Beatrice Boville and Other Stories Part 41

Violet, meanwhile, was waltzing with Staumgaurn and a dozen others, but looked rather white--not using any rouge but what nature had given her--and by the end of the evening her bouquet had utterly come to grief. Days went on till a fortnight of our last month had gone, and Telfer, to my sorrow (not surprise, for I always thought the Tressillian was a dangerous foe, and that, like Ringwood, he'd find himself unhorsed by a woman), grew grave and stern, haunted with ten times more recklessness than usual, and threw away his guineas at the Redoute in a wild way, quite new with him, for though he liked play _pour s'amuser_, he had too much control over his pa.s.sions ever to let play get ascendancy over him. I used to think he had the strongest pa.s.sions and the strongest will over them of any man I knew; but now a pa.s.sion least undesired and most hopeless of any that ever entered his soul, seemed to have mastered him. Not that he showed it; with the Tressillian he was simply distantly courteous; but I, who was on the _qui vive_ for his first sign of being conquered, saw his eyebrows contract when somebody was paying her desperate court, and his glance lighten and flash when she pa.s.sed near him. They had never been alone since the night of the ball, and Violet was too proud to try for a reconciliation, even if she'd cared for one.

One night we were at a ball at the Prince Humbugandschwerinn's. The Tressillian had been waltzing with all her might, and had all the men in the room, Humbugandschwerinn himself included, round her. Telfer leaned against a console ten minutes, watching her, and then abruptly left the ball-room, and did not return again. He came instead into the card-room, and sat down to _ecarte_ with De Tintiniac, and lost two games at ten Napoleons a side. Generally, he played very steadily, never giving his attention to anything but the game; but now he was listening to what a knot of men were saying, who were laughing, chatting, and sipping coffee, while they talked about--the Tressillian.

"I mark the king and play," said Telfer, his eyes fixed fiercely on a young fellow who was discussing Violet much as he'd have discussed his new Danish dog or English hunter. He was Jack Sn.o.bley, Lord Featherweight's son, who was doing the grand, a confounded young parvenu, vulgar as his cotton-spinning ancestry could make him, who could appreciate the Tressillian about as much as he could Dannecker's Ariadne, which work of art he p.r.o.nounced, in my hearing, "a pretty girl, but the dawg very badly done--too much like a cat." "I take your three to two," continued Telfer, his brow lowering as he heard the young fool praising and criticising Violet with small ceremony. The Major had the haughtiest patrician principles, and to hear a sn.o.b like this sandy-haired honorable, speaking of the woman _he_ chose to champion as he might have done of some ballerina or Chaumiere belle, was rather too much for Telfer's self-control.

When the game was done, he rose, and walked quietly over to where Sn.o.bley stood. He looked him down with that cold, haughty glance that has cowed men bolder than Lord Featherweight's hopeful offspring, and said a word or two to him in a low tone, which caused that gentleman to flush up red and look fierce with all his might.

"What's the girl to you, that I mayn't speak as I choose of her?" he retorted; the Sillery, of which he'd taken a good deal too much, working up in his weak brain. "I've heard that she jilted you, and that was why you've been setting them all against her, and saying she wanted to hook your old governor."

The Sillery must have indeed obscured Jack's reason with a vengeance to make him venture this very elegant and refined speech with the Major, most fastidious in his ideas of good breeding, and most direful in his wrath, of any man I ever knew. Telfer's cheek turned as white with pa.s.sion as the bronze would let it; his gray eyes grew almost black as they stared at the young sn.o.b. He was so supremely astonished that this ill-bred boy had actually dared thus to address him!

"Mr. Sn.o.bley," he said, with his chilled and most ironical smile, and his quietest, most courteous voice, "you must learn good manners before you venture to parley with gentlemen. Allow me to give you your first lesson." And stooping, as if to a very little boy--young Sn.o.bley was a good foot shorter than he--the Major struck him on the lips with his left-hand French kid glove. It was a very gentle blow--it would scarcely have reddened the Tressillian's delicate skin--but on the Hon. Jack it had electric effect. He was beginning to swear, to look big, to talk of satisfaction, insult, and all the rest of it; but Telfer laughed, bent his head, told him he was quite ready to satisfy him to any extent he required; and, turning away, sat down to _ecarte_ calm and impa.s.sive as ever, and pleased greatly with himself for having silenced this silly youth. The affair was much less exciting to him than it was to any other man in the room. "It's too great an honor for him, the young brute, for me to be called out by him, as if he were one of us. I hate sn.o.bs; Lord Featherweight's grandfather was butler to mine, and he himself was a cotton-spinner in Lancashire, and then this little contemptible puppy dares to----"

Telfer finished his sentence with a puff of smoke from his meerschaum, as he sat in his bedroom after the ball, into which sanctuary I had followed him to talk a little before turning in.

