Our Wager
Our Wager; or, How the Major Lost and Won
I
Introduces Major Telfer of the 50th Dashaway Hussars
The softest of lounging-chairs, an unexceptionable hubble-bubble bought at Benares, the last Bell’s Life, the morning papers, chocolate milled to a T, and a breakfast worthy of Francatelli,—what sensible man can ask more to make him comfortable? All these was my chum, Hamilton Telfer, Major (50th Dashaway Hussars), enjoying, and yet he was in a frame of mind anything but mild and genial.
“The deuce take the whole sex!” said he, stroking his moustache savagely. “They’re at the bottom of all the mischief going. The idea of my father at seventy-five, with hair as white as that poodle’s, making such a fool of himself, when here am I, at six-and-thirty, unmarried; it’s abominable, it’s disgusting. A girl of twenty, taking in an old man of his age, for the sake of his money——”
“But are you sure, Telfer,” said I, “that the affair’s really on the tapis?”
“Sure! Yes,” said the Major, with immeasurable disgust. “I never saw her till last night, but the governor wrote no end of rhapsodies about her, and as I came upon them he was taking leave of her, holding her hand in his, and saying, ‘I may write to you, may I not?’ and the young hypocrite lifted her eyes so bewitchingly, ‘Oh yes, I shall long so much to hear from you!’ She colored when she saw me—well she might! If she thinks she’ll make a fool of my father, and reign paramount at Torwood, give me a mother-in-law sixteen years younger than myself, and fill the house and cumber the estates with a lot of wretched little brats, she’ll find herself mistaken, for I’ll prevent it, if I live.”
“Don’t be too sure of that,” said I. “From what I know of Violet Tressillian, she’s not the sort of girl to lure her quarry in vain.”
“Of course she’ll try hard,” answered Telfer. “She comes of a race that always were poor and proud; she’s an orphan, and hasn’t a sou, and to catch a man like my father worth 15,000l. a year, with the surety of a good dower and jointure house whenever he die, is one of the best things that could chance to her; but I’ll be shot if she ever shall manage it.”
“Nous verrons. I bet you my roan filly Calceolaria against your colt Jockeyclub that before Christmas is out Violet Tressillian will be Violet Telfer.”
“Done!” cried the Major, stirring his chocolate fiercely. “You’ll lose, Vane; Calceolaria will come to my stables as sure as this mouthpiece is made of amber. Whenever this scheming little actress changes her name, it sha’n’t be to the same cognomen as mine. I say, it’s getting deuced warm—one must begin to go somewhere. What do you say to going abroad till the 12th? I’ve got three months’ leave—that will give me one away, and two on the moor. Will you go?”
“Yes, if you like; town’s emptying gradually, and it is confoundedly hot. Where shall it be?—Naples—Paris——”
“Paris in July! Heaven forbid! Why, it would be worse than London in November. By Jove! I’ll tell you where: let’s go to Essellau.”
“And where may that be? Somewhere in the Arctic regions, I hope, for I’ve spent half my worldly possessions already in sherry and seltzer and iced punch, and if I go where it’s warmer still, I shall be utterly beggared.”
“Essellau is in Swabia, as you ought to know by this, you Goth. It’s Marc von Edenburgh’s place, and a very jolly place, too, I can tell you; the sport’s first-rate there, and the pig-sticking really splendid. He’s just written to ask me to go, and take any fellows I like, as he’s got some English people—some friends of his mother’s. (A drawback that—I wonder who they are.) Will you come, Vane? I can promise you some fun, if only at the trente-et-quarante tables in Pipesandbeersbad.”
“Oh yes, I’ll come,” said I. “I hope the English won’t be some horrid snobs he’s picked up at some of the balls, who’ll be scraping acquaintance with us when we come back.”
“No fear,” said Telfer; “Marc’s as English as you or I, and knows the good breed when he sees them. He’d keep as clear of the Smith, Brown, and Robinson style as we should. It’s settled, then, you’ll come. All right! I wish I could settle that confounded Violet, too, first. I hope nothing will happen while I’m in Essellau. I don’t think it can. The Tressillian leaves town to-day with the Carterets, and the governor must stick here till parliament closes, and it’s sure to be late this year.”
With which consolatory reflection the Major rose, stretched himself, yawned, sighed, stroked his moustache, fitted on his lavender gloves, and rang to order his tilbury round.
Telfer was an only son, and when he heard it reported that his father intended to give him a belle-mère in a young lady as attractive as she was poor, who, if she caught him, would probably make a fool of the old gentleman in the widest sense of the word, he naturally swore very heartily, and anything but relished the idea. Hamilton Telfer, senior, had certainly been a good deal with Violet that season, and Violet, a girl poor as a rat and beautiful as Semele, talked to him, and sang to him, and rode with him more than she did with any of us; so people talked and talked, and said the old member would get caught, and the Major, when he heard it, waxed fiercely wroth at the folly his parent had fallen into while he’d been off the scene down at Dover with his troop, but, like a wise man, said nothing, knowing, both by experience and observation, that opposition in such affairs is like a patent Vesta among hayricks. Telfer was a particular chum of mine: we’d lounged about town, and shot on the moors, and campaigned in India together, and I don’t believe there was a better soldier, a cooler head, a quicker eye, or a steadier hand in the service than he was. He was six-and-thirty now, and had seen life pretty well, I can tell you, for there was not a get-at-able corner of the globe that he hadn’t looked at through his eye-glass. Tall and muscular, with a stern, handsome face, with the prospect of Torwood (where there’s some of the best shooting in England, I give you my word), and 15,000l. a year, Telfer was a great card in the matrimonial line, but hadn’t let himself be played as yet, for the petty trickery the women used in trying to get him dealt to them disgusted him, and small wonder. Men liked him cordially, women thought him cold and sarcastic; and he was much more genial, I admit, at mess, or at lansquenet, or in the smoking-room of the U. S., than he was in boudoirs and ball-rooms, as the mere knowledge that mammas and their darlings were trying to hook him made him get on his stilts at once.
“I don’t feel easy in my mind about the governor,” said he, as we drove along to the South-Eastern Station a few days after on our way to Essellau. “As I was bidding him good-bye this morning, Soames brought him a letter in a woman’s hand. Heaven knows he may have a score of fair correspondents for anything I care, but if I thought it was the Tressillian, devil take her——”
“And the devil won’t have had a prettier prize since Proserpine was stolen,” said I.
“No, confound it, I saw she was handsome enough,” swore the Major, disgusted; “and a pretty face always did make a fool of my father, according to his own telling. Well, thank God, I don’t take that weakness after him. I never went mad about any woman. You’ve just as much control over love, if you like, as over a quiet shooting pony; and if it don’t suit you to gallop, you can rein up and give over the sport. Any man who’s anything of a philosopher needn’t fall in love unless he likes.”
“Were you never in love, then, old boy?” I asked.
“Of course I have been. I’ve made love to no end of women in my time; but when one love was died out I took another, as I take a cigar, and never wept over the quenched ashes. You need never fall in love unless it’s convenient, and as to caring for a girl who don’t care for you, that’s a contemptible weakness, and one I don’t sympathize with at all. Come along, or the train will be off.”
He went up to the carriages, opened a door, shut it hastily, and turned away, with the frigid bow with which Telfer, in common with every other Briton, can say, “Go to the devil,” as plainly as if he spoke.
“By Jove!” said I, “what’s that eccentric move? Did you see the Medusa in that carriage, or a baby?”
“Something quite as bad,” said he, curtly. “I saw the Tressillian and her aunt. For Heaven’s sake, let’s get away from them. I’d rather have a special train, if it cost me a fortune, than travel with that girl, boxed up for four hours in the same compartment with such a little intrigante.”
“Calm your mind, old fellow; if she’s aiming at your governor she won’t hit you. She can’t be your wife and your mother-in-law both,” laughed Fred Walsham, a good-natured little chap in the Carabiniers, a friend of Von Edenburgh, who was coming with us.
“I’ll see her shot before she’s either,” said Telfer, fiercely stroking his moustache.
“Hush! the deuce! hold your tongue,” said Walsham, giving him a push. For past us, so close that the curling plumes in her hat touched the Major’s shoulder, floated the “little intrigante” in question, who’d come out of her carriage to see where a pug of hers was put. She’d heard all we said, confound it, for her head was up, her color bright, and she looked at Telfer proudly and disdainfully, with her dark eyes flashing. Telfer returned it to the full as haughtily, for he never shirked the consequences of his own actions (’pon my life, they looked like a great stag and a little greyhound challenging each other), and Violet swept away across the platform.
