respectable papa for intentions, or called to account by a fierce
brother with a stubby beard," said Belle, lazily taking up the letter.
As he did so, the melancholy indolence on his face changed to eagerness.
"The deuce! the Vane crest!"
"A note of invitation, probably?" suggested Gower.
"Would they send an invitation to Patty Greene's? I tell you it's
addressed to L. C.," said Belle, disdainfully, opening the letter,
leaving its giant deer couchant intact. "I thought it very likely; I
expected it, indeed--poor little dear! I oughtn't to have let it out.
Ain't you jealous, old fellows? Little darling! Perhaps I may be tricked
into matrimony after all. I'd rather a presentiment that advertisement
would come to something. There, you may all look at it, if you like."
It was a dainty sheet of scented cream-laid, stamped with the deer
couchant, such as had brought us many an invitation down from Fern
Chase, and on it was written, in delicate caligraphy:
"G. V. understands the meaning of the advertisement, and will meet L. C.
at the entrance of Fern Wood, at eleven o'clock to-morrow morning."
There was a dead silence as we read it; then a tremendous buzz. Cheaply
as we held women, I don't think there was one of us who wasn't surprised
at Geraldine's doing any clandestine thing like this. He sat with a look
of indolent triumph, curling his perfumed moustaches, and looking at the
little autograph, which gave us evidence of what he often
boasted--Geraldine Vane's regard.
"Let me look at your note," said Fairlie, stretching out his hand.
He soon returned it, with a brief, "Very complimentary indeed!"
When the men left, I chanced to be last, having mislaid my cigar-case.
As I looked about for it, Fairlie addressed me in the same brief, stern
tone between his teeth with which he spoke to Belle.
"Hardinge, you made this absurd bet with Courtenay, did you not? Is this
note a hoax upon him?"
"Not that I know of--it doesn't look like it. You see there is the Vane
crest, and the girl's own initials."
"Very true." He turned round to the window again, and leaned against it,
looking out into the dawn, with a look upon his face that I was very
sorry to see.
"But it is not like Geraldine," I began. "It may be a trick. Somebody
may have stolen their paper and crest--it's possible. I tell you what
I'll do to find out; I'll follow Belle to-morrow, and see who does meet
him in Fern Wood."
"Do," said Fairlie, eagerly. Then he checked himself, and went on
tapping an impatient tattoo on the shutter. "You see, I have known the
family for years--known her when she was a little child. I should be
sorry to think that one of them could be capable of such----"
Despite his self-command he could not finish his sentence. Geraldine was
a great deal too dear to him to be treated in seeming carelessness, or
spoken lightly of, however unwisely she might act. I found my
cigar-case. His laconic "Good night!" told me he would rather be alone,
so I closed the door and left him.
The morning was as sultry and as clear as a July day could be when Belle
lounged down the street, looking the perfection of a gentleman, a trifle
less bored and _blase_ than ordinary, _en route_ to his appointment at
Fern Wood (a sequestered part of the Vane estate), where trees and
lilies of the valley grew wild, and where the girls were accustomed to
go for picnics or sketching. As soon as he had turned a corner, Gower
and I turned it too, and with perseverance worthy a better cause, Tom
and I followed Belle in and out and down the road which led to Fern
Wood--a flat, dusty, stony two miles--on which, in the blazing noon of a
hot midsummer day, nothing short of Satanic coercion, or love of
Geraldine Vane, would have induced our beauty to immolate himself, and
expose his delicate complexion.
"I bet you anything, Tom," said I, confidently, "that this is a hoax,
like yesterday's. Geraldine will no more meet Belle there than all the
Ordnance Office."
"Well, we shall see," responded Gower. "Somebody might get the
note-paper from the bookseller, and the crest seal through the servants,
but they'll hardly get Geraldine there bodily against her will."
We waited at the entrance of the wood, shrouded ourselves in the wild
hawthorn hedges, while we could still see Belle--of course we did not
mean to be near enough to overhear him--who paced up and down the green
alleys under the firs and larches, rendered doubly dark by the
evergreens, brambles, and honeysuckles,
which, ripened by the sun,
Forbade the sun to enter.
He paced up and down there a good ten minutes, prying about with his
eye-glass, but unable to see very far in the tangled boughs, and heavy
dusky light of the untrimmed wood. Then there was the flutter of
something azure among the branches, and Gower gave vent to a low whistle
of surprise.
"By George, Hardinge! there's Geraldine! Well! I didn't think she'd have
done it. You see they're all alike if they get the opportunity."
