Part 11

With which Lady Marabout, getting fairly distracted under the iron hand of adverse fate, and the ruthless surveillance of the Hautton glass, invented an impromptu necessity for immediate shopping at Lewis and Allonby's, and drove off the ground at the sole moment of interest the match possessed for her--viz., when Carruthers was rattling down Hautton's stumps, and getting innings innumerable for the Household.

"Mais ce n'est que le premier pas qui coute;" the old proverb's so true we wear it threadbare with repeating it! Lady Marabout might as well have stayed on Lord's ground, and not lacerated her feelings by leaving at the very hour of the Household Cavalry's triumphs, for any good that she did thereby. The Hautton eye-glass had lighted on Chandos Cheveley, and Chandos Cheveley's eye-glass on Rosediamond's daughter;--and Cecil Ormsby arched her eyebrows, and gave her parasol a little impatient shake as they quitted Lord's.

"Lady Marabout, I never could have believed you ill-natured; you interrupted my ball last night, and my conversation this morning! I shall scold you if you ever do so again. And now tell me (as curiosity is a weakness incidental to all women, no woman ought to refuse to relieve it in another) why _are_ you so prejudiced against that very handsome, and very amusing person?"

"Prejudiced, my dear child! I am not in the least prejudiced," returned Lady Marabout. (Nobody ever admitted to a prejudice that _I_ ever heard. It's a plant that grows in all gardens, and is sedulously matted up, watered, and strengthened; but invariably disavowed by its sturdiest cultivators.) "As for Chandos Cheveley, I merely mentioned to you what all town knows about him; and the dislike I have to his class is one of principle, not of prejudice."

Lady Cecil made a _moue mutine_:

"Oh, Lady Marabout! if you go to 'principle,' _tout est perdu!_ 'Principle' has been made to bear the onus of every private pique since the world began, and has had to answer for more cruelties and injustice than any word in the language. The Romans flung the Christians to the lions 'on principle,' and the Europeans slew the Mahomedans 'on principle,' and 'principle' lighted the autos-da-fe, and signed to the tormentor to give a turn more to the rack! Please don't appeal to anything so severe and hypocritical. Come, what are the Ogre's sins?"

Lady Marabout laughed, despite the subject.

"Do you think I am a compiler of such catalogues, my love? Pray do not let us talk any more about Chandos Cheveley, he is very little worth it; all I say to you is, be as cool to him as you can, without rudeness, of course. I am never at home when he calls, and were I you, I would be always engaged when he asks you to waltz; his acquaintance can in no way benefit you."

Lady Cecil gave a little haughty toss of her head, and lay back in the barouche.

"_I_ will judge of that! I am not made for fetters of any kind, you know, and I like to choose my own acquaintance as well as to choose my own dresses. I cannot obey you either this evening, for he asked me to put him on my tablets for the first waltz at Lord Anisette's ball, and I consented. I had no 'engaged' ready, unless I had had a falsehood ready too, and _you_ wouldn't counsel that, Lady Marabout, I am very sure?"

With which straightforward and perplexing question Cecil Ormsby successfully silenced her chaperone, by planting her in that disagreeable position known as between the horns of a dilemma; and Lady Marabout, shrinking alike from the responsibility of counselling a "necessary equivocation," as society politely terms its indispensable lies, and the responsibility of allowing Cecil acquaintance with the "very worst" of the Amandine set, sighed, wondered envyingly how Anne Hautton would act in her place, and almost began to wish somebody else had had the onerous stewardship of that brilliant and priceless jewel, Rosediamond's daughter, now that the jewel threatened to be possessed with a will of its own:--the greatest possible flaw in a gem of pure water, which they only want to scintillate brilliantly among the bijouterie of society, and let itself be placed passively in the setting most suitable for it, that can be conceived in the eyes of lady lapidaries intrusted with its sale.

"It is very odd," thought Lady Marabout; "she seems to have taken a much greater fancy to that odious man than to Philip, or Goodwood, or Fitz, or any one of the men who admire her so much. I suppose I always _am_ to be worried in this sort of way! However, there can be no real danger; Chandos Cheveley is the merest butterfly flirt, and with all his faults none ever accused him of fortune-hunting. Still, they say he is wonderfully fascinating, and certainly he has the most beautiful voice I ever heard; and if Cecil should ever like him at all, I could never forgive myself, and what _should_ I say to General Ormsby?"

