he loved, Waldemar's wrath fell heavily, and would, to a certainty, have
found some means of wreaking itself, but for the last wishes of his
father. As it was, he took a nobler, yet a more complete revenge. The
day of the funeral, when they were assembled for the reading of the
will, Maximilian, unconscious of his doom, came with his gentle face,
and tender melancholy air, to inherit, as he believed, Fairlie, and all
the personal property.
Stunned as by a spent ball, horror-struck, disbelieving his senses, he
heard his younger brother proclaimed the heir. It was a serious thing
to him, moreover, for--for a man of large expenses and great
ostentation--his own means were small. To secure every shilling he had
schemed, and planned, and lied; and now every shilling was taken from
him. Like the dog of AEsopian memory, trying to catch two pieces of meat,
he had lost his own!
After the last words were read, Waldemar stood a moment irresolute; then
he lifted his head, his dark eyes bright and clear, his mouth fixed and
firm, a proud calm displacing his old look of passion and of care.
He went up to his brother with a generous impulse, and held out his
hand.
"Maximilian, from our boyhood you never liked me, and of late you have
done me a great wrong; but I am willing to believe that you did it from
a mistaken motive, and by me, at least, it shall never be recalled. My
father, in his wish to make amends for the one harsh act of his life to
me, has made a will which I know you consider unjust. I cannot dispute
his last desire that I should inherit Fairlie, but I can do what I know
he would sanction--divide with you the wealth his energy collected. Take
the half of the property, as if he had left it to you, and over his
grave let us forget the past!"
* * * * *
On the last day of the year, so eventful to them both, Falkenstein and
Valerie drove through the park at Fairlie. The role of a country
gentleman would have been the last into which Waldemar, with his
independent opinions and fastidious intellect, would have sunk; but he
was fond of the place from early associations, and he came down to take
possession. The tenantry and servants welcomed him heartily, for they
had often used to wish that the wild high-spirited child, who rode his
Shetland over the country at a headlong pace, and if he sometimes
teased their lives out, always gave them a kind word and merry laugh,
had been the heir instead of the one to whom they applied the old
proverb "still and ill."
The tenantry had been dismissed, the dinner finished, even the briarwood
pipe smoked out, and in the wide Elizabethan window of the library
Falkenstein stood, looking on the clear bright night, and watching the
Old Year out.
"You sent the deed of gift to-day to Maximilian?" said Valerie, clasping
both her hands on his arm.
"Yes. He does not take it very graciously; but perhaps we can hardly
expect that from a man who has been disinherited. I question if I should
accept it at all."
"But you could never have wronged another as he wronged you," cried
Valerie. "Oh, Waldemar! I think I never realised fully, till the day you
took your generous revenge, how noble, how good, how above all others
you are."
He smiled, and put his hand on her lips.
"Good, noble, silly child! those words may do for some spotless Gahlahad
or Folko, not for me, who, a month ago, was in debt to some of the
greatest blackguards in town, who have yielded to every temptation,
given way to every weakness; not with the excuse of a boy new to life,
but willfully and recklessly, knowing both the pleasures and their
price--I, who but for your love and my father's, should now be a
solitary exile, paying for my past follies with----"
"Be quiet," interrupted Valerie, with her passionate vivacity. "As
different as was 'Mirabeau juge par sa famille et Mirabeau juge par le
peuple,' are you judged by your enemies, and judged by those who love
you. Granted you have had temptations, follies, errors; so has every
man of high spirit and generous temper, and I value you far more coming
out of a fiery furnace with so much of pure gold that the flames could
not destroy, than if you were some ascetic Pharisee, who has never
succumbed because he has never been tempted, and, born with no
weaknesses, is born with no warmer virtues either!"
Falkenstein laughed, as he looked down at her.
"You little goose! Well, at least you have eloquence, Valerie, if not
truth, on your side; and your sophistry is dear to me, as it springs out
of your love."
"But it is not sophistry," she cried, with an energetic stamp of her
foot. "If you will not listen to philosophy, concede, at least, to fact.
Which is most worthy of my epithets--'noble and good'--Waldemar
Falkenstein, or Maximillian? And yet Maximillian has been quiet and
virtuous from his youth upwards, and always wins white balls from the
ballot of society."
"Well, you shall have the privilege of your sex--the last word," smiled
Waldemar, "more especially as the last word is on my side."
"Hark!" interrupted Valerie, quiet and subdued in a second, "the clock
is striking twelve."
Silently, with her arms round his neck, they listened to the parting
knell of the Old Year, stealing quietly away from its place among men.