It _was_ Geraldine herself--it was her fluttering muslin, her abundant
folds, her waving ribbons, her tiny sailor hat, and her little veil, and
under the veil her face, with its delicate tinting, its pencilled
eyebrows, and its undulating bright-colored hair. There was no doubt
about it: it was Geraldine. I vow I was as sorry to have to tell it to
Fairlie as if I'd had to tell him she was dead, for I knew how it would
cut him to the heart to know not only that she had given herself to his
rival, but that his little playmate, whom he had thought truth, and
honesty, and daylight itself, should have stooped to a clandestine
interview arranged through an advertisement! Their retreating figures
were soon lost in the dim woodland, and Tom and I turned to retrace our
steps.
"No doubt about it now, old fellow?" quoth Gower.
"No, confound her!" swore I.
"Confound her? _Et pourquoi!_ Hasn't she a right to do what she likes?"
"Of course she has, the cursed little flirt; but she'd no earthly
business to go making such love to Fairlie. It's a rascally shame, and I
don't care if I tell her so myself."
"She'll only say you're in love with her too," was Gower's sensible
response. "I'm not surprised myself. I always said she was an
out-and-out coquette."
I met Fairlie coming out of his room as I went up to mine. He looked as
men will look when they have not been in bed all night, and have watched
the sun up with painful thoughts for their companions.
"You have been----" he began; then stopped short, unwilling or unable to
put the question into words.
"After Belle? Yes. It is no hoax, Geraldine met him herself."
I did not relish telling him, and therefore told it, in all probability,
bluntly and blunderingly--tact, like talk, having, they say, been given
to women. A spasm passed over his face. "_Herself!_" he echoed. Until
then I do not think he had realized it as even possible.
"Yes, there was no doubt about it. What a wretched little coquette she
must have been; she always seemed to make such game of Belle----"
But Fairlie, saying something about his gloves that he had left behind,
had gone back into his room again before I had half done my sentence.
When Belle came back, about half an hour afterwards, with an affected
air of triumph, and for once in his life of languid sensations really
well contented, Gower and I poured questions upon him, as, done up with
the toil of his dusty walk, and horrified to find himself so low-bred as
to be hot, he kicked off his varnished boots, imbibed Seltzer, and
fanned himself with a periodical before he could find breath to answer
us.
"Was it Geraldine?"
"Of course it was Geraldine," he said, yawning.
"And will she marry you, Belle?"
"To be sure she will. I should like to see the woman that wouldn't,"
responded Belle, shutting his eyes and nestling down among the cushions.
"And what's more, I've been fool enough to let her make me ask her. Give
me some more sherry, Phil; a man wants support under such circumstances.
The deuce if I'm not as hot as a ploughboy! It was very cruel of her to
call a fellow out with the sun at the meridian; she might as well have
chosen twilight. But, I say, you fellows, keep the secret, will you? she
don't want her family to get wind of it, because they're bothering her
to marry that old cove, Mount Trefoil, with his sixty years and his
broad acres, and wouldn't let her take anybody else if they knew it;
she's under age, you see."
"But how did she know you were L. C.?"
"Fairlie told her, and the dear little vain thing immediately thought it
was an indirect proposal to herself, and answered it; of course I didn't
undeceive her. She _raffoles_ of me--it'll be almost too much of a good
thing, I'm afraid. She's deuced prudish, too, much more than I should
have thought _she_'d have been; but I vow she'd only let me kiss her
hand, and that was gloved."
"I hate prudes," said Gower; "they've always much more devilry than the
open-hearted ones. Videlicet--here's your young lady stiff enough only
to give you her hand to kiss, and yet she'll lower herself to a
clandestine correspondence and stolen interviews--a condescension I
don't think I should admire in _my_ wife."
"Love, my dear fellow, oversteps all--what d'ye call 'em?--boundaries,"
said Belle, languidly. "What a bore! I shall never be able to wear this
coat again, it's so ingrained with dust; little puss, why didn't she
wait till it was cooler?"
"Did you fix your marriage-day?" asked Tom, rather contemptuously.
