Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  “If we were only allured where there are warm hearts, we should keep in a blessed state of indifference,” said I, thinking savagely of Lady Turquoise and that confounded county Member.

  “Hallo, Arthur! what has turned you cynic?” laughed De Vigne. “Only this very morning were you sentimentalising over the ‘Lady of Shalott,’ and wanting to inflict it on me!”

  “Yes, and you stopped me with the abominable quotation, ‘Ass, am I omon-eyed?’ I say, De Vigne, I wish you’d tell us how that affair with Lucy Davis ended? Curly and I saw you quarrelling the day before you left.”

  “I never quarrelled!” said De Vigne, contemptuously. “I never do with anybody; if they don’t say what I like, I tell them my mind at once, and there’s an end of it. But I never quarrel! I met Lucy that evening as I was going into Frestonhills, and when I told her I was about to leave, she demanded — what do you think? — nothing less than a promise of marriage! Only fancy — from me to her! She even said I had made her one! I’ve been guilty of many mad things, but never of one quite so insane as that. I told her flatly it was a lie — so it was, and it put me in a passion to be saddled with such an atrocious falsehood: I never can stand quiet, and see people trying to chisel me, you know. I offered to do anything she liked for her; to provide for her as liberally as she chose. But not a word would she hear from me; she was mad, I suppose, because she could not startle or chicane me into admitting the promise of marriage, having possibly in her eye the heavy damages an enlightened court would grant to her ‘innocent years’ and her ‘wrongs!’ At any rate, she would not hear a word I said, but she poured her invectives into my ear, letting out that she had never loved me, but had intended to make me a stepping-stone to the money, and rank, she was always pining after; that, having failed, she hated me, and that before she died, would be revenged.”

  “By George! what an amusing idea. She’d be puzzled to do it, I fancy.”

  “Rather,” laughed De Vigne, reining up his mare; “but women say anything in a passion. Lucy Davis had gone straight out of my mind, till you said that handsome Trefusis made you think of her. I am glad the St Croix and L’Estranges are coming to lunch with you, Curly; I want to see more of my imperial beauty; and I must be back at Vigne by Saturday. Sabretasche, and Pigott, and Severn, and no end of men are coming down for the pheasants; I wish you were too, old fellows! Good night; Au revoir!” And De Vigne set us down before Trinity, and drove on to the Bull; smoking, and thinking, very likely, of his superb Trefusis.

  Oh, those jolly Cambridge days! The splendid manner in which we bumped Corpus and Katherine Hall, and carried off the Cup, to the envy of all the University; the style in which we thrashed the Exeter Eight, with ignominy unspeakable, before the eyes of Henley; the row and scuffle of Town and Gown rows, dear to the British passion for hard hits, where Curly knocked a cobbler down and then gave him in charge for an assault; the skill with which that mischievous young Honourable caught his whip round the shovel-hat of a dean, raising that venerated article of dress in mid-air, and only escaping rustication by dashing on with his tandem-team too quickly for identification: were they not all written, in their day, among the records of Trinity men’s larks?

  We used to vow we were confoundedly tired of Granta, and so I dare say we might feel at the time; but how pleasant they were, those light-hearted college days! — the honours of the Eight-oar; the thrashing of the Marylebone Eleven; the rattle cross country, for the Cesare-witch, or the Cambridge Sweepstakes; the flirtations of pretty shop-girls in Petty Cury, or Trumpington-street; the raving politics of the Union, occasional prelude to triumphs, forensic and senatorial; the noisy wines, where scanty humour woke more merriment than wittiest mots do twenty years after; and Cambridge port passed with a flavour, that no olives or anchovies can give to Comet claret now. How pleasant they were, those jolly college days! As I think of them, many kindly faces and joyous voices rise before me! Where are they all? Some lying with the colours on their breast beside the Euxine Sea, and along the line of the Pacific; some struck down by the assassin’s knife in the temples at Cawnpore; some sleeping beneath the sighing of the Delhi palms, or of the sad Atlantic waves; some wasting classic eloquence on country hinds, in moss-grown village churches; some fighting the great fight, between science and death, in the crowded hospital-wards of London; some wearing honour, and honesty, and truth from their hearts, in the breathless, up-hill press of the great world; — all of them, living or dead, scattered far away over the earth, since those old days, in the shadow of the academic walls!

  The time to lionise Cambridge, as everybody knows, is May and June, when the backs are all in their glory; when the graceful spires of King’s rise up against blue skies; when the white towers of John’s stand bosomed in green leafy shades; when the Trinity limes fill the air with fragrance, and the sun peers through the great shadowy elm-boughs, of Neville’s Court; and the brown Cam flows under its bridges, with water-lilies and forget-me-nots on its breast, gliding, as though conscious that it was in classic shades, through vistas of waving boughs, and past gray, stately college walls; bringing into the grave haunts of Learning, the glad and vernal freshness of the Spring. May is the time for Cambridge; still, even in October, we managed to give the L’Estranges, and the St. Croix, a very good reception. Women are always royally received by Cantabs, and our guests were calculated to excite the envy of all the University. We did the lions with very little architectural appreciation; but the science of eyes and smiles, is a pleasanter one than the science of styles and orders; and we were quite as contented, and I have no doubt much better amused, than if, Ruskin à la main, we had been competent to pull to pieces the beauty of King’s, and prate of “severity” and “purity.” Happy in our barbarianism, we crossed the Bridge of Sighs with a laugh at old Fantyre’s jokes; strolled down the Fellowship Walk, telling Julia St Croix, who had not two ideas in her head, that Bacon’s Gate would, to a surety, fall down on her; went in at Humility, through Virtue, and out at Honour, flirting desperately under those grave archways; and hurried irreverently through the libraries, where reading-men, cramming in niches, looked up, forgetting their studies at the rustle of Lady Blanche’s sick flounces, and Thorwaldsen’s “Byron” seemed to glance with Juanesque admiration at the superb eye of the Trefusis, as she lifted them to that statue; which does, indeed, as the poet himself averred, make a shocking nigger of him.

  “How strange it seems to me,” said De Vigne, as, entering King’s Chapel, we brushed against one of the senior Fellows, who had dozed away in college chambers all the prime of his life— “how incomprehensible, that men can pass a whole existence, in the sort of chrysalis state of which one sees so much in Universities. That muff is a Kingsman; he obtained his fellowship by right, his degree without distinction. He lives on, fuddling his brains — which he has never worked since he got his Eton captaincy — with port, and playing solemn rubbers, and eating heavy dinners, till a living falls as fat as his avarice desires. He has no thoughts, no ambition, no sphere beyond the academic pale.”

  “And no love, I dare say, save audit, and no mistress save turtle-soup,” laughed Flora L’Estrange.

  “Perhaps he had once, one whom the selfish creeds of the Fellowship system parted from him long ago,” said Curly, with a tender glance at that very practical-minded flirt, Julia St. Croix.

  “That’s right, Curly,” said De Vigne, amusedly, “make a romance of it Fellows of colleges, with snuff, and whist, and dry routine, are such appropriate subjects for sentiment! But after all, Miss Trefusis, that man is not a greater marvel to me than one of those classical scholars, who is nothing but a classical scholar, such as one meets here and in Oxford, binding down his ambitions to the elucidation of a dead tongue, exhausting his energies in the evolving of decayed philosophies, spending, as Pelham says, ‘one long school-day of lexicons and grammars,’ his memory the charnel-house for the bones of a lifeless language, his brain enacting the mechanical rôle of a dictionary or an encyclopaedia
, living all his life, without human aspirations or human sympathies, and in his death leaving no void among men, not missed even by a dog.”

  “It would not suit you?” asked the Trefusis, smiling. “No, no,” chuckled the old Fantyre to herself, “he’ll have his pleasure, I take it, cost him what it may.”

  “I!” echoed De Vigne, “chained down to the limits of a commentator’s studies; or a Hellenist’s labours! Heaven forbid! I love excitement, action, change; a mill-wheel monotony would be the death of me. I would rather have storms to encounter, than no movement to keep me alive.”

  “Are you so changeable, then?”

  “Well, yes! — I fancy I am. At least, I never met anything that could chain me long as yet.”

  He laughed as he spoke, leaning against one of the stalls, the sun streaming through the rich stained glass full upon his face, and his dark lustrous eyes, gleaming with amusement, at a thousand reminiscences evoked by her speech. The Trefusis looked at him with a curious smile, perhaps of longing to chain the restless and wayward spirit, perhaps of pique at his careless words, perhaps of resolve to conquer and to win him; it might have been hate, but — it certainly was not love! Still Flora L’Estrange whispered to her husband:

  “She will marry him if she can.”

  L’Estrange laughed, and looked at Granville and his companion, as they were (in appearance) discussing the subjects of the storied windows of Holy Henry’s chapel, but talking, I fancy, of other topics than sacred art or history.

  “Quite right, my pet, but I hope she won’t. I would as soon see him marry a tigress!”

  Tired of lionizing, we soon returned to Curly’s rooms, where the best luncheon which could be had out of Cambridge shops and Trinity buttery, with London wine, and game from his governor’s preserves, was ready for us. Curly never did anything without doing it well, and his rooms were, I think, the most luxurious in all Granta, with his grand piano, his bronzes, and his landscapes, mixed up with tobacco-pots, boxing-gloves, pipes, and portraits of ballet pets, and heroes of the Turf and the P.R. The luncheon was as merry as it was lavish — what college meal, with fast, pretty women at the board, ever was not? — and while the Badminton and champagne-cup went round, and the gyps waited as solemnly and dreadfully as gyps ever do, on like occasions, a cross-fire of wit and fun and nonsense, shot across the table, and mingled with the perfume of Curly’s hothouse bouquets, enough to bring the stones of time-honoured Trinity about our irreverent heads. De Vigne, in very high spirits, laughed and talked with all the brilliance for which society had distinguished him; Flora and Lady Blanche were always full of mischievous repartee; Curly and Julia St. Croix flirted so desperately, that if it had not been for the publicity of the scene, I believe the boy would have gone straight away into a proposal. Lady Fantyre, especially, when the claret-cup had gone round freely, was so amusing that we forgot she was old, and the Trefusis, if she did not contribute equally to the conversation, sat beside De Vigne, darting glances at him from her large Spanish eyes, and looking handsome enough to be inspiration to anybody.

  “So you leave Cambridge to-morrow?” she said, as they were waiting for the St Croix carriage to take them home again.

  “Yes. If you were going to remain I should stay too; but Mrs. St. Croix tells me you leave on Monday,” said De Vigne, in a low tone, with an admiring glance, to which few women would have been insensible.

  She looked at him with that cold, malicious smile, which had I been he, would have made me very careful of that woman.

  “It is easy to say that, when, as I am going on Monday I cannot put you to the test!”

  “I never trouble myself to say what I do not mean, Miss Trefusis.”

  She laughed; she had found she had power to pique him!

  “Then will you come and see me in town after Christmas?”

  What he answered I know not, but I dare say it was in the affirmative; he would hardly have refused anything to such a glance as she gave him. He lingered beside their carriage, and when it rolled away, stood in the Trinity gateway with a smile on his lips, twisting in his fingers a white azalea she had given him. But, two hours after, the flower was thrown into the college grate, and the b’edmaker swept it out with the cinders! So he was not very far gone as yet.

  The next morning, after we had “done chapel,” De Vigne, who had sent on his groom, hunters, and luggage the day before, walked down to the station, and we with him.

  “I wish you two fellows were coming to Vigne with me,” he said, as we went along. “You don’t know what a bore it is having a place like that! So much is expected of one. You belong to the county, and the county makes you feel the relationship pretty keenly, too. You must fill the house in the Recesses. You must hear horrible long speeches from your tenantry, wishing you health and happiness, while you’re wishing them at the devil. You must have confounded interviews with your steward, who looks frightfully glum at the pot of money that has been dropped over the Goodwood, and hints at the advisability of cutting down the very clump of oaks that makes the beauty of the drawing-room view. Then, worst of all, you’re expected to hunt your own county, even though it be as unfit as the Wash or the Black Forest, while you’re longing to be with the Burton or Tedworth, following Tom Smith, or Tom Edge, or Pytchley men, who don’t funk at every bull-finch!”

  “Do you hunt the Vigne pack, then, always?” asked Curly.

  “I? No. I never said I did all those things. I only said they are expected of me, and it’s tiresome to say no.”

  “Then you must make love to the Trefusis, if you don’t like ‘No,’ for her eyes say, ‘Do do it/ as clearly as eyes can speak.”

  He laughed. “Yes. I must admit she doesn’t look a very impregnable citadel.”

  “Not if you make it worth her while to surrender !”

  “None of them surrender for nothing,” said De Vigne, smiling. “With some, it’s cashmeres; with others, yellow boys; with some, it’s position; with others, a wedding-ring. I can’t see much difference myself, though I’d give cashmeres in plenty, and should be remarkably sorry to be chiselled into settlements.”

  “I should fancy so,” said Curly; “only think of the annihilation of larks, liberty, fun, claret, latchkeys, oyster suppers, B. and S., and Bals Masqués, expressed in those two doomed words, ‘a married man!’ To my mind, marrying’s as bad as hanging, and equally puts a finish to all life worth supporting!”

  “Did you tell Julia your views, Curly?” asked De Vigne, quietly.

  “Pooh! stuff! What’s Julia to do with me? the girl at the Cherryhinton public, is a vast lot better-looking,” muttered Curly, with an embarrassment that made me doubt if the limes of Trinity had not heard different opinions enunciated with regard to the Holy Bond. — N.B. Julia St Croix that day three months, tied herself to that same snuffy, portly, wine-embalmed Fellow, she had laughed at with us, in King’s Chapel. To be sure he had then become rector of Snooze-cum-Rest; and when Ruth goes to woo Boaz, we may always be pretty certain she knows he is master of the harvest, and has the golden wheat-ears in her eye, sweet innocent little dear though she look.

  “The Cherryhinton public? I see — that’s why skittles and beer have become suddenly delightful,” laughed De Vigne.

  “Why not?” asked Curly, meekly. “Skittles are no sin, and malt and hops are man’s natural aliment; and as for barmaids, why, if one’s denied houris and nectar, one must take to Jane and bitter beer, n’est-ce pas?”

  “Don’t know,” said De Vigne. “I prefer Quartier Bréda and Champagne. As Balzac says, ‘Une femme, belle comme Galatée ou Hélène, ne pourrait me plaire tant soit peu qu’elle soit crottée!”’

  “You forgot that once — you didn’t repudiate Lucy Davis?”

  “Lucy was half a lady, in dress at least,” laughed De Vigne, “and she got up uncommonly well, too; however, that was in my schoolboy days. After philosophies and problems a kitchen-maid is pardonable; and as for the young woman who presides over the post-office, or th
e oyster-patties, she is perfectly irresistible! The laissez-aller of the Paphian Temple, as the fine writers say, is so delightful after the stiff stoicism of the Porch!”

  “Well, thank Heaven, the Paphian Temple is built everywhere,” said Curly, “and you find it under the taps of XXX, as well as in the gilt walls of a Bréda boudoir; or the poor wretches who haven’t the Bréda gold key, would get locked into very outer darkness indeed! Here’s the train just starting. By Jove! that’s lucky! All right, old fellow. Here’s Puck; tumble in, old boy.”

  And the “old boy” being “tumbled in” (he was a wiry blue terrier), De Vigne seated himself, and was rolled off en route to Vigne with a pretty brunette opposite him, who seemed imbued with extreme admiration Of the terrier or — his master. Girls always begin by calling his children “little loves” to a widower, though the brats be as ugly as sin; and by admiring his dog to a bachelor, though frightened to death it should snap at them!

  Curly and I saw the train off and walked back to Granta, to console ourselves, first with billiards and beer at Brown’s, then with some hard practice on the river.

  Eheu! fugaces! — I belong to the Blue Jersey B.C., the first in England; but somehow I don’t feel the zest now that I used to feel, with “Time, Five!”

  “Well pulled, Five!” in my ear from our Stroke (poor fellow! he went down with jungle fever, and is lying in the banyan shadows, in Ceylon sand), and the shrill imperious shrieking, as the speed and bottom of Oxford told against us, of that wicked little dog Hervey, our Coxswain (he’s a bishop now, and hush-hushes you, and strokes his apron, if you whisper the smallest crumb of fun over his capital Comet wine). Dear old Cambridge! I wouldn’t give a straw for a Cambridge man who didn’t grow prolix as he talked, or wrote of her, and didn’t empty a bumper of Guinness’s or Moët — as his taste may lie — in her honour. A man may read, or he may not read, at college. I prefer the boy who knows how to feather his oar, to one who only knows Latin quantities and Greek unities; but at any rate, whether he get first classes or not, he will find his level, measure his weight, and learn — unless he be obtuse indeed — that through college life, as through all other life, the best watchwords are — Pluck, and Honour!