the other, so as to have an excuse for not offering that _poignee de
main_ which ought to be as sure a type of friendship, and as safe a
guarantee for good faith, as the Bedouin Arab's salt.
Belle nodded him a farewell, and lounged down the steps and into the
carriage, just as Fairlie's man brought his mare round.
Fairlie turned on to me with unusual fierceness, for generally he was
very calm, and gentle, and impassive in manner.
"Where is he gone?"
I could not help but tell him, reluctant though I was, for I guessed
pretty well what it would cost him to hear it. He did not say one word
while I told him, but bent over Marquis, drawing the dog's leash
tighter, so that I might not see his face, and without a sign or a reply
he was out of the barracks, across his mare's back, and rushing away at
a mad gallop, as if he would leave thought, and memory, and the curse of
love for a worthless woman behind him for ever.
His man stood looking at the gun Fairlie had thrown to him with a
puzzled expression.
"Is the Colonel gone mad?" I heard him say to himself. "The devil's in
it, I think. He used to treat his things a little carefuller than this.
As I live, he's been and gone and broke the trigger?"
The devil wasn't in it, but a woman _was_, an individual that causes as
much mischief as any Asmodeus, Belphegor, or Mephistopheles. Some fair
unknown correspondents assured me the other day, in a letter, that my
satire on women was "a monstrous libel." All I can say is, that if it
_be_ a libel, it is like many a one for which one pays the highest, and
which sounds the blackest--a libel that is _true_!
While his rival rode away as recklessly as though he was riding for his
life, the gallant bridegroom--as the _Court Circular_ would have
it--rolled on his way to Fern Wood, while Gower, very amiably occupying
the rumble, smoked, and bore his position philosophically, comforted by
the recollection that Geraldine's French maid was an uncommonly
good-looking, coquettish little person.
They rolled on, and speedily the postilion pulled up, according to
order, before the white five-bar gate, its paint blistering in the hot
summer dawn, and the great fern-leaves and long grass clinging up round
its posts, still damp with the six o'clock dew. Five minutes passed--ten
minutes--a quarter of an hour. Poor Belle got impatient. Twenty
minutes--five-and-twenty--thirty. Belle couldn't stand it. He began to
pace up and down the turf, soiling his boots frightfully with the long
wet grass, and rejecting all Tom's offers of consolation and a
cigar-case.
"Confound it!" cried poor Belle, piteously, "I thought women were always
ready to marry. I know, when I went to turn off Lacquers of the Rifles
at St. George's, his bride had been waiting for him half an hour, and
was in an awful state of mind, and all the other brides as well, for you
know they always marry first the girl that gets there first, and all the
other poor wretches were kept on tenter-hooks too. Lacquers had lost the
ring, and found it in his waistcoat after all! I say, Tom, devil take
it, where can she be? It's forty minutes, as I live. We shall lose the
train, you know. She's never prevented coming, surely. I think she'd let
me hear, don't you? She could send Justine to me if she couldn't come by
any wretched chance. Good Heavens, Tom, what shall I do?"
"Wait, and don't worry," was Tom's laconic and common-sense advice;
about the most irritating probably to a lover's feelings that could
pretty well be imagined. Belle swore at him in stronger terms than he
generally exerted himself to use, but was pulled up in the middle of
them by the sight of Geraldine and Justine, followed by a boy bearing
his bride's dainty trunks.
On came Geraldine in a travelling-dress; Justine following after her,
with a brilliant smile, that showed all her white teeth, at "Monsieur
Torm," for whom she had a very tender friendship, consolidated by
certain half-sovereigns and French phrases whispered by Gower after his
dinners at Fern Chase.
Belle met Geraldine with all that tender _empressement_ which he knew
well how to put into his slightest actions; but the young lady seemed
already almost to have begun repenting her hasty step. She hung her head
down, she held a handkerchief to her bright eyes, and to Belle's
tenderest and most ecstatic whispers she only answered by a convulsive
pressure of the arm, into which he had drawn her left hand, and a
half-smothered sob from her heart's depths.
Belle thought it all natural enough under the circumstances. He knew
women always made a point of impressing upon you that they are making a
frightful sacrifice for your good when they condescend to accept you,
and he whispered what tender consolation occurred to him as best fitted
for the occasion, thanked her, of course, for all the rapture, &c. &c.,
assured her of his life-long devotion--you know the style--and lifted
her into the carriage, Geraldine only responding with broken sighs and
stifled sobs.
