Part 28

"A second Marie Antoinette?--too truly and unfortunately so, I have heard! Levity in _any_ station sufficiently reprehensible, but when exhibited in the persons of those whom a higher power has placed in exalted positions, it is most deeply to be deplored. The evil and contagion of its example become incalculable; and even when, which I believe her excusers are wont to assert of Princess Helene, it is merely traceable to an over-gayety of spirit and an over-carelessness of comment and censure, it should be remembered that we are enjoined to abstain from every _appearance_ of evil!"

With which Constance shook out her phylacteries, represented by the thirty-guinea bracade-silk folds of her skirt (a dress I heard her describe as "very plain!--serviceable for travelling"), and glanced at my opposite neighbor with a look which said, "You are evidently not a proper person, but you hear for once what a proper person thinks!"

Our charming companion did hear it, for she apparently understood English very well. She laughed a little--a sweet, low, ringing laugh--(I was rather in love with her, I must say--I am still)--and spoke with a slight pretty accent.

"True, madame! but ah! what a pity your St. Paul did not advise, too, that people should not go by appearances, and think evil where evil is not!"

Lady Marechale gave stare number two with a curl of her lip, and bent her head stiffly.

"What a very strange person!" she observed to Agneta, in a murmur, meant, like a stage aside, to be duly heard and appreciated by the audience. And yet my sisters are thought very admirably bred women, too! But then, a woman alone--a foreigner, a stranger--surely no one would exact courtesy to such, from "ladies of position?"

"Have you ever seen Princess Helene, the Duchess of Lemongenseidlitz, may I ask?" Marechale inquired, hastily, to cover his wife's sneer. He's a very good fellow, and finds the constant and inevitable society of a saint slightly trying, and a very heavy chastisement for a few words sillily said one morning in St. George's.

"I have seen her, monsieur--yes!"

"And is she a second Marie Antoinette?"

She laughed gayly, showing her beautiful white teeth.

"Ah, bah, monsieur! many would say that is a great deal too good a comparison for her! A second Louise de Savoie--a second Duchesse de Chevreuse--nay, a second Lucrezia Borgia, some would tell you. She likes pleasure--who does not, though, except those with whom 'les raisins sont trop verts et bons pour des goujats?'"

"What an insufferably bold person!" murmured Constance.

"Very disagreeable to meet this style of people!" returned Agneta.

And both stiffened themselves with a little more starch; and we know that British wheats produce the stiffest starch in the world!

"Who, indeed!" cried Marechale, regardless of madame's frown. "You know this for truth, then, of Princess Helene?"

"Ah, bah, monsieur! who knows anything for truth?" laughed the lovely brunette. "The world dislikes truth so much, it is obliged to hide itself in out-of-the-way corners, and very rarely comes to light. Nobody knows the truth about her. Some think her, as you say, a second Marie Antoinette, who is surrendered to dissipation and levity, cares for nothing, and would dance and laugh over the dead bodies of the people. Others judge her as others judged Marie Antoinette; discredit the gossip, and think she is but a lively woman, who laughs at forms, likes to amuse herself, and does not see why a court should be a prison! The world likes the darker picture best; let it have it! I do not suppose it will break her heart!"

And the fair stranger laughed so sweetly, that every man at the dinner-table fell in love with her on the spot; and Lady Marechale and Mrs. Protocol sat throughout the remainder of the meal in frozen dignity and unbreakable silence, while the lovely brunette talked with and smiled on us all with enchanting gayety, wit, and abandon, chatting on all sorts of topics of the day.

Dinner over, she was the first to rise from the table, and bowed to us with exquisite grace and that charming smile of hers, of which the sweetest rays fell upon _me_, I swear, whether you consider the oath an emanation of personal vanity or not, my good sir. My sisters returned her bow and her good evening to them with that pointed stare which says so plainly, "You are not my equal, how dare you insult me by a courtesy?"

