their liking. The women whom women love are always quiet, colorless,
inoffensive--foils. Lady Marabout, tell me, why did you give that
general order to Mason?"
"I have told you before, my dear. Because I have no wish to know Mr.
Chandos Cheveley," returned Lady Marabout, as stiffly as she could say
anything. "It is, as I said, not from prejudice, but from prin----"
"Lady Marabout, if you use that word again, I will drive to uncle
Ormsby's rooms in the Albany and stay with him for the season; I will,
positively! I am sure all the gentlemen there will be delighted to have
my society! Pray, what _are_ your Ogre's crimes? Did you ever hear
anything dishonorable, mean, ungenerous, attributed to him? Did you ever
hear he broke his word, or failed to act like a gentleman, or was a
defaulter at any settling day?"
Lady Marabout required some explanation of what a defaulter at a
settling day might be, and, on receiving it, was compelled to confess
that she never _had_ heard anything of that kind imputed to Chandos
Cheveley.
"Of course I have not, my dear. The man is a gentleman, everybody knows,
however idle and improvident a one. If he could be accused of anything
of that kind, he would not belong to such clubs, and associate with such
men as he does. Besides, Philip would not know him; certainly would not
think well of him, which I confess he does. But that is not at all the
question."
"_Ne vous en deplaise_, I think it very much and very entirely the
question," returned Lady Cecil, with a toss of her haughty little head.
"If you can bring nothing in evidence against a man, it is not right to
send him to the galleys and mark him 'Forcat.'"
"My dear Cecil, there is plenty in evidence against him," said Lady
Marabout, with a mental back glance to certain stories told of the
"Amandine set," "though not of that kind. A man may be perfectly
unexceptionable in his conduct with his men friends, but very
objectionable acquaintance for us to seek, all the same."
"Ah, I see! Lord Goodwood may bet, and flirt, and lounge his days away,
and be as fast a man as he likes, and it is all right; but if Mr.
Cheveley does the same, it is all wrong, because he is not worth
forgiving."
"Naturally it is," returned Lady Marabout, seriously and naively. "But
how very oddly you put things, my love; and why you should interest
yourself in this man, when everything I tell you is to his disadvantage,
I cannot imagine."
A remark that showed Lady Marabout a skilful tactician, insomuch as it
silenced Cecil--a performance rather difficult of accomplishment.
"I am very glad I gave the order to Mason," thought that good lady. "I
only wish we did not meet the man in society; but it is impossible to
help that. We are all cards of one pack, and get shuffled together,
whether we like it or not. I wish Philip would pay her more attention;
he admires her, I can see, and he can make any woman like him in ten
days when he takes the trouble; but he is so tiresome! She would be
exactly suited to him; she has all he would exact--beauty, talent, good
blood, and even fortune, though that he would not need. The alliance
would be a great happiness to me. Well, he dines here to-night, and he
gives that concert at his barracks to-morrow morning, purely to please
Cecil, I am sure. I think it may be brought about with careful
management."
With which pleasant reflection she went to drive in the Ring, thinking
that her maternal and duenna duties would be alike well fulfilled, and
her chaperone's career well finished, if by any amount of tact,
intrigue, finesses, and diplomacy she could live to see Cecil Ormsby
sign herself Cecil Carruthers.
"If that man were only out of town!" she thought, as Cheveley passed
them in Amandine's mail-phaeton at the turn.
Lady Marabout might wish Cheveley were out of town--and wish it devoutly
she did--but she wasn't very likely to have her desire gratified till
the general migration should carry him off in its tide to the deck of a
yacht, a lodge in the Highlands, a German Kursaal, or any one of those
myriad "good houses" where nobody was so welcome as he, the best shot,
the best seat, the best wit, the best billiard-player, the best
whist-player, and the best authority on all fashionable topics, of any
man in England. Cheveley used to aver that he liked Lady Marabout,
though she detested him; nay, that he liked her _for_ her detestation;
he said it was cordial, sincere, and refreshing, therefore a treat in
the world of Belgravia; still, he didn't like her so well as to leave
Town in the middle of May to oblige her; and though he took her hint as
it was meant, and pulled up his hansom no more at her door, he met her
and Rosediamond's daughter at dinners, balls, concerts, morning-parties
innumerable. He saw them in the Ring; he was seen by them at the Opera;
he came across them constantly in the gyration of London life. Night
after night Lady Cecil persisted in writing his name in her tablets;
evening after evening a bizarre fate worried Lady Marabout, by putting
him on the left hand of her priceless charge at a dinner-party. Day
after day all the harmony of a concert was marred to her ear by seeing
her Ogre talking of Beethoven and Mozart, chamber music and bravura
music in Cecil's: morning after morning gall was poured into her
luncheon sherry, and wormwood mingled in her vol-au-vent, by being told,
with frank mischief, by her desired daughter-in-law, that she "had seen
Mr. Cheveley leaning on the rails, smoking," when she had taken her
after-breakfast canter.
