that girl's my particular aversion, she must haunt me like this. If
she'd been anybody I wanted to meet, I should never have caught a
glimpse of her. For mercy's sake, Vane, if you see a black hat and white
feather anywhere again, tell me, and we'll change the route
immediately."
Change the route we did, for, going on board the steamer at Duesseldorf,
there, on the deck, stood the Tressillian. Telfer turned sharp on his
heel, and went back as he came. "I'll be shot if I go down the Rhine
with her. Let's cut across into France." Cut across we did, but we
stopped at Brussels on our way; and when at last we caught sight of the
tops of the fir-trees around Essellau, Telfer took a long whiff at his
pipe with an air of contentment. "I should say we're safe now. She'll
hardly come pig-sticking into the middle of Swabia."
II.
VIOLET TRESSILLIAN.
Essellau was a very jolly place, with thick woods round it, and the
river Beersbad running in sight; and his pretty sister, the Comtesse
Virginie, his good wines, and good sport, made Von Edenburgh's a
pleasant house to visit at. Marc himself, who is in the Austrian service
(he was winged at Montebello the other day by a rascally Zouave, but he
paid him off for it, as I hope his countrymen will eventually pay off
all the Bonapartists for their _galimatias_)--Marc himself was a jolly
fellow, a good host, a keen shot, and a capital ecarte player, and made
us enjoy ourselves at Essellau as he had done before, hunting and
shooting with Telfer down at Torwood.
"I've some countrywomen of yours here, Telfer," said Marc, after we'd
talked over his English loves, given him tiding of duchesses and
danseuses, and messages from no end of pretty women that he'd flirted
with the Christmas before. "They're some friends of my mother's, and
when they were at Baden-Baden last year, Virginie struck up a desperate
young lady attachment with one of them----"
"Are they good-looking?--because, if they are, they may be drysalters'
daughters, and I shan't care," interrupted Fred.
Telfer stroked his moustache with a contemptuous smile--_he_ wouldn't
have looked at a drysalter's daughter if she'd had all the beauty of
Amphitrite.
"Come and see," said Marc. "Virginie will think you're neglecting her
atrociously."
Horribly bored to be going to meet some Englishwomen who might turn out
to be Smiths or Joneses, and would, to a dead certainty, spoil all his
pleasure in pig-sticking, shooting, and ecarte, by flirting with him
whether he would or no, the Major strode along corridors and galleries
after Von Edenburgh. When at length we reached the salon where Virginie
and her mother and friends were, Telfer lifted his eyes from the ground
as the door opened, started as if he'd been shot, and stepped back a
pace or two, with an audible, "If that isn't the very devil!"
There, in a low chair, sat the Tressillian, graceful as a Sphakiote
girl, with a toilet as perfect as her profile, dark hair like waves of
silk, and dark eyes full of liquid light, that, when they looked
irresistible, could do anything with any man that they liked. Violet
certainly looked as unlike that unlucky ogre and scapegoat, the devil,
as a young lady ever could. But worse than a score of demons was she in
poor Telfer's eyes: to have come out to Essellau only to be shut up in a
country-house for a whole month with his pet aversion!--certainly it
_was_ a hard case, and the fierce lightning glance he flashed on her was
pardonable under the circumstances. But nobody's more impassive than the
Major: I've seen him charge down into the Sikhs with just the same calm,
quiet expression as he'd wear smoking and reading a novel at home; so he
soon rallied, bowed to the Tressillian, who gave him an inclination as
cold as the North Pole, shook hands with her aunt and cousins (three
women I hate: the mamma's the most dexterous of manoeuvrers, and the
girls the arrantest of flirts), and then sat down to a little quiet chat
with Virginie von Edenburgh, who's pretty, intelligent, and unaffected,
though she's a belle at the Viennese court. Telfer was pleasant with the
little comtesse; he'd known her from childhood, and she was engaged to
the colonel of Marc's troop, so that Telfer felt quite sure she'd no
designs upon him, and talked to her _sans gene_, though to have wholly
abstained from bitterness and satire would have been an impossibility to
him, with the obnoxious Tressillian seated within sight. Once he fixed
her with his calm gray eyes, she met them with a proud flashing glance;
Telfer gave back the defiance, and _guerre a outrance_ was declared
between them. It was plain to see that they hated one another by
instinct, and I began to think Calceolaria wasn't so safe in my stables
after all, for if the Major set his face against anything, his father,
who pretty well worshipped him, would never venture to do it in
opposition; he'd as soon think of leaving Torwood to the country, to be
turned into an infirmary or a museum.
