we were going to teach them lansquenet? how often we heard from the aristocratic members of the Maltese Peerage? with like delightful pleasantries, which the questioners deemed high wit. We paid for it, too, to that arch old screw Balthazar; but I doubt very much if the money were not well lost, and the experience well gained. It cured me of my rawness and Little Grand of his self-conceit, the onlything that had before spoilt that good-hearted, quick-tempered, and clever-brained little fellow. Oh, Pater and Materfamilias, disturb not yourselves so unnecessarily about the crop of wild oats which your young ones are sowing broadcast. Those wild oats often spring from a good field of high spirit, hot courage, and thoughtless generosity, that are the sign and basis of nobler virtues to come, and from them very often rise two goodly plants—Experience and Discernment.
* * * * *
* * * * *
OR,
One of the kindest-natured persons that I ever knew on this earth, where kind people are as rare as black eagles or red deer, is Helena, Countess of Marabout,néeDe Bonc[oe]ur. She has foibles, she has weaknesses—who amongst us has not?—she will wear her dressesdécolletées, though she's sixty, if Burke tells us truth; she will rouge and practise a thousand other little toilette tricks, but they are surely innocent, since they deceive nobody; and if you wait for a woman who is no artifices, I am afraid you shall have to forswear the sexin toto, my friends, and come growling back to your Diogenes' tub in the Albany, with your lantern still lit every day of your lives.
Lady Marabout is a very charming person. As for her weaknesses, she is all the nicer for them, to my taste. I like people with weaknesses myself; those without them do look so dreadfully scornfully and unsympathizingly upon one from the altitude of their superiority,de toute la hauteur de sa bêtise, as a witty Frenchman says. Humanity was born with weaknesses. If I were a beggar, Imight hope for a coin from a man with some; a man without any, I know, would shut up his porte-monnaie, with an intensified click, to make me feel trebly envious, and consign me to D 15 and his truncheon, on the score of vagrancy.
Lady Marabout is a very charming person, despite her little foibles, and she gives very pleasant little dinners, both at her house in Lowndes Square and in her jointure villa at Twickenham, where the bad odors of Thames are drowned in the fragrance of the geraniums, piled in great heaps of red, white, and variegated blossom in the flowerbeds on the lawn. She has been married twice, but has only one son, by her first union—Carruthers, of the Guards—a very good fellow, whom his mother thinks perfection, though if shedidknow certain scenes in her adored Philip's life, the good lady might hesitate before she endowed her son with all the cardinal virtues as she does at the present moment. She has no daughters, therefore you will wonder to hear that the prime misery, burden, discomfort, and worry of her life is chaperonage. But so it is.
Lady Marabout is the essence of good nature; she can't say No: that unpleasant negative monosyllable was never heard to issue from her full, smiling, kind-looking lips: she is in a high position, she has an extensive circle, thanks to her own family and those of the baronet and peer she successively espoused; and some sister, or cousin, or friend, is incessantly hunting her up to bring out their girls, and sell them well off out of hand; young ladies being goods extremely likely to hangonhand nowadays.
"Of all troubles, the troubles of a chaperone are the greatest," said Lady Marabout to me at the wedding déjeûner of one of her protegées. "In the first place, one looks on at others' campaigns instead of conducting them one's self; secondly, it brings back one's own bright daysto see the young things' smiles and blushes, like that girl's just now (I do hope she'll be happy!); and thirdly, one has all the responsibility, and gets all the blame if anything goes wrong. I'll never chaperone anybody again now I have got rid of Leila."
So does Lady Marabout say twenty times; yet has she invariably some young lady under her wing, whose relatives are defunct, or invalided, or in India, or out of society somehow; and we all of us call her house The Yard, and her (among ourselves) not Lady Marabout but Lady Tattersall. The worries she has in her chaperone's office would fill a folio, specially as her heart inclines to the encouragement of romance, but her reason to the banishment thereof; and while her tenderness suffers if she thwarts her protégées' leanings, her conscience gives her neuralgic twinges if she abets them to unwise matches while under her dragonnage.
"What's the matter, mother?" asked Carruthers, one morning. He's very fond of his mother, and will never let any one laugh at her in his hearing.
"Matter? Everything!" replied Lady Marabout, concisely and comprehensively, as she sat on the sofa in her boudoir, with her white ringed hands and herbien conservélook, and her kindly pleasant eyes and her rich dress; one could see what a pretty woman she has been, and that Carruthers may thank her for his good looks. "To begin with, Félicie has been so stupid as to marry; married the greengrocer (whom she will ruin in a week!), and has left me to the mercies of a stupid woman who puts pink with cerise, mauve with magenta, and sky-blue with azureline, and has no recommendation except that she is as ugly as the Medusa, and so will not tempt you to——"
"Make love to her, as I did to Marie," laughed Carruthers. "Marie was a pretty little dear; it was very severe in you to send her away."
Lady Marabout tried hard to look severe and condemnatory, but failed signally, nature had formed the smooth brow and the kindly eyes in far too soft a mould.
"Don't jest about it, Philip; you know it was a great pain, annoyance, and scandal to me. Well! Félicie is gone, and Oakes was seen pawning some of my Mechlin the other day, so I have been obliged to dischargeher; and they both of them suited me so well! Then Bijou is ill, poor little pet——"
"With repletion of chicken panada?"
"No; Bijou isn't such a gourmet. You judge him by yourself, I suppose; men always do! Then Lady Hautton told me last night that you were the wildest man on town, and at forty——"
"You think I ought toranger? So I will, my dear mother, some day; but at present I am—so very comfortable; it would be a pity to alter! What pains one's friends are always at to tell unpalatable things; if they would but be only half so eager to tell us the pleasant ones! I shall expect you to cut Lady Hautton if she speak badly of me, I can't afford to lose your worship, mother!"