"Yes, I was very weak!" sighed Belle; "but you see she's uncommonly
pretty, and there's Mount Trefoil and lots of men, and, I fancy, that
dangerous fellow Fairlie, after her; so we hurried matters. We've been
making love to one another all these three months, you know, and fixed
it so soon as Thursday week. Of course she blushed, and sighed, and put
her handkerchief to her eyes, and all the rest of it, _en regle_; but
she consented, and I'm to be sacrificed. But not a word about it, my
dear fellows! The Vanes are to be kept in profoundest darkness, and, to
lull suspicion, I'm not to go there scarcely at all until then, and when
I do, she'll let me know when she will be out, and I'm to call on her
mother then. She'll write to me, and put the letters in a hollow tree in
the wood, where I'm to leave my answers, or, rather, send 'em; catch me
going over that road again! Don't give me joy, old boys. I know I'm
making a holocaust of myself, but deuce take me if I can help it--she is
so deuced pretty!"
Fairlie was not at mess that night. Nobody knew where he was. I learnt,
long months afterwards, that as soon as I had told him of Geraldine's
identity, he, still thirsting to disbelieve, reluctant to condemn,
catching at straws to save his idol from being shattered as men in love
will do, had thrown himself across his horse and torn off to Fern Dell
to see whether or no Geraldine was at home.
His heart beat faster and thicker as he entered the drawing-room than it
had done before the lines at Ferozeshah, or in the giant semicircle at
Sobraon; it stood still as in the far end of the room, lying back on a
low chair, sat Geraldine, her gloves and sailor hat lying on her lap.
She sprang up to welcome him with her old gay smile.
"Good God! that a child like that can be such an accomplished actress!"
thought Fairlie, as he just touched her hand.
"Have you been out to-day?" he asked suddenly.
"You see I have."
"Prevarication is conviction," thought Fairlie, with a deadly chill over
him.
"Where did you go, love?" asked mamma.
"To see Adela Ferrers; she is not well, you know, and I came home
through part of the wood to gather some of the anemones; I don't mean
anemones, they are over--lilies of the valley."
She spoke hurriedly, glancing at Fairlie all the time, who never took
his iron gaze off her, though all the beauty and glory was draining away
from his life with every succeeding proof that stared him in the face
with its cruel evidence.
At that minute Lady Vane was called from the room to give some
directions to her head gardener about some flowers, over which she was
particularly choice, and Fairlie and Geraldine were left in dead
silence, with only the ticking of the timepiece and the chirrup of the
birds outside the open windows to break its heavy monotony.
Fairlie bent over a spaniel, rolling the dog backwards and forwards on
the rug.
Geraldine stood on the rug, her head on one side in her old pretty
attitude of plaintiveness and defiance, the bright sunshine falling
round her and playing on her gay dress and fair hair--a tableau lost
upon the Colonel, who though he had risen too, was playing sedulously
with the dog.
"Colonel Fairlie, what is the matter with you? How unkind you are
to-day!"
Fairlie was roused at last, disgusted that so young a girl could be so
accomplished a liar and actress, sick at heart that he had been so
deceived, mad with jealousy, and that devil in him sent courtesy flying
to the winds.
"Pardon me, Miss Vane, you waste your coquetteries on me. Unhappily, I
know their value, and am not likely to be duped by them."
Geraldine's face flushed as deep a rose hue as the geraniums nodding
their heads in at the windows.
"Coquetteries?--duped? What do you mean?"
"You know well enough what. All I warn you is, never try them again on
me--never come near me any more with your innocent smiles and your lying
lips, or, by Heaven, Geraldine Vane, I may say what I think of you in
plainer words than suit the delicacy of a lady's ears!"
Geraldine's eyes flashed fire; from rose-hued as the geraniums she
changed to the dead white of the Guelder roses beside them.
"Colonel Fairlie, you are mad, I think! If you only came here to insult
me----"
"I had better leave? I agree with you. Good morning."
Wherewith Fairlie took his hat and whip, bowed himself out, and,
throwing himself across his horse, tore away many miles beyond Norwich,
I should say, and rode into the stable-yard at twelve o'clock that
night, his horse with every hair wringing and limb trembling at the
headlong pace he had been ridden; such a midnight gallop as only
Mazeppa, or a Border rider, or Turpin racing for his life, or a man
vainly seeking to leave behind him some pursuing ghost of memory or
passion, ever took before.
We saw little of him for the next few days. Luckily for him, he was
employed to purchase several strings of Suffolk horses for the corps,
and he rode about the country a good deal, and went over to Newmarket,
and to the Bury horse fair, inspecting the cattle, glad, I dare say, of
an excuse to get away.
"I feel nervous, terribly nervous; do give me the Seltzer and hock, Tom.