“You’ve made an enemy for life, Telfer,” said Walsham, as we whisked along.
“So much the better, if I’m a rock ahead to warn her off a marriage with the governor,” rejoined the Major, smoking, as he always did, under the officials’ very noses. “I hope I sha’n’t come across her again. If the Tressillian and I meet, we shall be about as amicable as a rat and a beagle. Take a weed, Fred. I do it on principle to resist unjust regulations. Why shouldn’t we take a pipe if we like? A man whose olfactory nerves are so badly organized as to dislike Cavendish is too great a muff to be considered.”
As ill luck would have it, when we crossed to Dover, who should cross, too, but the Tressillian and her party—aunt, cousins, maid, courier, and pug. Telfer wouldn’t see them, but got on the poop, as far away as ever he could from the spot where Violet sat nursing her dog and reading a novel, provokingly calm and comfortable to the envious eyes of all the malades around her.
“Good Heavens!” said he, “was anything ever so provoking? Just because that girl’s my particular aversion, she must haunt me like this. If she’d been anybody I wanted to meet, I should never have caught a glimpse of her. For mercy’s sake, Vane, if you see a black hat and white feather anywhere again, tell me, and we’ll change the route immediately.”
Change the route we did, for, going on board the steamer at Düsseldorf, there, on the deck, stood the Tressillian. Telfer turned sharp on his heel, and went back as he came. “I’ll be shot if I go down the Rhine with her. Let’s cut across into France.” Cut across we did, but we stopped at Brussels on our way; and when at last we caught sight of the tops of the fir-trees around Essellau, Telfer took a long whiff at his pipe with an air of contentment. “I should say we’re safe now. She’ll hardly come pig-sticking into the middle of Swabia.”
II
Violet Tressillian
Essellau was a very jolly place, with thick woods round it, and the river Beersbad running in sight; and his pretty sister, the Comtesse Virginie, his good wines, and good sport, made Von Edenburgh’s a pleasant house to visit at. Marc himself, who is in the Austrian service (he was winged at Montebello the other day by a rascally Zouave, but he paid him off for it, as I hope his countrymen will eventually pay off all the Bonapartists for their galimatias)—Marc himself was a jolly fellow, a good host, a keen shot, and a capital écarté player, and made us enjoy ourselves at Essellau as he had done before, hunting and shooting with Telfer down at Torwood.
“I’ve some countrywomen of yours here, Telfer,” said Marc, after we’d talked over his English loves, given him tiding of duchesses and danseuses, and messages from no end of pretty women that he’d flirted with the Christmas before. “They’re some friends of my mother’s, and when they were at Baden-Baden last year, Virginie struck up a desperate young lady attachment with one of them——”
“Are they good-looking?—because, if they are, they may be drysalters’ daughters, and I shan’t care,” interrupted Fred.
Telfer stroked his moustache with a contemptuous smile—he wouldn’t have looked at a drysalter’s daughter if she’d had all the beauty of Amphitrite.
“Come and see,” said Marc. “Virginie will think you’re neglecting her atrociously.”
Horribly bored to be going to meet some Englishwomen who might turn out to be Smiths or Joneses, and would, to a dead certainty, spoil all his pleasure in pig-sticking, shooting, and écarté, by flirting with him whether he would or no, the Major strode along corridors and galleries after Von Edenburgh. When at length we reached the salon where Virginie and her mother and friends were, Telfer lifted his eyes from the ground as the door opened, started as if he’d been shot, and stepped back a pace or two, with an audible, “If that isn’t the very devil!”
There, in a low chair, sat the Tressillian, graceful as a Sphakiote girl, with a toilet as perfect as her profile, dark hair like waves of silk, and dark eyes full of liquid light, that, when they looked irresistible, could do anything with any man that they liked. Violet certainly looked as unlike that unlucky ogre and scapegoat, the devil, as a young lady ever could. But worse than a score of demons was she in poor Telfer’s eyes: to have come out to Essellau only to be shut up in a country-house for a whole month with his pet aversion!—certainly it was a hard case, and the fierce lightning glance he flashed on her was pardonable under the circumstances. But nobody’s more impassive than the Major: I’ve seen him charge down into the Sikhs with just the same calm, quiet expression as he’d wear smoking and reading a novel at home; so he soon rallied, bowed to the Tressillian, who gave him an inclination as cold as the North Pole, shook hands with her aunt and cousins (three women I hate: the mamma’s the most dexterous of manœuvrers, and the girls the arrantest of flirts), and then sat down to a little quiet chat with Virginie von Edenburgh, who’s pretty, intelligent, and unaffected, though she’s a belle at the Viennese court. Telfer was pleasant with the little comtesse; he’d known her from childhood, and she was engaged to the colonel of Marc’s troop, so that Telfer felt quite sure she’d no designs upon him, and talked to her sans géne, though to have wholly abstained from bitterness and satire would have been an impossibility to him, with the obnoxious Tressillian seated within sight. Once he fixed her with his calm gray eyes, she met them with a proud flashing glance; Telfer gave back the defiance, and guerre à outrance was declared between them. It was plain to see that they hated one another by instinct, and I began to think Calceolaria wasn’t so safe in my stables after all, for if the Major set his face against anything, his father, who pretty well worshipped him, would never venture to do it in opposition; he’d as soon think of leaving Torwood to the country, to be turned into an infirmary or a museum.
That whole day Telfer was agreeable to the Von Edenburgh, distantly courteous to the Carterets, and utterly oblivious of the very existence of the Tressillian. When we were smoking together, after dinner, he began to unburden himself of his mighty wrath.
“Where the deuce did you pick up that girl, Marc?” asked he, as we stood looking at the sun setting over the woods of Essellau, and crimsoning the western clouds.
“What girl?” asked Marc.
“That confounded Tressillian,” answered the Major, gloomily.
“I told you the Carterets were friends of my mother’s, and last year, when the Tressillian came with them to Baden, Virginie met her, and they were struck with a great and sudden love for one another, after the insane custom of women. But why on earth, Telfer, do you call her such names? I think her divine; her eyes are something——”
“I wish her eyes had been at the devil before she’d bewitched my poor father with them,” said Telfer, pulling a rose to pieces fiercely. “I give you my word, Marc, that if I didn’t like you so well, I’d go straight off home to-morrow. Here have I been turning out of my route twenty times, on purpose to avoid her, and then she must turn up at the very place I thought I was sure to be safe from her. It’s enough to make a man swear, I should say, and not over-mildly either.”
“But what’s she done?” cried Von Edenburgh, thinking, I dare say, that Telfer had gone clean mad. “Refused you—jilted you—what is it?”
“Refused me! I should like to see myself giving her the chance,” said the Major, with intense scorn. “No but she’s done what I’d never forgive—tried to cozen the poor old governor into marrying her. She’s no money, you know, and no home of her own; but, for all that, for a girl of twenty to try and hook an old man of seventy-five, to cheat him into the idea that he’s made a conquest, and chisel him into the belief that she’s in love with him—faugh! the very idea disgusts one. What sort of a wife would a woman make who could act such a lie?”
As he spoke, a form swept past him, and a beautiful face full of scorn and passion gleamed on him through the demi-lumière.
“By Jove! you’ve done it now, Telfer,” said Walsham. “She was behind us, I bet you, gathering those roses; her hands are full of them, and she took that means of showing us she was within earshot. You have set your foot in it nicely, certainly.”
“Ce m’est bien égal,” said Telfer, haughtily. “If she hear what I say of her, so much the better. It’s the truth, that a young girl who’d sell herself for money, as soon as she’s got what she wanted will desert the man who’s given it to her; and I like my father too well to stand by and see him made a fool of. The Tressillian and I are open foes now—we’ll see which wins.”
“And a very fair foe you have, too,” thought I, as I looked at Violet that night as she stood in the window, a wreath of lilies on her splendid hair, and her impassioned eyes lighting into joyous laughter as she talked nonsense with Von Edenburgh.
“Isn’t she first-rate style, in spite of your prejudice?” I said to Telfer, who’d just finished a game at écarté with De Tintiniac, one of the best players in Europe. If the Major has any weakness, écarté is one of them. He just glanced across with a sarcastic smile.
