by Ouida
“No doubt. Why don’t you make the investment — she’s much more attractive than that Valletort ice statue who hooked you so nearly last year? Fortescue’s out! Well done, little Jimmy! Ah! there’s the Marabout carriage. I am as unwelcome to that good lady, I know, as if I were Quasimodo or Quilp, and as much to be shunned, in her estimation, as Vidocq, armed to the teeth; nevertheless, I shall go and talk to them, if only in revenge for the telegraphic warning of ‘dangerous’ she shot at Lady Cecil last night when I asked her to waltz. Goodwood, don’t you envy me my happy immunity from traps matrimonial?”
“There is that man again — how provoking! I wish we had not come to see Philip’s return match. He is positively coming up to talk to us,” thought Lady Marabout, restlessly, as her Ogre lifted his hat to her. In vain did she do her best to look severe, to look frigid, to chill him with a withering “good morning,” (a little word, capable, if you notice, of expressing every gradation in feeling, from the nadir of delighted intimacy to the zero of rebuking frigidity;) her coldest ice was as warm as a pine-apple ice that has been melting all day under a refreshment tent at a horticultural fête? Her rôle was not chilliness, and never could be; she would have beamed benign on a headsman who had led her out to instant decapitation, and been no more able to help it than a peach to help its bloom or a claret its bouquet. She did her utmost to freeze Chandos Cheveley, but either she failed signally, or he, being blessed with the brazen conscience she had attributed to him, was steeled to all the tacit repulses of her looks, for he leant against the barouche-door, let her freeze him away as she might, and chatted to Cecil Ormsby, “positively,” Lady Marabout remarked to that safest confidante, herself, “positively as if the man had been welcome at my house for the last ten years! If Cecil would but second me, he couldn’t do it; but she will smile and talk with him just as though he were Goodwood or Fitzbreguet! It is very disagreeable to be forced against one’s will like this into countenancing such a very objectionable person; and yet what can one do?”
Which query she could by no means satisfactorily answer herself, being a regular female Nerva for clemency, utterly incapable of the severity with which that stern Catiline, Lady Hautton, would have signed the unwelcome intruder out of the way in a brace of seconds. And under Nerva’s gentle rule, though Nerva was longing with all her heart to have the courage to call the lictors and say, “Away with him!” Cheveley leant against the door of the carriage unmolested, though decidedly undesired by one of its occupants, talked to by Lady Cecil, possibly because she found him as agreeable as her Grace of Amandine and Lillia Maréchale had done before her, possibly only from that rule of contrariety which is such a pet motor-power with her sex; and Lady Marabout reclined among her cushions, tucked up in her tiger-skin in precisely that state of mind in which Fuseli said to his wife, “Swear, my dear, you don’t know how much good it will do you,” dreading in herself the possible advent of the Hautton carriage, for that ancient enemy and rigid pietist, of whose keen tongue and eminent virtue she always stood secretly in awe, to see this worthless and utterly objectionable member of that fast, graceless, and “very incorrect” Amandine set, absolutely en sentinelle at the door of her barouche!
Does your best friend ever come when you want him most? Doesn’t your worst foe always come when you want him least? Of course, at that juncture, the Hautton carriage came on the ground (Hautton was one of the Zingari Club, and maternal interest brought her foe to Lord’s as it had brought herself), and the Hautton eye-glass, significantly and surprisedly raised, said as distinctly to Lady Marabout, as though elfishly endowed with vocal powers, “You allow that man acquaintance with Rosediamond’s daughter!” Lady Marabout was stung to the soul by the deserved rebuke, but she didn’t know how on earth to get rid of the sinner! There he leaned, calmly, nonchalantly, determinedly, as if he were absolutely welcome; and Lady Cecil talked on to him as if he were absolutely welcome too.
Lady Marabout felt branded in the eyes of all Belgravia to have Chandos Cheveley at her carriage-door, the most objectionable man of all his most objectionable class.
“It is very strange!” she thought. “I have seen that man about town the last five-and-twenty years — ever since he was a mere boy, taken up and petted by Adeline Patchouli for some piece of witty Brummelian impudence he said to her on his first introduction — and he has never sought my acquaintance before, but always seemed to be quite aware of my dislike to him and all his set. It is very grievous he should have chosen the very season I have poor dear Rosediamond’s daughter with me; but it is always my fate — if a thing can happen to annoy me it always will!”
