Delphi Collected Works of Ouida

by Ouida

  Fay looked up at him and laughed.

  “Well, I am fond of animals as you are fond of books. Is it not an open question whether the live dog or sheepskin is not as good as the dead Morocco or Russian leather?”

  “Is it an open question, whether Macaulay’s or Arago’s brain weighs no more than a cat’s or a puppy’s?”

  “Brain!” said impudent little Fay; “are your great men always as honest and as faithful as my poor little Snowdrop? I have an idea that Sheridan’s brains were often obscured by brandy; that Richelieu had the weakness to be prouder of his bad poems than his magnificent policies; and that Pope and Byron had the folly to be more tenacious of a glance at their physical defect than an onslaught on their noblest works. I could mention a good many other instances where brain was not always a voucher for corresponding strength of character.”

  Keane was surprised to hear a sensible speech from this volatile little puss, and honored her by answering her seriously.

  “Say, rather, Miss Morton, that those to whom many temptations fall should have many excuses made. Where the brain preponderates, excelling in creative faculty and rapid thought, there will the sensibilities be proportionately acute. The vivacity and vigorous life which produced the rapid flow of Sheridan’s eloquence led him into the dissipation which made him end his days in a spunging-house. Men of cooler minds and natures must not presume to judge him. They had not his temptation; they cannot judge of his fault. Richelieu, in all probability, amused himself with his verses as he amused himself with his white kitten and its cork, as a délassement; had he piqued himself upon his poetry, as they say, he would have turned poetaster instead of politician. As for the other two, you must remember that Pope’s deformity made him a subject of ridicule to the woman he was fool enough to worship, and Byron, poor fellow, was over-susceptible on all points, or he would scarcely have allowed the venomed arrows from the Scotch Reviewers to wound him, nor would he have cared for the desertion of a wife who was to him like ice to fire. When you are older, you will learn that it is very dangerous and unjust to say this thing is right, that wrong, that feeling wise, or this foolish; for all temperaments are different, and the same circumstances may produce very different effects. Your puppies will grow up with dissimilar characters; how much more so, then, must men?”

  Miss Fay was quiet for a minute, then she flashed her mischievous eyes on him.

  “Certainly; but then, by your own admission, you have no right to decide that your love for mathematics is wise, and my love for Snowdrop foolish; it may be quite au contraire. Perhaps, after all, I may have ‘chosen the better part.’”

  “Fay, go in and dress for dinner,” interrupted the General, trotting up; “your tongue would run on forever if nobody stopped it; you’re no exception to your sex on that point. Is she?”

  Keane laughed.

  “Perhaps Miss Morton’s frænum, like Sydie’s, was cut too far in her infancy, and therefore she has been ‘unbridled’ ever since.”

  “In all things!” cried little Fay. “Nobody has put the curb on me yet, and nobody ever shall.”

  “Don’t be too sure, Fay,” cried Sydie. “Rarey does wonders with the wildest fillies. Somebody may bring you down on your knees yet.”

  “You’ll have to see to that, Sydie,” laughed the General. “Come, get along, child, to your toilette. I never have my soup cold and my curry overdone. To wait for his dinner is a stretch of good nature, and patience that ought not to be expected of any man.”

  The soup was not cold nor the curry overdone, and the dinner was pleasant enough, in the long dining-room, with the June sun streaming in through its bay-windows from out the brilliant-colored garden, and the walls echoing with the laughter of Sydie and his cousin, the young lady keeping true to her avowal of “not caring for Plato’s presence.” “Plato,” however, listened quietly, peeling his peaches with tranquil amusement; for if the girl talked nonsense, it was clever nonsense, as rare, by the way, and quite as refreshing as true wit.

  “My gloves are safe; you’re too afraid of him, Fay,” whispered Sydie, bending forwards to give her some hautboys.

  “Am I?” cried Miss Fay, with a moue of supreme contempt. Neither the whisper nor the moue escaped Keane, as he talked with the governor on model drainage.

  “Where’s my hookah, Fay?” asked the General, after dessert. “Get it, will you, my pet?”

