Dowager-Countess of Patchouli on the respective beauties of two new
pelargonium seedlings, the Leucadia and the Beatrice, for which her
gardener had won prizes the day before at the Regent's Park Show--"dear
me! why is there invariably this sort of cross-purposes in everything?
It will be so grievous to lose Goodwood (and he _is_ decidedly struck
with her; when he bought that rosebud yesterday of her at the bazaar,
and put it in the breast of his waistcoat, I heard what he said, and it
was no nonsense, no mere flirting complaisance either)--it would be so
grievous to lose him; and yet if Valencia really care for Cardonnel--and
sometimes I almost fancy she does--I shouldn't know which way to advise.
I thought it would be odd if a season could pass quietly without my
having some worry of this sort! With fifty men always about Valencia, as
they are, how _can_ I be responsible for any mischief that may happen,
though, to hear Philip talk, one would really imagine it was _my_ fault
that they lost their heads, as he calls it! As if a forty-horse
steam-power could stop a man when he's once off down the incline into
love! The more you try to pull him back the more impetus you give him to
go headlong down. I wish Goodwood would propose, and we could settle the
affair definitively. It is singular, but she has had no offers hardly
with all her beauty. It is very singular, in _my_ first season I had
almost as many as I had names on my tablets at Almack's. But men don't
marry now, they say. Perhaps 'tisn't to be wondered at, though I
wouldn't allow it to Philip. Poor things! they lose a very great many
pleasant things by it, and get nothing, I'm sure, nine times out of ten,
except increased expenses and unwelcome worries. I don't think I would
have married if I'd been a man, though I'd never admit it, of course, to
one of them. There are plenty of women who know too much of their own
sex ever to wonder that a man doesn't marry, though of course we don't
say so; 'twouldn't be to our interest. Sculptors might as well preach
iconoclasm, or wine-merchants tee-totalism, as women misoganism, however
little in our hearts we may marvel at it. Oh, my dear Lady Patchouli!
you praise the Leucadia too kindly--you do indeed--but if you really
think so much of it, let me send you some slips. I shall be most happy,
and Fenton will be only too proud; it is his favorite seedling."
Carruthers was quite right. One fellow at least had lost his head after
the beauty of the season, and he was Cardonnel, of the--Lancers, as fine
a fellow, as Philip said, as any in the Queen's, but a dreadful
detrimental in the eyes of all chaperones, because he was but the fourth
son of one of the poorest peers in the United Kingdom, a fact which
gave him an aegis from all assaults matrimonial, and a freedom from all
smiles and wiles, traps and gins, which Goodwood was accustomed to tell
him he bitterly envied him, and on which Cardonnel had fervently
congratulated himself, till he came under the fire of the Hon. Val's
large luminous eyes one night, when he was levelling his glass from his
stall at Lady Marabout's box, to take a look at the new belle, as
advised to do by that most fastidious female critic, Vane Steinberg.
Valencia Valletort's luminous eyes had gleamed that night under their
lashes, and pierced through the lenses of his lorgnon. He saw her, and
saw nothing but her afterwards, as men looking on the sun keep it on
their retina to the damage and exclusion of all other objects.
Physical beauty, even when it is a little bit soulless, is an admirable
weapon for instantaneous slaughter, and the trained and pruned standard
roses show a very effective mass of bloom; though, as Lady Marabout's
floral tastes and experiences told her, they don't give one the lasting
pleasure that a careless bough of wild rose will do, with its untutored
grace and its natural fragrance. With the standard you see we keep in
the artificial air of the horticultural tent, and are never touched out
of it for a second; its perfume seems akin to a bouquet, and its destiny
is, we are sure, to a parterre. The wild-rose fragrance breathes of the
hill-side and the woodlands, and brings back to us soft touches of
memory, of youth, of a fairer life and a purer air than that in which we
are living now.
