said Carruthers, poising a macaroon on Pandore's nose. "Make
ready!--present!--fire! There's a good dog!"
"No, nothing of that sort: very natural, frank, vivacious. Nothing
artificial about her; very charming indeed! But she might be a young
Countess, the queen of a _monde_ rather than a young girl just out of a
French convent; and, you know, my dear Philip, that sort of wit and
nonchalance may be admirable for Cecil Cheveley, assured of her
position, but they're dangerous to a girl like this Flora Montolieu:
they will make people remark her and ask who she is, and try to pull her
to pieces, if they don't find her somebody they _dare_ not hit. I would
much rather she were of the general pattern, pleasing, but nothing
remarkable, well-bred, but nothing to envy, thoroughly educated, but
monosyllabic in society; such a girl as that passes among all the rest,
suits mediocre men (and the majority of men _are_ mediocre, you know, my
dear Philip), and pleases women because she is a nice girl, and no
rival; but this little Montolieu----"
And Lady Marabout sighed with a prescience of coming troubles, while
Carruthers laughed and rose.
"Will worry your life out! I must go, for I have to sit in court-martial
at two (for a mere trifle, a deuced bore to us, but _le service
oblige_!), so I shall escape introduction to your little Montolieu
to-day. Why _will_ you fill your house with girls, my dear mother?--it
is fifty times more agreeable when you are reigning alone. Henceforth, I
can't come in to lunch with you without going through the formula of a
mild flirtation--women think you so ill-natured if you don't flirt a
little with them, that amiable men like myself haven't strength of mind
to refuse. You should keep _your_ house an open sanctuary for me, when
you know I've no other in London except when I retreat into White's and
the U. S.!"
"She puzzles me!" pondered Lady Marabout, as Despreaux disrobed her that
night. "I always _am_ to be puzzled, I think! I never _can_ have one of
those quiet, mediocre, well-mannered, remarkable-for-nothing girls, who
have no idiosyncrasies and give nobody any trouble; one marries them
safely to some second-rate man; nobody admires them, and nobody dislikes
them; they're to society what neutral tint is among body-colors, or
rather what grays are among dresses, inoffensive, unimpeachable, always
look ladylike, but never look brilliant; colorless dresses are very
useful, and so are characterless girls; and I dare say the draper would
tell us the grays in the long run are the easiest to sell, as the girls
are to marry; they please the commonplace taste of the generality, and
do for every-day wear! Flora Montolieu puzzles me; she is very charming,
very striking, very lovable, but she puzzles me! I have a presentiment
that that child will give me a world of anxiety, an infinitude of
trouble!"
And Lady Marabout laid her head on her pillow, not the happier that
Flora Montolieu was lying asleep in the room next her, dreaming of the
wild-vine shadows and the night-blooming flowers of her native tropics,
under the rose-curtains of her new home in Lowndes Square, already a
burden on the soul and a responsibility on the mind of that home's most
genial and generous mistress.
"If she were a man, I should certainly call her a detrimental," said
Lady Marabout, after a more deliberate study of her charge. "You know,
my dear Philip, the sort of man one call detrimental; attractive enough
to do a great deal of damage, and ineligible enough to make the damage
very unacceptable: handsome and winning, but a younger son, or a
something nobody wants; a delightful flirtation, but a terrible
alliance; you know what I mean! Well, that is just what this little
Montolieu is in our sex; I am quite sure it is what she will be
considered; and if it be bad for a man, it is very much worse for a
woman! Everybody will admire her, and nobody will marry her; I have a
presentiment of it!"
With which prophetical melange of the glorious and the inglorious for
her charge's coming career, Lady Marabout sighed, and gave a little
shiver, such as
Sous des maux ignores nous fait gemir d'avance,
as Delphine Gay well phrased it. And she floated out of her boudoir to
the dining-room for luncheon, at which unformal and pleasant meal
Carruthers chanced to stay, criticise a new dry sherry, and take a look
at this unsalable young filly of the Marabout Yearling Sales.
"I don't know about her being detrimental, mother, nor about her being
little; she in more than middle height," laughed he; "but I vow she is
the prettiest thing you've had in your list for some time. You've had
much greater beauties, you say? Well, perhaps so; but I bet you any
money she will make a sensation."
