morning, pleasant, smiling, well-dressed, well-looking, with the grace
of good birth and the sunniness of good nature plainly written on her
smooth brow and her kindly eyes, and wealth--delicious little
god!--stamping itself all about her, from the diamond rings on her soft
white fingers to the broidered shoe on the feet, of whose smallness she
was still proud, one might have ignorantly imagined her to be the most
happy, enviable, well-conditioned, easy-going dowager in the United
Kingdom. But appearances are deceptive, and if we believe what she
constantly asserted, Lady Marabout was very nearly worn into her grave
by a thousand troubles; her almshouses, whose roofs would eternally blow
off with each high wind; her dogs, whom she would overfeed; her ladies'
maids, who were only hired to steal, tease, or scandalize her; the
begging letter-writers, who distilled tears from her eyes and sovereigns
from her purse, let Carruthers disclose their hypocrisies as he might;
the bolder begging-letters, written by hon. secs., and headed by names
with long handles, belonging to Pillars of the State and Lights of the
Church, which compelled her to make a miserable choice between a
straitened income or a remorseful conscience--tormented, in fine, with
worries small and large, from her ferns, on which she spent a large
fortune, and who drooped maliciously in their glass cases, with an
ill-natured obstinacy characteristic of desperately-courted individuals,
whether of the floral or the human world, to those marriageable young
ladies whom she took under her wing to usher into the great world, and
who were certain to run counter to her wishes and overthrow her plans,
to marry ill, or not marry at all, or do something or other to throw
discredit on her chaperoning abilities. She was, she assured us,
_petrie_ with worries, small and large, specially as she was so
eminently sunny, affable, and radiant a looking person, that all the
world took their troubles to her, selected her as their confidante, and
made her the repository of their annoyances; but her climax of misery
was to be compelled to chaperone, and as a petition for some debutante
to be intrusted to her care was invariably made each season, and "No"
was a monosyllable into which her lips utterly refused to form
themselves, each season did her life become a burden to her. There was
never any rest for the soul of Helena, Countess of Marabout, till her
house in Lowndes Square was shut up, and her charges off her hand, and
she could return in peace to her jointure-villa at Twickenham, or to
Carruthers' old Hall of Deepdene, and among her flowers, her birds, and
her hobbies, throw off for a while the weary burden of her worries as a
chaperone.
"Valencia will give me little trouble, I hope. So admirably brought-up a
girl, and so handsome as she is, will be sure to marry soon, and marry
well," thought Lady Marabout, self-congratulatorily, as she dressed for
dinner the day of her niece's arrival in town, running over mentally the
qualifications and attractions of Valencia Valletort, while Felicie's
successor, Mademoiselle Despreaux, whose crime was then to put pink
with cerise, mauve with magenta, and sky-blue with azureline, gave the
finishing touches to her toilette--"Valencia will give me no trouble;
she has all the De Boncoeur beauty, with the Valletort dignity. Who
would do for her? Let me see; eligible men are not abundant, and those
that are eligible are shy of being marked as Philip would say--perhaps
from being hunted so much, poor things! There is Fulke Nugent, heir to a
barony, and his father is ninety--very rich, too--he would do; and
Philip's friend, Caradoc, poor, I know, but their Earldom's the oldest
peerage patent. There is Eyre Lee, too; I don't much like the man,
supercilious and empty-headed; still he's an unobjectionable alliance.
And there is Goodwood. Every one has tried for Goodwood, and failed. I
should like Valencia to win him; he is decidedly the most eligible man
in town. I will invite him to dinner. If he is not attracted by
Valencia's beauty, nothing can attract him----_Despreaux! comme vous
etes bete! Otez ces panaches, de grace!_"
"Valencia will give me no trouble; she will marry at once," thought Lady
Marabout again, looking across the dinner-table at her niece.
If any young patrician might be likely to marry at once, it was the Hon.
