Chapter VI: How Pride Bowed and Fell (1)

Beyond meeting Earlscourt at White's, or, for an hour, at the reunion of some fair leader of ton, I scarcely saw him that season, for he was more and more devoted to public life. He looked wretchedly ill, and his physicians said if he wished to live he must go to the south of France in July, and winter at Corfu; but he paid them no heed; he occupied himself constantly with political and literary work, and grudged the three or four hours he gave to sleep that did him little good.

"Will you get me admittance to the Lords to-morrow night?" Beatrice asked me, one morning, when I met her in the Ride. I looked at her surprised.

"To the Lords? Of course, if you wish."

"I do wish it." Her hands clinched on her bridle, and the color flushed into her face, for Earlscourt just then passed us, riding with one of his brother ministers. He looked at us both, and his face changed strangely, though he rode on, continuing his conversation with the other man, while I went round the turn with Beatrice and the other fellows who were about her; le fruit defendu is always most attractive, and Beatrice's profound negligence of them all made them more mad about her than all the traps and witcheries, beguilements and attractions, that coquettes and beauties set out for them. She rode beautifully; and a woman who _does_ sit well down on her saddle, and knows how to handle her horse, never looks better than en Amazone. Earlscourt met her three times at the turn of the Ride; and though you would not have told that he was passing any other than an utter stranger, I think it must have struck him that he had lost much in losing Beatrice Boville. I was riding on her off-side each time when we passed him. As I say, I never, thank God! have cared a straw for the qu'en dira-t-on? and if people remarked on my intimacy with my cousin's cast off fiancee, so they might, but to Earlscourt I wished to explain it more for Beatrice's sake than my own; and as I rode out by Apsley House afterwards, I overtook him, and went up to Piccadilly with him, though his manner was decidedly distant and chill, so pointedly so that it would have been rude, had he not been too entirely a disciple of Chesterfield to be ever otherwise than courteous to his deadliest foe; but, disregarding his coldness, I said what I intended to say, and began an explanation that I considered only due to him.

"I beg your pardon, Earlscourt, for intruding on you a topic you have forbidden, but I shall be obliged to you to listen to me a moment. I wish to tell you my reasons for what, I dare say, seems strange to you, my continued intimacy with--"

But I was not permitted to end my sentence; he divined what I was about to say, and stopped me, with a cold, wearied air.

"I understand; but I prefer not to hear them. I have no desire to interfere with your actions, and less to be troubled with your motives. Of course, you choose your friendships as you please. All I beg is, that you obey the wish I expressed the other day, and intrude the subject no more upon me."

And he bade me good morning, urged his mare into a sharp canter, and turned down St. James's Street. How little those in the crowd, who looked at him as he rode by, pointing him out to the women with them as Viscount Earlscourt, the most eloquent debater in the Lords, the celebrated foreign minister, author, and diplomatist, guessed that a woman's name could touch and sting him as nothing else could do, and that under the calm and glittering upper-current of his life ran a dark, slender, unnoticed thread that had power to poison all the rest! Those women, mon ami!--if we _do_ satirize them a little bit now and then, are we doing any more than taking a very mild revenge? Don't they make fools of the very best and wisest of us, play the deuce with Caesar as with Catullus, and make Achilles soft as Amphimachus?

The next morning I met Beatrice at a concert at the Marchioness of Pursang's. Lady Pursang would not have been, vous concevez, on the visiting list of Lady Mechlin, as she was one of the creme de la creme, but she had met Beatrice the winter before at Pau, had been very delighted with her, and now continued the acquaintance in town. I happened to sit next our little Pythoness, who looked better, I think, that morning, than ever I saw her, though her face was set into that disdainful sadness which had become its habitual expression. She liked my society, and sought it, no doubt, because I was the only link between her and her lost past; and she was talking with me more animatedly than usual, thanking me for having got her admittance to the Lords that night, during a pause in the concert, when Earlscourt entered the room, and took the seat reserved for him, which was not far from ours. Music was one of his passions, the only delassement, indeed, he ever gave himself now; but to-day, though ostensibly he listened to Alboni and Arabella Goddard, Halle and Vieuxtemps, and talked to the marchioness and other women of her set, in reality he was watching Beatrice, who, her pride roused by his presence, laughed and chatted with me and other men with her old gay abandon, and, impervious to dereglement though he was, I fancy even _he_ felt it a severe trial of his composure when Lady Pursang, who had been the last five years in India with her husband, and who was ignorant of or had forgotten the name of the girl Earlscourt was to have married the year before, asked him, when the concert was over, to let her introduce him to her, yet Beatrice Boville, bringing him in innocent cruelty up to that little Pythoness, with whom he had parted so passionately and bitterly ten months before! Happy for them that they had that armor which the Spartans called heroism, the stoics philosophy, and we--simply style good breeding, or they would hardly have gone through that ordeal as well as they did when she introduced them to each other as strangers!--those two who had whispered such passionate love words, given and received such fond caresses, vowed barely twelve months before to pass their lifetime together! Happy for them they were used to society, or they would hardly have bowed to each other as calmly and admirably as they did, with the recollection of that night in which they had parted so bitterly, so full as it was in the minds of both. Beatrice was standing in one of the open windows of the little cabinet de peinture almost empty, and when the marchioness moved away, satisfied that she had introduced two people admirably fitted to entertain one another, Earlscourt, with people flirting and talking within a few yards of him, was virtually alone with Beatrice--for there is, after all, no solitude like the solitude of a crowd--and _then_, for the first time in his life, his self-possession forsook him. Beatrice was silent and very pale, looking out of the window on to the Green Park, which the house overlooked, and Earlscourt's pride had a hard struggle, but his passion got the better of him, malgre lui, and he leaned towards her.

