by Ouida
“If I do not, I shall desert the troupe, and form a circus of my own less mechanical and more enjoyable.”
“Il faut souffrir pour être belle, il faut souffrir encore plus pour être à la mode!” said Goodwood, on her right, while Lady Egidia Hautton thought, “How bold that little Montolieu is!” and her sister, Lady Feodorowna, wondered what her cousin Goodwood could see there.
“I do not see the necessity,” interrupted Flora, “and I certainly would never bow to the ‘il faut.’ I would make fashion follow me; I would not follow fashion.” (“That child talks as though she were the Duchess of Amandine;” thought Lady Marabout, catching fragmentary portions across the table, the Marabout oral and oracular organs being always conveniently multiplied when she was armed cap à pie as a chaperone.) “Sir Philip, you talk as if you belonged to the ‘nothing-is-new, and nothing-is-true, and it-don’t-signify’ class. I should have thought you were above the nil admirari affectation.”
“He admires, as we all do, when we find something that compels our homage,” said Goodwood, with an emphasis that would have made the hearts of any of the Hereditary Princesses palpitate with gratification, but at which the ungrateful Petit Caporal only glanced at him a little surprisedly with her large hazel eyes, as though she by no means saw the point of the speech.
Carruthers laughed:
“Nil admirari? Oh no. I enjoy life, but then it is thanks to the clubs, my yacht, my cigar-case, my stud, a thousand things, — not thanks at all to Belgravia.”
“Complimentary to the Belgraviennes!” cried Flora, with a shrug of her shoulders. “They have not known how to amuse you, then?”
“Ladies never do amuse us!” sighed Carruthers. “Tant pis pour nous!”
“Are you going to Lady Patchouli’s this evening?” asked Goodwood.
“I believe we are. I think Lady Marabout said so.”
“Then I shall exert myself, and go too. It will be a terrible bore — balls always are. But to waltz with you I will try to encounter it!”
Flora Montolieu arched her eyebrows, and gave him a little disdainful glance.
“Lord Goodwood, do not be so sure that I shall waltz at all with you. If you take vanity for wit, I cannot accept discourtesy as compliment!”
“Well hit, little lady!” thought Carruthers, with a mental bravissima.
“What a speech!” thought Lady Marabout, across the table, as shocked as though a footman had dropped a cascade of iced hock over her.
“You got it for once, Goodwood,” laughed Carruthers, as they drove away in his tilbury. “You never had such a sharp brush as that.”
“By Jove, no! Positively it was quite a new sensation — refreshing, indeed! One grows so tired of the women who agree with one eternally. She’s charming, on my word. Who is she, Phil? In an heraldic sense, I mean.”
“My dear child, what could possess you to answer Lord Goodwood like that?” cried Lady Marabout, as her barouche rolled down Palace Gardens.
“Possess me? The Demon of Mischief, I suppose.”
“But, my love, it was a wonderful compliment from him!”
“Was it? I do not see any compliment in those vain, impertinent, Brummelian amour-propreisms. I must coin the word, there is no good one to express it.”
“But, my dear Flora, you know he is the Marquis of Goodwood, the Duke of Doncaster’s son! It is not as if he were a boy in the Lancers, or an unfledged petit maître from the Foreign Office — —”
“Were he her Majesty’s son, he should not gratify his vanity at my expense! If he expected me to be flattered by his condescension, he mistook me very much. He has been allowed to adopt that tone, I suppose; but from a man to a woman a chivalrous courtesy is due, though the man be an emperor.”
“Perhaps so — of course; but that is their tone nowadays, my love, and you cannot alter it. I always say the Regency-men inaugurated it, and their sons and grandsons out-Herod Herod. But to turn a tide, or be a wit with impunity, a woman wants to occupy a prominent and unassailable position. Were you the Duchess of Amandine, you might say that sort of thing, but a young girl just out must not — indeed she must not! The Hauttons heard you, and the Hauttons are very merciless people; perfectly bred themselves, and pitiless on the least infringement of the convenances. Besides, ten to one you may have gained Goodwood’s ill-will; and he is a man whose word has immense weight, I assure you.”
“I do not see anything remarkable in him to give him weight,” said the literal and unimpressible little Montolieu. “He is a commonplace person to my taste, neither so brilliant nor so handsome by a great deal as many gentlemen I see — as Sir Philip, for instance, Lady Marabout?”
