Part 24

Telfer stroked his moustache with a contemptuous smile--_he_ wouldn't have looked at a drysalter's daughter if she'd had all the beauty of Amphitrite.

"Come and see," said Marc. "Virginie will think you're neglecting her atrociously."

Horribly bored to be going to meet some Englishwomen who might turn out to be Smiths or Joneses, and would, to a dead certainty, spoil all his pleasure in pig-sticking, shooting, and ecarte, by flirting with him whether he would or no, the Major strode along corridors and galleries after Von Edenburgh. When at length we reached the salon where Virginie and her mother and friends were, Telfer lifted his eyes from the ground as the door opened, started as if he'd been shot, and stepped back a pace or two, with an audible, "If that isn't the very devil!"

There, in a low chair, sat the Tressillian, graceful as a Sphakiote girl, with a toilet as perfect as her profile, dark hair like waves of silk, and dark eyes full of liquid light, that, when they looked irresistible, could do anything with any man that they liked. Violet certainly looked as unlike that unlucky ogre and scapegoat, the devil, as a young lady ever could. But worse than a score of demons was she in poor Telfer's eyes: to have come out to Essellau only to be shut up in a country-house for a whole month with his pet aversion!--certainly it _was_ a hard case, and the fierce lightning glance he flashed on her was pardonable under the circumstances. But nobody's more impassive than the Major: I've seen him charge down into the Sikhs with just the same calm, quiet expression as he'd wear smoking and reading a novel at home; so he soon rallied, bowed to the Tressillian, who gave him an inclination as cold as the North Pole, shook hands with her aunt and cousins (three women I hate: the mamma's the most dexterous of manoeuvrers, and the girls the arrantest of flirts), and then sat down to a little quiet chat with Virginie von Edenburgh, who's pretty, intelligent, and unaffected, though she's a belle at the Viennese court. Telfer was pleasant with the little comtesse; he'd known her from childhood, and she was engaged to the colonel of Marc's troop, so that Telfer felt quite sure she'd no designs upon him, and talked to her _sans gene_, though to have wholly abstained from bitterness and satire would have been an impossibility to him, with the obnoxious Tressillian seated within sight. Once he fixed her with his calm gray eyes, she met them with a proud flashing glance; Telfer gave back the defiance, and _guerre a outrance_ was declared between them. It was plain to see that they hated one another by instinct, and I began to think Calceolaria wasn't so safe in my stables after all, for if the Major set his face against anything, his father, who pretty well worshipped him, would never venture to do it in opposition; he'd as soon think of leaving Torwood to the country, to be turned into an infirmary or a museum.

That whole day Telfer was agreeable to the Von Edenburgh, distantly courteous to the Carterets, and utterly oblivious of the very existence of the Tressillian. When we were smoking together, after dinner, he began to unburden himself of his mighty wrath.

"Where the deuce did you pick up that girl, Marc?" asked he, as we stood looking at the sun setting over the woods of Essellau, and crimsoning the western clouds.

"What girl?" asked Marc.

"That confounded Tressillian," answered the Major, gloomily.

"I told you the Carterets were friends of my mother's, and last year, when the Tressillian came with them to Baden, Virginie met her, and they were struck with a great and sudden love for one another, after the insane custom of women. But why on earth, Telfer, do you call her such names? I think her divine; her eyes are something----"

"I wish her eyes had been at the devil before she'd bewitched my poor father with them," said Telfer, pulling a rose to pieces fiercely. "I give you my word, Marc, that if I didn't like you so well, I'd go straight off home to-morrow. Here have I been turning out of my route twenty times, on purpose to avoid her, and then she must turn up at the very place I thought I was sure to be safe from her. It's enough to make a man swear, I should say, and not over-mildly either."

"But what's she done?" cried Von Edenburgh, thinking, I dare say, that Telfer had gone clean mad. "Refused you--jilted you--what is it?"

"Refused me! I should like to see myself giving her the chance," said the Major, with intense scorn. "No but she's done what I'd never forgive--tried to cozen the poor old governor into marrying her. She's no money, you know, and no home of her own; but, for all that, for a girl of twenty to try and hook an old man of seventy-five, to cheat him into the idea that he's made a conquest, and chisel him into the belief that she's in love with him--faugh! the very idea disgusts one. What sort of a wife would a woman make who could act such a lie?"

