my poor little Nina, are you any wiser in your generation? You who have
had all nature taken out of you by "finishing," whose heads are crammed
with "society's" laws, and whose affections are measured out by rule,
who would have been cold, and dignified, and read Ernest a severe
lesson, and sent him back hopeless and hardened to go ten times worse
than he had gone before--believe me, that impulse points truer than "the
world," and that the dictates of the heart are better than the
regulations of society. Take my word for it, that love will do more for
a man than lectures; and faith in him be more likely to keep him
straight than all your moralising; and before you judge him severely for
having drunk a little too deep of the Sillery of life, remember that his
temptations are not your temptations, nor his ways your ways, and be
gentle to dangers which society and custom keep out of your own path.
The stern thorn crows you offer to us when we are inclined to ask your
absolution, are not the right means to win us from the rose wreaths of
our bacchanalia.
Nina, as you see, loved her _Lion_ too well to remember dignity, or
take her stand on principle; and gallantly did the young lady stand the
bombardment from all sides that sought to break her resolutions and
crush her "misplaced affections." Gordon chanced to come in that day and
light upon Ernest, and the fury into which he worked himself ill
beseemed so respectable a pharisee. Vaughan kept tranquilly haughty, and
told the banker, calmly, that he "thanked God he had his daughter's
love, and his money he would never have stooped to accept." Gordon
forbade him the house, and carried Nina back to England; but before she
went they had a parting interview, in which Ernest offered to leave her
free. But such freedom would have been worse than death to Nina, and,
before they separated, she told him that in three months more she should
be of age, and then, come what might, she would be his if he would take
her without wealth. Take her he would have done from the arms of Satanus
himself, but to disentangle himself from all his difficulties was a task
that beat the Augean stables hollow. The three months of his probation
he worked hard; he sold off all his pictures, his stud, and his
_meubles_; he sold, what cost him a more bitter pang, his encumbered
estates in Surrey; he paid off all his debts, Bluette's twenty thousand
francs included; and shaking himself free of the accumulated
embarrassments of fifteen years, he crossed the water to claim his last
love. No poor little Huguenot was ever persecuted for her faith more
than poor little Nina for her engagement. Every relative she had thought
it his duty to write admonitory letters, plentifully interspersed with
texts. Eusebius and his 4000_l._ a year, and his perspective bishopric,
were held up before her from morning to night; the banker, whose
deception in the Melusine had turned him into sharper vinegar than
before, told her with chill stoicism that she must of course choose her
own path in life, but that if that path led her into the Chaussee
d'Antin, she need never expect a sou from him, for all his property
would be divided between her two brothers. But Nina was neither to be
frightened nor bribed. She kept true to her lover, and disinherited
herself.
They were married a week or two after Nina's majority; and Gordon knew
it, though he could not prevent it. They did not miss the absence of
bridesmaids, bishop, dejeuner, and the usual fashionable crowd. It was a
marriage of the heart, you see, and did not want the trappings with
which they gild that bitter pill so often swallowed now-a-days--a
"mariage de convenance." Nina, as she saw further still into the wealth
of deep feeling and strong affection which, at her touch, she had awoke
in his heart, felt that money, and friends, and the world's smile were
well lost since she had won him. And Ernest--Ernest's sacrifice was
greater; for it is not a little thing, young ladies, for a man to give
up his accustomed freedom, and luxuries, and careless vie de garcon, and
to have to think and work for another, even though dearer than himself.
But he had long since seen so much of life, had exhausted all its
pleasures so rapidly, that they palled upon him, and for some time he
had vaguely wanted something of deeper interest, of warmer sympathy.
Unknown to himself, he had felt the "besoin d'etre aime"--a want the
trash offered him by the women of his acquaintance could never
satisfy--and his warm, passionate nature found rest in a love which,
though the strongest of his life, was still returned to him fourfold.
After some months of delicious _far niente_ in the south of France, they
came back to Paris. Though anything but rich, he was not absolutely
poor, after he had paid his debts, and the necessity to exertion rousing
his dormant talents, the _Lion_ turned _litterateur_. He was too
popular with men to be dropped because he had sold his stud or given up
his petits soupers. The romance of their story charmed the Parisians,
and, though (behind his back) they sometimes jested about the "Lion
amoureux," there were not a few who envied him his young love, and the
sunshine that shone round them in his inexpensive appartement garni.