And scarcely had we begun to sip our coffee up-stairs in the apartments Chanderlos had secured for the miladies Anglaises, than the duo upon her began as the two ladies sat with Spes between them on a sofa beside one of the windows opening on the balcony that ran round the house. A chance inadvertent assent of Dunbar's, a propos of--oh, sin unpardonable!--the beauty of the incognita's eyes, touched the valve and unloosened the hot springs that were seething below in silence. "A handsome woman!--oh yes, a gentleman's beauty, I dare say!--but a very odd person!" commenced Mrs. Protocol. "A very strange person!" assented Mrs. Marechale. "Very free manners!" added Agneta. "Quite French!" chorused Constance. "She has diamond rings--paste, no doubt!" said the Politician. "And rouges--the color's much too lovely to be natural!" sneered the Saint. "Paints her eyebrows, too!" "Not a doubt--and tints her lashes!" "An adventuress, I should say!" "Or worse!" "Evidently not a proper person!" "Certainly not!"

Through the soft mellow air, hushed into evening silence, the words reached me, as I walked through the window on to the balcony, and stood sipping my coffee and looking lazily over the landscape wrapped in sunset haze, over the valley where the twilight shadows were deepening, and the mountains that were steeped yet in a rose-hued golden radiance from the rays that had sunk behind them.

"My dear ladies," I cried, involuntarily, "can't you find anything a little more kindly to say of a stranger who has never done you any harm, and who, fifty to one, will never cross your path again?"

"Bravo!" echoed Marechale, who has never gone as quietly in the matrimonial break as Protocol, and indeed will never be thoroughly broken in--"bravo! women are always studying to make themselves attractive; it's a pity they don't put down among the items a trifle of generosity and charity, it would embellish them wonderfully."

Lady Marechale beat an injured tattoo with the spoon on her saucer, and leaned back with the air of a martyr, and drawing in her lips with a smile, whose inimitable sneer any lady might have envied--it was quite priceless!

"It is the first time, Sir George, I should presume, that a husband and a brother were ever heard to unite in upbraiding a wife and a sister with her disinclination to associate with, or her averseness to countenance, an improper person!"

"An improper person!" I cried. "But, my dear Constance, who ever told you that this lady you are so desperately bitter upon has any fault at all, save the worst fault in her own sex's eyes--that of beauty? I see nothing in her; her manners are perfect; her tone----"

"You must pardon me if I decline taking your verdict on so delicate a question," interrupted Lady Marechale, with withering satire. "Very possibly you see nothing objectionable in her--nothing, at least, that _you_ would call so! Your views and mine are sufficiently different on every subject, and the women with whom I believe you have chiefly associated are not those who are calculated to give you very much appreciation for the more refined classes of our sex! Very possibly the person in question is what _you_, and Sir George too, perhaps, find charming; but you must excuse me if I really cannot, to oblige you, stoop to countenance any one whom my intuition and my knowledge of the world both declare so very evidently what she should not be. She will endeavor, most probably, if she remain here, to push herself into our acquaintance, but if you and my husband should choose to insult us by favoring her efforts, Agneta and I, happily, can guard ourselves from the objectionable companionship into which those who _should_ be our protectors would wish to force us!"

With which Lady Marechale, with a little more martyrdom and an air of extreme dignity, had recourse to her _flacon_ of Viola Montana, and sank among the sofa cushions, a model of outraged and Spartan virtue. I set down my coffee-cup, and lounged out again to the peace of the balcony; Marechale shrugged his shoulders, rose, and followed me. Lo! on the part of the balcony that ran under _her_ windows, leaning on its balustrade, her white hand, white as the flowers, playing with the clematis tendrils, the "paste" diamond flashing in the last rays of the setting sun, stood our "dame d'industrie--or worse!" She was but a few feet farther on; she must have heard Lady Marechale's and Mrs. Protocol's duo on her demerits; she _had_ heard it, without doubt, for she was laughing gayly and joyously, laughter that sparkled all over her _riante_ face and flashed in her bright falcon eyes. Laughing still, she signed me to her. I need not say that the sign was obeyed.

"Chivalrous knight, I thank you! You are a Bayard of chivalry; you defend the absent! What a miracle, mon Dieu! Tell your friends from me not to speak so loudly when their windows are open; and, for yourself, rest assured your words of this evening will not be forgotten."

"I am happy, indeed, if I have been fortunate enough to obtain a chance remembrance, but do not give me too much praise for so simple a service; the clumsiest Cimon would be stirred into chivalry under such inspiration as I had----"

The beautiful hazel eyes flashed smilingly on me under their lashes. (_Those_ lashes tinted! Heaven forgive the malice of women!) She broke off a sprig of the clematis, with its long slender leaves and fragrant starry flowers, and gave it to me.