As he spoke, a form swept past him, and a beautiful face full of scorn and passion gleamed on him through the _demi-lumiere_.

"By Jove! you've done it now, Telfer," said Walsham. "She was behind us, I bet you, gathering those roses; her hands are full of them, and she took that means of showing us she was within earshot. You _have_ set your foot in it nicely, certainly."

"_Ce m'est bien egal_," said Telfer, haughtily. "If she hear what I say of her, so much the better. It's the truth, that a young girl who'd sell herself for money, as soon as she's got what she wanted will desert the man who's given it to her; and I like my father too well to stand by and see him made a fool of. The Tressillian and I are open foes now--we'll see which wins."

"And a very fair foe you have, too," thought I, as I looked at Violet that night as she stood in the window, a wreath of lilies on her splendid hair, and her impassioned eyes lighting into joyous laughter as she talked nonsense with Von Edenburgh.

"Isn't she first-rate style, in spite of your prejudice?" I said to Telfer, who'd just finished a game at ecarte with De Tintiniac, one of the best players in Europe. If the Major has any weakness, ecarte is one of them. He just glanced across with a sarcastic smile.

"Well got up, of course; so are all actresses--on the stage."

Then he dropped his glass and went back to his cards, and seemed to notice the splendid Tressillian not one whit more than he did her pup.

Whether his discourteous speeches had piqued Violet into showing off her best paces, or whether it's a natural weakness of her sex to shine in all times and places that they can, certain it was that I never saw the Tressillian more brilliant and bewitching than she was that night. Waltzing with Von Edenburgh, singing with me, talking fun with Fred, or merely lying back in her chair, playing lazily with her bouquet, she was eminently dangerous in whatever she did, and there wasn't a man in the castle who didn't gather round her, except her sworn foe the Major. Even De Tintiniac, that old campaigner at the green tables, who has long ago given over any mistress save hazard, glanced once or twice at the superb eyes beaming with the _droit de conquete_, but Telfer never looked up from his cards.

Telfer and she parted with the chilliest of "good nights," and met again in the morning with the most frigid of "good mornings," and to that simple exchange of words was their colloquy limited for an entire fortnight. Unless I'd been witness of it, I wouldn't have credited that any two people could live for that space of time in the same country-house and keep so distant. Nobody noticed it, for there were no end of guests at Essellau, and the Tressillian had so many liege subjects ready to her slightest bidding, that the Major's _lese-majeste_ wasn't of such consequence. But when day after day came, and he spent them all boar-hunting, shooting, fishing, or playing rouge-et-noir and roulette at the gaming-tables in Pipesandbeersbad, and when he was in the drawing-rooms at Essellau she saw him amusing and agreeable, and unbending to every one but herself, I don't know anything of woman's nature if I didn't see Violet's delicate cheek flush, and her eyes flash, whenever she caught the Major's cool, contemptuous, depreciating glance, much harder to her sex to bear than spoken ridicule or open war. Occasionally he cast a sarcasm, quick, sharp, and relentless as a Minie ball, at her, which she fired back with such rifle-powder as she had in her flask; but the return shot fell as harmlessly as it might have done on Achilles's breast.

"A man is very silly to marry," he was saying one evening to Marc, "since, as Emerson says, from the beginning of the world such as are in the institution want to get out, and such as are out want to get in."

Violet, sitting near at the piano, turned half round. "If all others are of my opinion, Major Telfer, you will never be tempted, for no one will be willing to enter it with you."

The shot fell short. Telfer neither smiled nor looked annoyed, but answered, tranquilly,--

"Possibly; but my time is to come. When I own Torwood, ladies will be as kind to me as they are now to my father; for it is wonderful what a charm to renew youth, reform rakes, buy love, and make the Beast the Beauty, is '_un peu de poudre d'or_,' in the eyes of the _beau sexe_."

The Tressillian flushed scarlet, but soon recovered herself.

