Cecil Castlemaine's Gage, Lady Marabout's Troubles, and Other Stories Part 35

Protocol's duo on her demerits; she _had_ heard it, without doubt, for she was laughing gayly and joyously, laughter that sparkled all over her _riante_ face and flashed in her bright falcon eyes. Laughing still, she signed me to her. I need not say that the sign was obeyed.

"Chivalrous knight, I thank you! You are a Bayard of chivalry; you defend the absent! What a miracle, mon Dieu! Tell your friends from me not to speak so loudly when their windows are open; and, for yourself, rest a.s.sured your words of this evening will not be forgotten."

"I am happy, indeed, if I have been fortunate enough to obtain a chance remembrance, but do not give me too much praise for so simple a service; the clumsiest Cimon would be stirred into chivalry under such inspiration as I had----"

The beautiful hazel eyes flashed smilingly on me under their lashes.

(_Those_ lashes tinted! Heaven forgive the malice of women!) She broke off a sprig of the clematis, with its long slender leaves and fragrant starry flowers, and gave it to me.

"_Tenez, mon ami_, if ever you see me again, show me that faded flower, and I shall remember this evening at Vicq d'Azyr. Nay, do not flatter yourself--do not thrust it in your breast; it is no gage d'amour! it is only a reward for loyal service, and a souvenir to refresh my own memory, which is treacherous sometimes, though not in grat.i.tude to those who serve me. Adieu, mon Bayard--et bonsoir!"

But I retained the hand that had given me my clematis-spray.

"Meet you again! But will not that be to-morrow? If I am not to see you, as your words threaten, till the clematis be faded and myself forgotten, let me at least, I beseech you, know where, who, by what name----"

She drew her hand away with something of a proud, surprised gesture; then she laughed again that sweet, ringing, mocking laugh:

"No, no, Bayard, it is too much to ask! Leave the future to hazard; it is always the best philosophy. Au revoir! Adieu--perhaps for a day, perhaps for a century!"

And the bewitching mystery floated away from me and through the open window of her room. You will imagine that my "intuition" did not lead me to the conclusion to which Lady Marechale's led her, or a.s.suredly should I have followed the donor of the clematis, despite her prohibition. Even with my "intuition" pointing where it did, I am not sure what I might have done if, in her salon, I had not caught sight of a valet and a lady's maid in waiting with her coffee, and they are not such spectators as one generally selects.

The servants closed her windows and drew down their Venetian blinds, and I returned to my coffee. Whether the two ladies within had overheard her conversation as she had heard theirs, I cannot say, but they looked trebly refrigerated, had congealed themselves into the chilliest human ice that is imaginable, and comported themselves towards me fully as distantly as though I had brought a dozen ballet-girls in to dinner with them, or introduced them to my choicest acquaintance from the Chateau des Fleurs.

"A man's taste is so pitiably low!" remarked Lady Marechale, in her favorite stage aside to Mrs. Protocol; to which that other lady responded, "Disgracefully so!"

Who _was_ my lovely unknown with the bright falcon eyes and the charming laugh, with her strange freedom that yet was _not_, somehow, free, and her strange fascination? I bade my man ask Chanderlos her name--couriers know everything generally--but neither Mills nor Chanderlos gave me any information. The people of the house did not know, or said they did not; they only knew she had servants in attendance who came with her, who revealed nothing, and paid any price for the best of everything. Are impertinent questions ever asked where money is plentiful?

I was dressing the next morning something later than usual, when I heard the roll of a carriage in the courtyard below. I looked through the half-open persiennes with a semi-presentiment that it was my sweet foreigner who was leaving ere I could presume on my clematis or improve our acquaintance. True enough, she it was, leaving Vicq d'Azyr in a travelling-carriage, with handsome roans and servants in imperial-blue liveries. Who the deuce could she be?

"Well, Constance," said I, as I bade Lady Marechale good morning, "your _bete noire_ won't 'press herself into your acquaintance,' as you were dreading last night, and won't excite Marechale and me to any more high treason. Won't you chant a Te Deum? She left this morning."