  “Voilà!” cried Miss Fay, lifting the narghilé from the sideboard. Then taking some cigars off the mantelpiece, she put one in her own mouth, struck a fusee, and, handing the case to Keane, said, with a saucy smile in her soft bright eyes, though, to tell the truth, she was a little bit afraid of taking liberties with him:

  “If you are not above such a sublunary indulgence, will you have a cigar with me?”

  “With the greatest pleasure,” said Keane, with a grave bow; “and if you would like to further rival George Sand, I shall be very happy to give you the address of my tailor.”

  “Thank you exceedingly; but as long as crinoline is the type of the sex that are a little lower than the angels, and ribbon-ties the seal of those but a trifle better than Mephistopheles, I don’t think I will change it,” responded Little Fay, contemptuously, as she threw herself down on a couch with an indignant defiant glance, and puffed at her Manilla.

  “I hate him, Sydie,” said the little lady, vehemently, that night.

  “Do you, dear?” answered the Cantab; “you see, you’ve never had anybody to be afraid of, or had any man neglect you before.”

  “He may neglect me if he please, I am sure I do not care,” rejoined Fay, disdainfully; “only I do wish, Sydie, that you had never brought him here to make us all uncomfortable.”

  “He don’t make me uncomfortable, quite otherwise; nor yet the governor; you’re the only victim, Fay.”

  Fay saw little enough of Keane for the next week or two. He was out all day with Sydie trout-fishing, or walking over his farms with the General, or sitting in the study reading, and writing his articles for the Cambridge Journal, Leonville’s Mathematical Journal, or the Westminster Review. But when she was with him, there was no mischief within her reach that Miss Fay did not perpetrate. Keane, to tease her, would condemn — so seriously that she believed him — all that she loved the best; he would tell her that he admired quiet, domestic women; that he thought girls should be very subdued and retiring; that they should work well, and not care much for society; at all of which, being her extreme antipodes, Little Fay would be vehemently wrathful. She would get on her pony without any saddle in her evening dress, and ride him at the five-bar gate in the stable-yard; she would put on Sydie’s smoking-cap, and look very pretty in it, and take a Queen’s on the divan of the smoking-room, reading Bell’s Life, and asking Keane how much he would bet on the October; she would spend all the morning making wreaths of roses, dressing herself and the puppies up in them, inquiring if it was not a laudable and industrious occupation. There was no nonsense or mischief Fay would not imagine and forthwith commit, and anything they wanted her not to do she would do straightway, even to the imperilling of her own life and limb. She tried hard to irritate or rouse “Plato,” as she called him, but Plato was not to be moved, and treated her as a spoilt child, whom he alone had sense enough to resist.

  “It will be great folly for you to attempt it, Miss Morton. Those horses are not fit to be driven by any one, much less by a woman,” said Keane, quietly, one morning.

  They were in the stable-yard, and chanced to be alone when a new purchase of the governor’s — two scarcely broken-in thorough-bred colts — were brought with a new mail-phaeton into the yard, and Miss Fay forthwith announced her resolution of driving them round the avenue. The groom that came with them told her they were almost more than he could manage, their own coachman begged and implored, Keane reasoned quietly, all to no purpose. The rosebud had put out its little wilful thorns; Keane’s words added fuel to the fire. Up she sprang, looking the daintiest morsel imaginable perche
d up on that very exalted box-seat, told the horrified groom to mount behind, and started them off, lifting her hat with a graceful bow to “Plato,” who stood watching the phaeton with his arms folded and his cigar in his mouth.

  Soon after, he started in the contrary direction, for the avenue circled the Beeches in an oval of four miles, and he knew he should meet her coming back. He strolled along under the pleasant shadow of the great trees, enjoying the sunset and the fresh air, and capable of enjoying them still more but for an inward misgiving. His presentiment was not without its grounds. He had walked about a mile and a half round the avenue, when a cloud of dust told him what was up, and in the distance came the thorough-breds, broken away as he had prophesied, tearing along with the bits between their teeth, Little Fay keeping gallantly hold of the ribbons, but as powerless over the colts now they had got their heads as the groom leaning from the back seat.