Ernest _was_ singularly happy--and suddenly he became the star of the
literary, as he had been of the fashionable world. His mots were
repeated, his vaudevilles applauded, his feuilletons adored. The world
smiled on Nina and her _Lion_; it made little difference to them--they
had been as contented when it frowned.
But it made a good deal of difference across the Channel. Gordon began
to repent. Ernest's family was high, his Austrian connexions very
aristocratic: there would be something after all in belonging to a man
so well known. (Be successful, ami lecteur, and all your relatives will
love you.) Besides, he had found out that it is no use to put your faith
in princes, or clergymen. Eusebius had treated him very badly when he
found he could not get Nina and her money, and spoke against the poor
banker everywhere, calling him, with tender pastoral regret, a "worldly
Egyptian," a "Dives," a "whitened sepulchre," and all the rest of it.
Probably, too, stoic though he was, he missed the chevelure doree; at
any rate, he wrote to her stiffly, but kindly, and settled two thousand
a year upon her. Vaughan was very willing she should be friends with her
father, but nothing would make him draw a sou of the money. So Nina--the
only sly thing she ever did in her life--after a while contrived to buy
back the Surrey estate, and gave it to him, with no end of prayers and
caresses, on the Jour de l'An.
"And you do not regret, my darling," smiled Ernest, after wishing her
the new year's wishes, "having forgiven me for once drinking too much
Sillery, and all the other naughty things of my vie de garcon?"
"Regret!" interrupted Nina, vehemently--"regret that I have won your
love, live your life, share your cares and joys, regret that my
existence is one long day of sunshine? Oh, why ask! you know I can never
repay you for the happiness of my life."
"Rather can I never repay you," said Vaughan, looking down into her
eyes, "for the faith that made you brave calumny and opposition, and
cling to my side despite all. I was heart-sick of the world, and you
called me back to life. I was weary of the fools who misjudged me, and I
let them think me what they might."
"Ah, how happy you make me!" cried Nina. "I should have been little
worthy of your love if I had suffered slander to warp me against you, or
if any revelations you cared enough for me to make of your past life,
had parted us:
Love is not love
That alters where it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
There, monsieur!" she said, throwing her arms round him with a laugh,
while happy tears stood in her eyes--"there is a grand quotation for
you. Mind and take care, Ernest, that you never realise the Ruskinstone
predictions, and make me repent having caught and caged such a terrible
thing as a hunted PARIS LION!"
SIR GALAHAD'S RAID.
SIR GALAHAD'S RAID.
AN ADVENTURE ON THE SWEET WATERS.
For the punishment of my sins may the gods never again send me to Pera!
That I might have plenty on my shoulders I am frankly willing to
concede; all I protest is, that when one submissively acknowledges the
justice of ones future terminating in Tophet, it comes a little hard to
get purgatory in this world into the bargain. Purgatory lies _perdu_ for
one all over the earth. I have had fifty times more than my share
already, and the gout still remains an untried experience, a Gehenna
grimly waiting to avenge every morsel of white truffle and every glass
of comet claret with which I innocently solace my frail mortality.
Purgatory!--I have been chained in it fifty times; _et vous_?
When you rush to a Chancellerie, with the English Arms gorgeous above
its doorway, on the spur of a frightfully mysterious and autocratic
telegram, that makes it life or death to catch the train for England in
ten minutes, and have time enough to smoke about two dozen very big
cheroots, cooling your heels in the bureau, and then hear (when properly
tortured into the due amount of frantic agony for the intelligence to be
fully appreciated) that his Excellency is gone snipe-shooting to ----,
and that the First Secretary is in his bath, and has given orders not to
be disturbed; your informant languidly pricking his cigar with his
toothpick, and politely intimating, by his eyebrows, that you and your
necessities may go to the deuce--what's _that_? When you are doing the
sanitary at Weedon, by some hideous conjunction of evil destinies, in
the very Ducal week itself, and thinking of the rush with which Tom
Alcroft will land the filly, or the close finish with which Fordham will
get the cup, while you are not there to see, are sorely tempted to
realize the Parisian vision of Anglo suicide, and load the apple-trees
with suspended human fruit;--what's _that_? When, having got leave, and
established yourself in cosy hunting-quarters, with some cattle not to
be beat in stay, blood, and pace, close to a killing pack that never
score a blank day, there falls a bitter, black frost, locking the
country up in iron bonds, and making every bit of ridge and furrow like
a sheet of glass--what's _that_?