"To discuss the Tressillian," said I. "But that surprises me less, old fellow, than that you should champion her. What's it for? Has hate turned to the other thing? Have you come to think that, though she'd make a very bad mother-in-law, she'd make a charming wife? 'Pon my life, if you have----"

"Hush! Don't jest!"

I knew by the tone of those three little monosyllables that the Major was done for--caught, conquered, and fettered by his dangerous foe.

Telfer sat silent for some minutes, looking out of the window where the dawn was rising over the hills, with a settled gloom upon his face. Then he rose, and began swinging about the room with his firm cavalry tread, his arms crossed on his chest, and his head bent down.

"By Heaven! Vane," he said at length, in a tone low, but pa.s.sionate and bitter, "I have gone on like a baby or a fool, playing with tools till they have cut me. Against my will, against my judgment, against reason, hope, everything, I have lingered in that girl's fascinations till I am bound by them hand and foot. I cannot deceive myself, I cannot shut the truth out; it was not honor, nor chivalry, nor friendship that made me to-night insult the man who spoke jestingly of her; it was love--love as mad, as reckless, as misplaced, as ever cursed a man and drove him to his ruin." He paused, breathing hard, with his teeth set, then broke out again: "I, who held love in such disdain, who have so long kept my pa.s.sions in such strong control, who thought no woman had the power to move me against my will--I love at last, despite myself, though I know that she is pitiless, that nothing I have said has been able to touch her into softer feeling, and that, mad as my pa.s.sion is for her, if her nature be as hard and haughty as I fear, I dare not, if I could, make her my wife. No, Vane, no," he went on, hastily, as I interrupted. "She does not love me, she has no gentler feeling in her; I thought she had, but I was mistaken. I tried her several times, but she will never forgive my first injustice to her; and to one with so little softness in her nature I dare not trust my peace. It were a worse h.e.l.l even than that I now endure, to have her with me, loving her as I do, and feel that her cold heart gave no response to mine; to possess her glorious beauty, and yet know that her love and her soul were dead in their chill pride to me----"

He paused again, and leaned against the window, his chest heaving, and hot tears standing in his haughty eyes, wrung from the very anguish of his soul. The pride that had never before bent to any human thing, was now cast in the dust before a woman who never did, and probably never would, love him in return.

V.

THE DUEL, AND ITS CONSEQUENCES.

The contemptible young puppy, for whom Telfer considered the honor of a ball from his pistol a great deal too good in the morning, sent Heavysides, of the 40th, a chum of his found up at the Bad, to claim "satisfaction," the valor produced in him by Sillery over night having been kept up since by copious draughts of cognac and Seltzer. Having signified to Heavysides that the Major would do Mr. Sn.o.bley the favor of shooting him in the retired valley of Konigshohle at sunrise the next day, I went to tell Telfer, who had a hearty laugh at the young fellow's challenge.

"I'd give him something to shoot me through the heart," said he, bitterly, "but I don't suppose he will. He's practised at pigeons, not at men, probably. I won't hurt him much, but a little lesson will do him good. Mind n.o.body in the house gets wind of the affair. Though I make a fool of myself in her defence, there is no need that she or others should know it. But if the boy should do for me, tell her, Vane--tell her," said the Major, shading his eyes with his hand, "that I have learnt to love her as I never dreamt I should love any woman, and that I do not blame her for the just lesson she has read me for the rudeness and the unjust prejudice I indulged in so long towards her. She retaliated fairly upon me, and G.o.d forbid that she should have one hour of her life embittered through remorse for me."

His voice sank into a whisper as he spoke; then, with an effort, he forced himself into calmness, and went to play billiards with Marc. This was the man who, three months before, had told me with such contemptuous decision that "we need never fall in love unless it's convenient; and as to caring for a girl who doesn't care for us, that was a weakness with which he couldn't sympathize at all!"

Late that night, Telfer and I, coming down the stairs, met the Tressillian going up them to her room. The Major stopped her, and held out his hand, with a softened light in his eyes. "Will you not bid me good-bye? I may not see you again."

There was a sadness in his smile bitterly significant to me, but very likely she didn't see it, not having any key to it, as I had.

Violet turned pale, and I fancied her lips twitched, but it might be the flickering of the light of the staircase lamps on her face. At any rate, being a young lady born and bred in good society, she put her hand in his, with a simple "What! are you going away?"

"Perhaps. At any rate, let us part in peace."

