Contraband Part 20

"Oh, indeed!" said Miss Kate. "I suppose you think you'd do quite as well as Sir Henry. Not a bit of you. He's A 1 with the ladies. Haven't you found that out in all your travels? Why the _young_ woman looked as if she'd eat poor _me_, when I only bowed to him! I mean the pale girl in a----Gracious! Captain Vanguard, if you like me tell me so, or, at least, if you kick me under the table--don't kick so precious hard!"

"That was my daughter, Miss Kate," said Sir Henry, in perfect good-humour, interpreting very correctly Frank's too strenuous warning below the surface.

Kate got out of her difficulty gracefully enough.

"Your daughter!" she repeated. "And a very nice daughter too. How fond she must be of you! I should, I know!"

Here Miss Cremorne exchanged glances with Vanguard, and Sir Henry felt a vague uncomfortable consciousness that the society was too young for him; relieved, however, by virtuous disapproval of Frank's promiscuous intimacies, and a dawning conviction that, if there had ever been any tendency to such an arrangement, he was well out of him for a son-in-law.

The sculptor now produced a velvet case of cigarettes which was handed round, and from which even the ladies did not disdain to take a few whiffs of the most fragrant tobacco in the world: Kilgarron only asking leave to indulge in a long strong Havanna, or "roofer," as he called it,--urging that to offer a man a cigarette when he wanted a cigar, was like giving him a slice of bread and b.u.t.ter when he asked for a beefsteak!

"Nonsense!" argued Mrs. Battersea. "Half a loaf is better than no bread, and half a frolic than no fun,--consequently, half a puff is better than no smoke. What do _you_ say, Kate! That's your second cigarette already."

The girl would have made a pretty picture, leaning back on the red velvet cushion of a sofa to which she had now betaken herself, while daintily holding the cigarette between her delicate fingers, she pursed up the rosiest and most provoking mouth imaginable to emit a long thin stream of aromatic smoke.

"What do I say?" she repeated, looking meaningly at Frank Vanguard.

"That I hate half-loaves, half-frolics, half-mouthfuls, half-measures in _everything_! All or none, say I. Take it or let it alone!"

The foreign-looking woman tapped her snuff-box. "You're wrong," said she. "Everything in life is a matter of compromise. Besides, on _your_ principle, my dear, you'd have all your eggs in one basket. Suppose you drop it?"

"What a mess there would be in the basket!" observed the sculptor.

"They'd make an omelette _anyhow_," said Lord Kilgarron, mixing himself a brandy-and-soda at the side-board.

"Besides, there are fresh ones laid every day," added Picard.

"With chickens in them," continued Mrs. Battersea, "if you'll only have patience."

"And after all, one egg is very like another," murmured Sir Henry somewhat hazily; "dress them how you please, there's generally a suspicion about them, and the freshest are rather tasteless at their best."

Frank said nothing; but thought of the eggs he had most valued in the world, their basket, and its fate. Well, he had learned his lesson now.

He must make the most of a pretty painted egg he had chosen to-night, from the shelf, indeed, rather than the nest, and must abide by his selection, defying memory, prudence, common sense--defying even the bright eyes, pleasant smiles, and winning whispers of Kate Cremorne.

A man who has lost the flower he values most is perhaps never so unhappy as when he roams the garden to find a hundred others ready to be gathered, as sweet, as bright, as blooming, lacking only the subtle, special fragrance that was all in all to _him_. He is far less lonely in the desert than in that bower of beauty, which the absence of his rose--be she red, white, or yellow--has converted to a bare and dreary waste. Young hearts are sadly impatient of sorrow. Like young horses first put in harness, they are given to fret and bounce, and dash at any distraction which serves to divert their thoughts from the collar and the curb. Frank felt in no mood for self-communing to-night; but he was well disposed to s.n.a.t.c.h at any gratification the hour could afford. As the champagne mounted to his brain, Helen's pale, proud image faded into distance, and Jin's black eyes seemed to chain him in their spells. Ere long, he began to think he was a very lucky fellow after all, and exchanged jest or repartee with Kate Cremorne, as if he had not a care nor a sorrow in the world. That discriminating young person detected, nevertheless, something hollow in all this merriment.