"So I perceived," answered Lady Marechale, frigidly; by which I suppose _she_ had not been above the weakness of looking through _her_ persiennes.

"What a pity you and Agneta agitated yourselves with such unnecessary alarm! It must have cost you a great deal of eau-de-Cologne and sal-volatile, I am afraid, last night. Do you think she contaminated the air of the salle-a-manger, because I will order Mills to throw some disinfectant about before you go down?"

"I have no inclination to jest upon a person of that stamp," rejoined Lady Marechale, with immense dignity, settling her turquoise wristband-studs.

"'That stamp of persons!' What! Do you think she is an adventuress, an intrigante, 'or worse' still, then? I hoped her dashing equipage might have done something towards cleansing her character. Wealth _is_ a universal purifier generally."

"Flippant impertinence!" murmured Lady Marechale, disgustedly, to Mrs.

Protocol, as she swept onwards down the staircase, not deigning me a glance, much less a response, stiffening herself with a little extra starch of Lucretian virtue and British-matronly dignity, which did not grow limp again throughout breakfast, while she found fault with the chocolate, considered the _pet.i.ts pains_ execrable, condemned the sardines as uneatable, petted Spes, kept Marechale and me at Coventry, and sighed over their enforced incarceration, by Dr. Berkeley's orders, in Vicq d'Azyr, that kept them in this stupid place away from Lemongenseidlitz.

Their antic.i.p.ations from Lemongenseidlitz were charmingly golden and rose-tinted. They looked forward to consolidating their friendship with the dear d.u.c.h.ess in its balmy air, to improving a pa.s.sing acquaintance into an intimate one with that charming person the Baroness Liebenfrauenmilch, Mistress of the Robes to Princess Helene, and to being very intimate at the Court, while the Pullingers (their bosom-friends and very dear rivals) would be simply presented, and remain in chagrin, uninvited to the state b.a.l.l.s and palace festivities.

And what more delightful than that last clause? for what sauce invented, from Careme to Soyer, flavors our own _plats_ so deliciously, I should like to know, as thinking that our beloved next-door neighbor is doomed to a very dry cutlet?

As Perette, in a humbler fashion, built visions from the pot of milk, so mesdames mes soeurs, from the glittering court and capital of Lemongenseidlitz, erected brilliant chateaux en Espagne of all their sayings and doings in that fashionable little city whither they were bound, and into which they had so many invaluable pa.s.sports. They were impatient to be journeying from our humble, solitary valley, and after a month of Vicq d'Azyr, they departed for their golden land, and I went with them, as I had slain izzards almost _ad nauseam_, and Dunbar's expiration of leave had taken him back to Dublin.

It was five o'clock when we reached its Reidenscher Hof, nine when we had finished dinner. It was stupid work yawning over coffee and _Galignani_. What was to be done? Marechale proposed the Opera, and for the first time in his life was unopposed by his wife. Constance was in a suave, benignant mood; she was thinking of her Graf von Rosenlau, of the Pullingers, and of the sweet, adroit manner in which she would--when she had captivated him and could proffer such hints--awaken his Serene Highness to a sense of his moral guilt in not bringing to instant capital punishment every agent in those Sata.n.u.s-farmed banks that throve throughout his duchy. Lady Marechale and Mrs. Protocol a.s.sented, and to the little miniature gayly-decorated Opera House we drove. They were in the middle of the second act of "Ernani." "Ernani" was stale to us all, and we naturally lorgne'd the boxes in lieu of the stage. I had turned my gla.s.s on the left-hand stage-box, and was going steadily round, when a faint cry of dismay, alarm, amazement, horror, broke, m.u.f.fled and low, from mesdames mes soeurs. Their lorgnons were riveted on one spot; their cheeks were blanched; their hands were tremulous; if they had beheld a spiritual visitant, no consternation more profound, more intense, could have seized both with its iron hand. _My_ sisters too! the chilliest, the calmest, the most impenetrable, the most una.s.sailable of mortals!