“Well got up, of course; so are all actresses—on the stage.”
Then he dropped his glass and went back to his cards, and seemed to notice the splendid Tressillian not one whit more than he did her pup.
Whether his discourteous speeches had piqued Violet into showing off her best paces, or whether it’s a natural weakness of her sex to shine in all times and places that they can, certain it was that I never saw the Tressillian more brilliant and bewitching than she was that night. Waltzing with Von Edenburgh, singing with me, talking fun with Fred, or merely lying back in her chair, playing lazily with her bouquet, she was eminently dangerous in whatever she did, and there wasn’t a man in the castle who didn’t gather round her, except her sworn foe the Major. Even De Tintiniac, that old campaigner at the green tables, who has long ago given over any mistress save hazard, glanced once or twice at the superb eyes beaming with the droit de conquête, but Telfer never looked up from his cards.
Telfer and she parted with the chilliest of “good nights,” and met again in the morning with the most frigid of “good mornings,” and to that simple exchange of words was their colloquy limited for an entire fortnight. Unless I’d been witness of it, I wouldn’t have credited that any two people could live for that space of time in the same country-house and keep so distant. Nobody noticed it, for there were no end of guests at Essellau, and the Tressillian had so many liege subjects ready to her slightest bidding, that the Major’s lèse-majesté wasn’t of such consequence. But when day after day came, and he spent them all boar-hunting, shooting, fishing, or playing rouge-et-noir and roulette at the gaming-tables in Pipesandbeersbad, and when he was in the drawing-rooms at Essellau she saw him amusing and agreeable, and unbending to every one but herself, I don’t know anything of woman’s nature if I didn’t see Violet’s delicate cheek flush, and her eyes flash, whenever she caught the Major’s cool, contemptuous, depreciating glance, much harder to her sex to bear than spoken ridicule or open war. Occasionally he cast a sarcasm, quick, sharp, and relentless as a Minié ball, at her, which she fired back with such rifle-powder as she had in her flask; but the return shot fell as harmlessly as it might have done on Achilles’s breast.
“A man is very silly to marry,” he was saying one evening to Marc, “since, as Emerson says, from the beginning of the world such as are in the institution want to get out, and such as are out want to get in.”
Violet, sitting near at the piano, turned half round. “If all others are of my opinion, Major Telfer, you will never be tempted, for no one will be willing to enter it with you.”
The shot fell short. Telfer neither smiled nor looked annoyed, but answered, tranquilly,—
“Possibly; but my time is to come. When I own Torwood, ladies will be as kind to me as they are now to my father; for it is wonderful what a charm to renew youth, reform rakes, buy love, and make the Beast the Beauty, is ‘un peu de poudre d’or,’ in the eyes of the beau sexe.”
The Tressillian flushed scarlet, but soon recovered herself.
“I have heard,” she said, pulling her bouquet to pieces with impatience, “that when people look through smoked glass the very sun looks dusky, and so I suppose, through your own moral perceptions, you view those of others. You know what De la Fayette wrote to Madame de Sablé: ‘Quelle corruption il faut avoir dans l’esprit pour être capable d’imaginer tout cela!’”
“It does not follow,” answered Telfer, impassively. “De la Fayette was quite wrong. Suard was nearer the truth when he said that Rochefoucauld, ‘a peint les hommes comme il les à vus. Il n’appartenait qu’à un homme d’une réputation bien pure et bien distinguée d’oser flétrir ainsi le principe de toutes les actions humaines.’”
“And Major Telfer is so unassailable himself that he can mount his pedestal and censure all weaker mortals,” said Violet, sarcastically. “Your judgments are, perhaps, not always as infallible as the gods’.”
“You are gone very wide of the original subject, Miss Tressillian,” answered Telfer, coldly. “I was merely speaking of that common social fraud and falsehood, a mariage de convenance, which, as I shall never sin in that manner myself, I am at liberty to censure with the scorn I feel for it.”
He looked hard at her as he spoke. The Tressillian’s eyes answered the stare as haughtily.
“Some may not be all mariages de convenance that you choose to call such. It does not necessarily follow, because a girl marries a rich man, that she marries him for his money. There may be love in the case, but the world never gives her the grace of the doubt.”
“What hardy hypocrisy,” thought Telfer. “She’d actually try to persuade me to my face that she was in love with the poor old governor and his gout!”
“Pardon me,” he said, with his most cynical smile. “In attributing disinterested affection to ladies, I think ‘quelque disposition qu’ait le monde à mal juger, il fait plus souvent grace au faux mérite qu’il ne fait injustice au véritable.’”
The Tressillian’s soft lips curved angrily; she turned away, and began to sing again, at Walsham’s entreaty. Telfer got up and lounged over to Virginie, with whom he laughed, talked, waltzed, and played chess for the rest of the evening.
III
From Which It Would Appear, That It Is Sometimes Well to Begin With a Little Aversion
After this split, Telfer and the Tressillian were rather further off each other than before; and whenever riding, and driving, at dinner, or in lionizing, they came by chance together, he avoided her silently as much as ever he could, without making a parade of it. Violet could see very well how cordially he hated her, and, woman-like, I dare say mine, and Edenburgh’s, and Walsham’s, and all her devoted friends’ admiration was valueless, as long as her vowed enemy treated her with such careless contempt.
One morning the two foes met by chance. Telfer and I, after a late night over at Pipesandbeersbad, with lansquenet, cheroots, and cognac, had betaken ourselves out to whip the Beersbad, whose fish, for all their boiling by the hot springs, are first-rate, I can assure you. Telfer tells you he likes fishing, but I never see that he does much more than lie full length under the shadiest tree he can find, with his cap over his eyes and his cigar in his mouth, doing the dolce lazily enough. A three-pound trout had no power to rouse him; and he’s lost a salmon before now in the Tweed because it bored him to play it! Shade of old Izaak! is that liking fishing? But few things ever did excite him, except it was a charge, or a Kaffir scrimmage; and then he looked more like a concentrated tempest than anything else, and woe to the turban that his sabre came down upon.
That part of the stream we’d tried first had been whipped before us, or the fish wouldn’t bite; and I, who haven’t as much patience as I might have, went up higher to try my luck. Telfer declined to come; he was comfortable, he said, and out of the sun; he preferred “Indiana” and his cheroot to catching all the fish in the Beersbad, so I bid him good-bye, and left him smoking and reading at his leisure under the linden-trees. I went further on than I had meant, up round a bend of the river, and was too absorbed in filling my basket to notice a storm coming up from the west, till I began to find myself getting wet to the skin, and the lightning flying up and down the hills round Essellau. I looked for the Major as I passed the lime-trees, but he wasn’t there, and I made the best of my way back to the castle, supposing he’d got there before me; but I was mistaken.
“I’ve seen nothing of him,” said Marc. “He’s stalking about the woods, I dare say, admiring the lightning. That’s more than the poor Tressillian does, I bet. She went out by herself, I believe, just before the storm, to get a water-lily she wanted to paint, and hasn’t appeared since. By Jove! if Telfer should have to play knight-errant to his ‘pet aversion,’ what fun it would be.”
Marc had his fun, for an hour afterwards, when the storm had blown over, up the terrace steps came Violet and the Major. They weren’t talking to each other, but they were actually walking together; and the courtesy with which he put a dripping rose-branch out of her path with his stick, was something quite new.
It seems that Telfer, disliking disagreeable sensations, and classing getting wet among such, had arisen when the thunder began to growl, and slowly wended his way homewards. But before he was halfway to Essellau the rain began to drip off his moustache, and seeing a little marble temple (the Parthenon turned into a summer-house!) close by, he thought he might as well go in and have another weed till it grew finer. Go in he did; and he’d just smoked half a cigar, and read the last chapter of “Indiana,” when he looked up, and saw the Tressillian’s pug, looking a bedraggled and miserable object, at his feet, and the Tressillian herself standing within a few yards of him. If Telfer had abstained from a few fierce mental oaths, he would have been of a much more pacific nature than he ever pretended to be; and I don’t doubt that he looked hauteur concentrated as he rose at his enemy’s entrance. Violet made a movement of retreat, but then thought better of it. It would have seemed too much like flying from the foe. So with a careless bow she sank on one of the seats, took off her hat, shook the rain-drops off her hair, and busied herself in sedulous attentions to the pug. The Major thought it incumbent on him to speak a few sentences about the thunder that was cracking over their heads; Violet answered him as briefly; and Telfer putting down his cigar with a sigh, sat watching the storm in silence, not troubling himself to talk any more.