The Hon. Val did _not_ have as many offers as her aunt and chaperone had
on the first flush of her pride in her anticipated. Young ladies,
educated on the "best systems," are apt to be a trifle wearisome, and
_don't_, somehow or other, take so well as the sedulous efforts of their
pruners and trainers--the rarefied moral atmosphere of the
conservatories, in which they are carefully screened from ordinary air,
and the anxiety evinced lest the flower should ever forget itself, and
sway naturally in the wind--deserve. But Cardonnel had gone mad after
her, that perfect face of hers had done for him; and whatever Goodwood
might be, _he_ was serious--he positively haunted the young beauty like
her own shadow--he was leaning on the rails every morning of his life
that she took her early ride--he sent her bouquets as lavishly as if
he'd been a nursery gardener. By some species of private surveillance,
or lover's clairvoyance, he knew beforehand where she would go, and was
at the concert, fete, morning party, bazaar, or whatever it happened to
be, as surely as was Lady Marabout herself. Poor Cardonnel was serious,
and fiercely fearful of his all-powerful and entirely eligible rival;
though greater friends than he and Goodwood had been, before this girl's
face appeared on the world of Belgravia, never lounged arm-in-arm into
Pratt's, or strolled down the "sweet shady side of Pall-Mall."
Goodwood's attentions were very marked, too, even to eyes less willing
to construe them so than Lady Marabout's. Goodwood himself, if chaffed
on the subject, vouchsafed nothing; laughed, stroked his moustaches, or
puffed his cigar, if he happened to have that blessed resource in all
difficulties, and comforter under all embarrassments, between his lips
at the moment; but decidedly he sought Valencia Valletort more, or, to
speak more correctly, he shunned her less than he'd ever done any other
young lady, and one or two Sunday mornings--_mirabile dictu!_--he was
positively seen at St. Paul's, Knightsbridge, in the seat behind Lady
Marabout's sittings. A fact which, combining as it did a brace of
miracles at once, of early rising and unusual piety, set every
Belgravienne in that fashionable sanctuary watching over the top of her
illuminated prayer-book, to the utter destruction of her hopes and
interruption of her orisons.
Dowagers began to tremble behind their fans, young ladies to quake over
their bouquets; the topic was eagerly discussed by every woman from
Clarges Street to Lowndes Square; their Graces of Doncaster smiled well
pleased on Valencia--she was unquestionable blood, and they so wished
dear Goodwood to settle! There was whispered an awful whisper to the
whole female world; whispered over matutinal chocolate, and luncheon
Strasbourg pates, ball-supper Moets', and demi-monde-supper Silleri,
over Vane Steinberg's cigar and Eulalie Rosiere's cigarette, over the
_Morning Post_ in the clubs, and _Le Follet_ in the boudoir, that--the
Pet Eligible would--marry! That the Pet Prophecy of universal smash was
going to be fulfilled could hardly have occasioned greater
consternation.
The soul of Lady Marabout had been disquieted ever since her son's
suggestions at Lady George Frangipane's morning party, and she began to
worry: for herself, for Valencia, for Goodwood, for Cardonnel, for her
responsibilities in general, and for her "dearest Adeliza's" alternate
opinions of her duenna qualifications in particular. Lady Marabout had
an intense wish, an innocent wish enough, as innocent and very similar
in its way to that of an Eton boy to make a centre at a rifle-contest,
viz., to win the Marquis of Goodwood; innocent, surely, for though
neither the rifle prize nor the Pet Eligible could be won without
mortification unspeakable to a host of unsuccessful aspirants, if we
decree that sort of thing sinful and selfish, as everything natural
seems to me to get decreed nowadays, we may as well shut up at once; if
we may not try for the top of the pole, why erect poles at all,
monsieur? If we must not do our best to pass our friend and brother, we
must give up climbing forever, and go on all fours placably with Don and
Pontos.
