Part 5

The inspection was over at last; and if any other than Conran had been my senior officer, I should have come off badly, in all probability, for the abominable manner in which I went through my evolutions. The day came to an end somehow or other, though I began to think it never would, the luncheon was ended, the bigwigs were taking their sieste, or otherwise occupied, and I, trusting to my absence not being noticed, tore off as hard as man can who has Cupid for his Pegasus. With a bouquet as large as a drum-head, clasped round with a bracelet, about which I had many doubts as to the propriety of offering to the possessor of such jewelry as the Marchioness must have, yet on which I thought I might venture after the scene of last night, I was soon on the veranda of the Casa di Fiori, and my natural shyness being stimulated into a distant resemblance of Little Grand's enviable brass, seeing the windows of the drawing-room open, I pushed aside the green venetians and entered noiselessly. The room did not look a quarter so inviting as the night before, though it was left in precisely a similar state. I do not know how it was, but those cards lying about on the floor, those sconces with the wax run down and dripping over them, those emptied caraffes that had diffused an odor not yet dissipated, those tables and velvet couches all _a tort et a travers_, did not look so very inviting after all, and even to my unsophisticated senses, scarcely seemed fit for a Peeress.

There was nobody in the room, and I walked through it towards the boudoir; from the open door I saw Fitzhervey, Guatamara, and my Marchioness--but oh! what horror unutterable! doing--_que pensez-vous?_ Drinking bottled porter!--and drinking bottled porter in a _peignoir_ not of the cleanliest, and with raven tresses not of the neatest!

Only fancy! she, that divine, _spirituelle_ creature, who had talked but a few hours before of the affinity of souls, to have come down, like any ordinary woman, to Guinness's stout, and a checked dressing-gown and unbrushed locks! To find your prophet without his silver veil, or your Leila dead drowned in a sack, or your Guinevere flown over with Sir Lancelot to Boulogne, or your long-esteemed Griselda gone off with your cockaded Jeames, is nothing to the torture, the unutterable anguish, of seeing your angel, your divinity, your bright particular star, your hallowed Arabian rose, come down to--Bottled Porter! Do not talk to me of Dore, sir, or Mr. Martin's pictures; their horrors dwindle into insignificance compared with the horror of finding an intimate liaison between one's first love and Bottled Porter!

In my first dim, unutterable anguish, I should have turned and fled; but my syren's voice had not lost all its power, despite the stout and dirty dressing-gown, for she was a very handsome woman, and could stand such things as well as anybody. She came towards me, with her softest smile, glancing at the bracelet on the bouquet, apologizing slightly for her neglige:--"I am so indolent. I only dress for those I care to please--and I never hoped to see _you_ to-day." In short, magnetizing me over again, and smoothing down my outraged sensibilities, till I ended by becoming almost blind (_quite_ I could not manage) to the checked _robe de chambre_ and the unbrushed bandeaux, by offering her my braceleted bouquet, which was very graciously accepted, and even by sharing the atrocious London porter, "that horrid stuff," she called it, "how I hate it! but it is the only thing Sir Benjamin Brodie allows me, I am so very delicate, you know, my sensibilities so frightfully acute!"

I had not twenty minutes to stay, having to be back at the barracks, or risk a reprimand, which, happily, the checked _peignoir_ had cooled me sufficiently to enable me to recollect. So I took my farewell--one not unlike Medora's and Conrad's, Fitzhervey and Guatamara having kindly withdrawn as soon as the bottled porter was finished--and I went out of the house in a very blissful state, despite Guinness and the unwelcome demi-toilette, which did not accord with Eugene Sue's and the Parlor Library's description of the general getting-up and stunning appearance of heroines and peeresses, "reclining, in robes of cloud-like tissue and folds of the richest lace, on a cabriole couch of amber velvet, while the air was filled with the voluptuous perfume of the flower-children of the South, and music from unseen choristers lulled the senses with its divinest harmony," &c., &c., &c.

