till you leave off kowtow-ing to 'what will be said,' and learn to defy
that terrible oligarchy of the Qu'en dira-t-on?"
"When will Goodwood propose?" wondered Lady Marabout, fifty times a day,
and Valencia Valletort wondered too. Whitebait was being eaten, and
yachts being fitted, manned, and victualled, outstanding Ascot debts
were being settled, and outstanding bills were being passed hurriedly
through St. Stephen's; all the clockwork of the season was being wound
up for the last time previous to a long standstill, and going at a deuce
of a pace, as if longing to run down, and give its million wheels and
levers peace; while everybody who'd anything to settle, whether monetary
or matrimonial, personal or political, was making up his mind about it
and getting it off his hands, and some men were being pulled up by
wide-awake Jews to see what they were "made of," while others were
pulled up by adroit dowagers to know what they had "meant" before the
accounts of the season were scored out and settled. "Had Goodwood
proposed?" asked all Belgravia. "Why hadn't Goodwood proposed?" asked
Lady Marabout and Valencia. Twenty most favorable opportunities for the
performance of that ceremony had Lady Marabout made for him
"accidentally on purpose" the last fortnight; each of those times she
had fancied the precious fish hooked and landed, and each time she had
seen him, free from the hook, floating on the surface of society.
"He _must_ speak definitely to-morrow," thought Lady Marabout. But the
larvae of to-morrow burst into the butterfly of to-day, and to-day passed
into the chrysalis of yesterday, and Goodwood was always very nearly
caught, and never _quite_!
"Come up-stairs, Philip; I want to show you a little Paul Potter I
bought the other day," said Lady Marabout one morning, returning from a
shopping expedition to Regent Street, meeting her son at her own door
just descending from his tilbury. "Lord Goodwood calling, did you say,
Soames? Oh, very well."
And Lady Marabout floated up the staircase, but signed to her footman to
open the door, not of the drawing-room, but of her own boudoir.
"The Potter is in my own room, Philip; you must come in here if you wish
to see it," said that adroit lady, for the benefit of Soames. But when
the door was shut, Lady Marabout lowered her voice confidentially: "The
Potter isn't here, dear; I had it hung in the little cabinet through the
drawing-rooms, but I don't wish to go up there for a few moments--you
understand."
Carruthers threw himself in a chair, and laughed till the dogs Bijou,
Bonbon, and Pandore all barked in a furious concert.
"I understand! So Goody's positively coming to the point up there, is
he?"
"No doubt he is," said Lady Marabout, reprovingly. "Why else should he
come in when I was not at home? There is nothing extraordinary in it.
The only thing I have wondered at is his having delayed so long."
"If a man had to hang himself, would you wonder he put off pulling the
bolt?"
"I don't see any point in your jests at all!" returned Lady Marabout.
"There is nothing ridiculous in winning such a girl as Valencia."
"No; but the question here is not of winning her, but of buying her. The
price is a little high--a ducal coronet and splendid settlements, a
wedding-ring and bondage for life; but he will buy her, nevertheless.
Cardonnel couldn't pay the first half of the price, and so he was swept
out of the auction-room. You are shocked, mother! Ah, truth _is_
shocking sometimes, and always _maladroit_; one oughtn't to bring it
into ladies' boudoirs."
"Hold your tongue, Philip! I will not have you so satirical. Where do
you take it from? Not from me, I am sure! Hark! there is Goodwood going!
That is his step on the stairs, I think! Dear me, Philip, I wish you
sympathized with me a little more, for I _do_ feel happy, and I can't
help it; dear Adeliza will be so gratified."
"My dear mother, I'll do my best to be sympathetic, I'll go and
congratulate Goodwood as he gets in his cab, if you fancy I ought; but,
you see, if I were in Dahomey beholding the head of my best friend
coming off, I couldn't quite get up the amount of sympathy in their
pleasure at the refreshing sight the Dahomites might expect from me, and
so----"
But Lady Marabout missed the comparison of herself to a Dahomite, for
she had opened the door and was crossing to the drawing-rooms, her eyes
bright, her step elastic, her heart exultant at the triumph of her
manoeuvres. The Hon. Val was playing with some ferns in an etagere at
the bottom of the farthest room, and responded to the kiss her aunt
bestowed on her about as much as if she had been one of the statuettes
on the consoles.
