whom we had known at Lee, where Vane, a Q. C., then resided, his
prospective baronetcy being at that time held by a third or fourth
cousin. Fairlie had known the family since his boyhood; there were four
daughters, tall graceful women, who had gained themselves the nickname
of The Swan and her Cygnets; and then there were twins, a boy of
eighteen, who'd just left Eton; and the girl Geraldine, a charming young
lady, whom Belle admired more warmly than that dandy often admired
anybody besides himself, and whom Fairlie liked cordially, having had
many a familiar bit of fun with her, as he had known her ever since he
was a dashing cadet, and she made her _debut_ in life in the first
column of the _Times_. Her sisters were handsome women; but Geraldine
was bewitching. A very pleasant family they were, and a vast acquisition
to us. Miss Geraldine flirted to a certain extent with us all, but
chiefly with the Colonel, whenever he was to be had, those two having a
very free-and-easy, familiar, pleasant style of intercourse, owing to
old acquaintance; and Belle spent two hours every evening on his
toilette when we were going to dine there, and vowed she was a "deuced
pretty little puss. Perhaps she might--he wasn't sure, but perhaps (it
would be a horrid sacrifice), if he were with her much longer, he wasn't
sure she mightn't persuade him to take compassion upon her, he _was_ so
weak where women were concerned!"
"What a conceit!" said Fairlie thereat, with a contemptuous twist of his
moustaches and a shrug of his shoulders to me. "I must say, if I were a
woman, I shouldn't feel over-flattered by a lover who admired his own
beauty first, and mine afterwards. Not that I pretend to understand
women."
By which speech I argued that his old playmate Geraldine hadn't thrown
hay over the Colonel, and been taught billiards by him, and ridden his
bay mare over the park in her evening dress, without interesting him
slightly; and that--though I don't think he knew it--he was deigning to
be a trifle jealous of his Second Captain, the all-mighty conqueror
Belle.
"What fools they must be that put in these things!" yawned Belle one
morning, reading over his breakfast coffee in the _Daily Pryer_ one of
those "advertisements for a wife" that one comes across sometimes in the
papers, and that make us, like a good many other things, agree with
Goldsmith:
Reason, they say, belongs to man,
But let them prove it if they can;
Wise Aristotle and Smiglicious,
By ratiocinations specious,
Have strove to prove with great precision,
With definition and division,
Homo est ratione praeditum,
But for my soul I cannot credit 'em.
"What fools they must be!" yawned Belle, wrapping his dressing-gown
round him, and coaxing his perfumy whiskers under his velvet
smoking-cap. Belle was always inundated by smoking-caps in cloth and
velvet, silk and beads, with blue tassels, and red tassels, and gold
tassels, embroidered and filigreed, rounded and pointed; he had them
sent to him by the dozen, and pretty good chaff he made of the donors.
"Awful fools! The idea of advertising for a wife, when the only
difficulty a man has is to keep from being tricked into taking one. I
bet you, if I did like this owl here, I should have a hundred answers;
and if it was known it was I----"
"Little Geraldine's self for a candidate, eh?" asked Tom Gower.
"Very possibly," said Belle, with a self-complacent smile. "She's a fast
little thing, don't check at much, and she's deucedly in love with me,
poor little dear--almost as much trouble to me as Julia Sedley was last
season. That girl all but proposed to me; she did, indeed. Never was
nearer coming to grief in my life. What will you bet me that, if I
advertise for a wife, I don't hoax lots of women?"
"I'll bet you ten pounds," said I, "that you don't hoax one!"
"Done!" said Belle, stretching out his hand for a dainty
memorandum-book, gift of the identical Julia Sedley aforesaid, and
entering the bet in it--"done! If I'm not asked to walk in the Close at
noon and look out for a pink bonnet and a black lace cloak, and to
loiter up the market-place till I come across a black hat and blue
muslin dress; if I'm not requested to call at No. 20, and to grant an
interview at No. 84; if I'm not written to by Agatha A. with hazel, and
Belinda B. with black, eyes--all coming after me like flies after a
sugar-cask, why you shall have your ten guineas, my boy, and my colt
into the bargain. Come, write out the advertisement, Tom--I can't, it's
too much trouble; draw it mild, that's all, or the letters we shall get
will necessitate an additional Norwich postman. By George, what fun it
will be to do the girls! Cut along, Tom, can't you?"
"All right," said Gower, pushing away his coffee-cup, and drawing the
ink to him. "Head it 'MARRIAGE,' of course?"
"Of course. That word's as attractive to a woman as the belt to a
prize-fighter, or a pipe of port to a college fellow."