The boxes were soon beside Belle's valises, Justine soon beside Gower,
the postilion cracked his whip over his outsider, Perkins refolded his
arms, and the carriage rolled down the lane.
Gower was very well contented with his seat in the rumble. Justine was a
very dainty little Frenchwoman, with the smoothest hair and the whitest
teeth in the world, and she and "Monsieur Torm" were eminently good
friends, as I have told you, though to-day she was very coquettish and
wilful, and laughed _a propos de bottes_ at Gower, say what Chaumiere
compliments he might.
"Ma chere et charmante petite," expostulated Tom, "tes moues mutines
sont ravissantes, mais je t'avoue que je prefere tes----"
"Tais-toi, becasse!" cried Justine, giving him a blow with her parasol,
and going off into what she would have called _eclats de rire_.
"Mais ecoute-moi, Justine," whispered Tom, piqued by her perversity; "je
raffole de toi! je t'adore, sur ma parole! je----Hallo! what the devil's
the matter? Good gracious! Deuce take it!"
Well might Tom call on his Satanic Majesty to explain what met his eyes
as he gave vent to all three ejaculations and maledictions. No less a
sight than the carriage-door flying violently open, Belle descending
with a violent impetus, his face crimson, and his hat in his hand,
clearing the hedge at a bound, plunging up to his ankles in mud on the
other side of it, and starting across country at the top of his speed,
rushing frantically straight over the heavy grass-land as if he had just
escaped from Hanwell, and the whole hue and cry of keepers and policemen
was let loose at his heels.
"Good Heavens! By Jove! Belle, Belle, I say, stop! Are you mad? What's
happened? What's the row? I say--the devil!"
But to his coherent but very natural exclamations poor Tom received no
answer. Justine was screaming with laughter, the postilion was staring,
Perkins swearing, Belle, flying across the country at express speed,
rapidly diminishing into a small black dot in the green landscape, while
from inside the carriage, from Geraldine, from the deserted bride, peals
of laughter, loud, long, and uproarious, rang out in the summer
stillness of the early morning.
"By Jupiter! but this is most extraordinary. The deuce is in it. Are
they both gone stark staring mad?" asked Tom of his Cuba, or the
blackbirds, or the hedge-cutter afar off, or anything or anybody that
might turn out so amiable as to solve his problem for him.
No reply being given him, however, Tom could stand it no longer. Down he
sprang, jerked the door open again, and put his head into the carriage.
"Hallo, old boy, done green, eh? Pity 'tisn't the 1st of April!" cried
Geraldine, with renewed screams of mirth from the interior.
"Eh? What? What did you say, Miss Vane?" ejaculated Gower, fairly
staggered by this extraordinary answer of a young girl, a lady, and a
forsaken bride.
"What did I say, my dear fellow? Why, that you're done most preciously,
and that I fancy it'll be a deuced long time before your delectable
friend tries his hand at matrimony again, that's all. Done! oh, by
George, he is done, and no mistake. Look at me, sir, ain't I a charming
bride?"
With which elegant language Geraldine took off her hat, pulled down some
false braids, pushed her hair off her forehead, shook her head like a
water-dog after a bath, and grinned in Gower's astonished eyes--_not_
Geraldine, but her twin-brother, Pretty Face!
"Do you know me now, old boy?" asked the Etonian, with demoniacal
delight,--"do you know me now? Haven't I chiselled him--haven't I
tricked him--haven't I done him as green as young gooseberries, and as
brown as that bag? Do you fancy he'll boast of his conquests again, or
advertise for another wife? So you didn't know how I got Gary Clements,
of the Ten Bells, to write the letters for me? and Justine to dress me
in Geraldine's things? You know they always did say they couldn't tell
her from me; I've proved it now, eh?--rather! Oh, by George, I never had
a better luck! and not a creature guesses it, not a soul, save Justine,
Nell, and I! By Jupiter, Gower, if you'd heard that unlucky Belle go on
swearing devotion interminable, and enough love to stock all Mudie's
novels! But I never dare let him kiss me, though my beard is down,
confound it! Oh! what jolly fun it's been, Gower, no words can tell. I
always said he shouldn't marry her; he'll hardly try to do it now, I
fancy! What a lark it's been! I couldn't have done it, you know, without
that spicy little French girl;--she did my hair, and got up my
crinoline, and stole Geraldine's dress, and tricked me up altogether,
and carried my notes to the hollow oak, and took all my messages to
Belle. Oh, Jupiter! what fun it's been! If Belle isn't gone clean out of
his senses, it's very odd to me. When he was going to kiss me, and
whispered, 'My dearest, my darling, my wife!' I just took off my hat and
grinned in his face, and said, 'Ain't this a glorious go? Oh! by
George, Gower, I think the fun will kill me!'"
