by Ouida
She laughed again, turning over the catalogue feverishly and unconsciously. Those were the words that rankled in her; and it was not much wonder if, to a proud spirit like Beatrice Boville’s, they seemed unpardonable. As I handed her and Lady Mechlin into their carriage when they left the exhibition, Earlscourt, as ill luck would have it, passed us, walking on to White’s, the fringe of Beatrice’s parasol brushed his arm, and a hot color flushed into her cheeks at the sudden rencontre. By the instinct of courtesy he bowed to her and Lady Mechlin, but passed up Pall-Mall without looking at Beatrice. How well society drills us, that we meet with such calm impassiveness in its routine those with whom we have sorrowed and joyed, loved and hated, in such far different scenes!
Their carriage drove on, and I overtook him as he went up Pall-Mall. He was walking slowly, with his hand pressed on his chest, and his lips set together, as if in bodily pain. He looked at me, as I joined him, with an annoyed glance of unusual irritation for him, for he was always calm and untroubled, punctiliously just, and though of a proud temper, never quick to anger.
“You passed that girl wonderfully coldly, Earlscourt,” I began, plunging recklessly into the thick of the subject.
“Coldly!” he repeated, bitterly. “It is very strange that you will pursue me with her name. I forbade you to intrude it upon me; was not that sufficient?”
“No; because I think you judged her too harshly.”
“Think so, if you please, but never renew the topic to me. If she gives you her confidence, enjoy it. If you choose, knowing what you do, to be misled by her, be so; but I beg of you to spare me your opinions and intentions.”
“But why? I say you do misjudge her. She might err in impatience and pride; but I would bet you any money you like that you would prove her guilty of no indelicacy, no treachery, no underhand conduct, though appearances might be against her.”
“Might be! You select your words strangely; you must have some deeper motive for your unusual blindness. I desire, for the last time, that you cease either the subject to me, or your acquaintance with me, whichever you prefer.”
With which, he went up the steps of White’s, and I strolled on, amazed at the fierce acrimony of his tone, utterly unlike anything I had ever heard from him, wished their pride to the devil, called myself a fool for meddling in the matter at all, and went to have a quiet weed in the smoking-room of the U. S. to cool myself. I was heartily sick of the whole affair. If they wanted it cleared, they must clear it themselves — I should trouble myself no more about it. Yet I couldn’t altogether dismiss Beatrice’s cause from my mind. I thought her, to say the truth, rather harshly used. I liked her for her fearless, truthful, impassioned character. I liked her for the very courage and pride with which she preferred to relinquish any chance of regaining her forfeited happiness, rather than stoop to solicit exculpation from charges of which she knew she was innocent. Perhaps, at first, she did not consider sufficiently Earlscourt’s provocation, and perhaps, now, she was too persisting in her resentment of it; still I liked her, and I was sorry to see her, at an age when life should have been couleur de rose, to one of her gay and insouciant nature, with a weary, passionate look on her face that she should not have had for ten years to come — a look that was rapidly hardening into stern and contemptuous sadness.
“You tell me I am too bitter,” she said to me one day, “how should I be otherwise? I, who have wronged no one, and have never in my life done anything of which I am ashamed, am called an intrigante by Lady Clive Edghill, and get ill-will from strangers, and misconstructions from my friends, merely because, thinking no harm myself, it never occurs to me that circumstances may look against me; and, hating falsehood, I cannot lie, and smile, and give soft words where I feel contempt and indignation. Mrs. Breloques yonder, with whom les présens ont toujours raison, and les absens ont toujours tort, who has honeyed speeches for her bitterest foes, and poisoned arrows (behind their back) for her most trusting friends, who goes to early matins every morning, and pries out for a second all over the top of her prayer-book, who kisses ‘darling Helena,’ and says she ‘never looked so sweetly,’ whispering en petit comité what a pity it is, when Helena is so passée, she will dress like a girl just out — she is called the sweetest woman possible — so amiable! and is praised for her high knowledge of religion. You tell me I am too bitter. I think not. Honesty does not prosper, and truth is at a miserable discount; straightforward frankness makes a myriad of foes, and adroit diplomacy as many friends. If you make a prettily-turned compliment, who cares if it is sincere? if you hold your tongue where you cannot praise, because you will not tell a conventional falsehood, the world thinks you very ill-natured, or odiously satirical. Society is entirely built upon insincerity and conventionality, from the wording of an acceptance of a dinner invitation, where we write ‘with much pleasure,’ thinking to ourselves ‘what a bore!’ to the giant hypocrisies daily spoken without a blush from pulpit and lecturn, and legitimatized both as permissible and praiseworthy. To truth and unconventionality society of course is adverse; and whoever dares to uphold them must expect to be hissed, as Paul by the Ephesians, because he shivered their silver shrines and destroyed the craft by which they got their wealth.”
