Cecil Castlemaine's Gage, Lady Marabout's Troubles, and Other Stories Part 11

"What is the cla.s.s, Lady Marabout, may I ask?"

"Those clever, detestable, idle, good-for-nothing, fashionable, worthless men about town, who have not a penny to their fortune, and spend a thousand a year on gloves and scented tobacco--who are seen at everybody's house, and never at their own--who drive horses fit for a Duke's stud, and haven't money enough to keep a donkey on thistles--who have handsome faces and brazen consciences--who are positively leaders of ton, and yet are glad to write feuilletons before the world is up to pay their stall at the Opera--who give a guinea for a bouquet, and can't pay a shilling of their just debts,--I detest the cla.s.s, my dear!"

"So it seems, Lady Marabout. I never heard you so vehement. And who is the particular scapegoat of this type of sinners?"

"Chandos Cheveley."

"Chandos Cheveley? Isn't he that magnificent man Sir Philip introduced to me at the Amandines' breakfast yesterday? Why, Lady Marabout, his figure alone might outbalance a mult.i.tude of sins!"

"He is handsome enough. _Did_ Philip introduce him to you, my dear? I wonder! It was very careless of him. But men _are_ so thoughtless; they will know anybody themselves, and they think we may do the same. The men called here while we were driving this morning. I am glad we were out: he very seldom comes to _my_ house."

"But why is he so dreadful? The Amandines are tremendously exclusive, I thought."

"Oh, he goes everywhere! No party is complete without Chandos Cheveley, and I have heard that at September or Christmas he has more invitations than he could possibly accept; but he is a most objectionable man, all the same--a man every one dreads to see come near her daughters. He has extreme fascination of manner, but he has not a farthing! How he lives, dresses, drives the horses he does, is one of those miracles of London men's lives which _we_ can never hope to puzzle out. Philip says he likes him, but Philip never speaks ill of anybody, except a woman now and then, who teases him; but the man is my detestation--has been for years. I was annoyed to see his card: it is the first time he has called this season. He knows I can't endure his cla.s.s or him."

With which Lady Marabout wound up a very unusually lengthy and uncharitable disquisition, length and uncharitableness being both out of her line; and Lady Cecil Ormsby rolled her handkerchief into a ball, threw it across the room for Bonbon, the spaniel puppy, and laughed till the c.o.c.katoo screamed with delight:

"Dear Lady Marabout, do forgive me, but it is such fun to hear you positively, for once, malicious! Who is your Horror, genealogically speaking? this terrible--what's his name?--Chandos Cheveley?"

"The younger son of a younger son of one of the Marquises of Danvers, I believe, my dear; an idle man about town, you know, with not a sou to be idle upon, who sets the fashion, but never pays his tailor. I am never malicious, I hope, but I do consider men of that stamp very objectionable."

"But what is Sir Philip but a man about town?"

"My son! Of course he is a man about town. My dear, what else should he be? But if Philip likes to lounge all his days away in a club-window, he has a perfect right; he has fortune. Chandos Cheveley is not worth a farthing, and yet yawns away his day in White's as if he were a millionnaire; the one can support his _far niente_, the other cannot.

There are gradations in everything, my love, but in nothing more than among the men, of the same set and the same style, whom one sees in Pall-Mall."

"There are chestnut horses and horse-chestnuts, chevaliers and chevaliers d'industrie, rois and rois d'Yvetot, Carrutherses and Chandos Cheveleys!" laughed Lady Cecil. "I understand, Lady Marabout. Il y a femmes et femmes--men about town and men about town, I shall learn all the cla.s.ses and distinctions soon. But how is one to know the sheep that may be let into the fold from the wolves in sheep's clothing, that must be kept out of it? Your Ogre is really very distinguished-looking."

