THE GREAT O'BOYNEVILLE.
The dowager was of a lively disposition, and by no means inclined to
spend her evenings in the dusky solitude of her drawing-room in Dorset
Square, where the departed General's monster mandarin-jars and Oriental
cabinets loomed dark and grim in the twilight. In the halls and on the
staircases of Tyburnia and Belgravia, in the deliciously-squeezy little
drawing-rooms and ante-chambers of the tortuous by-ways in May Fair,
wherever there was festivity or junketing in which a gentlewoman might
share, Mrs. MacClaverhouse and her black silk and diamonds were to be
seen. She took Cecil with her every where, and she informed the young
lady that it was on her account that the phantom-chariot and the grumpy
coachman with doubtful legs and feet were called into service every
evening.
It was quite in vain that Cecil remonstrated, declaring that she was
happier with her books and piano in the little back drawing-room in
Dorset Square than at the most brilliant assemblage of the season. Was
she happier at home than abroad, in this sad season, when it seemed to
her as if all hope and gladness had utterly vanished out of her life?
Was she happier? She employed the word in her remonstrance with her
aunt; for she would fain have hidden her wounds from the sharp eyes
of that unsentimental protectress. And at home she had at least the
liberty of being unhappy. She could sit alone playing _his_ favourite
music softly to herself in the dusk, while the dowager dozed at ease
in the adjoining chamber. In society, she felt like a slave crowned
with roses, compelled to wear the same company-smile night after night,
to affect an interest in the same frivolous subjects, to hold her own
amongst brilliant young ladies, who would have laughed her girlish
sorrow to scorn could they have penetrated beneath the frozen calm of
her manner. The brilliant young ladies declared that Cecil Chudleigh
was proud. "The Aspendell Chudleighs always have been poor and proud,"
it was said. There were faster spirits who called her "slow," and who
were pleased to ridicule the black robes of the dowager and the pale
face and white-muslin draperies of her niece.
And in the mean time Cecil went wherever the dowager chose to drag
her, with an uncomplaining patience which might have won for her
the crown of martyrdom, if there were any crowns for the martyrs of
every-day life. The slow season dragged itself out. Ah, how long
and how slow it seemed to Cecil Chudleigh, while she heard so many
voices declare how delicious a season it was--how especially gay and
brilliant. It was over at last, and Mrs. MacClaverhouse conveyed
her niece to Brighton, where, on the windy downs so familiar to her
girlhood, Cecil found a pensive kind of pleasure in wandering alone,
with her seal-skin jacket wrapped tightly across her chest, and the
plumes of her little hat fluttering in the autumn blast. The weather
could not be too cold or too dull for Cecil. She went to look at the
little lonely house where so many years of her joyless life had been
passed, and standing in the distance, she looked sadly at the familiar
windows, the patch of lawn, where the salt sea-breezes had blighted
her geraniums, where the cruel breath of the mistral had slain her
pet-blossoms of rose and honeysuckle.
"I did not know _him_ when I lived there," she thought. "What foolish
creatures women must be! It seems to me now as if there could not have
been a time in which I did not know him. Hector Gordon! His name would
have meant nothing if I had heard it then; and now the sound of any
other name at all like his sends a thrill of anguish through my heart."
After the autumn at Brighton, there came the dowager's customary winter
round of visits, the Christmas festivities, the refined hospitality
of a modern country-house, from which only the coarser elements
of old-fashioned joviality have been eliminated. It was all very
cheery and pleasant, and to any one but a young lady with a broken
heart could scarcely have failed to prove delightful. Other people
besides Lady Cecil had their troubles, and contrived to forget them.
Gay young bachelors blotted from their memory the amounts of their
tailors'-bills, and the threatening phraseology of lawyers'-letters,
which had followed them even to that hospitable shelter; match-making
matrons forgot the ages of their daughters and the failures of the
past season, the tendency of dear Maria's nose to get a little red
after dinner, and the alarming sharpness of poor Sophy's shoulders;
Paterfamilias forgot the delinquencies of his favourite son--it almost
always is the favourite son who turns out so badly; and the young
Cantab, who had lately been plucked, lulled himself into a sweet
unconsciousness of his featherless condition. Grim Care found the door
of Annerwold Manor House shut in his face, and was fain to obtain an
entrance to the hospitable mansion by sneaking down the chimney of
Cecil's chamber to haunt the girl with the memory of Hector Gordon's
face as she lay awake in the dead of the night.