Everybody has his ambition: one sighs for the Woolsack, another for the
Hunt Cup; somebody longs to be First Minister, somebody else pines to be
first dancer; one man plumes himself on a new fish-sauce, another on a
fresh reform bill; A. thirsts to get a single brief, B. for the time
when he shall be worried with no briefs at all; C. sets his hopes on
being the acrobat at Cremorne, D. on being the acrobat of the Tuileries;
fat bacon is Hodge the hedger's _summum bonum_, and Johannisberg _pur_
is mine; Empedocles thinks notoriety everything, and Diogenes thinks
quiet everything--each has his own reading of ambition, and Lady
Marabout had hers; the Duchess of Doncaster thirsted for the Garter for
her husband, Lady Elmers's pride was to possess the smallest terrier
that ever took daisy tea and was carried in a monkey-muff, her Grace of
Amandine slaved night and day to bring her party in and throw the
ministry out. Lady Marabout sighed but for one thing--to win the Pet
Eligible of the season, and give eclat for once to one phase of her
chaperone's existence.
Things were nicely in train. Goodwood was beginning to bite at that very
handsome fly the Hon. Val, and promised to be hooked and landed without
much difficulty before long, and placed, hopelessly for him,
triumphantly for her, in the lime-basket of matrimony. Things were
beautifully in train, and Lady Marabout was for once flattering herself
she should float pleasantly through an unruffled and successful season,
when Carruthers poured the one drop of _amari aliquid_ into her
champagne-cup by his suggestion of Cardonnel's doom. And then Lady
Marabout begun to worry.
She who could not endure to see a fly hurt or a flower pulled
needlessly, had nothing for it but to worry for Cardonnel's destiny, and
puzzle over the divided duties which Carruthers had hinted to her. To
reject the one man because he was not well off did seem to her
conscience, uncomfortably awakened by Phil's innuendoes, something more
mercenary than she quite liked to look at; yet to throw over the other,
future Duke of Doncaster, the eligible, the darling, the yearned-for of
all May Fair and Belgravia, seemed nothing short of madness to inculcate
to Valencia; a positive treason to that poor absent, trusting, "dearest
Adeliza," who, after the visions epistolarily spread out before her,
would utterly refuse to be comforted if Goodwood any way failed to
become her son-in-law, and, moreover, the heaviest blow to Lady Marabout
herself that the merciless axe of that brutal headsman Contretemps could
deal her.
"I do not know really what to do or what to advise," would Lady Marabout
say to herself over and over again (so disturbed by her onerous burden
of responsibilities that she would let Despreaux arrange the most
outrageous coiffures, and, never noticing them, go out to dinner with
emeralds on blue velvet, or something as shocking to feminine nerves in
her temporary aberration), forgetting one very great point, which,
remembered, would have saved her all trouble, that nobody asked her to
do anything, and not a soul requested her advice. "But Goodwood is
decidedly won, and Goodwood must not be lost; in our position we owe
something to society," she would invariably conclude these mental
debates; which last phase, being of a vagueness and obscure application
that might have matched it with any Queen's speech or electional address
upon record, was a mysterious balm to Lady Marabout's soul, and spoke
volumes to _her_, if a trifle hazy to you and to me.
But Lady Marabout, if she was a little bit of a sophist, had not worn
her eye-glass all these years without being keen-sighted on some
subjects, and, though perfectly satisfied with her niece's conduct with
Goodwood, saw certain symptoms which made her tremble lest the
detrimental Lancer should have won greater odds than the eligible
Marquis.
"Arthur Cardonnel is excessively handsome! Such very good style!
Isn't it a pity they're all so poor! His father played away
everything--literally everything. The sons have no more to marry upon,
any one of them, than if they were three crossing-sweepers," said her
ladyship, carelessly, driving home from St. Paul's one Sunday morning.
And, watching the effect of her stray arrow, she had beheld an actual
flush on the beauty's fair, impassive cheek, and had positively heard a
smothered sigh from an admirably brought-up heart, no more given
ordinarily to such weaknesses than the diamond-studded heart pendent
from her bracelet, the belle's heart and the bracelet's heart being both
formed alike, to fetch their price, and bid to do no more:--power of
volition would have been as inconvenient in, and interfered as greatly
with, the sale of one as of the other.
