"I must do something to stop this!" determined Lady Marabout, driving homewards, and glancing at Cecil Ormsby, as that young lady lay back in the carriage, a little grave and dreamy after her day's campaign—signs of the times terrifically ominous to her chaperone, skilled in reading such meteorological omens. But how was the drag to be put on the wheel? That momentous question absorbed Lady Marabout through her toilette that evening, pursued her to dinner, haunted her through two soirées, kept her wide awake all night, woke up with her to her early coffee, and flavored the potted tongue and the volaille à la Richelieu she took for her breakfast. "I can't turn the man out of town, and I can't tell people to strike him off their visiting-lists, and I can't shut Cecil and myself up in this house as if it were a convent, and, as to speaking to her, it is not the slightest use. She has such a way of putting things that one can never deny their truth, or reason them away, as one can with other girls. Fond as I am of her, she's fearfully difficult to manage. Still I owe it as a sacred duty to poor Rosediamond and the General, who says he places such implicitconfidence in me, to interfere. It is my duty; it can't be helped. I must speak to Chandos Cheveley himself. I have no right to consult my own scruples when so much is at stake," valorously determined Lady Marabout, resolved to follow stern moral rules, and, when right was right, to let "le diable prendre le fruit."
To be a perfect woman of the world, I take it, ladies must weed out early in life all such little contemptible weaknesses as a dislike to wounding other people; and a perfect woman of the world, therefore, Lady Marabout was not, and never would be. Nohow could she acquire Anne Hautton's invaluable sneer—nohow could she imitate that estimable pietist's delightful way of dropping little icy-barbed sentences, under which I have known the bravest to shrink, frozen, out of her path. Lady Marabout was grieved if she broke the head off a flower needlessly, and she could not cure herself of the same lingering folly in disliking to say a thing that pained anybody; it is incidental to the De Bonc[oe]ur blood—Carruthers inherits it—and I have seen fellows spared through it, whom he could else have withered into the depths of their boots by one of his satirical mots. So she did not go to her task of speaking to Chandos Cheveley, armed at all points for the encounter, and taking pleasure in feeling the edge of her rapier, as Lady Hautton would have done. The Cobra was dangerous, and must be crushed, but Lady Marabout did not very much relish setting her heel on it; it was a glittering, terrible, much-to-be-feared, and much-to-be-abused serpent,—but it mightfeelall the same, you see.
"I dislike the man on principle, but I don't want to pain him," she thought, sighing for the Hautton sternsavoir faireand Achilles impenetrability, and goading herself on with the remembrance of duty and General Ormsby, when the opportunity she had resolved to seek presented itself accidentally at a breakfast at LadyGeorge Frangipane's toy villa at Fulham, and she found herself comparatively alone in the rose-garden with Cheveley, for once without Cecil's terrible violet eyes upon her.
"Will you allow me a few words with you, Mr. Cheveley?" she asked, in her blandest manner—the kindly hypocrite!
The blow must be dealt, but it might as well be softened with a few chloroform fumes, and not struck savagely with an iron-spiked mace.
Cheveley raised his eyes.
"With me? With the greatest pleasure!"
"He is a mere fortune-hunter. I willnotspare him, I am resolved," determined Lady Marabout, as she toyed with her parasol-handle, remarked incidentally how unequalled Lady George was in roses, especially in the tea-rose, and dealt blow No. 1. "Mr. Cheveley, I am going to speak to you very frankly. I consider frankness in all things best, myself——"
Cheveley bowed, and smiled slightly.
"I wish he would answer, it would make it so much easier; he will only look at one with those eyes of his, and certainly theyaresplendid!" thought Lady Marabout, as she went on quickly, on the same principle as the Chasseurs Indiens approach an abattis at double-quick. "When Lord Rosediamond died last year he left, as probably you are aware, his daughter in my sole care; it was a great responsibility—very great—and I feel, of course, that I shall have to answer to him for my discharge of it."
Lady Marabout didn't say whether Rosediamond was accustomed to visit her per medium, and hear her account of her stewardship nightly through a table-claw; but we must suppose that he was. Cheveley bowed again, and didn't inquire, not being spiritually interested.
"Whywon'the answer?" thought Lady Marabout."That I have not been blind to your very marked attention to my dear Cecil, I think you must be aware, Mr. Cheveley, and it is on that subject, indeed, that I——"
"Wished to speak to me? I understand!" said Cheveley as she paused, with that faint smile, half sad, half proud, that perplexed Lady Marabout. "You are about to insinuate to me gently that those attentions have been exceedingly distasteful to you, exceedingly unacceptable in me; you would remind me that Lady Cecil Ormsby is a beauty and an heiress, and that I am a fortune-hunter, whose designs are seen through and motives found out; you would hint to me that our intercourse must cease: is it not so?"
Lady Marabout, cursed with that obstinate, ill-bred, unextinguishable weakness for truth incidental and ever fatal to the De Bonc[oe]urs, couldn't say that it wasnotwhat she was going to observe to him, but it was exceedingly unpleasant, now it was put in such plain, uncomplimentary terms, to admit to the man's face that she was about to tell him he was a mercenary schemer, whose attentions only sprang from a lawless passion for thebeaux yeuxof Cecil'scassette.
She would have told him all that, and much more, with greatest dignity and effect, if he hadn't anticipated her; but to have her weapon parried before it was fairly out of its sheath unnerved her arm at the outset.
"WhatwouldAnne Hautton do? Dear me! there never was anybody perpetually placed in such wretched positions as I am!" thought Lady Marabout, as she played with her parasol, and murmured something not very clear relative to "responsibility" and "not desirable," two words as infallibly a part of Lady Marabout's stock in trade as a sneer at the "swells" is ofPunch's. How she sighed for some cold, nonchalant, bitter sentence, such as the Hautton répertoire could have supplied! how she scorned herself for her own weakness and lack of severity!But she would not have relished hurting a burglar's feelings, though she had seen him in the very act of stealing her jewel-boxes, by taxing him with the theft; and though the Ogremustbe crushed, the crushing began to give Lady Marabout neuralgic twinges. She was no more able to say the stern things she had rehearsed and resolved upon, than she was able to stab him with her parasol, or strangle him with her handkerchief.
"I guessed rightly what you were about to say to me?" said Cheveley, who seemed somehow or other to have taken all the talk into his own hands, and to have become the master of the position. "I thought so. I do not wonder at your construction; I cannot blame you for your resolution. Lady Cecil has some considerable fortune, they say; it is very natural that you should have imagined a man like myself, with no wealth save a good name, which only serves to make lack of wealth more conspicuous, incapable of seeking her society for any better, higher, more disinterested motive than that of her money; it was not charitable, perhaps, to decide unhesitatingly that it was impossible I could be drawn to her by any other attraction, that it was imperative I must be dead to everything in her that gives her a nobler and a higher charm; but it was very natural, and one learns never to hope for the miracle of a charitable judgment,evenfrom Lady Marabout!"
"My dear Mr. Cheveley, indeed you mistake!" began Lady Marabout, restlessly. That was a little bit of a story, he didn't mistake at all; but Lady Marabout, collapsing like an india-rubber ball under the prick of a sarcasm, shivered all over at his words, his voice, his slight sad smile. "The man is as dreadful as Cecil," she thought; "he puts things so horribly clearly!"
