Part 12

To all of which charges Lady Marabout humbly bent her head, metaphorically speaking, and writhed, in secret, under the glance of her ancient enemy, while she talked and laughed with the Duke of Doncaster. C. Petronius, talking epicureanisms and witicisms, while the life-blood was ebbing away at every breath, was nothing to the suffering and the fortitude of Helena, Lady Marabout, turning a smiling, sunny, tranquil countenance to the world in front of her stall, while that world could see Chandos Cheveley admitted behind it!

"I must do something to stop this!" thought Lady Marabout, with the desperation of a Charlotte Corday.

"Is Cheveley going in for the Ormsby tin?" said Amandine to Eyre Lee. "Best thing he could do, eh? But Lady Tattersall and the trustees would cut rough, I am afraid."

"What does Chandos mean with that daughter of Rosediamond's?" wondered her Grace, annoyedly. She had had him some time in her own rose chains, and when ladies have driven a lover long in that sort of harness, they could double-thong him with all the might of their little hands, if they fancy he is trying to break away.

"Is Chandos Cheveley turning fortune-hunter? I suppose he would like Lady Cecil's money to pay off his Ascot losses," said Mrs. Marechale, with a malicious laugh. At Ascot, the day before, he had not gone near her carriage; the year before he had driven her down in her mail-phaeton: what would there be too black to say of him _now_?

"I must do something to stop this!" determined Lady Marabout, driving homewards, and glancing at Cecil Ormsby, as that young lady lay back in the carriage, a little grave and dreamy after her day's campaign--signs of the times terrifically ominous to her chaperone, skilled in reading such meteorological omens. But how was the drag to be put on the wheel? That momentous question absorbed Lady Marabout through her toilette that evening, pursued her to dinner, haunted her through two soirees, kept her wide awake all night, woke up with her to her early coffee, and flavored the potted tongue and the volaille a la Richelieu she took for her breakfast. "I can't turn the man out of town, and I can't tell people to strike him off their visiting-lists, and I can't shut Cecil and myself up in this house as if it were a convent, and, as to speaking to her, it is not the slightest use. She has such a way of putting things that one can never deny their truth, or reason them away, as one can with other girls. Fond as I am of her, she's fearfully difficult to manage. Still I owe it as a sacred duty to poor Rosediamond and the General, who says he places such implicit confidence in me, to interfere. It is my duty; it can't be helped. I must speak to Chandos Cheveley himself. I have no right to consult my own scruples when so much is at stake," valorously determined Lady Marabout, resolved to follow stern moral rules, and, when right was right, to let "le diable prendre le fruit."

To be a perfect woman of the world, I take it, ladies must weed out early in life all such little contemptible weaknesses as a dislike to wounding other people; and a perfect woman of the world, therefore, Lady Marabout was not, and never would be. Nohow could she acquire Anne Hautton's invaluable sneer--nohow could she imitate that estimable pietist's delightful way of dropping little icy-barbed sentences, under which I have known the bravest to shrink, frozen, out of her path. Lady Marabout was grieved if she broke the head off a flower needlessly, and she could not cure herself of the same lingering folly in disliking to say a thing that pained anybody; it is incidental to the De Boncoeur blood--Carruthers inherits it--and I have seen fellows spared through it, whom he could else have withered into the depths of their boots by one of his satirical mots. So she did not go to her task of speaking to Chandos Cheveley, armed at all points for the encounter, and taking pleasure in feeling the edge of her rapier, as Lady Hautton would have done. The Cobra was dangerous, and must be crushed, but Lady Marabout did not very much relish setting her heel on it; it was a glittering, terrible, much-to-be-feared, and much-to-be-abused serpent,--but it might _feel_ all the same, you see.

"I dislike the man on principle, but I don't want to pain him," she thought, sighing for the Hautton stern _savoir faire_ and Achilles impenetrability, and goading herself on with the remembrance of duty and General Ormsby, when the opportunity she had resolved to seek presented itself accidentally at a breakfast at Lady George Frangipane's toy villa at Fulham, and she found herself comparatively alone in the rose-garden with Cheveley, for once without Cecil's terrible violet eyes upon her.

