Beatrice Boville and Other Stories Part 27

He'd been brought up at Sainte Barbe, after being expelled from Rugby, knew all the best of the "jeunesse doree," and could not endure any place after Paris, where his life was as sparkling and brilliant as the foam off a gla.s.s of champagne. Wild and careless, high spirited, and lavish in his Opera suppers, his _cabaret_ dinners, his Trois Freres banquets, his lansquenet parties, his bouquets for baronnes, and his bracelets for ballerinas, Ernest gained his reputation as a _Lion_, and--ruined himself, too, poor old fellow!

His place down in Surrey had mortgages thick on every inch of its lands, and the money that kept him going was borrowed from those modern Satans, money lenders, at the usually ruinous interest. "But still," Ernest was wont to say, with great philosophy, "I've had ten years' swing of pleasure. Does every man get as much as that? And should I have been any happier if I'd been a good boy, and a country squire, sat on the bench, amused my mind with turnips, and married some bishop's daughter, who'd have marched me to church, forbidden cigars, and buried me in family boots?"

Certainly that would _not_ have been his line, and so, in natural horror at it, he dashed into a diametrically opposite one, and after the favor he had shown him from every handsome woman that drove through Longchamp, wore diamonds at the Tuileries, and supped with dominos noirs at bals d'Opera, and the favor he showed to cards, the _courses_, and the _coulisses_, few bishops would have imperilled their daughters' souls by setting them to hunt down this wicked _Lion_, especially as the poor _Lion_ now wasn't worth the trapping. If he had been, there would have been hue and cry enough after him I don't doubt; but the Gordon c.u.mmings of the beau s.e.xe rarely hunt unless it's worth their while, and they can bring home splendid spoils to make their bosom friends mad with envy; and Ernest, despite his handsome face, his fashionable reputation, and the aroma of conquest that hung about him (they used to say he never wooed ever so negligently but he won), was a.s.suredly neither an "eligible speculation" nor a "marrying man," and was an object rather of terror to English mammas steering budding young ladies through the dangerous vortex of French society with a fierce chevaux de frise of British prejudices and a keen British eye to business. If Ernest was of no other use, however, he was invaluable to his uncles, aunts, and male cousins, as a sort of scapegoat and _epouvantail_, to be held up on high to show the unwary what they would come to if they followed his steps.

It was so pleasant to them to exult over his backslidings, and, cutting him mercilessly up into little bits, hold condemnatory sermons over every one of the pieces. "Dans l'adversite de nos meilleurs amis, nous trouvons toujours quelque chose qui ne nous deplait pas;" and Vaughan's friends, like the rest of us pharisees, dearly loved to glance at the publican (especially if he was handsomer, cleverer, or any way better than themselves), and thank G.o.d loudly that they were not such men as he. Ernest was a hardened sinner, however; he laughed, put the Channel between him and them, and went on his ways without thinking or caring for their animadversions.

"By Jove! Emile," said he as they sat dining together at Leiter's, "I should like to find out my golden-haired sylphide. She was English, by her fair skin, and though I'm not very fond of my compatriotes, especially when they're abroad (I think touring John Bull detestable wrapped up in his treble plaid of reserve), still I should like to find her out just for simple curiosity. I a.s.sure you she'd the prettiest foot and ankle I ever saw, not excepting even Bluette's."

"Ma foi! that's a good deal from _you_. She must be found, then. Voyons!

shall we advertise in the _Moniteur_, employ the secret police, or call at all the hotels in person to say that you're quite ready to act out Soulie's 'Lion Amoureux,' if you can only discover the pet.i.te bourgeoise to play it with you?"

Vaughan laughed as he drank his demi-ta.s.se.

"Lion amoureux! that's an anomaly; we're only in love just enough pour nous amuser; and of us Albin says, very rightly,

Si vous connaissiez quelques meilleurs, Vous porteriez bientot cette ame ailleurs."

"Very well, then: if you don't know of anything better, let's hunt up this incognita. If she went to the Francais, she's most likely at the Odeon to-night," said De Concressault. "Shall we try?"

"Allons!" said Vaughan, rising indolently, as he did most things. "But it's rather silly, I think; there are bright smiles and pretty feet enough in Paris without one's setting off on a wild-goose chase after them."

They were playing the last act of "La Calomnie," as Vaughan and De Concressault took their places, put up their lorgnons, and looked round the house. He swore a few mental "Diables!" and "Sacres!" as his gaze fell on faces old or ugly, or too brunes or too blondes, or anything but what he wanted. At last, without moving his gla.s.s, he touched De Concressault's arm.

"There she is, Emile, in the fourth from the centre, in a white opera cloak, with pink flowers in her hair."

