by Ouida
“What a horrible position!” thought Lady Marabout.
She waited and hesitated till the pendule had ticked off sixty seconds, then she summoned her courage and spoke:
“My dear, advice in such matters is often very harmful, and always very useless; plenty of people have asked my counsel, but I never knew any of them take it unless it chanced to chime in with their fancy. A woman’s best adviser is her own heart, specially on such a subject as this. But before I give my opinion, may I ask if you have accepted him?”
Lady Marabout’s heart throbbed quick and fast as she put the momentous question, with an agitation for which she would have blushed before her admirably nonchalante niece; but the tug of war was coming, and if Goodwood should be lost!
“You have accepted him?” she asked again.
“No! I — refused him.”
The delicate rose went out of the Hon. Val’s cheeks for once, and she breathed quickly and shortly.
Goodwood was not lost then!
Was she sorry — was she glad? Lady Marabout hardly knew; like Wellington, she felt the next saddest thing after a defeat is a victory.
“But you love him, Valencia?” she asked, half ashamed of suggesting such weakness, to this glorious beauty.
The Hon. Val unclasped her necklet as if it were a chain, choking her, and her face grew white and set: the coldest will feel on occasion, and all have some tender place that can wince at the touch.
“Perhaps; but such folly is best put aside at once. Certainly I prefer him to others, but to accept him would have been madness, absurdity. I told him so!”
“You told him so! If you had the heart to do so, Valencia, he has not lost much in losing you!” burst in Lady Marabout, her indignation getting the better of her judgment, and her heart, as usual, giving the coup de grace to her reason. “I am shocked at you! Every tender-hearted woman feels regret for affection she is obliged to repulse, even when she does not return it; and you, who love this man — —”
“Would you have had me accept him, aunt?”
“Yes,” cried Lady Marabout, firmly, forgetting every vestige of “duty,” and every possibility of dear Adeliza’s vengeance, “if you love him, I would, decidedly. When I married my dear Philip’s father, he was what Cardonnel is, a cavalry man, as far off his family title then as Cardonnel is off his now.”
“The more reason I should not imitate your imprudence, my dear aunt; death might not carry off the intermediate heirs quite so courteously in this case! No, I refused Major Cardonnel, and I did rightly; I should have repented it by now had I accepted him. There is nothing more silly than to be led away by romance. You De Bonc[oe]urs are romantic, you know; we Valletorts are happily free from the weakness. I am very tired, aunt, so good night.”
The Hon. Val went, the waxlight she carried shedding a paler shade on her handsome face, whiter and more set than usual, but held more proudly, as if it already wore the Doncaster coronet; and Lady Marabout sighed as she rang for her maid.
“Of course she acted wisely, and I ought to be very pleased; but that poor dear fellow! — his eyes are so like his mother’s!”
“I congratulate you, mother, on a clear field. You’ve sent poor Arthur off very nicely,” said Carruthers, the next morning, paying his general visit in her boudoir before the day began, which is much the same time in Town as in Greenland, and commences, whatever almanacs may say, about two or half-past P.M. “Cardonnel left this morning for Heaven knows where, and is going to exchange, Shelleto tells me, into the —— th, which is ordered to Bengal, so he won’t trouble you much more. When shall I be allowed to congratulate my cousin as the future Duchess of Doncaster?”
“Pray, don’t tease me, Philip. I’ve been vexed enough about your friend. When he came to me this morning, and asked me if there was no hope, and I was obliged to tell him there was none, I felt wretched,” said Lady Marabout, as nearly pettishly as she ever said anything; “but I am really not responsible, not in the least. Besides, even you must admit that Goodwood is a much more desirable alliance, and if Valencia had accepted Cardonnel, pray what would all Belgravia have said? Why, that, disappointed of Goodwood, she took the other out of pure pique! We owe something to society, Philip, and something to ourselves.”
Carruthers laughed:
“Ah, my dear mother, you women will never be worth all you ought to be till you leave off kowtow-ing to ‘what will be said,’ and learn to defy that terrible oligarchy of the Qu’en dira-t-on?”
“When will Goodwood propose?” wondered Lady Marabout, fifty times a day, and Valencia Valletort wondered too. Whitebait was being eaten, and yachts being fitted, manned, and victualled, outstanding Ascot debts were being settled, and outstanding bills were being passed hurriedly through St. Stephen’s; all the clockwork of the season was being wound up for the last time previous to a long standstill, and going at a deuce of a pace, as if longing to run down, and give its million wheels and levers peace; while everybody who’d anything to settle, whether monetary or matrimonial, personal or political, was making up his mind about it and getting it off his hands, and some men were being pulled up by wide-awake Jews to see what they were “made of,” while others were pulled up by adroit dowagers to know what they had “meant” before the accounts of the season were scored out and settled. “Had Goodwood proposed?” asked all Belgravia. “Why hadn’t Goodwood proposed?” asked Lady Marabout and Valencia. Twenty most favorable opportunities for the performance of that ceremony had Lady Marabout made for him “accidentally on purpose” the last fortnight; each of those times she had fancied the precious fish hooked and landed, and each time she had seen him, free from the hook, floating on the surface of society.
“He must speak definitely to-morrow,” thought Lady Marabout. But the larvæ of to-morrow burst into the butterfly of to-day, and to-day passed into the chrysalis of yesterday, and Goodwood was always very nearly caught, and never quite!
“Come up-stairs, Philip; I want to show you a little Paul Potter I bought the other day,” said Lady Marabout one morning, returning from a shopping expedition to Regent Street, meeting her son at her own door just descending from his tilbury. “Lord Goodwood calling, did you say, Soames? Oh, very well.”
And Lady Marabout floated up the staircase, but signed to her footman to open the door, not of the drawing-room, but of her own boudoir.
“The Potter is in my own room, Philip; you must come in here if you wish to see it,” said that adroit lady, for the benefit of Soames. But when the door was shut, Lady Marabout lowered her voice confidentially: “The Potter isn’t here, dear; I had it hung in the little cabinet through the drawing-rooms, but I don’t wish to go up there for a few moments — you understand.”
Carruthers threw himself in a chair, and laughed till the dogs Bijou, Bonbon, and Pandore all barked in a furious concert.
“I understand! So Goody’s positively coming to the point up there, is he?”
“No doubt he is,” said Lady Marabout, reprovingly. “Why else should he come in when I was not at home? There is nothing extraordinary in it. The only thing I have wondered at is his having delayed so long.”
“If a man had to hang himself, would you wonder he put off pulling the bolt?”
“I don’t see any point in your jests at all!” returned Lady Marabout. “There is nothing ridiculous in winning such a girl as Valencia.”
“No; but the question here is not of winning her, but of buying her. The price is a little high — a ducal coronet and splendid settlements, a wedding-ring and bondage for life; but he will buy her, nevertheless. Cardonnel couldn’t pay the first half of the price, and so he was swept out of the auction-room. You are shocked, mother! Ah, truth is shocking sometimes, and always maladroit; one oughtn’t to bring it into ladies’ boudoirs.”
“Hold your tongue, Philip! I will not have you so satirical. Where do you take it from? Not from me, I am sure! Hark! there is Goodwood going! That is his step on the stairs, I think! Dear me, Phil
ip, I wish you sympathized with me a little more, for I do feel happy, and I can’t help it; dear Adeliza will be so gratified.”
“My dear mother, I’ll do my best to be sympathetic, I’ll go and congratulate Goodwood as he gets in his cab, if you fancy I ought; but, you see, if I were in Dahomey beholding the head of my best friend coming off, I couldn’t quite get up the amount of sympathy in their pleasure at the refreshing sight the Dahomites might expect from me, and so — —”
But Lady Marabout missed the comparison of herself to a Dahomite, for she had opened the door and was crossing to the drawing-rooms, her eyes bright, her step elastic, her heart exultant at the triumph of her man[oe]uvres. The Hon. Val was playing with some ferns in an étagère at the bottom of the farthest room, and responded to the kiss her aunt bestowed on her about as much as if she had been one of the statuettes on the consoles.
“Well, love, what did he say?” asked Lady Marabout, breathlessly, with eager delight and confident anticipation.
Like drops of ice on warm rose-leaves fell each word of the intensely chill and slightly sulky response on Lady Marabout’s heart.