“An my son? No, my love, he is not; very few men have Philip’s talents and person,” said Lady Marabout, consciously mollified and propitiated, but going on, nevertheless, with a Spartan impartiality highly laudable “Goodwood’s rank, however, is much higher than Philip’s (at least it stands so, though really the Carruthers are by far the older, dating as far back as Ethelbert II., while the Doncaster family are literally unknown till the fourteenth century, when Gervaise d’Ascotte received the acolade before Ascalon from Godfrey de Bouillon); Goodwood has great weight, my dear, in the best circles. A compliment from him is a great compliment to any woman, and the sort of answer you gave him — —”
“Must have been a great treat to him, dear Lady Marabout, if every one is in the habit of kow-towing before him. Princes, you know, are never so happy as when they can have a little bit of nature; and my speech must have been as refreshing to Lord Goodwood as the breath of his Bearnese breezes and the freedom of his Pyrenean forests were to Henri Quatre after the court etiquette and the formal ceremonial of Paris.”
“I don’t know about its being a treat to him, my dear; it was more likely to be a shower-bath. And your illustration isn’t to the point. The Bearnese breezes were Henri Quatre’s native air, and might be pleasant to him; but the figurative ones are not Goodwood’s, and I am sure cannot please him.”
“But, Lady Marabout, I do not want to please him!” persisted the young lady, perversely. “I don’t care in the least what he thinks, or what he says of me!”
“Dear me, how oddly things go!” thought Lady Marabout. “There was Valencia, one of the proudest girls in England, his equal in every way, an acknowledged beauty, who would have said the dust on the trottoir was diamonds, and worn turquoises on azureline, or emeralds on rose, I verily believe, if such opticisms and gaucheries had been Goodwood’s taste; and here is this child — for whom the utmost one can do will be to secure a younger son out of the Civil Service, or a country member — cannot be made to see that he is of an atom more importance than Soames or Mason, and treats him with downright nonchalant indifference. What odd anomalies one sees in everything!”
“Who is that young lady with you this season?” Lady Hautton asked, smiling that acidulated smile with which that amiable saint always puts long questions to you of which she knows the answer would be peine forte et dure. “Not the daughter of that horrid John Montolieu, who did all sorts of dreadful things, and was put into a West India regiment? Indeed! that man? Dear me! Married the sister of your incumbent at Fernditton? Ah, really! — very singular! But how do you come to have brought out the daughter?”
At all of which remarks Lady Marabout winced, and felt painfully guilty of a gross democratic dereliction from legitimate and beaten paths, conscious of having sinned heavily in the eyes of the world and Lady Hautton, by bringing within the sacred precincts of Belgravia the daughter of a mauvais sujet in a West India corps and a sister of a perpetual curate. The world was a terrible dragon to Lady Marabout; to her imagination it always appeared an incarnated and omniscient bugbear, Argus-eyed, and with all its hundred eyes relentlessly fixed on her, spying out each item of her shortcomings, every little flaw in the Marabout diamonds, any spur-made tear in her Honiton flounces, any crease in her train at a Drawing-room, any lèse-majesté against the royal rule of conventio
nalities, any glissade on the polished oak floor of society, though like a good many other people she often worried herself needlessly; the flaws, tears, creases, high treasons, and false glissades being fifty to one too infinitesimal or too unimportant to society for one of the hundred eyes (vigilant and unwinking though I grant they are) to take note of them. The world was a terrible bugbear to Lady Marabout, and its special impersonation was Anne Hautton. She disliked Anne Hautton; she didn’t esteem her; she knew her to be a narrow, censorious, prejudiced, and strongly malicious lady; but she was the personification of the World to Lady Marabout, and had weight and terror in consequence. Lady Marabout is not the first person who has burnt incense and bowed in fear before a little miserable clay image she cordially despised, for no better reason — for the self-same reason, indeed.
“She evidently thinks I ought not to have brought Flora out; and perhaps I shouldn’t; though, poor little thing, it seems very hard she may not enjoy society — fitted for society, too, as she is — just because her father is in a West India regiment, and poor Lilla was only a clergyman’s daughter. Goodwood really seems to admire her. I can never forgive him for his heartless flirtation with Valencia; but if he were to be won by a Montolieu, what would the Hauttons say?”