"Well, love, _what did he say_?" asked Lady Marabout, breathlessly, with
eager delight and confident anticipation.
Like drops of ice on warm rose-leaves fell each word of the intensely
chill and slightly sulky response on Lady Marabout's heart.
"He said that he goes to Cowes to-morrow for the Royal Yacht Squadron
dinner, and then on in the _Anadyomene_ to the Spitzbergen coast for
walruses. He left a P. P. C. card for you."
"_Walruses!_" shrieked Lady Marabout.
"Walruses," responded the Hon. Val.
"And said no more than that?"
"No more than that!"
The Pet Eligible had flown off uncaught after all! Lady Marabout needed
no further explanation--_tout fut dit_. They were both silent and
paralyzed. Do you suppose Pompey and Cornelia had much need of words
when they met at Lesbos after the horrible deroute of Pharsalia?
* * * * *
"I'm in your mother's blackest books for ever, Phil," said Goodwood to
Carruthers in the express to Southampton for the R.Y.C. Squadron Regatta
of that year, "but I can't help it. It's no good to badger us into
marriage; it only makes us double, and run to earth. I _was_ near
compromising myself with your cousin, I grant, but the thing that
chilled me was, she's too _studied_. It's all got up beforehand, and
goes upon clockwork, and it don't interest one accordingly; the
mechanism's perfect, but we know when it will raise its hand, and move
its eyes, and bow its head, and when we've looked at its beauty once we
get tired of it. That's the fault in Valencia, and in scores of them,
and as long as they _won't_ be natural, why, they can't have much chance
with us!"
Which piece of advice Carruthers, when he next saw his mother, repeated
to her, for the edification of all future debutantes, adding a small
sermon of his own:
"My dear mother, I ask you, is it to be expected that we can marry just
to oblige women and please the newspapers? Would you have me marched off
to Hanover Square because it would be a kindness to take one of Lady
Elmers' marriageable daughters, or because a leading journal fills up an
empty column with farcical lamentation on our dislike to the bondage? Of
course you wouldn't; yet, for no better reasons, you'd have chained poor
Goodwood, if you could have caught him. Whether a man likes to marry or
not is certainly his own private business, though just now it's made a
popular public discussion. Do you wonder that we shirk the institution?
If we have not fortune, marriage cramps our energies, our resources, our
ambitions, loads us with petty cares, and trebles our anxieties. To one
who rises with such a burden on his shoulders, how many sink down in
obscurity, who, but for the leaden weight of pecuniary difficulties with
which marriage has laden their feet, might have climbed the highest
round in the social ladder? On the other side, if we have fortune, if we
have the unhappy happiness to be eligible, is it wonderful that we are
not flattered by the worship of young ladies who love us for what we
shall give them, that we don't feel exactly honored by being courted for
what we are worth, and that we're not over-willing to give up our
liberty to oblige those who look on us only as good speculations? What
think you, eh?"
Lady Marabout looked up and shook her head mournfully:
"My dear Philip, you are right. I see it--I don't dispute it; but when a
thing becomes personal, you know philosophy becomes difficult. I have
such letters from poor dear Adeliza--such letters! Of course she thinks
it is all my fault, and I believe she will break entirely with me. It is
so very shocking. You see all Belgravia coupled their names, and the
very day that he went off to Cowes in that heartless, abominable manner,
if an announcement of the alliance as arranged did not positively appear
in the _Court Circular_! It did indeed! I am sure Anne Hautton was at
the bottom of it; it would be just like her. Perhaps poor Valencia
cannot be pitied after her treatment of Cardonnel, but it is very hard
on _me_."
Lady Marabout is right: when a thing becomes personal, philosophy
becomes difficult. When your gun misses fire, and a fine cock bird
whirrs up from the covert and takes wing unharmed, never to swell the
number of your triumphs and the size of your game-bag, could you by any
chance find it in your soul to sympathize with the bird's gratification
at your mortification and its own good luck? I fancy not.
LADY MARABOUT'S TROUBLES;
OR
THE WORRIES OF A CHAPERONE.
