though erring to her Order, was delicious to her individuality, at
Goodwood waltzing with the little Montolieu a suspicious number of
times, while Lady Egidia Hautton was condemned to his young brother,
Seton Ascotte, and Lady Feodorowna danced positively with nobody better
than their own county member, originally a scion of Goodwood's bankers!
Could the force of humiliation further go? Lady Hautton sat smiling and
chatting, but the tiara on her temples was a figurative thorn crown, and
Othello's occupation was gone. When a lady's daughters are dancing with
an unavailable _cadet_ of twenty, and a parvenu, only acceptable in the
last extremities of despair, what good is it for her to watch the smiles
and construe the attentions?
"We shall see who triumphs now," thought Lady Marabout, with a glow of
pleasure, for which her heart reproached her a moment afterwards. "It is
very wrong," she thought; "if those poor girls don't marry, one ought to
pity them; and as for her--going through five seasons, with a fresh
burden of responsibility leaving the schoolroom, and added on your hands
each year, _must_ sour the sweetest temper; it would do mine, I am sure.
I dare say, if I had had daughters, I should have been ten times more
worried even than I am."
Which she would have been, undoubtedly, and the eligibles on her
visiting-list ten times more too! Men wouldn't have voted the Marabout
dinners and soirees so pleasant as they did, under the sway of that
sunshiny hostess, if there had been Lady Maudes and Lady Marys to exact
attention, and lay mines under the Auxerre carpets, and man-traps among
the epergne flowers of Lowndes Square. Nor would Lady Marabout have been
the same; the sunshine couldn't have shone so brightly, nor the milk of
roses flowed so mildly under the weight and wear of marriageable but
unmarried daughters; the sunshine would have been fitful, the milk of
roses curdled at best. And no wonder! Those poor women! they have so
much to go through in the world, and play but such a monotonous role,
taken at its most brilliant and best, from first to last, from cradle to
grave, from the berceaunettes in which they commence their existence to
the mausoleum in which they finish it. If they _do_ get a little bit
soured when they have finished their own game, and have to sit at the
card-tables, wide awake however weary, vigilant however drowsy, alert
however bored to death, superintending the hands of the fresh players,
surreptitiously suggesting means for securing the tricks, keeping a
dragon's eye out for revokes, and bearing all the brunt of the blame if
the rubber be lost--if they do get a little bit soured, who can, after
all, greatly wonder?
"That's a very brilliant little thing, that girl Montolieu," said
Goodwood, driving over to Hornsey Wood, the morning after, with
Carruthers and some other men, in his drag.
"A deuced pretty waltzer!" said St. Lys, of the Bays; "turn her round in
a square foot."
"And looks very well in the saddle; sits her horse better than any woman
in the Ride, except Rosalie Rosiere, and as she came from the Cirque
Olympique originally, one don't count _her_," said Fulke Nugent. "I _do_
like a woman to ride well, I must say. I promised your mother to take a
look at the Marabout Yearling Sale, Phil, if ever I wanted the
never-desirable and ever-burdensome article she has to offer, and if
anything could tempt me to pay the price she asks, I think it would be
that charming Montolieu."
"She's the best thing Lady Tattersall ever had on hand," said Goodwood,
drawing his whip over his off-wheeler's back. "You know, Phil--gently,
gently, Coronet!--what spoilt your handsome cousin was, as I said, that
it was all mechanism; perfect mechanism, I admit, but all artificial,
prearranged, put together, wound up to smile in this place, bow in that,
and frown in the other; clockwork every inch of it! Now--so-ho, Zouave!
confound you, _won't_ you be quiet?--little Montolieu hasn't a bit of
artifice about her; 'tisn't only that you don't know what she's going to
say, but that _she_ doesn't either; and whether it's a smile or a frown,
a jest or a reproof, it's what the moment brings out, not what's planned
beforehand."
"The hard hit you had the other day seems to have piqued your interest,"
said Carruthers, smoothing a loose leaf of his Manilla.
"Naturally. The girl didn't care a button about my compliment (I only
said it to try her), and the plucky answer she gave me amused me
immensely. Anything unartificial and frank is as refreshing as
hock-and-seltzer after a field-day--one likes it, don't you know?"
"Wonderfully eloquent you are, Goody. If you come out like that in St.
Stephen's, we sha'n't know you, and the ministerialists will look down
in the mouth with a vengeance!"
"Don't be satirical, Phil! If I admire Mademoiselle Flora, what is it to
you, pray?"