"My worship? How conceited you are, Philip! As for Lady Hautton, I believe she does dislike you, because you did not engage yourself to Adelina, and were selected aide-de-camp to her Majesty, instead of Hautton; still, I am afraid she spoke too nearly the truth."
"Perhaps Marie has entered her service and told tales."
But Lady Marabout wouldn't laugh, she always looks very grave about Marie.
"My worst trouble," she began hastily, "is that your aunt Honiton is too ill to come to town; no chance of her being well enough to come at all this season; and of course the charge of Valencia has devolved on me. You know how I hate chaperoning, and I didsohope I should be free this year; besides, Valencia is a great responsibility,very great; a girl of so much beauty always is; there will be sure to be so many men about her at once, and your aunt will expect me to marry her so very well. It is excessively annoying."
"My poor dear mother!" cried Carruthers. "I grant youarean object of pity. You are everlastingly having young fillies sent you to break in, and they want such a tight hand on the ribbons."
"And a tight hand, as you call it, I never had, and never shall have," sighed Lady Marabout. "Valencia will be no trouble to me on that score, however; she has been admirably educated, knows all that is due to her position, and will never give me a moment's anxiety by any imprudence or inadvertence. But she is excessively handsome, and a beauty is a great responsibility when she first comes out."
"Val was always a handsome child, if I remember. I dare say she is a beauty now. When is she coming up? because I'll tell the men to mark the house and keep clear of it," laughed Carruthers. "You're a dreadfully dangerous person, mother; you have always the best-looking girl in town with you. Fulke Nugent says if he should ever want such a thing as a wife when he comes into the title, he shall take a look at the Marabout Yearlings Sale."
"Abominably rude of you and your friends to talk me over in your turf slang! I wishyouwould come and bid at the sale, Philip; I should like to see you married—well married, of course."
"My beloved mother!" cried Carruthers. "Leave me in peace, if you please, and catch the others if you can. There's Goodey, now; every chaperone and débutante in London has set traps for him for the last I don't know how many years; wouldn't he do for Valencia?"
"Goodwood? Of course he would; he would do for any one; the Dukedom's the oldest in the peerage. Goodwoodis highly eligible. Thank you for reminding me, Philip. Since Valencia is coming, I must do my best for her." Which phrase meant with Lady Marabout that she must be very lynx-eyed as to settlements, and a perfect dragon to all detrimental connections, must frown with Medusa severity on all horrors of younger sons, and advocate with all the weight of personal experience the advantage and agrémens of a good position, in all of which practicalities she generally broke down, with humiliation unspeakable, immediately her heart was enlisted and her sympathies appealed to on the enemy's side. She sighed, played with her bracelets thoughtfully, and then, heroically resigning herself to her impending fate, brightened up a little, and asked her son to go and choose a new pair of carriage-horses for her.
To look at Lady Marabout as she sat in her amber satin couch that morning, pleasant, smiling, well-dressed, well-looking, with the grace of good birth and the sunniness of good nature plainly written on her smooth brow and her kindly eyes, and wealth—delicious little god!—stamping itself all about her, from the diamond rings on her soft white fingers to the broidered shoe on the feet, of whose smallness she was still proud, one might have ignorantly imagined her to be the most happy, enviable, well-conditioned, easy-going dowager in the United Kingdom. But appearances are deceptive, and if we believe what she constantly asserted, Lady Marabout was very nearly worn into her grave by a thousand troubles; her almshouses, whose roofs would eternally blow off with each high wind; her dogs, whom she would overfeed; her ladies' maids, who were only hired to steal, tease, or scandalize her; the begging letter-writers, who distilled tears from her eyes and sovereigns from her purse, let Carruthers disclose their hypocrisies as he might; the bolder begging-letters, written by hon. secs., and headed by names with long handles, belonging to Pillars of theState and Lights of the Church, which compelled her to make a miserable choice between a straitened income or a remorseful conscience—tormented, in fine, with worries small and large, from her ferns, on which she spent a large fortune, and who drooped maliciously in their glass cases, with an ill-natured obstinacy characteristic of desperately-courted individuals, whether of the floral or the human world, to those marriageable young ladies whom she took under her wing to usher into the great world, and who were certain to run counter to her wishes and overthrow her plans, to marry ill, or not marry at all, or do something or other to throw discredit on her chaperoning abilities. She was, she assured us,pétriewith worries, small and large, specially as she was so eminently sunny, affable, and radiant a looking person, that all the world took their troubles to her, selected her as their confidante, and made her the repository of their annoyances; but her climax of misery was to be compelled to chaperone, and as a petition for some débutante to be intrusted to her care was invariably made each season, and "No" was a monosyllable into which her lips utterly refused to form themselves, each season did her life become a burden to her. There was never any rest for the soul of Helena, Countess of Marabout, till her house in Lowndes Square was shut up, and her charges off her hand, and she could return in peace to her jointure-villa at Twickenham, or to Carruthers' old Hall of Deepdene, and among her flowers, her birds, and her hobbies, throw off for a while the weary burden of her worries as a chaperone.
"Valencia will give me little trouble, I hope. So admirably brought-up a girl, and so handsome as she is, will be sure to marry soon, and marry well," thought Lady Marabout, self-congratulatorily, as she dressed for dinner the day of her niece's arrival in town, running over mentally the qualifications and attractions of Valencia Valletort, while Félicie's successor, Mademoiselle Despréaux,whose crime was then to put pink with cerise, mauve with magenta, and sky-blue with azureline, gave the finishing touches to her toilette—"Valencia will give me no trouble; she has all the De Boncoeur beauty, with the Valletort dignity. Who would do for her? Let me see; eligible men are not abundant, and those that are eligible are shy of being marked as Philip would say—perhaps from being hunted so much, poor things! There is Fulke Nugent, heir to a barony, and his father is ninety—very rich, too—he would do; and Philip's friend, Caradoc, poor, I know, but their Earldom's the oldest peerage patent. There is Eyre Lee, too; I don't much like the man, supercilious and empty-headed; still he's an unobjectionable alliance. And there is Goodwood. Every one has tried for Goodwood, and failed. I should like Valencia to win him; he is decidedly the most eligible man in town. I will invite him to dinner. If he is not attracted by Valencia's beauty, nothing can attract him——Despréaux! comme vous êtes bête! Otez ces panaches, de grace!"