"Will you allow me a few words with you, Mr. Cheveley?" she asked, in her blandest manner--the kindly hypocrite!

The blow must be dealt, but it might as well be softened with a few chloroform fumes, and not struck savagely with an iron-spiked mace.

Cheveley raised his eyes.

"With me? With the greatest pleasure!"

"He is a mere fortune-hunter. I will _not_ spare him, I am resolved," determined Lady Marabout, as she toyed with her parasol-handle, remarked incidentally how unequalled Lady George was in roses, especially in the tea-rose, and dealt blow No. 1. "Mr. Cheveley, I am going to speak to you very frankly. I consider frankness in all things best, myself----"

Cheveley bowed, and smiled slightly.

"I wish he would answer, it would make it so much easier; he will only look at one with those eyes of his, and certainly they _are_ splendid!" thought Lady Marabout, as she went on quickly, on the same principle as the Chasseurs Indiens approach an abattis at double-quick. "When Lord Rosediamond died last year he left, as probably you are aware, his daughter in my sole care; it was a great responsibility--very great--and I feel, of course, that I shall have to answer to him for my discharge of it."

Lady Marabout didn't say whether Rosediamond was accustomed to visit her per medium, and hear her account of her stewardship nightly through a table-claw; but we must suppose that he was. Cheveley bowed again, and didn't inquire, not being spiritually interested.

"Why _won't_ he answer?" thought Lady Marabout. "That I have not been blind to your very marked attention to my dear Cecil, I think you must be aware, Mr. Cheveley, and it is on that subject, indeed, that I----"

"Wished to speak to me? I understand!" said Cheveley as she paused, with that faint smile, half sad, half proud, that perplexed Lady Marabout. "You are about to insinuate to me gently that those attentions have been exceedingly distasteful to you, exceedingly unacceptable in me; you would remind me that Lady Cecil Ormsby is a beauty and an heiress, and that I am a fortune-hunter, whose designs are seen through and motives found out; you would hint to me that our intercourse must cease: is it not so?"

Lady Marabout, cursed with that obstinate, ill-bred, unextinguishable weakness for truth incidental and ever fatal to the De Boncoeurs, couldn't say that it was _not_ what she was going to observe to him, but it was exceedingly unpleasant, now it was put in such plain, uncomplimentary terms, to admit to the man's face that she was about to tell him he was a mercenary schemer, whose attentions only sprang from a lawless passion for the _beaux yeux_ of Cecil's _cassette_.

She would have told him all that, and much more, with greatest dignity and effect, if he hadn't anticipated her; but to have her weapon parried before it was fairly out of its sheath unnerved her arm at the outset.

"What _would_ Anne Hautton do? Dear me! there never was anybody perpetually placed in such wretched positions as I am!" thought Lady Marabout, as she played with her parasol, and murmured something not very clear relative to "responsibility" and "not desirable," two words as infallibly a part of Lady Marabout's stock in trade as a sneer at the "swells" is of _Punch's_. How she sighed for some cold, nonchalant, bitter sentence, such as the Hautton repertoire could have supplied! how she scorned herself for her own weakness and lack of severity! But she would not have relished hurting a burglar's feelings, though she had seen him in the very act of stealing her jewel-boxes, by taxing him with the theft; and though the Ogre _must_ be crushed, the crushing began to give Lady Marabout neuralgic twinges. She was no more able to say the stern things she had rehearsed and resolved upon, than she was able to stab him with her parasol, or strangle him with her handkerchief.