"Nothing at all," said Carruthers, with unnecessary rapidity of
enunciation.
"My love, what are you going to wear to-night? The Bishop of Bonviveur
is coming. He was a college friend of your poor uncle's; knew your dear
mother before she married. I want you to look your very best and charm
him, as you certainly do most people," said Lady Marabout. Adroit
intriguer! The bishop was going, sans doute; the bishop loved good wine,
good dinners, and good society, and found all three in Lowndes Square,
but the bishop was entirely unavailable for purposes matrimonial, having
had three wives, and being held tight in hand by a fourth; however, a
bishop is a convenient piece to cover your king, in chess, and the
bishop served admirably just then in Lady Marabout's moves as a _locum
tenens_ for Goodwood. Flora Montolieu, in her innocence, made herself
look her prettiest for her mother's old friend, and Flora Montolieu was
conveniently ready, looking her prettiest, for her chaperone's
pet-eligible, when Goodwood--who hated to dine anywhere in London except
at the clubs, the Castle, or the Guards' mess, and was as difficult to
get for your dinners as birds'-nests soup or Tokay pur--entered the
Marabout drawing-rooms.
"Anne Hautton will see he dined here to-night, in the _Morning Post_
to-morrow morning, and she will know Flora must attract him very
unusually. What _will_ she, and Egidia, and Feodorowna say?" thought
Lady Marabout, with a glow of pleasure, which she was conscious was
uncharitable and sinful, and yet couldn't repress, let her try how she
might.
In scheming for the future Duke of Doncaster for John Montolieu's
daughter, she felt much as democratically and treasonably guilty to her
order as a prince of the blood might feel heading a Chartist emeute; but
then, suppose the Chartist row was that Prince's sole chance of crushing
an odious foe, as it was the only chance for her to humiliate the
Hautton, don't you think it might look tempting? Judge nobody, my good
sir, till you've been in similar circumstances yourself--a golden rule,
which might with advantage employ those illuminating colors with which
ladies employ so much of their time just now. Remembering it, they might
hold their white hands from flinging those sharp flinty stones, that
surely suit them so ill, and that soil their fingers in one way quite as
much as they soil the victim's bowed head in another? Illuminate the
motto, mesdames and demoiselles! Perhaps you _will_ do that--on a smalt
ground, with a gold Persian arabesque round, and impossible flowers
twined in and out of the letters; but, _remember_ it!--pardon! It were
asking too much.
"My dear Philip, did you notice how very marked Goodwood's attentions
were to Flora last night?" asked Lady Marabout, the morning after, in
one of her most sunshiny and radiant moods, as Carruthers paid her his
general matutinal call in her boudoir.
"Marked?"
"Yes, marked! Why do you repeat it in that tone? If they _were_ marked,
there is nothing to be ridiculed that I see. They were very marked,
indeed, especially for him; he's such an unimpressible,
never-show-anything man. I wonder you did not notice it!"
"My dear mother!" said Carruthers, a little impatiently, brushing up the
Angora cat's ruff the wrong way with his cane, "do you suppose I pass my
evenings noticing the attentions other men may see fit to pay to young
ladies?"
"Well--don't be impatient. You never used to be," said Lady Marabout.
"If you were in my place just for a night or two, or any other
chaperone's, you'd be more full of pity. But people never _will_
sympathize with anything that doesn't touch themselves. The only chords
that strike the key-note in anybody is the chord that sounds 'self;' and
that is the reason why the world is as full of crash and tumult as
Beethoven's 'Storm.'"
"Quite right, my dear mother!"
"Of course it's quite right. I always think you have a great deal of
sympathy for a man, Philip, even for people you don't harmonize
with--(you could sympathize with that child Flora, yesterday, in her
rapturous delight at seeing that Coccoloba Uvifera in the Patchouli
conservatory, because it reminded her of her West Indian home, and you
care nothing whatever about flowers, nor yet about the West Indies, I
should suppose)--but you never will sympathize with me. You know how
many disappointments and grievances and vexations of every kind I have
had the last ten, twenty, ay, thirty, forty seasons--ever since I had to
chaperone your aunt Eleanore, almost as soon as I was married, and was
worried, more than anybody ever _was_ worried, by her coquetteries and
her inconsistencies and her vacillations--so badly as she married, too,
at the last! Those flirting beauties so often do; they throw away a
hundred admirable chances and put up with a wretched _dernier
resort_;--let a thousand salmon break away from the line out of their
carelessness, and end by being glad to land a little minnow. I don't
know when I _haven't_ been worried by chaperoning. Flora Montolieu is a
great anxiety, a great difficulty, little detrimental that she is!"
