Bohemian on a brilliant scale, that any day he might disappear from that
society where he now glittered, never to reappear, everybody knew; how
he floated there as he did, kept his cab and his man, paid for his stall
at the Opera, his club fees, and all the other trifles that won't wait,
was an eternal puzzle to every one ignorant of how expensively one may
live upon nothing if one just gets the knack, and of how far a
fashionable reputation, like a cake of chocolate, will go to support
life when nothing more substantial is obtainable. Lady Marabout had
sketched him correctly enough, allowing for a little politic bitterness
thrown in to counteract Carruthers's thoughtlessness in having
introduced him to Rosediamond's daughter (that priceless treasure for
whom Lady Marabout would fain have had a guard of Janissaries, if they
would not have been likely to look singular and come expensive); and
ladies of the Marabout class did look upon him as an Ogre, guarded their
daughters from his approach at a ball as carefully, if not as
demonstratively, as any duck its ducklings from the approach of a
water-rat, did not ask him to their dinners, and bowed to him chillily
in the Ring. Others regarded him as harmless, from his perfect
pennilessness; what danger was there in the fascinations of a man whom
all Belgravia knew hadn't money enough to buy dog-skin gloves, though he
always wore the best Paris lavender kid? While others, the pretty
married women chiefly, from her Grace of Amandine downwards to Mrs.
Marechale, of Lowndes Square, flirted with him, fearfully, and
considered Chandos Cheveley what nobody ever succeeded in disproving
him, the most agreeable man on town, with the finest figure, the best
style, and the most perfect bow, to be seen in the Park any day between
March and July. But then, as Lady Marabout remarked on a subsequent
occasion, a figure, a style, and a bow are admirable and enviable
things, but they're not among the cardinal virtues, and don't do to live
upon; and though they're very good buoys to float one on the smooth
sparkling sea of society, if there come a storm, one may go down,
despite them, and become helpless prey to the sharks waiting below.
"Philip certainly admires her very much; he said the other day there
was something in her, and that means a great deal from him," thought
Lady Marabout, complacently, as she and Cecil Ormsby were wending their
way through some crowded rooms. "Of course I shall not influence Cecil
towards him; it would not be honorable to do so, since she might look
for a higher title than my son's; still, if it should so fall out,
nothing would give me greater pleasure, and really nothing would seem
more natural with a little judicious manage----"
"May I have the honor of this valse with you?" was spoken in, though not
to, Lady Marabout's ear. It was a soft, a rich, a melodious voice
enough, and yet Lady Marabout would rather have heard the hiss of a
Cobra Capella, for the footmen _might_ have caught the serpent and
carried it off from Cecil Ormsby's vicinity, and she couldn't very well
tell them to rid the reception-chambers of Chandos Cheveley.
Lady Marabout vainly tried to catch Cecil's eye, and warn her of the
propriety of an utter and entire repudiation of the valse in question,
if there were no "engaged" producible to softly chill the hopes and
repulse the advances of the aspirant; but Lady Cecil's soul was
obstinately bent saltatory-wards; her chaperone's ocular telegram was
lost upon her, and only caught by the last person who should have seen
it, who read the message off the wires to his own amusement, but
naturally was not magnanimous enough to pass it on.
"I ought to have warned her never to dance with that detestable man. If
I could but have caught her eye even now!" thought Lady Marabout,
restlessly. The capella _would_ have been much the more endurable of the
two; the serpent couldn't have passed its arm round Rosediamond's
priceless daughter and whirled her down the ball-room to the music of
Coote and Timney's band, as Chandos Cheveley was now doing.
"Why did _you_ not ask her for that waltz, Philip?" cried the good lady,
almost petulantly.
Carruthers opened his eyes wide.