The General, Cecil's uncle and guardian, is one of the best-humored, best-tempered, and most _laissez-faire_ men in the Service, but was, for all that, a perpetual dead weight on Lady Marabout's mind just then, for was not he the person to whom, at the end of the season, she would have to render up account of the successes and the shortcomings of her chaperone's career?

"Do you think of proposing Chandos Cheveley as a suitable alliance for Cecil Ormsby, my dear Helena?" asked Lady Hautton, with that smile which was felt to be considerably worse than strychnine by her foes and victims, at a house in Grosvenor Place, that night.

"God forbid!" prayed Lady Marabout, mentally, as she joined in the Hautton laugh, and shivered under the stab of the Hautton sneer, which was an excessively sharp one. Lady Hautton being one of a rather numerous class of eminent Christians, so panoplied in the armor of righteousness that they can tread, without feeling it, on the tender feet of others.

The evening was spoiled to Lady Marabout; she felt morally and guiltily responsible for an unpardonable indiscretion:--with that man waltzing with Cecil Ormsby, her "graceful, graceless, gracious Grace" of Amandine visibly irritated with jealousy at the sight, and Anne Hautton whispering behind her fan with acidulated significance. Lady Marabout had never been more miserable in her life! She heard on all sides admiration of Rosediamond's daughter; she was gratified by seeing Goodwood, Fitzbreguet, Fulke Nugent, every eligible man in the room, suing for a place on her tablets; she had the delight of beholding Carruthers positively join the negligent beauty's train; and yet the night was a night of purgatory to Lady Marabout, for Chandos Cheveley had his first waltz, and several after it, and the Amandine set were there to gossip, and the Hautton clique to be shocked, at it.

"Soames, tell Mason, when Mr. Chandos Cheveley calls, I am not at home," said Lady Marabout at breakfast.

"Yes, my lady," said Soames, who treasured up the order, and told it to Mr. Chandos Cheveley's man at the first opportunity, though, greatly to his honor, we must admit, he did _not_ imitate the mild formula of fib, and tell his mistress her claret was not corked when it was so incontestably.

Cecil Ormsby lifted her head and looked across the table at her hostess, and the steady gaze of those violet eyes, which were Rosediamond's daughter's best weapons of war, so discomposed Lady Marabout, that she forgot herself sufficiently to proffer Bijou a piece of bread, an unparalleled insult, which that canine Sybarite did not forget all day long.

"Not at home, sir," said Mason, as duly directed, when Cheveley's cab pulled up, a week or two after the general order, at the door.

Cheveley smiled to himself as his gray had her head turned, and the wheel grated off the trottoir, while he lifted his hat to Cecil Ormsby, just visible between the amber curtains and above the balcony flowers of one of the windows of the drawing-room--quite visible enough for her return smile and bow to be seen in the street by Cheveley, in the room by Lady Marabout.

"Some of Lady Tattersall's generalship!" he thought, as the gray trotted out of the square. "Well! I have no business there. Cecil Ormsby is not her Grace of Amandine, nor little Marechale, and the good lady is quite right to brand me 'dangerous' to her charge, and pronounce me 'inadmissible' to her footman. I've very little title to resent her verdict."

"My dearest Cecil, whatever possessed you to bow to that man!" cried Lady Marabout, in direst distress.

"Is it not customary to bow to one's acquaintances--I thought it was?" asked Lady Cecil, with demure mischief.

"But, my dear, from a window!--and when Mason is saying we are not at home!"

"That isn't _Mason's_ fib, or _Mason's_ fault, Lady Marabout!" suggested Cecil, with wicked emphasis.

"There is no falsehood or fault at all anywhere--everybody knows well enough what 'not at home' means," returned Lady Marabout, almost pettishly.

"Oh yes," laughed the young lady, saucily. "It means 'I am at home and sitting in my drawing room, but I shall not rise to receive you, because you are not worth the trouble.' It's a polite cut direct, and a honeyed rudeness--a bitter almond wrapped up in a sugar dragee, like a good many other bonbons handed about in society."

