"Oh yes!"
"And what did you answer him, my love?"
"What would you advise me?"
Lady Marabout sighed, coughed, played nervously with the tassels of her peignoir, crumpled Bijou's ears with a reckless disregard to that priceless pet's feelings, and wished herself at the bottom of the Serpentine. Cardonnel had trusted her, she couldn't deserthim; poor dear Adeliza had trusted her, she couldn't betrayher; what was right to one would be wrong to the other, and to reconcile her divided duties was a Danaid's labor.For months she had worried her life out lest her advice should be asked, and now the climax was come, and asked it was.
"What a horrible position!" thought Lady Marabout.
She waited and hesitated till the pendule had ticked off sixty seconds, then she summoned her courage and spoke:
"My dear, advice in such matters is often very harmful, and always very useless; plenty of people have asked my counsel, but I never knew any of them take it unless it chanced to chime in with their fancy. A woman's best adviser is her own heart, specially on such a subject as this. But before I give my opinion, may I ask if you have accepted him?"
Lady Marabout's heart throbbed quick and fast as she put the momentous question, with an agitation for which she would have blushed before her admirably nonchalante niece; but the tug of war was coming, and if Goodwood should be lost!
"You have accepted him?" she asked again.
"No! I—refused him."
The delicate rose went out of the Hon. Val's cheeks for once, and she breathed quickly and shortly.
Goodwood wasnotlost then!
Was she sorry—was she glad? Lady Marabout hardly knew; like Wellington, she felt the next saddest thing after a defeat is a victory.
"But you love him, Valencia?" she asked, half ashamed of suggesting such weakness, to this glorious beauty.
The Hon. Val unclasped her necklet as if it were a chain, choking her, and her face grew white and set: the coldest will feel on occasion, and all havesometender place that can wince at the touch.
"Perhaps; but such folly is best put aside at once. Certainly I prefer him to others, but to accept him would have been madness, absurdity. I told him so!"
"You told him so! If you had the heart to do so, Valencia, he has not lost much in losing you!" burst in Lady Marabout, her indignation getting the better of her judgment, and her heart, as usual, giving the coup de grace to her reason. "I am shocked at you! Every tender-hearted woman feels regret for affection she is obliged to repulse, even when she does not return it; and you, who love this man——"
"Would you have had me accept him, aunt?"
"Yes," cried Lady Marabout, firmly, forgetting every vestige of "duty," and every possibility of dear Adeliza's vengeance, "if you love him, I would, decidedly. When I married my dear Philip's father, he was what Cardonnel is, a cavalry man, as far off his family title then as Cardonnel is off his now."
"The more reason I should not imitate your imprudence, my dear aunt; death might not carry off the intermediate heirs quite so courteously in this case! No, I refused Major Cardonnel, and I did rightly; I should have repented it by now had I accepted him. There is nothing more silly than to be led away by romance. You De Bonc[oe]ursareromantic, you know; we Valletorts are happily free from the weakness. I am very tired, aunt, so good night."
The Hon. Val went, the waxlight she carried shedding a paler shade on her handsome face, whiter and more set than usual, but held more proudly, as if it already wore the Doncaster coronet; and Lady Marabout sighed as she rang for her maid.
"Of course she acted wisely, and I ought to be very pleased; but that poor dear fellow!—his eyesareso like his mother's!"
"I congratulate you, mother, on a clear field. You've sent poor Arthur off very nicely," said Carruthers, the next morning, paying his general visit in her boudoir before the day began, which is much the same time in Townas in Greenland, and commences, whatever almanacs may say, about two or half-pastP.M."Cardonnel left this morning for Heaven knows where, and is going to exchange, Shelleto tells me, into the ——th, which is ordered to Bengal, sohewon't trouble you much more. When shall I be allowed to congratulate my cousin as the future Duchess of Doncaster?"
"Pray, don't tease me, Philip. I've been vexed enough about your friend. When he came to me this morning, and asked me if there was no hope, and I was obliged to tell him there was none, I felt wretched," said Lady Marabout, as nearly pettishly as she ever said anything; "but I am really not responsible, not in the least. Besides, even you must admit that Goodwood is a much more desirable alliance, and if Valencia had accepted Cardonnel, pray what would all Belgravia have said? Why, that, disappointed of Goodwood, she took the other out of pure pique! We owe something to society, Philip, and something to ourselves."
Carruthers laughed:
"Ah, my dear mother, you women will never be worth all you ought to be till you leave off kowtow-ing to 'what will be said,' and learn to defy that terrible oligarchy of the Qu'en dira-t-on?"
"When will Goodwood propose?" wondered Lady Marabout, fifty times a day, and Valencia Valletort wondered too. Whitebait was being eaten, and yachts being fitted, manned, and victualled, outstanding Ascot debts were being settled, and outstanding bills were being passed hurriedly through St. Stephen's; all the clockwork of the season was being wound up for the last time previous to a long standstill, and going at a deuce of a pace, as if longing to run down, and give its million wheels and levers peace; while everybody who'd anything to settle, whether monetary or matrimonial, personal or political, was making up his mind about it and getting itoff his hands, and some men were being pulled up by wide-awake Jews to see what they were "made of," while others were pulled up by adroit dowagers to know what they had "meant" before the accounts of the season were scored out and settled. "Had Goodwood proposed?" asked all Belgravia. "Why hadn't Goodwood proposed?" asked Lady Marabout and Valencia. Twenty most favorable opportunities for the performance of that ceremony had Lady Marabout made for him "accidentally on purpose" the last fortnight; each of those times she had fancied the precious fish hooked and landed, and each time she had seen him, free from the hook, floating on the surface of society.
"Hemustspeak definitely to-morrow," thought Lady Marabout. But the larvæ of to-morrow burst into the butterfly of to-day, and to-day passed into the chrysalis of yesterday, and Goodwood was always very nearly caught, and neverquite!
"Come up-stairs, Philip; I want to show you a little Paul Potter I bought the other day," said Lady Marabout one morning, returning from a shopping expedition to Regent Street, meeting her son at her own door just descending from his tilbury. "Lord Goodwood calling, did you say, Soames? Oh, very well."
And Lady Marabout floated up the staircase, but signed to her footman to open the door, not of the drawing-room, but of her own boudoir.
"The Potter is in my own room, Philip; you must come in here if you wish to see it," said that adroit lady, for the benefit of Soames. But when the door was shut, Lady Marabout lowered her voice confidentially: "The Potter isn't here, dear; I had it hung in the little cabinet through the drawing-rooms, but I don't wish to go up there for a few moments—you understand."
Carruthers threw himself in a chair, and laughed till the dogs Bijou, Bonbon, and Pandore all barked in a furious concert.
"I understand! So Goody's positively coming to the point up there, is he?"
"No doubt he is," said Lady Marabout, reprovingly. "Why else should he come in when I was not at home? There is nothing extraordinary in it. The only thing I have wondered at is his having delayed so long."
"If a man had to hang himself, would you wonder he put off pulling the bolt?"
"I don't see any point in your jests at all!" returned Lady Marabout. "There is nothing ridiculous in winning such a girl as Valencia."
"No; but the question here is not of winning her, but of buying her. The price is a little high—a ducal coronet and splendid settlements, a wedding-ring and bondage for life; but he will buy her, nevertheless. Cardonnel couldn't pay the first half of the price, and so he was swept out of the auction-room. You are shocked, mother! Ah, truthisshocking sometimes, and alwaysmaladroit; one oughtn't to bring it into ladies' boudoirs."