"'MARRIAGE.--A Bachelor----'"
"Tell 'em a military man; all girls have the scarlet fever."
"Very well--'an Officer in the Queen's, of considerable personal
attractions----'"
"My dear fellow, pray don't!" expostulated Belle, in extreme alarm; "we
shall have such swarms of 'em!"
"No, no! we must say that," persisted Gower--"'personal attractions,
aged eight-and-twenty----'"
"Can't you put it, 'in the flower of his age,' or his 'sixth lustre'?
It's so much more poetic."
"'--the flower of his age,' then (that'll leave 'em a wide range from
twenty to fifty, according to their taste), 'is desirous of meeting a
young lady of beauty, talent, and good family,'--eh?"
"Yes. All women think themselves beauties, if they're as ugly as sin.
Milliners and confectioner girls talk Anglo-French, and rattle a
tin-kettle piano after a fashion, and anybody buys a 'family' for
half-a-crown at the Heralds' Office--so fire away."
"'--who, feeling as he does the want of a kindred heart and sympathetic
soul, will accord him the favor of a letter or an interview, as a
preliminary to the greatest step in life.'"
"A step--like one on thin ice--very sure to bring a man to grief,"
interpolated Belle. "Say something about property; those soul-and-spirit
young ladies generally keep a look-out for tin, and only feel an
elective affinity for a lot of debentures and consols."
"'The advertiser being a man of some present and still more prospective
wealth, requires no fortune, the sole objects of his search being love
and domestic felicity.' Domestic felicity--how horrible! Don't it sound
exactly like the end of a lady's novel, where the unlucky hero is always
brought to an untimely end in a 'sweet cottage on the banks of the
lovely Severn.'"
"'Domestic felicity'--bah! What are you writing about?" yawned
Belle. "I'd as soon take to teetotalism: however, it'll tell in the
advertisement. Bravo, Tom, that will do. Address it to 'L. C., care of
Mrs. Greene, confectioner, St. Giles Street, Norwich.' Miss Patty'll
take the letters in for me, though not if she knew their errand. Tip
seven-and-sixpence with it, and send it to the _Daily Pryer_."
We did send it to the _Daily_, and in that broadsheet we all of us read
it two mornings after.
MARRIAGE.--A Bachelor, an Officer of the Queen's, of
considerable personal attractions, and in the flower of
his age, is desirous of meeting a young lady of beauty,
accomplishments, and good family, who, feeling as he does the
want of a kindred heart and sympathetic soul, will accord him
the favor either of a letter or an interview, as a preliminary
to the greatest step in life. The advertiser being a man of
some present and still more prospective wealth, requires no
fortune, the sole objects of his search being love and domestic
felicity. Address, L. C., care of Mrs. Greene, confectioner,
St. Giles Street, Norwich.
"Whose advertisement do you imagine that is?" said Fairlie, showing the
_Daily_ to Geraldine, as he sat with her and her sisters under some
lilac and larch trees in one of the meadows of Fern Chase, which had had
the civility, Geraldine said, to yield a second crop of hay expressly
for her to have the pleasure of making it. She leaned down towards him
as he lay on the grass, and read the advertisement, looking uncommonly
pretty in her dainty muslin dress, with its fluttering mauve ribbons,
and a wreath she had just twisted up, of bluebells and pinks and white
heaths which Fairlie had gathered as he lay, put on her bright hair. We
called her a little flirt, but I think she was an unintentional one; at
least, her agaceries were, all as unconscious as they were--her worst
enemies (_i. e._ plain young ladies) had to allow--unaffected.
"How exquisitely sentimental! Is it yours?" she asked, with demure
mischief.
"Mine!" echoed Fairlie, with supreme scorn.
"It's some one's here, because the address is at Mrs. Greene's. Come,
tell me at once, monsieur."
"The only fool in the Artillery," said Fairlie, curtly: "Belle
Courtenay."
"Captain Courtenay!" echoed Geraldine, with a little flush on her
cheeks, caused, perhaps, by the quick glance the Colonel shot at her as
he spoke.
"Captain Courtenay!" said Katherine Vane. "Why, what can he want with a
wife? I thought he had _l'embarras de choix_ offered him in that line;
at least, so he makes out himself."
"I dare say," said Fairlie, dryly, "it's for a bet he's made, to see how
many women he can hoax, I believe."
"How can you tell it is a hoax?" said Geraldine, throwing cowslips at
her greyhound. "It may be some medium of intercourse with some one he
really cares for, and who may understand his meaning."
"Perhaps you are in his confidence, Geraldine, or perhaps you are
thinking of answering it yourself?"