Bottled porter and a checked dressing-gown! Say what you like, sirs, it takes a very strong passion to overcome _those_. I have heard men ascribe the waning of their affections after the honeymoon to the constant sight of their wives--whom before they had only seen making papa's coffee with an angelic air and a toilette _tiree a quatre epingles_--everlastingly coming down too late for breakfast in a dressing-gown; and, upon my soul, if ever I marry, which Heaven in pitiful mercy forfend! and my wife make her appearance in one of those confounded _peignoirs_, I will give that much-run-after and deeply-to-be-pitied public character, the Divorce Judge, some more work to do--I will, upon my honor.

However, the _peignoir_ had not iced me enough that time to prevent my tumbling out of the house in as delicious an ecstasy as if I had been eating some of Monte Cristo's "hatchis." As I went out, not looking before me, I came bang against the chest of somebody else, who, not admiring the rencontre, hit my cap over my eyes, and exclaimed, in not the most courtly manner you will acknowledge, "You cursed owl, take that, then! What are you doing here, I should like to know?"

"Confound your impudence!" I retorted, as soon as my ocular powers were restored, and I saw the blue eyes, fair curls, and smart figure of my ancient Iolaues, now my bitterest foe--"confound your impertinence! what are _you_ doing here? you mean."

"Take care, and don't ask questions about what doesn't concern you," returned Little Grand, with a laugh--a most irritating laugh. There are times when such cachinnations sting one's ears more than a volley of oaths. "Go home and mind your own business, my chicken. You are a green bird, and nobody minds you, but still you'll find it as well not to come poaching on other men's manors."

"Other men's manors! Mine, if you please," I shouted, so mad with him I could have floored him where he stood.

"Phew!" laughed Little Grand, screwing up his lips into a contemptuous whistle, "you've been drinking too much Bass, my daisy; 'tis n't good for young heads--can't stand it. Go home, innocent."

The insult, the disdainful tone, froze my blood. My heart swelled with a sense of outraged dignity and injured manhood. With a conviction of my immeasurable superiority of position, as the beloved of that divine creature, I emancipated myself from the certain sort of slavery I was generally in to Little Grand, and spoke as I conceived it to be the habit of gentlemen whose honor had been wounded to speak.

"Mr. Grandison, you will pay for this insult. I shall expect satisfaction."

Little Grand laughed again--absolutely grinned, the audacious young imp--and he twelve months younger than I, too!

"Certainly, sir. If you wish to be made a target of, I shall be delighted to oblige you. I can't keep ladies waiting. It is always Place aux dames! with me; so, for the present, good morning!"

And off went the young coxcomb into the Casa di Fiori, and I, only consoled by the reflection of the different reception he would receive to what mine had been (_he_ had a braceleted bouquet, too, the young pretentious puppy!), started off again, assuaging my lacerated feelings with the delicious word of Satisfaction. I felt myself immeasurably raised above the heads of every other man in Malta--a perfect hero of romance; in fact, fit to figure in my beloved Alexandre's most highly-wrought yellow-papered _roman_, with a duel on my hands, and the love of a magnificent creature like my Eudoxia Adelaida. She had become Eudoxia Adelaida to me now, and I had forgiven, if not forgotten, the dirty dressing-gown: the bottled porter lay, of course, at Brodie's door. If he would condemn spiritual forms of life and light to the common realistic aliments of horrible barmaids and draymen, she could not help it, nor I either. If angels come down to earth, and are separated from their natural nourishment of manna and nectar, they must take what they can get, even though it be so coarse and sublunary a thing as Guinness's XXX, must they not, sir? Yes, I felt very _exalte_ with my affair of honor and my affair of the heart, Little Grand for my foe, and my Marchioness, for a love. I never stopped to remember that I might be smashing with frightful recklessness the Sixth and the Seventh Commandments. If Little Grand got shot, he must thank himself; he should not have insulted me; and if there was a Marquis St. Julian, why--I pitied him, poor fellow! that was all.

Full of these sublime sensations--grown at least three feet in my varnished boots--I lounged into the ball-room, feeling supreme pity for ensigns who were chattering round the door, admiring those poor, pale garrison girls. _They_ had not a duel and a Marchioness; _they_ did not know what beauty meant--what life was!

I did not dance--I was above that sort of thing now--there was not a woman worth the trouble in the room; and about the second waltz I saw my would-be rival talking to Ruthven, a fellow in Ours. Little Grand did not look glum or dispirited, as he ought to have done after the interview he must have had; but probably that was the boy's brass. He would never look beaten if you had hit him till he was black and blue. Presently Ruthven came up to me. He was not over-used to his business, for he began the opening chapter in rather school-boy fashion.