"Valencia will give me no trouble; she will marry at once," thought Lady Marabout again, looking across the dinner-table at her niece.
If any young patrician might be likely to marry at once, it was the Hon. Valencia Valletort; she was, to the most critical, a beauty: her figure was perfect, her features were perfect, and if you complained that her large glorious eyes were a trifle too changeless in expression, that her cheek, exquisitely independent of Maréchale powder, Blanc de Perle, and liquid rouge, though it was, rarely varied with her thoughts and feelings, why, you were very exacting, my good fellow, and should remember that nothing is quite perfect on the face of the earth—not even a racer or a woman—and that whether you bid at the Marabout yearling sales or the Rawcliffe, if you wish to be pleased you'd better leave a hypercriticalspirit behind you, and not expect to getallpoints to your liking. The best filly will have something faulty in temper or breeding, symmetry or pace, for your friend Jack Martingale to have the fun of pointing out to you when your money is paid and the filly in your stall; and your wife will have the same, only Martingale will pointherflaws out behind your back, and only hint them to you with an all-expressive "Not allowed to smoke in the dining-roomnow!" "A little bit of a flirt, madame—n'est-ce pas, Charlie?" "Reins kept rather tight, eh, old fellow?" or something equally ambiguous, significant, and unpleasant.
"I must consider, Philip, I have brought out the beauty of the season," said Lady Marabout to Carruthers, eying her niece as she danced at her first ball at the Dowager-Duchess of Amandine's, and beginning to brighten up a little under the weight of her responsibilities.
"I think you have, mother. Val's indisputably handsome. You must tell her to make play with Goodwood or Nugent."
Lady Marabout unfurled her fan, and indignantly interrupted him:
"My dear Philip! do you suppose I would teach Valencia, or any girl under my charge, to lay herself out for any man, whoever or whatever it might be? I trust your cousin would not stoop to use such man[oe]uvres, did I even stoop to counsel them. Depend upon it, Philip, it is precisely those women who try to 'make play,' as you call it, with your sex that fail most to charm them. It is abominable the way in which you men talk, as if we all hunted you down, and would drive you to St. George'snolens volens!"
"So you would, mother," laughed Carruthers. "We 'eligible men' have a harder life of it than rabbits in a warren, with a dozen beagles after them. From the minute we're of age we're beset with traps for the unwary, andthe spring-guns are so dexterously covered, with an inviting, innocent-looking turf of courtesies and hospitalities that it's next to a mural impossibility to escape them, let one retire into one's self, keep to monosyllables through all the courses of all the dinners and all the turns of all the valses, and avoid everything 'compromising,' as one may. I've suffered, and can tell you. I suffer still, though I believe and hope they are beginning to look on me as an incurable, given over to the clubs, the coulisses, and the cover-side. There's a fellow that's known still more of thepeines fortes et duresthan I. Goodwood's coming to ask for an introduction to Val, I would bet."
He was coming for that purpose, and, though Lady Marabout had so scornfully and sincerely repudiated her son's counsel relative to making play with Goodwood, blandly ignorant of her own weaknesses like a good many other people, Lady Marabout was not above a glow of chaperone gratification when she saw the glance of admiration which the Pet Eligible of the season bestowed on Valencia Valletort. Goodwood was a good-looking fellow—a clever fellow—though possibly he shone best alone at a mess luncheon, in a chat driving to Hornsey Wood, round the fire in a smoking-room, on a yacht deck, or anywhere where ladies of the titled world were not encountered, he having become afraid of them by dint of much persecution, as any October partridge of a setter's nose. He was passably good-looking, ordinarily clever, a very good fellow as I say, and—he was elder son of his Grace of Doncaster, which fact would have made him the desired of every unit of thebeau sexe, had he been hideous as the Veiled Prophet or Brutal Gilles de Rayes. The Beauty often loves the Beast in our day, as in the days of fairy lore. We see that beloved story of our petticoat days not seldom acted out, and when there is no possibility of personal transmogrification and amelioration for the Beast moreover; only—the Beauty has always hadwhispered in her little ear the title she will win, and the revenues she will gain, and the cloth of gold she will wear, if she caresses Bruin the enamoured, swears his ugly head is god-like, and vows fidelity unswerving!
Goodwood was no uncouth Bruin, and he had strawberry-leaves in his gift; none of your lacquered, or ormolu, or silver-gilt coronets, such as are cast about nowadays with a liberality that reminds one of flinging a handful of halfpence from a balcony, where the nimblest beggar is first to get the prize; but of the purest and best gold; and Goodwood had been tried for accordingly by every woman he came across for the last dozen years. Women of every style and every order had primed all their rifles, and had their shot at him, and done their best to make a centre and score themselves as winner: belles and bas bleus, bewitching widows and budding débutantes, fast young ladies who tried to capture him in the hunting-field by clearing a bullfinch; saintly young ladies, who illuminated missals, and hinted they would like to take his conversion in hand; brilliant women, who talked at him all through a long rainy day, when Perthshire was flooded, and the black-fowl unattainable; showy women, whoposê'dfor him whole evenings in their opera-boxes, whole mornings in their boudoir—all styles and orders had set at him, till he had sometimes sworn in his haste that all women were man-traps, and that he wished to Heaven he were a younger son in the Foreign Office, or a poor devil in the Line, or anything, rather than what he was; the Pet Eligible of his day.
