Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  “If that man were only out of town!” she thought, as Cheveley passed them in Amandine’s mail-phaeton at the turn.

  Lady Marabout might wish Cheveley were out of town — and wish it devoutly she did — but she wasn’t very likely to have her desire gratified till the general migration should carry him off in its tide to the deck of a yacht, a lodge in the Highlands, a German Kursaal, or any one of those myriad “good houses” where nobody was so welcome as he, the best shot, the best seat, the best wit, the best billiard-player, the best whist-player, and the best authority on all fashionable topics, of any man in England. Cheveley used to aver that he liked Lady Marabout, though she detested him; nay, that he liked her for her detestation; he said it was cordial, sincere, and refreshing, therefore a treat in the world of Belgravia; still, he didn’t like her so well as to leave Town in the middle of May to oblige her; and though he took her hint as it was meant, and pulled up his hansom no more at her door, he met her and Rosediamond’s daughter at dinners, balls, concerts, morning-parties innumerable. He saw them in the Ring; he was seen by them at the Opera; he came across them constantly in the gyration of London life. Night after night Lady Cecil persisted in writing his name in her tablets; evening after evening a bizarre fate worried Lady Marabout, by putting him on the left hand of her priceless charge at a dinner-party. Day after day all the harmony of a concert was marred to her ear by seeing her Ogre talking of Beethoven and Mozart, chamber music and bravura music in Cecil’s: morning after morning gall was poured into her luncheon sherry, and wormwood mingled in her vol-au-vent, by being told, with frank mischief, by her desired daughter-in-law, that she “had seen Mr. Cheveley leaning on the rails, smoking,” when she had taken her after-breakfast canter.

  “Chandos Cheveley getting up before noon! He must mean something unusual!” thought her chaperone.

  “Helena has set her heart on securing Cecil Ormsby for Carruthers. I hope she may succeed better than she did with poor Goodwood last season,” laughed Lady Hautton, with her inimitable sneer, glancing at the young lady in question at a bazaar in Willis’s Rooms, selling rosebuds for anything she liked to ask for them, and cigars tied up with blue ribbon a guinea the half-dozen, at the Marabout stall. Lady Hautton had just been paying a charitable visit to St. Cecilia’s Refuge, of which she was head patroness, where, having floated in with much benignity, been worshipped by a select little toady troop, administered spiritual consolation with admirable condescension, and distributed illuminated texts for the adornment of the walls and refreshment of the souls, she was naturally in a Christian frame of mind towards her neighbors. Lady Marabout caught the remark — as she was intended to do — and thought it not quite a pleasant one; but, my good sir, did you ever know those estimable people, who spend all their time fitting themselves for another world, ever take the trouble to make themselves decently agreeable in the present one? The little pleasant courtesies, affabilities, generosities, and kindnesses, that rub the edge off the flint-stones of the Via Dolorosa, are quite beneath the attention of Mary the Saint, and only get attended to by Martha the Worldly, poor butterfly thing! who is fit for nothing more serviceable and profitable!

  Lady Marabout had set her heart on Cecil Ormsby’s filling that post of honor — of which no living woman was deserving in her opinion — that of “Philip’s wife;” an individual who had been, for so many years, a fond ideal, a haunting anxiety, and a dreaded rival, en même temps, to her imagination. She was a little bit of a match-maker: she had, over and over again, arranged the most admirable and suitable alliances; alliances that would have shamed the scepticism of the world in general, as to the desirability of the holy bonds, and brought every refractory man to the steps of St. George’s; alliances, that would have come off with the greatest éclat, but for one trifling hindrance and difficulty — namely, the people most necessary to the arrangements could never by any chance be brought to view them in the same light, and were certain to give her diplomacy the croc-en-jambe at the very moment of its culminating glory and finishing finesses. She was a little bit of a match-maker — most kind-hearted women are; the tinder they play with is much better left alone, but they don’t remember that! Like children in a forest, they think they’ll light a pretty bright fire, just for fun, and never remember what a seared, dreary waste that fire may make, or what a prairie conflagration it may stretch into before it’s stopped.