"Chandos Cheveley getting up before noon! He _must_ mean something
unusual!" thought her chaperone.
"Helena has set her heart on securing Cecil Ormsby for Carruthers. I
hope she may succeed better than she did with poor Goodwood last
season," laughed Lady Hautton, with her inimitable sneer, glancing at
the young lady in question at a bazaar in Willis's Rooms, selling
rosebuds for anything she liked to ask for them, and cigars tied up with
blue ribbon a guinea the half-dozen, at the Marabout stall. Lady Hautton
had just been paying a charitable visit to St. Cecilia's Refuge, of
which she was head patroness, where, having floated in with much
benignity, been worshipped by a select little toady troop, administered
spiritual consolation with admirable condescension, and distributed
illuminated texts for the adornment of the walls and refreshment of the
souls, she was naturally in a Christian frame of mind towards her
neighbors. Lady Marabout caught the remark--as she was intended to
do--and thought it not quite a pleasant one; but, my good sir, did you
ever know those estimable people, who spend all their time fitting
themselves for another world, ever take the trouble to make themselves
decently agreeable in the present one? The little pleasant courtesies,
affabilities, generosities, and kindnesses, that rub the edge off the
flint-stones of the Via Dolorosa, are quite beneath the attention of
Mary the Saint, and only get attended to by Martha the Worldly, poor
butterfly thing! who is fit for nothing more serviceable and profitable!
Lady Marabout _had_ set her heart on Cecil Ormsby's filling that post of
honor--of which no living woman was deserving in her opinion--that of
"Philip's wife;" an individual who had been, for so many years, a fond
ideal, a haunting anxiety, and a dreaded rival, en meme temps, to her
imagination. She _was_ a little bit of a match-maker: she had, over and
over again, arranged the most admirable and suitable alliances;
alliances that would have shamed the scepticism of the world in general,
as to the desirability of the holy bonds, and brought every refractory
man to the steps of St. George's; alliances, that would have come off
with the greatest eclat, but for one trifling hindrance and
difficulty--namely, the people most necessary to the arrangements could
never by any chance be brought to view them in the same light, and were
certain to give her diplomacy the _croc-en-jambe_ at the very moment of
its culminating glory and finishing finesses. She was a little bit of a
match-maker--most kind-hearted women are; the tinder they play with is
much better left alone, but _they_ don't remember that! Like children in
a forest, they think they'll light a pretty bright fire, just for fun,
and never remember what a seared, dreary waste that fire may make, or
what a prairie conflagration it may stretch into before it's stopped.
"Cecil Ormsby is a terrible flirt," said Lady Hautton, to another lady,
glancing at the rapid sale of the rosebuds and cigars, the bunches of
violets and the sprays of lilies of the valley, in which that brilliant
beauty was doing such thriving business at such extravagant profits,
while the five Ladies Hautton presided solemnly over articles of
gorgeous splendor, which threatened to be left on hand, and go in a
tombola, as ignominiously as a beauty after half a dozen seasons, left
unwooed and unwon, goes to the pele-mele raffle of German Bad society,
and is sold off at the finish to an unknown of the Line, or a Civil
Service fellow, with five hundred a year.
"Was Cecil a flirt?" wondered Lady Marabout. Lady Marabout was fain to
confess to herself that she thought she was--nay, that she hoped she
was. If it wasn't flirting, that way in which she smiled on Chandos
Cheveley, sold him cigarettes, laughed with him over the ices and
nectarines he fetched her, and positively invested him with the cordon
d'honneur of a little bouquet of Fairy roses, for which twenty men sued,
and he (give Satan his due) did not even ask--if it wasn't flirting,
_what was it_? Lady Marabout shivered at the suggestion; and though she
was, on principle, excessively severe on flirting, she could be very
glad of what she didn't approve, when it aided her, on occasion--like
most other people--and would so far have agreed with Talleyrand, as to
welcome the worst crime (of coquetry) as far less a sin than the
unpardonable blunder of encouraging an Ogre!