"_Tenez, mon ami_, if ever you see me again, show me that faded flower, and I shall remember this evening at Vicq d'Azyr. Nay, do not flatter yourself--do not thrust it in your breast; it is no gage d'amour! it is only a reward for loyal service, and a souvenir to refresh my own memory, which is treacherous sometimes, though not in gratitude to those who serve me. Adieu, mon Bayard--et bonsoir!"

But I retained the hand that had given me my clematis-spray.

"Meet you again! But will not that be to-morrow? If I am not to see you, as your words threaten, till the clematis be faded and myself forgotten, let me at least, I beseech you, know where, who, by what name----"

She drew her hand away with something of a proud, surprised gesture; then she laughed again that sweet, ringing, mocking laugh:

"No, no, Bayard, it is too much to ask! Leave the future to hazard; it is always the best philosophy. Au revoir! Adieu--perhaps for a day, perhaps for a century!"

And the bewitching mystery floated away from me and through the open window of her room. You will imagine that my "intuition" did not lead me to the conclusion to which Lady Marechale's led her, or assuredly should I have followed the donor of the clematis, despite her prohibition. Even with my "intuition" pointing where it did, I am not sure what I might have done if, in her salon, I had not caught sight of a valet and a lady's maid in waiting with her coffee, and they are not such spectators as one generally selects.

The servants closed her windows and drew down their Venetian blinds, and I returned to my coffee. Whether the two ladies within had overheard her conversation as she had heard theirs, I cannot say, but they looked trebly refrigerated, had congealed themselves into the chilliest human ice that is imaginable, and comported themselves towards me fully as distantly as though I had brought a dozen ballet-girls in to dinner with them, or introduced them to my choicest acquaintance from the Chateau des Fleurs.

"A man's taste is so pitiably low!" remarked Lady Marechale, in her favorite stage aside to Mrs. Protocol; to which that other lady responded, "Disgracefully so!"

Who _was_ my lovely unknown with the bright falcon eyes and the charming laugh, with her strange freedom that yet was _not_, somehow, free, and her strange fascination? I bade my man ask Chanderlos her name--couriers know everything generally--but neither Mills nor Chanderlos gave me any information. The people of the house did not know, or said they did not; they only knew she had servants in attendance who came with her, who revealed nothing, and paid any price for the best of everything. Are impertinent questions ever asked where money is plentiful?

I was dressing the next morning something later than usual, when I heard the roll of a carriage in the courtyard below. I looked through the half-open persiennes with a semi-presentiment that it was my sweet foreigner who was leaving ere I could presume on my clematis or improve our acquaintance. True enough, she it was, leaving Vicq d'Azyr in a travelling-carriage, with handsome roans and servants in imperial-blue liveries. Who the deuce could she be?

"Well, Constance," said I, as I bade Lady Marechale good morning, "your _bete noire_ won't 'press herself into your acquaintance,' as you were dreading last night, and won't excite Marechale and me to any more high treason. Won't you chant a Te Deum? She left this morning."

"So I perceived," answered Lady Marechale, frigidly; by which I suppose _she_ had not been above the weakness of looking through _her_ persiennes.

"What a pity you and Agneta agitated yourselves with such unnecessary alarm! It must have cost you a great deal of eau-de-Cologne and sal-volatile, I am afraid, last night. Do you think she contaminated the air of the salle-a-manger, because I will order Mills to throw some disinfectant about before you go down?"

"I have no inclination to jest upon a person of that stamp," rejoined Lady Marechale, with immense dignity, settling her turquoise wristband-studs.

"'That stamp of persons!' What! Do you think she is an adventuress, an intrigante, 'or worse' still, then? I hoped her dashing equipage might have done something towards cleansing her character. Wealth _is_ a universal purifier generally."

"Flippant impertinence!" murmured Lady Marechale, disgustedly, to Mrs. Protocol, as she swept onwards down the staircase, not deigning me a glance, much less a response, stiffening herself with a little extra starch of Lucretian virtue and British-matronly dignity, which did not grow limp again throughout breakfast, while she found fault with the chocolate, considered the _petits pains_ execrable, condemned the sardines as uneatable, petted Spes, kept Marechale and me at Coventry, and sighed over their enforced incarceration, by Dr. Berkeley's orders, in Vicq d'Azyr, that kept them in this stupid place away from Lemongenseidlitz.