She could not forget him--yet. When the first snowdrops peeped pale
and pure from their sheltering leaves, the dowager went back to Dorset
Square, and all the old dreary round of housekeeping detail began
again for Cecil Chudleigh. The spoons and the china, the butcher's
uncertainty as to weight, and the poulterer's extortionate prices,
seemed more than usually wearisome to Cecil this year. Her burden had
been easy to bear before the coming of Hector Gordon--before that
one bright interval in her life, by contrast with which the rest of
her existence was so dull and joyless. He had loved her, and left
her. It was her own decision which had separated them for ever. But
sometimes--in some weak moment of depression, some foolish dreamy
interval of reverie--there arose before her the vision of what might
have been, if the man who loved her had refused to accept her decision;
if love had been stronger than reason; if, in spite of herself, he had
beaten down the barrier that divided them, and had stayed in England to
make her his wife.
"How do I know that this girl loves him as well as I do?" she thought,
bitterly. "My aunt may be right, perhaps, in her worldly wisdom, and
this Miss Chesham may have only cared for him because he was a good
match. Girls are sent out to India on purpose to get married, and how
can it be expected they should be otherwise than mercenary?"
But in the next moment Lady Cecil reproached herself for having thought
so basely of her happy rival. The heart of Lord Aspendell's daughter
was brave and generous, womanly and true; but there are moments of
weakness and uncertainty which overtake the noblest of the vanquished
in the battle of life.
In these weak moments Cecil tried in vain to shut from her mind the
picture of what her life might have been if Hector Gordon had been free
to marry her. She had loved him for himself alone, and would have loved
him as truly if he had been penniless; but in her thought of him she
could not forget the fact of his wealth. That gold which is so sordid
a thing in itself is also the keystone to many things that are not
sordid; and the only man who needs be ashamed of his affection for the
yellow dross is he who loves it with a morbid and diseased passion for
the stuff itself, and not the noble uses that may be made of it.
Cecil remembered the Scotchman's wealth, and all the power that goes
along with wealth, and there rose before her the vision of a spot
in which her childhood had been spent, and which she loved with a
passionate affection; a place she never hoped to see again, except in
her dreams; and the image of it haunted her in them when she was most
sorrowful--most weary of the joyless gaieties of her London life.
The place was a long rambling white house, built under the shelter of
woody hills, and surrounded by the loveliest gardens in North Devon. It
lay hidden in the very heart of a wood, and was called Chudleigh Combe.
You heard the distant roar of the waves breaking on a rocky shore, and
only by that sound knew how near all that luxuriant pastoral beauty
was to the mighty grandeur of the sea. Within a mile of Chudleigh
Combe there was a tiny fishing-village, a steep hilly street almost
inaccessible to any but its wild denizens, a bay of bright yellow sand,
and a ruined fortress on a rock. The place had been invaded lately by
exploring tourists, some of whom found their way to Chudleigh, where
there were a few valueless old pictures, of the most severely-dingy
school; a handsome collection of Oriental china, and a good deal of
quaint old furniture; brass-inlaid chests of drawers, wherein Evelina
and Cecilia might have kept their finery; Indian _secrétaires_,
at which Clarissa Harlowe might have written her famous letters;
high-backed chairs, on which Sir Charles Grandison might have sat,
gentleman-like and unbending.
The exploring tourists of these latter days were told that the
Chudleigh-Combe estate had been bought by the grandfather of the late
Lord Aspendell, and paid for with his wife's fortune; and that the
mansion had been built by the same Earl, and paid for with the same
money. The estate had never been entailed, and had been sold by the
last Earl, Cecil's father, to a wealthy citizen, who, after occupying
the lonely mansion through a rainy summer, repented himself bitterly
of his bargain, and tried to sell the estate; but an estate buried in
Devonian woods, and twenty miles from a railroad, is not every one's
money; and while Chudleigh Combe was yet in the market the merchant
died, leaving a will so badly worded as to occasion a Chancery suit.
This suit had been pending for more than a year, and the house was left
in charge of a superannuated cook, and the grounds in custody of a
couple of gardeners.
It was this place whose image haunted Cecil in her dreams, the scene in
which her childhood had been passed, and the spot which was associated
with the happiest period of her life. She thought how easy a thing it
would have been for Hector Gordon to buy Chudleigh Combe, and to take
her back to the familiar gardens--the dear old-fashioned rooms: how
easy, if there had been no such person as Mary Chesham.
