Cecil Castlemaine's Gage, Lady Marabout's Troubles, and Other Stories Part 33

"'You will have pity on her, m'sieu, and go?' asked old Cazot, more softly, as she looked in my face.

"I did not answer her, but put her aside out of my way, went down the mountain-path to where my horse was left cropping the gra.s.s on the level ground beneath a plane-tree, and rode at a gallop into Luz without looking back at the gray-turreted ruins of the Nid de l'Aigle.

"And I left Luz that night without seeing Florelle de l'Heris again--a tardy kindness--one, perhaps, as cruel as the cruelty from which old Cazot had protected her. Don't you think I was a fool, indeed, for once in my life, to listen to an old woman's prating? Call me so if you like, I shall not dispute it; we hardly know when we are fools, and when wise men! Well! I have not been much given to such weaknesses.

"I left Luz, sending a letter to Florelle, in which I bade her farewell, and entreated her to forget me--an entreaty which, while I made it, I felt would not be obeyed--one which, in the selfishness of my heart, I dare say, I hoped might not be. I went back to my old diplomatic and social life, to my customary pursuits, amus.e.m.e.nts, and ambitions, turning over the leaf of my life that contained my sojourn in the Pyrenees, as you turn over the page of a romance to which you will never recur. I led the same life, occupied myself with my old ambitions, and enjoyed my old pleasures; but I could not forget Florelle as wholly as I wished and tried to do. I had not usually been troubled with such memories; if unwelcome, I could generally thrust them aside; but Florelle I did not forget; the more I saw of other women the sweeter and brighter seemed by contrast her sensitive, delicate nature, unsullied by the world, and unstained by artifice and falsehood. The longer time went on, the more I regretted having given her up--perhaps on no better principle than that on which a child cares most for the toy he cannot have; perhaps because, away from her, I realized I had lost the purest and the strongest love I had ever won. In the whirl of my customary life I sometimes wondered how she had received my letter, and how far the iron had burnt into her young heart--wondered if she had joined the Sisters of Sainte Marie Purificatrice, or still led her solitary life among the rocks and beech-woods of Nid de l'Aigle. I often thought of her, little as the life I led was conducive to regretful or romantic thoughts. At length my desire to see her again grew ungovernable. I had never been in the habit of refusing myself what I wished; a man is a fool who does, if his wishes are in any degree attainable. And at the end of the season I went over to Paris, and down again once more into the Midi. I reached Luz, lying in the warm golden Pyrenean light as I had left it, and took once more the old familiar road up the hills to the Nid de l'Aigle. There had been no outward change from the year that had flown by; there drooped the fan-like branches of the pines; there rushed the Gave over its rocky bed; there came the silvery sheep-bell chimes down the mountain-sides; there, over hill and wood, streamed the mellow glories of the Southern sunlight. There is something unutterably painful in the sight of any place after one's lengthened absence, wearing the same smile, lying in the same sunlight. I rode on, picturing the flush of gladness that would dawn in Florelle's face at the sight of me, thinking that Mme. Cazot should not part me from her again, even, I thought, as I saw the old gray turrets above the beech-woods, if I paid old Cazot's exacted penalty of marriage! I loved Florelle more deeply than I had done twelve months before. 'L'absence allument les grandes pa.s.sions et eteignent les pet.i.tes,' they say. It had been the reverse with me.

"I rode up the bridle-path and pa.s.sed through the old gateway. There was an unusual stillness about the place; nothing but the roar of the torrent near, and the songs of the birds in the branches speaking in the summer air. My impatience to see Florelle, or to hear her, grew ungovernable. The door stood open. I groped my way through the pa.s.sage and pushed open the door of the old room. Under the oriel window, where I had seen her first, she lay on a little couch. I saw her again--but _how_! My G.o.d! to the day of my death I shall never forget her face as I saw it then; it was turned from me, and her hair streamed over her pillows, but as the sunlight fell upon it, I knew well enough what was written there. Old Cazot, sitting by the bed with her head on her arms, looked up, and came towards me, forcing me back.

"'You are come at last, to see her die. Look on your work--look well at it--and then go; with my curse upon you!'

