by Ouida
“Hum! What! Oh yes, of course! What else should it be, you owl!”
Not being in a condition to decide this point, I was silent, and he went on, growing more impressive at each phrase:
“She is splendid, really! And I’m a very difficile fellow, you know; but such hair, such eyes, one doesn’t see every day in those sun-dried Mitchells or those little pink Bovilliers. Well, yesterday, after that confounded luncheon (how I hate all those complimentary affairs! — one can’t enjoy the truffles for talking to the ladies, nor enjoy the ladies for discussing the truffles), I went for a ride with Conran out to Villa Neponte. I left him there, and went down to see the overland steamers come in. While I was waiting, I got into talk, somehow or other, with a very agreeable, gentleman-like fellow, who asked me if I’d only just come to Malta, and all that sort of thing — you know the introductory style of action — till we got quite good friends, and he told me he was living outside this wretched little hole at the Casa di Fiori, and said — wasn’t it civil of him? — said he should be very happy to see me if I’d call any time. He gave me his card — Lord Adolphus Fitzhervey — and a man with him called him ‘Dolph.’ As good luck had it, my weed went out just while we were talking, and Fitzhervey was monstrously pleasant, searched all over him for a fusee, couldn’t find one, and asked me to go up with him to the Casa di Fiori and get a light. Of course I did, and he and I and Guatamara had some sherbet and a smoke together, and then he introduced me to the Marchioness St. Julian, his sister — by Jove! such a magnificent woman, Simon, you never saw one like her, I’ll wager. She was uncommonly agreeable, too, and such a smile, my boy! She seemed to like me wonderfully — not rare that, though, you’ll say — and asked me to go and take coffee there to-night after mess, and bring one of my chums with me; and as I like to show you life, young one, and your taste wants improving after Aunt Minerva, you may come, if you like. Hallo! there’s Conran. I say, don’t tell him. I don’t want any poaching on my manor.”
Conran came in at that minute; he was then a Brevet-Major and Captain in Ours, and one of the older men who spoilt Little Grand in one way, as much as the women did in another. He was a fine, powerful fellow, with eyes like an eagle’s, and pluck like a lion’s; he had a grave look, and had been of late more silent and self-reticent than the other roistering, débonnair, light-hearted “Dare Devils;” but though, perhaps, tired of the wild escapades which reputation had once attributed to him, was always the most lenient to the boy’s monkey tricks, and always the one to whom he went if his larks had cost him too dear, or if he was in a scrape from which he saw no exit. Conran had recently come in for a good deal of money, and there were few bright eyes in Malta that would not have smiled kindly on him; but he did not care much for any of them. There was some talk of a love-affair before he went to India, that was the cause of his hard-heartedness, though I must say he did not look much like a victim to the grande passion, in my ideas, which were drawn from valentines and odes in the “Woman, thou fond and fair deceiver” style; in love that turned its collars down and let its hair go uncut and refused to eat, and recovered with a rapidity proportionate to its ostentation; and I did not know that, if a man has lost his treasure, he may mourn it so deeply that he may refuse to run about like Harpagon, crying for his cassette to an audience that only laughs at his miseries.
“Well, young ones,” said Conran, as he came in and threw down his cap and whip, “here you are, spending your hours in pipes and bad wine. What a blessing it is to have a palate that isn’t blasé, and that will swallow all wine just because it is wine! That South African goes down with better relish, Little Grand, than you’ll find in Château Margaux ten years hence. As soon as one begins to want touching up with olives, one’s real gusto is gone.”
“Hang olives, sir! they’re beastly,” said Little Grand; “and I don’t care who pretends they’re not. Olives are like sermons and wives, everybody makes a wry face, and would rather be excused ’em, Major; but it’s the custom to call ’em good things, and so men bolt ’em in complaisance, and while they hate the salt-water flavor, descant on the delicious rose taste!”
“Quite true, Little Grand! but one takes olives to enhance the wine; and so, perhaps, other men’s sermons make one enjoy one’s racier novel, and other men’s wives make one appreciate one’s liberty still better. Don’t abuse olives; you’ll want them figuratively and literally before you’ve done either drinking or living!”
“Oh! confound it, Major,” cried Little Grand, “I do hope and trust a spent ball may have the kindness to double me up and finish me off before then.”
“You’re not philosophic, my boy.”
“Thank Heaven, no!” ejaculated Little Grand, piously. “I’ve an uncle, a very great philosopher, beats all the sages hollow, from Bion to Buckle, and writes in the Metaphysical Quarterly, but I’ll be shot if he don’t spend so much time in trying to puzzle out what life is, that all his has slipped away without his having lived one bit. When I was staying with him one Christmas, he began boring me with a frightful theory on the non-existence of matter. I couldn’t stand that, so I cut him short, and set him down to the luncheon-table; and while he was full swing with a Strasbourg pâté and Comet hock, I stopped him and asked him if, with them in his mouth, he believed in matter or not? He was shut up, of course; bless your soul, those theorists always are, if you’re down upon ’em with a little fact!”
“Such as a Strasbourg pâté? — that is an unanswerable argument with most men, I believe,” said Conran, who liked to hear the boy chatter. “What are you going to do with yourself to-night, Grand?”
“I am going to — ar — hum — to a friend of mine,” said Little Grand, less glibly than usual.
“Very well; I only asked, because I would have taken you to Mrs. Fortescue’s with me; they’re having some acting proverbs (horrible exertion in this oven of a place, with the thermometer at a hundred and twenty degrees); but if you’ve better sport it’s no matter. Take care what friends you make, though, Grand; you’ll find some Maltese acquaintances very costly.”
“Thank you. I should say I can take care of myself,” replied Little Grand, with immeasurable scorn and dignity.
Conran laughed, struck him across the shoulders with his whip, stroked his own moustaches, and went out again, whistling one of Verdi’s airs.
“I don’t want him bothering, you know,” explained Little Grand; “she’s such a deuced magnificent woman!”
She was a magnificent woman, this Eudoxia Adelaida, Marchioness St. Julian; and proud enough Little Grand and I felt when we had that soft, jewelled hand held out to us, and that bewitching smile beamed upon us, and that joyous presence dazzling in our eyes, as we sat in the drawing-room of that Casa di Fiori. She was about thirty-five, I should say (boys always worship those who might have been schoolfellows of their mothers), tall and stately, and imposing, with the most beautiful pink and white skin, with a fine set of teeth, raven hair, and eyes tinted most exquisitely. Oh! she was magnificent, our Marchioness St. Julian! Into what unutterable insignificance, what miserable, washed-out shadows sank Stars and Garters’ lady, and the Mitchell girls, and all the belles of La Valetta, whom we hadn’t thought so very bad-looking before.
There was a young creature sitting a little out of the radiance of light, reading; but we had no eyes for anybody except the Marchioness St. Julian. We were in such high society, too; there was her brother, Lord Adolphus, and his bosom Pylades, the Baron Guatamara; and there was a big fellow, with hooked nose and very curly hair, who was introduced to us as the Prince of Orangia Magnolia; and a little wiry fellow, with bits of red and blue ribbon, and a star or two in his button-hole, who was M. le Due de Saint-Jeu. We were quite dazzled with the coruscations of so much aristocracy, especially when they talked across to each other — so familiarly, too — of Johnnie (that we Lord Russell), and Pam, and “old Buck” (my godfather Buckingham, Lord Adolphus explained to us), and Montpensier and old Joinville; and chatted of when the
y dined at the Tuileries, and stayed at Compiègne, and hunted at Belvoir, and spent Christmas at Holcombe or Longleat. We were in such high society! How contemptible appeared Mrs. Maberly’s and the Fortescue soirées; how infinitesimally small grew Charlie Ruthven, and Harry Villiers, and Grey and Albany, and all the other young fellows who thought it such great guns to be au mieux with little Graziella, or invited to Sir George Dashaway’s. We were a cut above those things now — rather!
That splendid Marchioness! There was a head for a coronet, if you like! And how benign she was! Grand sat on the couch beside her, and I on an ottoman on her left, and she leaned back in her magnificent toilette, flirting her fan like a Castilian, and flashing upon us her superb eyes from behind it; not speaking very much, but showing her white teeth in scores of heavenly smiles, till Little Grand, the blasé man of seventeen, and I the raw Moses of private tutelage, both felt that we had never come across anything like this; never, in fact, seen a woman worth a glance before.
She listened to us — or rather to him; I was too awestruck to advance much beyond monosyllables — and laughed at him, and smiled encouragingly on my gaucherie (and when a boy is gauche, how ready he is to worship such a helping hand!), and beamed upon us both with an effulgence compared with which the radiance of Helen, Galatea, [OE]none, Messalina, Laïs, and all the legendary beauties one reads about, must have been what the railway night-lamps that never burn are to the prismatic luminaries of Cremorne. They were all uncommonly pleasant, all except the girl who was reading, whom they introduced as the Signorina da’ Guari, a Tuscan, and daughter to Orangia Magnolia, with one of those marvellously beautiful faces that one sees in the most splendid painters’ models of the Campagna, who never lifted her head scarcely, though Guatamara and Saint-Jeu did their best to make her. But all the others were wonderfully agreeable, and quite fête’d Little Grand and me, at which, they, being more than double our age, and seemingly at home alike with Belgravia and Newmarket, the Faubourg and the Pytchley, we felt to grow at least a foot each in the aroma of this Casa di Fiori.
“This is rather stupid, Doxie,” began Lord Adolphus, addressing his sister; “not much entertainment for our guests. What do you say to a game of vingt-et-un, eh, Mr. Grandison?”
Little Grand fixed his blue eyes on the Marchioness, and said he should be very happy, but, as for entertainment — he wanted no other.
“No compliments, petit ami,” laughed the Marchioness, with a dainty blow of her fan. “Yes, Dolph, have vingt-et-un, or music, or anything you like. Sing us something, Lucrezia.”
The Italian girl thus addressed looked up with a passionate, haughty flush, and answered, with wonderfully little courtesy I considered, “I shall not sing to-night.”
“Are you unwell, fairest friend?” asked the Duc de Saint-Jeu, bending his little wiry figure over her.
She shrank away from him, and drew back, a hot color in her cheeks.
“Signore, I did not address you.”
The Marchioness looked angry, if those divine eyes could look anything so mortal. However, she shrugged her shoulders.
“Well, my dear Lucrezia, we can’t make you sing, of course, if you won’t. I, for my part, always do any little thing I can to amuse anybody; if I fail, I fail; I have done my best, and my friends will appreciate the effort, if not the result. No, my dear Prince, do not tease her,” said the Marchioness to Orangia Magnolia, who was arguing, I thought, somewhat imperatively for such a well-bred and courtly man, with Lucrezia; “we will have vingt-et-un, and Lucrezia will give us the delight of her voice some other evening, I dare say.”
We had vingt-et-un; the Marchioness would not play, but she sat in her rose velvet arm-chair, just behind Little Grand, putting in pretty little speeches, and questions, and bagatelles, and calling attention to the gambols of her darling greyhound Cupidon, and tapping Little Grand with her fan, till, I believe, he neither knew how the game went, nor what money he lost; and I, gazing at her, and cursing him for his facile tongue, never noticed my naturels, couldn’t have said what the maximum was if you had paid me for it, and might, for anything I knew to the contrary, have been seeing my life slip away with each card as Balzac’s hero with the Peau de Chagrin. Then we had sherbet, and wine, and cognac for those who preferred it; and the Marchioness gave us permission to smoke, and took a dainty hookah with an amber mouthpiece for her own use (divine she did look, too, with that hookah between her ruby lips!); and the smoke, and the cognac, and the smiles, unloosed our tongues, and we spake like very great donkeys, I dare say, but I’m sure with not a tenth part the wisdom that Balaam’s ass developed in his brief and pithy conversation.
However great the bosh we talked, though, we found very lenient auditors. Fitzhervey and Guatamara laughed at all our witticisms; the Prince of Orangia Magnolia joined in with a “Per Baccho!” and a “Bravo!” and little Saint-Jeu wheezed, and gave a faint echo of “Mon Dieu!” and “Très bien, très bien, vraiment!” and the Marchioness St. Julian laughed too, and joined in our nonsense, and, what was much more, bent a willing ear to our compliments, no matter how florid; and Saint-Jeu told us a story or two, more amusing than comme il faut, at which the Marchioness tried to look grave, and did look shocked, but laughed for all that behind her fan; and Lucrezia da’ Guari sat in shadow, as still and as silent as the Parian Euphrosyne on the console, though her passionate eyes and expressive face looked the very antipodes of silence and statuetteism, as she flashed half-shy, half-scornful, looks upon us.
If the first part of the evening had been delightful, this was something like Paradise! It was such high society! and with just dash enough of Mabille and coulisses laisseraller to give it piquancy. How different was the pleasantry and freedom of these real aristos, after the humdrum dinners and horrid bores of dances that those snobs of Maberlys, and Fortescues, and Mitchells, made believe to call Society!
What with the wine, and the smoke, and the smiles, I wasn’t quite clear as to whether I saw twenty horses’ heads or one when I was fairly into saddle, and riding back to the town, just as the first dawn was rising, Aphrodite-like, from the far blue waves of the Mediterranean. Little Grand was better seasoned, but even he was dizzy with the parting words of the Marchioness, which had softly breathed the delicious passport, “Come to-morrow.”
“By Jupiter!” swore Little Grand, obliged to give relief to his feelings— “by Jupiter, Simon! did you ever see such a glorious, enchanting, divine, delicious, adorable creature? Faugh! who could look at those Mitchell girls after her? Such eyes! such a smile! such a figure! Talk of a coronet! no imperial crown would be half good enough for her! And how pleasant those fellows are! I like that little chaffy chap, the Duke; what a slap-up story that was about the bal de l’Opéra. And Fitzhervey, too; there’s something uncommonly thorough-bred about him, ain’t there? And Guatamara’s an immensely jolly fellow. Ah, myboy! that’s something like society; all the ease and freedom of real rank; no nonsense about them, as there is about snobs. I say, what wouldn’t the other fellows give to be in our luck? I think even Conran would warm up about her. But, Simon, she’s deucedly taken with me — she is, upon my word; and she knows how to show it you, too! By George! one could die for a woman like that — eh?”
“Die!” I echoed, while my horse stumbled along up the hilly road, and I swayed forward, pretty nearly over his head, while poetry rushed to my lips, and electric sparks danced before my eyes:
“To die for those we love! oh, there is power
In the true heart, and pride, and joy, for this
It is to live without the vanished light
That strength is needed!”
“But I’ll be shot if it shall be vanished light,” returned Little Grand; “it don’t look much like it yet. The light’s only just lit, ’tisn’t likely it’s going out again directly; but she is a stunner! and — —”
“A stunner!” I shouted; “she’s much more than that — she’s an angel, and I’ll be much obliged to you to call her by her right n
ame, sir. She’s a beautiful, noble, loving woman; the most perfect of all Nature’s masterworks. She is divine, sir, and you and I are not worthy merely to kiss the hem of her garment.”
“Ain’t we, though? I don’t care much about kissing her dress; it’s silk, and I don’t know that I should derive much pleasure from pressing my lips on its texture; but her cheek — —”
“Her cheek is like the Catherine pear,
The side that’s next the sun!”
I shouted, as my horse went down in a rut. “She’s like Venus rising from the sea-shell; she’s like Aurora, when she came down on the first ray of the dawn to Tithonus; she’s like Briseis — —”
“Bother classics! she’s like herself, and beats ’em all hollow. She’s the finest creature ever seen on earth, and I should like to see the man who’d dare to say she wasn’t. And — I say, Simon — how much did you lose to-night?”
From sublimest heights I tumbled straight to bathos. The cold water of Grand’s query quenched my poetry, extinguished my electric lights, and sobered me like a douche bath.
“I don’t know,” I answered, with a sense of awe and horror stealing over me; “but I had a pony in my waistcoat-pocket that the governor had just sent me; Guatamara changed it for me, and — I’ve only sixpence left!”
“Old boy,” said Little Grand to me, the next morning, after early parade, “come in my room, and let’s make up some despatches to the governors. You see,” he continued, five minutes after,— “you see, we’re both of us pretty well cleared out; I’ve only got half a pony, and you haven’t a couple of fivers left. Now you know they evidently play rather high at the Casa di Fiori; do everything en prince, like nobs who’ve Barclays at their back; and one mustn’t hang fire; horrid shabby that would look. Besides, fancy seeming mean before her! So I’ve been thinking that, though governors are a screwy lot generally, if we put it to ’em clearly the sort of set we’ve got into, and show ’em that we can’t help, now that we are at Rome, doing as the Romans do, I should say they could hardly help bleeding a little — eh? Now, listen how I’ve put it. My old boy has a weakness for titles; he married my mother on the relationship to Viscount Twaddles (who doesn’t know of her existence; but who does to talk about as ‘our cousin’), and he’d eat up miles of dirt for a chance of coming to a strawberry-leaf; so I think this will touch him up beautifully. Listen! ain’t I sublimely respectful? ‘I’m sure, my dear father, you wilt be delighted to learn, that by wonderful luck, or rather I ought to say Providence, I have fallen on my feet in Malta, and got introduced to the very highest’ (wait! let me stick a dash under very)— ‘the very highest society here. They are quite tip-top. To show you what style, I need only mention Lord A. Fitzhervey, the Baron Guatamara, and the Marchioness St. Julian, as among my kindest friends. They have been yachting in the Levant, and are now staying in Malta: they are all most kind to me; and I know you will appreciate the intellectual advantages that such contact must afford me; at the same time you will understand that I can hardly enter such circles as a snob, and you will wish your son to comport himself as a gentleman; but gentlemanizing comes uncommon dear, I can tell you, with all the care in the world: and if you could let me have another couple of hundred, I should vote you’ — a what, Simon?— ‘an out-and-out brick’ is the sensible style, but I suppose ‘the best and kindest of parents’ is the filial dodge, eh? There! ‘With fond love to mamma and Florie, ever your affectionate son, Cosmo Grandison.’ Bravo! that’s prime; that’ll bring the yellows down, I take it. Here, old fellow, copy it to your governor; you couldn’t have a more stunning effusion — short, and to the purpose, as cabinet councils ought to be, and ain’t. Fire away, my juvenile.”