Valencia Valletort; she was, to the most critical, a beauty: her figure
was perfect, her features were perfect, and if you complained that her
large glorious eyes were a trifle too changeless in expression, that her
cheek, exquisitely independent of Marechale powder, Blanc de Perle, and
liquid rouge, though it was, rarely varied with her thoughts and
feelings, why, you were very exacting, my good fellow, and should
remember that nothing is quite perfect on the face of the earth--not
even a racer or a woman--and that whether you bid at the Marabout
yearling sales or the Rawcliffe, if you wish to be pleased you'd better
leave a hypercritical spirit behind you, and not expect to get _all_
points to your liking. The best filly will have something faulty in
temper or breeding, symmetry or pace, for your friend Jack Martingale to
have the fun of pointing out to you when your money is paid and the
filly in your stall; and your wife will have the same, only Martingale
will point _her_ flaws out behind your back, and only hint them to you
with an all-expressive "Not allowed to smoke in the dining-room _now_!"
"A little bit of a flirt, madame--n'est-ce pas, Charlie?" "Reins kept
rather tight, eh, old fellow?" or something equally ambiguous,
significant, and unpleasant.
"I must consider, Philip, I have brought out the beauty of the season,"
said Lady Marabout to Carruthers, eying her niece as she danced at her
first ball at the Dowager-Duchess of Amandine's, and beginning to
brighten up a little under the weight of her responsibilities.
"I think you have, mother. Val's indisputably handsome. You must tell
her to make play with Goodwood or Nugent."
Lady Marabout unfurled her fan, and indignantly interrupted him:
"My dear Philip! do you suppose I would teach Valencia, or any girl
under my charge, to lay herself out for any man, whoever or whatever it
might be? I trust your cousin would not stoop to use such manoeuvres,
did I even stoop to counsel them. Depend upon it, Philip, it is
precisely those women who try to 'make play,' as you call it, with your
sex that fail most to charm them. It is abominable the way in which you
men talk, as if we all hunted you down, and would drive you to St.
George's _nolens volens_!"
"So you would, mother," laughed Carruthers. "We 'eligible men' have a
harder life of it than rabbits in a warren, with a dozen beagles after
them. From the minute we're of age we're beset with traps for the
unwary, and the spring-guns are so dexterously covered, with an
inviting, innocent-looking turf of courtesies and hospitalities that
it's next to a mural impossibility to escape them, let one retire into
one's self, keep to monosyllables through all the courses of all the
dinners and all the turns of all the valses, and avoid everything
'compromising,' as one may. I've suffered, and can tell you. I suffer
still, though I believe and hope they are beginning to look on me as an
incurable, given over to the clubs, the coulisses, and the cover-side.
There's a fellow that's known still more of the _peines fortes et dures_
than I. Goodwood's coming to ask for an introduction to Val, I would
bet."
He was coming for that purpose, and, though Lady Marabout had so
scornfully and sincerely repudiated her son's counsel relative to making
play with Goodwood, blandly ignorant of her own weaknesses like a good
many other people, Lady Marabout was not above a glow of chaperone
gratification when she saw the glance of admiration which the Pet
Eligible of the season bestowed on Valencia Valletort. Goodwood was a
good-looking fellow--a clever fellow--though possibly he shone best
alone at a mess luncheon, in a chat driving to Hornsey Wood, round the
fire in a smoking-room, on a yacht deck, or anywhere where ladies of the
titled world were not encountered, he having become afraid of them by
dint of much persecution, as any October partridge of a setter's nose.
He was passably good-looking, ordinarily clever, a very good fellow as I
say, and--he was elder son of his Grace of Doncaster, which fact would
have made him the desired of every unit of the _beau sexe_, had he been
hideous as the Veiled Prophet or Brutal Gilles de Rayes. The Beauty
often loves the Beast in our day, as in the days of fairy lore. We see
that beloved story of our petticoat days not seldom acted out, and when
there is no possibility of personal transmogrification and amelioration
for the Beast moreover; only--the Beauty has always had whispered in
her little ear the title she will win, and the revenues she will gain,
and the cloth of gold she will wear, if she caresses Bruin the
enamoured, swears his ugly head is god-like, and vows fidelity
unswerving!