"I shook off her grasp, and forcing my way towards the window, threw myself down by Florelle's bed; till then I never knew how well I loved her. My voice awoke her from her sleep, and, with a wild cry of joy, she started up, weak as she was, and threw her arms round my neck, clinging to me with her little hands, and crying to me deliriously not to leave her while she lived--to stay with her till death should take her; where had I been so long? why had I come so late? _So late!_--those piteous words! As I held her in my arms, unconscious from the shock, and saw the pitiless marks that disease, the most hopeless and the most cruel, had made on the face that I had left fair, bright, and full of life as any child's, I felt the full bitterness of that piteous reproach, 'Why had I come so late?'

"What need to tell you more. Florelle de l'Heris was dying, and I had killed her. The child that I had loved so selfishly had loved me with all the concentrated tenderness of her isolated and impa.s.sioned nature; the letter I wrote bidding her farewell had given her her death-blow.

They told me that from the day she received that letter everything lost its interest for her. She would sit for hours looking down the road to Luz, as though watching wearily for one who never came, or kneeling before the pictures I had left as before some altar, praying to Heaven to take care of me, and bless me, and let her see me once again before she died. Consumption had killed her mother in her youth; during the chill winter at the Nid de l'Aigle the hereditary disease settled upon her. When I found her she was dying fast. All the medical aid, all the alleviations, luxuries, resources, that money could procure, to ward off the death I would have given twenty years of my life to avert, I lavished on her, but they were useless; for my consolation they told me that, used a few months earlier, they would have saved her! She lingered three weeks, fading away like a flower gathered before its fullest bloom. Each day was torture to me. I knew enough of the disease to know from the first there was no hope for her or me. Those long terrible night-hours, when she lay with her head upon my shoulder, and her little hot thin hands in mine, while I listened, uncertain whether every breath was not the last, or whether life was not already fled! By G.o.d! I cannot think of them!

One of those long summer nights Florelle died; happy with me, loving and forgiving me to the last; speaking to the last of that reunion in which _she_, in her innocent faith, believed and hoped, according to the promise of her creed!--died with her hands clasped round my neck, and her eyes looking up to mine, till the last ray of light was quenched in them--died while the morning dawn rose in the east and cast a golden radiance on her face, the herald of a day to which she never awoke!"

There was a dead silence between us; the Arno splashed against the wall below, murmuring its eternal song beneath its bridge, while the dark heavy clouds drifted over the sky with a sullen roll of thunder. He lay back in his chair, the deep shadow of the balcony pillar hiding his face from me, and his voice quivered painfully as he spoke the last words of his story. He was silent for many minutes, and so was I, regretting that my careless question had unfolded a page out of his life's history written in characters so painful to him. Such skeletons dwell in the hearts of most; hands need be tender that disentomb them and drag out to daylight ashes so mournful and so grievous, guarded so tenaciously, hidden so jealously. Each of us is tender over his own, but who does not think his brother's fit subject for jest, for gibe, for mocking dance of death?

He raised himself with a laugh, but his lips looked white as death as he drank down a draught of the Hermitage.

"Well! what say you: is the maxim right, _y-a-t-il femmes et femmes_?

Caramba! why need you have pitched upon that portfolio?--There are the lights in the Acqua d'Oro's palace; we must go, or we shall get into disgrace."

We went, and Beatrice Acqua d'Oro talked very ardent Italian to him, and the Comtesse Bois de Sandal remarked to me what a brilliant and successful man Lord ---- was, but how unimpressionable!--as cold and as glittering as ice. Nothing had ever made him _feel_, she was quite certain, pretty complimentary nonsense though he often talked. What would the Marchesa and the Comtesse have said, I wonder, had I told them of that little grave under the Pyrenean beech-woods? So much does the world know of any of us! In the lives of all men are doubled-down pages written on in secret, folded out of sight, forgotten as they make other entries in the diary, and never read by their fellows, only glanced at by themselves in some midnight hour of solitude.

Basta! they are painful reading, my friends. Don't you find them so? Let us leave the skeletons in the closet, the pictures in the portfolio, the doubled-down pages in the locked diary, and go to Beatrice Acqua d'Oro's, where the lights are burning gayly. What is Madame Bois de Sandal, _nee_ Dashwood, singing in the music room?

