← catalogue

Cecil Castlemaine's Gage, Lady Marabout's Troubles, and Other Stories

by Ouida · English · Gutenberg #37178 · 714,917 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Cecil Castlemaine's Gage, Lady Marabout's Troubles, and Other Stories
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Cecil Castlemaine's Gage, Lady Marabout's Troubles, and Other Stories

Author: Ouida


        
Release date: August 23, 2011 [eBook #37178]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/37178

Credits: Produced by David Edwards, Katherine Becker and the Online
        Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
        book was produced from scanned images of public domain
        material from the Google Print project.)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CECIL CASTLEMAINE'S GAGE, LADY MARABOUT'S TROUBLES, AND OTHER STORIES ***




Produced by David Edwards, Katherine Becker and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
book was produced from scanned images of public domain
material from the Google Print project.)









    CECIL CASTLEMAINE'S GAGE,

    LADY MARABOUT'S TROUBLES,

    AND

    OTHER STORIES.

    BY "OUIDA,"

    AUTHOR OF "IDALIA," "STRATHMORE," "CHANDOS,"
    "GRANVILLE DE VIGNE," ETC.


    PHILADELPHIA:
    J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY.
    1900.




    CECIL CASTLEMAINE'S GAGE,

    AND OTHER STORIES.




ADVERTISEMENT.


The Publishers have the pleasure of offering to the many admirers of the
writings of "Ouida," the present volume of Contributions, which have
appeared from time to time in the leading Journals of Europe, and which
have recently been collected and revised by the author, for publication
in book-form.

They have also in press, to be speedily published, another similar
volume of tales, from the same pen, together with an unpublished romance
entitled "UNDER TWO FLAGS."

Our editions of Ouida's Works are published by express arrangement with
the author; and any other editions that may appear in the American
market will be issued in violation of the courtesies usually extended
both to authors and publishers.

PHILADELPHIA, MAY, 1867.




CONTENTS


                                                                  PAGE

  CECIL CASTLEMAINE'S GAGE; OR, THE STORY OF A BROIDERED SHIELD     11

  LITTLE GRAND AND THE MARCHIONESS; OR, OUR MALTESE PEERAGE         37

  LADY MARABOUT'S TROUBLES; OR, THE WORRIES OF A CHAPERONE.--
  _In Three Seasons_:--
    Season the First.--The Eligible                                 84
    Season the Second.--The Ogre                                   121
    Season the Third.--The Climax                                  164

  A STUDY A LA LOUIS QUINZE; OR, PENDANT TO A PASTEL BY LA TOUR    211
    I. The First Morning                                           212
    II. The Second Morning                                         218
    III. Midnight                                                  227

  "DEADLY DASH." A STORY TOLD ON THE OFF DAY.                      235

  THE GENERAL'S MATCH-MAKING; OR, COACHES AND COUSINSHIP           265

  THE STORY OF A CRAYON-HEAD; OR, A DOUBLED-DOWN LEAF IN A MAN'S
  LIFE                                                             306

  THE BEAUTY OF VICQ D'AZYR; OR, NOT AT ALL A PROPER PERSON        339

  A STUDY A LA LOUIS QUATORZE: PENDANT TO A PORTRAIT BY MIGNARD    368




CECIL CASTLEMAINE'S GAGE;

OR,

THE STORY OF A BROIDERED SHIELD.


Cecil Castlemaine was the beauty of her county and her line, the
handsomest of all the handsome women that had graced her race, when she
moved, a century and a half ago, down the stately staircase, and through
the gilded and tapestried halls of Lilliesford. The Town had run mad
after her, and her face levelled politics, and was cited as admiringly
by the Whigs at St. James's as by the Tories at the Cocoa-tree, by the
beaux and Mohocks at Garraway's as by the alumni at the Grecian, by the
wits at Will's as by the fops at Ozinda's.

Wherever she went, whether to the Haymarket or the Opera, to the 'Change
for a fan or the palace for a state ball, to Drury Lane to see Pastoral
Philips's dreary dilution of Racine, or to some fair chief of her
faction for basset and ombre, she was surrounded by the best men of her
time, and hated by Whig beauties with virulent wrath, for she was a Tory
to the backbone, indeed a Jacobite at heart; worshipped Bolingbroke,
detested Marlborough and Eugene, believed in all the horrors of the
programme said to have been plotted by the Whigs for the anniversary
show of 1711, and was thought to have prompted the satire on those fair
politicians who are disguised as _Rosalinda_ and _Nigranilla_ in the
81st paper of the _Spectator_.

Cecil Castlemaine was the greatest beauty of her day, lovelier still at
four-and-twenty than she had been at seventeen, unwedded, though the
highest coronets in the land had been offered to her; far above the
coquetteries and minauderies of her friends, far above imitation of the
affectations of "Lady Betty Modley's skuttle," or need of practising the
Fan exercise; haughty, peerless, radiant, unwon--nay, more--untouched;
for the finest gentleman on the town could not flatter himself that he
had ever stirred the slightest trace of interest in her, nor boast, as
he stood in the inner circle at the Chocolate-house (unless, indeed, he
lied more impudently than Tom Wharton himself), that he had ever been
honored by a glance of encouragement from the Earl's daughter. She was
too proud to cheapen herself with coquetry, too fastidious to care for
her conquests over those who whispered to her through Nicolini's song,
vied to have the privilege of carrying her fan, drove past her windows
in Soho Square, crowded about her in St. James's Park, paid court even
to her little spaniel Indamara, and, to catch but a glimpse of her
brocaded train as it swept a ball-room floor, would leave even their
play at the Groom Porter's, Mrs. Oldfield in the green-room, a night
hunt with Mohun and their brother Mohocks, a circle of wits gathered
"within the steam of the coffeepot" at Will's, a dinner at Halifax's, a
supper at Bolingbroke's,--whatever, according to their several tastes,
made their best entertainment and was hardest to quit.

The highest suitors of the day sought her smile and sued for her hand;
men left the Court and the Mall to join the Flanders army before the
lines at Bouchain less for loyal love of England than hopeless love of
Cecil Castlemaine. Her father vainly urged her not to fling away offers
that all the women at St. James's envied her. She was untouched and
unwon, and when her friends, the court beauties, the fine ladies, the
coquettes of quality, rallied her on her coldness (envying her her
conquests), she would smile her slight proud smile and bow her stately
head. "Perhaps she was cold; she might be; they were personnable men? Oh
yes! she had nothing to say against them. His Grace of Belamour?--A
pretty wit, without doubt. Lord Millamont?--Diverting, but a coxcomb. He
had beautiful hands; it was a pity he was always thinking of them! Sir
Gage Rivers?--As obsequious a lover as the man in the 'Way of the
World,' but she had heard he was very boastful and facetious at women
over his chocolate at Ozinda's. The Earl of Argent?--A gallant soldier,
surely, but whatever he might protest, no mistress would ever rival with
him the dice at the Groom Porter's. Lord Philip Bellairs?--A proper
gentleman; no fault in him; a bel esprit and an elegant courtier;
pleased many, no doubt, but he did not please her overmuch. Perhaps her
taste was too finical, or her character too cold, as they said. She
preferred it should be so. When you were content it were folly to seek a
change. For her part, she failed to comprehend how women could stoop to
flutter their fans and choose their ribbons, and rack their tirewomen's
brains for new pulvillios, and lappets, and devices, and practise their
curtsy and recovery before their pier-glass, for no better aim or stake
than to draw the glance and win the praise of men for whom they cared
nothing. A woman who had the eloquence of beauty and a true pride should
be above heed for such affectations, pleasure in such applause!"

So she would put them all aside and turn the tables on her friends, and
go on her own way, proud, peerless, Cecil Castlemaine, conquering and
unconquered; and Steele must have had her name in his thoughts, and
honored it heartily and sincerely, when he wrote one Tuesday, on the
21st of October, under the domino of his Church Coquette, "I say I do
honor to those who _can be coquettes and are not such_, but I despise
all who would be so, and, in despair of arriving at it themselves, hate
and vilify all those who can." A definition justly drawn by his keen,
quick graver, though doubtless it only excited the ire of, and was
entirely lost upon, those who read the paper over their dish of bohea,
or over their toilette, while they shifted a patch for an hour before
they could determine it, or regretted the loss of ten guineas at crimp.

Cecil Castlemaine was the beauty of the Town: when she sat at Drury Lane
on the Tory side of the house, the devoutest admirer of Oldfield or Mrs.
Porter scarcely heard a word of the _Heroic Daughter_, or the _Amorous
Widow_, and the "beau fullest of his own dear self" forgot his
silver-fringed gloves, his medallion snuff-box, his knotted cravat, his
clouded cane, the slaughter that he planned to do, from gazing at her
where she sat as though she were reigning sovereign at St. James's, the
Castlemaine diamond's flashing crescent-like above her brow. At church
and court, at park and assembly, there were none who could eclipse that
haughty gentlewoman; therefore her fond women friends who had caressed
her so warmly and so gracefully, and pulled her to pieces behind her
back, if they could, so eagerly over their dainty cups of tea in an
afternoon visit, were glad, one and all, when on "Barnabybright,"
Anglice, the 22d (then the 11th) of June, the great Castlemaine chariot,
with its three herons blazoned on its coroneted panels, its laced
liveries and gilded harness, rolled over the heavy, ill-made roads down
into the country in almost princely pomp, the peasants pouring out from
the wayside cottages to stare at my lord's coach.

It was said in the town that a portly divine, who wore his scarf as one
of the chaplains to the Earl of Castlemaine, had prattled somewhat
indiscreetly at Child's of his patron's politics; that certain cipher
letters had passed the Channel enclosed in chocolate-cakes as soon as
French goods were again imported after the peace of Utrecht; that
gentlemen in high places were strongly suspected of mischievous designs
against the tranquillity of the country and government; that the Earl
had, among others, received a friendly hint from a relative in power to
absent himself for a while from the court where he was not best trusted,
and the town where an incautious word might be picked up and lead to
Tower Hill, and amuse himself at his goodly castle of Lilliesford, where
the red deer would not spy upon him, and the dark beech-woods would tell
no tales. And the ladies of quality, her dear friends and sisters, were
glad when they heard it as they punted at basset and fluttered their
fans complacently. They would have the field for themselves, for a
season, while Cecil Castlemaine was immured in her manor of Lilliesford;
would be free of her beauty to eclipse them at the next birthday, be
quit of their most dreaded rival, their most omnipotent leader of
fashion; and they rejoiced at the whisper of the cipher letter, the
damaging gossipry of the Whig coffee-houses, the bad repute into which
my Lord Earl had grown at St. James's, at the misfortune of their
friend, in a word, as human nature, masculine or feminine, will ever
do--to its shame be it spoken--unless the _fomes peccati_ be more
completely wrung out of it than it ever has been since the angel Gabriel
performed that work of purification on the infant Mahomet.

It was the June of the year '15, and the coming disaffection was
seething and boiling secretly among the Tories; the impeachment of
Ormond and Bolingbroke had strengthened the distaste to the new-come
Hanoverian pack, their attainder had been the blast of air needed to
excite the smouldering wood to flame, the gentlemen of that party in the
South began to grow impatient of the intrusion of the distant German
branch, to think lovingly of the old legitimate line, and to feel
something of the chafing irritation of the gentlemen of the North, who
were fretting like stag-hounds held in leash.

Envoys passed to and fro between St. Germain, and Jacobite nobles,
priests of the church that had fallen out of favor and was typified as
the Scarlet Woman by a rival who, though successful, was still bitter,
plotted with ecclesiastical relish in the task; letters were conveyed in
rolls of innocent lace, plans were forwarded in frosted confections,
messages were passed in invisible cipher that defied investigation. The
times were dangerous; full of plot and counterplot, of risk and danger,
of fomenting projects and hidden disaffection--times in which men,
living habitually over mines, learned to like the uncertainty, and to
think life flavorless without the chance of losing it any hour; and
things being in this state, the Earl of Castlemaine deemed it prudent to
take the counsel of his friend in power, and retire from London for a
while, perhaps for the safety of his own person, perhaps for the
advancement of his cause, either of which were easier insured at his
seat in the western counties than amidst the Whigs of the capital.

The castle of Lilliesford was bowered in the thick woods of the western
counties, a giant pile built by Norman masons. Troops of deer herded
under the gold-green beechen boughs, the sunlight glistened through the
aisles of the trees, and quivered down on to the thick moss, and ferns,
and tangled grass that grew under the park woodlands; the water-lilies
clustered on the river, and the swans "floated double, swan and shadow,"
under the leaves that swept into the water; then, when Cecil Castlemaine
came down to share her father's retirement, as now, when her name and
titles on the gold plate of a coffin that lies with others of her race
in the mausoleum across the park, where winter snows and sumer sun-rays
are alike to those who sleep within, is all that tells at Lilliesford
of the loveliest woman of her time who once reigned there as mistress.

The country was in its glad green midsummer beauty, and the
musk-rosebuds bloomed in profuse luxuriance over the chill marble of the
terraces, and scattered their delicate odorous petals in fragrant
showers on the sward of the lawns, when Cecil Castlemaine came down to
what she termed her exile. The morning was fair and cloudless, its
sunbeams piercing through the darkest glades in the woodlands, the
thickest shroud of the ivy, the deepest-hued pane of the mullioned
windows, as she passed down the great staircase where lords and
gentlewomen of her race gazed on her from the canvas of Lely and
Jamesone, Bourdain and Vandyke, crossed the hall with her dainty step,
so stately yet so light, and standing by the window of her own
bower-room, was lured out on to the terrace overlooking the west side of
the park.

She made such a picture as Vandyke would have liked to paint, with her
golden glow upon her, and the musk-roses clustering about her round the
pilasters of marble--the white chill marble to which Belamour and many
other of her lovers of the court and town had often likened her. Vandyke
would have lingered lovingly on the hand that rested on her stag-hound's
head, would have caught her air of court-like grace and dignity, would
have painted with delighted fidelity her deep azure eyes, her proud
brow, her delicate lips arched haughtily like a cupid's bow, would have
picked out every fold of her sweeping train, every play of light on her
silken skirts, every dainty tracery of her point-lace. Yet even painted
by Sir Anthony, that perfect master of art and of elegance, though more
finished it could have hardly been more faithful, more instinct with
grace, and life, and dignity, than a sketch drawn of her shortly after
that time by one who loved her well, which is still hanging in the
gallery at Lilliesford, lighted up by the afternoon sun when it streams
in through the western windows.

Cecil Castlemaine stood on the terrace looking over the lawns and
gardens through the opening vistas of meeting boughs and interlaced
leaves to the woods and hills beyond, fused in a soft mist of green and
purple, with her hand lying carelessly on her hound's broad head. She
was a zealous Tory, a skilled politician, and her thoughts were busy
with the hopes and fears, the chances for and against, of a cause that
lay near her heart, but whose plans were yet immature, whose first blow
was yet unstruck, and whose well-wishers were sanguine of a success they
had not yet hazarded, though they hardly ventured to whisper to each
other their previous designs and desires. Her thoughts were far away,
and she hardly heeded the beauty round her, musing on schemes and
projects dear to her party, that would imperil the Castlemaine coronet
but would serve the only royal house the Castlemaine line had ever in
their hearts acknowledged.

She had regretted leaving the Town, moreover; a leader of the mode, a
wit, a woman of the world, she missed her accustomed sphere; she was no
pastoral Phyllis, no country-born Mistress Fiddy, to pass her time in
provincial pleasures, in making cordial waters, in tending her
beau-pots, in preserving her fallen rose-leaves, in inspecting the
confections in the still-room; as little was she able, like many fine
ladies when in similar exile, to while it away by scolding her
tirewomen, and sorting a suit of ribbons, in ordering a set of gilded
leather hangings from Chelsea for the state chambers, and yawning over
chocolate in her bed till mid-day. She regretted leaving the Town, not
for Belamour, nor Argent, nor any, of those who vainly hoped, as they
glanced at the little mirror in the lids of their snuff-boxes, that they
might have graven themselves, were it ever so faintly, in her thoughts;
but for the wits, the pleasures, the choice clique, the accustomed
circle to which she was so used, the courtly, brilliant town-life where
she was wont to reign.

So she stood on the terrace the first morning of her exile, her thoughts
far away, with the loyal gentlemen of the North, and the banished court
at St. Germain, the lids drooping proudly over her haughty eyes, and her
lips half parted with a faint smile of triumph in the visions limned by
ambition and imagination, while the wind softly stirred the rich lace of
her bodice, and her fingers lay lightly, yet firmly, on the head of her
stag-hound. She looked up at last as she heard the ring of a horse's
hoofs, and saw a sorrel, covered with dust and foam, spurred up the
avenue, which, rounding past the terrace, swept on to the front
entrance; the sorrel looked wellnigh spent, and his rider somewhat worn
and languid, as a man might do with justice who had been in boot and
saddle twenty-four hours at the stretch, scarce stopping for a stoup of
wine; but he lifted his hat, and bowed down to his saddle-bow as he
passed her.

"Was it the long-looked-for messenger with definite news from St.
Germain?" wondered Lady Cecil, as her hound gave out a deep-tongued bay
of anger at the stranger. She went back into her bower-room, and toyed
absently with her flowered handkerchief, broidering a stalk to a
violet-leaf, and wondering what additional hope the horseman might have
brought to strengthen the good Cause, till her servants brought word
that his Lordship prayed the pleasure of her presence in the
octagon-room. Whereat she rose, and swept through the long corridors,
entered the octagon-room, the sunbeams gathering about her rich dress as
they passed through the stained-glass oriels, and saluted the new-comer,
when her father presented him to her as their trusty and welcome friend
and envoy, Sir Fulke Ravensworth, with her careless dignity and queenly
grace, that nameless air which was too highly bred to be condescension,
but markedly and proudly repelled familiarity, and signed a pale of
distance beyond which none must intrude.

The new-comer was a tall and handsome man, of noble presence, bronzed by
foreign suns, pale and jaded just now with hard riding, while his dark
silver-laced suit was splashed and covered with dust; but as he bowed
low to her, critical Cecil Castlemaine saw that not Belamour himself
could have better grace, not my Lord Millamont courtlier mien nor whiter
hands, and listened with gracious air to what her father unfolded to her
of his mission from St. Germain, whither he had come, at great personal
risk, in many disguises, and at breathless speed, to place in their
hands a precious letter in cipher from James Stuart to his well-beloved
and loyal subject Herbert George, Earl of Castlemaine. A letter spoken
of with closed doors and in low whispers, loyal as was the household,
supreme as the Earl ruled over his domains of Lilliesford, for these
were times when men mistrusted those of their own blood, and when the
very figure on the tapestry seemed instinct with life to spy and
betray--when they almost feared the silk that tied a missive should
babble of its contents, and the hound that slept beside them should read
and tell their thoughts.

To leave Lilliesford would be danger to the Envoy and danger to the
Cause; to stay as guest was to disarm suspicion. The messenger who had
brought such priceless news must rest within the shelter of his roof;
too much were risked by returning to the French coast yet awhile, or
even by joining Mar or Derwentwater, so the Earl enforced his will upon
the Envoy, and the Envoy thanked him and accepted.

Perchance the beauty, whose eyes he had seen lighten and proud brow
flush as she read the royal greeting and injunction, made a sojourn near
her presence not distasteful; perchance he cared little where he stayed
till the dawning time of action and of rising should arrive, when he
should take the field and fight till life or death for the "White Rose
and the long heads of hair." He was a soldier of fortune, a poor
gentleman with no patrimony but his name, no chance of distinction save
by his sword; sworn to a cause whose star was set forever; for many
years his life had been of changing adventure and shifting chances, now
fighting with Berwick at Almanza, now risking his life in some delicate
and dangerous errand for James Stuart that could not have been trusted
so well to any other officer about St. Germain; gallant to rashness, yet
with much of the acumen of the diplomatist, he was invaluable to his
Court and Cause, but, Stuart-like, men-like, they hastened to employ,
but ever forgot to reward!

Lady Cecil missed her town-life, and did not over-favor her exile in the
western counties. To note down on her Mather's tablets the drowsy
homilies droned out by the chaplain on a Sabbath noon, to play at
crambo, to talk with her tirewomen of new washes for the skin, to pass
her hours away in knotting?--she, whom Steele might have writ of when he
drew his character of _Eudoxia_, could wile her exile with none of these
inanities; neither could she consort with gentry who seemed to her
little better than the boors of a country wake, who had never heard of
Mr. Spectator and knew nothing of Mr. Cowley, countrywomen whose
ambition was in their cowslip wines, fox-hunters more ignorant and
uncouth than the dumb brutes they followed.

Who was there for miles around with whom she could stoop to associate,
with whom she cared to exchange a word? Madam from the vicarage, in her
grogram, learned in syrups, salves, and possets? Country Lady
Bountifuls, with gossip of the village and the poultry-yard? Provincial
Peeresses, who had never been to London since Queen Anne's coronation? A
squirearchy, who knew of no music save the concert of their stop-hounds,
no court save the court of the county assize, no literature unless by
miracle 't were Tarleton's Jests? None such as these could cross the
inlaid oak parquet of Lilliesford, and be ushered into the presence of
Cecil Castlemaine.

