Ouida

“ 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." ”

“ Ah, Philip, you don't know what the worries of a chaperone are!"
"Thank Heaven, no!" laughed Carruthers.
"It is easy to make a joke of it, and very tempting, I dare say—one's woes always are amusing to other people, they don't feel the smart themselves, and only laugh at the grimace it forces from one—but I can tell you, Philip, it is anything but a pleasant prospect to have to go about in society with a girl one may be ashamed of!—I don't know anything more trying; I would as soon wear paste diamonds as introduce a girl that is not perfectly good style." ”

“ You have given me a great many days this month," said Lady Marabout, gratefully. "Anne Hautton sees nothing of Hautton, she says, except at a distance in Pall-Mall or the Park, all the season through. Fancy if I saw no more of you! Do you know, Philip, I am almost reconciled to your never marrying. I have never seen anybody I should like at all for you, unless you had chosen Cecil Ormsby—Cecil Cheveley I mean; and I am sure I should be very jealous of your wife if you had one. I couldn't help it!"
"Rest tranquil, my dear mother; you will never be put to the test!" ”

“ That he may win her I know women too well not to fear, therefore I ask you to be my friend. If she refuse me, will you plead for me?—if she ask for counsel, will you give such as your own heart dictates (I ask no other) —and, will you remember that on Valencia's answer will rest the fate of a man's lifetime?"
He rose and left her, but the sound of his voice rang in Lady Marabout's ears, and the tears welled into her eyes: "Dear, dear! how like he looked to his poor dear mother! But what a position to place me in! Am I never to have any peace?" ”

“ I know that I shall find my Lorraine violet without stain or soil. Madame, Favette is still dearer to me now, Heaven help me, than five years ago. Five years—five years—true! it is an eternity! Yet the bitterness of the past has faded for ever from me now, and I only see—the future!"
Madame de Vaudreuil listened in silence; his words stirred in her chords long untouched, never heard amidst [Pg 227] the mots, the madrigals, the laughter of her world of Paris, Versailles, and Choisy. She struck him a little blow with her jessamine-sprays, with a mist gathering over her lovely blue eyes. ”

“ She was a magnificent woman, this Eudoxia Adelaida, Marchioness St. Julian; and proud enough Little Grand and I felt when we had that soft, jewelled hand held out to us, and that bewitching smile beamed upon us, and that joyous presence dazzling in our eyes, as we sat in the drawing-room of that Casa di Fiori. She was about thirty-five, I should say (boys always worship those who might have been schoolfellows of their mothers) , tall and stately, and imposing, with the most beautiful pink and white skin, with a fine set of teeth, raven hair, and eyes tinted most exquisitely. ”

“ Lady Marabout had never been more miserable in her life! She heard on all sides admiration of Rosediamond's daughter; she was gratified by seeing Goodwood, Fitzbreguet, Fulke Nugent, every eligible man in the room, suing for a place on her tablets; she had the delight of beholding Carruthers positively join the negligent beauty's train; and yet the night was a night of purgatory to Lady Marabout, for Chandos Cheveley had his first waltz, and several after it, and the Amandine set were there to gossip, and the Hautton clique to be shocked, at it. ”

“ With fifty men always about Valencia, as they are, how can I be responsible for any mischief that may happen, though, to hear Philip talk, one would really imagine it was my fault that they lost their heads, as he calls it! As if a forty-horse steam-power could stop a man when he's once off down the incline into love! The more you try to pull him back the more impetus you give him to go headlong down. I wish Goodwood would propose, and we could settle the affair definitively. ”

“ Just as we have been talking of him, there is that man again! I must bow to him, I suppose; though if there be a person I dislike——" said Lady Marabout, giving a frigid little bend of her head as her barouche, with its dashing roans, rolled from her door, and a tilbury passed them, driving slowly through the square.
Cecil Ormsby bowed to its occupant with less severity, and laughed under the sheltering shadow of her white parasol-fringe.
"The Ogre has a very pretty trap, though, Lady Marabout, and the most delicious gray horse in it! Such good action!" ”

