Part 16

"No more I do, my dear--that is, under some circumstances; it is impossible to lay down a fixed rule for everything! Marriages of convenience--well, perhaps not; but as _I_ understand these words, they mean a mere business affair, arranged as they are in France, without the slightest regard to the inclinations of either; merely regarding whether the incidents of fortune, birth, and station are equal and suitable. Marriages _de convenance_ are when a parvenu barters his gold for good blood, or where an _ancienne princesse_ mends her fortune with a _nouveau riche_, profound indifference, meanwhile, on each side. I do not call this so; decidedly not! Goodwood must be very deeply attached to you to have forgotten his detestation of marriage, and laid such a title as his at your feet. Have you any idea of the weight of the Dukes of Doncaster in the country? Have you any notion of what their rent-roll is? Have you any conception of their enormous influence, their very high place, the magnificence of their seats? Helmsley almost equals Windsor! All these are yours if you will; and you affect to hesitate----"

"To let Lord Goodwood buy me!"

"Buy you? Your phraseology is as strange as my son's!"

"To accept him only for the coronet and the rent-roll, his position and his Helmsley, seems not a very grateful and flattering return for his preference?"

"I do not see that at all," said Lady Marabout, irritably. Is there anything more annoying than to have unwelcome truths thrust in our teeth? "It is not as though he were odious to you--a hideous man, a coarse man, a cruel man, whose very presence repelled you. Goodwood is a man quite attractive enough to merit some regard, independent of his position; you have an affectionate nature, you would soon grow attached to him----"

Flora Montolieu shook her head.

"And, in fact," she went on, warming with her subject, and speaking all the more determinedly because she was speaking a little against her conscience, and wholly for her inclinations, "my dear Flora, if you need persuasion--which you must pardon me if I doubt your doing in your heart, for I cannot credit any woman as being insensible to the suit of a future Duke of Doncaster, or invulnerable to the honor it does her--if you need persuasion, I should think I need only refer to the happiness it will afford your poor dear mother, amidst her many trials, to hear of so brilliant a triumph for you. You are proud--Goodwood will place you in a position where pride may be indulged with impunity, nay, with advantage. You are ambitious--what can flatter your ambition more than such an offer. You are clever--as Goodwood's wife you may lead society like Madame de Rambouillet or immerse yourself in political intrigue like the Duchess of Devonshire. It is an offer which places within your reach everything most dazzling and attractive, and it is one, my dear Flora, which you must forgive me if I say a young girl of obscure rank, as rank goes, and no fortune whatever, should pause before she lightly rejects. You cannot afford to be fastidious as if you were an heiress or a lady-in-your-own-right."

That was as ill-natured a thing as the best-natured lady in Christendom ever said on the spur of self-interest, and it stung Flora Montolieu more than her hostess dreamed.

The color flushed into her face and her eyes flashed.

"You have said sufficient, Lady Marabout, I accept the Marquis to-morrow!"

And taking up her fan and her opera-cloak, leaving the discarded roses unheeded on the floor, she bade her chaperone good-night, and floated out of the dressing-room, while Lady Marabout sat stirring the cream in a second cup of coffee, a good deal puzzled, a little awed by the odd turn affairs had taken, with a slight feeling of guilt for her own share in the transaction, an uncomfortable dread lest the day should ever come when Flora should reproach her for having persuaded her into the marriage, a comfortable conviction that nothing but good _could_ come of such a brilliant and enviable alliance, and, above all other conflicting feelings, one delicious, dominant, glorified security of triumph over the Hauttons, _mere et filles_.

But when morning dawned, Lady Marabout's horizon seemed cleared of all clouds, and only radiant with unshadowed sunshine. Goodwood was coming, and coming to be accepted.

She seemed already to read the newspaper paragraphs announcing his capture and Flora's conquest, already to hear the Hauttons' enforced congratulations, already to see the nuptial party gathered round the altar rail of St. George's. Lady Marabout had never felt in a sunnier, more light-hearted mood, never more completely at peace with herself and all the world as she sat in her boudoir at her writing-table, penning a letter which began:

"MY DEAREST LILLA,--What happiness it gives me to congratulate you on the brilliant future opening to your sweet Flora----"

And which would have continued, no doubt, with similar eloquence if it had not been interrupted by Soames opening the door and announcing "Sir Philip Carruthers," who walked in, touched his mother's brow with his moustaches, and went to stand on the hearth with his arm on the mantelpiece.