So the presence of the Chevalier's messenger was not altogether
unwelcome and distasteful to her. She saw him but little, merely
conversing at table with him with that distant and dignified courtesy
which marked her out from the light, free, inconsequent manners in vogue
with other women of quality of her time; the air which had chilled half
the softest things even on Belamour's lips, and kept the vainest coxcomb
hesitating and abashed.

But by degrees she observed that the Envoy was a man who had lived in
many countries and in many courts, was well versed in the tongues of
France and Italy and Spain--in their belles-lettres too, moreover--and
had served his apprenticeship to good company in the salons of
Versailles, in the audience-room of the Vatican, at the receptions of
the Duchess du Maine, and with the banished family at St. Germain. He
spoke with a high and sanguine spirit of the troublous times approaching
and the beloved Cause whose crisis was at hand, which chimed in with her
humor better than the flippancies of Belamour, the airy nothings of
Millamont. He was but a soldier of fortune, a poor gentleman who, named
to her in the town, would have had never a word, and would have been
unnoted amidst the crowding beaux who clustered round to hold her fan
and hear how she had been pleasured with the drolleries of _Grief a la
Mode_. But down in the western counties she deigned to listen to the
Prince's officer, to smile--a smile beautiful when it came on her proud
lips, as the play of light on the opals of her jewelled stomacher--nay,
even to be amused when he spoke of the women of foreign courts, to be
interested when he told, which was but reluctantly, of his own perils,
escapes, and adventures, to discourse with him, riding home under the
beech avenues from hawking, or standing on the western terrace at curfew
to watch the sunset, of many things on which the nobles of the Mall and
the gentlemen about St. James's had never been allowed to share her
opinions. For Lady Cecil was deeply read (unusually deeply for her day,
since fine ladies of her rank and fashion mostly contented themselves
with skimming a romance of Scuderi's, or an act of _Aurungzebe_); but
she rarely spoke of those things, save perchance now and then to Mr.
Addison.

Fulke Ravensworth never flattered her, moreover, and flattery was a
honeyed confection of which she had long been cloyed; he even praised
boldly before her other women of beauty and grace whom he had seen at
Versailles, at Sceaux, and at St. Germain; neither did he defer to her
perpetually, but where he differed would combat her sentiments
courteously but firmly. Though a soldier and a man of action, he had an
admirable skill at the limner's art; could read to her the Divina
Commedia, or the comedies of Lope da' Vega, and transfer crabbed Latin
and abstruse Greek into elegant English for her pleasures and though a
beggared gentleman of most precarious fortunes, he would speak of life
and its chances, of the Cause and its perils, with a daring which she
found preferable to the lisped languor of the men of the town, who had
no better campaigns than laying siege to a prude, cared for no other
weapons than their toilettes and snuff-boxes, and sought no other
excitement than a _coup d'eclat_ with the lion-tumblers.

On the whole, through these long midsummer days, Lady Cecil found the
Envoy from St. Germain a companion that did not suit her ill, sought
less the solitude of her bower-room, and listened graciously to him in
the long twilight hours, while the evening dews gathered in the cups of
the musk-roses, and the star-rays began to quiver on the water-lilies
floating on the river below, that murmured along, with endless song,
under the beechen-boughs. A certain softness stole over her, relaxing
the cold hauteur of which Belamour had so often complained, giving a
nameless charm, supplying a nameless something, lacking before, in the
beauty of The Castlemaine.

She would stroke, half sadly, the smooth feathers of her tartaret falcon
Gabrielle when Fulke Ravensworth brought her the bird from the
ostreger's wrist, with its azure velvet hood, and silver bells and
jesses. She would wonder, as she glanced through Corneille or Congreve,
Philips or Petrarca, what it was, this passion of love, of which they
all treated, on which they all turned, no matter how different their
strain. And now and then would come over her cheek and brow a faint
fitful wavering flush, delicate and changing as the flush from the
rose-hued reflexions of western clouds on a statue of Pharos marble, and
then she would start and rouse herself, and wonder what she ailed, and
grow once more haughty, calm, stately, dazzling, but chill as the
Castlemaine diamonds that she wore.

So the summer-time passed, and the autumn came, the corn-lands brown
with harvest, the hazel-copses strewn with fallen nuts, the beech-leaves
turning into reddened gold. As the wheat ripened but to meet the sickle,
as the nuts grew but to fall, as the leaves turned to gold but to
wither, so the sanguine hopes, the fond ambitions of men, strengthened
and matured only to fade into disappointment and destruction! Four
months had sped by since the Prince's messenger had come to
Lilliesford--months that had gone swiftly with him as some sweet
delicious dream; and the time had come when he had orders to ride north,
secretly and swiftly, speak with Mr. Forster and other gentlemen
concerned in the meditated rising, and convey despatches and
instructions to the Earl of Mar; for Prince James was projecting soon to
join his loyal adherents in Scotland, and the critical moment was close
at hand, the moment when, to Fulke Ravensworth's high and sanguine
courage, victory seemed certain; failure, if no treachery marred, no
dissension weakened, impossible; the moment to which he looked for
honor, success, distinction, that should give him claim and title to
aspire--_where_? Strong man, cool soldier though he was, he shrank from
drawing his fancied future out from the golden haze of immature hope,
lest he should see it wither upon closer sight. He was but a landless
adventurer, with nothing but his sword and his honor, and kings he knew
were slow to pay back benefits, or recollect the hands that hewed them
free passage to their thrones.

Cecil Castlemaine stood within the window of her bower-room, the red
light of the October sun glittering on her gold-broidered skirt and her
corsage sewn with opals and emeralds; her hand was pressed lightly on
her bosom, as though some pain were throbbing there; it was new this
unrest, this weariness, this vague weight that hung upon her; it was the
perils of their Cause, she told herself; the risks her father ran: it
was weak, childish, unworthy a Castlemaine! Still the pain throbbed
there.

Her hound, asleep beside her, raised his head with a low growl as a step
intruded on the sanctity of the bower-room, then composed himself again
to slumber, satisfied it was no foe. His mistress turned slowly; she
knew the horses waited; she had shunned this ceremony of farewell, and
never thought any would be bold enough to venture here without
permission sought and gained.

"Lady Cecil, I could not go upon my way without one word of parting.
Pardon me if I have been too rash to seek it here."

Why was it that his brief frank words ever pleased her better than
Belamour's most honeyed phrases, Millamont's suavest periods? She
scarcely could have told, save that there were in them an earnestness
and truth new and rare to her ear and to her heart.

She pressed her hand closer on the opals--the jewels of calamity--and
smiled:

"Assuredly I wish you God speed, Sir Fulke, and safe issue from all
perils."

He bowed low; then raised himself to his fullest height, and stood
beside her, watching the light play upon the opals:

"That is all you vouchsafe me?"

"_All?_ It is as much as you would claim, sir, is it not? It is more
than I would say to many."

"Your pardon--it _is_ more than I should claim if prudence were ever by,
if reason always ruled! I have no right to ask for, seek for, even wish
for, more; such petitions may only be addressed by men of wealth and of
high title; a landless soldier should have no pride to sting, no heart
to wound; they are the prerogative of a happier fortune."

Her lips turned white, but she answered haughtily; the crimson light
flashing in her jewels, heirlooms priceless and hereditary, like her
beauty and her pride:

"This is strange language, sir! I fail to apprehend you."

"You have never thought that I ran a danger deadlier than that which I
have ever risked on any field? You have never guessed that I have had
the madness, the presumption, the crime--it may be in your eyes--to love
you."

The color flushed to her face, crimsoning even her brow, and then fled
back. Her first instinct was insulted pride--a beggared gentleman, a
landless soldier, spoke to her of love!--of love!--which Belamour had
barely had courage to whisper of; which none had dared to sue of her in
return. He had ventured to feel this for her! he had ventured to speak
of this to her!

The Envoy saw the rising resentment, the pride spoken in every line of
her delicate face, and stopped her as she would have spoken.

"Wait! I know all you would reply. You think it infinite daring,
presumption that merits highest reproof----"

"Since you divined so justly, it were pity you subjected yourself and me
to this most useless, most unexpected interview. Why----"

"_Why?_ Because, perchance, in this life you will see my face no more,
and you will think gently, mercifully of my offence (if offence it be to
love you more than life, and only less than honor), when you know that I
have fallen for the Cause, with your name in my heart, held only the
dearer because never on my lips! Sincere love can be no insult to
whomsoever proffered; Elizabeth Stuart saw no shame to her in the
devotion of William Craven!"

Cecil Castlemaine stood in the crimson glory of the autumn sunset, her
head erect, her pride unshaken, but her heart stirred strangely and
unwontedly. It smote the one with bitter pain, to think a penniless
exile should thus dare to speak of what princes and dukes had almost
feared to whisper; what had she done--what had she said, to give him
license for such liberty? It stirred the other with a tremulous warmth,
a vague, sweet pleasure, that were never visitants there before; but
that she scouted instantly as weakness, folly, debasement, in the Last
of the Castlemaines.

He saw well enough what passed within her, what made her eyes so
troubled, yet her brow and lips so proudly set, and he bent nearer
towards her, the great love that was in him trembling in his voice:

"Lady Cecil, hear me! If in the coming struggle I win distinction,
honor, rank--if victory come to us, and the King we serve remember me in
his prosperity as he does now in his adversity--if I can meet you
hereafter with tidings of triumph and success, my name made one which
England breathes with praise and pride, honors gained such as even you
will deem worthy of your line--then--then--will you let me speak of
what you refuse to hearken to now--then may I come to you, and seek a
gentler answer?"

She looked for a moment upon his face, as it bent towards her in the
radiance of the sunset light, the hope that hopes all things glistening
in his eyes, the high-souled daring of a gallant and sanguine spirit
flushing his forehead, the loud throbs of his heart audible in the
stillness around; and her proud eyes grew softer, her lips quivered for
an instant.

Then she turned towards him with queenly grace:

"_Yes!_"

It was spoken with stately dignity, though scarce above her breath; but
the hue that wavered in her cheek was but the lovelier, for the pride
that would not let her eyes droop nor her tears rise, would not let her
utter one softer word. That one word cost her much. That single
utterance was much from Cecil Castlemaine.

Her handkerchief lay at her feet, a delicate, costly toy of lace,
embroidered with her shield and chiffre; he stooped and raised it, and
thrust it in his breast to treasure it there.

"If I fail, I send this back in token that I renounce all hope; if I can
come to you with honor and with fame, this shall be my gage that I may
speak, that you will listen?"

She bowed her noble head, ever held haughtily, as though every crown of
Europe had a right to circle it; his hot lips lingered for a moment on
her hand; then Cecil Castlemaine stood alone in the window of her
bower-room, her hand pressed again upon the opals under which her heart
was beating with a dull, weary pain, looking out over the landscape,
where the golden leaves were falling fast, and the river, tossing sadly
dead branches on its waves, was bemoaning in plaintive language the
summer days gone by.

Two months came and went, the beech-boughs, black and sear, creaked in
the bleak December winds that sighed through frozen ferns and over the
couches of shivering deer, the snow drifted up on the marble terrace,
and icedrops clung where the warm rosy petals of the musk-rosebuds had
nestled. Across the country came terrible whispers that struck the
hearts of men of loyal faith to the White Rose with a bolt of ice-cold
terror and despair. Messengers riding in hot haste, open-mouthed
peasants gossiping by the village forge, horsemen who tarried for a
breathless rest at alehouse-doors, Whig divines who returned thanks for
God's most gracious mercy in vouchsafing victory to the strong, all told
the tale, all spread the news of the drawn battle of Sheriff-Muir, of
the surrender under Preston walls, of the flight of Prince James. The
tidings came one by one to Lilliesford, where my Lord Earl was holding
himself in readiness to co-operate with the gentlemen of the North to
set up the royal standard, broidered by his daughter's hands, in the
western counties, and proclaim James III. "sovereign lord and king of
the realms of Great Britain and Ireland." The tidings came to
Lilliesford, and Cecil Castlemaine clenched her white jewelled hands in
passionate anguish that a Stuart should have fled before the traitor of
Argyll, instead of dying with his face towards the rebel crew; that men
had lived who could choose surrender instead of heroic death; that _she_
had not been there, at Preston, to shame them with a woman's reading of
courage and of loyalty, and show them how to fall with a doomed city
rather than yield captive to a foe!

Perhaps amidst her grief for her Prince and for his Cause mingled--as
the deadliest thought of all--a memory of a bright proud face, that had
bent towards her with tender love and touching grace a month before, and
that might now be lying pale and cold, turned upwards to the winter
stars, on the field of Sheriff-Muir.

A year rolled by. Twelve months had fled since the gilded carriage of
the Castlemaines, with the lordly blazonment upon its panels, its
princely retinue and stately pomp, had come down into the western
counties. The bones were crumbling white in the coffins in the Tower,
and the skulls over Temple-bar had bleached white in winter snows and
spring-tide suns; Kenmuir had gone to a sleep that knew no wakening, and
Derwentwater had laid his fair young head down for a thankless cause;
the heather bloomed over the mounds of dead on the plains of
Sheriff-Muir, and the yellow gorse blossomed under the city walls of
Preston.

Another summer had dawned, bright and laughing, over England; none the
less fair for human lives laid down, for human hopes crushed out;
daisies powdering the turf sodden with human blood, birds carolling
their song over graves of heaped-up dead. The musk-roses tossed their
delicate heads again amidst the marble pilasters, and the
hawthorn-boughs shook their fragrant buds into the river at Lilliesford,
the purple hills lay wrapped in sunny mist, and hyacinth-bells mingled
with the tangled grass and fern under the woodland shades, where the red
deer nestled happily. Herons plumed their silvery wings down by the
water-side, swallows circled in sultry air above the great bell-tower,
and wood-pigeons cooed with soft love-notes among the leafy branches.
Yet the Countess of Castlemaine, last of her race, sole owner of the
lands that spread around her, stood on the rose-terrace, finding no joy
in the sunlight about her, no melody in the song of the birds.

She was the last of her name; her father, broken-hearted at the news
from Dumblain and Preston, had died the very day after his lodgment in
the Tower. There was no heir male of his line, and the title had passed
to his daughter; there had been thoughts of confiscation and attainder,
but others, unknown to her, solicited what she scorned to ask for
herself, and the greed of the hungry "Hanoverian pack" spared the lands
and the revenues of Lilliesford. In haughty pride, in lonely mourning,
the fairest beauty of the Court and Town withdrew again to the solitude
of her western counties, and tarried there, dwelling amidst her women
and her almost regal household, in the sacred solitude of grief, wherein
none might intrude. Proud Cecil Castlemaine was yet prouder than of
yore; alone, sorrowing for her ruined Cause and exiled King, she would
hold converse with none of those who had had a hand in drawing down the
disastrous fate she mourned, and only her staghound could have seen the
weariness upon her face when she bent down to him, or Gabrielle the
falcon felt her hand tremble when it stroked her folded wings. She stood
on the terrace, looking over her spreading lands, not the water-lilies
on the river below whiter than her lips, pressed painfully together.
Perhaps she repented of certain words, spoken to one whom now she would
never again behold--perhaps she thought of that delicate toy that was to
have been brought back in victory and hope, that now might lie stained
and stiffened with blood next a lifeless heart, for never a word in the
twelve months gone by had there come to Lilliesford as tidings of Fulke
Ravensworth.

Her pride was dear to her, dearer than aught else; she had spoken as was
her right to speak, she had done what became a Castlemaine; it would
have been weakness to have acted otherwise; what was he--a landless
soldier--that he should have dared as he had dared? Yet the sables she
wore were not solely for the dead Earl, not solely for the lost Stuarts
the hot mist that would blind the eyes of Cecil Castlemaine, as hours
swelled to days, and days to months, and she--the flattered beauty of
the Court and Town--stayed in self-chosen solitude in her halls of
Lilliesford, still unwedded and unwon.

The noon-hours chimed from the bell-tower, and the sunny beauty of the
morning but weighed with heavier sadness on her heart; the song of the
birds, the busy hum of the gnats, the joyous ring of the silver bell
round her pet fawn's neck, as it darted from her side under the drooping
boughs--none touched an answering chord of gladness in her. She stood
looking over her stretching woodlands in deep thought, so deep that she
heard no step over the lawn beneath, nor saw the frightened rush of the
deer, as a boy, crouching among the tangled ferns, sprang up from his
hiding-place under the beechen branches, and stood on the terrace before
her, craving her pardon in childish, yet fearless tones. She turned,
bending on him that glance which had made the over-bold glance of
princes fall abashed. The boy was but a little tatterdemalion to have
ventured thus abruptly into the presence of the Countess of Castlemaine;
still it was with some touch of a page's grace that he bowed before her.

"Lady, I crave your pardon, but my master bade me watch for you, though
I watched till midnight."

"Your master?"

A flush, warm as that on the leaves of the musk-roses, rose to her face
for an instant, then faded as suddenly. The boy did not notice her
words, but went on in an eager whisper, glancing anxiously round, as a
hare would glance fearing the hunters.

"And told me when I saw you not to speak his name, but only to give you
this as his gage, that though all else is lost he has not forgot _his_
honor nor _your_ will."

Cecil Castlemaine spoke no word, but she stretched out her hand and took
it--her own costly toy of cambric and lace, with her broidered shield
and coronet.

"Your master! Then--he lives?"

"Lady, he bade me say no more. You have his message; I must tell no
further."

She laid her hand upon his shoulder, a light, snow-white hand, yet one
that held him now in a clasp of steel.

"Child! answer me at your peril! Tell me of him whom you call your
master. Tell me all--quick--quick!"

"You are his friend?"

"His friend? My Heaven! Speak on!"

"He bade me tell no more on peril of his heaviest anger; but if you
_are_ his friend, I sure may speak what you should know without me. It
is a poor friend, lady, who has need to ask whether another be dead or
living!"

The scarlet blood flamed in the Countess's blanched face, she signed him
on with impetuous command; she was unused to disobedience, and the
child's words cut her to the quick.

"Sir Fulke sails for the French coast to-morrow night," the boy went on,
in tremulous haste. "He was left for dead--our men ran one way, and
Argyll's men the other--on the field of Sheriff-Muir; and sure if he had
not been strong indeed, he would have died that awful night, untended,
on the bleak moor, with the winds roaring round him, and his life ebbing
away. He was not one of those who _fled_; you know that of him if you
know aught. We got him away before dawn, Donald and I, and hid him in a
shieling; he was in the fever then, and knew nothing that was done to
him, only he kept that bit of lace in his hand for weeks and weeks, and
would not let us stir it from his grasp. What magic there was in it we
wondered often, but 'twas a magic, mayhap, that got him well at last; it
was an even chance but that he'd died, God bless him! though we did what
best we could. We've been wandering in the Highlands all the year,
hiding here and tarrying there. Sir Fulke sets no count upon his life.
Sure I think he thanks us little for getting him through the fever of
the wounds, but he could not have borne to be pinioned, you know, lady,
like a thief, and hung up by the brutes of Whigs, as a butcher hangs
sheep in the shambles! The worst of the danger's over--they've had
their fill of the slaughter; but we sail to-morrow night for the French
coast--England's no place for my master."

Cecil Castlemaine let go her hold upon the boy, and her hand closed
convulsively upon the dainty handkerchief--her gage sent so faithfully
back to her!

The child looked upon her face; perchance, in his master's delirium, he
had caught some knowledge of the story that hung to that broidered toy.

"If you _are_ his friend, madame, doubtless you have some last word to
send him?"

Cecil Castlemaine, whom nothing moved, whom nothing softened, bowed her
head at the simple question, her heart wrestling sorely, her lips set
together in unswerving pride, a mist before her haughty eyes, the
broidered shield upon her handkerchief--the shield of her stately and
unyielding race--pressed close against her breast.

"You have no word for him, lady?"

Her lips parted; she signed him away. Was this child to see her yielding
to such weakness? Had she, Countess of Castlemaine, no better pride, no
better strength, no better power of resolve, than this?

The boy lingered.

"I will tell Sir Fulke then, lady, that the ruined have no friends?"

Whiter and prouder still grew the delicate beauty of her face; she
raised her stately head, haughtily as she had used to glance over a
glittering Court, where each voice murmured praise of her loveliness and
reproach of her coldness; and placed the fragile toy of lace back in the
boy's hands.

"Go, seek your master, and give him this in gage that their calamity
makes friends more dear to us than their success. Go, he will know its
meaning!"