From the church towers through England tolled the twelve strokes, with a
melancholy echo, telling a world that its dead past was laid in a sealed
grave, and the stone of Never More was rolled to the door of the
sepulchre. The Old Year was gone, with all its sins and errors, its
golden gleams and midnight storms, its midsummer days of sunshine for
some, its winter nights of starless gloom for others. Its last knell
echoed; and then, from the old grey belfries in villages and towns, over
the stirring cities and the sleeping hamlets, over the quiet meadows and
stretching woodlands and grand old forest trees, rang the Silver Chimes
of the New Year.
"It shall be a happy New Year to you, my darling, if my love can make it
so," whispered Waldemar, as the musical bells clashed out in wild
harmony under the winter stars.
She looked up into his eyes. "I _must_ be happy, since it will be passed
with you. Do you remember, Waldemar, the night I saw you first, my
telling you New Year's-day was my birthday, and wondering where you and
I should spend the next? I liked you strangely from the first, but how
little I foresaw that my whole life was to hang on yours!"
"As little as I foresaw when, after heavy losses at Godolphin's, I
watched the Old Year out in my chambers, a tired, ruined, hopeless,
aimless man, with not one on whom I could rely for help or sympathy in
my need, that I should stand here now, free, clear from debt, with all
my old entanglements shaken off, my old scores wiped out, my darker
errors forgotten, my worst enemy humbled, and my own future bright. Oh!
Valerie! Heaven bless you for the love that followed me into exile!"
He drew her closer to him as he spoke, and as he felt the beating of the
heart that was always true to him, and the soft caress of the lips that
had always a smile for him, Falkenstein looked out over the wide
woodland that called him master, glistening in the clear starlight, and
as he listened to the SILVER CHIMES--joyous herald of the New-born
Year--he blessed in his inmost heart the GOLDEN FETTERS OF LOVE.
SLANDER AND SILLERY.
SLANDER AND SILLERY.
I.
THE LION OF THE CHAUSSEE D'ANTIN.
Ma mere est a Paris,
Mon pere est a Versailles.
Et moi je suis ici.
Pour chanter sur la paille,
L'amour! L'amour!
La nuit comme le jour.
Humming this popular if not over-recherche ditty, a man sat sketching in
pastels, one morning, in his rooms at Numero 10, Rue des Mauvais Sujets,
Chaussee d' Antin, Paris.
The band of the national guard, the marchands crying "Coco!" the
charlatans puffing everything from elixirs to lead-pencils, the Empress
and Mme. d'Alve passing in their carriage, the tramp of some Zouaves
just returned from Algeria--nothing in the street below disturbed him;
he went sketching on as if his life depended on the completion of the
picture. He was a man about thirty-three, middle height, and eminently
graceful. He was half Bohemian, half English, and the animation of the
one nation and the hauteur of the other were by turns expressed on his
chiselled features as his thoughts moved with his pencil. The stamp of
his good blood was on him; his face would have attracted and interested
in ever so large a crowd. He was very pale, and there was a tired look
on his wide, powerful forehead and in his long dark eyes, and a weary
line or two about his handsome mouth, as if he had exhausted his youth
very quickly; and, indeed, to see life as he had seen it _is_ somewhat a
fatiguing process, and apt to make one blase before one's time.
The rooms in which he sat were intensely comfortable, and very
provocative to a quiet pipe and idleness. To be sure, if one judged his
tastes by them, they were not probably, to use the popular jargon,
"healthy," for they had nothing very domestic or John Halifaxish about
them, and were certainly not calculated to gratify the eyes of maiden
aunts and spinster sisters.
There were fencing-foils, pistols, tobacco-boxes of every style and
order, from ballet-girls to terriers' heads. There were three or four
cockatoos and parrots on stands chattering bits of Quartier Latin songs,
or imitating the cries in the street below. There were cards,
dice-boxes, albums a rire, meerschaums, lorgnons, pink notes, no end of
De Kock's and Lebrun's books, and all the etcaeteras of chambres de
garcon strewed about: and there were things, too--pictures, statuettes,
fauteuils, and a breakfast-service of Sevres and silver--that Du Barry
need not have scrupled to put in her "petite bon-bonniere" at Luciennes.
So busy was he sketching and singing
"Messieurs les etudiens
Montez a la Chaumiere!"
that he never heard a knock at his door, and he looked up with an
impatient frown on his white, broad forehead as a man entered _sans
ceremonie_.