"Do you remember the last night we were together?"

She answered him bitterly. She had not forgiven him. She had sometimes, I am half afraid, sworn to revenge herself.

"I am hardly likely to forget it, Lord Earlscourt."

He looked at her longingly and wistfully; his pride was softened, that granite pride, hitherto so unassailable! and he bent nearer to her.

"Beatrice! I would give much to be able to wash out the memories of that night--to be proved mistaken--to be convicted of haste, of sternness--"

The tears rushed into her eyes.

"You need only have given one little thing--all I asked of you--trust!"

"Would to God I dare believe you now! Tell me, answer me, did I judge you too harshly? Love at my age never changes, however wronged; it is the latest, and it only expires with life itself. I confess to you, you are dearer to me still than anything ever was, than anything ever will be. Prove to me, for God's sake, that I misjudged you! Only prove it to me; explain away what appeared against you, and we may yet--"

He stopped; his voice trembled, his hand touched hers, he breathed short and fast. The Pythoness was very nearly tamed; her eyes grew soft and melting, her lips trembled; but pride was still strong in her. At the touch of his hand it very nearly gave way, but not wholly; it was there still, tenacious of its reign. She set her little teeth obstinately together, and looked up at him with her old hauteur.

"No, as I told you then, you must believe in me _without_ proof. I have not forgotten your bitter words, nor yet forgiven them. I doubt if I ever shall. You roused an evil spirit in me that night, Lord Earlscourt, which you cannot exorcise at a moment's notice. Remember what was your own motto, 'An indiscreet woman is never frank,'--yet from my very frankness you accused me of indiscretion, and of far worse than indiscretion--"

"My God! if I accused you falsely, Beatrice, forgive me!"

He must have loved her very much to bow his pride so far as that. _He_ was at _her_ feet--at _her_ mercy now; he, whom she had vainly sued, sued her; but a perverse, fiery devil in her urged her to take her own revenge, compelled her to throw away her own peace.

"You should have asked me that ten months ago; it is too late now."

His face dyed white, his eyes filled with passionate anguish. He crushed her hand in his.

"Too late! Great Heavens! Answer me, child, I entreat you--I beseech you--is it 'too late' because report is true that you have replaced me with your cousin--that you are engaged to Hervey? Tell me truth now, for pity's sake. I will be trifled with no longer."

Beatrice threw back her haughty little head contemptuously, though ladies _don't_ sneer at the idea of being liees with me generally, I can assure you. Her heart throbbed triumphantly and joyously. She had conquered him at last. The man of giant intellect and haughty will had bowed to her. She held him by a thread, he who ruled the fate of nations!--and she loved him so dearly! But the Pythoness was not wholly tamed, and she could not even yet forget her wrongs.

"You told me before I spoke falsehoods to you, Lord Earlscourt; my word would find no more credence now."

He looked at her, dropped her hand, and turned away, before Beatrice could detain him. Five minutes after he left the house. Little as I guessed it, he was jealous of me--I! who never in my own life rivalled any man who wished to _marry_! Beatrice had fully revenged herself. I wonder if she enjoyed it quite as much as she had anticipated, as she stood where he had left her looking out on the Green Park?

I went with Beatrice and her party to the Lords that night; it was the tug of war for the bill which Earlscourt was so determined should pass, and a great speech was expected from him. We were not disappointed. When he rose he spoke with effort, and his oratory suffered from the slight hoarseness of his voice, for half the beauty of his rhetoric lay in the flexibility and music of his tones; still, it was emphatically a great speech, and Beatrice Boville listened to it breathlessly, with her eyes fixed on the face--weary, worn, but grandly intellectual--of the man whom Europe reverenced, and she--a girl of twenty!--ruled. Perhaps her heart smote her for the lines she had added there; perhaps she felt her pride misplaced to him, great as he was, with his stainless honor and unequalled genius; perhaps she thought of how, with all his strength, his hand had trembled as it touched hers; and how, with all her love, she had been wilful and naughty to him a second time. His voice grew weaker as he ended, and he spoke with visible effort; still it was one of his greatest political triumphs: his bill passed by a large majority, and the papers, the morning after, filled their leading articles with admiration of Viscount Earlscourt's speech. But before those journals were out, Earlscourt was too ill almost to notice the success of his measures: as he left the House, the presiding devil of beloved Albion, that plays the deuce with English statesmen as with Italian cantatrices,--the confounded east wind,--had caught him, finished what over-exertion had begun, and knocked him over, prostrated with severe bronchitis. What pity it is that the body _will_ levy such cruel black mail upon the mind; that a gust of wind, a horse's plunge, the effluvia of a sewer, the carelessness of a pointsman, can destroy the grandest intellect, sweep off the men whose genius lights the world, as ruthlessly as a storm of rain a cloud of gnats, and strike Peel and Canning, Macaulay and Donaldson, in the prime of their power, as heedlessly as peasants little higher than the brutes, dull as the clods of their own valley, who stake their ambitions on a surfeit of fat bacon, and can barely scrawl their names upon a slate!

Unconscious that Earlscourt's jealousy had fastened so wrongly upon me, I was calling upon Beatrice late the next morning, ignorant myself of his illness, when his physician, who was Lady Mechlin's too, while paying her a complimentary visit, regretted to me my cousin's sudden attack.