       *       *       *       *       *

In place of the noon chimes the curfew was ringing from the bell-tower,
the swallows were gone to roost amidst the ivy, and the herons slept
with their heads under their silvery wings among the rushes by the
riverside, the ferns and wild hyacinths were damp with evening dew, and
the summer starlight glistened amidst the quivering woodland leaves.
There was the silence of coming night over the vast forest glades, and
no sound broke the stillness, save the song of the grasshopper stirring
the tangled grasses, or the sweet low sigh of the west wind fanning the
bells of the flowers. Cecil Castlemaine stood once more on the
rose-terrace, shrouded in the dense twilight shade flung from above by
the beech-boughs, waiting, listening, catching every rustle of the
leaves, every tremor of the heads of the roses, yet hearing nothing in
the stillness around but the quick, uncertain throbs of her heart
beating like the wing of a caged bird under its costly lace. Pride was
forgotten at length, and she only remembered--fear and love.

In the silence and the solitude came a step that she knew, came a
presence that she felt. She bowed her head upon her hands; it was new to
her this weakness, this terror, this anguish of joy; she sought to calm
herself, to steel herself, to summon back her pride, her strength; she
scorned herself for it all!

His hand touched her, his voice fell on her ear once more, eager,
breathless, broken.

"Cecil! Cecil! is this true? Is my ruin thrice blessed, or am I mad, and
dream of heaven?"

She lifted her head and looked at him with her old proud glance, her
lips trembling with words that all her pride could not summon into
speech; then her eyes filled with warm, blinding tears, and softened to
new beauty;--scarce louder than the sigh of the wind among the
flower-bells came her words to Fulke Ravensworth's ear, as her royal
head bowed on his breast.

"Stay, stay! Or, if you fly, your exile shall be my exile, your danger
my danger!"

The kerchief is a treasured heirloom to her descendants now, and fair
women of her race, who inherit from her her azure eyes and her queenly
grace, will recall how the proudest Countess of their Line loved a
ruined gentleman so well that she was wedded to him at even, in her
private chapel, at the hour of his greatest peril, his lowest fortune,
and went with him across the seas till friendly intercession in high
places gained them royal permission to dwell again at Lilliesford
unmolested. And how it was ever noticeable to those who murmured at her
coldness and her pride, that Cecil Castlemaine, cold and negligent as of
yore to all the world beside, would seek her husband's smile, and love
to meet his eyes, and cherish her beauty for his sake, and be restless
in his absence, even for the short span of a day, with a softer and more
clinging tenderness than was found in many weaker, many humbler women.

They are gone now the men and women of that generation, and their voices
come only to us through the faint echo of their written words. In summer
nights the old beech-trees toss their leaves in the silvery light of the
stars, and the river flows on unchanged, with the ceaseless, mournful
burden of its mystic song, the same now as in the midsummer of a century
and a half ago. The cobweb handkerchief lies before me with its
broidered shield; the same now as long years since, when it was
treasured close in a soldier's breast, and held by him dearer than all
save his honor and his word. So, things pulseless and passionless
endure, and human life passes away as swiftly as a song dies off from
the air--as quickly succeeded, and as quickly forgot! Ronsard's refrain
is the refrain of our lives:

    Le temps s'en va, le temps s'en va, ma dame!
    Las! le temps, non; mais _nous_ nous, en allons!




LITTLE GRAND AND THE MARCHIONESS;

OR,

OUR MALTESE PEERAGE.


All first things are voted the best: first kisses, first _toga virilis_,
first hair of the first whisker; first speeches are often so superior
that members subside after making them, fearful of eclipsing themselves;
first money won at play must always be best, as always the dearest
bought; and first wives are always so super-excellent, that, if a man
lose one, he is generally as fearful of hazarding a second as a trout of
biting twice.

But of all first things commend me to one's first uniform. No matter
that we get sick of harness, and get into mufti as soon as we can now;
there is no more exquisite pleasure than the first sight of one's self
in shako and sabretasche. How we survey ourselves in the glass, and ring
for hot water, that the handsome housemaid may see us in all our glory,
and lounge accidentally into our sisters' schoolroom, that the
governess, who is nice looking and rather flirty, may go down on the
spot before us and our scarlet and gold, chains and buttons! One's first
uniform! Oh! the exquisite sensation locked up for us in that first box
from Sagnarelli, or Bond Street!

I remember _my_ first uniform. I was eighteen--as raw a young cub as you
could want to see. I had not been licked into shape by a public school,
whose tongue may be rough, but cleans off grievances and nonsense better
than anything else. I had been in that hotbed of effeminacy, Church
principles and weak tea, a Private Tutor's, where mamma's darlings are
wrapped up, and stuffed with a little Terence and Horace to show grand
at home; and upon my life I do believe my sister Julia, aged thirteen,
was more wide awake and up to life than I was, when the governor, an old
rector, who always put me in mind of the Vicar of Wakefield, got me
gazetted to as crack a corps as any in the Line.

The ----th (familiarly known in the Service as the "Dare Devils," from
old Peninsular deeds) were just then at Malta, and with, among other
trifles, a chest protector from my father, and a recipe for
milk-arrowroot from my Aunt Matilda who lived in a constant state of
catarrh and of cure for the same, tumbled across the Bay of Biscay, and
found myself in Byron's confounded "little military hot-house," where
most military men, some time or other, have roasted themselves to death,
climbing its hilly streets, flirting with its Valetta belles, drinking
Bass in its hot verandas, yawning with ennui in its palace, cursing its
sirocco, and being done by its Jew sharpers.

From a private tutor's to a crack mess at Malta!--from a convent to a
casino could hardly be a greater change. Just at first I was as much
astray as a young pup taken into a stubble-field, and wondering what the
deuce he is to do there; but as it is a pup's nature to sniff at birds
and start them, so is it a boy's nature to snatch at the champagne of
life as soon as he catches sight of it, though you may have brought him
up on water from his cradle. I took to it, at least, like a retriever to
water-ducks, though I was green enough to be a first-rate butt for many
a day, and the practical jokes I had passed on me would have furnished
the _Times_ with food for crushers on "The Shocking State of the Army"
for a twelvemonth. My chief friend and ally, tormentor and initiator,
was a little fellow, Cosmo Grandison; in Ours he was "Little Grand" to
everybody, from the Colonel to the baggage-women. He was seventeen, and
had joined about a year. What a pretty boy he was, too! All the fair
ones in Valetta, from his Excellency's wife to our washerwomen, admired
that boy, and spoilt him and petted him, and I do not believe there was
a man of Ours who would have had heart to sit in court-martial on Little
Grand if he had broken every one of the Queen's regulations, and set
every General Order at defiance. I think I see him now--he was new to
Malta as I, having just landed with the Dare Devils, _en route_ from
India to Portsmouth--as he sat one day on the table in the mess-room as
cool as a cucumber, in spite of the broiling sun, smoking, and swinging
his legs, and settling his forage-cap on one side of his head, as
pretty-looking, plucky, impudent a young monkey as ever piqued himself
on being an old hand, and a knowing bird not to be caught by any chaff
however ingeniously prepared.

"Simon," began Little Grand (my "St. John," first barbarized by Mr. Pope
for the convenience of his dactyles and hexameters into Sinjin, being
further barbarized by this little imp into Simon)--"Simon, do you want
to see the finest woman in this confounded little pepper-box? You're no
judge of a woman, though, you muff--taste been warped, perhaps, by
constant contemplation of that virgin Aunt Minerva--Matilda, is it? all
the same."

"Hang your chaff," said I; "you'd make one out a fool."

"Precisely, my dear Simon; just what you are!" responded Little Grand,
pleasantly, "Bless your heart, I've been engaged to half a dozen women
since I joined. A man can hardly help it, you see; they've such a way of
drawing you on, you don't like to disappoint them, poor little dears,
and so you compromise yourself out of sheer benevolence. There's such a
run on a handsome man--it's a great bore. Sometimes I think I shall
shave my head, or do something to disfigure myself, as Spurina did. Poor
fellow, I feel for him! Well, Simon, you don't seem curious to know who
my beauty is?"

"One of those Mitchell girls of the Twenty-first? You waltzed with 'em
all night; but they're too tall for you, Grand."

"The Mitchell girls!" ejaculated he, with supreme scorn. "Great
maypoles! they go about with the Fusiliers like a pair of colors. On
every ball-room battlefield one's safe to see _them_ flaunting away, and
as everybody has a shot at 'em, their hearts must be pretty well riddled
into holes by this time. No, mine's rather higher game than that. My
mother's brother-in-law's aunt's sister's cousin's cousin once removed
was Viscount Twaddle, and I don't go anything lower than the Peerage."

"What, is it somebody you've met at his Excellency's?"

"Wrong again, beloved Simon. It's nobody I've met at old Stars and
Garters', though his lady-wife could no more do without me than without
her sal volatile and flirtations. No, _she_ don't go there; she's too
high for that sort of thing--sick of it. After all the European Courts,
Malta must be rather small and slow. I was introduced to her yesterday,
and," continued Little Grand, more solemnly than was his wont, "I do
assure you she's superb, divine; and I'm not very easy to please."

"What's her name?" I asked, rather impressed with this view of a lady
too high for old Stars and Garters, as we irreverently termed her
Majesty's representative in her island of Malta.

Little Grand took his pipe out of his lips to correct me with more
dignity.

"Her _title_, my dear Simon, is the Marchioness St. Julian."

"Is that an English peerage, Grand?"

"Hum! What! Oh yes, of course! What else should it be, you owl!"

Not being in a condition to decide this point, I was silent, and he went
on, growing more impressive at each phrase:

"She is splendid, really! And I'm a very _difficile_ fellow, you know;
but such hair, such eyes, one doesn't see every day in those sun-dried
Mitchells or those little pink Bovilliers. Well, yesterday, after that
confounded luncheon (how I hate all those complimentary affairs!--one
can't enjoy the truffles for talking to the ladies, nor enjoy the ladies
for discussing the truffles), I went for a ride with Conran out to Villa
Neponte. I left him there, and went down to see the overland steamers
come in. While I was waiting, I got into talk, somehow or other, with a
very agreeable, gentleman-like fellow, who asked me if I'd only just
come to Malta, and all that sort of thing--you know the introductory
style of action--till we got quite good friends, and he told me he was
living outside this wretched little hole at the Casa di Fiori, and
said--wasn't it civil of him?--said he should be very happy to see me if
I'd call any time. He gave me his card--Lord Adolphus Fitzhervey--and a
man with him called him 'Dolph.' As good luck had it, my weed went out
just while we were talking, and Fitzhervey was monstrously pleasant,
searched all over him for a fusee, couldn't find one, and asked me to go
up with him to the Casa di Fiori and get a light. Of course I did, and
he and I and Guatamara had some sherbet and a smoke together, and then
he introduced me to the Marchioness St. Julian, his sister--by Jove!
such a magnificent woman, Simon, _you_ never saw one like her, I'll
wager. She was uncommonly agreeable, too, and _such_ a smile, my boy!
She seemed to like me wonderfully--not rare that, though, you'll
say--and asked me to go and take coffee there to-night after mess, and
bring one of my chums with me; and as I like to show you life, young
one, and your taste wants improving after Aunt Minerva, you may come, if
you like. Hallo! there's Conran. I say, don't tell _him_. I don't want
any poaching on my manor."

Conran came in at that minute; he was then a Brevet-Major and Captain in
Ours, and one of the older men who spoilt Little Grand in one way, as
much as the women did in another. He was a fine, powerful fellow, with
eyes like an eagle's, and pluck like a lion's; he had a grave look, and
had been of late more silent and self-reticent than the other
roistering, debonnair, light-hearted "Dare Devils;" but though, perhaps,
tired of the wild escapades which reputation had once attributed to him,
was always the most lenient to the boy's monkey tricks, and always the
one to whom he went if his larks had cost him too dear, or if he was in
a scrape from which he saw no exit. Conran had recently come in for a
good deal of money, and there were few bright eyes in Malta that would
not have smiled kindly on him; but he did not care much for any of them.
There was some talk of a love-affair before he went to India, that was
the cause of his hard-heartedness, though I must say he did not look
much like a victim to the _grande passion_, in my ideas, which were
drawn from valentines and odes in the "Woman, thou fond and fair
deceiver" style; in love that turned its collars down and let its hair
go uncut and refused to eat, and recovered with a rapidity proportionate
to its ostentation; and I did not know that, if a man has lost his
treasure, he _may_ mourn it so deeply that he may refuse to run about
like Harpagon, crying for his _cassette_ to an audience that only laughs
at his miseries.

"Well, young ones," said Conran, as he came in and threw down his cap
and whip, "here you are, spending your hours in pipes and bad wine. What
a blessing it is to have a palate that isn't blase, and that will
swallow all wine just because it _is_ wine! That South African goes
down with better relish, Little Grand, than you'll find in Chateau
Margaux ten years hence. As soon as one begins to want touching up with
olives, one's real gusto is gone."

"Hang olives, sir! they're beastly," said Little Grand; "and I don't
care who pretends they're not. Olives are like sermons and wives,
everybody makes a wry face, and would rather be excused 'em, Major; but
it's the custom to call 'em good things, and so men bolt 'em in
complaisance, and while they hate the salt-water flavor, descant on the
delicious rose taste!"

"Quite true, Little Grand! but one takes olives to enhance the wine; and
so, perhaps, other men's sermons make one enjoy one's racier novel, and
other men's wives make one appreciate one's liberty still better. Don't
abuse olives; you'll want them figuratively and literally before you've
done either drinking or living!"

"Oh! confound it, Major," cried Little Grand, "I do hope and trust a
spent ball may have the kindness to double me up and finish me off
before then."

"You're not philosophic, my boy."

"Thank Heaven, no!" ejaculated Little Grand, piously. "I've an uncle, a
very great philosopher, beats all the sages hollow, from Bion to Buckle,
and writes in the Metaphysical Quarterly, but I'll be shot if he don't
spend so much time in trying to puzzle out what life is, that all his
has slipped away without his having _lived_ one bit. When I was staying
with him one Christmas, he began boring me with a frightful theory on
the non-existence of matter. I couldn't stand that, so I cut him short,
and set him down to the luncheon-table; and while he was full swing with
a Strasbourg pate and Comet hock, I stopped him and asked him if, with
them in his mouth, he believed in matter or not? He was shut up, of
course; bless your soul, those theorists always are, if you're down upon
'em with a little fact!"

"Such as a Strasbourg pate?--that _is_ an unanswerable argument with
most men, I believe," said Conran, who liked to hear the boy chatter.
"What are you going to do with yourself to-night, Grand?"

"I am going to--ar--hum--to a friend of mine," said Little Grand, less
glibly than usual.

"Very well; I only asked, because I would have taken you to Mrs.
Fortescue's with me; they're having some acting proverbs (horrible
exertion in this oven of a place, with the thermometer at a hundred and
twenty degrees); but if you've better sport it's no matter. Take care
what friends you make, though, Grand; you'll find some Maltese
acquaintances very costly."

"Thank you. I should say I can take care of myself," replied Little
Grand, with immeasurable scorn and dignity.

Conran laughed, struck him across the shoulders with his whip, stroked
his own moustaches, and went out again, whistling one of Verdi's airs.

"I don't want him bothering, you know," explained Little Grand; "she's
such a deuced magnificent woman!"

She was a magnificent woman, this Eudoxia Adelaida, Marchioness St.
Julian; and proud enough Little Grand and I felt when we had that soft,
jewelled hand held out to us, and that bewitching smile beamed upon us,
and that joyous presence dazzling in our eyes, as we sat in the
drawing-room of that Casa di Fiori. She was about thirty-five, I should
say (boys always worship those who might have been schoolfellows of
their mothers), tall and stately, and imposing, with the most beautiful
pink and white skin, with a fine set of teeth, raven hair, and eyes
tinted most exquisitely. Oh! she was magnificent, our Marchioness St.
Julian! Into what unutterable insignificance, what miserable, washed-out
shadows sank Stars and Garters' lady, and the Mitchell girls, and all
the belles of La Valetta, whom we hadn't thought so very bad-looking
before.

There was a young creature sitting a little out of the radiance of
light, reading; but we had no eyes for anybody except the Marchioness
St. Julian. We were in such high society, too; there was her brother,
Lord Adolphus, and his bosom Pylades, the Baron Guatamara; and there was
a big fellow, with hooked nose and very curly hair, who was introduced
to us as the Prince of Orangia Magnolia; and a little wiry fellow, with
bits of red and blue ribbon, and a star or two in his button-hole, who
was M. le Due de Saint-Jeu. We were quite dazzled with the coruscations
of so much aristocracy, especially when they talked across to each
other--so familiarly, too--of Johnnie (that we Lord Russell), and Pam,
and "old Buck" (my godfather Buckingham, Lord Adolphus explained to us),
and Montpensier and old Joinville; and chatted of when they dined at the
Tuileries, and stayed at Compiegne, and hunted at Belvoir, and spent
Christmas at Holcombe or Longleat. We were in such high society! How
contemptible appeared Mrs. Maberly's and the Fortescue soirees; how
infinitesimally small grew Charlie Ruthven, and Harry Villiers, and Grey
and Albany, and all the other young fellows who thought it such great
guns to be _au mieux_ with little Graziella, or invited to Sir George
Dashaway's. _We_ were a cut above those things now--rather!

That splendid Marchioness! There was a head for a coronet, if you like!
And how benign she was! Grand sat on the couch beside her, and I on an
ottoman on her left, and she leaned back in her magnificent toilette,
flirting her fan like a Castilian, and flashing upon us her superb eyes
from behind it; not speaking very much, but showing her white teeth in
scores of heavenly smiles, till Little Grand, the _blase_ man of
seventeen, and I the raw Moses of private tutelage, both felt that we
had never come across anything like this; never, in fact, seen a woman
worth a glance before.

She listened to us--or rather to him; I was too awestruck to advance
much beyond monosyllables--and laughed at him, and smiled encouragingly
on my _gaucherie_ (and when a boy is _gauche_, how ready he is to
worship such a helping hand!), and beamed upon us both with an
effulgence compared with which the radiance of Helen, Galatea, Oenone,
Messalina, Lais, and all the legendary beauties one reads about, must
have been what the railway night-lamps that _never_ burn are to the
prismatic luminaries of Cremorne. They were all uncommonly pleasant, all
except the girl who was reading, whom they introduced as the Signorina
da' Guari, a Tuscan, and daughter to Orangia Magnolia, with one of those
marvellously beautiful faces that one sees in the most splendid
painters' models of the Campagna, who never lifted her head scarcely,
though Guatamara and Saint-Jeu did their best to make her. But all the
others were wonderfully agreeable, and quite _fete'd_ Little Grand and
me, at which, they, being more than double our age, and seemingly at
home alike with Belgravia and Newmarket, the Faubourg and the Pytchley,
we felt to grow at least a foot each in the aroma of this Casa di Fiori.

"This is rather stupid, Doxie," began Lord Adolphus, addressing his
sister; "not much entertainment for our guests. What do you say to a
game of vingt-et-un, eh, Mr. Grandison?"

Little Grand fixed his blue eyes on the Marchioness, and said he should
be very happy, but, as for entertainment--_he_ wanted no other.

"No compliments, _petit ami_," laughed the Marchioness, with a dainty
blow of her fan. "Yes, Dolph, have vingt-et-un, or music, or anything
you like. Sing us something, Lucrezia."

The Italian girl thus addressed looked up with a passionate, haughty
flush, and answered, with wonderfully little courtesy I considered, "I
shall not sing to-night."

"Are you unwell, fairest friend?" asked the Duc de Saint-Jeu, bending
his little wiry figure over her.

She shrank away from him, and drew back, a hot color in her cheeks.

"Signore, I did not address _you_."

The Marchioness looked angry, if those divine eyes could look anything
so mortal. However, she shrugged her shoulders.

"Well, my dear Lucrezia, we can't make you sing, of course, if you
won't. I, for my part, always do any little thing I can to amuse
anybody; if I fail, I fail; I have done my best, and my friends will
appreciate the effort, if not the result. No, my dear Prince, do not
tease her," said the Marchioness to Orangia Magnolia, who was arguing, I
thought, somewhat imperatively for such a well-bred and courtly man,
with Lucrezia; "we will have vingt-et-un, and Lucrezia will give us the
delight of her voice some other evening, I dare say."

We had vingt-et-un; the Marchioness would not play, but she sat in her
rose velvet arm-chair, just behind Little Grand, putting in pretty
little speeches, and questions, and bagatelles, and calling attention to
the gambols of her darling greyhound Cupidon, and tapping Little Grand
with her fan, till, I believe, he neither knew how the game went, nor
what money he lost; and I, gazing at her, and cursing him for his facile
tongue, never noticed my naturels, couldn't have said what the maximum
was if you had paid me for it, and might, for anything I knew to the
contrary, have been seeing my life slip away with each card as Balzac's
hero with the Peau de Chagrin. Then we had sherbet, and wine, and cognac
for those who preferred it; and the Marchioness gave us permission to
smoke, and took a dainty hookah with an amber mouthpiece for her own use
(divine she did look, too, with that hookah between her ruby lips!); and
the smoke, and the cognac, and the smiles, unloosed our tongues, and we
spake like very great donkeys, I dare say, but I'm sure with not a tenth
part the wisdom that Balaam's ass developed in his brief and pithy
conversation.