"I can't send Cecil away from the stall, as if she were a naughty child,
and I can't order the man out of Willis's Rooms," thought that unhappy
and fatally-worried lady, as she presided behind her stall, an emphatic
witness of the truth of the poeticism that "grief smiles and gives no
sign," insomuch as she looked the fairest, sunniest, best-looking, and
best-tempered Dowager that ever shrouded herself in Chantilly lace.
"I do think those ineligible, detrimental, objectionable persons ought
not to be let loose on society as they are," she pondered; "let them
have their clubs and their mess breakfasts, their Ascot and their
Newmarket, their lansquenet parties and their handicap pigeon matches,
if they like; but to have them come amongst _us_ as they do, asked
everywhere if they happen to have good blood and good style, free to
waltz and flirt and sing, and show all sorts of attention to
marriageable girls, while all the while they are no more available for
anything serious than if they were club stewards or cabmen--creatures
that live on their fashionable aroma, and can't afford to buy the very
bottles of bouquets on their toilette-tables--fast men, too, who,
knowing they can never marry themselves, make a practice of turning
marriage into ridicule, and help to set all the rich men more dead
against it than they are,--to have them come promiscuously among the
very best people, with nothing to distinguish them as dangerous, or
label them as 'ought to be avoided,'--it's dreadful! it's a social evil!
it _ought_ to be remedied! They muzzle dogs in June, why can't they
label Ogres in the season? I mustn't send poor little Bijou out for a
walk in Kensington Gardens without a string, these men ought not to go
about in society without restriction: a snap of Bijou's doesn't do half
such mischief as a smile of theirs!"
And Lady Marabout chatted across the stall to his Grace of Doncaster,
and entrapped him into purchases of fitting ducal prodigality, and
smiled on scores of people she didn't know, in pleasant _pro tempore_
expediency that had, like most expediency in our day, its ultimate goal
in their purses and pockets, and longed for some select gendarmerie to
clear Willis's Rooms of her Cobra Capella, and kept an eye all the while
on Cecil Ormsby--Cecil, selling off everything on the stall by sheer
force of her bright violet eyes, receiving ten-pound notes for guinea
trifles, making her Bourse rise as high as she liked, courted for a
spray of mignonette as entreatingly as ever Law was courted in the Rue
Quincampoix for Mississippi scrip, served by a Corps d'Elite, in whom
she had actually enlisted Carruthers, Goodwood, Fulke Nugent,
Fitzbreguet, and plenty of the most desirable and most desired men in
town, yet of which--oh the obstinacy of women! she had actually made
Chandos Cheveley, with those wicked little Fairy roses in his coat,
positively the captain and the chief!
"It is enough to break one's heart!" thought Lady Marabout, wincing
under the Hautton glance, which she saw only the plainer because she
_wouldn't_ see it at all, and which said with horrible distinctness,
"There is that man, who can hardly keep his own cab, who floats on
society like a pleasure-boat, without rudder, ballast, or anchors, of
whom I have told you, in virtuous indignation and Christian charity,
fifty thousand naughty stories, who visits that wicked, notorious little
Marechale, who belongs to the Amandine set, who is everything that he
ought not and nothing that he ought to be, who hasn't a penny he doesn't
make by a well-made betting-book or a dashed-off magazine
article,--there he is flirting all day at your own stall with
Rosediamond's daughter, and you haven't the _savoir faire_, the strength
of will, the tact, the proper feeling, to stop it!"
To all of which charges Lady Marabout humbly bent her head,
metaphorically speaking, and writhed, in secret, under the glance of her
ancient enemy, while she talked and laughed with the Duke of Doncaster.
C. Petronius, talking epicureanisms and witicisms, while the life-blood
was ebbing away at every breath, was nothing to the suffering and the
fortitude of Helena, Lady Marabout, turning a smiling, sunny, tranquil
countenance to the world in front of her stall, while that world could
see Chandos Cheveley admitted behind it!