"She does like him!" sighed Lady Marabout over that Sabbath's luncheon
wines. "It's always my fate--always; and Goodwood, never won before,
will be thrown--actually thrown--away, as if he were the younger son of
a Nobody!" which horrible waste was so terrible to her imagination that
Lady Marabout could positively have shed tears at the bare prospect, and
might have shed them, too, if the Hon. Val, the butler, two footmen, and
a page had not inconveniently happened to be in the room at the time, so
that she was driven to restrain her feelings and drink some Amontillado
instead. Lady Marabout is not the first person by a good many who has
had to smile over sherry with a breaking heart. Ah! lips have quivered
as they laughed over Chambertin, and trembled as they touched the bowl
of a champagne-glass. Wine has assisted at many a joyous festa enough,
but some that has been drunk in gayety has caught gleams, in the eyes of
the drinkers, of salt water brighter than its brightest sparkles: water
that no other eyes can see. Because we may drink Badminton laughingly
when the gaze of Society the Non-Sympathetic is on us, do you think we
must never have tasted any more bitter dregs? _Va-t'en, becasse!_ where
have you lived! Nero does not always fiddle while Rome is burning from
utter heartlessness, believe me, but rather--sometimes,
perhaps--because his heart is aching!
"Goodwood will propose to-night, I fancy, he is so very attentive,"
thought Lady Marabout, sitting with her sister chaperones on the cosy
causeuses of a mansion in Carlton Terrace, at one of the last balls of
the departing season. "I never saw dear Valencia look better, and
certainly her waltzing is----Ah! good evening, Major Cardonnel! Very
warm to-night, is it not? I shall be so glad when I am down again at
Fernditton. Town, in the first week of July, is really not habitable."
And she furled her fan, and smiled on him with her pleasant eyes, and
couldn't help wishing he hadn't been on the Marchioness Rondeletia's
visiting list, he _was_ such a detrimental, and he was ten times
handsomer than Goodwood!
"Will Miss Valletort leave you soon?" asked Cardonnel, sitting down by
her.
"_Ah! monsieur, vous etes la!_" thought Lady Marabout, as she answered,
like a guarded diplomatist as she was, that it was not all settled at
present what her niece's post-season destiny would be, whether Devon or
Fernditton, or the Spas, with her mother, Lady Honiton; and then
unfurled her fan again, and chatted about Baden and her own indecision
as to whether she should go there this September.
"May I ask you a question, and will you pardon me for its plainness?"
asked Cardonnel, when she'd exhausted Baden's desirable and
non-desirable points.
Lady Marabout shuddered as she bent her head, and thought, "The creature
is never going to confide in me! He will win me over if he do, he looks
so like his mother! And what shall I say to Adeliza!"
"Is your niece engaged to Goodwood or not?"
If ever a little fib was tempting to any lady, from Eve downward, it was
tempting to Lady Marabout now! A falsehood would settle everything,
send Cardonnel off the field, and clear all possibility of losing the
"best match of the season." Besides, if not engaged to Goodwood actually
to-night, Val would be, if she liked, to-morrow, or the next day, or
before the week was over at the furthest--would it be such a falsehood
after all? She colored, she fidgeted her fan, she longed for the little
fib!--how terribly tempting it looked! But Lady Marabout is a bad hand
at prevarication, and she hates a lie, and she answered bravely, with a
regretful twinge, "Engaged? No; not----"
"Not yet! Thank God!"