"Hallo, Gus! so you and Little Grand have been falling out. Why don't you settle it with a little mill? A vast deal better than pistols. Duels always seem to me no fun. Two men stand up like fools, and----"

"Mr. Ruthven," said I, very haughtily, "if your principal desires to apologize----"

"Apologize! Bless your soul, no! But----"

"Then," said I, cutting him uncommonly short indeed, "you can have no necessity to address yourself to me, and I beg to refer you to my friend and second, Mr. Heavystone."

Wherewith I bowed, turned on my heel, and left him.

I did not sleep that night, though I tried hard, because I thought it the correct thing for heroes to sleep sweetly till the clock strikes the hour of their duel, execution, &c., or whatever it may hap. Egmont slept, Argyle slept, Philippe Egalite, scores of them, but I could not. Not that I funked it, thank Heaven--I never had a touch of that--but because I was in such a delicious state of excitement, self-admiration, and heroism, which had not cooled when I found myself walking down to the appointed place by the beach with poor old Heavy, who was intensely impressed by being charged with about five quires of the best cream-laid, to be given to the Marchioness in case I fell. Little Grand and Ruthven came on the ground at almost the same moment, Little Grand eminently jaunty and most _confoundedly_ handsome. We took off our caps with distant ceremony; the Castilian hidalgos were never more stately; but, then, what Knights of the Round Table ever splintered spears for such a woman?

The paces were measured, the pistols taken out of their case. We were just placed, and Ruthven, with a handkerchief in his hand, had just enumerated, in awful accents, "One! two!"--the "three!" yet hovered on his lips, when we heard a laugh--the third laugh that had chilled my blood in twenty-four hours. Somebody's hand was laid on Little Grand's shoulder, and Conran's voice interrupted the whole thing.

"Hallo, young ones! what farce is this?"

"Farce, sir!" retorted Little Grand, hotly--"farce! It is no farce. It is an affair of honor, and----"

"Don't make me laugh, my dear boy," smiled Conran; "it is so much too warm for such an exertion. Pray, why are you and your once sworn friend making popinjays of each other?"

"Mr. Grandison has grossly insulted me," I began, "and I demand satisfaction. I will not stir from the ground without it, and----"

"You _sha'n't_," shouted Little Grand. "Do you dare to pretend I want to funk, you little contemptible----"

Though it was too warm, Conran went off into a fit of laughter.

I dare say our sublimity had a comic touch in it of which we never dreamt. "My dear boys, pray don't, it is too fatiguing. Come, Grand, what is it all about?"

"I deny your right to question me, Major," retorted Little Grand, in a fury. "What have you to do with it? I mean to punish that young owl yonder--who didn't know how to drink anything but milk-and-water, didn't know how to say bo! to a goose, till I taught him--for very abominable impertinence, and I'll----"

"My impertinence! I like that!" I shouted. "It is your unwarrantable, overbearing self-conceit, that makes you the laughing-stock of all the mess, which----"

"Silence!" said Conran's still stern voice, which subdued us into involuntary respect. "No more of this nonsense! Put up those pistols, Ruthven. You are two hot-headed, silly boys, who don't know for what you are quarrelling. Live a few years longer, and you won't be so eager to get into hot water, and put cartridges into your best friends. No, I shall not hear any more about it. If you do not instantly give me your words of honor not to attempt to repeat this folly, as your senior officer I shall put you under arrest for six weeks."

O Alexandra Dumas!--O Monte Cristo!--O heroes of yellow paper and pluck invincible! I ask pardon of your shades; I must record the fact, lowering and melancholy as it is, that before our senior officer our heroism melted like Vanille ice in the sun, our glories tumbled to the ground like twelfth-cake ornaments under children's fingers, and before the threat of arrest the lions lay down like lambs.

Conran sent us back, humbled, sulky, and crestfallen, and resumed his solitary patrol upon the beach, where, before the sun was fairly up, he was having a shot at curlews. But if he was a little stern, he was no less kind-hearted; and in the afternoon of that day, while he lay, after his siesta, smoking on his little bed, I unburdened myself to him. He did not laugh at me, though I saw a quizzical smile under his black moustaches.