"Mistake? I do not think I do. You have thought all this, and very naturally; but now hear me for a moment. I have sought Lady Cecil's society, that is perfectlytrue; we have been thrown together in society, very often accidentally; sometimes, I admit, through my own seeking. Few men could be with her and be steeled against her. I have been with her too much; but I sought her at first carelessly, then irresistibly and unconsciously, never with the motive you attribute to me. I am not as utterly beggared as you deem me, but neither am I entirely barren of honor. Believe me, Lady Marabout, my pride alone would be amply sufficient to raise a barrier between me and Cecil stronger than any that could be opposed to me by others. Yesterday I casually overheard words from Amandine which showed me that society, like you, has put but one construction on the attention I have paid her—a construction I might have foreseen had I not been unconsciously fascinated, and forgetful, for the time, of the infallible whispers of my kind friends. Her fortune, I know, was never numbered among her attractions for me; so little, that now that Amandine's careless words have reminded me of the verdict of society, I shall neither seek her nor see her again. Scores of men marry women for their money, and their money alone, but I am not one of them; with my own precarious fortunes, only escaping ruin because I am not rich enough to tempt ruin. I would never take advantage of any interest I may have excited in her, to speak to her of a passion that the world would tell her was only another name for avarice and selfishness. I dare not trust myself with her longer, perhaps. I am no god to answer for my self-control; but you need not fear; I will never seek her love—never even tell her of mine. I shall leave town to-morrow; whatImay suffer matters not. Lady Cecil is safe from me! Whatever you may have heard of my faults, follies, or vices, none ever told you, I think, that I broke my word?"
"And when the man said that, my dear Philip, I assureyou I felt as guilty as if I had done him some horrible wrong; he stood there with his head up, looking at me with his sad proud eyes—and they are beautiful!—till, positively, I could almost have cried—I could, indeed, for though I don't like him on principle, I couldn't help pitying him," said Lady Marabout, in a subsequent relation of the scene to her son. "Wasn't it a terrible position? I was as near as possible forgetting everything due to poor Rosediamond, and saying to him that I believed Cecil liked him and would never like anybody else, but, thank Heaven! I remembered myself, and checked myself in time. If it had been anybody but Chandos Cheveley, I should really have admired him, he spoke so nobly! When he lifted his hat and left me, though Ioughtto have been glad (and Iwasglad, of course) that Cecil would be free from the society of anybody so objectionable and so dangerous, I felt wretched for him—I did indeed. Itisso hard always to be placed in such miserable positions!"
By which you will perceive that the triumphant crushing of Lady Marabout's Cobra didn't afford her the unmixed gratification she had anticipated.
"I have done what was my duty to poor Rosediamond, and what General Ormsby's confidence merited," she solaced herself that day, feeling uncomfortably and causelessly guilty, she hardly knew why, when she saw Chandos Cheveley keeping sedulously with the "Amandine set," and read in Cecil's tell-tale face wonder, perplexity, and regret thereat, till the Frangipane fête came to an end. She had appeased the manes of the late Rosediamond, who, to her imagination, always appeared sitting up aloft keeping watch over the discharge of her chaperone's duties, but she had a secret and horrible dread that she had excited the wrath of Rosediamond's daughter. She had driven her Ogre off the scene, it is true, but she could not feel that she had altogether come off thebest in the contest. Anne Hautton had congratulated her, indeed, on having "acted with decisionat last," but then she had marred it all by asking if Carruthers was likely to be engaged to Cecil? And Lady Marabout had been forced to confess he was not; Philip, when pressed by her that very morning to be a little attentive to Cecil, having shaken his head and laughed:
"She's a bewitching creature, mother, but she don't bewitchme! You know what Shakspeare says of wooing, wedding, and repentance. I've no fancy for the inseparable trio!"
Altogether, Lady Marabout was far from peace and tranquillity, though the Cobrawascrushed, as she drove away from the Frangipane breakfast, and she was little nearer them when Cecil turned her eyes upon her with a question worse to Lady Marabout's ear than the roar of a Lancaster battery.
"What have you said to him?"
"My dear Cecil! What have I said to whom?" returned Lady Marabout, with Machiavellian surprise.
"You know well enough, Lady Marabout! What have you said to him—to Mr. Cheveley?"
Cecil's impetuosity invariably knocked Lady Marabout down at one blow, as a ball knocks down the pegs at lawn billiards. She rallied after the shock, but not successfully, and tried at coldness and decision, as recommended by Hautton prescriptions.
"My dear Cecil, I have said to him what I think it my duty to say to him. Responsible as I am for you——"
"Responsible for me, Lady Marabout? Indeed you are not. I am responsible for myself!" interrupted Lady Cecil, with that haughty arch of her eyebrows and that flush on her face before which Lady Marabout was powerless. "What have you said to him? Iwillknow!"
"I said very little to him, indeed, my dear; he said it all himself."
"What did he say himself?"
"Imusttell her—she is so dreadfully persistent," thought the unhappy and badgered Peeress; and tell her she did, being a means of lessening the young lady's interest in the subject of discussion as little judicious as she could well have hit upon.
Lady Cecil listened, silent for once, shading her face with her parasol, shading the tears that gathered on her lashes and rolled down her delicate flushed cheeks, at the recital of Chandos Cheveley's words, from her chaperone's sight.
Lady Marabout gathered courage from the tranquillity with which her recital was heard.
"You see, my love, Chandos Cheveley's own honor points in the same direction with my judgment," she wound up, in conclusion. "He has acted rightly at last, I allow, and if you—if you have for the moment felt a tinge of warmer interest in him—if you have been taken by the fascination of his manner, and invested him with a young girl's romance, you will soon see with us how infinitely better it is that you should part, and how impossible it is that——"
Lady Cecil's eyes flashed such fire through their tears, that Lady Marabout stopped, collapsed and paralyzed.
"It is by such advice as that you repay his nobility, his generosity, his honor!—it is by such words as those you reward him for acting as not one man in a hundred would have acted! Hush, hush, Lady Marabout, I thought better of you!"
"Good Heavens!where will it end?" thought Lady Marabout, distractedly, as Rosediamond's wayward daughter sprang down at the door with a flush in her face, and a contemptuous anger in her eyes, that made Bijou, jumping on her, stop, stare, and whine in canine dismay.
"And I fancied she was listening passively!" thought Lady Marabout.
"Well! the man is gone to-day, that is one comfort. I am very thankful I acted as I did," reasoned that ever-worried lady in her boudoir the next morning. "I am afraid Cecil is really very fond of him, there were such black shadows under her eyes at breakfast, poor child! But it is much better as it is—much better. I should never have held up my head again if I had allowed her to make such a disadvantageous alliance. I can hardly bear to think of what would have been said, even now the danger is over!"
While Lady Marabout was thus comforting herself over her embroidery silks, Cecil Ormsby was pacing into the Park, with old Twitters the groom ten yards behind her, taking her early ride before the world was up—it was only eleven o'clock; Cecil had been used to early rising, and would never leave it off, having discovered some recipe that made her independent of ordinary mortals' quantum of sleep.
"Surely he will be here this morning to see me for the last time," thought that young lady, as she paced up the New Ride under the Kensington Gardens trees, with her heart beating quickly under the gold aiglettes of her riding-jacket.