And sitting against the wall, with others of her sisterhood, at a ball, a glorious and golden vision rose up before Lady Marabout’s eyes.
If the unknown, unwelcome, revolutionary little Montolieu should go in and win where the Lady Hauttons had tried and failed through five seasons — if this little tropical flower should be promoted to the Doncaster conservatory, where all the stately stephanotises of the peerage had vainly aspired to bloom — if this Petit Caporal should be crowned with the Doncaster diadem, that all the legitimate rulers had uselessly schemed to place on their brows! The soul of Lady Marabout rose elastic at the bare prospect — it would be a great triumph for a chaperone as for a general to conquer a valuable position with a handful of boy recruits.
If it should be! Anne Hautton would have nothing to say after that!
And Lady Marabout, though she was the most amiable lady in Christendom, was not exempt from a feeling of longing for a stone to roll to the door of her enemy’s stronghold, or a flourish of trumpets to silence the boastful and triumphant fanfare that was perpetually sounding at sight of her defeats from her opponent’s ramparts.
Wild, visionary, guiltily scheming, sinfully revolutionary seemed such a project in her eyes. Still, how tempting! It would be a terrible blow to Valencia, who’d tried for Goodwood fruitlessly, to be eclipsed by this unknown Flora; it would be a terrible blow to their Graces of Doncaster, who held nobody good enough, heraldically speaking, for their heir-apparent, to see him give the best coronet in England to a bewitching little interloper, sans money, birth, or rank. “They wouldn’t like it, of course; I shouldn’t like it for Philip, for instance, though she’s a very sweet little thing; all the Ascottes would be very vexed, and all the Valletorts would never forgive it; but it would be such a triumph over Anne Hautton!” pondered Lady Marabout, and the last clause carried the day. Did you ever know private pique fail to carry the day over public charity?
And Lady Marabout glanced with a glow of prospective triumph, which, though erring to her Order, was delicious to her individuality, at Goodwood waltzing with the little Montolieu a suspicious number of times, while Lady Egidia Hautton was condemned to his young brother, Seton Ascotte, and Lady Feodorowna danced positively with nobody better than their own county member, originally a scion of Goodwood’s bankers! Could the force of humiliation further go? Lady Hautton sat smiling and chatting, but the tiara on her temples was a figurative thorn crown, and Othello’s occupation was gone. When a lady’s daughters are dancing with an unavailable cadet of twenty, and a parvenu, only acceptable in the last extremities of despair, what good is it for her to watch the smiles and construe the attentions?
“We shall see who triumphs now,” thought Lady Marabout, with a glow of pleasure, for which her heart reproached her a moment afterwards. “It is very wrong,” she thought; “if those poor girls don’t marry, one ought to pity them; and as for her — going through five seasons, with a fresh burden of responsibility leaving the schoolroom, and added on your hands each year, must sour the sweetest temper; it would do mine, I am sure. I dare say, if I had had daughters, I should have been ten times more worried even than I am.”
Which she would have been, undoubtedly, and the eligibles on her visiting-list ten times more too! Men wouldn’t have voted the Marabout dinners and soirées so pleasant as they did, under the sway of that sunshiny hostess, if there had been Lady Maudes and Lady Marys to exact attention, and lay mines under the Auxerre carpets, and man-traps among the épergne flowers of Lowndes Square. Nor would Lady Marabout have been the same; the sunshine couldn’t have shone so brightly, nor the milk of roses flowed so mildly under the weight and wear of marriageable but unmarried daughters; the sunshine would have been fitful, the milk of roses curdled at best. And no wonder! Those poor women! they have so much to go through in the world, and play but such a monotonous rôle, taken at its most brilliant and best, from first to last, from cradle to grave, from the berceaunettes in which they commence their existence to the mausoleum in which they finish it. If they do get a little bit soured when they have finished their own game, and have to sit at the card-tables, wide awake however weary, vigilant however drowsy, alert however bored to death, superintending the hands of the fresh players, surreptitiously suggesting means for securing the tricks, keeping a dragon’s eye out for revokes, and bearing all the brunt of the blame if the rubber be lost — if they do get a little bit soured, who can, after all, greatly wonder?
“That’s a very brilliant little thing, that girl Montolieu,” said Goodwood, driving over to Hornsey Wood, the morning after, with Carruthers and some other men, in his drag.