That whole day Telfer was agreeable to the Von Edenburgh, distantly
courteous to the Carterets, and utterly oblivious of the very existence
of the Tressillian. When we were smoking together, after dinner, he
began to unburden himself of his mighty wrath.
"Where the deuce did you pick up that girl, Marc?" asked he, as we stood
looking at the sun setting over the woods of Essellau, and crimsoning
the western clouds.
"What girl?" asked Marc.
"That confounded Tressillian," answered the Major, gloomily.
"I told you the Carterets were friends of my mother's, and last year,
when the Tressillian came with them to Baden, Virginie met her, and they
were struck with a great and sudden love for one another, after the
insane custom of women. But why on earth, Telfer, do you call her such
names? I think her divine; her eyes are something----"
"I wish her eyes had been at the devil before she'd bewitched my poor
father with them," said Telfer, pulling a rose to pieces fiercely. "I
give you my word, Marc, that if I didn't like you so well, I'd go
straight off home to-morrow. Here have I been turning out of my route
twenty times, on purpose to avoid her, and then she must turn up at the
very place I thought I was sure to be safe from her. It's enough to make
a man swear, I should say, and not over-mildly either."
"But what's she done?" cried Von Edenburgh, thinking, I dare say, that
Telfer had gone clean mad. "Refused you--jilted you--what is it?"
"Refused me! I should like to see myself giving her the chance," said
the Major, with intense scorn. "No but she's done what I'd never
forgive--tried to cozen the poor old governor into marrying her. She's
no money, you know, and no home of her own; but, for all that, for a
girl of twenty to try and hook an old man of seventy-five, to cheat him
into the idea that he's made a conquest, and chisel him into the belief
that she's in love with him--faugh! the very idea disgusts one. What
sort of a wife would a woman make who could act such a lie?"
As he spoke, a form swept past him, and a beautiful face full of scorn
and passion gleamed on him through the _demi-lumiere_.
"By Jove! you've done it now, Telfer," said Walsham. "She was behind us,
I bet you, gathering those roses; her hands are full of them, and she
took that means of showing us she was within earshot. You _have_ set
your foot in it nicely, certainly."
"_Ce m'est bien egal_," said Telfer, haughtily. "If she hear what I say
of her, so much the better. It's the truth, that a young girl who'd sell
herself for money, as soon as she's got what she wanted will desert the
man who's given it to her; and I like my father too well to stand by and
see him made a fool of. The Tressillian and I are open foes now--we'll
see which wins."
"And a very fair foe you have, too," thought I, as I looked at Violet
that night as she stood in the window, a wreath of lilies on her
splendid hair, and her impassioned eyes lighting into joyous laughter as
she talked nonsense with Von Edenburgh.
"Isn't she first-rate style, in spite of your prejudice?" I said to
Telfer, who'd just finished a game at ecarte with De Tintiniac, one of
the best players in Europe. If the Major has any weakness, ecarte is one
of them. He just glanced across with a sarcastic smile.
"Well got up, of course; so are all actresses--on the stage."
Then he dropped his glass and went back to his cards, and seemed to
notice the splendid Tressillian not one whit more than he did her pup.
Whether his discourteous speeches had piqued Violet into showing off her
best paces, or whether it's a natural weakness of her sex to shine in
all times and places that they can, certain it was that I never saw the
Tressillian more brilliant and bewitching than she was that night.
Waltzing with Von Edenburgh, singing with me, talking fun with Fred, or
merely lying back in her chair, playing lazily with her bouquet, she was
eminently dangerous in whatever she did, and there wasn't a man in the
castle who didn't gather round her, except her sworn foe the Major. Even
De Tintiniac, that old campaigner at the green tables, who has long ago
given over any mistress save hazard, glanced once or twice at the superb
eyes beaming with the _droit de conquete_, but Telfer never looked up
from his cards.
