Holly Wreaths and Rose Chains

I

The Colonel of the “White Favors” and Cecil St. Aubyn

“What are you going to do with yourself this Christmas, old fellow?” said Vivian, of the 60th Hussars: the White Favors we call them, because, after Edgehill, Henriette Maria gave their Colonel a white rosette off her own dress to hang to his sword-knot, and all the 60th have like ribbons to this day. “If you’ve nothing better to do,” continued their present Lieutenant-Colonel, “Come down with me to Deerhurst. The governor’ll be charmed to see you; my mother has always some nice-looking girls there; and, as we keep the hounds, I can promise you some good hunting with the Harkaway.”

“I shall be delighted,” said I, who, being in the —— Lancers, had been chained by the leg at Kensington the whole year, and, of all the woes the most pitiable, had not been able to get leave for either the 12th or the 1st; but while my chums were shooting among the turnips, or stalking royals in Blackmount Forest, I had been tied to town, a solitary unit in Pall-Mall, standing on the forsaken steps of the U. S., or pacing my hack through the dreary desert of Hyde Park—like Macaulay’s New Zealander gazing on the ruins of London Bridge.

“Very well,” continued Vivian, “come down with me next week, and you can send your horses with Steevens and my stud. The governor could mount you well enough, but I never hunt with so much pleasure as when I’m on Qui Vive; so I dare say you, like me, prefer your own horses. I only hope we shan’t have a confounded ‘black frost;’ but we must take our chance of the weather. I think you’ll like my sisters; they’re just about half my age. Lots of children came in between, but were providentially nipped in the bud.”

“Are they pretty?”

“Can’t say, really; I’m too used to them to judge. I can’t make love to them, so I never took the trouble to criticise them; but we’ve always been a good-looking race, I believe. I tell you who’s staying there—that girl we met in Toronto. Do you remember her—Cecil St. Aubyn?”

“I should say I did. How did she get here?”

“She’s come to live with her aunt, Mrs. Coverdale. You know that over-dressed widow who lives in Hyde Park gardens, and, when she can’t afford Brighton, shuts the front shutters, lives in the back drawing-room, and says, ‘Not at home to callers?’ St. Aubyn is as poor as a rat, so I suppose he was glad to send Cecil here; and the Coverdale likes to have somebody who’ll draw men to her parties, which I’m sure her champagne will never do. It’s the most unblushing gooseberry ever ticketed ‘Veuve Clicquot.’”

“‘Pon my life, I’m delighted to hear it,” said I. “The St. Aubyn’s superb eyes will make the gooseberry go down. Men in Canada would have swallowed cask-washings to get a single waltz with her. All Toronto went mad on that score. You admired her, too, old fellow, only you weren’t with her long enough for such a stoic as you are to boil up into anything warmer.”

“Oh yes, I thought her extremely pretty, but I thought her a little flirt, nevertheless.”

“Stuff! An attractive girl can’t make herself ugly or disagreeable, or erect a brick wall round herself, with iron spikes on the top, for fear, through looking at her, any fellow might come to grief. The men followed her, and she couldn’t help that.”

“And she encouraged them, and she could help that. However, I don’t wish to speak against her; it’s nothing to me how she kills and slays, provided I’m not among the bag. Take care you don’t get shot yourself, Ned.”

“Keep your counsel for your own use, Syd. You put me in mind of the philanthropist, who ran to warn his neighbor of the dangers of soot while his own chimney was on fire.”

“As how? I don’t quite see the point of your parable,” said Vivian, with an expression of such innocent impassiveness that one would have thought he had never seen her fair face out of her furs in her sledge, or admired her small ankles when she was skating on the Ontario.

The winter before, a brother of mine, who was out there in the Rifles, wrote and asked me to go and have some buffalo-hunting, and Vivian went out with me for a couple of months. We had some very good sport in the western woods and plains, and his elk and bison horns are still stuck up in Vivian’s rooms at Uxbridge, with many another trophy of both hemispheres. We had sport of another kind, too, to the merry music of the silvery sledge-bells, over the crisp snow and the gleaming ice, while bright eyes shone on us under delicate lace veils, and little feet peeped from under heaps of sable and bearskin, and gay voices rang out in would-be fear when the horses shied at the shadow of themselves, or at the moon shining on the ice. Who thinks of Canada without in fancy hearing the ringing chimes of the gay sledge bells swinging joyous measure into the clear sunshine or the white moonlight, in tune with light laughter, and soft whispers, and careless hearts?

There we saw Cecil St. Aubyn, one of the prettiest girls in Toronto, then about nineteen. My brother Harry was mad about her, so were almost all the men in the Canada Rifles, and Engineers, and, 61st that were quartered there; and Vivian admired her too, though in a calmer sort of way. Perhaps if he had been with her more than a fortnight he might have gone further. As it was, he left Toronto liking her long Canadian eyes no more than was pleasant. It was as well so, perhaps, for it would not have been a good match for him, St. Aubyn being a broken-down gambler, who, having lost a princely fortune at Crocky’s, and the Bads, married at fifty a widow with a little money, and migrated to Toronto, where he was a torment to himself and to everybody else. Vivian, meanwhile, was a great matrimonial coup. Coming of a high county family, and being the only son, of course there was priceless value set on his life, which, equally, of course, he imperilled, after the manner of us all, in every way he could—in charges and skirmishes, yachting, hunting, and steeple-chasing—ever since some two-and-twenty years ago he joined as a cornet of fifteen—a man already in muscle and ideas, pleasures and pursuits.

At the present time he had been tranquilly engaged in the House, as he represented the borough of Cacklebury.

He spoke seldom, but always well, and was thought a very promising member, his speeches being in Bernal Osborne’s style; but he himself cared little about his senatorial laurels, and was fervently hoping that there would be a row with Russia, and that we should be allowed to go and stick Croats and make love to Bayadères, to freshen us up and make us boys again.

Next week, the first in December, he and I drove to Paddington, put ourselves in the express, and whisked through the snow-covered embankments, whitened fields, and holly hedges on the line down to Deerhurst. If the frost broke up we should have magnificent runs, and we looked at the country with a longing eye. Ever since he was six years old, he told me, he had gone out with the Harkaway Hack on Christmas-eve. When the drag met us, with the four bays steaming in the night air, and the groom warming into a smile at the sight of the Colonel, the sleet was coming down heavily, and the wind blew as keen as a sabre’s edge. The bays dashed along at a furious gallop under Vivian’s hand, the frosty road cracked under the wheel, the leaders’ breath was white in the misty night; we soon flew through the park gate—though he didn’t forget to throw down a sovereign on the snow for the old porteress—and up the leafless avenue, and bright and cheery the old manor-house, with its score of windows, like so many bright eyes, looked out upon the winter’s night.

“By George! we did that four miles quick enough,” said Vivian, jumping down, and shaking the snow off his hair and mustaches. “The old place looks cheery, doesn’t it? Ah! there are the girls; they’re sure to pounce on me.”

The two girls in question having warm hearts, not spoilt by the fashionable world they live in, darted across the hall, and, regardless of the snow, welcomed him ardently. They were proud of him, for he is a handsome dog, with haughty, aristocratic features, and a grand air as stately as a noble about Versailles in the polished “Age doré.”

He shook himself free, and went forward to meet his mother, whom he is very fond of; while the governor, a fine-looking, genial old fellow, bade me welcome to Deerhurst. In the library door I caught sight of a figure in white that I recognised as our belle of the sledge drives; she was looking at Vivian as he bent down to his mother. As soon as she saw me though, she disappeared, and he and I went up to our rooms to thaw, and dress for dinner.

By the fire, talking to Blanche Vivian, stood Cecil, when we went down to the drawing-room. She always makes me think of a Sèvres or Dresden figure, her coloring is so delicate, and yet brilliant; and if you were to see her Canadian eyes, her waving chestnut hair, and her instantaneous, radiant, coquettish smiles, you would not wonder at the Toronto men losing their heads about her.

“Why, Cecil, you never told me you knew Sydney!” cried Blanche, as Vivian shook hands with the St. Aubyn. “Where did you meet him? how long have you been acquainted? why did you never tell me?”

“How could I tell Colonel Vivian was your brother?” said Cecil, playing with a little silver Cupid driving a barrowful of matches on the mantelpiece till she tumbled all his matches into the fender.

“You might have asked. Never mind the wax-lights,” said Blanche, who, not having been long out, had a habit of saying anything that came into her head. “When did you see him? Tell me, Sydney, if she won’t.”

“Oh, in Canada, dear!” interrupted Cecil, quickly. “But it was for so short a time I should have thought Colonel Vivian would have forgotten my face, and name, and existence.”

“Nay, Miss St. Aubyn,” said Vivian, smiling. “Pardon me, but I think you must know your own power too well to think that any man who has seen you once could hope for his own peace to forget you.”

The words of course were flattering, but his quizzical smile made them doubtful. Cecil evidently took them as satire. “At least, you’ve forgotten anything we talked about at Toronto,” she said, rather impatiently, “for I remember telling you I detested compliments.”