"Mon Dieu! Ernest," cried his friend, "what the devil are you doing here
with your pipe and your pastels, when I've been waiting at Tortoni's a
good half-hour, and at last, out of patience, drove here to see what on
earth had become of you?"
"My dear fellow, I beg you a thousand pardons," said Vaughan, lazily. "I
was sketching this, and you and your horses went clean out of my head, I
honestly confess."
"And your breakfast too, it seems," said De Concressault, glancing at
the table. "Is it Madame de Melusine or the little Bluette whose
portrait absorbs you so much? No, by Jove! it's a prettier woman than
either of 'em. If she's like that, take me to see her this instant. What
glorious gold hair! I adore your countrywomen when they've hair that
color. Where did you get that face? Is she a duchess, or a danseuse, a
little actress you're going to patronise, or a millionnaire you're going
to marry?"
"I can't tell you," laughed Vaughan. "I've not an idea who she may be. I
saw her last evening coming out of the Francais, and picked up her
bouquet for her as she was getting into her carriage. The face was
young, the smile very pretty and bright, and, as they daguerreotyped
themselves in my mind, I thought I might as well transfer them to paper
before newer beauties chased them out of it."
"Diable! and you don't know who she is? However, we'll soon find out.
That gold hair mustn't be lost. But get your breakfast, pray, Ernest,
and let us be off to poor Armand's sale."
"That's the way we mourn our dead friends," said Vaughan, with a sneer,
pouring out his coffee. "Armand is jesting, laughing, and smoking with
us one day, the next he's pitched out of his carriage going down to
Asnieres, and all we think of is--that his horses are for sale. If I
were found in the Morgue to-morrow, your first emotion, Emile, would be,
'Vaughan's De l'Orme will be sold. I must go and bid for it directly.'"
De Concressault laughed as he looked up at a miniature of Marion de
l'Orme, once taken for the Marquis of Gordon. "I fancy, mon garcon,
there'll be too many sharks after all your possessions for me to stand
any chance."
"True enough," said Vaughan; "and I question if they'll wait till my
death before they come down on 'em. But I don't look forward. I take
life as it comes. Vogue la galere! At least, I've _lived_, not
vegetated." And humming his refrain,
"L'amour! l'amour!
La nuit comme le jour!"
he lounged down the stairs and drove to a sale in the Faubourg St.
Germain, where one of his Paris chums, a virtuoso and connoisseur, had
left endless _meubles_ to be sold by his duns and knocked down to his
friends.
Vaughan was quite right; he _had_ lived, and at a pretty good pace, too.
When he came of age a tolerably good fortune awaited him, but it had not
been long in his hands before he contrived to let it slip through them.
He'd been brought up at Sainte Barbe, after being expelled from Rugby,
knew all the best of the "jeunesse doree," and could not endure any
place after Paris, where his life was as sparkling and brilliant as the
foam off a glass of champagne. Wild and careless, high spirited, and
lavish in his Opera suppers, his _cabaret_ dinners, his Trois Freres
banquets, his lansquenet parties, his bouquets for baronnes, and his
bracelets for ballerinas, Ernest gained his reputation as a _Lion_,
and--ruined himself, too, poor old fellow!
His place down in Surrey had mortgages thick on every inch of its lands,
and the money that kept him going was borrowed from those modern Satans,
money lenders, at the usually ruinous interest. "But still," Ernest was
wont to say, with great philosophy, "I've had ten years' swing of
pleasure. Does every man get as much as that? And should I have been any
happier if I'd been a good boy, and a country squire, sat on the bench,
amused my mind with turnips, and married some bishop's daughter, who'd
have marched me to church, forbidden cigars, and buried me in family
boots?"
Certainly that would _not_ have been his line, and so, in natural horror
at it, he dashed into a diametrically opposite one, and after the favor
he had shown him from every handsome woman that drove through Longchamp,
wore diamonds at the Tuileries, and supped with dominos noirs at bals
d'Opera, and the favor he showed to cards, the _courses_, and the
_coulisses_, few bishops would have imperilled their daughters' souls by
setting them to hunt down this wicked _Lion_, especially as the poor
_Lion_ now wasn't worth the trapping. If he had been, there would have
been hue and cry enough after him I don't doubt; but the Gordon Cummings
of the beau sexe rarely hunt unless it's worth their while, and they can
bring home splendid spoils to make their bosom friends mad with envy;
and Ernest, despite his handsome face, his fashionable reputation, and
the aroma of conquest that hung about him (they used to say he never
wooed ever so negligently but he won), was assuredly neither an
"eligible speculation" nor a "marrying man," and was an object rather
of terror to English mammas steering budding young ladies through the
dangerous vortex of French society with a fierce chevaux de frise of
British prejudices and a keen British eye to business. If Ernest was of
no other use, however, he was invaluable to his uncles, aunts, and male
cousins, as a sort of scapegoat and _epouvantail_, to be held up on high
to show the unwary what they would come to if they followed his steps.