"Distinguished? Oh yes, my love; but the most distinguished men are the most objectionable sometimes. I a.s.sure you, my dear Cecil, I have seen an elder son whom sometimes I could hardly have told from his own valet, and a younger of the same family with the style of a D'Orsay. Why, did I not this very winter, when I went to stay at Rochdale, take Fitzbreguet himself, whom I had not chanced to see since he was a child, for one of the men out of livery, and bid him bring Bijou's basket out of the carriage. I did indeed--_I_ who hate such mistakes more than any one!

And Lionel, his second brother, has the beauty of an Apollo and the _air n.o.ble_ to perfection. One often sees it; it's through the doctrine of compensation, I suppose, but it's very perplexing, and causes endless _embrouillements_."

"When the mammas fall in love with Lord Fitz's coronet, and the daughters with Lord Lionel's face, I suppose?" interpolated Lady Cecil.

"Exactly so, dear. As for knowing the sheep from the wolves, as you call them," went on Lady Marabout, sorting her embroidery silks, "you may very soon know more of Chandos Cheveley's cla.s.s--(this Magenta braid is good for nothing; it's a beautiful color, but it fades immediately)--you meet them in the country at all fast houses, as they call them nowadays, like the Amandines'; they are constantly invited, because they are so amusing, or so dead a shot, or so good a whip, and live on their invitations, because they have no _locale_ of their own. You see, all the women worth nothing admire, and all the women worth anything shun, them. They have a dozen accomplishments, and not a single reliable quality; a hundred houses open to them, and not a shooting-box of their own property or rental. You will meet this Chandos Cheveley everywhere, for instance, as though he were somebody desirable. You will see him in his club-window, as though he were born only to read the papers; in the Ride, mounted on a much better animal than Fitzbreguet, though the one pays treble the price he ought, and the other, I dare say, no price at all; at Ascot, on Amandine's or Goodwood's drag, made as much of among them all as if he were an heir-apparent to the throne; and yet, my love, that man hasn't a penny, lives Heaven knows where, and how he gets money to keep his cab and buy his gloves is, as I say, one of those mysteries of settling days, whist-tables, periodical writing, Baden _coups de bonheur_, and such-like fountains of such men's fortunes which we can never hope to penetrate--and very little we should benefit if we could!

My dearest Cecil! if it is not ten minutes to five! We must go and drive at once."

Lady Ormsby was a great pet of Lady Marabout's; she had been so from a child; so much so, that when, the year after Valencia Valletort's discomfiture (a discomfiture so heavy and so public, that that young beauty was seized with a fit of filial devotion, attended her mamma to Nice, and figured not in Belgravia the ensuing season, and even Lady Marabout's temper had been slightly soured by it, as you perceive), another terrible charge was shifted on her shoulders by an appeal from the guardians of the late Earl of Rosediamond's daughter for her to be brought out under the Marabout wing, she had consented, and surrendered herself to be again a martyr to responsibility for the sake of Cecil and Cecil's lost mother. The young lady was a beauty; she was worse, she was an heiress; she was worse still, she was saucy, wayward, and notable for a strong will of her own--a more dangerous young thorough-bred was never brought to a gentler Rarey; and yet she was the first charge of this nature that Lady Marabout had ever accepted in the whole course of her life with no misgivings and with absolute pleasure. First, she was very fond of Cecil Ormsby; secondly, she longed to efface her miserable failure with Valencia by a brilliant success, which should light up all the gloom of her past of chaperonage; thirdly, she had a sweet and long-cherished diplomacy nestling in her heart to throw her son and Lord Rosediamond's daughter together, for the eventual ensnaring and fettering of Carruthers, which policy nothing could favor so well as having the weapon for that deadly purpose in her own house through April, May, and June.