“He said that he goes to Cowes to-morrow for the Royal Yacht Squadron dinner, and then on in the Anadyomene to the Spitzbergen coast for walruses. He left a P. P. C. card for you.”
“Walruses!” shrieked Lady Marabout.
“Walruses,” responded the Hon. Val.
“And said no more than that?”
“No more than that!”
The Pet Eligible had flown off uncaught after all! Lady Marabout needed no further explanation — tout fut dit. They were both silent and paralyzed. Do you suppose Pompey and Cornelia had much need of words when they met at Lesbos after the horrible déroute of Pharsalia?
“I’m in your mother’s blackest books for ever, Phil,” said Goodwood to Carruthers in the express to Southampton for the R.Y.C. Squadron Regatta of that year, “but I can’t help it. It’s no good to badger us into marriage; it only makes us double, and run to earth. I was near compromising myself with your cousin, I grant, but the thing that chilled me was, she’s too studied. It’s all got up beforehand, and goes upon clockwork, and it don’t interest one accordingly; the mechanism’s perfect, but we know when it will raise its hand, and move its eyes, and bow its head, and when we’ve looked at its beauty once we get tired of it. That’s the fault in Valencia, and in scores of them, and as long as they won’t be natural, why, they can’t have much chance with us!”
Which piece of advice Carruthers, when he next saw his mother, repeated to her, for the edification of all future débutantes, adding a small sermon of his own:
“My dear mother, I ask you, is it to be expected that we can marry just to oblige women and please the newspapers? Would you have me marched off to Hanover Square because it would be a kindness to take one of Lady Elmers’ marriageable daughters, or because a leading journal fills up an empty column with farcical lamentation on our dislike to the bondage? Of course you wouldn’t; yet, for no better reasons, you’d have chained poor Goodwood, if you could have caught him. Whether a man likes to marry or not is certainly his own private business, though just now it’s made a popular public discussion. Do you wonder that we shirk the institution? If we have not fortune, marriage cramps our energies, our resources, our ambitions, loads us with petty cares, and trebles our anxieties. To one who rises with such a burden on his shoulders, how many sink down in obscurity, who, but for the leaden weight of pecuniary difficulties with which marriage has laden their feet, might have climbed the highest round in the social ladder? On the other side, if we have fortune, if we have the unhappy happiness to be eligible, is it wonderful that we are not flattered by the worship of young ladies who love us for what we shall give them, that we don’t feel exactly honored by being courted for what we are worth, and that we’re not over-willing to give up our liberty to oblige those who look on us only as good speculations? What think you, eh?”
Lady Marabout looked up and shook her head mournfully:
“My dear Philip, you are right. I see it — I don’t dispute it; but when a thing becomes personal, you know philosophy becomes difficult. I have such letters from poor dear Adeliza — such letters! Of course she thinks it is all my fault, and I believe she will break entirely with me. It is so very shocking. You see all Belgravia coupled their names, and the very day that he went off to Cowes in that heartless, abominable manner, if an announcement of the alliance as arranged did not positively appear in the Court Circular! It did indeed! I am sure Anne Hautton was at the bottom of it; it would be just like her. Perhaps poor Valencia cannot be pitied after her treatment of Cardonnel, but it is very hard on me.”
Lady Marabout is right: when a thing becomes personal, philosophy becomes difficult. When your gun misses fire, and a fine cock bird whirrs up from the covert and takes wing unharmed, never to swell the number of your triumphs and the size of your game-bag, could you by any chance find it in your soul to sympathize with the bird’s gratification at your mortification and its own good luck? I fancy not.
SEASON THE SECOND — THE OGRE.
“If there be one class I dislike more than another, it is that class; and if there be one person in town I utterly detest, it is that man!” said our friend Lady Marabout, with much unction, one morning, to an audience consisting of Bijou, Bonbon, and Pandore, a cockatoo, an Angora cat, and a young lady sitting in a rocking-chair, reading the magazines of the month. The dogs barked, the cockatoo screamed, the cat purred a vehement affirmative, the human auditor looked up, and laughed:
“What is the class, Lady Marabout, may I ask?”