"My dear mother, you know I never dance! I come to balls to oblige my
hostesses and look at the women, but not to carry a seven-stone weight
of tulle illusion and white satin, going at express pace, with the
thermometer at 80 deg., and a dense crowd jostling one at every turn in
the circle. _Bien oblige!_ that's not my idea of pleasure; if it were
the Pyrrhic dance, now, or the Tarantella, or the Bolero, under a
Castilian chestnut-tree----"
"Hold your tongue! You might have danced for once, just to have kept her
from Chandos Cheveley."
"From the best waltzer in London? Not so selfish. Ask Amandine's wife if
women don't like to dance with that fellow!"
"I should be very sorry to mention his name to her, or any of her set,"
responded Lady Marabout, getting upon certain virtuous stilts of her
own, which she was given to mount on rare occasion and at distant
intervals, always finding them very uncomfortable and unsuitable
elevations, and being as glad to cast them off as a traveller to kick
off the _echasses_ he has had to strap on over the sandy plains of the
Landes.
"What could possess you to introduce him to Cecil, Philip? It was
careless, silly, unlike you; you know how I dislike men of
his--his--objectionable stamp," sighed Lady Marabout, the white and gold
namesakes in her coiffure softly trembling a gentle sigh in the perfumy
zephyr raised by the rotatory whirl of the waltzers, among whom she
watched with a horrible fascination, as one watches a tiger being pugged
out of its lair, or a deserter being led out to be shot, Chandos
Cheveley, waltzing Rosediamond's priceless daughter down the ball-room.
"He is so dreadfully handsome! I wonder why it is that men and women,
who have no fortune but their faces, will be so dangerously, so
obstinately, so provokingly attractive as one sees them so often!"
thought Lady Marabout, determining to beat an immediate retreat from the
present salons, since they were infested by the presence of her Ogre, to
Lady Hautton's house in Wilton Crescent.
Lady Hautton headed charitable bazaars, belonged to the Cummingite
nebulae, visited Homes and Hospitals (floating to the bedside of luckless
feminine patients to read out divers edifying passages, whose effect
must have been somewhat neutralized to the hearers, one would imagine,
by the envy-inspiring rustle of her silks, the flash of her rings, and
the chimes of her bracelets, chains, and chatelaine), looked on the
"Amandine set" as lost souls, and hence "did not know" Chandos
Cheveley--a fact which, though the Marabout and Hautton antagonism was
patent to all Belgravia, served to endear her all at once to her foe;
Lady Marabout, like a good many other people, being content to sink
personal resentment, and make a truce with the infidels for the sake of
enjoying a mutual antipathy--that closest of all links of union!
Lady Marabout and Lady Hautton were foes, but they were dear Helena and
dear Anne, all the same; dined at each other's tables, and smiled in
each other's faces. They might be private foes, but they were public
friends; and Lady Marabout beat a discreet retreat to the Hautton's
salons--"so many engagements" is so useful a plea!--and from the Hautton
she passed on to a ball at the Duke of Doncaster's; and, as at both, if
Lady Cecil Ormsby did not move "a goddess from above," she moved a
brilliant, sparkling, nonchalante, dangerous beauty, with some of her
sex's faults, all her sex's witcheries, and more than her sex's
mischief, holding her own royally, saucily, and proudly, and Chandos
Cheveley was encountered no more, but happily detained at petit souper
in a certain Section of the French Embassy, Lady Marabout drove
homewards, in the gray of the morning, relieved, complacent, and
gratified, dozing deliciously, till she was woke up with a start.
"Lady Marabout, what a splendid waltzer your Ogre, Chandos Cheveley,
is!"
Lady Marabout opened her eyes with a jerk that set her feathers
trembling, her diamonds scintillating, and her bracelets ringing an
astonished little carillon.
"My love, how you frightened me!"
Cecil Ormsby laughed--a gay, joyous laugh, innocent of having disturbed
a doze, a lapse into human weakness of which her chaperone never
permitted herself to plead guilty.
"Frightened you, did I? Why, your _bete noire_ is as terrible to you as
Coeur de Lion to the Saracen children, or Black Douglas to the Lowland!
