by Ouida
He smiled, and put his hand on her lips.
“Good, noble, silly child! those words may do for some spotless Gahlahad or Folko, not for me, who, a month ago, was in debt to some of the greatest blackguards in town, who have yielded to every temptation, given way to every weakness; not with the excuse of a boy new to life, but willfully and recklessly, knowing both the pleasures and their price — I, who but for your love and my father’s, should now be a solitary exile, paying for my past follies with — —”
“Be quiet,” interrupted Valérie, with her passionate vivacity. “As different as was ‘Mirabeau jugé par sa famille et Mirabeau jugé par le peuple,’ are you judged by your enemies, and judged by those who love you. Granted you have had temptations, follies, errors; so has every man of high spirit and generous temper, and I value you far more coming out of a fiery furnace with so much of pure gold that the flames could not destroy, than if you were some ascetic Pharisee, who has never succumbed because he has never been tempted, and, born with no weaknesses, is born with no warmer virtues either!”
Falkenstein laughed, as he looked down at her.
“You little goose! Well, at least you have eloquence, Valérie, if not truth, on your side; and your sophistry is dear to me, as it springs out of your love.”
“But it is not sophistry,” she cried, with an energetic stamp of her foot. “If you will not listen to philosophy, concede, at least, to fact. Which is most worthy of my epithets— ‘noble and good’ — Waldemar Falkenstein, or Maximillian? And yet Maximillian has been quiet and virtuous from his youth upwards, and always wins white balls from the ballot of society.”
“Well, you shall have the privilege of your sex — the last word,” smiled Waldemar, “more especially as the last word is on my side.”
“Hark!” interrupted Valérie, quiet and subdued in a second, “the clock is striking twelve.”
Silently, with her arms round his neck, they listened to the parting knell of the Old Year, stealing quietly away from its place among men. From the church towers through England tolled the twelve strokes, with a melancholy echo, telling a world that its dead past was laid in a sealed grave, and the stone of Never More was rolled to the door of the sepulchre. The Old Year was gone, with all its sins and errors, its golden gleams and midnight storms, its midsummer days of sunshine for some, its winter nights of starless gloom for others. Its last knell echoed; and then, from the old grey belfries in villages and towns, over the stirring cities and the sleeping hamlets, over the quiet meadows and stretching woodlands and grand old forest trees, rang the Silver Chimes of the New Year.
“It shall be a happy New Year to you, my darling, if my love can make it so,” whispered Waldemar, as the musical bells clashed out in wild harmony under the winter stars.
She looked up into his eyes. “I must be happy, since it will be passed with you. Do you remember, Waldemar, the night I saw you first, my telling you New Year’s-day was my birthday, and wondering where you and I should spend the next? I liked you strangely from the first, but how little I foresaw that my whole life was to hang on yours!”
“As little as I foresaw when, after heavy losses at Godolphin’s, I watched the Old Year out in my chambers, a tired, ruined, hopeless, aimless man, with not one on whom I could rely for help or sympathy in my need, that I should stand here now, free, clear from debt, with all my old entanglements shaken off, my old scores wiped out, my darker errors forgotten, my worst enemy humbled, and my own future bright. Oh! Valérie! Heaven bless you for the love that followed me into exile!”
He drew her closer to him as he spoke, and as he felt the beating of the heart that was always true to him, and the soft caress of the lips that had always a smile for him, Falkenstein looked out over the wide woodland that called him master, glistening in the clear starlight, and as he listened to the Silver Chimes — joyous herald of the New-born Year — he blessed in his inmost heart the Golden Fetters of Love.
SLANDER AND SILLERY.
I. THE LION OF THE CHAUSSÉE D’ANTIN.
Ma mère est à Paris, Mon père est à Versailles. Et moi je suis ici. Pour chanter sur la paille, L’amour! L’amour! La nuit comme le jour.
Humming this popular if not over-recherché ditty, a man sat sketching in pastels, one morning, in his rooms at Numéro 10, Rue des Mauvais Sujets, Chaussée d’ Antin, Paris.