Telfer and she parted with the chilliest of "good nights," and met again
in the morning with the most frigid of "good mornings," and to that
simple exchange of words was their colloquy limited for an entire
fortnight. Unless I'd been witness of it, I wouldn't have credited that
any two people could live for that space of time in the same
country-house and keep so distant. Nobody noticed it, for there were no
end of guests at Essellau, and the Tressillian had so many liege
subjects ready to her slightest bidding, that the Major's _lese-majeste_
wasn't of such consequence. But when day after day came, and he spent
them all boar-hunting, shooting, fishing, or playing rouge-et-noir and
roulette at the gaming-tables in Pipesandbeersbad, and when he was in
the drawing-rooms at Essellau she saw him amusing and agreeable, and
unbending to every one but herself, I don't know anything of woman's
nature if I didn't see Violet's delicate cheek flush, and her eyes
flash, whenever she caught the Major's cool, contemptuous, depreciating
glance, much harder to her sex to bear than spoken ridicule or open war.
Occasionally he cast a sarcasm, quick, sharp, and relentless as a Minie
ball, at her, which she fired back with such rifle-powder as she had in
her flask; but the return shot fell as harmlessly as it might have done
on Achilles's breast.
"A man is very silly to marry," he was saying one evening to Marc,
"since, as Emerson says, from the beginning of the world such as are in
the institution want to get out, and such as are out want to get in."
Violet, sitting near at the piano, turned half round. "If all others are
of my opinion, Major Telfer, you will never be tempted, for no one will
be willing to enter it with you."
The shot fell short. Telfer neither smiled nor looked annoyed, but
answered, tranquilly,--
"Possibly; but my time is to come. When I own Torwood, ladies will be as
kind to me as they are now to my father; for it is wonderful what a
charm to renew youth, reform rakes, buy love, and make the Beast the
Beauty, is '_un peu de poudre d'or_,' in the eyes of the _beau sexe_."
The Tressillian flushed scarlet, but soon recovered herself.
"I have heard," she said, pulling her bouquet to pieces with impatience,
"that when people look through smoked glass the very sun looks dusky,
and so I suppose, through your own moral perceptions, you view those of
others. You know what De la Fayette wrote to Madame de Sable: '_Quelle
corruption il faut avoir dans l'esprit pour etre capable d'imaginer tout
cela!_'"
"It does not follow," answered Telfer, impassively. "De la Fayette was
quite wrong. Suard was nearer the truth when he said that Rochefoucauld,
'_a peint les hommes comme il les a vus. Il n'appartenait qu'a un homme
d'une reputation bien pure et bien distinguee d'oser fletrir ainsi le
principe de toutes les actions humaines._'"
"And Major Telfer is so unassailable himself that he can mount his
pedestal and censure all weaker mortals," said Violet, sarcastically.
"Your judgments are, perhaps, not always as infallible as the gods'."
"You are gone very wide of the original subject, Miss Tressillian,"
answered Telfer, coldly. "I was merely speaking of that common social
fraud and falsehood, a _mariage de convenance_, which, as I shall never
sin in that manner myself, I am at liberty to censure with the scorn I
feel for it."
He looked hard at her as he spoke. The Tressillian's eyes answered the
stare as haughtily.
"Some may not be all _mariages de convenance_ that you choose to call
such. It does not necessarily follow, because a girl marries a rich man,
that she marries him for his money. There _may_ be love in the case, but
the world never gives her the grace of the doubt."
"What hardy hypocrisy," thought Telfer. "She'd actually try to persuade
me to my face that she was in love with the poor old governor and his
gout!"
"Pardon me," he said, with his most cynical smile. "In attributing
disinterested affection to ladies, I think '_quelque disposition qu'ait
le monde a mal juger, il fait plus souvent grace au faux merite qu'il ne
fait injustice au veritable_.'"
The Tressillian's soft lips curved angrily; she turned away, and began
to sing again, at Walsham's entreaty. Telfer got up and lounged over to
Virginie, with whom he laughed, talked, waltzed, and played chess for
the rest of the evening.
III.
FROM WHICH IT WOULD APPEAR, THAT IT IS SOMETIMES WELL TO BEGIN WITH A
LITTLE AVERSION.