"My dear Cecil, you have some very strange ideas; you will get called satirical if you don't take care," said Lady Marabout, nervously.

Cecil Ormsby's tone worried her, and made her feel something as she felt when she had a restive, half-broken pair of horses in her carriage, for the direction of whose next plunge or next kick nobody could answer.

"And if I be--what then?"

"My dear child, you could not anyhow get a more disadvantageous reputation! It may amuse gentlemen though it frightens half _them_; but it offends all women irremediably. You see, there are so few whom it doesn't hit somewhere," returned Lady Marabout, quite innocent of the neat satire of her own last sentence.

Cecil Ormsby laughed, and threw herself down by her chaperone's side:

"Never mind: I can bear their enmity; it is a greater compliment than their liking. The women whom women love are always quiet, colorless, inoffensive--foils. Lady Marabout, tell me, why did you give that general order to Mason?"

"I have told you before, my dear. Because I have no wish to know Mr. Chandos Cheveley," returned Lady Marabout, as stiffly as she could say anything. "It is, as I said, not from prejudice, but from prin----"

"Lady Marabout, if you use that word again, I will drive to uncle Ormsby's rooms in the Albany and stay with him for the season; I will, positively! I am sure all the gentlemen there will be delighted to have my society! Pray, what _are_ your Ogre's crimes? Did you ever hear anything dishonorable, mean, ungenerous, attributed to him? Did you ever hear he broke his word, or failed to act like a gentleman, or was a defaulter at any settling day?"

Lady Marabout required some explanation of what a defaulter at a settling day might be, and, on receiving it, was compelled to confess that she never _had_ heard anything of that kind imputed to Chandos Cheveley.

"Of course I have not, my dear. The man is a gentleman, everybody knows, however idle and improvident a one. If he could be accused of anything of that kind, he would not belong to such clubs, and associate with such men as he does. Besides, Philip would not know him; certainly would not think well of him, which I confess he does. But that is not at all the question."

"_Ne vous en deplaise_, I think it very much and very entirely the question," returned Lady Cecil, with a toss of her haughty little head. "If you can bring nothing in evidence against a man, it is not right to send him to the galleys and mark him 'Forcat.'"

"My dear Cecil, there is plenty in evidence against him," said Lady Marabout, with a mental back glance to certain stories told of the "Amandine set," "though not of that kind. A man may be perfectly unexceptionable in his conduct with his men friends, but very objectionable acquaintance for us to seek, all the same."

"Ah, I see! Lord Goodwood may bet, and flirt, and lounge his days away, and be as fast a man as he likes, and it is all right; but if Mr. Cheveley does the same, it is all wrong, because he is not worth forgiving."

"Naturally it is," returned Lady Marabout, seriously and naively. "But how very oddly you put things, my love; and why you should interest yourself in this man, when everything I tell you is to his disadvantage, I cannot imagine."

A remark that showed Lady Marabout a skilful tactician, insomuch as it silenced Cecil--a performance rather difficult of accomplishment.

"I am very glad I gave the order to Mason," thought that good lady. "I only wish we did not meet the man in society; but it is impossible to help that. We are all cards of one pack, and get shuffled together, whether we like it or not. I wish Philip would pay her more attention; he admires her, I can see, and he can make any woman like him in ten days when he takes the trouble; but he is so tiresome! She would be exactly suited to him; she has all he would exact--beauty, talent, good blood, and even fortune, though that he would not need. The alliance would be a great happiness to me. Well, he dines here to-night, and he gives that concert at his barracks to-morrow morning, purely to please Cecil, I am sure. I think it may be brought about with careful management."

With which pleasant reflection she went to drive in the Ring, thinking that her maternal and duenna duties would be alike well fulfilled, and her chaperone's career well finished, if by any amount of tact, intrigue, finesses, and diplomacy she could live to see Cecil Ormsby sign herself Cecil Carruthers.

"If that man were only out of town!" she thought, as Cheveley passed them in Amandine's mail-phaeton at the turn.