The band of the national guard, the marchands crying “Coco!” the charlatans puffing everything from elixirs to lead-pencils, the Empress and Mme. d’Alve passing in their carriage, the tramp of some Zouaves just returned from Algeria — nothing in the street below disturbed him; he went sketching on as if his life depended on the completion of the picture. He was a man about thirty-three, middle height, and eminently graceful. He was half Bohemian, half English, and the animation of the one nation and the hauteur of the other were by turns expressed on his chiselled features as his thoughts moved with his pencil. The stamp of his good blood was on him; his face would have attracted and interested in ever so large a crowd. He was very pale, and there was a tired look on his wide, powerful forehead and in his long dark eyes, and a weary line or two about his handsome mouth, as if he had exhausted his youth very quickly; and, indeed, to see life as he had seen it is somewhat a fatiguing process, and apt to make one blasé before one’s time.
The rooms in which he sat were intensely comfortable, and very provocative to a quiet pipe and idleness. To be sure, if one judged his tastes by them, they were not probably, to use the popular jargon, “healthy,” for they had nothing very domestic or John Halifaxish about them, and were certainly not calculated to gratify the eyes of maiden aunts and spinster sisters.
There were fencing-foils, pistols, tobacco-boxes of every style and order, from ballet-girls to terriers’ heads. There were three or four cockatoos and parrots on stands chattering bits of Quartier Latin songs, or imitating the cries in the street below. There were cards, dice-boxes, albums à rire, meerschaums, lorgnons, pink notes, no end of De Kock’s and Lebrun’s books, and all the etcæteras of chambres de garçon strewed about: and there were things, too — pictures, statuettes, fauteuils, and a breakfast-service of Sèvres and silver — that Du Barry need not have scrupled to put in her “petite bon-bonnière” at Luciennes.
So busy was he sketching and singing
“Messieurs les étudiens Montez á la Chaumière!”
that he never heard a knock at his door, and he looked up with an impatient frown on his white, broad forehead as a man entered sans cérémonie.
“Mon Dieu! Ernest,” cried his friend, “what the devil are you doing here with your pipe and your pastels, when I’ve been waiting at Tortoni’s a good half-hour, and at last, out of patience, drove here to see what on earth had become of you?”
“My dear fellow, I beg you a thousand pardons,” said Vaughan, lazily. “I was sketching this, and you and your horses went clean out of my head, I honestly confess.”
“And your breakfast too, it seems,” said De Concressault, glancing at the table. “Is it Madame de Mélusine or the little Bluette whose portrait absorbs you so much? No, by Jove! it’s a prettier woman than either of ’em. If she’s like that, take me to see her this instant. What glorious gold hair! I adore your countrywomen when they’ve hair that color. Where did you get that face? Is she a duchess, or a danseuse, a little actress you’re going to patronise, or a millionnaire you’re going to marry?”
“I can’t tell you,” laughed Vaughan. “I’ve not an idea who she may be. I saw her last evening coming out of the Français, and picked up her bouquet for her as she was getting into her carriage. The face was young, the smile very pretty and bright, and, as they daguerreotyped themselves in my mind, I thought I might as well transfer them to paper before newer beauties chased them out of it.”
“Diable! and you don’t know who she is? However, we’ll soon find out. That gold hair mustn’t be lost. But get your breakfast, pray, Ernest, and let us be off to poor Armand’s sale.”
“That’s the way we mourn our dead friends,” said Vaughan, with a sneer, pouring out his coffee. “Armand is jesting, laughing, and smoking with us one day, the next he’s pitched out of his carriage going down to Asnières, and all we think of is — that his horses are for sale. If I were found in the Morgue to-morrow, your first emotion, Emile, would be, ‘Vaughan’s De l’Orme will be sold. I must go and bid for it directly.”
De Concressault laughed as he looked up at a miniature of Marion de l’Orme, once taken for the Marquis of Gordon. “I fancy, mon garçon, there’ll be too many sharks after all your possessions for me to stand any chance.”
“True enough,” said Vaughan; “and I question if they’ll wait till my death before they come down on ’em. But I don’t look forward. I take life as it comes. Vogue la galère! At least, I’ve lived, not vegetated.” And humming his refrain,
“L’amour! l’amour! La nuit comme le jour!”
he lounged down the stairs and drove to a sale in the Faubourg St. Germain, where one of his Paris chums, a virtuoso and connoisseur, had left endless meubles to be sold by his duns and knocked down to his friends.
Vaughan was quite right; he had lived, and at a pretty good pace, too. When he came of age a tolerably good fortune awaited him, but it had not been long in his hands before he contrived to let it slip through them. He’d been brought up at Sainte Barbe, after being expelled from Rugby, knew all the best of the “jeunesse dorée,” and could not endure any place after Paris, where his life was as sparkling and brilliant as the foam off a glass of champagne. Wild and careless, high spirited, and lavish in his Opera suppers, his cabaret dinners, his Trois Frères banquets, his lansquenet parties, his bouquets for baronnes, and his bracelets for ballerinas, Ernest gained his reputation as a Lion, and — ruined himself, too, poor old fellow!
His place down in Surrey had mortgages thick on every inch of its lands, and the money that kept him going was borrowed from those modern Satans, money lenders, at the usually ruinous interest. “But still,” Ernest was wont to say, with great philosophy, “I’ve had ten years’ swing of pleasure. Does every man get as much as that? And should I have been any happier if I’d been a good boy, and a country squire, sat on the bench, amused my mind with turnips, and married some bishop’s daughter, who’d have marched me to church, forbidden cigars, and buried me in family boots?”
Certainly that would not have been his line, and so, in natural horror at it, he dashed into a diametrically opposite one, and after the favor he had shown him from every handsome woman that drove through Longchamp, wore diamonds at the Tuileries, and supped with dominos noirs at bals d’Opéra, and the favor he showed to cards, the courses, and the coulisses, few bishops would have imperilled their daughters’ souls by setting them to hunt down this wicked Lion, especially as the poor Lion now wasn’t worth the trapping. If he had been, there would have been hue and cry enough after him I don’t doubt; but the Gordon Cummings of the beau sexe rarely hunt unless it’s worth their while, and they can bring home splendid spoils to make their bosom friends mad with envy; and Ernest, despite his handsome face, his fashionable reputation, and the aroma of conquest that hung about him (they used to say he never wooed ever so negligently but he won), was assuredly neither an “eligible speculation” nor a “marrying man,” and was an object rather of terror to English mammas steering budding young ladies through the dangerous vortex of French society with a fierce chevaux de frise of British prejudices and a keen British eye to business. If Ernest was of no other use, however, he was invaluable to his uncles, aunts, and male cousins, as a sort of scapegoat and épouvantail, to be held up on high to show the unwary what they would come to if they followed his steps. It was so pleasant to them to exult over his backslidings, and, cutting him mercilessly up into little bits, hold condemnatory sermons over every one of the pieces. “Dans l’adversité de nos meilleurs amis, nous trouvons toujours quelque chose qui ne nous déplait pas;” and Vaughan’s friends, like the rest of us pharisees, dearly loved to glance at the publican (especially if he was handsomer, cleverer, or any way better than themselves), and thank God loudly that they were not such men as he. Ernest was a hardened sinner, however; he laughed, put the Channel between him and them, and went on his ways without thinking or caring for their animadversions.
“By Jove! Emile,” said he as they sat dining together at Leiter’s, “I should like to find out my golden-haired sylphide. She was English, by her fair skin, and though I’m not very fond of my compatriotes, especially when they’re abroad (I think touring John Bull detestable wrapped up in his treble plaid of reserve), still I should like to find her out just for simple curiosity. I assure you she’d the prettiest foot and ankle I ever saw, not excepting even Bluette’s.”
“Ma foi! that’s a good deal from you. She must be found, then. Voyons! shall we advertise in the Moniteur, employ the secret police, or call at all the hotels in person to say that you’re quite ready to act out Soulié’s ‘Lion Amoureux,’ if you can only discover the petite bourgeoise to play it with you?”
Vaughan laughed as he drank his demi-tasse.
“Lion amoureux! that’s an anomaly; we’re only in love just enough pour nous amuser; and of us Albin says, very rightly,
Si vous connaissiez quelques meilleurs, Vous porteriez bientôt cette âme ailleurs.”
“Very well, then: if you don’t know of anything better, let’s hunt up this incognita. If she went to the Français, she’s most likely at the Odéon to-night,” said De Concressault. “Shall we try?”
“Allons!” said Vaughan, rising indolently, as he did most things. “But it’s rather silly, I think; there are bright smiles and pretty feet enough in Paris without one’s setting off on a wild-goose chase after them.”
They were playing the last act of “La Calomnie,” as Vaughan and De Concressault took their places, put up their lorgnons, and looked round the house. He swore a few mental “Diables!” and “Sacrés!” as his gaze fell on faces old or ugly, or too brunes or too blondes, or anything but what he wanted. At last, without moving his glass, he touched De Concressault’s arm.
“There she is, Emile, in the fourth from the centre, in a white opera cloak, with pink flowers in her hair.”
“I see her, mon ami,” said Emile. “I found her out two seconds ago (see how well you sketch!) but I wouldn’t spoil your pleasure in discovering her. Mon Dieu! Ernest, she’s looking at you, and smiles as if she recognised you. Was there ever so lucky a Lauzun?”
Vaughan could have laughed outright to see by the brightness of the girl’s expression that she knew the saviour of her bouquet again, for though he was accustomed to easy conquests, such naive interest in him at such short notice was something new to him.
He didn’t take his lorgnon off her again, and she was certainly worth the honor, with her soft, lustrous gold hair, the eyes that defy definition — black in some lights, violet in others — a wide-arched forehead, promising plenty of brains, and a rayonnante, animated, joyous expression, quite refreshing to anybody as bored and blasé as Vaughan and De Concressault. As soon as the last piece was over Vaughan slipped out of his loge, and took up his station at the entrance.
He didn’t wait in vain: the golden hair soon came, on the arm of a gentleman — middle aged, as Vaughan noticed with a sensation of satisfaction. She glanced up at him as she passed: he looked very handsome in the gas glare. Vaughan perhaps was too sensible a fellow to think of his pose, but even we have our weaknesses under certain circumstances, as well as the crinolines. Luckily for him, he chanced to have in his pocket a gold serpent bracelet he had bought that morning for some fair dame or demoiselle. He stopped her, and held it out to her.
“I beg your pardon, mademoiselle,” he said in French, “but I think you dropped this?”
She looked up at him with the sunniest of smiles as she answered, in a pure accent, “No monsieur, thank you, it does not belong to me.”
The middle-aged man glanced sideways at him wit
h true British suspicion — I dare say a pickpocket, a Rouge, and Fieschi, were all mixed up in his mind as embodied in the graceful figure and bold glance of the Lion. He drew the girl on, looking much like a heavy cloud with a bright sun ray after it; but she half turned her head over her shoulder to give him a farewell smile, which Ernest returned with ten per cent. interest.
“Anglais,” said Emile, concisely.
“Malheureusement,” said Ernest as briefly, as he pushed his way into the air, and saw the gold hair vanish into her carriage. He went quickly up to the cocher.
“Où demeurent-ils, mon ami?” he whispered, slipping a five-franc piece into his hand.
The man smiled. “A l’Hôtel de Londres, monsieur; No. 6, au premier.”
“The devil! pourquoir ne allez pas?” said an unmistakably English voice from the interior of the voiture. The man set off at a trot; Ernest sprang into his own trap.
“Au Chateau Rouge! May as well go there, eh, Emile? What a deuced pity la chevelure dorée is English!”
“I wish she were a danseuse, an actress, a fleuriste — anything one could make his own introduction to. Confound it there’s the ‘heavy father,’ I’m afraid, in the case, and some rigorous mamma, or vigilant béguine of a governess: but, to judge by the young lady’s smiles, she’ll be easy game unless she’s tremendously fenced in.”
With which consolatory reflection Vaughan leaned back and lighted a cheroot, en route to spend the night as he had spent most of them for the last ten years, till the fan had begun to be more bore than pleasure.
II. NINA GORDON.
“Have you been to the Hôtel de Londres, Ernest?” said De Concressault, as Vaughan lounged into Tortoni’s next day, where Emile and three or four other men were drinking Seltzer and talking of how Cerisette had beaten Vivandière by a neck at Chantilly, or (the sport to which a Frenchman takes much more naturally) of how well Rivière played in the “Prix d’un Bouquet;” what a belle taille la De Servans had; and what a fool Senecterre had made of himself in the duel about Madame Viardot.