IN THREE SEASONS.
SEASON THE SECOND--THE OGRE.
"If there be one class I dislike more than another, it is that class;
and if there be one person in town I utterly detest, it is that man!"
said our friend Lady Marabout, with much unction, one morning, to an
audience consisting of Bijou, Bonbon, and Pandore, a cockatoo, an Angora
cat, and a young lady sitting in a rocking-chair, reading the magazines
of the month. The dogs barked, the cockatoo screamed, the cat purred a
vehement affirmative, the human auditor looked up, and laughed:
"What is the class, Lady Marabout, may I ask?"
"Those clever, detestable, idle, good-for-nothing, fashionable,
worthless men about town, who have not a penny to their fortune, and
spend a thousand a year on gloves and scented tobacco--who are seen at
everybody's house, and never at their own--who drive horses fit for a
Duke's stud, and haven't money enough to keep a donkey on thistles--who
have handsome faces and brazen consciences--who are positively leaders
of ton, and yet are glad to write feuilletons before the world is up to
pay their stall at the Opera--who give a guinea for a bouquet, and
can't pay a shilling of their just debts,--I detest the class, my dear!"
"So it seems, Lady Marabout. I never heard you so vehement. And who is
the particular scapegoat of this type of sinners?"
"Chandos Cheveley."
"Chandos Cheveley? Isn't he that magnificent man Sir Philip introduced
to me at the Amandines' breakfast yesterday? Why, Lady Marabout, his
figure alone might outbalance a multitude of sins!"
"He is handsome enough. _Did_ Philip introduce him to you, my dear? I
wonder! It was very careless of him. But men _are_ so thoughtless; they
will know anybody themselves, and they think we may do the same. The men
called here while we were driving this morning. I am glad we were out:
he very seldom comes to _my_ house."
"But why is he so dreadful? The Amandines are tremendously exclusive, I
thought."
"Oh, he goes everywhere! No party is complete without Chandos Cheveley,
and I have heard that at September or Christmas he has more invitations
than he could possibly accept; but he is a most objectionable man, all
the same--a man every one dreads to see come near her daughters. He has
extreme fascination of manner, but he has not a farthing! How he lives,
dresses, drives the horses he does, is one of those miracles of London
men's lives which _we_ can never hope to puzzle out. Philip says he
likes him, but Philip never speaks ill of anybody, except a woman now
and then, who teases him; but the man is my detestation--has been for
years. I was annoyed to see his card: it is the first time he has called
this season. He knows I can't endure his class or him."
With which Lady Marabout wound up a very unusually lengthy and
uncharitable disquisition, length and uncharitableness being both out of
her line; and Lady Cecil Ormsby rolled her handkerchief into a ball,
threw it across the room for Bonbon, the spaniel puppy, and laughed till
the cockatoo screamed with delight:
"Dear Lady Marabout, do forgive me, but it is such fun to hear you
positively, for once, malicious! Who is your Horror, genealogically
speaking? this terrible--what's his name?--Chandos Cheveley?"
"The younger son of a younger son of one of the Marquises of Danvers, I
believe, my dear; an idle man about town, you know, with not a sou to be
idle upon, who sets the fashion, but never pays his tailor. I am never
malicious, I hope, but I do consider men of that stamp very
objectionable."
"But what is Sir Philip but a man about town?"
"My son! Of course he is a man about town. My dear, what else should he
be? But if Philip likes to lounge all his days away in a club-window, he
has a perfect right; he has fortune. Chandos Cheveley is not worth a
farthing, and yet yawns away his day in White's as if he were a
millionnaire; the one can support his _far niente_, the other cannot.
There are gradations in everything, my love, but in nothing more than
among the men, of the same set and the same style, whom one sees in
Pall-Mall."
"There are chestnut horses and horse-chestnuts, chevaliers and
chevaliers d'industrie, rois and rois d'Yvetot, Carrutherses and Chandos
Cheveleys!" laughed Lady Cecil. "I understand, Lady Marabout. Il y a
femmes et femmes--men about town and men about town, I shall learn all
the classes and distinctions soon. But how is one to know the sheep that
may be let into the fold from the wolves in sheep's clothing, that must
be kept out of it? Your Ogre is really very distinguished-looking."