However great the bosh we talked, though, we found very lenient
auditors. Fitzhervey and Guatamara laughed at all our witticisms; the
Prince of Orangia Magnolia joined in with a "Per Baccho!" and a "Bravo!"
and little Saint-Jeu wheezed, and gave a faint echo of "Mon Dieu!" and
"Tres bien, tres bien, vraiment!" and the Marchioness St. Julian laughed
too, and joined in our nonsense, and, what was much more, bent a willing
ear to our compliments, no matter how florid; and Saint-Jeu told us a
story or two, more amusing than _comme il faut_, at which the
Marchioness tried to look grave, and _did_ look shocked, but laughed for
all that behind her fan; and Lucrezia da' Guari sat in shadow, as still
and as silent as the Parian Euphrosyne on the console, though her
passionate eyes and expressive face looked the very antipodes of silence
and statuetteism, as she flashed half-shy, half-scornful, looks upon us.

If the first part of the evening had been delightful, this was something
like Paradise! It was such high society! and with just dash enough of
Mabille and coulisses laisseraller to give it piquancy. How different
was the pleasantry and freedom of these _real_ aristos, after the
humdrum dinners and horrid bores of dances that those snobs of Maberlys,
and Fortescues, and Mitchells, made believe to call Society!

What with the wine, and the smoke, and the smiles, I wasn't quite clear
as to whether I saw twenty horses' heads or one when I was fairly into
saddle, and riding back to the town, just as the first dawn was rising,
Aphrodite-like, from the far blue waves of the Mediterranean. Little
Grand was better seasoned, but even he was dizzy with the parting words
of the Marchioness, which had softly breathed the delicious passport,
"Come to-morrow."

"By Jupiter!" swore Little Grand, obliged to give relief to his
feelings--"by Jupiter, Simon! did you ever see such a glorious,
enchanting, divine, delicious, adorable creature? Faugh! who could look
at those Mitchell girls after her? Such eyes! such a smile! such a
figure! Talk of a coronet! no imperial crown would be half good enough
for her! And how pleasant those fellows are! I like that little chaffy
chap, the Duke; what a slap-up story that was about the bal de l'Opera.
And Fitzhervey, too; there's something uncommonly thorough-bred about
him, ain't there? And Guatamara's an immensely jolly fellow. Ah, myboy!
that's something like society; all the ease and freedom of real rank; no
nonsense about them, as there is about snobs. I say, what wouldn't the
other fellows give to be in our luck? I think even Conran would warm up
about her. But, Simon, she's deucedly taken with me--she is, upon my
word; and she knows how to show it you, too! By George! one could die
for a woman like that--eh?"

"Die!" I echoed, while my horse stumbled along up the hilly road, and I
swayed forward, pretty nearly over his head, while poetry rushed to my
lips, and electric sparks danced before my eyes:

    "To die for those we love! oh, there is power
    In the true heart, and pride, and joy, for this
    It is to live without the vanished light
    That strength is needed!"

"But I'll be shot if it shall be vanished light," returned Little Grand;
"it don't look much like it yet. The light's only just lit, 'tisn't
likely it's going out again directly; but she is a stunner! and----"

"A stunner!" I shouted; "she's much more than that--she's an angel, and
I'll be much obliged to you to call her by her right name, sir. She's a
beautiful, noble, loving woman; the most perfect of all Nature's
masterworks. She is divine, sir, and you and I are not worthy merely to
kiss the hem of her garment."

"Ain't we, though? I don't care much about kissing her dress; it's silk,
and I don't know that I should derive much pleasure from pressing my
lips on its texture; but her cheek----"

    "Her cheek is like the Catherine pear,
    The side that's next the sun!"

I shouted, as my horse went down in a rut. "She's like Venus rising from
the sea-shell; she's like Aurora, when she came down on the first ray of
the dawn to Tithonus; she's like Briseis----"

"Bother classics! she's like herself, and beats 'em all hollow. She's
the finest creature ever seen on earth, and I should like to see the man
who'd dare to say she wasn't. And--I say, Simon--_how much did you lose
to-night_?"

From sublimest heights I tumbled straight to bathos. The cold water of
Grand's query quenched my poetry, extinguished my electric lights, and
sobered me like a douche bath.

"I don't know," I answered, with a sense of awe and horror stealing over
me; "but I had a pony in my waistcoat-pocket that the governor had just
sent me; Guatamara changed it for me, and--_I've only sixpence left_!"

"Old boy," said Little Grand to me, the next morning, after early
parade, "come in my room, and let's make up some despatches to the
governors. You see," he continued, five minutes after,--"you see, we're
both of us pretty well cleared out; I've only got half a pony, and you
haven't a couple of fivers left. Now you know they evidently play rather
high at the Casa di Fiori; do everything _en prince_, like nobs who've
Barclays at their back; and one mustn't hang fire; horrid shabby that
would look. Besides, fancy seeming mean before _her_! So I've been
thinking that, though governors are a screwy lot generally, if we put it
to 'em clearly the sort of set we've got into, and show 'em that we
can't help, now that we are at Rome, doing as the Romans do, I should
say they could hardly help bleeding a little--eh? Now, listen how I've
put it. My old boy has a weakness for titles; he married my mother on
the relationship to Viscount Twaddles (who doesn't know of her
existence; but who does to talk about as 'our cousin'), and he'd eat up
miles of dirt for a chance of coming to a strawberry-leaf; so I think
this will touch him up beautifully. Listen! ain't I sublimely
respectful? 'I'm sure, my dear father, you wilt be delighted to learn,
that by wonderful luck, or rather I ought to say Providence, I have
fallen on my feet in Malta, and got introduced to the very highest'
(wait! let me stick a dash under very)--'the _very_ highest society
here. They are quite tip-top. To show you what style, I need only
mention Lord A. Fitzhervey, the Baron Guatamara, and the Marchioness St.
Julian, as among my kindest friends. They have been yachting in the
Levant, and are now staying in Malta: they are all most kind to me; and
I know you will appreciate the intellectual advantages that such contact
must afford me; at the same time you will understand that I can hardly
enter such circles as a snob, and you will wish your son to comport
himself as a gentleman; but gentlemanizing comes uncommon dear, I can
tell you, with all the care in the world: and if you _could_ let me have
another couple of hundred, I should vote you'--a what, Simon?--'an
out-and-out brick' is the sensible style, but I suppose 'the best and
kindest of parents' is the filial dodge, eh? There! 'With fond love to
mamma and Florie, ever your affectionate son, COSMO GRANDISON.' Bravo!
that's prime; that'll bring the yellows down, I take it. Here, old
fellow, copy it to your governor; you couldn't have a more stunning
effusion--short, and to the purpose, as cabinet councils ought to be,
and ain't. Fire away, my juvenile."

I did fire away; only I, of a more impressionable and poetic nature than
Little Grand, gave a certain vent to my feelings in expatiating on the
beauty, grace, condescension, &c., &c., of the Marchioness to my mother;
I did _not_ mention the grivois stories, the brandy, and the hookah: I
was quite sure they were the sign of that delirious ease and disregard
of snobbish etiquette and convenances peculiar to the "Upper Ten," but I
thought the poor people at home, in vicarage seclusion, would be too out
of the world to fully appreciate such revelations of our _creme de la
creme_; besides, my governor had James's own detestation of the divine
weed, and considered that men who "made chimneys of their mouths" might
just as well have the mark of the Beast at once.

Little Grand and I were hard-up for cash, and _en attendant_ the
governors' replies and remittances, we had recourse to the tender
mercies and leather bags of napoleons, ducats, florins, and doubloons of
a certain Spanish Jew, one Balthazar Miraflores, a shrivelled-skinned,
weezing old cove, who was "most happy to lent anytink to his tear young
shentlesmen, but, by Got! he was as poor as Job, he was indeed!" Whether
Job ever lent money out on interest or not, I can't say; perhaps he did,
as in the finish he ended with having quadrupled his cattle and lands,
and all his goods--a knack usurers preserve in full force to this day;
but all I can say is, that if he was not poorer than Mr. Miraflores, he
was not much to be pitied, for he, miserly old shark, lived in his dark,
dirty hole, like a crocodile embedded in Nile mud, and crushed the bones
of all unwary adventurers who came within range of his great bristling
jaws.

Money, however, Little Grand and I got out of him in plenty, only for a
little bit of paper in exchange; and at that time we didn't know that
though the paper tax would be repealed at last, there would remain, as
long as youths are green and old birds cunning, a heavy and a bitter tax
on certain bits of paper to which one's hand is put, which Mr.
Gladstone, though he achieve the herculean task of making draymen take
kindly to vin ordinaire, and the popping of champagne corks a familiar
sound by cottage-hearths, will never be able to include in his budgets,
to come among the Taxes that are Repealed!

Well, we had our money from old Balthazar that morning, and we played
with it again that night up at the Casa di Fiori. Loo this time, by way
of change. Saint-Jeu said he always thought it well to change your game
as you change your loves: constancy, whether to cards or women, was most
fatiguing. We liked Saint-Jeu very much, we thought him such a funny
fellow. They said they did not care to play much--of course they didn't,
when Guatamara had had ecarte with the Grand-Duke of Chaffsandlarkstein
at half a million a side, and Lord Dolph had broken the bank at Homburg
"just for fun--no fun to old Blanc, who farms it, though, you know." But
the Marchioness, who was doubly gracious that night, told them they must
play, because it amused her _chers petits amis_. Besides, she said, in
her pretty, imperious way, she liked to see it--it amused her. After
that, of course, there was no more hesitation; down we sat, and young
Heavystone with us.

The evening before we had happened to mention him, said he was a fellow
of no end of tin, though as stupid an owl as ever spelt his own name
wrong when he passed a military examination, and the Marchioness,
recalling the name, said she remembered his father, and asked us to
bring him to see her; which we did, fearing no rival in "old Heavy."

So down we three sat, and had the evening before over again, with the
cards, and the smiles, and wiles of our divinity, and Saint-Jeu's
stories and Fitzhervey's cognac and cigars; with this difference, that
we found loo more exciting than vingt-et-un. They played it so fast,
too, it was like a breathless heat for the Goodwood Cup, and the
Marchioness watched it, leaning alternately over Grand's, and Heavy's,
and my chair, and saying, with such naive delight, "Oh, do take miss,
Cosmo; I would risk it if I were you, Mr. Heavystone; _pray_ don't let
my naughty brother win everything," that I'd have defied the stiffest of
the Stagyrites or the chilliest of Calvinists to have kept their head
cool with that syren voice in their ear.

And La Lucrezia sat, as she had sat the night before, by the open
window, still and silent, the Cape jasmines and Southern creepers
framing her in a soft moonlight picture, contrast enough to the
brilliantly lighted room, echoing with laughter at Saint-Jeu's stories,
perfumed with Cubas and narghiles, and shrining the magnificent,
full-blown, jewelled beauty of our Marchioness St. Julian, with which we
were as rapidly, as madly, as unreasoningly, and as sentimentally in
love as any boys of seventeen or eighteen ever could be. What greater
latitude, you will exclaim, recalling certain buried-away episodes of
_your_ hobbedehoyism, when you addressed Latin distichs to that
hazel-eyed Hebe who presided over oyster patties and water ices at the
pastrycook's in Eton; or ruined your governor's young plantations
cutting the name of Adeliza Mary, your cousin, at this day a portly
person in velvet and point, whom you can now call, with a thanksgiving
in the stead of the olden tremor, Mrs. Hector M'Cutchin? Yes, we were in
love in a couple of evenings, Little Grand vehemently and unpoetically,
I shyly and sentimentally, according to our temperament, and as the fair
Emily stirred feud between the two Noble Kinsmen, so the Marchioness St.
Julian began to sow seeds of jealousy and detestation between us, sworn
allies as we were. But "_le veritable amant ne connait point_
_d'amis_," and as soon as we began to grow jealous of each other, Little
Grand could have kicked me to the devil, and I could have kicked _him_
with the greatest pleasure in life.

But I was shy, Little Grand was blessed with all the audacity
imaginable; the consequence was, that when our horses came round, and
the Maltese who acted as cherub was going to close the gates of Paradise
upon us, he managed to slip into the Marchioness's boudoir to get a
tete-a-tete farewell, while I strode up and down the veranda, not
heeding Saint-Jeu, who was telling me a tale, to which, in any other
saner moments, I should have listened greedily, but longing to execute
on Little Grand some fierce and terrible vengeance, to which the
vendetta should be baby's play. Saint-Jeu left me to put his arm over
Heavy's shoulder, and tell him if ever he came to Paris he should be
transported to receive him at the Hotel de Millefleurs, and present him
at the Tuileries; and I stood swearing to myself, and breaking off
sprays of the veranda creepers, when I heard somebody say, very softly
and low,--

"Signore, come here a moment."

It was that sweetly pretty mute whom we had barely noticed, absorbed as
we were in the worship of our maturer idol, leaning out of the window,
her cheeks flushed, her lips parted, her eyes sad and anxious. Of course
I went to her, surprised at her waking up so suddenly to any interest in
me. She put her hand on my coat-sleeve, and drew me down towards her.

"Listen to me a moment. I hardly know how to warn you, and yet I must. I
cannot sit quietly by and see you and your young friends being deceived
as so many have been before you. Do not come here again---do not----"

"Figlia mia! are you not afraid of the night-air?" said the Prince of
Orangia Magnolia, just behind us.

His words were kind, but there was a nasty glitter in his eyes.
Lucrezia answered him in passionate Italian--of which I had no
knowledge--with such fire in her eyes, such haughty gesticulation, and
such a torrent of words, that I really began to think, pretty soft
little dear as she looked, that she must positively be a trifle out of
her mind, her silence before, and her queer speech to me, seemed such
odd behavior for a young lady in such high society. She was turning to
me again when Little Grand came out into the veranda, looking flushed,
proud, and self-complaisant, as such a winner and slayer of women would
do. My hand clenched on the jasmine, I thirsted to spring on him as he
stood there with his provoking, self-contented smile, and his confounded
coxcombical air, and his cursed fair curls--_my_ hair was dust-colored
and as rebellious as porcupine-quills--and wash out in his blood or
mine----A touch of a soft hand thrilled through my every nerve and
fibre: the Marchioness was there, and signed me to her. Lucrezia, Little
Grand, and all the rest of the universe vanished from my mind at the
lightning of that angel smile and the rustle of that moire-antique
dress. She beckoned me to her into the empty drawing-room.

"Augustus" (I never thought my name could sound so sweet before), "tell
me, what was my niece Lucrezia saying to you just now?"

Now I had a sad habit of telling the truth; it was an out-of-the-world
custom taught me, among other old-fashioned things, at home, though I
soon found how inconvenient a _betise_ modern society considers it; and
I blurted the truth out here, not distinctly or gracefully, though, as
Little Grand would have done, for I was in that state of exaltation
ordinarily expressed as not knowing whether one is standing in one's
Wellingtons or not.

The Marchioness sighed.

"Ah, did she say that? Poor dear girl! She dislikes me so much, it is
quite an hallucination, and yet, O Augustus, I have been to her like an
elder sister, like a mother. Imagine how it grieves me," and the
Marchioness shed some tears--pearls of price, thought I, worthy to drop
from angel eyes--"it is a bitter sorrow to me, but, poor darling! she is
not responsible."

She touched her veiny temple significantly as she spoke, and I
understood, and felt tremendously shocked at it, that the young, fair
Italian girl was a fierce and cruel maniac, who had the heart (oh! most
extraordinary madness did it seem to me; if _I_ had lost my senses I
could never have harmed _her_!) to hate, absolutely hate, the noblest,
tenderest, most beautiful of women!

"I never alluded to it to any one," continued the Marchioness.
"Guatamara and Saint-Jeu, though such intimate friends, are ignorant of
it. I would rather have any one think ever so badly of me, than reveal
to them the cruel misfortune of my sweet Lucrezia----"

How noble she looked as she spoke!

"But you, Augustus, you," and she smiled upon me till I grew as dizzy as
after my first taste of milk-punch, "I have not the courage to let _you_
go off with any bad impression of me. I have known you a very little
while, it is true--but a few hours, indeed--yet there are affinities of
heart and soul which overstep the bounds of time, and, laughing at the
chill ties of ordinary custom, make strangers dearer than old
friends----"

The room revolved round me, the lights danced up and down, my heart beat
like Thor's hammer, and my pulse went as fast as a favorite saving the
distance. _She_ speaking so to me! My senses whirled round and round
like fifty thousand witches on a Walpurgis Night, and down I went on my
knees before my magnificent idol, raving away I couldn't tell you what
now--the essence of everything I'd ever read, from Ovid to Alexander
Smith. It must have been something frightful to hear, though Heaven
knows I meant it earnestly enough. Suddenly I was pulled up with a
jerk, as one throws an unbroken colt back on his haunches in the middle
of his first start. _I thought I heard a laugh._

She started up too. "Hush! another time! We may be overheard." And
drawing her dress from my hands, which grasped it as agonisingly as a
cockney grasps his saddle-bow, holding on for dear life over the Burton
or Tedworth country, she stooped kindly over me, and floated away before
_I_ was recovered from the exquisite delirium of my ecstatic trance.

She loved me! This superb creature loved me! There was not a doubt of
it; and how I got back to the barracks that night in my heavenly state
of mind I could never have told. All I know is, that Grand and I never
spoke a word, by tacit consent, all the way back; that I felt a fiendish
delight when I saw his proud triumphant air, and thought how little he
guessed, poor fellow!----And that Dream of One Fair Woman was as
superior in rapture to the "Dream of Fair Women" as Tokay to the "Fine
Fruity Port" that results from damsons and a decoction of sloes!

The next day there was a grand affair in Malta to receive some foreign
Prince, whose name I do not remember now, who called on us _en route_ to
England. Of course all the troops turned out, and there was an
inspection of us, and a grand luncheon and dinner, and ball, and all
that sort of thing, which a month before I should have considered prime
fun, but which now, as it kept me out of my paradise, I thought the most
miserable bore that could possibly have chanced.

"I say," said Heavy to me as I was getting into harness--"I say, don't
you wonder Fitzhervey and the Marchioness ain't coming to the palace
to-day? One would have thought Old Stars and Garters would have been
sure to ask them."

"Ask them? I should say so," I returned, with immeasurable disdain. "Of
course he asked them; but she told me she shouldn't come, last night.
She is so tired of such things. She came yachting with Fitzhervey solely
to try and have a little quiet. She says people never give her a
moment's rest when she is in Paris or London. She was sorry to
disappoint Stars and Garters, but I don't think she likes his wife much:
she don't consider her good ton."

On which information Heavy lapsed into a state of profoundest awe and
wonderment, it having been one of his articles of faith, for the month
that we had been in Malta, that the palace people were exalted demigods,
whom it was only permissible to worship from a distance, and a very
respectful distance too. Heavy had lost some twenty odd pounds the night
before--of course we lost, young hands as we were, unaccustomed to the
society of that entertaining gentleman, Pam--and had grumbled not a
little at the loss of his gold bobs. But now I could see that such a
contemptibly pecuniary matter was clean gone from his memory, and that
he would have thought the world well lost for the honor of playing cards
with people who could afford to disappoint Old Stars and Garters.

The inspection was over at last; and if any other than Conran had been
my senior officer, I should have come off badly, in all probability, for
the abominable manner in which I went through my evolutions. The day
came to an end somehow or other, though I began to think it never would,
the luncheon was ended, the bigwigs were taking their sieste, or
otherwise occupied, and I, trusting to my absence not being noticed,
tore off as hard as man can who has Cupid for his Pegasus. With a
bouquet as large as a drum-head, clasped round with a bracelet, about
which I had many doubts as to the propriety of offering to the possessor
of such jewelry as the Marchioness must have, yet on which I thought I
might venture after the scene of last night, I was soon on the veranda
of the Casa di Fiori, and my natural shyness being stimulated into a
distant resemblance of Little Grand's enviable brass, seeing the windows
of the drawing-room open, I pushed aside the green venetians and entered
noiselessly. The room did not look a quarter so inviting as the night
before, though it was left in precisely a similar state. I do not know
how it was, but those cards lying about on the floor, those sconces with
the wax run down and dripping over them, those emptied caraffes that had
diffused an odor not yet dissipated, those tables and velvet couches all
_a tort et a travers_, did not look so very inviting after all, and even
to my unsophisticated senses, scarcely seemed fit for a Peeress.

There was nobody in the room, and I walked through it towards the
boudoir; from the open door I saw Fitzhervey, Guatamara, and my
Marchioness--but oh! what horror unutterable! doing--_que pensez-vous?_
Drinking bottled porter!--and drinking bottled porter in a _peignoir_
not of the cleanliest, and with raven tresses not of the neatest!