"I'm sure she will," reiterated Lady Marabout, despairingly. "I have no
doubt she will have a brilliant season; there is something very
piquante, taking, and uncommon about her; but who will marry her at the
end of it?"
Carruthers shouted with laughter.
"Heaven forbid that I should attempt to prophesy! I would undertake as
readily to say who'll be the owner of the winner of the Oaks ten years
hence! I can tell you who _won't_----"
"Yourself; because you'll never marry anybody at all," cried Lady
Marabout. "Well! I must say I should not wish you to renounce your
misogamistic notions here. The Montolieus are not at all what _you_
should look for; and a child like Flora would be excessively ill suited
to you. If I could see you married, as I should desire, to some woman of
weight and dignity, five or six-and-twenty, fit for you in every
way----"
"_De grace, de grace!_ My dear mother, the mere sketch will kill me, if
you insist on finishing it! Be reasonable! Can anything be more
comfortable, more tranquil, than I am now? I swing through life in a
rocking-chair; if I'm a trifle bored now and then, it's my heaviest
trial. I float as pleasantly on the waves of London life, in my way, as
the lotus-eaters of poetry on the Ganges in theirs; and _you'd_ have the
barbarity to introduce into my complacent existence the sting of
matrimony, the phosphorus of Hymen's torch, the symbolical serpent of a
wedding-ring?--for shame!"
Lady Marabout laughed despite herself, and the solemnity, in _her_ eyes,
of the subject.
"I _should_ like to see you happily married, for all that, though I
quite despair of it now; but perhaps you are right."
"Of course I am right! Adam was tranquil and unworried till fate sent
him a wife, and he was typical of the destinies of his descendants.
Those who are wise, take warning; those who are not, neglect it and
repent. Lady Hautton et C^{ie} are very fond of twisting scriptural
obscurities into 'types.' _There's_ a type plain as day, and salutary to
mankind, if detrimental to women!"
"Philip, you are abominable! don't be so wicked!" cried Lady Marabout,
enjoying it all the more because she was a little shocked at it, as your
best women will on occasion; human nature is human nature everywhere,
and the female heart gives pleasurable little pulses at the sight of
forbidden fruits now, as in the days of Eve.
"Who's that Miss Montolieu with your mother this year, Phil?" dozens of
men asked Carruthers, that season, across the mess-table, in the
smoking-room of the Guards, in the Ride or the Ring, in the doorways of
ball-rooms, or anywhere where such-like questions are asked and new
pretty women discussed.
"What is it in her that takes so astonishingly?" wondered Lady Marabout,
who is, like most women, orthodox on all points, loving things by rule,
worrying if they go out of the customary routine, and was, therefore,
quite incapable of reconciling herself to so revolutionary a fact as a
young lady being admired who was not a beauty, and sought while she was
detrimental in every way. It was "out of the general rule," and your
orthodox people hate anything "out of the general run," as they hate
their prosperous friends: the force of hatred can no further go! Flora
Montolieu's crime in Belgravia was much akin to the Bonapartes' crimes
to the Bourbons. Thrones must be filled legitimately, if not worthily,
in the eyes of the orthodox people, and this Petit Caporal of Lady
Marabout's had no business to reign where the Hereditary Princesses and
all the other noble lines failed to sway the sceptre. Lady Marabout,
belonging to the noble lines herself, agreed in her heart with them, and
felt a little bit guilty to have introduced this democratic and
unwelcome element in society.
Flora Montolieu "took," as people say of bubble companies, meaning that
they will pleasantly ruin a million or two: or of new fashions, meaning
that they will become general with the many and, _sequitur_, unwearable
with the few. She had the brilliance and grace of one of her own
tropical flowers, with something piquante and attractive about her that
one had to leave nameless, but that was all the more charming for that
very fact perhaps; full of life and animation, but soft as a gazelle, as
her chaperone averred; not characterless, as Lady Marabout fondly
desired (on the same principle, I suppose, as a timid whip likes a horse
as spiritless as a riding-school hack), but gifted with plenty of very
marked character, so much, indeed, that it rather puzzled her
_cameriste_.