"Perhaps," said the young lady, waywardly, making the cowslips into a
ball, "there might be worse investments. Your _bete noire_ is strikingly
handsome; he is the perfection of style; he is going to be Equerry to
the Prince; his mother is just married again to Lord Chevenix; he did
not name half his attractions in that line in the _Daily_."
With which Geraldine rushed across the meadow after the greyhound and
the cowslip ball, and Fairlie lay quiet plucking up the heaths by the
roots. He lay there still, when the cowslip ball struck him a soft
fragrant blow against his lips, and knocked the Cuba from between his
teeth.
"Why don't you speak?" asked Geraldine, plaintively. "You are not half
so pleasant to play with as you were before you went to India and I was
seven or eight, and you had La Grace, and battledoor and shuttlecock,
and cricket, and all sorts of games with me in the old garden at
Charlton."
He might have told her she was much less dangerous then than now; he was
not disposed to flatter her, however. So he answered her quietly,
"I preferred you as you were then."
"Indeed!" said Geraldine, with a hot color in her cheeks "I do not think
there are many who would indorse your complimentary opinion."
"Possibly," said Fairlie, coldly.
She took up her cowslips, and hit him hard with them several times.
"Don't speak in that tone. If you dislike me, you can say so in warmer
words, surely."
Fairlie smiled _malgre lui_.
"What a child you are, Geraldine! but a child that is a very mischievous
coquette, and has learned a hundred tricks and _agaceries_ of which my
little friend of seven or eight knew nothing. I grant you were not a
quarter so charming, but you were, I am afraid--more true."
Geraldine was ready to cry, but she was in a passion, nevertheless; such
a hot and short-lived passion as all women of any spirit can go into on
occasion, when they are unjustly suspected.
"If you choose to think so of me you may," she said, with immeasurable
hauteur, sweeping away from him, her mauve ribbons fluttering
disdainfully. "I, for one, shall not try to undeceive you."
The next night we all went up to a ball at the Vanes', to drink Rhenish,
eat ices, quiz the women, flirt with the pretty ones in corners, lounge
against doorways, criticise the feet in the waltzing as they passed us,
and do, in fact, anything but what we went to do--dance,--according to
our custom in such scenes.
The Swan and her Cygnets looked very stunning; they "made up well," as
ladies say when they cannot deny that another is good-looking, but
qualify your admiration by an assurance that she is shockingly plain in
the morning, and owes all to her milliner and maids. Geraldine, who, by
the greatest stretch of scepticism, could not be supposed "made up," was
bewitching, with her sunshiny enjoyment of everything, and her untiring
waltzing, going for all the world like a spinning-top, only a top tires,
and she did not. Belle, who made a principle of never dancing except
under extreme coercion by a very pretty hostess, could not resist her,
and Tom Gower, and Little Nell, and all the rest, not to mention half
Norfolk, crowded round her; all except Fairlie, who leaned against the
doorway, seeming to talk to her father or the members, or anybody near,
but watching the young lady for all that, who flirted not a little,
having in her mind the scene in the paddock of yesterday, and wishing,
perhaps, to show him that if he did not admire her more than when she
was eight, other men had better taste.
She managed to come near him towards the end of the evening, sending
Belle to get her an ice.
"Well," she said, with a comical _pitie d'elle-meme_, "do you dislike me
so much that you don't mean to dance with me at all? Not a single waltz
all night?"
"What time have you had to give me?" said Fairlie, coldly. "You have
been surrounded all the evening."
"Of course I have. I am not so disagreeable to other gentlemen as I am
to you. But I could have made time for you if you had only asked for it.
At your own ball last week you engaged me beforehand for six waltzes."
Fairlie relented towards her. Despite her flirting, he thought she did
not care for Belle after all.
"Well," he said, smiling, "will you give me one after supper?"
"You told me you shouldn't dance, Colonel Fairlie," said Katherine Vane,
smiling.
"One can't tell what one mayn't do under temptation," said Fairlie,
smiling too. "A man may change his mind, you know."
"Oh yes," cried Geraldine; "a man may change his mind, and we are
expected to be eminently grateful to him for his condescension; but if
_we_ change our minds, how severely we are condemned for vacillation:
'So weak!' 'Just like women!' 'Never like the same thing two minutes,
poor things!'"
"You don't like the same thing two minutes, Geraldine," laughed Fairlie;
"so I dare say you speak feelingly."
"I changeable! I am constancy itself!"
"Are you? You know what the Italians say of 'ocche azzure'?"
"But I don't believe it, monsieur!" cried Geraldine:
"Blue eyes beat black fifty to seven,
For black's of hell, but blue's of heaven!"
"I beg your pardon, mademoiselle," laughed Fairlie:
"Done, by the odds, it is not true!