Only fancy! she, that divine, _spirituelle_ creature, who had talked but
a few hours before of the affinity of souls, to have come down, like any
ordinary woman, to Guinness's stout, and a checked dressing-gown and
unbrushed locks! To find your prophet without his silver veil, or your
Leila dead drowned in a sack, or your Guinevere flown over with Sir
Lancelot to Boulogne, or your long-esteemed Griselda gone off with your
cockaded Jeames, is nothing to the torture, the unutterable anguish, of
seeing your angel, your divinity, your bright particular star, your
hallowed Arabian rose, come down to--Bottled Porter! Do not talk to me
of Dore, sir, or Mr. Martin's pictures; their horrors dwindle into
insignificance compared with the horror of finding an intimate liaison
between one's first love and Bottled Porter!

In my first dim, unutterable anguish, I should have turned and fled; but
my syren's voice had not lost all its power, despite the stout and dirty
dressing-gown, for she was a very handsome woman, and could stand such
things as well as anybody. She came towards me, with her softest smile,
glancing at the bracelet on the bouquet, apologizing slightly for her
neglige:--"I am so indolent. I only dress for those I care to
please--and I never hoped to see _you_ to-day." In short, magnetizing me
over again, and smoothing down my outraged sensibilities, till I ended
by becoming almost blind (_quite_ I could not manage) to the checked
_robe de chambre_ and the unbrushed bandeaux, by offering her my
braceleted bouquet, which was very graciously accepted, and even by
sharing the atrocious London porter, "that horrid stuff," she called it,
"how I hate it! but it is the only thing Sir Benjamin Brodie allows me,
I am so very delicate, you know, my sensibilities so frightfully acute!"

I had not twenty minutes to stay, having to be back at the barracks, or
risk a reprimand, which, happily, the checked _peignoir_ had cooled me
sufficiently to enable me to recollect. So I took my farewell--one not
unlike Medora's and Conrad's, Fitzhervey and Guatamara having kindly
withdrawn as soon as the bottled porter was finished--and I went out of
the house in a very blissful state, despite Guinness and the unwelcome
demi-toilette, which did not accord with Eugene Sue's and the Parlor
Library's description of the general getting-up and stunning appearance
of heroines and peeresses, "reclining, in robes of cloud-like tissue and
folds of the richest lace, on a cabriole couch of amber velvet, while
the air was filled with the voluptuous perfume of the flower-children of
the South, and music from unseen choristers lulled the senses with its
divinest harmony," &c., &c., &c.

Bottled porter and a checked dressing-gown! Say what you like, sirs, it
takes a very strong passion to overcome _those_. I have heard men
ascribe the waning of their affections after the honeymoon to the
constant sight of their wives--whom before they had only seen making
papa's coffee with an angelic air and a toilette _tiree a quatre
epingles_--everlastingly coming down too late for breakfast in a
dressing-gown; and, upon my soul, if ever I marry, which Heaven in
pitiful mercy forfend! and my wife make her appearance in one of those
confounded _peignoirs_, I will give that much-run-after and
deeply-to-be-pitied public character, the Divorce Judge, some more work
to do--I will, upon my honor.

However, the _peignoir_ had not iced me enough that time to prevent my
tumbling out of the house in as delicious an ecstasy as if I had been
eating some of Monte Cristo's "hatchis." As I went out, not looking
before me, I came bang against the chest of somebody else, who, not
admiring the rencontre, hit my cap over my eyes, and exclaimed, in not
the most courtly manner you will acknowledge, "You cursed owl, take
that, then! What are you doing here, I should like to know?"

"Confound your impudence!" I retorted, as soon as my ocular powers were
restored, and I saw the blue eyes, fair curls, and smart figure of my
ancient Iolaues, now my bitterest foe--"confound your impertinence! what
are _you_ doing here? you mean."

"Take care, and don't ask questions about what doesn't concern you,"
returned Little Grand, with a laugh--a most irritating laugh. There are
times when such cachinnations sting one's ears more than a volley of
oaths. "Go home and mind your own business, my chicken. You are a green
bird, and nobody minds you, but still you'll find it as well not to come
poaching on other men's manors."

"Other men's manors! Mine, if you please," I shouted, so mad with him I
could have floored him where he stood.

"Phew!" laughed Little Grand, screwing up his lips into a contemptuous
whistle, "you've been drinking too much Bass, my daisy; 'tis n't good
for young heads--can't stand it. Go home, innocent."

The insult, the disdainful tone, froze my blood. My heart swelled with a
sense of outraged dignity and injured manhood. With a conviction of my
immeasurable superiority of position, as the beloved of that divine
creature, I emancipated myself from the certain sort of slavery I was
generally in to Little Grand, and spoke as I conceived it to be the
habit of gentlemen whose honor had been wounded to speak.

"Mr. Grandison, you will pay for this insult. I shall expect
satisfaction."

Little Grand laughed again--absolutely grinned, the audacious young
imp--and he twelve months younger than I, too!

"Certainly, sir. If you wish to be made a target of, I shall be
delighted to oblige you. I can't keep ladies waiting. It is always Place
aux dames! with me; so, for the present, good morning!"

And off went the young coxcomb into the Casa di Fiori, and I, only
consoled by the reflection of the different reception he would receive
to what mine had been (_he_ had a braceleted bouquet, too, the young
pretentious puppy!), started off again, assuaging my lacerated feelings
with the delicious word of Satisfaction. I felt myself immeasurably
raised above the heads of every other man in Malta--a perfect hero of
romance; in fact, fit to figure in my beloved Alexandre's most
highly-wrought yellow-papered _roman_, with a duel on my hands, and the
love of a magnificent creature like my Eudoxia Adelaida. She had become
Eudoxia Adelaida to me now, and I had forgiven, if not forgotten, the
dirty dressing-gown: the bottled porter lay, of course, at Brodie's
door. If he would condemn spiritual forms of life and light to the
common realistic aliments of horrible barmaids and draymen, she could
not help it, nor I either. If angels come down to earth, and are
separated from their natural nourishment of manna and nectar, they must
take what they can get, even though it be so coarse and sublunary a
thing as Guinness's XXX, must they not, sir? Yes, I felt very _exalte_
with my affair of honor and my affair of the heart, Little Grand for my
foe, and my Marchioness, for a love. I never stopped to remember that I
might be smashing with frightful recklessness the Sixth and the Seventh
Commandments. If Little Grand got shot, he must thank himself; he should
not have insulted me; and if there was a Marquis St. Julian, why--I
pitied him, poor fellow! that was all.

Full of these sublime sensations--grown at least three feet in my
varnished boots--I lounged into the ball-room, feeling supreme pity for
ensigns who were chattering round the door, admiring those poor, pale
garrison girls. _They_ had not a duel and a Marchioness; _they_ did not
know what beauty meant--what life was!

I did not dance--I was above that sort of thing now--there was not a
woman worth the trouble in the room; and about the second waltz I saw my
would-be rival talking to Ruthven, a fellow in Ours. Little Grand did
not look glum or dispirited, as he ought to have done after the
interview he must have had; but probably that was the boy's brass. He
would never look beaten if you had hit him till he was black and blue.
Presently Ruthven came up to me. He was not over-used to his business,
for he began the opening chapter in rather school-boy fashion.

"Hallo, Gus! so you and Little Grand have been falling out. Why don't
you settle it with a little mill? A vast deal better than pistols. Duels
always seem to me no fun. Two men stand up like fools, and----"

"Mr. Ruthven," said I, very haughtily, "if your principal desires to
apologize----"

"Apologize! Bless your soul, no! But----"

"Then," said I, cutting him uncommonly short indeed, "you can have no
necessity to address yourself to me, and I beg to refer you to my friend
and second, Mr. Heavystone."

Wherewith I bowed, turned on my heel, and left him.

I did not sleep that night, though I tried hard, because I thought it
the correct thing for heroes to sleep sweetly till the clock strikes the
hour of their duel, execution, &c., or whatever it may hap. Egmont
slept, Argyle slept, Philippe Egalite, scores of them, but I could not.
Not that I funked it, thank Heaven--I never had a touch of that--but
because I was in such a delicious state of excitement, self-admiration,
and heroism, which had not cooled when I found myself walking down to
the appointed place by the beach with poor old Heavy, who was intensely
impressed by being charged with about five quires of the best
cream-laid, to be given to the Marchioness in case I fell. Little Grand
and Ruthven came on the ground at almost the same moment, Little Grand
eminently jaunty and most _confoundedly_ handsome. We took off our caps
with distant ceremony; the Castilian hidalgos were never more stately;
but, then, what Knights of the Round Table ever splintered spears for
such a woman?

The paces were measured, the pistols taken out of their case. We were
just placed, and Ruthven, with a handkerchief in his hand, had just
enumerated, in awful accents, "One! two!"--the "three!" yet hovered on
his lips, when we heard a laugh--the third laugh that had chilled my
blood in twenty-four hours. Somebody's hand was laid on Little Grand's
shoulder, and Conran's voice interrupted the whole thing.

"Hallo, young ones! what farce is this?"

"Farce, sir!" retorted Little Grand, hotly--"farce! It is no farce. It
is an affair of honor, and----"

"Don't make me laugh, my dear boy," smiled Conran; "it is so much too
warm for such an exertion. Pray, why are you and your once sworn friend
making popinjays of each other?"

"Mr. Grandison has grossly insulted me," I began, "and I demand
satisfaction. I will not stir from the ground without it, and----"

"You _sha'n't_," shouted Little Grand. "Do you dare to pretend I want to
funk, you little contemptible----"

Though it was too warm, Conran went off into a fit of laughter.

I dare say our sublimity had a comic touch in it of which we never
dreamt. "My dear boys, pray don't, it is too fatiguing. Come, Grand,
what is it all about?"

"I deny your right to question me, Major," retorted Little Grand, in a
fury. "What have you to do with it? I mean to punish that young owl
yonder--who didn't know how to drink anything but milk-and-water, didn't
know how to say bo! to a goose, till I taught him--for very abominable
impertinence, and I'll----"

"My impertinence! I like that!" I shouted. "It is your unwarrantable,
overbearing self-conceit, that makes you the laughing-stock of all the
mess, which----"

"Silence!" said Conran's still stern voice, which subdued us into
involuntary respect. "No more of this nonsense! Put up those pistols,
Ruthven. You are two hot-headed, silly boys, who don't know for what you
are quarrelling. Live a few years longer, and you won't be so eager to
get into hot water, and put cartridges into your best friends. No, I
shall not hear any more about it. If you do not instantly give me your
words of honor not to attempt to repeat this folly, as your senior
officer I shall put you under arrest for six weeks."

O Alexandra Dumas!--O Monte Cristo!--O heroes of yellow paper and pluck
invincible! I ask pardon of your shades; I must record the fact,
lowering and melancholy as it is, that before our senior officer our
heroism melted like Vanille ice in the sun, our glories tumbled to the
ground like twelfth-cake ornaments under children's fingers, and before
the threat of arrest the lions lay down like lambs.

Conran sent us back, humbled, sulky, and crestfallen, and resumed his
solitary patrol upon the beach, where, before the sun was fairly up, he
was having a shot at curlews. But if he was a little stern, he was no
less kind-hearted; and in the afternoon of that day, while he lay, after
his siesta, smoking on his little bed, I unburdened myself to him. He
did not laugh at me, though I saw a quizzical smile under his black
moustaches.

"What is your divinity's name?" he asked, when I had finished.

"Eudoxia Adelaida, Marchioness St. Julian."

"The Marchioness St. Julian! Oh!"

"Do you know her?" I inquired, somewhat perplexed by his tone.

He smiled straight out this time.

"I don't know _her_, but there are a good many Peeresses in Malta and
Gibraltar, and along the line of the Pacific, as my brother Ned, in the
_Belisarius_, will tell you. I could count two score such of my
acquaintance off at this minute."

I wondered what he meant. I dare say he knew all the Peerage; but that
had nothing to do with me, and I thought it strange that all the
Duchesses, and Countesses, and Baronesses should quit their
country-seats and town-houses to locate themselves along the line of the
Pacific.

"She's a fine woman, St. John?" he went on.

"Fine!" I reiterated, bursting into a panegyric, with which I won't bore
you as I bored him.

"Well, you're going there to-night, you say; take me with you, and we'll
see what I think of your Marchioness."

I looked at his fine figure and features, recalled certain tales of his
conquests, remembered that he knew French, Italian, German, and Spanish,
but, not being very able to refuse, acquiesced with a reluctance I could
not entirely conceal. Conran, however, did not perceive it, and after
mess took his cap, and went with me to the Casa di Fiori.

The rooms were all right again, my Marchioness was _en grande tenue_,
amber silk, black lace, diamonds, and all that sort of style. Fitzhervey
and the other men were in evening dress, drinking coffee; there was not
a trace of bottled porter anywhere, and it was all very brilliant and
presentable. The Marchioness St. Julian rose with the warmest effusion,
her dazzling white teeth showing in the sunniest of smiles, and both
hands outstretched.

"Augustus, _bien aime_, you are rather----"

"Late," I suppose she was going to say, but she stopped dead short, her
teeth remained parted in a stereotyped smile, a blankness of dismay came
over her luminous eyes. She caught sight of Conran, and I imagined I
heard a very low-breathed "Curse the fellow!" from courteous Lord Dolph.
Conran came forward, however, as if he did not notice it; there was only
that queer smile lurking under his moustaches. I introduced him to them,
and the Marchioness smiled again, and Fitzhervey almost resumed his
wonted extreme urbanity. But they were somehow or other wonderfully ill
at ease--wonderfully, for people in such high society; and I was ill at
ease too, from being only able to attribute Eudoxia Adelaida's evident
consternation at the sight of Conran to his having been some time or
other an old love of hers. "Ah!" thought I, grinding my teeth, "that
comes of loving a woman older than one's self."

The Major, however, seemed the only one who enjoyed himself. The
Marchioness was beaming on him graciously, though her ruffled feathers
were not quite smoothed down, and he was sitting by her with an intense
amusement in his eyes, alternately talking to her about Stars and
Garters, whom, by her answers, she did not seem to know so very
intimately after all, and chatting with Fitzhervey about hunting, who,
for a man that had hunted over every country, according to his own
account, seemed to confuse Tom Edge with Tom Smith, the Burton with the
Tedworth, a bullfinch with an ox-rail, in queer style, under Conran's
cross-questioning. We had been in the room about ten minutes, when a
voice, rich, low, sweet, rang out from some inner room, singing the
glorious "Inflammatus." How strange it sounded in the Casa di Fiori!

Conran started, the dark blood rose over the clear bronze of his cheek.
He turned sharply on to the Marchioness. "Good Heaven! whose voice is
that?"

"My niece's," she answered, staring at him, and touching a hand-bell. "I
will ask her to come and sing to us nearer. She has really a lovely
voice."

Conran grew pale again, and sat watching the door with the most
extraordinary anxiety. Some minutes went by; then Lucrezia entered, with
the same haughty reserve which her soft young face always wore when with
her aunt. It changed, though, when her glance fell on Conran, into the
wildest rapture I ever saw on any countenance. He fixed his eyes on her
with the look Little Grand says he's seen him wear in battle--a
contemptuous smile quivering on his face.

"Sing us something, Lucrezia dear," began the Marchioness. "You
shouldn't be like the nightingales, and give your music only to night
and solitude."

Lucrezia seemed not to hear her. She had never taken her eyes off
Conran, and she went, as dreamily as that dear little _Amina_ in the
"Sonnambula," to her seat under the jasmines in the window. For a few
minutes Conran, who didn't seem to care two straws what the society in
general thought of him, took his leave, to the relief, apparently, of
Fitzhervey and Guatamara.

As he went across the veranda--that memorable veranda!--I sitting in
dudgeon near the other window, while Fitzhervey was proposing ecarte to
Heavy, whom we had found there on our entrance, and the Marchioness had
vanished into her boudoir for a moment, I saw the Roman girl spring out
after him, and catch hold of his arm:

"Victor! Victor! for pity's sake!--I never thought we should meet like
this!"

"Nor did I."

"Hush! hush! you will kill me. In mercy, say some kinder words!"

"I can say nothing that it would be courteous to you to say."

I couldn't have been as inflexible, whatever her sins might have been,
with her hands clasped on me, and her face raised so close to mine.
Lucrezia's voice changed to a piteous wail:

"You love me no longer, then?"

"Love!" said Conran, fiercely--"love! How dare you speak to me of love?
I held you to be fond, innocent, true as Heaven; as such, you were
dearer to me than life--as dear as honor. I loved you with as deep a
passion as ever a man knew--Heaven help me! I love you now! How am I
rewarded? By finding you the companion of blackguards, the associate of
swindlers, one of the arch-intrigantes who lead on youths to ruin with
base smiles and devilish arts. Then you dare talk to me of love!"

With those passionate words he threw her off him. She fell at his feet
with a low moan. He either did not hear, or did not heed it; and I,
bewildered by what I heard, mechanically went and lifted her from the
ground. Lucrezia had not fainted, but she looked so wild, that I
believed the Marchioness, and set her down as mad; but then Conran must
be mad as well, which seemed too incredible a thing for me to
swallow--our cool Major mad!

"Where does he live?" asked Lucrezia of me, in a breathless whisper.

"He? Who?"

"Victor--your officer--Signor Conran."

"Why, he lives in Valetta, of course."

"Can I find him there?"

"I dare say, if you want him."

"Want him! Oh, Santa Maria! is not his absence death? Can I find him?"

"Oh, yes, I dare say. Anybody will show you Conran's rooms."

"Thank you."

With that, this mysterious young lady left me, and I turned in through
the window again. Heavy and the men were playing at lansquenet, that
most perilous, rapid, and bewitching of all the resistless Card Circes.
There was no Marchioness, and having done it once with impunity, I
thought I might do it again, and lifted the amber curtain that divided
the boudoir from the drawing-room. What did I behold? Oh! torture
unexampled! Oh! fiendish agony! There was Little Grand--self-conceited,
insulting, impertinent, abominable, unendurable Little Grand--on the
amber satin couch, with the Marchioness leaning her head on his
shoulder, and looking up in his thrice-confounded face with her most
adorable smile, _my_ smile, that had beamed, and, as I thought, beamed
only upon me!

If Mephistopheles had been by to tempt me, I would have sold my soul to
have wreaked vengeance on them both. Neither saw me, thank Heaven! and I
had self-possession enough not to give them the cruel triumph of
witnessing my anguish. I withdrew in silence, dropped the curtain, and
rushed to bury my wrongs and sorrows in the friendly bosom of the gentle
night. It was my first love, and I had made a fool of myself. The two
are synonymous.

How I reached the barracks I never knew. All the night long I sat
watching the stars out, raving to them of Eudoxia Adelaida, and cursing
in plentiful anathemas my late Orestes. How should I bear his impudent
grin every mortal night of my life across the mess-table? I tore up into
shreds about a ream of paper, inscribed with tender sonnets to my
faithless idol. I trampled into fifty thousand shreds a rosette off her
dress, for which, fool-like, I had begged the day before. I smashed the
looking-glass, which could only show me the image of a pitiful donkey. I
called on Heaven to redress my wrongs. Oh! curse it! never was a fellow
at once so utterly done for and so utterly done brown!

And in the vicarage, as I learnt afterwards, when my letter was received
at home, there was great glorification and pleasure. My mother and the
girls were enraptured at the high society darling Gussy was moving in;
"but then, you know, mamma, dear Gussy's manners are so gentle, so
gentleman-like, they are sure to please wherever he goes!" Wherewith my
mother cried, and dried her eyes, and cried again, over that abominable
letter copied from Little Grand's, and smelling of vilest tobacco.

Then entered a rectoress of a neighboring parish, to whom my mother and
the girls related with innocent exultation of my grand friends at Malta;
how Lord A. Fitzhervey was my sworn ally, and the Marchioness St. Julian
had quite taken me under her wing. And the rectoress, having a son of
her own, who was not doing anything so grand at Cambridge, but
principally sotting beer at a Cherryhinton public, smiled and was
wrathful, and said to her lord at dinner:

"My dear, did you ever hear of a Marchioness St. Julian?"

"No, my love, I believe not--never."

"Is there one in the peerage?"

"Can't say, my dear. Look in Burke."

So the rectoress got Burke and closed it, after deliberate inspection,
with malignant satisfaction.

"I thought not. How ridiculous those St. Johns are about that ugly boy
Augustus. As if Tom were not worth a hundred of him!"

I was too occupied with my own miseries then to think about Conran and
Lucrezia, though some time after I heard all about it. It seems, that, a
year before, Conran was on leave in Rome, and at Rome, loitering about
the Campagna one day, he made a chance acquaintance with an Italian
girl, by getting some flowers for her she had tried to reach and could
not. She was young, enthusiastic, intensely interesting, and had only an
old Roman nurse, deaf as a post and purblind, with her. The girl was
Lucrezia da Guari, and Lucrezia was lovely as one of her own myrtle or
orange flowers. Somehow or other Conran went there the next day, and the
next, and the next, and so on for a good many days, and always found
Lucrezia. Now, Conran had at bottom a touch of unstirred romance, and,
moreover, his own idea of what sort of woman he could love. Something in
this untrained yet winning Campagna flower answered to both. He was old
to trust his own discernment, and, after a month or two's walks and
talks, Conran, one of the proudest men going, offered himself and his
name to a Roman girl of whom he knew nothing, except that she seemed to
care for him as he had had a fancy to be cared for all his life. It was
a deucedly romantic thing--however, he did it! Lucrezia had told him her
father was a military officer, but somehow or other this father never
came to light, and when he called at their house--or rather
rooms--Conran always found him out, which he thought queer, but, on the
whole, rather providential, and he set the accident down to a
foreigner's roaming habits.