"Distinguished? Oh yes, my love; but the most distinguished men are the
most objectionable sometimes. I assure you, my dear Cecil, I have seen
an elder son whom sometimes I could hardly have told from his own valet,
and a younger of the same family with the style of a D'Orsay. Why, did I
not this very winter, when I went to stay at Rochdale, take Fitzbreguet
himself, whom I had not chanced to see since he was a child, for one of
the men out of livery, and bid him bring Bijou's basket out of the
carriage. I did indeed--_I_ who hate such mistakes more than any one!
And Lionel, his second brother, has the beauty of an Apollo and the _air
noble_ to perfection. One often sees it; it's through the doctrine of
compensation, I suppose, but it's very perplexing, and causes endless
_embrouillements_."
"When the mammas fall in love with Lord Fitz's coronet, and the
daughters with Lord Lionel's face, I suppose?" interpolated Lady Cecil.
"Exactly so, dear. As for knowing the sheep from the wolves, as you call
them," went on Lady Marabout, sorting her embroidery silks, "you may
very soon know more of Chandos Cheveley's class--(this Magenta braid is
good for nothing; it's a beautiful color, but it fades immediately)--you
meet them in the country at all fast houses, as they call them nowadays,
like the Amandines'; they are constantly invited, because they are so
amusing, or so dead a shot, or so good a whip, and live on their
invitations, because they have no _locale_ of their own. You see, all
the women worth nothing admire, and all the women worth anything shun,
them. They have a dozen accomplishments, and not a single reliable
quality; a hundred houses open to them, and not a shooting-box of their
own property or rental. You will meet this Chandos Cheveley everywhere,
for instance, as though he were somebody desirable. You will see him in
his club-window, as though he were born only to read the papers; in the
Ride, mounted on a much better animal than Fitzbreguet, though the one
pays treble the price he ought, and the other, I dare say, no price at
all; at Ascot, on Amandine's or Goodwood's drag, made as much of among
them all as if he were an heir-apparent to the throne; and yet, my love,
that man hasn't a penny, lives Heaven knows where, and how he gets money
to keep his cab and buy his gloves is, as I say, one of those mysteries
of settling days, whist-tables, periodical writing, Baden _coups de
bonheur_, and such-like fountains of such men's fortunes which we can
never hope to penetrate--and very little we should benefit if we could!
My dearest Cecil! if it is not ten minutes to five! We must go and drive
at once."
Lady Ormsby was a great pet of Lady Marabout's; she had been so from a
child; so much so, that when, the year after Valencia Valletort's
discomfiture (a discomfiture so heavy and so public, that that young
beauty was seized with a fit of filial devotion, attended her mamma to
Nice, and figured not in Belgravia the ensuing season, and even Lady
Marabout's temper had been slightly soured by it, as you perceive),
another terrible charge was shifted on her shoulders by an appeal from
the guardians of the late Earl of Rosediamond's daughter for her to be
brought out under the Marabout wing, she had consented, and surrendered
herself to be again a martyr to responsibility for the sake of Cecil and
Cecil's lost mother. The young lady was a beauty; she was worse, she was
an heiress; she was worse still, she was saucy, wayward, and notable for
a strong will of her own--a more dangerous young thorough-bred was never
brought to a gentler Rarey; and yet she was the first charge of this
nature that Lady Marabout had ever accepted in the whole course of her
life with no misgivings and with absolute pleasure. First, she was very
fond of Cecil Ormsby; secondly, she longed to efface her miserable
failure with Valencia by a brilliant success, which should light up all
the gloom of her past of chaperonage; thirdly, she had a sweet and
long-cherished diplomacy nestling in her heart to throw her son and Lord
Rosediamond's daughter together, for the eventual ensnaring and
fettering of Carruthers, which policy nothing could favor so well as
having the weapon for that deadly purpose in her own house through
April, May, and June.