One devil's black, but scores are blue!"
He whirled her off into the circle in the midst of our laughter at their
ready wit. Soon after he bid her good night, but he found time to
whisper as he did so.
"You are more like _my_ little Geraldine to-night!"
The look he got made him determine to make her his little Geraldine
before much more time had passed. At least he drove us back to Norwich
in what seemed very contented silence, for he smoked tranquilly, and let
the horses go their own pace--two certain indications that a man has
pleasant thoughts to accompany him.
I do not think he listened to Belle's, and Gower's, and my conversation,
not even when Belle took his weed out of his mouth and announced the
important fact: "Hardinge! my ten guineas, if you please. I've had a
letter!"
"What! an answer? By Jove!"
"Of course, an answer. I tell you all the pretty women in the city will
know my initials, and send after me. I only hope they _will_ be pretty,
and then one may have a good deal of fun. I was in at Greene's this
morning having mock-turtle, and talking to Patty (she's not bad-looking,
that little girl, only she drops her 'h's' so. I'm like that
fellow--what's his name?--in the 'Peau de Chagrin:' I don't admire my
loves in cotton prints), when she gave me the letter. I left it on my
dressing-table, but you can see it to-morrow. It's a horrid red
daubed-looking seal, and no crest; but that she mightn't use for fear of
being found out, and the writing is disguised, but that it would be. She
_says_ she has the three requisites; but where's the woman that don't
think herself Sappho and Galatea combined? And she was nineteen last
March. Poor little devil! she little thinks how she'll be done. I'm to
meet her on the Yarmouth road at two, and to look out for a lady
standing by the first milestone. Shall we go, Tom? It may lead to
something amusing, you know, though certainly it won't lead to
marriage."
"Oh! we'll go, old fellow," said I. "Deuce take you, Belle! what a lucky
fellow you are with the women."
"Luckier than I want to be," yawned Belle. "It's a horrid bore to be so
set upon. One may have too much of a good thing, you know."
At two the day after, having refreshed ourselves with a light luncheon
at Mrs. Greene's of lobster-salad and pale ale, Belle, Gower, and I
buttoned our gloves and rode leisurely up the road.
"How my heart palpitates!" said Belle, stroking his moustaches with a
bored air. "How can I tell, you know, but what I may be going to see the
arbiter of my destiny? Men have been tricked into all sorts of
tomfoolery by their compassionate feelings. And then--if she should
squint or have a turn-up nose! Good Heavens, what a fearful idea! I've
often wondered when I've seen men with ugly wives how they could have
been cheated into taking 'em; they couldn't have done it in their
senses, you know, nor yet with their eyes open. You may depend they took
'em to church in a state of coma from chloroform. 'Pon my word, I feel
quite nervous. You don't think the girl will have a parson and a
register hid behind the milestone, do you?"
"If she should, it won't be legal without a license, thanks to the fools
who turn Hymen into a tax-gatherer, and won't let a fellow make love
without he asks leave of the Archbishop of Canterbury," said Gower.
"Hallo, Belle, here's the milestone, but where's the lady?"
"Virgin modesty makes her unpunctual," said Belle, putting up his
eye-glass.
"Hang modesty!" swore Tom. "It's past two, and we left a good quarter of
that salad uneaten. Confound her!"
"There are no signs of her," said I. "Did she tell you her dress,
Belle?"
"Not a syllable about it; only mentioned a milestone, and one might have
found a market-woman sitting on that."
"Hallo! here's something feminine. Oh, good gracious! this can't be it,
it's got a brown stuff dress on, and a poke straw bonnet and a green
veil. No, no, Belle. If you married her, that _would_ be a case of
chloroform."
But the horrible brown stuff came sidling along the road with that
peculiar step belonging to ladies of a certain age, characterized by
Patty Greene as "tipputting," sweeping up the dust with its horrible
folds, making straight _en route_ for Belle, who was standing a little
in advance of us. Nineteen! Good Heavens! she must have been fifty if
she was a day, and under her green veil was a chestnut front--yes,
decidedly a front--and a face yellow as a Canadian's, and wrinkled as
Madame Pipelet's, made infinitely worse by that sweet maiden simper and
assumed juvenility common to _vieilles filles_. Up she came towards poor
Belle, who involuntarily retreated step by step till he had backed
against the milestone, and could get no farther, while she smiled up in
his handsome face, and he stared down in her withered one, with the most
comical expression of surprise, dismay, and horror that had ever
appeared on our "beauty's" impassive features.
"Are you--the--the--L. C.?" demanded the maiden of ten lustres, casting
her eyes to the ground with virgin modesty.