"What is your divinity's name?" he asked, when I had finished.

"Eudoxia Adelaida, Marchioness St. Julian."

"The Marchioness St. Julian! Oh!"

"Do you know her?" I inquired, somewhat perplexed by his tone.

He smiled straight out this time.

"I don't know _her_, but there are a good many Peeresses in Malta and Gibraltar, and along the line of the Pacific, as my brother Ned, in the _Belisarius_, will tell you. I could count two score such of my acquaintance off at this minute."

I wondered what he meant. I dare say he knew all the Peerage; but that had nothing to do with me, and I thought it strange that all the Duchesses, and Countesses, and Baronesses should quit their country-seats and town-houses to locate themselves along the line of the Pacific.

"She's a fine woman, St. John?" he went on.

"Fine!" I reiterated, bursting into a panegyric, with which I won't bore you as I bored him.

"Well, you're going there to-night, you say; take me with you, and we'll see what I think of your Marchioness."

I looked at his fine figure and features, recalled certain tales of his conquests, remembered that he knew French, Italian, German, and Spanish, but, not being very able to refuse, acquiesced with a reluctance I could not entirely conceal. Conran, however, did not perceive it, and after mess took his cap, and went with me to the Casa di Fiori.

The rooms were all right again, my Marchioness was _en grande tenue_, amber silk, black lace, diamonds, and all that sort of style. Fitzhervey and the other men were in evening dress, drinking coffee; there was not a trace of bottled porter anywhere, and it was all very brilliant and presentable. The Marchioness St. Julian rose with the warmest effusion, her dazzling white teeth showing in the sunniest of smiles, and both hands outstretched.

"Augustus, _bien aime_, you are rather----"

"Late," I suppose she was going to say, but she stopped dead short, her teeth remained parted in a stereotyped smile, a blankness of dismay came over her luminous eyes. She caught sight of Conran, and I imagined I heard a very low-breathed "Curse the fellow!" from courteous Lord Dolph. Conran came forward, however, as if he did not notice it; there was only that queer smile lurking under his moustaches. I introduced him to them, and the Marchioness smiled again, and Fitzhervey almost resumed his wonted extreme urbanity. But they were somehow or other wonderfully ill at ease--wonderfully, for people in such high society; and I was ill at ease too, from being only able to attribute Eudoxia Adelaida's evident consternation at the sight of Conran to his having been some time or other an old love of hers. "Ah!" thought I, grinding my teeth, "that comes of loving a woman older than one's self."

The Major, however, seemed the only one who enjoyed himself. The Marchioness was beaming on him graciously, though her ruffled feathers were not quite smoothed down, and he was sitting by her with an intense amusement in his eyes, alternately talking to her about Stars and Garters, whom, by her answers, she did not seem to know so very intimately after all, and chatting with Fitzhervey about hunting, who, for a man that had hunted over every country, according to his own account, seemed to confuse Tom Edge with Tom Smith, the Burton with the Tedworth, a bullfinch with an ox-rail, in queer style, under Conran's cross-questioning. We had been in the room about ten minutes, when a voice, rich, low, sweet, rang out from some inner room, singing the glorious "Inflammatus." How strange it sounded in the Casa di Fiori!

Conran started, the dark blood rose over the clear bronze of his cheek. He turned sharply on to the Marchioness. "Good Heaven! whose voice is that?"

"My niece's," she answered, staring at him, and touching a hand-bell. "I will ask her to come and sing to us nearer. She has really a lovely voice."

Conran grew pale again, and sat watching the door with the most extraordinary anxiety. Some minutes went by; then Lucrezia entered, with the same haughty reserve which her soft young face always wore when with her aunt. It changed, though, when her glance fell on Conran, into the wildest rapture I ever saw on any countenance. He fixed his eyes on her with the look Little Grand says he's seen him wear in battle--a contemptuous smile quivering on his face.

"Sing us something, Lucrezia dear," began the Marchioness. "You shouldn't be like the nightingales, and give your music only to night and solitude."