"Goodwood is certainly struck with her," thought Lady Marabout, as Despréaux disrobed her that night, running over with a retrogressive glance Valencia Valletort's successes at her first ball. "Very much struck, indeed, I should say. I will issue cards for another 'At Home.' As for 'making play' with him, as Philip terms it, of course that is only a man's nonsense. Valencia will neednone of those trickeries, I trust; still, it is any one's duty to make the best alliance possible for such a girl, and—dear Adeliza would be very pleased."
With which amiable remembrance of her sister (whom, conceiving it her duty to love, Lady Marabout persuaded herself that shedidlove, from a common feminine opticism that there's an eleventh commandment which makes it compulsory to be attached to relativesn'importeof whatever degree of disagreeability, though Lady Honiton was about the most odious hypochondriac going, in a perpetual state of unremitting battle with the whole outer world in general, and allopathists, hom[oe]opathists, and hydropathists in especial), the most amiable lady in all Christendom bade Despréaux bring up her cup of coffee an hour earlier in the morning, she had so much to do! asked if Bijou had had some panada set down by his basket in case he wanted something to take in the night; wished her maid good night, and laid her head on her pillow as the dawn streamed through the shutters, already settling what bridal presents she should give her niece Valencia, when she became present Marchioness of Goodwood and prospective Duchess of Doncaster before the altar rails of St. George's.
"That's a decidedly handsome girl, that cousin of yours, Phil," said Goodwood, on the pavement before her Grace of Amandine's, in Grosvenor Place, at the same hour that night.
"I think sheiscounted like me!" said Carruthers. "Of course she's handsome; hasn't she De Bonc[oe]ur blood in her, my good fellow? We're all of us good-looking, always have been, thank God! If you're inclined to sacrifice, Goodwood, now's your time, and my mother'll be delighted. She's brought out about half a million of débutantes, I should say, in her time, and all of 'em have gone wrong, somehow; wouldn't go off at all, like damp gunpowder, or would go off too quick in the wrong direction,like a volunteer's rifle charge; married ignominiously, or married obstinately, or never excited pity in the breast of any man, but had to retire to single-blessedness in the country, console themselves with piety and an harmonium, and spread nets for young clerical victims. Give her a triumph at last, and let her have glory for once, as a chaperone, in catchingyou!"
Goodwood gave a little shiver, and tried to light a Manilla, which utterly refused to take light, for the twelfth time in half a minute.
"Hold your tongue! If the Templars' Order were extant, wouldn't I take the vows and bless them! What an unspeakable comfort and protection that white cross would be to us, Phil, if we could stick it on our coats, and know it would say to every woman that looked at us, 'No go, my pretty little dears—not to be caught!' Marriage! I can't remember any time that that word wasn't my bugbear. When I was but a little chicken, some four years old, I distinctly remember, when I was playing with little Ida Keane on the terrace, hearing her mother simper to mine, 'Perhaps darling Goodwood may marry my little Ida some day, who knows?' I never would play with Ida afterwards; instinct preserved me; she's six or seven-and thirty now, and weighs ten stone, I'm positive. Whywon'tthey let us alone? The way journalists and dowagers, the fellows who want to write a taking article, and the women who want to get rid of a taking daughter, all badger us, in public and private, about marriage just now, is abominable, on my life; the affair'sours, I should say, not theirs, and to marry isn't the ultimatum of a man's existence, nor anything like it."
"I hope not! It's more like the extinguisher. Good night, old fellow." And Carruthers drove away in his hansom, while Goodwood got into his night-brougham, thinking that for the sake of the title, the evil (nuptial) daymustcome, sooner or later, but dashed off to forgetthe disagreeable obligation over the supper-table of the most sparkling empress of the demi-monde.
Lady Marabout had her wish; she brought out the belle of the season, and when a little time had slipped by, when the Hon. Val had been presented at the first Drawing-room, and shone there despite the worry, muddle, and squeeze incidental to that royal and fashionable ceremony, and she had gathered second-hand from her son what was said in the clubs relative to this new specimen of the Valletort beauty, she began to be happier under her duties than she had ever been before, and wrote letters to "dearest Adeliza," brimful of superlative adjectives and genuine warmth.
"Valencia will do me credit: I shall see her engaged before the end of June; she will have only to choose," Lady Marabout would say to herself some twenty times in the pauses of the morning concerts, the morning parties, the bazaar committees, the toilette consultations, the audiences to religious beggars, whose name was Legion and rapacity unmeasured, the mass of unanswered correspondence whose debt lay as heavily on Lady Marabout as his chains on a convict, and were about as little likely to be knocked off, and all the other things innumerable that made her life in the season one teetotum whirl of small worries and sunshiny cares, from the moment she began her day, with her earliest cup of Mocha softened with cream from that pet dairy of hers at Fernditton, where, according to Lady Marabout, the cows were constantlyin articulo mortis, but the milk invariably richer than anywhere else, an agricultural anomaly which presented no difficulties toherreason. Like all women, she loved paradoxes, defied logic recklessly, and would clear at a bound a chasm of solecisms that would have kept Plato in difficulties about crossing it, and in doubt about the strength of his jumping-pole, all his life long.
"She will do me great credit," the semi-consoled chaperonewould say to herself with self-congratulatory relief; and if Lady Marabout thought now and then, "I wish she were a trifle—a trifle more—demonstrative," she instantly checked such an ungrateful and hypercritical wish, and remembered that a heart is a highly treacherous and unadvisable possession for any young lady, and a most happy omission in her anatomy, though Lady Marabout had, she would confess to herself on occasions with great self-reproach, an unworthy and lingering weakness for that contraband article, for which she scorned and scolded herself with the very worst success.
