Cecil Castlemaine's Gage, Lady Marabout's Troubles, and Other Stories Part 20

"I do not see that at all," said Lady Marabout, irritably. Is there anything more annoying than to have unwelcome truths thrust in our teeth? "It is not as though he were odious to you--a hideous man, a coa.r.s.e man, a cruel man, whose very presence repelled you. Goodwood is a man quite attractive enough to merit some regard, independent of his position; you have an affectionate nature, you would soon grow attached to him----"

Flora Montolieu shook her head.

"And, in fact," she went on, warming with her subject, and speaking all the more determinedly because she was speaking a little against her conscience, and wholly for her inclinations, "my dear Flora, if you need persuasion--which you must pardon me if I doubt your doing in your heart, for I cannot credit any woman as being insensible to the suit of a future Duke of Doncaster, or invulnerable to the honor it does her--if you need persuasion, I should think I need only refer to the happiness it will afford your poor dear mother, amidst her many trials, to hear of so brilliant a triumph for you. You are proud--Goodwood will place you in a position where pride may be indulged with impunity, nay, with advantage. You are ambitious--what can flatter your ambition more than such an offer. You are clever--as Goodwood's wife you may lead society like Madame de Rambouillet or immerse yourself in political intrigue like the d.u.c.h.ess of Devonshire. It is an offer which places within your reach everything most dazzling and attractive, and it is one, my dear Flora, which you must forgive me if I say a young girl of obscure rank, as rank goes, and no fortune whatever, should pause before she lightly rejects. You cannot afford to be fastidious as if you were an heiress or a lady-in-your-own-right."

That was as ill-natured a thing as the best-natured lady in Christendom ever said on the spur of self-interest, and it stung Flora Montolieu more than her hostess dreamed.

The color flushed into her face and her eyes flashed.

"You have said sufficient, Lady Marabout, I accept the Marquis to-morrow!"

And taking up her fan and her opera-cloak, leaving the discarded roses unheeded on the floor, she bade her chaperone good-night, and floated out of the dressing-room, while Lady Marabout sat stirring the cream in a second cup of coffee, a good deal puzzled, a little awed by the odd turn affairs had taken, with a slight feeling of guilt for her own share in the transaction, an uncomfortable dread lest the day should ever come when Flora should reproach her for having persuaded her into the marriage, a comfortable conviction that nothing but good _could_ come of such a brilliant and enviable alliance, and, above all other conflicting feelings, one delicious, dominant, glorified security of triumph over the Hauttons, _mere et filles_.

But when morning dawned, Lady Marabout's horizon seemed cleared of all clouds, and only radiant with unshadowed sunshine. Goodwood was coming, and coming to be accepted.

She seemed already to read the newspaper paragraphs announcing his capture and Flora's conquest, already to hear the Hauttons' enforced congratulations, already to see the nuptial party gathered round the altar rail of St. George's. Lady Marabout had never felt in a sunnier, more light-hearted mood, never more completely at peace with herself and all the world as she sat in her boudoir at her writing-table, penning a letter which began:

"MY DEAREST LILLA,--What happiness it gives me to congratulate you on the brilliant future opening to your sweet Flora----"

And which would have continued, no doubt, with similar eloquence if it had not been interrupted by Soames opening the door and announcing "Sir Philip Carruthers," who walked in, touched his mother's brow with his moustaches, and went to stand on the hearth with his arm on the mantelpiece.

"My dear Philip, you never congratulated me last night; pray do so now!"

cried Lady Marabout, delightedly, wiping her pen on the pennon, which a small ormolu knight obligingly carried for that useful purpose. Ladies always wipe their pens as religiously as they bolt their bedroom doors, believe in cosmetics, and go to church on a Sunday.

"Was your news of last night true, then?" asked Carruthers, bending forwards to roll Bijou on its back with his foot.

"That Goodwood had spoken definitively to her? Perfectly. He proposed to her yesterday at the Frangipane concert--not _at_ the concert, of course, but afterwards, when they were alone for a moment in the conservatories. The d.u.c.h.ess interrupted them--did it on purpose--and he had only time to whisper hurriedly he should come this morning to hear his fate. I dare say he felt tolerably secure of it. Last night I naturally spoke to Flora about it. Oddly enough, she seemed positively to think at first of rejecting him--_rejecting_ him!--only fancy the madness! Between ourselves, I don't think she cares anything about him, but with such an alliance as that, of course I felt it my bounden duty to counsel her as strongly as I could to accept the unequalled position it proffered her. Indeed, it could have been only a girl's waywardness, a child's caprice to pretend to hesitate, for she _is_ very ambitious and very clever, and I would never believe that any woman--and she less than any--would be proof against such dazzling prospects. It would be absurd, you know, Philip. Whether it was hypocrisy or a real reluctance, because she doesn't feel for him the idealic love she dreams of, I don't know, but I put it before her in a way that plainly showed her all the brilliance of the proffered position, and before she bade me good night, I had vanquished all her scruples, if she had any, and I am able to say----"

"Good G.o.d, what have you done?"

"Done?" re-echoed Lady Marabout, vaguely terrified. "Certainly I persuaded her to accept him. She _has_ accepted him probably; he is here now! I should have been a strange person indeed to let any young girl in my charge rashly refuse such an offer."

"You induced her to accept him! G.o.d forgive you!"

Lady Marabout turned pale as death, and gazed at him with undefinable terror.

"Philip! You do not mean----"

"Great Heavens! have you never seen, mother----?"

He leaned his arms on the marble, with his forehead bowed upon them, and Lady Marabout gazed at him still, as a bird at a basilisk.