"Girls shouldn't have marked character; they should be clay that one can
mould, not a self-chiselled statuette, that will only go into its own
niche, and won't go into any other. This little Montolieu would make
just such a woman as Vittoria Colonna or Madame de Sable, but one
doesn't want _those_ qualities in a girl, who is but a single little ear
in the wheat-sheaf of society, and whom one wants to marry off, but
can't expect to marry well. Her poor mother, of course, will look to me
to do something advantageous for her, and I verily believe she is that
sort of girl that will let me do nothing," thought Lady Marabout,
already beginning to worry, as she talked to Lady George Frangipane at a
breakfast in Palace Gardens, and watched Flora Montolieu, with
Carruthers on her left and Goodwood on her right, amusing them both, to
all semblance, and holding her own to the Lady Hautton's despite, who
held _their_ own so excessively chillily and loftily that no ordinary
mortals cared to approach them, but, beholding them, thought
involuntarily of the stately icebergs off the Spitzbergen coast, only
that the icebergs _could_ melt or explode when their time came, and the
time was never known when the Hautton surface could be moved to anger or
melt to any sunshine whatever. At least, whether their maids or their
mother ever beheld the first of the phenomena, far be it from me to say,
but the world never saw either.
"Well, Miss Montolieu, how do you like our life here?" Carruthers was
asking. "Which is preferable--Belgravia or St. Denis?"
"Oh, Belgravia, decidedly," laughed Lady Marabout's charge. "I think
your life charming. All change, excitement, gayety, who would not like
it?"
"Nobody--that is not fresh to it?"
"Fresh to it? Ah! are you one of the class who find no beauty in
anything unless it is new? If so, do not charge the blame on to the
thing, as your tone implies; take it rather to yourself and your own
fickleness."
"Perhaps I do," smiled Carruthers. "But whether one's self or 'the
thing' is to blame, the result's much the same--satiety! Wait till you
have had two or three seasons, and then tell me if you find this
mill-wheel routine, these circus gyrations, so delightful! We are the
performing stud, who go round and round in the hippodrome, day after day
for show, till we are sick of the whole programme, knowing our white
stars are but a daub of paint, and our gay spangles only tinfoil. You
are a little pony just joined to the troupe, and just pleased with the
glitter of the arena. Wait till you've had a few years of it before you
say whether going through the same hoops and passing over the same
sawdust is so very amusing."
"If I do not, I shall desert the troupe, and form a circus of my own
less mechanical and more enjoyable."
"_Il faut souffrir pour etre belle, il faut souffrir encore plus pour
etre a la mode!_" said Goodwood, on her right, while Lady Egidia Hautton
thought, "How bold that little Montolieu is!" and her sister, Lady
Feodorowna, wondered what her cousin Goodwood _could_ see there.
"I do not see the necessity," interrupted Flora, "and I certainly would
never bow to the 'il faut.' I would make fashion follow me; I would not
follow fashion." ("That child talks as though she were the Duchess of
Amandine;" thought Lady Marabout, catching fragmentary portions across
the table, the Marabout oral and oracular organs being always
conveniently multiplied when she was armed cap a pie as a chaperone.)
"Sir Philip, you talk as if you belonged to the 'nothing-is-new, and
nothing-is-true, and it-don't-signify' class. I should have thought you
were above the nil admirari affectation."
"He admires, as we all do, when we find something that compels our
homage," said Goodwood, with an emphasis that would have made the hearts
of any of the Hereditary Princesses palpitate with gratification, but at
which the ungrateful Petit Caporal only glanced at him a little
surprisedly with her large hazel eyes, as though she by no means saw the
point of the speech.
Carruthers laughed:
"Nil admirari? Oh no. I enjoy life, but then it is thanks to the clubs,
my yacht, my cigar-case, my stud, a thousand things,--not thanks at all
to Belgravia."
"Complimentary to the Belgraviennes!" cried Flora, with a shrug of her
shoulders. "They have not known how to amuse you, then?"
"Ladies never _do_ amuse us!" sighed Carruthers. "_Tant pis pour nous!_"
"Are you going to Lady Patchouli's this evening?" asked Goodwood.
"I believe we are. I think Lady Marabout said so."
"Then I shall exert myself, and go too. It will be a terrible
bore--balls always are. But to waltz with _you_ I will try to encounter
it!"
Flora Montolieu arched her eyebrows, and gave him a little disdainful
glance.
"Lord Goodwood, do not be so sure that I shall waltz at all with you. If
_you_ take vanity for wit, _I_ cannot accept discourtesy as compliment!"
