Cecil Castlemaine's Gage, Lady Marabout's Troubles, and Other Stories Part 8

said Lady Marabout to Carruthers, eying her niece as she danced at her first ball at the Dowager-d.u.c.h.ess of Amandine's, and beginning to brighten up a little under the weight of her responsibilities.

"I think you have, mother. Val's indisputably handsome. You must tell her to make play with Goodwood or Nugent."

Lady Marabout unfurled her fan, and indignantly interrupted him:

"My dear Philip! do you suppose I would teach Valencia, or any girl under my charge, to lay herself out for any man, whoever or whatever it might be? I trust your cousin would not stoop to use such manoeuvres, did I even stoop to counsel them. Depend upon it, Philip, it is precisely those women who try to 'make play,' as you call it, with your s.e.x that fail most to charm them. It is abominable the way in which you men talk, as if we all hunted you down, and would drive you to St.

George's _nolens volens_!"

"So you would, mother," laughed Carruthers. "We 'eligible men' have a harder life of it than rabbits in a warren, with a dozen beagles after them. From the minute we're of age we're beset with traps for the unwary, and the spring-guns are so dexterously covered, with an inviting, innocent-looking turf of courtesies and hospitalities that it's next to a mural impossibility to escape them, let one retire into one's self, keep to monosyllables through all the courses of all the dinners and all the turns of all the valses, and avoid everything 'compromising,' as one may. I've suffered, and can tell you. I suffer still, though I believe and hope they are beginning to look on me as an incurable, given over to the clubs, the coulisses, and the cover-side.

There's a fellow that's known still more of the _peines fortes et dures_ than I. Goodwood's coming to ask for an introduction to Val, I would bet."

He was coming for that purpose, and, though Lady Marabout had so scornfully and sincerely repudiated her son's counsel relative to making play with Goodwood, blandly ignorant of her own weaknesses like a good many other people, Lady Marabout was not above a glow of chaperone gratification when she saw the glance of admiration which the Pet Eligible of the season bestowed on Valencia Valletort. Goodwood was a good-looking fellow--a clever fellow--though possibly he shone best alone at a mess luncheon, in a chat driving to Hornsey Wood, round the fire in a smoking-room, on a yacht deck, or anywhere where ladies of the t.i.tled world were not encountered, he having become afraid of them by dint of much persecution, as any October partridge of a setter's nose.

He was pa.s.sably good-looking, ordinarily clever, a very good fellow as I say, and--he was elder son of his Grace of Doncaster, which fact would have made him the desired of every unit of the _beau s.e.xe_, had he been hideous as the Veiled Prophet or Brutal Gilles de Rayes. The Beauty often loves the Beast in our day, as in the days of fairy lore. We see that beloved story of our petticoat days not seldom acted out, and when there is no possibility of personal transmogrification and amelioration for the Beast moreover; only--the Beauty has always had whispered in her little ear the t.i.tle she will win, and the revenues she will gain, and the cloth of gold she will wear, if she caresses Bruin the enamoured, swears his ugly head is G.o.d-like, and vows fidelity unswerving!

Goodwood was no uncouth Bruin, and he had strawberry-leaves in his gift; none of your lacquered, or ormolu, or silver-gilt coronets, such as are cast about nowadays with a liberality that reminds one of flinging a handful of halfpence from a balcony, where the nimblest beggar is first to get the prize; but of the purest and best gold; and Goodwood had been tried for accordingly by every woman he came across for the last dozen years. Women of every style and every order had primed all their rifles, and had their shot at him, and done their best to make a centre and score themselves as winner: belles and bas bleus, bewitching widows and budding debutantes, fast young ladies who tried to capture him in the hunting-field by clearing a bullfinch; saintly young ladies, who illuminated missals, and hinted they would like to take his conversion in hand; brilliant women, who talked at him all through a long rainy day, when Perths.h.i.+re was flooded, and the black-fowl unattainable; showy women, who _pose'd_ for him whole evenings in their opera-boxes, whole mornings in their boudoir--all styles and orders had set at him, till he had sometimes sworn in his haste that all women were man-traps, and that he wished to Heaven he were a younger son in the Foreign Office, or a poor devil in the Line, or anything, rather than what he was; the Pet Eligible of his day.

"Goodwood is certainly struck with her," thought Lady Marabout, as Despreaux disrobed her that night, running over with a retrogressive glance Valencia Valletort's successes at her first ball. "Very much struck, indeed, I should say. I will issue cards for another 'At Home.'

As for 'making play' with him, as Philip terms it, of course that is only a man's nonsense. Valencia will need none of those trickeries, I trust; still, it is any one's duty to make the best alliance possible for such a girl, and--dear Adeliza would be very pleased."

With which amiable remembrance of her sister (whom, conceiving it her duty to love, Lady Marabout persuaded herself that she _did_ love, from a common feminine opticism that there's an eleventh commandment which makes it compulsory to be attached to relatives _n'importe_ of whatever degree of disagreeability, though Lady Honiton was about the most odious hypochondriac going, in a perpetual state of unremitting battle with the whole outer world in general, and allopathists, h.o.m.oeopathists, and hydropathists in especial), the most amiable lady in all Christendom bade Despreaux bring up her cup of coffee an hour earlier in the morning, she had so much to do! asked if Bijou had had some panada set down by his basket in case he wanted something to take in the night; wished her maid good night, and laid her head on her pillow as the dawn streamed through the shutters, already settling what bridal presents she should give her niece Valencia, when she became present Marchioness of Goodwood and prospective d.u.c.h.ess of Doncaster before the altar rails of St. George's.

"That's a decidedly handsome girl, that cousin of yours, Phil," said Goodwood, on the pavement before her Grace of Amandine's, in Grosvenor Place, at the same hour that night.

"I think she _is_ counted like me!" said Carruthers. "Of course she's handsome; hasn't she De Boncoeur blood in her, my good fellow? We're all of us good-looking, always have been, thank G.o.d! If you're inclined to sacrifice, Goodwood, now's your time, and my mother'll be delighted.

She's brought out about half a million of debutantes, I should say, in her time, and all of 'em have gone wrong, somehow; wouldn't go off at all, like damp gunpowder, or would go off too quick in the wrong direction, like a volunteer's rifle charge; married ignominiously, or married obstinately, or never excited pity in the breast of any man, but had to retire to single-blessedness in the country, console themselves with piety and an harmonium, and spread nets for young clerical victims.

Give her a triumph at last, and let her have glory for once, as a chaperone, in catching _you_!"

Goodwood gave a little s.h.i.+ver, and tried to light a Manilla, which utterly refused to take light, for the twelfth time in half a minute.

"Hold your tongue! If the Templars' Order were extant, wouldn't I take the vows and bless them! What an unspeakable comfort and protection that white cross would be to us, Phil, if we could stick it on our coats, and know it would say to every woman that looked at us, 'No go, my pretty little dears--not to be caught!' Marriage! I can't remember any time that that word wasn't my bugbear. When I was but a little chicken, some four years old, I distinctly remember, when I was playing with little Ida Keane on the terrace, hearing her mother simper to mine, 'Perhaps darling Goodwood may marry my little Ida some day, who knows?' I never would play with Ida afterwards; instinct preserved me; she's six or seven-and thirty now, and weighs ten stone, I'm positive. Why _won't_ they let us alone? The way journalists and dowagers, the fellows who want to write a taking article, and the women who want to get rid of a taking daughter, all badger us, in public and private, about marriage just now, is abominable, on my life; the affair's _ours_, I should say, not theirs, and to marry isn't the ultimatum of a man's existence, nor anything like it."

"I hope not! It's more like the extinguisher. Good night, old fellow."

And Carruthers drove away in his hansom, while Goodwood got into his night-brougham, thinking that for the sake of the t.i.tle, the evil (nuptial) day _must_ come, sooner or later, but dashed off to forget the disagreeable obligation over the supper-table of the most sparkling empress of the demi-monde.

Lady Marabout had her wish; she brought out the belle of the season, and when a little time had slipped by, when the Hon. Val had been presented at the first Drawing-room, and shone there despite the worry, muddle, and squeeze incidental to that royal and fas.h.i.+onable ceremony, and she had gathered second-hand from her son what was said in the clubs relative to this new specimen of the Valletort beauty, she began to be happier under her duties than she had ever been before, and wrote letters to "dearest Adeliza," brimful of superlative adjectives and genuine warmth.

"Valencia will do me credit: I shall see her engaged before the end of June; she will have only to choose," Lady Marabout would say to herself some twenty times in the pauses of the morning concerts, the morning parties, the bazaar committees, the toilette consultations, the audiences to religious beggars, whose name was Legion and rapacity unmeasured, the ma.s.s of unanswered correspondence whose debt lay as heavily on Lady Marabout as his chains on a convict, and were about as little likely to be knocked off, and all the other things innumerable that made her life in the season one teetotum whirl of small worries and suns.h.i.+ny cares, from the moment she began her day, with her earliest cup of Mocha softened with cream from that pet dairy of hers at Fernditton, where, according to Lady Marabout, the cows were constantly _in articulo mortis_, but the milk invariably richer than anywhere else, an agricultural anomaly which presented no difficulties to _her_ reason.

Like all women, she loved paradoxes, defied logic recklessly, and would clear at a bound a chasm of solecisms that would have kept Plato in difficulties about crossing it, and in doubt about the strength of his jumping-pole, all his life long.

"She will do me great credit," the semi-consoled chaperone would say to herself with self-congratulatory relief; and if Lady Marabout thought now and then, "I wish she were a trifle--a trifle more--demonstrative,"

she instantly checked such an ungrateful and hypercritical wish, and remembered that a heart is a highly treacherous and unadvisable possession for any young lady, and a most happy omission in her anatomy, though Lady Marabout had, she would confess to herself on occasions with great self-reproach, an unworthy and lingering weakness for that contraband article, for which she scorned and scolded herself with the very worst success.

Lady Marabout _had_ a heart herself; to it she had had to date the greatest worries, troubles, imprudences, and vexations of her life; she had had to thank it for nothing, and to dislike it for much; it had made her grieve most absurdly for other people's griefs; it had given her a hundred unphilosophical pangs at philosophic ingrat.i.tude from people who wanted her no longer; it had teased, worried, and plagued her all her life long, had often interfered in the most meddling and inconvenient manner between her and her reason, her comfort and her prudence; and yet she had a weakness for the same detrimental organ in other people--a weakness of which she could no more have cured herself than of her belief in the detection-defying powers of liquid rouge, the potentiality of a Liliputian night-bolt against an army of burglars, the miraculous properties of sal volatile, the efficacy of sermons, and such-like articles of faith common to feminine orthodoxy. A weakness of which she never felt more ignominiously convicted and more secretly ashamed than in the presence of Miss Valletort, that young lady having a lofty and magnificent disdain for all such follies, quite unattainable to ordinary mortals, which oppressed Lady Marabout with a humiliating sense of inferiority to her niece of eighteen summers. "So admirably educated! so admirably brought up!" she would say to herself over and over again, and if heretic suggestions that the stiffest trained flowers are not always the best, that the upright and spotless arum-lily isn't so fragrant as the careless, brilliant, tangled clematis; that rose-boughs, tossing free in suns.h.i.+ne and liberty, beat hollow the most carefully-pruned standard that ever won a medal at Regent's Park, with such-like allegories, arising from contemplation of her conservatory or her balcony flowers, _would_ present themselves, Lady Marabout repressed them dutifully, and gratefully thought how many pounds' weight lighter became the weary burden of a chaperone's responsibilities when the onerous charge had been educated "on the best system."

"Goodwood's attentions _are_ serious, Philip, say what you like," said the Countess to her son, as determinedly as a theologian states his pet points with wool in his ears, that he may not hear any Satan-inspired, rational, and mathematical disproval of them, with which you may rashly seek to soil his tympana and smash his arguments--"Goodwood's attentions _are_ serious, Philip, say what you like," said her ladys.h.i.+p, at a morning party at Kew, eating her Neapolitan ice, complacently glancing at the "most eligible alliance of the season," who was throwing the b.a.l.l.s at lawn-billiards, and talking between whiles to the Hon. Val with praiseworthy and promising animation.

"Serious indeed, mother, if they tend matrimony-wards!" smiled Carruthers. "It's a very serious time indeed for unwary sparrows when they lend an ear to the call-bird, and think about hopping on to the lime-twigs. I should think it's from a sense of compunction for the net you've led us into, that you all particularize our attentions, whenever they point near St. George's, by that very suggestive little adjective 'serious!' Yes, I am half afraid poor Goodey is a little touched. He threw over our Derby sweepstakes up at Hornsey Wood yesterday to go and stifle himself in Willis's rooms at your bazaar, and buy a guinea cup of Souchong from Valencia; and, considering he's one of the best shots in England, I don't think you could have a more conclusive, if you could have a more poetic, proof of devoted renunciation. _I_'d fifty times rather get a spear in my side, a la Ivanhoe, for a woman than give up a Pigeon-match, a Cup-day, or a Field-night!"

"You'll never do either!" laughed Lady Marabout, who made it one of her chief troubles that her son would not marry, chiefly, probably, because if he _had_ married she would have been miserable, and thought no woman good enough for him, would have been jealous of his wife's share of his heart, and supremely wretched, I have no doubt, at his throwing himself away, as she would have thought it, had his handkerchief lighted on a Princess born, lovely as Galatea, and blessed with Venus's cestus.

"Never, _plaise a Dieu_!" responded her son, piously over his ice; "but if Goodwood's serious, what's Cardonnel? _He_'s lost his head, if you like, after the Valletort beauty."

"Major Cardonnel!" said Lady Marabout, hastily. "Oh no, I don't think so. I hope not--I trust not."

"Why so? He's one of the finest fellows in the Service."

"I dare say; but you see, my dear Philip, he's not--not--desirable."

Carruthers stroked his moustaches and laughed:

"Fie, fie, mother! if all other Belgraviennes are Mammon-wors.h.i.+ppers, I thought you kept clear of the paganism. I thought your freedom from it was the only touch by which you weren't 'purely feminine,' as the lady novelists say of their pet bits of chill propriety."

"Wors.h.i.+p Mammon! Heaven forbid!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Lady Marabout. "But there are duties, you see, my dear; your friend is a very delightful man, to be sure; I like him excessively, and if Valencia felt any _great_ preference for him----"

"You'd feel it _your_ duty to counsel her to throw him over for Goodwood."

"I never said so, Philip," interrupted Lady Marabout, with as near an approach to asperity as she could achieve, which approach was less like vinegar than most people's best honey.

"But you implied it. What are 'duties' else, and why is poor Cardonnel 'not desirable'?"

Lady Marabout played a little tattoo with her spoon in perplexity.

"My dear Philip, you know as well as I do what I mean. One might think you were a boy of twenty to hear you!"

"My dear mother, like all disputants, when beaten in argument and driven into a corner, you resort to vituperation of your opponent!" laughed Carruthers, as he left her and lounged away to pick up the stick with which pretty Flora Elmers had just knocked the pipe out of Aunt Sally's head on to the velvet lawn of Lady George Frangipane's dower-house, leaving his mother by no means tranquillized by his suggestions.

"Dear me!" thought Lady Marabout, uneasily, as she conversed with the Dowager-Countess of Patchouli on the respective beauties of two new pelargonium seedlings, the Leucadia and the Beatrice, for which her gardener had won prizes the day before at the Regent's Park Show--"dear me! why is there invariably this sort of cross-purposes in everything?

It will be so grievous to lose Goodwood (and he _is_ decidedly struck with her; when he bought that rosebud yesterday of her at the bazaar, and put it in the breast of his waistcoat, I heard what he said, and it was no nonsense, no mere flirting complaisance either)--it would be so grievous to lose him; and yet if Valencia really care for Cardonnel--and sometimes I almost fancy she does--I shouldn't know which way to advise.

I thought it would be odd if a season could pa.s.s quietly without my having some worry of this sort! With fifty men always about Valencia, as they are, how _can_ I be responsible for any mischief that may happen, though, to hear Philip talk, one would really imagine it was _my_ fault that they lost their heads, as he calls it! As if a forty-horse steam-power could stop a man when he's once off down the incline into love! The more you try to pull him back the more impetus you give him to go headlong down. I wish Goodwood would propose, and we could settle the affair definitively. It is singular, but she has had no offers hardly with all her beauty. It is very singular, in _my_ first season I had almost as many as I had names on my tablets at Almack's. But men don't marry now, they say. Perhaps 'tisn't to be wondered at, though I wouldn't allow it to Philip. Poor things! they lose a very great many pleasant things by it, and get nothing, I'm sure, nine times out of ten, except increased expenses and unwelcome worries. I don't think I would have married if I'd been a man, though I'd never admit it, of course, to one of them. There are plenty of women who know too much of their own s.e.x ever to wonder that a man doesn't marry, though of course we don't say so; 'twouldn't be to our interest. Sculptors might as well preach iconoclasm, or wine-merchants tee-totalism, as women misoganism, however little in our hearts we may marvel at it. Oh, my dear Lady Patchouli!

you praise the Leucadia too kindly--you do indeed--but if you really think so much of it, let me send you some slips. I shall be most happy, and Fenton will be only too proud; it is his favorite seedling."

Carruthers was quite right. One fellow at least had lost his head after the beauty of the season, and he was Cardonnel, of the--Lancers, as fine a fellow, as Philip said, as any in the Queen's, but a dreadful detrimental in the eyes of all chaperones, because he was but the fourth son of one of the poorest peers in the United Kingdom, a fact which gave him an aegis from all a.s.saults matrimonial, and a freedom from all smiles and wiles, traps and gins, which Goodwood was accustomed to tell him he bitterly envied him, and on which Cardonnel had fervently congratulated himself, till he came under the fire of the Hon. Val's large luminous eyes one night, when he was levelling his gla.s.s from his stall at Lady Marabout's box, to take a look at the new belle, as advised to do by that most fastidious female critic, Vane Steinberg.

Valencia Valletort's luminous eyes had gleamed that night under their lashes, and pierced through the lenses of his lorgnon. He saw her, and saw nothing but her afterwards, as men looking on the sun keep it on their retina to the damage and exclusion of all other objects.

Physical beauty, even when it is a little bit soulless, is an admirable weapon for instantaneous slaughter, and the trained and pruned standard roses show a very effective ma.s.s of bloom; though, as Lady Marabout's floral tastes and experiences told her, they don't give one the lasting pleasure that a careless bough of wild rose will do, with its untutored grace and its natural fragrance. With the standard you see we keep in the artificial air of the horticultural tent, and are never touched out of it for a second; its perfume seems akin to a bouquet, and its destiny is, we are sure, to a parterre. The wild-rose fragrance breathes of the hill-side and the woodlands, and brings back to us soft touches of memory, of youth, of a fairer life and a purer air than that in which we are living now.

The Hon. Val did _not_ have as many offers as her aunt and chaperone had on the first flush of her pride in her antic.i.p.ated. Young ladies, educated on the "best systems," are apt to be a trifle wearisome, and _don't_, somehow or other, take so well as the sedulous efforts of their pruners and trainers--the rarefied moral atmosphere of the conservatories, in which they are carefully screened from ordinary air, and the anxiety evinced lest the flower should ever forget itself, and sway naturally in the wind--deserve. But Cardonnel had gone mad after her, that perfect face of hers had done for him; and whatever Goodwood might be, _he_ was serious--he positively haunted the young beauty like her own shadow--he was leaning on the rails every morning of his life that she took her early ride--he sent her bouquets as lavishly as if he'd been a nursery gardener. By some species of private surveillance, or lover's clairvoyance, he knew beforehand where she would go, and was at the concert, fete, morning party, bazaar, or whatever it happened to be, as surely as was Lady Marabout herself. Poor Cardonnel was serious, and fiercely fearful of his all-powerful and entirely eligible rival; though greater friends than he and Goodwood had been, before this girl's face appeared on the world of Belgravia, never lounged arm-in-arm into Pratt's, or strolled down the "sweet shady side of Pall-Mall."

Goodwood's attentions were very marked, too, even to eyes less willing to construe them so than Lady Marabout's. Goodwood himself, if chaffed on the subject, vouchsafed nothing; laughed, stroked his moustaches, or puffed his cigar, if he happened to have that blessed resource in all difficulties, and comforter under all embarra.s.sments, between his lips at the moment; but decidedly he sought Valencia Valletort more, or, to speak more correctly, he shunned her less than he'd ever done any other young lady, and one or two Sunday mornings--_mirabile dictu!_--he was positively seen at St. Paul's, Knightsbridge, in the seat behind Lady Marabout's sittings. A fact which, combining as it did a brace of miracles at once, of early rising and unusual piety, set every Belgravienne in that fas.h.i.+onable sanctuary watching over the top of her illuminated prayer-book, to the utter destruction of her hopes and interruption of her orisons.

Dowagers began to tremble behind their fans, young ladies to quake over their bouquets; the topic was eagerly discussed by every woman from Clarges Street to Lowndes Square; their Graces of Doncaster smiled well pleased on Valencia--she was unquestionable blood, and they so wished dear Goodwood to settle! There was whispered an awful whisper to the whole female world; whispered over matutinal chocolate, and luncheon Strasbourg pates, ball-supper Moets', and demi-monde-supper Silleri, over Vane Steinberg's cigar and Eulalie Rosiere's cigarette, over the _Morning Post_ in the clubs, and _Le Follet_ in the boudoir, that--the Pet Eligible would--marry! That the Pet Prophecy of universal smash was going to be fulfilled could hardly have occasioned greater consternation.

The soul of Lady Marabout had been disquieted ever since her son's suggestions at Lady George Frangipane's morning party, and she began to worry: for herself, for Valencia, for Goodwood, for Cardonnel, for her responsibilities in general, and for her "dearest Adeliza's" alternate opinions of her duenna qualifications in particular. Lady Marabout had an intense wish, an innocent wish enough, as innocent and very similar in its way to that of an Eton boy to make a centre at a rifle-contest, viz., to win the Marquis of Goodwood; innocent, surely, for though neither the rifle prize nor the Pet Eligible could be won without mortification unspeakable to a host of unsuccessful aspirants, if we decree that sort of thing sinful and selfish, as everything natural seems to me to get decreed nowadays, we may as well shut up at once; if we may not try for the top of the pole, why erect poles at all, monsieur? If we must not do our best to pa.s.s our friend and brother, we must give up climbing forever, and go on all fours placably with Don and Pontos.

Everybody has his ambition: one sighs for the Woolsack, another for the Hunt Cup; somebody longs to be First Minister, somebody else pines to be first dancer; one man plumes himself on a new fish-sauce, another on a fresh reform bill; A. thirsts to get a single brief, B. for the time when he shall be worried with no briefs at all; C. sets his hopes on being the acrobat at Cremorne, D. on being the acrobat of the Tuileries; fat bacon is Hodge the hedger's _summum bonum_, and Johannisberg _pur_ is mine; Empedocles thinks notoriety everything, and Diogenes thinks quiet everything--each has his own reading of ambition, and Lady Marabout had hers; the d.u.c.h.ess of Doncaster thirsted for the Garter for her husband, Lady Elmers's pride was to possess the smallest terrier that ever took daisy tea and was carried in a monkey-m.u.f.f, her Grace of Amandine slaved night and day to bring her party in and throw the ministry out. Lady Marabout sighed but for one thing--to win the Pet Eligible of the season, and give eclat for once to one phase of her chaperone's existence.

Things were nicely in train. Goodwood was beginning to bite at that very handsome fly the Hon. Val, and promised to be hooked and landed without much difficulty before long, and placed, hopelessly for him, triumphantly for her, in the lime-basket of matrimony. Things were beautifully in train, and Lady Marabout was for once flattering herself she should float pleasantly through an unruffled and successful season, when Carruthers poured the one drop of _amari aliquid_ into her champagne-cup by his suggestion of Cardonnel's doom. And then Lady Marabout begun to worry.

She who could not endure to see a fly hurt or a flower pulled needlessly, had nothing for it but to worry for Cardonnel's destiny, and puzzle over the divided duties which Carruthers had hinted to her. To reject the one man because he was not well off did seem to her conscience, uncomfortably awakened by Phil's innuendoes, something more mercenary than she quite liked to look at; yet to throw over the other, future Duke of Doncaster, the eligible, the darling, the yearned-for of all May Fair and Belgravia, seemed nothing short of madness to inculcate to Valencia; a positive treason to that poor absent, trusting, "dearest Adeliza," who, after the visions epistolarily spread out before her, would utterly refuse to be comforted if Goodwood any way failed to become her son-in-law, and, moreover, the heaviest blow to Lady Marabout herself that the merciless axe of that brutal headsman Contretemps could deal her.