"Hold your tongue, Philip! I will not have you so satirical. Where do you take it from? Not from me, I am sure! Hark! there is Goodwood going! That is his step on the stairs, I think! Dear me, Philip, I wish you sympathized with me a little more, for Idofeel happy, and I can't help it; dear Adeliza will be so gratified."
"My dear mother, I'll do my best to be sympathetic, I'll go and congratulate Goodwood as he gets in his cab, if you fancy I ought; but, you see, if I were in Dahomey beholding the head of my best friend coming off, I couldn't quite get up the amount of sympathy in their pleasure at the refreshing sight the Dahomites might expect from me, and so——"
But Lady Marabout missed the comparison of herself to a Dahomite, for she had opened the door and was crossing to the drawing-rooms, her eyes bright, her step elastic, her heart exultant at the triumph of her man[oe]uvres.The Hon. Val was playing with some ferns in an étagère at the bottom of the farthest room, and responded to the kiss her aunt bestowed on her about as much as if she had been one of the statuettes on the consoles.
"Well, love,what did he say?" asked Lady Marabout, breathlessly, with eager delight and confident anticipation.
Like drops of ice on warm rose-leaves fell each word of the intensely chill and slightly sulky response on Lady Marabout's heart.
"He said that he goes to Cowes to-morrow for the Royal Yacht Squadron dinner, and then on in theAnadyomeneto the Spitzbergen coast for walruses. He left a P. P. C. card for you."
"Walruses!" shrieked Lady Marabout.
"Walruses," responded the Hon. Val.
"And said no more than that?"
"No more than that!"
The Pet Eligible had flown off uncaught after all! Lady Marabout needed no further explanation—tout fut dit. They were both silent and paralyzed. Do you suppose Pompey and Cornelia had much need of words when they met at Lesbos after the horrible déroute of Pharsalia?
"I'm in your mother's blackest books for ever, Phil," said Goodwood to Carruthers in the express to Southampton for the R.Y.C. Squadron Regatta of that year, "but I can't help it. It's no good to badger us into marriage; it only makes us double, and run to earth. Iwasnear compromising myself with your cousin, I grant, but the thing that chilled me was, she's toostudied. It's all got up beforehand, and goes upon clockwork, and it don't interest one accordingly; the mechanism's perfect, but we know when it will raise its hand, and move its eyes, and bow its head, and when we've looked at its beauty once we get tired of it. That's the fault in Valencia, and inscores of them, and as long as theywon'tbe natural, why, they can't have much chance with us!"
Which piece of advice Carruthers, when he next saw his mother, repeated to her, for the edification of all future débutantes, adding a small sermon of his own:
"My dear mother, I ask you, is it to be expected that we can marry just to oblige women and please the newspapers? Would you have me marched off to Hanover Square because it would be a kindness to take one of Lady Elmers' marriageable daughters, or because a leading journal fills up an empty column with farcical lamentation on our dislike to the bondage? Of course you wouldn't; yet, for no better reasons, you'd have chained poor Goodwood, if you could have caught him. Whether a man likes to marry or not is certainly his own private business, though just now it's made a popular public discussion. Do you wonder that we shirk the institution? If we have not fortune, marriage cramps our energies, our resources, our ambitions, loads us with petty cares, and trebles our anxieties. To one who rises with such a burden on his shoulders, how many sink down in obscurity, who, but for the leaden weight of pecuniary difficulties with which marriage has laden their feet, might have climbed the highest round in the social ladder? On the other side, if we have fortune, if we have the unhappy happiness to be eligible, is it wonderful that we are not flattered by the worship of young ladies who love us for what we shall give them, that we don't feel exactly honored by being courted for what we are worth, and that we're not over-willing to give up our liberty to oblige those who look on us only as good speculations? What think you, eh?"
Lady Marabout looked up and shook her head mournfully:
"My dear Philip, you are right. I see it—I don't dispute it; but when a thing becomes personal, you knowphilosophy becomes difficult. I have such letters from poor dear Adeliza—such letters! Of course she thinks it is all my fault, and I believe she will break entirely with me. It is so very shocking. You see all Belgravia coupled their names, and the very day that he went off to Cowes in that heartless, abominable manner, if an announcement of the alliance as arranged did not positively appear in theCourt Circular! It did indeed! I am sure Anne Hautton was at the bottom of it; it would be just like her. Perhaps poor Valencia cannot be pitied after her treatment of Cardonnel, but it is very hard onme."
Lady Marabout is right: when a thing becomes personal, philosophy becomes difficult. When your gun misses fire, and a fine cock bird whirrs up from the covert and takes wing unharmed, never to swell the number of your triumphs and the size of your game-bag, could you by any chance find it in your soul to sympathize with the bird's gratification at your mortification and its own good luck? I fancy not.
* * * * *
* * * * *
OR,
"If there be one class I dislike more than another, it is that class; and if there be one person in town I utterly detest, it is that man!" said our friend Lady Marabout, with much unction, one morning, to an audience consisting of Bijou, Bonbon, and Pandore, a cockatoo, an Angora cat, and a young lady sitting in a rocking-chair, reading the magazines of the month. The dogs barked, the cockatoo screamed, the cat purred a vehement affirmative, the human auditor looked up, and laughed:
"What is the class, Lady Marabout, may I ask?"
"Those clever, detestable, idle, good-for-nothing, fashionable, worthless men about town, who have not a penny to their fortune, and spend a thousand a year on gloves and scented tobacco—who are seen at everybody's house, and never at their own—who drive horses fit for a Duke's stud, and haven't money enough to keep a donkey on thistles—who have handsome faces and brazen consciences—who are positively leaders of ton, and yet are glad to write feuilletons before the world is up to pay their stallat the Opera—who give a guinea for a bouquet, and can't pay a shilling of their just debts,—I detest the class, my dear!"
"So it seems, Lady Marabout. I never heard you so vehement. And who is the particular scapegoat of this type of sinners?"
"Chandos Cheveley."
"Chandos Cheveley? Isn't he that magnificent man Sir Philip introduced to me at the Amandines' breakfast yesterday? Why, Lady Marabout, his figure alone might outbalance a multitude of sins!"
"He is handsome enough.DidPhilip introduce him to you, my dear? I wonder! It was very careless of him. But menareso thoughtless; they will know anybody themselves, and they think we may do the same. The men called here while we were driving this morning. I am glad we were out: he very seldom comes tomyhouse."
"But why is he so dreadful? The Amandines are tremendously exclusive, I thought."
"Oh, he goes everywhere! No party is complete without Chandos Cheveley, and I have heard that at September or Christmas he has more invitations than he could possibly accept; but he is a most objectionable man, all the same—a man every one dreads to see come near her daughters. He has extreme fascination of manner, but he has not a farthing! How he lives, dresses, drives the horses he does, is one of those miracles of London men's lives whichwecan never hope to puzzle out. Philip says he likes him, but Philip never speaks ill of anybody, except a woman now and then, who teases him; but the man is my detestation—has been for years. I was annoyed to see his card: it is the first time he has called this season. He knows I can't endure his class or him."
With which Lady Marabout wound up a very unusually lengthy and uncharitable disquisition, length and uncharitableness being both out of her line; and LadyCecil Ormsby rolled her handkerchief into a ball, threw it across the room for Bonbon, the spaniel puppy, and laughed till the cockatoo screamed with delight:
"Dear Lady Marabout, do forgive me, but it is such fun to hear you positively, for once, malicious! Who is your Horror, genealogically speaking? this terrible—what's his name?—Chandos Cheveley?"