As she bent down to pat the pug she caught his eyes on her with a cold, critical glance. He was thinking how pure her profile was and how exquisite her eyes, and—of how cordially he should hate her if his father married her. Her color rose, but she met his look steadily, which is a difficult thing to do if you’ve anything to conceal, for the Major’s eyes are very keen and clear. Her lips curved with a smile half amused, half disdainful. “What a pity, Major Telfer,” she said, with a silvery laugh, “that you should be condemned to imprisonment with one who is unfortunately such a bête noire to you as I am! I assure you, I feel for you; if I were not coward enough to be a little afraid of that lightning, I would really go away to relieve you from your sufferings. I should feel quite honored by the distinction of your hatred if I didn’t know, you, on principle, dislike every woman living. Is your judgment always infallible?”
Beyond a little surprise in his eyes, Telfer’s features were as impassive as ever. “Far from it,” he answered, quietly “I merely judge people by their actions.”
The Tressillian’s luminous eyes flashed proudly. “An unsafe guide, Major Telfer; you cannot judge of actions until you know their motives. I know perfectly well why you dislike and avoid me: you listened to a foolish report, and you heard me giving your father permission to write to me. Those are your grounds, are they not?”
Telfer, for once in his life, was astonished, but he looked at her fixedly. “And were they not just ones?”
“No,” said Violet, vehemently,—“no, they were most rankly unjust; and it is hard, indeed, if a girl, who has no friends or advisers that she can trust, may not accept the kindness and ask the counsels of a man fifty-five years older than herself without his being given to her as a lover, and the world’s whispering that she is trying to entrap him. You pique yourself on your clear-sightedness, Major Telfer, but for once your judgment failed you when you attributed such mean and mercenary motives to me, and supposed, because, as you so generously stated, I had ‘no money and no home,’ I must necessarily have no heart or conscience, but be ready to give myself at any moment to the highest bidder, and take advantage of the kindness of your noble-minded, generous-hearted father to trick him into marriage.” She stopped, fairly out of breath with excitement. Telfer was going to speak, but she silenced him with a haughty gesture. “No; now we are started on the subject, hear me to the end. You have done me gross injustice—an offence the Tressillians never forgive—but, for my own sake, I wish to show you how mistaken you were in your hasty condemnation. At the beginning of the season I was introduced to your father. He knew my mother well in her girlhood, and he said I reminded him of her. He was very kind to me, and I, who have no real friend on earth, of course was grateful to him, for I was thankful to have any one on whom I could rely. You know, probably as well as I do, that there is little love lost between the Carterets and myself, though, by my father’s will, I must stay with them till I am of age. I have one brother, a boy of eighteen; he is with his regiment serving out in India, and the climate is killing him by inches, though he is too brave to try and get sick leave. Your father has been doing all he can to have him exchanged; the letters I have had from him have been to tell me of his success, and to say that Arthur is gazetted to the Buffs, and coming home overland. There is the head and front of my offending, Major Telfer; a very simple explanation, is it not? Perhaps another time you will be more cautious in your censure.”
A faint flush came over the Major’s bronzed cheek; he looked out of the portico, and was silent for a minute. The knowledge that he has wronged another is a keen pang to a proud man of an honor almost fastidious in his punctilio of right. He swung quickly round, and held out his hand to her.
“I beg your pardon; I have misjudged you, and I am thoroughly ashamed of myself for it,” he said, in a low voice.
When the Major does come down from his hauteur, and let some of his winning cordial nature come out, no woman living, unless she were some animated Medusa, could find it in her heart to say him nay. His frank self-condemnation touched Violet, despite herself, and, without thinking, she laid her small fingers in his proffered hand. Then the Tressillian pride flashed up again; she drew it hastily away, and walked out into the air.
“Pray do not distress yourself,” she said, with an effort (not successful) to seem perfectly calm and nonchalant. “It is not of the slightest consequence; we understand each other’s sentiments now, and shall in future be courteous in our hate like two of the French noblesse, complimenting one another before they draw their swords to slay or to be slain. It has cleared now, so I will leave you to the solitude I disturbed. Come, Floss.” And calling the pug after her, Violet very gracefully swept down the steps, but with a stride the Major was at her side.
“Nay, Miss Tressillian,” he said, gently, “it is true I’ve given you cause to think me as rude as Orson or Caliban, but I am not quite such a bear as to let you walk home through these woods alone.”
Violet made an impatient movement. “Pray don’t trouble yourself. We are close to the castle, and—pardon me, but truth-telling seems the order for the day—I much prefer you in your open enmity to your simulated courtesy. We have been rude to each other for three weeks; in another one you will be gone, so it is scarcely worth while to begin politeness now.”
“As you please,” said Telfer, coldly.
He’d made great advances and concessions for him, and was far too English when repulsed to go on making any more. But he was astonished—extremely so—for he’d been courted and sought since he was in jackets, and couldn’t make out a young girl like the Tressillian treating him so lightly. He walked along beside her in profound silence, but though neither of them spoke a word, he didn’t leave her side till she was safe on the terrace at Essellau. The Major was very grave that night at dinner, and occasionally he looked at Violet with a strange, inquiring glance, as the young lady, in the most brilliant of spirits, fired away French repartees with Von Edenburgh and De Tintiniac, her face absolutely rayonnant in the gleam of the wax lights. I thought the spirits were a little too high to be real. Late at night, as he and I and Marc were smoking on the terrace, before turning in, Telfer constrained himself to tell us of the scene in the summer-house. He’d abused her to us. Common honor, he said, obliged him to tell us the truth about her.
“I am sorry,” said he, slowly, between the whiffs of his meerschaum. “If there is one thing I hate, it is injustice. I was never guilty of misjudging anybody before in my life, that I know of; and, I give you my word, I experienced a new sensation—I absolutely felt humbled before that girl’s great, flashing, truthful eyes, to think that I’d been listening to report and judging from prejudice like any silly, gossiping woman.”
“It seems to have made a great impression on you, Telfer,” laughed Marc. “Has your detestation of Violet changed to something as warm, but more gentle? Shall we have to say the love wherewith he loves her is greater than the hate wherewith he hated her?”
“Not exactly,” answered the Major, calmly, with a supercilious twist of his moustaches. “But I like pluck wherever I see it, and she’s a true Tressillian.”
IV
In Which the Major Provokes a Quarrel in Behalf of the Fair Tressillian
“Well, Telfer,” said I, two mornings after, “if you want to be at the moor by the 12th, we must start soon; this is the 6th. It will be sharp work to get there as it is.”
“What, do you think of not going at all?” said Telfer, laying down the Revue des deux Mondes with a yawn. “We are very well here. Marc bothers me tremendously to stay on another month, and the shooting’s as good as we shall get at Glenattock. What do you say, Vane?”
“Just as you like,” I answered. “The pigs are as good as the grouse, for anything I know. They put me in mind of getting my first spear at Burampootra. I only thought you wanted to be off out of sight of the Tressillian.”
He laughed slightly. “Oh! the young lady’s no particular eyesore to me now I don’t regard her in the light of a belle-mère. Well, shall we stop here, then?”
“Comme vous voulez. I don’t care.”
“No philosopher ever moves when he’s comfortable,” said the Major, laughing. “I’ll write and tell Montague he can shoot over Glenattock if he likes. I dare say he can find some men who’ll keep him company and fill the box. I say, old fellow, I’ve won Calceolaria, but I sha’n’t have her, because I consider the bet drawn. Our wager was laid on the supposition that the Tressillian wished to marry the governor, but as she never has had the desire, I’ve neither lost nor won.”
“Well, we’ll wait and see,” said I. “Christmas isn’t come yet. Here comes Violet. She looks well, don’t she? Confess now, prejudice apart, that you admire her, nolens volens.”
Telfer looked at her steadily as she came into the billiard-room in her hat and habit, as she’d been riding with Lucy Carteret, Marc, and De Tintiniac. “Yes,” he said, slowly, under his breath, “she is very good style, I admit.”
Lucy Carteret challenged Telfer to a game; she has a tall, svelte figure, and knows she looks well at billiards. He played lazily, and let her win easily enough, paying as little attention to the agaceries and glances she lavished upon him as if he’d been an automaton. When they’d played it out, he went up to the Tressillian, who was talking to Marc in the window, and, to my supreme astonishment, asked her to have a game.