"Philip, Philip! what have I done? How could I tell?" she murmured, distractedly, tears welling into her eyes. "If I had only known! But how could I dream that child had any fascination for you? How could I fancy----"

"Hush! No, you are in no way to blame. You could not know it. _I_ barely knew it till last night," he answered, gently.

"Philip loves her, and _I_ have made her marry Goodwood!" thought Lady Marabout, agonized, remorseful, conscience-struck, heart-broken in a thousand ways at once. The climax of her woes was reached, life had no greater bitterness for her left; her son loved, and loved the last woman in England she would have had him love; that woman was given to another, and _she_ had been the instrument of wrecking the life to save or serve which she would have laid down her own in glad and instant sacrifice!

Lady Marabout bowed her head under a grief, before which the worries so great before, the schemes but so lately so precious, the small triumphs just now so all-absorbing, shrank away into their due insignificance.

Philip suffering, and suffering through her! Self glided far away from Lady Marabout's memory then, and she hated herself, more fiercely than the gentle-hearted soul had ever hated any foe, for her own criminal share in bringing down this unforeseen terrific blow on her beloved one's head.

"Philip, my dearest, what _can_ I do?" she cried, distractedly; "if I had thought--if I had guessed----"

"Do nothing. A woman who could give herself to a man whom she did not love should be no wife of mine, let me suffer what I might."

"But _I_ persuaded her, Philip! Mine is the blame!"

His lips quivered painfully:

"Had she cared for me as--I may have fancied, she had not been so easy to persuade! She has much force of character, where she wills. He is here now, you say; I cannot risk meeting him just yet. Leave me for a little while; leave me--I am best alone."

Gentle though he always was to her, his mother knew him too well ever to dispute his will, and the most bitter tears Lady Marabout had ever known, ready as she was to weep for other people's woes, and rarely as she had to weep for any of her own, choked her utterance and blinded her eyes as she obeyed and closed the door on his solitude. Philip--her idolized Philip--that ever her house should have sheltered this creature to bring a curse upon him! that ever she should have brought this tropical flower to poison the air for the only one dear to her!

"I am justly punished," thought Lady Marabout, humbly and penitentially--"justly. I thought wickedly of Anne Hautton. I did not do as I would be done by. I longed to enjoy their mortification. I advised Flora against my own conscience and against hers. I am justly chastised!

But that _he_ should suffer through me, that my fault has fallen on his head, that my Philip, my n.o.ble Philip, should love and not be loved, and that _I_ have brought it on him----Good Heaven! what is that?"

"That" was a man whom her eyes, being misty with tears, Lady Marabout had brushed against, as she ascended the staircase, ere she perceived him, and who, pa.s.sing on with a muttered apology, was down in the hall and out of the door Mason held open before she had recovered the shock of the rencontre, much before she had a possibility of recognizing him through the mist aforesaid.

A fear, a hope, a joy, a dread, one so woven with another there was no disentangling them, sprang up like a ray of light in Lady Marabout's heart--a possibility dawned in her: to be rejected as an impossibility?

Lady Marabout crossed the ante-room, her heart throbbing tumultuously, spurred on to n.o.ble atonement and reckless self-sacrifice, if fate allowed them.

She opened the drawing-room door; Flora Montolieu was alone.

"Flora, you have seen Goodwood?"

She turned, her own face as pale and her own eyes as dim as Lady Marabout's.

"Yes."

"You have refused him?"

Flora Montolieu misconstrued her chaperone's eagerness, and answered haughtily enough:

"I have told him that indifference would be too poor a return for his affections to insult him with it, and that I would not do him the injury of repaying his trust by falsehood and deception. I meant what I said to you last night; I said it on the spur of pain, indignation, no matter what; but I could not keep my word when the trial came."

Lady Marabout bent down and kissed her, with a fervent grat.i.tude that not a little bewildered the recipient.

"My dear child! thank G.o.d! little as I thought to say so. Flora, tell me, you love some one else?"

"Lady Marabout, you have no right----"

"Yea, I have a right--the strongest right! Is not that other my son?"

Flora Montolieu looked up, then dropped her head and burst into tears--tears that Lady Marabout soothed then, tears that Carruthers soothed, yet more effectually still, five minutes afterwards.

"That _I_ should have sued that little Montolieu, and sued to her for Philip!" mused Lady Marabout. "It is very odd. Perhaps I get used to being crossed and disappointed and trampled on in every way and by everybody; but certainly, though it is most contrary to my wishes, though a child like that is the last person I should ever have chosen or dreamt of as Philip's wife, though it is a great pain to me, and Anne Hautton of course will be delighted to rake up everything she can about the Montolieus, and it _is_ heart-breaking when one thinks how a Carruthers _might_ marry, how the Carruthers always _have_ married, rarely any but ladies in their own right for countless generations, still it _is_ very odd, but I certainly feel happier than ever I did in my life, annoyed as I am and grieved as I am. It _is_ heart-breaking (that horrid John Montolieu! I wonder what relation one stands in legally to the father of one's son's wife; I will ask Sir Fitzroy Kelley; not that the Montolieus are likely to come to England)--it is very sad when one thinks whom Philip might have married; and yet she certainly is infinitely charming, and she really appreciates and understands him. If it were not for what Anne Hautton will always say, I could really be pleased! To think what an anxious hope, what a dreaded ideal, Philip's wife has always been to me; and now, just as I had got reconciled to his determined bachelor preferences, and had grown to argue with him that it was best he shouldn't marry, he goes and falls in love with this child! Everything is at cross-purposes in life, I think!

There is only one thing I am resolved upon--I will NEVER chaperone anybody again."