With which Lady Marabout, getting fairly distracted under the iron hand of adverse fate, and the ruthless surveillance of the Hautton glass, invented an impromptu necessity for immediate shopping at Lewis and Allonby’s, and drove off the ground at the sole moment of interest the match possessed for her — viz., when Carruthers was rattling down Hautton’s stumps, and getting innings innumerable for the Household.
“Mais ce n’est que le premier pas qui coûte;” the old proverb’s so true we wear it threadbare with repeating it! Lady Marabout might as well have stayed on Lord’s ground, and not lacerated her feelings by leaving at the very hour of the Household Cavalry’s triumphs, for any good that she did thereby. The Hautton eye-glass had lighted on Chandos Cheveley, and Chandos Cheveley’s eye-glass on Rosediamond’s daughter; — and Cecil Ormsby arched her eyebrows, and gave her parasol a little impatient shake as they quitted Lord’s.
“Lady Marabout, I never could have believed you ill-natured; you interrupted my ball last night, and my conversation this morning! I shall scold you if you ever do so again. And now tell me (as curiosity is a weakness incidental to all women, no woman ought to refuse to relieve it in another) why are you so prejudiced against that very handsome, and very amusing person?”
“Prejudiced, my dear child! I am not in the least prejudiced,” returned Lady Marabout. (Nobody ever admitted to a prejudice that I ever heard. It’s a plant that grows in all gardens, and is sedulously matted up, watered, and strengthened; but invariably disavowed by its sturdiest cultivators.) “As for Chandos Cheveley, I merely mentioned to you what all town knows about him; and the dislike I have to his class is one of principle, not of prejudice.”
Lady Cecil made a moue mutine:
“Oh, Lady Marabout! if you go to ‘principle,’ tout est perdu! ‘Principle’ has been made to bear the onus of every private pique since the world began, and has had to answer for more cruelties and injustice than any word in the language. The Romans flung the Christians to the lions ‘on principle,’ and the Europeans slew the Mahomedans ‘on principle,’ and ‘principle’ lighted the autos-da-fé, and signed to the tormentor to give a turn more to the rack! Please don’t appeal to anything so severe and hypocritical. Come, what are the Ogre’s sins?”
Lady Marabout laughed, despite the subject.
“Do you think I am a compiler of such catalogues, my love? Pray do not let us talk any more about Chandos Cheveley, he is very little worth it; all I say to you is, be as cool to him as you can, without rudeness, of course. I am never at home when he calls, and were I you, I would be always engaged when he asks you to waltz; his acquaintance can in no way benefit you.”
Lady Cecil gave a little haughty toss of her head, and lay back in the barouche.
“I will judge of that! I am not made for fetters of any kind, you know, and I like to choose my own acquaintance as well as to choose my own dresses. I cannot obey you either this evening, for he asked me to put him on my tablets for the first waltz at Lord Anisette’s ball, and I consented. I had no ‘engaged’ ready, unless I had had a falsehood ready too, and you wouldn’t counsel that, Lady Marabout, I am very sure?”
With which straightforward and perplexing question Cecil Ormsby successfully silenced her chaperone, by planting her in that disagreeable position known as between the horns of a dilemma; and Lady Marabout, shrinking alike from the resp
onsibility of counselling a “necessary equivocation,” as society politely terms its indispensable lies, and the responsibility of allowing Cecil acquaintance with the “very worst” of the Amandine set, sighed, wondered envyingly how Anne Hautton would act in her place, and almost began to wish somebody else had had the onerous stewardship of that brilliant and priceless jewel, Rosediamond’s daughter, now that the jewel threatened to be possessed with a will of its own: — the greatest possible flaw in a gem of pure water, which they only want to scintillate brilliantly among the bijouterie of society, and let itself be placed passively in the setting most suitable for it, that can be conceived in the eyes of lady lapidaries intrusted with its sale.