“A deuced pretty waltzer!” said St. Lys, of the Bays; “turn her round in a square foot.”
“And looks very well in the saddle; sits her horse better than any woman in the Ride, except Rosalie Rosière, and as she came from the Cirque Olympique originally, one don’t count her,” said Fulke Nugent. “I do like a woman to ride well, I must say. I promised your mother to take a look at the Marabout Yearling Sale, Phil, if ever I wanted the never-desirable and ever-burdensome article she has to offer, and if anything could tempt me to pay the price she asks, I think it would be that charming Montolieu.”
“She’s the best thing Lady Tattersall ever had on hand,” said Goodwood, drawing his whip over his off-wheeler’s back. “You know, Phil — gently, gently, Coronet! — what spoilt your handsome cousin was, as I said, that it was all mechanism; perfect mechanism, I admit, but all artificial, prearranged, put together, wound up to smile in this place, bow in that, and frown in the other; clockwork every inch of it! Now — so-ho, Zouave! confound you, won’t you be quiet? — little Montolieu hasn’t a bit of artifice about her; ’tisn’t only that you don’t know what she’s going to say, but that she doesn’t either; and whether it’s a smile or a frown, a jest or a reproof, it’s what the moment brings out, not what’s planned beforehand.”
“The hard hit you had the other day seems to have piqued your interest,” said Carruthers, smoothing a loose leaf of his Manilla.
“Naturally. The girl didn’t care a button about my compliment (I only said it to try her), and the plucky answer she gave me amused me immensely. Anything unartificial and frank is as refreshing as hock-and-seltzer after a field-day — one likes it, don’t you know?”
“Wonderfully eloquent you are, Goody. If you come out like that in St. Stephen’s, we sha’n’t know you, and the ministerialists will look down in the mouth with a vengeance!”
“Don’t be satirical, Phil! If I admire Mademoiselle Flora, what is it to you, pray?”
“Nothing at all,” said Carruthers, with unnecessary rapidity of enunciation.
“My love, what are you going to wear to-night? The Bishop
of Bonviveur is coming. He was a college friend of your poor uncle’s; knew your dear mother before she married. I want you to look your very best and charm him, as you certainly do most people,” said Lady Marabout. Adroit intriguer! The bishop was going, sans doute; the bishop loved good wine, good dinners, and good society, and found all three in Lowndes Square, but the bishop was entirely unavailable for purposes matrimonial, having had three wives, and being held tight in hand by a fourth; however, a bishop is a convenient piece to cover your king, in chess, and the bishop served admirably just then in Lady Marabout’s moves as a locum tenens for Goodwood. Flora Montolieu, in her innocence, made herself look her prettiest for her mother’s old friend, and Flora Montolieu was conveniently ready, looking her prettiest, for her chaperone’s pet-eligible, when Goodwood — who hated to dine anywhere in London except at the clubs, the Castle, or the Guards’ mess, and was as difficult to get for your dinners as birds’-nests soup or Tokay pur — entered the Marabout drawing-rooms.
“Anne Hautton will see he dined here to-night, in the Morning Post to-morrow morning, and she will know Flora must attract him very unusually. What will she, and Egidia, and Feodorowna say?” thought Lady Marabout, with a glow of pleasure, which she was conscious was uncharitable and sinful, and yet couldn’t repress, let her try how she might.
In scheming for the future Duke of Doncaster for John Montolieu’s daughter, she felt much as democratically and treasonably guilty to her order as a prince of the blood might feel heading a Chartist émeute; but then, suppose the Chartist row was that Prince’s sole chance of crushing an odious foe, as it was the only chance for her to humiliate the Hautton, don’t you think it might look tempting? Judge nobody, my good sir, till you’ve been in similar circumstances yourself — a golden rule, which might with advantage employ those illuminating colors with which ladies employ so much of their time just now. Remembering it, they might hold their white hands from flinging those sharp flinty stones, that surely suit them so ill, and that soil their fingers in one way quite as much as they soil the victim’s bowed head in another? Illuminate the motto, mesdames and demoiselles! Perhaps you will do that — on a smalt ground, with a gold Persian arabesque round, and impossible flowers twined in and out of the letters; but, remember it! — pardon! It were asking too much.