It was so pleasant to them to exult over his backslidings, and, cutting
him mercilessly up into little bits, hold condemnatory sermons over
every one of the pieces. "Dans l'adversite de nos meilleurs amis, nous
trouvons toujours quelque chose qui ne nous deplait pas;" and Vaughan's
friends, like the rest of us pharisees, dearly loved to glance at the
publican (especially if he was handsomer, cleverer, or any way better
than themselves), and thank God loudly that they were not such men as
he. Ernest was a hardened sinner, however; he laughed, put the Channel
between him and them, and went on his ways without thinking or caring
for their animadversions.
"By Jove! Emile," said he as they sat dining together at Leiter's, "I
should like to find out my golden-haired sylphide. She was English, by
her fair skin, and though I'm not very fond of my compatriotes,
especially when they're abroad (I think touring John Bull detestable
wrapped up in his treble plaid of reserve), still I should like to find
her out just for simple curiosity. I assure you she'd the prettiest foot
and ankle I ever saw, not excepting even Bluette's."
"Ma foi! that's a good deal from _you_. She must be found, then. Voyons!
shall we advertise in the _Moniteur_, employ the secret police, or call
at all the hotels in person to say that you're quite ready to act out
Soulie's 'Lion Amoureux,' if you can only discover the petite
bourgeoise to play it with you?"
Vaughan laughed as he drank his demi-tasse.
"Lion amoureux! that's an anomaly; we're only in love just enough pour
nous amuser; and of us Albin says, very rightly,
Si vous connaissiez quelques meilleurs,
Vous porteriez bientot cette ame ailleurs."
"Very well, then: if you don't know of anything better, let's hunt up
this incognita. If she went to the Francais, she's most likely at the
Odeon to-night," said De Concressault. "Shall we try?"
"Allons!" said Vaughan, rising indolently, as he did most things. "But
it's rather silly, I think; there are bright smiles and pretty feet
enough in Paris without one's setting off on a wild-goose chase after
them."
They were playing the last act of "La Calomnie," as Vaughan and De
Concressault took their places, put up their lorgnons, and looked round
the house. He swore a few mental "Diables!" and "Sacres!" as his gaze
fell on faces old or ugly, or too brunes or too blondes, or anything but
what he wanted. At last, without moving his glass, he touched De
Concressault's arm.
"There she is, Emile, in the fourth from the centre, in a white opera
cloak, with pink flowers in her hair."
"I see her, mon ami," said Emile. "I found her out two seconds ago (see
how well you sketch!) but I wouldn't spoil your pleasure in discovering
her. Mon Dieu! Ernest, she's looking at you, and smiles as if she
recognised you. Was there ever so lucky a Lauzun?"
Vaughan could have laughed outright to see by the brightness of the
girl's expression that she knew the saviour of her bouquet again, for
though he was accustomed to easy conquests, such naive interest in him
at such short notice was something new to him.
He didn't take his lorgnon off her again, and she was certainly worth
the honor, with her soft, lustrous gold hair, the eyes that defy
definition--black in some lights, violet in others--a wide-arched
forehead, promising plenty of brains, and a rayonnante, animated, joyous
expression, quite refreshing to anybody as bored and blase as Vaughan
and De Concressault. As soon as the last piece was over Vaughan slipped
out of his loge, and took up his station at the entrance.
He didn't wait in vain: the golden hair soon came, on the arm of a
gentleman--middle aged, as Vaughan noticed with a sensation of
satisfaction. She glanced up at him as she passed: he looked very
handsome in the gas glare. Vaughan perhaps was too sensible a fellow to
think of his pose, but even _we_ have our weaknesses under certain
circumstances, as well as the crinolines. Luckily for him, he chanced to
have in his pocket a gold serpent bracelet he had bought that morning
for some fair dame or demoiselle. He stopped her, and held it out to
her.
"I beg your pardon, mademoiselle," he said in French, "but I think you
dropped this?"
She looked up at him with the sunniest of smiles as she answered, in a
pure accent, "No monsieur, thank you, it does not belong to me."