"I have heard," she said, pulling her bouquet to pieces with impatience, "that when people look through smoked glass the very sun looks dusky, and so I suppose, through your own moral perceptions, you view those of others. You know what De la Fayette wrote to Madame de Sable: '_Quelle corruption il faut avoir dans l'esprit pour etre capable d'imaginer tout cela!_'"

"It does not follow," answered Telfer, impassively. "De la Fayette was quite wrong. Suard was nearer the truth when he said that Rochefoucauld, '_a peint les hommes comme il les a vus. Il n'appartenait qu'a un homme d'une reputation bien pure et bien distinguee d'oser fletrir ainsi le principe de toutes les actions humaines._'"

"And Major Telfer is so unassailable himself that he can mount his pedestal and censure all weaker mortals," said Violet, sarcastically. "Your judgments are, perhaps, not always as infallible as the gods'."

"You are gone very wide of the original subject, Miss Tressillian," answered Telfer, coldly. "I was merely speaking of that common social fraud and falsehood, a _mariage de convenance_, which, as I shall never sin in that manner myself, I am at liberty to censure with the scorn I feel for it."

He looked hard at her as he spoke. The Tressillian's eyes answered the stare as haughtily.

"Some may not be all _mariages de convenance_ that you choose to call such. It does not necessarily follow, because a girl marries a rich man, that she marries him for his money. There _may_ be love in the case, but the world never gives her the grace of the doubt."

"What hardy hypocrisy," thought Telfer. "She'd actually try to persuade me to my face that she was in love with the poor old governor and his gout!"

"Pardon me," he said, with his most cynical smile. "In attributing disinterested affection to ladies, I think '_quelque disposition qu'ait le monde a mal juger, il fait plus souvent grace au faux merite qu'il ne fait injustice au veritable_.'"

The Tressillian's soft lips curved angrily; she turned away, and began to sing again, at Walsham's entreaty. Telfer got up and lounged over to Virginie, with whom he laughed, talked, waltzed, and played chess for the rest of the evening.

III.

FROM WHICH IT WOULD APPEAR, THAT IT IS SOMETIMES WELL TO BEGIN WITH A LITTLE AVERSION.

After this split, Telfer and the Tressillian were rather further off each other than before; and whenever riding, and driving, at dinner, or in lionizing, they came by chance together, he avoided her silently as much as ever he could, without making a parade of it. Violet could see very well how cordially he hated her, and, woman-like, I dare say mine, and Edenburgh's, and Walsham's, and all her devoted friends' admiration was valueless, as long as her vowed enemy treated her with such careless contempt.

One morning the two foes met by chance. Telfer and I, after a late night over at Pipesandbeersbad, with lansquenet, cheroots, and cognac, had betaken ourselves out to whip the Beersbad, whose fish, for all their boiling by the hot springs, are first-rate, I can assure you. Telfer tells you he likes fishing, but I never see that he does much more than lie full length under the shadiest tree he can find, with his cap over his eyes and his cigar in his mouth, doing the _dolce_ lazily enough. A three-pound trout had no power to rouse him; and he's lost a salmon before now in the Tweed because it bored him to play it! Shade of old Izaak! is _that_ liking fishing? But few things ever did excite him, except it was a charge, or a Kaffir scrimmage; and then he looked more like a concentrated tempest than anything else, and woe to the turban that his sabre came down upon.

That part of the stream we'd tried first had been whipped before us, or the fish wouldn't bite; and I, who haven't as much patience as I might have, went up higher to try my luck. Telfer declined to come; he was comfortable, he said, and out of the sun; he preferred "Indiana" and his cheroot to catching all the fish in the Beersbad, so I bid him good-bye, and left him smoking and reading at his leisure under the linden-trees. I went further on than I had meant, up round a bend of the river, and was too absorbed in filling my basket to notice a storm coming up from the west, till I began to find myself getting wet to the skin, and the lightning flying up and down the hills round Essellau. I looked for the Major as I passed the lime-trees, but he wasn't there, and I made the best of my way back to the castle, supposing he'd got there before me; but I was mistaken.

