Thaddeus of Warsaw Part 27

"Sir, this generous conduct to strangers--"

"Generous to myself, Mr. Constantine, and not to strangers; I cannot consider you as such, for men who devote themselves to their country must find a brother in every honest breast. I will not hear of our meeting on any other terms." [Footnote: This generous man is no fict.i.tious character, the original being Dr. Blackburne, late of Cavendish Square; but who, since the above was written, has long retired from his profession, pa.s.sing a revered old age in the beautiful neighborhood of our old British cla.s.sic scenes, the Abbey of Glas...o...b..ry.]

Thaddeus could not immediately form a reply adequate to the sentiment which the generous philanthropy of the doctor awakened. Whilst he stood incapable of speaking, Cavendish, with one glance of his penetrating eye, deciphered his countenance, and giving him a friendly shake by the hand, disappeared.

The count took up his hat; and musing all the way he went on the unexpected scenes we meet in life,--disappointment where we expected kindness, and friendship where no hope could arise,--he arrived at the door of Lady Dundas, in Harley Street.

He was instantly let in, and with much ceremony ushered into a splendid library, where he was told the ladies would attend him.

Before they entered, they allowed him time to examine its costly furniture, its glittering book-cases, bird-cages, globes, and reading-stands, all shining with burnished gilding; its polished plaster casts of the nine muses, which stood in nine recesses about the room, draperied with blue net, looped up with artificial roses; and its fine cut-steel Grecian stove, on each side of which was placed, on sandal-wood pedestals, two five-feet statues of Apollo and Minerva.

Thaddeus had twice walked round these fopperies of learning, when the door opened, and Lady Dundas, dressed in a morning wrapper of Indian shawls, waddled into the apartment. She neither bowed nor curtseyed to the count, who was standing when she entered, but looking at him from head to foot, said as she pa.s.sed, "So you are come;" and ringing the bell, called to the servant in no very soft tones, "Tell Miss Dundas the person Lady Tinemouth spoke of is here." Her ladyship then sat down in one of the little gilded chairs, leaving Thaddeus still standing on the spot where he had bowed to her entrance.

"You may sit down," cried she, stirring the fire, and not deigning to look at him; "for my daughter may not choose to come this half-hour."

"I prefer standing," replied the count, who could have laughed at the accuracy of Miss Egerton's picture, had he not prognosticated more disagreeableness to himself from the ill manners of which this was a specimen.

Lady Dundas took no further notice of him. Turning from her bloated countenance, (which pride as well as high living had swollen from prettiness to deformity,) he walked to a window and stationed himself there, looking into the street, until the door was again opened, and two ladies made their appearance.

"Miss Dundas," cried her ladyship, "here is the young man that is to teach you German."

Thaddeus bowed; the younger of the ladies curtseyed; and so did the other, not forgetting to accompany such condescension with a toss of the head, that the effect of undue humility might be done away.

Whilst a servant was setting chairs round a table, on which was painted the Judgment of Hercules, Lady Dundas again opened her lips.

"Pray, Mr. Thingumbob, have you brought any grammars, and primers, and dictionaries, and syntaxes with you?"

Before he had time to reply in the negative, Miss Dundas interrupted her mother.

"I wish, madam, you would leave the arrangement of my studies to myself. Does your ladyship think we would learn out of any book which had been touched by other people? Thomas," cried she to a servant, "send Stephens. .h.i.ther."

Thaddeus silently contemplated this strange mother and daughter, whilst the pretty Euphemia paid the same compliment to him. During his stay, he ventured to look once only at her sylph-like figure.

There was an unreceding something in her liquid blue eyes, when he chanced to meet them, which displeased him; and he could not help seeing that from the instant she entered the room she had seldom ceased staring in his face.

He was a little relieved by the maid putting the books on the table.

Miss Dundas, taking her seat, desired him to sit down by her and arrange the lessons. Lady Dundas was drawing to the other side of Thaddeus, when Euphemia, suddenly whisking round, pushed before her mother, and exclaimed--

"Dear mamma! you don't want to learn!" and squeezed herself upon the edge of her mother's chair, who, very angrily getting up, declared that rudeness to a parent was intolerable from such well-bred young women, and left the room.

Euphemia blushed at the reproof more than at her conduct; and Miss Dundas added to her confusion by giving her a second reprimand.

Thaddeus pitied the evident embarra.s.sment of the little beauty, and to relieve her, presented the page in the German grammar with which they were to begin. This had the desired effect; and for an hour and a half they prosecuted their studies with close attention.

Whilst the count continued his directions to her sister, and then turned his address to herself, Miss Euphemia, wholly unseen by him, with a bent head was affecting to hear him though at the same time she looked obliquely through her thick flaxen ringlets, and gazing with wonder and admiration on his face as it inclined towards her, said to herself, "If this man were a gentleman, I should think him the most charming creature in the world."

"Will your task be too long, madam?" inquired Thaddeus; "will it give you any inconvenience to remember?"

"To remember what?" asked she, for in truth she had neither seen what he had been pointing at nor heard what he had been saying.

"The lesson madam, I have just been proposing."

"Show it to me again, and then I shall be a better judge."

He did as he was desired, and was taking his leave, when she called after him:

"Pray, Mr. Constantine, come to-morrow at two. I want you particularly."

The count bowed and withdrew.

"And what do you want with him to-morrow, child?" asked Miss Dundas; "you are not accustomed to be so fond of improvement."

Euphemia knew very well what she was accustomed to be fond of; but not choosing to let her austere sister into her predilection for the contemplation of superior beauty, she merely answered, "You know, Diana, you often reproach me for my absurd devotion to novel-reading, and my repugnance to graver books; now I want at once to be like you, a woman of great erudition: and for that purpose I will study day and night at the German, till I can read all the philosophers, and be a fit companion for my sister."