The old life in Dorset Square brought with it all the old
responsibilities. The dowager's health had been very uncertain all
through the winter, and the dowager's temper was something worse than
uncertain. She had founded high hopes on the chance of a marriage
between her nephew and niece, a marriage which should bring Hector
Gordon and Hector Gordon's wealth comfortably under her dominion: and
now that all those fond expectations had been disappointed, she was
inclined to resent her disappointment as a wrong inflicted upon her by
Cecil.
In such peevish lamentations did Mrs. MacClaverhouse bewail her poverty
at this period, that Cecil began to feel herself a burden on her aunt's
slender income, and to taste all the bitterness that poisons the
bread of dependence. She did not know the world well enough to know
that there are people to whom it is delightful to grumble,--mental
voluptuaries, who would be unhappy if they could find no crumpled
rose-leaf for the justification of their discontent. Cecil fancied that
her protectress had substantial cause for her lamentations, and she
began to be ashamed of her useless life and the trifling expenses which
her presence inflicted upon her kinswoman.
"I am as well educated as most of the governesses I have met with,
auntie," she said once; "why shouldn't I go out as a governess, and
earn my living?"
"What!" screamed the dowager; "Lord Aspendell's daughter would be a
nice sort of person to teach a regiment of tiresome brats for twenty
pounds a-year. Upon my word, Cecil, I haven't common patience with you
when I hear you talk such nonsense."
"But I needn't tell people who I am, auntie, if there's any reason why
a nobleman's daughter shouldn't earn her living. I could call myself
Miss Chudleigh--or Miss any thing--and I might earn more than twenty
pounds a-year."
"Nonsense, child; don't let me hear any more of such absurdity. What's
to become of my silver, I should like to know, if you leave me? I
consider it very unkind and heartless of you to talk of deserting me."
"But I wouldn't leave you for the world, auntie, if I really am any use
or any comfort to you," answered Cecil, tenderly; "only--sometimes I
can't help thinking that I am a burden to you."
"Wait till I tell you that you are a burden, Lady Cecil," replied the
dowager severely. "I have been disappointed about you and Hector, and I
don't deny that I have felt the disappointment very deeply; but--well,
that's over, and I suppose I am to end my days in Dorset Square. It
might have been all very different if the General had been tolerably
prudent; however, all I have to say is, that if I were as poor as Job,
no niece of mine should degrade herself by going out as a governess."
Lady Cecil bowed her head to this decision, but she remembered, with
a sigh, how many governesses she had seen in the households of her
friends, who were infinitely less dependent than she was, and whose
lives were infinitely happier than hers. The sordid cares of Dorset
Square were heavier than usual this year, for her aunt's feeble
health threw the weight of financial and housekeeping arrangements
entirely upon Cecil; and to this were added the constant anxiety of
the sick-room, the long summer days spent in the stifling atmosphere
of a sunny drawing-room, whose windows were rarely opened from dawn to
sunset, the tension of the mind kept always on the stretch to amuse
or soothe a peevish invalid; and Lady Cecil bore all her trials with
meek uncomplaining patience. She was very patient; and in the unbroken
round of her daily duties she found very little time to think of her
one great sorrow,--so little time that the shadow of the past grew dim,
and dimmer, until she was able to remember Hector Gordon with perfect
resignation to the fate that had separated her from him, and to hear
his name spoken suddenly without a painful consciousness of the hot
blood rushing to her cheeks.
The season was drawing to a close, and the early glories of the Lady's
Mile had faded, when the dowager was well enough to array herself
in black silk and diamonds, and to go to parties once more. She was
nothing if not a woman of the world, and the chief consolation of
her sick chamber had been the friendly visits of other dowagers and
gossiping maiden-ladies, who brought her the freshest scandals of the
West End. To her the dulness of the Dorset Square drawing-room had been
far more painful than to Cecil; and within a week from the day on which
her medical man pronounced her well enough to take an airing in the
phantom chariot, she buckled on her armour of state, and accompanied
Cecil to a ball at the house of the fashionable physician who had
attended her occasionally during her illness.
It was at this assembly that Cecil Chudleigh met the person who was
destined to exercise a very powerful influence over her fate. Once in
every season Dr. Molyneux's sombre old house in Harley Street burst
into a sudden blaze of splendour and brightness. Once in every season
the marble busts of divers pagan notabilities, more or less connected
with the science of medicine, trembled on their scagliola pedestals as
the light feet of fashionable beauty, and the varnished boots of gilded
youth, trod the physician's stately chambers. The popular medical man
gave many parties--snug dinners, at which the amber wines of the fair
Rhineland, and the violet-scented vintages of Burgundy, were consumed
by connoisseurs who could fix the date of a vintage as easily as an
archæologist decides the period of a frieze or a column. But these
pleasant dinner-parties were given chiefly to learned old fogies of the
doctor's own profession, and were given for the doctor's own pleasure.