After this split, Telfer and the Tressillian were rather further off
each other than before; and whenever riding, and driving, at dinner, or
in lionizing, they came by chance together, he avoided her silently as
much as ever he could, without making a parade of it. Violet could see
very well how cordially he hated her, and, woman-like, I dare say mine,
and Edenburgh's, and Walsham's, and all her devoted friends' admiration
was valueless, as long as her vowed enemy treated her with such careless
contempt.
One morning the two foes met by chance. Telfer and I, after a late night
over at Pipesandbeersbad, with lansquenet, cheroots, and cognac, had
betaken ourselves out to whip the Beersbad, whose fish, for all their
boiling by the hot springs, are first-rate, I can assure you. Telfer
tells you he likes fishing, but I never see that he does much more than
lie full length under the shadiest tree he can find, with his cap over
his eyes and his cigar in his mouth, doing the _dolce_ lazily enough. A
three-pound trout had no power to rouse him; and he's lost a salmon
before now in the Tweed because it bored him to play it! Shade of old
Izaak! is _that_ liking fishing? But few things ever did excite him,
except it was a charge, or a Kaffir scrimmage; and then he looked more
like a concentrated tempest than anything else, and woe to the turban
that his sabre came down upon.
That part of the stream we'd tried first had been whipped before us, or
the fish wouldn't bite; and I, who haven't as much patience as I might
have, went up higher to try my luck. Telfer declined to come; he was
comfortable, he said, and out of the sun; he preferred "Indiana" and his
cheroot to catching all the fish in the Beersbad, so I bid him good-bye,
and left him smoking and reading at his leisure under the linden-trees.
I went further on than I had meant, up round a bend of the river, and
was too absorbed in filling my basket to notice a storm coming up from
the west, till I began to find myself getting wet to the skin, and the
lightning flying up and down the hills round Essellau. I looked for the
Major as I passed the lime-trees, but he wasn't there, and I made the
best of my way back to the castle, supposing he'd got there before me;
but I was mistaken.
"I've seen nothing of him," said Marc. "He's stalking about the woods, I
dare say, admiring the lightning. That's more than the poor Tressillian
does, I bet. She went out by herself, I believe, just before the storm,
to get a water-lily she wanted to paint, and hasn't appeared since. By
Jove! if Telfer should have to play knight-errant to his 'pet aversion,'
what fun it would be."
Marc had his fun, for an hour afterwards, when the storm had blown over,
up the terrace steps came Violet and the Major. They weren't talking to
each other, but they were actually walking together; and the courtesy
with which he put a dripping rose-branch out of her path with his stick,
was something quite new.
It seems that Telfer, disliking disagreeable sensations, and classing
getting wet among such, had arisen when the thunder began to growl, and
slowly wended his way homewards. But before he was halfway to Essellau
the rain began to drip off his moustache, and seeing a little marble
temple (the Parthenon turned into a summer-house!) close by, he thought
he might as well go in and have another weed till it grew finer. Go in
he did; and he'd just smoked half a cigar, and read the last chapter of
"Indiana," when he looked up, and saw the Tressillian's pug, looking a
bedraggled and miserable object, at his feet, and the Tressillian
herself standing within a few yards of him. If Telfer had abstained from
a few fierce mental oaths, he would have been of a much more pacific
nature than he ever pretended to be; and I don't doubt that he looked
hauteur concentrated as he rose at his enemy's entrance. Violet made a
movement of retreat, but then thought better of it. It would have seemed
too much like flying from the foe. So with a careless bow she sank on
one of the seats, took off her hat, shook the rain-drops off her hair,
and busied herself in sedulous attentions to the pug. The Major thought
it incumbent on him to speak a few sentences about the thunder that was
cracking over their heads; Violet answered him as briefly; and Telfer
putting down his cigar with a sigh, sat watching the storm in silence,
not troubling himself to talk any more.
As she bent down to pat the pug she caught his eyes on her with a cold,
critical glance. He was thinking how pure her profile was and how
exquisite her eyes, and--of how cordially he should hate her if his
father married her. Her color rose, but she met his look steadily, which
is a difficult thing to do if you've anything to conceal, for the
Major's eyes are very keen and clear. Her lips curved with a smile half
amused, half disdainful. "What a pity, Major Telfer," she said, with a
silvery laugh, "that you should be condemned to imprisonment with one
who is unfortunately such a _bete noire_ to you as I am! I assure you, I
feel for you; if I were not coward enough to be a little afraid of that
lightning, I would really go away to relieve you from your sufferings. I
should feel quite honored by the distinction of your hatred if I didn't
know, you, on principle, dislike every woman living. Is your judgment
always infallible?"