"Lord Earlscourt would speak last night," he began. "I entreated him not; but those public men are so obstinate; to-day he is very ill--very ill indeed, though prompt measures stopped the worst. He has risen to dictate something of importance to his secretary; he would work his brain if he were dying; but it has taken a severe hold on him, I fear. I shall send him somewhere south as soon as he can leave the house, which will not be for some weeks. He would be a great loss to the country. We have not such another foreign minister. But I admit to you, Major Hervey--though of course I do not wish it to go further--that I _do_ think very seriously of Lord Earlscourt's state of health."

Beatrice heard him as she sat at her Davenport; her face grew white, and her eyes filled with great anguish. She thought of his words to her only the day before, and of how her pride had repelled him a second time. I saw her hand clinch on the pen she was playing with, and her teeth set tight together, her habitual action under any strong emotion, thinking to herself, no doubt, "And my last words to him were bitter ones!"

When the physician had left, I went up to her.--

"Beatrice, you must let me tell him _now_!"

She did not answer, but her hand clinched tighter on the pen-handle.

"His life is in your hands; for God's sake relinquish your pride."

But her pride was strong in her, and dear to her still, strong and dear as her love; and the two struggled together. Earlscourt had bowed _his_ pride to her; but she had not yielded up her own, and it cost her much to yield it even now. All the Pythoness in her was not tamed yet. She was silent--she wavered--then her great love for him vanquished all else. She rose, white as death, her passionate eyes full of unshed tears, the bitterest, yet the softest, Beatrice Boville had ever known.

"Take me to him. No one shall tell him but myself."

Earlscourt was lying on a couch in his library; he had been unable to dictate or to write himself, for severe remedies had prostrated him utterly, and he could not speak above his breath, though he was loath to give up, and acknowledge himself as ill as he was. His eyes were closed, his forehead knitted together in pain, and his labored breathing told plainly enough how fiercely his foe had attacked him, and that it was by no means conquered yet. He had not slept all night, and had fallen into a short slumber now, desiring his attendants to leave him. I bade the groom of the chambers let us enter unannounced, and, opening the door myself, signed to Beatrice to go in, while her aunt and I waited in the anteroom. She stopped a moment at the entrance; her pride had its last struggle; but he turned restlessly, with a weary sigh, and by that sigh the Pythoness was conquered. Beatrice went forward and fell on her knees beside his sofa, bending down till her lips touched his brow, and her hot tears fell on his hands.

"I was too proud last night to tell you you misjudged me. I have no pride now. I am your own--wholly your own. I never loved, I never should love, any but you. I forgive you now. O, how could you ever doubt me? Lord Earlscourt--Ernest--may we not yet be all we once were to one another?"

Awakened by her kisses on his brow, bewildered by her sudden appearance, he tried to rise, but sank back exhausted. He did not disbelieve her now. He had no voice to speak to her, no strength to answer her; but he drew her down closer and closer to him, as she knelt by him, and, as her heart beat once more against his, the little Pythoness, tamed at last, threw her arms round him and sobbed like a child on his breast. And so--Beatrice Boville took her best REVENGE!--while I shut the library door, invited Lady Mechlin to inspect Earlscourt's collection of French pictures, and asked what she thought of _Punch_ this week.

I don't know what his physicians would have said of the treatment, as they'd recommended him "perfect quiet;" all I do know is, that though Earlscourt went to the south of Europe as soon as he could leave the house, Beatrice Boville went with him; and he took his place on the benches and in the cabinet this season, without any trace of bronchia, or any sign of wearing out.

Lady Clive, I regret to say, "does not know" Lady Earlscourt: anything for her beloved brother she _would_ do, were it possible; but she hopes we understand that, for her daughters' sakes, she feels it quite impossible to countenance that "shocking little intrigante."

A LINE IN THE "DAILY."

A LINE IN THE "DAILY."

WHO DID IT, AND WHO WAS DONE BY IT.

"Lieutenant-Colonel Fairlie's troop of Horse Artillery is ordered to Norwich to replace the 12th Lancers, en route to Bombay."--Those three lines in the papers spread dismay into the souls of Norfolk young ladies, and no less horror into ours, for we were very jolly at Woolwich, could run up to the Clubs and down to Epsom, and were far too material not to prefer ball-room belles to bluebells, strawberry-ice to fresh hautboys, the sparkle of champagne-cups to all the murmurs of the brooks, and the flutter of ballet-girls' wings to all the rustle of forest-leaves. But, unhappily, the Ordnance Office is no more given to considering the feelings of their Royal Gunners than the Horse Guards the individual desires of the two other Arms; and off we went to Norwich, repining bitterly, or, in modern English, swearing hard at our destinies, creating an immense sensation with our 6-pounders, as we flatter ourselves the Royals always contrive to do, whether on fair friends or fierce foes, and were looked upon spitefully by the one or two young ladies whose hearts were gone eastwards with the Twelfth, smilingly by the one or two hundred who, having fruitlessly laid out a great deal of tackle on the Twelfth, proceeded to manufacture fresh flies to catch us.

We soon made up, I think, to the Norwich girls for the loss of the Twelfth. They set dead upon Fairlie, our captain, a Brevet Lieutenant-Colonel, and a C. B. for "services in India," where he had rivalled Norman Ramsay at Fuentes d'Onor, had had a ball put in his hip, and had come home again to be worshipped by the women for his romantic reputation. They made an immense deal, too, of Levison Courtenay, the beauty of the troop, and called Belle in consequence; who did not want any flummery or flirtation to increase his opinion of himself, being as vain of his almond eyes as any girl just entered as the favorite for the season. There were Tom Gower, too, a capital fellow, with no nonsense about him, who made no end of chaff of Belle Courtenay; and Little Nell, otherwise Harcourt Poulteney Nelson, who had by some miracle escaped expulsion both from Carshalton and the College; and _votre humble serviteur_ Phil Hardinge, first lieutenant; and one or two other fellows, who having cut dashing figures at our Woolwich reviews, cantering across Blackheath Common, or waltzing with dainty beauties down our mess-room, made the Artillery welcome in that city of shawls and oratorios, where according to the Gazetteer, no virtuous person ought to dwell, that volume, with characteristic lucidity, pronouncing its streets "ill-disposed."

