by Ouida
“Of course I have,” said Vaughan. “The name is Gordon — general name enough in England. They were gone to the Expiatoire, the portière told me. There is the heavy father, as I feared, and a quasi-governess acting duenna; they’re travelling with another family, whose name I could not hear: the woman said ‘C’était beaucoup trop dur pour les lèvres.’ I dare say they’re some Brummagem people — some Fudge family or other — on their travels. Confound it!”
“Poor Ernest,” laughed De Concressault. “Some gold hair has bewitched him, and instead of finding it belongs to a danseuse, or a married woman, or a fleuriste of the Palais Royal, or something attainable, he finds it turn into an unapproachable English girl, with no end of outlying sentries round her, who’ll fire at the first familiar approach.”
“It is a hard case,” said De Kerroualle, a dashing fellow in one of the “Régiments de famille.” “Never mind, mon ami; ‘contre fortune bon cœur,’ you know: it’ll be more fun to devastate one of our countrymen’s inviolate strongholds than to conquer where the white flag’s already held out. Halloa! here’s a compatriot of yours, I’d bet; look at his sanctified visage and stiff choker — a Church of England man, eh?”
“The devil!” muttered Vaughan, turning round; “deuce take him, it’s my cousin Ruskinstone! What in the world does he do in Paris?”
The man he spoke of was the Rev. Eusebius Ruskinstone, the Dean’s Warden of the cathedral of Faithandgrace, a tall, thin young clerical of eight or nine-and-twenty, with goodness enough (it was generally supposed) in his little finger to make up for all Ernest’s sins, scarlet though they were. He had just sat down and taken up the carte to blunder through “Potage au Duc de Malakoff,” “Fricassée de volaille à la Princesse Mathilde,” and all the rest of it, when his eye lit on his graceless cousin, and a vinegar asperity spread over his bland visage. Vaughan rose with a lazy grace, immensely bored within him: “My dear Ruskinstone, what an unanticipated pleasure. I never hoped Vanity Fair would have had power to lure you into its naughty peep-shows and roundabouts.”
The Rev. Eusebius reddened slightly; he had once stated strongly his opinion that poor Paris was Pandemonium. “How do you do?” he said, giving his cousin two fingers; “it is a long time since we saw you in England.”
“England doesn’t want me,” said Ernest, dryly. “I don’t fancy I should be very welcome at Faithandgrace, should I? The dear Chapter would probably consign me to starvation for my skeptical notions, as Calvin did Castellio. But what has brought you to Paris? Are you come to fight the Jesuits in a conference, or to abjure the Wardenship and turn over to them?”
Eusebius was shocked at the irreverent tone, but there was a satirical smile on his cousin’s lips that he didn’t care to provoke. “I am come,” he said, stiffly, “partly for health, partly to collect materials for a work on the ‘Gurgoyles and Rose Mouldings of Mediæval Architecture,’ and partly to oblige some friends of mine. Pardon me, here they come.”
Vaughan lifted his eyes, expecting nothing very delectable in Ruskinstone’s friends; to his astonishment they fell on his beauty of the Français! with the outlying sentries of father, governess, and two other women, the Warden’s maiden sisters, stiff, maniérées, and prudish, like too many Englishwomen. The young lady of the Français was a curious contrast to them: she started a little as she saw Vaughan, and smiled brilliantly. On the spur of that smile Ernest greeted his cousins with a degree of empressement that they certainly wouldn’t have been honored by without it. They were rather frightened at coming in actual contact with such a monster of iniquity as a Paris Lion, who, they’d heard, had out-Juan’d Don Juan, and gave him but a frigid welcome. Mr. Gordon had doubtless heard, too, of Vaughan’s misdemeanors, for he looked stoical and acidulated as he bowed. But the young girl’s eyes reconciled Ernest to all the rest, as she frankly returned a look with which he was wont to win his way through women’s hearts, ‘midst the hum of ball rooms, in the soft tête-à-tête in boudoirs, and over the sparkling Sillery of petits soupers. So, for the sake of his new quarry, he disregarded the cold looks of the others, and made himself so charming, that nobody could withstand the fascination of his manner till their dinner was served, and then, telling his cousins he would do himself the pleasure of calling on them the next day, he left the café to drive over to Gentilly, to inspect a grey colt of De Kerroualle’s.
“La chevelure dorée is quite as pretty by daylight, Ernest,” said De Concressault. “Bon dieu! it is such a relief to see eyes that are not tinted, and a skin whose pink and white is not born from the mysterious rites of the toilet.”
Vaughan nodded, with his Manilla between his teeth.
“That cousin of yours is queer style, mon garçon,” said Kerroualle. “How some of those islanders contrive to iron themselves into the stiffness and flatness they do, is to me the profoundest enigma. But what Church of England meaning lies hid in his coat-tails? They are, for all the world, like our révérends pères! What is it for?”
“High Church. Next door shop to yours, you know. Our ecclesiastics are given to balancing themselves on a tight rope between their ‘mother’ and their ‘sister,’ till they tumble over into their sister’s open arms — the Catholics say into salvation, the Protestants into damnation; into neither, I myself opine, poor simpletons. Ruskinstone is fearfully architectural. The sole things he’ll see here will be façades, gurgoyles, and clerestories, and his soul knows no warmer loves than ‘stone dolls,’ as Newton calls them. I say, Gaston, what do you think of my love of the Français; isn’t she chic, isn’t she mignonne, isn’t she spirituelle?”
“Yes,” assented De Kerroualle, “prettier than either Bluette or Madame de Mélusine would allow, or — relish.”
Ernest frowned. “I’ve done with Bluette; she’s a pretty face, but — ah, bah! one can’t amuse oneself always with a little paysanne, for she’s nothing better, after all; and I’m half afraid the Mélusine begins to bore me.”
“Better not tell her so, mon ami,” said De Kerroualle; “she’d be a nasty enemy.”
“Pooh! a woman like that loves and forgets.”
“Sans doute; but they also sometimes revenge. Poor little Bluette you may safely turn over; but Madame la Baronne won’t so easily be jilted.”
Vaughan laughed. “Oh, I’m not going to break her heart. Don’t you know, Gaston, ‘on a bien de la peine à rompre, même quand on ne s’aime plus.”
“I shouldn’t have said you found it so,” smiled De Concressault, “for you change your loves as you change your gloves. La chevelure dorée will be the next, eh?”
“Poor little thing!” said Ernest, bitterly. “I wish her a better fate.”
He went to call on la chevelure dorée, nevertheless, the morning after, and found her in the salon alone, greatly to his surprise and pleasure. Nina Gordon was pretty even in the morning — as Byron says — and she was much more, she was fascinating, and as perfectly demonstrative and natural as any peasant girl out of the meadows of Arles, ignorant of the magic words toilette, cosmétique, and crinoline.
She received him with evident pleasure and perfect unreserve, which even this daring and skeptical Lion could not twist or contort into boldness, and began to talk fast and gaily.
“Do I like Paris?” she said, in answer to his question. “Oh yes; or at least I should, if I could see it differently. I detest sight-seeing, crowding one’s brains with pictures, statues, palaces, Holy Families jostling Polinchinelle, races, mixing up with grand masses, Versailles, clouding St. Cloud — the Trianon rattled through in five minutes — all in inextricable muddle. I should like to see Paris at leisure, with some one with whom I had a ‘rapport,’ my thoughts undisturbed, and my historical associations fresh and fervent.”
“I wish I were honored with the office of your guide,” said Ernest, smiling. “Do you think you would have a ‘rapport’ with me?”
She smiled in return. “Yes, I think I should. I cannot tell why. But as it is, my warmest souvenir of Cond
é is chilled by the offer of an ice, and my tenderest thought of Louise de la Vallière is shivered with the suggestion of dinner.”
Vaughan laughed. “Bravo!” thought he. “Thank God this is no tame English icicle. I would give much,” he said, “to be able to take my cousin’s place, and show you Paris. We would have no such vulgar gastronomical interruptions; we would go through it all perfectly. I would make you hear the very whispers with which La Vallière, under the old oaks of St. Germain, unknowingly, told her love to Louis. In the forest glades of St. Cloud you should see Cinq-Mars and the Royal Hunt riding out in the chasse de nuit; in the gloomy walls of the prisons you should hear André Chénier reciting his last verses, and see Egalité completing his last toilet. The glittering ‘Cotillons’ on the terraces of Versailles, the fierce canaille surging through the salons of the Tuileries, the Templars dying in the green meadows at the back of St. Antoine — they should all rise up for you under my incantations.”
Positively Ernest, bored and blasé, accustomed to look at Paris through the gas-lights of his Lion’s life, warmed into romance to please the eyes that now beamed upon him.
“Ah! that would be delightful,” said the girl, her eyes sparkling. “Mr. Ruskinstone, you know, is terrible to me, for he goes about with ‘Ruskin’ in one hand, ‘Murray’ in the other, and a Phrase-book or two in his pocket (of course he wants it, as he’s a ‘classical scholar’), and no matter whatever associations cling around a place, only looks at it in regard to its architectural points. I beg your pardon,” she said, interrupting herself with a blush, “I forgot he was your cousin; but really that constant cold stone does tease me so.”
At that moment the heavy father, as Ernest irreverently styled the tall, pompous head of one of the first banks in London, who was worth a million if he was worth a sou, entered, and the Rev. Eusebius after him, who had been spending a lively morning taking notes among the catacombs. He was prepared to be as cold as a refrigerator, and the banker to follow his example, at finding this bête noire of the Chaussée d’Antin tête-à-tête with Nina. But Ernest had a sort of haughty high breeding and careless dignity which warned people off from any liberties with him; and Gordon remembered that he knew Paris and its haute volée so well that he might be a useful acquaintance if kept at arm’s length from Nina, and afterwards dropped. Unlucky man! he actually thought his weak muscles were strong enough to cope with a Lion’s!
Vaughan took his leave, after offering his box at the Opéra-Comique to Mr. Gordon, and drove to the Jockey Club, pondering much on this new species of the beau sexe. He was too used to women not to know at a glance that she had nothing bold about her, and yet he was too skeptical to credit that a girl could possibly exist who was neither a coquette nor a prude. As soon as the door closed on him his friends began to open their batteries of scandal.
“How sad it is to see life wasted as my cousin wastes his,” said the Warden, balancing a paper-knife thoughtfully, with a depressed air; “frittered away on mere trifles, as valuless and empty as soap-bubbles, but not, alas! so innocent.”
“What do you mean?” Nina asked, quickly.
“What do I mean, Miss Gordon?” repeated Eusebius, reproachfully; “what can I mean but the idle whirl of gaiety, the vitiating pleasures, the debts and the vices which are to be laid at poor Ernest’s door. Ever since we were boys together, and he was expelled from Rugby for going to Coventry fair and staying there all night, he has been going rapidly down the road to ruin.”
“He looks very comfortable in his descent,” smiled the young lady. “Pray why, after all, shouldn’t horses, operas, and Manillas, be as legitimate objects to set one’s affections upon as Norman arches and Gregorian chants? He has his dissipations, you have yours. Chacun à son goût!”
The Warden had his reasons for conciliating the young heiress, so he made a feeble effort to smile. “You know as well as I that you do not think what you say, Miss Gordon. Were it merely Vaughan’s tastes that were in fault it would not be of such fearful consequence, but unfortunately it is his principles.”
“He is utterly without any,” said Miss Selina Ruskinstone, who, ten years before, had been deeply and hopelessly in love with Ernest, and never forgave him for not reciprocating the passion.
“He is a skeptic, a gambler, a spendthrift; and a more heartlessless flirt never lived,” averred Miss Augusta, who hated the whole of Ernest’s sex — even the Chapter — pour cause.
“Gentlemen can’t help seeming flirts sometimes, some women pay such attention to them,” said Nina, with a mischievous laugh. “Poor Mr. Vaughn! I hope he’s not as black as he is painted. His physiognomy tells a different tale; he is just my ideal of ‘Ernest Maltravers.’ How kind his eyes are; have you ever looked into them, Selina?”
Miss Ruskinstone gave an angry sneer, vouchsafing no other response.
“My dear Nina, how foolishly you talk, about looking into a young man’s eyes,” frowned her father. “I am surprised to hear you.”
Her own eyes opened in astonishment. “Why mayn’t I look at them? It is by the eyes that, like a dog, I know whom to like and whom to avoid.”
“And pray does your prescience guide you to see a saint in a ruined Lion of the Chaussée d’Antin?” sneered Selina, with another contemptuous sniff.
“Not a saint. I’m not good enough to appreciate the race,” laughed Nina. “But I do not believe your cousin to be all you paint him; or, at least, if circumstances have led him into extravagance, I have a conviction that he has a warm heart and a noble character au fond.”
“We will hope so,” said the Warden, meekly, with an expression which plainly said how vain a hope it was.
“I think we have wasted a great deal too much conversation on a thankless subject,” said Selina, with asperity. “Don’t you think it time, Mr. Gordon, for us to go to the Louvre?”
That day, as they were driving along the Boulevards, they passed Ernest with Bluette in his carriage going to the Pré Catalan: they all knew her, from having seen her play at the Odéon. Selina and Augusta turned down their mouths, and turned up their eyes. Gordon pulled up his collar, and looked a Brutus in spectacles. Nina colored, and looked vexed. Triumph glittered in Eusebius’s meek eyes, but he sighed a pastor’s sigh over a lost soul.
III. “LE LION AMOUREUX.”
The morning after, as they were going into the Exposition des Beaux Arts, they met Vaughan; and no ghost would have been more unwelcome to the Warden than the distingué figure of his fashionable cousin. Nina was the only one who looked pleased to recognise him, and she, as she returned his smile, forgot that the evening before it had been given to Bluette.
“Are you coming in too?” she asked.
“I was not, but I will with pleasure,” said Ernest. And into the Exhibition with them he went, to Ruskinstone’s wrath and Gordon’s annoyance.
Vaughan was a connoisseur in art. The Warden knew no more than what he took verbatim from the god of his idolatry, Mr. John Ruskin. It was very natural that Nina should listen to the friend of Ingres and Vernet instead of to the second-hand worshipper of Turner. Vaughan, by instinct, dropped his customary tone of compliment — compliment he never used to women he delighted to honor — and talked so charmingly, that Nina utterly forgot the luckless Eusebius, and started when a low, sweet voice said, close beside her, “What, Ernest, you here?”
She turned, and saw a woman about eight-and-twenty, dressed in perfection of taste, with an exquisite figure, and a face of brunette beauty; the rouge most undiscoverable, and the eyes artistically tinted to make them look larger, which, Heaven knows, was needless. She darted a quick look at Vaughan’s companion, which Nina gave back with a dash of hauteur. A shade came over his face as he answered her greeting.
“Will you not introduce me to your friend?” said the new comer. “She is of your nation, I fancy, and you know I am entêtée of everything English.”
Ernest looked rather gloomy at the compliment, but turning to Nina, begged to introduce h
er to Madame de Mélusine. The gay, handsome baronne, taking in all the English girl’s points as rapidly as a groom at Tattersall’s does a two-year-old’s, was chatting volubly to Nina, when the others came up. Gordon, though wont to boast that he belonged to the aristocracy of money, was always ready to fall in the dust before the noblesse of blood, and was gratified at the introduction, remembering to have read in the Moniteur the name of De Mélusine at the ball at the Tuileries. And the widow was very charming even to the professedly stoical eyes of a Brutus of sixty-two. She soon floated off, however, with her party, giving Vaughan a gay “A ce soir!” and requesting to be allowed the honor of calling on the Gordons.
“Is she a great friend of yours?” asked Nina, when she and he were a little in advance of the others.
“I have known her some time.”
“And you are very intimate, I suppose, as she called you by your Christian name?”
He smiled a smile that puzzled Nina. “Oh! we soon get familiar here!”
“Where are you going to see her again this evening?” she persevered, playing with her parasol fringe.
“At her own house — a house that will charm you. By the way, it once belonged to Bussy Rabutin, and it has all Louis Quatorze furniture.”
“Is it a dinner? — a ball?”
“No, an Opera supper — she is famed for her Sillery and her mots. Ten to one I shall not go; what amuses one once palls with repetition.”
“I don’t understand that,” said Nina, quickly; “what I like, I like pour toujours.”
“Pauvre enfant! you little know life,” muttered Ernest. “Ah! Miss Gordon, you are at the happy age when one can believe in the feelings and friendships, and all the charming little romances of existence. But I have passed it, and so that I am amused for a moment, so that something takes time off my hands, I look no further, and expect no more. I know well enough the champagne will cease to sparkle, but I drink it while it foams, and don’t trouble myself to lament over it. Qu’importe? when one bottle’s empty, there is another!”