Cecil Castlemaine's Gage, Lady Marabout's Troubles, and Other Stories Part 14

"I guessed rightly what you were about to say to me?" said Cheveley, who seemed somehow or other to have taken all the talk into his own hands, and to have become the master of the position. "I thought so. I do not wonder at your construction; I cannot blame you for your resolution.

Lady Cecil has some considerable fortune, they say; it is very natural that you should have imagined a man like myself, with no wealth save a good name, which only serves to make lack of wealth more conspicuous, incapable of seeking her society for any better, higher, more disinterested motive than that of her money; it was not charitable, perhaps, to decide unhesitatingly that it was impossible I could be drawn to her by any other attraction, that it was imperative I must be dead to everything in her that gives her a n.o.bler and a higher charm; but it was very natural, and one learns never to hope for the miracle of a charitable judgment, _even_ from Lady Marabout!"

"My dear Mr. Cheveley, indeed you mistake!" began Lady Marabout, restlessly. That was a little bit of a story, he didn't mistake at all; but Lady Marabout, collapsing like an india-rubber ball under the p.r.i.c.k of a sarcasm, shivered all over at his words, his voice, his slight sad smile. "The man is as dreadful as Cecil," she thought; "he puts things so horribly clearly!"

"Mistake? I do not think I do. You have thought all this, and very naturally; but now hear me for a moment. I have sought Lady Cecil's society, that is perfectly true; we have been thrown together in society, very often accidentally; sometimes, I admit, through my own seeking. Few men could be with her and be steeled against her. I have been with her too much; but I sought her at first carelessly, then irresistibly and unconsciously, never with the motive you attribute to me. I am not as utterly beggared as you deem me, but neither am I entirely barren of honor. Believe me, Lady Marabout, my pride alone would be amply sufficient to raise a barrier between me and Cecil stronger than any that could be opposed to me by others. Yesterday I casually overheard words from Amandine which showed me that society, like you, has put but one construction on the attention I have paid her--a construction I might have foreseen had I not been unconsciously fascinated, and forgetful, for the time, of the infallible whispers of my kind friends. Her fortune, I know, was never numbered among her attractions for me; so little, that now that Amandine's careless words have reminded me of the verdict of society, I shall neither seek her nor see her again. Scores of men marry women for their money, and their money alone, but I am not one of them; with my own precarious fortunes, only escaping ruin because I am not rich enough to tempt ruin. I would never take advantage of any interest I may have excited in her, to speak to her of a pa.s.sion that the world would tell her was only another name for avarice and selfishness. I dare not trust myself with her longer, perhaps. I am no G.o.d to answer for my self-control; but you need not fear; I will never seek her love--never even tell her of mine. I shall leave town to-morrow; what _I_ may suffer matters not. Lady Cecil is safe from me! Whatever you may have heard of my faults, follies, or vices, none ever told you, I think, that I broke my word?"

"And when the man said that, my dear Philip, I a.s.sure you I felt as guilty as if I had done him some horrible wrong; he stood there with his head up, looking at me with his sad proud eyes--and they are beautiful!--till, positively, I could almost have cried--I could, indeed, for though I don't like him on principle, I couldn't help pitying him," said Lady Marabout, in a subsequent relation of the scene to her son. "Wasn't it a terrible position? I was as near as possible forgetting everything due to poor Rosediamond, and saying to him that I believed Cecil liked him and would never like anybody else, but, thank Heaven! I remembered myself, and checked myself in time. If it had been anybody but Chandos Cheveley, I should really have admired him, he spoke so n.o.bly! When he lifted his hat and left me, though I _ought_ to have been glad (and I _was_ glad, of course) that Cecil would be free from the society of anybody so objectionable and so dangerous, I felt wretched for him--I did indeed. It _is_ so hard always to be placed in such miserable positions!"

By which you will perceive that the triumphant crushing of Lady Marabout's Cobra didn't afford her the unmixed gratification she had antic.i.p.ated.

"I have done what was my duty to poor Rosediamond, and what General Ormsby's confidence merited," she solaced herself that day, feeling uncomfortably and causelessly guilty, she hardly knew why, when she saw Chandos Cheveley keeping sedulously with the "Amandine set," and read in Cecil's tell-tale face wonder, perplexity, and regret thereat, till the Frangipane fete came to an end. She had appeased the manes of the late Rosediamond, who, to her imagination, always appeared sitting up aloft keeping watch over the discharge of her chaperone's duties, but she had a secret and horrible dread that she had excited the wrath of Rosediamond's daughter. She had driven her Ogre off the scene, it is true, but she could not feel that she had altogether come off the best in the contest. Anne Hautton had congratulated her, indeed, on having "acted with decision _at last_," but then she had marred it all by asking if Carruthers was likely to be engaged to Cecil? And Lady Marabout had been forced to confess he was not; Philip, when pressed by her that very morning to be a little attentive to Cecil, having shaken his head and laughed:

"She's a bewitching creature, mother, but she don't bewitch _me_! You know what Shakspeare says of wooing, wedding, and repentance. I've no fancy for the inseparable trio!"

Altogether, Lady Marabout was far from peace and tranquillity, though the Cobra _was_ crushed, as she drove away from the Frangipane breakfast, and she was little nearer them when Cecil turned her eyes upon her with a question worse to Lady Marabout's ear than the roar of a Lancaster battery.

"What have you said to him?"