The Clergy asked us to their rectories--a temptation we were often proof against, there being three noticeable facts in rectories, that the talk is always slow, "the Church" being present, and having much the same chilling effect as the presence of a chaperone at a tete-a-tete; the daughters generally ugly, and, from leading the choir at morning services, perfectly convinced that they sing like Clara Novello, and that the harmonium is a most delightful instrument; and, last and worst, the wines are almost always poor, except the port which the reverend host drinks himself, but which, Dieu merci! we rarely or never touch.

The County asked us, too; and there we went for good hock, tolerable-looking women, and first-rate billiard-tables. For the first month we were in Norfolk we voted it unanimously the most infernally slow and hideous county going; and I dare say we made ourselves uncommonly disagreeable, as people, if they are not pleased, be they ever so well bred, have a knack of doing.

Things were thus quiescent and stagnant, when Fairlie one night at mess told us a bit of news.

"Old fellows, whom do you think I met to-day?"

"How should we know? Cut along."

"The Swan and her Cygnets."

"The Vanes? Oh, bravo!" was shouted at a chorus, for the dame and demoiselles in question we had known in town that winter, and a nicer, pleasanter, faster set of women I never came across. "What's bringing them down here, and how's Geraldine?"

"Vane's come into his baronetcy, and his place is close by Norwich," said Fairlie; "his wife's health has been bad, and so they left town early; and Geraldine is quite well, and counting on haymaking, she informed me."

"Come, that is good news," said Belle, yawning. "There'll be one pretty woman in the county, thank Heaven! Poor little Geraldine! I must go and call on her to-morrow."

"She has existed without your calls, Belle," said Fairlie, dryly, "and don't look as if she'd pined after you."

"My dear fellow, how should you know?" said Belle, in no wise disconcerted. "A little rogue soon makes 'em look well, and as for smiles, they'll smile while they're dying for you. Little Vane and I were always good friends, and shall be again--if I care."

"Conceited owl!" said Fairlie, under his moustaches. "I'm sorry to hurt your feelings, then, but your pretty 'friend' never asked after you."

"I dare say not," said Belle, complacently. "Where a woman's most interested she's always quietest, and Geraldine----"

"Lady Vane begged me to tell you you will always be welcome over there, old fellows," said Fairlie, remorselessly cutting him short. "Perhaps we shall find something to amuse us better than these stiltified Chapter dinners."

The Vanes of whom we talked were an uncommonly pleasant set of people whom we had known at Lee, where Vane, a Q. C., then resided, his prospective baronetcy being at that time held by a third or fourth cousin. Fairlie had known the family since his boyhood; there were four daughters, tall graceful women, who had gained themselves the nickname of The Swan and her Cygnets; and then there were twins, a boy of eighteen, who'd just left Eton; and the girl Geraldine, a charming young lady, whom Belle admired more warmly than that dandy often admired anybody besides himself, and whom Fairlie liked cordially, having had many a familiar bit of fun with her, as he had known her ever since he was a dashing cadet, and she made her _debut_ in life in the first column of the _Times_. Her sisters were handsome women; but Geraldine was bewitching. A very pleasant family they were, and a vast acquisition to us. Miss Geraldine flirted to a certain extent with us all, but chiefly with the Colonel, whenever he was to be had, those two having a very free-and-easy, familiar, pleasant style of intercourse, owing to old acquaintance; and Belle spent two hours every evening on his toilette when we were going to dine there, and vowed she was a "deuced pretty little puss. Perhaps she might--he wasn't sure, but perhaps (it would be a horrid sacrifice), if he were with her much longer, he wasn't sure she mightn't persuade him to take compassion upon her, he _was_ so weak where women were concerned!"

"What a conceit!" said Fairlie thereat, with a contemptuous twist of his moustaches and a shrug of his shoulders to me. "I must say, if I were a woman, I shouldn't feel over-flattered by a lover who admired his own beauty first, and mine afterwards. Not that I pretend to understand women."

By which speech I argued that his old playmate Geraldine hadn't thrown hay over the Colonel, and been taught billiards by him, and ridden his bay mare over the park in her evening dress, without interesting him slightly; and that--though I don't think he knew it--he was deigning to be a trifle jealous of his Second Captain, the all-mighty conqueror Belle.

"What fools they must be that put in these things!" yawned Belle one morning, reading over his breakfast coffee in the _Daily Pryer_ one of those "advertisements for a wife" that one comes across sometimes in the papers, and that make us, like a good many other things, agree with Goldsmith:

Reason, they say, belongs to man,
But let them prove it if they can;
Wise Aristotle and Smiglicious,
By ratiocinations specious,
Have strove to prove with great precision,
With definition and division,
Homo est ratione praeditum,
But for my soul I cannot credit 'em.