The middle-aged man glanced sideways at him with true British
suspicion--I dare say a pickpocket, a Rouge, and Fieschi, were all mixed
up in his mind as embodied in the graceful figure and bold glance of the
_Lion_. He drew the girl on, looking much like a heavy cloud with a
bright sun ray after it; but she half turned her head over her shoulder
to give him a farewell smile, which Ernest returned with ten per cent.
interest.
"Anglais," said Emile, concisely.
"Malheureusement," said Ernest as briefly, as he pushed his way into the
air, and saw the gold hair vanish into her carriage. He went quickly up
to the cocher.
"Ou demeurent-ils, mon ami?" he whispered, slipping a five-franc piece
into his hand.
The man smiled. "A l'Hotel de Londres, monsieur; No. 6, au premier."
"The devil! pourquoir ne allez pas?" said an unmistakably English voice
from the interior of the voiture. The man set off at a trot; Ernest
sprang into his own trap.
"Au Chateau Rouge! May as well go there, eh, Emile? What a deuced pity
la chevelure doree is English!"
"I wish she were a danseuse, an actress, a fleuriste--anything one could
make his own introduction to. Confound it there's the 'heavy father,'
I'm afraid, in the case, and some rigorous mamma, or vigilant _beguine_
of a governess: but, to judge by the young lady's smiles, she'll be easy
game unless she's tremendously fenced in."
With which consolatory reflection Vaughan leaned back and lighted a
cheroot, _en route_ to spend the night as he had spent most of them for
the last ten years, till the fan had begun to be more bore than
pleasure.
II.
NINA GORDON.
"Have you been to the Hotel de Londres, Ernest?" said De Concressault,
as Vaughan lounged into Tortoni's next day, where Emile and three or
four other men were drinking Seltzer and talking of how Cerisette had
beaten Vivandiere by a neck at Chantilly, or (the sport to which a
Frenchman takes much more naturally) of how well Riviere played in the
"Prix d'un Bouquet;" what a _belle taille_ la De Servans had; and what a
fool Senecterre had made of himself in the duel about Madame Viardot.
"Of course I have," said Vaughan. "The name is Gordon--general name
enough in England. They were gone to the Expiatoire, the portiere told
me. There _is_ the heavy father, as I feared, and a quasi-governess
acting duenna; they're travelling with another family, whose name I
could not hear: the woman said 'C'etait beaucoup trop dur pour les
levres.' I dare say they're some Brummagem people--some Fudge family or
other--on their travels. Confound it!"
"Poor Ernest," laughed De Concressault. "Some gold hair has bewitched
him, and instead of finding it belongs to a danseuse, or a married
woman, or a fleuriste of the Palais Royal, or something attainable, he
finds it turn into an unapproachable English girl, with no end of
outlying sentries round her, who'll fire at the first familiar
approach."
"It is a hard case," said De Kerroualle, a dashing fellow in one of the
"Regiments de famille." "Never mind, mon ami; 'contre fortune bon
coeur,' you know: it'll be more fun to devastate one of our countrymen's
inviolate strongholds than to conquer where the white flag's already
held out. Halloa! here's a compatriot of yours, I'd bet; look at his
sanctified visage and stiff choker--a Church of England man, eh?"
"The devil!" muttered Vaughan, turning round; "deuce take him, it's my
cousin Ruskinstone! What in the world does _he_ do in Paris?"
The man he spoke of was the Rev. Eusebius Ruskinstone, the Dean's
Warden of the cathedral of Faithandgrace, a tall, thin young clerical of
eight or nine-and-twenty, with goodness enough (it was generally
supposed) in his little finger to make up for all Ernest's sins, scarlet
though they were. He had just sat down and taken up the carte to blunder
through "Potage au Duc de Malakoff," "Fricassee de volaille a la
Princesse Mathilde," and all the rest of it, when his eye lit on his
graceless cousin, and a vinegar asperity spread over his bland visage.
Vaughan rose with a lazy grace, immensely bored within him: "My dear
Ruskinstone, what an unanticipated pleasure. I never hoped Vanity Fair
would have had power to lure _you_ into its naughty peep-shows and
roundabouts."
The Rev. Eusebius reddened slightly; he had once stated strongly his
opinion that poor Paris was Pandemonium. "How do you do?" he said,
giving his cousin two fingers; "it is a long time since we saw you in
England."
"England doesn't want me," said Ernest, dryly. "I don't fancy I should
be very welcome at Faithandgrace, should I? The dear Chapter would
probably consign me to starvation for my skeptical notions, as Calvin
did Castellio. But what _has_ brought you to Paris? Are you come to
fight the Jesuits in a conference, or to abjure the Wardenship and turn
over to them?"