Beatrice Boville and Other Stories Part 16

James's, and veterans of Pall-Mall, down for the Christmas; belles renewing their London acquaintance, and recalling that "pleasant day at Richmond." But, by Jove! if I describe all the different species presented to view in that ball-room, I might use as many words as an old whip giving you the genealogy of a killing pack in a flying county.

Suffice it, there they all were to criticise us, and pretty sharply I dare say they did it, when they were out of our hearing, in their respective clarences, broughams, dog-carts, drags, tilburies, and hansoms. Before our faces, of course, they only clapped their snowy kid gloves, and murmured "Bravissimo!" with an occasional "Go it, Jack!" and "Get up the steam, old fellow!" from the young bloods in the background; and a shower of bouquets at Cecil and Blanche from their especial worshippers.

Blanche made the dearest little _Catherine_ that ever dressed herself up in blue and silver, and when she drew her toy-rapier in the green-room, asked me if I could not get her a cornetcy in ours. As for Cecil, she played _a ravir_ as Cos, in his Milan armor, whispered with some difficulty, as the steel gorget pressed his throat uncomfortably.

Vestris herself never made a more brilliant or impa.s.sioned _Countess_.

She and Syd really acquitted themselves in a style to qualify them for London boards, and as she threw herself at his feet--

Huon--my husband--lord--canst thou forgive The scornful maid? for the devoted wife Had cleaved to thee, though ne'er she owned thee lord,

I thought the St. Aubyn must be as great an actress as Rachel, if some of that fervor was not real.

Cecil played in the afterpiece, "The wonderful Woman;" the Colonel didn't; and Cos being _De Frontignac_, Syd leaned against one of the scenes, and looked on the whole thing with calm indifference externally, but much disquietude and annoyance within him. He was not jealous of the puppy; he would as soon have thought of putting himself on a par with Blanche's little white terrier, but he'd come to set a price on Cecil's winning smiles, and to see them given pretty equally to him, and to a young fool, her inferior in everything save position, whom he knew in her inmost soul she must ridicule and despise, galled his pride, and steeled his heart against her. His experience in women made him know that it was highly probable that Cecil was playing both at once, and that though, as he guessed, she loved him, she would, if Cos offered first, accept the t.i.tle, and wealth, and position his cousin, equally with himself, could give her; and such love as that was far from the Colonel's ideal.

"By George! Vivian, that Canadian of yours is a perfect angel," said a man in the Dragoons, who had played _Ulric_. "She's such a deuced lot ove pluck, such eyes, such hair, such a voice! 'Pon my life, I quite envy you. I suppose you mean to act out the play in reality, don't you?"

Vivian lying back in an arm-chair in the green-room crushed up one of the satin playbills in his hand, and answered simply, "You do me too much honor, Calvert. Miss St. Aubyn and I have no thought of each other."

If any man had given Vivian the lie, he would have had him out and shot him instanter; nevertheless, he told this one with the most unhesitating defiance of truth. He did not see Cecil, who had just come off the stage, standing behind him. But she heard his words, went as white as Muriel's phantom, and brushed past us into her dressing room, whence she emerged, when her name was called, her cheeks bright with their first rouge, and her eyes unnaturally brilliant. _How_ she flirted with Horace that night, when the theatricals were over! Young ladies who wanted to hook the pet baronet, whispered over their bouquets, "How bold!" and dowagers, seeing one of their best matrimonial speculations endangered by the brilliant Canadian, murmured behind their fans to each other their wonder that Mrs. Vivian should allow any one so fast and so unblushing a coquette to a.s.sociate with her young daughters.

Vivian watched her with intense earnestness. He had given her a bouquet that day, and she had thanked him for it with her soft, fond eyes, and told him she should use it. Now, as she came into the ball-room, he looked at the one in her hand; it was not his, but his cousin's.

He set his teeth hard; and swore a bitter oath to himself. As _Huon_, he was obliged to dance the first dance with the _Countess_, but he spoke little to her, and indeed, Cecil did not give him much opportunity, for she talked fast, and at random, on all sorts of indifferent subjects, with more than even her usual vivacity, and quite unlike the ordinary soft and winning way she had used of late when with him. He danced no more with her, but, daring the waltzes with which he was obliged to favor certain county beauties, and all the time he was doing the honors of Deerhurst, with his calm, stately, Bayard-like courtesy, his eyes would fasten on the St. Aubyn, driving the Dragoons to desperation, waltzing while Horace whispered tender speeches in her ear, or sitting jesting and laughing, half the men in the room gathered round her--with a look of pa.s.sion and hopelessness, tenderness and determination, strangely combined.