Beatrice was right; her truth and fearlessness were her enemies with most people, even with the man who had loved her best. Had she been ready with an adroit falsehood and a quick excuse, Earlscourt’s suspicions would never have been raised as they were by her frank admission that there was something she would rather not tell him, and her innocent request to be trusted. That must have been some very innocent and unworldly village schoolmaster, I should say, who first set going that venerable proverb, “Honesty is the best policy.” He must have known comically little of life. A diplomatist who took it as his motto would soon come to grief, and ladies would soon stone out of their circles any woman bête enough to try its truth among them. There is no policy at greater discount in the world, and straightforward and candid people stand at very unequal odds with the rest of humanity; they are the one morsel of bread to a hogshead of sack, the handful of Spartans against a swarm of Persians, and they get the brunt of the battle and the worst of the fight.
VI. HOW PRIDE BOWED AND FELL.
Beyond meeting Earlscourt at White’s, or, for an hour, at the réunion of some fair leader of ton, I scarcely saw him that season, for he was more and more devoted to public life. He looked wretchedly ill, and his physicians said if he wished to live he must go to the south of France in July, and winter at Corfu; but he paid them no heed; he occupied himself constantly with political and literary work, and grudged the three or four hours he gave to sleep that did him little good.
“Will you get me admittance to the Lords to-morrow night?” Beatrice asked me, one morning, when I met her in the Ride. I looked at her surprised.
“To the Lords? Of course, if you wish.”
“I do wish it.” Her hands clinched on her bridle, and the color flushed into her face, for Earlscourt just then passed us, riding with one of his brother ministers. He looked at us both, and his face changed strangely, though he rode on, continuing his conversation with the other man, while I went round the turn with Beatrice and the other fellows who were about her; le fruit défendu is always most attractive, and Beatrice’s profound negligence of them all made them more mad about her than all the traps and witcheries, beguilements and attractions, that coquettes and beauties set out for them. She rode beautifully; and a woman who does sit well down on her saddle, and knows how to handle her horse, never looks better than en Amazone. Earlscourt met her three times at the turn of the Ride; and though you would not have told that he was passing any other than an utter stranger, I think it must have struck him that he had lost much in losing Beatrice Boville. I was riding on her off-side each time when we passed him. As I say, I never, thank God! have cared a straw for the qu’en dira-t-on? and if people remarked on my intimacy with my cousin’s cast off fiancée, so they might, but to Earlscourt I
wished to explain it more for Beatrice’s sake than my own; and as I rode out by Apsley House afterwards, I overtook him, and went up to Piccadilly with him, though his manner was decidedly distant and chill, so pointedly so that it would have been rude, had he not been too entirely a disciple of Chesterfield to be ever otherwise than courteous to his deadliest foe; but, disregarding his coldness, I said what I intended to say, and began an explanation that I considered only due to him.
“I beg your pardon, Earlscourt, for intruding on you a topic you have forbidden, but I shall be obliged to you to listen to me a moment. I wish to tell you my reasons for what, I dare say, seems strange to you, my continued intimacy with—”
But I was not permitted to end my sentence; he divined what I was about to say, and stopped me, with a cold, wearied air.
“I understand; but I prefer not to hear them. I have no desire to interfere with your actions, and less to be troubled with your motives. Of course, you choose your friendships as you please. All I beg is, that you obey the wish I expressed the other day, and intrude the subject no more upon me.”