"L. C. ar----My dear madam, I don't quite understand you," faltered
Belle, taken aback for once in his life.
"Was it not you," faltered the fair one, shaking out a
pocket-handkerchief that sent a horrible odor of musk to the olfactory
nerves of poor Belle, most fastidious connoisseur in perfume, "who
advertised for a kindred heart and sympathetic soul?"
"Really, my good lady," began Belle, still too aghast by the chestnut
front to recover his self-possession.
"Because," simpered his inamorata, too agitated by her own feelings to
hear his horrible appellative, keeping him at bay there with the fatal
milestone behind him and the awful brown stuff in front of him--"because
I, too, have desired to meet with some elective affinity, some
spirit-tie that might give me all those more subtle sympathies which can
never be found in the din and bustle of the heartless world; I, too,
have pined for the objects of your search--love and domestic happiness.
Oh, blessed words, surely we might--might we not?----"
She paused, overcome with maidenly confusion, and buried her face in the
musk-scented handkerchief. Tom and I, where we stood _perdus_, burst
into uncontrollable shouts of laughter. Poor Belle gave one blank look
of utter terror at the _tout ensemble_ of brown stuff, straw poke, and
chestnut front. He forgot courtesy, manners, and everything else; his
lips were parted, with his small white teeth glancing under his silky
moustaches, his sleepy eyes were open wide, and as the maiden lady
dropped her handkerchief, and gave him what she meant to be the softest
and most tender glance, he turned straight round, sprang on his bay, and
rushed down the Yarmouth road as if the whole of the dignitaries of the
church and law were tearing after him to force him _nolens volens_ into
carrying out the horrible promise in his cursed line in the _Daily_.
What was Tom's and my amazement to see the maiden lady seat herself
astride on the milestone, and join her cachinnatory shouts to ours,
fling her green veil into a hawthorn tree, jerk her bonnet into our
faces, kick off her brown stuff into the middle of the road, tear off
her chestnut front and yellow mask, and perform a frantic war-dance on
the roadside turf. No less a person than that mischievous monkey and
inimitable mimic Little Nell!
"You young demon!" shouted Gower, shrieking with laughter till he cried.
"A pretty fellow you are to go tricking your senior officer like this.
You little imp, how can you tell but what I shall court-martial you
to-morrow?"
"No, no, you won't!" cried Little Nell, pursuing his frantic dance.
"Wasn't it prime? wasn't it glorious? wasn't it worth the Kohinoor to
see? You won't go and peach, when I've just given you a better farce
than all old Buckstone's? By Jove! Belle's face at my chestnut front!
This'll be one of his prime conquests, eh? I say, old fellows, when
Charles Mathews goes to glory, don't you think I might take his place,
and beat him hollow, too?"
When we got back to barracks, we found Belle prostrate on his sofa,
heated, injured, crestfallen, solacing himself with Seltzer-and-water,
and swearing away anything but mildly at that "wretched old woman." He
bound us over to secrecy, which, with Little Nell's confidence in our
minds, we naturally promised. Poor Belle! to have been made a fool of
before two was humiliation more than sufficient for our all-conquering
_blondin_. For one who had so often refused to stir across a ball-room
to look at a Court beauty, to have ridden out three miles to see an old
maid of fifty with a chestnut front! The insult sank deep into his soul,
and threw him into an abject melancholy, which hung over him all through
mess, and was not dissipated till a letter came to him from Mrs.
Greene's, when we were playing loo in Fairlie's room. That night Fairlie
was in gay spirits. He had called at Fern Chase that morning, and though
he had not been able to see Geraldine alone, he had passed a pleasant
couple of hours there, playing pool with her and her sisters, and had
been as good friends as ever with his old playmate.
"Well, Belle," said he, feeling good-natured even with him that night,
"did you get any good out of your advertisement? Did your lady turn out
a very pretty one?"
"No: deuced ugly, like the generality," yawned poor Belle, giving me a
kick to remind me of my promise. Little Nell was happily about the city
somewhere with Pretty Face, or the boy would scarcely have kept his
countenance.
"What amusement you can find in hoaxing silly women," said Fairlie, "is
incomprehensible to me. However, men's tastes differ, happily. Here
comes another epistle for you, Belle; perhaps there's better luck for
you there."
"Oh! I shall have no end of letters. I sha'n't answer any more. I think
it's such a deuced trouble. Diamonds trumps, eh?" said Belle, laying the
note down till he should have leisure to attend to it. Poor old fellow!
I dare say he was afraid of another onslaught from maiden ladies.
"Come, Belle," said Glenville; "come, Belle, open your letter; we're all
impatience. If you won't go, I will in your place."