IV.

THE COLONEL KILLS HIS FOX, BUT LOSES HIS HEAD AFTER OTHER GAME.

The next day was Christmas-eve; and on the 24th of December the hounds, from time immemorial, had been taken out by a Vivian. For the last few days the frost had been gradually breaking up, thank Heaven, and we looked forward to a good day's sport The meet was at Deerhurst, and it proved a strong muster for the Harkaway; though not exactly up to the Northamptonshire Leicestershire mark, are a clever, steady pack. Cecil and Blanche were the only two women with us, for the country is cramped and covered with blind fences, and the fair s.e.x seldom hunt with the Harkaway. But the St. Aubyn is a first-rate seat, and Blanche has, she tells me, ridden anything from the day she first stuck on to her Shetland, when she was three years old. They were both down in time.

Indeed, I question if they went to bed at all, or did any more than change their ball dresses for their habits. As I lifted Blanche on to her pet chestnut, I heard Syd telling Cecil that Billiard-ball was saddled.

"Thank you," said the St. Aubyn, hurriedly. "I need not trouble you.

Sir Horace has promised to mount me."

Vivian bent his head with a strange smile, and sprang on Qui Vive, while Cecil mounted a showy roan, thorough-bred, the only good horse Cos had in his stud, despite the thousands he had paid into trainers' and breeders' pockets.

"Stole away--forward, forward!" screamed Vivian's fellow-member for Cacklebury; and, holding Qui Vive hard by the head, away went Syd after the couple or two of hounds that were leading the way over some pasture land, with an ox-rail at the bottom of it, all the field after him.

Cecil's roan flew over the gra.s.s land, and rose at the ox-rail as steadily as Qui Vive. Blanche's chestnut let himself be kicked along at no end of a pace, his mistress sitting down in her stirrups as well as the gallant M. F. H., her father. I never _do_ think of anything but the hounds flying along in front of me, but I could not help turning my head over my shoulder to see if she was all right; and I never admired her so much as when she pa.s.sed me with a merry laugh: "Five to one I beat you, monsieur!" Away we went over the dark ploughed lands, and the naked thorn hedges, the wide straggling briar fences, and the fields covered with stones and belted with black-looking plantations. Down went Cos with his horse wallowing helplessly in a ditch, after considerately throwing him unhurt on the bank. Syd set his teeth as he lifted Qui Vive over the prostrate baronet, to the imminent danger of that dandy field-sportsman's life. "Take hold of his head, Miss St. Aubyn," shouted the M. F. H.; but before the words had pa.s.sed his lips, Cecil had landed gallantly a little farther down. Another ten minutes with the hounds streaming over the country--a ten minutes of wild delight, worth all the monotonous hours of every-day life--and Qui Vive was alone with the hounds. We could see him speeding along a quarter of a mile ahead of us, and Cecil's roan was but half a field behind him. She was "riding jealous" of one of the best riders in the Queen's; the M. F. H. just in front of her turned his head once, in admiration of her pluck, to see her lift her horse at a staken-bound fence; but the Colonel never looked round. Away they went--they disappeared over the brow of a hill. Blanche shook her reins and struck her chestnut, and I sawed my hunter's mouth mercilessly with the snaffle. No use--we were too late by three minutes.

Confound it! they had just killed their fox after twenty minutes' burst over a stiff country, one of the fastest things I ever saw.

Cecil was pale with over-excitement, and upon my word she looked more ready to cry than anything when the M. F. H. complimented her with his genial smile, and his cordial "Well done, my dear. I never saw anybody ride better. I used to think my little Blanche the best seat in the country, but she must give place to you--eh, Syd?"

"Miss St. Aubyn does everything well that she attempts," answered the Colonel, in his calm, courteous tone, looking, nevertheless, as stern as if he had just slain his deadliest enemy, instead of having seen a fox killed.

Cecil flushed scarlet, and Cos coming up at that moment, a sadly bespattered object for such an Adonis to present, his coat possessing more the appearance of a bricklayer's than any one else's, after its bath of white mud, she turned to him, and began to laugh and talk with rather wild gaiety. It so chanced that the fox was killed on Horace's land, and we, being not more than a mile and a half off his house, the gallant Cos immediately seized upon the idea of having the object of his idolatry up there to luncheon; and his uncle, and Cecil, and Blanche acquiescing in the arrangement, to his house we went, with such of the field as had ridden up after the finish. Cos trotted forward with the St. Aubyn to show us the way by a short cut through the park, and the echoes of Cecil's laughter rang to Vivian in the rear discussing the run with his father.

