by Ouida
Late that night, Telfer and I, coming down the stairs, met the Tressillian going up them to her room. The Major stopped her, and held out his hand, with a softened light in his eyes. “Will you not bid me good-bye? I may not see you again.”
There was a sadness in his smile bitterly significant to me, but very likely she didn’t see it, not having any key to it, as I had.
Violet turned pale, and I fancied her lips twitched, but it might be the flickering of the light of the staircase lamps on her face. At any rate, being a young lady born and bred in good society, she put her hand in his, with a simple “What! are you going away?”
“Perhaps. At any rate, let us part in peace.”
The proud man laughed as he said it, though he was enduring tortures. Violet heard the laugh, and didn’t see the straining anxiety in his gaze.
She drew her hand rapidly away. “Certainly. Bon voyage, Major Telfer, and good night,” she answered, carelessly; and, with a graceful bend, the Tressillian floated on up the stairs with the dignity of a young empress.
Telfer looked after the white gossamer dress and the beautiful head, with its wreath of scarlet flowers, and an iron sternness settled on his face. All hope was gone now. She could not have parted with him like this if she had cared for him one straw more than for the flowers in her hair. Yet, in the morning, he was going to risk his life for her. Ah, well! I’ve always seen that in love there’s one of the two who gives all and gets nothing.
In the morning, by five o’clock, in the valley of Königshöhle, a snug bit of pasture land between two rocks, where no gendarme could pounce upon us, young Snobley made his appearance to enjoy the honor of being a target for one of the best shots in Europe. Snobley had a good deal of swagger and would-be dash, and made a great show of pluck, which your man of true pluck never does. Telfer stood talking to me up to the last minute, took his pistol carelessly in his hand, and, without taking any apparent aim, fired.
If Telfer made up his mind to shoot off your fifth waistcoat-button, your fifth waistcoat-button would be irrevocably doomed; and therefore, having determined to himself to lodge a bullet in this young puppy’s left wrist, in the left wrist did the ball lodge. Snobley was “satisfied,” very amply satisfied, I fancy, by his looks. He’d fired, and sent his shot right into the trunk of a chestnut growing some seven yards off his opponent, to Heavyside’s supreme scorn.
“That’ll teach him not to talk of young ladies in his Mabille slang,” said Telfer, lighting his cigar. “I hope the little snob may be the better for my lesson. Now I am en route, I’ll go over to Pipesandbeersbad, breakfast at the Hôtel de France, and go and see Humbugandschwerinn: he wants me to look at some English racers Brookes has just sent him over. Make my excuses at Essellau; and I say, Vane, see if you can’t get us away in a day or two; have some call home, or something, for I shall never stand this long.”
With which not over-clear speech the Major mounted his horse and cantered off towards the Bad.
I rode back; went to my own room, had some chocolate, read Pigault le Brun, and about noon, seeing Virginie, the Tressillian, and several others out on the terrace, went to join them. Marc slipped his arm through mine and drew me aside.
“I say, Vane, what’s all this about Telfer striking some fellow for talking about the Tressillian? Staurmgaurn was over here just now, and told me there was a row in the card-room at Humbugandschwerinn’s between Telfer and another Englishman. I knew nothing about it. Is it true?”
“So far true,” I answered, “that Telfer put a ball in the youth’s wrist at seven o’clock this morning; and serve him right too — he’s an impudent young snob.”
“By Jove!” cried Marc, “what in the world made him take the Tressillian’s part? Have the beaux yeux really made an impression on the most unimpressionable of men?”
“The devil they have,” said I, crossly; “but I wish she’d been at the deuce first, for he’s too good a fellow to waste his best years pining after a pair of dark eyes.”
Marc shrugged his shoulders. “C’est vrai; but we’re all fools some time or other. The idea of Telfer’s chivalry! I declare it’s quite like the old days of Froissart and Commines — fighting for my lady’s favor.” And away he went, singing those two famous lines from Alcyonée:
Pour mériter son cœur, pour plaire à ses beaux yeux, J’ai fait la guerre aux rois: je l’aurais faite aux dieux;
and I thought to myself that if the Tressillian proved a De Longueville, I could find it in my soul to shoot her without remorse.