“I shouldn’t have guessed it,” murmured Vivian, stroking his mustaches.

“And you,” Cecil went on, regardless of the interruption, “told me you never complimented any woman you respected; so that speech just now doesn’t say much for your opinion of me.”

“How dare I begin to like you?” laughed Vivian.

“Don’t you know Levinge and Castlereagh were great friends of mine? Poor fellows! the sole object of their desires now is six feet of Crimean sod, if we’re lucky enough to get out there.” Cecil colored. Levinge’s and Castlereagh’s hard drinking and gloomy aspect at mess were popularly attributed to the witchery of the St. Aubyn. Canada, while she was in it, was as fatal to the Service as the Cape or the cholera.

“If I talked so romantically, Colonel Vivian, with what superb mockery you would curl your mustaches. Surely the Iron Hand (wasn’t that your sobriquet in Caffreland?) does not believe in broken hearts?”

“Perhaps not; but I do believe in some people’s liking to try and break them.”

“So do I. It is a favorite pastime with your sex,” said Cecil, beating the hearth-rug impatiently with her little satin shoe.

“I don’t think we often attack,” laughed Vivian. “We sometimes yield out of amiability, and we sometimes take out the foils in self-defence, though we are no match for those delicate hands that use their Damascus blades so skilfully. We soon learn to cry quarter!”

“To a dozen different conquerors in as many months, then!” cried Cecil, with a defiant toss of her head.

Vivian looked down on her as a Newfoundland might look down on a small and impetuous-minded King Charles, who is hoping to irritate him. Just then three other people staying there came in. A fat old dowager and a thin daughter, who had turquoise eyes, and from whom, being a great pianist, we all fled in mortal terror of a hailstorm of Thalberg and Hertz, and a cousin of Syd’s, Cossetting, a young chap, a blondin, with fair curls parted down the centre, whose brains were small, hands like a girl’s, and thoughts centred on dew bouquets and his own beauty, but who, having a baronetcy, with much tin, was strongly set upon by the turquoise eyes, but appeared himself to lean more towards the Canadian, as a greater contrast to himself, I suppose.

“How do you do, Cos?” said Vivian, carelessly. The Iron Hand very naturally scorned this effeminate patte de velours.

“You here!” lisped the baronet. “Delighted to see you! thought you’d killed yourself over a fence, or something, before this——”

“Why, Horace,” burst in energetic little Blanche, “I have told you for the last month that he was coming down for Christmas.”

“Did you, my dear child?” said Cos. “‘Pon my life I forgot it. Miss St. Aubyn, my man Cléante (he’s the handiest dog—he once belonged to the Duc d’Aumale) has just discovered something quite new—there’s no perfume like it; he calls it ‘Fleurs des Tilleuls,’ and the best of it is, nobody can have it. If you’ll allow me——”

“Everybody seems to make it their duty to forget Sydney,” muttered Blanche, as the Baronet murmured the rest of his speech inaudibly.

“Never mind, petite; I can bear it,” laughed Vivian, leaning against the mantelpiece with that look of quiet strength characteristic of both his mind and body.

Cecil overheard the whisper, and flushed a quick look at him; then turning to Cossetting, talked over the “Fleurs des Tilleuls” as if her whole mind was absorbed in bouquet.

When dinner was announced, Vivian troubled himself, however, to give his arm to Cecil, and, tossing his head back in the direction of the turquoise eyes, said to the discomfited Horace, “You sing, don’t you, Cosset? Miss Screechington will bore you less than she would me.”

“Is it, then, because I ‘bore you less’ that you do me the honor?” asked Cecil, quickly.

“Yes,” said Syd, calmly; “or, rather, to put it more courteously, you amuse me more.”

“Monseigneur! je vous remercie,” said Cecil, her long almond eyes sparkling dangerously. “You promote me to the same rank with an opera, a hookah, a rat-hunt, and a French novel?”

“And,” Vivian went on tranquilly, “I dare say I shall amuse you better than that poor little fool with his lisp and his talk of the toilet, and his hands that never pulled in a thorough-bred or aided a rowing match.”

“Oh, we’re not in the Iliad and Odyssey days to deify physical strength,” said Cecil, who secretly adored it, as all women do; “nor yet among the Pawnees to reverence a man according to his scalps. Though Sir Horace may not have followed your example and jeopardised his life on every possible occasion, he is very handsome, and can be very agreeable.”

“Is it possible you can endure that fop?” said Vivian, quickly.

“Certainly. Why not?”

The Colonel stroked his moustache contemptuously. “I should have fancied you more difficile, that is all; but Cos is, as you say, good-looking, and very well off. I wish——”

“What? That you were ‘less bored?’”

“That I always wish; but I was thinking of Cos, there—milk-posset, as little Eardley in the troop says they called him at Eton—I was wishing he could see Levinge and Castlereagh, just as épouvantails, to make him turn and flee as the French noblesse did when they saw their cousins and brothers strung up à la lanterne.”

“Wasn’t it very strange,” Blanche was saying to me at the same time, “that Cecil never mentioned Sydney? I’ve so often spoken of him, told her his troop, and all about him. (He has always been so kind to me, though he is eighteen years older—just twice my age.) Besides, I found her one day looking at his picture in the gallery, so she must have known it was the same Colonel Vivian, mustn’t she Captain Thornton?”

“I should say so. Have you known her long?”

“No. We met her at Brighton this August with that silly woman, Mrs. Coverdale. All her artifices and falsehoods annoy Cecil so; Cecil doesn’t mind saying she’s not rich, she knows it’s no crime.”

“C’est pire qu’un crime, c’est une faute,” said I.

“Don’t talk in that way,” laughed Blanche. “That’s bitter and sarcastic, like Sydney in his grand moods, when I’m half afraid of him. I am sure Cecil couldn’t be nicer, if she were ever such an heiress. Mamma asked her for Christmas because she once knew Mr. St. Aubyn well, and Cecil is not happy with Mrs. Coverdale. False and true don’t suit each other. I hope Sydney will like her—do you think he does?”

That was a question I could not answer. He admired her, of course, because he could not well have helped it, and had done so in Canada; and he was talking to her now, I dare say, to force her to acknowledge that he was more amusing than Horace Cos. But he seemed to me to weigh her in a criticising balance, as if he expected to find her wanting—as if it pleased him to provoke and correct her, as one pricks and curbs a beautiful two-year old, just to see its graceful impatience at the check and the glance of its wild eye.

II

The Canadian’s Cold Bath Warms Up the Colonel

Deerhurst was a capital house to spend a Christmas in. It was the house of an English gentleman, with even the dens called bachelors’ rooms comfortable and luxurious to the last extent: a first-rate stud, a capital billiard table, a good sporting country, pretty girls to amuse one with when tired of the pink, the best Chablis and Château Margaux to be had anywhere, and a host who would have liked a hundred people at his dinner-table the whole year round. The snow, confound it! prevented our taking the hounds out for the first few days; but we were not bored as one might have expected, and our misery was the girls’ delight, who were fervently hoping that the ice might come thick enough for them to skate. Cecil was invaluable in a country-house; her resources were as unlimited as Houdin’s inexhaustible bottle. She played in French vaudevilles and Sheridan Knowles’s comedies, acted charades, planned tableaux vivants, sang gay wild chansons peculiar to herself, that made the Screechington bravuras and themes more insupportable than ever; and, what was more, managed to infuse into everybody else some of her own energy and spirit. She made every one do as she liked; but she tyrannised over us so charmingly that we never chafed at the bit; and to the other girls she was so good-natured in giving them the rôles they liked, in praising, and in aiding them, that it was difficult for feminine malice, though its limits are boundless, to find fault with her. Vivian, though he did not relax his criticism of her, was agreeable to her, as he had been in Canada, and as he is always to women when he is not too lazy. He consented to stand for Rienzi in a tableau, though he hates doing all those things, and played in the Proverbs with such a flashing fire of wit in answer to Cecil that we told him he beat Mathews.

“I’m inspired,” he said, with a laughing bend of his head to Cecil, when somebody complimented him.

She gave an impatient movement—she was accustomed to have such things whispered in earnest, not in jest. She laughed, however. “Are you inspired, then, to take Huon’s part? All the characters are cast but that.”

“I’m afraid I can’t play well enough.”

“Nonsense. You cannot think that. Say you would rather not at once.”

Vivian stroked his mustaches thoughtfully. “Well, you see, it bores me rather; and I’m not Christian enough to suffer ennui cheerfully to please other people.”

“Very well, then, I will give the part to Sir Horace,” said Cecil, looking through the window at the church spire, covered with the confounded snow.

Vivian stroked away at his mustaches rather fiercely this time. “Cos! he’ll ruin the play. Dress him up as a lord in waiting, he’ll be a dainty lay figure, but for anything more he’s not as fit as this setter! Fancy that essenced, fair-haired young idiot taking Huon—his lisp would be so effective!”

She looked up in his face with one of her mischievous, dangerous smiles, and put up her hands in an attitude of petition. “He must have the part if you won’t. Be good, and don’t spoil the play. I have set my mind on its being perfect, and—I will have such a dress as the Countess if you will only do as I tell you.”