"My dear Cecil! What have I said to whom?" returned Lady Marabout, with Machiavellian surprise.

"You know well enough, Lady Marabout! What have you said to him--to Mr.

Cheveley?"

Cecil's impetuosity invariably knocked Lady Marabout down at one blow, as a ball knocks down the pegs at lawn billiards. She rallied after the shock, but not successfully, and tried at coldness and decision, as recommended by Hautton prescriptions.

"My dear Cecil, I have said to him what I think it my duty to say to him. Responsible as I am for you----"

"Responsible for me, Lady Marabout? Indeed you are not. I am responsible for myself!" interrupted Lady Cecil, with that haughty arch of her eyebrows and that flush on her face before which Lady Marabout was powerless. "What have you said to him? I _will_ know!"

"I said very little to him, indeed, my dear; he said it all himself."

"What did he say himself?"

"I _must_ tell her--she is so dreadfully persistent," thought the unhappy and badgered Peeress; and tell her she did, being a means of lessening the young lady's interest in the subject of discussion as little judicious as she could well have hit upon.

Lady Cecil listened, silent for once, shading her face with her parasol, shading the tears that gathered on her lashes and rolled down her delicate flushed cheeks, at the recital of Chandos Cheveley's words, from her chaperone's sight.

Lady Marabout gathered courage from the tranquillity with which her recital was heard.

"You see, my love, Chandos Cheveley's own honor points in the same direction with my judgment," she wound up, in conclusion. "He has acted rightly at last, I allow, and if you--if you have for the moment felt a tinge of warmer interest in him--if you have been taken by the fascination of his manner, and invested him with a young girl's romance, you will soon see with us how infinitely better it is that you should part, and how impossible it is that----"

Lady Cecil's eyes flashed such fire through their tears, that Lady Marabout stopped, collapsed and paralyzed.

"It is by such advice as that you repay his n.o.bility, his generosity, his honor!--it is by such words as those you reward him for acting as not one man in a hundred would have acted! Hush, hush, Lady Marabout, I thought better of you!"

"Good Heavens! _where will it end?_" thought Lady Marabout, distractedly, as Rosediamond's wayward daughter sprang down at the door with a flush in her face, and a contemptuous anger in her eyes, that made Bijou, jumping on her, stop, stare, and whine in canine dismay.

"And I fancied she was listening pa.s.sively!" thought Lady Marabout.

"Well! the man is gone to-day, that is one comfort. I am very thankful I acted as I did," reasoned that ever-worried lady in her boudoir the next morning. "I am afraid Cecil is really very fond of him, there were such black shadows under her eyes at breakfast, poor child! But it is much better as it is--much better. I should never have held up my head again if I had allowed her to make such a disadvantageous alliance. I can hardly bear to think of what would have been said, even now the danger is over!"

While Lady Marabout was thus comforting herself over her embroidery silks, Cecil Ormsby was pacing into the Park, with old Twitters the groom ten yards behind her, taking her early ride before the world was up--it was only eleven o'clock; Cecil had been used to early rising, and would never leave it off, having discovered some recipe that made her independent of ordinary mortals' quantum of sleep.

"Surely he will be here this morning to see me for the last time,"

thought that young lady, as she paced up the New Ride under the Kensington Gardens trees, with her heart beating quickly under the gold aiglettes of her riding-jacket.

"I must see her once more, and then----" thought Chandos Cheveley, as he leaned against the rails, smoking, as he had done scores of mornings before. His man had packed his things; his hansom was waiting at the gates to take him to the station, and his portmanteau was lettered "Ischl." He had only come to take one last look of the face that haunted him as no other had ever succeeded in doing. The ring of a horse's hoof fell on his ear. There she came, on her roan hack, with the sun glancing off her chestnut hair. He looked up to bow to her as she pa.s.sed on, for the Ride had never been a rendezvous for more than a bow (Cecil's insurrectionary tactics had always been carried on before Lady Marabout's face), but the roan was pulled up by him that morning for the very first time, and Cecil's eyes fell on him through their lashes.

"Mr. Cheveley--is it true you are going out of town?"

"Quite true."

If her voice quivered as she asked the question, he barely kept his own from doing the same as he answered it.

"Will you be gone long?"

"Till next season, at earliest."

His promise to Lady Marabout was hard to keep! He would not have trusted his strength if he had known she would have done more than canter on with her usual bow and smile.

Cecil was silent. The groom waited like a statue his ten yards behind them. She played with her reins nervously, the color coming and going painfully in her face.

"Lady Marabout told me of--of some conversation you had with her yesterday?"

Low as the words were, Cheveley heard them, and his hand, as it lay on the rails, shook like a girl's.

Cecil was silent again; she looked at him, her eyes full of unshed tears, as the color burned in her face, and she drooped her head almost to a level with her hands as they played with the reins.

"She told me--you----"

She stopped again. Cecil was new to making proposals, though not to rejecting them. Cheveley set his teeth to keep in the words that rushed to his lips, and Cecil saw the struggle as she bent her head lower and lower to the saddle, and twisted the reins into a Gordian knot.

"Do you--must we--why should----"

Fragmentary monosyllables enough, but sufficient to fell his strength.

"For G.o.d's sake do not tempt me!" he muttered. "You little know----"

"I know all!" she whispered softly.

"You cannot! My worthless life!--my honor! I could not take such a sacrifice, I would not!----"

"But--if my peace----"

She could not end her phrase, yet it said enough;--his hand closed on hers.