Cecil Ormsby was a beauty and an heiress--spirited, sarcastic,
brilliant, wilful, very proud; altogether, a more spirited young filly
never needed a tight hand on the ribbons, a light but a firm seat, and a
temperate though judicious use of the curb to make her endure being
ridden at all, even over the most level grass countries of life. And
yet, for the reasons just mentioned, Lady Marabout, who never had a
tight hand upon anything, who is to be thrown in a moment by any wilful
kick or determined plunge, who is utterly at the mercy of any filly that
chooses to take the bit between her own teeth and bolt off, and is
entirely incapable of using the curb, even to the most ill-natured and
ill-trained Shetland that ever deserved to have its mouth sawed,--Lady
Marabout undertook the jockeyship without fear.
"I dare say you wonder, after my grief with Valencia, that I have
consented to bring another girl out, but when I heard it was poor
Rosediamond's wish--his dying wish, one may almost say--that Cecil
should make her debut with me, what _was_ I to do, my dear?" she
explained, half apologetically, to Carruthers, when the question was
first agitated. Perhaps, too, Lady Marabout had in her heart been
slightly sickened of perfectly trained young ladies brought up on the
best systems, and admitted to herself that the pets of the foreign
houses may _not_ be the most attractive flowers after all.
So Lady Cecil Ormsby was installed in Lowndes Square, and though she was
the inheritor of her mother's wealth, which was considerable, and
possessor of her own wit and beauty, which were not inconsiderable
either, and therefore a prize to fortune-hunters and a lure to
misogamists, as Lady Marabout knew very well how to keep the first off,
and had her pet project of numbering her refractory son among the
converted second, she rather congratulated herself than otherwise in
having the pleasure and eclat of introducing her; and men voted the
Marabout Yearlings Sale of that season, since it comprised Rosediamond's
handsome daughter, as dangerous as a horse-dealer's auction to a young
greenhorn, or a draper's "sale, without reserve, at enormous sacrifice,"
to a lady with a soul on bargains bent.
"How very odd! Just as we have been talking of him, there is that man
again! I must bow to him, I suppose; though if there _be_ a person I
dislike----" said Lady Marabout, giving a frigid little bend of her head
as her barouche, with its dashing roans, rolled from her door, and a
tilbury passed them, driving slowly through the square.
Cecil Ormsby bowed to its occupant with less severity, and laughed under
the sheltering shadow of her white parasol-fringe.
"The Ogre has a very pretty trap, though, Lady Marabout, and the most
delicious gray horse in it! Such good action!"
"If its action is good, my love, I dare say it is more than could be
said of its master's actions. He is going to call on that Mrs.
Marechale, very probably; he was always there last season."
And Lady Marabout shook her head and looked grave, which, combined with
the ever-damnatory demonstrative conjunction, blackened Mrs. Marechale's
moral character as much as Lady Marabout could blacken any one's, she
loving as little to soil her own fingers and her neighbors' reputations
with the indelible Italian chalk of scandal as any lady I know; being
given, on the contrary, when compelled to draw any little social croquis
of a back-biting nature, to sketch them in as lightly as she could, take
out as many lights as possible, and rub in the shadows with a very
chary and pitying hand, except, indeed, when she took the portrait of
such an Ogre as Chandos Cheveley, when I can't say she was quite so
merciful, specially when policy and prejudice combined to suggest that
it would be best (and not unjust) to use the blackest Conte crayons
obtainable.
The subject of it would not have denied the correctness of the
silhouette Lady Marabout had snipped out for the edification of Lady
Cecil, had he caught a glimpse of it: he had no habitation, nor was ever
likely to have any, save a bachelor's suite in a back street; he had
been an idle man for the last twenty years, with not a sou to be idle
upon; the springs of his very precarious fortunes, his pursuits, habits,
reputation, ways and means, were all much what she had described them;
yet he set the fashion much oftener than Goodwood, and dukes and
millionnaires would follow the style of his tie, or the shape of his
hat; he moved in the most brilliant circles as Court Circulars have it,
and all the best houses were open to him. At his Grace of Amandine's,
staying there for the shooting, he would alter the stud, find fault with
the claret, arrange a Drive for deer in the forest, and flirt with her
Grace herself, as though, as Lady Marabout averred, he had been
Heir-apparent or Prince Regent, who honored the Castle by his mere
presence, Amandine all the while swearing by every word he spoke,
thinking nothing well done without Cheveley, and submitting to be set
aside in his own Castle, with the greatest gratification at the
extinction.