"His heart's not in the game," she whispered to her sister, as the whole party took up a fresh position in the conservatory. "Something's gone wrong with Frank; and I think we needn't ask him to Greenwich next Sunday."

Henceforth she divided her smiles between the sculptor, whom she had known from her childhood, and Picard, on whom she bestowed perhaps the larger share, appreciating, as women do, a certain spice of the adventurer, which he betrayed, without parading, in dress, manner, gestures, even in the curl of his moustache, and the turn of his well-shaped, sinewy, sunburnt hands.

Sir Henry fell to Mrs. Battersea, who encouraged him to drink more champagne than is good for anybody after one in the morning; while Frank, placidly smoking, suffered himself to be amused by the foreign-looking Englishwoman, whose spirits seemed rather to increase than diminish with the waning hours.

So the night wore on. It was already four o'clock in a bright summer sunrise, when Sir Henry lighting a fresh cigar as he grappled to Picard's offered arm with great good-will--expressed his intention of walking home.

"Every yard of the way, my dear fellow. Does one all the good in the world. Nothing like exercise. Never had gout, though I'm bred for it both sides; and, faith, I've earned it, too! We used to live hard in my early days. But I always took a deal of exercise--always. That is why I'm pretty fresh on my legs now."

Picard a.s.sented, as younger men are bound to a.s.sent to such plat.i.tudes from their elders; and Sir Henry, whose pedestrianism was indeed of an exceedingly intermittent nature, puffed a volume of smoke in the rosy face of morning, and proceeding with his reflections.

"Now, Frank and that heavy fellow have gone off together on the chance of finding a cab. Much better have footed it like you and me. 'Gad, what a lovely day it's going to be! And what a pleasant night we've had! I'm not sure, though,"--here he turned round full on his companion--"I'm not sure we make the most of our lives after all. Hang it! if I had to begin again, I think I'd go in more for nature. Keep always out of doors, farm more, shoot more--look after the poor, hunt the country, and never go from home. I'm getting on now, and begin to understand the old Tartar chief, who longed for the Land of Gra.s.s when he was dying--

"And I would I were back in Cauca-land, To hear my herdsmen's horn; And to watch the waggons and brown brood mares, And the tents where I was born!"

Picard had never read Kingsley's stirring verses. "This old chap's very drunk!" he thought; but having his own reasons for wishing to stand well with Miss Hallaton's father, he "hardened him on," as he would have called it, without remorse. "I don't think _you_ can complain, Sir Henry," said he. "You've had the best of everything all your time, and can give pounds of weight to most of the young ones still. You might marry any woman in London to-morrow if you liked. I wonder you don't."

Sir Henry looked pleased.

"Marry!" he repeated. "Marry! I'm not sure that I wouldn't, only, between you and me, my dear fellow, women in general are a very inferior lot. They're delightful, I grant you, wholesale; but when you come to the retail business, as the tradesmen say, there's great risk and very little profit about the article. They don't wear well when you buy, and if you want to sell, there's no market that I know of nearer than Constantinople. I fancy the Turks understand the business; but I am _not_ a Turk. Heaven forbid! Fancy a plurality of wives!"

"I'm not sure I should mind it!" laughed Picard--"with the Bosphorus at one's door, of course."

"The Bosphorus wouldn't help you," said Sir Henry. "She'd come up again if she wanted, you may depend, though you sank her forty fathom deep, with a round-shot tied to her ankles. No; I think I understand the s.e.x thoroughly. In my own experience, I've found them perverse, wilful, obstinate."

"Unselfish, at least," put in Picard.

"Unselfish!" exclaimed the other. "Not a bit of it! They're twice as selfish as we are, and that's saying a good deal. A tyrant, indeed, keeps them down, and so long as he remains perfectly unfeeling, the thing works moderately well. But if they can get what you and I call a good fellow to marry them, why he leads the life of a galley slave!