"My dear Philip, you never congratulated me last night; pray do so now!" cried Lady Marabout, delightedly, wiping her pen on the pennon, which a small ormolu knight obligingly carried for that useful purpose. Ladies always wipe their pens as religiously as they bolt their bedroom doors, believe in cosmetics, and go to church on a Sunday.

"Was your news of last night true, then?" asked Carruthers, bending forwards to roll Bijou on its back with his foot.

"That Goodwood had spoken definitively to her? Perfectly. He proposed to her yesterday at the Frangipane concert--not _at_ the concert, of course, but afterwards, when they were alone for a moment in the conservatories. The Duchess interrupted them--did it on purpose--and he had only time to whisper hurriedly he should come this morning to hear his fate. I dare say he felt tolerably secure of it. Last night I naturally spoke to Flora about it. Oddly enough, she seemed positively to think at first of rejecting him--_rejecting_ him!--only fancy the madness! Between ourselves, I don't think she cares anything about him, but with such an alliance as that, of course I felt it my bounden duty to counsel her as strongly as I could to accept the unequalled position it proffered her. Indeed, it could have been only a girl's waywardness, a child's caprice to pretend to hesitate, for she _is_ very ambitious and very clever, and I would never believe that any woman--and she less than any--would be proof against such dazzling prospects. It would be absurd, you know, Philip. Whether it was hypocrisy or a real reluctance, because she doesn't feel for him the idealic love she dreams of, I don't know, but I put it before her in a way that plainly showed her all the brilliance of the proffered position, and before she bade me good night, I had vanquished all her scruples, if she had any, and I am able to say----"

"Good God, what have you done?"

"Done?" re-echoed Lady Marabout, vaguely terrified. "Certainly I persuaded her to accept him. She _has_ accepted him probably; he is here now! I should have been a strange person indeed to let any young girl in my charge rashly refuse such an offer."

"You induced her to accept him! God forgive you!"

Lady Marabout turned pale as death, and gazed at him with undefinable terror.

"Philip! You do not mean----"

"Great Heavens! have you never seen, mother----?"

He leaned his arms on the marble, with his forehead bowed upon them, and Lady Marabout gazed at him still, as a bird at a basilisk.

"Philip, Philip! what have I done? How could I tell?" she murmured, distractedly, tears welling into her eyes. "If I had only known! But how could I dream that child had any fascination for you? How could I fancy----"

"Hush! No, you are in no way to blame. You could not know it. _I_ barely knew it till last night," he answered, gently.

"Philip loves her, and _I_ have made her marry Goodwood!" thought Lady Marabout, agonized, remorseful, conscience-struck, heart-broken in a thousand ways at once. The climax of her woes was reached, life had no greater bitterness for her left; her son loved, and loved the last woman in England she would have had him love; that woman was given to another, and _she_ had been the instrument of wrecking the life to save or serve which she would have laid down her own in glad and instant sacrifice! Lady Marabout bowed her head under a grief, before which the worries so great before, the schemes but so lately so precious, the small triumphs just now so all-absorbing, shrank away into their due insignificance. Philip suffering, and suffering through her! Self glided far away from Lady Marabout's memory then, and she hated herself, more fiercely than the gentle-hearted soul had ever hated any foe, for her own criminal share in bringing down this unforeseen terrific blow on her beloved one's head.

"Philip, my dearest, what _can_ I do?" she cried, distractedly; "if I had thought--if I had guessed----"

"Do nothing. A woman who could give herself to a man whom she did not love should be no wife of mine, let me suffer what I might."

"But _I_ persuaded her, Philip! Mine is the blame!"

His lips quivered painfully:

"Had she cared for me as--I may have fancied, she had not been so easy to persuade! She has much force of character, where she wills. He is here now, you say; I cannot risk meeting him just yet. Leave me for a little while; leave me--I am best alone."