The tender grace of a day that is dead Will never come back to me!

That is the burden of many songs sung in this world, for some dead flowers strew most paths, and gra.s.s grows over myriad graves, and many leaves are folded down in many lives, I fear. And--retrospection is very idle, my good fellow, and regret is as bad as the tic, and flirting is deucedly pleasant; the white Hermitage we drank to-night is gone, we know, but are there no other bottles left of wine every whit as good?

Shall we waste our time sighing after spilt lees? Surely not. And yet--ah me!--the dead fragrance of those vines that yielded us the golden nectar of our youth!

THE BEAUTY OF VICQ D'AZYR;

OR,

"NOT AT ALL A PROPER PERSON."

Bon ami, do you consider the possession of sisters an agreeable addition to anybody's existence? _I_ hold it very intensely the reverse. Who pats a man down so spitefully as his sisters? Who refuses so obstinately to see any good in the Nazarene they have known from their nurseries? Who snubs him so contumaciously, when he's a little chap in jackets and they young ladies already out? Who worries him so pertinaciously to marry their pet friend, "who has ten thousand a year, dear! Red hair? I'm sure she has not! It's the most lovely auburn! But you never see any beauty in _refined_ women!" Who, if you incline towards a pretty little ineligible, rakes up so laboriously every sc.r.a.p of gossip detrimental to her, and pours into your ear the delightful intelligence that she has been engaged to Powell of the Grays, is a shocking flirt, wears false teeth, is full five years older than she says she is, and has most objectionable connections? Who, I should like to know, does any and all of these things, my good fellow, so amiably and unremittingly as your sisters? till--some day of grace, perhaps--you make a telling speech at St. Stephen's, and fling a second-hand aroma of distinction upon them; or marry a co-heiress and lady-in-her-own-right, and they _raffolent_ of that charming creature, speculating on the desirability of being invited to your house when the men are down for September. Then, what a dear fellow you become! they always _were_ so fond of you! a little wild! oh, yes! but they are _so_ glad you are changed, and think more seriously now! it was only from a _real_ interest in your welfare that they used to grieve, &c., &c.

My sisters were my natural enemies, I remember, when I was in the daisy age and exposed to their thraldom; they were so blandly superior, so ineffably condescending, and wielded, with such smiling dexterity, that feminine power of torture known familiarly as "nagging!" Now, of course, they leave me in peace; but from my earliest to my emanc.i.p.ated years they were my natural enemies. I might occasionally excite the enmity, it is possible. I remember, when I was aged eight, covering Constance, a stately brunette, with a mortifying amount of confusion, by asking her, as she welcomed a visitor with effusion, why she said she was delighted to see her when she had cried "There's that odious woman again!" as we saw the carriage drive up. I have a criminal recollection of taking Gwendolina's fan, fresh from Howell and James's, and stripping it of its gold-powdered down before her face ere she could rush to its rescue, as an invaluable medium in the manufacture of mayflies. I also have a dim and guilty recollection of saying to the Hon. George Cursitt, standing then in the interesting position of my prospective brother-in-law, "Mr.

Cursitt, Agneta doesn't care one straw for you. I heard her saying so last night to Con; and that if you weren't so near the t.i.tle, she would never have accepted you;" which revelation inopportunely brought that desirable alliance to an end, and Olympian thunders on my culprit's head.

I had my sins, doubtless, but they were more than avenged on me; my sisters were my natural enemies, and I never knew of any man's who weren't so, more or less. Ah! my good sirs, those domesticities are all of them horrid bores, and how any man, happily and thrice blessedly free from them, can take the very worst of them voluntarily on his head by the Gate of Marriage (which differs thus remarkably from a certain Gate at Jerusalem, that at the one the camels kneel down to be lightened of all _their_ burdens ere they can pa.s.s through it; at the other, the poor human animal kneels down to be loaded with all _his_ ere he is permitted to enter), does pa.s.s my comprehension, I confess. I might amply avenge the injuries of my boyhood received from _mesdemoiselles mes soeurs_. Could I not tell Gwendolina of the pot of money dropped by her caro sposo over the Cesarewitch Stakes? Could I not intimate to Agneta where her Right Honorable lord and master spent the small hours last night, when popularly supposed to be nodding on the Treasury benches in the service of the state? Could I not rend the pride of Constance, by casually asking monsieur her husband, as I sip her coffee in her drawing-room this evening, who was that very pretty blonde with him at the Crystal Palace yesterday? the blonde being as well known about town as any other star of the demi-monde. Of course I could: but I am magnanimous; I can too thoroughly sympathize with those poor fellows.