Cecil Ormsby was a beauty and an heiress--spirited, sarcastic, brilliant, wilful, very proud; altogether, a more spirited young filly never needed a tight hand on the ribbons, a light but a firm seat, and a temperate though judicious use of the curb to make her endure being ridden at all, even over the most level gra.s.s countries of life. And yet, for the reasons just mentioned, Lady Marabout, who never had a tight hand upon anything, who is to be thrown in a moment by any wilful kick or determined plunge, who is utterly at the mercy of any filly that chooses to take the bit between her own teeth and bolt off, and is entirely incapable of using the curb, even to the most ill-natured and ill-trained Shetland that ever deserved to have its mouth sawed,--Lady Marabout undertook the jockeyship without fear.

"I dare say you wonder, after my grief with Valencia, that I have consented to bring another girl out, but when I heard it was poor Rosediamond's wish--his dying wish, one may almost say--that Cecil should make her debut with me, what _was_ I to do, my dear?" she explained, half apologetically, to Carruthers, when the question was first agitated. Perhaps, too, Lady Marabout had in her heart been slightly sickened of perfectly trained young ladies brought up on the best systems, and admitted to herself that the pets of the foreign houses may _not_ be the most attractive flowers after all.

So Lady Cecil Ormsby was installed in Lowndes Square, and though she was the inheritor of her mother's wealth, which was considerable, and possessor of her own wit and beauty, which were not inconsiderable either, and therefore a prize to fortune-hunters and a lure to misogamists, as Lady Marabout knew very well how to keep the first off, and had her pet project of numbering her refractory son among the converted second, she rather congratulated herself than otherwise in having the pleasure and eclat of introducing her; and men voted the Marabout Yearlings Sale of that season, since it comprised Rosediamond's handsome daughter, as dangerous as a horse-dealer's auction to a young greenhorn, or a draper's "sale, without reserve, at enormous sacrifice,"

to a lady with a soul on bargains bent.

"How very odd! Just as we have been talking of him, there is that man again! I must bow to him, I suppose; though if there _be_ a person I dislike----" said Lady Marabout, giving a frigid little bend of her head as her barouche, with its dashing roans, rolled from her door, and a tilbury pa.s.sed them, driving slowly through the square.

Cecil Ormsby bowed to its occupant with less severity, and laughed under the sheltering shadow of her white parasol-fringe.

"The Ogre has a very pretty trap, though, Lady Marabout, and the most delicious gray horse in it! Such good action!"

"If its action is good, my love, I dare say it is more than could be said of its master's actions. He is going to call on that Mrs.

Marechale, very probably; he was always there last season."

And Lady Marabout shook her head and looked grave, which, combined with the ever-d.a.m.natory demonstrative conjunction, blackened Mrs. Marechale's moral character as much as Lady Marabout could blacken any one's, she loving as little to soil her own fingers and her neighbors' reputations with the indelible Italian chalk of scandal as any lady I know; being given, on the contrary, when compelled to draw any little social croquis of a back-biting nature, to sketch them in as lightly as she could, take out as many lights as possible, and rub in the shadows with a very chary and pitying hand, except, indeed, when she took the portrait of such an Ogre as Chandos Cheveley, when I can't say she was quite so merciful, specially when policy and prejudice combined to suggest that it would be best (and not unjust) to use the blackest Conte crayons obtainable.

The subject of it would not have denied the correctness of the silhouette Lady Marabout had snipped out for the edification of Lady Cecil, had he caught a glimpse of it: he had no habitation, nor was ever likely to have any, save a bachelor's suite in a back street; he had been an idle man for the last twenty years, with not a sou to be idle upon; the springs of his very precarious fortunes, his pursuits, habits, reputation, ways and means, were all much what she had described them; yet he set the fashion much oftener than Goodwood, and dukes and millionnaires would follow the style of his tie, or the shape of his hat; he moved in the most brilliant circles as Court Circulars have it, and all the best houses were open to him. At his Grace of Amandine's, staying there for the shooting, he would alter the stud, find fault with the claret, arrange a Drive for deer in the forest, and flirt with her Grace herself, as though, as Lady Marabout averred, he had been Heir-apparent or Prince Regent, who honored the Castle by his mere presence, Amandine all the while swearing by every word he spoke, thinking nothing well done without Cheveley, and submitting to be set aside in his own Castle, with the greatest gratification at the extinction.