And he bade me good morning, urged his mare into a sharp canter, and turned down St. James’s Street. How little those in the crowd, who looked at him as he rode by, pointing him out to the women with them as Viscount Earlscourt, the most eloquent debater in the Lords, the celebrated foreign minister, author, and diplomatist, guessed that a woman’s name could touch and sting him as nothing else could do, and that under the calm and glittering upper-current of his life ran a dark, slender, unnoticed thread that had power to poison all the rest! Those women, mon ami! — if we do satirize them a little bit now and then, are we doing any more than taking a very mild revenge? Don’t they make fools of the very best and wisest of us, play the deuce with Cæsar as with Catullus, and make Achilles soft as Amphimachus?
The next morning I met Beatrice at a concert at the Marchioness of Pursang’s. Lady Pursang would not have been, vous concevez, on the visiting list of Lady Mechlin, as she was one of the crème de la crème, but she had met Beatrice the winter before at Pau, had been very delighted with her, and now continued the acquaintance in town. I happened to sit next our little Pythoness, who looked better, I think, that morning, than ever I saw her, though her face was set into that disdainful sadness which had become its habitual expression. She liked my society, and sought it, no doubt, because I was the only link between her and her lost past; and she was talking with me more animatedly than usual, thanking me for having got her admittance to the Lords that night, during a pause in the concert, when Earlscourt entered the room, and took the seat reserved for him, which was not far from ours. Music was one of his passions, the only délassement, indeed, he ever gave himself now; but to-day, though ostensibly he listened to Alboni and Arabella Goddard, Hallé and Vieuxtemps, and talked to the marchioness and other women of her set, in reality he was watching Beatrice, who, her pride roused by his presence, laughed and chatted with me and other men with her old gay abandon, and, impervious to déréglement though he was, I fancy even he felt it a severe trial of his composure when Lady Pursang, who had been the last five years in India with her husband, and who was ignorant of or had forgotten the name of the girl Earlscourt was to have married the year before, asked him, when the concert was over, to let her introduce him to her, yet Beatrice Boville, bringing him in innocent cruelty up to that little Pythoness, with whom he had parted so passionately and bitterly ten months before! Happy for them that they had that armor which the Spartans called heroism, the stoics philosophy, and we — simply style good breeding, or they would hardly have gone through that ordeal as well as they did when she introduced them to each other as strangers! — those two who had whispered such passionate love words, given and received such fond caresses, vowed barely twelve months before to pass their lifetime together! Happy for them they were used to society, or they would hardly have bowed to each other as calmly and admirably as they did, with the recollection of that night in which they had parted so bitterly, so full as it was in the minds of both. Beatrice was standing in one of the open windows of the little cabinet de peinture almost empty, and when the marchioness moved away, satisfied that she had introduced two people admirably fitted to entertain one another, Earlscourt, with people flirting and talking within a few yards of him, was virtually alone with Beatrice — for there is, after all, no solitude like the solitude of a crowd — and then, for the first time in his life, his self-possession forsook him. Beatrice was silent and very pale, looking out of the window on to the Green Park, which the house overlooked, and Earlscourt’s pride had a hard struggle, but his passion got the better of him, malgré lui, and he leaned towards her.
“Do you remember the last night we were together?”
She answered him bitterly. She had not forgiven him. She had sometimes, I am half afraid, sworn to revenge herself.
“I am hardly likely to forget it, Lord Earlscourt.”
He looked at her longingly and wistfully; his pride was softened, that granite pride, hitherto so unassailable! and he bent nearer to her.
“Beatrice! I would give much to be able to wash out the memories of that night — to be proved mistaken — to be convicted of haste, of sternness—”
The tears rushed into her eyes.
“You need only have given one little thing — all I asked of you — trust!”
“Would to God I dare believe you now! Tell me, answer me, did I judge you too harshly? Love at my age never changes, however wronged; it is the latest, and it only expires with life itself. I confess to you, you are dearer to me still than anything ever was, than anything ever will be. Prove to me, for God’s sake, that I misjudged you! Only prove it to me; explain away what appeared against you, and we may yet—”
He stopped; his voice trembled, his hand touched hers, he breathed short and fast. The Pythoness was very nearly tamed; her eyes grew soft and melting, her lips trembled; but pride was still strong in her. At the touch of his hand it very nearly gave way, but not wholly; it was there still, tenacious of its reign. She set her little teeth obstinately together, and looked up at him with her old hauteur.