"Well hit, little lady!" thought Carruthers, with a mental bravissima.
"What a speech!" thought Lady Marabout, across the table, as shocked as
though a footman had dropped a cascade of iced hock over her.
"You got it for once, Goodwood," laughed Carruthers, as they drove away
in his tilbury. "You never had such a sharp brush as that."
"By Jove, no! Positively it was quite a new sensation--refreshing,
indeed! One grows so tired of the women who agree with one eternally.
She's charming, on my word. Who _is_ she, Phil? In an heraldic sense, I
mean."
"My dear child, what could possess you to answer Lord Goodwood like
that?" cried Lady Marabout, as her barouche rolled down Palace Gardens.
"Possess me? The Demon of Mischief, I suppose."
"But, my love, it was a wonderful compliment from him!"
"Was it? I do not see any compliment in those vain, impertinent,
Brummelian amour-propreisms. I must coin the word, there is no good one
to express it."
"But, my dear Flora, you know he is the Marquis of Goodwood, the Duke of
Doncaster's son! It is not as if he were a boy in the Lancers, or an
unfledged _petit maitre_ from the Foreign Office----"
"Were he her Majesty's son, he should not gratify his vanity at my
expense! If he expected me to be flattered by his condescension, he
mistook me very much. He has been allowed to adopt that tone, I suppose;
but from a man to a woman a chivalrous courtesy is due, though the man
be an emperor."
"Perhaps so--of course; but that _is_ their tone nowadays, my love, and
you cannot alter it. I always say the Regency-men inaugurated it, and
their sons and grandsons out-Herod Herod. But to turn a tide, or be a
wit with impunity, a woman wants to occupy a prominent and unassailable
position. Were you the Duchess of Amandine, you might say that sort of
thing, but a young girl just out _must not_--indeed she must not! The
Hauttons heard you, and the Hauttons are very merciless people;
perfectly bred themselves, and pitiless on the least infringement of the
convenances. Besides, ten to one you may have gained Goodwood's
ill-will; and he is a man whose word has immense weight, I assure you."
"I do not see anything remarkable in him to give him weight," said the
literal and unimpressible little Montolieu. "He is a commonplace person
to my taste, neither so brilliant nor so handsome by a great deal as
many gentlemen I see--as Sir Philip, for instance, Lady Marabout?"
"An my son? No, my love, he is not; very few men have Philip's talents
and person," said Lady Marabout, consciously mollified and propitiated,
but going on, nevertheless, with a Spartan impartiality highly laudable
"Goodwood's rank, however, is much higher than Philip's (at least it
stands so, though really the Carruthers are by far the older, dating as
far back as Ethelbert II., while the Doncaster family are literally
unknown till the fourteenth century, when Gervaise d'Ascotte received
the acolade before Ascalon from Godfrey de Bouillon); Goodwood _has_
great weight, my dear, in the best circles. A compliment from him is a
great compliment to any woman, and the sort of answer you gave him----"
"Must have been a great treat to him, dear Lady Marabout, if every one
is in the habit of kow-towing before him. Princes, you know, are never
so happy as when they can have a little bit of nature; and my speech
must have been as refreshing to Lord Goodwood as the breath of his
Bearnese breezes and the freedom of his Pyrenean forests were to Henri
Quatre after the court etiquette and the formal ceremonial of Paris."
"I don't know about its being a treat to him, my dear; it was more
likely to be a shower-bath. And your illustration isn't to the point.
The Bearnese breezes were Henri Quatre's native air, and might be
pleasant to him; but the figurative ones are not Goodwood's, and I am
sure cannot please him."
"But, Lady Marabout, I do not want to please him!" persisted the young
lady, perversely. "I don't care in the least what he thinks, or what he
says of me!"
"Dear me, how oddly things go!" thought Lady Marabout. "There was
Valencia, one of the proudest girls in England, his equal in every way,
an acknowledged beauty, who would have said the dust on the trottoir was
diamonds, and worn turquoises on azureline, or emeralds on rose, I
verily believe, if such opticisms and gaucheries had been Goodwood's
taste; and here is this child--for whom the utmost one can do will be to
secure a younger son out of the Civil Service, or a country
member--cannot be made to see that he is of an atom more importance
than Soames or Mason, and treats him with downright nonchalant
indifference. What odd anomalies one sees in everything!"
