Chronicles of Dustypore Part 7

'Now,' said Mrs. Vereker, gleefully re-entering the room, with a cl.u.s.ter of lace and flowers artistically poised upon her shapely little head, 'is not that a duck, and don't I look adorable?'

'Quite a work of art,' cried Desvoeux, with enthusiasm. 'Siren! why, already too dangerously fair, why deck yourself with fresh allurements for the fascination of a broken-hearted world? I am convinced Saint Simon Stylites would have come down from his pillar on the spot if he could but have seen it!'

'And confessed himself a gone c.o.o.n from a moral point of view,' laughed Mrs. Vereker, despoiling herself of the work of art in question. 'And now let us have some lunch; and mind, Mr. Desvoeux, you can only have a very little, because, you see, we did not expect you.'

Afterwards, when it was time for Maud to go, it was discovered that no carriage had arrived to take her home. 'What can I do?' she said, in despair. 'Felicia will be waiting to take me to the Camp. George promised to send back his office-carriage here the moment he got to the Board.'

'Then,' said Desvoeux, with great presence of mind, 'he has obviously forgotten it, and I will drive you home. Let me order my horses; they are quite steady.'

Maud looked at Mrs. Vereker--she felt a burning wish to go, and needed but the faintest encouragement. Felicia would, she knew, be not well pleased; but then it was George's fault that she was unprovided for, and it seemed hardly good-natured to reject so easy an escape from the embarra.s.sment which his carelessness had produced.

'I would come and sit in the back seat, to make it proper,' cried Mrs.

Vereker, 'but that I am afraid of the sun. I tell you what: I will drive, and you can sit in the back seat, Mr. Desvoeux; that will do capitally.'

'Thank you,' said Desvoeux, with the most melancholy attempt at politeness and his face sinking to zero.

'Indeed, that is impossible!' cried Maud. 'I know you want to stay at home. I will go with Mr. Desvoeux.' And go accordingly they did, and on the way home Desvoeux became, as was but natural, increasingly confidential. 'This is my carriage,' he explained, 'for driving married ladies in: you see there is a seat behind--very far behind--and well railed off, to put the husbands in and keep them in their proper place--quite in the background. It is so disagreeable when they lean over and try to join in the conversation; and people never know when they are _de trop_.'

'Ah, but,' said Maud, 'I don't like driving with you alone. I hear you are a very terrible person. People give you a very bad character.'

'I know,' answered her companion; 'girls are always jilting me and treating me horribly badly, and then they say that it is all my fault. I dare say they have been telling you about Miss Fotheringham's affair, and making me out a monster; but it was she that was alone to blame.'

'Indeed,' said Maud, 'I heard that it made her very ill, and she had to be sent to England, to be kept out of a consumption.'

'This was how it was,' said Desvoeux; 'I adored her--quite adored her; I thought her an angel, and I think her one still, but with one defect--a sort of frantic jealousy, quite a mania. Well, I had a friend--it happened to be a lady--for whom I had all the feelings of a brother. We had corresponded for years. I had sent her innumerable notes, letters, flowers, presents, you know. I had a few things that she had given me--a note or two, a glove, a flower, a photograph, perhaps--just the sort of thing, you know, that one sends----'

'To one's brother,' put in Maud. 'Yes; I know exactly.'

'Yes,' said Desvoeux, in the most injured tone, 'and I used to lend her my ponies, and, when she wanted me, to drive her. And what do you think that Miss Fotheringham was cruel, wild enough to ask? To give back all my little mementoes to write no more notes, have no more drives; in fact, discard my oldest, dearest friend!--I told her, of course, that it was impossible, impossible!' Desvoeux cried, getting quite excited over his wrongs: '"Cruel girl," I said, "am I to seal my devotion to you by an infidelity to the kindest, tenderest, sweetest of beings?" Thereupon Miss Fotheringham became quite unreasonable, went into hysterics, sent me back a most lovely locket which I had sent her only that morning; and Fotheringham _pere_ wrote me the most odious note, in his worst style, declaring that I was trifling! Trifling, indeed! and to ask me to give up my----'

'Your sister!' cried Maud; 'it was hard indeed! Well, here we are at home. Let me jump down quick and go in and get my scolding.'

'And I,' said Desvoeux, 'will go to the Agency and get mine.'

Stolen waters are sweet, however; and it is to be feared that these two young people enjoyed their _tete-a-tete_ none the less for the consideration that their elders would have prevented it if they had had the chance.

CHAPTER XII.

A CHAPTER OF DISCLOSURES.

For his thoughts, Would they were blank sooner than filled with me!

Maud did not exactly get a scolding, but Felicia looked extremely grave.

Maud's high spirits were gone in an instant; the excitement which had enabled her to defy propriety hitherto deserted her at the door; the recklessness with which Desvoeux always infected her had driven away with him in his mail-phaeton, and left her merely with the disagreeable consciousness of having acted foolishly and wrongly. Felicia knew exactly how matters stood and scarcely said a word. Her silence however was, Maud felt, the bitterest reproach.

'Scold me, scold me, dear,' she cried, the tears starting to her eyes; 'only don't look like that and say nothing!'

'Well,' said Felicia, 'first promise me never again to drive alone with Mr. Desvoeux.'

'After all,' suggested Maud, 'it is a mere matter of appearances, and what do they signify?'

'Some matters of appearance,' said Felicia, 'signify very much. Besides, this is something more than that. It is bad enough for you to be _seen_ with him--what I really care about is your _being_ with him at all.'