"What fools they must be!" yawned Belle, wrapping his dressing-gown round him, and coaxing his perfumy whiskers under his velvet smoking-cap. Belle was always inundated by smoking-caps in cloth and velvet, silk and beads, with blue tassels, and red tassels, and gold tassels, embroidered and filigreed, rounded and pointed; he had them sent to him by the dozen, and pretty good chaff he made of the donors. "Awful fools! The idea of advertising for a wife, when the only difficulty a man has is to keep from being tricked into taking one. I bet you, if I did like this owl here, I should have a hundred answers; and if it was known it was I----"

"Little Geraldine's self for a candidate, eh?" asked Tom Gower.

"Very possibly," said Belle, with a self-complacent smile. "She's a fast little thing, don't check at much, and she's deucedly in love with me, poor little dear--almost as much trouble to me as Julia Sedley was last season. That girl all but proposed to me; she did, indeed. Never was nearer coming to grief in my life. What will you bet me that, if I advertise for a wife, I don't hoax lots of women?"

"I'll bet you ten pounds," said I, "that you don't hoax one!"

"Done!" said Belle, stretching out his hand for a dainty memorandum-book, gift of the identical Julia Sedley aforesaid, and entering the bet in it--"done! If I'm not asked to walk in the Close at noon and look out for a pink bonnet and a black lace cloak, and to loiter up the market-place till I come across a black hat and blue muslin dress; if I'm not requested to call at No. 20, and to grant an interview at No. 84; if I'm not written to by Agatha A. with hazel, and Belinda B. with black, eyes--all coming after me like flies after a sugar-cask, why you shall have your ten guineas, my boy, and my colt into the bargain. Come, write out the advertisement, Tom--I can't, it's too much trouble; draw it mild, that's all, or the letters we shall get will necessitate an additional Norwich postman. By George, what fun it will be to do the girls! Cut along, Tom, can't you?"

"All right," said Gower, pushing away his coffee-cup, and drawing the ink to him. "Head it 'MARRIAGE,' of course?"

"Of course. That word's as attractive to a woman as the belt to a prize-fighter, or a pipe of port to a college fellow."

"'MARRIAGE.--A Bachelor----'"

"Tell 'em a military man; all girls have the scarlet fever."

"Very well--'an Officer in the Queen's, of considerable personal attractions----'"

"My dear fellow, pray don't!" expostulated Belle, in extreme alarm; "we shall have such swarms of 'em!"

"No, no! we must say that," persisted Gower--"'personal attractions, aged eight-and-twenty----'"

"Can't you put it, 'in the flower of his age,' or his 'sixth lustre'? It's so much more poetic."

"'--the flower of his age,' then (that'll leave 'em a wide range from twenty to fifty, according to their taste), 'is desirous of meeting a young lady of beauty, talent, and good family,'--eh?"

"Yes. All women think themselves beauties, if they're as ugly as sin. Milliners and confectioner girls talk Anglo-French, and rattle a tin-kettle piano after a fashion, and anybody buys a 'family' for half-a-crown at the Heralds' Office--so fire away."

"'--who, feeling as he does the want of a kindred heart and sympathetic soul, will accord him the favor of a letter or an interview, as a preliminary to the greatest step in life.'"

"A step--like one on thin ice--very sure to bring a man to grief," interpolated Belle. "Say something about property; those soul-and-spirit young ladies generally keep a look-out for tin, and only feel an elective affinity for a lot of debentures and consols."

"'The advertiser being a man of some present and still more prospective wealth, requires no fortune, the sole objects of his search being love and domestic felicity.' Domestic felicity--how horrible! Don't it sound exactly like the end of a lady's novel, where the unlucky hero is always brought to an untimely end in a 'sweet cottage on the banks of the lovely Severn.'"

"'Domestic felicity'--bah! What are you writing about?" yawned Belle. "I'd as soon take to teetotalism: however, it'll tell in the advertisement. Bravo, Tom, that will do. Address it to 'L. C., care of Mrs. Greene, confectioner, St. Giles Street, Norwich.' Miss Patty'll take the letters in for me, though not if she knew their errand. Tip seven-and-sixpence with it, and send it to the _Daily Pryer_."

We did send it to the _Daily_, and in that broadsheet we all of us read it two mornings after.

MARRIAGE.--A Bachelor, an Officer of the Queen's, of
considerable personal attractions, and in the flower of
his age, is desirous of meeting a young lady of beauty,
accomplishments, and good family, who, feeling as he does the
want of a kindred heart and sympathetic soul, will accord him
the favor either of a letter or an interview, as a preliminary
to the greatest step in life. The advertiser being a man of
some present and still more prospective wealth, requires no
fortune, the sole objects of his search being love and domestic
felicity. Address, L. C., care of Mrs. Greene, confectioner,
St. Giles Street, Norwich.

"Whose advertisement do you imagine that is?" said Fairlie, showing the _Daily_ to Geraldine, as he sat with her and her sisters under some lilac and larch trees in one of the meadows of Fern Chase, which had had the civility, Geraldine said, to yield a second crop of hay expressly for her to have the pleasure of making it. She leaned down towards him as he lay on the grass, and read the advertisement, looking uncommonly pretty in her dainty muslin dress, with its fluttering mauve ribbons, and a wreath she had just twisted up, of bluebells and pinks and white heaths which Fairlie had gathered as he lay, put on her bright hair. We called her a little flirt, but I think she was an unintentional one; at least, her agaceries were, all as unconscious as they were--her worst enemies (_i. e._ plain young ladies) had to allow--unaffected.

"How exquisitely sentimental! Is it yours?" she asked, with demure mischief.

"Mine!" echoed Fairlie, with supreme scorn.

"It's some one's here, because the address is at Mrs. Greene's. Come, tell me at once, monsieur."

