DESVŒUX MAKES THE RUNNING.
Free love, free field—we love but while we may:
The woods are hushed, their music is no more;
The leaf is dead, the yearning past away,
New leaf, new life—the days of frost are o'er.
New life, new love, to suit the newer day:
New loves are sweet as those that went before,
Free love, free field—we love but while we may.
Felicia was beginning to find Maud a serious charge, and to be weighed down in spirit by the responsibility involved in her protection. It would have been easy enough to tell her not to flirt; but it was when Maud was unconscious and self-forgetful that she fascinated the most; and how warn her against the exercise of attractions of which she never thought and the existence of which would have been a surprise to her? When, on the lawn, Maud's hat blew off and all her wealth of soft brown hair tumbled about her shoulders in picturesque disarray, and she stood, bright and eager and careless of the disaster, thinking only of the fortunes of the game, but beautiful, as every creature who came near her seemed to feel—when she was merriest in the midst of merry talk, and made some saucy speech and then blushed scarlet at her own audacity—when her intensity of enjoyment in things around her bespoke itself in every look and gesture—when the pleasure she gave seemed to infect her being and she charmed others because she was herself in love with life, how warn her against all this? You might as well have preached to an April shower!
Desvœux, too, was not a lover likely to be easily discouraged or to let the grass grow beneath his feet. Both from temperament and policy he pressed upon a position where advantages seemed likely to be gained. Despite the very coolest welcomes Felicia began to find him an inconveniently frequent visitor. An avowed foe to croquet, he appeared with provoking regularity at her Thursday afternoons, when the Dustypore world was collected to enjoy that innocent recreation on the lawn, and somehow he always contrived to be playing in Maud's game. Even at church he put in an unexpected appearance, and sate through a discourse of three-quarters of an hour with a patience that was almost ostentatiously hypocritical. Then he would come and be so bright, natural and amusing, and such good company, that Felicia was frequently not near as chilling to him as she wished and as she felt that the occasion demanded. He was unlike anybody that Maud had ever met before. He seemed to take for granted that all existing institutions and customs were radically wrong and that everybody knew it. 'Make love to married women? Of course; why not—what are pretty married women for? Hard upon the husbands? Not a bit; all the unfairness was the other way: the husbands have such tremendous advantages, that it is quite disheartening to fight against such odds: tradition and convention and the natural feminine conservatism all in favour of the husbands; and then the Churchmen, as they always do, taking their part too: it was so mean! No, no; if the husbands cannot take care of themselves they deserve the worst that can befall them.' Or he would say, 'Go to church! Thank you, if Miss Vernon sings in the choir and will say "How d'ye do?" to me as she comes out, I will go and welcome; but otherwise, ça m'embête, as the Frenchman said. I always was a fidget, Miss Vernon, and feel the most burning desire to chatter directly any one tells me to hold my tongue; and then I'm argumentative and hate all the speaking being on one side; and then—and then,—well, on the whole, I rather agree with a friend of mine, who said that he had only three reasons for not going to church—he disbelieved the history, disapproved the morality and disliked the art.'
Maud used to laugh at these speeches; and though she did not like them nor the man who made them, and understood what Felicia meant by saying that Desvœux's fun had about it something which hurt one, it seemed quite natural to laugh at them. She observed too, before long, that they were seldom made when Felicia was by, and that Desvœux, if in higher spirits at Mrs. Vereker's than at the Vernons' house, was also several shades less circumspect in what he said, and divulged tastes and opinions which were concealed before her cousin. More than once, as Felicia came up Desvœux had adroitly turned the conversation from some topic which he knew she would dislike; and Maud, who was guilelessness itself, had betrayed by flushing cheeks and embarrassed manner the fact of something having been concealed.
On the whole, Felicia had never found the world harder to manage or the little empire of her drawing-room less amenable to her sway. Her guests somehow would not be what she wished. Desvœux, though behaving with marked deference to her wishes and always sedulously polite, pleased her less and less, Maud's innocence and impulsiveness, however attractive, frequently produced embarrassments which it required all Felicia's tact to overcome. Her husband, laconic and indolent, gave not the slightest help. Another ground on which she distressed herself (very unnecessarily, could she only have known) was, that Sutton, among other performers on Felicia's little stage, played not at all the brilliant part which she had mentally assigned him. The slightly contemptuous dislike for Desvœux which Felicia had often heard him express, and in which she greatly sympathised, though veiled under a rigid courtesy, was yet incompatible with cordiality, or good cheer; and Desvœux, whose high spirits nothing could put down, often appeared the pleasanter companion of the two. Sutton, in fact, had on more occasions than one come into collision with Desvœux in a manner which a less easy-going and light-hearted man would have found it difficult to forgive. Once, at mess, on a Guest-night, Desvœux had rattled out some offensive nonsense about women, and Sutton had got up and, pushing his chair back unceremoniously, had marched silently away to the billiard-room in a manner which in him, the most chivalrous of hosts, implied a more than ordinarily vehement condemnation. Afterwards Desvœux had been given to understand that, if he came to the mess, he must not, in the Major's presence at any rate, outrage good taste and good morals by any such displays. Then, at another time, there was a pretty young woman—a sergeant's wife—to whom Desvœux showed an inclination to be polite. Sutton had told Desvœux that it must not be, in a quietly decisive way which he felt there was no disputing, though there was something in the other's authoritative air which was extremely galling. He could not be impertinent to Sutton, and he bore him no deep resentment; but he revenged himself by affecting to regard him as the ordinary 'plunger' of the period—necessary for purposes of defence and a first-rate leader of native cavalry, but socially dull, and a fair object for an occasional irreverence. Sutton's tendency was to be more silent than usual when Desvœux was of the party. Desvœux, on the other hand, would not have let Sutton's or the prophet Jeremiah's presence act as a damper on spirits which were always at boiling-point and a temperament which was for ever effervescing into some more or less indiscreet form of mirth. The result was that the one man quite eclipsed the other and tossed the ball of talk about with an ease and dexterity not always quite respectful to his less agile senior. One night, for instance, Maud, in a sudden freak of fancy, had set her heart upon a round of story-telling. 'I shall come last of course,' she said, 'as I propose it, and by that time it will be bedtime; but, Major Sutton, you must tell us something about some of your battles, please, something very romantic and exciting.'
Sutton was the victim of a morbid modesty as to all his soldiering exploits and would far rather have fought a battle than described it. 'Ah,' he said, 'but our fighting out here is not at all romantic; it is mostly routine, you know, and not picturesque or amusing.'
'Yes, but,' said Maud, 'tell us something that is picturesque or amusing: a hairbreadth escape, or a forlorn hope, or a mine. I love accounts of mines. You dig and dig for weeks, you know, and then you're countermined and hear the enemy digging near you; and then you put the powder in and light the match, and run away, and then—now you go on!'
'And then there is a smash, I suppose,' laughed Sutton; 'but you know all about it better than I. I'm not a gunner—all my work is above-ground.'
'Well, then,' cried Maud, with the eager air of a child longing for a story, 'tell us something above ground. How did you get your Victoria Cross, now?'
Maud, however, was not destined to get a story out of Sutton.
'There was nothing romantic about that, at any rate,' he said. 'It was at Mírabad. There was a cannon down at the end of the lane which was likely to be troublesome, and some of our fellows went down with me and spiked it. That was all!'
'Excuse me, Miss Vernon,' said Desvœux; 'Sutton's modesty spoils an excellent story. Let me tell it as it deserves.' And then he threw himself into a mock-tragical attitude.
'Go on,' said Maud, eagerly.
'The street-fighting at Mírabad,' said Desvœux, with a declamatory air, 'was the fiercest of the whole campaign——'
'What campaign?' asked Sutton.
'The Mírabad campaign,' replied the other, with great presence of mind, 'in eighteen hundred and—, I forget the year—but never mind.'
'Yes, never mind the year,' said Maud; 'go on.'
'The enemy fought us inch by inch, and lane by lane; from every window poured a little volley; every house had to be stormed, hand-to-hand we fought our way, and so on. You know the sort of thing. Then, as we turned into the main street, puff! a great blaze and a roar, and a dense cloud of smoke, and smash came a cannon-ball into the midst of us—five or six men were knocked over—Tomkin's horse lost a tail, Brown had his nose put out of joint, Smith was blown up to a second-storey window—something must be done. But I am tiring you?'
'No, no,' cried Maud, 'I like it—go on.'
'Well, let me see. Oh yes, something must be done. To put spurs to my Arab's sides, to cut my way down through the astonished mob, to leap the barricade (it was only eight feet high, and armed with a chevaux de frise), to sabre the six gunners who were working the battery, was, I need hardly say, the work of a moment. Then—a crushing blow from behind, and I remember nothing more, till, a month later, I found myself, weak and wounded, in bed; and a lovely nun gave me some gruel, and told me that Mírabad was ours! "Where am I?" I exclaimed, for I felt so confused, and the nun looked so angelic, that I fancied I must have gone to heaven. My companion, however, soon brought me to earth by—et cætera et cætera et cætera.'
'That is the sort of thing which happens in "Charles O'Malley,"' said Sutton; 'only Lever would have put Tippoo Sahib or Tantia Topee on the other side of the barricade, and I should have had to cut his head off and slaughter all his bodyguard before I got out again.'
'And then,' said Maud, 'the nun would have turned out to be some one.'
'But,' said Desvœux, 'how do you know that the nun did not turn out to be some one, if only I had chosen to fill up those et cæteras?'
'Well,' said Sutton, who apparently had had enough of the joke 'that part of the story I will tell you myself. The nun was a male one—my good friend Boldero, who took me into his quarters, looked after me for six weeks, till I got about again, and was as good a nurse as any one could wish for.'
'I should have liked to be the nun,' Maud cried, moved by a sudden impulse which brought the words out as the thought flashed into her mind, and turning crimson, as was her wont, before they were out of her mouth.
'That is very kind of you,' said Sutton, standing up, and defending her, as Maud felt, from all eyes but his own; 'and you would have been a very charming nurse and cured me, I dare say, even faster than Boldero. And now, Desvœux, go and sing us a song as a finale to your story.
Maud knew perfectly well that this was a mere diversion to save her from the confusion of a thoughtless speech and turn Desvœux's attention from her. It seemed quite natural and of a piece with Sutton's watchful, sympathetic care to give her all possible pleasure and to shield her from every shade of annoyance. A thrill of gratitude shot through her. There was a charm, a fascination, in protection so prompt, so delicate, so kind, compared with which all other attractions seemed faint indeed. That evening Maud went to bed with her heart in a tumult, and wept, she knew not wherefore, far into the night—only again and again the tears streamed out—the outcome, though as yet she knew it not, of that purest of all pure fountains, an innocent first love.