"I must do something to stop this!" thought Lady Marabout, with the
desperation of a Charlotte Corday.
"Is Cheveley going in for the Ormsby tin?" said Amandine to Eyre Lee.
"Best thing he could do, eh? But Lady Tattersall and the trustees would
cut rough, I am afraid."
"What does Chandos mean with that daughter of Rosediamond's?" wondered
her Grace, annoyedly. She had had him some time in her own rose chains,
and when ladies have driven a lover long in that sort of harness, they
could double-thong him with all the might of their little hands, if they
fancy he is trying to break away.
"Is Chandos Cheveley turning fortune-hunter? I suppose he would like
Lady Cecil's money to pay off his Ascot losses," said Mrs. Marechale,
with a malicious laugh. At Ascot, the day before, he had not gone near
her carriage; the year before he had driven her down in her
mail-phaeton: what would there be too black to say of him _now_?
"I must do something to stop this!" determined Lady Marabout, driving
homewards, and glancing at Cecil Ormsby, as that young lady lay back in
the carriage, a little grave and dreamy after her day's campaign--signs
of the times terrifically ominous to her chaperone, skilled in reading
such meteorological omens. But how was the drag to be put on the wheel?
That momentous question absorbed Lady Marabout through her toilette that
evening, pursued her to dinner, haunted her through two soirees, kept
her wide awake all night, woke up with her to her early coffee, and
flavored the potted tongue and the volaille a la Richelieu she took for
her breakfast. "I can't turn the man out of town, and I can't tell
people to strike him off their visiting-lists, and I can't shut Cecil
and myself up in this house as if it were a convent, and, as to speaking
to her, it is not the slightest use. She has such a way of putting
things that one can never deny their truth, or reason them away, as one
can with other girls. Fond as I am of her, she's fearfully difficult to
manage. Still I owe it as a sacred duty to poor Rosediamond and the
General, who says he places such implicit confidence in me, to
interfere. It is my duty; it can't be helped. I must speak to Chandos
Cheveley himself. I have no right to consult my own scruples when so
much is at stake," valorously determined Lady Marabout, resolved to
follow stern moral rules, and, when right was right, to let "le diable
prendre le fruit."
To be a perfect woman of the world, I take it, ladies must weed out
early in life all such little contemptible weaknesses as a dislike to
wounding other people; and a perfect woman of the world, therefore, Lady
Marabout was not, and never would be. Nohow could she acquire Anne
Hautton's invaluable sneer--nohow could she imitate that estimable
pietist's delightful way of dropping little icy-barbed sentences, under
which I have known the bravest to shrink, frozen, out of her path. Lady
Marabout was grieved if she broke the head off a flower needlessly, and
she could not cure herself of the same lingering folly in disliking to
say a thing that pained anybody; it is incidental to the De Boncoeur
blood--Carruthers inherits it--and I have seen fellows spared through
it, whom he could else have withered into the depths of their boots by
one of his satirical mots. So she did not go to her task of speaking to
Chandos Cheveley, armed at all points for the encounter, and taking
pleasure in feeling the edge of her rapier, as Lady Hautton would have
done. The Cobra was dangerous, and must be crushed, but Lady Marabout
did not very much relish setting her heel on it; it was a glittering,
terrible, much-to-be-feared, and much-to-be-abused serpent,--but it
might _feel_ all the same, you see.
"I dislike the man on principle, but I don't want to pain him," she
thought, sighing for the Hautton stern _savoir faire_ and Achilles
impenetrability, and goading herself on with the remembrance of duty and
General Ormsby, when the opportunity she had resolved to seek presented
itself accidentally at a breakfast at Lady George Frangipane's toy
villa at Fulham, and she found herself comparatively alone in the
rose-garden with Cheveley, for once without Cecil's terrible violet eyes
upon her.
"Will you allow me a few words with you, Mr. Cheveley?" she asked, in
her blandest manner--the kindly hypocrite!
The blow must be dealt, but it might as well be softened with a few
chloroform fumes, and not struck savagely with an iron-spiked mace.
Cheveley raised his eyes.
"With me? With the greatest pleasure!"