The day Conran had really gone the length of offering to make an unknown
Italian his wife, he went, for the first time in the evening, to Da
Guari's house. The servant showed him in unannounced to a
brightly-lighted chamber, reeking with wine and smoke, where a dozen men
were playing trente et quarante at an amateur bank, and two or three
others were gathered round what he had believed his own fair and pure
Campagna flower. He understood it all; he turned away with a curse upon
him. He wanted love and innocence; adventuresses he could have by the
score, and he was sick to death of them. From that hour he never saw her
again till he met her at the Casa di Fiori.

The next day I went to Conran while he was breakfasting, and unburdened
my mind to him. He looked ill and haggard, but he listened to me very
kindly, though he spoke of the people at the Casa di Fiori in a hard,
brief, curious manner.

"Plenty have been taken in like you, Gus," he said "I was, years ago, in
my youth, when I joined the Army. There are scores of such women, as I
told you, down the line of the Pacific, and about here; anywhere, in
fact, where the army and navy give them fresh pigeons to be gulled. They
take titles that sound grand in boys' ears, and fascinate them till
they've won all their money, and then--send them to the dogs. Your
Marchioness St. Julian's real name is Sarah Briggs."

I gave an involuntary shriek. Sarah Briggs finished me. It was the
death-stroke, that could never be got over.

"She was a ballet-girl in London," continued Conran; "then, when she was
sixteen, married that Fitzhervey, _alias_ Briggs, _alias_ Smith, _alias_
what you please, and set up in her present more lucrative employment
with her three or four confederates. Saint-Jeu was expelled from Paris
for keeping a hell in the Chaussee d'Antin, Fitzhervey was a leg at
Newmarket, Orangia Magnolia a lawyer's clerk, who was had up for
forgery, Guatamara is--by another name--a scoundrel of Rome. There is
the history of your Maltese Peerage, Gussy. Well, you'll be wider awake
next time. Wait, there is somebody at my door. Stay here a moment, I'll
come back to you."

Accordingly, I stayed in his bedroom, where I had found him writing, and
he went into his sitting-room, of which, from the diminutiveness of his
domicile, I commanded a full view, sit where I would. What was my
astonishment to see Lucrezia! I went to his bedroom door; it was locked
from the outside, so I perforce remained where I was, to, _nolens
volens_, witness the finish of last night's interview.

Stern to the last extent and deadly pale, Conran stood, too surprised to
speak, and most probably at a loss for words.

Lucrezia came up to him nevertheless with the abandonment of youth and
southern blood.

"Victor! Victor! let me speak to you. You shall listen; you shall not
judge me unheard."

"Signorina, I have judged you by only too ample evidence."

He had recovered himself now, and was as cool as needs be.

"I deny it. But you love me still?"

"Love you? More shame on me! A laugh, a compliment, a caress, a
cashmere, is as much as such women as you are worth. Love becomes
ridiculous named in the same breath with you."

She caught hold of his hand and crushed it in both her own.

"Kill me you will. Death would have no sting from your hand, but never
speak such words to _me_."

His voice trembled.

"How can I choose but speak them? You know that I believed you in Italy,
and how on that belief I offered you my name--a name never yet stained,
never yet held unworthy. I lost you, to find you in society which
stamped you for ever. A lovely fiend, holding raw boys enchained, that
your associates might rifle their purses with marked cards and cogged
dice. I hoped to have found a diamond, without spot or flaw. I
discovered my error too late; it was only glass, which all men were free
to pick up and trample on at their pleasure."

He tried to wrench his hand away, but she would not let it go.

"Hush! hush! listen to me first. If you once thought me worthy of your
love, you may, surely, now accord me pity. I shall not trouble you long.
After this, you need see me no more. I am going back to my old convent.
You and the world will soon forget me, but I shall remember you, and
pray for you, as dearer than my own soul."

Conran's head was bent down now, and his voice was thick, as he answered
briefly,

"Go on."

This scene half consoled me for Eudoxia Adelaida--(I mean, O Heavens,
Sarah Briggs!)--it was so exquisitely romantic, and Conran and Lucrezia
wouldn't have done at all badly for Monte Cristo and that dear little
Haidee. I was fearfully poetic in those days.

"When I met you in Rome," Lucrezia went on, in obedience to his
injunction, "two years ago, you remember I had only left my convent and
lived with my father but a month or two. I told you he was an officer. I
only said what I had been told, and I knew no more than you that he was
the keeper of a gambling house."

She shuddered as she paused, and leaned her forehead on Conran's hand.
He did not repulse her, and she continued, in her broken, simple
English:

"The evening you promised me what I should have needed to have been an
angel to be worthy of--your love and your name--that very evening, when
I reached home, my father bade me dress for a soiree he was going to
give. I obeyed him, of course. I knew nothing but what he told me, and I
went down, to find a dozen young nobles and a few Englishmen drinking
and playing on a table covered with green cloth. Some few of them came
up to me, but I felt frightened; their looks, their tones, their florid
compliments, were so different to yours. But my father kept his eye on
me, and would not let me leave. While they were leaning over my chair,
and whispering in my ear, _you_ came to the door of the salon, and I
went towards you, and you looked cold, and harsh, as I had never seen
you before, and put me aside, and turned away without a word. Oh,
Victor! why did you not kill me then? Death would have been kindness.
Your Othello was kinder to Desdemona; he slew her--he did not _leave_
her. From that hour I never saw you, and from that hour my father
persecuted me because I would never join in his schemes, nor enter his
vile gaming-rooms. Yet I have lived with him, because I could not get
away. I have been too carefully watched. We Italians are not free, like
your happy English girls. A few weeks ago we were compelled to leave
Rome, the young Contino di Firenze had been stilettoed leaving my
father's rooms, and he could stay in Italy no longer. We came here, and
joined that hateful woman, who calls herself Marchioness St. Julian;
and, because she could not bend me to her will, gives out that I am her
niece, and mad! I wonder I am _not_ mad, Victor. I wish hearts would
break, as the romancers make them; but how long one suffers and lives
on! Oh, my love, my soul, my life, only say that you believe me, and
look kindly at me once again, then I will never trouble you again, I
will only pray for you. But believe me, Victor. The Mother Superior of
my convent will tell you it is the truth that I speak. Oh, for the love
of Heaven, believe me! Believe me or I shall die!"

It was not in the nature of man to resist her; there was truth in the
girl's voice and face, if ever truth walked abroad on earth. And Conran
did believe her, and told her so in a few unconnected words, lifting her
up in his arms, and vowing, with most unrighteous oaths, that her father
should never have power to persecute her again as long as he himself
lived to shelter and take care of her.

I was so interested in my Monte Cristo and Haidee (it was so like a
chapter out of a book), that I entirely forgot my durance vile, and my
novel and excessively disgraceful, though enforced, occupation of spy;
and there I stayed, alternating between my interest in them and my
agonies at the revelations concerning my Eudoxia Adelaida--oh, hang it!
I mean Sarah Briggs--till, after a most confounded long time, Conran saw
fit to take Lucrezia off, to get asylum for her with the Colonel's wife
for a day or two, that "those fools might not misconstrue her." By which
comprehensive epithet he, I suppose, politely designated "Ours."

Then I went my ways to my own room, and there I found a scented,
mauve-hued, creamy billet-doux, in uncommon bad handwriting, though,
from my miserable Eudoxia Adelaida to the "friend and lover of her
soul." Confound the woman!--how I swore at that daintily-perfumed and
most vilely-scrawled letter. To think that where that beautiful
signature stretched from one side to the other--"Eudoxia Adelaida St.
Julian"--there _ought_ to have been that short, vile, low-bred, hideous,
Billingsgate cognomen of "Sarah Briggs!"

In the note she reproached me--the wretched hypocrite!--for my departure
the previous night, "without one farewell to your Eudoxia, O cruel
Augustus!" and asked me to give her a rendezvous at some vineyards lying
a little way off the Casa di Fiori, on the road to Melita. Now, being a
foolish boy, and regarding myself as having been loved and wronged,
whereas I had only been playing the very common _role_ of pigeon, I
could not resist the temptation of going, just to take one last look of
that fair, cruel face, and upbraid her with being the first to sow the
fatal seeds of lifelong mistrust and misery in my only too fond and
faithful, &c. &c. &c.

So, at the appointed hour, just when the sun was setting over the
far-away Spanish shore, and the hush of night was sinking over the
little, rocky, peppery, military-thick, Mediterranean isle, I found
myself _en route_ to the vineyards; which, till I came to Malta, had
been one of my delusions, Idea picturing them in wreaths and avenues,
Reality proving them hop-sticks and parched earth. I drew near; it was
quite dark now, the sun had gone to sleep under the blue waves, and the
moon was not yet up. Though I knew she was Sarah Briggs, and an
adventuress who had made game of me, two facts that one would fancy
might chill the passion out of anybody, so mad was I about that woman,
that, if I had met her then and there, I should have let her wheedle me
over, and gone back to the Casa di Fiori with her and been fleeced
again: I am sure I should, sir, and so would you, if, at eighteen, new
to life, you had fallen in with Eudox----pshaw!--with Sarah Briggs, my
Marchioness St Julian.

I drew near the vineyards: my heart beat thick, I could not see, but I
was certain I heard the rustle of her dress, caught the perfume of her
hair. All her sins vanished: how could I upbraid her, though she were
three times over Sarah Briggs? Yes, she was coming; I _felt_ her near;
an electric thrill rushed through me as soul met soul. I heard a
murmured "Dearest, sweetest!" I felt the warm clasp of two arms, but--a
cold row of undress waistcoat-buttons came against my face, and a voice
I knew too well cried out, as I rebounded from him, impelled thereto by
a not gentle kick,--

"The devil! get out! Who the deuce are you?"

We both stopped for breath. At that minute up rose the silver moon, and
in its tell-tale rays we glared on one another, I and Little Grand.

That silence was sublime: the pause between Beethoven's andante
allegro--the second before the Spanish bull rushes upon the torreador.

"You little miserable wretch!" burst out Grand, slowly and terribly;
"you little, mean, sneaking, spying, contemptible milksop! I should like
to know what you mean by bringing out your ugly phiz at this hour, when
you used to be afraid of stirring out for fear of nurse's bogies? And to
dare to come lurking after me!"

"After you, Mr. Grandison!" I repeated, with grandiloquence. "Really you
put too much importance on your own movements. I came by appointment to
meet the Marchioness St. Julian, whom, I presume, as you are well
acquainted with her, you know in her real name of Sarah Briggs, and
to----"

"Sarah Briggs!--_you_ come by appointment?" stammered Little Grand.

"Yes, sir; if you disbelieve my word of honor, I will condescend to show
you my invitation."

"You little ape!" swore Grand, coming back to his previous wrath; "it is
a lie, a most abominable, unwarrantable lie! _I_ came by appointment,
sir; you did no such thing. Look there!"

And he flaunted before my eyes in the moonlight the fac-simile of my
letter, verbatim copy, save that in his Cosmo was put in the stead of
Augustus.

"Look there!" said I, giving him mine.

Little Grand snatched it, read it over once, twice, thrice, then drooped
his head, with a burning color in his face, and was silent.

The "knowing hand" was done!

We were both of us uncommonly quiet for ten minutes, neither of us liked
to be the first to give in.

At last Little Grand looked up and held out his hand, no more nonsense
about him now.

"Simon, you and I have been two great fools; we can't chaff one another.
She's a cursed actress, and--let's make it up, old boy."

We made it up accordingly--when Little Grand was not conceited he was a
very jolly fellow--and then I gave him my whole key to the mysteries,
intricacies, and charms of our Casa di Fiori. We could not chaff one
another, but poor Little Grand was pitiably sore then, and for long
afterwards. He, the "old bird," the cool hand, the sharp one of Ours, to
have been done brown, to be the joke of the mess, the laugh of all the
men, down to the weest drummer-boy! Poor Little Grand! He was too done
up to swagger, too thoroughly angry with himself to swear at anybody
else. He only whispered to me, "Why the dickens could she want you and
me to meet our selves?"

"To give us a finishing hoax, I suppose," I suggested.

Little Grand drew his cap over his eyes, and hung his head down in
abject humiliation.

"I suppose so. What fools we have been, Simon! And, I say, I've borrowed
three hundred of old Miraflores, and it's all gone up at that devilish
Casa; and how I shall get it from the governor, Heaven knows, for _I_
don't."

"I'm in the same pickle, Grand," I groaned. "I've given that old rascal
notes of hand for two hundred pounds, and, if it don't drop from the
clouds, I shall never pay it. Oh, I say, Grand, love comes deucedly
expensive."

"Ah!" said he, with a sympathetic shiver, "think what a pair of hunters
we might have had for the money!" With which dismal and remorseful
remembrance the old bird, who had been trapped like a young pigeon,
swore mightily, and withdrew into humbled and disgusted silence.

Next morning we heard, to our comfort--what lots of people there always
are to tell us how to lock our stable-door when our solitary mare has
been stolen--that, with a gentle hint from the police, the Marchioness
St. Julian, with her _confreres_, had taken wing to the Ionian Isles,
where, at Corfu or Cephalonia, they will re-erect the Casa di Fiori, and
glide gently on again from vingt-et-un to loo, and from loo to
lansquenet, under eyes as young and blinded as our own. They went
without Lucrezia. Conran took her into his own hands. Any other man in
the regiment would have been pretty well ridiculed at taking a bride out
of the Casa di Fiori; but the statements made by the high-born Abbess of
her Roman convert were so clear, and so to the girl's honor, and he had
such a way of holding his own, of keeping off liberties from himself and
anything belonging to him, and was, moreover, known to be of such
fastidious honor, that his young wife was received as if she had been a
Princess in her own right. With her respected parent Conran had a brief
interview previous to his flight from Malta, in which, with a few gentle
hints, he showed that worthy it would be wiser to leave his daughter
unmolested for the future, and I doubt if Mr. Orangia Magnolia, _alias_
Pepe Guari, would know his own child in the joyous, graceful,
daintily-dressed mistress of Conran's handsome Parisian establishment.

Little Grand and I suffered cruelly. We were the butts of the mess for
many a long month afterwards, when every idiot's tongue asked us on
every side after the health of the Marchioness St. Julian? when we were
going to teach them lansquenet? how often we heard from the aristocratic
members of the Maltese Peerage? with like delightful pleasantries, which
the questioners deemed high wit. We paid for it, too, to that arch old
screw Balthazar; but I doubt very much if the money were not well lost,
and the experience well gained. It cured me of my rawness and Little
Grand of his self-conceit, the only thing that had before spoilt that
good-hearted, quick-tempered, and clever-brained little fellow. Oh,
Pater and Materfamilias, disturb not yourselves so unnecessarily about
the crop of wild oats which your young ones are sowing broadcast. Those
wild oats often spring from a good field of high spirit, hot courage,
and thoughtless generosity, that are the sign and basis of nobler
virtues to come, and from them very often rise two goodly
plants--Experience and Discernment.




LADY MARABOUT'S TROUBLES:

OR,

THE WORRIES OF A CHAPERONE.

IN THREE SEASONS.


SEASON THE FIRST.--THE ELIGIBLE.

One of the kindest-natured persons that I ever knew on this earth, where
kind people are as rare as black eagles or red deer, is Helena, Countess
of Marabout, _nee_ De Boncoeur. She has foibles, she has weaknesses--who
amongst us has not?--she will wear her dresses _decolletees_, though
she's sixty, if Burke tells us truth; she will rouge and practise a
thousand other little toilette tricks, but they are surely innocent,
since they deceive nobody; and if you wait for a woman who is no
artifices, I am afraid you shall have to forswear the sex _in toto_, my
friends, and come growling back to your Diogenes' tub in the Albany,
with your lantern still lit every day of your lives.

Lady Marabout is a very charming person. As for her weaknesses, she is
all the nicer for them, to my taste. I like people with weaknesses
myself; those without them do look so dreadfully scornfully and
unsympathizingly upon one from the altitude of their superiority, _de
toute la hauteur de sa betise_, as a witty Frenchman says. Humanity was
born with weaknesses. If I were a beggar, I might hope for a coin from
a man with some; a man without any, I know, would shut up his
porte-monnaie, with an intensified click, to make me feel trebly
envious, and consign me to D 15 and his truncheon, on the score of
vagrancy.

Lady Marabout is a very charming person, despite her little foibles, and
she gives very pleasant little dinners, both at her house in Lowndes
Square and in her jointure villa at Twickenham, where the bad odors of
Thames are drowned in the fragrance of the geraniums, piled in great
heaps of red, white, and variegated blossom in the flowerbeds on the
lawn. She has been married twice, but has only one son, by her first
union--Carruthers, of the Guards--a very good fellow, whom his mother
thinks perfection, though if she _did_ know certain scenes in her adored
Philip's life, the good lady might hesitate before she endowed her son
with all the cardinal virtues as she does at the present moment. She has
no daughters, therefore you will wonder to hear that the prime misery,
burden, discomfort, and worry of her life is chaperonage. But so it is.

Lady Marabout is the essence of good nature; she can't say No: that
unpleasant negative monosyllable was never heard to issue from her full,
smiling, kind-looking lips: she is in a high position, she has an
extensive circle, thanks to her own family and those of the baronet and
peer she successively espoused; and some sister, or cousin, or friend,
is incessantly hunting her up to bring out their girls, and sell them
well off out of hand; young ladies being goods extremely likely to hang
_on_ hand nowadays.

"Of all troubles, the troubles of a chaperone are the greatest," said
Lady Marabout to me at the wedding dejeuner of one of her protegees. "In
the first place, one looks on at others' campaigns instead of conducting
them one's self; secondly, it brings back one's own bright days to see
the young things' smiles and blushes, like that girl's just now (I do
hope she'll be happy!); and thirdly, one has all the responsibility, and
gets all the blame if anything goes wrong. I'll never chaperone anybody
again now I have got rid of Leila."

So does Lady Marabout say twenty times; yet has she invariably some
young lady under her wing, whose relatives are defunct, or invalided, or
in India, or out of society somehow; and we all of us call her house The
Yard, and her (among ourselves) not Lady Marabout but Lady Tattersall.
The worries she has in her chaperone's office would fill a folio,
specially as her heart inclines to the encouragement of romance, but her
reason to the banishment thereof; and while her tenderness suffers if
she thwarts her protegees' leanings, her conscience gives her neuralgic
twinges if she abets them to unwise matches while under her dragonnage.

"What's the matter, mother?" asked Carruthers, one morning. He's very
fond of his mother, and will never let any one laugh at her in his
hearing.

"Matter? Everything!" replied Lady Marabout, concisely and
comprehensively, as she sat on the sofa in her boudoir, with her white
ringed hands and her _bien conserve_ look, and her kindly pleasant eyes
and her rich dress; one could see what a pretty woman she has been, and
that Carruthers may thank her for his good looks. "To begin with,
Felicie has been so stupid as to marry; married the greengrocer (whom
she will ruin in a week!), and has left me to the mercies of a stupid
woman who puts pink with cerise, mauve with magenta, and sky-blue with
azureline, and has no recommendation except that she is as ugly as the
Medusa, and so will not tempt you to----"

"Make love to her, as I did to Marie," laughed Carruthers. "Marie was a
pretty little dear; it was very severe in you to send her away."

Lady Marabout tried hard to look severe and condemnatory, but failed
signally, nature had formed the smooth brow and the kindly eyes in far
too soft a mould.

"Don't jest about it, Philip; you know it was a great pain, annoyance,
and scandal to me. Well! Felicie is gone, and Oakes was seen pawning
some of my Mechlin the other day, so I have been obliged to discharge
_her_; and they both of them suited me so well! Then Bijou is ill, poor
little pet----"

"With repletion of chicken panada?"

"No; Bijou isn't such a gourmet. You judge him by yourself, I suppose;
men always do! Then Lady Hautton told me last night that you were the
wildest man on town, and at forty----"

"You think I ought to _ranger_? So I will, my dear mother, some day; but
at present I am--so very comfortable; it would be a pity to alter! What
pains one's friends are always at to tell unpalatable things; if they
would but be only half so eager to tell us the pleasant ones! I shall
expect you to cut Lady Hautton if she speak badly of me, I can't afford
to lose your worship, mother!"

"My worship? How conceited you are, Philip! As for Lady Hautton, I
believe she does dislike you, because you did not engage yourself to
Adelina, and were selected aide-de-camp to her Majesty, instead of
Hautton; still, I am afraid she spoke too nearly the truth."