“It is very odd,” thought Lady Marabout; “she seems to have taken a much greater fancy to that odious man than to Philip, or Goodwood, or Fitz, or any one of the men who admire her so much. I suppose I always am to be worried in this sort of way! However, there can be no real danger; Chandos Cheveley is the merest butterfly flirt, and with all his faults none ever accused him of fortune-hunting. Still, they say he is wonderfully fascinating, and certainly he has the most beautiful voice I ever heard; and if Cecil should ever like him at all, I could never forgive myself, and what should I say to General Ormsby?”
The General, Cecil’s uncle and guardian, is one of the best-humored, best-tempered, and most laissez-faire men in the Service, but was, for all that, a perpetual dead weight on Lady Marabout’s mind just then, for was not he the person to whom, at the end of the season, she would have to render up account of the successes and the shortcomings of her chaperone’s career?
“Do you think of proposing Chandos Cheveley as a suitable alliance for Cecil Ormsby, my dear Helena?” asked Lady Hautton, with that smile which was felt to be considerably worse than strychnine by her foes and victims, at a house in Grosvenor Place, that night.
“God forbid!” prayed Lady Marabout, mentally, as she joined in the Hautton laugh, and shivered under the stab of the Hautton sneer, which was an excessively sharp one. Lady Hautton being one of a rather numerous class of eminent Christians, so panoplied in the armor of righteousness that they can tread, without feeling it, on the tender feet of others.
The evening was spoiled to Lady Marabout; she felt morally and guiltily responsible for an unpardonable indiscretion: — with that man waltzing with Cecil Ormsby, her “graceful, graceless, gracious Grace” of Amandine visibly irritated with jealousy at the sight, and Anne Hautton whispering behind her fan with acidulated significance. Lady Marabout had never been more miserable in her life! She heard on all sides admiration of Rosediamond’s daughter; she was gratified by seeing Goodwood, Fitzbreguet, Fulke Nugent, every eligible man in the room, suing for a place on her tablets; she had the delight of beholding Carruthers positively join the negligent beauty’s train; and yet the night was a night of purgatory to Lady Marabout, for Chandos Cheveley had his first waltz, and several after it, and the Amandine set were there to gossip, and the Hautton clique to be shocked, at it.
“Soames, tell Mason, when Mr. Chandos Cheveley calls, I am not at home,” said Lady Marabout at breakfast.
“Yes, my lady,” said Soames, who treasured up the order, and told it to Mr. Chandos Cheveley’s man at the first opportunity, though, greatly to his honor, we must admit, he did not imitate the mild formula of fib, and tell his mistress her claret was not corked when it was so incontestably.
Cecil Ormsby lifted her head and looked across the table at her hostess, and the steady gaze of those violet eyes, which were Rosediamond’s daughter’s best weapons of war, so discomposed Lady Marabout, that she forgot herself sufficiently to proffer Bijou a piece of bread, an unparalleled insult, which that canine Sybarite did not forget all day long.
“Not at home, sir,” said Mason, as duly directed, when Cheveley’s cab pulled up, a week or two after the general order, at the door.
Cheveley smiled to himself as his gray had her head turned, and the wheel grated off the trottoir, while he lifted his hat to Cecil Ormsby, just visible between the amber curtains and above the balcony flowers of one of the windows of the drawing-room — quite visible enough for her return smile and bow to be seen in the street by Cheveley, in the room by Lady Marabout.
“Some of Lady Tattersall’s generalship!” he thought, as the gray trotted out of the square. “Well! I have no business there. Cecil Ormsby is not her Grace of Amandine, nor little Maréchale, and the good lady is quite right to brand me ‘dangerous’ to her charge, and pronounce me ‘inadmissible’ to her footman. I’ve very little title to resent her verdict.”
“My dearest Cecil, whatever possessed you to bow to that man!” cried Lady Marabout, in direst distress.
“Is it not customary to bow to one’s acquaintances — I thought it was?” asked Lady Cecil, with demure mischief.
“But, my dear, from a window! — and when Mason is saying we are not at home!”
“That isn’t Mason’s fib, or Mason’s fault, Lady Marabout!” suggested Cecil, with wicked emphasis.
“There is no falsehood or fault at all anywhere — everybody knows well enough what ‘not at home’ means,” returned Lady Marabout, almost pettishly.
