by Ouida
“My dear Mr. Cheveley, indeed you mistake!” began Lady Marabout, restlessly. That was a little bit of a story, he didn’t mistake at all; but Lady Marabout, collapsing like an india-rubber ball under the prick of a sarcasm, shivered all over at his words, his voice, his slight sad smile. “The man is as dreadful as Cecil,” she thought; “he puts things so horribly clearly!”
“Mistake? I do not think I do. You have thought all this, and very naturally; but now hear me for a moment. I have sought Lady Cecil’s society, that is perfectly true; we have been thrown together in society, very often accidentally; sometimes, I admit, through my own seeking. Few men could be with her and be steeled against her. I have been with her too much; but I sought her at first carelessly, then irresistibly and unconsciously, never with the motive you attribute to me. I am not as utterly beggared as you deem me, but neither am I entirely barren of honor. Believe me, Lady Marabout, my pride alone would be amply sufficient to raise a barrier between me and Cecil stronger than any that could be opposed to me by others. Yesterday I casually overheard words from Amandine which showed me that society, like you, has put but one construction on the attention I have paid her — a construction I might have foreseen had I not been unconsciously fascinated, and forgetful, for the time, of the infallible whispers of my kind friends. Her fortune, I know, was never numbered among her attractions for me; so little, that now that Amandine’s careless words have reminded me of the verdict of society, I shall neither seek her nor see her again. Scores of men marry women for their money, and their money alone, but I am not one of them; with my own precarious fortunes, only escaping ruin because I am not rich enough to tempt ruin. I would never take advantage of any interest I may have excited in her, to speak to her of a passion that the world would tell her was only another name for avarice and selfishness. I dare not trust myself with her longer, perhaps. I am no god to answer for my self-control; but you need not fear; I will never seek her love — never even tell her of mine. I shall leave town to-morrow; what I may suffer matters not. Lady Cecil is safe from me! Whatever you may have heard of my faults, follies, or vices, none ever told you, I think, that I broke my word?”
“And when the man said that, my dear Philip, I assure you I felt as guilty as if I had done him some horrible wrong; he stood there with his head up, looking at me with his sad proud eyes — and they are beautiful! — till, positively, I could almost have cried — I could, indeed, for though I don’t like him on principle, I couldn’t help pitying him,” said Lady Marabout, in a subsequent relation of the scene to her son. “Wasn’t it a terrible position? I was as near as possible forgetting everything due to poor Rosediamond, and saying to him that I believed Cecil liked him and would never like anybody else, but, thank Heaven! I remembered myself, and checked myself in time. If it had been anybody but Chandos Cheveley, I should really have admired him, he spoke so nobly! When he lifted his hat and left me, though I ought to have been glad (and I was glad, of course) that Cecil would be free from the society of anybody so objectionable and so dangerous, I felt wretched for him — I did indeed. It is so hard always to be placed in such miserable positions!”
By which you will perceive that the triumphant crushing of Lady Marabout’s Cobra didn’t afford her the unmixed gratification she had anticipated.
“I have done what was my duty to poor Rosediamond, and what General Ormsby’s confidence merited,” she solaced herself that day, feeling uncomfortably and causelessly guilty, she hardly knew why, when she saw Chandos Cheveley keeping sedulously with the “Amandine set,” and read in Cecil’s tell-tale face wonder, perplexity, and regret thereat, till the Frangipane fête came to an end. She had appeased the manes of the late Rosediamond, who, to her imagination, always appeared sitting up aloft keeping watch over the discharge of her chaperone’s duties, but she had a secret and horrible dread that she had excited the wrath of Rosediamond’s daughter. She had driven her Ogre off the scene, it is true, but she could not feel that she had altogether come off the best in the contest. Anne Hautton had congratulated her, indeed, on having “acted with decision at last,” but then she had marred it all by asking if Carruthers was likely to be engaged to Cecil? And Lady Marabout had been forced to confess he was not; Philip, when pressed by her that very morning to be a little attentive to Cecil, having shaken his head and laughed:
“She’s a bewitching creature, mother, but she don’t bewitch me! You know what Shakspeare says of wooing, wedding, and repentance. I’ve no fancy for the inseparable trio!”