"Who _is_ that young lady with you this season?" Lady Hautton asked,
smiling that acidulated smile with which that amiable saint always puts
long questions to you of which she knows the answer would be _peine
forte et dure_. "Not the daughter of that horrid John Montolieu, who did
all sorts of dreadful things, and was put into a West India regiment?
Indeed! that man? Dear me! Married the sister of your incumbent at
Fernditton? Ah, really!--very singular! But how do you come to have
brought out the daughter?"
At all of which remarks Lady Marabout winced, and felt painfully guilty
of a gross democratic dereliction from legitimate and beaten paths,
conscious of having sinned heavily in the eyes of the world and Lady
Hautton, by bringing within the sacred precincts of Belgravia the
daughter of a _mauvais sujet_ in a West India corps and a sister of a
perpetual curate. The world was a terrible dragon to Lady Marabout; to
her imagination it always appeared an incarnated and omniscient bugbear,
Argus-eyed, and with all its hundred eyes relentlessly fixed on her,
spying out each item of her shortcomings, every little flaw in the
Marabout diamonds, any spur-made tear in her Honiton flounces, any
crease in her train at a Drawing-room, any lese-majeste against the
royal rule of conventionalities, any glissade on the polished oak floor
of society, though like a good many other people she often worried
herself needlessly; the flaws, tears, creases, high treasons, and false
glissades being fifty to one too infinitesimal or too unimportant to
society for one of the hundred eyes (vigilant and unwinking though I
grant they are) to take note of them. The world was a terrible bugbear
to Lady Marabout, and its special impersonation was Anne Hautton. She
disliked Anne Hautton; she didn't esteem her; she knew her to be a
narrow, censorious, prejudiced, and strongly malicious lady; but she was
the personification of the World to Lady Marabout, and had weight and
terror in consequence. Lady Marabout is not the first person who has
burnt incense and bowed in fear before a little miserable clay image she
cordially despised, for no better reason--for the self-same reason,
indeed.
"She evidently thinks I ought not to have brought Flora out; and perhaps
I shouldn't; though, poor little thing, it seems very hard she may not
enjoy society--fitted for society, too, as she is--just because her
father is in a West India regiment, and poor Lilla was only a
clergyman's daughter. Goodwood really seems to admire her. I can never
forgive him for his heartless flirtation with Valencia; but if he _were_
to be won by a Montolieu, what would the Hauttons say?"
And sitting against the wall, with others of her sisterhood, at a ball,
a glorious and golden vision rose up before Lady Marabout's eyes.
If the unknown, unwelcome, revolutionary little Montolieu should go in
and win where the Lady Hauttons had tried and failed through five
seasons--if this little tropical flower should be promoted to the
Doncaster conservatory, where all the stately stephanotises of the
peerage had vainly aspired to bloom--if this Petit Caporal should be
crowned with the Doncaster diadem, that all the legitimate rulers had
uselessly schemed to place on their brows! The soul of Lady Marabout
rose elastic at the bare prospect--it would be a great triumph for a
chaperone as for a general to conquer a valuable position with a handful
of boy recruits.
If it _should_ be! Anne Hautton would have nothing to say after _that_!
And Lady Marabout, though she was the most amiable lady in Christendom,
was not exempt from a feeling of longing for a stone to roll to the
door of her enemy's stronghold, or a flourish of trumpets to silence the
boastful and triumphant _fanfare_ that was perpetually sounding at sight
of her defeats from her opponent's ramparts.
Wild, visionary, guiltily scheming, sinfully revolutionary seemed such a
project in her eyes. Still, how tempting! It would be a terrible blow to
Valencia, who'd tried for Goodwood fruitlessly, to be eclipsed by this
unknown Flora; it would be a terrible blow to their Graces of Doncaster,
who held nobody good enough, heraldically speaking, for their
heir-apparent, to see him give the best coronet in England to a
bewitching little interloper, sans money, birth, or rank. "They wouldn't
like it, of course; I shouldn't like it for Philip, for instance, though
she's a very sweet little thing; all the Ascottes would be very vexed,
and all the Valletorts would never forgive it; but it would be _such_ a
triumph over Anne Hautton!" pondered Lady Marabout, and the last clause
carried the day. Did you ever know private pique fail to carry the day
over public charity?