“Thank you, no,” answered Violet, coldly; “it is too warm for billiards.”
This was certainly the first time the Major had ever been refused in any of his overtures to her sex, and I believe it surprised him exceedingly. He bent his head, and soon after he went for a walk in the rosery with Lucy Carteret, whom he hates. We always hate those manœuvring, maniéré girls, who are everlastingly flinging bait after us, whether or no we want to nibble; and just in proportion as they fixatrice, and crinoline, and cosmetique to hook us, will leave us to die in the sun when they’ve once trapped us into the basket.
That night, when Telfer sat down to écarté, Violet was singing in another room, out of which her voice came distinctly to us. I noticed he didn’t play quite as well as usual. I don’t suppose he could be listening, though, for he doesn’t care for music, and still less for the Tressillian.
“Mademoiselle,” said De Tintiniac, going up to her afterwards, “you can boast of greater conquests than Orpheus. He only charmed rocks, but you have distracted the two most inveterate joueurs in Europe.”
Telfer looked annoyed. Violet laughed. “Pardon me if I doubt your compliment. If you were so kind as to listen to me, I have not enough vanity to think that your opponent would yield to what he would think such immeasurable weakness.”
“You are not magnanimous, Miss Tressillian,” said Telfer, in a low tone, leaning down over the piano. “You are ceaselessly reminding me of a hasty prejudice, unjustly formed, of which I have told you I am heartily ashamed.”
“A hasty prejudice!” repeated Violet. “I beg your pardon, Major Telfer; I think ours is a very strong and lasting enmity, as mutual as it is well founded. Don’t contradict me; you know you could have shot me with as little remorse as a partridge.”
“But can you never forget,” continued Telfer, impatiently, “that my enmity, as you please to term it, was grafted on erroneous opinions and false reports, and will you never credit that when I see myself in the wrong, I am too just to others to continue in it?”
The Tressillian laughed—a mischievous, provoquant laugh. “No, I believe neither in sudden conversions nor sudden friendships. Pray do not trouble yourself to be ’just’ to me; you see I did not droop and die under the shadow of your wrath.”
“Oh no,” said Telfer, with a sardonic twist of his moustaches, “one would not accuse you of too much softness, Miss Tressillian.”
She colored, and the pride of her family flashed out of her eyes. The Tressillians are all deucedly proud, and would die sooner than yield an inch. “If by softness you mean weakness, you are right,” she said, haughtily. “As I have told you, we never forgive injustice.”
Telfer frowned. If there was one thing he hated more than another, it was a woman who had anything hard about her. He smiled his chilliest smile. “Those are harsh words from a lady’s lips—not so becoming to them as something gentler. You remind me, Miss Tressillian, of a young panther I once had, beautiful to look at, but eminently dangerous to approach, much less to caress. Everybody admired my panther, but no one dared to choose it for a pet.”
With this uncourteous allegory the Major turned away, leaving Violet to make it out as best she might. It was good fun to watch the Tressillian’s face: I only, standing near, had caught what he said, for he had spoken very low. First she looked haughty and annoyed, then a little troubled and perplexed: she sat quiet a minute, playing thoughtfully with her bracelets; then shook her head with a movement of defiance, and began to sing a Venetian barcarole with more élan and spirit than ever.
“By Jove! Telfer,” said I, as we sat in the smoking-room that night, “your would-have-been mother-in-law has plenty of pluck. She’d have kept you in good training, and made a better boy of you; it’s quite a loss to your morals that your father didn’t marry her.”
Telfer didn’t look best pleased. He stretched himself full length on one of the divans, and answered not.
“I shouldn’t be surprised if, with all her beauty, she hangs on hand,” said Walsham, “for she hasn’t a rap, you know; her governor gamed it all away, and she’s certainly a bit of a flirt.”
“I don’t think so,” said Telfer, shortly.
“Oh, by George! don’t you? but I do,” cried Fred. “Why, she takes a turn at us all, from old De Tintiniac, with his padded figure and coulisses compliments, to Marc, young and beautiful, as the novels say,—but we’ll spare his blushes—from Vane, there, with his long rent-roll, to poor me, who she knows goes on tick for my weeds and gloves. She flirts with us all, one after the other, except you, whom she don’t dare to touch. Tell me where you get your noli me tangere armor, Telfer, and I’ll adopt it to-morrow, for the girls make such desperate love to me I know some of them will propose before long.”
Telfer smoked vigorously during Fred’s peroration, and his brow darkened. “I do not consider Miss Tressillian a flirt,” he said, slowly. “She’s too careless in showing you her weak points to be trying to trap you. What I call a coquette is a woman who is all things to all men, whose every languishing glance is a bait, and whose every thought is a conquest.”
“And pray how can you tell but what the Tressillian’s naturalness and carelessness may be only a superior bit of acting? The highest art, you know, is to imitate nature so close that you can’t tell which is which,” laughed Walsham.
Telfer didn’t seem to relish the suggestion, but went on smoking fiercely.
“Not that I want to speak against the girl,” Fred went on; “she’s very amusing, and well enough, I dare say, if she weren’t so devilish proud.”
“You seem rather inconsistent,” said Telfer, impatiently. “First, you accuse her of being too free, and then blame her for being too reserved.”
Walsham laughed.
“If I’m inconsistent, you’re a perfect weathercock. A month ago you were calling Violet every name you could think of, and now you snap us all off short if we say a word against her.”
Telfer looked haughty enough to extinguish Fred upon the spot; Fred being a small, lively little chap, with not the slightest dignity about him.
“I know little or nothing of Miss Tressillian, but as I was the first to prejudice you all against her, it is only common honor to take her part when I think her unjustly attacked.”
Fred gave me a wink of intense significance, but remonstrated no further, for Telfer had something of the dark look upon him that our men knew so well when he led them down to the slaughter at Alma and Balaklava.
“I tell you,” continued the Major, after a little silence, “that I am disgusted with myself for having listened to whispers and reports, and believed in them just because they suited the bias of my prejudice. It didn’t matter to me whom my father married, as far as money went, for beyond 10,000l. or so, it must all come in the entail; but I couldn’t endure the idea of his being chiselled by some Becky Sharp or Blanche Armory, and I made up my mind that the Tressillian was of that genre. I’ve changed my opinion now. I don’t think she either is an actress or an intrigante; and I should be a coward indeed if I hesitated to say so, out of common justice to a young girl who has no one to defend her.”
“Bravo, my boy!” said Walsham; “I thought the Tressillian’s bright eyes wouldn’t let you hate her long. You’re quite right, though ’pon my life it is really horrid how women contrive to damage each other. If there’s an unlucky girl who has made the best match of the season—she might be an angel from heaven—her bosom-friends would manage gently to spread abroad the interesting facts that she’s a ‘dreadful flirt,’ ‘has a snub nose,’ is an awful temper, had a ballet-girl for her mamma, or something detrimental. An attractive woman is the target for all her sex to shoot their sneers at, and if the poor thing isn’t so riddled with arrows that she’s no beauty left, it isn’t her sisters’ fault.”
“I believe you,” said Telfer. “My gauge of a woman’s fascinations is the amount of hatred all the others bear her. It often amuses me to hear the tone that ladies take in talking of some girl whom we admire. She’s a charming creature—a darling—their particular friend but... there’s always a ’but’ to neutralize the praise, and with their honeyed hatred they contrive to damn the luckless object irretrievably. If another man’s a good shot, or whip, or billiard-player, we’re not spiteful to him for it. We think him a good fellow, and like him the better; but the dear beau sexe cannot bear a rival, and never rest while one of their acquaintance has diamonds a carat larger, dresses a trifle more costly, has finer horses, or more conquests. The only style of friend I ever heard women speak well of is some plain and timorous individual, good-natured to foolery, and weak as water, who never comes in their orbit, and whom we never look at; and then what a darling she is, and how eloquently they will laud her to the skies, despising her miserably all the while for not having been born pretty!”
“True enough,” Marc began. “Why do the Carterets treat the Tressillian so disagreeably?—only because, though without their fortune, she makes ten times their coups; and get themselves up how they may, they know none of us care to waltz with them if she’s in the room. Let’s drink her health in Marcobrunnen—she’s magnificent eyes.”