Altogether, Lady Marabout was far from peace and tranquillity, though the Cobra was crushed, as she drove away from the Frangipane breakfast, and she was little nearer them when Cecil turned her eyes upon her with a question worse to Lady Marabout’s ear than the roar of a Lancaster battery.
“What have you said to him?”
“My dear Cecil! What have I said to whom?” returned Lady Marabout, with Machiavellian surprise.
“You know well enough, Lady Marabout! What have you said to him — to Mr. Cheveley?”
Cecil’s impetuosity invariably knocked Lady Marabout down at one blow, as a ball knocks down the pegs at lawn billiards. She rallied after the shock, but not successfully, and tried at coldness and decision, as recommended by Hautton prescriptions.
“My dear Cecil, I have said to him what I think it my duty to say to him. Responsible as I am for you — —”
“Responsible for me, Lady Marabout? Indeed you are not. I am responsible for myself!” interrupted Lady Cecil, with that haughty arch of her eyebrows and that flush on her face before which Lady Marabout was powerless. “What have you said to him? I will know!”
“I said very little to him, indeed, my dear; he said it all himself.”
“What did he say himself?”
“I must tell her — she is so dreadfully persistent,” thought the unhappy and badgered Peeress; and tell her she did, being a means of lessening the young lady’s interest in the subject of discussion as little judicious as she could well have hit upon.
Lady Cecil listened, silent for once, shading her face with her parasol, shading the tears that gathered on her lashes and rolled down her delicate flushed cheeks, at the recital of Chandos Cheveley’s words, from her chaperone’s sight.
Lady Marabout gathered courage from the tranquillity with which her recital was heard.
“You see, my love, Chandos Cheveley’s own honor points in the same direction with my judgment,” she wound up, in conclusion. “He has acted rightly at last, I allow, and if you — if you have for the moment felt a tinge of warmer interest in him — if you have been taken by the fascination of his manner, and invested him with a young girl’s romance, you will soon see with us how infinitely better it is that you should part, and how impossible it is that — —”
Lady Cecil’s eyes flashed such fire through their tears, that Lady Marabout stopped, collapsed and paralyzed.
“It is by such advice as that you repay his nobility, his generosity, his honor! — it is by such words as those you reward him for acting as not one man in a hundred would have acted! Hush, hush, Lady Marabout, I thought better of you!”
“Good Heavens! where will it end?” thought Lady Marabout, distractedly, as Rosediamond’s wayward daughter sprang down at the door with a flush in her face, and a contemptuous anger in her eyes, that made Bijou, jumping on her, stop, stare, and whine in canine dismay.
“And I fancied she was listening passively!” thought Lady Marabout.
“Well! the man is gone to-day, that is one comfort. I am very thankful I acted as I did,” reasoned that ever-worried lady in her boudoir the next morning. “I am afraid Cecil is really very fond of him, there were such black shadows under her eyes at breakfast, poor child! But it is much better as it is — much better. I should never have held up my head again if I had allowed her to make such a disadvantageous alliance. I can hardly bear to think of what would have been said, even now the danger is over!”
While La
dy Marabout was thus comforting herself over her embroidery silks, Cecil Ormsby was pacing into the Park, with old Twitters the groom ten yards behind her, taking her early ride before the world was up — it was only eleven o’clock; Cecil had been used to early rising, and would never leave it off, having discovered some recipe that made her independent of ordinary mortals’ quantum of sleep.
“Surely he will be here this morning to see me for the last time,” thought that young lady, as she paced up the New Ride under the Kensington Gardens trees, with her heart beating quickly under the gold aiglettes of her riding-jacket.