Their anticipations from Lemongenseidlitz were charmingly golden and rose-tinted. They looked forward to consolidating their friendship with the dear Duchess in its balmy air, to improving a passing acquaintance into an intimate one with that charming person the Baroness Liebenfrauenmilch, Mistress of the Robes to Princess Helene, and to being very intimate at the Court, while the Pullingers (their bosom-friends and very dear rivals) would be simply presented, and remain in chagrin, uninvited to the state balls and palace festivities. And what more delightful than that last clause? for what sauce invented, from Careme to Soyer, flavors our own _plats_ so deliciously, I should like to know, as thinking that our beloved next-door neighbor is doomed to a very dry cutlet?

As Perette, in a humbler fashion, built visions from the pot of milk, so mesdames mes soeurs, from the glittering court and capital of Lemongenseidlitz, erected brilliant chateaux en Espagne of all their sayings and doings in that fashionable little city whither they were bound, and into which they had so many invaluable passports. They were impatient to be journeying from our humble, solitary valley, and after a month of Vicq d'Azyr, they departed for their golden land, and I went with them, as I had slain izzards almost _ad nauseam_, and Dunbar's expiration of leave had taken him back to Dublin.

It was five o'clock when we reached its Reidenscher Hof, nine when we had finished dinner. It was stupid work yawning over coffee and _Galignani_. What was to be done? Marechale proposed the Opera, and for the first time in his life was unopposed by his wife. Constance was in a suave, benignant mood; she was thinking of her Graf von Rosenlaeu, of the Pullingers, and of the sweet, adroit manner in which she would--when she had captivated him and could proffer such hints--awaken his Serene Highness to a sense of his moral guilt in not bringing to instant capital punishment every agent in those Satanus-farmed banks that throve throughout his duchy. Lady Marechale and Mrs. Protocol assented, and to the little miniature gayly-decorated Opera House we drove. They were in the middle of the second act of "Ernani." "Ernani" was stale to us all, and we naturally lorgne'd the boxes in lieu of the stage. I had turned my glass on the left-hand stage-box, and was going steadily round, when a faint cry of dismay, alarm, amazement, horror, broke, muffled and low, from mesdames mes soeurs. Their lorgnons were riveted on one spot; their cheeks were blanched; their hands were tremulous; if they had beheld a spiritual visitant, no consternation more profound, more intense, could have seized both with its iron hand. _My_ sisters too! the chilliest, the calmest, the most impenetrable, the most unassailable of mortals!

"And we called her, in her hearing, not a proper person?" gasped Lady Marechale.

"We thought her a lorette! an intrigante! a dame d'industrie!" echoed Mrs. Protocol.

"Who wore paste jewels!"

"Who came from the Rue Breda!"

"Who wanted to know us!"

"Whom we wouldn't know!"

I turned my Voightlander where their Voightlanders turned; there, in the royal box, leaning back in the fauteuil that marked her rank, there, with her lovely hazel eyes, her witching smile, her radiant beauty, matchless as the pearls gleaming above her brow, there sat the "adventuress--or worse!" of Vicq d'Azyr; the "evidently a not proper person" of my discerning sisters--H.S.H. Princess Helene, Grand-Duchess of Lemongenseidlitz-Phizzstrelitz! Great Heavens! how had we never guessed her before? How had we never divined her identity? How had we never remembered all we had heard of her love of laisser-aller, her taste for adventure, her delight in travelling, when she could, unattended and incognita? How had we never put this and that together, and penetrated the metamorphosis?

"_And I called her not a proper person!_" gasped Lady Marechale, again shrinking back behind the azure curtains; the projectiles she had shot with such vindictive severity, such delighted acrimony, from the murderous mortar of malice, recoiling back upon her head for once, and crushing her to powder. What reception would they have _now_ at the Court? Von Rosenlaeu would be powerless; the Pullingers themselves would be better off! Perette's pot of milk was smashed and spilt! "Adieu, veau, vache, cochon, couvee!"