Beyond a little surprise in his eyes, Telfer's features were as
impassive as ever. "Far from it," he answered, quietly "I merely judge
people by their actions."
The Tressillian's luminous eyes flashed proudly. "An unsafe guide, Major
Telfer; you cannot judge of actions until you know their motives. I know
perfectly well why you dislike and avoid me: you listened to a foolish
report, and you heard me giving your father permission to write to me.
Those are your grounds, are they not?"
Telfer, for once in his life, _was_ astonished, but he looked at her
fixedly. "And were they not just ones?"
"No," said Violet, vehemently,--"no, they were most rankly unjust; and
it is hard, indeed, if a girl, who has no friends or advisers that she
can trust, may not accept the kindness and ask the counsels of a man
fifty-five years older than herself without his being given to her as a
lover, and the world's whispering that she is trying to entrap him. You
pique yourself on your clear-sightedness, Major Telfer, but for once
your judgment failed you when you attributed such mean and mercenary
motives to me, and supposed, because, as you so generously stated, I had
'no money and no home,' I must necessarily have no heart or conscience,
but be ready to give myself at any moment to the highest bidder, and
take advantage of the kindness of your noble-minded, generous-hearted
father to trick him into marriage." She stopped, fairly out of breath
with excitement. Telfer was going to speak, but she silenced him with a
haughty gesture. "No; now we are started on the subject, hear me to the
end. You have done me gross injustice--an offence the Tressillians never
forgive--but, for my own sake, I wish to show you how mistaken you were
in your hasty condemnation. At the beginning of the season I was
introduced to your father. He knew my mother well in her girlhood, and
he said I reminded him of her. He was very kind to me, and I, who have
no real friend on earth, of course was grateful to him, for I was
thankful to have any one on whom I could rely. You know, probably as
well as I do, that there is little love lost between the Carterets and
myself, though, by my father's will, I must stay with them till I am of
age. I have one brother, a boy of eighteen; he is with his regiment
serving out in India, and the climate is killing him by inches, though
he is too brave to try and get sick leave. Your father has been doing
all he can to have him exchanged; the letters I have had from him have
been to tell me of his success, and to say that Arthur is gazetted to
the Buffs, and coming home overland. There is the head and front of my
offending, Major Telfer; a very simple explanation, is it not? Perhaps
another time you will be more cautious in your censure."
A faint flush came over the Major's bronzed cheek; he looked out of the
portico, and was silent for a minute. The knowledge that he has wronged
another is a keen pang to a proud man of an honor almost fastidious in
his punctilio of right. He swung quickly round, and held out his hand to
her.
"I beg your pardon; I have misjudged you, and I am thoroughly ashamed of
myself for it," he said, in a low voice.
When the Major does come down from his hauteur, and let some of his
winning cordial nature come out, no woman living, unless she were some
animated Medusa, could find it in her heart to say him nay. His frank
self-condemnation touched Violet, despite herself, and, without
thinking, she laid her small fingers in his proffered hand. Then the
Tressillian pride flashed up again; she drew it hastily away, and walked
out into the air.
"Pray do not distress yourself," she said, with an effort (not
successful) to seem perfectly calm and nonchalant. "It is not of the
slightest consequence; we understand each other's sentiments now, and
shall in future be courteous in our hate like two of the French
_noblesse_, complimenting one another before they draw their swords to
slay or to be slain. It has cleared now, so I will leave you to the
solitude I disturbed. Come, Floss." And calling the pug after her,
Violet very gracefully swept down the steps, but with a stride the Major
was at her side.
"Nay, Miss Tressillian," he said, gently, "it is true I've given you
cause to think me as rude as Orson or Caliban, but I am not quite such a
bear as to let you walk home through these woods alone."
Violet made an impatient movement. "Pray don't trouble yourself. We are
close to the castle, and--pardon me, but truth-telling seems the order
for the day--I much prefer you in your open enmity to your simulated
courtesy. We have been rude to each other for three weeks; in another
one you will be gone, so it is scarcely worth while to begin politeness
now."
"As you please," said Telfer, coldly.