And the wicked little dog of an Etonian sank back among the carriage
cushions stifled with his laughter. Gower staggered backwards against a
roadside tree, and stood there with his lips parted and his eyes wide
open, bewildered, more than that cool hand had ever been in all his
days, by the extraordinary finish of poor Belle's luckless wooing; the
postilion rolled off his saddle in cachinnatory fits at the little
monkey's narrative! Perkins, like a soldier as he was, utterly impassive
to all surrounding circumstances, shouldered a valise and dashed at
quick march after his luckless master; Justine clapped her plump
French-gloved fingers with a million ma Fois! and mon Dieus! and O
Ciels! and far away in the gray distance sped the retreating figure of
poor Belle, with the license in one pocket and the wedding-ring in the
other, flying, as if his life depended on it, from the shame, and the
misery, and the horror of that awful sell, drawn on his luckless head by
that ill-fated line in the _Daily_.
While Belle drove to his hapless wooing, Fairlie galloped on and on.
Where he went he neither knew nor cared. He had ridden heedlessly along,
and the Grey, left to her own devices, had taken the road to which her
head for the last four months had been so often turned--the road leading
to Fern Chase,--and about a mile from the Vane estate lost her left
hind-shoe, and came to a dead stop of her own accord, after having been
ridden for a couple of hours as hard as if she had been at the Grand
Military. Fairlie threw himself off the saddle, and, leaving the bridle
loose on the mare's neck, who he knew would not stray a foot away from
him, he flung himself on the grass, under the cool morning shadows of
the roadside trees, no sound in the quiet country round him breaking in
on his weary thoughts, till the musical ring of a pony's hoofs came
pattering down the lane. He never heard it, however, nor looked up,
till the quick trot slackened and then stopped beside him.
"Colonel Fairlie!"
"Good Heavens! Geraldine!"
"Well," she said, with tears in her eyes and petulant anger in her
voice, "so you have never had the grace to come and apologize for
insulting me as you did last week?"
"For mercy's sake do not trifle with me."
"Trifle! No, indeed!" interrupted the young lady. "Your behavior was no
trifle, and it will be a very long time before I forgive it, if ever I
do."
"Stay--wait a moment."
"How can you ask me, when, five days ago, you bid me never come near you
with my cursed coquetries again?" asked Geraldine, trying, and vainly,
to get the bridle out of his grasp.
"God forgive me! I did not know what I said. What I had heard was enough
to madden a colder man than I. Is it untrue?"
"Is what untrue?"
"You know well enough. Answer me, is it true or not?"
"How can I tell what you mean? You talk in enigmas. Let me go."
"I will never let you go till you have answered me."
"How can I answer you if I don't know what you mean?" retorted
Geraldine, half laughing.
"Do not jest. Tell me, yes or no, are you going to marry that cursed
fool?"
"What 'cursed fool'? Your language is not elegant, Colonel Fairlie!"
said Geraldine, with demure mischief.
"Belle! Would you have met him? Did you intend to elope with him?"
Geraldine's eyes, always large enough, grew larger and a darker blue
still, in extremest astonishment.
"Belle!--elope with him? What are you dreaming? Are you mad?"
"Almost," said Fairlie, recklessly. "Have you misled him, then--tricked
him? Do you care nothing for him? Answer me, for Heaven's sake,
Geraldine!"
"I know nothing of what you are talking!" said Geraldine, with her
surprised eyes wide open still. "Oblige me by leaving my pony's head. I
shall be too late home."
"You never answered his advertisement, then?"
"The very question insults me! Let my pony go."
"You never met him in Fern Wood--never engaged yourself to him--never
corresponded with him?"
"Colonel Fairlie, you have no earthly right to put such questions to
me," interrupted Geraldine, with her hot geranium color in her cheeks
and her eyes flashing fire. "I honor the report, whoever circulated it,
far more than it deserves, by condescending to contradict it. Have the
kindness to unhand my pony, and allow me to continue my ride."