Lady Marabouthada heart herself; to it she had had to date the greatest worries, troubles, imprudences, and vexations of her life; she had had to thank it for nothing, and to dislike it for much; it had made her grieve most absurdly for other people's griefs; it had given her a hundred unphilosophical pangs at philosophic ingratitude from people who wanted her no longer; it had teased, worried, and plagued her all her life long, had often interfered in the most meddling and inconvenient manner between her and her reason, her comfort and her prudence; and yet she had a weakness for the same detrimental organ in other people—a weakness of which she could no more have cured herself than of her belief in the detection-defying powers of liquid rouge, the potentiality of a Liliputian night-bolt against an army of burglars, the miraculous properties of sal volatile, the efficacy of sermons, and such-like articles of faith common to feminine orthodoxy. A weakness of which she never felt more ignominiously convicted and more secretly ashamed than in the presence of Miss Valletort, that young lady having a lofty and magnificent disdain for all such follies, quite unattainable to ordinary mortals, which oppressed Lady Marabout with a humiliating sense of inferiority to her niece of eighteen summers. "So admirably educated! so admirably brought up!" she would say to herself overand over again, and if heretic suggestions that the stiffest trained flowers are not always the best, that the upright and spotless arum-lily isn't so fragrant as the careless, brilliant, tangled clematis; that rose-boughs, tossing free in sunshine and liberty, beat hollow the most carefully-pruned standard that ever won a medal at Regent's Park, with such-like allegories, arising from contemplation of her conservatory or her balcony flowers,wouldpresent themselves, Lady Marabout repressed them dutifully, and gratefully thought how many pounds' weight lighter became the weary burden of a chaperone's responsibilities when the onerous charge had been educated "on the best system."
"Goodwood's attentionsareserious, Philip, say what you like," said the Countess to her son, as determinedly as a theologian states his pet points with wool in his ears, that he may not hear any Satan-inspired, rational, and mathematical disproval of them, with which you may rashly seek to soil his tympana and smash his arguments—"Goodwood's attentionsareserious, Philip, say what you like," said her ladyship, at a morning party at Kew, eating her Neapolitan ice, complacently glancing at the "most eligible alliance of the season," who was throwing the balls at lawn-billiards, and talking between whiles to the Hon. Val with praiseworthy and promising animation.
"Serious indeed, mother, if they tend matrimony-wards!" smiled Carruthers. "It's a very serious time indeed for unwary sparrows when they lend an ear to the call-bird, and think about hopping on to the lime-twigs. I should think it's from a sense of compunction for the net you've led us into, that you all particularize our attentions, whenever they point near St. George's, by that very suggestive little adjective 'serious!' Yes, I am half afraid poor Goodey is a little touched. He threw over our Derby sweepstakes up at Hornsey Wood yesterday to go and stifle himself in Willis's rooms at your bazaar, and buya guinea cup of Souchong from Valencia; and, considering he's one of the best shots in England, I don't think you could have a more conclusive, if you could have a more poetic, proof of devoted renunciation.I'd fifty times rather get a spear in my side, à la Ivanhoe, for a woman than give up a Pigeon-match, a Cup-day, or a Field-night!"
"You'll never do either!" laughed Lady Marabout, who made it one of her chief troubles that her son would not marry, chiefly, probably, because if hehadmarried she would have been miserable, and thought no woman good enough for him, would have been jealous of his wife's share of his heart, and supremely wretched, I have no doubt, at his throwing himself away, as she would have thought it, had his handkerchief lighted on a Princess born, lovely as Galatea, and blessed with Venus's cestus.
"Never,plaise à Dieu!" responded her son, piously over his ice; "but if Goodwood's serious, what's Cardonnel?He's lost his head, if you like, after the Valletort beauty."
"Major Cardonnel!" said Lady Marabout, hastily. "Oh no, I don't think so. I hope not—I trust not."
"Why so? He's one of the finest fellows in the Service."
"I dare say; but you see, my dear Philip, he's not—not—desirable."
Carruthers stroked his moustaches and laughed:
"Fie, fie, mother! if all other Belgraviennes are Mammon-worshippers, I thought you kept clear of the paganism. I thought your freedom from it was the only touch by which you weren't 'purely feminine,' as the lady novelists say of their pet bits of chill propriety."
"Worship Mammon! Heaven forbid!" ejaculated Lady Marabout. "But there are duties, you see, my dear; your friend is a very delightful man, to be sure; I like him excessively, and if Valencia felt anygreatpreference for him——"
"You'd feel ityourduty to counsel her to throw him over for Goodwood."
"I never said so, Philip," interrupted Lady Marabout, with as near an approach to asperity as she could achieve, which approach was less like vinegar than most people's best honey.
"But you implied it. What are 'duties' else, and why is poor Cardonnel 'not desirable'?"
Lady Marabout played a little tattoo with her spoon in perplexity.
"My dear Philip, you know as well as I do what I mean. One might think you were a boy of twenty to hear you!"
"My dear mother, like all disputants, when beaten in argument and driven into a corner, you resort to vituperation of your opponent!" laughed Carruthers, as he left her and lounged away to pick up the stick with which pretty Flora Elmers had just knocked the pipe out of Aunt Sally's head on to the velvet lawn of Lady George Frangipane's dower-house, leaving his mother by no means tranquillized by his suggestions.