* * * * *

When the pitcher lies shivered into fragments, and the milk is spilt, you know, poor Perette's dreams are shivered and spilt with them. "I have not seen you at the palace yet?" asked her Grace of Frangipane. "We do not see you at the Court, mesdames?" asked M. de la Croix-et-Cordons. "How did it happen you were not at the Duchess's ball last night?" asked "those odious Pullingers." And what had my sister to say in reply? My clematis secured _me_ a charming reception--how charming I don't feel called upon to reveal--but Princess Helene, with that calm dignity which easily replaced, when she chose, her witching _abandon_, turned the tables upon her detractors, and taught them how dangerous it may be to speak ill--of the wrong people.

A STUDY A LA LOUIS QUATORZE:

PENDANT TO A PORTRAIT BY MIGNARD.

She was surpassingly fair, Madame la Marquise. Mignard's portraits of her may fully rival his far-famed Portrait aux Amours. One of them has her painted as Venus Victrix, in the fashion of the day; one of them, as herself, as Leontine Opportune de Vivonne de Rennecourt, Marquise de la Riviere, with her creve-coeurs, and her diamonds, and her gay smile, showing her teeth, white and gleaming as the pearls mingled with her curls a la mode Montespan. Not Louise de la Beaume-le-Blanc, when the elm-boughs of St. Germain first flung their shadow on her golden head, before it bent for the Carmelite veil before the altar in the Rue St. Jacques; not Henriette d'Angleterre, when she listened to the trouveres' romances sung under her balcony at St. Cloud, before her young life was quenched by the hand of Morel and the order of Monsieur; not Athenais de Mortemart, when the liveries of lapis lazuli blue dashed through the streets of Paris, and the outriders cleared her path with their whips, before the game was lost, and the iron spikes were fastened inside the Montespan bracelets;--none of them, her contemporaries and acquaintances, eclipsed in loveliness Madame la Marquise. Had she but been fair instead of dark, the brown Bourbon eyes would have fallen on her of a surety; she would have outshone the lapis lazuli liveries with a royal guard of scarlet and gold, and her friend Athenais would have hated her as that fair lady hated "la sotte Fontanges" and "Saint Maintenon;" for their sex, in all ages, have remembered the sage's precept, "Love as though you will one day hate," and invariably carry about with them, ready for need, a little essence of the acid of Malice, to sour in an instant the sugared cream of their loves and their friendships if occasion rise up and the storm-cloud of rivalry loom in the horizon.

She was a beauty, Madame la Marquise, and she knew it, as she leaned out over the balcony of her chateau of Petite Foret, that lay close to Clagny, under the shadow of the wood of Ville d'Avree, outside the gates of Versailles, looking down on her bosquets, gardens, and terraces designed by Le Notre; for though she was alone, and there was nothing but her little dog Osmin to admire her white skin, and her dark eyes, and her beautiful hands and arms, and her diamond pendants that glittered in the moonlight, she smiled, her flashing triumphant smile, as she whispered to herself, "He is mine--mine! Bah! how can he help himself?" and pressed the ruby agraffe on her bosom with the look of a woman who knew no resistance, and brooked no reluctance to worship at her shrine.

Nothing ever opposed Madame la Marquise, and life went smoothly on with her. If Bossuet ever reproved her, it was in those _anathemes caches sous des fleurs d'oranger_ in which that politic priest knew how to deal when expedient, however haughty and relentless to the world in general. M. le Marquis was not a savage eccentricity like M. de Pardaillon de Gondran, would never have dreamt of imitating the eccentricity of going into mourning, but if the Bourbon eye _had_ fallen on his wife, would have said, like a loyal peer of France, that all his household treasures were the King's. Disagreeables fled before the scintillations of her smiles, as the crowd fled before her gilded carriage and her Flanders horses; and if ever a little fit of piety once in a while came over her, and Conscience whispered a mal a propos word in her delicate ear, she would give an enamelled lamp to Sainte Marie Reparatrice, by the advice of the Comtesse de Soubise and the Princesse de Monaco (who did such expiatory things themselves, and knew the comfort they afforded), and emerge from her repentance one of the most radiant of all the brilliant butterflies that fluttered their gorgeous wings in the Jardin de Flore under the sunny skies of Versailles.