Gentle though he always was to her, his mother knew him too well ever to dispute his will, and the most bitter tears Lady Marabout had ever known, ready as she was to weep for other people's woes, and rarely as she had to weep for any of her own, choked her utterance and blinded her eyes as she obeyed and closed the door on his solitude. Philip--her idolized Philip--that ever her house should have sheltered this creature to bring a curse upon him! that ever she should have brought this tropical flower to poison the air for the only one dear to her!

"I am justly punished," thought Lady Marabout, humbly and penitentially--"justly. I thought wickedly of Anne Hautton. I did not do as I would be done by. I longed to enjoy their mortification. I advised Flora against my own conscience and against hers. I am justly chastised! But that _he_ should suffer through me, that my fault has fallen on his head, that my Philip, my noble Philip, should love and not be loved, and that _I_ have brought it on him----Good Heaven! what is that?"

"That" was a man whom her eyes, being misty with tears, Lady Marabout had brushed against, as she ascended the staircase, ere she perceived him, and who, passing on with a muttered apology, was down in the hall and out of the door Mason held open before she had recovered the shock of the rencontre, much before she had a possibility of recognizing him through the mist aforesaid.

A fear, a hope, a joy, a dread, one so woven with another there was no disentangling them, sprang up like a ray of light in Lady Marabout's heart--a possibility dawned in her: to be rejected as an impossibility? Lady Marabout crossed the ante-room, her heart throbbing tumultuously, spurred on to noble atonement and reckless self-sacrifice, if fate allowed them.

She opened the drawing-room door; Flora Montolieu was alone.

"Flora, you have seen Goodwood?"

She turned, her own face as pale and her own eyes as dim as Lady Marabout's.

"Yes."

"You have refused him?"

Flora Montolieu misconstrued her chaperone's eagerness, and answered haughtily enough:

"I have told him that indifference would be too poor a return for his affections to insult him with it, and that I would not do him the injury of repaying his trust by falsehood and deception. I meant what I said to you last night; I said it on the spur of pain, indignation, no matter what; but I could not keep my word when the trial came."

Lady Marabout bent down and kissed her, with a fervent gratitude that not a little bewildered the recipient.

"My dear child! thank God! little as I thought to say so. Flora, tell me, you love some one else?"

"Lady Marabout, you have no right----"

"Yea, I have a right--the strongest right! Is not that other my son?"

Flora Montolieu looked up, then dropped her head and burst into tears--tears that Lady Marabout soothed then, tears that Carruthers soothed, yet more effectually still, five minutes afterwards.

* * * * *

"That _I_ should have sued that little Montolieu, and sued to her for Philip!" mused Lady Marabout. "It is very odd. Perhaps I get used to being crossed and disappointed and trampled on in every way and by everybody; but certainly, though it is most contrary to my wishes, though a child like that is the last person I should ever have chosen or dreamt of as Philip's wife, though it is a great pain to me, and Anne Hautton of course will be delighted to rake up everything she can about the Montolieus, and it _is_ heart-breaking when one thinks how a Carruthers _might_ marry, how the Carruthers always _have_ married, rarely any but ladies in their own right for countless generations, still it _is_ very odd, but I certainly feel happier than ever I did in my life, annoyed as I am and grieved as I am. It _is_ heart-breaking (that horrid John Montolieu! I wonder what relation one stands in legally to the father of one's son's wife; I will ask Sir Fitzroy Kelley; not that the Montolieus are likely to come to England)--it is very sad when one thinks whom Philip might have married; and yet she certainly is infinitely charming, and she really appreciates and understands him. If it were not for what Anne Hautton will always say, I could really be pleased! To think what an anxious hope, what a dreaded ideal, Philip's wife has always been to me; and now, just as I had got reconciled to his determined bachelor preferences, and had grown to argue with him that it was best he shouldn't marry, he goes and falls in love with this child! Everything is at cross-purposes in life, I think! There is only one thing I am resolved upon--I will NEVER chaperone anybody again."

And she kept her vow. None can christen her Lady Tattersall any longer with point, for there are no yearling sales in that house in Lowndes Square, whatever there be in the other domiciles of that fashionable quarter. Lady Marabout has shaken that burden off her shoulders, and moves in blissful solitude and tripled serenity through Belgravia, relieved of responsibility, and wearing her years as lightly, losing the odd trick at her whist as sunnily, and beaming on the world in general as radiantly as any dowager in the English Peerage.