It was only once in a year that he flung open his house for the benefit
of polite society in general, and his own patience in particular.
Guntor had _carte blanche_ on these occasions, and sent in a bill some
six months afterwards, which was by no means a _carte blanche_. Groves
of exotics and wagon-loads of evergreens came to Harley Street from
unknown regions beyond the Edgware Road, and the doctor's patients,
calling upon him on the morning before the festival, found the sombre
hall a forest of moderator lamps, and candelabra, and the dining-room
in which they were wont to wait the great physician's summons,
completely abandoned to the possession of the confectioner's minions.
Every one who was worth meeting was to be met at Dr. Molyneux's
parties. Fashionable countesses, and pretty daughters of nameless
citizens from far northern regions of commercial splendour beyond
Islington and Hackney; cabinet ministers and briefless barristers;
a popular actor who had been taken up by the aristocracy; literary
men and African explorers; the very latest celebrity in the musical
world; and the last promoter of the last company for the cultivation
of the art of lace-making by spiders, or the construction of a canal
across the Isthmus of Panama--all these and many more were to be met
in the Harley Street drawing-rooms, or on the Harley Street staircase;
for it was only the more adventurous spirits who penetrated the
drawing-room, or heard any thing but the highest notes of the last
Scandinavian tenor. There were people who preferred the desultory
snatches of conversation, and rapid circulation of new arrivals, on
Dr. Molyneux's staircase to the splendid crush of his rooms. In the
crowded drawing-rooms beauty waxed pale in the glare of lamps and
tapers, but on the staircase wandering breezes from open windows and
doors fluttered the gauzy draperies of youth and the stately plumage of
age; and there was a dash of Bohemianism in the gaiety, which is apt to
be pleasing to modern revellers. For a thorough-going, cross-country
flirtation there was no place like Dr. Molyneux's broad landing.
There were deep window-seats that must surely have been devised by
some designing architect with a special view to the annihilation of
masculine peace, and the triumph of feminine loveliness. There were
stands of exotics whose friendly shade protected Edwin the briefless
and Angelina the beautiful from the awful eye of Angelina's mamma.
There were statuettes of marble and Parian, in pretended contemplation
of which Celadon and Amelia could bask in the light of each other's
eyes, while Amelia's papa was powerless to tear her from the
companionship of her penniless adorer. There were voluminous curtains
falling artistically from the carved cornices of massive doorways,
beneath whose shelter irrevocable engagements were made, only to be
broken by death, or the distracting complications of an ensuing season.
Arriving late at Dr. Molyneux's assembly, the energetic dowager was
fain to content herself with a resting-place in one of the broad
window-seats, where she installed herself very comfortably, but much to
the discomfiture of a young lady in pink _tulle_, spotted and festooned
with innocent white daisies. The damsel in pink had been working the
destruction--in a clubbable point of view--of an aristocratic Guardsman
of six feet two and a half, but the advent of the Scottish widow scared
her covey, and the irrevocable word remained unspoken. The dowager, who
read almost every thing that was to be read, had fallen on a new view
of some important feature in the science of physiology, and insisted
upon discussing her theories with a distinguished surgeon; while Cecil,
very weary and indifferent, found her way to a seat on the broad flight
of stairs leading to an upper floor, and sat there above an animated
group of pretty girls who were eating ices and talking through the
banisters to the gilded youth upon the lower stairs. Sitting here,
enthroned above the rest, as on a daïs, and fanning herself listlessly,
Lady Cecil was seen by the man who was to make himself the master of
her destiny.
Scarcely ten minutes had elapsed since the arrival of Mrs.
MacClaverhouse and her niece, when the gilded youth upon the staircase
were fluttered by the advent of a sturdy stranger, whose broad
shoulders made a passage through the elegant crowd very much as a
blundering collier might cut her way athwart a fleet of prize wherries;
while a massive forehead, and a bush of straight brown hair arose above
all those beautiful partings and ambrosial locks of exactly the same
pattern.
The gilded youth, turning indignantly upon the pushing stranger with
the stalwart shoulders and resolute elbows, beheld a man who was known
to most people by sight, and to all England by the record of his doings
and sayings in the newspapers. The pushing stranger was no other than
Mr. O'Boyneville, Queen's Counsel, one of the most popular men at the
English Bar, and the man whose reckless audacity and ready cleverness
had won more causes than were ever gained by the eloquence of a Berryer
or the splendid declamation of an Erskine.