Lady Marabout stared at him and at the words muttered under his
moustaches:
"Really, Major Cardonnel, I do not see why you----"
"Should thank Heaven for it? Yet I do--it is a reprieve. Lady Marabout,
you and my mother were close friends; will you listen to me for a
second, while we are not overheard? That I have loved your niece--had
the madness to love her, if you will--you cannot but have seen; that she
has given me some reasonable encouragement it is no coxcombry to say,
though I have known from the first what a powerful rival I had against
me; but that Valencia loves me and does not love him, I believe--nay, I
_know_. I have said nothing decided to her; when all hangs on a single
die we shrink from hazarding the throw. But I must know my fate
to-night. If she come to you--as girls will, I believe, sometimes--for
countenance and counsel, will you stand my friend?--will you, for the
sake of my friendship with your son, your friendship with my mother,
support my cause, and uphold what I believe Valencia's heart will say in
my favor?"
Lady Marabout was silent: no Andalusian ever worried her fan more
ceaselessly in coquetry than she did in perplexity. Her heart was
appealed to, and when that was enlisted, Lady Marabout was lost!
"But--but--my dear Major Cardonnel, you are aware----" she began, and
stopped. I should suppose it may be a little awkward to tell a man to
his face he is "not desirable!"
"I am aware that I cannot match with Goodwood? I am; but I know, also,
that Goodwood's love cannot match with mine, and that your niece's
affection is not his. That he may win her I know women too well not to
fear, therefore I ask _you_ to be my friend. If she refuse me, will you
plead for me?--if she ask for counsel, will you give such as your own
heart dictates (I ask no other)--and, will you remember that on
Valencia's answer will rest the fate of a man's lifetime?"
He rose and left her, but the sound of his voice rang in Lady Marabout's
ears, and the tears welled into her eyes: "Dear, dear! how like he
looked to his poor dear mother! But what a position to place me in! Am I
_never_ to have any peace?"
Not at this ball, at any rate. Of all the worried chaperones and
distracted duennas who hid their anxieties under pleasant smiles or
affable lethargy, none were a quarter so miserable as Helena, Lady
Marabout. Her heart and her head were enlisted on opposite sides; her
wishes pulled one way, her sympathies another; her sense of justice to
Cardonnel urged her to one side, her sense of duty to "dearest Adeliza"
urged her to the other; her pride longed for one alliance, her heart
yearned for the other. Cardonnel had confided in her and appealed to
her; _sequitur_, Lady Marabout's honor would not allow her to go against
him: yet, it was nothing short of grossest treachery to poor Adeliza,
down there in Devon, expecting every day to congratulate her daughter on
a prospective duchy won, to counsel Valencia to take one of these
beggared Cardonnels, and, besides--to lose all her own laurels, to lose
the capture of Goodwood!
No Guelphs and Ghibelins, no Royalists and Imperialists, ever fought so
hard as Lady Marabout's divided duties.
"Valencia, Major Cardonnel spoke to me to-night," began that
best-hearted and most badgered of ladies, as she sat before her
dressing-room fire that night, alone with her niece.
Valencia smiled slightly, and a faint idea crossed Lady Marabout's mind
that Valencia's smile was hardly a pleasant one, a trifle too much like
the play of moonbeams on ice.
"He spoke to me about you."
"Indeed!"
"Perhaps you can guess, my dear, what he said?"
"I am no clairvoyante, aunt;" and Miss Val yawned a little, and held out
one of her long slender feet to admire it.
"Every woman, my love, becomes half a clairvoyante when she is in love,"
said Lady Marabout, a little bit impatiently; she hadn't been brought up
on the best systems herself, and though she admired the refrigeration
(on principle), it irritated her just a little now and then. "Did
he--did he say anything to _you_ to-night?"
"Oh yes!"
"And what did you answer him, my love?"
"What would you advise me?"
Lady Marabout sighed, coughed, played nervously with the tassels of her
peignoir, crumpled Bijou's ears with a reckless disregard to that
priceless pet's feelings, and wished herself at the bottom of the
Serpentine. Cardonnel had trusted her, she couldn't desert _him_; poor
dear Adeliza had trusted her, she couldn't betray _her_; what was right
to one would be wrong to the other, and to reconcile her divided duties
was a Danaid's labor. For months she had worried her life out lest her
advice should be asked, and now the climax was come, and asked it was.