"I must see her once more, and then——" thought Chandos Cheveley, as he leaned against the rails, smoking, as he had done scores of mornings before. His man had packed his things; his hansom was waiting at the gates to take him to the station, and his portmanteau was lettered "Ischl." He had only come to take one last look of the face that haunted him as no other had ever succeeded in doing. The ring of a horse's hoof fell on his ear. There she came, on her roan hack, with the sun glancing off her chestnut hair. He looked up to bow to her as she passed on, for the Ride had never been a rendezvous for more than a bow (Cecil's insurrectionary tactics had always been carried on before Lady Marabout'sface), but the roan was pulled up by him that morning for the very first time, and Cecil's eyes fell on him through their lashes.
"Mr. Cheveley—is it true you are going out of town?"
"Quite true."
If her voice quivered as she asked the question, he barely kept his own from doing the same as he answered it.
"Will you be gone long?"
"Till next season, at earliest."
His promise to Lady Marabout was hard to keep! He would not have trusted his strength if he had known she would have done more than canter on with her usual bow and smile.
Cecil was silent. The groom waited like a statue his ten yards behind them. She played with her reins nervously, the color coming and going painfully in her face.
"Lady Marabout told me of—of some conversation you had with her yesterday?"
Low as the words were, Cheveley heard them, and his hand, as it lay on the rails, shook like a girl's.
Cecil was silent again; she looked at him, her eyes full of unshed tears, as the color burned in her face, and she drooped her head almost to a level with her hands as they played with the reins.
"She told me—you——"
She stopped again. Cecil was new to making proposals, though not to rejecting them. Cheveley set his teeth to keep in the words that rushed to his lips, and Cecil saw the struggle as she bent her head lower and lower to the saddle, and twisted the reins into a Gordian knot.
"Do you—must we—why should——"
Fragmentary monosyllables enough, but sufficient to fell his strength.
"For God's sake do not tempt me!" he muttered. "You little know——"
"I know all!" she whispered softly.
"You cannot! My worthless life!—my honor! I could not take such a sacrifice, I would not!——"
"But—if my peace——"
She could not end her phrase, yet it said enough;—his hand closed on hers.
"Your peace! Good God! inmyhands! I stay; then—let the world say what it likes!"
"Drive back; I have changed my mind about going abroad to-day," said Cheveley, as he got into his hansom at Albert Gate.
"How soon she has got over it! Girls do," thought Lady Marabout, as Cecil Ormsby came in from her ride with the brightest bloom on her cheeks a June breeze ever fanned there. She laid her hat on the table, flung her gauntlets at Bijou, and threw herself on her knees by Lady Marabout, a saucy smile on her face, though her lashes were wet.
"Dear Lady Marabout, I can forgive you now, but you will never forgive me!"
Lady Marabout turned white as her point-lace cap, gave a little gasp of paralyzed terror, and pushed back her chair as though a shell had exploded on the hearth-rug.
"Cecil! Good Heaven!—you don't mean——"
"Yes I do," said Cecil, with a fresh access of color, and a low, soft laugh.
Lady Marabout gasped again for breath:
"General Ormsby!" was all she could ejaculate.
"General Ormsby? What of him? Did you ever know uncle Johnnie refuse to pleaseme? And if my money be to interfere with my happiness, and not promote it, as I conceive it its duty and purpose to do, why, I am of age in July, you know, and I shall make a deed of gift of it all to the Soldiers' Home or the Wellington College, and there is only one person who will care for methen."
Lady Cecil was quite capable of carrying her threat into execution, and Lady Cecil had her own way accordingly, as she had had it from her babyhood.
"I shall never hold up my head again! And what a horrible triumph for Anne Hautton! I am always the victim—always!" said Lady Marabout, that day two months, when the last guest at Cecil Ormsby's wedding déjeûner had rolled away from the house. "A girl who might have married anybody, Philip; she refused twenty offers this season—she did, indeed! It is heart-breaking, say what you like; you needn't laugh, itis. Why did I offer them Fernditton for this month, you say, if I didn't countenance the alliance? Nonsense! that is nothing to the purpose. Of course, I seemed to countenance it to a degree, for Cecil's sake, and I admire Chandos Cheveley, I confess (at least I should do, if I didn't dislike his class on principle); but, say what you like, Philip, it is the most terrible thing that could have happened forme. Those menoughtto be labelled, or muzzled, or done something with, and not be let loose on society as they are. He has a noble nature, you say. I don't say anything against his nature! She worships him? Well, I know she does. What is that to the point? He will make her happy? I am sure he will. He has the gentlest way with her possible. But how does that consoleme? Think whatyoufeel when an outsider, as you call it, beats all the favorites, upsets all your betting-books, and carries off the Doncaster Cup, and then realize, if you've any humanity in you, whatwefeel under such a trial as this is to me! Only to think what Anne Hautton will always say!"
Lady Marabout is not the only person to whom the first thought, the most dreaded ghost, the ghastliest skeleton, the direst aggravation, the sharpest dagger-thrust,under all troubles, is the remembrance of that one omnipotent Ogre—"Qu'en dira-t-on?"
"Laugh at her, mother," counselled Carruthers; and,amis lecteurs, I pass on his advice to you as the best and sole bowstring for strangling the ogre in question, which is the grimmest we have in all Bogeydom.
* * * * *
* * * * *
OR,
"My dear Philip, the most unfortunate thing has happened," said Lady Marabout, one morning; "really the greatest contretemps that could have occurred. I suppose I neveramto be quiet!"
"What's the rownow, madre carissima?" asked her son.
"It is no row, but it is an annoyance. You have heard me speak of my poor dear friend Mrs. Montolieu; you know she married unhappily, poor thing, to a dreadful creature, something in a West India regiment—nobody at all. It is very odd, and it is very wrong, and there must be a great mistake somewhere, but certainly most marriagesareunhappy."
"And yet you are always recommending the institution! What an extraordinary obstinacy and opticism, my dear mother! I suppose you do it on the same principle as nurses recommend children nasty medicines, or as old Levett used to tender me dry biscuitsans confiture: ''Tisn't so nice as marmalade, I know, Master Philip, but then, dear, it'ssowholesome!'"
"Hold your tongue, Philip," cried Lady Marabout; "I don't mean it in that sense at all, and you know I don't. If poor Lilla Montolieu is unhappy, I am sure it is all her abominable odious husband's fault; she is the sweetest creature possible. But she has a daughter, and concerning that daughter she wrote to me about a month ago, and—I never was more vexed in my life—she wants me to bring her out this season."
"A victim again! My poor dear mother, you certainly deserve a Belgravian testimonial; you shall have a statue set up in Lowndes Square commemorative of the heroic endurance of a chaperone's existence, subscribed for gratefully by the girls you married well, and penitentially by the girls you couldn't marry at all."
Lady Marabout laughed a little, but sighed again:
"'It is fun to you, but it is death to me'——"
"As the women say when we flirt with them," interpolated Carruthers.
