Chapter VII: Front Matter (7)

"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? In an heraldic sense, I mean."

"My dear child, what could possess you to answer Lord Goodwood like that?" cried Lady Marabout, as her barouche rolled down Palace Gardens.

"Possess me? The Demon of Mischief, I suppose."

"But, my love, it was a wonderful compliment from him!"

"Was it? I do not see any compliment in those vain, impertinent, Brummelian amour-propreisms. I must coin the word, there is no good one to express it."

"But, my dear Flora, you know he is the Marquis of Goodwood, the Duke of Doncaster's son! It is not as if he were a boy in the Lancers, or an unfledged _petit maitre_ from the Foreign Office----"

"Were he her Majesty's son, he should not gratify his vanity at my expense! If he expected me to be flattered by his condescension, he mistook me very much. He has been allowed to adopt that tone, I suppose; but from a man to a woman a chivalrous courtesy is due, though the man be an emperor."

"Perhaps so--of course; but that _is_ their tone nowadays, my love, and you cannot alter it. I always say the Regency-men inaugurated it, and their sons and grandsons out-Herod Herod. But to turn a tide, or be a wit with impunity, a woman wants to occupy a prominent and unassailable position. Were you the Duchess of Amandine, you might say that sort of thing, but a young girl just out _must not_--indeed she must not! 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?"

"An my son? No, my love, he is not; very few men have Philip's talents and person," said Lady Marabout, consciously mollified and propitiated, but going on, nevertheless, with a Spartan impartiality highly laudable "Goodwood's rank, however, is much higher than Philip's (at least it stands so, though really the Carruthers are by far the older, dating as far back as Ethelbert II., while the Doncaster family are literally unknown till the fourteenth century, when Gervaise d'Ascotte received the acolade before Ascalon from Godfrey de Bouillon); Goodwood _has_ great weight, my dear, in the best circles. A compliment from him is a great compliment to any woman, and the sort of answer you gave him----"

"Must have been a great treat to him, dear Lady Marabout, if every one is in the habit of kow-towing before him. Princes, you know, are never so happy as when they can have a little bit of nature; and my speech must have been as refreshing to Lord Goodwood as the breath of his Bearnese breezes and the freedom of his Pyrenean forests were to Henri Quatre after the court etiquette and the formal ceremonial of Paris."

"I don't know about its being a treat to him, my dear; it was more likely to be a shower-bath. And your illustration isn't to the point. The Bearnese breezes were Henri Quatre's native air, and might be pleasant to him; but the figurative ones are not Goodwood's, and I am sure cannot please him."

"But, Lady Marabout, I do not want to please him!" persisted the young lady, perversely. "I don't care in the least what he thinks, or what he says of me!"

"Dear me, how oddly things go!" thought Lady Marabout. "There was Valencia, one of the proudest girls in England, his equal in every way, an acknowledged beauty, who would have said the dust on the trottoir was diamonds, and worn turquoises on azureline, or emeralds on rose, I verily believe, if such opticisms and gaucheries had been Goodwood's taste; and here is this child--for whom the utmost one can do will be to secure a younger son out of the Civil Service, or a country member--cannot be made to see that he is of an atom more importance than Soames or Mason, and treats him with downright nonchalant indifference. What odd anomalies one sees in everything!"

"Who _is_ that young lady with you this season?" Lady Hautton asked, smiling that acidulated smile with which that amiable saint always puts long questions to you of which she knows the answer would be _peine forte et dure_. "Not the daughter of that horrid John Montolieu, who did all sorts of dreadful things, and was put into a West India regiment? Indeed! that man? Dear me! Married the sister of your incumbent at Fernditton? Ah, really!--very singular! But how do you come to have brought out the daughter?"

At all of which remarks Lady Marabout winced, and felt painfully guilty of a gross democratic dereliction from legitimate and beaten paths, conscious of having sinned heavily in the eyes of the world and Lady Hautton, by bringing within the sacred precincts of Belgravia the daughter of a _mauvais sujet_ in a West India corps and a sister of a perpetual curate. The world was a terrible dragon to Lady Marabout; to her imagination it always appeared an incarnated and omniscient bugbear, Argus-eyed, and with all its hundred eyes relentlessly fixed on her, spying out each item of her shortcomings, every little flaw in the Marabout diamonds, any spur-made tear in her Honiton flounces, any crease in her train at a Drawing-room, any lese-majeste against the royal rule of conventionalities, any glissade on the polished oak floor of society, though like a good many other people she often worried herself needlessly; the flaws, tears, creases, high treasons, and false glissades being fifty to one too infinitesimal or too unimportant to society for one of the hundred eyes (vigilant and unwinking though I grant they are) to take note of them. The world was a terrible bugbear to Lady Marabout, and its special impersonation was Anne Hautton. She disliked Anne Hautton; she didn't esteem her; she knew her to be a narrow, censorious, prejudiced, and strongly malicious lady; but she was the personification of the World to Lady Marabout, and had weight and terror in consequence. Lady Marabout is not the first person who has burnt incense and bowed in fear before a little miserable clay image she cordially despised, for no better reason--for the self-same reason, indeed.

"She evidently thinks I ought not to have brought Flora out; and perhaps I shouldn't; though, poor little thing, it seems very hard she may not enjoy society--fitted for society, too, as she is--just because her father is in a West India regiment, and poor Lilla was only a clergyman's daughter. Goodwood really seems to admire her. I can never forgive him for his heartless flirtation with Valencia; but if he _were_ to be won by a Montolieu, what would the Hauttons say?"

And sitting against the wall, with others of her sisterhood, at a ball, a glorious and golden vision rose up before Lady Marabout's eyes.

If the unknown, unwelcome, revolutionary little Montolieu should go in and win where the Lady Hauttons had tried and failed through five seasons--if this little tropical flower should be promoted to the Doncaster conservatory, where all the stately stephanotises of the peerage had vainly aspired to bloom--if this Petit Caporal should be crowned with the Doncaster diadem, that all the legitimate rulers had uselessly schemed to place on their brows! The soul of Lady Marabout rose elastic at the bare prospect--it would be a great triumph for a chaperone as for a general to conquer a valuable position with a handful of boy recruits.

If it _should_ be! Anne Hautton would have nothing to say after _that_!

And Lady Marabout, though she was the most amiable lady in Christendom, was not exempt from a feeling of longing for a stone to roll to the door of her enemy's stronghold, or a flourish of trumpets to silence the boastful and triumphant _fanfare_ that was perpetually sounding at sight of her defeats from her opponent's ramparts.

Wild, visionary, guiltily scheming, sinfully revolutionary seemed such a project in her eyes. Still, how tempting! It would be a terrible blow to Valencia, who'd tried for Goodwood fruitlessly, to be eclipsed by this unknown Flora; it would be a terrible blow to their Graces of Doncaster, who held nobody good enough, heraldically speaking, for their heir-apparent, to see him give the best coronet in England to a bewitching little interloper, sans money, birth, or rank. "They wouldn't like it, of course; I shouldn't like it for Philip, for instance, though she's a very sweet little thing; all the Ascottes would be very vexed, and all the Valletorts would never forgive it; but it would be _such_ a triumph over Anne Hautton!" pondered Lady Marabout, and the last clause carried the day. Did you ever know private pique fail to carry the day over public charity?

And Lady Marabout glanced with a glow of prospective triumph, which, though erring to her Order, was delicious to her individuality, at Goodwood waltzing with the little Montolieu a suspicious number of times, while Lady Egidia Hautton was condemned to his young brother, Seton Ascotte, and Lady Feodorowna danced positively with nobody better than their own county member, originally a scion of Goodwood's bankers! Could the force of humiliation further go? Lady Hautton sat smiling and chatting, but the tiara on her temples was a figurative thorn crown, and Othello's occupation was gone. When a lady's daughters are dancing with an unavailable _cadet_ of twenty, and a parvenu, only acceptable in the last extremities of despair, what good is it for her to watch the smiles and construe the attentions?

"We shall see who triumphs now," thought Lady Marabout, with a glow of pleasure, for which her heart reproached her a moment afterwards. "It is very wrong," she thought; "if those poor girls don't marry, one ought to pity them; and as for her--going through five seasons, with a fresh burden of responsibility leaving the schoolroom, and added on your hands each year, _must_ sour the sweetest temper; it would do mine, I am sure. I dare say, if I had had daughters, I should have been ten times more worried even than I am."

Which she would have been, undoubtedly, and the eligibles on her visiting-list ten times more too! Men wouldn't have voted the Marabout dinners and soirees so pleasant as they did, under the sway of that sunshiny hostess, if there had been Lady Maudes and Lady Marys to exact attention, and lay mines under the Auxerre carpets, and man-traps among the epergne flowers of Lowndes Square. Nor would Lady Marabout have been the same; the sunshine couldn't have shone so brightly, nor the milk of roses flowed so mildly under the weight and wear of marriageable but unmarried daughters; the sunshine would have been fitful, the milk of roses curdled at best. And no wonder! Those poor women! they have so much to go through in the world, and play but such a monotonous role, taken at its most brilliant and best, from first to last, from cradle to grave, from the berceaunettes in which they commence their existence to the mausoleum in which they finish it. If they _do_ get a little bit soured when they have finished their own game, and have to sit at the card-tables, wide awake however weary, vigilant however drowsy, alert however bored to death, superintending the hands of the fresh players, surreptitiously suggesting means for securing the tricks, keeping a dragon's eye out for revokes, and bearing all the brunt of the blame if the rubber be lost--if they do get a little bit soured, who can, after all, greatly wonder?

"That's a very brilliant little thing, that girl Montolieu," said Goodwood, driving over to Hornsey Wood, the morning after, with Carruthers and some other men, in his drag.

"A deuced pretty waltzer!" said St. Lys, of the Bays; "turn her round in a square foot."

"And looks very well in the saddle; sits her horse better than any woman in the Ride, except Rosalie Rosiere, and as she came from the Cirque Olympique originally, one don't count _her_," said Fulke Nugent. "I _do_ like a woman to ride well, I must say. I promised your mother to take a look at the Marabout Yearling Sale, Phil, if ever I wanted the never-desirable and ever-burdensome article she has to offer, and if anything could tempt me to pay the price she asks, I think it would be that charming Montolieu."

"She's the best thing Lady Tattersall ever had on hand," said Goodwood, drawing his whip over his off-wheeler's back. "You know, Phil--gently, gently, Coronet!--what spoilt your handsome cousin was, as I said, that it was all mechanism; perfect mechanism, I admit, but all artificial, prearranged, put together, wound up to smile in this place, bow in that, and frown in the other; clockwork every inch of it! Now--so-ho, Zouave! confound you, _won't_ you be quiet?--little Montolieu hasn't a bit of artifice about her; 'tisn't only that you don't know what she's going to say, but that _she_ doesn't either; and whether it's a smile or a frown, a jest or a reproof, it's what the moment brings out, not what's planned beforehand."

"The hard hit you had the other day seems to have piqued your interest," said Carruthers, smoothing a loose leaf of his Manilla.

"Naturally. The girl didn't care a button about my compliment (I only said it to try her), and the plucky answer she gave me amused me immensely. Anything unartificial and frank is as refreshing as hock-and-seltzer after a field-day--one likes it, don't you know?"

"Wonderfully eloquent you are, Goody. If you come out like that in St. Stephen's, we sha'n't know you, and the ministerialists will look down in the mouth with a vengeance!"

"Don't be satirical, Phil! If I admire Mademoiselle Flora, what is it to you, pray?"

"Nothing at all," said Carruthers, with unnecessary rapidity of enunciation.

"My love, what are you going to wear to-night? The Bishop of Bonviveur is coming. He was a college friend of your poor uncle's; knew your dear mother before she married. I want you to look your very best and charm him, as you certainly do most people," said Lady Marabout. Adroit intriguer! The bishop was going, sans doute; the bishop loved good wine, good dinners, and good society, and found all three in Lowndes Square, but the bishop was entirely unavailable for purposes matrimonial, having had three wives, and being held tight in hand by a fourth; however, a bishop is a convenient piece to cover your king, in chess, and the bishop served admirably just then in Lady Marabout's moves as a _locum tenens_ for Goodwood. Flora Montolieu, in her innocence, made herself look her prettiest for her mother's old friend, and Flora Montolieu was conveniently ready, looking her prettiest, for her chaperone's pet-eligible, when Goodwood--who hated to dine anywhere in London except at the clubs, the Castle, or the Guards' mess, and was as difficult to get for your dinners as birds'-nests soup or Tokay pur--entered the Marabout drawing-rooms.

"Anne Hautton will see he dined here to-night, in the _Morning Post_ to-morrow morning, and she will know Flora must attract him very unusually. What _will_ she, and Egidia, and Feodorowna say?" thought Lady Marabout, with a glow of pleasure, which she was conscious was uncharitable and sinful, and yet couldn't repress, let her try how she might.

In scheming for the future Duke of Doncaster for John Montolieu's daughter, she felt much as democratically and treasonably guilty to her order as a prince of the blood might feel heading a Chartist emeute; but then, suppose the Chartist row was that Prince's sole chance of crushing an odious foe, as it was the only chance for her to humiliate the Hautton, don't you think it might look tempting? Judge nobody, my good sir, till you've been in similar circumstances yourself--a golden rule, which might with advantage employ those illuminating colors with which ladies employ so much of their time just now. Remembering it, they might hold their white hands from flinging those sharp flinty stones, that surely suit them so ill, and that soil their fingers in one way quite as much as they soil the victim's bowed head in another? Illuminate the motto, mesdames and demoiselles! Perhaps you _will_ do that--on a smalt ground, with a gold Persian arabesque round, and impossible flowers twined in and out of the letters; but, _remember_ it!--pardon! It were asking too much.

"My dear Philip, did you notice how very marked Goodwood's attentions were to Flora last night?" asked Lady Marabout, the morning after, in one of her most sunshiny and radiant moods, as Carruthers paid her his general matutinal call in her boudoir.

"Marked?"

"Yes, marked! Why do you repeat it in that tone? If they _were_ marked, there is nothing to be ridiculed that I see. They were very marked, indeed, especially for him; he's such an unimpressible, never-show-anything man. I wonder you did not notice it!"

"My dear mother!" said Carruthers, a little impatiently, brushing up the Angora cat's ruff the wrong way with his cane, "do you suppose I pass my evenings noticing the attentions other men may see fit to pay to young ladies?"

"Well--don't be impatient. 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!"

"Of course it's quite right. I always think you have a great deal of sympathy for a man, Philip, even for people you don't harmonize with--(you could sympathize with that child Flora, yesterday, in her rapturous delight at seeing that Coccoloba Uvifera in the Patchouli conservatory, because it reminded her of her West Indian home, and you care nothing whatever about flowers, nor yet about the West Indies, I should suppose)--but you never will sympathize with me. You know how many disappointments and grievances and vexations of every kind I have had the last ten, twenty, ay, thirty, forty seasons--ever since I had to chaperone your aunt Eleanore, almost as soon as I was married, and was worried, more than anybody ever _was_ worried, by her coquetteries and her inconsistencies and her vacillations--so badly as she married, too, at the last! Those flirting beauties so often do; they throw away a hundred admirable chances and put up with a wretched _dernier resort_;--let a thousand salmon break away from the line out of their carelessness, and end by being glad to land a little minnow. I don't know when I _haven't_ been worried by chaperoning. Flora Montolieu is a great anxiety, a great difficulty, little detrimental that she is!"

"Detrimental! What an odd word you choose for her."

"I don't choose it for her; she _is_ it," returned Lady Marabout, decidedly.

"How so?"

"How so! Why, my dear Philip, I told you the very first day she came. How so! when she is John Montolieu's daughter, when she has no birth to speak of, and not a farthing to her fortune."

"If she were Jack Ketch's daughter, you could not speak much worse. Her high-breeding might do credit to a Palace; I only wish one found it in all Palaces! and I never knew you before measure people by their money."

"My dear Philip, no more I do. I can't bear you when you speak in that tone; it's so hard and sarcastic, and unlike you. _I_ don't know what you mean either. I should have thought a man of the world like yourself knew well enough what I intend when I say Flora is a detrimental. She has a sweet temper, very clever, very lively, very charming, as any one knows by the number of men that crowd about her, but a detrimental she is----"

"Poor little heart!" muttered Carruthers in his beard, too low for his mother to hear.

"--And yet I am quite positive that if she herself act judiciously, and it is well managed for her, Goodwood may be won before the season is over," concluded Lady Marabout.

Carruthers, not feeling much interest, it is presumed, in the exclusively feminine pursuit of match-making, returned no answer, but played with Bijou's silver bells, and twisted his own tawny moustaches.

"I am quite positive it _may be_, if properly managed," reiterated Lady Marabout. "You might second me a little, Philip."

"_I?_ Good Heavens! my dear mother, what are you thinking of? I would sooner turn torreador, and throw lassos over bulls at Madrid, than help you to fling nuptial cables over poor devils in Belgravia. Twenty to one? I'm going to the Yard to look at a bay filly of Cope Fielden's, and then on to a mess-luncheon of the Bays."

"Must you go?" said his mother, looking lovingly on him. "You look tired, Philip. Don't you feel well?"

"Perfectly; but Cambridge had us out over those confounded Wormwood Scrubs this morning, and three hours in this June sun, in our harness, makes one swear. If it were a sharp brush, it would put life into one; as it is, it only inspires one with an intense suffering from boredom, and an intense desire for hock and seltzer."

"I am very glad you haven't a sharp brush, as you call it, for all that," said Lady Marabout. "It might be very pleasant to you, Philip, but it wouldn't be quite so much so to me. I wish you would stay to luncheon."

"Not to-day, thanks; I have so many engagements."

"You have been very good in coming to see me this season--even better than usual. It _is_ very good of you, with all your amusements and distractions. 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!" said Carruthers, with a laugh, as he bid her good morning.

"Perhaps it _is_ best he shouldn't marry: I begin to think so," mused Lady Marabout, as the door closed on him. "I used to wish it very much for some things. He is the last of his name, and it seems a pity; there ought to be an heir for Deepdene; but still marriage _is_ such a lottery (he is right enough there, though I don't admit it to him: it's a tombola where there is one prize to a million of blanks; one can't help seeing that, though, on principle, I never allow it to him or any of his men), and if Philip had any woman who didn't appreciate him, or didn't understand him, or didn't make him happy, how wretched _I_ should be! 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."

With which compliment to Carruthers at her sex's expense Lady Marabout returned to weaving her pet projected toils for the ensnaring of Goodwood, for whom also, if asked, I dare say the Duchess of Doncaster would have averred on _her_ part, looking through _her_ maternal Claude glasses, no woman was good enough either. When ladies have daughters to marry, men always present to their imaginations a battalion of worthless, decalogue-smashing, utterly unreliable individuals, amongst whom there is not one fit to be trusted or fit to be chosen; but when their sons are the candidates for the holy bond, they view all women through the same foggy and non-embellishing medium, which, if it does not speak very much for their unprejudiced discernment, at least speaks to the oft-disputed fact of the equality of merit in the sexes, and would make it appear that, in vulgar parlance, there must be six of the one and half a dozen of the other.

"Flora, soft and careless, and rebellious as she looks, _is_ ambitious, and has set her heart on winning Goodwood, I do believe, as much as ever poor Valencia did. True, she takes a different plan of action, as Philip would call it, and treats him with gay nonchalante indifference, which certainly seems to pique him more than ever my poor niece's beauty and quiet deference to his opinions did; but that is because she reads him better, and knows more cleverly how to rouse him. She has set her heart on winning Goodwood, I am certain, ambitious as it seems. How eagerly she looked out for the Blues yesterday at that Hyde Park inspection--though I am sure Goodwood does not look half so handsome as Philip does in harness, as they call it; Philip is so much the finer man! I will just sound her to-day--or to-night as we come back from the opera," thought Lady Marabout, one morning.

Things were moving to the very best of her expectations. Learning experience from manifold failures, Lady Marabout had laid her plans this time with a dexterity that defied discomfiture: seconded by both the parties primarily necessary to the accomplishment of her manoeuvres, with only a little outer-world opposition to give it piquancy and excitement, she felt that she might defy the fates to checkmate her here. This should be her Marathon and Lemnos, which, simply reverted to, should be sufficient to secure her immunity from the attacks of any feminine Xantippus who should try to rake up her failures and tarnish her glory. To win Goodwood with a nobody's daughter would be a feat as wonderful in its way as for Miltiades to have passed "in a single day and with a north wind," as Oracle exacted, to the conquest of the Pelasgian Isles; and Lady Marabout longed to do it, as you, my good sir, may have longed in your day to take a king in check with your only available pawn, or win one of the ribands of the turf with a little filly that seemed to general judges scarcely calculated to be in the first flight at the Chester Consolation Scramble.

Things were beautifully in train; it even began to dawn on the perceptions of the Hauttons, usually very slow to open to anything revolutionary and unwelcome. Her Grace of Doncaster, a large, lethargic, somnolent dowager, rarely awake to anything but the interests and restoration of the old ultra-Tory party in a Utopia always dreamed of and never realized, like many other Utopias political and poetical, public and personal, had turned her eyes on Flora Montolieu, and asked her son the question inevitable, "_Who_ is she?" to which Goodwood had replied with a devil-may-care recklessness and a headlong indefiniteness which grated on her Grace's ears, and imparted her no information whatever: "One of Lady Tattersall's yearlings, and the most charming creature _I_ ever met. You know that? Why did you ask me, then? You know all I do, and all I care to do!"--a remark that made the Duchess wish her very dear and personal friend, Lady Marabout, were comfortably and snugly interred in the mausoleum of Fern Ditton, rather than alive in the flesh in Belgravia, chaperoning young ladies whom nobody knew, and who were not to be found in any of Sir E. Burke's triad of volumes.

Belgravia, and her sister Mayfair, wondered at it, and talked over it, raked up the parental Montolieu lineage mercilessly, and found out, from the Bishop of Bonviveur and Sauceblanche, that the uncle on the distaff side had been only a Tug at Eton, and had lived and died at Fern Ditton a perpetual curate and nothing else--not even a dean, not even a rector! Goodwood _couldn't_ be serious, settled the coteries. But the more hints, innuendoes, questions, and adroitly concealed but simply suggested animadversion Lady Marabout received, the greater was her glory, the warmer her complacency, when she saw her Little Montolieu, who was not little at all, leading, as she undoubtedly did lead, the most desired eligible of the day captive in her chains, sent bouquets by him, begged for waltzes by him, followed by him at the Ride, riveting his lorgnon at the Opera, monopolizing his attention--though, clever little intriguer, she knew too well how to pique him ever to let him monopolize hers.

"She certainly makes play, as Philip would call it, admirably with Goodwood," said Lady Marabout, admiringly, at a morning party, stirring a cup of Orange Pekoe, yet with a certain irrepressible feeling that she should almost prefer so very young a girl not to be quite so adroit a schemer at seventeen. "That indifference and nonchalance is the very thing to pique and retain such a courted fastidious creature as Goodwood; and she knows it, too. Now a clumsy casual observer might even fancy that she liked some others--even you, Philip, for instance--much better; she talks to you much more, appeals to you twice as often, positively teases you to stop and lunch or come to dinner here, and really told you the other night at the Opera she missed you when you didn't come in the morning; but to anybody who knows anything of the world, it is easy enough to see which way her inclinations (yes, I _do_ hope it is inclination as well as ambition--I am not one of those who advocate pure _mariages de convenance_; I don't think them right, indeed, though they are undoubtedly very expedient sometimes) turn. I do not think _anybody_ ever could prove me to have erred in my quick-sightedness in those affairs. I may have been occasionally mistaken in other things, or been the victim of adverse and unforeseen circumstances which were beyond my control, and betrayed me; but I know no one can read a girl's heart more quickly and surely than I, or a man's either, for that matter."

"Oh, we all know you are a clairvoyante in heart episodes, my dear mother; they are the one business of your life!" smiled Carruthers, setting down his ice, and lounging across the lawn to a group of cedars, where Flora Montolieu stood playing at croquet, and who, like a scheming adventuress, as she was, immediately verified Lady Marabout's words, and piqued Goodwood a outrance by avowing herself tired of the game, and entering with animated verve into the prophecies for Ascot with Carruthers, whose bay filly Sunbeam, sister to Wild-Falcon, was entered to run for the Queen's Cup.

"What an odd smile that was of Philip's," thought Lady Marabout, left to herself and her Orange Pekoe. "He has been very intimate with Goodwood ever since they joined the Blues, cornets together, three-and-twenty years ago; surely he can't have heard him drop anything that would make him fancy he was _not serious_?"

An idle fear, which Lady Marabout dismissed contemptuously from her mind when she saw how entirely Goodwood--in defiance of the Hauttons' sneer, the drowsy Duchess's unconcealed frown, all the comments sure to be excited in feminine minds, and all the chaff likely to be elicited from masculine lips at the mess-table, and in the U. S., and in the Guards' box before the curtain went up for the ballet--vowed himself to the service of the little detrimental throughout that morning party, and spoke a temporary adieu, whose tenderness, if she did not exactly catch, Lady Marabout could at least construe, as he pulled up the tiger-skin over Flora's dainty dress, before the Marabout carriage rolled down the Fulham Road to town. At which tenderness of farewell Carruthers--steeled to all such weaknesses himself--gave a disdainful glance and a contemptuous twist of his moustaches, as he stood by the door talking to his mother.

"You too, Phil?" said Goodwood, with a laugh, as the carriage rolled away.

Carruthers stared at him haughtily, as he will stare at his best friends if they touch his private concerns more nearly than he likes; a stare which said disdainfully, "I don't understand you," and thereby told the only lie to which Carruthers ever stooped in the whole course of his existence.

Goodwood laughed again.

"If you poach on my manor _here_, I shall kill you Phil; so _gare a vous_!"

"You are in an enigmatical mood to-day! I can't say I see much wit in your riddles," said Carruthers, with his grandest and most contemptuous air, as he lit his Havana.

"Confound that fellow! I'd rather have had any other man in London for a rival! Twenty and more years ago how he cut me out with that handsome Virginie Peauderose, that we were both such mad boys after in Paris. However, it will be odd if _I_ can't win the day here. A Goodwood rejected--pooh! There isn't a woman in England that would do it!" thought Goodwood, as he drove down the Fulham Road.

"'_His_ manor!' Who's told him it's his? And if it be, what is that to me?" thought Carruthers, as he got into his tilbury. "Philip, _you_'re not a fool, like the rest of them, I hope? You've not forsworn yourself surely? Pshaw!--nonsense!--impossible!"

"Certainly she _has_ something very charming about her. If I were a man I don't think I could resist her," thought Lady Marabout, as she sat in her box in the grand tier, tenth from the Queen's, moving her fan slowly, lifting her lorgnon now and then, listening vaguely to the music of the second act of the "Barbiere," for probably about the two hundredth time in her life, and looking at Flora Moutolieu, sitting opposite to her.

"The women are eternally asking me who she is, I don't care a hang _who_, but she's the prettiest thing in London," said Fulke Nugent, which was the warmest praise that any living man about town remembered to have heard fall from his lips, which limited themselves religiously to one legitimate laudation, which is a superlative nowadays, though Mr. Lindley Murray, if alive, wouldn't, perhaps, receive or recognize it as such: "Not bad-looking."

"It isn't _who_ a woman is, it's _what_ she is, that's the question, I take it," said Goodwood, as he left the Guards' box to visit the Marabout.

"By George!" laughed Nugent to Carruthers, "Goodey must be serious, eh, Phil? He don't care a button for little Bibi; he don't care even for Zerlina. When the ballet begins, I verily believe he's thinking less of the women before him than of the woman who has left the house; and if a fellow can give more ominous signs of being 'serious,' as the women phrase it, I don't know 'em, do you?"

"I don't know much about that sort of thing at all!" muttered Carruthers, as he went out to follow Goodwood to the Marabout box.

That is an old, old story, that of the fair Emily stirring feud between Palamon and Arcite. It has been acted out many a time since Beaumont and Fletcher lived and wrote their twin-thoughts and won their twin laurels; but the bars that shut the kinsmen in their prison-walls, the ivy-leaves that filled in the rents of their prison-stones, were not more entirely and blissfully innocent of the feud going on within, and the battle foaming near them, than the calm, complacent soul of Lady Marabout was of the rivalry going on close beside her for the sake of little Montolieu.

She certainly thought Philip made himself specially brilliant and agreeable that night; but then that was nothing new, he was famous for talking well, and liked his mother enough not seldom to shower out for her some of his very best things; certainly she thought Goodwood did not shine by the contrast, and looked, to use an undignified word, rather cross than otherwise; but then nobody _did_ shine beside Philip, and she knew a reason that made Goodwood pardonably cross at the undesired presence of his oldest and dearest chum. Even _she_ almost wished Philip away. If the presence of her idolized son could have been unwelcome to her at any time, it was so that night.

"It isn't like Philip to monopolize her so, he who has so much tact usually, and cares nothing for girls himself," thought Lady Marabout; "he must do it for mischief, and yet _that_ isn't like him at all; it's very tiresome, at any rate."

And with that skilful diplomacy in such matters, on which, if it was sometimes overthrown, Lady Marabout not unjustly plumed herself, she dexterously entangled Carruthers in conversation, and during the crash of one of the choruses whispered, as he bent forward to pick up her fan, which she had let drop,

"Leave Flora a little to Goodwood; he has a right--he spoke decisively to her to-day."

Carruthers bowed his head, and stooped lower for the fan.

He left her accordingly to Goodwood till the curtain fell after the last act of the "Barbiere;" and Lady Marabout congratulated herself on her own adroitness. "There is nothing like a little tact," she thought; "what would society be without the guiding genius of tact, I wonder? One dreadful Donnybrook Fair!"

But, someway or other, despite all her tact, or because her son inherited that valuable quality in a triple measure to herself, someway, it was Goodwood who led her to her carriage, and Carruthers who led the little Montolieu.

"Terribly _bete_ of Philip; how very unlike him!" mused Lady Marabout, as she gathered her burnous round her.

Carruthers talked and laughed as he led Flora Montolieu through the passages, more gayly, perhaps, than usual.

"My mother has told me some news to-night, Miss Montolieu," he said, carelessly. "Am I premature in proffering you my congratulations? But even if I be so, you will not refuse the privilege to an old friend--to a very sincere friend--and will allow me to be the first to wish you happiness?"

Lady Marabout's carriage stopped the way. Flora Montolieu colored, looked full at him, and went to it, without having time to answer his congratulations, in which the keenest-sighted hearer would have failed to detect anything beyond every-day friendship and genuine indifference. The most truthful men will make the most consummate actors when spurred up to it.

"My dear child, you look ill to-night; I am glad you have no engagements," said Lady Marabout, as she sat down before the dressing-room fire, toasting her little satin-shod foot--she has a weakness for fire even in the hottest weather--while Flora Montolieu lay back in a low chair, crushing the roses mercilessly. "You _do_ feel well? I should not have thought so, your face looks so flushed, and your eyes so preternaturally dark. Perhaps it is the late hours; you were not used to them in France, of course, and it must be such a change to this life from your unvarying conventual routine at St. Denis. My love, what was it Lord Goodwood said to you to-day?"

"Do not speak to me of him, Lady Marabout, I hate his name!"

Lady Marabout started with an astonishment that nearly upset the cup of coffee she was sipping.

"Hate his name? My dearest Flora, why, in Heaven's name?"

Flora did not answer; she pulled the roses off her hair as though they had been infected with Brinvilliers' poison.

"What has he done?"

"_He_ has done nothing!"

"Who has done anything, then?"

"Oh, no one--no one has done anything, but--I am sick of Lord Goodwood's name--tired of it!"

Lady Marabout sat almost speechless with surprise.

"Tired of it, my dear Flora?"

Little Montolieu laughed:

"Well, tired of it, perhaps from hearing him praised so often, as the Athenian trader grew sick of Aristides, and the Jacobin of Washington's name. Is it unpardonably heterodox to say so?"

Lady Marabout stirred her coffee in perplexity:

"My dear child, pray don't speak in that way; that's like Philip's tone when he is enigmatical and sarcastic, and worries me. I really cannot in the least understand you about Lord Goodwood, it is quite incomprehensible to me. I thought I overheard him to-day at Lady George's concert speak very definitely to you indeed, and when he was interrupted by the Duchess before you could give him his reply, I thought I heard him say he should call to-morrow morning to know your ultimate decision. Was I right?"

"Quite right."

"He really proposed marriage to you to-day?"

"Yes."

"And yet you say you are sick of his name?"

"Does it follow, imperatively, Lady Marabout, that because the Sultan throws his handkerchief, it must be picked up with humility and thanksgiving?" asked Flora Montolieu, furling and unfurling her fan with an impatient rapidity that threatened entire destruction of its ivory and feathers, with their Watteau-like group elaborately painted on them--as pretty a toy of the kind as could be got for money, which had been given her by Carruthers one day in payment of some little bagatelle of a bet.

"Sultan!--Humility!" repeated Lady Marabout, scarcely crediting her senses. "My dear Flora, do you know what you are saying? You must be jesting! There is not a woman in England who would be insensible to the honor of Goodwood's proposals. You are jesting, Flora!"

"I am not, indeed!"

"You mean to say, you could positively think of _rejecting_ him!" cried Lady Marabout, rising from her chair in the intensity of her amazement, convinced that she was the victim of some horrible hallucination.

"Why should it surprise you if I did?"

"_Why?_" repeated Lady Marabout, indignantly. "Do you ask me _why_? You must be a child, indeed, or a consummate actress, to put such a question; excuse me, my dear, if I speak a little strongly: you perfectly bewilder me, and I confess I cannot see your motives or your meaning in the least. You have made a conquest such as the proudest women in the peerage have vainly tried to make; you have one of the highest titles in the country offered to you; you have won a man whom everybody declared would never be won; you have done this, pardon me, without either birth or fortune on your own side, and then you speak of rejecting Goodwood--Goodwood, of all the men in England! You cannot be serious, Flora, or, if you are, you must be mad!"

Lady Marabout spoke more hotly than Lady Marabout had ever spoken in all her life. Goodwood absolutely won--Goodwood absolutely "come to the point"--the crowning humiliation of the Hauttons positively within her grasp--her Marathon and Lemnos actually gained! and all to be lost and flung away by the unaccountable caprice of a wayward child! It was sufficient to exasperate a saint, and a saint Lady Marabout never pretended to be.

Flora Montolieu toyed recklessly with her fan.

"You told Sir Philip this evening, I think, of----"

"I hinted it to him, my dear--yes. Philip has known all along how much I desired it, and as Goodwood is one of his oldest and most favorite friends, I knew it would give him sincere pleasure both for my sake and Goodwood's, and yours too, for I think Philip likes you as much as he ever does any young girl--better, indeed; and I could not imagine--I could not dream for an instant--that there was any doubt of your acceptation, as, indeed, there _cannot_ be. You have been jesting to worry me, Flora!"

Little Montolieu rose, threw her fan aside, as if its ivory stems had been hot iron, and leaned against the mantelpiece.

"You advise me to accept Lord Goodwood, then, Lady Marabout?"

"My love, if you need my advice, certainly!--such an alliance will never be proffered to you again; the brilliant position it will place you in I surely have no need to point out!" returned Lady Marabout. "The little hypocrite!" she mused, angrily, "as if her own mind were not fully made up--as if any girl in Europe would hesitate over accepting the Doncaster coronet--as if a nameless Montolieu could doubt for a moment her own delight at being created Marchioness of Goodwood! Such a triumph as _that_--why I wouldn't credit _any_ woman who pretended she wasn't dazzled by it!"

"I thought you did not approve of marriages of convenience?"

Lady Marabout played a tattoo--slightly perplexed tattoo--with her spoon in her Sevres saucer.

"No more I do, my dear--that is, under some circumstances; it is impossible to lay down a fixed rule for everything! Marriages of convenience--well, perhaps not; but as _I_ understand these words, they mean a mere business affair, arranged as they are in France, without the slightest regard to the inclinations of either; merely regarding whether the incidents of fortune, birth, and station are equal and suitable. Marriages _de convenance_ are when a parvenu barters his gold for good blood, or where an _ancienne princesse_ mends her fortune with a _nouveau riche_, profound indifference, meanwhile, on each side. I do not call this so; decidedly not! Goodwood must be very deeply attached to you to have forgotten his detestation of marriage, and laid such a title as his at your feet. Have you any idea of the weight of the Dukes of Doncaster in the country? Have you any notion of what their rent-roll is? Have you any conception of their enormous influence, their very high place, the magnificence of their seats? Helmsley almost equals Windsor! All these are yours if you will; and you affect to hesitate----"

"To let Lord Goodwood buy me!"

"Buy you? Your phraseology is as strange as my son's!"

"To accept him only for the coronet and the rent-roll, his position and his Helmsley, seems not a very grateful and flattering return for his preference?"

"I do not see that at all," said Lady Marabout, irritably. Is there anything more annoying than to have unwelcome truths thrust in our teeth? "It is not as though he were odious to you--a hideous man, a coarse man, a cruel man, whose very presence repelled you. Goodwood is a man quite attractive enough to merit some regard, independent of his position; you have an affectionate nature, you would soon grow attached to him----"

Flora Montolieu shook her head.

"And, in fact," she went on, warming with her subject, and speaking all the more determinedly because she was speaking a little against her conscience, and wholly for her inclinations, "my dear Flora, if you need persuasion--which you must pardon me if I doubt your doing in your heart, for I cannot credit any woman as being insensible to the suit of a future Duke of Doncaster, or invulnerable to the honor it does her--if you need persuasion, I should think I need only refer to the happiness it will afford your poor dear mother, amidst her many trials, to hear of so brilliant a triumph for you. You are proud--Goodwood will place you in a position where pride may be indulged with impunity, nay, with advantage. 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 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."

That was as ill-natured a thing as the best-natured lady in Christendom ever said on the spur of self-interest, and it stung Flora Montolieu more than her hostess dreamed.

The color flushed into her face and her eyes flashed.

"You have said sufficient, Lady Marabout, I accept the Marquis to-morrow!"

And taking up her fan and her opera-cloak, leaving the discarded roses unheeded on the floor, she bade her chaperone good-night, and floated out of the dressing-room, while Lady Marabout sat stirring the cream in a second cup of coffee, a good deal puzzled, a little awed by the odd turn affairs had taken, with a slight feeling of guilt for her own share in the transaction, an uncomfortable dread lest the day should ever come when Flora should reproach her for having persuaded her into the marriage, a comfortable conviction that nothing but good _could_ come of such a brilliant and enviable alliance, and, above all other conflicting feelings, one delicious, dominant, glorified security of triumph over the Hauttons, _mere et filles_.

But when morning dawned, Lady Marabout's horizon seemed cleared of all clouds, and only radiant with unshadowed sunshine. Goodwood was coming, and coming to be accepted.

She seemed already to read the newspaper paragraphs announcing his capture and Flora's conquest, already to hear the Hauttons' enforced congratulations, already to see the nuptial party gathered round the altar rail of St. George's. Lady Marabout had never felt in a sunnier, more light-hearted mood, never more completely at peace with herself and all the world as she sat in her boudoir at her writing-table, penning a letter which began:

"MY DEAREST LILLA,--What happiness it gives me to congratulate
you on the brilliant future opening to your sweet Flora----"

And which would have continued, no doubt, with similar eloquence if it had not been interrupted by Soames opening the door and announcing "Sir Philip Carruthers," who walked in, touched his mother's brow with his moustaches, and went to stand on the hearth with his arm on the mantelpiece.

"My dear Philip, you never congratulated me last night; pray do so now!" cried Lady Marabout, delightedly, wiping her pen on the pennon, which a small ormolu knight obligingly carried for that useful purpose. Ladies always wipe their pens as religiously as they bolt their bedroom doors, believe in cosmetics, and go to church on a Sunday.

"Was your news of last night true, then?" asked Carruthers, bending forwards to roll Bijou on its back with his foot.

"That Goodwood had spoken definitively to her? Perfectly. He proposed to her yesterday at the Frangipane concert--not _at_ the concert, of course, but afterwards, when they were alone for a moment in the conservatories. The Duchess interrupted them--did it on purpose--and he had only time to whisper hurriedly he should come this morning to hear his fate. I dare say he felt tolerably secure of it. Last night I naturally spoke to Flora about it. Oddly enough, she seemed positively to think at first of rejecting him--_rejecting_ him!--only fancy the madness! Between ourselves, I don't think she cares anything about him, but with such an alliance as that, of course I felt it my bounden duty to counsel her as strongly as I could to accept the unequalled position it proffered her. Indeed, it could have been only a girl's waywardness, a child's caprice to pretend to hesitate, for she _is_ very ambitious and very clever, and I would never believe that any woman--and she less than any--would be proof against such dazzling prospects. It would be absurd, you know, Philip. Whether it was hypocrisy or a real reluctance, because she doesn't feel for him the idealic love she dreams of, I don't know, but I put it before her in a way that plainly showed her all the brilliance of the proffered position, and before she bade me good night, I had vanquished all her scruples, if she had any, and I am able to say----"

"Good God, what have you done?"

"Done?" re-echoed Lady Marabout, vaguely terrified. "Certainly I persuaded her to accept him. She _has_ accepted him probably; he is here now! I should have been a strange person indeed to let any young girl in my charge rashly refuse such an offer."

"You induced her to accept him! God forgive you!"

Lady Marabout turned pale as death, and gazed at him with undefinable terror.

"Philip! You do not mean----"

"Great Heavens! have you never seen, mother----?"

He leaned his arms on the marble, with his forehead bowed upon them, and Lady Marabout gazed at him still, as a bird at a basilisk.

"Philip, Philip! what have I done? How could I tell?" she murmured, distractedly, tears welling into her eyes. "If I had only known! But how could I dream that child had any fascination for you? How could I fancy----"