Cecil Castlemaine's Gage, Lady Marabout's Troubles, and Other Stories Part 23

The foyer was filled with princes of the blood, marshals of France, dukes, marquises, the elite of her troop of lovers; lords and gentlemen crowded the pa.s.sages, flinging their bouquets for her carpet as she pa.s.sed; and poor scholars, young poets, youths without a sou--amongst them Diderot, Gilbert, Jean-Jacques Rousseau--pressed forward to catch a glimpse, by the light of the links, of this beauty, on which only the eyes of grands seigneurs who could dress Cupidon in a court habit _parfile d'or_ were allowed to gaze closely, as she left the Francais, after her unmatched and uninterrupted triumphs, and went to her carriage with Richelieu. The suppers of Thargelie Dumarsais were renowned through Paris; they equalled in magnificence the suppers of the Regency, rivalled them for license, and surpa.s.sed them for wit. All the world might flock to her fetes where she undisguisedly sought to surpa.s.s the lavishness of Versailles, even by having showers of silver flung from her windows to the people in the streets below; but to her _soupers a huis clos_ only a chosen few were admitted, and men would speak of having supped with la Dumarsais as boastfully as women of having supped with the King at Choisy.

"What you have lost in not seeing her play _Phedre_! Helvetius would have excused you; all the talk of his salons is not worth one glance at la Dumarsais. Mon ami! you will be converted to Paris when once you have seen her," said the Marquis de la Thorilliere, as his carriage stopped in the Chaussee d'Antin.

Leon de Tallemont laughed, and thought of the eyes that would brighten at his glance, and the heart that would beat against his once more under the vine shadows of Lorraine. No new magic, however seductive, should have strength to shake his allegiance to that Memory, and, true to his violet in Lorraine, he defied the Queen of the Foyer.

"We are late, but that is always a more pardonable fault than to be too early," said the Marquis, as they were ushered across the vestibule, through several salons, into the supper-room, hung with rich tapestries of "Les Nymphes au Bain," "Diane Cha.s.seresse," and "Apollon et Daphne;"

with gilded consoles, and rosewood buffets, enamelled with medallion groups, and crowded with Sevres and porcelaine de Saxe, while Venetian mirrors at each end of the salle reflected the table, with its wines, and fruits, and flowers, its gold dishes and Bohemian gla.s.s. The air was heavily perfumed, and vibrating with laughter. The guests were Richelieu, Bievre, Saxe, D'Etissac, Montcrif, and lovely Marie Camargo, the queen of the coulisses who introduced the "short skirts" of the ballet, and upheld her innovation so stanchly amidst the outcries of scandalized Jansenists and journalists. But even Marie Camargo herself paled--and would have paled even had she been, what she was not, in the first flush of her youth--before the superb beauty, the languid voluptuousness, the sensuous grace, the southern eyes, the full lips, like the open leaves of a damask rose, melting yet mocking, of the most beautiful and most notorious woman of a day in which beauty and notoriety were rife, the woman with the diamond of Louis Quinze sparkling in the light upon her bosom, whom Versailles and Paris hailed as Thargelie Dumarsais.

The air, scented with amber, rang with the gay echoes of a stanza of Dorat's, chanted by Marie Camargo; the "Cupids and Bacchantes," painted in the panels of Sevres, seemed to laugh in sympathy with the revel over which they presided; the light flashed on the King's diamond, to which Richelieu pointed, with a wicked whisper; for the Marshal was getting tired of his own reign, and his master might pay his court when he would. Thargelie Dumarsais, more beautiful still at her _pet.i.t souper_ than at her _pet.i.t lever_, with her hair crowned with roses, true flowers of Venus that might have crowned Aspasia, looked up laughingly as her lacqueys ushered in le Marquis de la Thorilliere and le Chevalier de Tallemont.

"M. le Marquis," cried the actress, "you are late! It is an impertinence forbidden at my court. I shall sup in future with barred doors, like M.

d'Orleans; then all you late-comers----"

Through the scented air, through the echoing laughter, stopping her own words, broke a startled bitter cry:

"_Mon Dieu, c'est Favette!_"

Thargelie Dumarsais shrank back in her rose velvet fauteuil as though the blow of a dagger had struck her; the color fled from her lips, and underneath the delicate rouge on her cheeks; her hand trembled as it grasped the King's aigrette.

