Lady Mitford wrote the letter to Sir Charles, as her strange visitor had counselled her to do. She suffered much in writing it; she hoped much from its effect. Time rolled on, and she knew that Sir Charles must have received the letter; then she counted the days which must elapse before the answer could arrive, and, arming herself with patience, she waited.
[CHAPTER XXXI.]
AMONG THE SPRINGS.
It was the month of September, and the little town of Baden was full. It is now the big town of Baden, and is still, during its season, filled to overflowing; but the company is by no means so select, so pleasant, so agreeable as it used to be. The vor-eisenbahn Baden was as superior to the present excursionists' resort as was the ante-railway Ascot Meeting to what now is merely a succession of Derby-days in Bucks. Then, when you posted in from Strasburg, or arrived in the eilwagen, from deadly-lively Carlsruhe, you found Mr. Rheinboldt, the landlord of the Badischer Hof, attended by the stoutest, the best-tempered, and the stupidest even of German porters, coming forward to meet you with the pleasantest of greetings. You had written on beforehand if you were a wise man, and your old room was ready--one of that little row of snug dormitories set apart for bachelors, and looking on to the trim garden. You had a wash, with more water than you had met with since you left home (they were beginning to understand the English mania for soap-and-water at the Badischer Hof even so long ago), and you made your toilette and came down to the five-o'clock table-d'hôte, where you found most of the people who had been there the previous season, and many of their friends whom they had induced to come. Most of the people knew each other or of each other, and there was a sociability among them which the railway has utterly annihilated. Now London sends her bagmen and Paris her lorettes; but in those days, if "our Mr. Johnson" got as far as Parry by way of Cally or Bolong, he was looked upon as an intrepid voyager, while very few Parisian ladies, save those of the best class, came into the Grand Duke's territory.
It was hot in England in that September, but it was hotter at Baden. With the earliest dawn came thick vapours rolling down from the Black Forest, encompassing the little town with a white and misty shroud, which invariably presaged a sultry day, and invariably kept its promise. All day long the big red-faced sun glared down upon the denizens of the pleasantest corner of Vanity Fair; glared in the early morning upon the water-drinkers sipping the nauseous fluid in the thick and heavy glass tumblers, and tendering their kreutzers to the attendant maidens at the Brunnen; glared upon them as they took the prescribed constitutional walk, and returned to the hotel to breakfast; glared upon the fevered gamblers, who, with last night's excitement only half slept off, with bleared eyes and shaking hands and parched throats, took their places round the gaming-table as the clock struck noon, and eyed the stolid-faced croupiers as intently as though the chances of the game were to be gleamed from a perusal of their fishy eyes or pursed mouths. The revellers who were starting off for picnics to the Black Forest, or excursions to the Favourite or Eberstein-Schloss, glanced up with terror at the scorching red ball in the sky, and bade courteous Mr. Rheinboldt, the landlord of the Badischer Hof, to see that plenty of ice was packed with the sparkling Moselle, and to let Karl and Fritz take care that an unlimited supply of umbrellas was placed in the carriage. The Englishmen, whom M. Benazet, the proprietor of the gaming-tables, grateful for their patronage, had provided with shooting, or who had received invitations to the triebjagd of some neighbouring landowner, looked with comic wonder, not unmixed with horror, at the green jerkins, fantastic game-bags, couteaux de chasse or hunting-knives (worn in the belt), and general appearance of their foreign friends; and then when lunch-time arrived, and they saw each German eating his own sausage and drinking from his own particular flask, which he never dreamed of passing, they recollected with dismay the luncheons at similar parties in England, the snowy cloth laid under the shade of the hedge, the luscious game-pie, the cooling claret-cup, the glancing eyes and natty ankles of those who had accompanied the luncheon. Hot! It was no word for it. It was blazing, tearing, drying, baking, scorching heat, and it was hotter at Baden than anywhere else.
So they said at least, and as they were from almost every part of the civilized world, they ought to have known. There were English people, swells, peers and peeresses, bankers and bankeresses, a neat little legal set,--Sir Nisey and Lady Prious, Mr. Tocsin, Q.C., Mr. Serjeant Stentor, and some of the junior members of the bar,--a select assortment of the Stock-Exchange, and some eligible young men from the West-end government offices. There were joyous Russians, whose names all ended in "vitch" and "gorod," and were otherwise utterly unpronounceable, who spoke all European languages with equal fluency and facility, and who put down rouleaux of Napoleons on the roulette-table where other people staked thalers or florins. There were a few Frenchmen and French ladies; here was an Austrian gross-herzog or grand-duke, there some Prussian cavalry subalterns who could not play at the table because they had spent the half-crown of their daily allowance in roast veal, Bairisch beer, and a horrible compound called "grogs an rhum," which they drank at night, "after," as they said to themselves, "the English fashion."