“I must see her once more, and then — —” thought Chandos Cheveley, as he leaned against the rails, smoking, as he had done scores of mornings before. His man had packed his things; his hansom was waiting at the gates to take him to the station, and his portmanteau was lettered “Ischl.” He had only come to take one last look of the face that haunted him as no other had ever succeeded in doing. The ring of a horse’s hoof fell on his ear. There she came, on her roan hack, with the sun glancing off her chestnut hair. He looked up to bow to her as she passed on, for the Ride had never been a rendezvous for more than a bow (Cecil’s insurrectionary tactics had always been carried on before Lady Marabout’s face), but the roan was pulled up by him that morning for the very first time, and Cecil’s eyes fell on him through their lashes.
“Mr. Cheveley — is it true you are going out of town?”
“Quite true.”
If her voice quivered as she asked the question, he barely kept his own from doing the same as he answered it.
“Will you be gone long?”
“Till next season, at earliest.”
His promise to Lady Marabout was hard to keep! He would not have trusted his strength if he had known she would have done more than canter on with her usual bow and smile.
Cecil was silent. The groom waited like a statue his ten yards behind them. She played with her reins nervously, the color coming and going painfully in her face.
“Lady Marabout told me of — of some conversation you had with her yesterday?”
Low as the words were, Cheveley heard them, and his hand, as it lay on the rails, shook like a girl’s.
Cecil was silent again; she looked at him, her eyes full of unshed tears, as the color burned in her face, and she drooped her head almost to a level with her hands as they played with the reins.
“She told me — you — —”
She stopped again. Cecil was new to making proposals, though not to rejecting them. Cheveley set his teeth to keep in the words that rushed to his lips, and Cecil saw the struggle as she bent her head lower and lower to the saddle, and twisted the reins into a Gordian knot.
“Do you — must we — why should — —”
Fragmentary monosyllables enough, but sufficient to fell his strength.
“For God’s sake do not tempt me!” he muttered. “You little know — —”
“I know all!” she whispered softly.
“You cannot! My worthless life! — my honor! I could not take such a sacrifice, I would not! — —”
“But — if my peace — —”
She could not end her phrase, yet it said enough; — his hand closed on hers.
“Your peace! Good God! in my hands! I stay; then — let the world say what it likes!”
“Drive back; I have changed my mind about going abroad to-day,” said Cheveley, as he got into his hansom at Albert Gate.
“How soon she has got over it! Girls do,” thought Lady Marabout, as Cecil Ormsby came in from her ride with the brightest bloom on her cheeks a June breeze ever fanned there. She laid her hat on the table, flung her gauntlets at Bijou, and threw herself on her knees by Lady Marabout, a saucy smile on her face, though her lashes were wet.
“Dear Lady Marabout, I can forgive you now, but you will never forgive me!”
Lady Marabout turned white as her point-lace cap, gave a little gasp of paralyzed terror, and pushed back her chair as though a shell had exploded on the hearth-rug.
“Cecil! Good Heaven! — you don’t mean — —”
“Yes I do,” said Cecil, with a fresh access of color, and a low, soft laugh.
Lady Marabout gasped again for breath:
“General Ormsby!” was all she could ejaculate.
“General Ormsby? What of him? Did you ever know uncle Johnnie refuse to please me? And if my money be to interfere with my happiness, and not promote it, as I conceive it its duty and purpose to do, why, I am of age in July, you know, and I shall make a deed of gift of it all to the Soldiers’ Home or the Wellington College, and there is only one person who will care for me then.”
Lady Cecil was quite capable of carrying her threat into execution, and Lady Cecil had her own way accordingly, as she had had it from her babyhood.