"I see her, mon ami," said Emile. "I found her out two seconds ago (see how well you sketch!) but I wouldn't spoil your pleasure in discovering her. Mon Dieu! Ernest, she's looking at you, and smiles as if she recognised you. Was there ever so lucky a Lauzun?"

Vaughan could have laughed outright to see by the brightness of the girl's expression that she knew the saviour of her bouquet again, for though he was accustomed to easy conquests, such naive interest in him at such short notice was something new to him.

He didn't take his lorgnon off her again, and she was certainly worth the honor, with her soft, l.u.s.trous gold hair, the eyes that defy definition--black in some lights, violet in others--a wide-arched forehead, promising plenty of brains, and a rayonnante, animated, joyous expression, quite refreshing to anybody as bored and blase as Vaughan and De Concressault. As soon as the last piece was over Vaughan slipped out of his loge, and took up his station at the entrance.

He didn't wait in vain: the golden hair soon came, on the arm of a gentleman--middle aged, as Vaughan noticed with a sensation of satisfaction. She glanced up at him as she pa.s.sed: he looked very handsome in the gas glare. Vaughan perhaps was too sensible a fellow to think of his pose, but even _we_ have our weaknesses under certain circ.u.mstances, as well as the crinolines. Luckily for him, he chanced to have in his pocket a gold serpent bracelet he had bought that morning for some fair dame or demoiselle. He stopped her, and held it out to her.

"I beg your pardon, mademoiselle," he said in French, "but I think you dropped this?"

She looked up at him with the sunniest of smiles as she answered, in a pure accent, "No monsieur, thank you, it does not belong to me."

The middle-aged man glanced sideways at him with true British suspicion--I dare say a pickpocket, a Rouge, and Fieschi, were all mixed up in his mind as embodied in the graceful figure and bold glance of the _Lion_. He drew the girl on, looking much like a heavy cloud with a bright sun ray after it; but she half turned her head over her shoulder to give him a farewell smile, which Ernest returned with ten per cent.

interest.

"Anglais," said Emile, concisely.

"Malheureus.e.m.e.nt," said Ernest as briefly, as he pushed his way into the air, and saw the gold hair vanish into her carriage. He went quickly up to the cocher.

"Ou demeurent-ils, mon ami?" he whispered, slipping a five-franc piece into his hand.

The man smiled. "A l'Hotel de Londres, monsieur; No. 6, au premier."

"The devil! pourquoir ne allez pas?" said an unmistakably English voice from the interior of the voiture. The man set off at a trot; Ernest sprang into his own trap.

"Au Chateau Rouge! May as well go there, eh, Emile? What a deuced pity la chevelure doree is English!"

"I wish she were a danseuse, an actress, a fleuriste--anything one could make his own introduction to. Confound it there's the 'heavy father,'

I'm afraid, in the case, and some rigorous mamma, or vigilant _beguine_ of a governess: but, to judge by the young lady's smiles, she'll be easy game unless she's tremendously fenced in."

With which consolatory reflection Vaughan leaned back and lighted a cheroot, _en route_ to spend the night as he had spent most of them for the last ten years, till the fan had begun to be more bore than pleasure.

II.

NINA GORDON.

"Have you been to the Hotel de Londres, Ernest?" said De Concressault, as Vaughan lounged into Tortoni's next day, where Emile and three or four other men were drinking Seltzer and talking of how Cerisette had beaten Vivandiere by a neck at Chantilly, or (the sport to which a Frenchman takes much more naturally) of how well Riviere played in the "Prix d'un Bouquet;" what a _belle taille_ la De Servans had; and what a fool Senecterre had made of himself in the duel about Madame Viardot.

"Of course I have," said Vaughan. "The name is Gordon--general name enough in England. They were gone to the Expiatoire, the portiere told me. There _is_ the heavy father, as I feared, and a quasi-governess acting duenna; they're travelling with another family, whose name I could not hear: the woman said 'C'etait beaucoup trop dur pour les levres.' I dare say they're some Brummagem people--some Fudge family or other--on their travels. Confound it!"

"Poor Ernest," laughed De Concressault. "Some gold hair has bewitched him, and instead of finding it belongs to a danseuse, or a married woman, or a fleuriste of the Palais Royal, or something attainable, he finds it turn into an unapproachable English girl, with no end of outlying sentries round her, who'll fire at the first familiar approach."

"It is a hard case," said De Kerroualle, a dashing fellow in one of the "Regiments de famille." "Never mind, mon ami; 'contre fortune bon coeur,' you know: it'll be more fun to devastate one of our countrymen's inviolate strongholds than to conquer where the white flag's already held out. Halloa! here's a compatriot of yours, I'd bet; look at his sanctified visage and stiff choker--a Church of England man, eh?"