It had been hotter than ever during the day, but the day was happily past and over, and the moon was streaming on the broad gravelled Platz in front of the Conversationshaus, and the band, stationed in the little oil-lamp-illumined kiosk, were rattling away at Strauss's waltzes and Labitskey's galops. The gamblers were already thronging the roulette and trente-et-quarante tables; and of the non-gamblers all such as had ladies with them were promenading and listening to the music, while the others were seated, drinking and smoking. It was a splendid evening; the diners at the late tables-d'hôte were wending their way from their hotels to the promenade; the consumers of the German mittagsessen, were listening to the band in delicious anticipation of the reh-braten and the haring-salad and the bok-bier, or the Ahrbleichart, at which another half-hour would see them hard at work; the clamouring for coffee was incessant, and the head-waiter, Joseph, who was so like Bouffé, was almost driven out of his wits by the Babel of voices. They chattered, those tall occupants of the little wooden round-tables--how they chattered! They turned round and stared at the promenaders, and made their comments on them after they had passed. They had something to say, some remark, either complimentary or disparaging, to make upon all the ladies. But there was only one man who seemed to attract any special attention, and that was the Russian Prince Tchernigow.
A man of middle height, with brown-black hair, a perfectly bloodless complexion, stern deeply sunken eyes, a stiff moustache bristling over a determined mouth. A man with small hands and feet, and apparently but little muscular development, but strong, brave, and vindictive. A man whose face Lavater might have studied for months without getting beyond the merest rudiments of his science--impassive, unaltering, statuesque. He never played but with rouleaux of napoleons--twenty in a rouleau; and though the space in front of him was shining with gold at one moment, or laid bare by the sweeping rake of the croupier,--winning or losing, his expression would not change for an instant. He had been to Baden for two or three seasons running, and was beginning to be looked upon as an habitué; the croupiers acknowledged his taking his seat, intending to do battle, by a slight grave bow; he had broken the bank more than once, and was a lion among the visitors, and notably amongst the English. Tchernigow's horses and carriages, his bold play, his good shooting, the wonderful way in which he spoke our language, his love of solitude, his taciturnity, his singular physique, were all freely discussed at the late tables-d'hôte of hotels at which the prince was not staving. His reputation of beau joueur caused him to be followed as soon as he was seen going into the rooms, and his play was watched and humbly imitated by scores. He seldom attended the balls, and very rarely danced, though he valsed to perfection; and all the women in the room were eager for his selection. His appearance on the promenade always excited attention, but he never gave the smallest sign of having observed it.
Among those who looked up as Prince Tchernigow passed was Lord Dollamore, who was seated at one of the tables, with no companion save his invariable one--his stick. Dollamore generally came to Baden every year. The place amused him; it was a grand field for the display of the worst passions of human nature,--a study which always afforded him infinite delight. He never played, but he was constantly hovering round the tables; and there was scarcely an incident which happened in the seething crowd, scarcely a change which swept across the faces of the leading actors, that passed unnoticed by him. He did not dance; he would have been prevented by his lameness from indulging in such a pastime, even had his taste impelled him to it; but he was a constant attendant at the balls which M. Benazet provided for the amusement of his patrons; and looking on at the actual life before him as he might have looked on the mimic life of a theatrical representation, he had innumerable conferences with his stick on all he saw and heard, and on the arguments which he deduced therefrom. He immensely enjoyed being seated, as he was then, in the calm autumnal moonlit evening, with a cup of excellent coffee by his side, a cigar in his mouth, and the ever-shifting panorama of human faces passing before him.
"That Tchernigow is really delicious!" he said to himself--or to his stick--as he looked after the Russian, and marked the excitement which he created; "there's a savage insolence about him which is positively refreshing in these days of bowing and scraping and preposterous politeness. How they chatter, and gape, and nudge each other with their elbows about him! and what a supreme indifference he affects to it all! Affects? Yes, mon prince, it is accepted as the real thing by these good people, but we are not to be taken in by veneer, nous autres! It would require a very small scratch indeed to pick off the Petersburg-cum-Paris polish, and to arrive at the genuine Calmuck substratum. Only to look at you to tell that Nature's handwriting never lies; and if ever there were a more delightfully truculent, ruffianly, bloodthirsty savage than yourself, mon prince, I am very much out in my ideas. God help the woman on whom you ever get a legitimate hold! Ah, that reminds me--what has become of the widow? There is no doubt that Tchernigow was badly hit in London. The only man received at her house, the only man permitted to assuage her grief, to wipe away those tears which doubtless flowed so constantly for poor Percy Hammond! What an audacious little devil it is! How pluckily she fought that business of guardianship to the child; and how gracefully she retired from the contest when she saw that she had no chance, and that defeat was inevitable! She's the cleverest woman, in a certain way, that I've ever met with; and I'd take my oath she's playing some long-headed, far-sighted game now, and that Tchernigow is the stake. No more flirtation and coquetry--for the present--les eaux sont bases; the widow is hard up, and means to recoup herself by a rich marriage. That's why that infatuated cad Mitford was snubbed so severely. I think she comprehends that Tchernigow will stand no nonsense, and as he is the parti at present in view, his will is law. She can't have given up the chase; but how on earth is she working it?"