The loungers on the staircase were almost reconciled to being pushed
when they discovered how popular a man had elbowed them; and several
claimed acquaintance with the great O'Boyneville.
"Read your speech in that breach of promise case," said one; "never
read any thing so jolly."
"I should like to have seen you and Valentine pitching into each other
in the Common Pleas yesterday. It isn't every man who can shut up
Valentine," said another.
Mr. O'Boyneville bestowed a friendly nod upon his admirers. He had
all that easy consciousness of his own abilities, and good-natured
wish not to be proud, which seems a distinguishing characteristic of
the Hibernian mind. He pushed his way upward, nodding right and left,
but his mind was at that moment full of a great case of Vendors and
Purchasers, speedily to be decided in one of the Courts of Equity, in
which some Irish slate-quarries were distractingly involved with the
operations of a gigantic builder, and in which innumerable folios of
affidavits had been filed on both sides. The great barrister was by
no means a party-going man, and the gilded youth made merry upon the
antediluvian cut of his dress-coat, the yellow tinge of his cambric
cravat, and the high shirt-collars which fenced his massive jaws, as he
passed out of their ken. He came to Dr. Molyneux's ball only because
the doctor was his personal friend, and had carried him through a very
sharp attack of brain fever induced by overwork; but he would fain have
taken his red bag with him, and, ensconced in some obscure corner, have
refreshed himself with a dip into the great slate case.
He was a tall, broad-shouldered man, with massively cut features, a
mouth and chin that were almost classic in their modelling, strongly
marked eyebrows, and large bright blue eyes--the eyes that are better
adapted to "threaten and command" than to melt with tenderness or
darken with melancholy. Nobody had ever called him handsome, nobody had
ever called him plain. In his face and figure alike there was a daring
that was almost insolence, a manliness that approached nobility. He was
the man of men to wear a barrister's wig and gown, to wind himself into
the innermost souls of irresolute jurymen, and to freeze the heart's
blood of timid witnesses.
When something less than forty, Laurence O'Boyneville had found himself
the most successful man of his age, far higher on the ladder of fortune
than many men who were twenty years his senior and who had worked
well too in their time. But to the Irish lawyer had been given an
indomitable energy, which is so good a substitute for the sacred fire
of genius, that it is very apt to be mistaken for that supernal flame.
Nature had bestowed upon him, and education had sharpened, a rapidity
of perception that was almost like inspiration; and the more desperate
the case he had undertaken, the more brilliant was his handling of its
difficulties, the more daring his defiance of his opponent. He had
the true warrior spirit, and rose with the desperation of anticipated
defeat. His greatest triumphs had been achieved by movements as wildly
hazardous as the charge of the six hundred at Balaclava.
He was a Charles the Twelfth, a Frederick the Great, a Napoleon of
the Bar, and he enjoyed a good fight as only the born warrior can
enjoy it. For seventeen years he had known no interest and found no
pleasure outside his profession. Patiently and uncomplainingly he had
passed through his probationary years of poverty and disappointment.
He had seen his contemporaries--young men who had started with as much
ambition as himself--grow weary of the long waiting, and turn aside to
begin anew in other and easier paths the pursuit of fortune. But he
held on; and from the first insignificant chance that had been flung
in his way, to the full triumphs of his present position, he never
swerved by one hair's-breadth from the line he had drawn for himself,
or neglected the smallest opportunity.
He found himself rapidly growing rich, for he had neither time nor
inclination for the spending of money. He exacted his price, in that
tacit manner peculiar to his profession, but he set little value on the
produce of his labour when the golden stream flowed in upon him. He
neither drank nor smoked. He rarely played at any game of hazard; and
though, while watching the Derby canter with ignorant eyes, his rapid
perception showed him the one horse out of twenty whose build stamped
him a winner, he had only been induced to visit a race-course some
half-dozen times in the twenty years of his London life.
In all those twenty years Laurence O'Boyneville had been a voluntary
exile from feminine society. The successful barrister has no time for
flower-shows or fancy-fairs, morning concerts or archæological-society
meetings, picnics, kettle-drums, or _thès dansantes_. For him the days
are too short for social intercourse, the nights too brief for rest.
And Mr. O'Boyneville loved his profession, and had given all his mind
to the labour of his love.