"Detrimental! What an odd word you choose for her."
"I don't choose it for her; she _is_ it," returned Lady Marabout,
decidedly.
"How so?"
"How so! Why, my dear Philip, I told you the very first day she came.
How so! when she is John Montolieu's daughter, when she has no birth to
speak of, and not a farthing to her fortune."
"If she were Jack Ketch's daughter, you could not speak much worse. Her
high-breeding might do credit to a Palace; I only wish one found it in
all Palaces! and I never knew you before measure people by their money."
"My dear Philip, no more I do. I can't bear you when you speak in that
tone; it's so hard and sarcastic, and unlike you. _I_ don't know what
you mean either. I should have thought a man of the world like yourself
knew well enough what I intend when I say Flora is a detrimental. She
has a sweet temper, very clever, very lively, very charming, as any one
knows by the number of men that crowd about her, but a detrimental she
is----"
"Poor little heart!" muttered Carruthers in his beard, too low for his
mother to hear.
"--And yet I am quite positive that if she herself act judiciously, and
it is well managed for her, Goodwood may be won before the season is
over," concluded Lady Marabout.
Carruthers, not feeling much interest, it is presumed, in the
exclusively feminine pursuit of match-making, returned no answer, but
played with Bijou's silver bells, and twisted his own tawny moustaches.
"I am quite positive it _may be_, if properly managed," reiterated Lady
Marabout. "You might second me a little, Philip."
"_I?_ Good Heavens! my dear mother, what are you thinking of? I would
sooner turn torreador, and throw lassos over bulls at Madrid, than help
you to fling nuptial cables over poor devils in Belgravia. Twenty to
one? I'm going to the Yard to look at a bay filly of Cope Fielden's,
and then on to a mess-luncheon of the Bays."
"Must you go?" said his mother, looking lovingly on him. "You look
tired, Philip. Don't you feel well?"
"Perfectly; but Cambridge had us out over those confounded Wormwood
Scrubs this morning, and three hours in this June sun, in our harness,
makes one swear. If it were a sharp brush, it would put life into one;
as it is, it only inspires one with an intense suffering from boredom,
and an intense desire for hock and seltzer."
"I am very glad you haven't a sharp brush, as you call it, for all
that," said Lady Marabout. "It might be very pleasant to you, Philip,
but it wouldn't be quite so much so to me. I wish you would stay to
luncheon."
"Not to-day, thanks; I have so many engagements."
"You have been very good in coming to see me this season--even better
than usual. It _is_ very good of you, with all your amusements and
distractions. You have given me a great many days this month," said Lady
Marabout, gratefully. "Anne Hautton sees nothing of Hautton, she says,
except at a distance in Pall-Mall or the Park, all the season through.
Fancy if I saw no more of you! Do you know, Philip, I am almost
reconciled to your never marrying. I have never seen anybody I should
like at all for you, unless you had chosen Cecil Ormsby--Cecil Cheveley
I mean; and I am sure I should be very jealous of your wife if you had
one. I couldn't help it!"
"Rest tranquil, my dear mother; you will never be put to the test!" said
Carruthers, with a laugh, as he bid her good morning.
"Perhaps it _is_ best he shouldn't marry: I begin to think so," mused
Lady Marabout, as the door closed on him. "I used to wish it very much
for some things. He is the last of his name, and it seems a pity; there
ought to be an heir for Deepdene; but still marriage _is_ such a
lottery (he is right enough there, though I don't admit it to him: it's
a tombola where there is one prize to a million of blanks; one can't
help seeing that, though, on principle, I never allow it to him or any
of his men), and if Philip had any woman who didn't appreciate him, or
didn't understand him, or didn't make him happy, how wretched _I_ should
be! I have often pictured Philip's wife to myself, I have often
idealized the sort of woman I should like to see him marry, but it's
very improbable I shall ever meet my ideal realized; one never does!
And, after all, whenever I have fancied, years ago, he _might_ be
falling in love, I have always felt a horrible dread lest she shouldn't
be worthy of him--a jealous fear of her that I could not conquer. It's
much better as it is; there is no woman good enough for him."
