your own country, but I saw a coronet upon your handkerchief the other
day, and I can tell you are a grand seigneur--you have the air of it,
the manner. M'sieu, you can have many women to love you; cannot you
spare this one? you must have many pleasures, pursuits, enjoyments in
your world, can you not leave me this single treasure? Think, m'sieu! If
Ma'amselle Florelle loves you now, she will love you only the dearer as
years go on; and _you_, you will tire of her, weary of her, want change,
fresh beauty, new excitement--you must know that you will, or why should
you shrink from the bondage of marriage?--you will weary of her; you
will neglect her first and desert her afterwards; what will be the
child's life _then_? Think! You have done her cruel harm enough now with
your wooing words, why will you do her more? What is your love beside
hers? If you have heart or conscience, you cannot dare to contrast them
together; _she_ would give up everything for you, and _you_ would give
up nothing! M'sieu, Florelle is not like the women of your world; she is
innocent of evil as the holy saints; those who meet her should guard her
from the knowledge, and not lead her to it. Were the Sieur De l'Heris
living now, were her House powerful as I have known them, would you have
dared or dreamt of seeking her as you do now? M'sieu, he who wrongs
trust, betrays hospitality, and takes advantage of that very purity,
guilelessness, and want of due protection which should be the best and
strongest appeal to every man of chivalry and honor--he, whoever he be,
the De l'Heris would have held, as what he is, a coward! Will you not
now have pity upon the child, and let her go?'
"I have seldom been moved in, never been swayed from, any pursuit or any
purpose, whether of love, or pleasure, or ambition; but something in old
Cazot's words stirred me strangely, more strangely still from the daring
and singularity of the speaker. Her intense love for her young charge
gave her pathos, eloquence, and even a certain rude majesty, as she
spoke; her bronzed wrinkled features worked with emotions she could not
repress, and hot tears fell over her hard cheeks. I felt that what she
said was true; that as surely as the night follows the day would
weariness of it succeed to my love for Florelle, that to the hospitality
I had so readily received I had, in truth, given but an ill return, and
that I had deliberately taken advantage of the very ignorance of the
world and faith in me which should have most appealed to my honor. I
knew that what she said was true, and this epithet of 'coward' hit me
harder from the lips of a woman, on whom her sex would not let me avenge
it, with whom my conscience would not let me dispute it, than it would
have done from any man. _I_ called a coward by an old peasant woman!
absurd idea enough, wasn't it? It is a more absurd one still that I
could not listen to her unmoved, that her words touched me--how or why I
could not have told--stirred up in me something of weakness,
unselfishness, or chivalrousness--I know not what exactly--that prompted
me for once to give up my own egotistical evanescent passions and act to
Florelle as though all the males of her house were on earth to make me
render account of my acts. At old Cazot's words I shrank for once from
my own motives and my own desires, shrank from classing Florelle with
the _cocottes_ of my world, from bringing her down to their level and
their life.
"'You will have pity on her, m'sieu, and go?' asked old Cazot, more
softly, as she looked in my face.
"I did not answer her, but put her aside out of my way, went down the
mountain-path to where my horse was left cropping the grass on the level
ground beneath a plane-tree, and rode at a gallop into Luz without
looking back at the gray-turreted ruins of the Nid de l'Aigle.
"And I left Luz that night without seeing Florelle de l'Heris again--a
tardy kindness--one, perhaps, as cruel as the cruelty from which old
Cazot had protected her. Don't you think I was a fool, indeed, for once
in my life, to listen to an old woman's prating? Call me so if you like,
I shall not dispute it; we hardly know when we are fools, and when wise
men! Well! I have not been much given to such weaknesses.