“ Can anything be more comfortable, more tranquil, than I am now? I swing through life in a rocking-chair; if I'm a trifle bored now and then, it's my heaviest trial. I float as pleasantly on the waves of London life, in my way, as the lotus-eaters of poetry on the Ganges in theirs; and you'd have the barbarity to introduce into my complacent existence the sting of matrimony, the phosphorus of Hymen's torch, the symbolical serpent of a wedding-ring?—for shame!"
Lady Marabout laughed despite herself, and the solemnity, in her eyes, of the subject. ”

“ She who could not endure to see a fly hurt or a flower pulled needlessly, had nothing for it but to worry for Cardonnel's destiny, and puzzle over the divided duties which Carruthers had hinted to her. To reject the one man because he was not well off did seem to her conscience, uncomfortably awakened by Phil's innuendoes, something more mercenary than she quite liked to look at; yet to throw over the other, future Duke of Doncaster, the eligible, the darling, the yearned-for of all May Fair and Belgravia, seemed nothing short of madness to inculcate to Valencia ”

“ We shall see the Countess of Marabout moving through London society with a West Indian, who has a skin like Othello; has as much idea of manners as a housemaid that suddenly turns out an heiress, and is invited by people to whom she yesterday carried up their hot water; reflects indelible disgrace on her chaperone by gaucheries unparalleled; throws glass or silver missiles at Soames's head when he doesn't wait upon her at luncheon to her liking, as she has been accustomed to do at the negroes——"
"Philip, pray don't!" cried Lady Marabout, piteously. ”

“ The Hauttons heard you, and the Hauttons are very merciless people; perfectly bred themselves, and pitiless on the least infringement of the convenances. Besides, ten to one you may have gained Goodwood's ill-will; and he is a man whose word has immense weight, I assure you."
"I do not see anything remarkable in him to give him weight," said the literal and unimpressible little Montolieu. "He is a commonplace person to my taste, neither so brilliant nor so handsome by a great deal as many gentlemen I see—as Sir Philip, for instance, Lady Marabout?" ”

“ Lady Marabout played a little tattoo with her spoon in perplexity.
"My dear Philip, you know as well as I do what I mean. One might think you were a boy of twenty to hear you!"
"My dear mother, like all disputants, when beaten in argument and driven into a corner, you resort to vituperation of your opponent!" laughed Carruthers, as he left her and lounged away to pick up the stick with which pretty Flora Elmers had just knocked the pipe out of Aunt Sally's head on to the velvet lawn of Lady George Frangipane's dower-house, leaving his mother by no means tranquillized by his suggestions. ”

“ I have often pictured Philip's wife to myself, I have often idealized the sort of woman I should like to see him marry, but it's very improbable I shall ever meet my ideal realized; one never does! And, after all, whenever I have fancied, years ago, he might be falling in love, I have always felt a horrible dread lest she shouldn't be worthy of him—a jealous fear of her that I could not conquer. It's much better as it is; there is no woman good enough for him. ”

“ If you take vanity for wit, I cannot accept discourtesy as compliment!"
"Well hit, little lady!" thought Carruthers, with a mental bravissima.
"What a speech!" thought Lady Marabout, across the table, as shocked as though a footman had dropped a cascade of iced hock over her.
"You got it for once, Goodwood," laughed Carruthers, as they drove away in his tilbury. "You never had such a sharp brush as that."
"By Jove, no! Positively it was quite a new sensation—refreshing, indeed! One grows so tired of the women who agree with one eternally. She's charming, on my word. Who is she, Phil? ”

“ Lady Marabout remarked to that safest confidante, herself, "positively as if the man had been welcome at my house for the last ten years! If Cecil would but second me, he couldn't do it; but she will smile and talk with him just as though he were Goodwood or Fitzbreguet! It is very disagreeable to be forced against one's will like this into countenancing such a very objectionable person; and yet what can one do?" ”

“ Goodwood was not lost then!
Was she sorry—was she glad? Lady Marabout hardly knew; like Wellington, she felt the next saddest thing after a defeat is a victory.
"But you love him, Valencia?" she asked, half ashamed of suggesting such weakness, to this glorious beauty.
The Hon. Val unclasped her necklet as if it were a chain, choking her, and her face grew white and set: the coldest will feel on occasion, and all have some tender place that can wince at the touch. ”

