A CHAPTER OF DISCLOSURES.
For his thoughts,
Would they were blank sooner than filled with me!
Maud did not exactly get a scolding, but Felicia looked extremely grave.
Maud's high spirits were gone in an instant; the excitement which had
enabled her to defy propriety hitherto deserted her at the door; the
recklessness with which Desvoeux always infected her had driven away
with him in his mail-phaeton, and left her merely with the disagreeable
consciousness of having acted foolishly and wrongly. Felicia knew
exactly how matters stood and scarcely said a word. Her silence however
was, Maud felt, the bitterest reproach.
'Scold me, scold me, dear,' she cried, the tears starting to her eyes;
'only don't look like that and say nothing!'
'Well,' said Felicia, 'first promise me never again to drive alone with
Mr. Desvoeux.'
'After all,' suggested Maud, 'it is a mere matter of appearances, and
what do they signify?'
'Some matters of appearance,' said Felicia, 'signify very much. Besides,
this is something more than that. It is bad enough for you to be _seen_
with him--what I really care about is your _being_ with him at all.'
'But,' said Maud, 'he is really very nice: he amuses me so much!'
'Yes,' answered the other, 'he amuses one, but then it always hurts. His
fun has a something, I don't know what it is, but which is only just not
offensive; and I don't trust him a bit.'
'But,' Maud argued, 'he is great friends with George, is he not?'
'Not great friends,' said Felicia; 'they were at college together, and
have worked in the same office for years, and are intimate like
schoolboys, and George never says an unkind word of any one; but I do
not call them friends at all.'
'No?' said Maud, quite unconvinced, and feeling vexed at Felicia's
evident dislike for her companion. 'Well, he's a great friend of mine,
so don't abuse him, please.'
'Nonsense, child!' cried Felicia, in a fright. 'You don't know him in
the least, or you would not say that. To begin with, he is not quite a
gentleman, you know.'
'Not a gentleman!' cried Maud, aghast, 'he seems to me a very fine
one.'
'As fine as you please,' said Felicia, 'but not a thorough gentleman.
Gentlemen never say things that hurt you or offend your taste. Now with
Mr. Desvoeux I feel for ever in a fright lest he should say something I
dislike; and I know he _thinks_ things that I dislike.'
'I think you are prejudiced, Felicia. What he says seems to me all very
nice.'
'Perhaps it is prejudice,' Felicia answered, 'but I think it all the
same. I feel the difference with other people; Major Sutton, for
instance.'
'He is your ideal, is he not?' cried Maud, blushing and laughing, for
somehow she was beginning to feel that Felicia had designs upon her.
'Yes,' Felicia said in her fervent way; 'he is pure and true and
chivalrous to the core: he seems to me made of quite other stuff from
men like Mr. Desvoeux.'
'He is all made of solid gold,' cried Maud, by this time in a teasing
mood, 'and Mr. Desvoeux is plaster-of-Paris and putty and pinchbeck, and
everything that is horrid. But he is very amusing, dearest Felicia, all
the same, _and very nice_. I will not drive with him any more, of
course, if you do not like it.'
Thereupon Maud, in a somewhat rebellious frame of mind, was about to go
and take her things off, and was already half-way through the doorway
when she turned round and saw Felicia's sweet, serene, refined brow
wearing a look of harassment and annoyance, and a sudden pang of remorse
struck her that she should, in pure mischief, have been wounding a
tender heart and endangering a friendship, compared with which she felt
everything else in the world was but a straw in the balance. She rushed
back and flung her arms round her companion's neck. 'Dearest Felicia,'
she said, 'you know that I would fly to the moon rather than do anything
you did not like or make you love me the tiniest atom less. I want to
tell you something. You think, I know, that I am falling in love with
Mr. Desvoeux. Well, dear, I don't care for him _that!_'
Thereupon Maud clapped two remarkably pretty hands together in a manner
highly expressive of the most light-hearted indifference, and Felicia
felt that at any rate she might console herself with the reflection that
Maud was as yet quite heart-whole, and that, so far as Desvoeux was
concerned, Sutton's prospects were not endangered. The certainty,
however, that Desvoeux had selected Maud for his next flirtation, and
that she felt no especial repugnance to the selection, made Felicia
doubly anxious that her chosen hero should succeed, and her _protégée_ be
put beyond the reach of danger as soon as possible. But then Sutton
proved provokingly unamenable to Felicia's kind designs upon him.
His continued bachelorhood was a mystery of which not even she possessed
the key. It was not insensibility, for every word, look, and gesture
bespoke him more than ordinarily alive to all the charms which sway
mankind. It certainly was not that either the wish or the power to
please were wanting; nobody was more courteous at heart, or more prompt
to show it, or more universally popular: nor could it be want of
opportunity; for, though he had been all his life fighting, marching,
hurrying on busy missions from one wild outpost to another, on guard for
months together at some dangerous spot where treachery or fanaticism
rendered an explosion imminent; yet the busiest military life has its
intervals of quiet, and the love-making of soldiers is proverbially
expeditious. Was it, then, some old romance, some far-off English
recollection, some face that had fascinated his boyhood, and forbade
him, when a man, to think any other altogether lovely? Could the locket,
which formed the single ornament where all else was of Spartan
simplicity, have told a tale of one of those catastrophes where love and
hope and happiness get swamped in hopeless shipwreck? Was it that,
absolutely unknown to both parties, his relations to Felicia filled too
large a place in his heart for any other devotion to find room there?
Was it that a widow sister who had been left with a tribe of profitless
boys upon her hands, and to whom a remittance of Sutton's pay went every
month, had made him think of marriage as an unattainable luxury?
Sutton, at any rate, remained without a wife, and showed no symptom of
anxiety to find one. To those venturesome friends who were sufficiently
familiar to rally him on the subject he replied, cheerfully enough, that
his regiment was his wife and that such a turbulent existence as his
would make any other sort of spouse a most inconvenient appendage.
Ladies, experienced in the arts of fascination, knew instinctively that
he was unassailable, and even the most intrepid and successful gave up
the thoughts of conquest in despair. To be a sort of privileged brother
to Felicia--to be the children's especial patron and ally--to sit
chatting with Vernon far into the night with all the pleasant intimacy
of family relationship, seemed to be all the domestic pleasures of which
he stood in need. 'As well,' Felicia sighed, 'might some poor maiden
waste her love upon the cold front of a marble Jove.'
Such was the man upon whom Felicia had essayed her first attempt at
match-making; and such the man, too, whom Maud, though she had buried
the secret deep in the recesses of her heart--far even out of her own
sight--had already begun to love with all the passionate violence of a
first attachment.