My vengeance would recoil on innocent heads, so I am magnanimous and silent.

My sisters have long ceased to be mesdemoiselles, they have become mesdames, in that transforming crucible of marriage in which, a.s.suredly, all that glitters is not gold, but in which much is swamped, and crushed, and fused with uncongenial metal, and from which the elixir of happiness but rarely exhales, whatever feminine alchemists, who patronize the hymeneal furnace, may choose to a.s.sure us to the contrary.

My sisters are indisputably very fine women, and develop in full bloom all those essential qualities which their moral and mental trainers sedulously instilled into them when they were limited to the school-room and thorough-ba.s.s, Garcia and an "expurgated" Shakespeare, the society of Mademoiselle Colletmonte and Fraulein von Engel, and the occasional refection of a mild, religious, respectably-twaddling fiction of the milk-and-water, pious-tendency, nursery-chronicling, and grammar-disregarding cla.s.s, nowadays indited for the mental improvement of a commonplace generation in general, and growing young ladies in particular. My sisters are women of the world to perfection; indeed, for talent in refrigerating with a glance; in expressing disdain of a toilette or a ton by an upraised eyebrow; in a.s.suming a various impenetrable plait-il? expression at a moment's notice; in sweeping past intimate friends with a charming unconsciousness of their existence, when such unconsciousness is expedient or desirable; in reducing an unwished-for intruder into an instantaneous and agonizing sense of his own de trop-ism and insignificance--in all such accomplishments and acquirements necessary to existence in all proper worlds, I think they may be matched with the best-bred lady to be found any day, from April to August, between Berkeley Square and Wilton Crescent. Constance, now Lady Marechale, is of a saintly turn, and touched with fas.h.i.+onable fanaticism, pets evangelical bishops and ragged school-boys, drives to special services, and is called our n.o.ble and Christian patroness by physicians and hon. secs., holds doctrinal points and strong tracts, mixed together in equal proportion, an infallible chloride of lime for the disinfectance of our polluted globe, and appears to receive celestial telegrams of indisputable veracity and charming acrimony concerning the destiny of the vengeful contents of the Seven Vials.

Agneta, now Mrs. Albany Protocol, is a Cabinet Ministress, and a second d.u.c.h.esse de Longueville (in her own estimation at the least); is "strengthening her party" when she issues her dinner invitations, whispers awfully of a "crisis" when even penny-paper leaders can't get up a breeze, and spends her existence in "pus.h.i.+ng" poor Protocol, who, thorough Englishman that he is, considers it a point of honor to stand still in all paths with praiseworthy Britannic obstinacy and opticism.

Gwendolina, now Lady Frederic Farniente, is a b.u.t.terfly of fas.h.i.+on, has delicate health, affects dilettanteism, is interested by nothing, has many other charming minauderies, and lives in an exclusive circle--so tremendously exclusive, indeed, that it is possible she may at last draw the _cordon sanitaire_ so _very_ tight, that she will be left alone with the pretty woman her mirrors reflect.

They have each of them attained to what the world calls a "good position"--an eminence the world dearly reveres; if you can climb to it, _do_; never mind what dirt may cling to your feet, or what you may chance to pull down in your ascent, so questions will be asked you at the top, when you wave your flag victoriously from a plateau at a good elevation. They haven't all their ambitions--who has? If a fresh Alexander conquered the world he would fret out his life for a standing-place to be able to try Archimedes' little experiment on his newly-won globe. Lady Marechale dies for entrance to certain salons which are closed to her; she is but a Baronet's wife, and, though so heavenly-minded, has _some_ weaknesses of earth. Mrs. Protocol grieves because she thinks a grateful country ought to wreathe her lord's brow with laurels--_Anglice_, strawberry-leaves--and the country remains ungrateful, and the brows bare. Lady Frederic frets because her foe and rival, Lady Maria Fitz-Sachet, has footmen an inch taller than her own.