"And we called her, in her hearing, not a proper person?" gasped Lady Marechale.

"We thought her a lorette! an intrigante! a dame d'industrie!" echoed Mrs. Protocol.

"Who wore paste jewels!"

"Who came from the Rue Breda!"

"Who wanted to know us!"

"Whom we wouldn't know!"

I turned my Voightlander where their Voightlanders turned; there, in the royal box, leaning back in the fauteuil that marked her rank, there, with her lovely hazel eyes, her witching smile, her radiant beauty, matchless as the pearls gleaming above her brow, there sat the "adventuress--or worse!" of Vicq d'Azyr; the "evidently a not proper person" of my discerning sisters--H.S.H. Princess Helene, Grand-d.u.c.h.ess of Lemongenseidlitz-Phizzstrelitz! Great Heavens! how had we never guessed her before? How had we never divined her ident.i.ty? How had we never remembered all we had heard of her love of laisser-aller, her taste for adventure, her delight in travelling, when she could, unattended and incognita? How had we never put this and that together, and penetrated the metamorphosis?

"_And I called her not a proper person!_" gasped Lady Marechale, again shrinking back behind the azure curtains; the projectiles she had shot with such vindictive severity, such delighted acrimony, from the murderous mortar of malice, recoiling back upon her head for once, and crushing her to powder. What reception would they have _now_ at the Court? Von Rosenlau would be powerless; the Pullingers themselves would be better off! Perette's pot of milk was smashed and spilt! "Adieu, veau, vache, cochon, couvee!"

When the pitcher lies shivered into fragments, and the milk is spilt, you know, poor Perette's dreams are shivered and spilt with them. "I have not seen you at the palace yet?" asked her Grace of Frangipane. "We do not see you at the Court, mesdames?" asked M. de la Croix-et-Cordons.

"How did it happen you were not at the d.u.c.h.ess's ball last night?" asked "those odious Pullingers." And what had my sister to say in reply? My clematis secured _me_ a charming reception--how charming I don't feel called upon to reveal--but Princess Helene, with that calm dignity which easily replaced, when she chose, her witching _abandon_, turned the tables upon her detractors, and taught them how dangerous it may be to speak ill--of the wrong people.

A STUDY a LA LOUIS QUATORZE:

PENDANT TO A PORTRAIT BY MIGNARD.

She was surpa.s.singly fair, Madame la Marquise. Mignard's portraits of her may fully rival his far-famed Portrait aux Amours. One of them has her painted as Venus Victrix, in the fashion of the day; one of them, as herself, as Leontine Opportune de Vivonne de Rennecourt, Marquise de la Riviere, with her creve-coeurs, and her diamonds, and her gay smile, showing her teeth, white and gleaming as the pearls mingled with her curls a la mode Montespan. Not Louise de la Beaume-le-Blanc, when the elm-boughs of St. Germain first flung their shadow on her golden head, before it bent for the Carmelite veil before the altar in the Rue St.

Jacques; not Henriette d'Angleterre, when she listened to the trouveres'

romances sung under her balcony at St. Cloud, before her young life was quenched by the hand of Morel and the order of Monsieur; not Athenas de Mortemart, when the liveries of lapis lazuli blue dashed through the streets of Paris, and the outriders cleared her path with their whips, before the game was lost, and the iron spikes were fastened inside the Montespan bracelets;--none of them, her contemporaries and acquaintances, eclipsed in loveliness Madame la Marquise. Had she but been fair instead of dark, the brown Bourbon eyes would have fallen on her of a surety; she would have outshone the lapis lazuli liveries with a royal guard of scarlet and gold, and her friend Athenas would have hated her as that fair lady hated "la sotte Fontanges" and "Saint Maintenon;" for their s.e.x, in all ages, have remembered the sage's precept, "Love as though you will one day hate," and invariably carry about with them, ready for need, a little essence of the acid of Malice, to sour in an instant the sugared cream of their loves and their friendships if occasion rise up and the storm-cloud of rivalry loom in the horizon.