"Favette--Favette! Who calls me that?"

It was a forgotten name, the name of a bygone life that fell on her ear with a strange familiar chime, breaking in on the wit, the license, the laughter of her midnight supper, as the subdued and mournful sound of vesper bells might fall upon the wild refrains and noisy drinking-songs of baccha.n.a.lian melody.

A surprised silence fell upon the group, the laughter hushed, the voices stopped; it was a strange interruption for a midnight supper. Thargelie Dumarsais involuntarily rose, her lips white, her eyes fixed, her hand clasped convulsively on the King's diamond. A vague, speechless terror held mastery over her, an awe she could not shake off had fastened upon her, as though the dead had risen from their graves, and come thither to rebuke her for the past forgotten, the innocence lost. The roses in her hair, the flowers of revel, touched a cheek blanched as though she beheld some unearthly thing, and the hand that lay on the royal jewel shook and trembled.

"Favette? Favette?" she echoed again. "It is so many years since I heard that name!"

Her guests sat silent still, comprehending nothing of this single name which had such power to move and startle her. Richelieu alone, leaning back in his chair, leisurely picked out one of his brandy-cherries, and waited as a man waits for the next scene at a theatre:

"Is it an unexpected tragedy, or an arranged comedy, ma chere? Ought one to cry or to laugh? Give me the _mot d'ordre_!"

His words broke the spell, and called Thargelie Dumarsais back to the world about her. Actress by profession and by nature, she rallied with a laugh, putting out her jewelled hand with a languid glance from her long almond-shaped eyes.

"A friend of early years, my dear Duc, that is all. Ah, Monsieur de Tallemont what a strange rencontre! When did you come to Paris? I scarcely knew you at the first moment; you have so long been an exile, one may pardonably be startled by your apparition, and take you for a ghost! I suppose you never dreamed of meeting Favette Fontanie under my _nom de theatre_? Ah! how we change, do we not, Leon? Time is so short, we have no time to stand still! Marie, ma chere, give Monsieur le Chevalier a seat beside you--he cannot be happier placed!"

Leon de Tallemont heard not a word that she spoke; he stood like a man stunned and paralyzed by a sudden and violent blow, his head bowed, a mortal pallor changing his face to the hues of death, the features that were a moment before bright, laughing, and careless, now set in mute and rigid anguish.

"Favette! Favette!" he murmured, hoa.r.s.ely, in the vague dreamy agony with which a man calls wildly and futilely on the beloved dead to come back to him from the silence and horror of the grave.

"Peste!" laughed Richelieu. "This cast-off lover seems a strange fellow!

Does he not know that absent people have never the presumption to dream of keeping their places, but learn to give them graciously up!--shall I teach him the lesson? If he have his sixteen quarterings, a p.r.i.c.k of my sword will soon punish his impudence!"

The jeer fell unheeded on Leon de Tallemont's ear; had he heard it, the flippant sneer would have had no power to sting him then. Regardless of the men around the supper-table, he grasped Thargelie Dumarsais's hands in his:

"This is how we meet!"

She shrank away from his glance, terrified, she scarce knew why, at the mute anguish upon his face.

Perhaps for a moment she realized how utterly she had abused the love and wrecked the life of this man; perhaps with his voice came back to her thronging thoughts of guileless days, memories ringing through the haze of years, as distant chimes ring over the water from lands we have quitted, reaching us when we have floated far away out to sea--memories of an innocent and untroubled life, when she had watched the woodland flowers open to the morning sun, and listened to the song of the brooks murmuring over the violet roots, and heard the sweet evening song of the birds rise to heaven under the deep vine shadows of Lorraine.

One moment she was silent, her eyes falling, troubled and guilty, beneath his gaze; then she looked up, laughing gayly, and flas.h.i.+ng on him her languid l.u.s.trous glance.