They haven't all their ambitions satisfied. We are too occupied with kicking our dear friends and neighbors down off the rounds of the social ladder to advance ourselves always perhaps as entirely as we otherwise might do. But still they occupy "unexceptionable positions," and from those fortified and impregnable citadels are very severe upon those who are not, and very jealous of those who are, similarly favored by fortune. When St. Peter lets ladies through the celestial portals, he'll never please them unless he locks out all their acquaintance, and indulges them with a gratifying peep at the rejected candidates.

The triad regard each other after the manner of ladies; that is to say, Lady Marechale holds Mrs. Protocol and Lady Frederic "frivolous and worldly;" Lady Frederic gives them both one little supercilious expressive epithet, "_precieuses_;" Mrs. Protocol considers Lady Marechale a "pharisee," and Lady Frederic a "b.u.t.terfly;"--in a word, there is that charming family love to one another which ladies so delight to evince, that I suppose we must excuse them for it on the plea that

'Tis their nature to!

which Dr. Watts puts forward so amiably and grammatically in excuse for the bellicose propensities of the canine race, but which is never remembered by priest or layman in extenuation of the human.

They dislike one another--relatives always do--still, the three Arms will combine their Horse, Line, and Field Batteries in a common cause and against a common enemy; the Saint, the Politician, and the b.u.t.terfly have several rallying-points in common, and when it comes to the question of extinguis.h.i.+ng an ineligible, of combining a sneer with a smile, of blending the unexceptionably-courteous with the indescribably-contemptuous, of calmly shutting their doors to those who won't aggrandize them, and blandly throwing them open to those who will, it would be an invidious task to give the golden apple, and decide which of the three ladies most distinguishes herself in such social prowess.

Need I say that I _don't_ see very much of them?--severe strictures on society in general, with moral plat.i.tudes, over the luncheon wines at Lady Marechale's; discourse redolent of blue-books, with vindictive hits at Protocol and myself for our disinclination to accept a "mission," and our levity of life and opinions at "a period so full of social revolutions and wide-spread agitation as the present," through the soup and fish at Agneta's; softly hissed acerbities and languidly yawned satires on the prettiest women of my acquaintance, over the coffee at Lady Frederic's; are none of them particularly inviting or alluring. And as they or similar conversational confections are invariably included in each of the three ladies' entertainments _en pet.i.t comite_, it isn't wonderful if I forswear their drawing-rooms.

Cheres dames, you complain, and your chosen defenders for you, that men don't affect your society nowadays save and except when making love to you. It isn't _our_ fault, indeed: you bore us, and--what can we do?--we shrink as naturally and pardonably from voluntary boredom as from any other voluntary suffering, and s.h.i.+rk an air redolent of ennui from the same principle as we do an air redolent of diphtheria. Self-preservation is a law of nature, and female society consists too exclusively of milk-and-water, dashed here and there with citric acid of malice, to be either a recherche or refres.h.i.+ng beverage to palates that have tasted warmer spices or more wholesome tonics.