Cecil, in her soft, childlike moods, could finish any man. Of course Vivian rehearsed “Love” with her that afternoon, a play that was to come off on the 23rd. Cos sulked slightly at being commanded by her to dress himself beautifully and play the Prince of Milan.

“To be refused by you,” lisped Horace. “Oh, I dare say! No! ’pon my life——”

“My dear Cos, you’ll have plenty of fellow-sufferers,” whispered Syd, mischievously.

“Do you dare to disobey me, Sir Horace?” cried Cecil. “For shame! I should have thought you more of a preux chevalier. If you don’t order over from Boxwood that suit of Milan armor you say one of your ancestors wore at Flodden, and wear it on Tuesday, you shall never waltz with me again. Now what do you say?”

“Nobody can rethitht you,” murmured Cos. “You do anything with a fellow that you chooth.”

Vivian glanced down at him with superb scorn, and turned to me. “What a confounded frost this is. The weathercock sticks at the north, and old Ben says there’s not a chance of a change till the new moon. Qui Vive might as well have kept at Hounslow. To waste all the season like this would make a parson swear! If I’d foreseen it I would have gone to Paris with Lovell, as he wanted me to do.”

I suppose the Colonel was piqued to find he was not the only one persuaded into his rôle. He bent over Laura Caldecott’s chair, a pretty girl, but with nothing to say for herself, admired her embroidery, and talked with great empressement about it, till Laura, much flattered at such unusual attention, after lisping a good deal of nonsense, finally promised to embroider a note-case for him, “if you’ll be good and use it, and not throw it away, as you naughty men always do the pretty things we give you,” simpered Miss Laura.

“Hearts included,” said Syd, smiling. “I assure you if you give me yours, I will prize it with Turkish jealousy.”

The fair brodeuse gave a silly laugh; and Vivian, whose especial detestation is this sort of love-making nonsense, went on flirting with her, talking the persiflage that one whispers leaning over the back of a phaeton after a dinner at the Castle or a day at Ascot, but never expects to be called to remember the next morning, when one bows to the object thereof in the Ring, and the flavor of the claret-cup and the scent of the cigar are both fled with the moonbeams and forgotten.

Cecil gave the Colonel and his flirtation a glance, and let Cossetting lean over the back of her chair and deliver himself of some lackadaisical sentiment (taken second-hand out of “Isidora” or the “Amant de la Lune,” and diluted to be suitable for presentation to her), looking up at him with her large velvet eyes, or flashing on him her radiant smile, till Horace pulled up his little stiff collar, coaxed his flaxen whiskers, looked at her with his half-closed light eyes—and thought himself irresistible—and Miss Screechington broke the string of the purse she was making, and scattered all the steel beads about the floor in the futile hope of gaining his attention. Blanche went down on her knees and spent twenty minutes hunting them all up; but as I helped her I saw the turquoise eyes looked anything but grateful for our efforts, though if Blanche had done anything for me with that ready kindness and those soft little white hands, I should have repaid her very warmly. But oh, these women! these women! Do they ever love one another in their hearts? Does not Chloris always swear that Lelia’s gazelle eyes have a squint in them and Delia hint that Daphne, who is innocent as a dove, is bad style, and horridly bold?

At last Cecil got tired of Cos’s drawling platitudes, and walked up to one of the windows. “How is the ice, will anybody tell me? I am wild to try it, ain’t you, Blanche? If we are kept waiting much longer, we will have the carpets up and skate on the oak floors.”

I told her I thought they might try it safely. “Then let us go after luncheon, shall we?” said Cecil. “It is quite sunny now. You skate, of course, Sir Horace?”

“Oh! to be sure—certainly,” murmured Cos. “We’d a quadrille on the Serpentine last February, Talbot, and I, and some other men—lots of people said they never saw it better done. But it’s rather cold—don’t you think so?”

“Do you expect to find ice in warm weather?” said Vivian, curtly, from the fire, where he was standing watching the commencement of the note-case.

“No. But I hate cold,” said Horace, looking at his snowy fingers. “One looks such a figure—blue, and wet, and shivering; the house is much the best place in a frost.”

“Poor fellow!” said Vivian, with a contemptuous twist of his mustaches. “I fear, however fêté you may be in every other quarter, the seasons won’t change to accommodate you.”

“Oh! you are a dreadful man,” drawled Cos. “You don’t a bit mind tanning yourself, nor getting drenched through, nor soiling your hands——”

“Thank Heaven, no!” responded Syd. “I’m neither a school-girl, nor—a fop.”

“Would you believe it, Miss St. Aubyn?” said the baronet, appealingly. “That man’ll get up before daylight and let himself be drenched to the skin for the chance of playing a pike; and will turn out of a comfortable arm-chair on a winter’s night just to go after poachers and knock a couple of men over, and think it the primest fun in life. I don’t understand it myself, do you?”

“Yes,” said Cecil, fervently. “I delight in a man’s love for sport, for I idolise horses, and there is nothing that can beat a canter on a fine fresh morning over a grass country; and I believe that a man who has the strength, and nerve, and energy to go thoroughly into fishing, or shooting, or whatever it be, will carry the same will and warmth into the rest of his life; and the hand that is strong in the field and firm in righteous wrath, will be the truer in friendship and the gentler in pity.”

Cecil spoke with energetic enthusiasm. Horace stared, the Screechington sneered, Laura gave an affected little laugh. The Colonel swung round from his study of the fire, his face lighting up. I’ve seen Syd on occasion look as soft as a woman. However, he said nothing; he only took her in to luncheon, and was exceedingly kind to her and oblivious of Laura Caldecott’s existence throughout that meal, which, at Deerhurst, was of unusual splendor and duration. And afterwards, when she had arrayed herself in a hat with soft curling feathers, and looped up her dress in some inexplicable manner that showed her dainty high heels artistically, he took her little skates in his hand and walked down by her side to the pond. It was some way to the pond—a good sized piece of water, that snobs would have called the Lake, by way of dignifying their possessions, with willows on its banks (where in summer the sentimental Screechington would have reclined, Tennyson à la main), and boats and punts beside it, among which was a tub, in which Blanche confessed to me she had paddled herself across to the saturation of a darling blue muslin, and the agonised feelings of her governess, only twelve months before.

“A dreadful stiff old thing that governess was,” said Blanche, looking affectionately at the tub. “Do you know, Captain Thornton, when she went away, and I saw her boxes actually on the carriage-top, I waltzed round the schoolroom seven times, and burnt ‘Noel et Chapsal’ in the fire—I did, indeed!”

The way, as I say, was long to the pond; and as Cecil’s dainty high heels and Syd’s swinging cavalry strides kept pace over the snow together, they had plenty of time for conversation.

“Miss Caldecott is looking for you,” said Cecil, with a contemptuous glance at the fair Laura, who, between two young dandies, was picking her route over the snow holding her things very high indeed, and casting back looks at the Colonel.

“Is she? It is very kind of her.”

“If you feel the kindness so deeply, you had better repay it by joining her.”

Vivian laughed. “Not just now, thank you. We are close to the kennels—hark at their bay! Would you like to come and see them? By-the-by, how is your wolf-dog—Leatherstockings, didn’t you call him?”

“Do you remember him?” said Cecil, her eyes beaming and her lips quivering. “Dear old dog, I loved him so much, and he loved me. He was bitten by an asp just before I left, and papa would have him shot. Good gracious! what is the matter?—she is actually frightened at that setter!”

The “she” of whom Cecil so disdainfully spoke was Miss Caldecott, who, on seeing a large setter leap upon her with muddy paws and much sudden affection, began to scream, and rushed to Vivian with a beseeching cry of “Save me, save me!” Cecil stood and laughed, and called the setter to her.

“Here, Don—Dash—what is your name? Come here, good dog. That poor young lady has nerves, and you must not try them, or you will cause her endless expenses in sal volatile and ether; But I have no such interesting weaknesses, and you may lavish any demonstrations you please on me!”

We all laughed as she thus talked confidentially to the setter, holding his feathered paws against her waist; while Vivian stood by her with admiration in his glance. Poor Laura looked foolish, and began to caress a great bull-dog, who snapped at her. She hadn’t Cecil’s ways either with dogs or men.

“What a delightful scene,” whispered Cecil to the Colonel, as we left the kennels. “You were not half so touched by it as you were expected to be!”

Vivian laughed. “Didn’t you effectually destroy all romantic effect? You can be very mischievous to your enemies.”

Cecil colored. “She is no enemy of mine; I know nothing of her, but I do detest that mock sentimentality, that would-be fine ladyism that thinks it looks interesting when it pleads guilty to sal volatile, and screams at an honest dog’s bark. Did you see how shocked she and Miss Screechington looked because I let the hounds leap about me?”

“Of course; but though you have not lived very long, you must have learned that you are too dangerous to the peace of our sex to expect much mercy from your own.”

A flush came into Cecil’s cheeks not brought by the wind. Her feathers gave a little dance as she shook her head with her customary action of annoyance.