She was a beauty, Madame la Marquise, and she knew it, as she leaned out over the balcony of her chateau of Pet.i.te Foret, that lay close to Clagny, under the shadow of the wood of Ville d'Avree, outside the gates of Versailles, looking down on her bosquets, gardens, and terraces designed by Le Notre; for though she was alone, and there was nothing but her little dog Osmin to admire her white skin, and her dark eyes, and her beautiful hands and arms, and her diamond pendants that glittered in the moonlight, she smiled, her flashing triumphant smile, as she whispered to herself, "He is mine--mine! Bah! how can he help himself?" and pressed the ruby agraffe on her bosom with the look of a woman who knew no resistance, and brooked no reluctance to worship at her shrine.

Nothing ever opposed Madame la Marquise, and life went smoothly on with her. If Bossuet ever reproved her, it was in those _anathemes caches sous des fleurs d'oranger_ in which that politic priest knew how to deal when expedient, however haughty and relentless to the world in general.

M. le Marquis was not a savage eccentricity like M. de Pardaillon de Gondran, would never have dreamt of imitating the eccentricity of going into mourning, but if the Bourbon eye _had_ fallen on his wife, would have said, like a loyal peer of France, that all his household treasures were the King's. Disagreeables fled before the scintillations of her smiles, as the crowd fled before her gilded carriage and her Flanders horses; and if ever a little fit of piety once in a while came over her, and Conscience whispered a mal a propos word in her delicate ear, she would give an enamelled lamp to Sainte Marie Reparatrice, by the advice of the Comtesse de Soubise and the Princesse de Monaco (who did such expiatory things themselves, and knew the comfort they afforded), and emerge from her repentance one of the most radiant of all the brilliant b.u.t.terflies that fluttered their gorgeous wings in the Jardin de Flore under the sunny skies of Versailles.

The moonlight glittered on the fountains, falling with measured splash into their marble basins; the lime-leaves, faintly stirred by the sultry breezes, perfumed the night with their voluptuous fragrance, and the roses, twining round the carved and gilded bal.u.s.trade, shook off their bowed head drops of dew, that gleamed brightly as the diamonds among the curls of the woman who leaned above, resting her delicate rouged cheek on her jewelled hand, alone--a very rare circ.u.mstance with the Marquise de la Riviere. Osmin did not admire the rare solitude, for he rattled his silver bells and barked--an Italian greyhound's shrill, fretful bark--as his quick ears caught the distant sound of steps coming swiftly over the turf below, and his mistress smiled as she patted his head:

"Ah, Osmin!--here he is?"

A man came out from under the heavy shadow of lime sand chestnuts, whose darkness the moon's rays had no power to pierce, crossed the lawn just under the balcony, and, coming up the terrace-steps, stood near her--a man, young, fair, handsome, whose age and form the uniform of a Captain of the Guards would have suited far better than the dark robes of a priest, which he wore; his lips were pressed closely together, and his face was pale with a pallor that consorted painfully with the warm pa.s.sionate gleam of his eyes.

"So! You are late in obeying my commands, monsieur!"

Surely no other man in France would have stood silent beside her, under the spell of her dazzling glances, with such a picture before him as Madame la Marquise, in her azure silk and her point d'Angleterre, with her diamond pendants shaking among her hair, and her arched eyebrows lifted imperiously! But he did; his lips pressed closer, his eyes gleaming brighter. She changed her tone; it was soft, seductive, reproachful, and the smile on her lips was tender--as tender as it ever could be with the mockery that always lay under it; and it broke at last the spell that bound him, as she whispered, "Ah! Gaston, you love me no longer!"

"Not love you? O G.o.d!"

They were but five words, but they told Madame la Marquise of a pa.s.sion such as she had never roused, despite all her fascinations and intrigues, in the lovers that crowded round her in the salons within, or at Versailles, over the trees yonder, where love was gallantry, and all was light comedy, with nothing so foolish as tragedy known.