"The younger son of a younger son of one of the Marquises of Danvers, I believe, my dear; an idle man about town, you know, with not a sou to be idle upon, who sets the fashion, but never pays his tailor. I am never malicious, I hope, but I do consider men of that stamp very objectionable."
"But what is Sir Philip but a man about town?"
"My son! Of course he is a man about town. My dear, what else should he be? But if Philip likes to lounge all his days away in a club-window, he has a perfect right; he has fortune. Chandos Cheveley is not worth a farthing, and yet yawns away his day in White's as if he were a millionnaire; the one can support hisfar niente, the other cannot. There are gradations in everything, my love, but in nothing more than among the men, of the same set and the same style, whom one sees in Pall-Mall."
"There are chestnut horses and horse-chestnuts, chevaliers and chevaliers d'industrie, rois and rois d'Yvetot, Carrutherses and Chandos Cheveleys!" laughed Lady Cecil. "I understand, Lady Marabout. Il y a femmes et femmes—men about town and men about town, I shall learn all the classes and distinctions soon. But how is one to know the sheep that may be let into the fold from the wolves in sheep's clothing, that must be kept out of it? Your Ogre is really very distinguished-looking."
"Distinguished? Oh yes, my love; but the most distinguished men are the most objectionable sometimes. Iassure you, my dear Cecil, I have seen an elder son whom sometimes I could hardly have told from his own valet, and a younger of the same family with the style of a D'Orsay. Why, did I not this very winter, when I went to stay at Rochdale, take Fitzbreguet himself, whom I had not chanced to see since he was a child, for one of the men out of livery, and bid him bring Bijou's basket out of the carriage. I did indeed—Iwho hate such mistakes more than any one! And Lionel, his second brother, has the beauty of an Apollo and theair nobleto perfection. One often sees it; it's through the doctrine of compensation, I suppose, but it's very perplexing, and causes endlessembrouillements."
"When the mammas fall in love with Lord Fitz's coronet, and the daughters with Lord Lionel's face, I suppose?" interpolated Lady Cecil.
"Exactly so, dear. As for knowing the sheep from the wolves, as you call them," went on Lady Marabout, sorting her embroidery silks, "you may very soon know more of Chandos Cheveley's class—(this Magenta braid is good for nothing; it's a beautiful color, but it fades immediately)—you meet them in the country at all fast houses, as they call them nowadays, like the Amandines'; they are constantly invited, because they are so amusing, or so dead a shot, or so good a whip, and live on their invitations, because they have nolocaleof their own. You see, all the women worth nothing admire, and all the women worth anything shun, them. They have a dozen accomplishments, and not a single reliable quality; a hundred houses open to them, and not a shooting-box of their own property or rental. You will meet this Chandos Cheveley everywhere, for instance, as though he were somebody desirable. You will see him in his club-window, as though he were born only to read the papers; in the Ride, mounted on a much better animal than Fitzbreguet, though the one pays treble the price he ought, and the other, I dare say,no price at all; at Ascot, on Amandine's or Goodwood's drag, made as much of among them all as if he were an heir-apparent to the throne; and yet, my love, that man hasn't a penny, lives Heaven knows where, and how he gets money to keep his cab and buy his gloves is, as I say, one of those mysteries of settling days, whist-tables, periodical writing, Badencoups de bonheur, and such-like fountains of such men's fortunes which we can never hope to penetrate—and very little we should benefit if we could! My dearest Cecil! if it is not ten minutes to five! We must go and drive at once."
Lady Ormsby was a great pet of Lady Marabout's; she had been so from a child; so much so, that when, the year after Valencia Valletort's discomfiture (a discomfiture so heavy and so public, that that young beauty was seized with a fit of filial devotion, attended her mamma to Nice, and figured not in Belgravia the ensuing season, and even Lady Marabout's temper had been slightly soured by it, as you perceive), another terrible charge was shifted on her shoulders by an appeal from the guardians of the late Earl of Rosediamond's daughter for her to be brought out under the Marabout wing, she had consented, and surrendered herself to be again a martyr to responsibility for the sake of Cecil and Cecil's lost mother. The young lady was a beauty; she was worse, she was an heiress; she was worse still, she was saucy, wayward, and notable for a strong will of her own—a more dangerous young thorough-bred was never brought to a gentler Rarey; and yet she was the first charge of this nature that Lady Marabout had ever accepted in the whole course of her life with no misgivings and with absolute pleasure. First, she was very fond of Cecil Ormsby; secondly, she longed to efface her miserable failure with Valencia by a brilliant success, which should light up all the gloom of her past of chaperonage; thirdly, she had a sweet and long-cherished diplomacy nestling in her heart to throw her son and Lord Rosediamond'sdaughter together, for the eventual ensnaring and fettering of Carruthers, which policy nothing could favor so well as having the weapon for that deadly purpose in her own house through April, May, and June.
Cecil Ormsby was a beauty and an heiress—spirited, sarcastic, brilliant, wilful, very proud; altogether, a more spirited young filly never needed a tight hand on the ribbons, a light but a firm seat, and a temperate though judicious use of the curb to make her endure being ridden at all, even over the most level grass countries of life. And yet, for the reasons just mentioned, Lady Marabout, who never had a tight hand upon anything, who is to be thrown in a moment by any wilful kick or determined plunge, who is utterly at the mercy of any filly that chooses to take the bit between her own teeth and bolt off, and is entirely incapable of using the curb, even to the most ill-natured and ill-trained Shetland that ever deserved to have its mouth sawed,—Lady Marabout undertook the jockeyship without fear.
"I dare say you wonder, after my grief with Valencia, that I have consented to bring another girl out, but when I heard it was poor Rosediamond's wish—his dying wish, one may almost say—that Cecil should make her début with me, whatwasI to do, my dear?" she explained, half apologetically, to Carruthers, when the question was first agitated. Perhaps, too, Lady Marabout had in her heart been slightly sickened of perfectly trained young ladies brought up on the best systems, and admitted to herself that the pets of the foreign houses maynotbe the most attractive flowers after all.
So Lady Cecil Ormsby was installed in Lowndes Square, and though she was the inheritor of her mother's wealth, which was considerable, and possessor of her own wit and beauty, which were not inconsiderable either, and therefore a prize to fortune-hunters and a lure to misogamists, as Lady Marabout knew very well how to keep thefirst off, and had her pet project of numbering her refractory son among the converted second, she rather congratulated herself than otherwise in having the pleasure and éclat of introducing her; and men voted the Marabout Yearlings Sale of that season, since it comprised Rosediamond's handsome daughter, as dangerous as a horse-dealer's auction to a young greenhorn, or a draper's "sale, without reserve, at enormous sacrifice," to a lady with a soul on bargains bent.
"How very odd! Just as we have been talking of him, there is that man again! I must bow to him, I suppose; though if therebea person I dislike——" said Lady Marabout, giving a frigid little bend of her head as her barouche, with its dashing roans, rolled from her door, and a tilbury passed them, driving slowly through the square.
Cecil Ormsby bowed to its occupant with less severity, and laughed under the sheltering shadow of her white parasol-fringe.
"The Ogre has a very pretty trap, though, Lady Marabout, and the most delicious gray horse in it! Such good action!"
"If its action is good, my love, I dare say it is more than could be said of its master's actions. He is going to call on that Mrs. Maréchale, very probably; he was always there last season."