But that Chandos Cheveley was not worth a farthing, that he was but a Bohemian on a brilliant scale, that any day he might disappear from that society where he now glittered, never to reappear, everybody knew; how he floated there as he did, kept his cab and his man, paid for his stall at the Opera, his club fees, and all the other trifles that won't wait, was an eternal puzzle to every one ignorant of how expensively one may live upon nothing if one just gets the knack, and of how far a fashionable reputation, like a cake of chocolate, will go to support life when nothing more substantial is obtainable. Lady Marabout had sketched him correctly enough, allowing for a little politic bitterness thrown in to counteract Carruthers's thoughtlessness in having introduced him to Rosediamond's daughter (that priceless treasure for whom Lady Marabout would fain have had a guard of Janissaries, if they would not have been likely to look singular and come expensive); and ladies of the Marabout cla.s.s did look upon him as an Ogre, guarded their daughters from his approach at a ball as carefully, if not as demonstratively, as any duck its ducklings from the approach of a water-rat, did not ask him to their dinners, and bowed to him chillily in the Ring. Others regarded him as harmless, from his perfect pennilessness; what danger was there in the fascinations of a man whom all Belgravia knew hadn't money enough to buy dog-skin gloves, though he always wore the best Paris lavender kid? While others, the pretty married women chiefly, from her Grace of Amandine downwards to Mrs.

Marechale, of Lowndes Square, flirted with him, fearfully, and considered Chandos Cheveley what n.o.body ever succeeded in disproving him, the most agreeable man on town, with the finest figure, the best style, and the most perfect bow, to be seen in the Park any day between March and July. But then, as Lady Marabout remarked on a subsequent occasion, a figure, a style, and a bow are admirable and enviable things, but they're not among the cardinal virtues, and don't do to live upon; and though they're very good buoys to float one on the smooth sparkling sea of society, if there come a storm, one may go down, despite them, and become helpless prey to the sharks waiting below.

"Philip certainly admires her very much; he said the other day there was something in her, and that means a great deal from him," thought Lady Marabout, complacently, as she and Cecil Ormsby were wending their way through some crowded rooms. "Of course I shall not influence Cecil towards him; it would not be honorable to do so, since she might look for a higher t.i.tle than my son's; still, if it should so fall out, nothing would give me greater pleasure, and really nothing would seem more natural with a little judicious manage----"

"May I have the honor of this valse with you?" was spoken in, though not to, Lady Marabout's ear. It was a soft, a rich, a melodious voice enough, and yet Lady Marabout would rather have heard the hiss of a Cobra Capella, for the footmen _might_ have caught the serpent and carried it off from Cecil Ormsby's vicinity, and she couldn't very well tell them to rid the reception-chambers of Chandos Cheveley.

Lady Marabout vainly tried to catch Cecil's eye, and warn her of the propriety of an utter and entire repudiation of the valse in question, if there were no "engaged" producible to softly chill the hopes and repulse the advances of the aspirant; but Lady Cecil's soul was obstinately bent saltatory-wards; her chaperone's ocular telegram was lost upon her, and only caught by the last person who should have seen it, who read the message off the wires to his own amus.e.m.e.nt, but naturally was not magnanimous enough to pa.s.s it on.

"I ought to have warned her never to dance with that detestable man. If I could but have caught her eye even now!" thought Lady Marabout, restlessly. The capella _would_ have been much the more endurable of the two; the serpent couldn't have pa.s.sed its arm round Rosediamond's priceless daughter and whirled her down the ball-room to the music of Coote and Timney's band, as Chandos Cheveley was now doing.

"Why did _you_ not ask her for that waltz, Philip?" cried the good lady, almost petulantly.

Carruthers opened his eyes wide.