The years went by him with all their changes of fashion, and left him
unchanged. His brief holidays were scarcely times of rest, for he
carried his work with him wherever he went. Thus it was that at nearly
forty years of age the mighty Laurence was still a bachelor. He had
seen pretty women and had admired them, with an artistic pleasure in
a pretty face; but they had passed him by like the shadows of fair
women in the poet's vision. He had no time for more than transient
admiration--or let it rather be said that as yet the one face which was
to awake his soul from its dull slumber had not dawned upon him.
Mr. O'Boyneville was rich, and was known to be rich; and on those rare
occasions when he did appear in society he found himself received
with extreme courtesy by some members of the gentler sex. There were
mothers with unmarried daughters of five-and-thirty who would have
been quite willing to cultivate Mr. O'Boyneville's acquaintance; but
the Irish luminary appeared only to vanish; and the fair damsels of
five-and-thirty who were so inclined to be interested in his triumphs,
and so ready to talk of his last great success, had little opportunity
of impressing him with their intellectual graces or charming him by
their amiability.
For twenty years from the day in which he had come from the banks of
the Shannon to drop friendless into the wilderness of London, with only
one letter of introduction and one five-pound note in his pocket, until
to-day, when his name was a synonym for daring and success, he had gone
scatheless. Cupid's fatal shadow rarely darkens the sombre thresholds
of the Temple, nor does the god care to penetrate those courts of law
where his name has so often been taken in vain by mercenary damsels
seeking golden ointments for the wounds inflicted by his arrows.
Pretty witnesses had stepped into the box believing their charms
invincible, and had retired weeping after a verbal contest with the
great O'Boyneville, as some tender fawn may fly, mauled and torn by the
mighty boar of the forest. Grecian noses and timid blue eyes, blooming
cheeks rendered more blooming by the coquettish adjustment of a spotted
veil, might exercise a charm of potent power in other regions; but they
availed nothing when Laurence O'Boyneville rose to cross-examine the
witnesses of his opponent.
"Put up your veil, Ma'am, and let us see your face, if you please,"
he said at starting. And then came the torture,--the searching tone
of voice, that seemed to imply an occult knowledge; the see-sawing
of trivial facts, which seemed to transform the moral standpoint of
the witness into a shifting quicksand of uncertainty; the frivolous
questions beside the subject, that seemed so foolish and unmeaning,
till all in a moment they wove themselves into a fatal web in which
the witness was inextricably entangled. In such ordeals Beauty
appealed vainly to the merciless advocate; and, having derived his
chief knowledge of the fair sex from witnesses in _nisi prius_,
breach-of-promise, and divorce cases, it may be that Mr. O'Boyneville's
estimate of womankind was scarcely an elevated one.
Of all living creatures, perhaps Laurence O'Boyneville would have
seemed to a superficial observer the last to fall a victim to a sudden
and unreasoning passion. When a man attains the age of forty without
one pulse of his heart being quickened by any tender emotion, it is
to be expected that he will jog quietly on to fifty; and that if then
he dislikes the prospect of a lonely old age, uncheered except by the
attentions of a housekeeper--who, if she does not poison him with
subtle doses of tartar emetic, will most likely forge a codicil to
his will, and possess herself of his goods and chattels when he is
dead,--he will look out for some wealthy widow of his own age, and
settle quietly down to the enjoyment of ponderous dinners and expensive
wines. And yet, on reflection, it seems very probable that the busy
man--the plodding labourer in the arid fields of life--is the most
likely subject for that sudden love which springs into life vigorous
and perfect as Minerva when she burst armed and helmeted from the
brain of Jove. The man most apt to fall in love with unknown Beauty
in an omnibus, is the man who has least time for the cultivation of
accredited Beauty's society in the drawing-rooms of his friends. Sooner
or later the god claims his prey; and the unbeliever who has gone
scatheless for twenty years has good reason to dread the chances of the
one-and-twentieth. Mr. O'Boyneville pushed his way up Dr. Molyneux's
staircase at half-past eleven a free man; but he descended the same
staircase at a quarter to one as fettered a slave as Samson when
they bore him from the false embraces of Delilah; and yet no artful
enchantress spread her nets for his entanglement, no mercenary Circe
wove her spell for his destruction.
The crowd upon the landing-place grew closer as the night waxed older,
and in the confusion occasioned by one set of people always struggling
to get away, and another set of people always struggling to get into
the drawing-rooms, to say nothing of chivalrous young men for ever
striving to carry ices or other airy refreshments to distressed
damsels, the loungers who did not care about dancing had enough to
do to keep their ground. It was this perpetual motion that drove the
mighty O'Boyneville on to the very flight of stairs where Cecil sat
pensive and silent, while the buzz of voices around her grew every
moment louder.