“Oh yes,” laughed the young lady, saucily. “It means ‘I am at home and sitting in my drawing room, but I shall not rise to receive you, because you are not worth the trouble.’ It’s a polite cut direct, and a honeyed rudeness — a bitter almond wrapped up in a sugar dragée, like a good many other bonbons handed about in society.”
“My dear Cecil, you have some very strange ideas; you will get called satirical if you don’t take care,” said Lady Marabout, nervously.
Cecil Ormsby’s tone worried her, and made her feel something as she felt when she had a restive, half-broken pair of horses in her carriage, for the direction of whose next plunge or next kick nobody could answer.
“And if I be — what then?”
“My dear child, you could not anyhow get a more disadvantageous reputation! It may amuse gentlemen though it frightens half them; but it offends all women irremediably. You see, there are so few whom it doesn’t hit somewhere,” returned Lady Marabout, quite innocent of the neat satire of her own last sentence.
Cecil Ormsby laughed, and threw herself down by her chaperone’s side:
“Never mind: I can bear their enmity; it is a greater compliment than their liking. The women whom women love are always quiet, colorless, inoffensive — foils. Lady Marabout, tell me, why did you give that general order to Mason?”
“I have told you before, my dear. Because I have no wish to know Mr. Chandos Cheveley,” returned Lady Marabout, as stiffly as she could say anything. “It is, as I said, not from prejudice, but from prin — —”
“Lady Marabout, if you use that word again, I will drive to uncle Ormsby’s rooms in the Albany and stay with him for the season; I will, positively! I am sure all the gentlemen there will be delighted to have my society! Pray, what are your Ogre’s crimes? Did you ever hear anything dishonorable, mean, ungenerous, attributed to him? Did you ever hear he broke his word, or failed to act like a gentleman, or was a defaulter at any settling day?”
Lady Marabout required some explanation of what a defaulter at a settling day might be, and, on receiving it, was compelled to confess that she never had heard anything of that kind imputed to Chandos Cheveley.
“Of course I have not, my dear. The man is a gentleman, everybody knows, however idle and improvident a one. If he could be accused of anything of that kind, he would not belong to such clubs, and associate with such men as he does. Besides, Philip would not know him; certainly would not think well of him, which I confess he does. But that is not at all the question.”
“Ne vous en déplaise, I think it very much and very entirely the question,” returned Lady Cecil, with a toss of her haughty little head. “If you can bring nothing in evidence against a man, it is not right to send him to the galleys and mark him ‘Forçat.’”
“My dear Cecil, there
is plenty in evidence against him,” said Lady Marabout, with a mental back glance to certain stories told of the “Amandine set,” “though not of that kind. A man may be perfectly unexceptionable in his conduct with his men friends, but very objectionable acquaintance for us to seek, all the same.”
“Ah, I see! Lord Goodwood may bet, and flirt, and lounge his days away, and be as fast a man as he likes, and it is all right; but if Mr. Cheveley does the same, it is all wrong, because he is not worth forgiving.”
“Naturally it is,” returned Lady Marabout, seriously and naïvely. “But how very oddly you put things, my love; and why you should interest yourself in this man, when everything I tell you is to his disadvantage, I cannot imagine.”
A remark that showed Lady Marabout a skilful tactician, insomuch as it silenced Cecil — a performance rather difficult of accomplishment.
“I am very glad I gave the order to Mason,” thought that good lady. “I only wish we did not meet the man in society; but it is impossible to help that. We are all cards of one pack, and get shuffled together, whether we like it or not. I wish Philip would pay her more attention; he admires her, I can see, and he can make any woman like him in ten days when he takes the trouble; but he is so tiresome! She would be exactly suited to him; she has all he would exact — beauty, talent, good blood, and even fortune, though that he would not need. The alliance would be a great happiness to me. Well, he dines here to-night, and he gives that concert at his barracks to-morrow morning, purely to please Cecil, I am sure. I think it may be brought about with careful management.”
With which pleasant reflection she went to drive in the Ring, thinking that her maternal and duenna duties would be alike well fulfilled, and her chaperone’s career well finished, if by any amount of tact, intrigue, finesses, and diplomacy she could live to see Cecil Ormsby sign herself Cecil Carruthers.