Beatrice Boville and Other Stories Part 19

Waldemar laughed as he took out his latch-key. "I'm afraid I couldn't get up so much romance. You and I have done with all that, Tom. Confound it, I never saw G.o.dolphin, after all. Well, I must go and breakfast with him to-morrow."

II.

FALKENSTEIN BREAKS LANCES WITH THE "LONGS YEUX BLEUS."

He did breakfast with G.o.dolphin, not, however, before he had held a small but disagreeable levee to one or two rather impatient callers whom he couldn't satisfy, and a certain Amadeus Levi, who, having helped him to the payment of those debts of honor incurred in Harry's rooms, held him by Golden Fetters as hard to unclasp as the chains that bound Prometheus. He shook himself free of them at last, drove to Knightsbridge, and had a chat with G.o.dolphin, over coffee and chibouques, went to his two or three hours' diplomatic work in the Deeds and Chronicles Office, and when he came out, instead of going to his club as usual, thought he might as well call on the Cashrangers, and turned his steps to Lowndes Square. Valerie L'Estrange was sitting at a Davenport, done out of her Watteau costume into very becoming English morning dress; he had only time to shake hands with her before Bella and her mamma set upon him. Miss Cashranger had a great admiration for him, and, though his want of money was a drawback, the royal gules of his blazonments, joined to his manifold attractions, fairly dazzled her, and she held him tight, talking over the palace concerts, till a dowager and her daughter, and a couple of men from Hounslow, being ushered in, he was at liberty, and sitting down by Valerie, gave her a book she had said the night before she wished to read.

"'Goethe's Autobiography!' Oh, thank you--how kind you are!"

"Not at all," laughed Falkenstein. "To merit such things I ought to have saved your life at least. What are you doing here; writing some more proverbs, I hope, to give me a part in one?"

She shook her head. "Nothing half so agreeable. I am writing dinner invitations, and answering Belle's letters."

"Why, can't she answer them herself?"

"My motto here is 'Ich Dien,'" she answered, with a flush on her cheeks.

Bella turned languidly round, and verified her words: "Val, Puppet's scratching at the door; let him in, will you?"

Waldemar rose and opened the door for a little slate-colored greyhound, and while Bella lisped out her regrets for his trouble, smiled a smile that made Miss Cashranger color, and looked searchingly at Valerie to see how she took it. She turned a grateful, radiant look on him, and whispered, "Je m'affranchirai un jour."

"Et comment?"

She raised her mobile eyebrows: "Dieu sait! Comme actrice, comme feuilletonniste--j'ai mes reves, monsieur--mais pas comme inst.i.tutrice: cela me tuerait bientot."

"Je le crois," said Falkenstein, briefly, as he took up the autobiography, and began to talk on it.

"I don't like Goethe for one thing," said Valerie; "he loved a dozen women one after the other. That I would pardon him; most men do so; but I don't believe he really loved any one of them."

"Oh yes he did; quite enough, at least, to please himself. He wasn't so silly as to go in for a never-ending, heart-burning, heart-breaking, absorbing pa.s.sion. We don't do those things."

"Go in for it!" repeated Valerie, contemptuously, "I suppose if he had been of the nature to feel such, he couldn't have helped it."

"I can help going near the fire, can't I, if I don't wish to be burnt?"

"Yes; but a coal may fly out of the fire, and set you in flames, when you are sitting far away from it."

"Then I ought to wear asbestos," said Waldemar, with a merry quizzical smile. "You authors, and poets, and artists think 'the world well lost, and all for love!' but we rational people, who know the world, find it quite the contrary. Those are very pretty ideas for your proverbs, but they don't suit real life. _We_, when we're boys, wors.h.i.+p some parterre divinity, till we see her some luckless day inebriate with eau-de-Cologne, or more unpoetic porter, are cured and disenchanted, wait ten years with Christines and Minna Herzliebs in the interim, and wind up with a rich widow, who keeps us straight and heads our table.

_You_, fresh from the school-room, fasten on some lachrymose curate, or flirting dragoon, as the object of your early romances, walk with him under the limes, work him a smoking-cap, and write him tender little notes, till mamma whispers her hope that Mr. A. or B. is serious, and you, balancing, like a sensible girl, A. or B.'s tangible settlements with the others' intangible love-speeches, forsake the limes, forswear the notes, and announce yourself as 'sold.' That's the love of our day, Miss L'Estrange, and very wise and----"

"Love!" cried Valerie, with supreme scorn. "You don't know the common A B C of love. You might as well call gilt leather-work pure gold."

