Beatrice Boville and Other Stories Part 26

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 n.o.ble, how good, how above all others you are."

He smiled, and put his hand on her lips.

"Good, n.o.ble, 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 pa.s.sionate 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 succ.u.mbed 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--'n.o.ble and good'--Waldemar Falkenstein, or Maximillian? And yet Maximillian has been quiet and virtuous from his youth upwards, and always wins white b.a.l.l.s from the ballot of society."

"Well, you shall have the privilege of your s.e.x--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 suns.h.i.+ne 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 pa.s.sed 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 G.o.dolphin'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 pa.s.sing 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 c.o.c.katoos and parrots on stands chattering bits of Quartier Latin songs, or imitating the cries in the street below. There were cards, dice-boxes, alb.u.ms a rire, meerschaums, lorgnons, pink notes, no end of De k.o.c.k'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 "pet.i.te 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 d.u.c.h.ess, 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.