  “Cecil Ormsby is a terrible flirt,” said Lady Hautton, to another lady, glancing at the rapid sale of the rosebuds and cigars, the bunches of violets and the sprays of lilies of the valley, in which that brilliant beauty was doing such thriving business at such extravagant profits, while the five Ladies Hautton presided solemnly over articles of gorgeous splendor, which threatened to be left on hand, and go in a tombola, as ignominiously as a beauty after half a dozen seasons, left unwooed and unwon, goes to the pêle-mêle raffle of German Bad society, and is sold off at the finish to an unknown of the Line, or a Civil Service fellow, with five hundred a year.

  “Was Cecil a flirt?” wondered Lady Marabout. Lady Marabout was fain to confess to herself that she thought she was — nay, that she hoped she was. If it wasn’t flirting, that way in which she smiled on Chandos Cheveley, sold him cigarettes, laughed with him over the ices and nectarines he fetched her, and positively invested him with the cordon d’honneur of a little bouquet of Fairy roses, for which twenty men sued, and he (give Satan his due) did not even ask — if it wasn’t flirting, what was it? Lady Marabout shivered at the suggestion; and though she was, on principle, excessively severe on flirting, she could be very glad of what she didn’t approve, when it aided her, on occasion — like most other people — and would so far have agreed with Talleyrand, as to welcome the worst crime (of coquetry) as far less a sin than the unpardonable blunder of encouraging an Ogre!

  “I can’t send Cecil away from the stall, as if she were a naughty child, and I can’t order the man out of Willis’s Rooms,” thought that unhappy and fatally-worried lady, as she presided behind her stall, an emphatic witness of the truth of the poeticism that “grief smiles and gives no sign,” insomuch as she looked the fairest, sunniest, best-looking, and best-tempered Dowager that ever shrouded herself in Chantilly lace.

  “I do think those ineligible, detrimental, objectionable persons ought not to be let loose on society as they are,” she pondered; “let them have their clubs and their mess breakfasts, their Ascot and their Newmarket, their lansquenet parties and their handicap pigeon matches, if they like; but to have them come amongst us as they do, asked everywhere if they happen to have good blood and good style, free to waltz and flirt and sing, and show all sorts of attention to marriageable girls, while all the while they are no more available for anything serious than if they were club stewards or cabmen — creatures that live on their fashionable aroma, and can’t afford to buy the very bottles of bouquets on their toilette-tables — fast men, too, who, knowing they can never marry themselves, make a practice of turning marriage into ridicule, and help to set all the rich men more dead against it than they are, — to have them come promiscuously among the very best people, with nothing to distinguish them as dangerous, or label them as ‘ought to be avoided,’ — it’s dreadful! it’s a social evil! it ought to be remedied! They muzzle dogs in June, why can’t they label Ogres in the season? I mustn’t send poor little Bijou out for a walk in Kensington Gardens without a string, these men ought not to go about in society without restriction: a snap of Bijou’s doesn’t do half such mischief as a smile of theirs!”

  And Lady Marabout chatted across the stall to his Grace of Doncaster, and entrapped him into purchases of fitting ducal prodigality, and smiled on scores of people she didn’t know, in pleasant pro tempore expediency that had, like most expediency in our day, its ultimate goal in their purses and pockets, and longed for some select gendarmerie to clear Willis’s Rooms of her Cobra Capella, and kept an eye all the while on Cecil Ormsby — Cecil, selling off everything on the stall by sheer forc
e of her bright violet eyes, receiving ten-pound notes for guinea trifles, making her Bourse rise as high as she liked, courted for a spray of mignonette as entreatingly as ever Law was courted in the Rue Quincampoix for Mississippi scrip, served by a Corps d’Elite, in whom she had actually enlisted Carruthers, Goodwood, Fulke Nugent, Fitzbreguet, and plenty of the most desirable and most desired men in town, yet of which — oh the obstinacy of women! she had actually made Chandos Cheveley, with those wicked little Fairy roses in his coat, positively the captain and the chief!

  “It is enough to break one’s heart!” thought Lady Marabout, wincing under the Hautton glance, which she saw only the plainer because she wouldn’t see it at all, and which said with horrible distinctness, “There is that man, who can hardly keep his own cab, who floats on society like a pleasure-boat, without rudder, ballast, or anchors, of whom I have told you, in virtuous indignation and Christian charity, fifty thousand naughty stories, who visits that wicked, notorious little Maréchale, who belongs to the Amandine set, who is everything that he ought not and nothing that he ought to be, who hasn’t a penny he doesn’t make by a well-made betting-book or a dashed-off magazine article, — there he is flirting all day at your own stall with Rosediamond’s daughter, and you haven’t the savoir faire, the strength of will, the tact, the proper feeling, to stop it!”