"You shall _not_ go," said Fairlie, as passionately as she, "till you
have answered me one more question: Can you, will you ever forgive me?"
"No," said Geraldine, with an impatient shake of her head, but a smile
nevertheless under the shadow of her hat.
"Not if you know it was jealousy of him which maddened me, love for you
which made me speak such unpardonable words to you?--not if I tell you
how perfect was the tale I was told, so that there was no link wanting,
no room for doubt or hope?--not if I tell you what tortures I had
endured in losing you--what bitter punishment I have already borne in
crediting the report that you were secretly engaged to my rival--would
you not forgive me then?"
"No," whispered the young lady perversely, but smiling still, the
geraniums brighter in her cheeks, and her eyes fixed on the bridle.
Fairlie dropped the reins, let go her hand, and left her free to ride,
if she would, away from him.
"Will you leave me, Geraldine? Not for this morning only, remember, nor
for to-day, nor for this year, but--for ever?"
"No!" It was a very different "No" this time.
"Will you forgive me, then, my darling?"
Her fingers clasped his hand closely, and Geraldine looked at him from
under her hat; her eyes, so like an April day, with their tears, and
their tender and mischievous smile, were so irresistibly provocative
that Fairlie took his pardon for granted, and thanked her in the way
that seemed to him at once most eloquent and most satisfactory.
If you wish to know what became of Belle, he fled across the country to
the railway station, and spent his leave Heaven knows where--in
sackcloth and ashes, I suppose--meditating on his frightful sell. _We_
saw nothing more of him; he could hardly show in Norwich again with all
his laurels tumbled in the dust, and his trophies of conquest
laughing-stocks for all the troop. He exchanged into the Z Battery going
out to India, and I never saw or heard of him till a year or two ago,
when he landed at Portsmouth, a much wiser and pleasanter man. The
lesson, joined to the late campaign under Sir Colin, had done him a vast
amount of good; he had lost his conceit, his vanity, his affectation,
and was what Nature meant him to be--a sensible, good-hearted fellow. As
luck would have it, Pretty Face, who had joined the Eleventh, was there
too, and Fairlie and his wife as well, and Belle had the good sense to
laugh it over with them, assuring Geraldine, however, that no one had
eclipsed the G. V. whom he had once hoped had answered his memorable
advertisement. He has grown wiser, and makes a jest of it now; it may be
a sore point still, I cannot say--nobody sees it; but, whether or no, in
the old city of Norwich, and in our corps, from Cadets to Colonels,
nobody forgets THE LINE IN THE "DAILY:" WHO DID IT, AND WHO WAS DONE BY
IT.
HOLLY WREATHS AND ROSE CHAINS.
HOLLY WREATHS AND ROSE CHAINS.
I.
THE COLONEL OF THE "WHITE FAVORS" AND CECIL ST. AUBYN.
"What are you going to do with yourself this Christmas, old fellow?"
said Vivian, of the 60th Hussars: the White Favors we call them,
because, after Edgehill, Henriette Maria gave their Colonel a white
rosette off her own dress to hang to his sword-knot, and all the 60th
have like ribbons to this day. "If you've nothing better to do,"
continued their present Lieutenant-Colonel, "Come down with me to
Deerhurst. The governor'll be charmed to see you; my mother has always
some nice-looking girls there; and, as we keep the hounds, I can promise
you some good hunting with the Harkaway."
"I shall be delighted," said I, who, being in the ---- Lancers, had been
chained by the leg at Kensington the whole year, and, of all the woes
the most pitiable, had not been able to get leave for either the 12th or
the 1st; but while my chums were shooting among the turnips, or stalking
royals in Blackmount Forest, I had been tied to town, a solitary unit in
Pall-Mall, standing on the forsaken steps of the U. S., or pacing my
hack through the dreary desert of Hyde Park--like Macaulay's New
Zealander gazing on the ruins of London Bridge.
"Very well," continued Vivian, "come down with me next week, and you can
send your horses with Steevens and my stud. The governor could mount you
well enough, but I never hunt with so much pleasure as when I'm on Qui
Vive; so I dare say you, like me, prefer your own horses. I only hope we
shan't have a confounded 'black frost;' but we must take our chance of
the weather. I think you'll like my sisters; they're just about half my
age. Lots of children came in between, but were providentially nipped in
the bud."
"Are they pretty?"
