by Ouida
“When the mammas fall in love with Lord Fitz’s coronet, and the daughters with Lord Lionel’s face, I suppose?” interpolated Lady Cecil.
“Exactly so, dear. As for knowing the sheep from the wolves, as you call them,” went on Lady Marabout, sorting her embroidery silks, “you may very soon know more of Chandos Cheveley’s class — (this Magenta braid is good for nothing; it’s a beautiful color, but it fades immediately) — you meet them in the country at all fast houses, as they call them nowadays, like the Amandines’; they are constantly invited, because they are so amusing, or so dead a shot, or so good a whip, and live on their invitations, because they have no locale of their own. You see, all the women worth nothing admire, and all the women worth anything shun, them. They have a dozen accomplishments, and not a single reliable quality; a hundred houses open to them, and not a shooting-box of their own property or rental. You will meet this Chandos Cheveley everywhere, for instance, as though he were somebody desirable. You will see him in his club-window, as though he were born only to read the papers; in the Ride, mounted on a much better animal than Fitzbreguet, though the one pays treble the price he ought, and the other, I dare say, no price at all; at Ascot, on Amandine’s or Goodwood’s drag, made as much of among them all as if he were an heir-apparent to the throne; and yet, my love, that man hasn’t a penny, lives Heaven knows where, and how he gets money to keep his cab and buy his gloves is, as I say, one of those mysteries of settling days, whist-tables, periodical writing, Baden coups de bonheur, and such-like fountains of such men’s fortunes which we can never hope to penetrate — and very little we should benefit if we could! My dearest Cecil! if it is not ten minutes to five! We must go and drive at once.”
Lady Ormsby was a great pet of Lady Marabout’s; she had been so from a child; so much so, that when, the year after Valencia Valletort’s discomfiture (a discomfiture so heavy and so public, that that young beauty was seized with a fit of filial devotion, attended her mamma to Nice, and figured not in Belgravia the ensuing season, and even Lady Marabout’s temper had been slightly soured by it, as you perceive), another terrible charge was shifted on her shoulders by an appeal from the guardians of the late Earl of Rosediamond’s daughter for her to be brought out under the Marabout wing, she had consented, and surrendered herself to be again a martyr to responsibility for the sake of Cecil and Cecil’s lost mother. The young lady was a beauty; she was worse, she was an heiress; she was worse still, she was saucy, wayward, and notable for a strong will of her own — a more dangerous young thorough-bred was never brought to a gentler Rarey; and yet she was the first charge of this nature that Lady Marabout had ever accepted in the whole course of her life with no misgivings and with absolute pleasure. First, she was very fond of Cecil Ormsby; secondly, she longed to efface her miserable failure with Valencia by a brilliant success, which should light up all the gloom of her past of chaperonage; thirdly, she had a sweet and long-cherished diplomacy nestling in her heart to throw her son and Lord Rosediamond’s daughter together, for the eventual ensnaring and fettering of Carruthers, which policy nothing could favor so well as having the weapon for that deadly purpose in her own house through April, May, and June.
Cecil Ormsby was a beauty and an heiress — spirited, sarcastic, brilliant, wilful, very proud; altogether, a more spirited young filly never needed a tight hand on the ribbons, a light but a firm seat, and a temperate though judicious use of the curb to make her endure being ridden at all, even over the most level grass countries of life. And yet, for the reasons just mentioned, Lady Marabout, who never had a tight hand upon anything, who is to be thrown in a moment by any wilful kick or determined plunge, who is utterly at the mercy of any filly that chooses to take the bit between her own teeth and bolt off, and is entirely incapable of using the curb, even to the most ill-natured and ill-trained Shetland that ever deserved to have its mouth sawed, — Lady Marabout undertook the jockeyship without fear.
“I dare say you wonder, after my grief with Valencia, that I have consented to bring another girl out, but when I heard it was poor Rosediamond’s wish — his dying wish, one may almost say — that Cecil should make her début with me, what was I to do, my dear?” she explained, half apologetically, to Carruthers, when the question was first agitated. Perhaps, too, Lady Marabout had in her heart been slightly sickened of perfectly trained young ladies brought up on the best systems, and admitted to herself that the pets of the foreign houses may not be the most attractive flowers after all.