"Dear me!" thought Lady Marabout, uneasily, as she conversed with the Dowager-Countess of Patchouli on the respective beauties of two new pelargonium seedlings, the Leucadia and the Beatrice, for which her gardener had won prizes the day before at the Regent's Park Show—"dear me! why is there invariably this sort of cross-purposes in everything? It will be so grievous to lose Goodwood (and heisdecidedly struck with her; when he bought that rosebud yesterday of her at the bazaar, and put it in the breast of his waistcoat, I heard what he said, and it was no nonsense, no mere flirting complaisance either)—it would be so grievous to lose him; and yet if Valencia really care for Cardonnel—and sometimes I almost fancy she does—I shouldn't know which way to advise. I thought it would be odd if a season couldpass quietly without my having some worry of this sort! With fifty men always about Valencia, as they are, howcanI be responsible for any mischief that may happen, though, to hear Philip talk, one would really imagine it wasmyfault that they lost their heads, as he calls it! As if a forty-horse steam-power could stop a man when he's once off down the incline into love! The more you try to pull him back the more impetus you give him to go headlong down. I wish Goodwood would propose, and we could settle the affair definitively. It is singular, but she has had no offers hardly with all her beauty. It is very singular, inmyfirst season I had almost as many as I had names on my tablets at Almack's. But men don't marry now, they say. Perhaps 'tisn't to be wondered at, though I wouldn't allow it to Philip. Poor things! they lose a very great many pleasant things by it, and get nothing, I'm sure, nine times out of ten, except increased expenses and unwelcome worries. I don't think I would have married if I'd been a man, though I'd never admit it, of course, to one of them. There are plenty of women who know too much of their own sex ever to wonder that a man doesn't marry, though of course we don't say so; 'twouldn't be to our interest. Sculptors might as well preach iconoclasm, or wine-merchants tee-totalism, as women misoganism, however little in our hearts we may marvel at it. Oh, my dear Lady Patchouli! you praise the Leucadia too kindly—you do indeed—but if you really think so much of it, let me send you some slips. I shall be most happy, and Fenton will be only too proud; it is his favorite seedling."
Carruthers was quite right. One fellow at least had lost his head after the beauty of the season, and he was Cardonnel, of the—Lancers, as fine a fellow, as Philip said, as any in the Queen's, but a dreadful detrimental in the eyes of all chaperones, because he was but the fourth son of one of the poorest peers in the United Kingdom, a factwhich gave him an ægis from all assaults matrimonial, and a freedom from all smiles and wiles, traps and gins, which Goodwood was accustomed to tell him he bitterly envied him, and on which Cardonnel had fervently congratulated himself, till he came under the fire of the Hon. Val's large luminous eyes one night, when he was levelling his glass from his stall at Lady Marabout's box, to take a look at the new belle, as advised to do by that most fastidious female critic, Vane Steinberg. Valencia Valletort's luminous eyes had gleamed that night under their lashes, and pierced through the lenses of his lorgnon. He saw her, and saw nothing but her afterwards, as men looking on the sun keep it on their retina to the damage and exclusion of all other objects.
Physical beauty, even when it is a little bit soulless, is an admirable weapon for instantaneous slaughter, and the trained and pruned standard roses show a very effective mass of bloom; though, as Lady Marabout's floral tastes and experiences told her, they don't give one the lasting pleasure that a careless bough of wild rose will do, with its untutored grace and its natural fragrance. With the standard you see we keep in the artificial air of the horticultural tent, and are never touched out of it for a second; its perfume seems akin to a bouquet, and its destiny is, we are sure, to a parterre. The wild-rose fragrance breathes of the hill-side and the woodlands, and brings back to us soft touches of memory, of youth, of a fairer life and a purer air than that in which we are living now.
The Hon. Val didnothave as many offers as her aunt and chaperone had on the first flush of her pride in her anticipated. Young ladies, educated on the "best systems," are apt to be a trifle wearisome, anddon't, somehow or other, take so well as the sedulous efforts of their pruners and trainers—the rarefied moral atmosphere of the conservatories, in which they are carefully screened from ordinary air, and the anxiety evinced lest the flowershould ever forget itself, and sway naturally in the wind—deserve. But Cardonnel had gone mad after her, that perfect face of hers had done for him; and whatever Goodwood might be,hewas serious—he positively haunted the young beauty like her own shadow—he was leaning on the rails every morning of his life that she took her early ride—he sent her bouquets as lavishly as if he'd been a nursery gardener. By some species of private surveillance, or lover's clairvoyance, he knew beforehand where she would go, and was at the concert, fête, morning party, bazaar, or whatever it happened to be, as surely as was Lady Marabout herself. Poor Cardonnel was serious, and fiercely fearful of his all-powerful and entirely eligible rival; though greater friends than he and Goodwood had been, before this girl's face appeared on the world of Belgravia, never lounged arm-in-arm into Pratt's, or strolled down the "sweet shady side of Pall-Mall."
Goodwood's attentions were very marked, too, even to eyes less willing to construe them so than Lady Marabout's. Goodwood himself, if chaffed on the subject, vouchsafed nothing; laughed, stroked his moustaches, or puffed his cigar, if he happened to have that blessed resource in all difficulties, and comforter under all embarrassments, between his lips at the moment; but decidedly he sought Valencia Valletort more, or, to speak more correctly, he shunned her less than he'd ever done any other young lady, and one or two Sunday mornings—mirabile dictu!—he was positively seen at St. Paul's, Knightsbridge, in the seat behind Lady Marabout's sittings. A fact which, combining as it did a brace of miracles at once, of early rising and unusual piety, set every Belgravienne in that fashionable sanctuary watching over the top of her illuminated prayer-book, to the utter destruction of her hopes and interruption of her orisons.
Dowagers began to tremble behind their fans, young ladies to quake over their bouquets; the topic was eagerlydiscussed by every woman from Clarges Street to Lowndes Square; their Graces of Doncaster smiled well pleased on Valencia—she was unquestionable blood, and they so wished dear Goodwood to settle! There was whispered an awful whisper to the whole female world; whispered over matutinal chocolate, and luncheon Strasbourg pâtés, ball-supper Moëts', and demi-monde-supper Silleri, over Vane Steinberg's cigar and Eulalie Rosière's cigarette, over theMorning Postin the clubs, andLe Folletin the boudoir, that—the Pet Eligible would—marry! That the Pet Prophecy of universal smash was going to be fulfilled could hardly have occasioned greater consternation.