A very slap-up place was Cos's baronial hall, for the Cossettings had combined blood and money far many generations; its style and appointments were calculated to back him powerfully in the matrimonial market, and that Cecil might have it all was fully apparent, as he devoted himself to her at the luncheon, which made its appearance at a minute's notice, as if Aladdin had called it up. Cecil seemed disposed to have it too. A deep flush had come up in her cheeks; she smiled her brightest smiles on Cos; she drank his Moet's, bending her graceful head with a laughing pledge to her host; she talked so fast, so gaily, such repartee, such sarcasms, such jeux de mots, that it was well no women were at table to sit in judgment on her afterwards. A deadly paleness came over Vivian's face as he listened to her--but he sat at the bottom of the board where Cecil could not see him. His father, the gayest and best-tempered of mortals, laughed and applauded her; the other men were charmed with a style and a wit so new to them; and Cos, of course, was in the seventh heaven.

The horses were dead beat, and Cos's drag, with its four bays very fresh, for they were so little worked, was ordered to take us back to Deerhurst.

"Who'll drive," said Horace. "Will you, Syd?"

"No," said his cousin, more laconically than politely.

"Let _me_," cried Cecil. "I can drive four in hand. Nothing I like better."

"Give me the ribbons," interposed the Colonel, changing his mind, "if you can't drive them yourself, Cos, as you ought to do."

"No, no," murmured Cos. "Mith St. Aubyn shall do everything she wishes in _my_ house."

"Let her drive them," laughed Vivian, senior. "Blanche has tooled my drag often enough before now."

Before he had finished, Cecil had sprung up on to the box as lightly as a bird; her cheeks were flushed deeper still, and her gazelle eyes flashed darker than ever. Cos mounted beside her. Blanche and I in the back seat. The M. F. H., Syd, and the two other men behind. The bays shook their harness and started off at a rattling pace, Cecil tooling them down the avenue with her little gauntleted hands as well as if she had been Four-in-hand Forester of the Queen's Bays, or any other crack whip. How she flirted, and jested, and laughed, and shook the ribbons till the bays tore along the stony road in the dusky winter's afternoon--even Blanche, though a game little lady herself, looked anxious.

Cecil asked Horace for a cigar, and struck a fusee, and puffed away into the frosty air like the wildest young Cantab at Trinity. It didn't make her sick, for she and Blanche had had two Queens out of Vivian's case, and smoked them to the last ash for fun only the day before; and she drove us at a mad gallop into Deerhurst Park, past the dark trees and the gleaming water and the trooping deer, and pulled up before the hall door just as the moon came out on Christmas-eve.

We were all rather fast at Deerhurst, so Blanche got no scolding from her mamma (who, like a sensible woman, never put into their heads that things done in the glad innocency of the heart were "wrong"); and Cecil, as soon as she had sprung down, s.n.a.t.c.hed her hand from Cos, and went up to her own room.

The Colonel's lips were pressed close together, and his forehead had the dark frown that Guy wears in his portrait.

It had been done with another, so it was all wrong; but oh! Syd, my friend, if the "dry" that was drunk, and the drag that was tooled, and the weed that was smoked, had been _yours_, wouldn't it have been the most charming caprice of the most charming woman!

That night, at dinner, a letter by the afternoon's post came to the Colonel. It was "On her Majesty's Service," and his mother asked him anxiously what it was.

"Only to tell me to join soon," said he, carelessly, giving me a sign to keep the contents of a similar letter I had just received to myself; which I should have done anyhow, as I had reason to hope that the disclosure of them would have quenched the light in some bright eyes beside me.

"Ordered off at last, thank G.o.d!" said Syd, handing his father the letter as soon as the ladies were gone. "There's a train starts at 12.40, isn't there, for town? You and I, Ned, had better go to-night.

You don't look so charmed, old fellow, as you did when you went out to Scinde. I say, don't tell my sisters; there is no need to make a row in the house. Governor, you'll prepare my mother; I must bid _her_ good-by."

I _did not_ view the Crimea with the unmingled, devil-me-care delight with which I had gone out under "fighting Napier" nine years before, for Blanche's sunshiny face had made life fairer to me; and to obey Syd, and go without a farewell of her, was really too great a sacrifice to friendship. But he and I went to the drawing-rooms, chatted, and took coffee as if nothing had chanced, till he could no longer stand seeing Cecil, still excited, singing chansons to Cos, who was leaning enraptured over the instrument, and he went off to his own room. The other girls and men were busy playing the Race game; Blanche and I were sitting in the back drawing-room beside the fire, and the words that decided my destiny were so few, that I cite them as a useful lesson to those novelists who are in the habit of making their heroes, while waiting breathless to hear their fate, recite off at a cool canter four pages of the neatest-turned sentences without a single break-down or a single pull-up, to see how the lady takes it.

"Blanche, I must bid you good-by to-night." Blanche turned to me in bewildered anxiety. "I must join my troop: perhaps I may be sent to the Crimea. I could go happily if I thought you would regret me?"

Brutally selfish that was to be sure, but she did not take it so. She looked as if she was going to faint, and for fear she should, trusting to the engrossing nature of the Race game in the further apartment, I drew nearer to her. "Will you promise to give yourself to n.o.body else while I am away, my darling?" Blanche's eyes did promise me through their tears, and this brief scene, occupying the s.p.a.ce of two minutes, twisted our fates into one on that eventful Christmas-eve.

While I was parting with my poor little Blanche in the library, Vivian was bidding his mother farewell in her dressing-room. His mother had the one soft place in his heart, steeled and made skeptical to all others by that fatal first love of which he had spoken to Cecil. Possibly some of her son's bitter grief was shown to her on that sad Christmas-eve; at all events, when he left her dressing-room, he had the tired, haggard look left by any conflict of pa.s.sion. As he came down the stairs to come to the dog-cart that was to take us to the station, the door of Blanche's boudoir stood open, and in it he saw Cecil. The fierce tide of his love surged up, subduing all his pride, and he paused to take his last sight of the face that would haunt him in the long night watches and the rapid rush of many a charge. She looked up and saw him; that look overpowered all his calmness and resolve. He turned, and bent towards her, every feature quivering with the pa.s.sion she had once longed to rouse. His hot breath scorched her cheek, and he caught her fiercely against his heart in an iron embrace, pressing his burning lips on hers. "G.o.d forgive you! I have loved you too well. Women have ever been fatal to my race!"

He almost threw her from him in the violence of feelings roused after a long sleep. In another moment he was driving the dog-cart at a mad gallop past the old church in which we had spent such pleasant hours.

Its clock tolled out twelve strokes as we pa.s.sed it, and on the quiet village, and the weird-like trees, and the tall turrets of Deerhurst, the Christmas morning dawned.

Vivian continued so utterly enfeebled and prostrate that there was but one chance for him--return homewards. I was going to England with despatches, and Syd, at his mother's entreaty, let himself be carried down to a transport, and shipped for England. He was utterly listless and strengthless, although the voyage did him a little good. He did not care where he went, so he stayed in town with me while I presented myself at the Horse Guards and war Office, and then we travelled down together to Deerhurst.

Oddly enough it was Christmas-eve again when we drove up the old avenue.

The snow was falling heavily, and lay deep on the road and thick on the hedges and trees. The meadows and woods were white against the dark, hushed sky, and the old church, and its churchyard cedars, were loaded too with the clouds' Christmas gift. To me, at least, the English scene was very pleasant, after the heat, and dirt, and minor worries of Gallipoli and Constantinople. The wide stretching country, with its pollards, and holly hedges, and homesteads, the cattle safe housed, the yule fire burning cheerily on the hearths, the cottages and farms nestling down among their orchards and pasture-lands, all was so heartily and thoroughly English. They seemed to bring back days when I was a boy skating and sliding on the mere at home, or riding out with the harriers light-hearted and devil-me-care as a boy might be, coming back to hear the poor governor's cheery voice tell me I was one of the old stock, and to toss down a b.u.mper of Rhenish with a time-honored Christmas toast. The crackle of the crisp snow, the snort of the horses as they plunged on into the darkening night, and the red fire-light flickering on the lattice windows of the cottages we pa.s.sed, were so many welcomes home, and I double-thonged the off-wheeler with a vengeance as I thought of soft lips that would soon touch mine, and a soft voice that would soon whisper my best "Io triumphe!"

The lodge-gates flew open. We pa.s.sed the old oaks and beeches, the deer trooping away over the snow as we startled them out of their rest. We were not expected that night, and my man rang such a peal at the bell as might have been heard all over the quiet park. Another minute, and Blanche and I were together again, and alone in the library where we had parted just twelve months before. Of course, for the time being, we neither knew nor cared what was going on in the other rooms of the house. The Colonel had gone to rest himself on the sofa in the dining-room. Half an hour had elapsed, perhaps, when a wild cry rang through the house, startling even us, absorbed though we were in our tete-a-tete. Blanche's first thought was of her brother. She ran out through the hall, and up the staircase, and I followed her. At the top of the stairs, leaning against the wall, breathing fast, and his face ashy white, stood Syd, and at his feet, in a dead faint, lay Cecil St.