“Ah, never compliment me, I am so tired of it.”

“I wish I could believe that,” said Syd, in a low tone. “Your feelings are warm, your impulses frank and true; it were a pity to mar them by an undue love for the flattering voices of empty-headed fools.”

Tears of pleasure started into her eyes, but she would not let him see it. She had not forgotten the Caldecott flirtation of the morning enough to resist revenging it. She looked up with a merry laugh.

“Je m’amuse—voilà tout. There is no great harm in it.”

A shadow of disappointment passed over Syd’s haughty face.

“No, if you do not do it once too often. I have known men—and women too—who all their lives through have been haunted by the memory of a slight word, a careless look, with which, unwittingly or in obstinacy, they shut the door of their own happiness. Have you ever heard of the Deerhurst ghost?”

“No,” said Cecil, softly. “Tell it me.”

“It is a short story. Do you know that picture of Muriel Vivian, the girl with the hawk on her wrist and long hair of your color? She lived in Charles’s time, and was a great beauty at the court. There were many who would have lived and died for her, but the one who loved her best was her cousin Guy. The story says that she had plighted herself to him in these very woods; at any rate, he followed her when she went to join the court, and she kept him on, luring him with vague promises, and flirting with Goring, and Francis Egerton, and all the other gay gentlemen. One night his endurance broke down: he asked her whether or no she cared for him? He begged, as a sign, for the rosebud she had in her dress. She laughed at him, and—gave the flower to Harry Carrew, a young fellow in Lunsford’s ‘Babe-eaters.’ Guy said no more, and left her. Before dawn he shot Carrew through the heart, took the rosebud from the boy’s doublet, put it in his own breast, and fell upon his sword. They say Muriel lost her senses. I don’t believe it: no coquette ever had so much feeling; but if you ask the old servants they will tell you, and firmly credit the story too, that hers and Guy Vivian’s ghosts still are to be seen every midnight at Christmas-eve, the day that he fought and killed little Harry Carrew.”

He laughed, but Cecil shuddered.

“What a horrible story! But do you believe that any woman ever possessed such power over a man?”

“I believe it since I have seen it. One of my best friends is now hopelessly insane because a woman as worthless as this dead branch forsook him. Poor fellow! they set it down to a coup de soleil, but it was the falsehood of Emily Rushbrooke that did it. But, for myself, I never should lose my head for any woman. I did once when I was a boy, but I know better now.”

A wild, desperate idea came into Cecil’s mind. She contrasted the passionless calm of his face with the tender gentleness of his tone a few moments ago, and she would have given her life to see him “lose his head for her” as he had done for that other. How she hated her, whoever she had been! Cecil had seen too many men not to know that Syd’s cool exterior covered a stormy heart, and in the longing to rouse up the storm at her incantation she resolved to play a dangerous game. The ghost story did not warn her. As Mephistopheles to Faust came Horace Cos to aid the impulse, and Cecil turned to him with one of her radiant smiles. She never looked prettier than in her black hat; the wind had only blown a bright flush into her cheeks—though it had turned Laura blue and the Screechington red—and the Colonel looked up at her as he put her skates on with something of the look Guy might have given Muriel Vivian flirting gaily with the roistering cavaliers.

“Now, Sir Horace, show us some of those wonderful Serpentine figures,” cried Cecil, balancing herself with the grace of a curlew, and whirling here, there, and everywhere at her will as easily as if she were on a chalked ball-room floor. She hadn’t skated and sledged on the Ontario for nothing. More than one man had lost his own balance looking after her. Cos wasn’t started yet; one pair of skates were too large, another pair too small; if he’d thought of it he’d have had his own sent over. He stood on the brink much as Winkle, of Pickwickian memory, trembled in Weller’s grasp. Cecil looked at him with laughing eyes, a shrewd suspicion that he had planted her adorer, and that the quadrille on the Serpentine was an offspring of the Cossetting poetic fancy. Thrice did the luckless baronet essay the ice, and thrice did he come to grief with heels in the air, and his dainty apparel disordered. At last, his Canadian sorceress took compassion upon him, and declaring she was tired, asked him to drive her across the pond. Cos, with an air of languid martyrdom and a heavy sigh as he glanced at his Houbigants, torn and soiled, grasped the back of the chair, and actually contrived to start it. Once started, away went the chair and its Phaeton after it, whether he would or no, its occupant looking up and laughing in the dandy’s heated, disconcerted, and anxious face. All at once there was a crash, a plunge, and a shout from Vivian, who was on the opposite bank. The chair had broken the ice, flung Cecil out into the water with the shock, while her charioteer, by a lucky jump backwards, had saved himself, and stood on the brink of the chasm unharmed. Cecil’s crinoline kept her from sinking; she stretched out her little hand with a cry—it sounded like Vivian’s name as it came to my ears on the keen north wind—but before Vivian, who came across the ice like a whirlwind, could get to her, Cos, valorously determining to wet his wristbands, stooped down, and, holding by the chair, which was firmly wedged in, put his arm round her and dragged her out. Vivian came up two seconds too late.

“Are you hurt?” he said, bending towards her.

“No,” said Cecil, faintly, as her head drooped unconsciously on Cos’s shoulder. She had struck her forehead on the ice, which had stunned her slightly. The Colonel saw the chestnut hair resting against Cos’s arm; he dropped the hand he had taken, and turned to the shore.

“Bring her to the bank,” he said, briefly. “I will go home and send a carriage. Good Heavens! that that fool should have saved her!” I heard him mutter, as he brushed past me.

He drove the carriage down himself, and under pretext of holding on the horses, did not descend from the box while Horace wrapped rugs and cloaks round Cecil, who, having more pluck than strength, declared she was quite well now, but nearly fainted when Horace lifted her out, and she was consigned by Mrs. Vivian to her bedroom for the rest of the day.

“It is astonishing how we miss Cecil,” remarked Blanche, at dinner. “Isn’t it dull without her, Sydney?”

“I didn’t perceive it,” said the Colonel, calmly; “but I am very sorry for the cause of her absence.”

“Well, by Jove! it sounds unfeeling; but I can’t say I am,” murmured Horace. “It’s something to have saved such a deuced pretty girl as that.”

“Curse that puppy,” muttered Syd to his champagne glass. “A fool that isn’t fit for her to look at——”

Syd’s and my room, in the bachelors’ wing, adjoin each other; and as our windows both possess the convenience of balconies, we generally smoke in them, and hold a little chat before turning in. When I stepped out into my balcony that night, Syd was already puffing away at his pipe. Perhaps his Cavendish was unusually good, for he did not seem greatly inclined to talk, but leant over the balcony, looking out into the clear frosty night, with the winter stars shining on the wide white uplands and the leafless glittering trees.

“What’s that?” said he sharply, as the notes of a cornet playing, and playing badly, Halévy’s air, “Quand de la Nuit,” struck on the night air.

“A serenade, I suppose.”

“A serenade in the snow. Who is romantic idiot enough for that?” said Vivian contemptuously, nearly pitching himself over to see where the cornet came from. It came from under Cecil’s windows, where a light was still burning. The player looked uncommonly like Cossetting wrapped up in a cloak with a wide-awake on, under which the moonlight showed us some fair hair peeping.

Vivian drew back with an oath he did not mean me to hear. He laughed scornfully. “Milk-posset, of course! There is no other fool in the house. His passion must be miraculously deep to drag him out of his bed into the snow to play some false notes to his lady-love. It’s rather windy, don’t you think, Ned. Good night, old fellow—and, I say, don’t turn little Blanche’s head with your pretty speeches. You and I are bound not to flirt, since we’re sworn never to marry; and I don’t want the child played with, though possibly (being a woman) she’d very soon recover it.”

With which sarcasm on his sister and her sex, the Colonel shut down the window with a clang; and I remained, smoking four pipes and a half, meditating on his last words, for I had been playing with the child, and felt (inhuman brute! the ladies will say) that I should be sorry if she did recover it.

III

Showing That Love-Making on Holy Ground Doesn’t Prosper

Cecil came down the next morning looking very pretty after her ducking. Vivian asked her how she was with his general air of calm courtesy, helped her to some cold pheasant, and applied himself to his breakfast and some talk with a sporting man about the chances of the frost breaking up.

Horace, who looked upon himself as a preux chevalier, had had his left arm put in a sling on the strength of a bruise as big as a fourpenny-piece, and appeared to consider himself entitled to Cecil’s eternal gratitude and admiration for having gone the length of wetting his coat sleeves for her.

“Do you like music by starlight?” he whispered, with a self-conscious smile, after a course of delicate attentions throughout breakfast.

Syd fixed his eyes on Cecil’s, steadily but impassively. The color rose into her face, and she turned to Cos with a mischievous laugh.

“Very much, if—I am not too sleepy to hear it; and it isn’t a cornet out of tune.”

“How cruel!” murmured Horace, as he passed her coffee. “You shouldn’t criticise so severely when a fellow tries to please you.”