The soul of Lady Marabout had been disquieted ever since her son's suggestions at Lady George Frangipane's morning party, and she began to worry: for herself, for Valencia, for Goodwood, for Cardonnel, for her responsibilities in general, and for her "dearest Adeliza's" alternate opinions of her duenna qualifications in particular. Lady Marabout had an intense wish, an innocent wish enough, as innocent and very similar in its way to that of an Eton boy to make a centre at a rifle-contest, viz., to win the Marquis of Goodwood; innocent, surely, for though neither the rifle prize nor the Pet Eligible could be won without mortification unspeakable to a host of unsuccessful aspirants, if we decree that sort of thing sinful and selfish, as everything natural seems to me to get decreed nowadays, we may as well shut up at once; if we may not try for the top of the pole, why erect poles at all, monsieur? If we must not do our best to pass our friend and brother, we must give up climbing forever, and go on all fours placably with Don and Pontos.
Everybody has his ambition: one sighs for the Woolsack, another for the Hunt Cup; somebody longs to be First Minister, somebody else pines to be first dancer; one man plumes himself on a new fish-sauce, another on a fresh reform bill; A. thirsts to get a single brief, B. for the timewhen he shall be worried with no briefs at all; C. sets his hopes on being the acrobat at Cremorne, D. on being the acrobat of the Tuileries; fat bacon is Hodge the hedger'ssummum bonum, and Johannisbergpuris mine; Empedocles thinks notoriety everything, and Diogenes thinks quiet everything—each has his own reading of ambition, and Lady Marabout had hers; the Duchess of Doncaster thirsted for the Garter for her husband, Lady Elmers's pride was to possess the smallest terrier that ever took daisy tea and was carried in a monkey-muff, her Grace of Amandine slaved night and day to bring her party in and throw the ministry out. Lady Marabout sighed but for one thing—to win the Pet Eligible of the season, and give éclat for once to one phase of her chaperone's existence.
Things were nicely in train. Goodwood was beginning to bite at that very handsome fly the Hon. Val, and promised to be hooked and landed without much difficulty before long, and placed, hopelessly for him, triumphantly for her, in the lime-basket of matrimony. Things were beautifully in train, and Lady Marabout was for once flattering herself she should float pleasantly through an unruffled and successful season, when Carruthers poured the one drop ofamari aliquidinto her champagne-cup by his suggestion of Cardonnel's doom. And then Lady Marabout begun to worry.
She who could not endure to see a fly hurt or a flower pulled needlessly, had nothing for it but to worry for Cardonnel's destiny, and puzzle over the divided duties which Carruthers had hinted to her. To reject the one man because he was not well off did seem to her conscience, uncomfortably awakened by Phil's innuendoes, something more mercenary than she quite liked to look at; yet to throw over the other, future Duke of Doncaster, the eligible, the darling, the yearned-for of all May Fair and Belgravia, seemed nothing short of madness to inculcate to Valencia; a positive treason to that poor absent, trusting,"dearest Adeliza," who, after the visions epistolarily spread out before her, would utterly refuse to be comforted if Goodwood any way failed to become her son-in-law, and, moreover, the heaviest blow to Lady Marabout herself that the merciless axe of that brutal headsman Contretemps could deal her.
"I do not know really what to do or what to advise," would Lady Marabout say to herself over and over again (so disturbed by her onerous burden of responsibilities that she would let Despréaux arrange the most outrageous coiffures, and, never noticing them, go out to dinner with emeralds on blue velvet, or something as shocking to feminine nerves in her temporary aberration), forgetting one very great point, which, remembered, would have saved her all trouble, that nobody asked her to do anything, and not a soul requested her advice. "But Goodwood is decidedly won, and Goodwood must not be lost; in our position we owe something to society," she would invariably conclude these mental debates; which last phase, being of a vagueness and obscure application that might have matched it with any Queen's speech or electional address upon record, was a mysterious balm to Lady Marabout's soul, and spoke volumes toher, if a trifle hazy to you and to me.
But Lady Marabout, if she was a little bit of a sophist, had not worn her eye-glass all these years without being keen-sighted on some subjects, and, though perfectly satisfied with her niece's conduct with Goodwood, saw certain symptoms which made her tremble lest the detrimental Lancer should have won greater odds than the eligible Marquis.
"Arthur Cardonnel is excessively handsome! Such very good style! Isn't it a pity they're all so poor! His father played away everything—literally everything. The sons have no more to marry upon, any one of them, than if they were three crossing-sweepers," said her ladyship,carelessly, driving home from St. Paul's one Sunday morning.
And, watching the effect of her stray arrow, she had beheld an actual flush on the beauty's fair, impassive cheek, and had positively heard a smothered sigh from an admirably brought-up heart, no more given ordinarily to such weaknesses than the diamond-studded heart pendent from her bracelet, the belle's heart and the bracelet's heart being both formed alike, to fetch their price, and bid to do no more:—power of volition would have been as inconvenient in, and interfered as greatly with, the sale of one as of the other.
"She does like him!" sighed Lady Marabout over that Sabbath's luncheon wines. "It's always my fate—always; and Goodwood, never won before, will be thrown—actually thrown—away, as if he were the younger son of a Nobody!" which horrible waste was so terrible to her imagination that Lady Marabout could positively have shed tears at the bare prospect, and might have shed them, too, if the Hon. Val, the butler, two footmen, and a page had not inconveniently happened to be in the room at the time, so that she was driven to restrain her feelings and drink some Amontillado instead. Lady Marabout is not the first person by a good many who has had to smile over sherry with a breaking heart. Ah! lips have quivered as they laughed over Chambertin, and trembled as they touched the bowl of a champagne-glass. Wine has assisted at many a joyous festa enough, but some that has been drunk in gayety has caught gleams, in the eyes of the drinkers, of salt water brighter than its brightest sparkles: water that no other eyes can see. Because we may drink Badminton laughingly when the gaze of Society the Non-Sympathetic is on us, do you think we must never have tasted any more bitter dregs?Va-t'en, bécasse!where have you lived! Nero does not always fiddle while Rome is burning from utter heartlessness,believe me, but rather—sometimes, perhaps—because his heart is aching!