And, really, I can't see anything terrible in him; he is excessively
brilliant and agreeable, has something worth hearing to say to you,
and his waltzing is----!"
Lady Cecil Ormsby had not a word in her repertory--though it
was an enthusiastic and comprehensive one, and embraced five
languages--sufficiently commendatory to finish her sentence.
"I dare say, dear! I never denied, or heard denied, his having every
accomplishment under the sun. The only pity is, he has nothing more
substantial!" returned Lady Marabout, a little bit tartly for _her_
lips, only used to the softest (and most genuine) milk of roses.
Lord Rosediamond's daughter laughed a little mournfully, and played with
her fan.
"Poor man! Brilliant and beggared, fashionable and friendless, courted
and cashiered--a sad destiny! Do you know, Lady Marabout, I have half a
mind to champion your Ogre!"
"My love, don't talk nonsense!" said Lady Marabout, hastily, at which
Lady Cecil only laughed still more softly and gayly again, and sprung
down as the carriage stopped in Lowndes Square.
"Rosediamond's daughter's deucedly handsome, eh, Cheveley? I saw you
waltzing with her last night," said Goodwood at Lord's the next morning,
watching a match between the Household Cavalry and the Zingari Eleven.
"Yes, she is the best thing we have seen for some time," said Cheveley,
glancing round to see if the Marabout liveries were on the ground.
"Don't let the Amandine or little Marechale hear you say so, or you'll
have a deuce of a row," laughed Goodwood. "She's worth a good deal, too;
she's all her mother's property, and that's something, I know. The
deaths in her family have kept her back two years or more, but now she
_is_ out, I dare say Lady Tattersall will put her up high in the
market."
"No doubt. Why don't _you_ make the investment--she's much more
attractive than that Valletort ice statue who hooked you so nearly last
year? Fortescue's out! Well done, little Jimmy! Ah! there's the Marabout
carriage. I am as unwelcome to that good lady, I know, as if I were
Quasimodo or Quilp, and as much to be shunned, in her estimation, as
Vidocq, armed to the teeth; nevertheless, I shall go and talk to them,
if only in revenge for the telegraphic warning of 'dangerous' she shot
at Lady Cecil last night when I asked her to waltz. Goodwood, don't you
envy me my happy immunity from traps matrimonial?"
"There is that man again--how provoking! I wish we had not come to see
Philip's return match. He is positively coming up to talk to us,"
thought Lady Marabout, restlessly, as her Ogre lifted his hat to her. In
vain did she do her best to look severe, to look frigid, to chill him
with a withering "good morning," (a little word, capable, if you notice,
of expressing every gradation in feeling, from the nadir of delighted
intimacy to the zero of rebuking frigidity;) her coldest ice was as warm
as a pine-apple ice that has been melting all day under a refreshment
tent at a horticultural fete? Her _role_ was _not_ chilliness, and never
could be; she would have beamed benign on a headsman who had led her out
to instant decapitation, and been no more able to help it than a peach
to help its bloom or a claret its bouquet. She did her utmost to freeze
Chandos Cheveley, but either she failed signally, or he, being blessed
with the brazen conscience she had attributed to him, was steeled to all
the tacit repulses of her looks, for he leant against the barouche-door,
let her freeze him away as she might, and chatted to Cecil Ormsby,
"positively," Lady Marabout remarked to that safest confidante, herself,
"positively as if the man had been welcome at my house for the last ten
years! If Cecil _would_ but second me, he couldn't do it; but she _will_
smile and talk with him just as though he were Goodwood or Fitzbreguet!
It is very disagreeable to be forced against one's will like this into
countenancing such a very objectionable person; and yet what _can_ one
do?"
