FACILIS DESCENSUS AVERNI.
Birds, yet in freedom, shun the net
Which love around your haunts hath set.
The pleasant weeks flew by, a round of enjoyments. Maud found herself in
great request. She and Mrs. Vereker held quite a little levée every
morning. Day after day a never-failing stream of visitors poured along
the path to the modest but picturesque residence where these two
beauties waited to charm mankind. The grass-plot in front was worn quite
bare by a succession of ponies, who waited there while their owners were
worshipping within.
No young officer who arrived for a holiday considered himself at all _en
règle_ till he had been to pay his respects to this adorable couple.
Mrs. Vereker was none the less attractive, as she knew very well, for
being contrasted with another charming woman, whose charms were of a
different order. 'Blest pair of syrens!' Desvoeux used to say in his
impudent fashion; 'it is too charming to have you both together--a
dangerous conspiracy against the peace of mind of one-half of the
species.'
'Ah!' Mrs. Vereker would answer, turning her violet eyes upon him, with
a sweet reproachful smile, which would have melted any heart but
Desvoeux's; 'and when one of the syrens is young and lovely, and just
arrived from the Plains. There _were_ days, my dear Maud, when Mr.
Desvoeux used to want to ride with me and used to run my errands so
nicely! Alas! alas! for masculine weathercocks! I am very jealous of
you, my dear, I'd have you to know, and shall some day tear your pretty
eyes out. You do too much execution by half. Meanwhile, here is my dear
General Beau coming up the road.'
Maud shrugged her shoulders and arched her pretty brow, and both
Desvoeux and Mrs. Vereker burst out laughing to see the General
portrayed.
'The General to the life!' cried Desvoeux, '"like a poet or a peer
With his arched eyebrow and Parnassian sneer."'
'I protest against the poet,' cried Mrs. Vereker, laughing; 'we always
flirt in the very plainest prose. As for his eyebrows, they are
adorable.'
Then the General arrived, as great a dandy as ever Poole turned out, and
was in the drawing-room before Maud's gravity was at all re-established.
'And what was the laugh about?' he inquired.
'About a Parnassian sneer,' said Desvoeux with great presence of mind;
'and where do you come from, General?'
'I have been calling at the Fotheringhams,' said the General; 'my
intimacy with Mrs. Fotheringham does not incline me to wish to be one of
her daughters.'
'Poor girls!' said Mrs. Vereker, 'we were commiserating them the other
day, and saying how cruelly their mother treats them.'
'Ah!' said the General, 'she does indeed; actually makes the poor things
do lessons all the morning. A certain gentleman, a friend of mine, I
cannot tell you his name, went there the other day with the most serious
intentions towards the little one, the one with yellow hair, and
actually found them hard at work at Mill's "Logic."'
'Two women were grinding at the mill,' said Desvoeux, 'and one was taken
and the other left, I suppose?'
'I am afraid,' said Mrs. Vereker, 'that both were left. But fancy a
woman who was also a logician! For my part, I consider it a great
privilege to be as unreasonable as I choose.'
'The arguments of beauty,' said the General, 'are always irresistible;
but I am quite for female education.'
'And I,' said Mrs. Vereker, 'am dead against it. We know quite as much
as is good for us as it is. What do you say, Maud?'
'I have quite forgotten all I learnt at school already,' said Maud.
'General Beau, can you say your Duty to your Neighbour?'
'And your duty to your neighbour's wife?' put in Desvoeux. 'But I object
to all education as revolutionary--part of this horrid radical epoch it
which we live.'
'Yes,' said Mrs. Vereker, 'one of the nice things about India is its
being a military despotism. As for Europe, the mobs have it all their
own way.'
'Horrid mobs!' said Desvoeux, 'as if an unwashed rabble was Nature's
last achievement.
Her 'prentice hand she tried on lords,
And then she made the masses O!'
'But you must teach them religion, you know,' said the General, 'the
Catechism, and so forth.'
'Of course,' said Maud; their Duty to their Neighbour, for instance.'
'I don't know,' said Mrs. Vereker; 'they only learn it all by rote. When
I was last in England our clergyman gave us this specimen of one of his
parishioners, to whom he had been detailing the mysteries of faith:
'"_Clergyman._ And now, Sally, how do you expect to be saved?"'
'"_Sally._ Dun'noa; please, sir, tell I."'
'Well,' said Desvoeux, 'theology is a thing I never could understand
myself. Now I must be off to my Agent.'
'When shall we see you again?' said Maud.
'Dun'noa,' said Desvoeux; 'please, ma'am, tell I. What time shall I come
and take you out this afternoon?'
But the ladies had visitors more distinguished even than the General.
The Agent himself came in one Sunday after church and asked to be
allowed to stay to lunch. Cards flowed in apace from Government House,
for the Master of the Ceremonies there knew that no entertainment would
be complete where Maud was not.
There were little dances got up expressly in her honour, for which her
card of engagements was filled for days before: at every point homage,
the sweetest that woman's ears can listen to, awaited her. A chorus of
worshippers assured her she was beautiful; the incense was for ever
burning on her shrine, till the very air became drugged with flattery.
Yet Maud was not completely happy; her conscience was ill at ease. The
scene around her was pleasant; but, tried by certain standards, she knew
that it would fall short. She remembered, with a sigh, the sort of way
in which her cousin Vernon would have turned up his nose at the people
among whom she was living, and she knew that in many ways they deserved
it. Felicia, she knew, thought Mrs. Vereker utterly frivolous, fast and
slightly vulgar; and she felt that Felicia was right. Her husband,
conscience reminded her, disapproved of and despised Desvoeux: and was
there not something to disapprove and dislike about him? Still Maud felt
herself unable to resist the current that was hurrying her along. The
consequence was that she had fallen out of harmony with those stricter
judges whose tastes just now it was convenient to forget. It gave her no
pleasure to think of them. She fancied Jem in a silently reproachful
mood, Felicia daintily contemptuous, Vernon with an outspoken sneer. Her
letters to her husband, though they never contained the
hundred-thousandth part of one untruth, began to be less faithful and
complete transcripts of her life than of old. Desvoeux ought, in truth,
to have occupied a more prominent place. She felt ashamed to tell her
husband, toiling hard in solitude and heat, of the round of gaiety in
which her life was passed. On the other hand, her husband's letters gave
her no satisfaction. They were far from amusing; indeed, the life which
he was leading was hardly susceptible, in livelier hands than his, of
being rendered amusing or picturesque. He missed her, of course; but
then he would be with her again in a few weeks, and Maud did not think
it necessary to be sentimental about it. His pen was far from a ready
one, and this Report, Maud knew, would be worse to him than a campaign.
In his letters to her his one idea would have been to conceal from her
anything that was disagreeable, and she might, if she had chosen, have
augured ill from his reticence; but life just now was too bright and
exciting for such inward monition to get a hearing. Her companions had
infected her with a passion for pleasure, and duty had faded into
indistinctness. Then, too, her new position as a married lady and as
Sutton's bride was not without its charm. She was a much grander lady
now than she had been the year before as Miss Vernon, and this access of
dignity was pleasurable. It involved, however, being taken in to dinner
by officials of an age, dignity, and disposition which she found
anything but congenial to her own, though Desvoeux protested that she
was trying to establish a flirtation with the Agent. Once at Government
House she had the honour of sitting next the Viceroy, an alarming but
yet delightful eminence. How kind he seemed, how full of friendly talk,
how eager to know about her husband and his doings!
'How is your _preux chevalier_?' he said. 'What would become of
everything, I wonder, in that stormy corner that he keeps in such good
order, but for him? He is one of the people whom I completely trust.'
Maud felt her cheek glowing with pleasure, yet the pleasure was not
without a sting. Everybody conspired to speak of her husband as some one
beyond the usual flight in goodness, chivalry, nobility of soul. Was she
behaving as became the wife of such a man? Was she loving, honouring,
and obeying in the full spirit of her vow? Was it honourable or right
that half-a-dozen foolish lads should be competing for familiarity with
her, and a man like Desvoeux be her habitual companion? Ought her
husband to hear such things of her? This was the little skeleton which
Maud kept locked up, along with many lovely dresses, in her bedroom
closet--this the little prick her conscience gave her--this the drop of
bitter in the glittering, ambrosial draught of pleasure.
She drank it all the same and found it too sweet to put it from her
lips.