"We'll go there next week when I come back to town. You may take your oath he's got the bill; and if he's heard nothing about Mitford's fortune, we may get it for next to nothing."
[CHAPTER X.]
SOUVENT FEMME VARIE.
No; Laurence Alsager was certainly not best pleased at all he heard about Mrs. Hammond. Mrs. Hammond, a pretty little woman, coming to call upon you--great Heaven! Is that the way that that oaf Mitford talked of her who two years ago was Laura Molyneux, the mere mention of whose name caused Alsager to thrill to his finger-tips; and whose low trainante voice, long steady passionate glances, and rippling shoulders could have led him to destruction? Drove her chestnuts well, eh? Yes, by Jove! there were few women could touch her either in riding or driving, and--Laurence laughed grimly to himself as he strode along. What was it Dollamore had said about Mitford's readiness to go to the bad, to shake a loose leg, to enjoy those advantages of health, wealth, and position which had before been denied to him? Why, here was the very woman to ensnare him, to act as his evil genius, the very counter-charm of Lady Mitford's quietude and girlish grace; a woman of the world, bright, sharp, active, and alert; with plenty of savoir fair, an enormous talent for flirtation, and not the smallest scrap of heart to throw into the balance against any of her whims. No, by George, not a scrap. Laurence bethought him of a certain December morning in Kensington Gardens, and the whole scene rose vividly before him. The trees all stripped and bare, and stridently clanging in the bitter wind; the thick dun clouds hanging over the horizon; the greatcoated park-keeper stamping vigorously over the gravel, and banging himself with his arms with vague notions of generating calorie; and he himself pacing up and down by Laura Molyneux's side. The arguments he had used, the very phrases which he had employed to induce her to reconsider the determination then announced to him, were ringing in his ears. He recollected how he had humbled himself, how he had implored her to reconsider her decision, how even he had begged for time, and how he had been met with one stern pitiless refusal; and how he had gone away to weep bitter tears of mortified pride, and rejected love, and savage disappointment; and how she had stepped into the neat little brougham waiting for her at the gate, and been whirled off to accept the hand and heart of Mr. Percy Hammond, a retired civil-servant from India, a widower with one daughter, who had shaken the pagoda-tree to some purpose and returned to England with a colossal fortune.
That was the then finale of the intimacy between Laura Molyneux and Laurence Alsager. In the course of the next week he started on his tour; in the course of the next month St. George's, Hanover Square, was the scene of her marriage,--a bishop welding the chains. And now two years had elapsed, and he was back in London, pretty much the same as if he had never left it; and she was asking whether he had returned, and he had begun to feel a great interest in Lady Mitford; and Sir Charles Mitford evidently thought Mrs. Hammond a most delightful person, and every thing was à tort et à travers, as it has been, is, and always shall be, in the great world of London.
Nil admirari is the motto on which your precocious youth piques himself; but which is adopted in all due seriousness and sobriety by the calm student of life. Who wonders at anything?--at the peevishness of your wife; at the ingratitude of the child for whom you have pinched and slaved; at the treachery of the one familiar friend; at the enormous legacy left you by the uncle whose last words to you were that you were a jackanapes, and, so far as he was concerned, should be a beggar? The man of the world is surprised at nothing; he is not l'homme blasé of the caricaturist; he is not an atom astonished at finding nothing in anything; on the contrary, he finds plenty of novelty in every variety of life; but nothing which may happen to him excites the smallest wonderment on his part. So that when Colonel Alsager walked into the Guards club to dinner, and received from the hall-porter a small note with an address in a handwriting perfectly familiar to him, he was not in the least surprised.
But he looked at the note, and twisted it between his fingers, and even put it into his waistcoat pocket, as he walked up to the table whereon stood the framed menu, and left it there while he walked round and spoke to two or three men who were already at dinner; and it was not until he was comfortably seated at his little table, and had eaten a few mouthfuls of soup, that he took it from his pocket, leisurely opened it, and bringing the candle within range, began to read it. Even then he paused for a moment, recollecting with what heart-throbs of anxiety and sensations of acute delight he used to read the previous epistles from the same source; then, as with an effort, he set himself to its perusal.
It was very short.
"I shall be at home to-morrow at three, and hope to see you. I hear all sorts of rumours, which you alone can solve. Chi non sa niente non dubita di niente! It will be for you to read the riddle. L."
He smiled outright as, after reading it and restoring it to his pocket, he said to himself, "The old story; she always made a mystery when there was no other excitement; but I'll go, for all that."