Bah! I could go on ad infinitum, and cite "circles of purgatory" in
which mortal man is doomed to pass his time, beside which Dante's Caina,
Antenora, and Ptolomea sink into insignificance. But of all Purgatories,
chiefest in my memory, is----Pera. Pera in the old Crimean time--Pera
the "beautiful suburb" of fond "fiction"--Pera, with the dirt, the
fleas, the murders, the mosquitoes, the crooked streets, the lying
Greeks, the stench, the hubbub, the dulness, and the everlasting "Bono
Johnny."
"Call a dog Hervey, and I shall love him," said Johnson, so dear was his
friend to him:--"call a dog Johnny, and I shall kick him," so abominable
grew that word in the eternal Turkish jabber! Tell me, O prettiest,
softest-voiced, most beguiling, feminine AEothen, in as romantic periods
as you will, of bird-like feluccas darting over the Bosphorus, of curled
caiques gliding through fragrant water-weeds; of Arabian Nights
reproduced, when up through the darkness peals the roll of the drums
calling the Faithful to prayers; of the nights of Ramadan, with the
starry clusters of light gleaming all down Stamboul, and flashing,
firefly-like, through the dark citron groves;--tell me of it as you
will, I don't care; you may think me a Goth, _ce m'est bien egal_, and
_you_ were not in cavalry quarters at Pera. I wasn't exacting; I did not
mind having ants in my jam, nor centipedes in my boots, nor a shirt in
six months, nor bacon for a luxury that strongly resembled an old file
rusted by sea-water, nor any little trifle of that sort up in the front;
all that is in the fortune of war: but I confess that Pera put me fairly
out of patience, specially when a certain trusty friend of mine, who has
no earthly fault, that I wot of, except that of perpetually looking at
life through a Claude glass (which is the most aggravating opticism to a
dispassionate and unblinded mind that the world holds), _would_ poetize
upon it, or at least on the East in general, which came pretty much to
the same thing.
The sun poured down on me till (conscience, probably) I remembered the
scriptural threat to the wicked, "their brains shall boil in their
skulls like pots;"--Sir Galahad, as I will call him, would murmur to
himself, with his cheroot in his teeth, Manfred's _salut_ to the sun,
looking as lovingly at it as any eagle. Mosquitoes reduced me to the
very borders of madness,--Sir Galahad would placidly remark, how
Buckland would revel here in all those gorgeous beetles. A Greek told
crackers till I had to double-thong him like a puppy,--Sir Galahad would
shout to me to let the fellow alone, he looked so deuced picturesque, he
must have him for a study. I made myself wretched in a ticklish caique,
the size of a cockle-shell, where, when one was going full harness to
the Great Effendi's, it was a moral impossibility to be doubled without
one's sash swinging into the water, one's sword sticking over the side,
and the liveliest sensation of cramp pervading one's body,--Sir Galahad,
blandly indifferent, would discourse, with superb Ruskin obscurity, of
"tone," and "coloring," and "harmonized light," while he looked down the
Golden Horn, for he was a little Art-mad, and painted so well that if
he had been a professional, the hanging committee would have shut him
out to a certainty.
Now he was a good fellow, a _beau sabreur_, who had fetched some superb
back strokes in the battery at Balaclava, who could send a line
spinning, and land his horse in a gentleman riders' race, and pot the
big game, and lead the first flight over Northamptonshire doubles at
home, as well as a man wants to do; but I put it to any dispassionate
person, whether this persistent poetism of his, flying in the face of
facts and of fleas, was not enough to make anybody swear in that
mosquito-purgatorio of Pera?