And Lady Marabout shook her head and looked grave, which, combined with the ever-damnatory demonstrative conjunction, blackened Mrs. Maréchale's moral character as much as Lady Marabout could blacken any one's, she loving as little to soil her own fingers and her neighbors' reputations with the indelible Italian chalk of scandal as any lady I know; being given, on the contrary, when compelled to draw any little social croquis of a back-biting nature, to sketch them in as lightly as she could, take out as many lights as possible, and rub in the shadowswith a very chary and pitying hand, except, indeed, when she took the portrait of such an Ogre as Chandos Cheveley, when I can't say she was quite so merciful, specially when policy and prejudice combined to suggest that it would be best (and not unjust) to use the blackest Conté crayons obtainable.
The subject of it would not have denied the correctness of the silhouette Lady Marabout had snipped out for the edification of Lady Cecil, had he caught a glimpse of it: he had no habitation, nor was ever likely to have any, save a bachelor's suite in a back street; he had been an idle man for the last twenty years, with not a sou to be idle upon; the springs of his very precarious fortunes, his pursuits, habits, reputation, ways and means, were all much what she had described them; yet he set the fashion much oftener than Goodwood, and dukes and millionnaires would follow the style of his tie, or the shape of his hat; he moved in the most brilliant circles as Court Circulars have it, and all the best houses were open to him. At his Grace of Amandine's, staying there for the shooting, he would alter the stud, find fault with the claret, arrange a Drive for deer in the forest, and flirt with her Grace herself, as though, as Lady Marabout averred, he had been Heir-apparent or Prince Regent, who honored the Castle by his mere presence, Amandine all the while swearing by every word he spoke, thinking nothing well done without Cheveley, and submitting to be set aside in his own Castle, with the greatest gratification at the extinction.
But that Chandos Cheveley was not worth a farthing, that he was but a Bohemian on a brilliant scale, that any day he might disappear from that society where he now glittered, never to reappear, everybody knew; how he floated there as he did, kept his cab and his man, paid for his stall at the Opera, his club fees, and all the other trifles that won't wait, was an eternal puzzle to every oneignorant of how expensively one may live upon nothing if one just gets the knack, and of how far a fashionable reputation, like a cake of chocolate, will go to support life when nothing more substantial is obtainable. Lady Marabout had sketched him correctly enough, allowing for a little politic bitterness thrown in to counteract Carruthers's thoughtlessness in having introduced him to Rosediamond's daughter (that priceless treasure for whom Lady Marabout would fain have had a guard of Janissaries, if they would not have been likely to look singular and come expensive); and ladies of the Marabout class did look upon him as an Ogre, guarded their daughters from his approach at a ball as carefully, if not as demonstratively, as any duck its ducklings from the approach of a water-rat, did not ask him to their dinners, and bowed to him chillily in the Ring. Others regarded him as harmless, from his perfect pennilessness; what danger was there in the fascinations of a man whom all Belgravia knew hadn't money enough to buy dog-skin gloves, though he always wore the best Paris lavender kid? While others, the pretty married women chiefly, from her Grace of Amandine downwards to Mrs. Maréchale, of Lowndes Square, flirted with him, fearfully, and considered Chandos Cheveley what nobody ever succeeded in disproving him, the most agreeable man on town, with the finest figure, the best style, and the most perfect bow, to be seen in the Park any day between March and July. But then, as Lady Marabout remarked on a subsequent occasion, a figure, a style, and a bow are admirable and enviable things, but they're not among the cardinal virtues, and don't do to live upon; and though they're very good buoys to float one on the smooth sparkling sea of society, if there come a storm, one may go down, despite them, and become helpless prey to the sharks waiting below.
"Philip certainly admires her very much; he said theother day there was something in her, and that means a great deal from him," thought Lady Marabout, complacently, as she and Cecil Ormsby were wending their way through some crowded rooms. "Of course I shall not influence Cecil towards him; it would not be honorable to do so, since she might look for a higher title than my son's; still, if it should so fall out, nothing would give me greater pleasure, and really nothing would seem more natural with a little judicious manage——"
"May I have the honor of this valse with you?" was spoken in, though not to, Lady Marabout's ear. It was a soft, a rich, a melodious voice enough, and yet Lady Marabout would rather have heard the hiss of a Cobra Capella, for the footmenmighthave caught the serpent and carried it off from Cecil Ormsby's vicinity, and she couldn't very well tell them to rid the reception-chambers of Chandos Cheveley.
Lady Marabout vainly tried to catch Cecil's eye, and warn her of the propriety of an utter and entire repudiation of the valse in question, if there were no "engaged" producible to softly chill the hopes and repulse the advances of the aspirant; but Lady Cecil's soul was obstinately bent saltatory-wards; her chaperone's ocular telegram was lost upon her, and only caught by the last person who should have seen it, who read the message off the wires to his own amusement, but naturally was not magnanimous enough to pass it on.
"I ought to have warned her never to dance with that detestable man. If I could but have caught her eye even now!" thought Lady Marabout, restlessly. The capellawouldhave been much the more endurable of the two; the serpent couldn't have passed its arm round Rosediamond's priceless daughter and whirled her down the ball-room to the music of Coote and Timney's band, as Chandos Cheveley was now doing.
"Why didyounot ask her for that waltz, Philip?" cried the good lady, almost petulantly.
Carruthers opened his eyes wide.
"My dear mother, you know I never dance! I come to balls to oblige my hostesses and look at the women, but not to carry a seven-stone weight of tulle illusion and white satin, going at express pace, with the thermometer at 80 deg., and a dense crowd jostling one at every turn in the circle.Bien obligé!that's not my idea of pleasure; if it were the Pyrrhic dance, now, or the Tarantella, or the Bolero, under a Castilian chestnut-tree——"
"Hold your tongue! You might have danced for once, just to have kept her from Chandos Cheveley."
"From the best waltzer in London? Not so selfish. Ask Amandine's wife if women don't like to dance with that fellow!"
"I should be very sorry to mention his name to her, or any of her set," responded Lady Marabout, getting upon certain virtuous stilts of her own, which she was given to mount on rare occasion and at distant intervals, always finding them very uncomfortable and unsuitable elevations, and being as glad to cast them off as a traveller to kick off theéchasseshe has had to strap on over the sandy plains of the Landes.
"What could possess you to introduce him to Cecil, Philip? It was careless, silly, unlike you; you know how I dislike men of his—his—objectionable stamp," sighed Lady Marabout, the white and gold namesakes in her coiffure softly trembling a gentle sigh in the perfumy zephyr raised by the rotatory whirl of the waltzers, among whom she watched with a horrible fascination, as one watches a tiger being pugged out of its lair, or a deserter being led out to be shot, Chandos Cheveley, waltzing Rosediamond's priceless daughter down the ball-room.
"He is so dreadfully handsome! I wonder why it is that men and women, who have no fortune but their faces,will be so dangerously, so obstinately, so provokingly attractive as one sees them so often!" thought Lady Marabout, determining to beat an immediate retreat from the present salons, since they were infested by the presence of her Ogre, to Lady Hautton's house in Wilton Crescent.