This speech from Euphemia (who had always been so declared an enemy to pedantry as to affirm that she learnt German merely because it was the fashion) would have awakened Miss Dundas to some suspicion of a covert design, had she not been in the habit of taking down such large draughts of adulation, that whenever herself was the subject, she gave it full confidence. Euphemia seldom administered these doses but to serve particular views; and seeing in the present case that a little flattery was necessary, she felt no compunction in sacrificing sincerity to the gratification of caprice. Weak in understanding, she had fed on works of imagination, until her mind loathed all kinds of food. Not content with devouring the elegant pages of Mackenzie, Radcliffe, and Lee, she flew with voracious appet.i.te to sate herself on the garbage of any circulating library that fell in her way.

The effects of such a taste were exhibited in her manners. Being very pretty, she became very sentimental. She dressed like a wood nymph, and talked as if her soul were made of love and sorrow. Neither of these emotions had she ever really felt; but in idea she was always the victim of some ill-fated pa.s.sion, fancying herself at different periods in love with one or other of the finest young men in her circle.

By this management she kept faithful to her favorite principle that "love was a want of her soul!" As it was the rule of her life, it ever trembled on her tongue, ever introduced the confession of any new attachment, which usually happened three times a year, to her dear friend Miss Arabella Rothes. Fortunately for the longevity of their mutual friendship, this young lady lived in an ancient house, forty miles to the north of London. This latter circ.u.mstance proved a pretty distress for their pens to descant on; and Arabella remained a most charming sentimental writing-stock, to receive the catalogue of Miss Euphemia's lovers; indeed, that gentle creature might have matched every lady in Cowley's calendar with a gentleman. But every throb of her heart must have acknowledged a different master. First, the fashionable sloven, Augustus Somers, lounged and sauntered himself into her good graces; but his dishevelled hair, and otherwise neglected toilette, not exactly meeting her ideas of an elegant lover, she gave him up at the end of three weeks. The next object her eyes fell upon, as most opposite to her former fancy, was the charming Marquis of Inverary. But here all her arrows failed, for she never could extract from him more than a "how d'ye do?" through the long lapse of four months, during which time she continued as constant to his fine figure, and her own folly, as could have fallen to the lot of any poor despairing damsel. However, my lord was so cruel, so perfidious, as to allow several opportunities to pa.s.s in which he might have declared his pa.s.sion; and she told Arabella, in a letter of six sheets, that she would bear it no longer.

She put this wise resolution in practice, and had already played the same game with half a score, (the last of whom was a young guardsman, who had just ridden into her heart by managing his steed with the air of a "feathered Mercury," one day in Hyde Park,) when Thaddeus made his appearance before her.

The moment she fixed her eyes on him, her inflammable imagination was set in a blaze. She forgot his apparent subordinate quality in the n.o.bleness of his figure; and once or twice that evening, while she was flitting about, the sparkling cynosure of the d.u.c.h.ess of Orkney's masquerade, her thoughts hovered over the handsome foreigner.

She viewed the subject first one way and then another, and, in her ever varying mind, "he was everything by turns, and nothing long;"

but at length she argued herself into a belief that he must be a man of rank from some of the German courts, who having seen her somewhere unknown to herself, had fallen in love with her, and so had persuaded Lady Tinemouth to introduce him as a master of languages to her family that he might the better appreciate the disinterestedness of her disposition.

This wild notion having once got into her head, received instant credence. She resolved, without seeming to suspect it, to treat him as his quality deserved, and to deliver sentiments in his hearing which should charm him with their delicacy and generosity.

With these chimeras floating in her brain, she returned home, went to bed, and dreamed that Mr. Constantine had turned out to be the _Duc d'Enghien_, had offered her his hand, and that she was conducted to the altar by a train of princes and princesses, his brothers and sisters.

She woke the next morning from these deliriums in an ecstasy, deeming them prophetic; and, taking up her book, began with a fluttering attention to scan the lesson which Thaddeus had desired her to learn.

CHAPTER XXIII.

"What are these words? These seeming flowers? Maids to call them, 'Love in idleness.'"

The following day at noon, as the Count Sobieski was crossing Cavendish Square to keep his appointment in Harley Street, he was met by Lady Sara Ross. She had spoken with the Misses Dundas the night before, at the masquerade, where discovering the pretty Euphemia through the dress of Eloisa, her jealous and incensed heart could not withstand the temptation of hinting at the captivating Abelard she had selected to direct her studies. Her ladyship soon penetrated into the situation of Euphemia's heated fancy, and drew from her, without betraying herself, that she expected to see her master the following day. Stung to the soul, Lady Sara quitted the rooms, and in a paroxysm of disappointment, determined to throw herself in his way as he went to her rival's house.

With this hope, she had already been traversing the square upwards of half an hour, attended by her maid, when her anxious eye at last caught a view of his figure proceeding along Margaret Street. Hardly able to support her tottering frame, shaken as it was with contending emotions, she accosted him first: for he was pa.s.sing straight onward, without looking to the right or the left. On seeing her ladyship, he stopped, and expressed his pleasure at the meeting.

"If you _really_ are pleased to meet me," said she, forcing a smile, "take a walk with me round the square. I want to speak with you."

Thaddeus bowed, and she put her arm through his, but remained silent for a few minutes, in evident confusion. The count recollected it must now be quite two. He knew the awkwardness of making the Misses Dundas wait; and notwithstanding his reluctance to appear impatient with Lady Sara, he found himself obliged to say--

"I am sorry I must urge your ladyship to honor me with your commands, for it is already past the time when I ought to have been with the Misses Dundas."