“And first-rate style,” said I.
“And a deuced pretty foot,” cried Fred.
“Et une taille superbe,” added de Tintiniac, just come in. “En vérité, elle est chouette cette Violette Anglaise.”
So we chanted the Tressillian’s praises. Telfer drank the toast in silence—I thought with a frown on his brow at the freedom with which we discussed his fair foe.
Little Countess Virginie’s wedding was to come off in another month, and Marc begged us so hard to stay on till then, that, Telfer seeming very willing, I consented, though it would be the first September I had ever spent out of the English open since I was old enough to know partridges from pheasants. The Tressillian being Virginie’s pet friend, after young ladies’ custom of contracting eternal alliances (which ordinarily terminate in a quarrel about the shade of a ponceau ribbon, or a mauve flower, or a cornet’s eyes, some three months after the signing and sealing thereof), was of course to be one of the filles d’honneur. So, as I said to Telfer, he’d have time for a few more battles before the two enemies parted to meet again—nobody could tell when.
I began to think that the Major had really been wounded, and that his opponent’s bright eyes wouldn’t let him come out of the fight wholly scathless, as I saw him leaning against the wall at a ball in the Redoute at Pipesandbeersbad, watching Violet with great earnestness as she whirled round in a deux temps, bewitching as was her wont all the frequenters of the Bad. Rich English dyspeptics, poverty-stricken princes, Austrian diplomats, come to cure their hypochondria; French décorés, to try their new cabals and martingales; British snobs, to indulge the luxury of grumbling,—all of them found some strange attraction in the “Violette Anglaise.”
Violet sank on a seat after her valse. Telfer quietly displaced a young dragoon from Lucca, and sat down by her.
“I am going to stay on another month, Miss Tressillian; are you not sorry to hear it?” he said, with a smile, but I thought a little anxiety in his eyes.
The color flushed over her face, and she answered, with a laugh, not quite a real one: “Of course I am very sorry. I would go away myself to let you enjoy your last week in peace if I were not engaged to Virginie. Cannot you get me leave of absence from her? I know you would throw your whole heart into the petition.”
Telfer curled his moustaches impatiently.
“Truth has come out of her well at last,” he said, with a dash of bitterness, “and has disguised herself in Miss Tressillian’s tulle illusion.”
Violet colored brighter still.
“Well,” she said, quickly, “was it not your decision that we should never waste courtesy on one another? Was not your own desire guerre à outrance?”
“No,” answered Telfer, his brow darkening; “that I certainly must deny. I did you injustice, and I offered you an apology. No man could do more than acknowledge he was in the wrong. I offered you the palm-branch once; you were pleased to refuse it. I am not a man, Miss Tressillian, to run the chance of another repulse. My friendship is not so cheap that I shall intrude it where it is undesired.” He spoke with a laugh, but his eyes had a grave anger in them that Violet didn’t quite relish.
She looked a little bit frightened up at him. The proud, brilliant Tressillian was as pale and quiet as a little child after a good scolding. But she soon rallied, and flashed up haughtier than ever.
“Major Telfer, you make one great error—one very common to your sex. You drop us one day, and take us up the next, and then think that we must be grateful to you for the supreme honor you do us. You are cold to us, absolutely rude, as long as it pleases your lordly will, and then, at the first word of courtesy and kindness, you expect us to rise and make you a révérence in the utmost humiliation and thanksgiving. You men”—and Violet began destroying her bouquet with immense energy—“treat us exactly as a cat will treat a mouse. You yourself, for instance, in a moment’s hasty judgment, construed all my actions by the light of your own unjust suspicions, and believing everything, no matter how unfounded, spoke against me to all your acquaintance, and treated me with, as you must admit, but scanty courtesy, for one whom I have heard piques himself on his high breeding. And now, when you discover that your suspicions had no foundation, and your hatred no grounds, you wonder that I find it difficult to be as grateful as you seem to think I should be for your having so kindly misjudged me.”
As the young lady gave all this forth with much vehemence and spirit, Telfer’s lips set, and the blood forced itself through the bronze of his cheeks. He bent towards her till his moustache touched her hair.
“You have no mercy, Violet Tressillian,” he said, between his teeth. “Take care that no one is as pitiless to you in return.”
She started, and her bouquet fell to the ground. Telfer gave it her back without looking at her, and turned round to an Austrian with his usual impassive air.
“Do you know where De Tintiniac is, Staumgaurn? In the roulette room? All right. I am going there now.”
He did go there, and I’ve a notion that the croupier of Pipesandbeersbad made something that night out of the Major’s preoccupation.
Violet, meanwhile, was waltzing with Staumgaurn and a dozen others, but looked rather white—not using any rouge but what nature had given her—and by the end of the evening her bouquet had utterly come to grief. Days went on till a fortnight of our last month had gone, and Telfer, to my sorrow (not surprise, for I always thought the Tressillian was a dangerous foe, and that, like Ringwood, he’d find himself unhorsed by a woman), grew grave and stern, haunted with ten times more recklessness than usual, and threw away his guineas at the Redoute in a wild way, quite new with him, for though he liked play pour s’amuser, he had too much control over his passions ever to let play get ascendancy over him. I used to think he had the strongest passions and the strongest will over them of any man I knew; but now a passion least undesired and most hopeless of any that ever entered his soul, seemed to have mastered him. Not that he showed it; with the Tressillian he was simply distantly courteous; but I, who was on the qui vive for his first sign of being conquered, saw his eyebrows contract when somebody was paying her desperate court, and his glance lighten and flash when she passed near him. They had never been alone since the night of the ball, and Violet was too proud to try for a reconciliation, even if she’d cared for one.
One night we were at a ball at the Prince Humbugandschwerinn’s. The Tressillian had been waltzing with all her might, and had all the men in the room, Humbugandschwerinn himself included, round her. Telfer leaned against a console ten minutes, watching her, and then abruptly left the ball-room, and did not return again. He came instead into the card-room, and sat down to écarté with De Tintiniac, and lost two games at ten Napoleons a side. Generally, he played very steadily, never giving his attention to anything but the game; but now he was listening to what a knot of men were saying, who were laughing, chatting, and sipping coffee, while they talked about—the Tressillian.
“I mark the king and play,” said Telfer, his eyes fixed fiercely on a young fellow who was discussing Violet much as he’d have discussed his new Danish dog or English hunter. He was Jack Snobley, Lord Featherweight’s son, who was doing the grand, a confounded young parvenu, vulgar as his cotton-spinning ancestry could make him, who could appreciate the Tressillian about as much as he could Dannecker’s Ariadne, which work of art he pronounced, in my hearing, “a pretty girl, but the dawg very badly done—too much like a cat.” “I take your three to two,” continued Telfer, his brow lowering as he heard the young fool praising and criticising Violet with small ceremony. The Major had the haughtiest patrician principles, and to hear a snob like this sandy-haired honorable, speaking of the woman he chose to champion as he might have done of some ballerina or Chaumière belle, was rather too much for Telfer’s self-control.
When the game was done, he rose, and walked quietly over to where Snobley stood. He looked him down with that cold, haughty glance that has cowed men bolder than Lord Featherweight’s hopeful offspring, and said a word or two to him in a low tone, which caused that gentleman to flush up red and look fierce with all his might.
“What’s the girl to you, that I mayn’t speak as I choose of her?” he retorted; the Sillery, of which he’d taken a good deal too much, working up in his weak brain. “I’ve heard that she jilted you, and that was why you’ve been setting them all against her, and saying she wanted to hook your old governor.”
The Sillery must have indeed obscured Jack’s reason with a vengeance to make him venture this very elegant and refined speech with the Major, most fastidious in his ideas of good breeding, and most direful in his wrath, of any man I ever knew. Telfer’s cheek turned as white with passion as the bronze would let it; his gray eyes grew almost black as they stared at the young snob. He was so supremely astonished that this ill-bred boy had actually dared thus to address him!