Which query she could by no means satisfactorily answer herself, being a
regular female Nerva for clemency, utterly incapable of the severity
with which that stern Catiline, Lady Hautton, would have signed the
unwelcome intruder out of the way in a brace of seconds. And under
Nerva's gentle rule, though Nerva was longing with all her heart to have
the courage to call the lictors and say, "Away with him!" Cheveley leant
against the door of the carriage unmolested, though decidedly undesired
by one of its occupants, talked to by Lady Cecil, possibly because she
found him as agreeable as her Grace of Amandine and Lillia Marechale had
done before her, possibly only from that rule of contrariety which is
such a pet motor-power with her sex; and Lady Marabout reclined among
her cushions, tucked up in her tiger-skin in precisely that state of
mind in which Fuseli said to his wife, "Swear, my dear, you don't know
how much good it will do you," dreading in herself the possible advent
of the Hautton carriage, for that ancient enemy and rigid pietist, of
whose keen tongue and eminent virtue she always stood secretly in awe,
to see this worthless and utterly objectionable member of that fast,
graceless, and "very incorrect" Amandine set, absolutely _en sentinelle_
at the door of her barouche!
Does your best friend _ever_ come when you want him most? Doesn't your
worst foe _always_ come when you want him least? Of course, at that
juncture, the Hautton carriage came on the ground (Hautton was one of
the Zingari Club, and maternal interest brought her foe to Lord's as it
had brought herself), and the Hautton eye-glass, significantly and
surprisedly raised, said as distinctly to Lady Marabout, as though
elfishly endowed with vocal powers, "You allow _that_ man acquaintance
with Rosediamond's daughter!" Lady Marabout was stung to the soul by the
deserved rebuke, but she didn't know how on earth to get rid of the
sinner! There he leaned, calmly, nonchalantly, determinedly, as if he
were absolutely welcome; and Lady Cecil talked on to him as if he were
absolutely welcome too.
Lady Marabout felt branded in the eyes of all Belgravia to have Chandos
Cheveley at her carriage-door, the most objectionable man of all his
most objectionable class.
"It is very strange!" she thought. "I have seen that man about town the
last five-and-twenty years--ever since he was a mere boy, taken up and
petted by Adeline Patchouli for some piece of witty Brummelian impudence
he said to her on his first introduction--and he has never sought my
acquaintance before, but always seemed to be quite aware of my dislike
to him and all his set. It is very grievous he should have chosen the
very season I have poor dear Rosediamond's daughter with me; but it is
always my fate--if a thing can happen to annoy me it always will!"
With which Lady Marabout, getting fairly distracted under the iron hand
of adverse fate, and the ruthless surveillance of the Hautton glass,
invented an impromptu necessity for immediate shopping at Lewis and
Allonby's, and drove off the ground at the sole moment of interest the
match possessed for her--viz., when Carruthers was rattling down
Hautton's stumps, and getting innings innumerable for the Household.
"Mais ce n'est que le premier pas qui coute;" the old proverb's so true
we wear it threadbare with repeating it! Lady Marabout might as well
have stayed on Lord's ground, and not lacerated her feelings by leaving
at the very hour of the Household Cavalry's triumphs, for any good that
she did thereby. The Hautton eye-glass had lighted on Chandos Cheveley,
and Chandos Cheveley's eye-glass on Rosediamond's daughter;--and Cecil
Ormsby arched her eyebrows, and gave her parasol a little impatient
shake as they quitted Lord's.
"Lady Marabout, I never could have believed you ill-natured; you
interrupted my ball last night, and my conversation this morning! I
shall scold you if you ever do so again. And now tell me (as curiosity
is a weakness incidental to all women, no woman ought to refuse to
relieve it in another) why _are_ you so prejudiced against that very
handsome, and very amusing person?"
"Prejudiced, my dear child! I am not in the least prejudiced," returned
Lady Marabout. (Nobody ever admitted to a prejudice that _I_ ever heard.
It's a plant that grows in all gardens, and is sedulously matted up,
watered, and strengthened; but invariably disavowed by its sturdiest
cultivators.) "As for Chandos Cheveley, I merely mentioned to you what
all town knows about him; and the dislike I have to his class is one of
principle, not of prejudice."