“Those clever, detestable, idle, good-for-nothing, fashionable, worthless men about town, who have not a penny to their fortune, and spend a thousand a year on gloves and scented tobacco — who are seen at everybody’s house, and never at their own — who drive horses fit for a Duke’s stud, and haven’t money enough to keep a donkey on thistles — who have handsome faces and brazen consciences — who are positively leaders of ton, and yet are glad to write feuilletons before the world is up to pay their stall at the Opera — who give a guinea for a bouquet, and can’t pay a shilling of their just debts, — I detest the class, my dear!”
“So it seems, Lady Marabout. I never heard you so vehement. And who is the particular scapegoat of this type of sinners?”
“Chandos Cheveley.”
“Chandos Cheveley? Isn’t he that magnificent man Sir Philip introduced to me at the Amandines’ breakfast yesterday? Why, Lady Marabout, his figure alone might outbalance a multitude of sins!”
“He is handsome enough. Did Philip introduce him to you, my dear? I wonder! It was very careless of him. But men are so thoughtless; they will know anybody themselves, and they think we may do the same. The men called here while we were driving this morning. I am glad we were out: he very seldom comes to my house.”
“But why is he so dreadful? The Amandines are tremendously exclusive, I thought.”
“Oh, he goes everywhere! No party is complete without Chandos Cheveley, and I have heard that at September or Christmas he has more invitations than he could possibly accept; but he is a most objectionable man, all the same — a man every one dreads to see come near her daughters. He has extreme fascination of manner, but he has not a farthing! How he lives, dresses, drives the horses he does, is one of those miracles of London men’s lives which we can never hope to puzzle out. Philip says he likes him, but Philip never speaks ill of anybody, except a woman now and then, who teases him; but the man is my detestation — has been for years. I was annoyed to see his card: it is the first time he has called this season. He knows I can’t endure his class or him.”
With which Lady Marabout wound up a very unusually lengthy and uncharitable disquisition, length and uncharitableness being both out of her line; and Lady Cecil Ormsby rolled her handkerchief into a ball, threw it across the room for Bonbon, the spaniel puppy, and laughed till the cockatoo screamed with delight:
> “Dear Lady Marabout, do forgive me, but it is such fun to hear you positively, for once, malicious! Who is your Horror, genealogically speaking? this terrible — what’s his name? — Chandos Cheveley?”
“The younger son of a younger son of one of the Marquises of Danvers, I believe, my dear; an idle man about town, you know, with not a sou to be idle upon, who sets the fashion, but never pays his tailor. I am never malicious, I hope, but I do consider men of that stamp very objectionable.”
“But what is Sir Philip but a man about town?”
“My son! Of course he is a man about town. My dear, what else should he be? But if Philip likes to lounge all his days away in a club-window, he has a perfect right; he has fortune. Chandos Cheveley is not worth a farthing, and yet yawns away his day in White’s as if he were a millionnaire; the one can support his far niente, the other cannot. There are gradations in everything, my love, but in nothing more than among the men, of the same set and the same style, whom one sees in Pall-Mall.”
“There are chestnut horses and horse-chestnuts, chevaliers and chevaliers d’industrie, rois and rois d’Yvetot, Carrutherses and Chandos Cheveleys!” laughed Lady Cecil. “I understand, Lady Marabout. Il y a femmes et femmes — men about town and men about town, I shall learn all the classes and distinctions soon. But how is one to know the sheep that may be let into the fold from the wolves in sheep’s clothing, that must be kept out of it? Your Ogre is really very distinguished-looking.”
“Distinguished? Oh yes, my love; but the most distinguished men are the most objectionable sometimes. I assure you, my dear Cecil, I have seen an elder son whom sometimes I could hardly have told from his own valet, and a younger of the same family with the style of a D’Orsay. Why, did I not this very winter, when I went to stay at Rochdale, take Fitzbreguet himself, whom I had not chanced to see since he was a child, for one of the men out of livery, and bid him bring Bijou’s basket out of the carriage. I did indeed — I who hate such mistakes more than any one! And Lionel, his second brother, has the beauty of an Apollo and the air noble to perfection. One often sees it; it’s through the doctrine of compensation, I suppose, but it’s very perplexing, and causes endless embrouillements.”