"You see, poor dear Lilla didn't know what to do. There she is, in that miserable island with the unpronounceable name that the man is governor of; shut out of all society, with nobody to marry this girl to if she had her there, except their secretary, or a West Indian planter. Of course, no mother would ruin her daughter's prospects, and take her into such an out-of-the-world corner. She knew no one so well as myself, and so to me she applied. She is the sweetest creature! I would do anything to oblige or please her, but I can't help being very sorry she has pounced upon me. And I don't the least know what this girl is like, not even whether she is presentable. I dare say she was petted and spoiled in that lazy, luxurious, tropical life when she was little, and she has been brought up the last few years in a convent in France, the very last educationIshould choose for a girl. Fancy, if I should find her an ignorant, unformed hoyden, or a lethargic, overgrown child, or an artificialFrench girl, who goes to confession every day, and carries on twenty undiscoverable love affairs—fancy, if she should be ugly, or awkward, or brusque, or gauche, as ten to one she will be—fancy, if I find her utterly unpresentable!—what in the world shall I do?"
"Decline her," suggested Carruthers. "I wouldn't have a horse put in my tilbury that I'd never seen, and risk driving a spavined, wall-eyed, underbred brute through the Park; and I suppose the ignominy of the début would be to you much what the ignominy of such a turn-out would be to me."
"Decline her? I can't, my dear Philip! I agreed to have her a month ago. I have never seen you to tell you till now, you know; you've been so sworn to Newmarket all through the Spring Meetings. Decline her? she comes to-night!"
"Comes to-night?" laughed Carruthers. "All is lost, then. We shall see the Countess of Marabout moving through London society with a West Indian, who has a skin like Othello; has as much idea of manners as a housemaid that suddenly turns out an heiress, and is invited by people to whom she yesterday carried up their hot water; reflects indelible disgrace on her chaperone by gaucheries unparalleled; throws glass or silver missiles at Soames's head when he doesn't wait upon her at luncheon to her liking, as she has been accustomed to do at the negroes——"
"Philip, pray don't!" cried Lady Marabout, piteously.
"Or, we shall welcome under the Marabout wing a young lady fresh from convent walls and pensionnaire flirtations, who astonishes a dinner-party by only taking the first course, on the score of jours maigres and conscientious scruples; who is visited by révérends pères from Farm Street, and fills your drawing-room with High Church curates, whom she tries to draw over from their 'mother's' to their 'sister's' open arms; who goes everyday to early morning mass instead of taking an early morning canter, and who, when invited to sing at a soirée musicale, begins 'Sancta Maria adorata!'"
"Philip,don't!" cried Lady Marabout. "Bark at him, Bijou, the heartless man! It is as likely as not little Montolieu may realize one of your horrible sketches. Ah, Philip, you don't know what the worries of a chaperone are!"
"Thank Heaven, no!" laughed Carruthers.
"It is easy to make a joke of it, and very tempting, I dare say—one's woes alwaysareamusing to other people, they don't feel the smart themselves, and only laugh at the grimace it forces from one—but I can tell you, Philip, it is anythingbuta pleasant prospect to have to go about in society with a girl one may be ashamed of!—I don't know anything more trying; I would as soon wear paste diamonds as introduce a girl that is not perfectly good style."
"But why not have thought of all this in time?"
Lady Marabout sank back in her chair, and curled Bijou's ears, with a sigh.
"My dear Philip, if everybody always thought of things in time, would there be any follies committed at all? It's precisely because repentance comes too late, that repentance is such a horrible wasp, with such a merciless sting. Besides,couldI refuse poor Lilla Montolieu, unhappy as she is with that bear of a man?"
"I never felt more anxious in my life," thought Lady Marabout, as she sat before the fire in her drawing-room—it was a chilly April day—stirring the cream into her pre-prandial cup of tea, resting one of her small satin-slippered feet on Bijou's back, while the firelight sparkled on the Dresden figures, the statuettes, the fifty thousand costly trifles, in which the Marabout rooms equalled any in Belgravia. "I never felt more anxious—not on any of Philip's dreadful yachting expeditions, nor even when hewent on thatperilous exploring tour into Arabia Deserta, I do think. Ifsheshouldbe unpresentable—and then poor dear Lilla's was not much of a match, and the girl will not have a sou, she tells me frankly; I can hardly hope to do anything for her. There is one thing, she will not be a responsibility like Valencia or Cecil, and what would have been a bad match forthemwill be a good one for her. She must accept the first offer made her, if she have any at all, which will be very doubtful; few Benedicts bow to Beatrices nowadays, unless Beatrice is a good 'investment,' as they call it. She will soon be here. That is the carriage now stopped, I do think. How anxious I feel! Really it can't be worse for a Turkish bridegroom never to see his wife's face till after the ceremony than it is for one not to have seen a girl till one has to introduce her. If she shouldn't be good style!"
And Lady Marabout's heart palpitated, possibly prophetically, as she set down her little Sèvres cup and rose out of her arm-chair, with Bijou shaking his silver collar and bells, to welcome the new inmate of Lowndes Square, with her sunny smile and her kindly voice, and her soft beaming eyes, which, as I have often stated, would have made Lady Marabout look amiable at an Abruzzi bandit who had demanded her purse, or an executioner who had led her out to capital punishment, and now made her radiate, warm and bright, on a guest whose advent she dreaded. Hypocrisy, you say. Not a bit of it! Hypocrisy may be eminently courteous, but take my word for it, it's nevercordial! There are natures who throw such golden rays around them naturally, as there are others who think brusquerie and acidity cardinal virtues, and deal them out as points of conscience; are there not sunbeams that shine kindly alike on fragrant violet tufts and barren brambles, velvet lawns and muddy trottoirs? are there not hail-clouds that send jagged points of ice on all the world pêle-mêle, as mercilessly on the broken rose as on the granite boulder?
"Sheisgood style, thank Heaven!" thought Lady Marabout, as she went forward, with her white soft hands, their jewels flashing in the light, outstretched in welcome. "My dear child, how much you are like your mother! You must let me be fond of you for her sake, first, and then—for your own!"
The conventional thought did not make the cordial utterance insincere. The two ran in couples—we often drive such pairs, every one of us—and if they entail insincerity,Veritas, vale!
"Madre mia, I called to inquire if you have survived the anxiety of last night, and to know whatjeune sauvageor feirreligieuseyou may have had sent you for the galvanizing of Belgravia?" said Carruthers, paying his accustomed visit in his mother's boudoir, and throwing macaroons at Bijou's nose.
"My dear Philip, I hardly know; she puzzles me. She's what, if she were a man, I should classify as a detrimental."
"Is she awkward?"
"Not in the least. Perfect manners, wherever she learned them."
"Brusque?"
"Soft as a gazelle. Very like her mother."
"Brown?"
"Fair as that statuette, with a beautiful bloom; lovely gold hair, too, and hazel eyes."
"What are the shortcomings, then?"
"There are none; and it's that that puzzles me. She's been six years in that convent, and yet, I do assure you, her style is perfect. She's hardly eighteen, but she's the air of the best society. She is—a—well,almostnobody, as people rank now, you know, for poor dear Lilla's marriage was not what she should have made, but the girl might be a royal duke's daughter for manner."
"A premature artificialfemme du monde? Bah! nothing more odious," said Carruthers, poising a macaroon on Pandore'snose. "Make ready!—present!—fire! There's a good dog!"