"I guessed rightly what you were about to say to me?" said Cheveley, who seemed somehow or other to have taken all the talk into his own hands, and to have become the master of the position. "I thought so. I do not wonder at your construction; I cannot blame you for your resolution. Lady Cecil has some considerable fortune, they say; it is very natural that you should have imagined a man like myself, with no wealth save a good name, which only serves to make lack of wealth more conspicuous, incapable of seeking her society for any better, higher, more disinterested motive than that of her money; it was not charitable, perhaps, to decide unhesitatingly that it was impossible I could be drawn to her by any other attraction, that it was imperative I must be dead to everything in her that gives her a nobler and a higher charm; but it was very natural, and one learns never to hope for the miracle of a charitable judgment, _even_ from Lady Marabout!"

"My dear Mr. Cheveley, indeed you mistake!" began Lady Marabout, restlessly. That was a little bit of a story, he didn't mistake at all; but Lady Marabout, collapsing like an india-rubber ball under the prick of a sarcasm, shivered all over at his words, his voice, his slight sad smile. "The man is as dreadful as Cecil," she thought; "he puts things so horribly clearly!"

"Mistake? I do not think I do. You have thought all this, and very naturally; but now hear me for a moment. I have sought Lady Cecil's society, that is perfectly true; we have been thrown together in society, very often accidentally; sometimes, I admit, through my own seeking. Few men could be with her and be steeled against her. I have been with her too much; but I sought her at first carelessly, then irresistibly and unconsciously, never with the motive you attribute to me. I am not as utterly beggared as you deem me, but neither am I entirely barren of honor. Believe me, Lady Marabout, my pride alone would be amply sufficient to raise a barrier between me and Cecil stronger than any that could be opposed to me by others. Yesterday I casually overheard words from Amandine which showed me that society, like you, has put but one construction on the attention I have paid her--a construction I might have foreseen had I not been unconsciously fascinated, and forgetful, for the time, of the infallible whispers of my kind friends. Her fortune, I know, was never numbered among her attractions for me; so little, that now that Amandine's careless words have reminded me of the verdict of society, I shall neither seek her nor see her again. Scores of men marry women for their money, and their money alone, but I am not one of them; with my own precarious fortunes, only escaping ruin because I am not rich enough to tempt ruin. I would never take advantage of any interest I may have excited in her, to speak to her of a passion that the world would tell her was only another name for avarice and selfishness. I dare not trust myself with her longer, perhaps. I am no god to answer for my self-control; but you need not fear; I will never seek her love--never even tell her of mine. I shall leave town to-morrow; what _I_ may suffer matters not. Lady Cecil is safe from me! Whatever you may have heard of my faults, follies, or vices, none ever told you, I think, that I broke my word?"

* * * * *

"And when the man said that, my dear Philip, I assure you I felt as guilty as if I had done him some horrible wrong; he stood there with his head up, looking at me with his sad proud eyes--and they are beautiful!--till, positively, I could almost have cried--I could, indeed, for though I don't like him on principle, I couldn't help pitying him," said Lady Marabout, in a subsequent relation of the scene to her son. "Wasn't it a terrible position? I was as near as possible forgetting everything due to poor Rosediamond, and saying to him that I believed Cecil liked him and would never like anybody else, but, thank Heaven! I remembered myself, and checked myself in time. If it had been anybody but Chandos Cheveley, I should really have admired him, he spoke so nobly! When he lifted his hat and left me, though I _ought_ to have been glad (and I _was_ glad, of course) that Cecil would be free from the society of anybody so objectionable and so dangerous, I felt wretched for him--I did indeed. It _is_ so hard always to be placed in such miserable positions!"

By which you will perceive that the triumphant crushing of Lady Marabout's Cobra didn't afford her the unmixed gratification she had anticipated.