They wonder at the fellows asking for beer before their execution. I
don't; and if a fellow wants it to keep his spirits up before he's
hanged, he may surely want it before he's married, for one's a swing and
a crash, and it's all over and done most likely before you've time to
know anything about it; but the other you walk into so deliberately,
superintend the sacrifice of yourself, as it were, like that old cove
Seneca; feel yourself rolling down-hill like Regulus, with all the
horrid nails of the 'domesticities' pricking you in every corner; see
life ebbing away from you; all the sunshine of life, as poets have it,
fading, sweetly but surely, from your grasp, and Death, _alias_ the
Matrimonial Black Cap, coming down ruthlessly on your devoted heads. I
feel low--shockingly low. Pass me the Seltzer, Tom, do!"
So spake Geraldine's _sposo_ that was to be, on the evening before his
marriage-day, lying on his sofa in his Cashmere dressing-gown, his gold
embroidered slippers, and his velvet smoking-cap, puffing largely at his
meerschaum, and unbosoming his private sentiments and emotions to the
(on this score) sufficiently sympathetic listeners, Gower and I.
"I don't pity you!" said Tom, contemptuously, who had as much disdain
for a man who married as for one who bought gooseberry for champagne, or
Cape for comet hock, and did not know the difference--"I don't pity you
one bit. You've put the curb on yourself; you can't complain if you get
driven where you don't like."
"But, my dear fellow, _can_ one help it?" expostulated Belle,
pathetically. "When a little winning, bewitching, attractive little
animal like that takes you in hand, and traps you as you catch a pony,
holding out a sieve of oats, and coaxing you, and so-ho-ing you till
she's fairly got the bridle over your head, and the bit between your
teeth, what is a man to do?"
"Remember that as soon as the bit is in your mouth, she'll never trouble
herself to give you any oats, or so-ho you softly any more, but will
take the whip hand of you, and not let you have the faintest phantom of
a will of your own ever again," growled the misogamistic Tom.
"Catch a man's remembering while it's any use," was Belle's very true
rejoinder. "After he's put his hand to a little bill, he'll remember
it's a very green thing to do, but he don't often remember it before, I
fancy. No, in things like this, one can't help one's self; one's time is
come, and one goes down before fate. If anybody had told me that I
should go as spooney about any woman as I have about that little girl
Geraldine, I'd have given 'em the lie direct; I would, indeed! But then
she made such desperate love to me, took such a deuced fancy to me, you
see: else, after all, the women _I_ might have chosen----By George! I
wonder what Lady Con, and the little Bosanquet, and poor Honoria, and
all the rest of 'em will say?"
"What?" said Gower; "say 'Poor dear fellow!' to you, and 'Poor girl, I
pity her!' to your wife. So you're going to elope with Miss Geraldine? A
man's generally too ready to marry his daughters, to force a fellow to
carry them off by stealth. Besides, as Bulwer says somewhere,
'_Gentlemen_ don't run away with the daughters of gentlemen.'"
"Pooh, nonsense! all's fair in love or war," returned Belle, going into
the hock and Seltzer to keep up his spirits. "You see, she's afraid, her
governor's mind being so set on old Mount Trefoil and his baron's
coronet; they might offer some opposition, put it off till she was
one-and-twenty, you know--and she's so distractedly fond of me, poor
little thing, that she'd die under the probation, probably--and I'm sure
I couldn't keep faithful to her for two mortal years. Besides, there's
something amusing in eloping; the excitement of it keeps up one's
spirits; whereas, if I were marched to church with so many mourners--I
mean groomsmen--I should feel I was rehearsing my own obsequies like
Charles V., and should funk it, ten to one I should. No! I like eloping:
it gives the certain flavor of forbidden fruit, which many things,
besides pure water, want to 'give them a relish.'"
"Let's see how's the thing to be managed?" asked Gower. "Beyond telling
me I was to go with you, consigned ignominiously to the rumble, to
witness the ceremony, I'm not very clear as to the programme."
"Why, as soon as it's dawn," responded Belle, with leisurely whiffs of
his meerschaum, "I'm to take the carriage up to the gate at Fern
Wood--this is what she tells me in her last note; she was coming to meet
me, but just as she was dressed her mother took her to call on some
people, and she had to resort to the old hollow tree. The deuce is in
it, I think, to prevent our meeting; if it weren't for the letters and
her maid, we should have been horribly put to it for communication;--I'm
to take the carriage, as I say, and drive up there, where she and her
maid will be waiting. We drive away, of course, catch the 8.15 train,
and cut off to town, and get married at the Regeneration, Piccadilly,
where a fellow I know very well will act the priestly Calcraft. The
thing that bothers me most of all is getting up so early. I used to hate
it so awfully when I was a young one at the college. I like to have my
bath, and my coffee, and my paper leisurely, and saunter through my
dressing, and get up when the day's _warmed_ for me. Early parade's one
of the crying cruelties of the service; I always turn in again after it,
and regard it as a hideous nightmare. I vow I couldn't give a greater
test of my devotion than by getting up at six o'clock to go after
her--deuced horrible exertion! I'm quite certain that my linen won't be
aired, nor my coffee fit to drink, nor Perkins with his eyes half open,
nor a quarter of his wits about him. Six o'clock! By George! nothing
should get me up at that unearthly hour except my dear, divine,
delicious little demon Geraldine! But she's so deuced fond of me, one
must make sacrifices for such a little darling."
With which sublimely unselfish and heroic sentiment the bridegroom-elect
drank the last of his hock and Seltzer, took his pipe out of his lips,
flung his smoking-cap lazily on to his Skye's head, who did not relish
the attention, and rose languidly to get into his undress in time for
mess.
As Belle had to get up so frightfully early in the morning, he did not
think it worth while to go to bed at all, but asked us all to
vingt-et-un in his room, where, with the rattle of half-sovereigns and
the flow of rum-punch, kept up his courage before the impending doom of
matrimony. Belle was really in love with Geraldine, but in love in his
own particular way, and consoled himself for his destiny and her absence
by what I dare say seems to mademoiselle, fresh from her perusal of
"Aurora Leigh" or "Lucille," very material comforters indeed. But, if
truth were told, I am afraid mademoiselle would find, save that from one
or two fellows here and there, who go in for love as they go in for
pig-sticking or tiger-hunting, with all their might and main, wagering
even their lives in the sport, the Auroras and Lucilles are very apt to
have their charms supplanted by the points of a favorite, their absence
made endurable by the aroma of Turkish tobacco, and their last fond
admonishing words, spoken with such persuasive caresses under the
moonlight and the limes, against those "horrid cards, love," forgotten
that very night under the glare of gas, while the hands that lately held
their own so tenderly, clasp wellnigh with as much affection the
unprecedented luck "two honors and five trumps!"
Man's love is of man's life a thing apart.
Byron was right; and if we go no deeper, how can it well be otherwise,
when we have our stud, our pipe, our Pytchley, our Newmarket, our club,
our coulisses, our Mabille, and our Epsom, and they--oh, Heaven help
them!--have no distraction but a needle or a novel! The Fates forbid
that our _agremens_ should be _less_, but I dare say, if they had a vote
in it, they'd try to get a trifle _more_. So Belle put his "love apart,"
to keep (or to rust, whichever you please) till six A. M. that morning,
when, having by dint of extreme physical exertion got himself dressed,
saw his valet pack his things with the keenest anxiety relative to the
immaculate folding of his coats and the safe repose of his shirts, and
at last was ready to go and fetch the bride his line in the _Daily_ had
procured him.
As Belle went down the stairs with Gower, who should come too, with his
gun in his hand, his cap over his eyes, and a pointer following close at
his heels, but Fairlie, going out to shoot over a friend's manor.
Of course he knew that Belle had asked for and obtained leave for a
couple of months, but he had never heard for what purpose; and possibly,
as he saw him at such an unusual hour, going out, not in his usual
travelling guise of a wide-awake and a Maude, but with a delicate
lavender tie and a toilet of the most unexceptionable art, the purport
of his journey flashed fully on his mind, for his face grew as fixed and
unreadable as if he had had on the iron mask. Belle, guessing as he did
that Fairlie would not have disliked to have been in his place that
morning, was too kind-hearted and infinitely too much of a gentleman to
hint at his own triumph. He laughed, and nodded a good morning.
"Off early, you see, Fairlie; going to make the most of my leave.
'Tisn't very often we can get one; our corps is deuced stiff and strict
compared to the Guards and the Cavalry."
"At least our strictness keeps us from such disgraceful scenes as some
of the other regiments have shown up of late," answered Fairlie between
his teeth.
"Ah! well, perhaps so; still, strictness ain't pleasant, you know, when
one's the victim."
"Certainly not."
"And, therefore, we should never be hard upon others."
"I perfectly agree with you."
"There's a good fellow. Well, I must be off; I've no time for
philosophizing. Good-bye, Colonel."
"Good-bye--a safe journey."