"The only fool in the Artillery," said Fairlie, curtly: "Belle Courtenay."

"Captain Courtenay!" echoed Geraldine, with a little flush on her cheeks, caused, perhaps, by the quick glance the Colonel shot at her as he spoke.

"Captain Courtenay!" said Katherine Vane. "Why, what can he want with a wife? I thought he had _l'embarras de choix_ offered him in that line; at least, so he makes out himself."

"I dare say," said Fairlie, dryly, "it's for a bet he's made, to see how many women he can hoax, I believe."

"How can you tell it is a hoax?" said Geraldine, throwing cowslips at her greyhound. "It may be some medium of intercourse with some one he really cares for, and who may understand his meaning."

"Perhaps you are in his confidence, Geraldine, or perhaps you are thinking of answering it yourself?"

"Perhaps," said the young lady, waywardly, making the cowslips into a ball, "there might be worse investments. Your _bete noire_ is strikingly handsome; he is the perfection of style; he is going to be Equerry to the Prince; his mother is just married again to Lord Chevenix; he did not name half his attractions in that line in the _Daily_."

With which Geraldine rushed across the meadow after the greyhound and the cowslip ball, and Fairlie lay quiet plucking up the heaths by the roots. He lay there still, when the cowslip ball struck him a soft fragrant blow against his lips, and knocked the Cuba from between his teeth.

"Why don't you speak?" asked Geraldine, plaintively. "You are not half so pleasant to play with as you were before you went to India and I was seven or eight, and you had La Grace, and battledoor and shuttlecock, and cricket, and all sorts of games with me in the old garden at Charlton."

He might have told her she was much less dangerous then than now; he was not disposed to flatter her, however. So he answered her quietly,

"I preferred you as you were then."

"Indeed!" said Geraldine, with a hot color in her cheeks "I do not think there are many who would indorse your complimentary opinion."

"Possibly," said Fairlie, coldly.

She took up her cowslips, and hit him hard with them several times.

"Don't speak in that tone. If you dislike me, you can say so in warmer words, surely."

Fairlie smiled _malgre lui_.

"What a child you are, Geraldine! but a child that is a very mischievous coquette, and has learned a hundred tricks and _agaceries_ of which my little friend of seven or eight knew nothing. I grant you were not a quarter so charming, but you were, I am afraid--more true."

Geraldine was ready to cry, but she was in a passion, nevertheless; such a hot and short-lived passion as all women of any spirit can go into on occasion, when they are unjustly suspected.

"If you choose to think so of me you may," she said, with immeasurable hauteur, sweeping away from him, her mauve ribbons fluttering disdainfully. "I, for one, shall not try to undeceive you."

The next night we all went up to a ball at the Vanes', to drink Rhenish, eat ices, quiz the women, flirt with the pretty ones in corners, lounge against doorways, criticise the feet in the waltzing as they passed us, and do, in fact, anything but what we went to do--dance,--according to our custom in such scenes.

The Swan and her Cygnets looked very stunning; they "made up well," as ladies say when they cannot deny that another is good-looking, but qualify your admiration by an assurance that she is shockingly plain in the morning, and owes all to her milliner and maids. Geraldine, who, by the greatest stretch of scepticism, could not be supposed "made up," was bewitching, with her sunshiny enjoyment of everything, and her untiring waltzing, going for all the world like a spinning-top, only a top tires, and she did not. Belle, who made a principle of never dancing except under extreme coercion by a very pretty hostess, could not resist her, and Tom Gower, and Little Nell, and all the rest, not to mention half Norfolk, crowded round her; all except Fairlie, who leaned against the doorway, seeming to talk to her father or the members, or anybody near, but watching the young lady for all that, who flirted not a little, having in her mind the scene in the paddock of yesterday, and wishing, perhaps, to show him that if he did not admire her more than when she was eight, other men had better taste.

She managed to come near him towards the end of the evening, sending Belle to get her an ice.

"Well," she said, with a comical _pitie d'elle-meme_, "do you dislike me so much that you don't mean to dance with me at all? Not a single waltz all night?"

"What time have you had to give me?" said Fairlie, coldly. "You have been surrounded all the evening."

"Of course I have. I am not so disagreeable to other gentlemen as I am to you. But I could have made time for you if you had only asked for it. At your own ball last week you engaged me beforehand for six waltzes."

Fairlie relented towards her. Despite her flirting, he thought she did not care for Belle after all.

"Well," he said, smiling, "will you give me one after supper?"

"You told me you shouldn't dance, Colonel Fairlie," said Katherine Vane, smiling.

"One can't tell what one mayn't do under temptation," said Fairlie, smiling too. "A man may change his mind, you know."

"Oh yes," cried Geraldine; "a man may change his mind, and we are expected to be eminently grateful to him for his condescension; but if _we_ change our minds, how severely we are condemned for vacillation: 'So weak!' 'Just like women!' 'Never like the same thing two minutes, poor things!'"

"You don't like the same thing two minutes, Geraldine," laughed Fairlie; "so I dare say you speak feelingly."

"I changeable! I am constancy itself!"

"Are you? You know what the Italians say of 'ocche azzure'?"

"But I don't believe it, monsieur!" cried Geraldine:

"Blue eyes beat black fifty to seven,
For black's of hell, but blue's of heaven!"

"I beg your pardon, mademoiselle," laughed Fairlie:

"Done, by the odds, it is not true!
One devil's black, but scores are blue!"

He whirled her off into the circle in the midst of our laughter at their ready wit. Soon after he bid her good night, but he found time to whisper as he did so.

"You are more like _my_ little Geraldine to-night!"