Falkenstein laughed heartily. "Well, there's a good deal more leather-work than gold about in the world, isn't there?"

"A good deal more, granted; but there is some gold to be found, I should hope."

"Not without alloy; it can't be worked, you know."

"It can't be worked for the base purposes of earth; but it may be found still undefiled before men's touch has soiled it. So I believe in some hearts, undefiled by the breath of conventionality and cant, may lie the true love of the poets, 'lasting, and knowing not change.'"

"Ah! you're too ideal for me," cried Waldemar, smiling at her impetuous earnestness. "You are all enthusiasm, imagination, effervescence----"

"I am not," she answered, impatiently. "I can be very practical when I like; I made myself the loveliest wreath yesterday; quite as pretty as Bella buys at Mitch.e.l.l's for five times the sum mine cost me. That was very realistic, wasn't it?"

"No. That exercised your fancy. You wouldn't do--what do you call it?--plain work, with half the gusto; now, would you?"

Valerie made a _moue mutine_, expressive of entire repudiation of such employment.

"I thought so," laughed Falkenstein. "You idealists are like the fire in the grate yonder; you flame up very hot and bright for a moment, but 'the sparks fly upward and expire,' and if they're not fed with some fresh fuel they soon die out into lifeless cinders."

"On the contrary," said Valerie, quickly, "we are like wood fires, and burn red down to the last ash."

"Mr. Falkenstein, come and look at this little 'Ghirlandaio,'" said Bella, turning round, with an angry light in her eyes; "it is such a gem. Papa bought it the other day."

Waldemar rose reluctantly enough to inspect the "Ghirlandaio,"

manufactured in a back slum, and smoked into proper antiquity to pigeon, under the attractive t.i.tle of an "Old Master," the brewer and his species, and found Miss Cashranger's ignorant dilettantism very tame after Valerie's animated arguments and gesticulation. But he was too old a hand at such game not to know how to take advantage of even an enemy's back-handed stroke, and he turned the discussion on art to an inspection of Valerie's portfolio, over whose croquis and pastels, and water-colors, he lingered as long as he could, till the clock reminded him that it was time to walk on into Eaton Square, where he was going to dine at his father's. The governor excepted, Falkenstein had little rapport with his family. His brother was as chilly disagreeable in private life as he was popularly considered irreproachable in public, and as pragmatical and uncharitable as your immaculate individuals ordinarily are. His sisters were cold, conventional women, as utterly incapable of appreciating him as of allowing the odor of his Latakia in their drawing-room, and so it chanced that Waldemar, a favorite in every other house he entered, received but a chill welcome at home. A prophet has no honor in his own country, and the hearth where a man's own kin are seated is too often the one to nurture the c.o.c.katrice's eggs of ill-nature and injustice against him. Thank Heaven there are others where the fire burns brighter, and the smiles are fonder for him. It were hard for some of us if we were dependent on the mercies of our "own family."

The old Count gave him this night but a distant welcome, for Maximilian was there to "d.a.m.n" his brother with "faint praise," and had been pouring into his father's ear tales of "poor Waldemar's losses at play."

All that Falkenstein said, his sisters took up, contradicted, and jarred upon, till he, fairly out of patience, lapsed into silence, only broken by a sarcasm deftly flung at Maximillian to floor him completely in his orthodoxy or ethics. He was glad to bid the governor good night; and leaving them to hold a congress over his skepticism, radicalism, and other dangerous opinions, he walked through the streets, and swore slightly, with his pipe between his teeth, as he opened his own door.

"Since my father prefers Max to me, let him have him," thought Waldemar, smoking, and undressing himself. "If people choose to dictate to me or misjudge me, let them go; and if they have not penetration enough to judge what I am, I shall not take the trouble to show them."

But, nevertheless, as he thus resolved, Falkenstein smoked hard and fast, for he was fond of the old Count, and felt keenly his desertion; for, steel himself as he might, egotist as he might call himself, Waldemar was quick in his susceptibilities and tenacious in his attachments.