But as I turned away from Marc, I came upon her, looking pale and ill enough to satisfy anybody. The color flushed into her cheeks as she saw me; we spoke of the weather, the chances of storm, Floss’s new collar, and other trifles; then she asked me, bending over her little dog, —
“Is Captain Staurmgaurn’s news true, that your friend has — has been quarrelling with a young Englishman?”
“Yes,” I answered. “I wonder Staurmgaurn told you; it is scarcely a topic to interest ladies. Telfer has given the young gentleman a well-merited lesson.”
“Have they fought?” she asked, breathlessly, laying her hand on my arm, and looking as white as a ghost.
“Yes, they have,” said I; “and he fought, Miss Tressillian, for one who gave him a very cold adieu last night.”
Her head drooped, she trembled perceptibly, and the color rushed back to her cheeks.
“Is he safe?” she asked, in the lowest of whispers.
“Quite,” I answered, quickly, as De Tintiniac lounged up to us; and I left my words, like a prudent diplomatist, to bear fruit as best they might.
I wondered if she cared for him, or if it was merely a girl’s natural feeling for a man who had let himself be shot at, rather than hear a light word spoken of her. But they were both so deuced proud, Heaven’s special intervention alone seemed likely to bring them together.
The Major didn’t come home from Pipesandbeersbad till between two and three that night, and he’s told me since that being un peu fou with his self-willed and vehement passion, never went to bed at all, but sat and walked about his room smoking, unable to sleep, in a frame of mind that, when sane, a few months before, he would have pronounced spoony and contemptible in the lowest degree. At eight he strode forth into the park, brushing off the dew with his impatient steps, glad of the fresh morning air upon his brow, which was as burning as our first headache from “that cursed punch of Jones’s,” the day after our “first wine,” which acute suffering any gentleman who ever tasted that delicious mélange of rum and milk and lemons, will keenly recall among other passed-away passages of his green youth.
Telfer strode on and on, over the molehills and through the ferns, down this slope and up that, under the oaks, and lindens, and fir-trees gleaming red beneath the October sun, with very little notion of where he was going or what he was doing, a great stag-hound of Marc’s following at his heels. The path he took, without thinking, led him to the top of a rock overhanging the Beersbad, where that historic stream was but a few yards in width; and here Telfer, lying down with his head against a plane-tree, struck a fusee and lighted a cigar — for a weed’s a pleasant companion in any stage of existence: if we’re happy we smoke in the fulness of our hearts, and build airy castles on each fragrant cloud; and if we’re unhappy, we smoke to console ourselves, and draw in with each whiff philosophy and peace. So the Major smoked and thought, till a bark from the staghound made him look up. On the top of the cliffs on the other side of the stream, looking down into the valleys below, with her head turned away from him, stood Violet Tressillian; and at the sight of that graceful figure, with its indescribable high-bred air, I don’t doubt the Major’s once unimpressive heart beat faster than it had ever done in a charge or a skirmish. She was full twenty feet above him, and the rocks on which she stood sloped precipitately down to a ledge exactly opposite that on which he lay smoking — a ledge in reality but a few inches wide, but to which the treacherous boughs and ferns w
aving over it gave a semblance of a firm broad footing — a semblance which (like a good many other things one meets with) it utterly failed to carry out when you came to try it.
Violet, not seeing Telfer lying perdu among the grass at the foot of his plane-tree, walked along to the edge of the cliff, her eyes on the ground, so deep in thought that she never noticed the river beneath, but began to descend the slope, little Floss coming with exceeding trepidation after her. Telfer sprang up to warn her. “Violet! Violet! go back! go back! Oh! my God, do you not hear?”