"He is a mere fortune-hunter. I will _not_ spare him, I am resolved,"
determined Lady Marabout, as she toyed with her parasol-handle, remarked
incidentally how unequalled Lady George was in roses, especially in the
tea-rose, and dealt blow No. 1. "Mr. Cheveley, I am going to speak to
you very frankly. I consider frankness in all things best, myself----"
Cheveley bowed, and smiled slightly.
"I wish he would answer, it would make it so much easier; he will only
look at one with those eyes of his, and certainly they _are_ splendid!"
thought Lady Marabout, as she went on quickly, on the same principle as
the Chasseurs Indiens approach an abattis at double-quick. "When Lord
Rosediamond died last year he left, as probably you are aware, his
daughter in my sole care; it was a great responsibility--very great--and
I feel, of course, that I shall have to answer to him for my discharge
of it."
Lady Marabout didn't say whether Rosediamond was accustomed to visit her
per medium, and hear her account of her stewardship nightly through a
table-claw; but we must suppose that he was. Cheveley bowed again, and
didn't inquire, not being spiritually interested.
"Why _won't_ he answer?" thought Lady Marabout. "That I have not been
blind to your very marked attention to my dear Cecil, I think you must
be aware, Mr. Cheveley, and it is on that subject, indeed, that I----"
"Wished to speak to me? I understand!" said Cheveley as she paused, with
that faint smile, half sad, half proud, that perplexed Lady Marabout.
"You are about to insinuate to me gently that those attentions have been
exceedingly distasteful to you, exceedingly unacceptable in me; you
would remind me that Lady Cecil Ormsby is a beauty and an heiress, and
that I am a fortune-hunter, whose designs are seen through and motives
found out; you would hint to me that our intercourse must cease: is it
not so?"
Lady Marabout, cursed with that obstinate, ill-bred, unextinguishable
weakness for truth incidental and ever fatal to the De Boncoeurs,
couldn't say that it was _not_ what she was going to observe to him, but
it was exceedingly unpleasant, now it was put in such plain,
uncomplimentary terms, to admit to the man's face that she was about to
tell him he was a mercenary schemer, whose attentions only sprang from a
lawless passion for the _beaux yeux_ of Cecil's _cassette_.
She would have told him all that, and much more, with greatest dignity
and effect, if he hadn't anticipated her; but to have her weapon parried
before it was fairly out of its sheath unnerved her arm at the outset.
"What _would_ Anne Hautton do? Dear me! there never was anybody
perpetually placed in such wretched positions as I am!" thought Lady
Marabout, as she played with her parasol, and murmured something not
very clear relative to "responsibility" and "not desirable," two words
as infallibly a part of Lady Marabout's stock in trade as a sneer at the
"swells" is of _Punch's_. How she sighed for some cold, nonchalant,
bitter sentence, such as the Hautton repertoire could have supplied! how
she scorned herself for her own weakness and lack of severity! But she
would not have relished hurting a burglar's feelings, though she had
seen him in the very act of stealing her jewel-boxes, by taxing him with
the theft; and though the Ogre _must_ be crushed, the crushing began to
give Lady Marabout neuralgic twinges. She was no more able to say the
stern things she had rehearsed and resolved upon, than she was able to
stab him with her parasol, or strangle him with her handkerchief.
"I guessed rightly what you were about to say to me?" said Cheveley, who
seemed somehow or other to have taken all the talk into his own hands,
and to have become the master of the position. "I thought so. I do not
wonder at your construction; I cannot blame you for your resolution.
Lady Cecil has some considerable fortune, they say; it is very natural
that you should have imagined a man like myself, with no wealth save a
good name, which only serves to make lack of wealth more conspicuous,
incapable of seeking her society for any better, higher, more
disinterested motive than that of her money; it was not charitable,
perhaps, to decide unhesitatingly that it was impossible I could be
drawn to her by any other attraction, that it was imperative I must be
dead to everything in her that gives her a nobler and a higher charm;
but it was very natural, and one learns never to hope for the miracle of
a charitable judgment, _even_ from Lady Marabout!"
"My dear Mr. Cheveley, indeed you mistake!" began Lady Marabout,
restlessly. That was a little bit of a story, he didn't mistake at all;
but Lady Marabout, collapsing like an india-rubber ball under the prick
of a sarcasm, shivered all over at his words, his voice, his slight sad
smile. "The man is as dreadful as Cecil," she thought; "he puts things
so horribly clearly!"