  To all of which charges Lady Marabout humbly bent her head, metaphorically speaking, and writhed, in secret, under the glance of her ancient enemy, while she talked and laughed with the Duke of Doncaster. C. Petronius, talking epicureanisms and witicisms, while the life-blood was ebbing away at every breath, was nothing to the suffering and the fortitude of Helena, Lady Marabout, turning a smiling, sunny, tranquil countenance to the world in front of her stall, while that world could see Chandos Cheveley admitted behind it!

  “I must do something to stop this!” thought Lady Marabout, with the desperation of a Charlotte Corday.

  “Is Cheveley going in for the Ormsby tin?” said Amandine to Eyre Lee. “Best thing he could do, eh? But Lady Tattersall and the trustees would cut rough, I am afraid.”

  “What does Chandos mean with that daughter of Rosediamond’s?” wondered her Grace, annoyedly. She had had him some time in her own rose chains, and when ladies have driven a lover long in that sort of harness, they could double-thong him with all the might of their little hands, if they fancy he is trying to break away.

  “Is Chandos Cheveley turning fortune-hunter? I suppose he would like Lady Cecil’s money to pay off his Ascot losses,” said Mrs. Maréchale, with a malicious laugh. At Ascot, the day before, he had not gone near her carriage; the year before he had driven her down in her mail-phaeton: what would there be too black to say of him now?

  “I must do something to stop this!” determined Lady Marabout, driving homewards, and glancing at Cecil Ormsby, as that young lady lay back in the carriage, a little grave and dreamy after her day’s campaign — signs of the times terrifically ominous to her chaperone, skilled in reading such meteorological omens. But how was the drag to be put on the wheel? That momentous question absorbed Lady Marabout through her toilette that evening, pursued her to dinner, haunted her through two soirées, kept her wide awake all night, woke up with her to her early coffee, and flavored the potted tongue and the volaille à la Richelieu she took for her breakfast. “I can’t turn the man out of town, and I can’t tell people to strike him off their visiting-lists, and I can’t shut Cecil and myself up in this house as if it were a convent, and, as to speaking to her, it is not the slightest use. She has such a way of putting things that one can never deny their truth, or reason them away, as one can with other girls. Fond as I am of her, she’s fearfully difficult to manage. Still I owe it as a sacred duty to poor Rosediamond and the General, who says he places such implicit confidence in me, to interfere. It is my duty; it can’t be helped. I must speak to Chandos Cheveley himself. I have no right to consult my own scruples when so much is at stake,” valorously determined Lady Marabout, resolved to follow stern moral rules, and, when right was right, to let “le diable prendre le fruit.”

  To be a perfect woman of the world, I take it, ladies must weed out early in life all such little contemptible weaknesses as a dislike to wounding other people; and a perfect woman of the world, therefore, Lady Marabout was not, and never would be. Nohow could she acquire Anne Hautton’s invaluable sneer — nohow could she imitate that estimable pietist’s delightful way of dropping little icy-barbed sentences, under which I have known the bravest to shrink, frozen, out of her path. Lady Marabout was grieved if she broke the head off a flower needlessly, and she could not cure herself of the same lingering folly in disliking to say a thing that pained anybody; it is incidental to the De Bonc[oe]ur blood — Carruthers inherits it — and I have seen fellows spared through it, whom he could else have withered into the depths of their boots by one of his satirical mots. So she did not go to her task of speaking to Chandos Cheveley, armed at all points for the encounter, and taking pleasure in feeling the edge of her rapier, as Lady Hautton would have done. The Cobra was dangerous, and must be crushed, but Lady Marabout did not very much relish setting her heel on it; it was a glittering, terrible, much-to-be-feared, and much-to-be-abused serpent, — but it might feel all the same, you see.

  “I dislike the man on principle, but I don’t want to pain him,” she thought, sighing for the Hautton stern savoir faire and Achilles impenetrability, and goading herself on with the remembrance of duty and General Ormsby, when the opportunity she had resolved to seek presented itself accidentally at a breakfast at Lady George Frangipane’s toy villa at Fulham, and she found herself comparatively alone in the rose-garden with Cheveley, for once without Cecil’s terrible violet eyes upon her.