With which compliment to Carruthers at her sex's expense Lady Marabout
returned to weaving her pet projected toils for the ensnaring of
Goodwood, for whom also, if asked, I dare say the Duchess of Doncaster
would have averred on _her_ part, looking through _her_ maternal Claude
glasses, no woman was good enough either. When ladies have daughters to
marry, men always present to their imaginations a battalion of
worthless, decalogue-smashing, utterly unreliable individuals, amongst
whom there is not one fit to be trusted or fit to be chosen; but when
their sons are the candidates for the holy bond, they view all women
through the same foggy and non-embellishing medium, which, if it does
not speak very much for their unprejudiced discernment, at least speaks
to the oft-disputed fact of the equality of merit in the sexes, and
would make it appear that, in vulgar parlance, there must be six of the
one and half a dozen of the other.
"Flora, soft and careless, and rebellious as she looks, _is_ ambitious,
and has set her heart on winning Goodwood, I do believe, as much as ever
poor Valencia did. True, she takes a different plan of action, as Philip
would call it, and treats him with gay nonchalante indifference, which
certainly seems to pique him more than ever my poor niece's beauty and
quiet deference to his opinions did; but that is because she reads him
better, and knows more cleverly how to rouse him. She has set her heart
on winning Goodwood, I am certain, ambitious as it seems. How eagerly
she looked out for the Blues yesterday at that Hyde Park
inspection--though I am sure Goodwood does not look half so handsome as
Philip does in harness, as they call it; Philip is so much the finer
man! I will just sound her to-day--or to-night as we come back from the
opera," thought Lady Marabout, one morning.
Things were moving to the very best of her expectations. Learning
experience from manifold failures, Lady Marabout had laid her plans this
time with a dexterity that defied discomfiture: seconded by both the
parties primarily necessary to the accomplishment of her manoeuvres,
with only a little outer-world opposition to give it piquancy and
excitement, she felt that she might defy the fates to checkmate her
here. This should be her Marathon and Lemnos, which, simply reverted to,
should be sufficient to secure her immunity from the attacks of any
feminine Xantippus who should try to rake up her failures and tarnish
her glory. To win Goodwood with a nobody's daughter would be a feat as
wonderful in its way as for Miltiades to have passed "in a single day
and with a north wind," as Oracle exacted, to the conquest of the
Pelasgian Isles; and Lady Marabout longed to do it, as you, my good sir,
may have longed in your day to take a king in check with your only
available pawn, or win one of the ribands of the turf with a little
filly that seemed to general judges scarcely calculated to be in the
first flight at the Chester Consolation Scramble.
Things were beautifully in train; it even began to dawn on the
perceptions of the Hauttons, usually very slow to open to anything
revolutionary and unwelcome. Her Grace of Doncaster, a large,
lethargic, somnolent dowager, rarely awake to anything but the interests
and restoration of the old ultra-Tory party in a Utopia always dreamed
of and never realized, like many other Utopias political and poetical,
public and personal, had turned her eyes on Flora Montolieu, and asked
her son the question inevitable, "_Who_ is she?" to which Goodwood had
replied with a devil-may-care recklessness and a headlong indefiniteness
which grated on her Grace's ears, and imparted her no information
whatever: "One of Lady Tattersall's yearlings, and the most charming
creature _I_ ever met. You know that? Why did you ask me, then? You know
all I do, and all I care to do!"--a remark that made the Duchess wish
her very dear and personal friend, Lady Marabout, were comfortably and
snugly interred in the mausoleum of Fern Ditton, rather than alive in
the flesh in Belgravia, chaperoning young ladies whom nobody knew, and
who were not to be found in any of Sir E. Burke's triad of volumes.
Belgravia, and her sister Mayfair, wondered at it, and talked over it,
raked up the parental Montolieu lineage mercilessly, and found out, from
the Bishop of Bonviveur and Sauceblanche, that the uncle on the distaff
side had been only a Tug at Eton, and had lived and died at Fern Ditton
a perpetual curate and nothing else--not even a dean, not even a rector!
Goodwood _couldn't_ be serious, settled the coteries. But the more
hints, innuendoes, questions, and adroitly concealed but simply
suggested animadversion Lady Marabout received, the greater was her
glory, the warmer her complacency, when she saw her Little Montolieu,
who was not little at all, leading, as she undoubtedly did lead, the
most desired eligible of the day captive in her chains, sent bouquets by
him, begged for waltzes by him, followed by him at the Ride, riveting
his lorgnon at the Opera, monopolizing his attention--though, clever
little intriguer, she knew too well how to pique him ever to let him
monopolize hers.