"Can't say, really; I'm too used to them to judge. I can't make love to
them, so I never took the trouble to criticise them; but we've always
been a good-looking race, I believe. I tell you who's staying
there--that girl we met in Toronto. Do you remember her--Cecil St.
Aubyn?"
"I should say I did. How did she get here?"
"She's come to live with her aunt, Mrs. Coverdale. You know that
over-dressed widow who lives in Hyde Park gardens, and, when she can't
afford Brighton, shuts the front shutters, lives in the back
drawing-room, and says, 'Not at home to callers?' St. Aubyn is as poor
as a rat, so I suppose he was glad to send Cecil here; and the Coverdale
likes to have somebody who'll draw men to her parties, which I'm sure
her champagne will never do. It's the most unblushing gooseberry ever
ticketed 'Veuve Clicquot.'"
"'Pon my life, I'm delighted to hear it," said I. "The St. Aubyn's
superb eyes will make the gooseberry go down. Men in Canada would have
swallowed cask-washings to get a single waltz with her. All Toronto
went mad on that score. You admired her, too, old fellow, only you
weren't with her long enough for such a stoic as you are to boil up into
anything warmer."
"Oh yes, I thought her extremely pretty, but I thought her a little
flirt, nevertheless."
"Stuff! An attractive girl can't make herself ugly or disagreeable, or
erect a brick wall round herself, with iron spikes on the top, for fear,
through looking at her, any fellow might come to grief. The men followed
her, and she couldn't help that."
"And she encouraged them, and she _could_ help that. However, I don't
wish to speak against her; it's nothing to me how she kills and slays,
provided I'm not among the bag. Take care you don't get shot yourself,
Ned."
"Keep your counsel for your own use, Syd. You put me in mind of the
philanthropist, who ran to warn his neighbor of the dangers of soot
while his own chimney was on fire."
"As how? I don't quite see the point of your parable," said Vivian, with
an expression of such innocent impassiveness that one would have thought
he had never seen her fair face out of her furs in her sledge, or
admired her small ankles when she was skating on the Ontario.
The winter before, a brother of mine, who was out there in the Rifles,
wrote and asked me to go and have some buffalo-hunting, and Vivian went
out with me for a couple of months. We had some very good sport in the
western woods and plains, and his elk and bison horns are still stuck up
in Vivian's rooms at Uxbridge, with many another trophy of both
hemispheres. We had sport of another kind, too, to the merry music of
the silvery sledge-bells, over the crisp snow and the gleaming ice,
while bright eyes shone on us under delicate lace veils, and little feet
peeped from under heaps of sable and bearskin, and gay voices rang out
in would-be fear when the horses shied at the shadow of themselves, or
at the moon shining on the ice. Who thinks of Canada without in fancy
hearing the ringing chimes of the gay sledge bells swinging joyous
measure into the clear sunshine or the white moonlight, in tune with
light laughter, and soft whispers, and careless hearts?
There we saw Cecil St. Aubyn, one of the prettiest girls in Toronto,
then about nineteen. My brother Harry was mad about her, so were almost
all the men in the Canada Rifles, and Engineers, and, 61st that were
quartered there; and Vivian admired her too, though in a calmer sort of
way. Perhaps if he had been with her more than a fortnight he might have
gone further. As it was, he left Toronto liking her long Canadian eyes
no more than was pleasant. It was as well so, perhaps, for it would not
have been a good match for him, St. Aubyn being a broken-down gambler,
who, having lost a princely fortune at Crocky's, and the Bads, married
at fifty a widow with a little money, and migrated to Toronto, where he
was a torment to himself and to everybody else. Vivian, meanwhile, was a
great matrimonial _coup_. Coming of a high county family, and being the
only son, of course there was priceless value set on his life, which,
equally, of course, he imperilled, after the manner of us all, in every
way he could--in charges and skirmishes, yachting, hunting, and
steeple-chasing--ever since some two-and-twenty years ago he joined as a
cornet of fifteen--a man already in muscle and ideas, pleasures and
pursuits.
At the present time he had been tranquilly engaged in the House, as he
represented the borough of Cacklebury.
He spoke seldom, but always well, and was thought a very promising
member, his speeches being in Bernal Osborne's style; but he himself
cared little about his senatorial laurels, and was fervently hoping
that there would be a row with Russia, and that we should be allowed to
go and stick Croats and make love to Bayaderes, to freshen us up and
make us boys again.