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.