"She certainly makes play, as Philip would call it, admirably with
Goodwood," said Lady Marabout, admiringly, at a morning party, stirring
a cup of Orange Pekoe, yet with a certain irrepressible feeling that she
should almost prefer so very young a girl not to be quite so adroit a
schemer at seventeen. "That indifference and nonchalance is the very
thing to pique and retain such a courted fastidious creature as
Goodwood; and she knows it, too. Now a clumsy casual observer might even
fancy that she liked some others--even you, Philip, for instance--much
better; she talks to you much more, appeals to you twice as often,
positively teases you to stop and lunch or come to dinner here, and
really told you the other night at the Opera she missed you when you
didn't come in the morning; but to anybody who knows anything of the
world, it is easy enough to see which way her inclinations (yes, I _do_
hope it is inclination as well as ambition--I am not one of those who
advocate pure _mariages de convenance_; I don't think them right,
indeed, though they are undoubtedly very expedient sometimes) turn. I do
not think _anybody_ ever could prove me to have erred in my
quick-sightedness in those affairs. I may have been occasionally
mistaken in other things, or been the victim of adverse and unforeseen
circumstances which were beyond my control, and betrayed me; but I know
no one can read a girl's heart more quickly and surely than I, or a
man's either, for that matter."
"Oh, we all know you are a clairvoyante in heart episodes, my dear
mother; they are the one business of your life!" smiled Carruthers,
setting down his ice, and lounging across the lawn to a group of cedars,
where Flora Montolieu stood playing at croquet, and who, like a scheming
adventuress, as she was, immediately verified Lady Marabout's words, and
piqued Goodwood a outrance by avowing herself tired of the game, and
entering with animated verve into the prophecies for Ascot with
Carruthers, whose bay filly Sunbeam, sister to Wild-Falcon, was entered
to run for the Queen's Cup.
"What an odd smile that was of Philip's," thought Lady Marabout, left to
herself and her Orange Pekoe. "He has been very intimate with Goodwood
ever since they joined the Blues, cornets together, three-and-twenty
years ago; surely he can't have heard him drop anything that would make
him fancy he was _not serious_?"
An idle fear, which Lady Marabout dismissed contemptuously from her mind
when she saw how entirely Goodwood--in defiance of the Hauttons' sneer,
the drowsy Duchess's unconcealed frown, all the comments sure to be
excited in feminine minds, and all the chaff likely to be elicited from
masculine lips at the mess-table, and in the U. S., and in the Guards'
box before the curtain went up for the ballet--vowed himself to the
service of the little detrimental throughout that morning party, and
spoke a temporary adieu, whose tenderness, if she did not exactly catch,
Lady Marabout could at least construe, as he pulled up the tiger-skin
over Flora's dainty dress, before the Marabout carriage rolled down the
Fulham Road to town. At which tenderness of farewell Carruthers--steeled
to all such weaknesses himself--gave a disdainful glance and a
contemptuous twist of his moustaches, as he stood by the door talking to
his mother.
"You too, Phil?" said Goodwood, with a laugh, as the carriage rolled
away.
Carruthers stared at him haughtily, as he will stare at his best friends
if they touch his private concerns more nearly than he likes; a stare
which said disdainfully, "I don't understand you," and thereby told the
only lie to which Carruthers ever stooped in the whole course of his
existence.
Goodwood laughed again.
"If you poach on my manor _here_, I shall kill you Phil; so _gare a
vous_!"
"You are in an enigmatical mood to-day! I can't say I see much wit in
your riddles," said Carruthers, with his grandest and most contemptuous
air, as he lit his Havana.
"Confound that fellow! I'd rather have had any other man in London for a
rival! Twenty and more years ago how he cut me out with that handsome
Virginie Peauderose, that we were both such mad boys after in Paris.
However, it will be odd if _I_ can't win the day here. A Goodwood
rejected--pooh! There isn't a woman in England that would do it!"
thought Goodwood, as he drove down the Fulham Road.
"'_His_ manor!' Who's told him it's his? And if it be, what is that to
me?" thought Carruthers, as he got into his tilbury. "Philip, _you_'re
not a fool, like the rest of them, I hope? You've not forsworn yourself
surely? Pshaw!--nonsense!--impossible!"
"Certainly she _has_ something very charming about her. If I were a man
I don't think I could resist her," thought Lady Marabout, as she sat in
her box in the grand tier, tenth from the Queen's, moving her fan
slowly, lifting her lorgnon now and then, listening vaguely to the music
of the second act of the "Barbiere," for probably about the two
hundredth time in her life, and looking at Flora Moutolieu, sitting
opposite to her.