"No, nothing of that sort: very natural, frank, vivacious. Nothing artificial about her; very charming indeed! But she might be a young Countess, the queen of amonderather than a young girl just out of a French convent; and, you know, my dear Philip, that sort of wit and nonchalance may be admirable for Cecil Cheveley, assured of her position, but they're dangerous to a girl like this Flora Montolieu: they will make people remark her and ask who she is, and try to pull her to pieces, if they don't find her somebody theydarenot hit. I would much rather she were of the general pattern, pleasing, but nothing remarkable, well-bred, but nothing to envy, thoroughly educated, but monosyllabic in society; such a girl as that passes among all the rest, suits mediocre men (and the majority of menaremediocre, you know, my dear Philip), and pleases women because she is a nice girl, and no rival; but this little Montolieu——"
And Lady Marabout sighed with a prescience of coming troubles, while Carruthers laughed and rose.
"Will worry your life out! I must go, for I have to sit in court-martial at two (for a mere trifle, a deuced bore to us, butle service oblige!), so I shall escape introduction to your little Montolieu to-day. Whywillyou fill your house with girls, my dear mother?—it is fifty times more agreeable when you are reigning alone. Henceforth, I can't come in to lunch with you without going through the formula of a mild flirtation—women think you so ill-natured if you don't flirt a little with them, that amiable men like myself haven't strength of mind to refuse. You should keepyourhouse an open sanctuary for me, when you know I've no other in London except when I retreat into White's and the U. S.!"
"She puzzles me!" pondered Lady Marabout, as Despréaux disrobed her that night. "I alwaysamto bepuzzled, I think! I nevercanhave one of those quiet, mediocre, well-mannered, remarkable-for-nothing girls, who have no idiosyncrasies and give nobody any trouble; one marries them safely to some second-rate man; nobody admires them, and nobody dislikes them; they're to society what neutral tint is among body-colors, or rather what grays are among dresses, inoffensive, unimpeachable, always look ladylike, but never look brilliant; colorless dresses are very useful, and so are characterless girls; and I dare say the draper would tell us the grays in the long run are the easiest to sell, as the girls are to marry; they please the commonplace taste of the generality, and do for every-day wear! Flora Montolieu puzzles me; she is very charming, very striking, very lovable, but she puzzles me! I have a presentiment that that child will give me a world of anxiety, an infinitude of trouble!"
And Lady Marabout laid her head on her pillow, not the happier that Flora Montolieu was lying asleep in the room next her, dreaming of the wild-vine shadows and the night-blooming flowers of her native tropics, under the rose-curtains of her new home in Lowndes Square, already a burden on the soul and a responsibility on the mind of that home's most genial and generous mistress.
"If she were a man, I should certainly call her a detrimental," said Lady Marabout, after a more deliberate study of her charge. "You know, my dear Philip, the sort of man one call detrimental; attractive enough to do a great deal of damage, and ineligible enough to make the damage very unacceptable: handsome and winning, but a younger son, or a something nobody wants; a delightful flirtation, but a terrible alliance; you know what I mean! Well, that is just what this little Montolieu is in our sex; I am quite sure it is what she will be considered; and if it be bad for a man, it is very much worse for a woman! Everybody will admire her, and nobody will marry her; I have a presentiment of it!"
With which prophetical mélange of the glorious and the inglorious for her charge's coming career, Lady Marabout sighed, and gave a little shiver, such as
Sous des maux ignorés nous fait gémir d'avance,
as Delphine Gay well phrased it. And she floated out of her boudoir to the dining-room for luncheon, at which unformal and pleasant meal Carruthers chanced to stay, criticise a new dry sherry, and take a look at this unsalable young filly of the Marabout Yearling Sales.
"I don't know about her being detrimental, mother, nor about her being little; she in more than middle height," laughed he; "but I vow she is the prettiest thing you've had in your list for some time. You've had much greater beauties, you say? Well, perhaps so; but I bet you any money she will make a sensation."
"I'm sure she will," reiterated Lady Marabout, despairingly. "I have no doubt she will have a brilliant season; there is something very piquante, taking, and uncommon about her; but who will marry her at the end of it?"
Carruthers shouted with laughter.
"Heaven forbid that I should attempt to prophesy! I would undertake as readily to say who'll be the owner of the winner of the Oaks ten years hence! I can tell you whowon't——"
"Yourself; because you'll never marry anybody at all," cried Lady Marabout. "Well! I must say I should not wish you to renounce your misogamistic notions here. The Montolieus are not at all whatyoushould look for; and a child like Flora would be excessively ill suited to you. If I could see you married, as I should desire, to some woman of weight and dignity, five or six-and-twenty, fit for you in every way——"
"De grace, de grace!My dear mother, the mere sketch will kill me, if you insist on finishing it! Be reasonable!Can anything be more comfortable, more tranquil, than I am now? I swing through life in a rocking-chair; if I'm a trifle bored now and then, it's my heaviest trial. I float as pleasantly on the waves of London life, in my way, as the lotus-eaters of poetry on the Ganges in theirs; andyou'dhave the barbarity to introduce into my complacent existence the sting of matrimony, the phosphorus of Hymen's torch, the symbolical serpent of a wedding-ring?—for shame!"
Lady Marabout laughed despite herself, and the solemnity, inhereyes, of the subject.
"Ishouldlike to see you happily married, for all that, though I quite despair of it now; but perhaps you are right."
"Of course I am right! Adam was tranquil and unworried till fate sent him a wife, and he was typical of the destinies of his descendants. Those who are wise, take warning; those who are not, neglect it and repent. Lady Hauttonet Cieare very fond of twisting scriptural obscurities into 'types.'There'sa type plain as day, and salutary to mankind, if detrimental to women!"
"Philip, you are abominable! don't be so wicked!" cried Lady Marabout, enjoying it all the more because she was a little shocked at it, as your best women will on occasion; human nature is human nature everywhere, and the female heart gives pleasurable little pulses at the sight of forbidden fruits now, as in the days of Eve.
"Who's that Miss Montolieu with your mother this year, Phil?" dozens of men asked Carruthers, that season, across the mess-table, in the smoking-room of the Guards, in the Ride or the Ring, in the doorways of ball-rooms, or anywhere where such-like questions are asked and new pretty women discussed.
"What is it in her that takes so astonishingly?" wondered Lady Marabout, who is, like most women, orthodox on all points, loving things by rule, worrying if they goout of the customary routine, and was, therefore, quite incapable of reconciling herself to so revolutionary a fact as a young lady being admired who was not a beauty, and sought while she was detrimental in every way. It was "out of the general rule," and your orthodox people hate anything "out of the general run," as they hate their prosperous friends: the force of hatred can no further go! Flora Montolieu's crime in Belgravia was much akin to the Bonapartes' crimes to the Bourbons. Thrones must be filled legitimately, if not worthily, in the eyes of the orthodox people, and this Petit Caporal of Lady Marabout's had no business to reign where the Hereditary Princesses and all the other noble lines failed to sway the sceptre. Lady Marabout, belonging to the noble lines herself, agreed in her heart with them, and felt a little bit guilty to have introduced this democratic and unwelcome element in society.