Having nothing better to do, the barrister lounged with his back
against the wall and looked down at the fair aristocratic face of his
neighbour, while he meditated upon the great slate case. But being
a student of character, he fell to musing on the lady sitting below
him--sitting almost at his feet, as it were, with only the width of the
stair-carpet between them.
"I shouldn't like to drive _her_ too hard," he thought, "if I had her
as a witness on the other side. She's the sort of woman who could keep
her self-possession, and make a man look foolish. I saw Valentine
tackle such a woman once, and he got considerably the worst of it."
"And then, after ruminating for some minutes upon an intricate point in
the slate case, he took courage and addressed Lady Cecil. His Hibernian
daring rarely abandoned him, even in that feminine society to which he
was so unaccustomed; and yet there was a kind of restraint upon him
to-night, and a strange schoolboy feeling took possession of him as he
spoke to Cecil.
"Do you like this sort of thing?" he asked. "Molyneux saved my life
three years ago, or I shouldn't be here: but he can't have saved the
lives of all these people; and yet, if he hasn't, I don't understand
why they come here."
"Dr. Molyneux is very popular," answered Cecil, smiling a little at
the barrister's manner. "I think he almost saved my aunt's life in
the spring; and if every body here has as much reason as I have to be
grateful to him, they may very well endure a little crushing. Besides,
one is crushed quite as much at other houses, where the parties are not
so pleasant."
Mr. O'Boyneville shrugged his shoulders.
"Well, I suppose there are sane people who consider this sort of thing
agreeable," said he; "it is one of the enigmas of social life. I am a
working man, and the mysteries of fashion are a sealed book to me. But
of course, if it is the fashion to be hustled upon a staircase, people
will submit to be hustled on a staircase, just as the Chinese women
pinch their feet, and savages flatten their skulls and elongate their
ears. So Molyneux attended your aunt, did he? Is she with you to-night?"
"Oh yes, she is here."
Cecil glanced unconsciously towards the embrasure between the curtains
where the dowager was seated as she said this; and Mr. O'Boyneville,
accustomed to watch the glances of witnesses and jurymen, was quick to
interpret her look.
"The lady in black is your aunt," he said. "What's her name?"
"MacClaverhouse," answered Cecil, looking with some wonder at this
uncivilised stranger who questioned her so coolly.
"I suppose he is an American," she thought; "and yet he doesn't talk
like one."
"And you are Miss MacClaverhouse, of course?" said the presumptuous
O'Boyneville. He was determined to know who this young lady was--this
aristocratic beauty with the fair classic face and listless manner.
Another man would have left Cecil unmolested, and would have stolen
away to extract the information he wanted from the master of the house;
but the unsophisticated O'Boyneville had no idea of any such diplomacy.
He had been asking questions all his life, and he questioned Cecil
almost as he would have questioned one of his own witnesses, with a
friendly unceremoniousness.
"My name is Chudleigh," said the young lady, very coldly.
"Why, that's the name of the Aspendell family; and you belong to that
family, I suppose, Miss Chudleigh?"
"Yes; the late Lord Aspendell was my father."
"Indeed! Ah! I met the Earl once, ten years ago; and that unfortunate
young man who ran through so much money, and was killed in the Alps?"
"He was my brother," murmured Cecil, rising as if she would have made
her escape from this uncivilised monster.
"I beg your pardon a thousand times. Yes, to be sure, I ought to have
remembered that. Your brother, of course; and I suppose he really _did_
contrive to make away with every acre of the Aspendell property, eh?"
Lady Cecil looked indignantly at her questioner, and the stairs
immediately below her being a little clearer just now, she moved
downwards and made her way towards her aunt. The barrister looked after
her with a bewildered aspect.
"I suppose she didn't like my talking to her about her brother," he
thought. "He was a thorough young scamp, if ever there was one. And
the present Lord Aspendell must be as poor as Job. And this girl's his
niece, I suppose, or his cousin. Poor and proud--that's a pity! and
she's a nice girl too."
He looked after her; she was entering the dancing-room on the arm of
an irreproachable cavalier. Mr. O'Boyneville watched her till she
disappeared, and then tried to take up the thread of his meditations
upon the slate case at the exact point at which he had dropped it.
But for once in his life he found his thoughts wandering away from the
contemplation of his professional duties. The image of the patrician
face on which he had so lately been looking haunted him as no such
image had ever haunted him before.