Lady Cecil made a _moue mutine_:
"Oh, Lady Marabout! if you go to 'principle,' _tout est perdu!_
'Principle' has been made to bear the onus of every private pique since
the world began, and has had to answer for more cruelties and injustice
than any word in the language. The Romans flung the Christians to the
lions 'on principle,' and the Europeans slew the Mahomedans 'on
principle,' and 'principle' lighted the autos-da-fe, and signed to the
tormentor to give a turn more to the rack! Please don't appeal to
anything so severe and hypocritical. Come, what are the Ogre's sins?"
Lady Marabout laughed, despite the subject.
"Do you think I am a compiler of such catalogues, my love? Pray do not
let us talk any more about Chandos Cheveley, he is very little worth it;
all I say to you is, be as cool to him as you can, without rudeness, of
course. I am never at home when he calls, and were I you, I would be
always engaged when he asks you to waltz; his acquaintance can in no way
benefit you."
Lady Cecil gave a little haughty toss of her head, and lay back in the
barouche.
"_I_ will judge of that! I am not made for fetters of any kind, you
know, and I like to choose my own acquaintance as well as to choose my
own dresses. I cannot obey you either this evening, for he asked me to
put him on my tablets for the first waltz at Lord Anisette's ball, and I
consented. I had no 'engaged' ready, unless I had had a falsehood ready
too, and _you_ wouldn't counsel that, Lady Marabout, I am very sure?"
With which straightforward and perplexing question Cecil Ormsby
successfully silenced her chaperone, by planting her in that
disagreeable position known as between the horns of a dilemma; and Lady
Marabout, shrinking alike from the responsibility of counselling a
"necessary equivocation," as society politely terms its indispensable
lies, and the responsibility of allowing Cecil acquaintance with the
"very worst" of the Amandine set, sighed, wondered envyingly how Anne
Hautton would act in her place, and almost began to wish somebody else
had had the onerous stewardship of that brilliant and priceless jewel,
Rosediamond's daughter, now that the jewel threatened to be possessed
with a will of its own:--the greatest possible flaw in a gem of pure
water, which they only want to scintillate brilliantly among the
bijouterie of society, and let itself be placed passively in the setting
most suitable for it, that can be conceived in the eyes of lady
lapidaries intrusted with its sale.
"It is very odd," thought Lady Marabout; "she seems to have taken a much
greater fancy to that odious man than to Philip, or Goodwood, or Fitz,
or any one of the men who admire her so much. I suppose I always _am_ to
be worried in this sort of way! However, there can be no real danger;
Chandos Cheveley is the merest butterfly flirt, and with all his faults
none ever accused him of fortune-hunting. Still, they say he is
wonderfully fascinating, and certainly he has the most beautiful voice I
ever heard; and if Cecil should ever like him at all, I could never
forgive myself, and what _should_ I say to General Ormsby?"
The General, Cecil's uncle and guardian, is one of the best-humored,
best-tempered, and most _laissez-faire_ men in the Service, but was, for
all that, a perpetual dead weight on Lady Marabout's mind just then, for
was not he the person to whom, at the end of the season, she would have
to render up account of the successes and the shortcomings of her
chaperone's career?
"Do you think of proposing Chandos Cheveley as a suitable alliance for
Cecil Ormsby, my dear Helena?" asked Lady Hautton, with that smile which
was felt to be considerably worse than strychnine by her foes and
victims, at a house in Grosvenor Place, that night.
"God forbid!" prayed Lady Marabout, mentally, as she joined in the
Hautton laugh, and shivered under the stab of the Hautton sneer, which
was an excessively sharp one. Lady Hautton being one of a rather
numerous class of eminent Christians, so panoplied in the armor of
righteousness that they can tread, without feeling it, on the tender
feet of others.