Goodwood was no uncouth Bruin, and he had strawberry-leaves in his gift;
none of your lacquered, or ormolu, or silver-gilt coronets, such as are
cast about nowadays with a liberality that reminds one of flinging a
handful of halfpence from a balcony, where the nimblest beggar is first
to get the prize; but of the purest and best gold; and Goodwood had been
tried for accordingly by every woman he came across for the last dozen
years. Women of every style and every order had primed all their rifles,
and had their shot at him, and done their best to make a centre and
score themselves as winner: belles and bas bleus, bewitching widows and
budding debutantes, fast young ladies who tried to capture him in the
hunting-field by clearing a bullfinch; saintly young ladies, who
illuminated missals, and hinted they would like to take his conversion
in hand; brilliant women, who talked at him all through a long rainy
day, when Perthshire was flooded, and the black-fowl unattainable; showy
women, who _pose'd_ for him whole evenings in their opera-boxes, whole
mornings in their boudoir--all styles and orders had set at him, till he
had sometimes sworn in his haste that all women were man-traps, and that
he wished to Heaven he were a younger son in the Foreign Office, or a
poor devil in the Line, or anything, rather than what he was; the Pet
Eligible of his day.
"Goodwood is certainly struck with her," thought Lady Marabout, as
Despreaux disrobed her that night, running over with a retrogressive
glance Valencia Valletort's successes at her first ball. "Very much
struck, indeed, I should say. I will issue cards for another 'At Home.'
As for 'making play' with him, as Philip terms it, of course that is
only a man's nonsense. Valencia will need none of those trickeries, I
trust; still, it is any one's duty to make the best alliance possible
for such a girl, and--dear Adeliza would be very pleased."
With which amiable remembrance of her sister (whom, conceiving it her
duty to love, Lady Marabout persuaded herself that she _did_ love, from
a common feminine opticism that there's an eleventh commandment which
makes it compulsory to be attached to relatives _n'importe_ of whatever
degree of disagreeability, though Lady Honiton was about the most odious
hypochondriac going, in a perpetual state of unremitting battle with the
whole outer world in general, and allopathists, homoeopathists, and
hydropathists in especial), the most amiable lady in all Christendom
bade Despreaux bring up her cup of coffee an hour earlier in the
morning, she had so much to do! asked if Bijou had had some panada set
down by his basket in case he wanted something to take in the night;
wished her maid good night, and laid her head on her pillow as the dawn
streamed through the shutters, already settling what bridal presents she
should give her niece Valencia, when she became present Marchioness of
Goodwood and prospective Duchess of Doncaster before the altar rails of
St. George's.
"That's a decidedly handsome girl, that cousin of yours, Phil," said
Goodwood, on the pavement before her Grace of Amandine's, in Grosvenor
Place, at the same hour that night.
"I think she _is_ counted like me!" said Carruthers. "Of course she's
handsome; hasn't she De Boncoeur blood in her, my good fellow? We're all
of us good-looking, always have been, thank God! If you're inclined to
sacrifice, Goodwood, now's your time, and my mother'll be delighted.
She's brought out about half a million of debutantes, I should say, in
her time, and all of 'em have gone wrong, somehow; wouldn't go off at
all, like damp gunpowder, or would go off too quick in the wrong
direction, like a volunteer's rifle charge; married ignominiously, or
married obstinately, or never excited pity in the breast of any man, but
had to retire to single-blessedness in the country, console themselves
with piety and an harmonium, and spread nets for young clerical victims.
Give her a triumph at last, and let her have glory for once, as a
chaperone, in catching _you_!"
Goodwood gave a little shiver, and tried to light a Manilla, which
utterly refused to take light, for the twelfth time in half a minute.
"Hold your tongue! If the Templars' Order were extant, wouldn't I take
the vows and bless them! What an unspeakable comfort and protection that
white cross would be to us, Phil, if we could stick it on our coats, and
know it would say to every woman that looked at us, 'No go, my pretty
little dears--not to be caught!' Marriage! I can't remember any time
that that word wasn't my bugbear. When I was but a little chicken, some
four years old, I distinctly remember, when I was playing with little
Ida Keane on the terrace, hearing her mother simper to mine, 'Perhaps
darling Goodwood may marry my little Ida some day, who knows?' I never
would play with Ida afterwards; instinct preserved me; she's six or
seven-and thirty now, and weighs ten stone, I'm positive. Why _won't_
they let us alone? The way journalists and dowagers, the fellows who
want to write a taking article, and the women who want to get rid of a
taking daughter, all badger us, in public and private, about marriage
just now, is abominable, on my life; the affair's _ours_, I should say,
not theirs, and to marry isn't the ultimatum of a man's existence, nor
anything like it."