"My dear mother, you know I never dance! I come to b.a.l.l.s to oblige my hostesses and look at the women, but not to carry a seven-stone weight of tulle illusion and white satin, going at express pace, with the thermometer at 80 deg., and a dense crowd jostling one at every turn in the circle. _Bien oblige!_ that's not my idea of pleasure; if it were the Pyrrhic dance, now, or the Tarantella, or the Bolero, under a Castilian chestnut-tree----"

"Hold your tongue! You might have danced for once, just to have kept her from Chandos Cheveley."

"From the best waltzer in London? Not so selfish. Ask Amandine's wife if women don't like to dance with that fellow!"

"I should be very sorry to mention his name to her, or any of her set,"

responded Lady Marabout, getting upon certain virtuous stilts of her own, which she was given to mount on rare occasion and at distant intervals, always finding them very uncomfortable and unsuitable elevations, and being as glad to cast them off as a traveller to kick off the _echa.s.ses_ he has had to strap on over the sandy plains of the Landes.

"What could possess you to introduce him to Cecil, Philip? It was careless, silly, unlike you; you know how I dislike men of his--his--objectionable stamp," sighed Lady Marabout, the white and gold namesakes in her coiffure softly trembling a gentle sigh in the perfumy zephyr raised by the rotatory whirl of the waltzers, among whom she watched with a horrible fascination, as one watches a tiger being pugged out of its lair, or a deserter being led out to be shot, Chandos Cheveley, waltzing Rosediamond's priceless daughter down the ball-room.

"He is so dreadfully handsome! I wonder why it is that men and women, who have no fortune but their faces, will be so dangerously, so obstinately, so provokingly attractive as one sees them so often!"

thought Lady Marabout, determining to beat an immediate retreat from the present salons, since they were infested by the presence of her Ogre, to Lady Hautton's house in Wilton Crescent.

Lady Hautton headed charitable bazaars, belonged to the c.u.mmingite nebulae, visited Homes and Hospitals (floating to the bedside of luckless feminine patients to read out divers edifying pa.s.sages, whose effect must have been somewhat neutralized to the hearers, one would imagine, by the envy-inspiring rustle of her silks, the flash of her rings, and the chimes of her bracelets, chains, and chatelaine), looked on the "Amandine set" as lost souls, and hence "did not know" Chandos Cheveley--a fact which, though the Marabout and Hautton antagonism was patent to all Belgravia, served to endear her all at once to her foe; Lady Marabout, like a good many other people, being content to sink personal resentment, and make a truce with the infidels for the sake of enjoying a mutual antipathy--that closest of all links of union!

Lady Marabout and Lady Hautton were foes, but they were dear Helena and dear Anne, all the same; dined at each other's tables, and smiled in each other's faces. They might be private foes, but they were public friends; and Lady Marabout beat a discreet retreat to the Hautton's salons--"so many engagements" is so useful a plea!--and from the Hautton she pa.s.sed on to a ball at the Duke of Doncaster's; and, as at both, if Lady Cecil Ormsby did not move "a G.o.ddess from above," she moved a brilliant, sparkling, nonchalante, dangerous beauty, with some of her s.e.x's faults, all her s.e.x's witcheries, and more than her s.e.x's mischief, holding her own royally, saucily, and proudly, and Chandos Cheveley was encountered no more, but happily detained at pet.i.t souper in a certain Section of the French Emba.s.sy, Lady Marabout drove homewards, in the gray of the morning, relieved, complacent, and gratified, dozing deliciously, till she was woke up with a start.

"Lady Marabout, what a splendid waltzer your Ogre, Chandos Cheveley, is!"

Lady Marabout opened her eyes with a jerk that set her feathers trembling, her diamonds scintillating, and her bracelets ringing an astonished little carillon.

"My love, how you frightened me!"

Cecil Ormsby laughed--a gay, joyous laugh, innocent of having disturbed a doze, a lapse into human weakness of which her chaperone never permitted herself to plead guilty.