"Souvent femme varie;
Bien fol est, qui s'y fie."
We sat by the firelight in the old library of Kerton Manor. The dreary
January evening was closing in, with a sharp sleet lashing the windows
and rattling on their diamond panes, but the gleams from the great
burning logs lighted up the dark crimson cushions of Utrecht and the
polished walnut panels so changefully and enticingly that no one had the
heart to think of candles.
All the younger members of the party were assembled there, with Mrs.
Bellasys to play propriety. It was her mission to be chaperon in
ordinary to her daughter and her daughter's friends, and she went
through with it, admirable in her patient self-denial. May they be
reckoned to her credit hereafter--those long hours, when she sat sleepy,
weary, uncomplaining, with an aching head but a stereotyped smile.
Let us speak gently of these maternal martyrs, manoeuvring though they
be. If they have erred, they have suffered. I knew once a lady with a
lot of six, nubile, but not attractive, all with a decided bias toward
Terpsichore and Hymen. Fancy what she must have endured, with those
plain young women round her, always clamoring for partners, temporary or
permanent, like fledglings in a nest for food. Clever and unscrupulous
as she was--they called her the "judicious Hooker"--she must have been
conscious of her utter inability to satisfy them. She knew, too, that
if, by any dispensation, one were removed, five daughters of the
horse-leech would still remain, with ravenous appetites unappeased. Yet
the poor old bird was cheerful, and sometimes, after supper, would chirp
quite merrily. _Honneur au courage malheureux._ Let us stand aside in
the cloak-room, and salute her as she passes out with all the honors of
war.
Mrs. Bellasys was a little woman, who always reminded me of a certain
tropical monkey--name unknown. She wore her hair bushily on each side of
her small face, just like the said intelligent animal, and had the same
eager, rather frightened way of glancing out of her beady black eyes,
accompanied by a quick turning of the head when addressed. She had her
full share of troubles in her time, but she took them all
contentedly--not to say complacently--as part of the day's work. Her
husband was not a model of fidelity, nor, indeed, of any of the conjugal
or cardinal virtues. He was a sort of Maëlstrom, into which fair
fortunes and names were sucked down, only emerging in unrecognizable
fragments. His own would have gone too, doubtless; but he had been lucky
at play for a long time--too constantly so, some said--and a pistol
bullet cut him short before he had half spent his wife's money, so that
she was left comfortably off, and her daughter was a fair average
heiress. She had long ago abdicated the government in favor of Flora,
who treated her well on the whole, _en bonne princesse_.
It is an invariable rule that, if there is a delicate subject which we
determine beforehand to avoid, this particular one is sure
imperceptibly to creep into the conversation.
Mr. Bruce was to arrive before dinner, an event which we guessed would
not add materially to the comfort of two of our party (how silent those
two were in their remote corner where the firelight never came), so of
course we found ourselves talking of ill-assorted marriages.
"You count _mésalliances_ among such?" Guy asked, at length. "Yes, you
are right; but I know a case where 'a man's being balked in his
intention to degrade himself' ruined him for life. Ralph Mohun told me
of it. It was a nine-days' wonder in Vienna soon after he joined the
Imperial Cuirassiers. A Bohemian count flourished there then--a great
favorite with every one, for he was frank and generous, like most boys
well-born and of great possessions, who have only seen things in general
on the sunny side. While down at his castle for the shooting, he fell in
love with the daughter of one of his foresters. The man was a dull,
brutal cur, and, when drunk, especially savage. His daughter was rarely
beautiful; at all events, the count, a good judge, thought her peerless.
"He meant fairly by the girl from the first, and promised her marriage,
actually intending to keep his word. Still there were arrangements to be
made before he could introduce such a novel element into blood that for
centuries had been pure as the _sangue azzura_. He went up to Vienna for
that purpose, leaving his design a profound secret to all his
dependents. If these thought about it at all, they probably believed
their master's intentions to be--like Dick Harcourt's toward the Irish
lady--'strictly dishonorable.'
"One night during his absence shrieks came from the cottage where the
forester lived alone with his daughter. Those who heard them made haste;
but it was a desolate spot, far from any other dwelling, and they came
too late.
"They found the girl lying in her blood, not a feature of her pretty
face recognizable. Near her were the butt of a gun shivered, and her
father senselessly drunk. He had evidently finished the bottle after
beating her to death.
"Whether it was merely an outbreak of his stupid ferocity, or if she had
exasperated him by her threats and taunts, for she was of a haughty
spirit, poor child! and perhaps rather elevated by the thought of the
coming coronet, will never be known. The murderer was in no state to
make a confession, and he remained obstinately silent in prison till his
lord's return."
"How very horrible!" Mrs. Bellasys cried out, shuddering; "was not the
count very angry?"
"Well, he _was_ rather vexed," replied Guy, coolly. "They are high
justiciaries on their own lands, those great Bohemian barons, and so he
gave the forester a fair trial. It was soon over; the man denied
nothing, only whining out, in excuse, that he thought his daughter was
dishonored. The shadow of death was closing round him, and he was nearly
mad with fear.
"The old steward saw a strange sort of smile twist his master's white,
quivering lips when he heard this, but he never said a word. I imagine
he thought to reveal his purpose now that it was crushed too great a
sacrifice even to clear the dead girl's fair fame; perhaps, though, he
could not trust his voice, for he did not announce the sentence in
words, but wrote it down: his hand shook very much, and it never carried
a full glass unspilled to his mouth again.
"The court broke up at midday, and the man went straight, unconfessed,
to the place of his punishment. They tied him to the tree nearest his
own door, and the count sat by while he howled his life out under the
lash. He was hardly dead by sundown."