"What a horrible position!" thought Lady Marabout.
She waited and hesitated till the pendule had ticked off sixty seconds,
then she summoned her courage and spoke:
"My dear, advice in such matters is often very harmful, and always very
useless; plenty of people have asked my counsel, but I never knew any of
them take it unless it chanced to chime in with their fancy. A woman's
best adviser is her own heart, specially on such a subject as this. But
before I give my opinion, may I ask if you have accepted him?"
Lady Marabout's heart throbbed quick and fast as she put the momentous
question, with an agitation for which she would have blushed before her
admirably nonchalante niece; but the tug of war was coming, and if
Goodwood should be lost!
"You have accepted him?" she asked again.
"No! I--refused him."
The delicate rose went out of the Hon. Val's cheeks for once, and she
breathed quickly and shortly.
Goodwood was _not_ lost then!
Was she sorry--was she glad? Lady Marabout hardly knew; like Wellington,
she felt the next saddest thing after a defeat is a victory.
"But you love him, Valencia?" she asked, half ashamed of suggesting such
weakness, to this glorious beauty.
The Hon. Val unclasped her necklet as if it were a chain, choking her,
and her face grew white and set: the coldest will feel on occasion, and
all have _some_ tender place that can wince at the touch.
"Perhaps; but such folly is best put aside at once. Certainly I prefer
him to others, but to accept him would have been madness, absurdity. I
told him so!"
"You told him so! If you had the heart to do so, Valencia, he has not
lost much in losing you!" burst in Lady Marabout, her indignation
getting the better of her judgment, and her heart, as usual, giving the
coup de grace to her reason. "I am shocked at you! Every tender-hearted
woman feels regret for affection she is obliged to repulse, even when
she does not return it; and you, who love this man----"
"Would you have had me accept him, aunt?"
"Yes," cried Lady Marabout, firmly, forgetting every vestige of "duty,"
and every possibility of dear Adeliza's vengeance, "if you love him, I
would, decidedly. When I married my dear Philip's father, he was what
Cardonnel is, a cavalry man, as far off his family title then as
Cardonnel is off his now."
"The more reason I should not imitate your imprudence, my dear aunt;
death might not carry off the intermediate heirs quite so courteously in
this case! No, I refused Major Cardonnel, and I did rightly; I should
have repented it by now had I accepted him. There is nothing more silly
than to be led away by romance. You De Boncoeurs _are_ romantic, you
know; we Valletorts are happily free from the weakness. I am very tired,
aunt, so good night."
The Hon. Val went, the waxlight she carried shedding a paler shade on
her handsome face, whiter and more set than usual, but held more
proudly, as if it already wore the Doncaster coronet; and Lady Marabout
sighed as she rang for her maid.
"Of course she acted wisely, and I ought to be very pleased; but that
poor dear fellow!--his eyes _are_ so like his mother's!"
"I congratulate you, mother, on a clear field. You've sent poor Arthur
off very nicely," said Carruthers, the next morning, paying his general
visit in her boudoir before the day began, which is much the same time
in Town as in Greenland, and commences, whatever almanacs may say,
about two or half-past P.M. "Cardonnel left this morning for Heaven
knows where, and is going to exchange, Shelleto tells me, into the
----th, which is ordered to Bengal, so _he_ won't trouble you much more.
When shall I be allowed to congratulate my cousin as the future Duchess
of Doncaster?"
"Pray, don't tease me, Philip. I've been vexed enough about your friend.
When he came to me this morning, and asked me if there was no hope, and
I was obliged to tell him there was none, I felt wretched," said Lady
Marabout, as nearly pettishly as she ever said anything; "but I am
really not responsible, not in the least. Besides, even you must admit
that Goodwood is a much more desirable alliance, and if Valencia had
accepted Cardonnel, pray what would all Belgravia have said? Why, that,
disappointed of Goodwood, she took the other out of pure pique! We owe
something to society, Philip, and something to ourselves."
Carruthers laughed: