by Ouida
A wild, desperate idea came into Cecil’s mind. She contrasted the passionless calm of his face with the tender gentleness of his tone a few moments ago, and she would have given her life to see him “lose his head for her” as he had done for that other. How she hated her, whoever she had been! Cecil had seen too many men not to know that Syd’s cool exterior covered a stormy heart, and in the longing to rouse up the storm at her incantation she resolved to play a dangerous game. The ghost story did not warn her. As Mephistopheles to Faust came Horace Cos to aid the impulse, and Cecil turned to him with one of her radiant smiles. She never looked prettier than in her black hat; the wind had only blown a bright flush into her cheeks — though it had turned Laura blue and the Screechington red — and the Colonel looked up at her as he put her skates on with something of the look Guy might have given Muriel Vivian flirting gaily with the roistering cavaliers.
“Now, Sir Horace, show us some of those wonderful Serpentine figures,” cried Cecil, balancing herself with the grace of a curlew, and whirling here, there, and everywhere at her will as easily as if she were on a chalked ball-room floor. She hadn’t skated and sledged on the Ontario for nothing. More than one man had lost his own balance looking after her. Cos wasn’t started yet; one pair of skates were too large, another pair too small; if he’d thought of it he’d have had his own sent over. He stood on the brink much as Winkle, of Pickwickian memory, trembled in Weller’s grasp. Cecil looked at him with laughing eyes, a shrewd suspicion that he had planted her adorer, and that the quadrille on the Serpentine was an offspring of the Cossetting poetic fancy. Thrice did the luckless baronet essay the ice, and thrice did he come to grief with heels in the air, and his dainty apparel disordered. At last, his Canadian sorceress took compassion upon him, and declaring she was tired, asked him to drive her across the pond. Cos, with an air of languid martyrdom and a heavy sigh as he glanced at his Houbigants, torn and soiled, grasped the back of the chair, and actually contrived to start it. Once started, away went the chair and its Phaeton after it, whether he would or no, its occupant looking up and laughing in the dandy’s heated, disconcerted, and anxious face. All at once there was a crash, a plunge, and a shout from Vivian, who was on the opposite bank. The chair had broken the ice, flung Cecil out into the water with the shock, while her charioteer, by a lucky jump backwards, had saved himself, and stood on the brink of the chasm unharmed. Cecil’s crinoline kept her from sinking; she stretched out her little hand with a cry — it sounded like Vivian’s name as it came to my ears on the keen north wind — but before Vivian, who came across the ice like a whirlwind, could get to her, Cos, valorously determining to wet his wristbands, stooped down, and, holding by the chair, which was firmly wedged in, put his arm round her and dragged her out. Vivian came up two seconds too late.
“Are you hurt?” he said, bending towards her.
“No,” said Cecil, faintly, as her head drooped unconsciously on Cos’s shoulder. She had struck her forehead on the ice, which had stunned her slightly. The Colonel saw the chestnut hair resting against Cos’s arm; he dropped the hand he had taken, and turned to the shore.
“Bring her to the bank,” he said, briefly. “I will go home and send a carriage. Good Heavens! that that fool should have saved her!” I heard him mutter, as he brushed past me.
He drove the carriage down himself, and under pretext of holding on the horses, did not descend from the box while Horace wrapped rugs and cloaks round Cecil, who, having more pluck than strength, declared she was quite well now, but nearly fainted when Horace lifted her out, and she was consigned by Mrs. Vivian to her bedroom for the rest of the day.
“It is astonishing how we miss Cecil,” remarked Blanche, at dinner. “Isn’t it dull without her, Sydney?”
“I didn’t perceive it,” said the Colonel, calmly; “but I am very sorry for the cause of her absence.”
“Well, by Jove! it sounds unfeeling; but I can’t say I am,” murmured Horace. “It’s something to have saved such a deuced pretty girl as that.”
“Curse that puppy,” muttered Syd to his champagne glass. “A fool that isn’t fit for her to look at — —”
Syd’s and my room, in the bachelors’ wing, adjoin each other; and as our windows both possess the convenience of balconies, we generally smoke in them, and hold a little chat before turning in. When I stepped out into my balcony that night, Syd was already puffing away at his pipe. Perhaps his Cavendish was unusually good, for he did not seem greatly inclined to talk, but leant over the balcony, looking out into the clear frosty night, with the winter stars shining on the wide white uplands and the leafless glittering trees.
“What’s that?” said he sharply, as the notes of a cornet playing, and playing badly, Halévy’s air, “Quand de la Nuit,” struck on the night air.
“A serenade, I suppose.”
“A serenade in the snow. Who is romantic idiot enough for that?” said Vivian contemptuously, nearly pitching himself over to see where the cornet came from. It came from under Cecil’s windows, where a light was still burning. The player looked uncommonly like Cossetting wrapped up in a cloak with a wide-awake on, under which the moonlight showed us some fair hair peeping.
Vivian drew back with an oath he did not mean me to hear. He laughed scornfully. “Milk-posset, of course! There is no other fool in the house. His passion must be miraculously deep to drag him out of his bed into the snow to play some false notes to his lady-love. It’s rather windy, don’t you think, Ned. Good night, old fellow — and, I say, don’t turn little Blanche’s head with your pretty speeches. You and I are bound not to flirt, since we’re sworn never to marry; and I don’t want the child played with, though possibly (being a woman) she’d very soon recover it.”
With which sarcasm on his sister and her sex, the Colonel shut down the window with a clang; and I remained, smoking four pipes and a half, meditating on his last words, for I had been playing with the child, and felt (inhuman brute! the ladies will say) that I should be sorry if she did recover it.
III. SHOWING THAT LOVE-MAKING ON HOLY GROUND DOESN’T PROSPER.
Cecil came down the next morning looking very pretty after her ducking. Vivian asked her how she was with his general air of calm courtesy, helped her to some cold pheasant, and applied himself to his breakfast and some talk with a sporting man about the chances of the frost breaking up.
Horace, who looked upon himself as a preux chevalier, had had his left arm put in a sling on the strength of a bruise as big as a fourpenny-piece, and appeared to consider himself entitled to Cecil’s eternal gratitude and admiration for having gone the length of wetting his coat sleeves for her.
“Do you like music by starlight?” he whispered, with a self-conscious smile, after a course of delicate attentions throughout breakfast.
Syd fixed his eyes on Cecil’s, steadily but impassively. The color rose into her face, and she turned to Cos with a mischievous laugh.
“Very much, if — I am not too sleepy to hear it; and it isn’t a cornet out of tune.”
“How cruel!” murmured Horace, as he passed her coffee. “You shouldn’t criticise so severely when a fellow tries to please you.”
“That poor dear girl really thinks I turned out into the snow last night to give her that serenade,” observed Cos, with a languid laugh, when we were alone in the billiard-room. “Good, isn’t it, the idea of my troubling myself?”
“Whose cracked cornet was it, then, that made that confounded row last night?” I asked.
Horace laughed again; it was rarely he was so highly amused at anything: “It was Cléante’s, to be sure. He don’t play badly when his hands are not numbed, poor devil! Of course he made no end of a row about going out into the snow, but I made him do it. I knew Cecil would think it was I. Women are so vain, poor things!”
It was lucky I alone was the repository of his confidence, for if Vivian had chanced to have been in the billiard-room, it is highly probable he would then and there have brained his cousin
with one of the cues.
Happily he was out of the reach of temptation, in the stables, looking after Qui Vive, who had to “bide in stall,” as much to that gallant bay’s disquiet as to her owner’s; for I don’t know which of the two best loves a burst over a stiff country, or a fast twenty minutes up wind alone with the hounds when they throw up their heads.