  On came the phaeton, bumping, rattling, oscillating, threatening every second to be turned over. Keane caught one glance of Fay’s face, resolute and pale, and of her little hands grasping the ribbons, till they were cut and bleeding with the strain. There was nothing for it but to stand straight in the animals’ path, catch their heads, and throw them back on their haunches. Luckily, his muscles were like iron — luckily, too, the colts had come a long way, and were not fresh. He stood like a rock, and checked them; running a very close risk of dislocating his arms with the shock, but saving little Fay from destruction. The colts stood trembling, the groom jumped out and caught the reins, Keane amused himself silently with the mingled penitence, vexation, shame, and rebellion visible in the little lady’s face.

  “Well,” said he, quietly, “as you were so desirous of breaking your neck, will you ever forgive me for defeating your purpose?”

  “Pray don’t!” cried Fay, passionately. “I do thank you so much for saving my life; I think it so generous and brave of you to have rescued me at such risk to yourself. I feel that I can never be grateful enough to you, but don’t talk in that way. I know it was silly and self-willed of me.”

  “It was; that fact is obvious.”

  “Then I shall make it more so,” cried Miss Fay, with her old wilfulness. “I do feel very grateful, and I would tell you so, if you would let me; but if you think it has made me afraid, you are quite wrong, and so you shall see.”

  And before he could interfere, or do more than mechanically spring up after her, she had caught the reins from the groom, and started the trembling colts off again. But Keane put his hand on the ribbons.

  “Foolish child; are you mad?” he said, so gravely yet so gently that Fay let them go, and let him drive her back to the stable-yard, where she sprang out, and rushed away to her own room, terrified the governor with a few vehement sentences, which gave him a vague idea that Keane was murdered and both Fay’s legs broken, and then had a private cry all to herself, with her arms round Snowdrop’s neck, curled up in one of the drawing-room windows, where she had not been long when the General and Keane passed through, not noticing her, hidden as she was, in curtains, cushions, and flowers.

  “She’s a little wilful thing, Keane,” the General was saying, “but you mustn’t think the worse of her for that.”

  “I don’t. I am sick of those conventional young ladies who agree with everything one says to them — who keep all the frowns for mothers and servants, and are as serene as a cloudless sky abroad, smile blandly on all alike, and haven’t an opinion of their own.”

  “Fay’s plenty of opinions of her own,” chuckled the General; “and she tells ’em pretty freely, too. Bless the child, she’s not ashamed of any of her thoughts and never will be.”

  “I hope not. Your little niece can do things that no other young lady could and they are so pretty in her that it would be a thousand pities for her to grow one atom less natural and wilful. Grapes growing wild are charming — grapes trained to a stake are ruined. I assure you, if I were you, I would not scold her for driving those colts to-day. High spirits and love of fun led her on, and the courage and presence of mind she displayed are too rare among her sex for us to do right in checking them.”

  “To be sure, to be sure,” assented the governor, gleefully. “God bless the child, she’s one among a thousand, sir. Cognac, not milk and water. There’s the dinner-bell; confound it.”

  Whereat the General made his exit, and Keane also; and Fay kissed the spaniel with even more passionate attachment than ordinary.

  “Ah, Snowdrop, I don’t hate him any more; he is a darling!”

  One glowing August morning Keane was in the study pondering whether he would go to his moor or not. The General had besought him to stay. His gamekeeper wrote him that it was a horribly bad rainy season in Invernessshire; the trout and the rabbits were very good sport in a mild way here. Altogether, Keane felt half disposed to keep where he was, when a shadow fell across his paper; and, as he looked up, he saw in the open window the English rosebud.

  “Is it not one of the open questions, Mr. Keane,” asked Fay, “whether it is very wise to spend all this glorious morning shut out of the sight of the sun-rays and the scent of the flowers?”

  “How have you been spending it, then?”

  “Putting bouquets in all the rooms, cleaning my aviary, talking to the puppies, and reading Jocelyn under the limes in the shrubberies — all very puerile, but all very pleasant. Perhaps if you descended to a lazy day like that now and then, you might be none the worse!”