"I left Luz, sending a letter to Florelle, in which I bade her farewell,
and entreated her to forget me--an entreaty which, while I made it, I
felt would not be obeyed--one which, in the selfishness of my heart, I
dare say, I hoped might not be. I went back to my old diplomatic and
social life, to my customary pursuits, amusements, and ambitions,
turning over the leaf of my life that contained my sojourn in the
Pyrenees, as you turn over the page of a romance to which you will never
recur. I led the same life, occupied myself with my old ambitions, and
enjoyed my old pleasures; but I could not forget Florelle as wholly as I
wished and tried to do. I had not usually been troubled with such
memories; if unwelcome, I could generally thrust them aside; but
Florelle I did not forget; the more I saw of other women the sweeter and
brighter seemed by contrast her sensitive, delicate nature, unsullied by
the world, and unstained by artifice and falsehood. The longer time went
on, the more I regretted having given her up--perhaps on no better
principle than that on which a child cares most for the toy he cannot
have; perhaps because, away from her, I realized I had lost the purest
and the strongest love I had ever won. In the whirl of my customary life
I sometimes wondered how she had received my letter, and how far the
iron had burnt into her young heart--wondered if she had joined the
Sisters of Sainte Marie Purificatrice, or still led her solitary life
among the rocks and beech-woods of Nid de l'Aigle. I often thought of
her, little as the life I led was conducive to regretful or romantic
thoughts. At length my desire to see her again grew ungovernable. I had
never been in the habit of refusing myself what I wished; a man is a
fool who does, if his wishes are in any degree attainable. And at the
end of the season I went over to Paris, and down again once more into
the Midi. I reached Luz, lying in the warm golden Pyrenean light as I
had left it, and took once more the old familiar road up the hills to
the Nid de l'Aigle. There had been no outward change from the year that
had flown by; there drooped the fan-like branches of the pines; there
rushed the Gave over its rocky bed; there came the silvery sheep-bell
chimes down the mountain-sides; there, over hill and wood, streamed the
mellow glories of the Southern sunlight. There is something unutterably
painful in the sight of any place after one's lengthened absence,
wearing the same smile, lying in the same sunlight. I rode on, picturing
the flush of gladness that would dawn in Florelle's face at the sight of
me, thinking that Mme. Cazot should not part me from her again, even, I
thought, as I saw the old gray turrets above the beech-woods, if I paid
old Cazot's exacted penalty of marriage! I loved Florelle more deeply
than I had done twelve months before. 'L'absence allument les grandes
passions et eteignent les petites,' they say. It had been the reverse
with me.
"I rode up the bridle-path and passed through the old gateway. There was
an unusual stillness about the place; nothing but the roar of the
torrent near, and the songs of the birds in the branches speaking in the
summer air. My impatience to see Florelle, or to hear her, grew
ungovernable. The door stood open. I groped my way through the passage
and pushed open the door of the old room. Under the oriel window, where
I had seen her first, she lay on a little couch. I saw her again--but
_how_! My God! to the day of my death I shall never forget her face as I
saw it then; it was turned from me, and her hair streamed over her
pillows, but as the sunlight fell upon it, I knew well enough what was
written there. Old Cazot, sitting by the bed with her head on her arms,
looked up, and came towards me, forcing me back.
"'You are come at last, to see her die. Look on your work--look well at
it--and then go; with my curse upon you!'
"I shook off her grasp, and forcing my way towards the window, threw
myself down by Florelle's bed; till then I never knew how well I loved
her. My voice awoke her from her sleep, and, with a wild cry of joy, she
started up, weak as she was, and threw her arms round my neck, clinging
to me with her little hands, and crying to me deliriously not to leave
her while she lived--to stay with her till death should take her; where
had I been so long? why had I come so late? _So late!_--those piteous
words! As I held her in my arms, unconscious from the shock, and saw the
pitiless marks that disease, the most hopeless and the most cruel, had
made on the face that I had left fair, bright, and full of life as any
child's, I felt the full bitterness of that piteous reproach, 'Why had I
come so late?'
"What need to tell you more. Florelle de l'Heris was dying, and I had
killed her. The child that I had loved so selfishly had loved me with
all the concentrated tenderness of her isolated and impassioned nature;
the letter I wrote bidding her farewell had given her her death-blow.
They told me that from the day she received that letter everything lost
its interest for her. She would sit for hours looking down the road to
Luz, as though watching wearily for one who never came, or kneeling
before the pictures I had left as before some altar, praying to Heaven
to take care of me, and bless me, and let her see me once again before
she died. Consumption had killed her mother in her youth; during the
chill winter at the Nid de l'Aigle the hereditary disease settled upon
her. When I found her she was dying fast. All the medical aid, all the
alleviations, luxuries, resources, that money could procure, to ward off
the death I would have given twenty years of my life to avert, I
lavished on her, but they were useless; for my consolation they told me
that, used a few months earlier, they would have saved her! She lingered
three weeks, fading away like a flower gathered before its fullest
bloom. Each day was torture to me. I knew enough of the disease to know
from the first there was no hope for her or me. Those long terrible
night-hours, when she lay with her head upon my shoulder, and her little
hot thin hands in mine, while I listened, uncertain whether every breath
was not the last, or whether life was not already fled! By God! I cannot
think of them!