Lady Marabout might wish Cheveley were out of town--and wish it devoutly she did--but she wasn't very likely to have her desire gratified till the general migration should carry him off in its tide to the deck of a yacht, a lodge in the Highlands, a German Kursaal, or any one of those myriad "good houses" where nobody was so welcome as he, the best shot, the best seat, the best wit, the best billiard-player, the best whist-player, and the best authority on all fashionable topics, of any man in England. Cheveley used to aver that he liked Lady Marabout, though she detested him; nay, that he liked her _for_ her detestation; he said it was cordial, sincere, and refreshing, therefore a treat in the world of Belgravia; still, he didn't like her so well as to leave Town in the middle of May to oblige her; and though he took her hint as it was meant, and pulled up his hansom no more at her door, he met her and Rosediamond's daughter at dinners, balls, concerts, morning-parties innumerable. He saw them in the Ring; he was seen by them at the Opera; he came across them constantly in the gyration of London life. Night after night Lady Cecil persisted in writing his name in her tablets; evening after evening a bizarre fate worried Lady Marabout, by putting him on the left hand of her priceless charge at a dinner-party. Day after day all the harmony of a concert was marred to her ear by seeing her Ogre talking of Beethoven and Mozart, chamber music and bravura music in Cecil's: morning after morning gall was poured into her luncheon sherry, and wormwood mingled in her vol-au-vent, by being told, with frank mischief, by her desired daughter-in-law, that she "had seen Mr. Cheveley leaning on the rails, smoking," when she had taken her after-breakfast canter.

"Chandos Cheveley getting up before noon! He _must_ mean something unusual!" thought her chaperone.

"Helena has set her heart on securing Cecil Ormsby for Carruthers. I hope she may succeed better than she did with poor Goodwood last season," laughed Lady Hautton, with her inimitable sneer, glancing at the young lady in question at a bazaar in Willis's Rooms, selling rosebuds for anything she liked to ask for them, and cigars tied up with blue ribbon a guinea the half-dozen, at the Marabout stall. Lady Hautton had just been paying a charitable visit to St. Cecilia's Refuge, of which she was head patroness, where, having floated in with much benignity, been worshipped by a select little toady troop, administered spiritual consolation with admirable condescension, and distributed illuminated texts for the adornment of the walls and refreshment of the souls, she was naturally in a Christian frame of mind towards her neighbors. Lady Marabout caught the remark--as she was intended to do--and thought it not quite a pleasant one; but, my good sir, did you ever know those estimable people, who spend all their time fitting themselves for another world, ever take the trouble to make themselves decently agreeable in the present one? The little pleasant courtesies, affabilities, generosities, and kindnesses, that rub the edge off the flint-stones of the Via Dolorosa, are quite beneath the attention of Mary the Saint, and only get attended to by Martha the Worldly, poor butterfly thing! who is fit for nothing more serviceable and profitable!

Lady Marabout _had_ set her heart on Cecil Ormsby's filling that post of honor--of which no living woman was deserving in her opinion--that of "Philip's wife;" an individual who had been, for so many years, a fond ideal, a haunting anxiety, and a dreaded rival, en meme temps, to her imagination. She _was_ a little bit of a match-maker: she had, over and over again, arranged the most admirable and suitable alliances; alliances that would have shamed the scepticism of the world in general, as to the desirability of the holy bonds, and brought every refractory man to the steps of St. George's; alliances, that would have come off with the greatest eclat, but for one trifling hindrance and difficulty--namely, the people most necessary to the arrangements could never by any chance be brought to view them in the same light, and were certain to give her diplomacy the _croc-en-jambe_ at the very moment of its culminating glory and finishing finesses. She was a little bit of a match-maker--most kind-hearted women are; the tinder they play with is much better left alone, but _they_ don't remember that! Like children in a forest, they think they'll light a pretty bright fire, just for fun, and never remember what a seared, dreary waste that fire may make, or what a prairie conflagration it may stretch into before it's stopped.

"Cecil Ormsby is a terrible flirt," said Lady Hautton, to another lady, glancing at the rapid sale of the rosebuds and cigars, the bunches of violets and the sprays of lilies of the valley, in which that brilliant beauty was doing such thriving business at such extravagant profits, while the five Ladies Hautton presided solemnly over articles of gorgeous splendor, which threatened to be left on hand, and go in a tombola, as ignominiously as a beauty after half a dozen seasons, left unwooed and unwon, goes to the pele-mele raffle of German Bad society, and is sold off at the finish to an unknown of the Line, or a Civil Service fellow, with five hundred a year.