That she was fully reconciled to Carruthers's change of resolve was shown in the fact that when Anne Hautton turned to her, on the evening of his marriage-day, after the dinner to which Lady Marabout had bidden all her friends, and a good many of her foes, with an amiable murmur:

"I am _so_ grieved for you, dearest Helena--I know what your disappointment must be!--what should _I_ feel if Hautton----Your _belle-fille_ is charming, certainly, very lovely; but then--such a connection! You have my deepest sympathies! I always told you how wrong you were when you fancied Goodwood admired little Montolieu--I beg her pardon, I mean Lady Carruthers--but you _will_ give your imagination such reins!"

Lady Marabout smiled, calmly and amusedly, felt no pang, and--thought of Philip.

I take it things must be very rose-colored with us when we can smile sincerely on our enemies, and defeat their stings simply because we feel them not.

A STUDY A LA LOUIS QUINZE;

OR,

PENDANT TO A PASTEL BY LA TOUR.

I have, among others hanging on my wall, a pastel of La Tour's; of the artist-lover of Julie Fel, of the monarch of pastellistes, the touch of whose crayons was a "brevet of wit and of beauty," and on whose easel bloomed afresh the laughing eyes, the brilliant tints, the rose-hued lips of all the loveliest women of the "Regne Galant," from the princesses of the Blood of the House of Bourbon to the princesses of the green-room of the Comedie-Francaise. Painted in the days of Louis Quinze, the light of more than a century having fallen on its soft colors to fade and blot them with the icy brush of time, my pastel is still fresh, still eloquent. The genius that created it is gone--gone the beauty that inspired it--but the picture is deathless! It shows me the face of a woman, of a beautiful woman, else, be sure she would not have been honored by the crayons of La Tour; her full Southern lips are parted with a smile of triumph; a chef-d'oeuvre of coquetry, a head-dress of lace and pearls and little bouquets of roses is on her unpowdered hair, which is arranged much like Julie Fel's herself in the portrait that hangs, if I remember right, at the Musee de Saint Quentin; and her large eyes are glancing at you with languor, malice, victory, all commingled. At the back of the picture is written "Mlle. Thargelie Dumarsais;" the letters are faded and yellow, but the pastel is living and laughing yet, through the divine touch of the genius of La Tour. With its perfume of dead glories, with its odor of the Beau Siecle, the pastel hangs on my wall, living relic of a buried age, and sometimes in my mournful moments the full laughing lips of my pastel will part, and breathe, and speak to me of the distant past, when Thargelie Dumarsais saw all Paris at her feet, and was not humbled then as now by being only valued and remembered for the sake of the talent of La Tour. My beautiful pastel gives me many confidences. I will betray one to you--a single leaf from a life of the eighteenth century.

I.

THE FIRST MORNING.

In the heart of Lorraine, nestled down among its woods, stood an old chateau that might have been the chateau of the Sleeping Beauty of fairy fame, so sequestered it stood amidst its trees chained together by fragrant fetters of honeysuckle and wild vine, so undisturbed slept the morning shadows on the wild thyme that covered the turf, so unbroken was the silence in which the leaves barely stirred, and the birds folded their wings and hushed their song till the heat of the noonday should be passed. Beyond the purple hills stretching up in the soft haze of distance in the same province of laughing, luxurious, sunlit Lorraine, was Luneville, the Luneville of Stanislaus, Montesquieu, of Voltaire, of Henault, of Boufflers, a Versailles in miniature, even possessing a perfect replica of Pompadour in its own pretty pagan of a Marquise. Within a few leagues was Luneville, but the echo of its mots and madrigals did not reach over the hills, did not profane the sunny air, did not mingle with the vintage-song of the vine-dressers, the silver babble of the woodland brook, the hushed chant of the Ave Maria, the vesper bells chimed from the churches and monasteries, which made the sole music known or heard in this little valley of Lorraine.