“No, as I told you then, you must believe in me without proof. I have not forgotten your bitter words, nor yet forgiven them. I doubt if I ever shall. You roused an evil spirit in me that night, Lord Earlscourt, which you cannot exorcise at a moment’s notice. Remember what was your own motto, ‘An indiscreet woman is never frank,’ — yet from my very frankness you accused me of indiscretion, and of far worse than indiscretion—”
“My God! if I accused you falsely, Beatrice, forgive me!”
He must have loved her very much to bow his pride so far as that. He was at her feet — at her mercy now; he, whom she had vainly sued, sued her; but a perverse, fiery devil in her urged her to take her own revenge, compelled her to throw away her own peace.
“You should have asked me that ten months ago; it is too late now.”
His face dyed white, his eyes filled with passionate anguish. He crushed her hand in his.
“Too late! Great Heavens! Answer me, child, I entreat you — I beseech you — is it ‘too late’ because report is true that you have replaced me with your cousin — that you are engaged to Hervey? Tell me truth now, for pity’s sake. I will be trifled with no longer.”
Beatrice threw back her haughty little head contemptuously, though ladies don’t sneer at the idea of being liées with me generally, I can assure you. Her heart throbbed triumphantly and joyously. She had conquered him at last. The man of giant intellect and haughty will had bowed to her. She held him by a thread, he who ruled the fate of nations! — and she loved him so dearly! But the Pythoness was not wholly tamed, and she could not even yet forget her wrongs.
“You told me before I spoke falsehoods to you, Lord Earlscourt; my word would find no more credence now.”
He looked at her, dropped her hand, and turned away, before Beatrice could detain him. Five minutes after he left the house. Littl
e as I guessed it, he was jealous of me — I! who never in my own life rivalled any man who wished to marry! Beatrice had fully revenged herself. I wonder if she enjoyed it quite as much as she had anticipated, as she stood where he had left her looking out on the Green Park?
I went with Beatrice and her party to the Lords that night; it was the tug of war for the bill which Earlscourt was so determined should pass, and a great speech was expected from him. We were not disappointed. When he rose he spoke with effort, and his oratory suffered from the slight hoarseness of his voice, for half the beauty of his rhetoric lay in the flexibility and music of his tones; still, it was emphatically a great speech, and Beatrice Boville listened to it breathlessly, with her eyes fixed on the face — weary, worn, but grandly intellectual — of the man whom Europe reverenced, and she — a girl of twenty! — ruled. Perhaps her heart smote her for the lines she had added there; perhaps she felt her pride misplaced to him, great as he was, with his stainless honor and unequalled genius; perhaps she thought of how, with all his strength, his hand had trembled as it touched hers; and how, with all her love, she had been wilful and naughty to him a second time. His voice grew weaker as he ended, and he spoke with visible effort; still it was one of his greatest political triumphs: his bill passed by a large majority, and the papers, the morning after, filled their leading articles with admiration of Viscount Earlscourt’s speech. But before those journals were out, Earlscourt was too ill almost to notice the success of his measures: as he left the House, the presiding devil of beloved Albion, that plays the deuce with English statesmen as with Italian cantatrices, — the confounded east wind, — had caught him, finished what over-exertion had begun, and knocked him over, prostrated with severe bronchitis. What pity it is that the body will levy such cruel black mail upon the mind; that a gust of wind, a horse’s plunge, the effluvia of a sewer, the carelessness of a pointsman, can destroy the grandest intellect, sweep off the men whose genius lights the world, as ruthlessly as a storm of rain a cloud of gnats, and strike Peel and Canning, Macaulay and Donaldson, in the prime of their power, as heedlessly as peasants little higher than the brutes, dull as the clods of their own valley, who stake their ambitions on a surfeit of fat bacon, and can barely scrawl their names upon a slate!