Lucrezia seemed not to hear her. She had never taken her eyes off Conran, and she went, as dreamily as that dear little _Amina_ in the "Sonnambula," to her seat under the jasmines in the window. For a few minutes Conran, who didn't seem to care two straws what the society in general thought of him, took his leave, to the relief, apparently, of Fitzhervey and Guatamara.

As he went across the veranda--that memorable veranda!--I sitting in dudgeon near the other window, while Fitzhervey was proposing ecarte to Heavy, whom we had found there on our entrance, and the Marchioness had vanished into her boudoir for a moment, I saw the Roman girl spring out after him, and catch hold of his arm:

"Victor! Victor! for pity's sake!--I never thought we should meet like this!"

"Nor did I."

"Hush! hush! you will kill me. In mercy, say some kinder words!"

"I can say nothing that it would be courteous to you to say."

I couldn't have been as inflexible, whatever her sins might have been, with her hands clasped on me, and her face raised so close to mine. Lucrezia's voice changed to a piteous wail:

"You love me no longer, then?"

"Love!" said Conran, fiercely--"love! How dare you speak to me of love? I held you to be fond, innocent, true as Heaven; as such, you were dearer to me than life--as dear as honor. I loved you with as deep a passion as ever a man knew--Heaven help me! I love you now! How am I rewarded? By finding you the companion of blackguards, the associate of swindlers, one of the arch-intrigantes who lead on youths to ruin with base smiles and devilish arts. Then you dare talk to me of love!"

With those passionate words he threw her off him. She fell at his feet with a low moan. He either did not hear, or did not heed it; and I, bewildered by what I heard, mechanically went and lifted her from the ground. Lucrezia had not fainted, but she looked so wild, that I believed the Marchioness, and set her down as mad; but then Conran must be mad as well, which seemed too incredible a thing for me to swallow--our cool Major mad!

"Where does he live?" asked Lucrezia of me, in a breathless whisper.

"He? Who?"

"Victor--your officer--Signor Conran."

"Why, he lives in Valetta, of course."

"Can I find him there?"

"I dare say, if you want him."

"Want him! Oh, Santa Maria! is not his absence death? Can I find him?"

"Oh, yes, I dare say. Anybody will show you Conran's rooms."

"Thank you."

With that, this mysterious young lady left me, and I turned in through the window again. Heavy and the men were playing at lansquenet, that most perilous, rapid, and bewitching of all the resistless Card Circes. There was no Marchioness, and having done it once with impunity, I thought I might do it again, and lifted the amber curtain that divided the boudoir from the drawing-room. What did I behold? Oh! torture unexampled! Oh! fiendish agony! There was Little Grand--self-conceited, insulting, impertinent, abominable, unendurable Little Grand--on the amber satin couch, with the Marchioness leaning her head on his shoulder, and looking up in his thrice-confounded face with her most adorable smile, _my_ smile, that had beamed, and, as I thought, beamed only upon me!

If Mephistopheles had been by to tempt me, I would have sold my soul to have wreaked vengeance on them both. Neither saw me, thank Heaven! and I had self-possession enough not to give them the cruel triumph of witnessing my anguish. I withdrew in silence, dropped the curtain, and rushed to bury my wrongs and sorrows in the friendly bosom of the gentle night. It was my first love, and I had made a fool of myself. The two are synonymous.

How I reached the barracks I never knew. All the night long I sat watching the stars out, raving to them of Eudoxia Adelaida, and cursing in plentiful anathemas my late Orestes. How should I bear his impudent grin every mortal night of my life across the mess-table? I tore up into shreds about a ream of paper, inscribed with tender sonnets to my faithless idol. I trampled into fifty thousand shreds a rosette off her dress, for which, fool-like, I had begged the day before. I smashed the looking-glass, which could only show me the image of a pitiful donkey. I called on Heaven to redress my wrongs. Oh! curse it! never was a fellow at once so utterly done for and so utterly done brown!

And in the vicarage, as I learnt afterwards, when my letter was received at home, there was great glorification and pleasure. My mother and the girls were enraptured at the high society darling Gussy was moving in; "but then, you know, mamma, dear Gussy's manners are so gentle, so gentleman-like, they are sure to please wherever he goes!" Wherewith my mother cried, and dried her eyes, and cried again, over that abominable letter copied from Little Grand's, and smelling of vilest tobacco.