So Lady Cecil Ormsby was installed in Lowndes Square, and though she was the inheritor of her mother’s wealth, which was considerable, and possessor of her own wit and beauty, which were not inconsiderable either, and therefore a prize to fortune-hunters and a lure to misogamists, as Lady Marabout knew very well how to keep the first off, and had her pet project of numbering her refractory son among the converted second, she rather congratulated herself than otherwise in having the pleasure and éclat of introducing her; and men voted the Marabout Yearlings Sale of that season, since it comprised Rosediamond’s handsome daughter, as dangerous as a horse-dealer’s auction to a young greenhorn, or a draper’s “sale, without reserve, at enormous sacrifice,” to a lady with a soul on bargains bent.
“How very odd! Just as we have been talking of him, there is that man again! I must bow to him, I suppose; though if there be a person I dislike — —” said Lady Marabout, giving a frigid little bend of her head as her barouche, with its dashing roans, rolled from her door, and a tilbury passed them, driving slowly through the square.
Cecil Ormsby bowed to its occupant with less severity, and laughed under the sheltering shadow of her white parasol-fringe.
“The Ogre has a very pretty trap, though, Lady Marabout, and the most delicious gray horse in it! Such good action!”
“If its action is good, my love, I dare say it is more than could be said of its master’s actions. He is going to call on that Mrs. Maréchale, very probably; he was always there last season.”
And Lady Marabout shook her head and looked grave, which, combined with the ever-damnatory demonstrative conjunction, blackened Mrs. Maréchale’s moral character as much as Lady Marabout could blacken any one’s, she loving as little to soil her own fingers and her neighbors’ reputations with the indelible Italian chalk of scandal as any lady I know; being given, on the contrary, when compelled to draw any little social croquis of a back-biting nature, to sketch them in as lightly as she could, take out as many lights as possible, and rub in the shadows with a very chary and pitying hand, except, indeed, when she took the portrait of such an Ogre as Chandos Cheveley, when I can’t say she was quite so merciful, specially when policy and prejudice combined to suggest that it would be best (and not unjust) to use the blackest Conté crayons obtainable.
The subject of it would not have denied the correctness of the silhouette Lady Marabout had snipped out for the edification of Lady Cecil, had he caught a glimpse of it: he had no habitation, nor was ever likely to have any, save a bachelor’s suite in a back street; he had been an idle man for the last twenty years, with not a sou to be idle upon; the springs of his very precarious fortunes, his pursuits, habits, reputation, ways and means, were all much what she had described them; yet he set the fashion much oftener than Goodwood, and dukes and millionnaires would follow the style of his tie, or the shape of his hat; he moved in the most brilliant circles as Court Circulars have it, and all the best houses were open to him. At his Grace of Amandine’s, staying there for the shooting, he would alter the stud, find fault with the claret, arrange a Drive for deer in the forest, and flirt with her Grace herself, as though, as Lady Marabout averred, he had been Heir-apparent or Prince Regent, who honored the Castle by his mere presence, Amandine all the while swearing by every word he spoke, thinking nothing well done without Cheveley, and submitting to be set aside in his own Castle, with the greatest gratification at the extinction.
But that Chandos Cheveley was not worth a farthing, that he was but a
Bohemian on a brilliant scale, that any day he might disappear from that society where he now glittered, never to reappear, everybody knew; how he floated there as he did, kept his cab and his man, paid for his stall at the Opera, his club fees, and all the other trifles that won’t wait, was an eternal puzzle to every one ignorant of how expensively one may live upon nothing if one just gets the knack, and of how far a fashionable reputation, like a cake of chocolate, will go to support life when nothing more substantial is obtainable. Lady Marabout had sketched him correctly enough, allowing for a little politic bitterness thrown in to counteract Carruthers’s thoughtlessness in having introduced him to Rosediamond’s daughter (that priceless treasure for whom Lady Marabout would fain have had a guard of Janissaries, if they would not have been likely to look singular and come expensive); and ladies of the Marabout class did look upon him as an Ogre, guarded their daughters from his approach at a ball as carefully, if not as demonstratively, as any duck its ducklings from the approach of a water-rat, did not ask him to their dinners, and bowed to him chillily in the Ring. Others regarded him as harmless, from his perfect pennilessness; what danger was there in the fascinations of a man whom all Belgravia knew hadn’t money enough to buy dog-skin gloves, though he always wore the best Paris lavender kid? While others, the pretty married women chiefly, from her Grace of Amandine downwards to Mrs. Maréchale, of Lowndes Square, flirted with him, fearfully, and considered Chandos Cheveley what nobody ever succeeded in disproving him, the most agreeable man on town, with the finest figure, the best style, and the most perfect bow, to be seen in the Park any day between March and July. But then, as Lady Marabout remarked on a subsequent occasion, a figure, a style, and a bow are admirable and enviable things, but they’re not among the cardinal virtues, and don’t do to live upon; and though they’re very good buoys to float one on the smooth sparkling sea of society, if there come a storm, one may go down, despite them, and become helpless prey to the sharks waiting below.