"I am sorry I offended her," he thought, "for she really seems a nice
girl."
The doctor came out upon the landing in animated conversation with one
of his guests at this very moment, and perceiving Mrs. MacClaverhouse
in the shadow of the window-curtains, stopped to give her cordial
greeting.
"I have seen Lady Cecil, and she told me where to look for you," said
the physician. "Won't you come into the rooms? We're a little crowded,
but I'll find you a comfortable seat; and Herr Kerskratten, the German
bass, is going to sing his great drinking-song."
But before Dr. Molyneux could steer the dowager through the crowd about
the doorway, Mr. O'Boyneville had pushed his way to the elbow of his
physician, whom he saluted in that sonorous voice which was one of
the most useful gifts a liberal nature had bestowed upon him. After a
briefly cordial greeting, the Irishman bent his head to whisper in the
ear of his friend:
"Introduce me to the old lady."
Dr. Molyneux looked at him in some astonishment as he complied.
"I know you are a hunter of lions, Mrs. MacClaverhouse," he said, "so I
don't think it would be fair if I didn't introduce you to a gentleman
whose name must be tolerably familiar to you in the law reports that
enliven your morning papers. Mr O'Boyneville--Mrs. MacClaverhouse."
The barrister, who had found so little to say to Lady Cecil, recovered
the natural flow of his eloquence in the society of the dowager, and
made himself eminently agreeable to that lady. He took her quite off
the hands of her host, and contrived to find her a corner on a sofa
near the piano, where some ladies of the wallflower species were primly
seated. He talked with more animation than was pleasant to the German
bass during that gentleman's great song; but Mrs. MacClaverhouse was
one of those people who make a point of chattering throughout the
progress of a musical performance, and praising it loudly when it is
concluded. She was delighted with the Irish barrister, and from her
he obtained all the information he wanted about Lady Cecil Chudleigh.
Perhaps the wily dowager perceived that this uncivilised Hercules of
the law courts was smitten by her niece's tranquil beauty, and knew
that he was rich, and speculated upon the possibility of his being
able to support that corner house in Hyde Park Gardens, for whose
lofty chambers her spirit languished. However it might be, she was
monstrously civil to the great O'Boyneville; and before her niece came
to seek her she had invited him to dine in Dorset Square at an early
date, to meet a distinguished luminary of the Sudder Dewanee.
Cecil did not condescend to honour the Irishman by one glance as she
talked to her aunt.
"Shall we go now, auntie? The rooms are very warm, and I am sure you
must be tired."
"I suppose that means that _you_ are tired," answered Mrs.
MacClaverhouse. "However, I'm quite ready to take my departure."
"Shall I go and look for your carriage?" asked Mr O'Boyneville.
"No, thanks," Cecil replied, very coldly. "Captain Norris has been kind
enough to go in search of it. He will not fetch us till it is really at
the door, auntie."
"I hope not," said Mrs. MacClaverhouse. "But I sometimes fancy Dr.
Molyneux sows the seeds of his winter bronchitis cases while his
visitors are waiting for their carriages in that windy vestibule of
his. Perhaps you will be good enough to get me through the middle
passage, Mr. O'Boyneville, while Captain Norris looks after my niece."
Captain Norris, the irreproachable gentleman who had walked the solemn
measures of a quadrille with Cecil, arrived at this moment, flushed,
but triumphant.
"The carriage is there, Mrs. MacClaverhouse. May I offer you my arm?"
But the dowager slipped her hand over Mr. O'Boyneville's sleeve, and
the Captain took possession of Cecil. There were a good many pauses on
the way, pleasant salutations, and friendly greetings; but in due time
the ladies were safely installed in their chariot; and looking out into
the summer night, Cecil was obliged to bow to Mr. O'Boyneville, who
stood bare-headed upon the pavement.
"What a horrible man, auntie!" she exclaimed, with something like a
shudder; "and how could you be so friendly with him?"
And Mr. O'Boyneville, on his way to a big house in Bloomsbury, where
he ate his hurried meals and took his brief night's rest, and which
was popularly supposed to be his home, abandoned himself to musings of
quite a different fashion.
"If ever I were to marry," he thought--"and Heaven knows it's a remote
contingency--I would marry such a woman as Lady Cecil Chudleigh."
Many men have pronounced such resolutions as this, and have lived to
ally themselves to the most vulgar opposite of their chosen ideal; but
then Laurence O'Boyneville was a man with whom will was power.