The look he got made him determine to make her his little Geraldine before much more time had passed. At least he drove us back to Norwich in what seemed very contented silence, for he smoked tranquilly, and let the horses go their own pace--two certain indications that a man has pleasant thoughts to accompany him.

I do not think he listened to Belle's, and Gower's, and my conversation, not even when Belle took his weed out of his mouth and announced the important fact: "Hardinge! my ten guineas, if you please. I've had a letter!"

"What! an answer? By Jove!"

"Of course, an answer. I tell you all the pretty women in the city will know my initials, and send after me. I only hope they _will_ be pretty, and then one may have a good deal of fun. I was in at Greene's this morning having mock-turtle, and talking to Patty (she's not bad-looking, that little girl, only she drops her 'h's' so. I'm like that fellow--what's his name?--in the 'Peau de Chagrin:' I don't admire my loves in cotton prints), when she gave me the letter. I left it on my dressing-table, but you can see it to-morrow. It's a horrid red daubed-looking seal, and no crest; but that she mightn't use for fear of being found out, and the writing is disguised, but that it would be. She _says_ she has the three requisites; but where's the woman that don't think herself Sappho and Galatea combined? And she was nineteen last March. Poor little devil! she little thinks how she'll be done. I'm to meet her on the Yarmouth road at two, and to look out for a lady standing by the first milestone. Shall we go, Tom? It may lead to something amusing, you know, though certainly it won't lead to marriage."

"Oh! we'll go, old fellow," said I. "Deuce take you, Belle! what a lucky fellow you are with the women."

"Luckier than I want to be," yawned Belle. "It's a horrid bore to be so set upon. One may have too much of a good thing, you know."

At two the day after, having refreshed ourselves with a light luncheon at Mrs. Greene's of lobster-salad and pale ale, Belle, Gower, and I buttoned our gloves and rode leisurely up the road.

"How my heart palpitates!" said Belle, stroking his moustaches with a bored air. "How can I tell, you know, but what I may be going to see the arbiter of my destiny? Men have been tricked into all sorts of tomfoolery by their compassionate feelings. And then--if she should squint or have a turn-up nose! Good Heavens, what a fearful idea! I've often wondered when I've seen men with ugly wives how they could have been cheated into taking 'em; they couldn't have done it in their senses, you know, nor yet with their eyes open. You may depend they took 'em to church in a state of coma from chloroform. 'Pon my word, I feel quite nervous. You don't think the girl will have a parson and a register hid behind the milestone, do you?"

"If she should, it won't be legal without a license, thanks to the fools who turn Hymen into a tax-gatherer, and won't let a fellow make love without he asks leave of the Archbishop of Canterbury," said Gower. "Hallo, Belle, here's the milestone, but where's the lady?"

"Virgin modesty makes her unpunctual," said Belle, putting up his eye-glass.

"Hang modesty!" swore Tom. "It's past two, and we left a good quarter of that salad uneaten. Confound her!"

"There are no signs of her," said I. "Did she tell you her dress, Belle?"

"Not a syllable about it; only mentioned a milestone, and one might have found a market-woman sitting on that."

"Hallo! here's something feminine. Oh, good gracious! this can't be it, it's got a brown stuff dress on, and a poke straw bonnet and a green veil. No, no, Belle. If you married her, that _would_ be a case of chloroform."

But the horrible brown stuff came sidling along the road with that peculiar step belonging to ladies of a certain age, characterized by Patty Greene as "tipputting," sweeping up the dust with its horrible folds, making straight _en route_ for Belle, who was standing a little in advance of us. Nineteen! Good Heavens! she must have been fifty if she was a day, and under her green veil was a chestnut front--yes, decidedly a front--and a face yellow as a Canadian's, and wrinkled as Madame Pipelet's, made infinitely worse by that sweet maiden simper and assumed juvenility common to _vieilles filles_. Up she came towards poor Belle, who involuntarily retreated step by step till he had backed against the milestone, and could get no farther, while she smiled up in his handsome face, and he stared down in her withered one, with the most comical expression of surprise, dismay, and horror that had ever appeared on our "beauty's" impassive features.

"Are you--the--the--L. C.?" demanded the maiden of ten lustres, casting her eyes to the ground with virgin modesty.

"L. C. ar----My dear madam, I don't quite understand you," faltered Belle, taken aback for once in his life.

"Was it not you," faltered the fair one, shaking out a pocket-handkerchief that sent a horrible odor of musk to the olfactory nerves of poor Belle, most fastidious connoisseur in perfume, "who advertised for a kindred heart and sympathetic soul?"

"Really, my good lady," began Belle, still too aghast by the chestnut front to recover his self-possession.

"Because," simpered his inamorata, too agitated by her own feelings to hear his horrible appellative, keeping him at bay there with the fatal milestone behind him and the awful brown stuff in front of him--"because I, too, have desired to meet with some elective affinity, some spirit-tie that might give me all those more subtle sympathies which can never be found in the din and bustle of the heartless world; I, too, have pined for the objects of your search--love and domestic happiness. Oh, blessed words, surely we might--might we not?----"

She paused, overcome with maidenly confusion, and buried her face in the musk-scented handkerchief. Tom and I, where we stood _perdus_, burst into uncontrollable shouts of laughter. Poor Belle gave one blank look of utter terror at the _tout ensemble_ of brown stuff, straw poke, and chestnut front. He forgot courtesy, manners, and everything else; his lips were parted, with his small white teeth glancing under his silky moustaches, his sleepy eyes were open wide, and as the maiden lady dropped her handkerchief, and gave him what she meant to be the softest and most tender glance, he turned straight round, sprang on his bay, and rushed down the Yarmouth road as if the whole of the dignitaries of the church and law were tearing after him to force him _nolens volens_ into carrying out the horrible promise in his cursed line in the _Daily_. What was Tom's and my amazement to see the maiden lady seat herself astride on the milestone, and join her cachinnatory shouts to ours, fling her green veil into a hawthorn tree, jerk her bonnet into our faces, kick off her brown stuff into the middle of the road, tear off her chestnut front and yellow mask, and perform a frantic war-dance on the roadside turf. No less a person than that mischievous monkey and inimitable mimic Little Nell!

"You young demon!" shouted Gower, shrieking with laughter till he cried. "A pretty fellow you are to go tricking your senior officer like this. You little imp, how can you tell but what I shall court-martial you to-morrow?"

"No, no, you won't!" cried Little Nell, pursuing his frantic dance. "Wasn't it prime? wasn't it glorious? wasn't it worth the Kohinoor to see? You won't go and peach, when I've just given you a better farce than all old Buckstone's? By Jove! Belle's face at my chestnut front! This'll be one of his prime conquests, eh? I say, old fellows, when Charles Mathews goes to glory, don't you think I might take his place, and beat him hollow, too?"

When we got back to barracks, we found Belle prostrate on his sofa, heated, injured, crestfallen, solacing himself with Seltzer-and-water, and swearing away anything but mildly at that "wretched old woman." He bound us over to secrecy, which, with Little Nell's confidence in our minds, we naturally promised. Poor Belle! to have been made a fool of before two was humiliation more than sufficient for our all-conquering _blondin_. For one who had so often refused to stir across a ball-room to look at a Court beauty, to have ridden out three miles to see an old maid of fifty with a chestnut front! The insult sank deep into his soul, and threw him into an abject melancholy, which hung over him all through mess, and was not dissipated till a letter came to him from Mrs. Greene's, when we were playing loo in Fairlie's room. That night Fairlie was in gay spirits. He had called at Fern Chase that morning, and though he had not been able to see Geraldine alone, he had passed a pleasant couple of hours there, playing pool with her and her sisters, and had been as good friends as ever with his old playmate.

"Well, Belle," said he, feeling good-natured even with him that night, "did you get any good out of your advertisement? Did your lady turn out a very pretty one?"

"No: deuced ugly, like the generality," yawned poor Belle, giving me a kick to remind me of my promise. Little Nell was happily about the city somewhere with Pretty Face, or the boy would scarcely have kept his countenance.

"What amusement you can find in hoaxing silly women," said Fairlie, "is incomprehensible to me. However, men's tastes differ, happily. Here comes another epistle for you, Belle; perhaps there's better luck for you there."

"Oh! I shall have no end of letters. I sha'n't answer any more. I think it's such a deuced trouble. Diamonds trumps, eh?" said Belle, laying the note down till he should have leisure to attend to it. Poor old fellow! I dare say he was afraid of another onslaught from maiden ladies.

"Come, Belle," said Glenville; "come, Belle, open your letter; we're all impatience. If you won't go, I will in your place."

"Do, my dear fellow. Take care you're not pounced down upon by a respectable papa for intentions, or called to account by a fierce brother with a stubby beard," said Belle, lazily taking up the letter. As he did so, the melancholy indolence on his face changed to eagerness.

"The deuce! the Vane crest!"

"A note of invitation, probably?" suggested Gower.

"Would they send an invitation to Patty Greene's? I tell you it's addressed to L. C.," said Belle, disdainfully, opening the letter, leaving its giant deer couchant intact. "I thought it very likely; I expected it, indeed--poor little dear! I oughtn't to have let it out. Ain't you jealous, old fellows? Little darling! Perhaps I may be tricked into matrimony after all. I'd rather a presentiment that advertisement would come to something. There, you may all look at it, if you like."

It was a dainty sheet of scented cream-laid, stamped with the deer couchant, such as had brought us many an invitation down from Fern Chase, and on it was written, in delicate caligraphy:

"G. V. understands the meaning of the advertisement, and will meet L. C. at the entrance of Fern Wood, at eleven o'clock to-morrow morning."

There was a dead silence as we read it; then a tremendous buzz. Cheaply as we held women, I don't think there was one of us who wasn't surprised at Geraldine's doing any clandestine thing like this. He sat with a look of indolent triumph, curling his perfumed moustaches, and looking at the little autograph, which gave us evidence of what he often boasted--Geraldine Vane's regard.

"Let me look at your note," said Fairlie, stretching out his hand.

He soon returned it, with a brief, "Very complimentary indeed!"

When the men left, I chanced to be last, having mislaid my cigar-case. As I looked about for it, Fairlie addressed me in the same brief, stern tone between his teeth with which he spoke to Belle.

"Hardinge, you made this absurd bet with Courtenay, did you not? Is this note a hoax upon him?"

"Not that I know of--it doesn't look like it. You see there is the Vane crest, and the girl's own initials."

"Very true." He turned round to the window again, and leaned against it, looking out into the dawn, with a look upon his face that I was very sorry to see.

"But it is not like Geraldine," I began. "It may be a trick. Somebody may have stolen their paper and crest--it's possible. I tell you what I'll do to find out; I'll follow Belle to-morrow, and see who does meet him in Fern Wood."

"Do," said Fairlie, eagerly. Then he checked himself, and went on tapping an impatient tattoo on the shutter. "You see, I have known the family for years--known her when she was a little child. I should be sorry to think that one of them could be capable of such----"