Lady Hautton headed charitable bazaars, belonged to the Cummingite nebulæ, visited Homes and Hospitals (floating to the bedside of luckless feminine patients to read out divers edifying passages, whose effect must have been somewhat neutralized to the hearers, one would imagine, by the envy-inspiring rustle of her silks, the flash of her rings, and the chimes of her bracelets, chains, and châtelaine), looked on the "Amandine set" as lost souls, and hence "did not know" Chandos Cheveley—a fact which, though the Marabout and Hautton antagonism was patent to all Belgravia, served to endear her all at once to her foe; Lady Marabout, like a good many other people, being content to sink personal resentment, and make a truce with the infidels for the sake of enjoying a mutual antipathy—that closest of all links of union!
Lady Marabout and Lady Hautton were foes, but they were dear Helena and dear Anne, all the same; dined at each other's tables, and smiled in each other's faces. They might be private foes, but they were public friends; and Lady Marabout beat a discreet retreat to the Hautton's salons—"so many engagements" is so useful a plea!—and from the Hautton she passed on to a ball at the Duke of Doncaster's; and, as at both, if Lady Cecil Ormsby did not move "a goddess from above," she moved a brilliant, sparkling, nonchalante, dangerous beauty, with some of her sex's faults, all her sex's witcheries, and more than her sex's mischief, holding her own royally, saucily, and proudly, and Chandos Cheveley was encountered no more, but happily detained at petit souper in a certain Section of the French Embassy, Lady Marabout drove homewards, in the gray of the morning, relieved,complacent, and gratified, dozing deliciously, till she was woke up with a start.
"Lady Marabout, what a splendid waltzer your Ogre, Chandos Cheveley, is!"
Lady Marabout opened her eyes with a jerk that set her feathers trembling, her diamonds scintillating, and her bracelets ringing an astonished little carillon.
"My love, how you frightened me!"
Cecil Ormsby laughed—a gay, joyous laugh, innocent of having disturbed a doze, a lapse into human weakness of which her chaperone never permitted herself to plead guilty.
"Frightened you, did I? Why, yourbête noireis as terrible to you as C[oe]ur de Lion to the Saracen children, or Black Douglas to the Lowland! And, really, I can't see anything terrible in him; he is excessively brilliant and agreeable, has something worth hearing to say to you, and his waltzing is——!"
Lady Cecil Ormsby had not a word in her repertory—though it was an enthusiastic and comprehensive one, and embraced five languages—sufficiently commendatory to finish her sentence.
"I dare say, dear! I never denied, or heard denied, his having every accomplishment under the sun. The only pity is, he has nothing more substantial!" returned Lady Marabout, a little bit tartly forherlips, only used to the softest (and most genuine) milk of roses.
Lord Rosediamond's daughter laughed a little mournfully, and played with her fan.
"Poor man! Brilliant and beggared, fashionable and friendless, courted and cashiered—a sad destiny! Do you know, Lady Marabout, I have half a mind to champion your Ogre!"
"My love, don't talk nonsense!" said Lady Marabout, hastily, at which Lady Cecil only laughed still more softly and gayly again, and sprung down as the carriage stopped in Lowndes Square.
"Rosediamond's daughter's deucedly handsome, eh, Cheveley? I saw you waltzing with her last night," said Goodwood at Lord's the next morning, watching a match between the Household Cavalry and the Zingari Eleven.
"Yes, she is the best thing we have seen for some time," said Cheveley, glancing round to see if the Marabout liveries were on the ground.
"Don't let the Amandine or little Maréchale hear you say so, or you'll have a deuce of a row," laughed Goodwood. "She's worth a good deal, too; she's all her mother's property, and that's something, I know. The deaths in her family have kept her back two years or more, but now sheisout, I dare say Lady Tattersall will put her up high in the market."
"No doubt. Why don'tyoumake the investment—she's much more attractive than that Valletort ice statue who hooked you so nearly last year? Fortescue's out! Well done, little Jimmy! Ah! there's the Marabout carriage. I am as unwelcome to that good lady, I know, as if I were Quasimodo or Quilp, and as much to be shunned, in her estimation, as Vidocq, armed to the teeth; nevertheless, I shall go and talk to them, if only in revenge for the telegraphic warning of 'dangerous' she shot at Lady Cecil last night when I asked her to waltz. Goodwood, don't you envy me my happy immunity from traps matrimonial?"
"There is that man again—how provoking! I wish we had not come to see Philip's return match. He is positively coming up to talk to us," thought Lady Marabout, restlessly, as her Ogre lifted his hat to her. In vain did she do her best to look severe, to look frigid, to chill him with a withering "good morning," (a little word, capable, if you notice, of expressing every gradation in feeling, from the nadir of delighted intimacy to the zero of rebuking frigidity;) her coldest ice was as warm as a pine-apple ice that has been melting all day under a refreshmenttent at a horticultural fête? Herrôlewasnotchilliness, and never could be; she would have beamed benign on a headsman who had led her out to instant decapitation, and been no more able to help it than a peach to help its bloom or a claret its bouquet. She did her utmost to freeze Chandos Cheveley, but either she failed signally, or he, being blessed with the brazen conscience she had attributed to him, was steeled to all the tacit repulses of her looks, for he leant against the barouche-door, let her freeze him away as she might, and chatted to Cecil Ormsby, "positively," Lady Marabout remarked to that safest confidante, herself, "positively as if the man had been welcome at my house for the last ten years! If Cecilwouldbut second me, he couldn't do it; but shewillsmile and talk with him just as though he were Goodwood or Fitzbreguet! It is very disagreeable to be forced against one's will like this into countenancing such a very objectionable person; and yet whatcanone do?"
Which query she could by no means satisfactorily answer herself, being a regular female Nerva for clemency, utterly incapable of the severity with which that stern Catiline, Lady Hautton, would have signed the unwelcome intruder out of the way in a brace of seconds. And under Nerva's gentle rule, though Nerva was longing with all her heart to have the courage to call the lictors and say, "Away with him!" Cheveley leant against the door of the carriage unmolested, though decidedly undesired by one of its occupants, talked to by Lady Cecil, possibly because she found him as agreeable as her Grace of Amandine and Lillia Maréchale had done before her, possibly only from that rule of contrariety which is such a pet motor-power with her sex; and Lady Marabout reclined among her cushions, tucked up in her tiger-skin in precisely that state of mind in which Fuseli said to his wife, "Swear, my dear, you don't know how much good it will do you," dreading in herself the possible adventof the Hautton carriage, for that ancient enemy and rigid pietist, of whose keen tongue and eminent virtue she always stood secretly in awe, to see this worthless and utterly objectionable member of that fast, graceless, and "very incorrect" Amandine set, absolutelyen sentinelleat the door of her barouche!
Does your best friendevercome when you want him most? Doesn't your worst foealwayscome when you want him least? Of course, at that juncture, the Hautton carriage came on the ground (Hautton was one of the Zingari Club, and maternal interest brought her foe to Lord's as it had brought herself), and the Hautton eye-glass, significantly and surprisedly raised, said as distinctly to Lady Marabout, as though elfishly endowed with vocal powers, "You allowthatman acquaintance with Rosediamond's daughter!" Lady Marabout was stung to the soul by the deserved rebuke, but she didn't know how on earth to get rid of the sinner! There he leaned, calmly, nonchalantly, determinedly, as if he were absolutely welcome; and Lady Cecil talked on to him as if he were absolutely welcome too.
Lady Marabout felt branded in the eyes of all Belgravia to have Chandos Cheveley at her carriage-door, the most objectionable man of all his most objectionable class.