His passionate tones startled her. Never dreaming he was there, she looked hurriedly up; her foot slipped; unable to stay her descent, she came down the steep cliff with an impetus which, to a certainty, would send her over the narrow ledge into the river below — a fall of full thirty feet. To see her perish thus before his eyes — die thus while he stood calmly by! A whole age of torture was crowded into the misery of that one brief moment. There was but one way to save her. He sprang across the gulf that parted them, while the river in its straitened bed hissed and foamed beneath him, and, standing on the narrow ledge, where there seemed scarce footing for a dog, he caught her as she fell in his iron grasp, as little swayed by the shock as the rock on which he stood. Holding her tight to him with one arm, he swung himself down by the other to a less dangerous position, on a flat plateau of cliff, and leaning against one of the linden-trees on its summit, he bent over her; his eyes dim, and his pulses beating with the emotions he had controlled while he wanted cool thought and firm nerve to save her, but over which he had no more power now. He pressed her to his heart, forgetting pride, and doubt, and fear; and Violet, by way of answer, only burst into a passion of tears. Who would have recognized the proud, brilliant Tressillian, in the pale, trembling woman who sobbed on his breast with the abandon of a child, and who, at his passionate kisses, only blushed like a wild rose?
Telfer evidently thought the transformation complete, for he forgot all his reserve resolutions and hauteur, and poured out the tenderest love for a girl who, three months before, he had wished at the devil! And the Tressillian was conquered at last; she was pitiless no longer, and, having vanquished him, was, woman-like, ready to be a slave to her captive; and her eyes were never more dangerous than now, when, shy and softened, they looked up through their tears into Telfer’s.
What old De Tintiniac said of her was true, that all her beauty wanted to make it perfect was for her to be in love!
So at least I thought, when, several hours afterwards, I met them coming across the park, and I knew by the gleam of the Major’s eyes that he had lost Calceolaria and won Violet.
“How strange it is,” laughed Telfer that evening, when they were alone in the conservatory, “that you and I, who so hated each other, should now be so dear to one another. Oh, Violet! how ashamed I have been since of my unjustifiable prejudices, my abominable discourtesy — —”
“You were dreadfully rude,” said the Tressillian, smiling; “and judged me very cruelly by all the false reports that women chose to gossip of me. But you are wrong. I never hated you. Your father had spoken of you as so generous, so noble, so chivalrous a soldier, so kind a son, that I was prepared to admire you immensely, and when you looked so sternly on me at our first introduction, and I overheard your bitter words about me at the station, I really was never more vexed and disappointed in my life. And then a demon entered into me, and I thought — forgive me, Hamilton — that I would try to make you repent your hasty judgment and recant your prejudices. But I could not always fight you with the coolness I wished; your indifference began to pique me more and more. Wounds from you ranked as they did from no one else, and something besides pride made me feel your neglect so keenly. I had meant — yes, I must tell you all,” and the Tressillian, in her soft repentance, looked, Telfer thought, more bewitching than in her most brilliant moments— “I had wished,” she went on in a whisper, with her color bright, “to make you regret your injustice, to conquer your stubborn pride, and to revenge myself on you for all the wrong you had done me in thoughts and words. But, you see, I wasn’t so strong as I fancied; I thought I could fence with the buttons on, but I was mistaken, and — and — when I heard that you had fought for me, I knew then that — —” And Violet stopped with a smile and a sigh; the sigh for the past, I suppose, and the smile for the present.
“Well, nous sommes quittes, dearest,” smiled Telfer. “Thank Heaven! we no longer need reproach each other. Too many elevate the one they love into an ideal of such superhuman excellence, that at the first shadow of mortality they see their poor idol is shivered from its pedestal. But we have seen the worst side of each other’s character, Violet, and henceforth love shall cover all faults, and subdue all pride between us.”
Telfer kept his word. They had had their last quarrel, and buried their last suspicion before their marriage, and were not, like the generality, doves first and tigers after. The governor, of course, was charmed that a match on which he had secretly set his heart had brought itself about so neatly without his interference. He had begun to despair of his son’s ever giving Torwood a mistress, and the diamonds he gave Violet, in the excess of his pleasure, brought her no end of female enemies, for they were some of the finest water in the kingdom. Seldom, indeed, has slander been productive of such good fruits, for rarely, very rarely, does that Upas-tree put forth any but Dead Sea apples.