One of those long summer nights Florelle died; happy with me, loving and
forgiving me to the last; speaking to the last of that reunion in which
_she_, in her innocent faith, believed and hoped, according to the
promise of her creed!--died with her hands clasped round my neck, and
her eyes looking up to mine, till the last ray of light was quenched in
them--died while the morning dawn rose in the east and cast a golden
radiance on her face, the herald of a day to which she never awoke!"
* * * * *
There was a dead silence between us; the Arno splashed against the wall
below, murmuring its eternal song beneath its bridge, while the dark
heavy clouds drifted over the sky with a sullen roll of thunder. He lay
back in his chair, the deep shadow of the balcony pillar hiding his face
from me, and his voice quivered painfully as he spoke the last words of
his story. He was silent for many minutes, and so was I, regretting that
my careless question had unfolded a page out of his life's history
written in characters so painful to him. Such skeletons dwell in the
hearts of most; hands need be tender that disentomb them and drag out to
daylight ashes so mournful and so grievous, guarded so tenaciously,
hidden so jealously. Each of us is tender over his own, but who does not
think his brother's fit subject for jest, for gibe, for mocking dance
of death?
He raised himself with a laugh, but his lips looked white as death as he
drank down a draught of the Hermitage.
"Well! what say you: is the maxim right, _y-a-t-il femmes et femmes_?
Caramba! why need you have pitched upon that portfolio?--There are the
lights in the Acqua d'Oro's palace; we must go, or we shall get into
disgrace."
We went, and Beatrice Acqua d'Oro talked very ardent Italian to him, and
the Comtesse Bois de Sandal remarked to me what a brilliant and
successful man Lord ---- was, but how unimpressionable!--as cold and as
glittering as ice. Nothing had ever made him _feel_, she was quite
certain, pretty complimentary nonsense though he often talked. What
would the Marchesa and the Comtesse have said, I wonder, had I told them
of that little grave under the Pyrenean beech-woods? So much does the
world know of any of us! In the lives of all men are doubled-down pages
written on in secret, folded out of sight, forgotten as they make other
entries in the diary, and never read by their fellows, only glanced at
by themselves in some midnight hour of solitude.
Basta! they are painful reading, my friends. Don't you find them so? Let
us leave the skeletons in the closet, the pictures in the portfolio, the
doubled-down pages in the locked diary, and go to Beatrice Acqua
d'Oro's, where the lights are burning gayly. What is Madame Bois de
Sandal, _nee_ Dashwood, singing in the music room?
The tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me!
That is the burden of many songs sung in this world, for some dead
flowers strew most paths, and grass grows over myriad graves, and many
leaves are folded down in many lives, I fear. And--retrospection is very
idle, my good fellow, and regret is as bad as the tic, and flirting is
deucedly pleasant; the white Hermitage we drank to-night is gone, we
know, but are there no other bottles left of wine every whit as good?
Shall we waste our time sighing after spilt lees? Surely not. And
yet--ah me!--the dead fragrance of those vines that yielded us the
golden nectar of our youth!
THE BEAUTY OF VICQ D'AZYR;
OR,
"NOT AT ALL A PROPER PERSON."