Since Falkenstein had got intimate with Valerie L'Estrange in one ball you are pretty sure that week after week did not lessen their friends.h.i.+p. He was amused, and past memories of women he had wooed, and won, and left, certain pa.s.sages in his life where such had reproached him, not always deservedly, never presented themselves to check him in his new pursuit. It is pleasant to a naturalist to study a b.u.t.terfly pinned to the wall; the rememberance that the b.u.t.terfly may die of the sport does not occur to him, or, at least, never troubles him.

So Falkenstein called to Lowndes Square, and lent her books, and gave her a little Skye of his, and met her occasionally by accident on purpose in Kensington Gardens, where Valerie, according to Mrs.

Cashranger's request, sometimes took one of her cousins, a headstrong young demon of six or seven, for an early walk, to which early walks Valerie made no objection, preferring them to the drawing-rooms of No.

133, and liking them, you may guess, none the less after seeing somebody she knew standing by the pond throwing in sticks for his retriever, and Falkenstein had sat down with her under the bushes by the water, and talked of all the things in heaven and earth; while Julius Adolphus ran about and gobbled at the China geese, and wetted his silk stockings unreproved. He made no love to her, not a bit; he talked of it theoretically, but never practically. But he liked to talk to her, to argue with her, to see her demonstrative pleasure in his society, to watch her coming through the trees, and find the _longs yeux bleus_ gleam and darken at his approach. All this amused him, pleased him as something original and out of the beaten track. She told him all she thought and felt; she pleased him, and beguiled him from his darker thoughts, and she began to reconcile him to human nature, which, with Faria, he had learnt to cla.s.s into "les tigres et les crocodiles a deux pieds."

It was well he had this amus.e.m.e.nt, for it was his only one. He was going to the bad, as we say; debts and entanglements imperceptibly gathered round him, held him tight, and only in Valerie's lively society (lively, for when with him she was as happy as a bird) could exercise his dark spirit.

You remember the vow he made when the Silver Chimes rang in the New Year? So did not he. We cannot be always Medes and Persians, madam, to resist every temptation and keep unbroken every law, though you, sitting in your cus.h.i.+oned chair, in unattacked tranquillity, can tell us easily enough we should be. One night, when he was dining with Bevan, Tom produced those two little ivory fiends, whose rattle is in the ear of watchful deans and proctors as the singing of the rattlesnake, and whose witchery is more wily and irresistible than the witchery of woman. No beaux yeux, whether of the ca.s.sette or of one's first love, ever subjugate a man so completely as the fascinations of play. Once yielded to the charm, the Circe that clasps us will not let us go. Falkenstein, though in much he had the strong will of his race, had no power to resist the beguilements of his Omphale; he played again and again, and five times out of seven lost.

"Well, Falkenstein," cried G.o.dolphin, after five games of ecarte at a pony a side, three of which Falkenstein had lost, "I heard Max lamenting to old Straitlace in the lobby, the other night, that you were going to the devil, only the irreproachable member phrased it in more delicate periods."

"Quite true," said Falkenstein, with a short laugh, "if for devil you subst.i.tute Queen's Bench."

"Well, we're en route together, old fellow," interrupted Tom Bevan; "and, with all your sins, you're a fat lot better than that brother of yours, who, I believe, don't know Latakia from Maryland. Jesse Egerton told me the other day that his wife has an awful life of it; but who'd credit it of a man who patronises Exeter Hall, and gave the s...o...b..acks only yesterday such unlimited supply of weak tea, buns, and strong texts?"

"Who indeed! Max is such a moral man," sneered Falkenstein; "though he has done one or two things in his life that I wouldn't have stooped to do. But you may sin as much as you like as long as you sin under the rose. John Bull takes his vices as a ten pound voter takes a bribe; he stretches his hand out eagerly enough, but he turns his eyes away and looks innocent, and is the first to point at his neighbor and cry out against moral corruption. Melville's quite right that there is an eleventh commandment--'Thou shalt not be found out'--whose transgression is the only one society visits with impunity."

"True enough," laughed Jimmy Fitzroy. "Thank Heaven, n.o.body can accuse us of studying the law and the prophets overmuch. By the way, old fellow, who's that stunning little girl you were walking with by the Serpentine yesterday morning, when I was waiting for the Metcalfe, who promised to meet me at twelve, and never came till half-past one--the most unpunctual woman going. Any new game? She's a governess, ain't she?

She'd some sort of brat with her; but she's deuced good style, anyhow."