"Perhaps Marie has entered her service and told tales."

But Lady Marabout wouldn't laugh, she always looks very grave about
Marie.

"My worst trouble," she began hastily, "is that your aunt Honiton is too
ill to come to town; no chance of her being well enough to come at all
this season; and of course the charge of Valencia has devolved on me.
You know how I hate chaperoning, and I did _so_ hope I should be free
this year; besides, Valencia is a great responsibility, very great; a
girl of so much beauty always is; there will be sure to be so many men
about her at once, and your aunt will expect me to marry her so very
well. It is excessively annoying."

"My poor dear mother!" cried Carruthers. "I grant you _are_ an object of
pity. You are everlastingly having young fillies sent you to break in,
and they want such a tight hand on the ribbons."

"And a tight hand, as you call it, I never had, and never shall have,"
sighed Lady Marabout. "Valencia will be no trouble to me on that score,
however; she has been admirably educated, knows all that is due to her
position, and will never give me a moment's anxiety by any imprudence or
inadvertence. But she is excessively handsome, and a beauty is a great
responsibility when she first comes out."

"Val was always a handsome child, if I remember. I dare say she is a
beauty now. When is she coming up? because I'll tell the men to mark the
house and keep clear of it," laughed Carruthers. "You're a dreadfully
dangerous person, mother; you have always the best-looking girl in town
with you. Fulke Nugent says if he should ever want such a thing as a
wife when he comes into the title, he shall take a look at the Marabout
Yearlings Sale."

"Abominably rude of you and your friends to talk me over in your turf
slang! I wish _you_ would come and bid at the sale, Philip; I should
like to see you married--well married, of course."

"My beloved mother!" cried Carruthers. "Leave me in peace, if you
please, and catch the others if you can. There's Goodey, now; every
chaperone and debutante in London has set traps for him for the last I
don't know how many years; wouldn't he do for Valencia?"

"Goodwood? Of course he would; he would do for any one; the Dukedom's
the oldest in the peerage. Goodwood is highly eligible. Thank you for
reminding me, Philip. Since Valencia is coming, I must do my best for
her." Which phrase meant with Lady Marabout that she must be very
lynx-eyed as to settlements, and a perfect dragon to all detrimental
connections, must frown with Medusa severity on all horrors of younger
sons, and advocate with all the weight of personal experience the
advantage and agremens of a good position, in all of which
practicalities she generally broke down, with humiliation unspeakable,
immediately her heart was enlisted and her sympathies appealed to on the
enemy's side. She sighed, played with her bracelets thoughtfully, and
then, heroically resigning herself to her impending fate, brightened up
a little, and asked her son to go and choose a new pair of
carriage-horses for her.

To look at Lady Marabout as she sat in her amber satin couch that
morning, pleasant, smiling, well-dressed, well-looking, with the grace
of good birth and the sunniness of good nature plainly written on her
smooth brow and her kindly eyes, and wealth--delicious little
god!--stamping itself all about her, from the diamond rings on her soft
white fingers to the broidered shoe on the feet, of whose smallness she
was still proud, one might have ignorantly imagined her to be the most
happy, enviable, well-conditioned, easy-going dowager in the United
Kingdom. But appearances are deceptive, and if we believe what she
constantly asserted, Lady Marabout was very nearly worn into her grave
by a thousand troubles; her almshouses, whose roofs would eternally blow
off with each high wind; her dogs, whom she would overfeed; her ladies'
maids, who were only hired to steal, tease, or scandalize her; the
begging letter-writers, who distilled tears from her eyes and sovereigns
from her purse, let Carruthers disclose their hypocrisies as he might;
the bolder begging-letters, written by hon. secs., and headed by names
with long handles, belonging to Pillars of the State and Lights of the
Church, which compelled her to make a miserable choice between a
straitened income or a remorseful conscience--tormented, in fine, with
worries small and large, from her ferns, on which she spent a large
fortune, and who drooped maliciously in their glass cases, with an
ill-natured obstinacy characteristic of desperately-courted individuals,
whether of the floral or the human world, to those marriageable young
ladies whom she took under her wing to usher into the great world, and
who were certain to run counter to her wishes and overthrow her plans,
to marry ill, or not marry at all, or do something or other to throw
discredit on her chaperoning abilities. She was, she assured us,
_petrie_ with worries, small and large, specially as she was so
eminently sunny, affable, and radiant a looking person, that all the
world took their troubles to her, selected her as their confidante, and
made her the repository of their annoyances; but her climax of misery
was to be compelled to chaperone, and as a petition for some debutante
to be intrusted to her care was invariably made each season, and "No"
was a monosyllable into which her lips utterly refused to form
themselves, each season did her life become a burden to her. There was
never any rest for the soul of Helena, Countess of Marabout, till her
house in Lowndes Square was shut up, and her charges off her hand, and
she could return in peace to her jointure-villa at Twickenham, or to
Carruthers' old Hall of Deepdene, and among her flowers, her birds, and
her hobbies, throw off for a while the weary burden of her worries as a
chaperone.

"Valencia will give me little trouble, I hope. So admirably brought-up a
girl, and so handsome as she is, will be sure to marry soon, and marry
well," thought Lady Marabout, self-congratulatorily, as she dressed for
dinner the day of her niece's arrival in town, running over mentally the
qualifications and attractions of Valencia Valletort, while Felicie's
successor, Mademoiselle Despreaux, whose crime was then to put pink
with cerise, mauve with magenta, and sky-blue with azureline, gave the
finishing touches to her toilette--"Valencia will give me no trouble;
she has all the De Boncoeur beauty, with the Valletort dignity. Who
would do for her? Let me see; eligible men are not abundant, and those
that are eligible are shy of being marked as Philip would say--perhaps
from being hunted so much, poor things! There is Fulke Nugent, heir to a
barony, and his father is ninety--very rich, too--he would do; and
Philip's friend, Caradoc, poor, I know, but their Earldom's the oldest
peerage patent. There is Eyre Lee, too; I don't much like the man,
supercilious and empty-headed; still he's an unobjectionable alliance.
And there is Goodwood. Every one has tried for Goodwood, and failed. I
should like Valencia to win him; he is decidedly the most eligible man
in town. I will invite him to dinner. If he is not attracted by
Valencia's beauty, nothing can attract him----_Despreaux! comme vous
etes bete! Otez ces panaches, de grace!_"

"Valencia will give me no trouble; she will marry at once," thought Lady
Marabout again, looking across the dinner-table at her niece.

If any young patrician might be likely to marry at once, it was the Hon.
Valencia Valletort; she was, to the most critical, a beauty: her figure
was perfect, her features were perfect, and if you complained that her
large glorious eyes were a trifle too changeless in expression, that her
cheek, exquisitely independent of Marechale powder, Blanc de Perle, and
liquid rouge, though it was, rarely varied with her thoughts and
feelings, why, you were very exacting, my good fellow, and should
remember that nothing is quite perfect on the face of the earth--not
even a racer or a woman--and that whether you bid at the Marabout
yearling sales or the Rawcliffe, if you wish to be pleased you'd better
leave a hypercritical spirit behind you, and not expect to get _all_
points to your liking. The best filly will have something faulty in
temper or breeding, symmetry or pace, for your friend Jack Martingale to
have the fun of pointing out to you when your money is paid and the
filly in your stall; and your wife will have the same, only Martingale
will point _her_ flaws out behind your back, and only hint them to you
with an all-expressive "Not allowed to smoke in the dining-room _now_!"
"A little bit of a flirt, madame--n'est-ce pas, Charlie?" "Reins kept
rather tight, eh, old fellow?" or something equally ambiguous,
significant, and unpleasant.

"I must consider, Philip, I have brought out the beauty of the season,"
said Lady Marabout to Carruthers, eying her niece as she danced at her
first ball at the Dowager-Duchess of Amandine's, and beginning to
brighten up a little under the weight of her responsibilities.

"I think you have, mother. Val's indisputably handsome. You must tell
her to make play with Goodwood or Nugent."

Lady Marabout unfurled her fan, and indignantly interrupted him:

"My dear Philip! do you suppose I would teach Valencia, or any girl
under my charge, to lay herself out for any man, whoever or whatever it
might be? I trust your cousin would not stoop to use such manoeuvres,
did I even stoop to counsel them. Depend upon it, Philip, it is
precisely those women who try to 'make play,' as you call it, with your
sex that fail most to charm them. It is abominable the way in which you
men talk, as if we all hunted you down, and would drive you to St.
George's _nolens volens_!"

"So you would, mother," laughed Carruthers. "We 'eligible men' have a
harder life of it than rabbits in a warren, with a dozen beagles after
them. From the minute we're of age we're beset with traps for the
unwary, and the spring-guns are so dexterously covered, with an
inviting, innocent-looking turf of courtesies and hospitalities that
it's next to a mural impossibility to escape them, let one retire into
one's self, keep to monosyllables through all the courses of all the
dinners and all the turns of all the valses, and avoid everything
'compromising,' as one may. I've suffered, and can tell you. I suffer
still, though I believe and hope they are beginning to look on me as an
incurable, given over to the clubs, the coulisses, and the cover-side.
There's a fellow that's known still more of the _peines fortes et dures_
than I. Goodwood's coming to ask for an introduction to Val, I would
bet."

He was coming for that purpose, and, though Lady Marabout had so
scornfully and sincerely repudiated her son's counsel relative to making
play with Goodwood, blandly ignorant of her own weaknesses like a good
many other people, Lady Marabout was not above a glow of chaperone
gratification when she saw the glance of admiration which the Pet
Eligible of the season bestowed on Valencia Valletort. Goodwood was a
good-looking fellow--a clever fellow--though possibly he shone best
alone at a mess luncheon, in a chat driving to Hornsey Wood, round the
fire in a smoking-room, on a yacht deck, or anywhere where ladies of the
titled world were not encountered, he having become afraid of them by
dint of much persecution, as any October partridge of a setter's nose.
He was passably good-looking, ordinarily clever, a very good fellow as I
say, and--he was elder son of his Grace of Doncaster, which fact would
have made him the desired of every unit of the _beau sexe_, had he been
hideous as the Veiled Prophet or Brutal Gilles de Rayes. The Beauty
often loves the Beast in our day, as in the days of fairy lore. We see
that beloved story of our petticoat days not seldom acted out, and when
there is no possibility of personal transmogrification and amelioration
for the Beast moreover; only--the Beauty has always had whispered in
her little ear the title she will win, and the revenues she will gain,
and the cloth of gold she will wear, if she caresses Bruin the
enamoured, swears his ugly head is god-like, and vows fidelity
unswerving!

Goodwood was no uncouth Bruin, and he had strawberry-leaves in his gift;
none of your lacquered, or ormolu, or silver-gilt coronets, such as are
cast about nowadays with a liberality that reminds one of flinging a
handful of halfpence from a balcony, where the nimblest beggar is first
to get the prize; but of the purest and best gold; and Goodwood had been
tried for accordingly by every woman he came across for the last dozen
years. Women of every style and every order had primed all their rifles,
and had their shot at him, and done their best to make a centre and
score themselves as winner: belles and bas bleus, bewitching widows and
budding debutantes, fast young ladies who tried to capture him in the
hunting-field by clearing a bullfinch; saintly young ladies, who
illuminated missals, and hinted they would like to take his conversion
in hand; brilliant women, who talked at him all through a long rainy
day, when Perthshire was flooded, and the black-fowl unattainable; showy
women, who _pose'd_ for him whole evenings in their opera-boxes, whole
mornings in their boudoir--all styles and orders had set at him, till he
had sometimes sworn in his haste that all women were man-traps, and that
he wished to Heaven he were a younger son in the Foreign Office, or a
poor devil in the Line, or anything, rather than what he was; the Pet
Eligible of his day.

"Goodwood is certainly struck with her," thought Lady Marabout, as
Despreaux disrobed her that night, running over with a retrogressive
glance Valencia Valletort's successes at her first ball. "Very much
struck, indeed, I should say. I will issue cards for another 'At Home.'
As for 'making play' with him, as Philip terms it, of course that is
only a man's nonsense. Valencia will need none of those trickeries, I
trust; still, it is any one's duty to make the best alliance possible
for such a girl, and--dear Adeliza would be very pleased."

With which amiable remembrance of her sister (whom, conceiving it her
duty to love, Lady Marabout persuaded herself that she _did_ love, from
a common feminine opticism that there's an eleventh commandment which
makes it compulsory to be attached to relatives _n'importe_ of whatever
degree of disagreeability, though Lady Honiton was about the most odious
hypochondriac going, in a perpetual state of unremitting battle with the
whole outer world in general, and allopathists, homoeopathists, and
hydropathists in especial), the most amiable lady in all Christendom
bade Despreaux bring up her cup of coffee an hour earlier in the
morning, she had so much to do! asked if Bijou had had some panada set
down by his basket in case he wanted something to take in the night;
wished her maid good night, and laid her head on her pillow as the dawn
streamed through the shutters, already settling what bridal presents she
should give her niece Valencia, when she became present Marchioness of
Goodwood and prospective Duchess of Doncaster before the altar rails of
St. George's.

"That's a decidedly handsome girl, that cousin of yours, Phil," said
Goodwood, on the pavement before her Grace of Amandine's, in Grosvenor
Place, at the same hour that night.

"I think she _is_ counted like me!" said Carruthers. "Of course she's
handsome; hasn't she De Boncoeur blood in her, my good fellow? We're all
of us good-looking, always have been, thank God! If you're inclined to
sacrifice, Goodwood, now's your time, and my mother'll be delighted.
She's brought out about half a million of debutantes, I should say, in
her time, and all of 'em have gone wrong, somehow; wouldn't go off at
all, like damp gunpowder, or would go off too quick in the wrong
direction, like a volunteer's rifle charge; married ignominiously, or
married obstinately, or never excited pity in the breast of any man, but
had to retire to single-blessedness in the country, console themselves
with piety and an harmonium, and spread nets for young clerical victims.
Give her a triumph at last, and let her have glory for once, as a
chaperone, in catching _you_!"

Goodwood gave a little shiver, and tried to light a Manilla, which
utterly refused to take light, for the twelfth time in half a minute.

"Hold your tongue! If the Templars' Order were extant, wouldn't I take
the vows and bless them! What an unspeakable comfort and protection that
white cross would be to us, Phil, if we could stick it on our coats, and
know it would say to every woman that looked at us, 'No go, my pretty
little dears--not to be caught!' Marriage! I can't remember any time
that that word wasn't my bugbear. When I was but a little chicken, some
four years old, I distinctly remember, when I was playing with little
Ida Keane on the terrace, hearing her mother simper to mine, 'Perhaps
darling Goodwood may marry my little Ida some day, who knows?' I never
would play with Ida afterwards; instinct preserved me; she's six or
seven-and thirty now, and weighs ten stone, I'm positive. Why _won't_
they let us alone? The way journalists and dowagers, the fellows who
want to write a taking article, and the women who want to get rid of a
taking daughter, all badger us, in public and private, about marriage
just now, is abominable, on my life; the affair's _ours_, I should say,
not theirs, and to marry isn't the ultimatum of a man's existence, nor
anything like it."

"I hope not! It's more like the extinguisher. Good night, old fellow."
And Carruthers drove away in his hansom, while Goodwood got into his
night-brougham, thinking that for the sake of the title, the evil
(nuptial) day _must_ come, sooner or later, but dashed off to forget
the disagreeable obligation over the supper-table of the most sparkling
empress of the demi-monde.

Lady Marabout had her wish; she brought out the belle of the season, and
when a little time had slipped by, when the Hon. Val had been presented
at the first Drawing-room, and shone there despite the worry, muddle,
and squeeze incidental to that royal and fashionable ceremony, and she
had gathered second-hand from her son what was said in the clubs
relative to this new specimen of the Valletort beauty, she began to be
happier under her duties than she had ever been before, and wrote
letters to "dearest Adeliza," brimful of superlative adjectives and
genuine warmth.

"Valencia will do me credit: I shall see her engaged before the end of
June; she will have only to choose," Lady Marabout would say to herself
some twenty times in the pauses of the morning concerts, the morning
parties, the bazaar committees, the toilette consultations, the
audiences to religious beggars, whose name was Legion and rapacity
unmeasured, the mass of unanswered correspondence whose debt lay as
heavily on Lady Marabout as his chains on a convict, and were about as
little likely to be knocked off, and all the other things innumerable
that made her life in the season one teetotum whirl of small worries and
sunshiny cares, from the moment she began her day, with her earliest cup
of Mocha softened with cream from that pet dairy of hers at Fernditton,
where, according to Lady Marabout, the cows were constantly _in articulo
mortis_, but the milk invariably richer than anywhere else, an
agricultural anomaly which presented no difficulties to _her_ reason.
Like all women, she loved paradoxes, defied logic recklessly, and would
clear at a bound a chasm of solecisms that would have kept Plato in
difficulties about crossing it, and in doubt about the strength of his
jumping-pole, all his life long.

"She will do me great credit," the semi-consoled chaperone would say to
herself with self-congratulatory relief; and if Lady Marabout thought
now and then, "I wish she were a trifle--a trifle more--demonstrative,"
she instantly checked such an ungrateful and hypercritical wish, and
remembered that a heart is a highly treacherous and unadvisable
possession for any young lady, and a most happy omission in her anatomy,
though Lady Marabout had, she would confess to herself on occasions with
great self-reproach, an unworthy and lingering weakness for that
contraband article, for which she scorned and scolded herself with the
very worst success.

Lady Marabout _had_ a heart herself; to it she had had to date the
greatest worries, troubles, imprudences, and vexations of her life; she
had had to thank it for nothing, and to dislike it for much; it had made
her grieve most absurdly for other people's griefs; it had given her a
hundred unphilosophical pangs at philosophic ingratitude from people who
wanted her no longer; it had teased, worried, and plagued her all her
life long, had often interfered in the most meddling and inconvenient
manner between her and her reason, her comfort and her prudence; and yet
she had a weakness for the same detrimental organ in other people--a
weakness of which she could no more have cured herself than of her
belief in the detection-defying powers of liquid rouge, the potentiality
of a Liliputian night-bolt against an army of burglars, the miraculous
properties of sal volatile, the efficacy of sermons, and such-like
articles of faith common to feminine orthodoxy. A weakness of which she
never felt more ignominiously convicted and more secretly ashamed than
in the presence of Miss Valletort, that young lady having a lofty and
magnificent disdain for all such follies, quite unattainable to ordinary
mortals, which oppressed Lady Marabout with a humiliating sense of
inferiority to her niece of eighteen summers. "So admirably educated! so
admirably brought up!" she would say to herself over and over again,
and if heretic suggestions that the stiffest trained flowers are not
always the best, that the upright and spotless arum-lily isn't so
fragrant as the careless, brilliant, tangled clematis; that rose-boughs,
tossing free in sunshine and liberty, beat hollow the most
carefully-pruned standard that ever won a medal at Regent's Park, with
such-like allegories, arising from contemplation of her conservatory or
her balcony flowers, _would_ present themselves, Lady Marabout repressed
them dutifully, and gratefully thought how many pounds' weight lighter
became the weary burden of a chaperone's responsibilities when the
onerous charge had been educated "on the best system."

"Goodwood's attentions _are_ serious, Philip, say what you like," said
the Countess to her son, as determinedly as a theologian states his pet
points with wool in his ears, that he may not hear any Satan-inspired,
rational, and mathematical disproval of them, with which you may rashly
seek to soil his tympana and smash his arguments--"Goodwood's attentions
_are_ serious, Philip, say what you like," said her ladyship, at a
morning party at Kew, eating her Neapolitan ice, complacently glancing
at the "most eligible alliance of the season," who was throwing the
balls at lawn-billiards, and talking between whiles to the Hon. Val with
praiseworthy and promising animation.

"Serious indeed, mother, if they tend matrimony-wards!" smiled
Carruthers. "It's a very serious time indeed for unwary sparrows when
they lend an ear to the call-bird, and think about hopping on to the
lime-twigs. I should think it's from a sense of compunction for the net
you've led us into, that you all particularize our attentions, whenever
they point near St. George's, by that very suggestive little adjective
'serious!' Yes, I am half afraid poor Goodey is a little touched. He
threw over our Derby sweepstakes up at Hornsey Wood yesterday to go and
stifle himself in Willis's rooms at your bazaar, and buy a guinea cup
of Souchong from Valencia; and, considering he's one of the best shots
in England, I don't think you could have a more conclusive, if you could
have a more poetic, proof of devoted renunciation. _I_'d fifty times
rather get a spear in my side, a la Ivanhoe, for a woman than give up a
Pigeon-match, a Cup-day, or a Field-night!"

"You'll never do either!" laughed Lady Marabout, who made it one of her
chief troubles that her son would not marry, chiefly, probably, because
if he _had_ married she would have been miserable, and thought no woman
good enough for him, would have been jealous of his wife's share of his
heart, and supremely wretched, I have no doubt, at his throwing himself
away, as she would have thought it, had his handkerchief lighted on a
Princess born, lovely as Galatea, and blessed with Venus's cestus.