“ The boy lingered.
"I will tell Sir Fulke then, lady, that the ruined have no friends?"
Whiter and prouder still grew the delicate beauty of her face; she raised her stately head, haughtily as she had used to glance over a glittering Court, where each voice murmured praise of her loveliness and reproach of her coldness; and placed the fragile toy of lace back in the boy's hands.
"Go, seek your master, and give him this in gage that their calamity makes friends more dear to us than their success. Go, he will know its meaning!" ”

“ Come, do you hate me now, Fay?" [Pg 291]
"No," said Fay, a little shyly. "I never hated you, I always admired you; but I was afraid of you, though I would never confess it to Sydie."
"Never be afraid of me," said Keane, putting his hand on hers as it lay on the arm of his chair. "You have no cause. You can do things few girls can; but they are pretty in you, where they might be—not so pretty in others. I like them at the least. You are very fond of your cousin, are you not?" ”

“ 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 [Pg 203] or immerse yourself in political intrigue like the Duchess 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. ”

“ Lucrezia's voice changed to a piteous wail:
"You love me no longer, then?"
"Love!" said Conran, fiercely—"love! How dare you speak to me of love? I held you to be fond, innocent, true as Heaven; as such, you were dearer to me than life—as dear as honor. I loved you with as deep a passion as ever a man knew—Heaven help me! I love you now! How am I rewarded? By finding you the companion of blackguards, the associate of swindlers, one of the arch-intrigantes who lead on youths to ruin with base smiles and devilish arts. ”

“ At least, whether their maids or their mother ever beheld the first of the phenomena, far be it from me to say, but the world never saw either.
"Well, Miss Montolieu, how do you like our life here?" Carruthers was asking. "Which is preferable—Belgravia or St. Denis?"
"Oh, Belgravia, decidedly," laughed Lady Marabout's charge. "I think your life charming. All change, excitement, gayety, who would not like it?"
"Nobody—that is not fresh to it?"
"Fresh to it? Ah! are you one of the class who find no beauty in anything unless it is new? ”

“ But many a paradise like it has dawned and faded, before and since the Versailles of Louis Quatorze.
He loved, and Madame la Marquise loved him. Through one brief tumult of struggle he passed: struggle between the creed of the Dominican abbey, where no sin would have been held so thrice accursed, so unpardonable, so deserving of the scourge and the stake as this—and the creed of the Bourbon Court, where churchmen's gallantries were every-day gossip; where the Abbé de Rancé, ere he founded the saintly gloom of La Trappe, scandalized town and court as much as Lauzun ”

“ You never used to be," said Lady Marabout. "If you were in my place just for a night or two, or any other chaperone's, you'd be more full of pity. But people never will sympathize with anything that doesn't touch themselves. The only chords that strike the key-note in anybody is the chord that sounds 'self;' and that is the reason why the world is as full of crash and tumult as Beethoven's 'Storm.'"
"Quite right, my dear mother!" ”

“ None can christen her Lady Tattersall any longer with point, for there are no yearling sales in that house in Lowndes Square, whatever there be in the other domiciles of that fashionable quarter. Lady Marabout has shaken that burden off her shoulders, and moves in blissful solitude and tripled serenity through Belgravia, relieved of responsibility, and wearing her years as lightly, losing the odd trick at her whist as sunnily, and beaming on the world in general as radiantly as any dowager in the English Peerage. ”

“ 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 noble atonement and reckless self-sacrifice, if fate allowed them.
She opened the drawing-room door; Flora Montolieu was alone.
"Flora, you have seen Goodwood?" ”

“ Cecil's impetuosity invariably knocked Lady Marabout down at one blow, as a ball knocks down the pegs at lawn billiards. She rallied after the shock, but not successfully, and tried at coldness and decision, as recommended by Hautton prescriptions.
"My dear Cecil, I have said to him what I think it my duty to say to him. Responsible as I am for you——"
"Responsible for me, Lady Marabout? Indeed you are not. I am responsible for myself!" interrupted Lady Cecil, with that haughty arch of her eyebrows and that flush on her face before which Lady Marabout was powerless. "What have you said to him? ”