"I've seen nothing of him," said Marc. "He's stalking about the woods, I dare say, admiring the lightning. That's more than the poor Tressillian does, I bet. She went out by herself, I believe, just before the storm, to get a water-lily she wanted to paint, and hasn't appeared since. By Jove! if Telfer should have to play knight-errant to his 'pet aversion,' what fun it would be."

Marc had his fun, for an hour afterwards, when the storm had blown over, up the terrace steps came Violet and the Major. They weren't talking to each other, but they were actually walking together; and the courtesy with which he put a dripping rose-branch out of her path with his stick, was something quite new.

It seems that Telfer, disliking disagreeable sensations, and classing getting wet among such, had arisen when the thunder began to growl, and slowly wended his way homewards. But before he was halfway to Essellau the rain began to drip off his moustache, and seeing a little marble temple (the Parthenon turned into a summer-house!) close by, he thought he might as well go in and have another weed till it grew finer. Go in he did; and he'd just smoked half a cigar, and read the last chapter of "Indiana," when he looked up, and saw the Tressillian's pug, looking a bedraggled and miserable object, at his feet, and the Tressillian herself standing within a few yards of him. If Telfer had abstained from a few fierce mental oaths, he would have been of a much more pacific nature than he ever pretended to be; and I don't doubt that he looked hauteur concentrated as he rose at his enemy's entrance. Violet made a movement of retreat, but then thought better of it. It would have seemed too much like flying from the foe. So with a careless bow she sank on one of the seats, took off her hat, shook the rain-drops off her hair, and busied herself in sedulous attentions to the pug. The Major thought it incumbent on him to speak a few sentences about the thunder that was cracking over their heads; Violet answered him as briefly; and Telfer putting down his cigar with a sigh, sat watching the storm in silence, not troubling himself to talk any more.

As she bent down to pat the pug she caught his eyes on her with a cold, critical glance. He was thinking how pure her profile was and how exquisite her eyes, and--of how cordially he should hate her if his father married her. Her color rose, but she met his look steadily, which is a difficult thing to do if you've anything to conceal, for the Major's eyes are very keen and clear. Her lips curved with a smile half amused, half disdainful. "What a pity, Major Telfer," she said, with a silvery laugh, "that you should be condemned to imprisonment with one who is unfortunately such a _bete noire_ to you as I am! I assure you, I feel for you; if I were not coward enough to be a little afraid of that lightning, I would really go away to relieve you from your sufferings. I should feel quite honored by the distinction of your hatred if I didn't know, you, on principle, dislike every woman living. Is your judgment always infallible?"

Beyond a little surprise in his eyes, Telfer's features were as impassive as ever. "Far from it," he answered, quietly "I merely judge people by their actions."

The Tressillian's luminous eyes flashed proudly. "An unsafe guide, Major Telfer; you cannot judge of actions until you know their motives. I know perfectly well why you dislike and avoid me: you listened to a foolish report, and you heard me giving your father permission to write to me. Those are your grounds, are they not?"

Telfer, for once in his life, _was_ astonished, but he looked at her fixedly. "And were they not just ones?"

"No," said Violet, vehemently,--"no, they were most rankly unjust; and it is hard, indeed, if a girl, who has no friends or advisers that she can trust, may not accept the kindness and ask the counsels of a man fifty-five years older than herself without his being given to her as a lover, and the world's whispering that she is trying to entrap him. You pique yourself on your clear-sightedness, Major Telfer, but for once your judgment failed you when you attributed such mean and mercenary motives to me, and supposed, because, as you so generously stated, I had 'no money and no home,' I must necessarily have no heart or conscience, but be ready to give myself at any moment to the highest bidder, and take advantage of the kindness of your noble-minded, generous-hearted father to trick him into marriage." She stopped, fairly out of breath with excitement. Telfer was going to speak, but she silenced him with a haughty gesture. "No; now we are started on the subject, hear me to the end. You have done me gross injustice--an offence the Tressillians never forgive--but, for my own sake, I wish to show you how mistaken you were in your hasty condemnation. At the beginning of the season I was introduced to your father. He knew my mother well in her girlhood, and he said I reminded him of her. He was very kind to me, and I, who have no real friend on earth, of course was grateful to him, for I was thankful to have any one on whom I could rely. You know, probably as well as I do, that there is little love lost between the Carterets and myself, though, by my father's will, I must stay with them till I am of age. I have one brother, a boy of eighteen; he is with his regiment serving out in India, and the climate is killing him by inches, though he is too brave to try and get sick leave. Your father has been doing all he can to have him exchanged; the letters I have had from him have been to tell me of his success, and to say that Arthur is gazetted to the Buffs, and coming home overland. There is the head and front of my offending, Major Telfer; a very simple explanation, is it not? Perhaps another time you will be more cautious in your censure."