"Never, _plaise a Dieu_!" responded her son, piously over his ice; "but
if Goodwood's serious, what's Cardonnel? _He_'s lost his head, if you
like, after the Valletort beauty."

"Major Cardonnel!" said Lady Marabout, hastily. "Oh no, I don't think
so. I hope not--I trust not."

"Why so? He's one of the finest fellows in the Service."

"I dare say; but you see, my dear Philip, he's not--not--desirable."

Carruthers stroked his moustaches and laughed:

"Fie, fie, mother! if all other Belgraviennes are Mammon-worshippers, I
thought you kept clear of the paganism. I thought your freedom from it
was the only touch by which you weren't 'purely feminine,' as the lady
novelists say of their pet bits of chill propriety."

"Worship Mammon! Heaven forbid!" ejaculated Lady Marabout. "But there
are duties, you see, my dear; your friend is a very delightful man, to
be sure; I like him excessively, and if Valencia felt any _great_
preference for him----"

"You'd feel it _your_ duty to counsel her to throw him over for
Goodwood."

"I never said so, Philip," interrupted Lady Marabout, with as near an
approach to asperity as she could achieve, which approach was less like
vinegar than most people's best honey.

"But you implied it. What are 'duties' else, and why is poor Cardonnel
'not desirable'?"

Lady Marabout played a little tattoo with her spoon in perplexity.

"My dear Philip, you know as well as I do what I mean. One might think
you were a boy of twenty to hear you!"

"My dear mother, like all disputants, when beaten in argument and driven
into a corner, you resort to vituperation of your opponent!" laughed
Carruthers, as he left her and lounged away to pick up the stick with
which pretty Flora Elmers had just knocked the pipe out of Aunt Sally's
head on to the velvet lawn of Lady George Frangipane's dower-house,
leaving his mother by no means tranquillized by his suggestions.

"Dear me!" thought Lady Marabout, uneasily, as she conversed with the
Dowager-Countess of Patchouli on the respective beauties of two new
pelargonium seedlings, the Leucadia and the Beatrice, for which her
gardener had won prizes the day before at the Regent's Park Show--"dear
me! why is there invariably this sort of cross-purposes in everything?
It will be so grievous to lose Goodwood (and he _is_ decidedly struck
with her; when he bought that rosebud yesterday of her at the bazaar,
and put it in the breast of his waistcoat, I heard what he said, and it
was no nonsense, no mere flirting complaisance either)--it would be so
grievous to lose him; and yet if Valencia really care for Cardonnel--and
sometimes I almost fancy she does--I shouldn't know which way to advise.
I thought it would be odd if a season could pass quietly without my
having some worry of this sort! With fifty men always about Valencia, as
they are, how _can_ I be responsible for any mischief that may happen,
though, to hear Philip talk, one would really imagine it was _my_ fault
that they lost their heads, as he calls it! As if a forty-horse
steam-power could stop a man when he's once off down the incline into
love! The more you try to pull him back the more impetus you give him to
go headlong down. I wish Goodwood would propose, and we could settle the
affair definitively. It is singular, but she has had no offers hardly
with all her beauty. It is very singular, in _my_ first season I had
almost as many as I had names on my tablets at Almack's. But men don't
marry now, they say. Perhaps 'tisn't to be wondered at, though I
wouldn't allow it to Philip. Poor things! they lose a very great many
pleasant things by it, and get nothing, I'm sure, nine times out of ten,
except increased expenses and unwelcome worries. I don't think I would
have married if I'd been a man, though I'd never admit it, of course, to
one of them. There are plenty of women who know too much of their own
sex ever to wonder that a man doesn't marry, though of course we don't
say so; 'twouldn't be to our interest. Sculptors might as well preach
iconoclasm, or wine-merchants tee-totalism, as women misoganism, however
little in our hearts we may marvel at it. Oh, my dear Lady Patchouli!
you praise the Leucadia too kindly--you do indeed--but if you really
think so much of it, let me send you some slips. I shall be most happy,
and Fenton will be only too proud; it is his favorite seedling."

Carruthers was quite right. One fellow at least had lost his head after
the beauty of the season, and he was Cardonnel, of the--Lancers, as fine
a fellow, as Philip said, as any in the Queen's, but a dreadful
detrimental in the eyes of all chaperones, because he was but the fourth
son of one of the poorest peers in the United Kingdom, a fact which
gave him an aegis from all assaults matrimonial, and a freedom from all
smiles and wiles, traps and gins, which Goodwood was accustomed to tell
him he bitterly envied him, and on which Cardonnel had fervently
congratulated himself, till he came under the fire of the Hon. Val's
large luminous eyes one night, when he was levelling his glass from his
stall at Lady Marabout's box, to take a look at the new belle, as
advised to do by that most fastidious female critic, Vane Steinberg.
Valencia Valletort's luminous eyes had gleamed that night under their
lashes, and pierced through the lenses of his lorgnon. He saw her, and
saw nothing but her afterwards, as men looking on the sun keep it on
their retina to the damage and exclusion of all other objects.

Physical beauty, even when it is a little bit soulless, is an admirable
weapon for instantaneous slaughter, and the trained and pruned standard
roses show a very effective mass of bloom; though, as Lady Marabout's
floral tastes and experiences told her, they don't give one the lasting
pleasure that a careless bough of wild rose will do, with its untutored
grace and its natural fragrance. With the standard you see we keep in
the artificial air of the horticultural tent, and are never touched out
of it for a second; its perfume seems akin to a bouquet, and its destiny
is, we are sure, to a parterre. The wild-rose fragrance breathes of the
hill-side and the woodlands, and brings back to us soft touches of
memory, of youth, of a fairer life and a purer air than that in which we
are living now.

The Hon. Val did _not_ have as many offers as her aunt and chaperone had
on the first flush of her pride in her anticipated. Young ladies,
educated on the "best systems," are apt to be a trifle wearisome, and
_don't_, somehow or other, take so well as the sedulous efforts of their
pruners and trainers--the rarefied moral atmosphere of the
conservatories, in which they are carefully screened from ordinary air,
and the anxiety evinced lest the flower should ever forget itself, and
sway naturally in the wind--deserve. But Cardonnel had gone mad after
her, that perfect face of hers had done for him; and whatever Goodwood
might be, _he_ was serious--he positively haunted the young beauty like
her own shadow--he was leaning on the rails every morning of his life
that she took her early ride--he sent her bouquets as lavishly as if
he'd been a nursery gardener. By some species of private surveillance,
or lover's clairvoyance, he knew beforehand where she would go, and was
at the concert, fete, morning party, bazaar, or whatever it happened to
be, as surely as was Lady Marabout herself. Poor Cardonnel was serious,
and fiercely fearful of his all-powerful and entirely eligible rival;
though greater friends than he and Goodwood had been, before this girl's
face appeared on the world of Belgravia, never lounged arm-in-arm into
Pratt's, or strolled down the "sweet shady side of Pall-Mall."

Goodwood's attentions were very marked, too, even to eyes less willing
to construe them so than Lady Marabout's. Goodwood himself, if chaffed
on the subject, vouchsafed nothing; laughed, stroked his moustaches, or
puffed his cigar, if he happened to have that blessed resource in all
difficulties, and comforter under all embarrassments, between his lips
at the moment; but decidedly he sought Valencia Valletort more, or, to
speak more correctly, he shunned her less than he'd ever done any other
young lady, and one or two Sunday mornings--_mirabile dictu!_--he was
positively seen at St. Paul's, Knightsbridge, in the seat behind Lady
Marabout's sittings. A fact which, combining as it did a brace of
miracles at once, of early rising and unusual piety, set every
Belgravienne in that fashionable sanctuary watching over the top of her
illuminated prayer-book, to the utter destruction of her hopes and
interruption of her orisons.

Dowagers began to tremble behind their fans, young ladies to quake over
their bouquets; the topic was eagerly discussed by every woman from
Clarges Street to Lowndes Square; their Graces of Doncaster smiled well
pleased on Valencia--she was unquestionable blood, and they so wished
dear Goodwood to settle! There was whispered an awful whisper to the
whole female world; whispered over matutinal chocolate, and luncheon
Strasbourg pates, ball-supper Moets', and demi-monde-supper Silleri,
over Vane Steinberg's cigar and Eulalie Rosiere's cigarette, over the
_Morning Post_ in the clubs, and _Le Follet_ in the boudoir, that--the
Pet Eligible would--marry! That the Pet Prophecy of universal smash was
going to be fulfilled could hardly have occasioned greater
consternation.

The soul of Lady Marabout had been disquieted ever since her son's
suggestions at Lady George Frangipane's morning party, and she began to
worry: for herself, for Valencia, for Goodwood, for Cardonnel, for her
responsibilities in general, and for her "dearest Adeliza's" alternate
opinions of her duenna qualifications in particular. Lady Marabout had
an intense wish, an innocent wish enough, as innocent and very similar
in its way to that of an Eton boy to make a centre at a rifle-contest,
viz., to win the Marquis of Goodwood; innocent, surely, for though
neither the rifle prize nor the Pet Eligible could be won without
mortification unspeakable to a host of unsuccessful aspirants, if we
decree that sort of thing sinful and selfish, as everything natural
seems to me to get decreed nowadays, we may as well shut up at once; if
we may not try for the top of the pole, why erect poles at all,
monsieur? If we must not do our best to pass our friend and brother, we
must give up climbing forever, and go on all fours placably with Don and
Pontos.

Everybody has his ambition: one sighs for the Woolsack, another for the
Hunt Cup; somebody longs to be First Minister, somebody else pines to be
first dancer; one man plumes himself on a new fish-sauce, another on a
fresh reform bill; A. thirsts to get a single brief, B. for the time
when he shall be worried with no briefs at all; C. sets his hopes on
being the acrobat at Cremorne, D. on being the acrobat of the Tuileries;
fat bacon is Hodge the hedger's _summum bonum_, and Johannisberg _pur_
is mine; Empedocles thinks notoriety everything, and Diogenes thinks
quiet everything--each has his own reading of ambition, and Lady
Marabout had hers; the Duchess of Doncaster thirsted for the Garter for
her husband, Lady Elmers's pride was to possess the smallest terrier
that ever took daisy tea and was carried in a monkey-muff, her Grace of
Amandine slaved night and day to bring her party in and throw the
ministry out. Lady Marabout sighed but for one thing--to win the Pet
Eligible of the season, and give eclat for once to one phase of her
chaperone's existence.

Things were nicely in train. Goodwood was beginning to bite at that very
handsome fly the Hon. Val, and promised to be hooked and landed without
much difficulty before long, and placed, hopelessly for him,
triumphantly for her, in the lime-basket of matrimony. Things were
beautifully in train, and Lady Marabout was for once flattering herself
she should float pleasantly through an unruffled and successful season,
when Carruthers poured the one drop of _amari aliquid_ into her
champagne-cup by his suggestion of Cardonnel's doom. And then Lady
Marabout begun to worry.

She who could not endure to see a fly hurt or a flower pulled
needlessly, had nothing for it but to worry for Cardonnel's destiny, and
puzzle over the divided duties which Carruthers had hinted to her. To
reject the one man because he was not well off did seem to her
conscience, uncomfortably awakened by Phil's innuendoes, something more
mercenary than she quite liked to look at; yet to throw over the other,
future Duke of Doncaster, the eligible, the darling, the yearned-for of
all May Fair and Belgravia, seemed nothing short of madness to inculcate
to Valencia; a positive treason to that poor absent, trusting, "dearest
Adeliza," who, after the visions epistolarily spread out before her,
would utterly refuse to be comforted if Goodwood any way failed to
become her son-in-law, and, moreover, the heaviest blow to Lady Marabout
herself that the merciless axe of that brutal headsman Contretemps could
deal her.

"I do not know really what to do or what to advise," would Lady Marabout
say to herself over and over again (so disturbed by her onerous burden
of responsibilities that she would let Despreaux arrange the most
outrageous coiffures, and, never noticing them, go out to dinner with
emeralds on blue velvet, or something as shocking to feminine nerves in
her temporary aberration), forgetting one very great point, which,
remembered, would have saved her all trouble, that nobody asked her to
do anything, and not a soul requested her advice. "But Goodwood is
decidedly won, and Goodwood must not be lost; in our position we owe
something to society," she would invariably conclude these mental
debates; which last phase, being of a vagueness and obscure application
that might have matched it with any Queen's speech or electional address
upon record, was a mysterious balm to Lady Marabout's soul, and spoke
volumes to _her_, if a trifle hazy to you and to me.

But Lady Marabout, if she was a little bit of a sophist, had not worn
her eye-glass all these years without being keen-sighted on some
subjects, and, though perfectly satisfied with her niece's conduct with
Goodwood, saw certain symptoms which made her tremble lest the
detrimental Lancer should have won greater odds than the eligible
Marquis.

"Arthur Cardonnel is excessively handsome! Such very good style!
Isn't it a pity they're all so poor! His father played away
everything--literally everything. The sons have no more to marry upon,
any one of them, than if they were three crossing-sweepers," said her
ladyship, carelessly, driving home from St. Paul's one Sunday morning.

And, watching the effect of her stray arrow, she had beheld an actual
flush on the beauty's fair, impassive cheek, and had positively heard a
smothered sigh from an admirably brought-up heart, no more given
ordinarily to such weaknesses than the diamond-studded heart pendent
from her bracelet, the belle's heart and the bracelet's heart being both
formed alike, to fetch their price, and bid to do no more:--power of
volition would have been as inconvenient in, and interfered as greatly
with, the sale of one as of the other.

"She does like him!" sighed Lady Marabout over that Sabbath's luncheon
wines. "It's always my fate--always; and Goodwood, never won before,
will be thrown--actually thrown--away, as if he were the younger son of
a Nobody!" which horrible waste was so terrible to her imagination that
Lady Marabout could positively have shed tears at the bare prospect, and
might have shed them, too, if the Hon. Val, the butler, two footmen, and
a page had not inconveniently happened to be in the room at the time, so
that she was driven to restrain her feelings and drink some Amontillado
instead. Lady Marabout is not the first person by a good many who has
had to smile over sherry with a breaking heart. Ah! lips have quivered
as they laughed over Chambertin, and trembled as they touched the bowl
of a champagne-glass. Wine has assisted at many a joyous festa enough,
but some that has been drunk in gayety has caught gleams, in the eyes of
the drinkers, of salt water brighter than its brightest sparkles: water
that no other eyes can see. Because we may drink Badminton laughingly
when the gaze of Society the Non-Sympathetic is on us, do you think we
must never have tasted any more bitter dregs? _Va-t'en, becasse!_ where
have you lived! Nero does not always fiddle while Rome is burning from
utter heartlessness, believe me, but rather--sometimes,
perhaps--because his heart is aching!

"Goodwood will propose to-night, I fancy, he is so very attentive,"
thought Lady Marabout, sitting with her sister chaperones on the cosy
causeuses of a mansion in Carlton Terrace, at one of the last balls of
the departing season. "I never saw dear Valencia look better, and
certainly her waltzing is----Ah! good evening, Major Cardonnel! Very
warm to-night, is it not? I shall be so glad when I am down again at
Fernditton. Town, in the first week of July, is really not habitable."

And she furled her fan, and smiled on him with her pleasant eyes, and
couldn't help wishing he hadn't been on the Marchioness Rondeletia's
visiting list, he _was_ such a detrimental, and he was ten times
handsomer than Goodwood!

"Will Miss Valletort leave you soon?" asked Cardonnel, sitting down by
her.

"_Ah! monsieur, vous etes la!_" thought Lady Marabout, as she answered,
like a guarded diplomatist as she was, that it was not all settled at
present what her niece's post-season destiny would be, whether Devon or
Fernditton, or the Spas, with her mother, Lady Honiton; and then
unfurled her fan again, and chatted about Baden and her own indecision
as to whether she should go there this September.

"May I ask you a question, and will you pardon me for its plainness?"
asked Cardonnel, when she'd exhausted Baden's desirable and
non-desirable points.

Lady Marabout shuddered as she bent her head, and thought, "The creature
is never going to confide in me! He will win me over if he do, he looks
so like his mother! And what shall I say to Adeliza!"

"Is your niece engaged to Goodwood or not?"

If ever a little fib was tempting to any lady, from Eve downward, it was
tempting to Lady Marabout now! A falsehood would settle everything,
send Cardonnel off the field, and clear all possibility of losing the
"best match of the season." Besides, if not engaged to Goodwood actually
to-night, Val would be, if she liked, to-morrow, or the next day, or
before the week was over at the furthest--would it be such a falsehood
after all? She colored, she fidgeted her fan, she longed for the little
fib!--how terribly tempting it looked! But Lady Marabout is a bad hand
at prevarication, and she hates a lie, and she answered bravely, with a
regretful twinge, "Engaged? No; not----"

"Not yet! Thank God!"

Lady Marabout stared at him and at the words muttered under his
moustaches:

"Really, Major Cardonnel, I do not see why you----"

"Should thank Heaven for it? Yet I do--it is a reprieve. Lady Marabout,
you and my mother were close friends; will you listen to me for a
second, while we are not overheard? That I have loved your niece--had
the madness to love her, if you will--you cannot but have seen; that she
has given me some reasonable encouragement it is no coxcombry to say,
though I have known from the first what a powerful rival I had against
me; but that Valencia loves me and does not love him, I believe--nay, I
_know_. I have said nothing decided to her; when all hangs on a single
die we shrink from hazarding the throw. But I must know my fate
to-night. If she come to you--as girls will, I believe, sometimes--for
countenance and counsel, will you stand my friend?--will you, for the
sake of my friendship with your son, your friendship with my mother,
support my cause, and uphold what I believe Valencia's heart will say in
my favor?"

Lady Marabout was silent: no Andalusian ever worried her fan more
ceaselessly in coquetry than she did in perplexity. Her heart was
appealed to, and when that was enlisted, Lady Marabout was lost!

"But--but--my dear Major Cardonnel, you are aware----" she began, and
stopped. I should suppose it may be a little awkward to tell a man to
his face he is "not desirable!"

"I am aware that I cannot match with Goodwood? I am; but I know, also,
that Goodwood's love cannot match with mine, and that your niece's
affection is not his. That he may win her I know women too well not to
fear, therefore I ask _you_ to be my friend. If she refuse me, will you
plead for me?--if she ask for counsel, will you give such as your own
heart dictates (I ask no other)--and, will you remember that on
Valencia's answer will rest the fate of a man's lifetime?"

He rose and left her, but the sound of his voice rang in Lady Marabout's
ears, and the tears welled into her eyes: "Dear, dear! how like he
looked to his poor dear mother! But what a position to place me in! Am I
_never_ to have any peace?"

Not at this ball, at any rate. Of all the worried chaperones and
distracted duennas who hid their anxieties under pleasant smiles or
affable lethargy, none were a quarter so miserable as Helena, Lady
Marabout. Her heart and her head were enlisted on opposite sides; her
wishes pulled one way, her sympathies another; her sense of justice to
Cardonnel urged her to one side, her sense of duty to "dearest Adeliza"
urged her to the other; her pride longed for one alliance, her heart
yearned for the other. Cardonnel had confided in her and appealed to
her; _sequitur_, Lady Marabout's honor would not allow her to go against
him: yet, it was nothing short of grossest treachery to poor Adeliza,
down there in Devon, expecting every day to congratulate her daughter on
a prospective duchy won, to counsel Valencia to take one of these
beggared Cardonnels, and, besides--to lose all her own laurels, to lose
the capture of Goodwood!

No Guelphs and Ghibelins, no Royalists and Imperialists, ever fought so
hard as Lady Marabout's divided duties.

"Valencia, Major Cardonnel spoke to me to-night," began that
best-hearted and most badgered of ladies, as she sat before her
dressing-room fire that night, alone with her niece.

Valencia smiled slightly, and a faint idea crossed Lady Marabout's mind
that Valencia's smile was hardly a pleasant one, a trifle too much like
the play of moonbeams on ice.

"He spoke to me about you."

"Indeed!"

"Perhaps you can guess, my dear, what he said?"

"I am no clairvoyante, aunt;" and Miss Val yawned a little, and held out
one of her long slender feet to admire it.

"Every woman, my love, becomes half a clairvoyante when she is in love,"
said Lady Marabout, a little bit impatiently; she hadn't been brought up
on the best systems herself, and though she admired the refrigeration
(on principle), it irritated her just a little now and then. "Did
he--did he say anything to _you_ to-night?"

"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 desert _him_; poor
dear Adeliza had trusted her, she couldn't betray _her_; 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 was _not_ lost 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 have _some_ tender 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 Boncoeurs _are_ romantic, 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 eyes _are_ so 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 Town as in Greenland, and commences, whatever almanacs may say,
about two or half-past P.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, so _he_ won'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 it off 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.

"He _must_ speak definitely to-morrow," thought Lady Marabout. But the
larvae 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 never _quite_!

"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, mo

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/37178