“Mr. Snobley,” he said, with his chilled and most ironical smile, and his quietest, most courteous voice, “you must learn good manners before you venture to parley with gentlemen. Allow me to give you your first lesson.” And stooping, as if to a very little boy—young Snobley was a good foot shorter than he—the Major struck him on the lips with his left-hand French kid glove. It was a very gentle blow—it would scarcely have reddened the Tressillian’s delicate skin—but on the Hon. Jack it had electric effect. He was beginning to swear, to look big, to talk of satisfaction, insult, and all the rest of it; but Telfer laughed, bent his head, told him he was quite ready to satisfy him to any extent he required; and, turning away, sat down to écarté calm and impassive as ever, and pleased greatly with himself for having silenced this silly youth. The affair was much less exciting to him than it was to any other man in the room. “It’s too great an honor for him, the young brute, for me to be called out by him, as if he were one of us. I hate snobs; Lord Featherweight’s grandfather was butler to mine, and he himself was a cotton-spinner in Lancashire, and then this little contemptible puppy dares to——”
Telfer finished his sentence with a puff of smoke from his meerschaum, as he sat in his bedroom after the ball, into which sanctuary I had followed him to talk a little before turning in.
“To discuss the Tressillian,” said I. “But that surprises me less, old fellow, than that you should champion her. What’s it for? Has hate turned to the other thing? Have you come to think that, though she’d make a very bad mother-in-law, she’d make a charming wife? ‘Pon my life, if you have——”
“Hush! Don’t jest!”
I knew by the tone of those three little monosyllables that the Major was done for—caught, conquered, and fettered by his dangerous foe.
Telfer sat silent for some minutes, looking out of the window where the dawn was rising over the hills, with a settled gloom upon his face. Then he rose, and began swinging about the room with his firm cavalry tread, his arms crossed on his chest, and his head bent down.
“By Heaven! Vane,” he said at length, in a tone low, but passionate and bitter, “I have gone on like a baby or a fool, playing with tools till they have cut me. Against my will, against my judgment, against reason, hope, everything, I have lingered in that girl’s fascinations till I am bound by them hand and foot. I cannot deceive myself, I cannot shut the truth out; it was not honor, nor chivalry, nor friendship that made me to-night insult the man who spoke jestingly of her; it was love—love as mad, as reckless, as misplaced, as ever cursed a man and drove him to his ruin.” He paused, breathing hard, with his teeth set, then broke out again: “I, who held love in such disdain, who have so long kept my passions in such strong control, who thought no woman had the power to move me against my will—I love at last, despite myself, though I know that she is pitiless, that nothing I have said has been able to touch her into softer feeling, and that, mad as my passion is for her, if her nature be as hard and haughty as I fear, I dare not, if I could, make her my wife. No, Vane, no,” he went on, hastily, as I interrupted. “She does not love me, she has no gentler feeling in her; I thought she had, but I was mistaken. I tried her several times, but she will never forgive my first injustice to her; and to one with so little softness in her nature I dare not trust my peace. It were a worse hell even than that I now endure, to have her with me, loving her as I do, and feel that her cold heart gave no response to mine; to possess her glorious beauty, and yet know that her love and her soul were dead in their chill pride to me——”
He paused again, and leaned against the window, his chest heaving, and hot tears standing in his haughty eyes, wrung from the very anguish of his soul. The pride that had never before bent to any human thing, was now cast in the dust before a woman who never did, and probably never would, love him in return.
V
The Duel, and Its Consequences
The contemptible young puppy, for whom Telfer considered the honor of a ball from his pistol a great deal too good in the morning, sent Heavysides, of the 40th, a chum of his found up at the Bad, to claim “satisfaction,” the valor produced in him by Sillery over night having been kept up since by copious draughts of cognac and Seltzer. Having signified to Heavysides that the Major would do Mr. Snobley the favor of shooting him in the retired valley of Königshöhle at sunrise the next day, I went to tell Telfer, who had a hearty laugh at the young fellow’s challenge.
“I’d give him something to shoot me through the heart,” said he, bitterly, “but I don’t suppose he will. He’s practised at pigeons, not at men, probably. I won’t hurt him much, but a little lesson will do him good. Mind nobody in the house gets wind of the affair. Though I make a fool of myself in her defence, there is no need that she or others should know it. But if the boy should do for me, tell her, Vane—tell her,” said the Major, shading his eyes with his hand, “that I have learnt to love her as I never dreamt I should love any woman, and that I do not blame her for the just lesson she has read me for the rudeness and the unjust prejudice I indulged in so long towards her. She retaliated fairly upon me, and God forbid that she should have one hour of her life embittered through remorse for me.”
His voice sank into a whisper as he spoke; then, with an effort, he forced himself into calmness, and went to play billiards with Marc. This was the man who, three months before, had told me with such contemptuous decision that “we need never fall in love unless it’s convenient; and as to caring for a girl who doesn’t care for us, that was a weakness with which he couldn’t sympathize at all!”
Late that night, Telfer and I, coming down the stairs, met the Tressillian going up them to her room. The Major stopped her, and held out his hand, with a softened light in his eyes. “Will you not bid me good-bye? I may not see you again.”
There was a sadness in his smile bitterly significant to me, but very likely she didn’t see it, not having any key to it, as I had.
Violet turned pale, and I fancied her lips twitched, but it might be the flickering of the light of the staircase lamps on her face. At any rate, being a young lady born and bred in good society, she put her hand in his, with a simple “What! are you going away?”
“Perhaps. At any rate, let us part in peace.”
The proud man laughed as he said it, though he was enduring tortures. Violet heard the laugh, and didn’t see the straining anxiety in his gaze.
She drew her hand rapidly away. “Certainly. Bon voyage, Major Telfer, and good night,” she answered, carelessly; and, with a graceful bend, the Tressillian floated on up the stairs with the dignity of a young empress.
Telfer looked after the white gossamer dress and the beautiful head, with its wreath of scarlet flowers, and an iron sternness settled on his face. All hope was gone now. She could not have parted with him like this if she had cared for him one straw more than for the flowers in her hair. Yet, in the morning, he was going to risk his life for her. Ah, well! I’ve always seen that in love there’s one of the two who gives all and gets nothing.
In the morning, by five o’clock, in the valley of Königshöhle, a snug bit of pasture land between two rocks, where no gendarme could pounce upon us, young Snobley made his appearance to enjoy the honor of being a target for one of the best shots in Europe. Snobley had a good deal of swagger and would-be dash, and made a great show of pluck, which your man of true pluck never does. Telfer stood talking to me up to the last minute, took his pistol carelessly in his hand, and, without taking any apparent aim, fired.
If Telfer made up his mind to shoot off your fifth waistcoat-button, your fifth waistcoat-button would be irrevocably doomed; and therefore, having determined to himself to lodge a bullet in this young puppy’s left wrist, in the left wrist did the ball lodge. Snobley was “satisfied,” very amply satisfied, I fancy, by his looks. He’d fired, and sent his shot right into the trunk of a chestnut growing some seven yards off his opponent, to Heavyside’s supreme scorn.
“That’ll teach him not to talk of young ladies in his Mabille slang,” said Telfer, lighting his cigar. “I hope the little snob may be the better for my lesson. Now I am en route, I’ll go over to Pipesandbeersbad, breakfast at the Hôtel de France, and go and see Humbugandschwerinn: he wants me to look at some English racers Brookes has just sent him over. Make my excuses at Essellau; and I say, Vane, see if you can’t get us away in a day or two; have some call home, or something, for I shall never stand this long.”
With which not over-clear speech the Major mounted his horse and cantered off towards the Bad.
I rode back; went to my own room, had some chocolate, read Pigault le Brun, and about noon, seeing Virginie, the Tressillian, and several others out on the terrace, went to join them. Marc slipped his arm through mine and drew me aside.
“I say, Vane, what’s all this about Telfer striking some fellow for talking about the Tressillian? Staurmgaurn was over here just now, and told me there was a row in the card-room at Humbugandschwerinn’s between Telfer and another Englishman. I knew nothing about it. Is it true?”
“So far true,” I answered, “that Telfer put a ball in the youth’s wrist at seven o’clock this morning; and serve him right too—he’s an impudent young snob.”
“By Jove!” cried Marc, “what in the world made him take the Tressillian’s part? Have the beaux yeux really made an impression on the most unimpressionable of men?”
“The devil they have,” said I, crossly; “but I wish she’d been at the deuce first, for he’s too good a fellow to waste his best years pining after a pair of dark eyes.”
Marc shrugged his shoulders. “C’est vrai; but we’re all fools some time or other. The idea of Telfer’s chivalry! I declare it’s quite like the old days of Froissart and Commines—fighting for my lady’s favor.” And away he went, singing those two famous lines from Alcyonée:
Pour mériter son cœur, pour plaire à ses beaux yeux,
J’ai fait la guerre aux rois: je l’aurais faite aux dieux;
and I thought to myself that if the Tressillian proved a De Longueville, I could find it in my soul to shoot her without remorse.