To the stables, by an odd coincidence, Cecil, putting the irresistible black hat on the top of her chestnut braids, prevailed on Blanche to escort her, vowing (which was nearly, but not quite, the truth) that she loved the sweet pets of horses better than anything on earth. Where Cecil went, Laura made a point of going too, to keep her enemy in sight, I suppose; though Cecil, liking a fast walk on the frosty roads, a game of battledore and shuttlecock with Blanche (when we were out of the house), or anything, in short, better than working with her feet on the fender, and the Caldecott inanities or Screechington scandals in her ear, often led Laura many an unwelcome dance, and brought that luckless young lady to try at things which did not sit well upon her as they did upon the St. Aubyn, who had a knack of doing, and doing charmingly, a thousand things no other woman could have attempted. So, as Vivian and I, and some of the other men, stood in the stable-doors, smoking, and talking over the studs accommodated in the spacious stalls, a strong party of four young ladies came across the yard.
“I’m come to look at Qui Vive; will you show him to me?” said Cecil, softly. Her gentle, childlike way was the most telling of all her changing moods, but I must do her the justice to say that it was perfectly natural, she was no actress.
“With great pleasure,” said Syd, very courteously, if not over-cordially; and to Qui Vive’s stall Cecil went, alone in her glory, for Laura was infinitely too terrified at the sight of the bay’s strong black hind legs to risk a kick from them, even to follow Syd. Helena Vivian stayed with her, and Blanche came with me to visit my hunters.
Cecil is a tolerable judge of a horse; she praised Qui Vive’s lean head, full eye, and silky coat with discrimination, and Qui Vive, though not the best-tempered of thorough-breds, let her pat his smooth sides and kiss his strong neck without any hostile demonstration.
Vivian watched her as if she were a spoilt child who bewitched him, but whom he knew to be naughty; he could not resist the fascination of her ways, but he never altered his calm, courteous tone to her — the tone Cecil longed to hear change, were it even into invectives against her, to testify some deeper interest.
“Now show me the mount you will give me when the frost breaks up and we take out the hounds,” said Cecil, with a farewell caress of Qui Vive.
“You shall have the grey four-year-old; Billiard-ball, and he will suit you exactly, for he is as light as a bird, checks at nothing, and will take you safe over the stiffest bullfinch. I know you may trust him, for he has carried Blanche.”
Cecil threw back her head. “Oh, I would ride anything, Qui Vive himself, if he would bear a habit. I am not like Miss Caldecott, who, catching sight of his dear brown legs, vanished as rapidly as if she had seen Muriel’s ghost on Christmas-eve.”
The Colonel smiled. “You are very unmerciful to poor Miss Caldecott. What has she done to offend you?”
“Offend me! Nothing in the world. Though I heard her lament with Miss Screechington in the music-room, that I was ‘so fast,’ and ‘such slang style;’ I consider that rather a compliment, for I never knew any lady pull to pieces my bonnet, or my bouquet, or my hat, unless it was a prettier one than their own. That sounds a vain speech, but I don’t mean it so.”
The Colonel looked down into her velvet eyes; she was most dangerous to him in this mood. “No,” he said, briefly, “no one would accuse you of vanity, though they might, pardon me, of love of admiration.”
Cecil laughed merrily. “Yes, perhaps so; it is pleasant, you know. Yet sometimes I am tired of it all, and I want — —”
“A more difficult conquest? To find a diamond, merely, like Cleopatra, to show your estimate of its value by throwing it away.”
A flush of vexation came into her cheeks. “Do you think me utterly heartless?” she said impetuously. “No. I mean that I often tire of the fulsome compliments, the flattery, the attention, the whirl of society! I do like admiration. I tell you candidly what every other woman acknowledges to herself but denies to the world; but often it is nothing to me — mere Dead Sea fruit. I care nothing for the voices that whisper it; the eyes that express it wake no response in mine, and I would give it all for one word of true interest, one glance of real — —”
Vivian looked down on her steadily with his searching eagle eyes, out of which, when he chose, nothing could be read. “If I dare believe you — —” he said, half aloud.
Gentle as his tone was, the mere doubt stung Cecil to the quick. Something of the wild, desperate feeling of the day previous rose in her heart. The same feeling that makes men brave heaven and hell to win their desires worked up in her. If she had been one of us, just at that moment, she would have flinched at nothing; being a young lady, her hands were tied. She could only go to Cos’s stalls with him (Cos knows as much about horseflesh as I do about the profound female mystery they call “shopping”), and flirt with him to desperation, while Horace got the steam up faster than he, with his very languid motor powers, often did, being accustomed to be spared the trouble and have all the love made to him — an indolence in which the St. Aubyn, who knows how to keep a man well up to hand, never indulged him.