"You look like a somnambulist, _mon ami_! Did n.o.body ever tell you, then, how Mme. de la Vrilliere carried me off from Lorraine, and brought me in her train to Paris, till, when Favette Fontanie was tired of being petted like the spaniel, the monkey, and the parrot, she broke away from Madame la Marquise, and made, after a little probation at the Foire St.

Laurent, her appearance at the Francais as Thargelie Dumarsais? _Allons donc!_ have I lost my beauty, that you look at me thus? You should be reminding me of the proverb, '_On revient toujours a ses premiers amours!_' Surely, Thargelie Dumarsais will be as attractive to teach such a lesson as that little peasant girl, Favette, used to be? Bah, Leon! Can I not love you as well again in Paris as I once loved you at Grande Charmille? And--who knows?--perhaps I will!"

She leaned towards him; her breath fanning his cheek, her scented hair brus.h.i.+ng his lips, her l.u.s.trous eyes meeting his with eloquent meaning, her lips parted with the resistless witchery of that melting and seductive _sourire d'amour_ to which they were so admirably trained. He gazed down on her, breathless, silence-stricken--gazed down on the sorceress beauty to which the innocent loveliness of his Lorraine flower had changed. Was this woman, with the rouge upon her cheeks, the crimson roses in her hair, the mocking light in her eyes, the wicked laugh on her lips, the diamond glittering like a serpent's eye in her bosom--was she the guileless child he had left weeping, on the broken steps of the fountain, tears as pure as the dew in the violet-bells, with the summer sunlight streaming round her, and no shade on her young brow darker than the fleeting shadow flung from above by the vine-leaves? A cry broke once more from his lips:

"Would to G.o.d I had died before to-night!"

Then he lifted his head, with a smile upon his face--a smile that touched and vaguely terrified all those who saw it--the smile of a breaking heart.

"I thank you for your proffered embraces, but _I_ am faithful. I love but one, and I have lost her; Favette is dead! I know nothing of Thargelie Dumarsais, the Courtesan."

He bowed low to her and left her--never to see her face again.

A silence fell on those he had quitted, even upon Richelieu; perhaps even he realized that all beauty, faith, and joy were stricken from this man's life; and--reality of feeling was an exile so universally banished from the gay salons of the Dix-huitieme Siecle, that its intrusion awed them as by the unwonted presence of some ghostly visitant.

Thargelie Dumarsais sat silent--her thoughts had flown away once more from her brilliant supper-chamber to the fountain at Grande Charmille: she was seeing the dragon-flies flutter among the elm-boughs, and the water ripple over the wild thyme; she was feeling the old priest's good-night kiss upon her brow, and her own hymn rise and mingle with the chant of the vesper choir; she was hearing the song of the forest-birds echo in the Lorraine woods, and a fond voice whisper to her, "Fear not, Favette!--we shall meet as we part!"

Richelieu took up his Dresden saucer of cherries once more with a burst of laughter.

"_Voila un drole!_--this fellow takes things seriously. What fools there are in this world! It will be a charming little story for Versailles.

Dieu! how Louis will laugh when I tell it him! I fear though, ma cherie, that the 'friend of your childhood' will make you lose your reputation by his impolite epithets!"

"When one has nothing, one can lose nothing--eh, ma chere?" laughed Marie Camargo. "Monsieur le Duc, she does not hear us----"

"No, _l'infidele_!" cried Richelieu. "Mademoiselle! I see plainly you love this rude lover of bygone days better than you do us!--is it not the truth?"

"Chut! n.o.body asks for truths in a polite age!" laughed Thargelie Dumarsais, shaking off unwelcome memories once for all, and looking down at the King's diamond gleaming in the light--the diamond that prophesied to her the triumph of the King's love.

"Naturally," added La Camargo. "My friend, I shall die with envy of your glorious jewel. _Dieu! comme il brille!_"

"DEADLY DASH."

A STORY TOLD ON THE OFF DAY.