But as I turned away from Marc, I came upon her, looking pale and ill enough to satisfy anybody. The color flushed into her cheeks as she saw me; we spoke of the weather, the chances of storm, Floss’s new collar, and other trifles; then she asked me, bending over her little dog,—
“Is Captain Staurmgaurn’s news true, that your friend has—has been quarrelling with a young Englishman?”
“Yes,” I answered. “I wonder Staurmgaurn told you; it is scarcely a topic to interest ladies. Telfer has given the young gentleman a well-merited lesson.”
“Have they fought?” she asked, breathlessly, laying her hand on my arm, and looking as white as a ghost.
“Yes, they have,” said I; “and he fought, Miss Tressillian, for one who gave him a very cold adieu last night.”
Her head drooped, she trembled perceptibly, and the color rushed back to her cheeks.
“Is he safe?” she asked, in the lowest of whispers.
“Quite,” I answered, quickly, as De Tintiniac lounged up to us; and I left my words, like a prudent diplomatist, to bear fruit as best they might.
I wondered if she cared for him, or if it was merely a girl’s natural feeling for a man who had let himself be shot at, rather than hear a light word spoken of her. But they were both so deuced proud, Heaven’s special intervention alone seemed likely to bring them together.
The Major didn’t come home from Pipesandbeersbad till between two and three that night, and he’s told me since that being un peu fou with his self-willed and vehement passion, never went to bed at all, but sat and walked about his room smoking, unable to sleep, in a frame of mind that, when sane, a few months before, he would have pronounced spoony and contemptible in the lowest degree. At eight he strode forth into the park, brushing off the dew with his impatient steps, glad of the fresh morning air upon his brow, which was as burning as our first headache from “that cursed punch of Jones’s,” the day after our “first wine,” which acute suffering any gentleman who ever tasted that delicious mélange of rum and milk and lemons, will keenly recall among other passed-away passages of his green youth.
Telfer strode on and on, over the molehills and through the ferns, down this slope and up that, under the oaks, and lindens, and fir-trees gleaming red beneath the October sun, with very little notion of where he was going or what he was doing, a great stag-hound of Marc’s following at his heels. The path he took, without thinking, led him to the top of a rock overhanging the Beersbad, where that historic stream was but a few yards in width; and here Telfer, lying down with his head against a plane-tree, struck a fusee and lighted a cigar—for a weed’s a pleasant companion in any stage of existence: if we’re happy we smoke in the fulness of our hearts, and build airy castles on each fragrant cloud; and if we’re unhappy, we smoke to console ourselves, and draw in with each whiff philosophy and peace. So the Major smoked and thought, till a bark from the staghound made him look up. On the top of the cliffs on the other side of the stream, looking down into the valleys below, with her head turned away from him, stood Violet Tressillian; and at the sight of that graceful figure, with its indescribable high-bred air, I don’t doubt the Major’s once unimpressive heart beat faster than it had ever done in a charge or a skirmish. She was full twenty feet above him, and the rocks on which she stood sloped precipitately down to a ledge exactly opposite that on which he lay smoking—a ledge in reality but a few inches wide, but to which the treacherous boughs and ferns waving over it gave a semblance of a firm broad footing—a semblance which (like a good many other things one meets with) it utterly failed to carry out when you came to try it.
Violet, not seeing Telfer lying perdu among the grass at the foot of his plane-tree, walked along to the edge of the cliff, her eyes on the ground, so deep in thought that she never noticed the river beneath, but began to descend the slope, little Floss coming with exceeding trepidation after her. Telfer sprang up to warn her. “Violet! Violet! go back! go back! Oh! my God, do you not hear?”
His passionate tones startled her. Never dreaming he was there, she looked hurriedly up; her foot slipped; unable to stay her descent, she came down the steep cliff with an impetus which, to a certainty, would send her over the narrow ledge into the river below—a fall of full thirty feet. To see her perish thus before his eyes—die thus while he stood calmly by! A whole age of torture was crowded into the misery of that one brief moment. There was but one way to save her. He sprang across the gulf that parted them, while the river in its straitened bed hissed and foamed beneath him, and, standing on the narrow ledge, where there seemed scarce footing for a dog, he caught her as she fell in his iron grasp, as little swayed by the shock as the rock on which he stood. Holding her tight to him with one arm, he swung himself down by the other to a less dangerous position, on a flat plateau of cliff, and leaning against one of the linden-trees on its summit, he bent over her; his eyes dim, and his pulses beating with the emotions he had controlled while he wanted cool thought and firm nerve to save her, but over which he had no more power now. He pressed her to his heart, forgetting pride, and doubt, and fear; and Violet, by way of answer, only burst into a passion of tears. Who would have recognized the proud, brilliant Tressillian, in the pale, trembling woman who sobbed on his breast with the abandon of a child, and who, at his passionate kisses, only blushed like a wild rose?
Telfer evidently thought the transformation complete, for he forgot all his reserve resolutions and hauteur, and poured out the tenderest love for a girl who, three months before, he had wished at the devil! And the Tressillian was conquered at last; she was pitiless no longer, and, having vanquished him, was, woman-like, ready to be a slave to her captive; and her eyes were never more dangerous than now, when, shy and softened, they looked up through their tears into Telfer’s.
What old De Tintiniac said of her was true, that all her beauty wanted to make it perfect was for her to be in love!
So at least I thought, when, several hours afterwards, I met them coming across the park, and I knew by the gleam of the Major’s eyes that he had lost Calceolaria and won Violet.
“How strange it is,” laughed Telfer that evening, when they were alone in the conservatory, “that you and I, who so hated each other, should now be so dear to one another. Oh, Violet! how ashamed I have been since of my unjustifiable prejudices, my abominable discourtesy——”
“You were dreadfully rude,” said the Tressillian, smiling; “and judged me very cruelly by all the false reports that women chose to gossip of me. But you are wrong. I never hated you. Your father had spoken of you as so generous, so noble, so chivalrous a soldier, so kind a son, that I was prepared to admire you immensely, and when you looked so sternly on me at our first introduction, and I overheard your bitter words about me at the station, I really was never more vexed and disappointed in my life. And then a demon entered into me, and I thought—forgive me, Hamilton—that I would try to make you repent your hasty judgment and recant your prejudices. But I could not always fight you with the coolness I wished; your indifference began to pique me more and more. Wounds from you ranked as they did from no one else, and something besides pride made me feel your neglect so keenly. I had meant—yes, I must tell you all,” and the Tressillian, in her soft repentance, looked, Telfer thought, more bewitching than in her most brilliant moments—“I had wished,” she went on in a whisper, with her color bright, “to make you regret your injustice, to conquer your stubborn pride, and to revenge myself on you for all the wrong you had done me in thoughts and words. But, you see, I wasn’t so strong as I fancied; I thought I could fence with the buttons on, but I was mistaken, and—and—when I heard that you had fought for me, I knew then that——” And Violet stopped with a smile and a sigh; the sigh for the past, I suppose, and the smile for the present.
“Well, nous sommes quittes, dearest,” smiled Telfer. “Thank Heaven! we no longer need reproach each other. Too many elevate the one they love into an ideal of such superhuman excellence, that at the first shadow of mortality they see their poor idol is shivered from its pedestal. But we have seen the worst side of each other’s character, Violet, and henceforth love shall cover all faults, and subdue all pride between us.”
Telfer kept his word. They had had their last quarrel, and buried their last suspicion before their marriage, and were not, like the generality, doves first and tigers after. The governor, of course, was charmed that a match on which he had secretly set his heart had brought itself about so neatly without his interference. He had begun to despair of his son’s ever giving Torwood a mistress, and the diamonds he gave Violet, in the excess of his pleasure, brought her no end of female enemies, for they were some of the finest water in the kingdom. Seldom, indeed, has slander been productive of such good fruits, for rarely, very rarely, does that Upas-tree put forth any but Dead Sea apples.
Violet Tressillian was Violet Telfer before the Christmas recess, but I considered the bet drawn. So Telfer and I exchanged the roan filly and the colt, and Calceolaria in the Torwood stables, and Jockey Club in my stalls, stand witnesses to this day of Our Wager, and how the Major Lost and Won.