“Do have some pity on me,” I heard Cos murmuring, as she stroked a great brute of his, with a head like a fiddle-case, and no action at all. “I assure you, Miss St. Aubyn, you make me wretched. I’d die for you to-morrow if I only saw how, and yet you take no more notice of me sometimes than if I were that colt.”
Cecil glanced at him with a smile that would have driven Cos distracted if he’d been in for it as deep as he pretended.
“I don’t see that you are much out of condition, Sir Horace, but if you have any particular fancy to suicide, the horse-pond will accommodate you at a moment’s notice; only don’t do it till after our play, because I have set my heart on that suit of Milan armor. Pray don’t look so plaintive. If it will make you any happier, I am going for a walk, and you may come too. Blanche, dear, which way is it to the plantations?”
Now poor Horace hated a walk on a frosty morning as cordially as anything, being altogether averse to any natural exercise: but he was sworn to the St. Aubyn, and Blanche and I, dropping behind them, he had a good hour of her fascinations to himself. I do not know whether he improved the occasion, but Cecil at luncheon looked tired and teased. I should think, after Syd’s graphic epigrammatic talk, the baronet’s lisped nonsense must have been rather trying, especially as Cecil has a strong leaning to intellect.
Vivian didn’t appear at luncheon; he was gone rabbit-shooting with the other fellows, and I should have been with them if I had not thought lounging in the drawing-room, reading “Clytemnestra” to Blanche, with many pauses, the greater fun of the two. I am keen about sport, too; but ever since, at the age of ten, I conceived a romantic passion for my mother’s lady’s-maid — a tall and stately young lady, who eventually married a retail tea-dealer — I have thought the beaux yeux the best of all games.
“Mrs. Vivian, Blanche and Helena and I want to be very useful, if you will let us,” said Cecil, one morning. She was always soft and playful with that gentlest of all women, Syd’s mother. “What do you smile in that incredulous way for? We can be extraordinarily industrious: the steam sewing-machine is nothing to us when we choose! What do you think we are going to do? We are going to decorate the church for Christmas. To leave it to that poor little old clerk, who would only stick two holly twigs in the pulpit candlesticks, and fancy he had done a work of high art, would be madness. And, besides, it will be such fun.”
“If you think it so, pray do it, dear,” laughed Mrs. Vivian. “I can’t say I should, but your tastes and mine are probably rather different. The servants will
do as you direct them.”
“Oh no,” said Cecil; “we mean to do it all ourselves. The gentlemen may help us if they like — those, at least, who prefer our society to that of smaller animals, with lop-ears and little bushy tails, who have a fascination superior sometimes to any of our attractions.” She flashed a glance at the Colonel, who was watching her over the top of Punch, as, when I was a boy, I have watched the sun, though it pained my eyes to do it. “You’re the grand seigneur of Deerhurst,” said Cecil, turning to him; “will you be good, and order cart-loads of holly and evergreens (and plenty of the Portugal laurel, please, because it’s so pretty) down to the church; and will you come and do all the hard work for me? The rabbits would so enjoy a little peace to-day, poor things!”
He smiled in spite of himself, and did her bidding, with a flush of pleasure on his face. I believe at that moment, to please her, he would have cut down the best timber on the estates — even the old oaks, in whose shadow in the midsummer of centuries before Guy Vivian and Muriel had plighted their troth.
The way to the church was through a winding walk, between high walls of yew, and the sanctuary itself was a find old Norman place, whose tout ensemble I admired, though I could not pick it to pieces architecturally.
To the church we all went, of course, with more readiness than we probably ever did in our lives, regardless of the rose chains with which we were very likely to become entangled, while white hands weaved the holly wreaths.
Vivian had ordered evergreens enough to decorate fifty churches, and had sent over to the neighboring town for no end of ribbon emblazonments and illuminated scrolls, on which Cecil looked with delight. She seemed to know by instinct it was done for her, and not for his sisters.