The evening was spoiled to Lady Marabout; she felt morally and guiltily
responsible for an unpardonable indiscretion:--with that man waltzing
with Cecil Ormsby, her "graceful, graceless, gracious Grace" of Amandine
visibly irritated with jealousy at the sight, and Anne Hautton
whispering behind her fan with acidulated significance. Lady Marabout
had never been more miserable in her life! She heard on all sides
admiration of Rosediamond's daughter; she was gratified by seeing
Goodwood, Fitzbreguet, Fulke Nugent, every eligible man in the room,
suing for a place on her tablets; she had the delight of beholding
Carruthers positively join the negligent beauty's train; and yet the
night was a night of purgatory to Lady Marabout, for Chandos Cheveley
had his first waltz, and several after it, and the Amandine set were
there to gossip, and the Hautton clique to be shocked, at it.
"Soames, tell Mason, when Mr. Chandos Cheveley calls, I am not at home,"
said Lady Marabout at breakfast.
"Yes, my lady," said Soames, who treasured up the order, and told it to
Mr. Chandos Cheveley's man at the first opportunity, though, greatly to
his honor, we must admit, he did _not_ imitate the mild formula of fib,
and tell his mistress her claret was not corked when it was so
incontestably.
Cecil Ormsby lifted her head and looked across the table at her hostess,
and the steady gaze of those violet eyes, which were Rosediamond's
daughter's best weapons of war, so discomposed Lady Marabout, that she
forgot herself sufficiently to proffer Bijou a piece of bread, an
unparalleled insult, which that canine Sybarite did not forget all day
long.
"Not at home, sir," said Mason, as duly directed, when Cheveley's cab
pulled up, a week or two after the general order, at the door.
Cheveley smiled to himself as his gray had her head turned, and the
wheel grated off the trottoir, while he lifted his hat to Cecil Ormsby,
just visible between the amber curtains and above the balcony flowers of
one of the windows of the drawing-room--quite visible enough for her
return smile and bow to be seen in the street by Cheveley, in the room
by Lady Marabout.
"Some of Lady Tattersall's generalship!" he thought, as the gray trotted
out of the square. "Well! I have no business there. Cecil Ormsby is not
her Grace of Amandine, nor little Marechale, and the good lady is quite
right to brand me 'dangerous' to her charge, and pronounce me
'inadmissible' to her footman. I've very little title to resent her
verdict."
"My dearest Cecil, whatever possessed you to bow to that man!" cried
Lady Marabout, in direst distress.
"Is it not customary to bow to one's acquaintances--I thought it was?"
asked Lady Cecil, with demure mischief.
"But, my dear, from a window!--and when Mason is saying we are not at
home!"
"That isn't _Mason's_ fib, or _Mason's_ fault, Lady Marabout!" suggested
Cecil, with wicked emphasis.
"There is no falsehood or fault at all anywhere--everybody knows well
enough what 'not at home' means," returned Lady Marabout, almost
pettishly.
"Oh yes," laughed the young lady, saucily. "It means 'I am at home and
sitting in my drawing room, but I shall not rise to receive you, because
you are not worth the trouble.' It's a polite cut direct, and a honeyed
rudeness--a bitter almond wrapped up in a sugar dragee, like a good many
other bonbons handed about in society."
"My dear Cecil, you have some very strange ideas; you will get called
satirical if you don't take care," said Lady Marabout, nervously.
Cecil Ormsby's tone worried her, and made her feel something as she felt
when she had a restive, half-broken pair of horses in her carriage, for
the direction of whose next plunge or next kick nobody could answer.
"And if I be--what then?"
"My dear child, you could not anyhow get a more disadvantageous
reputation! It may amuse gentlemen though it frightens half _them_; but
it offends all women irremediably. You see, there are so few whom it
doesn't hit somewhere," returned Lady Marabout, quite innocent of the
neat satire of her own last sentence.
Cecil Ormsby laughed, and threw herself down by her chaperone's side: