by Ouida
“You seem rather inconsistent,” said Telfer, impatiently. “First, you accuse her of being too free, and then blame her for being too reserved.”
Walsham laughed.
“If I’m inconsistent, you’re a perfect weathercock. A month ago you were calling Violet every name you could think of, and now you snap us all off short if we say a word against her.”
Telfer looked haughty enough to extinguish Fred upon the spot; Fred being a small, lively little chap, with not the slightest dignity about him.
“I know little or nothing of Miss Tressillian, but as I was the first to prejudice you all against her, it is only common honor to take her part when I think her unjustly attacked.”
Fred gave me a wink of intense significance, but remonstrated no further, for Telfer had something of the dark look upon him that our men knew so well when he led them down to the slaughter at Alma and Balaklava.
“I tell you,” continued the Major, after a little silence, “that I am disgusted with myself for having listened to whispers and reports, and believed in them just because they suited the bias of my prejudice. It didn’t matter to me whom my father married, as far as money went, for beyond 10,000l. or so, it must all come in the entail; but I couldn’t endure the idea of his being chiselled by some Becky Sharp or Blanche Armory, and I made up my mind that the Tressillian was of that genre. I’ve changed my opinion now. I don’t think she either is an actress or an intrigante; and I should be a coward indeed if I hesitated to say so, out of common justice to a young girl who has no one to defend her.”
“Bravo, my boy!” said Walsham; “I thought the Tressillian’s bright eyes wouldn’t let you hate her long. You’re quite right, though ‘pon my life it is really horrid how women contrive to damage each other. If there’s an unlucky girl who has made the best match of the season — she might be an angel from heaven — her bosom-friends would manage gently to spread abroad the interesting facts that she’s a ‘dreadful flirt,’ ‘has a snub nose,’ is an awful temper, had a ballet-girl for her mamma, or something detrimental. An attractive woman is the target for all her sex to shoot their sneers at, and if the poor thing isn’t so riddled with arrows that she’s no beauty left, it isn’t her sisters’ fault.”
“I believe you,” said Telfer. “My gauge of a woman’s fascinations is the amount of hatred all the others bear her. It often amuses me to hear the tone that ladies take in talking of some girl whom we admire. She’s a charming creature — a darling — their particular friend but ... there’s always a ‘but’ to neutralize the praise, and with their honeyed hatred they contrive to damn the luckless object irretrievably. If another man’s a good shot, or whip, or billiard-player, we’re not spiteful to him for it. We think him a good fellow, and like him the better; but the dear beau sexe cannot bear a rival, and never rest while one of their acquaintance has diamonds a carat larger, dresses a trifle more costly, has finer horses, or more conquests. The only style of friend I ever heard women speak well of is some plain and timorous individual, good-natured to foolery, and weak as water, who never comes in their orbit, and whom we never look at; and then what a darling she is, and how eloquently they will laud her to the skies, despising her miserably all the while for not having been born pretty!”
“True enough,” Marc began. “Why do the Carterets treat the Tressillian so disagreeably? — only because, though without their fortune, she makes ten times their coups; and get themselves up how they may, they know none of us care to waltz with them if she’s in the room. Let’s drink her health in Marcobrunnen — she’s magnificent eyes.”
“And first-rate style,” said I.
“And a deuced pretty foot,” cried Fred.
“Et une taille superbe,” added de Tintiniac, just come in. “En vérité, elle est chouette cette Violette Anglaise.”
So we chanted the Tressillian’s praises. Telfer drank the toast in silence — I thought with a frown on his brow at the freedom with which we discussed his fair foe.
Little Countess Virginie’s wedding was to come off in another month, and Marc begged us so hard to stay on till then, that, Telfer seeming very willing, I consented, though it would be the first September I had ever spent out of the English open since I was old enough to know partridges from pheasants. The Tressillian being Virginie’s pet friend, after young ladies’ custom of contracting eternal alliances (which ordinarily terminate in a quarrel about the shade of a ponceau ribbon, or a mauve flower, or a cornet’s eyes, some three months after the signing and sealing thereof), was of course to be one of the filles d’honneur. So, as I said to Telfer, he’d have time for a few more battles before the two enemies parted to meet again — nobody could tell when.
I began to think that the Major had really been wounded, and that his opponent’s bright eyes wouldn’t let him come out of the fight wholly scathless, as I saw him leaning against the wall at a ball in the Redoute at Pipesandbeersbad, watching Violet with great earnestness as she whirled round in a deux temps, bewitching as was her wont all the frequenters of the Bad. Rich English dyspeptics, poverty-stricken princes, Austrian diplomats, come to cure their hypochondria; French décorés, to try their new cabals and martingales; British snobs, to indulge the luxury of grumbling, — all of them found some strange attraction in the “Violette Anglaise.”
Violet sank on a seat after her valse. Telfer quietly displaced a young dragoon from Lucca, and sat down by her.
“I am going to stay on another month, Miss Tressillian; are you not sorry to hear it?” he said, with a smile, but I thought a little anxiety in his eyes.
The color flushed over her face, and she answered, with a laugh, not quite a real one: “Of course I am very sorry. I would go away myself to let you enjoy your last week in peace if I were not engaged to Virginie. Cannot you get me leave of absence from her? I know you would throw your whole heart into the petition.”
Telfer curled his moustaches impatiently.
“Truth has come out of her well at last,” he said, with a dash of bitterness, “and has disguised herself in Miss Tressillian’s tulle illusion.”
Violet colored brighter still.
“Well,” she said, quickly, “was it not your decision that we should never waste courtesy on one another? Was not your own desire guerre à outrance?”
“No,” answered Telfer, his brow darkening; “that I certainly must deny. I did you injustice, and I offered you an apology. No man could do more than acknowledge he was in the wrong. I offered you the palm-branch once; you were pleased to refuse it. I am not a man, Miss Tressillian, to run the chance of another repulse. My friendship is not so cheap that I shall intrude it where it is undesired.” He spoke with a laugh, but his eyes had a grave anger in them that Violet didn’t quite relish.
She looked a little bit frightened up at him. The proud, brilliant Tressillian was as pale and quiet as a little child after a good scolding. But she soon rallied, and flashed up haughtier than ever.
“Major Telfer, you make one great error — one very common to your sex. You drop us one day, and take us up the next, and then think that we must be grateful to you for the supreme honor you do us. You are cold to us, absolutely rude, as long as it pleases your lordly will, and then, at the first word of courtesy and kindness, you expect us to rise and make you a révérence in the utmost humiliation and thanksgiving. You men” — and Violet began destroying her bouquet with immense energy— “treat us exactly as a cat will treat a mouse. You yourself, for instance, in a moment’s hasty judgment, construed all my actions by the light of your own unjust suspicions, and believing everything, no matter how unfounded, spoke against me to all your acquaintance, and treated me with, as you must admit, but scanty courtesy, for one whom I have heard piques himself on his high breeding. And now, when you discover that your suspicions had no foundation, and your hatred no grounds, you wonder that I find it difficult to be as grateful as you seem to think I should be for your having so kindly misjudged me.”
As the
young lady gave all this forth with much vehemence and spirit, Telfer’s lips set, and the blood forced itself through the bronze of his cheeks. He bent towards her till his moustache touched her hair.
“You have no mercy, Violet Tressillian,” he said, between his teeth. “Take care that no one is as pitiless to you in return.”
She started, and her bouquet fell to the ground. Telfer gave it her back without looking at her, and turned round to an Austrian with his usual impassive air.
“Do you know where De Tintiniac is, Staumgaurn? In the roulette room? All right. I am going there now.”
He did go there, and I’ve a notion that the croupier of Pipesandbeersbad made something that night out of the Major’s preoccupation.
Violet, meanwhile, was waltzing with Staumgaurn and a dozen others, but looked rather white — not using any rouge but what nature had given her — and by the end of the evening her bouquet had utterly come to grief. Days went on till a fortnight of our last month had gone, and Telfer, to my sorrow (not surprise, for I always thought the Tressillian was a dangerous foe, and that, like Ringwood, he’d find himself unhorsed by a woman), grew grave and stern, haunted with ten times more recklessness than usual, and threw away his guineas at the Redoute in a wild way, quite new with him, for though he liked play pour s’amuser, he had too much control over his passions ever to let play get ascendancy over him. I used to think he had the strongest passions and the strongest will over them of any man I knew; but now a passion least undesired and most hopeless of any that ever entered his soul, seemed to have mastered him. Not that he showed it; with the Tressillian he was simply distantly courteous; but I, who was on the qui vive for his first sign of being conquered, saw his eyebrows contract when somebody was paying her desperate court, and his glance lighten and flash when she passed near him. They had never been alone since the night of the ball, and Violet was too proud to try for a reconciliation, even if she’d cared for one.
One night we were at a ball at the Prince Humbugandschwerinn’s. The Tressillian had been waltzing with all her might, and had all the men in the room, Humbugandschwerinn himself included, round her. Telfer leaned against a console ten minutes, watching her, and then abruptly left the ball-room, and did not return again. He came instead into the card-room, and sat down to écarté with De Tintiniac, and lost two games at ten Napoleons a side. Generally, he played very steadily, never giving his attention to anything but the game; but now he was listening to what a knot of men were saying, who were laughing, chatting, and sipping coffee, while they talked about — the Tressillian.
“I mark the king and play,” said Telfer, his eyes fixed fiercely on a young fellow who was discussing Violet much as he’d have discussed his new Danish dog or English hunter. He was Jack Snobley, Lord Featherweight’s son, who was doing the grand, a confounded young parvenu, vulgar as his cotton-spinning ancestry could make him, who could appreciate the Tressillian about as much as he could Dannecker’s Ariadne, which work of art he pronounced, in my hearing, “a pretty girl, but the dawg very badly done — too much like a cat.” “I take your three to two,” continued Telfer, his brow lowering as he heard the young fool praising and criticising Violet with small ceremony. The Major had the haughtiest patrician principles, and to hear a snob like this sandy-haired honorable, speaking of the woman he chose to champion as he might have done of some ballerina or Chaumière belle, was rather too much for Telfer’s self-control.
When the game was done, he rose, and walked quietly over to where Snobley stood. He looked him down with that cold, haughty glance that has cowed men bolder than Lord Featherweight’s hopeful offspring, and said a word or two to him in a low tone, which caused that gentleman to flush up red and look fierce with all his might.
“What’s the girl to you, that I mayn’t speak as I choose of her?” he retorted; the Sillery, of which he’d taken a good deal too much, working up in his weak brain. “I’ve heard that she jilted you, and that was why you’ve been setting them all against her, and saying she wanted to hook your old governor.”
The Sillery must have indeed obscured Jack’s reason with a vengeance to make him venture this very elegant and refined speech with the Major, most fastidious in his ideas of good breeding, and most direful in his wrath, of any man I ever knew. Telfer’s cheek turned as white with passion as the bronze would let it; his gray eyes grew almost black as they stared at the young snob. He was so supremely astonished that this ill-bred boy had actually dared thus to address him!
“Mr. Snobley,” he said, with his chilled and most ironical smile, and his quietest, most courteous voice, “you must learn good manners before you venture to parley with gentlemen. Allow me to give you your first lesson.” And stooping, as if to a very little boy — young Snobley was a good foot shorter than he — the Major struck him on the lips with his left-hand French kid glove. It was a very gentle blow — it would scarcely have reddened the Tressillian’s delicate skin — but on the Hon. Jack it had electric effect. He was beginning to swear, to look big, to talk of satisfaction, insult, and all the rest of it; but Telfer laughed, bent his head, told him he was quite ready to satisfy him to any extent he required; and, turning away, sat down to écarté calm and impassive as ever, and pleased greatly with himself for having silenced this silly youth. The affair was much less exciting to him than it was to any other man in the room. “It’s too great an honor for him, the young brute, for me to be called out by him, as if he were one of us. I hate snobs; Lord Featherweight’s grandfather was butler to mine, and he himself was a cotton-spinner in Lancashire, and then this little contemptible puppy dares to — —”
Telfer finished his sentence with a puff of smoke from his meerschaum, as he sat in his bedroom after the ball, into which sanctuary I had followed him to talk a little before turning in.
“To discuss the Tressillian,” said I. “But that surprises me less, old fellow, than that you should champion her. What’s it for? Has hate turned to the other thing? Have you come to think that, though she’d make a very bad mother-in-law, she’d make a charming wife? ‘Pon my life, if you have — —”
“Hush! Don’t jest!”
I knew by the tone of those three little monosyllables that the Major was done for — caught, conquered, and fettered by his dangerous foe.
Telfer sat silent for some minutes, looking out of the window where the dawn was rising over the hills, with a settled gloom upon his face. Then he rose, and began swinging about the room with his firm cavalry tread, his arms crossed on his chest, and his head bent down.
“By Heaven! Vane,” he said at length, in a tone low, but passionate and bitter, “I have gone on like a baby or a fool, playing with tools till they have cut me. Against my will, against my judgment, against reason, hope, everything, I have lingered in that girl’s fascinations till I am bound by them hand and foot. I cannot deceive myself, I cannot shut the truth out; it was not honor, nor chivalry, nor friendship that made me to-night insult the man who spoke jestingly of her; it was love — love as mad, as reckless, as misplaced, as ever cursed a man and drove him to his ruin.” He paused, breathing hard, with his teeth set, then broke out again: “I, who held love in such disdain, who have so long kept my passions in such strong control, who thought no woman had the power to move me against my will — I love at last, despite myself, though I know that she is pitiless, that nothing I have said has been able to touch her into softer feeling, and that, mad as my passion is for her, if her nature be as hard and haughty as I fear, I dare not, if I could, make her my wife. No, Vane, no,” he went on, hastily, as I interrupted. “She does not love me, she has no gentler feeling in her; I thought she had, but I was mistaken. I tried her several times, but she will never forgive my first injustice to her; and to one with so little softness in her nature I dare not trust my peace. It were a worse hell even than that I now endure, to have her with me, loving her as I do, and feel that her cold heart gave no response to mine; to possess her glorious beauty, and yet know that
her love and her soul were dead in their chill pride to me — —”
He paused again, and leaned against the window, his chest heaving, and hot tears standing in his haughty eyes, wrung from the very anguish of his soul. The pride that had never before bent to any human thing, was now cast in the dust before a woman who never did, and probably never would, love him in return.
V. THE DUEL, AND ITS CONSEQUENCES.
The contemptible young puppy, for whom Telfer considered the honor of a ball from his pistol a great deal too good in the morning, sent Heavysides, of the 40th, a chum of his found up at the Bad, to claim “satisfaction,” the valor produced in him by Sillery over night having been kept up since by copious draughts of cognac and Seltzer. Having signified to Heavysides that the Major would do Mr. Snobley the favor of shooting him in the retired valley of Königshöhle at sunrise the next day, I went to tell Telfer, who had a hearty laugh at the young fellow’s challenge.
“I’d give him something to shoot me through the heart,” said he, bitterly, “but I don’t suppose he will. He’s practised at pigeons, not at men, probably. I won’t hurt him much, but a little lesson will do him good. Mind nobody in the house gets wind of the affair. Though I make a fool of myself in her defence, there is no need that she or others should know it. But if the boy should do for me, tell her, Vane — tell her,” said the Major, shading his eyes with his hand, “that I have learnt to love her as I never dreamt I should love any woman, and that I do not blame her for the just lesson she has read me for the rudeness and the unjust prejudice I indulged in so long towards her. She retaliated fairly upon me, and God forbid that she should have one hour of her life embittered through remorse for me.”
His voice sank into a whisper as he spoke; then, with an effort, he forced himself into calmness, and went to play billiards with Marc. This was the man who, three months before, had told me with such contemptuous decision that “we need never fall in love unless it’s convenient; and as to caring for a girl who doesn’t care for us, that was a weakness with which he couldn’t sympathize at all!”