So I don't see much of my triad of sisters unless accidentally, but last August I encountered them by chance at Vicq d'Azyr. Do you know Vicq d'Azyr? No? All right? when it is known universally it will be spoilt; it will soon be fas.h.i.+onable, dyspeptic, artificial, like the crowds that will flock to it; its warm, bubbling springs will be gathered into long upright gla.s.ses, and quaffed by yellow-visaged groups; bra.s.s bands will bray where now the thrushes, orioles, and nightingales have the woodlands to themselves; cavalcades of hired hacks will cut up its thyme-covered turf, and young ladies will sketch in tortured outline and miserable washes the glorious sweep of its mountains, the crimson tints of its forests, the rush of its tumbling torrents, the golden gleam of its southern sun. Vicq d'Azyr will be a Spa, and will be spoilt; dyspepsia and bronchia, vanities and flirtations, cares and conquests, physicians and intrigantes, real marchionesses puffing under asthma, fict.i.tious marquises strewing chaff for pigeons, monde and demi-monde, grandes dames and dames d'industrie will float into it, a mighty army of b.u.t.terflies with a locust power of destruction: Vicq d'Azyr will be no more, and in its stead we shall have--a Fas.h.i.+onable Bath. Vicq d'Azyr, however, is free _yet_ from the hand of the spoiler, and is charming--its vine-clad hills stretching up in sunny slopes; its little homesteads nestling on the mountains' sides among the pines that load the air with their rich heavy perfume; its torrents foaming down the ravines, flinging their snowy spray far over the bows of arbutus and mountain-ash that bend across the brinks of their rus.h.i.+ng courses; its dark-eyed peasant girls that dance at sunset under the linden-trees like living incarnations of Florian's pastorals; its sultry brilliant summer nights, when all is still, when the birds are sleeping among the ilex-leaves, and the wind barely stirs the tangled boughs of the woodland; when night is down on the mountains, wrapping hill and valley, crag and forest in one soft purple mist, and the silence around is only broken by the mystic music of the rus.h.i.+ng waters, the soft whirr of the night-birds' wings, or the distant chime of a village clock faintly tolling through the air:----Caramba, messieurs! I beg your pardon! I don't know why I poetize on Vicq d'Azyr. _I_ went there to slay, not to sketch, with a rifle, not with a stylus, to kill izzards and chamois, not to indite a poem a la mode, with double-barrelled adjectives, no metre, and a "purpose;" nor to add my quota to the luckless loaded walls of the Academy by a pre-Raphaelite landscape of a.r.s.enical green, with the effete trammels of perspective gallantry disregarded, and trees like Dr. Syntax's wife, "roundabout and rather squat," with just two-dozen-and-seven leaves apiece for liberal allowance. I went to Vicq d'Azyr, amongst other places, last August, for chamois-hunting with Dunbar, of the Queen's Bays, taking up our abode at the Toison d'Or, whither all artists, tourists, men who come for the sport, women who come for its scenery, or invalids who come for its waters (whose properties, _miserabile dictu!_ are just being discovered as a panacea for every human ill--from a migraine to an "incurable pulmonary affliction"), seek accommodation if they can have it, since it is the only hotel in the place, though a very good one; is adorned with a balcony running round the house, twined and buried in honeysuckle and wild clematis, which enchants young ladies into instant promotion of it into their sketch-books; and gives you, what is of rather more importance, and what makes you ready to admire the clematis when, under gastronomic exasperation, you might swear at it as a harbor for tarantule--an omelette, I a.s.sure you, wellnigh as well cooked as you have it at Mivart's or Meurice's.

At the Toison d'Or we took up our abode, and at the Toison d'Or we encountered my two elder sisters, Constance and Agneta, travelling for once on the same road, as they had left Paris together, and were together going on to the fas.h.i.+onable capital of a fas.h.i.+onable little toy duchy on the other side of the Rhine, when they should have finished with the wilder beauties and more unknown charms of Vicq d'Azyr and its environs. Each lady had her little train of husband, courier, valet, lady's-maid, small dog, and giant jewel-box. I have put the list in the inverse ratio of their importance, I believe. Your husband _versus_ your jewel-box? Of course, my dear madam; absurd! What's the value of a little simple gold ring against a dozen glittering circlets of diamonds, emeralds, rubies, and garnets?

Each lady was bent on recruiting herself at Vicq d'Azyr after the toils of the season, and of s.h.i.+ning _apres_ with all the brilliance that a fair share of beauty, good positions, and money, fairly ent.i.tled them to expect, at the little Court of--we will call it Lemongenseidlitz--denominated by its charming d.u.c.h.ess, Princess Helene of Lemongenseidlitz-Phizzstrelitz, the loveliest and most volage of all minor royalties. Each lady was strongly opposed to whatever the other wished; each thought the weather "sultry" when the other thought it "chilly," and _vice versa_. Each considered her own ailments "unheard-of suffering, dear!--I could never make any one feel!" &c. &c.--and a.s.sured you, with mild disdain, that the other's malady was "purely nervous, entirely exaggerated, but she _will_ dwell on it so much, poor darling!"

Each related to you how admirably they would have travelled if _her_ counsel had been followed, and described how the other _would_ take the direction of everything, _would_ confuse poor Chanderlos, the courier, till he hardly knew where he was, and _would_ take the night express out of pure unkindness, just because she knew how ill it always made her (the speaker) feel to be torn across any country the whole night at that dreadful pace; each was dissatisfied with everything, pleased with nothing, and bored, as became ladies of good degree; each found the sun too hot or the wind too cold, the mists too damp or the air too dry, and both combined their forces to worry their ladies'-maids, find fault with the viands, drive their lords to the registering of an oath never to travel with women again, welcome us benignly, since they thought we might amuse them, and smile their sunniest on Dunbar--he's heir-prospective to the Gwynne Marquisate, and Lady Marqueterie, the Saint, is not above keeping one eye open for worldly distinctions, while Mrs. Albany Protocol, though a Radical, is, like certain others of the ultra-Liberal party, not above a personal kow-towing before those "ridiculous and ought-to-be exploded conservative inst.i.tutions"--Rank and t.i.tle.

At the Toison d'Or, I say, when, after knocking over izzards _ad libitum_ in another part of the district, we descended one evening into the valley where Vicq d'Azyr lies nestled in the sunset light, with the pretty vendangeuses trooping down from the sloping vineyards, and the cattle winding homewards down the hill-side paths, and the vesper-bells softly chiming from the convent-tower rising yonder above its woods of linden and acacia--at the Toison d'Or, just alighting with the respective suites aforesaid, and all those portable embarra.s.sments of books, tiger-skin rugs, flacons of bouquet, travelling-bags warranted to carry any and everything that the most fastidious can require en route from Piccadilly to Peru, with which ladies do love to enc.u.mber and embitter their own persons and their companions' lives, we met, as I have told you, mesdames mes soeurs.

"What! Dear me, how very singular! Never should have dreamt of meeting _you_; so much too quiet a place, I should have thought. No Kursaal _here_? Come for sport--oh! Take Spes, will you! Poor little dear, he's been barking the whole way because he couldn't see out of the window.

Ah, Major Dunbar, charmed to see you! What an amusing rencontre, is it not?" And Lady Marechale, slightly out of temper for so eminent a Christian at the commencement of her greeting, smoothed down her ruffled feathers and turned smilingly on Dunbar. I have said he will be one day Marquis of Gwynne.

"By George, old fellow! _you_ in this out-of-the-way place! That's all right. Sport good, here? Glad to hear it. The deuce take me, if ever I am lured into travelling in a _partie carree_ again."

And Marechale raised his eyebrows, and whispered confidentially to me stronger language than I may commit to print, though, considering his provocation, it was surely as pardonable as Uncle Toby's.

"The thing I dislike in this sort of hotels and places is the admixture of people with whom one is obliged to come in contact," said Constance, putting up her gla.s.s as she entered the long low room where the humble table d'hote of the Toison d'Or was spread. Lady Marechale talks sweetly of the equality of persons in the sight of Heaven, but I never heard her recognize the same upon the soil of earth.

"Exactly! One may encounter such very objectionable characters! _I_ wished to dine in our own apartments, but Albany said no; and he is so positive, you know! This place seems miserably primitive," responded Agneta. Mrs. Protocol pets Rouges and Republicans of every country, talks liberalism like a feminine Sieyes or John Bright, projects a Reform Bill that shall bear the strongest possible family resemblance to the Decrets du 4 Aout, and considers "social distinctions _odious_ between man and man;" but her practice is scarcely consistent with her theory, seeing that she is about as tenacious and resentful of objectionable contact as a sea-anemone.

"Who is that, I wonder?" whispered Lady Marechale, acidulating herself in readiness, after the custom of English ladies when catching sight of a stranger whom they "don't know."

"I wonder! All alone--how very queer!" echoed Mrs. Protocol, drawing her black lace shawl around her, with that peculiar movement which announces a woman's prescience of something antagonistic to her, that is to be repelled _d'avance_, as surely as a hedgehog's transfer of itself into a p.r.i.c.kly ball denotes a sense of a coming enemy, and a need of caution and self-protection.

"Who is that deucedly handsome woman?" whispered Marechale to me.