Beatrice Boville and Other Stories Part 11

"For mercy's sake do not trifle with me."

"Trifle! No, indeed!" interrupted the young lady. "Your behavior was no trifle, and it will be a very long time before I forgive it, if ever I do."

"Stay--wait a moment."

"How can you ask me, when, five days ago, you bid me never come near you with my cursed coquetries again?" asked Geraldine, trying, and vainly, to get the bridle out of his grasp.

"G.o.d forgive me! I did not know what I said. What I had heard was enough to madden a colder man than I. Is it untrue?"

"Is what untrue?"

"You know well enough. Answer me, is it true or not?"

"How can I tell what you mean? You talk in enigmas. Let me go."

"I will never let you go till you have answered me."

"How can I answer you if I don't know what you mean?" retorted Geraldine, half laughing.

"Do not jest. Tell me, yes or no, are you going to marry that cursed fool?"

"What 'cursed fool'? Your language is not elegant, Colonel Fairlie!"

said Geraldine, with demure mischief.

"Belle! Would you have met him? Did you intend to elope with him?"

Geraldine's eyes, always large enough, grew larger and a darker blue still, in extremest astonishment.

"Belle!--elope with him? What are you dreaming? Are you mad?"

"Almost," said Fairlie, recklessly. "Have you misled him, then--tricked him? Do you care nothing for him? Answer me, for Heaven's sake, Geraldine!"

"I know nothing of what you are talking!" said Geraldine, with her surprised eyes wide open still. "Oblige me by leaving my pony's head. I shall be too late home."

"You never answered his advertis.e.m.e.nt, then?"

"The very question insults me! Let my pony go."

"You never met him in Fern Wood--never engaged yourself to him--never corresponded with him?"

"Colonel Fairlie, you have no earthly right to put such questions to me," interrupted Geraldine, with her hot geranium color in her cheeks and her eyes flashing fire. "I honor the report, whoever circulated it, far more than it deserves, by condescending to contradict it. Have the kindness to unhand my pony, and allow me to continue my ride."

"You shall _not_ go," said Fairlie, as pa.s.sionately as she, "till you have answered me one more question: Can you, will you ever forgive me?"

"No," said Geraldine, with an impatient shake of her head, but a smile nevertheless under the shadow of her hat.

"Not if you know it was jealousy of him which maddened me, love for you which made me speak such unpardonable words to you?--not if I tell you how perfect was the tale I was told, so that there was no link wanting, no room for doubt or hope?--not if I tell you what tortures I had endured in losing you--what bitter punishment I have already borne in crediting the report that you were secretly engaged to my rival--would you not forgive me then?"

"No," whispered the young lady perversely, but smiling still, the geraniums brighter in her cheeks, and her eyes fixed on the bridle.

Fairlie dropped the reins, let go her hand, and left her free to ride, if she would, away from him.

"Will you leave me, Geraldine? Not for this morning only, remember, nor for to-day, nor for this year, but--for ever?"

"No!" It was a very different "No" this time.

"Will you forgive me, then, my darling?"

Her fingers clasped his hand closely, and Geraldine looked at him from under her hat; her eyes, so like an April day, with their tears, and their tender and mischievous smile, were so irresistibly provocative that Fairlie took his pardon for granted, and thanked her in the way that seemed to him at once most eloquent and most satisfactory.

If you wish to know what became of Belle, he fled across the country to the railway station, and spent his leave Heaven knows where--in sackcloth and ashes, I suppose--meditating on his frightful sell. _We_ saw nothing more of him; he could hardly show in Norwich again with all his laurels tumbled in the dust, and his trophies of conquest laughing-stocks for all the troop. He exchanged into the Z Battery going out to India, and I never saw or heard of him till a year or two ago, when he landed at Portsmouth, a much wiser and pleasanter man. The lesson, joined to the late campaign under Sir Colin, had done him a vast amount of good; he had lost his conceit, his vanity, his affectation, and was what Nature meant him to be--a sensible, good-hearted fellow. As luck would have it, Pretty Face, who had joined the Eleventh, was there too, and Fairlie and his wife as well, and Belle had the good sense to laugh it over with them, a.s.suring Geraldine, however, that no one had eclipsed the G. V. whom he had once hoped had answered his memorable advertis.e.m.e.nt. He has grown wiser, and makes a jest of it now; it may be a sore point still, I cannot say--n.o.body sees it; but, whether or no, in the old city of Norwich, and in our corps, from Cadets to Colonels, n.o.body forgets THE LINE IN THE "DAILY:" WHO DID IT, AND WHO WAS DONE BY IT.

HOLLY WREATHS AND ROSE CHAINS.

HOLLY WREATHS AND ROSE CHAINS.

I.

THE COLONEL OF THE "WHITE FAVORS" AND CECIL ST. AUBYN.

"What are you going to do with yourself this Christmas, old fellow?"

said Vivian, of the 60th Hussars: the White Favors we call them, because, after Edgehill, Henriette Maria gave their Colonel a white rosette off her own dress to hang to his sword-knot, and all the 60th have like ribbons to this day. "If you've nothing better to do,"

continued their present Lieutenant-Colonel, "Come down with me to Deerhurst. The governor'll be charmed to see you; my mother has always some nice-looking girls there; and, as we keep the hounds, I can promise you some good hunting with the Harkaway."

"I shall be delighted," said I, who, being in the ---- Lancers, had been chained by the leg at Kensington the whole year, and, of all the woes the most pitiable, had not been able to get leave for either the 12th or the 1st; but while my chums were shooting among the turnips, or stalking royals in Blackmount Forest, I had been tied to town, a solitary unit in Pall-Mall, standing on the forsaken steps of the U. S., or pacing my hack through the dreary desert of Hyde Park--like Macaulay's New Zealander gazing on the ruins of London Bridge.

"Very well," continued Vivian, "come down with me next week, and you can send your horses with Steevens and my stud. The governor could mount you well enough, but I never hunt with so much pleasure as when I'm on Qui Vive; so I dare say you, like me, prefer your own horses. I only hope we shan't have a confounded 'black frost;' but we must take our chance of the weather. I think you'll like my sisters; they're just about half my age. Lots of children came in between, but were providentially nipped in the bud."

"Are they pretty?"

"Can't say, really; I'm too used to them to judge. I can't make love to them, so I never took the trouble to criticise them; but we've always been a good-looking race, I believe. I tell you who's staying there--that girl we met in Toronto. Do you remember her--Cecil St.

Aubyn?"

"I should say I did. How did she get here?"

"She's come to live with her aunt, Mrs. Coverdale. You know that over-dressed widow who lives in Hyde Park gardens, and, when she can't afford Brighton, shuts the front shutters, lives in the back drawing-room, and says, 'Not at home to callers?' St. Aubyn is as poor as a rat, so I suppose he was glad to send Cecil here; and the Coverdale likes to have somebody who'll draw men to her parties, which I'm sure her champagne will never do. It's the most unblushing gooseberry ever ticketed 'Veuve Clicquot.'"

"'Pon my life, I'm delighted to hear it," said I. "The St. Aubyn's superb eyes will make the gooseberry go down. Men in Canada would have swallowed cask-washings to get a single waltz with her. All Toronto went mad on that score. You admired her, too, old fellow, only you weren't with her long enough for such a stoic as you are to boil up into anything warmer."

"Oh yes, I thought her extremely pretty, but I thought her a little flirt, nevertheless."