On the off-day after the Derby everybody, except the great winners, is, it will be generally admitted, the resigned prey to a certain gentle sadness, not to say melancholy, that will only dissipate itself under a prolonged regimen of S. and B., seidlitz well dashed with Amontillado, or certain heavenly West Indian decoctions;--this indisposition, I would suggest, we should call, delicately and dubiously, Epsomitis. It will serve to describe innumerable forms and degrees of the reactionary malady.

There is the severest shape of all, "dead money," that covers four figures, dropped irretrievably, and lost to the "milkers;" lost always _you_ say because of a cough, or because of a close finish, or because of something dark, or because of a strain in the practising gallops, or because of a couple of brutes that cannoned just at the start; and never, of course, because the horse you had fancied was sheerly and simply only fit for a plater. There is the second severe form, when you awake with a cheerful expectation of a summons for driving "at twelve miles an hour" (as if that wasn't moderate and discreet!), and for thereby smas.h.i.+ng a greengrocer's cart into the middle of next week, and running a waggonette into an omnibus, as you came back from the Downs, of which you have no more remembrance than that there was a crash, and a smash, and a woman's screams, and a man's "d--n the swells!" and a _tintamarre_ of roaring conductor and bellowing greengrocer, and infuriated females, through which you dashed somehow with a cheer--more shame for you--and a most inappropriate _l'Africaine_ chorus from the men on your drag. There is the milder form, which is only the rueful recollection of seeing, in a wild ecstasy, the chestnut with the white blaze sweep with his superb stride to the front, and of having, in your moment of rapturous grat.i.tude to the red and blue, rushed, unintentionally, during the discussion of Fortnum and Mason's hamper, into a promise to take Euphrosyne Brown to Baden in August, where you know very well she will cost you more than all your sums netted through Gladiateur. There are the slenderer touches of the malady, which give you, over your breakfast coffee, a certain dolorous meditation as to how you could have been such a fool as to have placed all your trust in Danebury, or to have put in a hole through Spring Cottage just what your yacht costs for three months; which makes you wonder why on earth you took that lot of actresses on to the hill, and threw money enough away on them in those wages of idiotcy (or wages of sin, as your uncle the dean would translate it), of cashmeres, eau de Cologne, gloves, and bracelets, to have purchased those two weight-carriers offered you at 600 the pair, and dirt-cheap at that; or which makes you only dully and headachily conscious that you drank champagne up on the box-seat as if you were a young fellow from Eton, and now pay for the juvenile folly, as you know you deserve to do, when that beautiful white Burgundy at your club, or your own cool perfect claret at home, seems to stare you in the face and ask, "Why did you crack all those bottles of Dry on the Downs?"

There are symptoms and varieties innumerable of the malady that I propose shall be known henceforward as Epsomitis; therefore, the off-day finds everybody more or less slightly done-up and mournful. Twenty-four hours and the Oaks, if properly prepared for by a strictly medicinal course of _brules-gueules_, as the Cha.s.seurs say, smoked perseveringly, will bring all patients round on the Friday; but during the twenty-four hours a sense that all on and off the course is vanity and vexation of spirit will generally and somnolently predominate in the universal and fas.h.i.+onable disease of Epsomitis.

One off-day, after the magnificent victory of Monarque's unrivalled son, an acquaintance of mine, suffering considerably from these symptoms, sought my philosophy and my prescriptions. A very sharp irritant for Epsomitis may be administered in the form of "I told you so? It's all your own fault!" But this species of blister and douche bath combined is rarely given unless the patient be mad enough to let his wife, if he unluckily have one, learn what ails him. As far as I was concerned, I was much too sympathetic with the sufferer to be down upon him with the triumphant reminder that I had cautioned him all along not to place his trust in Russley. I, instead, prescribed him cool wines, and led him on to talk of other people's misfortunes, the very best way to get reconciled with your own. We talked of old times, of old memories, of old acquaintance, in the twilight, between Derby and Oaks. We got a little melancholy; too much champagne is always productive on the morrow of a gently sentimental tinge, and a man is always inclined to look on the world as a desert when he has the conviction that he himself has been made a fool in it. Among other names, that of Deadly Dash came up between us. What had become of him? I did not know; he did. He told me; and I will tell it here, for the story is of the past now.