"I hope not! It's more like the extinguisher. Good night, old fellow."
And Carruthers drove away in his hansom, while Goodwood got into his
night-brougham, thinking that for the sake of the title, the evil
(nuptial) day _must_ come, sooner or later, but dashed off to forget
the disagreeable obligation over the supper-table of the most sparkling
empress of the demi-monde.
Lady Marabout had her wish; she brought out the belle of the season, and
when a little time had slipped by, when the Hon. Val had been presented
at the first Drawing-room, and shone there despite the worry, muddle,
and squeeze incidental to that royal and fashionable ceremony, and she
had gathered second-hand from her son what was said in the clubs
relative to this new specimen of the Valletort beauty, she began to be
happier under her duties than she had ever been before, and wrote
letters to "dearest Adeliza," brimful of superlative adjectives and
genuine warmth.
"Valencia will do me credit: I shall see her engaged before the end of
June; she will have only to choose," Lady Marabout would say to herself
some twenty times in the pauses of the morning concerts, the morning
parties, the bazaar committees, the toilette consultations, the
audiences to religious beggars, whose name was Legion and rapacity
unmeasured, the mass of unanswered correspondence whose debt lay as
heavily on Lady Marabout as his chains on a convict, and were about as
little likely to be knocked off, and all the other things innumerable
that made her life in the season one teetotum whirl of small worries and
sunshiny cares, from the moment she began her day, with her earliest cup
of Mocha softened with cream from that pet dairy of hers at Fernditton,
where, according to Lady Marabout, the cows were constantly _in articulo
mortis_, but the milk invariably richer than anywhere else, an
agricultural anomaly which presented no difficulties to _her_ reason.
Like all women, she loved paradoxes, defied logic recklessly, and would
clear at a bound a chasm of solecisms that would have kept Plato in
difficulties about crossing it, and in doubt about the strength of his
jumping-pole, all his life long.
"She will do me great credit," the semi-consoled chaperone would say to
herself with self-congratulatory relief; and if Lady Marabout thought
now and then, "I wish she were a trifle--a trifle more--demonstrative,"
she instantly checked such an ungrateful and hypercritical wish, and
remembered that a heart is a highly treacherous and unadvisable
possession for any young lady, and a most happy omission in her anatomy,
though Lady Marabout had, she would confess to herself on occasions with
great self-reproach, an unworthy and lingering weakness for that
contraband article, for which she scorned and scolded herself with the
very worst success.
Lady Marabout _had_ a heart herself; to it she had had to date the
greatest worries, troubles, imprudences, and vexations of her life; she
had had to thank it for nothing, and to dislike it for much; it had made
her grieve most absurdly for other people's griefs; it had given her a
hundred unphilosophical pangs at philosophic ingratitude from people who
wanted her no longer; it had teased, worried, and plagued her all her
life long, had often interfered in the most meddling and inconvenient
manner between her and her reason, her comfort and her prudence; and yet
she had a weakness for the same detrimental organ in other people--a
weakness of which she could no more have cured herself than of her
belief in the detection-defying powers of liquid rouge, the potentiality
of a Liliputian night-bolt against an army of burglars, the miraculous
properties of sal volatile, the efficacy of sermons, and such-like
articles of faith common to feminine orthodoxy. A weakness of which she
never felt more ignominiously convicted and more secretly ashamed than
in the presence of Miss Valletort, that young lady having a lofty and
magnificent disdain for all such follies, quite unattainable to ordinary
mortals, which oppressed Lady Marabout with a humiliating sense of
inferiority to her niece of eighteen summers. "So admirably educated! so
admirably brought up!" she would say to herself over and over again,
and if heretic suggestions that the stiffest trained flowers are not
always the best, that the upright and spotless arum-lily isn't so
fragrant as the careless, brilliant, tangled clematis; that rose-boughs,
tossing free in sunshine and liberty, beat hollow the most
carefully-pruned standard that ever won a medal at Regent's Park, with
such-like allegories, arising from contemplation of her conservatory or
her balcony flowers, _would_ present themselves, Lady Marabout repressed
them dutifully, and gratefully thought how many pounds' weight lighter
became the weary burden of a chaperone's responsibilities when the
onerous charge had been educated "on the best system."