The proud man laughed as he said it, though he was enduring tortures.

Violet heard the laugh, and didn't see the straining anxiety in his gaze.

She drew her hand rapidly away. "Certainly. _Bon voyage_, Major Telfer, and good night," she answered, carelessly; and, with a graceful bend, the Tressillian floated on up the stairs with the dignity of a young empress.

Telfer looked after the white gossamer dress and the beautiful head, with its wreath of scarlet flowers, and an iron sternness settled on his face. All hope was gone now. She could not have parted with him like this if she had cared for him one straw more than for the flowers in her hair. Yet, in the morning, he was going to risk his life for her. Ah, well! I've always seen that in love there's one of the two who gives all and gets nothing.

In the morning, by five o'clock, in the valley of Konigshohle, a snug bit of pasture land between two rocks, where no gendarme could pounce upon us, young Sn.o.bley made his appearance to enjoy the honor of being a target for one of the best shots in Europe. Sn.o.bley had a good deal of swagger and would-be dash, and made a great show of pluck, which your man of true pluck never does. Telfer stood talking to me up to the last minute, took his pistol carelessly in his hand, and, without taking any apparent aim, fired.

If Telfer made up his mind to shoot off your fifth waistcoat-b.u.t.ton, your fifth waistcoat-b.u.t.ton would be irrevocably doomed; and therefore, having determined to himself to lodge a bullet in this young puppy's left wrist, in the left wrist did the ball lodge. Sn.o.bley was "satisfied," very amply satisfied, I fancy, by his looks. He'd fired, and sent his shot right into the trunk of a chestnut growing some seven yards off his opponent, to Heavyside's supreme scorn.

"That'll teach him not to talk of young ladies in his Mabille slang,"

said Telfer, lighting his cigar. "I hope the little sn.o.b may be the better for my lesson. Now I am _en route_, I'll go over to Pipesandbeersbad, breakfast at the Hotel de France, and go and see Humbugandschwerinn: he wants me to look at some English racers Brookes has just sent him over. Make my excuses at Essellau; and I say, Vane, see if you can't get us away in a day or two; have some call home, or something, for I shall never stand this long."

With which not over-clear speech the Major mounted his horse and cantered off towards the Bad.

I rode back; went to my own room, had some chocolate, read Pigault le Brun, and about noon, seeing Virginie, the Tressillian, and several others out on the terrace, went to join them. Marc slipped his arm through mine and drew me aside.

"I say, Vane, what's all this about Telfer striking some fellow for talking about the Tressillian? Staurmgaurn was over here just now, and told me there was a row in the card-room at Humbugandschwerinn's between Telfer and another Englishman. I knew nothing about it. Is it true?"

"So far true," I answered, "that Telfer put a ball in the youth's wrist at seven o'clock this morning; and serve him right too--he's an impudent young sn.o.b."

"By Jove!" cried Marc, "what in the world made him take the Tressillian's part? Have the _beaux yeux_ really made an impression on the most unimpressionable of men?"

"The devil they have," said I, crossly; "but I wish she'd been at the deuce first, for he's too good a fellow to waste his best years pining after a pair of dark eyes."

Marc shrugged his shoulders. "_C'est vrai_; but we're all fools some time or other. The idea of Telfer's chivalry! I declare it's quite like the old days of Froissart and Commines--fighting for my lady's favor."

And away he went, singing those two famous lines from Alcyonee:

Pour meriter son coeur, pour plaire a ses beaux yeux, J'ai fait la guerre aux rois: je l'aurais faite aux dieux;

and I thought to myself that if the Tressillian proved a De Longueville, I could find it in my soul to shoot her without remorse.

But as I turned away from Marc, I came upon her, looking pale and ill enough to satisfy anybody. The color flushed into her cheeks as she saw me; we spoke of the weather, the chances of storm, Floss's new collar, and other trifles; then she asked me, bending over her little dog,--

"Is Captain Staurmgaurn's news true, that your friend has--has been quarrelling with a young Englishman?"

"Yes," I answered. "I wonder Staurmgaurn told you; it is scarcely a topic to interest ladies. Telfer has given the young gentleman a well-merited lesson."

"Have they fought?" she asked, breathlessly, laying her hand on my arm, and looking as white as a ghost.

"Yes, they have," said I; "and he fought, Miss Tressillian, for one who gave him a very cold adieu last night."

Her head drooped, she trembled perceptibly, and the color rushed back to her cheeks.

"Is he safe?" she asked, in the lowest of whispers.

"Quite," I answered, quickly, as De Tintiniac lounged up to us; and I left my words, like a prudent diplomatist, to bear fruit as best they might.