"I have done what was my duty to poor Rosediamond, and what General Ormsby's confidence merited," she solaced herself that day, feeling uncomfortably and causelessly guilty, she hardly knew why, when she saw Chandos Cheveley keeping sedulously with the "Amandine set," and read in Cecil's tell-tale face wonder, perplexity, and regret thereat, till the Frangipane fete came to an end. She had appeased the manes of the late Rosediamond, who, to her imagination, always appeared sitting up aloft keeping watch over the discharge of her chaperone's duties, but she had a secret and horrible dread that she had excited the wrath of Rosediamond's daughter. She had driven her Ogre off the scene, it is true, but she could not feel that she had altogether come off the best in the contest. Anne Hautton had congratulated her, indeed, on having "acted with decision _at last_," but then she had marred it all by asking if Carruthers was likely to be engaged to Cecil? And Lady Marabout had been forced to confess he was not; Philip, when pressed by her that very morning to be a little attentive to Cecil, having shaken his head and laughed:

"She's a bewitching creature, mother, but she don't bewitch _me_! You know what Shakspeare says of wooing, wedding, and repentance. I've no fancy for the inseparable trio!"

Altogether, Lady Marabout was far from peace and tranquillity, though the Cobra _was_ crushed, as she drove away from the Frangipane breakfast, and she was little nearer them when Cecil turned her eyes upon her with a question worse to Lady Marabout's ear than the roar of a Lancaster battery.

"What have you said to him?"

"My dear Cecil! What have I said to whom?" returned Lady Marabout, with Machiavellian surprise.

"You know well enough, Lady Marabout! What have you said to him--to Mr. Cheveley?"

Cecil's impetuosity invariably knocked Lady Marabout down at one blow, as a ball knocks down the pegs at lawn billiards. She rallied after the shock, but not successfully, and tried at coldness and decision, as recommended by Hautton prescriptions.

"My dear Cecil, I have said to him what I think it my duty to say to him. Responsible as I am for you----"

"Responsible for me, Lady Marabout? Indeed you are not. I am responsible for myself!" interrupted Lady Cecil, with that haughty arch of her eyebrows and that flush on her face before which Lady Marabout was powerless. "What have you said to him? I _will_ know!"

"I said very little to him, indeed, my dear; he said it all himself."

"What did he say himself?"

"I _must_ tell her--she is so dreadfully persistent," thought the unhappy and badgered Peeress; and tell her she did, being a means of lessening the young lady's interest in the subject of discussion as little judicious as she could well have hit upon.

Lady Cecil listened, silent for once, shading her face with her parasol, shading the tears that gathered on her lashes and rolled down her delicate flushed cheeks, at the recital of Chandos Cheveley's words, from her chaperone's sight.

Lady Marabout gathered courage from the tranquillity with which her recital was heard.

"You see, my love, Chandos Cheveley's own honor points in the same direction with my judgment," she wound up, in conclusion. "He has acted rightly at last, I allow, and if you--if you have for the moment felt a tinge of warmer interest in him--if you have been taken by the fascination of his manner, and invested him with a young girl's romance, you will soon see with us how infinitely better it is that you should part, and how impossible it is that----"

Lady Cecil's eyes flashed such fire through their tears, that Lady Marabout stopped, collapsed and paralyzed.

"It is by such advice as that you repay his nobility, his generosity, his honor!--it is by such words as those you reward him for acting as not one man in a hundred would have acted! Hush, hush, Lady Marabout, I thought better of you!"

"Good Heavens! _where will it end?_" thought Lady Marabout, distractedly, as Rosediamond's wayward daughter sprang down at the door with a flush in her face, and a contemptuous anger in her eyes, that made Bijou, jumping on her, stop, stare, and whine in canine dismay.

"And I fancied she was listening passively!" thought Lady Marabout.

"Well! the man is gone to-day, that is one comfort. I am very thankful I acted as I did," reasoned that ever-worried lady in her boudoir the next morning. "I am afraid Cecil is really very fond of him, there were such black shadows under her eyes at breakfast, poor child! But it is much better as it is--much better. I should never have held up my head again if I had allowed her to make such a disadvantageous alliance. I can hardly bear to think of what would have been said, even now the danger is over!"

While Lady Marabout was thus comforting herself over her embroidery silks, Cecil Ormsby was pacing into the Park, with old Twitters the groom ten yards behind her, taking her early ride before the world was up--it was only eleven o'clock; Cecil had been used to early rising, and would never leave it off, having discovered some recipe that made her independent of ordinary mortals' quantum of sleep.