"The devil!" muttered Vaughan, turning round; "deuce take him, it's my cousin Ruskinstone! What in the world does _he_ do in Paris?"

The man he spoke of was the Rev. Eusebius Ruskinstone, the Dean's Warden of the cathedral of Faithandgrace, a tall, thin young clerical of eight or nine-and-twenty, with goodness enough (it was generally supposed) in his little finger to make up for all Ernest's sins, scarlet though they were. He had just sat down and taken up the carte to blunder through "Potage au Duc de Malakoff," "Frica.s.see de volaille a la Princesse Mathilde," and all the rest of it, when his eye lit on his graceless cousin, and a vinegar asperity spread over his bland visage.

Vaughan rose with a lazy grace, immensely bored within him: "My dear Ruskinstone, what an unantic.i.p.ated pleasure. I never hoped Vanity Fair would have had power to lure _you_ into its naughty peep-shows and roundabouts."

The Rev. Eusebius reddened slightly; he had once stated strongly his opinion that poor Paris was Pandemonium. "How do you do?" he said, giving his cousin two fingers; "it is a long time since we saw you in England."

"England doesn't want me," said Ernest, dryly. "I don't fancy I should be very welcome at Faithandgrace, should I? The dear Chapter would probably consign me to starvation for my skeptical notions, as Calvin did Castellio. But what _has_ brought you to Paris? Are you come to fight the Jesuits in a conference, or to abjure the Wardenship and turn over to them?"

Eusebius was shocked at the irreverent tone, but there was a satirical smile on his cousin's lips that he didn't care to provoke. "I am come,"

he said, stiffly, "partly for health, partly to collect materials for a work on the 'Gurgoyles and Rose Mouldings of Mediaeval Architecture,' and partly to oblige some friends of mine. Pardon me, here they come."

Vaughan lifted his eyes, expecting nothing very delectable in Ruskinstone's friends; to his astonishment they fell on his beauty of the Francais! with the outlying sentries of father, governess, and two other women, the Warden's maiden sisters, stiff, manierees, and prudish, like too many Englishwomen. The young lady of the Francais was a curious contrast to them: she started a little as she saw Vaughan, and smiled brilliantly. On the spur of that smile Ernest greeted his cousins with a degree of _empress.e.m.e.nt_ that they certainly wouldn't have been honored by without it. They were rather frightened at coming in actual contact with such a monster of iniquity as a Paris _Lion_, who, they'd heard, had out-Juan'd Don Juan, and gave him but a frigid welcome. Mr. Gordon had doubtless heard, too, of Vaughan's misdemeanors, for he looked stoical and acidulated as he bowed. But the young girl's eyes reconciled Ernest to all the rest, as she frankly returned a look with which he was wont to win his way through women's hearts, 'midst the hum of ball rooms, in the soft tete-a-tete in boudoirs, and over the sparkling Sillery of _pet.i.ts soupers_. So, for the sake of his new quarry, he disregarded the cold looks of the others, and made himself so charming, that n.o.body could withstand the fascination of his manner till their dinner was served, and then, telling his cousins he would do himself the pleasure of calling on them the next day, he left the cafe to drive over to Gentilly, to inspect a grey colt of De Kerroualle's.

"La chevelure doree is quite as pretty by daylight, Ernest," said De Concressault. "Bon dieu! it is such a relief to see eyes that are not tinted, and a skin whose pink and white is not born from the mysterious rites of the toilet."

Vaughan nodded, with his Manilla between his teeth.

"That cousin of yours is queer style, mon garcon," said Kerroualle.

"How some of those islanders contrive to iron themselves into the stiffness and flatness they do, is to me the profoundest enigma. But what Church of England meaning lies hid in his coat-tails? They are, for all the world, like our reverends peres! What is it for?"

"High Church. Next door shop to yours, you know. Our ecclesiastics are given to balancing themselves on a tight rope between their 'mother' and their 'sister,' till they tumble over into their sister's open arms--the Catholics say into salvation, the Protestants into d.a.m.nation; into neither, I myself opine, poor simpletons. Ruskinstone is fearfully architectural. The sole things he'll see here will be facades, gurgoyles, and clerestories, and his soul knows no warmer loves than 'stone dolls,' as Newton calls them. I say, Gaston, what do you think of _my_ love of the Francais; isn't she _chic_, isn't she mignonne, isn't she spirituelle?"

"Yes," a.s.sented De Kerroualle, "prettier than either Bluette or Madame de Melusine would allow, or--relish."

Ernest frowned. "I've done with Bluette; she's a pretty face, but--ah, bah! one can't amuse oneself always with a little paysanne, for she's nothing better, after all; and I'm half afraid the Melusine begins to bore me."