"Was Cecil a flirt?" wondered Lady Marabout. Lady Marabout was fain to confess to herself that she thought she was--nay, that she hoped she was. If it wasn't flirting, that way in which she smiled on Chandos Cheveley, sold him cigarettes, laughed with him over the ices and nectarines he fetched her, and positively invested him with the cordon d'honneur of a little bouquet of Fairy roses, for which twenty men sued, and he (give Satan his due) did not even ask--if it wasn't flirting, _what was it_? Lady Marabout shivered at the suggestion; and though she was, on principle, excessively severe on flirting, she could be very glad of what she didn't approve, when it aided her, on occasion--like most other people--and would so far have agreed with Talleyrand, as to welcome the worst crime (of coquetry) as far less a sin than the unpardonable blunder of encouraging an Ogre!

"I can't send Cecil away from the stall, as if she were a naughty child, and I can't order the man out of Willis's Rooms," thought that unhappy and fatally-worried lady, as she presided behind her stall, an emphatic witness of the truth of the poeticism that "grief smiles and gives no sign," insomuch as she looked the fairest, sunniest, best-looking, and best-tempered Dowager that ever shrouded herself in Chantilly lace.

"I do think those ineligible, detrimental, objectionable persons ought not to be let loose on society as they are," she pondered; "let them have their clubs and their mess breakfasts, their Ascot and their Newmarket, their lansquenet parties and their handicap pigeon matches, if they like; but to have them come amongst _us_ as they do, asked everywhere if they happen to have good blood and good style, free to waltz and flirt and sing, and show all sorts of attention to marriageable girls, while all the while they are no more available for anything serious than if they were club stewards or cabmen--creatures that live on their fashionable aroma, and can't afford to buy the very bottles of bouquets on their toilette-tables--fast men, too, who, knowing they can never marry themselves, make a practice of turning marriage into ridicule, and help to set all the rich men more dead against it than they are,--to have them come promiscuously among the very best people, with nothing to distinguish them as dangerous, or label them as 'ought to be avoided,'--it's dreadful! it's a social evil! it _ought_ to be remedied! They muzzle dogs in June, why can't they label Ogres in the season? I mustn't send poor little Bijou out for a walk in Kensington Gardens without a string, these men ought not to go about in society without restriction: a snap of Bijou's doesn't do half such mischief as a smile of theirs!"

And Lady Marabout chatted across the stall to his Grace of Doncaster, and entrapped him into purchases of fitting ducal prodigality, and smiled on scores of people she didn't know, in pleasant _pro tempore_ expediency that had, like most expediency in our day, its ultimate goal in their purses and pockets, and longed for some select gendarmerie to clear Willis's Rooms of her Cobra Capella, and kept an eye all the while on Cecil Ormsby--Cecil, selling off everything on the stall by sheer force of her bright violet eyes, receiving ten-pound notes for guinea trifles, making her Bourse rise as high as she liked, courted for a spray of mignonette as entreatingly as ever Law was courted in the Rue Quincampoix for Mississippi scrip, served by a Corps d'Elite, in whom she had actually enlisted Carruthers, Goodwood, Fulke Nugent, Fitzbreguet, and plenty of the most desirable and most desired men in town, yet of which--oh the obstinacy of women! she had actually made Chandos Cheveley, with those wicked little Fairy roses in his coat, positively the captain and the chief!

"It is enough to break one's heart!" thought Lady Marabout, wincing under the Hautton glance, which she saw only the plainer because she _wouldn't_ see it at all, and which said with horrible distinctness, "There is that man, who can hardly keep his own cab, who floats on society like a pleasure-boat, without rudder, ballast, or anchors, of whom I have told you, in virtuous indignation and Christian charity, fifty thousand naughty stories, who visits that wicked, notorious little Marechale, who belongs to the Amandine set, who is everything that he ought not and nothing that he ought to be, who hasn't a penny he doesn't make by a well-made betting-book or a dashed-off magazine article,--there he is flirting all day at your own stall with Rosediamond's daughter, and you haven't the _savoir faire_, the strength of will, the tact, the proper feeling, to stop it!"