Flora Montolieu "took," as people say of bubble companies, meaning that they will pleasantly ruin a million or two: or of new fashions, meaning that they will become general with the many and,sequitur, unwearable with the few. She had the brilliance and grace of one of her own tropical flowers, with something piquante and attractive about her that one had to leave nameless, but that was all the more charming for that very fact perhaps; full of life and animation, but soft as a gazelle, as her chaperone averred; not characterless, as Lady Marabout fondly desired (on the same principle, I suppose, as a timid whip likes a horse as spiritless as a riding-school hack), but gifted with plenty of very marked character, so much, indeed, that it rather puzzled hercamériste.
"Girls shouldn't have marked character; they should be clay that one can mould, not a self-chiselled statuette, that will only go into its own niche, and won't go into any other. This little Montolieu would make just such a woman as Vittoria Colonna or Madame de Sablé, butone doesn't wantthosequalities in a girl, who is but a single little ear in the wheat-sheaf of society, and whom one wants to marry off, but can't expect to marry well. Her poor mother, of course, will look to me to do something advantageous for her, and I verily believe she is that sort of girl that will let me do nothing," thought Lady Marabout, already beginning to worry, as she talked to Lady George Frangipane at a breakfast in Palace Gardens, and watched Flora Montolieu, with Carruthers on her left and Goodwood on her right, amusing them both, to all semblance, and holding her own to the Lady Hautton's despite, who heldtheirown so excessively chillily and loftily that no ordinary mortals cared to approach them, but, beholding them, thought involuntarily of the stately icebergs off the Spitzbergen coast, only that the icebergscouldmelt or explode when their time came, and the time was never known when the Hautton surface could be moved to anger or melt to any sunshine whatever. At least, whether their maids or their mother ever beheld the first of the phenomena, far be it from me to say, but the world never saw either.
"Well, Miss Montolieu, how do you like our life here?" Carruthers was asking. "Which is preferable—Belgravia or St. Denis?"
"Oh, Belgravia, decidedly," laughed Lady Marabout's charge. "I think your life charming. All change, excitement, gayety, who would not like it?"
"Nobody—that is not fresh to it?"
"Fresh to it? Ah! are you one of the class who find no beauty in anything unless it is new? If so, do not charge the blame on to the thing, as your tone implies; take it rather to yourself and your own fickleness."
"Perhaps I do," smiled Carruthers. "But whether one's self or 'the thing' is to blame, the result's much the same—satiety! Wait till you have had two or three seasons, and then tell me if you find this mill-wheel routine,these circus gyrations, so delightful! We are the performing stud, who go round and round in the hippodrome, day after day for show, till we are sick of the whole programme, knowing our white stars are but a daub of paint, and our gay spangles only tinfoil. You are a little pony just joined to the troupe, and just pleased with the glitter of the arena. Wait till you've had a few years of it before you say whether going through the same hoops and passing over the same sawdust is so very amusing."
"If I do not, I shall desert the troupe, and form a circus of my own less mechanical and more enjoyable."
"Il faut souffrir pour être belle, il faut souffrir encore plus pour être à la mode!" said Goodwood, on her right, while Lady Egidia Hautton thought, "How bold that little Montolieu is!" and her sister, Lady Feodorowna, wondered what her cousin Goodwoodcouldsee there.
"I do not see the necessity," interrupted Flora, "and I certainly would never bow to the 'il faut.' I would make fashion follow me; I would not follow fashion." ("That child talks as though she were the Duchess of Amandine;" thought Lady Marabout, catching fragmentary portions across the table, the Marabout oral and oracular organs being always conveniently multiplied when she was armed cap à pie as a chaperone.) "Sir Philip, you talk as if you belonged to the 'nothing-is-new, and nothing-is-true, and it-don't-signify' class. I should have thought you were above the nil admirari affectation."
"He admires, as we all do, when we find something that compels our homage," said Goodwood, with an emphasis that would have made the hearts of any of the Hereditary Princesses palpitate with gratification, but at which the ungrateful Petit Caporal only glanced at him a little surprisedly with her large hazel eyes, as though she by no means saw the point of the speech.
Carruthers laughed:
"Nil admirari? Oh no. I enjoy life, but then it is thanks to the clubs, my yacht, my cigar-case, my stud, a thousand things,—not thanks at all to Belgravia."
"Complimentary to the Belgraviennes!" cried Flora, with a shrug of her shoulders. "They have not known how to amuse you, then?"
"Ladies neverdoamuse us!" sighed Carruthers. "Tant pis pour nous!"
"Are you going to Lady Patchouli's this evening?" asked Goodwood.
"I believe we are. I think Lady Marabout said so."
"Then I shall exert myself, and go too. It will be a terrible bore—balls always are. But to waltz withyouI will try to encounter it!"
Flora Montolieu arched her eyebrows, and gave him a little disdainful glance.
"Lord Goodwood, do not be so sure that I shall waltz at all with you. Ifyoutake vanity for wit,Icannot accept discourtesy as compliment!"
"Well hit, little lady!" thought Carruthers, with a mental bravissima.
"What a speech!" thought Lady Marabout, across the table, as shocked as though a footman had dropped a cascade of iced hock over her.
"You got it for once, Goodwood," laughed Carruthers, as they drove away in his tilbury. "You never had such a sharp brush as that."
"By Jove, no! Positively it was quite a new sensation—refreshing, indeed! One grows so tired of the women who agree with one eternally. She's charming, on my word. Whoisshe, Phil? In an heraldic sense, I mean."
"My dear child, what could possess you to answer Lord Goodwood like that?" cried Lady Marabout, as her barouche rolled down Palace Gardens.
"Possess me? The Demon of Mischief, I suppose."
"But, my love, it was a wonderful compliment from him!"
"Was it? I do not see any compliment in those vain, impertinent, Brummelian amour-propreisms. I must coin the word, there is no good one to express it."
"But, my dear Flora, you know he is the Marquis of Goodwood, the Duke of Doncaster's son! It is not as if he were a boy in the Lancers, or an unfledgedpetit maîtrefrom the Foreign Office——"
"Were he her Majesty's son, he should not gratify his vanity at my expense! If he expected me to be flattered by his condescension, he mistook me very much. He has been allowed to adopt that tone, I suppose; but from a man to a woman a chivalrous courtesy is due, though the man be an emperor."
"Perhaps so—of course; but thatistheir tone nowadays, my love, and you cannot alter it. I always say the Regency-men inaugurated it, and their sons and grandsons out-Herod Herod. But to turn a tide, or be a wit with impunity, a woman wants to occupy a prominent and unassailable position. Were you the Duchess of Amandine, you might say that sort of thing, but a young girl just outmust not—indeed she must not! The Hauttons heard you, and the Hauttons are very merciless people; perfectly bred themselves, and pitiless on the least infringement of the convenances. Besides, ten to one you may have gained Goodwood's ill-will; and he is a man whose word has immense weight, I assure you."
"I do not see anything remarkable in him to give him weight," said the literal and unimpressible little Montolieu. "He is a commonplace person to my taste, neither so brilliant nor so handsome by a great deal as many gentlemen I see—as Sir Philip, for instance, Lady Marabout?"