Violet Tressillian was Violet Telfer before the Christmas recess, but I considered the bet drawn. So Telfer and I exchanged the roan filly and the colt, and Calceolaria in the Torwood stables, and Jockey Club in my stalls, stand witnesses to this day of Our Wager, and how the Major Lost and Won.
OUR COUNTRY QUARTERS.
I remember well the day that we (that is the 110th Lancers) were ordered down to Layton Rise. Savage enough we all were to quit P —— for that detestable country place. Many and miserable were the tales we raked up of the ennui we had experienced at other provincial quarters; sadly we dressed for Lady Dashwood’s ball, the last soirée before our departure. And then the bills and the billets-doux that rained down upon our devoted heads!
However, by some miracle we escaped them all; and on a bright April morning, 184-, we were en route for this Layton Rise, this terra incognita, as grumpy and as seedy as ever any poor demons were. But there was no help for it; so leaving, we flattered ourselves, a great many hearts the heavier for this order from the Horse Guards, we, as I said, set out for Layton Rise.
The only bit of good news that provoking morning had brought was that my particular chum, Drummond Fane, a captain of ours, who had been cutting about on leave from Constantinople to Kamtchatka for the last six months, would join us at Layton. Fane was really a good fellow, a perfect gentleman (ça va sans dire, as he was one of ours), intensely plucky, knew, I believe, every language under the sun, and, as he had been tumbling about in the world ever since he went to Eton at eight years old, had done everything, seen everything, and could talk on every possible subject. He was a great favorite with ladies: I always wonder they did not quite spoil him. I have seen a young lady actually neglect a most eligible heir to a dukedom, that her mamma had been at great pains to procure for her, if this “fascinating younger son” were by. For Fane was the younger son of the Earl of Avanley, and would, of course, every one said, one day retrieve his fortunes by marriage with some heiress in want of rank.
He has been my great friend ever since I, a small youth, spoiled by having come into my property while in the nursery, became his fag at Eton: and when I bought my commission in the 110th, of which he was a captain, our intimacy increased.
But revenons à nos moutons. On the road we naturally talked of Layton, wondering if there was any one fit to visit, anybody that gave good dinners, if there was a pack of hounds, a billiard-room, or any pretty girls. Suddenly the Honorable Ennuyé L’Estrange threw a little light on the matter, by recollecting, “now he thought of it, he believed that was where an uncle of his lived; his name was Aspi —
Aspinall — no! Aspeden.” “Had he any cousins?” was the inquiry. He “y’ally could not remember!” So we were left to conjure up imaginary Miss Aspedens, more handsome than their honorable cousin, who might relieve for us the monotony of country quarters. The sun was very bright as we entered Layton Rise; the clattering and clashing that we made soon brought out the inhabitants, and, lying in the light of a spring day, it did not seem such a very miserable little town after all. Our mess was established at the one good inn of the one good street of the place, and I and two other young subs fixed our residence at a grocer’s, where a card of “Lodgings to let furnished” was embordered in vine-leaves and roses.
As I was leaning out of the window smoking my last cigar before mess, with Sydney and Mounteagle stretched in equally elegant attitudes on equally hard sofas, I heard our grocer, a sleek little Methodist, addressing some party in the street with— “I fear me I have done evil in admitting these young servants of Satan into mine habitation!” “Well, Nathan,” replied a Quaker, “thou didst it for the best, and verily these officers seem quiet and gentlemanly youths.” “Gentlemanlike,” I should say we were, rather — but “quiet!” — how we shouted over the innocent “Friend’s” mistake. Here the voices again resumed. “Doubtless, when the Aspedens return, there will be dances and devices of the Evil One, and Quelps will make a good time of it; however, the custom of ungodly men I would not take were it offered!” So these Aspedens were out — confound it! But the clock struck six; so, flinging the remains of my cigar on the Quaker’s broad-brimmed hat, adorned with which ornament he walked unconsciously away, we strolled down to the mess-room.
A few hours later some of them met in my room, and having sent out for some cards, which the grocer kindly wrapped in a tract against gambling, we had just sat down to loo, when the door was thrown open, and Captain Fane announced. A welcome addition!