“I shall never hold up my head again! And what a horrible triumph for Anne Hautton! I am always the victim — always!” said Lady Marabout, that day two months, when the last guest at Cecil Ormsby’s wedding déjeûner had rolled away from the house. “A girl who might have married anybody, Philip; she refused twenty offers this season — she did, indeed! It is heart-breaking, say what you like; you needn’t laugh, it is. Why did I offer them Fernditton for this month, you say, if I didn’t countenance the alliance? Nonsense! that is nothing to the purpose. Of course, I seemed to countenance it to a degree, for Cecil’s sake, and I admire Chandos Cheveley, I confess (at least I should do, if I didn’t dislike his class on principle); but, say what you like, Philip, it is the most terrible thing that could have happened for me. Those men ought to be labelled, or muzzled, or done something with, and not be let loose on society as they are. He has a noble nature, you say. I don’t say anything against his nature! She worships him? Well, I know she does. What is that to the point? He will make her happy? I am sure he will. He has the gentlest way with her possible. But how does that console me? Think what you feel when an outsider, as you call it, beats all the favorites, upsets all your betting-books, and carries off the Doncaster Cup, and then realize, if you’ve any humanity in you, what we feel under such a trial as this is to me! Only to think what Anne Hautton will always say!”
Lady Marabout is not the only person to whom the first thought, the most dreaded ghost, the ghastliest skeleton, the direst aggravation, the sharpest dagger-thrust, under all troubles, is the remembrance of that one omnipotent Ogre— “Qu’en dira-t-on?”
“Laugh at her, mother,” counselled Carruthers; and, amis lecteurs, I pass on his advice to you as the best and sole bowstring for strangling the ogre in question, which is the grimmest we have in all Bogeydom.
SEASON THE THIRD. — THE CLIMAX.
“My dear Philip, the most unfortunate thing has happened,” said Lady Marabout, one morning; “really the greatest contretemps that could have occurred. I suppose I never am to be quiet!”
“What’s the row now, madre carissima?” asked her son.
“It is no row, but it is an annoyance. You have heard me speak of my poor dear friend Mrs. Montolieu; you know she married unhappily, poor thing, to a dreadful creature, something in a West India regiment — nobody at all. It is very odd, and it is very wrong, and there must be a great mistake somewhere, but certainly most marriages are unhappy.”
“And yet you are always recommending the institution! What an extraordinary obstinacy and opticism, my dear mother! I suppose you do it on the same principle as nurses recommend children nasty medicines, or as old Levett used to tender me dry biscuit sans confiture: ‘’Tisn’t so nice as marmalade, I know, Master Philip, but then, dear, it’s so wholesome!’”
“Hold your tongue, Philip,” cried Lady Marabout; “I don’t mean it in that sense at all, and you know I don’t. If poor Lilla Montolieu is unhappy, I am sure it is all her abominable odious husband’s fault; she is the sweetest creature possible. But she has a daughter, and concerning that daughter she wrote to me about a month ago, and — I never was more vexed in my life — she wants
me to bring her out this season.”
“A victim again! My poor dear mother, you certainly deserve a Belgravian testimonial; you shall have a statue set up in Lowndes Square commemorative of the heroic endurance of a chaperone’s existence, subscribed for gratefully by the girls you married well, and penitentially by the girls you couldn’t marry at all.”
Lady Marabout laughed a little, but sighed again:
“‘It is fun to you, but it is death to me’ — —”
“As the women say when we flirt with them,” interpolated Carruthers.
“You see, poor dear Lilla didn’t know what to do. There she is, in that miserable island with the unpronounceable name that the man is governor of; shut out of all society, with nobody to marry this girl to if she had her there, except their secretary, or a West Indian planter. Of course, no mother would ruin her daughter’s prospects, and take her into such an out-of-the-world corner. She knew no one so well as myself, and so to me she applied. She is the sweetest creature! I would do anything to oblige or please her, but I can’t help being very sorry she has pounced upon me. And I don’t the least know what this girl is like, not even whether she is presentable. I dare say she was petted and spoiled in that lazy, luxurious, tropical life when she was little, and she has been brought up the last few years in a convent in France, the very last education I should choose for a girl. Fancy, if I should find her an ignorant, unformed hoyden, or a lethargic, overgrown child, or an artificial French girl, who goes to confession every day, and carries on twenty undiscoverable love affairs — fancy, if she should be ugly, or awkward, or brusque, or gauche, as ten to one she will be — fancy, if I find her utterly unpresentable! — what in the world shall I do?”