'But,' said Maud, 'he is really very nice: he amuses me so much!'

'Yes,' answered the other, 'he amuses one, but then it always hurts. His fun has a something, I don't know what it is, but which is only just not offensive; and I don't trust him a bit.'

'But,' Maud argued, 'he is great friends with George, is he not?'

'Not great friends,' said Felicia; 'they were at college together, and have worked in the same office for years, and are intimate like schoolboys, and George never says an unkind word of any one; but I do not call them friends at all.'

'No?' said Maud, quite unconvinced, and feeling vexed at Felicia's evident dislike for her companion. 'Well, he's a great friend of mine, so don't abuse him, please.'

'Nonsense, child!' cried Felicia, in a fright. 'You don't know him in the least, or you would not say that. To begin with, he is not quite a gentleman, you know.'

'Not a gentleman!' cried Maud, aghast, 'he seems to me a very fine one.'

'As fine as you please,' said Felicia, 'but not a thorough gentleman.

Gentlemen never say things that hurt you or offend your taste. Now with Mr. Desvoeux I feel for ever in a fright lest he should say something I dislike; and I know he _thinks_ things that I dislike.'

'I think you are prejudiced, Felicia. What he says seems to me all very nice.'

'Perhaps it is prejudice,' Felicia answered, 'but I think it all the same. I feel the difference with other people; Major Sutton, for instance.'

'He is your ideal, is he not?' cried Maud, blushing and laughing, for somehow she was beginning to feel that Felicia had designs upon her.

'Yes,' Felicia said in her fervent way; 'he is pure and true and chivalrous to the core: he seems to me made of quite other stuff from men like Mr. Desvoeux.'

'He is all made of solid gold,' cried Maud, by this time in a teasing mood, 'and Mr. Desvoeux is plaster-of-Paris and putty and pinchbeck, and everything that is horrid. But he is very amusing, dearest Felicia, all the same, _and very nice_. I will not drive with him any more, of course, if you do not like it.'

Thereupon Maud, in a somewhat rebellious frame of mind, was about to go and take her things off, and was already half-way through the doorway when she turned round and saw Felicia's sweet, serene, refined brow wearing a look of hara.s.sment and annoyance, and a sudden pang of remorse struck her that she should, in pure mischief, have been wounding a tender heart and endangering a friendship, compared with which she felt everything else in the world was but a straw in the balance. She rushed back and flung her arms round her companion's neck. 'Dearest Felicia,'

she said, 'you know that I would fly to the moon rather than do anything you did not like or make you love me the tiniest atom less. I want to tell you something. You think, I know, that I am falling in love with Mr. Desvoeux. Well, dear, I don't care for him _that!_'

Thereupon Maud clapped two remarkably pretty hands together in a manner highly expressive of the most light-hearted indifference, and Felicia felt that at any rate she might console herself with the reflection that Maud was as yet quite heart-whole, and that, so far as Desvoeux was concerned, Sutton's prospects were not endangered. The certainty, however, that Desvoeux had selected Maud for his next flirtation, and that she felt no especial repugnance to the selection, made Felicia doubly anxious that her chosen hero should succeed, and her _protegee_ be put beyond the reach of danger as soon as possible. But then Sutton proved provokingly unamenable to Felicia's kind designs upon him.

His continued bachelorhood was a mystery of which not even she possessed the key. It was not insensibility, for every word, look, and gesture bespoke him more than ordinarily alive to all the charms which sway mankind. It certainly was not that either the wish or the power to please were wanting; n.o.body was more courteous at heart, or more prompt to show it, or more universally popular: nor could it be want of opportunity; for, though he had been all his life fighting, marching, hurrying on busy missions from one wild outpost to another, on guard for months together at some dangerous spot where treachery or fanaticism rendered an explosion imminent; yet the busiest military life has its intervals of quiet, and the love-making of soldiers is proverbially expeditious. Was it, then, some old romance, some far-off English recollection, some face that had fascinated his boyhood, and forbade him, when a man, to think any other altogether lovely? Could the locket, which formed the single ornament where all else was of Spartan simplicity, have told a tale of one of those catastrophes where love and hope and happiness get swamped in hopeless shipwreck? Was it that, absolutely unknown to both parties, his relations to Felicia filled too large a place in his heart for any other devotion to find room there?

Was it that a widow sister who had been left with a tribe of profitless boys upon her hands, and to whom a remittance of Sutton's pay went every month, had made him think of marriage as an unattainable luxury?

Sutton, at any rate, remained without a wife, and showed no symptom of anxiety to find one. To those venturesome friends who were sufficiently familiar to rally him on the subject he replied, cheerfully enough, that his regiment was his wife and that such a turbulent existence as his would make any other sort of spouse a most inconvenient appendage.

Ladies, experienced in the arts of fascination, knew instinctively that he was una.s.sailable, and even the most intrepid and successful gave up the thoughts of conquest in despair. To be a sort of privileged brother to Felicia--to be the children's especial patron and ally--to sit chatting with Vernon far into the night with all the pleasant intimacy of family relationship, seemed to be all the domestic pleasures of which he stood in need. 'As well,' Felicia sighed, 'might some poor maiden waste her love upon the cold front of a marble Jove.'

Such was the man upon whom Felicia had essayed her first attempt at match-making; and such the man, too, whom Maud, though she had buried the secret deep in the recesses of her heart--far even out of her own sight--had already begun to love with all the pa.s.sionate violence of a first attachment.