"It is very strange!" she thought. "I have seen that man about town the last five-and-twenty years—ever since he was a mere boy, taken up and petted by Adeline Patchouli for some piece of witty Brummelian impudence he said to her on his first introduction—and he has never sought my acquaintance before, but always seemed to be quite aware of my dislike to him and all his set. It is very grievous he should have chosen the very season I have poor dear Rosediamond's daughter with me; but it is always my fate—if a thing can happen to annoy me it always will!"
With which Lady Marabout, getting fairly distractedunder the iron hand of adverse fate, and the ruthless surveillance of the Hautton glass, invented an impromptu necessity for immediate shopping at Lewis and Allonby's, and drove off the ground at the sole moment of interest the match possessed for her—viz., when Carruthers was rattling down Hautton's stumps, and getting innings innumerable for the Household.
"Mais ce n'est que le premier pas qui coûte;" the old proverb's so true we wear it threadbare with repeating it! Lady Marabout might as well have stayed on Lord's ground, and not lacerated her feelings by leaving at the very hour of the Household Cavalry's triumphs, for any good that she did thereby. The Hautton eye-glass had lighted on Chandos Cheveley, and Chandos Cheveley's eye-glass on Rosediamond's daughter;—and Cecil Ormsby arched her eyebrows, and gave her parasol a little impatient shake as they quitted Lord's.
"Lady Marabout, I never could have believed you ill-natured; you interrupted my ball last night, and my conversation this morning! I shall scold you if you ever do so again. And now tell me (as curiosity is a weakness incidental to all women, no woman ought to refuse to relieve it in another) whyareyou so prejudiced against that very handsome, and very amusing person?"
"Prejudiced, my dear child! I am not in the least prejudiced," returned Lady Marabout. (Nobody ever admitted to a prejudice thatIever heard. It's a plant that grows in all gardens, and is sedulously matted up, watered, and strengthened; but invariably disavowed by its sturdiest cultivators.) "As for Chandos Cheveley, I merely mentioned to you what all town knows about him; and the dislike I have to his class is one of principle, not of prejudice."
Lady Cecil made amoue mutine:
"Oh, Lady Marabout! if you go to 'principle,'tout est perdu!'Principle' has been made to bear the onusof every private pique since the world began, and has had to answer for more cruelties and injustice than any word in the language. The Romans flung the Christians to the lions 'on principle,' and the Europeans slew the Mahomedans 'on principle,' and 'principle' lighted the autos-da-fé, and signed to the tormentor to give a turn more to the rack! Please don't appeal to anything so severe and hypocritical. Come, what are the Ogre's sins?"
Lady Marabout laughed, despite the subject.
"Do you think I am a compiler of such catalogues, my love? Pray do not let us talk any more about Chandos Cheveley, he is very little worth it; all I say to you is, be as cool to him as you can, without rudeness, of course. I am never at home when he calls, and were I you, I would be always engaged when he asks you to waltz; his acquaintance can in no way benefit you."
Lady Cecil gave a little haughty toss of her head, and lay back in the barouche.
"Iwill judge of that! I am not made for fetters of any kind, you know, and I like to choose my own acquaintance as well as to choose my own dresses. I cannot obey you either this evening, for he asked me to put him on my tablets for the first waltz at Lord Anisette's ball, and I consented. I had no 'engaged' ready, unless I had had a falsehood ready too, andyouwouldn't counsel that, Lady Marabout, I am very sure?"
With which straightforward and perplexing question Cecil Ormsby successfully silenced her chaperone, by planting her in that disagreeable position known as between the horns of a dilemma; and Lady Marabout, shrinking alike from the responsibility of counselling a "necessary equivocation," as society politely terms its indispensable lies, and the responsibility of allowing Cecil acquaintance with the "very worst" of the Amandine set, sighed, wondered envyingly how Anne Hautton would act in her place, and almost began to wish somebody else hadhad the onerous stewardship of that brilliant and priceless jewel, Rosediamond's daughter, now that the jewel threatened to be possessed with a will of its own:—the greatest possible flaw in a gem of pure water, which they only want to scintillate brilliantly among the bijouterie of society, and let itself be placed passively in the setting most suitable for it, that can be conceived in the eyes of lady lapidaries intrusted with its sale.
"It is very odd," thought Lady Marabout; "she seems to have taken a much greater fancy to that odious man than to Philip, or Goodwood, or Fitz, or any one of the men who admire her so much. I suppose I alwaysamto be worried in this sort of way! However, there can be no real danger; Chandos Cheveley is the merest butterfly flirt, and with all his faults none ever accused him of fortune-hunting. Still, they say he is wonderfully fascinating, and certainly he has the most beautiful voice I ever heard; and if Cecil should ever like him at all, I could never forgive myself, and whatshouldI say to General Ormsby?"
The General, Cecil's uncle and guardian, is one of the best-humored, best-tempered, and mostlaissez-fairemen in the Service, but was, for all that, a perpetual dead weight on Lady Marabout's mind just then, for was not he the person to whom, at the end of the season, she would have to render up account of the successes and the shortcomings of her chaperone's career?
"Do you think of proposing Chandos Cheveley as a suitable alliance for Cecil Ormsby, my dear Helena?" asked Lady Hautton, with that smile which was felt to be considerably worse than strychnine by her foes and victims, at a house in Grosvenor Place, that night.
"God forbid!" prayed Lady Marabout, mentally, as she joined in the Hautton laugh, and shivered under the stab of the Hautton sneer, which was an excessively sharp one. Lady Hautton being one of a rather numerous classof eminent Christians, so panoplied in the armor of righteousness that they can tread, without feeling it, on the tender feet of others.
The evening was spoiled to Lady Marabout; she felt morally and guiltily responsible for an unpardonable indiscretion:—with that man waltzing with Cecil Ormsby, her "graceful, graceless, gracious Grace" of Amandine visibly irritated with jealousy at the sight, and Anne Hautton whispering behind her fan with acidulated significance. Lady Marabout had never been more miserable in her life! She heard on all sides admiration of Rosediamond's daughter; she was gratified by seeing Goodwood, Fitzbreguet, Fulke Nugent, every eligible man in the room, suing for a place on her tablets; she had the delight of beholding Carruthers positively join the negligent beauty's train; and yet the night was a night of purgatory to Lady Marabout, for Chandos Cheveley had his first waltz, and several after it, and the Amandine set were there to gossip, and the Hautton clique to be shocked, at it.
"Soames, tell Mason, when Mr. Chandos Cheveley calls, I am not at home," said Lady Marabout at breakfast.
"Yes, my lady," said Soames, who treasured up the order, and told it to Mr. Chandos Cheveley's man at the first opportunity, though, greatly to his honor, we must admit, he didnotimitate the mild formula of fib, and tell his mistress her claret was not corked when it was so incontestably.
Cecil Ormsby lifted her head and looked across the table at her hostess, and the steady gaze of those violet eyes, which were Rosediamond's daughter's best weapons of war, so discomposed Lady Marabout, that she forgot herself sufficiently to proffer Bijou a piece of bread, an unparalleled insult, which that canine Sybarite did not forget all day long.
"Not at home, sir," said Mason, as duly directed, when Cheveley's cab pulled up, a week or two after the general order, at the door.
Cheveley smiled to himself as his gray had her head turned, and the wheel grated off the trottoir, while he lifted his hat to Cecil Ormsby, just visible between the amber curtains and above the balcony flowers of one of the windows of the drawing-room—quite visible enough for her return smile and bow to be seen in the street by Cheveley, in the room by Lady Marabout.