"Surely he will be here this morning to see me for the last time," thought that young lady, as she paced up the New Ride under the Kensington Gardens trees, with her heart beating quickly under the gold aiglettes of her riding-jacket.

"I must see her once more, and then----" thought Chandos Cheveley, as he leaned against the rails, smoking, as he had done scores of mornings before. His man had packed his things; his hansom was waiting at the gates to take him to the station, and his portmanteau was lettered "Ischl." He had only come to take one last look of the face that haunted him as no other had ever succeeded in doing. The ring of a horse's hoof fell on his ear. There she came, on her roan hack, with the sun glancing off her chestnut hair. He looked up to bow to her as she passed on, for the Ride had never been a rendezvous for more than a bow (Cecil's insurrectionary tactics had always been carried on before Lady Marabout's face), but the roan was pulled up by him that morning for the very first time, and Cecil's eyes fell on him through their lashes.

"Mr. Cheveley--is it true you are going out of town?"

"Quite true."

If her voice quivered as she asked the question, he barely kept his own from doing the same as he answered it.

"Will you be gone long?"

"Till next season, at earliest."

His promise to Lady Marabout was hard to keep! He would not have trusted his strength if he had known she would have done more than canter on with her usual bow and smile.

Cecil was silent. The groom waited like a statue his ten yards behind them. She played with her reins nervously, the color coming and going painfully in her face.

"Lady Marabout told me of--of some conversation you had with her yesterday?"

Low as the words were, Cheveley heard them, and his hand, as it lay on the rails, shook like a girl's.

Cecil was silent again; she looked at him, her eyes full of unshed tears, as the color burned in her face, and she drooped her head almost to a level with her hands as they played with the reins.

"She told me--you----"

She stopped again. Cecil was new to making proposals, though not to rejecting them. Cheveley set his teeth to keep in the words that rushed to his lips, and Cecil saw the struggle as she bent her head lower and lower to the saddle, and twisted the reins into a Gordian knot.

"Do you--must we--why should----"

Fragmentary monosyllables enough, but sufficient to fell his strength.

"For God's sake do not tempt me!" he muttered. "You little know----"

"I know all!" she whispered softly.

"You cannot! My worthless life!--my honor! I could not take such a sacrifice, I would not!----"

"But--if my peace----"

She could not end her phrase, yet it said enough;--his hand closed on hers.

"Your peace! Good God! in _my_ hands! I stay; then--let the world say what it likes!"

* * * * *

"Drive back; I have changed my mind about going abroad to-day," said Cheveley, as he got into his hansom at Albert Gate.

"How soon she has got over it! Girls do," thought Lady Marabout, as Cecil Ormsby came in from her ride with the brightest bloom on her cheeks a June breeze ever fanned there. She laid her hat on the table, flung her gauntlets at Bijou, and threw herself on her knees by Lady Marabout, a saucy smile on her face, though her lashes were wet.

"Dear Lady Marabout, I can forgive you now, but you will never forgive me!"

Lady Marabout turned white as her point-lace cap, gave a little gasp of paralyzed terror, and pushed back her chair as though a shell had exploded on the hearth-rug.

"Cecil! Good Heaven!--you don't mean----"

"Yes I do," said Cecil, with a fresh access of color, and a low, soft laugh.

Lady Marabout gasped again for breath:

"General Ormsby!" was all she could ejaculate.

"General Ormsby? What of him? Did you ever know uncle Johnnie refuse to please _me_? And if my money be to interfere with my happiness, and not promote it, as I conceive it its duty and purpose to do, why, I am of age in July, you know, and I shall make a deed of gift of it all to the Soldiers' Home or the Wellington College, and there is only one person who will care for me _then_."

Lady Cecil was quite capable of carrying her threat into execution, and Lady Cecil had her own way accordingly, as she had had it from her babyhood.

* * * * *