"An my son? No, my love, he is not; very few men have Philip's talents and person," said Lady Marabout, consciously mollified and propitiated, but going on, nevertheless, with a Spartan impartiality highly laudable"Goodwood's rank, however, is much higher than Philip's (at least it stands so, though really the Carruthers are by far the older, dating as far back as Ethelbert II., while the Doncaster family are literally unknown till the fourteenth century, when Gervaise d'Ascotte received the acolade before Ascalon from Godfrey de Bouillon); Goodwoodhasgreat weight, my dear, in the best circles. A compliment from him is a great compliment to any woman, and the sort of answer you gave him——"
"Must have been a great treat to him, dear Lady Marabout, if every one is in the habit of kow-towing before him. Princes, you know, are never so happy as when they can have a little bit of nature; and my speech must have been as refreshing to Lord Goodwood as the breath of his Bearnese breezes and the freedom of his Pyrenean forests were to Henri Quatre after the court etiquette and the formal ceremonial of Paris."
"I don't know about its being a treat to him, my dear; it was more likely to be a shower-bath. And your illustration isn't to the point. The Bearnese breezes were Henri Quatre's native air, and might be pleasant to him; but the figurative ones are not Goodwood's, and I am sure cannot please him."
"But, Lady Marabout, I do not want to please him!" persisted the young lady, perversely. "I don't care in the least what he thinks, or what he says of me!"
"Dear me, how oddly things go!" thought Lady Marabout. "There was Valencia, one of the proudest girls in England, his equal in every way, an acknowledged beauty, who would have said the dust on the trottoir was diamonds, and worn turquoises on azureline, or emeralds on rose, I verily believe, if such opticisms and gaucheries had been Goodwood's taste; and here is this child—for whom the utmost one can do will be to secure a younger son out of the Civil Service, or a country member—cannot be made to see that he is of an atom more importancethan Soames or Mason, and treats him with downright nonchalant indifference. What odd anomalies one sees in everything!"
"Whoisthat young lady with you this season?" Lady Hautton asked, smiling that acidulated smile with which that amiable saint always puts long questions to you of which she knows the answer would bepeine forte et dure. "Not the daughter of that horrid John Montolieu, who did all sorts of dreadful things, and was put into a West India regiment? Indeed! that man? Dear me! Married the sister of your incumbent at Fernditton? Ah, really!—very singular! But how do you come to have brought out the daughter?"
At all of which remarks Lady Marabout winced, and felt painfully guilty of a gross democratic dereliction from legitimate and beaten paths, conscious of having sinned heavily in the eyes of the world and Lady Hautton, by bringing within the sacred precincts of Belgravia the daughter of amauvais sujetin a West India corps and a sister of a perpetual curate. The world was a terrible dragon to Lady Marabout; to her imagination it always appeared an incarnated and omniscient bugbear, Argus-eyed, and with all its hundred eyes relentlessly fixed on her, spying out each item of her shortcomings, every little flaw in the Marabout diamonds, any spur-made tear in her Honiton flounces, any crease in her train at a Drawing-room, any lèse-majesté against the royal rule of conventionalities, any glissade on the polished oak floor of society, though like a good many other people she often worried herself needlessly; the flaws, tears, creases, high treasons, and false glissades being fifty to one too infinitesimal or too unimportant to society for one of the hundred eyes (vigilant and unwinking though I grant they are) to take note of them. The world was a terrible bugbear to Lady Marabout, and its special impersonation was Anne Hautton. She disliked Anne Hautton; shedidn't esteem her; she knew her to be a narrow, censorious, prejudiced, and strongly malicious lady; but she was the personification of the World to Lady Marabout, and had weight and terror in consequence. Lady Marabout is not the first person who has burnt incense and bowed in fear before a little miserable clay image she cordially despised, for no better reason—for the self-same reason, indeed.
"She evidently thinks I ought not to have brought Flora out; and perhaps I shouldn't; though, poor little thing, it seems very hard she may not enjoy society—fitted for society, too, as she is—just because her father is in a West India regiment, and poor Lilla was only a clergyman's daughter. Goodwood really seems to admire her. I can never forgive him for his heartless flirtation with Valencia; but if hewereto be won by a Montolieu, what would the Hauttons say?"
And sitting against the wall, with others of her sisterhood, at a ball, a glorious and golden vision rose up before Lady Marabout's eyes.
If the unknown, unwelcome, revolutionary little Montolieu should go in and win where the Lady Hauttons had tried and failed through five seasons—if this little tropical flower should be promoted to the Doncaster conservatory, where all the stately stephanotises of the peerage had vainly aspired to bloom—if this Petit Caporal should be crowned with the Doncaster diadem, that all the legitimate rulers had uselessly schemed to place on their brows! The soul of Lady Marabout rose elastic at the bare prospect—it would be a great triumph for a chaperone as for a general to conquer a valuable position with a handful of boy recruits.
If itshouldbe! Anne Hautton would have nothing to say afterthat!
And Lady Marabout, though she was the most amiable lady in Christendom, was not exempt from a feeling oflonging for a stone to roll to the door of her enemy's stronghold, or a flourish of trumpets to silence the boastful and triumphantfanfarethat was perpetually sounding at sight of her defeats from her opponent's ramparts.
Wild, visionary, guiltily scheming, sinfully revolutionary seemed such a project in her eyes. Still, how tempting! It would be a terrible blow to Valencia, who'd tried for Goodwood fruitlessly, to be eclipsed by this unknown Flora; it would be a terrible blow to their Graces of Doncaster, who held nobody good enough, heraldically speaking, for their heir-apparent, to see him give the best coronet in England to a bewitching little interloper, sans money, birth, or rank. "They wouldn't like it, of course; I shouldn't like it for Philip, for instance, though she's a very sweet little thing; all the Ascottes would be very vexed, and all the Valletorts would never forgive it; but it would besucha triumph over Anne Hautton!" pondered Lady Marabout, and the last clause carried the day. Did you ever know private pique fail to carry the day over public charity?
And Lady Marabout glanced with a glow of prospective triumph, which, though erring to her Order, was delicious to her individuality, at Goodwood waltzing with the little Montolieu a suspicious number of times, while Lady Egidia Hautton was condemned to his young brother, Seton Ascotte, and Lady Feodorowna danced positively with nobody better than their own county member, originally a scion of Goodwood's bankers! Could the force of humiliation further go? Lady Hautton sat smiling and chatting, but the tiara on her temples was a figurative thorn crown, and Othello's occupation was gone. When a lady's daughters are dancing with an unavailablecadetof twenty, and a parvenu, only acceptable in the last extremities of despair, what good is it for her to watch the smiles and construe the attentions?
"We shall see who triumphs now," thought Lady Marabout,with a glow of pleasure, for which her heart reproached her a moment afterwards. "It is very wrong," she thought; "if those poor girls don't marry, one ought to pity them; and as for her—going through five seasons, with a fresh burden of responsibility leaving the schoolroom, and added on your hands each year,mustsour the sweetest temper; it would do mine, I am sure. I dare say, if I had had daughters, I should have been ten times more worried even than I am."
