by Ouida
To the Derby, of course, we went — Curly, I, and some other men, in De Vigne’s drag, lunched off Rhenish, and Guinness, and Moët, and all the delicacies Fortnum and Mason ever packed in a hamper for Epsom; and drove back to mess along the crowded road. Dropping the others en route, De Vigne drove me on to dine with him at his own house in Wilton-crescent.
“Come into my room first, old fellow,” he said, as we passed up the stairs. “I bought my wedding presents for Sabretasche and his wife that will be, yesterday, and want to show them to you. Holloa! what the deuce is that fellow Raymond doing! — reading my letters as I’ live! I think I am fated to come across rascals! However, as they make up nine-tenths of the world, I suppose I can’t be surprised at the constant rencontres!”
From the top of the staircase we saw, though at some I distance, straight through into De Vigne’s bedroom, the door of which stood open. At the writing-table in the centre sat his head valet, Raymond, so earnestly reading some of the correspondence upon it, that he never heard or saw us. De Vigne sometimes wrote his letters in his bedroom; he always read those by the first post over his matutinal coffee; and as he was immeasurably careless both with his papers and his money, his servants had always full opportunity to peruse the one and take the other. If he had seen the man taking ten pounds off his dressing-table, he would have had a fling at human nature, thought it was the way of that class of people, and kept the man on, because he was a useful servant, and no more of a thief, probably, than another would be. But — no matter in what rank — a dishonourable or a sneaky thing, a breach of trust in any way, always irritated him beyond conception; he had been betrayed in greater or minor things so often, and treachery was so utterly foreign to his own frank and impetuous nature, that his impatience at it was very pardonable. I could see his eyebrows contract ominously; he went up, stretched his hand over the man’s shoulder, and took the letter quietly out of his grasp.
“Go to Mills for your next month’s wages, and leave this evening.”
Raymond, sleek, and smooth, and impenetrable as he was, started violently, and changed colour; but his answer was very ready.
“Why, Majori I was merely sorting your papers, sir. You have often ordered me to do that.”
“No lies — leave the room!” said his master, briefly, as he turned to me. “Arthur, here are the things I mentioned. Come and look at them.”
His valet did not obey his order; he still lingered. He began again, in his soft, purring tone:
“You wouldn’t dismiss me like this, Major, if you knew what I could tell you.”
“Leave the room, and send Robert to me,” said De Vigne, with that stem hauteur which always came up when people teazed him. He had had his own way from his infancy, and was totally unaccustomed to being crossed. It is bad training for the world for a man to have been obeyed from his cradle.
“You would give me a good deal, Major, to know what I know. I have a secret in my keeping, sir, that you would pay me handsomely to learn—”
“Silence — and leave the room!” reiterated De Vigne, with an impatient stamp of his foot.
Raymond bowed, with the grace becoming a groom of the chambers.
“Certainly, sir. I hope you will pardon me for having troubled you.”
Wherewith he backed out with all the sang-froid imaginable, and De Vigne turned to me:
“Cool fellow, isn’t he?”
“Yes, but you might as well have heard what he had to say.”
“My dear fellow, why?” cried De Vigne, with his most grandiose and contemptuous smile. “What could that man possibly know that could concern me? It was only a ruse to get money out of me, or twist his low-bred curiosity in spying over my letters into a matter of moment I was especially annoyed at it, because the letter he was reading is a note from Alma; nothing in it — merely to answer a question I asked her about one of her pictures; but you know the child has an enthusiastic way of expressing herself at all times — means nothing, but sounds a great deal, and the ‘Dear Sir Folko,’ and ‘your ever grateful Little Alma,’ and all the rest of it — the days are so long when I don’t go to see her, and she envies the women who are in my set and always with me — and all that — reads rather.... I know how she means it, but a common man like Raymond will put a very different significance upon it.”
“Most probably, I know how she means it too; still, you know the old saying, De Vigne, relative to toying with edged tools?”
“No, I don’t,” said De Vigne, curtly; “or at least I should say I know edged tools, when I see them, as well as you do, and am old enough, if I did come across them, not to cut myself with them. I can’t think what has possessed Sabretasche and you to try and sermonise to me! Heaven knows you need to lecture yourselves, both of you! I don’t stand it very well from him; but I’ll be shot if I do from you, you young dog, whom I patronised in jackets in Frestonhills! Get out with you, and let Robert take the Derby dust off you in the blue- room.”
And he threw Alma’s note into a private drawer (to be kept, I wonder?), and pushed me out by the shoulders.
No Cup day ever was so ill-bred as to send dusky English rain-drops on the exquisite toilettes that grace the most aristocratic race in the universe, and we had “Queen’s weather” for Ascot. We had all betted on the Colonel’s chestnut, who won the Ascot Cup, distancing all the rest of the first flight at an easy swinging gallop, without any apparent effort: (I have taken a liberty with the Ascot of ‘54, which I trust will be pardoned me at the Corner! — Ouida.) and when we had seen the race fairly run, we went up to the Molyneux carriage to congratulate the Colonel on his chestnut’s triumph; Sabretasche being missed from his usual circle of titled betting-men and great turfites, and, for the first time in all his life, watching Ascot run, with his attention more given to the face beside him than the course before.
His old-accustomed bay-window saw comparatively little of him; his mornings were given to Violet in the tête-à-tête of her boudoir; in the Ride and the Ring he was by her side or in her carriage; and the whist-tables of the United, the guinea points of the Travellers’, the coulisses, the lansquenet parties, saw but very little of him. The Colonel, for the time being, was lost to us and to “life,” which he had lived so recklessly and graced so brilliantly for so many years; and I suppose his new occupation charmed him, for when we did get an hour or two of him, he was certainly more delightful than ever: there was such a joyous ring in his ever-brilliant wit — such gentleness, to all people and all things, out of the abundance of his own happiness — such a depth of rest and contentment, in lieu of that touching and deep-seated melancholy, which had gone down so far into his character under his gay and fashionable exterior, that it had seemed as if nothing would uproot it So happily does human life forget its past sorrows in present joy, as the green meadows grow dark or golden, according as the summer sun fades on and off them! His marriage was fixed to take place in a few weeks, and all the prosaic details which attend on love in these days of matter-of-fact and almighty dollars (how often to tarnish and corrode it!) grew in his hands into the generous gifts of love to love, the outward symbols of the inward worship. So surrounded, and with such a future lying before her, in its brilliant colours and seductive witchery, can you not fancy that our over-radiant beauty looked — how, words are not warm enough to tell; it would need a brush of power diviner than Titian’s to picture to you Violet Molyneux’s face as it was then, the incarnation of young, shadowless, brilliant, impassioned life!
“I knew we should win!” she said, as we approached her barouche. “Did I not tell you so, Major De Vigne?”
“You did, fair prophetess; and if you will always honour me with your clairvoyant instructions, I will always make up my books accordingly.”
“The number of bets I have made to-day is something frightful,” answered Violet. “If that darling horse had failed me I should have been utterly ruined in gloves.”
“As it is, you will have bracelets and négligés enough
to fill Hunt and Roskell’s! You are most dangerous to approach, Miss Molyneux, in more ways than one,” said Vane Castleton, who was leaning against the carriage door flirting with her mother.
“Oh! pray don’t, Lord Vane; you talk as if I were some grim and terrible Thalestris!” cried Violet, with contemptuous impatience, looking at Sabretasche with a laugh.
“Thalestris!” repeated Sabretasche, smiling. “You have but very little of the Amazon about you; not enough, perhaps, if your lines had fallen in hard places.”
“Instead of rose-leaves! Yet I think I can fight my own battles?”
“Oh yes!” laughed Sabretasche. “I never meant to hint but that you had, in very great perfection, that prerogative par excellence of woman, that Damascus blade, whose brilliant chasing makes us treat it as a toy, until the point has wounded us — the tongue!”
“If mine is a Damascus blade, yours is an Excalibur itself! Le fourgon se moque de la pelle, monsieur!”
“An English inelegance taking refuge in a foreign idiom! What true feminine diplomacy!” laughed Sabretasche, resting his eyes on her with that deep tenderness for her, for all she did, and said, and thought, which had grown into his life.
She laughed too — a sweet, gay laugh of perfect happiness.
“Ah! there is Her Majesty going off the stand — before Queen Violet goes too? Colonel Sabretasche tells me, Major de Vigne, that you know the artist of that lovely ‘Louis Dix-sept,’ and that she is a lady living at Richmond. May I go and see her!”
“Certainly, if you will be so kind.”
De Vigne felt a certain annoyance; why, I doubt if he could have told — a certain selfish desire to keep his little flower blooming unseen, save by his own eyes, acting unconsciously upon him.
“The kindness will be to me. Is she young?”
“Yes.”
“And very pretty!”
“Really I cannot say; ladies’ tastes differ from ours on such points.”
“I hope she is,” said Violet, plaintively. “I never did like plain people, never could! I dare say it is very wrong, but I think one likes a handsome face as naturally as one prefers a lily to a dandelion; and I am quite certain the artist of that sketch must be pretty — she could not help it.”
“She is pretty,” said Sabretasche; “at least attractive — what you will call so.”
“Then will you take me to see her to-morrow, Major de Vigne, and introduce us? Of course you will; no one refuses me anything! You can come with me, can you not, Vivian? We will all ride down there early, shall we?”
“Yes, and lunch at the Dilcoosha, if Lady Molyneux permit?”
“Go where? Do what?” asked the Viscountess, languidly, turning reluctantly from her, I presume, interesting conversation with Vane Castleton.
Sabretasche repeated his question.
“To see an artist, and lunch with you? Oh yes, I shall be very happy. I don’t think we have any engagements for to-morrow morning,” said Lady Molyneux, turning again to Castleton. “Are you going to the Lumleys to-night, Vane?”
The morning after, half-a-dozen of us rode down out of Lowndes Square. First, the Colonel and Violet; next, the Viscountess and her pet, Vane Castleton; then De Vigne and I — De Vigne, I must confess, in one of his most haughty, reserved, and impatient moods, annoyed, more than he knew, at having to take people to see Alma, whom he had had to himself so long that he seemed to consider any other visit to her as an invasion on his own “vested interests.” Besides, he was irritated to be tricked into taking Vane Castleton there, of all men in the world! Lady Molyneux had asked him; De Vigne knew nothing of his addition to the party until he had reached Lowndes Square, and to make any comment on, or opposition to it, would have been as useless as unwise.
“Does Miss Tressillian live alone with an old nurse, Major De Vigne?” Lady Molyneux was asking, in that voice which was languor and superciliousness embodied. “How very queer — so young a girl! To be sure, she is only an artist! Artists are queer people generally. Still, it is very odd!”
“Artists, like other people, must live; and if they have happened to have lost their parents, they cannot live with them, I presume,” responded De Vigne, dryly. The Viscountess had always an irritating effect upon his nerves.
“No, of course not: still there are plenty of places where a girl can take refuge that are most irreproachable — a school for instance. She would be much better, I should fancy, as a teacher, or a—”
“She happens to be a gentlewoman,” interrupted De Vigne, quietly, “and nurtured in as much luxury and refinement as your daughter.”
“Indeed!” said the Viscountess, with a nasty sneer and upraised eyebrows. “Pray, is she quite a — quite a Proper person for Violet to visit?”
De Vigne’s slumbering wrath roused up; every vein glowed with righteous anger and scorn for the pharisaic Peeress, of whose own under-currents he knew a story or two not quite so spotless as might have been.
“Lady Molyneux, if the ladies your daughter meets in our set at Court and Drawing-Room, balls and operas, the immaculate Cordelias and Lucretias of English Matronage, could lay claim to half as pure a life, and half as pure a heart, as the young girl you are so ready to suspect and to condemn, it might be better for them and — for their husbands!”
It was a more unspoken, and, in this case, more personal, speech than is customary to the bland reserve and reticence customary in “good society,” where we may sin, but may not say we do, and where it is only permitted to ridicule or blackguard our friends behind their backs. The Viscountess reddened under her delicate rouge, and turned with a laugh to Castleton. The white gate and dark thatched gables of St. Crucis Farm were now close at hand, and De Vigne rode forward.
“What a picturesque place!” cried Violet, dropping her reins on her mare’s neck. “Oh, Vivian, do look at those little lovely yellow chickens, and that great China rose, climbing all over the house, and the veritable lattice windows, and that splendid black cat in the sunshine! Wouldn’t you like to live here!”
Sabretasche shook his head, and would have crossed himself had he been a Catholic.
“My dear Violet! Heaven forefend! I cannot say I should.”
“Nor she either,” laughed De Vigne. “She will be much more in her element in its neighbour, your luxurious Dilcoosha.”
Sabretasche smiled, Violet’s delicate colour deepened, to vie with the China roses she admired, while the Colonel lifted her from her saddle close to the objects of her attachment, the little lovely yellow chickens, surely the prettiest of all new-born things; humiliatingly pretty beside the rough ugliness of new-born man, who piques himself on being lord of all created creatures; God knows why, except that he is slowest in development, and quickest in evil!
Certainly the old farm-house looked its best that day; the grey stone, the black wooden porch, the dark thatch, with its sombre lichens, that had all appeared so dark and dreary in the dim February light in which we first saw them, were only antiquated in the full glow of the June sunlight. The deep cool shadows of the two great chesnut trees beside it, with their large leaves and snowy pyramidal blossoms, the warm colours of the China roses and the honeysuckles against its walls, of the full-blossomed apple-trees, and the fragrant lilacs — those delicate perfumy boughs that Horace Walpole, the man of wit and gossip, courts and salons, patches and powders, still found time to love — gave it the picturesqueness and brightness which charmed Violet at first sight; for not more different is the view of human life in youth and age, than the view of the same place in summer and winter. If our life were but all youth! if our year were but all summer!
Out of the wide, low lattice window of her own room, half shadowed by the great branches of the chesnut-trees, with their mélange of green and white, yet with the full glow of the golden morning sunbeams, and the rose-hued reflex of the China roses upon her, Alma was leaning as we alighted. Like her home, she chanced to look her prettiest and most picturesque that day; a picture shrined in
the dark chesnut-boughs and the glowing flowers — a picture which we could see, though she could not see us.
“Is that Miss Tressillian? How lovely she is!” cried Violet, enthusiastically.
Sabretasche, thinking of her alone, smiled at her ecstasies. The Viscountess raised her glass with supercilious and hypercritic curiosity. Castleton did the same, with the look in his eyes that he had given the night before to the very superior ankles of a new danseuse. De Vigne caught the look — by George! how his eyes flashed — and he led the way into the house, sorely wrathful within him. Alma’s innate high breeding never showed itself more than now when she received her unexpected influx of visitors. The girl had seen no society, had never been “finished,” nor taught to “give a reception;” yet her inborn self-possession and tact never deserted her, and if she had been brought up all her days in the salons of the Tuileries or St. James, it would have been impossible to show more calm and winning grace than she did at this sudden inroad on the conventual solitude of her studio. Violet and she fraternised immediately; it was no visit from a fashionable beauty to a friendless artist, for Violet was infinitely too thorough bred not to recognise the intuitive aristocracy which in the Little Tressillian was thoroughly stamped in blood’and feature, manner and mind, and would have survived all adventitious circumstances or surroundings. There was, besides, a certain resemblance, which we had often noticed in their natures, their vivacity, and their perfect freedom from all affectations.