Bon ami, do you consider the possession of sisters an agreeable addition
to anybody's existence? _I_ hold it very intensely the reverse. Who pats
a man down so spitefully as his sisters? Who refuses so obstinately to
see any good in the Nazarene they have known from their nurseries? Who
snubs him so contumaciously, when he's a little chap in jackets and they
young ladies already out? Who worries him so pertinaciously to marry
their pet friend, "who has ten thousand a year, dear! Red hair? I'm sure
she has not! It's the most lovely auburn! But you never see any beauty
in _refined_ women!" Who, if you incline towards a pretty little
ineligible, rakes up so laboriously every scrap of gossip detrimental to
her, and pours into your ear the delightful intelligence that she has
been engaged to Powell of the Grays, is a shocking flirt, wears false
teeth, is full five years older than she says she is, and has most
objectionable connections? Who, I should like to know, does any and all
of these things, my good fellow, so amiably and unremittingly as your
sisters? till--some day of grace, perhaps--you make a telling speech at
St. Stephen's, and fling a second-hand aroma of distinction upon them;
or marry a co-heiress and lady-in-her-own-right, and they _raffolent_ of
that charming creature, speculating on the desirability of being
invited to your house when the men are down for September. Then, what a
dear fellow you become! they always _were_ so fond of you! a little
wild! oh, yes! but they are _so_ glad you are changed, and think more
seriously now! it was only from a _real_ interest in your welfare that
they used to grieve, &c., &c.
My sisters were my natural enemies, I remember, when I was in the daisy
age and exposed to their thraldom; they were so blandly superior, so
ineffably condescending, and wielded, with such smiling dexterity, that
feminine power of torture known familiarly as "nagging!" Now, of course,
they leave me in peace; but from my earliest to my emancipated years
they were my natural enemies. I might occasionally excite the enmity, it
is possible. I remember, when I was aged eight, covering Constance, a
stately brunette, with a mortifying amount of confusion, by asking her,
as she welcomed a visitor with effusion, why she said she was delighted
to see her when she had cried "There's that odious woman again!" as we
saw the carriage drive up. I have a criminal recollection of taking
Gwendolina's fan, fresh from Howell and James's, and stripping it of its
gold-powdered down before her face ere she could rush to its rescue, as
an invaluable medium in the manufacture of mayflies. I also have a dim
and guilty recollection of saying to the Hon. George Cursitt, standing
then in the interesting position of my prospective brother-in-law, "Mr.
Cursitt, Agneta doesn't care one straw for you. I heard her saying so
last night to Con; and that if you weren't so near the title, she would
never have accepted you;" which revelation inopportunely brought that
desirable alliance to an end, and Olympian thunders on my culprit's
head.
I had my sins, doubtless, but they were more than avenged on me; my
sisters were my natural enemies, and I never knew of any man's who
weren't so, more or less. Ah! my good sirs, those domesticities are all
of them horrid bores, and how any man, happily and thrice blessedly
free from them, can take the very worst of them voluntarily on his head
by the Gate of Marriage (which differs thus remarkably from a certain
Gate at Jerusalem, that at the one the camels kneel down to be lightened
of all _their_ burdens ere they can pass through it; at the other, the
poor human animal kneels down to be loaded with all _his_ ere he is
permitted to enter), does pass my comprehension, I confess. I might
amply avenge the injuries of my boyhood received from _mesdemoiselles
mes soeurs_. Could I not tell Gwendolina of the pot of money dropped by
her caro sposo over the Cesarewitch Stakes? Could I not intimate to
Agneta where her Right Honorable lord and master spent the small hours
last night, when popularly supposed to be nodding on the Treasury
benches in the service of the state? Could I not rend the pride of
Constance, by casually asking monsieur her husband, as I sip her coffee
in her drawing-room this evening, who was that very pretty blonde with
him at the Crystal Palace yesterday? the blonde being as well known
about town as any other star of the demi-monde. Of course I could: but I
am magnanimous; I can too thoroughly sympathize with those poor fellows.
My vengeance would recoil on innocent heads, so I am magnanimous and
silent.
My sisters have long ceased to be mesdemoiselles, they have become
mesdames, in that transforming crucible of marriage in which, assuredly,
all that glitters is not gold, but in which much is swamped, and
crushed, and fused with uncongenial metal, and from which the elixir of
happiness but rarely exhales, whatever feminine alchemists, who
patronize the hymeneal furnace, may choose to assure us to the contrary.
