by Ouida
“G. V. understands the meaning of the advertisement, and will meet L. C. at the entrance of Fern Wood, at eleven o’clock to-morrow morning.”
There was a dead silence as we read it; then a tremendous buzz. Cheaply as we held women, I don’t think there was one of us who wasn’t surprised at Geraldine’s doing any clandestine thing like this. He sat with a look of indolent triumph, curling his perfumed moustaches, and looking at the little autograph, which gave us evidence of what he often boasted — Geraldine Vane’s regard.
“Let me look at your note,” said Fairlie, stretching out his hand.
He soon returned it, with a brief, “Very complimentary indeed!”
When the men left, I chanced to be last, having mislaid my cigar-case. As I looked about for it, Fairlie addressed me in the same brief, stern tone between his teeth with which he spoke to Belle.
“Hardinge, you made this absurd bet with Courtenay, did you not? Is this note a hoax upon him?”
“Not that I know of — it doesn’t look like it. You see there is the Vane crest, and the girl’s own initials.”
“Very true.” He turned round to the window again, and leaned against it, looking out into the dawn, with a look upon his face that I was very sorry to see.
“But it is not like Geraldine,” I began. “It may be a trick. Somebody may have stolen their paper and crest — it’s possible. I tell you what I’ll do to find out; I’ll follow Belle to-morrow, and see who does meet him in Fern Wood.”
“Do,” said Fairlie, eagerly. Then he checked himself, and went on tapping an impatient tattoo on the shutter. “You see, I have known the family for years — known her when she was a little child. I should be sorry to think that one of them could be capable of such — —”
Despite his self-command he could not finish his sentence. Geraldine was a great deal too dear to him to be treated in seeming carelessness, or spoken lightly of, however unwisely she might act. I found my cigar-case. His laconic “Good night!” told me he would rather be alone, so I closed the door and left him.
The morning was as sultry and as clear as a July day could be when Belle lounged down the street, looking the perfection of a gentleman, a trifle less bored and blasé than ordinary, en route to his appointment at Fern Wood (a sequestered part of the Vane estate), where trees and lilies of the valley grew wild, and where the girls were accustomed to go for picnics or sketching. As soon as he had turned a corner, Gower and I turned it too, and with perseverance worthy a better cause, Tom and I followed Belle in and out and down the road which led to Fern Wood — a flat, dusty, stony two miles — on which, in the blazing noon of a hot midsummer day, nothing short of Satanic coercion, or love of Geraldine Vane, would have induced our beauty to immolate himself, and expose his delicate complexion.
“I bet you anything, Tom,” said I, confidently, “that this is a hoax, like yesterday’s. Geraldine will no more meet Belle there than all the Ordnance Office.”
“Well, we shall see,” responded Gower. “Somebody might get the note-paper from the bookseller, and the crest seal through the servants, but they’ll hardly get Geraldine there bodily against her will.”
We waited at the entrance of the wood, shrouded ourselves in the wild hawthorn hedges, while we could still see Belle — of course we did not mean to be near enough to overhear him — who paced up and down the green alleys under the firs and larches, rendered doubly dark by the evergreens, brambles, and honeysuckles,
which, ripened by the sun, Forbade the sun to enter.
He paced up and down there a good ten minutes, prying about with his eye-glass, but unable to see very far in the tangled boughs, and heavy dusky light of the untrimmed wood. Then there was the flutter of something azure among the branches, and Gower gave vent to a low whistle of surprise.
“By George, Hardinge! there’s Geraldine! Well! I didn’t think she’d have done it. You see they’re all alike if they get the opportunity.”
It was Geraldine herself — it was her fluttering muslin, her abundant folds, her waving ribbons, her tiny sailor hat, and her little veil, and under the veil her face, with its delicate tinting, its pencilled eyebrows, and its undulating bright-colored hair. There was no doubt about it: it was Geraldine. I vow I was as sorry to have to tell it to Fairlie as if I’d had to tell him she was dead, for I knew how it would cut him to the heart to know not only that she had given herself to his rival, but that his little playmate, whom he had thought truth, and honesty, and daylight itself, should have stooped to a clandestine interview arranged through an advertisement! Their retreating figures were soon lost in the dim woodland, and Tom and I turned to retrace our steps.
“No doubt about it now, old fellow?” quoth Gower.
“No, confound her!” swore I.
“Confound her? Et pourquoi! Hasn’t she a right to do what she likes?”
“Of course she has, the cursed little flirt; but she’d no earthly business to go making such love to Fairlie. It’s a rascally shame, and I don’t care if I tell her so myself.”
“She’ll only say you’re in love with her too,” was Gower’s sensible response. “I’m not surprised myself. I always said she was an out-and-out coquette.”
I met Fairlie coming out of his room as I went up to mine. He looked as men will look when they have not been in bed all night, and have watched the sun up with painful thoughts for their companions.
“You have been — —” he began; then stopped short, unwilling or unable to put the question into words.
“After Belle? Yes. It is no hoax, Geraldine met him herself.”
I did not relish telling him, and therefore told it, in all probability, bluntly and blunderingly — tact, like talk, having, they say, been given to women. A spasm passed over his face. “Herself!” he echoed. Until then I do not think he had realized it as even possible.
“Yes, there was no doubt about it. What a wretched little coquette she must have been; she always seemed to make such game of Belle — —”
But Fairlie, saying something about his gloves that he had left behind, had gone back into his room again before I had half done my sentence. When Belle came back, about half an hour afterwards, with an affected air of triumph, and for once in his life of languid sensations really well contented, Gower and I poured questions upon him, as, done up with the toil of his dusty walk, and horrified to find himself so low-bred as to be hot, he kicked off his varnished boots, imbibed Seltzer, and fanned himself with a periodical before he could find breath to answer us.
“Was it Geraldine?”
“Of course it was Geraldine,” he said, yawning.
“And will she marry you, Belle?”
“To be sure she will. I should like to see the woman that wouldn’t,” responded Belle, shutting his eyes and nestling down among the cushions. “And what’s more, I’ve been fool enough to let her make me ask her. Give me some more sherry, Phil; a man wants support under such circumstances. The deuce if I’m not as hot as a ploughboy! It was very cruel of her to call a fellow out with the sun at the meridian; she might as well have chosen twilight. But, I say, you fellows, keep the secret, will you? she don’t want her family to get wind of it, because they’re bothering her to marry that old cove, Mount Trefoil, with his sixty years and his broad acres, and wouldn’t let her take anybody else if they knew it; she’s under age, you see.”
“But how did she know you were L. C.?”
“Fairlie told her, and the dear little vain thing immediately thought it was an indirect proposal to herself, and answered it; of course I didn’t undeceive her. She raffoles of me — it’ll be almost too much of a good thing, I’m afraid. She’s deuced prudish, too, much more than I should have thought she’d have been; but I vow she’d only let me kiss her hand, and that was gloved.”
“I hate prudes,” said Gower; “they’ve always much more devilry than the open-hearted ones. Videlicet — here’s your young lady stiff enough only to give you her hand to kiss, and yet she’ll lo
wer herself to a clandestine correspondence and stolen interviews — a condescension I don’t think I should admire in my wife.”
“Love, my dear fellow, oversteps all — what d’ye call ’em? — boundaries,” said Belle, languidly. “What a bore! I shall never be able to wear this coat again, it’s so ingrained with dust; little puss, why didn’t she wait till it was cooler?”
“Did you fix your marriage-day?” asked Tom, rather contemptuously.
“Yes, I was very weak!” sighed Belle; “but you see she’s uncommonly pretty, and there’s Mount Trefoil and lots of men, and, I fancy, that dangerous fellow Fairlie, after her; so we hurried matters. We’ve been making love to one another all these three months, you know, and fixed it so soon as Thursday week. Of course she blushed, and sighed, and put her handkerchief to her eyes, and all the rest of it, en règle; but she consented, and I’m to be sacrificed. But not a word about it, my dear fellows! The Vanes are to be kept in profoundest darkness, and, to lull suspicion, I’m not to go there scarcely at all until then, and when I do, she’ll let me know when she will be out, and I’m to call on her mother then. She’ll write to me, and put the letters in a hollow tree in the wood, where I’m to leave my answers, or, rather, send ’em; catch me going over that road again! Don’t give me joy, old boys. I know I’m making a holocaust of myself, but deuce take me if I can help it — she is so deuced pretty!”
Fairlie was not at mess that night. Nobody knew where he was. I learnt, long months afterwards, that as soon as I had told him of Geraldine’s identity, he, still thirsting to disbelieve, reluctant to condemn, catching at straws to save his idol from being shattered as men in love will do, had thrown himself across his horse and torn off to Fern Dell to see whether or no Geraldine was at home.
His heart beat faster and thicker as he entered the drawing-room than it had done before the lines at Ferozeshah, or in the giant semicircle at Sobraon; it stood still as in the far end of the room, lying back on a low chair, sat Geraldine, her gloves and sailor hat lying on her lap. She sprang up to welcome him with her old gay smile.
“Good God! that a child like that can be such an accomplished actress!” thought Fairlie, as he just touched her hand.
“Have you been out to-day?” he asked suddenly.
“You see I have.”
“Prevarication is conviction,” thought Fairlie, with a deadly chill over him.
“Where did you go, love?” asked mamma.
“To see Adela Ferrers; she is not well, you know, and I came home through part of the wood to gather some of the anemones; I don’t mean anemones, they are over — lilies of the valley.”
She spoke hurriedly, glancing at Fairlie all the time, who never took his iron gaze off her, though all the beauty and glory was draining away from his life with every succeeding proof that stared him in the face with its cruel evidence.
At that minute Lady Vane was called from the room to give some directions to her head gardener about some flowers, over which she was particularly choice, and Fairlie and Geraldine were left in dead silence, with only the ticking of the timepiece and the chirrup of the birds outside the open windows to break its heavy monotony.
Fairlie bent over a spaniel, rolling the dog backwards and forwards on the rug.
Geraldine stood on the rug, her head on one side in her old pretty attitude of plaintiveness and defiance, the bright sunshine falling round her and playing on her gay dress and fair hair — a tableau lost upon the Colonel, who though he had risen too, was playing sedulously with the dog.
“Colonel Fairlie, what is the matter with you? How unkind you are to-day!”
Fairlie was roused at last, disgusted that so young a girl could be so accomplished a liar and actress, sick at heart that he had been so deceived, mad with jealousy, and that devil in him sent courtesy flying to the winds.
“Pardon me, Miss Vane, you waste your coquetteries on me. Unhappily, I know their value, and am not likely to be duped by them.”
Geraldine’s face flushed as deep a rose hue as the geraniums nodding their heads in at the windows.
“Coquetteries? — duped? What do you mean?”
“You know well enough what. All I warn you is, never try them again on me — never come near me any more with your innocent smiles and your lying lips, or, by Heaven, Geraldine Vane, I may say what I think of you in plainer words than suit the delicacy of a lady’s ears!”
Geraldine’s eyes flashed fire; from rose-hued as the geraniums she changed to the dead white of the Guelder roses beside them.
“Colonel Fairlie, you are mad, I think! If you only came here to insult me — —”
“I had better leave? I agree with you. Good morning.”
Wherewith Fairlie took his hat and whip, bowed himself out, and, throwing himself across his horse, tore away many miles beyond Norwich, I should say, and rode into the stable-yard at twelve o’clock that night, his horse with every hair wringing and limb trembling at the headlong pace he had been ridden; such a midnight gallop as only Mazeppa, or a Border rider, or Turpin racing for his life, or a man vainly seeking to leave behind him some pursuing ghost of memory or passion, ever took before.
We saw little of him for the next few days. Luckily for him, he was employed to purchase several strings of Suffolk horses for the corps, and he rode about the country a good deal, and went over to Newmarket, and to the Bury horse fair, inspecting the cattle, glad, I dare say, of an excuse to get away.
“I feel nervous, terribly nervous; do give me the Seltzer and hock, Tom. They wonder at the fellows asking for beer before their execution. I don’t; and if a fellow wants it to keep his spirits up before he’s hanged, he may surely want it before he’s married, for one’s a swing and a crash, and it’s all over and done most likely before you’ve time to know anything about it; but the other you walk into so deliberately, superintend the sacrifice of yourself, as it were, like that old cove Seneca; feel yourself rolling down-hill like Regulus, with all the horrid nails of the ‘domesticities’ pricking you in every corner; see life ebbing away from you; all the sunshine of life, as poets have it, fading, sweetly but surely, from your grasp, and Death, alias the Matrimonial Black Cap, coming down ruthlessly on your devoted heads. I feel low — shockingly low. Pass me the Seltzer, Tom, do!”
So spake Geraldine’s sposo that was to be, on the evening before his marriage-day, lying on his sofa in his Cashmere dressing-gown, his gold embroidered slippers, and his velvet smoking-cap, puffing largely at his meerschaum, and unbosoming his private sentiments and emotions to the (on this score) sufficiently sympathetic listeners, Gower and I.
“I don’t pity you!” said Tom, contemptuously, who had as much disdain for a man who married as for one who bought gooseberry for champagne, or Cape for comet hock, and did not know the difference— “I don’t pity you one bit. You’ve put the curb on yourself; you can’t complain if you get driven where you don’t like.”
“But, my dear fellow, can one help it?” expostulated Belle, pathetically. “When a little winning, bewitching, attractive little animal like that takes you in hand, and traps you as you catch a pony, holding out a sieve of oats, and coaxing you, and so-ho-ing you till she’s fairly got the bridle over your head, and the bit between your teeth, what is a man to do?”
“Remember that as soon as the bit is in your mouth, she’ll never trouble herself to give you any oats, or so-ho you softly any more, but will take the whip hand of you, and not let you have the faintest phantom of a will of your own ever again,” growled the misogamistic Tom.
“Catch a man’s remembering while it’s any use,” was Belle’s very true rejoinder. “After he’s put his hand to a little bill, he’ll remember it’s a very green thing to do, but he don’t often remember it before, I fancy. No, in things like this, one can’t help one’s self; one’s time is come, and one goes down before fate. If anybody had told me that I should go as spooney about any woman as I have about that little girl Geraldine, I’d have given ’em the
lie direct; I would, indeed! But then she made such desperate love to me, took such a deuced fancy to me, you see: else, after all, the women I might have chosen —— By George! I wonder what Lady Con, and the little Bosanquet, and poor Honoria, and all the rest of ’em will say?”
“What?” said Gower; “say ‘Poor dear fellow!’ to you, and ‘Poor girl, I pity her!’ to your wife. So you’re going to elope with Miss Geraldine? A man’s generally too ready to marry his daughters, to force a fellow to carry them off by stealth. Besides, as Bulwer says somewhere, ‘Gentlemen don’t run away with the daughters of gentlemen.’”
“Pooh, nonsense! all’s fair in love or war,” returned Belle, going into the hock and Seltzer to keep up his spirits. “You see, she’s afraid, her governor’s mind being so set on old Mount Trefoil and his baron’s coronet; they might offer some opposition, put it off till she was one-and-twenty, you know — and she’s so distractedly fond of me, poor little thing, that she’d die under the probation, probably — and I’m sure I couldn’t keep faithful to her for two mortal years. Besides, there’s something amusing in eloping; the excitement of it keeps up one’s spirits; whereas, if I were marched to church with so many mourners — I mean groomsmen — I should feel I was rehearsing my own obsequies like Charles V., and should funk it, ten to one I should. No! I like eloping: it gives the certain flavor of forbidden fruit, which many things, besides pure water, want to ‘give them a relish.’”
“Let’s see how’s the thing to be managed?” asked Gower. “Beyond telling me I was to go with you, consigned ignominiously to the rumble, to witness the ceremony, I’m not very clear as to the programme.”
“Why, as soon as it’s dawn,” responded Belle, with leisurely whiffs of his meerschaum, “I’m to take the carriage up to the gate at Fern Wood — this is what she tells me in her last note; she was coming to meet me, but just as she was dressed her mother took her to call on some people, and she had to resort to the old hollow tree. The deuce is in it, I think, to prevent our meeting; if it weren’t for the letters and her maid, we should have been horribly put to it for communication; — I’m to take the carriage, as I say, and drive up there, where she and her maid will be waiting. We drive away, of course, catch the 8.15 train, and cut off to town, and get married at the Regeneration, Piccadilly, where a fellow I know very well will act the priestly Calcraft. The thing that bothers me most of all is getting up so early. I used to hate it so awfully when I was a young one at the college. I like to have my bath, and my coffee, and my paper leisurely, and saunter through my dressing, and get up when the day’s warmed for me. Early parade’s one of the crying cruelties of the service; I always turn in again after it, and regard it as a hideous nightmare. I vow I couldn’t give a greater test of my devotion than by getting up at six o’clock to go after her — deuced horrible exertion! I’m quite certain that my linen won’t be aired, nor my coffee fit to drink, nor Perkins with his eyes half open, nor a quarter of his wits about him. Six o’clock! By George! nothing should get me up at that unearthly hour except my dear, divine, delicious little demon Geraldine! But she’s so deuced fond of me, one must make sacrifices for such a little darling.”