Sir Galahad was a capital fellow, and the men would have gone after him
to the death; the fair, frank, handsome face, a little womanish perhaps,
was very pleasant to look at, and he got the Victoria not long ago for a
deed that would suit Arthur's Table; but in Pera, I avow, he made me
swear hard, and if he would just have set his heel on his Claude glass,
cursed the Turks, and growled refreshingly, I should have loved him
better. He was philosophic and he was poetic; and the combination of
temperaments lifted him in a mortifying altitude above ordinary
humanity, that was baked, broiled, grumbling, savage, bitten, fleeced,
and holding its own against miserable rats, Greeks, and Bono Johnnies,
with an Aristides thieving its last shirt, and a Pisistratus getting
drunk at its case-bottle! That sublime serenity of his in Pera ended in
making me unholy and ungenerous; if he would but have sworn once at the
confounded country, I should have borne it, but he never did, and I
longed to see him out of temper, I pined and thirsted to get him
disenchanted. "_Tout vient a point, a qui sait attendre_," they say; a
motto, by the way, that might be written over the Horse Guards for the
comfort of gloomy souls, when, in the words of the Psalmist, "Promotion
cometh neither from the south, nor from the east, nor from the
west"--by which lament one might conclude David of Israel to have been a
sufferer by the Purchase-system!
"Delicious!" said Sir Galahad, sending a whiff of Turkish tobacco into
the air one morning after exercise, when he and I, having ridden out a
good many miles along the Sweet Waters, turned the horses loose, bought
some grapes and figs of an old Turk, dispossessed him of his bit of
cocoa-matting, and flung ourselves under a plane-tree. And the fellow
looked round him through his race-glass at the cypress woods, the
mosques and minarets, the almond thickets, the "soft creamy distance,"
as he called it in his _argot d'atelier_, and the Greek fishermen near,
drawing up a net full of silvery prismatic fishes, with a relish
absolutely exasperating. Exasperating--when the sun was broiling one's
brain through the linen, and there wasn't a drop of Bass or soda and B
to be got for love or money, and one thought thirstily of days at home
in England, with the birds whirring up from the stubble in the cool
morning, and the cold punch uncorked for luncheon, under the home woods
fringing the open.
"One wants Hunt to catch that bit of color," murmured Sir Galahad,
luxuriously eying a mutilated Janissary's tomb covered with scarlet
creepers.
"Hunt be hanged!" said I (meaning no disrespect to that eminent
Pre-Raphaelite, whose "Light of the World" I took at first sight to be a
policeman going his night rounds, and come out in his shirt by mistake;
by the way, it is a droll idea to symbolize the "light of the world" by
a watchman with a dark lantern, _lux in tenebras_ with a vengeance!).
"Give me the sweet shady side of Pall Mall, and the devil may take the
Sweet Waters. What's the Feast of Bairam beside the Derby-day, or your
confounded coloring beside a well-done cutlet? What's lemonade by
Brighton Tipper, and a veiled bundle by a pretty blonde, and an eternity
of Stamboul by an hour of Piccadilly?"
Sir Galahad smiled superior, and shied a date at me.
"Goth! can't you be content to feed like the Patriarchs and live an
idyl?"
"No! I'd rather feed like a Parisian and live an idler! Eat grapes if
you choose; I agree with Brillat-Savarin, and don't like my wine in
pills."
"My good fellow, you're all prose."
"And you're all poetry. You're as bad as that pretty little commissariat
girl who lisped me to death last night at the Embassy with platitudes of
bosh about the 'poetry of marriage.'"
"The deuce!" said Sir Galahad, with a whistle, "that must be like most
other poetry nowadays--uncommon dull prose, sliced up in uneven lengths!
Didn't you tell her so?"
"Couldn't; I should have pulled the string for a shower-bath of
sentiment! When a woman's bolted on romance you only make the pace worse
if you gall her with the curb of common sense. When romance is in,
reason's out,--excuse the personality!"
He didn't hear me; he was up like a retriever who scents a wild duck or
a water-rat among the sedges, for sweeping near us with soft gliding
motion, as pretty as a toy and as graceful as a swan, came a caique,
with the wife of a Pacha of at least a hundred tails in it, to judge by
the costliness of her exquisite attire. Now, women were not rare, but
then they were always veiled, which is like giving a man a nugget he
mustn't take out of the quartz, a case of champagne he mustn't undo, a
cover-side he is never to beat, a trout stream in which he must never
fling a fly; and Sir Galahad, whose loves were not, I admit, quite so
saintly as Arthur's code exacted, lost his head in a second as the
caique drifted past us, and, raising herself on her cushions, the Leilah
Duda, or Salya within it, glanced toward the myrtle screen that half hid
us, with the divinest antelope eyes in the world, and letting the
silver gauze folds of her veil float half aside, showed us the beautiful
warm bloom, the proud lips, and the chestnut tresses braided with pearls
and threaded with gold, of your genuine Circassian beauty. Shade of Don
Juan! what a face it was!