  “Is that a challenge? Will you take me under the limes?”

  “No, indeed! I do not admit men who despise them to my gardens of Armida, any more than you would admit me into your Schools. I have as great a scorn for a skeptic as you have for a tyro.”

  “Pardon me. I have no scorn for a tyro. But you would not come to the Accademe; you dislike ‘Plato’ too much.”

  Fay looked up at him half shyly, half mischievously.

  “Yes, I do dislike you, when you look down on me as Richelieu might have looked down on his kitten.”

  “Liking to see its play?” said Keane, half sadly. “Contrasting its gay insouciance with his own toil and turmoil, regretting, perhaps, the time when trifles made his joy as they did his kitten’s? If I were to look on you so, there would not be much to offend you.”

  “You do not think so of me, or you would speak to me as if I were an intelligent being, not a silly little thing.”

  “How do you know I think you silly?”

  “Because you think all women so.”

  “Perhaps; but then you should rather try to redeem me from my error in doctrine. Come, let us sign a treaty of peace. Take me under the limes. I want some fresh air after writing all day; and in payment I will teach you Euclid, as you vainly beseeched your cousin to do yesterday.”

  “Will you?” cried Fay, eagerly. Then she threw back her head. “I never am won by bribes.”

  “Nor yet by threats? What a difficult young lady you are. Come, show me your shrubbery sanctum now you have invaded mine.”

  The English rosebud laid aside its wilful thorns, and Fay, a little less afraid of her Plato, and therefore a little less defiant to him, led him over the grounds, filled his hands with flowers, showed him her aviary, read some of Jocelyn to him, to show him, she said, that Lamartine was better than the [OE]dipus in Coloneus, and thought, as she dressed for dinner, “I wonder if he does despise me — he has such a beautiful face, if he were not so haughty and cold!”

  The next day Keane gave her an hour of Euclid in the study. Certainly The Coach had never had such a pretty pupil; and he wished every dull head he had to cram was as intelligent as this fair-haired one. Fay was quick and clever; she was stimulated, moreover, by his decree concerning the stupidity of all women; she really worked as hard as any young man studying for degrees when they supposed her fast asleep in bed, and she got over the Pons Asinorum in a style that fairly astonished her tutor.

  The Coach did not dislike his occupation either; it did him good, after his
life of solitude and study, something as the kitten and cork did Richelieu good after his cabinets and councils; and Little Fay, with her flowers and fun, mischief and impudence, and that winning wilfulness which it amused him gradually to tame down, unbent the chillness which had grown upon him. He was the better for it, as a man after hard study or practice is the better for some fresh sea-breezes, and some days of careless dolce.

  “Well, Fay, have you had another poor devil flinging himself at your feet by means of a postage-stamp?” said Sydie one morning at breakfast. “You can’t disguise anything from me, your most interested, anxious, and near and dear relative. Whenever the governor looks particularly stormy I see the signs of the times, that if I do not forthwith remove your dangerously attractive person, all the bricks, spooneys, swells, and do-nothings in the county will speedily fill the Hanwell wards to overflowing.”

  “Don’t talk such nonsense, Sydie,” said Fay, impatiently, with a glance at Keane, as she handed him his chocolate.

  “Ah! deuce take the fellows,” chuckled the General. “Love, devotion, admiration! What a lot of stuff they do write. I wonder if Fay were a little beggar, how much of it all would stand the test? But we know a trick worth two of that. Try those sardines, Keane. House is let, Fay — eh? House is let; nobody need apply. Ha, ha!”

  And the General took some more curry, laughing till he was purple, while Fay blushed scarlet, a trick of which she was rarely guilty; Sydie smiled, and Keane picked out his sardines with calm deliberation.

  “Hallo! God bless my soul!” burst forth the General again. “Devil take me! I’ll be hanged if I stand it! Confound ’em all! I do call it hard for a man not to be able to sit at his breakfast in peace. Good Heavens! what will come to the country, if all those little devils grow up to be food for Calcraft? He’s actually pulling the bark off the trees, as I live! Excuse me, I can’t sit still and see it.”