"It was revenge, not justice," Mrs. Bellasys said, more firmly than was
her wont. I saw the quick, impatient movement of her daughter's little
foot; she did not appreciate her mother's moralities.
The answer came in the deepest of Livingstone's deep, stern tones.
"He was no saint, but a man, and a very miserable one; he acted
according to his light, and in his despair caught at the weapon that was
nearest to his hand. After all, the blood of a base, brutal hound, take
it in what fashion you will, is a poor compensation for one life cut
short in agony, and another blasted utterly.
"Mohun knew the count's family. Some of them, maiden aunts I suppose,
were devotees of the first order: these came in person, or sent their
pet priests, to argue with him on his unchristian habits of sullen
solitude. The men of his old set came too, to laugh him out of the
horrors. Saint and sinner got the same answer--a shake of the head, a
curse, a threat if he were not left alone, growled out between deep
draughts of strong Moldavian wine. They went, and were wise; for his
pistols lay always beside him--in case his servants offended him, or if
he should take a sudden fancy to suicide--and the shaking finger could
have pulled a trigger still.
"After a little he left Vienna, shut himself up in his castle, and would
see no one.
"In England they would have tried at the '_de lunatico_' statute; but
his next of kin left him in peace, biding their time as patiently as
they could. They had not to wait long; in four years a good constitution
broke up, suddenly at last, and the count exchanged stupor for a sleep
with his fathers, without benefit of clergy. Perhaps they would not have
given him absolution, for he died certainly not in charity with all
men."
"I don't know," Mrs. Bellasys objected, with a timid obstinacy; "I can
not argue with you; but I am sure it was very wrong."
I struck in to the meek little woman's rescue.
"That's right, Mrs. Bellasys, don't let him put you down with the high
hand; it's always his way when truth is against him; but I never knew
him break down a stubborn fact yet."
Guy turned upon me directly.
"Frank, I have often remarked in you, with pain, quite a feminine
propensity to theorize. Women _will_ do it. My dear Mrs. Bellasys, don't
look so dreadfully like an accusing angel about to bring me to book; you
know I am a hopeless heretic. They get up a sort of _Memoria Technica_
in early youth, and it clings to them all their life through. If they go
astray, they never cease proclaiming aloud that 'they know it's very
wrong;' though eminently unpractical, they think it due to themselves to
pet certain abstract truths (circumstances don't affect them in the
least), like that priestess of Cotytto, who said to the magistrate,
through her tears, 'I may have been unfortunate, but I've always been
respectable!' Sometimes principle gets the pull over passion, but, in
such a case, regrets come as often afterward as remorse does in the
reverse. I was reading a French story the other day--" He checked
himself with a laugh. "Bah! I am in the prosaic vein, it seems,
anecdoting like the old knave of clubs."
"Will you go on?" Flora said, leaning over toward him, her eyes
glittering in the firelight.
The thrill in her voice--strangely contagious it was--told how much she
was interested. I do not wonder at it. There was only one man on earth
for whom she had ever really cared--he sat beside her then--and, I
believe, what attracted her most in him was the daring disregard of
opinions, conventionalities, and more sacred things yet, which carried
him on straight to the accomplishment of his thought or purpose. In
those days, if either were an obstacle, he flinched no more before a
great moral law than at a big fence.
"Well," Guy went on, "it is the simple history of Fernande, an _ange
déchue_ of the Quartier Brèda. She had formed a connection with a man
who suited her perfectly in every way, and they went on in happy
immorality, till she found out that Maurice had a wife somewhere, a very
charming person, who loved him dearly; perhaps she thought that the
possession of two such affections by one man was _de luxe_; at all
events, she cut him at once, refusing consistently to see him again.
Maurice, after trying all other means to move her in vain, resorted to
the expedient of a brain fever. When his wife and mother saw him very
near his end, they sent for Fernande as a last resource. They ought to
have preferred death to dishonor, of course; but, my dear Mrs. Bellasys,
they were not strong-minded. What would you have? There are women and
women.
"She came and nursed him faithfully; when he got better, though still
very weak, she took advantage of his unprotected position to inflict on
him the longest lectures, replete with good sense and good feeling, as
to his conjugal duties, proprieties, and so forth. He gave in at last,
on the principle of 'any thing for a quiet life,' and promised to behave
himself like a decent head of a family. When the balance of power was
thoroughly re-established, she left him, first entreating him, when he
found himself really in love with his wife, and happy, to write and tell
her so. This was to be her reward, you know. The others went to Italy,
Fernande to a place she had in Brittany, where she put herself on a
strict _régime_ of penitence, attending matins regularly, and doing as
much good in her neighborhood as Lady Bountiful, or--my mother. In about
a twelvemonth the letter came; Maurice was devoted to his wife, and
great on the point of domestic felicity. Then Fernande went into her
oratory and prayed. What do you think was the substance of her prayer?"
"That she might go mad or die," was the quick answer: it came from Flora
Bellasys.
"How good of you," Guy said, "to let me finish that long story, when you
knew it by heart."
I think no ear but his and mine caught the whisper--"I never read or
heard of it till now."
He bent his head in assent, as if the intelligence did not surprise him
much, and then spoke suddenly,
"Charley, will you make an observation? You have been displaying that
incontestable talent of yours for silence long enough."
Very seldom was Forrester taken by surprise, but this time his reply was
not ready. There was an embarrassing pause, broken by a _Deus ex
machinâ_,--the butler announcing that Mr. Bruce had arrived, and was in
the drawing-room.