Which she would have been, undoubtedly, and the eligibles on her visiting-list ten times more too! Men wouldn't have voted the Marabout dinners and soirées so pleasant as they did, under the sway of that sunshiny hostess, if there had been Lady Maudes and Lady Marys to exact attention, and lay mines under the Auxerre carpets, and man-traps among the épergne flowers of Lowndes Square. Nor would Lady Marabout have been the same; the sunshine couldn't have shone so brightly, nor the milk of roses flowed so mildly under the weight and wear of marriageable but unmarried daughters; the sunshine would have been fitful, the milk of roses curdled at best. And no wonder! Those poor women! they have so much to go through in the world, and play but such a monotonous rôle, taken at its most brilliant and best, from first to last, from cradle to grave, from the berceaunettes in which they commence their existence to the mausoleum in which they finish it. If theydoget a little bit soured when they have finished their own game, and have to sit at the card-tables, wide awake however weary, vigilant however drowsy, alert however bored to death, superintending the hands of the fresh players, surreptitiously suggesting means for securing the tricks, keeping a dragon's eye out for revokes, and bearing all the brunt of the blame if the rubber be lost—if they do get a little bit soured, who can, after all, greatly wonder?
"That's a very brilliant little thing, that girl Montolieu,"said Goodwood, driving over to Hornsey Wood, the morning after, with Carruthers and some other men, in his drag.
"A deuced pretty waltzer!" said St. Lys, of the Bays; "turn her round in a square foot."
"And looks very well in the saddle; sits her horse better than any woman in the Ride, except Rosalie Rosière, and as she came from the Cirque Olympique originally, one don't counther," said Fulke Nugent. "Idolike a woman to ride well, I must say. I promised your mother to take a look at the Marabout Yearling Sale, Phil, if ever I wanted the never-desirable and ever-burdensome article she has to offer, and if anything could tempt me to pay the price she asks, I think it would be that charming Montolieu."
"She's the best thing Lady Tattersall ever had on hand," said Goodwood, drawing his whip over his off-wheeler's back. "You know, Phil—gently, gently, Coronet!—what spoilt your handsome cousin was, as I said, that it was all mechanism; perfect mechanism, I admit, but all artificial, prearranged, put together, wound up to smile in this place, bow in that, and frown in the other; clockwork every inch of it! Now—so-ho, Zouave! confound you,won'tyou be quiet?—little Montolieu hasn't a bit of artifice about her; 'tisn't only that you don't know what she's going to say, but thatshedoesn't either; and whether it's a smile or a frown, a jest or a reproof, it's what the moment brings out, not what's planned beforehand."
"The hard hit you had the other day seems to have piqued your interest," said Carruthers, smoothing a loose leaf of his Manilla.
"Naturally. The girl didn't care a button about my compliment (I only said it to try her), and the plucky answer she gave me amused me immensely. Anythingunartificial and frank is as refreshing as hock-and-seltzer after a field-day—one likes it, don't you know?"
"Wonderfully eloquent you are, Goody. If you come out like that in St. Stephen's, we sha'n't know you, and the ministerialists will look down in the mouth with a vengeance!"
"Don't be satirical, Phil! If I admire Mademoiselle Flora, what is it to you, pray?"
"Nothing at all," said Carruthers, with unnecessary rapidity of enunciation.
"My love, what are you going to wear to-night? The Bishop of Bonviveur is coming. He was a college friend of your poor uncle's; knew your dear mother before she married. I want you to look your very best and charm him, as you certainly do most people," said Lady Marabout. Adroit intriguer! The bishop was going, sans doute; the bishop loved good wine, good dinners, and good society, and found all three in Lowndes Square, but the bishop was entirely unavailable for purposes matrimonial, having had three wives, and being held tight in hand by a fourth; however, a bishop is a convenient piece to cover your king, in chess, and the bishop served admirably just then in Lady Marabout's moves as alocum tenensfor Goodwood. Flora Montolieu, in her innocence, made herself look her prettiest for her mother's old friend, and Flora Montolieu was conveniently ready, looking her prettiest, for her chaperone's pet-eligible, when Goodwood—who hated to dine anywhere in London except at the clubs, the Castle, or the Guards' mess, and was as difficult to get for your dinners as birds'-nests soup or Tokay pur—entered the Marabout drawing-rooms.
"Anne Hautton will see he dined here to-night, in theMorning Postto-morrow morning, and she will know Flora must attract him very unusually. Whatwillshe, and Egidia, and Feodorowna say?" thought Lady Marabout, with a glow of pleasure, which she was consciouswas uncharitable and sinful, and yet couldn't repress, let her try how she might.
In scheming for the future Duke of Doncaster for John Montolieu's daughter, she felt much as democratically and treasonably guilty to her order as a prince of the blood might feel heading a Chartist émeute; but then, suppose the Chartist row was that Prince's sole chance of crushing an odious foe, as it was the only chance for her to humiliate the Hautton, don't you think it might look tempting? Judge nobody, my good sir, till you've been in similar circumstances yourself—a golden rule, which might with advantage employ those illuminating colors with which ladies employ so much of their time just now. Remembering it, they might hold their white hands from flinging those sharp flinty stones, that surely suit them so ill, and that soil their fingers in one way quite as much as they soil the victim's bowed head in another? Illuminate the motto, mesdames and demoiselles! Perhaps youwilldo that—on a smalt ground, with a gold Persian arabesque round, and impossible flowers twined in and out of the letters; but,rememberit!—pardon! It were asking too much.
"My dear Philip, did you notice how very marked Goodwood's attentions were to Flora last night?" asked Lady Marabout, the morning after, in one of her most sunshiny and radiant moods, as Carruthers paid her his general matutinal call in her boudoir.
"Marked?"
"Yes, marked! Why do you repeat it in that tone? If theyweremarked, there is nothing to be ridiculed that I see. They were very marked, indeed, especially for him; he's such an unimpressible, never-show-anything man. I wonder you did not notice it!"
"My dear mother!" said Carruthers, a little impatiently, brushing up the Angora cat's ruff the wrong way with his cane, "do you suppose I pass my eveningsnoticing the attentions other men may see fit to pay to young ladies?"
"Well—don't be impatient. You never used to be," said Lady Marabout. "If you were in my place just for a night or two, or any other chaperone's, you'd be more full of pity. But people neverwillsympathize with anything that doesn't touch themselves. The only chords that strike the key-note in anybody is the chord that sounds 'self;' and that is the reason why the world is as full of crash and tumult as Beethoven's 'Storm.'"
"Quite right, my dear mother!"
"Of course it's quite right. I always think you have a great deal of sympathy for a man, Philip, even for people you don't harmonize with—(you could sympathize with that child Flora, yesterday, in her rapturous delight at seeing that Coccoloba Uvifera in the Patchouli conservatory, because it reminded her of her West Indian home, and you care nothing whatever about flowers, nor yet about the West Indies, I should suppose)—but you never will sympathize with me. You know how many disappointments and grievances and vexations of every kind I have had the last ten, twenty, ay, thirty, forty seasons—ever since I had to chaperone your aunt Eleanore, almost as soon as I was married, and was worried, more than anybody everwasworried, by her coquetteries and her inconsistencies and her vacillations—so badly as she married, too, at the last! Those flirting beauties so often do; they throw away a hundred admirable chances and put up with a wretcheddernier resort;—let a thousand salmon break away from the line out of their carelessness, and end by being glad to land a little minnow. I don't know when Ihaven'tbeen worried by chaperoning. Flora Montolieu is a great anxiety, a great difficulty, little detrimental that she is!"
"Detrimental! What an odd word you choose for her."
"I don't choose it for her; sheisit," returned Lady Marabout, decidedly.