  “Will you allow me a few words with you, Mr. Cheveley?” she asked, in her blandest manner — the kindly hypocrite!

  The blow must be dealt, but it might as well be softened with a few chloroform fumes, and not struck savagely with an iron-spiked mace.

  Cheveley raised his eyes.

  “With me? With the greatest pleasure!”

  “He is a mere fortune-hunter. I will not spare him, I am resolved,” determined Lady Marabout, as she toyed with her parasol-handle, remarked incidentally how unequalled Lady George was in roses, especially in the tea-rose, and dealt blow No. 1. “Mr. Cheveley, I am going to speak to you very frankly. I consider frankness in all things best, myself — —”

  Cheveley bowed, and smiled slightly.

  “I wish he would answer, it would make it so much easier; he will only look at one with those eyes of his, and certainly they are splendid!” thought Lady Marabout, as she went on quickly, on the same principle as the Chasseurs Indiens approach an abattis at double-quick. “When Lord Rosediamond died last year he left, as probably you are aware, his daughter in my sole care; it was a great responsibility — very great — and I feel, of course, that I shall have to answer to him for my discharge of it.”

  Lady Marabout didn’t say whether Rosediamond was accustomed to visit her per medium, and hear her account of her stewardship nightly through a table-claw; but we must suppose that he was. Cheveley bowed again, and didn’t inquire, not being spiritually interested.

  “Why won’t he answer?” thought Lady Marabout. “That I have not been blind to your very marked attention to my dear Cecil, I think you must be aware, Mr. Cheveley, and it is on that subject, indeed, that I — —”

  “Wished to speak to me? I understand!” said Cheveley as she paused, with that faint smile, half sad, half proud, that perplexed Lady Marabout. “You are about to insinuate to me gently that those attentions have been exceedingly distasteful to you, exceedingly unacceptable in me; you would remind me that Lady Cecil Ormsby is a beauty and an heiress, and that I am a fortune-hunter, whose designs are seen through and motives found out; you would hint to me that our intercourse must cease: is it not so?”

  Lady Marabout, cursed with that obstinate, ill-bred, unextinguishable weakne
ss for truth incidental and ever fatal to the De Bonc[oe]urs, couldn’t say that it was not what she was going to observe to him, but it was exceedingly unpleasant, now it was put in such plain, uncomplimentary terms, to admit to the man’s face that she was about to tell him he was a mercenary schemer, whose attentions only sprang from a lawless passion for the beaux yeux of Cecil’s cassette.

  She would have told him all that, and much more, with greatest dignity and effect, if he hadn’t anticipated her; but to have her weapon parried before it was fairly out of its sheath unnerved her arm at the outset.

  “What would Anne Hautton do? Dear me! there never was anybody perpetually placed in such wretched positions as I am!” thought Lady Marabout, as she played with her parasol, and murmured something not very clear relative to “responsibility” and “not desirable,” two words as infallibly a part of Lady Marabout’s stock in trade as a sneer at the “swells” is of Punch’s. How she sighed for some cold, nonchalant, bitter sentence, such as the Hautton répertoire could have supplied! how she scorned herself for her own weakness and lack of severity! But she would not have relished hurting a burglar’s feelings, though she had seen him in the very act of stealing her jewel-boxes, by taxing him with the theft; and though the Ogre must be crushed, the crushing began to give Lady Marabout neuralgic twinges. She was no more able to say the stern things she had rehearsed and resolved upon, than she was able to stab him with her parasol, or strangle him with her handkerchief.

  “I guessed rightly what you were about to say to me?” said Cheveley, who seemed somehow or other to have taken all the talk into his own hands, and to have become the master of the position. “I thought so. I do not wonder at your construction; I cannot blame you for your resolution. Lady Cecil has some considerable fortune, they say; it is very natural that you should have imagined a man like myself, with no wealth save a good name, which only serves to make lack of wealth more conspicuous, incapable of seeking her society for any better, higher, more disinterested motive than that of her money; it was not charitable, perhaps, to decide unhesitatingly that it was impossible I could be drawn to her by any other attraction, that it was imperative I must be dead to everything in her that gives her a nobler and a higher charm; but it was very natural, and one learns never to hope for the miracle of a charitable judgment, even from Lady Marabout!”