"Some of Lady Tattersall's generalship!" he thought, as the gray trotted out of the square. "Well! I have no business there. Cecil Ormsby is not her Grace of Amandine, nor little Maréchale, and the good lady is quite right to brand me 'dangerous' to her charge, and pronounce me 'inadmissible' to her footman. I've very little title to resent her verdict."
"My dearest Cecil, whatever possessed you to bow to that man!" cried Lady Marabout, in direst distress.
"Is it not customary to bow to one's acquaintances—I thought it was?" asked Lady Cecil, with demure mischief.
"But, my dear, from a window!—and when Mason is saying we are not at home!"
"That isn'tMason'sfib, orMason'sfault, Lady Marabout!" suggested Cecil, with wicked emphasis.
"There is no falsehood or fault at all anywhere—everybody knows well enough what 'not at home' means," returned Lady Marabout, almost pettishly.
"Oh yes," laughed the young lady, saucily. "It means 'I am at home and sitting in my drawing room, but I shall not rise to receive you, because you are not worth the trouble.' It's a polite cut direct, and a honeyed rudeness—a bitter almond wrapped up in a sugar dragée, like a good many other bonbons handed about in society."
"My dear Cecil, you have some very strange ideas;you will get called satirical if you don't take care," said Lady Marabout, nervously.
Cecil Ormsby's tone worried her, and made her feel something as she felt when she had a restive, half-broken pair of horses in her carriage, for the direction of whose next plunge or next kick nobody could answer.
"And if I be—what then?"
"My dear child, you could not anyhow get a more disadvantageous reputation! It may amuse gentlemen though it frightens halfthem; but it offends all women irremediably. You see, there are so few whom it doesn't hit somewhere," returned Lady Marabout, quite innocent of the neat satire of her own last sentence.
Cecil Ormsby laughed, and threw herself down by her chaperone's side:
"Never mind: I can bear their enmity; it is a greater compliment than their liking. The women whom women love are always quiet, colorless, inoffensive—foils. Lady Marabout, tell me, why did you give that general order to Mason?"
"I have told you before, my dear. Because I have no wish to know Mr. Chandos Cheveley," returned Lady Marabout, as stiffly as she could say anything. "It is, as I said, not from prejudice, but from prin——"
"Lady Marabout, if you use that word again, I will drive to uncle Ormsby's rooms in the Albany and stay with him for the season; I will, positively! I am sure all the gentlemen there will be delighted to have my society! Pray, whatareyour Ogre's crimes? Did you ever hear anything dishonorable, mean, ungenerous, attributed to him? Did you ever hear he broke his word, or failed to act like a gentleman, or was a defaulter at any settling day?"
Lady Marabout required some explanation of what a defaulter at a settling day might be, and, on receiving it,was compelled to confess that she neverhadheard anything of that kind imputed to Chandos Cheveley.
"Of course I have not, my dear. The man is a gentleman, everybody knows, however idle and improvident a one. If he could be accused of anything of that kind, he would not belong to such clubs, and associate with such men as he does. Besides, Philip would not know him; certainly would not think well of him, which I confess he does. But that is not at all the question."
"Ne vous en déplaise, I think it very much and very entirely the question," returned Lady Cecil, with a toss of her haughty little head. "If you can bring nothing in evidence against a man, it is not right to send him to the galleys and mark him 'Forçat.'"
"My dear Cecil, there is plenty in evidence against him," said Lady Marabout, with a mental back glance to certain stories told of the "Amandine set," "though not of that kind. A man may be perfectly unexceptionable in his conduct with his men friends, but very objectionable acquaintance for us to seek, all the same."
"Ah, I see! Lord Goodwood may bet, and flirt, and lounge his days away, and be as fast a man as he likes, and it is all right; but if Mr. Cheveley does the same, it is all wrong, because he is not worth forgiving."
"Naturally it is," returned Lady Marabout, seriously and naïvely. "But how very oddly you put things, my love; and why you should interest yourself in this man, when everything I tell you is to his disadvantage, I cannot imagine."
A remark that showed Lady Marabout a skilful tactician, insomuch as it silenced Cecil—a performance rather difficult of accomplishment.
"I am very glad I gave the order to Mason," thought that good lady. "I only wish we did not meet the man in society; but it is impossible to help that. We are all cards of one pack, and get shuffled together, whether welike it or not. I wish Philip would pay her more attention; he admires her, I can see, and he can make any woman like him in ten days when he takes the trouble; but he is so tiresome! She would be exactly suited to him; she has all he would exact—beauty, talent, good blood, and even fortune, though that he would not need. The alliance would be a great happiness to me. Well, he dines here to-night, and he gives that concert at his barracks to-morrow morning, purely to please Cecil, I am sure. I think it may be brought about with careful management."
With which pleasant reflection she went to drive in the Ring, thinking that her maternal and duenna duties would be alike well fulfilled, and her chaperone's career well finished, if by any amount of tact, intrigue, finesses, and diplomacy she could live to see Cecil Ormsby sign herself Cecil Carruthers.
"If that man were only out of town!" she thought, as Cheveley passed them in Amandine's mail-phaeton at the turn.
Lady Marabout might wish Cheveley were out of town—and wish it devoutly she did—but she wasn't very likely to have her desire gratified till the general migration should carry him off in its tide to the deck of a yacht, a lodge in the Highlands, a German Kursaal, or any one of those myriad "good houses" where nobody was so welcome as he, the best shot, the best seat, the best wit, the best billiard-player, the best whist-player, and the best authority on all fashionable topics, of any man in England. Cheveley used to aver that he liked Lady Marabout, though she detested him; nay, that he liked herforher detestation; he said it was cordial, sincere, and refreshing, therefore a treat in the world of Belgravia; still, he didn't like her so well as to leave Town in the middle of May to oblige her; and though he took her hint as it was meant, and pulled up his hansom no moreat her door, he met her and Rosediamond's daughter at dinners, balls, concerts, morning-parties innumerable. He saw them in the Ring; he was seen by them at the Opera; he came across them constantly in the gyration of London life. Night after night Lady Cecil persisted in writing his name in her tablets; evening after evening a bizarre fate worried Lady Marabout, by putting him on the left hand of her priceless charge at a dinner-party. Day after day all the harmony of a concert was marred to her ear by seeing her Ogre talking of Beethoven and Mozart, chamber music and bravura music in Cecil's: morning after morning gall was poured into her luncheon sherry, and wormwood mingled in her vol-au-vent, by being told, with frank mischief, by her desired daughter-in-law, that she "had seen Mr. Cheveley leaning on the rails, smoking," when she had taken her after-breakfast canter.
"Chandos Cheveley getting up before noon! Hemustmean something unusual!" thought her chaperone.
"Helena has set her heart on securing Cecil Ormsby for Carruthers. I hope she may succeed better than she did with poor Goodwood last season," laughed Lady Hautton, with her inimitable sneer, glancing at the young lady in question at a bazaar in Willis's Rooms, selling rosebuds for anything she liked to ask for them, and cigars tied up with blue ribbon a guinea the half-dozen, at the Marabout stall. Lady Hauttonhadjust been paying a charitable visit to St. Cecilia's Refuge, of which she was head patroness, where, having floated in with much benignity, been worshipped by a select little toady troop, administered spiritual consolation with admirable condescension, and distributed illuminated texts for the adornment of the walls and refreshment of the souls, she was naturally in a Christian frame of mind towards her neighbors. Lady Marabout caught the remark—as she was intended to do—and thought it not quite a pleasant one; but, my good sir, did you ever know those estimable people, whospend all their time fitting themselves for another world, ever take the trouble to make themselves decently agreeable in the present one? The little pleasant courtesies, affabilities, generosities, and kindnesses, that rub the edge off the flint-stones of the Via Dolorosa, are quite beneath the attention of Mary the Saint, and only get attended to by Martha the Worldly, poor butterfly thing! who is fit for nothing more serviceable and profitable!