“That poor dear girl really thinks I turned out into the snow last night to give her that serenade,” observed Cos, with a languid laugh, when we were alone in the billiard-room. “Good, isn’t it, the idea of my troubling myself?”

“Whose cracked cornet was it, then, that made that confounded row last night?” I asked.

Horace laughed again; it was rarely he was so highly amused at anything: “It was Cléante’s, to be sure. He don’t play badly when his hands are not numbed, poor devil! Of course he made no end of a row about going out into the snow, but I made him do it. I knew Cecil would think it was I. Women are so vain, poor things!”

It was lucky I alone was the repository of his confidence, for if Vivian had chanced to have been in the billiard-room, it is highly probable he would then and there have brained his cousin with one of the cues.

Happily he was out of the reach of temptation, in the stables, looking after Qui Vive, who had to “bide in stall,” as much to that gallant bay’s disquiet as to her owner’s; for I don’t know which of the two best loves a burst over a stiff country, or a fast twenty minutes up wind alone with the hounds when they throw up their heads.

To the stables, by an odd coincidence, Cecil, putting the irresistible black hat on the top of her chestnut braids, prevailed on Blanche to escort her, vowing (which was nearly, but not quite, the truth) that she loved the sweet pets of horses better than anything on earth. Where Cecil went, Laura made a point of going too, to keep her enemy in sight, I suppose; though Cecil, liking a fast walk on the frosty roads, a game of battledore and shuttlecock with Blanche (when we were out of the house), or anything, in short, better than working with her feet on the fender, and the Caldecott inanities or Screechington scandals in her ear, often led Laura many an unwelcome dance, and brought that luckless young lady to try at things which did not sit well upon her as they did upon the St. Aubyn, who had a knack of doing, and doing charmingly, a thousand things no other woman could have attempted. So, as Vivian and I, and some of the other men, stood in the stable-doors, smoking, and talking over the studs accommodated in the spacious stalls, a strong party of four young ladies came across the yard.

“I’m come to look at Qui Vive; will you show him to me?” said Cecil, softly. Her gentle, childlike way was the most telling of all her changing moods, but I must do her the justice to say that it was perfectly natural, she was no actress.

“With great pleasure,” said Syd, very courteously, if not over-cordially; and to Qui Vive’s stall Cecil went, alone in her glory, for Laura was infinitely too terrified at the sight of the bay’s strong black hind legs to risk a kick from them, even to follow Syd. Helena Vivian stayed with her, and Blanche came with me to visit my hunters.

Cecil is a tolerable judge of a horse; she praised Qui Vive’s lean head, full eye, and silky coat with discrimination, and Qui Vive, though not the best-tempered of thorough-breds, let her pat his smooth sides and kiss his strong neck without any hostile demonstration.

Vivian watched her as if she were a spoilt child who bewitched him, but whom he knew to be naughty; he could not resist the fascination of her ways, but he never altered his calm, courteous tone to her—the tone Cecil longed to hear change, were it even into invectives against her, to testify some deeper interest.

“Now show me the mount you will give me when the frost breaks up and we take out the hounds,” said Cecil, with a farewell caress of Qui Vive.

“You shall have the grey four-year-old; Billiard-ball, and he will suit you exactly, for he is as light as a bird, checks at nothing, and will take you safe over the stiffest bullfinch. I know you may trust him, for he has carried Blanche.”

Cecil threw back her head. “Oh, I would ride anything, Qui Vive himself, if he would bear a habit. I am not like Miss Caldecott, who, catching sight of his dear brown legs, vanished as rapidly as if she had seen Muriel’s ghost on Christmas-eve.”

The Colonel smiled. “You are very unmerciful to poor Miss Caldecott. What has she done to offend you?”

“Offend me! Nothing in the world. Though I heard her lament with Miss Screechington in the music-room, that I was ‘so fast,’ and ‘such slang style;’ I consider that rather a compliment, for I never knew any lady pull to pieces my bonnet, or my bouquet, or my hat, unless it was a prettier one than their own. That sounds a vain speech, but I don’t mean it so.”

The Colonel looked down into her velvet eyes; she was most dangerous to him in this mood. “No,” he said, briefly, “no one would accuse you of vanity, though they might, pardon me, of love of admiration.”

Cecil laughed merrily. “Yes, perhaps so; it is pleasant, you know. Yet sometimes I am tired of it all, and I want——”

“A more difficult conquest? To find a diamond, merely, like Cleopatra, to show your estimate of its value by throwing it away.”

A flush of vexation came into her cheeks. “Do you think me utterly heartless?” she said impetuously. “No. I mean that I often tire of the fulsome compliments, the flattery, the attention, the whirl of society! I do like admiration. I tell you candidly what every other woman acknowledges to herself but denies to the world; but often it is nothing to me—mere Dead Sea fruit. I care nothing for the voices that whisper it; the eyes that express it wake no response in mine, and I would give it all for one word of true interest, one glance of real——”

Vivian looked down on her steadily with his searching eagle eyes, out of which, when he chose, nothing could be read. “If I dare believe you——” he said, half aloud.

Gentle as his tone was, the mere doubt stung Cecil to the quick. Something of the wild, desperate feeling of the day previous rose in her heart. The same feeling that makes men brave heaven and hell to win their desires worked up in her. If she had been one of us, just at that moment, she would have flinched at nothing; being a young lady, her hands were tied. She could only go to Cos’s stalls with him (Cos knows as much about horseflesh as I do about the profound female mystery they call “shopping”), and flirt with him to desperation, while Horace got the steam up faster than he, with his very languid motor powers, often did, being accustomed to be spared the trouble and have all the love made to him—an indolence in which the St. Aubyn, who knows how to keep a man well up to hand, never indulged him.

“Do have some pity on me,” I heard Cos murmuring, as she stroked a great brute of his, with a head like a fiddle-case, and no action at all. “I assure you, Miss St. Aubyn, you make me wretched. I’d die for you to-morrow if I only saw how, and yet you take no more notice of me sometimes than if I were that colt.”

Cecil glanced at him with a smile that would have driven Cos distracted if he’d been in for it as deep as he pretended.

“I don’t see that you are much out of condition, Sir Horace, but if you have any particular fancy to suicide, the horse-pond will accommodate you at a moment’s notice; only don’t do it till after our play, because I have set my heart on that suit of Milan armor. Pray don’t look so plaintive. If it will make you any happier, I am going for a walk, and you may come too. Blanche, dear, which way is it to the plantations?”

Now poor Horace hated a walk on a frosty morning as cordially as anything, being altogether averse to any natural exercise: but he was sworn to the St. Aubyn, and Blanche and I, dropping behind them, he had a good hour of her fascinations to himself. I do not know whether he improved the occasion, but Cecil at luncheon looked tired and teased. I should think, after Syd’s graphic epigrammatic talk, the baronet’s lisped nonsense must have been rather trying, especially as Cecil has a strong leaning to intellect.

Vivian didn’t appear at luncheon; he was gone rabbit-shooting with the other fellows, and I should have been with them if I had not thought lounging in the drawing-room, reading “Clytemnestra” to Blanche, with many pauses, the greater fun of the two. I am keen about sport, too; but ever since, at the age of ten, I conceived a romantic passion for my mother’s lady’s-maid—a tall and stately young lady, who eventually married a retail tea-dealer—I have thought the beaux yeux the best of all games.

“Mrs. Vivian, Blanche and Helena and I want to be very useful, if you will let us,” said Cecil, one morning. She was always soft and playful with that gentlest of all women, Syd’s mother. “What do you smile in that incredulous way for? We can be extraordinarily industrious: the steam sewing-machine is nothing to us when we choose! What do you think we are going to do? We are going to decorate the church for Christmas. To leave it to that poor little old clerk, who would only stick two holly twigs in the pulpit candlesticks, and fancy he had done a work of high art, would be madness. And, besides, it will be such fun.”

“If you think it so, pray do it, dear,” laughed Mrs. Vivian. “I can’t say I should, but your tastes and mine are probably rather different. The servants will do as you direct them.”

“Oh no,” said Cecil; “we mean to do it all ourselves. The gentlemen may help us if they like—those, at least, who prefer our society to that of smaller animals, with lop-ears and little bushy tails, who have a fascination superior sometimes to any of our attractions.” She flashed a glance at the Colonel, who was watching her over the top of Punch, as, when I was a boy, I have watched the sun, though it pained my eyes to do it. “You’re the grand seigneur of Deerhurst,” said Cecil, turning to him; “will you be good, and order cart-loads of holly and evergreens (and plenty of the Portugal laurel, please, because it’s so pretty) down to the church; and will you come and do all the hard work for me? The rabbits would so enjoy a little peace to-day, poor things!”

He smiled in spite of himself, and did her bidding, with a flush of pleasure on his face. I believe at that moment, to please her, he would have cut down the best timber on the estates—even the old oaks, in whose shadow in the midsummer of centuries before Guy Vivian and Muriel had plighted their troth.

The way to the church was through a winding walk, between high walls of yew, and the sanctuary itself was a find old Norman place, whose tout ensemble I admired, though I could not pick it to pieces architecturally.

To the church we all went, of course, with more readiness than we probably ever did in our lives, regardless of the rose chains with which we were very likely to become entangled, while white hands weaved the holly wreaths.

Vivian had ordered evergreens enough to decorate fifty churches, and had sent over to the neighboring town for no end of ribbon emblazonments and illuminated scrolls, on which Cecil looked with delight. She seemed to know by instinct it was done for her, and not for his sisters.

“How kind that is of you,” she said, softly. “That is like what you were in Toronto. Why are you not always the same?”

For a moment she saw passion enough in his eye to satisfy her, but he soon mastered it, and answered her courteously:

“I am very glad they please you. Shall we go to work at once, for fear it grow dusk before we get through with it?”

“Can I do anything to help you?” murmured Cos in her ear.

She did not want him, and laughed mischievously. “You can cut some holly if you like. Begin on those large boughs.”

“Better not, Cos,” said the Colonel. “You will certainly soil your hands, and you might chance to scratch them.”

“And if you did you would never forgive me, so I will let you off duty. You may go back to the dormeuse and the ‘Lys de la Vallée’ if you wish,” laughed Cecil.

Horace looked sulky, and curled his blond whiskers in dudgeon, while Cecil, with half a dozen satellites about her, proceeded to work with vigorous energy, keeping Syd, however, as her head workman; and the Colonel twisted pillars, nailed up crosses, hung wreaths, and put up illuminated texts, as if he had been a carpenter all his life, and his future subsistence entirely depended on his adorning Deerhurst church in good taste. It was amusing to me to see him, whom the highest London society, the gayest Paris life bored—who pronounced the most dashing opera supper and the most vigorous debates alike slow—taking the deepest interest in decorating a little village church! I question if Eros did not lurk under the shiny leaves and the scarlet berries of those holly boughs quite as dangerously as ever he did under the rose petals consecrated to him.

I had my own affairs to attend to, sitting on the pulpit stairs at Blanche’s feet, twisting the refractory evergreens at her direction; but I kept an occasional look-out at the Colonel and his dangerous Canadian for all that. They found time (as we did) for plenty of conversation over the Christmas decorations, and Cecil talked softly and earnestly for once without any “mischief.” She talked of her father’s embarrassments, her mother’s trials, of Mrs. Coverdale, with honest detestation of that widow’s arts and artifices, and of her own tastes, and ideas, and feelings, showing the Colonel (what she did not show generally to her numerous worshippers) her heart as well as her mind. As she knelt on the altar steps, twisting green leaves round the communion rails, Syd standing beside her, his pale bronze cheek flushed, and his eyes never left their study of her face as she bent over her work, looking up every minute to ask him for another branch, or another strip of blue ribbon.

When it had grown dusk, and the church was finished, looking certainly very pretty, with the dark leaves against its white pillars, and the scarlet berries kissing the stained windows, Cecil went noiselessly up into the organ-loft, and played the Christmas anthem. Vivian followed her, and, leaning against the organ, watched her, shading his eyes with his hand. She went on playing—first a Miserere, then Mozart’s Symphony in E, and then improvisations of her own—the sort of music that, when one stands calmly to listen to it, makes one feel it whether one likes or not. As she played, tears rose to her lashes, and she looked up at Vivian’s face, bending over her in the gloaming. Love was in her eyes, and Syd knew it, but feared to trust to it. His pulses beat fast, he leaned towards her, till his mustaches touched her soft perfumy hair. Words hung on his lips. But the door of the organ-loft opened.

“‘Pon my life, Miss St. Aubyn, that’s divine, delicious!” cried Cos. “We always thought that you were divine, but we never knew till now that you brought the angels’ harmony with you to earth. For Heaven’s sake, play that last thing again!”

“I never play what I compose twice,” said Cecil, hurriedly, stooping down for her hat.

Vivian cursed him inwardly for his untimely interruption, but cooler thought made him doubt if he were not well saved some words, dictates of hasty passion, that he might have lived to repent. For Guy Vivian’s fate warned him, and he mistrusted the love of a flirt, if flirt, as he feared—from her sudden caprices to him, her alternate impatience with, and encouragement of, his cousin—Cecil St. Aubyn would prove. He gave her his arm down the yew-tree walk. Neither of them spoke all the way, but he sent a servant on for another shawl, and wrapped it round her very tenderly when it came; and when he stood in the lighted hall, I saw by the stern, worn look of his face—the look I have seen him wear after a hard fight—that the fiery passions in him had been having a fierce battle.

That evening the St. Aubyn was off her fun, said she was tired, and, disregarding the misery she caused to Cos and four other men, who, figuratively speaking, not literally, for they went into the “dry” and comestibles fast enough, had lived on her smiles for the last month, excused herself to Mrs. Vivian, and departed to her dormitory. Syd gave her her candle, and held her little hand two seconds in his as he bid her softly good night at the foot of the staircase.

I did not get much out of him in the balcony that night, and long after I had turned in, I scented his Cavendish as he smoked, Heaven knows how many pipes, in the chill December air. The next day, the 23rd, was the night of our theatricals, which went off as dashingly as if Mr. Kean, with his eternal “R-r-r-richard,” had been there to superintend them.

All the country came; dowagers and beauties, with the odor of Belgravia still strong about them: people not quite so high, who were not the rose, but living near it, toadied that flower with much amusing and undue worship; a detachment of Dragoons from the next town, whom the girls wanted to draw, and the mammas to warn off—Dragoons being ordinarily better waltzers than speculations; all the magnates, custos rotulorum, sheriff, members, and magistrates—the two latter portions of the constitution being chiefly remarkable for keenness about hunting and turnips, and an unchristian and deadly enmity against all poachers and vagrants; rectors, who tossed down the still Ai with Falstaff’s keen relish; other rectors, who came against their principles, but preferred fashion to salvation, having daughters to marry and sons to start; hunting men; girls who could waltz in a nutshell; dandies of St. James’s, and veterans of Pall-Mall, down for the Christmas; belles renewing their London acquaintance, and recalling that “pleasant day at Richmond.” But, by Jove! if I describe all the different species presented to view in that ball-room, I might use as many words as an old whip giving you the genealogy of a killing pack in a flying county.

Suffice it, there they all were to criticise us, and pretty sharply I dare say they did it, when they were out of our hearing, in their respective clarences, broughams, dog-carts, drags, tilburies, and hansoms. Before our faces, of course, they only clapped their snowy kid gloves, and murmured “Bravissimo!” with an occasional “Go it, Jack!” and “Get up the steam, old fellow!” from the young bloods in the background; and a shower of bouquets at Cecil and Blanche from their especial worshippers.

Blanche made the dearest little Catherine that ever dressed herself up in blue and silver, and when she drew her toy-rapier in the green-room, asked me if I could not get her a cornetcy in ours. As for Cecil, she played à ravir as Cos, in his Milan armor, whispered with some difficulty, as the steel gorget pressed his throat uncomfortably. Vestris herself never made a more brilliant or impassioned Countess. She and Syd really acquitted themselves in a style to qualify them for London boards, and as she threw herself at his feet—

Huon—my husband—lord—canst thou forgive
The scornful maid? for the devoted wife
Had cleaved to thee, though ne’er she owned thee lord,

I thought the St. Aubyn must be as great an actress as Rachel, if some of that fervor was not real.

Cecil played in the afterpiece, “The wonderful Woman;” the Colonel didn’t; and Cos being De Frontignac, Syd leaned against one of the scenes, and looked on the whole thing with calm indifference externally, but much disquietude and annoyance within him. He was not jealous of the puppy; he would as soon have thought of putting himself on a par with Blanche’s little white terrier, but he’d come to set a price on Cecil’s winning smiles, and to see them given pretty equally to him, and to a young fool, her inferior in everything save position, whom he knew in her inmost soul she must ridicule and despise, galled his pride, and steeled his heart against her. His experience in women made him know that it was highly probable that Cecil was playing both at once, and that though, as he guessed, she loved him, she would, if Cos offered first, accept the title, and wealth, and position his cousin, equally with himself, could give her; and such love as that was far from the Colonel’s ideal.

“By George! Vivian, that Canadian of yours is a perfect angel,” said a man in the Dragoons, who had played Ulric. “She’s such a deuced lot ove pluck, such eyes, such hair, such a voice! ‘Pon my life, I quite envy you. I suppose you mean to act out the play in reality, don’t you?”

Vivian lying back in an arm-chair in the green-room crushed up one of the satin playbills in his hand, and answered simply, “You do me too much honor, Calvert. Miss St. Aubyn and I have no thought of each other.”

If any man had given Vivian the lie, he would have had him out and shot him instanter; nevertheless, he told this one with the most unhesitating defiance of truth. He did not see Cecil, who had just come off the stage, standing behind him. But she heard his words, went as white as Muriel’s phantom, and brushed past us into her dressing room, whence she emerged, when her name was called, her cheeks bright with their first rouge, and her eyes unnaturally brilliant. How she flirted with Horace that night, when the theatricals were over! Young ladies who wanted to hook the pet baronet, whispered over their bouquets, “How bold!” and dowagers, seeing one of their best matrimonial speculations endangered by the brilliant Canadian, murmured behind their fans to each other their wonder that Mrs. Vivian should allow any one so fast and so unblushing a coquette to associate with her young daughters.

Vivian watched her with intense earnestness. He had given her a bouquet that day, and she had thanked him for it with her soft, fond eyes, and told him she should use it. Now, as she came into the ball-room, he looked at the one in her hand; it was not his, but his cousin’s.

He set his teeth hard; and swore a bitter oath to himself. As Huon, he was obliged to dance the first dance with the Countess, but he spoke little to her, and indeed, Cecil did not give him much opportunity, for she talked fast, and at random, on all sorts of indifferent subjects, with more than even her usual vivacity, and quite unlike the ordinary soft and winning way she had used of late when with him. He danced no more with her, but, daring the waltzes with which he was obliged to favor certain county beauties, and all the time he was doing the honors of Deerhurst, with his calm, stately, Bayard-like courtesy, his eyes would fasten on the St. Aubyn, driving the Dragoons to desperation, waltzing while Horace whispered tender speeches in her ear, or sitting jesting and laughing, half the men in the room gathered round her—with a look of passion and hopelessness, tenderness and determination, strangely combined.

IV

The Colonel Kills His Fox, but Loses His Head After Other Game

The next day was Christmas-eve; and on the 24th of December the hounds, from time immemorial, had been taken out by a Vivian. For the last few days the frost had been gradually breaking up, thank Heaven, and we looked forward to a good day’s sport The meet was at Deerhurst, and it proved a strong muster for the Harkaway; though not exactly up to the Northamptonshire Leicestershire mark, are a clever, steady pack. Cecil and Blanche were the only two women with us, for the country is cramped and covered with blind fences, and the fair sex seldom hunt with the Harkaway. But the St. Aubyn is a first-rate seat, and Blanche has, she tells me, ridden anything from the day she first stuck on to her Shetland, when she was three years old. They were both down in time. Indeed, I question if they went to bed at all, or did any more than change their ball dresses for their habits. As I lifted Blanche on to her pet chestnut, I heard Syd telling Cecil that Billiard-ball was saddled.

“Thank you,” said the St. Aubyn, hurriedly. “I need not trouble you. Sir Horace has promised to mount me.”

Vivian bent his head with a strange smile, and sprang on Qui Vive, while Cecil mounted a showy roan, thorough-bred, the only good horse Cos had in his stud, despite the thousands he had paid into trainers’ and breeders’ pockets.

“Stole away—forward, forward!” screamed Vivian’s fellow-member for Cacklebury; and, holding Qui Vive hard by the head, away went Syd after the couple or two of hounds that were leading the way over some pasture land, with an ox-rail at the bottom of it, all the field after him. Cecil’s roan flew over the grass land, and rose at the ox-rail as steadily as Qui Vive. Blanche’s chestnut let himself be kicked along at no end of a pace, his mistress sitting down in her stirrups as well as the gallant M. F. H., her father. I never do think of anything but the hounds flying along in front of me, but I could not help turning my head over my shoulder to see if she was all right; and I never admired her so much as when she passed me with a merry laugh: “Five to one I beat you, monsieur!” Away we went over the dark ploughed lands, and the naked thorn hedges, the wide straggling briar fences, and the fields covered with stones and belted with black-looking plantations. Down went Cos with his horse wallowing helplessly in a ditch, after considerately throwing him unhurt on the bank. Syd set his teeth as he lifted Qui Vive over the prostrate baronet, to the imminent danger of that dandy field-sportsman’s life. “Take hold of his head, Miss St. Aubyn,” shouted the M. F. H.; but before the words had passed his lips, Cecil had landed gallantly a little farther down. Another ten minutes with the hounds streaming over the country—a ten minutes of wild delight, worth all the monotonous hours of every-day life—and Qui Vive was alone with the hounds. We could see him speeding along a quarter of a mile ahead of us, and Cecil’s roan was but half a field behind him. She was “riding jealous” of one of the best riders in the Queen’s; the M. F. H. just in front of her turned his head once, in admiration of her pluck, to see her lift her horse at a staken-bound fence; but the Colonel never looked round. Away they went—they disappeared over the brow of a hill. Blanche shook her reins and struck her chestnut, and I sawed my hunter’s mouth mercilessly with the snaffle. No use—we were too late by three minutes. Confound it! they had just killed their fox after twenty minutes’ burst over a stiff country, one of the fastest things I ever saw.

Cecil was pale with over-excitement, and upon my word she looked more ready to cry than anything when the M. F. H. complimented her with his genial smile, and his cordial “Well done, my dear. I never saw anybody ride better. I used to think my little Blanche the best seat in the country, but she must give place to you—eh, Syd?”

“Miss St. Aubyn does everything well that she attempts,” answered the Colonel, in his calm, courteous tone, looking, nevertheless, as stern as if he had just slain his deadliest enemy, instead of having seen a fox killed.

Cecil flushed scarlet, and Cos coming up at that moment, a sadly bespattered object for such an Adonis to present, his coat possessing more the appearance of a bricklayer’s than any one else’s, after its bath of white mud, she turned to him, and began to laugh and talk with rather wild gaiety. It so chanced that the fox was killed on Horace’s land, and we, being not more than a mile and a half off his house, the gallant Cos immediately seized upon the idea of having the object of his idolatry up there to luncheon; and his uncle, and Cecil, and Blanche acquiescing in the arrangement, to his house we went, with such of the field as had ridden up after the finish. Cos trotted forward with the St. Aubyn to show us the way by a short cut through the park, and the echoes of Cecil’s laughter rang to Vivian in the rear discussing the run with his father.

A very slap-up place was Cos’s baronial hall, for the Cossettings had combined blood and money far many generations; its style and appointments were calculated to back him powerfully in the matrimonial market, and that Cecil might have it all was fully apparent, as he devoted himself to her at the luncheon, which made its appearance at a minute’s notice, as if Aladdin had called it up. Cecil seemed disposed to have it too. A deep flush had come up in her cheeks; she smiled her brightest smiles on Cos; she drank his Moët’s, bending her graceful head with a laughing pledge to her host; she talked so fast, so gaily, such repartee, such sarcasms, such jeux de mots, that it was well no women were at table to sit in judgment on her afterwards. A deadly paleness came over Vivian’s face as he listened to her—but he sat at the bottom of the board where Cecil could not see him. His father, the gayest and best-tempered of mortals, laughed and applauded her; the other men were charmed with a style and a wit so new to them; and Cos, of course, was in the seventh heaven.

The horses were dead beat, and Cos’s drag, with its four bays very fresh, for they were so little worked, was ordered to take us back to Deerhurst.

“Who’ll drive,” said Horace. “Will you, Syd?”

“No,” said his cousin, more laconically than politely.

“Let me,” cried Cecil. “I can drive four in hand. Nothing I like better.”

“Give me the ribbons,” interposed the Colonel, changing his mind, “if you can’t drive them yourself, Cos, as you ought to do.”

“No, no,” murmured Cos. “Mith St. Aubyn shall do everything she wishes in my house.”

“Let her drive them,” laughed Vivian, senior. “Blanche has tooled my drag often enough before now.”

Before he had finished, Cecil had sprung up on to the box as lightly as a bird; her cheeks were flushed deeper still, and her gazelle eyes flashed darker than ever. Cos mounted beside her. Blanche and I in the back seat. The M. F. H., Syd, and the two other men behind. The bays shook their harness and started off at a rattling pace, Cecil tooling them down the avenue with her little gauntleted hands as well as if she had been Four-in-hand Forester of the Queen’s Bays, or any other crack whip. How she flirted, and jested, and laughed, and shook the ribbons till the bays tore along the stony road in the dusky winter’s afternoon—even Blanche, though a game little lady herself, looked anxious.

Cecil asked Horace for a cigar, and struck a fusee, and puffed away into the frosty air like the wildest young Cantab at Trinity. It didn’t make her sick, for she and Blanche had had two Queens out of Vivian’s case, and smoked them to the last ash for fun only the day before; and she drove us at a mad gallop into Deerhurst Park, past the dark trees and the gleaming water and the trooping deer, and pulled up before the hall door just as the moon came out on Christmas-eve.

We were all rather fast at Deerhurst, so Blanche got no scolding from her mamma (who, like a sensible woman, never put into their heads that things done in the glad innocency of the heart were “wrong”); and Cecil, as soon as she had sprung down, snatched her hand from Cos, and went up to her own room.

The Colonel’s lips were pressed close together, and his forehead had the dark frown that Guy wears in his portrait.

It had been done with another, so it was all wrong; but oh! Syd, my friend, if the “dry” that was drunk, and the drag that was tooled, and the weed that was smoked, had been yours, wouldn’t it have been the most charming caprice of the most charming woman!

That night, at dinner, a letter by the afternoon’s post came to the Colonel. It was “On her Majesty’s Service,” and his mother asked him anxiously what it was.

“Only to tell me to join soon,” said he, carelessly, giving me a sign to keep the contents of a similar letter I had just received to myself; which I should have done anyhow, as I had reason to hope that the disclosure of them would have quenched the light in some bright eyes beside me.

“Ordered off at last, thank God!” said Syd, handing his father the letter as soon as the ladies were gone. “There’s a train starts at 12.40, isn’t there, for town? You and I, Ned, had better go to-night. You don’t look so charmed, old fellow, as you did when you went out to Scinde. I say, don’t tell my sisters; there is no need to make a row in the house. Governor, you’ll prepare my mother; I must bid her good-by.”

I did not view the Crimea with the unmingled, devil-me-care delight with which I had gone out under “fighting Napier” nine years before, for Blanche’s sunshiny face had made life fairer to me; and to obey Syd, and go without a farewell of her, was really too great a sacrifice to friendship. But he and I went to the drawing-rooms, chatted, and took coffee as if nothing had chanced, till he could no longer stand seeing Cecil, still excited, singing chansons to Cos, who was leaning enraptured over the instrument, and he went off to his own room. The other girls and men were busy playing the Race game; Blanche and I were sitting in the back drawing-room beside the fire, and the words that decided my destiny were so few, that I cite them as a useful lesson to those novelists who are in the habit of making their heroes, while waiting breathless to hear their fate, recite off at a cool canter four pages of the neatest-turned sentences without a single break-down or a single pull-up, to see how the lady takes it.

“Blanche, I must bid you good-by to-night.” Blanche turned to me in bewildered anxiety. “I must join my troop: perhaps I may be sent to the Crimea. I could go happily if I thought you would regret me?”

Brutally selfish that was to be sure, but she did not take it so. She looked as if she was going to faint, and for fear she should, trusting to the engrossing nature of the Race game in the further apartment, I drew nearer to her. “Will you promise to give yourself to nobody else while I am away, my darling?” Blanche’s eyes did promise me through their tears, and this brief scene, occupying the space of two minutes, twisted our fates into one on that eventful Christmas-eve.

While I was parting with my poor little Blanche in the library, Vivian was bidding his mother farewell in her dressing-room. His mother had the one soft place in his heart, steeled and made skeptical to all others by that fatal first love of which he had spoken to Cecil. Possibly some of her son’s bitter grief was shown to her on that sad Christmas-eve; at all events, when he left her dressing-room, he had the tired, haggard look left by any conflict of passion. As he came down the stairs to come to the dog-cart that was to take us to the station, the door of Blanche’s boudoir stood open, and in it he saw Cecil. The fierce tide of his love surged up, subduing all his pride, and he paused to take his last sight of the face that would haunt him in the long night watches and the rapid rush of many a charge. She looked up and saw him; that look overpowered all his calmness and resolve. He turned, and bent towards her, every feature quivering with the passion she had once longed to rouse. His hot breath scorched her cheek, and he caught her fiercely against his heart in an iron embrace, pressing his burning lips on hers. “God forgive you! I have loved you too well. Women have ever been fatal to my race!”

He almost threw her from him in the violence of feelings roused after a long sleep. In another moment he was driving the dog-cart at a mad gallop past the old church in which we had spent such pleasant hours. Its clock tolled out twelve strokes as we passed it, and on the quiet village, and the weird-like trees, and the tall turrets of Deerhurst, the Christmas morning dawned.

Vivian continued so utterly enfeebled and prostrate that there was but one chance for him—return homewards. I was going to England with despatches, and Syd, at his mother’s entreaty, let himself be carried down to a transport, and shipped for England. He was utterly listless and strengthless, although the voyage did him a little good. He did not care where he went, so he stayed in town with me while I presented myself at the Horse Guards and war Office, and then we travelled down together to Deerhurst.

Oddly enough it was Christmas-eve again when we drove up the old avenue. The snow was falling heavily, and lay deep on the road and thick on the hedges and trees. The meadows and woods were white against the dark, hushed sky, and the old church, and its churchyard cedars, were loaded too with the clouds’ Christmas gift. To me, at least, the English scene was very pleasant, after the heat, and dirt, and minor worries of Gallipoli and Constantinople. The wide stretching country, with its pollards, and holly hedges, and homesteads, the cattle safe housed, the yule fire burning cheerily on the hearths, the cottages and farms nestling down among their orchards and pasture-lands, all was so heartily and thoroughly English. They seemed to bring back days when I was a boy skating and sliding on the mere at home, or riding out with the harriers light-hearted and devil-me-care as a boy might be, coming back to hear the poor governor’s cheery voice tell me I was one of the old stock, and to toss down a bumper of Rhenish with a time-honored Christmas toast. The crackle of the crisp snow, the snort of the horses as they plunged on into the darkening night, and the red fire-light flickering on the lattice windows of the cottages we passed, were so many welcomes home, and I double-thonged the off-wheeler with a vengeance as I thought of soft lips that would soon touch mine, and a soft voice that would soon whisper my best “Io triumphe!”

The lodge-gates flew open. We passed the old oaks and beeches, the deer trooping away over the snow as we startled them out of their rest. We were not expected that night, and my man rang such a peal at the bell as might have been heard all over the quiet park. Another minute, and Blanche and I were together again, and alone in the library where we had parted just twelve months before. Of course, for the time being, we neither knew nor cared what was going on in the other rooms of the house. The Colonel had gone to rest himself on the sofa in the dining-room. Half an hour had elapsed, perhaps, when a wild cry rang through the house, startling even us, absorbed though we were in our tête-à-tête. Blanche’s first thought was of her brother. She ran out through the hall, and up the staircase, and I followed her. At the top of the stairs, leaning against the wall, breathing fast, and his face ashy white, stood Syd, and at his feet, in a dead faint, lay Cecil St. Aubyn. I caught hold of Blanche’s arm and held her back as she was about to spring forward. I thought their meeting had much best be uninterrupted; for, if Cecil’s had been mere flirtation I fancied the Colonel’s return could scarcely have moved her like this.

Vivian stood looking down on her, all the passion in him breaking bounds. He could not stand calmly by the woman he loved. He did not wait to know whether she was his or another’s—whether she was worthy or unworthy of him—but he lifted her up and pressed her unconscious form against his heart, covering her lips with wild caresses. Waking from her trance, she opened her eyes with a terrified stare, and gazed up in his face; then tears came to her relief, and she sank down at his feet again with a pitiful cry, “Forgive me—forgive me!” Weak as Syd was, he found strength to raise her in his arms, and whisper, as he bent over her, “If you love me, I have nothing to forgive.”

The snow fell softly without over the woods and fields and the winds roared through the old oaks and whistled among the frozen ferns, but Christmas-eve passed brightly enough to us at home within the strong walls of Deerhurst.

I am sure that all Moore’s pictures of Paradise seemed to me tame compared to that drawing-room, with its warmth, and coziness, and luxuries; with the waxlights shining on the silver of the English tea equipage (pleasant to eye and taste, let one love campaigning ever so well, after the roast beans of the Commissariat), and the fire-gleams dancing on the soft brow and shining hair of the face beside me. I doubt if Vivian either ever spent a happier Christmas-eve as he lay on the sofa in the back drawing-room, with Cecil sitting on a low seat by him, her hand in his, and the Canadian eyes telling him eloquently of love and reconciliation. They had such volumes to say! As soon as she knew that wild farewell of his preceded his departure to the Crimea, Cecil, always impulsive, had written to him on the instant, telling him how she loved him, detailing what she had heard in the green-room, confessing that, in desperation, she had done everything she could to rouse his jealousy, assuring him that that same evening she had refused Cos’s proposals, and beseeching him to forgive her and come back to her. That letter Vivian had never had (six months from that time, by the way, it turned up, after a journey to India and Melbourne, following a cousin of his, colonel of a line regiment, she in her haste having omitted to put his troop on the address), and Cecil, whose feeling was too deep to let her mention the subject to Blanche or Helena, made up her mind that he would never forgive her, and being an impressionable young lady, had, on the anniversary of Christmas-eve, been comparing her fate with that of Muriel in the ghost legend, and, on seeing the Colonel’s unexpected apparition, had fainted straight away in the over-excitement and sudden joy of the moment.

Such was Cecil’s story, and Vivian was content with it and gladly took occasion to practise the Christmas duties of peace, and love, and pardon. He had the best anodyne for his wounds now, and there was no danger for him, since Cecil had taken the place of the Scutari nurses. No “Crimean heroes,” as they call us in the papers, were ever more fêted and petted than were the Colonel and I.

Christmas morning dawned, the sun shining bright on the snow-covered trees, and the Christmas bells chiming merrily; and as we stood on the terrace to see the whole village trooping up through the avenue to receive the gifts left to them by some old Vivian long gone to his rest with his forefathers under the churchyard cedars, Syd looked down with a smile into Cecil’s eyes as she hung on his arm, and whispered,

“I will double those alms, love, in memory of the priceless gift this Christmas has given me. Ah! Thornton and I little knew, when we came down for the hunting, how fast you and Blanche would capture us with your—Holly Wreaths and Rose Chains.”

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