The chateau of Grande Charmille stood nestled in its woods, gray, lonely, still, silent as death, yet not gloomy, for white pigeons circled above its pointed towers, brilliant dragon-flies fluttered above the broken basin of the fountain that sang as gayly as it rippled among the thyme as though it fell into a marble cup, and bees hummed their busy happy buzz among the jessamine that clung to its ivy-covered walls--walls built long before Lorraine had ceased to be a kingdom and a power, long before a craven and effeminated Valois had dared to kick the dead body of a slaughtered Guise. Not gloomy with the golden light of a summer noon playing amidst the tangled boughs and on the silvered lichens; not gloomy, for under the elm-boughs on the broken stone steps that led to the fountain, her feet half buried in violet-roots and wild thyme, leaning her head on her hand, as she looked into the water, where the birds flew down to drink, and fluttered their wings fearless of her presence, was a young girl of sixteen--and if women sometimes darken lives, it must be allowed that they always illumine landscapes!

Aline, when Boufflers saw her in the spring morning, in all the grace of youth and beauty, unconscious of themselves, made not a prettier picture than this young dreamer under the elm-boughs of the Lorraine woods, as she bent over the water, watching it bubble and splash from the fountain-spout, and hide itself with a rippling murmur under the broad green reeds and the leaves of the water-lily. She was a charming picture: a brunette with long ebon tresses, with her lashes drooping over her black, languid, almond-shaped eyes, a smile on her half-pouted lips, and all the innocence and dawning beauty of her sixteen years about her, while she sat on the broken steps, now brushing the water-drops off the violets, now weaving the reeds into a pretty, useless toy, now beckoning the birds that came to peck on the rose-sprays beside her.

"Favette! where are your dreams?"

Favette, the young naiad of the Lorraine elm-woods, looked up, the plait of rushes dropping from her hands, and a warm sudden blush tinging her cheeks and brow with a tint like that on the damask rose-leaves that had fallen into the water, and floated there like delicate shells.

"Mon Dieu, Monsieur Leon! how you frightened me!"

And like a startled fawn, or a young bird glancing round at a rustle amidst the leaves, Favette sprang up, half shy, half smiling, all her treasures gathered from the woods--of flowers, of mosses, of berries, of feathery grasses, of long ivy-sprays--falling from her lap on to the turf in unheeded disorder.

"_I_ frightened you, Favette? Surely not. Are you sorry to see me, then?"

"Sorry? Oh no, Monsieur Leon!" and Favette glanced through her thick curled lashes, slyly yet archly, and began to braid again her plait of rushes.

"Come, tell me, then, what and whom were you dreaming of, ma mie, as you looked down into the water? Tell me, Favette. You have no secrets from your playmate, your friend, your brother?"

Favette shook her head, smiling, and plaited her rushes all wrong, the blush on her cheeks as bright as that on the cups of the rose-leaves that the wind shook down in a fresh shower into the brook.

"Come, tell me, mignonne. Was it--of me?"

"Of you? Well, perhaps--yes!"

It was first love that whispered in Favette's pretty voice those three little words; it was first love that answered in his, as he threw himself down on the violet-tufted turf at her feet, as Boufflers at Aline's.

"Ah, Favette, so should it be! for every hope, every dream, every thought of _mine_, is centred in and colored by you."

"Yet you can leave me to-day," pouted Favette, with a sigh and a _moue mutine_, and gathering tears in her large gazelle eyes.

"Leave you? Would to Heaven I were not forced! But against a king's will what power has a subject? None are too great, none are too lowly, to be touched by that iron hand if they provoke its grasp. Vincennes yawns for those who dare to think, For-l'Eveque for those who dare to jest. Monsieur de Voltaire was sent to the Bastille for merely defending a truth and his own honor against De Rohan-Chabot. Who am I, that I should look for better grace?"

Favette struck him, with her plaited rushes, a reproachful little blow.

"Monsieur Vincennes--Monsieur Voltaire--who are they? I know nothing of those stupid people!"

He smiled, and fondly stroked her hair:

"Little darling! The one is a prison that manacles the deadly crimes of Free Speech and Free Thought; the other, a man who has suffered for both, but loves both still, and will, sooner or later, help to give both to the world----"

"Ah, you think of your studies, of your ambitions, of your great heroes! You think nothing of me, save to call me a little darling. You are cruel, Monsieur Leon!"