There was my poor brother Ralph--I do believe, sir, he died of it--married a pig-headed idiot without two ideas, and she traded on his kind heart till she wore it clean away. I argued the point with her once. Fancy _arguing_ with a woman, and an ignorant one! 'What should _you_ say,' I asked, 'if Ralph took you out partridge-shooting, we'll suppose, and kept you for hours standing in wet turnips to load for him, or carry a spare gun? Yet you have no scruple in making him accompany you to parties, which he hates far more than you would the wet turnips, and are not ashamed to speak very unkindly to him even if he _looks_ bored.' 'That's nothing to do with it,' she answered.--Such is a woman's logic.--'I dare say _you_ wouldn't stand it; but then you've more character than Ralph!' She's married a stock-jobber since. I'm happy to say he bullies her like the devil, yet I do believe she likes him twice as well as Ralph."

"But _you_ took warning, I hope, Sir Henry," said Picard, laughing in his sleeve.

"They never tried that sort of thing with _me_," answered the baronet.

"Still, there's no certainty about the thing, and I fancy it's better to let it alone. Besides, one's ideas vary about women in a regular procession of decades. Up to ten, we're dependent on them; from ten to twenty, we despise them; from twenty to thirty, we adore them; from thirty to forty, we believe in them; from forty to fifty, we mistrust them; from fifty to sixty, we avoid them; from sixty to seventy, we tolerate them; and if we live any longer after that, why we become dependent on them again."

Picard burst out laughing.

"A moral lesson!" he exclaimed, "and from one who has not neglected practice in theory. Here we are at your own door, Sir Henry. I shall not forget your maxims. Good night."

The other feeling for his latch-key, looked up where the blinds were drawn over the windows of Helen's bed-chamber.

"There are exceptions," said he musingly, "and one good one is worth all the others put together; and yet nine-tenths of our annoyances, and all our sorrows, can generally be traced to a woman."

Picard sighed as he turned away. Men may rail as they will, but each has a secret image of his own that he esteems a pearl of exceptional price, an angel far above the common short-comings of humanity. Like the negro with his fetish, he takes it out sometimes to blame and scold, no less than plead with and adore, but he always puts it back reverently in its place, to nestle in the warmest and most sacred corner of his heart.

CHAPTER XIX.

A DRAWN BATTLE.

Mrs. Lascelles, retiring for the night, or rather morning, on her return from the Opera, found herself beset with troubles and perplexities of unusual gravity. Taking off her ornaments, and laying them one by one on the dressing-table, she reflected sadly on the relative positions of her two greatest friends, Jin Ross and Helen Hallaton. The longer she looked at the complication the less she liked it. For a woman to entertain two lovers, as a game-keeper hunts a brace of pointers, she considered natural enough. They should be made to range in different directions at her bidding, back each other without hesitation on her behalf, and, above all, come meekly to heel at the shortest notice when desired. This seemed only the normal condition of humanity, and, in her own case, she had hitherto found such amicable arrangements answer remarkably well.

Sir Henry, indeed, proved wilder than any she had hitherto endeavoured to train; but Goldthred, again, if not the most sagacious, was by far the meekest and most docile she had ever taken in hand. For a moment, she laid down her brushes, smiled at her own comely face in the gla.s.s, and by some unaccountable a.s.sociation of ideas, found herself wishing this last admirer would show a little more self-a.s.sertion, more enterprise, altogether borrow a leaf or two out of the black books studied over-diligently by the former.

Then she reproached herself for giving a thought to her own concerns, while Helen Hallaton looked so pale and sad, resuming the thread of her regrets with the use of her hair-brushes, and cherishing a certain impulse of womanly indignation at the idea of two young ladies being in love with one man.

The proverb affirming that "What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander," cannot a.s.suredly be of feminine invention. The code of our fair aggressors seems framed by a justice whose scales are not duly registered, and whose bandage does not entirely cover both eyes. "If I kill _you_," seems the ladies' verdict, "justifiable homicide, and it serves you right! But if you kill _me_, it's premeditated woman-slaughter, and penal servitude for life!"

How many of us are thus transported, without really deserving it, I refrain from speculating; but I am informed by convicts themselves that good conduct is powerless to obtain any remission of sentence, and that there is no such thing as a ticket-of-leave.

Before Mrs. Lascelles got into bed, she resolved to make a touching appeal to Jin's generosity directly after breakfast, and if need were, to back it with all the force of her own authority and moral influence.