A yataghan might have been at his throat, a bowstring at his neck,
eunuchs might have slaughtered, and pachas have impaled him, Galahad
would have seen more of that loveliness: headlong he plunged down the
slope, crushing through the almond thickets and scattering the green
tree-frogs right and left; the caique was just rounding past as he
reached the water's edge, and the beauty's veil was drawn in terror of
her guard. But as the little cockle-shell, pretty and ticklish as a
nautilus, was moored to a broad flight of marble stairs, the Circassian
turned her head towards the place where the Unbeliever stood in the
sunlight--her eyes were left her, and with them women speak in a
universal tongue. Then the green lattice gate shut, the white
impenetrable walls hid her from sight, and Sir Galahad stood looking
down the Sweet Waters in a sort of beatific vision, in love for the
1360th time in his life. And certainly he had never been in love with
better reason; for is there anything on earth so divine as your
antelope-eyed and gold-haired Circassian?
"I shall be inside those walls or know the reason why," said he, whom
two gazelle eyes had fired and captured, there by the side of the sunny
Sweet Waters, where the lazy air was full of syringa and rose odors, and
there was no sound but the indolent beating of the tired oars on the
ripples.
"Which reason you will rapidly find," I suggested, "in a knock on the
head from the Faithful!"
"Well! a very picturesque way of coming to grief; to go off the scene in
the sick-wards, from raki and fruit, would be commonplace and
humiliating, but to die in a serail, stabbed through and through by
green-eyed jealousy, would be piquant and refreshing to the last degree;
do you really think there's a chance of it?" said Galahad, rather
anxiously--the eager wistful anxiety of a man who, athirst for the
forest, hears of the rumored slot of an outlying deer--while he shouted
the Greek fishermen to him, and learned after sore travail through a
slough of mixed Italian, Turkish, and Albanian, that the white palace,
with its green lattice and its hanging gardens, belonged to a rich
merchant of Constantinople, and that this veiled angel was the favorite
of his harem, Leilah Derran, a recent purchase in Circassia, and the
queen of the Anderun.
"The old rascal!" swore Galahad, in his wrath, which was not, however, I
think, caused by any particular Christian disgust at polygamy. "A fat
old sinner, I'll be bound, who sits on his divan puffing his chibouque
and stuffing his sweetmeats, as yellow as Beppo, and as round as a ball.
Bah! what pearls before swine! It's enough to make a saint swear. Those
heavenly eyes!..." And Galahad went into a somewhat earthly reverie,
colored with a thirsty jealousy of the purchaser and the possessor of
this Circassian gazelle, as he rode reluctantly back towards Pera.
The Circassian was in his head, and did not get out again. He let
himself be bewitched by that lovely face which had flashed on him for a
second, and began to feel himself as aggrieved by that innocent and
unoffending Turkish lord of hers, as if the unlucky gentleman had stolen
his own property! The antelope eyes had looked softly and hauntingly
sad, moreover: I demonstrated to him that it was nothing more than the
way that the eyelashes drooped, but nobody in love (very few people out
of it) have any taste for logic; he was simply disgusted with my
realism, and saw an instant vision for himself of this loveliest of
slaves, captive in a bazaar and sold into the splendid bondage of the
harem as into an inevitable fate, mournful in her royalty as a
nightingale in a cage stifled with roses, and as little able to escape
as the bird. A vision which intoxicated and enraptured Sir Galahad, who,
in the teeth of every abomination of Pera, had been content to see only
what he wished to see, and had maintained that the execrable East, to
make it the East of Hafiz and all the poets, only wanted--available
Haidees!
"Hang it! I think it's nothing _but_ Hades," said an Aide, overhearing
that statement one night, as we stumbled out of a half-cafe,
half-gambling-booth pandemonium into the crooked, narrow, pitch-dark
street, where dogs were snarling over offal, jackals screaming, Turkish
bands shrieking, cannon booming out the hour of prayer, women yelling
alarms of fire, a Zouave was spitting a Greek by way of practice, and an
Irishman had just potted a Dalmatian, in as brawling, rowing,
pestiferous, unodorous an earthly Gehenna as men ever succeeded in
making.