My sisters are indisputably very fine women, and develop in full bloom
all those essential qualities which their moral and mental trainers
sedulously instilled into them when they were limited to the
school-room and thorough-bass, Garcia and an "expurgated" Shakespeare,
the society of Mademoiselle Colletmonte and Fraeulein von Engel, and the
occasional refection of a mild, religious, respectably-twaddling fiction
of the milk-and-water, pious-tendency, nursery-chronicling, and
grammar-disregarding class, nowadays indited for the mental improvement
of a commonplace generation in general, and growing young ladies in
particular. My sisters are women of the world to perfection; indeed, for
talent in refrigerating with a glance; in expressing disdain of a
toilette or a ton by an upraised eyebrow; in assuming a various
impenetrable plait-il? expression at a moment's notice; in sweeping past
intimate friends with a charming unconsciousness of their existence,
when such unconsciousness is expedient or desirable; in reducing an
unwished-for intruder into an instantaneous and agonizing sense of his
own de trop-ism and insignificance--in all such accomplishments and
acquirements necessary to existence in all proper worlds, I think they
may be matched with the best-bred lady to be found any day, from April
to August, between Berkeley Square and Wilton Crescent. Constance, now
Lady Marechale, is of a saintly turn, and touched with fashionable
fanaticism, pets evangelical bishops and ragged school-boys, drives to
special services, and is called our noble and Christian patroness by
physicians and hon. secs., holds doctrinal points and strong tracts,
mixed together in equal proportion, an infallible chloride of lime for
the disinfectance of our polluted globe, and appears to receive
celestial telegrams of indisputable veracity and charming acrimony
concerning the destiny of the vengeful contents of the Seven Vials.
Agneta, now Mrs. Albany Protocol, is a Cabinet Ministress, and a second
Duchesse de Longueville (in her own estimation at the least); is
"strengthening her party" when she issues her dinner invitations,
whispers awfully of a "crisis" when even penny-paper leaders can't get
up a breeze, and spends her existence in "pushing" poor Protocol, who,
thorough Englishman that he is, considers it a point of honor to stand
still in all paths with praiseworthy Britannic obstinacy and opticism.
Gwendolina, now Lady Frederic Farniente, is a butterfly of fashion, has
delicate health, affects dilettanteism, is interested by nothing, has
many other charming minauderies, and lives in an exclusive circle--so
tremendously exclusive, indeed, that it is possible she may at last draw
the _cordon sanitaire_ so _very_ tight, that she will be left alone with
the pretty woman her mirrors reflect.
They have each of them attained to what the world calls a "good
position"--an eminence the world dearly reveres; if you can climb to it,
_do_; never mind what dirt may cling to your feet, or what you may
chance to pull down in your ascent, so questions will be asked you at
the top, when you wave your flag victoriously from a plateau at a good
elevation. They haven't all their ambitions--who has? If a fresh
Alexander conquered the world he would fret out his life for a
standing-place to be able to try Archimedes' little experiment on his
newly-won globe. Lady Marechale dies for entrance to certain salons
which are closed to her; she is but a Baronet's wife, and, though so
heavenly-minded, has _some_ weaknesses of earth. Mrs. Protocol grieves
because she thinks a grateful country ought to wreathe her lord's brow
with laurels--_Anglice_, strawberry-leaves--and the country remains
ungrateful, and the brows bare. Lady Frederic frets because her foe and
rival, Lady Maria Fitz-Sachet, has footmen an inch taller than her own.
They haven't all their ambitions satisfied. We are too occupied with
kicking our dear friends and neighbors down off the rounds of the social
ladder to advance ourselves always perhaps as entirely as we otherwise
might do. But still they occupy "unexceptionable positions," and from
those fortified and impregnable citadels are very severe upon those who
are not, and very jealous of those who are, similarly favored by
fortune. When St. Peter lets ladies through the celestial portals, he'll
never please them unless he locks out all their acquaintance, and
indulges them with a gratifying peep at the rejected candidates.
The triad regard each other after the manner of ladies; that is to say,
Lady Marechale holds Mrs. Protocol and Lady Frederic "frivolous and
worldly;" Lady Frederic gives them both one little supercilious
expressive epithet, "_precieuses_;" Mrs. Protocol considers Lady
Marechale a "pharisee," and Lady Frederic a "butterfly;"--in a word,
there is that charming family love to one another which ladies so
delight to evince, that I suppose we must excuse them for it on the plea
that
'Tis their nature to!
which Dr. Watts puts forward so amiably and grammatically in excuse for
the bellicose propensities of the canine race, but which is never
remembered by priest or layman in extenuation of the human.