"Goodwood will propose to-night, I fancy, he is so very attentive," thought Lady Marabout, sitting with her sister chaperones on the cosy causeuses of a mansion in Carlton Terrace, at one of the last balls of the departing season. "I never saw dear Valencia look better, and certainly her waltzing is——Ah! good evening, Major Cardonnel! Very warm to-night, is it not? I shall be so glad when I am down again at Fernditton. Town, in the first week of July, is really not habitable."
And she furled her fan, and smiled on him with her pleasant eyes, and couldn't help wishing he hadn't been on the Marchioness Rondeletia's visiting list, hewassuch a detrimental, and he was ten times handsomer than Goodwood!
"Will Miss Valletort leave you soon?" asked Cardonnel, sitting down by her.
"Ah! monsieur, vous êtes là!" thought Lady Marabout, as she answered, like a guarded diplomatist as she was, that it was not all settled at present what her niece's post-season destiny would be, whether Devon or Fernditton, or the Spas, with her mother, Lady Honiton; and then unfurled her fan again, and chatted about Baden and her own indecision as to whether she should go there this September.
"May I ask you a question, and will you pardon me for its plainness?" asked Cardonnel, when she'd exhausted Baden's desirable and non-desirable points.
Lady Marabout shuddered as she bent her head, and thought, "The creature is never going to confide in me! He will win me over if he do, he looks so like his mother! And what shall I say to Adeliza!"
"Is your niece engaged to Goodwood or not?"
If ever a little fib was tempting to any lady, from Eve downward, it was tempting to Lady Marabout now! Afalsehood would settle everything, send Cardonnel off the field, and clear all possibility of losing the "best match of the season." Besides, if not engaged to Goodwood actually to-night, Val would be, if she liked, to-morrow, or the next day, or before the week was over at the furthest—would it be such a falsehood after all? She colored, she fidgeted her fan, she longed for the little fib!—how terribly tempting it looked! But Lady Marabout is a bad hand at prevarication, and she hates a lie, and she answered bravely, with a regretful twinge, "Engaged? No; not——"
"Not yet! Thank God!"
Lady Marabout stared at him and at the words muttered under his moustaches:
"Really, Major Cardonnel, I do not see why you——"
"Should thank Heaven for it? Yet I do—it is a reprieve. Lady Marabout, you and my mother were close friends; will you listen to me for a second, while we are not overheard? That I have loved your niece—had the madness to love her, if you will—you cannot but have seen; that she has given me some reasonable encouragement it is no coxcombry to say, though I have known from the first what a powerful rival I had against me; but that Valencia loves me and does not love him, I believe—nay, Iknow. I have said nothing decided to her; when all hangs on a single die we shrink from hazarding the throw. But I must know my fate to-night. If she come to you—as girls will, I believe, sometimes—for countenance and counsel, will you stand my friend?—will you, for the sake of my friendship with your son, your friendship with my mother, support my cause, and uphold what I believe Valencia's heart will say in my favor?"
Lady Marabout was silent: no Andalusian ever worried her fan more ceaselessly in coquetry than she did inperplexity. Her heart was appealed to, and when that was enlisted, Lady Marabout was lost!
"But—but—my dear Major Cardonnel, you are aware——" she began, and stopped. I should suppose it may be a little awkward to tell a man to his face he is "not desirable!"
"I am aware that I cannot match with Goodwood? I am; but I know, also, that Goodwood's love cannot match with mine, and that your niece's affection is not his. That he may win her I know women too well not to fear, therefore I askyouto be my friend. If she refuse me, will you plead for me?—if she ask for counsel, will you give such as your own heart dictates (I ask no other)—and, will you remember that on Valencia's answer will rest the fate of a man's lifetime?"
He rose and left her, but the sound of his voice rang in Lady Marabout's ears, and the tears welled into her eyes: "Dear, dear! how like he looked to his poor dear mother! But what a position to place me in! Am Ineverto have any peace?"
Not at this ball, at any rate. Of all the worried chaperones and distracted duennas who hid their anxieties under pleasant smiles or affable lethargy, none were a quarter so miserable as Helena, Lady Marabout. Her heart and her head were enlisted on opposite sides; her wishes pulled one way, her sympathies another; her sense of justice to Cardonnel urged her to one side, her sense of duty to "dearest Adeliza" urged her to the other; her pride longed for one alliance, her heart yearned for the other. Cardonnel had confided in her and appealed to her;sequitur, Lady Marabout's honor would not allow her to go against him: yet, it was nothing short of grossest treachery to poor Adeliza, down there in Devon, expecting every day to congratulate her daughter on a prospective duchy won, to counsel Valencia to take oneof these beggared Cardonnels, and, besides—to lose all her own laurels, to lose the capture of Goodwood!
No Guelphs and Ghibelins, no Royalists and Imperialists, ever fought so hard as Lady Marabout's divided duties.
"Valencia, Major Cardonnel spoke to me to-night," began that best-hearted and most badgered of ladies, as she sat before her dressing-room fire that night, alone with her niece.
Valencia smiled slightly, and a faint idea crossed Lady Marabout's mind that Valencia's smile was hardly a pleasant one, a trifle too much like the play of moonbeams on ice.
"He spoke to me about you."
"Indeed!"
"Perhaps you can guess, my dear, what he said?"
"I am no clairvoyante, aunt;" and Miss Val yawned a little, and held out one of her long slender feet to admire it.
"Every woman, my love, becomes half a clairvoyante when she is in love," said Lady Marabout, a little bit impatiently; she hadn't been brought up on the best systems herself, and though she admired the refrigeration (on principle), it irritated her just a little now and then. "Did he—did he say anything toyouto-night?"