A faint flush came over the Major's bronzed cheek; he looked out of the portico, and was silent for a minute. The knowledge that he has wronged another is a keen pang to a proud man of an honor almost fastidious in his punctilio of right. He swung quickly round, and held out his hand to her.

"I beg your pardon; I have misjudged you, and I am thoroughly ashamed of myself for it," he said, in a low voice.

When the Major does come down from his hauteur, and let some of his winning cordial nature come out, no woman living, unless she were some animated Medusa, could find it in her heart to say him nay. His frank self-condemnation touched Violet, despite herself, and, without thinking, she laid her small fingers in his proffered hand. Then the Tressillian pride flashed up again; she drew it hastily away, and walked out into the air.

"Pray do not distress yourself," she said, with an effort (not successful) to seem perfectly calm and nonchalant. "It is not of the slightest consequence; we understand each other's sentiments now, and shall in future be courteous in our hate like two of the French _noblesse_, complimenting one another before they draw their swords to slay or to be slain. It has cleared now, so I will leave you to the solitude I disturbed. Come, Floss." And calling the pug after her, Violet very gracefully swept down the steps, but with a stride the Major was at her side.

"Nay, Miss Tressillian," he said, gently, "it is true I've given you cause to think me as rude as Orson or Caliban, but I am not quite such a bear as to let you walk home through these woods alone."

Violet made an impatient movement. "Pray don't trouble yourself. We are close to the castle, and--pardon me, but truth-telling seems the order for the day--I much prefer you in your open enmity to your simulated courtesy. We have been rude to each other for three weeks; in another one you will be gone, so it is scarcely worth while to begin politeness now."

"As you please," said Telfer, coldly.

He'd made great advances and concessions for him, and was far too English when repulsed to go on making any more. But he was astonished--extremely so--for he'd been courted and sought since he was in jackets, and couldn't make out a young girl like the Tressillian treating him so lightly. He walked along beside her in profound silence, but though neither of them spoke a word, he didn't leave her side till she was safe on the terrace at Essellau. The Major was very grave that night at dinner, and occasionally he looked at Violet with a strange, inquiring glance, as the young lady, in the most brilliant of spirits, fired away French repartees with Von Edenburgh and De Tintiniac, her face absolutely _rayonnant_ in the gleam of the wax lights. I thought the spirits were a little too high to be real. Late at night, as he and I and Marc were smoking on the terrace, before turning in, Telfer constrained himself to tell us of the scene in the summer-house. He'd abused her to us. Common honor, he said, obliged him to tell us the truth about her.

"I am sorry," said he, slowly, between the whiffs of his meerschaum. "If there is one thing I hate, it is injustice. I was never guilty of misjudging anybody before in my life, that I know of; and, I give you my word, I experienced a new sensation--I absolutely felt humbled before that girl's great, flashing, truthful eyes, to think that I'd been listening to report and judging from prejudice like any silly, gossiping woman."

"It seems to have made a great impression on you, Telfer," laughed Marc. "Has your detestation of Violet changed to something as warm, but more gentle? Shall we have to say the love wherewith he loves her is greater than the hate wherewith he hated her?"

"Not exactly," answered the Major, calmly, with a supercilious twist of his moustaches. "But I like pluck wherever I see it, and she's a true Tressillian."

IV.

IN WHICH THE MAJOR PROVOKES A QUARREL IN BEHALF OF THE FAIR TRESSILLIAN.

"Well, Telfer," said I, two mornings after, "if you want to be at the moor by the 12th, we must start soon; this is the 6th. It will be sharp work to get there as it is."