“Philip certainly admires her very much; he said the other day there was something in her, and that means a great deal from him,” thought Lady Marabout, complacently, as she and Cecil Ormsby were wending their way through some crowded rooms. “Of course I shall not influence Cecil towards him; it would not be honorable to do so, since she might look for a higher title than my son’s; still, if it should so fall out, nothing would give me greater pleasure, and really nothing would seem more natural with a little judicious manage — —”
“May I have the honor of this valse with you?” was spoken in, though not to, Lady Marabout’s ear. It was a soft, a rich, a melodious voice enough, and yet Lady Marabout would rather have heard the hiss of a Cobra Capella, for the footmen might have caught the serpent and carried it off from Cecil Ormsby’s vicinity, and she couldn’t very well tell them to rid the reception-chambers of Chandos Cheveley.
Lady Marabout vainly tried to catch Cecil’s eye, and warn her of the propriety of an utter and entire repudiation of the valse in question, if there were no “engaged” producible to softly chill the hopes and repulse the advances of the aspirant; but Lady Cecil’s soul was obstinately bent saltatory-wards; her chaperone’s ocular telegram was lost upon her, and only caught by the last person who should have seen it, who read the message off the wires to his own amusement, but naturally was not magnanimous enough to pass it on.
“I ought to have warned her never to dance with that detestable man. If I could but have caught her eye even now!” thought Lady Marabout, restlessly. The capella would have been much the more endurable of the two; the serpent couldn’t have passed its arm round Rosediamond’s priceless daughter and whirled her down the ball-room to the music of Coote and Timney’s band, as Chandos Cheveley was now doing.
“Why did you not ask her for that waltz, Philip?” cried the good lady, almost petulantly.
Carruthers opened his eyes wide.
“My dear mother, you know I never dance! I come to balls to oblige my hostesses and look at the women, but not to carry a seven-stone weight of tulle illusion and white satin, going at express pace, with the thermometer at 80 deg., and a dense crowd jostling one at every turn in the circle. Bien obligé! that’s not my idea of pleasure; if it were the Pyrrhic dance, now, or the Tarantella, or the Bolero, under a Castilian chestnut-tree — —”
“Hold your tongue! You might have danced for once, just to have kept her from Chandos Cheveley.”
“From the best waltzer in London? Not so selfish. Ask Amandine’s wife if women don’t like to dance with that fellow!”
“I should be very sorry to mention his name to her, or any of her set,” responded Lady Marabout, getting upon certain virtuous stilts of her own, which she was given to mount on rare occasion and at distant intervals, always finding them very uncomfortable and unsuitable elevations, and being as glad to cast them off as a traveller to kick off the échasses he has had to strap on over the sandy plains of the Landes.
“What could possess you to introduce him to Cecil, Philip? It was careless, silly, unlike you; you know how I dislike men of his — his — objectionable stamp,” sighed Lady Marabout, the white and gold namesakes in her coiffure softly trembling a gentle sigh in the perfumy zephyr raised by the rotatory whirl of the waltzers, among whom she watched with a horrible fascination, as one watches a tiger being pugged out of its lair, or a deserter being led out to be shot, Chandos Cheveley, waltzing Rosediamond’s priceless daughter down the ball-room.
