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.