"Goodwood's attentions _are_ serious, Philip, say what you like," said
the Countess to her son, as determinedly as a theologian states his pet
points with wool in his ears, that he may not hear any Satan-inspired,
rational, and mathematical disproval of them, with which you may rashly
seek to soil his tympana and smash his arguments--"Goodwood's attentions
_are_ serious, Philip, say what you like," said her ladyship, at a
morning party at Kew, eating her Neapolitan ice, complacently glancing
at the "most eligible alliance of the season," who was throwing the
balls at lawn-billiards, and talking between whiles to the Hon. Val with
praiseworthy and promising animation.
"Serious indeed, mother, if they tend matrimony-wards!" smiled
Carruthers. "It's a very serious time indeed for unwary sparrows when
they lend an ear to the call-bird, and think about hopping on to the
lime-twigs. I should think it's from a sense of compunction for the net
you've led us into, that you all particularize our attentions, whenever
they point near St. George's, by that very suggestive little adjective
'serious!' Yes, I am half afraid poor Goodey is a little touched. He
threw over our Derby sweepstakes up at Hornsey Wood yesterday to go and
stifle himself in Willis's rooms at your bazaar, and buy a guinea cup
of Souchong from Valencia; and, considering he's one of the best shots
in England, I don't think you could have a more conclusive, if you could
have a more poetic, proof of devoted renunciation. _I_'d fifty times
rather get a spear in my side, a la Ivanhoe, for a woman than give up a
Pigeon-match, a Cup-day, or a Field-night!"
"You'll never do either!" laughed Lady Marabout, who made it one of her
chief troubles that her son would not marry, chiefly, probably, because
if he _had_ married she would have been miserable, and thought no woman
good enough for him, would have been jealous of his wife's share of his
heart, and supremely wretched, I have no doubt, at his throwing himself
away, as she would have thought it, had his handkerchief lighted on a
Princess born, lovely as Galatea, and blessed with Venus's cestus.
"Never, _plaise a Dieu_!" responded her son, piously over his ice; "but
if Goodwood's serious, what's Cardonnel? _He_'s lost his head, if you
like, after the Valletort beauty."
"Major Cardonnel!" said Lady Marabout, hastily. "Oh no, I don't think
so. I hope not--I trust not."
"Why so? He's one of the finest fellows in the Service."
"I dare say; but you see, my dear Philip, he's not--not--desirable."
Carruthers stroked his moustaches and laughed:
"Fie, fie, mother! if all other Belgraviennes are Mammon-worshippers, I
thought you kept clear of the paganism. I thought your freedom from it
was the only touch by which you weren't 'purely feminine,' as the lady
novelists say of their pet bits of chill propriety."
"Worship Mammon! Heaven forbid!" ejaculated Lady Marabout. "But there
are duties, you see, my dear; your friend is a very delightful man, to
be sure; I like him excessively, and if Valencia felt any _great_
preference for him----"
"You'd feel it _your_ duty to counsel her to throw him over for
Goodwood."
"I never said so, Philip," interrupted Lady Marabout, with as near an
approach to asperity as she could achieve, which approach was less like
vinegar than most people's best honey.
"But you implied it. What are 'duties' else, and why is poor Cardonnel
'not desirable'?"
Lady Marabout played a little tattoo with her spoon in perplexity.
"My dear Philip, you know as well as I do what I mean. One might think
you were a boy of twenty to hear you!"
"My dear mother, like all disputants, when beaten in argument and driven
into a corner, you resort to vituperation of your opponent!" laughed
Carruthers, as he left her and lounged away to pick up the stick with
which pretty Flora Elmers had just knocked the pipe out of Aunt Sally's
head on to the velvet lawn of Lady George Frangipane's dower-house,
leaving his mother by no means tranquillized by his suggestions.