“He is so dreadfully handsome! I wonder why it is that men and women, who have no fortune but their faces, will be so dangerously, so obstinately, so provokingly attractive as one sees them so often!” thought Lady Marabout, determining to beat an immediate retreat from the present salons, since they were infested by the presence of her Ogre, to Lady Hautton’s house in Wilton Crescent.
Lady Hautton headed charitable bazaars, belonged to the Cummingite nebulæ, visited Homes and Hospitals (floating to the bedside of luckless feminine patients to read out divers edifying passages, whose effect must have been somewhat neutralized to the hearers, one would imagine, by the envy-inspiring rustle of her silks, the flash of her rings, and the chimes of her bracelets, chains, and châtelaine), looked on the “Amandine set” as lost souls, and hence “did not know” Chandos Cheveley — a fact which, though the Marabout and Hautton antagonism was patent to all Belgravia, served to endear her all at once to her foe; Lady Marabout, like a good many other people, being content to sink personal resentment, and make a truce with the infidels for the sake of enjoying a mutual antipathy — that closest of all links of union!
Lady Marabout and Lady Hautton were foes, but they were dear Helena and dear Anne, all the same; dined at each other’s tables, and smiled in each other’s faces. They might be private foes, but they were public friends; and Lady Marabout beat a discreet retreat to the Hautton’s salons— “so many engagements” is so useful a plea! — and from the Hautton she passed on to a ball at the Duke of Doncaster’s; and, as at both, if Lady Cecil Ormsby did not move “a goddess from above,” she moved a brilliant, sparkling, nonchalante, dangerous beauty, with some of her sex’s faults, all her sex’s witcheries, and more than her sex’s mischief, holding her own royally, saucily, and proudly, and Chandos Cheveley was encountered no more, but happily detained at petit souper in a certain Section of the French Embassy, Lady Marabout drove homewards, in the gray of the morning, relieved, complacent, and gratified, dozing deliciously, till she was woke up with a start.
“Lady Marabout, what a splendid waltzer your Ogre, Chandos Cheveley, is!”
Lady Marabout opened her eyes with a jerk that set her feathers trembling, her diamonds scintillating, and her bracelets ringing an astonished little carillon.
“My love, how you frightened me!”
Cecil Ormsby laughed — a gay, joyous laugh, innocent of having disturbed a doze, a lapse into human weakness of which her chaperone never permitted herself to plead guilty.
“Frightened you, did I? Why, you
r bête noire is as terrible to you as C[oe]ur de Lion to the Saracen children, or Black Douglas to the Lowland! And, really, I can’t see anything terrible in him; he is excessively brilliant and agreeable, has something worth hearing to say to you, and his waltzing is —— !”
Lady Cecil Ormsby had not a word in her repertory — though it was an enthusiastic and comprehensive one, and embraced five languages — sufficiently commendatory to finish her sentence.
“I dare say, dear! I never denied, or heard denied, his having every accomplishment under the sun. The only pity is, he has nothing more substantial!” returned Lady Marabout, a little bit tartly for her lips, only used to the softest (and most genuine) milk of roses.
Lord Rosediamond’s daughter laughed a little mournfully, and played with her fan.
“Poor man! Brilliant and beggared, fashionable and friendless, courted and cashiered — a sad destiny! Do you know, Lady Marabout, I have half a mind to champion your Ogre!”
“My love, don’t talk nonsense!” said Lady Marabout, hastily, at which Lady Cecil only laughed still more softly and gayly again, and sprung down as the carriage stopped in Lowndes Square.
“Rosediamond’s daughter’s deucedly handsome, eh, Cheveley? I saw you waltzing with her last night,” said Goodwood at Lord’s the next morning, watching a match between the Household Cavalry and the Zingari Eleven.
“Yes, she is the best thing we have seen for some time,” said Cheveley, glancing round to see if the Marabout liveries were on the ground.
“Don’t let the Amandine or little Maréchale hear you say so, or you’ll have a deuce of a row,” laughed Goodwood. “She’s worth a good deal, too; she’s all her mother’s property, and that’s something, I know. The deaths in her family have kept her back two years or more, but now she is out, I dare say Lady Tattersall will put her up high in the market.”