Lady Marabouthadset her heart on Cecil Ormsby's filling that post of honor—of which no living woman was deserving in her opinion—that of "Philip's wife;" an individual who had been, for so many years, a fond ideal, a haunting anxiety, and a dreaded rival, en même temps, to her imagination. Shewasa little bit of a match-maker: she had, over and over again, arranged the most admirable and suitable alliances; alliances that would have shamed the scepticism of the world in general, as to the desirability of the holy bonds, and brought every refractory man to the steps of St. George's; alliances, that would have come off with the greatest éclat, but for one trifling hindrance and difficulty—namely, the people most necessary to the arrangements could never by any chance be brought to view them in the same light, and were certain to give her diplomacy thecroc-en-jambeat the very moment of its culminating glory and finishing finesses. She was a little bit of a match-maker—most kind-hearted women are; the tinder they play with is much better left alone, buttheydon't remember that! Like children in a forest, they think they'll light a pretty bright fire, just for fun, and never remember what a seared, dreary waste that fire may make, or what a prairie conflagration it may stretch into before it's stopped.
"Cecil Ormsby is a terrible flirt," said Lady Hautton, to another lady, glancing at the rapid sale of the rosebuds and cigars, the bunches of violets and the sprays of lilies of the valley, in which that brilliant beauty was doingsuch thriving business at such extravagant profits, while the five Ladies Hautton presided solemnly over articles of gorgeous splendor, which threatened to be left on hand, and go in a tombola, as ignominiously as a beauty after half a dozen seasons, left unwooed and unwon, goes to the pêle-mêle raffle of German Bad society, and is sold off at the finish to an unknown of the Line, or a Civil Service fellow, with five hundred a year.
"Was Cecil a flirt?" wondered Lady Marabout. Lady Marabout was fain to confess to herself that she thought she was—nay, that she hoped she was. If it wasn't flirting, that way in which she smiled on Chandos Cheveley, sold him cigarettes, laughed with him over the ices and nectarines he fetched her, and positively invested him with the cordon d'honneur of a little bouquet of Fairy roses, for which twenty men sued, and he (give Satan his due) did not even ask—if it wasn't flirting,what was it? Lady Marabout shivered at the suggestion; and though she was, on principle, excessively severe on flirting, she could be very glad of what she didn't approve, when it aided her, on occasion—like most other people—and would so far have agreed with Talleyrand, as to welcome the worst crime (of coquetry) as far less a sin than the unpardonable blunder of encouraging an Ogre!
"I can't send Cecil away from the stall, as if she were a naughty child, and I can't order the man out of Willis's Rooms," thought that unhappy and fatally-worried lady, as she presided behind her stall, an emphatic witness of the truth of the poeticism that "grief smiles and gives no sign," insomuch as she looked the fairest, sunniest, best-looking, and best-tempered Dowager that ever shrouded herself in Chantilly lace.
"I do think those ineligible, detrimental, objectionable persons ought not to be let loose on society as they are," she pondered; "let them have their clubs and their mess breakfasts, their Ascot and their Newmarket, their lansquenetparties and their handicap pigeon matches, if they like; but to have them come amongstusas they do, asked everywhere if they happen to have good blood and good style, free to waltz and flirt and sing, and show all sorts of attention to marriageable girls, while all the while they are no more available for anything serious than if they were club stewards or cabmen—creatures that live on their fashionable aroma, and can't afford to buy the very bottles of bouquets on their toilette-tables—fast men, too, who, knowing they can never marry themselves, make a practice of turning marriage into ridicule, and help to set all the rich men more dead against it than they are,—to have them come promiscuously among the very best people, with nothing to distinguish them as dangerous, or label them as 'ought to be avoided,'—it's dreadful! it's a social evil! itoughtto be remedied! They muzzle dogs in June, why can't they label Ogres in the season? I mustn't send poor little Bijou out for a walk in Kensington Gardens without a string, these men ought not to go about in society without restriction: a snap of Bijou's doesn't do half such mischief as a smile of theirs!"
And Lady Marabout chatted across the stall to his Grace of Doncaster, and entrapped him into purchases of fitting ducal prodigality, and smiled on scores of people she didn't know, in pleasantpro temporeexpediency that had, like most expediency in our day, its ultimate goal in their purses and pockets, and longed for some select gendarmerie to clear Willis's Rooms of her Cobra Capella, and kept an eye all the while on Cecil Ormsby—Cecil, selling off everything on the stall by sheer force of her bright violet eyes, receiving ten-pound notes for guinea trifles, making her Bourse rise as high as she liked, courted for a spray of mignonette as entreatingly as ever Law was courted in the Rue Quincampoix for Mississippi scrip, served by a Corps d'Elite, in whom she had actuallyenlisted Carruthers, Goodwood, Fulke Nugent, Fitzbreguet, and plenty of the most desirable and most desired men in town, yet of which—oh the obstinacy of women! she had actually made Chandos Cheveley, with those wicked little Fairy roses in his coat, positively the captain and the chief!
"It is enough to break one's heart!" thought Lady Marabout, wincing under the Hautton glance, which she saw only the plainer because shewouldn'tsee it at all, and which said with horrible distinctness, "There is that man, who can hardly keep his own cab, who floats on society like a pleasure-boat, without rudder, ballast, or anchors, of whom I have told you, in virtuous indignation and Christian charity, fifty thousand naughty stories, who visits that wicked, notorious little Maréchale, who belongs to the Amandine set, who is everything that he ought not and nothing that he ought to be, who hasn't a penny he doesn't make by a well-made betting-book or a dashed-off magazine article,—there he is flirting all day at your own stall with Rosediamond's daughter, and you haven't thesavoir faire, the strength of will, the tact, the proper feeling, to stop it!"
To all of which charges Lady Marabout humbly bent her head, metaphorically speaking, and writhed, in secret, under the glance of her ancient enemy, while she talked and laughed with the Duke of Doncaster. C. Petronius, talking epicureanisms and witicisms, while the life-blood was ebbing away at every breath, was nothing to the suffering and the fortitude of Helena, Lady Marabout, turning a smiling, sunny, tranquil countenance to the world in front of her stall, while that world could see Chandos Cheveley admitted behind it!
"I must do something to stop this!" thought Lady Marabout, with the desperation of a Charlotte Corday.
"Is Cheveley going in for the Ormsby tin?" said Amandine to Eyre Lee. "Best thing he could do, eh?But Lady Tattersall and the trustees would cut rough, I am afraid."
"What does Chandos mean with that daughter of Rosediamond's?" wondered her Grace, annoyedly. She had had him some time in her own rose chains, and when ladies have driven a lover long in that sort of harness, they could double-thong him with all the might of their little hands, if they fancy he is trying to break away.
"Is Chandos Cheveley turning fortune-hunter? I suppose he would like Lady Cecil's money to pay off his Ascot losses," said Mrs. Maréchale, with a malicious laugh. At Ascot, the day before, he had not gone near her carriage; the year before he had driven her down in her mail-phaeton: what would there be too black to say of himnow?